arXiv Papers of Zero-Shot/Few-Shot Learning

Abstract:
Deep learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for spatio-temporal modeling of fluid dynamics. However, existing approaches often suffer from limited generalization to unseen flow conditions and typically require retraining when applied to new scenarios. In this paper, we present LLM4Fluid, a spatio-temporal prediction framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as generalizable neural solvers for fluid dynamics. The framework first compresses high-dimensional flow fields into a compact latent space via reduced-order modeling enhanced with a physics-informed disentanglement mechanism, effectively mitigating spatial feature entanglement while preserving essential flow structures. A pretrained LLM then serves as a temporal processor, autoregressively predicting the dynamics of physical sequences with time series prompts. To bridge the modality gap between prompts and physical sequences, which can otherwise degrade prediction accuracy, we propose a dedicated modality alignment strategy that resolves representational mismatch and stabilizes long-term prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse flow scenarios demonstrate that LLM4Fluid functions as a robust and generalizable neural solver without retraining, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy while exhibiting powerful zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qisongxiao/LLM4Fluid.

Paperid: 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21426.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we address a fundamental gap between pre-training and fine-tuning of deep neural networks: while pre-training has shifted from unimodal to multimodal learning with enhanced visual understanding, fine-tuning predominantly remains unimodal, limiting the benefits of rich pre-trained representations. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach that transforms unimodal datasets into multimodal ones using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate synthetic image captions for fine-tuning models with a multimodal objective. Our method employs carefully designed prompts incorporating class labels and domain context to produce high-quality captions tailored for classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a supervised contrastive loss function that explicitly encourages clustering of same-class representations during fine-tuning, along with a new inference technique that leverages class-averaged text embeddings from multiple synthetic captions per image. Extensive experiments across 13 image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods, with particularly significant improvements in few-shot learning scenarios. Our work establishes a new paradigm for dataset enhancement that effectively bridges the gap between multimodal pre-training and fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/s-enmt/MMFT.

Paperid: 3, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20883.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Morphing techniques generate artificial biometric samples that combine features from multiple individuals, allowing each contributor to be verified against a single enrolled template. While extensively studied in face recognition, this vulnerability remains largely unexplored in voice biometrics. Prior work on voice morphing is computationally expensive, non-scalable, and limited to acoustically similar identity pairs, constraining practical deployment. Moreover, existing sound-morphing methods target audio textures, music, or environmental sounds and are not transferable to voice identity manipulation. We propose VoxMorph, a zero-shot framework that produces high-fidelity voice morphs from as little as five seconds of audio per subject without model retraining. Our method disentangles vocal traits into prosody and timbre embeddings, enabling fine-grained interpolation of speaking style and identity. These embeddings are fused via Spherical Linear Interpolation (Slerp) and synthesized using an autoregressive language model coupled with a Conditional Flow Matching network. VoxMorph achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering a 2.6x gain in audio quality, a 73% reduction in intelligibility errors, and a 67.8% morphing attack success rate on automated speaker verification systems under strict security thresholds. This work establishes a practical and scalable paradigm for voice morphing with significant implications for biometric security. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/VoxMorph/

Paperid: 4, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20745.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, deployment is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory wall, motivating a shift toward extremely low-bit quantization. However, most quantization-aware training (QAT) methods apply hard rounding and the straight-through estimator (STE) from the beginning of the training, which prematurely discretizes the optimization landscape and induces persistent gradient mismatch between latent weights and quantized weights, hindering effective optimization of quantized models. To address this, we propose Hestia, a Hessian-guided differentiable QAT framework for extremely low-bit LLMs, which replaces the rigid step function with a temperature-controlled softmax relaxation to maintain gradient flow early in training while progressively hardening quantization. Furthermore, Hestia leverages a tensor-wise Hessian trace metric as a lightweight curvature signal to drive fine-grained temperature annealing, enabling sensitivity-aware discretization across the model. Evaluations on Llama-3.2 show that Hestia consistently outperforms existing ternary QAT baselines, yielding average zero-shot improvements of 5.39% and 4.34% for the 1B and 3B models. These results indicate that Hessian-guided relaxation effectively recovers representational capacity, establishing a more robust training path for 1.58-bit LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/hestia2026/Hestia.

Paperid: 5, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20650.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Long-horizon, repetitive workflows are common in professional settings, such as processing expense reports from receipts and entering student grades from exam papers. These tasks are often tedious for humans since they can extend to extreme lengths proportional to the size of the data to process. However, they are ideal for Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) due to their structured, recurring sub-workflows with logic that can be systematically learned. Identifying the absence of an evaluation benchmark as a primary bottleneck, we establish OS-Marathon, comprising 242 long-horizon, repetitive tasks across 2 domains to evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) agents. We then introduce a cost-effective method to construct a condensed demonstration using only few-shot examples to teach agents the underlying workflow logic, enabling them to execute similar workflows effectively on larger, unseen data collections. Extensive experiments demonstrate both the inherent challenges of these tasks and the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project website: https://os-marathon.github.io/.

Paperid: 6, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20524.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to detect and localise abnormal regions in the image without access to any in-domain training images. While recent approaches leverage vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to transfer high-level concept knowledge, methods based on purely vision foundation models (VFMs), like DINOv2, have lagged behind in performance. We argue that this gap stems from two practical issues: (i) limited diversity in existing auxiliary anomaly detection datasets and (ii) overly shallow VFM adaptation strategies. To address both challenges, we propose AnomalyVFM, a general and effective framework that turns any pretrained VFM into a strong zero-shot anomaly detector. Our approach combines a robust three-stage synthetic dataset generation scheme with a parameter-efficient adaptation mechanism, utilising low-rank feature adapters and a confidence-weighted pixel loss. Together, these components enable modern VFMs to substantially outperform current state-of-the-art methods. More specifically, with RADIO as a backbone, AnomalyVFM achieves an average image-level AUROC of 94.1% across 9 diverse datasets, surpassing previous methods by significant 3.3 percentage points. Project Page: https://maticfuc.github.io/anomaly_vfm/

Paperid: 7, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20336.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cryptocurrency projects articulate value propositions through whitepapers, making claims about functionality and technical capabilities. This study investigates whether these narratives align with observed market behavior. We construct a pipeline combining zero-shot NLP classification (BART-MNLI) with CP tensor decomposition to compare three spaces: (1) a claims matrix from 24 whitepapers across 10 semantic categories, (2) market statistics for 49 assets over two years of hourly data, and (3) latent factors from tensor decomposition (rank 2, 92.45% variance explained). Using Procrustes rotation and Tucker's congruence coefficient, we test alignment across 23 common entities. Results show weak alignment: claims-statistics (phi=0.341, p=0.332), claims-factors (phi=0.077, p=0.747), and statistics-factors (phi=0.197, p<0.001). The statistics-factors significance validates our methodology, confirming the pipeline detects relationships when present. Inter-model validation with DeBERTa-v3 yields 32% exact agreement but 67% top-3 agreement. Cross-sectional analysis reveals heterogeneous contributions: NEAR, MKR, ATOM show positive alignment while ENS, UNI, Bitcoin diverge most. Excluding Bitcoin confirms results are not driven by market dominance. We interpret findings as weak alignment between whitepaper narratives and market factor structure. Limited power (n=23) precludes distinguishing weak from no alignment, but strong alignment (phi>=0.70) can be confidently rejected. Implications for narrative economics and investment analysis are discussed.

Paperid: 8, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19210.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs). While test-time defenses are promising, existing methods fail to provide sufficient robustness against strong attacks and are often hampered by high inference latency and task-specific applicability. To address these limitations, we start by investigating the intrinsic properties of AEs, which reveals that AEs exhibit severe feature inconsistency under progressive frequency attenuation. We further attribute this to the model's inherent spectral bias. Leveraging this insight, we propose an efficient test-time defense named Contrastive Spectral Rectification (CSR). CSR optimizes a rectification perturbation to realign the input with the natural manifold under a spectral-guided contrastive objective, which is applied input-adaptively. Extensive experiments across 16 classification benchmarks demonstrate that CSR outperforms the SOTA by an average of 18.1% against strong AutoAttack with modest inference overhead. Furthermore, CSR exhibits broad applicability across diverse visual tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Summu77/CSR.

Paperid: 9, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19151.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent progress at the intersection of large language models (LLMs) and time series (TS) analysis has revealed both promise and fragility. While LLMs can reason over temporal structure given carefully engineered context, they often struggle with numeric fidelity, modality interference, and principled cross-modal integration. We present TS-Debate, a modality-specialized, collaborative multi-agent debate framework for zero-shot time series reasoning. TS-Debate assigns dedicated expert agents to textual context, visual patterns, and numerical signals, preceded by explicit domain knowledge elicitation, and coordinates their interaction via a structured debate protocol. Reviewer agents evaluate agent claims using a verification-conflict-calibration mechanism, supported by lightweight code execution and numerical lookup for programmatic verification. This architecture preserves modality fidelity, exposes conflicting evidence, and mitigates numeric hallucinations without task-specific fine-tuning. Across 20 tasks spanning three public benchmarks, TS-Debate achieves consistent and significant performance improvements over strong baselines, including standard multimodal debate in which all agents observe all inputs.

Paperid: 10, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18032.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With the rapid recent advance in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a surging need for high-performance dielectric elastomers. However, it remains a grand challenge to develop soft elastomers that simultaneously possess high dielectric constants (k, related to energy storage capacity) and low Young's moduli (E, related to mechanical flexibility). While some new elastomer designs have been reported in individual (mostly one-off) studies, almost no structured dataset is currently available for dielectric elastomers that systematically encompasses their molecular sequence, dielectric, and mechanical properties. Within this context, we curate a compact, high-quality dataset of acrylate-based dielectric elastomers, one of the most widely explored elastomer backbones due to its versatile chemistry and molecular design flexibility, by screening and aggregating experimental results from the literature over the past 10 years. Building on this dataset, we propose a multimodal learning framework that leverages large-scale pretrained polymer representations from graph- and sequence-based encoders. These pretrained embeddings transfer rich chemical and structural knowledge from vast polymer corpora, enabling accurate few-shot prediction of both dielectric and mechanical properties from molecular sequences. Our results represent a new paradigm for transferring knowledge from pretrained multimodal models to overcome severe data scarcity, which can be readily translated to other polymer backbones (e.g., silicones, urethanes) and thus accelerate data-efficient discovery of soft high-k dielectric elastomers. Our source code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/Polymers

Paperid: 11, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17814.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet heterogeneity in architecture, alignment strategies, and efficiency means that no single model is uniformly superior across tasks. In practical deployments, workloads span lightweight OCR to complex multimodal reasoning; using one MLLM for all queries either over-provisions compute on easy instances or sacrifices accuracy on hard ones. Query-level model selection (routing) addresses this tension, but extending routing from text-only LLMs to MLLMs is nontrivial due to modality fusion, wide variation in computational cost across models, and the absence of a standardized, budget-aware evaluation. We present MMR-Bench, a unified benchmark that isolates the multimodal routing problem and enables comparison under fixed candidate sets and cost models. MMR-Bench provides (i) a controlled environment with modality-aware inputs and variable compute budgets, (ii) a broad suite of vision-language tasks covering OCR, general VQA, and multimodal math reasoning, and (iii) strong single-model reference, oracle upper bounds, and representative routing policies. Using MMR-Bench, we show that incorporating multimodal signals improves routing quality. Empirically, these cues improve the cost-accuracy frontier and enable the routed system to exceed the strongest single model's accuracy at roughly 33% of its cost. Furthermore, policies trained on a subset of models and tasks generalize zero-shot to new datasets and text-only benchmarks without retuning, establishing MMR-Bench as a foundation for studying adaptive multimodal model selection and efficient MLLM deployment. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Hunter-Wrynn/MMR-Bench.

Paperid: 12, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16982.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Modern generative video models excel at producing convincing, high-quality outputs, but struggle to maintain multi-view and spatiotemporal consistency in highly dynamic real-world environments. In this work, we introduce \textbf{AnyView}, a diffusion-based video generation framework for \emph{dynamic view synthesis} with minimal inductive biases or geometric assumptions. We leverage multiple data sources with various levels of supervision, including monocular (2D), multi-view static (3D) and multi-view dynamic (4D) datasets, to train a generalist spatiotemporal implicit representation capable of producing zero-shot novel videos from arbitrary camera locations and trajectories. We evaluate AnyView on standard benchmarks, showing competitive results with the current state of the art, and propose \textbf{AnyViewBench}, a challenging new benchmark tailored towards \emph{extreme} dynamic view synthesis in diverse real-world scenarios. In this more dramatic setting, we find that most baselines drastically degrade in performance, as they require significant overlap between viewpoints, while AnyView maintains the ability to produce realistic, plausible, and spatiotemporally consistent videos when prompted from \emph{any} viewpoint. Results, data, code, and models can be viewed at: https://tri-ml.github.io/AnyView/

Paperid: 13, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16516.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series data from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) provides critical information for patient monitoring. While recent advancements in applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to time series modeling (TSM) have shown great promise, their effectiveness on the irregular ICU data, characterized by particularly high rates of missing values, remains largely unexplored. This work investigates two key components underlying the success of LLMs for TSM: the time series encoder and the multimodal alignment strategy. To this end, we establish a systematic testbed to evaluate their impact across various state-of-the-art LLM-based methods on benchmark ICU datasets against strong supervised and self-supervised baselines. Results reveal that the encoder design is more critical than the alignment strategy. Encoders that explicitly model irregularity achieve substantial performance gains, yielding an average AUPRC increase of $12.8\%$ over the vanilla Transformer. While less impactful, the alignment strategy is also noteworthy, with the best-performing semantically rich, fusion-based strategy achieving a modest $2.9\%$ improvement over cross-attention. However, LLM-based methods require at least 10$\times$ longer training than the best-performing irregular supervised models, while delivering only comparable performance. They also underperform in data-scarce few-shot learning settings. These findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of LLMs for irregular ICU time series. The code is available at https://github.com/mHealthUnimelb/LLMTS.

Paperid: 14, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16498.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate fine-grained tree species classification is critical for forest inventory and biodiversity monitoring. Existing methods predominantly focus on designing complex architectures to fit local data distributions. However, they often overlook the long-tailed distributions and high inter-class similarity inherent in limited data, thereby struggling to distinguish between few-shot or confusing categories. In the process of knowledge dissemination in the human world, individuals will actively seek expert assistance to transcend the limitations of local thinking. Inspired by this, we introduce an external "Domain Expert" and propose an Expert Knowledge-Guided Classification Decision Calibration Network (EKDC-Net) to overcome these challenges. Our framework addresses two core issues: expert knowledge extraction and utilization. Specifically, we first develop a Local Prior Guided Knowledge Extraction Module (LPKEM). By leveraging Class Activation Map (CAM) analysis, LPKEM guides the domain expert to focus exclusively on discriminative features essential for classification. Subsequently, to effectively integrate this knowledge, we design an Uncertainty-Guided Decision Calibration Module (UDCM). This module dynamically corrects the local model's decisions by considering both overall category uncertainty and instance-level prediction uncertainty. Furthermore, we present a large-scale classification dataset covering 102 tree species, named CU-Tree102 to address the issue of scarce diversity in current benchmarks. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, as a lightweight plug-and-play module, EKDC-Net improves backbone accuracy by 6.42% and precision by 11.46% using only 0.08M additional learnable parameters. The dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/TreeCLS.

Paperid: 15, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16211.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We study Compositional Video Understanding (CVU), where models must recognize verbs and objects and compose them to generalize to unseen combinations. We find that existing Zero-Shot Compositional Action Recognition (ZS-CAR) models fail primarily due to an overlooked failure mode: object-driven verb shortcuts. Through systematic analysis, we show that this behavior arises from two intertwined factors: severe sparsity and skewness of compositional supervision, and the asymmetric learning difficulty between verbs and objects. As training progresses, the existing ZS-CAR model increasingly ignores visual evidence and overfits to co-occurrence statistics. Consequently, the existing model does not gain the benefit of compositional recognition in unseen verb-object compositions. To address this, we propose RCORE, a simple and effective framework that enforces temporally grounded verb learning. RCORE introduces (i) a composition-aware augmentation that diversifies verb-object combinations without corrupting motion cues, and (ii) a temporal order regularization loss that penalizes shortcut behaviors by explicitly modeling temporal structure. Across two benchmarks, Sth-com and our newly constructed EK100-com, RCORE significantly improves unseen composition accuracy, reduces reliance on co-occurrence bias, and achieves consistently positive compositional gaps. Our findings reveal object-driven shortcuts as a critical limiting factor in ZS-CAR and demonstrate that addressing them is essential for robust compositional video understanding.

Paperid: 16, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16192.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Lifting perspective images and videos to 360° panoramas enables immersive 3D world generation. Existing approaches often rely on explicit geometric alignment between the perspective and the equirectangular projection (ERP) space. Yet, this requires known camera metadata, obscuring the application to in-the-wild data where such calibration is typically absent or noisy. We propose 360Anything, a geometry-free framework built upon pre-trained diffusion transformers. By treating the perspective input and the panorama target simply as token sequences, 360Anything learns the perspective-to-equirectangular mapping in a purely data-driven way, eliminating the need for camera information. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and video perspective-to-360° generation, outperforming prior works that use ground-truth camera information. We also trace the root cause of the seam artifacts at ERP boundaries to zero-padding in the VAE encoder, and introduce Circular Latent Encoding to facilitate seamless generation. Finally, we show competitive results in zero-shot camera FoV and orientation estimation benchmarks, demonstrating 360Anything's deep geometric understanding and broader utility in computer vision tasks. Additional results are available at https://360anything.github.io/.

Paperid: 17, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16038.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) can aid synthesis planning in chemistry, but standard prompting methods often yield hallucinated or outdated suggestions. We study LLM interactions with a reaction knowledge graph by casting reaction path retrieval as a Text2Cypher (natural language to graph query) generation problem, and define single- and multi-step retrieval tasks. We compare zero-shot prompting to one-shot variants using static, random, and embedding-based exemplar selection, and assess a checklist-driven validator/corrector loop. To evaluate our framework, we consider query validity and retrieval accuracy. We find that one-shot prompting with aligned exemplars consistently performs best. Our checklist-style self-correction loop mainly improves executability in zero-shot settings and offers limited additional retrieval gains once a good exemplar is present. We provide a reproducible Text2Cypher evaluation setup to facilitate further work on KG-grounded LLMs for synthesis planning. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-molecular-systems/KG-LLM-Synthesis-Retrieval.

Paperid: 18, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15708.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Role-play prompting is known to steer the behavior of language models by injecting a persona into the prompt, improving their zero-shot reasoning capabilities. However, such improvements are inconsistent across different tasks or instances. This inconsistency suggests that zero-shot and role-play prompting may offer complementary strengths rather than one being universally superior. Building on this insight, we propose Persona Switch, a novel decoding method that dynamically combines the benefits of both prompting strategies. Our method proceeds step-by-step, selecting the better output between zero-shot and role-play prompting at each step by comparing their output confidence, as measured by the logit gap. Experiments with widely-used LLMs demonstrate that Persona Switch consistently outperforms competitive baselines, achieving up to 5.13% accuracy improvement. Furthermore, we show that output confidence serves as an informative measure for selecting the more reliable output.

Paperid: 19, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15681.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot recognition in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery remains a critical bottleneck for real-world applications due to extreme data scarcity. A promising strategy involves synthesizing a large dataset with a generative adversarial network (GAN), pre-training a model via self-supervised learning (SSL), and then fine-tuning on the few labeled samples. However, this approach faces a fundamental paradox: conventional GANs themselves require abundant data for stable training, contradicting the premise of few-shot learning. To resolve this, we propose the consistency-regularized generative adversarial network (Cr-GAN), a novel framework designed to synthesize diverse, high-fidelity samples even when trained under these severe data limitations. Cr-GAN introduces a dual-branch discriminator that decouples adversarial training from representation learning. This architecture enables a channel-wise feature interpolation strategy to create novel latent features, complemented by a dual-domain cycle consistency mechanism that ensures semantic integrity. Our Cr-GAN framework is adaptable to various GAN architectures, and its synthesized data effectively boosts multiple SSL algorithms. Extensive experiments on the MSTAR and SRSDD datasets validate our approach, with Cr-GAN achieving a highly competitive accuracy of 71.21% and 51.64%, respectively, in the 8-shot setting, significantly outperforming leading baselines, while requiring only ~5 of the parameters of state-of-the-art diffusion models. Code is available at: https://github.com/yikuizhai/Cr-GAN.

Paperid: 20, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15479.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The safe deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes fields like biomedicine, requires them to be able to reason about cause and effect. We investigate this ability by testing 13 open-source LLMs on a fundamental task: pairwise causal discovery (PCD) from text. Our benchmark, using 12 diverse datasets, evaluates two core skills: 1) \textbf{Causal Detection} (identifying if a text contains a causal link) and 2) \textbf{Causal Extraction} (pulling out the exact cause and effect phrases). We tested various prompting methods, from simple instructions (zero-shot) to more complex strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Few-shot In-Context Learning (FICL). The results show major deficiencies in current models. The best model for detection, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, only achieved a mean score of 49.57\% ($C_{detect}$), while the best for extraction, Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, reached just 47.12\% ($C_{extract}$). Models performed best on simple, explicit, single-sentence relations. However, performance plummeted for more difficult (and realistic) cases, such as implicit relationships, links spanning multiple sentences, and texts containing multiple causal pairs. We provide a unified evaluation framework, built on a dataset validated with high inter-annotator agreement ($κ\ge 0.758$), and make all our data, code, and prompts publicly available to spur further research. \href{https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}{Code available here: https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}

Paperid: 21, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15065.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP-based foreground-background (FG-BG) decomposition methods have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performance. However, existing approaches still suffer from several limitations. For background regions obtained from decomposition, existing methods adopt a uniform suppression strategy for all patches, overlooking the varying contributions of different patches to the prediction. For foreground regions, existing methods fail to adequately consider that some local patches may exhibit appearance or semantic similarity to other classes, which may mislead the training process. To address these issues, we propose a new plug-and-play framework. This framework consists of three core components: (1) a Foreground-Background Decomposition module, which follows previous FG-BG methods to separate an image into foreground and background regions; (2) an Adaptive Background Suppression module, which adaptively weights patch classification entropy; and (3) a Confusable Foreground Rectification module, which identifies and rectifies confusable foreground patches. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed plug-and-play framework significantly improves the performance of existing FG-BG decomposition methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/lounwb/FoBoR.

Paperid: 22, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15013.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Batch inference workloads for causal transformer models frequently process sequences that share common prefixes, such as system prompts, few-shot examples, or shared queries. Standard inference engines treat each sequence independently, redundantly recomputing identical MLP activations for every copy of the shared prefix. We introduce RadixMLP, a technique that exploits the position-wise nature of MLPs, LayerNorms, linear projections, and embeddings to eliminate this redundancy. RadixMLP dynamically maps batches to a prefix trie, gathering shared segments into a compressed representation for position-wise computation and scattering results back only at attention boundaries. RadixMLP is stateless and operates within a single forward pass. In end-to-end serving benchmarks on MS~MARCO v1.1 with Qwen3 models (0.6B to 8B parameters), RadixMLP achieves 1.44-1.59$\times$ speedups in realistic reranking workloads, with up to $5\times$ speedups on synthetic benchmarks with longer shared prefixes. Our code is available at https://github.com/michaelfeil/radix-mlp.

Paperid: 23, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14957.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) seeks to automatically generate training curricula for reinforcement learning (RL) agents, with the goal of improving generalisation and zero-shot performance. However, designing effective curricula remains a difficult problem, particularly in settings where small subsets of environment parameterisations result in significant increases in the complexity of the required policy. Current methods struggle with a difficult credit assignment problem and rely on regret approximations that fail to identify challenging levels, both of which are compounded as the size of the environment grows. We propose Dynamic Environment Generation for UED (DEGen) to enable a denser level generator reward signal, reducing the difficulty of credit assignment and allowing for UED to scale to larger environment sizes. We also introduce a new regret approximation, Maximised Negative Advantage (MNA), as a significantly improved metric to optimise for, that better identifies more challenging levels. We show empirically that MNA outperforms current regret approximations and when combined with DEGen, consistently outperforms existing methods, especially as the size of the environment grows. We have made all our code available here: https://github.com/HarryMJMead/Dynamic-Environment-Generation-for-UED.

Paperid: 24, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14172.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We study sentence-level detection of the 19 human values in the refined Schwartz continuum in about 74k English sentences from news and political manifestos (ValueEval'24 corpus). Each sentence is annotated with value presence, yielding a binary moral-presence label and a 19-way multi-label task under severe class imbalance. First, we show that moral presence is learnable from single sentences: a DeBERTa-base classifier attains positive-class F1 = 0.74 with calibrated thresholds. Second, we compare direct multi-label value detectors with presence-gated hierarchies under a single 8 GB GPU budget. Under matched compute, presence gating does not improve over direct prediction, indicating that gate recall becomes a bottleneck. Third, we investigate lightweight auxiliary signals - short-range context, LIWC-22 and moral lexica, and topic features - and small ensembles. Our best supervised configuration, a soft-voting ensemble of DeBERTa-based models enriched with such signals, reaches macro-F1 = 0.332 on the 19 values, improving over the best previous English-only baseline on this corpus (macro-F1 $\approx$ 0.28). We additionally benchmark 7-9B instruction-tuned LLMs (Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B) in zero-/few-shot and QLoRA setups, and find that they lag behind the supervised ensemble under the same hardware constraint. Overall, our results provide empirical guidance for building compute-efficient, value-aware NLP models under realistic GPU budgets.

Paperid: 25, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13059.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Crack detection is critical for concrete infrastructure safety, but real-world cracks often appear in low-light environments like tunnels and bridge undersides, degrading computer vision segmentation accuracy. Pixel-level annotation of low-light crack images is extremely time-consuming, yet most deep learning methods require large, well-illuminated datasets. We propose a dual-branch prototype learning network integrating Retinex theory with few-shot learning for low-light crack segmentation. Retinex-based reflectance components guide illumination-invariant global representation learning, while metric learning reduces dependence on large annotated datasets. We introduce a cross-similarity prior mask generation module that computes high-dimensional similarities between query and support features to capture crack location and structure, and a multi-scale feature enhancement module that fuses multi-scale features with the prior mask to alleviate spatial inconsistency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance under low-light conditions. Code: https://github.com/YulunGuo/CrackFSS.

Paperid: 26, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12766.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in generalization but suffer from insufficient spatial perception. Focusing on complex continuous environments, we categorize key perceptual bottlenecks into three spatial challenges: door interaction,multi-room navigation, and ambiguous instruction execution, where existing methods consistently suffer high failure rates. We present Spatial-VLN, a perception-guided exploration framework designed to overcome these challenges. The framework consists of two main modules. The Spatial Perception Enhancement (SPE) module integrates panoramic filtering with specialized door and region experts to produce spatially coherent, cross-view consistent perceptual representations. Building on this foundation, our Explored Multi-expert Reasoning (EMR) module uses parallel LLM experts to address waypoint-level semantics and region-level spatial transitions. When discrepancies arise between expert predictions, a query-and-explore mechanism is activated, prompting the agent to actively probe critical areas and resolve perceptual ambiguities. Experiments on VLN-CE demonstrate that Spatial VLN achieves state-of-the-art performance using only low-cost LLMs. Furthermore, to validate real-world applicability, we introduce a value-based waypoint sampling strategy that effectively bridges the Sim2Real gap. Extensive real-world evaluations confirm that our framework delivers superior generalization and robustness in complex environments. Our codes and videos are available at https://yueluhhxx.github.io/Spatial-VLN-web/.

Paperid: 27, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12480.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural codec language models achieve impressive zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) by fully imitating the acoustic characteristics of a short speech prompt, including timbre, prosody, and paralinguistic information. However, such holistic imitation limits their ability to isolate and control individual attributes. In this paper, we present a unified codec language model SpeechEdit that extends zero-shot TTS with a selective control mechanism. By default, SpeechEdit reproduces the complete acoustic profile inferred from the speech prompt, but it selectively overrides only the attributes specified by explicit control instructions. To enable controllable modeling, SpeechEdit is trained on our newly constructed LibriEdit dataset, which provides delta (difference-aware) training pairs derived from LibriHeavy. Experimental results show that our approach maintains naturalness and robustness while offering flexible and localized control over desired attributes. Audio samples are available at https://speech-editing.github.io/speech-editing/.

Paperid: 28, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12083.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Spatio-Temporal (ST) Foundation Models (STFMs) promise cross-dataset generalization, yet joint ST pretraining is computationally expensive and grapples with the heterogeneity of domain-specific spatial patterns. Substantially extending our preliminary conference version, we present FactoST-v2, an enhanced factorized framework redesigned for full weight transfer and arbitrary-length generalization. FactoST-v2 decouples universal temporal learning from domain-specific spatial adaptation. The first stage pretrains a minimalist encoder-only backbone using randomized sequence masking to capture invariant temporal dynamics, enabling probabilistic quantile prediction across variable horizons. The second stage employs a streamlined adapter to rapidly inject spatial awareness via meta adaptive learning and prompting. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse domains demonstrate that FactoST-v2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with linear efficiency - significantly outperforming existing foundation models in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios while rivaling domain-specific expert baselines. This factorized paradigm offers a practical, scalable path toward truly universal STFMs. Code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/FactoST.

Paperid: 29, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12082.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Assisting pathologists in the analysis of histopathological images has high clinical value, as it supports cancer detection and staging. In this context, histology foundation models have recently emerged. Among them, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide strong yet imperfect zero-shot predictions. We propose to refine these predictions by adapting Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to histopathological applications, requiring no additional model training. We present HistoCRF, a CRF-based framework, with a novel definition of the pairwise potential that promotes label diversity and leverages expert annotations. We consider three experiments: without annotations, with expert annotations, and with iterative human-in-the-loop annotations that progressively correct misclassified patches. Experiments on five patch-level classification datasets covering different organs and diseases demonstrate average accuracy gains of 16.0% without annotations and 27.5% with only 100 annotations, compared to zero-shot predictions. Moreover, integrating a human in the loop reaches a further gain of 32.6% with the same number of annotations. The code will be made available on https://github.com/tgodelaine/HistoCRF.

Paperid: 30, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11259.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are emerging as powerful tools for nonlinear Model Order Reduction (MOR) of time-dependent parameterized Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, existing methodologies struggle to combine geometric inductive biases with interpretable latent behavior, overlooking dynamics-driven features or disregarding spatial information. In this work, we address this gap by introducing Latent Dynamics Graph Convolutional Network (LD-GCN), a purely data-driven, encoder-free architecture that learns a global, low-dimensional representation of dynamical systems conditioned on external inputs and parameters. The temporal evolution is modeled in the latent space and advanced through time-stepping, allowing for time-extrapolation, and the trajectories are consistently decoded onto geometrically parameterized domains using a GNN. Our framework enhances interpretability by enabling the analysis of the reduced dynamics and supporting zero-shot prediction through latent interpolation. The methodology is mathematically validated via a universal approximation theorem for encoder-free architectures, and numerically tested on complex computational mechanics problems involving physical and geometric parameters, including the detection of bifurcating phenomena for Navier-Stokes equations. Code availability: https://github.com/lorenzotomada/ld-gcn-rom

Paperid: 31, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10497.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP often leads to catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge. Prior work primarily aims to mitigate forgetting during adaptation; however, forgetting often remains inevitable during this process. We introduce a novel paradigm, continued fine-tuning (CFT), which seeks to recover pretrained knowledge after a zero-shot model has already been adapted. We propose a simple, model-agnostic CFT strategy (named MERGETUNE) guided by linear mode connectivity (LMC), which can be applied post hoc to existing fine-tuned models without requiring architectural changes. Given a fine-tuned model, we continue fine-tuning its trainable parameters (e.g., soft prompts or linear heads) to search for a continued model which has two low-loss paths to the zero-shot (e.g., CLIP) and the fine-tuned (e.g., CoOp) solutions. By exploiting the geometry of the loss landscape, the continued model implicitly merges the two solutions, restoring pretrained knowledge lost in the fine-tuned counterpart. A challenge is that the vanilla LMC constraint requires data replay from the pretraining task. We approximate this constraint for the zero-shot model via a second-order surrogate, eliminating the need for large-scale data replay. Experiments show that MERGETUNE improves the harmonic mean of CoOp by +5.6% on base-novel generalisation without adding parameters. On robust fine-tuning evaluations, the LMC-merged model from MERGETUNE surpasses ensemble baselines with lower inference cost, achieving further gains and state-of-the-art results when ensembled with the zero-shot model. Our code is available at https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/MERGETUNE.

Paperid: 32, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10477.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As hubs of human activity, urban surfaces consist of a wealth of semantic entities. Segmenting these various entities from satellite imagery is crucial for a range of downstream applications. Current advanced segmentation models can reliably segment entities defined by physical attributes (e.g., buildings, water bodies) but still struggle with socially defined categories (e.g., schools, parks). In this work, we achieve socio-semantic segmentation by vision-language model reasoning. To facilitate this, we introduce the Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation dataset named SocioSeg, a new resource comprising satellite imagery, digital maps, and pixel-level labels of social semantic entities organized in a hierarchical structure. Additionally, we propose a novel vision-language reasoning framework called SocioReasoner that simulates the human process of identifying and annotating social semantic entities via cross-modal recognition and multi-stage reasoning. We employ reinforcement learning to optimize this non-differentiable process and elicit the reasoning capabilities of the vision-language model. Experiments demonstrate our approach's gains over state-of-the-art models and strong zero-shot generalization. Our dataset and code are available in https://github.com/AMAP-ML/SocioReasoner.

Paperid: 33, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10096.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal models excel in English, supported by abundant image-text and audio-text data, but performance drops sharply for other languages due to limited multilingual multimodal resources. Existing solutions rely on machine translation, while advances in multilingual text modeling remain underutilized. We introduce M2M, a lightweight alignment method that learns only a few linear layers--using English text alone--to map multilingual text embeddings into multimodal space. Despite its simplicity, M2M matches baseline performance in English (94.9% Recall@10) and achieves strong zero-shot transfer (89.5% Recall@10 averaged across 11 languages, 10 unseen) on XTD Text-to-Image retrieval. Qualitative t-SNE visualizations show that multilingual embeddings align tightly with multimodal representations, while weight analysis reveals that the transformation reshapes embedding geometry rather than performing trivial rotations. Beyond image-text retrieval, M2M demonstrates robustness across datasets and tasks, extending to Audio-Text retrieval and Text-to-Image generation. We release code and checkpoints (https://github.com/piyushsinghpasi/M2M) along with multilingual evaluation datasets: MSCOCO Multilingual 30K (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/mscoco-multilingual-30k), AudioCaps Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/audiocaps-multilingual), and Clotho Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/clotho-multilingual).

Paperid: 34, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09805.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Modern logical reasoning with LLMs primarily relies on employing complex interactive frameworks that decompose the reasoning process into subtasks solved through carefully designed prompts or requiring external resources (e.g., symbolic solvers) to exploit their strong logical structures. While interactive approaches introduce additional overhead or depend on external components, which limit their scalability. In this work, we introduce a non-interactive, end-to-end framework for reasoning tasks, enabling reasoning to emerge within the model itself-improving generalization while preserving analyzability without any external resources. We show that introducing structural information into the few-shot prompt activates a subset of attention heads that patterns aligned with logical reasoning operators. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Aware Intervention (AAI), an inference-time intervention method that reweights attention scores across selected heads identified by their logical patterns. AAI offers an efficient way to steer the model's reasoning toward leveraging prior knowledge through attention modulation. Extensive experiments show that AAI enhances logical reasoning performance across diverse benchmarks, and model architectures, while incurring negligible additional computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/aai_for_logical_reasoning.

Paperid: 35, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09717.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Online medical consultations generate large volumes of conversational health data that often embed protected health information, requiring robust methods to classify data categories and assign risk levels in line with policies and practice. However, existing approaches lack unified standards and reliable automated methods to fulfill sensitivity classification for such conversational health data. This study presents a large language model-based extraction pipeline, SALP-CG, for classifying and grading privacy risks in online conversational health data. We concluded health-data classification and grading rules in accordance with GB/T 39725-2020. Combining few-shot guidance, JSON Schema constrained decoding, and deterministic high-risk rules, the backend-agnostic extraction pipeline achieves strong category compliance and reliable sensitivity across diverse LLMs. On the MedDialog-CN benchmark, models yields robust entity counts, high schema compliance, and accurate sensitivity grading, while the strongest model attains micro-F1=0.900 for maximum-level prediction. The category landscape stratified by sensitivity shows that Level 2-3 items dominate, enabling re-identification when combined; Level 4-5 items are less frequent but carry outsize harm. SALP-CG reliably helps classify categories and grading sensitivity in online conversational health data across LLMs, offering a practical method for health data governance. Code is available at https://github.com/dommii1218/SALP-CG.

Paperid: 36, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09708.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3\% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.

Paperid: 37, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08665.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
VLA models have shown promising potential in embodied navigation by unifying perception and planning while inheriting the strong generalization abilities of large VLMs. However, most existing VLA models rely on reactive mappings directly from observations to actions, lacking the explicit reasoning capabilities and persistent memory required for complex, long-horizon navigation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose VLingNav, a VLA model for embodied navigation grounded in linguistic-driven cognition. First, inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce an adaptive chain-of-thought mechanism, which dynamically triggers explicit reasoning only when necessary, enabling the agent to fluidly switch between fast, intuitive execution and slow, deliberate planning. Second, to handle long-horizon spatial dependencies, we develop a visual-assisted linguistic memory module that constructs a persistent, cross-modal semantic memory, enabling the agent to recall past observations to prevent repetitive exploration and infer movement trends for dynamic environments. For the training recipe, we construct Nav-AdaCoT-2.9M, the largest embodied navigation dataset with reasoning annotations to date, enriched with adaptive CoT annotations that induce a reasoning paradigm capable of adjusting both when to think and what to think about. Moreover, we incorporate an online expert-guided reinforcement learning stage, enabling the model to surpass pure imitation learning and to acquire more robust, self-explored navigation behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLingNav achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of embodied navigation benchmarks. Notably, VLingNav transfers to real-world robotic platforms in a zero-shot manner, executing various navigation tasks and demonstrating strong cross-domain and cross-task generalization.

Paperid: 38, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08078.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning-based automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning but remains challenging in few-shot scenarios due to the scarcity of annotated training data. Recently, self-supervised foundation models such as DINOv3, which were trained on large natural image datasets, have shown strong potential for dense feature extraction that can help with the few-shot learning challenge. Yet, their direct application to medical images is hindered by domain differences. In this work, we propose DINO-AugSeg, a novel framework that leverages DINOv3 features to address the few-shot medical image segmentation challenge. Specifically, we introduce WT-Aug, a wavelet-based feature-level augmentation module that enriches the diversity of DINOv3-extracted features by perturbing frequency components, and CG-Fuse, a contextual information-guided fusion module that exploits cross-attention to integrate semantic-rich low-resolution features with spatially detailed high-resolution features. Extensive experiments on six public benchmarks spanning five imaging modalities, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, and dermoscopy, demonstrate that DINO-AugSeg consistently outperforms existing methods under limited-sample conditions. The results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating wavelet-domain augmentation and contextual fusion for robust feature representation, suggesting DINO-AugSeg as a promising direction for advancing few-shot medical image segmentation. Code and data will be made available on https://github.com/apple1986/DINO-AugSeg.

Paperid: 39, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08022.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot image Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to detect and localise anomalies without access to any normal training samples of the target data. While recent ZSAD approaches leverage additional modalities such as language to generate fine-grained prompts for localisation, vision-only methods remain limited to image-level classification, lacking spatial precision. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective training-free vision-only ZSAD framework that circumvents the need for fine-grained prompts by leveraging the inversion of a pretrained Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM). Specifically, given an input image and a generic text description (e.g., "an image of an [object class]"), we invert the image to obtain latent representations and initiate the denoising process from a fixed intermediate timestep to reconstruct the image. Since the underlying diffusion model is trained solely on normal data, this process yields a normal-looking reconstruction. The discrepancy between the input image and the reconstructed one highlights potential anomalies. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on VISA dataset, demonstrating strong localisation capabilities without auxiliary modalities and facilitating a shift away from prompt dependence for zero-shot anomaly detection research. Code is available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/DIVAD.

Paperid: 40, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07335.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot remote sensing image classification is challenging due to limited labeled samples and high variability in land-cover types. We propose a reconstruction-guided few-shot network (RGFS-Net) that enhances generalization to unseen classes while preserving consistency for seen categories. Our method incorporates a masked image reconstruction task, where parts of the input are occluded and reconstructed to encourage semantically rich feature learning. This auxiliary task strengthens spatial understanding and improves class discrimination under low-data settings. We evaluated the efficacy of EuroSAT and PatternNet datasets under 1-shot and 5-shot protocols, our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines. The proposed method is simple, effective, and compatible with standard backbones, offering a robust solution for few-shot remote sensing classification. Codes are available at https://github.com/stark0908/RGFS.

Paperid: 41, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07310.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Attention mechanisms have become a core component of deep learning models, with Channel Attention and Spatial Attention being the two most representative architectures. Current research on their fusion strategies primarily bifurcates into sequential and parallel paradigms, yet the selection process remains largely empirical, lacking systematic analysis and unified principles. We systematically compare channel-spatial attention combinations under a unified framework, building an evaluation suite of 18 topologies across four classes: sequential, parallel, multi-scale, and residual. Across two vision and nine medical datasets, we uncover a "data scale-method-performance" coupling law: (1) in few-shot tasks, the "Channel-Multi-scale Spatial" cascaded structure achieves optimal performance; (2) in medium-scale tasks, parallel learnable fusion architectures demonstrate superior results; (3) in large-scale tasks, parallel structures with dynamic gating yield the best performance. Additionally, experiments indicate that the "Spatial-Channel" order is more stable and effective for fine-grained classification, while residual connections mitigate vanishing gradient problems across varying data scales. We thus propose scenario-based guidelines for building future attention modules. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/DWlzm.

Paperid: 42, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06993.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong general-purpose capabilities, yet still struggle on Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC), a core perception task that requires subtle visual discrimination and is crucial for many real-world applications. A widely adopted strategy for boosting performance on challenging tasks such as math and coding is Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, several prior works have reported that CoT can actually harm performance on visual perception tasks. These studies, though, examine the issue from relatively narrow angles and leave open why CoT degrades perception-heavy performance. We systematically re-examine the role of CoT in FGVC through the lenses of zero-shot evaluation and multiple training paradigms. Across these settings, we uncover a central paradox: the degradation induced by CoT is largely driven by the reasoning length, in which longer textual reasoning consistently lowers classification accuracy. We term this phenomenon the ``Cost of Thinking''. Building on this finding, we make two key contributions: (1) \alg, a simple and general plug-and-play normalization method for multi-reward optimization that balances heterogeneous reward signals, and (2) ReFine-RFT, a framework that combines ensemble rewards with \alg to constrain reasoning length while providing dense accuracy-oriented feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our findings and the proposed ReFine-RFT, achieving state-of-the-art performance across FGVC benchmarks. Code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/jiezhu23/ReFine-RFT}{Project Link}.

Paperid: 43, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06496.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spatial intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, reason about, and describe objects and their relationships within three-dimensional environments, forming a foundation for embodied perception and scene understanding. 3D captioning aims to describe 3D scenes in natural language; however, it remains challenging due to the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds and, more critically, the weak grounding and limited out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of existing captioners across drastically different environments, including indoor and outdoor 3D scenes. To address this challenge, we propose 3D CoCa v2, a generalizable 3D captioning framework that unifies contrastive vision-language learning with 3D caption generation and further improves robustness via test-time search (TTS) without updating the captioner parameters. 3D CoCa v2 builds on a frozen CLIP-based semantic prior, a spatially-aware 3D scene encoder for geometry, and a multimodal decoder jointly optimized with contrastive and captioning objectives, avoiding external detectors or handcrafted proposals. At inference, TTS produces diverse caption candidates and performs reward-guided selection using a compact scene summary. Experiments show improvements over 3D CoCa of +1.50 CIDEr@0.5IoU on ScanRefer and +1.61 CIDEr@0.5IoU on Nr3D, and +3.8 CIDEr@0.25 in zero-shot OOD evaluation on TOD3Cap. Code will be released at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/3DCoCav2.

Paperid: 44, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06198.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Biryani, one of India's most celebrated dishes, exhibits remarkable regional diversity in its preparation, ingredients, and presentation. With the growing availability of online cooking videos, there is unprecedented potential to study such culinary variations using computational tools systematically. However, existing video understanding methods fail to capture the fine-grained, multimodal, and culturally grounded differences in procedural cooking videos. This work presents the first large-scale, curated dataset of biryani preparation videos, comprising 120 high-quality YouTube recordings across 12 distinct regional styles. We propose a multi-stage framework leveraging recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) to segment videos into fine-grained procedural units and align them with audio transcripts and canonical recipe text. Building on these aligned representations, we introduce a video comparison pipeline that automatically identifies and explains procedural differences between regional variants. We construct a comprehensive question-answer (QA) benchmark spanning multiple reasoning levels to evaluate procedural understanding in VLMs. Our approach employs multiple VLMs in complementary roles, incorporates human-in-the-loop verification for high-precision tasks, and benchmarks several state-of-the-art models under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The resulting dataset, comparison methodology, and QA benchmark provide a new testbed for evaluating VLMs on structured, multimodal reasoning tasks and open new directions for computational analysis of cultural heritage through cooking videos. We release all data, code, and the project website at https://farzanashaju.github.io/how-does-india-cook-biryani/.

Paperid: 45, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05942.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Domain-generalized retinal vessel segmentation is critical for automated ophthalmic diagnosis, yet faces significant challenges from domain shift induced by non-uniform illumination and varying contrast, compounded by the difficulty of preserving fine vessel structures. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot capabilities, existing SAM-based methods rely on simple adapter fine-tuning while overlooking frequency-domain information that encodes domain-invariant features, resulting in degraded generalization under illumination and contrast variations. Furthermore, SAM's direct upsampling inevitably loses fine vessel details. To address these limitations, we propose WaveRNet, a wavelet-guided frequency learning framework for robust multi-source domain-generalized retinal vessel segmentation. Specifically, we devise a Spectral-guided Domain Modulator (SDM) that integrates wavelet decomposition with learnable domain tokens, enabling the separation of illumination-robust low-frequency structures from high-frequency vessel boundaries while facilitating domain-specific feature generation. Furthermore, we introduce a Frequency-Adaptive Domain Fusion (FADF) module that performs intelligent test-time domain selection through wavelet-based frequency similarity and soft-weighted fusion. Finally, we present a Hierarchical Mask-Prompt Refiner (HMPR) that overcomes SAM's upsampling limitation through coarse-to-fine refinement with long-range dependency modeling. Extensive experiments under the Leave-One-Domain-Out protocol on four public retinal datasets demonstrate that WaveRNet achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Chanchan-Wang/WaveRNet.

Paperid: 46, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05858.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance in zero-shot multilingual machine translation (MT). Some follow-up works further improved MT performance via preference optimization, but they leave a key aspect largely underexplored: the order in which data samples are given during training. We address this topic by integrating curriculum learning into various state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms to boost MT performance. We introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy with restarts (CLewR), which reiterates easy-to-hard curriculum multiple times during training to effectively mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of easy examples. We demonstrate consistent gains across several model families (Gemma2, Qwen2.5, Llama3.1) and preference optimization techniques. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/alexandra-dragomir/CLewR.

Paperid: 47, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05573.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This work presents Orient Anything V2, an enhanced foundation model for unified understanding of object 3D orientation and rotation from single or paired images. Building upon Orient Anything V1, which defines orientation via a single unique front face, V2 extends this capability to handle objects with diverse rotational symmetries and directly estimate relative rotations. These improvements are enabled by four key innovations: 1) Scalable 3D assets synthesized by generative models, ensuring broad category coverage and balanced data distribution; 2) An efficient, model-in-the-loop annotation system that robustly identifies 0 to N valid front faces for each object; 3) A symmetry-aware, periodic distribution fitting objective that captures all plausible front-facing orientations, effectively modeling object rotational symmetry; 4) A multi-frame architecture that directly predicts relative object rotations. Extensive experiments show that Orient Anything V2 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on orientation estimation, 6DoF pose estimation, and object symmetry recognition across 11 widely used benchmarks. The model demonstrates strong generalization, significantly broadening the applicability of orientation estimation in diverse downstream tasks.

Paperid: 48, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05552.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Universal visual anomaly detection (AD) aims to identify anomaly images and segment anomaly regions towards open and dynamic scenarios, following zero- and few-shot paradigms without any dataset-specific fine-tuning. We have witnessed significant progress in widely use of visual-language foundational models in recent approaches. However, current methods often struggle with complex prompt engineering, elaborate adaptation modules, and challenging training strategies, ultimately limiting their flexibility and generality. To address these issues, this paper rethinks the fundamental mechanism behind visual-language models for AD and presents an embarrassingly simple, general, and effective framework for Universal vision Anomaly Detection (UniADet). Specifically, we first find language encoder is used to derive decision weights for anomaly classification and segmentation, and then demonstrate that it is unnecessary for universal AD. Second, we propose an embarrassingly simple method to completely decouple classification and segmentation, and decouple cross-level features, i.e., learning independent weights for different tasks and hierarchical features. UniADet is highly simple (learning only decoupled weights), parameter-efficient (only 0.002M learnable parameters), general (adapting a variety of foundation models), and effective (surpassing state-of-the-art zero-/few-shot by a large margin and even full-shot AD methods for the first time) on 14 real-world AD benchmarks covering both industrial and medical domains. We will make the code and model of UniADet available at https://github.com/gaobb/UniADet.

Paperid: 49, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05103.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding the role of citations is essential for research assessment and citation-aware digital libraries. However, existing citation classification frameworks often conflate citation intent (why a work is cited) with cited content type (what part is cited), limiting their effectiveness in auto classification due to a dilemma between fine-grained type distinctions and practical classification reliability. We introduce SOFT, a Semantically Orthogonal Framework with Two dimensions that explicitly separates citation intent from cited content type, drawing inspiration from semantic role theory. We systematically re-annotate the ACL-ARC dataset using SOFT and release a cross-disciplinary test set sampled from ACT2. Evaluation with both zero-shot and fine-tuned Large Language Models demonstrates that SOFT enables higher agreement between human annotators and LLMs, and supports stronger classification performance and robust cross-domain generalization compared to ACL-ARC and SciCite annotation frameworks. These results confirm SOFT's value as a clear, reusable annotation standard, improving clarity, consistency, and generalizability for digital libraries and scholarly communication infrastructures. All code and data are publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/zhiyintan/SOFT.

Paperid: 50, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04857.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Online misinformation is increasingly pervasive, yet most existing benchmarks and methods evaluate veracity at the level of whole claims or paragraphs using coarse binary labels, obscuring how true and false details often co-exist within single sentences. These simplifications also limit interpretability: global explanations cannot identify which specific segments are misleading or differentiate how a detail is false (e.g., distorted vs. fabricated). To address these gaps, we introduce MisSpans, the first multi-domain, human-annotated benchmark for span-level misinformation detection and analysis, consisting of paired real and fake news stories. MisSpans defines three complementary tasks: MisSpansIdentity for pinpointing false spans within sentences, MisSpansType for categorising false spans by misinformation type, and MisSpansExplanation for providing rationales grounded in identified spans. Together, these tasks enable fine-grained localisation, nuanced characterisation beyond true/false and actionable explanations. Expert annotators were guided by standardised guidelines and consistency checks, leading to high inter-annotator agreement. We evaluate 15 representative LLMs, including reasoning-enhanced and non-reasoning variants, under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Results reveal the challenging nature of fine-grained misinformation identification and analysis, and highlight the need for a deeper understanding of how performance may be influenced by multiple interacting factors, including model size and reasoning capabilities, along with domain-specific textual features. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/MisSpans.

Paperid: 51, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04582.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-Visualization (Text2Vis) systems translate natural language queries over tabular data into concise answers and executable visualizations. While closed-source LLMs generate functional code, the resulting charts often lack semantic alignment and clarity, qualities that can only be assessed post-execution. Open-source models struggle even more, frequently producing non-executable or visually poor outputs. Although supervised fine-tuning can improve code executability, it fails to enhance overall visualization quality, as traditional SFT loss cannot capture post-execution feedback. To address this gap, we propose RL-Text2Vis, the first reinforcement learning framework for Text2Vis generation. Built on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), our method uses a novel multi-objective reward that jointly optimizes textual accuracy, code validity, and visualization quality using post-execution feedback. By training Qwen2.5 models (7B and 14B), RL-Text2Vis achieves a 22% relative improvement in chart quality over GPT-4o on the Text2Vis benchmark and boosts code execution success from 78% to 97% relative to its zero-shot baseline. Our models significantly outperform strong zero-shot and supervised baselines and also demonstrate robust generalization to out-of-domain datasets like VIS-Eval and NVBench. These results establish GRPO as an effective strategy for structured, multimodal reasoning in visualization generation. We release our code at https://github.com/vis-nlp/RL-Text2Vis.

Paperid: 52, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04564.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems often assume congruence between vocal emotion and lexical semantics. However, in real-world interactions, acoustic-semantic conflict is common yet overlooked, where the emotion conveyed by tone contradicts the literal meaning of spoken words. We show that state-of-the-art SER models, including ASR-based, self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches and Audio Language Models (ALMs), suffer performance degradation under such conflicts due to semantic bias or entangled acoustic-semantic representations. To address this, we propose the Fusion Acoustic-Semantic (FAS) framework, which explicitly disentangles acoustic and semantic pathways and bridges them through a lightweight, query-based attention module. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce the Conflict in Acoustic-Semantic Emotion (CASE), the first dataset dominated by clear and interpretable acoustic-semantic conflicts in varied scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAS consistently outperforms existing methods in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. Notably, on the CASE benchmark, conventional SER models fail dramatically, while FAS sets a new SOTA with 59.38% accuracy. Our code and datasets is available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/FAS.

Paperid: 53, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04233.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present the LEMAS-Dataset, which, to our knowledge, is currently the largest open-source multilingual speech corpus with word-level timestamps. Covering over 150,000 hours across 10 major languages, LEMAS-Dataset is constructed via a efficient data processing pipeline that ensures high-quality data and annotations. To validate the effectiveness of LEMAS-Dataset across diverse generative paradigms, we train two benchmark models with distinct architectures and task specializations on this dataset. LEMAS-TTS, built upon a non-autoregressive flow-matching framework, leverages the dataset's massive scale and linguistic diversity to achieve robust zero-shot multilingual synthesis. Our proposed accent-adversarial training and CTC loss mitigate cross-lingual accent issues, enhancing synthesis stability. Complementarily, LEMAS-Edit employs an autoregressive decoder-only architecture that formulates speech editing as a masked token infilling task. By exploiting precise word-level alignments to construct training masks and adopting adaptive decoding strategies, it achieves seamless, smooth-boundary speech editing with natural transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on LEMAS-Dataset deliver high-quality synthesis and editing performance, confirming the dataset's quality. We envision that this richly timestamp-annotated, fine-grained multilingual corpus will drive future advances in prompt-based speech generation systems.

Paperid: 54, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03793.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Node classification is a fundamental problem in information retrieval with many real-world applications, such as community detection in social networks, grouping articles published online and product categorization in e-commerce. Zero-shot node classification in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) presents a significant challenge, particularly due to the absence of labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Zero-shot Prompt Tuning (ZPT) framework to address this problem by leveraging a Universal Bimodal Conditional Generator (UBCG). Our approach begins with pre-training a graph-language model to capture both the graph structure and the associated textual descriptions of each node. Following this, a conditional generative model is trained to learn the joint distribution of nodes in both graph and text modalities, enabling the generation of synthetic samples for each class based solely on the class name. These synthetic node and text embeddings are subsequently used to perform continuous prompt tuning, facilitating effective node classification in a zero-shot setting. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our framework performs better than existing state-of-the-art baselines. We also provide ablation studies to validate the contribution of the bimodal generator. The code is provided at: https://github.com/Sethup123/ZPT.

Paperid: 55, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03596.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to rapidly learn novel class concepts from limited examples to segment specific targets in unseen images, and has been widely applied in areas such as medical diagnosis and industrial inspection. However, existing studies largely overlook the complex environmental factors encountered in real world scenarios-such as illumination, background, and camera viewpoint-which can substantially increase the difficulty of test images. As a result, models trained under laboratory conditions often fall short of practical deployment requirements. To bridge this gap, in this paper, an environment-robust FSS setting is introduced that explicitly incorporates challenging test cases arising from complex environments-such as motion blur, small objects, and camouflaged targets-to enhance model's robustness under realistic, dynamic conditions. An environment robust FSS benchmark (ER-FSS) is established, covering eight datasets across multiple real world scenarios. In addition, an Adaptive Attention Distillation (AAD) method is proposed, which repeatedly contrasts and distills key shared semantics between known (support) and unknown (query) images to derive class-specific attention for novel categories. This strengthens the model's ability to focus on the correct targets in complex environments, thereby improving environmental robustness. Comparative experiments show that AAD improves mIoU by 3.3% - 8.5% across all datasets and settings, demonstrating superior performance and strong generalization. The source code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/Adaptive-Attention-Distillation-for-FSS.

Paperid: 56, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03170.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) has achieved notable progress, most existing methods remain limited to inter-utterance-level control, making fine-grained intra-utterance expression challenging due to their reliance on non-public datasets or complex multi-stage training. In this paper, we propose a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. Specifically, we propose a segment-aware emotion conditioning strategy that combines causal masking with monotonic stream alignment filtering to isolate emotion conditioning and schedule mask transitions, enabling smooth intra-utterance emotion shifts while preserving global semantic coherence. Based on this, we further propose a segment-aware duration steering strategy to combine local duration embedding steering with global EOS logit modulation, allowing local duration adjustment while ensuring globally consistent termination. To eliminate the need for segment-level manual prompt engineering, we construct a 30,000-sample multi-emotion and duration-annotated text dataset to enable LLM-based automatic prompt construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method not only achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency in multi-emotion and duration control, but also maintains baseline-level speech quality of the underlying TTS model. Audio samples are available at https://aclanonymous111.github.io/TED-TTS-DemoPage/.

Paperid: 57, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02760.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation aims to recover the depth information of 3D scenes from 2D images. Recent work has made significant progress, but its reliance on large-scale datasets and complex decoders has limited its efficiency and generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and data-centric framework for zero-shot monocular depth estimation. We first adopt DINOv3 as the visual encoder to obtain high-quality dense features. Secondly, to address the inherent drawbacks of the complex structure of the DPT, we design the Simple Depth Transformer (SDT), a compact transformer-based decoder. Compared to the DPT, it uses a single-path feature fusion and upsampling process to reduce the computational overhead of cross-scale feature fusion, achieving higher accuracy while reducing the number of parameters by approximately 85%-89%. Furthermore, we propose a quality-based filtering strategy to filter out harmful samples, thereby reducing dataset size while improving overall training quality. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our framework surpasses the DPT in accuracy. This work highlights the importance of balancing model design and data quality for achieving efficient and generalizable zero-shot depth estimation. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/AnyDepth. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/AnyDepth.

Paperid: 58, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02759.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Some deep learning-based point cloud registration methods struggle with zero-shot generalization, often requiring dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning or retraining for new environments. We identify three critical limitations: (a) fixed user-defined parameters (e.g., voxel size, search radius) that fail to generalize across varying scales, (b) learned keypoint detectors exhibit poor cross-domain transferability, and (c) absolute coordinates amplify scale mismatches between datasets. To address these three issues, we present BUFFER-X, a training-free registration framework that achieves zero-shot generalization through: (a) geometric bootstrapping for automatic hyperparameter estimation, (b) distribution-aware farthest point sampling to replace learned detectors, and (c) patch-level coordinate normalization to ensure scale consistency. Our approach employs hierarchical multi-scale matching to extract correspondences across local, middle, and global receptive fields, enabling robust registration in diverse environments. For efficiency-critical applications, we introduce BUFFER-X-Lite, which reduces total computation time by 43% (relative to BUFFER-X) through early exit strategies and fast pose solvers while preserving accuracy. We evaluate on a comprehensive benchmark comprising 12 datasets spanning object-scale, indoor, and outdoor scenes, including cross-sensor registration between heterogeneous LiDAR configurations. Results demonstrate that our approach generalizes effectively without manual tuning or prior knowledge of test domains. Code: https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/BUFFER-X.

Paperid: 59, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02457.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current foundation models for 3D shapes excel at global tasks (retrieval, classification) but transfer poorly to local part-level reasoning. Recent approaches leverage vision and language foundation models to directly solve dense tasks through multi-view renderings and text queries. While promising, these pipelines require expensive inference over multiple renderings, depend heavily on large language-model (LLM) prompt engineering for captions, and fail to exploit the inherent 3D geometry of shapes. We address this gap by introducing an encoder-only 3D model that produces language-aligned patch-level features directly from point clouds. Our pre-training approach builds on existing data engines that generate part-annotated 3D shapes by pairing multi-view SAM regions with VLM captioning. Using this data, we train a point cloud transformer encoder in two stages: (1) distillation of dense 2D features from visual encoders such as DINOv2 into 3D patches, and (2) alignment of these patch embeddings with part-level text embeddings through a multi-positive contrastive objective. Our 3D encoder achieves zero-shot 3D part segmentation with fast single-pass inference without any test-time multi-view rendering, while significantly outperforming previous rendering-based and feed-forward approaches across several 3D part segmentation benchmarks. Project website: https://souhail-hadgi.github.io/patchalign3dsite/

Paperid: 60, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02359.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting unknown deepfake manipulations remains one of the most challenging problems in face forgery detection. Current state-of-the-art approaches fail to generalize to unseen manipulations, as they primarily rely on supervised training with existing deepfakes or pseudo-fakes, which leads to overfitting to specific forgery patterns. In contrast, self-supervised methods offer greater potential for generalization, but existing work struggles to learn discriminative representations only from self-supervision. In this paper, we propose ExposeAnyone, a fully self-supervised approach based on a diffusion model that generates expression sequences from audio. The key idea is, once the model is personalized to specific subjects using reference sets, it can compute the identity distances between suspected videos and personalized subjects via diffusion reconstruction errors, enabling person-of-interest face forgery detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 1) our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.22 percentage points in the average AUC on DF-TIMIT, DFDCP, KoDF, and IDForge datasets, 2) our model is also capable of detecting Sora2-generated videos, where the previous approaches perform poorly, and 3) our method is highly robust to corruptions such as blur and compression, highlighting the applicability in real-world face forgery detection.

Paperid: 61, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02295.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current work on robot failure detection and correction typically operate in a post hoc manner, analyzing errors and applying corrections only after failures occur. This work introduces CycleVLA, a system that equips Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) with proactive self-correction, the capability to anticipate incipient failures and recover before they fully manifest during execution. CycleVLA achieves this by integrating a progress-aware VLA that flags critical subtask transition points where failures most frequently occur, a VLM-based failure predictor and planner that triggers subtask backtracking upon predicted failure, and a test-time scaling strategy based on Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding to improve retry success after backtracking. Extensive experiments show that CycleVLA improves performance for both well-trained and under-trained VLAs, and that MBR serves as an effective zero-shot test-time scaling strategy for VLAs. Project Page: https://dannymcy.github.io/cyclevla/

Paperid: 62, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02273.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation segmentation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization through large-scale pretraining, but adapting them to domain-specific semantic segmentation remains challenging, particularly for thin structures (e.g., retinal vessels) and noisy modalities (e.g., SAR imagery). Full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and risks catastrophic forgetting. We propose \textbf{TopoLoRA-SAM}, a topology-aware and parameter-efficient adaptation framework for binary semantic segmentation. TopoLoRA-SAM injects Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the frozen ViT encoder, augmented with a lightweight spatial convolutional adapter and optional topology-aware supervision via differentiable clDice. We evaluate our approach on five benchmarks spanning retinal vessel segmentation (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE\_DB1), polyp segmentation (Kvasir-SEG), and SAR sea/land segmentation (SL-SSDD), comparing against U-Net, DeepLabV3+, SegFormer, and Mask2Former. TopoLoRA-SAM achieves the best retina-average Dice and the best overall average Dice across datasets, while training only \textbf{5.2\%} of model parameters ($\sim$4.9M). On the challenging CHASE\_DB1 dataset, our method substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness, demonstrating that topology-aware parameter-efficient adaptation can match or exceed fully fine-tuned specialist models. Code is available at : https://github.com/salimkhazem/Seglab.git

Paperid: 63, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02267.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Human mesh recovery from multi-view images faces a fundamental challenge: real-world datasets contain imperfect ground-truth annotations that bias the models' training, while synthetic data with precise supervision suffers from domain gap. In this paper, we propose DiffProxy, a novel framework that generates multi-view consistent human proxies for mesh recovery. Central to DiffProxy is leveraging the diffusion-based generative priors to bridge the synthetic training and real-world generalization. Its key innovations include: (1) a multi-conditional mechanism for generating multi-view consistent, pixel-aligned human proxies; (2) a hand refinement module that incorporates flexible visual prompts to enhance local details; and (3) an uncertainty-aware test-time scaling method that increases robustness to challenging cases during optimization. These designs ensure that the mesh recovery process effectively benefits from the precise synthetic ground truth and generative advantages of the diffusion-based pipeline. Trained entirely on synthetic data, DiffProxy achieves state-of-the-art performance across five real-world benchmarks, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization particularly on challenging scenarios with occlusions and partial views. Project page: https://wrk226.github.io/DiffProxy.html

Paperid: 64, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02078.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.

Paperid: 65, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01456.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we revisit multimodal few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (FS-PCS), identifying a conflict in "Fuse-then-Refine" paradigms: the "Plasticity-Stability Dilemma." In addition, CLIP's inter-class confusion can result in semantic blindness. To address these issues, we present the Decoupled-experts Arbitration Few-Shot SegNet (DA-FSS), a model that effectively distinguishes between semantic and geometric paths and mutually regularizes their gradients to achieve better generalization. DA-FSS employs the same backbone and pre-trained text encoder as MM-FSS to generate text embeddings, which can increase free modalities' utilization rate and better leverage each modality's information space. To achieve this, we propose a Parallel Expert Refinement module to generate each modal correlation. We also propose a Stacked Arbitration Module (SAM) to perform convolutional fusion and arbitrate correlations for each modality pathway. The Parallel Experts decouple two paths: a Geometric Expert maintains plasticity, and a Semantic Expert ensures stability. They are coordinated via a Decoupled Alignment Module (DAM) that transfers knowledge without propagating confusion. Experiments on popular datasets (S3DIS, ScanNet) demonstrate the superiority of DA-FSS over MM-FSS. Meanwhile, geometric boundaries, completeness, and texture differentiation are all superior to the baseline. The code is available at: https://github.com/MoWenQAQ/DA-FSS.

Paperid: 66, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01454.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
To address the scarcity of high-quality part annotations in existing datasets, we introduce PartImageNet++ (PIN++), a dataset that provides detailed part annotations for all categories in ImageNet-1K. With 100 annotated images per category, totaling 100K images, PIN++ represents the most comprehensive dataset covering a diverse range of object categories. Leveraging PIN++, we propose a Multi-scale Part-supervised recognition Model (MPM) for robust classification on ImageNet-1K. We first trained a part segmentation network using PIN++ and used it to generate pseudo part labels for the remaining unannotated images. MPM then integrated a conventional recognition architecture with auxiliary bypass layers, jointly supervised by both pseudo part labels and the original part annotations. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments on PIN++, including part segmentation, object segmentation, and few-shot learning, exploring various ways to leverage part annotations in downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach not only enhanced part-based models for robust object recognition but also established strong baselines for multiple downstream tasks, highlighting the potential of part annotations in improving model performance. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/LixiaoTHU/PartImageNetPP.

Paperid: 67, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00537.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM), known for its remarkable zero-shot segmentation capabilities, has garnered significant attention in the community. Nevertheless, its performance is challenged when dealing with what we refer to as visually non-salient scenarios, where there is low contrast between the foreground and background. In these cases, existing methods often cannot capture accurate contours and fail to produce promising segmentation results. In this paper, we propose Visually Non-Salient SAM (VNS-SAM), aiming to enhance SAM's perception of visually non-salient scenarios while preserving its original zero-shot generalizability. We achieve this by effectively exploiting SAM's low-level features through two designs: Mask-Edge Token Interactive decoder and Non-Salient Feature Mining module. These designs help the SAM decoder gain a deeper understanding of non-salient characteristics with only marginal parameter increments and computational requirements. The additional parameters of VNS-SAM can be optimized within 4 hours, demonstrating its feasibility and practicality. In terms of data, we established VNS-SEG, a unified dataset for various VNS scenarios, with more than 35K images, in contrast to previous single-task adaptations. It is designed to make the model learn more robust VNS features and comprehensively benchmark the model's segmentation performance and generalizability on VNS scenarios. Extensive experiments across various VNS segmentation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of VNS-SAM, particularly under zero-shot settings, highlighting its potential for broad real-world applications. Codes and datasets are publicly available at https://guangqian-guo.github.io/VNS-SAM.

Paperid: 68, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.25073.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D reconstruction have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality scene capture from dense multi-view imagery, yet struggle when input views are limited. Various approaches, including regularization techniques, semantic priors, and geometric constraints, have been implemented to address this challenge. Latest diffusion-based methods have demonstrated substantial improvements by generating novel views from new camera poses to augment training data, surpassing earlier regularization and prior-based techniques. Despite this progress, we identify three critical limitations in these state-of-the-art approaches: inadequate coverage beyond known view peripheries, geometric inconsistencies across generated views, and computationally expensive pipelines. We introduce GaMO (Geometry-aware Multi-view Outpainter), a framework that reformulates sparse-view reconstruction through multi-view outpainting. Instead of generating new viewpoints, GaMO expands the field of view from existing camera poses, which inherently preserves geometric consistency while providing broader scene coverage. Our approach employs multi-view conditioning and geometry-aware denoising strategies in a zero-shot manner without training. Extensive experiments on Replica and ScanNet++ demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction quality across 3, 6, and 9 input views, outperforming prior methods in PSNR and LPIPS, while achieving a $25\times$ speedup over SOTA diffusion-based methods with processing time under 10 minutes. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/GaMO/

Paperid: 69, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24947.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate and interpretable crop disease diagnosis is essential for agricultural decision-making, yet existing methods often rely on costly supervised fine-tuning and perform poorly under domain shifts. We propose Caption--Prompt--Judge (CPJ), a training-free few-shot framework that enhances Agri-Pest VQA through structured, interpretable image captions. CPJ employs large vision-language models to generate multi-angle captions, refined iteratively via an LLM-as-Judge module, which then inform a dual-answer VQA process for both recognition and management responses. Evaluated on CDDMBench, CPJ significantly improves performance: using GPT-5-mini captions, GPT-5-Nano achieves \textbf{+22.7} pp in disease classification and \textbf{+19.5} points in QA score over no-caption baselines. The framework provides transparent, evidence-based reasoning, advancing robust and explainable agricultural diagnosis without fine-tuning. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/CPJ-Agricultural/CPJ-Agricultural-Diagnosis.

Paperid: 70, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24766.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative video modeling has emerged as a compelling tool to zero-shot reason about plausible physical interactions for open-world manipulation. Yet, it remains a challenge to translate such human-led motions into the low-level actions demanded by robotic systems. We observe that given an initial image and task instruction, these models excel at synthesizing sensible object motions. Thus, we introduce Dream2Flow, a framework that bridges video generation and robotic control through 3D object flow as an intermediate representation. Our method reconstructs 3D object motions from generated videos and formulates manipulation as object trajectory tracking. By separating the state changes from the actuators that realize those changes, Dream2Flow overcomes the embodiment gap and enables zero-shot guidance from pre-trained video models to manipulate objects of diverse categories-including rigid, articulated, deformable, and granular. Through trajectory optimization or reinforcement learning, Dream2Flow converts reconstructed 3D object flow into executable low-level commands without task-specific demonstrations. Simulation and real-world experiments highlight 3D object flow as a general and scalable interface for adapting video generation models to open-world robotic manipulation. Videos and visualizations are available at https://dream2flow.github.io/.

Paperid: 71, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24702.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning Segmentation requires models to interpret complex, context-dependent linguistic queries to achieve pixel-level localization. Current dominant approaches rely heavily on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, SFT suffers from catastrophic forgetting and domain dependency, while RL is often hindered by training instability and rigid reliance on predefined reward functions. Although recent training-free methods circumvent these training burdens, they are fundamentally limited by a static inference paradigm. These methods typically rely on a single-pass "generate-then-segment" chain, which suffers from insufficient reasoning depth and lacks the capability to self-correct linguistic hallucinations or spatial misinterpretations. In this paper, we challenge these limitations and propose EVOL-SAM3, a novel zero-shot framework that reformulates reasoning segmentation as an inference-time evolutionary search process. Instead of relying on a fixed prompt, EVOL-SAM3 maintains a population of prompt hypotheses and iteratively refines them through a "Generate-Evaluate-Evolve" loop. We introduce a Visual Arena to assess prompt fitness via reference-free pairwise tournaments, and a Semantic Mutation operator to inject diversity and correct semantic errors. Furthermore, a Heterogeneous Arena module integrates geometric priors with semantic reasoning to ensure robust final selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOL-SAM3 not only substantially outperforms static baselines but also significantly surpasses fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the challenging ReasonSeg benchmark in a zero-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/Evol-SAM3.

Paperid: 72, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24645.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Currently, artificial intelligence is profoundly transforming the audio domain; however, numerous advanced algorithms and tools remain fragmented, lacking a unified and efficient framework to unlock their full potential. Existing audio agent frameworks often suffer from complex environment configurations and inefficient tool collaboration. To address these limitations, we introduce AudioFab, an open-source agent framework aimed at establishing an open and intelligent audio-processing ecosystem. Compared to existing solutions, AudioFab's modular design resolves dependency conflicts, simplifying tool integration and extension. It also optimizes tool learning through intelligent selection and few-shot learning, improving efficiency and accuracy in complex audio tasks. Furthermore, AudioFab provides a user-friendly natural language interface tailored for non-expert users. As a foundational framework, AudioFab's core contribution lies in offering a stable and extensible platform for future research and development in audio and multimodal AI. The code is available at https://github.com/SmileHnu/AudioFab.

Paperid: 73, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24321.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A long-standing objective in humanoid robotics is the realization of versatile agents capable of following diverse multimodal instructions with human-level flexibility. Despite advances in humanoid control, bridging high-level multimodal perception with whole-body execution remains a significant bottleneck. Existing methods often struggle to translate heterogeneous instructions -- such as language, music, and trajectories -- into stable, real-time actions. Here we show that UniAct, a two-stage framework integrating a fine-tuned MLLM with a causal streaming pipeline, enables humanoid robots to execute multimodal instructions with sub-500 ms latency. By unifying inputs through a shared discrete codebook via FSQ, UniAct ensures cross-modal alignment while constraining motions to a physically grounded manifold. This approach yields a 19% improvement in the success rate of zero-shot tracking of imperfect reference motions. We validate UniAct on UniMoCap, our 20-hour humanoid motion benchmark, demonstrating robust generalization across diverse real-world scenarios. Our results mark a critical step toward responsive, general-purpose humanoid assistants capable of seamless interaction through unified perception and control.

Paperid: 74, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23808.pdf GitHub

Authors:Core Team, Dong Zhang, Gang Wang, Jinlong Xue, Kai Fang, Liang Zhao, Rui Ma, Shuhuai Ren, Shuo Liu, Tao Guo, Weiji Zhuang, Xin Zhang, Xingchen Song, Yihan Yan, Yongzhe He, Cici, Bowen Shen, Chengxuan Zhu, Chong Ma, Chun Chen, Heyu Chen, Jiawei Li, Lei Li, Menghang Zhu, Peidian Li, Qiying Wang, Sirui Deng, Weimin Xiong, Wenshan Huang, Wenyu Yang, Yilin Jiang, Yixin Yang, Yuanyuan Tian, Yue Ma, Yue Yu, Zihan Zhang, Zihao Yue, Bangjun Xiao, Bingquan Xia, Bofei Gao, Bowen Ye, Can Cai, Chang Liu, Chenhong He, Chunan Li, Dawei Zhu, Duo Zhang, Fengyuan Shi, Guoan Wang, Hailin Zhang, Hanglong Lv, Hanyu Li, Hao Tian, Heng Qu, Hongshen Xu, Houbin Zhang, Huaqiu Liu, Jiangshan Duo, Jianguang Zuo, Jianyu Wei, Jiebao Xiao, Jinhao Dong, Jun Shi, Junhao Hu, Kainan Bao, Kang Zhou, Linghao Zhang, Meng Chen, Nuo Chen, Peng Zhang, Qianli Chen, Qiantong Wang, Rang Li, Shaohui Liu, Shengfan Wang, Shicheng Li, Shihua Yu, Shijie Cao, Shimao Chen, Shuhao Gu, Weikun Wang, Wenhan Ma, Xiangwei Deng, Xing Yong, Xing Zhang, Xu Wang, Yifan Song, Yihao Zhao, Yingbo Zhao, Yizhao Gao, Yu Cheng, Yu Tu, Yudong Wang, Zhaojun Huang, Zhengju Tang, Zhenru Lin, Zhichao Song, Zhipeng Xu, Zhixian Zheng, Zihan Jiang

Abstract:
Existing audio language models typically rely on task-specific fine-tuning to accomplish particular audio tasks. In contrast, humans are able to generalize to new audio tasks with only a few examples or simple instructions. GPT-3 has shown that scaling next-token prediction pretraining enables strong generalization capabilities in text, and we believe this paradigm is equally applicable to the audio domain. By scaling MiMo-Audio's pretraining data to over one hundred million of hours, we observe the emergence of few-shot learning capabilities across a diverse set of audio tasks. We develop a systematic evaluation of these capabilities and find that MiMo-Audio-7B-Base achieves SOTA performance on both speech intelligence and audio understanding benchmarks among open-source models. Beyond standard metrics, MiMo-Audio-7B-Base generalizes to tasks absent from its training data, such as voice conversion, style transfer, and speech editing. MiMo-Audio-7B-Base also demonstrates powerful speech continuation capabilities, capable of generating highly realistic talk shows, recitations, livestreaming and debates. At the post-training stage, we curate a diverse instruction-tuning corpus and introduce thinking mechanisms into both audio understanding and generation. MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct achieves open-source SOTA on audio understanding benchmarks (MMSU, MMAU, MMAR, MMAU-Pro), spoken dialogue benchmarks (Big Bench Audio, MultiChallenge Audio) and instruct-TTS evaluations, approaching or surpassing closed-source models. Model checkpoints and full evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Audio.

Paperid: 75, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23705.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Transparent objects remain notoriously hard for perception systems: refraction, reflection and transmission break the assumptions behind stereo, ToF and purely discriminative monocular depth, causing holes and temporally unstable estimates. Our key observation is that modern video diffusion models already synthesize convincing transparent phenomena, suggesting they have internalized the optical rules. We build TransPhy3D, a synthetic video corpus of transparent/reflective scenes: 11k sequences rendered with Blender/Cycles. Scenes are assembled from a curated bank of category-rich static assets and shape-rich procedural assets paired with glass/plastic/metal materials. We render RGB + depth + normals with physically based ray tracing and OptiX denoising. Starting from a large video diffusion model, we learn a video-to-video translator for depth (and normals) via lightweight LoRA adapters. During training we concatenate RGB and (noisy) depth latents in the DiT backbone and co-train on TransPhy3D and existing frame-wise synthetic datasets, yielding temporally consistent predictions for arbitrary-length input videos. The resulting model, DKT, achieves zero-shot SOTA on real and synthetic video benchmarks involving transparency: ClearPose, DREDS (CatKnown/CatNovel), and TransPhy3D-Test. It improves accuracy and temporal consistency over strong image/video baselines, and a normal variant sets the best video normal estimation results on ClearPose. A compact 1.3B version runs at ~0.17 s/frame. Integrated into a grasping stack, DKT's depth boosts success rates across translucent, reflective and diffuse surfaces, outperforming prior estimators. Together, these results support a broader claim: "Diffusion knows transparency." Generative video priors can be repurposed, efficiently and label-free, into robust, temporally coherent perception for challenging real-world manipulation.

Paperid: 76, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23427.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models for segmentation such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) family exhibit strong zero-shot performance, but remain vulnerable in shifted or limited-knowledge domains. This work investigates whether uncertainty quantification can mitigate such challenges and enhance model generalisability in a domain-agnostic manner. To this end, we (1) curate UncertSAM, a benchmark comprising eight datasets designed to stress-test SAM under challenging segmentation conditions including shadows, transparency, and camouflage; (2) evaluate a suite of lightweight, post-hoc uncertainty estimation methods; and (3) assess a preliminary uncertainty-guided prediction refinement step. Among evaluated approaches, a last-layer Laplace approximation yields uncertainty estimates that correlate well with segmentation errors, indicating a meaningful signal. While refinement benefits are preliminary, our findings underscore the potential of incorporating uncertainty into segmentation models to support robust, domain-agnostic performance. Our benchmark and code are made publicly available.

Paperid: 77, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23020.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
3D visual grounding aims to locate objects based on natural language descriptions in 3D scenes. Existing methods rely on a pre-defined Object Lookup Table (OLT) to query Visual Language Models (VLMs) for reasoning about object locations, which limits the applications in scenarios with undefined or unforeseen targets. To address this problem, we present OpenGround, a novel zero-shot framework for open-world 3D visual grounding. Central to OpenGround is the Active Cognition-based Reasoning (ACR) module, which is designed to overcome the fundamental limitation of pre-defined OLTs by progressively augmenting the cognitive scope of VLMs. The ACR module performs human-like perception of the target via a cognitive task chain and actively reasons about contextually relevant objects, thereby extending VLM cognition through a dynamically updated OLT. This allows OpenGround to function with both pre-defined and open-world categories. We also propose a new dataset named OpenTarget, which contains over 7000 object-description pairs to evaluate our method in open-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenGround achieves competitive performance on Nr3D, state-of-the-art on ScanRefer, and delivers a substantial 17.6% improvement on OpenTarget. Project Page at https://why-102.github.io/openground.io/.

Paperid: 78, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22819.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Panoramic depth estimation provides a comprehensive solution for capturing complete $360^\circ$ environmental structural information, offering significant benefits for robotics and AR/VR applications. However, while extensively studied in indoor settings, its zero-shot generalization to open-world domains lags far behind perspective images, which benefit from abundant training data. This disparity makes transferring capabilities from the perspective domain an attractive solution. To bridge this gap, we present Depth Anything in $360^\circ$ (DA360), a panoramic-adapted version of Depth Anything V2. Our key innovation involves learning a shift parameter from the ViT backbone, transforming the model's scale- and shift-invariant output into a scale-invariant estimate that directly yields well-formed 3D point clouds. This is complemented by integrating circular padding into the DPT decoder to eliminate seam artifacts, ensuring spatially coherent depth maps that respect spherical continuity. Evaluated on standard indoor benchmarks and our newly curated outdoor dataset, Metropolis, DA360 shows substantial gains over its base model, achieving over 50\% and 10\% relative depth error reduction on indoor and outdoor benchmarks, respectively. Furthermore, DA360 significantly outperforms robust panoramic depth estimation methods, achieving about 30\% relative error improvement compared to PanDA across all three test datasets and establishing new state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot panoramic depth estimation.

Paperid: 79, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22489.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose Video Gaussian Masked Autoencoders (Video-GMAE), a self-supervised approach for representation learning that encodes a sequence of images into a set of Gaussian splats moving over time. Representing a video as a set of Gaussians enforces a reasonable inductive bias: that 2-D videos are often consistent projections of a dynamic 3-D scene. We find that tracking emerges when pretraining a network with this architecture. Mapping the trajectory of the learnt Gaussians onto the image plane gives zero-shot tracking performance comparable to state-of-the-art. With small-scale finetuning, our models achieve 34.6% improvement on Kinetics, and 13.1% on Kubric datasets, surpassing existing self-supervised video approaches. The project page and code are publicly available at https://videogmae.org/ and https://github.com/tekotan/video-gmae.

Paperid: 80, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22193.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) enables promptable, high-quality segmentation but is often too computationally expensive for latency-critical settings. TinySAM is a lightweight, distilled SAM variant that preserves strong zero-shot mask quality, yet its "segment-everything" mode still requires hundreds of prompts and remains slow in practice. We first replicate TinySAM on COCO val2017 using official checkpoints, matching the reported AP within 0.03%, establishing a reliable experimental baseline. Building on this, we propose Tiny-YOLOSAM, a fast hybrid pipeline that uses a recent YOLO detector (YOLOv12) to generate box prompts for TinySAM on salient foreground objects, and supplements uncovered regions with sparse point prompts sampled only where YOLO-guided masks provide no coverage. On COCO val2017, the hybrid system substantially improves class-agnostic coverage (AR from 16.4% to 77.1%, mIoU from 19.2% to 67.8%) while reducing end-to-end runtime from 49.20s/image to 10.39s/image (4.7x) on an Apple M1 Pro CPU. These results suggest detector-guided prompting combined with targeted sparse sampling as an effective alternative to dense "segment-everything" prompting for practical full-scene segmentation.

Paperid: 81, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22179.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A fundamental limitation of supervised deep learning in high-dimensional tabular domains is "Generalization Collapse": models learn precise decision boundaries for known distributions but fail catastrophically when facing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data. We hypothesize that this failure stems from the lack of topological constraints in the latent space, resulting in diffuse manifolds where novel anomalies remain statistically indistinguishable from benign data. To address this, we propose Latent Sculpting, a hierarchical two-stage representation learning framework. Stage 1 utilizes a hybrid 1D-CNN and Transformer Encoder trained with a novel Dual-Centroid Compactness Loss (DCCL) to actively "sculpt" benign traffic into a low-entropy, hyperspherical cluster. Unlike standard contrastive losses that rely on triplet mining, DCCL optimizes global cluster centroids to enforce absolute manifold density. Stage 2 conditions a Masked Autoregressive Flow (MAF) on this pre-structured manifold to learn an exact density estimate. We evaluate this methodology on the rigorous CIC-IDS-2017 benchmark, treating it as a proxy for complex, non-stationary data streams. Empirical results demonstrate that explicit manifold sculpting is a prerequisite for robust zero-shot generalization. While supervised baselines suffered catastrophic performance collapse on unseen distribution shifts (F1 approx 0.30) and the strongest unsupervised baseline achieved only 0.76, our framework achieved an F1-Score of 0.87 on strictly zero-shot anomalies. Notably, we report an 88.89% detection rate on "Infiltration" scenarios--a complex distributional shift where state-of-the-art supervised models achieved 0.00% accuracy. These findings suggest that decoupling structure learning from density estimation provides a scalable path toward generalized anomaly detection.

Paperid: 82, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21652.pdf GitHub

Authors:Zi Wang, Mingkai Huang, Zhang Shi, Hongjie Hu, Lan Lan, Hui Zhang, Yan Li, Xi Hu, Qing Lu, Zongming Zhu, Qiong Yao, Yuxiang Dai, Fanwen Wang, Yinzhe Wu, Jun Lyu, Qianqian Gao, Guangming Xu, Zhenxuan Zhang, Haosen Zhang, Qing Li, Guangming Wang, Tianxing He, Lizhen Lan, Siyue Li, Le Xue, Mengting Sun, Yuntong Lyu, Junpu Hu, Jiayu Zhu, Rizwan Ahmad, Zhengyu Bu, Xianling Qian, Guanke Cai, Ruiyu Cao, Weirui Cai, Chang Xu, Yuyang Ren, Feidan Yu, Siying Ma, Ziqiang Xu, Xinran Chen, Sha Hua, Daniel Kim, Yajing Zhang, Chen Ouyang, Wenjia Bai, Jing Qin, Yucheng Yang, Daniel Rueckert, He Wang, Qian Tao, Claudia Prieto, Michael Markl, Alistair Young, Lianming Wu, Shuo Wang, Chen Qin, Mengsu Zeng, Xihong Hu, Haibo Xu, Xiaobo Qu, Hao Li, Guang Yang, Chengyan Wang

Abstract:
Multimodal cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging provides comprehensive and non-invasive insights into cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis and underlying mechanisms. Despite decades of advancements, its widespread clinical adoption remains constrained by prolonged scan times and heterogeneity across medical environments. This underscores the urgent need for a generalist reconstruction foundation model for ultra-fast CMR imaging, one capable of adapting across diverse imaging scenarios and serving as the essential substrate for all downstream analyses. To enable this goal, we curate MMCMR-427K, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal CMR k-space database to date, comprising 427,465 multi-coil k-space data paired with structured metadata across 13 international centers, 12 CMR modalities, 15 scanners, and 17 CVD categories in populations across three continents. Building on this unprecedented resource, we introduce CardioMM, a generalist reconstruction foundation model capable of dynamically adapting to heterogeneous fast CMR imaging scenarios. CardioMM unifies semantic contextual understanding with physics-informed data consistency to deliver robust reconstructions across varied scanners, protocols, and patient presentations. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that CardioMM achieves state-of-the-art performance in the internal centers and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen external settings. Even at imaging acceleration up to 24x, CardioMM reliably preserves key cardiac phenotypes, quantitative myocardial biomarkers, and diagnostic image quality, enabling a substantial increase in CMR examination throughput without compromising clinical integrity. Together, our open-access MMCMR-427K database and CardioMM framework establish a scalable pathway toward high-throughput, high-quality, and clinically accessible cardiovascular imaging.

Paperid: 83, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot fine-grained visual categorization (FS-FGVC) focuses on identifying various subcategories within a common superclass given just one or few support examples. Most existing methods aim to boost classification accuracy by enriching the extracted features with discriminative part-level details. However, they often overlook the fact that the set of support samples acts as a confounding variable, which hampers the FS-FGVC performance by introducing biased data distribution and misguiding the extraction of discriminative features. To address this issue, we propose a new causal FS-FGVC (CausalFSFG) approach inspired by causal inference for addressing biased data distributions through causal intervention. Specifically, based on the structural causal model (SCM), we argue that FS-FGVC infers the subcategories (i.e., effect) from the inputs (i.e., cause), whereas both the few-shot condition disturbance and the inherent fine-grained nature (i.e., large intra-class variance and small inter-class variance) lead to unobservable variables that bring spurious correlations, compromising the final classification performance. To further eliminate the spurious correlations, our CausalFSFG approach incorporates two key components: (1) Interventional multi-scale encoder (IMSE) conducts sample-level interventions, (2) Interventional masked feature reconstruction (IMFR) conducts feature-level interventions, which together reveal real causalities from inputs to subcategories. Extensive experiments and thorough analyses on the widely-used public datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, and Stanford Cars, demonstrate that our CausalFSFG achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/CausalFSFG_TMM.

Paperid: 84, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21204.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human infants, with only a few hundred hours of speech exposure, acquire basic units of new languages, highlighting a striking efficiency gap compared to the data-hungry self-supervised speech models. To address this gap, this paper introduces SpidR-Adapt for rapid adaptation to new languages using minimal unlabeled data. We cast such low-resource speech representation learning as a meta-learning problem and construct a multi-task adaptive pre-training (MAdaPT) protocol which formulates the adaptation process as a bi-level optimization framework. To enable scalable meta-training under this framework, we propose a novel heuristic solution, first-order bi-level optimization (FOBLO), avoiding heavy computation costs. Finally, we stabilize meta-training by using a robust initialization through interleaved supervision which alternates self-supervised and supervised objectives. Empirically, SpidR-Adapt achieves rapid gains in phonemic discriminability (ABX) and spoken language modeling (sWUGGY, sBLIMP, tSC), improving over in-domain language models after training on less than 1h of target-language audio, over $100\times$ more data-efficient than standard training. These findings highlight a practical, architecture-agnostic path toward biologically inspired, data-efficient representations. We open-source the training code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/facebookresearch/spidr-adapt.

Paperid: 85, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20153.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Low-shot object counting addresses estimating the number of previously unobserved objects in an image using only few or no annotated test-time exemplars. A considerable challenge for modern low-shot counters are dense regions with small objects. While total counts in such situations are typically well addressed by density-based counters, their usefulness is limited by poor localization capabilities. This is better addressed by point-detection-based counters, which are based on query-based detectors. However, due to limited number of pre-trained queries, they underperform on images with very large numbers of objects, and resort to ad-hoc techniques like upsampling and tiling. We propose CoDi, the first latent diffusion-based low-shot counter that produces high-quality density maps on which object locations can be determined by non-maxima suppression. Our core contribution is the new exemplar-based conditioning module that extracts and adjusts the object prototypes to the intermediate layers of the denoising network, leading to accurate object location estimation. On FSC benchmark, CoDi outperforms state-of-the-art by 15% MAE, 13% MAE and 10% MAE in the few-shot, one-shot, and reference-less scenarios, respectively, and sets a new state-of-the-art on MCAC benchmark by outperforming the top method by 44% MAE. The code is available at https://github.com/gsustar/CoDi.

Paperid: 86, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20000.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently achieved impressive photorealism in image and video generation. However, their application to image animation remains limited, even when trained on large-scale datasets. Two primary challenges contribute to this: the high dimensionality of video signals leads to a scarcity of training data, causing DMs to favor memorization over prompt compliance when generating motion; moreover, DMs struggle to generalize to novel motion patterns not present in the training set, and fine-tuning them to learn such patterns, especially using limited training data, is still under-explored. To address these limitations, we propose Modular Image-to-Video Adapter (MIVA), a lightweight sub-network attachable to a pre-trained DM, each designed to capture a single motion pattern and scalable via parallelization. MIVAs can be efficiently trained on approximately ten samples using a single consumer-grade GPU. At inference time, users can specify motion by selecting one or multiple MIVAs, eliminating the need for prompt engineering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIVA enables more precise motion control while maintaining, or even surpassing, the generation quality of models trained on significantly larger datasets.

Paperid: 87, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19957.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents an approach developed to address the PlantClef 2025 challenge, which consists of a fine-grained multi-label species identification, over high-resolution images. Our solution focused on employing class prototypes obtained from the training dataset as a proxy guidance for training a segmentation Vision Transformer (ViT) on the test set images. To obtain these representations, the proposed method extracts features from training dataset images and create clusters, by applying K-Means, with $K$ equals to the number of classes in the dataset. The segmentation model is a customized narrow ViT, built by replacing the patch embedding layer with a frozen DinoV2, pre-trained on the training dataset for individual species classification. This model is trained to reconstruct the class prototypes of the training dataset from the test dataset images. We then use this model to obtain attention scores that enable to identify and localize areas of interest and consequently guide the classification process. The proposed approach enabled a domain-adaptation from multi-class identification with individual species, into multi-label classification from high-resolution vegetation plots. Our method achieved fifth place in the PlantCLEF 2025 challenge on the private leaderboard, with an F1 score of 0.33331. Besides that, in absolute terms our method scored 0.03 lower than the top-performing submission, suggesting that it may achieved competitive performance in the benchmark task. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}.

Paperid: 88, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19686.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, the introduction of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has largely improved the generation ability of unified models. However, it is observed that the current thinking process during generation mainly focuses on the text consistency with the text prompt, ignoring the \textbf{visual context consistency} with the visual reference images during the multi-modal generation, e.g., multi-reference generation. The lack of such consistency results in the failure in maintaining key visual features (like human ID, object attribute, style). To this end, we integrate the visual context consistency into the reasoning of unified models, explicitly motivating the model to sustain such consistency by 1) Adaptive Visual Planning: generating structured visual check list to figure out the visual element of needed consistency keeping, and 2) Iterative Visual Correction: performing self-reflection with the guidance of check lists and refining the generated result in an iterative manner. To achieve this, we use supervised finetuning to teach the model how to plan the visual checking, conduct self-reflection and self-refinement, and use flow-GRPO to further enhance the visual consistency through a customized visual checking reward. The experiments show that our method outperforms both zero-shot unified models and those with text CoTs in multi-modal generation, demonstrating higher visual context consistency.

Paperid: 89, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19302.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) hold great promise for advancing remote sensing (RS) analysis, yet existing reasoning segmentation frameworks couple linguistic reasoning and pixel prediction through end-to-end supervised fine-tuning, leading to weak geometric grounding and limited generalization across tasks. To address this, we developed Think2Seg-RS, a decoupled framework that trains an LVLM prompter to control a frozen Segment Anything Model (SAM) via structured geometric prompts. Through a mask-only reinforcement learning objective, the LVLM learns to translate abstract semantic reasoning into spatially grounded actions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the EarthReason dataset. Remarkably, the learned prompting policy generalizes zero-shot to multiple referring segmentation benchmarks, exposing a distinct divide between semantic-level and instance-level grounding. We further found that compact segmenters outperform larger ones under semantic-level supervision, and that negative prompts are ineffective in heterogeneous aerial backgrounds. Together, these findings establish semantic-level reasoning segmentation as a new paradigm for geospatial understanding, opening the way toward unified, interpretable LVLM-driven Earth observation. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Ricardo-XZ/Think2Seg-RS.

Paperid: 90, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19090.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large speech generation models are evolving from single-speaker, short sentence synthesis to multi-speaker, long conversation geneartion. Current long-form speech generation models are predominately constrained to dyadic, turn-based interactions. To address this, we introduce JoyVoice, a novel anthropomorphic foundation model designed for flexible, boundary-free synthesis of up to eight speakers. Unlike conventional cascaded systems, JoyVoice employs a unified E2E-Transformer-DiT architecture that utilizes autoregressive hidden representations directly for diffusion inputs, enabling holistic end-to-end optimization. We further propose a MM-Tokenizer operating at a low bitrate of 12.5 Hz, which integrates multitask semantic and MMSE losses to effectively model both semantic and acoustic information. Additionally, the model incorporates robust text front-end processing via large-scale data perturbation. Experiments show that JoyVoice achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual generation (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean) and zero-shot voice cloning. JoyVoice achieves top-tier results on both the Seed-TTS-Eval Benchmark and multi-speaker long-form conversational voice cloning tasks, demonstrating superior audio quality and generalization. It achieves significant improvements in prosodic continuity for long-form speech, rhythm richness in multi-speaker conversations, paralinguistic naturalness, besides superior intelligibility. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://jea-speech.github.io/JoyVoice

Paperid: 91, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18546.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are sensitive to the personas imposed on them at inference time, yet prompt-level "drug" interventions have never been benchmarked rigorously. We present the first controlled study of psychoactive framings on GPT-5-mini using ARC-Challenge. Four single-sentence prompts -- LSD, cocaine, alcohol, and cannabis -- are compared against a sober control across 100 validation items per condition, with deterministic decoding, full logging, Wilson confidence intervals, and Fisher exact tests. Control accuracy is 0.45; alcohol collapses to 0.10 (p = 3.2e-8), cocaine to 0.21 (p = 4.9e-4), LSD to 0.19 (p = 1.3e-4), and cannabis to 0.30 (p = 0.041), largely because persona prompts disrupt the mandated "Answer: " template. Persona text therefore behaves like a "few-shot consumable" that can destroy reliability without touching model weights. All experimental code, raw results, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/lexdoudkin/llms-on-drugs.

Paperid: 92, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18365.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful priors for image editing tasks such as inpainting and local modification, where the objective is to generate realistic content that remains consistent with observed regions. In particular, zero-shot approaches that leverage a pretrained diffusion model, without any retraining, have been shown to achieve highly effective reconstructions. However, state-of-the-art zero-shot methods typically rely on a sequence of surrogate likelihood functions, whose scores are used as proxies for the ideal score. This procedure however requires vector-Jacobian products through the denoiser at every reverse step, introducing significant memory and runtime overhead. To address this issue, we propose a new likelihood surrogate that yields simple and efficient to sample Gaussian posterior transitions, sidestepping the backpropagation through the denoiser network. Our extensive experiments show that our method achieves strong observation consistency compared with fine-tuned baselines and produces coherent, high-quality reconstructions, all while significantly reducing inference cost. Code is available at https://github.com/YazidJanati/ding.

Paperid: 93, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17547.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussians have recently emerged as an effective scene representation for real-time splatting and accurate novel-view synthesis, motivating several works to adapt multi-view structure prediction networks to regress per-pixel 3D Gaussians from images. However, most prior work extends these networks to predict additional Gaussian parameters -- orientation, scale, opacity, and appearance -- while relying almost exclusively on view-synthesis supervision. We show that a view-synthesis loss alone is insufficient to recover geometrically meaningful splats in this setting. We analyze and address the ambiguities of learning 3D Gaussian splats under self-supervision for pose-free generalizable splatting, and introduce G3Splat, which enforces geometric priors to obtain geometrically consistent 3D scene representations. Trained on RE10K, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in (i) geometrically consistent reconstruction, (ii) relative pose estimation, and (iii) novel-view synthesis. We further demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization on ScanNet, substantially outperforming prior work in both geometry recovery and relative pose estimation. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page (https://m80hz.github.io/g3splat/).

Paperid: 94, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16913.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we present a panoramic metric depth foundation model that generalizes across diverse scene distances. We explore a data-in-the-loop paradigm from the view of both data construction and framework design. We collect a large-scale dataset by combining public datasets, high-quality synthetic data from our UE5 simulator and text-to-image models, and real panoramic images from the web. To reduce domain gaps between indoor/outdoor and synthetic/real data, we introduce a three-stage pseudo-label curation pipeline to generate reliable ground truth for unlabeled images. For the model, we adopt DINOv3-Large as the backbone for its strong pre-trained generalization, and introduce a plug-and-play range mask head, sharpness-centric optimization, and geometry-centric optimization to improve robustness to varying distances and enforce geometric consistency across views. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (e.g., Stanford2D3D, Matterport3D, and Deep360) demonstrate strong performance and zero-shot generalization, with particularly robust and stable metric predictions in diverse real-world scenes. The project page can be found at: \href{https://insta360-research-team.github.io/DAP_website/} {https://insta360-research-team.github.io/DAP\_website/}

Paperid: 95, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16909.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mobile manipulators in households must both navigate and manipulate. This requires a compact, semantically rich scene representation that captures where objects are, how they function, and which parts are actionable. Scene graphs are a natural choice, yet prior work often separates spatial and functional relations, treats scenes as static snapshots without object states or temporal updates, and overlooks information most relevant for accomplishing the current task. To address these limitations, we introduce MomaGraph, a unified scene representation for embodied agents that integrates spatial-functional relationships and part-level interactive elements. However, advancing such a representation requires both suitable data and rigorous evaluation, which have been largely missing. We thus contribute MomaGraph-Scenes, the first large-scale dataset of richly annotated, task-driven scene graphs in household environments, along with MomaGraph-Bench, a systematic evaluation suite spanning six reasoning capabilities from high-level planning to fine-grained scene understanding. Built upon this foundation, we further develop MomaGraph-R1, a 7B vision-language model trained with reinforcement learning on MomaGraph-Scenes. MomaGraph-R1 predicts task-oriented scene graphs and serves as a zero-shot task planner under a Graph-then-Plan framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models, reaching 71.6% accuracy on the benchmark (+11.4% over the best baseline), while generalizing across public benchmarks and transferring effectively to real-robot experiments.

Paperid: 96, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16880.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate surgical instrument segmentation in endoscopic videos is crucial for computer-assisted interventions, yet remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, rapid motion, specular artefacts, and long-term instrument re-entry. While SAM3 provides a powerful spatio-temporal framework for video object segmentation, its performance in surgical scenes is limited by indiscriminate memory updates, fixed memory capacity, and weak identity recovery after occlusions. We propose ReMeDI-SAM3, a training-free memory-enhanced extension of SAM3, that addresses these limitations through three components: (i) relevance-aware memory filtering with a dedicated occlusion-aware memory for storing pre-occlusion frames, (ii) a piecewise interpolation scheme that expands the effective memory capacity, and (iii) a feature-based re-identification module with temporal voting for reliable post-occlusion identity disambiguation. Together, these components mitigate error accumulation and enable reliable recovery after occlusions. Evaluations on EndoVis17 and EndoVis18 under a zero-shot setting show absolute mcIoU improvements of around 7% and 16%, respectively, over vanilla SAM3, outperforming even prior training-based approaches. Project page: https://valaybundele.github.io/remedi-sam3/.

Paperid: 97, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16143.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This work presents a novel framework for few-shot 3D part segmentation. Recent advances have demonstrated the significant potential of 2D foundation models for low-shot 3D part segmentation. However, it is still an open problem that how to effectively aggregate 2D knowledge from foundation models to 3D. Existing methods either ignore geometric structures for 3D feature learning or neglects the high-quality grouping clues from SAM, leading to under-segmentation and inconsistent part labels. We devise a novel SAM segment graph-based propagation method, named SegGraph, to explicitly learn geometric features encoded within SAM's segmentation masks. Our method encodes geometric features by modeling mutual overlap and adjacency between segments while preserving intra-segment semantic consistency. We construct a segment graph, conceptually similar to an atlas, where nodes represent segments and edges capture their spatial relationships (overlap/adjacency). Each node adaptively modulates 2D foundation model features, which are then propagated via a graph neural network to learn global geometric structures. To enforce intra-segment semantic consistency, we map segment features to 3D points with a novel view-direction-weighted fusion attenuating contributions from low-quality segments. Extensive experiments on PartNet-E demonstrate that our method outperforms all competing baselines by at least 6.9 percent mIoU. Further analysis reveals that SegGraph achieves particularly strong performance on small components and part boundaries, demonstrating its superior geometric understanding. The code is available at: https://github.com/YueyangHu2000/SegGraph.

Paperid: 98, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15748.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual Species Recognition (VSR) is pivotal to biodiversity assessment and conservation, evolution research, and ecology and ecosystem management. Training a machine-learned model for VSR typically requires vast amounts of annotated images. Yet, species-level annotation demands domain expertise, making it realistic for domain experts to annotate only a few examples. These limited labeled data motivate training an ''expert'' model via few-shot learning (FSL). Meanwhile, advanced Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated prominent performance on general recognition tasks. It is straightforward to ask whether LMMs excel in the highly specialized VSR task and whether they outshine FSL expert models. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that LMMs struggle in this task, despite using various established prompting techniques. LMMs even significantly underperform FSL expert models, which are as simple as finetuning a pretrained visual encoder on the few-shot images. However, our in-depth analysis reveals that LMMs can effectively post-hoc correct the expert models' incorrect predictions. Briefly, given a test image, when prompted with the top predictions from an FSL expert model, LMMs can recover the ground-truth label. Building on this insight, we derive a simple method called Post-hoc Correction (POC), which prompts an LMM to re-rank the expert model's top predictions using enriched prompts that include softmax confidence scores and few-shot visual examples. Across five challenging VSR benchmarks, POC outperforms prior art of FSL by +6.4% in accuracy without extra training, validation, or manual intervention. Importantly, POC generalizes to different pretrained backbones and LMMs, serving as a plug-and-play module to significantly enhance existing FSL methods.

Paperid: 99, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15701.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Evaluations of image compression performance which include human preferences have generally found that naive distortion functions such as MSE are insufficiently aligned to human perception. In order to align compression models to human perception, prior work has employed differentiable perceptual losses consisting of neural networks calibrated on large-scale datasets of human psycho-visual judgments. We show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) can replicate binary human two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) judgments zero-shot when asked to reason about the differences between pairs of images. Motivated to exploit the powerful zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs, we propose Vision-Language Models for Image Compression (VLIC), a diffusion-based image compression system designed to be post-trained with binary VLM judgments. VLIC leverages existing techniques for diffusion model post-training with preferences, rather than distilling the VLM judgments into a separate perceptual loss network. We show that calibrating this system on VLM judgments produces competitive or state-of-the-art performance on human-aligned visual compression depending on the dataset, according to perceptual metrics and large-scale user studies. We additionally conduct an extensive analysis of the VLM-based reward design and training procedure and share important insights. More visuals are available at https://kylesargent.github.io/vlic

Paperid: 100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15599.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce FlexAvatar, a method for creating high-quality and complete 3D head avatars from a single image. A core challenge lies in the limited availability of multi-view data and the tendency of monocular training to yield incomplete 3D head reconstructions. We identify the root cause of this issue as the entanglement between driving signal and target viewpoint when learning from monocular videos. To address this, we propose a transformer-based 3D portrait animation model with learnable data source tokens, so-called bias sinks, which enables unified training across monocular and multi-view datasets. This design leverages the strengths of both data sources during inference: strong generalization from monocular data and full 3D completeness from multi-view supervision. Furthermore, our training procedure yields a smooth latent avatar space that facilitates identity interpolation and flexible fitting to an arbitrary number of input observations. In extensive evaluations on single-view, few-shot, and monocular avatar creation tasks, we verify the efficacy of FlexAvatar. Many existing methods struggle with view extrapolation while FlexAvatar generates complete 3D head avatars with realistic facial animations. Website: https://tobias-kirschstein.github.io/flexavatar/

Paperid: 101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15319.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) denotes the identification of anomalies within a target category with a limited number of normal samples. Existing FSAD methods largely rely on pre-trained feature representations to detect anomalies, but the inherent domain gap between pre-trained representations and target FSAD scenarios is often overlooked. This study proposes a Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network (PCSNet) to address the domain gap, thereby improving feature descriptiveness in target scenarios and enhancing FSAD performance. In particular, PCSNet comprises a prototypical feature adaption (PFA) sub-network and a context-aware segmentation (CAS) sub-network. PFA extracts prototypical features as guidance to ensure better feature compactness for normal data while distinct separation from anomalies. A pixel-level disparity classification loss is also designed to make subtle anomalies more distinguishable. Then a CAS sub-network is introduced for pixel-level anomaly localization, where pseudo anomalies are exploited to facilitate the training process. Experimental results on MVTec and MPDD demonstrate the superior FSAD performance of PCSNet, with 94.9% and 80.2% image-level AUROC in an 8-shot scenario, respectively. Real-world applications on automotive plastic part inspection further demonstrate that PCSNet can achieve promising results with limited training samples. Code is available at https://github.com/yuxin-jiang/PCSNet.

Paperid: 102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15261.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pan-sharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with its corresponding low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. To achieve effective fusion, it is crucial to fully exploit the complementary information between the two modalities. Traditional CNN-based methods typically rely on channel-wise concatenation with fixed convolutional operators, which limits their adaptability to diverse spatial and spectral variations. While cross-attention mechanisms enable global interactions, they are computationally inefficient and may dilute fine-grained correspondences, making it difficult to capture complex semantic relationships. Recent advances in the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture have demonstrated impressive success in image generation and editing tasks. Unlike cross-attention, MMDiT employs in-context conditioning to facilitate more direct and efficient cross-modal information exchange. In this paper, we propose MMMamba, a cross-modal in-context fusion framework for pan-sharpening, with the flexibility to support image super-resolution in a zero-shot manner. Built upon the Mamba architecture, our design ensures linear computational complexity while maintaining strong cross-modal interaction capacity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal interleaved (MI) scanning mechanism that facilitates effective information exchange between the PAN and MS modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

Paperid: 103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14938.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce TalkVerse, a large-scale, open corpus for single-person, audio-driven talking video generation designed to enable fair, reproducible comparison across methods. While current state-of-the-art systems rely on closed data or compute-heavy models, TalkVerse offers 2.3 million high-resolution (720p/1080p) audio-video synchronized clips totaling 6.3k hours. These are curated from over 60k hours of video via a transparent pipeline that includes scene-cut detection, aesthetic assessment, strict audio-visual synchronization checks, and comprehensive annotations including 2D skeletons and structured visual/audio-style captions. Leveraging TalkVerse, we present a reproducible 5B DiT baseline built on Wan2.2-5B. By utilizing a video VAE with a high downsampling ratio and a sliding window mechanism with motion-frame context, our model achieves minute-long generation with low drift. It delivers comparable lip-sync and visual quality to the 14B Wan-S2V model but with 10$\times$ lower inference cost. To enhance storytelling in long videos, we integrate an MLLM director to rewrite prompts based on audio and visual cues. Furthermore, our model supports zero-shot video dubbing via controlled latent noise injection. We open-source the dataset, training recipes, and 5B checkpoints to lower barriers for research in audio-driven human video generation. Project Page: https://zhenzhiwang.github.io/talkverse/

Paperid: 104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14480.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) achieves strong generalization in vision-language tasks by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space. However, recent findings show that CLIP-like models still underutilize fine-grained semantic signals in text, and this issue becomes even more pronounced when dealing with long and detailed captions. This stems from CLIP's training objective, which optimizes only global image-text similarity and overlooks token-level supervision - limiting its ability to achieve fine-grained visual-text alignment. To address this, we propose SuperCLIP, a simple yet effective framework that augments contrastive learning with classification-based supervision. By adding only a lightweight linear layer to the vision encoder, SuperCLIP leverages token-level cues to enhance visual-textual alignment - with just a 0.077% increase in total FLOPs, and no need for additional annotated data. Experiments show that SuperCLIP consistently improves zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and purely visual tasks. These gains hold regardless of whether the model is trained on original web data or rich re-captioned data, demonstrating SuperCLIP's ability to recover textual supervision in both cases. Furthermore, SuperCLIP alleviates CLIP's small-batch performance drop through classification-based supervision that avoids reliance on large batch sizes. Code and models will be made open source.

Paperid: 105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13687.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The quality of the latent space in visual tokenizers (e.g., VAEs) is crucial for modern generative models. However, the standard reconstruction-based training paradigm produces a latent space that is biased towards low-level information, leading to a foundation flaw: better pixel-level accuracy does not lead to higher-quality generation. This implies that pouring extensive compute into visual tokenizer pre-training translates poorly to improved performance in generation. We identify this as the ``pre-training scaling problem`` and suggest a necessary shift: to be effective for generation, a latent space must concisely represent high-level semantics. We present VTP, a unified visual tokenizer pre-training framework, pioneering the joint optimization of image-text contrastive, self-supervised, and reconstruction losses. Our large-scale study reveals two principal findings: (1) understanding is a key driver of generation, and (2) much better scaling properties, where generative performance scales effectively with compute, parameters, and data allocated to the pretraining of the visual tokenizer. After large-scale pre-training, our tokenizer delivers a competitive profile (78.2 zero-shot accuracy and 0.36 rFID on ImageNet) and 4.1 times faster convergence on generation compared to advanced distillation methods. More importantly, it scales effectively: without modifying standard DiT training specs, solely investing more FLOPS in pretraining VTP achieves 65.8\% FID improvement in downstream generation, while conventional autoencoder stagnates very early at 1/10 FLOPS. Our pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/VTP.

Paperid: 106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13511.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Our objective is to build a general time-aware video-text embedding model for retrieval. To that end, we propose a simple and efficient recipe, dubbed TARA (Time Aware Retrieval Adaptation), to adapt Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to a time-aware video-text embedding model without using any video data at all. For evaluating time-awareness in retrieval, we propose a new benchmark with temporally opposite (chiral) actions as hard negatives and curated splits for chiral and non-chiral actions. We show that TARA outperforms all existing video-text models on this chiral benchmark while also achieving strong results on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, we discover additional benefits of TARA beyond time-awareness: (i) TARA embeddings are negation-aware as shown in NegBench benchmark that evaluates negation in video retrieval, (ii) TARA achieves state of the art performance on verb and adverb understanding in videos. Overall, TARA yields a strong, versatile, time-aware video-text embedding model with state of the art zero-shot performance.

Paperid: 107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13251.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent codec-based language models~(LMs) have revolutionized text-to-speech~(TTS). However, since standard codecs tightly couple timbre and prosody, continuation-based LMs inevitably replicate this entanglement, hindering independent control. Recent efforts attempt to break this entanglement via codec design, but insufficient decoupling remains a critical bottleneck. To tackle this challenge, we propose DisCo-Speech, a zero-shot controllable TTS framework that enables prosody control and voice cloning via a disentangled speech codec (DisCodec) and an LM-based generator. The core component, DisCodec, contains two core stages: 1) Tri-factor disentanglement, which explicitly factorizes speech into content, prosody, and timbre subspaces via parallel encoders and hybrid losses; and 2) Fusion and reconstruction, which fuses content and prosody into unified content-prosody tokens suitable for LM prediction, while jointly optimizing reconstruction quality to resolve the disentanglement-reconstruction trade-off. With this design, the LM performs prosodic continuation from a style prompt while the decoder handles target timbre injection, enabling flexible zero-shot control. Experiments show that DisCo-Speech matches state-of-the-art voice cloning performance while outperforming baselines in zero-shot prosody control. By resolving the core entanglement at the codec level, DisCo-Speech provides a robust foundation for controllable speech synthesis. Audio samples are available at https://github.com/disco-speech/DisCo-Speech, and the code and weights will be released at the same link.

Paperid: 108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12978.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the landscape of recommender systems is undergoing a significant transformation. Traditionally, user reviews have served as a critical source of rich, contextual information for enhancing recommendation quality. However, as LLMs demonstrate an unprecedented ability to understand and generate human-like text, this raises the question of whether explicit user reviews remain essential in the era of LLMs. In this paper, we provide a systematic investigation of the evolving role of text reviews in recommendation by comparing deep learning methods and LLM approaches. Particularly, we conduct extensive experiments on eight public datasets with LLMs and evaluate their performance in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. We further introduce a benchmarking evaluation framework for review-aware recommender systems, RAREval, to comprehensively assess the contribution of textual reviews to the recommendation performance of review-aware recommender systems. Our framework examines various scenarios, including the removal of some or all textual reviews, random distortion, as well as recommendation performance in data sparsity and cold-start user settings. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs are capable of functioning as effective review-aware recommendation engines, generally outperforming traditional deep learning approaches, particularly in scenarios characterized by data sparsity and cold-start conditions. In addition, the removal of some or all textual reviews and random distortion does not necessarily lead to declines in recommendation accuracy. These findings motivate a rethinking of how user preference from text reviews can be more effectively leveraged. All code and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/zhytk/RAREval-data-processing.

Paperid: 109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12678.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP achieves strong zero-shot image-text retrieval by aligning global vision and text representations, yet it falls behind on fine-grained tasks even when fine-tuned on long, detailed captions. In this work, we propose $β$-CLIP, a multi-granular text-conditioned contrastive learning framework designed to achieve hierarchical alignment between multiple textual granularities-from full captions to sentences and phrases-and their corresponding visual regions. For each level of granularity, $β$-CLIP utilizes cross-attention to dynamically pool image patches, producing contextualized visual embeddings. To address the semantic overlap inherent in this hierarchy, we introduce the $β$-Contextualized Contrastive Alignment Loss ($β$-CAL). This objective parameterizes the trade-off between strict query-specific matching and relaxed intra-image contextualization, supporting both soft Cross-Entropy and hard Binary Cross-Entropy formulations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that $β$-CLIP significantly improves dense alignment: achieving 91.8% T2I 92.3% I2T at R@1 on Urban1K and 30.9% on FG-OVD (Hard), setting state-of-the-art among methods trained without hard negatives. $β$-CLIP establishes a robust, adaptive baseline for dense vision-language correspondence. The code and models are released at https://github.com/fzohra/B-CLIP.

Paperid: 110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12230.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fall recovery is a critical skill for humanoid robots in dynamic environments such as RoboCup, where prolonged downtime often decides the match. Recent techniques using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have produced robust get-up behaviors, yet existing methods require training of separate policies for each robot morphology. This paper presents a single DRL policy capable of recovering from falls across seven humanoid robots with diverse heights (0.48 - 0.81 m), weights (2.8 - 7.9 kg), and dynamics. Trained with CrossQ, the unified policy transfers zero-shot up to 86 +/- 7% (95% CI [81, 89]) on unseen morphologies, eliminating the need for robot-specific training. Comprehensive leave-one-out experiments, morph scaling analysis, and diversity ablations show that targeted morphological coverage improves zero-shot generalization. In some cases, the shared policy even surpasses the specialist baselines. These findings illustrate the practicality of morphology-agnostic control for fall recovery, laying the foundation for generalist humanoid control. The software is open-source and available at: https://github.com/utra-robosoccer/unified-humanoid-getup

Paperid: 111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11988.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate capture of human-object interaction from ubiquitous sensors like RGB cameras is important for applications in human understanding, gaming, and robot learning. However, inferring 4D interactions from a single RGB view is highly challenging due to the unknown object and human information, depth ambiguity, occlusion, and complex motion, which hinder consistent 3D and temporal reconstruction. Previous methods simplify the setup by assuming ground truth object template or constraining to a limited set of object categories. We present CARI4D, the first category-agnostic method that reconstructs spatially and temporarily consistent 4D human-object interaction at metric scale from monocular RGB videos. To this end, we propose a pose hypothesis selection algorithm that robustly integrates the individual predictions from foundation models, jointly refine them through a learned render-and-compare paradigm to ensure spatial, temporal and pixel alignment, and finally reasoning about intricate contacts for further refinement satisfying physical constraints. Experiments show that our method outperforms prior art by 38% on in-distribution dataset and 36% on unseen dataset in terms of reconstruction error. Our model generalizes beyond the training categories and thus can be applied zero-shot to in-the-wild internet videos. Our code and pretrained models will be publicly released.

Paperid: 112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11982.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow, manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained multimodal astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search scalable to 140 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

Paperid: 113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11941.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (ZS-SAR) is fundamentally constrained by prevailing approaches that rely on aligning skeleton features with static, class-level semantics. This coarse-grained alignment fails to bridge the domain shift between seen and unseen classes, thereby impeding the effective transfer of fine-grained visual knowledge. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{DynaPURLS}, a unified framework that establishes robust, multi-scale visual-semantic correspondences and dynamically refines them at inference time to enhance generalization. Our framework leverages a large language model to generate hierarchical textual descriptions that encompass both global movements and local body-part dynamics. Concurrently, an adaptive partitioning module produces fine-grained visual representations by semantically grouping skeleton joints. To fortify this fine-grained alignment against the train-test domain shift, DynaPURLS incorporates a dynamic refinement module. During inference, this module adapts textual features to the incoming visual stream via a lightweight learnable projection. This refinement process is stabilized by a confidence-aware, class-balanced memory bank, which mitigates error propagation from noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmark datasets, including NTU RGB+D 60/120 and PKU-MMD, demonstrate that DynaPURLS significantly outperforms prior art, setting new state-of-the-art records. The source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Alchemist0754/DynaPURLS

Paperid: 114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11884.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning has advanced two fundamentally different paradigms for instance segmentation: specialized models optimized through task-specific fine-tuning and generalist foundation models capable of zero-shot segmentation. This work presents a comprehensive comparison between SAM3 (Segment Anything Model, also called SAMv3) operating in zero-shot mode and three variants of Ultralytics YOLO11 (nano, medium, and large) fine-tuned for instance segmentation. The evaluation is conducted on the MinneApple dataset, a dense benchmark comprising 670 orchard images with 28,179 annotated apple instances, enabling rigorous validation of model behavior under high object density and occlusion. Our analysis shows IoU choices can inflate performance gaps by up to 30%. At the appropriate IoU = 0.15 threshold, YOLO models achieve 68.9%, 72.2%, and 71.9% F1, while SAM3 reaches 59.8% in pure zero-shot mode. However, YOLO exhibits steep degradation 48-50 points across IoU ranges whereas SAM3 drops only 4 points, revealing 12 times superior boundary stability of SAM3. This highlights the strength of SAMv3 in mask precision versus specialization in detection completeness of YOLO11. We provide open-source code, evaluation pipelines, and methodological recommendations, contributing to a deeper understanding of when specialized fine-tuned models or generalist foundation models are preferable for dense instance segmentation tasks. This project repository is available on GitHub as https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Segment-Anything-Model-SAM3-Zero-Shot-Segmentation-Against-Fine-Tuned-YOLO-Detectors

Paperid: 115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11769.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable impressive zero shot manipulation, but their inference stacks are often too heavy for responsive web demos or high frequency robot control on commodity GPUs. We present BLURR, a lightweight inference wrapper that can be plugged into existing VLA controllers without retraining or changing model checkpoints. Instantiated on the pi-zero VLA controller, BLURR keeps the original observation interfaces and accelerates control by combining an instruction prefix key value cache, mixed precision execution, and a single step rollout schedule that reduces per step computation. In our SimplerEnv based evaluation, BLURR maintains task success rates comparable to the original controller while significantly lowering effective FLOPs and wall clock latency. We also build an interactive web demo that allows users to switch between controllers and toggle inference options in real time while watching manipulation episodes. This highlights BLURR as a practical approach for deploying modern VLA policies under tight compute budgets.

Paperid: 116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11654.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The acquisition cost for large, annotated motion datasets remains a critical bottleneck for skeletal-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Although Text-to-Motion (T2M) generative models offer a compelling, scalable source of synthetic data, their training objectives, which emphasize general artistic motion, and dataset structures fundamentally differ from HAR's requirements for kinematically precise, class-discriminative actions. This disparity creates a significant domain gap, making generalist T2M models ill-equipped for generating motions suitable for HAR classifiers. To address this challenge, we propose KineMIC (Kinetic Mining In Context), a transfer learning framework for few-shot action synthesis. KineMIC adapts a T2M diffusion model to an HAR domain by hypothesizing that semantic correspondences in the text encoding space can provide soft supervision for kinematic distillation. We operationalize this via a kinetic mining strategy that leverages CLIP text embeddings to establish correspondences between sparse HAR labels and T2M source data. This process guides fine-tuning, transforming the generalist T2M backbone into a specialized few-shot Action-to-Motion generator. We validate KineMIC using HumanML3D as the source T2M dataset and a subset of NTU RGB+D 120 as the target HAR domain, randomly selecting just 10 samples per action class. Our approach generates significantly more coherent motions, providing a robust data augmentation source that delivers a +23.1% accuracy points improvement. Animated illustrations and supplementary materials are available at (https://lucazzola.github.io/publications/kinemic).

Paperid: 117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11548.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the success of deep learning based models in medical image segmentation, most state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods perform fully-supervised learning, which commonly rely on large scale annotated training datasets. However, medical image annotation is highly time-consuming, hindering its clinical applications. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been emerged as an appealing strategy in training with limited annotations, largely reducing the labelling cost. We propose a novel SSL framework SSL-MedSAM2, which contains a training-free few-shot learning branch TFFS-MedSAM2 based on the pretrained large foundation model Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for pseudo label generation, and an iterative fully-supervised learning branch FSL-nnUNet based on nnUNet for pseudo label refinement. The results on MICCAI2025 challenge CARE-LiSeg (Liver Segmentation) demonstrate an outstanding performance of SSL-MedSAM2 among other methods. The average dice scores on the test set in GED4 and T1 MRI are 0.9710 and 0.9648 respectively, and the Hausdorff distances are 20.07 and 21.97 respectively. The code is available via https://github.com/naisops/SSL-MedSAM2/tree/main.

Paperid: 118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11458.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Skeleton-Cache, the first training-free test-time adaptation framework for skeleton-based zero-shot action recognition (SZAR), aimed at improving model generalization to unseen actions during inference. Skeleton-Cache reformulates inference as a lightweight retrieval process over a non-parametric cache that stores structured skeleton representations, combining both global and fine-grained local descriptors. To guide the fusion of descriptor-wise predictions, we leverage the semantic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assign class-specific importance weights. By integrating these structured descriptors with LLM-guided semantic priors, Skeleton-Cache dynamically adapts to unseen actions without any additional training or access to training data. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60/120 and PKU-MMD II demonstrate that Skeleton-Cache consistently boosts the performance of various SZAR backbones under both zero-shot and generalized zero-shot settings. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Alchemist0754/Skeleton-Cache.

Paperid: 119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11141.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training vision models with language supervision enables general and transferable representations. However, many visual domains, especially non-object-centric domains such as medical imaging and remote sensing, contain itemized text annotations: multiple text items describing distinct and semantically independent findings within a single image. Such supervision differs from standard multi-caption supervision, where captions are redundant or highly overlapping. Here, we introduce ItemizedCLIP, a framework for learning complete and explainable visual representations from itemized text supervision. ItemizedCLIP employs a cross-attention module to produce text item-conditioned visual embeddings and a set of tailored objectives that jointly enforce item independence (distinct regions for distinct items) and representation completeness (coverage of all items). Across four domains with naturally itemized text supervision (brain MRI, head CT, chest CT, remote sensing) and one additional synthetically itemized dataset, ItemizedCLIP achieves substantial improvements in zero-shot performance and fine-grained interpretability over baselines. The resulting ItemizedCLIP representations are semantically grounded, item-differentiable, complete, and visually interpretable. Our code is available at https://github.com/MLNeurosurg/ItemizedCLIP.

Paperid: 120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11130.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Stereo foundation models achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Efficient stereo architectures, on the other hand, sacrifice robustness for speed and require costly per-domain fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we present Fast-FoundationStereo, a family of architectures that achieve, for the first time, strong zero-shot generalization at real-time frame rate. We employ a divide-and-conquer acceleration strategy with three components: (1) knowledge distillation to compress the hybrid backbone into a single efficient student; (2) blockwise neural architecture search for automatically discovering optimal cost filtering designs under latency budgets, reducing search complexity exponentially; and (3) structured pruning for eliminating redundancy in the iterative refinement module. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic pseudo-labeling pipeline used to curate 1.4M in-the-wild stereo pairs to supplement synthetic training data and facilitate knowledge distillation. The resulting model can run over 10x faster than FoundationStereo while closely matching its zero-shot accuracy, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art among real-time methods. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/Fast-FoundationStereo/

Paperid: 121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11013.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
LLMs are highly sensitive to prompt design, but handcrafting effective prompts is difficult and often requires intricate crafting of few-shot examples. We propose a fast automatic prompt construction algorithm that augments human instructions by generating a small set of few shot examples. Our method iteratively replaces/drops/keeps few-shot examples using Monte Carlo Shapley estimation of example utility. For faster execution, we use aggressive subsampling and a replay buffer for faster evaluations. Our method can be run using different compute time budgets. On a limited budget, we outperform existing automatic prompting methods on text simplification and GSM8K and obtain second best results on classification and summarization. With an extended, but still modest compute budget we set a new state of the art among automatic prompting methods on classification, simplification and GSM8K. Our results show that carefully constructed examples, rather than exhaustive instruction search, are the dominant lever for fast and data efficient prompt engineering. Our code is available at https://github.com/Batorskq/PIAST.

Paperid: 122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10725.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Depth estimation in videos is essential for visual perception in real-world applications. However, existing methods either rely on simple frame-by-frame monocular models, leading to temporal inconsistencies and inaccuracies, or use computationally demanding temporal modeling, unsuitable for real-time applications. These limitations significantly restrict general applicability and performance in practical settings. To address this, we propose VeloDepth, an efficient and robust online video depth estimation pipeline that effectively leverages spatiotemporal priors from previous depth predictions and performs deep feature propagation. Our method introduces a novel Propagation Module that refines and propagates depth features and predictions using flow-based warping coupled with learned residual corrections. In addition, our design structurally enforces temporal consistency, resulting in stable depth predictions across consecutive frames with improved efficiency. Comprehensive zero-shot evaluation on multiple benchmarks demonstrates the state-of-the-art temporal consistency and competitive accuracy of VeloDepth, alongside its significantly faster inference compared to existing video-based depth estimators. VeloDepth thus provides a practical, efficient, and accurate solution for real-time depth estimation suitable for diverse perception tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/velodepth

Paperid: 123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10685.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. Given a single photograph, SHARP regresses the parameters of a 3D Gaussian representation of the depicted scene. This is done in less than a second on a standard GPU via a single feedforward pass through a neural network. The 3D Gaussian representation produced by SHARP can then be rendered in real time, yielding high-resolution photorealistic images for nearby views. The representation is metric, with absolute scale, supporting metric camera movements. Experimental results demonstrate that SHARP delivers robust zero-shot generalization across datasets. It sets a new state of the art on multiple datasets, reducing LPIPS by 25-34% and DISTS by 21-43% versus the best prior model, while lowering the synthesis time by three orders of magnitude. Code and weights are provided at https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp

Paperid: 124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10521.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel classes in query images using only a small annotated support set. While prior research has mainly focused on improving decoders, the encoder's limited ability to extract meaningful features for unseen classes remains a key bottleneck. In this work, we introduce \textit{Take a Peek} (TaP), a simple yet effective method that enhances encoder adaptability for both FSS and cross-domain FSS (CD-FSS). TaP leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the encoder on the support set with minimal computational overhead, enabling fast adaptation to novel classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our method is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing FSS pipelines. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks--including COCO $20^i$, Pascal $5^i$, and cross-domain datasets such as DeepGlobe, ISIC, and Chest X-ray--demonstrate that TaP consistently improves segmentation performance across diverse models and shot settings. Notably, TaP delivers significant gains in complex multi-class scenarios, highlighting its practical effectiveness in realistic settings. A rank sensitivity analysis also shows that strong performance can be achieved even with low-rank adaptations, ensuring computational efficiency. By addressing a critical limitation in FSS--the encoder's generalization to novel classes--TaP paves the way toward more robust, efficient, and generalizable segmentation systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pasqualedem/TakeAPeek.

Paperid: 125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10244.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) formulates real-world applications like ''auto-annotation'', as it aims to learn a model over a few labeled and abundant unlabeled examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and their pretraining data, the SSFSL literature largely neglects these open-source resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to achieve auto-annotation in the real world, SSFSL should leverage such open-source resources. To this end, we start by applying established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Counterintuitively, they significantly underperform FSL baselines. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause: VLMs produce rather ''flat'' distributions of softmax probabilities. This results in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. We address this issue with embarrassingly simple techniques: classifier initialization and temperature tuning. They jointly increase the confidence scores of pseudo-labels, improving the utilization rate of unlabeled data, and strengthening supervision signals. Building on this, we propose: Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperature Tuning (SWIFT), which enables existing SSL methods to effectively finetune a VLM on limited labeled data, abundant unlabeled data, and task-relevant but noisy data retrieved from the VLM's pretraining set. Extensive experiments on five SSFSL benchmarks show that SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes VLMs with the unlabeled data being labeled with ground truth!

Paperid: 126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10043.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks through in-context learning but often under-perform in Named Entity Recognition (NER), especially for lower-resource languages like Portuguese. While open-weight LLMs enable local deployment, no single model dominates all tasks, motivating ensemble approaches. However, existing LLM ensembles focus on text generation or classification, leaving NER under-explored. In this context, this work proposes a novel three-step ensemble pipeline for zero-shot NER using similarly capable, locally run LLMs. Our method outperforms individual LLMs in four out of five Portuguese NER datasets by leveraging a heuristic to select optimal model combinations with minimal annotated data. Moreover, we show that ensembles obtained on different source datasets generally outperform individual LLMs in cross-dataset configurations, potentially eliminating the need for annotated data for the current task. Our work advances scalable, low-resource, and zero-shot NER by effectively combining multiple small LLMs without fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/Joao-Luz/local-llm-ner-ensemble.

Paperid: 127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08965.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language Models (LMs) struggle with complex, interdependent instructions, particularly in high-stakes domains like finance where precision is critical. We introduce FIFE, a novel, high-difficulty benchmark designed to assess LM instruction-following capabilities for financial analysis tasks. FIFE comprises 88 human-authored prompts and employs a verification system with chainable, verifiable constraints for fine-grained reward signals. We evaluate 53 models (proprietary, open-weight, open-source) in a zero-shot setting. Our key findings reveal a clear performance hierarchy: the top open-weight model (76.1 strict / 79.5 loose) surpasses the leading proprietary system (65.9 strict / 70.5 loose), while the best open-source models lag significantly (45.5 strict / 48.9 loose). However, even top-performing models struggle with FIFE's complex requirements, failing to achieve perfect compliance. We release our dataset and code as an open-source resource to promote research in Reinforcement Learning for the financial domain.

Paperid: 128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08912.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Nighttime environments pose significant challenges for camera-based perception, as existing methods passively rely on the scene lighting. We introduce Lighting-driven Dynamic Active Sensing (LiDAS), a closed-loop active illumination system that combines off-the-shelf visual perception models with high-definition headlights. Rather than uniformly brightening the scene, LiDAS dynamically predicts an optimal illumination field that maximizes downstream perception performance, i.e., decreasing light on empty areas to reallocate it on object regions. LiDAS enables zero-shot nighttime generalization of daytime-trained models through adaptive illumination control. Trained on synthetic data and deployed zero-shot in real-world closed-loop driving scenarios, LiDAS enables +18.7% mAP50 and +5.0% mIoU over standard low-beam at equal power. It maintains performances while reducing energy use by 40%. LiDAS complements domain-generalization methods, further strengthening robustness without retraining. By turning readily available headlights into active vision actuators, LiDAS offers a cost-effective solution to robust nighttime perception.

Paperid: 129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08606.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model excels in few-shot learning by aligning visual and textual representations. Our study shows that template-sample similarity (TSS), defined as the resemblance between a text template and an image sample, introduces bias. This bias leads the model to rely on template proximity rather than true sample-to-category alignment, reducing both accuracy and robustness in classification. We present a framework that uses empty prompts, textual inputs that convey the idea of "emptiness" without category information. These prompts capture unbiased template features and offset TSS bias. The framework employs two stages. During pre-training, empty prompts reveal and reduce template-induced bias within the CLIP encoder. During few-shot fine-tuning, a bias calibration loss enforces correct alignment between images and their categories, ensuring the model focuses on relevant visual cues. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our template correction method significantly reduces performance fluctuations caused by TSS, yielding higher classification accuracy and stronger robustness. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/zhenyuZ-HUST/Decoupling-Template-Bias-in-CLIP.

Paperid: 130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08221.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding objects is fundamental to computer vision. Beyond object recognition that provides only a category label as typical output, in-depth object understanding represents a comprehensive perception of an object category, involving its components, appearance characteristics, inter-category relationships, contextual background knowledge, etc. Developing such capability requires sufficient multi-modal data, including visual annotations such as parts, attributes, and co-occurrences for specific tasks, as well as textual knowledge to support high-level tasks like reasoning and question answering. However, these data are generally task-oriented and not systematically organized enough to achieve the expected understanding of object categories. In response, we propose the Visual Knowledge Base that structures multi-modal object knowledge as graphs, and present a construction framework named VisKnow that extracts multi-modal, object-level knowledge for object understanding. This framework integrates enriched aligned text and image-source knowledge with region annotations at both object and part levels through a combination of expert design and large-scale model application. As a specific case study, we construct AnimalKB, a structured animal knowledge base covering 406 animal categories, which contains 22K textual knowledge triplets extracted from encyclopedic documents, 420K images, and corresponding region annotations. A series of experiments showcase how AnimalKB enhances object-level visual tasks such as zero-shot recognition and fine-grained VQA, and serves as challenging benchmarks for knowledge graph completion and part segmentation. Our findings highlight the potential of automatically constructing visual knowledge bases to advance visual understanding and its practical applications. The project page is available at https://vipl-vsu.github.io/VisKnow.

Paperid: 131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07831.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent video generation models demonstrate impressive synthesis capabilities but remain limited by single-modality conditioning, constraining their holistic world understanding. This stems from insufficient cross-modal interaction and limited modal diversity for comprehensive world knowledge representation. To address these limitations, we introduce UnityVideo, a unified framework for world-aware video generation that jointly learns across multiple modalities (segmentation masks, human skeletons, DensePose, optical flow, and depth maps) and training paradigms. Our approach features two core components: (1) dynamic noising to unify heterogeneous training paradigms, and (2) a modality switcher with an in-context learner that enables unified processing via modular parameters and contextual learning. We contribute a large-scale unified dataset with 1.3M samples. Through joint optimization, UnityVideo accelerates convergence and significantly enhances zero-shot generalization to unseen data. We demonstrate that UnityVideo achieves superior video quality, consistency, and improved alignment with physical world constraints. Code and data can be found at: https://github.com/dvlab-research/UnityVideo

Paperid: 132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07407.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Ensuring reliable tool use is critical for safe agentic AI systems. Language models frequently produce unreliable reasoning with plausible but incorrect solutions that are difficult to verify. To address this, we investigate fine-tuning models to use Prolog as an external tool for verifiable computation. Using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we fine-tune Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on a cleaned GSM8K-Prolog-Prover dataset while varying (i) prompt structure, (ii) reward composition (execution, syntax, semantics, structure), and (iii) inference protocol: single-shot, best-of-N, and two agentic modes where Prolog is invoked internally or independently. Our reinforcement learning approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, with our 3B model achieving zero-shot MMLU performance comparable to 7B few-shot results. Our findings reveal that: 1) joint tuning of prompt, reward, and inference shapes program syntax and logic; 2) best-of-N with external Prolog verification maximizes accuracy on GSM8K; 3) agentic inference with internal repair yields superior zero-shot generalization on MMLU-Stem and MMLU-Pro. These results demonstrate that grounding model reasoning in formal verification systems substantially improves reliability and auditability for safety-critical applications. The source code for reproducing our experiments is available under https://github.com/niklasmellgren/grpo-prolog-inference

Paperid: 133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07222.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
To address the trade-off between robustness and performance for robust VLM, we observe that function words could incur vulnerability of VLMs against cross-modal adversarial attacks, and propose Function-word De-Attention (FDA) accordingly to mitigate the impact of function words. Similar to differential amplifiers, our FDA calculates the original and the function-word cross-attention within attention heads, and differentially subtracts the latter from the former for more aligned and robust VLMs. Comprehensive experiments include 2 SOTA baselines under 6 different attacks on 2 downstream tasks, 3 datasets, and 3 models. Overall, our FDA yields an average 18/13/53% ASR drop with only 0.2/0.3/0.6% performance drops on the 3 tested models on retrieval, and a 90% ASR drop with a 0.3% performance gain on visual grounding. We demonstrate the scalability, generalization, and zero-shot performance of FDA experimentally, as well as in-depth ablation studies and analysis. Code will be made publicly at https://github.com/michaeltian108/FDA.

Paperid: 134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07155.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models exhibit remarkable generative ability, yet achieving smooth and semantically consistent image morphing remains a challenge. Existing approaches often yield abrupt transitions or over-saturated appearances due to the lack of adaptive structural and semantic alignments. We propose CHIMERA, a zero-shot diffusion-based framework that formulates morphing as a cached inversion-guided denoising process. To handle large semantic and appearance disparities, we propose Adaptive Cache Injection and Semantic Anchor Prompting. Adaptive Cache Injection (ACI) caches down, mid, and up blocks features from both inputs during DDIM inversion and re-injects them adaptively during denoising, enabling spatial and semantic alignment in depth- and time-adaptive manners and enabling natural feature fusion and smooth transitions. Semantic Anchor Prompting (SAP) leverages a vision-language model to generate a shared anchor prompt that serves as a semantic anchor, bridging dissimilar inputs and guiding the denoising process toward coherent results. Finally, we introduce the Global-Local Consistency Score (GLCS), a morphing-oriented metric that simultaneously evaluates the global harmonization of the two inputs and the smoothness of the local morphing transition. Extensive experiments and user studies show that CHIMERA achieves smoother and more semantically aligned transitions than existing methods, establishing a new state of the art in image morphing. The code and project page will be publicly released.

Paperid: 135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06905.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reference-to-video (R2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that align with a text prompt while preserving the subject identity from reference images. However, current R2V methods are hindered by the reliance on explicit reference image-video-text triplets, whose construction is highly expensive and difficult to scale. We bypass this bottleneck by introducing Saber, a scalable zero-shot framework that requires no explicit R2V data. Trained exclusively on video-text pairs, Saber employs a masked training strategy and a tailored attention-based model design to learn identity-consistent and reference-aware representations. Mask augmentation techniques are further integrated to mitigate copy-paste artifacts common in reference-to-video generation. Moreover, Saber demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities across a varying number of references and achieves superior performance on the OpenS2V-Eval benchmark compared to methods trained with R2V data.

Paperid: 136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06694.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Rapid expansion of social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Reddit has enabled large-scale analysis of public perceptions on diverse topics, including social issues, politics, natural disasters, and consumer sentiment. Topic modeling is a widely used approach for uncovering latent themes in text data, typically framed as an unsupervised classification task. However, traditional models, originally designed for longer and more formal documents, struggle with short social media posts due to limited co-occurrence statistics, fragmented semantics, inconsistent spelling, and informal language. To address these challenges, we propose a new method, TopiCLEAR: Topic extraction by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensional Reduction. Specifically, each text is embedded using Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and provisionally clustered using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The clusters are then refined iteratively using a supervised projection based on linear discriminant analysis, followed by GMM-based clustering until convergence. Notably, our method operates directly on raw text, eliminating the need for preprocessing steps such as stop word removal. We evaluate our approach on four diverse datasets, 20News, AgNewsTitle, Reddit, and TweetTopic, each containing human-labeled topic information. Compared with seven baseline methods, including a recent SBERT-based method and a zero-shot generative AI method, our approach achieves the highest similarity to human-annotated topics, with significant improvements for both social media posts and online news articles. Additionally, qualitative analysis shows that our method produces more interpretable topics, highlighting its potential for applications in social media data and web content analytics.

Paperid: 137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05613.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (CD-FSS) seeks to segment unknown classes in unseen domains using only a few annotated examples. This setting is inherently challenging: source and target domains exhibit substantial distribution shifts, label spaces are disjoint, and support images are scarce--making standard episodic methods unreliable and computationally demanding at test time. To address these constraints, we propose DistillFSS, a framework that embeds support-set knowledge directly into a model's parameters through a teacher--student distillation process. By internalizing few-shot reasoning into a dedicated layer within the student network, DistillFSS eliminates the need for support images at test time, enabling fast, lightweight inference, while allowing efficient extension to novel classes in unseen domains through rapid teacher-driven specialization. Combined with fine-tuning, the approach scales efficiently to large support sets and significantly reduces computational overhead. To evaluate the framework under realistic conditions, we introduce a new CD-FSS benchmark spanning medical imaging, industrial inspection, and remote sensing, with disjoint label spaces and variable support sizes. Experiments show that DistillFSS matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in multi-class and multi-shot scenarios, while offering substantial efficiency gains. The code is available at https://github.com/pasqualedem/DistillFSS.

Paperid: 138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05505.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a method to compute explicit solutions of parametric Generalized Nash Equilibrium (GNE) problems with convex quadratic cost functions and linear coupling and local constraints. Assuming the parameters only enter the linear terms of the cost functions and constraint right-hand sides, we provide the exact multiparametric solution of the GNE problem. Such a solution enables (i) minimal real-time computation, (ii) inherent interpretability, explainability, and exact enumeration of all multiple equilibria, (iii) determine desired GNE solution types in the case of infinitely-many equilibria, and (iv) zero-shot updates of the GNE solution due to changes of constraint right-hand sides and/or linear costs. In line with explicit Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches, we apply our method to solve game-theoretic MPC (Receding Horizon Games) explicitly, comparing performance against centralized solvers in a battery charging game and in a toy two-mass spring system control problem. A Python implementation of the algorithms presented in this paper is available on https://github.com/bemporad/nash_mpqp.

Paperid: 139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05245.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of protein function is essential for elucidating molecular mechanisms and advancing biological and therapeutic discovery. Yet experimental annotation lags far behind the rapid growth of protein sequence data. Computational approaches address this gap by associating proteins with Gene Ontology (GO) terms, which encode functional knowledge through hierarchical relations and textual definitions. However, existing models often emphasize one modality over the other, limiting their ability to generalize, particularly to unseen or newly introduced GO terms that frequently arise as the ontology evolves, and making the previously trained models outdated. We present STAR-GO, a Transformer-based framework that jointly models the semantic and structural characteristics of GO terms to enhance zero-shot protein function prediction. STAR-GO integrates textual definitions with ontology graph structure to learn unified GO representations, which are processed in hierarchical order to propagate information from general to specific terms. These representations are then aligned with protein sequence embeddings to capture sequence-function relationships. STAR-GO achieves state-of-the-art performance and superior zero-shot generalization, demonstrating the utility of integrating semantics and structure for robust and adaptable protein function prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/boun-tabi-lifelu/stargo.

Paperid: 140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04720.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech synthesis relies on length alignment between text sequences and audio representations, constraining naturalness and expressiveness. Existing methods depend on duration modeling or pseudo-alignment strategies that severely limit naturalness and computational efficiency. We propose M3-TTS, a concise and efficient NAR TTS paradigm based on multi-modal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT) architecture. M3-TTS employs joint diffusion transformer layers for cross-modal alignment, achieving stable monotonic alignment between variable-length text-speech sequences without pseudo-alignment requirements. Single diffusion transformer layers further enhance acoustic detail modeling. The framework integrates a mel-vae codec that provides 3* training acceleration. Experimental results on Seed-TTS and AISHELL-3 benchmarks demonstrate that M3-TTS achieves state-of-the-art NAR performance with the lowest word error rates (1.36\% English, 1.31\% Chinese) while maintaining competitive naturalness scores. Code and demos will be available at https://wwwwxp.github.io/M3-TTS.

Paperid: 141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04520.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Due to the scarcity of annotated data and the substantial computational costs of model, conventional tuning methods in medical image segmentation face critical challenges. Current approaches to adapting pretrained models, including full-parameter and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, still rely heavily on task-specific training on downstream tasks. Therefore, zero-shot segmentation has gained increasing attention, especially with foundation models such as SAM demonstrating promising generalization capabilities. However, SAM still faces notable limitations on medical datasets due to domain shifts, making efficient zero-shot enhancement an urgent research goal. To address these challenges, we propose BA-TTA-SAM, a task-agnostic test-time adaptation framework that significantly enhances the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM via test-time adaptation. This framework integrates two key mechanisms: (1) The encoder-level Gaussian prompt injection embeds Gaussian-based prompts directly into the image encoder, providing explicit guidance for initial representation learning. (2) The cross-layer boundary-aware attention alignment exploits the hierarchical feature interactions within the ViT backbone, aligning deep semantic responses with shallow boundary cues. Experiments on four datasets, including ISIC, Kvasir, BUSI, and REFUGE, show an average improvement of 12.4\% in the DICE score compared with SAM's zero-shot segmentation performance. The results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models in medical image segmentation. Our framework significantly enhances the generalization ability of SAM, without requiring any source-domain training data. Extensive experiments on publicly available medical datasets strongly demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/Emilychenlin/BA-TTA-SAM.

Paperid: 142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03905.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The remarkable success in text-to-image diffusion models has motivated extensive investigation of their potential for video applications. Zero-shot techniques aim to adapt image diffusion models for videos without requiring further model training. Recent methods largely emphasize integrating inter-frame correspondence into attention mechanisms. However, the soft constraint applied to identify the valid features to attend is insufficient, which could lead to temporal inconsistency. In this paper, we present FRESCO, which integrates intra-frame correspondence with inter-frame correspondence to formulate a more robust spatial-temporal constraint. This enhancement ensures a consistent transformation of semantically similar content between frames. Our method goes beyond attention guidance to explicitly optimize features, achieving high spatial-temporal consistency with the input video, significantly enhancing the visual coherence of manipulated videos. We verify FRESCO adaptations on two zero-shot tasks of video-to-video translation and text-guided video editing. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating high-quality, coherent videos, highlighting a significant advance over current zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03720.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for diverse applications. However, their uniform token processing paradigm introduces critical vulnerabilities in instruction handling, particularly when exposed to adversarial scenarios. In this work, we identify and propose a novel class of vulnerabilities, termed Tool-Completion Attack (TCA), which exploits function-calling mechanisms to subvert model behavior. To evaluate LLM robustness against such threats, we introduce the Tool-Completion benchmark, a comprehensive security assessment framework, which reveals that even state-of-the-art models remain susceptible to TCA, with surprisingly high attack success rates. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce Context-Aware Hierarchical Learning (CAHL), a sophisticated mechanism that dynamically balances semantic comprehension with role-specific instruction constraints. CAHL leverages the contextual correlations between different instruction segments to establish a robust, context-aware instruction hierarchy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAHL significantly enhances LLM robustness against both conventional attacks and the proposed TCA, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities in zero-shot evaluations while still preserving model performance on generic tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/S2AILab/CAHL.

Paperid: 144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03704.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Long-context dialogue systems suffer from State Inertia, where static constraints prevent models from resolving conflicts between evolving user intents and established historical context. To address this, we propose DZ-TDPO, a non-destructive alignment framework that synergizes conflict-aware dynamic KL constraints with a calibrated temporal attention bias. Experiments on the Multi-Session Chat (MSC) dataset demonstrate that DZ-TDPO achieves state-of-the-art win rates (55.4% on Phi-3.5) while maintaining robust zero-shot generalization. Our scaling analysis reveals a "Capacity-Stability Trade-off": while smaller models incur an "alignment tax" (perplexity surge) to overcome historical inertia, the larger Qwen2.5-7B model achieves 50.8% win rate with negligible perplexity overhead. This confirms that TAI can be alleviated via precise attention regulation rather than destructive weight updates, preserving general capabilities (MMLU) across model scales. Code and data are available: https://github.com/lyj20071013/DZ-TDPO

Paperid: 145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03620.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The protection of Intellectual Property (IP) in Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a critical challenge in contemporary AI research. While fingerprinting techniques have emerged as a fundamental mechanism for detecting unauthorized model usage, existing methods -- whether behavior-based or structural -- suffer from vulnerabilities such as false claim attacks or susceptible to weight manipulations. To overcome these limitations, we propose SELF, a novel intrinsic weight-based fingerprinting scheme that eliminates dependency on input and inherently resists false claims. SELF achieves robust IP protection through two key innovations: 1) unique, scalable and transformation-invariant fingerprint extraction via singular value and eigenvalue decomposition of LLM attention weights, and 2) effective neural network-based fingerprint similarity comparison based on few-shot learning and data augmentation. Experimental results demonstrate SELF maintains high IP infringement detection accuracy while showing strong robustness against various downstream modifications, including quantization, pruning, and fine-tuning attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HanxiuZhang/SELF_v2.

Paperid: 146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03445.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pretraining (VLP) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in medical image analysis, enabling representation learning from large-scale image-text pairs without relying on expensive manual annotations. However, existing methods often struggle with the noise inherent in web-collected data and the complexity of unstructured long medical texts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel VLP framework integrating a Multi-Agent data GENeration (MAGEN) system and Ontology-based Multi-Aspect Knowledge-Enhanced (O-MAKE) pretraining. First, MAGEN enhances data quality by synthesizing knowledge-enriched descriptions via a foundation model-assisted captioning and retrieval-based verification pipeline. Second, O-MAKE addresses the difficulty of learning from long, unstructured texts by decomposing them into distinct knowledge aspects. This facilitates fine-grained alignment at both global and patch levels, while explicitly modeling medical concept relationships through ontology-guided mechanisms. We validate our framework in the field of dermatology, where comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on disease classification and cross-modal retrieval tasks across eight datasets. Our code and the augmented dataset Derm1M-AgentAug, comprising over 400k skin-image-text pairs, will be released at https://github.com/SiyuanYan1/Derm1M.

Paperid: 147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03370.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce ShelfGaussian, an open-vocabulary multi-modal Gaussian-based 3D scene understanding framework supervised by off-the-shelf vision foundation models (VFMs). Gaussian-based methods have demonstrated superior performance and computational efficiency across a wide range of scene understanding tasks. However, existing methods either model objects as closed-set semantic Gaussians supervised by annotated 3D labels, neglecting their rendering ability, or learn open-set Gaussian representations via purely 2D self-supervision, leading to degraded geometry and limited to camera-only settings. To fully exploit the potential of Gaussians, we propose a Multi-Modal Gaussian Transformer that enables Gaussians to query features from diverse sensor modalities, and a Shelf-Supervised Learning Paradigm that efficiently optimizes Gaussians with VFM features jointly at 2D image and 3D scene levels. We evaluate ShelfGaussian on various perception and planning tasks. Experiments on Occ3D-nuScenes demonstrate its state-of-the-art zero-shot semantic occupancy prediction performance. ShelfGaussian is further evaluated on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to assess its in the-wild performance across diverse urban scenarios. Project website: https://lunarlab-gatech.github.io/ShelfGaussian/.

Paperid: 148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03043.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in eliciting visual reasoning within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches typically train separate models for different tasks and treat image and video reasoning as disjoint domains. This results in limited scalability toward a multimodal reasoning generalist, which restricts practical versatility and hinders potential knowledge sharing across tasks and modalities. To this end, we propose OneThinker, an all-in-one reasoning model that unifies image and video understanding across diverse fundamental visual tasks, including question answering, captioning, spatial and temporal grounding, tracking, and segmentation. To achieve this, we construct the OneThinker-600k training corpus covering all these tasks and employ commercial models for CoT annotation, resulting in OneThinker-SFT-340k for SFT cold start. Furthermore, we propose EMA-GRPO to handle reward heterogeneity in multi-task RL by tracking task-wise moving averages of reward standard deviations for balanced optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse visual benchmarks show that OneThinker delivers strong performance on 31 benchmarks, across 10 fundamental visual understanding tasks. Moreover, it exhibits effective knowledge transfer between certain tasks and preliminary zero-shot generalization ability, marking a step toward a unified multimodal reasoning generalist. All code, model, and data are released.

Paperid: 149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02942.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The next frontier for video generation lies in developing models capable of zero-shot reasoning, where understanding real-world scientific laws is crucial for accurate physical outcome modeling under diverse conditions. However, existing video benchmarks are physical commonsense-based, offering limited insight into video models' scientific reasoning capability. We introduce VideoScience-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate undergraduate-level scientific understanding in video models. Each prompt encodes a composite scientific scenario that requires understanding and reasoning across multiple scientific concepts to generate the correct phenomenon. The benchmark comprises 200 carefully curated prompts spanning 14 topics and 103 concepts in physics and chemistry. We conduct expert-annotated evaluations across seven state-of-the-art video models in T2V and I2V settings along five dimensions: Prompt Consistency, Phenomenon Congruency, Correct Dynamism, Immutability, and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. Using a VLM-as-a-Judge to assess video generations, we observe strong correlation with human assessments. To the best of our knowledge, VideoScience-Bench is the first benchmark to evaluate video models not only as generators but also as reasoners, requiring their generations to demonstrate scientific understanding consistent with expected physical and chemical phenomena. Our data and evaluation code are available at: \href{https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/VideoScience}{github.com/hao-ai-lab/VideoScience}.

Paperid: 150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02438.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical healthcare, obtaining detailed annotations is challenging, highlighting the need for robust Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Pretrained VLMs enable fine-tuning on small datasets or zero-shot inference, achieving performance comparable to task-specific models. Contrastive learning (CL) is a key paradigm for training VLMs but inherently requires large batch sizes for effective learning, making it computationally demanding and often limited to well-resourced institutions. Moreover, with limited data in healthcare, it is important to prioritize knowledge extraction from both data and models during training to improve performance. Therefore, we focus on leveraging the momentum method combined with distillation to simultaneously address computational efficiency and knowledge exploitation. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) leveraging momentum self-distillation to enhance multimodal learning, and (2) integrating momentum mechanisms with gradient accumulation to enlarge the effective batch size without increasing resource consumption. Our method attains competitive performance with state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in zero-shot classification, while providing a substantial boost in the few-shot adaption, achieving over 90% AUC-ROC and improving retrieval tasks by 2-3%. Importantly, our method achieves high training efficiency with a single GPU while maintaining reasonable training time. Our approach aims to advance efficient multimodal learning by reducing resource requirements while improving performance over SOTA methods. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/phphuc612/MSD .

Paperid: 151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02005.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Audio-Visual Affordance Grounding (AV-AG), a new task that segments object interaction regions from action sounds. Unlike existing approaches that rely on textual instructions or demonstration videos, which often limited by ambiguity or occlusion, audio provides real-time, semantically rich, and visually independent cues for affordance grounding, enabling more intuitive understanding of interaction regions. To support this task, we construct the first AV-AG dataset, comprising a large collection of action sounds, object images, and pixel-level affordance annotations. The dataset also includes an unseen subset to evaluate zero-shot generalization. Furthermore, we propose AVAGFormer, a model equipped with a semantic-conditioned cross-modal mixer and a dual-head decoder that effectively fuses audio and visual signals for mask prediction. Experiments show that AVAGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on AV-AG, surpassing baselines from related tasks. Comprehensive analyses highlight the distinctions between AV-AG and AVS, the benefits of end-to-end modeling, and the contribution of each component. Code and dataset have been released on https://jscslld.github.io/AVAGFormer/.

Paperid: 152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01970.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The mechanism by which RL contributes to reasoning capabilities-whether it incentivizes the synthesis of new skills or merely amplifies existing behaviors-remains a subject of intense debate. In this work, we investigate this question through the lens of Complementary Reasoning, a complex task that requires integrating internal parametric knowledge with external contextual information. Using a controlled synthetic dataset of human biographies, we strictly decouple this ability into two atomic skills: Parametric Reasoning (relying on internal knowledge) and Contextual Reasoning (depending on external information). To rigorously assess capability boundaries, we evaluate generalization across three distinct levels of difficulty: I.I.D., Composition, and Zero-shot settings. We find that while SFT is sufficient for in-distribution performance, it struggles with O.O.D. generalization, particularly in Zero-shot settings where relational combinations are novel. Crucially, we identify the SFT Generalization Paradox: Models supervised solely on the composite task achieve near-perfect in-distribution accuracy but collapse on out-of-distribution generalization, indicating their reliance on rote memorization of path shortcuts. In contrast, we find that RL acts as a reasoning synthesizer rather than a probability amplifier. However, we uncover a strict atomic prerequisite: RL can only synthesize these complex strategies if the base model has first mastered the independent atomic skills (Parametric and Contextual) via SFT. These findings challenge the view of RL as a mere amplifier, suggesting that given sufficient atomic foundations, RL can actively synthesize complex reasoning strategies from learned primitives without explicit supervision on such complex strategies. This indicates that decoupled atomic training followed by RL offers a scalable path to generalization for complex reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01199.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neurons process information in ways that depend on their cell type, connectivity, and the brain region in which they are embedded. However, inferring these factors from neural activity remains a significant challenge. To build general-purpose representations that allow for resolving information about a neuron's identity, we introduce NuCLR, a self-supervised framework that aims to learn representations of neural activity that allow for differentiating one neuron from the rest. NuCLR brings together views of the same neuron observed at different times and across different stimuli and uses a contrastive objective to pull these representations together. To capture population context without assuming any fixed neuron ordering, we build a spatiotemporal transformer that integrates activity in a permutation-equivariant manner. Across multiple electrophysiology and calcium imaging datasets, a linear decoding evaluation on top of NuCLR representations achieves a new state-of-the-art for both cell type and brain region decoding tasks, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to unseen animals. We present the first systematic scaling analysis for neuron-level representation learning, showing that increasing the number of animals used during pretraining consistently improves downstream performance. The learned representations are also label-efficient, requiring only a small fraction of labeled samples to achieve competitive performance. These results highlight how large, diverse neural datasets enable models to recover information about neuron identity that generalize across animals. Code is available at https://github.com/nerdslab/nuclr.

Paperid: 154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01008.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-driven 3D reconstruction demands a mask generator that simultaneously understands open-vocabulary instructions and remains consistent across viewpoints. We present LISA-3D, a two-stage framework that lifts language-image segmentation into 3D by retrofitting the instruction-following model LISA with geometry-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) layers and reusing a frozen SAM-3D reconstructor. During training we exploit off-the-shelf RGB-D sequences and their camera poses to build a differentiable reprojection loss that enforces cross-view agreement without requiring any additional 3D-text supervision. The resulting masks are concatenated with RGB images to form RGBA prompts for SAM-3D, which outputs Gaussian splats or textured meshes without retraining. Across ScanRefer and Nr3D, LISA-3D improves language-to-3D accuracy by up to +15.6 points over single-view baselines while adapting only 11.6M parameters. The system is modular, data-efficient, and supports zero-shot deployment on unseen categories, providing a practical recipe for language-guided 3D content creation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/binisalegend/LISA-3D.

Paperid: 155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00708.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advancements in AI for science unlocks capabilities for critical drug discovery tasks such as protein-ligand binding affinity prediction. However, current models overfit to existing oversimplified datasets that does not represent naturally occurring and biologically relevant proteins with modifications. In this work, we curate a complete and modification-aware version of the widely used DAVIS dataset by incorporating 4,032 kinase-ligand pairs involving substitutions, insertions, deletions, and phosphorylation events. This enriched dataset enables benchmarking of predictive models under biologically realistic conditions. Based on this new dataset, we propose three benchmark settings-Augmented Dataset Prediction, Wild-Type to Modification Generalization, and Few-Shot Modification Generalization-designed to assess model robustness in the presence of protein modifications. Through extensive evaluation of both docking-free and docking-based methods, we find that docking-based model generalize better in zero-shot settings. In contrast, docking-free models tend to overfit to wild-type proteins and struggle with unseen modifications but show notable improvement when fine-tuned on a small set of modified examples. We anticipate that the curated dataset and benchmarks offer a valuable foundation for developing models that better generalize to protein modifications, ultimately advancing precision medicine in drug discovery. The benchmark is available at: https://github.com/ZhiGroup/DAVIS-complete

Paperid: 156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00691.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Gait patterns play a critical role in human identification and healthcare analytics, yet current progress remains constrained by small, narrowly designed models that fail to scale or generalize. Building a unified gait foundation model requires addressing two longstanding barriers: (a) Scalability. Why have gait models historically failed to follow scaling laws? (b) Generalization. Can one model serve the diverse gait tasks that have traditionally been studied in isolation? We introduce FoundationGait, the first scalable, self-supervised pretraining framework for gait understanding. Its largest version has nearly 0.13 billion parameters and is pretrained on 12 public gait datasets comprising over 2 million walking sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoundationGait, with or without fine-tuning, performs robustly across a wide spectrum of gait datasets, conditions, tasks (e.g., human identification, scoliosis screening, depression prediction, and attribute estimation), and even input modality. Notably, it achieves 48.0% zero-shot rank-1 accuracy on the challenging in-the-wild Gait3D dataset (1,000 test subjects) and 64.5% on the largest in-the-lab OU-MVLP dataset (5,000+ test subjects), setting a new milestone in robust gait recognition. Coming code and model: https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.

Paperid: 157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00564.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A key aspect of learned partial differential equation (PDE) solvers is that the main cost often comes from generating training data with classical solvers rather than learning the model itself. Another is that there are clear axes of difficulty--e.g., more complex geometries and higher Reynolds numbers--along which problems become (1) harder for classical solvers and thus (2) more likely to benefit from neural speedups. Towards addressing this chicken-and-egg challenge, we study difficulty transfer on 2D incompressible Navier-Stokes, systematically varying task complexity along geometry (number and placement of obstacles), physics (Reynolds number), and their combination. Similar to how it is possible to spend compute to pre-train foundation models and improve their performance on downstream tasks, we find that by classically solving (analogously pre-generating) many low and medium difficulty examples and including them in the training set, it is possible to learn high-difficulty physics from far fewer samples. Furthermore, we show that by combining low and high difficulty data, we can spend 8.9x less compute on pre-generating a dataset to achieve the same error as using only high difficulty examples. Our results highlight that how we allocate classical-solver compute across difficulty levels is as important as how much we allocate overall, and suggest substantial gains from principled curation of pre-generated PDE data for neural solvers. Our code is available at https://github.com/Naman-Choudhary-AI-ML/pregenerating-pde

Paperid: 158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00310.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised anomaly detection aims to identify anomalies without pixel-level annotations. Synthetic anomaly-based methods exhibit a unique capacity to introduce controllable irregularities with known masks, enabling explicit supervision during training. However, existing methods often produce synthetic anomalies that are visually distinct from real pathological patterns and ignore anatomical structure. This paper presents a novel Anatomy-aware Realistic Texture-based Anomaly Synthesis framework (ART-ASyn) for chest X-rays that generates realistic and anatomically consistent lung opacity related anomalies using texture-based augmentation guided by our proposed Progressive Binary Thresholding Segmentation method (PBTSeg) for lung segmentation. The generated paired samples of synthetic anomalies and their corresponding precise pixel-level anomaly mask for each normal sample enable explicit segmentation supervision. In contrast to prior work limited to one-class classification, ART-ASyn is further evaluated for zero-shot anomaly segmentation, demonstrating generalizability on an unseen dataset without target-domain annotations. Code availability is available at https://github.com/angelacao-hub/ART-ASyn.

Paperid: 159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00181.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tabular data drive most real-world machine learning applications, yet building general-purpose models for them remains difficult. Mixed numeric and categorical fields, weak feature structure, and limited labeled data make scaling and generalization challenging. To this end, we introduce Orion-Bix, a tabular foundation model that combines biaxial attention with meta-learned in-context reasoning for few-shot tabular learning. Its encoder alternates standard, grouped, hierarchical, and relational attention, fusing their outputs through multi-CLS summarization to capture both local and global dependencies efficiently. A label-aware ICL head adapts on the fly and scales to large label spaces via hierarchical decision routing. Meta-trained on synthetically generated, structurally diverse tables with causal priors, Orion-Bix learns transferable inductive biases across heterogeneous data. Delivered as a scikit-learn compatible foundation model, it outperforms gradient-boosting baselines and remains competitive with state-of-the-art tabular foundation models on public benchmarks, showing that biaxial attention with episodic meta-training enables robust, few-shot-ready tabular learning. The model is publicly available at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/Orion-BiX .

Paperid: 160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23428.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models, have enabled the creation of visually compelling and dynamic videos from simple textual descriptions or initial frames. However, these models often fail to provide an explicit representation of motion separate from content, limiting their applicability for content creators. To address this gap, we propose DisMo, a novel paradigm for learning abstract motion representations directly from raw video data via an image-space reconstruction objective. Our representation is generic and independent of static information such as appearance, object identity, or pose. This enables open-world motion transfer, allowing motion to be transferred across semantically unrelated entities without requiring object correspondences, even between vastly different categories. Unlike prior methods, which trade off motion fidelity and prompt adherence, are overfitting to source structure or drifting from the described action, our approach disentangles motion semantics from appearance, enabling accurate transfer and faithful conditioning. Furthermore, our motion representation can be combined with any existing video generator via lightweight adapters, allowing us to effortlessly benefit from future advancements in video models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a diverse set of motion transfer tasks. Finally, we show that the learned representations are well-suited for downstream motion understanding tasks, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art video representation models such as V-JEPA in zero-shot action classification on benchmarks including Something-Something v2 and Jester. Project page: https://compvis.github.io/DisMo

Paperid: 161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23332.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Instruction-driven segmentation in remote sensing generates masks from guidance, offering great potential for accessible and generalizable applications. However, existing methods suffer from fragmented task formulations and limited instruction data, hindering effective understanding and generalization. To address these issues, we introduce GeoSeg-1M, the first million-scale dataset for remote sensing instruction-driven segmentation, constructed via an automatic mask filtering and instruction generation pipeline that synthesizes referring, interactive, and reasoning segmentation instructions from multiple public datasets. GeoSeg-1M contains 590K images, 117 categories, and 1.1M image-mask-instruction triplets. Building upon this foundation, we further curate GeoSeg-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate contextual understanding and reasoning capabilities across diverse instruction-driven tasks and complex geospatial scenes. Furthermore, we present UniGeoSeg, a unified framework that serves as a strong baseline, incorporating task-aware text enhancement, latent knowledge memory, and a progressive training strategy to facilitate multi-task learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of UniGeoSeg across GeoSeg-Bench and diverse public benchmarks, while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization. Datasets and source code were released at https://github.com/MiliLab/UniGeoSeg.

Paperid: 162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23162.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Event-related potentials (ERP) are measurements of brain activity with wide applications in basic and clinical neuroscience, that are typically estimated using the average of many trials of electroencephalography signals (EEG) to sufficiently reduce noise and signal variability. We introduce EEG2ERP, a novel uncertainty-aware autoencoder approach that maps an arbitrary number of EEG trials to their associated ERP. To account for the ERP uncertainty we use bootstrapped training targets and introduce a separate variance decoder to model the uncertainty of the estimated ERP. We evaluate our approach in the challenging zero-shot scenario of generalizing to new subjects considering three different publicly available data sources; i) the comprehensive ERP CORE dataset that includes over 50,000 EEG trials across six ERP paradigms from 40 subjects, ii) the large P300 Speller BCI dataset, and iii) a neuroimaging dataset on face perception consisting of both EEG and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. We consistently find that our method in the few trial regime provides substantially better ERP estimates than commonly used conventional and robust averaging procedures. EEG2ERP is the first deep learning approach to map EEG signals to their associated ERP, moving toward reducing the number of trials necessary for ERP research. Code is available at https://github.com/andersxa/EEG2ERP

Paperid: 163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23034.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning transferable latent actions from large-scale object manipulation videos can significantly enhance generalization in downstream robotics tasks, as such representations are agnostic to different robot embodiments. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual reconstruction objectives while neglecting physical priors, leading to sub-optimal performance in learning universal representations. To address these challenges, we propose a Universal Latent Action Learning framework that takes task instructions and multiple frames as inputs, and optimizes both future frame reconstruction and action sequence prediction. Unlike prior works, incorporating action predictions (e.g., gripper or hand trajectories and orientations) allows the model to capture richer physical priors such as real-world distances and orientations, thereby enabling seamless transferability to downstream tasks. We further decompose the latent actions into learnable motion and scene tokens to distinguish the robot's active movements from environmental changes, thus filtering out irrelevant dynamics. By distilling the learned latent actions into the latest VLA models, we achieve strong performance across both simulated (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and real-world robot settings. Notably, with only 10 real-world trajectories per task collected on a Franka robot, our approach successfully completes all five challenging tasks, demonstrating strong few-shot transferability in robotic manipulation.

Paperid: 164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22664.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown strong generalization under zero-shot settings, yet adapting them to downstream tasks with limited supervision remains a significant challenge. Existing multi-modal prompt learning methods typically rely on fixed, shared prompts and deterministic parameters, which limits their ability to capture instance-level variation or model uncertainty across diverse tasks and domains. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel Variational Multi-Modal Prompt Learning (VaMP) framework that enables sample-specific, uncertainty-aware prompt tuning in multi-modal representation learning. VaMP generates instance-conditioned prompts by sampling from a learned posterior distribution, allowing the model to personalize its behavior based on input content. To further enhance the integration of local and global semantics, we introduce a class-aware prior derived from the instance representation and class prototype. Building upon these, we formulate prompt tuning as variational inference over latent prompt representations and train the entire framework end-to-end through reparameterized sampling. Experiments on few-shot and domain generalization benchmarks show that VaMP achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the benefits of modeling both uncertainty and task structure in our method. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vamp

Paperid: 165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22595.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot industrial anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods typically yield coarse anomaly maps as vision transformers (ViTs) extract patch-level features only. To solve this, recent solutions attempt to predict finer anomalies using features from ZSAD, but they still struggle to recover fine-grained anomalies without missed detections, mainly due to the gap between randomly synthesized training anomalies and real ones. We observe that anomaly score maps exactly provide complementary spatial cues that are largely absent from ZSAD's image features, a fact overlooked before. Inspired by this, we propose an anomaly-aware refiner (AnoRefiner) that can be plugged into most ZSAD models and improve patch-level anomaly maps to the pixel level. First, we design an anomaly refinement decoder (ARD) that progressively enhances image features using anomaly score maps, reducing the reliance on synthetic anomaly data. Second, motivated by the mass production paradigm, we propose a progressive group-wise test-time training (PGT) strategy that trains ARD in each product group for the refinement process in the next group, while staying compatible with any ZSAD method. Experiments on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets show that AnoRefiner boosts various ZSAD models by up to a 5.2\% gain in pixel-AP metrics, which can also be directly observed in many visualizations. The code will be available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/AnoRefiner.

Paperid: 166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21726.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
How to enable human-like long-term memory in large language models (LLMs) has been a central question for unlocking more general capabilities such as few-shot generalization. Existing memory frameworks and benchmarks focus on finding the optimal memory compression algorithm for higher performance in tasks that require recollection and sometimes further reasoning. However, such efforts have ended up building more human bias into the compression algorithm, through the search for the best prompts and memory architectures that suit specific benchmarks, rather than finding a general solution that would work on other data distributions. On the other hand, goal-directed search on uncompressed information could potentially exhibit superior performance because compression is lossy, and a predefined compression algorithm will not fit all raw data distributions. Here we present SUMER (Search in Uncompressed Memory via Experience Replay), an end-to-end reinforcement learning agent with verifiable reward (RLVR) that learns to use search tools to gather information and answer a target question. On the LoCoMo dataset for long-context conversation understanding, SUMER with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct learned to use search tools and outperformed all other biased memory compression approaches and also the full-context baseline, reaching SOTA performance (43% gain over the prior best). We demonstrate that a simple search method applied to raw data outperforms goal-agnostic and biased compression algorithms in current long-context memory tasks, arguing for new paradigms and benchmarks that are more dynamic and autonomously scalable. Code for SUMER and all implemented baselines is publicly available at https://github.com/zycyc/SUMER.

Paperid: 167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21122.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale vision generative models, including diffusion and flow models, have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual generation tasks. However, transferring these pre-trained models to downstream tasks often results in significant parameter redundancy. In this paper, we propose EntPruner, an entropy-guided automatic progressive pruning framework for diffusion and flow models. First, we introduce entropy-guided pruning, a block-level importance assessment strategy specifically designed for generative models. Unlike discriminative models, generative models require preserving the diversity and condition-fidelity of the output distribution. As the importance of each module can vary significantly across downstream tasks, EntPruner prioritizes pruning of less important blocks using data-dependent Conditional Entropy Deviation (CED) as a guiding metric. CED quantifies how much the distribution diverges from the learned conditional data distribution after removing a block. Second, we propose a zero-shot adaptive pruning framework to automatically determine when and how much to prune during training. This dynamic strategy avoids the pitfalls of one-shot pruning, mitigating mode collapse, and preserving model performance. Extensive experiments on DiT and SiT models demonstrate the effectiveness of EntPruner, achieving up to 2.22$\times$ inference speedup while maintaining competitive generation quality on ImageNet and three downstream datasets.

Paperid: 168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21038.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Can in-context learning (ICL) override pre-trained label semantics, or does it merely refine an existing semantic backbone? We address this question by treating LLMs as prompt-induced classifiers and contrasting their behavior under \emph{natural} demonstrations (with correct labels) and \emph{inverted} demonstrations (systematically flipping label meanings). We decompose ICL behavior into three alignment metrics (truth, prior, and prompt alignment) and introduce a semantic override rate, defined as correctness under flipped semantics. Across eight classification tasks and eight open-source LLMs (1--12B parameters), we find consistent evidence for a semantic anchor view. With natural demonstrations, ICL improves accuracy while maintaining strong prior alignment; most correct predictions coincide with zero-shot behavior, even when the prior is weak. With inverted demonstrations, models cannot learn coherent anti-semantic classifiers: prompt alignment increases only by sacrificing accuracy, and semantic override rates remain exactly zero in our few-shot 1--12B setting. Rather than flexibly remapping label meanings, ICL primarily adjusts how inputs project onto stable semantic directions learned during pre-training, clarifying fundamental limits of few-shot prompting and suggesting that overriding label semantics at these scales requires interventions beyond ICL. All code is available at: https://github.com/AnanthaPadmanaban-KrishnaKumar/semantic-anchors-icl.

Paperid: 169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20841.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
To manipulate objects in novel, unstructured environments, robots need task-oriented grasps that target object parts based on the given task. Geometry-based methods often struggle with visually defined parts, occlusions, and unseen objects. We introduce OVAL-Grasp, a zero-shot open-vocabulary approach to task-oriented, affordance based grasping that uses large-language models and vision-language models to allow a robot to grasp objects at the correct part according to a given task. Given an RGB image and a task, OVAL-Grasp identifies parts to grasp or avoid with an LLM, segments them with a VLM, and generates a 2D heatmap of actionable regions on the object. During our evaluations, we found that our method outperformed two task oriented grasping baselines on experiments with 20 household objects with 3 unique tasks for each. OVAL-Grasp successfully identifies and segments the correct object part 95% of the time and grasps the correct actionable area 78.3% of the time in real-world experiments with the Fetch mobile manipulator. Additionally, OVAL-Grasp finds correct object parts under partial occlusions, demonstrating a part selection success rate of 80% in cluttered scenes. We also demonstrate OVAL-Grasp's efficacy in scenarios that rely on visual features for part selection, and show the benefit of a modular design through our ablation experiments. Our project webpage is available at https://ekjt.github.io/OVAL-Grasp/

Paperid: 170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20648.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
To act in the world, a model must name what it sees and know where it is in 3D. Today's vision-language models (VLMs) excel at open-ended 2D description and grounding, yet multi-object 3D detection remains largely missing from the VLM toolbox. We present LocateAnything3D, a VLM-native recipe that casts 3D detection as a next-token prediction problem. The key is a short, explicit Chain-of-Sight (CoS) sequence that mirrors how human reason from images: find an object in 2D, then infer its distance, size, and pose. The decoder first emits 2D detections as a visual chain-of-thought, then predicts 3D boxes under an easy-to-hard curriculum: across objects, a near-to-far order reduces early ambiguity and matches ego-centric utility; within each object, a center-from-camera, dimensions, and rotation factorization ranks information by stability and learnability. This VLM-native interface preserves open-vocabulary and visual-prompting capability without specialized heads. On the challenging Omni3D benchmark, our model achieves state-of-the-art results, with 49.89 AP_3D, surpassing the previous best by +15.51 absolute improvement even when the baseline is given ground-truth 2D boxes. It also generalizes zero-shot to held-out categories with strong robustness. By turning 3D detection into a disciplined next-token problem, LocateAnything3D offers a practical foundation for models to perceive in 3D.

Paperid: 171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20633.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies excel in aligning language, perception, and robot control. However, most VLAs are trained purely by imitation, which overfits to demonstrations, and is brittle under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) directly optimizes task reward and thus addresses this misalignment, but real-robot interaction is expensive and conventional simulators are hard to engineer and transfer. We address both data efficiency and optimization stability in VLA post-training via a learned world model and an RL procedure tailored to flow-based action heads. Specifically, we introduce Prophet, a unified action-to-video robot actuation pretrained across large-scale, heterogeneous robot data to learn reusable action-outcome dynamics. It is able to few-shot adapt to new robots, objects, and environments, yielding a rollout-ready simulator. Upon Prophet, we reinforce action policies with Flow-action-GRPO (FA-GRPO), which adapts Flow-GRPO to operate on VLA actions, and with FlowScale, a stepwise reweighting that rescales per-step gradients in the flow head. Together, Prophet, FA-GRPO, and FlowScale constitute ProphRL, a practical, data- and compute-efficient path to VLA post-training. Experiments show 5-17% success gains on public benchmarks and 24-30% gains on real robots across different VLA variants.

Paperid: 172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20274.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Until recently, the general corpus of CLIP-type fundamental models has widely explored either the retrieval of short descriptions or the classification of objects in the scene as SINGLE-object image classification task. The same holds for retrieving the image embedding (image retrieval task) given a text prompt. However, real-world scene images exhibit rich compositional structure involving multiple objects and actions. The latest methods in the CLIP-based literature improve class-level discrimination by mining harder negative image-text pairs and by refining permanent text prompts, often using LLMs. However, these improvements remain confined to predefined class lists and do not explicitly model relational or compositional structure. PyramidCLIP partially addresses this gap by aligning global and local visual features, yet it still lacks explicit modeling of inter-object relations. Hence, to further leverage this aspect for scene analysis, the proposed ScenarioCLIP model accepts input texts, grounded relations, and input images, along with focused regions highlighting relations. The proposed model is pretrained on curated scenario data, and finetuned for specialized downstream tasks, such as cross-modal retrieval and fine-grained visual understanding tasks. To address the lack of domain-specific datasets, we generate a novel dataset by extending image-text pairs from existing diverse indoor and outdoor scenario datasets that are publicly available. We used a pipeline of existing language models to ground action, object, and relations, filled by manual and automatic curation. We established a comprehensive benchmark for several scenario-based tasks and compared it with many baseline methods. ScenarioCLIP demonstrates robust zero-shot and finetune performance on various domain-specific tasks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/scenario-clip/ScenarioCLIP

Paperid: 173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20253.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D object detection is fundamental for spatial understanding. Real-world environments demand models capable of recognizing diverse, previously unseen objects, which remains a major limitation of closed-set methods. Existing open-vocabulary 3D detectors relax annotation requirements but still depend on training scenes, either as point clouds or images. We take this a step further by introducing Zoo3D, the first training-free 3D object detection framework. Our method constructs 3D bounding boxes via graph clustering of 2D instance masks, then assigns semantic labels using a novel open-vocabulary module with best-view selection and view-consensus mask generation. Zoo3D operates in two modes: the zero-shot Zoo3D$_0$, which requires no training at all, and the self-supervised Zoo3D$_1$, which refines 3D box prediction by training a class-agnostic detector on Zoo3D$_0$-generated pseudo labels. Furthermore, we extend Zoo3D beyond point clouds to work directly with posed and even unposed images. Across ScanNet200 and ARKitScenes benchmarks, both Zoo3D$_0$ and Zoo3D$_1$ achieve state-of-the-art results in open-vocabulary 3D object detection. Remarkably, our zero-shot Zoo3D$_0$ outperforms all existing self-supervised methods, hence demonstrating the power and adaptability of training-free, off-the-shelf approaches for real-world 3D understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/col14m/zoo3d .

Paperid: 174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19957.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Computer Using Agents (CUAs) are increasingly equipped with external tools, enabling them to perform complex and realistic tasks. For CUAs to operate effectively, application selection, which refers to deciding which application to use before invoking fine-grained tools such as APIs, is a fundamental capability. It determines whether the agent initializes the correct environment, avoids orchestration confusion, and efficiently focuses on relevant context. However, existing benchmarks primarily assess fine-grained API selection, offering limited insight into whether models can reason across and choose between different applications. To fill this gap, we introduce AppSelectBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating application selection in CUAs. AppSelectBench contains a novel user task generation pipeline that produces realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user intents at scale, together with unified evaluation protocols covering random, heuristic, zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented-settings. AppSelectBench covers one hundred widely used desktop applications and includes more than one hundred thousand realistic, diverse, and semantically grounded user tasks. Extensive experiments across both closed-source and open-source large language models reveal systematic strengths and weaknesses in inter-application reasoning, showing that even the most capable models still struggle to make consistent application choices. Together, these results establish AppSelectBench as a foundation for studying and advancing application level reasoning, an essential yet underexplored capability of intelligent CUAs. The source is available at https://microsoft.github.io/appselectbench/.

Paperid: 175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19426.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
SAM3D has garnered widespread attention for its strong 3D object reconstruction capabilities. However, a key limitation remains: SAM3D cannot reconstruct specific objects referred to by textual descriptions, a capability that is essential for practical applications such as 3D editing, game development, and virtual environments. To address this gap, we introduce Ref-SAM3D, a simple yet effective extension to SAM3D that incorporates textual descriptions as a high-level prior, enabling text-guided 3D reconstruction from a single RGB image. Through extensive qualitative experiments, we show that Ref-SAM3D, guided only by natural language and a single 2D view, delivers competitive and high-fidelity zero-shot reconstruction performance. Our results demonstrate that Ref-SAM3D effectively bridges the gap between 2D visual cues and 3D geometric understanding, offering a more flexible and accessible paradigm for reference-guided 3D reconstruction. Code is available at: https://github.com/FudanCVL/Ref-SAM3D.

Paperid: 176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19083.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for named entity recognition (NER) in low-resource scenarios. However, existing ICL-based NER methods suffer from three key limitations: (1) reliance on dynamic retrieval of annotated examples, which is problematic when annotated data is scarce; (2) limited generalization to unseen domains due to the LLM's insufficient internal domain knowledge; and (3) failure to incorporate external knowledge or resolve entity ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose KDR-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework for multi-domain low-resource in-context NER that integrates Knowledge retrieval, Disambiguation, and Reflective analysis. KDR-Agent leverages natural-language type definitions and a static set of entity-level contrastive demonstrations to reduce dependency on large annotated corpora. A central planner coordinates specialized agents to (i) retrieve factual knowledge from Wikipedia for domain-specific mentions, (ii) resolve ambiguous entities via contextualized reasoning, and (iii) reflect on and correct model predictions through structured self-assessment. Experiments across ten datasets from five domains demonstrate that KDR-Agent significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and few-shot ICL baselines across multiple LLM backbones. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/MWXGOD/KDR-Agent.

Paperid: 177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18452.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) extract spatially downsampled representations, posing challenges for pixel-level tasks. Existing upsampling approaches face a fundamental trade-off: classical filters are fast and broadly applicable but rely on fixed forms, while modern upsamplers achieve superior accuracy through learnable, VFM-specific forms at the cost of retraining for each VFM. We introduce Neighborhood Attention Filtering (NAF), which bridges this gap by learning adaptive spatial-and-content weights through Cross-Scale Neighborhood Attention and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), guided solely by the high-resolution input image. NAF operates zero-shot: it upsamples features from any VFM without retraining, making it the first VFM-agnostic architecture to outperform VFM-specific upsamplers and achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks. It maintains high efficiency, scaling to 2K feature maps and reconstructing intermediate-resolution maps at 18 FPS. Beyond feature upsampling, NAF demonstrates strong performance on image restoration, highlighting its versatility. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/valeoai/NAF.

Paperid: 178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18254.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating per-point 3D motion between consecutive point clouds. Recent methods achieve centimeter-level accuracy on popular autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets, but are typically only trained and evaluated on a single sensor. In this paper, we aim to learn general motion priors that transfer to diverse and unseen LiDAR sensors. However, prior work in LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection demonstrate that naively training on multiple datasets yields worse performance than single dataset models. Interestingly, we find that this conventional wisdom does not hold for motion estimation, and that state-of-the-art scene flow methods greatly benefit from cross-dataset training. We posit that low-level tasks such as motion estimation may be less sensitive to sensor configuration; indeed, our analysis shows that models trained on fast-moving objects (e.g., from highway datasets) perform well on fast-moving objects, even across different datasets. Informed by our analysis, we propose UniFlow, a family of feedforward models that unifies and trains on multiple large-scale LiDAR scene flow datasets with diverse sensor placements and point cloud densities. Our frustratingly simple solution establishes a new state-of-the-art on Waymo and nuScenes, improving over prior work by 5.1% and 35.2% respectively. Moreover, UniFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on unseen datasets like TruckScenes, outperforming prior TruckScenes-specific models by 30.1%.

Paperid: 179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18163.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) models achieve strong performance in segmenting novel classes with minimal labeled examples, yet their decision-making processes remain largely opaque. While explainable AI has advanced significantly in standard computer vision tasks, interpretability in FSS remains virtually unexplored despite its critical importance for understanding model behavior and guiding support set selection in data-scarce scenarios. This paper introduces the first dedicated method for interpreting matching-based FSS models by leveraging their inherent structural properties. Our Affinity Explainer approach extracts attribution maps that highlight which pixels in support images contribute most to query segmentation predictions, using matching scores computed between support and query features at multiple feature levels. We extend standard interpretability evaluation metrics to the FSS domain and propose additional metrics to better capture the practical utility of explanations in few-shot scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on FSS benchmark datasets, using different models, demonstrate that our Affinity Explainer significantly outperforms adapted standard attribution methods. Qualitative analysis reveals that our explanations provide structured, coherent attention patterns that align with model architectures and and enable effective model diagnosis. This work establishes the foundation for interpretable FSS research, enabling better model understanding and diagnostic for more reliable few-shot segmentation systems. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/pasqualedem/AffinityExplainer.

Paperid: 180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17918.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Despite 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excelling in most configurations, it lacks generalization across novel viewpoints in a few-shot scenario because it overfits to the sparse observations. We revisit 3DGS optimization from a machine learning perspective, framing novel view synthesis as a generalization problem to unseen viewpoints-an underexplored direction. We propose Frequency-Adaptive Sharpness Regularization (FASR), which reformulates the 3DGS training objective, thereby guiding 3DGS to converge toward a better generalization solution. Although Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) similarly reduces the sharpness of the loss landscape to improve generalization of classification models, directly employing it to 3DGS is suboptimal due to the discrepancy between the tasks. Specifically, it hinders reconstructing high-frequency details due to excessive regularization, while reducing its strength leads to under-penalizing sharpness. To address this, we reflect the local frequency of images to set the regularization weight and the neighborhood radius when estimating the local sharpness. It prevents floater artifacts in novel viewpoints and reconstructs fine details that SAM tends to oversmooth. Across datasets with various configurations, our method consistently improves a wide range of baselines. Code will be available at https://bbangsik13.github.io/FASR.

Paperid: 181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17448.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, making their adversarial robustness a crucial concern. While adversarial knowledge distillation has shown promise in transferring robustness from teacher to student models, traditional single-teacher approaches suffer from limited knowledge diversity, slow convergence, and difficulty in balancing robustness and accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose MMT-ARD: a Multimodal Multi-Teacher Adversarial Robust Distillation framework. Our key innovation is a dual-teacher knowledge fusion architecture that collaboratively optimizes clean feature preservation and robust feature enhancement. To better handle challenging adversarial examples, we introduce a dynamic weight allocation strategy based on teacher confidence, enabling adaptive focus on harder samples. Moreover, to mitigate bias among teachers, we design an adaptive sigmoid-based weighting function that balances the strength of knowledge transfer across modalities. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that MMT-ARD improves robust accuracy by +4.32% and zero-shot accuracy by +3.5% on the ViT-B-32 model, while achieving a 2.3x increase in training efficiency over traditional single-teacher methods. These results highlight the effectiveness and scalability of MMT-ARD in enhancing the adversarial robustness of multimodal large models. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsnotacie/MMT-ARD.

Paperid: 182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17201.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical image segmentation, heterogeneous privacy policies across institutions often make joint training on pooled datasets infeasible, motivating continual image segmentation-learning from data streams without catastrophic forgetting. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers strong zero-shot priors and has been widely fine-tuned across downstream tasks, its large parameter count and computational overhead challenge practical deployment. This paper demonstrates that the SAM paradigm is highly promising once its computational efficiency and performance can be balanced. To this end, we introduce the Alignment Layer, a lightweight, plug-and-play module which aligns encoder-decoder feature distributions to efficiently adapt SAM to specific medical images, improving accuracy while reducing computation. Building on SAM and the Alignment Layer, we then propose Continual Alignment for SAM (CA-SAM), a continual learning strategy that automatically adapts the appropriate Alignment Layer to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, while leveraging SAM's zero-shot priors to preserve strong performance on unseen medical datasets. Experimented across nine medical segmentation datasets under continual-learning scenario, CA-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code, models and datasets will be released on \mbox{https://github.com/azzzzyo/Continual-Alignment-for-SAM.}

Paperid: 183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16972.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Optimizing patent claims is a critical yet challenging task, demanding careful balance between maximizing novelty and preserving legal scope. Manual claim drafting is labor-intensive, costly, and inherently inconsistent, while conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack the structured, iterative reasoning essential for precise claim refinement. To address these challenges, we introduce Tree of Claims (ToC), an innovative framework that redefines claim editing as a guided search problem. ToC synergistically integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a collaborative multi-agent system, comprising an LLM-based EditorAgent that proposes contextually grounded edits, and an ExaminerAgent that mimics patent examiner critiques through structured, chain-of-thought analyses of novelty and prior art disclosure. Driven by a carefully designed multi-objective reward function, ToC jointly optimizes novelty, scope retention, and semantic coherence. Experimental evaluation on a benchmark of 1145 claims demonstrates that ToC significantly outperforms standard LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving an average composite score improvement of 8\%, and up to 9\% in certain cases. Extensive experiments, including detailed ablation studies, validate ToC's efficacy in generating superior, legally robust claim revisions. Overall, ToC establishes a transparent, controllable, and interpretable methodology that effectively bridges advanced LLM reasoning capabilities with strategic MCTS planning for structured patent claim optimization.The source code is available at https://github.com/ysy2003/ToC.

Paperid: 184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16671.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in visual generation have increasingly explored the integration of reasoning capabilities. They incorporate textual reasoning, i.e., think, either before (as pre-planning) or after (as post-refinement) the generation process, yet they lack on-the-fly multimodal interaction during the generation itself. In this preliminary study, we introduce Thinking-while-Generating (TwiG), the first interleaved framework that enables co-evolving textual reasoning throughout the visual generation process. As visual content is progressively generating, textual reasoning is interleaved to both guide upcoming local regions and reflect on previously synthesized ones. This dynamic interplay produces more context-aware and semantically rich visual outputs. To unveil the potential of this framework, we investigate three candidate strategies, zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our curated TwiG-50K dataset, and reinforcement learning (RL) via a customized TwiG-GRPO strategy, each offering unique insights into the dynamics of interleaved reasoning. We hope this work inspires further research into interleaving textual reasoning for enhanced visual generation. Code will be released at: https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Thinking-while-Generating.

Paperid: 185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16668.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent progress in generative video models, such as Veo-3, has shown surprising zero-shot reasoning abilities, creating a growing need for systematic and reliable evaluation. We introduce V-ReasonBench, a benchmark designed to assess video reasoning across four key dimensions: structured problem-solving, spatial cognition, pattern-based inference, and physical dynamics. The benchmark is built from both synthetic and real-world image sequences and provides a diverse set of answer-verifiable tasks that are reproducible, scalable, and unambiguous. Evaluations of six state-of-the-art video models reveal clear dimension-wise differences, with strong variation in structured, spatial, pattern-based, and physical reasoning. We further compare video models with strong image models, analyze common hallucination behaviors, and study how video duration affects Chain-of-Frames reasoning. Overall, V-ReasonBench offers a unified and reproducible framework for measuring video reasoning and aims to support the development of models with more reliable, human-aligned reasoning skills.

Paperid: 186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16618.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Surgical video segmentation is crucial for computer-assisted surgery, enabling precise localization and tracking of instruments and tissues. Interactive Video Object Segmentation (iVOS) models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) provide prompt-based flexibility beyond methods with predefined categories, but face challenges in surgical scenarios due to the domain gap and limited long-term tracking. To address these limitations, we construct SA-SV, the largest surgical iVOS benchmark with instance-level spatio-temporal annotations (masklets) spanning eight procedure types (61k frames, 1.6k masklets), enabling comprehensive development and evaluation for long-term tracking and zero-shot generalization. Building on SA-SV, we propose SAM2S, a foundation model enhancing \textbf{SAM2} for \textbf{S}urgical iVOS through: (1) DiveMem, a trainable diverse memory mechanism for robust long-term tracking; (2) temporal semantic learning for instrument understanding; and (3) ambiguity-resilient learning to mitigate annotation inconsistencies across multi-source datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning on SA-SV enables substantial performance gains, with SAM2 improving by 12.99 average $\mathcal{J}$\&$\mathcal{F}$ over vanilla SAM2. SAM2S further advances performance to 80.42 average $\mathcal{J}$\&$\mathcal{F}$, surpassing vanilla and fine-tuned SAM2 by 17.10 and 4.11 points respectively, while maintaining 68 FPS real-time inference and strong zero-shot generalization. Code and dataset will be released at https://jinlab-imvr.github.io/SAM2S.

Paperid: 187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16378.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to learn the concepts of attributes and objects in seen compositions and to recognize their unseen compositions. Most Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based CZSL methods focus on disentangling attributes and objects by leveraging the global semantic representation obtained from the image encoder. However, this representation has limited representational capacity and do not allow for complete disentanglement of the two. To this end, we propose CAMS, which aims to extract semantic features from visual features and perform semantic disentanglement in multidimensional spaces, thereby improving generalization over unseen attribute-object compositions. Specifically, CAMS designs a Gated Cross-Attention that captures fine-grained semantic features from the high-level image encoding blocks of CLIP through a set of latent units, while adaptively suppressing background and other irrelevant information. Subsequently, it conducts Multi-Space Disentanglement to achieve disentanglement of attribute and object semantics. Experiments on three popular benchmarks (MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA) demonstrate that CAMS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both closed-world and open-world settings. The code is available at https://github.com/ybyangjing/CAMS.

Paperid: 188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16166.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models despite recent progress in zero-shot generalization and simulation-to-real-world transfer. Current VLA models suffer from stage hallucination, where agents exploit coarse evaluation signals to shortcut multi-step tasks, reporting high progress without truly completing them. We present EvoVLA, a self-supervised VLA framework that addresses this issue through three complementary components: Stage-Aligned Reward (SAR), which uses triplet contrastive learning with Gemini-generated hard negatives to prevent visual shortcuts; Pose-Based Object Exploration (POE), which grounds curiosity in relative object-gripper pose instead of raw pixels; and Long-Horizon Memory, which uses selective context retention and gated fusion to stabilize intrinsic shaping during extended rollouts. Extensive evaluations on Discoverse-L, a long-horizon manipulation benchmark with three multi-stage tasks, show that EvoVLA improves average task success by 10.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline (OpenVLA-OFT), reaching 69.2 percent. EvoVLA also achieves one-and-a-half times better sample efficiency and reduces stage hallucination from 38.5 percent to 14.8 percent. Real-world deployment on physical robots reaches an average success rate of 54.6 percent across four manipulation tasks, outperforming OpenVLA-OFT by 11 points, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer and strong generalization. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EvoVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/EvoVLA.

Paperid: 189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15704.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Egocentric videos are a valuable and scalable data source to learn manipulation policies. However, due to significant data heterogeneity, most existing approaches utilize human data for simple pre-training, which does not unlock its full potential. This paper first provides a scalable recipe for collecting and using egocentric data by categorizing human data into two categories: in-the-wild and on-task alongside with systematic analysis on how to use the data. We first curate a dataset, PHSD, which contains over 1,000 hours of diverse in-the-wild egocentric data and over 20 hours of on-task data directly aligned to the target manipulation tasks. This enables learning a large egocentric language-conditioned flow matching policy, Human0. With domain adaptation techniques, Human0 minimizes the gap between humans and humanoids. Empirically, we show Human0 achieves several novel properties from scaling human data, including language following of instructions from only human data, few-shot learning, and improved robustness using on-task data. Project website: https://xiongyicai.github.io/In-N-On/

Paperid: 190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15311.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFMs) have shown strong generalization and zero-shot recognition capabilities in open-world point cloud processing tasks. However, these models often underperform in practical scenarios where data are noisy, incomplete, or drawn from a different distribution than the training data. To address this, we propose Uni-Adapter, a novel training-free online test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for 3D VLFMs based on dynamic prototype learning. We define a 3D cache to store class-specific cluster centers as prototypes, which are continuously updated to capture intra-class variability in heterogeneous data distributions. These dynamic prototypes serve as anchors for cache-based logit computation via similarity scoring. Simultaneously, a graph-based label smoothing module captures inter-prototype similarities to enforce label consistency among similar prototypes. Finally, we unify predictions from the original 3D VLFM and the refined 3D cache using entropy-weighted aggregation for reliable adaptation. Without retraining, Uni-Adapter effectively mitigates distribution shifts, achieving state-of-the-art performance on diverse 3D benchmarks over different 3D VLFMs, improving ModelNet-40C by 10.55%, ScanObjectNN-C by 8.26%, and ShapeNet-C by 4.49% over the source 3D VLFMs. Project page: https://mehran-tam.github.io/Uni-Adapter

Paperid: 191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15260.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we report the results of the TeamNRC's participation in the BHASHA-Task 1 Grammatical Error Correction shared task https://github.com/BHASHA-Workshop/IndicGEC2025/ for 5 Indian languages. Our approach, focusing on zero/few-shot prompting of language models of varying sizes (4B to large proprietary models) achieved a Rank 4 in Telugu and Rank 2 in Hindi with GLEU scores of 83.78 and 84.31 respectively. In this paper, we extend the experiments to the other three languages of the shared task - Tamil, Malayalam and Bangla, and take a closer look at the data quality and evaluation metric used. Our results primarily highlight the potential of small language models, and summarize the concerns related to creating good quality datasets and appropriate metrics for this task that are suitable for Indian language scripts.

Paperid: 192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14901.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As CLIP's global alignment limits its ability to capture fine-grained details, recent efforts have focused on enhancing its region-text alignment. However, current remote sensing (RS)-specific CLIP variants still inherit this limited spatial awareness. We identify two key limitations behind this: (1) current RS image-text datasets generate global captions from object-level labels, leaving the original object-level supervision underutilized; (2) despite the success of region-text alignment methods in general domain, their direct application to RS data often leads to performance degradation. To address these, we construct the first multi-granularity RS image-text dataset, MGRS-200k, featuring rich object-level textual supervision for RS region-category alignment. We further investigate existing fine-grained CLIP tuning strategies and find that current explicit region-text alignment methods, whether in a direct or indirect way, underperform due to severe degradation of CLIP's semantic coherence. Building on these, we propose FarSLIP, a Fine-grained Aligned RS Language-Image Pretraining framework. Rather than the commonly used patch-to-CLS self-distillation, FarSLIP employs patch-to-patch distillation to align local and global visual cues, which improves feature discriminability while preserving semantic coherence. Additionally, to effectively utilize region-text supervision, it employs simple CLS token-based region-category alignment rather than explicit patch-level alignment, further enhancing spatial awareness. FarSLIP features improved fine-grained vision-language alignment in RS domain and sets a new state of the art not only on RS open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, but also on image-level tasks such as zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval. Our dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/FarSLIP.

Paperid: 193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14719.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose an approach to enhancing synthetic video realism, which can re-render synthetic videos from a simulator in photorealistic fashion. Our realism enhancement approach is a zero-shot framework that focuses on preserving the multi-level structures from synthetic videos into the enhanced one in both spatial and temporal domains, built upon a diffusion video foundational model without further fine-tuning. Specifically, we incorporate an effective modification to have the generation/denoising process conditioned on estimated structure-aware information from the synthetic video, such as depth maps, semantic maps, and edge maps, by an auxiliary model, rather than extracting the information from a simulator. This guidance ensures that the enhanced videos are consistent with the original synthetic video at both the structural and semantic levels. Our approach is a simple yet general and powerful approach to enhancing synthetic video realism: we show that our approach outperforms existing baselines in structural consistency with the original video while maintaining state-of-the-art photorealism quality in our experiments.

Paperid: 194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14186.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Precise event spotting (PES) aims to recognize fine-grained events at exact moments and has become a key component of sports analytics. This task is particularly challenging due to rapid succession, motion blur, and subtle visual differences. Consequently, most existing methods rely on domain-specific, end-to-end training with large labeled datasets and often struggle in few-shot conditions due to their dependence on pixel- or pose-based inputs alone. However, obtaining large labeled datasets is practically hard. We propose a Unified Multi-Entity Graph Network (UMEG-Net) for few-shot PES. UMEG-Net integrates human skeletons and sport-specific object keypoints into a unified graph and features an efficient spatio-temporal extraction module based on advanced GCN and multi-scale temporal shift. To further enhance performance, we employ multimodal distillation to transfer knowledge from keypoint-based graphs to visual representations. Our approach achieves robust performance with limited labeled data and significantly outperforms baseline models in few-shot settings, providing a scalable and effective solution for few-shot PES. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LZYAndy/UMEG-Net.

Paperid: 195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14178.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, pre-trained VLA policies still suffer from substantial performance degradation during downstream deployment. Although fine-tuning can mitigate this issue, its reliance on costly demonstration collection and intensive computation makes it impractical in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce VLA-Pilot, a plug-and-play inference-time policy steering method for zero-shot deployment of pre-trained VLA without any additional fine-tuning or data collection. We evaluate VLA-Pilot on six real-world downstream manipulation tasks across two distinct robotic embodiments, encompassing both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VLA-Pilot substantially boosts the success rates of off-the-shelf pre-trained VLA policies, enabling robust zero-shot generalization to diverse tasks and embodiments. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://rip4kobe.github.io/vla-pilot/.

Paperid: 196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14033.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Flood prediction is critical for emergency planning and response to mitigate human and economic losses. Traditional physics-based hydrodynamic models generate high-resolution flood maps using numerical methods requiring fine-grid discretization; which are computationally intensive and impractical for real-time large-scale applications. While recent studies have applied convolutional neural networks for flood map super-resolution with good accuracy and speed, they suffer from limited generalizability to unseen areas. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages latent diffusion models to perform super-resolution on coarse-grid flood maps, with the objective of achieving the accuracy of fine-grid flood maps while significantly reducing inference time. Experimental results demonstrate that latent diffusion models substantially decrease the computational time required to produce high-fidelity flood maps without compromising on accuracy, enabling their use in real-time flood risk management. Moreover, diffusion models exhibit superior generalizability across different physical locations, with transfer learning further accelerating adaptation to new geographic regions. Our approach also incorporates physics-informed inputs, addressing the common limitation of black-box behavior in machine learning, thereby enhancing interpretability. Code is available at https://github.com/neosunhan/flood-diff.

Paperid: 197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13924.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has recently shown significant promise across various NLP and computer vision tasks by explicitly generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, we find that reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuned CoT reasoning can paradoxically degrade performance in Visual Grounding tasks, particularly as CoT outputs become lengthy or complex. Additionally, our analysis reveals that increased dataset size does not always enhance performance due to varying data complexities. Motivated by these findings, we propose Curriculum-based Relative Policy Optimization (CuRPO), a novel training strategy that leverages CoT length and generalized Intersection over Union (gIoU) rewards as complexity indicators to progressively structure training data from simpler to more challenging examples. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and LISA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. CuRPO consistently outperforms existing methods, including Visual-RFT, with notable improvements of up to +12.52 mAP on RefCOCO. Moreover, CuRPO exhibits exceptional efficiency and robustness, delivering strong localization performance even in few-shot learning scenarios, particularly benefiting tasks characterized by ambiguous and intricate textual descriptions.The code is released on https://github.com/qyoung-yan/CuRPO.

Paperid: 198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13784.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot Video Object Detection (FSVOD) addresses the challenge of detecting novel objects in videos with limited labeled examples, overcoming the constraints of traditional detection methods that require extensive training data. This task presents key challenges, including maintaining temporal consistency across frames affected by occlusion and appearance variations, and achieving novel object generalization without relying on complex region proposals, which are often computationally expensive and require task-specific training. Our novel object-aware temporal modeling approach addresses these challenges by incorporating a filtering mechanism that selectively propagates high-confidence object features across frames. This enables efficient feature progression, reduces noise accumulation, and enhances detection accuracy in a few-shot setting. By utilizing few-shot trained detection and classification heads with focused feature propagation, we achieve robust temporal consistency without depending on explicit object tube proposals. Our approach achieves performance gains, with AP improvements of 3.7% (FSVOD-500), 5.3% (FSYTV-40), 4.3% (VidOR), and 4.5 (VidVRD) in the 5-shot setting. Further results demonstrate improvements in 1-shot, 3-shot, and 10-shot configurations. We make the code public at: https://github.com/yogesh-iitj/fs-video-vit

Paperid: 199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13417.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries from satellite imagery is essential for land management and crop monitoring, yet existing methods often produce incomplete boundaries, merge adjacent fields, and struggle to scale. We present the Delineate Anything Flow (DelAnyFlow) methodology, a resolution-agnostic approach for large-scale field boundary mapping. DelAnyFlow combines the DelAny instance segmentation model, based on a YOLOv11 backbone and trained on the large-scale Field Boundary Instance Segmentation-22M (FBIS 22M) dataset, with a structured post-processing, merging, and vectorization sequence to generate topologically consistent vector boundaries. FBIS 22M, the largest dataset of its kind, contains 672,909 multi-resolution image patches (0.25-10m) and 22.9million validated field instances. The DelAny model delivers state-of-the-art accuracy with over 100% higher mAP and 400x faster inference than SAM2. DelAny demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization and supports national-scale applications: using Sentinel 2 data for 2024, DelAnyFlow generated a complete field boundary layer for Ukraine (603,000km2) in under six hours on a single workstation. DelAnyFlow outputs significantly improve boundary completeness relative to operational products from Sinergise Solutions and NASA Harvest, particularly in smallholder and fragmented systems (0.25-1ha). For Ukraine, DelAnyFlow delineated 3.75M fields at 5m and 5.15M at 2.5m, compared to 2.66M detected by Sinergise Solutions and 1.69M by NASA Harvest. This work delivers a scalable, cost-effective methodology for field delineation in regions lacking digital cadastral data. A project landing page with links to model weights, code, national-scale vector outputs, and dataset is available at https://lavreniuk.github.io/Delineate-Anything/.

Paperid: 200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13118.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot event extraction (ZSEE) remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the need for complex reasoning and domain-specific understanding. Direct prompting often yields incomplete or structurally invalid outputs--such as misclassified triggers, missing arguments, and schema violations. To address these limitations, we present Agent-Event-Coder (AEC), a novel multi-agent framework that treats event extraction like software engineering: as a structured, iterative code-generation process. AEC decomposes ZSEE into specialized subtasks--retrieval, planning, coding, and verification--each handled by a dedicated LLM agent. Event schemas are represented as executable class definitions, enabling deterministic validation and precise feedback via a verification agent. This programming-inspired approach allows for systematic disambiguation and schema enforcement through iterative refinement. By leveraging collaborative agent workflows, AEC enables LLMs to produce precise, complete, and schema-consistent extractions in zero-shot settings. Experiments across five diverse domains and six LLMs demonstrate that AEC consistently outperforms prior zero-shot baselines, showcasing the power of treating event extraction like code generation. The code and data are released on https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/Agent-Event-Coder.

Paperid: 201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13099.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Lifelong learning on Whole Slide Images (WSIs) aims to train or fine-tune a unified model sequentially on cancer-related tasks, reducing the resources and effort required for data transfer and processing, especially given the gigabyte-scale size of WSIs. In this paper, we introduce MergeSlide, a simple yet effective framework that treats lifelong learning as a model merging problem by leveraging a vision-language pathology foundation model. When a new task arrives, it is: 1) defined with class-aware prompts, 2) fine-tuned for a few epochs using an MLP-free backbone, and 3) merged into a unified model using an orthogonal continual merging strategy that preserves performance and mitigates catastrophic forgetting. For inference under the class-incremental learning (CLASS-IL) setting, where task identity is unknown, we introduce Task-to-Class Prompt-aligned (TCP) inference. Specifically, TCP first identifies the most relevant task using task-level prompts and then applies the corresponding class-aware prompts to generate predictions. To evaluate MergeSlide, we conduct experiments on a stream of six TCGA datasets. The results show that MergeSlide outperforms both rehearsal-based continual learning and vision-language zero-shot baselines. Code and data are available at https://github.com/caodoanh2001/MergeSlide.

Paperid: 202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12912.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Transferring the depth-based end-to-end policy trained in simulation to physical robots can yield an efficient and robust grasping policy, yet sensor artifacts in real depth maps like voids and noise establish a significant sim2real gap that critically impedes policy transfer. Training-time strategies like procedural noise injection or learned mappings suffer from data inefficiency due to unrealistic noise simulation, which is often ineffective for grasping tasks that require fine manipulation or dependency on paired datasets heavily. Furthermore, leveraging foundation models to reduce the sim2real gap via intermediate representations fails to mitigate the domain shift fully and adds computational overhead during deployment. This work confronts dual challenges of data inefficiency and deployment complexity. We propose DiffuDepGrasp, a deploy-efficient sim2real framework enabling zero-shot transfer through simulation-exclusive policy training. Its core innovation, the Diffusion Depth Generator, synthesizes geometrically pristine simulation depth with learned sensor-realistic noise via two synergistic modules. The first Diffusion Depth Module leverages temporal geometric priors to enable sample-efficient training of a conditional diffusion model that captures complex sensor noise distributions, while the second Noise Grafting Module preserves metric accuracy during perceptual artifact injection. With only raw depth inputs during deployment, DiffuDepGrasp eliminates computational overhead and achieves a 95.7% average success rate on 12-object grasping with zero-shot transfer and strong generalization to unseen objects.Project website: https://diffudepgrasp.github.io/.

Paperid: 203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12878.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Analyzing hand-object interaction in egocentric vision facilitates VR/AR applications and human-robot policy transfer. Existing research has mostly focused on modeling the behavior paradigm of interactive actions (i.e., "how to interact"). However, the more challenging and fine-grained problem of capturing the critical moments of contact and separation between the hand and the target object (i.e., "when to interact") is still underexplored, which is crucial for immersive interactive experiences in mixed reality and robotic motion planning. Therefore, we formulate this problem as temporal interaction localization (TIL). Some recent works extract semantic masks as TIL references, but suffer from inaccurate object grounding and cluttered scenarios. Although current temporal action localization (TAL) methods perform well in detecting verb-noun action segments, they rely on category annotations during training and exhibit limited precision in localizing hand-object contact/separation moments. To address these issues, we propose a novel zero-shot approach dubbed EgoLoc to localize hand-object contact and separation timestamps in egocentric videos. EgoLoc introduces hand-dynamics-guided sampling to generate high-quality visual prompts. It exploits the vision-language model to identify contact/separation attributes, localize specific timestamps, and provide closed-loop feedback for further refinement. EgoLoc eliminates the need for object masks and verb-noun taxonomies, leading to generalizable zero-shot implementation. Comprehensive experiments on the public dataset and our novel benchmarks demonstrate that EgoLoc achieves plausible TIL for egocentric videos. It is also validated to effectively facilitate multiple downstream applications in egocentric vision and robotic manipulation tasks. Code and relevant data will be released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/EgoLoc.

Paperid: 204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12410.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The deployment of automated pavement defect detection is often hindered by poor cross-domain generalization. Supervised detectors achieve strong in-domain accuracy but require costly re-annotation for new environments, while standard self-supervised methods capture generic features and remain vulnerable to domain shift. We propose \ours, a self-supervised framework that \emph{visually probes} target domains without labels. \ours introduces a Self-supervised Prompt Enhancement Module (SPEM), which derives defect-aware prompts from unlabeled target data to guide a frozen ViT backbone, and a Domain-Aware Prompt Alignment (DAPA) objective, which aligns prompt-conditioned source and target representations. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks show that \ours consistently outperforms strong supervised, self-supervised, and adaptation baselines, achieving robust zero-shot transfer, improved resilience to domain variations, and high data efficiency in few-shot adaptation. These results highlight self-supervised prompting as a practical direction for building scalable and adaptive visual inspection systems. Source code is publicly available: https://github.com/xixiaouab/PROBE/tree/main

Paperid: 205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12232.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over 2000+ hours of extensive training and often struggle to generalize to unfamiliar environments without additional fine-tuning, limiting their practical application in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SocialNav-Map, a novel zero-shot social navigation framework that combines dynamic human trajectory prediction with occupancy mapping, enabling safe and efficient navigation without the need for environment-specific training. Specifically, SocialNav-Map first transforms the task goal position into the constructed map coordinate system. Subsequently, it creates a dynamic occupancy map that incorporates predicted human movements as dynamic obstacles. The framework employs two complementary methods for human trajectory prediction: history prediction and orientation prediction. By integrating these predicted trajectories into the occupancy map, the robot can proactively avoid potential collisions with humans while efficiently navigating to its destination. Extensive experiments on the Social-HM3D and Social-MP3D datasets demonstrate that SocialNav-Map significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL-based methods, which require 2,396 GPU hours of training. Notably, it reduces human collision rates by over 10% without necessitating any training in novel environments. By eliminating the need for environment-specific training, SocialNav-Map achieves superior navigation performance, paving the way for the deployment of social navigation systems in real-world environments characterized by diverse human behaviors. The code is available at: https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SocialNav-Map.

Paperid: 206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11978.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative LLMs typically improve Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance through instruction tuning. They excel at generating entities by semantic pattern matching but lack an explicit, verifiable reasoning mechanism. This "cognitive shortcutting" leads to suboptimal performance and brittle generalization, especially in zero-shot and lowresource scenarios where reasoning from limited contextual cues is crucial. To address this issue, a reasoning framework is proposed for NER, which shifts the extraction paradigm from implicit pattern matching to explicit reasoning. This framework consists of three stages: Chain of Thought (CoT) generation, CoT tuning, and reasoning enhancement. First, a dataset annotated with NER-oriented CoTs is generated, which contain task-relevant reasoning chains. Then, they are used to tune the NER model to generate coherent rationales before deriving the final answer. Finally, a reasoning enhancement stage is implemented to optimize the reasoning process using a comprehensive reward signal. This stage ensures explicit and verifiable extractions. Experiments show that ReasoningNER demonstrates impressive cognitive ability in the NER task, achieving competitive performance. In zero-shot settings, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming GPT-4 by 12.3 percentage points on the F1 score. Analytical results also demonstrate its great potential to advance research in reasoningoriented information extraction. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HuiResearch/ReasoningIE.

Paperid: 207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language foundation models (VLMs) show promise for diverse imaging tasks but often underperform on medical benchmarks. Prior efforts to improve performance include model finetuning, which requires large domain-specific datasets and significant compute, or manual prompt engineering, which is hard to generalize and often inaccessible to medical institutions seeking to deploy these tools. These challenges motivate interest in approaches that draw on a model's embedded knowledge while abstracting away dependence on human-designed prompts to enable scalable, weight-agnostic performance improvements. To explore this, we adapt the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) framework for structured automated prompt optimization in medical vision-language systems through a comprehensive, formal evaluation. We implement prompting pipelines for five medical imaging tasks across radiology, gastroenterology, and dermatology, evaluating 10 open-source VLMs with four prompt optimization techniques. Optimized pipelines achieved a median relative improvement of 53% over zero-shot prompting baselines, with the largest gains ranging from 300% to 3,400% on tasks where zero-shot performance is low. These results highlight the substantial potential of applying automated prompt optimization to medical AI systems, demonstrating significant gains for vision-based applications requiring accurate clinical image interpretation. By reducing dependence on prompt design to elicit intended outputs, these techniques allow clinicians to focus on patient care and clinical decision-making. Furthermore, our experiments offer scalability and preserve data privacy, demonstrating performance improvement on open-source VLMs. We publicly release our evaluation pipelines to support reproducible research on specialized medical tasks, available at https://github.com/DaneshjouLab/prompt-triage-lab.

Paperid: 208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11787.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Systematics contaminate observables, leading to distribution shifts relative to theoretically simulated signals-posing a major challenge for using pre-trained models to label such observables. Since systematics are often poorly understood and difficult to model, removing them directly and entirely may not be feasible. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that aligns learned features between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples by optimizing a feature-alignment loss on the representations extracted from a pre-trained ID model. We first experimentally validate the method on the MNIST dataset using possible alignment losses, including mean squared error and optimal transport, and subsequently apply it to large-scale maps of neutral hydrogen. Our results show that optimal transport is particularly effective at aligning OOD features when parity between ID and OOD samples is unknown, even with limited data-mimicking real-world conditions in extracting information from large-scale surveys. Our code is available at https://github.com/sultan-hassan/feature-alignment-for-OOD-generalization.

Paperid: 209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10481.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained VLMs exhibit strong zero-shot classification capabilities, but their predictions degrade significantly under common image corruptions. To improve robustness, many test-time adaptation (TTA) methods adopt positive data augmentation (PDA), which generates multiple views of each test sample to reduce prediction variance. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations. First, it introduces considerable computational overhead due to the large number of augmentations required per image. Second, it fails to mitigate prediction bias, where the model tends to predict certain classes disproportionately under corruption, as PDA operates on corrupted inputs and typically does not remove the corruption itself. To address these challenges, we propose Panda, a novel TTA method based on negative data augmentation (NDA). Unlike positive augmentations that preserve object semantics, Panda generates negative augmentations by disrupting semantic content. It divides images into patches and randomly assembles them from a shared patch pool. These negatively augmented images retain corruption-specific features while discarding object-relevant signals. We then subtract the mean feature of these negative samples from the original image feature, effectively suppressing corruption-related components while preserving class-relevant information. This mitigates prediction bias under distribution shifts. Panda allows augmentation to be shared across samples within a batch, resulting in minimal computational overhead. Panda can be seamlessly integrated into existing test-time adaptation frameworks and substantially improve their robustness. Our experiments indicate that Panda delivers superior performance compared to PDA methods, and a wide range of TTA methods exhibit significantly enhanced performance when integrated with Panda. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruxideng/Panda .

Paperid: 210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10047.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly classification (AC) and segmentation (AS) methods aim to identify and outline defects without using any labeled samples. In this paper, we reveal a key property that is overlooked by existing methods: normal image patches across industrial products typically find many other similar patches, not only in 2D appearance but also in 3D shapes, while anomalies remain diverse and isolated. To explicitly leverage this discriminative property, we propose a Mutual Scoring framework (MuSc-V2) for zero-shot AC/AS, which flexibly supports single 2D/3D or multimodality. Specifically, our method begins by improving 3D representation through Iterative Point Grouping (IPG), which reduces false positives from discontinuous surfaces. Then we use Similarity Neighborhood Aggregation with Multi-Degrees (SNAMD) to fuse 2D/3D neighborhood cues into more discriminative multi-scale patch features for mutual scoring. The core comprises a Mutual Scoring Mechanism (MSM) that lets samples within each modality to assign score to each other, and Cross-modal Anomaly Enhancement (CAE) that fuses 2D and 3D scores to recover modality-specific missing anomalies. Finally, Re-scoring with Constrained Neighborhood (RsCon) suppresses false classification based on similarity to more representative samples. Our framework flexibly works on both the full dataset and smaller subsets with consistently robust performance, ensuring seamless adaptability across diverse product lines. In aid of the novel framework, MuSc-V2 achieves significant performance improvements: a $\textbf{+23.7\%}$ AP gain on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and a $\textbf{+19.3\%}$ boost on the Eyecandies dataset, surpassing previous zero-shot benchmarks and even outperforming most few-shot methods. The code will be available at The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/MuSc-V2}{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/MuSc-V2}.

Paperid: 211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10030.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large transformer models, trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated impressive few-shot performance on previously unseen tasks without requiring parameter updates. This capability has also been explored in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents interact with the environment to retrieve context and maximize cumulative rewards, showcasing strong adaptability in complex settings. However, in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents must coordinate toward a shared goal, decentralized policy deployment can lead to mismatches in task alignment and reward assignment, limiting the efficiency of policy adaptation. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval (MAICC), a novel approach designed to enhance coordination by fast adaptation. Our method involves training a centralized embedding model to capture fine-grained trajectory representations, followed by decentralized models that approximate the centralized one to obtain team-level task information. Based on the learned embeddings, relevant trajectories are retrieved as context, which, combined with the agents' current sub-trajectories, inform decision-making. During decentralized execution, we introduce a novel memory mechanism that effectively balances test-time online data with offline memory. Based on the constructed memory, we propose a hybrid utility score that incorporates both individual- and team-level returns, ensuring credit assignment across agents. Extensive experiments on cooperative MARL benchmarks, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF) and SMAC (v1/v2), show that MAICC enables faster adaptation to unseen tasks compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/MAICC.

Paperid: 212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09820.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-view image retrieval, particularly street-to-satellite matching, is a critical task for applications such as autonomous navigation, urban planning, and localization in GPS-denied environments. However, existing approaches often require supervised training on curated datasets and rely on panoramic or UAV-based images, which limits real-world deployment. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective cross-view image retrieval framework that leverages a pretrained vision encoder and a large language model (LLM), requiring no additional training. Given a monocular street-view image, our method extracts geographic cues through web-based image search and LLM-based location inference, generates a satellite query via geocoding API, and retrieves matching tiles using a pretrained vision encoder (e.g., DINOv2) with PCA-based whitening feature refinement. Despite using no ground-truth supervision or finetuning, our proposed method outperforms prior learning-based approaches on the benchmark dataset under zero-shot settings. Moreover, our pipeline enables automatic construction of semantically aligned street-to-satellite datasets, which is offering a scalable and cost-efficient alternative to manual annotation. All source codes will be made publicly available at https://jeonghomin.github.io/street2orbit.github.io/.

Paperid: 213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09809.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at zero-shot inference but often degrade under test-time domain shifts. For this reason, episodic test-time adaptation strategies have recently emerged as powerful techniques for adapting VLMs to a single unlabeled image. However, existing adaptation strategies, such as test-time prompt tuning, typically require backpropagating through large encoder weights or altering core model components. In this work, we introduce Spectrum-Aware Test-Time Steering (STS), a lightweight adaptation framework that extracts a spectral subspace from the textual embeddings to define principal semantic directions and learns to steer latent representations in a spectrum-aware manner by adapting a small number of per-sample shift parameters to minimize entropy across augmented views. STS operates entirely at inference in the latent space, without backpropagation through or modification of the frozen encoders. Building on standard evaluation protocols, our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that STS largely surpasses or compares favorably against state-of-the-art test-time adaptation methods, while introducing only a handful of additional parameters and achieving inference speeds up to 8x faster with a 12x smaller memory footprint than conventional test-time prompt tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/kdafnis/STS.

Paperid: 214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09690.pdf GitHub

Authors:Omnilingual ASR team, Gil Keren, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Yen Meng, Christophe Ropers, Matthew Setzler, Skyler Wang, Ife Adebara, Michael Auli, Can Balioglu, Kevin Chan, Chierh Cheng, Joe Chuang, Caley Droof, Mark Duppenthaler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Alexander Erben, Cynthia Gao, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Kehan Lyu, Sagar Miglani, Vineel Pratap, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Safiyyah Saleem, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Zheng-Xin Yong, Yu-An Chung, Jean Maillard, Rashel Moritz, Alexandre Mourachko, Mary Williamson, Shireen Yates

Abstract:
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by architectures that restrict language support, making extension inaccessible to most--all while entangled with ethical concerns when pursued without community collaboration. To transcend these limitations, we introduce Omnilingual ASR, the first large-scale ASR system designed for extensibility. Omnilingual ASR enables communities to introduce unserved languages with only a handful of data samples. It scales self-supervised pre-training to 7B parameters to learn robust speech representations and introduces an encoder-decoder architecture designed for zero-shot generalization, leveraging a LLM-inspired decoder. This capability is grounded in a massive and diverse training corpus; by combining breadth of coverage with linguistic variety, the model learns representations robust enough to adapt to unseen languages. Incorporating public resources with community-sourced recordings gathered through compensated local partnerships, Omnilingual ASR expands coverage to over 1,600 languages, the largest such effort to date--including over 500 never before served by ASR. Automatic evaluations show substantial gains over prior systems, especially in low-resource conditions, and strong generalization. We release Omnilingual ASR as a family of models, from 300M variants for low-power devices to 7B for maximum accuracy. We reflect on the ethical considerations shaping this design and conclude by discussing its societal impact. In particular, we highlight how open-sourcing models and tools can lower barriers for researchers and communities, inviting new forms of participation. Open-source artifacts are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr.

Paperid: 215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09602.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dexterous functional tool-use grasping is essential for effective robotic manipulation of tools. However, existing approaches face significant challenges in efficiently constructing large-scale datasets and ensuring generalizability to everyday object scales. These issues primarily arise from size mismatches between robotic and human hands, and the diversity in real-world object scales. To address these limitations, we propose the ScaleADFG framework, which consists of a fully automated dataset construction pipeline and a lightweight grasp generation network. Our dataset introduce an affordance-based algorithm to synthesize diverse tool-use grasp configurations without expert demonstrations, allowing flexible object-hand size ratios and enabling large robotic hands (compared to human hands) to grasp everyday objects effectively. Additionally, we leverage pre-trained models to generate extensive 3D assets and facilitate efficient retrieval of object affordances. Our dataset comprising five object categories, each containing over 1,000 unique shapes with 15 scale variations. After filtering, the dataset includes over 60,000 grasps for each 2 dexterous robotic hands. On top of this dataset, we train a lightweight, single-stage grasp generation network with a notably simple loss design, eliminating the need for post-refinement. This demonstrates the critical importance of large-scale datasets and multi-scale object variant for effective training. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real robot confirm that the ScaleADFG framework exhibits strong adaptability to objects of varying scales, enhancing functional grasp stability, diversity, and generalizability. Moreover, our network exhibits effective zero-shot transfer to real-world objects. Project page is available at https://sizhe-wang.github.io/ScaleADFG_webpage

Paperid: 216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09555.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation requires precise spatial understanding to interact with objects in the real world. Point-based methods suffer from sparse sampling, leading to the loss of fine-grained semantics. Image-based methods typically feed RGB and depth into 2D backbones pre-trained on 3D auxiliary tasks, but their entangled semantics and geometry are sensitive to inherent depth noise in real-world that disrupts semantic understanding. Moreover, these methods focus on high-level geometry while overlooking low-level spatial cues essential for precise interaction. We propose SpatialActor, a disentangled framework for robust robotic manipulation that explicitly decouples semantics and geometry. The Semantic-guided Geometric Module adaptively fuses two complementary geometry from noisy depth and semantic-guided expert priors. Also, a Spatial Transformer leverages low-level spatial cues for accurate 2D-3D mapping and enables interaction among spatial features. We evaluate SpatialActor on multiple simulation and real-world scenarios across 50+ tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance with 87.4% on RLBench and improves by 13.9% to 19.4% under varying noisy conditions, showing strong robustness. Moreover, it significantly enhances few-shot generalization to new tasks and maintains robustness under various spatial perturbations. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/SpatialActor

Paperid: 217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09540.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in context optimization (CoOp) guided by large language model (LLM)-distilled medical semantic priors offer a scalable alternative to manual prompt engineering and full fine-tuning for adapting biomedical CLIP-based vision-language models (VLMs). However, prompt learning in this context is challenged by semantic misalignment between LLMs and CLIP variants due to divergent training corpora and model architectures; it further lacks scalability across continuously evolving families of foundation models. More critically, pairwise multimodal alignment via conventional Euclidean-space optimization lacks the capacity to model unified representations or apply localized geometric constraints, which tends to amplify modality gaps in complex biomedical imaging and destabilize few-shot adaptation. In this work, we propose vMFCoOp, a framework that inversely estimates von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions on a shared Hyperspherical Manifold, aligning semantic biases between arbitrary LLMs and CLIP backbones via Unified Semantic Anchors to achieve robust biomedical prompting and superior few-shot classification. Grounded in three complementary constraints, vMFCoOp demonstrates consistent improvements across 14 medical datasets, 12 medical imaging modalities, and 13 anatomical regions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, generalization, and clinical applicability. This work aims to continuously expand to encompass more downstream applications, and the corresponding resources are intended to be shared through https://github.com/VinyehShaw/UniEqui.

Paperid: 218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09388.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recognizing unseen skeleton action categories remains highly challenging due to the absence of corresponding skeletal priors. Existing approaches generally follow an "align-then-classify" paradigm but face two fundamental issues, i.e., (i) fragile point-to-point alignment arising from imperfect semantics, and (ii) rigid classifiers restricted by static decision boundaries and coarse-grained anchors. To address these issues, we propose a novel method for zero-shot skeleton action recognition, termed $\texttt{$\textbf{Flora}$}$, which builds upon $\textbf{F}$lexib$\textbf{L}$e neighb$\textbf{O}$r-aware semantic attunement and open-form dist$\textbf{R}$ibution-aware flow cl$\textbf{A}$ssifier. Specifically, we flexibly attune textual semantics by incorporating neighboring inter-class contextual cues to form direction-aware regional semantics, coupled with a cross-modal geometric consistency objective that ensures stable and robust point-to-region alignment. Furthermore, we employ noise-free flow matching to bridge the modality distribution gap between semantic and skeleton latent embeddings, while a condition-free contrastive regularization enhances discriminability, leading to a distribution-aware classifier with fine-grained decision boundaries achieved through token-level velocity predictions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, showing particularly impressive performance even when trained with only 10\% of the seen data. Code is available at https://github.com/cseeyangchen/Flora.

Paperid: 219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09064.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pre-training models (VLPs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding and zero-shot generalization, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial examples, raising concerns about their reliability. Recent work, Test-Time Counterattack (TTC), improves robustness by generating perturbations that maximize the embedding deviation of adversarial inputs using PGD, pushing them away from their adversarial representations. However, due to the fundamental difference in optimization objectives between adversarial attacks and counterattacks, generating counterattacks solely based on gradients with respect to the adversarial input confines the search to a narrow space. As a result, the counterattacks could overfit limited adversarial patterns and lack the diversity to fully neutralize a broad range of perturbations. In this work, we argue that enhancing the diversity and coverage of counterattacks is crucial to improving adversarial robustness in test-time defense. Accordingly, we propose Directional Orthogonal Counterattack (DOC), which augments counterattack optimization by incorporating orthogonal gradient directions and momentum-based updates. This design expands the exploration of the counterattack space and increases the diversity of perturbations, which facilitates the discovery of more generalizable counterattacks and ultimately improves the ability to neutralize adversarial perturbations. Meanwhile, we present a directional sensitivity score based on averaged cosine similarity to boost DOC by improving example discrimination and adaptively modulating the counterattack strength. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that DOC improves adversarial robustness under various attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/bookman233/DOC.

Paperid: 220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08909.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-only training provides an attractive approach to address data scarcity challenges in zero-shot image captioning (ZIC), avoiding the expense of collecting paired image-text annotations. However, although these approaches perform well within training domains, they suffer from poor cross-domain generalization, often producing hallucinated content when encountering novel visual environments. Retrieval-based methods attempt to mitigate this limitation by leveraging external knowledge, but they can paradoxically exacerbate hallucination when retrieved captions contain entities irrelevant to the inputs. We introduce the concept of negative entities--objects that appear in generated caption but are absent from the input--and propose Negative Entity Suppression (NES) to tackle this challenge. NES seamlessly integrates three stages: (1) it employs synthetic images to ensure consistent image-to-text retrieval across both training and inference; (2) it filters negative entities from retrieved content to enhance accuracy; and (3) it applies attention-level suppression using identified negative entities to further minimize the impact of hallucination-prone features. Evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates that NES maintains competitive in-domain performance while improving cross-domain transfer and reducing hallucination rates, achieving new state-of-the-art results in ZIC. Our code is available at https://github.com/nidongpinyinme/NESCap.

Paperid: 221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08747.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) is a generative, few-shot fluid intelligence benchmark. Although humans effortlessly solve ARC-AGI, it remains extremely difficult for even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Inspired by methods for modelling human intelligence spanning neuroscience to psychology, we propose a cognitively plausible ARC-AGI solver. Our solver integrates System 1 intuitions with System 2 reasoning in an efficient and interpretable process using neurosymbolic methods based on Vector Symbolic Algebras (VSAs). Our solver works by object-centric program synthesis, leveraging VSAs to represent abstract objects, guide solution search, and enable sample-efficient neural learning. Preliminary results indicate success, with our solver scoring 10.8% on ARC-AGI-1-Train and 3.0% on ARC-AGI-1-Eval. Additionally, our solver performs well on simpler benchmarks, scoring 94.5% on Sort-of-ARC and 83.1% on 1D-ARC -- the latter outperforming GPT-4 at a tiny fraction of the computational cost. Importantly, our approach is unique; we believe we are the first to apply VSAs to ARC-AGI and have developed the most cognitively plausible ARC-AGI solver yet. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ijoffe/ARC-VSA-2025.

Paperid: 222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08626.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated significant potential in medical image segmentation. Yet, its performance is limited when only a small amount of labeled data is available, while there is abundant valuable yet often overlooked hierarchical information in medical data. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from self-supervised learning and propose SAMora, an innovative framework that captures hierarchical medical knowledge by applying complementary self-supervised learning objectives at the image, patch, and pixel levels. To fully exploit the complementarity of hierarchical knowledge within LoRAs, we introduce HL-Attn, a hierarchical fusion module that integrates multi-scale features while maintaining their distinct characteristics. SAMora is compatible with various SAM variants, including SAM2, SAMed, and H-SAM. Experimental results on the Synapse, LA, and PROMISE12 datasets demonstrate that SAMora outperforms existing SAM variants. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in both few-shot and fully supervised settings while reducing fine-tuning epochs by 90%. The code is available at https://github.com/ShChen233/SAMora.

Paperid: 223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08590.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) routing has demonstrated strong capability in balancing response quality with computational cost. As users exhibit diverse preferences, personalization has attracted increasing attention in LLM routing, since even identical queries may require different models to generate responses tailored to individual needs. However, existing approaches are not fully personalized and often fail to capture the complex interactions between specific users and LLMs. Moreover, user preference data is typically scarce, noisy, and inconsistent in format, which limits the effectiveness of methods that rely solely on user-specific data. To address these challenges, we propose GMTRouter, which represents multi-turn user-LLM interactions as a heterogeneous graph with four node types: user, LLM, query, and response, thereby preserving the rich relational structure of the interaction. Through a tailored message-passing mechanism, GMTRouter learns to capture user preferences from few-shot data within a lightweight inductive graph learning framework, enabling effective personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMTRouter consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 0.9 to 21.6 percent higher accuracy and 0.006 to 0.309 higher AUC across multiple datasets. More importantly, we demonstrate that GMTRouter can adapt to new users and evolving preferences using only few-shot data, without extensive fine-tuning. The code for GMTRouter is publicly available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/GMTRouter.

Paperid: 224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08418.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurately simulating systems governed by PDEs, such as voltage fields in cardiac electrophysiology (EP) modelling, remains a significant modelling challenge. Traditional numerical solvers are computationally expensive and sensitive to discretisation, while canonical deep learning methods are data-hungry and struggle with chaotic dynamics and long-term predictions. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) mitigate some of these issues by incorporating physical constraints in the learning process, yet they remain limited by mesh resolution and long-term predictive stability. In this work, we propose a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO) approach to solve PDE problems in cardiac EP. Unlike PINNs, PINO models learn mappings between function spaces, allowing them to generalise to multiple mesh resolutions and initial conditions. Our results show that PINO models can accurately reproduce cardiac EP dynamics over extended time horizons and across multiple propagation scenarios, including zero-shot evaluations on scenarios unseen during training. Additionally, our PINO models maintain high predictive quality in long roll-outs (where predictions are recursively fed back as inputs), and can scale their predictive resolution by up to 10x the training resolution. These advantages come with a significant reduction in simulation time compared to numerical PDE solvers, highlighting the potential of PINO-based approaches for efficient and scalable cardiac EP simulations.

Paperid: 225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08163.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes with zero samples by transferring semantic knowledge from seen classes. Current approaches typically correlate global visual features with semantic information (i.e., attributes) or align local visual region features with corresponding attributes to enhance visual-semantic interactions. Although effective, these methods often overlook the intrinsic interactions between local region features, which can further improve the acquisition of transferable and explicit visual features. In this paper, we propose a network named Multi-Granularity Mutual Refinement Network (Mg-MRN), which refine discriminative and transferable visual features by learning decoupled multi-granularity features and cross-granularity feature interactions. Specifically, we design a multi-granularity feature extraction module to learn region-level discriminative features through decoupled region feature mining. Then, a cross-granularity feature fusion module strengthens the inherent interactions between region features of varying granularities. This module enhances the discriminability of representations at each granularity level by integrating region representations from adjacent hierarchies, further improving ZSL recognition performance. Extensive experiments on three popular ZSL benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and competitiveness of our proposed Mg-MRN method. Our code is available at https://github.com/NingWang2049/Mg-MRN.

Paperid: 226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08048.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot detection-based counters estimate the number of instances in the image specified only by a few test-time exemplars. A common approach to localize objects across multiple sizes is to merge backbone features of different resolutions. Furthermore, to enable small object detection in densely populated regions, the input image is commonly upsampled and tiling is applied to cope with the increased computational and memory requirements. Because of these ad-hoc solutions, existing counters struggle with images containing diverse-sized objects and densely populated regions of small objects. We propose GECO2, an end-to-end few-shot counting and detection method that explicitly addresses the object scale issues. A new dense query representation gradually aggregates exemplar-specific feature information across scales that leads to high-resolution dense queries that enable detection of large as well as small objects. GECO2 surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot counters in counting as well as detection accuracy by 10% while running 3x times faster at smaller GPU memory footprint.

Paperid: 227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07416.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce PhysWorld, a framework that enables robot learning from video generation through physical world modeling. Recent video generation models can synthesize photorealistic visual demonstrations from language commands and images, offering a powerful yet underexplored source of training signals for robotics. However, directly retargeting pixel motions from generated videos to robots neglects physics, often resulting in inaccurate manipulations. PhysWorld addresses this limitation by coupling video generation with physical world reconstruction. Given a single image and a task command, our method generates task-conditioned videos and reconstructs the underlying physical world from the videos, and the generated video motions are grounded into physically accurate actions through object-centric residual reinforcement learning with the physical world model. This synergy transforms implicit visual guidance into physically executable robotic trajectories, eliminating the need for real robot data collection and enabling zero-shot generalizable robotic manipulation. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks demonstrate that PhysWorld substantially improves manipulation accuracy compared to previous approaches. Visit \href{https://pointscoder.github.io/PhysWorld_Web/}{the project webpage} for details.

Paperid: 228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07298.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Low-dose computed tomography (CT) represents a significant improvement in patient safety through lower radiation doses, but increased noise, blur, and contrast loss can diminish diagnostic quality. Therefore, consistency and robustness in image quality assessment become essential for clinical applications. In this study, we propose an LLM-based quality assessment system that generates both numerical scores and textual descriptions of degradations such as noise, blur, and contrast loss. Furthermore, various inference strategies - from the zero-shot approach to metadata integration and error feedback - are systematically examined, demonstrating the progressive contribution of each method to overall performance. The resultant assessments yield not only highly correlated scores but also interpretable output, thereby adding value to clinical workflows. The source codes of our study are available at https://github.com/itu-biai/lmms_ldct_iqa.

Paperid: 229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07068.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale visual out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has witnessed remarkable progress by leveraging vision-language models such as CLIP. However, a significant limitation of current methods is their reliance on a pre-defined set of in-distribution (ID) ground-truth label names (positives). These fixed label names can be unavailable, unreliable at scale, or become less relevant due to in-distribution shifts after deployment. Towards truly unsupervised OOD detection, we utilize widely available text corpora for positive label mining, bypassing the need for positives. In this paper, we utilize widely available text corpora for positive label mining under a general concept mining paradigm. Within this framework, we propose ClusterMine, a novel positive label mining method. ClusterMine is the first method to achieve state-of-the-art OOD detection performance without access to positive labels. It extracts positive concepts from a large text corpus by combining visual-only sample consistency (via clustering) and zero-shot image-text consistency. Our experimental study reveals that ClusterMine is scalable across a plethora of CLIP models and achieves state-of-the-art robustness to covariate in-distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/HHU-MMBS/clustermine_wacv_official.

Paperid: 230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06644.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce the task of unified anomaly detection and classification, which aims to simultaneously detect anomalous regions in images and identify their specific categories. Existing methods typically treat anomaly detection and classification as separate tasks, thereby neglecting their inherent correlation, limiting information sharing, and resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose UniADC, a unified anomaly detection and classification model that can effectively perform both tasks with only a few or even no anomaly images. Specifically, UniADC consists of two key components: a training-free controllable inpainting network and a multi-task discriminator. The inpainting network can synthesize anomaly images of specific categories by repainting normal regions guided by anomaly priors, and can also repaint few-shot anomaly samples to augment the available anomaly data. The multi-task discriminator is then trained on these synthesized samples, enabling precise anomaly detection and classification by aligning fine-grained image features with anomaly-category embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on three anomaly detection and classification datasets, including MVTec-FS, MTD, and WFDD, and the results demonstrate that UniADC consistently outperforms existing methods in anomaly detection, localization, and classification. The code is available at https://github.com/cnulab/UniADC.

Paperid: 231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06427.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Metaphors and metaphorical language (MLs) play an important role in healthcare communication between clinicians, patients, and patients' family members. In this work, we focus on Dutch language data from cancer patients. We extract metaphors used by patients using two data sources: (1) cancer patient storytelling interview data and (2) online forum data, including patients' posts, comments, and questions to professionals. We investigate how current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform on this task by exploring different prompting strategies such as chain of thought reasoning, few-shot learning, and self-prompting. With a human-in-the-loop setup, we verify the extracted metaphors and compile the outputs into a corpus named HealthQuote.NL. We believe the extracted metaphors can support better patient care, for example shared decision making, improved communication between patients and clinicians, and enhanced patient health literacy. They can also inform the design of personalized care pathways. We share prompts and related resources at https://github.com/aaronlifenghan/HealthQuote.NL

Paperid: 232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06424.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While zero-shot diffusion-based compression methods have seen significant progress in recent years, they remain notoriously slow and computationally demanding. This paper presents an efficient zero-shot diffusion-based compression method that runs substantially faster than existing methods, while maintaining performance that is on par with the state-of-the-art techniques. Our method builds upon the recently proposed Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (DDCMs) compression scheme. Specifically, DDCM compresses an image by sequentially choosing the diffusion noise vectors from reproducible random codebooks, guiding the denoiser's output to reconstruct the target image. We modify this framework with Turbo-DDCM, which efficiently combines a large number of noise vectors at each denoising step, thereby significantly reducing the number of required denoising operations. This modification is also coupled with an improved encoding protocol. Furthermore, we introduce two flexible variants of Turbo-DDCM, a priority-aware variant that prioritizes user-specified regions and a distortion-controlled variant that compresses an image based on a target PSNR rather than a target BPP. Comprehensive experiments position Turbo-DDCM as a compelling, practical, and flexible image compression scheme.

Paperid: 233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05966.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot multimodal industrial anomaly detection is a critical yet underexplored task, offering the ability to quickly adapt to complex industrial scenarios. In few-shot settings, insufficient training samples often fail to cover the diverse patterns present in test samples. This challenge can be mitigated by extracting structural commonality from a small number of training samples. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot unsupervised multimodal industrial anomaly detection method based on structural commonality, CIF (Commonality In Few). To extract intra-class structural information, we employ hypergraphs, which are capable of modeling higher-order correlations, to capture the structural commonality within training samples, and use a memory bank to store this intra-class structural prior. Firstly, we design a semantic-aware hypergraph construction module tailored for single-semantic industrial images, from which we extract common structures to guide the construction of the memory bank. Secondly, we use a training-free hypergraph message passing module to update the visual features of test samples, reducing the distribution gap between test features and features in the memory bank. We further propose a hyperedge-guided memory search module, which utilizes structural information to assist the memory search process and reduce the false positive rate. Experimental results on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and the Eyecandies dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in few-shot settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Sunny5250/CIF.

Paperid: 234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04811.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Biomedical image segmentation is critical for precise structure delineation and downstream analysis. Traditional methods often struggle with noisy data, while deep learning models such as U-Net have set new benchmarks in segmentation performance. nnU-Net further automates model configuration, making it adaptable across datasets without extensive tuning. However, it requires a substantial amount of annotated data for cross-validation, posing a challenge when only raw images but no labels are available. Large foundation models offer zero-shot generalizability, but may underperform on specific datasets with unique characteristics, limiting their direct use for analysis. This work addresses these bottlenecks by proposing a data-centric AI workflow that leverages active learning and pseudo-labeling to combine the strengths of traditional neural networks and large foundation models while minimizing human intervention. The pipeline starts by generating pseudo-labels from a foundation model, which are then used for nnU-Net's self-configuration. Subsequently, a representative core-set is selected for minimal manual annotation, enabling effective fine-tuning of the nnU-Net model. This approach significantly reduces the need for manual annotations while maintaining competitive performance, providing an accessible solution for biomedical researchers to apply state-of-the-art AI techniques in their segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/MMV-Lab/AL_BioMed_img_seg.

Paperid: 235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04255.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper does not introduce a novel architecture; instead, it revisits a fundamental yet overlooked baseline: adapting human-centric foundation models for anatomical landmark detection in medical imaging. While landmark detection has traditionally relied on domain-specific models, the emergence of large-scale pre-trained vision models presents new opportunities. In this study, we investigate the adaptation of Sapiens, a human-centric foundation model designed for pose estimation, to medical imaging through multi-dataset pretraining, establishing a new state of the art across multiple datasets. Our proposed model, MedSapiens, demonstrates that human-centric foundation models, inherently optimized for spatial pose localization, provide strong priors for anatomical landmark detection, yet this potential has remained largely untapped. We benchmark MedSapiens against existing state-of-the-art models, achieving up to 5.26% improvement over generalist models and up to 21.81% improvement over specialist models in the average success detection rate (SDR). To further assess MedSapiens adaptability to novel downstream tasks with few annotations, we evaluate its performance in limited-data settings, achieving 2.69% improvement over the few-shot state of the art in SDR. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/MedSapiens .

Paperid: 236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04247.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal co-embedding models, especially CLIP, have advanced the state of the art in zero-shot classification and multimedia information retrieval in recent years by aligning images and text in a shared representation space. However, such modals trained on a contrastive alignment can lack stability towards small input perturbations. Especially when dealing with manually expressed queries, minor variations in the query can cause large differences in the ranking of the best-matching results. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of the effect of multiple classes of non-semantic query perturbations in an multimedia information retrieval scenario. We evaluate a diverse set of lexical, syntactic, and semantic perturbations across multiple CLIP variants using the TRECVID Ad-Hoc Video Search queries and the V3C1 video collection. Across models, we find that syntactic and semantic perturbations drive the largest instabilities, while brittleness is concentrated in trivial surface edits such as punctuation and case. Our results highlight robustness as a critical dimension for evaluating vision-language models beyond benchmark accuracy.

Paperid: 237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03376.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a framework that combines Large Language Models with computational image analytics for non-invasive, zero-shot prediction of IDH mutation status in brain gliomas. For each subject, coregistered multi-parametric MRI scans and multi-class tumor segmentation maps were processed to extract interpretable semantic (visual) attributes and quantitative features, serialized in a standardized JSON file, and used to query GPT 4o and GPT 5 without fine-tuning. We evaluated this framework on six publicly available datasets (N = 1427) and results showcased high accuracy and balanced classification performance across heterogeneous cohorts, even in the absence of manual annotations. GPT 5 outperformed GPT 4o in context-driven phenotype interpretation. Volumetric features emerged as the most important predictors, supplemented by subtype-specific imaging markers and clinical information. Our results demonstrate the potential of integrating LLM-based reasoning with computational image analytics for precise, non-invasive tumor genotyping, advancing diagnostic strategies in neuro-oncology. The code is available at https://github.com/ATPLab-LUMS/CIM-LLM.

Paperid: 238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03367.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large-scale vision and language models have led to significant progress in zero-shot learning tasks. Methods such as CoOp and CoCoOp have shown that replacing handcrafted prompts with learnable vectors, known as prompt learning, can result in improved performance. However, these models often struggle to generalize to entirely unseen categories. While traditional zero-shot learning techniques benefit from various data augmentation strategies, prompt learning has primarily focused on text-based modifications, leaving the potential of image-based augmentation largely unexplored. In this work, we explore how image-level augmentations, particularly those that introduce attribute-specific variations, can support and enhance prompt learning. Our analysis examines the interaction between these augmentations and soft prompt frameworks, revealing their potential to improve generalization. We also identify a limitation in existing methods, such as CoCoOp, which do not provide explicit guidance for learning prompts that focus on semantically meaningful visual features. To address this, we propose Adding Attributes to Prompt Learning, AAPL, a novel method that introduces adversarial token embeddings to decouple superficial visual variations introduced by augmentation from class-relevant semantic representations. This decoupling enables the learned prompts to concentrate on visually discriminative features that align with the target categories. We conduct comprehensive experiments on eleven benchmark datasets, and AAPL consistently outperforms existing methods across few-shot, zero-shot, cross-dataset, and domain generalization settings. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Gahyeonkim09/AAPL

Paperid: 239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03128.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
LLMs can provide substantial zero-shot performance on diverse tasks using a simple task prompt, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning. However, when applying these models to sensitive tasks, it is crucial to thoroughly assess their robustness against adversarial inputs. In this work, we introduce Static Deceptor (StaDec) and Dynamic Deceptor (DyDec), two innovative attack frameworks designed to systematically generate dynamic and adaptive adversarial examples by leveraging the understanding of the LLMs. We produce subtle and natural-looking adversarial inputs that preserve semantic similarity to the original text while effectively deceiving the target LLM. By utilizing an automated, LLM-driven pipeline, we eliminate the dependence on external heuristics. Our attacks evolve with the advancements in LLMs and demonstrate strong transferability across models unknown to the attacker. Overall, this work provides a systematic approach for the self-assessment of an LLM's robustness. We release our code and data at https://github.com/Shukti042/AdversarialExample.

Paperid: 240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02888.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Nucleotide sequence variation can induce significant shifts in functional fitness. Recent nucleotide foundation models promise to predict such fitness effects directly from sequence, yet heterogeneous datasets and inconsistent preprocessing make it difficult to compare methods fairly across DNA and RNA families. Here we introduce NABench, a large-scale, systematic benchmark for nucleic acid fitness prediction. NABench aggregates 162 high-throughput assays and curates 2.6 million mutated sequences spanning diverse DNA and RNA families, with standardized splits and rich metadata. We show that NABench surpasses prior nucleotide fitness benchmarks in scale, diversity, and data quality. Under a unified evaluation suite, we rigorously assess 29 representative foundation models across zero-shot, few-shot prediction, transfer learning, and supervised settings. The results quantify performance heterogeneity across tasks and nucleic-acid types, demonstrating clear strengths and failure modes for different modeling choices and establishing strong, reproducible baselines. We release NABench to advance nucleic acid modeling, supporting downstream applications in RNA/DNA design, synthetic biology, and biochemistry. Our code is available at https://github.com/mrzzmrzz/NABench.

Paperid: 241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02802.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tabular foundation models represent a growing paradigm in structured data learning, extending the benefits of large-scale pretraining to tabular domains. However, their adoption remains limited due to heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines, fragmented APIs, inconsistent fine-tuning procedures, and the absence of standardized evaluation for deployment-oriented metrics such as calibration and fairness. We present TabTune, a unified library that standardizes the complete workflow for tabular foundation models through a single interface. TabTune provides consistent access to seven state-of-the-art models supporting multiple adaptation strategies, including zero-shot inference, meta-learning, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). The framework automates model-aware preprocessing, manages architectural heterogeneity internally, and integrates evaluation modules for performance, calibration, and fairness. Designed for extensibility and reproducibility, TabTune enables consistent benchmarking of adaptation strategies of tabular foundation models.

Paperid: 242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02591.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-animal tracking is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior. However, it remains a challenging task due to variations in habitat, motion patterns, and species appearance. Traditional approaches typically require extensive model fine-tuning and heuristic design for each application scenario. In this work, we explore the potential of recent vision foundation models for zero-shot multi-animal tracking. By combining a Grounding Dino object detector with the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) tracker and carefully designed heuristics, we develop a tracking framework that can be applied to new datasets without any retraining or hyperparameter adaptation. Evaluations on ChimpAct, Bird Flock Tracking, AnimalTrack, and a subset of GMOT-40 demonstrate strong and consistent performance across diverse species and environments. The code is available at https://github.com/ecker-lab/SAM2-Animal-Tracking.

Paperid: 243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02580.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable success of text-to-image diffusion models, their output of a single, flattened image remains a critical bottleneck for professional applications requiring layer-wise control. Existing solutions either rely on fine-tuning with large, inaccessible datasets or are training-free yet limited to generating isolated foreground elements, failing to produce a complete and coherent scene. To address this, we introduce the Training-free Noise Transplantation and Cultivation Diffusion Model (TAUE), a novel framework for zero-shot, layer-wise image generation. Our core technique, Noise Transplantation and Cultivation (NTC), extracts intermediate latent representations from both foreground and composite generation processes, transplanting them into the initial noise for subsequent layers. This ensures semantic and structural coherence across foreground, background, and composite layers, enabling consistent, multi-layered outputs without requiring fine-tuning or auxiliary datasets. Extensive experiments show that our training-free method achieves performance comparable to fine-tuned methods, enhancing layer-wise consistency while maintaining high image quality and fidelity. TAUE not only eliminates costly training and dataset requirements but also unlocks novel downstream applications, such as complex compositional editing, paving the way for more accessible and controllable generative workflows.

Paperid: 244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the retrieval domain, candidates' fusion from heterogeneous retrievers is a long-standing challenge, particularly for complex, multi-modal data such as videos. While typical fusion techniques are training-free, they rely solely on rank or score signals, disregarding candidates' representations. This work introduces Vote-in-Context (ViC), a generalized, training-free framework that re-thinks list-wise reranking and fusion as a zero-shot reasoning task for a Vision-Language Model (VLM). The core insight is to serialize both content evidence and retriever metadata directly within the VLM's prompt, allowing the model to adaptively weigh retriever consensus against visual-linguistic content. We demonstrate the generality of this framework by applying it to the challenging domain of cross-modal video retrieval. To this end, we introduce the S-Grid, a compact serialization map that represents each video as an image grid, optionally paired with subtitles to enable list-wise reasoning over video candidates. ViC is evaluated both as a single-list reranker, where it dramatically improves the precision of individual retrievers, and as an ensemble fuser, where it consistently outperforms strong baselines like CombSUM. Across video retrieval benchmarks including ActivityNet and VATEX, the framework establishes new state-of-the-art zero-shot retrieval performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex visual and temporal signals alongside text. In zero-shot settings, ViC achieves Recall@1 scores of 87.1% (t2v) / 89.0% (v2t) on MSR-VTT and 99.6% (v2t) on VATEX, representing massive gains of up to +40 Recall@1 over previous state-of-the-art baselines. We present ViC as a simple, reproducible, and highly effective recipe for turning modern VLMs into powerful zero-shot rerankers and fusers. Code and resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/mohammad2012191/ViC

Paperid: 245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01458.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Safety and reliability are essential for deploying Visual Question Answering (VQA) in surgery, where incorrect or ambiguous responses can harm the patient. Most surgical VQA research focuses on accuracy or linguistic quality while overlooking safety behaviors such as ambiguity awareness, referral to human experts, or triggering a second opinion. Inspired by Automatic Failure Detection (AFD), we study uncertainty estimation as a key enabler of safer decision making. We introduce Question Aligned Semantic Nearest Neighbor Entropy (QA-SNNE), a black box uncertainty estimator that incorporates question semantics into prediction confidence. It measures semantic entropy by comparing generated answers with nearest neighbors in a medical text embedding space, conditioned on the question. We evaluate five models, including domain specific Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuned (PEFT) models and zero-shot Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), on EndoVis18-VQA and PitVQA. PEFT models degrade under mild paraphrasing, while LVLMs are more resilient. Across three LVLMs and two PEFT baselines, QA-SNNE improves AUROC in most in-template settings and enhances hallucination detection. The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUROC) increases by 15-38% for zero-shot models, with gains maintained under out-of-template stress. QA-SNNE offers a practical and interpretable step toward AFD in surgical VQA by linking semantic uncertainty to question context. Combining LVLM backbones with question aligned uncertainty estimation can improve safety and clinician trust. The code and model are available at https://github.com/DennisPierantozzi/QASNNE

Paperid: 246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01374.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in diversity-critical scenarios. There have been some attempts to design online multimodal RL algorithms based on diffusion or amortized actors. However, these actors are intractable, making existing methods struggle with balancing performance, decision diversity, and efficiency simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, we first reformulate existing intractable multimodal actors within a unified framework, and prove that they can be directly optimized by policy gradient via reparameterization. Then, we propose a distance-based diversity regularization that does not explicitly require decision probabilities. We identify two diversity-critical domains, namely multi-goal achieving and generative RL, to demonstrate the advantages of multimodal policies and our method, particularly in terms of few-shot robustness. In conventional MuJoCo benchmarks, our algorithm also shows competitive performance. Moreover, our experiments highlight that the amortized actor is a promising policy model class with strong multimodal expressivity and high performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/PneuC/DrAC

Paperid: 247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01203.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the associated dollar costs of API calls can fluctuate over time, potentially invalidating conclusions drawn in prior research. To address this, we propose a Fair Evaluation protocol for Test-Time Compute (FEval-TTC), designed to ensure consistent assessment of test-time compute (TTC) methods, regardless of such fluctuations. FEval-TTC focuses on the evaluation of TTC methods that utilize underlying Chains-of-Thought (CoT). It supports evaluations across multiple LLMs on a diverse set of mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. The few-shot prompting and answer extraction processes are standardized across datasets, reducing both time and monetary overhead for researchers. Furthermore, we provide a cost modelling procedure that estimates both the token and dollar cost per query, facilitating equitable comparisons of prevalent TTC methods. We open-source FEval-TTC for public use at https://github.com/networkslab/feval_ttc .

Paperid: 248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00962.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Most video-anomaly research stops at frame-wise detection, offering little insight into why an event is abnormal, typically outputting only frame-wise anomaly scores without spatial or semantic context. Recent video anomaly localization and video anomaly understanding methods improve explainability but remain data-dependent and task-specific. We propose a unified reasoning framework that bridges the gap between temporal detection, spatial localization, and textual explanation. Our approach is built upon a chained test-time reasoning process that sequentially connects these tasks, enabling holistic zero-shot anomaly analysis without any additional training. Specifically, our approach leverages intra-task reasoning to refine temporal detections and inter-task chaining for spatial and semantic understanding, yielding improved interpretability and generalization in a fully zero-shot manner. Without any additional data or gradients, our method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across multiple video anomaly detection, localization, and explanation benchmarks. The results demonstrate that careful prompt design with task-wise chaining can unlock the reasoning power of foundation models, enabling practical, interpretable video anomaly analysis in a fully zero-shot manner. Project Page: https://rathgrith.github.io/Unified_Frame_VAA/.

Paperid: 249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00096.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Urban Artificial Intelligence (Urban AI) has advanced human-centered urban tasks such as perception prediction and human dynamics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can integrate multimodal inputs to address heterogeneous data in complex urban systems but often underperform on domain-specific tasks. Urban-MAS, an LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework, is introduced for human-centered urban prediction under zero-shot settings. It includes three agent types: Predictive Factor Guidance Agents, which prioritize key predictive factors to guide knowledge extraction and enhance the effectiveness of compressed urban knowledge in LLMs; Reliable UrbanInfo Extraction Agents, which improve robustness by comparing multiple outputs, validating consistency, and re-extracting when conflicts occur; and Multi-UrbanInfo Inference Agents, which integrate extracted multi-source information across dimensions for prediction. Experiments on running-amount prediction and urban perception across Tokyo, Milan, and Seattle demonstrate that Urban-MAS substantially reduces errors compared to single-LLM baselines. Ablation studies indicate that Predictive Factor Guidance Agents are most critical for enhancing predictive performance, positioning Urban-MAS as a scalable paradigm for human-centered urban AI prediction. Code is available on the project website:https://github.com/THETUREHOOHA/UrbanMAS

Paperid: 250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27265.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical imaging, vision-language models face a critical duality: pretrained networks offer broad robustness but lack subtle, modality-specific characteristics, while fine-tuned expert models achieve high in-distribution accuracy yet falter under modality shift. Existing model-merging techniques, designed for natural-image benchmarks, are simple and efficient but fail to deliver consistent gains across diverse medical modalities; their static interpolation limits reliability in varied clinical tasks. To address this, we introduce Test-Time Task adaptive merging (T^3), a backpropagation-free framework that computes per-sample interpolation coefficients via the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two models' output distributions. T^3 dynamically preserves local precision when models agree and defers to generalist robustness under drift. To overcome the inference costs of sample-wise merging, we further propose a batch-wise extension, T^3_B, that computes a merging coefficient across a batch of samples, dramatically reducing computational bottleneck. Recognizing the lack of a standardized medical-merging benchmark, we present a rigorous cross-evaluation protocol spanning in-domain, base-to-novel, and corruptions across four modalities. Empirically, T^3 sets new state-of-the-art in Top-1 accuracy and error reduction, outperforming strong baselines while maintaining efficiency, paving the way for adaptive MVLM deployment in clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Razaimam45/TCube.

Paperid: 251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27128.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in neural decoding have enabled the reconstruction of visual experiences from brain activity, positioning fMRI-to-image reconstruction as a promising bridge between neuroscience and computer vision. However, current methods predominantly rely on subject-specific models or require subject-specific fine-tuning, limiting their scalability and real-world applicability. In this work, we introduce ZEBRA, the first zero-shot brain visual decoding framework that eliminates the need for subject-specific adaptation. ZEBRA is built on the key insight that fMRI representations can be decomposed into subject-related and semantic-related components. By leveraging adversarial training, our method explicitly disentangles these components to isolate subject-invariant, semantic-specific representations. This disentanglement allows ZEBRA to generalize to unseen subjects without any additional fMRI data or retraining. Extensive experiments show that ZEBRA significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines and achieves performance comparable to fully finetuned models on several metrics. Our work represents a scalable and practical step toward universal neural decoding. Code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/ZEBRA.

Paperid: 252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27020.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In open-world environments, human-object interactions (HOIs) evolve continuously, challenging conventional closed-world HOI detection models. Inspired by humans' ability to progressively acquire knowledge, we explore incremental HOI detection (IHOID) to develop agents capable of discerning human-object relations in such dynamic environments. This setup confronts not only the common issue of catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning but also distinct challenges posed by interaction drift and detecting zero-shot HOI combinations with sequentially arriving data. Therefore, we propose a novel exemplar-free incremental relation distillation (IRD) framework. IRD decouples the learning of objects and relations, and introduces two unique distillation losses for learning invariant relation features across different HOI combinations that share the same relation. Extensive experiments on HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in mitigating forgetting, strengthening robustness against interaction drift, and generalization on zero-shot HOIs. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/weiyana/ContinualHOI}{this HTTP URL}

Paperid: 253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26345.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Health-related misinformation is very prevalent and potentially harmful. It is difficult to identify, especially when claims distort or misinterpret scientific findings. We investigate the impact of synthetic data generation and lightweight fine-tuning techniques on the ability of large language models (LLMs) to recognize fallacious arguments using the MISSCI dataset and framework. In this work, we propose MisSynth, a pipeline that applies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to produce synthetic fallacy samples, which are then used to fine-tune an LLM model. Our results show substantial accuracy gains with fine-tuned models compared to vanilla baselines. For instance, the LLaMA 3.1 8B fine-tuned model achieved an over 35% F1-score absolute improvement on the MISSCI test split over its vanilla baseline. We demonstrate that introducing synthetic fallacy data to augment limited annotated resources can significantly enhance zero-shot LLM classification performance on real-world scientific misinformation tasks, even with limited computational resources. The code and synthetic dataset are available on https://github.com/mxpoliakov/MisSynth.

Paperid: 254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25970.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Rectified flow models have become a de facto standard in image generation due to their stable sampling trajectories and high-fidelity outputs. Despite their strong generative capabilities, they face critical limitations in image editing tasks: inaccurate inversion processes for mapping real images back into the latent space, and gradient entanglement issues during editing often result in outputs that do not faithfully reflect the target prompt. Recent efforts have attempted to directly map source and target distributions via ODE-based approaches without inversion; however,these methods still yield suboptimal editing quality. In this work, we propose a flow decomposition-and-aggregation framework built upon an inversion-free formulation to address these limitations. Specifically, we semantically decompose the target prompt into multiple sub-prompts, compute an independent flow for each, and aggregate them to form a unified editing trajectory. While we empirically observe that decomposing the original flow enhances diversity in the target space, generating semantically aligned outputs still requires consistent guidance toward the full target prompt. To this end, we design a projection and soft-aggregation mechanism for flow, inspired by gradient conflict resolution in multi-task learning. This approach adaptively weights the sub-target velocity fields, suppressing semantic redundancy while emphasizing distinct directions, thereby preserving both diversity and consistency in the final edited output. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot editing approaches in terms of semantic fidelity and attribute disentanglement. The code is available at https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/SplitFlow.

Paperid: 255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25094.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot Human-Object Interaction detection aims to localize humans and objects in an image and recognize their interaction, even when specific verb-object pairs are unseen during training. Recent works have shown promising results using prompt learning with pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP, which align natural language prompts with visual features in a shared embedding space. However, existing approaches still fail to handle the visual complexity of interaction, including (1) intra-class visual diversity, where instances of the same verb appear in diverse poses and contexts, and (2) inter-class visual entanglement, where distinct verbs yield visually similar patterns. To address these challenges, we propose VDRP, a framework for Visual Diversity and Region-aware Prompt learning. First, we introduce a visual diversity-aware prompt learning strategy that injects group-wise visual variance into the context embedding. We further apply Gaussian perturbation to encourage the prompts to capture diverse visual variations of a verb. Second, we retrieve region-specific concepts from the human, object, and union regions. These are used to augment the diversity-aware prompt embeddings, yielding region-aware prompts that enhance verb-level discrimination. Experiments on the HICO-DET benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under four zero-shot evaluation settings, effectively addressing both intra-class diversity and inter-class visual entanglement. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/VDRP.

Paperid: 256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24803.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Practical deployment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) demands strong test-time performance, motivating methods that guide inference-time search and selectively spend compute to improve quality. We present the Multi-Agent System Process Reward Model (MASPRM). It assigns per-action, per-agent values to partial inter-agent transcripts and acts as an inference-time controller. MASPRM is trained from multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts without requiring step-level human annotations, by propagating returns to local targets. At inference, MASPRM guides step-level beam search and MCTS, focusing computation on promising branches and pruning early. On GSM8K and MATH, MASPRM-guided decoding with an outcome reward model (ORM) applied to the final answer, improves exact match (EM) over a single straight-through MAS pass by $+30.7$ and $+22.9$ points, respectively. A MASPRM trained on GSM8K transfers zero-shot to MATH without retraining, adding $8.4$ EM points at the same budget. MASPRM is a plug-in value model that estimates per-agent progress and complements verifier-style decoders, enabling more reliable, compute-aware multi-agent reasoning. Code: https://github.com/milad1378yz/MASPRM

Paperid: 257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24152.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This technical report presents our solution for the RoboSense Challenge at IROS 2025, which evaluates Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on autonomous driving scene understanding across perception, prediction, planning, and corruption detection tasks. We propose a systematic framework built on four core components. First, a Mixture-of-Prompts router classifies questions and dispatches them to task-specific expert prompts, eliminating interference across diverse question types. Second, task-specific prompts embed explicit coordinate systems, spatial reasoning rules, role-playing, Chain-of-Thought/Tree-of-Thought reasoning, and few-shot examples tailored to each task. Third, a visual assembly module composes multi-view images with object crops, magenta markers, and adaptive historical frames based on question requirements. Fourth, we configure model inference parameters (temperature, top-p, message roles) per task to optimize output quality. Implemented on Qwen2.5-VL-72B, our approach achieves 70.87% average accuracy on Phase-1 (clean data) and 72.85% on Phase-2 (corrupted data), demonstrating that structured prompting and spatial grounding substantially enhance VLM performance on safety-critical autonomous driving tasks. Code and prompt are available at https://github.com/wuaodi/UCAS-CSU-phase2.

Paperid: 258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23607.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humans learn abstract concepts through multisensory synergy, and once formed, such representations can often be recalled from a single modality. Inspired by this principle, we introduce Concerto, a minimalist simulation of human concept learning for spatial cognition, combining 3D intra-modal self-distillation with 2D-3D cross-modal joint embedding. Despite its simplicity, Concerto learns more coherent and informative spatial features, as demonstrated by zero-shot visualizations. It outperforms both standalone SOTA 2D and 3D self-supervised models by 14.2% and 4.8%, respectively, as well as their feature concatenation, in linear probing for 3D scene perception. With full fine-tuning, Concerto sets new SOTA results across multiple scene understanding benchmarks (e.g., 80.7% mIoU on ScanNet). We further present a variant of Concerto tailored for video-lifted point cloud spatial understanding, and a translator that linearly projects Concerto representations into CLIP's language space, enabling open-world perception. These results highlight that Concerto emerges spatial representations with superior fine-grained geometric and semantic consistency.

Paperid: 259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23574.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative depth estimation methods leverage the rich visual priors stored in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, demonstrating astonishing zero-shot capability. However, parameter updates during training lead to catastrophic degradation in the image generation capability of the pre-trained model. We introduce MERGE, a unified model for image generation and depth estimation, starting from a fixed pre-trained text-to-image model. MERGE demonstrates that the pre-trained text-to-image model can do more than image generation, but also expand to depth estimation effortlessly. Specifically, MERGE introduces a play-and-plug framework that enables seamless switching between image generation and depth estimation modes through simple and pluggable converters. Meanwhile, we propose a Group Reuse Mechanism to encourage parameter reuse and improve the utilization of the additional learnable parameters. MERGE unleashes the powerful depth estimation capability of the pre-trained text-to-image model while preserving its original image generation ability. Compared to other unified models for image generation and depth estimation, MERGE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple depth estimation benchmarks. The code will be made available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/MERGE

Paperid: 260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23397.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Video temporal grounding (VTG) aims to locate precise segments in videos based on language queries, which is a fundamental challenge in video understanding. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in tackling VTG through reinforcement learning (RL), they overlook the challenges arising from both the quality and difficulty of training samples. (1) Partially annotated samples. Many samples contain relevant segments beyond the annotated interval, introducing ambiguous supervision. (2) Hard-to-ground samples. Samples with poor zero-shot performance produce consistently low and indistinguishable rewards during RL training, exhibiting no clear preference among multiple outputs and thus hindering learning efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose VideoTG-R1, a novel curriculum RL framework with reflected boundary annotations, enabling data-efficient training. Specifically, we propose a Boundary Reflection Agent that utilizes MLLMs to predict query-relevant timestamps outside the annotated intervals, allowing us to identify and filter out partially annotated samples, thereby reducing ambiguity. Furthermore, we introduce a Difficulty Estimation Agent to assess the training difficulty of each sample and design a curriculum RL strategy that dynamically masks the videos of hard-to-ground samples according to the training steps, easing the training difficulty and providing clearer preference. Experiments on the VTG and grounded VideoQA tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Remarkably, with only 10% of the training samples and 21% of the computational budget, VideoTG-R1 outperforms full-data counterparts under both group relative policy optimization (GRPO) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The code is available at https://github.com/ldong1111/VideoTG-R1.

Paperid: 261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23190.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The widespread use of cameras in our society has created an overwhelming amount of video data, far exceeding the capacity for human monitoring. This presents a critical challenge for public safety and security, as the timely detection of anomalous or criminal events is crucial for effective response and prevention. The ability for an embodied agent to recognize unexpected events is fundamentally tied to its capacity for spatial reasoning. This paper investigates the spatial reasoning of vision-language models (VLMs) by framing anomalous action recognition as a zero-shot, language-grounded task, addressing the embodied perception challenge of interpreting dynamic 3D scenes from sparse 2D video. Specifically, we investigate whether small, pre-trained vision--LLMs can act as spatially-grounded, zero-shot anomaly detectors by converting video into text descriptions and scoring labels via textual entailment. We evaluate four open models on UCF-Crime and RWF-2000 under prompting and privacy-preserving conditions. Few-shot exemplars can improve accuracy for some models, but may increase false positives, and privacy filters -- especially full-body GAN transforms -- introduce inconsistencies that degrade accuracy. These results chart where current vision--LLMs succeed (simple, spatially salient events) and where they falter (noisy spatial cues, identity obfuscation). Looking forward, we outline concrete paths to strengthen spatial grounding without task-specific training: structure-aware prompts, lightweight spatial memory across clips, scene-graph or 3D-pose priors during description, and privacy methods that preserve action-relevant geometry. This positions zero-shot, language-grounded pipelines as adaptable building blocks for embodied, real-world video understanding. Our implementation for evaluating VLMs is publicly available at: https://github.com/pascalbenschopTU/VLLM_AnomalyRecognition

Paperid: 262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22851.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Concept erasure in text-to-image diffusion models is crucial for mitigating harmful content, yet existing methods often compromise generative quality. We introduce Semantic Surgery, a novel training-free, zero-shot framework for concept erasure that operates directly on text embeddings before the diffusion process. It dynamically estimates the presence of target concepts in a prompt and performs a calibrated vector subtraction to neutralize their influence at the source, enhancing both erasure completeness and locality. The framework includes a Co-Occurrence Encoding module for robust multi-concept erasure and a visual feedback loop to address latent concept persistence. As a training-free method, Semantic Surgery adapts dynamically to each prompt, ensuring precise interventions. Extensive experiments on object, explicit content, artistic style, and multi-celebrity erasure tasks show our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. We achieve superior completeness and robustness while preserving locality and image quality (e.g., 93.58 H-score in object erasure, reducing explicit content to just 1 instance, and 8.09 H_a in style erasure with no quality degradation). This robustness also allows our framework to function as a built-in threat detection system, offering a practical solution for safer text-to-image generation.

Paperid: 263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22531.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed text understanding, yet their adaptation to specialized legal domains remains constrained by the cost of full fine-tuning. This study provides a systematic evaluation of fine tuning, parameter efficient adaptation (LoRA, QLoRA), and zero-shot prompting strategies for unfair clause detection in Terms of Service (ToS) documents, a key application in legal NLP. We finetune BERT and DistilBERT, apply 4-bit Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to models such as TinyLlama, LLaMA 3B/7B, and SaulLM, and evaluate GPT-4o and O-versions in zero-shot settings. Experiments on the CLAUDETTE-ToS benchmark and the Multilingual Scraper Corpus show that full fine-tuning achieves the strongest precision recall balance, while LoRA-based models provide competitive recall with up to 3x lower memory cost. These findings highlight practical design trade-offs for efficient and domain-adapted LLMs, contributing open baselines for fine-tuning research in legal text processing.

Paperid: 264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22251.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Prompt engineering, particularly Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, significantly enhances LLM reasoning capabilities. We introduce "Sculpting," a constrained, rule-based prompting method designed to improve upon standard CoT by reducing errors from semantic ambiguity and flawed common sense. We evaluate three prompting strategies (Zero Shot, standard CoT, and Sculpting) across three OpenAI model generations (gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4o, gpt-5) using the GSM8K mathematical reasoning benchmark (1,317 problems). Our findings reveal a "Prompting Inversion": Sculpting provides advantages on gpt-4o (97% vs. 93% for standard CoT), but becomes detrimental on gpt-5 (94.00% vs. 96.36% for CoT on full benchmark). We trace this to a "Guardrail-to-Handcuff" transition where constraints preventing common-sense errors in mid-tier models induce hyper-literalism in advanced models. Our detailed error analysis demonstrates that optimal prompting strategies must co-evolve with model capabilities, suggesting simpler prompts for more capable models.

Paperid: 265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22197.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Task-specific pre-training is essential when task representations diverge from generic pre-training features. Existing task-general pre-training EEG models struggle with complex tasks like emotion recognition due to mismatches between task-specific features and broad pre-training approaches. This work aims to develop a task-specific multi-dataset joint pre-training framework for cross-dataset emotion recognition, tackling problems of large inter-dataset distribution shifts, inconsistent emotion category definitions, and substantial inter-subject variability. We introduce a cross-dataset covariance alignment loss to align second-order statistical properties across datasets, enabling robust generalization without the need for extensive labels or per-subject calibration. To capture the long-term dependency and complex dynamics of EEG, we propose a hybrid encoder combining a Mamba-like linear attention channel encoder and a spatiotemporal dynamics model. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art large-scale EEG models by an average of 4.57% in AUROC for few-shot emotion recognition and 11.92% in accuracy for zero-shot generalization to a new dataset. Performance scales with the increase of datasets used in pre-training. Multi-dataset joint pre-training achieves a performance gain of 8.55% over single-dataset training. This work provides a scalable framework for task-specific pre-training and highlights its benefit in generalizable affective computing. Our code is available at https://github.com/ncclab-sustech/mdJPT_nips2025.

Paperid: 266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22127.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to distribution shifts caused by input corruptions. In this work, we investigate how corruptions affect CLIP's image embeddings and uncover a consistent phenomenon we term as embedding variance collapse, where both intra-class and inter-class variances shrink as corruption severity increases. We find that this collapse is closely tied to performance degradation, with inter-class variance strongly correlated with classification accuracy. To explain this phenomenon, we analyze how corruptions alter the structure of the embedding space. Our theoretical results suggest that the visual encoder tends to encode corruption-related signals, which dilute class-discriminative features and compress the representation geometry. We further show that maximizing inter-class variance, even when estimated from pseudo-labels, can provably enhance embedding quality. Based on this insight, we propose Mint, a simple test-time adaptation method that maximizes pseudo-label-based inter-class variance on the fly using a mean accumulator and a gradient accumulator. Mint operates effectively with small batch sizes and consistently improves performance across multiple corruption benchmarks and CLIP architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/baowenxuan/Mint .

Paperid: 267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21793.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) increasingly benefits from integrating 2D and 3D data, but robust cross-modal fusion remains challenging. We propose a novel unsupervised framework, Multi-Modal Attention-Driven Fusion Restoration (MAFR), which synthesises a unified latent space from RGB images and point clouds using a shared fusion encoder, followed by attention-guided, modality-specific decoders. Anomalies are localised by measuring reconstruction errors between input features and their restored counterparts. Evaluations on the MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies benchmarks demonstrate that MAFR achieves state-of-the-art results, with a mean I-AUROC of 0.972 and 0.901, respectively. The framework also exhibits strong performance in few-shot learning settings, and ablation studies confirm the critical roles of the fusion architecture and composite loss. MAFR offers a principled approach for fusing visual and geometric information, advancing the robustness and accuracy of industrial anomaly detection. Code is available at https://github.com/adabrh/MAFR

Paperid: 268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21571.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach for pretraining robotic manipulation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using a large corpus of unscripted real-life video recordings of human hand activities. Treating human hand as dexterous robot end-effector, we show that "in-the-wild" egocentric human videos without any annotations can be transformed into data formats fully aligned with existing robotic V-L-A training data in terms of task granularity and labels. This is achieved by the development of a fully-automated holistic human activity analysis approach for arbitrary human hand videos. This approach can generate atomic-level hand activity segments and their language descriptions, each accompanied with framewise 3D hand motion and camera motion. We process a large volume of egocentric videos and create a hand-VLA training dataset containing 1M episodes and 26M frames. This training data covers a wide range of objects and concepts, dexterous manipulation tasks, and environment variations in real life, vastly exceeding the coverage of existing robot data. We design a dexterous hand VLA model architecture and pretrain the model on this dataset. The model exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on completely unseen real-world observations. Additionally, fine-tuning it on a small amount of real robot action data significantly improves task success rates and generalization to novel objects in real robotic experiments. We also demonstrate the appealing scaling behavior of the model's task performance with respect to pretraining data scale. We believe this work lays a solid foundation for scalable VLA pretraining, advancing robots toward truly generalizable embodied intelligence.

Paperid: 269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21462.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot node classification on hypergraphs requires models that generalize from scarce labels while capturing high-order structures. Existing hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) effectively encode such structures but often suffer from overfitting and scalability issues due to complex, black-box architectures. In this work, we propose ZEN (Zero-Parameter Hypergraph Neural Network), a fully linear and parameter-free model that achieves both expressiveness and efficiency. Built upon a unified formulation of linearized HNNs, ZEN introduces a tractable closed-form solution for the weight matrix and a redundancy-aware propagation scheme to avoid iterative training and to eliminate redundant self information. On 11 real-world hypergraph benchmarks, ZEN consistently outperforms eight baseline models in classification accuracy while achieving up to 696x speedups over the fastest competitor. Moreover, the decision process of ZEN is fully interpretable, providing insights into the characteristic of a dataset. Our code and datasets are fully available at https://github.com/chaewoonbae/ZEN.

Paperid: 270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21323.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The alignment of vision-language representations endows current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with strong multi-modal reasoning capabilities. However, the interpretability of the alignment component remains uninvestigated due to the difficulty in mapping the semantics of multi-modal representations into a unified concept set. To address this problem, we propose VL-SAE, a sparse autoencoder that encodes vision-language representations into its hidden activations. Each neuron in its hidden layer correlates to a concept represented by semantically similar images and texts, thereby interpreting these representations with a unified concept set. To establish the neuron-concept correlation, we encourage semantically similar representations to exhibit consistent neuron activations during self-supervised training. First, to measure the semantic similarity of multi-modal representations, we perform their alignment in an explicit form based on cosine similarity. Second, we construct the VL-SAE with a distance-based encoder and two modality-specific decoders to ensure the activation consistency of semantically similar representations. Experiments across multiple VLMs (e.g., CLIP, LLaVA) demonstrate the superior capability of VL-SAE in interpreting and enhancing the vision-language alignment. For interpretation, the alignment between vision and language representations can be understood by comparing their semantics with concepts. For enhancement, the alignment can be strengthened by aligning vision-language representations at the concept level, contributing to performance improvements in downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification and hallucination elimination. Codes are available at https://github.com/ssfgunner/VL-SAE.

Paperid: 271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20888.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unified, generalizable semantic control in video generation remains a critical open challenge. Existing methods either introduce artifacts by enforcing inappropriate pixel-wise priors from structure-based controls, or rely on non-generalizable, condition-specific finetuning or task-specific architectures. We introduce Video-As-Prompt (VAP), a new paradigm that reframes this problem as in-context generation. VAP leverages a reference video as a direct semantic prompt, guiding a frozen Video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) via a plug-and-play Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) expert. This architecture prevents catastrophic forgetting and is guided by a temporally biased position embedding that eliminates spurious mapping priors for robust context retrieval. To power this approach and catalyze future research, we built VAP-Data, the largest dataset for semantic-controlled video generation with over 100K paired videos across 100 semantic conditions. As a single unified model, VAP sets a new state-of-the-art for open-source methods, achieving a 38.7% user preference rate that rivals leading condition-specific commercial models. VAP's strong zero-shot generalization and support for various downstream applications mark a significant advance toward general-purpose, controllable video generation.

Paperid: 272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20813.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents GSWorld, a robust, photo-realistic simulator for robotics manipulation that combines 3D Gaussian Splatting with physics engines. Our framework advocates "closing the loop" of developing manipulation policies with reproducible evaluation of policies learned from real-robot data and sim2real policy training without using real robots. To enable photo-realistic rendering of diverse scenes, we propose a new asset format, which we term GSDF (Gaussian Scene Description File), that infuses Gaussian-on-Mesh representation with robot URDF and other objects. With a streamlined reconstruction pipeline, we curate a database of GSDF that contains 3 robot embodiments for single-arm and bimanual manipulation, as well as more than 40 objects. Combining GSDF with physics engines, we demonstrate several immediate interesting applications: (1) learning zero-shot sim2real pixel-to-action manipulation policy with photo-realistic rendering, (2) automated high-quality DAgger data collection for adapting policies to deployment environments, (3) reproducible benchmarking of real-robot manipulation policies in simulation, (4) simulation data collection by virtual teleoperation, and (5) zero-shot sim2real visual reinforcement learning. Website: https://3dgsworld.github.io/.

Paperid: 273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20335.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Parking is a critical pillar of driving safety. While recent end-to-end (E2E) approaches have achieved promising in-domain results, robustness under domain shifts (e.g., weather and lighting changes) remains a key challenge. Rather than relying on additional data, in this paper, we propose Dino-Diffusion Parking (DDP), a domain-agnostic autonomous parking pipeline that integrates visual foundation models with diffusion-based planning to enable generalized perception and robust motion planning under distribution shifts. We train our pipeline in CARLA at regular setting and transfer it to more adversarial settings in a zero-shot fashion. Our model consistently achieves a parking success rate above 90% across all tested out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, with ablation studies confirming that both the network architecture and algorithmic design significantly enhance cross-domain performance over existing baselines. Furthermore, testing in a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) environment reconstructed from a real-world parking lot demonstrates promising sim-to-real transfer.

Paperid: 274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20264.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) are capable of retrieving high-performing policy for any reward function specified directly at test-time, commonly referred to as zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL). While this is a very efficient process in terms of compute, it can be less so in terms of data: as a standard assumption, BFMs require computing rewards over a non-negligible inference dataset, assuming either access to a functional form of rewards, or significant labeling efforts. To alleviate these limitations, we tackle the problem of task inference purely through interaction with the environment at test-time. We propose OpTI-BFM, an optimistic decision criterion that directly models uncertainty over reward functions and guides BFMs in data collection for task inference. Formally, we provide a regret bound for well-trained BFMs through a direct connection to upper-confidence algorithms for linear bandits. Empirically, we evaluate OpTI-BFM on established zero-shot benchmarks, and observe that it enables successor-features-based BFMs to identify and optimize an unseen reward function in a handful of episodes with minimal compute overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/ThomasRupf/opti-bfm.

Paperid: 275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20162.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel attribute-object compositions based on the knowledge learned from seen ones. Existing methods suffer from performance degradation caused by the distribution shift of label space at test time, which stems from the inclusion of unseen compositions recombined from attributes and objects. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel approach that accumulates comprehensive knowledge in both textual and visual modalities from unsupervised data to update multimodal prototypes at test time. Building on this, we further design an adaptive update weight to control the degree of prototype adjustment, enabling the model to flexibly adapt to distribution shift during testing. Moreover, a dynamic priority queue is introduced that stores high-confidence images to acquire visual knowledge from historical images for inference. Considering the semantic consistency of multimodal knowledge, we align textual and visual prototypes by multimodal collaborative representation learning. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets under both closed-world and open-world settings. Code will be available at https://github.com/xud-yan/TOMCAT .

Paperid: 276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19710.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent boom of large pre-trained models witnesses remarkable success in developing foundation models (FMs) for time series forecasting. Despite impressive performance across diverse downstream forecasting tasks, existing time series FMs possess massive network architectures and require substantial pre-training on large-scale datasets, which significantly hinders their deployment in resource-constrained environments. In response to this growing tension between versatility and affordability, we propose SEMPO, a novel lightweight foundation model that requires pretraining on relatively small-scale data, yet exhibits strong general time series forecasting. Concretely, SEMPO comprises two key modules: 1) energy-aware SpEctral decomposition module, that substantially improves the utilization of pre-training data by modeling not only the high-energy frequency signals but also the low-energy yet informative frequency signals that are ignored in current methods; and 2) Mixture-of-PrOmpts enabled Transformer, that learns heterogeneous temporal patterns through small dataset-specific prompts and adaptively routes time series tokens to prompt-based experts for parameter-efficient model adaptation across different datasets and domains. Equipped with these modules, SEMPO significantly reduces both pre-training data scale and model size, while achieving strong generalization. Extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmarks covering 16 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SEMPO in both zero-shot and few-shot forecasting scenarios compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SEMPO.

Paperid: 277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19599.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown remarkable zero-shot performance in medical image understanding, yet their grounding ability, the extent to which textual concepts align with visual evidence, remains underexplored. In the medical domain, however, reliable grounding is essential for interpretability and clinical adoption. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for evaluating cross-modal interpretability in chest X-rays across seven CLIP-style VLM variants. We generate visual explanations using cross-attention and similarity-based localization maps, and quantitatively assess their alignment with radiologist-annotated regions across multiple pathologies. Our analysis reveals that: (1) while all VLM variants demonstrate reasonable localization for large and well-defined pathologies, their performance substantially degrades for small or diffuse lesions; (2) models that are pretrained on chest X-ray-specific datasets exhibit improved alignment compared to those trained on general-domain data. (3) The overall recognition ability and grounding ability of the model are strongly correlated. These findings underscore that current VLMs, despite their strong recognition ability, still fall short in clinically reliable grounding, highlighting the need for targeted interpretability benchmarks before deployment in medical practice. XBench code is available at https://github.com/Roypic/Benchmarkingattention

Paperid: 278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19410.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Identifying which text spans refer to entities -- mention detection -- is both foundational for information extraction and a known performance bottleneck. We introduce ToMMeR, a lightweight model (<300K parameters) probing mention detection capabilities from early LLM layers. Across 13 NER benchmarks, ToMMeR achieves 93\% recall zero-shot, with over 90\% precision using an LLM as a judge showing that ToMMeR rarely produces spurious predictions despite high recall. Cross-model analysis reveals that diverse architectures (14M-15B parameters) converge on similar mention boundaries (DICE >75\%), confirming that mention detection emerges naturally from language modeling. When extended with span classification heads, ToMMeR achieves near SOTA NER performance (80-87\% F1 on standard benchmarks). Our work provides evidence that structured entity representations exist in early transformer layers and can be efficiently recovered with minimal parameters.

Paperid: 279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18714.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper addresses metric 3D reconstruction of indoor scenes by exploiting their inherent geometric regularities with compact representations. Using planar 3D primitives - a well-suited representation for man-made environments - we introduce PLANA3R, a pose-free framework for metric Planar 3D Reconstruction from unposed two-view images. Our approach employs Vision Transformers to extract a set of sparse planar primitives, estimate relative camera poses, and supervise geometry learning via planar splatting, where gradients are propagated through high-resolution rendered depth and normal maps of primitives. Unlike prior feedforward methods that require 3D plane annotations during training, PLANA3R learns planar 3D structures without explicit plane supervision, enabling scalable training on large-scale stereo datasets using only depth and normal annotations. We validate PLANA3R on multiple indoor-scene datasets with metric supervision and demonstrate strong generalization to out-of-domain indoor environments across diverse tasks under metric evaluation protocols, including 3D surface reconstruction, depth estimation, and relative pose estimation. Furthermore, by formulating with planar 3D representation, our method emerges with the ability for accurate plane segmentation. The project page is available at https://lck666666.github.io/plana3r

Paperid: 280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18475.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The extraction of pharmacological knowledge from regulatory documents has become a key focus in biomedical natural language processing, with applications ranging from adverse event monitoring to AI-assisted clinical decision support. However, research in this field has predominantly relied on English-language corpora such as DrugBank, leaving a significant gap in resources tailored to other healthcare systems. To address this limitation, we introduce DART (Drug Annotation from Regulatory Texts), the first structured corpus of Italian Summaries of Product Characteristics derived from the official repository of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA). The dataset was built through a reproducible pipeline encompassing web-scale document retrieval, semantic segmentation of regulatory sections, and clinical summarization using a few-shot-tuned large language model with low-temperature decoding. DART provides structured information on key pharmacological domains such as indications, adverse drug reactions, and drug-drug interactions. To validate its utility, we implemented an LLM-based drug interaction checker that leverages the dataset to infer clinically meaningful interactions. Experimental results show that instruction-tuned LLMs can accurately infer potential interactions and their clinical implications when grounded in the structured textual fields of DART. We publicly release our code on GitHub: https://github.com/PRAISELab-PicusLab/DART.

Paperid: 281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18287.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Identity preserving editing of faces is a generative task that enables modifying the illumination, adding/removing eyeglasses, face aging, editing hairstyles, modifying expression etc., while preserving the identity of the face. Recent progress in 2D generative models have enabled photorealistic editing of faces using simple techniques leveraging the compositionality in GANs. However, identity preserving editing for 3D faces with a given set of attributes is a challenging task as the generative model must reason about view consistency from multiple poses and render a realistic 3D face. Further, 3D portrait editing requires large-scale attribute labelled datasets and presents a trade-off between editability in low-resolution and inflexibility to editing in high resolution. In this work, we aim to alleviate some of the constraints in editing 3D faces by identifying latent space directions that correspond to photorealistic edits. To address this, we present a method that builds on recent advancements in 3D-aware deep generative models and 2D portrait editing techniques to perform efficient few-shot identity preserving attribute editing for 3D-aware generative models. We aim to show from experimental results that using just ten or fewer labelled images of an attribute is sufficient to estimate edit directions in the latent space that correspond to 3D-aware attribute editing. In this work, we leverage an existing face dataset with masks to obtain the synthetic images for few attribute examples required for estimating the edit directions. Further, to demonstrate the linearity of edits, we investigate one-shot stylization by performing sequential editing and use the (2D) Attribute Style Manipulation (ASM) technique to investigate a continuous style manifold for 3D consistent identity preserving face aging. Code and results are available at: https://vishal-vinod.github.io/gmpi-edit/

Paperid: 282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18244.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot 3D object classification is crucial for real-world applications like autonomous driving, however it is often hindered by a significant domain gap between the synthetic data used for training and the sparse, noisy LiDAR scans encountered in the real-world. Current methods trained solely on synthetic data fail to generalize to outdoor scenes, while those trained only on real data lack the semantic diversity to recognize rare or unseen objects. We introduce BlendCLIP, a multimodal pretraining framework that bridges this synthetic-to-real gap by strategically combining the strengths of both domains. We first propose a pipeline to generate a large-scale dataset of object-level triplets -- consisting of a point cloud, image, and text description -- mined directly from real-world driving data and human annotated 3D boxes. Our core contribution is a curriculum-based data mixing strategy that first grounds the model in the semantically rich synthetic CAD data before progressively adapting it to the specific characteristics of real-world scans. Our experiments show that our approach is highly label-efficient: introducing as few as 1.5\% real-world samples per batch into training boosts zero-shot accuracy on the nuScenes benchmark by 27\%. Consequently, our final model achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging outdoor datasets like nuScenes and TruckScenes, improving over the best prior method by 19.3\% on nuScenes, while maintaining strong generalization on diverse synthetic benchmarks. Our findings demonstrate that effective domain adaptation, not full-scale real-world annotation, is the key to unlocking robust open-vocabulary 3D perception. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance on https://github.com/kesu1/BlendCLIP.

Paperid: 283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18172.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate 3D reconstruction of lunar surfaces is essential for space exploration. However, existing stereo vision reconstruction methods struggle in this context due to the Moon's lack of texture, difficult lighting variations, and atypical orbital trajectories. State-of-the-art deep learning models, trained on human-scale datasets, have rarely been tested on planetary imagery and cannot be transferred directly to lunar conditions. To address this issue, we introduce LunarStereo, the first open dataset of photorealistic stereo image pairs of the Moon, simulated using ray tracing based on high-resolution topography and reflectance models. It covers diverse altitudes, lighting conditions, and viewing angles around the lunar South Pole, offering physically grounded supervision for 3D reconstruction tasks. Based on this dataset, we adapt the MASt3R model to the lunar domain through fine-tuning on LunarStereo. We validate our approach through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on both synthetic and real lunar data, evaluating 3D surface reconstruction and relative pose estimation. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real lunar data validate the approach, demonstrating significant improvements over zero-shot baselines and paving the way for robust cross-scale generalization in extraterrestrial environments.

Paperid: 284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17725.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance in long-context understanding. However, current long-context LLM benchmarks are limited by rigid context length, labor-intensive annotation, and the pressing challenge of label leakage issues during LLM training. Therefore, we propose \textsc{AcademicEval}, a live benchmark for evaluating LLMs over long-context generation tasks. \textsc{AcademicEval} adopts papers on arXiv to introduce several academic writing tasks with long-context inputs, \textit{i.e.}, \textsc{Title}, \textsc{Abstract}, \textsc{Introduction}, and \textsc{Related Work}, which cover a wide range of abstraction levels and require no manual labeling. Moreover, \textsc{AcademicEval} integrates high-quality and expert-curated few-shot demonstrations from a collected co-author graph to enable flexible context length. Especially, \textsc{AcademicEval} features an efficient live evaluation, ensuring no label leakage. We conduct a holistic evaluation on \textsc{AcademicEval}, and the results illustrate that LLMs perform poorly on tasks with hierarchical abstraction levels and tend to struggle with long few-shot demonstrations, highlighting the challenge of our benchmark. Through experimental analysis, we also reveal some insights for enhancing LLMs' long-context modeling capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/AcademicEval

Paperid: 285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human communication combines speech with expressive nonverbal cues such as hand gestures that serve manifold communicative functions. Yet, current generative gesture generation approaches are restricted to simple, repetitive beat gestures that accompany the rhythm of speaking but do not contribute to communicating semantic meaning. This paper tackles a core challenge in co-speech gesture synthesis: generating iconic or deictic gestures that are semantically coherent with a verbal utterance. Such gestures cannot be derived from language input alone, which inherently lacks the visual meaning that is often carried autonomously by gestures. We therefore introduce a zero-shot system that generates gestures from a given language input and additionally is informed by imagistic input, without manual annotation or human intervention. Our method integrates an image analysis pipeline that extracts key object properties such as shape, symmetry, and alignment, together with a semantic matching module that links these visual details to spoken text. An inverse kinematics engine then synthesizes iconic and deictic gestures and combines them with co-generated natural beat gestures for coherent multimodal communication. A comprehensive user study demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In scenarios where speech alone was ambiguous, gestures generated by our system significantly improved participants' ability to identify object properties, confirming their interpretability and communicative value. While challenges remain in representing complex shapes, our results highlight the importance of context-aware semantic gestures for creating expressive and collaborative virtual agents or avatars, marking a substantial step forward towards efficient and robust, embodied human-agent interaction. More information and example videos are available here: https://review-anon-io.github.io/ImaGGen.github.io/

Paperid: 286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17489.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting AI-involved text is essential for combating misinformation, plagiarism, and academic misconduct. However, AI text generation includes diverse collaborative processes (AI-written text edited by humans, human-written text edited by AI, and AI-generated text refined by other AI), where various or even new LLMs could be involved. Texts generated through these varied processes exhibit complex characteristics, presenting significant challenges for detection. Current methods model these processes rather crudely, primarily employing binary classification (purely human vs. AI-involved) or multi-classification (treating human-AI collaboration as a new class). We observe that representations of texts generated through different processes exhibit inherent clustering relationships. Therefore, we propose DETree, a novel approach that models the relationships among different processes as a Hierarchical Affinity Tree structure, and introduces a specialized loss function that aligns text representations with this tree. To facilitate this learning, we developed RealBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that automatically incorporates a wide spectrum of hybrid texts produced through various human-AI collaboration processes. Our method improves performance in hybrid text detection tasks and significantly enhances robustness and generalization in out-of-distribution scenarios, particularly in few-shot learning conditions, further demonstrating the promise of training-based approaches in OOD settings. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DETree.

Paperid: 287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16989.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Given a task and a set of steps composing it, Video Step Grounding (VSG) aims to detect which steps are performed in a video. Standard approaches for this task require a labeled training set (e.g., with step-level annotations or narrations), which may be costly to collect. Moreover, they process the full video offline, limiting their applications for scenarios requiring online decisions. Thus, in this work, we explore how to perform VSG online and without training. We achieve this by exploiting the zero-shot capabilities of recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). In particular, we use LMMs to predict the step associated with a restricted set of frames, without access to the whole video. We show that this online strategy without task-specific tuning outperforms offline and training-based models. Motivated by this finding, we develop Bayesian Grounding with Large Multimodal Models (BaGLM), further injecting knowledge of past frames into the LMM-based predictions. BaGLM exploits Bayesian filtering principles, modeling step transitions via (i) a dependency matrix extracted through large language models and (ii) an estimation of step progress. Experiments on three datasets show superior performance of BaGLM over state-of-the-art training-based offline methods.

Paperid: 288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16518.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advances in open-vocabulary semantic mapping and object navigation have enabled robots to perform an informed search of their environment for an arbitrary object. However, such zero-shot object navigation is typically designed for simple queries with an object name like "television" or "blue rug". Here, we consider more complex free-text queries with spatial relationships, such as "find the remote on the table" while still leveraging robustness of a semantic map. We present DIV-Nav, a real-time navigation system that efficiently addresses this problem through a series of relaxations: i) Decomposing natural language instructions with complex spatial constraints into simpler object-level queries on a semantic map, ii) computing the Intersection of individual semantic belief maps to identify regions where all objects co-exist, and iii) Validating the discovered objects against the original, complex spatial constrains via a LVLM. We further investigate how to adapt the frontier exploration objectives of online semantic mapping to such spatial search queries to more effectively guide the search process. We validate our system through extensive experiments on the MultiON benchmark and real-world deployment on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot using a Jetson Orin AGX. More details and videos are available at https://anonsub42.github.io/reponame/

Paperid: 289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16370.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Social manufacturing leverages community collaboration and scattered resources to realize mass individualization in modern industry. However, this paradigm shift also introduces substantial challenges in quality control, particularly in defect detection. The main difficulties stem from three aspects. First, products often have highly customized configurations. Second, production typically involves fragmented, small-batch orders. Third, imaging environments vary considerably across distributed sites. To overcome the scarcity of real-world datasets and tailored algorithms, we introduce the Mass Individualization Robust Anomaly Detection (MIRAD) dataset. As the first benchmark explicitly designed for anomaly detection in social manufacturing, MIRAD captures three critical dimensions of this domain: (1) diverse individualized products with large intra-class variation, (2) data collected from six geographically dispersed manufacturing nodes, and (3) substantial imaging heterogeneity, including variations in lighting, background, and motion conditions. We then conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art (SOTA) anomaly detection methods on MIRAD, covering one-class, multi-class, and zero-shot approaches. Results show a significant performance drop across all models compared with conventional benchmarks, highlighting the unresolved complexities of defect detection in real-world individualized production. By bridging industrial requirements and academic research, MIRAD provides a realistic foundation for developing robust quality control solutions essential for Industry 5.0. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/wu33learn/MIRAD.

Paperid: 290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16036.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The robust causal capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold the potential of detecting defective objects in Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD). However, most traditional IAD methods lack the ability to provide multi-turn human-machine dialogues and detailed descriptions, such as the color of objects, the shape of an anomaly, or specific types of anomalies. At the same time, methods based on large pre-trained models have not fully stimulated the ability of large models in anomaly detection tasks. In this paper, we explore the combination of rich text semantics with both image-level and pixel-level information from images and propose IAD-GPT, a novel paradigm based on MLLMs for IAD. We employ Abnormal Prompt Generator (APG) to generate detailed anomaly prompts for specific objects. These specific prompts from the large language model (LLM) are used to activate the detection and segmentation functions of the pre-trained visual-language model (i.e., CLIP). To enhance the visual grounding ability of MLLMs, we propose Text-Guided Enhancer, wherein image features interact with normal and abnormal text prompts to dynamically select enhancement pathways, which enables language models to focus on specific aspects of visual data, enhancing their ability to accurately interpret and respond to anomalies within images. Moreover, we design a Multi-Mask Fusion module to incorporate mask as expert knowledge, which enhances the LLM's perception of pixel-level anomalies. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA datasets demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised and few-shot anomaly detection and segmentation tasks, such as MVTec-AD and VisA datasets. The codes are available at \href{https://github.com/LiZeWen1225/IAD-GPT}{https://github.com/LiZeWen1225/IAD-GPT}.

Paperid: 291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15683.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Dense Retrieval Models (DRMs) are a prominent development in Information Retrieval (IR). A key challenge with these neural Transformer-based models is that they often struggle to generalize beyond the specific tasks and domains they were trained on. To address this challenge, prior research in IR incorporated the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework within each Transformer layer of a DRM, which, though effective, substantially increased the number of additional parameters. In this paper, we propose a more efficient design, which introduces a single MoE block (SB-MoE) after the final Transformer layer. To assess the retrieval effectiveness of SB-MoE, we perform an empirical evaluation across three IR tasks. Our experiments involve two evaluation setups, aiming to assess both in-domain effectiveness and the model's zero-shot generalizability. In the first setup, we fine-tune SB-MoE with four different underlying DRMs on seven IR benchmarks and evaluate them on their respective test sets. In the second setup, we fine-tune SB-MoE on MSMARCO and perform zero-shot evaluation on thirteen BEIR datasets. Additionally, we perform further experiments to analyze the model's dependency on its hyperparameters (i.e., the number of employed and activated experts) and investigate how this variation affects SB-MoE's performance. The obtained results show that SB-MoE is particularly effective for DRMs with lightweight base models, such as TinyBERT and BERT-Small, consistently exceeding standard model fine-tuning across benchmarks. For DRMs with more parameters, such as BERT-Base and Contriever, our model requires a larger number of training samples to achieve improved retrieval performance. Our code is available online at: https://github.com/FaySokli/SB-MoE.

Paperid: 292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15557.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents ClapperText, a benchmark dataset for handwritten and printed text recognition in visually degraded and low-resource settings. The dataset is derived from 127 World War II-era archival video segments containing clapperboards that record structured production metadata such as date, location, and camera-operator identity. ClapperText includes 9,813 annotated frames and 94,573 word-level text instances, 67% of which are handwritten and 1,566 are partially occluded. Each instance includes transcription, semantic category, text type, and occlusion status, with annotations available as rotated bounding boxes represented as 4-point polygons to support spatially precise OCR applications. Recognizing clapperboard text poses significant challenges, including motion blur, handwriting variation, exposure fluctuations, and cluttered backgrounds, mirroring broader challenges in historical document analysis where structured content appears in degraded, non-standard forms. We provide both full-frame annotations and cropped word images to support downstream tasks. Using a consistent per-video evaluation protocol, we benchmark six representative recognition and seven detection models under zero-shot and fine-tuned conditions. Despite the small training set (18 videos), fine-tuning leads to substantial performance gains, highlighting ClapperText's suitability for few-shot learning scenarios. The dataset offers a realistic and culturally grounded resource for advancing robust OCR and document understanding in low-resource archival contexts. The dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/linty5/ClapperText.

Paperid: 293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15382.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent development of zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has opened a new avenue for learning pre-trained generalist policies that can adapt to arbitrary new tasks in a zero-shot manner. While the popular Forward-Backward representations (FB) and related methods have shown promise in zero-shot RL, we empirically found that their modeling lacks expressivity and that extrapolation errors caused by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions during offline learning sometimes lead to biased representations, ultimately resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose Behavior-REgularizEd Zero-shot RL with Expressivity enhancement (BREEZE), an upgraded FB-based framework that simultaneously enhances learning stability, policy extraction capability, and representation learning quality. BREEZE introduces behavioral regularization in zero-shot RL policy learning, transforming policy optimization into a stable in-sample learning paradigm. Additionally, BREEZE extracts the policy using a task-conditioned diffusion model, enabling the generation of high-quality and multimodal action distributions in zero-shot RL settings. Moreover, BREEZE employs expressive attention-based architectures for representation modeling to capture the complex relationships between environmental dynamics. Extensive experiments on ExORL and D4RL Kitchen demonstrate that BREEZE achieves the best or near-the-best performance while exhibiting superior robustness compared to prior offline zero-shot RL methods. The official implementation is available at: https://github.com/Whiterrrrr/BREEZE.

Paperid: 294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14978.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent image editing models have achieved impressive results while following natural language editing instructions, but they rely on supervised fine-tuning with large datasets of input-target pairs. This is a critical bottleneck, as such naturally occurring pairs are hard to curate at scale. Current workarounds use synthetic training pairs that leverage the zero-shot capabilities of existing models. However, this can propagate and magnify the artifacts of the pretrained model into the final trained model. In this work, we present a new training paradigm that eliminates the need for paired data entirely. Our approach directly optimizes a few-step diffusion model by unrolling it during training and leveraging feedback from vision-language models (VLMs). For each input and editing instruction, the VLM evaluates if an edit follows the instruction and preserves unchanged content, providing direct gradients for end-to-end optimization. To ensure visual fidelity, we incorporate distribution matching loss (DMD), which constrains generated images to remain within the image manifold learned by pretrained models. We evaluate our method on standard benchmarks and include an extensive ablation study. Without any paired data, our method performs on par with various image editing diffusion models trained on extensive supervised paired data, under the few-step setting. Given the same VLM as the reward model, we also outperform RL-based techniques like Flow-GRPO.

Paperid: 295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14965.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real-world robots localize objects from natural-language instructions while scenes around them keep changing. Yet most of the existing 3D visual grounding (3DVG) method still assumes a reconstructed and up-to-date point cloud, an assumption that forces costly re-scans and hinders deployment. We argue that 3DVG should be formulated as an active, memory-driven problem, and we introduce ChangingGrounding, the first benchmark that explicitly measures how well an agent can exploit past observations, explore only where needed, and still deliver precise 3D boxes in changing scenes. To set a strong reference point, we also propose Mem-ChangingGrounder, a zero-shot method for this task that marries cross-modal retrieval with lightweight multi-view fusion: it identifies the object type implied by the query, retrieves relevant memories to guide actions, then explores the target efficiently in the scene, falls back when previous operations are invalid, performs multi-view scanning of the target, and projects the fused evidence from multi-view scans to get accurate object bounding boxes. We evaluate different baselines on ChangingGrounding, and our Mem-ChangingGrounder achieves the highest localization accuracy while greatly reducing exploration cost. We hope this benchmark and method catalyze a shift toward practical, memory-centric 3DVG research for real-world applications. Project page: https://hm123450.github.io/CGB/ .

Paperid: 296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14830.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real-world robotic manipulation in homes and factories demands reliability, efficiency, and robustness that approach or surpass the performance of skilled human operators. We present RL-100, a real-world reinforcement learning framework built on diffusion-based visuomotor policies. RL-100 unifies imitation and reinforcement learning under a single PPO-style objective applied within the denoising process, yielding conservative and stable policy improvements across both offline and online stages. To meet deployment latency constraints, we employ a lightweight consistency distillation procedure that compresses multi-step diffusion into a one-step controller for high-frequency control. The framework is task-, embodiment-, and representation-agnostic, and supports both single-action outputs and action-chunking control. We evaluate RL-100 on seven diverse real-robot manipulation tasks, ranging from dynamic pushing and agile bowling to pouring, cloth folding, unscrewing, and multi-stage juicing. RL-100 attains 100% success across evaluated trials, achieving 900 out of 900 successful episodes, including up to 250 out of 250 consecutive trials on one task, and matches or surpasses expert teleoperators in time-to-completion. Without retraining, a single policy attains approximately 90% zero-shot success under environmental and dynamics shifts, adapts in a few-shot regime to significant task variations (86.7%), and remains robust to aggressive human perturbations (about 95%). In a public shopping-mall deployment, the juicing robot served random customers continuously for roughly seven hours without failure. Together, these results suggest a practical path toward deployment-ready robot learning: start from human priors, align training objectives with human-grounded metrics, and reliably extend performance beyond human demonstrations.

Paperid: 297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14630.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Representation Tokenizer (RepTok), a generative modeling framework that represents an image using a single continuous latent token obtained from self-supervised vision transformers. Building on a pre-trained SSL encoder, we fine-tune only the semantic token embedding and pair it with a generative decoder trained jointly using a standard flow matching objective. This adaptation enriches the token with low-level, reconstruction-relevant details, enabling faithful image reconstruction. To preserve the favorable geometry of the original SSL space, we add a cosine-similarity loss that regularizes the adapted token, ensuring the latent space remains smooth and suitable for generation. Our single-token formulation resolves spatial redundancies of 2D latent spaces and significantly reduces training costs. Despite its simplicity and efficiency, RepTok achieves competitive results on class-conditional ImageNet generation and naturally extends to text-to-image synthesis, reaching competitive zero-shot performance on MS-COCO under extremely limited training budgets. Our findings highlight the potential of fine-tuned SSL representations as compact and effective latent spaces for efficient generative modeling.

Paperid: 298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14305.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mathematical reasoning remains one of the most challenging domains for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only linguistic understanding but also structured logical deduction and numerical precision. While recent LLMs demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning abilities, their mathematical competence across diverse languages remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on English or a narrow subset of high-resource languages, leaving significant gaps in assessing multilingual and cross-lingual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we introduce MathMist, a parallel multilingual benchmark for mathematical problem solving and reasoning. MathMist encompasses over 21K aligned question-answer pairs across seven languages, representing a balanced coverage of high-, medium-, and low-resource linguistic settings. The dataset captures linguistic variety, multiple types of problem settings, and solution synthesizing capabilities. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including open-source small and medium LLMs, proprietary systems, and multilingual-reasoning-focused models, under zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), and code-switched reasoning paradigms. Our results reveal persistent deficiencies in LLMs' ability to perform consistent and interpretable mathematical reasoning across languages, with pronounced degradation in low-resource settings. All the codes and data are available at GitHub: https://github.com/mahbubhimel/MathMist

Paperid: 299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14286.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Early event prediction (EEP) systems continuously estimate a patient's imminent risk to support clinical decision-making. For bedside trust, risk trajectories must be accurate and temporally stable, shifting only with new, relevant evidence. However, current benchmarks (a) ignore stability of risk scores and (b) evaluate mainly on tabular inputs, leaving trajectory behavior untested. To address this gap, we introduce CAREBench, an EEP benchmark that evaluates deployability using multi-modal inputs-tabular EHR, ECG waveforms, and clinical text-and assesses temporal stability alongside predictive accuracy. We propose a stability metric that quantifies short-term variability in per-patient risk and penalizes abrupt oscillations based on local-Lipschitz constants. CAREBench spans six prediction tasks such as sepsis onset and compares classical learners, deep sequence models, and zero-shot LLMs. Across tasks, existing methods, especially LLMs, struggle to jointly optimize accuracy and stability, with notably poor recall at high-precision operating points. These results highlight the need for models that produce evidence-aligned, stable trajectories to earn clinician trust in continuous monitoring settings. (Code: https://github.com/SeewonChoi/CAREBench.)

Paperid: 300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13869.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) in the context of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) remains a challenging problem, particularly when it comes to learn from a few-shot (FS) samples without catastrophic forgetting. Current most effective state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, like LFS-GAN, introduce a non-negligible quantity of new weights at each training iteration, which would become significant when considering the long term. For this reason, this paper introduces \textcolor{red}{\textbf{\underline{c}}}ontinual few-sh\textcolor{red}{\textbf{\underline{o}}}t learning with \textcolor{red}{\textbf{\underline{lo}}}w-\textcolor{red}{\textbf{\underline{r}}}ank adaptation in GANs named CoLoR-GAN, a framework designed to handle both FS and CL together, leveraging low-rank tensors to efficiently adapt the model to target tasks while reducing even more the number of parameters required. Applying a vanilla LoRA implementation already permitted us to obtain pretty good results. In order to optimize even further the size of the adapters, we challenged LoRA limits introducing a LoRA in LoRA (LLoRA) technique for convolutional layers. Finally, aware of the criticality linked to the choice of the hyperparameters of LoRA, we provide an empirical study to easily find the best ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoLoR-GAN through experiments on several benchmark CL and FS tasks and show that our model is efficient, reaching SOTA performance but with a number of resources enormously reduced. Source code is available on \href{https://github.com/munsifali11/CoLoR-GAN}{Github.

Paperid: 301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13660.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current 3D gaze estimation methods struggle to generalize across diverse data domains, primarily due to i) the scarcity of annotated datasets, and ii) the insufficient diversity of labeled data. In this work, we present OmniGaze, a semi-supervised framework for 3D gaze estimation, which utilizes large-scale unlabeled data collected from diverse and unconstrained real-world environments to mitigate domain bias and generalize gaze estimation in the wild. First, we build a diverse collection of unlabeled facial images, varying in facial appearances, background environments, illumination conditions, head poses, and eye occlusions. In order to leverage unlabeled data spanning a broader distribution, OmniGaze adopts a standard pseudo-labeling strategy and devises a reward model to assess the reliability of pseudo labels. Beyond pseudo labels as 3D direction vectors, the reward model also incorporates visual embeddings extracted by an off-the-shelf visual encoder and semantic cues from gaze perspective generated by prompting a Multimodal Large Language Model to compute confidence scores. Then, these scores are utilized to select high-quality pseudo labels and weight them for loss computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniGaze achieves state-of-the-art performance on five datasets under both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Furthermore, we also evaluate the efficacy of OmniGaze as a scalable data engine for gaze estimation, which exhibits robust zero-shot generalization on four unseen datasets.

Paperid: 302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12864.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed as the reasoning engines for agentic AI systems, yet they exhibit a critical flaw: a rigid adherence to explicit rules that leads to decisions misaligned with human common sense and intent. This "rule-rigidity" is a significant barrier to building trustworthy autonomous agents. While prior work has shown that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human explanations can mitigate this issue, SFT is computationally expensive and inaccessible to many practitioners. To address this gap, we introduce the Rule-Intent Distinction (RID) Framework, a novel, low-compute meta-prompting technique designed to elicit human-aligned exception handling in LLMs in a zero-shot manner. The RID framework provides the model with a structured cognitive schema for deconstructing tasks, classifying rules, weighing conflicting outcomes, and justifying its final decision. We evaluated the RID framework against baseline and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting on a custom benchmark of 20 scenarios requiring nuanced judgment across diverse domains. Our human-verified results demonstrate that the RID framework significantly improves performance, achieving a 95% Human Alignment Score (HAS), compared to 80% for the baseline and 75% for CoT. Furthermore, it consistently produces higher-quality, intent-driven reasoning. This work presents a practical, accessible, and effective method for steering LLMs from literal instruction-following to liberal, goal-oriented reasoning, paving the way for more reliable and pragmatic AI agents.

Paperid: 303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12789.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although recent advances in visual generation have been remarkable, most existing architectures still depend on distinct encoders for images and text. This separation constrains diffusion models' ability to perform cross-modal reasoning and knowledge transfer. Prior attempts to bridge this gap often use the last layer information from VLM, employ multiple visual encoders, or train large unified models jointly for text and image generation, which demands substantial computational resources and large-scale data, limiting its accessibility.We present UniFusion, a diffusion-based generative model conditioned on a frozen large vision-language model (VLM) that serves as a unified multimodal encoder. At the core of UniFusion is the Layerwise Attention Pooling (LAP) mechanism that extracts both high level semantics and low level details from text and visual tokens of a frozen VLM to condition a diffusion generative model. We demonstrate that LAP outperforms other shallow fusion architectures on text-image alignment for generation and faithful transfer of visual information from VLM to the diffusion model which is key for editing. We propose VLM-Enabled Rewriting Injection with Flexibile Inference (VERIFI), which conditions a diffusion transformer (DiT) only on the text tokens generated by the VLM during in-model prompt rewriting. VERIFI combines the alignment of the conditioning distribution with the VLM's reasoning capabilities for increased capabilities and flexibility at inference. In addition, finetuning on editing task not only improves text-image alignment for generation, indicative of cross-modality knowledge transfer, but also exhibits tremendous generalization capabilities. Our model when trained on single image editing, zero-shot generalizes to multiple image references further motivating the unified encoder design of UniFusion.

Paperid: 304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12686.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Abnormal stop detection (ASD) in intercity coach transportation is critical for ensuring passenger safety, operational reliability, and regulatory compliance. However, two key challenges hinder ASD effectiveness: sparse GPS trajectories, which obscure short or unauthorized stops, and limited labeled data, which restricts supervised learning. Existing methods often assume dense sampling or regular movement patterns, limiting their applicability. To address data sparsity, we propose a Sparsity-Aware Segmentation (SAS) method that adaptively defines segment boundaries based on local spatial-temporal density. Building upon these segments, we introduce three domain-specific indicators to capture abnormal stop behaviors. To further mitigate the impact of sparsity, we develop Locally Temporal-Indicator Guided Adjustment (LTIGA), which smooths these indicators via local similarity graphs. To overcome label scarcity, we construct a spatial-temporal graph where each segment is a node with LTIGA-refined features. We apply label propagation to expand weak supervision across the graph, followed by a GCN to learn relational patterns. A final self-training module incorporates high-confidence pseudo-labels to iteratively improve predictions. Experiments on real-world coach data show an AUC of 0.854 and AP of 0.866 using only 10 labeled instances, outperforming prior methods. The code and dataset are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/pangjunbiao/Abnormal-Stop-Detection-SSL.git}

Paperid: 305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12461.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, various approaches have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) for incorporating textual information about items into recommender systems. Existing methods primarily focus on either fine-tuning LLMs to generate recommendations or integrating LLM-based embeddings into downstream models. In this work, we follow the latter direction and propose \textbf{TextGCN}, which applies parameter-free graph convolution layers directly over LLM-based item-title embeddings, instead of learning ID-based embeddings as in traditional methods. By combining language semantics with graph message passing, this architecture achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, significantly outperforming prior approaches. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{TextGCN-MLP}, which extends TextGCN with a trainable multilayer perceptron trained using a contrastive loss, achieving state-of-the-art in-domain performance on recommendation benchmarks. However, the zero-shot performance of TextGCN-MLP remains lower than that of TextGCN, highlighting the trade-off between in-domain specialization and zero-shot generalization. We release our code on github at \href{https://github.com/ChernovAndrey/TFCE}{github.com/ChernovAndrey/TFCE}.

Paperid: 306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11646.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Autoregressive (AR) frameworks have recently achieved remarkable progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) by leveraging discrete speech tokens and large language model techniques. Despite their success, existing AR-based zero-shot TTS systems face two critical limitations: (i) an inherent speed-quality trade-off, as sequential token generation either reduces frame rates at the cost of expressiveness or enriches tokens at the cost of efficiency, and (ii) a text-oriented supervision mismatch, as cross-entropy loss penalizes token errors uniformly without considering the fine-grained acoustic similarity among adjacent tokens. To address these challenges, we propose BridgeTTS, a novel AR-TTS framework built upon the dual speech representation paradigm BridgeCode. BridgeTTS reduces AR iterations by predicting sparse tokens while reconstructing rich continuous features for high-quality synthesis. Joint optimization of token-level and feature-level objectives further enhances naturalness and intelligibility. Experiments demonstrate that BridgeTTS achieves competitive quality and speaker similarity while significantly accelerating synthesis. Speech demos are available at https://test1562.github.io/demo/.

Paperid: 307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11566.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scooping items with tools such as spoons and ladles is common in daily life, ranging from assistive feeding to retrieving items from environmental disaster sites. However, developing a general and autonomous robotic scooping policy is challenging since it requires reasoning about complex tool-object interactions. Furthermore, scooping often involves manipulating deformable objects, such as granular media or liquids, which is challenging due to their infinite-dimensional configuration spaces and complex dynamics. We propose a method, SCOOP'D, which uses simulation from OmniGibson (built on NVIDIA Omniverse) to collect scooping demonstrations using algorithmic procedures that rely on privileged state information. Then, we use generative policies via diffusion to imitate demonstrations from observational input. We directly apply the learned policy in diverse real-world scenarios, testing its performance on various item quantities, item characteristics, and container types. In zero-shot deployment, our method demonstrates promising results across 465 trials in diverse scenarios, including objects of different difficulty levels that we categorize as "Level 1" and "Level 2." SCOOP'D outperforms all baselines and ablations, suggesting that this is a promising approach to acquiring robotic scooping skills. Project page is at https://scoopdiff.github.io/.

Paperid: 308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11565.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Interactive 3D point cloud segmentation enables efficient annotation of complex 3D scenes through user-guided prompts. However, current approaches are typically restricted in scope to a single domain (indoor or outdoor), and to a single form of user interaction (either spatial clicks or textual prompts). Moreover, training on multiple datasets often leads to negative transfer, resulting in domain-specific tools that lack generalizability. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{SNAP} (\textbf{S}egment a\textbf{N}ything in \textbf{A}ny \textbf{P}oint cloud), a unified model for interactive 3D segmentation that supports both point-based and text-based prompts across diverse domains. Our approach achieves cross-domain generalizability by training on 7 datasets spanning indoor, outdoor, and aerial environments, while employing domain-adaptive normalization to prevent negative transfer. For text-prompted segmentation, we automatically generate mask proposals without human intervention and match them against CLIP embeddings of textual queries, enabling both panoptic and open-vocabulary segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SNAP consistently delivers high-quality segmentation results. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on 8 out of 9 zero-shot benchmarks for spatial-prompted segmentation and demonstrate competitive results on all 5 text-prompted benchmarks. These results show that a unified model can match or exceed specialized domain-specific approaches, providing a practical tool for scalable 3D annotation. Project page is at, https://neu-vi.github.io/SNAP/

Paperid: 309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11520.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Walking assistance in extreme or complex environments remains a significant challenge for people with blindness or low vision (BLV), largely due to the lack of a holistic scene understanding. Motivated by the real-world needs of the BLV community, we build mmWalk, a simulated multi-modal dataset that integrates multi-view sensor and accessibility-oriented features for outdoor safe navigation. Our dataset comprises 120 manually controlled, scenario-categorized walking trajectories with 62k synchronized frames. It contains over 559k panoramic images across RGB, depth, and semantic modalities. Furthermore, to emphasize real-world relevance, each trajectory involves outdoor corner cases and accessibility-specific landmarks for BLV users. Additionally, we generate mmWalkVQA, a VQA benchmark with over 69k visual question-answer triplets across 9 categories tailored for safe and informed walking assistance. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) using zero- and few-shot settings and found they struggle with our risk assessment and navigational tasks. We validate our mmWalk-finetuned model on real-world datasets and show the effectiveness of our dataset for advancing multi-modal walking assistance.

Paperid: 310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11340.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Interactive 3D scenes are increasingly vital for embodied intelligence, yet existing datasets remain limited due to the labor-intensive process of annotating part segmentation, kinematic types, and motion trajectories. We present REACT3D, a scalable zero-shot framework that converts static 3D scenes into simulation-ready interactive replicas with consistent geometry, enabling direct use in diverse downstream tasks. Our contributions include: (i) openable-object detection and segmentation to extract candidate movable parts from static scenes, (ii) articulation estimation that infers joint types and motion parameters, (iii) hidden-geometry completion followed by interactive object assembly, and (iv) interactive scene integration in widely supported formats to ensure compatibility with standard simulation platforms. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on detection/segmentation and articulation metrics across diverse indoor scenes, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework and providing a practical foundation for scalable interactive scene generation, thereby lowering the barrier to large-scale research on articulated scene understanding. Our project page is \textit{\hypersetup{urlcolor=black}\href{https://react3d.github.io/}{react3d.github.io}}.

Paperid: 311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11330.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive audio-language pretraining yields powerful joint representations, yet a persistent audio-text modality gap limits the benefits of coupling multimodal encoders with large language models (LLMs). We present Diffusion-Link, a diffusion-based modality-bridging module that generatively maps audio embeddings into the text-embedding distribution. The module is trained at the output embedding from the frozen multimodal encoder and implemented as a lightweight network with three residual MLP blocks. To assess the effect of Diffusion-Link on multimodal encoder-LLM coupling, we evaluate on Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC); to our knowledge, this is the first application of diffusion-based modality bridging to AAC. We report two results. (1) Modality-gap analysis: on similarity and geometric criteria, Diffusion-Link reduces the modality gap the most among prior diffusion-based methods and shows a collective migration of audio embeddings toward the text distribution. (2) Downstream AAC: attaching Diffusion-Link to the same multimodal LLM baseline achieves state-of-the-art on AudioCaps in both zero-shot and fully supervised captioning without external knowledge, with relative gains up to 52.5% and 7.5%, respectively. These findings show that closing the modality gap is pivotal for effective coupling between multimodal encoders and LLMs, and diffusion-based modality bridging offers a promising direction beyond knowledge-retrieval-centric designs. Code will be released upon acceptance https://github.com/DevKiHyun/Diffusion-Link

Paperid: 312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11106.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) is a critical task in computer vision that enables models to recognize unseen combinations of known attributes and objects during inference, addressing the combinatorial challenge of requiring training data for every possible composition. This is particularly challenging because the visual appearance of primitives is highly contextual; for example, ``small'' cats appear visually distinct from ``older'' ones, and ``wet'' cars differ significantly from ``wet'' cats. Effectively modeling this contextuality and the inherent compositionality is crucial for robust compositional zero-shot recognition. This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first comprehensive survey specifically focused on Compositional Zero-Shot Learning. We systematically review the state-of-the-art CZSL methods, introducing a taxonomy grounded in disentanglement, with four families of approaches: no explicit disentanglement, textual disentanglement, visual disentanglement, and cross-modal disentanglement. We provide a detailed comparative analysis of these methods, highlighting their core advantages and limitations in different problem settings, such as closed-world and open-world CZSL. Finally, we identify the most significant open challenges and outline promising future research directions. This survey aims to serve as a foundational resource to guide and inspire further advancements in this fascinating and important field. Papers studied in this survey with their official code are available on our github: https://github.com/ans92/Compositional-Zero-Shot-Learning

Paperid: 313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10100.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised Federated Learning (UFL) aims to collaboratively train a global model across distributed clients without sharing data or accessing label information. Previous UFL works have predominantly focused on representation learning and clustering tasks. Recently, vision language models (e.g., CLIP) have gained significant attention for their powerful zero-shot prediction capabilities. Leveraging this advancement, classification problems that were previously infeasible under the UFL paradigm now present promising new opportunities, yet remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we extend UFL to the classification problem with CLIP for the first time and propose a novel method, \underline{\textbf{Fed}}erated \underline{\textbf{Co}}operative \underline{\textbf{P}}seudo \underline{\textbf{L}}abeling (\textbf{FedCoPL}). Specifically, clients estimate and upload their pseudo label distribution, and the server adjusts and redistributes them to avoid global imbalance among classes. Moreover, we introduce a partial prompt aggregation protocol for effective collaboration and personalization. In particular, visual prompts containing general image features are aggregated at the server, while text prompts encoding personalized knowledge are retained locally. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our FedCoPL compared to baseline methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/krumpguo/FedCoPL}{https://github.com/krumpguo/FedCoPL}.

Paperid: 314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09599.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities when provided with chain-of-thought exemplars, but curating large reasoning datasets remains laborious and resource-intensive. In this work, we introduce Prompting Test-Time Scaling (P-TTS), a simple yet effective inference-time data augmentation strategy for enhancing LLM reasoning through finetuning. Rather than collecting thousands or even millions of examples, P-TTS leverages a small pool of only 90 manually selected reasoning instances and systematically varies exemplar augmentation through principled instruction prompting intensities at test time to synthesize diverse reasoning trajectory contexts. Then we finetune the various sizes of Qwen-2.5 models on P-TTS data. Across a suite of mathematical reasoning AIME2024 & 25, MATH500, and GPQA-Diamond, our P-TTS-7B and 32B models outperform the prior competitive baselines like S1 and S1.1 (1K-shot), achieving absolute accuracy gains of +26.66% and +30.00% on AIME'24 (7B), and +13.34% and +6.67% on AIME'25 (7B); P-TTS-32B yields gains of +23.33% and +16.63% on AIME'24, and +26.63% and +3.33% on AIME'25 (vs. S1 and S1.1, respectively), with comparable or better performance on MATH500 and GPQA-Diamond. We further show that P-TTS enhances zero-shot generalization accuracy on out-of-domain reasoning benchmarks of Gaokao, Kaoyan, OlympiadBench, AMC23, GradeSchoolMath, and Minerva. Our analysis suggests that test-time scaling effectively explores the latent space of reasoning patterns, amplifying LLM problem-solving with minimal annotation overhead, and further unlocking the reasoning potential and capabilities of LLMs. Prompting Test-Time Scaling offers a practical, low-cost way to elicit LLM reasoning in resource-constrained or rapidly evolving domains.

Paperid: 315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09574.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Autonomous navigation in unfamiliar environments requires robots to simultaneously explore, localise, and plan under uncertainty, without relying on predefined maps or extensive training. We present a biologically inspired, Active Inference-based framework, Active Inference MAPping and Planning (AIMAPP). This model unifies mapping, localisation, and decision-making within a single generative model. Inspired by hippocampal navigation, it uses topological reasoning, place-cell encoding, and episodic memory to guide behaviour. The agent builds and updates a sparse topological map online, learns state transitions dynamically, and plans actions by minimising Expected Free Energy. This allows it to balance goal-directed and exploratory behaviours. We implemented a ROS-compatible navigation system that is sensor and robot-agnostic, capable of integrating with diverse hardware configurations. It operates in a fully self-supervised manner, is resilient to drift, and supports both exploration and goal-directed navigation without any pre-training. We demonstrate robust performance in large-scale real and simulated environments against state-of-the-art planning models, highlighting the system's adaptability to ambiguous observations, environmental changes, and sensor noise. The model offers a biologically inspired, modular solution to scalable, self-supervised navigation in unstructured settings. AIMAPP is available at https://github.com/decide-ugent/AIMAPP.

Paperid: 316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09358.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to advance beyond text-only methods by incorporating multiple modalities of input information to produce a set of conclusive phrases. Traditional multi-modal approaches have been proven to have significant limitations in handling the challenging absence and unseen scenarios. Additionally, we identify shortcomings in existing benchmarks that overestimate model capability due to significant overlap in training tests. In this work, we propose leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) for the MMKP task. Firstly, we use two widely-used strategies, e.g., zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to assess the lower bound performance of VLMs. Next, to improve the complex reasoning capabilities of VLMs, we adopt Fine-tune-CoT, which leverages high-quality CoT reasoning data generated by a teacher model to finetune smaller models. Finally, to address the "overthinking" phenomenon, we propose a dynamic CoT strategy which adaptively injects CoT data during training, allowing the model to flexibly leverage its reasoning capabilities during the inference stage. We evaluate the proposed strategies on various datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/DynamicCoT.

Paperid: 317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08902.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate recognition of biomedical named entities is critical for medical information extraction and knowledge discovery. However, existing methods often struggle with nested entities, entity boundary ambiguity, and cross-lingual generalization. In this paper, we propose a unified Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). We first reformulate BioNER as a text generation task and design a symbolic tagging strategy to jointly handle both flat and nested entities with explicit boundary annotation. To enhance multilingual and multi-task generalization, we perform bilingual joint fine-tuning across multiple Chinese and English datasets. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive learning-based entity selector that filters incorrect or spurious predictions by leveraging boundary-sensitive positive and negative samples. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets and two unseen corpora show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and robust zero-shot generalization across languages. The source codes are freely available at https://github.com/dreamer-tx/LLMNER.

Paperid: 318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08713.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Enabling embodied agents to effectively imagine future states is critical for robust and generalizable visual navigation. Current state-of-the-art approaches, however, adopt modular architectures that separate navigation planning from visual world modeling, leading to state-action misalignment and limited adaptability in novel or dynamic scenarios. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose UniWM, a unified, memory-augmented world model integrating egocentric visual foresight and planning within a single multimodal autoregressive backbone. Unlike modular frameworks, UniWM explicitly grounds action decisions in visually imagined outcomes, ensuring tight alignment between prediction and control. A hierarchical memory mechanism further integrates detailed short-term perceptual cues with longer-term trajectory context, enabling stable, coherent reasoning over extended horizons. Extensive experiments across four challenging benchmarks (Go Stanford, ReCon, SCAND, HuRoN) demonstrate that UniWM substantially improves navigation success rates by up to 30%, significantly reduces trajectory errors compared to strong baselines, and exhibits impressive zero-shot generalization on the unseen TartanDrive dataset. These results highlight UniWM as a principled step toward unified, imagination-driven embodied navigation.

Paperid: 319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08392.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer timbre from a source speaker to any unseen target speaker while preserving linguistic content. Growing application scenarios demand models with streaming inference capabilities. This has created a pressing need for models that are simultaneously fast, lightweight, and high-fidelity. However, existing streaming methods typically rely on either autoregressive (AR) or non-autoregressive (NAR) frameworks, which either require large parameter sizes to achieve strong performance or struggle to generalize to unseen speakers. In this study, we propose MeanVC, a lightweight and streaming zero-shot VC approach. MeanVC introduces a diffusion transformer with a chunk-wise autoregressive denoising strategy, combining the strengths of both AR and NAR paradigms for efficient streaming processing. By introducing mean flows, MeanVC regresses the average velocity field during training, enabling zero-shot VC with superior speech quality and speaker similarity in a single sampling step by directly mapping from the start to the endpoint of the flow trajectory. Additionally, we incorporate diffusion adversarial post-training to mitigate over-smoothing and further enhance speech quality. Experimental results demonstrate that MeanVC significantly outperforms existing zero-shot streaming VC systems, achieving superior conversion quality with higher efficiency and significantly fewer parameters. Audio demos and code are publicly available at https://aslp-lab.github.io/MeanVC.

Paperid: 320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07856.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, more attention has been paid to feedforward reconstruction paradigms, which mainly learn a fixed view transformation implicitly and reconstruct the scene with a single representation. However, their generalization capability and reconstruction accuracy are still limited while reconstructing driving scenes, which results from two aspects: (1) The fixed view transformation fails when the camera configuration changes, limiting the generalization capability across different driving scenes equipped with different camera configurations. (2) The small overlapping regions between sparse views of the $360^\circ$ panorama and the complexity of driving scenes increase the learning difficulty, reducing the reconstruction accuracy. To handle these difficulties, we propose \textbf{XYZCylinder}, a feedforward model based on a unified cylinder lifting method which involves camera modeling and feature lifting. Specifically, to improve the generalization capability, we design a Unified Cylinder Camera Modeling (UCCM) strategy, which avoids the learning of viewpoint-dependent spatial correspondence and unifies different camera configurations with adjustable parameters. To improve the reconstruction accuracy, we propose a hybrid representation with several dedicated modules based on newly designed Cylinder Plane Feature Group (CPFG) to lift 2D image features to 3D space. Experimental results show that XYZCylinder achieves state-of-the-art performance under different evaluation settings, and can be generalized to other driving scenes in a zero-shot manner. Project page: \href{https://yuyuyu223.github.io/XYZCYlinder-projectpage/}{here}.

Paperid: 321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07286.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Predicting the fitness impact of mutations is central to protein engineering but constrained by limited assays relative to the size of sequence space. Protein language models (pLMs) trained with masked language modeling (MLM) exhibit strong zero-shot fitness prediction; we provide a unifying view by interpreting natural evolution as implicit reward maximization and MLM as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), in which extant sequences act as expert demonstrations and pLM log-odds serve as fitness estimates. Building on this perspective, we introduce EvoIF, a lightweight model that integrates two complementary sources of evolutionary signal: (i) within-family profiles from retrieved homologs and (ii) cross-family structural-evolutionary constraints distilled from inverse folding logits. EvoIF fuses sequence-structure representations with these profiles via a compact transition block, yielding calibrated probabilities for log-odds scoring. On ProteinGym (217 mutational assays; >2.5M mutants), EvoIF and its MSA-enabled variant achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance while using only 0.15% of the training data and fewer parameters than recent large models. Ablations confirm that within-family and cross-family profiles are complementary, improving robustness across function types, MSA depths, taxa, and mutation depths. The codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/EvoIF.

Paperid: 322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07135.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models (RSVLMs) have shown remarkable potential thanks to large-scale pretraining, achieving strong zero-shot performance on various tasks. However, their ability to generalize in low-data regimes, such as few-shot learning, remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we present the first structured benchmark for evaluating few-shot adaptation methods on RSVLMs. We conduct comprehensive experiments across ten remote sensing scene classification datasets, applying five widely used few-shot adaptation strategies to three state-of-the-art RSVLMs with varying backbones. Our findings reveal that models with similar zero-shot performance can exhibit markedly different behavior under few-shot adaptation, with some RSVLMs being inherently more amenable to such adaptation than others. The variability of performance and the absence of a clear winner among existing methods highlight the need for the development of more robust methods for few-shot adaptation tailored to RS. To facilitate future research, we provide a reproducible benchmarking framework and open-source code to systematically evaluate RSVLMs under few-shot conditions. The source code is publicly available on Github: https://github.com/elkhouryk/fewshot_RSVLMs

Paperid: 323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07134.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is a fundamental ability that underpins practical applications, such as companion robots, guidance robots and service assistants, where continuously following moving targets is essential. Recent advances have enabled language-guided tracking in complex and unstructured scenes. However, existing approaches lack explicit spatial reasoning and effective temporal memory, causing failures under severe occlusions or in the presence of similar-looking distractors. To address these challenges, we present TrackVLA++, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that enhances embodied visual tracking with two key modules, a spatial reasoning mechanism and a Target Identification Memory (TIM). The reasoning module introduces a Chain-of-Thought paradigm, termed Polar-CoT, which infers the target's relative position and encodes it as a compact polar-coordinate token for action prediction. Guided by these spatial priors, the TIM employs a gated update strategy to preserve long-horizon target memory, ensuring spatiotemporal consistency and mitigating target loss during extended occlusions. Extensive experiments show that TrackVLA++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks across both egocentric and multi-camera settings. On the challenging EVT-Bench DT split, TrackVLA++ surpasses the previous leading approach by 5.1 and 12, respectively. Furthermore, TrackVLA++ exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robust real-world tracking in dynamic and occluded scenarios.

Paperid: 324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07052.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a workflow for speech emotion recognition (SER) that combines pre-trained representations with automated hyperparameter optimisation (HPO). Using SpeechBrain wav2vec2-base model fine-tuned on IEMOCAP as the encoder, we compare two HPO strategies, Gaussian Process Bayesian Optimisation (GP-BO) and Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), under an identical four-dimensional search space and 15-trial budget, with balanced class accuracy (BCA) on the German EmoDB corpus as the objective. All experiments run on 8 CPU cores with 32 GB RAM. GP-BO achieves 0.96 BCA in 11 minutes, and TPE (Hyperopt implementation) attains 0.97 in 15 minutes. In contrast, grid search requires 143 trials and 1,680 minutes to exceed 0.9 BCA, and the best AutoSpeech 2020 baseline reports only 0.85 in 30 minutes on GPU. For cross-lingual generalisation, an EmoDB-trained HPO-tuned model improves zero-shot accuracy by 0.25 on CREMA-D and 0.26 on RAVDESS. Results show that efficient HPO with pre-trained encoders delivers competitive SER on commodity CPUs. Source code to this work is available at: https://github.com/youngaryan/speechbrain-emotion-hpo.

Paperid: 325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07041.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Over the past decade, U-Net has been the dominant architecture in medical image segmentation, leading to the development of thousands of U-shaped variants. Despite its widespread adoption, there is still no comprehensive benchmark to systematically evaluate their performance and utility, largely because of insufficient statistical validation and limited consideration of efficiency and generalization across diverse datasets. To bridge this gap, we present U-Bench, the first large-scale, statistically rigorous benchmark that evaluates 100 U-Net variants across 28 datasets and 10 imaging modalities. Our contributions are threefold: (1) Comprehensive Evaluation: U-Bench evaluates models along three key dimensions: statistical robustness, zero-shot generalization, and computational efficiency. We introduce a novel metric, U-Score, which jointly captures the performance-efficiency trade-off, offering a deployment-oriented perspective on model progress. (2) Systematic Analysis and Model Selection Guidance: We summarize key findings from the large-scale evaluation and systematically analyze the impact of dataset characteristics and architectural paradigms on model performance. Based on these insights, we propose a model advisor agent to guide researchers in selecting the most suitable models for specific datasets and tasks. (3) Public Availability: We provide all code, models, protocols, and weights, enabling the community to reproduce our results and extend the benchmark with future methods. In summary, U-Bench not only exposes gaps in previous evaluations but also establishes a foundation for fair, reproducible, and practically relevant benchmarking in the next decade of U-Net-based segmentation models. The project can be accessed at: https://fenghetan9.github.io/ubench. Code is available at: https://github.com/FengheTan9/U-Bench.

Paperid: 326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06708.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Systematic reviews are a standard practice for summarizing the state of evidence in software engineering. Conducting systematic reviews is laborious, especially during the screening or study selection phase, where the number of papers can be overwhelming. During this phase, papers are assessed against inclusion and exclusion criteria based on their titles and abstracts. Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can perform title-abstract screening at a level comparable to that of a master's student. While LLMs cannot be fully trusted, they can help, for example, in Rapid Reviews, which try to expedite the review process. Building on recent research, we developed AiSysRev, an LLM-based screening tool implemented as a web application running in a Docker container. The tool accepts a CSV file containing paper titles and abstracts. Users specify inclusion and exclusion criteria. One can use multiple LLMs for screening via OpenRouter. AiSysRev supports both zero-shot and few-shot screening, and also allows for manual screening through interfaces that display LLM results as guidance for human reviewers.We conducted a trial study with 137 papers using the tool. Our findings indicate that papers can be classified into four categories: Easy Includes, Easy Excludes, Boundary Includes, and Boundary Excludes. The Boundary cases, where LLMs are prone to errors, highlight the need for human intervention. While LLMs do not replace human judgment in systematic reviews, they can significantly reduce the burden of assessing large volumes of scientific literature. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVbEj4Y4tQI Tool: https://github.com/EvoTestOps/AISysRev

Paperid: 327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06199.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Hair care is an essential daily activity, yet it remains inaccessible to individuals with limited mobility and challenging for autonomous robot systems due to the fine-grained physical structure and complex dynamics of hair. In this work, we present DYMO-Hair, a model-based robot hair care system. We introduce a novel dynamics learning paradigm that is suited for volumetric quantities such as hair, relying on an action-conditioned latent state editing mechanism, coupled with a compact 3D latent space of diverse hairstyles to improve generalizability. This latent space is pre-trained at scale using a novel hair physics simulator, enabling generalization across previously unseen hairstyles. Using the dynamics model with a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planner, DYMO-Hair is able to perform visual goal-conditioned hair styling. Experiments in simulation demonstrate that DYMO-Hair's dynamics model outperforms baselines on capturing local deformation for diverse, unseen hairstyles. DYMO-Hair further outperforms baselines in closed-loop hair styling tasks on unseen hairstyles, with an average of 22% lower final geometric error and 42% higher success rate than the state-of-the-art system. Real-world experiments exhibit zero-shot transferability of our system to wigs, achieving consistent success on challenging unseen hairstyles where the state-of-the-art system fails. Together, these results introduce a foundation for model-based robot hair care, advancing toward more generalizable, flexible, and accessible robot hair styling in unconstrained physical environments. More details are available on our project page: https://chengyzhao.github.io/DYMOHair-web/.

Paperid: 328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06145.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We tackle the problem of forecasting bimanual 3D hand motion & articulation from a single image in everyday settings. To address the lack of 3D hand annotations in diverse settings, we design an annotation pipeline consisting of a diffusion model to lift 2D hand keypoint sequences to 4D hand motion. For the forecasting model, we adopt a diffusion loss to account for the multimodality in hand motion distribution. Extensive experiments across 6 datasets show the benefits of training on diverse data with imputed labels (14% improvement) and effectiveness of our lifting (42% better) & forecasting (16.4% gain) models, over the best baselines, especially in zero-shot generalization to everyday images.

Paperid: 329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06093.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
As algorithmic decision-makers are increasingly applied to high-stakes domains, AI alignment research has evolved from a focus on universal value alignment to context-specific approaches that account for decision-maker attributes. Prior work on Decision-Maker Alignment (DMA) has explored two primary strategies: (1) classical AI methods integrating case-based reasoning, Bayesian reasoning, and naturalistic decision-making, and (2) large language model (LLM)-based methods leveraging prompt engineering. While both approaches have shown promise in limited domains such as medical triage, their generalizability to novel contexts remains underexplored. In this work, we implement a prior classical AI model and develop an LLM-based algorithmic decision-maker evaluated using a large reasoning model (GPT-5) and a non-reasoning model (GPT-4) with weighted self-consistency under a zero-shot prompting framework, as proposed in recent literature. We evaluate both approaches on a health insurance decision-making dataset annotated for three target decision-makers with varying levels of risk tolerance (0.0, 0.5, 1.0). In the experiments reported herein, classical AI and LLM-based models achieved comparable alignment with attribute-based targets, with classical AI exhibiting slightly better alignment for a moderate risk profile. The dataset and open-source implementation are publicly available at: https://github.com/TeX-Base/ClassicalAIvsLLMsforDMAlignment and https://github.com/Parallax-Advanced-Research/ITM/tree/feature_insurance.

Paperid: 330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06068.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dexterous grasping with multi-fingered hands remains challenging due to high-dimensional articulations and the cost of optimization-based pipelines. Existing end-to-end methods require training on large-scale datasets for specific hands, limiting their ability to generalize across different embodiments. We propose an eigengrasp-based, end-to-end framework for cross-embodiment grasp generation. From a hand's morphology description, we derive a morphology embedding and an eigengrasp set. Conditioned on these, together with the object point cloud and wrist pose, an amplitude predictor regresses articulation coefficients in a low-dimensional space, which are decoded into full joint articulations. Articulation learning is supervised with a Kinematic-Aware Articulation Loss (KAL) that emphasizes fingertip-relevant motions and injects morphology-specific structure. In simulation on unseen objects across three dexterous hands, our model attains a 91.9% average grasp success rate with less than 0.4 seconds inference per grasp. With few-shot adaptation to an unseen hand, it achieves 85.6% success on unseen objects in simulation, and real-world experiments on this few-shot generalized hand achieve an 87% success rate. The code and additional materials will be made available upon publication on our project website https://connor-zh.github.io/cross_embodiment_dexterous_grasping.

Paperid: 331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series classification (TSC) spans diverse application scenarios, yet labeled data are often scarce, making task-specific training costly and inflexible. Recent reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) show promise in understanding temporal patterns, but purely zero-shot usage remains suboptimal. We propose FETA, a multi-agent framework for training-free TSC via exemplar-based in-context reasoning. FETA decomposes a multivariate series into channel-wise subproblems, retrieves a few structurally similar labeled examples for each channel, and leverages a reasoning LLM to compare the query against these exemplars, producing channel-level labels with self-assessed confidences; a confidence-weighted aggregator then fuses all channel decisions. This design eliminates the need for pretraining or fine-tuning, improves efficiency by pruning irrelevant channels and controlling input length, and enhances interpretability through exemplar grounding and confidence estimation. On nine challenging UEA datasets, FETA achieves strong accuracy under a fully training-free setting, surpassing multiple trained baselines. These results demonstrate that a multi-agent in-context reasoning framework can transform LLMs into competitive, plug-and-play TSC solvers without any parameter training. The code is available at https://github.com/SongyuanSui/FETATSC.

Paperid: 332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05684.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models leverage internet-scale text data, yet embodied AI remains constrained by the prohibitive costs of physical trajectory collection. Desktop environments -- particularly gaming -- offer a compelling alternative: they provide rich sensorimotor interactions at scale while maintaining the structured observation-action coupling essential for embodied learning. We present D2E (Desktop to Embodied AI), a framework that demonstrates desktop interactions can serve as an effective pretraining substrate for robotics embodied AI tasks. Unlike prior work that remained domain-specific (e.g., VPT for Minecraft) or kept data proprietary (e.g., SIMA), D2E establishes a complete pipeline from scalable desktop data collection to verified transfer in embodied domains. Our framework comprises three components: (1) the OWA Toolkit that unifies diverse desktop interactions into a standardized format with 152x compression, (2) the Generalist-IDM that achieves strong zero-shot generalization across unseen games through timestamp-based event prediction, enabling internet-scale pseudo-labeling, and (3) VAPT that transfers desktop-pretrained representations to physical manipulation and navigation. Using 1.3K+ hours of data (259 hours of human demonstrations, and 1K+ hours of pseudo-labeled gameplay), we achieve a total of 96.6% success rate on LIBERO manipulation and 83.3% on CANVAS navigation benchmarks. This validates that sensorimotor primitives in digital interactions exhibit sufficient invariance to transfer meaningfully to physical embodied tasks, establishing desktop pretraining as a practical paradigm for robotics. We will make all our work public, including the OWA toolkit, datasets of human-collected and pseudo-labeled, and VAPT-trained models available at https://worv-ai.github.io/d2e/

Paperid: 333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05064.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed under diverse memory and compute constraints. Existing approaches build model families by training each size independently, which is prohibitively expensive and provides only coarse-grained size options. In this work, we identify a novel phenomenon that we call boomerang distillation: starting from a large base model (the teacher), one first distills down to a small student and then progressively reconstructs intermediate-sized models by re-incorporating blocks of teacher layers into the student without any additional training. This process produces zero-shot interpolated models of many intermediate sizes whose performance scales smoothly between the student and teacher, often matching or surpassing pretrained or distilled models of the same size. We further analyze when this type of interpolation succeeds, showing that alignment between teacher and student through pruning and distillation is essential. Boomerang distillation thus provides a simple and efficient way to generate fine-grained model families, dramatically reducing training cost while enabling flexible adaptation across deployment environments. The code and models are available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/boomerang-distillation.

Paperid: 334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04938.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural architecture search (NAS) automates the design process of high-performing architectures, but remains bottlenecked by expensive performance evaluation. Most existing studies that achieve faster evaluation are mostly tied to cell-based search spaces and graph encodings tailored to those individual search spaces, limiting their flexibility and scalability when applied to more expressive search spaces. In this work, we aim to close the gap of individual search space restrictions and search space dependent network representations. We present ONNX-Bench, a benchmark consisting of a collection of neural networks in a unified format based on ONNX files. ONNX-Bench includes all open-source NAS-bench-based neural networks, resulting in a total size of more than 600k {architecture, accuracy} pairs. This benchmark allows creating a shared neural network representation, ONNX-Net, able to represent any neural architecture using natural language descriptions acting as an input to a performance predictor. This text-based encoding can accommodate arbitrary layer types, operation parameters, and heterogeneous topologies, enabling a single surrogate to generalise across all neural architectures rather than being confined to cell-based search spaces. Experiments show strong zero-shot performance across disparate search spaces using only a small amount of pretraining samples, enabling the unprecedented ability to evaluate any neural network architecture instantly.

Paperid: 335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Built upon language and vision foundation models with strong generalization ability and trained on large-scale robotic data, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising approach to learning generalist robotic policies. However, a key drawback of existing VLAs is their extremely high inference costs. In this paper, we propose HyperVLA to address this problem. Unlike existing monolithic VLAs that activate the whole model during both training and inference, HyperVLA uses a novel hypernetwork (HN)-based architecture that activates only a small task-specific policy during inference, while still retaining the high model capacity needed to accommodate diverse multi-task behaviors during training. Successfully training an HN-based VLA is nontrivial so HyperVLA contains several key algorithm design features that improve its performance, including properly utilizing the prior knowledge from existing vision foundation models, HN normalization, and an action generation strategy. Compared to monolithic VLAs, HyperVLA achieves a similar or even higher success rate for both zero-shot generalization and few-shot adaptation, while significantly reducing inference costs. Compared to OpenVLA, a state-of-the-art VLA model, HyperVLA reduces the number of activated parameters at test time by $90\times$, and accelerates inference speed by $120\times$. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MasterXiong/HyperVLA

Paperid: 336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04001.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic causes severe social and economic disruption around the world, raising various subjects that are discussed over social media. Identifying pandemic-related named entities as expressed on social media is fundamental and important to understand the discussions about the pandemic. However, there is limited work on named entity recognition on this topic due to the following challenges: 1) COVID-19 texts in social media are informal and their annotations are rare and insufficient to train a robust recognition model, and 2) named entity recognition in COVID-19 requires extensive domain-specific knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a novel entity knowledge augmentation approach for COVID-19, which can also be applied in general biomedical named entity recognition in both informal text format and formal text format. Experiments carried out on the COVID-19 tweets dataset and PubMed dataset show that our proposed entity knowledge augmentation improves NER performance in both fully-supervised and few-shot settings. Our source code is publicly available: https://github.com/kkkenshi/LLM-EKA/tree/master

Paperid: 337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03903.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on vision-language reasoning tasks. However, their potential for zero-shot fine-grained image classification, a challenging task requiring precise differentiation between visually similar categories, remains underexplored. We present a novel method that transforms zero-shot fine-grained image classification into a visual question-answering framework, leveraging LVLMs' comprehensive understanding capabilities rather than relying on direct class name generation. We enhance model performance through a novel attention intervention technique. We also address a key limitation in existing datasets by developing more comprehensive and precise class description benchmarks. We validate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experimentation across multiple fine-grained image classification benchmarks. Our proposed method consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach, demonstrating both the effectiveness of our method and the broader potential of LVLMs for zero-shot fine-grained classification tasks. Code and Datasets: https://github.com/Atabuzzaman/Fine-grained-classification

Paperid: 338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03545.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose SketchPlan, a diffusion-based planner that interprets 2D hand-drawn sketches over depth images to generate 3D flight paths for drone navigation. SketchPlan comprises two components: a SketchAdapter that learns to map the human sketches to projected 2D paths, and DiffPath, a diffusion model that infers 3D trajectories from 2D projections and a first person view depth image. Our model achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, generating accurate and safe flight paths in previously unseen real-world environments. To train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 32k flight paths using a diverse set of photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes. We automatically label the data by computing 2D projections of the 3D flight paths onto the camera plane, and use this to train the DiffPath diffusion model. However, since real human 2D sketches differ significantly from ideal 2D projections, we additionally label 872 of the 3D flight paths with real human sketches and use this to train the SketchAdapter to infer the 2D projection from the human sketch. We demonstrate SketchPlan's effectiveness in both simulated and real-world experiments, and show through ablations that training on a mix of human labeled and auto-labeled data together with a modular design significantly boosts its capabilities to correctly interpret human intent and infer 3D paths. In real-world drone tests, SketchPlan achieved 100\% success in low/medium clutter and 40\% in unseen high-clutter environments, outperforming key ablations by 20-60\% in task completion.

Paperid: 339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03502.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce ALHD, the first large-scale comprehensive Arabic dataset explicitly designed to distinguish between human- and LLM-generated texts. ALHD spans three genres (news, social media, reviews), covering both MSA and dialectal Arabic, and contains over 400K balanced samples generated by three leading LLMs and originated from multiple human sources, which enables studying generalizability in Arabic LLM-genearted text detection. We provide rigorous preprocessing, rich annotations, and standardized balanced splits to support reproducibility. In addition, we present, analyze and discuss benchmark experiments using our new dataset, in turn identifying gaps and proposing future research directions. Benchmarking across traditional classifiers, BERT-based models, and LLMs (zero-shot and few-shot) demonstrates that fine-tuned BERT models achieve competitive performance, outperforming LLM-based models. Results are however not always consistent, as we observe challenges when generalizing across genres; indeed, models struggle to generalize when they need to deal with unseen patterns in cross-genre settings, and these challenges are particularly prominent when dealing with news articles, where LLM-generated texts resemble human texts in style, which opens up avenues for future research. ALHD establishes a foundation for research related to Arabic LLM-detection and mitigating risks of misinformation, academic dishonesty, and cyber threats.

Paperid: 340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03291.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but face prohibitive computational and memory costs. Pruning offers a promising path by inducing sparsity while preserving architectural flexibility. However, existing methods struggle to balance efficiency and robustness: local metric approaches prune layer by layer but often collapse under high sparsity, whereas global feedback methods enforce consistency at the cost of expensive weight updates or restrictive semi-structured formats. We present UniPruning, a unified post-training pruning framework that combines the speed of local saliency metrics with the stability of global coordination, enabled by a mirror descent based optimization, all without updating model weights. UniPruning leverages fast layer-wise scoring and a lightweight global controller to allocate a single sparsity budget, supporting both unstructured and semi-structured N :M pruning within one framework. After a brief calibration, it can generate pruning masks for arbitrary sparsity levels in one shot, and adapts seamlessly to hardware-aware constraints. Extensive experiments on multiple pretrained LLM families and standard benchmarks show that UniPruning consistently delivers competitive or superior perplexity and zero-shot accuracy. Ablation studies further highlight the importance of mirror descent and local saliency anchoring. Overall, UniPruning provides an efficient, principled, and scalable solution for sparsifying large-scale LLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/RainbowQTT/UniPruning.

Paperid: 341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03260.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Learning is an important paradigm within General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence Systems, particularly in those that operate in open-world scenarios where systems must adapt to new tasks dynamically. Semantic spaces play a pivotal role as they bridge seen and unseen classes, but whether human-annotated or generated by a machine learning model, they often contain noisy, redundant, or irrelevant attributes that hinder performance. To address this, we introduce a partitioning scheme that simulates unseen conditions in an inductive setting (which is the most challenging), allowing attribute relevance to be assessed without access to semantic information from unseen classes. Within this framework, we study two complementary feature-selection strategies and assess their generalisation. The first adapts embedded feature selection to the particular demands of ZSL, turning model-driven rankings into meaningful semantic pruning; the second leverages evolutionary computation to directly explore the space of attribute subsets more broadly. Experiments on five benchmark datasets (AWA2, CUB, SUN, aPY, FLO) show that both methods consistently improve accuracy on unseen classes by reducing redundancy, but in complementary ways: RFS is efficient and competitive though dependent on critical hyperparameters, whereas GA is more costly yet explores the search space more broadly and avoids such dependence. These results confirm that semantic spaces are inherently redundant and highlight the proposed partitioning scheme as an effective tool to refine them under inductive conditions.

Paperid: 342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03051.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Global optimization of expensive, derivative-free black-box functions requires extreme sample efficiency. While Bayesian optimization (BO) is the current state-of-the-art, its performance hinges on surrogate and acquisition function hyper-parameters that are often hand-tuned and fail to generalize across problem landscapes. We present ZeroShotOpt, a general-purpose, pretrained model for continuous black-box optimization tasks ranging from 2D to 20D. Our approach leverages offline reinforcement learning on large-scale optimization trajectories collected from 12 BO variants. To scale pretraining, we generate millions of synthetic Gaussian process-based functions with diverse landscapes, enabling the model to learn transferable optimization policies. As a result, ZeroShotOpt achieves robust zero-shot generalization on a wide array of unseen benchmarks, matching or surpassing the sample efficiency of leading global optimizers, including BO, while also offering a reusable foundation for future extensions and improvements. Our open-source code, dataset, and model are available at: https://github.com/jamisonmeindl/zeroshotopt

Paperid: 343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02328.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical Multimodal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) have shown great promise in medical visual question answering (Med-VQA). However, when deployed in low-resource settings where abundant labeled data are unavailable, existing Med-MLLMs commonly fail due to their medical reasoning capability bottlenecks: (i) the intrinsic reasoning bottleneck that ignores the details from the medical image; (ii) the extrinsic reasoning bottleneck that fails to incorporate specialized medical knowledge. To address those limitations, we propose AMANDA, a training-free agentic framework that performs medical knowledge augmentation via LLM agents. Specifically, our intrinsic medical knowledge augmentation focuses on coarse-to-fine question decomposition for comprehensive diagnosis, while extrinsic medical knowledge augmentation grounds the reasoning process via biomedical knowledge graph retrieval. Extensive experiments across eight Med-VQA benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements in both zero-shot and few-shot Med-VQA settings. The code is available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/AMANDA.

Paperid: 344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02270.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised adaptation of CLIP-based vision-language models (VLMs) for fine-grained image classification requires sensitivity to microscopic local cues. While CLIP exhibits strong zero-shot transfer, its reliance on coarse global features restricts its performance on fine-grained classification tasks. Prior efforts inject fine-grained knowledge by aligning large language model (LLM) descriptions with the CLIP $\texttt{[CLS]}$ token; however, this approach overlooks spatial precision. We propose $\textbf{microCLIP}$, a self-training framework that jointly refines CLIP's visual and textual representations using fine-grained cues. At its core is Saliency-Oriented Attention Pooling (SOAP) within a lightweight TokenFusion module, which builds a saliency-guided $\texttt{[FG]}$ token from patch embeddings and fuses it with the global $\texttt{[CLS]}$ token for coarse-fine alignment. To stabilize adaptation, we introduce a two-headed LLM-derived classifier: a frozen classifier that, via multi-view alignment, provides a stable text-based prior for pseudo-labeling, and a learnable classifier initialized from LLM descriptions and fine-tuned with TokenFusion. We further develop Dynamic Knowledge Aggregation, which convexly combines fixed LLM/CLIP priors with TokenFusion's evolving logits to iteratively refine pseudo-labels. Together, these components uncover latent fine-grained signals in CLIP, yielding a consistent $2.90\%$ average accuracy gain across 13 fine-grained benchmarks while requiring only light adaptation. Our code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/microCLIP.

Paperid: 345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01934.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly detection streamlines and simplifies industrial safety inspection. However, limited samples make accurate differentiation between normal and abnormal features challenging, and even more so under category-agnostic conditions. Large-scale pre-training of foundation visual encoders has advanced many fields, as the enormous quantity of data helps to learn the general distribution of normal images. We observe that the anomaly amount in an image directly correlates with the difference in the learnt embeddings and utilize this to design a few-shot anomaly detector termed FoundAD. This is done by learning a nonlinear projection operator onto the natural image manifold. The simple operator acts as an effective tool for anomaly detection to characterize and identify out-of-distribution regions in an image. Extensive experiments show that our approach supports multi-class detection and achieves competitive performance while using substantially fewer parameters than prior methods. Backed up by evaluations with multiple foundation encoders, including fresh DINOv3, we believe this idea broadens the perspective on foundation features and advances the field of few-shot anomaly detection.

Paperid: 346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01619.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While there has been significant progress in the field of 3D avatar creation from visual observations, modeling physically plausible dynamics of humans with loose garments remains a challenging problem. Although a few existing works address this problem by leveraging physical simulation, they suffer from limited accuracy or robustness to novel animation inputs. In this work, we present MPMAvatar, a framework for creating 3D human avatars from multi-view videos that supports highly realistic, robust animation, as well as photorealistic rendering from free viewpoints. For accurate and robust dynamics modeling, our key idea is to use a Material Point Method-based simulator, which we carefully tailor to model garments with complex deformations and contact with the underlying body by incorporating an anisotropic constitutive model and a novel collision handling algorithm. We combine this dynamics modeling scheme with our canonical avatar that can be rendered using 3D Gaussian Splatting with quasi-shadowing, enabling high-fidelity rendering for physically realistic animations. In our experiments, we demonstrate that MPMAvatar significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art physics-based avatar in terms of (1) dynamics modeling accuracy, (2) rendering accuracy, and (3) robustness and efficiency. Additionally, we present a novel application in which our avatar generalizes to unseen interactions in a zero-shot manner-which was not achievable with previous learning-based methods due to their limited simulation generalizability. Our project page is at: https://KAISTChangmin.github.io/MPMAvatar/

Paperid: 347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00814.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic fabric manipulation in garment production for sewing, cutting, and ironing requires reliable flattening and alignment, yet remains challenging due to fabric deformability, effectively infinite degrees of freedom, and frequent occlusions from wrinkles, folds, and the manipulator's End-Effector (EE) and arm. To address these issues, this paper proposes the first Random-to-Target Fabric Flattening (RTFF) policy, which aligns a random wrinkled fabric state to an arbitrary wrinkle-free target state. The proposed policy adopts a hybrid Imitation Learning-Visual Servoing (IL-VS) framework, where IL learns with explicit fabric models for coarse alignment of the wrinkled fabric toward a wrinkle-free state near the target, and VS ensures fine alignment to the target. Central to this framework is a template-based mesh that offers precise target state representation, wrinkle-aware geometry prediction, and consistent vertex correspondence across RTFF manipulation steps, enabling robust manipulation and seamless IL-VS switching. Leveraging the power of mesh, a novel IL solution for RTFF-Mesh Action Chunking Transformer (MACT)-is then proposed by conditioning the mesh information into a Transformer-based policy. The RTFF policy is validated on a real dual-arm tele-operation system, showing zero-shot alignment to different targets, high accuracy, and strong generalization across fabrics and scales. Project website: https://kaitang98.github.io/RTFF_Policy/

Paperid: 348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00458.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language object detectors (VLODs) such as YOLO-World and Grounding DINO achieve impressive zero-shot recognition by aligning region proposals with text representations. However, their performance often degrades under domain shift. We introduce VLOD-TTA, a test-time adaptation (TTA) framework for VLODs that leverages dense proposal overlap and image-conditioned prompt scores. First, an IoU-weighted entropy objective is proposed that concentrates adaptation on spatially coherent proposal clusters and reduces confirmation bias from isolated boxes. Second, image-conditioned prompt selection is introduced, which ranks prompts by image-level compatibility and fuses the most informative prompts with the detector logits. Our benchmarking across diverse distribution shifts -- including stylized domains, driving scenes, low-light conditions, and common corruptions -- shows the effectiveness of our method on two state-of-the-art VLODs, YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, with consistent improvements over the zero-shot and TTA baselines. Code : https://github.com/imatif17/VLOD-TTA

Paperid: 349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00296.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting hallucinations in Large Language Model-generated text is crucial for their safe deployment. While probing classifiers show promise, they operate on isolated layer-token pairs and are LLM-specific, limiting their effectiveness and hindering cross-LLM applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address these shortcomings. We build on the natural sequential structure of activation data in both axes (layers $\times$ tokens) and advocate treating full activation tensors akin to images. We design ACT-ViT, a Vision Transformer-inspired model that can be effectively and efficiently applied to activation tensors and supports training on data from multiple LLMs simultaneously. Through comprehensive experiments encompassing diverse LLMs and datasets, we demonstrate that ACT-ViT consistently outperforms traditional probing techniques while remaining extremely efficient for deployment. In particular, we show that our architecture benefits substantially from multi-LLM training, achieves strong zero-shot performance on unseen datasets, and can be transferred effectively to new LLMs through fine-tuning. Full code is available at https://github.com/BarSGuy/ACT-ViT.

Paperid: 350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26618.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Panorama has a full FoV (360$^\circ\times$180$^\circ$), offering a more complete visual description than perspective images. Thanks to this characteristic, panoramic depth estimation is gaining increasing traction in 3D vision. However, due to the scarcity of panoramic data, previous methods are often restricted to in-domain settings, leading to poor zero-shot generalization. Furthermore, due to the spherical distortions inherent in panoramas, many approaches rely on perspective splitting (e.g., cubemaps), which leads to suboptimal efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{DA}$$^{\textbf{2}}$: $\textbf{D}$epth $\textbf{A}$nything in $\textbf{A}$ny $\textbf{D}$irection, an accurate, zero-shot generalizable, and fully end-to-end panoramic depth estimator. Specifically, for scaling up panoramic data, we introduce a data curation engine for generating high-quality panoramic depth data from perspective, and create $\sim$543K panoramic RGB-depth pairs, bringing the total to $\sim$607K. To further mitigate the spherical distortions, we present SphereViT, which explicitly leverages spherical coordinates to enforce the spherical geometric consistency in panoramic image features, yielding improved performance. A comprehensive benchmark on multiple datasets clearly demonstrates DA$^{2}$'s SoTA performance, with an average 38% improvement on AbsRel over the strongest zero-shot baseline. Surprisingly, DA$^{2}$ even outperforms prior in-domain methods, highlighting its superior zero-shot generalization. Moreover, as an end-to-end solution, DA$^{2}$ exhibits much higher efficiency over fusion-based approaches. Both the code and the curated panoramic data will be released. Project page: https://depth-any-in-any-dir.github.io/.

Paperid: 351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26462.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP has revolutionized zero-shot learning by enabling task generalization without fine-tuning. While prompting techniques like CoOp and CoCoOp enhance CLIP's adaptability, their effectiveness in Federated Learning (FL) remains an open challenge. Existing federated prompt learning approaches, such as FedCoOp and FedTPG, improve performance but face generalization issues, high communication costs, and reliance on a central server, limiting scalability and privacy. We propose Zero-shot Decentralized Federated Learning (ZeroDFL), a fully decentralized framework that enables zero-shot adaptation across distributed clients without a central coordinator. ZeroDFL employs an iterative prompt-sharing mechanism, allowing clients to optimize and exchange textual prompts to enhance generalization while drastically reducing communication overhead. We validate ZeroDFL on nine diverse image classification datasets, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms--or remains on par with--state-of-the-art federated prompt learning methods. More importantly, ZeroDFL achieves this performance in a fully decentralized setting while reducing communication overhead by 118x compared to FedTPG. These results highlight that our approach not only enhances generalization in federated zero-shot learning but also improves scalability, efficiency, and privacy preservation--paving the way for decentralized adaptation of large vision-language models in real-world applications.

Paperid: 352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26111.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Establishing fair and robust benchmarks is essential for evaluating intelligent code generation by large language models (LLMs). Our survey of 35 existing benchmarks uncovers three major imbalances: 85.7% focus on a single programming language; 94.3% target only function-level or statement-level tasks; and over 80% include fewer than ten test cases on average. To address these gaps, we propose MultiOOP, a multi-language object-oriented programming benchmark covering six popular languages (Python, PHP, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript) with 267 tasks per language. We design a translator that extends an existing single-language OOP benchmark and the pass@o metric to a multilingual setting. Moreover, we propose an automated framework for augmenting test cases to ensure the reliability of the evaluation results. We evaluate 14 mainstream LLMs under zero-shot prompting and report three key findings: 1) Substantial performance degradation: pass@1 scores on MultiOOP drop by up to 65.6 percentage points compared to function-level tasks (e.g., HumanEval). 2) Cross-language variability: GPT-4o mini achieves pass@1 of 48.06% in Python but only 0.12%-15.26% in other languages, indicating limited multilingual generalization. 3) Conceptual gaps: pass@o scores are consistently 1.1-19.2 points lower than pass@k, demonstrating that LLMs often generate executable code without fully capturing core OOP concepts. Our benchmark, metric extensions, and evaluation scripts will be publicly released to foster a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of LLMs in object-oriented code generation. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/alphadl/OOP-eval and https://huggingface.co/datasets/codeai-dteam/MultiOOP respectively.

Paperid: 353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26036.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at zero-shot tasks by aligning image and text embeddings, its performance in few-shot classification is hindered by a critical limitation: intra-modal misalignment. This issue, caused by a persistent modality gap and CLIP's exclusively inter-modal training objective, leaves the embedding spaces uncalibrated, making direct image-to-image comparisons unreliable. Existing methods attempt to address this by refining similarity logits or by computationally expensive per-sample optimization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SeMoBridge, a lightweight yet powerful approach that directly addresses the misalignment. Our method maps images into the text modality, while keeping their semantic content intact through what we call a Semantic Modality Bridge. SeMoBridge is closed-form and can optionally be trained through multi-modal supervision, combining image and text-alignment losses to optimize the projection. Experiments show that the trained version, SeMoBridge-T, requires only a fraction of the training time while overall outperforming other methods, particularly in low-data scenarios (1, 2, and 4 shots). The code is available at https://github.com/christti98/semobridge.

Paperid: 354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25826.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for time series analysis, driven by large-scale pretraining on diverse data corpora. However, time series inherently exhibit heterogeneous information density over time, influenced by system states and signal complexity, presenting significant modeling challenges especially in a zero-shot scenario. Current TSFMs rely on non-adaptive processing pipelines that fail to capture this dynamic nature. For example, common tokenization strategies such as fixed-size patching enforce rigid observational granularity, limiting their ability to adapt to varying information densities. Similarly, conventional positional encodings impose a uniform temporal scale, making it difficult to model diverse periodicities and trends across series. To overcome these limitations, we propose Kairos, a flexible TSFM framework that integrates a dynamic patching tokenizer and an instance-adaptive positional embedding. Kairos adaptively selects tokenization granularity and tailors positional encodings to the unique characteristics of each time series instance. Trained on a large-scale Predictability-Stratified Time Series (PreSTS) corpus comprising over 300 billion time points and adopting a multi-patch prediction strategy in the inference stage, Kairos achieves superior performance with much fewer parameters on two common zero-shot benchmarks, GIFT-Eval and the Time-Series-Library benchmark, consistently outperforming established methods across diverse tasks. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/Kairos .

Paperid: 355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25791.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely used tool for assessing cardiac function due to its low cost and accessibility. Emergent research shows that ECGs can help make predictions on key outcomes traditionally derived from more complex modalities such as echocardiograms (ECHO), enabling the use of ECGs as a more accessible method to predict broader measurements of cardiac function. ECHO, in particular, are of great importance because they require considerable hospital resources while playing a key role in clinical cardiac assessment. To aid this use case, we introduce EchoingECG, a probabilistic student-teacher model that leverages uncertainty-aware ECG embeddings and ECHO supervision to improve ECG-based cardiac function prediction. Our approach integrates Probabilistic Cross-Modal Embeddings (PCME++), a probabilistic contrastive framework, with ECHO-CLIP, a vision-language pre-trained model trained on ECHO-text pairs, to distill ECHO knowledge into ECG representations. Through experiments and external validation, we showed that EchoingECG outperforms state-of-the-art foundation ECG models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tune settings for ECHO predictions based on ECG. We also highlighted that variance estimation (enabled through our method) enhanced our understanding of model performance by identifying underlying regions of uncertainty within ECGs. The code is available: https://github.com/mcintoshML/EchoingECG.

Paperid: 356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25275.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bridge models have recently been explored for speech enhancement tasks such as denoising, dereverberation, and super-resolution, while these efforts are typically confined to a single task or small-scale datasets, with constrained general speech restoration (GSR) capability at scale. In this work, we introduce VoiceBridge, a GSR system rooted in latent bridge models (LBMs), capable of reconstructing high-fidelity speech at full-band (\textit{i.e.,} 48~kHz) from various distortions. By compressing speech waveform into continuous latent representations, VoiceBridge models the~\textit{diverse LQ-to-HQ tasks} (namely, low-quality to high-quality) in GSR with~\textit{a single latent-to-latent generative process} backed by a scalable transformer architecture. To better inherit the advantages of bridge models from the data domain to the latent space, we present an energy-preserving variational autoencoder, enhancing the alignment between the waveform and latent space over varying energy levels. Furthermore, to address the difficulty of HQ reconstruction from distinctively different LQ priors, we propose a joint neural prior, uniformly alleviating the reconstruction burden of LBM. At last, considering the key requirement of GSR systems, human perceptual quality, a perceptually aware fine-tuning stage is designed to mitigate the cascading mismatch in generation while improving perceptual alignment. Extensive validation across in-domain and out-of-domain tasks and datasets (\textit{e.g.}, refining recent zero-shot speech and podcast generation results) demonstrates the superior performance of VoiceBridge. Demo samples can be visited at: https://VoiceBridge-demo.github.io/.

Paperid: 357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25131.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present MGM-Omni, a unified Omni LLM for omni-modal understanding and expressive, long-horizon speech generation. Unlike cascaded pipelines that isolate speech synthesis, MGM-Omni adopts a "brain-mouth" design with a dual-track, token-based architecture that cleanly decouples multimodal reasoning from real-time speech generation. This design enables efficient cross-modal interaction and low-latency, streaming speech generation. For understanding, a unified training strategy coupled with a dual audio encoder design enables long-form audio perception across diverse acoustic conditions. For generation, a chunk-based parallel decoding scheme narrows the text speech token-rate gap, accelerating inference and supporting streaming zero-shot voice cloning with stable timbre over extended durations. Compared to concurrent work, MGM-Omni achieves these capabilities with markedly data-efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGM-Omni outperforms existing open source models in preserving timbre identity across extended sequences, producing natural and context-aware speech, and achieving superior long-form audio and omnimodal understanding. MGM-Omni establishes an efficient, end-to-end paradigm for omnimodal understanding and controllable, personalised long-horizon speech generation.

Paperid: 358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25033.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize novel concepts from only a few labeled support samples. Recent studies enhance support features by incorporating additional semantic information or designing complex semantic fusion modules. However, they still suffer from hallucinating semantics that contradict the visual evidence due to the lack of grounding in actual instances, resulting in noisy guidance and costly corrections. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, bridging Vision and Text with LLMs for Few-Shot Learning (VT-FSL), which constructs precise cross-modal prompts conditioned on Large Language Models (LLMs) and support images, seamlessly integrating them through a geometry-aware alignment. It mainly consists of Cross-modal Iterative Prompting (CIP) and Cross-modal Geometric Alignment (CGA). Specifically, the CIP conditions an LLM on both class names and support images to generate precise class descriptions iteratively in a single structured reasoning pass. These descriptions not only enrich the semantic understanding of novel classes but also enable the zero-shot synthesis of semantically consistent images. The descriptions and synthetic images act respectively as complementary textual and visual prompts, providing high-level class semantics and low-level intra-class diversity to compensate for limited support data. Furthermore, the CGA jointly aligns the fused textual, support, and synthetic visual representations by minimizing the kernelized volume of the 3-dimensional parallelotope they span. It captures global and nonlinear relationships among all representations, enabling structured and consistent multimodal integration. The proposed VT-FSL method establishes new state-of-the-art performance across ten diverse benchmarks, including standard, cross-domain, and fine-grained few-shot learning scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/peacelwh/VT-FSL.

Paperid: 359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24473.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spatial intelligence spans a rich suite of abilities, including visualising and transforming shapes, mentally rotating objects, judging relational positions and containment, and estimating numerosity. However, it still remains a critical unresolved challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).To fill this gap, we propose to treat Euclidean geometry problem-solving as a surrogate task. Specifically, we meticulously constructed a curated multimodal dataset, called Euclid30K, comprising approximately 30K plane and solid geometry problems. To enable the model to acquire and apply Euclidean principles from these geometry problems, we employed Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to finetune the Qwen2.5VL family and RoboBrain2.0 family, inspiring the models to identify shapes, count, and relate entities, and perform multi-step deductive reasoning using Euclidean principles. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting models achieve substantial zero-shot gains across four spatial reasoning benchmarks (Super-CLEVR, Omni3DBench, VSI-Bench, and MindCube) without any task-specific adaptations. Notably, after training on the Euclid30K, the mean VSI-Bench accuracy of all evaluated models rose from 34.5% to 40.5%, improving by 5.5 percentage points. Among them, RoboBrain2.0-Euclid-7B achieves 49.6\% accuracy, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art model, Spatial-MLLM.To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study showing that geometry-centric fine-tuning can confer vision-language models with broadly transferable spatial skills. Code and Euclid30K dataset can be found in https://zgca-ai4edu.github.io/Euclids_Gift.

Paperid: 360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23770.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The success of contrastive learning depends on the construction and utilization of high-quality positive pairs. However, current methods face critical limitations on two fronts: on the construction side, both handcrafted and generative augmentations often suffer from limited diversity and risk semantic corruption; on the learning side, the absence of a quality assessment mechanism leads to suboptimal supervision where all pairs are treated equally. To tackle these challenges, we propose GenView++, a unified framework that addresses both fronts by introducing two synergistic innovations. To improve pair construction, GenView++ introduces a multi-source adaptive view generation mechanism to synthesize diverse yet semantically coherent views by dynamically modulating generative parameters across image-conditioned, text-conditioned, and image-text-conditioned strategies. Second, a quality-driven contrastive learning mechanism assesses each pair's semantic alignment and diversity to dynamically reweight their training contribution, prioritizing high-quality pairs while suppressing redundant or misaligned pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GenView++ across both vision and vision-language tasks. For vision representation learning, it improves MoCov2 by +2.5% on ImageNet linear classification. For vision-language learning, it raises the average zero-shot classification accuracy by +12.31% over CLIP and +5.31% over SLIP across ten datasets, and further improves Flickr30k text retrieval R@5 by +3.2%. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaojieli0903/GenViewPlusPlus.

Paperid: 361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23733.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper we propose FastViDAR, a novel framework that takes four fisheye camera inputs and produces a full $360^\circ$ depth map along with per-camera depth, fusion depth, and confidence estimates. Our main contributions are: (1) We introduce Alternative Hierarchical Attention (AHA) mechanism that efficiently fuses features across views through separate intra-frame and inter-frame windowed self-attention, achieving cross-view feature mixing with reduced overhead. (2) We propose a novel ERP fusion approach that projects multi-view depth estimates to a shared equirectangular coordinate system to obtain the final fusion depth. (3) We generate ERP image-depth pairs using HM3D and 2D3D-S datasets for comprehensive evaluation, demonstrating competitive zero-shot performance on real datasets while achieving up to 20 FPS on NVIDIA Orin NX embedded hardware. Project page: \href{https://3f7dfc.github.io/FastVidar/}{https://3f7dfc.github.io/FastVidar/}

Paperid: 362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23607.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the field of 3D content generation, single image scene reconstruction methods still struggle to simultaneously ensure the quality of individual assets and the coherence of the overall scene in complex environments, while texture editing techniques often fail to maintain both local continuity and multi-view consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel system ZeroScene, which leverages the prior knowledge of large vision models to accomplish both single image-to-3D scene reconstruction and texture editing in a zero-shot manner. ZeroScene extracts object-level 2D segmentation and depth information from input images to infer spatial relationships within the scene. It then jointly optimizes 3D and 2D projection losses of the point cloud to update object poses for precise scene alignment, ultimately constructing a coherent and complete 3D scene that encompasses both foreground and background. Moreover, ZeroScene supports texture editing of objects in the scene. By imposing constraints on the diffusion model and introducing a mask-guided progressive image generation strategy, we effectively maintain texture consistency across multiple viewpoints and further enhance the realism of rendered results through Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only ensures the geometric and appearance accuracy of generated assets, but also faithfully reconstructs scene layouts and produces highly detailed textures that closely align with text prompts.

Paperid: 363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23501.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate predictions based on prompts without additional fine-tuning. While prompt engineering has been widely studied, the impact of role design within prompts remains underexplored. This study examines the influence of role configurations in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o from OpenAI and Llama2-7b and Llama2-13b from Meta. We evaluate the models' performance across datasets, focusing on tasks like sentiment analysis, text classification, question answering, and math reasoning. Our findings suggest the potential of role-based prompt structuring to enhance LLM performance.

Paperid: 364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23433.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real-world videos often show routine activities punctuated by memorable, surprising events. However, most Video-LLMs process videos by sampling frames uniformly, likely missing critical moments that define a video's narrative. We introduce SPIKE, an inference-time framework that quantifies Bayesian Surprise as the belief update triggered by new visual evidence in the video stream, identifying moments where new visual evidence conflicts with prior beliefs. SPIKE effectively localizes surprise in videos, strongly correlated with humans on positive (FunQA) and negative (Oops!) surprise benchmarks. Since the beliefs of zero-shot Video-LLMs are often suboptimal, we develop SPIKE-RL, which leverages GRPO to optimize belief hypotheses based on a reward signal from the video caption. SPIKE and SPIKE-RL guide query-agnostic surprise-weighted frame sampling, which allocates more frames to interesting moments in the video. With this strategy, we achieve consistent performance gains on five downstream benchmarks over uniform sampling. By enabling Video-LLMs to track beliefs and register surprise, our work paves the way for more robust models that can revise their understanding in response to new information.

Paperid: 365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23208.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This study aims to test and evaluate the capabilities and characteristics of current mainstream Visual Language Models (VLMs) in generating critiques for traditional Chinese painting. To achieve this, we first developed a quantitative framework for Chinese painting critique. This framework was constructed by extracting multi-dimensional evaluative features covering evaluative stance, feature focus, and commentary quality from human expert critiques using a zero-shot classification model. Based on these features, several representative critic personas were defined and quantified. This framework was then employed to evaluate selected VLMs such as Llama, Qwen, or Gemini. The experimental design involved persona-guided prompting to assess the VLM's ability to generate critiques from diverse perspectives. Our findings reveal the current performance levels, strengths, and areas for improvement of VLMs in the domain of art critique, offering insights into their potential and limitations in complex semantic understanding and content generation tasks. The code used for our experiments can be publicly accessed at: https://github.com/yha9806/VULCA-EMNLP2025.

Paperid: 366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23099.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Molecule generation is key to drug discovery and materials science, enabling the design of novel compounds with specific properties. Large language models (LLMs) can learn to perform a wide range of tasks from just a few examples. However, generating valid molecules using representations like SMILES is challenging for LLMs in few-shot settings. In this work, we explore how LLMs can generate 100% valid molecules. We evaluate whether LLMs can use SELFIES, a representation where every string corresponds to a valid molecule, for valid molecule generation but find that LLMs perform worse with SELFIES than with SMILES. We then examine LLMs' ability to correct invalid SMILES and find their capacity limited. Finally, we introduce SmiSelf, a cross-chemical language framework for invalid SMILES correction. SmiSelf converts invalid SMILES to SELFIES using grammatical rules, leveraging SELFIES' mechanisms to correct the invalid SMILES. Experiments show that SmiSelf ensures 100% validity while preserving molecular characteristics and maintaining or even enhancing performance on other metrics. SmiSelf helps expand LLMs' practical applications in biomedicine and is compatible with all SMILES-based generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/wentao228/SmiSelf.

Paperid: 367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved exceptional performance across diverse tasks, continually surpassing previous expectations regarding their capabilities. Nevertheless, their proficiency in perceiving emotions from images remains debated, with studies yielding divergent results in zero-shot scenarios. We argue that this inconsistency stems partly from constraints in existing evaluation methods, including the oversight of plausible responses, limited emotional taxonomies, neglect of contextual factors, and labor-intensive annotations. To facilitate customized visual emotion evaluation for MLLMs, we propose an Emotion Statement Judgment task that overcomes these constraints. Complementing this task, we devise an automated pipeline that efficiently constructs emotion-centric statements with minimal human effort. Through systematically evaluating prevailing MLLMs, our study showcases their stronger performance in emotion interpretation and context-based emotion judgment, while revealing relative limitations in comprehending perception subjectivity. When compared to humans, even top-performing MLLMs like GPT4o demonstrate remarkable performance gaps, underscoring key areas for future improvement. By developing a fundamental evaluation framework and conducting a comprehensive MLLM assessment, we hope this work contributes to advancing emotional intelligence in MLLMs. Project page: https://github.com/wdqqdw/MVEI.

Paperid: 368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21670.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce MORPH, a shape-agnostic, autoregressive foundation model for partial differential equations (PDEs). MORPH is built on a convolutional vision transformer backbone that seamlessly handles heterogeneous spatiotemporal datasets of varying data dimensionality (1D--3D) at different resolutions, multiple fields with mixed scalar and vector components. The architecture combines (i) component-wise convolution, which jointly processes scalar and vector channels to capture local interactions, (ii) inter-field cross-attention, which models and selectively propagates information between different physical fields, (iii) axial attentions, which factorizes full spatiotemporal self-attention along individual spatial and temporal axes to reduce computational burden while retaining expressivity. We pretrain multiple model variants on a diverse collection of heterogeneous PDE datasets and evaluate transfer to a range of downstream prediction tasks. Using both full-model fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adapters (LoRA), MORPH outperforms models trained from scratch in both zero-shot and full-shot generalization. Across extensive evaluations, MORPH matches or surpasses strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art models. Collectively, these capabilities present a flexible and powerful backbone for learning from heterogeneous and multimodal nature of scientific observations, charting a path toward scalable and data-efficient scientific machine learning. The source code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lanl/MORPH.

Paperid: 369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21055.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing foreground-background (FG-BG) decomposition methods for the few-shot out-of-distribution (FS-OOD) detection often suffer from low robustness due to over-reliance on the local class similarity and a fixed background patch extraction strategy. To address these challenges, we propose a new FG-BG decomposition framework, namely Mambo, for FS-OOD detection. Specifically, we propose to first learn a background prompt to obtain the local background similarity containing both the background and image semantic information, and then refine the local background similarity using the local class similarity. As a result, we use both the refined local background similarity and the local class similarity to conduct background extraction, reducing the dependence of the local class similarity in previous methods. Furthermore, we propose the patch self-calibrated tuning to consider the sample diversity to flexibly select numbers of background patches for different samples, and thus exploring the issue of fixed background extraction strategies in previous methods. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed Mambo achieves the best performance, compared to SOTA methods in terms of OOD detection and near OOD detection setting. The source code will be released at https://github.com/YuzunoKawori/Mambo.

Paperid: 370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20209.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), low-resource languages like Tigrinya remain underserved due to persistent challenges, including limited corpora, inadequate tokenization strategies, and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. This paper investigates transfer learning techniques using multilingual pretrained models to enhance translation quality for morphologically rich, low-resource languages. We propose a refined approach that integrates language-specific tokenization, informed embedding initialization, and domain-adaptive fine-tuning. To enable rigorous assessment, we construct a high-quality, human-aligned English-Tigrinya evaluation dataset covering diverse domains. Experimental results demonstrate that transfer learning with a custom tokenizer substantially outperforms zero-shot baselines, with gains validated by BLEU, chrF, and qualitative human evaluation. Bonferroni correction is applied to ensure statistical significance across configurations. Error analysis reveals key limitations and informs targeted refinements. This study underscores the importance of linguistically aware modeling and reproducible benchmarks in bridging the performance gap for underrepresented languages. Resources are available at https://github.com/hailaykidu/MachineT_TigEng and https://huggingface.co/Hailay/MachineT_TigEng

Paperid: 371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19742.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot Dialog State Tracking (zs-DST) is essential for enabling Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (TODs) to generalize to new domains without costly data annotation. A central challenge lies in the semantic misalignment between dynamic dialog contexts and static prompts, leading to inflexible cross-layer coordination, domain interference, and catastrophic forgetting. To tackle this, we propose Hierarchical Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation (HiCoLoRA), a framework that enhances zero-shot slot inference through robust prompt alignment. It features a hierarchical LoRA architecture for dynamic layer-specific processing (combining lower-layer heuristic grouping and higher-layer full interaction), integrates Spectral Joint Domain-Slot Clustering to identify transferable associations (feeding an Adaptive Linear Fusion Mechanism), and employs Semantic-Enhanced SVD Initialization (SemSVD-Init) to preserve pre-trained knowledge. Experiments on multi-domain datasets MultiWOZ and SGD show that HiCoLoRA outperforms baselines, achieving SOTA in zs-DST. Code is available at https://github.com/carsonz/HiCoLoRA.

Paperid: 372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19658.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In-context imitation learning (ICIL) enables robots to learn tasks from prompts consisting of just a handful of demonstrations. By eliminating the need for parameter updates at deployment time, this paradigm supports few-shot adaptation to novel tasks. However, recent ICIL methods rely on Transformers, which have computational limitations and tend to underperform when handling longer prompts than those seen during training. In this work, we introduce RoboSSM, a scalable recipe for in-context imitation learning based on state-space models (SSM). Specifically, RoboSSM replaces Transformers with Longhorn -- a state-of-the-art SSM that provides linear-time inference and strong extrapolation capabilities, making it well-suited for long-context prompts. We evaluate our approach on the LIBERO benchmark and compare it against strong Transformer-based ICIL baselines. Experiments show that RoboSSM extrapolates effectively to varying numbers of in-context demonstrations, yields high performance on unseen tasks, and remains robust in long-horizon scenarios. These results highlight the potential of SSMs as an efficient and scalable backbone for ICIL. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngjuY/RoboSSM.

Paperid: 373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19460.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Imitation learning has been a trend recently, yet training a generalist agent across multiple tasks still requires large-scale expert demonstrations, which are costly and labor-intensive to collect. To address the challenge of limited supervision, we propose Self-Evolved Imitation Learning (SEIL), a framework that progressively improves a few-shot model through simulator interactions. The model first attempts tasksin the simulator, from which successful trajectories are collected as new demonstrations for iterative refinement. To enhance the diversity of these demonstrations, SEIL employs dual-level augmentation: (i) Model-level, using an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) model to collaborate with the primary model, and (ii) Environment-level, introducing slight variations in initial object positions. We further introduce a lightweight selector that filters complementary and informative trajectories from the generated pool to ensure demonstration quality. These curated samples enable the model to achieve competitive performance with far fewer training examples. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that SEIL achieves a new state-of-the-art performance in few-shot imitation learning scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/Jasper-aaa/SEIL.git.

Paperid: 374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19203.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastively-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have become the standard approach for learning discriminative vision-language representations. However, these models often exhibit shallow language understanding, manifesting bag-of-words behaviour. These limitations are reinforced by their dual-encoder design, which induces a modality gap. Additionally, the reliance on vast web-collected data corpora for training makes the process computationally expensive and introduces significant privacy concerns. To address these limitations, in this work, we challenge the necessity of vision encoders for retrieval tasks by introducing a vision-free, single-encoder retrieval pipeline. Departing from the traditional text-to-image retrieval paradigm, we migrate to a text-to-text paradigm with the assistance of VLLM-generated structured image descriptions. We demonstrate that this paradigm shift has significant advantages, including a substantial reduction of the modality gap, improved compositionality, and better performance on short and long caption queries, all attainable with only a few hours of calibration on two GPUs. Additionally, substituting raw images with textual descriptions introduces a more privacy-friendly alternative for retrieval. To further assess generalisation and address some of the shortcomings of prior compositionality benchmarks, we release two benchmarks derived from Flickr30k and COCO, containing diverse compositional queries made of short captions, which we coin subFlickr and subCOCO. Our vision-free retriever matches and often surpasses traditional multimodal models. Importantly, our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on multiple retrieval and compositionality benchmarks, with models as small as 0.3B parameters. Code is available at: https://github.com/IoannaNti/LexiCLIP

Paperid: 375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18874.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Regulatory limits on explicit targeting have not eliminated algorithmic profiling on the Web, as optimisation systems still adapt ad delivery to users' private attributes. The widespread availability of powerful zero-shot multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically lowered the barrier for exploiting these latent signals for adversarial inference. We investigate this emerging societal risk, specifically how adversaries can now exploit these signals to reverse-engineer private attributes from ad exposure alone. We introduce a novel pipeline that leverages LLMs as adversarial inference engines to perform natural language profiling. Applying this method to a longitudinal dataset comprising over 435,000 ad impressions collected from 891 users, we conducted a large-scale study to assess the feasibility and precision of inferring private attributes from passive online ad observations. Our results demonstrate that off-the-shelf LLMs can accurately reconstruct complex user private attributes, including party preference, employment status, and education level, consistently outperforming strong census-based priors and matching or exceeding human social perception, while operating at only a fraction of the cost (223$\times$ lower) and time (52$\times$ faster) required by humans. Critically, actionable profiling is feasible even within short observation windows, indicating that prolonged tracking is not a prerequisite for a successful attack. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that ad streams serve as a high-fidelity digital footprint, enabling off-platform profiling that inherently bypasses current platform safeguards, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in the ad ecosystem and the urgent need for responsible web AI governance in the generative AI era. The code is available at https://github.com/Breezelled/when-ads-become-profiles.

Paperid: 376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18738.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to identify prominent objects by integrating complementary information from RGB and thermal modalities. However, learning the precise boundaries and complete objects remains challenging due to the intrinsic insufficient feature fusion and the extrinsic limitations of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid prompt-driven segment anything model (HyPSAM), which leverages the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segment anything model (SAM) for RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic fusion network (DFNet) that generates high-quality initial saliency maps as visual prompts. DFNet employs dynamic convolution and multi-branch decoding to facilitate adaptive cross-modality interaction, overcoming the limitations of fixed-parameter kernels and enhancing multi-modal feature representation. Moreover, we propose a plug-and-play refinement network (P2RNet), which serves as a general optimization strategy to guide SAM in refining saliency maps by using hybrid prompts. The text prompt ensures reliable modality input, while the mask and box prompts enable precise salient object localization. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, HyPSAM has remarkable versatility, seamlessly integrating with different RGB-T SOD methods to achieve significant performance gains, thereby highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in this field. The code and results of our method are available at: https://github.com/milotic233/HyPSAM.

Paperid: 377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18642.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Monocular relative and metric depth estimation has seen a tremendous boost in the last few years due to the sharp advancements in foundation models and in particular transformer based networks. As we start to see applications to the domain of endoscopic images, there is still a lack of robust benchmarks and high-quality datasets in that area. This paper addresses these limitations by presenting a comprehensive benchmark of state-of-the-art (metric and relative) depth estimation models evaluated on real, unseen endoscopic images, providing critical insights into their generalisation and performance in clinical scenarios. Additionally, we introduce and publish a novel synthetic dataset (EndoSynth) of endoscopic surgical instruments paired with ground truth metric depth and segmentation masks, designed to bridge the gap between synthetic and real-world data. We demonstrate that fine-tuning depth foundation models using our synthetic dataset boosts accuracy on most unseen real data by a significant margin. By providing both a benchmark and a synthetic dataset, this work advances the field of depth estimation for endoscopic images and serves as an important resource for future research. Project page, EndoSynth dataset and trained weights are available at https://github.com/TouchSurgery/EndoSynth.

Paperid: 378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18592.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Rapid adaptation in unseen environments is essential for scalable real-world autonomy, yet existing approaches rely on exhaustive exploration or rigid navigation policies that fail to generalize. We present VLN-Zero, a two-phase vision-language navigation framework that leverages vision-language models to efficiently construct symbolic scene graphs and enable zero-shot neurosymbolic navigation. In the exploration phase, structured prompts guide VLM-based search toward informative and diverse trajectories, yielding compact scene graph representations. In the deployment phase, a neurosymbolic planner reasons over the scene graph and environmental observations to generate executable plans, while a cache-enabled execution module accelerates adaptation by reusing previously computed task-location trajectories. By combining rapid exploration, symbolic reasoning, and cache-enabled execution, the proposed framework overcomes the computational inefficiency and poor generalization of prior vision-language navigation methods, enabling robust and scalable decision-making in unseen environments. VLN-Zero achieves 2x higher success rate compared to state-of-the-art zero-shot models, outperforms most fine-tuned baselines, and reaches goal locations in half the time with 55% fewer VLM calls on average compared to state-of-the-art models across diverse environments. Codebase, datasets, and videos for VLN-Zero are available at: https://vln-zero.github.io/.

Paperid: 379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18388.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Running a large open-vocabulary (Open-vocab) detector on every video frame is accurate but expensive. We introduce a training-free pipeline that invokes OWLv2 only on fixed-interval keyframes and propagates detections to intermediate frames using compressed-domain motion vectors (MV). A simple 3x3 grid aggregation of motion vectors provides translation and uniform-scale updates, augmented with an area-growth check and an optional single-class switch. The method requires no labels, no fine-tuning, and uses the same prompt list for all open-vocabulary methods. On ILSVRC2015-VID (validation dataset), our approach (MVP) attains mAP@0.5=0.609 and mAP@[0.5:0.95]=0.316. At loose intersection-over-union (IoU) thresholds it remains close to framewise OWLv2-Large (0.747/0.721 at 0.2/0.3 versus 0.784/0.780), reflecting that coarse localization is largely preserved. Under the same keyframe schedule, MVP outperforms tracker-based propagation (MOSSE, KCF, CSRT) at mAP@0.5. A supervised reference (YOLOv12x) reaches 0.631 at mAP@0.5 but requires labeled training, whereas our method remains label-free and open-vocabulary. These results indicate that compressed-domain propagation is a practical way to reduce detector invocations while keeping strong zero-shot coverage in videos. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/microa/MVP.

Paperid: 380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18354.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly detection in images is typically addressed by learning from collections of training data or relying on reference samples. In many real-world scenarios, however, such training data may be unavailable, and only the test image itself is provided. We address this zero-shot setting by proposing a single-image anomaly localization method that leverages the inductive bias of convolutional neural networks, inspired by Deep Image Prior (DIP). Our method is named Single Shot Decomposition Network (SSDnet). Our key assumption is that natural images often exhibit unified textures and patterns, and that anomalies manifest as localized deviations from these repetitive or stochastic patterns. To learn the deep image prior, we design a patch-based training framework where the input image is fed directly into the network for self-reconstruction, rather than mapping random noise to the image as done in DIP. To avoid the model simply learning an identity mapping, we apply masking, patch shuffling, and small Gaussian noise. In addition, we use a perceptual loss based on inner-product similarity to capture structure beyond pixel fidelity. Our approach needs no external training data, labels, or references, and remains robust in the presence of noise or missing pixels. SSDnet achieves 0.99 AUROC and 0.60 AUPRC on MVTec-AD and 0.98 AUROC and 0.67 AUPRC on the fabric dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The implementation code will be released at https://github.com/mehrdadmoradi124/SSDnet

Paperid: 381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18282.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in how to act. We present PEEK (Policy-agnostic Extraction of Essential Keypoints), which fine-tunes VLMs to predict a unified point-based intermediate representation: 1. end-effector paths specifying what actions to take, and 2. task-relevant masks indicating where to focus. These annotations are directly overlaid onto robot observations, making the representation policy-agnostic and transferable across architectures. To enable scalable training, we introduce an automatic annotation pipeline, generating labeled data across 20+ robot datasets spanning 9 embodiments. In real-world evaluations, PEEK consistently boosts zero-shot generalization, including a 41.4x real-world improvement for a 3D policy trained only in simulation, and 2-3.5x gains for both large VLAs and small manipulation policies. By letting VLMs absorb semantic and visual complexity, PEEK equips manipulation policies with the minimal cues they need--where, what, and how. Website at https://peek-robot.github.io/.

Paperid: 382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18165.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Regularization is essential in deep learning to enhance generalization and mitigate overfitting. However, conventional techniques often rely on heuristics, making them less reliable or effective across diverse settings. We propose Self Identity Mapping (SIM), a simple yet effective, data-intrinsic regularization framework that leverages an inverse mapping mechanism to enhance representation learning. By reconstructing the input from its transformed output, SIM reduces information loss during forward propagation and facilitates smoother gradient flow. To address computational inefficiencies, We instantiate SIM as $ Ï\text{SIM} $ by incorporating patch-level feature sampling and projection-based method to reconstruct latent features, effectively lowering complexity. As a model-agnostic, task-agnostic regularizer, SIM can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module, making it applicable to different network architectures and tasks. We extensively evaluate $Ï\text{SIM}$ across three tasks: image classification, few-shot prompt learning, and domain generalization. Experimental results show consistent improvements over baseline methods, highlighting $Ï\text{SIM}$'s ability to enhance representation learning across various tasks. We also demonstrate that $Ï\text{SIM}$ is orthogonal to existing regularization methods, boosting their effectiveness. Moreover, our results confirm that $Ï\text{SIM}$ effectively preserves semantic information and enhances performance in dense-to-dense tasks, such as semantic segmentation and image translation, as well as in non-visual domains including audio classification and time series anomaly detection. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/XiudingCai/SIM-pytorch.

Paperid: 383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18056.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces TempSamp-R1, a new reinforcement fine-tuning framework designed to improve the effectiveness of adapting multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to video temporal grounding tasks. We reveal that existing reinforcement learning methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), rely on on-policy sampling for policy updates. However, in tasks with large temporal search spaces, this strategy becomes both inefficient and limited in performance, as it often fails to identify temporally accurate solutions. To address this limitation, TempSamp-R1 leverages ground-truth annotations as off-policy supervision to provide temporally precise guidance, effectively compensating for the sparsity and misalignment in on-policy solutions. To further stabilize training and reduce variance in reward-based updates, TempSamp-R1 provides a non-linear soft advantage computation method that dynamically reshapes the reward feedback via an asymmetric transformation. By employing a hybrid Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training paradigm, TempSamp-R1 optimizes a single unified model to support both CoT and non-CoT inference modes, enabling efficient handling of queries with varying reasoning complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that TempSamp-R1 outperforms GRPO-based baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets: Charades-STA (R1@0.7: 52.9%, +2.7%), ActivityNet Captions (R1@0.5: 56.0%, +5.3%), and QVHighlights (mAP: 30.0%, +3.0%). Moreover, TempSamp-R1 shows robust few-shot generalization capabilities under limited data. Code: https://github.com/HVision-NKU/TempSamp-R1

Paperid: 384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17759.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scaling real robot data is a key bottleneck in imitation learning, leading to the use of auxiliary data for policy training. While other aspects of robotic manipulation such as image or language understanding may be learned from internet-based datasets, acquiring motion knowledge remains challenging. Human data, with its rich diversity of manipulation behaviors, offers a valuable resource for this purpose. While previous works show that using human data can bring benefits, such as improving robustness and training efficiency, it remains unclear whether it can realize its greatest advantage: enabling robot policies to directly learn new motions for task completion. In this paper, we systematically explore this potential through multi-task human-robot cotraining. We introduce MotionTrans, a framework that includes a data collection system, a human data transformation pipeline, and a weighted cotraining strategy. By cotraining 30 human-robot tasks simultaneously, we direcly transfer motions of 13 tasks from human data to deployable end-to-end robot policies. Notably, 9 tasks achieve non-trivial success rates in zero-shot manner. MotionTrans also significantly enhances pretraining-finetuning performance (+40% success rate). Through ablation study, we also identify key factors for successful motion learning: cotraining with robot data and broad task-related motion coverage. These findings unlock the potential of motion-level learning from human data, offering insights into its effective use for training robotic manipulation policies. All data, code, and model weights are open-sourced https://motiontrans.github.io/.

Paperid: 385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17598.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation (TTA) has gained increasing popularity due to its efficacy in addressing ``distribution shift'' issue while simultaneously protecting data privacy. However, most prior methods assume that a paired source domain model and target domain sharing the same label space coexist, heavily limiting their applicability. In this paper, we investigate a more general source model capable of adaptation to multiple target domains without needing shared labels. This is achieved by using a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), \egno, CLIP, that can recognize images through matching with class descriptions. While the zero-shot performance of VLMs is impressive, they struggle to effectively capture the distinctive attributes of a target domain. To that end, we propose a novel method -- Context-aware Language-driven TTA (COLA). The proposed method incorporates a lightweight context-aware module that consists of three key components: a task-aware adapter, a context-aware unit, and a residual connection unit for exploring task-specific knowledge, domain-specific knowledge from the VLM and prior knowledge of the VLM, respectively. It is worth noting that the context-aware module can be seamlessly integrated into a frozen VLM, ensuring both minimal effort and parameter efficiency. Additionally, we introduce a Class-Balanced Pseudo-labeling (CBPL) strategy to mitigate the adverse effects caused by class imbalance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method not only in TTA scenarios but also in class generalisation tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/NUDT-Bai-Group/COLA-TTA.

Paperid: 386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17430.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The field of Embodied AI predominantly relies on simulation for training and evaluation, often using either fully synthetic environments that lack photorealism or high-fidelity real-world reconstructions captured with expensive hardware. As a result, sim-to-real transfer remains a major challenge. In this paper, we introduce EmbodiedSplat, a novel approach that personalizes policy training by efficiently capturing the deployment environment and fine-tuning policies within the reconstructed scenes. Our method leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) and the Habitat-Sim simulator to bridge the gap between realistic scene capture and effective training environments. Using iPhone-captured deployment scenes, we reconstruct meshes via GS, enabling training in settings that closely approximate real-world conditions. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of training strategies, pre-training datasets, and mesh reconstruction techniques, evaluating their impact on sim-to-real predictivity in real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that agents fine-tuned with EmbodiedSplat outperform both zero-shot baselines pre-trained on large-scale real-world datasets (HM3D) and synthetically generated datasets (HSSD), achieving absolute success rate improvements of 20% and 40% on real-world Image Navigation task. Moreover, our approach yields a high sim-vs-real correlation (0.87-0.97) for the reconstructed meshes, underscoring its effectiveness in adapting policies to diverse environments with minimal effort. Project page: https://gchhablani.github.io/embodied-splat.

Paperid: 387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17289.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce CoDe-KG, an open-source, end-to-end pipeline for extracting sentence-level knowledge graphs by combining robust coreference resolution with syntactic sentence decomposition. Using our model, we contribute a dataset of over 150,000 knowledge triples, which is open source. We also contribute a training corpus of 7248 rows for sentence complexity, 190 rows of gold human annotations for co-reference resolution using open source lung-cancer abstracts from PubMed, 900 rows of gold human annotations for sentence conversion policies, and 398 triples of gold human annotations. We systematically select optimal prompt-model pairs across five complexity categories, showing that hybrid chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting yields up to 99.8% exact-match accuracy on sentence simplification. On relation extraction (RE), our pipeline achieves 65.8% macro-F1 on REBEL, an 8-point gain over the prior state of the art, and 75.7% micro-F1 on WebNLG2, while matching or exceeding performance on Wiki-NRE and CaRB. Ablation studies demonstrate that integrating coreference and decomposition increases recall on rare relations by over 20%. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/KaushikMahmud/CoDe-KG_EMNLP_2025

Paperid: 388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17143.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce MaskVCT, a zero-shot voice conversion (VC) model that offers multi-factor controllability through multiple classifier-free guidances (CFGs). While previous VC models rely on a fixed conditioning scheme, MaskVCT integrates diverse conditions in a single model. To further enhance robustness and control, the model can leverage continuous or quantized linguistic features to enhance intellgibility and speaker similarity, and can use or omit pitch contour to control prosody. These choices allow users to seamlessly balance speaker identity, linguistic content, and prosodic factors in a zero-shot VC setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MaskVCT achieves the best target speaker and accent similarities while obtaining competitive word and character error rates compared to existing baselines. Audio samples are available at https://maskvct.github.io/.

Paperid: 389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17084.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Video action recognition is a fundamental task in computer vision, but state-of-the-art models are often computationally expensive and rely on extensive video pre-training. In parallel, large-scale vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) offer powerful zero-shot capabilities on static images, while motion vectors (MV) provide highly efficient temporal information directly from compressed video streams. To synergize the strengths of these paradigms, we propose MoCLIP-Lite, a simple yet powerful two-stream late fusion framework for efficient video recognition. Our approach combines features from a frozen CLIP image encoder with features from a lightweight, supervised network trained on raw MV. During fusion, both backbones are frozen, and only a tiny Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) head is trained, ensuring extreme efficiency. Through comprehensive experiments on the UCF101 dataset, our method achieves a remarkable 89.2% Top-1 accuracy, significantly outperforming strong zero-shot (65.0%) and MV-only (66.5%) baselines. Our work provides a new, highly efficient baseline for video understanding that effectively bridges the gap between large static models and dynamic, low-cost motion cues. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/microa/MoCLIP-Lite.

Paperid: 390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17066.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation predicts a user's next destination from historical movements. Traditional models require intensive training, while LLMs offer flexible and generalizable zero-shot solutions but often generate generic or geographically irrelevant results due to missing trajectory and spatial context. To address these issues, we propose RALLM-POI, a framework that couples LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation and self-rectification. We first propose a Historical Trajectory Retriever (HTR) that retrieves relevant past trajectories to serve as contextual references, which are then reranked by a Geographical Distance Reranker (GDR) for prioritizing spatially relevant trajectories. Lastly, an Agentic LLM Rectifier (ALR) is designed to refine outputs through self-reflection. Without additional training, RALLM-POI achieves substantial accuracy gains across three real-world Foursquare datasets, outperforming both conventional and LLM-based baselines. Code is released at https://github.com/LKRcrocodile/RALLM-POI.

Paperid: 391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17065.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Echocardiography is a vital non-invasive modality for cardiac assessment, with left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) serving as a key indicator of heart function. Existing LVEF estimation methods depend on large-scale annotated video datasets, which are costly and limit adaptability across various clinical settings. Recent vision-language models for echocardiography, such as EchoCLIP, apply image-to-text pretraining but fail to capture crucial temporal dynamics and localized cardiac structures essential for accurate diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose CardiacCLIP, a video-based framework that enhances LVEF prediction through attention-based frame aggregation and multi-resolution input scaling. Specifically, we introduce MFL (Multi Frame Learning), a novel attention-based mechanism for selectively fusing informative frames, and EchoZoom, a multi-scale feature extraction strategy that refines spatial representations of cardiac structures. As a novel adaptation of CLIP models for few-shot echocardiogram video analysis, our approach significantly improves diagnostic accuracy, reducing MAE by 2.07 on the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset under 1-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/CardiacCLIP.

Paperid: 392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16664.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Retrieval systems rely on representations learned by increasingly powerful models. However, due to the high training cost and inconsistencies in learned representations, there is significant interest in facilitating communication between representations and ensuring compatibility across independently trained neural networks. In the literature, two primary approaches are commonly used to adapt different learned representations: affine transformations, which adapt well to specific distributions but can significantly alter the original representation, and orthogonal transformations, which preserve the original structure with strict geometric constraints but limit adaptability. A key challenge is adapting the latent spaces of updated models to align with those of previous models on downstream distributions while preserving the newly learned representation spaces. In this paper, we impose a relaxed orthogonality constraint, namely $Î»$-orthogonality regularization, while learning an affine transformation, to obtain distribution-specific adaptation while retaining the original learned representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and datasets validate our approach, demonstrating that it preserves the model's zero-shot performance and ensures compatibility across model updates. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/lambda_orthogonality

Paperid: 393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16632.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot font generation aims to create new fonts with a limited number of glyph references. It can be used to significantly reduce the labor cost of manual font design. However, due to the variety and complexity of font styles, the results generated by existing methods often suffer from visible defects, such as stroke errors, artifacts and blurriness. To address these issues, we propose DA-Font, a novel framework which integrates a Dual-Attention Hybrid Module (DAHM). Specifically, we introduce two synergistic attention blocks: the component attention block that leverages component information from content images to guide the style transfer process, and the relation attention block that further refines spatial relationships through interacting the content feature with both original and stylized component-wise representations. These two blocks collaborate to preserve accurate character shapes and stylistic textures. Moreover, we also design a corner consistency loss and an elastic mesh feature loss to better improve geometric alignment. Extensive experiments show that our DA-Font outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across diverse font styles and characters, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing structural integrity and local fidelity. The source code can be found at \href{https://github.com/wrchen2001/DA-Font}{\textit{https://github.com/wrchen2001/DA-Font}}.

Paperid: 394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16560.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In text-video retrieval, auxiliary captions are often used to enhance video understanding, bridging the gap between the modalities. While recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled strong zero-shot caption generation, we observe that such captions tend to be generic and indistinguishable across visually similar videos, limiting their utility for fine-grained retrieval. Moreover, conventional captioning approaches are typically evaluated using language generation metrics, such as BLEU, which are not typically tailored for retrieval tasks that require making discriminative distinctions between candidates. To address this, we propose $\textbf{CaRe-DPO}$, a retrieval framework that directly optimizes caption generation using retrieval relevance scores. At its core is Dual-Group Direct Preference Optimization (DG-DPO), a novel learning strategy that supervises captioning by modeling preferences across groups of distinct video and caption pairs. In addition, we present an MLLM-based retrieval model that incorporates role-embeddings to better distinguish between textual inputs with different functional roles, such as an auxiliary caption and a text query. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CaRe-DPO significantly enhances retrieval performance by effectively leveraging auxiliary knowledge to generate fine-grained captions for retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/CaReDPO.

Paperid: 395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16072.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language-conditioned robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only accurate task execution but also the ability to detect failures for robust deployment in real-world environments. Although recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly improved the spatial reasoning and task-planning capabilities of robots, they remain limited in their ability to recognize their own failures. In particular, a critical yet underexplored challenge lies in detecting semantic misalignment errors, where the robot executes a task that is semantically meaningful but inconsistent with the given instruction. To address this, we propose a method for building datasets targeting Semantic Misalignment Failures detection, from existing language-conditioned manipulation datasets. We also present I-FailSense, an open-source VLM framework with grounded arbitration designed specifically for failure detection. Our approach relies on post-training a base VLM, followed by training lightweight classification heads, called FS blocks, attached to different internal layers of the VLM and whose predictions are aggregated using an ensembling mechanism. Experiments show that I-FailSense outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs, both comparable in size and larger, in detecting semantic misalignment errors. Notably, despite being trained only on semantic misalignment detection, I-FailSense generalizes to broader robotic failure categories and effectively transfers to other simulation environments and real-world with zero-shot or minimal post-training. The datasets and models are publicly released on HuggingFace (Webpage: https://clemgris.github.io/I-FailSense/).

Paperid: 396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15969.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present VoXtream, a fully autoregressive, zero-shot streaming text-to-speech (TTS) system for real-time use that begins speaking from the first word. VoXtream directly maps incoming phonemes to audio tokens using a monotonic alignment scheme and a dynamic look-ahead that does not delay onset. Built around an incremental phoneme transformer, a temporal transformer predicting semantic and duration tokens, and a depth transformer producing acoustic tokens, VoXtream achieves, to our knowledge, the lowest initial delay among publicly available streaming TTS: 102 ms on GPU. Despite being trained on a mid-scale 9k-hour corpus, it matches or surpasses larger baselines on several metrics, while delivering competitive quality in both output- and full-streaming settings. Demo and code are available at https://herimor.github.io/voxtream.

Paperid: 397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15871.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on text prompts, which is essential for applications such as robotics. However, existing 3DVG methods encounter two main challenges: first, they struggle to handle the implicit representation of spatial textures in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), making per-scene training indispensable; second, they typically require larges amounts of labeled data for effective training. To this end, we propose \underline{G}rounding via \underline{V}iew \underline{R}etrieval (GVR), a novel zero-shot visual grounding framework for 3DGS to transform 3DVG as a 2D retrieval task that leverages object-level view retrieval to collect grounding clues from multiple views, which not only avoids the costly process of 3D annotation, but also eliminates the need for per-scene training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual grounding performance while avoiding per-scene training, providing a solid foundation for zero-shot 3DVG research. Video demos can be found in https://github.com/leviome/GVR_demos.

Paperid: 398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15550.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has blurred the line between AI-generated and human-written text. This progress brings societal risks such as misinformation, authorship ambiguity, and intellectual property concerns, highlighting the urgent need for reliable AI-generated text detection methods. However, recent advances in generative language modeling have resulted in significant overlap between the feature distributions of human-written and AI-generated text, blurring classification boundaries and making accurate detection increasingly challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose a DNA-inspired perspective, leveraging a repair-based process to directly and interpretably capture the intrinsic differences between human-written and AI-generated text. Building on this perspective, we introduce DNA-DetectLLM, a zero-shot detection method for distinguishing AI-generated and human-written text. The method constructs an ideal AI-generated sequence for each input, iteratively repairs non-optimal tokens, and quantifies the cumulative repair effort as an interpretable detection signal. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and exhibits strong robustness against various adversarial attacks and input lengths. Specifically, DNA-DetectLLM achieves relative improvements of 5.55% in AUROC and 2.08% in F1 score across multiple public benchmark datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xiaoweizhu57/DNA-DetectLLM.

Paperid: 399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15356.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent work has investigated the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as zero-shot models for generating individual-level characteristics (e.g., to serve as risk models or augment survey datasets). However, when should a user have confidence that an LLM will provide high-quality predictions for their particular task? To address this question, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of LLMs' zero-shot predictive capabilities across a wide range of tabular prediction tasks. We find that LLMs' performance is highly variable, both on tasks within the same dataset and across different datasets. However, when the LLM performs well on the base prediction task, its predicted probabilities become a stronger signal for individual-level accuracy. Then, we construct metrics to predict LLMs' performance at the task level, aiming to distinguish between tasks where LLMs may perform well and where they are likely unsuitable. We find that some of these metrics, each of which are assessed without labeled data, yield strong signals of LLMs' predictive performance on new tasks.

Paperid: 400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15225.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce VocAlign, a novel source-free domain adaptation framework specifically designed for VLMs in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. Our method adopts a student-teacher paradigm enhanced with a vocabulary alignment strategy, which improves pseudo-label generation by incorporating additional class concepts. To ensure efficiency, we use Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the model, preserving its original capabilities while minimizing computational overhead. In addition, we propose a Top-K class selection mechanism for the student model, which significantly reduces memory requirements while further improving adaptation performance. Our approach achieves a notable 6.11 mIoU improvement on the CityScapes dataset and demonstrates superior performance on zero-shot segmentation benchmarks, setting a new standard for source-free adaptation in the open-vocabulary setting.

Paperid: 401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15178.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG) aims at localizing the spatio-temporal tube of a video, as specified by the input text query. In this paper, we utilize multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to explore a zero-shot solution in STVG. We reveal two key insights about MLLMs: (1) MLLMs tend to dynamically assign special tokens, referred to as \textit{grounding tokens}, for grounding the text query; and (2) MLLMs often suffer from suboptimal grounding due to the inability to fully integrate the cues in the text query (\textit{e.g.}, attributes, actions) for inference. Based on these insights, we propose a MLLM-based zero-shot framework for STVG, which includes novel decomposed spatio-temporal highlighting (DSTH) and temporal-augmented assembling (TAS) strategies to unleash the reasoning ability of MLLMs. The DSTH strategy first decouples the original query into attribute and action sub-queries for inquiring the existence of the target both spatially and temporally. It then uses a novel logit-guided re-attention (LRA) module to learn latent variables as spatial and temporal prompts, by regularizing token predictions for each sub-query. These prompts highlight attribute and action cues, respectively, directing the model's attention to reliable spatial and temporal related visual regions. In addition, as the spatial grounding by the attribute sub-query should be temporally consistent, we introduce the TAS strategy to assemble the predictions using the original video frames and the temporal-augmented frames as inputs to help improve temporal consistency. We evaluate our method on various MLLMs, and show that it outperforms SOTA methods on three common STVG benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/zaiquanyang/LLaVA_Next_STVG.

Paperid: 402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15105.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Time series forecasting (TSF) is critical in domains like energy, finance, healthcare, and logistics, requiring models that generalize across diverse datasets. Large pre-trained models such as Chronos and Time-MoE show strong zero-shot (ZS) performance but suffer from high computational costs. In this work, We introduce Super-Linear, a lightweight and scalable mixture-of-experts (MoE) model for general forecasting. It replaces deep architectures with simple frequency-specialized linear experts, trained on resampled data across multiple frequency regimes. A lightweight spectral gating mechanism dynamically selects relevant experts, enabling efficient, accurate forecasting. Despite its simplicity, Super-Linear matches state-of-the-art performance while offering superior efficiency, robustness to various sampling rates, and enhanced interpretability. The implementation of Super-Linear is available at \href{https://github.com/azencot-group/SuperLinear}{https://github.com/azencot-group/SuperLinear}

Paperid: 403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14687.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emerging field of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) for humanoid robots faces several fundamental challenges, including the high cost of data acquisition, the lack of a standardized benchmark, and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. To overcome these obstacles, we propose RealMirror, a comprehensive, open-source embodied AI VLA platform. RealMirror builds an efficient, low-cost data collection, model training, and inference system that enables end-to-end VLA research without requiring a real robot. To facilitate model evolution and fair comparison, we also introduce a dedicated VLA benchmark for humanoid robots, featuring multiple scenarios, extensive trajectories, and various VLA models. Furthermore, by integrating generative models and 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct realistic environments and robot models, we successfully demonstrate zero-shot Sim2Real transfer, where models trained exclusively on simulation data can perform tasks on a real robot seamlessly, without any fine-tuning. In conclusion, with the unification of these critical components, RealMirror provides a robust framework that significantly accelerates the development of VLA models for humanoid robots. Project page: https://terminators2025.github.io/RealMirror.github.io

Paperid: 404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14623.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dynamic energy systems and controls require advanced modeling frameworks to design and test supervisory and fault tolerant strategies. Modelica is a widely used equation based language, but developing control modules is labor intensive and requires specialized expertise. This paper examines the use of large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of Control Description Language modules in the Building Modelica Library as a case study. We developed a structured workflow that combines standardized prompt scaffolds, library aware grounding, automated compilation with OpenModelica, and human in the loop evaluation. Experiments were carried out on four basic logic tasks (And, Or, Not, and Switch) and five control modules (chiller enable/disable, bypass valve control, cooling tower fan speed, plant requests, and relief damper control). The results showed that GPT 4o failed to produce executable Modelica code in zero shot mode, while Claude Sonnet 4 achieved up to full success for basic logic blocks with carefully engineered prompts. For control modules, success rates reached 83 percent, and failed outputs required medium level human repair (estimated one to eight hours). Retrieval augmented generation often produced mismatches in module selection (for example, And retrieved as Or), while a deterministic hard rule search strategy avoided these errors. Human evaluation also outperformed AI evaluation, since current LLMs cannot assess simulation results or validate behavioral correctness. Despite these limitations, the LLM assisted workflow reduced the average development time from 10 to 20 hours down to 4 to 6 hours per module, corresponding to 40 to 60 percent time savings. These results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LLM assisted Modelica generation, and point to future research in pre simulation validation, stronger grounding, and closed loop evaluation.

Paperid: 405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14268.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily on scoring model's output distribution while training-based detectors are often constrained by overfitting to the training data, limiting generalization. We found that the performance bottleneck of training-based detectors stems from the misalignment between training objective and task needs. To address this, we propose Direct Discrepancy Learning (DDL), a novel optimization strategy that directly optimizes the detector with task-oriented knowledge. DDL enables the detector to better capture the core semantics of the detection task, thereby enhancing both robustness and generalization. Built upon this, we introduce DetectAnyLLM, a unified detection framework that achieves state-of-the-art MGTD performance across diverse LLMs. To ensure a reliable evaluation, we construct MIRAGE, the most diverse multi-task MGTD benchmark. MIRAGE samples human-written texts from 10 corpora across 5 text-domains, which are then re-generated or revised using 17 cutting-edge LLMs, covering a wide spectrum of proprietary models and textual styles. Extensive experiments on MIRAGE reveal the limitations of existing methods in complex environment. In contrast, DetectAnyLLM consistently outperforms them, achieving over a 70% performance improvement under the same training data and base scoring model, underscoring the effectiveness of our DDL. Project page: {https://fjc2005.github.io/detectanyllm}.

Paperid: 406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14230.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Structured pruning of large language models (LLMs) offers substantial efficiency improvements by removing entire hidden units, yet current approaches often suffer from significant performance degradation, particularly in zero-shot settings, and necessitate costly recovery techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or adapter insertion. To address these critical shortcomings, we introduce NIRVANA, a novel pruning method explicitly designed to balance immediate zero-shot accuracy preservation with robust fine-tuning capability. Leveraging a first-order saliency criterion derived from the Neural Tangent Kernel under Adam optimization dynamics, NIRVANA provides a theoretically grounded pruning strategy that respects essential model training behaviors. To further address the unique challenges posed by structured pruning, NIRVANA incorporates an adaptive sparsity allocation mechanism across layers and modules (attention vs. MLP), which adjusts pruning intensity between modules in a globally balanced manner. Additionally, to mitigate the high sensitivity of pruning decisions to calibration data quality, we propose a simple yet effective KL divergence-based calibration data selection strategy, ensuring more reliable and task-agnostic pruning outcomes. Comprehensive experiments conducted on Llama3, Qwen, and T5 models demonstrate that NIRVANA outperforms existing structured pruning methods under equivalent sparsity constraints, providing a theoretically sound and practical approach to LLM compression. The code is available at https://github.com/iDEA-iSAIL-Lab-UIUC/NIRVANA.

Paperid: 407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14084.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) seeks to identify anomalies from arbitrary novel categories, offering a scalable and annotation-efficient solution. Traditionally, most ZSAD works have been based on the CLIP model, which performs anomaly detection by calculating the similarity between visual and text embeddings. Recently, vision foundation models such as DINOv3 have demonstrated strong transferable representation capabilities. In this work, we are the first to adapt DINOv3 for ZSAD. However, this adaptation presents two key challenges: (i) the domain bias between large-scale pretraining data and anomaly detection tasks leads to feature misalignment; and (ii) the inherent bias toward global semantics in pretrained representations often leads to subtle anomalies being misinterpreted as part of the normal foreground objects, rather than being distinguished as abnormal regions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AD-DINOv3, a novel vision-language multimodal framework designed for ZSAD. Specifically, we formulate anomaly detection as a multimodal contrastive learning problem, where DINOv3 is employed as the visual backbone to extract patch tokens and a CLS token, and the CLIP text encoder provides embeddings for both normal and abnormal prompts. To bridge the domain gap, lightweight adapters are introduced in both modalities, enabling their representations to be recalibrated for the anomaly detection task. Beyond this baseline alignment, we further design an Anomaly-Aware Calibration Module (AACM), which explicitly guides the CLS token to attend to anomalous regions rather than generic foreground semantics, thereby enhancing discriminability. Extensive experiments on eight industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that AD-DINOv3 consistently matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods.The code will be available at https://github.com/Kaisor-Yuan/AD-DINOv3.

Paperid: 408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13720.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in large-scale outdoor environments faces many challenges; we specifically address a coupled one: long-range targets that reduce to tiny projections and intermittent visibility due to partial or complete occlusion. We present a unified, lightweight closed-loop system built on an aligned multi-scale image tile hierarchy. Through hierarchical target-saliency fusion, it summarizes localized semantic contrast into a stable coarse-layer regional saliency that provides the target direction and indicates target visibility. This regional saliency supports visibility-aware heading maintenance through keyframe memory, saliency-weighted fusion of historical headings, and active search during temporary invisibility. The system avoids whole-image rescaling, enables deterministic bottom-up aggregation, supports zero-shot navigation, and runs efficiently on a mobile robot. Across simulation and real-world outdoor trials, the system detects semantic targets beyond 150m, maintains a correct heading through visibility changes with 82.6% probability, and improves overall task success by 17.5% compared with the SOTA methods, demonstrating robust ZSON toward distant and intermittently observable targets.

Paperid: 409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13399.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Instruction-based image editing has advanced rapidly, yet reliable and interpretable evaluation remains a bottleneck. Current protocols either (i) depend on paired reference images -- resulting in limited coverage and inheriting biases from prior generative models -- or (ii) rely solely on zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs), whose prompt-based assessments of instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality are often imprecise. To address this, we introduce EdiVal-Agent, an automated, scalable, and fine-grained evaluation framework for multi-turn instruction-based editing from an object-centric perspective, supported by a suite of expert tools. Given an image, EdiVal-Agent first decomposes it into semantically meaningful objects, then synthesizes diverse, context-aware editing instructions. For evaluation, it integrates VLMs with open-vocabulary object detectors to assess instruction following, uses semantic-level feature extractors to evaluate content consistency, and leverages human preference models to judge visual quality. We show that combining VLMs with object detectors yields stronger agreement with human judgments in instruction-following evaluation compared to using VLMs alone and CLIP-based metrics. Furthermore, the pipeline's modular design allows future tools to be seamlessly integrated, enhancing evaluation accuracy over time. Instantiating this pipeline, we build EdiVal-Bench, a multi-turn editing benchmark covering 9 instruction types and 11 state-of-the-art editing models spanning autoregressive (AR) (including Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1), flow-matching, and diffusion paradigms. We demonstrate that EdiVal-Agent can be used to identify existing failure modes, thereby informing the development of the next generation of editing models. Project page: https://tianyucodings.github.io/EdiVAL-page/.

Paperid: 410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13175.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents unprecedented opportunities to revolutionize medical contrastive vision-language pre-training. In this paper, we show how LLMs can facilitate large-scale supervised pre-training, thereby advancing vision-language alignment. We begin by demonstrate that modern LLMs can automatically extract diagnostic labels from radiology reports with remarkable precision (>96\% AUC in our experiments) without complex prompt engineering, enabling the creation of large-scale "silver-standard" datasets at a minimal cost (~\$3 for 50k CT image-report pairs). Further, we find that vision encoder trained on this "silver-standard" dataset achieves performance comparable to those trained on labels extracted by specialized BERT-based models, thereby democratizing the access to large-scale supervised pre-training. Building on this foundation, we proceed to reveal that supervised pre-training fundamentally improves contrastive vision-language alignment. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a 3D ResNet-18 with vanilla CLIP training, including 83.8\% AUC for zero-shot diagnosis on CT-RATE, 77.3\% AUC on RAD-ChestCT, and substantial improvements in cross-modal retrieval (MAP@50=53.7\% for image-image, Recall@100=52.2\% for report-image). These results demonstrate the potential of utilizing LLMs to facilitate {\bf more performant and scalable} medical AI systems. Our code is avaiable at https://github.com/SadVoxel/More-performant-and-scalable.

Paperid: 411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13127.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models(LLMs) have led to the development of LLM-based AI agents. A key challenge is the creation of agents that can effectively ground themselves in complex, adversarial long-horizon environments. Existing methods mainly focus on (1) using LLMs as policies to interact with the environment through generating low-level feasible actions, and (2) utilizing LLMs to generate high-level tasks or language guides to stimulate action generation. However, the former struggles to generate reliable actions, while the latter relies heavily on expert experience to translate high-level tasks into specific action sequences. To address these challenges, we introduce the Plan with Language, Act with Parameter (PLAP) planning framework that facilitates the grounding of LLM-based agents in long-horizon environments. The PLAP method comprises three key components: (1) a skill library containing environment-specific parameterized skills, (2) a skill planner powered by LLMs, and (3) a skill executor converting the parameterized skills into executable action sequences. We implement PLAP in MicroRTS, a long-horizon real-time strategy game that provides an unfamiliar and challenging environment for LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PLAP. In particular, GPT-4o-driven PLAP in a zero-shot setting outperforms 80% of baseline agents, and Qwen2-72B-driven PLAP, with carefully crafted few-shot examples, surpasses the top-tier scripted agent, CoacAI. Additionally, we design comprehensive evaluation metrics and test 6 closed-source and 2 open-source LLMs within the PLAP framework, ultimately releasing an LLM leaderboard ranking long-horizon skill planning ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/AI-Research-TeamX/PLAP.

Paperid: 412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12955.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The automated generation of research workflows is essential for improving the reproducibility of research and accelerating the paradigm of "AI for Science". However, existing methods typically extract merely fragmented procedural components and thus fail to capture complete research workflows. To address this gap, we propose an end-to-end framework that generates comprehensive, structured research workflows by mining full-text academic papers. As a case study in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, our paragraph-centric approach first employs Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning with SciBERT to identify workflow-descriptive paragraphs, achieving an F1-score of 0.9772. Subsequently, we utilize Flan-T5 with prompt learning to generate workflow phrases from these paragraphs, yielding ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores of 0.4543, 0.2877, and 0.4427, respectively. These phrases are then systematically categorized into data preparation, data processing, and data analysis stages using ChatGPT with few-shot learning, achieving a classification precision of 0.958. By mapping categorized phrases to their document locations in the documents, we finally generate readable visual flowcharts of the entire research workflows. This approach facilitates the analysis of workflows derived from an NLP corpus and reveals key methodological shifts over the past two decades, including the increasing emphasis on data analysis and the transition from feature engineering to ablation studies. Our work offers a validated technical framework for automated workflow generation, along with a novel, process-oriented perspective for the empirical investigation of evolving scientific paradigms. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/ZH-heng/research_workflow.

Paperid: 413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12858.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning has produced remarkable advances in humanoid locomotion, yet a fundamental dilemma persists for real-world deployment: policies must choose between the robustness of reactive proprioceptive control or the proactivity of complex, fragile perception-driven systems. This paper resolves this dilemma by introducing a paradigm that imbues a purely proprioceptive policy with proactive capabilities, achieving the foresight of perception without its deployment-time costs. Our core contribution is a contrastive learning framework that compels the actor's latent state to encode privileged environmental information from simulation. Crucially, this ``distilled awareness" empowers an adaptive gait clock, allowing the policy to proactively adjust its rhythm based on an inferred understanding of the terrain. This synergy resolves the classic trade-off between rigid, clocked gaits and unstable clock-free policies. We validate our approach with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to a full-sized humanoid, demonstrating highly robust locomotion over challenging terrains, including 30 cm high steps and 26.5Â° slopes, proving the effectiveness of our method. Website: https://lu-yidan.github.io/cra-loco.

Paperid: 414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12136.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Translating programs between various parallel programming languages is an important problem in the high-performance computing (HPC) community. Existing tools for this problem are either too narrow in scope and/or outdated. Recent explosive growth in the popularity of large language models (LLMs) and their ability to generate and translate code offers a potential alternative approach. Toward that end, we first need to systematically evaluate the ability of LLMs to translate between parallel languages. In this work, we introduce UniPar, a systematic evaluation framework for LLM-based parallel code translation. Specifically, in this work, we target translations between serial code, CUDA, and OpenMP. Our goal is to assess how well current instruction-tuned LLMs -- specifically GPT-4o-mini and LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct -- can be used out of the box or enhanced through known strategies. We evaluated four major usage modes: hyperparameter optimization for decoding, zero- and few-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and iterative feedback through compiler-based repair. As a part of the evaluation, we construct a new dataset called PARATRANS, covering both serial-to-parallel translation and cross-paradigm transformations. Our findings reveal that while off-the-shelf models struggle under the default settings (e.g., GPT-4o-mini achieves only 46% compilation and 15% functional correctness), our UniPar methodology -- combining fine-tuning, hyperparameter tuning, and compiler-guided repair -- improves performance by up to 2X (69% compilation and 33% correctness). We believe that our findings will provide useful insights for researchers to further improve LLMs for the parallel language translation problem. UniPar source code and PARATRANS dataset are available at our GitHub repository https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/UniPar_AI.

Paperid: 415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12129.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Navigation is a fundamental capability in embodied AI, representing the intelligence required to perceive and interact within physical environments following language instructions. Despite significant progress in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which exhibit remarkable zero-shot performance on general vision-language tasks, their generalization ability in embodied navigation remains largely confined to narrow task settings and embodiment-specific architectures. In this work, we introduce a cross-embodiment and cross-task Navigation Foundation Model (NavFoM), trained on eight million navigation samples that encompass quadrupeds, drones, wheeled robots, and vehicles, and spanning diverse tasks such as vision-and-language navigation, object searching, target tracking, and autonomous driving. NavFoM employs a unified architecture that processes multimodal navigation inputs from varying camera configurations and navigation horizons. To accommodate diverse camera setups and temporal horizons, NavFoM incorporates identifier tokens that embed camera view information of embodiments and the temporal context of tasks. Furthermore, to meet the demands of real-world deployment, NavFoM controls all observation tokens using a dynamically adjusted sampling strategy under a limited token length budget. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple navigation tasks and embodiments without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Additional real-world experiments further confirm the strong generalization capability and practical applicability of our approach.

Paperid: 416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12105.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation has recently attracted great attention. The goal is to develop a model capable of segmenting unseen classes using only a few annotated samples. Most existing approaches adapt a pre-trained model by training from scratch an additional module. Achieving optimal performance with these approaches requires extensive training on large-scale datasets. The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) is a foundational model for zero-shot image and video segmentation with a modular design. In this paper, we propose a Few-Shot segmentation method based on SAM2 (FS-SAM2), where SAM2's video capabilities are directly repurposed for the few-shot task. Moreover, we apply a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to the original modules in order to handle the diverse images typically found in standard datasets, unlike the temporally connected frames used in SAM2's pre-training. With this approach, only a small number of parameters is meta-trained, which effectively adapts SAM2 while benefiting from its impressive segmentation performance. Our method supports any K-shot configuration. We evaluate FS-SAM2 on the PASCAL-5$^i$, COCO-20$^i$ and FSS-1000 datasets, achieving remarkable results and demonstrating excellent computational efficiency during inference. Code is available at https://github.com/fornib/FS-SAM2

Paperid: 417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11839.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent Vision-Language-Action models show potential to generalize across embodiments but struggle to quickly align with a new robot's action space when high-quality demonstrations are scarce, especially for bipedal humanoids. We present TrajBooster, a cross-embodiment framework that leverages abundant wheeled-humanoid data to boost bipedal VLA. Our key idea is to use end-effector trajectories as a morphology-agnostic interface. TrajBooster (i) extracts 6D dual-arm end-effector trajectories from real-world wheeled humanoids, (ii) retargets them in simulation to Unitree G1 with a whole-body controller trained via a heuristic-enhanced harmonized online DAgger to lift low-dimensional trajectory references into feasible high-dimensional whole-body actions, and (iii) forms heterogeneous triplets that couple source vision/language with target humanoid-compatible actions to post-pre-train a VLA, followed by only 10 minutes of teleoperation data collection on the target humanoid domain. Deployed on Unitree G1, our policy achieves beyond-tabletop household tasks, enabling squatting, cross-height manipulation, and coordinated whole-body motion with markedly improved robustness and generalization. Results show that TrajBooster allows existing wheeled-humanoid data to efficiently strengthen bipedal humanoid VLA performance, reducing reliance on costly same-embodiment data while enhancing action space understanding and zero-shot skill transfer capabilities. For more details, For more details, please refer to our \href{https://jiachengliu3.github.io/TrajBooster/}.

Paperid: 418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11772.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) capabilities to operate reliably in dynamic environments. MOT ensures consistent object identity assignment and precise spatial delineation. Recent advances in foundation models, such as SAM2, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization for video segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS (MOT+Segmentation) remains limited by insufficient identity management and memory efficiency. This work introduces Seg2Track-SAM2, a framework that integrates pre-trained object detectors with SAM2 and a novel Seg2Track module to address track initialization, track management, and reinforcement. The proposed approach requires no fine-tuning and remains detector-agnostic. Experimental results on KITTI MOT and KITTI MOTS benchmarks show that Seg2Track-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, ranking fourth overall in both car and pedestrian classes on KITTI MOTS, while establishing a new benchmark in association accuracy (AssA). Furthermore, a sliding-window memory strategy reduces memory usage by up to 75% with negligible performance degradation, supporting deployment under resource constraints. These results confirm that Seg2Track-SAM2 advances MOTS by combining robust zero-shot tracking, enhanced identity preservation, and efficient memory utilization. The code is available at https://github.com/hcmr-lab/Seg2Track-SAM2

Paperid: 419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11589.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of video generation models such as Sora, video quality assessment (VQA) is becoming increasingly crucial for selecting high-quality videos from large-scale datasets used in pre-training. Traditional VQA methods, typically producing single numerical scores, often lack comprehensiveness and interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce MVQA-68K, a novel multi-dimensional VQA dataset comprising over 68,000 carefully annotated videos, covering seven essential quality dimensions: overall aesthetics, camera movement, dynamic degree, texture detail, composition, visual quality, and factual consistency. Each annotation includes detailed chain-of-thought reasoning to facilitate interpretability and comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVQA-68K significantly enhances the performance of various multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on the VQA task, achieving state-of-the-art results not only on our internal test set (Fig.1) but also on public benchmarks including LSVQ-test, LSVQ-1080p, and LIVE-VQC. Meantime, incorporating explicit reasoning process during VQA training substantially boosts the zero-shot generalization. Code and dataset will be available at github: https://github.com/Controller01-ai/MVQA-68K

Paperid: 420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11517.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
BACKGROUND: Medical large language models (LLMS) have demonstrated remarkable performance in answering medical examinations. However, the extent to which this high performance is transferable to medical questions in Spanish and from a Latin American country remains unexplored. This knowledge is crucial as LLM-based medical applications gain traction in Latin America. AIMS: to build a dataset of questions from medical examinations taken by Peruvian physicians pursuing specialty training; to fine-tune a LLM on this dataset; to evaluate and compare the performance in terms of accuracy between vanilla LLMs and the fine-tuned LLM. METHODS: We curated PeruMedQA, a multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) datasets containing 8,380 questions spanning 12 medical domains (2018-2025). We selected eight medical LLMs including medgemma-4b-it and medgemma-27b-text-it, and developed zero-shot task-specific prompts to answer the questions appropriately. We employed parameter-efficient fine tuning (PEFT)and low-rant adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune medgemma-4b-it utilizing all questions except those from 2025 (test set). RESULTS: medgemma-27b-text-it outperformed all other models, achieving a proportion of correct answers exceeding 90% in several instances. LLMs with <10 billion parameters exhibited <60% of correct answers, while some exams yielded results <50%. The fine-tuned version of medgemma-4b-it emerged victorious agains all LLMs with <10 billion parameters and rivaled a LLM with 70 billion parameters across various examinations. CONCLUSIONS: For medical AI application and research that require knowledge bases from Spanish-speaking countries and those exhibiting similar epidemiological profiles to Peru's, interested parties should utilize medgemma-27b-text-it or a fine-tuned version of medgemma-4b-it.

Paperid: 421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11496.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Claim normalization, the transformation of informal social media posts into concise, self-contained statements, is a crucial step in automated fact-checking pipelines. This paper details our submission to the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Task~2, which challenges systems to perform claim normalization across twenty languages, divided into thirteen supervised (high-resource) and seven zero-shot (no training data) tracks. Our approach, leveraging fine-tuned Small Language Models (SLMs) for supervised languages and Large Language Model (LLM) prompting for zero-shot scenarios, achieved podium positions (top three) in fifteen of the twenty languages. Notably, this included second-place rankings in eight languages, five of which were among the seven designated zero-shot languages, underscoring the effectiveness of our LLM-based zero-shot strategy. For Portuguese, our initial development language, our system achieved an average METEOR score of 0.5290, ranking third. All implementation artifacts, including inference, training, evaluation scripts, and prompt configurations, are publicly available at https://github.com/ju-resplande/checkthat2025_normalization.

Paperid: 422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11425.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Speech tokenization enables discrete representation and facilitates speech language modeling. However, existing neural codecs capture low-level acoustic features, overlooking the semantic and contextual cues inherent to human speech. While recent efforts introduced semantic representations from self-supervised speech models or incorporated contextual representations from pre-trained language models, challenges remain in aligning and unifying the semantic and contextual representations. We introduce FuseCodec, which unifies acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations through strong cross-modal alignment and globally informed supervision. We propose three complementary techniques: (i) Latent Representation Fusion, integrating semantic and contextual features directly into the encoder latent space for robust and unified representation learning; (ii) Global Semantic-Contextual Supervision, supervising discrete tokens with globally pooled and broadcasted representations to enhance temporal consistency and cross-modal alignment; and (iii) Temporally Aligned Contextual Supervision, strengthening alignment by dynamically matching contextual and speech tokens within a local window for fine-grained token-level supervision. We further introduce FuseCodec-TTS, demonstrating our methodology's applicability to zero-shot speech synthesis. Empirically, FuseCodec achieves state-of-the-art performance in LibriSpeech, surpassing EnCodec, SpeechTokenizer, and DAC in transcription accuracy, perceptual quality, intelligibility, and speaker similarity. Results highlight the effectiveness of contextually and semantically guided tokenization for speech tokenization and downstream tasks. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mubtasimahasan/FuseCodec.

Paperid: 423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11220.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Learning (FSL), which involves learning to generalize using only a few data samples, has demonstrated promising and superior performances to ordinary CNN methods. While Bayesian based estimation approaches using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence have shown improvements, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks and natural noises. We introduce ANROT-HELANet, an Adversarially and Naturally RObusT Hellinger Aggregation Network that significantly advances the state-of-the-art in FSL robustness and performance. Our approach implements an adversarially and naturally robust Hellinger distance-based feature class aggregation scheme, demonstrating resilience to adversarial perturbations up to $Îµ=0.30$ and Gaussian noise up to $Ï=0.30$. The network achieves substantial improvements across benchmark datasets, including gains of 1.20\% and 1.40\% for 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios on miniImageNet respectively. We introduce a novel Hellinger Similarity contrastive loss function that generalizes cosine similarity contrastive loss for variational few-shot inference scenarios. Our approach also achieves superior image reconstruction quality with a FID score of 2.75, outperforming traditional VAE (3.43) and WAE (3.38) approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on four few-shot benchmarked datasets verify that ANROT-HELANet's combination of Hellinger distance-based feature aggregation, attention mechanisms, and our novel loss function establishes new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining robustness against both adversarial and natural perturbations. Our code repository will be available at https://github.com/GreedYLearner1146/ANROT-HELANet/tree/main.

Paperid: 424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11149.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Designing robust controllers for precise trajectory tracking with quadrotors is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and underactuation, and becomes harder with flexible cable-suspended payloads that add degrees of freedom and hybrid dynamics. Classical model-based methods offer stability guarantees but require extensive tuning and often fail to adapt when the configuration changes-when a payload is added or removed, or when its mass or cable length varies. We present RoVerFly, a unified learning-based control framework where a single reinforcement learning (RL) policy functions as an implicit hybrid controller, managing complex dynamics without explicit mode detection or controller switching. Trained with task and domain randomization, the controller is resilient to disturbances and varying dynamics. It achieves strong zero-shot generalization across payload settings-including no payload as well as varying mass and cable length-without re-tuning, while retaining the interpretability and structure of a feedback tracking controller. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/mintaeshkim/roverfly.

Paperid: 425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11063.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in organoid models have revolutionized the study of human kidney disease mechanisms and drug discovery by enabling scalable, cost-effective research without the need for animal sacrifice. Here, we present a kidney organoid platform optimized for efficient screening in polycystic kidney disease (PKD). While these systems generate rich spatial-temporal microscopy video datasets, current manual approaches to analysis remain limited to coarse classifications (e.g., hit vs. non-hit), often missing valuable pixel-level and longitudinal information. To help overcome this bottleneck, we developed Organoid Tracker, a graphical user interface (GUI) platform designed with a modular plugin architecture, which empowers researchers to extract detailed, quantitative metrics without programming expertise. Built on the cutting-edge vision foundation model Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), Organoid Tracker enables zero-shot segmentation and automated analysis of spatial-temporal microscopy videos. It quantifies key metrics such as cyst formation rate, growth velocity, and morphological changes, while generating comprehensive reports. By providing an extensible, open-source framework, Organoid Tracker offers a powerful solution for improving and accelerating research in kidney development, PKD modeling, and therapeutic discovery. The platform is publicly available as open-source software at https://github.com/hrlblab/OrganoidTracker.

Paperid: 426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10937.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The proliferation of clickbait headlines poses significant challenges to the credibility of information and user trust in digital media. While recent advances in machine learning have improved the detection of manipulative content, the lack of explainability limits their practical adoption. This paper presents a model for explainable clickbait detection that not only identifies clickbait titles but also attributes them to specific linguistic manipulation strategies. We introduce a synthetic dataset generated by systematically augmenting real news headlines using a predefined catalogue of clickbait strategies. This dataset enables controlled experimentation and detailed analysis of model behaviour. We present a two-stage framework for automatic clickbait analysis comprising detection and tactic attribution. In the first stage, we compare a fine-tuned BERT classifier with large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4.0 and Gemini 2.4 Flash, under both zero-shot prompting and few-shot prompting enriched with illustrative clickbait headlines and their associated persuasive tactics. In the second stage, a dedicated BERT-based classifier predicts the specific clickbait strategies present in each headline. This work advances the development of transparent and trustworthy AI systems for combating manipulative media content. We share the dataset with the research community at https://github.com/LLM-HITCS25S/ClickbaitTacticsDetection

Paperid: 427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10556.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As a lightweight and non-invasive imaging technique, lung ultrasound (LUS) has gained importance for assessing lung pathologies. The use of Artificial intelligence (AI) in medical decision support systems is promising due to the time- and expertise-intensive interpretation, however, due to the poor quality of existing data used for training AI models, their usability for real-world applications remains unclear. In a prospective study, we analyze data from 63 COVID-19 suspects (33 positive) collected at Maastricht University Medical Centre. Ultrasound recordings at six body locations were acquired following the BLUE protocol and manually labeled for severity of lung involvement. Several AI models were applied and trained for detection and severity of pulmonary infection. The severity of the lung infection, as assigned by human annotators based on the LUS videos, is not significantly different between COVID-19 positive and negative patients (p = 0.89). Nevertheless, the predictions of image-based AI models identify a COVID-19 infection with 65% accuracy when applied zero-shot (i.e., trained on other datasets), and up to 79% with targeted training, whereas the accuracy based on human annotations is at most 65%. Multi-modal models combining images and CBC improve significantly over image-only models. Although our analysis generally supports the value of AI in LUS assessment, the evaluated models fall short of the performance expected from previous work. We find this is due to 1) the heterogeneity of LUS datasets, limiting the generalization ability to new data, 2) the frame-based processing of AI models ignoring video-level information, and 3) lack of work on multi-modal models that can extract the most relevant information from video-, image- and variable-based inputs. To aid future research, we publish the dataset at: https://github.com/NinaWie/COVID-BLUES.

Paperid: 428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10535.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across a variety of tasks for efficiently fine-tuning AI models, especially on resource-constrained edges. However, in real-world applications, edge users often exhibit task-specific preferences that are difficult to handle with a unified model trained under a closed-world assumption, and the challenge may further increase when there are significant domain shifts between training and deployment. Meanwhile, retraining/fine-tuning models for each user is also impractical due to its cost-intensive nature and privacy concerns over raw data utilization from edges. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic-guided LoRA Parameter Generation (SG-LoRA), the first of its kind framework to efficiently produce user-specific LoRA parameters without any additional training on user tasks or access to user-specific data. Concretely, SG-LoRA uses task descriptions as the semantic bridge, measuring their proximity to a set of known expert tasks in a shared embedding space. Based on this semantic guidance, it models the target task's LoRA parameter distribution to generate high-performing parameters for novel tasks. SG-LoRA enables the real-time construction of LoRA models aligned with individual intents by distilling knowledge from prominent LoRA experts and, meanwhile, offering a privacy-preserving solution for personalized model adaptation in a novel zero-shot open-world setting proposed in this work. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging tasks confirm the superior performance and remarkable adaptability of SG-LoRA. Code is available at https://github.com/keepgoingjkg/SG-LoRA.

Paperid: 429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10454.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a training-free framework for vision-and-language navigation (VLN). Existing zero-shot VLN methods are mainly designed for discrete environments or involve unsupervised training in continuous simulator environments, which makes it challenging to generalize and deploy them in real-world scenarios. To achieve a training-free framework in continuous environments, our framework formulates navigation guidance as graph constraint optimization by decomposing instructions into explicit spatial constraints. The constraint-driven paradigm decodes spatial semantics through constraint solving, enabling zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. Specifically, we construct a spatial constraint library covering all types of spatial relationship mentioned in VLN instructions. The human instruction is decomposed into a directed acyclic graph, with waypoint nodes, object nodes and edges, which are used as queries to retrieve the library to build the graph constraints. The graph constraint optimization is solved by the constraint solver to determine the positions of waypoints, obtaining the robot's navigation path and final goal. To handle cases of no solution or multiple solutions, we construct a navigation tree and the backtracking mechanism. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in success rate and navigation efficiency compared to state-of-the-art zero-shot VLN methods. We further conduct real-world experiments to show that our framework can effectively generalize to new environments and instruction sets, paving the way for a more robust and autonomous navigation framework.

Paperid: 430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10416.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present TASC, a Task-Aware Shared Control framework for teleoperated manipulation that infers task-level user intent and provides assistance throughout the task. To support everyday tasks without predefined knowledge, TASC constructs an open-vocabulary interaction graph from visual input to represent functional object relationships, and infers user intent accordingly. A shared control policy then provides rotation assistance during both grasping and object interaction, guided by spatial constraints predicted by a vision-language model. Our method addresses two key challenges in general-purpose, long-horizon shared control: (1) understanding and inferring task-level user intent, and (2) generalizing assistance across diverse objects and tasks. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that TASC improves task efficiency and reduces user input effort compared to prior methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first shared control framework that supports everyday manipulation tasks with zero-shot generalization. The code that supports our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/fitz0401/tasc.

Paperid: 431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09397.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) offer promise for clinical decision support, yet their reliability under distribution shifts remains a major concern for safe deployment. These models often learn task-agnostic correlations due to variability in imaging protocols and free-text reports, limiting their generalizability and increasing the risk of failure in real-world settings. We propose DRiFt, a structured feature decoupling framework that explicitly separates clinically relevant signals from task-agnostic noise using parameter-efficient tuning (LoRA) and learnable prompt tokens. To enhance cross-modal alignment and reduce uncertainty, we curate high-quality, clinically grounded image-text pairs by generating captions for a diverse medical dataset. Our approach improves in-distribution performance by +11.4% Top-1 accuracy and +3.3% Macro-F1 over prior prompt-based methods, while maintaining strong robustness across unseen datasets. Ablation studies reveal that disentangling task-relevant features and careful alignment significantly enhance model generalization and reduce unpredictable behavior under domain shift. These insights contribute toward building safer, more trustworthy VLMs for clinical use. The code is available at https://github.com/rumaima/DRiFt.

Paperid: 432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09327.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automated surgical skill assessment (SSA) is a central task in surgical computer vision. Developing robust SSA models is challenging due to the scarcity of skill annotations, which are time-consuming to produce and require expert consensus. Few-shot learning (FSL) offers a scalable alternative enabling model development with minimal supervision, though its success critically depends on effective pre-training. While widely studied for several surgical downstream tasks, pre-training has remained largely unexplored in SSA. In this work, we formulate SSA as a few-shot task and investigate how self-supervised pre-training strategies affect downstream few-shot SSA performance. We annotate a publicly available robotic surgery dataset with Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skill (OSATS) scores, and evaluate various pre-training sources across three few-shot settings. We quantify domain similarity and analyze how domain gap and the inclusion of procedure-specific data into pre-training influence transferability. Our results show that small but domain-relevant datasets can outperform large scale, less aligned ones, achieving accuracies of 60.16%, 66.03%, and 73.65% in the 1-, 2-, and 5-shot settings, respectively. Moreover, incorporating procedure-specific data into pre-training with a domain-relevant external dataset significantly boosts downstream performance, with an average gain of +1.22% in accuracy and +2.28% in F1-score; however, applying the same strategy with less similar but large-scale sources can instead lead to performance degradation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/anastadimi/ssa-fsl.

Paperid: 433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09311.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled strong zero-shot classification through image-text alignment. Yet, their purely visual inference capabilities remain under-explored. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both language-guided and vision-only image classification with a diverse set of dual-encoder VLMs, including both well-established and recent models such as SigLIP 2 and RADIOv2.5. The performance is compared in a standard setup on the ImageNet-1k validation set and its label-corrected variant. The key factors affecting accuracy are analysed, including prompt design, class diversity, the number of neighbours in k-NN, and reference set size. We show that language and vision offer complementary strengths, with some classes favouring textual prompts and others better handled by visual similarity. To exploit this complementarity, we introduce a simple, learning-free fusion method based on per-class precision that improves classification performance. The code is available at: https://github.com/gonikisgo/bmvc2025-vlm-image-recognition.

Paperid: 434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09307.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Materials characterization is fundamental to acquiring materials information, revealing the processing-microstructure-property relationships that guide material design and optimization. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown promise in generative and predictive tasks within materials science, their capacity to understand real-world characterization imaging data remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present MatCha, the first benchmark for materials characterization image understanding, comprising 1,500 questions that demand expert-level domain expertise. MatCha encompasses four key stages of materials research comprising 21 distinct tasks, each designed to reflect authentic challenges faced by materials scientists. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs on MatCha reveals a significant performance gap compared to human experts. These models exhibit degradation when addressing questions requiring higher-level expertise and sophisticated visual perception. Simple few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting struggle to alleviate these limitations. These findings highlight that existing MLLMs still exhibit limited adaptability to real-world materials characterization scenarios. We hope MatCha will facilitate future research in areas such as new material discovery and autonomous scientific agents. MatCha is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MatCha.

Paperid: 435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09116.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation segmentation models achieve reasonable leaf instance extraction from top-view crop images without training (i.e., zero-shot). However, segmenting entire plant individuals with each consisting of multiple overlapping leaves remains challenging. This problem is referred to as a hierarchical segmentation task, typically requiring annotated training datasets, which are often species-specific and require notable human labor. To address this, we introduce ZeroPlantSeg, a zero-shot segmentation for rosette-shaped plant individuals from top-view images. We integrate a foundation segmentation model, extracting leaf instances, and a vision-language model, reasoning about plants' structures to extract plant individuals without additional training. Evaluations on datasets with multiple plant species, growth stages, and shooting environments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing zero-shot methods and achieves better cross-domain performance than supervised methods. Implementations are available at https://github.com/JunhaoXing/ZeroPlantSeg.

Paperid: 436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08699.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual navigation in robotics traditionally relies on globally-consistent 3D maps or learned controllers, which can be computationally expensive and difficult to generalize across diverse environments. In this work, we present a novel RGB-only, object-level topometric navigation pipeline that enables zero-shot, long-horizon robot navigation without requiring 3D maps or pre-trained controllers. Our approach integrates global topological path planning with local metric trajectory control, allowing the robot to navigate towards object-level sub-goals while avoiding obstacles. We address key limitations of previous methods by continuously predicting local trajectory using monocular depth and traversability estimation, and incorporating an auto-switching mechanism that falls back to a baseline controller when necessary. The system operates using foundational models, ensuring open-set applicability without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both simulated environments and real-world tests, highlighting its robustness and deployability. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a more adaptable and effective solution for visual navigation in open-set environments. The source code is made publicly available: https://github.com/podgorki/TANGO.

Paperid: 437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07613.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical vision-language models (Med-VLMs) have shown impressive results in tasks such as report generation and visual question answering, but they still face several limitations. Most notably, they underutilize patient metadata and lack integration of clinical diagnostic knowledge. Moreover, most existing models are typically trained from scratch or fine-tuned on large-scale 2D image-text pairs, requiring extensive computational resources, and their effectiveness on 3D medical imaging is often limited due to the absence of structural information. To address these gaps, we propose a data-efficient fine-tuning pipeline to adapt 3D CT-based Med-VLMs for 3D MRI and demonstrate its application in Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis. Our system introduces two key innovations. First, we convert structured metadata into synthetic reports, enriching textual input for improved image-text alignment. Second, we add an auxiliary token trained to predict the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score, a widely used clinical measure of cognitive function that correlates with AD severity. This provides additional supervision for fine-tuning. Applying lightweight prompt tuning to both image and text modalities, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ADNI with only 1,504 training MRIs, outperforming methods trained on 27,161 MRIs, and shows strong zero-shot generalization on OASIS-2 and AIBL. Code is available at https://github.com/CFQ666312/DEFT-VLM-AD.

Paperid: 438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07530.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spatial conditioning in pretrained text-to-image diffusion models has significantly improved fine-grained control over the structure of generated images. However, existing control adapters exhibit limited adaptability and incur high training costs when encountering novel spatial control conditions that differ substantially from the training tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Universal Few-Shot Control (UFC), a versatile few-shot control adapter capable of generalizing to novel spatial conditions. Given a few image-condition pairs of an unseen task and a query condition, UFC leverages the analogy between query and support conditions to construct task-specific control features, instantiated by a matching mechanism and an update on a small set of task-specific parameters. Experiments on six novel spatial control tasks show that UFC, fine-tuned with only 30 annotated examples of novel tasks, achieves fine-grained control consistent with the spatial conditions. Notably, when fine-tuned with 0.1% of the full training data, UFC achieves competitive performance with the fully supervised baselines in various control tasks. We also show that UFC is applicable agnostically to various diffusion backbones and demonstrate its effectiveness on both UNet and DiT architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/kietngt00/UFC.

Paperid: 439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07472.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the rapid advancements in video generation technology, creating high-quality videos that precisely align with user intentions remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often fail to achieve fine-grained control over video details, limiting their practical applicability. We introduce ANYPORTAL, a novel zero-shot framework for video background replacement that leverages pre-trained diffusion models. Our framework collaboratively integrates the temporal prior of video diffusion models with the relighting capabilities of image diffusion models in a zero-shot setting. To address the critical challenge of foreground consistency, we propose a Refinement Projection Algorithm, which enables pixel-level detail manipulation to ensure precise foreground preservation. ANYPORTAL is training-free and overcomes the challenges of achieving foreground consistency and temporally coherent relighting. Experimental results demonstrate that ANYPORTAL achieves high-quality results on consumer-grade GPUs, offering a practical and efficient solution for video content creation and editing.

Paperid: 440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06809.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The scarcity of high-quality, logically sound data is a critical bottleneck for advancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work confronts this challenge by turning decades of automated theorem proving research into a scalable data engine. Rather than relying on error-prone LLMs or complex proof-assistant syntax like Lean and Isabelle, our framework leverages E-prover's saturation capabilities on the vast TPTP axiom library to derive a massive, guaranteed-valid corpus of theorems. Our pipeline is principled and simple: saturate axioms, filter for "interesting" theorems, and generate tasks. With no LLMs in the loop, we eliminate factual errors by construction. This purely symbolic data is then transformed into three difficulty-controlled challenges: entailment verification, premise selection, and proof reconstruction. Our zero-shot experiments on frontier models reveal a clear weakness: performance collapses on tasks requiring deep, structural reasoning. Our framework provides both the diagnostic tool to measure this gap and a scalable source of symbolic training data to address it. We make the code and data publicly available. https://github.com/sileod/reasoning_core https://hf.co/datasets/reasoning-core/rc1

Paperid: 441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06311.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
High-quality wind power forecasting is crucial for the operation of modern power grids. However, prevailing data-driven paradigms either train a site-specific model which cannot generalize to other locations or rely on fine-tuning of general-purpose time series foundation models which are difficult to incorporate domain-specific data in the energy sector. This paper introduces WindFM, a lightweight and generative Foundation Model designed specifically for probabilistic wind power forecasting. WindFM employs a discretize-and-generate framework. A specialized time-series tokenizer first converts continuous multivariate observations into discrete, hierarchical tokens. Subsequently, a decoder-only Transformer learns a universal representation of wind generation dynamics by autoregressively pre-training on these token sequences. Using the comprehensive WIND Toolkit dataset comprising approximately 150 billion time steps from more than 126,000 sites, WindFM develops a foundational understanding of the complex interplay between atmospheric conditions and power output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our compact 8.1M parameter model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on both deterministic and probabilistic tasks, outperforming specialized models and larger foundation models without any fine-tuning. In particular, WindFM exhibits strong adaptiveness under out-of-distribution data from a different continent, demonstrating the robustness and transferability of its learned representations. Our pre-trained model is publicly available at https://github.com/shiyu-coder/WindFM.

Paperid: 442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05661.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A scene graph is a structured represention of objects and their relationships in a scene. Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) involves predicting future scene graphs from video clips, enabling applications as intelligent surveillance and human-machine collaboration. Existing SGA approaches primarily leverage visual cues, often struggling to integrate valuable commonsense knowledge, thereby limiting long-term prediction robustness. To explicitly leverage such commonsense knowledge, we propose a new approach to better understand the objects, concepts, and relationships in a scene graph. Our approach decouples the SGA task in two steps: first a scene graph capturing model is used to convert a video clip into a sequence of scene graphs, then a pure text-based model is used to predict scene graphs in future frames. Our focus in this work is on the second step, and we call it Linguistic Scene Graph Anticipation (LSGA) and believes it should have independent interest beyond the use in SGA discussed here. For LSGA, we introduce an Object-Oriented Two-Staged Method (OOTSM) where an Large Language Model (LLM) first forecasts object appearances and disappearances before generating detailed human-object relations. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate OOTSM in two settings. For LSGA, we evaluate our fine-tuned open-sourced LLMs against zero-shot APIs (i.e., GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and DeepSeek-V3) on a benchmark constructed from Action Genome annotations. For SGA, we combine our OOTSM with STTran++ from, and our experiments demonstrate effective state-of-the-art performance: short-term mean-Recall (@10) increases by 3.4% while long-term mean-Recall (@50) improves dramatically by 21.9%. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhuXMMM/OOTSM.

Paperid: 443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emotional content of song lyrics plays a pivotal role in shaping listener experiences and influencing musical preferences. This paper investigates the task of multi-label emotional attribution of song lyrics by predicting six emotional intensity scores corresponding to six fundamental emotions. A manually labeled dataset is constructed using a mean opinion score (MOS) approach, which aggregates annotations from multiple human raters to ensure reliable ground-truth labels. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several publicly available large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot scenarios. Additionally, we fine-tune a BERT-based model specifically for predicting multi-label emotion scores. Experimental results reveal the relative strengths and limitations of zero-shot and fine-tuned models in capturing the nuanced emotional content of lyrics. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs for emotion recognition in creative texts, providing insights into model selection strategies for emotion-based music information retrieval applications. The labeled dataset is available at https://github.com/LLM-HITCS25S/LyricsEmotionAttribution.

Paperid: 444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05117.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present HyPINO, a multi-physics neural operator designed for zero-shot generalization across a broad class of parametric PDEs without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Our approach combines a Swin Transformer-based hypernetwork with mixed supervision: (i) labeled data from analytical solutions generated via the Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS), and (ii) unlabeled samples optimized using physics-informed objectives. The model maps PDE parametrizations to target Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and can handle linear elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic equations in two dimensions with varying source terms, geometries, and mixed Dirichlet/Neumann boundary conditions, including interior boundaries. HyPINO achieves strong zero-shot accuracy on seven benchmark problems from PINN literature, outperforming U-Nets, Poseidon, and Physics-Informed Neural Operators (PINO). Further, we introduce an iterative refinement procedure that compares the physics of the generated PINN to the requested PDE and uses the discrepancy to generate a "delta" PINN. Summing their contributions and repeating this process forms an ensemble whose combined solution progressively reduces the error on six benchmarks and achieves over 100x gain in average $L_2$ loss in the best case, while retaining forward-only inference. Additionally, we evaluate the fine-tuning behavior of PINNs initialized by HyPINO and show that they converge faster and to lower final error than both randomly initialized and Reptile-meta-learned PINNs on five benchmarks, performing on par on the remaining two. Our results highlight the potential of this scalable approach as a foundation for extending neural operators toward solving increasingly complex, nonlinear, and high-dimensional PDE problems. The code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/rbischof/hypino.

Paperid: 445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04685.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing speech tokenizers typically assign a fixed number of tokens per second, regardless of the varying information density or temporal fluctuations in the speech signal. This uniform token allocation mismatches the intrinsic structure of speech, where information is distributed unevenly over time. To address this, we propose VARSTok, a VAriable-frame-Rate Speech Tokenizer that adapts token allocation based on local feature similarity. VARSTok introduces two key innovations: (1) a temporal-aware density peak clustering algorithm that adaptively segments speech into variable-length units, and (2) a novel implicit duration coding scheme that embeds both content and temporal span into a single token index, eliminating the need for auxiliary duration predictors. Extensive experiments show that VARSTok significantly outperforms strong fixed-rate baselines. Notably, it achieves superior reconstruction naturalness while using up to 23% fewer tokens than a 40 Hz fixed-frame-rate baseline. VARSTok further yields lower word error rates and improved naturalness in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that a fully dynamic, variable-frame-rate acoustic speech tokenizer can be seamlessly integrated into downstream speech language models. Speech samples are available at https://zhengrachel.github.io/VARSTok.

Paperid: 446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04448.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal misinformation, encompassing textual, visual, and cross-modal distortions, poses an increasing societal threat that is amplified by generative AI. Existing methods typically focus on a single type of distortion and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. In this work, we observe that different distortion types share common reasoning capabilities while also requiring task-specific skills. We hypothesize that joint training across distortion types facilitates knowledge sharing and enhances the model's ability to generalize. To this end, we introduce TRUST-VL, a unified and explainable vision-language model for general multimodal misinformation detection. TRUST-VL incorporates a novel Question-Aware Visual Amplifier module, designed to extract task-specific visual features. To support training, we also construct TRUST-Instruct, a large-scale instruction dataset containing 198K samples featuring structured reasoning chains aligned with human fact-checking workflows. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance, while also offering strong generalization and interpretability.

Paperid: 447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04442.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The success of powerful open source Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled the community to create a vast collection of post-trained models adapted to specific tasks and domains. However, navigating and understanding these models remains challenging due to inconsistent metadata and unstructured repositories. We introduce Delta Activations, a method to represent finetuned models as vector embeddings by measuring shifts in their internal activations relative to a base model. This representation allows for effective clustering by domain and task, revealing structure in the model landscape. Delta Activations also demonstrate desirable properties: it is robust across finetuning settings and exhibits an additive property when finetuning datasets are mixed. In addition, we show that Delta Activations can embed tasks via few-shot finetuning, and further explore its use for model selection and merging. We hope Delta Activations can facilitate the practice of reusing publicly available models. Code is available at https://github.com/OscarXZQ/delta_activations.

Paperid: 448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04338.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Leveraging visual priors from pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) generative models has shown success in dense prediction. However, dense prediction is inherently an image-to-image task, suggesting that image editing models, rather than T2I generative models, may be a more suitable foundation for fine-tuning. Motivated by this, we conduct a systematic analysis of the fine-tuning behaviors of both editors and generators for dense geometry estimation. Our findings show that editing models possess inherent structural priors, which enable them to converge more stably by ``refining" their innate features, and ultimately achieve higher performance than their generative counterparts. Based on these findings, we introduce \textbf{FE2E}, a framework that pioneeringly adapts an advanced editing model based on Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture for dense geometry prediction. Specifically, to tailor the editor for this deterministic task, we reformulate the editor's original flow matching loss into the ``consistent velocity" training objective. And we use logarithmic quantization to resolve the precision conflict between the editor's native BFloat16 format and the high precision demand of our tasks. Additionally, we leverage the DiT's global attention for a cost-free joint estimation of depth and normals in a single forward pass, enabling their supervisory signals to mutually enhance each other. Without scaling up the training data, FE2E achieves impressive performance improvements in zero-shot monocular depth and normal estimation across multiple datasets. Notably, it achieves over 35\% performance gains on the ETH3D dataset and outperforms the DepthAnything series, which is trained on 100$\times$ data. The project page can be accessed \href{https://amap-ml.github.io/FE2E/}{here}.

Paperid: 449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04180.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
AI models rely on annotated data to learn pattern and perform prediction. Annotation is usually a labor-intensive step that require associating labels ranging from a simple classification label to more complex tasks such as object detection, oriented bounding box estimation, and instance segmentation. Traditional tools often require extensive manual input, limiting scalability for large datasets. To address this, we introduce VisioFirm, an open-source web application designed to streamline image labeling through AI-assisted automation. VisioFirm integrates state-of-the-art foundation models into an interface with a filtering pipeline to reduce human-in-the-loop efforts. This hybrid approach employs CLIP combined with pre-trained detectors like Ultralytics models for common classes and zero-shot models such as Grounding DINO for custom labels, generating initial annotations with low-confidence thresholding to maximize recall. Through this framework, when tested on COCO-type of classes, initial prediction have been proven to be mostly correct though the users can refine these via interactive tools supporting bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and polygons. Additionally, VisioFirm has on-the-fly segmentation powered by Segment Anything accelerated through WebGPU for browser-side efficiency. The tool supports multiple export formats (YOLO, COCO, Pascal VOC, CSV) and operates offline after model caching, enhancing accessibility. VisioFirm demonstrates up to 90\% reduction in manual effort through benchmarks on diverse datasets, while maintaining high annotation accuracy via clustering of connected CLIP-based disambiguate components and IoU-graph for redundant detection suppression. VisioFirm can be accessed from \href{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}.

Paperid: 450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04072.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have recently achieved more expressive and natural speech synthesis by scaling to large speech datasets. However, the proportion of expressive speech in such large-scale corpora is often unclear. Besides, existing expressive speech corpora are typically smaller in scale and primarily used for benchmarking TTS systems. In this paper, we introduce the LibriQuote dataset, an English corpus derived from read audiobooks, designed for both fine-tuning and benchmarking expressive zero-shot TTS system. The training dataset includes 12.7K hours of read, non-expressive speech and 5.3K hours of mostly expressive speech drawn from character quotations. Each utterance in the expressive subset is supplemented with the context in which it was written, along with pseudo-labels of speech verbs and adverbs used to describe the quotation (\textit{e.g. ``he whispered softly''}). Additionally, we provide a challenging 7.5 hour test set intended for benchmarking TTS systems: given a neutral reference speech as input, we evaluate system's ability to synthesize an expressive utterance while preserving reference timbre. We validate qualitatively the test set by showing that it covers a wide range of emotions compared to non-expressive speech, along with various accents. Extensive subjective and objective evaluations show that fine-tuning a baseline TTS system on LibriQuote significantly improves its synthesized speech intelligibility, and that recent systems fail to synthesize speech as expressive and natural as the ground-truth utterances. The dataset and evaluation code are freely available. Audio samples can be found at https://libriquote.github.io/.

Paperid: 451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04011.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present NER Retriever, a zero-shot retrieval framework for ad-hoc Named Entity Retrieval, a variant of Named Entity Recognition (NER), where the types of interest are not provided in advance, and a user-defined type description is used to retrieve documents mentioning entities of that type. Instead of relying on fixed schemas or fine-tuned models, our method builds on internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to embed both entity mentions and user-provided open-ended type descriptions into a shared semantic space. We show that internal representations, specifically the value vectors from mid-layer transformer blocks, encode fine-grained type information more effectively than commonly used top-layer embeddings. To refine these representations, we train a lightweight contrastive projection network that aligns type-compatible entities while separating unrelated types. The resulting entity embeddings are compact, type-aware, and well-suited for nearest-neighbor search. Evaluated on three benchmarks, NER Retriever significantly outperforms both lexical and dense sentence-level retrieval baselines. Our findings provide empirical support for representation selection within LLMs and demonstrate a practical solution for scalable, schema-free entity retrieval. The NER Retriever Codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/ShacharOr100/ner_retriever

Paperid: 452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03957.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) to fact-check misinformation remains uncertain, despite their growing use. To this end, we present CANDY, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in fact-checking Chinese misinformation. Specifically, we curate a carefully annotated dataset of ~20k instances. Our analysis shows that current LLMs exhibit limitations in generating accurate fact-checking conclusions, even when enhanced with chain-of-thought reasoning and few-shot prompting. To understand these limitations, we develop a taxonomy to categorize flawed LLM-generated explanations for their conclusions and identify factual fabrication as the most common failure mode. Although LLMs alone are unreliable for fact-checking, our findings indicate their considerable potential to augment human performance when deployed as assistive tools in scenarios. Our dataset and code can be accessed at https://github.com/SCUNLP/CANDY

Paperid: 453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03873.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Food recognition has gained significant attention, but the rapid emergence of new dishes requires methods for recognizing unseen food categories, motivating Zero-Shot Food Learning (ZSFL). We propose the task of Compositional Zero-Shot Food Recognition (CZSFR), where cuisines and ingredients naturally align with attributes and objects in Compositional Zero-Shot learning (CZSL). However, CZSFR faces three challenges: (1) Redundant background information distracts models from learning meaningful food features, (2) Role confusion between staple and side dishes leads to misclassification, and (3) Semantic bias in a single attribute can lead to confusion of understanding. Therefore, we propose SalientFusion, a context-aware CZSFR method with two components: SalientFormer, which removes background redundancy and uses depth features to resolve role confusion; DebiasAT, which reduces the semantic bias by aligning prompts with visual features. Using our proposed benchmarks, CZSFood-90 and CZSFood-164, we show that SalientFusion achieves state-of-the-art results on these benchmarks and the most popular general datasets for the general CZSL. The code is avaliable at https://github.com/Jiajun-RUC/SalientFusion.

Paperid: 454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03740.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities across diverse applications. However, adapting these models to new fine-grained domains remains difficult due to reliance on prompt engineering and the high cost of full model fine-tuning. Existing adaptation approaches rely on augmented components, such as prompt tokens and adapter modules, which could limit adaptation quality, destabilize the model, and compromise the rich knowledge learned during pretraining. In this work, we present CLIP-SVD, a novel multi-modal and parameter-efficient adaptation technique that leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to modify the internal parameter space of CLIP without injecting additional modules. Specifically, we fine-tune only the singular values of the CLIP parameter matrices to rescale the basis vectors for domain adaptation while retaining the pretrained model. This design enables enhanced adaptation performance using only 0.04% of the model's total parameters and better preservation of its generalization ability. CLIP-SVD achieves state-of-the-art classification results on 11 natural and 10 biomedical datasets, outperforming previous methods in both accuracy and generalization under few-shot settings. Additionally, we leverage a natural language-based approach to analyze the effectiveness and dynamics of the CLIP adaptation to allow interpretability of CLIP-SVD. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/CLIP-SVD.

Paperid: 455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03324.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Point clouds are widely used for infrastructure monitoring by providing geometric information, where segmentation is required for downstream tasks such as defect detection. Existing research has automated semantic segmentation of structural components, while brick-level segmentation (identifying defects such as spalling and mortar loss) has been primarily conducted from RGB images. However, acquiring high-resolution images is impractical in low-light environments like masonry tunnels. Point clouds, though robust to dim lighting, are typically unstructured, sparse, and noisy, limiting fine-grained segmentation. We present InfraDiffusion, a zero-shot framework that projects masonry point clouds into depth maps using virtual cameras and restores them by adapting the Denoising Diffusion Null-space Model (DDNM). Without task-specific training, InfraDiffusion enhances visual clarity and geometric consistency of depth maps. Experiments on masonry bridge and tunnel point cloud datasets show significant improvements in brick-level segmentation using the Segment Anything Model (SAM), underscoring its potential for automated inspection of masonry assets. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/Jingyixiong/InfraDiffusion-official-implement.

Paperid: 456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although large scale models achieve significant improvements in performance, the overfitting challenge still frequently undermines their generalization ability. In super resolution tasks on images, diffusion models as representatives of generative models typically adopt large scale architectures. However, few-shot drone-captured infrared training data frequently induces severe overfitting in large-scale architectures. To address this key challenge, our method proposes a new Gaussian quantization representation learning method oriented to diffusion models that alleviates overfitting and enhances robustness. At the same time, an effective monitoring mechanism tracks large scale architectures during training to detect signs of overfitting. By introducing Gaussian quantization representation learning, our method effectively reduces overfitting while maintaining architecture complexity. On this basis, we construct a multi source drone-based infrared image benchmark dataset for detection and use it to emphasize overfitting issues of large scale architectures in few sample, drone-based diverse drone-based image reconstruction scenarios. To verify the efficacy of the method in mitigating overfitting, experiments are conducted on the constructed benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing super resolution approaches and significantly mitigates overfitting of large scale architectures under complex conditions. The code and DroneSR dataset will be available at: https://github.com/wengzp1/GARLSR.

Paperid: 457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01813.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Drug shortages pose critical risks to patient care and healthcare systems worldwide, yet the effectiveness of regulatory interventions remains poorly understood due to fundamental information asymmetries in pharmaceutical supply chains. We present \textbf{ShortageSim}, the first Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent simulation framework that captures the complex, strategic interactions between drug manufacturers, institutional buyers, and regulatory agencies in response to shortage alerts. Unlike traditional game-theoretic models that assume perfect rationality and complete information, \textbf{ShortageSim} leverages LLMs to simulate bounded-rational decision-making under uncertainty. Through a sequential production game spanning multiple quarters, we model how FDA announcements, both reactive alerts about existing shortages and proactive warnings about potential disruptions, propagate through the supply chain and influence capacity investment and procurement decisions. Our experiments on historical shortage events reveal that \textbf{ShortageSim} reduces the resolution-lag percentage for discontinued-disclosed cases by 83\%, bringing simulated durations more aligned to ground truth than the zero-shot baseline. We open-source \textbf{ShortageSim} and a dataset of 2,925 FDA shortage events at https://github.com/Lemutisme/Sortage_Management, providing a novel computational framework for designing and testing interventions in complex, information-scarce supply chains.

Paperid: 458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01658.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mobile manipulation stands as a core challenge in robotics, enabling robots to assist humans across varied tasks and dynamic daily environments. Conventional mobile manipulation approaches often struggle to generalize across different tasks and environments due to the lack of large-scale training. However, recent advances in manipulation foundation models demonstrate impressive generalization capability on a wide range of fixed-base manipulation tasks, which are still limited to a fixed setting. Therefore, we devise a plug-in module named MoTo, which can be combined with any off-the-shelf manipulation foundation model to empower them with mobile manipulation ability. Specifically, we propose an interaction-aware navigation policy to generate robot docking points for generalized mobile manipulation. To enable zero-shot ability, we propose an interaction keypoints framework via vision-language models (VLM) under multi-view consistency for both target object and robotic arm following instructions, where fixed-base manipulation foundation models can be employed. We further propose motion planning objectives for the mobile base and robot arm, which minimize the distance between the two keypoints and maintain the physical feasibility of trajectories. In this way, MoTo guides the robot to move to the docking points where fixed-base manipulation can be successfully performed, and leverages VLM generation and trajectory optimization to achieve mobile manipulation in a zero-shot manner, without any requirement on mobile manipulation expert data. Extensive experimental results on OVMM and real-world demonstrate that MoTo achieves success rates of 2.68% and 16.67% higher than the state-of-the-art mobile manipulation methods, respectively, without requiring additional training data.

Paperid: 459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01228.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-agent distributed collaborative mapping provides comprehensive and efficient representations for robots. However, existing approaches lack instance-level awareness and semantic understanding of environments, limiting their effectiveness for downstream applications. To address this issue, we propose OpenMulti, an open-vocabulary instance-level multi-agent distributed implicit mapping framework. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Agent Instance Alignment module, which constructs an Instance Collaborative Graph to ensure consistent instance understanding across agents. To alleviate the degradation of mapping accuracy due to the blind-zone optimization trap, we leverage Cross Rendering Supervision to enhance distributed learning of the scene. Experimental results show that OpenMulti outperforms related algorithms in both fine-grained geometric accuracy and zero-shot semantic accuracy. In addition, OpenMulti supports instance-level retrieval tasks, delivering semantic annotations for downstream applications. The project website of OpenMulti is publicly available at https://openmulti666.github.io/.

Paperid: 460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01183.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
High-quality image segmentation is fundamental to pixel-level geospatial analysis in remote sensing, necessitating robust segmentation quality assessment (SQA), particularly in unsupervised settings lacking ground truth. Although recent deep learning (DL) based unsupervised SQA methods show potential, they often suffer from coarse evaluation granularity, incomplete assessments, and poor transferability. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces Panoramic Quality Mapping (PQM) as a new paradigm for comprehensive, pixel-wise SQA, and presents SegAssess, a novel deep learning framework realizing this approach. SegAssess distinctively formulates SQA as a fine-grained, four-class panoramic segmentation task, classifying pixels within a segmentation mask under evaluation into true positive (TP), false positive (FP), true negative (TN), and false negative (FN) categories, thereby generating a complete quality map. Leveraging an enhanced Segment Anything Model (SAM) architecture, SegAssess uniquely employs the input mask as a prompt for effective feature integration via cross-attention. Key innovations include an Edge Guided Compaction (EGC) branch with an Aggregated Semantic Filter (ASF) module to refine predictions near challenging object edges, and an Augmented Mixup Sampling (AMS) training strategy integrating multi-source masks to significantly boost cross-domain robustness and zero-shot transferability. Comprehensive experiments across 32 datasets derived from 6 sources demonstrate that SegAssess achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and exhibits remarkable zero-shot transferability to unseen masks, establishing PQM via SegAssess as a robust and transferable solution for unsupervised SQA. The code is available at https://github.com/Yangbn97/SegAssess.

Paperid: 461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00905.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP's success has demonstrated that prompt tuning can achieve robust cross-modal semantic alignment for tasks ranging from open-domain recognition to fine-grained classification. However, redundant or weakly relevant feature components introduce noise and incur unnecessary computational costs. In this work, we propose Spotlighter, a lightweight token-selection framework that simultaneously enhances accuracy and efficiency in prompt tuning. Spotlighter evaluates each visual token's activation from both sample-wise and semantic-wise perspectives and retains only the top-scoring tokens for downstream prediction. A class-specific semantic memory bank of learned prototypes refines this selection, ensuring semantic representativeness and compensating for discarded features. To further prioritize informative signals, we introduce a two-level ranking mechanism that dynamically weights token--prototype interactions. Across 11 few-shot benchmarks, Spotlighter outperforms CLIP by up to 11.19\% in harmonic mean accuracy and achieves up to 0.8K additional FPS, with only 21 extra parameters. These results establish Spotlighter as an effective and scalable baseline for prompt tuning. Code for our method will be available at https://github.com/greatest-gourmet/Spotlighter.

Paperid: 462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00767.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human motion generation has shown great advances thanks to the recent diffusion models trained on large-scale motion capture data. Most of existing works, however, currently target animation of isolated people in empty scenes. Meanwhile, synthesizing realistic human-object interactions in complex 3D scenes remains a critical challenge in computer graphics and robotics. One obstacle towards generating versatile high-fidelity human-object interactions is the lack of large-scale datasets with diverse object manipulations. Indeed, existing motion capture data is typically restricted to single people and manipulations of limited sets of objects. To address this issue, we propose an automatic motion extraction pipeline and use it to collect interaction-rich human motions. Our new dataset InterPose contains 73.8K sequences of 3D human motions and corresponding text captions automatically obtained from 45.8K videos with human-object interactions. We perform extensive experiments and demonstrate InterPose to bring significant improvements to state-of-the-art methods for human motion generation. Moreover, using InterPose we develop an LLM-based agent enabling zero-shot animation of people interacting with diverse objects and scenes.

Paperid: 463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00629.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Among the hardest tasks for humans are those found in competitive programming where problems require sophisticated algorithmic thinking, puzzle solving, and the creation of effective code. As a domain to assess language models (LMs), it has not received enough attention, though. This study presents the ICPC benchmark, which consists of 254 international collegiate programming contest (ICPC) tasks. Each problem includes official analysis, reference code, and sample, high-quality unit, and hidden tests. We are able to develop and evaluate a variety of LM inference techniques for competitive programming with these resources. With zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, we find that o1 only achieves a 19.1\% pass@1 solve rate. With our best inference technique, which combines multi-turn self-judge with reflection and retrieval over episodic information, raises this to 42.2\%. Furthermore, we conduct a new human-in-the-loop investigation to gain a deeper understanding of the remaining difficulties. Surprisingly, we discover that o1 can solve 17 out of 18 problems that were previously unsolvable by any model or technique with just a few specific instructions. A footstep toward LMs with grounded, imaginative, and algorithmic thinking is provided by our quantitative findings and qualitative research. We open-source our code and data at https://github.com/kraritt/zolve.

Paperid: 464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00622.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is a long-standing and highly challenging research topic. Recently, driven by the rise of large language models (LLMs), research has increasingly shifted from purely time series methods toward harnessing textual modalities to enhance forecasting performance. However, the vast discrepancy between text and temporal data often leads current multimodal architectures to over-emphasise one modality while neglecting the other, resulting in information loss that harms forecasting performance. To address this modality imbalance, we introduce BALM-TSF (Balanced Multimodal Alignment for LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting), a lightweight time series forecasting framework that maintains balance between the two modalities. Specifically, raw time series are processed by the time series encoder, while descriptive statistics of raw time series are fed to an LLM with learnable prompt, producing compact textual embeddings. To ensure balanced cross-modal context alignment of time series and textual embeddings, a simple yet effective scaling strategy combined with a contrastive objective then maps these textual embeddings into the latent space of the time series embeddings. Finally, the aligned textual semantic embeddings and time series embeddings are together integrated for forecasting. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that, with minimal trainable parameters, BALM-TSF achieves state-of-the-art performance in both long-term and few-shot forecasting, confirming its ability to harness complementary information from text and time series. Code is available at https://github.com/ShiqiaoZhou/BALM-TSF.

Paperid: 465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00576.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present Galaxea Open-World Dataset, a large-scale, diverse collection of robot behaviors recorded in authentic human living and working environments. All demonstrations are gathered using a consistent robotic embodiment, paired with precise subtask-level language annotations to facilitate both training and evaluation. Building on this dataset, we introduce G0, a dual-system framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for multimodal planning with a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for fine-grained execution. G0 is trained using a three-stage curriculum: cross-embodiment pre-training, single-embodiment pre-training, and task-specific post-training. A comprehensive benchmark spanning tabletop manipulation, few-shot learning, and long-horizon mobile manipulation, demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we find that the single-embodiment pre-training stage, together with the Galaxea Open-World Dataset, plays a critical role in achieving strong performance.

Paperid: 466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00482.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This report investigates approaches for prompting a tool-augmented large language model (LLM) to act as a role-playing dialogue agent in the API track of the Commonsense Persona-grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025. In this setting, dialogue agents often produce overly long in-character responses (over-speaking) while failing to use tools effectively according to the persona (under-acting), such as generating function calls that do not exist or making unnecessary tool calls before answering. We explore four prompting approaches to address these issues: 1) basic role prompting, 2) human-crafted role prompting, 3) automatic prompt optimization (APO), and 4) rule-based role prompting. The rule-based role prompting (RRP) approach achieved the best performance through two novel techniques--character-card/scene-contract design and strict enforcement of function calling--which led to an overall score of 0.571, improving on the zero-shot baseline score of 0.519. These findings demonstrate that RRP design can substantially improve the effectiveness and reliability of role-playing dialogue agents compared with more elaborate methods such as APO. To support future efforts in developing persona prompts, we are open-sourcing all of our best-performing prompts and the APO tool. Source code is available at https://github.com/scb-10x/apo.

Paperid: 467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00428.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Controllable face generation poses critical challenges in generative modeling due to the intricate balance required between semantic controllability and photorealism. While existing approaches struggle with disentangling semantic controls from generation pipelines, we revisit the architectural potential of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) through the lens of expert specialization. This paper introduces Face-MoGLE, a novel framework featuring: (1) Semantic-decoupled latent modeling through mask-conditioned space factorization, enabling precise attribute manipulation; (2) A mixture of global and local experts that captures holistic structure and region-level semantics for fine-grained controllability; (3) A dynamic gating network producing time-dependent coefficients that evolve with diffusion steps and spatial locations. Face-MoGLE provides a powerful and flexible solution for high-quality, controllable face generation, with strong potential in generative modeling and security applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in multimodal and monomodal face generation settings and its robust zero-shot generalization capability. Project page is available at https://github.com/XavierJiezou/Face-MoGLE.

Paperid: 468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00305.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Transductive few-shot learning has triggered an abundant literature focusing on vision-only models, but is still at a nascent stage within the recent context of foundational vision-language models (VLMs). Only a few recent methods addressed the problem, pointing to the potential of tranduction in VLMs and to the need for VLM-tailored methods. Building on this momentum, we leverage information-theoretic concepts and recent progress in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), developing a highly competitive transductive few-shot CLIP method. Specifically, we introduce a novel Language-aware Information MaximizatiOn (LIMO) loss integrating three complementary terms: (i) the mutual information between the vision inputs and the textual class descriptions; (ii) a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence penalizing deviation of the network's probabilistic outputs from the text-driven zero-shot predictions; and (iii) a standard cross-entropy loss based on the labeled shots. Furthermore, we challenge the commonly followed fine-tuning practices in the context of transductive few-shot learning, and explore PEFT strategies, completely overlooked in this context. Surprisingly, we observe substantial boosts in performances, which points to the potential of adapting a subset of the model's parameters in the transductive few-shot setting. We report comprehensive evaluations, which show that LIMO outperforms the very recent transductive few-shot CLIP methods by a large margin and yields significant gains over the best-performing inductive methods. Our code is publicly available at:\[ \href{https://github.com/ghassenbaklouti/LIMO}{\text{here}} \]

Paperid: 469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21770.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humans usually show exceptional generalisation and discovery ability in the open world, when being shown uncommon new concepts. Whereas most existing studies in the literature focus on common typical data from closed sets, open-world novel discovery is under-explored in videos. In this paper, we are interested in asking: What if atypical unusual videos are exposed in the learning process? To this end, we collect a new video dataset consisting of various types of unusual atypical data (e.g., sci-fi, animation, etc.). To study how such atypical data may benefit open-world learning, we feed them into the model training process for representation learning. Focusing on three key tasks in open-world learning: out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, novel category discovery (NCD), and zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR), we found that even straightforward learning approaches with atypical data consistently improve performance across various settings. Furthermore, we found that increasing the categorical diversity of the atypical samples further boosts OOD detection performance. Additionally, in the NCD task, using a smaller yet more semantically diverse set of atypical samples leads to better performance compared to using a larger but more typical dataset. In the ZSAR setting, the semantic diversity of atypical videos helps the model generalise better to unseen action classes. These observations in our extensive experimental evaluations reveal the benefits of atypical videos for visual representation learning in the open world, together with the newly proposed dataset, encouraging further studies in this direction. The project page is at: https://julysun98.github.io/atypical_dataset.

Paperid: 470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21222.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current object re-identification (ReID) methods train domain-specific models (e.g., for persons or vehicles), which lack generalization and demand costly labeled data for new categories. While self-supervised learning reduces annotation needs by learning instance-wise invariance, it struggles to capture \textit{identity-sensitive} features critical for ReID. This paper proposes Visual In-Context Prompting~(VICP), a novel framework where models trained on seen categories can directly generalize to unseen novel categories using only \textit{in-context examples} as prompts, without requiring parameter adaptation. VICP synergizes LLMs and vision foundation models~(VFM): LLMs infer semantic identity rules from few-shot positive/negative pairs through task-specific prompting, which then guides a VFM (\eg, DINO) to extract ID-discriminative features via \textit{dynamic visual prompts}. By aligning LLM-derived semantic concepts with the VFM's pre-trained prior, VICP enables generalization to novel categories, eliminating the need for dataset-specific retraining. To support evaluation, we introduce ShopID10K, a dataset of 10K object instances from e-commerce platforms, featuring multi-view images and cross-domain testing. Experiments on ShopID10K and diverse ReID benchmarks demonstrate that VICP outperforms baselines by a clear margin on unseen categories. Code is available at https://github.com/Hzzone/VICP.

Paperid: 471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20783.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A fundamental aspect of the semantics of natural language is that novel meanings can be formed from the composition of previously known parts. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in recent years, however, there is evidence that they are unable to perform this kind of composition. For example, given an image of a red cube and a blue cylinder, a VLM such as CLIP is likely to incorrectly label the image as a red cylinder or a blue cube, indicating it represents the image as a `bag-of-words' and fails to capture compositional semantics. Diffusion models have recently gained significant attention for their impressive generative abilities, and zero-shot classifiers based on diffusion models have been shown to perform competitively with CLIP in certain compositional tasks. In this work we explore whether the generative Diffusion Classifier has improved compositional generalisation abilities compared to discriminative models. We assess three models -- Diffusion Classifier, CLIP, and ViLT -- on their ability to bind objects with attributes and relations in both zero-shot learning (ZSL) and generalised zero-shot learning (GZSL) settings. Our results show that the Diffusion Classifier and ViLT perform well at concept binding tasks, but that all models struggle significantly with the relational GZSL task, underscoring the broader challenges VLMs face with relational reasoning. Analysis of CLIP embeddings suggests that the difficulty may stem from overly similar representations of relational concepts such as left and right. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/otmive/diffusion_classifier_clip

Paperid: 472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20758.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize objects in 3D scenes using natural language descriptions. Although supervised methods achieve higher accuracy in constrained settings, zero-shot 3DVG holds greater promise for real-world applications since eliminating scene-specific training requirements. However, existing zero-shot methods face challenges of spatial-limited reasoning due to reliance on single-view localization, and contextual omissions or detail degradation. To address these issues, we propose SeqVLM, a novel zero-shot 3DVG framework that leverages multi-view real-world scene images with spatial information for target object reasoning. Specifically, SeqVLM first generates 3D instance proposals via a 3D semantic segmentation network and refines them through semantic filtering, retaining only semantic-relevant candidates. A proposal-guided multi-view projection strategy then projects these candidate proposals onto real scene image sequences, preserving spatial relationships and contextual details in the conversion process of 3D point cloud to images. Furthermore, to mitigate VLM computational overload, we implement a dynamic scheduling mechanism that iteratively processes sequances-query prompts, leveraging VLM's cross-modal reasoning capabilities to identify textually specified objects. Experiments on the ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving Acc@0.25 scores of 55.6% and 53.2%, surpassing previous zero-shot methods by 4.0% and 5.2%, respectively, which advance 3DVG toward greater generalization and real-world applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/JiawLin/SeqVLM.

Paperid: 473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20691.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation image-text models such as CLIP with zero-shot capabilities enable a wide array of applications. MobileCLIP is a recent family of image-text models at 3-15ms latency and 50-150M parameters with state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy. The main ingredients in MobileCLIP were its low-latency and light architectures and a novel multi-modal reinforced training that made knowledge distillation from multiple caption-generators and CLIP teachers efficient, scalable, and reproducible. In this paper, we improve the multi-modal reinforced training of MobileCLIP through: 1) better CLIP teacher ensembles trained on the DFN dataset, 2) improved captioner teachers trained on the DFN dataset and fine-tuned on a diverse selection of high-quality image-caption datasets. We discover new insights through ablations such as the importance of temperature tuning in contrastive knowledge distillation, the effectiveness of caption-generator fine-tuning for caption diversity, and the additive improvement from combining synthetic captions generated by multiple models. We train a new family of models called MobileCLIP2 and achieve state-of-the-art ImageNet-1k zero-shot accuracies at low latencies. In particular, we observe 2.2% improvement in ImageNet-1k accuracy for MobileCLIP2-B compared with MobileCLIP-B architecture. Notably, MobileCLIP2-S4 matches the zero-shot accuracy of SigLIP-SO400M/14 on ImageNet-1k while being 2$\times$ smaller and improves on DFN ViT-L/14 at 2.5$\times$ lower latency. We release our pretrained models (https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileclip) and the data generation code (https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileclip-dr). The data generation code makes it easy to create new reinforced datasets with arbitrary teachers using distributed scalable processing.

Paperid: 474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19953.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their application to real-world robotics remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a modular USD framework to address the challenges in the safety, interpretability, and deployability of the learned skills. Our approach employs user-defined factorization of the state space to learn disentangled skill representations. It assigns different skill discovery algorithms to each factor based on the desired intrinsic reward function. To encourage structured morphology-aware skills, we introduce symmetry-based inductive biases tailored to individual factors. We also incorporate a style factor and regularization penalties to promote safe and robust behaviors. We evaluate our framework in simulation using a quadrupedal robot and demonstrate zero-shot transfer of the learned skills to real hardware. Our results show that factorization and symmetry lead to the discovery of structured human-interpretable behaviors, while the style factor and penalties enhance safety and diversity. Additionally, we show that the learned skills can be used for downstream tasks and perform on par with oracle policies trained with hand-crafted rewards.

Paperid: 475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19544.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With advancements in AI, new gaze estimation methods are exceeding state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks, but their real-world application reveals a gap with commercial eye-tracking solutions. Factors like model size, inference time, and privacy often go unaddressed. Meanwhile, webcam-based eye-tracking methods lack sufficient accuracy, in particular due to head movement. To tackle these issues, we introduce We bEyeTrack, a framework that integrates lightweight SOTA gaze estimation models directly in the browser. It incorporates model-based head pose estimation and on-device few-shot learning with as few as nine calibration samples (k < 9). WebEyeTrack adapts to new users, achieving SOTA performance with an error margin of 2.32 cm on GazeCapture and real-time inference speeds of 2.4 milliseconds on an iPhone 14. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/RedForestAi/WebEyeTrack.

Paperid: 476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19542.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong performance on single-video tasks (e.g., video question answering), their ability across multiple videos remains critically underexplored. However, this capability is essential for real-world applications, including multi-camera surveillance and cross-video procedural learning. To bridge this gap, we present CVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to assess cross-video relational reasoning rigorously. CVBench comprises 1,000 question-answer pairs spanning three hierarchical tiers: cross-video object association (identifying shared entities), cross-video event association (linking temporal or causal event chains), and cross-video complex reasoning (integrating commonsense and domain knowledge). Built from five domain-diverse video clusters (e.g., sports, life records), the benchmark challenges models to synthesise information across dynamic visual contexts. Extensive evaluation of 10+ leading MLLMs (including GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-flash, Qwen2.5-VL) under zero-shot or chain-of-thought prompting paradigms. Key findings reveal stark performance gaps: even top models, such as GPT-4o, achieve only 60% accuracy on causal reasoning tasks, compared to the 91% accuracy of human performance. Crucially, our analysis reveals fundamental bottlenecks inherent in current MLLM architectures, notably deficient inter-video context retention and poor disambiguation of overlapping entities. CVBench establishes a rigorous framework for diagnosing and advancing multi-video reasoning, offering architectural insights for next-generation MLLMs. The data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Hokhim2/CVBench.

Paperid: 477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19485.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Gas leaks pose serious threats to human health and contribute significantly to atmospheric pollution, drawing increasing public concern. However, the lack of effective detection methods hampers timely and accurate identification of gas leaks. While some vision-based techniques leverage infrared videos for leak detection, the blurry and non-rigid nature of gas clouds often limits their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called Joint Vision-Language Gas leak Segmentation (JVLGS), which integrates the complementary strengths of visual and textual modalities to enhance gas leak representation and segmentation. Recognizing that gas leaks are sporadic and many video frames may contain no leak at all, our method incorporates a post-processing step to reduce false positives caused by noise and non-target objects, an issue that affects many existing approaches. Extensive experiments conducted across diverse scenarios show that JVLGS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art gas leak segmentation methods. We evaluate our model under both supervised and few-shot learning settings, and it consistently achieves strong performance in both, whereas competing methods tend to perform well in only one setting or poorly in both. Code available at: https://github.com/GeekEagle/JVLGS

Paperid: 478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19467.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Nonmedical opioid use is an urgent public health challenge, with far-reaching clinical and social consequences that are often underreported in traditional healthcare settings. Social media platforms, where individuals candidly share first-person experiences, offer a valuable yet underutilized source of insight into these impacts. In this study, we present a named entity recognition (NER) framework to extract two categories of self-reported consequences from social media narratives related to opioid use: ClinicalImpacts (e.g., withdrawal, depression) and SocialImpacts (e.g., job loss). To support this task, we introduce RedditImpacts 2.0, a high-quality dataset with refined annotation guidelines and a focus on first-person disclosures, addressing key limitations of prior work. We evaluate both fine-tuned encoder-based models and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) under zero- and few-shot in-context learning settings. Our fine-tuned DeBERTa-large model achieves a relaxed token-level F1 of 0.61 [95% CI: 0.43-0.62], consistently outperforming LLMs in precision, span accuracy, and adherence to task-specific guidelines. Furthermore, we show that strong NER performance can be achieved with substantially less labeled data, emphasizing the feasibility of deploying robust models in resource-limited settings. Our findings underscore the value of domain-specific fine-tuning for clinical NLP tasks and contribute to the responsible development of AI tools that may enhance addiction surveillance, improve interpretability, and support real-world healthcare decision-making. The best performing model, however, still significantly underperforms compared to inter-expert agreement (Cohen's kappa: 0.81), demonstrating that a gap persists between expert intelligence and current state-of-the-art NER/AI capabilities for tasks requiring deep domain knowledge.

Paperid: 479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19428.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a comprehensive system for addressing Tasks A, B, and C of the LLMs4OL 2025 challenge, which together span the full ontology construction pipeline: term extraction, typing, and taxonomy discovery. Our approach combines retrieval-augmented prompting, zero-shot classification, and attention-based graph modeling -- each tailored to the demands of the respective task. For Task A, we jointly extract domain-specific terms and their ontological types using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Training data was reformulated into a document to terms and types correspondence, while test-time inference leverages semantically similar training examples. This single-pass method requires no model finetuning and improves overall performance through lexical augmentation Task B, which involves assigning types to given terms, is handled via a dual strategy. In the few-shot setting (for domains with labeled training data), we reuse the RAG scheme with few-shot prompting. In the zero-shot setting (for previously unseen domains), we use a zero-shot classifier that combines cosine similarity scores from multiple embedding models using confidence-based weighting. In Task C, we model taxonomy discovery as graph inference. Using embeddings of type labels, we train a lightweight cross-attention layer to predict is-a relations by approximating a soft adjacency matrix. These modular, task-specific solutions enabled us to achieve top-ranking results in the official leaderboard across all three tasks. Taken together these strategies showcase the scalability, adaptability, and robustness of LLM-based architectures for ontology learning across heterogeneous domains. Code is available at: https://github.com/BelyaevaAlex/LLMs4OL-Challenge-Alexbek

Paperid: 480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19322.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, yet truly autonomous medical-imaging triage, where a system decides when to stop, escalate, or defer under real constraints, remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AT-CXR, an uncertainty-aware agent for chest X-rays. The system estimates per-case confidence and distributional fit, then follows a stepwise policy to issue an automated decision or abstain with a suggested label for human intervention. We evaluate two router designs that share the same inputs and actions: a deterministic rule-based router and an LLM-decided router. Across five-fold evaluation on a balanced subset of NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset, both variants outperform strong zero-shot vision-language models and state-of-the-art supervised classifiers, achieving higher full-coverage accuracy and superior selective-prediction performance, evidenced by a lower area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC) and a lower error rate at high coverage, while operating with lower latency that meets practical clinical constraints. The two routers provide complementary operating points, enabling deployments to prioritize maximal throughput or maximal accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/XLIAaron/uncertainty-aware-cxr-agent.

Paperid: 481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19244.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a training-free method, Articulate3D, to pose a 3D asset through language control. Despite advances in vision and language models, this task remains surprisingly challenging. To achieve this goal, we decompose the problem into two steps. We modify a powerful image-generator to create target images conditioned on the input image and a text instruction. We then align the mesh to the target images through a multi-view pose optimisation step. In detail, we introduce a self-attention rewiring mechanism (RSActrl) that decouples the source structure from pose within an image generative model, allowing it to maintain a consistent structure across varying poses. We observed that differentiable rendering is an unreliable signal for articulation optimisation; instead, we use keypoints to establish correspondences between input and target images. The effectiveness of Articulate3D is demonstrated across a diverse range of 3D objects and free-form text prompts, successfully manipulating poses while maintaining the original identity of the mesh. Quantitative evaluations and a comparative user study, in which our method was preferred over 85\% of the time, confirm its superiority over existing approaches. Project page:https://odeb1.github.io/articulate3d_page_deb/

Paperid: 482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have made significant strides in generating high-quality images. However, progressively manipulating certain attributes of generated images to meet the desired user expectations remains challenging, particularly for content with rich details, such as human faces. Some studies have attempted to address this by training slider modules. However, they follow a One-for-One manner, where an independent slider is trained for each attribute, requiring additional training whenever a new attribute is introduced. This not only results in parameter redundancy accumulated by sliders but also restricts the flexibility of practical applications and the scalability of attribute manipulation. To address this issue, we introduce the All-in-One Slider, a lightweight module that decomposes the text embedding space into sparse, semantically meaningful attribute directions. Once trained, it functions as a general-purpose slider, enabling interpretable and fine-grained continuous control over various attributes. Moreover, by recombining the learned directions, the All-in-One Slider supports zero-shot manipulation of unseen attributes (e.g., races and celebrities) and the composition of multiple attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enables accurate and scalable attribute manipulation, achieving notable improvements compared to previous methods. Furthermore, our method can be extended to integrate with the inversion framework to perform attribute manipulation on real images, broadening its applicability to various real-world scenarios. The code and trained model will be released at: https://github.com/ywxsuperstar/KSAE-FaceSteer.

Paperid: 483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19162.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A foundational task for the digital analysis of documents is text line segmentation. However, automating this process with deep learning models is challenging because it requires large, annotated datasets that are often unavailable for historical documents. Additionally, the annotation process is a labor- and cost-intensive task that requires expert knowledge, which makes few-shot learning a promising direction for reducing data requirements. In this work, we demonstrate that small and simple architectures, coupled with a topology-aware loss function, are more accurate and data-efficient than more complex alternatives. We pair a lightweight UNet++ with a connectivity-aware loss, initially developed for neuron morphology, which explicitly penalizes structural errors like line fragmentation and unintended line merges. To increase our limited data, we train on small patches extracted from a mere three annotated pages per manuscript. Our methodology significantly improves upon the current state-of-the-art on the U-DIADS-TL dataset, with a 200% increase in Recognition Accuracy and a 75% increase in Line Intersection over Union. Our method also achieves an F-Measure score on par with or even exceeding that of the competition winner of the DIVA-HisDB baseline detection task, all while requiring only three annotated pages, exemplifying the efficacy of our approach. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/RafaelSterzinger/acpr_few_shot_hist.

Paperid: 484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18799.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Effective waste sorting is critical for sustainable recycling, yet AI research in this domain continues to lag behind commercial systems due to limited datasets and reliance on legacy object detectors. In this work, we advance AI-driven waste detection by establishing strong baselines and introducing an ensemble-based semi-supervised learning framework. We first benchmark state-of-the-art Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) models on the real-world ZeroWaste dataset, demonstrating that while class-only prompts perform poorly, LLM-optimized prompts significantly enhance zero-shot accuracy. Next, to address domain-specific limitations, we fine-tune modern transformer-based detectors, achieving a new baseline of 51.6 mAP. We then propose a soft pseudo-labeling strategy that fuses ensemble predictions using spatial and consensus-aware weighting, enabling robust semi-supervised training. Applied to the unlabeled ZeroWaste-s subset, our pseudo-annotations achieve performance gains that surpass fully supervised training, underscoring the effectiveness of scalable annotation pipelines. Our work contributes to the research community by establishing rigorous baselines, introducing a robust ensemble-based pseudo-labeling pipeline, generating high-quality annotations for the unlabeled ZeroWaste-s subset, and systematically evaluating OVOD models under real-world waste sorting conditions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/h-abid97/robust-waste-detection.

Paperid: 485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18691.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
As the embodiment gap between a robot and a human narrows, new opportunities arise to leverage datasets of humans interacting with their surroundings for robot learning. We propose a novel technique for training sensorimotor policies with reinforcement learning by imitating predictive models of human motions. Our key insight is that the motion of keypoints on human-inspired robot end-effectors closely mirrors the motion of corresponding human body keypoints. This enables us to use a model trained to predict future motion on human data \emph{zero-shot} on robot data. We train sensorimotor policies to track the predictions of such a model, conditioned on a history of past robot states, while optimizing a relatively sparse task reward. This approach entirely bypasses gradient-based kinematic retargeting and adversarial losses, which limit existing methods from fully leveraging the scale and diversity of modern human-scene interaction datasets. Empirically, we find that our approach can work across robots and tasks, outperforming existing baselines by a large margin. In addition, we find that tracking a human motion model can substitute for carefully designed dense rewards and curricula in manipulation tasks. Code, data and qualitative results available at https://jirl-upenn.github.io/track_reward/.

Paperid: 486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18463.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting anomalies in surveillance footage is inherently challenging due to their unpredictable and context-dependent nature. This work introduces a novel context-aware zero-shot anomaly detection framework that identifies abnormal events without exposure to anomaly examples during training. The proposed hybrid architecture combines TimeSformer, DPC, and CLIP to model spatiotemporal dynamics and semantic context. TimeSformer serves as the vision backbone to extract rich spatial-temporal features, while DPC forecasts future representations to identify temporal deviations. Furthermore, a CLIP-based semantic stream enables concept-level anomaly detection through context-specific text prompts. These components are jointly trained using InfoNCE and CPC losses, aligning visual inputs with their temporal and semantic representations. A context-gating mechanism further enhances decision-making by modulating predictions with scene-aware cues or global video features. By integrating predictive modeling with vision-language understanding, the system can generalize to previously unseen behaviors in complex environments. This framework bridges the gap between temporal reasoning and semantic context in zero-shot anomaly detection for surveillance. The code for this research has been made available at https://github.com/NK-II/Context-Aware-Zero-Shot-Anomaly-Detection-in-Surveillance.

Paperid: 487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18075.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Open-set few-shot hyperspectral image (HSI) classification aims to classify image pixels by using few labeled pixels per class, where the pixels to be classified may be not all from the classes that have been seen. To address the open-set HSI classification challenge, current methods focus mainly on distinguishing the unknown class samples from the known class samples and rejecting them to increase the accuracy of identifying known class samples. They fails to further identify or discovery the unknow classes among the samples. This paper proposes a prototype learning and clustering method for discoverying unknown classes in HSIs under the few-shot environment. Using few labeled samples, it strives to develop the ability of infering the prototypes of unknown classes while distinguishing unknown classes from known classes. Once the unknown class samples are rejected by the learned known class classifier, the proposed method can further cluster the unknown class samples into different classes according to their distance to the inferred unknown class prototypes. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, extensive experiments on four benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits competitive performance in open-set few-shot HSI classification tasks. All the codes are available at \href{https://github.com/KOBEN-ff/OpenFUCD-main} {https://github.com/KOBEN-ff/OpenFUCD-main}

Paperid: 488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17283.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models like SAM (Segment Anything Model) exhibit strong zero-shot image segmentation performance, but often fall short on domain-specific tasks. Fine-tuning these models typically requires significant manual effort and domain expertise. In this work, we introduce QTT-SEG, a meta-learning-driven approach for automating and accelerating the fine-tuning of SAM for image segmentation. Built on the Quick-Tune hyperparameter optimization framework, QTT-SEG predicts high-performing configurations using meta-learned cost and performance models, efficiently navigating a search space of over 200 million possibilities. We evaluate QTT-SEG on eight binary and five multiclass segmentation datasets under tight time constraints. Our results show that QTT-SEG consistently improves upon SAM's zero-shot performance and surpasses AutoGluon Multimodal, a strong AutoML baseline, on most binary tasks within three minutes. On multiclass datasets, QTT-SEG delivers consistent gains as well. These findings highlight the promise of meta-learning in automating model adaptation for specialized segmentation tasks. Code available at: https://github.com/ds-brx/QTT-SEG/

Paperid: 489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17078.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving their performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) for low-resource languages. Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance in LLMs. We construct neuron probe data from the ground-truth MUSE bilingual dictionaries, and define a subset of language overlap neurons accordingly to ensure full activation of these anchored neurons. Subsequently, we propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlapping neurons, guiding optimal bridge selection. The experiments conducted on 4 cross-lingual tasks and 15 language pairs from 7 diverse families, covering both high-low and moderate-low pairs, validate the effectiveness of BridgeX-ICL and offer empirical insights into the underlying multilingual mechanisms of LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xuyuemei/BridgeX-ICL.

Paperid: 490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16757.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we present a systematic and comprehensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art reranking methods, encompassing large language model (LLM)-based, lightweight contextual, and zero-shot approaches, with respect to their performance in information retrieval tasks. We evaluate in total 22 methods, including 40 variants (depending on used LLM) across several established benchmarks, including TREC DL19, DL20, and BEIR, as well as a novel dataset designed to test queries unseen by pretrained models. Our primary goal is to determine, through controlled and fair comparisons, whether a performance disparity exists between LLM-based rerankers and their lightweight counterparts, particularly on novel queries, and to elucidate the underlying causes of any observed differences. To disentangle confounding factors, we analyze the effects of training data overlap, model architecture, and computational efficiency on reranking performance. Our findings indicate that while LLM-based rerankers demonstrate superior performance on familiar queries, their generalization ability to novel queries varies, with lightweight models offering comparable efficiency. We further identify that the novelty of queries significantly impacts reranking effectiveness, highlighting limitations in existing approaches. https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/llm-reranking-generalization-study

Paperid: 491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16634.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Fault Diagnosis (FSC-FD), which aims to continuously learn from new fault classes with only a few samples without forgetting old ones, is critical for real-world industrial systems. However, this challenging task severely amplifies the issues of catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge and overfitting on scarce new data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework built upon Dual-Granularity Representations, termed the Dual-Granularity Guidance Network (DGGN). Our DGGN explicitly decouples feature learning into two parallel streams: 1) a fine-grained representation stream, which utilizes a novel Multi-Order Interaction Aggregation module to capture discriminative, class-specific features from the limited new samples. 2) a coarse-grained representation stream, designed to model and preserve general, class-agnostic knowledge shared across all fault types. These two representations are dynamically fused by a multi-semantic cross-attention mechanism, where the stable coarse-grained knowledge guides the learning of fine-grained features, preventing overfitting and alleviating feature conflicts. To further mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we design a Boundary-Aware Exemplar Prioritization strategy. Moreover, a decoupled Balanced Random Forest classifier is employed to counter the decision boundary bias caused by data imbalance. Extensive experiments on the TEP benchmark and a real-world MFF dataset demonstrate that our proposed DGGN achieves superior diagnostic performance and stability compared to state-of-the-art FSC-FD approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DGGN

Paperid: 492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16463.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The advent of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly transformed Continual Learning (CL), mainly due to their zero-shot classification abilities. Such proficiency makes VLMs well-suited for real-world applications, enabling robust performance on novel unseen classes without requiring adaptation. However, fine-tuning remains essential when downstream tasks deviate significantly from the pre-training domain. Prior CL approaches primarily focus on preserving the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs during incremental fine-tuning on a downstream task. We take a step further by devising an approach that transforms preservation into enhancement of the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs. Our approach, named MoDular Embedding Recomposition (MoDER), introduces a modular framework that trains multiple textual experts, each specialized in a single seen class, and stores them in a foundational hub. At inference time, for each unseen class, we query the hub and compose the retrieved experts to synthesize a refined prototype that improves classification. We show the effectiveness of our method across two popular zero-shot incremental protocols, Class-IL and MTIL, comprising a total of 14 datasets. The codebase is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/mammoth.

Paperid: 493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16390.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Question answering (QA) is an actively studied topic, being a core natural language processing (NLP) task that needs to be addressed before achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, the lack of QA datasets in specific domains and languages hinders the development of robust AI models able to generalize across various domains and languages. To this end, we introduce MedQARo, the first large-scale medical QA benchmark in Romanian, alongside a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). We construct a high-quality and large-scale dataset comprising 102,646 QA pairs related to cancer patients. The questions regard medical case summaries of 1,011 patients, requiring either keyword extraction or reasoning to be answered correctly. MedQARo is the result of a time-consuming manual annotation process carried out by seven physicians specialized in oncology or radiotherapy, who spent a total of about 2,100 work hours to generate the QA pairs. We experiment with four LLMs from distinct families of models on MedQARo. Each model is employed in two scenarios, namely one based on zero-shot prompting and one based on supervised fine-tuning. Our results show that fine-tuned models significantly outperform their zero-shot counterparts, clearly indicating that pretrained models fail to generalize on MedQARo. Our findings demonstrate the importance of both domain-specific and language-specific fine-tuning for reliable clinical QA in Romanian. We publicly release our dataset and code at https://github.com/ana-rogoz/MedQARo.

Paperid: 494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16159.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Meta-learning aims to uniformly sample homogeneous support-query pairs, characterized by the same categories and similar attributes, and extract useful inductive biases through identical network architectures. However, this identical network design results in over-semantic homogenization. To address this, we propose a novel homologous but heterogeneous network. By treating support-query pairs as dual perspectives, we introduce heterogeneous visual aggregation (HA) modules to enhance complementarity while preserving semantic commonality. To further reduce semantic noise and amplify the uniqueness of heterogeneous semantics, we design a heterogeneous transfer (HT) module. Finally, we propose heterogeneous CLIP (HC) textual information to enhance the generalization capability of multimodal models. In the weakly-supervised few-shot semantic segmentation (WFSS) task, with only 1/24 of the parameters of existing state-of-the-art models, TLG achieves a 13.2\% improvement on Pascal-5\textsuperscript{i} and a 9.7\% improvement on COCO-20\textsuperscript{i}. To the best of our knowledge, TLG is also the first weakly supervised (image-level) model that outperforms fully supervised (pixel-level) models under the same backbone architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/jarch-ma/TLG.

Paperid: 495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16059.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series (TS) data are ubiquitous across various application areas, rendering time series forecasting (TSF) a fundamental task. With the astounding advances in large language models (LLMs), a variety of methods have been developed to adapt LLMs for time series forecasting. Despite unlocking the potential of LLMs in comprehending TS data, existing methods are inherently constrained by their shallow integration of TS information, wherein LLMs typically access TS representations at shallow layers, primarily at the input layer. This causes the influence of TS representations to progressively fade in deeper layers and eventually leads to ineffective adaptation between textual embeddings and TS representations. In this paper, we propose the Multi-layer Steerable Embedding Fusion (MSEF), a novel framework that enables LLMs to directly access time series patterns at all depths, thereby mitigating the progressive loss of TS information in deeper layers. Specifically, MSEF leverages off-the-shelf time series foundation models to extract semantically rich embeddings, which are fused with intermediate text representations across LLM layers via layer-specific steering vectors. These steering vectors are designed to continuously optimize the alignment between time series and textual modalities and facilitate a layer-specific adaptation mechanism that ensures efficient few-shot learning capabilities. Experimental results on seven benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements by MSEF compared with baselines, with an average reduction of 31.8% in terms of MSE. The code is available at https://github.com/One1sAll/MSEF.

Paperid: 496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15972.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Estimating the 6D pose of novel objects is a fundamental yet challenging problem in robotics, often relying on access to object CAD models. However, acquiring such models can be costly and impractical. Recent approaches aim to bypass this requirement by leveraging strong priors from foundation models to reconstruct objects from single or multi-view images, but typically require additional training or produce hallucinated geometry. To this end, we propose UnPose, a novel framework for zero-shot, model-free 6D object pose estimation and reconstruction that exploits 3D priors and uncertainty estimates from a pre-trained diffusion model. Specifically, starting from a single-view RGB-D frame, UnPose uses a multi-view diffusion model to estimate an initial 3D model using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation, along with pixel-wise epistemic uncertainty estimates. As additional observations become available, we incrementally refine the 3DGS model by fusing new views guided by the diffusion model's uncertainty, thereby continuously improving the pose estimation accuracy and 3D reconstruction quality. To ensure global consistency, the diffusion prior-generated views and subsequent observations are further integrated in a pose graph and jointly optimized into a coherent 3DGS field. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UnPose significantly outperforms existing approaches in both 6D pose estimation accuracy and 3D reconstruction quality. We further showcase its practical applicability in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15828.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, achieving remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, this progress has come at the cost of increasingly large model sizes, which pose significant challenges for deployment, scalability, and energy efficiency. To address these limitations, post-training pruning has emerged as a promising approach for reducing model size and inference latency without the need for retraining. Despite these advantages, many existing pruning methods result in substantial performance degradation or require computationally expensive fine-tuning. In this work, we introduce Z-Pruner, a novel post-training pruning method designed to induce sparsity in pretrained LLMs without any retraining. Unlike conventional approaches, Z-Pruner leverages both weight update magnitudes and activation patterns to identify and eliminate redundant parameters more effectively. Our method is model-agnostic, efficient, and easy to implement. We evaluate Z-Pruner using multiple widely-used LLM architectures, including LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and OPT, across a diverse set of standard language benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that Z-Pruner surpasses state-of-the-art pruning methods that require intensive weight updates. Specifically, Z-Pruner achieves the lowest perplexity scores and the highest overall average score for zero-shot accuracy. We have made the corresponding codes publicly available at https://github.com/sazzadadib/Z-Pruner.

Paperid: 498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15476.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation plays a pivotal role in disease diagnosis and treatment planning, particularly in resource-constrained clinical settings where lightweight and generalizable models are urgently needed. However, existing lightweight models often compromise performance for efficiency and rarely adopt computationally expensive attention mechanisms, severely restricting their global contextual perception capabilities. Additionally, current architectures neglect the channel redundancy issue under the same convolutional kernels in medical imaging, which hinders effective feature extraction. To address these challenges, we propose LGMSNet, a novel lightweight framework based on local and global dual multiscale that achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal computational overhead. LGMSNet employs heterogeneous intra-layer kernels to extract local high-frequency information while mitigating channel redundancy. In addition, the model integrates sparse transformer-convolutional hybrid branches to capture low-frequency global information. Extensive experiments across six public datasets demonstrate LGMSNet's superiority over existing state-of-the-art methods. In particular, LGMSNet maintains exceptional performance in zero-shot generalization tests on four unseen datasets, underscoring its potential for real-world deployment in resource-limited medical scenarios. The whole project code is in https://github.com/cq-dong/LGMSNet.

Paperid: 499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15413.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) with different sensing modalities requires both strong generalization across diverse users and efficient personalization for individuals. However, conventional HAR models often fail to generalize when faced with user-specific variations, leading to degraded performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel on-device few-shot learning framework that bridges generalization and personalization in HAR. Our method first trains a generalizable representation across users and then rapidly adapts to new users with only a few labeled samples, updating lightweight classifier layers directly on resource-constrained devices. This approach achieves robust on-device learning with minimal computation and memory cost, making it practical for real-world deployment. We implement our framework on the energy-efficient RISC-V GAP9 microcontroller and evaluate it on three benchmark datasets (RecGym, QVAR-Gesture, Ultrasound-Gesture). Across these scenarios, post-deployment adaptation improves accuracy by 3.73\%, 17.38\%, and 3.70\%, respectively. These results demonstrate that few-shot on-device learning enables scalable, user-aware, and energy-efficient wearable human activity recognition by seamlessly uniting generalization and personalization. The related framework is open sourced for further research\footnote{https://github.com/kangpx/onlineTiny2023}.

Paperid: 500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14811.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Tinker, a versatile framework for high-fidelity 3D editing that operates in both one-shot and few-shot regimes without any per-scene finetuning. Unlike prior techniques that demand extensive per-scene optimization to ensure multi-view consistency or to produce dozens of consistent edited input views, Tinker delivers robust, multi-view consistent edits from as few as one or two images. This capability stems from repurposing pretrained diffusion models, which unlocks their latent 3D awareness. To drive research in this space, we curate the first large-scale multi-view editing dataset and data pipeline, spanning diverse scenes and styles. Building on this dataset, we develop our framework capable of generating multi-view consistent edited views without per-scene training, which consists of two novel components: (1) Referring multi-view editor: Enables precise, reference-driven edits that remain coherent across all viewpoints. (2) Any-view-to-video synthesizer: Leverages spatial-temporal priors from video diffusion to perform high-quality scene completion and novel-view generation even from sparse inputs. Through extensive experiments, Tinker significantly reduces the barrier to generalizable 3D content creation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on editing, novel-view synthesis, and rendering enhancement tasks. We believe that Tinker represents a key step towards truly scalable, zero-shot 3D editing. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/Tinker

Paperid: 501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14782.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Urban transportation systems encounter diverse challenges across multiple tasks, such as traffic forecasting, electric vehicle (EV) charging demand prediction, and taxi dispatch. Existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: small-scale deep learning models are task-specific and data-hungry, limiting their generalizability across diverse scenarios, while large language models (LLMs), despite offering flexibility through natural language interfaces, struggle with structured spatiotemporal data and numerical reasoning in transportation domains. To address these limitations, we propose TransLLM, a unified foundation framework that integrates spatiotemporal modeling with large language models through learnable prompt composition. Our approach features a lightweight spatiotemporal encoder that captures complex dependencies via dilated temporal convolutions and dual-adjacency graph attention networks, seamlessly interfacing with LLMs through structured embeddings. A novel instance-level prompt routing mechanism, trained via reinforcement learning, dynamically personalizes prompts based on input characteristics, moving beyond fixed task-specific templates. The framework operates by encoding spatiotemporal patterns into contextual representations, dynamically composing personalized prompts to guide LLM reasoning, and projecting the resulting representations through specialized output layers to generate task-specific predictions. Experiments across seven datasets and three tasks demonstrate the exceptional effectiveness of TransLLM in both supervised and zero-shot settings. Compared to ten baseline models, it delivers competitive performance on both regression and planning problems, showing strong generalization and cross-task adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/BiYunying/TransLLM.

Paperid: 502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14440.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images guided by textual prompts. However, achieving multi-subject compositional synthesis with precise spatial control remains a significant challenge. In this work, we address the task of layout-controllable multi-subject synthesis (LMS), which requires both faithful reconstruction of reference subjects and their accurate placement in specified regions within a unified image. While recent advancements have separately improved layout control and subject synthesis, existing approaches struggle to simultaneously satisfy the dual requirements of spatial precision and identity preservation in this composite task. To bridge this gap, we propose MUSE, a unified synthesis framework that employs concatenated cross-attention (CCA) to seamlessly integrate layout specifications with textual guidance through explicit semantic space expansion. The proposed CCA mechanism enables bidirectional modality alignment between spatial constraints and textual descriptions without interference. Furthermore, we design a progressive two-stage training strategy that decomposes the LMS task into learnable sub-objectives for effective optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MUSE achieves zero-shot end-to-end generation with superior spatial accuracy and identity consistency compared to existing solutions, advancing the frontier of controllable image synthesis. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/pf0607/MUSE.

Paperid: 503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13843.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current e-commerce multimodal retrieval systems face two key limitations: they optimize for specific tasks with fixed modality pairings, and lack comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating unified retrieval approaches. To address these challenges, we introduce UniECS, a unified multimodal e-commerce search framework that handles all retrieval scenarios across image, text, and their combinations. Our work makes three key contributions. First, we propose a flexible architecture with a novel gated multimodal encoder that uses adaptive fusion mechanisms. This encoder integrates different modality representations while handling missing modalities. Second, we develop a comprehensive training strategy to optimize learning. It combines cross-modal alignment loss (CMAL), cohesive local alignment loss (CLAL), intra-modal contrastive loss (IMCL), and adaptive loss weighting. Third, we create M-BEER, a carefully curated multimodal benchmark containing 50K product pairs for e-commerce search evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniECS consistently outperforms existing methods across four e-commerce benchmarks with fine-tuning or zero-shot evaluation. On our M-BEER bench, UniECS achieves substantial improvements in cross-modal tasks (up to 28\% gain in R@10 for text-to-image retrieval) while maintaining parameter efficiency (0.2B parameters) compared to larger models like GME-Qwen2VL (2B) and MM-Embed (8B). Furthermore, we deploy UniECS in the e-commerce search platform of Kuaishou Inc. across two search scenarios, achieving notable improvements in Click-Through Rate (+2.74\%) and Revenue (+8.33\%). The comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in both experimental and real-world settings. Corresponding codes, models and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/qzp2018/UniECS.

Paperid: 504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13560.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have demonstrated remarkable class-generalizable ability to unseen classes in few-shot anomaly segmentation (FSAS), leveraging supervised prompt learning or fine-tuning on seen classes. However, their cross-category generalization largely depends on prior knowledge of real seen anomaly samples. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely DictAS, which enables a unified model to detect visual anomalies in unseen object categories without any retraining on the target data, only employing a few normal reference images as visual prompts. The insight behind DictAS is to transfer dictionary lookup capabilities to the FSAS task for unseen classes via self-supervised learning, instead of merely memorizing the normal and abnormal feature patterns from the training set. Specifically, DictAS mainly consists of three components: (1) Dictionary Construction - to simulate the index and content of a real dictionary using features from normal reference images. (2) Dictionary Lookup - to retrieve queried region features from the dictionary via a sparse lookup strategy. When a query feature cannot be retrieved, it is classified as an anomaly. (3) Query Discrimination Regularization - to enhance anomaly discrimination by making abnormal features harder to retrieve from the dictionary. To achieve this, Contrastive Query Constraint and Text Alignment Constraint are further proposed. Extensive experiments on seven public industrial and medical datasets demonstrate that DictAS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FSAS methods.

Paperid: 505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12977.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) typically optimises the architecture search process by exploiting the network or gradient properties at initialisation through zero-cost proxies. The existing proxies often rely on labelled data, which is usually unavailable in real-world settings. Furthermore, the majority of the current methods focus either on optimising the convergence and generalisation attributes or solely on the expressivity of the network architectures. To address both limitations, we first demonstrate how channel collinearity affects the convergence and generalisation properties of a neural network. Then, by incorporating the convergence, generalisation and expressivity in one approach, we propose a zero-cost proxy that omits the requirement of labelled data for its computation. In particular, we leverage the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the neural network layer features and the extrinsic curvature of the network output to design our proxy. %As a result, the proposed proxy is formulated as the simplified harmonic mean of the logarithms of two key components: the sum of the inverse of the feature condition number and the extrinsic curvature of the network output. Our approach enables accurate prediction of network performance on test data using only a single label-free data sample. Our extensive evaluation includes a total of six experiments, including the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) search space, i.e. DARTS and the Transformer search space, i.e. AutoFormer. The proposed proxy demonstrates a superior performance on multiple correlation benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, and TransNAS-Bench-101-micro; as well as on the NAS task within the DARTS and the AutoFormer search space, all while being notably efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/rohanasthana/Dextr.

Paperid: 506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12854.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation (MERG) is crucial for building emotionally intelligent human-computer interactions. Although large language models (LLMs) have improved text-based ERG, challenges remain in handling multimodal emotional content and maintaining identity consistency. Thus, we propose E3RG, an Explicit Emotion-driven Empathetic Response Generation System based on multimodal LLMs which decomposes MERG task into three parts: multimodal empathy understanding, empathy memory retrieval, and multimodal response generation. By integrating advanced expressive speech and video generative models, E3RG delivers natural, emotionally rich, and identity-consistent responses without extra training. Experiments validate the superiority of our system on both zero-shot and few-shot settings, securing Top-1 position in the Avatar-based Multimodal Empathy Challenge on ACM MM 25. Our code is available at https://github.com/RH-Lin/E3RG.

Paperid: 507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12669.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting human-perceived misery scores from natural language descriptions of real-world scenarios. The task is framed as a regression problem, where the model assigns a scalar value from 0 to 100 to each input statement. We evaluate multiple prompting strategies, including zero-shot, fixed-context few-shot, and retrieval-based prompting using BERT sentence embeddings. Few-shot approaches consistently outperform zero-shot baselines, underscoring the value of contextual examples in affective prediction. To move beyond static evaluation, we introduce the "Misery Game Show", a novel gamified framework inspired by a television format. It tests LLMs through structured rounds involving ordinal comparison, binary classification, scalar estimation, and feedback-driven reasoning. This setup enables us to assess not only predictive accuracy but also the model's ability to adapt based on corrective feedback. The gamified evaluation highlights the broader potential of LLMs in dynamic emotional reasoning tasks beyond standard regression. Code and data link: https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/Misery_Data_Exps_GitHub

Paperid: 508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12349.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Analyzing hand-object interaction in egocentric vision facilitates VR/AR applications and human-robot policy transfer. Existing research has mostly focused on modeling the behavior paradigm of interactive actions (i.e., ``how to interact''). However, the more challenging and fine-grained problem of capturing the critical moments of contact and separation between the hand and the target object (i.e., ``when to interact'') is still underexplored, which is crucial for immersive interactive experiences in mixed reality and robotic motion planning. Therefore, we formulate this problem as temporal interaction localization (TIL). Some recent works extract semantic masks as TIL references, but suffer from inaccurate object grounding and cluttered scenarios. Although current temporal action localization (TAL) methods perform well in detecting verb-noun action segments, they rely on category annotations during training and exhibit limited precision in localizing hand-object contact/separation moments. To address these issues, we propose a novel zero-shot approach dubbed EgoLoc to localize hand-object contact and separation timestamps in egocentric videos. EgoLoc introduces hand-dynamics-guided sampling to generate high-quality visual prompts. It exploits the vision-language model to identify contact/separation attributes, localize specific timestamps, and provide closed-loop feedback for further refinement. EgoLoc eliminates the need for object masks and verb-noun taxonomies, leading to generalizable zero-shot implementation. Comprehensive experiments on the public dataset and our novel benchmarks demonstrate that EgoLoc achieves plausible TIL for egocentric videos. It is also validated to effectively facilitate multiple downstream applications in egocentric vision and robotic manipulation tasks. Code and relevant data will be released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/EgoLoc.

Paperid: 509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11919.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models have shown significant promise in remote sensing applications, particularly for land-use and land-cover (LULC) via zero-shot classification and retrieval. However, current approaches face two key challenges: reliance on large spatial tiles that increase computational cost, and dependence on text-based supervision, which is often not readily available. In this work, we present TimeSenCLIP, a lightweight framework that reevaluate the role of spatial context by evaluating the effectiveness of a single pixel by leveraging its temporal and spectral dimensions, for classifying LULC and ecosystem types. By leveraging spectral and temporal information from Sentinel-2 imagery and cross-view learning with geo-tagged ground-level photos, we minimises the need for caption-based training while preserving semantic alignment between overhead (satellite) and ground perspectives. Our approach is grounded in the LUCAS and Sen4Map datasets, and evaluated on classification tasks including LULC, crop type, and ecosystem type. We demonstrate that single pixel inputs, when combined with temporal and spectral cues, are sufficient for thematic mapping, offering a scalable and efficient alternative for large-scale remote sensing applications. Code is available at https://github.com/pallavijain-pj/TimeSenCLIP

Paperid: 510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The visuomotor policy can easily overfit to its training datasets, such as fixed camera positions and backgrounds. This overfitting makes the policy perform well in the in-distribution scenarios but underperform in the out-of-distribution generalization. Additionally, the existing methods also have difficulty fusing multi-view information to generate an effective 3D representation. To tackle these issues, we propose Omni-Vision Diffusion Policy (OmniD), a multi-view fusion framework that synthesizes image observations into a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) representation. We introduce a deformable attention-based Omni-Feature Generator (OFG) to selectively abstract task-relevant features while suppressing view-specific noise and background distractions. OmniD achieves 11\%, 17\%, and 84\% average improvement over the best baseline model for in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and few-shot experiments, respectively. Training code and simulation benchmark are available: https://github.com/1mather/omnid.git

Paperid: 511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11503.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reliable autonomous navigation across the unstructured terrains of distant planetary surfaces is a critical enabler for future space exploration. However, the deployment of learning-based controllers is hindered by the inherent sim-to-real gap, particularly for the complex dynamics of wheel interactions with granular media. This work presents a complete sim-to-real framework for developing and validating robust control policies for dynamic waypoint tracking on such challenging surfaces. We leverage massively parallel simulation to train reinforcement learning agents across a vast distribution of procedurally generated environments with randomized physics. These policies are then transferred zero-shot to a physical wheeled rover operating in a lunar-analogue facility. Our experiments systematically compare multiple reinforcement learning algorithms and action smoothing filters to identify the most effective combinations for real-world deployment. Crucially, we provide strong empirical evidence that agents trained with procedural diversity achieve superior zero-shot performance compared to those trained on static scenarios. We also analyze the trade-offs of fine-tuning with high-fidelity particle physics, which offers minor gains in low-speed precision at a significant computational cost. Together, these contributions establish a validated workflow for creating reliable learning-based navigation systems, marking a critical step towards deploying autonomous robots in the final frontier.

Paperid: 512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11469.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of the glomerular basement membrane (GBM) in electron microscopy (EM) images is fundamental for quantifying membrane thickness and supporting the diagnosis of various kidney diseases. While supervised deep learning approaches achieve high segmentation accuracy, their reliance on extensive pixel-level annotation renders them impractical for clinical workflows. Few-shot learning can reduce this annotation burden but often struggles to capture the fine structural details necessary for GBM analysis. In this study, we introduce CoFi, a fast and efficient coarse-to-fine few-shot segmentation pipeline designed for GBM delineation in EM images. CoFi first trains a lightweight neural network using only three annotated images to produce an initial coarse segmentation mask. This mask is then automatically processed to generate high-quality point prompts with morphology-aware pruning, which are subsequently used to guide SAM in refining the segmentation. The proposed method achieved exceptional GBM segmentation performance, with a Dice coefficient of 74.54% and an inference speed of 1.9 FPS. We demonstrate that CoFi not only alleviates the annotation and computational burdens associated with conventional methods, but also achieves accurate and reliable segmentation results. The pipeline's speed and annotation efficiency make it well-suited for research and hold strong potential for clinical applications in renal pathology. The pipeline is publicly available at: https://github.com/ddrrnn123/CoFi.

Paperid: 513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10971.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) can be enhanced through rule mining; however, the resulting logical rules are often difficult for humans to interpret due to their inherent complexity and the idiosyncratic labeling conventions of individual KGs. This work presents Rule2Text, a comprehensive framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language explanations for mined logical rules, thereby improving KG accessibility and usability. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple datasets, including Freebase variants (FB-CVT-REV, FB+CVT-REV, and FB15k-237) as well as the ogbl-biokg dataset, with rules mined using AMIE 3.5.1. We systematically evaluate several LLMs across a comprehensive range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, variable type incorporation, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To systematically assess models' performance, we conduct a human evaluation of generated explanations on correctness and clarity. To address evaluation scalability, we develop and validate an LLM-as-a-judge framework that demonstrates strong agreement with human evaluators. Leveraging the best-performing model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), LLM judge, and human-in-the-loop feedback, we construct high-quality ground truth datasets, which we use to fine-tune the open-source Zephyr model. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in explanation quality after fine-tuning, with particularly strong gains in the domain-specific dataset. Additionally, we integrate a type inference module to support KGs lacking explicit type information. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

Paperid: 514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10922.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent advancement in video temporal grounding (VTG) has significantly enhanced fine-grained video understanding, primarily driven by multimodal large language models (MLLMs). With superior multimodal comprehension and reasoning abilities, VTG approaches based on MLLMs (VTG-MLLMs) are gradually surpassing traditional fine-tuned methods. They not only achieve competitive performance but also excel in generalization across zero-shot, multi-task, and multi-domain settings. Despite extensive surveys on general video-language understanding, comprehensive reviews specifically addressing VTG-MLLMs remain scarce. To fill this gap, this survey systematically examines current research on VTG-MLLMs through a three-dimensional taxonomy: 1) the functional roles of MLLMs, highlighting their architectural significance; 2) training paradigms, analyzing strategies for temporal reasoning and task adaptation; and 3) video feature processing techniques, which determine spatiotemporal representation effectiveness. We further discuss benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and summarize empirical findings. Finally, we identify existing limitations and propose promising research directions. For additional resources and details, readers are encouraged to visit our repository at https://github.com/ki-lw/Awesome-MLLMs-for-Video-Temporal-Grounding.

Paperid: 515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10256.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Crack detection plays a crucial role in civil infrastructures, including inspection of pavements, buildings, etc., and deep learning has significantly advanced this field in recent years. While numerous technical and review papers exist in this domain, emerging trends are reshaping the landscape. These shifts include transitions in learning paradigms (from fully supervised learning to semi-supervised, weakly-supervised, unsupervised, few-shot, domain adaptation and fine-tuning foundation models), improvements in generalizability (from single-dataset performance to cross-dataset evaluation), and diversification in dataset acquisition (from RGB images to specialized sensor-based data). In this review, we systematically analyze these trends and highlight representative works. Additionally, we introduce a new annotated dataset collected with 3D laser scans, 3DCrack, to support future research and conduct extensive benchmarking experiments to establish baselines for commonly used deep learning methodologies, including recent foundation models. Our findings provide insights into the evolving methodologies and future directions in deep learning-based crack detection. Project page: https://github.com/nantonzhang/Awesome-Crack-Detection

Paperid: 516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10113.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As the oldest mature writing system, Oracle Bone Script (OBS) has long posed significant challenges for archaeological decipherment due to its rarity, abstractness, and pictographic diversity. Current deep learning-based methods have made exciting progress on the OBS decipherment task, but existing approaches often ignore the intricate connections between glyphs and the semantics of OBS. This results in limited generalization and interpretability, especially when addressing zero-shot settings and undeciphered OBS. To this end, we propose an interpretable OBS decipherment method based on Large Vision-Language Models, which synergistically combines radical analysis and pictograph-semantic understanding to bridge the gap between glyphs and meanings of OBS. Specifically, we propose a progressive training strategy that guides the model from radical recognition and analysis to pictographic analysis and mutual analysis, thus enabling reasoning from glyph to meaning. We also design a Radical-Pictographic Dual Matching mechanism informed by the analysis results, significantly enhancing the model's zero-shot decipherment performance. To facilitate model training, we propose the Pictographic Decipherment OBS Dataset, which comprises 47,157 Chinese characters annotated with OBS images and pictographic analysis texts. Experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art Top-10 accuracy and superior zero-shot decipherment capabilities. More importantly, our model delivers logical analysis processes, possibly providing archaeologically valuable reference results for undeciphered OBS, and thus has potential applications in digital humanities and historical research. The dataset and code will be released in https://github.com/PKXX1943/PD-OBS.

Paperid: 517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09967.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in histopathology vision-language foundation models (VLFMs) have shown promise in addressing data scarcity for whole slide image (WSI) classification via zero-shot adaptation. However, these methods remain outperformed by conventional multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches trained on large datasets, motivating recent efforts to enhance VLFM-based WSI classification through fewshot learning paradigms. While existing few-shot methods improve diagnostic accuracy with limited annotations, their reliance on conventional classifier designs introduces critical vulnerabilities to data scarcity. To address this problem, we propose a Meta-Optimized Classifier (MOC) comprising two core components: (1) a meta-learner that automatically optimizes a classifier configuration from a mixture of candidate classifiers and (2) a classifier bank housing diverse candidate classifiers to enable a holistic pathological interpretation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MOC outperforms prior arts in multiple few-shot benchmarks. Notably, on the TCGA-NSCLC benchmark, MOC improves AUC by 10.4% over the state-of-the-art few-shot VLFM-based methods, with gains up to 26.25% under 1-shot conditions, offering a critical advancement for clinical deployments where diagnostic training data is severely limited. Code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/MOC.

Paperid: 518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09702.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in zero-shot speech generation have enabled models to synthesize speech that mimics speaker identity and speaking style from speech prompts. However, these models' effectiveness is significantly limited in real-world scenarios where high-quality speech prompts are absent, incomplete, or out of domain. This issue arises primarily from a significant quality mismatch between the speech data utilized for model training and the input prompt speech during inference. To address this, we introduce $\text{M}^3\text{PDB}$, the first large-scale, multi-modal, multi-label, and multilingual prompt database designed for robust prompt selection in speech generation. Our dataset construction leverages a novel multi-modal, multi-agent annotation framework, enabling precise and hierarchical labeling across diverse modalities. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight yet effective prompt selection strategy tailored for real-time, resource-constrained inference settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed database and selection strategy effectively support various challenging speech generation scenarios. We hope our work can inspire the community to shift focus from improving performance on standard benchmarks to addressing more realistic and diverse application scenarios in speech generation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/hizening/M3PDB.

Paperid: 519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09641.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large-scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front-middle-back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question-answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical scenario depths: Financial Knowledge & Data Analysis, Financial Analysis & Decision Support, and Financial Risk Control & Asset Optimization. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art MLLMs in a zero-shot setting. The top model, Qwen-VL-max, achieves an overall accuracy of 76.3%, outperforming non-expert humans but trailing financial experts by over 14 percentage points. Our error analysis uncovers six recurring failure modes-including cross-modal misalignment, hallucinations, and lapses in business-process reasoning-that highlight critical avenues for future research. VisFinEval aims to accelerate the development of robust, domain-tailored MLLMs capable of seamlessly integrating textual and visual financial information. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLM-Lab/VisFinEval.

Paperid: 520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09178.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing, yet the scarcity of defective samples restricts traditional detection methods to scenario-specific applications. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in generalization capabilities, their performance in industrial anomaly detection remains limited. To address this challenge, we propose IAD-R1, a universal post-training framework applicable to VLMs of different architectures and parameter scales, which substantially enhances their anomaly detection capabilities. IAD-R1 employs a two-stage training strategy: the Perception Activation Supervised Fine-Tuning (PA-SFT) stage utilizes a meticulously constructed high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset (Expert-AD) for training, enhancing anomaly perception capabilities and establishing reasoning-to-answer correlations; the Structured Control Group Relative Policy Optimization (SC-GRPO) stage employs carefully designed reward functions to achieve a capability leap from "Anomaly Perception" to "Anomaly Interpretation". Experimental results demonstrate that IAD-R1 achieves significant improvements across 7 VLMs, the largest improvement was on the DAGM dataset, with average accuracy 43.3% higher than the 0.5B baseline. Notably, the 0.5B parameter model trained with IAD-R1 surpasses commercial models including GPT-4.1 and Claude-Sonnet-4 in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of IAD-R1. The dataset, code, and all model weights will be publicly available at https://github.com/Yanhui-Lee/IAD-R1.

Paperid: 521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08241.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning skills from human motions offers a promising path toward generalizable policies for versatile humanoid whole-body control, yet two key cornerstones are missing: (1) a high-quality motion tracking framework that faithfully transforms large-scale kinematic references into robust and extremely dynamic motions on real hardware, and (2) a distillation approach that can effectively learn these motion primitives and compose them to solve downstream tasks. We address these gaps with BeyondMimic, a real-world framework to learn from human motions for versatile and naturalistic humanoid control via guided diffusion. Our framework provides a motion tracking pipeline capable of challenging skills such as jumping spins, sprinting, and cartwheels with state-of-the-art motion quality. Moving beyond simply mimicking existing motions, we further introduce a unified diffusion policy that enables zero-shot task-specific control at test time using simple cost functions. Deployed on hardware, BeyondMimic performs diverse tasks at test time, including waypoint navigation, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, bridging sim-to-real motion tracking and flexible synthesis of human motion primitives for whole-body control. https://beyondmimic.github.io/.

Paperid: 522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07976.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 78.0% and 34.3% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 100 turns and output tokens exceeding 400k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 51.1 on xBench and 58.7 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. Finally, we also show that ASearcher-Web-QwQ could achieve performance of commercial systems using external summary tool in a zero-shot transfer manner and test-time search. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.

Paperid: 523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07955.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Expert domain writing, such as scientific writing, typically demands extensive domain knowledge. Recent advances in LLMs show promising potential in reducing the expert workload. However, evaluating the quality of automatically generated scientific writing is a crucial open issue, as it requires knowledge of domain-specific evaluation criteria and the ability to discern expert preferences. Conventional automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge systems are insufficient to grasp expert preferences and domain-specific quality standards. To address this gap and support human-AI collaborative writing, we focus on related work generation, one of the most challenging scientific tasks, as an exemplar. We propose GREP, a multi-turn evaluation framework that integrates classical related work evaluation criteria with expert-specific preferences. Instead of assigning a single score, our framework decomposes the evaluation into fine-grained dimensions. This localized evaluation approach is further augmented with contrastive few-shot examples to provide detailed contextual guidance for the evaluation dimensions. The design principles allow our framework to deliver cardinal assessment of quality, which can facilitate better post-training compared to ordinal preference data. For better accessibility, we design two variants of GREP: a more precise variant with proprietary LLMs as evaluators, and a cheaper alternative with open-weight LLMs. Empirical investigation reveals that our framework is able to assess the quality of related work sections in a much more robust manner compared to standard LLM judges, reflects natural scenarios of scientific writing, and bears a strong correlation with the human expert assessment. We also observe that generations from state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to satisfy validation constraints of a suitable related work section. They (mostly) fail to improve based on feedback as well.

Paperid: 524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07925.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to extract relevant video segments based on a given natural language query. Recently, zero-shot VTG methods have gained attention by leveraging pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to localize target moments without additional training. However, existing approaches suffer from semantic fragmentation, where temporally continuous frames sharing the same semantics are split across multiple segments. When segments are fragmented, it becomes difficult to predict an accurate target moment that aligns with the text query. Also, they rely on skewed similarity distributions for localization, making it difficult to select the optimal segment. Furthermore, they heavily depend on the use of LLMs which require expensive inferences. To address these limitations, we propose a \textit{TAG}, a simple yet effective Temporal-Aware approach for zero-shot video temporal Grounding, which incorporates temporal pooling, temporal coherence clustering, and similarity adjustment. Our proposed method effectively captures the temporal context of videos and addresses distorted similarity distributions without training. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions benchmark datasets without rely on LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nuetee/TAG

Paperid: 525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07835.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in histopathology, such as CONCH and QuiltNet, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot classification capabilities across various tasks. However, their general-purpose design may lead to suboptimal performance in specific downstream applications. While supervised fine-tuning methods address this issue, they require manually labeled samples for adaptation. This paper investigates annotation-free adaptation of VLMs through continued pretraining on domain- and task-relevant image-caption pairs extracted from existing databases. Our experiments on two VLMs, CONCH and QuiltNet, across three downstream tasks reveal that these pairs substantially enhance both zero-shot and few-shot performance. Notably, with larger training sizes, continued pretraining matches the performance of few-shot methods while eliminating manual labeling. Its effectiveness, task-agnostic design, and annotation-free workflow make it a promising pathway for adapting VLMs to new histopathology tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMicroscopy/Annotation-free-VLM-specialization.

Paperid: 526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07769.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The synthesis of spatiotemporally coherent 4D content presents fundamental challenges in computer vision, requiring simultaneous modeling of high-fidelity spatial representations and physically plausible temporal dynamics. Current approaches often struggle to maintain view consistency while handling complex scene dynamics, particularly in large-scale environments with multiple interacting elements. This work introduces Dream4D, a novel framework that bridges this gap through a synergy of controllable video generation and neural 4D reconstruction. Our approach seamlessly combines a two-stage architecture: it first predicts optimal camera trajectories from a single image using few-shot learning, then generates geometrically consistent multi-view sequences via a specialized pose-conditioned diffusion process, which are finally converted into a persistent 4D representation. This framework is the first to leverage both rich temporal priors from video diffusion models and geometric awareness of the reconstruction models, which significantly facilitates 4D generation and shows higher quality (e.g., mPSNR, mSSIM) over existing methods.

Paperid: 527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07616.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in test-time scaling have led to the emergence of thinking LLMs that exhibit self-reflective behaviors and multi-step reasoning. While RL drives this self-improvement paradigm, a recent study (Gandhi et al., 2025) shows that RL alone does not truly instill these new reasoning abilities - it merely draws out behaviors already present in the base models. This raises a question: How can we train the models that don't exhibit such thinking behavior to develop it in the first place? To this end, we propose ThinkTuning, a GRPO-based interactive training approach where we augment the rollouts of a student model with the guidance from a teacher model. A simple idea from classroom practice inspires our method: a teacher poses a problem, lets the student try an answer, then gives corrective feedback -- enough to point the mind in the right direction and then show the solution. Each piece of feedback reshapes the student's thoughts, leading them to arrive at the correct solution. Similarly, we find that this type of implicit supervision through feedback from a teacher model of the same size improves the reasoning capabilities of the student model. In particular, on average, our method shows a 3.85% improvement over zero-shot baselines across benchmarks, and on MATH-500, AIME and GPQA-Diamond it shows 2.08%, 2.23% and 3.99% improvements over the vanilla-GRPO baseline. Source code is available at https://github.com/3rdAT/ThinkTuning.

Paperid: 528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07543.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automated soccer commentary generation has evolved from template-based systems to advanced neural architectures, aiming to produce real-time descriptions of sports events. While frameworks like SoccerNet-Caption laid foundational work, their inability to achieve fine-grained alignment between video content and commentary remains a significant challenge. Recent efforts such as MatchTime, with its MatchVoice model, address this issue through coarse and fine-grained alignment techniques, achieving improved temporal synchronization. In this paper, we extend MatchVoice to commentary generation for soccer highlights using the GOAL dataset, which emphasizes short clips over entire games. We conduct extensive experiments to reproduce the original MatchTime results and evaluate our setup, highlighting the impact of different training configurations and hardware limitations. Furthermore, we explore the effect of varying window sizes on zero-shot performance. While MatchVoice exhibits promising generalization capabilities, our findings suggest the need for integrating techniques from broader video-language domains to further enhance performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/chidaksh/SoccerCommentary.

Paperid: 529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07312.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Efficient lightweight neural networks are with increasing attention due to their faster reasoning speed and easier deployment on mobile devices. However, existing video pre-trained models still focus on the common ViT architecture with high latency, and few works attempt to build efficient architecture on mobile devices. This paper bridges this gap by introducing temporal structural reparameterization into an efficient image-text model and training it on a large-scale high-quality video-text dataset, resulting in an efficient video-text model that can run on mobile devices with strong zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities, termed as MobileViCLIP. In particular, in terms of inference speed on mobile devices, our MobileViCLIP-Small is 55.4x times faster than InternVideo2-L14 and 6.7x faster than InternVideo2-S14. In terms of zero-shot retrieval performance, our MobileViCLIP-Small obtains similar performance as InternVideo2-L14 and obtains 6.9\% better than InternVideo2-S14 on MSR-VTT. The code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MobileViCLIP.

Paperid: 530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07295.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly popularized in the multilingual world, ensuring hallucination-free factuality becomes markedly crucial. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly focus on textual or visual modalities with a primary emphasis on English, which creates a gap in evaluation when processing multilingual input, especially in speech. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel \textbf{C}ross-lingual and \textbf{C}ross-modal \textbf{F}actuality benchmark (\textbf{CCFQA}). Specifically, the CCFQA benchmark contains parallel speech-text factual questions across 8 languages, designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' cross-lingual and cross-modal factuality capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the CCFQA benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a few-shot transfer learning strategy that effectively transfers the Question Answering (QA) capabilities of LLMs in English to multilingual Spoken Question Answering (SQA) tasks, achieving competitive performance with GPT-4o-mini-Audio using just 5-shot training. We release CCFQA as a foundational research resource to promote the development of MLLMs with more robust and reliable speech understanding capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/yxduir/ccfqa.

Paperid: 531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06757.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods have been extensively studied, with many demonstrating high zero-shot performance on in-the-wild images and videos. However, these methods often struggle in challenging scenarios involving complex human poses or significant occlusions. Although some studies address 3D human pose estimation under occlusion, they typically evaluate performance on datasets that lack realistic or substantial occlusions, e.g., most existing datasets introduce occlusions with random patches over the human or clipart-style overlays, which may not reflect real-world challenges. To bridge this gap in realistic occlusion datasets, we introduce a novel benchmark dataset, VOccl3D, a Video-based human Occlusion dataset with 3D body pose and shape annotations. Inspired by works such as AGORA and BEDLAM, we constructed this dataset using advanced computer graphics rendering techniques, incorporating diverse real-world occlusion scenarios, clothing textures, and human motions. Additionally, we fine-tuned recent HPS methods, CLIFF and BEDLAM-CLIFF, on our dataset, demonstrating significant qualitative and quantitative improvements across multiple public datasets, as well as on the test split of our dataset, while comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we leveraged our dataset to enhance human detection performance under occlusion by fine-tuning an existing object detector, YOLO11, thus leading to a robust end-to-end HPS estimation system under occlusions. Overall, this dataset serves as a valuable resource for future research aimed at benchmarking methods designed to handle occlusions, offering a more realistic alternative to existing occlusion datasets. See the Project page for code and dataset:https://yashgarg98.github.io/VOccl3D-dataset/

Paperid: 532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06729.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Oral histories are vital records of lived experience, particularly within communities affected by systemic injustice and historical erasure. Effective and efficient analysis of their oral history archives can promote access and understanding of the oral histories. However, Large-scale analysis of these archives remains limited due to their unstructured format, emotional complexity, and high annotation costs. This paper presents a scalable framework to automate semantic and sentiment annotation for Japanese American Incarceration Oral History. Using LLMs, we construct a high-quality dataset, evaluate multiple models, and test prompt engineering strategies in historically sensitive contexts. Our multiphase approach combines expert annotation, prompt design, and LLM evaluation with ChatGPT, Llama, and Qwen. We labeled 558 sentences from 15 narrators for sentiment and semantic classification, then evaluated zero-shot, few-shot, and RAG strategies. For semantic classification, ChatGPT achieved the highest F1 score (88.71%), followed by Llama (84.99%) and Qwen (83.72%). For sentiment analysis, Llama slightly outperformed Qwen (82.66%) and ChatGPT (82.29%), with all models showing comparable results. The best prompt configurations were used to annotate 92,191 sentences from 1,002 interviews in the JAIOH collection. Our findings show that LLMs can effectively perform semantic and sentiment annotation across large oral history collections when guided by well-designed prompts. This study provides a reusable annotation pipeline and practical guidance for applying LLMs in culturally sensitive archival analysis. By bridging archival ethics with scalable NLP techniques, this work lays the groundwork for responsible use of artificial intelligence in digital humanities and preservation of collective memory. GitHub: https://github.com/kc6699c/LLM4OralHistoryAnalysis.

Paperid: 533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06496.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
An ensemble of trained multimodal encoders and vision-language models (VLMs) has become a standard approach for visual question answering (VQA) tasks. However, such models often fail to produce responses with the detailed precision necessary for complex, domain-specific applications such as medical VQA. Our representation model, BIND: BLIVA Integrated with Dense Encoding, extends prior multimodal work by refining the joint embedding space through dense, query-token-based encodings inspired by contrastive pretraining techniques. This refined encoder powers Med-GRIM, a model designed for medical VQA tasks that leverages graph-based retrieval and prompt engineering to integrate domain-specific knowledge. Rather than relying on compute-heavy fine-tuning of vision and language models on specific datasets, Med-GRIM applies a low-compute, modular workflow with small language models (SLMs) for efficiency. Med-GRIM employs prompt-based retrieval to dynamically inject relevant knowledge, ensuring both accuracy and robustness in its responses. By assigning distinct roles to each agent within the VQA system, Med-GRIM achieves large language model performance at a fraction of the computational cost. Additionally, to support scalable research in zero-shot multimodal medical applications, we introduce DermaGraph, a novel Graph-RAG dataset comprising diverse dermatological conditions. This dataset facilitates both multimodal and unimodal querying. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Rakesh-123-cryp/Med-GRIM.git

Paperid: 534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06429.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning has revolutionized medical imaging, but its effectiveness is severely limited by insufficient labeled training data. This paper introduces a novel GAN-based semi-supervised learning framework specifically designed for low labeled-data regimes, evaluated across settings with 5 to 50 labeled samples per class. Our approach integrates three specialized neural networks -- a generator for class-conditioned image translation, a discriminator for authenticity assessment and classification, and a dedicated classifier -- within a three-phase training framework. The method alternates between supervised training on limited labeled data and unsupervised learning that leverages abundant unlabeled images through image-to-image translation rather than generation from noise. We employ ensemble-based pseudo-labeling that combines confidence-weighted predictions from the discriminator and classifier with temporal consistency through exponential moving averaging, enabling reliable label estimation for unlabeled data. Comprehensive evaluation across eleven MedMNIST datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves statistically significant improvements over six state-of-the-art GAN-based semi-supervised methods, with particularly strong performance in the extreme 5-shot setting where the scarcity of labeled data is most challenging. The framework maintains its superiority across all evaluated settings (5, 10, 20, and 50 shots per class). Our approach offers a practical solution for medical imaging applications where annotation costs are prohibitive, enabling robust classification performance even with minimal labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/GuidoManni/SPARSE.

Paperid: 535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06382.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The integration of prompt tuning with multimodal learning has shown significant generalization abilities for various downstream tasks. Despite advancements, existing methods heavily depend on massive modality-specific labeled data (e.g., video, audio, and image), or are customized for a single modality. In this study, we present Text as Any-Modality by Consistent Prompt Tuning (TaAM-CPT), a scalable approach for constructing a general representation model toward unlimited modalities using solely text data. TaAM-CPT comprises modality prompt pools, text construction, and modality-aligned text encoders from pre-trained models, which allows for extending new modalities by simply adding prompt pools and modality-aligned text encoders. To harmonize the learning across different modalities, TaAM-CPT designs intra- and inter-modal learning objectives, which can capture category details within modalities while maintaining semantic consistency across different modalities. Benefiting from its scalable architecture and pre-trained models, TaAM-CPT can be seamlessly extended to accommodate unlimited modalities. Remarkably, without any modality-specific labeled data, TaAM-CPT achieves leading results on diverse datasets spanning various modalities, including video classification, image classification, and audio classification. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/TaAM-CPT.

Paperid: 536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06206.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of human-robot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain (OOD) generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization. To the best of our knowledge, Affordance-R1 is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with reasoning into affordance reasoning. The code of our method and our dataset is released on https://github.com/hq-King/Affordance-R1.

Paperid: 537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP show strong zero-shot performance but struggle with generalization under distribution shifts. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses this by adapting VLMs to unlabeled test data in new domains. While some TTA methods rely on prompt-tuning, training-free cache-based approaches are preferred for efficiency. However, current cache-based TTA models store only a limited set of high-confidence samples, restricting the decision boundary to these samples and ignoring the influence of other incoming test data. To address this, we propose Efficient Test-Time Adaptation (ETTA), introducing a Recursive Updating module that integrates all incoming test samples, progressively refining the decision boundary. This strategy mimics an unbounded cache, dynamically updating contextual embeddings for improved accuracy with minimal memory and computational overhead. ETTA also includes an Adaptive Ensemble module to reduce prompt dependency in image-to-text scores by dynamically selecting optimal prompts for each class. Furthermore, ETTA adaptively combines scores from both modules based on confidence levels, leveraging their complementary strengths. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks confirm that ETTA surpasses the state-of-the-art TTA models in computational complexity and accuracy, setting a new standard for effective, efficient test-time adaptation. The code has been released at https://github.com/hamidreza-dastmalchi/ETTA.

Paperid: 538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05599.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual tokenizer is a critical component for vision generation. However, the existing tokenizers often face unsatisfactory trade-off between compression ratios and reconstruction fidelity. To fill this gap, we introduce a powerful and concise WeTok tokenizer, which surpasses the previous leading tokenizers via two core innovations. (1) Group-wise lookup-free Quantization (GQ). We partition the latent features into groups, and perform lookup-free quantization for each group. As a result, GQ can efficiently overcome memory and computation limitations of prior tokenizers, while achieving a reconstruction breakthrough with more scalable codebooks. (2) Generative Decoding (GD). Different from prior tokenizers, we introduce a generative decoder with a prior of extra noise variable. In this case, GD can probabilistically model the distribution of visual data conditioned on discrete tokens, allowing WeTok to reconstruct visual details, especially at high compression ratios. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks show superior performance of our WeTok. On the ImageNet 50k validation set, WeTok achieves a record-low zero-shot rFID (WeTok: 0.12 vs. FLUX-VAE: 0.18 vs. SD-VAE 3.5: 0.19) with a 400% compression ratio. Furthermore, our highest compression model achieves a zero-shot rFID of 3.49 with a compression ratio of 768, outperforming Cosmos (384) 4.57 which has only 50% compression rate of ours. Code and models are available: https://github.com/zhuangshaobin/WeTok.

Paperid: 539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05213.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Segmentation(FSS) aims to efficient segmentation of new objects with few labeled samples. However, its performance significantly degrades when domain discrepancies exist between training and deployment. Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation(CD-FSS) is proposed to mitigate such performance degradation. Current CD-FSS methods primarily sought to develop segmentation models on a source domain capable of cross-domain generalization. However, driven by escalating concerns over data privacy and the imperative to minimize data transfer and training expenses, the development of source-free CD-FSS approaches has become essential. In this work, we propose a source-free CD-FSS method that leverages both textual and visual information to facilitate target domain task adaptation without requiring source domain data. Specifically, we first append Task-Specific Attention Adapters (TSAA) to the feature pyramid of a pretrained backbone, which adapt multi-level features extracted from the shared pre-trained backbone to the target task. Then, the parameters of the TSAA are trained through a Visual-Visual Embedding Alignment (VVEA) module and a Text-Visual Embedding Alignment (TVEA) module. The VVEA module utilizes global-local visual features to align image features across different views, while the TVEA module leverages textual priors from pre-aligned multi-modal features (e.g., from CLIP) to guide cross-modal adaptation. By combining the outputs of these modules through dense comparison operations and subsequent fusion via skip connections, our method produces refined prediction masks. Under both 1-shot and 5-shot settings, the proposed approach achieves average segmentation accuracy improvements of 2.18\% and 4.11\%, respectively, across four cross-domain datasets, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art CD-FSS methods. Code are available at https://github.com/ljm198134/TVGTANet.

Paperid: 540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05205.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalizable dense feature matching in endoscopic images is crucial for robot-assisted tasks, including 3D reconstruction, navigation, and surgical scene understanding. Yet, it remains a challenge due to difficult visual conditions (e.g., weak textures, large viewpoint variations) and a scarcity of annotated data. To address these challenges, we propose EndoMatcher, a generalizable endoscopic image matcher via large-scale, multi-domain data pre-training. To address difficult visual conditions, EndoMatcher employs a two-branch Vision Transformer to extract multi-scale features, enhanced by dual interaction blocks for robust correspondence learning. To overcome data scarcity and improve domain diversity, we construct Endo-Mix6, the first multi-domain dataset for endoscopic matching. Endo-Mix6 consists of approximately 1.2M real and synthetic image pairs across six domains, with correspondence labels generated using Structure-from-Motion and simulated transformations. The diversity and scale of Endo-Mix6 introduce new challenges in training stability due to significant variations in dataset sizes, distribution shifts, and error imbalance. To address them, a progressive multi-objective training strategy is employed to promote balanced learning and improve representation quality across domains. This enables EndoMatcher to generalize across unseen organs and imaging conditions in a zero-shot fashion. Extensive zero-shot matching experiments demonstrate that EndoMatcher increases the number of inlier matches by 140.69% and 201.43% on the Hamlyn and Bladder datasets over state-of-the-art methods, respectively, and improves the Matching Direction Prediction Accuracy (MDPA) by 9.40% on the Gastro-Matching dataset, achieving dense and accurate matching under challenging endoscopic conditions. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Beryl2000/EndoMatcher.

Paperid: 541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04746.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) is a machine learning paradigm that aims to generalize models from a small number of labeled examples, typically fewer than 10 per class. FSL is particularly crucial in biomedical, environmental, materials, and mechanical sciences, where samples are limited and data collection is often prohibitively costly, time-consuming, or ethically constrained. In this study, we present an innovative approach to FSL by demonstrating that a Large Multi-Modal Model (LMMM), trained on a set of independent tasks spanning diverse domains, task types, and input modalities, can substantially improve the generalization of FSL models, outperforming models based on conventional meta-learning on tasks of the same type. To support this, we first constructed a Multi-Modal Model Few-shot Dataset (M3FD, over 10K+ few-shot samples), which includes 2D RGB images, 2D/3D medical scans, tabular and time-course datasets, from which we manually curated FSL tasks such as classification. We further introduced M3F (Multi-Modal Model for Few-shot learning framework), a novel Large Multi-Modal Model framework tailored for data-constrained scientific applications. M3F supports a wide range of scientific data types through a modular pipeline. By fine-tuning the model on M3FD, M3F improves model performance, making LMMM feasible for real-world FSL deployment. The source code is located at https://github.com/ptdang1001/M3F. To democratize access to complex FSL data and promote reproducibility for public usage, M3FD is paired with a flexible and user-friendly tool that enables efficient querying, task-specific sampling, and preprocessing. Together, our dataset and framework offer a unified, scalable solution that significantly lowers the barrier to applying LMMMs in data-scarce scientific domains.

Paperid: 542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04611.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Monocular and stereo depth estimation offer complementary strengths: monocular methods capture rich contextual priors but lack geometric precision, while stereo approaches leverage epipolar geometry yet struggle with ambiguities such as reflective or textureless surfaces. Despite post-hoc synergies, these paradigms remain largely disjoint in practice. We introduce a unified framework that bridges both through iterative bidirectional alignment of their latent representations. At its core, a novel cross-attentive alignment mechanism dynamically synchronizes monocular contextual cues with stereo hypothesis representations during stereo reasoning. This mutual alignment resolves stereo ambiguities (e.g., specular surfaces) by injecting monocular structure priors while refining monocular depth with stereo geometry within a single network. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results: \textbf{it reduces zero-shot generalization error by $\!>\!40\%$ on Middlebury and ETH3D}, while addressing longstanding failures on transparent and reflective surfaces. By harmonizing multi-view geometry with monocular context, our approach enables robust 3D perception that transcends modality-specific limitations. Codes available at https://github.com/aeolusguan/BridgeDepth.

Paperid: 543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04251.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code - https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time/

Paperid: 544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04227.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse multimodal tasks by leveraging large-scale pre-training. However, enabling them to learn continually from non-stationary data remains a major challenge, as their cross-modal alignment and generalization capabilities are particularly vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting. Unlike traditional unimodal continual learning (CL), VLMs face unique challenges such as cross-modal feature drift, parameter interference due to shared architectures, and zero-shot capability erosion. This survey offers the first focused and systematic review of continual learning for VLMs (VLM-CL). We begin by identifying the three core failure modes that degrade performance in VLM-CL. Based on these, we propose a challenge-driven taxonomy that maps solutions to their target problems: (1) \textit{Multi-Modal Replay Strategies} address cross-modal drift through explicit or implicit memory mechanisms; (2) \textit{Cross-Modal Regularization} preserves modality alignment during updates; and (3) \textit{Parameter-Efficient Adaptation} mitigates parameter interference with modular or low-rank updates. We further analyze current evaluation protocols, datasets, and metrics, highlighting the need for better benchmarks that capture VLM-specific forgetting and compositional generalization. Finally, we outline open problems and future directions, including continual pre-training and compositional zero-shot learning. This survey aims to serve as a comprehensive and diagnostic reference for researchers developing lifelong vision-language systems. All resources are available at: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/Awesome-Continual-learning-of-Vision-Language-Models.

Paperid: 545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Paralinguistic vocalizations-including non-verbal sounds like laughter and breathing, as well as lexicalized interjections such as "uhm" and "oh"-are integral to natural spoken communication. Despite their importance in conveying affect, intent, and interactional cues, such cues remain largely overlooked in conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We present NVSpeech, an integrated and scalable pipeline that bridges the recognition and synthesis of paralinguistic vocalizations, encompassing dataset construction, ASR modeling, and controllable TTS. (1) We introduce a manually annotated dataset of 48,430 human-spoken utterances with 18 word-level paralinguistic categories. (2) We develop the paralinguistic-aware ASR model, which treats paralinguistic cues as inline decodable tokens (e.g., "You're so funny [Laughter]"), enabling joint lexical and non-verbal transcription. This model is then used to automatically annotate a large corpus, the first large-scale Chinese dataset of 174,179 utterances (573 hours) with word-level alignment and paralingustic cues. (3) We finetune zero-shot TTS models on both human- and auto-labeled data to enable explicit control over paralinguistic vocalizations, allowing context-aware insertion at arbitrary token positions for human-like speech synthesis. By unifying the recognition and generation of paralinguistic vocalizations, NVSpeech offers the first open, large-scale, word-level annotated pipeline for expressive speech modeling in Mandarin, integrating recognition and synthesis in a scalable and controllable manner. Dataset and audio demos are available at https://nvspeech170k.github.io/.

Paperid: 546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04141.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advances in speech representation and large language models have enhanced zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) performance. However, existing zero-shot TTS models face challenges in capturing the complex correlations between acoustic and semantic features, resulting in a lack of expressiveness and similarity. The primary reason lies in the complex relationship between semantic and acoustic features, which manifests independent and interdependent aspects.This paper introduces a TTS framework that combines both autoregressive (AR) and non-autoregressive (NAR) modules to harmonize the independence and interdependence of acoustic and semantic information. The AR model leverages the proposed Parallel Tokenizer to synthesize the top semantic and acoustic tokens simultaneously. In contrast, considering the interdependence, the Coupled NAR model predicts detailed tokens based on the general AR model's output. Parallel GPT, built on this architecture, is designed to improve zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis through its parallel structure. Experiments on English and Chinese datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the quality and efficiency of the synthesis of existing zero-shot TTS models. Speech demos are available at https://t1235-ch.github.io/pgpt/.

Paperid: 547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04038.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Motion sensor time-series are central to human activity recognition (HAR), with applications in health, sports, and smart devices. However, existing methods are trained for fixed activity sets and require costly retraining when new behaviours or sensor setups appear. Recent attempts to use large language models (LLMs) for HAR, typically by converting signals into text or images, suffer from limited accuracy and lack verifiable interpretability. We propose ZARA, the first agent-based framework for zero-shot, explainable HAR directly from raw motion time-series. ZARA integrates an automatically derived pair-wise feature knowledge base that captures discriminative statistics for every activity pair, a multi-sensor retrieval module that surfaces relevant evidence, and a hierarchical agent pipeline that guides the LLM to iteratively select features, draw on this evidence, and produce both activity predictions and natural-language explanations. ZARA enables flexible and interpretable HAR without any fine-tuning or task-specific classifiers. Extensive experiments on 8 HAR benchmarks show that ZARA achieves SOTA zero-shot performance, delivering clear reasoning while exceeding the strongest baselines by 2.53x in macro F1. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of each module, marking ZARA as a promising step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion time-series analysis. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.

Paperid: 548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03742.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) has great potential for developing multifunctional and general medical diagnostic capabilities. However, aligning medical images with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to reports with a high SNR presents a semantic density gap, leading to visual alignment bias. In this paper, we propose boosting vision semantic density to improve alignment effectiveness. On one hand, we enhance visual semantics through disease-level vision contrastive learning, which strengthens the model's ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal samples for each anatomical structure. On the other hand, we introduce an anatomical normality modeling method to model the distribution of normal samples for each anatomy, leveraging VQ-VAE for reconstructing normal vision embeddings in the latent space. This process amplifies abnormal signals by leveraging distribution shifts in abnormal samples, enhancing the model's perception and discrimination of abnormal attributes. The enhanced visual representation effectively captures the diagnostic-relevant semantics, facilitating more efficient and accurate alignment with the diagnostic report. We conduct extensive experiments on two chest CT datasets, CT-RATE and Rad-ChestCT, and an abdominal CT dataset, MedVL-CT69K, and comprehensively evaluate the diagnosis performance across multiple tasks in the chest and abdominal CT scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Notably, our method achieved an average AUC of 84.9% across 54 diseases in 15 organs, significantly surpassing existing methods. Additionally, we demonstrate the superior transfer learning capabilities of our pre-trained model. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ViSD-Boost.

Paperid: 549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03669.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We would like to estimate the pose and full shape of an object from a single observation, without assuming known 3D model or category. In this work, we propose OmniShape, the first method of its kind to enable probabilistic pose and shape estimation. OmniShape is based on the key insight that shape completion can be decoupled into two multi-modal distributions: one capturing how measurements project into a normalized object reference frame defined by the dataset and the other modelling a prior over object geometries represented as triplanar neural fields. By training separate conditional diffusion models for these two distributions, we enable sampling multiple hypotheses from the joint pose and shape distribution. OmniShape demonstrates compelling performance on challenging real world datasets. Project website: https://tri-ml.github.io/omnishape

Paperid: 550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03511.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation (CD-FSMIS) is a potential solution for segmenting medical images with limited annotation using knowledge from other domains. The significant performance of current CD-FSMIS models relies on the heavily training procedure over other source medical domains, which degrades the universality and ease of model deployment. With the development of large visual models of natural images, we propose a training-free CD-FSMIS model that introduces the Multi-center Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Prompting (MAUP) strategy for adapting the foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM), which is trained with natural images, into the CD-FSMIS task. To be specific, MAUP consists of three key innovations: (1) K-means clustering based multi-center prompts generation for comprehensive spatial coverage, (2) uncertainty-aware prompts selection that focuses on the challenging regions, and (3) adaptive prompt optimization that can dynamically adjust according to the target region complexity. With the pre-trained DINOv2 feature encoder, MAUP achieves precise segmentation results across three medical datasets without any additional training compared with several conventional CD-FSMIS models and training-free FSMIS model. The source code is available at: https://github.com/YazhouZhu19/MAUP.

Paperid: 551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03447.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, large pre-trained vision-language models have shown remarkable performance in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD). With fine-tuning on a single auxiliary dataset, the model enables cross-category anomaly detection on diverse datasets covering industrial defects and medical lesions. Compared to manually designed prompts, prompt learning eliminates the need for expert knowledge and trial-and-error. However, it still faces the following challenges: (i) static learnable tokens struggle to capture the continuous and diverse patterns of normal and anomalous states, limiting generalization to unseen categories; (ii) fixed textual labels provide overly sparse category information, making the model prone to overfitting to a specific semantic subspace. To address these issues, we propose Conditional Prompt Synthesis (CoPS), a novel framework that synthesizes dynamic prompts conditioned on visual features to enhance ZSAD performance. Specifically, we extract representative normal and anomaly prototypes from fine-grained patch features and explicitly inject them into prompts, enabling adaptive state modeling. Given the sparsity of class labels, we leverage a variational autoencoder to model semantic image features and implicitly fuse varied class tokens into prompts. Additionally, integrated with our spatially-aware alignment mechanism, extensive experiments demonstrate that CoPS surpasses state-of-the-art methods by 2.5% AUROC in both classification and segmentation across 13 industrial and medical datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/cqylunlun/CoPS.

Paperid: 552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03402.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Explicitly disentangling style and content in vision models remains challenging due to their semantic overlap and the subjectivity of human perception. Existing methods propose separation through generative or discriminative objectives, but they still face the inherent ambiguity of disentangling intertwined concepts. Instead, we ask: Can we bypass explicit disentanglement by learning to merge style and content invertibly, allowing separation to emerge naturally? We propose SCFlow, a flow-matching framework that learns bidirectional mappings between entangled and disentangled representations. Our approach is built upon three key insights: 1) Training solely to merge style and content, a well-defined task, enables invertible disentanglement without explicit supervision; 2) flow matching bridges on arbitrary distributions, avoiding the restrictive Gaussian priors of diffusion models and normalizing flows; and 3) a synthetic dataset of 510,000 samples (51 styles $\times$ 10,000 content samples) was curated to simulate disentanglement through systematic style-content pairing. Beyond controllable generation tasks, we demonstrate that SCFlow generalizes to ImageNet-1k and WikiArt in zero-shot settings and achieves competitive performance, highlighting that disentanglement naturally emerges from the invertible merging process.

Paperid: 553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03300.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning-based semantic segmentation models achieve impressive results yet remain limited in handling distribution shifts between training and test data. In this paper, we present SDGPA (Synthetic Data Generation and Progressive Adaptation), a novel method that tackles zero-shot domain adaptive semantic segmentation, in which no target images are available, but only a text description of the target domain's style is provided. To compensate for the lack of target domain training data, we utilize a pretrained off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model, which generates training images by transferring source domain images to target style. Directly editing source domain images introduces noise that harms segmentation because the layout of source images cannot be precisely maintained. To address inaccurate layouts in synthetic data, we propose a method that crops the source image, edits small patches individually, and then merges them back together, which helps improve spatial precision. Recognizing the large domain gap, SDGPA constructs an augmented intermediate domain, leveraging easier adaptation subtasks to enable more stable model adaptation to the target domain. Additionally, to mitigate the impact of noise in synthetic data, we design a progressive adaptation strategy, ensuring robust learning throughout the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot semantic segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/ROUJINN/SDGPA

Paperid: 554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03138.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robots operating in human-centric or hazardous environments must proactively anticipate and mitigate dangers beyond basic obstacle detection. Traditional navigation systems often depend on static maps, which struggle to account for dynamic risks, such as a person emerging from a suddenly opening door. As a result, these systems tend to be reactive rather than anticipatory when handling dynamic hazards. Recent advancements in pre-trained large language models and vision-language models (VLMs) create new opportunities for proactive hazard avoidance. In this work, we propose a zero-shot language-as-cost mapping framework that leverages VLMs to interpret visual scenes, assess potential dynamic risks, and assign risk-aware navigation costs preemptively, enabling robots to anticipate hazards before they materialize. By integrating this language-based cost map with a geometric obstacle map, the robot not only identifies existing obstacles but also anticipates and proactively plans around potential hazards arising from environmental dynamics. Experiments in simulated and diverse dynamic environments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves navigation success rates and reduces hazard encounters, compared to reactive baseline planners. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/Taekmino/LaC.

Paperid: 555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03102.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) often requires effective adaptation of models using limited labeled data. However, most existing FSL methods rely on entangled representations, requiring the model to implicitly recover the unmixing process to obtain disentangled representations using only limited supervision, which hinders effective adaptation. Recent theoretical studies show that multimodal contrastive learning methods, such as CLIP, can disentangle latent representations up to linear transformations. In light of this, we propose the Causal CLIP Adapter (CCA), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles visual features extracted from CLIP using unsupervised Independent Component Analysis (ICA). This removes the need to learn the unmixing process from the labeled data, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters and mitigating overfitting. Taking a step further, while ICA can obtain visual disentangled representations, it may also disrupt CLIP's intra- and inter-modal alignment. To counteract this, CCA further leverages CLIP's inherent cross-modal alignment by enhancing it in two ways: unidirectionally, through fine-tuning a CLIP-based text classifier, and bidirectionally, via a cross-attention mechanism that enriches visual and textual representations through mutual interaction. Both unimodal and cross-modal classification outputs can be effectively combined linearly to improve classification accuracy. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of few-shot performance and robustness to distributional shifts, while maintaining computational efficiency. Code will be available at https://github.com/tianjiao-j/CCA.

Paperid: 556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03099.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose Point2Act, which directly retrieves the 3D action point relevant for a contextually described task, leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Foundation models opened the possibility for generalist robots that can perform a zero-shot task following natural language descriptions within an unseen environment. While the semantics obtained from large-scale image and language datasets provide contextual understanding in 2D images, the rich yet nuanced features deduce blurry 2D regions and struggle to find precise 3D locations for actions. Our proposed 3D relevancy fields bypass the high-dimensional features and instead efficiently imbue lightweight 2D point-level guidance tailored to the task-specific action. The multi-view aggregation effectively compensates for misalignments due to geometric ambiguities, such as occlusion, or semantic uncertainties inherent in the language descriptions. The output region is highly localized, reasoning fine-grained 3D spatial context that can directly transfer to an explicit position for physical action at the on-the-fly reconstruction of the scene. Our full-stack pipeline, which includes capturing, MLLM querying, 3D reconstruction, and grasp pose extraction, generates spatially grounded responses in under 20 seconds, facilitating practical manipulation tasks. Project page: https://sangminkim-99.github.io/point2act/

Paperid: 557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02739.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The success of large-scale pre-training paradigm, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), has inspired the development of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs). However, their application to financial candlestick (K-line) data remains limited, often underperforming non-pre-trained architectures. Moreover, existing TSFMs often overlook crucial downstream tasks such as volatility prediction and synthetic data generation. To address these limitations, we propose Kronos, a unified, scalable pre-training framework tailored to financial K-line modeling. Kronos introduces a specialized tokenizer that discretizes continuous market information into token sequences, preserving both price dynamics and trade activity patterns. We pre-train Kronos using an autoregressive objective on a massive, multi-market corpus of over 12 billion K-line records from 45 global exchanges, enabling it to learn nuanced temporal and cross-asset representations. Kronos excels in a zero-shot setting across a diverse set of financial tasks. On benchmark datasets, Kronos boosts price series forecasting RankIC by 93% over the leading TSFM and 87% over the best non-pre-trained baseline. It also achieves a 9% lower MAE in volatility forecasting and a 22% improvement in generative fidelity for synthetic K-line sequences. These results establish Kronos as a robust, versatile foundation model for end-to-end financial time series analysis. Our pre-trained model is publicly available at https://github.com/shiyu-coder/Kronos.

Paperid: 558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02363.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image editing in rectified flow models remains challenging due to the fundamental trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and editing flexibility. While inversion-based methods suffer from trajectory deviation, recent inversion-free approaches like FlowEdit offer direct editing pathways but can benefit from additional guidance to improve structure preservation. In this work, we demonstrate that optimal transport theory provides a unified framework for improving both paradigms in rectified flow editing. We introduce a zero-shot transport-guided inversion framework that leverages optimal transport during the reverse diffusion process, and extend optimal transport principles to enhance inversion-free methods through transport-optimized velocity field corrections. Incorporating transport-based guidance can effectively balance reconstruction accuracy and editing controllability across different rectified flow editing approaches. For inversion-based editing, our method achieves high-fidelity reconstruction with LPIPS scores of 0.001 and SSIM of 0.992 on face editing benchmarks, observing 7.8% to 12.9% improvements over RF-Inversion on LSUN datasets. For inversion-free editing with FlowEdit on FLUX and Stable Diffusion 3, we demonstrate consistent improvements in semantic consistency and structure preservation across diverse editing scenarios. Our semantic face editing experiments show an 11.2% improvement in identity preservation and enhanced perceptual quality. The unified optimal transport framework produces visually compelling edits with superior detail preservation across both inversion-based and direct editing paradigms. Code is available for RF-Inversion and FlowEdit at: https://github.com/marianlupascu/OT-RF

Paperid: 559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02343.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Quantization significantly accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by replacing original high-precision matrices with low-precision counterparts. Recent advances in weight-activation quantization have primarily focused on mapping both weights and activations to the INT4 format. Although the new FP4 Tensor Cores in NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture offer up to 4x speedup over FP16, existing INT4-based kernels fail to fully exploit this capability due to mismatched data formats. To bridge this gap, we propose MicroMix, a co-designed mixed-precision quantization algorithm and matrix multiplication kernel based on Microscaling (MX) data formats. Tailored for the Blackwell architecture, the MicroMix kernel supports arbitrary combinations of MXFP4, MXFP6, and MXFP8 channels, and produces BFloat16 outputs. To achieve a favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for each linear layer, we introduce quantization thresholds that identify activation elements where lower-precision formats (MXFP4 or MXFP6) incur excessive quantization error. Our algorithm selectively allocates higher-precision channels to preserve accuracy while maintaining compute efficiency. MicroMix achieves competitive or superior performance across diverse downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot learning, language modeling, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. On both consumer-grade (RTX 5070Ti laptop) and server-grade (RTX 5090) GPUs, our kernel delivers at least 20% faster execution than TensorRT-FP8. Furthermore, when applied to various Llama and Qwen models, MicroMix consistently improves prefill latency and memory efficiency across a range of batch sizes compared to TensorRT baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/lwy2020/MicroMix.

Paperid: 560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01558.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been exploited in various Computer Vision tasks (e.g., few-shot recognition) via model adaptation, such as prompt tuning and adapters. However, existing adaptation methods are designed by human experts, requiring significant time cost and experience. Inspired by recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) based code generation, we propose an Evolutionary Vision-Language Model Adaptation (EvoVLMA) method to automatically search training-free efficient adaptation algorithms for VLMs. We recognize feature selection and logits computation as the key functions in training-free VLM adaptation, and propose a two-stage LLM-assisted evolutionary algorithm for optimizing these parts in a sequential manner, effectively addressing the challenge posed by the expansive search space through a divide-and-conquer strategy. Besides, to enhance the stability and efficiency of searching process, we propose low-precision code conversion, web based code execution and process monitoring, leading to a highly effective automatic algorithm design system. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the algorithms found by EvoVLMA can obtain promising results compared to previous manually-designed ones. More specifically, in the 8-shot image classification setting, the classical APE algorithm can be improved by 1.91 points in recognition accuracy. This research opens new possibilities for automating the optimization of adaptation algorithms of pre-trained multimodal models. Code is available at: https://github.com/kding1225/EvoVLMA

Paperid: 561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01270.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot video captioning aims to generate sentences for describing videos without training the model on video-text pairs, which remains underexplored. Existing zero-shot image captioning methods typically adopt a text-only training paradigm, where a language decoder reconstructs single-sentence embeddings obtained from CLIP. However, directly extending them to the video domain is suboptimal, as applying average pooling over all frames neglects temporal dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose a Semantic Group Captioning (SGCap) method for zero-shot video captioning. In particular, it develops the Semantic Group Decoding (SGD) strategy to employ multi-frame information while explicitly modeling inter-frame temporal relationships. Furthermore, existing zero-shot captioning methods that rely on cosine similarity for sentence retrieval and reconstruct the description supervised by a single frame-level caption, fail to provide sufficient video-level supervision. To alleviate this, we introduce two key components, including the Key Sentences Selection (KSS) module and the Probability Sampling Supervision (PSS) module. The two modules construct semantically-diverse sentence groups that models temporal dynamics and guide the model to capture inter-sentence causal relationships, thereby enhancing its generalization ability to video captioning. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SGCap significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art zero-shot alternatives and even achieves performance competitive with fully supervised ones. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/SGCap_Video.

Paperid: 562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01225.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In zero-shot setting, test-time adaptation adjusts pre-trained models using unlabeled data from the test phase to enhance performance on unknown test distributions. Existing cache-enhanced TTA methods rely on a low-entropy criterion to select samples for prototype construction, assuming intra-class compactness. However, low-entropy samples may be unreliable under distribution shifts, and the resulting prototypes may not ensure compact intra-class distributions. This study identifies a positive correlation between cache-enhanced performance and intra-class compactness. Based on this observation, we propose a Multi-Cache enhanced Prototype-based Test-Time Adaptation (MCP) featuring three caches: an entropy cache for initializing prototype representations with low-entropy samples, an align cache for integrating visual and textual information to achieve compact intra-class distributions, and a negative cache for prediction calibration using high-entropy samples. We further developed MCP++, a framework incorporating cross-modal prototype alignment and residual learning, introducing prototype residual fine-tuning. Comparative and ablation experiments across 15 downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed method and framework achieve state-of-the-art generalization performance. Project Page available at: https://zhaihaotian.github.io/MCP-ICCV25/

Paperid: 563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01064.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In clinical practice, medical image analysis often requires efficient execution on resource-constrained mobile devices. However, existing mobile models-primarily optimized for natural images-tend to perform poorly on medical tasks due to the significant information density gap between natural and medical domains. Combining computational efficiency with medical imaging-specific architectural advantages remains a challenge when developing lightweight, universal, and high-performing networks. To address this, we propose a mobile model called Mobile U-shaped Vision Transformer (Mobile U-ViT) tailored for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we employ the newly purposed ConvUtr as a hierarchical patch embedding, featuring a parameter-efficient large-kernel CNN with inverted bottleneck fusion. This design exhibits transformer-like representation learning capacity while being lighter and faster. To enable efficient local-global information exchange, we introduce a novel Large-kernel Local-Global-Local (LGL) block that effectively balances the low information density and high-level semantic discrepancy of medical images. Finally, we incorporate a shallow and lightweight transformer bottleneck for long-range modeling and employ a cascaded decoder with downsample skip connections for dense prediction. Despite its reduced computational demands, our medical-optimized architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance across eight public 2D and 3D datasets covering diverse imaging modalities, including zero-shot testing on four unseen datasets. These results establish it as an efficient yet powerful and generalization solution for mobile medical image analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/FengheTan9/Mobile-U-ViT.

Paperid: 564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00477.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In controllable image synthesis, generating coherent and consistent images from multiple references with spatial layout awareness remains an open challenge. We present LAMIC, a Layout-Aware Multi-Image Composition framework that, for the first time, extends single-reference diffusion models to multi-reference scenarios in a training-free manner. Built upon the MMDiT model, LAMIC introduces two plug-and-play attention mechanisms: 1) Group Isolation Attention (GIA) to enhance entity disentanglement; and 2) Region-Modulated Attention (RMA) to enable layout-aware generation. To comprehensively evaluate model capabilities, we further introduce three metrics: 1) Inclusion Ratio (IN-R) and Fill Ratio (FI-R) for assessing layout control; and 2) Background Similarity (BG-S) for measuring background consistency. Extensive experiments show that LAMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance across most major metrics: it consistently outperforms existing multi-reference baselines in ID-S, BG-S, IN-R and AVG scores across all settings, and achieves the best DPG in complex composition tasks. These results demonstrate LAMIC's superior abilities in identity keeping, background preservation, layout control, and prompt-following, all achieved without any training or fine-tuning, showcasing strong zero-shot generalization ability. By inheriting the strengths of advanced single-reference models and enabling seamless extension to multi-image scenarios, LAMIC establishes a new training-free paradigm for controllable multi-image composition. As foundation models continue to evolve, LAMIC's performance is expected to scale accordingly. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/Suchenl/LAMIC.

Paperid: 565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00399.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled impressive generalization across diverse video understanding tasks under zero-shot settings. However, their capabilities in high-stakes industrial domains-where recognizing both routine operations and safety-critical anomalies is essential-remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce iSafetyBench, a new video-language benchmark specifically designed to evaluate model performance in industrial environments across both normal and hazardous scenarios. iSafetyBench comprises 1,100 video clips sourced from real-world industrial settings, annotated with open-vocabulary, multi-label action tags spanning 98 routine and 67 hazardous action categories. Each clip is paired with multiple-choice questions for both single-label and multi-label evaluation, enabling fine-grained assessment of VLMs in both standard and safety-critical contexts. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art video-language models under zero-shot conditions. Despite their strong performance on existing video benchmarks, these models struggle with iSafetyBench-particularly in recognizing hazardous activities and in multi-label scenarios. Our results reveal significant performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust, safety-aware multimodal models for industrial applications. iSafetyBench provides a first-of-its-kind testbed to drive progress in this direction. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/iSafetyBench/data.

Paperid: 566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00395.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.

Paperid: 567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23740.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) often contain sufficient information to support the inference of new facts. Identifying logical rules not only improves the completeness of a knowledge graph but also enables the detection of potential errors, reveals subtle data patterns, and enhances the overall capacity for reasoning and interpretation. However, the complexity of such rules, combined with the unique labeling conventions of each KG, can make them difficult for humans to understand. In this paper, we explore the potential of large language models to generate natural language explanations for logical rules. Specifically, we extract logical rules using the AMIE 3.5.1 rule discovery algorithm from the benchmark dataset FB15k-237 and two large-scale datasets, FB-CVT-REV and FB+CVT-REV. We examine various prompting strategies, including zero- and few-shot prompting, including variable entity types, and chain-of-thought reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive human evaluation of the generated explanations based on correctness, clarity, and hallucination, and also assess the use of large language models as automatic judges. Our results demonstrate promising performance in terms of explanation correctness and clarity, although several challenges remain for future research. All scripts and data used in this study are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL}{https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

Paperid: 568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23715.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep functional maps have recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving non-rigid shape correspondence tasks. Methods that use this approach combine the power and flexibility of the functional map framework, with data-driven learning for improved accuracy and generality. However, most existing methods in this area restrict the learning aspect only to the feature functions and still rely on axiomatic modeling for formulating the training loss or for functional map regularization inside the networks. This limits both the accuracy and the applicability of the resulting approaches only to scenarios where assumptions of the axiomatic models hold. In this work, we show, for the first time, that both in-network regularization and functional map training can be replaced with data-driven methods. For this, we first train a generative model of functional maps in the spectral domain using score-based generative modeling, built from a large collection of high-quality maps. We then exploit the resulting model to promote the structural properties of ground truth functional maps on new shape collections. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the learned models are category-agnostic, and can fully replace commonly used strategies such as enforcing Laplacian commutativity or orthogonality of functional maps. Our key technical contribution is a novel distillation strategy from diffusion models in the spectral domain. Experiments demonstrate that our learned regularization leads to better results than axiomatic approaches for zero-shot non-rigid shape matching. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daidedou/diffumatch/

Paperid: 569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23657.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While large-scale pre-training has advanced human trajectory prediction, a critical challenge remains: zero-shot transfer to unseen dataset with varying temporal dynamics. State-of-the-art pre-trained models often require fine-tuning to adapt to new datasets with different frame rates or observation horizons, limiting their scalability and practical utility. In this work, we systematically investigate this limitation and propose a robust solution. We first demonstrate that existing data-aware discrete models struggle when transferred to new scenarios with shifted temporal setups. We then isolate the temporal generalization from dataset shift, revealing that a simple, explicit conditioning mechanism for temporal metadata is a highly effective solution. Based on this insight, we present OmniTraj, a Transformer-based model pre-trained on a large-scale, heterogeneous dataset. Our experiments show that explicitly conditioning on the frame rate enables OmniTraj to achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot transfer performance, reducing prediction error by over 70\% in challenging cross-setup scenarios. After fine-tuning, OmniTraj achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including NBA, JTA, WorldPose, and ETH-UCY. The code is publicly available: https://github.com/vita-epfl/omnitraj

Paperid: 570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23642.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot classification and segmentation (FS-CS) focuses on jointly performing multi-label classification and multi-class segmentation using few annotated examples. Although the current state of the art (SOTA) achieves high accuracy in both tasks, it struggles with small objects. To overcome this, we propose the Efficient Masked Attention Transformer (EMAT), which improves classification and segmentation accuracy, especially for small objects. EMAT introduces three modifications: a novel memory-efficient masked attention mechanism, a learnable downscaling strategy, and parameter-efficiency enhancements. EMAT outperforms all FS-CS methods on the PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets, using at least four times fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, as the current FS-CS evaluation setting discards available annotations, despite their costly collection, we introduce two novel evaluation settings that consider these annotations to better reflect practical scenarios.

Paperid: 571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23577.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown the capability to generate fluent and logical content, presenting significant challenges to machine-generated text detection, particularly text polished by adversarial perturbations such as paraphrasing. Current zero-shot detectors often employ Gaussian distributions as statistical measure for computing detection thresholds, which falters when confronted with the heavy-tailed statistical artifacts characteristic of adversarial or non-native English texts. In this paper, we introduce T-Detect, a novel detection method that fundamentally redesigns the curvature-based detectors. Our primary innovation is the replacement of standard Gaussian normalization with a heavy-tailed discrepancy score derived from the Student's t-distribution. This approach is theoretically grounded in the empirical observation that adversarial texts exhibit significant leptokurtosis, rendering traditional statistical assumptions inadequate. T-Detect computes a detection score by normalizing the log-likelihood of a passage against the expected moments of a t-distribution, providing superior resilience to statistical outliers. We validate our approach on the challenging RAID benchmark for adversarial text and the comprehensive HART dataset. Experiments show that T-Detect provides a consistent performance uplift over strong baselines, improving AUROC by up to 3.9\% in targeted domains. When integrated into a two-dimensional detection framework (CT), our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an AUROC of 0.926 on the Books domain of RAID. Our contributions are a new, theoretically-justified statistical foundation for text detection, an ablation-validated method that demonstrates superior robustness, and a comprehensive analysis of its performance under adversarial conditions. Ours code are released at https://github.com/ResearAI/t-detect.

Paperid: 572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23143.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose X-NeMo, a novel zero-shot diffusion-based portrait animation pipeline that animates a static portrait using facial movements from a driving video of a different individual. Our work first identifies the root causes of the key issues in prior approaches, such as identity leakage and difficulty in capturing subtle and extreme expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce a fully end-to-end training framework that distills a 1D identity-agnostic latent motion descriptor from driving image, effectively controlling motion through cross-attention during image generation. Our implicit motion descriptor captures expressive facial motion in fine detail, learned end-to-end from a diverse video dataset without reliance on pretrained motion detectors. We further enhance expressiveness and disentangle motion latents from identity cues by supervising their learning with a dual GAN decoder, alongside spatial and color augmentations. By embedding the driving motion into a 1D latent vector and controlling motion via cross-attention rather than additive spatial guidance, our design eliminates the transmission of spatial-aligned structural clues from the driving condition to the diffusion backbone, substantially mitigating identity leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-NeMo surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, producing highly expressive animations with superior identity resemblance. Our code and models are available for research.

Paperid: 573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23070.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-grained image classification, the task of distinguishing between visually similar subcategories within a broader category (e.g., bird species, car models, flower types), is a challenging computer vision problem. Traditional approaches rely heavily on fixed vocabularies and closed-set classification paradigms, limiting their scalability and adaptability in real-world settings where novel classes frequently emerge. Recent research has demonstrated that combining large language models (LLMs) with vision-language models (VLMs) makes open-set recognition possible without the need for predefined class labels. However, the existing methods are often limited in harnessing the power of LLMs at the classification phase, and also rely heavily on the guessed class names provided by an LLM without thorough analysis and refinement. To address these bottlenecks, we propose our training-free method, Enriched-FineR (or E-FineR for short), which demonstrates state-of-the-art results in fine-grained visual recognition while also offering greater interpretability, highlighting its strong potential in real-world scenarios and new domains where expert annotations are difficult to obtain. Additionally, we demonstrate the application of our proposed approach to zero-shot and few-shot classification, where it demonstrated performance on par with the existing SOTA while being training-free and not requiring human interventions. Overall, our vocabulary-free framework supports the shift in image classification from rigid label prediction to flexible, language-driven understanding, enabling scalable and generalizable systems for real-world applications. Well-documented code is available on https://github.com/demidovd98/e-finer.

Paperid: 574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22952.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Label placement is a critical aspect of map design, serving as a form of spatial annotation that directly impacts clarity and interpretability. Despite its importance, label placement remains largely manual and difficult to scale, as existing automated systems struggle to integrate cartographic conventions, adapt to context, or interpret labeling instructions. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm for automatic label placement (ALP) that formulates the task as a data editing problem and leverages large language models (LLMs) for context-aware spatial annotation. To support this direction, we curate MAPLE, the first known benchmarking dataset for evaluating ALP on real-world maps, encompassing diverse landmark types and label placement annotations from open-source data. Our method retrieves labeling guidelines relevant to each landmark type leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), integrates them into prompts, and employs instruction-tuned LLMs to generate ideal label coordinates. We evaluate four open-source LLMs on MAPLE, analyzing both overall performance and generalization across different types of landmarks. This includes both zero-shot and instruction-tuned performance. Our results demonstrate that LLMs, when guided by structured prompts and domain-specific retrieval, can learn to perform accurate spatial edits, aligning the generated outputs with expert cartographic standards. Overall, our work presents a scalable framework for AI-assisted map finishing and demonstrates the potential of foundation models in structured data editing tasks. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/HarryShomer/MAPLE.

Paperid: 575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22813.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable success across numerous tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to Trojan (backdoor) attacks, raising serious concerns about their safety in real-world mission-critical applications. A common countermeasure is trigger inversion -- reconstructing malicious "shortcut" patterns (triggers) inserted by an adversary during training. Current trigger-inversion methods typically search the full pixel space under specific assumptions but offer no assurances that the estimated trigger is more than an adversarial perturbation that flips the model output. Here, we propose a data-free, zero-shot trigger-inversion strategy that restricts the search space while avoiding strong assumptions on trigger appearance. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion-based generator guided by the target classifier; through iterative generation, we produce candidate triggers that align with the internal representations the model relies on for malicious behavior. Empirical evaluations, both quantitative and qualitative, show that our approach reconstructs triggers that effectively distinguish clean versus Trojaned models. DISTIL surpasses alternative methods by high margins, achieving up to 7.1% higher accuracy on the BackdoorBench dataset and a 9.4% improvement on trojaned object detection model scanning, offering a promising new direction for reliable backdoor defense without reliance on extensive data or strong prior assumptions about triggers. The code is available at https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/DISTIL.

Paperid: 576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22576.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an important building block in trustworthy image recognition systems as unknown classes may arise at test-time. OOD detection methods typically revolve around a single classifier, leading to a split in the research field between the classical supervised setting (e.g. ResNet18 classifier trained on CIFAR100) vs. the zero-shot setting (class names fed as prompts to CLIP). In both cases, an overarching challenge is that the OOD detection performance is implicitly constrained by the classifier's capabilities on in-distribution (ID) data. In this work, we show that given a little open-mindedness from both ends, remarkable OOD detection can be achieved by instead creating a heterogeneous ensemble - COOkeD combines the predictions of a closed-world classifier trained end-to-end on a specific dataset, a zero-shot CLIP classifier, and a linear probe classifier trained on CLIP image features. While bulky at first sight, this approach is modular, post-hoc and leverages the availability of pre-trained VLMs, thus introduces little overhead compared to training a single standard classifier. We evaluate COOkeD on popular CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks, but also consider more challenging, realistic settings ranging from training-time label noise, to test-time covariate shift, to zero-shot shift which has been previously overlooked. Despite its simplicity, COOkeD achieves state-of-the-art performance and greater robustness compared to both classical and CLIP-based OOD detection methods. Code is available at https://github.com/glhr/COOkeD

Paperid: 577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22480.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Estimating 2D camera motion is a fundamental computer vision task that models the projection of 3D camera movements onto the 2D image plane. Current methods rely on either homography-based approaches, limited to planar scenes, or meshflow techniques that use grid-based local homographies but struggle with complex non-linear transformations. A key insight of our work is that combining flow fields from different homographies creates motion patterns that cannot be represented by any single homography. We introduce CamFlow, a novel framework that represents camera motion using hybrid motion bases: physical bases derived from camera geometry and stochastic bases for complex scenarios. Our approach includes a hybrid probabilistic loss function based on the Laplace distribution that enhances training robustness. For evaluation, we create a new benchmark by masking dynamic objects in existing optical flow datasets to isolate pure camera motion. Experiments show CamFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenarios, demonstrating superior robustness and generalization in zero-shot settings. Code and datasets are available at our project page: https://lhaippp.github.io/CamFlow/.

Paperid: 578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21981.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present the first unified, modular, open-source 3DGS-based simulation framework for Real2Sim2Real robot learning. It features a holistic Real2Sim pipeline that synthesizes hyper-realistic geometry and appearance of complex real-world scenarios, paving the way for analyzing and bridging the Sim2Real gap. Powered by Gaussian Splatting and MuJoCo, Discoverse enables massively parallel simulation of multiple sensor modalities and accurate physics, with inclusive supports for existing 3D assets, robot models, and ROS plugins, empowering large-scale robot learning and complex robotic benchmarks. Through extensive experiments on imitation learning, Discoverse demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot Sim2Real transfer performance compared to existing simulators. For code and demos: https://air-discoverse.github.io/.

Paperid: 579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21786.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pre-trained models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, and prompt learning has emerged as an efficient alternative to full fine-tuning. However, existing methods often struggle with generalization to novel classes, a phenomenon attributed to overfitting on seen classes and forgetting general knowledge. Furthermore, recent approaches that improve generalization often introduce complex architectures or heavy computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Semantic-Guided Context Optimization (MSGCoOp) framework to enhance few-shot generalization while maintaining computational efficiency. Our approach leverages an ensemble of parallel learnable context vectors to capture diverse semantic aspects. To enrich these prompts, we introduce a semantic guidance mechanism that aligns them with comprehensive class descriptions automatically generated by a Large Language Model (LLM). Furthermore, a diversity regularization loss encourages the prompts to learn complementary and orthogonal features, preventing them from collapsing into redundant representations. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets show that MSGCoOp significantly improves performance on base-to-novel generalization, achieving an average harmonic mean improvement of 1.10\% over the strong KgCoOp baseline. Our method also demonstrates enhanced robustness in cross-domain generalization tasks. Our code is avaliable at: \href{https://github.com/Rain-Bus/MSGCoOp}{https://github.com/Rain-Bus/MSGCoOp}.

Paperid: 580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21745.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language and vision-language models have enabled strong reasoning capabilities, yet they remain impractical for specialized domains like remote sensing, where annotated data is scarce and expensive. We present the first few-shot reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) framework for satellite imagery that eliminates the need for caption supervision--relying solely on lightweight, rule-based binary or IoU-based rewards. Adapting the "1-shot RLVR" paradigm from language models to vision-language models, we employ policy-gradient optimization with as few as one curated example to align model outputs for satellite reasoning tasks. Comprehensive experiments across multiple remote sensing benchmarks--including classification, visual question answering, and grounding--show that even a single example yields substantial improvements over the base model. Scaling to 128 examples matches or exceeds models trained on thousands of annotated samples. While the extreme one-shot setting can induce mild, task-specific overfitting, our approach consistently demonstrates robust generalization and efficiency across diverse tasks. Further, we find that prompt design and loss weighting significantly influence training stability and final accuracy. Our method enables cost-effective and data-efficient development of domain-specialist vision-language reasoning models, offering a pragmatic recipe for data-scarce fields: start from a compact VLM, curate a handful of reward-checkable cases, and train via RLVR.

Paperid: 581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21638.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The development of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms has been largely driven by ambitious challenge tasks and benchmarks. Games have dominated RL benchmarks because they present relevant challenges, are inexpensive to run and easy to understand. While games such as Go and Atari have led to many breakthroughs, they often do not directly translate to real-world embodied applications. In recognising the need to diversify RL benchmarks and addressing complexities that arise in embodied interaction scenarios, we introduce Assistax: an open-source benchmark designed to address challenges arising in assistive robotics tasks. Assistax uses JAX's hardware acceleration for significant speed-ups for learning in physics-based simulations. In terms of open-loop wall-clock time, Assistax runs up to $370\times$ faster when vectorising training runs compared to CPU-based alternatives. Assistax conceptualises the interaction between an assistive robot and an active human patient using multi-agent RL to train a population of diverse partner agents against which an embodied robotic agent's zero-shot coordination capabilities can be tested. Extensive evaluation and hyperparameter tuning for popular continuous control RL and MARL algorithms provide reliable baselines and establish Assistax as a practical benchmark for advancing RL research for assistive robotics. The code is available at: https://github.com/assistive-autonomy/assistax.

Paperid: 582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21404.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
LIT-PCBA is widely used to benchmark virtual screening models, but our audit reveals that it is fundamentally compromised. We find extensive data leakage and molecular redundancy across its splits, including 2D-identical ligands within and across partitions, pervasive analog overlap, and low-diversity query sets. In ALDH1 alone, for instance, 323 active training -- validation analog pairs occur at ECFP4 Tanimoto similarity $\geq 0.6$; across all targets, 2,491 2D-identical inactives appear in both training and validation, with very few corresponding actives. These overlaps allow models to succeed through scaffold memorization rather than generalization, inflating enrichment factors and AUROC scores. These flaws are not incidental -- they are so severe that a trivial memorization-based baseline with no learnable parameters can exploit them to match or exceed the reported performance of state-of-the-art deep learning and 3D-similarity models. As a result, nearly all published results on LIT-PCBA are undermined. Even models evaluated in "zero-shot" mode are affected by analog leakage into the query set, weakening claims of generalization. In its current form, the benchmark does not measure a model's ability to recover novel chemotypes and should not be taken as evidence of methodological progress. All code, data, and baseline implementations are available at: https://github.com/sievestack/LIT-PCBA-audit

Paperid: 583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20939.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

Paperid: 584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20925.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Given the vastness of chemical space and the ongoing emergence of previously uncharacterized proteins, zero-shot compound-protein interaction (CPI) prediction better reflects the practical challenges and requirements of real-world drug development. Although existing methods perform adequately during certain CPI tasks, they still face the following challenges: (1) Representation learning from local or complete protein sequences often overlooks the complex interdependencies between subsequences, which are essential for predicting spatial structures and binding properties. (2) Dependence on large-scale or scarce multimodal protein datasets demands significant training data and computational resources, limiting scalability and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that pretrains protein representations for CPI prediction tasks using subsequence reordering, explicitly capturing the dependencies between protein subsequences. Furthermore, we apply length-variable protein augmentation to ensure excellent pretraining performance on small training datasets. To evaluate the model's effectiveness and zero-shot learning ability, we combine it with various baseline methods. The results demonstrate that our approach can improve the baseline model's performance on the CPI task, especially in the challenging zero-shot scenario. Compared to existing pre-training models, our model demonstrates superior performance, particularly in data-scarce scenarios where training samples are limited. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Hoch-Zhang/PSRP-CPI.

Paperid: 585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20564.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present ZSE-Cap (Zero-Shot Ensemble for Captioning), our 4th place system in Event-Enriched Image Analysis (EVENTA) shared task on article-grounded image retrieval and captioning. Our zero-shot approach requires no finetuning on the competition's data. For retrieval, we ensemble similarity scores from CLIP, SigLIP, and DINOv2. For captioning, we leverage a carefully engineered prompt to guide the Gemma 3 model, enabling it to link high-level events from the article to the visual content in the image. Our system achieved a final score of 0.42002, securing a top-4 position on the private test set, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining foundation models through ensembling and prompting. Our code is available at https://github.com/ductai05/ZSE-Cap.

Paperid: 586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20025.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations constrains their effectiveness for dense prediction tasks, such as grounding, OCR, and segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce Region-Aware Cluster Discrimination (RICE), a novel method that enhances region-level visual and OCR capabilities. We first construct a billion-scale candidate region dataset and propose a Region Transformer layer to extract rich regional semantics. We further design a unified region cluster discrimination loss that jointly supports object and OCR learning within a single classification framework, enabling efficient and scalable distributed training on large-scale data. Extensive experiments show that RICE consistently outperforms previous methods on tasks, including segmentation, dense detection, and visual perception for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). The pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/deepglint/MVT.

Paperid: 587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent research leveraging large-scale pretrained diffusion models has demonstrated the potential of using diffusion features to establish semantic correspondences in images. Inspired by advancements in diffusion-based techniques, we propose a novel zero-shot method for refining point cloud registration algorithms. Our approach leverages correspondences derived from depth images to enhance point feature representations, eliminating the need for a dedicated training dataset. Specifically, we first project the point cloud into depth maps from multiple perspectives and extract implicit knowledge from a pretrained diffusion network as depth diffusion features. These features are then integrated with geometric features obtained from existing methods to establish more accurate correspondences between point clouds. By leveraging these refined correspondences, our approach achieves significantly improved registration accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only enhances the performance of existing point cloud registration techniques but also exhibits robust generalization capabilities across diverse datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhengcy-lambo/RARE.git.

Paperid: 588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19949.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual anomaly detection has been widely used in industrial inspection and medical diagnosis. Existing methods typically demand substantial training samples, limiting their utility in zero-/few-shot scenarios. While recent efforts have leveraged CLIP's zero-shot recognition capability for this task, they often ignore optimizing visual features to focus on local anomalies, reducing their efficacy. In this work, we propose AF-CLIP (Anomaly-Focused CLIP) by dramatically enhancing its visual representations to focus on local defects. Our approach introduces a lightweight adapter that emphasizes anomaly-relevant patterns in visual features, simultaneously optimizing both class-level features for image classification and patch-level features for precise localization. To capture anomalies of different sizes and improve detection accuracy, prior to the adapter, we develop a multi-scale spatial aggregation mechanism to effectively consolidate neighborhood context. Complementing these visual enhancements, we design learnable textual prompts that generically characterize normal and abnormal states. After optimization on auxiliary datasets using a composite objective function, AF-CLIP demonstrates strong zero-shot detection capability. Our method is also extended to few-shot scenarios by extra memory banks. Experimental results across diverse industrial and medical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/Faustinaqq/AF-CLIP.

Paperid: 589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19847.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for building reliable machine learning models. Although negative prompt tuning has enhanced the OOD detection capabilities of vision-language models, these tuned models often suffer from reduced generalization performance on unseen classes and styles. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Knowledge Regularized Negative Feature Tuning (KR-NFT), which integrates an innovative adaptation architecture termed Negative Feature Tuning (NFT) and a corresponding knowledge-regularization (KR) optimization strategy. Specifically, NFT applies distribution-aware transformations to pre-trained text features, effectively separating positive and negative features into distinct spaces. This separation maximizes the distinction between in-distribution (ID) and OOD images. Additionally, we introduce image-conditional learnable factors through a lightweight meta-network, enabling dynamic adaptation to individual images and mitigating sensitivity to class and style shifts. Compared to traditional negative prompt tuning, NFT demonstrates superior efficiency and scalability. To optimize this adaptation architecture, the KR optimization strategy is designed to enhance the discrimination between ID and OOD sets while mitigating pre-trained knowledge forgetting. This enhances OOD detection performance on trained ID classes while simultaneously improving OOD detection on unseen ID datasets. Notably, when trained with few-shot samples from ImageNet dataset, KR-NFT not only improves ID classification accuracy and OOD detection but also significantly reduces the FPR95 by 5.44\% under an unexplored generalization setting with unseen ID categories. Codes can be found at \href{https://github.com/ZhuWenjie98/KRNFT}.

Paperid: 590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19817.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bimanual manipulation, fundamental to human daily activities, remains a challenging task due to its inherent complexity of coordinated control. Recent advances have enabled zero-shot learning of single-arm manipulation skills through agent-agnostic visual representations derived from human videos; however, these methods overlook crucial agent-specific information necessary for bimanual coordination, such as end-effector positions. We propose Ag2x2, a computational framework for bimanual manipulation through coordination-aware visual representations that jointly encode object states and hand motion patterns while maintaining agent-agnosticism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ag2x2 achieves a 73.5% success rate across 13 diverse bimanual tasks from Bi-DexHands and PerAct2, including challenging scenarios with deformable objects like ropes. This performance outperforms baseline methods and even surpasses the success rate of policies trained with expert-engineered rewards. Furthermore, we show that representations learned through Ag2x2 can be effectively leveraged for imitation learning, establishing a scalable pipeline for skill acquisition without expert supervision. By maintaining robust performance across diverse tasks without human demonstrations or engineered rewards, Ag2x2 represents a step toward scalable learning of complex bimanual robotic skills.

Paperid: 591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19481.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a universal prior model for 3D head avatars with explicit hair compositionality. Existing approaches to build generalizable priors for 3D head avatars often adopt a holistic modeling approach, treating the face and hair as an inseparable entity. This overlooks the inherent compositionality of the human head, making it difficult for the model to naturally disentangle face and hair representations, especially when the dataset is limited. Furthermore, such holistic models struggle to support applications like 3D face and hairstyle swapping in a flexible and controllable manner. To address these challenges, we introduce a prior model that explicitly accounts for the compositionality of face and hair, learning their latent spaces separately. A key enabler of this approach is our synthetic hairless data creation pipeline, which removes hair from studio-captured datasets using estimated hairless geometry and texture derived from a diffusion prior. By leveraging a paired dataset of hair and hairless captures, we train disentangled prior models for face and hair, incorporating compositionality as an inductive bias to facilitate effective separation. Our model's inherent compositionality enables seamless transfer of face and hair components between avatars while preserving identity. Additionally, we demonstrate that our model can be fine-tuned in a few-shot manner using monocular captures to create high-fidelity, hair-compositional 3D head avatars for unseen subjects. These capabilities highlight the practical applicability of our approach in real-world scenarios, paving the way for flexible and expressive 3D avatar generation.

Paperid: 592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19140.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper studies the few-shot segmentation (FSS) task, which aims to segment objects belonging to unseen categories in a query image by learning a model on a small number of well-annotated support samples. Our analysis of two mainstream FSS paradigms reveals that the predictions made by prototype learning methods are usually conservative, while those of affinity learning methods tend to be more aggressive. This observation motivates us to balance the conservative and aggressive information captured by these two types of FSS frameworks so as to improve the segmentation performance. To achieve this, we propose a **P**rototype-**A**ffinity **H**ybrid **Net**work (PAHNet), which introduces a Prototype-guided Feature Enhancement (PFE) module and an Attention Score Calibration (ASC) module in each attention block of an affinity learning model (called affinity learner). These two modules utilize the predictions generated by a pre-trained prototype learning model (called prototype predictor) to enhance the foreground information in support and query image representations and suppress the mismatched foreground-background (FG-BG) relationships between them, respectively. In this way, the aggressiveness of the affinity learner can be effectively mitigated, thereby eventually increasing the segmentation accuracy of our PAHNet method. Experimental results show that PAHNet outperforms most recently proposed methods across 1-shot and 5-shot settings on both PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets, suggesting its effectiveness. The code is available at: [GitHub - tianyu-zou/PAHNet: Balancing Conservatism and Aggressiveness: Prototype-Affinity Hybrid Network for Few-Shot Segmentation (ICCV'25)](https://github.com/tianyu-zou/PAHNet)

Paperid: 593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18791.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Code-mixing, the practice of switching between languages within a conversation, poses unique challenges for traditional NLP. Existing benchmarks are limited by their narrow language pairs and tasks, failing to adequately assess large language models' (LLMs) code-mixing abilities. Despite the recognized importance of code-mixing for multilingual users, research on LLMs in this context remains sparse. Additionally, current techniques for synthesizing code-mixed data are underdeveloped to generate code-mixing. In response, we introduce CodeMixBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering eight tasks, including three specific to LLMs and five traditional NLP tasks, and 18 languages across seven language families. We also propose a new method for generating large-scale synthetic code-mixed texts by combining word substitution with GPT-4 prompting. Our evaluation reveals consistent underperformance of LLMs on code-mixed datasets involving different language families. Enhancements in training data size, model scale, and few-shot learning could improve their performance. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jeromeyluck/CodeMixBench.

Paperid: 594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18633.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
A common and controversial use of text-to-image models is to generate pictures by explicitly naming artists, such as "in the style of Greg Rutkowski". We introduce a benchmark for prompted-artist recognition: predicting which artist names were invoked in the prompt from the image alone. The dataset contains 1.95M images covering 110 artists and spans four generalization settings: held-out artists, increasing prompt complexity, multiple-artist prompts, and different text-to-image models. We evaluate feature similarity baselines, contrastive style descriptors, data attribution methods, supervised classifiers, and few-shot prototypical networks. Generalization patterns vary: supervised and few-shot models excel on seen artists and complex prompts, whereas style descriptors transfer better when the artist's style is pronounced; multi-artist prompts remain the most challenging. Our benchmark reveals substantial headroom and provides a public testbed to advance the responsible moderation of text-to-image models. We release the dataset and benchmark to foster further research: https://graceduansu.github.io/IdentifyingPromptedArtists/

Paperid: 595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18262.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semantics-driven 3D spatial constraints align highlevel semantic representations with low-level action spaces, facilitating the unification of task understanding and execution in robotic manipulation. The synergistic reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) enables cross-modal 3D spatial constraint construction. Nevertheless, existing methods have three key limitations: (1) coarse semantic granularity in constraint modeling, (2) lack of real-time closed-loop planning, (3) compromised robustness in semantically diverse environments. To address these challenges, we propose ReSem3D, a unified manipulation framework for semantically diverse environments, leveraging the synergy between VFMs and MLLMs to achieve fine-grained visual grounding and dynamically constructs hierarchical 3D spatial constraints for real-time manipulation. Specifically, the framework is driven by hierarchical recursive reasoning in MLLMs, which interact with VFMs to automatically construct 3D spatial constraints from natural language instructions and RGB-D observations in two stages: part-level extraction and region-level refinement. Subsequently, these constraints are encoded as real-time optimization objectives in joint space, enabling reactive behavior to dynamic disturbances. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments are conducted in semantically rich household and sparse chemical lab environments. The results demonstrate that ReSem3D performs diverse manipulation tasks under zero-shot conditions, exhibiting strong adaptability and generalization. Code and videos are available at https://github.com/scy-v/ReSem3D and https://resem3d.github.io.

Paperid: 596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18033.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong common-sense reasoning abilities, making them promising for robotic navigation and planning tasks. However, despite recent progress, bridging the gap between language descriptions and actual robot actions in the open-world, beyond merely invoking limited predefined motion primitives, remains an open challenge. In this work, we aim to enable robots to interpret and decompose complex language instructions, ultimately synthesizing a sequence of trajectory points to complete diverse navigation tasks given open-set instructions and open-set objects. We observe that multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong cross-modal understanding when processing free-form language instructions, demonstrating robust scene comprehension. More importantly, leveraging their code-generation capability, MLLMs can interact with vision-language perception models to generate compositional 2D bird-eye-view value maps, effectively integrating semantic knowledge from MLLMs with spatial information from maps to reinforce the robot's spatial understanding. To further validate our approach, we effectively leverage large-scale autonomous vehicle datasets (AVDs) to validate our proposed zero-shot vision-language navigation framework in outdoor navigation tasks, demonstrating its capability to execute a diverse range of free-form natural language navigation instructions while maintaining robustness against object detection errors and linguistic ambiguities. Furthermore, we validate our system on a Husky robot in both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrating its real-world robustness and applicability. Supplementary videos are available at https://trailab.github.io/OpenNav-website/

Paperid: 597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17963.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-video generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from text and image prompts. While the personalization of dynamic concepts, which capture subject-specific appearance and motion from a single video, is now feasible, most existing methods require per-instance fine-tuning, limiting scalability. We introduce a fully zero-shot framework for dynamic concept personalization in text-to-video models. Our method leverages structured 2x2 video grids that spatially organize input and output pairs, enabling the training of lightweight Grid-LoRA adapters for editing and composition within these grids. At inference, a dedicated Grid Fill module completes partially observed layouts, producing temporally coherent and identity preserving outputs. Once trained, the entire system operates in a single forward pass, generalizing to previously unseen dynamic concepts without any test-time optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate high-quality and consistent results across a wide range of subjects beyond trained concepts and editing scenarios.

Paperid: 598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17657.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce a new interpretation of the attention matrix as a discrete-time Markov chain. Our interpretation sheds light on common operations involving attention scores such as selection, summation, and averaging in a unified framework. It further extends them by considering indirect attention, propagated through the Markov chain, as opposed to previous studies that only model immediate effects. Our main observation is that tokens corresponding to semantically similar regions form a set of metastable states, where the attention clusters, while noisy attention scores tend to disperse. Metastable states and their prevalence can be easily computed through simple matrix multiplication and eigenanalysis, respectively. Using these lightweight tools, we demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot segmentation. Lastly, we define TokenRank -- the steady state vector of the Markov chain, which measures global token importance. We demonstrate that using it brings improvements in unconditional image generation. We believe our framework offers a fresh view of how tokens are being attended in modern visual transformers.

Paperid: 599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17539.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate significant potential in the field of medical diagnosis. However, they face critical challenges in specialized domains such as ophthalmology, particularly the fragmentation of annotation granularity and inconsistencies in clinical reasoning logic, which hinder precise cross-modal understanding. This paper introduces FundusExpert, an ophthalmology-specific MLLM with integrated positioning-diagnosis reasoning capabilities, along with FundusGen, a dataset constructed through the intelligent Fundus-Engine system. Fundus-Engine automates localization and leverages MLLM-based semantic expansion to integrate global disease classification, local object detection, and fine-grained feature analysis within a single fundus image. Additionally, by constructing a clinically aligned cognitive chain, it guides the model to generate interpretable reasoning paths. FundusExpert, fine-tuned with instruction data from FundusGen, achieves the best performance in ophthalmic question-answering tasks, surpassing the average accuracy of the 40B MedRegA by 26.6%. It also excels in zero-shot report generation tasks, achieving a clinical consistency of 77.0%, significantly outperforming GPT-4o's 47.6%. Furthermore, we reveal a scaling law between data quality and model capability ($L \propto N^{0.068}$), demonstrating that the cognitive alignment annotations in FundusGen enhance data utilization efficiency. By integrating region-level localization with diagnostic reasoning chains, our work develops a scalable, clinically-aligned MLLM and explores a pathway toward bridging the visual-language gap in specific MLLMs. Our project can be found at https://github.com/MeteorElf/FundusExpert.

Paperid: 600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17186.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The booming development of AI agents presents unprecedented opportunities for automating complex tasks across various domains. However, their multi-step, multi-tool collaboration capabilities in the financial sector remain underexplored. This paper introduces FinGAIA, an end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate the practical abilities of AI agents in the financial domain. FinGAIA comprises 407 meticulously crafted tasks, spanning seven major financial sub-domains: securities, funds, banking, insurance, futures, trusts, and asset management. These tasks are organized into three hierarchical levels of scenario depth: basic business analysis, asset decision support, and strategic risk management. We evaluated 10 mainstream AI agents in a zero-shot setting. The best-performing agent, ChatGPT, achieved an overall accuracy of 48.9\%, which, while superior to non-professionals, still lags financial experts by over 35 percentage points. Error analysis has revealed five recurring failure patterns: Cross-modal Alignment Deficiency, Financial Terminological Bias, Operational Process Awareness Barrier, among others. These patterns point to crucial directions for future research. Our work provides the first agent benchmark closely related to the financial domain, aiming to objectively assess and promote the development of agents in this crucial field. Partial data is available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLM-Lab/FinGAIA.

Paperid: 601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16815.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language-action (VLA) reasoning tasks require agents to interpret multimodal instructions, perform long-horizon planning, and act adaptively in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically train VLA models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping inputs to actions without explicit reasoning, which hinders their ability to plan over multiple steps or adapt to complex task variations. In this paper, we propose ThinkAct, a dual-system framework that bridges high-level reasoning with low-level action execution via reinforced visual latent planning. ThinkAct trains a multimodal LLM to generate embodied reasoning plans guided by reinforcing action-aligned visual rewards based on goal completion and trajectory consistency. These reasoning plans are compressed into a visual plan latent that conditions a downstream action model for robust action execution on target environments. Extensive experiments on embodied reasoning and robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkAct enables few-shot adaptation, long-horizon planning, and self-correction behaviors in complex embodied AI tasks.

Paperid: 602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16782.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Quantization is a key technique to reduce network size and computational complexity by representing the network parameters with a lower precision. Traditional quantization methods rely on access to original training data, which is often restricted due to privacy concerns or security challenges. Zero-shot Quantization (ZSQ) addresses this by using synthetic data generated from pre-trained models, eliminating the need for real training data. Recently, ZSQ has been extended to object detection. However, existing methods use unlabeled task-agnostic synthetic images that lack the specific information required for object detection, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel task-specific ZSQ framework for object detection networks, which consists of two main stages. First, we introduce a bounding box and category sampling strategy to synthesize a task-specific calibration set from the pre-trained network, reconstructing object locations, sizes, and category distributions without any prior knowledge. Second, we integrate task-specific training into the knowledge distillation process to restore the performance of quantized detection networks. Extensive experiments conducted on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the efficiency and state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/DFQ-Dojo/dfq-toolkit .

Paperid: 603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16343.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Most existing sound event detection~(SED) algorithms operate under a closed-set assumption, restricting their detection capabilities to predefined classes. While recent efforts have explored language-driven zero-shot SED by exploiting audio-language models, their performance is still far from satisfactory due to the lack of fine-grained alignment and cross-modal feature fusion. In this work, we propose the Detect Any Sound Model (DASM), a query-based framework for open-vocabulary SED guided by multi-modal queries. DASM formulates SED as a frame-level retrieval task, where audio features are matched against query vectors derived from text or audio prompts. To support this formulation, DASM introduces a dual-stream decoder that explicitly decouples event recognition and temporal localization: a cross-modality event decoder performs query-feature fusion and determines the presence of sound events at the clip-level, while a context network models temporal dependencies for frame-level localization. Additionally, an inference-time attention masking strategy is proposed to leverage semantic relations between base and novel classes, substantially enhancing generalization to novel classes. Experiments on the AudioSet Strong dataset demonstrate that DASM effectively balances localization accuracy with generalization to novel classes, outperforming CLAP-based methods in open-vocabulary setting (+ 7.8 PSDS) and the baseline in the closed-set setting (+ 6.9 PSDS). Furthermore, in cross-dataset zero-shot evaluation on DESED, DASM achieves a PSDS1 score of 42.2, even exceeding the supervised CRNN baseline. The project page is available at https://cai525.github.io/Transformer4SED/demo_page/DASM/.

Paperid: 604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16193.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Text-guided Image Editing (TIE) enables image modifications through text prompts. However, current TIE models still struggle to balance image quality, editing alignment, and consistency with the original image, limiting their practical applications. Existing TIE evaluation benchmarks and metrics have limitations on scale or alignment with human perception. To this end, we introduce EBench-18K, the first large-scale image Editing Benchmark including 18K edited images with fine-grained human preference annotations for evaluating TIE. Specifically, EBench-18K includes 1,080 source images with corresponding editing prompts across 21 tasks, 18K+ edited images produced by 17 state-of-the-art TIE models, 55K+ mean opinion scores (MOSs) assessed from three evaluation dimensions, and 18K+ question-answering (QA) pairs. Based on EBench-18K, we employ outstanding LMMs to assess edited images, while the evaluation results, in turn, provide insights into assessing the alignment between the LMMs' understanding ability and human preferences. Then, we propose LMM4Edit, a LMM-based metric for evaluating image Editing models from perceptual quality, editing alignment, attribute preservation, and task-specific QA accuracy in an all-in-one manner. Extensive experiments show that LMM4Edit achieves outstanding performance and aligns well with human preference. Zero-shot validation on the other datasets also shows the generalization ability of our model. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/LMM4Edit.

Paperid: 605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16116.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of video diffusion models has been hindered by fundamental limitations in temporal modeling, particularly the rigid synchronization of frame evolution imposed by conventional scalar timestep variables. While task-specific adaptations and autoregressive models have sought to address these challenges, they remain constrained by computational inefficiency, catastrophic forgetting, or narrow applicability. In this work, we present Pusa, a groundbreaking paradigm that leverages vectorized timestep adaptation (VTA) to enable fine-grained temporal control within a unified video diffusion framework. Besides, VTA is a non-destructive adaptation, which means it fully preserves the capabilities of the base model. By finetuning the SOTA Wan2.1-T2V-14B model with VTA, we achieve unprecedented efficiency -- surpassing the performance of Wan-I2V-14B with $\leq$ 1/200 of the training cost (\$500 vs. $\geq$ \$100,000) and $\leq$ 1/2500 of the dataset size (4K vs. $\geq$ 10M samples). Pusa not only sets a new standard for image-to-video (I2V) generation, achieving a VBench-I2V total score of 87.32\% (vs. 86.86\% of Wan-I2V-14B), but also unlocks many zero-shot multi-task capabilities such as start-end frames and video extension -- all without task-specific training. Meanwhile, Pusa can still perform text-to-video generation. Mechanistic analyses reveal that our approach preserves the foundation model's generative priors while surgically injecting temporal dynamics, avoiding the combinatorial explosion inherent to vectorized timesteps. This work establishes a scalable, efficient, and versatile paradigm for next-generation video synthesis, democratizing high-fidelity video generation for research and industry alike. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Yaofang-Liu/Pusa-VidGen

Paperid: 606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15793.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of pre-trained foundation models is increasingly attracting interest in medical imaging due to its effectiveness and computational efficiency. Among these methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a notable approach based on the assumption that the adaptation inherently occurs in a low-dimensional subspace. While it has shown good performance, its implementation requires a fixed and unalterable rank, which might be challenging to select given the unique complexities and requirements of each medical imaging downstream task. Inspired by advancements in natural image processing, we introduce a novel approach for medical image segmentation that dynamically adjusts the intrinsic rank during adaptation. Viewing the low-rank representation of the trainable weight matrices as a singular value decomposition, we introduce an l_1 sparsity regularizer to the loss function, and tackle it with a proximal optimizer. The regularizer could be viewed as a penalty on the decomposition rank. Hence, its minimization enables to find task-adapted ranks automatically. Our method is evaluated in a realistic few-shot fine-tuning setting, where we compare it first to the standard LoRA and then to several other PEFT methods across two distinguishable tasks: base organs and novel organs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the significant performance improvements driven by our method, highlighting its efficiency and robustness against suboptimal rank initialization. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/ghassenbaklouti/ARENA

Paperid: 607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15664.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense potential in computer-aided design (CAD), particularly for automated debugging and verification within electronic design automation (EDA) tools. However, Design for Testability (DFT) remains a relatively underexplored area. This paper presents VeriRAG, the first LLM-assisted DFT-EDA framework. VeriRAG leverages a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to enable LLM to revise code to ensure DFT compliance. VeriRAG integrates (1) an autoencoder-based similarity measurement model for precise retrieval of reference RTL designs for the LLM, and (2) an iterative code revision pipeline that allows the LLM to ensure DFT compliance while maintaining synthesizability. To support VeriRAG, we introduce VeriDFT, a Verilog-based DFT dataset curated for DFT-aware RTL repairs. VeriRAG retrieves structurally similar RTL designs from VeriDFT, each paired with a rigorously validated correction, as references for code repair. With VeriRAG and VeriDFT, we achieve fully automated DFT correction -- resulting in a 7.72-fold improvement in successful repair rate compared to the zero-shot baseline (Fig. 5 in Section V). Ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each component of the VeriRAG framework. We open-source our data, models, and scripts at https://github.com/yuyangdu01/LLM4DFT.

Paperid: 608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15576.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Terahertz (THz) imaging enables non-invasive analysis for applications such as security screening and material classification, but effective image classification remains challenging due to limited annotations, low resolution, and visual ambiguity. We introduce In-Context Learning (ICL) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as a flexible, interpretable alternative that requires no fine-tuning. Using a modality-aligned prompting framework, we adapt two open-weight VLMs to the THz domain and evaluate them under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Our results show that ICL improves classification and interpretability in low-data regimes. This is the first application of ICL-enhanced VLMs to THz imaging, offering a promising direction for resource-constrained scientific domains. Code: \href{https://github.com/Nicolas-Poggi/Project_THz_Classification/tree/main}{GitHub repository}.

Paperid: 609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15542.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot human-object interaction (HOI) detection remains a challenging task, particularly in generalizing to unseen actions. Existing methods address this challenge by tapping Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to access knowledge beyond the training data. However, they either struggle to distinguish actions involving the same object or demonstrate limited generalization to unseen classes. In this paper, we introduce HOLa (Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation), a novel approach that both enhances generalization to unseen classes and improves action distinction. In training, HOLa decomposes VLM text features for given HOI classes via low-rank factorization, producing class-shared basis features and adaptable weights. These features and weights form a compact HOI representation that preserves shared information across classes, enhancing generalization to unseen classes. Subsequently, we refine action distinction by adapting weights for each HOI class and introducing human-object tokens to enrich visual interaction representations. To further distinguish unseen actions, we guide the weight adaptation with LLM-derived action regularization. Experimental results show that our method sets a new state-of-the-art across zero-shot HOI settings on HICO-DET, achieving an unseen-class mAP of 27.91 in the unseen-verb setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChelsieLei/HOLa.

Paperid: 610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15480.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, achieve remarkable zero-shot performance, yet their downstream potential hinges on effective fine-tuning. Most adaptation methods typically focus on refining representation from separate modalities (text or vision) but neglect the critical role of their fused representations in the decision-making process, \emph{\ie} rational matrix that drives the final prediction. To bridge the gap, we propose a simple yet effective \textbf{R}ational \textbf{Ada}ptaion ({RAda}) to explicitly exploit the final fused representation during fine-tuning. RAda employs a learned mask, obtained from a lightweight attention layer attached at the end of a VLM, to dynamically calibrate the contribution of each element in the rational matrix, enabling targeted adjustments to the final cross-modal interactions without incurring costly modifications to intermediate features. Experiments in different settings (i.e., updating, or freezing pretrained encoders in adaptation, and test-time training that can only access the unlabeled test data) show that RAda serves as a versatile fine-tuning technique, improving the baseline with minimal code and performing comparably against current arts in most settings. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/khufia/RAda/tree/main}{github.com/khufia/RAda}.

Paperid: 611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15286.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a novel evaluation paradigm for AI text detectors that prioritizes real-world and equitable assessment. Current approaches predominantly report conventional metrics like AUROC, overlooking that even modest false positive rates constitute a critical impediment to practical deployment of detection systems. Furthermore, real-world deployment necessitates predetermined threshold configuration, making detector stability (i.e. the maintenance of consistent performance across diverse domains and adversarial scenarios), a critical factor. These aspects have been largely ignored in previous research and benchmarks. Our benchmark, SHIELD, addresses these limitations by integrating both reliability and stability factors into a unified evaluation metric designed for practical assessment. Furthermore, we develop a post-hoc, model-agnostic humanification framework that modifies AI text to more closely resemble human authorship, incorporating a controllable hardness parameter. This hardness-aware approach effectively challenges current SOTA zero-shot detection methods in maintaining both reliability and stability. (Data and code: https://github.com/navid-aub/SHIELD-Benchmark)

Paperid: 612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15249.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In light of recent breakthroughs in text-to-image (T2I) generation, particularly with diffusion transformers (DiT), subject-driven technologies are increasingly being employed for high-fidelity customized production that preserves subject identity from reference inputs, enabling thrilling design workflows and engaging entertainment. Existing alternatives typically require either per-subject optimization via trainable text embeddings or training specialized encoders for subject feature extraction on large-scale datasets. Such dependencies on training procedures fundamentally constrain their practical applications. More importantly, current methodologies fail to fully leverage the inherent zero-shot potential of modern diffusion transformers (e.g., the Flux series) for authentic subject-driven synthesis. To bridge this gap, we propose FreeCus, a genuinely training-free framework that activates DiT's capabilities through three key innovations: 1) We introduce a pivotal attention sharing mechanism that captures the subject's layout integrity while preserving crucial editing flexibility. 2) Through a straightforward analysis of DiT's dynamic shifting, we propose an upgraded variant that significantly improves fine-grained feature extraction. 3) We further integrate advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enrich cross-modal semantic representations. Extensive experiments reflect that our method successfully unlocks DiT's zero-shot ability for consistent subject synthesis across diverse contexts, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable results compared to approaches that require additional training. Notably, our framework demonstrates seamless compatibility with existing inpainting pipelines and control modules, facilitating more compelling experiences. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Monalissaa/FreeCus.

Paperid: 613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15243.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the progress in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL), a model pre-trained with DINO combined with a prototypical classifier outperforms the latest SOTA methods. A crucial limitation that needs to be overcome is that updating too many parameters of the transformers leads to overfitting due to the scarcity of labeled samples. To address this challenge, we propose a new concept, Coalescent Projection (CP), as an effective successor to soft prompts. Additionally, we propose a novel pseudo-class generation method combined with Self-Supervised Transformations (SSTs) that relies solely on the base domain to prepare the network for encountering unseen samples from different domains. The proposed method exhibits its effectiveness in comprehensive experiments on the extreme domain shift scenario of the BSCD-FSL benchmark. Our code is published at https://github.com/Naeem-Paeedeh/CPLSR.

Paperid: 614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15109.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
One of the main challenges in the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) loop closure problem is the recognition of previously visited places. In this work, we tackle the two main problems of real-time SLAM systems: 1) loop closure detection accuracy and 2) real-time computation constraints on the embedded hardware. Our LoopNet method is based on a multitasking variant of the classical ResNet architecture, adapted for online retraining on a dynamic visual dataset and optimized for embedded devices. The online retraining is designed using a few-shot learning approach. The architecture provides both an index into the queried visual dataset, and a measurement of the prediction quality. Moreover, by leveraging DISK (DIStinctive Keypoints) descriptors, LoopNet surpasses the limitations of handcrafted features and traditional deep learning methods, offering better performance under varying conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/RovisLab/LoopNet. Additinally, we introduce a new loop closure benchmarking dataset, coined LoopDB, which is available at https://github.com/RovisLab/LoopDB.

Paperid: 615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14902.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Universal multimodal retrieval (UMR), which aims to address complex retrieval tasks where both queries and candidates span diverse modalities, has been significantly advanced by the emergence of MLLMs. While state-of-the-art MLLM-based methods in the literature predominantly adopt contrastive learning principles, they often differ in their specific training recipes. Despite their success, the mechanisms underlying their retrieval capabilities remain largely unexplored, potentially resulting in suboptimal performance and limited generalization ability. To address these issues, we present a comprehensive study aimed at uncovering the key factors that drive effective embedding learning for UMR using MLLMs. We begin by implementing a general MLLM-based embedding learning pipeline, and systematically analyze the primary contributors to high-performing universal retrieval systems. Based on this, we explore various aspects of the details in embedding generation and training strategies, including progressive transition, hard negative mining and re-ranker distillation. Notably, our findings reveal that often-overlooked factors can have a substantial impact on model performance. Building on these discoveries, we introduce a unified framework termed U-MARVEL (\textbf{U}niversal \textbf{M}ultimod\textbf{A}l \textbf{R}etrie\textbf{V}al via \textbf{E}mbedding \textbf{L}earning), which outperforms state-of-the-art competitors on the M-BEIR benchmark by a large margin in supervised settings, and also exihibits strong zero-shot performance on several tasks such as composed image retrieval and text-to-video retrieval. These results underscore the generalization potential of our framework across various embedding-based retrieval tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chaxjli/U-MARVEL

Paperid: 616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14534.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot online voice conversion (VC) holds significant promise for real-time communications and entertainment. However, current VC models struggle to preserve semantic fidelity under real-time constraints, deliver natural-sounding conversions, and adapt effectively to unseen speaker characteristics. To address these challenges, we introduce Conan, a chunkwise online zero-shot voice conversion model that preserves the content of the source while matching the voice timbre and styles of reference speech. Conan comprises three core components: 1) a Stream Content Extractor that leverages Emformer for low-latency streaming content encoding; 2) an Adaptive Style Encoder that extracts fine-grained stylistic features from reference speech for enhanced style adaptation; 3) a Causal Shuffle Vocoder that implements a fully causal HiFiGAN using a pixel-shuffle mechanism. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Conan outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective metrics. Audio samples can be found at https://aaronz345.github.io/ConanDemo.

Paperid: 617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14368.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Ultrasound technology enables safe, non-invasive imaging of dynamic tissue behavior, making it a valuable tool in medicine, biomechanics, and sports science. However, accurately tracking tissue motion in B-mode ultrasound remains challenging due to speckle noise, low edge contrast, and out-of-plane movement. These challenges complicate the task of tracking anatomical landmarks over time, which is essential for quantifying tissue dynamics in many clinical and research applications. This manuscript introduces DUSTrack (Deep learning and optical flow-based toolkit for UltraSound Tracking), a semi-automated framework for tracking arbitrary points in B-mode ultrasound videos. We combine deep learning with optical flow to deliver high-quality and robust tracking across diverse anatomical structures and motion patterns. The toolkit includes a graphical user interface that streamlines the generation of high-quality training data and supports iterative model refinement. It also implements a novel optical-flow-based filtering technique that reduces high-frequency frame-to-frame noise while preserving rapid tissue motion. DUSTrack demonstrates superior accuracy compared to contemporary zero-shot point trackers and performs on par with specialized methods, establishing its potential as a general and foundational tool for clinical and biomechanical research. We demonstrate DUSTrack's versatility through three use cases: cardiac wall motion tracking in echocardiograms, muscle deformation analysis during reaching tasks, and fascicle tracking during ankle plantarflexion. As an open-source solution, DUSTrack offers a powerful, flexible framework for point tracking to quantify tissue motion from ultrasound videos. DUSTrack is available at https://github.com/praneethnamburi/DUSTrack.

Paperid: 618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13482.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) based on wearable inertial sensors plays a critical role in remote health monitoring. In patients with movement disorders, the ability to detect abnormal patient movements in their home environments can enable continuous optimization of treatments and help alert caretakers as needed. Machine learning approaches have been proposed for HAR tasks using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data; however, most rely on application-specific labels and lack generalizability to data collected in different environments or populations. To address this limitation, we propose a new cross-modal self-supervised pretraining approach to learn representations from large-sale unlabeled IMU-video data and demonstrate improved generalizability in HAR tasks on out of distribution (OOD) IMU datasets, including a dataset collected from patients with Parkinson's disease. Specifically, our results indicate that the proposed cross-modal pretraining approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art IMU-video pretraining approach and IMU-only pretraining under zero-shot and few-shot evaluations. Broadly, our study provides evidence that in highly dynamic data modalities, such as IMU signals, cross-modal pretraining may be a useful tool to learn generalizable data representations. Our software is available at https://github.com/scheshmi/IMU-Video-OOD-HAR.

Paperid: 619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12236.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Phrase grounding, i.e., mapping natural language phrases to specific image regions, holds significant potential for disease localization in medical imaging through clinical reports. While current state-of-the-art methods rely on discriminative, self-supervised contrastive models, we demonstrate that generative text-to-image diffusion models, leveraging cross-attention maps, can achieve superior zero-shot phrase grounding performance. Contrary to prior assumptions, we show that fine-tuning diffusion models with a frozen, domain-specific language model, such as CXR-BERT, substantially outperforms domain-agnostic counterparts. This setup achieves remarkable improvements, with mIoU scores doubling those of current discriminative methods. These findings highlight the underexplored potential of generative models for phrase grounding tasks. To further enhance performance, we introduce Bimodal Bias Merging (BBM), a novel post-processing technique that aligns text and image biases to identify regions of high certainty. BBM refines cross-attention maps, achieving even greater localization accuracy. Our results establish generative approaches as a more effective paradigm for phrase grounding in the medical imaging domain, paving the way for more robust and interpretable applications in clinical practice. The source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Felix-012/generate_to_ground.

Paperid: 620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11901.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Imbalanced problems are prevalent in various real-world scenarios and are extensively explored in classification tasks. However, they also present challenges for regression tasks due to the rarity of certain target values. A common alternative is to employ balancing algorithms in preprocessing to address dataset imbalance. However, due to the variety of resampling methods and learning models, determining the optimal solution requires testing many combinations. Furthermore, the learning model, dataset, and evaluation metric affect the best strategies. This work proposes the Meta-learning for Imbalanced Regression (Meta-IR) framework, which diverges from existing literature by training meta-classifiers to recommend the best pipeline composed of the resampling strategy and learning model per task in a zero-shot fashion. The meta-classifiers are trained using a set of meta-features to learn how to map the meta-features to the classes indicating the best pipeline. We propose two formulations: Independent and Chained. Independent trains the meta-classifiers to separately indicate the best learning algorithm and resampling strategy. Chained involves a sequential procedure where the output of one meta-classifier is used as input for another to model intrinsic relationship factors. The Chained scenario showed superior performance, suggesting a relationship between the learning algorithm and the resampling strategy per task. Compared with AutoML frameworks, Meta-IR obtained better results. Moreover, compared with baselines of six learning algorithms and six resampling algorithms plus no resampling, totaling 42 (6 X 7) configurations, Meta-IR outperformed all of them. The code, data, and further information of the experiments can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/JusciAvelino/Meta-IR.

Paperid: 621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11569.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models, pre-trained on large image datasets and capable of capturing rich feature representations, have recently shown potential for zero-shot image registration. However, their performance has mostly been tested in the context of rigid or less complex structures, such as the brain or abdominal organs, and it remains unclear whether these models can handle more challenging, deformable anatomy. Breast MRI registration is particularly difficult due to significant anatomical variation between patients, deformation caused by patient positioning, and the presence of thin and complex internal structure of fibroglandular tissue, where accurate alignment is crucial. Whether foundation model-based registration algorithms can address this level of complexity remains an open question. In this study, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of foundation model-based registration algorithms for breast MRI. We assess five pre-trained encoders, including DINO-v2, SAM, MedSAM, SSLSAM, and MedCLIP, across four key breast registration tasks that capture variations in different years and dates, sequences, modalities, and patient disease status (lesion versus no lesion). Our results show that foundation model-based algorithms such as SAM outperform traditional registration baselines for overall breast alignment, especially under large domain shifts, but struggle with capturing fine details of fibroglandular tissue. Interestingly, additional pre-training or fine-tuning on medical or breast-specific images in MedSAM and SSLSAM, does not improve registration performance and may even decrease it in some cases. Further work is needed to understand how domain-specific training influences registration and to explore targeted strategies that improve both global alignment and fine structure accuracy. We also publicly release our code at \href{https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/Foundation-based-reg}{Github}.

Paperid: 622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11001.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Service robots are increasingly deployed in diverse and dynamic environments, where both physical layouts and social contexts change over time and across locations. In these unstructured settings, conventional navigation systems that rely on fixed parameters often fail to generalize across scenarios, resulting in degraded performance and reduced social acceptance. Although recent approaches have leveraged reinforcement learning to enhance traditional planners, these methods often fail in real-world deployments due to poor generalization and limited simulation diversity, which hampers effective sim-to-real transfer. To tackle these issues, we present LE-Nav, an interpretable and scene-aware navigation framework that leverages multi-modal large language model reasoning and conditional variational autoencoders to adaptively tune planner hyperparameters. To achieve zero-shot scene understanding, we utilize one-shot exemplars and chain-of-thought prompting strategies. Additionally, a conditional variational autoencoder captures the mapping between natural language instructions and navigation hyperparameters, enabling expert-level tuning. Experiments show that LE-Nav can generate hyperparameters achieving human-level tuning across diverse planners and scenarios. Real-world navigation trials and a user study on a smart wheelchair platform demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on quantitative metrics such as success rate, efficiency, safety, and comfort, while receiving higher subjective scores for perceived safety and social acceptance. Code is available at https://github.com/Cavendish518/LE-Nav.

Paperid: 623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10548.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advanced vision-language models(VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on passive, offline image and video understanding tasks. However, their effectiveness in embodied settings, which require online interaction and active scene understanding remains limited. In such scenarios, an agent perceives the environment from a first-person perspective, with each action dynamically shaping subsequent observations. Even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro struggle in open-environment interactions, exhibiting clear limitations in spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning. To address this gap, we introduce EmRACE-3K, a dataset of over 3,000 language-guided tasks situated in diverse, photorealistic environments constructed using Unreal Engine and the UnrealCV-Zoo framework. The tasks encompass a wide range of embodied challenges, including navigation, object manipulation, and multi-stage goal execution. Each task unfolds as a multi-step trajectory, pairing first-person visual observations with high-level instructions, grounded actions, and natural language rationales that express the agent's intent at every step. Using EmRACE-3K, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the embodied reasoning capabilities of VLMs across three key dimensions: Exploration, Dynamic Spatial-Semantic Reasoning, and Multi-stage Goal Execution. In zero-shot settings, all models achieve success rates below 20%, underscoring the challenge posed by our benchmark and the current limitations of VLMs in interactive environments. To demonstrate the utility of EmRACE-3K, we further fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-7B using supervised learning followed by reinforcement learning. This approach yields substantial improvements across all three challenge categories, highlighting the dataset's effectiveness in enabling the development of embodied reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10543.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In robot manipulation, robot learning has become a prevailing approach. However, generative models within this field face a fundamental trade-off between the slow, iterative sampling of diffusion models and the architectural constraints of faster Flow-based methods, which often rely on explicit consistency losses. To address these limitations, we introduce MP1, which pairs 3D point-cloud inputs with the MeanFlow paradigm to generate action trajectories in one network function evaluation (1-NFE). By directly learning the interval-averaged velocity via the "MeanFlow Identity", our policy avoids any additional consistency constraints. This formulation eliminates numerical ODE-solver errors during inference, yielding more precise trajectories. MP1 further incorporates CFG for improved trajectory controllability while retaining 1-NFE inference without reintroducing structural constraints. Because subtle scene-context variations are critical for robot learning, especially in few-shot learning, we introduce a lightweight Dispersive Loss that repels state embeddings during training, boosting generalization without slowing inference. We validate our method on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks, as well as in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show MP1 achieves superior average task success rates, outperforming DP3 by 10.2% and FlowPolicy by 7.3%. Its average inference time is only 6.8 ms-19x faster than DP3 and nearly 2x faster than FlowPolicy. Our code is available at https://github.com/LogSSim/MP1.git.

Paperid: 625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10539.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
World models (WMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in prediction, generation, and planning tasks. Existing WMs primarily focus on unstructured data and cannot leverage the ubiquitous structured data, often represented as graphs, in the digital world. While multiple graph foundation models have been proposed, they focus on graph learning tasks and cannot extend to diverse multi-modal data and interdisciplinary tasks. To address these challenges, we propose the Graph World Model (GWM), a world model that supports both unstructured and graph-structured states with multi-modal information and represents diverse tasks as actions. The core of a GWM is a generic message-passing algorithm to aggregate structured information, either over a unified multi-modal token space by converting multi-modal data into text (GWM-T) or a unified multi-modal embedding space by modality-specific encoders (GWM-E). Notably, GWM introduces action nodes to support diverse tasks, where action nodes are linked to other nodes via direct reference or similarity computation. Extensive experiments on six tasks from diverse domains, including multi-modal generation and matching, recommendation, graph prediction, multi-agent, retrieval-augmented generation, and planning and optimization, show that the same GWM outperforms or matches domain-specific baselines' performance, benefits from multi-hop structures, and demonstrates strong zero-shot/few-shot capabilities on unseen new tasks. Our code for GWM is released at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/GWM.

Paperid: 626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10524.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scaling language models unlocks impressive capabilities, but the accompanying computational and memory demands make both training and deployment expensive. Existing efficiency efforts typically target either parameter sharing or adaptive computation, leaving open the question of how to attain both simultaneously. We introduce Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR), a unified framework that combines the two axes of efficiency inside a single Recursive Transformer. MoR reuses a shared stack of layers across recursion steps to achieve parameter efficiency, while lightweight routers enable adaptive token-level thinking by dynamically assigning different recursion depths to individual tokens. This allows MoR to focus quadratic attention computation only among tokens still active at a given recursion depth, further improving memory access efficiency by selectively caching only their key-value pairs. Beyond these core mechanisms, we also propose a KV sharing variant that reuses KV pairs from the first recursion, specifically designed to decrease prefill latency and memory footprint. Across model scales ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters, MoR forms a new Pareto frontier: at equal training FLOPs and smaller model sizes, it significantly lowers validation perplexity and improves few-shot accuracy, while delivering higher throughput compared with vanilla and existing recursive baselines. These gains demonstrate that MoR is an effective path towards large-model quality without incurring large-model cost.

Paperid: 627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10118.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pixel-level annotation is expensive and time-consuming. Semi-supervised segmentation methods address this challenge by learning models on few labeled images alongside a large corpus of unlabeled images. Although foundation models could further account for label scarcity, effective mechanisms for their exploitation remain underexplored. We address this by devising a novel semi-supervised panoptic approach fueled by two dedicated foundation models. We enhance recognition by complementing unsupervised mask-transformer consistency with zero-shot classification of CLIP features. We enhance localization by class-agnostic decoder warm-up with respect to SAM pseudo-labels. The resulting decoupled enhancement of recognition and localization (DEARLi) particularly excels in the most challenging semi-supervised scenarios with large taxonomies and limited labeled data. Moreover, DEARLi outperforms the state of the art in semi-supervised semantic segmentation by a large margin while requiring 8x less GPU memory, in spite of being trained only for the panoptic objective. We observe 29.9 PQ and 38.9 mIoU on ADE20K with only 158 labeled images. The source code is available at https://github.com/helen1c/DEARLi.

Paperid: 628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10095.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP has shown promising performance across many short-text tasks in a zero-shot manner. However, limited by the input length of the text encoder, CLIP struggles on under-stream tasks with long-text inputs ($>77$ tokens). To remedy this issue, we propose FIX-CLIP, which includes three novel modules: (1) A dual-branch training pipeline that aligns short and long texts with masked and raw images, respectively, which boosts the long-text representation while preserving the short-text ability. (2) Multiple learnable regional prompts with unidirectional masks in Transformer layers for regional information extraction. (3) A hierarchical feature alignment module in the intermediate encoder layers to promote the consistency of multi-scale features. Furthermore, we collect 30M images and utilize existing MLLMs to synthesize long-text captions for training. Extensive experiments show that FIX-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on both long-text and short-text retrieval benchmarks. For downstream applications, we reveal that FIX-CLIP's text encoder delivers promising performance in a plug-and-play manner for diffusion models with long-text input. The code is available at https://github.com/bcwang-sjtu/Fix-CLIP.

Paperid: 629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10065.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present MoVieS, a novel feed-forward model that synthesizes 4D dynamic novel views from monocular videos in one second. MoVieS represents dynamic 3D scenes using pixel-aligned grids of Gaussian primitives, explicitly supervising their time-varying motion. This allows, for the first time, the unified modeling of appearance, geometry and motion, and enables view synthesis, reconstruction and 3D point tracking within a single learning-based framework. By bridging novel view synthesis with dynamic geometry reconstruction, MoVieS enables large-scale training on diverse datasets with minimal dependence on task-specific supervision. As a result, it also naturally supports a wide range of zero-shot applications, such as scene flow estimation and moving object segmentation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of MoVieS across multiple tasks, achieving competitive performance while offering several orders of magnitude speedups.

Paperid: 630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09982.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Hit-like molecular generation with therapeutic potential is essential for target-specific drug discovery. However, the field lacks heterogeneous data and unified frameworks for integrating diverse molecular representations. To bridge this gap, we introduce TextOmics, a pioneering benchmark that establishes one-to-one correspondences between omics expressions and molecular textual descriptions. TextOmics provides a heterogeneous dataset that facilitates molecular generation through representations alignment. Built upon this foundation, we propose ToDi, a generative framework that jointly conditions on omics expressions and molecular textual descriptions to produce biologically relevant, chemically valid, hit-like molecules. ToDi leverages two encoders (OmicsEn and TextEn) to capture multi-level biological and semantic associations, and develops conditional diffusion (DiffGen) for controllable generation. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of TextOmics and demonstrate ToDi outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, while also showcasing remarkable potential in zero-shot therapeutic molecular generation. Sources are available at: https://github.com/hala-ToDi.

Paperid: 631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The fashion retail business is centered around the capacity to comprehend products. Product attribution helps in comprehending products depending on the business process. Quality attribution improves the customer experience as they navigate through millions of products offered by a retail website. It leads to well-organized product catalogs. In the end, product attribution directly impacts the 'discovery experience' of the customer. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in understanding multimodal data, their performance on fine-grained fashion attribute recognition remains under-explored. This paper presents a zero-shot evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs that balance performance with speed and cost efficiency, mainly GPT-4o-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash. We have used the dataset DeepFashion-MultiModal (https://github.com/yumingj/DeepFashion-MultiModal) to evaluate these models in the attribution tasks of fashion products. Our study evaluates these models across 18 categories of fashion attributes, offering insight into where these models excel. We only use images as the sole input for product information to create a constrained environment. Our analysis shows that Gemini 2.0 Flash demonstrates the strongest overall performance with a macro F1 score of 56.79% across all attributes, while GPT-4o-mini scored a macro F1 score of 43.28%. Through detailed error analysis, our findings provide practical insights for deploying these LLMs in production e-commerce product attribution-related tasks and highlight the need for domain-specific fine-tuning approaches. This work also lays the groundwork for future research in fashion AI and multimodal attribute extraction.

Paperid: 632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09948.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning-based prediction models for High-Level Synthesis (HLS) of hardware designs often struggle to generalize. In this paper, we study how to close the generalizability gap of these models through pretraining on synthetic data and introduce Iceberg, a synthetic data augmentation approach that expands both large language model (LLM)-generated programs and weak labels of unseen design configurations. Our weak label generation method is integrated with an in-context model architecture, enabling meta-learning from actual and proximate labels. Iceberg improves the geometric mean modeling accuracy by $86.4\%$ when adapt to six real-world applications with few-shot examples and achieves a $2.47\times$ and a $1.12\times$ better offline DSE performance when adapting to two different test datasets. Our open-sourced code is here: https://github.com/UCLA-VAST/iceberg

Paperid: 633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09795.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models like CLIP have enabled zero-shot OOD detection by leveraging both image and textual label information. Among these, negative label-based methods such as NegLabel and CSP have shown promising results by utilizing a lexicon of words to define negative labels for distinguishing OOD samples. However, these methods suffer from detecting in-distribution samples as OOD due to negative labels that are subcategories of in-distribution labels or proper nouns. They also face limitations in handling images that match multiple in-distribution and negative labels. We propose NegRefine, a novel negative label refinement framework for zero-shot OOD detection. By introducing a filtering mechanism to exclude subcategory labels and proper nouns from the negative label set and incorporating a multi-matching-aware scoring function that dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple labels matching an image, NegRefine ensures a more robust separation between in-distribution and OOD samples. We evaluate NegRefine on large-scale benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K. The code is available at https://github.com/ah-ansari/NegRefine.

Paperid: 634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09500.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities but struggle with distribution shifts in downstream tasks when labeled data is unavailable, which has motivated the development of Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) to improve VLMs' performance during inference without annotations. Among various TTA approaches, cache-based methods show promise by preserving historical knowledge from low-entropy samples in a dynamic cache and fostering efficient adaptation. However, these methods face two critical reliability challenges: (1) entropy often becomes unreliable under distribution shifts, causing error accumulation in the cache and degradation in adaptation performance; (2) the final predictions may be unreliable due to inflexible decision boundaries that fail to accommodate large downstream shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a Reliable Test-time Adaptation (ReTA) method that integrates two complementary strategies to enhance reliability from two perspectives. First, to mitigate the unreliability of entropy as a sample selection criterion for cache construction, we introduce Consistency-aware Entropy Reweighting (CER), which incorporates consistency constraints to weight entropy during cache updating. While conventional approaches rely solely on low entropy for cache prioritization and risk introducing noise, our method leverages predictive consistency to maintain a high-quality cache and facilitate more robust adaptation. Second, we present Diversity-driven Distribution Calibration (DDC), which models class-wise text embeddings as multivariate Gaussian distributions, enabling adaptive decision boundaries for more accurate predictions across visually diverse content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReTA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under real-world distribution shifts. Code: https://github.com/Evelyn1ywliang/ReTA.

Paperid: 635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09318.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generating spoken dialogue is more challenging than monologue text-to-speech (TTS) due to the need for realistic turn-taking and distinct speaker timbres. Existing spoken dialogue generation models, being auto-regressive, suffer from slow and unstable inference. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ZipVoice-Dialog, a non-autoregressive zero-shot spoken dialogue generation model built upon flow matching. Key designs include: 1) speaker-turn embeddings for precise speaker turn-taking; 2) a curriculum learning strategy for stable speech-text alignment; 3) specialized strategies to enable stereo dialogue generation. Additionally, recognizing the lack of open-source large-scale spoken dialogue datasets, we curated OpenDialog, a 6.8k-hour spoken dialogue dataset from in-the-wild speech data. Furthermore, we established a benchmark to comprehensively evaluate various models. Experimental results demonstrate that ZipVoice-Dialog achieves superior performance in intelligibility, speaker turn-taking accuracy, speaker similarity, and inference speed. Our codes, model checkpoints, demo samples, and the OpenDialog dataset are all publicly available at https://github.com/k2-fsa/ZipVoice.

Paperid: 636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09299.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The remarkable representational power of Vision Transformers (ViTs) remains underutilized in few-shot image classification. In this work, we introduce ViT-ProtoNet, which integrates a ViT-Small backbone into the Prototypical Network framework. By averaging class conditional token embeddings from a handful of support examples, ViT-ProtoNet constructs robust prototypes that generalize to novel categories under 5-shot settings. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on four standard benchmarks: Mini-ImageNet, FC100, CUB-200, and CIFAR-FS, including overlapped support variants to assess robustness. Across all splits, ViT-ProtoNet consistently outperforms CNN-based prototypical counterparts, achieving up to a 3.2\% improvement in 5-shot accuracy and demonstrating superior feature separability in latent space. Furthermore, it outperforms or is competitive with transformer-based competitors using a more lightweight backbone. Comprehensive ablations examine the impact of transformer depth, patch size, and fine-tuning strategy. To foster reproducibility, we release code and pretrained weights. Our results establish ViT-ProtoNet as a powerful, flexible approach for few-shot classification and set a new baseline for transformer-based meta-learners.

Paperid: 637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09279.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold considerable promise for applications in healthcare. However, their deployment in safety-critical settings is hindered by two key limitations: (i) sensitivity to prompt design, and (ii) a tendency to generate incorrect responses with high confidence. As clinicians may rely on a model's stated confidence to gauge the reliability of its predictions, it is especially important that when a model expresses high confidence, it is also highly accurate. We introduce Prompt4Trust, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework for prompt augmentation targeting confidence calibration in MLLMs. A lightweight LLM is trained to produce context-aware auxiliary prompts that guide a downstream task MLLM to generate responses in which the expressed confidence more accurately reflects predictive accuracy. Unlike conventional calibration techniques, Prompt4Trust specifically prioritizes aspects of calibration most critical for safe and trustworthy clinical decision-making. Beyond improvements driven by this clinically motivated calibration objective, our proposed method also improves task accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art medical visual question answering (VQA) performance on the PMC-VQA benchmark, which is composed of multiple-choice questions spanning diverse medical imaging modalities. Moreover, our framework trained with a small downstream task MLLM showed promising zero-shot generalization to larger MLLMs in our experiments, suggesting the potential for scalable calibration without the associated computational costs. This work demonstrates the potential of automated yet human-aligned prompt engineering for improving the the trustworthiness of MLLMs in safety critical settings. Our codebase can be found at https://github.com/xingbpshen/prompt4trust.

Paperid: 638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09214.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D detection technology is widely used in the field of autonomous driving, with its application scenarios gradually expanding from enclosed highways to open conventional roads. For rare anomaly categories that appear on the road, 3D detection models trained on closed sets often misdetect or fail to detect anomaly objects. To address this risk, it is necessary to enhance the generalization ability of 3D detection models for targets of arbitrary shapes and to possess the capability to filter out anomalies. The generalization of 3D detection is limited by two factors: the coupled training of 2D and 3D, and the insufficient diversity in the scale distribution of training samples. This paper proposes a Stereo-based 3D Anomaly object Detection (S3AD) algorithm, which decouples the training strategy of 3D and 2D to release the generalization ability for arbitrary 3D foreground detection, and proposes an anomaly scoring algorithm based on foreground confidence prediction, achieving target-level anomaly scoring. In order to further verify and enhance the generalization of anomaly detection, we use a 3D rendering method to synthesize two augmented reality binocular stereo 3D detection datasets which named KITTI-AR. KITTI-AR extends upon KITTI by adding 97 new categories, totaling 6k pairs of stereo images. The KITTI-AR-ExD subset includes 39 common categories as extra training data to address the sparse sample distribution issue. Additionally, 58 rare categories form the KITTI-AR-OoD subset, which are not used in training to simulate zero-shot scenarios in real-world settings, solely for evaluating 3D anomaly detection. Finally, the performance of the algorithm and the dataset is verified in the experiments. (Code and dataset can be obtained at https://github.com/shiyi-mu/S3AD-Code).

Paperid: 639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09183.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) faces dual challenges of data scarcity and incremental learning in real-world scenarios. While pool-based prompting methods have demonstrated success in traditional incremental learning, their effectiveness in FSCIL settings remains unexplored. This paper presents the first study of current prompt pool methods in FSCIL tasks, revealing an unanticipated performance degradation in incremental sessions. Through comprehensive analysis, we identify that this phenomenon stems from token-dimension saturation: with limited data, excessive prompts compete for task-relevant information, leading to model overfitting. Based on this finding, we propose LGSP-Prompt (Local-Global Spatial Prompting), which innovatively shifts pool-based prompt learning from the token dimension to the spatial dimension. LGSP-Prompt generates spatial prompts by synergistically combining local spatial features and global frequency-domain representations to highlight key patterns in input images. We construct two spatial prompt pools enabling dynamic prompt selection to maintain acquired knowledge while effectively learning novel sessions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple FSCIL benchmarks, showing significant advantages in both base knowledge preservation and incremental learning. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Jywsuperman/LGSP.

Paperid: 640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09139.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human pose estimation traditionally relies on architectures that encode keypoint priors, limiting their generalization to novel poses or unseen keypoints. Recent language-guided approaches like LocLLM reformulate keypoint localization as a vision-language task, enabling zero-shot generalization through textual descriptions. However, LocLLM's linear projector fails to capture complex spatial-textual interactions critical for high-precision localization. To address this, we propose PoseLLM, the first Large Language Model (LLM)-based pose estimation framework that replaces the linear projector with a nonlinear MLP vision-language connector. This lightweight two-layer MLP with GELU activation enables hierarchical cross-modal feature transformation, enhancing the fusion of visual patches and textual keypoint descriptions. Trained exclusively on COCO data, PoseLLM achieves 77.8 AP on the COCO validation set, outperforming LocLLM by +0.4 AP, while maintaining strong zero-shot generalization on Human-Art and MPII. Our work demonstrates that a simple yet powerful nonlinear connector significantly boosts localization accuracy without sacrificing generalization, advancing the state-of-the-art in language-guided pose estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/Ody-trek/PoseLLM.

Paperid: 641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09082.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only for future frame prediction can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior work reading out depth or illumination from video generators required fine-tuning, which is impractical for flow where labels are scarce and synthetic datasets suffer from a sim-to-real gap. Inspired by the Counterfactual World Model (CWM) paradigm, which can obtain point-wise correspondences by injecting a small tracer perturbation into a next-frame predictor and tracking its propagation, we extend this idea to generative video models. We explore several popular architectures and find that successful zero-shot flow extraction in this manner is aided by three model properties: (1) distributional prediction of future frames (avoiding blurry or noisy outputs); (2) factorized latents that treat each spatio-temporal patch independently; and (3) random-access decoding that can condition on any subset of future pixels. These properties are uniquely present in the recent Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) architecture. Building on LRAS, we propose KL-tracing: a novel test-time procedure that injects a localized perturbation into the first frame, rolls out the model one step, and computes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between perturbed and unperturbed predictive distributions. Without any flow-specific fine-tuning, our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on real-world TAP-Vid DAVIS dataset (16.6% relative improvement for endpoint error) and synthetic TAP-Vid Kubric (4.7% relative improvement). Our results indicate that counterfactual prompting of controllable generative video models is a scalable and effective alternative to supervised or photometric-loss approaches for high-quality flow.

Paperid: 642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09070.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) synthesizes speech in a target speaker's voice while preserving linguistic and paralinguistic content. However, timbre leakage-where source speaker traits persist-remains a challenge, especially in neural codec and LLM-based VC, where quantized representations entangle speaker identity with content. We introduce SemAlignVC, an architecture designed to prevent timbre leakage using SemAlign, a novel method that aligns text and audio representations to ensure speaker-independent semantic encoding. This disentangled representation conditions an autoregressive transformer for high-fidelity conversion without explicit speaker embeddings. Experiments show SemAlignVC significantly reduces timbre leakage, outperforming baselines in speaker timbre similarity, intelligibility, and naturalness, making it a robust, privacy-preserving, and generalizable VC solution. Audio samples can be accessed at https://shivammehta25.github.io/SemAlignVC/

Paperid: 643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08851.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding open-world semantics is critical for robotic planning and control, particularly in unstructured outdoor environments. Existing vision-language mapping approaches typically rely on object-centric segmentation priors, which often fail outdoors due to semantic ambiguities and indistinct class boundaries. We propose OTAS - an Open-vocabulary Token Alignment method for outdoor Segmentation. OTAS addresses the limitations of open-vocabulary segmentation models by extracting semantic structure directly from the output tokens of pre-trained vision models. By clustering semantically similar structures across single and multiple views and grounding them in language, OTAS reconstructs a geometrically consistent feature field that supports open-vocabulary segmentation queries. Our method operates in a zero-shot manner, without scene-specific fine-tuning, and achieves real-time performance of up to ~17 fps. On the Off-Road Freespace Detection dataset, OTAS yields a modest IoU improvement over fine-tuned and open-vocabulary 2D segmentation baselines. In 3D segmentation on TartanAir, it achieves up to a 151% relative IoU improvement compared to existing open-vocabulary mapping methods. Real-world reconstructions further demonstrate OTAS' applicability to robotic deployment. Code and a ROS 2 node are available at https://otas-segmentation.github.io/.

Paperid: 644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08841.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural architecture search (NAS) is a promising approach for automatically designing neural network architectures. However, the architecture estimation of NAS is computationally expensive and time-consuming because of training multiple architectures from scratch. Although existing zero-shot NAS methods use training-free proxies to accelerate the architecture estimation, their effectiveness, stability, and generality are still lacking. We present a novel training-free estimation proxy called weighted response correlation (WRCor). WRCor utilizes correlation coefficient matrices of responses across different input samples to calculate the proxy scores of estimated architectures, which can measure their expressivity and generalizability. Experimental results on proxy evaluation demonstrate that WRCor and its voting proxies are more efficient estimation strategies than existing proxies. We also apply them with different search strategies in architecture search. Experimental results on architecture search show that our zero-shot NAS algorithm outperforms most existing NAS algorithms in different search spaces. Our NAS algorithm can discover an architecture with a 22.1% test error on the ImageNet-1k dataset within 4 GPU hours. All codes are publicly available at https://github.com/kunjing96/ZSNAS-WRCor.git.

Paperid: 645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08607.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition but degrade significantly under \textit{temporally evolving distribution shifts} common in real-world scenarios (e.g., gradual illumination or seasonal changes). Existing continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) methods are typically built around sudden and severe distribution shifts and neglect temporal continuity, leading to three core defects: limited memory cache restricts long-range distribution modeling, causing catastrophic forgetting; entropy-based confidence becomes unreliable under temporal drift, worsening error accumulation; and static visual representations misalign with evolving inputs. We formalize this practical problem as \textit{Continual-Temporal Test-Time Adaptation (CT-TTA)}, where test distributions evolve gradually over time. To address it, we propose \textit{BayesTTA}, a Bayesian adaptation framework that enforces temporally consistent predictions and dynamically aligns visual representations. Specifically, BayesTTA incrementally estimates class-conditional Gaussian mixture distributions without storing raw data, adaptively selects covariance structures through statistical hypothesis testing, and performs calibrated inference using Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA). These calibrated predictions supervise self-paced adaptation of normalization layers, ensuring efficient and stable representation alignment. We establish a comprehensive CT-TTA benchmark across four temporally evolving datasets and further evaluate generalization on ten standard TTA datasets. Extensive experiments show that BayesTTA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant gains while maintaining efficiency. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/cuishuang99/BayesTTA}{https://github.com/cuishuang99/BayesTTA}.

Paperid: 646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08590.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image-text matching (ITM) aims to address the fundamental challenge of aligning visual and textual modalities, which inherently differ in their representations, continuous, high-dimensional image features vs. discrete, structured text. We propose a novel framework that bridges the modality gap by leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as visual semantic parsers. By generating rich Visual Semantic Descriptions (VSD), MLLMs provide semantic anchor that facilitate cross-modal alignment. Our approach combines: (1) Instance-level alignment by fusing visual features with VSD to enhance the linguistic expressiveness of image representations, and (2) Prototype-level alignment through VSD clustering to ensure category-level consistency. These modules can be seamlessly integrated into existing ITM models. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MSCOCO demonstrate substantial performance improvements. The approach also exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization to cross-domain tasks, including news and remote sensing ITM. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Image-Text-Matching/VSD.

Paperid: 647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08248.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate identification of fungi species presents a unique challenge in computer vision due to fine-grained inter-species variation and high intra-species variation. This paper presents our approach for the FungiCLEF 2025 competition, which focuses on few-shot fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) using the FungiTastic Few-Shot dataset. Our team (DS@GT) experimented with multiple vision transformer models, data augmentation, weighted sampling, and incorporating textual information. We also explored generative AI models for zero-shot classification using structured prompting but found them to significantly underperform relative to vision-based models. Our final model outperformed both competition baselines and highlighted the effectiveness of domain specific pretraining and balanced sampling strategies. Our approach ranked 35/74 on the private test set in post-completion evaluation, this suggests additional work can be done on metadata selection and domain-adapted multi-modal learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/fungiclef-2025.

Paperid: 648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08000.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP and large multimodal models (LMMs) have better accuracy on examples involving concepts that are highly represented in the training data. However, the role of concept combinations in the training data on compositional generalization is largely unclear -- for instance, how does accuracy vary when a common object appears in an uncommon pairing with another object? In this paper, we investigate how word co-occurrence statistics in the pretraining dataset (a proxy for co-occurrence of visual concepts) impacts CLIP/LMM performance. To disentangle the effects of word co-occurrence frequencies from single-word frequencies, we measure co-occurrence with pointwise mutual information (PMI), which normalizes the joint probability of two words co-occurring by the probability of co-occurring independently. Using synthetically generated images with a variety of concept pairs, we show a strong correlation between PMI in the CLIP pretraining data and zero-shot accuracy in CLIP models trained on LAION-400M (r=0.97 and 14% accuracy gap between images in the top and bottom 5% of PMI values), demonstrating that even accuracy on common concepts is affected by the combination of concepts in the image. Leveraging this finding, we reproduce this effect in natural images by editing them to contain pairs with varying PMI, resulting in a correlation of r=0.75. Finally, we demonstrate that this behavior in CLIP transfers to LMMs built on top of CLIP (r=0.70 for TextVQA, r=0.62 for VQAv2). Our findings highlight the need for algorithms and architectures that improve compositional generalization in multimodal models without scaling the training data combinatorially. Our code is available at https://github.com/helenqu/multimodal-pretraining-pmi.

Paperid: 649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07997.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are fundamental models that compress continuous visual data into discrete tokens. Existing methods have tried to improve the quantization strategy for better reconstruction quality, however, there still exists a large gap between VQ-VAEs and VAEs. To narrow this gap, we propose MGVQ, a novel method to augment the representation capability of discrete codebooks, facilitating easier optimization for codebooks and minimizing information loss, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Specifically, we propose to retain the latent dimension to preserve encoded features and incorporate a set of sub-codebooks for quantization. Furthermore, we construct comprehensive zero-shot benchmarks featuring resolutions of 512p and 2k to evaluate the reconstruction performance of existing methods rigorously. MGVQ achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both ImageNet and 8 zero-shot benchmarks across all VQ-VAEs. Notably, compared with SD-VAE, we outperform them on ImageNet significantly, with rFID 0.49 v.s. 0.91, and achieve superior PSNR on all zero-shot benchmarks. These results highlight the superiority of MGVQ in reconstruction and pave the way for preserving fidelity in HD image processing tasks. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/MKJia/MGVQ.

Paperid: 650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07939.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in general multimodal tasks, they often struggle in industrial anomaly detection and reasoning, particularly in delivering interpretable explanations and generalizing to unseen categories. This limitation stems from the inherently domain-specific nature of anomaly detection, which hinders the applicability of existing VLMs in industrial scenarios that require precise, structured, and context-aware analysis. To address these challenges, we propose SAGE, a VLM-based framework that enhances anomaly reasoning through Self-Guided Fact Enhancement (SFE) and Entropy-aware Direct Preference Optimization (E-DPO). SFE integrates domain-specific knowledge into visual reasoning via fact extraction and fusion, while E-DPO aligns model outputs with expert preferences using entropy-aware optimization. Additionally, we introduce AD-PL, a preference-optimized dataset tailored for industrial anomaly reasoning, consisting of 28,415 question-answering instances with expert-ranked responses. To evaluate anomaly reasoning models, we develop Multiscale Logical Evaluation (MLE), a quantitative framework analyzing model logic and consistency. SAGE demonstrates superior performance on industrial anomaly datasets under zero-shot and one-shot settings. The code, model and dataset are available at https://github.com/amoreZgx1n/SAGE.

Paperid: 651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07374.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalizable depth completion enables the acquisition of dense metric depth maps for unseen environments, offering robust perception capabilities for various downstream tasks. However, training such models typically requires large-scale datasets with metric depth labels, which are often labor-intensive to collect. This paper presents PacGDC, a label-efficient technique that enhances data diversity with minimal annotation effort for generalizable depth completion. PacGDC builds on novel insights into inherent ambiguities and consistencies in object shapes and positions during 2D-to-3D projection, allowing the synthesis of numerous pseudo geometries for the same visual scene. This process greatly broadens available geometries by manipulating scene scales of the corresponding depth maps. To leverage this property, we propose a new data synthesis pipeline that uses multiple depth foundation models as scale manipulators. These models robustly provide pseudo depth labels with varied scene scales, affecting both local objects and global layouts, while ensuring projection consistency that supports generalization. To further diversify geometries, we incorporate interpolation and relocation strategies, as well as unlabeled images, extending the data coverage beyond the individual use of foundation models. Extensive experiments show that PacGDC achieves remarkable generalizability across multiple benchmarks, excelling in diverse scene semantics/scales and depth sparsity/patterns under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Code: https://github.com/Wang-xjtu/PacGDC.

Paperid: 652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07254.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Modern deep learning implementations for medical imaging usually rely on large labeled datasets. These datasets are often difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns, high costs, and even scarcity of cases. In this paper, a label-efficient strategy is proposed for chest X-ray diagnosis that seeks to reflect real-world hospital scenarios. The experiments use the NIH Chest X-ray14 dataset and a pre-trained CLIP ViT-B/32 model. The model is adapted via partial fine-tuning of its visual encoder and then evaluated using zero-shot and few-shot learning with 1-16 labeled examples per disease class. The tests demonstrate that CLIP's pre-trained vision-language features can be effectively adapted to few-shot medical imaging tasks, achieving over 20\% improvement in mean AUC score as compared to the zero-shot baseline. The key aspect of this work is to attempt to simulate internal hospital workflows, where image archives exist but annotations are sparse. This work evaluates a practical and scalable solution for both common and rare disease diagnosis. Additionally this research is intended for academic and experimental purposes only and has not been peer reviewed yet. All code is found at https://github.com/heet007-code/CLIP-disease-xray.

Paperid: 653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07095.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Generating diverse and natural human motion sequences based on textual descriptions constitutes a fundamental and challenging research area within the domains of computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Despite significant advancements in this field, current methodologies often face challenges regarding zero-shot generalization capabilities, largely attributable to the limited size of training datasets. Moreover, the lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework impedes the advancement of this task by failing to identify directions for improvement. In this work, we aim to push text-to-motion into a new era, that is, to achieve the generalization ability of zero-shot. To this end, firstly, we develop an efficient annotation pipeline and introduce MotionMillion-the largest human motion dataset to date, featuring over 2,000 hours and 2 million high-quality motion sequences. Additionally, we propose MotionMillion-Eval, the most comprehensive benchmark for evaluating zero-shot motion generation. Leveraging a scalable architecture, we scale our model to 7B parameters and validate its performance on MotionMillion-Eval. Our results demonstrate strong generalization to out-of-domain and complex compositional motions, marking a significant step toward zero-shot human motion generation. The code is available at https://github.com/VankouF/MotionMillion-Codes.

Paperid: 654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06908.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of memes on social media has highlighted the urgent need for effective approaches to detect harmful content. However, traditional data-driven approaches struggle to detect new memes due to their evolving nature and the lack of up-to-date annotated data. To address this issue, we propose MIND, a multi-agent framework for zero-shot harmful meme detection that does not rely on annotated data. MIND implements three key strategies: 1) We retrieve similar memes from an unannotated reference set to provide contextual information. 2) We propose a bi-directional insight derivation mechanism to extract a comprehensive understanding of similar memes. 3) We then employ a multi-agent debate mechanism to ensure robust decision-making through reasoned arbitration. Extensive experiments on three meme datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework not only outperforms existing zero-shot approaches but also shows strong generalization across different model architectures and parameter scales, providing a scalable solution for harmful meme detection. The code is available at https://github.com/destroy-lonely/MIND.

Paperid: 655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06733.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical anomaly detection (AD) is challenging due to diverse imaging modalities, anatomical variations, and limited labeled data. We propose a novel approach combining visual adapters and prompt learning with Partial Optimal Transport (POT) and contrastive learning (CL) to improve CLIP's adaptability to medical images, particularly for AD. Unlike standard prompt learning, which often yields a single representation, our method employs multiple prompts aligned with local features via POT to capture subtle abnormalities. CL further enforces intra-class cohesion and inter-class separation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot, zero-shot, and cross-dataset scenarios without synthetic data or memory banks. The code is available at https://github.com/mahshid1998/MADPOT.

Paperid: 656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06679.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable progress in solving the text-promptable object counting problem. Representative methods typically specify text prompts with object category information in images. This however is insufficient for training the model to accurately distinguish the number of objects in the counting task. To this end, we propose QUANet, which introduces novel quantity-oriented text prompts with a vision-text quantity alignment loss to enhance the model's quantity awareness. Moreover, we propose a dual-stream adaptive counting decoder consisting of a Transformer stream, a CNN stream, and a number of Transformer-to-CNN enhancement adapters (T2C-adapters) for density map prediction. The T2C-adapters facilitate the effective knowledge communication and aggregation between the Transformer and CNN streams. A cross-stream quantity ranking loss is proposed in the end to optimize the ranking orders of predictions from the two streams. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks such as FSC-147, CARPK, PUCPR+, and ShanghaiTech demonstrate our model's strong generalizability for zero-shot class-agnostic counting. Code is available at https://github.com/viscom-tongji/QUANet

Paperid: 657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06205.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we, as the DS@GT team for CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Task 4a Scientific Web Discourse Detection, present the methods we explored for this task. For this multiclass classification task, we determined if a tweet contained a scientific claim, a reference to a scientific study or publication, and/or mentions of scientific entities, such as a university or a scientist. We present 3 modeling approaches for this task: transformer finetuning, few-shot prompting of LLMs, and a combined ensemble model whose design was informed by earlier experiments. Our team placed 7th in the competition, achieving a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.8611, an improvement over the DeBERTaV3 baseline of 0.8375. Our code is available on Github at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2025-swd/tree/main/subtask-4a.

Paperid: 658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06093.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We describe DS@GT's second-place solution to the PlantCLEF 2025 challenge on multi-species plant identification in vegetation quadrat images. Our pipeline combines (i) a fine-tuned Vision Transformer ViTD2PC24All for patch-level inference, (ii) a 4x4 tiling strategy that aligns patch size with the network's 518x518 receptive field, and (iii) domain-prior adaptation through PaCMAP + K-Means visual clustering and geolocation filtering. Tile predictions are aggregated by majority vote and re-weighted with cluster-specific Bayesian priors, yielding a macro-averaged F1 of 0.348 (private leaderboard) while requiring no additional training. All code, configuration files, and reproducibility scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/plantclef-2025.

Paperid: 659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05859.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) enables immersive 3D experiences, but efficient compression of dynamic 3D representation remains a major challenge. Existing dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting methods couple reconstruction with optimization-dependent compression and customized motion formats, limiting generalization and standardization. To address this, we propose D-FCGS, a novel Feedforward Compression framework for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting. Key innovations include: (1) a standardized Group-of-Frames (GoF) structure with I-P coding, leveraging sparse control points to extract inter-frame motion tensors; (2) a dual prior-aware entropy model that fuses hyperprior and spatial-temporal priors for accurate rate estimation; (3) a control-point-guided motion compensation mechanism and refinement network to enhance view-consistent fidelity. Trained on Gaussian frames derived from multi-view videos, D-FCGS generalizes across diverse scenes in a zero-shot fashion. Experiments show that it matches the rate-distortion performance of optimization-based methods, achieving over 40 times compression compared to the baseline while preserving visual quality across viewpoints. This work advances feedforward compression of dynamic 3DGS, facilitating scalable FVV transmission and storage for immersive applications.

Paperid: 660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05502.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate estimation of mutational effects on protein-protein binding energies is an open problem with applications in structural biology and therapeutic design. Several deep learning predictors for this task have been proposed, but, presumably due to the scarcity of binding data, these methods underperform computationally expensive estimates based on empirical force fields. In response, we propose a transfer-learning approach that leverages advances in protein sequence modeling and folding stability prediction for this task. The key idea is to parameterize the binding energy as the difference between the folding energy of the protein complex and the sum of the folding energies of its binding partners. We show that using a pre-trained inverse-folding model as a proxy for folding energy provides strong zero-shot performance, and can be fine-tuned with (1) copious folding energy measurements and (2) more limited binding energy measurements. The resulting predictor, StaB-ddG, is the first deep learning predictor to match the accuracy of the state-of-the-art empirical force-field method FoldX, while offering an over 1,000x speed-up.

Paperid: 661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05394.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable generalization in zero- and few-shot settings, but adapting them efficiently to decentralized, heterogeneous data remains a challenge. While prompt tuning has emerged as a popular parameter-efficient approach in personalized federated learning, existing methods often sacrifice generalization in favor of personalization, struggling particularly on unseen classes or domains. In this work, we propose pFedMMA, the first personalized federated learning framework that leverages multi-modal adapters for vision-language tasks. Each adapter contains modality-specific up- and down-projection layers alongside a globally shared projection that aligns cross-modal features. Our asymmetric optimization strategy allows clients to locally adapt to personalized data distributions while collaboratively training the shared projection to improve global generalization. This design is also communication-efficient, as only the shared component is exchanged during rounds. Through extensive experiments across eleven datasets, including domain- and label-shift scenarios, we show that pFedMMA achieves state-of-the-art trade-offs between personalization and generalization, outperforming recent federated prompt tuning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/sajjad-ucsb/pFedMMA.

Paperid: 662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05146.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The widespread and rapid adoption of AI-generated content, created by models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models, has revolutionized the digital media landscape by allowing efficient and creative content generation. However, these models also blur the difference between real images and AI-generated synthetic images, raising concerns regarding content authenticity and integrity. While many existing solutions to detect fake images focus solely on classification and higher-resolution images, they often lack transparency in their decision-making, making it difficult for users to understand why an image is classified as fake. In this paper, we present VERITAS, a comprehensive framework that not only accurately detects whether a small (32x32) image is AI-generated but also explains why it was classified that way through artifact localization and semantic reasoning. VERITAS produces human-readable explanations that describe key artifacts in synthetic images. We show that this architecture offers clear explanations of the basis of zero-shot synthetic image detection tasks. Code and relevant prompts can be found at https://github.com/V-i-g-n-e-s-h-N/VERITAS .

Paperid: 663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05063.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Biomedical datasets are often constrained by stringent privacy requirements and frequently suffer from severe class imbalance. These two aspects hinder the development of accurate machine learning models. While generative AI offers a promising solution, producing synthetic images of sufficient quality for training robust classifiers remains challenging. This work addresses the classification of individual white blood cells, a critical task in diagnosing hematological malignancies such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML). We introduce CytoDiff, a stable diffusion model fine-tuned with LoRA weights and guided by few-shot samples that generates high-fidelity synthetic white blood cell images. Our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in classifier performance when training data is limited. Using a small, highly imbalanced real dataset, the addition of 5,000 synthetic images per class improved ResNet classifier accuracy from 27\% to 78\% (+51\%). Similarly, CLIP-based classification accuracy increased from 62\% to 77\% (+15\%). These results establish synthetic image generation as a valuable tool for biomedical machine learning, enhancing data coverage and facilitating secure data sharing while preserving patient privacy. Paper code is publicly available at https://github.com/JanCarreras24/CytoDiff.

Paperid: 664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05007.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Critical View of Safety (CVS) is crucial for safe laparoscopic cholecystectomy, yet assessing CVS criteria remains a complex and challenging task, even for experts. Traditional models for CVS recognition depend on vision-only models learning with costly, labor-intensive spatial annotations. This study investigates how text can be harnessed as a powerful tool for both training and inference in multi-modal surgical foundation models to automate CVS recognition. Unlike many existing multi-modal models, which are primarily adapted for multi-class classification, CVS recognition requires a multi-label framework. Zero-shot evaluation of existing multi-modal surgical models shows a significant performance gap for this task. To address this, we propose CVS-AdaptNet, a multi-label adaptation strategy that enhances fine-grained, binary classification across multiple labels by aligning image embeddings with textual descriptions of each CVS criterion using positive and negative prompts. By adapting PeskaVLP, a state-of-the-art surgical foundation model, on the Endoscapes-CVS201 dataset, CVS-AdaptNet achieves 57.6 mAP, improving over the ResNet50 image-only baseline (51.5 mAP) by 6 points. Our results show that CVS-AdaptNet's multi-label, multi-modal framework, enhanced by textual prompts, boosts CVS recognition over image-only methods. We also propose text-specific inference methods, that helps in analysing the image-text alignment. While further work is needed to match state-of-the-art spatial annotation-based methods, this approach highlights the potential of adapting generalist models to specialized surgical tasks. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/CVS-AdaptNet

Paperid: 665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04710.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate detection of anatomic landmarks is essential for assessing alveolar bone and root conditions, thereby optimizing clinical outcomes in orthodontics, periodontics, and implant dentistry. Manual annotation of landmarks on cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) by dentists is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subject to inter-observer variability. Deep learning-based automated methods present a promising approach to streamline this process efficiently. However, the scarcity of training data and the high cost of expert annotations hinder the adoption of conventional deep learning techniques. To overcome these challenges, we introduce GeoSapiens, a novel few-shot learning framework designed for robust dental landmark detection using limited annotated CBCT of anterior teeth. Our GeoSapiens framework comprises two key components: (1) a robust baseline adapted from Sapiens, a foundational model that has achieved state-of-the-art performance in human-centric vision tasks, and (2) a novel geometric loss function that improves the model's capacity to capture critical geometric relationships among anatomical structures. Experiments conducted on our collected dataset of anterior teeth landmarks revealed that GeoSapiens surpassed existing landmark detection methods, outperforming the leading approach by an 8.18% higher success detection rate at a strict 0.5 mm threshold-a standard widely recognized in dental diagnostics. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GeoSapiens.

Paperid: 666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04349.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have enabled natural speech synthesis, but fine-grained, time-varying emotion control remains challenging. Existing methods often allow only utterance-level control and require full model fine-tuning with a large emotion speech dataset, which can degrade performance. Inspired by adding conditional control to the existing model in ControlNet (Zhang et al, 2023), we propose the first ControlNet-based approach for controllable flow-matching TTS (TTS-CtrlNet), which freezes the original model and introduces a trainable copy of it to process additional conditions. We show that TTS-CtrlNet can boost the pretrained large TTS model by adding intuitive, scalable, and time-varying emotion control while inheriting the ability of the original model (e.g., zero-shot voice cloning & naturalness). Furthermore, we provide practical recipes for adding emotion control: 1) optimal architecture design choice with block analysis, 2) emotion-specific flow step, and 3) flexible control scale. Experiments show that ours can effectively add an emotion controller to existing TTS, and achieves state-of-the-art performance with emotion similarity scores: Emo-SIM and Aro-Val SIM. The project page is available at: https://curryjung.github.io/ttsctrlnet_project_page

Paperid: 667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04004.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents the first photo-realistic LiDAR-Inertial-Camera Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that simultaneously addresses visual quality, geometric accuracy, and real-time performance. The proposed method performs robust and accurate pose estimation within a continuous-time trajectory optimization framework, while incrementally reconstructing a 3D Gaussian map using camera and LiDAR data, all in real time. The resulting map enables high-quality, real-time novel view rendering of both RGB images and depth maps. To effectively address under-reconstruction in regions not covered by the LiDAR, we employ a lightweight zero-shot depth model that synergistically combines RGB appearance cues with sparse LiDAR measurements to generate dense depth maps. The depth completion enables reliable Gaussian initialization in LiDAR-blind areas, significantly improving system applicability for sparse LiDAR sensors. To enhance geometric accuracy, we use sparse but precise LiDAR depths to supervise Gaussian map optimization and accelerate it with carefully designed CUDA-accelerated strategies. Furthermore, we explore how the incrementally reconstructed Gaussian map can improve the robustness of odometry. By tightly incorporating photometric constraints from the Gaussian map into the continuous-time factor graph optimization, we demonstrate improved pose estimation under LiDAR degradation scenarios. We also showcase downstream applications via extending our elaborate system, including video frame interpolation and fast 3D mesh extraction. To support rigorous evaluation, we construct a dedicated LiDAR-Inertial-Camera dataset featuring ground-truth poses, depth maps, and extrapolated trajectories for assessing out-of-sequence novel view synthesis. Both the dataset and code will be made publicly available on project page https://xingxingzuo.github.io/gaussian_lic2.

Paperid: 668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03283.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Molecular property prediction is a fundamental task in computational chemistry with critical applications in drug discovery and materials science. While recent works have explored Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task, they primarily rely on textual molecular representations such as SMILES/SELFIES, which can be ambiguous and structurally less informative. In this work, we introduce MolVision, a novel approach that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by integrating both molecular structure as images and textual descriptions to enhance property prediction. We construct a benchmark spanning ten diverse datasets, covering classification, regression and description tasks. Evaluating nine different VLMs in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned settings, we find that visual information improves prediction performance, particularly when combined with efficient fine-tuning strategies such as LoRA. Our results reveal that while visual information alone is insufficient, multimodal fusion significantly enhances generalization across molecular properties. Adaptation of vision encoder for molecular images in conjunction with LoRA further improves the performance. The code and data is available at : $\href{https://molvision.github.io/MolVision/}{https://molvision.github.io/MolVision/}$.

Paperid: 669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03018.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-domain table question answering traditionally relies on a two-stage pipeline: static table retrieval followed by a closed-domain answer. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end agentic framework that embeds multi-turn tool calls-using a BM25+-based search API and a SQLite SQL executor-directly into a large language model. To further adapt a compact 4B-parameter model, we introduce a two-stage fine-tuning process: supervised cold-start on easy questions, then Async GRPO reinforcement learning on harder cases with LoRA adapters and a rollout buffer. This unified approach enables the model to jointly retrieve, reason, and execute queries, yielding a dramatic accuracy improvement from single-digit zero-shot performance to over 0.86 exact match on a held-out test set. Our results underscore the effectiveness of integrating structured tool calls with targeted RL fine-tuning for scalable, accurate table QA. The code is available at https://github.com/TabibitoQZP/OpenTableR1.

Paperid: 670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02948.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Autonomous driving has seen significant progress, driven by extensive real-world data. However, in long-tail scenarios, accurately predicting the safety of the ego vehicle's future motion remains a major challenge due to uncertainties in dynamic environments and limitations in data coverage. In this work, we aim to explore whether it is possible to enhance the motion risk prediction capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLM) by synthesizing high-risk motion data. Specifically, we introduce a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) based motion simulation method to model risks from three aspects: the ego-vehicle, other vehicles, and the environment. This allows us to synthesize plug-and-play, high-risk motion data suitable for VLM training, which we call DriveMRP-10K. Furthermore, we design a VLM-agnostic motion risk estimation framework, named DriveMRP-Agent. This framework incorporates a novel information injection strategy for global context, ego-vehicle perspective, and trajectory projection, enabling VLMs to effectively reason about the spatial relationships between motion waypoints and the environment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by fine-tuning with DriveMRP-10K, our DriveMRP-Agent framework can significantly improve the motion risk prediction performance of multiple VLM baselines, with the accident recognition accuracy soaring from 27.13% to 88.03%. Moreover, when tested via zero-shot evaluation on an in-house real-world high-risk motion dataset, DriveMRP-Agent achieves a significant performance leap, boosting the accuracy from base_model's 29.42% to 68.50%, which showcases the strong generalization capabilities of our method in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02935.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to an agent's capacity to infer the mental states of other agents. ToM is essential for effective collaboration. To assess ToM in a dynamic, goal-oriented, and collaborative environment, we introduce a novel task, Instruction Inference, in which an agent assists a principal in reaching a goal by interpreting indirect or ambiguous instructions. We present Tomcat, an LLM-based agent, designed to exhibit ToM reasoning in interpreting and responding to the principal's instructions. We implement two variants of Tomcat. One, dubbed Fs-CoT, is based on a small number of examples (i.e., few-shot or Fs) demonstrating the requisite structured reasoning (i.e., chain-of-thought or CoT). One, dubbed CP, relies on commonsense knowledge and information about the problem (i.e., commonsense prompt or CP). We realized both variants of Tomcat on three leading large language models (LLMs), namely, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemma-3-27B. To evaluate the effectiveness of Tomcat, we conducted a study with 52 human participants in which we provided participants with the same information as the CP variant of Tomcat. We computed intent accuracy, action optimality, and planning optimality to measure the ToM capabilities of Tomcat and our study participants. We found that Tomcat with Fs-CoT, particularly with GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1, achieves performance comparable to the human participants, underscoring its ToM potential for human-AI collaboration.

Paperid: 672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02768.pdf GitHub

Authors:Ke-Han Lu, Zhehuai Chen, Szu-Wei Fu, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Sung-Feng Huang, Chih-Kai Yang, Chee-En Yu, Chun-Wei Chen, Wei-Chih Chen, Chien-yu Huang, Yi-Cheng Lin, Yu-Xiang Lin, Chi-An Fu, Chun-Yi Kuan, Wenze Ren, Xuanjun Chen, Wei-Ping Huang, En-Pei Hu, Tzu-Quan Lin, Yuan-Kuei Wu, Kuan-Po Huang, Hsiao-Ying Huang, Huang-Cheng Chou, Kai-Wei Chang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Hung-yi Lee

Abstract:
We introduce DeSTA2.5-Audio, a general-purpose Large Audio Language Model (LALM) designed for robust auditory perception and instruction-following, without requiring task-specific audio instruction-tuning. Recent LALMs typically augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities by training on large-scale, manually curated or LLM-synthesized audio-instruction datasets. However, these approaches have often suffered from the catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's original language abilities. To address this, we revisit the data construction pipeline and propose DeSTA, a self-generated cross-modal alignment strategy in which the backbone LLM generates its own training targets. This approach preserves the LLM's native language proficiency while establishing effective audio-text alignment, thereby enabling zero-shot generalization without task-specific tuning. Using DeSTA, we construct DeSTA-AQA5M, a large-scale, task-agnostic dataset containing 5 million training samples derived from 7,000 hours of audio spanning 50 diverse datasets, including speech, environmental sounds, and music. DeSTA2.5-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of audio-language benchmarks, including Dynamic-SUPERB, MMAU, SAKURA, Speech-IFEval, and VoiceBench. Comprehensive comparative studies demonstrate that our self-generated strategy outperforms widely adopted data construction and training strategies in both auditory perception and instruction-following capabilities. Our findings underscore the importance of carefully designed data construction in LALM development and offer practical insights for building robust, general-purpose LALMs.

Paperid: 673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02358.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vanilla autoregressive image generation models generate visual tokens step-by-step, limiting their ability to capture holistic relationships among token sequences. Moreover, because most visual tokenizers map local image patches into latent tokens, global information is limited. To address this, we introduce \textit{Hita}, a novel image tokenizer for autoregressive (AR) image generation. It introduces a holistic-to-local tokenization scheme with learnable holistic queries and local patch tokens. Hita incorporates two key strategies to better align with the AR generation process: 1) {arranging} a sequential structure with holistic tokens at the beginning, followed by patch-level tokens, and using causal attention to maintain awareness of previous tokens; and 2) adopting a lightweight fusion module before feeding the de-quantized tokens into the decoder to control information flow and prioritize holistic tokens. Extensive experiments show that Hita accelerates the training speed of AR generators and outperforms those trained with vanilla tokenizers, achieving \textbf{2.59 FID} and \textbf{281.9 IS} on the ImageNet benchmark. Detailed analysis of the holistic representation highlights its ability to capture global image properties, such as textures, materials, and shapes. Additionally, Hita also demonstrates effectiveness in zero-shot style transfer and image in-painting. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Hita}{https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Hita}.

Paperid: 674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02314.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly generation is emerging as a practical solution for augmenting the scarce anomaly data in industrial quality control settings. An ideal generator would meet three demands at once, namely (i) keep the normal background intact, (ii) inpaint anomalous regions to tightly overlap with the corresponding anomaly masks, and (iii) generate anomalous regions in a semantically valid location, while still producing realistic, diverse appearances from only a handful of real examples. Existing diffusion-based methods usually satisfy at most two of these requirements: global anomaly generators corrupt the background, whereas mask-guided ones often falter when the mask is imprecise or misplaced. We propose MAGIC--Mask-guided inpainting with multi-level perturbations and Context-aware alignment--to resolve all three issues. At its core, MAGIC fine-tunes a Stable Diffusion inpainting backbone that preserves normal regions and ensures strict adherence of the synthesized anomaly to the supplied mask, directly addressing background corruption and misalignment. To offset the diversity loss that fine-tuning can cause, MAGIC adds two complementary perturbation strategies: (i) Gaussian prompt-level perturbation applied during fine-tuning and inference that broadens the global appearance of anomalies while avoiding low-fidelity textual appearances, and (ii) mask-guided spatial noise injection that enriches local texture variations. Additionally, the context-aware mask alignment module forms semantic correspondences and relocates masks so that every anomaly remains plausibly contained within the host object, eliminating out-of-boundary artifacts. Under a consistent identical evaluation protocol on the MVTec-AD dataset, MAGIC outperforms previous state-of-the-arts in downstream anomaly tasks.

Paperid: 675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01634.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We present Depth Anything at Any Condition (DepthAnything-AC), a foundation monocular depth estimation (MDE) model capable of handling diverse environmental conditions. Previous foundation MDE models achieve impressive performance across general scenes but not perform well in complex open-world environments that involve challenging conditions, such as illumination variations, adverse weather, and sensor-induced distortions. To overcome the challenges of data scarcity and the inability of generating high-quality pseudo-labels from corrupted images, we propose an unsupervised consistency regularization finetuning paradigm that requires only a relatively small amount of unlabeled data. Furthermore, we propose the Spatial Distance Constraint to explicitly enforce the model to learn patch-level relative relationships, resulting in clearer semantic boundaries and more accurate details. Experimental results demonstrate the zero-shot capabilities of DepthAnything-AC across diverse benchmarks, including real-world adverse weather benchmarks, synthetic corruption benchmarks, and general benchmarks. Project Page: https://ghost233lism.github.io/depthanything-AC-page Code: https://github.com/HVision-NKU/DepthAnythingAC

Paperid: 676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01016.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce an innovative vector quantization based action tokenizer built upon the largest-scale action trajectory dataset to date, leveraging over 100 times more data than previous approaches. This extensive dataset enables our tokenizer to capture rich spatiotemporal dynamics, resulting in a model that not only accelerates inference but also generates smoother and more coherent action outputs. Once trained, the tokenizer can be seamlessly adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner, from short-horizon reactive behaviors to long-horizon planning. A key finding of our work is that the domain gap between synthetic and real action trajectories is marginal, allowing us to effectively utilize a vast amount of synthetic data during training without compromising real-world performance. To validate our approach, we conducted extensive experiments in both simulated environments and on real robotic platforms. The results demonstrate that as the volume of synthetic trajectory data increases, the performance of our tokenizer on downstream tasks improves significantly-most notably, achieving up to a 30% higher success rate on two real-world tasks in long-horizon scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of our action tokenizer as a robust and scalable solution for real-time embodied intelligence systems, paving the way for more efficient and reliable robotic control in diverse application domains.Project website: https://xiaoxiao0406.github.io/vqvla.github.io

Paperid: 677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00790.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unified image restoration is a significantly challenging task in low-level vision. Existing methods either make tailored designs for specific tasks, limiting their generalizability across various types of degradation, or rely on training with paired datasets, thereby suffering from closed-set constraints. To address these issues, we propose a novel, dataset-free, and unified approach through recurrent posterior sampling utilizing a pretrained latent diffusion model. Our method incorporates the multimodal understanding model to provide sematic priors for the generative model under a task-blind condition. Furthermore, it utilizes a lightweight module to align the degraded input with the generated preference of the diffusion model, and employs recurrent refinement for posterior sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness and robustness. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/LD-RPS.

Paperid: 678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00721.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA) presents substantial challenges due to the lack of images in the target domain. Previous approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to tackle this challenge, exploiting their zero-shot learning capabilities. However, these methods primarily address domain distribution shifts and overlook the misalignment between the detection task and VLMs, which rely on manually crafted prompts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the unified prompt and representation enhancement (UPRE) framework, which jointly optimizes both textual prompts and visual representations. Specifically, our approach introduces a multi-view domain prompt that combines linguistic domain priors with detection-specific knowledge, and a visual representation enhancement module that produces domain style variations. Furthermore, we introduce multi-level enhancement strategies, including relative domain distance and positive-negative separation, which align multi-modal representations at the image level and capture diverse visual representations at the instance level, respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in ZSDA detection scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/UPRE.

Paperid: 679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00566.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to classify unseen skeleton-based human actions without prior exposure to such categories during training. This task is extremely challenging due to the difficulty in generalizing from known to unknown actions. Previous studies typically use two-stage training: pre-training skeleton encoders on seen action categories using cross-entropy loss and then aligning pre-extracted skeleton and text features, enabling knowledge transfer to unseen classes through skeleton-text alignment and language models' generalization. However, their efficacy is hindered by 1) insufficient discrimination for skeleton features, as the fixed skeleton encoder fails to capture necessary alignment information for effective skeleton-text alignment; 2) the neglect of alignment bias between skeleton and unseen text features during testing. To this end, we propose a prototype-guided feature alignment paradigm for zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition, termed PGFA. Specifically, we develop an end-to-end cross-modal contrastive training framework to improve skeleton-text alignment, ensuring sufficient discrimination for skeleton features. Additionally, we introduce a prototype-guided text feature alignment strategy to mitigate the adverse impact of the distribution discrepancy during testing. We provide a theoretical analysis to support our prototype-guided text feature alignment strategy and empirically evaluate our overall PGFA on three well-known datasets. Compared with the top competitor SMIE method, our PGFA achieves absolute accuracy improvements of 22.96%, 12.53%, and 18.54% on the NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets, respectively.

Paperid: 680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00419.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding Earth's subsurface is critical for energy transition, natural hazard mitigation, and planetary science. Yet subsurface analysis remains fragmented, with separate models required for structural interpretation, stratigraphic analysis, geobody segmentation, and property modeling-each tightly coupled to specific data distributions and task formulations. We introduce the Geological Everything Model 3D (GEM), a unified generative architecture that reformulates all these tasks as prompt-conditioned inference along latent structural frameworks derived from subsurface imaging. This formulation moves beyond task-specific models by enabling a shared inference mechanism, where GEM propagates human-provided prompts-such as well logs, masks, or structural sketches-along inferred structural frameworks to produce geologically coherent outputs. Through this mechanism, GEM achieves zero-shot generalization across tasks with heterogeneous prompt types, without retraining for new tasks or data sources. This capability emerges from a two-stage training process that combines self-supervised representation learning on large-scale field seismic data with adversarial fine-tuning using mixed prompts and labels across diverse subsurface tasks. GEM demonstrates broad applicability across surveys and tasks, including Martian radar stratigraphy analysis, structural interpretation in subduction zones, full seismic stratigraphic interpretation, geobody segmentation, and property modeling. By bridging expert knowledge with generative reasoning in a structurally aware manner, GEM lays the foundation for scalable, human-in-the-loop geophysical AI-transitioning from fragmented pipelines to a vertically integrated, promptable reasoning system. Project page: https://douyimin.github.io/GEM

Paperid: 681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00401.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We investigate cross-domain few-shot learning under the constraint that fine-tuning of backbones (i.e., feature extractors) is impossible or infeasible -- a scenario that is increasingly common in practical use cases. Handling the low-quality and static embeddings produced by frozen, "black-box" backbones leads to a problem representation of few-shot classification as a series of multiple instance verification (MIV) tasks. Inspired by this representation, we introduce a novel approach to few-shot domain adaptation, named the "MIV-head", akin to a classification head that is agnostic to any pretrained backbone and computationally efficient. The core components designed for the MIV-head, when trained on few-shot data from a target domain, collectively yield strong performance on test data from that domain. Importantly, it does so without fine-tuning the backbone, and within the "meta-testing" phase. Experimenting under various settings and on an extension of the Meta-dataset benchmark for cross-domain few-shot image classification, using representative off-the-shelf convolutional neural network and vision transformer backbones pretrained on ImageNet1K, we show that the MIV-head achieves highly competitive accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art "adapter" (or partially fine-tuning) methods applied to the same backbones, while incurring substantially lower adaptation cost. We also find well-known "classification head" approaches lag far behind in terms of accuracy. Ablation study empirically justifies the core components of our approach. We share our code at https://github.com/xxweka/MIV-head.

Paperid: 682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00392.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Feature matching plays a fundamental role in many computer vision tasks, yet existing methods heavily rely on scarce and clean multi-view image collections, which constrains their generalization to diverse and challenging scenarios. Moreover, conventional feature encoders are typically trained on single-view 2D images, limiting their capacity to capture 3D-aware correspondences. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework that lifts 2D images to 3D space, named as \textbf{Lift to Match (L2M)}, taking full advantage of large-scale and diverse single-view images. To be specific, in the first stage, we learn a 3D-aware feature encoder using a combination of multi-view image synthesis and 3D feature Gaussian representation, which injects 3D geometry knowledge into the encoder. In the second stage, a novel-view rendering strategy, combined with large-scale synthetic data generation from single-view images, is employed to learn a feature decoder for robust feature matching, thus achieving generalization across diverse domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior generalization across zero-shot evaluation benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed framework for robust feature matching.

Paperid: 683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00390.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient scaling of large language models by activating only a subset of experts per input token. However, deploying MoE-based models incurs significant memory overhead due to the need to retain all experts in memory. While structured pruning is promising to reduce memory costs, existing methods often show suboptimal performance and unstable degradation in three dimensions: model architectures, calibration data sources, and calibration sample sizes. This paper proposes Mixture-of-Novices-and-Experts (MoNE), a novel expert pruning method that replaces redundant experts with lightweight novices to achieve effective and robust model compression. MoNE evaluates expert redundancy based on two metrics: access frequency and output variance. Experts exhibiting low usage and stable outputs are pruned and replaced with lightweight novices-unbiased estimations of their original outputs-minimizing performance degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoNE consistently outperforms baseline methods with minimal accuracy degradation across the three dimensions, confirming its effectiveness and robustness. Notably, it improves the average zero shot accuracy across nine downstream tasks by up to 2.71 under 25\% pruning ratio and 3.61 under 50\% pruning. The code is available at https://github.com/zxgx/mode-pd.

Paperid: 684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00327.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has proven effective in reducing computational costs while maintaining performance comparable to fully fine-tuned foundation models across various tasks. However, its fixed low-rank structure restricts its adaptability in scenarios with substantial domain gaps, where higher ranks are often required to capture domain-specific complexities. Current adaptive LoRA methods attempt to overcome this limitation by dynamically expanding or selectively allocating ranks, but these approaches frequently depend on computationally intensive techniques such as iterative pruning, rank searches, or additional regularization. To address these challenges, we introduce Stable Rank-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (SR-LoRA), a novel framework that utilizes the stable rank of pre-trained weight matrices as a natural prior for layer-wise rank allocation. By leveraging the stable rank, which reflects the intrinsic dimensionality of the weights, SR-LoRA enables a principled and efficient redistribution of ranks across layers, enhancing adaptability without incurring additional search costs. Empirical evaluations on few-shot tasks with significant domain gaps show that SR-LoRA consistently outperforms recent adaptive LoRA variants, achieving a superior trade-off between performance and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndoluminalSurgicalVision-IMR/SR-LoRA.

Paperid: 685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00273.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled advances in humanoid robot locomotion, yet most learning frameworks do not account for mechanical intelligence embedded in parallel actuation mechanisms due to limitations in simulator support for closed kinematic chains. This omission can lead to inaccurate motion modeling and suboptimal policies, particularly for robots with high actuation complexity. This paper presents general formulations and simulation methods for three types of parallel mechanisms: a differential pulley, a five-bar linkage, and a four-bar linkage, and trains a parallel-mechanism aware policy through an end-to-end curriculum RL framework for BRUCE, a kid-sized humanoid robot. Unlike prior approaches that rely on simplified serial approximations, we simulate all closed-chain constraints natively using GPU-accelerated MuJoCo (MJX), preserving the hardware's mechanical nonlinear properties during training. We benchmark our RL approach against a model predictive controller (MPC), demonstrating better surface generalization and performance in real-world zero-shot deployment. This work highlights the computational approaches and performance benefits of fully simulating parallel mechanisms in end-to-end learning pipelines for legged humanoids. Project codes with parallel mechanisms: https://github.com/alvister88/og_bruce

Paperid: 686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00037.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Model fusion aims to combine the knowledge of multiple models by creating one representative model that captures the strengths of all of its parents. However, this process is non-trivial due to differences in internal representations, which can stem from permutation invariance, random initialization, or differently distributed training data. We present a novel, neuron-centric family of model fusion algorithms designed to integrate multiple trained neural networks into a single network effectively regardless of training data distribution. Our algorithms group intermediate neurons of parent models to create target representations that the fused model approximates with its corresponding sub-network. Unlike prior approaches, our approach incorporates neuron attribution scores into the fusion process. Furthermore, our algorithms can generalize to arbitrary layer types. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithms consistently outperform previous fusion techniques, particularly in zero-shot and non-IID fusion scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/AndrewSpano/neuron-interpolation-model-fusion.

Paperid: 687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23919.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Improving data efficiency and generalization in robotic manipulation remains a core challenge. We propose a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained multimodal image-generation model as a world model to guide policy learning. By exploiting its rich visual-semantic representations and strong generalization across diverse scenes, the model generates open-ended future state predictions that inform downstream manipulation. Coupled with zero-shot low-level control modules, our approach enables general-purpose robotic manipulation without task-specific training. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that our method achieves effective performance across a wide range of manipulation tasks with no additional data collection or fine-tuning. Supplementary materials are available on our website: https://world4omni.github.io/.

Paperid: 688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23822.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have achieved remarkable success in zero-shot learning (ZSL) by leveraging large-scale visual-text pair datasets. However, these methods often lack interpretability, as they compute the similarity between an entire query image and the embedded category words, making it difficult to explain their predictions. One approach to address this issue is to develop interpretable models by integrating language, where classifiers are built using discrete attributes, similar to human perception. This introduces a new challenge: how to effectively align local visual features with corresponding attributes based on pre-trained VLMs. To tackle this, we propose LaZSL, a locally-aligned vision-language model for interpretable ZSL. LaZSL employs local visual-semantic alignment via optimal transport to perform interaction between visual regions and their associated attributes, facilitating effective alignment and providing interpretable similarity without the need for additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method offers several advantages, including enhanced interpretability, improved accuracy, and strong domain generalization. Codes available at: https://github.com/shiming-chen/LaZSL.

Paperid: 689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23810.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
An innovative few-shot anomaly detection approach is presented, leveraging the pre-trained CLIP model for medical data, and adapting it for both image-level anomaly classification (AC) and pixel-level anomaly segmentation (AS). A dual-branch design is proposed to separately capture normal and abnormal features through learnable adapters in the CLIP vision encoder. To improve semantic alignment, learnable text prompts are employed to link visual features. Furthermore, SigLIP loss is applied to effectively handle the many-to-one relationship between images and unpaired text prompts, showcasing its adaptation in the medical field for the first time. Our approach is validated on multiple modalities, demonstrating superior performance over existing methods for AC and AS, in both same-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations. Unlike prior work, it does not rely on synthetic data or memory banks, and an ablation study confirms the contribution of each component. The code is available at https://github.com/mahshid1998/MadCLIP.

Paperid: 690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23785.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose VisTex-OVLM, a novel image prompted object detection method that introduces visual textualization -- a process that projects a few visual exemplars into the text feature space to enhance Object-level Vision-Language Models' (OVLMs) capability in detecting rare categories that are difficult to describe textually and nearly absent from their pre-training data, while preserving their pre-trained object-text alignment. Specifically, VisTex-OVLM leverages multi-scale textualizing blocks and a multi-stage fusion strategy to integrate visual information from visual exemplars, generating textualized visual tokens that effectively guide OVLMs alongside text prompts. Unlike previous methods, our method maintains the original architecture of OVLM, maintaining its generalization capabilities while enhancing performance in few-shot settings. VisTex-OVLM demonstrates superior performance across open-set datasets which have minimal overlap with OVLM's pre-training data and achieves state-of-the-art results on few-shot benchmarks PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO. The code will be released at https://github.com/WitGotFlg/VisTex-OVLM.

Paperid: 691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23605.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Lecture slide element detection and retrieval are key problems in slide understanding. Training effective models for these tasks often depends on extensive manual annotation. However, annotating large volumes of lecture slides for supervised training is labor intensive and requires domain expertise. To address this, we propose a large language model (LLM)-guided synthetic lecture slide generation pipeline, SynLecSlideGen, which produces high-quality, coherent and realistic slides. We also create an evaluation benchmark, namely RealSlide by manually annotating 1,050 real lecture slides. To assess the utility of our synthetic slides, we perform few-shot transfer learning on real data using models pre-trained on them. Experimental results show that few-shot transfer learning with pretraining on synthetic slides significantly improves performance compared to training only on real data. This demonstrates that synthetic data can effectively compensate for limited labeled lecture slides. The code and resources of our work are publicly available on our project website: https://synslidegen.github.io/.

Paperid: 692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23298.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enormous potential to perform few-shot in-context learning in the context of medical image analysis. However, safe deployment of these models into real-world clinical practice requires an in-depth analysis of the accuracies of their predictions, and their associated calibration errors, particularly across different demographic subgroups. In this work, we present the first investigation into the calibration biases and demographic unfairness of MLLMs' predictions and confidence scores in few-shot in-context learning for medical image classification. We introduce CALIN, an inference-time calibration method designed to mitigate the associated biases. Specifically, CALIN estimates the amount of calibration needed, represented by calibration matrices, using a bi-level procedure: progressing from the population level to the subgroup level prior to inference. It then applies this estimation to calibrate the predicted confidence scores during inference. Experimental results on three medical imaging datasets: PAPILA for fundus image classification, HAM10000 for skin cancer classification, and MIMIC-CXR for chest X-ray classification demonstrate CALIN's effectiveness at ensuring fair confidence calibration in its prediction, while improving its overall prediction accuracies and exhibiting minimum fairness-utility trade-off. Our codebase can be found at https://github.com/xingbpshen/medical-calibration-fairness-mllm.

Paperid: 693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23266.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs face significant obstacles due to their massive parameter scale, which imposes memory, storage, and deployment challenges. Although recent expert merging methods promise greater efficiency by consolidating multiple experts, they are fundamentally hindered by parameter conflicts arising from expert specialization. In this paper, we present Sub-MoE, a novel MoE compression framework via Subspace Expert Merging. Our key insight is to perform joint Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on concatenated expert weights, reducing conflicting parameters by extracting shared $U$-matrices while enabling effective merging of the expert-specific $V$ components. Specifically, Sub-MoE consists of two innovative phases: (1) Adaptive Expert Clustering, which groups functionally coherent experts via K-means clustering based on cosine similarity of expert outputs; and (2) Subspace Expert Merging, which first enforces Experts Union Decomposition to derive the shared $U$-matrix across experts in the same group, then pursues frequency-based merging for individual $V$-matrices, and finalizes expert reconstruction using the merged $V$-matrix. In this way, we align and fuse experts in a shared subspace, and can be extended with intra-expert compression for further inference optimization. Extensive experiments on Mixtral, DeepSeek, and Qwen-1.5|3 MoE LLMs demonstrate that our Sub-MoE significantly outperforms existing expert pruning and merging methods. Notably, our Sub-MoE maintains 96\%|86\% of original performance with 25\%|50\% expert reduction on Mixtral-8x7B in zero-shot benchmarks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lliai/MoERazor.

Paperid: 694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22979.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (GFSS) aims to extend a segmentation model to novel classes with only a few annotated examples while maintaining performance on base classes. Recently, pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have been leveraged in GFSS to improve generalization on novel classes through multi-modal prototypes learning. However, existing prototype-based methods are inherently deterministic, limiting the adaptability of learned prototypes to diverse samples, particularly for novel classes with scarce annotations. To address this, we propose FewCLIP, a probabilistic prototype calibration framework over multi-modal prototypes from the pretrained CLIP, thus providing more adaptive prototype learning for GFSS. Specifically, FewCLIP first introduces a prototype calibration mechanism, which refines frozen textual prototypes with learnable visual calibration prototypes, leading to a more discriminative and adaptive representation. Furthermore, unlike deterministic prototype learning techniques, FewCLIP introduces distribution regularization over these calibration prototypes. This probabilistic formulation ensures structured and uncertainty-aware prototype learning, effectively mitigating overfitting to limited novel class data while enhancing generalization. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets demonstrate that our proposed FewCLIP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across both GFSS and class-incremental setting. The code is available at https://github.com/jliu4ai/FewCLIP.

Paperid: 695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22967.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We address the task of zero-shot video classification for extremely fine-grained actions (e.g., Windmill Dunk in basketball), where no video examples or temporal annotations are available for unseen classes. While image-language models (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP) show strong open-set recognition, they lack temporal modeling needed for video understanding. We propose ActAlign, a truly zero-shot, training-free method that formulates video classification as a sequence alignment problem, preserving the generalization strength of pretrained image-language models. For each class, a large language model (LLM) generates an ordered sequence of sub-actions, which we align with video frames using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in a shared embedding space. Without any video-text supervision or fine-tuning, ActAlign achieves 30.5% accuracy on ActionAtlas--the most diverse benchmark of fine-grained actions across multiple sports--where human performance is only 61.6%. ActAlign outperforms billion-parameter video-language models while using 8x fewer parameters. Our approach is model-agnostic and domain-general, demonstrating that structured language priors combined with classical alignment methods can unlock the open-set recognition potential of image-language models for fine-grained video understanding.

Paperid: 696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22819.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLM) have demonstrated impressive performance in image recognition by leveraging self-supervised training on large datasets. Their performance can be further improved by adapting to the test sample using test-time prompt tuning (TPT). Unfortunately, the singular focus of TPT approaches on improving the accuracy suffers from tunnel vision, and leads to degradation in confidence calibration. This limits the applicability of TPT in critical applications. We make three contributions in this work. (1) We posit that random or naive initialization of prompts leads to overfitting on a particular test sample, and is the main reason for miscalibration of the VLM after TPT. To mitigate the problem, we propose careful initialization of test time prompt using prior knowledge about the target label attributes from a large language model (LLM); (2) To further maintain the quality of prompts during \tpt, we propose a novel regularization loss to reduce intraclass distance, and increase inter-class distance between the learnt Through extensive experiments on different CLIP architectures and 15 datasets, we show that our approach can effectively improve the calibration after TPT. We report an average expected calibration error (ECE) of 4.11 with our method, TCA, compared to 11.7 for vanilla TPT, 6.12 for C-TPT (ICLR'24), 6.78 for DiffTPT (CVPR'23), and 8.43 for PromptAlign (NeurIPS'23). The code is publicly accessible at: https://github.com/rhebbalaguppe/TCA_PromptWithoutPanic.

Paperid: 697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22101.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Common prototype-based medical image few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods model foreground and background classes using class-specific prototypes. However, given the high variability of the background, a more promising direction is to focus solely on foreground modeling, treating the background as an anomaly -- an approach introduced by ADNet. Yet, ADNet faces three key limitations: dependence on a single prototype per class, a focus on binary classification, and fixed thresholds that fail to adapt to patient and organ variability. To address these shortcomings, we propose the Tied Prototype Model (TPM), a principled reformulation of ADNet with tied prototype locations for foreground and background distributions. Building on its probabilistic foundation, TPM naturally extends to multiple prototypes and multi-class segmentation while effectively separating non-typical background features. Notably, both extensions lead to improved segmentation accuracy. Finally, we leverage naturally occurring class priors to define an ideal target for adaptive thresholds, boosting segmentation performance. Taken together, TPM provides a fresh perspective on prototype-based FSS for medical image segmentation. The code can be found at https://github.com/hjk92g/TPM-FSS.

Paperid: 698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22044.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstruction and rendering-based talking head synthesis methods achieve high-quality results with strong identity preservation but are limited by their dependence on identity-specific models. Each new identity requires training from scratch, incurring high computational costs and reduced scalability compared to generative model-based approaches. To overcome this limitation, we propose FIAG, a novel 3D speaking head synthesis framework that enables efficient identity-specific adaptation using only a few training footage. FIAG incorporates Global Gaussian Field, which supports the representation of multiple identities within a shared field, and Universal Motion Field, which captures the common motion dynamics across diverse identities. Benefiting from the shared facial structure information encoded in the Global Gaussian Field and the general motion priors learned in the motion field, our framework enables rapid adaptation from canonical identity representations to specific ones with minimal data. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, validating both the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed framework. Code is available at: \textit{https://github.com/gme-hong/FIAG}.

Paperid: 699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21923.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Histological analysis plays a crucial role in understanding tissue structure and pathology. While recent advancements in registration methods have improved 2D histological analysis, they often struggle to preserve critical 3D spatial relationships, limiting their utility in both clinical and research applications. Specifically, constructing accurate 3D models from 2D slices remains challenging due to tissue deformation, sectioning artifacts, variability in imaging techniques, and inconsistent illumination. Deep learning-based registration methods have demonstrated improved performance but suffer from limited generalizability and require large-scale training data. In contrast, non-deep-learning approaches offer better generalizability but often compromise on accuracy. In this study, we introduced ZeroReg3D, a novel zero-shot registration pipeline tailored for accurate 3D reconstruction from serial histological sections. By combining zero-shot deep learning-based keypoint matching with optimization-based affine and non-rigid registration techniques, ZeroReg3D effectively addresses critical challenges such as tissue deformation, sectioning artifacts, staining variability, and inconsistent illumination without requiring retraining or fine-tuning. The code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/ZeroReg3D

Paperid: 700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21826.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As rich sources of history, maps provide crucial insights into historical changes, yet their diverse visual representations and limited annotated data pose significant challenges for automated processing. We propose a simple yet effective approach for few-shot segmentation of historical maps, leveraging the rich semantic embeddings of large vision foundation models combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Siegfried benchmark dataset in vineyard and railway segmentation, achieving +5% and +13% relative improvements in mIoU in 10-shot scenarios and around +20% in the more challenging 5-shot setting. Additionally, it demonstrates strong performance on the ICDAR 2021 competition dataset, attaining a mean PQ of 67.3% for building block segmentation, despite not being optimized for this shape-sensitive metric, underscoring its generalizability. Notably, our approach maintains high performance even in extremely low-data regimes (10- & 5-shot), while requiring only 689k trainable parameters - just 0.21% of the total model size. Our approach enables precise segmentation of diverse historical maps while drastically reducing the need for manual annotations, advancing automated processing and analysis in the field. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/RafaelSterzinger/few-shot-map-segmentation.

Paperid: 701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21803.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) play a vital role in monitoring cardiac health and diagnosing heart diseases. However, traditional deep learning approaches for ECG analysis rely heavily on large-scale manual annotations, which are both time-consuming and resource-intensive to obtain. To overcome this limitation, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative, enabling the extraction of robust ECG representations that can be efficiently transferred to various downstream tasks. While previous studies have explored SSL for ECG pretraining and multi-modal ECG-language alignment, they often fail to capture the multi-scale nature of ECG signals. As a result, these methods struggle to learn generalized representations due to their inability to model the hierarchical structure of ECG data. To address this gap, we introduce MELP, a novel Multi-scale ECG-Language Pretraining (MELP) model that fully leverages hierarchical supervision from ECG-text pairs. MELP first pretrains a cardiology-specific language model to enhance its understanding of clinical text. It then applies three levels of cross-modal supervision-at the token, beat, and rhythm levels-to align ECG signals with textual reports, capturing structured information across different time scales. We evaluate MELP on three public ECG datasets across multiple tasks, including zero-shot ECG classification, linear probing, and transfer learning. Experimental results demonstrate that MELP outperforms existing SSL methods, underscoring its effectiveness and adaptability across diverse clinical applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/MELP.

Paperid: 702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21718.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In many industries, predicting metric outcomes of large systems is a fundamental problem, driven largely by traditional tabular regression. However, such methods struggle on complex systems data in the wild such as configuration files or system logs, where feature engineering is often infeasible. We propose text-to-text regression as a general, scalable alternative. For predicting resource efficiency on Borg, Google's massive compute cluster scheduling system, a 60M parameter encoder-decoder, trained from random initialization, achieves up to a near perfect 0.99 (0.9 average) rank correlation across the entire fleet, and 100x lower MSE than tabular approaches. The model also easily adapts to new tasks in only 500 few-shot examples and captures the densities of complex outcome distributions. Ablation studies highlight the importance of using encoders, increasing sequence length, and the model's inherent uncertainty quantification. These findings pave the way for universal simulators of real-world outcomes.

Paperid: 703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21619.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing autoregressive large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a significant limitation in applications requiring strict audio-visual synchronization, such as video dubbing. This paper introduces IndexTTS2, which proposes a novel, general, and autoregressive model-friendly method for speech duration control. The method supports two generation modes: one explicitly specifies the number of generated tokens to precisely control speech duration; the other freely generates speech in an autoregressive manner without specifying the number of tokens, while faithfully reproducing the prosodic features of the input prompt. Furthermore, IndexTTS2 achieves disentanglement between emotional expression and speaker identity, enabling independent control over timbre and emotion. In the zero-shot setting, the model can accurately reconstruct the target timbre (from the timbre prompt) while perfectly reproducing the specified emotional tone (from the style prompt). To enhance speech clarity in highly emotional expressions, we incorporate GPT latent representations and design a novel three-stage training paradigm to improve the stability of the generated speech. Additionally, to lower the barrier for emotional control, we designed a soft instruction mechanism based on text descriptions by fine-tuning Qwen3, effectively guiding the generation of speech with the desired emotional orientation. Finally, experimental results on multiple datasets show that IndexTTS2 outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS models in terms of word error rate, speaker similarity, and emotional fidelity. Audio samples are available at: https://index-tts.github.io/index-tts2.github.io/

Paperid: 704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21575.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose STRuCT-LLM, a unified framework for training large language models (LLMs) to perform structured reasoning over both relational and graph-structured data. Our approach jointly optimizes Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. To support fine-grained optimization in graph-based parsing, we introduce a topology-aware reward function based on graph edit distance. Unlike prior work that treats relational and graph formalisms in isolation, STRuCT-LLM leverages shared abstractions between SQL and Cypher to induce cross-formalism transfer, enabling SQL training to improve Cypher performance and vice versa - even without shared schemas. Our largest model (QwQ-32B) achieves substantial relative improvements across tasks: on semantic parsing, Spider improves by 13.5\% and Text2Cypher by 73.1\%. The model also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving performance on downstream tabular QA (TableBench: 8.5\%) and knowledge graph QA (CR-LT-KGQA: 1.7\%) without any QA-specific supervision. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of executable queries as scaffolds for structured reasoning and the synergistic benefits of jointly training on SQL and Cypher (code available at https://github.com/bouv/STRuCT-LLM).

Paperid: 705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21526.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Warping-Alone Field Transforms (WAFT), a simple and effective method for optical flow. WAFT is similar to RAFT but replaces cost volume with high-resolution warping, achieving better accuracy with lower memory cost. This design challenges the conventional wisdom that constructing cost volumes is necessary for strong performance. WAFT is a simple and flexible meta-architecture with minimal inductive biases and reliance on custom designs. Compared with existing methods, WAFT ranks 1st on Spring and KITTI benchmarks, achieves the best zero-shot generalization on KITTI, while being up to 4.1x faster than methods with similar performance. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/WAFT.

Paperid: 706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20879.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generation of images containing multiple humans, performing complex actions, while preserving their facial identities, is a significant challenge. A major factor contributing to this is the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this, we introduce MultiHuman-Testbench, a novel benchmark for rigorously evaluating generative models for multi-human generation. The benchmark comprises 1800 samples, including carefully curated text prompts, describing a range of simple to complex human actions. These prompts are matched with a total of 5,550 unique human face images, sampled uniformly to ensure diversity across age, ethnic background, and gender. Alongside captions, we provide human-selected pose conditioning images which accurately match the prompt. We propose a multi-faceted evaluation suite employing four key metrics to quantify face count, ID similarity, prompt alignment, and action detection. We conduct a thorough evaluation of a diverse set of models, including zero-shot approaches and training-based methods, with and without regional priors. We also propose novel techniques to incorporate image and region isolation using human segmentation and Hungarian matching, significantly improving ID similarity. Our proposed benchmark and key findings provide valuable insights and a standardized tool for advancing research in multi-human image generation. The dataset and evaluation codes will be available at https://github.com/Qualcomm-AI-research/MultiHuman-Testbench.

Paperid: 707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20487.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humanoid robots are drawing significant attention as versatile platforms for complex motor control, human-robot interaction, and general-purpose physical intelligence. However, achieving efficient whole-body control (WBC) in humanoids remains a fundamental challenge due to sophisticated dynamics, underactuation, and diverse task requirements. While learning-based controllers have shown promise for complex tasks, their reliance on labor-intensive and costly retraining for new scenarios limits real-world applicability. To address these limitations, behavior(al) foundation models (BFMs) have emerged as a new paradigm that leverages large-scale pre-training to learn reusable primitive skills and broad behavioral priors, enabling zero-shot or rapid adaptation to a wide range of downstream tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of BFMs for humanoid WBC, tracing their development across diverse pre-training pipelines. Furthermore, we discuss real-world applications, current limitations, urgent challenges, and future opportunities, positioning BFMs as a key approach toward scalable and general-purpose humanoid intelligence. Finally, we provide a curated and long-term list of BFM papers and projects to facilitate more subsequent research, which is available at https://github.com/yuanmingqi/awesome-bfm-papers.

Paperid: 708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20254.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The complexity and diversity of surgical workflows, driven by heterogeneous operating room settings, institutional protocols, and anatomical variability, present a significant challenge in developing generalizable models for cross-institutional and cross-procedural surgical understanding. While recent surgical foundation models pretrained on large-scale vision-language data offer promising transferability, their zero-shot performance remains constrained by domain shifts, limiting their utility in unseen surgical environments. To address this, we introduce Surgical Phase Anywhere (SPA), a lightweight framework for versatile surgical workflow understanding that adapts foundation models to institutional settings with minimal annotation. SPA leverages few-shot spatial adaptation to align multi-modal embeddings with institution-specific surgical scenes and phases. It also ensures temporal consistency through diffusion modeling, which encodes task-graph priors derived from institutional procedure protocols. Finally, SPA employs dynamic test-time adaptation, exploiting the mutual agreement between multi-modal phase prediction streams to adapt the model to a given test video in a self-supervised manner, enhancing the reliability under test-time distribution shifts. SPA is a lightweight adaptation framework, allowing hospitals to rapidly customize phase recognition models by defining phases in natural language text, annotating a few images with the phase labels, and providing a task graph defining phase transitions. The experimental results show that the SPA framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot surgical phase recognition across multiple institutions and procedures, even outperforming full-shot models with 32-shot labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SPA

Paperid: 709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19658.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although new vision foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have significantly enhanced zero-shot image segmentation capabilities, reliance on human-provided prompts poses significant challenges in adapting SAM2 to medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, SAM2's performance in medical image segmentation was limited by the domain shift issue, since it was originally trained on natural images and videos. To address these challenges, we proposed SAM2 with support-set guided prompting (SAM2-SGP), a framework that eliminated the need for manual prompts. The proposed model leveraged the memory mechanism of SAM2 to generate pseudo-masks using image-mask pairs from a support set via a Pseudo-mask Generation (PMG) module. We further introduced a novel Pseudo-mask Attention (PMA) module, which used these pseudo-masks to automatically generate bounding boxes and enhance localized feature extraction by guiding attention to relevant areas. Furthermore, a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) strategy was adopted to mitigate the domain shift issue. The proposed framework was evaluated on both 2D and 3D datasets across multiple medical imaging modalities, including fundus photography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound. The results demonstrated a significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art models, such as nnUNet and SwinUNet, as well as foundation models, such as SAM2 and MedSAM2, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/astlian9/SAM_Support.

Paperid: 710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18448.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Language-driven grasp detection has the potential to revolutionize human-robot interaction by allowing robots to understand and execute grasping tasks based on natural language commands. However, existing approaches face two key challenges. First, they often struggle to interpret complex text instructions or operate ineffectively in densely cluttered environments. Second, most methods require a training or finetuning step to adapt to new domains, limiting their generation in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce GraspMAS, a new multi-agent system framework for language-driven grasp detection. GraspMAS is designed to reason through ambiguities and improve decision-making in real-world scenarios. Our framework consists of three specialized agents: Planner, responsible for strategizing complex queries; Coder, which generates and executes source code; and Observer, which evaluates the outcomes and provides feedback. Intensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that our GraspMAS significantly outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, robot experiments conducted in both simulation and real-world settings further validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our project page is available at https://zquang2202.github.io/GraspMAS

Paperid: 711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18208.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have revolutionized 3D scene reconstruction from sparse image collections. Recent work has explored integrating pre-trained vision features, particularly from DINO, to enhance few-shot reconstruction capabilities. However, the effectiveness of such approaches remains unclear, especially in extreme few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we present a systematic evaluation of DINO-enhanced NeRF models, comparing baseline NeRF, frozen DINO features, LoRA fine-tuned features, and multi-scale feature fusion. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that all DINO variants perform worse than the baseline NeRF, achieving PSNR values around 12.9 to 13.0 compared to the baseline's 14.71. This counterintuitive result suggests that pre-trained vision features may not be beneficial for few-shot 3D reconstruction and may even introduce harmful biases. We analyze potential causes including feature-task mismatch, overfitting to limited data, and integration challenges. Our findings challenge common assumptions in the field and suggest that simpler architectures focusing on geometric consistency may be more effective for few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18088.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Simulation-based data synthesis has emerged as a powerful paradigm for advancing real-world robotic manipulation. Yet existing datasets remain insufficient for robust bimanual manipulation due to (1) the lack of scalable task generation methods and (2) oversimplified simulation environments. We present RoboTwin 2.0, a scalable framework for automated, large-scale generation of diverse and realistic data, together with unified evaluation protocols for dual-arm manipulation. At its core is RoboTwin-OD, an object library of 731 instances across 147 categories with semantic and manipulation-relevant annotations. Building on this, we design an expert data synthesis pipeline that leverages multimodal language models (MLLMs) and simulation-in-the-loop refinement to automatically generate task-level execution code. To improve sim-to-real transfer, RoboTwin 2.0 applies structured domain randomization along five axes: clutter, lighting, background, tabletop height, and language, enhancing data diversity and policy robustness. The framework is instantiated across 50 dual-arm tasks and five robot embodiments. Empirically, it yields a 10.9% gain in code generation success rate. For downstream policy learning, a VLA model trained with synthetic data plus only 10 real demonstrations achieves a 367% relative improvement over the 10-demo baseline, while zero-shot models trained solely on synthetic data obtain a 228% gain. These results highlight the effectiveness of RoboTwin 2.0 in strengthening sim-to-real transfer and robustness to environmental variations. We release the data generator, benchmark, dataset, and code to support scalable research in robust bimanual manipulation. Project Page: https://robotwin-platform.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/robotwin-Platform/robotwin/.

Paperid: 713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17503.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented transfer capabilities and are being increasingly adopted for data-efficient image classification. Despite its growing popularity, its reliability aspect remains largely unexplored. This work explores the split conformal prediction (SCP) framework to provide trustworthiness guarantees when transferring such models based on a small labeled calibration set. Despite its potential, the generalist nature of the VLMs' pre-training could negatively affect the properties of the predicted conformal sets for specific tasks. While common practice in transfer learning for discriminative purposes involves an adaptation stage, we observe that deploying such a solution for conformal purposes is suboptimal since adapting the model using the available calibration data breaks the rigid exchangeability assumptions for test data in SCP. To address this issue, we propose transductive split conformal adaptation (SCA-T), a novel pipeline for transfer learning on conformal scenarios, which performs an unsupervised transductive adaptation jointly on calibration and test data. We present comprehensive experiments utilizing medical VLMs across various image modalities, transfer tasks, and non-conformity scores. Our framework offers consistent gains in efficiency and conditional coverage compared to SCP, maintaining the same empirical guarantees.

Paperid: 714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17500.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are gaining attention in medical image analysis. These are pre-trained on large, heterogeneous data sources, yielding rich and transferable representations. Notably, the combination of modality-specialized VLMs with few-shot adaptation has provided fruitful results, enabling the efficient deployment of high-performing solutions. However, previous works on this topic make strong assumptions about the distribution of adaptation data, which are unrealistic in the medical domain. First, prior art assumes access to a balanced support set, a condition that breaks the natural imbalance in disease prevalence found in real-world scenarios. Second, these works typically assume the presence of an additional validation set to fix critical hyper-parameters, which is highly data-inefficient. This work challenges these favorable deployment scenarios and introduces a realistic, imbalanced, validation-free adaptation setting. Our extensive benchmark across various modalities and downstream tasks demonstrates that current methods systematically compromise their performance when operating under realistic conditions, occasionally even performing worse than zero-shot inference. Also, we introduce a training-free linear probe that adaptively blends visual and textual supervision. Detailed studies demonstrate that the proposed solver is a strong, efficient baseline, enabling robust adaptation in challenging scenarios.

Paperid: 715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17307.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation focuses on adapting a model at test time to a specific domain using only a few unlabeled examples, addressing domain shift. Prior methods leverage CLIP's strong out-of-distribution (OOD) abilities by generating domain-specific prompts to guide its generalized, frozen features. However, since downstream datasets are not explicitly seen by CLIP, solely depending on the feature space knowledge is constrained by CLIP's prior knowledge. Notably, when using a less robust backbone like ViT-B/16, performance significantly drops on challenging real-world benchmarks. Departing from the state-of-the-art of inheriting the intrinsic OOD capability of CLIP, this work introduces learning directly on the input space to complement the dataset-specific knowledge for frozen CLIP. Specifically, an independent side branch is attached in parallel with CLIP and enforced to learn exclusive knowledge via revert attention. To better capture the dataset-specific label semantics for downstream adaptation, we propose to enhance the inter-dispersion among text features via greedy text ensemble and refinement. The text and visual features are then progressively fused in a domain-aware manner by a generated domain prompt to adapt toward a specific domain. Extensive experiments show our method's superiority on 5 large-scale benchmarks (WILDS and DomainNet), notably improving over smaller networks like ViT-B/16 with gains of \textbf{+5.1} in F1 for iWildCam and \textbf{+3.1\%} in WC Acc for FMoW.

Paperid: 716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17220.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in video diffusion models based on Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in generating temporally coherent videos. Yet, a fundamental question persists: how do these models internally establish and represent temporal correspondences across frames? We introduce DiffTrack, the first quantitative analysis framework designed to answer this question. DiffTrack constructs a dataset of prompt-generated video with pseudo ground-truth tracking annotations and proposes novel evaluation metrics to systematically analyze how each component within the full 3D attention mechanism of DiTs (e.g., representations, layers, and timesteps) contributes to establishing temporal correspondences. Our analysis reveals that query-key similarities in specific, but not all, layers play a critical role in temporal matching, and that this matching becomes increasingly prominent during the denoising process. We demonstrate practical applications of DiffTrack in zero-shot point tracking, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing vision foundation and self-supervised video models. Further, we extend our findings to motion-enhanced video generation with a novel guidance method that improves temporal consistency of generated videos without additional training. We believe our work offers crucial insights into the inner workings of video DiTs and establishes a foundation for further research and applications leveraging their temporal understanding.

Paperid: 717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16940.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Global localization is necessary for autonomous operations on the lunar surface where traditional Earth-based navigation infrastructure, such as GPS, is unavailable. As NASA advances toward sustained lunar presence under the Artemis program, autonomous operations will be an essential component of tasks such as robotic exploration and infrastructure deployment. Tasks such as excavation and transport of regolith require precise pose estimation, but proposed approaches such as visual-inertial odometry (VIO) accumulate odometry drift over long traverses. Precise pose estimation is particularly important for upcoming missions such as the ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) that rely on autonomous agents to operate over extended timescales and varied terrain. To help overcome odometry drift over long traverses, we propose LunarLoc, an approach to global localization that leverages instance segmentation for zero-shot extraction of boulder landmarks from onboard stereo imagery. Segment detections are used to construct a graph-based representation of the terrain, which is then aligned with a reference map of the environment captured during a previous session using graph-theoretic data association. This method enables accurate and drift-free global localization in visually ambiguous settings. LunarLoc achieves sub-cm level accuracy in multi-session global localization experiments, significantly outperforming the state of the art in lunar global localization. To encourage the development of further methods for global localization on the Moon, we release our datasets publicly with a playback module: https://github.com/mit-acl/lunarloc-data.

Paperid: 718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16728.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While existing Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) models have achieved significant success, their performance with limited labeled samples and a small number of known categories remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the task of Few-shot Generalized Category Discovery (FSGCD), aiming to achieve competitive performance in GCD tasks under conditions of known information scarcity. To tackle this challenge, we propose a decision boundary enhancement framework with affinity-based retrieval. Our framework is designed to learn the decision boundaries of known categories and transfer these boundaries to unknown categories. First, we use a decision boundary pre-training module to mitigate the overfitting of pre-trained information on known category boundaries and improve the learning of these decision boundaries using labeled samples. Second, we implement a two-stage retrieval-guided decision boundary optimization strategy. Specifically, this strategy further enhances the severely limited known boundaries by using affinity-retrieved pseudo-labeled samples. Then, these refined boundaries are applied to unknown clusters via guidance from affinity-based feature retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing methods on six public GCD benchmarks under the FSGCD setting. The codes are available at: https://github.com/Ryh1218/FSGCD

Paperid: 719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16718.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Adapting a single agent to a new multi-agent system brings challenges, necessitating adjustments across various tasks, environments, and interactions with unknown teammates and opponents. Addressing this challenge is highly complex, and researchers have proposed two simplified scenarios, Multi-agent reinforcement learning for zero-shot learning and Ad-Hoc Teamwork. Building on these foundations, we propose a more comprehensive setting, Agent Collaborative-Competitive Adaptation (ACCA), which evaluates an agent to generalize across diverse scenarios, tasks, and interactions with both unfamiliar opponents and teammates. In ACCA, agents adjust to task and environmental changes, collaborate with unseen teammates, and compete against unknown opponents. We introduce a new modeling approach, Multi-Retrieval and Dynamic Generation (MRDG), that effectively models both teammates and opponents using their behavioral trajectories. This method incorporates a positional encoder for varying team sizes and a hypernetwork module to boost agents' learning and adaptive capabilities. Additionally, a viewpoint alignment module harmonizes the observational perspectives of retrieved teammates and opponents with the learning agent. Extensive tests in benchmark scenarios like SMAC, Overcooked-AI, and Melting Pot show that MRDG significantly improves robust collaboration and competition with unseen teammates and opponents, surpassing established baselines. Our code is available at: https://github.com/vcis-wangchenxu/MRDG.git

Paperid: 720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16406.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Modern Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) reduce the cost of customizing large language models (LLMs), yet still require a separate optimization run for every downstream dataset. We introduce \textbf{Drag-and-Drop LLMs (\textit{DnD})}, a prompt-conditioned parameter generator that eliminates per-task training by mapping a handful of unlabeled task prompts directly to LoRA weight updates. A lightweight text encoder distills each prompt batch into condition embeddings, which are then transformed by a cascaded hyper-convolutional decoder into the full set of LoRA matrices. Once trained in a diverse collection of prompt-checkpoint pairs, DnD produces task-specific parameters in seconds, yielding i) up to \textbf{12,000$\times$} lower overhead than full fine-tuning, ii) average gains up to \textbf{30\%} in performance over the strongest training LoRAs on unseen common-sense reasoning, math, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and iii) robust cross-domain generalization despite never seeing the target data or labels. Our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned parameter generation is a viable alternative to gradient-based adaptation for rapidly specializing LLMs. Our project is available at \href{https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD}{https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD}.

Paperid: 721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16393.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although the annotation paradigm based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has made significant breakthroughs in recent years, its actual deployment still has two core bottlenecks: first, the cost of calling commercial APIs in large-scale annotation is very expensive; second, in scenarios that require fine-grained semantic understanding, such as sentiment classification and toxicity classification, the annotation accuracy of LLMs is even lower than that of Small Language Models (SLMs) dedicated to this field. To address these problems, we propose a new paradigm of multi-model cooperative annotation and design a fully automatic annotation framework AutoAnnotator based on this. Specifically, AutoAnnotator consists of two layers. The upper-level meta-controller layer uses the generation and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to select SLMs for annotation, automatically generate annotation code and verify difficult samples; the lower-level task-specialist layer consists of multiple SLMs that perform annotation through multi-model voting. In addition, we use the difficult samples obtained by the secondary review of the meta-controller layer as the reinforcement learning set and fine-tune the SLMs in stages through a continual learning strategy, thereby improving the generalization of SLMs. Extensive experiments show that AutoAnnotator outperforms existing open-source/API LLMs in zero-shot, one-shot, CoT, and majority voting settings. Notably, AutoAnnotator reduces the annotation cost by 74.15% compared to directly annotating with GPT-3.5-turbo, while still improving the accuracy by 6.21%. Project page: https://github.com/Zhaiyuan-Ji/AutoAnnotator.

Paperid: 722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16017.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation and ego-motion estimation are significant tasks for scene perception and navigation in stable, accurate and efficient robot-assisted endoscopy. To tackle lighting variations and sparse textures in endoscopic scenes, multiple techniques including optical flow, appearance flow and intrinsic image decomposition have been introduced into the existing methods. However, the effective training strategy for multiple modules are still critical to deal with both illumination issues and information interference for self-supervised depth estimation in endoscopy. Therefore, a novel framework with multistep efficient finetuning is proposed in this work. In each epoch of end-to-end training, the process is divided into three steps, including optical flow registration, multiscale image decomposition and multiple transformation alignments. At each step, only the related networks are trained without interference of irrelevant information. Based on parameter-efficient finetuning on the foundation model, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised depth estimation on SCARED dataset and zero-shot depth estimation on Hamlyn dataset, with 4\%$\sim$10\% lower error. The evaluation code of this work has been published on https://github.com/BaymaxShao/EndoMUST.

Paperid: 723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15153.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The advent of Large Vision Models (LVMs) offers new opportunities for few-shot medical image segmentation. However, existing training-free methods based on LVMs fail to effectively utilize negative prompts, leading to poor performance on low-contrast medical images. To address this issue, we propose SynPo, a training-free few-shot method based on LVMs (e.g., SAM), with the core insight: improving the quality of negative prompts. To select point prompts in a more reliable confidence map, we design a novel Confidence Map Synergy Module by combining the strengths of DINOv2 and SAM. Based on the confidence map, we select the top-k pixels as the positive points set and choose the negative points set using a Gaussian distribution, followed by independent K-means clustering for both sets. Then, these selected points are leveraged as high-quality prompts for SAM to get the segmentation results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SynPo achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art training-based few-shot methods.

Paperid: 724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14861.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Transcriptomic foundation models (TFMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for analyzing gene expression in cells and tissues, supporting key tasks such as cell-type annotation, batch correction, and perturbation prediction. However, the diversity of model implementations and training strategies across recent TFMs, though promising, makes it challenging to isolate the contribution of individual design choices or evaluate their potential synergies. This hinders the field's ability to converge on best practices and limits the reproducibility of insights across studies. We present BMFM-RNA, an open-source, modular software package that unifies diverse TFM pretraining and fine-tuning objectives within a single framework. Leveraging this capability, we introduce a novel training objective, whole cell expression decoder (WCED), which captures global expression patterns using an autoencoder-like CLS bottleneck representation. In this paper, we describe the framework, supported input representations, and training objectives. We evaluated four model checkpoints pretrained on CELLxGENE using combinations of masked language modeling (MLM), WCED and multitask learning. Using the benchmarking capabilities of BMFM-RNA, we show that WCED-based models achieve performance that matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches like scGPT across more than a dozen datasets in both zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. BMFM-RNA, available as part of the biomed-multi-omics project ( https://github.com/BiomedSciAI/biomed-multi-omic ), offers a reproducible foundation for systematic benchmarking and community-driven exploration of optimal TFM training strategies, enabling the development of more effective tools to leverage the latest advances in AI for understanding cell biology.

Paperid: 725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14842.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Building image classification models remains cumbersome in data-scarce domains, where collecting large labeled datasets is impractical. In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for few-shot image classification (FSIC), enabling models to generalize across domains without gradient-based adaptation. However, prior work has largely overlooked a critical component of ICL-based FSIC pipelines: the role of image embeddings. In this work, we present PictSure, an ICL framework that places the embedding model -- its architecture, pretraining, and training dynamics -- at the center of analysis. We systematically examine the effects of different visual encoder types, pretraining objectives, and fine-tuning strategies on downstream FSIC performance. Our experiments show that the training success and the out-of-domain performance are highly dependent on how the embedding models are pretrained. Consequently, PictSure manages to outperform existing ICL-based FSIC models on out-of-domain benchmarks that differ significantly from the training distribution, while maintaining comparable results on in-domain tasks. Code can be found at https://github.com/PictSure/pictsure-library.

Paperid: 726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14629.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major global health risk, requiring early detection and proactive control of breeding sites to prevent outbreaks. In this paper, we present VisText-Mosquito, a multimodal dataset that integrates visual and textual data to support automated detection, segmentation, and reasoning for mosquito breeding site analysis. The dataset includes 1,828 annotated images for object detection, 142 images for water surface segmentation, and natural language reasoning texts linked to each image. The YOLOv9s model achieves the highest precision of 0.92926 and mAP@50 of 0.92891 for object detection, while YOLOv11n-Seg reaches a segmentation precision of 0.91587 and mAP@50 of 0.79795. For reasoning generation, we tested a range of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our fine-tuned Mosquito-LLaMA3-8B model achieved the best results, with a final loss of 0.0028, a BLEU score of 54.7, BERTScore of 0.91, and ROUGE-L of 0.85. This dataset and model framework emphasize the theme "Prevention is Better than Cure", showcasing how AI-based detection can proactively address mosquito-borne disease risks. The dataset and implementation code are publicly available at GitHub: https://github.com/adnanul-islam-jisun/VisText-Mosquito

Paperid: 727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14356.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Egocentric video-language understanding demands both high efficiency and accurate spatial-temporal modeling. Existing approaches face three key challenges: 1) Excessive pre-training cost arising from multi-stage pre-training pipelines, 2) Ineffective spatial-temporal encoding due to manually split 3D rotary positional embeddings that hinder feature interactions, and 3) Imprecise learning objectives in soft-label multi-instance retrieval, which neglect negative pair correlations. In this paper, we introduce EVA02-AT, a suite of EVA02-based video-language foundation models tailored to egocentric video understanding tasks. EVA02-AT first efficiently transfers an image-based CLIP model into a unified video encoder via a single-stage pretraining. Second, instead of applying rotary positional embeddings to isolated dimensions, we introduce spatial-temporal rotary positional embeddings along with joint attention, which can effectively encode both spatial and temporal information on the entire hidden dimension. This joint encoding of spatial-temporal features enables the model to learn cross-axis relationships, which are crucial for accurately modeling motion and interaction in videos. Third, focusing on multi-instance video-language retrieval tasks, we introduce the Symmetric Multi-Similarity (SMS) loss and a novel training framework that advances all soft labels for both positive and negative pairs, providing a more precise learning objective. Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and Charades-Ego under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate that EVA02-AT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse egocentric video-language tasks with fewer parameters. Models with our SMS loss also show significant performance gains on multi-instance retrieval benchmarks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/xqwang14/EVA02-AT .

Paperid: 728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14317.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes presents significant challenges due to diverse object geometries, occlusions, and potential collisions. Existing methods primarily focus on single-object grasping or grasp-pose prediction without interaction, which are insufficient for complex, cluttered scenes. Recent vision-language-action models offer a potential solution but require extensive real-world demonstrations, making them costly and difficult to scale. To address these limitations, we revisit the sim-to-real transfer pipeline and develop key techniques that enable zero-shot deployment in reality while maintaining robust generalization. We propose ClutterDexGrasp, a two-stage teacher-student framework for closed-loop target-oriented dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes. The framework features a teacher policy trained in simulation using clutter density curriculum learning, incorporating both a geometry and spatially-embedded scene representation and a novel comprehensive safety curriculum, enabling general, dynamic, and safe grasping behaviors. Through imitation learning, we distill the teacher's knowledge into a student 3D diffusion policy (DP3) that operates on partial point cloud observations. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first zero-shot sim-to-real closed-loop system for target-oriented dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes, demonstrating robust performance across diverse objects and layouts. More details and videos are available at https://clutterdexgrasp.github.io/.

Paperid: 729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14136.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we construct two research objectives: i) explore the learned embedding space of BiomedCLIP, an open-source large vision language model, to analyse meaningful class separations, and ii) quantify the limitations of BiomedCLIP when applied to a highly imbalanced, out-of-distribution multi-label medical dataset. We experiment on IU-xray dataset, which exhibits the aforementioned criteria, and evaluate BiomedCLIP in classifying images (radiographs) in three contexts: zero-shot inference, full finetuning, and linear probing. The results show that the model under zero-shot settings over-predicts all labels, leading to poor precision and inter-class separability. Full fine-tuning improves classification of distinct diseases, while linear probing detects overlapping features. We demonstrate visual understanding of the model using Grad-CAM heatmaps and compare with 15 annotations by a radiologist. We highlight the need for careful adaptations of the models to foster reliability and applicability in a real-world setting. The code for the experiments in this work is available and maintained on GitHub.

Paperid: 730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13751.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong semantic understanding and zero-shot generalization, yet most existing systems assume an accurate low-level controller with hand-crafted action "vocabulary" such as end-effector pose or root velocity. This assumption confines prior work to quasi-static tasks and precludes the agile, whole-body behaviors required by humanoid whole-body control (WBC) tasks. To capture this gap in the literature, we start by introducing the first sim-to-real-ready, vision-language, closed-loop benchmark for humanoid WBC, comprising over 150 tasks from 10 categories. We then propose LeVERB: Latent Vision-Language-Encoded Robot Behavior, a hierarchical latent instruction-following framework for humanoid vision-language WBC, the first of its kind. At the top level, a vision-language policy learns a latent action vocabulary from synthetically rendered kinematic demonstrations; at the low level, a reinforcement-learned WBC policy consumes these latent verbs to generate dynamics-level commands. In our benchmark, LeVERB can zero-shot attain a 80% success rate on simple visual navigation tasks, and 58.5% success rate overall, outperforming naive hierarchical whole-body VLA implementation by 7.8 times.

Paperid: 731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13387.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This work presents a generalizable framework to transfer relative depth to metric depth. Current monocular depth estimation methods are mainly divided into metric depth estimation (MMDE) and relative depth estimation (MRDE). MMDEs estimate depth in metric scale but are often limited to a specific domain. MRDEs generalize well across different domains, but with uncertain scales which hinders downstream applications. To this end, we aim to build up a framework to solve scale uncertainty and transfer relative depth to metric depth. Previous methods used language as input and estimated two factors for conducting rescaling. Our approach, TR2M, utilizes both text description and image as inputs and estimates two rescale maps to transfer relative depth to metric depth at pixel level. Features from two modalities are fused with a cross-modality attention module to better capture scale information. A strategy is designed to construct and filter confident pseudo metric depth for more comprehensive supervision. We also develop scale-oriented contrastive learning to utilize depth distribution as guidance to enforce the model learning about intrinsic knowledge aligning with the scale distribution. TR2M only exploits a small number of trainable parameters to train on datasets in various domains and experiments not only demonstrate TR2M's great performance in seen datasets but also reveal superior zero-shot capabilities on five unseen datasets. We show the huge potential in pixel-wise transferring relative depth to metric depth with language assistance. (Code is available at: https://github.com/BeileiCui/TR2M)

Paperid: 732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13342.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fact verification is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM applications. In this study, we evaluate 12 pre-trained LLMs and one specialized fact-verifier, including frontier LLMs and open-weight reasoning LLMs, using a collection of examples from 14 fact-checking benchmarks. We share three findings intended to guide future development of more robust fact verifiers. First, we highlight the importance of addressing annotation errors and ambiguity in datasets, demonstrating that approximately 16\% of ambiguous or incorrectly labeled data substantially influences model rankings. Neglecting this issue may result in misleading conclusions during comparative evaluations, and we suggest using a systematic pipeline utilizing LLM-as-a-judge to help identify these issues at scale. Second, we discover that frontier LLMs with few-shot in-context examples, often overlooked in previous works, achieve top-tier performance. We therefore recommend future studies include comparisons with these simple yet highly effective baselines. Lastly, despite their effectiveness, frontier LLMs incur substantial costs, motivating the development of small, fine-tuned fact verifiers. We show that these small models still have room for improvement, particularly on instances that require complex reasoning. Encouragingly, we demonstrate that augmenting training with synthetic multi-hop reasoning data significantly enhances their capabilities in such instances. We release our code, model, and dataset at https://github.com/just1nseo/verifying-the-verifiers

Paperid: 733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13053.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing large-scale zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models deliver high speech quality but suffer from slow inference speeds due to massive parameters. To address this issue, this paper introduces ZipVoice, a high-quality flow-matching-based zero-shot TTS model with a compact model size and fast inference speed. Key designs include: 1) a Zipformer-based vector field estimator to maintain adequate modeling capabilities under constrained size; 2) Average upsampling-based initial speech-text alignment and Zipformer-based text encoder to improve speech intelligibility; 3) A flow distillation method to reduce sampling steps and eliminate the inference overhead associated with classifier-free guidance. Experiments on 100k hours multilingual datasets show that ZipVoice matches state-of-the-art models in speech quality, while being 3 times smaller and up to 30 times faster than a DiT-based flow-matching baseline. Codes, model checkpoints and demo samples are publicly available at https://github.com/k2-fsa/ZipVoice.

Paperid: 734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12258.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While the rapid proliferation of wearable cameras has raised significant concerns about egocentric video privacy, prior work has largely overlooked the unique privacy threats posed to the camera wearer. This work investigates the core question: How much privacy information about the camera wearer can be inferred from their first-person view videos? We introduce EgoPrivacy, the first large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of privacy risks in egocentric vision. EgoPrivacy covers three types of privacy (demographic, individual, and situational), defining seven tasks that aim to recover private information ranging from fine-grained (e.g., wearer's identity) to coarse-grained (e.g., age group). To further emphasize the privacy threats inherent to egocentric vision, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Attack, a novel attack strategy that leverages ego-to-exo retrieval from an external pool of exocentric videos to boost the effectiveness of demographic privacy attacks. An extensive comparison of the different attacks possible under all threat models is presented, showing that private information of the wearer is highly susceptible to leakage. For instance, our findings indicate that foundation models can effectively compromise wearer privacy even in zero-shot settings by recovering attributes such as identity, scene, gender, and race with 70-80% accuracy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/williamium3000/ego-privacy.

Paperid: 735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12239.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mastering dexterous, contact-rich object manipulation demands precise estimation of both in-hand object poses and external contact locations$\unicode{x2013}$tasks particularly challenging due to partial and noisy observations. We present ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-Tactile Simultaneous Contact and Object Pose Estimation, an object-centric neural implicit representation that fuses vision and high-resolution tactile feedback. By representing objects as signed distance fields and distributed tactile feedback as neural shear fields, ViTaSCOPE accurately localizes objects and registers extrinsic contacts onto their 3D geometry as contact fields. Our method enables seamless reasoning over complementary visuo-tactile cues by leveraging simulation for scalable training and zero-shot transfers to the real-world by bridging the sim-to-real gap. We evaluate our method through comprehensive simulated and real-world experiments, demonstrating its capabilities in dexterous manipulation scenarios.

Paperid: 736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11798.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) display remarkable capabilities to understand or even produce political discourse, but have been found to consistently display a progressive left-leaning bias. At the same time, so-called persona or identity prompts have been shown to produce LLM behavior that aligns with socioeconomic groups that the base model is not aligned with. In this work, we analyze whether zero-shot persona prompting with limited information can accurately predict individual voting decisions and, by aggregation, accurately predict positions of European groups on a diverse set of policies. We evaluate if predictions are stable towards counterfactual arguments, different persona prompts and generation methods. Finally, we find that we can simulate voting behavior of Members of the European Parliament reasonably well with a weighted F1 score of approximately 0.793. Our persona dataset of politicians in the 2024 European Parliament and our code are available at https://github.com/dess-mannheim/european_parliament_simulation.

Paperid: 737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11661.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Instance segmentation of prohibited items in security X-ray images is a critical yet challenging task. This is mainly caused by the significant appearance gap between prohibited items in X-ray images and natural objects, as well as the severe overlapping among objects in X-ray images. To address these issues, we propose an occlusion-aware instance segmentation pipeline designed to identify prohibited items in X-ray images. Specifically, to bridge the representation gap, we integrate the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into our pipeline, taking advantage of its rich priors and zero-shot generalization capabilities. To address the overlap between prohibited items, we design an occlusion-aware bilayer mask decoder module that explicitly models the occlusion relationships. To supervise occlusion estimation, we manually annotated occlusion areas of prohibited items in two large-scale X-ray image segmentation datasets, PIDray and PIXray. We then reorganized these additional annotations together with the original information as two occlusion-annotated datasets, PIDray-A and PIXray-A. Extensive experimental results on these occlusion-annotated datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The datasets and codes are available at: https://github.com/Ryh1218/Occ

Paperid: 738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11515.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Two-Tower Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various downstream VL tasks. While BridgeTower further enhances performance by building bridges between encoders, it \textit{(i)} suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of unimodal representations, \textit{(ii)} restricts the flexible exploitation of different levels of unimodal semantic knowledge, and \textit{(iii)} is limited to the evaluation on traditional low-resolution datasets only with the Two-Tower VLM architecture. In this work, we propose Manager, a lightweight, efficient and effective plugin that adaptively aggregates insights from different levels of pre-trained unimodal experts to facilitate more comprehensive VL alignment and fusion. First, under the Two-Tower VLM architecture, we introduce ManagerTower, a novel VLM that introduces the manager in each cross-modal layer. Whether with or without VL pre-training, ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines and achieves superior performance on 4 downstream VL tasks. Moreover, we extend our exploration to the latest Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) architecture. We demonstrate that LLaVA-OV-Manager significantly boosts the zero-shot performance of LLaVA-OV across different categories of capabilities, images, and resolutions on 20 downstream datasets, whether the multi-grid algorithm is enabled or not. In-depth analysis reveals that both our manager and the multi-grid algorithm can be viewed as a plugin that improves the visual representation by capturing more diverse visual details from two orthogonal perspectives (depth and width). Their synergy can mitigate the semantic ambiguity caused by the multi-grid algorithm and further improve performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.

Paperid: 739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11350.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is a widely-used method to bridge the gap between audio and text domains. Current CLAP methods enable sound and music retrieval in English, ignoring multilingual spoken content. To address this, we introduce general language audio pretraining (GLAP), which expands CLAP with multilingual and multi-domain abilities. GLAP demonstrates its versatility by achieving competitive performance on standard audio-text retrieval benchmarks like Clotho and AudioCaps, while significantly surpassing existing methods in speech retrieval and classification tasks. Additionally, GLAP achieves strong results on widely used sound-event zero-shot benchmarks, while simultaneously outperforming previous methods on speech content benchmarks. Further keyword spotting evaluations across 50 languages emphasize GLAP's advanced multilingual capabilities. Finally, multilingual sound and music understanding is evaluated across four languages. Checkpoints and Source: https://github.com/xiaomi-research/dasheng-glap.

Paperid: 740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11120.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In spite of strong performance achieved by LLMs, the costs of their deployment are unaffordable. For the compression of LLMs, gradient-based pruning methods present promising effectiveness. However, in these methods, the gradient computation with one-hot labels ignore the potential predictions on other words, thus missing key information for generative capability of the original model. To address this issue, we introduce a self-distillation loss during the pruning phase (rather than post-training) to fully exploit the predictions of the original model, thereby obtaining more accurate gradient information for pruning. Moreover, we find that, compared to attention modules, the predictions of LLM are less sensitive to multilayer perceptron (MLP) modules, which take up more than $5 \times$ parameters (LLaMA3.2-1.2B). To this end, we focus on the pruning of MLP modules, to significantly compress LLM without obvious performance degradation. Experimental results on extensive zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing pruning methods. Furthermore, our method achieves very competitive performance among 1B-scale open source LLMs. The source code and trained weights are available at https://github.com/visresearch/SDMPrune.

Paperid: 741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11111.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained enormous attention in recent years due to their capability of understanding and generating natural languages. With the rapid development and wild-range applications (e.g., Agents, Embodied Intelligence), the robustness of LLMs has received increased attention. As the core brain of many AI applications, the robustness of LLMs requires that models should not only generate consistent contents, but also ensure the correctness and stability of generated content when dealing with unexpeted application scenarios (e.g., toxic prompts, limited noise domain data, outof-distribution (OOD) applications, etc). In this survey paper, we conduct a thorough review of the robustness of LLMs, aiming to provide a comprehensive terminology of concepts and methods around this field and facilitate the community. Specifically, we first give a formal definition of LLM robustness and present the collection protocol of this survey paper. Then, based on the types of perturbated inputs, we organize this survey from the following perspectives: 1) Adversarial Robustness: tackling the problem that prompts are manipulated intentionally, such as noise prompts, long context, data attack, etc; 2) OOD Robustness: dealing with the unexpected real-world application scenarios, such as OOD detection, zero-shot transferring, hallucinations, etc; 3) Evaluation of Robustness: summarizing the new evaluation datasets, metrics, and tools for verifying the robustness of LLMs. After reviewing the representative work from each perspective, we discuss and highlight future opportunities and research directions in this field. Meanwhile, we also organize related works and provide an easy-to-search project (https://github.com/zhangkunzk/Awesome-LLM-Robustness-papers) to support the community.

Paperid: 742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11031.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As image generators produce increasingly realistic images, concerns about potential misuse continue to grow. Supervised detection relies on large, curated datasets and struggles to generalize across diverse generators. In this work, we investigate the use of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot detection of AI-generated images. While off-the-shelf VLMs exhibit some task-specific reasoning and chain-of-thought prompting offers gains, we show that task-aligned prompting elicits more focused reasoning and significantly improves performance without fine-tuning. Specifically, prefixing the model's response with the phrase "Let's examine the style and the synthesis artifacts" -- a method we call zero-shot-s$^2$ -- boosts Macro F1 scores by 8%-29%. These gains are consistent for two widely used open-source models and across three recent, diverse datasets spanning human faces, objects, and animals with images generated by 16 different models -- demonstrating strong generalization. We further evaluate the approach across three additional model sizes and observe improvements in most dataset-model combinations -- suggesting robustness to model scale. Surprisingly, self-consistency, a behavior previously observed in language reasoning, where aggregating answers from diverse reasoning paths improves performance, also holds in this setting. Even here, zero-shot-s$^2$ scales better than chain-of-thought in most cases -- indicating that it elicits more useful diversity. Our findings show that task-aligned prompts elicit more focused reasoning and enhance latent capabilities in VLMs, like the detection of AI-generated images -- offering a simple, generalizable, and explainable alternative to supervised methods. Our code is publicly available on github: https://github.com/Zoher15/Zero-shot-s2.

Paperid: 743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10943.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful but static; they lack mechanisms to adapt their weights in response to new tasks, knowledge, or examples. We introduce Self-Adapting LLMs (SEAL), a framework that enables LLMs to self-adapt by generating their own finetuning data and update directives. Given a new input, the model produces a self-edit-a generation that may restructure the information in different ways, specify optimization hyperparameters, or invoke tools for data augmentation and gradient-based updates. Through supervised finetuning (SFT), these self-edits result in persistent weight updates, enabling lasting adaptation. To train the model to produce effective self-edits, we use a reinforcement learning loop with the downstream performance of the updated model as the reward signal. Unlike prior approaches that rely on separate adaptation modules or auxiliary networks, SEAL directly uses the model's own generation to control its adaptation process. Experiments on knowledge incorporation and few-shot generalization show that SEAL is a promising step toward language models capable of self-directed adaptation. Our website and code is available at https://jyopari.github.io/posts/seal.

Paperid: 744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10892.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Uniform-state discrete diffusion models hold the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent ability to self-correct. However, they are typically outperformed by autoregressive models and masked diffusion models. In this work, we narrow this performance gap by leveraging a key insight: Uniform-state diffusion processes naturally emerge from an underlying Gaussian diffusion. Our method, Duo, transfers powerful techniques from Gaussian diffusion to improve both training and sampling. First, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy guided by the Gaussian process, doubling training speed by reducing variance. Models trained with curriculum learning surpass autoregressive models in zero-shot perplexity on 3 of 7 benchmarks. Second, we present Discrete Consistency Distillation, which adapts consistency distillation from the continuous to the discrete setting. This algorithm unlocks few-step generation in diffusion language models by accelerating sampling by two orders of magnitude. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: http://s-sahoo.github.io/duo

Paperid: 745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10730.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, the rapid advancements of vision-language models, such as CLIP, leads to significant progress in zero-/few-shot anomaly detection (ZFSAD) tasks. However, most existing CLIP-based ZFSAD methods commonly assume prior knowledge of categories and rely on carefully crafted prompts tailored to specific scenarios. While such meticulously designed text prompts effectively capture semantic information in the textual space, they fall short of distinguishing normal and anomalous instances within the joint embedding space. Moreover, these ZFSAD methods are predominantly explored in industrial scenarios, with few efforts conducted to medical tasks. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for ZFSAD tasks in medical domain, denoted as IQE-CLIP. We reveal that query embeddings, which incorporate both textual and instance-aware visual information, are better indicators for abnormalities. Specifically, we first introduce class-based prompting tokens and learnable prompting tokens for better adaptation of CLIP to the medical domain. Then, we design an instance-aware query module (IQM) to extract region-level contextual information from both text prompts and visual features, enabling the generation of query embeddings that are more sensitive to anomalies. Extensive experiments conducted on six medical datasets demonstrate that IQE-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on both zero-shot and few-shot tasks. We release our code and data at https://github.com/hongh0/IQE-CLIP/.

Paperid: 746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10627.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents our system for Track 1: Mistake Identification in the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors. The task involves evaluating whether a tutor's response correctly identifies a mistake in a student's mathematical reasoning. We explore four approaches: (1) an ensemble of machine learning models over pooled token embeddings from multiple pretrained language models (LMs); (2) a frozen sentence-transformer using [CLS] embeddings with an MLP classifier; (3) a history-aware model with multi-head attention between token-level history and response embeddings; and (4) a retrieval-augmented few-shot prompting system with a large language model (LLM) i.e. GPT 4o. Our final system retrieves semantically similar examples, constructs structured prompts, and uses schema-guided output parsing to produce interpretable predictions. It outperforms all baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining example-driven prompting with LLM reasoning for pedagogical feedback assessment. Our code is available at https://github.com/NaumanNaeem/BEA_2025.

Paperid: 747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09623.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Embodied foundation models are crucial for Artificial Intelligence (AI) interacting with the physical world by integrating multi-modal inputs, such as proprioception, vision and language, to understand human intentions and generate actions to control robots. While these models demonstrate strong generalization and few-shot learning capabilities, they face significant challenges in continually acquiring new skills without forgetting previously learned skills, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose the Analytic Task Scheduler (ATS), a novel framework for continual learning in embodied foundation models. ATS consists of a task-specific model library, where each model is fine-tuned independently on a single task, and an analytic scheduler trained using recursive least squares (RLS) to learn the mapping between language instructions and task-specific models. This architecture enables accurate task recognition and dynamic model selection while fundamentally avoiding parameter interference across tasks. The scheduler updates its parameters incrementally using only statistics (autocorrelation and cross-correlation matrices), enabling forgetting-resistant learning without the need to revisit historical data. We validate ATS on a real-world robot platform (RM65B), demonstrating superior resistance to forgetting and strong adaptability to task variations. The results highlight ATS as an effective, scalable, and deployable solution for continual learning in embodied foundation models operating in complex, dynamic environments. Our code will be available at https://github.com/MIAA-Embodied-AI/AnalyticTaskScheduler

Paperid: 748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09403.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Domain Adaptation (DA) is crucial for robust deployment of medical image segmentation models when applied to new clinical centers with significant domain shifts. Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) is appealing as it can deal with privacy concerns and access constraints on source-domain data during adaptation to target-domain data. However, SFDA faces challenges such as insufficient supervision in the target domain with unlabeled images. In this work, we propose a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-guided Reliable Pseudo-Labels method for SFDA (SRPL-SFDA) with three key components: 1) Test-Time Tri-branch Intensity Enhancement (T3IE) that not only improves quality of raw pseudo-labels in the target domain, but also leads to SAM-compatible inputs with three channels to better leverage SAM's zero-shot inference ability for refining the pseudo-labels; 2) A reliable pseudo-label selection module that rejects low-quality pseudo-labels based on Consistency of Multiple SAM Outputs (CMSO) under input perturbations with T3IE; and 3) A reliability-aware training procedure in the unlabeled target domain where reliable pseudo-labels are used for supervision and unreliable parts are regularized by entropy minimization. Experiments conducted on two multi-domain medical image segmentation datasets for fetal brain and the prostate respectively demonstrate that: 1) SRPL-SFDA effectively enhances pseudo-label quality in the unlabeled target domain, and improves SFDA performance by leveraging the reliability-aware training; 2) SRPL-SFDA outperformed state-of-the-art SFDA methods, and its performance is close to that of supervised training in the target domain. The code of this work is available online: https://github.com/HiLab-git/SRPL-SFDA.

Paperid: 749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09369.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper studies the problem of Line Segment Detection (LSD) for the characterization of line geometry in images, with the aim of learning a domain-agnostic robust LSD model that works well for any natural images. With the focus of scalable self-supervised learning of LSD, we revisit and streamline the fundamental designs of (deep and non-deep) LSD approaches to have a high-performing and efficient LSD learner, dubbed as ScaleLSD, for the curation of line geometry at scale from over 10M unlabeled real-world images. Our ScaleLSD works very well to detect much more number of line segments from any natural images even than the pioneered non-deep LSD approach, having a more complete and accurate geometric characterization of images using line segments. Experimentally, our proposed ScaleLSD is comprehensively testified under zero-shot protocols in detection performance, single-view 3D geometry estimation, two-view line segment matching, and multiview 3D line mapping, all with excellent performance obtained. Based on the thorough evaluation, our ScaleLSD is observed to be the first deep approach that outperforms the pioneered non-deep LSD in all aspects we have tested, significantly expanding and reinforcing the versatility of the line geometry of images. Code and Models are available at https://github.com/ant-research/scalelsd

Paperid: 750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08990.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical vision-language alignment through cross-modal contrastive learning shows promising performance in image-text matching tasks, such as retrieval and zero-shot classification. However, conventional cross-modal contrastive learning (CLIP-based) methods suffer from suboptimal visual representation capabilities, which also limits their effectiveness in vision-language alignment. In contrast, although the models pretrained via multimodal masked modeling struggle with direct cross-modal matching, they excel in visual representation. To address this contradiction, we propose ALTA (ALign Through Adapting), an efficient medical vision-language alignment method that utilizes only about 8% of the trainable parameters and less than 1/5 of the computational consumption required for masked record modeling. ALTA achieves superior performance in vision-language matching tasks like retrieval and zero-shot classification by adapting the pretrained vision model from masked record modeling. Additionally, we integrate temporal-multiview radiograph inputs to enhance the information consistency between radiographs and their corresponding descriptions in reports, further improving the vision-language alignment. Experimental evaluations show that ALTA outperforms the best-performing counterpart by over 4% absolute points in text-to-image accuracy and approximately 6% absolute points in image-to-text retrieval accuracy. The adaptation of vision-language models during efficient alignment also promotes better vision and language understanding. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/DopamineLcy/ALTA.

Paperid: 751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08771.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Inferring causal relationships between variable pairs is crucial for understanding multivariate interactions in complex systems. Knowledge-based causal discovery -- which involves inferring causal relationships by reasoning over the metadata of variables (e.g., names or textual context) -- offers a compelling alternative to traditional methods that rely on observational data. However, existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce unstable and inconsistent results, compromising their reliability for causal inference. To address this, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to enhance knowledge-based causal discovery. Our approach identifies informative metapath-based subgraphs within KGs and further refines the selection of these subgraphs using Learning-to-Rank-based models. The top-ranked subgraphs are then incorporated into zero-shot prompts, improving the effectiveness of LLMs in inferring the causal relationship. Extensive experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most baselines by up to 44.4 points in F1 scores, evaluated across diverse LLMs and KGs. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub: https://github.com/susantiyuni/path-to-causality

Paperid: 752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08640.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humans intuitively perceive object shape and orientation from a single image, guided by strong priors about canonical poses. However, existing 3D generative models often produce misaligned results due to inconsistent training data, limiting their usability in downstream tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the task of orientation-aligned 3D object generation: producing 3D objects from single images with consistent orientations across categories. To facilitate this, we construct Objaverse-OA, a dataset of 14,832 orientation-aligned 3D models spanning 1,008 categories. Leveraging Objaverse-OA, we fine-tune two representative 3D generative models based on multi-view diffusion and 3D variational autoencoder frameworks to produce aligned objects that generalize well to unseen objects across various categories. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over post-hoc alignment approaches. Furthermore, we showcase downstream applications enabled by our aligned object generation, including zero-shot object orientation estimation via analysis-by-synthesis and efficient arrow-based object rotation manipulation.

Paperid: 753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08607.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The in-context learning paradigm with LLMs has been instrumental in advancing a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The selection of few-shot examples (exemplars / demonstration samples) is essential for constructing effective prompts under context-length budget constraints. In this paper, we formulate the exemplar selection task as a top-m best arms identification problem. A key challenge in this setup is the exponentially large number of arms that need to be evaluated to identify the m-best arms. We propose CASE (Challenger Arm Sampling for Exemplar selection), a novel sample-efficient selective exploration strategy that maintains a shortlist of "challenger" arms, which are current candidates for the top-m arms. In each iteration, only one of the arms from this shortlist or the current topm set is pulled, thereby reducing sample complexity and, consequently, the number of LLM evaluations. Furthermore, we model the scores of exemplar subsets (arms) using a parameterized linear scoring function, leading to stochastic linear bandits setting. CASE achieves remarkable efficiency gains of up to 7x speedup in runtime while requiring 7x fewer LLM calls (87% reduction) without sacrificing performance compared to state-of-the-art exemplar selection methods. We release our code and data at https://github.com/kiranpurohit/CASE

Paperid: 754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08592.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This work stems from an observed limitation of text encoders: embeddings may not be able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics, resulting in failed retrieval even in simple cases. To examine such behaviors, we first introduce a new evaluation dataset, CapRetrieval, in which passages are image captions and queries are phrases targeting entity or event concepts in diverse forms. Zero-shot evaluation suggests that encoders often struggle with these fine-grained matching, regardless of training sources or model size. Aiming for enhancement, we proceed to finetune encoders with our proposed data generation strategies, enabling a small 0.1B encoder to outperform the state-of-the-art 7B model. Within this process, we further uncover the granularity dilemma, a challenge for embeddings to capture fine-grained salience while aligning with overall semantics. Our dataset, code and models in this work are publicly released at https://github.com/lxucs/CapRetrieval.

Paperid: 755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08388.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training reasoning language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) for one-hot correctness inherently relies on the LM being able to explore and solve its task with some chance at initialization. Furthermore, a key use case of reasoning LMs is to act as teachers for distilling new students and cold-starting future RL iterations rather than being deployed themselves. From these considerations, we introduce a new framework that avoids RL's exploration challenge by training a new class of Reinforcement-Learned Teachers (RLTs) focused on yielding the most effective downstream distillation. RLTs are prompted with both the question and solution to each problem, and tasked to simply "connect-the-dots" with detailed explanations tailored for their students. We train RLTs with dense rewards obtained by feeding each explanation to the student and testing its understanding of the problem's solution. In practice, the raw outputs of a 7B RLT provide higher final performance on competition and graduate-level tasks than existing distillation and cold-starting pipelines that collect and postprocess the reasoning traces of orders of magnitude larger LMs. Furthermore, RLTs maintain their effectiveness when training larger students and when applied zero-shot to out-of-distribution tasks, unlocking new levels of efficiency and re-usability for the RL reasoning framework.

Paperid: 756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08013.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-task learning for dense prediction is limited by the need for extensive annotation for every task, though recent works have explored training with partial task labels. Leveraging the generalization power of diffusion models, we extend the partial learning setup to a zero-shot setting, training a multi-task model on multiple synthetic datasets, each labeled for only a subset of tasks. Our method, StableMTL, repurposes image generators for latent regression. Adapting a denoising framework with task encoding, per-task conditioning and a tailored training scheme. Instead of per-task losses requiring careful balancing, a unified latent loss is adopted, enabling seamless scaling to more tasks. To encourage inter-task synergy, we introduce a multi-stream model with a task-attention mechanism that converts N-to-N task interactions into efficient 1-to-N attention, promoting effective cross-task sharing. StableMTL outperforms baselines on 7 tasks across 8 benchmarks.

Paperid: 757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper we introduce the first effort to adapt large language models (LLMs) to the Ukrainian dialect (in our case Hutsul), a low-resource and morphologically complex dialect spoken in the Carpathian Highlands. We created a parallel corpus of 9852 dialect-to-standard Ukrainian sentence pairs and a dictionary of 7320 dialectal word mappings. We also addressed data shortage by proposing an advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to generate synthetic parallel translation pairs, expanding the corpus with 52142 examples. We have fine-tuned multiple open-source LLMs using LoRA and evaluated them on a standard-to-dialect translation task, also comparing with few-shot GPT-4o translation. In the absence of human annotators, we adopt a multi-metric evaluation strategy combining BLEU, chrF++, TER, and LLM-based judgment (GPT-4o). The results show that even small(7B) finetuned models outperform zero-shot baselines such as GPT-4o across both automatic and LLM-evaluated metrics. All data, models, and code are publicly released at: https://github.com/woters/vuyko-hutsul

Paperid: 758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07280.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) have emerged as powerful generative tools, capable of synthesizing high-quality spatiotemporal content. Yet, their potential goes far beyond mere video generation. We argue that the training dynamics of VDMs, driven by the need to model coherent sequences, naturally pushes them to internalize structured representations and an implicit understanding of the visual world. To probe the extent of this internal knowledge, we introduce a few-shot fine-tuning framework that repurposes VDMs for new tasks using only a handful of examples. Our method transforms each task into a visual transition, enabling the training of LoRA weights on short input-output sequences without altering the generative interface of a frozen VDM. Despite minimal supervision, the model exhibits strong generalization across diverse tasks, from low-level vision (for example, segmentation and pose estimation) to high-level reasoning (for example, on ARC-AGI). These results reframe VDMs as more than generative engines. They are adaptable visual learners with the potential to serve as the backbone for future foundation models in vision.

Paperid: 759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07274.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Code-switching presents a complex challenge for syntactic analysis, especially in low-resource language settings where annotated data is scarce. While recent work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for sequence-level tagging, few approaches systematically investigate how well these models capture syntactic structure in code-switched contexts. Moreover, existing parsers trained on monolingual treebanks often fail to generalize to multilingual and mixed-language input. To address this gap, we introduce the BiLingua Parser, an LLM-based annotation pipeline designed to produce Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations for code-switched text. First, we develop a prompt-based framework for Spanish-English and Spanish-GuaranÃ data, combining few-shot LLM prompting with expert review. Second, we release two annotated datasets, including the first Spanish-GuaranÃ UD-parsed corpus. Third, we conduct a detailed syntactic analysis of switch points across language pairs and communicative contexts. Experimental results show that BiLingua Parser achieves up to 95.29% LAS after expert revision, significantly outperforming prior baselines and multilingual parsers. These results show that LLMs, when carefully guided, can serve as practical tools for bootstrapping syntactic resources in under-resourced, code-switched environments. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/N3mika/ParsingProject

Paperid: 760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06657.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in structured prediction tasks, including regression, but existing approaches primarily focus on point estimates and lack systematic comparison across different methods. We investigate probabilistic regression using LLMs for unstructured inputs, addressing challenging text-to-distribution prediction tasks such as price estimation where both nuanced text understanding and uncertainty quantification are critical. We propose a novel quantile regression approach that enables LLMs to produce full predictive distributions, improving upon traditional point estimates. Through extensive experiments across three diverse price prediction datasets, we demonstrate that a Mistral-7B model fine-tuned with quantile heads significantly outperforms traditional approaches for both point and distributional estimations, as measured by three established metrics each for prediction accuracy and distributional calibration. Our systematic comparison of LLM approaches, model architectures, training approaches, and data scaling reveals that Mistral-7B consistently outperforms encoder architectures, embedding-based methods, and few-shot learning methods. Our experiments also reveal the effectiveness of LLM-assisted label correction in achieving human-level accuracy without systematic bias. Our curated datasets are made available at https://github.com/vnik18/llm-price-quantile-reg/ to support future research.

Paperid: 761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06157.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) excel at capturing structural and semantic information in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), while struggling to generalize across domains and tasks. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a recent study explored the integration of HGNNs with LLMs for generalizable heterogeneous graph learning. However, this approach typically encodes structural information as HG tokens using HGNNs, and disparities in embedding spaces between HGNNs and LLMs have been shown to bias the LLM's comprehension of HGs. Moreover, since these HG tokens are often derived from node-level tasks, the model's ability to generalize across tasks remains limited. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective Masked Language Modeling-based method, called MLM4HG. MLM4HG introduces metapath-based textual sequences instead of HG tokens to extract structural and semantic information inherent in HGs, and designs customized textual templates to unify different graph tasks into a coherent cloze-style 'mask' token prediction paradigm. Specifically,MLM4HG first converts HGs from various domains to texts based on metapaths, and subsequently combines them with the unified task texts to form a HG-based corpus. Moreover, the corpus is fed into a pretrained LM for fine-tuning with a constrained target vocabulary, enabling the fine-tuned LM to generalize to unseen target HGs. Extensive cross-domain and multi-task experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superior generalization performance of MLM4HG over state-of-the-art methods in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/MLM4HG.

Paperid: 762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06105.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While Foundation Models provide a general tool for rapid content creation, they regularly require task-specific adaptation. Traditionally, this exercise involves careful curation of datasets and repeated fine-tuning of the underlying model. Fine-tuning techniques enable practitioners to adapt foundation models for many new applications but require expensive and lengthy training while being notably sensitive to hyperparameter choices. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Text-to-LoRA (T2L), a model capable of adapting large language models (LLMs) on the fly solely based on a natural language description of the target task. T2L is a hypernetwork trained to construct LoRAs in a single inexpensive forward pass. After training T2L on a suite of 9 pre-trained LoRA adapters (GSM8K, Arc, etc.), we show that the ad-hoc reconstructed LoRA instances match the performance of task-specific adapters across the corresponding test sets. Furthermore, T2L can compress hundreds of LoRA instances and zero-shot generalize to entirely unseen tasks. This approach provides a significant step towards democratizing the specialization of foundation models and enables language-based adaptation with minimal compute requirements. Our code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/text-to-lora

Paperid: 763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06076.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained at large scale have shown unprecedented transferability capabilities and are being progressively integrated into medical image analysis. Although its discriminative potential has been widely explored, its reliability aspect remains overlooked. This work investigates their behavior under the increasingly popular split conformal prediction (SCP) framework, which theoretically guarantees a given error level on output sets by leveraging a labeled calibration set. However, the zero-shot performance of VLMs is inherently limited, and common practice involves few-shot transfer learning pipelines, which cannot absorb the rigid exchangeability assumptions of SCP. To alleviate this issue, we propose full conformal adaptation, a novel setting for jointly adapting and conformalizing pre-trained foundation models, which operates transductively over each test data point using a few-shot adaptation set. Moreover, we complement this framework with SS-Text, a novel training-free linear probe solver for VLMs that alleviates the computational cost of such a transductive approach. We provide comprehensive experiments using 3 different modality-specialized medical VLMs and 9 adaptation tasks. Our framework requires exactly the same data as SCP, and provides consistent relative improvements of up to 27% on set efficiency while maintaining the same coverage guarantees.

Paperid: 764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06069.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting Large Language Model (LLM)-generated code is a growing challenge with implications for security, intellectual property, and academic integrity. We investigate the role of conditional probability distributions in improving zero-shot LLM-generated code detection, when considering both the code and the corresponding task prompt that generated it. Our key insight is that when evaluating the probability distribution of code tokens using an LLM, there is little difference between LLM-generated and human-written code. However, conditioning on the task reveals notable differences. This contrasts with natural language text, where differences exist even in the unconditional distributions. Leveraging this, we propose a novel zero-shot detection approach that approximates the original task used to generate a given code snippet and then evaluates token-level entropy under the approximated task conditioning (ATC). We further provide a mathematical intuition, contextualizing our method relative to previous approaches. ATC requires neither access to the generator LLM nor the original task prompts, making it practical for real-world applications. To the best of our knowledge, it achieves state-of-the-art results across benchmarks and generalizes across programming languages, including Python, CPP, and Java. Our findings highlight the importance of task-level conditioning for LLM-generated code detection. The supplementary materials and code are available at https://github.com/maorash/ATC, including the dataset gathering implementation, to foster further research in this area.

Paperid: 765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05688.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Para-/non-linguistic information in speech is pivotal in shaping the listeners' impression. Although zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has achieved high speaker fidelity, modulating subtle para-/non-linguistic information to control perceived voice characteristics, i.e., impressions, remains challenging. We have therefore developed a voice impression control method in zero-shot TTS that utilizes a low-dimensional vector to represent the intensities of various voice impression pairs (e.g., dark-bright). The results of both objective and subjective evaluations have demonstrated our method's effectiveness in impression control. Furthermore, generating this vector via a large language model enables target-impression generation from a natural language description of the desired impression, thus eliminating the need for manual optimization. Audio examples are available on our demo page (https://ntt-hilab-gensp.github.io/is2025voiceimpression/).

Paperid: 766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05419.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has been used to efficiently solve vision-based control tasks in highdimensional image observations. Although recent MBRL algorithms perform well in trained observations, they fail when faced with visual distractions in observations. These task-irrelevant distractions (e.g., clouds, shadows, and light) may be constantly present in real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose a novel self-supervised method, Dream to Generalize (Dr. G), for zero-shot MBRL. Dr. G trains its encoder and world model with dual contrastive learning which efficiently captures task-relevant features among multi-view data augmentations. We also introduce a recurrent state inverse dynamics model that helps the world model to better understand the temporal structure. The proposed methods can enhance the robustness of the world model against visual distractions. To evaluate the generalization performance, we first train Dr. G on simple backgrounds and then test it on complex natural video backgrounds in the DeepMind Control suite, and the randomizing environments in Robosuite. Dr. G yields a performance improvement of 117% and 14% over prior works, respectively. Our code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/JeongsooHa/DrG.git

Paperid: 767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05413.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present SmoothRot, a novel post-training quantization technique to enhance the efficiency of 4-bit quantization in Large Language Models (LLMs). SmoothRot addresses the critical challenge of massive activation outliers, by integrating channel-wise scaling with Hadamard transformations. Our technique effectively transforms extreme outliers into quantization-friendly activations, significantly improving quantization accuracy. Experiments conducted on popular LLMs (LLaMA2 7B, LLaMA3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B) demonstrate that SmoothRot consistently reduces the performance gap between quantized and FP16 models by approximately 10-30\% across language generation and zero-shot reasoning tasks, without introducing additional inference latency. Code is available at https://github.com/czakop/smoothrot.

Paperid: 768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05407.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rise of generative APIs has fueled interest in privacy-preserving synthetic data generation. While the Private Evolution (PE) algorithm generates Differential Privacy (DP) synthetic images using diffusion model APIs, it struggles with few-shot private data due to the limitations of its DP-protected similarity voting approach. In practice, the few-shot private data challenge is particularly prevalent in specialized domains like healthcare and industry. To address this challenge, we propose a novel API-assisted algorithm, Private Contrastive Evolution (PCEvolve), which iteratively mines inherent inter-class contrastive relationships in few-shot private data beyond individual data points and seamlessly integrates them into an adapted Exponential Mechanism (EM) to optimize DP's utility in an evolution loop. We conduct extensive experiments on four specialized datasets, demonstrating that PCEvolve outperforms PE and other API-assisted baselines. These results highlight the potential of leveraging API access with private data for quality evaluation, enabling the generation of high-quality DP synthetic images and paving the way for more accessible and effective privacy-preserving generative API applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/TsingZ0/PCEvolve.

Paperid: 769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05383.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Biometric face authentication is crucial in computer vision, but ensuring fairness and generalization across demographic groups remains a big challenge. Therefore, we investigated whether Vision Transformer (ViT) and ResNet, leveraging pre-trained global features, can fairly authenticate different demographic faces while relying minimally on local features. In this investigation, we used three pre-trained state-of-the-art (SOTA) ViT foundation models from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for global features as well as ResNet-18. We concatenated the features from ViT and ResNet, passed them through two fully connected layers, and trained on customized face image datasets to capture the local features. Then, we designed a novel few-shot prototype network with backbone features embedding. We also developed new demographic face image support and query datasets for this empirical study. The network's testing was conducted on this dataset in one-shot, three-shot, and five-shot scenarios to assess how performance improves as the size of the support set increases. We observed results across datasets with varying races/ethnicities, genders, and age groups. The Microsoft Swin Transformer backbone performed better among the three SOTA ViT for this task. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Sufianlab/FairVitBio.

Paperid: 770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05027.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Partial label learning (PLL) seeks to train generalizable classifiers from datasets with inexact supervision, a common challenge in real-world applications. Existing studies have developed numerous approaches to progressively refine and recover ground-truth labels by training convolutional neural networks. However, limited attention has been given to foundation models that offer transferrable representations. In this work, we empirically conduct comprehensive evaluations of 11 foundation models across 13 PLL approaches on 8 benchmark datasets under 3 PLL scenarios. We further propose PartialCLIP, an efficient fine-tuning framework for foundation models in PLL. Our findings reveal that current PLL approaches tend to 1) achieve significant performance gains when using foundation models, 2) exhibit remarkably similar performance to each other, 3) maintain stable performance across varying ambiguity levels, while 4) are susceptible to foundation model selection and adaptation strategies. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficacy of text-embedding classifier initialization and effective candidate label filtering using zero-shot CLIP. Our experimental results and analysis underscore the limitations of current PLL approaches and provide valuable insights for developing more generalizable PLL models. The source code can be found at https://github.com/SEU-hk/PartialCLIP.

Paperid: 771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04807.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundational to the Chinese language and culture, Chinese characters encompass extraordinarily extensive and ever-expanding categories, with the latest Chinese GB18030-2022 standard containing 87,887 categories. The accurate recognition of this vast number of characters, termed mega-category recognition, presents a formidable yet crucial challenge for cultural heritage preservation and digital applications. Despite significant advances in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), mega-category recognition remains unexplored due to the absence of comprehensive datasets, with the largest existing dataset containing merely 16,151 categories. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce MegaHan97K, a mega-category, large-scale dataset covering an unprecedented 97,455 categories of Chinese characters. Our work offers three major contributions: (1) MegaHan97K is the first dataset to fully support the latest GB18030-2022 standard, providing at least six times more categories than existing datasets; (2) It effectively addresses the long-tail distribution problem by providing balanced samples across all categories through its three distinct subsets: handwritten, historical and synthetic subsets; (3) Comprehensive benchmarking experiments reveal new challenges in mega-category scenarios, including increased storage demands, morphologically similar character recognition, and zero-shot learning difficulties, while also unlocking substantial opportunities for future research. To the best of our knowledge, the MetaHan97K is likely the dataset with the largest classes not only in the field of OCR but may also in the broader domain of pattern recognition. The dataset is available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/MegaHan97K.

Paperid: 772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04713.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained VLMs achieve strong performance on downstream tasks when adapted with just a few labeled examples. As the adapted models inevitably encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) test data that deviates from the in-distribution (ID) task-specific training data, enhancing OOD generalization in few-shot adaptation is critically important. We study robust few-shot VLM adaptation, aiming to increase both ID and OOD accuracy. By comparing different adaptation methods (e.g., prompt tuning, linear probing, contrastive finetuning, and full finetuning), we uncover three key findings: (1) finetuning with proper hyperparameters significantly outperforms the popular VLM adaptation methods prompt tuning and linear probing; (2) visual encoder-only finetuning achieves better efficiency and accuracy than contrastively finetuning both visual and textual encoders; (3) finetuning the top layers of the visual encoder provides the best balance between ID and OOD accuracy. Building on these findings, we propose partial finetuning of the visual encoder empowered with two simple augmentation techniques: (1) retrieval augmentation which retrieves task-relevant data from the VLM's pretraining dataset to enhance adaptation, and (2) adversarial perturbation which promotes robustness during finetuning. Results show that the former/latter boosts OOD/ID accuracy while slightly sacrificing the ID/OOD accuracy. Yet, perhaps understandably, naively combining the two does not maintain their best OOD/ID accuracy. We address this dilemma with the developed SRAPF, Stage-wise Retrieval Augmentation-based Adversarial Partial Finetuning. SRAPF consists of two stages: (1) partial finetuning the visual encoder using both ID and retrieved data, and (2) adversarial partial finetuning with few-shot ID data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRAPF achieves the state-of-the-art ID and OOD accuracy on the ImageNet OOD benchmarks.

Paperid: 773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04598.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In studies of transferable learning, scaling laws are obtained for various important foundation models to predict their properties and performance at larger scales. We show here how scaling law derivation can also be used for model and dataset comparison, allowing to decide which procedure is to be preferred for pre-training. For the first time, full scaling laws based on dense measurements across a wide span of model and samples seen scales are derived for two important language-vision learning procedures, CLIP and MaMMUT, that use either contrastive only or contrastive and captioning text generative loss. Ensuring sufficient prediction accuracy for held out points, we use derived scaling laws to compare both models, obtaining evidence for MaMMUT's stronger improvement with scale and better sample efficiency than standard CLIP. To strengthen validity of the comparison, we show scaling laws for various downstream tasks, classification, retrieval, and segmentation, and for different open datasets, DataComp, DFN and Re-LAION, observing consistently the same trends. We show that comparison can also be performed when deriving scaling laws with a constant learning rate schedule, reducing compute cost. Accurate derivation of scaling laws provides thus means to perform model and dataset comparison across scale spans, avoiding misleading conclusions based on measurements from single reference scales only, paving the road for systematic comparison and improvement of open foundation models and datasets for their creation. We release all the pre-trained models with their intermediate checkpoints, including openMaMMUT-L/14, which achieves $80.3\%$ zero-shot ImageNet-1k accuracy, trained on 12.8B samples from DataComp-1.4B. Code for reproducing experiments in the paper and raw experiments data can be found at https://github.com/LAION-AI/scaling-laws-for-comparison.

Paperid: 774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04227.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning robot control policies from human videos is a promising direction for scaling up robot learning. However, how to extract action knowledge (or action representations) from videos for policy learning remains a key challenge. Existing action representations such as video frames, pixelflow, and pointcloud flow have inherent limitations such as modeling complexity or loss of information. In this paper, we propose to use object-centric 3D motion field to represent actions for robot learning from human videos, and present a novel framework for extracting this representation from videos for zero-shot control. We introduce two novel components in its implementation. First, a novel training pipeline for training a ''denoising'' 3D motion field estimator to extract fine object 3D motions from human videos with noisy depth robustly. Second, a dense object-centric 3D motion field prediction architecture that favors both cross-embodiment transfer and policy generalization to background. We evaluate the system in real world setups. Experiments show that our method reduces 3D motion estimation error by over 50% compared to the latest method, achieve 55% average success rate in diverse tasks where prior approaches fail~($\lesssim 10$\%), and can even acquire fine-grained manipulation skills like insertion.

Paperid: 775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04220.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unlocking spatial reasoning in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask: can LMMs reason about 3D space using only structured 2D representations derived from perception? We introduce Struct2D, a perception-guided prompting framework that combines bird's-eye-view (BEV) images with object marks and object-centric metadata, optionally incorporating egocentric keyframes when needed. Using Struct2D, we conduct an in-depth zero-shot analysis of closed-source LMMs (e.g., GPT-o3) and find that they exhibit surprisingly strong spatial reasoning abilities when provided with structured 2D inputs, effectively handling tasks such as relative direction estimation and route planning. Building on these insights, we construct Struct2D-Set, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset with 200K fine-grained QA pairs across eight spatial reasoning categories, generated automatically from 3D indoor scenes. We fine-tune an open-source LMM (Qwen2.5VL) on Struct2D-Set, achieving competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, including 3D question answering, dense captioning, and object grounding. Our approach demonstrates that structured 2D inputs can effectively bridge perception and language reasoning in LMMs-without requiring explicit 3D representations as input. We will release both our code and dataset to support future research.

Paperid: 776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04217.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://github.com/HHYHRHY/OWMM-Agent

Paperid: 777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04098.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present TextAtari, a benchmark for evaluating language agents on very long-horizon decision-making tasks spanning up to 100,000 steps. By translating the visual state representations of classic Atari games into rich textual descriptions, TextAtari creates a challenging test bed that bridges sequential decision-making with natural language processing. The benchmark includes nearly 100 distinct tasks with varying complexity, action spaces, and planning horizons, all rendered as text through an unsupervised representation learning framework (AtariARI). We evaluate three open-source large language models (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama3.1-8B) across three agent frameworks (zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought, and reflection reasoning) to assess how different forms of prior knowledge affect performance on these long-horizon challenges. Four scenarios-Basic, Obscured, Manual Augmentation, and Reference-based-investigate the impact of semantic understanding, instruction comprehension, and expert demonstrations on agent decision-making. Our results reveal significant performance gaps between language agents and human players in extensive planning tasks, highlighting challenges in sequential reasoning, state tracking, and strategic planning across tens of thousands of steps. TextAtari provides standardized evaluation protocols, baseline implementations, and a framework for advancing research at the intersection of language models and planning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lww007/Text-Atari-Agents.

Paperid: 778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04020.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Review-based Product Question Answering (PQA) allows e-commerce platforms to automatically address customer queries by leveraging insights from user reviews. However, existing PQA systems generate answers with only a single perspective, failing to capture the diversity of customer opinions. In this paper we introduce a novel task Quantitative Query-Focused Summarization (QQSUM), which aims to summarize diverse customer opinions into representative Key Points (KPs) and quantify their prevalence to effectively answer user queries. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shows promise for PQA, its generated answers still fall short of capturing the full diversity of viewpoints. To tackle this challenge, our model QQSUM-RAG, which extends RAG, employs few-shot learning to jointly train a KP-oriented retriever and a KP summary generator, enabling KP-based summaries that capture diverse and representative opinions. Experimental results demonstrate that QQSUM-RAG achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art RAG baselines in both textual quality and quantification accuracy of opinions. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/QQSUMM

Paperid: 779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04005.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in few-shot adaptation for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have greatly expanded their ability to generalize across tasks using only a few labeled examples. However, existing approaches primarily build upon the strong zero-shot priors of these models by leveraging carefully designed, task-specific prompts. This dependence on predefined class names can restrict their applicability, especially in scenarios where exact class names are unavailable or difficult to specify. To address this limitation, we introduce vocabulary-free few-shot learning for VLMs, a setting where target class instances - that is, images - are available but their corresponding names are not. We propose Similarity Mapping (SiM), a simple yet effective baseline that classifies target instances solely based on similarity scores with a set of generic prompts (textual or visual), eliminating the need for carefully handcrafted prompts. Although conceptually straightforward, SiM demonstrates strong performance, operates with high computational efficiency (learning the mapping typically takes less than one second), and provides interpretability by linking target classes to generic prompts. We believe that our approach could serve as an important baseline for future research in vocabulary-free few-shot learning. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxZanella/vocabulary-free-FSL.

Paperid: 780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03662.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Locating human-object interaction (HOI) actions within video serves as the foundation for multiple downstream tasks, such as human behavior analysis and human-robot skill transfer. Current temporal action localization methods typically rely on annotated action and object categories of interactions for optimization, which leads to domain bias and low deployment efficiency. Although some recent works have achieved zero-shot temporal action localization (ZS-TAL) with large vision-language models (VLMs), their coarse-grained estimations and open-loop pipelines hinder further performance improvements for temporal interaction localization (TIL). To address these issues, we propose a novel zero-shot TIL approach dubbed EgoLoc to locate the timings of grasp actions for human-object interaction in egocentric videos. EgoLoc introduces a self-adaptive sampling strategy to generate reasonable visual prompts for VLM reasoning. By absorbing both 2D and 3D observations, it directly samples high-quality initial guesses around the possible contact/separation timestamps of HOI according to 3D hand velocities, leading to high inference accuracy and efficiency. In addition, EgoLoc generates closed-loop feedback from visual and dynamic cues to further refine the localization results. Comprehensive experiments on the publicly available dataset and our newly proposed benchmark demonstrate that EgoLoc achieves better temporal interaction localization for egocentric videos compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We will release our code and relevant data as open-source at https://github.com/IRMVLab/EgoLoc.

Paperid: 781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) showing promising results on general zero-shot image classification tasks, fine-grained image classification remains challenging. It demands precise attention to subtle visual details to distinguish between visually similar subcategories--details that MLLMs may easily overlook without explicit guidance. To address this, we introduce AutoSEP, an iterative self-supervised prompt learning framework designed to enhance MLLM fine-grained classification capabilities in a fully unsupervised manner. Our core idea is to leverage unlabeled data to learn a description prompt that guides MLLMs in identifying crucial discriminative features within an image, and boosts classification accuracy. We developed an automatic self-enhancing prompt learning framework called AutoSEP to iteratively improve the description prompt using unlabeled data, based on instance-level classification scoring function. AutoSEP only requires black-box access to MLLMs, eliminating the need for any training or fine-tuning. We evaluate our approach on multiple fine-grained classification datasets. It consistently outperforms other unsupervised baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our self-supervised optimization framework. Notably, AutoSEP on average improves 13 percent over standard zero-shot classification and 5 percent over the best-performing baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/yq-hong/AutoSEP

Paperid: 782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03131.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce native-resolution image synthesis, a novel generative modeling paradigm that enables the synthesis of images at arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. This approach overcomes the limitations of conventional fixed-resolution, square-image methods by natively handling variable-length visual tokens, a core challenge for traditional techniques. To this end, we introduce the Native-resolution diffusion Transformer (NiT), an architecture designed to explicitly model varying resolutions and aspect ratios within its denoising process. Free from the constraints of fixed formats, NiT learns intrinsic visual distributions from images spanning a broad range of resolutions and aspect ratios. Notably, a single NiT model simultaneously achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both ImageNet-256x256 and 512x512 benchmarks. Surprisingly, akin to the robust zero-shot capabilities seen in advanced large language models, NiT, trained solely on ImageNet, demonstrates excellent zero-shot generalization performance. It successfully generates high-fidelity images at previously unseen high resolutions (e.g., 1536 x 1536) and diverse aspect ratios (e.g., 16:9, 3:1, 4:3), as shown in Figure 1. These findings indicate the significant potential of native-resolution modeling as a bridge between visual generative modeling and advanced LLM methodologies.

Paperid: 783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03117.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across various tasks by leveraging large-scale, unsupervised pre-training. However, they often inherit harmful or unwanted knowledge from noisy internet-sourced datasets, compromising their reliability in real-world applications. Existing model unlearning methods either rely on access to pre-trained datasets or focus on coarse-grained unlearning (e.g., entire classes), leaving a critical gap for fine-grained unlearning. In this paper, we address the challenging scenario of selectively forgetting specific portions of knowledge within a class, without access to pre-trained data, while preserving the model's overall performance. We propose a novel three-stage approach that progressively unlearns targeted knowledge while mitigating over-forgetting. It consists of (1) a forgetting stage to fine-tune the CLIP on samples to be forgotten, (2) a reminding stage to restore performance on retained samples, and (3) a restoring stage to recover zero-shot capabilities using model souping. Additionally, we introduce knowledge distillation to handle the distribution disparity between forgetting, retaining samples, and unseen pre-trained data. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet-1K, and style datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively unlearns specific subgroups while maintaining strong zero-shot performance on semantically similar subgroups and other categories, significantly outperforming baseline unlearning methods, which lose effectiveness under the CLIP unlearning setting.

Paperid: 784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03114.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale delineation of individual trees from remote sensing imagery is crucial to the advancement of ecological research, particularly as climate change and other environmental factors rapidly transform forest landscapes across the world. Current RGB tree segmentation methods rely on training specialized machine learning models with labeled tree datasets. While these learning-based approaches can outperform manual data collection when accurate, the existing models still depend on training data that's hard to scale. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of using a state-of-the-art image segmentation model, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), in a zero-shot manner for individual tree detection and segmentation. We evaluate a pretrained SAM2 model on two tasks in this domain: (1) zero-shot segmentation and (2) zero-shot transfer by using predictions from an existing tree detection model as prompts. Our results suggest that SAM2 not only has impressive generalization capabilities, but also can form a natural synergy with specialized methods trained on in-domain labeled data. We find that applying large pretrained models to problems in remote sensing is a promising avenue for future progress. We make our code available at: https://github.com/open-forest-observatory/tree-detection-framework.

Paperid: 785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03110.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable success due to its large-scale pretraining on general domains, but it still faces challenges when applying it to downstream distant domains that have only scarce training data, which gives rise to the Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) task. Inspired by Self-Attention's insensitivity to token orders, we find an interesting phenomenon neglected in current works: disrupting the continuity of image tokens (i.e., making pixels not smoothly transited across patches) in ViT leads to a noticeable performance decline in the general (source) domain but only a marginal decrease in downstream target domains. This questions the role of image tokens' continuity in ViT's generalization under large domain gaps. In this paper, we delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find continuity aids ViT in learning larger spatial patterns, which are harder to transfer than smaller ones, enlarging domain distances. Meanwhile, it implies that only smaller patterns within each patch could be transferred under extreme domain gaps. Based on this interpretation, we further propose a simple yet effective method for CDFSL that better disrupts the continuity of image tokens, encouraging the model to rely less on large patterns and more on smaller ones. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in reducing domain gaps and outperforming state-of-the-art works. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/ReCIT.

Paperid: 786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03096.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive language-image pre-training aligns the features of text-image pairs in a common latent space via distinct encoders for each modality. While this approach achieves impressive performance in several zero-shot tasks, it cannot natively handle multimodal inputs, i.e., encoding image and text into a single feature vector. As a remedy, it is common practice to use additional modules to merge the features extracted by the unimodal encoders. In this work, we present FuseLIP, an alternative architecture for multimodal embedding. Leveraging recent progress in discrete image tokenizers, we propose to use a single transformer model which operates on an extended vocabulary of text and image tokens. This early fusion approach allows the different modalities to interact at each depth of encoding and obtain richer representations compared to common late fusion. We collect new datasets for multimodal pre-training and evaluation, designing challenging tasks for multimodal encoder models. We show that FuseLIP outperforms other approaches in multimodal embedding tasks such as VQA and text-guided image transformation retrieval, while being comparable to baselines on unimodal tasks.

Paperid: 787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03007.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of generative models, the realism of AI-generated images has significantly improved, posing critical challenges for verifying digital content authenticity. Current deepfake detection methods often depend on datasets with limited generation models and content diversity that fail to keep pace with the evolving complexity and increasing realism of the AI-generated content. Large multimodal models (LMMs), widely adopted in various vision tasks, have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities, yet their potential in deepfake detection remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{DFBench}, a large-scale DeepFake Benchmark featuring (i) broad diversity, including 540,000 images across real, AI-edited, and AI-generated content, (ii) latest model, the fake images are generated by 12 state-of-the-art generation models, and (iii) bidirectional benchmarking and evaluating for both the detection accuracy of deepfake detectors and the evasion capability of generative models. Based on DFBench, we propose \textbf{MoA-DF}, Mixture of Agents for DeepFake detection, leveraging a combined probability strategy from multiple LMMs. MoA-DF achieves state-of-the-art performance, further proving the effectiveness of leveraging LMMs for deepfake detection. Database and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/DFBench.

Paperid: 788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02914.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A crucial yet under-appreciated prerequisite in machine learning solutions for real-applications is data annotation: human annotators are hired to manually label data according to detailed, expert-crafted guidelines. This is often a laborious, tedious, and costly process. To study methods for facilitating data annotation, we introduce a new benchmark AnnoGuide: Auto-Annotation from Annotation Guidelines. It aims to evaluate automated methods for data annotation directly from expert-defined annotation guidelines, eliminating the need for manual labeling. As a case study, we repurpose the well-established nuScenes dataset, commonly used in autonomous driving research, which provides comprehensive annotation guidelines for labeling LiDAR point clouds with 3D cuboids across 18 object classes. These guidelines include a few visual examples and textual descriptions, but no labeled 3D cuboids in LiDAR data, making this a novel task of multi-modal few-shot 3D detection without 3D annotations. The advances of powerful foundation models (FMs) make AnnoGuide especially timely, as FMs offer promising tools to tackle its challenges. We employ a conceptually straightforward pipeline that (1) utilizes open-source FMs for object detection and segmentation in RGB images, (2) projects 2D detections into 3D using known camera poses, and (3) clusters LiDAR points within the frustum of each 2D detection to generate a 3D cuboid. Starting with a non-learned solution that leverages off-the-shelf FMs, we progressively refine key components and achieve significant performance improvements, boosting 3D detection mAP from 12.1 to 21.9! Nevertheless, our results highlight that AnnoGuide remains an open and challenging problem, underscoring the urgent need for developing LiDAR-based FMs. We release our code and models at GitHub: https://annoguide.github.io/annoguide3Dbenchmark

Paperid: 789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02858.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language-queried Audio Source Separation (LASS) enables open-vocabulary sound separation via natural language queries. While existing methods rely on task-specific training, we explore whether pretrained diffusion models, originally designed for audio generation, can inherently perform separation without further training. In this study, we introduce a training-free framework leveraging generative priors for zero-shot LASS. Analyzing naive adaptations, we identify key limitations arising from modality-specific challenges. To address these issues, we propose Diffusion-Guided Mask Optimization (DGMO), a test-time optimization framework that refines spectrogram masks for precise, input-aligned separation. Our approach effectively repurposes pretrained diffusion models for source separation, achieving competitive performance without task-specific supervision. This work expands the application of diffusion models beyond generation, establishing a new paradigm for zero-shot audio separation. The code is available at: https://wltschmrz.github.io/DGMO/

Paperid: 790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02846.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present PBR-SR, a novel method for physically based rendering (PBR) texture super resolution (SR). It outputs high-resolution, high-quality PBR textures from low-resolution (LR) PBR input in a zero-shot manner. PBR-SR leverages an off-the-shelf super-resolution model trained on natural images, and iteratively minimizes the deviations between super-resolution priors and differentiable renderings. These enhancements are then back-projected into the PBR map space in a differentiable manner to produce refined, high-resolution textures. To mitigate view inconsistencies and lighting sensitivity, which is common in view-based super-resolution, our method applies 2D prior constraints across multi-view renderings, iteratively refining the shared, upscaled textures. In parallel, we incorporate identity constraints directly in the PBR texture domain to ensure the upscaled textures remain faithful to the LR input. PBR-SR operates without any additional training or data requirements, relying entirely on pretrained image priors. We demonstrate that our approach produces high-fidelity PBR textures for both artist-designed and AI-generated meshes, outperforming both direct SR models application and prior texture optimization methods. Our results show high-quality outputs in both PBR and rendering evaluations, supporting advanced applications such as relighting.

Paperid: 791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02843.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) aims to transfer knowledge from a data-sufficient source domain to data-scarce target domains. Although Vision Transformer (ViT) has shown superior capability in many vision tasks, its transferability against huge domain gaps in CDFSL is still under-explored. In this paper, we find an intriguing phenomenon: during the source-domain training, prompt tuning, as a common way to train ViT, could be harmful for the generalization of ViT in target domains, but setting them to random noises (i.e., random registers) could consistently improve target-domain performance. We then delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find that learnable prompts capture domain information during the training on the source dataset, which views irrelevant visual patterns as vital cues for recognition. This can be viewed as a kind of overfitting and increases the sharpness of the loss landscapes. In contrast, random registers are essentially a novel way of perturbing attention for the sharpness-aware minimization, which helps the model find a flattened minimum in loss landscapes, increasing the transferability. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a simple but effective approach for CDFSL to enhance the perturbation on attention maps by adding random registers on the semantic regions of image tokens, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of random registers. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks validate our rationale and state-of-the-art performance. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/REAP.

Paperid: 792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02493.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D plane reconstruction from a single image is a crucial yet challenging topic in 3D computer vision. Previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods have focused on training their system on a single dataset from either indoor or outdoor domain, limiting their generalizability across diverse testing data. In this work, we introduce a novel framework dubbed ZeroPlane, a Transformer-based model targeting zero-shot 3D plane detection and reconstruction from a single image, over diverse domains and environments. To enable data-driven models across multiple domains, we have curated a large-scale planar benchmark, comprising over 14 datasets and 560,000 high-resolution, dense planar annotations for diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. To address the challenge of achieving desirable planar geometry on multi-dataset training, we propose to disentangle the representation of plane normal and offset, and employ an exemplar-guided, classification-then-regression paradigm to learn plane and offset respectively. Additionally, we employ advanced backbones as image encoder, and present an effective pixel-geometry-enhanced plane embedding module to further facilitate planar reconstruction. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot evaluation datasets have demonstrated that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods on both reconstruction accuracy and generalizability, especially over in-the-wild data. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jcliu0428/ZeroPlane.

Paperid: 793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02426.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Entity relationship classification remains a challenging task in information extraction, especially in scenarios with limited labeled data and complex relational structures. In this study, we conduct a comparative analysis of three distinct AI agent architectures designed to perform relation classification using large language models (LLMs). The agentic architectures explored include (1) reflective self-evaluation, (2) hierarchical task decomposition, and (3) a novel multi-agent dynamic example generation mechanism, each leveraging different modes of reasoning and prompt adaptation. In particular, our dynamic example generation approach introduces real-time cooperative and adversarial prompting. We systematically compare their performance across multiple domains and model backends. Our experiments demonstrate that multi-agent coordination consistently outperforms standard few-shot prompting and approaches the performance of fine-tuned models. These findings offer practical guidance for the design of modular, generalizable LLM-based systems for structured relation extraction. The source codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/maryambrj/ALIEN.git.

Paperid: 794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02044.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) continue to revolutionize AI research, there is a growing interest in building large-scale brain foundation models to advance neuroscience. While most existing brain foundation models are pre-trained on time-series signals or connectome features, we propose a novel graph-based pre-training paradigm for constructing a brain graph foundation model. In this paper, we introduce the Brain Graph Foundation Model, termed BrainGFM, a unified framework that leverages graph contrastive learning and graph masked autoencoders for large-scale fMRI-based pre-training. BrainGFM is pre-trained on a diverse mixture of brain atlases with varying parcellations, significantly expanding the pre-training corpus and enhancing the model's ability to generalize across heterogeneous fMRI-derived brain representations. To support efficient and versatile downstream transfer, we integrate both graph prompts and language prompts into the model design, enabling BrainGFM to flexibly adapt to a wide range of atlases, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and task settings. Furthermore, we employ meta-learning to optimize the graph prompts, facilitating strong generalization to previously unseen disorders under both few-shot and zero-shot learning conditions via language-guided prompting. BrainGFM is pre-trained on 27 neuroimaging datasets spanning 25 common neurological and psychiatric disorders, encompassing 2 types of brain atlases (functional and anatomical) across 8 widely-used parcellations, and covering over 25,000 subjects, 60,000 fMRI scans, and a total of 400,000 graph samples aggregated across all atlases and parcellations. The code is available at: https://github.com/weixinxu666/BrainGFM

Paperid: 795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01738.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual rating is an essential capability of artificial intelligence (AI) for multi-dimensional quantification of visual content, primarily applied in ordinal regression (OR) tasks such as image quality assessment, facial age estimation, and medical image grading. However, current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) under-perform in such visual rating ability while also suffering the lack of relevant datasets and benchmarks. In this work, we collect and present STORM, a data collection and benchmark for Stimulating Trustworthy Ordinal Regression Ability of MLLMs for universal visual rating. STORM encompasses 14 ordinal regression datasets across five common visual rating domains, comprising 655K image-level pairs and the corresponding carefully curated VQAs. Importantly, we also propose a coarse-to-fine processing pipeline that dynamically considers label candidates and provides interpretable thoughts, providing MLLMs with a general and trustworthy ordinal thinking paradigm. This benchmark aims to evaluate the all-in-one and zero-shot performance of MLLMs in scenarios requiring understanding of the essential common ordinal relationships of rating labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and shed light on better fine-tuning strategies. The STORM dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available on the following webpage to support further research in this area. Datasets and codes are released on the project page: https://storm-bench.github.io/.

Paperid: 796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01237.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce the $\underline{Ko}rean \underline{G}rammar \underline{E}valuation Bench\underline{M}ark (KoGEM)$, designed to assess the linguistic competence of LLMs and humans in Korean. KoGEM consists of 1.5k multiple-choice QA pairs covering five main categories and 16 subcategories. The zero-shot evaluation of 27 LLMs of various sizes and types reveals that while LLMs perform remarkably well on straightforward tasks requiring primarily definitional knowledge, they struggle with tasks that demand the integration of real-world experiential knowledge, such as phonological rules and pronunciation. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis suggests that incorporating such experiential knowledge could enhance the linguistic competence of LLMs. With KoGEM, we not only highlight the limitations of current LLMs in linguistic competence but also uncover hidden facets of LLMs in linguistic competence, paving the way for enhancing comprehensive language understanding. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/SungHo3268/KoGEM.

Paperid: 797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01074.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Several studies have explored the mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) in coding tasks, but most have focused on programming languages (PLs) in a monolingual setting. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between multiple PLs and English in the concept space of LLMs. We perform a few-shot translation task on 21 PL pairs using two Llama-based models. By decoding the embeddings of intermediate layers during this task, we observe that the concept space is closer to English (including PL keywords) and assigns high probabilities to English tokens in the second half of the intermediate layers. We analyze neuron activations for 11 PLs and English, finding that while language-specific neurons are primarily concentrated in the bottom layers, those exclusive to each PL tend to appear in the top layers. For PLs that are highly aligned with multiple other PLs, identifying language-specific neurons is not feasible. These PLs also tend to have a larger keyword set than other PLs and are closer to the model's concept space regardless of the input/output PL in the translation task. Our findings provide insights into how LLMs internally represent PLs, revealing structural patterns in the model's concept space. Code is available at https://github.com/cisnlp/code-specific-neurons.

Paperid: 798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00981.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
How language-specific are speech representations learned by self-supervised models? Existing work has shown that a range of linguistic features can be successfully decoded from end-to-end models trained only on speech recordings. However, it's less clear to what extent pre-training on specific languages improves language-specific linguistic information. Here we test the encoding of Dutch phonetic and lexical information in internal representations of self-supervised Wav2Vec2 models. Pre-training exclusively on Dutch improves the representation of Dutch linguistic features as compared to pre-training on similar amounts of English or larger amounts of multilingual data. This language-specific advantage is well-detected by trained clustering or classification probes, and partially observable using zero-shot metrics. Furthermore, the language-specific benefit on linguistic feature encoding aligns with downstream performance on Automatic Speech Recognition.

Paperid: 799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00956.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for continual learning in anomaly detection, aimed at better reflecting real-world deployment scenarios. Our benchmark, Continual-MEGA, includes a large and diverse dataset that significantly expands existing evaluation settings by combining carefully curated existing datasets with our newly proposed dataset, ContinualAD. In addition to standard continual learning with expanded quantity, we propose a novel scenario that measures zero-shot generalization to unseen classes, those not observed during continual adaptation. This setting poses a new problem setting that continual adaptation also enhances zero-shot performance. We also present a unified baseline algorithm that improves robustness in few-shot detection and maintains strong generalization. Through extensive evaluations, we report three key findings: (1) existing methods show substantial room for improvement, particularly in pixel-level defect localization; (2) our proposed method consistently outperforms prior approaches; and (3) the newly introduced ContinualAD dataset enhances the performance of strong anomaly detection models. We release the benchmark and code in https://github.com/Continual-Mega/Continual-Mega.

Paperid: 800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00777.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in biomedical relation extraction, even in zero-shot scenarios. However, evaluating LLMs in this task remains challenging due to their ability to generate human-like text, often producing synonyms or abbreviations of gold-standard answers, making traditional automatic evaluation metrics unreliable. On the other hand, while human evaluation is more reliable, it is costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for real-world applications. This paper investigates the use of LLMs-as-the-Judge as an alternative evaluation method for biomedical relation extraction. We benchmark 8 LLMs as judges to evaluate the responses generated by 5 other LLMs across 3 biomedical relation extraction datasets. Unlike other text-generation tasks, we observe that LLM-based judges perform quite poorly (usually below 50% accuracy) in the biomedical relation extraction task. Our findings reveal that it happens mainly because relations extracted by LLMs do not adhere to any standard format. To address this, we propose structured output formatting for LLM-generated responses that helps LLM-Judges to improve their performance by about 15% (on average). We also introduce a domain adaptation technique to further enhance LLM-Judge performance by effectively transferring knowledge between datasets. We release both our human-annotated and LLM-annotated judgment data (36k samples in total) for public use here: https://github.com/tahmedge/llm_judge_biomedical_re.

Paperid: 801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00774.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current motion-based multiple object tracking (MOT) approaches rely heavily on Intersection-over-Union (IoU) for object association. Without using 3D features, they are ineffective in scenarios with occlusions or visually similar objects. To address this, our paper presents a novel depth-aware framework for MOT. We estimate depth using a zero-shot approach and incorporate it as an independent feature in the association process. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Alignment Score that refines IoU by integrating both coarse bounding box overlap and fine-grained (pixel-level) alignment to improve association accuracy without requiring additional learnable parameters. To our knowledge, this is the first MOT framework to incorporate 3D features (monocular depth) as an independent decision matrix in the association step. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks without any training nor fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/Milad-Khanchi/DepthMOT

Paperid: 802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00457.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse tasks without domain-specific training, fueling interest in their potential for time-series forecasting. While LLMs have shown potential in zero-shot forecasting through prompting alone, recent studies suggest that LLMs lack inherent effectiveness in forecasting. Given these conflicting findings, a rigorous validation is essential for drawing reliable conclusions. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs as zero-shot forecasters compared to state-of-the-art domain-specific models. Our experiments show that LLM-based zero-shot forecasters often struggle to achieve high accuracy due to their sensitivity to noise, underperforming even simple domain-specific models. We have explored solutions to reduce LLMs' sensitivity to noise in the zero-shot setting, but improving their robustness remains a significant challenge. Our findings suggest that rather than emphasizing zero-shot forecasting, a more promising direction would be to focus on fine-tuning LLMs to better process numerical sequences. Our experimental code is available at https://github.com/junwoopark92/revisiting-LLMs-zeroshot-forecaster.

Paperid: 803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00447.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This study investigates the performance of few-shot learning (FSL) approaches in recognizing Bangla handwritten characters and numerals using limited labeled data. It demonstrates the applicability of these methods to scripts with intricate and complex structures, where dataset scarcity is a common challenge. Given the complexity of Bangla script, we hypothesize that models performing well on these characters can generalize effectively to languages of similar or lower structural complexity. To this end, we introduce SynergiProtoNet, a hybrid network designed to improve the recognition accuracy of handwritten characters and digits. The model integrates advanced clustering techniques with a robust embedding framework to capture fine-grained details and contextual nuances. It leverages multi-level (both high- and low-level) feature extraction within a prototypical learning framework. We rigorously benchmark SynergiProtoNet against several state-of-the-art few-shot learning models: BD-CSPN, Prototypical Network, Relation Network, Matching Network, and SimpleShot, across diverse evaluation settings including Monolingual Intra-Dataset Evaluation, Monolingual Inter-Dataset Evaluation, Cross-Lingual Transfer, and Split Digit Testing. Experimental results show that SynergiProtoNet consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a new benchmark in few-shot learning for handwritten character and digit recognition. The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/MehediAhamed/SynergiProtoNet.

Paperid: 804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00173.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present MotionPersona, a novel real-time character controller that allows users to characterize a character by specifying attributes such as physical traits, mental states, and demographics, and projects these properties into the generated motions for animating the character. In contrast to existing deep learning-based controllers, which typically produce homogeneous animations tailored to a single, predefined character, MotionPersona accounts for the impact of various traits on human motion as observed in the real world. To achieve this, we develop a block autoregressive motion diffusion model conditioned on SMPLX parameters, textual prompts, and user-defined locomotion control signals. We also curate a comprehensive dataset featuring a wide range of locomotion types and actor traits to enable the training of this characteristic-aware controller. Unlike prior work, MotionPersona is the first method capable of generating motion that faithfully reflects user-specified characteristics (e.g., an elderly person's shuffling gait) while responding in real time to dynamic control inputs. Additionally, we introduce a few-shot characterization technique as a complementary conditioning mechanism, enabling customization via short motion clips when language prompts fall short. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MotionPersona outperforms existing methods in characteristics-aware locomotion control, achieving superior motion quality and diversity. Results, code, and demo can be found at: https://motionpersona25.github.io/.

Paperid: 805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24844.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training data mixtures greatly impact the generalization performance of large language models. Existing domain reweighting methods often rely on costly weight computations and require retraining when new data is introduced. To this end, we introduce a flexible and efficient data mixing framework, Chameleon, that employs leverage scores to quantify domain importance within a learned embedding space. We first construct a domain affinity matrix over domain embeddings. The induced leverage scores determine a mixture that upweights domains sharing common representations in embedding space. This formulation allows direct transfer to new data by computing the new domain embeddings. In experiments, we demonstrate improvements over three key scenarios: (i) our computed weights improve performance on pretraining domains with a fraction of the compute of existing methods; (ii) Chameleon can adapt to data changes without proxy retraining, boosting few-shot reasoning accuracies when transferred to new data; (iii) our method enables efficient domain reweighting in finetuning, consistently improving test perplexity on all finetuning domains over uniform mixture. Our code is available at https://github.com/LIONS-EPFL/Chameleon.

Paperid: 806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24693.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models pre-trained at large scale have shown unprecedented adaptability and generalization to downstream tasks. Although its discriminative potential has been widely explored, its reliability and uncertainty are still overlooked. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of CLIP models under the split conformal prediction paradigm, which provides theoretical guarantees to black-box models based on a small, labeled calibration set. In contrast to the main body of literature on conformal predictors in vision classifiers, foundation models exhibit a particular characteristic: they are pre-trained on a one-time basis on an inaccessible source domain, different from the transferred task. This domain drift negatively affects the efficiency of the conformal sets and poses additional challenges. To alleviate this issue, we propose Conf-OT, a transfer learning setting that operates transductive over the combined calibration and query sets. Solving an optimal transport problem, the proposed method bridges the domain gap between pre-training and adaptation without requiring additional data splits but still maintaining coverage guarantees. We comprehensively explore this conformal prediction strategy on a broad span of 15 datasets and three non-conformity scores. Conf-OT provides consistent relative improvements of up to 20% on set efficiency while being 15 times faster than popular transductive approaches.

Paperid: 807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24340.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Classifying geospatial imagery remains a major bottleneck for applications such as disaster response and land-use monitoring-particularly in regions where annotated data is scarce or unavailable. Existing tools (e.g., RS-CLIP) that claim zero-shot classification capabilities for satellite imagery nonetheless rely on task-specific pretraining and adaptation to reach competitive performance. We introduce GeoVision Labeler (GVL), a strictly zero-shot classification framework: a vision Large Language Model (vLLM) generates rich, human-readable image descriptions, which are then mapped to user-defined classes by a conventional Large Language Model (LLM). This modular, and interpretable pipeline enables flexible image classification for a large range of use cases. We evaluated GVL across three benchmarks-SpaceNet v7, UC Merced, and RESISC45. It achieves up to 93.2% zero-shot accuracy on the binary Buildings vs. No Buildings task on SpaceNet v7. For complex multi-class classification tasks (UC Merced, RESISC45), we implemented a recursive LLM-driven clustering to form meta-classes at successive depths, followed by hierarchical classification-first resolving coarse groups, then finer distinctions-to deliver competitive zero-shot performance. GVL is open-sourced at https://github.com/microsoft/geo-vision-labeler to catalyze adoption in real-world geospatial workflows.

Paperid: 808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24190.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification remains challenging due to the scarcity of labeled training examples. Augmenting them with synthetic data has emerged as a promising way to alleviate this issue, but models trained on synthetic samples often face performance degradation due to the inherent gap between real and synthetic distributions. To address this limitation, we develop a theoretical framework that quantifies the impact of such distribution discrepancies on supervised learning, specifically in the context of image classification. More importantly, our framework suggests practical ways to generate good synthetic samples and to train a predictor with high generalization ability. Building upon this framework, we propose a novel theoretical-based algorithm that integrates prototype learning to optimize both data partitioning and model training, effectively bridging the gap between real few-shot data and synthetic data. Extensive experiments results show that our approach demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, outperforming them across multiple datasets.

Paperid: 809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23745.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in aligning visual and textual modalities, enabling a wide range of applications in multimodal understanding and generation. While they excel in zero-shot and transfer learning scenarios, VLMs remain susceptible to misclassification, often yielding confident yet incorrect predictions. This limitation poses a significant risk in safety-critical domains, where erroneous predictions can lead to severe consequences. In this work, we introduce TrustVLM, a training-free framework designed to address the critical challenge of estimating when VLM's predictions can be trusted. Motivated by the observed modality gap in VLMs and the insight that certain concepts are more distinctly represented in the image embedding space, we propose a novel confidence-scoring function that leverages this space to improve misclassification detection. We rigorously evaluate our approach across 17 diverse datasets, employing 4 architectures and 2 VLMs, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of up to 51.87% in AURC, 9.14% in AUROC, and 32.42% in FPR95 compared to existing baselines. By improving the reliability of the model without requiring retraining, TrustVLM paves the way for safer deployment of VLMs in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/EPFL-IMOS/TrustVLM.

Paperid: 810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23716.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce AnySplat, a feed forward network for novel view synthesis from uncalibrated image collections. In contrast to traditional neural rendering pipelines that demand known camera poses and per scene optimization, or recent feed forward methods that buckle under the computational weight of dense views, our model predicts everything in one shot. A single forward pass yields a set of 3D Gaussian primitives encoding both scene geometry and appearance, and the corresponding camera intrinsics and extrinsics for each input image. This unified design scales effortlessly to casually captured, multi view datasets without any pose annotations. In extensive zero shot evaluations, AnySplat matches the quality of pose aware baselines in both sparse and dense view scenarios while surpassing existing pose free approaches. Moreover, it greatly reduce rendering latency compared to optimization based neural fields, bringing real time novel view synthesis within reach for unconstrained capture settings.Project page: https://city-super.github.io/anysplat/

Paperid: 811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23660.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents Diffusion via Autoregressive models (D-AR), a new paradigm recasting the image diffusion process as a vanilla autoregressive procedure in the standard next-token-prediction fashion. We start by designing the tokenizer that converts images into sequences of discrete tokens, where tokens in different positions can be decoded into different diffusion denoising steps in the pixel space. Thanks to the diffusion properties, these tokens naturally follow a coarse-to-fine order, which directly lends itself to autoregressive modeling. Therefore, we apply standard next-token prediction on these tokens, without modifying any underlying designs (either causal masks or training/inference strategies), and such sequential autoregressive token generation directly mirrors the diffusion procedure in image space. That is, once the autoregressive model generates an increment of tokens, we can directly decode these tokens into the corresponding diffusion denoising step in the streaming manner. Our pipeline naturally reveals several intriguing properties, for example, it supports consistent previews when generating only a subset of tokens and enables zero-shot layout-controlled synthesis. On the standard ImageNet benchmark, our method achieves 2.09 FID using a 775M Llama backbone with 256 discrete tokens. We hope our work can inspire future research on unified autoregressive architectures of visual synthesis, especially with large language models. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/showlab/D-AR

Paperid: 812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23625.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Audio source separation is fundamental for machines to understand complex acoustic environments and underpins numerous audio applications. Current supervised deep learning approaches, while powerful, are limited by the need for extensive, task-specific labeled data and struggle to generalize to the immense variability and open-set nature of real-world acoustic scenes. Inspired by the success of generative foundation models, we investigate whether pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion models can overcome these limitations. We make a surprising discovery: zero-shot source separation can be achieved purely through a pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion model under the right configuration. Our method, named ZeroSep, works by inverting the mixed audio into the diffusion model's latent space and then using text conditioning to guide the denoising process to recover individual sources. Without any task-specific training or fine-tuning, ZeroSep repurposes the generative diffusion model for a discriminative separation task and inherently supports open-set scenarios through its rich textual priors. ZeroSep is compatible with a variety of pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion backbones and delivers strong separation performance on multiple separation benchmarks, surpassing even supervised methods.

Paperid: 813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23566.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) remains a persistent challenge in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) due to the inherent freedom of symbol layout and variability in handwriting styles. Prior methods have faced performance bottlenecks, proposing isolated architectural modifications that are difficult to integrate coherently into a unified framework. Meanwhile, recent advances in pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong cross-task generalization, offering a promising foundation for developing unified solutions. In this paper, we introduce Uni-MuMER, which fully fine-tunes a VLM for the HMER task without modifying its architecture, effectively injecting domain-specific knowledge into a generalist framework. Our method integrates three data-driven tasks: Tree-Aware Chain-of-Thought (Tree-CoT) for structured spatial reasoning, Error-Driven Learning (EDL) for reducing confusion among visually similar characters, and Symbol Counting (SC) for improving recognition consistency in long expressions. Experiments on the CROHME and HME100K datasets show that Uni-MuMER achieves new state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the best lightweight specialized model SSAN by 16.31% and the top-performing VLM Gemini2.5-flash by 24.42% in the zero-shot setting. Our datasets, models, and code are open-sourced at: https://github.com/BFlameSwift/Uni-MuMER

Paperid: 814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scaling laws motivate the development of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) that pre-train vast parameters and achieve remarkable zero-shot forecasting performance. Surprisingly, even after fine-tuning, TSFMs cannot consistently outperform smaller, specialized models trained on full-shot downstream data. A key question is how to realize effective adaptation of TSFMs for a target forecasting task. Through empirical studies on various TSFMs, the pre-trained models often exhibit inherent sparsity and redundancy in computation, suggesting that TSFMs have learned to activate task-relevant network substructures to accommodate diverse forecasting tasks. To preserve this valuable prior knowledge, we propose a structured pruning method to regularize the subsequent fine-tuning process by focusing it on a more relevant and compact parameter space. Extensive experiments on seven TSFMs and six benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning a smaller, pruned TSFM significantly improves forecasting performance compared to fine-tuning original models. This prune-then-finetune paradigm often enables TSFMs to achieve state-of-the-art performance and surpass strong specialized baselines. Source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/Prune-then-Finetune.

Paperid: 815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23189.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Embodied visual tracking is a fundamental skill in Embodied AI, enabling an agent to follow a specific target in dynamic environments using only egocentric vision. This task is inherently challenging as it requires both accurate target recognition and effective trajectory planning under conditions of severe occlusion and high scene dynamics. Existing approaches typically address this challenge through a modular separation of recognition and planning. In this work, we propose TrackVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that learns the synergy between object recognition and trajectory planning. Leveraging a shared LLM backbone, we employ a language modeling head for recognition and an anchor-based diffusion model for trajectory planning. To train TrackVLA, we construct an Embodied Visual Tracking Benchmark (EVT-Bench) and collect diverse difficulty levels of recognition samples, resulting in a dataset of 1.7 million samples. Through extensive experiments in both synthetic and real-world environments, TrackVLA demonstrates SOTA performance and strong generalizability. It significantly outperforms existing methods on public benchmarks in a zero-shot manner while remaining robust to high dynamics and occlusion in real-world scenarios at 10 FPS inference speed. Our project page is: https://pku-epic.github.io/TrackVLA-web.

Paperid: 816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23175.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Quadrupedal robots have demonstrated remarkable agility and robustness in traversing complex terrains. However, they struggle with dynamic object interactions, where contact must be precisely sensed and controlled. To bridge this gap, we present LocoTouch, a system that equips quadrupedal robots with tactile sensing to address a particularly challenging task in this category: long-distance transport of unsecured cylindrical objects, which typically requires custom mounting or fastening mechanisms to maintain stability. For efficient large-area tactile sensing, we design a high-density distributed tactile sensor that covers the entire back of the robot. To effectively leverage tactile feedback for robot control, we develop a simulation environment with high-fidelity tactile signals, and train tactile-aware transport policies using a two-stage learning pipeline. Furthermore, we design a novel reward function to promote robust, symmetric, and frequency-adaptive locomotion gaits. After training in simulation, LocoTouch transfers zero-shot to the real world, reliably transporting a wide range of unsecured cylindrical objects with diverse sizes, weights, and surface properties. Moreover, it remains robust over long distances, on uneven terrain, and under severe perturbations.

Paperid: 817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23134.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Appearance editing according to user needs is a pivotal task in video editing. Existing text-guided methods often lead to ambiguities regarding user intentions and restrict fine-grained control over editing specific aspects of objects. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a novel approach named {Zero-to-Hero}, which focuses on reference-based video editing that disentangles the editing process into two distinct problems. It achieves this by first editing an anchor frame to satisfy user requirements as a reference image and then consistently propagating its appearance across other frames. We leverage correspondence within the original frames to guide the attention mechanism, which is more robust than previously proposed optical flow or temporal modules in memory-friendly video generative models, especially when dealing with objects exhibiting large motions. It offers a solid ZERO-shot initialization that ensures both accuracy and temporal consistency. However, intervention in the attention mechanism results in compounded imaging degradation with over-saturated colors and unknown blurring issues. Starting from Zero-Stage, our Hero-Stage Holistically learns a conditional generative model for vidEo RestOration. To accurately evaluate the consistency of the appearance, we construct a set of videos with multiple appearances using Blender, enabling a fine-grained and deterministic evaluation. Our method outperforms the best-performing baseline with a PSNR improvement of 2.6 dB. The project page is at https://github.com/Tonniia/Zero2Hero.

Paperid: 818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23049.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pruning is a widely used technique to compress large language models (LLMs) by removing unimportant weights, but it often suffers from significant performance degradation - especially under semi-structured sparsity constraints. Existing pruning methods primarily focus on estimating the importance of individual weights, which limits their ability to preserve critical capabilities of the model. In this work, we propose a new perspective: rather than merely selecting which weights to prune, we first redistribute parameter importance to make the model inherently more amenable to pruning. By minimizing the information entropy of normalized importance scores, our approach concentrates importance onto a smaller subset of weights, thereby enhancing pruning robustness. We instantiate this idea through DenoiseRotator, which applies learnable orthogonal transformations to the model's weight matrices. Our method is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with existing pruning techniques such as Magnitude, SparseGPT, and Wanda. Evaluated on LLaMA3, Qwen2.5, and Mistral models under 50% unstructured and 2:4 semi-structured sparsity, DenoiseRotator consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy. For instance, on LLaMA3-70B pruned with SparseGPT at 2:4 semi-structured sparsity, DenoiseRotator reduces the perplexity gap to the dense model by 58%, narrowing the degradation from 8.1 to 3.4 points. Codes are available at https://github.com/Axel-gu/DenoiseRotator.

Paperid: 819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23019.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deployable service and delivery robots struggle to navigate multi-floor buildings to reach object goals, as existing systems fail due to single-floor assumptions and requirements for offline, globally consistent maps. Multi-floor environments pose unique challenges including cross-floor transitions and vertical spatial reasoning, especially navigating unknown buildings. Object-Goal Navigation benchmarks like HM3D and MP3D also capture this multi-floor reality, yet current methods lack support for online, floor-aware navigation. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{\textit{ASCENT}}, an online framework for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation that enables robots to operate without pre-built maps or retraining on new object categories. It introduces: (1) a \textbf{Multi-Floor Abstraction} module that dynamically constructs hierarchical representations with stair-aware obstacle mapping and cross-floor topology modeling, and (2) a \textbf{Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning} module that combines frontier ranking with LLM-driven contextual analysis for multi-floor navigation decisions. We evaluate on HM3D and MP3D benchmarks, outperforming state-of-the-art zero-shot approaches, and demonstrate real-world deployment on a quadruped robot.

Paperid: 820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22815.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Irregular Multivariate Time Series (IMTS) forecasting is challenging due to the unaligned nature of multi-channel signals and the prevalence of extensive missing data. Existing methods struggle to capture reliable temporal patterns from such data due to significant missing values. While pre-trained foundation models show potential for addressing these challenges, they are typically designed for Regularly Sampled Time Series (RTS). Motivated by the visual Mask AutoEncoder's (MAE) powerful capability for modeling sparse multi-channel information and its success in RTS forecasting, we propose VIMTS, a framework adapting Visual MAE for IMTS forecasting. To mitigate the effect of missing values, VIMTS first processes IMTS along the timeline into feature patches at equal intervals. These patches are then complemented using learned cross-channel dependencies. Then it leverages visual MAE's capability in handling sparse multichannel data for patch reconstruction, followed by a coarse-to-fine technique to generate precise predictions from focused contexts. In addition, we integrate self-supervised learning for improved IMTS modeling by adapting the visual MAE to IMTS data. Extensive experiments demonstrate VIMTS's superior performance and few-shot capability, advancing the application of visual foundation models in more general time series tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/WHU-HZY/VIMTS.

Paperid: 821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22664.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) typically pair a modestly sized vision encoder with a large language model (LLM), e.g., Llama-70B, making the decoder the primary computational burden during training. To reduce costs, a potential promising strategy is to first train the vision encoder using a small language model before transferring it to the large one. We construct small "surrogate models" that share the same embedding space and representation language as the large target LLM by directly inheriting its shallow layers. Vision encoders trained on the surrogate can then be directly transferred to the larger model, a process we call zero-shot grafting -- when plugged directly into the full-size target LLM, the grafted pair surpasses the encoder-surrogate pair and, on some benchmarks, even performs on par with full decoder training with the target LLM. Furthermore, our surrogate training approach reduces overall VLM training costs by ~45% when using Llama-70B as the decoder. The code is at https://github.com/facebookresearch/zero.

Paperid: 822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22299.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Information retrieval plays a crucial role in resource localization. Current dense retrievers retrieve the relevant documents within a corpus via embedding similarities, which compute similarities between dense vectors mainly depending on word co-occurrence between queries and documents, but overlook the real query intents. Thus, they often retrieve numerous irrelevant documents. Particularly in the scenarios of complex queries such as \emph{negative-constraint queries}, their retrieval performance could be catastrophic. To address the issue, we propose a neuro-symbolic information retrieval method, namely \textbf{NS-IR}, that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to optimize the embeddings of naive natural language by considering the \emph{logical consistency} between queries and documents. Specifically, we introduce two novel techniques, \emph{logic alignment} and \emph{connective constraint}, to rerank candidate documents, thereby enhancing retrieval relevance. Furthermore, we construct a new dataset \textbf{NegConstraint} including negative-constraint queries to evaluate our NS-IR's performance on such complex IR scenarios. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NS-IR not only achieves superior zero-shot retrieval performance on web search and low-resource retrieval tasks, but also performs better on negative-constraint queries. Our scource code and dataset are available at https://github.com/xgl-git/NS-IR-main.

Paperid: 823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21897.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) has been widely used to train a model that can perform segmentation from only a few annotated images. However, most existing prototype-based FSMIS methods generate multiple prototypes from the support image solely by random sampling or local averaging, which can cause particularly severe boundary blurring due to the tendency for normal features accounting for the majority of features of a specific category. Consequently, we propose to focus more attention to those weaker features that are crucial for clear segmentation boundary. Specifically, we design a Support Self-Prediction (SSP) module to identify such weak features by comparing true support mask with one predicted by global support prototype. Then, a Hard Prototypes Generation (HPG) module is employed to generate multiple hard prototypes based on these weak features. Subsequently, a Multiple Similarity Maps Fusion (MSMF) module is devised to generate final segmenting mask in a dual-path fashion to mitigate the imbalance between foreground and background in medical images. Furthermore, we introduce a boundary loss to further constraint the edge of segmentation. Extensive experiments on three publicly available medical image datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/jcjiang99/CoW.

Paperid: 824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21876.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent approaches on 3D camera control in video diffusion models (VDMs) often create anchor videos to guide diffusion models as a structured prior by rendering from estimated point clouds following annotated camera trajectories. However, errors inherent in point cloud estimation often lead to inaccurate anchor videos. Moreover, the requirement for extensive camera trajectory annotations further increases resource demands. To address these limitations, we introduce EPiC, an efficient and precise camera control learning framework that automatically constructs high-quality anchor videos without expensive camera trajectory annotations. Concretely, we create highly precise anchor videos for training by masking source videos based on first-frame visibility. This approach ensures high alignment, eliminates the need for camera trajectory annotations, and thus can be readily applied to any in-the-wild video to generate image-to-video (I2V) training pairs. Furthermore, we introduce Anchor-ControlNet, a lightweight conditioning module that integrates anchor video guidance in visible regions to pretrained VDMs, with less than 1% of backbone model parameters. By combining the proposed anchor video data and ControlNet module, EPiC achieves efficient training with substantially fewer parameters, training steps, and less data, without requiring modifications to the diffusion model backbone typically needed to mitigate rendering misalignments. Although being trained on masking-based anchor videos, our method generalizes robustly to anchor videos made with point clouds during inference, enabling precise 3D-informed camera control. EPiC achieves SOTA performance on RealEstate10K and MiraData for I2V camera control task, demonstrating precise and robust camera control ability both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, EPiC also exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to video-to-video scenarios.

Paperid: 825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21795.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation aims to segment unseen object categories from just a handful of annotated examples. This requires mechanisms that can both identify semantically related objects across images and accurately produce segmentation masks. We note that Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), with its prompt-and-propagate mechanism, offers both strong segmentation capabilities and a built-in feature matching process. However, we show that its representations are entangled with task-specific cues optimized for object tracking, which impairs its use for tasks requiring higher level semantic understanding. Our key insight is that, despite its class-agnostic pretraining, SAM2 already encodes rich semantic structure in its features. We propose SANSA (Semantically AligNed Segment Anything 2), a framework that makes this latent structure explicit, and repurposes SAM2 for few-shot segmentation through minimal task-specific modifications. SANSA achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot segmentation benchmarks specifically designed to assess generalization, outperforms generalist methods in the popular in-context setting, supports various prompts flexible interaction via points, boxes, or scribbles, and remains significantly faster and more compact than prior approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/ClaudiaCuttano/SANSA.

Paperid: 826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21780.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Generative models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in generating high-fidelity visual content. In this work, we explore how generative models can further be used not only to synthesize visual content but also to understand the properties of a scene given a natural image. We formulate scene understanding as an inverse generative modeling problem, where we seek to find conditional parameters of a visual generative model to best fit a given natural image. To enable this procedure to infer scene structure from images substantially different than those seen during training, we further propose to build this visual generative model compositionally from smaller models over pieces of a scene. We illustrate how this procedure enables us to infer the set of objects in a scene, enabling robust generalization to new test scenes with an increased number of objects of new shapes. We further illustrate how this enables us to infer global scene factors, likewise enabling robust generalization to new scenes. Finally, we illustrate how this approach can be directly applied to existing pretrained text-to-image generative models for zero-shot multi-object perception. Code and visualizations are at https://energy-based-model.github.io/compositional-inference.

Paperid: 827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21524.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning shared representations is a primary area of multimodal representation learning. The current approaches to achieve a shared embedding space rely heavily on paired samples from each modality, which are significantly harder to obtain than unpaired ones. In this work, we demonstrate that shared representations can be learned almost exclusively from unpaired data. Our arguments are grounded in the spectral embeddings of the random walk matrices constructed independently from each unimodal representation. Empirical results in computer vision and natural language processing domains support its potential, revealing the effectiveness of unpaired data in capturing meaningful cross-modal relations, demonstrating high capabilities in retrieval tasks, generation, arithmetics, zero-shot, and cross-domain classification. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate these capabilities almost exclusively from unpaired samples, giving rise to a cross-modal embedding that could be viewed as universal, i.e., independent of the specific modalities of the data. Our code IS publicly available at https://github.com/shaham-lab/SUE.

Paperid: 828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21457.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to the process of actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information. It is a critical component of efficient perception and decision-making in humans and advanced embodied agents. Recently, the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as central planning and decision-making modules in robotic systems has gained extensive attention. However, despite the importance of active perception in embodied intelligence, there is little to no exploration of how MLLMs can be equipped with or learn active perception capabilities. In this paper, we first provide a systematic definition of MLLM-based active perception tasks. We point out that the recently proposed GPT-o3 model's zoom-in search strategy can be regarded as a special case of active perception; however, it still suffers from low search efficiency and inaccurate region selection. To address these issues, we propose ACTIVE-O3, a purely reinforcement learning based training framework built on top of GRPO, designed to equip MLLMs with active perception capabilities. We further establish a comprehensive benchmark suite to evaluate ACTIVE-O3 across both general open-world tasks, such as small-object and dense object grounding, and domain-specific scenarios, including small object detection in remote sensing and autonomous driving, as well as fine-grained interactive segmentation. In addition, ACTIVE-O3 also demonstrates strong zero-shot reasoning abilities on the V* Benchmark, without relying on any explicit reasoning data. We hope that our work can provide a simple codebase and evaluation protocol to facilitate future research on active perception in MLLMs.

Paperid: 829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20764.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving a target image specified by a query image and a relative text that describes a semantic modification to the query image. Existing methods in CIR struggle to accurately represent the image and the text modification, resulting in subpar performance. To address this limitation, we introduce a CIR framework, ConText-CIR, trained with a Text Concept-Consistency loss that encourages the representations of noun phrases in the text modification to better attend to the relevant parts of the query image. To support training with this loss function, we also propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates training data from existing CIR datasets or unlabeled images. We show that these components together enable stronger performance on CIR tasks, setting a new state-of-the-art in composed image retrieval in both the supervised and zero-shot settings on multiple benchmark datasets, including CIRR and CIRCO. Source code, model checkpoints, and our new datasets are available at https://github.com/mvrl/ConText-CIR.

Paperid: 830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20742.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse graph-related tasks, their high-dimensional hidden representations render them black boxes. In this work, we propose Graph Lingual Network (GLN), a GNN built on large language models (LLMs), with hidden representations in the form of human-readable text. Through careful prompt design, GLN incorporates not only the message passing module of GNNs but also advanced GNN techniques, including graph attention and initial residual connection. The comprehensibility of GLN's hidden representations enables an intuitive analysis of how node representations change (1) across layers and (2) under advanced GNN techniques, shedding light on the inner workings of GNNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GLN achieves strong zero-shot performance on node classification and link prediction, outperforming existing LLM-based baseline methods.

Paperid: 831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20612.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) trained on internet-scale data achieve remarkable zero-shot detection performance on common objects like car, truck, and pedestrian. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution classes, tasks and imaging modalities not typically found in their pre-training. Rather than simply re-training VLMs on more visual data, we argue that one should align VLMs to new concepts with annotation instructions containing a few visual examples and rich textual descriptions. To this end, we introduce Roboflow100-VL, a large-scale collection of 100 multi-modal object detection datasets with diverse concepts not commonly found in VLM pre-training. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on our benchmark in zero-shot, few-shot, semi-supervised, and fully-supervised settings, allowing for comparison across data regimes. Notably, we find that VLMs like GroundingDINO and Qwen2.5-VL achieve less than 2% zero-shot accuracy on challenging medical imaging datasets within Roboflow100-VL, demonstrating the need for few-shot concept alignment. Lastly, we discuss our recent CVPR 2025 Foundational FSOD competition and share insights from the community. Notably, the winning team significantly outperforms our baseline by 16.8 mAP! Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/roboflow/rf100-vl/ and https://universe.roboflow.com/rf100-vl/

Paperid: 832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20507.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The global challenge of sustainable recycling demands automated, fast, and accurate, state-of-the-art (SOTA) material detection systems that act as a bedrock for a circular economy. Democratizing access to these cutting-edge solutions that enable real-time waste analysis is essential for scaling up recycling efforts and fostering the Green Deal. In response, we introduce \textbf{Electrolyzers-HSI}, a novel multimodal benchmark dataset designed to accelerate the recovery of critical raw materials through accurate electrolyzer materials classification. The dataset comprises 55 co-registered high-resolution RGB images and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) data cubes spanning the 400--2500 nm spectral range, yielding over 4.2 million pixel vectors and 424,169 labeled ones. This enables non-invasive spectral analysis of shredded electrolyzer samples, supporting quantitative and qualitative material classification and spectral properties investigation. We evaluate a suite of baseline machine learning (ML) methods alongside SOTA transformer-based deep learning (DL) architectures, including Vision Transformer, SpectralFormer, and the Multimodal Fusion Transformer, to investigate architectural bottlenecks for further efficiency optimisation when deploying transformers in material identification. We implement zero-shot detection techniques and majority voting across pixel-level predictions to establish object-level classification robustness. In adherence to the FAIR data principles, the electrolyzers-HSI dataset and accompanying codebase are openly available at https://github.com/hifexplo/Electrolyzers-HSI and https://rodare.hzdr.de/record/3668, supporting reproducible research and facilitating the broader adoption of smart and sustainable e-waste recycling solutions.

Paperid: 833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20469.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D reconstruction techniques and vision-language models have fueled significant progress in 3D semantic understanding, a capability critical to robotics, autonomous driving, and virtual/augmented reality. However, methods that rely on 2D priors are prone to a critical challenge: cross-view semantic inconsistencies induced by occlusion, image blur, and view-dependent variations. These inconsistencies, when propagated via projection supervision, deteriorate the quality of 3D Gaussian semantic fields and introduce artifacts in the rendered outputs. To mitigate this limitation, we propose CCL-LGS, a novel framework that enforces view-consistent semantic supervision by integrating multi-view semantic cues. Specifically, our approach first employs a zero-shot tracker to align a set of SAM-generated 2D masks and reliably identify their corresponding categories. Next, we utilize CLIP to extract robust semantic encodings across views. Finally, our Contrastive Codebook Learning (CCL) module distills discriminative semantic features by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class distinctiveness. In contrast to previous methods that directly apply CLIP to imperfect masks, our framework explicitly resolves semantic conflicts while preserving category discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCL-LGS outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Our project page is available at https://epsilontl.github.io/CCL-LGS/.

Paperid: 834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20446.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative modeling of time series is a central challenge in time series analysis, particularly under data-scarce conditions. Despite recent advances in generative modeling, a comprehensive understanding of how state-of-the-art generative models perform under limited supervision remains lacking. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale study evaluating leading generative models in data-scarce settings, revealing a substantial performance gap between full-data and data-scarce regimes. To close this gap, we propose a unified diffusion-based generative framework that can synthesize high-fidelity time series across diverse domains using just a few examples. Our model is pre-trained on a large, heterogeneous collection of time series datasets, enabling it to learn generalizable temporal representations. It further incorporates architectural innovations such as dynamic convolutional layers for flexible channel adaptation and dataset token conditioning for domain-aware generation. Without requiring abundant supervision, our unified model achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot settings-outperforming domain-specific baselines across a wide range of subset sizes. Remarkably, it also surpasses all baselines even when tested on full datasets benchmarks, highlighting the strength of pre-training and cross-domain generalization. We hope this work encourages the community to revisit few-shot generative modeling as a key problem in time series research and pursue unified solutions that scale efficiently across domains. Code is available at https://github.com/azencot-group/ImagenFew.

Paperid: 835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20024.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Due to the powerful vision-language reasoning and generalization abilities, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention in the field of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving. However, their application to closed-loop systems remains underexplored, and current MLLM-based methods have not shown clear superiority to mainstream E2E imitation learning approaches. In this work, we propose ReasonPlan, a novel MLLM fine-tuning framework designed for closed-loop driving through holistic reasoning with a self-supervised Next Scene Prediction task and supervised Decision Chain-of-Thought process. This dual mechanism encourages the model to align visual representations with actionable driving context, while promoting interpretable and causally grounded decision making. We curate a planning-oriented decision reasoning dataset, namely PDR, comprising 210k diverse and high-quality samples. Our method outperforms the mainstream E2E imitation learning method by a large margin of 19% L2 and 16.1 driving score on Bench2Drive benchmark. Furthermore, ReasonPlan demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on unseen DOS benchmark, highlighting its adaptability in handling zero-shot corner cases. Code and dataset will be found in https://github.com/Liuxueyi/ReasonPlan.

Paperid: 836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19896.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent trends are emerging in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous agents that take actions based on the content of the user text prompts. We intend to apply these concepts to the field of Control in space, enabling LLMs to play a significant role in the decision-making process for autonomous satellite operations. As a first step towards this goal, we have developed a pure LLM-based solution for the Kerbal Space Program Differential Games (KSPDG) challenge, a public software design competition where participants create autonomous agents for maneuvering satellites involved in non-cooperative space operations, running on the KSP game engine. Our approach leverages prompt engineering, few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning techniques to create an effective LLM-based agent that ranked 2nd in the competition. To the best of our knowledge, this work pioneers the integration of LLM agents into space research. The project comprises several open repositories to facilitate replication and further research. The codebase is accessible on \href{https://github.com/ARCLab-MIT/kspdg}{GitHub}, while the trained models and datasets are available on \href{https://huggingface.co/OhhTuRnz}{Hugging Face}. Additionally, experiment tracking and detailed results can be reviewed on \href{https://wandb.ai/carrusk/huggingface}{Weights \& Biases

Paperid: 837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19846.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image analysis and autonomous driving and has a problem with the high cost of annotating the labels required in training. To address this problem, semantic segmentation methods based on semi-supervised learning with a small number of labeled data have been proposed. For example, one approach is to train a semantic segmentation model using images with annotated labels and pseudo labels. In this approach, the accuracy of the semantic segmentation model depends on the quality of the pseudo labels, and the quality of the pseudo labels depends on the performance of the model to be trained and the amount of data with annotated labels. In this paper, we generate pseudo labels using zero-shot annotation with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), improve the accuracy of the pseudo labels using the Unified Dual-Stream Perturbations Approach (UniMatch), and use them as enhanced labels to train a semantic segmentation model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through the experiments using the public datasets: PASCAL and MS COCO. The project web page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/ZERO-SHOT-PLG/

Paperid: 838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19813.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have transformed novel view synthesis by modeling scene-specific volumetric representations directly from images. While generalizable NeRF models can generate novel views across unknown scenes by learning latent ray representations, their performance heavily depends on a large number of multi-view observations. However, with limited input views, these methods experience significant degradation in rendering quality. To address this limitation, we propose GoLF-NRT: a Global and Local feature Fusion-based Neural Rendering Transformer. GoLF-NRT enhances generalizable neural rendering from few input views by leveraging a 3D transformer with efficient sparse attention to capture global scene context. In parallel, it integrates local geometric features extracted along the epipolar line, enabling high-quality scene reconstruction from as few as 1 to 3 input views. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive sampling strategy based on attention weights and kernel regression, improving the accuracy of transformer-based neural rendering. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that GoLF-NRT achieves state-of-the-art performance across varying numbers of input views, highlighting the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/GoLF-NRT.

Paperid: 839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19800.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader (Alyafeai et al.,2021) laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance. We release the code: https://github.com/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE for the research community.

Paperid: 840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19503.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent methods for zero-shot Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection typically leverage the generalization ability of large Vision-Language Model (VLM), i.e., CLIP, on unseen categories, showing impressive results on various zero-shot settings. However, existing methods struggle to adapt CLIP representations for human-object pairs, as CLIP tends to overlook fine-grained information necessary for distinguishing interactions. To address this issue, we devise, LAIN, a novel zero-shot HOI detection framework enhancing the locality and interaction awareness of CLIP representations. The locality awareness, which involves capturing fine-grained details and the spatial structure of individual objects, is achieved by aggregating the information and spatial priors of adjacent neighborhood patches. The interaction awareness, which involves identifying whether and how a human is interacting with an object, is achieved by capturing the interaction pattern between the human and the object. By infusing locality and interaction awareness into CLIP representation, LAIN captures detailed information about the human-object pairs. Our extensive experiments on existing benchmarks show that LAIN outperforms previous methods on various zero-shot settings, demonstrating the importance of locality and interaction awareness for effective zero-shot HOI detection.

Paperid: 841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19462.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We present VoiceStar, the first zero-shot TTS model that achieves both output duration control and extrapolation. VoiceStar is an autoregressive encoder-decoder neural codec language model, that leverages a novel Progress-Monitoring Rotary Position Embedding (PM-RoPE) and is trained with Continuation-Prompt Mixed (CPM) training. PM-RoPE enables the model to better align text and speech tokens, indicates the target duration for the generated speech, and also allows the model to generate speech waveforms much longer in duration than those seen during. CPM training also helps to mitigate the training/inference mismatch, and significantly improves the quality of the generated speech in terms of speaker similarity and intelligibility. VoiceStar outperforms or is on par with current state-of-the-art models on short-form benchmarks such as Librispeech and Seed-TTS, and significantly outperforms these models on long-form/extrapolation benchmarks (20-50s) in terms of intelligibility and naturalness. Code and models: https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceStar. Audio samples: https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceStar_web

Paperid: 842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19312.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of unsupervised representation learning and large-scale pre-trained vision-language models has significantly improved cross-modal retrieval tasks. However, existing multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) studies lack a comprehensive exploration of document-level retrieval and suffer from the absence of cross-domain datasets at this granularity. To address this limitation, we introduce DocMMIR, a novel multi-modal document retrieval framework designed explicitly to unify diverse document formats and domains, including Wikipedia articles, scientific papers (arXiv), and presentation slides, within a comprehensive retrieval scenario. We construct a large-scale cross-domain multimodal benchmark, comprising 450K samples, which systematically integrates textual and visual information. Our comprehensive experimental analysis reveals substantial limitations in current state-of-the-art MLLMs (CLIP, BLIP2, SigLIP-2, ALIGN) when applied to our tasks, with only CLIP demonstrating reasonable zero-shot performance. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic investigation of training strategies, including cross-modal fusion methods and loss functions, and develop a tailored approach to train CLIP on our benchmark. This results in a +31% improvement in MRR@10 compared to the zero-shot baseline. All our data and code are released in https://github.com/J1mL1/DocMMIR.

Paperid: 843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18698.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to sub-quadratic attention approximation via Monarch matrices, an expressive class of structured matrices. Based on the variational form of softmax, we describe an efficient optimization-based algorithm to compute an approximate projection of softmax attention onto the class of Monarch matrices with $Î(N\sqrt{N} d)$ computational complexity and $Î(Nd)$ memory/IO complexity. Unlike previous approaches, MonarchAttention is both (1) transferable, yielding minimal performance loss with no additional training, even when replacing every attention layer of the transformer, and (2) hardware-efficient, utilizing the highest-throughput tensor core units on modern GPUs. With optimized kernels, MonarchAttention achieves substantial speed-ups in wall-time over FlashAttention-2: $1.4\times$ for shorter sequences $(N=256)$, $4.5\times$ for medium-length sequences $(N=4K)$, and $8.2\times$ for longer sequences $(N=16K)$. We demonstrate the quality of MonarchAttention on diverse tasks and architectures in vision and language problems, showing that it flexibly and accurately approximates softmax attention in a variety of contexts. Our code is available at https://github.com/cjyaras/monarch-attention.

Paperid: 844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18601.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human-generated reward signals are critical for aligning generative models with human preferences, guiding both training and inference-time evaluations. While large language models (LLMs) employed as proxy evaluators, i.e., LLM-as-a-Judge, significantly reduce the costs associated with manual annotations, they typically require extensive modality-specific training data and fail to generalize well across diverse multimodal tasks. In this paper, we propose Flex-Judge, a reasoning-guided multimodal judge model that leverages minimal textual reasoning data to robustly generalize across multiple modalities and evaluation formats. Our core intuition is that structured textual reasoning explanations inherently encode generalizable decision-making patterns, enabling an effective transfer to multimodal judgments, e.g., with images or videos. Empirical results demonstrate that Flex-Judge, despite being trained on significantly fewer text data, achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art commercial APIs and extensively trained multimodal evaluators. Notably, Flex-Judge presents broad impact in modalities like molecule, where comprehensive evaluation benchmarks are scarce, underscoring its practical value in resource-constrained domains. Our framework highlights reasoning-based text supervision as a powerful, cost-effective alternative to traditional annotation-intensive approaches, substantially advancing scalable multimodal model-as-a-judge.

Paperid: 845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18561.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning Video Object Segmentation is a challenging task, which generates a mask sequence from an input video and an implicit, complex text query. Existing works probe into the problem by finetuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) for segmentation-based output, while still falling short in difficult cases on videos given temporally-sensitive queries, primarily due to the failure to integrate temporal and spatial information. In this paper, we propose ThinkVideo, a novel framework which leverages the zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capability of MLLM to address these challenges. Specifically, ThinkVideo utilizes the CoT prompts to extract object selectivities associated with particular keyframes, then bridging the reasoning image segmentation model and SAM2 video processor to output mask sequences. The ThinkVideo framework is training-free and compatible with closed-source MLLMs, which can be applied to Reasoning Video Instance Segmentation. We further extend the framework for online video streams, where the CoT is used to update the object of interest when a better target starts to emerge and becomes visible. We conduct extensive experiments on video object segmentation with explicit and implicit queries. The results show that ThinkVideo significantly outperforms previous works in both cases, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Paperid: 846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18527.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many existing models for clinical trial outcome prediction are optimized using task-specific loss functions on trial phase-specific data. While this scheme may boost prediction for common diseases and drugs, it can hinder learning of generalizable representations, leading to more false positives/negatives. To address this limitation, we introduce CLaDMoP, a new pre-training approach for clinical trial outcome prediction, alongside the Successful Clinical Trials dataset(SCT), specifically designed for this task. CLaDMoP leverages a Large Language Model-to encode trials' eligibility criteria-linked to a lightweight Drug-Molecule branch through a novel multi-level fusion technique. To efficiently fuse long embeddings across levels, we incorporate a grouping block, drastically reducing computational overhead. CLaDMoP avoids reliance on task-specific objectives by pre-training on a "pair matching" proxy task. Compared to established zero-shot and few-shot baselines, our method significantly improves both PR-AUC and ROC-AUC, especially for phase I and phase II trials. We further evaluate and perform ablation on CLaDMoP after Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, comparing it to state-of-the-art supervised baselines, including MEXA-CTP, on the Trial Outcome Prediction(TOP) benchmark. CLaDMoP achieves up to 10.5% improvement in PR-AUC and 3.6% in ROC-AUC, while attaining comparable F1 score to MEXA-CTP, highlighting its potential for clinical trial outcome prediction. Code and SCT dataset can be downloaded from https://github.com/murai-lab/CLaDMoP.

Paperid: 847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18499.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress, their proficiency in graph-related tasks remains notably limited, hindering the development of truly general-purpose models. Previous attempts, including pretraining graph foundation models or employing supervised fine-tuning, often face challenges such as the scarcity of large-scale, universally represented graph data. We introduce G1, a simple yet effective approach demonstrating that Reinforcement Learning (RL) on synthetic graph-theoretic tasks can significantly scale LLMs' graph reasoning abilities. To enable RL training, we curate ErdÃµs, the largest graph reasoning dataset to date comprising 50 diverse graph-theoretic tasks of varying difficulty levels, 100k training data and 5k test data, all drived from real-world graphs. With RL on ErdÃµs, G1 obtains substantial improvements in graph reasoning, where our finetuned 3B model even outperforms Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct (24x size). RL-trained models also show strong zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks, domains, and graph encoding schemes, including other graph-theoretic benchmarks as well as real-world node classification and link prediction tasks, without compromising general reasoning abilities. Our findings offer an efficient, scalable path for building strong graph reasoners by finetuning LLMs with RL on graph-theoretic tasks, which combines the strengths of pretrained LLM capabilities with abundant, automatically generated synthetic data, suggesting that LLMs possess graph understanding abilities that RL can elicit successfully. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/PKU-ML/G1, with models and datasets hosted on Hugging Face collections https://huggingface.co/collections/PKU-ML/g1-683d659e992794fc99618cf2 for broader accessibility.

Paperid: 848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18453.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Most existing Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech(ZS-TTS) systems generate the unseen speech based on single prompt, such as reference speech or text descriptions, which limits their flexibility. We propose a customized emotion ZS-TTS system based on multi-modal prompt. The system disentangles speech into the content, timbre, emotion and prosody, allowing emotion prompts to be provided as text, image or speech. To extract emotion information from different prompts, we propose a multi-modal prompt emotion encoder. Additionally, we introduce an prosody predictor to fit the distribution of prosody and propose an emotion consistency loss to preserve emotion information in the predicted prosody. A diffusion-based acoustic model is employed to generate the target mel-spectrogram. Both objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our system outperforms existing systems in terms of naturalness and similarity. The samples are available at https://mpetts-demo.github.io/mpetts_demo/.

Paperid: 849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18334.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Past work has demonstrated that autonomous vehicles can drive more safely if they communicate with one another than if they do not. However, their communication has often not been human-understandable. Using natural language as a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication protocol offers the potential for autonomous vehicles to drive cooperatively not only with each other but also with human drivers. In this work, we propose a suite of traffic tasks in autonomous driving where vehicles in a traffic scenario need to communicate in natural language to facilitate coordination in order to avoid an imminent collision and/or support efficient traffic flow. To this end, this paper introduces a novel method, LLM+Debrief, to learn a message generation and high-level decision-making policy for autonomous vehicles through multi-agent discussion. To evaluate LLM agents for driving, we developed a gym-like simulation environment that contains a range of driving scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLM+Debrief is more effective at generating meaningful and human-understandable natural language messages to facilitate cooperation and coordination than a zero-shot LLM agent. Our code and demo videos are available at https://talking-vehicles.github.io/.

Paperid: 850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18283.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances such as Chain-of-Thought prompting have significantly improved large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot medical reasoning. However, prompting-based methods often remain shallow and unstable, while fine-tuned medical LLMs suffer from poor generalization under distribution shifts and limited adaptability to unseen clinical scenarios. To address these limitations, we present TAGS, a test-time framework that combines a broadly capable generalist with a domain-specific specialist to offer complementary perspectives without any model fine-tuning or parameter updates. To support this generalist-specialist reasoning process, we introduce two auxiliary modules: a hierarchical retrieval mechanism that provides multi-scale exemplars by selecting examples based on both semantic and rationale-level similarity, and a reliability scorer that evaluates reasoning consistency to guide final answer aggregation. TAGS achieves strong performance across nine MedQA benchmarks, boosting GPT-4o accuracy by 13.8%, DeepSeek-R1 by 16.8%, and improving a vanilla 7B model from 14.1% to 23.9%. These results surpass several fine-tuned medical LLMs, without any parameter updates. The code will be available at https://github.com/JianghaoWu/TAGS.

Paperid: 851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17982.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been integrated into multiple instance learning (MIL) frameworks to address the challenge of few-shot, weakly supervised classification of whole slide images (WSIs). A key trend involves leveraging multi-scale information to better represent hierarchical tissue structures. However, existing methods often face two key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of interactions within the same modalities across scales (e.g., 5x and 20x) and (2) inadequate alignment between visual and textual modalities on the same scale. To address these gaps, we propose HiVE-MIL, a hierarchical vision-language framework that constructs a unified graph consisting of (1) parent-child links between coarse (5x) and fine (20x) visual/textual nodes to capture hierarchical relationships, and (2) heterogeneous intra-scale edges linking visual and textual nodes on the same scale. To further enhance semantic consistency, HiVE-MIL incorporates a two-stage, text-guided dynamic filtering mechanism that removes weakly correlated patch-text pairs, and introduces a hierarchical contrastive loss to align textual semantics across scales. Extensive experiments on TCGA breast, lung, and kidney cancer datasets demonstrate that HiVE-MIL consistently outperforms both traditional MIL and recent VLM-based MIL approaches, achieving gains of up to 4.1% in macro F1 under 16-shot settings. Our results demonstrate the value of jointly modeling hierarchical structure and multimodal alignment for efficient and scalable learning from limited pathology data. The code is available at https://github.com/bryanwong17/HiVE-MIL

Paperid: 852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17955.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding visual scenes is fundamental to human intelligence. While discriminative models have significantly advanced computer vision, they often struggle with compositional understanding. In contrast, recent generative text-to-image diffusion models excel at synthesizing complex scenes, suggesting inherent compositional capabilities. Building on this, zero-shot diffusion classifiers have been proposed to repurpose diffusion models for discriminative tasks. While prior work offered promising results in discriminative compositional scenarios, these results remain preliminary due to a small number of benchmarks and a relatively shallow analysis of conditions under which the models succeed. To address this, we present a comprehensive study of the discriminative capabilities of diffusion classifiers on a wide range of compositional tasks. Specifically, our study covers three diffusion models (SD 1.5, 2.0, and, for the first time, 3-m) spanning 10 datasets and over 30 tasks. Further, we shed light on the role that target dataset domains play in respective performance; to isolate the domain effects, we introduce a new diagnostic benchmark Self-Bench comprised of images created by diffusion models themselves. Finally, we explore the importance of timestep weighting and uncover a relationship between domain gap and timestep sensitivity, particularly for SD3-m. To sum up, diffusion classifiers understand compositionality, but conditions apply! Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/eugene6923/Diffusion-Classifiers-Compositionality.

Paperid: 853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17941.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their tendency to overthinking leads to unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains, dramatically increasing inference costs. To mitigate this issue, we introduce VeriThinker, a novel approach for CoT compression. Unlike conventional methods that fine-tune LRMs directly on the original reasoning task using synthetic concise CoT data, we innovatively fine-tune the model solely through an auxiliary verification task. By training LRMs to accurately verify the correctness of CoT solutions, the LRMs inherently become more discerning about the necessity of subsequent self-reflection steps, thereby effectively suppressing overthinking. Extensive experiments validate that VeriThinker substantially reduces reasoning chain lengths while maintaining or even slightly improving accuracy. When applied to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, our approach reduces reasoning tokens on MATH500 from 3790 to 2125 while improving accuracy by 0.8% (94.0% to 94.8%), and on AIME25, tokens decrease from 14321 to 10287 with a 2.1% accuracy gain (38.7% to 40.8%). Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that VeriThinker can also be zero-shot generalized to speculative reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/czg1225/VeriThinker

Paperid: 854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17911.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-view geo-localization determines the location of a query image, captured by a drone or ground-based camera, by matching it to a geo-referenced satellite image. While traditional approaches focus on image-level localization, many applications, such as search-and-rescue, infrastructure inspection, and precision delivery, demand object-level accuracy. This enables users to prompt a specific object with a single click on a drone image to retrieve precise geo-tagged information of the object. However, variations in viewpoints, timing, and imaging conditions pose significant challenges, especially when identifying visually similar objects in extensive satellite imagery. To address these challenges, we propose an Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization Network (OCGNet). It integrates user-specified click locations using Gaussian Kernel Transfer (GKT) to preserve location information throughout the network. This cue is dually embedded into the feature encoder and feature matching blocks, ensuring robust object-specific localization. Additionally, OCGNet incorporates a Location Enhancement (LE) module and a Multi-Head Cross Attention (MHCA) module to adaptively emphasize object-specific features or expand focus to relevant contextual regions when necessary. OCGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public dataset, CVOGL. It also demonstrates few-shot learning capabilities, effectively generalizing from limited examples, making it suitable for diverse applications (https://github.com/ZheyangH/OCGNet).

Paperid: 855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17909.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Model ensembles have long been a cornerstone for improving generalization and robustness in deep learning. However, their effectiveness often comes at the cost of substantial computational overhead. To address this issue, state-of-the-art methods aim to replicate ensemble-class performance without requiring multiple independently trained networks. Unfortunately, these algorithms often still demand considerable compute at inference. In response to these limitations, we introduce $\textbf{NeuroTrails}$, a sparse multi-head architecture with dynamically evolving topology. This unexplored model-agnostic training paradigm improves ensemble performance while reducing the required resources. We analyze the underlying reason for its effectiveness and observe that the various neural trails induced by dynamic sparsity attain a $\textit{Goldilocks zone}$ of prediction diversity. NeuroTrails displays efficacy with convolutional and transformer-based architectures on computer vision and language tasks. Experiments on ResNet-50/ImageNet, LLaMA-350M/C4, among many others, demonstrate increased accuracy and stronger robustness in zero-shot generalization, while requiring significantly fewer parameters.

Paperid: 856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17674.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. However, existing SNNs still exhibit a significant performance gap compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to inadequate pre-training strategies. These limitations manifest as restricted generalization ability, task specificity, and a lack of multimodal understanding, particularly in challenging tasks such as multimodal question answering and zero-shot 3D classification. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Spike-based Vision-Language (SVL) pretraining framework that empowers SNNs with open-world 3D understanding while maintaining spike-driven efficiency. SVL introduces two key components: (i) Multi-scale Triple Alignment (MTA) for label-free triplet-based contrastive learning across 3D, image, and text modalities, and (ii) Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Integration (Rep-VLI) to enable lightweight inference without relying on large text encoders. Extensive experiments show that SVL achieves a top-1 accuracy of 85.4% in zero-shot 3D classification, surpassing advanced ANN models, and consistently outperforms prior SNNs on downstream tasks, including 3D classification (+6.1%), DVS action recognition (+2.1%), 3D detection (+1.1%), and 3D segmentation (+2.1%) with remarkable efficiency. Moreover, SVL enables SNNs to perform open-world 3D question answering, sometimes outperforming ANNs. To the best of our knowledge, SVL represents the first scalable, generalizable, and hardware-friendly paradigm for 3D open-world understanding, effectively bridging the gap between SNNs and ANNs in complex open-world understanding tasks. Code is available https://github.com/bollossom/SVL.

Paperid: 857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17649.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Images are often obstructed by various obstacles due to capture limitations, hindering the observation of objects of interest. Most existing methods address occlusions from specific elements like fences or raindrops, but are constrained by the wide range of real-world obstructions, making comprehensive data collection impractical. To overcome these challenges, we propose Instruct2See, a novel zero-shot framework capable of handling both seen and unseen obstacles. The core idea of our approach is to unify obstruction removal by treating it as a soft-hard mask restoration problem, where any obstruction can be represented using multi-modal prompts, such as visual semantics and textual instructions, processed through a cross-attention unit to enhance contextual understanding and improve mode control. Additionally, a tunable mask adapter allows for dynamic soft masking, enabling real-time adjustment of inaccurate masks. Extensive experiments on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution obstacles show that Instruct2See consistently achieves strong performance and generalization in obstruction removal, regardless of whether the obstacles were present during the training phase. Code and dataset are available at https://jhscut.github.io/Instruct2See.

Paperid: 858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17589.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In our prior works, we introduced a scalable streaming speech synthesis model, CosyVoice 2, which integrates a large language model (LLM) and a chunk-aware flow matching (FM) model, and achieves low-latency bi-streaming speech synthesis and human-parity quality. Despite these advancements, CosyVoice 2 exhibits limitations in language coverage, domain diversity, data volume, text formats, and post-training techniques. In this paper, we present CosyVoice 3, an improved model designed for zero-shot multilingual speech synthesis in the wild, surpassing its predecessor in content consistency, speaker similarity, and prosody naturalness. Key features of CosyVoice 3 include: 1) A novel speech tokenizer to improve prosody naturalness, developed via supervised multi-task training, including automatic speech recognition, speech emotion recognition, language identification, audio event detection, and speaker analysis. 2) A new differentiable reward model for post-training applicable not only to CosyVoice 3 but also to other LLM-based speech synthesis models. 3) Dataset Size Scaling: Training data is expanded from ten thousand hours to one million hours, encompassing 9 languages and 18 Chinese dialects across various domains and text formats. 4) Model Size Scaling: Model parameters are increased from 0.5 billion to 1.5 billion, resulting in enhanced performance on our multilingual benchmark due to the larger model capacity. These advancements contribute significantly to the progress of speech synthesis in the wild. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://funaudiollm.github.io/cosyvoice3.

Paperid: 859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17425.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal models like CLIP have gained significant attention due to their remarkable zero-shot performance across various tasks. However, studies have revealed that CLIP can inadvertently learn spurious associations between target variables and confounding factors. To address this, we introduce \textsc{Locate-Then-Correct} (LTC), a contrastive framework that identifies spurious attention heads in Vision Transformers via mechanistic insights and mitigates them through targeted ablation. Furthermore, LTC identifies salient, task-relevant attention heads, enabling the integration of discriminative features through orthogonal projection to improve classification performance. We evaluate LTC on benchmarks with inherent background and gender biases, achieving over a $>50\%$ gain in worst-group accuracy compared to non-training post-hoc baselines. Additionally, we visualize the representation of selected heads and find that the presented interpretation corroborates our contrastive mechanism for identifying both spurious and salient attention heads. Code available at https://github.com/wj210/CLIP_LTC.

Paperid: 860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17330.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we propose Few Shot Domain Adapting Graph (FS-DAG), a scalable and efficient model architecture for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) in few-shot settings. FS-DAG leverages domain-specific and language/vision specific backbones within a modular framework to adapt to diverse document types with minimal data. The model is robust to practical challenges such as handling OCR errors, misspellings, and domain shifts, which are critical in real-world deployments. FS-DAG is highly performant with less than 90M parameters, making it well-suited for complex real-world applications for Information Extraction (IE) tasks where computational resources are limited. We demonstrate FS-DAG's capability through extensive experiments for information extraction task, showing significant improvements in convergence speed and performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, this work highlights the ongoing progress in developing smaller, more efficient models that do not compromise on performance. Code : https://github.com/oracle-samples/fs-dag

Paperid: 861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17099.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained generative models have opened new frontiers in brain decoding by enabling the synthesis of realistic texts and images from non-invasive brain recordings. However, the reliability of such outputs remains questionable--whether they truly reflect semantic activation in the brain, or are merely hallucinated by the powerful generative models. In this paper, we focus on EEG-to-text decoding and address its hallucination issue through the lens of posterior collapse. Acknowledging the underlying mismatch in information capacity between EEG and text, we reframe the decoding task as semantic summarization of core meanings rather than previously verbatim reconstruction of stimulus texts. To this end, we propose the Generative Language Inspection Model (GLIM), which emphasizes learning informative and interpretable EEG representations to improve semantic grounding under heterogeneous and small-scale data conditions. Experiments on the public ZuCo dataset demonstrate that GLIM consistently generates fluent, EEG-grounded sentences without teacher forcing. Moreover, it supports more robust evaluation beyond text similarity, through EEG-text retrieval and zero-shot semantic classification across sentiment categories, relation types, and corpus topics. Together, our architecture and evaluation protocols lay the foundation for reliable and scalable benchmarking in generative brain decoding.

Paperid: 862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16978.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Grammar plays a critical role in natural language processing and text/code generation by enabling the definition of syntax, the creation of parsers, and guiding structured outputs. Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across domains, their ability to infer and generate grammars has not yet been thoroughly explored. In this paper, we aim to study and improve the ability of LLMs for few-shot grammar generation, where grammars are inferred from sets of a small number of positive and negative examples and generated in Backus-Naur Form. To explore this, we introduced a novel dataset comprising 540 structured grammar generation challenges, devised 6 metrics, and evaluated 8 various LLMs against it. Our findings reveal that existing LLMs perform sub-optimally in grammar generation. To address this, we propose an LLM-driven hybrid genetic algorithm, namely HyGenar, to optimize grammar generation. HyGenar achieves substantial improvements in both the syntactic and semantic correctness of generated grammars across LLMs.

Paperid: 863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16967.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training robust retrieval and reranker models typically relies on large-scale retrieval datasets; for example, the BGE collection contains 1.6 million query-passage pairs sourced from various data sources. However, we find that certain datasets can negatively impact model effectiveness -- pruning 8 out of 15 datasets from the BGE collection reduces the training set size by 2.35$\times$ and increases nDCG@10 on BEIR by 1.0 point. This motivates a deeper examination of training data quality, with a particular focus on "false negatives", where relevant passages are incorrectly labeled as irrelevant. We propose a simple, cost-effective approach using cascading LLM prompts to identify and relabel hard negatives. Experimental results show that relabeling false negatives with true positives improves both E5 (base) and Qwen2.5-7B retrieval models by 0.7-1.4 nDCG@10 on BEIR and by 1.7-1.8 nDCG@10 on zero-shot AIR-Bench evaluation. Similar gains are observed for rerankers fine-tuned on the relabeled data, such as Qwen2.5-3B on BEIR. The reliability of the cascading design is further supported by human annotation results, where we find judgment by GPT-4o shows much higher agreement with humans than GPT-4o-mini.

Paperid: 864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16784.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we present the runner-up solution for the Ego4D EgoSchema Challenge at CVPR 2025 (Confirmed on May 20, 2025). Inspired by the success of large models, we evaluate and leverage leading accessible multimodal large models and adapt them to video understanding tasks via few-shot learning and model ensemble strategies. Specifically, diversified prompt styles and process paradigms are systematically explored and evaluated to effectively guide the attention of large models, fully unleashing their powerful generalization and adaptability abilities. Experimental results demonstrate that, with our carefully designed approach, directly utilizing an individual multimodal model already outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method which includes several additional processes. Besides, an additional stage is further introduced that facilitates the cooperation and ensemble of periodic results, which achieves impressive performance improvements. We hope this work serves as a valuable reference for the practical application of large models and inspires future research in the field. Our Code is available at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/EgoSchema-CVPR25.

Paperid: 865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16743.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant computational and memory challenges due to their extensive size, making pruning essential for their efficient deployment. Existing one-shot pruning methods often apply uniform sparsity constraints across layers or within each layer, resulting in suboptimal performance, especially at high sparsity ratios. This work introduces TRIM (Targeted Row-wise Iterative Metric-driven pruning), a novel approach that applies varying sparsity ratios to individual output dimensions (rows) within each layer. TRIM employs an iterative adjustment process guided by quality metrics to optimize dimension-wise sparsity allocation, focusing on reducing variance in quality retention across outputs to preserve critical information. TRIM can be seamlessly integrated with existing layer-wise pruning strategies. Our evaluations on perplexity and zero-shot tasks across diverse LLM families (Qwen2.5, LLaMA-2, and OPT) and sparsity levels demonstrate that TRIM achieves new state-of-the-art results and enhances stability. For instance, at 80% sparsity, TRIM reduces perplexity by 48% for Qwen2.5-14B and over 90% for OPT-13B compared to baseline methods. We conclude that fine-grained, dimension-wise sparsity adaptation is crucial for pushing the limits of extreme LLM compression. Code available at: https://github.com/flobk/TRIM

Paperid: 866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16691.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Voice Conversion research in recent times has increasingly focused on improving the zero-shot capabilities of existing methods. Despite remarkable advancements, current architectures still tend to struggle in zero-shot cross-lingual settings. They are also often unable to generalize for speakers of unseen languages and accents. In this paper, we adopt a simple yet effective approach that combines discrete speech representations from self-supervised models with a non-autoregressive Diffusion-Transformer based conditional flow matching speech decoder. We show that this architecture allows us to train a voice-conversion model in a purely textless, self-supervised fashion. Our technique works without requiring multiple encoders to disentangle speech features. Our model also manages to excel in zero-shot cross-lingual settings even for unseen languages. For Demo: https://ez-vc.github.io/EZ-VC-Demo/

Paperid: 867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16658.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Hyperspectral pansharpening has received much attention in recent years due to technological and methodological advances that open the door to new application scenarios. However, research on this topic is only now gaining momentum. The most popular methods are still borrowed from the more mature field of multispectral pansharpening and often overlook the unique challenges posed by hyperspectral data fusion, such as i) the very large number of bands, ii) the overwhelming noise in selected spectral ranges, iii) the significant spectral mismatch between panchromatic and hyperspectral components, iv) a typically high resolution ratio. Imprecise data modeling especially affects spectral fidelity. Even state-of-the-art methods perform well in certain spectral ranges and much worse in others, failing to ensure consistent quality across all bands, with the risk of generating unreliable results. Here, we propose a hyperspectral pansharpening method that explicitly addresses this problem and ensures uniform spectral quality. To this end, a single lightweight neural network is used, with weights that adapt on the fly to each band. During fine-tuning, the spatial loss is turned on and off to ensure a fast convergence of the spectral loss to the desired level, according to a hysteresis-like dynamic. Furthermore, the spatial loss itself is appropriately redefined to account for nonlinear dependencies between panchromatic and spectral bands. Overall, the proposed method is fully unsupervised, with no prior training on external data, flexible, and low-complexity. Experiments on a recently published benchmarking toolbox show that it ensures excellent sharpening quality, competitive with the state-of-the-art, consistently across all bands. The software code and the full set of results are shared online on https://github.com/giu-guarino/rho-PNN.

Paperid: 868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16258.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Interpreting figurative language such as sarcasm across multi-modal inputs presents unique challenges, often requiring task-specific fine-tuning and extensive reasoning steps. However, current Chain-of-Thought approaches do not efficiently leverage the same cognitive processes that enable humans to identify sarcasm. We present IRONIC, an in-context learning framework that leverages Multi-modal Coherence Relations to analyze referential, analogical and pragmatic image-text linkages. Our experiments show that IRONIC achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection across different baselines. This demonstrates the need for incorporating linguistic and cognitive insights into the design of multi-modal reasoning strategies. Our code is available at: https://github.com/aashish2000/IRONIC

Paperid: 869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15928.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Video Question Answering (VideoQA) have introduced LLM-based agents, modular frameworks, and procedural solutions, yielding promising results. These systems use dynamic agents and memory-based mechanisms to break down complex tasks and refine answers. However, significant improvements remain in tracking objects for grounding over time and decision-making based on reasoning to better align object references with language model outputs, as newer models get better at both tasks. This work presents an LLM-brained agent for zero-shot Video Question Answering (VideoQA) that combines a Chain-of-Thought framework with grounding reasoning alongside YOLO-World to enhance object tracking and alignment. This approach establishes a new state-of-the-art in VideoQA and Video Understanding, showing enhanced performance on NExT-QA, iVQA, and ActivityNet-QA benchmarks. Our framework also enables cross-checking of grounding timeframes, improving accuracy and providing valuable support for verification and increased output reliability across multiple video domains. The code is available at https://github.com/t-montes/viqagent.

Paperid: 870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15755.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The intrication of brain signals drives research that leverages multimodal AI to align brain modalities with visual and textual data for explainable descriptions. However, most existing studies are limited to coarse interpretations, lacking essential details on object descriptions, locations, attributes, and their relationships. This leads to imprecise and ambiguous reconstructions when using such cues for visual decoding. To address this, we analyze different choices of vision feature spaces from pre-trained visual components within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and introduce a zero-shot multimodal brain decoding method that interacts with these models to decode across multiple levels of granularities. % To assess a model's ability to decode fine details from brain signals, we propose the Multi-Granularity Brain Detail Understanding Benchmark (MG-BrainDub). This benchmark includes two key tasks: detailed descriptions and salient question-answering, with metrics highlighting key visual elements like objects, attributes, and relationships. Our approach enhances neural decoding precision and supports more accurate neuro-decoding applications. Code will be available at https://github.com/weihaox/VINDEX.

Paperid: 871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15660.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The generalization capabilities of vision-language-action (VLA) models to unseen tasks are crucial to achieving general-purpose robotic manipulation in open-world settings. However, the cross-task generalization capabilities of existing VLA models remain significantly underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AGNOSTOS, a novel simulation benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate cross-task zero-shot generalization in manipulation. AGNOSTOS comprises 23 unseen manipulation tasks for testing, distinct from common training task distributions, and incorporates two levels of generalization difficulty to assess robustness. Our systematic evaluation reveals that current VLA models, despite being trained on diverse datasets, struggle to generalize effectively to these unseen tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose Cross-Task In-Context Manipulation (X-ICM), a method that conditions large language models (LLMs) on in-context demonstrations from seen tasks to predict action sequences for unseen tasks. Additionally, we introduce a dynamics-guided sample selection strategy that identifies relevant demonstrations by capturing cross-task dynamics. On AGNOSTOS, X-ICM significantly improves cross-task zero-shot generalization performance over leading VLAs. We believe AGNOSTOS and X-ICM will serve as valuable tools for advancing general-purpose robotic manipulation.

Paperid: 872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15425.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical Vision-Language Models (MVLMs) have achieved par excellence generalization in medical image analysis, yet their performance under noisy, corrupted conditions remains largely untested. Clinical imaging is inherently susceptible to acquisition artifacts and noise; however, existing evaluations predominantly assess generally clean datasets, overlooking robustness -- i.e., the model's ability to perform under real-world distortions. To address this gap, we first introduce MediMeta-C, a corruption benchmark that systematically applies several perturbations across multiple medical imaging datasets. Combined with MedMNIST-C, this establishes a comprehensive robustness evaluation framework for MVLMs. We further propose RobustMedCLIP, a visual encoder adaptation of a pretrained MVLM that incorporates few-shot tuning to enhance resilience against corruptions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark 5 major MVLMs across 5 medical imaging modalities, revealing that existing models exhibit severe degradation under corruption and struggle with domain-modality tradeoffs. Our findings highlight the necessity of diverse training and robust adaptation strategies, demonstrating that efficient low-rank adaptation when paired with few-shot tuning, improves robustness while preserving generalization across modalities.

Paperid: 873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15263.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
By pretraining to synthesize coherent images from perturbed inputs, generative models inherently learn to understand object boundaries and scene compositions. How can we repurpose these generative representations for general-purpose perceptual organization? We finetune Stable Diffusion and MAE (encoder+decoder) for category-agnostic instance segmentation using our instance coloring loss exclusively on a narrow set of object types (indoor furnishings and cars). Surprisingly, our models exhibit strong zero-shot generalization, accurately segmenting objects of types and styles unseen in finetuning (and in many cases, MAE's ImageNet-1K pretraining too). Our best-performing models closely approach the heavily supervised SAM when evaluated on unseen object types and styles, and outperform it when segmenting fine structures and ambiguous boundaries. In contrast, existing promptable segmentation architectures or discriminatively pretrained models fail to generalize. This suggests that generative models learn an inherent grouping mechanism that transfers across categories and domains, even without internet-scale pretraining. Code, pretrained models, and demos are available on our website.

Paperid: 874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14910.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Customizable multilingual zero-shot singing voice synthesis (SVS) has various potential applications in music composition and short video dubbing. However, existing SVS models overly depend on phoneme and note boundary annotations, limiting their robustness in zero-shot scenarios and producing poor transitions between phonemes and notes. Moreover, they also lack effective multi-level style control via diverse prompts. To overcome these challenges, we introduce TCSinger 2, a multi-task multilingual zero-shot SVS model with style transfer and style control based on various prompts. TCSinger 2 mainly includes three key modules: 1) Blurred Boundary Content (BBC) Encoder, predicts duration, extends content embedding, and applies masking to the boundaries to enable smooth transitions. 2) Custom Audio Encoder, uses contrastive learning to extract aligned representations from singing, speech, and textual prompts. 3) Flow-based Custom Transformer, leverages Cus-MOE, with F0 supervision, enhancing both the synthesis quality and style modeling of the generated singing voice. Experimental results show that TCSinger 2 outperforms baseline models in both subjective and objective metrics across multiple related tasks. Singing voice samples are available at https://aaronz345.github.io/TCSinger2Demo/.

Paperid: 875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14667.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful outputs but can degrade reasoning depth, leading to significant trade-offs in complex, multi-step tasks, and remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To address this, we introduce SAFEPATH, a lightweight alignment method that fine-tunes LRMs to emit a short, 8-token Safety Primer at the start of their reasoning, in response to harmful prompts, while leaving the rest of the reasoning process unsupervised. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks indicate that SAFEPATH effectively reduces harmful outputs while maintaining reasoning performance. Specifically, SAFEPATH reduces harmful responses by up to 90.0% and blocks 83.3% of jailbreak attempts in the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B model, while requiring 295.9x less compute than Direct Refusal and 314.1x less than SafeChain. We further introduce a zero-shot variant that requires no fine-tuning. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how existing methods in LLMs generalize, or fail, when applied to reasoning-centric models, revealing critical gaps and new directions for safer AI.

Paperid: 876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14412.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Effective prompt engineering remains a central challenge in fully harnessing the capabilities of LLMs. While well-designed prompts can dramatically enhance performance, crafting them typically demands expert intuition and a nuanced understanding of the task. Moreover, the most impactful prompts often hinge on subtle semantic cues, ones that may elude human perception but are crucial for guiding LLM behavior. In this paper, we introduce PRL (Prompts from Reinforcement Learning), a novel RL-based approach for automatic prompt generation. Unlike previous methods, PRL can produce novel few-shot examples that were not seen during training. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of benchmarks, including text classification, simplification, and summarization. On the classification task, it surpasses prior methods by 2.58% over APE and 1.00% over EvoPrompt. Additionally, it improves the average ROUGE scores on the summarization task by 4.32 over APE and by 2.12 over EvoPrompt and the SARI score on simplification by 6.93 over APE and by 6.01 over EvoPrompt. Our code is available at https://github.com/Batorskq/prl .

Paperid: 877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14239.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper focus on few-shot object detection~(FSOD) and instance segmentation~(FSIS), which requires a model to quickly adapt to novel classes with a few labeled instances. The existing methods severely suffer from bias classification because of the missing label issue which naturally exists in an instance-level few-shot scenario and is first formally proposed by us. Our analysis suggests that the standard classification head of most FSOD or FSIS models needs to be decoupled to mitigate the bias classification. Therefore, we propose an embarrassingly simple but effective method that decouples the standard classifier into two heads. Then, these two individual heads are capable of independently addressing clear positive samples and noisy negative samples which are caused by the missing label. In this way, the model can effectively learn novel classes while mitigating the effects of noisy negative samples. Without bells and whistles, our model without any additional computation cost and parameters consistently outperforms its baseline and state-of-the-art by a large margin on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmarks for FSOD and FSIS tasks. The Code is available at https://csgaobb.github.io/Projects/DCFS.

Paperid: 878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14231.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Traditional visual grounding methods primarily focus on single-image scenarios with simple textual references. However, extending these methods to real-world scenarios that involve implicit and complex instructions, particularly in conjunction with multiple images, poses significant challenges, which is mainly due to the lack of advanced reasoning ability across diverse multi-modal contexts. In this work, we aim to address the more practical universal grounding task, and propose UniVG-R1, a reasoning guided multimodal large language model (MLLM) for universal visual grounding, which enhances reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning (RL) combined with cold-start data. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) grounding dataset, annotated with detailed reasoning chains, to guide the model towards correct reasoning paths via supervised fine-tuning. Subsequently, we perform rule-based reinforcement learning to encourage the model to identify correct reasoning chains, thereby incentivizing its reasoning capabilities. In addition, we identify a difficulty bias arising from the prevalence of easy samples as RL training progresses, and we propose a difficulty-aware weight adjustment strategy to further strengthen the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniVG-R1, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on MIG-Bench with a 9.1% improvement over the previous method. Furthermore, our model exhibits strong generalizability, achieving an average improvement of 23.4% in zero-shot performance across four image and video reasoning grounding benchmarks. The project page can be accessed at https://amap-ml.github.io/UniVG-R1-page/.

Paperid: 879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14167.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, large-scale pre-trained diffusion transformer models have made significant progress in video generation. While current DiT models can produce high-definition, high-frame-rate, and highly diverse videos, there is a lack of fine-grained control over the video content. Controlling the motion of subjects in videos using only prompts is challenging, especially when it comes to describing complex movements. Further, existing methods fail to control the motion in image-to-video generation, as the subject in the reference image often differs from the subject in the reference video in terms of initial position, size, and shape. To address this, we propose the Leveraging Motion Prior (LMP) framework for zero-shot video generation. Our framework harnesses the powerful generative capabilities of pre-trained diffusion transformers to enable motion in the generated videos to reference user-provided motion videos in both text-to-video and image-to-video generation. To this end, we first introduce a foreground-background disentangle module to distinguish between moving subjects and backgrounds in the reference video, preventing interference in the target video generation. A reweighted motion transfer module is designed to allow the target video to reference the motion from the reference video. To avoid interference from the subject in the reference video, we propose an appearance separation module to suppress the appearance of the reference subject in the target video. We annotate the DAVIS dataset with detailed prompts for our experiments and design evaluation metrics to validate the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in generation quality, prompt-video consistency, and control capability. Our homepage is available at https://vpx-ecnu.github.io/LMP-Website/

Paperid: 880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13938.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$, a high-quality, curated benchmark of 161 problems for end-to-end verified code generation in Lean. Each problem consists of (1) the task of generating a specification that matches a held-out ground-truth specification, and (2) the task of generating a Lean implementation that provably satisfies this specification. Unlike prior benchmarks, ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$ avoids test-case supervision, LLM-generated annotations, and specifications that leak implementation logic or allow vacuous solutions. All outputs are verified post-hoc using Lean's type checker to ensure machine-checkable correctness. We use ${\rm C{\small LEVER}}$ to evaluate several few-shot and agentic approaches based on state-of-the-art language models. These methods all struggle to achieve full verification, establishing it as a challenging frontier benchmark for program synthesis and formal reasoning. Our benchmark can be found on GitHub(https://github.com/trishullab/clever) as well as HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/datasets/amitayusht/clever). All our evaluation code is also available online(https://github.com/trishullab/clever-prover).

Paperid: 881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13669.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-view geo-localisation identifies coarse geographical position of an automated vehicle by matching a ground-level image to a geo-tagged satellite image from a database. Despite the advancements in Cross-view geo-localisation, significant challenges still persist such as similar looking scenes which makes it challenging to find the correct match as the top match. Existing approaches reach high recall rates but they still fail to rank the correct image as the top match. To address this challenge, this paper proposes GeoVLM, a novel approach which uses the zero-shot capabilities of vision language models to enable cross-view geo-localisation using interpretable cross-view language descriptions. GeoVLM is a trainable reranking approach which improves the best match accuracy of cross-view geo-localisation. GeoVLM is evaluated on standard benchmark VIGOR and University-1652 and also through real-life driving environments using Cross-View United Kingdom, a new benchmark dataset introduced in this paper. The results of the paper show that GeoVLM improves retrieval performance of cross-view geo-localisation compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the help of explainable natural language descriptions. The code is available at https://github.com/CAV-Research-Lab/GeoVLM

Paperid: 882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13480.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Suicide prevention remains a critical public health challenge. While online platforms such as Reddit's r/SuicideWatch have historically provided spaces for individuals to express suicidal thoughts and seek community support, the advent of large language models (LLMs) introduces a new paradigm-where individuals may begin disclosing ideation to AI systems instead of humans. This study evaluates the capability of LLMs to perform automated suicide risk assessment using the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). We assess the zero-shot performance of six models-including Claude, GPT, Mistral, and LLaMA-in classifying posts across a 7-point severity scale (Levels 0-6). Results indicate that Claude and GPT closely align with human annotations, while Mistral achieves the lowest ordinal prediction error. Most models exhibit ordinal sensitivity, with misclassifications typically occurring between adjacent severity levels. We further analyze confusion patterns, misclassification sources, and ethical considerations, underscoring the importance of human oversight, transparency, and cautious deployment. Full code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/av9ash/llm_cssrs_code.

Paperid: 883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13441.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present GrasMolmo, a generalizable open-vocabulary task-oriented grasping (TOG) model. GraspMolmo predicts semantically appropriate, stable grasps conditioned on a natural language instruction and a single RGB-D frame. For instance, given "pour me some tea", GraspMolmo selects a grasp on a teapot handle rather than its body. Unlike prior TOG methods, which are limited by small datasets, simplistic language, and uncluttered scenes, GraspMolmo learns from PRISM, a novel large-scale synthetic dataset of 379k samples featuring cluttered environments and diverse, realistic task descriptions. We fine-tune the Molmo visual-language model on this data, enabling GraspMolmo to generalize to novel open-vocabulary instructions and objects. In challenging real-world evaluations, GraspMolmo achieves state-of-the-art results, with a 70% prediction success on complex tasks, compared to the 35% achieved by the next best alternative. GraspMolmo also successfully demonstrates the ability to predict semantically correct bimanual grasps zero-shot. We release our synthetic dataset, code, model, and benchmarks to accelerate research in task-semantic robotic manipulation, which, along with videos, are available at https://abhaybd.github.io/GraspMolmo/.

Paperid: 884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13419.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) plays a crucial role in visual affective computing, aiming to infer a person's emotional state based on facial data. Scientifically, facial expressions (FEs) result from the coordinated movement of facial muscles, which can be decomposed into specific action units (AUs) that provide detailed emotional insights. However, traditional methods often struggle with limited interpretability, constrained generalization and reasoning abilities. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown exceptional performance in various visual tasks, while they still face significant challenges in FEA due to the lack of specialized datasets and their inability to capture the intricate relationships between FEs and AUs. To address these issues, we introduce a novel FEA Instruction Dataset that provides accurate and aligned FE and AU descriptions and establishes causal reasoning relationships between them, followed by constructing a new benchmark, FEABench. Moreover, we propose FEALLM, a novel MLLM architecture designed to capture more detailed facial information, enhancing its capability in FEA tasks. Our model demonstrates strong performance on FEABench and impressive generalization capability through zero-shot evaluation on various datasets, including RAF-DB, AffectNet, BP4D, and DISFA, showcasing its robustness and effectiveness in FEA tasks. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/953206211/FEALLM.

Paperid: 885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13317.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) alleviates the cost of data labeling process by exploiting unlabeled data, and has achieved promising results on various tasks such as image classification. Meanwhile, the Pretrain-Finetuning paradigm has garnered significant attention in recent years, and exploiting pre-trained models could also reduce the requirement of labeled data in downstream tasks. Therefore, a question naturally occurs: \emph{When the labeled data is scarce in the target tasks, should we exploit unlabeled data or pre-trained models?} To answer this question, we select pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as representative pretrain-finetuning instances and propose \textit{Few-shot SSL} -- a framework that enables fair comparison between these two paradigms by controlling the amount of labeled data used. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate that pre-trained VLMs generally outperform SSL methods in nearly all cases, except when the data has low resolution or lacks clear semantic structure. Therefore, we encourage future SSL research to compare with pre-trained models and explore deeper integration, such as using pre-trained knowledge to enhance pseudo-labeling. To support future research, we release our unified reproduction and evaluation framework. Codes are available \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Rethinking-SSL-and-Pretrain-Finetuning-5566 }{here}.

Paperid: 886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13233.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot capabilities on downstream tasks. Prior research highlights the crucial role of visual augmentation techniques, like random cropping, in alignment with fine-grained class descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing zero-shot performance by incorporating multi-view information. However, the inherent randomness of these augmentations can inevitably introduce background artifacts and cause models to overly focus on local details, compromising global semantic understanding. To address these issues, we propose an \textbf{A}ttention-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{S}election (\textbf{ABS}) method from local details to global context, which applies attention-guided cropping in both raw images and feature space, supplement global semantic information through strategic feature selection. Additionally, we introduce a soft matching technique to effectively filter LLM descriptions for better alignment. \textbf{ABS} achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution generalization and zero-shot classification tasks. Notably, \textbf{ABS} is training-free and even rivals few-shot and test-time adaptation methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/BIT-DA/ABS}{\textcolor{darkgreen}{https://github.com/BIT-DA/ABS}}.

Paperid: 887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13232.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning robust representations from data often requires scale, which has led to the success of recent zero-shot models such as CLIP. However, the obtained robustness can easily be deteriorated when these models are fine-tuned on other downstream tasks (e.g., of smaller scales). Previous works often interpret this phenomenon in the context of domain shift, developing fine-tuning methods that aim to preserve the original domain as much as possible. However, in a different context, fine-tuned models with limited data are also prone to learning features that are spurious to humans, such as background or texture. In this paper, we propose StarFT (Spurious Textual Alignment Regularization), a novel framework for fine-tuning zero-shot models to enhance robustness by preventing them from learning spuriosity. We introduce a regularization that aligns the output distribution for spuriosity-injected labels with the original zero-shot model, ensuring that the model is not induced to extract irrelevant features further from these descriptions. We leverage recent language models to get such spuriosity-injected labels by generating alternative textual descriptions that highlight potentially confounding features. Extensive experiments validate the robust generalization of StarFT and its emerging properties: zero-shot group robustness and improved zero-shot classification. Notably, StarFT boosts both worst-group and average accuracy by 14.30% and 3.02%, respectively, in the Waterbirds group shift scenario, where other robust fine-tuning baselines show even degraded performance.

Paperid: 888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13181.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce SLED, an alternative approach to speech language modeling by encoding speech waveforms into sequences of continuous latent representations and modeling them autoregressively using an energy distance objective. The energy distance offers an analytical measure of the distributional gap by contrasting simulated and target samples, enabling efficient training to capture the underlying continuous autoregressive distribution. By bypassing reliance on residual vector quantization, SLED avoids discretization errors and eliminates the need for the complicated hierarchical architectures common in existing speech language models. It simplifies the overall modeling pipeline while preserving the richness of speech information and maintaining inference efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that SLED achieves strong performance in both zero-shot and streaming speech synthesis, showing its potential for broader applications in general-purpose speech language models.

Paperid: 889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13124.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The biological implausibility of backpropagation (BP) has motivated many alternative, brain-inspired algorithms that attempt to rely only on local information, such as predictive coding (PC) and equilibrium propagation. However, these algorithms have notoriously struggled to train very deep networks, preventing them from competing with BP in large-scale settings. Indeed, scaling PC networks (PCNs) has recently been posed as a challenge for the community (Pinchetti et al., 2024). Here, we show that 100+ layer PCNs can be trained reliably using a Depth-$Î¼$P parameterisation (Yang et al., 2023; Bordelon et al., 2023) which we call "$Î¼$PC". Through an extensive analysis of the scaling behaviour of PCNs, we reveal several pathologies that make standard PCNs difficult to train at large depths. We then show that, despite addressing only some of these instabilities, $Î¼$PC allows stable training of very deep (up to 128-layer) residual networks on simple classification tasks with competitive performance and little tuning compared to current benchmarks. Moreover, $Î¼$PC enables zero-shot transfer of both weight and activity learning rates across widths and depths. Our results have implications for other local algorithms and could be extended to convolutional and transformer architectures. Code for $Î¼$PC is made available as part of a JAX library for PCNs at https://github.com/thebuckleylab/jpc (Innocenti et al., 2024).

Paperid: 890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12912.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models such as contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) have demonstrated a remarkable generalizability, which has enabled a wide range of applications represented by zero-shot classification. However, vision-language models still suffer when they face datasets with large gaps from training ones, i.e., distribution shifts. We found that CLIP is especially vulnerable to sensor degradation, a type of realistic distribution shift caused by sensor conditions such as weather, light, or noise. Collecting a new dataset from a test distribution for fine-tuning highly costs since sensor degradation occurs unexpectedly and has a range of variety. Thus, we investigate test-time adaptation (TTA) of zero-shot classification, which enables on-the-fly adaptation to the test distribution with unlabeled test data. Existing TTA methods for CLIP mainly focus on modifying image and text embeddings or predictions to address distribution shifts. Although these methods can adapt to domain shifts, such as fine-grained labels spaces or different renditions in input images, they fail to adapt to distribution shifts caused by sensor degradation. We found that this is because image embeddings are "corrupted" in terms of uniformity, a measure related to the amount of information. To make models robust to sensor degradation, we propose a novel method called uniformity-aware information-balanced TTA (UnInfo). To address the corruption of image embeddings, we introduce uniformity-aware confidence maximization, information-aware loss balancing, and knowledge distillation from the exponential moving average (EMA) teacher. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our UnInfo improves accuracy under sensor degradation by retaining information in terms of uniformity.

Paperid: 891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12911.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge naturally from unscripted videos of human activities, and can be leveraged to better reason about their content. We present HiERO, a weakly-supervised method to enrich video segments features with the corresponding hierarchical activity threads. By aligning video clips with their narrated descriptions, HiERO infers contextual, semantic and temporal reasoning with an hierarchical architecture. We prove the potential of our enriched features with multiple video-text alignment benchmarks (EgoMCQ, EgoNLQ) with minimal additional training, and in zero-shot for procedure learning tasks (EgoProceL and Ego4D Goal-Step). Notably, HiERO achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the benchmarks, and for procedure learning tasks it outperforms fully-supervised methods by a large margin (+12.5% F1 on EgoProceL) in zero shot. Our results prove the relevance of using knowledge of the hierarchy of human activities for multiple reasoning tasks in egocentric vision.

Paperid: 892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12800.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have seen significant advancements in recent years, driven by improvements in deep learning and neural network architectures. Viewing the output speech as a data distribution, previous approaches often employ traditional speech representations, such as waveforms or spectrograms, within the Flow Matching framework. However, these methods have limitations, including overlooking various speech attributes and incurring high computational costs due to additional constraints introduced during training. To address these challenges, we introduce OZSpeech, the first TTS method to explore optimal transport conditional flow matching with one-step sampling and a learned prior as the condition, effectively disregarding preceding states and reducing the number of sampling steps. Our approach operates on disentangled, factorized components of speech in token format, enabling accurate modeling of each speech attribute, which enhances the TTS system's ability to precisely clone the prompt speech. Experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance over existing methods in content accuracy, naturalness, prosody generation, and speaker style preservation. Audio samples are available at our demo page https://ozspeech.github.io/OZSpeech_Web/.

Paperid: 893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12703.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose SpatialLLM, a novel approach advancing spatial intelligence tasks in complex urban scenes. Unlike previous methods requiring geographic analysis tools or domain expertise, SpatialLLM is a unified language model directly addressing various spatial intelligence tasks without any training, fine-tuning, or expert intervention. The core of SpatialLLM lies in constructing detailed and structured scene descriptions from raw spatial data to prompt pre-trained LLMs for scene-based analysis. Extensive experiments show that, with our designs, pretrained LLMs can accurately perceive spatial distribution information and enable zero-shot execution of advanced spatial intelligence tasks, including urban planning, ecological analysis, traffic management, etc. We argue that multi-field knowledge, context length, and reasoning ability are key factors influencing LLM performances in urban analysis. We hope that SpatialLLM will provide a novel viable perspective for urban intelligent analysis and management. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/SpatialLLM.

Paperid: 894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12547.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In robotics applications, few-shot segmentation is crucial because it allows robots to perform complex tasks with minimal training data, facilitating their adaptation to diverse, real-world environments. However, pixel-level annotations of even small amount of images is highly time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we present a novel few-shot binary segmentation method based on bounding-box annotations instead of pixel-level labels. We introduce, ProMi, an efficient prototype-mixture-based method that treats the background class as a mixture of distributions. Our approach is simple, training-free, and effective, accommodating coarse annotations with ease. Compared to existing baselines, ProMi achieves the best results across different datasets with significant gains, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, we present qualitative experiments tailored to real-world mobile robot tasks, demonstrating the applicability of our approach in such scenarios. Our code: https://github.com/ThalesGroup/promi.

Paperid: 895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12482.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) faces the challenge of scarce labeled samples. Self-Supervised learning (SSL) and Few-Shot Learning (FSL) offer promising avenues to address this issue. However, existing methods often struggle to adapt to the spatial geometric diversity of HSIs and lack sufficient spectral prior knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a method, Spectral-Spatial Self-Supervised Learning for Few-Shot Hyperspectral Image Classification (S4L-FSC), aimed at improving the performance of few-shot HSI classification. Specifically, we first leverage heterogeneous datasets to pretrain a spatial feature extractor using a designed Rotation-Mirror Self-Supervised Learning (RM-SSL) method, combined with FSL. This approach enables the model to learn the spatial geometric diversity of HSIs using rotation and mirroring labels as supervisory signals, while acquiring transferable spatial meta-knowledge through few-shot learning. Subsequently, homogeneous datasets are utilized to pretrain a spectral feature extractor via a combination of FSL and Masked Reconstruction Self-Supervised Learning (MR-SSL). The model learns to reconstruct original spectral information from randomly masked spectral vectors, inferring spectral dependencies. In parallel, FSL guides the model to extract pixel-level discriminative features, thereby embedding rich spectral priors into the model. This spectral-spatial pretraining method, along with the integration of knowledge from heterogeneous and homogeneous sources, significantly enhances model performance. Extensive experiments on four HSI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed S4L-FSC approach for few-shot HSI classification.

Paperid: 896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12328.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present Team asdfo123's submission to the LLMSR@XLLM25 shared task, which evaluates large language models on producing fine-grained, controllable, and interpretable reasoning processes. Systems must extract all problem conditions, decompose a chain of thought into statement-evidence pairs, and verify the logical validity of each pair. Leveraging only the off-the-shelf Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, we craft a concise few-shot, multi-turn prompt that first enumerates all conditions and then guides the model to label, cite, and adjudicate every reasoning step. A lightweight post-processor based on regular expressions normalises spans and enforces the official JSON schema. Without fine-tuning, external retrieval, or ensembling, our method ranks 5th overall, achieving macro F1 scores on par with substantially more complex and resource-consuming pipelines. We conclude by analysing the strengths and limitations of our approach and outlining directions for future research in structural reasoning with LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/asdfo123/LLMSR-asdfo123.

Paperid: 897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12236.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of annotated data and the limited generalization capabilities of existing models. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in FSRE through in-context learning (ICL), their general-purpose training objectives often result in suboptimal performance for task-specific relation extraction. To overcome these challenges, we propose TKRE (Two-Stage Knowledge-Guided Pre-training for Relation Extraction), a novel framework that synergistically integrates LLMs with traditional relation extraction models, bridging generative and discriminative learning paradigms. TKRE introduces two key innovations: (1) leveraging LLMs to generate explanation-driven knowledge and schema-constrained synthetic data, addressing the issue of data scarcity; and (2) a two-stage pre-training strategy combining Masked Span Language Modeling (MSLM) and Span-Level Contrastive Learning (SCL) to enhance relational reasoning and generalization. Together, these components enable TKRE to effectively tackle FSRE tasks. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of TKRE, achieving new state-of-the-art performance in FSRE and underscoring its potential for broader application in low-resource scenarios. \footnote{The code and data are released on https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/TKRE.

Paperid: 898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12212.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on task-specific data is essential for their effective deployment. As dataset sizes grow, efficiently selecting optimal subsets for training becomes crucial to balancing performance and computational costs. Traditional data selection methods often require fine-tuning a scoring model on the target dataset, which is time-consuming and resource-intensive, or rely on heuristics that fail to fully leverage the model's predictive capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Data Whisperer, an efficient, training-free, attention-based method that leverages few-shot in-context learning with the model to be fine-tuned. Comprehensive evaluations were conducted on both raw and synthetic datasets across diverse tasks and models. Notably, Data Whisperer achieves superior performance compared to the full GSM8K dataset on the Llama-3-8B-Instruct model, using just 10% of the data, and outperforms existing methods with a 3.1-point improvement and a 7.4$\times$ speedup. The code is available at https://github.com/gszfwsb/Data-Whisperer.

Paperid: 899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12021.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Task arithmetic enables efficient model editing by representing task-specific changes as vectors in parameter space. Task arithmetic typically assumes that the source and target models are initialized from the same pre-trained parameters. This assumption limits its applicability in cross-model transfer settings, where models are independently pre-trained on different datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a method based on few-shot orthogonal alignment, which aligns task vectors to the parameter space of a differently pre-trained target model. These transformations preserve key properties of task vectors, such as norm and rank, and are learned using only a small number of labeled examples. We evaluate the method using two Vision Transformers pre-trained on YFCC100M and LAION400M, and test on eight classification datasets. Experimental results show that our method improves transfer accuracy over direct task vector application and achieves performance comparable to few-shot fine-tuning, while maintaining the modularity and reusability of task vectors. Our code is available at https://github.com/kawakera-lab/CrossModelTransfer.

Paperid: 900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11882.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remarkable progress in zero-shot learning (ZSL) has been achieved using generative models. However, existing generative ZSL methods merely generate (imagine) the visual features from scratch guided by the strong class semantic vectors annotated by experts, resulting in suboptimal generative performance and limited scene generalization. To address these and advance ZSL, we propose an inductive variational autoencoder for generative zero-shot learning, dubbed GenZSL. Mimicking human-level concept learning, GenZSL operates by inducting new class samples from similar seen classes using weak class semantic vectors derived from target class names (i.e., CLIP text embedding). To ensure the generation of informative samples for training an effective ZSL classifier, our GenZSL incorporates two key strategies. Firstly, it employs class diversity promotion to enhance the diversity of class semantic vectors. Secondly, it utilizes target class-guided information boosting criteria to optimize the model. Extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmark datasets showcase the superiority and potential of our GenZSL with significant efficacy and efficiency over f-VAEGAN, e.g., 24.7% performance gains and more than $60\times$ faster training speed on AWA2. Codes are available at https://github.com/shiming-chen/GenZSL.

Paperid: 901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11835.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The robustness and security of large language models (LLMs) has become a prominent research area. One notable vulnerability is the ability to bypass LLM safeguards by translating harmful queries into rare or underrepresented languages, a simple yet effective method of "jailbreaking" these models. Despite the growing concern, there has been limited research addressing the safeguarding of LLMs in multilingual scenarios, highlighting an urgent need to enhance multilingual safety. In this work, we investigate the correlation between various attack features across different languages and propose Multilingual Collaborative Defense (MCD), a novel learning method that optimizes a continuous, soft safety prompt automatically to facilitate multilingual safeguarding of LLMs. The MCD approach offers three advantages: First, it effectively improves safeguarding performance across multiple languages. Second, MCD maintains strong generalization capabilities while minimizing false refusal rates. Third, MCD mitigates the language safety misalignment caused by imbalances in LLM training corpora. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCD, we manually construct multilingual versions of commonly used jailbreak benchmarks, such as MaliciousInstruct and AdvBench, to assess various safeguarding methods. Additionally, we introduce these datasets in underrepresented (zero-shot) languages to verify the language transferability of MCD. The results demonstrate that MCD outperforms existing approaches in safeguarding against multilingual jailbreak attempts while also exhibiting strong language transfer capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/HLiang-Lee/MCD.

Paperid: 902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11703.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in text-to-image generation, using synthetically generated data seldom brings a significant boost in performance for supervised learning. Oftentimes, synthetic datasets do not faithfully recreate the data distribution of real data, i.e., they lack the fidelity or diversity needed for effective downstream model training. While previous work has employed few-shot guidance to address this issue, existing methods still fail to capture and generate features unique to specific real images. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset generation framework named LoFT, LoRA-Fused Training-data Generation with Few-shot Guidance. Our method fine-tunes LoRA weights on individual real images and fuses them at inference time, producing synthetic images that combine the features of real images for improved diversity and fidelity of generated data. We evaluate the synthetic data produced by LoFT on 10 datasets, using 8 to 64 real images per class as guidance and scaling up to 1000 images per class. Our experiments show that training on LoFT-generated data consistently outperforms other synthetic dataset methods, significantly increasing accuracy as the dataset size increases. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that LoFT generates datasets with high fidelity and sufficient diversity, which contribute to the performance improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LoFT.

Paperid: 903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11404.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) have enabled broad progress in the general medical field. However, pathology still remains a more challenging subdomain, with current pathology specific VLMs exhibiting limitations in both diagnostic accuracy and reasoning plausibility. Such shortcomings are largely attributable to the nature of current pathology datasets, which are primarily composed of image description pairs that lack the depth and structured diagnostic paradigms employed by real world pathologists. In this study, we leverage pathology textbooks and real world pathology experts to construct high-quality, reasoning-oriented datasets. Building on this, we introduce Patho-R1, a multimodal RL-based pathology Reasoner, trained through a three-stage pipeline: (1) continued pretraining on 3.5 million image-text pairs for knowledge infusion; (2) supervised fine-tuning on 500k high-quality Chain-of-Thought samples for reasoning incentivizing; (3) reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization and Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization strategies for multimodal reasoning quality refinement. To further assess the alignment quality of our dataset, we propose Patho-CLIP, trained on the same figure-caption corpus used for continued pretraining. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that both Patho-CLIP and Patho-R1 achieve robust performance across a wide range of pathology-related tasks, including zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, Visual Question Answering, and Multiple Choice Question. Our project is available at the Patho-R1 repository: https://github.com/Wenchuan-Zhang/Patho-R1.

Paperid: 904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11239.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding human mobility through Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is increasingly important for applications such as urban planning, personalized services, and generative agent simulation. However, progress in this field is hindered by two key challenges: the over-reliance on older datasets from 2012-2013 and the lack of reproducible, city-level check-in datasets that reflect diverse global regions. To address these gaps, we present Massive-STEPS (Massive Semantic Trajectories for Understanding POI Check-ins), a large-scale, publicly available benchmark dataset built upon the Semantic Trails dataset and enriched with semantic POI metadata. Massive-STEPS spans 12 geographically and culturally diverse cities and features more recent (2017-2018) and longer-duration (24 months) check-in data than prior datasets. We benchmarked a wide range of POI recommendation models on Massive-STEPS using both supervised and zero-shot approaches, and evaluated their performance across multiple urban contexts. By releasing Massive-STEPS, we aim to facilitate reproducible and equitable research in human mobility and POI recommendation. The dataset and benchmarking code are available at: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/Massive-STEPS

Paperid: 905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11079.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Audio deepfake detection (ADD) has grown increasingly important due to the rise of high-fidelity audio generative models and their potential for misuse. Given that audio large language models (ALLMs) have made significant progress in various audio processing tasks, a heuristic question arises: \textit{Can ALLMs be leveraged to solve ADD?}. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of ALLMs on ADD, revealing their ineffectiveness. To this end, we propose ALLM4ADD, an ALLM-driven framework for ADD. Specifically, we reformulate ADD task as an audio question answering problem, prompting the model with the question: ``Is this audio fake or real?''. We then perform supervised fine-tuning to enable the ALLM to assess the authenticity of query audio. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our ALLM-based method can achieve superior performance in fake audio detection, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. As a pioneering study, we anticipate that this work will inspire the research community to leverage ALLMs to develop more effective ADD systems. Code is available at https://github.com/ucas-hao/qwen_audio_for_add.git

Paperid: 906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10939.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models often struggle with zero-shot generalization, and several modular approaches have been proposed to address this challenge. Yet, we hypothesize that a key limitation remains: the entanglement of general knowledge and task-specific adaptations. To overcome this, we propose a modular framework that disentangles these components by constructing a library of task-specific LoRA modules alongside a general-domain LoRA. By subtracting this general knowledge component from each task-specific module, we obtain residual modules that focus more exclusively on task-relevant information, a method we call general knowledge subtraction (GenKnowSub). Leveraging the refined task-specific modules and the Arrow routing algorithm \citep{ostapenko2024towards}, we dynamically select and combine modules for new inputs without additional training. Our studies on the Phi-3 model and standard Arrow as baselines reveal that using general knowledge LoRAs derived from diverse languages, including English, French, and German, yields consistent performance gains in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings across a wide set of benchmarks. Further experiments on Phi-2 demonstrate how GenKnowSub generalizes to weaker LLMs. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/saharsamr/Modular-LLM.

Paperid: 907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10289.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen state-object combinations by leveraging known combinations. Existing studies basically rely on the cross-modal alignment capabilities of CLIP but tend to overlook its limitations in capturing fine-grained local features, which arise from its architectural and training paradigm. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-Stage Cross-modal Interaction (MSCI) model that effectively explores and utilizes intermediate-layer information from CLIP's visual encoder. Specifically, we design two self-adaptive aggregators to extract local information from low-level visual features and integrate global information from high-level visual features, respectively. These key information are progressively incorporated into textual representations through a stage-by-stage interaction mechanism, significantly enhancing the model's perception capability for fine-grained local visual information. Additionally, MSCI dynamically adjusts the attention weights between global and local visual information based on different combinations, as well as different elements within the same combination, allowing it to flexibly adapt to diverse scenarios. Experiments on three widely used datasets fully validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model. Data and code are available at https://github.com/ltpwy/MSCI.

Paperid: 908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09926.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Universal visual anomaly detection aims to identify anomalies from novel or unseen vision domains without additional fine-tuning, which is critical in open scenarios. Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP exhibit strong generalization with just zero or a few normal images. However, existing methods struggle with designing prompt templates, complex token interactions, or requiring additional fine-tuning, resulting in limited flexibility. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method called AdaptCLIP based on two key insights. First, adaptive visual and textual representations should be learned alternately rather than jointly. Second, comparative learning between query and normal image prompt should incorporate both contextual and aligned residual features, rather than relying solely on residual features. AdaptCLIP treats CLIP models as a foundational service, adding only three simple adapters, visual adapter, textual adapter, and prompt-query adapter, at its input or output ends. AdaptCLIP supports zero-/few-shot generalization across domains and possesses a training-free manner on target domains once trained on a base dataset. AdaptCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 anomaly detection benchmarks from industrial and medical domains, significantly outperforming existing competitive methods. We will make the code and model of AdaptCLIP available at https://github.com/gaobb/AdaptCLIP.

Paperid: 909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09731.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) exhibit vast knowledge of the physical world, including intuition of physical and spatial properties, affordances, and motion. With fine-tuning, VLMs can also natively produce robot trajectories. We demonstrate that eliciting wrenches, not trajectories, allows VLMs to explicitly reason about forces and leads to zero-shot generalization in a series of manipulation tasks without pretraining. We achieve this by overlaying a consistent visual representation of relevant coordinate frames on robot-attached camera images to augment our query. First, we show how this addition enables a versatile motion control framework evaluated across four tasks (opening and closing a lid, pushing a cup or chair) spanning prismatic and rotational motion, an order of force and position magnitude, different camera perspectives, annotation schemes, and two robot platforms over 220 experiments, resulting in 51% success across the four tasks. Then, we demonstrate that the proposed framework enables VLMs to continually reason about interaction feedback to recover from task failure or incompletion, with and without human supervision. Finally, we observe that prompting schemes with visual annotation and embodied reasoning can bypass VLM safeguards. We characterize prompt component contribution to harmful behavior elicitation and discuss its implications for developing embodied reasoning. Our code, videos, and data are available at: https://scalingforce.github.io/.

Paperid: 910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09274.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Medical imaging is a cornerstone of modern healthcare, driving advancements in diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient care. Among its various tasks, segmentation remains one of the most challenging problem due to factors such as data accessibility, annotation complexity, structural variability, variation in medical imaging modalities, and privacy constraints. Despite recent progress, achieving robust generalization and domain adaptation remains a significant hurdle, particularly given the resource-intensive nature of some proposed models and their reliance on domain expertise. This survey explores cutting-edge advancements in medical image segmentation, focusing on methodologies such as Generative AI, Few-Shot Learning, Foundation Models, and Universal Models. These approaches offer promising solutions to longstanding challenges. We provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundations, state-of-the-art techniques, and recent applications of these methods. Finally, we discuss inherent limitations, unresolved issues, and future research directions aimed at enhancing the practicality and accessibility of segmentation models in medical imaging. We are maintaining a \href{https://github.com/faresbougourzi/Awesome-DL-for-Medical-Imaging-Segmentation}{GitHub Repository} to continue tracking and updating innovations in this field.

Paperid: 911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09265.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero- and few-shot visual anomaly segmentation relies on powerful vision-language models that detect unseen anomalies using manually designed textual prompts. However, visual representations are inherently independent of language. In this paper, we explore the potential of a pure visual foundation model as an alternative to widely used vision-language models for universal visual anomaly segmentation. We present a novel paradigm that unifies anomaly segmentation into change segmentation. This paradigm enables us to leverage large-scale synthetic image pairs, featuring object-level and local region changes, derived from existing image datasets, which are independent of target anomaly datasets. We propose a one-prompt Meta-learning framework for Universal Anomaly Segmentation (MetaUAS) that is trained on this synthetic dataset and then generalizes well to segment any novel or unseen visual anomalies in the real world. To handle geometrical variations between prompt and query images, we propose a soft feature alignment module that bridges paired-image change perception and single-image semantic segmentation. This is the first work to achieve universal anomaly segmentation using a pure vision model without relying on special anomaly detection datasets and pre-trained visual-language models. Our method effectively and efficiently segments any anomalies with only one normal image prompt and enjoys training-free without guidance from language. Our MetaUAS significantly outperforms previous zero-shot, few-shot, and even full-shot anomaly segmentation methods. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/MetaUAS.

Paperid: 912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09263.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly detection is a practical and challenging task due to the scarcity of anomaly samples in industrial inspection. Some existing anomaly detection methods address this issue by synthesizing anomalies with noise or external data. However, there is always a large semantic gap between synthetic and real-world anomalies, resulting in weak performance in anomaly detection. To solve the problem, we propose a few-shot Anomaly-driven Generation (AnoGen) method, which guides the diffusion model to generate realistic and diverse anomalies with only a few real anomalies, thereby benefiting training anomaly detection models. Specifically, our work is divided into three stages. In the first stage, we learn the anomaly distribution based on a few given real anomalies and inject the learned knowledge into an embedding. In the second stage, we use the embedding and given bounding boxes to guide the diffusion model to generate realistic and diverse anomalies on specific objects (or textures). In the final stage, we propose a weakly-supervised anomaly detection method to train a more powerful model with generated anomalies. Our method builds upon DRAEM and DesTSeg as the foundation model and conducts experiments on the commonly used industrial anomaly detection dataset, MVTec. The experiments demonstrate that our generated anomalies effectively improve the model performance of both anomaly classification and segmentation tasks simultaneously, \eg, DRAEM and DseTSeg achieved a 5.8\% and 1.5\% improvement in AU-PR metric on segmentation task, respectively. The code and generated anomalous data are available at https://github.com/gaobb/AnoGen.

Paperid: 913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09040.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real robots are expected to repeat the same behavior in new environments with very little new data, yet modern controllers either incur heavy per-step inference or require deployment-time fine-tuning. We propose RT-Cache, a training-free retrieval-as-control pipeline that caches diverse image action trajectories in a unified vector memory and, at test time, embeds the current frame to retrieve and replay multi-step snippets, replacing per-step model calls. A hierarchical search keeps lookups sub-second at million scale, shifting cost from compute to storage and enabling real-time control on modest GPUs. Across real-robot tasks and large open logs, RT-Cache achieves higher success and lower completion time than strong retrieval baselines (approximately x2 higher success and ~30% faster in our settings), and a single-episode anchoring study shows immediate adaptation to a more complex, contact-rich task without fine-tuning. RT-Cache turns experience into an append-only memory, offering a simple, scalable path to few-shot deployment today and a foundation for multimodal keys and optional integration with high-level policies. Project page: https://rt-cache.github.io/.

Paperid: 914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08712.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning navigation in dynamic open-world environments is an important yet challenging skill for robots. Most previous methods rely on precise localization and mapping or learn from expensive real-world demonstrations. In this paper, we propose the Navigation Diffusion Policy (NavDP), an end-to-end framework trained solely in simulation and can zero-shot transfer to different embodiments in diverse real-world environments. The key ingredient of NavDP's network is the combination of diffusion-based trajectory generation and a critic function for trajectory selection, which are conditioned on only local observation tokens encoded from a shared policy transformer. Given the privileged information of the global environment in simulation, we scale up the demonstrations of good quality to train the diffusion policy and formulate the critic value function targets with contrastive negative samples. Our demonstration generation approach achieves about 2,500 trajectories/GPU per day, 20$\times$ more efficient than real-world data collection, and results in a large-scale navigation dataset with 363.2km trajectories across 1244 scenes. Trained with this simulation dataset, NavDP achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently outstanding generalization capability on quadruped, wheeled, and humanoid robots in diverse indoor and outdoor environments. In addition, we present a preliminary attempt at using Gaussian Splatting to make in-domain real-to-sim fine-tuning to further bridge the sim-to-real gap. Experiments show that adding such real-to-sim data can improve the success rate by 30\% without hurting its generalization capability.

Paperid: 915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07916.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce MiniMax-Speech, an autoregressive Transformer-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) model that generates high-quality speech. A key innovation is our learnable speaker encoder, which extracts timbre features from a reference audio without requiring its transcription. This enables MiniMax-Speech to produce highly expressive speech with timbre consistent with the reference in a zero-shot manner, while also supporting one-shot voice cloning with exceptionally high similarity to the reference voice. In addition, the overall quality of the synthesized audio is enhanced through the proposed Flow-VAE. Our model supports 32 languages and demonstrates excellent performance across multiple objective and subjective evaluations metrics. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on objective voice cloning metrics (Word Error Rate and Speaker Similarity) and has secured the top position on the public TTS Arena leaderboard. Another key strength of MiniMax-Speech, granted by the robust and disentangled representations from the speaker encoder, is its extensibility without modifying the base model, enabling various applications such as: arbitrary voice emotion control via LoRA; text to voice (T2V) by synthesizing timbre features directly from text description; and professional voice cloning (PVC) by fine-tuning timbre features with additional data. We encourage readers to visit https://minimax-ai.github.io/tts_tech_report for more examples.

Paperid: 916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07675.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a practical solution for addressing data scarcity challenges by leveraging unlabeled data. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs), pre-trained on massive image-text pairs, have demonstrated remarkable zero-/few-shot performance that often surpasses SSL approaches due to their exceptional generalization capabilities. This gap motivates us to question: how can we effectively harness the powerful generalization capabilities of VLMs into task-specific models? Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a natural framework for transferring VLM capabilities, but we identify that it suffers from gradient conflicts between supervised and distillation losses. To address this challenge, we propose Dual-Head Optimization (DHO), which introduces dual prediction heads for each distinct signal. We observe that DHO resolves gradient conflicts, enabling improved feature learning compared to single-head KD baselines, with practical benefits of minimal computational overhead and test-time hyperparameter tuning without retraining. Extensive experiments across 15 datasets show that DHO consistently outperforms KD baselines, often outperforming teacher models with smaller student models. DHO also achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution ImageNet semi-supervised learning and out-of-distribution generalization across ImageNet variants. We publicly release our code and model checkpoints to facilitate future research at https://github.com/erjui/DHO.

Paperid: 917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07609.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning to associate audio with textual descriptions is valuable for a range of tasks, including pretraining, zero-shot classification, audio retrieval, audio captioning, and text-conditioned audio generation. Existing contrastive language-audio pretrained models are typically trained using global, clip-level descriptions, which provide only weak temporal supervision. We hypothesize that CLAP-like language-audio models - particularly, if they are expected to produce frame-level embeddings - can benefit from a stronger temporal supervision. To confirm our hypothesis, we curate a novel dataset of approximately 12,000 audio recordings from Freesound, each annotated with single-sentence free-text descriptions linked to a specific temporal segment in an audio recording. We use large language models to clean these annotations by removing references to non-audible events, transcribed speech, typos, and annotator language bias. We further propose a frame-wise contrastive training strategy that learns to align text descriptions with temporal regions in an audio recording and demonstrate that our model has better temporal text-audio alignment abilities compared to models trained only on global captions when evaluated on the AudioSet Strong benchmark. The dataset and our source code are available on Zenodo and GitHub, respectively.

Paperid: 918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07171.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge Graphs (KGs), composed of triples in the form of (head, relation, tail) and consisting of entities and relations, play a key role in information retrieval systems such as question answering, entity search, and recommendation. In real-world KGs, although many entities exist, the relations exhibit a long-tail distribution, which can hinder information retrieval performance. Previous few-shot knowledge graph completion studies focused exclusively on the positive triple information that exists in the graph or, when negative triples were incorporated, used them merely as a signal to indicate incorrect triples. To overcome this limitation, we propose Relation-Based Conditional Diffusion with Attention Pooling (ReCDAP). First, negative triples are generated by randomly replacing the tail entity in the support set. By conditionally incorporating positive information in the KG and non-existent negative information into the diffusion process, the model separately estimates the latent distributions for positive and negative relations. Moreover, including an attention pooler enables the model to leverage the differences between positive and negative cases explicitly. Experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/hou27/ReCDAP-FKGC.

Paperid: 919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06761.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image synthesis, demonstrating impressive text comprehension and zero-shot generalization. These models refine images from random noise based on textual prompts, with initial reliance on text input shifting towards enhanced visual fidelity over time. This transition suggests that static model parameters might not optimally address the distinct phases of generation. We introduce LGR-AD (Learning Graph Representation of Agent Diffusers), a novel multi-agent system designed to improve adaptability in dynamic computer vision tasks. LGR-AD models the generation process as a distributed system of interacting agents, each representing an expert sub-model. These agents dynamically adapt to varying conditions and collaborate through a graph neural network that encodes their relationships and performance metrics. Our approach employs a coordination mechanism based on top-$k$ maximum spanning trees, optimizing the generation process. Each agent's decision-making is guided by a meta-model that minimizes a novel loss function, balancing accuracy and diversity. Theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evaluations show that LGR-AD outperforms traditional diffusion models across various benchmarks, highlighting its potential for scalable and flexible solutions in complex image generation tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/YousIA/LGR_AD

Paperid: 920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06152.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as clinical assistants across various medical fields. However, specialized dermatology VLM capable of delivering professional and detailed diagnostic analysis remains underdeveloped, primarily due to less specialized text descriptions in current dermatology multimodal datasets. To address this issue, we propose MM-Skin, the first large-scale multimodal dermatology dataset that encompasses 3 imaging modalities, including clinical, dermoscopic, and pathological and nearly 10k high-quality image-text pairs collected from professional textbooks. In addition, we generate over 27k diverse, instruction-following vision question answering (VQA) samples (9 times the size of current largest dermatology VQA dataset). Leveraging public datasets and MM-Skin, we developed SkinVL, a dermatology-specific VLM designed for precise and nuanced skin disease interpretation. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations of SkinVL on VQA, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and zero-shot classification tasks across 8 datasets, reveal its exceptional performance for skin diseases in comparison to both general and medical VLM models. The introduction of MM-Skin and SkinVL offers a meaningful contribution to advancing the development of clinical dermatology VLM assistants. MM-Skin is available at https://github.com/ZwQ803/MM-Skin

Paperid: 921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06079.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Preference feedback collected by human or VLM annotators is often noisy, presenting a significant challenge for preference-based reinforcement learning that relies on accurate preference labels. To address this challenge, we propose TREND, a novel framework that integrates few-shot expert demonstrations with a tri-teaching strategy for effective noise mitigation. Our method trains three reward models simultaneously, where each model views its small-loss preference pairs as useful knowledge and teaches such useful pairs to its peer network for updating the parameters. Remarkably, our approach requires as few as one to three expert demonstrations to achieve high performance. We evaluate TREND on various robotic manipulation tasks, achieving up to 90% success rates even with noise levels as high as 40%, highlighting its effective robustness in handling noisy preference feedback. Project page: https://shuaiyihuang.github.io/publications/TREND.

Paperid: 922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06002.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in language and image tasks, leading an increasing number of studies to explore the application of pre-trained image models, such as CLIP, in the domain of few-shot action recognition (FSAR). However, current methods generally suffer from several problems: 1) Direct fine-tuning often undermines the generalization capability of the pre-trained model; 2) The exploration of task-specific information is insufficient in the visual tasks; 3) The semantic order information is typically overlooked during text modeling; 4) Existing cross-modal alignment techniques ignore the temporal coupling of multimodal information. To address these, we propose Task-Adapter++, a parameter-efficient dual adaptation method for both image and text encoders. Specifically, to make full use of the variations across different few-shot learning tasks, we design a task-specific adaptation for the image encoder so that the most discriminative information can be well noticed during feature extraction. Furthermore, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate detailed sequential sub-action descriptions for each action class, and introduce semantic order adapters into the text encoder to effectively model the sequential relationships between these sub-actions. Finally, we develop an innovative fine-grained cross-modal alignment strategy that actively maps visual features to reside in the same temporal stage as semantic descriptions. Extensive experiments fully demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 benchmarks consistently. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Jaulin-Bage/Task-Adapter-pp.

Paperid: 923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05583.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) involves assigning documents to labels organized within a taxonomy. Most previous research on HTC has focused on supervised methods. However, in real-world scenarios, employing supervised HTC can be challenging due to a lack of annotated data. Moreover, HTC often faces issues with large label spaces and long-tail distributions. In this work, we present Knowledge Graphs for zero-shot Hierarchical Text Classification (KG-HTC), which aims to address these challenges of HTC in applications by integrating knowledge graphs with Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide structured semantic context during classification. Our method retrieves relevant subgraphs from knowledge graphs related to the input text using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. Our KG-HTC can enhance LLMs to understand label semantics at various hierarchy levels. We evaluate KG-HTC on three open-source HTC datasets: WoS, DBpedia, and Amazon. Our experimental results show that KG-HTC significantly outperforms three baselines in the strict zero-shot setting, particularly achieving substantial improvements at deeper levels of the hierarchy. This evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating structured knowledge into LLMs to address HTC's challenges in large label spaces and long-tailed label distributions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/QianboZang/KG-HTC.

Paperid: 924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05343.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models demonstrate strong multimodal alignment and generalization across diverse tasks. Among them, CLIP stands out as one of the most successful approaches. In this work, we extend the application of CLIP to sound source localization, proposing a self-supervised method operates without explicit text input. We introduce a framework that maps audios into tokens compatible with CLIP's text encoder, producing audio-driven embeddings. These embeddings are used to generate sounding region masks, from which visual features are extracted and aligned with the audio embeddings through a contrastive audio-visual correspondence objective. Our findings show that alignment knowledge of pre-trained multimodal foundation model enables our method to generate more complete and compact localization for sounding objects. We further propose an LLM-guided extension that distills object-aware audio-visual scene understanding into the model during training to enhance alignment. Extensive experiments across five diverse tasks demonstrate that our method, in all variants, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and achieves strong generalization in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05189.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Prompt learning is one of the most effective paradigms for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to the biomedical image classification tasks in few shot scenarios. However, most of the current prompt learning methods only used the text prompts and ignored the particular structures (such as the complex anatomical structures and subtle pathological features) in the biomedical images. In this work, we propose Biomed-DPT, a knowledge-enhanced dual modality prompt tuning technique. In designing the text prompt, Biomed-DPT constructs a dual prompt including the template-driven clinical prompts and the large language model (LLM)-driven domain-adapted prompts, then extracts the clinical knowledge from the domain-adapted prompts through the knowledge distillation technique. In designing the vision prompt, Biomed-DPT introduces the zero vector as a soft prompt to leverage attention re-weighting so that the focus on non-diagnostic regions and the recognition of non-critical pathological features are avoided. Biomed-DPT achieves an average classification accuracy of 66.14\% across 11 biomedical image datasets covering 9 modalities and 10 organs, with performance reaching 78.06\% in base classes and 75.97\% in novel classes, surpassing the Context Optimization (CoOp) method by 6.20\%, 3.78\%, and 8.04\%, respectively. Our code are available at \underline{https://github.com/Kanyooo/Biomed-DPT}.

Paperid: 926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05071.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification but struggles with fine-grained understanding due to its focus on coarse-grained short captions. To address this, we propose Fine-Grained CLIP (FG-CLIP), which enhances fine-grained understanding through three key innovations. First, we leverage large multimodal models to generate 1.6 billion long caption-image pairs for capturing global-level semantic details. Second, a high-quality dataset is constructed with 12 million images and 40 million region-specific bounding boxes aligned with detailed captions to ensure precise, context-rich representations. Third, 10 million hard fine-grained negative samples are incorporated to improve the model's ability to distinguish subtle semantic differences. We construct a comprehensive dataset, termed FineHARD, by integrating high-quality region-specific annotations with hard fine-grained negative samples. Corresponding training methods are meticulously designed for these data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FG-CLIP outperforms the original CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including fine-grained understanding, open-vocabulary object detection, image-text retrieval, and general multimodal benchmarks. These results highlight FG-CLIP's effectiveness in capturing fine-grained image details and improving overall model performance. The data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/FG-CLIP.

Paperid: 927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04364.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating under strict swarm-like constraints-limited local perception and communication-remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks often do not fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks (Pursuit, Synchronization, Foraging, Flocking, Transport) within a configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely solely on local sensory input ($k\times k$ view) and local communication. We propose metrics for coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Zero-shot evaluations of leading LLMs (e.g., deepseek-v3, o4-mini) reveal significant task-dependent performance variations. While some rudimentary coordination is observed, our results indicate that current LLMs significantly struggle with robust long-range planning and adaptive strategy formation under the uncertainty inherent in these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under such swarm-like constraints is crucial for understanding their utility in future decentralized intelligent systems. We release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built on a customizable physical system-providing environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and comprehensive datasets. This aims to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of emergent collective behavior under severe informational decentralization. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.

Paperid: 928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04113.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Modern zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems, despite using extensive pre-training, often struggle in challenging scenarios such as tongue twisters, repeated words, code-switching, and cross-lingual synthesis, leading to intelligibility issues. To address these limitations, this paper leverages preference alignment techniques, which enable targeted construction of out-of-pretraining-distribution data to enhance performance. We introduce a new dataset, named the Intelligibility Preference Speech Dataset (INTP), and extend the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework to accommodate diverse TTS architectures. After INTP alignment, in addition to intelligibility, we observe overall improvements including naturalness, similarity, and audio quality for multiple TTS models across diverse domains. Based on that, we also verify the weak-to-strong generalization ability of INTP for more intelligible models such as CosyVoice 2 and Ints. Moreover, we showcase the potential for further improvements through iterative alignment based on Ints. Audio samples are available at https://intalign.github.io/.

Paperid: 929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03947.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
One of the primary aspirations in reinforcement learning research is developing general-purpose agents capable of rapidly adapting to and mastering novel tasks. While RL gaming agents have mastered many Atari games, they remain slow and costly to train for each game. In this work, we demonstrate that latest reasoning LLMs with out-of-domain RL post-training can play a challenging Atari game called Frogger under a zero-shot setting. We then investigate the effect of in-context learning and the amount of reasoning effort on LLM performance. Lastly, we demonstrate a way to bootstrap traditional RL method with LLM demonstrations, which significantly improves their performance and sample efficiency. Our implementation is open sourced at https://github.com/AlienKevin/frogger.

Paperid: 930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03827.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Stress haunts people in modern society, which may cause severe health issues if left unattended. With social media becoming an integral part of daily life, leveraging social media to detect stress has gained increasing attention. While the majority of the work focuses on classifying stress states and stress categories, this study introduce a new task aimed at estimating more specific stressors (like exam, writing paper, etc.) through users' posts on social media. Unfortunately, the diversity of stressors with many different classes but a few examples per class, combined with the consistent arising of new stressors over time, hinders the machine understanding of stressors. To this end, we cast the stressor estimation problem within a practical scenario few-shot learning setting, and propose a novel meta-learning based stressor estimation framework that is enhanced by a meta-knowledge inheritance mechanism. This model can not only learn generic stressor context through meta-learning, but also has a good generalization ability to estimate new stressors with little labeled data. A fundamental breakthrough in our approach lies in the inclusion of the meta-knowledge inheritance mechanism, which equips our model with the ability to prevent catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new stressors. The experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with the baselines. Additionally, we construct a social media-based stressor estimation dataset that can help train artificial intelligence models to facilitate human well-being. The dataset is now public at \href{https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/xinwangcs/stressor-cause-of-mental-health-problem-dataset}{\underline{Kaggle}} and \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/XinWangcs/Stressor}{\underline{Hugging Face}}.

Paperid: 931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03097.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The diffusion models, in early stages focus on constructing basic image structures, while the refined details, including local features and textures, are generated in later stages. Thus the same network layers are forced to learn both structural and textural information simultaneously, significantly differing from the traditional deep learning architectures (e.g., ResNet or GANs) which captures or generates the image semantic information at different layers. This difference inspires us to explore the time-wise diffusion models. We initially investigate the key contributions of the U-Net parameters to the denoising process and identify that properly zeroing out certain parameters (including large parameters) contributes to denoising, substantially improving the generation quality on the fly. Capitalizing on this discovery, we propose a simple yet effective method-termed ``MaskUNet''- that enhances generation quality with negligible parameter numbers. Our method fully leverages timestep- and sample-dependent effective U-Net parameters. To optimize MaskUNet, we offer two fine-tuning strategies: a training-based approach and a training-free approach, including tailored networks and optimization functions. In zero-shot inference on the COCO dataset, MaskUNet achieves the best FID score and further demonstrates its effectiveness in downstream task evaluations. Project page: https://gudaochangsheng.github.io/MaskUnet-Page/

Paperid: 932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03046.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The verification of successful grasps is a crucial aspect of robot manipulation, particularly when handling deformable objects. Traditional methods relying on force and tactile sensors often struggle with deformable and non-rigid objects. In this work, we present a vision-based approach for grasp verification to determine whether the robotic gripper has successfully grasped an object. Our method employs a two-stage architecture; first YOLO-based object detection model to detect and locate the robot's gripper and then a ResNet-based classifier determines the presence of an object. To address the limitations of real-world data capture, we introduce HSR-GraspSynth, a synthetic dataset designed to simulate diverse grasping scenarios. Furthermore, we explore the use of Visual Question Answering capabilities as a zero-shot baseline to which we compare our model. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high accuracy in real-world environments, with potential for integration into grasping pipelines. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/pauamargant/HSR-GraspSynth .

Paperid: 933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02867.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present an open-vocabulary and zero-shot method for arbitrary referring expression segmentation (RES), targeting input expressions that are more general than what prior works were designed to handle. Specifically, our inputs encompass both object- and part-level labels as well as implicit references pointing to properties or qualities of object/part function, design, style, material, etc. Our model, coined RESAnything, leverages Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) reasoning, where the key idea is attribute prompting. We generate detailed descriptions of object/part attributes including shape, color, and location for potential segment proposals through systematic prompting of a large language model (LLM), where the proposals are produced by a foundational image segmentation model. Our approach encourages deep reasoning about object or part attributes related to function, style, design, etc., enabling the system to handle implicit queries without any part annotations for training or fine-tuning. As the first zero-shot and LLM-based RES method, RESAnything achieves clearly superior performance among zero-shot methods on traditional RES benchmarks and significantly outperforms existing methods on challenging scenarios involving implicit queries and complex part-level relations. Finally, we contribute a new benchmark dataset to offer ~3K carefully curated RES instances to assess part-level, arbitrary RES solutions.

Paperid: 934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02753.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We explore Generalizable Tumor Segmentation, aiming to train a single model for zero-shot tumor segmentation across diverse anatomical regions. Existing methods face limitations related to segmentation quality, scalability, and the range of applicable imaging modalities. In this paper, we uncover the potential of the internal representations within frozen medical foundation diffusion models as highly efficient zero-shot learners for tumor segmentation by introducing a novel framework named DiffuGTS. DiffuGTS creates anomaly-aware open-vocabulary attention maps based on text prompts to enable generalizable anomaly segmentation without being restricted by a predefined training category list. To further improve and refine anomaly segmentation masks, DiffuGTS leverages the diffusion model, transforming pathological regions into high-quality pseudo-healthy counterparts through latent space inpainting, and applies a novel pixel-level and feature-level residual learning approach, resulting in segmentation masks with significantly enhanced quality and generalization. Comprehensive experiments on four datasets and seven tumor categories demonstrate the superior performance of our method, surpassing current state-of-the-art models across multiple zero-shot settings. Codes are available at https://github.com/Yankai96/DiffuGTS.

Paperid: 935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02325.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning discriminative 3D representations that generalize well to unknown testing categories is an emerging requirement for many real-world 3D applications. Existing well-established methods often struggle to attain this goal due to insufficient 3D training data from broader concepts. Meanwhile, pre-trained large vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities. Yet, they are limited in extracting suitable 3D representations due to substantial gaps between their 2D training and 3D testing distributions. To address these challenges, we propose Testing-time Distribution Alignment (TeDA), a novel framework that adapts a pretrained 2D vision-language model CLIP for unknown 3D object retrieval at test time. To our knowledge, it is the first work that studies the test-time adaptation of a vision-language model for 3D feature learning. TeDA projects 3D objects into multi-view images, extracts features using CLIP, and refines 3D query embeddings with an iterative optimization strategy by confident query-target sample pairs in a self-boosting manner. Additionally, TeDA integrates textual descriptions generated by a multimodal language model (InternVL) to enhance 3D object understanding, leveraging CLIP's aligned feature space to fuse visual and textual cues. Extensive experiments on four open-set 3D object retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that TeDA greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even those requiring extensive training. We also experimented with depth maps on Objaverse-LVIS, further validating its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzhichuan123/TeDA.

Paperid: 936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02278.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pretraining on large datasets of images-text pairs is one of the main building blocks of current Vision-Language Models. While with additional training, these models excel in various downstream tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, and visual commonsense reasoning. However, a notable weakness of pretrained models like CLIP, is their inability to perform entity grounding and compositional image and text matching~\cite{Jiang2024ComCLIP, yang2023amc, Rajabi2023GroundedVSR, learninglocalizeCVPR24}. In this work we propose a novel learning-free zero-shot augmentation of CLIP embeddings that has favorable compositional properties. We compute separate embeddings of sub-images of object entities and relations that are localized by the state of the art open vocabulary detectors and dynamically adjust the baseline global image embedding. % The final embedding is obtained by computing a weighted combination of the sub-image embeddings. The resulting embedding is then utilized for similarity computation with text embedding, resulting in a average 1.5\% improvement in image-text matching accuracy on the Visual Genome and SVO Probes datasets~\cite{krishna2017visualgenome, svo}. Notably, the enhanced embeddings demonstrate superior retrieval performance, thus achieving significant gains on the Flickr30K and MS-COCO retrieval benchmarks~\cite{flickr30ke, mscoco}, improving the state-of-the-art Recall@1 by 12\% and 0.4\%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/madhukarreddyvongala/GroundingCLIP.

Paperid: 937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02266.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which token embedding vectors are first generated deterministically, directly from the token IDs using a Fourier expansion of their normalized values, followed by a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) that captures higher-order interactions. We train standard transformers and our architecture on natural language inference tasks (SNLI and MNLI), and evaluate zero-shot performance on sentence textual similarity (STS-B). Our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance using significantly fewer parameters, trains faster, and operates effectively without the need for dropout. This proof-of-concept study highlights the potential for scalable, memory-efficient language models and motivates further large-scale experimentation based on our findings.

Paperid: 938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01862.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Adapting autonomous agents to industrial, domestic, and other daily tasks is currently gaining momentum. However, in the global or cross-lingual application contexts, ensuring effective interaction with the environment and executing unrestricted human task-specified instructions in diverse languages remains an unsolved problem. To address this challenge, we propose ReLI, a language-agnostic framework designed to enable autonomous agents to converse naturally, semantically reason about the environment, and to perform downstream tasks, regardless of the task instruction's linguistic origin. First, we ground large-scale pre-trained foundation models and transform them into language-to-action models that can directly provide common-sense reasoning and high-level robot control through natural, free-flow human-robot conversational interactions. Further, we perform cross-lingual grounding of the models to ensure that ReLI generalises across the global languages. To demonstrate the ReLI's robustness, we conducted extensive simulated and real-world experiments on various short- and long-horizon tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot spatial navigation, scene information retrieval, and query-oriented tasks. We benchmarked the performance on 140 languages involving over 70K multi-turn conversations. On average, ReLI achieved over 90%$\pm$0.2 accuracy in cross-lingual instruction parsing and task execution success rates. These results demonstrate the ReLI's potential to enhance natural human-robot interaction in the real world while championing linguistic diversity. Demonstrations and resources will be publicly available at https://linusnep.github.io/ReLI/.

Paperid: 939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01431.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Camouflaged object segmentation presents unique challenges compared to traditional segmentation tasks, primarily due to the high similarity in patterns and colors between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Effective solutions to this problem have significant implications in critical areas such as pest control, defect detection, and lesion segmentation in medical imaging. Prior research has predominantly emphasized supervised or unsupervised pre-training methods, leaving zero-shot approaches significantly underdeveloped. Existing zero-shot techniques commonly utilize the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in automatic mode or rely on vision-language models to generate cues for segmentation; however, their performances remain unsatisfactory, due to the similarity of the camouflaged object and the background. This work studies how to avoid training by integrating large pre-trained models like SAM-2 and Owl-v2 with temporal information into a modular pipeline. Evaluated on the MoCA-Mask dataset, our approach achieves outstanding performance improvements, significantly outperforming existing zero-shot methods by raising the F-measure ($F_Î²^w$) from 0.296 to 0.628. Our approach also surpasses supervised methods, increasing the F-measure from 0.476 to 0.628. Additionally, evaluation on the MoCA-Filter dataset demonstrates an increase in the success rate from 0.628 to 0.697 when compared with FlowSAM, a supervised transfer method. A thorough ablation study further validates the individual contributions of each component. Besides our main contributions, we also highlight inconsistencies in previous work regarding metrics and settings. Code can be found in https://github.com/weathon/vcos.

Paperid: 940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01237.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in audio-visual learning have shown promising results in learning representations across modalities. However, most approaches rely on global audio representations that fail to capture fine-grained temporal correspondences with visual frames. Additionally, existing methods often struggle with conflicting optimization objectives when trying to jointly learn reconstruction and cross-modal alignment. In this work, we propose CAV-MAE Sync as a simple yet effective extension of the original CAV-MAE framework for self-supervised audio-visual learning. We address three key challenges: First, we tackle the granularity mismatch between modalities by treating audio as a temporal sequence aligned with video frames, rather than using global representations. Second, we resolve conflicting optimization goals by separating contrastive and reconstruction objectives through dedicated global tokens. Third, we improve spatial localization by introducing learnable register tokens that reduce semantic load on patch tokens. We evaluate the proposed approach on AudioSet, VGG Sound, and the ADE20K Sound dataset on zero-shot retrieval, classification and localization tasks demonstrating state-of-the-art performance and outperforming more complex architectures.

Paperid: 941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00649.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive zero-shot performance across a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks, including document re-ranking. However, their effectiveness degrades on unseen tasks and domains, largely due to shifts in vocabulary and word distributions. In this paper, we investigate Task Arithmetic, a technique that combines the weights of LLMs pre-trained on different tasks or domains via simple mathematical operations, such as addition or subtraction, to adapt retrieval models without requiring additional fine-tuning. Our method is able to synthesize diverse tasks and domain knowledge into a single model, enabling effective zero-shot adaptation in different retrieval contexts. Extensive experiments on publicly available scientific, biomedical, and multilingual datasets show that our method improves state-of-the-art re-ranking performance by up to 18% in NDCG@10 and 15% in P@10. In addition to these empirical gains, our analysis provides insights into the strengths and limitations of Task Arithmetic as a practical strategy for zero-shot learning and model adaptation. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/DetectiveMB/Task-Arithmetic-for-ZS-IR.

Paperid: 942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00426.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D part assembly aims to understand part relationships and predict their 6-DoF poses to construct realistic 3D shapes, addressing the growing demand for autonomous assembly, which is crucial for robots. Existing methods mainly estimate the transformation of each part by training neural networks under supervision, which requires a substantial quantity of manually labeled data. However, the high cost of data collection and the immense variability of real-world shapes and parts make traditional methods impractical for large-scale applications. In this paper, we propose first a zero-shot part assembly method that utilizes pre-trained point cloud diffusion models as discriminators in the assembly process, guiding the manipulation of parts to form realistic shapes. Specifically, we theoretically demonstrate that utilizing a diffusion model for zero-shot part assembly can be transformed into an Iterative Closest Point (ICP) process. Then, we propose a novel pushing-away strategy to address the overlap parts, thereby further enhancing the robustness of the method. To verify our work, we conduct extensive experiments and quantitative comparisons to several strong baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which even surpasses the supervised learning method. The code has been released on https://github.com/Ruiyuan-Zhang/Zero-Shot-Assembly.

Paperid: 943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21344.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Machine learning models have utilized semantic features, deep features, or both to assess lung nodule malignancy. However, their reliance on manual annotation during inference, limited interpretability, and sensitivity to imaging variations hinder their application in real-world clinical settings. Thus, this research aims to integrate semantic features derived from radiologists' assessments of nodules, guiding the model to learn clinically relevant, robust, and explainable imaging features for predicting lung cancer. We obtained 938 low-dose CT scans from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) with 1,246 nodules and semantic features. Additionally, the Lung Image Database Consortium dataset contains 1,018 CT scans, with 2,625 lesions annotated for nodule characteristics. Three external datasets were obtained from UCLA Health, the LUNGx Challenge, and the Duke Lung Cancer Screening. We fine-tuned a pretrained Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to align imaging and semantic text features and predict the one-year lung cancer diagnosis. Our model outperformed state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the NLST test set with an AUROC of 0.901 and AUPRC of 0.776. It also showed robust results in external datasets. Using CLIP, we also obtained predictions on semantic features through zero-shot inference, such as nodule margin (AUROC: 0.812), nodule consistency (0.812), and pleural attachment (0.840). Our approach surpasses the SOTA models in predicting lung cancer across datasets collected from diverse clinical settings, providing explainable outputs, aiding clinicians in comprehending the underlying meaning of model predictions. This approach also prevents the model from learning shortcuts and generalizes across clinical settings. The code is available at https://github.com/luotingzhuang/CLIP_nodule.

Paperid: 944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21063.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Federated domain generalization (FedDG) aims to learn a globally generalizable model from decentralized clients with heterogeneous data while preserving privacy. Recent studies have introduced prompt learning to adapt vision-language models (VLMs) in FedDG by learning a single global prompt. However, such a one-prompt-fits-all learning paradigm typically leads to performance degradation on personalized samples. Although the mixture of experts (MoE) offers a promising solution for specialization, existing MoE-based methods suffer from coarse image-level expert assignment and high communication costs from parameterized routers. To address these limitations, we propose TRIP, a Token-level prompt mixture with parameter-free routing framework for FedDG, which treats multiple prompts as distinct experts. Unlike existing image-level routing designs, TRIP assigns different tokens within an image to specific experts. To ensure communication efficiency, TRIP incorporates a parameter-free routing mechanism based on token clustering and optimal transport. The instance-specific prompt is then synthesized by aggregating experts, weighted by the number of tokens assigned to each. Additionally, TRIP develops an unbiased learning strategy for prompt experts, leveraging the VLM's zero-shot generalization capability. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that TRIP achieves optimal generalization results, with communication of only 1K parameters per round. Our code is available at https://github.com/GongShuai8210/TRIP.

Paperid: 945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20998.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (e.g., GPT-4, Gemini, Chameleon) have evolved into powerful tools with millions of users. However, they remain generic models and lack personalized knowledge of specific user concepts. Previous work has explored personalization for text generation, yet it remains unclear how these methods can be adapted to new modalities, such as image generation. In this paper, we introduce Yo'Chameleon, the first attempt to study personalization for large multimodal models. Given 3-5 images of a particular concept, Yo'Chameleon leverages soft-prompt tuning to embed subject-specific information to (i) answer questions about the subject and (ii) recreate pixel-level details to produce images of the subject in new contexts. Yo'Chameleon is trained with (i) a self-prompting optimization mechanism to balance performance across multiple modalities, and (ii) a ``soft-positive" image generation approach to enhance image quality in a few-shot setting.

Paperid: 946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20303.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
By mapping sites at large scales using remotely sensed data, archaeologists can generate unique insights into long-term demographic trends, inter-regional social networks, and past adaptations to climate change. Remote sensing surveys complement field-based approaches, and their reach can be especially great when combined with deep learning and computer vision techniques. However, conventional supervised deep learning methods face challenges in annotating fine-grained archaeological features at scale. While recent vision foundation models have shown remarkable success in learning large-scale remote sensing data with minimal annotations, most off-the-shelf solutions are designed for RGB images rather than multi-spectral satellite imagery, such as the 8-band data used in our study. In this paper, we introduce DeepAndes, a transformer-based vision foundation model trained on three million multi-spectral satellite images, specifically tailored for Andean archaeology. DeepAndes incorporates a customized DINOv2 self-supervised learning algorithm optimized for 8-band multi-spectral imagery, marking the first foundation model designed explicitly for the Andes region. We evaluate its image understanding performance through imbalanced image classification, image instance retrieval, and pixel-level semantic segmentation tasks. Our experiments show that DeepAndes achieves superior F1 scores, mean average precision, and Dice scores in few-shot learning scenarios, significantly outperforming models trained from scratch or pre-trained on smaller datasets. This underscores the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised pre-training in archaeological remote sensing. Codes will be available on https://github.com/geopacha/DeepAndes.

Paperid: 947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20168.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of models, we propose a novel class of model-internal confidence estimators (MICE) to better assess confidence when calling tools. MICE first decodes from each intermediate layer of the language model using logitLens and then computes similarity scores between each layer's generation and the final output. These features are fed into a learned probabilistic classifier to assess confidence in the decoded output. On the simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models, we find that MICE beats or matches the baselines on smoothed expected calibration error. Using MICE confidences to determine whether to call a tool significantly improves over strong baselines on a new metric, expected tool-calling utility. Further experiments show that MICE is sample-efficient, can generalize zero-shot to unseen APIs, and results in higher tool-calling utility in scenarios with varying risk levels. Our code is open source, available at https://github.com/microsoft/mice_for_cats.

Paperid: 948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19876.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces DeeCLIP, a novel framework for detecting AI-generated images using CLIP-ViT and fusion learning. Despite significant advancements in generative models capable of creating highly photorealistic images, existing detection methods often struggle to generalize across different models and are highly sensitive to minor perturbations. To address these challenges, DeeCLIP incorporates DeeFuser, a fusion module that combines high-level and low-level features, improving robustness against degradations such as compression and blurring. Additionally, we apply triplet loss to refine the embedding space, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish between real and synthetic content. To further enable lightweight adaptation while preserving pre-trained knowledge, we adopt parameter-efficient fine-tuning using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) within the CLIP-ViT backbone. This approach supports effective zero-shot learning without sacrificing generalization. Trained exclusively on 4-class ProGAN data, DeeCLIP achieves an average accuracy of 89.00% on 19 test subsets composed of generative adversarial network (GAN) and diffusion models. Despite having fewer trainable parameters, DeeCLIP outperforms existing methods, demonstrating superior robustness against various generative models and real-world distortions. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mamadou-Keita/DeeCLIP for research purposes.

Paperid: 949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19742.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The presence of species provides key insights into the ecological properties of a location such as land cover, climatic conditions or even soil properties. We propose a method to predict such ecological properties directly from remote sensing (RS) images by aligning them with species habitat descriptions. We introduce the EcoWikiRS dataset, consisting of high-resolution aerial images, the corresponding geolocated species observations, and, for each species, the textual descriptions of their habitat from Wikipedia. EcoWikiRS offers a scalable way of supervision for RS vision language models (RS-VLMs) for ecology. This is a setting with weak and noisy supervision, where, for instance, some text may describe properties that are specific only to part of the species' niche or is irrelevant to a specific image. We tackle this by proposing WINCEL, a weighted version of the InfoNCE loss. We evaluate our model on the task of ecosystem zero-shot classification by following the habitat definitions from the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). Our results show that our approach helps in understanding RS images in a more ecologically meaningful manner. The code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/eceo-epfl/EcoWikiRS.

Paperid: 950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19506.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image deocclusion (or amodal completion) aims to recover the invisible regions (\ie, shape and appearance) of occluded instances in images. Despite recent advances, the scarcity of high-quality data that balances diversity, plausibility, and fidelity remains a major obstacle. To address this challenge, we identify three critical elements: leveraging in-the-wild image data for diversity, incorporating human expertise for plausibility, and utilizing generative priors for fidelity. We propose SynergyAmodal, a novel framework for co-synthesizing in-the-wild amodal datasets with comprehensive shape and appearance annotations, which integrates these elements through a tripartite data-human-model collaboration. First, we design an occlusion-grounded self-supervised learning algorithm to harness the diversity of in-the-wild image data, fine-tuning an inpainting diffusion model into a partial completion diffusion model. Second, we establish a co-synthesis pipeline to iteratively filter, refine, select, and annotate the initial deocclusion results of the partial completion diffusion model, ensuring plausibility and fidelity through human expert guidance and prior model constraints. This pipeline generates a high-quality paired amodal dataset with extensive category and scale diversity, comprising approximately 16K pairs. Finally, we train a full completion diffusion model on the synthesized dataset, incorporating text prompts as conditioning signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in achieving zero-shot generalization and textual controllability. Our code, dataset, and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/imlixinyang/SynergyAmodal.

Paperid: 951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19322.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

Paperid: 952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19146.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) models have been driven by the integration of large language models (LLMs), enhancing semantic comprehension and improving speech naturalness. However, existing LLM-based TTS models often lack open-source training code and efficient inference acceleration frameworks, limiting their accessibility and adaptability. Additionally, there is no publicly available TTS model specifically optimized for podcast scenarios, which are in high demand for voice interaction applications. To address these limitations, we introduce Muyan-TTS, an open-source trainable TTS model designed for podcast applications within a $50,000 budget. Our model is pre-trained on over 100,000 hours of podcast audio data, enabling zero-shot TTS synthesis with high-quality voice generation. Furthermore, Muyan-TTS supports speaker adaptation with dozens of minutes of target speech, making it highly customizable for individual voices. In addition to open-sourcing the model, we provide a comprehensive data collection and processing pipeline, a full training procedure, and an optimized inference framework that accelerates LLM-based TTS synthesis. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/MYZY-AI/Muyan-TTS.

Paperid: 953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19139.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Task robust adaptation is a long-standing pursuit in sequential decision-making. Some risk-averse strategies, e.g., the conditional value-at-risk principle, are incorporated in domain randomization or meta reinforcement learning to prioritize difficult tasks in optimization, which demand costly intensive evaluations. The efficiency issue prompts the development of robust active task sampling to train adaptive policies, where risk-predictive models are used to surrogate policy evaluation. This work characterizes the optimization pipeline of robust active task sampling as a Markov decision process, posits theoretical and practical insights, and constitutes robustness concepts in risk-averse scenarios. Importantly, we propose an easy-to-implement method, referred to as Posterior and Diversity Synergized Task Sampling (PDTS), to accommodate fast and robust sequential decision-making. Extensive experiments show that PDTS unlocks the potential of robust active task sampling, significantly improves the zero-shot and few-shot adaptation robustness in challenging tasks, and even accelerates the learning process under certain scenarios. Our project website is at https://thu-rllab.github.io/PDTS_project_page.

Paperid: 954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18696.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the ample availability of graph data, obtaining vertex labels is a tedious and expensive task. Therefore, it is desirable to learn from a few labeled vertices only. Existing few-shot learners assume a class oracle, which provides labeled vertices for a desired class. However, such an oracle is not available in a real-world setting, i.e., when drawing a vertex for labeling it is unknown to which class the vertex belongs. Few-shot learners are often combined with prototypical networks, while classical semi-supervised vertex classification uses discriminative models, e.g., Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). In this paper, we train our models by iteratively prompting a human annotator with vertices to annotate. We perform three experiments where we continually relax our assumptions. First, we assume a class oracle, i.e., the human annotator is provided with an equal number of vertices to label for each class. We denote this as "Balanced Sampling''. In the subsequent experiment, "Unbalanced Sampling,'' we replace the class oracle with $k$-medoids clustering and draw vertices to label from the clusters. In the last experiment, the "Unknown Number of Classes,'' we no longer assumed we knew the number and distribution of classes. Our results show that prototypical models outperform discriminative models in all experiments when fewer than $20$ samples per class are available. While dropping the assumption of the class oracle for the "Unbalanced Sampling'' experiment reduces the performance of the GCN by $9\%$, the prototypical network loses only $1\%$ on average. For the "Unknown Number of Classes'' experiment, the average performance for both models decreased further by $1\%$. Source code: https://github.com/Ximsa/2023-felix-ma

Paperid: 955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18684.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Interpreting object-referential language and grounding objects in 3D with spatial relations and attributes is essential for robots operating alongside humans. However, this task is often challenging due to the diversity of scenes, large number of fine-grained objects, and complex free-form nature of language references. Furthermore, in the 3D domain, obtaining large amounts of natural language training data is difficult. Thus, it is important for methods to learn from little data and zero-shot generalize to new environments. To address these challenges, we propose SORT3D, an approach that utilizes rich object attributes from 2D data and merges a heuristics-based spatial reasoning toolbox with the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform sequential reasoning. Importantly, our method does not require text-to-3D data for training and can be applied zero-shot to unseen environments. We show that SORT3D achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on complex view-dependent grounding tasks on two benchmarks. We also implement the pipeline to run real-time on two autonomous vehicles and demonstrate that our approach can be used for object-goal navigation on previously unseen real-world environments. All source code for the system pipeline is publicly released at https://github.com/nzantout/SORT3D.

Paperid: 956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18397.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning greatly improves the interpretability and problem-solving abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches are focused on text CoT, limiting their ability to leverage visual cues. Visual CoT remains underexplored, and the only work is based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) that relies on extensive labeled bounding-box data and is hard to generalize to unseen cases. In this paper, we introduce Unsupervised Visual CoT (UV-CoT), a novel framework for image-level CoT reasoning via preference optimization. UV-CoT performs preference comparisons between model-generated bounding boxes (one is preferred and the other is dis-preferred), eliminating the need for bounding-box annotations. We get such preference data by introducing an automatic data generation pipeline. Given an image, our target MLLM (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B) generates seed bounding boxes using a template prompt and then answers the question using each bounded region as input. An evaluator MLLM (e.g., OmniLLM-12B) ranks the responses, and these rankings serve as supervision to train the target MLLM with UV-CoT by minimizing negative log-likelihood losses. By emulating human perception--identifying key regions and reasoning based on them--UV-CoT can improve visual comprehension, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks where textual descriptions alone fall short. Our experiments on six datasets demonstrate the superiority of UV-CoT, compared to the state-of-the-art textual and visual CoT methods. Our zero-shot testing on four unseen datasets shows the strong generalization of UV-CoT. The code is available in https://github.com/kesenzhao/UV-CoT.

Paperid: 957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18070.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard non-parametric approach for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date knowledge and mitigating catastrophic forgetting common in continual learning. However, standard RAG, relying on independent passage retrieval, fails to capture the interconnected nature of human memory crucial for complex reasoning (associativity) and contextual understanding (sense-making). While structured RAG methods like HippoRAG utilize knowledge graphs (KGs) built from triples, the inherent context loss limits fidelity. We introduce PropRAG, a framework leveraging contextually rich propositions and a novel beam search algorithm over proposition paths to explicitly discover multi-step reasoning chains. Crucially, PropRAG's online retrieval process operates entirely without invoking generative LLMs, relying instead on efficient graph traversal and pre-computed embeddings. This avoids online LLM inference costs and potential inconsistencies during evidence gathering. LLMs are used effectively offline for high-quality proposition extraction and post-retrieval for answer generation. PropRAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot Recall@5 results on PopQA (55.3%), 2Wiki (93.7%), HotpotQA (97.0%), and MuSiQue (77.3%), alongside top F1 scores (e.g., 52.4% on MuSiQue). By improving evidence retrieval through richer representation and explicit, LLM-free online path finding, PropRAG advances non-parametric continual learning.

Paperid: 958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18059.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
As extended reality (XR) is redefining how users interact with computing devices, research in human action recognition is gaining prominence. Typically, models deployed on immersive computing devices are static and limited to their default set of classes. The goal of our research is to provide users and developers with the capability to personalize their experience by adding new action classes to their device models continually. Importantly, a user should be able to add new classes in a low-shot and efficient manner, while this process should not require storing or replaying any of user's sensitive training data. We formalize this problem as privacy-aware few-shot continual action recognition. Towards this end, we propose POET: Prompt-Offset Tuning. While existing prompt tuning approaches have shown great promise for continual learning of image, text, and video modalities; they demand access to extensively pretrained transformers. Breaking away from this assumption, POET demonstrates the efficacy of prompt tuning a significantly lightweight backbone, pretrained exclusively on the base class data. We propose a novel spatio-temporal learnable prompt offset tuning approach, and are the first to apply such prompt tuning to Graph Neural Networks. We contribute two new benchmarks for our new problem setting in human action recognition: (i) NTU RGB+D dataset for activity recognition, and (ii) SHREC-2017 dataset for hand gesture recognition. We find that POET consistently outperforms comprehensive benchmarks. Source code at https://github.com/humansensinglab/POET-continual-action-recognition.

Paperid: 959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17816.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose to train a subject-driven customized video generation model through decoupling the subject-specific learning from temporal dynamics in zero-shot without additional tuning. A traditional method for video customization that is tuning-free often relies on large, annotated video datasets, which are computationally expensive and require extensive annotation. In contrast to the previous approach, we introduce the use of an image customization dataset directly on training video customization models, factorizing the video customization into two folds: (1) identity injection through image customization dataset and (2) temporal modeling preservation with a small set of unannotated videos through the image-to-video training method. Additionally, we employ random image token dropping with randomized image initialization during image-to-video fine-tuning to mitigate the copy-and-paste issue. To further enhance learning, we introduce stochastic switching during joint optimization of subject-specific and temporal features, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our method achieves strong subject consistency and scalability, outperforming existing video customization models in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

Paperid: 960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16930.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Synthetic datasets are a crucial ingredient for training stereo matching networks, but the question of what makes a stereo dataset effective remains largely unexplored. We investigate the design space of synthetic datasets by varying the parameters of a procedural dataset generator, and report the effects on zero-shot stereo matching performance using standard benchmarks. We collect the best settings to produce Infinigen-Stereo, a procedural generator specifically optimized for zero-shot stereo datasets. Models trained only on data from our system outperform robust baselines trained on a combination of existing synthetic datasets and have stronger zero-shot stereo matching performance than public checkpoints from prior works. We open source our system at https://github.com/princeton-vl/InfinigenStereo to enable further research on procedural stereo datasets.

Paperid: 961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16801.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has achieved success on multiple downstream tasks by aligning image and text modalities. However, the nature of global contrastive learning limits CLIP's ability to comprehend compositional concepts, such as relations and attributes. Although recent studies employ global hard negative samples to improve compositional understanding, these methods significantly compromise the model's inherent general capabilities by forcibly distancing textual negative samples from images in the embedding space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Decoupled Global-Local Alignment (DeGLA) framework that improves compositional understanding while substantially mitigating losses in general capabilities. To optimize the retention of the model's inherent capabilities, we incorporate a self-distillation mechanism within the global alignment process, aligning the learnable image-text encoder with a frozen teacher model derived from an exponential moving average. Under the constraint of self-distillation, it effectively mitigates the catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge during fine-tuning. To improve compositional understanding, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct about 2M high-quality negative captions across five types. Subsequently, we propose the Image-Grounded Contrast (IGC) loss and Text-Grounded Contrast (TGC) loss to enhance vision-language compositionally. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the DeGLA framework. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, DeGLA achieves an average enhancement of 3.5% across the VALSE, SugarCrepe, and ARO benchmarks. Concurrently, it obtains an average performance improvement of 13.0% on zero-shot classification tasks across eleven datasets. Our code will be released at https://github.com/xiaoxing2001/DeGLA

Paperid: 962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16433.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have gained attention for their zero-shot inference using instructional text prompts. While these models excel in general computer vision, their potential for domain generalization in remote sensing (RS) remains underexplored. Existing approaches enhance prompt learning by generating visual prompt tokens but rely on full-image features, introducing noise and background artifacts that vary within a class, causing misclassification. To address this, we propose FrogDogNet, a novel prompt learning framework integrating Fourier frequency filtering and self-attention to improve RS scene classification and domain generalization. FrogDogNet selectively retains invariant low-frequency components while eliminating noise and irrelevant backgrounds, ensuring robust feature representation across domains. The model first extracts significant features via projection and self-attention, then applies frequency-based filtering to preserve essential structural information for prompt learning. Extensive experiments on four RS datasets and three domain generalization tasks show that FrogDogNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning methods, demonstrating superior adaptability across domain shifts. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of frequency-based invariant feature retention in generalization, paving the way for broader applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/HariseetharamG/FrogDogNet

Paperid: 963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16427.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal language analysis is a rapidly evolving field that leverages multiple modalities to enhance the understanding of high-level semantics underlying human conversational utterances. Despite its significance, little research has investigated the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to comprehend cognitive-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce MMLA, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to address this gap. MMLA comprises over 61K multimodal utterances drawn from both staged and real-world scenarios, covering six core dimensions of multimodal semantics: intent, emotion, dialogue act, sentiment, speaking style, and communication behavior. We evaluate eight mainstream branches of LLMs and MLLMs using three methods: zero-shot inference, supervised fine-tuning, and instruction tuning. Extensive experiments reveal that even fine-tuned models achieve only about 60%~70% accuracy, underscoring the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex human language. We believe that MMLA will serve as a solid foundation for exploring the potential of large language models in multimodal language analysis and provide valuable resources to advance this field. The datasets and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/thuiar/MMLA.

Paperid: 964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16408.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The LLMSR@XLLM25 formulates a low-resource structural reasoning task that challenges LLMs to generate interpretable, step-by-step rationales with minimal labeled data. We present Less is More, the third-place winning approach in the LLMSR@XLLM25, which focuses on structured reasoning from only 24 labeled examples. Our approach leverages a multi-agent framework with reverse-prompt induction, retrieval-augmented reasoning synthesis via GPT-4o, and dual-stage reward-guided filtering to distill high-quality supervision across three subtasks: question parsing, CoT parsing, and step-level verification. All modules are fine-tuned from Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct under a unified LoRA+ setup. By combining structure validation with reward filtering across few-shot and zero-shot prompts, our pipeline consistently improves structure reasoning quality. These results underscore the value of controllable data distillation in enhancing structured inference under low-resource constraints. Our code is available at https://github.com/JhCircle/Less-is-More.

Paperid: 965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15958.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize novel scenes that faithfully preserve subject identity from reference images while adhering to textual guidance, yet existing methods struggle with a critical trade-off between fidelity and efficiency. Tuning-based approaches rely on time-consuming and resource-intensive subject-specific optimization, while zero-shot methods fail to maintain adequate subject consistency. In this work, we propose FreeGraftor, a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through cross-image feature grafting. Specifically, FreeGraftor employs semantic matching and position-constrained attention fusion to transfer visual details from reference subjects to the generated image. Additionally, our framework incorporates a novel noise initialization strategy to preserve geometry priors of reference subjects for robust feature matching. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method enables precise subject identity transfer while maintaining text-aligned scene synthesis. Without requiring model fine-tuning or additional training, FreeGraftor significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and training-free approaches in both subject fidelity and text alignment. Furthermore, our framework can seamlessly extend to multi-subject generation, making it practical for real-world deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nihukat/FreeGraftor.

Paperid: 966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15046.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Offline meta-RL usually tackles generalization by inferring task beliefs from high-quality samples or warmup explorations. The restricted form limits their generality and usability since these supervision signals are expensive and even infeasible to acquire in advance for unseen tasks. Learning directly from the raw text about decision tasks is a promising alternative to leverage a much broader source of supervision. In the paper, we propose \textbf{T}ext-to-\textbf{D}ecision \textbf{A}gent (\textbf{T2DA}), a simple and scalable framework that supervises offline meta-RL with natural language. We first introduce a generalized world model to encode multi-task decision data into a dynamics-aware embedding space. Then, inspired by CLIP, we predict which textual description goes with which decision embedding, effectively bridging their semantic gap via contrastive language-decision pre-training and aligning the text embeddings to comprehend the environment dynamics. After training the text-conditioned generalist policy, the agent can directly realize zero-shot text-to-decision generation in response to language instructions. Comprehensive experiments on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks show that T2DA facilitates high-capacity zero-shot generalization and outperforms various types of baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/T2DA.

Paperid: 967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14606.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human instance matting aims to estimate an alpha matte for each human instance in an image, which is challenging as it easily fails in complex cases requiring disentangling mingled pixels belonging to multiple instances along hairy and thin boundary structures. In this work, we address this by introducing MP-Mat, a novel 3D-and-instance-aware matting framework with multiplane representation, where the multiplane concept is designed from two different perspectives: scene geometry level and instance level. Specifically, we first build feature-level multiplane representations to split the scene into multiple planes based on depth differences. This approach makes the scene representation 3D-aware, and can serve as an effective clue for splitting instances in different 3D positions, thereby improving interpretability and boundary handling ability especially in occlusion areas. Then, we introduce another multiplane representation that splits the scene in an instance-level perspective, and represents each instance with both matte and color. We also treat background as a special instance, which is often overlooked by existing methods. Such an instance-level representation facilitates both foreground and background content awareness, and is useful for other down-stream tasks like image editing. Once built, the representation can be reused to realize controllable instance-level image editing with high efficiency. Extensive experiments validate the clear advantage of MP-Mat in matting task. We also demonstrate its superiority in image editing tasks, an area under-explored by existing matting-focused methods, where our approach under zero-shot inference even outperforms trained specialized image editing techniques by large margins. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/JiaoSiyi/MPMat.git}.

Paperid: 968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14478.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Navigating unknown environments to find a target object is a significant challenge. While semantic information is crucial for navigation, relying solely on it for decision-making may not always be efficient, especially in environments with weak semantic cues. Additionally, many methods are susceptible to misdetections, especially in environments with visually similar objects. To address these limitations, we propose ApexNav, a zero-shot object navigation framework that is both more efficient and reliable. For efficiency, ApexNav adaptively utilizes semantic information by analyzing its distribution in the environment, guiding exploration through semantic reasoning when cues are strong, and switching to geometry-based exploration when they are weak. For reliability, we propose a target-centric semantic fusion method that preserves long-term memory of the target and similar objects, enabling robust object identification even under noisy detections. We evaluate ApexNav on the HM3Dv1, HM3Dv2, and MP3D datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both SR and SPL metrics. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of each module. Furthermore, real-world experiments validate the practicality of ApexNav in physical environments. The code will be released at https://github.com/Robotics-STAR-Lab/ApexNav.

Paperid: 969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14280.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As machine learning evolves, domain generalization (DG) and domain adaptation (DA) have become crucial for enhancing model robustness across diverse environments. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) plays a significant role in these tasks, offering powerful zero-shot capabilities that allow models to perform effectively in unseen domains. However, there remains a significant gap in the literature, as no comprehensive survey currently exists that systematically explores the applications of CLIP in DG and DA, highlighting the necessity for this review. This survey presents a comprehensive review of CLIP's applications in DG and DA. In DG, we categorize methods into optimizing prompt learning for task alignment and leveraging CLIP as a backbone for effective feature extraction, both enhancing model adaptability. For DA, we examine both source-available methods utilizing labeled source data and source-free approaches primarily based on target domain data, emphasizing knowledge transfer mechanisms and strategies for improved performance across diverse contexts. Key challenges, including overfitting, domain diversity, and computational efficiency, are addressed, alongside future research opportunities to advance robustness and efficiency in practical applications. By synthesizing existing literature and pinpointing critical gaps, this survey provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners, proposing directions for effectively leveraging CLIP to enhance methodologies in domain generalization and adaptation. Ultimately, this work aims to foster innovation and collaboration in the quest for more resilient machine learning models that can perform reliably across diverse real-world scenarios. A more up-to-date version of the papers is maintained at: https://github.com/jindongli-Ai/Survey_on_CLIP-Powered_Domain_Generalization_and_Adaptation.

Paperid: 970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13805.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mobile GUI agents show promise in automating tasks but face generalization challenges in diverse real-world scenarios. Traditional approaches using pre-training or fine-tuning with massive datasets struggle with the diversity of mobile applications and user-specific tasks. We propose enhancing mobile GUI agent capabilities through human demonstrations, focusing on improving performance in unseen scenarios rather than pursuing universal generalization through larger datasets. To realize this paradigm, we introduce LearnGUI, the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for studying demonstration-based learning in mobile GUI agents, comprising 2,252 offline tasks and 101 online tasks with high-quality human demonstrations. We further develop LearnAct, a sophisticated multi-agent framework that automatically extracts knowledge from demonstrations to enhance task completion. This framework integrates three specialized agents: DemoParser for knowledge extraction, KnowSeeker for relevant knowledge retrieval, and ActExecutor for demonstration-enhanced task execution. Our experimental results show significant performance gains in both offline and online evaluations. In offline assessments, a single demonstration improves model performance, increasing Gemini-1.5-Pro's accuracy from 19.3% to 51.7%. In online evaluations, our framework enhances UI-TARS-7B-SFT's task success rate from 18.1% to 32.8%. LearnAct framework and LearnGUI benchmark establish demonstration-based learning as a promising direction for more adaptable, personalized, and deployable mobile GUI agents.

Paperid: 971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13730.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-source intelligence provides a stream of unstructured textual data that can inform assessments of territorial control. We present CONTACT, a framework for territorial control prediction using large language models (LLMs) and minimal supervision. We evaluate two approaches: SetFit, an embedding-based few-shot classifier, and a prompt tuning method applied to BLOOMZ-560m, a multilingual generative LLM. Our model is trained on a small hand-labeled dataset of news articles covering ISIS activity in Syria and Iraq, using prompt-conditioned extraction of control-relevant signals such as military operations, casualties, and location references. We show that the BLOOMZ-based model outperforms the SetFit baseline, and that prompt-based supervision improves generalization in low-resource settings. CONTACT demonstrates that LLMs fine-tuned using few-shot methods can reduce annotation burdens and support structured inference from open-ended OSINT streams. Our code is available at https://github.com/PaulKMandal/CONTACT/.

Paperid: 972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13568.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-workload design space exploration (DSE) is crucial in CPU architecture design. Existing DSE methods typically employ the transfer learning technique to leverage knowledge from source workloads, aiming to minimize the requirement of target workload simulation. However, these methods struggle with overfitting, data ambiguity, and workload dissimilarity. To address these challenges, we reframe the cross-workload CPU DSE task as a few-shot meta-learning problem and further introduce MetaDSE. By leveraging model agnostic meta-learning, MetaDSE swiftly adapts to new target workloads, greatly enhancing the efficiency of cross-workload CPU DSE. Additionally, MetaDSE introduces a novel knowledge transfer method called the workload-adaptive architectural mask algorithm, which uncovers the inherent properties of the architecture. Experiments on SPEC CPU 2017 demonstrate that MetaDSE significantly reduces prediction error by 44.3\% compared to the state-of-the-art. MetaDSE is open-sourced and available at this \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Meta_DSE-02F8}{anonymous GitHub.}

Paperid: 973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13406.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-agent collaboration holds great promise for enhancing the safety, reliability, and mobility of autonomous driving systems by enabling information sharing among multiple connected agents. However, existing multi-agent communication approaches are hindered by limitations of existing communication media, including high bandwidth demands, agent heterogeneity, and information loss. To address these challenges, we introduce LangCoop, a new paradigm for collaborative autonomous driving that leverages natural language as a compact yet expressive medium for inter-agent communication. LangCoop features two key innovations: Mixture Model Modular Chain-of-thought (M$^3$CoT) for structured zero-shot vision-language reasoning and Natural Language Information Packaging (LangPack) for efficiently packaging information into concise, language-based messages. Through extensive experiments conducted in the CARLA simulations, we demonstrate that LangCoop achieves a remarkable 96\% reduction in communication bandwidth (< 2KB per message) compared to image-based communication, while maintaining competitive driving performance in the closed-loop evaluation. Our project page and code are at https://xiangbogaobarry.github.io/LangCoop/.

Paperid: 974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13399.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting anomalous hazards in visual data, particularly in video streams, is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. Existing models often struggle with unpredictable, out-of-label hazards due to their reliance on predefined object categories. In this paper, we propose a multimodal approach that integrates vision-language reasoning with zero-shot object detection to improve hazard identification and explanation. Our pipeline consists of a Vision-Language Model (VLM), a Large Language Model (LLM), in order to detect hazardous objects within a traffic scene. We refine object detection by incorporating OpenAI's CLIP model to match predicted hazards with bounding box annotations, improving localization accuracy. To assess model performance, we create a ground truth dataset by denoising and extending the foundational COOOL (Challenge-of-Out-of-Label) anomaly detection benchmark dataset with complete natural language descriptions for hazard annotations. We define a means of hazard detection and labeling evaluation on the extended dataset using cosine similarity. This evaluation considers the semantic similarity between the predicted hazard description and the annotated ground truth for each video. Additionally, we release a set of tools for structuring and managing large-scale hazard detection datasets. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of current vision-language-based approaches, offering insights into future improvements in autonomous hazard detection systems. Our models, scripts, and data can be found at https://github.com/mi3labucm/COOOLER.git

Paperid: 975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13181.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Perception Encoder (PE), a state-of-the-art vision encoder for image and video understanding trained via simple vision-language learning. Traditionally, vision encoders have relied on a variety of pretraining objectives, each tailored to specific downstream tasks such as classification, captioning, or localization. Surprisingly, after scaling our carefully tuned image pretraining recipe and refining with our robust video data engine, we find that contrastive vision-language training alone can produce strong, general embeddings for all of these downstream tasks. There is only one caveat: these embeddings are hidden within the intermediate layers of the network. To draw them out, we introduce two alignment methods: language alignment for multimodal language modeling, and spatial alignment for dense prediction. Together, our PE family of models achieves best-in-class results on a wide variety of tasks, including (1) zero-shot image and video classification and retrieval, simultaneously obtaining 86.6 average zero-shot ImageNet robustness and 76.9 zero-shot Kinetics-400 video classification; (2) document, image, and video Q&A, enabling 94.6 DocVQA, 80.9 InfographicVQA, and 82.7 PerceptionTest with an 8B LLM; and (3) spatial tasks such as detection, tracking, and depth estimation, setting a new COCO state-of-the-art of 66.0 box mAP. To foster further research, we release our models, code, and novel dataset of synthetically and human-annotated videos: https://github.com/facebookresearch/perception_models

Paperid: 976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13075.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Proteins typically exist in complexes, interacting with other proteins or biomolecules to perform their specific biological roles. Research on single-chain protein modeling has been extensively and deeply explored, with advancements seen in models like the series of ESM and AlphaFold2. Despite these developments, the study and modeling of multi-chain proteins remain largely uncharted, though they are vital for understanding biological functions. Recognizing the importance of these interactions, we introduce APM (All-Atom Protein Generative Model), a model specifically designed for modeling multi-chain proteins. By integrating atom-level information and leveraging data on multi-chain proteins, APM is capable of precisely modeling inter-chain interactions and designing protein complexes with binding capabilities from scratch. It also performs folding and inverse-folding tasks for multi-chain proteins. Moreover, APM demonstrates versatility in downstream applications: it achieves enhanced performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while also supporting zero-shot sampling in certain tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results. We released our code at https://github.com/bytedance/apm.

Paperid: 977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12717.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive language image pre-training (CLIP) is an essential component of building modern vision-language foundation models. While CLIP demonstrates remarkable zero-shot performance on downstream tasks, the multi-modal feature spaces still suffer from a modality gap, which is a gap between image and text feature clusters and limits downstream task performance. Although existing works attempt to address the modality gap by modifying pre-training or fine-tuning, they struggle with heavy training costs with large datasets or degradations of zero-shot performance. This paper presents CLIP-Refine, a post-pre-training method for CLIP models at a phase between pre-training and fine-tuning. CLIP-Refine aims to align the feature space with 1 epoch training on small image-text datasets without zero-shot performance degradations. To this end, we introduce two techniques: random feature alignment (RaFA) and hybrid contrastive-distillation (HyCD). RaFA aligns the image and text features to follow a shared prior distribution by minimizing the distance to random reference vectors sampled from the prior. HyCD updates the model with hybrid soft labels generated by combining ground-truth image-text pair labels and outputs from the pre-trained CLIP model. This contributes to achieving both maintaining the past knowledge and learning new knowledge to align features. Our extensive experiments with multiple classification and retrieval tasks show that CLIP-Refine succeeds in mitigating the modality gap and improving the zero-shot performance.

Paperid: 978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12442.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Existing zero-shot 3D point cloud segmentation methods often struggle with limited transferability from seen classes to unseen classes and from semantic to visual space. To alleviate this, we introduce 3D-PointZshotS, a geometry-aware zero-shot segmentation framework that enhances both feature generation and alignment using latent geometric prototypes (LGPs). Specifically, we integrate LGPs into a generator via a cross-attention mechanism, enriching semantic features with fine-grained geometric details. To further enhance stability and generalization, we introduce a self-consistency loss, which enforces feature robustness against point-wise perturbations. Additionally, we re-represent visual and semantic features in a shared space, bridging the semantic-visual gap and facilitating knowledge transfer to unseen classes. Experiments on three real-world datasets, namely ScanNet, SemanticKITTI, and S3DIS, demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over four baselines in terms of harmonic mIoU. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/LexieYang/3D-PointZshotS}{Github}.

Paperid: 979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12330.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge, conventional single-agent RAG remains fundamentally limited in resolving complex queries demanding coordinated reasoning across heterogeneous data ecosystems. We present HM-RAG, a novel Hierarchical Multi-agent Multimodal RAG framework that pioneers collaborative intelligence for dynamic knowledge synthesis across structured, unstructured, and graph-based data. The framework is composed of three-tiered architecture with specialized agents: a Decomposition Agent that dissects complex queries into contextually coherent sub-tasks via semantic-aware query rewriting and schema-guided context augmentation; Multi-source Retrieval Agents that carry out parallel, modality-specific retrieval using plug-and-play modules designed for vector, graph, and web-based databases; and a Decision Agent that uses consistency voting to integrate multi-source answers and resolve discrepancies in retrieval results through Expert Model Refinement. This architecture attains comprehensive query understanding by combining textual, graph-relational, and web-derived evidence, resulting in a remarkable 12.95% improvement in answer accuracy and a 3.56% boost in question classification accuracy over baseline RAG systems on the ScienceQA and CrisisMMD benchmarks. Notably, HM-RAG establishes state-of-the-art results in zero-shot settings on both datasets. Its modular architecture ensures seamless integration of new data modalities while maintaining strict data governance, marking a significant advancement in addressing the critical challenges of multimodal reasoning and knowledge synthesis in RAG systems. Code is available at https://github.com/ocean-luna/HMRAG.

Paperid: 980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12256.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Over the past years, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have demonstrated how AI can solve many perception and generation tasks, such as image classification and text writing, yet reasoning remains a challenge. This paper introduces the FLIP dataset, a benchmark for evaluating AI reasoning capabilities based on human verification tasks on the Idena blockchain. FLIP challenges present users with two orderings of 4 images, requiring them to identify the logically coherent one. By emphasizing sequential reasoning, visual storytelling, and common sense, FLIP provides a unique testbed for multimodal AI systems. Our experiments evaluate state-of-the-art models, leveraging both vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs). Results reveal that even the best open-sourced and closed-sourced models achieve maximum accuracies of 75.5% and 77.9%, respectively, in zero-shot settings, compared to human performance of 95.3%. Captioning models aid reasoning models by providing text descriptions of images, yielding better results than when using the raw images directly, 69.6% vs. 75.2% for Gemini 1.5 Pro. Combining the predictions from 15 models in an ensemble increases the accuracy to 85.2%. These findings highlight the limitations of existing reasoning models and the need for robust multimodal benchmarks like FLIP. The full codebase and dataset will be available at https://github.com/aplesner/FLIP-Reasoning-Challenge.

Paperid: 981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12157.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Movie Audio Description (AD) aims to narrate visual content during dialogue-free segments, particularly benefiting blind and visually impaired (BVI) audiences. Compared with general video captioning, AD demands plot-relevant narration with explicit character name references, posing unique challenges in movie understanding.To identify active main characters and focus on storyline-relevant regions, we propose FocusedAD, a novel framework that delivers character-centric movie audio descriptions. It includes: (i) a Character Perception Module(CPM) for tracking character regions and linking them to names; (ii) a Dynamic Prior Module(DPM) that injects contextual cues from prior ADs and subtitles via learnable soft prompts; and (iii) a Focused Caption Module(FCM) that generates narrations enriched with plot-relevant details and named characters. To overcome limitations in character identification, we also introduce an automated pipeline for building character query banks. FocusedAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including strong zero-shot results on MAD-eval-Named and our newly proposed Cinepile-AD dataset. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/Thorin215/FocusedAD .

Paperid: 982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12104.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With its powerful visual-language alignment capability, CLIP performs well in zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks. However, we found in experiments that CLIP's logits suffer from serious inter-class confusion problems in downstream tasks, and the ambiguity between categories seriously affects the accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Logits DeConfusion, which effectively learns and eliminates inter-class confusion in logits by combining our Multi-level Adapter Fusion (MAF) module with our Inter-Class Deconfusion (ICD) module. Our MAF extracts features from different levels and fuses them uniformly to enhance feature representation. Our ICD learnably eliminates inter-class confusion in logits with a residual structure. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the classification performance and alleviate the inter-class confusion problem. The code is available at https://github.com/LiShuo1001/LDC.

Paperid: 983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Given a single labeled example, in-context segmentation aims to segment corresponding objects. This setting, known as one-shot segmentation in few-shot learning, explores the segmentation model's generalization ability and has been applied to various vision tasks, including scene understanding and image/video editing. While recent Segment Anything Models have achieved state-of-the-art results in interactive segmentation, these approaches are not directly applicable to in-context segmentation. In this work, we propose the Dual Consistency SAM (DC-SAM) method based on prompt-tuning to adapt SAM and SAM2 for in-context segmentation of both images and videos. Our key insights are to enhance the features of the SAM's prompt encoder in segmentation by providing high-quality visual prompts. When generating a mask prior, we fuse the SAM features to better align the prompt encoder. Then, we design a cycle-consistent cross-attention on fused features and initial visual prompts. Next, a dual-branch design is provided by using the discriminative positive and negative prompts in the prompt encoder. Furthermore, we design a simple mask-tube training strategy to adopt our proposed dual consistency method into the mask tube. Although the proposed DC-SAM is primarily designed for images, it can be seamlessly extended to the video domain with the support of SAM2. Given the absence of in-context segmentation in the video domain, we manually curate and construct the first benchmark from existing video segmentation datasets, named In-Context Video Object Segmentation (IC-VOS), to better assess the in-context capability of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 55.5 (+1.4) mIoU on COCO-20i, 73.0 (+1.1) mIoU on PASCAL-5i, and a J&F score of 71.52 on the proposed IC-VOS benchmark. Our source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/zaplm/DC-SAM.

Paperid: 984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11895.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) has emerged as a crucial yet challenging task in industrial inspection, where normal distribution modeling must be accomplished with only a few normal images. While existing approaches typically employ multi-modal foundation models combining language and vision modalities for prompt-guided anomaly detection, these methods often demand sophisticated prompt engineering and extensive manual tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate that a straightforward nearest-neighbor search framework can surpass state-of-the-art performance in both single-class and multi-class FSAD scenarios. Our proposed method, VisionAD, consists of four simple yet essential components: (1) scalable vision foundation models that extract universal and discriminative features; (2) dual augmentation strategies - support augmentation to enhance feature matching adaptability and query augmentation to address the oversights of single-view prediction; (3) multi-layer feature integration that captures both low-frequency global context and high-frequency local details with minimal computational overhead; and (4) a class-aware visual memory bank enabling efficient one-for-all multi-class detection. Extensive evaluations across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD benchmarks demonstrate VisionAD's exceptional performance. Using only 1 normal images as support, our method achieves remarkable image-level AUROC scores of 97.4%, 94.8%, and 70.8% respectively, outperforming current state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins (+1.6%, +3.2%, and +1.4%). The training-free nature and superior few-shot capabilities of VisionAD make it particularly appealing for real-world applications where samples are scarce or expensive to obtain. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiqigeww/VisionAD.

Paperid: 985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11055.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly Detection involves identifying deviations from normal data distributions and is critical in fields such as medical diagnostics and industrial defect detection. Traditional AD methods typically require the availability of normal training samples; however, this assumption is not always feasible. Recently, the rich pretraining knowledge of CLIP has shown promising zero-shot generalization in detecting anomalies without the need for training samples from target domains. However, CLIP's coarse-grained image-text alignment limits localization and detection performance for fine-grained anomalies due to: (1) spatial misalignment, and (2) the limited sensitivity of global features to local anomalous patterns. In this paper, we propose Crane which tackles both problems. First, we introduce a correlation-based attention module to retain spatial alignment more accurately. Second, to boost the model's awareness of fine-grained anomalies, we condition the learnable prompts of the text encoder on image context extracted from the vision encoder and perform a local-to-global representation fusion. Moreover, our method can incorporate vision foundation models such as DINOv2 to further enhance spatial understanding and localization. The key insight of Crane is to balance learnable adaptations for modeling anomalous concepts with non-learnable adaptations that preserve and exploit generalized pretrained knowledge, thereby minimizing in-domain overfitting and maximizing performance on unseen domains. Extensive evaluation across 14 diverse industrial and medical datasets demonstrates that Crane consistently improves the state-of-the-art ZSAD from 2% to 28%, at both image and pixel levels, while remaining competitive in inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/AlirezaSalehy/Crane.

Paperid: 986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11042.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Peer review is a cornerstone of quality control in scientific publishing. With the increasing workload, the unintended use of `quick' heuristics, referred to as lazy thinking, has emerged as a recurring issue compromising review quality. Automated methods to detect such heuristics can help improve the peer-reviewing process. However, there is limited NLP research on this issue, and no real-world dataset exists to support the development of detection tools. This work introduces LazyReview, a dataset of peer-review sentences annotated with fine-grained lazy thinking categories. Our analysis reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to detect these instances in a zero-shot setting. However, instruction-based fine-tuning on our dataset significantly boosts performance by 10-20 performance points, highlighting the importance of high-quality training data. Furthermore, a controlled experiment demonstrates that reviews revised with lazy thinking feedback are more comprehensive and actionable than those written without such feedback. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines that can be used to train junior reviewers in the community. (Code available here: https://github.com/UKPLab/acl2025-lazy-review)

Paperid: 987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10647.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language models rely on semantic priors to perform in-context learning, which leads to poor performance on tasks involving inductive reasoning. Instruction-tuning methods based on imitation learning can superficially enhance the in-context learning performance of language models, but they often fail to improve the model's understanding of the underlying rules that connect inputs and outputs in few-shot demonstrations. We propose ReDis, a reasoning distillation technique designed to improve the inductive reasoning capabilities of language models. Through a careful combination of data augmentation, filtering, supervised fine-tuning, and alignment, ReDis achieves significant performance improvements across a diverse range of tasks, including 1D-ARC, List Function, ACRE, and MiniSCAN. Experiments on three language model backbones show that ReDis outperforms equivalent few-shot prompting baselines across all tasks and even surpasses the teacher model, GPT-4o, in some cases. ReDis, based on the LLaMA-3 backbone, achieves relative improvements of 23.2%, 2.8%, and 66.6% over GPT-4o on 1D-ARC, ACRE, and MiniSCAN, respectively, within a similar hypothesis search space. The code, dataset, and model checkpoints will be made available at https://github.com/NafisSadeq/reasoning-distillation.git.

Paperid: 988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10433.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Object pose estimation is a core means for robots to understand and interact with their environment. For this task, monocular category-level methods are attractive as they require only a single RGB camera. However, current methods rely on shape priors or CAD models of the intra-class known objects. We propose a diffusion-based monocular category-level 9D object pose generation method, MonoDiff9D. Our motivation is to leverage the probabilistic nature of diffusion models to alleviate the need for shape priors, CAD models, or depth sensors for intra-class unknown object pose estimation. We first estimate coarse depth via DINOv2 from the monocular image in a zero-shot manner and convert it into a point cloud. We then fuse the global features of the point cloud with the input image and use the fused features along with the encoded time step to condition MonoDiff9D. Finally, we design a transformer-based denoiser to recover the object pose from Gaussian noise. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmark datasets show that MonoDiff9D achieves state-of-the-art monocular category-level 9D object pose estimation accuracy without the need for shape priors or CAD models at any stage. Our code will be made public at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/MonoDiff9D.

Paperid: 989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10003.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual navigation, a fundamental challenge in mobile robotics, demands versatile policies to handle diverse environments. Classical methods leverage geometric solutions to minimize specific costs, offering adaptability to new scenarios but are prone to system errors due to their multi-modular design and reliance on hand-crafted rules. Learning-based methods, while achieving high planning success rates, face difficulties in generalizing to unseen environments beyond the training data and often require extensive training. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of learning-based methods and classical approaches for RGB-only visual navigation. Our method first trains a conditional diffusion model on diverse path-RGB observation pairs. During inference, it integrates the gradients of differentiable scene-specific and task-level costs, guiding the diffusion model to generate valid paths that meet the constraints. This approach alleviates the need for retraining, offering a plug-and-play solution. Extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor settings, across simulated and real-world scenarios, demonstrate zero-shot transfer capability of our approach, achieving higher success rates and fewer collisions compared to baseline methods. Code will be released at https://github.com/SYSU-RoboticsLab/NaviD.

Paperid: 990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09480.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.

Paperid: 991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09448.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large pre-trained models showed promising results in few-shot learning. However, their generalization ability on two-dimensional Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data, i.e., correlation shift and diversity shift, has not been thoroughly investigated. Researches have shown that even with a significant amount of training data, few methods can achieve better performance than the standard empirical risk minimization method (ERM) in OoD generalization. This few-shot OoD generalization dilemma emerges as a challenging direction in deep neural network generalization research, where the performance suffers from overfitting on few-shot examples and OoD generalization errors. In this paper, leveraging a broader supervision source, we explore a novel Bayesian cross-modal image-text alignment learning method (Bayes-CAL) to address this issue. Specifically, the model is designed as only text representations are fine-tuned via a Bayesian modelling approach with gradient orthogonalization loss and invariant risk minimization (IRM) loss. The Bayesian approach is essentially introduced to avoid overfitting the base classes observed during training and improve generalization to broader unseen classes. The dedicated loss is introduced to achieve better image-text alignment by disentangling the causal and non-casual parts of image features. Numerical experiments demonstrate that Bayes-CAL achieved state-of-the-art OoD generalization performances on two-dimensional distribution shifts. Moreover, compared with CLIP-like models, Bayes-CAL yields more stable generalization performances on unseen classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/LinLLLL/BayesCAL.

Paperid: 992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tracking multiple objects based on textual queries is a challenging task that requires linking language understanding with object association across frames. Previous works typically train the whole process end-to-end or integrate an additional referring text module into a multi-object tracker, but they both require supervised training and potentially struggle with generalization to open-set queries. In this work, we introduce ReferGPT, a novel zero-shot referring multi-object tracking framework. We provide a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with spatial knowledge enabling it to generate 3D-aware captions. This enhances its descriptive capabilities and supports a more flexible referring vocabulary without training. We also propose a robust query-matching strategy, leveraging CLIP-based semantic encoding and fuzzy matching to associate MLLM generated captions with user queries. Extensive experiments on Refer-KITTI, Refer-KITTIv2 and Refer-KITTI+ demonstrate that ReferGPT achieves competitive performance against trained methods, showcasing its robustness and zero-shot capabilities in autonomous driving. The codes are available on https://github.com/Tzoulio/ReferGPT

Paperid: 993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07174.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for automating the evaluation of natural language generation. Previous frameworks of LLM-as-a-judge fall short in two ways: they either use zero-shot setting without consulting any human input, which leads to low alignment, or fine-tune LLMs on labeled data, which requires a non-trivial number of samples. Moreover, previous methods often provide little reasoning behind automated evaluations. In this paper, we propose HypoEval, Hypothesis-guided Evaluation framework, which first uses a small corpus of human evaluations to generate more detailed rubrics for human judgments and then incorporates a checklist-like approach to combine LLM's assigned scores on each decomposed dimension to acquire overall scores. With only 30 human evaluations, HypoEval achieves state-of-the-art performance in alignment with both human rankings (Spearman correlation) and human scores (Pearson correlation), on average outperforming G-Eval by 11.86% and fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with at least 3 times more human evaluations by 11.95%. Furthermore, we conduct systematic studies to assess the robustness of HypoEval, highlighting its effectiveness as a reliable and interpretable automated evaluation framework.

Paperid: 994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07092.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available here: https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM.

Paperid: 995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06908.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical imaging, the primary challenge is collecting large-scale labeled data due to privacy concerns, logistics, and high labeling costs. In this work, we present the UK Biobank Organs and Bones (UKBOB), the largest labeled dataset of body organs, comprising 51,761 MRI 3D samples (equivalent to 17.9 million 2D images) and more than 1.37 billion 2D segmentation masks of 72 organs, all based on the UK Biobank MRI dataset. We utilize automatic labeling, introduce an automated label cleaning pipeline with organ-specific filters, and manually annotate a subset of 300 MRIs with 11 abdominal classes to validate the quality (referred to as UKBOB-manual). This approach allows for scaling up the dataset collection while maintaining confidence in the labels. We further confirm the validity of the labels by demonstrating zero-shot generalization of trained models on the filtered UKBOB to other small labeled datasets from similar domains (e.g., abdominal MRI). To further mitigate the effect of noisy labels, we propose a novel method called Entropy Test-time Adaptation (ETTA) to refine the segmentation output. We use UKBOB to train a foundation model, Swin-BOB, for 3D medical image segmentation based on the Swin-UNetr architecture, achieving state-of-the-art results in several benchmarks in 3D medical imaging, including the BRATS brain MRI tumor challenge (with a 0.4% improvement) and the BTCV abdominal CT scan benchmark (with a 1.3% improvement). The pre-trained models and the code are available at https://emmanuelleb985.github.io/ukbob , and the filtered labels will be made available with the UK Biobank.

Paperid: 996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06330.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper investigates the application of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to small models for cross-domain few-shot object detection in aerial images. Originally designed for large-scale models, LoRA helps mitigate overfitting, making it a promising approach for resource-constrained settings. We integrate LoRA into DiffusionDet, and evaluate its performance on the DOTA and DIOR datasets. Our results show that LoRA applied after an initial fine-tuning slightly improves performance in low-shot settings (e.g., 1-shot and 5-shot), while full fine-tuning remains more effective in higher-shot configurations. These findings highlight LoRA's potential for efficient adaptation in aerial object detection, encouraging further research into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for few-shot learning. Our code is available here: https://github.com/HichTala/LoRA-DiffusionDet.

Paperid: 997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06304.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Long-range dependencies are critical for understanding genomic structure and function, yet most conventional methods struggle with them. Widely adopted transformer-based models, while excelling at short-context tasks, are limited by the attention module's quadratic computational complexity and inability to extrapolate to sequences longer than those seen in training. In this work, we explore State Space Models (SSMs) as a promising alternative by benchmarking two SSM-inspired architectures, Caduceus and Hawk, on long-range genomics modeling tasks under conditions parallel to a 50M parameter transformer baseline. We discover that SSMs match transformer performance and exhibit impressive zero-shot extrapolation across multiple tasks, handling contexts 10 to 100 times longer than those seen during training, indicating more generalizable representations better suited for modeling the long and complex human genome. Moreover, we demonstrate that these models can efficiently process sequences of 1M tokens on a single GPU, allowing for modeling entire genomic regions at once, even in labs with limited compute. Our findings establish SSMs as efficient and scalable for long-context genomic analysis.

Paperid: 998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06021.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a novel memory-modular learner for image classification that separates knowledge memorization from reasoning. Our model enables effective generalization to new classes by simply replacing the memory contents, without the need for model retraining. Unlike traditional models that encode both world knowledge and task-specific skills into their weights during training, our model stores knowledge in the external memory of web-crawled image and text data. At inference time, the model dynamically selects relevant content from the memory based on the input image, allowing it to adapt to arbitrary classes by simply replacing the memory contents. The key differentiator that our learner meta-learns to perform classification tasks with noisy web data from unseen classes, resulting in robust performance across various classification scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance and versatility of our approach in handling diverse classification tasks, including zero-shot/few-shot classification of unseen classes, fine-grained classification, and class-incremental classification.

Paperid: 999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05686.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robustness is critical in zero-shot singing voice conversion (SVC). This paper introduces two novel methods to strengthen the robustness of the kNN-VC framework for SVC. First, kNN-VC's core representation, WavLM, lacks harmonic emphasis, resulting in dull sounds and ringing artifacts. To address this, we leverage the bijection between WavLM, pitch contours, and spectrograms to perform additive synthesis, integrating the resulting waveform into the model to mitigate these issues. Second, kNN-VC overlooks concatenative smoothness, a key perceptual factor in SVC. To enhance smoothness, we propose a new distance metric that filters out unsuitable kNN candidates and optimize the summing weights of the candidates during inference. Although our techniques are built on the kNN-VC framework for implementation convenience, they are broadly applicable to general concatenative neural synthesis models. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of these modifications in achieving robust SVC. Demo: http://knnsvc.com Code: https://github.com/SmoothKen/knn-svc

Paperid: 1000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05499.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A personalized model for scanpath prediction provides insights into the visual preferences and attention patterns of individual subjects. However, existing methods for training scanpath prediction models are data-intensive and cannot be effectively personalized to new individuals with only a few available examples. In this paper, we propose few-shot personalized scanpath prediction task (FS-PSP) and a novel method to address it, which aims to predict scanpaths for an unseen subject using minimal support data of that subject's scanpath behavior. The key to our method's adaptability is the Subject-Embedding Network (SE-Net), specifically designed to capture unique, individualized representations for each subject's scanpaths. SE-Net generates subject embeddings that effectively distinguish between subjects while minimizing variability among scanpaths from the same individual. The personalized scanpath prediction model is then conditioned on these subject embeddings to produce accurate, personalized results. Experiments on multiple eye-tracking datasets demonstrate that our method excels in FS-PSP settings and does not require any fine-tuning steps at test time. Code is available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/few-shot-scanpath

Paperid: 1001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05461.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep classifiers are known to be sensitive to data distribution shifts, primarily due to their reliance on spurious correlations in training data. It has been suggested that these classifiers can still find useful features in the network's last layer that hold up under such shifts. In this work, we question the use of last-layer representations for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation and explore the utility of intermediate layers. To this end, we introduce \textit{Intermediate Layer Classifiers} (ILCs). We discover that intermediate layer representations frequently offer substantially better generalisation than those from the penultimate layer. In many cases, zero-shot OOD generalisation using earlier-layer representations approaches the few-shot performance of retraining on penultimate layer representations. This is confirmed across multiple datasets, architectures, and types of distribution shifts. Our analysis suggests that intermediate layers are less sensitive to distribution shifts compared to the penultimate layer. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how information is distributed across network layers and its role in OOD generalisation, while also pointing to the limits of penultimate layer representation utility. Code is available at https://github.com/oshapio/intermediate-layer-generalization

Paperid: 1002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05287.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The ability to robustly grasp a variety of objects is essential for dexterous robots. In this paper, we present a framework for zero-shot dynamic dexterous grasping using single-view visual inputs, designed to be resilient to various disturbances. Our approach utilizes a hand-centric object shape representation based on dynamic distance vectors between finger joints and object surfaces. This representation captures the local shape around potential contact regions rather than focusing on detailed global object geometry, thereby enhancing generalization to shape variations and uncertainties. To address perception limitations, we integrate a privileged teacher policy with a mixed curriculum learning approach, allowing the student policy to effectively distill grasping capabilities and explore for adaptation to disturbances. Trained in simulation, our method achieves success rates of 97.0% across 247,786 simulated objects and 94.6% across 512 real objects, demonstrating remarkable generalization. Quantitative and qualitative results validate the robustness of our policy against various disturbances.

Paperid: 1003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04954.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Graphs are growing rapidly, along with the number of distinct label categories associated with them. Applications like e-commerce, healthcare, recommendation systems, and various social media platforms are rapidly moving towards graph representation of data due to their ability to capture both structural and attribute information. One crucial task in graph analysis is node classification, where unlabeled nodes are categorized into predefined classes. In practice, novel classes appear incrementally sometimes with just a few labels (seen classes) or even without any labels (unseen classes), either because they are new or haven't been explored much. Traditional methods assume abundant labeled data for training, which isn't always feasible. We investigate a broader objective: \emph{Graph Class Incremental Learning under Weak Supervision (GCL)}, addressing this challenge by meta-training on base classes with limited labeled instances. During the incremental streams, novel classes can have few-shot or zero-shot representation. Our proposed framework GOTHAM efficiently accommodates these unlabeled nodes by finding the closest prototype representation, serving as class representatives in the attribute space. For Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), our framework additionally incorporates semantic information to enhance the representation. By employing teacher-student knowledge distillation to mitigate forgetting, GOTHAM achieves promising results across various tasks. Experiments on datasets such as Cora-ML, Amazon, and OBGN-Arxiv showcase the effectiveness of our approach in handling evolving graph data under limited supervision. The repository is available here: \href{https://github.com/adityashahane10/GOTHAM--Graph-based-Class-Incremental-Learning-Framework-under-Weak-Supervision}{\small \textcolor{blue}{Code}}

Paperid: 1004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04519.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything 2 (SAM2) enables robust single-object tracking using segmentation. To extend this to multi-object tracking (MOT), we propose SAM2MOT, introducing a novel Tracking by Segmentation paradigm. Unlike Tracking by Detection or Tracking by Query, SAM2MOT directly generates tracking boxes from segmentation masks, reducing reliance on detection accuracy. SAM2MOT has two key advantages: zero-shot generalization, allowing it to work across datasets without fine-tuning, and strong object association, inherited from SAM2. To further improve performance, we integrate a trajectory manager system for precise object addition and removal, and a cross-object interaction module to handle occlusions. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT. Code is available at https://github.com/TripleJoy/SAM2MOT.

Paperid: 1005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04517.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models pretrained on extensive datasets, such as GroundingDINO and LAE-DINO, have performed remarkably in the cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) task. Through rigorous few-shot training, we found that the integration of image-based data augmentation techniques and grid-based sub-domain search strategy significantly enhances the performance of these foundation models. Building upon GroundingDINO, we employed several widely used image augmentation methods and established optimization objectives to effectively navigate the expansive domain space in search of optimal sub-domains. This approach facilitates efficient few-shot object detection and introduces an approach to solving the CD-FSOD problem by efficiently searching for the optimal parameter configuration from the foundation model. Our findings substantially advance the practical deployment of vision-language models in data-scarce environments, offering critical insights into optimizing their cross-domain generalization capabilities without labor-intensive retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/jaychempan/ETS.

Paperid: 1006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04083.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Objective: Zero-shot methodology promises to cut down on costs of dataset annotation and domain expertise needed to make use of NLP. Generative large language models trained to align with human goals have achieved high zero-shot performance across a wide variety of tasks. As of yet, it is unclear how well these models perform on biomedical relation extraction (RE). To address this knowledge gap, we explore patterns in the performance of OpenAI LLMs across a diverse sampling of RE tasks. Methods: We use OpenAI GPT-4-turbo and OpenAI's reasoning models o1 and GPT-OSS to conduct end-to-end RE experiments on seven datasets. We use the JSON generation capabilities of GPT models to generate structured output in two ways: (1) by defining an explicit schema describing the structure of relations, and (2) using a setting that infers the structure from the prompt language. Results: Our work is the first to study and compare the performance of the GPT-4, o1 and GPT-OSS for the end-to-end zero-shot biomedical RE task across a broad array of datasets. We found the zero-shot performances to be proximal to that of fine-tuned methods. The limitations of this approach are that it performs poorly on instances containing many relations and errs on the boundaries of textual mentions. Conclusion: LLMs exhibit promising zero-shot capabilities in complex biomedical RE tasks, offering competitive performance with reduced dataset curation costs and NLP modeling needs but with increased perpetual compute costs. Addressing the limitations we identify could further boost reliability. The code, data, and prompts for all our experiments are publicly available for additional benchmarking by the community: https://github.com/bionlproc/ZeroShotRE

Paperid: 1007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03801.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-label Recognition (MLR) involves assigning multiple labels to each data instance in an image, offering advantages over single-label classification in complex scenarios. However, it faces the challenge of annotating all relevant categories, often leading to uncertain annotations, such as unseen or incomplete labels. Recent Vision and Language Pre-training (VLP) based methods have made significant progress in tackling zero-shot MLR tasks by leveraging rich vision-language correlations. However, the correlation between multi-label semantics has not been fully explored, and the learned visual features often lack essential semantic information. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a Semantic-guided Representation Learning approach (SigRL) that enables the model to learn effective visual and textual representations, thereby improving the downstream alignment of visual images and categories. Specifically, we first introduce a graph-based multi-label correlation module (GMC) to facilitate information exchange between labels, enriching the semantic representation across the multi-label texts. Next, we propose a Semantic Visual Feature Reconstruction module (SVFR) to enhance the semantic information in the visual representation by integrating the learned textual representation during reconstruction. Finally, we optimize the image-text matching capability of the VLP model using both local and global features to achieve zero-shot MLR. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on several MLR benchmarks, encompassing both zero-shot MLR (with unseen labels) and single positive multi-label learning (with limited labels), demonstrating the superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/MVL-Lab/SigRL.

Paperid: 1008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03720.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are ubiquitous and widely used in various applications. However, most real-world knowledge graphs are incomplete, which significantly degrades their performance on downstream tasks. Additionally, the relationships in real-world knowledge graphs often follow a long-tail distribution, meaning that most relations are represented by only a few training triplets. To address these challenges, few-shot learning has been introduced. Few-shot KG completion aims to make accurate predictions for triplets involving novel relations when only a limited number of training triplets are available. Although many methods have been proposed, they typically learn each relation individually, overlooking the correlations between different tasks and the relevant information in previously trained tasks. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning-based few-shot KG completion method (TransNet). By learning the relationships between different tasks, TransNet effectively transfers knowledge from similar tasks to improve the current task's performance. Furthermore, by employing meta-learning, TransNet can generalize effectively to new, unseen relations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of TransNet over state-of-the-art methods. Code can be found at https://github.com/lihuiliullh/TransNet/tree/main

Paperid: 1009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03198.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstructing 3D scenes from monocular surgical videos can enhance surgeon's perception and therefore plays a vital role in various computer-assisted surgery tasks. However, achieving scale-consistent reconstruction remains an open challenge due to inherent issues in endoscopic videos, such as dynamic deformations and textureless surfaces. Despite recent advances, current methods either rely on calibration or instrument priors to estimate scale, or employ SfM-like multi-stage pipelines, leading to error accumulation and requiring offline optimization. In this paper, we present Endo3R, a unified 3D foundation model for online scale-consistent reconstruction from monocular surgical video, without any priors or extra optimization. Our model unifies the tasks by predicting globally aligned pointmaps, scale-consistent video depths, and camera parameters without any offline optimization. The core contribution of our method is expanding the capability of the recent pairwise reconstruction model to long-term incremental dynamic reconstruction by an uncertainty-aware dual memory mechanism. The mechanism maintains history tokens of both short-term dynamics and long-term spatial consistency. Notably, to tackle the highly dynamic nature of surgical scenes, we measure the uncertainty of tokens via Sampson distance and filter out tokens with high uncertainty. Regarding the scarcity of endoscopic datasets with ground-truth depth and camera poses, we further devise a self-supervised mechanism with a novel dynamics-aware flow loss. Abundant experiments on SCARED and Hamlyn datasets demonstrate our superior performance in zero-shot surgical video depth prediction and camera pose estimation with online efficiency. Project page: https://wrld.github.io/Endo3R/.

Paperid: 1010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02876.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual grounding focuses on detecting objects from images based on language expressions. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced visual grounding performance by training large models with large-scale datasets. However, the problem remains challenging, especially when similar objects appear in the input image. For example, an LVLM may not be able to differentiate Diet Coke and regular Coke in an image. In this case, if additional reference images of Diet Coke and regular Coke are available, it can help the visual grounding of similar objects. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Reference Visual Grounding (MRVG). In this task, a model has access to a set of reference images of objects in a database. Based on these reference images and a language expression, the model is required to detect a target object from a query image. We first introduce a new dataset to study the MRVG problem. Then we introduce a novel method, named MRVG-Net, to solve this visual grounding problem. We show that by efficiently using reference images with few-shot object detection and using Large Language Models (LLMs) for object matching, our method achieves superior visual grounding performance compared to the state-of-the-art LVLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B. Our approach bridges the gap between few-shot detection and visual grounding, unlocking new capabilities for visual understanding, which has wide applications in robotics. Project page with our video, code, and dataset: https://irvlutd.github.io/MultiGrounding

Paperid: 1011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02828.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models are widely used for image editing tasks. Existing editing methods often design a representation manipulation procedure by curating an edit direction in the text embedding or score space. However, such a procedure faces a key challenge: overestimating the edit strength harms visual consistency while underestimating it fails the editing task. Notably, each source image may require a different editing strength, and it is costly to search for an appropriate strength via trial-and-error. To address this challenge, we propose Concept Lancet (CoLan), a zero-shot plug-and-play framework for principled representation manipulation in diffusion-based image editing. At inference time, we decompose the source input in the latent (text embedding or diffusion score) space as a sparse linear combination of the representations of the collected visual concepts. This allows us to accurately estimate the presence of concepts in each image, which informs the edit. Based on the editing task (replace/add/remove), we perform a customized concept transplant process to impose the corresponding editing direction. To sufficiently model the concept space, we curate a conceptual representation dataset, CoLan-150K, which contains diverse descriptions and scenarios of visual terms and phrases for the latent dictionary. Experiments on multiple diffusion-based image editing baselines show that methods equipped with CoLan achieve state-of-the-art performance in editing effectiveness and consistency preservation.

Paperid: 1012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02801.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Thermal imaging is crucial for scene understanding, particularly in low-light and nighttime conditions. However, collecting large thermal datasets is costly and labor-intensive due to the specialized equipment required for infrared image capture. To address this challenge, researchers have explored visible-to-thermal image translation. Most existing methods rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Diffusion Models (DMs), treating the task as a style transfer problem. As a result, these approaches attempt to learn both the modality distribution shift and underlying physical principles from limited training data. In this paper, we propose F-ViTA, a novel approach that leverages the general world knowledge embedded in foundation models to guide the diffusion process for improved translation. Specifically, we condition an InstructPix2Pix Diffusion Model with zero-shot masks and labels from foundation models such as SAM and Grounded DINO. This allows the model to learn meaningful correlations between scene objects and their thermal signatures in infrared imagery. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that F-ViTA outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, our model generalizes well to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and can generate Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR), Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR), and Near-Infrared (NIR) translations from the same visible image. Code: https://github.com/JayParanjape/F-ViTA/tree/master.

Paperid: 1013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
RGB-based novel object pose estimation is critical for rapid deployment in robotic applications, yet zero-shot generalization remains a key challenge. In this paper, we introduce PicoPose, a novel framework designed to tackle this task using a three-stage pixel-to-pixel correspondence learning process. Firstly, PicoPose matches features from the RGB observation with those from rendered object templates, identifying the best-matched template and establishing coarse correspondences. Secondly, PicoPose smooths the correspondences by globally regressing a 2D affine transformation, including in-plane rotation, scale, and 2D translation, from the coarse correspondence map. Thirdly, PicoPose applies the affine transformation to the feature map of the best-matched template and learns correspondence offsets within local regions to achieve fine-grained correspondences. By progressively refining the correspondences, PicoPose significantly improves the accuracy of object poses computed via PnP/RANSAC. PicoPose achieves state-of-the-art performance on the seven core datasets of the BOP benchmark, demonstrating exceptional generalization to novel objects. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/foollh/PicoPose.

Paperid: 1014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02534.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries from satellite imagery is vital for land management and crop monitoring. However, current methods face challenges due to limited dataset sizes, resolution discrepancies, and diverse environmental conditions. We address this by reformulating the task as instance segmentation and introducing the Field Boundary Instance Segmentation - 22M dataset (FBIS-22M), a large-scale, multi-resolution dataset comprising 672,909 high-resolution satellite image patches (ranging from 0.25 m to 10 m) and 22,926,427 instance masks of individual fields, significantly narrowing the gap between agricultural datasets and those in other computer vision domains. We further propose Delineate Anything, an instance segmentation model trained on our new FBIS-22M dataset. Our proposed model sets a new state-of-the-art, achieving a substantial improvement of 88.5% in mAP@0.5 and 103% in mAP@0.5:0.95 over existing methods, while also demonstrating significantly faster inference and strong zero-shot generalization across diverse image resolutions and unseen geographic regions. Code, pre-trained models, and the FBIS-22M dataset are available at https://lavreniuk.github.io/Delineate-Anything.

Paperid: 1015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02454.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation aims to accurately segment "unseen" new categories in point cloud scenes using limited labeled data. However, pretraining-based methods not only introduce excessive time overhead but also overlook the local structure representation among irregular point clouds. To address these issues, we propose a pretraining-free local structure fitting network for few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation, named TaylorSeg. Specifically, inspired by Taylor series, we treat the local structure representation of irregular point clouds as a polynomial fitting problem and propose a novel local structure fitting convolution, called TaylorConv. This convolution learns the low-order basic information and high-order refined information of point clouds from explicit encoding of local geometric structures. Then, using TaylorConv as the basic component, we construct two variants of TaylorSeg: a non-parametric TaylorSeg-NN and a parametric TaylorSeg-PN. The former can achieve performance comparable to existing parametric models without pretraining. For the latter, we equip it with an Adaptive Push-Pull (APP) module to mitigate the feature distribution differences between the query set and the support set. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Notably, under the 2-way 1-shot setting, TaylorSeg-PN achieves improvements of +2.28% and +4.37% mIoU on the S3DIS and ScanNet datasets respectively, compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/changshuowang/TaylorSeg.

Paperid: 1016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02451.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The development of Text-to-Video (T2V) generation has made motion transfer possible, enabling the control of video motion based on existing footage. However, current methods have two limitations: 1) struggle to handle multi-subjects videos, failing to transfer specific subject motion; 2) struggle to preserve the diversity and accuracy of motion as transferring to subjects with varying shapes. To overcome these, we introduce \textbf{ConMo}, a zero-shot framework that disentangle and recompose the motions of subjects and camera movements. ConMo isolates individual subject and background motion cues from complex trajectories in source videos using only subject masks, and reassembles them for target video generation. This approach enables more accurate motion control across diverse subjects and improves performance in multi-subject scenarios. Additionally, we propose soft guidance in the recomposition stage which controls the retention of original motion to adjust shape constraints, aiding subject shape adaptation and semantic transformation. Unlike previous methods, ConMo unlocks a wide range of applications, including subject size and position editing, subject removal, semantic modifications, and camera motion simulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConMo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motion fidelity and semantic consistency. The code is available at https://github.com/Andyplus1/ConMo.

Paperid: 1017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02407.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present F5R-TTS, a novel text-to-speech (TTS) system that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into a flow-matching based architecture. By reformulating the deterministic outputs of flow-matching TTS into probabilistic Gaussian distributions, our approach enables seamless integration of reinforcement learning algorithms. During pretraining, we train a probabilistically reformulated flow-matching based model which is derived from F5-TTS with an open-source dataset. In the subsequent reinforcement learning (RL) phase, we employ a GRPO-driven enhancement stage that leverages dual reward metrics: word error rate (WER) computed via automatic speech recognition and speaker similarity (SIM) assessed by verification models. Experimental results on zero-shot voice cloning demonstrate that F5R-TTS achieves significant improvements in both speech intelligibility (a 29.5% relative reduction in WER) and speaker similarity (a 4.6% relative increase in SIM score) compared to conventional flow-matching based TTS systems. Audio samples are available at https://frontierlabs.github.io/F5R.

Paperid: 1018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00954.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal retrieval systems are becoming increasingly vital for cutting-edge AI technologies, such as embodied AI and AI-driven digital content industries. However, current multimodal retrieval tasks lack sufficient complexity and demonstrate limited practical application value. It spires us to design Instance-Driven Multimodal Image Retrieval (IDMR), a novel task that requires models to retrieve images containing the same instance as a query image while matching a text-described scenario. Unlike existing retrieval tasks focused on global image similarity or category-level matching, IDMR demands fine-grained instance-level consistency across diverse contexts. To benchmark this capability, we develop IDMR-bench using real-world object tracking and first-person video data. Addressing the scarcity of training data, we propose a cross-domain synthesis method that creates 557K training samples by cropping objects from standard detection datasets. Our Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based retrieval model, trained on 1.2M samples, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both traditional benchmarks and our zero-shot IDMR-bench. Experimental results demonstrate previous models' limitations in instance-aware retrieval and highlight the potential of MLLM for advanced retrieval applications. The whole training dataset, codes and models, with wide ranges of sizes, are available at https://github.com/BwLiu01/IDMR.

Paperid: 1019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00676.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) presents unique challenges due to specialized vocabularies, the sheer volume of entities, and the continuous emergence of novel entities. Traditional NER models, constrained by fixed taxonomies and human annotations, struggle to generalize beyond predefined entity types. To address these issues, we introduce GLiNER-BioMed, a domain-adapted suite of Generalist and Lightweight Model for NER (GLiNER) models specifically tailored for biomedicine. In contrast to conventional approaches, GLiNER uses natural language labels to infer arbitrary entity types, enabling zero-shot recognition. Our approach first distills the annotation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into a smaller, more efficient model, enabling the generation of high-coverage synthetic biomedical NER data. We subsequently train two GLiNER architectures, uni- and bi-encoder, at multiple scales to balance computational efficiency and recognition performance. Experiments on several biomedical datasets demonstrate that GLiNER-BioMed outperforms the state-of-the-art in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, achieving 5.96% improvement in F1-score over the strongest baseline (p-value < 0.001). Ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of our synthetic data generation strategy and emphasize the complementary benefits of synthetic biomedical pre-training combined with fine-tuning on general-domain annotations. All datasets, models, and training pipelines are publicly available at https://github.com/ds4dh/GLiNER-biomed.

Paperid: 1020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00478.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS), which focuses on segmenting new classes in images using only a limited number of annotated examples, has recently progressed in data-scarce domains. However, in this work, we show that the existing FSS methods often struggle to generalize to underwater environments. Specifically, the prior features extracted by pre-trained models used as feature extractors are fragile due to the unique challenges of underwater images. To address this, we propose FSSUWNet, a tailored FSS framework for underwater images with feature enhancement. FSSUWNet exploits the integration of complementary features, emphasizing both low-level and high-level image characteristics. In addition to employing a pre-trained model as the primary encoder, we propose an auxiliary encoder called Feature Enhanced Encoder which extracts complementary features to better adapt to underwater scene characteristics. Furthermore, a simple and effective Feature Alignment Module aims to provide global prior knowledge and align low-level features with high-level features in dimensions. Given the scarcity of underwater images, we introduce a cross-validation dataset version based on the Segmentation of Underwater Imagery dataset. Extensive experiments on public underwater segmentation datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, our method outperforms the previous best method by 2.8% and 2.6% in terms of the mean Intersection over Union metric for 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios in the datasets, respectively. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/lizhh268/FSSUWNet.

Paperid: 1021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00437.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a novel approach, termed ADGaussian, for generalizable street scene reconstruction. The proposed method enables high-quality rendering from single-view input. Unlike prior Gaussian Splatting methods that primarily focus on geometry refinement, we emphasize the importance of joint optimization of image and depth features for accurate Gaussian prediction. To this end, we first incorporate sparse LiDAR depth as an additional input modality, formulating the Gaussian prediction process as a joint learning framework of visual information and geometric clue. Furthermore, we propose a multi-modal feature matching strategy coupled with a multi-scale Gaussian decoding model to enhance the joint refinement of multi-modal features, thereby enabling efficient multi-modal Gaussian learning. Extensive experiments on two large-scale autonomous driving datasets, Waymo and KITTI, demonstrate that our ADGaussian achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits superior zero-shot generalization capabilities in novel-view shifting.

Paperid: 1022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00356.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), driven by models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and CLIP, have made substantial progress in aligning visual and textual information. Despite these successes, the extraction of precise and high-quality mask region representations remains a critical challenge, limiting the full potential of RIS tasks. In this paper, we introduce a training-free, hybrid global-local feature extraction approach that integrates detailed mask-specific features with contextual information from the surrounding area, enhancing mask region representation. To further strengthen alignment between mask regions and referring expressions, we propose a spatial guidance augmentation strategy that improves spatial coherence, which is essential for accurately localizing described areas. By incorporating multiple spatial cues, this approach facilitates more robust and precise referring segmentation. Extensive experiments on standard RIS benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing zero-shot RIS models, achieving substantial performance gains. We believe our approach advances RIS tasks and establishes a versatile framework for region-text alignment, offering broader implications for cross-modal understanding and interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fhgyuanshen/HybridGL .

Paperid: 1023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23980.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a flexible Semi-Automatic Labeling Tool (SALT) for general LiDAR point clouds with cross-scene adaptability and 4D consistency. Unlike recent approaches that rely on camera distillation, SALT operates directly on raw LiDAR data, automatically generating pre-segmentation results. To achieve this, we propose a novel zero-shot learning paradigm, termed data alignment, which transforms LiDAR data into pseudo-images by aligning with the training distribution of vision foundation models. Additionally, we design a 4D-consistent prompting strategy and 4D non-maximum suppression module to enhance SAM2, ensuring high-quality, temporally consistent presegmentation. SALT surpasses the latest zero-shot methods by 18.4% PQ on SemanticKITTI and achieves nearly 40-50% of human annotator performance on our newly collected low-resolution LiDAR data and on combined data from three LiDAR types, significantly boosting annotation efficiency. We anticipate that SALT's open-sourcing will catalyze substantial expansion of current LiDAR datasets and lay the groundwork for the future development of LiDAR foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/Cavendish518/SALT.

Paperid: 1024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23875.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The development of control policies for multi-robot systems traditionally follows a complex and labor-intensive process, often lacking the flexibility to adapt to dynamic tasks. This has motivated research on methods to automatically create control policies. However, these methods require iterative processes of manually crafting and refining objective functions, thereby prolonging the development cycle. This work introduces \textit{GenSwarm}, an end-to-end system that leverages large language models to automatically generate and deploy control policies for multi-robot tasks based on simple user instructions in natural language. As a multi-language-agent system, GenSwarm achieves zero-shot learning, enabling rapid adaptation to altered or unseen tasks. The white-box nature of the code policies ensures strong reproducibility and interpretability. With its scalable software and hardware architectures, GenSwarm supports efficient policy deployment on both simulated and real-world multi-robot systems, realizing an instruction-to-execution end-to-end functionality that could prove valuable for robotics specialists and non-specialists alike.The code of the proposed GenSwarm system is available online: https://github.com/WindyLab/GenSwarm.

Paperid: 1025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23740.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (TODS) often face the challenge of encountering new intents. New Intent Discovery (NID) is a crucial task that aims to identify these novel intents while maintaining the capability to recognize existing ones. Previous efforts to adapt TODS to new intents have struggled with inadequate semantic representation or have depended on external knowledge, which is often not scalable or flexible. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities; however, their scale can be impractical for real-world applications that involve extensive queries. To address the limitations of existing NID methods by leveraging LLMs, we propose LANID, a framework that enhances the semantic representation of lightweight NID encoders with the guidance of LLMs. Specifically, LANID employs the $K$-nearest neighbors and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithms to sample selective utterance pairs from the training set. It then queries an LLM to ascertain the relationships between these pairs. The data produced from this process is utilized to design a contrastive fine-tuning task, which is then used to train a small encoder with a contrastive triplet loss. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method across three distinct NID datasets, surpassing strong baselines in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/floatSDSDS/LANID.

Paperid: 1026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23367.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has gained popularity for its shift towards next-scale prediction. However, existing VAR paradigms process the entire token map at each scale step, leading to the complexity and runtime scaling dramatically with image resolution. To address this challenge, we propose FastVAR, a post-training acceleration method for efficient resolution scaling with VARs. Our key finding is that the majority of latency arises from the large-scale step where most tokens have already converged. Leveraging this observation, we develop the cached token pruning strategy that only forwards pivotal tokens for scale-specific modeling while using cached tokens from previous scale steps to restore the pruned slots. This significantly reduces the number of forwarded tokens and improves the efficiency at larger resolutions. Experiments show the proposed FastVAR can further speedup FlashAttention-accelerated VAR by 2.7$\times$ with negligible performance drop of <1%. We further extend FastVAR to zero-shot generation of higher resolution images. In particular, FastVAR can generate one 2K image with 15GB memory footprints in 1.5s on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/FastVAR.

Paperid: 1027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23239.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have allowed the augmentation of information retrieval (IR) pipelines with synthetic data in various ways. Yet, the main training paradigm remains: contrastive learning with binary relevance labels and the InfoNCE loss, where one positive document is compared against one or more negatives. This objective treats all documents that are not explicitly annotated as relevant on an equally negative footing, regardless of their actual degree of relevance, thus (a) missing subtle nuances that are useful for ranking and (b) being susceptible to annotation noise. To overcome this limitation, in this work we forgo real training documents and annotations altogether and use open-source LLMs to directly generate synthetic documents that answer real user queries according to several different levels of relevance. This fully synthetic ranking context of graduated relevance, together with an appropriate list-wise loss (Wasserstein distance), enables us to train dense retrievers in a way that better captures the ranking task. Experiments on various IR datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms conventional training with InfoNCE by a large margin. Without using any real documents for training, our dense retriever significantly outperforms the same retriever trained through self-supervision. More importantly, it matches the performance of the same retriever trained on real, labeled training documents of the same dataset, while being more robust to distribution shift and clearly outperforming it when evaluated zero-shot on the BEIR dataset collection.

Paperid: 1028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23234.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Z-SASLM, a Zero-Shot Style-Aligned SLI (Spherical Linear Interpolation) Blending Latent Manipulation pipeline that overcomes the limitations of current multi-style blending methods. Conventional approaches rely on linear blending, assuming a flat latent space leading to suboptimal results when integrating multiple reference styles. In contrast, our framework leverages the non-linear geometry of the latent space by using SLI Blending to combine weighted style representations. By interpolating along the geodesic on the hypersphere, Z-SASLM preserves the intrinsic structure of the latent space, ensuring high-fidelity and coherent blending of diverse styles - all without the need for fine-tuning. We further propose a new metric, Weighted Multi-Style DINO ViT-B/8, designed to quantitatively evaluate the consistency of the blended styles. While our primary focus is on the theoretical and practical advantages of SLI Blending for style manipulation, we also demonstrate its effectiveness in a multi-modal content fusion setting through comprehensive experimental studies. Experimental results show that Z-SASLM achieves enhanced and robust style alignment. The implementation code can be found at: https://github.com/alessioborgi/Z-SASLM.

Paperid: 1029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23108.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce SupertonicTTS, a novel text-to-speech (TTS) system designed for efficient and streamlined speech synthesis. SupertonicTTS comprises three components: a speech autoencoder for continuous latent representation, a text-to-latent module leveraging flow-matching for text-to-latent mapping, and an utterance-level duration predictor. To enable a lightweight architecture, we employ a low-dimensional latent space, temporal compression of latents, and ConvNeXt blocks. The TTS pipeline is further simplified by operating directly on raw character-level text and employing cross-attention for text-speech alignment, thus eliminating the need for grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) modules and external aligners. In addition, we propose context-sharing batch expansion that accelerates loss convergence and stabilizes text-speech alignment with minimal memory and I/O overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that SupertonicTTS delivers performance comparable to contemporary zero-shot TTS models with only 44M parameters, while significantly reducing architectural complexity and computational cost. Audio samples are available at: https://supertonictts.github.io/.

Paperid: 1030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22679.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image quality assessment (IQA) focuses on the perceptual visual quality of images, playing a crucial role in downstream tasks such as image reconstruction, compression, and generation. The rapid advancement of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of IQA, moving toward comprehensive image quality understanding that incorporates content analysis, degradation perception, and comparison reasoning beyond mere numerical scoring. Previous MLLM-based methods typically either generate numerical scores lacking interpretability or heavily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using large-scale annotated datasets to provide descriptive assessments, limiting their flexibility and applicability. In this paper, we propose Q-Insight, a reinforcement learning-based model built upon group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which demonstrates strong visual reasoning capability for image quality understanding while requiring only a limited amount of rating scores and degradation labels. By jointly optimizing score regression and degradation perception tasks with carefully designed reward functions, our approach effectively exploits their mutual benefits for enhanced performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Insight substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both score regression and degradation perception tasks, while exhibiting impressive zero-shot generalization to comparison reasoning tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/lwq20020127/Q-Insight.

Paperid: 1031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22359.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the similar structures of human faces, existing face alignment methods cannot learn unified knowledge from multiple datasets with different landmark annotations. The limited training samples in a single dataset commonly result in fragile robustness in this field. To mitigate knowledge discrepancies among different datasets and train a task-agnostic unified face alignment (TUFA) framework, this paper presents a strategy to unify knowledge from multiple datasets. Specifically, we calculate a mean face shape for each dataset. To explicitly align these mean shapes on an interpretable plane based on their semantics, each shape is then incorporated with a group of semantic alignment embeddings. The 2D coordinates of these aligned shapes can be viewed as the anchors of the plane. By encoding them into structure prompts and further regressing the corresponding facial landmarks using image features, a mapping from the plane to the target faces is finally established, which unifies the learning target of different datasets. Consequently, multiple datasets can be utilized to boost the generalization ability of the model. The successful mitigation of discrepancies also enhances the efficiency of knowledge transferring to a novel dataset, significantly boosts the performance of few-shot face alignment. Additionally, the interpretable plane endows TUFA with a task-agnostic characteristic, enabling it to locate landmarks unseen during training in a zero-shot manner. Extensive experiments are carried on seven benchmarks and the results demonstrate an impressive improvement in face alignment brought by knowledge discrepancies mitigation. The code is available at https://github.com/Jiahao-UTS/TUFA.

Paperid: 1032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22351.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot depth estimation (DE) models exhibit strong generalization performance as they are trained on large-scale datasets. However, existing models struggle with high-resolution images due to the discrepancy in image resolutions of training (with smaller resolutions) and inference (for high resolutions). Processing them at full resolution leads to decreased estimation accuracy on depth with tremendous memory consumption, while downsampling to the training resolution results in blurred edges in the estimated depth images. Prevailing high-resolution depth estimation methods adopt a patch-based approach, which introduces depth discontinuity issues when reassembling the estimated depth patches, resulting in test-time inefficiency. Additionally, to obtain fine-grained depth details, these methods rely on synthetic datasets due to the real-world sparse ground truth depth, leading to poor generalizability. To tackle these limitations, we propose Patch Refine Once (PRO), an efficient and generalizable tile-based framework. Our PRO consists of two key components: (i) Grouped Patch Consistency Training that enhances test-time efficiency while mitigating the depth discontinuity problem by jointly processing four overlapping patches and enforcing a consistency loss on their overlapping regions within a single backpropagation step, and (ii) Bias Free Masking that prevents the DE models from overfitting to dataset-specific biases, enabling better generalization to real-world datasets even after training on synthetic data. Zero-shot evaluations on Booster, ETH3D, Middlebury 2014, and NuScenes demonstrate that our PRO can be seamlessly integrated into existing depth estimation models.

Paperid: 1033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21847.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We present ReCoM, an efficient framework for generating high-fidelity and generalizable human body motions synchronized with speech. The core innovation lies in the Recurrent Embedded Transformer (RET), which integrates Dynamic Embedding Regularization (DER) into a Vision Transformer (ViT) core architecture to explicitly model co-speech motion dynamics. This architecture enables joint spatial-temporal dependency modeling, thereby enhancing gesture naturalness and fidelity through coherent motion synthesis. To enhance model robustness, we incorporate the proposed DER strategy, which equips the model with dual capabilities of noise resistance and cross-domain generalization, thereby improving the naturalness and fluency of zero-shot motion generation for unseen speech inputs. To mitigate inherent limitations of autoregressive inference, including error accumulation and limited self-correction, we propose an iterative reconstruction inference (IRI) strategy. IRI refines motion sequences via cyclic pose reconstruction, driven by two key components: (1) classifier-free guidance improves distribution alignment between generated and real gestures without auxiliary supervision, and (2) a temporal smoothing process eliminates abrupt inter-frame transitions while ensuring kinematic continuity. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate ReCoM's effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance across metrics. Notably, it reduces the FrÃ©chet Gesture Distance (FGD) from 18.70 to 2.48, demonstrating an 86.7% improvement in motion realism. Our project page is https://yong-xie-xy.github.io/ReCoM/.

Paperid: 1034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21785.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cued Speech (CS) is an innovative visual communication system that integrates lip-reading with hand coding, designed to enhance effective communication for individuals with hearing impairments. Automatic CS Recognition (ACSR) refers to the AI-driven process of automatically recognizing hand gestures and lip movements in CS, converting them into text. However, previous work often relies on complex fusion modules and training techniques. Additionally, due to the limited amount of data in CS, the extraction of hand features, as well as recognition modeling, has consistently been subpar, significantly limiting the effectiveness of ACSR. To address this issue, we have innovatively explored the capabilities of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in recognizing hand shapes and positions in CS. More precisely, we propose a new Semi Training-Free paradigm for ACSR, named STF-ACSR. This approach leverages zero-shot recognition of hand movements through the Chinese CS Prompt Module (CCSPM), which equipped a training-free keyframe filtering and customized prompt engineering based on MLLM. It then integrates the recognition results into the lip-reading model using a Minimalist Fusion Module (MFM), effectively achieving superior recognition results. Furthermore, specifically for this study, we have supplemented the existing dataset of 6 normal hearing CS cuers by recording additional data from 8 cuers with hearing impairments, resulting in a new mixed dataset. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that STF-ACSR significantly outperforms previous methods on both normal and hearing-impaired data. Implementation and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/DennisHgj/STF_ACSR.

Paperid: 1035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20782.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce zero-shot audio-video editing, a novel task that requires transforming original audio-visual content to align with a specified textual prompt without additional model training. To evaluate this task, we curate a benchmark dataset, AvED-Bench, designed explicitly for zero-shot audio-video editing. AvED-Bench includes 110 videos, each with a 10-second duration, spanning 11 categories from VGGSound. It offers diverse prompts and scenarios that require precise alignment between auditory and visual elements, enabling robust evaluation. We identify limitations in existing zero-shot audio and video editing methods, particularly in synchronization and coherence between modalities, which often result in inconsistent outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose AvED, a zero-shot cross-modal delta denoising framework that leverages audio-video interactions to achieve synchronized and coherent edits. AvED demonstrates superior results on both AvED-Bench and the recent OAVE dataset to validate its generalization capabilities. Results are available at https://genjib.github.io/project_page/AVED/index.html

Paperid: 1036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20752.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual reasoning abilities play a crucial role in understanding complex multimodal data, advancing both domain-specific applications and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Existing methods improve VLM reasoning via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning, using meticulously annotated training data to enhance visual reasoning capabilities. However, this training paradigm may lead to overfitting and cognitive rigidity, restricting the model's ability to transfer visual reasoning skills across domains and limiting its real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose Reason-RFT, a novel reinforcement fine-tuning framework that significantly enhances generalization capabilities in visual reasoning tasks. Reason-RFT introduces a two-phase training framework for visual reasoning: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with curated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data activates the reasoning potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), followed by (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based reinforcement learning that generates multiple reasoning-response pairs, significantly enhancing generalization in visual reasoning tasks. To evaluate Reason-RFT's visual reasoning capabilities, we reconstructed a comprehensive dataset spanning visual counting, structure perception, and spatial transformation. Experimental results demonstrate Reasoning-RFT's three key advantages: (1) Performance Enhancement: achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple tasks, outperforming most mainstream open-source and proprietary models; (2) Generalization Superiority: consistently maintaining robust performance across diverse tasks and domains, outperforming alternative training paradigms; (3) Data Efficiency: excelling in few-shot learning scenarios while surpassing full-dataset SFT baselines. Project website: https://tanhuajie.github.io/ReasonRFT

Paperid: 1037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20301.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language Bottleneck Models (LBMs) are proposed to achieve interpretable image recognition by classifying images based on textual concept bottlenecks. However, current LBMs simply list all concepts together as the bottleneck layer, leading to the spurious cue inference problem and cannot generalized to unseen classes. To address these limitations, we propose the Attribute-formed Language Bottleneck Model (ALBM). ALBM organizes concepts in the attribute-formed class-specific space, where concepts are descriptions of specific attributes for specific classes. In this way, ALBM can avoid the spurious cue inference problem by classifying solely based on the essential concepts of each class. In addition, the cross-class unified attribute set also ensures that the concept spaces of different classes have strong correlations, as a result, the learned concept classifier can be easily generalized to unseen classes. Moreover, to further improve interpretability, we propose Visual Attribute Prompt Learning (VAPL) to extract visual features on fine-grained attributes. Furthermore, to avoid labor-intensive concept annotation, we propose the Description, Summary, and Supplement (DSS) strategy to automatically generate high-quality concept sets with a complete and precise attribute. Extensive experiments on 9 widely used few-shot benchmarks demonstrate the interpretability, transferability, and performance of our approach. The code and collected concept sets are available at https://github.com/tiggers23/ALBM.

Paperid: 1038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20220.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Category-level 3D/6D pose estimation is a crucial step towards comprehensive 3D scene understanding, which would enable a broad range of applications in robotics and embodied AI. Recent works explored neural mesh models that approach a range of 2D and 3D tasks from an analysis-by-synthesis perspective. Despite the largely enhanced robustness to partial occlusion and domain shifts, these methods depended heavily on 3D annotations for part-contrastive learning, which confines them to a narrow set of categories and hinders efficient scaling. In this work, we present DINeMo, a novel neural mesh model that is trained with no 3D annotations by leveraging pseudo-correspondence obtained from large visual foundation models. We adopt a bidirectional pseudo-correspondence generation method, which produce pseudo correspondence utilize both local appearance features and global context information. Experimental results on car datasets demonstrate that our DINeMo outperforms previous zero- and few-shot 3D pose estimation by a wide margin, narrowing the gap with fully-supervised methods by 67.3%. Our DINeMo also scales effectively and efficiently when incorporating more unlabeled images during training, which demonstrate the advantages over supervised learning methods that rely on 3D annotations. Our project page is available at https://analysis-by-synthesis.github.io/DINeMo/.

Paperid: 1039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19739.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image-event joint depth estimation methods leverage complementary modalities for robust perception, yet face challenges in generalizability stemming from two factors: 1) limited annotated image-event-depth datasets causing insufficient cross-modal supervision, and 2) inherent frequency mismatches between static images and dynamic event streams with distinct spatiotemporal patterns, leading to ineffective feature fusion. To address this dual challenge, we propose Frequency-decoupled Unified Self-supervised Encoder (FUSE) with two synergistic components: The Parameter-efficient Self-supervised Transfer (PST) establishes cross-modal knowledge transfer through latent space alignment with image foundation models, effectively mitigating data scarcity by enabling joint encoding without depth ground truth. Complementing this, we propose the Frequency-Decoupled Fusion module (FreDFuse) to explicitly decouple high-frequency edge features from low-frequency structural components, resolving modality-specific frequency mismatches through physics-aware fusion. This combined approach enables FUSE to construct a universal image-event encoder that only requires lightweight decoder adaptation for target datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 14% and 24.9% improvements in Abs.Rel on MVSEC and DENSE datasets. The framework exhibits remarkable zero-shot adaptability to challenging scenarios including extreme lighting and motion blur, significantly advancing real-world deployment capabilities. The source code for our method is publicly available at: https://github.com/sunpihai-up/FUSE

Paperid: 1040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19311.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This study addresses the technical bottlenecks in handling long text and the "hallucination" issue caused by insufficient short text information in remote sensing vision-language foundation models (VLFM). We propose a novel vision-language foundation model, LRSCLIP, and a multimodal dataset, LRS2M. The main contributions are as follows: (1) By integrating multi-source remote sensing data and adopting a large language model labeling strategy, we construct the LRS2M dataset, which contains 2 million image-text pairs, providing both short and long texts for the first time, thus solving the problem of semantic granularity limitations in existing datasets; (2) The design of the LRSCLIP architecture based on Long-CLIP's KPS module, which extends CLIP's text processing capacity and achieves fine-grained cross-modal feature alignment through a dual-text loss weighting mechanism. Experimental results show that LRSCLIP improves retrieval accuracy by 10\%-20\% over the Long-CLIP baseline in the zero-shot long-text cross-modal retrieval task. For the zero-shot short-text cross-modal retrieval task, LRSCLIP achieves improvements over the current best model, GeoRSCLIP, with increases of 0.17\%, 0.67\%, and 0.92\% in Text to Image R@1, Image to Text R@1, and mR on RSITMD, respectively, and 0.04\%, 2.93\%, and 1.28\% on RSICD. In the zero-shot image classification task (average accuracy=75.75\%) and semantic localization task (Rmi=0.7653), LRSCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results validate the dual advantages of fine-grained semantic understanding and global feature matching in LRSCLIP. This work provides a new benchmark model and data support for remote sensing multimodal learning. The related code has been open source and is available at https://github.com/MitsuiChen14/LRSCLIP.

Paperid: 1041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19207.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a novel method for reconstructing personalized 3D human avatars with realistic animation from only a few images. Due to the large variations in body shapes, poses, and cloth types, existing methods mostly require hours of per-subject optimization during inference, which limits their practical applications. In contrast, we learn a universal prior from over a thousand clothed humans to achieve instant feedforward generation and zero-shot generalization. Specifically, instead of rigging the avatar with shared skinning weights, we jointly infer personalized avatar shape, skinning weights, and pose-dependent deformations, which effectively improves overall geometric fidelity and reduces deformation artifacts. Moreover, to normalize pose variations and resolve coupled ambiguity between canonical shapes and skinning weights, we design a 3D canonicalization process to produce pixel-aligned initial conditions, which helps to reconstruct fine-grained geometric details. We then propose a multi-frame feature aggregation to robustly reduce artifacts introduced in canonicalization and fuse a plausible avatar preserving person-specific identities. Finally, we train the model in an end-to-end framework on a large-scale capture dataset, which contains diverse human subjects paired with high-quality 3D scans. Extensive experiments show that our method generates more authentic reconstruction and animation than state-of-the-arts, and can be directly generalized to inputs from casually taken phone photos. Project page and code is available at https://github.com/rongakowang/FRESA.

Paperid: 1042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a target-aware video diffusion model that generates videos from an input image in which an actor interacts with a specified target while performing a desired action. The target is defined by a segmentation mask and the desired action is described via a text prompt. Unlike existing controllable image-to-video diffusion models that often rely on dense structural or motion cues to guide the actor's movements toward the target, our target-aware model requires only a simple mask to indicate the target, leveraging the generalization capabilities of pretrained models to produce plausible actions. This makes our method particularly effective for human-object interaction (HOI) scenarios, where providing precise action guidance is challenging, and further enables the use of video diffusion models for high-level action planning in applications such as robotics. We build our target-aware model by extending a baseline model to incorporate the target mask as an additional input. To enforce target awareness, we introduce a special token that encodes the target's spatial information within the text prompt. We then fine-tune the model with our curated dataset using a novel cross-attention loss that aligns the cross-attention maps associated with this token with the input target mask. To further improve performance, we selectively apply this loss to the most semantically relevant transformer blocks and attention regions. Experimental results show that our target-aware model outperforms existing solutions in generating videos where actors interact accurately with the specified targets. We further demonstrate its efficacy in two downstream applications: video content creation and zero-shot 3D HOI motion synthesis.

Paperid: 1043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18948.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current generative models, such as autoregressive and diffusion approaches, decompose high-dimensional data distribution learning into a series of simpler subtasks. However, inherent conflicts arise during the joint optimization of these subtasks, and existing solutions fail to resolve such conflicts without sacrificing efficiency or scalability. We propose a novel equivariant image modeling framework that inherently aligns optimization targets across subtasks by leveraging the translation invariance of natural visual signals. Our method introduces (1) column-wise tokenization which enhances translational symmetry along the horizontal axis, and (2) windowed causal attention which enforces consistent contextual relationships across positions. Evaluated on class-conditioned ImageNet generation at 256x256 resolution, our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art AR models while using fewer computational resources. Systematic analysis demonstrates that enhanced equivariance reduces inter-task conflicts, significantly improving zero-shot generalization and enabling ultra-long image synthesis. This work establishes the first framework for task-aligned decomposition in generative modeling, offering insights into efficient parameter sharing and conflict-free optimization. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/drx-code/EquivariantModeling.

Paperid: 1044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18794.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have noticeably advanced photo-realistic novel view synthesis using images from densely spaced camera viewpoints. However, these methods struggle in few-shot scenarios due to limited supervision. In this paper, we present NexusGS, a 3DGS-based approach that enhances novel view synthesis from sparse-view images by directly embedding depth information into point clouds, without relying on complex manual regularizations. Exploiting the inherent epipolar geometry of 3DGS, our method introduces a novel point cloud densification strategy that initializes 3DGS with a dense point cloud, reducing randomness in point placement while preventing over-smoothing and overfitting. Specifically, NexusGS comprises three key steps: Epipolar Depth Nexus, Flow-Resilient Depth Blending, and Flow-Filtered Depth Pruning. These steps leverage optical flow and camera poses to compute accurate depth maps, while mitigating the inaccuracies often associated with optical flow. By incorporating epipolar depth priors, NexusGS ensures reliable dense point cloud coverage and supports stable 3DGS training under sparse-view conditions. Experiments demonstrate that NexusGS significantly enhances depth accuracy and rendering quality, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin. Furthermore, we validate the superiority of our generated point clouds by substantially boosting the performance of competing methods. Project page: https://usmizuki.github.io/NexusGS/.

Paperid: 1045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18339.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) enables neural network compression without original training data, making it a promising solution for restricted data access scenarios. To compensate for the lack of data, recent ZSQ methods typically rely on synthetic inputs generated from the full-precision model. However, these synthetic inputs often lead to activation distortion, especially under low-bit settings. To mitigate this, existing methods typically employ per-channel scaling, but they still struggle due to the severe computational overhead during the accumulation process. To overcome this critical bottleneck, we propose GranQ, a novel activation quantization framework that introduces an efficient pre-scaling strategy. Unlike conventional channel-wise methods that repeatedly perform scaling operations during accumulation, GranQ applies scaling factors in a pre-scaling step through fully vectorized computation, eliminating runtime scaling overhead. This design enables GranQ to maintain fine-grained quantization accuracy while significantly reducing computational burden, particularly in low-bit quantization settings. Extensive experiments under quantization-aware training (QAT) settings demonstrate that GranQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ZSQ methods across CIFAR and ImageNet. In particular, our method achieves up to 5.45% higher accuracy in the 3-bit setting on CIFAR-100 and even surpasses the full-precision baseline on CIFAR-10. Furthermore, GranQ achieves significant speedup in quantization latency over conventional per-channel methods, demonstrating improved efficiency. With these findings, we anticipate that GranQ will inspire future research beyond conventional ZSQ approaches centered on data generation and model fine-tuning. The official code is available at https://github.com/anonymus-orange/GranQ.

Paperid: 1046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18227.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates powerful zero-shot capabilities; however, its accuracy and robustness significantly decrease when applied to medical image segmentation. Existing methods address this issue through modality fusion, integrating textual and image information to provide more detailed priors. In this study, we argue that the granularity of text and the domain gap affect the accuracy of the priors. Furthermore, the discrepancy between high-level abstract semantics and pixel-level boundary details in images can introduce noise into the fusion process. To address this, we propose Prior-Guided SAM (PG-SAM), which employs a fine-grained modality prior aligner to leverage specialized medical knowledge for better modality alignment. The core of our method lies in efficiently addressing the domain gap with fine-grained text from a medical LLM. Meanwhile, it also enhances the priors' quality after modality alignment, ensuring more accurate segmentation. In addition, our decoder enhances the model's expressive capabilities through multi-level feature fusion and iterative mask optimizer operations, supporting unprompted learning. We also propose a unified pipeline that effectively supplies high-quality semantic information to SAM. Extensive experiments on the Synapse dataset demonstrate that the proposed PG-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is released at https://github.com/logan-0623/PG-SAM.

Paperid: 1047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18033.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In Omnimatte, one aims to decompose a given video into semantically meaningful layers, including the background and individual objects along with their associated effects, such as shadows and reflections. Existing methods often require extensive training or costly self-supervised optimization. In this paper, we present OmnimatteZero, a training-free approach that leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained video diffusion models for omnimatte. It can remove objects from videos, extract individual object layers along with their effects, and composite those objects onto new videos. These are accomplished by adapting zero-shot image inpainting techniques for video object removal, a task they fail to handle effectively out-of-the-box. To overcome this, we introduce temporal and spatial attention guidance modules that steer the diffusion process for accurate object removal and temporally consistent background reconstruction. We further show that self-attention maps capture information about the object and its footprints and use them to inpaint the object's effects, leaving a clean background. Additionally, through simple latent arithmetic, object layers can be isolated and recombined seamlessly with new video layers to produce new videos. Evaluations show that OmnimatteZero not only achieves superior performance in terms of background reconstruction but also sets a new record for the fastest Omnimatte approach, achieving real-time performance with minimal frame runtime.

Paperid: 1048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17885.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automating software vulnerability detection (SVD) remains a critical challenge in an era of increasingly complex and interdependent software systems. Despite significant advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code analysis, prevailing evaluation methodologies often lack the \textbf{context-aware robustness} necessary to capture real-world intricacies and cross-component interactions. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{VulnSage}, a comprehensive evaluation framework and a dataset curated from diverse, large-scale open-source system software projects developed in C/C++. Unlike prior datasets, it leverages a heuristic noise pre-filtering approach combined with LLM-based reasoning to ensure a representative and minimally noisy spectrum of vulnerabilities. The framework supports multi-granular analysis across function, file, and inter-function levels and employs four diverse zero-shot prompt strategies: Baseline, Chain-of-Thought, Think, and Think & Verify. Through this evaluation, we uncover that structured reasoning prompts substantially improve LLM performance, with Think & Verify reducing ambiguous responses from 20.3% to 9.1% while increasing accuracy. We further demonstrate that code-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose alternatives, with performance varying significantly across vulnerability types, revealing that no single approach universally excels across all security contexts. Link to dataset and codes: https://github.com/Erroristotle/VulnSage.git

Paperid: 1049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17544.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We formulate the motor system of an interactive avatar as a generative motion model that can drive the body to move through 3D space in a perpetual, realistic, controllable, and responsive manner. Although human motion generation has been extensively studied, many existing methods lack the responsiveness and realism of real human movements. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models, we propose PRIMAL, which is learned with a two-stage paradigm. In the pretraining stage, the model learns body movements from a large number of sub-second motion segments, providing a generative foundation from which more complex motions are built. This training is fully unsupervised without annotations. Given a single-frame initial state during inference, the pretrained model not only generates unbounded, realistic, and controllable motion, but also enables the avatar to be responsive to induced impulses in real time. In the adaptation phase, we employ a novel ControlNet-like adaptor to fine-tune the base model efficiently, adapting it to new tasks such as few-shot personalized action generation and spatial target reaching. Evaluations show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We leverage the model to create a real-time character animation system in Unreal Engine that feels highly responsive and natural. Code, models, and more results are available at: https://yz-cnsdqz.github.io/eigenmotion/PRIMAL

Paperid: 1050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17309.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Bimanual robotic manipulation provides significant versatility, but also presents an inherent challenge due to the complexity involved in the spatial and temporal coordination between two hands. Existing works predominantly focus on attaining human-level manipulation skills for robotic hands, yet little attention has been paid to task planning on long-horizon timescales. With their outstanding in-context learning and zero-shot generation abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied and grounded in diverse robotic embodiments to facilitate task planning. However, LLMs still suffer from errors in long-horizon reasoning and from hallucinations in complex robotic tasks, lacking a guarantee of logical correctness when generating the plan. Previous works, such as LLM+P, extended LLMs with symbolic planners. However, none have been successfully applied to bimanual robots. New challenges inevitably arise in bimanual manipulation, necessitating not only effective task decomposition but also efficient task allocation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces LLM+MAP, a bimanual planning framework that integrates LLM reasoning and multi-agent planning, automating effective and efficient bimanual task planning. We conduct simulated experiments on various long-horizon manipulation tasks of differing complexity. Our method is built using GPT-4o as the backend, and we compare its performance against plans generated directly by LLMs, including GPT-4o, V3 and also recent strong reasoning models o1 and R1. By analyzing metrics such as planning time, success rate, group debits, and planning-step reduction rate, we demonstrate the superior performance of LLM+MAP, while also providing insights into robotic reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/Kchu/LLM-MAP.

Paperid: 1051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17238.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we address the challenge of few-shot classification in histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) by utilizing foundational vision-language models (VLMs) and slide-level prompt learning. Given the gigapixel scale of WSIs, conventional multiple instance learning (MIL) methods rely on aggregation functions to derive slide-level (bag-level) predictions from patch representations, which require extensive bag-level labels for training. In contrast, VLM-based approaches excel at aligning visual embeddings of patches with candidate class text prompts but lack essential pathological prior knowledge. Our method distinguishes itself by utilizing pathological prior knowledge from language models to identify crucial local tissue types (patches) for WSI classification, integrating this within a VLM-based MIL framework. Our approach effectively aligns patch images with tissue types, and we fine-tune our model via prompt learning using only a few labeled WSIs per category. Experimentation on real-world pathological WSI datasets and ablation studies highlight our method's superior performance over existing MIL- and VLM-based methods in few-shot WSI classification tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LTS5/SLIP.

Paperid: 1052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17109.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) involves diverse tasks with a broad range of visual content manipulation intent across domain, scene, object, and attribute. The key challenge for ZS-CIR tasks is to modify a reference image according to manipulation text to accurately retrieve a target image, especially when the reference image is missing essential target content. In this paper, we propose a novel prediction-based mapping network, named PrediCIR, to adaptively predict the missing target visual content in reference images in the latent space before mapping for accurate ZS-CIR. Specifically, a world view generation module first constructs a source view by omitting certain visual content of a target view, coupled with an action that includes the manipulation intent derived from existing image-caption pairs. Then, a target content prediction module trains a world model as a predictor to adaptively predict the missing visual information guided by user intention in manipulating text at the latent space. The two modules map an image with the predicted relevant information to a pseudo-word token without extra supervision. Our model shows strong generalization ability on six ZS-CIR tasks. It obtains consistent and significant performance boosts ranging from 1.73% to 4.45% over the best methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on ZS-CIR. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pter61/predicir.

Paperid: 1053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17095.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent 3D face editing methods using masks have produced high-quality edited images by leveraging Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Despite their impressive performance, existing methods often provide limited user control due to the use of pre-trained segmentation masks. To utilize masks with a desired layout, an extensive training dataset is required, which is challenging to gather. We present FFaceNeRF, a NeRF-based face editing technique that can overcome the challenge of limited user control due to the use of fixed mask layouts. Our method employs a geometry adapter with feature injection, allowing for effective manipulation of geometry attributes. Additionally, we adopt latent mixing for tri-plane augmentation, which enables training with a few samples. This facilitates rapid model adaptation to desired mask layouts, crucial for applications in fields like personalized medical imaging or creative face editing. Our comparative evaluations demonstrate that FFaceNeRF surpasses existing mask based face editing methods in terms of flexibility, control, and generated image quality, paving the way for future advancements in customized and high-fidelity 3D face editing. The code is available on the {\href{https://kwanyun.github.io/FFaceNeRF_page/}{project-page}}.

Paperid: 1054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16718.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Speaker verification is a typical zero-shot learning task, where inference of unseen classes is performed by comparing embeddings of test instances to known examples. The models performing inference must hence naturally generate embeddings that cluster same-class instances compactly, while maintaining separation across classes. In order to learn to do so, they are typically trained on a large number of classes (speakers), often using specialized losses. However real-world speaker datasets often lack the class diversity needed to effectively learn this in a generalizable manner. We introduce CAARMA, a class augmentation framework that addresses this problem by generating synthetic classes through data mixing in the embedding space, expanding the number of training classes. To ensure the authenticity of the synthetic classes we adopt a novel adversarial refinement mechanism that minimizes categorical distinctions between synthetic and real classes. We evaluate CAARMA on multiple speaker verification tasks, as well as other representative zero-shot comparison-based speech analysis tasks and obtain consistent improvements: our framework demonstrates a significant improvement of 8\% over all baseline models. The code is available at: https://github.com/massabaali7/CAARMA/

Paperid: 1055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16531.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep networks for electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding are often only trained to solve one specific task, such as pathology or age decoding. A more general task-agnostic approach is to train deep networks to match a (clinical) EEG recording to its corresponding textual medical report and vice versa. This approach was pioneered in the computer vision domain matching images and their text captions and subsequently allowed to do successful zero-shot decoding using textual class prompts. In this work, we follow this approach and develop a contrastive learning framework, EEG-CLIP, that aligns the EEG time series and the descriptions of the corresponding clinical text in a shared embedding space. We investigated its potential for versatile EEG decoding, evaluating performance in a range of few-shot and zero-shot settings. Overall, we show that EEG-CLIP manages to non-trivially align text and EEG representations. Our work presents a promising approach to learn general EEG representations, which could enable easier analyses of diverse decoding questions through zero-shot decoding or training task-specific models from fewer training examples. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/tidiane-camaret/EEGClip

Paperid: 1056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16282.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalized few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation (GFS-PCS) adapts models to new classes with few support samples while retaining base class segmentation. Existing GFS-PCS methods enhance prototypes via interacting with support or query features but remain limited by sparse knowledge from few-shot samples. Meanwhile, 3D vision-language models (3D VLMs), generalizing across open-world novel classes, contain rich but noisy novel class knowledge. In this work, we introduce a GFS-PCS framework that synergizes dense but noisy pseudo-labels from 3D VLMs with precise yet sparse few-shot samples to maximize the strengths of both, named GFS-VL. Specifically, we present a prototype-guided pseudo-label selection to filter low-quality regions, followed by an adaptive infilling strategy that combines knowledge from pseudo-label contexts and few-shot samples to adaptively label the filtered, unlabeled areas. Additionally, we design a novel-base mix strategy to embed few-shot samples into training scenes, preserving essential context for improved novel class learning. Moreover, recognizing the limited diversity in current GFS-PCS benchmarks, we introduce two challenging benchmarks with diverse novel classes for comprehensive generalization evaluation. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework across models and datasets. Our approach and benchmarks provide a solid foundation for advancing GFS-PCS in the real world. The code is at https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/GFS-VL

Paperid: 1057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16120.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multi-species animal pose estimation has emerged as a challenging yet critical task, hindered by substantial visual diversity and uncertainty. This paper challenges the problem by efficient prompt learning for Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models, \textit{e.g.} CLIP, aiming to resolve the cross-species generalization problem. At the core of the solution lies in the prompt designing, probabilistic prompt modeling and cross-modal adaptation, thereby enabling prompts to compensate for cross-modal information and effectively overcome large data variances under unbalanced data distribution. To this end, we propose a novel probabilistic prompting approach to fully explore textual descriptions, which could alleviate the diversity issues caused by long-tail property and increase the adaptability of prompts on unseen category instance. Specifically, we first introduce a set of learnable prompts and propose a diversity loss to maintain distinctiveness among prompts, thus representing diverse image attributes. Diverse textual probabilistic representations are sampled and used as the guidance for the pose estimation. Subsequently, we explore three different cross-modal fusion strategies at spatial level to alleviate the adverse impacts of visual uncertainty. Extensive experiments on multi-species animal pose benchmarks show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code is available at https://github.com/Raojiyong/PPAP.

Paperid: 1058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16067.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bokeh rendering methods play a key role in creating the visually appealing, softly blurred backgrounds seen in professional photography. While recent learning-based approaches show promising results, generating realistic Bokeh with variable strength remains challenging. Existing methods require additional inputs and suffer from unrealistic Bokeh reproduction due to reliance on synthetic data. In this work, we propose Bokehlicious, a highly efficient network that provides intuitive control over Bokeh strength through an Aperture-Aware Attention mechanism, mimicking the physical lens aperture. To further address the lack of high-quality real-world data, we present RealBokeh, a novel dataset featuring 23,000 high-resolution (24-MP) images captured by professional photographers, covering diverse scenes with varied aperture and focal length settings. Evaluations on both our new RealBokeh and established Bokeh rendering benchmarks show that Bokehlicious consistently outperforms SOTA methods while significantly reducing computational cost and exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization. Our method and dataset further extend to defocus deblurring, achieving competitive results on the RealDOF benchmark. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/TimSeizinger/Bokehlicious

Paperid: 1059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15973.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained on tremendous image-text pairs, vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated promising zero-shot generalization across numerous image-based tasks. However, extending these capabilities to video tasks remains challenging due to limited labeled video data and high training costs. Recent video prompting methods attempt to adapt CLIP for video tasks by introducing learnable prompts, but they typically rely on a single static prompt for all video sequences, overlooking the diverse temporal dynamics and spatial variations that exist across frames. This limitation significantly hinders the model's ability to capture essential temporal information for effective video understanding. To address this, we propose an integrated Spatial-TempOral dynamic Prompting (STOP) model which consists of two complementary modules, the intra-frame spatial prompting and inter-frame temporal prompting. Our intra-frame spatial prompts are designed to adaptively highlight discriminative regions within each frame by leveraging intra-frame attention and temporal variation, allowing the model to focus on areas with substantial temporal dynamics and capture fine-grained spatial details. Additionally, to highlight the varying importance of frames for video understanding, we further introduce inter-frame temporal prompts, dynamically inserting prompts between frames with high temporal variance as measured by frame similarity. This enables the model to prioritize key frames and enhances its capacity to understand temporal dependencies across sequences. Extensive experiments on various video benchmarks demonstrate that STOP consistently achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2025-STOP.

Paperid: 1060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15969.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models for Earth observation (EO) typically rely on the visual spectrum of data as the only model input, thus failing to leverage the rich spectral information available in the multispectral channels recorded by satellites. Therefore, we introduce Llama3-MS-CLIP, the first vision-language model pre-trained with contrastive learning on a large-scale multispectral dataset and report on the performance gains due to the extended spectral range. Furthermore, we present the largest-to-date image-caption dataset for multispectral data, consisting of one million Sentinel-2 samples and corresponding textual descriptions generated using Llama3-LLaVA-Next and Overture Maps data. We develop a scalable captioning pipeline, which is validated by domain experts. We evaluate Llama3-MS-CLIP on multispectral zero-shot image classification and retrieval using three datasets of varying complexity. Our results demonstrate that Llama3-MS-CLIP significantly outperforms other RGB-based approaches, improving classification accuracy by +6.77% on average and retrieval performance by +4.63% mAP compared to the second-best model. Our results emphasize the relevance of multispectral vision-language learning. The image-caption dataset, code, and model weights are available at https://github.com/IBM/MS-CLIP.

Paperid: 1061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15851.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Animatable head avatar generation typically requires extensive data for training. To reduce the data requirements, a natural solution is to leverage existing data-free static avatar generation methods, such as pre-trained diffusion models with score distillation sampling (SDS), which align avatars with pseudo ground-truth outputs from the diffusion model. However, directly distilling 4D avatars from video diffusion often leads to over-smooth results due to spatial and temporal inconsistencies in the generated video. To address this issue, we propose Zero-1-to-A, a robust method that synthesizes a spatial and temporal consistency dataset for 4D avatar reconstruction using the video diffusion model. Specifically, Zero-1-to-A iteratively constructs video datasets and optimizes animatable avatars in a progressive manner, ensuring that avatar quality increases smoothly and consistently throughout the learning process. This progressive learning involves two stages: (1) Spatial Consistency Learning fixes expressions and learns from front-to-side views, and (2) Temporal Consistency Learning fixes views and learns from relaxed to exaggerated expressions, generating 4D avatars in a simple-to-complex manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Zero-1-to-A improves fidelity, animation quality, and rendering speed compared to existing diffusion-based methods, providing a solution for lifelike avatar creation. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhenglinZhou/Zero-1-to-A.

Paperid: 1062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15683.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bi-temporal change detection at scale based on Very High Resolution (VHR) images is crucial for Earth monitoring. This remains poorly addressed so far: methods either require large volumes of annotated data (semantic case), or are limited to restricted datasets (binary set-ups). Most approaches do not exhibit the versatility required for temporal and spatial adaptation: simplicity in architecture design and pretraining on realistic and comprehensive datasets. Synthetic datasets are the key solution but still fail to handle complex and diverse scenes. In this paper, we present HySCDG a generative pipeline for creating a large hybrid semantic change detection dataset that contains both real VHR images and inpainted ones, along with land cover semantic map at both dates and the change map. Being semantically and spatially guided, HySCDG generates realistic images, leading to a comprehensive and hybrid transfer-proof dataset FSC-180k. We evaluate FSC-180k on five change detection cases (binary and semantic), from zero-shot to mixed and sequential training, and also under low data regime training. Experiments demonstrate that pretraining on our hybrid dataset leads to a significant performance boost, outperforming SyntheWorld, a fully synthetic dataset, in every configuration. All codes, models, and data are available here: https://yb23.github.io/projects/cywd/

Paperid: 1063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15617.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Traditional transformer-based semantic segmentation relies on quantized embeddings. However, our analysis reveals that autoencoder accuracy on segmentation mask using quantized embeddings (e.g. VQ-VAE) is 8% lower than continuous-valued embeddings (e.g. KL-VAE). Motivated by this, we propose a continuous-valued embedding framework for semantic segmentation. By reformulating semantic mask generation as a continuous image-to-embedding diffusion process, our approach eliminates the need for discrete latent representations while preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic details. Our key contribution includes a diffusion-guided autoregressive transformer that learns a continuous semantic embedding space by modeling long-range dependencies in image features. Our framework contains a unified architecture combining a VAE encoder for continuous feature extraction, a diffusion-guided transformer for conditioned embedding generation, and a VAE decoder for semantic mask reconstruction. Our setting facilitates zero-shot domain adaptation capabilities enabled by the continuity of the embedding space. Experiments across diverse datasets (e.g., Cityscapes and domain-shifted variants) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness to distribution shifts, including adverse weather (e.g., fog, snow) and viewpoint variations. Our model also exhibits strong noise resilience, achieving robust performance ($\approx$ 95% AP compared to baseline) under gaussian noise, moderate motion blur, and moderate brightness/contrast variations, while experiencing only a moderate impact ($\approx$ 90% AP compared to baseline) from 50% salt and pepper noise, saturation and hue shifts. Code available: https://github.com/mahmed10/CAMSS.git

Paperid: 1064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15426.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at various image-related tasks, they encounter challenges in precisely aligning coordinates with spatial information within images, particularly in position-aware tasks such as visual grounding. This limitation arises from two key factors. First, MLLMs lack explicit spatial references, making it difficult to associate textual descriptions with precise image locations. Second, their feature extraction processes prioritize global context over fine-grained spatial details, leading to weak localization capability. To address these issues, we introduce VPP-LLaVA, an MLLM enhanced with Visual Position Prompt (VPP) to improve its grounding capability. VPP-LLaVA integrates two complementary mechanisms: the global VPP overlays a learnable, axis-like tensor onto the input image to provide structured spatial cues, while the local VPP incorporates position-aware queries to support fine-grained localization.To effectively train our model with spatial guidance, we further introduce VPP-SFT, a curated dataset of 0.6M high-quality visual grounding samples. Designed in a compact format, it enables efficient training and is significantly smaller than datasets used by other MLLMs (e.g., ~21M samples in MiniGPT-v2), yet still provides a strong performance boost. The resulting model, VPP-LLaVA, not only achieves state-of-the-art results on standard visual grounding benchmarks but also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to challenging unseen datasets. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WayneTomas/VPP-LLaVA.

Paperid: 1065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15106.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Three-dimensional local descriptors are crucial for encoding geometric surface properties, making them essential for various point cloud understanding tasks. Among these descriptors, GeDi has demonstrated strong zero-shot 6D pose estimation capabilities but remains computationally impractical for real-world applications due to its expensive inference process. Can we retain GeDi's effectiveness while significantly improving its efficiency? In this paper, we explore this question by introducing a knowledge distillation framework that trains an efficient student model to regress local descriptors from a GeDi teacher. Our key contributions include: an efficient large-scale training procedure that ensures robustness to occlusions and partial observations while operating under compute and storage constraints, and a novel loss formulation that handles weak supervision from non-distinctive teacher descriptors. We validate our approach on five BOP Benchmark datasets and demonstrate a significant reduction in inference time while maintaining competitive performance with existing methods, bringing zero-shot 6D pose estimation closer to real-time feasibility. Project Website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/dGeDi/

Paperid: 1066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15060.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While representation learning and generative modeling seek to understand visual data, unifying both domains remains unexplored. Recent Unified Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods have started to bridge the gap between both paradigms. However, they rely solely on semantic token reconstruction, which requires an external tokenizer during training -- introducing a significant overhead. In this work, we introduce Sorcen, a novel unified SSL framework, incorporating a synergic Contrastive-Reconstruction objective. Our Contrastive objective, "Echo Contrast", leverages the generative capabilities of Sorcen, eliminating the need for additional image crops or augmentations during training. Sorcen "generates" an echo sample in the semantic token space, forming the contrastive positive pair. Sorcen operates exclusively on precomputed tokens, eliminating the need for an online token transformation during training, thereby significantly reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1k demonstrate that Sorcen outperforms the previous Unified SSL SoTA by 0.4%, 1.48 FID, 1.76%, and 1.53% on linear probing, unconditional image generation, few-shot learning, and transfer learning, respectively, while being 60.8% more efficient. Additionally, Sorcen surpasses previous single-crop MIM SoTA in linear probing and achieves SoTA performance in unconditional image generation, highlighting significant improvements and breakthroughs in Unified SSL models.

Paperid: 1067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14958.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot video object segmentation aims to reduce annotation costs; however, existing methods still require abundant dense frame annotations for training, which are scarce in the medical domain. We investigate an extremely low-data regime that utilizes annotations from only a few video frames and leverages existing labeled images to minimize costly video annotations. Specifically, we propose a two-phase framework. First, we learn a few-shot segmentation model using labeled images. Subsequently, to improve performance without full supervision, we introduce a spatiotemporal consistency relearning approach on medical videos that enforces consistency between consecutive frames. Constraints are also enforced between the image model and relearning model at both feature and prediction levels. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation methods. Our model bridges the gap between abundant annotated medical images and scarce, sparsely labeled medical videos to achieve strong video segmentation performance in this low data regime. Code is available at https://github.com/MedAITech/RAB.

Paperid: 1068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14911.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emergence of vision-language models has transformed medical AI, enabling unprecedented advances in diagnostic capability and clinical applications. However, progress in dermatology has lagged behind other medical domains due to the lack of standard image-text pairs. Existing dermatological datasets are limited in both scale and depth, offering only single-label annotations across a narrow range of diseases instead of rich textual descriptions, and lacking the crucial clinical context needed for real-world applications. To address these limitations, we present Derm1M, the first large-scale vision-language dataset for dermatology, comprising 1,029,761 image-text pairs. Built from diverse educational resources and structured around a standard ontology collaboratively developed by experts, Derm1M provides comprehensive coverage for over 390 skin conditions across four hierarchical levels and 130 clinical concepts with rich contextual information such as medical history, symptoms, and skin tone. To demonstrate Derm1M potential in advancing both AI research and clinical application, we pretrained a series of CLIP-like models, collectively called DermLIP, on this dataset. The DermLIP family significantly outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models on eight diverse datasets across multiple tasks, including zero-shot skin disease classification, clinical and artifacts concept identification, few-shot/full-shot learning, and cross-modal retrieval. Our dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanYan1/Derm1M upon acceptance.

Paperid: 1069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14809.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics may be hard to specify, human experts can often provide high-fidelity abstractions that capture the essential high-level structure of a task and user preferences in the target environment. Existing hierarchical approaches often target discrete settings and do not generalize across tasks. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach that addresses these limitations by dynamically planning over the expert-specified abstraction to generate subgoals to learn a goal-conditioned policy. To overcome the challenges of learning under sparse rewards, we shape the reward based on the optimal state value in the abstract model. This structured decision-making process enhances sample efficiency and facilitates zero-shot generalization. Our empirical evaluation on a suite of procedurally generated continuous control environments demonstrates that our approach outperforms existing hierarchical reinforcement learning methods in terms of sample efficiency, task completion rate, scalability to complex tasks, and generalization to novel scenarios.

Paperid: 1070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14607.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce MapBench-the first dataset specifically designed for human-readable, pixel-based map-based outdoor navigation, curated from complex path finding scenarios. MapBench comprises over 1600 pixel space map path finding problems from 100 diverse maps. In MapBench, LVLMs generate language-based navigation instructions given a map image and a query with beginning and end landmarks. For each map, MapBench provides Map Space Scene Graph (MSSG) as an indexing data structure to convert between natural language and evaluate LVLM-generated results. We demonstrate that MapBench significantly challenges state-of-the-art LVLMs both zero-shot prompting and a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) augmented reasoning framework that decomposes map navigation into sequential cognitive processes. Our evaluation of both open-source and closed-source LVLMs underscores the substantial difficulty posed by MapBench, revealing critical limitations in their spatial reasoning and structured decision-making capabilities. We release all the code and dataset in https://github.com/taco-group/MapBench.

Paperid: 1071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14443.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.

Paperid: 1072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14258.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces JuDGE (Judgment Document Generation Evaluation), a novel benchmark for evaluating the performance of judgment document generation in the Chinese legal system. We define the task as generating a complete legal judgment document from the given factual description of the case. To facilitate this benchmark, we construct a comprehensive dataset consisting of factual descriptions from real legal cases, paired with their corresponding full judgment documents, which serve as the ground truth for evaluating the quality of generated documents. This dataset is further augmented by two external legal corpora that provide additional legal knowledge for the task: one comprising statutes and regulations, and the other consisting of a large collection of past judgment documents. In collaboration with legal professionals, we establish a comprehensive automated evaluation framework to assess the quality of generated judgment documents across various dimensions. We evaluate various baseline approaches, including few-shot in-context learning, fine-tuning, and a multi-source retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach, using both general and legal-domain LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that, while RAG approaches can effectively improve performance in this task, there is still substantial room for further improvement. All the codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/oneal2000/JuDGE.

Paperid: 1073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13988.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Leading large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning-intensive tasks, such as standardized educational testing. However, they often require extensive training in low-resource settings with inaccessible infrastructure. Small or compact models, though more efficient, frequently lack sufficient support for underrepresented languages, leaving a performance gap in critical domains. This work explores the potential of parameter-efficient fine-tuning of compact open-weight language models to handle reasoning-intensive tasks in the underrepresented Ukrainian language, building on the findings of the ZNO-Eval benchmark. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLaMA 3.1 (8 billion parameters), LLaMA 3.2 (3 billion parameters), and Gemma 2 (9 billion parameters) models on chain-of-thought solutions resulted in a modest test score improvement of up to 17.4% on complex matching tasks and 1.6% overall compared to tuning on answer letters alone, offering enhanced interpretability and robustness. In addition, the proposed tuning method with joint task topic and step-by-step solution generation outperforms standard chain-of-thought tuning in matching tasks and provides a 5.4% gain over the best LLaMA 3.2 model due to guiding the model to recall and apply domain-relevant information. Contrasting obtained results with zero-shot evaluations of leading open-weight and proprietary models such as Qwen, DeepSeek R1, OpenAI o1 and o3, Gemini, and Claude, highlight that fine-tuning LLaMA and Gemma models with 2,032 step-by-step solutions and 20 to 50 million trainable parameters on a single A100 GPU lets them outperform GPT-4o mini, Mistral Large, and larger open-weight models. This research also evaluates how merging the quantized adapter with the base model influences the generation quality. Source code and tuned models are available at https://github.com/NLPForUA/ZNO.

Paperid: 1074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13836.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-driven motion generation has advanced significantly with the rise of denoising diffusion models. However, previous methods often oversimplify representations for the skeletal joints, temporal frames, and textual words, limiting their ability to fully capture the information within each modality and their interactions. Moreover, when using pre-trained models for downstream tasks, such as editing, they typically require additional efforts, including manual interventions, optimization, or fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce a skeleton-aware latent diffusion (SALAD), a model that explicitly captures the intricate inter-relationships between joints, frames, and words. Furthermore, by leveraging cross-attention maps produced during the generation process, we enable attention-based zero-shot text-driven motion editing using a pre-trained SALAD model, requiring no additional user input beyond text prompts. Our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in terms of text-motion alignment without compromising generation quality, and demonstrates practical versatility by providing diverse editing capabilities beyond generation. Code is available at project page.

Paperid: 1075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13588.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Methods based on diffusion backbones have recently revolutionized novel view synthesis (NVS). However, those models require pretrained 2D diffusion checkpoints (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as the basis for geometrical priors. Since such checkpoints require exorbitant amounts of data and compute to train, this greatly limits the scalability of diffusion-based NVS models. We present Next-Scale Autoregression Conditioned by View (ArchonView), a method that significantly exceeds state-of-the-art methods despite being trained from scratch with 3D rendering data only and no 2D pretraining. We achieve this by incorporating both global (pose-augmented semantics) and local (multi-scale hierarchical encodings) conditioning into a backbone based on the next-scale autoregression paradigm. Our model also exhibits robust performance even for difficult camera poses where previous methods fail, and is several times faster in inference speed compared to diffusion. We experimentally verify that performance scales with model and dataset size, and conduct extensive demonstration of our method's synthesis quality across several tasks. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Shiran-Yuan/ArchonView.

Paperid: 1076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13446.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mobile manipulation is the fundamental challenge for robotics to assist humans with diverse tasks and environments in everyday life. However, conventional mobile manipulation approaches often struggle to generalize across different tasks and environments because of the lack of large-scale training. In contrast, recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown impressive generalization capabilities, but these foundation models are developed for fixed-base manipulation tasks. Therefore, we propose an efficient policy adaptation framework named MoManipVLA to transfer pre-trained VLA models of fix-base manipulation to mobile manipulation, so that high generalization ability across tasks and environments can be achieved in mobile manipulation policy. Specifically, we utilize pre-trained VLA models to generate waypoints of the end-effector with high generalization ability. We design motion planning objectives for the mobile base and the robot arm, which aim at maximizing the physical feasibility of the trajectory. Finally, we present an efficient bi-level objective optimization framework for trajectory generation, where the upper-level optimization predicts waypoints for base movement to enhance the manipulator policy space, and the lower-level optimization selects the optimal end-effector trajectory to complete the manipulation task. In this way, MoManipVLA can adjust the position of the robot base in a zero-shot manner, thus making the waypoints predicted from the fixed-base VLA models feasible. Extensive experimental results on OVMM and the real world demonstrate that MoManipVLA achieves a 4.2% higher success rate than the state-of-the-art mobile manipulation, and only requires 50 training cost for real world deployment due to the strong generalization ability in the pre-trained VLA models.

Paperid: 1077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13347.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remote sensing novel view synthesis (NVS) offers significant potential for 3D interpretation of remote sensing scenes, with important applications in urban planning and environmental monitoring. However, remote sensing scenes frequently lack sufficient multi-view images due to acquisition constraints. While existing NVS methods tend to overfit when processing limited input views, advanced few-shot NVS methods are computationally intensive and perform sub-optimally in remote sensing scenes. This paper presents TriDF, an efficient hybrid 3D representation for fast remote sensing NVS from as few as 3 input views. Our approach decouples color and volume density information, modeling them independently to reduce the computational burden on implicit radiance fields and accelerate reconstruction. We explore the potential of the triplane representation in few-shot NVS tasks by mapping high-frequency color information onto this compact structure, and the direct optimization of feature planes significantly speeds up convergence. Volume density is modeled as continuous density fields, incorporating reference features from neighboring views through image-based rendering to compensate for limited input data. Additionally, we introduce depth-guided optimization based on point clouds, which effectively mitigates the overfitting problem in few-shot NVS. Comprehensive experiments across multiple remote sensing scenes demonstrate that our hybrid representation achieves a 30x speed increase compared to NeRF-based methods, while simultaneously improving rendering quality metrics over advanced few-shot methods (7.4% increase in PSNR, 12.2% in SSIM, and 18.7% in LPIPS). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/kanehub/TriDF

Paperid: 1078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13082.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Performing robotic grasping from a cluttered bin based on human instructions is a challenging task, as it requires understanding both the nuances of free-form language and the spatial relationships between objects. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on web-scale data, such as GPT-4o, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across both text and images. But can they truly be used for this task in a zero-shot setting? And what are their limitations? In this paper, we explore these research questions via the free-form language-based robotic grasping task, and propose a novel method, FreeGrasp, leveraging the pre-trained VLMs' world knowledge to reason about human instructions and object spatial arrangements. Our method detects all objects as keypoints and uses these keypoints to annotate marks on images, aiming to facilitate GPT-4o's zero-shot spatial reasoning. This allows our method to determine whether a requested object is directly graspable or if other objects must be grasped and removed first. Since no existing dataset is specifically designed for this task, we introduce a synthetic dataset FreeGraspData by extending the MetaGraspNetV2 dataset with human-annotated instructions and ground-truth grasping sequences. We conduct extensive analyses with both FreeGraspData and real-world validation with a gripper-equipped robotic arm, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in grasp reasoning and execution. Project website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/FreeGrasp/.

Paperid: 1079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12590.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Personalized image generation aims to produce images of user-specified concepts while enabling flexible editing. Recent training-free approaches, while exhibit higher computational efficiency than training-based methods, struggle with identity preservation, applicability, and compatibility with diffusion transformers (DiTs). In this paper, we uncover the untapped potential of DiT, where simply replacing denoising tokens with those of a reference subject achieves zero-shot subject reconstruction. This simple yet effective feature injection technique unlocks diverse scenarios, from personalization to image editing. Building upon this observation, we propose \textbf{Personalize Anything}, a training-free framework that achieves personalized image generation in DiT through: 1) timestep-adaptive token replacement that enforces subject consistency via early-stage injection and enhances flexibility through late-stage regularization, and 2) patch perturbation strategies to boost structural diversity. Our method seamlessly supports layout-guided generation, multi-subject personalization, and mask-controlled editing. Evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in identity preservation and versatility. Our work establishes new insights into DiTs while delivering a practical paradigm for efficient personalization.

Paperid: 1080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12562.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The aim of multiple object tracking (MOT) is to detect all objects in a video and bind them into multiple trajectories. Generally, this process is carried out in two steps: detecting objects and associating them across frames based on various cues and metrics. Many studies and applications adopt object appearance, also known as re-identification (ReID) features, for target matching through straightforward similarity calculation. However, we argue that this practice is overly naive and thus overlooks the unique characteristics of MOT tasks. Unlike regular re-identification tasks that strive to distinguish all potential targets in a general representation, multi-object tracking typically immerses itself in differentiating similar targets within the same video sequence. Therefore, we believe that seeking a more suitable feature representation space based on the different sample distributions of each sequence will enhance tracking performance. In this paper, we propose using history-aware transformations on ReID features to achieve more discriminative appearance representations. Specifically, we treat historical trajectory features as conditions and employ a tailored Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) to find a spatial projection matrix that maximizes the differentiation between different trajectories. Our extensive experiments reveal that this training-free projection can significantly boost feature-only trackers to achieve competitive, even superior tracking performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while also demonstrating impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal and further encourages future investigation into the importance and customization of ReID models in multiple object tracking. The code will be released at https://github.com/HELLORPG/HATReID-MOT.

Paperid: 1081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12206.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has shown impressive zero-shot performance on image classification. However, state-of-the-art methods often rely on fine-tuning techniques like prompt learning and adapter-based tuning to optimize CLIP's performance. The necessity for fine-tuning significantly limits CLIP's adaptability to novel datasets and domains. This requirement mandates substantial time and computational resources for each new dataset. To overcome this limitation, we introduce simple yet effective training-free approaches, Single-stage LMM Augmented CLIP (SLAC) and Two-stage LMM Augmented CLIP (TLAC), that leverages powerful Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), such as Gemini, for image classification. The proposed methods leverages the capabilities of pre-trained LMMs, allowing for seamless adaptation to diverse datasets and domains without the need for additional training. Our approaches involve prompting the LMM to identify objects within an image. Subsequently, the CLIP text encoder determines the image class by identifying the dataset class with the highest semantic similarity to the LLM predicted object. Our models achieved superior accuracy on 9 of 11 base-to-novel datasets, including ImageNet, SUN397, and Caltech101, while maintaining a strictly training-free paradigm. Our TLAC model achieved an overall accuracy of 83.44%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art few-shot methods by a margin of 6.75%. Compared to other training-free approaches, our TLAC method achieved 83.6% average accuracy across 13 datasets, a 9.7% improvement over the previous methods. Our Code is available at https://github.com/ans92/TLAC

Paperid: 1082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12150.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper proposes a general solution to enable point cloud recognition models to handle distribution shifts at test time. Unlike prior methods, which rely heavily on training data (often inaccessible during online inference) and are limited to recognizing a fixed set of point cloud classes predefined during training, we explore a more practical and challenging scenario: adapting the model solely based on online test data to recognize both previously seen classes and novel, unseen classes at test time. To this end, we develop \textbf{Point-Cache}, a hierarchical cache model that captures essential clues of online test samples, particularly focusing on the global structure of point clouds and their local-part details. Point-Cache, which serves as a rich 3D knowledge base, is dynamically managed to prioritize the inclusion of high-quality samples. Designed as a plug-and-play module, our method can be flexibly integrated into large multimodal 3D models to support open-vocabulary point cloud recognition. Notably, our solution operates with efficiency comparable to zero-shot inference, as it is entirely training-free. Point-Cache demonstrates substantial gains across 8 challenging benchmarks and 4 representative large 3D models, highlighting its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-Cache.

Paperid: 1083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12024.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent progress in 3D/4D scene generation emphasizes the importance of physical alignment throughout video generation and scene reconstruction. However, existing methods improve the alignment separately at each stage, making it difficult to manage subtle misalignments arising from another stage. Here, we present SteerX, a zero-shot inference-time steering method that unifies scene reconstruction into the generation process, tilting data distributions toward better geometric alignment. To this end, we introduce two geometric reward functions for 3D/4D scene generation by using pose-free feed-forward scene reconstruction models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SteerX in improving 3D/4D scene generation.

Paperid: 1084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12006.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The availability of large-scale remote sensing video data underscores the importance of high-quality interactive segmentation. However, challenges such as small object sizes, ambiguous features, and limited generalization make it difficult for current methods to achieve this goal. In this work, we propose ROS-SAM, a method designed to achieve high-quality interactive segmentation while preserving generalization across diverse remote sensing data. The ROS-SAM is built upon three key innovations: 1) LoRA-based fine-tuning, which enables efficient domain adaptation while maintaining SAM's generalization ability, 2) Enhancement of deep network layers to improve the discriminability of extracted features, thereby reducing misclassifications, and 3) Integration of global context with local boundary details in the mask decoder to generate high-quality segmentation masks. Additionally, we design the data pipeline to ensure the model learns to better handle objects at varying scales during training while focusing on high-quality predictions during inference. Experiments on remote sensing video datasets show that the redesigned data pipeline boosts the IoU by 6%, while ROS-SAM increases the IoU by 13%. Finally, when evaluated on existing remote sensing object tracking datasets, ROS-SAM demonstrates impressive zero-shot capabilities, generating masks that closely resemble manual annotations. These results confirm ROS-SAM as a powerful tool for fine-grained segmentation in remote sensing applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ShanZard/ROS-SAM.

Paperid: 1085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11509.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automatically synthesizing figures from text captions is a compelling capability. However, achieving high geometric precision and editability requires representing figures as graphics programs in languages like TikZ, and aligned training data (i.e., graphics programs with captions) remains scarce. Meanwhile, large amounts of unaligned graphics programs and captioned raster images are more readily available. We reconcile these disparate data sources by presenting TikZero, which decouples graphics program generation from text understanding by using image representations as an intermediary bridge. It enables independent training on graphics programs and captioned images and allows for zero-shot text-guided graphics program synthesis during inference. We show that our method substantially outperforms baselines that can only operate with caption-aligned graphics programs. Furthermore, when leveraging caption-aligned graphics programs as a complementary training signal, TikZero matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models, including commercial systems like GPT-4o. Our code, datasets, and select models are publicly available.

Paperid: 1086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11026.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) models, audio-visual-to-audio-visual (AV2AV) translation still faces a critical challenge: maintaining speaker consistency between the original and translated vocal and facial features. To address this issue, we propose a conditional flow matching (CFM) zero-shot audio-visual renderer that utilizes strong dual guidance from both audio and visual modalities. By leveraging multimodal guidance with CFM, our model robustly preserves speaker-specific characteristics and enhances zero-shot AV2AV translation abilities. For the audio modality, we enhance the CFM process by integrating robust speaker embeddings with x-vectors, which serve to bolster speaker consistency. Additionally, we convey emotional nuances to the face rendering module. The guidance provided by both audio and visual cues remains independent of semantic or linguistic content, allowing our renderer to effectively handle zero-shot translation tasks for monolingual speakers in different languages. We empirically demonstrate that the inclusion of high-quality mel-spectrograms conditioned on facial information not only enhances the quality of the synthesized speech but also positively influences facial generation, leading to overall performance improvements in LSE and FID score. Our code is available at https://github.com/Peter-SungwooCho/MAVFlow.

Paperid: 1087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10860.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose RI3D, a novel 3DGS-based approach that harnesses the power of diffusion models to reconstruct high-quality novel views given a sparse set of input images. Our key contribution is separating the view synthesis process into two tasks of reconstructing visible regions and hallucinating missing regions, and introducing two personalized diffusion models, each tailored to one of these tasks. Specifically, one model ('repair') takes a rendered image as input and predicts the corresponding high-quality image, which in turn is used as a pseudo ground truth image to constrain the optimization. The other model ('inpainting') primarily focuses on hallucinating details in unobserved areas. To integrate these models effectively, we introduce a two-stage optimization strategy: the first stage reconstructs visible areas using the repair model, and the second stage reconstructs missing regions with the inpainting model while ensuring coherence through further optimization. Moreover, we augment the optimization with a novel Gaussian initialization method that obtains per-image depth by combining 3D-consistent and smooth depth with highly detailed relative depth. We demonstrate that by separating the process into two tasks and addressing them with the repair and inpainting models, we produce results with detailed textures in both visible and missing regions that outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a diverse set of scenes with extremely sparse inputs.

Paperid: 1088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10714.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The linear growth of key-value (KV) cache memory and quadratic computational in attention mechanisms complexity pose significant bottlenecks for large language models (LLMs) in long-context processing. While existing KV cache optimization methods address these challenges through token pruning or feature merging, they often incur irreversible information loss or require costly parameter retraining. To this end, we propose ZSMerge, a dynamic KV cache compression framework designed for efficient cache management, featuring three key operations: (1) fine-grained memory allocation guided by multi-dimensional token importance metrics at head-level granularity, (2) a residual merging mechanism that preserves critical context through compensated attention scoring, and (3) a zero-shot adaptation mechanism compatible with diverse LLM architectures without requiring retraining. ZSMerge significantly enhances memory efficiency and inference speed with negligible performance degradation across LLMs. When applied to LLaMA2-7B, it demonstrates a 20:1 compression ratio for key-value cache retention (reducing memory footprint to 5\% of baseline) while sustaining comparable generation quality, coupled with triple throughput gains at extreme 54k-token contexts that eliminate out-of-memory failures. The code is available at https://github.com/SusCom-Lab/ZSMerge.

Paperid: 1089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10630.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a general framework for universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation. Existing zero-shot methods build inference framework upon large language models (LLM) for specific tasks, which differs a lot in overall pipeline and fails to generalize across different types of goal. Towards the aim of universal zero-shot navigation, we propose a uniform graph representation to unify different goals, including object category, instance image and text description. We also convert the observation of agent into an online maintained scene graph. With this consistent scene and goal representation, we preserve most structural information compared with pure text and are able to leverage LLM for explicit graph-based reasoning. Specifically, we conduct graph matching between the scene graph and goal graph at each time instant and propose different strategies to generate long-term goal of exploration according to different matching states. The agent first iteratively searches subgraph of goal when zero-matched. With partial matching, the agent then utilizes coordinate projection and anchor pair alignment to infer the goal location. Finally scene graph correction and goal verification are applied for perfect matching. We also present a blacklist mechanism to enable robust switch between stages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show that our UniGoal achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on three studied navigation tasks with a single model, even outperforming task-specific zero-shot methods and supervised universal methods.

Paperid: 1090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10252.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes without labeled training examples by leveraging class-level semantic descriptors such as attributes. A fundamental challenge in ZSL is semantic misalignment, where semantic-unrelated information involved in visual features introduce ambiguity to visual-semantic interaction. Unlike existing methods that suppress semantic-unrelated information post hoc either in the feature space or the model space, we propose addressing this issue at the input stage, preventing semantic-unrelated patches from propagating through the network. To this end, we introduce Semantically contextualized VIsual Patches (SVIP) for ZSL, a transformer-based framework designed to enhance visual-semantic alignment. Specifically, we propose a self-supervised patch selection mechanism that preemptively learns to identify semantic-unrelated patches in the input space. This is trained with the supervision from aggregated attention scores across all transformer layers, which estimate each patch's semantic score. As removing semantic-unrelated patches from the input sequence may disrupt object structure, we replace them with learnable patch embeddings. With initialization from word embeddings, we can ensure they remain semantically meaningful throughout feature extraction. Extensive experiments on ZSL benchmarks demonstrate that SVIP achieves state-of-the-art performance results while providing more interpretable and semantically rich feature representations. Code is available at https://github.com/uqzhichen/SVIP.

Paperid: 1091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD). By leveraging auxiliary data during training, these models can directly perform cross-category anomaly detection on target datasets, such as detecting defects on industrial product surfaces or identifying tumors in organ tissues. Existing approaches typically construct text prompts through either manual design or the optimization of learnable prompt vectors. However, these methods face several challenges: 1) handcrafted prompts require extensive expert knowledge and trial-and-error; 2) single-form learnable prompts struggle to capture complex anomaly semantics; and 3) an unconstrained prompt space limits generalization to unseen categories. To address these issues, we propose Bayesian Prompt Flow Learning (Bayes-PFL), which models the prompt space as a learnable probability distribution from a Bayesian perspective. Specifically, a prompt flow module is designed to learn both image-specific and image-agnostic distributions, which are jointly utilized to regularize the text prompt space and improve the model's generalization on unseen categories. These learned distributions are then sampled to generate diverse text prompts, effectively covering the prompt space. Additionally, a residual cross-model attention (RCA) module is introduced to better align dynamic text embeddings with fine-grained image features. Extensive experiments on 15 industrial and medical datasets demonstrate our method's superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaozhen228/Bayes-PFL.

Paperid: 1092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10069.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires agents to interpret natural language instructions while navigating unconstrained 3D spaces. Existing VLN-CE frameworks rely on a two-stage approach: a waypoint predictor to generate waypoints and a navigator to execute movements. However, current waypoint predictors struggle with spatial awareness, while navigators lack historical reasoning and backtracking capabilities, limiting adaptability. We propose a zero-shot VLN-CE framework integrating an enhanced waypoint predictor with a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based navigator. Our predictor employs a stronger vision encoder, masked cross-attention fusion, and an occupancy-aware loss for better waypoint quality. The navigator incorporates history-aware reasoning and adaptive path planning with backtracking, improving robustness. Experiments on R2R-CE and MP3D benchmarks show our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot settings, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully supervised methods. Real-world validation on Turtlebot 4 further highlights its adaptability.

Paperid: 1093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10003.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to adapt to continuously emerging new classes while preserving knowledge of previously learned ones. Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) presents a greater challenge that requires the model to learn new classes from only a limited number of samples per class. While incremental learning typically assumes restricted access to past data, it often remains available in many real-world scenarios. This raises a practical question: should one retrain the model on the full dataset (i.e., joint training), or continue updating it solely with new data? In CIL, joint training is considered an ideal benchmark that provides a reference for evaluating the trade-offs between performance and computational cost. However, in FSCIL, joint training becomes less reliable due to severe imbalance between base and incremental classes. This results in the absence of a practical baseline, making it unclear which strategy is preferable for practitioners. To this end, we revisit joint training in the context of FSCIL by incorporating imbalance mitigation techniques, and suggest a new imbalance-aware joint training benchmark for FSCIL. We then conduct extensive comparisons between this benchmark and FSCIL methods to analyze which approach is most suitable when prior data is accessible. Our analysis offers realistic insights and guidance for selecting training strategies in real-world FSCIL scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/shiwonkim/Joint_FSCIL

Paperid: 1094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09958.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL). However, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. To address this gap, we investigate the impact of demonstrations on token representations within the practical alignment tasks. We find that the transformer embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation, which plays an important role in the generation of prior response tokens. Once the prior response tokens are determined, the demonstrations become redundant.Motivated by this finding, we propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment (PICA) method consisting of two stages. In the first few-shot stage, the model generates several prior response tokens via standard ICL while concurrently extracting the ICL vector that stores the task function from the separator token representation. In the following zero-shot stage, this ICL vector guides the model to generate responses without further demonstrations.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PICA not only surpasses vanilla ICL but also achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. The proposed training-free method reduces the time cost (e.g., 5.45+) with improved alignment performance (e.g., 6.57+). Consequently, our work highlights the application of ICL for alignment and calls for a deeper understanding of ICL for complex generations. The code will be available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/PICA.

Paperid: 1095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09446.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in generating high-quality images but also raise people's concerns about generating harmful or misleading content. While extensive approaches have been proposed to erase unwanted concepts without requiring retraining from scratch, they inadvertently degrade performance on normal generation tasks. In this work, we propose Interpret then Deactivate (ItD), a novel framework to enable precise concept removal in T2I diffusion models while preserving overall performance. ItD first employs a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to interpret each concept as a combination of multiple features. By permanently deactivating the specific features associated with target concepts, we repurpose SAE as a zero-shot classifier that identifies whether the input prompt includes target concepts, allowing selective concept erasure in diffusion models. Moreover, we demonstrate that ItD can be easily extended to erase multiple concepts without requiring further training. Comprehensive experiments across celebrity identities, artistic styles, and explicit content demonstrate ItD's effectiveness in eliminating targeted concepts without interfering with normal concept generation. Additionally, ItD is also robust against adversarial prompts designed to circumvent content filters. Code is available at: https://github.com/NANSirun/Interpret-then-deactivate.

Paperid: 1096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09423.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We study the task of language-conditioned pick and place in clutter, where a robot should grasp a target object in open clutter and move it to a specified place. Some approaches learn end-to-end policies with features from vision foundation models, requiring large datasets. Others combine foundation models in a zero-shot setting, suffering from cascading errors. In addition, they primarily leverage vision and language foundation models, focusing less on action priors. In this paper, we aim to develop an effective policy by integrating foundation priors from vision, language, and action. We propose A$^2$, an action prior alignment method that aligns unconditioned action priors with 3D vision-language priors by learning one attention layer. The alignment formulation enables our policy to train with less data and preserve zero-shot generalization capabilities. We show that a shared policy for both pick and place actions enhances the performance for each task, and introduce a policy adaptation scheme to accommodate the multi-modal nature of actions. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real-world show that our policy achieves higher task success rates with fewer steps for both pick and place tasks in clutter, effectively generalizing to unseen objects and language instructions. Videos and codes are available at https://xukechun.github.io/papers/A2.

Paperid: 1097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09335.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Effective Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is crucial for future service robots in aging societies. Existing solutions are biased toward only well-trained objects, creating a gap when dealing with new objects. Currently, HRI systems using predefined gestures or language tokens for pretrained objects pose challenges for all individuals, especially elderly ones. These challenges include difficulties in recalling commands, memorizing hand gestures, and learning new names. This paper introduces NVP-HRI, an intuitive multi-modal HRI paradigm that combines voice commands and deictic posture. NVP-HRI utilizes the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to analyze visual cues and depth data, enabling precise structural object representation. Through a pre-trained SAM network, NVP-HRI allows interaction with new objects via zero-shot prediction, even without prior knowledge. NVP-HRI also integrates with a large language model (LLM) for multimodal commands, coordinating them with object selection and scene distribution in real time for collision-free trajectory solutions. We also regulate the action sequence with the essential control syntax to reduce LLM hallucination risks. The evaluation of diverse real-world tasks using a Universal Robot showcased up to 59.2\% efficiency improvement over traditional gesture control, as illustrated in the video https://youtu.be/EbC7al2wiAc. Our code and design will be openly available at https://github.com/laiyuzhi/NVP-HRI.git.

Paperid: 1098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09130.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents InteractEdit, a novel framework for zero-shot Human-Object Interaction (HOI) editing, addressing the challenging task of transforming an existing interaction in an image into a new, desired interaction while preserving the identities of the subject and object. Unlike simpler image editing scenarios such as attribute manipulation, object replacement or style transfer, HOI editing involves complex spatial, contextual, and relational dependencies inherent in humans-objects interactions. Existing methods often overfit to the source image structure, limiting their ability to adapt to the substantial structural modifications demanded by new interactions. To address this, InteractEdit decomposes each scene into subject, object, and background components, then employs Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and selective fine-tuning to preserve pretrained interaction priors while learning the visual identity of the source image. This regularization strategy effectively balances interaction edits with identity consistency. We further introduce IEBench, the most comprehensive benchmark for HOI editing, which evaluates both interaction editing and identity preservation. Our extensive experiments show that InteractEdit significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a strong baseline for future HOI editing research and unlocking new possibilities for creative and practical applications. Code will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 1099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08997.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Quadrupeds have gained rapid advancement in their capability of traversing across complex terrains. The adoption of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), transformers and various knowledge transfer techniques can greatly reduce the sim-to-real gap. However, the classical teacher-student framework commonly used in existing locomotion policies requires a pre-trained teacher and leverages the privilege information to guide the student policy. With the implementation of large-scale models in robotics controllers, especially transformers-based ones, this knowledge distillation technique starts to show its weakness in efficiency, due to the requirement of multiple supervised stages. In this paper, we propose Unified Locomotion Transformer (ULT), a new transformer-based framework to unify the processes of knowledge transfer and policy optimization in a single network while still taking advantage of privilege information. The policies are optimized with reinforcement learning, next state-action prediction, and action imitation, all in just one training stage, to achieve zero-shot deployment. Evaluation results demonstrate that with ULT, optimal teacher and student policies can be obtained at the same time, greatly easing the difficulty in knowledge transfer, even with complex transformer-based models.

Paperid: 1100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08990.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their alignment, they can still be jailbroken, i.e., harmful and toxic content can be elicited from them. While existing red-teaming methods have shown promise in uncovering such vulnerabilities, these methods struggle with limited success and high computational and monetary costs. To address this, we propose a black-box Jailbreak method with Cross-Behavior attacks (JCB), that can automatically and efficiently find successful jailbreak prompts. JCB leverages successes from past behaviors to help jailbreak new behaviors, thereby significantly improving the attack efficiency. Moreover, JCB does not rely on time- and/or cost-intensive calls to auxiliary LLMs to discover/optimize the jailbreak prompts, making it highly efficient and scalable. Comprehensive experimental evaluations show that JCB significantly outperforms related baselines, requiring up to 94% fewer queries while still achieving 12.9% higher average attack success. JCB also achieves a notably high 37% attack success rate on Llama-2-7B, one of the most resilient LLMs, and shows promising zero-shot transferability across different LLMs.

Paperid: 1101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08906.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate strong performance but struggle when adapted to downstream tasks. Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient and effective strategy to adapt VLMs while preserving their pre-trained knowledge. However, existing methods still lead to overfitting and degrade zero-shot generalization. To address this challenge, we propose an optimal transport (OT)-guided prompt learning framework that mitigates forgetting by preserving the structural consistency of feature distributions between pre-trained and fine-tuned models. Unlike conventional point-wise constraints, OT naturally captures cross-instance relationships and expands the feasible parameter space for prompt tuning, allowing a better trade-off between adaptation and generalization. Our approach enforces joint constraints on both vision and text representations, ensuring a holistic feature alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our simple yet effective method can outperform existing prompt learning strategies in base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset evaluation, and domain generalization without additional augmentation or ensemble techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/ChongQingNoSubway/Prompt-OT

Paperid: 1102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08497.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become essential for transfer learning across diverse tasks. However, adapting these models with limited few-shot data often leads to overfitting, diminishing their performance on new tasks. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Representation Learning (MMRL) framework that introduces a shared, learnable, and modality-agnostic representation space. MMRL projects the space tokens to text and image representation tokens, facilitating more effective multi-modal interactions. Unlike previous approaches that solely optimize class token features, MMRL integrates representation tokens at higher layers of the encoders--where dataset-specific features are more prominent--while preserving generalized knowledge in the lower layers. During training, both representation and class features are optimized, with trainable projection layer applied to the representation tokens, whereas the class token projection layer remains frozen to retain pre-trained knowledge. Furthermore, a regularization term is introduced to align the class features and text features with the zero-shot features from the frozen VLM, thereby safeguarding the model's generalization capacity. For inference, a decoupling strategy is employed, wherein both representation and class features are utilized for base classes, while only the class features, which retain more generalized knowledge, are used for new tasks. Extensive experiments across 15 datasets demonstrate that MMRL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a balanced trade-off between task-specific adaptation and generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yunncheng/MMRL.

Paperid: 1103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08101.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Query-based methods with dense features have demonstrated remarkable success in 3D object detection tasks. However, the computational demands of these models, particularly with large image sizes and multiple transformer layers, pose significant challenges for efficient running on edge devices. Existing pruning and distillation methods either need retraining or are designed for ViT models, which are hard to migrate to 3D detectors. To address this issue, we propose a zero-shot runtime pruning method for transformer decoders in 3D object detection models. The method, termed tgGBC (trim keys gradually Guided By Classification scores), systematically trims keys in transformer modules based on their importance. We expand the classification score to multiply it with the attention map to get the importance score of each key and then prune certain keys after each transformer layer according to their importance scores. Our method achieves a 1.99x speedup in the transformer decoder of the latest ToC3D model, with only a minimal performance loss of less than 1%. Interestingly, for certain models, our method even enhances their performance. Moreover, we deploy 3D detectors with tgGBC on an edge device, further validating the effectiveness of our method. The code can be found at https://github.com/iseri27/tg_gbc.

Paperid: 1104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08048.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, Probabilistic Language-Image Pre-Training (ProLIP) has been proposed to tackle the multiplicity issue of vision-language (VL) tasks. Despite their success in probabilistic representation learning at a scale, the ProLIP models cannot handle long context texts longer than 64 context length, which limits their ability to capture rich contextual information from longer text sequences. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fine-tuning strategy for ProLIP to accept longer texts, e.g., 256 text tokens. Experimental results on Urban-1k and the DataComp evaluation suite show that the proposed LongProLIP recipe can improve understanding of long contexts while minimizing the negative effect of fine-tuning.We also observe a trade-off between the long context understanding (measured by Urban-1k) and general zero-shot capability (measured by evaluation datasets by DataComp). Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/prolip

Paperid: 1105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07940.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning-based point cloud registration have improved generalization, yet most methods still require retraining or manual parameter tuning for each new environment. In this paper, we identify three key factors limiting generalization: (a) reliance on environment-specific voxel size and search radius, (b) poor out-of-domain robustness of learning-based keypoint detectors, and (c) raw coordinate usage, which exacerbates scale discrepancies. To address these issues, we present a zero-shot registration pipeline called BUFFER-X by (a) adaptively determining voxel size/search radii, (b) using farthest point sampling to bypass learned detectors, and (c) leveraging patch-wise scale normalization for consistent coordinate bounds. In particular, we present a multi-scale patch-based descriptor generation and a hierarchical inlier search across scales to improve robustness in diverse scenes. We also propose a novel generalizability benchmark using 11 datasets that cover various indoor/outdoor scenarios and sensor modalities, demonstrating that BUFFER-X achieves substantial generalization without prior information or manual parameter tuning for the test datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/BUFFER-X.

Paperid: 1106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07507.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in 2D-to-3D perception have significantly improved the understanding of 3D scenes from 2D images. However, existing methods face critical challenges, including limited generalization across scenes, suboptimal perception accuracy, and slow reconstruction speeds. To address these limitations, we propose Perception-Efficient 3D Reconstruction (PE3R), a novel framework designed to enhance both accuracy and efficiency. PE3R employs a feed-forward architecture to enable rapid 3D semantic field reconstruction. The framework demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across diverse scenes and objects while significantly improving reconstruction speed. Extensive experiments on 2D-to-3D open-vocabulary segmentation and 3D reconstruction validate the effectiveness and versatility of PE3R. The framework achieves a minimum 9-fold speedup in 3D semantic field reconstruction, along with substantial gains in perception accuracy and reconstruction precision, setting new benchmarks in the field. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hujiecpp/PE3R.

Paperid: 1107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07503.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning segmentation is a challenging vision-language task that aims to output the segmentation mask with respect to a complex, implicit, and even non-visual query text. Previous works incorporated multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with segmentation models to approach the difficult problem. However, their segmentation quality often falls short in complex cases, particularly when dealing with out-of-domain objects with intricate structures, blurry boundaries, occlusions, or high similarity with surroundings. In this paper, we introduce ThinkFirst, a training-free reasoning segmentation framework that leverages GPT's chain of thought to address these challenging cases. Our approach allows GPT-4o or other powerful MLLMs to generate a detailed, chain-of-thought description of an image. This summarized description is then passed to a language-instructed segmentation assistant to aid the segmentation process. Our framework allows users to easily interact with the segmentation agent using multimodal inputs, such as easy text and image scribbles, for successive refinement or communication. We evaluate the performance of ThinkFirst on diverse objects. Extensive experiments show that, this zero-shot-CoT approach significantly improves the vanilla reasoning segmentation agent, both qualitatively and quantitatively, while being less sensitive or critical to user-supplied prompts after Thinking First.

Paperid: 1108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07465.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Object detection and segmentation are widely employed in computer vision applications, yet conventional models like YOLO series, while efficient and accurate, are limited by predefined categories, hindering adaptability in open scenarios. Recent open-set methods leverage text prompts, visual cues, or prompt-free paradigm to overcome this, but often compromise between performance and efficiency due to high computational demands or deployment complexity. In this work, we introduce YOLOE, which integrates detection and segmentation across diverse open prompt mechanisms within a single highly efficient model, achieving real-time seeing anything. For text prompts, we propose Re-parameterizable Region-Text Alignment (RepRTA) strategy. It refines pretrained textual embeddings via a re-parameterizable lightweight auxiliary network and enhances visual-textual alignment with zero inference and transferring overhead. For visual prompts, we present Semantic-Activated Visual Prompt Encoder (SAVPE). It employs decoupled semantic and activation branches to bring improved visual embedding and accuracy with minimal complexity. For prompt-free scenario, we introduce Lazy Region-Prompt Contrast (LRPC) strategy. It utilizes a built-in large vocabulary and specialized embedding to identify all objects, avoiding costly language model dependency. Extensive experiments show YOLOE's exceptional zero-shot performance and transferability with high inference efficiency and low training cost. Notably, on LVIS, with 3$\times$ less training cost and 1.4$\times$ inference speedup, YOLOE-v8-S surpasses YOLO-Worldv2-S by 3.5 AP. When transferring to COCO, YOLOE-v8-L achieves 0.6 AP$^b$ and 0.4 AP$^m$ gains over closed-set YOLOv8-L with nearly 4$\times$ less training time. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/yoloe.

Paperid: 1109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07413.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities across diverse vision-language tasks after training on mega-scale datasets. However, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and keypoint detection, pose significant challenges for MLLMs when represented solely as text outputs. Simultaneously, current MLLMs utilizing latent embeddings for visual task decoding generally demonstrate limited adaptability to both multi-task learning and multi-granularity scenarios. In this work, we present REF-VLM, an end-to-end framework for unified training of various visual decoding tasks. To address complex visual decoding scenarios, we introduce the Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm (TRP), which explicitly decouples three critical dimensions in visual decoding tasks through a triplet structure: concepts, decoding types, and targets. TRP employs symbolic delimiters to enforce structured representation learning, enhancing the parsability and interpretability of model outputs. Additionally, we construct Visual-Task Instruction Following Dataset (VTInstruct), a large-scale multi-task dataset containing over 100 million multimodal dialogue samples across 25 task types. Beyond text inputs and outputs, VT-Instruct incorporates various visual prompts such as point, box, scribble, and mask, and generates outputs composed of text and visual units like box, keypoint, depth and mask. The combination of different visual prompts and visual units generates a wide variety of task types, expanding the applicability of REF-VLM significantly. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our REF-VLM outperforms other MLLMs across a variety of standard benchmarks. The code, dataset, and demo available at https://github.com/MacavityT/REF-VLM.

Paperid: 1110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07275.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot human-AI coordination is the training of an ego-agent to coordinate with humans without human data. Most studies on zero-shot human-AI coordination have focused on enhancing the ego-agent's coordination ability in a given environment without considering the issue of generalization to unseen environments. Real-world applications of zero-shot human-AI coordination should consider unpredictable environmental changes and the varying coordination ability of co-players depending on the environment. Previously, the multi-agent UED (Unsupervised Environment Design) approach has investigated these challenges by jointly considering environmental changes and co-player policy in competitive two-player AI-AI scenarios. In this paper, our study extends a multi-agent UED approach to zero-shot human-AI coordination. We propose a utility function and co-player sampling for a zero-shot human-AI coordination setting that helps train the ego-agent to coordinate with humans more effectively than a previous multi-agent UED approach. The zero-shot human-AI coordination performance was evaluated in the Overcooked-AI environment, using human proxy agents and real humans. Our method outperforms other baseline models and achieves high performance in human-AI coordination tasks in unseen environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/Uwonsang/ACD_Human-AI

Paperid: 1111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07082.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Computer Vision have introduced the concept of pretrained representation uncertainty, enabling zero-shot uncertainty estimation. This holds significant potential for Earth Observation (EO), where trustworthiness is critical, yet the complexity of EO data poses challenges to uncertainty-aware methods. In this work, we investigate the generalization of representation uncertainty in EO, considering the domain's unique semantic characteristics. We pretrain uncertainties on large EO datasets and propose an evaluation framework to assess their zero-shot performance in multi-label classification and segmentation EO tasks. Our findings reveal that, unlike uncertainties pretrained on natural images, EO-pretraining exhibits strong generalization across unseen EO domains, geographic locations, and target granularities, while maintaining sensitivity to variations in ground sampling distance. We demonstrate the practical utility of pretrained uncertainties showcasing their alignment with task-specific uncertainties in downstream tasks, their sensitivity to real-world EO image noise, and their ability to generate spatial uncertainty estimates out-of-the-box. Initiating the discussion on representation uncertainty in EO, our study provides insights into its strengths and limitations, paving the way for future research in the field. Code and weights are available at: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/EOUncertaintyGeneralization.

Paperid: 1112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06748.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate medical image segmentation is crucial for precise anatomical delineation. Deep learning models like U-Net have shown great success but depend heavily on large datasets and struggle with domain shifts, complex structures, and limited training samples. Recent studies have explored diffusion models for segmentation by iteratively refining masks. However, these methods still retain the conventional image-to-mask mapping, making them highly sensitive to input data, which hampers stability and generalization. In contrast, we introduce DiffAtlas, a novel generative framework that models both images and masks through diffusion during training, effectively ``GenAI-fying'' atlas-based segmentation. During testing, the model is guided to generate a specific target image-mask pair, from which the corresponding mask is obtained. DiffAtlas retains the robustness of the atlas paradigm while overcoming its scalability and domain-specific limitations. Extensive experiments on CT and MRI across same-domain, cross-modality, varying-domain, and different data-scale settings using the MMWHS and TotalSegmentator datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, particularly in limited-data and zero-shot modality segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/M3DV/DiffAtlas.

Paperid: 1113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06661.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) identifies outliers for applications like defect and lesion detection. While CLIP shows promise for zero-shot AD tasks due to its strong generalization capabilities, its inherent Anomaly-Unawareness leads to limited discrimination between normal and abnormal features. To address this problem, we propose Anomaly-Aware CLIP (AA-CLIP), which enhances CLIP's anomaly discrimination ability in both text and visual spaces while preserving its generalization capability. AA-CLIP is achieved through a straightforward yet effective two-stage approach: it first creates anomaly-aware text anchors to differentiate normal and abnormal semantics clearly, then aligns patch-level visual features with these anchors for precise anomaly localization. This two-stage strategy, with the help of residual adapters, gradually adapts CLIP in a controlled manner, achieving effective AD while maintaining CLIP's class knowledge. Extensive experiments validate AA-CLIP as a resource-efficient solution for zero-shot AD tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results in industrial and medical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/Mwxinnn/AA-CLIP.

Paperid: 1114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06626.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose DiffCLIP, a novel vision-language model that extends the differential attention mechanism to CLIP architectures. Differential attention was originally developed for large language models to amplify relevant context while canceling out noisy information. In this work, we integrate this mechanism into CLIP's dual encoder (image and text) framework. With minimal additional parameters, DiffCLIP achieves superior performance on image-text understanding tasks. Across zero-shot classification, retrieval, and robustness benchmarks, DiffCLIP consistently outperforms baseline CLIP models. Notably, these gains come with negligible computational overhead, demonstrating that differential attention can significantly enhance multi-modal representations without sacrificing efficiency. Code can be found at https://github.com/hammoudhasan/DiffCLIP.

Paperid: 1115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06568.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Personalized image generation with text-to-image diffusion models generates unseen images based on reference image content. Zero-shot adapter methods such as IP-Adapter and OminiControl are especially interesting because they do not require test-time fine-tuning. However, they struggle to balance preserving personalized content and adherence to the text prompt. We identify a critical design flaw resulting in this performance gap: current adapters inadequately integrate personalization images with the textual descriptions. The generated images, therefore, replicate the personalized content rather than adhere to the text prompt instructions. Yet the base text-to-image has strong conceptual understanding capabilities that can be leveraged. We propose Conceptrol, a simple yet effective framework that enhances zero-shot adapters without adding computational overhead. Conceptrol constrains the attention of visual specification with a textual concept mask that improves subject-driven generation capabilities. It achieves as much as 89% improvement on personalization benchmarks over the vanilla IP-Adapter and can even outperform fine-tuning approaches such as Dreambooth LoRA. The source code is available at https://github.com/QY-H00/Conceptrol.

Paperid: 1116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06520.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Traditional methods for reasoning segmentation rely on supervised fine-tuning with categorical labels and simple descriptions, limiting its out-of-domain generalization and lacking explicit reasoning processes. To address these limitations, we propose Seg-Zero, a novel framework that demonstrates remarkable generalizability and derives explicit chain-of-thought reasoning through cognitive reinforcement. Seg-Zero introduces a decoupled architecture consisting of a reasoning model and a segmentation model. The reasoning model interprets user intentions, generates explicit reasoning chains, and produces positional prompts, which are subsequently used by the segmentation model to generate precious pixel-level masks. We design a sophisticated reward mechanism that integrates both format and accuracy rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Seg-Zero achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Experiments show that Seg-Zero-7B achieves a zero-shot performance of 57.5 on the ReasonSeg benchmark, surpassing the prior LISA-7B by 18\%. This significant improvement highlights Seg-Zero's ability to generalize across domains while presenting an explicit reasoning process. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Seg-Zero.

Paperid: 1117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06505.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-image generation have driven interest in generating personalized human images that depict specific identities from reference images. Although existing methods achieve high-fidelity identity preservation, they are generally limited to single-ID scenarios and offer insufficient facial editability. We present DynamicID, a tuning-free framework that inherently facilitates both single-ID and multi-ID personalized generation with high fidelity and flexible facial editability. Our key innovations include: 1) Semantic-Activated Attention (SAA), which employs query-level activation gating to minimize disruption to the base model when injecting ID features and achieve multi-ID personalization without requiring multi-ID samples during training. 2) Identity-Motion Reconfigurator (IMR), which applies feature-space manipulation to effectively disentangle and reconfigure facial motion and identity features, supporting flexible facial editing. 3) a task-decoupled training paradigm that reduces data dependency, together with VariFace-10k, a curated dataset of 10k unique individuals, each represented by 35 distinct facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that DynamicID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, facial editability, and multi-ID personalization capability. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ByteCat-bot/DynamicID.

Paperid: 1118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06467.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, sparsely-supervised 3D object detection has gained great attention, achieving performance close to fully-supervised 3D objectors while requiring only a few annotated instances. Nevertheless, these methods suffer challenges when accurate labels are extremely absent. In this paper, we propose a boosting strategy, termed SP3D, explicitly utilizing the cross-modal semantic prompts generated from Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to boost the 3D detector with robust feature discrimination capability under sparse annotation settings. Specifically, we first develop a Confident Points Semantic Transfer (CPST) module that generates accurate cross-modal semantic prompts through boundary-constrained center cluster selection. Based on these accurate semantic prompts, which we treat as seed points, we introduce a Dynamic Cluster Pseudo-label Generation (DCPG) module to yield pseudo-supervision signals from the geometry shape of multi-scale neighbor points. Additionally, we design a Distribution Shape score (DS score) that chooses high-quality supervision signals for the initial training of the 3D detector. Experiments on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) have validated that SP3D can enhance the performance of sparsely supervised detectors by a large margin under meager labeling conditions. Moreover, we verified SP3D in the zero-shot setting, where its performance exceeded that of the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/SP3D.

Paperid: 1119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06312.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Earth observation (EO) spans a broad spectrum of modalities, including optical, radar, multispectral, and hyperspectral data, each capturing distinct environmental signals. However, current vision-language models in EO, particularly CLIP-based variants, remain confined to individual modalities, limiting generalization and scalability across diverse tasks. We present DOFA-CLIP (Dynamic-One-For-All CLIP), a unified vision-language foundation model that dynamically adapts to EO modalities with flexible spectral configurations through a single Transformer backbone. Our approach introduces three key contributions: 1) the construction of GeoLangBind-2M, a large-scale EO image-text dataset covering six heterogeneous modalities with rich natural language descriptions; 2) a novel training strategy called VECT (Vision-models Enhanced Contrastive Text-image pretraining), which enhances the spatial awareness of CLIP features with multiple vision foundation models; and 3) a Modality-aware Knowledge Agglomeration (MaKA) module that refines feature distillation with modality-specific awareness. DOFA-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across a wide range of EO benchmarks, including unseen modalities and a diverse number of input spectral bands. Together, these contributions establish a scalable foundation for multimodal EO understanding and open new avenues for integrating heterogeneous EO data with large language models. Code and datasets will be released. Code and datasets are publicly available.

Paperid: 1120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06273.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We explore a novel zero-shot Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) framework, dubbed Zero-AVSR, which enables speech recognition in target languages without requiring any audio-visual speech data in those languages. Specifically, we introduce the Audio-Visual Speech Romanizer (AV-Romanizer), which learns language-agnostic speech representations by predicting Roman text. Then, by leveraging the strong multilingual modeling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose converting the predicted Roman text into language-specific graphemes, forming the proposed Cascaded Zero-AVSR. Taking it a step further, we explore a unified Zero-AVSR approach by directly integrating the audio-visual speech representations encoded by the AV-Romanizer into the LLM. This is achieved through finetuning the adapter and the LLM using our proposed multi-task learning scheme. To capture the wide spectrum of phonetic and linguistic diversity, we also introduce a Multilingual Audio-Visual Romanized Corpus (MARC) consisting of 2,916 hours of audio-visual speech data across 82 languages, along with transcriptions in both language-specific graphemes and Roman text. Extensive analysis and experiments confirm that the proposed Zero-AVSR framework has the potential to expand language support beyond the languages seen during the training of the AV-Romanizer.

Paperid: 1121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06014.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Depth ambiguity is a fundamental challenge in spatial scene understanding, especially in transparent scenes where single-depth estimates fail to capture full 3D structure. Existing models, limited to deterministic predictions, overlook real-world multi-layer depth. To address this, we introduce a paradigm shift from single-prediction to multi-hypothesis spatial foundation models. We first present \texttt{MD-3k}, a benchmark exposing depth biases in expert and foundational models through multi-layer spatial relationship labels and new metrics. To resolve depth ambiguity, we propose Laplacian Visual Prompting (LVP), a training-free spectral prompting technique that extracts hidden depth from pre-trained models via Laplacian-transformed RGB inputs. By integrating LVP-inferred depth with standard RGB-based estimates, our approach elicits multi-layer depth without model retraining. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of LVP in zero-shot multi-layer depth estimation, unlocking more robust and comprehensive geometry-conditioned visual generation, 3D-grounded spatial reasoning, and temporally consistent video-level depth inference. Our benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/Xiaohao-Xu/Ambiguity-in-Space.

Paperid: 1122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05157.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Language models are strong few-shot learners and achieve good overall accuracy in text classification tasks, masking the fact that their results suffer from great class accuracy imbalance. We believe that the pursuit of overall accuracy should not come from enriching the strong classes, but from raising up the weak ones. To address the imbalance, we propose a Heaviside step function based ensemble debiasing method, which enables flexible rectifications of in-context learned class probabilities at both class and sample levels. Evaluations with Llama-2-13B on seven text classification benchmarks show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy gains with balanced class accuracies. More importantly, we perform analyses on the resulted probability correction scheme, showing that sample-level corrections are necessary to elevate weak classes. Due to effectively correcting weak classes, our method also brings significant performance gains to a larger model variant, Llama-2-70B, especially on a biomedical domain task, further demonstrating the necessity of ensemble debiasing at both levels. Our source code is available at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/DCS.

Paperid: 1123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04877.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Imitation Learning can train robots to perform complex and diverse manipulation tasks, but learned policies are brittle with observations outside of the training distribution. 3D scene representations that incorporate observations from calibrated RGBD cameras have been proposed as a way to mitigate this, but in our evaluations with unseen embodiments and camera viewpoints they show only modest improvement. To address those challenges, we propose Adapt3R, a general-purpose 3D observation encoder which synthesizes data from calibrated RGBD cameras into a vector that can be used as conditioning for arbitrary IL algorithms. The key idea is to use a pretrained 2D backbone to extract semantic information, using 3D only as a medium to localize this information with respect to the end-effector. We show across 93 simulated and 6 real tasks that when trained end-to-end with a variety of IL algorithms, Adapt3R maintains these algorithms' learning capacity while enabling zero-shot transfer to novel embodiments and camera poses.

Paperid: 1124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04592.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remote Sensing Image Captioning (RSIC) is a cross-modal field bridging vision and language, aimed at automatically generating natural language descriptions of features and scenes in remote sensing imagery. Despite significant advances in developing sophisticated methods and large-scale datasets for training vision-language models (VLMs), two critical challenges persist: the scarcity of non-English descriptive datasets and the lack of multilingual capability evaluation for models. These limitations fundamentally impede the progress and practical deployment of RSIC, particularly in the era of large VLMs. To address these challenges, this paper presents several significant contributions to the field. First, we introduce and analyze BRSIC (Bilingual Remote Sensing Image Captioning), a comprehensive bilingual dataset that enriches three established English RSIC datasets with Chinese descriptions, encompassing 13,634 images paired with 68,170 bilingual captions. Building upon this foundation, we develop a systematic evaluation framework that addresses the prevalent inconsistency in evaluation protocols, enabling rigorous assessment of model performance through standardized retraining procedures on BRSIC. Furthermore, we present an extensive empirical study of eight state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs), examining their capabilities across multiple paradigms including zero-shot inference, supervised fine-tuning, and multi-lingual training. This comprehensive evaluation provides crucial insights into the strengths and limitations of current LVLMs in handling multilingual remote sensing tasks. Additionally, our cross-dataset transfer experiments reveal interesting findings. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/mrazhou/BRSIC.

Paperid: 1125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04554.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. Machine Translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-context examples, in particular when they are semantically similar to the sentence to translate. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-based translation paradigm, compositional translation, to replace naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. An LLM is used to decompose a sentence into simpler phrases, and then to translate each phrase with the help of retrieved demonstrations. Finally, the LLM is prompted to translate the initial sentence with the help of the self-generated phrase-translation pairs. Our intuition is that this approach should improve translation because these shorter phrases should be intrinsically easier to translate and easier to match with relevant examples. This is especially beneficial in low-resource scenarios, and more generally whenever the selection pool is small or out of domain. We show that compositional translation boosts LLM translation performance on a wide range of popular MT benchmarks, including FLORES 200, NTREX 128 and TICO-19. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/compositional-translation

Paperid: 1126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04538.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Enabling robots to learn novel tasks in a data-efficient manner is a long-standing challenge. Common strategies involve carefully leveraging prior experiences, especially transition data collected on related tasks. Although much progress has been made for general pick-and-place manipulation, far fewer studies have investigated contact-rich assembly tasks, where precise control is essential. We introduce SRSA (Skill Retrieval and Skill Adaptation), a novel framework designed to address this problem by utilizing a pre-existing skill library containing policies for diverse assembly tasks. The challenge lies in identifying which skill from the library is most relevant for fine-tuning on a new task. Our key hypothesis is that skills showing higher zero-shot success rates on a new task are better suited for rapid and effective fine-tuning on that task. To this end, we propose to predict the transfer success for all skills in the skill library on a novel task, and then use this prediction to guide the skill retrieval process. We establish a framework that jointly captures features of object geometry, physical dynamics, and expert actions to represent the tasks, allowing us to efficiently learn the transfer success predictor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRSA significantly outperforms the leading baseline. When retrieving and fine-tuning skills on unseen tasks, SRSA achieves a 19% relative improvement in success rate, exhibits 2.6x lower standard deviation across random seeds, and requires 2.4x fewer transition samples to reach a satisfactory success rate, compared to the baseline. Furthermore, policies trained with SRSA in simulation achieve a 90% mean success rate when deployed in the real world. Please visit our project webpage https://srsa2024.github.io/.

Paperid: 1127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04207.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Can our brain signals faithfully reflect the original visual stimuli, even including high-frequency details? Although human perceptual and cognitive capacities enable us to process and remember visual information, these abilities are constrained by several factors, such as limited attentional resources and the finite capacity of visual memory. When visual stimuli are processed by human visual system into brain signals, some information is inevitably lost, leading to a discrepancy known as the \textbf{System GAP}. Additionally, perceptual and cognitive dynamics, along with technical noise in signal acquisition, degrade the fidelity of brain signals relative to the visual stimuli, known as the \textbf{Random GAP}. When encoded brain representations are directly aligned with the corresponding pretrained image features, the System GAP and Random GAP between paired data challenge the model, requiring it to bridge these gaps. However, in the context of limited paired data, these gaps are difficult for the model to learn, leading to overfitting and poor generalization to new data. To address these GAPs, we propose a simple yet effective approach called the \textbf{Uncertainty-aware Blur Prior (UBP)}. It estimates the uncertainty within the paired data, reflecting the mismatch between brain signals and visual stimuli. Based on this uncertainty, UBP dynamically blurs the high-frequency details of the original images, reducing the impact of the mismatch and improving alignment. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of \textbf{50.9\%} and a top-5 accuracy of \textbf{79.7\%} on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of \textbf{13.7\%} and \textbf{9.8\%}, respectively. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/Uncertainty-aware-Blur-Prior}{GitHub}.

Paperid: 1128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04006.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to enable models to segment novel/unseen object classes using only a limited number of labeled examples. However, current FSS methods frequently struggle with generalization due to incomplete and biased feature representations, especially when support images do not capture the full appearance variability of the target class. To improve the FSS pipeline, we propose a novel framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to adapt general class semantic information to the query image. Furthermore, the framework employs dense pixel-wise matching to identify similarities between query and support images, resulting in enhanced FSS performance. Inspired by reasoning-based segmentation frameworks, our method, named DSV-LFS, introduces an additional token into the LLM vocabulary, allowing a multimodal LLM to generate a "semantic prompt" from class descriptions. In parallel, a dense matching module identifies visual similarities between the query and support images, generating a "visual prompt". These prompts are then jointly employed to guide the prompt-based decoder for accurate segmentation of the query image. Comprehensive experiments on the benchmark datasets Pascal-$5^{i}$ and COCO-$20^{i}$ demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance-by a significant margin-demonstrating superior generalization to novel classes and robustness across diverse scenarios. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/aminpdik/DSV-LFS}{https://github.com/aminpdik/DSV-LFS}

Paperid: 1129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03998.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The growing adoption of batteries in the electric vehicle industry and various consumer products has created an urgent need for effective recycling solutions. These products often contain a mix of compliant and rigid components, making robotic disassembly a critical step toward achieving scalable recycling processes. Diffusion policy has emerged as a promising approach for learning low-level skills in robotics. To effectively apply diffusion policy to contact-rich tasks, incorporating force as feedback is essential. In this paper, we apply diffusion policy with vision and force in a compliant object prying task. However, when combining low-dimensional contact force with high-dimensional image, the force information may be diluted. To address this issue, we propose a method that effectively integrates force with image data for diffusion policy observations. We validate our approach on a battery prying task that demands high precision and multi-step execution. Our model achieves a 96\% success rate in diverse scenarios, marking a 57\% improvement over the vision-only baseline. Our method also demonstrates zero-shot transfer capability to handle unseen objects and battery types. Supplementary videos and implementation codes are available on our project website. https://rros-lab.github.io/diffusion-with-force.github.io/

Paperid: 1130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03984.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Autonomous visual navigation is an essential element in robot autonomy. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising policy training paradigm. However existing RL methods suffer from high sample complexity, poor sim-to-real transfer, and limited runtime adaptability to navigation scenarios not seen during training. These problems are particularly challenging for drones, with complex nonlinear and unstable dynamics, and strong dynamic coupling between control and perception. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with differentiable deep reinforcement learning (DDRL) to train vision-based drone navigation policies. By leveraging high-fidelity 3D scene representations and differentiable simulation, our method improves sample efficiency and sim-to-real transfer. Additionally, we incorporate a Context-aided Estimator Network (CENet) to adapt to environmental variations at runtime. Moreover, by curriculum training in a mixture of different surrounding environments, we achieve in-task generalization, the ability to solve new instances of a task not seen during training. Drone hardware experiments demonstrate our method's high training efficiency compared to state-of-the-art RL methods, zero shot sim-to-real transfer for real robot deployment without fine tuning, and ability to adapt to new instances within the same task class (e.g. to fly through a gate at different locations with different distractors in the environment). Our simulator and training framework are open-sourced at: https://github.com/Qianzhong-Chen/grad_nav.

Paperid: 1131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03734.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to predict robotic actions based on visual observations and language instructions. Existing approaches require fine-tuning pre-trained visionlanguage models (VLMs) as visual and language features are independently fed into downstream policies, degrading the pre-trained semantic alignments. We propose OTTER, a novel VLA architecture that leverages these existing alignments through explicit, text-aware visual feature extraction. Instead of processing all visual features, OTTER selectively extracts and passes only task-relevant visual features that are semantically aligned with the language instruction to the policy transformer. This allows OTTER to keep the pre-trained vision-language encoders frozen. Thereby, OTTER preserves and utilizes the rich semantic understanding learned from large-scale pre-training, enabling strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. In simulation and real-world experiments, OTTER significantly outperforms existing VLA models, demonstrating strong zeroshot generalization to novel objects and environments. Video, code, checkpoints, and dataset: https://ottervla.github.io/.

Paperid: 1132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03644.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dongba pictographic is the only pictographic script still in use in the world. Its pictorial ideographic features carry rich cultural and contextual information. However, due to the lack of relevant datasets, research on semantic understanding of Dongba hieroglyphs has progressed slowly. To this end, we constructed \textbf{DongbaMIE} - the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongba pictographs. The dataset consists of images of Dongba hieroglyphic characters and their corresponding semantic annotations in Chinese. It contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs. The annotations cover four semantic dimensions: object, action, relation and attribute. Systematic evaluation of mainstream multimodal large language models shows that the models are difficult to perform information extraction of Dongba hieroglyphs efficiently under zero-shot and few-shot learning. Although supervised fine-tuning can improve the performance, accurate extraction of complex semantics is still a great challenge at present.

Paperid: 1133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03613.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Despite its prevalent use in image-text matching tasks in a zero-shot manner, CLIP has been shown to be highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations added onto images. Recent studies propose to finetune the vision encoder of CLIP with adversarial samples generated on the fly, and show improved robustness against adversarial attacks on a spectrum of downstream datasets, a property termed as zero-shot robustness. In this paper, we show that malicious perturbations that seek to maximise the classification loss lead to `falsely stable' images, and propose to leverage the pre-trained vision encoder of CLIP to counterattack such adversarial images during inference to achieve robustness. Our paradigm is simple and training-free, providing the first method to defend CLIP from adversarial attacks at test time, which is orthogonal to existing methods aiming to boost zero-shot adversarial robustness of CLIP. We conduct experiments across 16 classification datasets, and demonstrate stable and consistent gains compared to test-time defence methods adapted from existing adversarial robustness studies that do not rely on external networks, without noticeably impairing performance on clean images. We also show that our paradigm can be employed on CLIP models that have been adversarially finetuned to further enhance their robustness at test time. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/Sxing2/CLIP-Test-time-Counterattacks}{here}.

Paperid: 1134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03045.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents ArticuBot, in which a single learned policy enables a robotics system to open diverse categories of unseen articulated objects in the real world. This task has long been challenging for robotics due to the large variations in the geometry, size, and articulation types of such objects. Our system, Articubot, consists of three parts: generating a large number of demonstrations in physics-based simulation, distilling all generated demonstrations into a point cloud-based neural policy via imitation learning, and performing zero-shot sim2real transfer to real robotics systems. Utilizing sampling-based grasping and motion planning, our demonstration generalization pipeline is fast and effective, generating a total of 42.3k demonstrations over 322 training articulated objects. For policy learning, we propose a novel hierarchical policy representation, in which the high-level policy learns the sub-goal for the end-effector, and the low-level policy learns how to move the end-effector conditioned on the predicted goal. We demonstrate that this hierarchical approach achieves much better object-level generalization compared to the non-hierarchical version. We further propose a novel weighted displacement model for the high-level policy that grounds the prediction into the existing 3D structure of the scene, outperforming alternative policy representations. We show that our learned policy can zero-shot transfer to three different real robot settings: a fixed table-top Franka arm across two different labs, and an X-Arm on a mobile base, opening multiple unseen articulated objects across two labs, real lounges, and kitchens. Videos and code can be found on our project website: https://articubot.github.io/.

Paperid: 1135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02910.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Gas leakage poses a significant hazard that requires prevention. Traditionally, human inspection has been used for detection, a slow and labour-intensive process. Recent research has applied machine learning techniques to this problem, yet there remains a shortage of high-quality, publicly available datasets. This paper introduces a synthetic dataset, SimGas, featuring diverse backgrounds, interfering foreground objects, diverse leak locations, and precise segmentation ground truth. We propose a zero-shot method that combines background subtraction, zero-shot object detection, filtering, and segmentation to leverage this dataset. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods based solely on background subtraction and zero-shot object detection with segmentation, reaching an IoU of 69%. We also present an analysis of various prompt configurations and threshold settings to provide deeper insights into the performance of our method. Finally, we qualitatively (because of the lack of ground truth) tested our performance on GasVid and reached decent results on the real-world dataset. The dataset, code, and full qualitative results are available at https://github.com/weathon/Lang-Gas.

Paperid: 1136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02799.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot Font Generation (FFG) aims to create new font libraries using limited reference glyphs, with crucial applications in digital accessibility and equity for low-resource languages, especially in multilingual artificial intelligence systems. Although existing methods have shown promising performance, transitioning to unseen characters in low-resource languages remains a significant challenge, especially when font glyphs vary considerably across training sets. MX-Font considers the content of a character from the perspective of a local component, employing a Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach to adaptively extract the component for better transition. However, the lack of a robust feature extractor prevents them from adequately decoupling content and style, leading to sub-optimal generation results. To alleviate these problems, we propose Heterogeneous Aggregation Experts (HAE), a powerful feature extraction expert that helps decouple content and style downstream from being able to aggregate information in channel and spatial dimensions. Additionally, we propose a novel content-style homogeneity loss to enhance the untangling. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our MX-Font++ yields superior visual results in FFG and effectively outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/stephensun11/MXFontpp.

Paperid: 1137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02698.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

Paperid: 1138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02424.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) is essential for industrial inspection, yet existing methods typically rely on ``comparing'' test images to normal references from a training set. However, variations in appearance and positioning often complicate the alignment of these references with the test image, limiting detection accuracy. We observe that most anomalies manifest as local variations, meaning that even within anomalous images, valuable normal information remains. We argue that this information is useful and may be more aligned with the anomalies since both the anomalies and the normal information originate from the same image. Therefore, rather than relying on external normality from the training set, we propose INP-Former, a novel method that extracts Intrinsic Normal Prototypes (INPs) directly from the test image. Specifically, we introduce the INP Extractor, which linearly combines normal tokens to represent INPs. We further propose an INP Coherence Loss to ensure INPs can faithfully represent normality for the testing image. These INPs then guide the INP-Guided Decoder to reconstruct only normal tokens, with reconstruction errors serving as anomaly scores. Additionally, we propose a Soft Mining Loss to prioritize hard-to-optimize samples during training. INP-Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-class, multi-class, and few-shot AD tasks across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD, positioning it as a versatile and universal solution for AD. Remarkably, INP-Former also demonstrates some zero-shot AD capability. Code is available at:https://github.com/luow23/INP-Former.

Paperid: 1139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02248.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent studies are leveraging advancements in large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive internet-crawled text data to generate textual descriptions of downstream classes in CLIP-based zero-shot image classification. While most of these approaches aim at improving accuracy, our work focuses on ``making better mistakes", of which the mistakes' severities are derived from the given label hierarchy of downstream tasks. Since CLIP's image encoder is trained with language supervising signals, it implicitly captures the hierarchical semantic relationships between different classes. This motivates our goal of making better mistakes in zero-shot classification, a task for which CLIP is naturally well-suited. Our approach (HAPrompts) queries the language model to produce textual representations for given classes as zero-shot classifiers of CLIP to perform image classification on downstream tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce making better mistakes in CLIP-based zero-shot classification. Our approach outperforms the related methods in a holistic comparison across five datasets of varying scales with label hierarchies of different heights in our experiments. Our code and LLM-generated image prompts: \href{https://github.com/ltong1130ztr/HAPrompts}{https://github.com/ltong1130ztr/HAPrompts}.

Paperid: 1140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02247.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Object Goal Navigation-requiring an agent to locate a specific object in an unseen environment-remains a core challenge in embodied AI. Although recent progress in Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based agents has demonstrated promising perception and decision-making abilities through prompting, none has yet established a fully modular world model design that reduces risky and costly interactions with the environment by predicting the future state of the world. We introduce WMNav, a novel World Model-based Navigation framework powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). It predicts possible outcomes of decisions and builds memories to provide feedback to the policy module. To retain the predicted state of the environment, WMNav proposes the online maintained Curiosity Value Map as part of the world model memory to provide dynamic configuration for navigation policy. By decomposing according to a human-like thinking process, WMNav effectively alleviates the impact of model hallucination by making decisions based on the feedback difference between the world model plan and observation. To further boost efficiency, we implement a two-stage action proposer strategy: broad exploration followed by precise localization. Extensive evaluation on HM3D and MP3D validates WMNav surpasses existing zero-shot benchmarks in both success rate and exploration efficiency (absolute improvement: +3.2% SR and +3.2% SPL on HM3D, +13.5% SR and +1.1% SPL on MP3D). Project page: https://b0b8k1ng.github.io/WMNav/.

Paperid: 1141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02147.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Gradient-based optimization drives the unprecedented performance of modern deep neural network models across diverse applications. Adaptive algorithms have accelerated neural network training due to their rapid convergence rates; however, they struggle to find ``flat minima" reliably, resulting in suboptimal generalization compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). By revisiting various adaptive algorithms' mechanisms, we propose the Frankenstein optimizer, which combines their advantages. The proposed Frankenstein dynamically adjusts first- and second-momentum coefficients according to the optimizer's current state to directly maintain consistent learning dynamics and immediately reflect sudden gradient changes. Extensive experiments across several research domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, few-shot learning, and scientific simulations show that Frankenstein surpasses existing adaptive algorithms and SGD empirically regarding convergence speed and generalization performance. Furthermore, this research deepens our understanding of adaptive algorithms through centered kernel alignment analysis and loss landscape visualization during the learning process. Code is available at https://github.com/acctouhou/Frankenstein_optimizer

Paperid: 1142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01895.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning ability is crucial for solving challenging tasks. With the advancement of foundation models, such as the emergence of large language models (LLMs), a wide range of reasoning strategies has been proposed, including test-time enhancements, such as Chain-ofThought, and post-training optimizations, as used in DeepSeek-R1. While these reasoning strategies have demonstrated effectiveness across various challenging language or vision tasks, their applicability and impact on time-series forecasting (TSF), particularly the challenging zero-shot TSF, remain largely unexplored. In particular, it is unclear whether zero-shot TSF benefits from reasoning and, if so, what types of reasoning strategies are most effective. To bridge this gap, we propose ReC4TS, the first benchmark that systematically evaluates the effectiveness of popular reasoning strategies when applied to zero-shot TSF tasks. ReC4TS conducts comprehensive evaluations across datasets spanning eight domains, covering both unimodal and multimodal with short-term and longterm forecasting tasks. More importantly, ReC4TS provides key insights: (1) Self-consistency emerges as the most effective test-time reasoning strategy; (2) Group-relative policy optimization emerges as a more suitable approach for incentivizing reasoning ability during post-training; (3) Multimodal TSF benefits more from reasoning strategies compared to unimodal TSF. Beyond these insights, ReC4TS establishes two pioneering starting blocks to support future zero-shot TSF reasoning research: (1) A novel dataset, TimeThinking, containing forecasting samples annotated with reasoning trajectories from multiple advanced LLMs, and (2) A new and simple test-time scaling-law validated on foundational TSF models enabled by self-consistency reasoning strategy. All data and code are publicly accessible at: https://github.com/AdityaLab/OpenTimeR

Paperid: 1143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01885.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many dynamic decision problems, such as robotic control, involve a series of tasks, many of which are unknown at training time. Typical approaches for these problems, such as multi-task and meta reinforcement learning, do not generalize well when the tasks are diverse. On the other hand, approaches that aim to tackle task diversity, such as using task embedding as policy context and task clustering, typically lack performance guarantees and require a large number of training tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for learning a policy committee that includes at least one near-optimal policy with high probability for tasks encountered during execution. While we show that this problem is in general inapproximable, we present two practical algorithmic solutions. The first yields provable approximation and task sample complexity guarantees when tasks are low-dimensional (the best we can do due to inapproximability), whereas the second is a general and practical gradient-based approach. In addition, we provide a provable sample complexity bound for few-shot learning. Our experiments on MuJoCo and Meta-World show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art multi-task, meta-, and task clustering baselines in training, generalization, and few-shot learning, often by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/CERL-WUSTL/PACMAN.

Paperid: 1144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01785.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by $24.3\%$ over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by $21.9$ on COCO's two-shot setting and $15.4$ on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.

Paperid: 1145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01710.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, existing foundation models rely on multi-stage processing or complex architectures for predicting multiple codebooks, limiting efficiency and integration flexibility. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spark-TTS, a novel system powered by BiCodec, a single-stream speech codec that decomposes speech into two complementary token types: low-bitrate semantic tokens for linguistic content and fixed-length global tokens for speaker attributes. This disentangled representation, combined with the Qwen2.5 LLM and a chain-of-thought (CoT) generation approach, enables both coarse-grained control (e.g., gender, speaking style) and fine-grained adjustments (e.g., precise pitch values, speaking rate). To facilitate research in controllable TTS, we introduce VoxBox, a meticulously curated 100,000-hour dataset with comprehensive attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spark-TTS not only achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning but also generates highly customizable voices that surpass the limitations of reference-based synthesis. Source code, pre-trained models, and audio samples are available at https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS.

Paperid: 1146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01622.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent work found that LLMs are sensitive to a wide range of arbitrary prompt dimensions, including the type of delimiters, answer enumerators, instruction wording, and more. This throws into question popular single-prompt evaluation practices. We present DOVE (Dataset Of Variation Evaluation) a large-scale dataset containing prompt perturbations of various evaluation benchmarks. In contrast to previous work, we examine LLM sensitivity from an holistic perspective, and assess the joint effects of perturbations along various dimensions, resulting in thousands of perturbations per instance. We evaluate several model families against DOVE, leading to several findings, including efficient methods for choosing well-performing prompts, observing that few-shot examples reduce sensitivity, and identifying instances which are inherently hard across all perturbations. DOVE consists of more than 250M prompt perturbations and model outputs, which we make publicly available to spur a community-wide effort toward meaningful, robust, and efficient evaluation. Browse the data, contribute, and more: https://slab-nlp.github.io/DOVE/

Paperid: 1147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01616.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces RoboDexVLM, an innovative framework for robot task planning and grasp detection tailored for a collaborative manipulator equipped with a dexterous hand. Previous methods focus on simplified and limited manipulation tasks, which often neglect the complexities associated with grasping a diverse array of objects in a long-horizon manner. In contrast, our proposed framework utilizes a dexterous hand capable of grasping objects of varying shapes and sizes while executing tasks based on natural language commands. The proposed approach has the following core components: First, a robust task planner with a task-level recovery mechanism that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) is designed, which enables the system to interpret and execute open-vocabulary commands for long sequence tasks. Second, a language-guided dexterous grasp perception algorithm is presented based on robot kinematics and formal methods, tailored for zero-shot dexterous manipulation with diverse objects and commands. Comprehensive experimental results validate the effectiveness, adaptability, and robustness of RoboDexVLM in handling long-horizon scenarios and performing dexterous grasping. These results highlight the framework's ability to operate in complex environments, showcasing its potential for open-vocabulary dexterous manipulation. Our open-source project page can be found at https://henryhcliu.github.io/robodexvlm.

Paperid: 1148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01334.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The burgeoning volume of multi-modal data necessitates advanced retrieval paradigms beyond unimodal and cross-modal approaches. Composed Multi-modal Retrieval (CMR) emerges as a pivotal next-generation technology, enabling users to query images or videos by integrating a reference visual input with textual modifications, thereby achieving unprecedented flexibility and precision. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of CMR, covering its fundamental challenges, technical advancements, and applications. CMR is categorized into supervised, zero-shot, and semi-supervised learning paradigms. We discuss key research directions, including data construction, model architecture, and loss optimization in supervised CMR, as well as transformation frameworks and linear integration in zero-shot CMR, and semi-supervised CMR that leverages generated pseudo-triplets while addressing data noise/uncertainty. Additionally, we extensively survey the diverse application landscape of CMR, highlighting its transformative potential in e-commerce, social media, search engines, public security, etc. Seven high impact application scenarios are explored in detail with benchmark data sets and performance analysis. Finally, we further provide new potential research directions with the hope of inspiring exploration in other yet-to-be-explored fields. A curated list of works is available at: https://github.com/kkzhang95/Awesome-Composed-Multi-modal-Retrieval

Paperid: 1149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01020.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in medical vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in image classification tasks, driven by their strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. However, given the high variability and complexity inherent in medical imaging data, the ability of these models to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data in this domain remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct the first systematic investigation into the OOD detection potential of medical VLMs. We evaluate state-of-the-art VLM-based OOD detection methods across a diverse set of medical VLMs, including both general and domain-specific purposes. To accurately reflect real-world challenges, we introduce a cross-modality evaluation pipeline for benchmarking full-spectrum OOD detection, rigorously assessing model robustness against both semantic shifts and covariate shifts. Furthermore, we propose a novel hierarchical prompt-based method that significantly enhances OOD detection performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. The codes are available at https://github.com/PyJulie/Medical-VLMs-OOD-Detection.

Paperid: 1150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00986.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In egocentric video understanding, the motion of hands and objects as well as their interactions play a significant role by nature. However, existing egocentric video representation learning methods mainly focus on aligning video representation with high-level narrations, overlooking the intricate dynamics between hands and objects. In this work, we aim to integrate the modeling of fine-grained hand-object dynamics into the video representation learning process. Since no suitable data is available, we introduce HOD, a novel pipeline employing a hand-object detector and a large language model to generate high-quality narrations with detailed descriptions of hand-object dynamics. To learn these fine-grained dynamics, we propose EgoVideo, a model with a new lightweight motion adapter to capture fine-grained hand-object motion information. Through our co-training strategy, EgoVideo effectively and efficiently leverages the fine-grained hand-object dynamics in the HOD data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple egocentric downstream tasks, including improvements of 6.3% in EK-100 multi-instance retrieval, 5.7% in EK-100 classification, and 16.3% in EGTEA classification in zero-shot settings. Furthermore, our model exhibits robust generalization capabilities in hand-object interaction and robot manipulation tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/EgoHOD/.

Paperid: 1151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00748.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate lymph node (LN) segmentation is critical in radiotherapy treatment and prognosis analysis, but is limited by the need for large annotated datasets. While deep learning-based segmentation foundation models show potential in developing high-performing models with fewer samples, their medical adaptation faces LN domain-specific prior deficiencies and inefficient few-shot fine-tuning for complex clinical practices, highlighting the necessity of an LN segmentation foundation model. In this work, we annotated 36,106 visible LNs from 3,346 publicly available head-and-neck CT scans to establish a robust LN segmentation model (nnUNetv2). Building on this, we propose Dynamic Gradient Sparsification Training (DGST), a few-shot fine-tuning approach that preserves foundational knowledge while dynamically updating the most critical parameters of the LN segmentation model with few annotations. We validate it on two publicly available LN segmentation datasets: SegRap2023 and LNQ2023. The results show that DGST outperforms existing few-shot fine-tuning methods, achieving satisfactory performance with limited labeled data. We release the dataset, models and all implementations to facilitate relevant research: https://github.com/Zihaoluoh/LN-Seg-FM.

Paperid: 1152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00441.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs), extensively pre-trained on large-scale datasets, have become essential to foundation models, allowing excellent performance on diverse downstream tasks with minimal adaptation. Consequently, there is growing interest in adapting pre-trained ViTs across various fields, including privacy-sensitive domains where clients are often reluctant to share their data. Existing adaptation methods typically require direct data access, rendering them infeasible under these constraints. A straightforward solution may be sending the pre-trained ViT to clients for local adaptation, which poses issues of model intellectual property protection and incurs heavy client computation overhead. To address these issues, we propose a novel split adaptation (SA) method that enables effective downstream adaptation while protecting data and models. SA, inspired by split learning (SL), segments the pre-trained ViT into a frontend and a backend, with only the frontend shared with the client for data representation extraction. But unlike regular SL, SA replaces frontend parameters with low-bit quantized values, preventing direct exposure of the model. SA allows the client to add bi-level noise to the frontend and the extracted data representations, ensuring data protection. Accordingly, SA incorporates data-level and model-level out-of-distribution enhancements to mitigate noise injection's impact on adaptation performance. Our SA focuses on the challenging few-shot adaptation and adopts patch retrieval augmentation for overfitting alleviation. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate SA's superiority over state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate its defense against advanced data reconstruction attacks while preventing model leakage with minimal computation cost on the client side. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/conditionWang/Split_Adaptation.

Paperid: 1153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00329.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate an embedding model which outputs can use a natural language instruction to control the representation of a visual embedding. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves best-for-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of visual embeddings, outputting high-quality visual representations with natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page: https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/ABC/

Paperid: 1154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00276.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite recent progress, video generative models still struggle to animate static images into videos that portray delicate human actions, particularly when handling uncommon or novel actions whose training data are limited. In this paper, we explore the task of learning to animate images to portray delicate human actions using a small number of videos -- 16 or fewer -- which is highly valuable for real-world applications like video and movie production. Learning generalizable motion patterns that smoothly transition from user-provided reference images in a few-shot setting is highly challenging. We propose FLASH (Few-shot Learning to Animate and Steer Humans), which learns generalizable motion patterns by forcing the model to reconstruct a video using the motion features and cross-frame correspondences of another video with the same motion but different appearance. This encourages transferable motion learning and mitigates overfitting to limited training data. Additionally, FLASH extends the decoder with additional layers to propagate details from the reference image to generated frames, improving transition smoothness. Human judges overwhelmingly favor FLASH, with 65.78\% of 488 responses prefer FLASH over baselines. We strongly recommend watching the videos in the website: https://lihaoxin05.github.io/human_action_animation/, as motion artifacts are hard to notice from images.

Paperid: 1155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20974.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-world continual learning (OWCL) adapts to sequential tasks with open samples, learning knowledge incrementally while preventing forgetting. However, existing OWCL still requires a large amount of labeled data for training, which is often impractical in real-world applications. Given that new categories/entities typically come with limited annotations and are in small quantities, a more realistic situation is OWCL with scarce labeled data, i.e., few-shot training samples. Hence, this paper investigates the problem of open-world few-shot continual learning (OFCL), challenging in (i) learning unbounded tasks without forgetting previous knowledge and avoiding overfitting, (ii) constructing compact decision boundaries for open detection with limited labeled data, and (iii) transferring knowledge about knowns and unknowns and even update the unknowns to knowns once the labels of open samples are learned. In response, we propose a novel OFCL framework that integrates three key components: (1) an instance-wise token augmentation (ITA) that represents and enriches sample representations with additional knowledge, (2) a margin-based open boundary (MOB) that supports open detection with new tasks emerge over time, and (3) an adaptive knowledge space (AKS) that endows unknowns with knowledge for the updating from unknowns to knowns. Finally, extensive experiments show that the proposed OFCL framework outperforms all baselines remarkably with practical importance and reproducibility. The source code is released at https://github.com/liyj1201/OFCL.

Paperid: 1156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20861.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstructing 3D shapes from a single image plays an important role in computer vision. Many methods have been proposed and achieve impressive performance. However, existing methods mainly focus on extracting semantic information from images and then simply concatenating it with 3D point clouds without further exploring the concatenated semantics. As a result, these entangled semantic features significantly hinder the reconstruction performance. In this paper, we propose a novel single-image 3D reconstruction method called Mining Effective Semantic Cues for 3D Reconstruction from a Single Image (MESC-3D), which can actively mine effective semantic cues from entangled features. Specifically, we design an Effective Semantic Mining Module to establish connections between point clouds and image semantic attributes, enabling the point clouds to autonomously select the necessary information. Furthermore, to address the potential insufficiencies in semantic information from a single image, such as occlusions, inspired by the human ability to represent 3D objects using prior knowledge drawn from daily experiences, we introduce a 3D Semantic Prior Learning Module. This module incorporates semantic understanding of spatial structures, enabling the model to interpret and reconstruct 3D objects with greater accuracy and realism, closely mirroring human perception of complex 3D environments. Extensive evaluations show that our method achieves significant improvements in reconstruction quality and robustness compared to prior works. Additionally, further experiments validate the strong generalization capabilities and excels in zero-shot preformance on unseen classes. Code is available at https://github.com/QINGQINGLE/MESC-3D.

Paperid: 1157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20780.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The increasing use of vision-language models (VLMs) in healthcare applications presents great challenges related to hallucinations, in which the models may generate seemingly plausible results that are in fact incorrect. Such hallucinations can jeopardize clinical decision making, potentially harming the diagnosis and treatments. In this work, we propose MedHallTune, a large-scale benchmark designed specifically to evaluate and mitigate hallucinations in medical VLMs. Comprising over 100,000 images and 1,000,000 instruction pairs, MedHallTune includes both hallucination and non-hallucination samples, each with ground-truth annotations. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of current medical and general VLMs using MedHallTune, assessing their performance across key metrics, including clinical accuracy, relevance, detail level, and risk level. The experimental results show that fine-tuning with MedHallTune successfully improves the ability of several existing models to manage hallucinations and boost their zero-shot performance on downstream visual-question-answering (VQA) tasks, making them more reliable for practical medical applications. Our work contributes to the development of more trustworthy VLMs. Codes and dataset will be available at \href{https://github.com/russellyq/MedHallTune}{MedHallTune}.

Paperid: 1158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20625.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot object counting aims to count instances of arbitrary object categories specified by text descriptions. Existing methods typically rely on vision-language models like CLIP, but often exhibit limited sensitivity to text prompts. We present T2ICount, a diffusion-based framework that leverages rich prior knowledge and fine-grained visual understanding from pretrained diffusion models. While one-step denoising ensures efficiency, it leads to weakened text sensitivity. To address this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Correction Module that progressively refines text-image feature alignment, and a Representational Regional Coherence Loss that provides reliable supervision signals by leveraging the cross-attention maps extracted from the denosing U-Net. Furthermore, we observe that current benchmarks mainly focus on majority objects in images, potentially masking models' text sensitivity. To address this, we contribute a challenging re-annotated subset of FSC147 for better evaluation of text-guided counting ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across different benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/cha15yq/T2ICount.

Paperid: 1159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20390.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Achieving realistic simulations of humans interacting with a wide range of objects has long been a fundamental goal. Extending physics-based motion imitation to complex human-object interactions (HOIs) is challenging due to intricate human-object coupling, variability in object geometries, and artifacts in motion capture data, such as inaccurate contacts and limited hand detail. We introduce InterMimic, a framework that enables a single policy to robustly learn from hours of imperfect MoCap data covering diverse full-body interactions with dynamic and varied objects. Our key insight is to employ a curriculum strategy -- perfect first, then scale up. We first train subject-specific teacher policies to mimic, retarget, and refine motion capture data. Next, we distill these teachers into a student policy, with the teachers acting as online experts providing direct supervision, as well as high-quality references. Notably, we incorporate RL fine-tuning on the student policy to surpass mere demonstration replication and achieve higher-quality solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that InterMimic produces realistic and diverse interactions across multiple HOI datasets. The learned policy generalizes in a zero-shot manner and seamlessly integrates with kinematic generators, elevating the framework from mere imitation to generative modeling of complex human-object interactions.

Paperid: 1160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20382.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a low-cost data generation pipeline that integrates physics-based simulation, human demonstrations, and model-based planning to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality datasets for contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. Starting with a small number of embodiment-flexible human demonstrations collected in a virtual reality simulation environment, the pipeline refines these demonstrations using optimization-based kinematic retargeting and trajectory optimization to adapt them across various robot embodiments and physical parameters. This process yields a diverse, physically consistent dataset that enables cross-embodiment data transfer, and offers the potential to reuse legacy datasets collected under different hardware configurations or physical parameters. We validate the pipeline's effectiveness by training diffusion policies from the generated datasets for challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks across multiple robot embodiments, including a floating Allegro hand and bimanual robot arms. The trained policies are deployed zero-shot on hardware for bimanual iiwa arms, achieving high success rates with minimal human input. Project website: https://lujieyang.github.io/physicsgen/.

Paperid: 1161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20321.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual generative and understanding models typically rely on distinct tokenizers to process images, presenting a key challenge for unifying them within a single framework. Recent studies attempt to address this by connecting the training of VQVAE (for autoregressive generation) and CLIP (for understanding) to build a unified tokenizer. However, directly combining these training objectives has been observed to cause severe loss conflicts. In this paper, we show that reconstruction and semantic supervision do not inherently conflict. Instead, the underlying bottleneck stems from limited representational capacity of discrete token space. Building on these insights, we introduce UniTok, a unified tokenizer featuring a novel multi-codebook quantization mechanism that effectively scales up the vocabulary size and bottleneck dimension. In terms of final performance, UniTok sets a new record of 0.38 rFID and 78.6% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. Besides, UniTok can be seamlessly integrated into MLLMs to unlock native visual generation capability, without compromising the understanding performance. Additionally, we show that UniTok favors cfg-free generation, reducing gFID from 14.6 to 2.5 on ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark. GitHub: https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniTok.

Paperid: 1162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20122.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens, incurring extraneous inference costs. Upon examination of the output distribution of current LLMs, we find evidence on their latent ability to reason more concisely, relative to their default behavior. To elicit this capability, we propose simple fine-tuning methods which leverage self-generated concise reasoning paths obtained by best-of-N sampling and few-shot conditioning, in task-specific settings. Our combined method achieves a 30% reduction in output tokens on average, across five model families on GSM8K and MATH, while maintaining average accuracy. By exploiting the fundamental stochasticity and in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, our self-training approach robustly elicits concise reasoning on a wide range of models, including those with extensive post-training. Code is available at https://github.com/TergelMunkhbat/concise-reasoning

Paperid: 1163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20110.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) is crucial to solving downstream tasks in 3D perception and modeling. However, the remarkable accuracy of recent MMDE methods is confined to their training domains. These methods fail to generalize to unseen domains even in the presence of moderate domain gaps, which hinders their practical applicability. We propose a new model, UniDepthV2, capable of reconstructing metric 3D scenes from solely single images across domains. Departing from the existing MMDE paradigm, UniDepthV2 directly predicts metric 3D points from the input image at inference time without any additional information, striving for a universal and flexible MMDE solution. In particular, UniDepthV2 implements a self-promptable camera module predicting a dense camera representation to condition depth features. Our model exploits a pseudo-spherical output representation, which disentangles the camera and depth representations. In addition, we propose a geometric invariance loss that promotes the invariance of camera-prompted depth features. UniDepthV2 improves its predecessor UniDepth model via a new edge-guided loss which enhances the localization and sharpness of edges in the metric depth outputs, a revisited, simplified and more efficient architectural design, and an additional uncertainty-level output which enables downstream tasks requiring confidence. Thorough evaluations on ten depth datasets in a zero-shot regime consistently demonstrate the superior performance and generalization of UniDepthV2. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/UniDepth

Paperid: 1164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19960.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have revolutionized seismic monitoring, yet developing a foundation model that performs well across multiple complex tasks remains challenging, particularly when dealing with degraded signals or data scarcity. This work presents SeisMoLLM, the first foundation model that utilizes cross-modal transfer for seismic monitoring, to unleash the power of large-scale pre-training from a large language model without requiring direct pre-training on seismic datasets. Through elaborate waveform tokenization and fine-tuning of pre-trained GPT-2 model, SeisMoLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DiTing and STEAD datasets across five critical tasks: back-azimuth estimation, epicentral distance estimation, magnitude estimation, phase picking, and first-motion polarity classification. It attains 36 best results out of 43 task metrics and 12 top scores out of 16 few-shot generalization metrics, with many relative improvements ranging from 10% to 50%. In addition to its superior performance, SeisMoLLM maintains efficiency comparable to or even better than lightweight models in both training and inference. These findings establish SeisMoLLM as a promising foundation model for practical seismic monitoring and highlight cross-modal transfer as an exciting new direction for earthquake studies, showcasing the potential of advanced deep learning techniques to propel seismology research forward.

Paperid: 1165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19717.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.

Paperid: 1166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19638.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.

Paperid: 1167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19512.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fully inductive knowledge graph models can be trained on multiple domains and subsequently perform zero-shot knowledge graph completion (KGC) in new unseen domains. This is an important capability towards the goal of having foundation models for knowledge graphs. In this work, we introduce a more expressive and capable fully inductive model, dubbed TRIX, which not only yields strictly more expressive triplet embeddings (head entity, relation, tail entity) compared to state-of-the-art methods, but also introduces a new capability: directly handling both entity and relation prediction tasks in inductive settings. Empirically, we show that TRIX outperforms the state-of-the-art fully inductive models in zero-shot entity and relation predictions in new domains, and outperforms large-context LLMs in out-of-domain predictions. The source code is available at https://github.com/yuchengz99/TRIX.

Paperid: 1168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19409.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning over sequences of images remains a challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While recent models incorporate multi-image data during pre-training, they still struggle to recognize sequential structures, often treating images independently. This work introduces ImageChain, a framework that enhances MLLMs with sequential reasoning capabilities over image data by modeling visual sequences as a multi-turn conversation. In ImageChain, images are interleaved with corresponding textual descriptions to form a controlled dialogue that explicitly captures temporal dependencies and narrative progression. Our method optimizes for the task of next-scene description, where the model generates a context-aware description of an upcoming scene based on preceding visual and textual cues. We demonstrate that our approach improves performance on the next-scene description task -- achieving an average improvement from 3.7% to 19% in SimRate, a metric that quantifies semantic similarity to human-annotated ground truths. Moreover, ImageChain achieves robust zero-shot out-of-domain performance in applications ranging from comics to robotics. Extensive experiments validate that instruction-tuning in a multimodal, multi-turn conversation design is key to bridging the gap between static image understanding and temporally-aware reasoning.

Paperid: 1169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19159.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compared to width-wise pruning, depth-wise pruning can significantly accelerate inference in resource-constrained scenarios. However, treating the entire Transformer layer as the minimum pruning unit may degrade model performance by indiscriminately discarding the entire information of the layer. This paper reveals the ``Patch-like'' feature relationship between layers in large language models by analyzing the correlation of the outputs of different layers in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Building on this observation, we propose a sliding layer merging method that dynamically selects and fuses consecutive layers from top to bottom according to a pre-defined similarity threshold, thereby simplifying the model structure while maintaining its performance. Extensive experiments on LLMs with various architectures and different parameter scales show that our method outperforms existing pruning techniques in both zero-shot inference performance and retraining recovery quality after pruning. In particular, in the experiment with 35% pruning on the Vicuna-7B model, our method achieved a 1.654% improvement in average performance on zero-shot tasks compared to the existing method. Moreover, we further reveal the potential of combining depth pruning with width pruning to enhance the pruning effect. Our codes are available at https://github.com/920927/SLM-a-sliding-layer-merging-method.

Paperid: 1170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18924.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While recent zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models have significantly improved speech quality and expressiveness, mainstream systems still suffer from issues related to speech-text alignment modeling: 1) models without explicit speech-text alignment modeling exhibit less robustness, especially for hard sentences in practical applications; 2) predefined alignment-based models suffer from naturalness constraints of forced alignments. This paper introduces \textit{MegaTTS 3}, a TTS system featuring an innovative sparse alignment algorithm that guides the latent diffusion transformer (DiT). Specifically, we provide sparse alignment boundaries to MegaTTS 3 to reduce the difficulty of alignment without limiting the search space, thereby achieving high naturalness. Moreover, we employ a multi-condition classifier-free guidance strategy for accent intensity adjustment and adopt the piecewise rectified flow technique to accelerate the generation process. Experiments demonstrate that MegaTTS 3 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS speech quality and supports highly flexible control over accent intensity. Notably, our system can generate high-quality one-minute speech with only 8 sampling steps. Audio samples are available at https://sditdemo.github.io/sditdemo/.

Paperid: 1171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18771.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph-structured data has become increasingly prevalent across various domains, raising the demand for effective models to handle graph tasks like node classification and link prediction. Traditional graph learning models like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant strides, but their capabilities in handling graph data remain limited in certain contexts. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising candidates for graph tasks, yet most studies focus primarily on performance benchmarks and fail to address their broader potential, including their ability to handle limited data, their transferability across tasks, and their robustness. In this work, we provide a comprehensive exploration of LLMs applied to graph tasks. We evaluate the performance of pure LLMs, including those without parameter optimization and those fine-tuned with instructions, across various scenarios. Our analysis goes beyond accuracy, assessing LLM ability to perform in few-shot/zero-shot settings, transfer across domains, understand graph structures, and demonstrate robustness in challenging scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments with 16 graph learning models alongside 6 LLMs (e.g., Llama3B, GPT-4o, Qwen-plus), comparing their performance on datasets like Cora, PubMed, ArXiv, and Products. Our findings show that LLMs, particularly those with instruction tuning, outperform traditional models in few-shot settings, exhibit strong domain transferability, and demonstrate excellent generalization and robustness. This work offers valuable insights into the capabilities of LLMs for graph learning, highlighting their advantages and potential for real-world applications, and paving the way for future research in this area. Codes and datasets are released in https://github.com/myflashbarry/LLM-benchmarking.

Paperid: 1172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18495.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging yet challenging task that allows users to search for target images using a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text specifying the user's desired changes to the reference image. Given its significant academic and practical value, CIR has become a rapidly growing area of interest in the computer vision and machine learning communities, particularly with the advances in deep learning. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive review of CIR to provide a timely overview of this field. Therefore, we synthesize insights from over 120 publications in top conferences and journals, including ACM TOIS, SIGIR, and CVPR In particular, we systematically categorize existing supervised CIR and zero-shot CIR models using a fine-grained taxonomy. For a comprehensive review, we also briefly discuss approaches for tasks closely related to CIR, such as attribute-based CIR and dialog-based CIR. Additionally, we summarize benchmark datasets for evaluation and analyze existing supervised and zero-shot CIR methods by comparing experimental results across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we present promising future directions in this field, offering practical insights for researchers interested in further exploration. The curated collection of related works is maintained and continuously updated in https://github.com/haokunwen/Awesome-Composed-Image-Retrieval.

Paperid: 1173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18302.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce LDGen, a novel method for integrating large language models (LLMs) into existing text-to-image diffusion models while minimizing computational demands. Traditional text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, exhibit limitations in multilingual processing, hindering image generation across diverse languages. We address these challenges by leveraging the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Our approach employs a language representation strategy that applies hierarchical caption optimization and human instruction techniques to derive precise semantic information,. Subsequently, we incorporate a lightweight adapter and a cross-modal refiner to facilitate efficient feature alignment and interaction between LLMs and image features. LDGen reduces training time and enables zero-shot multilingual image generation. Experimental results indicate that our method surpasses baseline models in both prompt adherence and image aesthetic quality, while seamlessly supporting multiple languages. Project page: https://zrealli.github.io/LDGen.

Paperid: 1174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18219.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn.

Paperid: 1175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18195.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent few-shot object detection (FSOD) methods have focused on augmenting synthetic samples for novel classes, show promising results to the rise of diffusion models. However, the diversity of such datasets is often limited in representativeness because they lack awareness of typical and hard samples, especially in the context of foreground and background relationships. To tackle this issue, we propose a Multi-Perspective Data Augmentation (MPAD) framework. In terms of foreground-foreground relationships, we propose in-context learning for object synthesis (ICOS) with bounding box adjustments to enhance the detail and spatial information of synthetic samples. Inspired by the large margin principle, support samples play a vital role in defining class boundaries. Therefore, we design a Harmonic Prompt Aggregation Scheduler (HPAS) to mix prompt embeddings at each time step of the generation process in diffusion models, producing hard novel samples. For foreground-background relationships, we introduce a Background Proposal method (BAP) to sample typical and hard backgrounds. Extensive experiments on multiple FSOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods, achieving an average increase of $17.5\%$ in nAP50 over the baseline on PASCAL VOC. Code is available at https://github.com/nvakhoa/MPAD.

Paperid: 1176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18176.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to build an adversarially robust zero-shot image classifier. We ground our work on CLIP, a vision-language pre-trained encoder model that can perform zero-shot classification by matching an image with text prompts ``a photo of a .''. Purification is the path we choose since it does not require adversarial training on specific attack types and thus can cope with any foreseen attacks. We then formulate purification risk as the KL divergence between the joint distributions of the purification process of denoising the adversarial samples and the attack process of adding perturbations to benign samples, through bidirectional Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs). The final derived results inspire us to explore purification in the multi-modal latent space of CLIP. We propose two variants for our CLIPure approach: CLIPure-Diff which models the likelihood of images' latent vectors with the DiffusionPrior module in DaLLE-2 (modeling the generation process of CLIP's latent vectors), and CLIPure-Cos which models the likelihood with the cosine similarity between the embeddings of an image and ``a photo of a.''. As far as we know, CLIPure is the first purification method in multi-modal latent space and CLIPure-Cos is the first purification method that is not based on generative models, which substantially improves defense efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and 13 datasets that previous CLIP-based defense methods used for evaluating zero-shot classification robustness. Results show that CLIPure boosts the SOTA robustness by a large margin, e.g., from 71.7% to 91.1% on CIFAR10, from 59.6% to 72.6% on ImageNet, and 108% relative improvements of average robustness on the 13 datasets over previous SOTA. The code is available at https://github.com/TMLResearchGroup-CAS/CLIPure.

Paperid: 1177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17928.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Source localization in graph information propagation is essential for mitigating network disruptions, including misinformation spread, cyber threats, and infrastructure failures. Existing deep generative approaches face significant challenges in real-world applications due to limited propagation data availability. We present SIDSL (\textbf{S}tructure-prior \textbf{I}nformed \textbf{D}iffusion model for \textbf{S}ource \textbf{L}ocalization), a generative diffusion framework that leverages topology-aware priors to enable robust source localization with limited data. SIDSL addresses three key challenges: unknown propagation patterns through structure-based source estimations via graph label propagation, complex topology-propagation relationships via a propagation-enhanced conditional denoiser with GNN-parameterized label propagation module, and class imbalance through structure-prior biased diffusion initialization. By learning pattern-invariant features from synthetic data generated by established propagation models, SIDSL enables effective knowledge transfer to real-world scenarios. Experimental evaluation on four real-world datasets demonstrates superior performance with 7.5-13.3\% F1 score improvements over baselines, including over 19\% improvement in few-shot and 40\% in zero-shot settings, validating the framework's effectiveness for practical source localization. Our code can be found \href{https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SIDSL}{here}.

Paperid: 1178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17258.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved video generation and editing capabilities. However, multi-grained video editing, which encompasses class-level, instance-level, and part-level modifications, remains a formidable challenge. The major difficulties in multi-grained editing include semantic misalignment of text-to-region control and feature coupling within the diffusion model. To address these difficulties, we present VideoGrain, a zero-shot approach that modulates space-time (cross- and self-) attention mechanisms to achieve fine-grained control over video content. We enhance text-to-region control by amplifying each local prompt's attention to its corresponding spatial-disentangled region while minimizing interactions with irrelevant areas in cross-attention. Additionally, we improve feature separation by increasing intra-region awareness and reducing inter-region interference in self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in real-world scenarios. Our code, data, and demos are available at https://knightyxp.github.io/VideoGrain_project_page/

Paperid: 1179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16704.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Code summarization is a critical task in natural language processing and software engineering, which aims to generate concise descriptions of source code. Recent advancements have improved the quality of these summaries, enhancing code readability and maintainability. However, the content of a repository or a class has not been considered in function code summarization. This study investigated the effectiveness of code summarization models beyond the function level, exploring the impact of class and repository contexts on the summary quality. The study involved revising benchmarks for evaluating models at class and repository levels, assessing baseline models, and evaluating LLMs with in-context learning to determine the enhancement of summary quality with additional context. The findings revealed that the fine-tuned state-of-the-art CodeT5+ base model excelled in code summarization, while incorporating few-shot learning and retrieved code chunks from RAG significantly enhanced the performance of LLMs in this task. Notably, the Deepseek Coder 1.3B and Starcoder2 15B models demonstrated substantial improvements in metrics such as BLEURT, METEOR, and BLEU-4 at both class and repository levels. Repository-level summarization exhibited promising potential but necessitates significant computational resources and gains from the inclusion of structured context. Lastly, we employed the recent SIDE code summarization metric in our evaluation. This study contributes to refining strategies for prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and RAG, addressing gaps in benchmarks for code summarization at various levels. Finally, we publish all study details, code, datasets, and results of evaluation in the GitHub repository available at https://github.com/kilimanj4r0/code-summarization-beyond-function-level.

Paperid: 1180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15749.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time complexity is a theoretic measure to determine the amount of time the algorithm needs for its execution. In reality, developers write algorithms into code snippets within limited resources, making the calculation of a code's time complexity a fundamental task. However, determining the precise time complexity of a code is theoretically undecidable. In response, recent advancements have leaned toward deploying datasets for code time complexity prediction and initiating preliminary experiments for this challenge. We investigate the challenge in low-resource scenarios where only a few labeled instances are given for training. Remarkably, we are the first to introduce TCProF: a Time-Complexity Prediction SSL Framework as an effective solution for code time complexity prediction in low-resource settings. TCProF significantly boosts performance by integrating our augmentation, symbolic modules, and a co-training mechanism, achieving a more than 60% improvement over self-training approaches. We further provide an extensive comparative analysis between TCProF, ChatGPT, and Gemini-Pro, offering a detailed evaluation of our approach. Our code is at https://github.com/peer0/few-shot-tc.

Paperid: 1181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15613.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Current robotic pick-and-place policies typically require consistent gripper configurations across training and inference. This constraint imposes high retraining or fine-tuning costs, especially for imitation learning-based approaches, when adapting to new end-effectors. To mitigate this issue, we present a diffusion-based policy with a hybrid learning-optimization framework, enabling zero-shot adaptation to novel grippers without additional data collection for retraining policy. During training, the policy learns manipulation primitives from demonstrations collected using a base gripper. At inference, a diffusion-based optimization strategy dynamically enforces kinematic and safety constraints, ensuring that generated trajectories align with the physical properties of unseen grippers. This is achieved through a constrained denoising procedure that adapts trajectories to gripper-specific parameters (e.g., tool-center-point offsets, jaw widths) while preserving collision avoidance and task feasibility. We validate our method on a Franka Panda robot across six gripper configurations, including 3D-printed fingertips, flexible silicone gripper, and Robotiq 2F-85 gripper. Our approach achieves a 93.3% average task success rate across grippers (vs. 23.3-26.7% for diffusion policy baselines), supporting tool-center-point variations of 16-23.5 cm and jaw widths of 7.5-11.5 cm. The results demonstrate that constrained diffusion enables robust cross-gripper manipulation while maintaining the sample efficiency of imitation learning, eliminating the need for gripper-specific retraining. Video and code are available at https://github.com/yaoxt3/GADP.

Paperid: 1182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14816.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the efficacy of network sparsity in alleviating the deployment strain of Large Language Models (LLMs), it endures significant performance degradation. Applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the sparse LLMs offers an intuitive approach to counter this predicament, while it holds shortcomings include: 1) The inability to integrate LoRA weights into sparse LLMs post-training, and 2) Insufficient performance recovery at high sparsity ratios. In this paper, we introduce dynamic Low-rank Sparse Adaptation (LoSA), a novel method that seamlessly integrates low-rank adaptation into LLM sparsity within a unified framework, thereby enhancing the performance of sparse LLMs without increasing the inference latency. In particular, LoSA dynamically sparsifies the LoRA outcomes based on the corresponding sparse weights during fine-tuning, thus guaranteeing that the LoRA module can be integrated into the sparse LLMs post-training. Besides, LoSA leverages Representation Mutual Information (RMI) as an indicator to determine the importance of layers, thereby efficiently determining the layer-wise sparsity rates during fine-tuning. Predicated on this, LoSA adjusts the rank of the LoRA module based on the variability in layer-wise reconstruction errors, allocating an appropriate fine-tuning for each layer to reduce the output discrepancies between dense and sparse LLMs. Extensive experiments tell that LoSA can efficiently boost the efficacy of sparse LLMs within a few hours, without introducing any additional inferential burden. For example, LoSA reduced the perplexity of sparse LLaMA-2-7B by 68.73 and increased zero-shot accuracy by 16.32$\%$, achieving a 2.60$\times$ speedup on CPU and 2.23$\times$ speedup on GPU, requiring only 45 minutes of fine-tuning on a single NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/wzhuang-xmu/LoSA.

Paperid: 1183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14786.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce SigLIP 2, a family of new multilingual vision-language encoders that build on the success of the original SigLIP. In this second iteration, we extend the original image-text training objective with several prior, independently developed techniques into a unified recipe -- this includes captioning-based pretraining, self-supervised losses (self-distillation, masked prediction) and online data curation. With these changes, SigLIP 2 models outperform their SigLIP counterparts at all model scales in core capabilities, including zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer performance when extracting visual representations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Furthermore, the new training recipe leads to significant improvements on localization and dense prediction tasks. We also train variants which support multiple resolutions and preserve the input's native aspect ratio. Finally, we train on a more diverse data-mixture that includes de-biasing techniques, leading to much better multilingual understanding and improved fairness. To allow users to trade off inference cost with performance, we release model checkpoints at four sizes: ViT-B (86M), L (303M), So400m (400M), and g (1B).

Paperid: 1184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14604.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address distribution shifts between source and target data by relying solely on target data during testing. In open-world scenarios, models often encounter noisy samples, i.e., samples outside the in-distribution (ID) label space. Leveraging the zero-shot capability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), this paper introduces Zero-Shot Noisy TTA (ZS-NTTA), focusing on adapting the model to target data with noisy samples during test-time in a zero-shot manner. We find existing TTA methods underperform under ZS-NTTA, often lagging behind even the frozen model. We conduct comprehensive experiments to analyze this phenomenon, revealing that the negative impact of unfiltered noisy data outweighs the benefits of clean data during model updating. Also, adapting a classifier for ID classification and noise detection hampers both sub-tasks. Built on this, we propose a framework that decouples the classifier and detector, focusing on developing an individual detector while keeping the classifier frozen. Technically, we introduce the Adaptive Noise Detector (AdaND), which utilizes the frozen model's outputs as pseudo-labels to train a noise detector. To handle clean data streams, we further inject Gaussian noise during adaptation, preventing the detector from misclassifying clean samples as noisy. Beyond the ZS-NTTA, AdaND can also improve the zero-shot out-of-distribution (ZS-OOD) detection ability of VLMs. Experiments show that AdaND outperforms in both ZS-NTTA and ZS-OOD detection. On ImageNet, AdaND achieves a notable improvement of $8.32\%$ in harmonic mean accuracy ($\text{Acc}_\text{H}$) for ZS-NTTA and $9.40\%$ in FPR95 for ZS-OOD detection, compared to SOTA methods. Importantly, AdaND is computationally efficient and comparable to the model-frozen method. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/ZS-NTTA.

Paperid: 1185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14214.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) has gained significant attention as an alternative to traditional unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), which relies on the constant availability of labeled source data. However, SFUDA approaches come with inherent limitations that are frequently overlooked. These challenges include performance degradation when the unlabeled target data fails to meet critical assumptions, such as having a closed-set label distribution identical to that of the source domain, or when sufficient unlabeled target data is unavailable-a common situation in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose an asymmetric co-training (ACT) method specifically designed for the SFFSDA scenario. SFFSDA presents a more practical alternative to SFUDA, as gathering a few labeled target instances is more feasible than acquiring large volumes of unlabeled target data in many real-world contexts. Our ACT method begins by employing a weak-strong augmentation to enhance data diversity. Then we use a two-step optimization process to train the target model. In the first step, we optimize the label smoothing cross-entropy loss, the entropy of the class-conditional distribution, and the reverse-entropy loss to bolster the model's discriminative ability while mitigating overfitting. The second step focuses on reducing redundancy in the output space by minimizing classifier determinacy disparity. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our ACT approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art SFUDA methods and transfer learning techniques. Our findings suggest that adapting a source pre-trained model using only a small amount of labeled target data offers a practical and dependable solution. The code is available at https://github.com/gengxuli/ACT.

Paperid: 1186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13964.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many everyday mobile manipulation tasks require precise interaction with small objects, such as grasping a knob to open a cabinet or pressing a light switch. In this paper, we develop Servoing with Vision Models (SVM), a closed-loop training-free framework that enables a mobile manipulator to tackle such precise tasks involving the manipulation of small objects. SVM employs an RGB-D wrist camera and uses visual servoing for control. Our novelty lies in the use of state-of-the-art vision models to reliably compute 3D targets from the wrist image for diverse tasks and under occlusion due to the end-effector. To mitigate occlusion artifacts, we employ vision models to out-paint the end-effector thereby significantly enhancing target localization. We demonstrate that aided by out-painting methods, open-vocabulary object detectors can serve as a drop-in module to identify semantic targets (e.g. knobs) and point tracking methods can reliably track interaction sites indicated by user clicks. This training-free method obtains an 85% zero-shot success rate on manipulating unseen objects in novel environments in the real world, outperforming an open-loop control method and an imitation learning baseline trained on 1000+ demonstrations by an absolute success rate of 50%.

Paperid: 1187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13442.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) now achieve near-human performance on standard math word problem benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K), yet their true reasoning ability remains disputed. A key concern is that models often produce confident, yet unfounded, answers to unanswerable problems. We introduce TreeCut, a synthetic dataset that systematically generates infinite unanswerable math word problems and their answerable counterparts, by representing each question as a tree and removing chosen necessary conditions. Experiments show TreeCut effectively induce hallucinations in large language models, including GPT-4o and o3-mini, with rates of 64% and 44% in their respective worst-case scenarios under zero-shot setting. Further analysis highlights that deeper or more complex trees, composite item names, and removing necessary condition near the middle of a path all increase the likelihood of hallucinations, underscoring the persistent challenges LLMs face in identifying unanswerable math problems. The dataset generation code and sample data are available at https://github.com/j-bagel/treecut-math.

Paperid: 1188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13398.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite recent advancements, most computational methods for molecule optimization are constrained to single- or double-property optimization tasks and suffer from poor scalability and generalizability to novel optimization tasks. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable out-of-domain generalizability to novel tasks. To demonstrate LLMs' potential for molecule optimization, we introduce MuMOInstruct, the first high-quality instruction-tuning dataset specifically focused on complex multi-property molecule optimization tasks. Leveraging MuMOInstruct, we develop GeLLMOs, a series of instruction-tuned LLMs for molecule optimization. Extensive evaluations across 5 in-domain and 5 out-of-domain tasks demonstrate that GeLLMOs consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines. GeLLMOs also exhibit outstanding zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks, significantly outperforming powerful closed-source LLMs. Such strong generalizability demonstrates the tremendous potential of GeLLMOs as foundational models for molecule optimization, thereby tackling novel optimization tasks without resource-intensive retraining. MuMOInstruct, models, and code are accessible through https://github.com/ninglab/GeLLMO.

Paperid: 1189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12965.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The basic underlying assumption of machine learning (ML) models is that the training and test data are sampled from the same distribution. However, in daily practice, this assumption is often broken, i.e.~the distribution of the test data changes over time, which hinders the application of conventional ML models. One domain where the distribution shift naturally occurs is text classification, since people always find new topics to discuss. To this end, we survey research articles studying open-set text classification and related tasks. We divide the methods in this area based on the constraints that define the kind of distribution shift and the corresponding problem formulation, i.e.~learning with the Universum, zero-shot learning, and open-set learning. We next discuss the predominant mitigation approaches for each problem setup. Finally, we identify several future work directions, aiming to push the boundaries beyond the state of the art. Interestingly, we find that continual learning can solve many of the issues caused by the shifting class distribution. We maintain a list of relevant papers at https://github.com/Eduard6421/Open-Set-Survey.

Paperid: 1190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12614.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions for different tasks, including single-target instructions and multiple-target instructions. Single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time, limiting its ability to model correlations between relations and thus restricting its capability to extract complex relations. While multiple-target instruction UIE allows for the extraction of multiple relations simultaneously, the inclusion of irrelevant relations introduces decision complexity and impacts extraction accuracy. Therefore, for multi-relation extraction, we propose LDNet, which incorporates multi-aspect relation modeling and a label drop mechanism. By assigning different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making, we reduce decision confusion. Additionally, the label drop mechanism effectively mitigates the impact of irrelevant relations. Experiments show that LDNet outperforms or achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets, in both single-modal and multi-modal, few-shot and zero-shot settings.\footnote{https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/LDNet}

Paperid: 1191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12582.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In real-world action recognition systems, incorporating more attributes helps achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior. However, using a single model to simultaneously recognize multiple attributes can lead to a decrease in accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel method i.e. Adaptive Attribute Prototype Model (AAPM) for human action recognition, which captures rich action-relevant attribute information and strikes a balance between accuracy and robustness. Firstly, we introduce the Text-Constrain Module (TCM) to incorporate textual information from potential labels, and constrain the construction of different attributes prototype representations. In addition, we explore the Attribute Assignment Method (AAM) to address the issue of training bias and increase robustness during the training process.Furthermore, we construct a new video dataset with attribute-based multi-label called Multi-Kinetics for evaluation, which contains various attribute labels (e.g. action, scene, object, etc.) related to human behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AAPM achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both attribute-based multi-label few-shot action recognition and single-label few-shot action recognition. The project and dataset are available at an anonymous account https://github.com/theAAPM/AAPM

Paperid: 1192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12513.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
After pre-training on extensive image-text pairs, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) demonstrates promising performance on a wide variety of benchmarks. However, a substantial volume of multimodal interleaved documents remains underutilized for contrastive vision-language representation learning. To fully leverage these unpaired documents, we initially establish a Real-World Data Extraction pipeline to extract high-quality images and texts. Then we design a hierarchical retrieval method to efficiently associate each image with multiple semantically relevant realistic texts. To further enhance fine-grained visual information, we propose an image semantic augmented generation module for synthetic text production. Furthermore, we employ a semantic balance sampling strategy to improve dataset diversity, enabling better learning of long-tail concepts. Based on these innovations, we construct RealSyn, a dataset combining realistic and synthetic texts, available in three scales: 15M, 30M, and 100M. We compare our dataset with other widely used datasets of equivalent scale for CLIP training. Models pre-trained on RealSyn consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance across various downstream tasks, including linear probe, zero-shot transfer, zero-shot robustness, and zero-shot retrieval. Furthermore, extensive experiments confirm that RealSyn significantly enhances contrastive vision-language representation learning and demonstrates robust scalability. To facilitate future research, the RealSyn dataset and pretrained model weights are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RealSyn.

Paperid: 1193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12481.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
State classification of objects and their relations is core to many long-horizon tasks, particularly in robot planning and manipulation. However, the combinatorial explosion of possible object-predicate combinations, coupled with the need to adapt to novel real-world environments, makes it a desideratum for state classification models to generalize to novel queries with few examples. To this end, we propose PHIER, which leverages predicate hierarchies to generalize effectively in few-shot scenarios. PHIER uses an object-centric scene encoder, self-supervised losses that infer semantic relations between predicates, and a hyperbolic distance metric that captures hierarchical structure; it learns a structured latent space of image-predicate pairs that guides reasoning over state classification queries. We evaluate PHIER in the CALVIN and BEHAVIOR robotic environments and show that PHIER significantly outperforms existing methods in few-shot, out-of-distribution state classification, and demonstrates strong zero- and few-shot generalization from simulated to real-world tasks. Our results demonstrate that leveraging predicate hierarchies improves performance on state classification tasks with limited data.

Paperid: 1194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12231.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Current robotic systems can understand the categories and poses of objects well. But understanding physical properties like mass, friction, and hardness, in the wild, remains challenging. We propose a new method that reconstructs 3D objects using the Gaussian splatting representation and predicts various physical properties in a zero-shot manner. We propose two techniques during the reconstruction phase: a geometry-aware regularization loss function to improve the shape quality and a region-aware feature contrastive loss function to promote region affinity. Two other new techniques are designed during inference: a feature-based property propagation module and a volume integration module tailored for the Gaussian representation. Our framework is named as zero-shot physical understanding with Gaussian splatting, or PUGS. PUGS achieves new state-of-the-art results on the standard benchmark of ABO-500 mass prediction. We provide extensive quantitative ablations and qualitative visualization to demonstrate the mechanism of our designs. We show the proposed methodology can help address challenging real-world grasping tasks. Our codes, data, and models are available at https://github.com/EverNorif/PUGS

Paperid: 1195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12134.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, most existing approaches focus on hard token decoding, which constrains reasoning within the discrete vocabulary space and may not always be optimal. While recent efforts explore continuous-space reasoning, they often require full-model fine-tuning and suffer from catastrophic forgetting, limiting their applicability to state-of-the-art LLMs that already perform well in zero-shot settings with a proper instruction. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for continuous-space reasoning that does not require modifying the LLM. Specifically, we employ a lightweight fixed assistant model to speculatively generate instance-specific soft thought tokens as the initial chain of thoughts, which are then mapped into the LLM's representation space via a trainable projection module. Experimental results on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method enhances LLM reasoning performance through supervised, parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Source code is available at https://github.com/xuyige/SoftCoT.

Paperid: 1196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11741.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) aims to map natural language questions to executable SQL queries. Although large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress, current approaches struggle with poor transferability to open-source LLMs, limited robustness against logic and function errors in complex queries, and inefficiencies in structured search. We introduce SQL-o1, a self-reward-driven heuristic search framework built on an agent-based architecture to enhance model reasoning capabilities. SQL-o1 leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for structured, multi-step exploration, and incorporates a dynamic pruning strategy to accelerate inference without sacrificing accuracy. On the Spider and Bird benchmarks, SQL-o1 achieves a +10.8 execution accuracy improvement on the complex Bird dataset, surpassing even GPT-4-based models. Notably, it exhibits strong few-shot generalization and robust cross-model transferability across open-source LLMs. Our code is available at:https://github.com/ShuaiLyu0110/SQL-o1.

Paperid: 1197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11681.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Alignment tuning is crucial for ensuring large language models (LLMs) behave ethically and helpfully. Current alignment approaches require high-quality annotations and significant training resources. This paper proposes a low-cost, tuning-free method using in-context learning (ICL) to enhance LLM alignment. Through an analysis of high-quality ICL demos, we identified style as a key factor influencing LLM alignment capabilities and explicitly restyled ICL exemplars based on this stylistic framework. Additionally, we combined the restyled demos to achieve a balance between the two conflicting aspects of LLM alignment--factuality and safety. We packaged the restyled examples as prompts to trigger few-shot learning, improving LLM alignment. Compared to the best baseline approach, with an average score of 5.00 as the maximum, our method achieves a maximum 0.10 increase on the Alpaca task (from 4.50 to 4.60), a 0.22 enhancement on the Just-eval benchmark (from 4.34 to 4.56), and a maximum improvement of 0.32 (from 3.53 to 3.85) on the MT-Bench dataset. We release the code and data at https://github.com/AnonymousCode-ComputerScience/RIDE.

Paperid: 1198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11367.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze SAE for interpretable feature extraction from LLMs in safety-critical classification tasks. Our framework evaluates (1) model-layer selection and scaling properties, (2) SAE architectural configurations, including width and pooling strategies, and (3) the effect of binarizing continuous SAE activations. SAE-derived features achieve macro F1 > 0.8, outperforming hidden-state and BoW baselines while demonstrating cross-model transfer from Gemma 2 2B to 9B-IT models. These features generalize in a zero-shot manner to cross-lingual toxicity detection and visual classification tasks. Our analysis highlights the significant impact of pooling strategies and binarization thresholds, showing that binarization offers an efficient alternative to traditional feature selection while maintaining or improving performance. These findings establish new best practices for SAE-based interpretability and enable scalable, transparent deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. Full repo: https://github.com/shan23chen/MOSAIC.

Paperid: 1199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10674.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent open-world representation learning approaches have leveraged CLIP to enable zero-shot 3D object recognition. However, performance on real point clouds with occlusions still falls short due to unrealistic pretraining settings. Additionally, these methods incur high inference costs because they rely on Transformer's attention modules. In this paper, we make two contributions to address these limitations. First, we propose occlusion-aware text-image-point cloud pretraining to reduce the training-testing domain gap. From 52K synthetic 3D objects, our framework generates nearly 630K partial point clouds for pretraining, consistently improving real-world recognition performances of existing popular 3D networks. Second, to reduce computational requirements, we introduce DuoMamba, a two-stream linear state space model tailored for point clouds. By integrating two space-filling curves with 1D convolutions, DuoMamba effectively models spatial dependencies between point tokens, offering a powerful alternative to Transformer. When pretrained with our framework, DuoMamba surpasses current state-of-the-art methods while reducing latency and FLOPs, highlighting the potential of our approach for real-world applications. Our code and data are available at https://ndkhanh360.github.io/project-occtip.

Paperid: 1200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10263.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tracking how data is mentioned and used in research papers provides critical insights for improving data discoverability, quality, and production. However, manually identifying and classifying dataset mentions across vast academic literature is resource-intensive and not scalable. This paper presents a machine learning framework that automates dataset mention detection across research domains by leveraging large language models (LLMs), synthetic data, and a two-stage fine-tuning process. We employ zero-shot extraction from research papers, an LLM-as-a-Judge for quality assessment, and a reasoning agent for refinement to generate a weakly supervised synthetic dataset. The Phi-3.5-mini instruct model is pre-fine-tuned on this dataset, followed by fine-tuning on a manually annotated subset. At inference, a ModernBERT-based classifier efficiently filters dataset mentions, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high recall. Evaluated on a held-out manually annotated sample, our fine-tuned model outperforms NuExtract-v1.5 and GLiNER-large-v2.1 in dataset extraction accuracy. Our results highlight how LLM-generated synthetic data can effectively address training data scarcity, improving generalization in low-resource settings. This framework offers a pathway toward scalable monitoring of dataset usage, enhancing transparency, and supporting researchers, funders, and policymakers in identifying data gaps and strengthening data accessibility for informed decision-making.

Paperid: 1201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09897.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advent of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) has catalyzed major transformations in chemistry, yet the application of these methods to spectroscopic and spectrometric data, referred to as Spectroscopy Machine Learning (SpectraML), remains relatively underexplored. Modern spectroscopic techniques (MS, NMR, IR, Raman, UV-Vis) generate an ever-growing volume of high-dimensional data, creating a pressing need for automated and intelligent analysis beyond traditional expert-based workflows. In this survey, we provide a unified review of SpectraML, systematically examining state-of-the-art approaches for both forward tasks (molecule-to-spectrum prediction) and inverse tasks (spectrum-to-molecule inference). We trace the historical evolution of ML in spectroscopy, from early pattern recognition to the latest foundation models capable of advanced reasoning, and offer a taxonomy of representative neural architectures, including graph-based and transformer-based methods. Addressing key challenges such as data quality, multimodal integration, and computational scalability, we highlight emerging directions such as synthetic data generation, large-scale pretraining, and few- or zero-shot learning. To foster reproducible research, we also release an open-source repository containing recent papers and their corresponding curated datasets (https://github.com/MINE-Lab-ND/SpectrumML_Survey_Papers). Our survey serves as a roadmap for researchers, guiding progress at the intersection of spectroscopy and AI.

Paperid: 1202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09597.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as chatbots, yet their ability to personalize responses to user preferences remains limited. We introduce PrefEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer, memorize and adhere to user preferences in a long-context conversational setting. PrefEval comprises 3,000 manually curated user preference and query pairs spanning 20 topics. PrefEval contains user personalization or preference information in both explicit and implicit forms, and evaluates LLM performance using a generation and a classification task. With PrefEval, we evaluated the aforementioned preference following capabilities of 10 open-source and proprietary LLMs in multi-session conversations with varying context lengths up to 100k tokens. We benchmark with various prompting, iterative feedback, and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our benchmarking effort reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs face significant challenges in proactively following users' preferences during conversations. In particular, in zero-shot settings, preference following accuracy falls below 10% at merely 10 turns (~3k tokens) across most evaluated models. Even with advanced prompting and retrieval methods, preference following still deteriorates in long-context conversations. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning on PrefEval significantly improves performance. We believe PrefEval serves as a valuable resource for measuring, understanding, and enhancing LLMs' preference following abilities, paving the way for personalized conversational agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://prefeval.github.io/.

Paperid: 1203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09057.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose general visual inspection model using Vision-Language Model~(VLM) with few-shot images of non-defective or defective products, along with explanatory texts that serve as inspection criteria. Although existing VLM exhibit high performance across various tasks, they are not trained on specific tasks such as visual inspection. Thus, we construct a dataset consisting of diverse images of non-defective and defective products collected from the web, along with unified formatted output text, and fine-tune VLM. For new products, our method employs In-Context Learning, which allows the model to perform inspections with an example of non-defective or defective image and the corresponding explanatory texts with visual prompts. This approach eliminates the need to collect a large number of training samples and re-train the model for each product. The experimental results show that our method achieves high performance, with MCC of 0.804 and F1-score of 0.950 on MVTec AD in a one-shot manner. Our code is available at~https://github.com/ia-gu/Vision-Language-In-Context-Learning-Driven-Few-Shot-Visual-Inspection-Model.

Paperid: 1204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09018.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) are inherently interpretable and intervenable neural network models, which explain their final label prediction by the intermediate prediction of high-level semantic concepts. However, they require target task training to learn input-to-concept and concept-to-label mappings, incurring target dataset collections and training resources. In this paper, we present \textit{zero-shot concept bottleneck models} (Z-CBMs), which predict concepts and labels in a fully zero-shot manner without training neural networks. Z-CBMs utilize a large-scale concept bank, which is composed of millions of vocabulary extracted from the web, to describe arbitrary input in various domains. For the input-to-concept mapping, we introduce concept retrieval, which dynamically finds input-related concepts by the cross-modal search on the concept bank. In the concept-to-label inference, we apply concept regression to select essential concepts from the retrieved concepts by sparse linear regression. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our Z-CBMs provide interpretable and intervenable concepts without any additional training. Code will be available at https://github.com/yshinya6/zcbm.

Paperid: 1205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08662.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mitigating positional bias of language models (LMs) for listwise inputs is a well-known and important problem (e.g., lost-in-the-middle). While zero-shot order-invariant LMs have been proposed to solve this issue, their success on practical listwise problems has been limited. In this work, as a first contribution, we identify and overcome two limitations to make zero-shot invariant LMs more practical: (1) training and inference distribution mismatch arising from modifying positional ID assignments to enforce invariance, and (2) failure to adapt to mixture of order-invariant and sensitive inputs in practical listwise problems. Then, to overcome these issues we propose (1) RoToR, a zero-shot invariant LM for genuinely order-invariant inputs with minimal modifications of positional IDs, and (2) Selective Routing, an adaptive framework that handles both order-invariant and order-sensitive inputs in listwise tasks. On the Lost in the middle (LitM), Knowledge Graph QA (KGQA), and MMLU benchmarks, we show that RoToR with Selective Routing can effectively handle practical listwise input tasks in a zero-shot manner (https://github.com/soyoung97/RoToR)

Paperid: 1206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08645.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE$^3$SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE$^3$SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.

Paperid: 1207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07601.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) is an emerging AD paradigm. Unlike the traditional unsupervised AD setting that requires a large number of normal samples to train a model, ZSAD is more practical for handling data-restricted real-world scenarios. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown revolutionary reasoning capabilities in various vision tasks. However, the reasoning of image abnormalities remains underexplored due to the lack of corresponding datasets and benchmarks. To facilitate research in AD & reasoning, we establish the first visual instruction tuning dataset, Anomaly-Instruct-125k, and the evaluation benchmark, VisA-D&R. Through investigation with our benchmark, we reveal that current MLLMs like GPT-4o cannot accurately detect and describe fine-grained anomalous details in images. To address this, we propose Anomaly-OneVision (Anomaly-OV), the first specialist visual assistant for ZSAD and reasoning. Inspired by human behavior in visual inspection, Anomaly-OV leverages a Look-Twice Feature Matching (LTFM) mechanism to adaptively select and emphasize abnormal visual tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Anomaly-OV achieves significant improvements over advanced generalist models in both detection and reasoning. Extensions to medical and 3D AD are provided for future study. The link to our project page: https://xujiacong.github.io/Anomaly-OV/

Paperid: 1208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07380.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been pivotal in recent robotics milestones and is poised to play a prominent role in the future. However, these advances can rely on proprietary simulators, expensive hardware, and a daunting range of tools and skills. As a result, broader communities are disconnecting from the state-of-the-art; education curricula are poorly equipped to teach indispensable modern robotics skills involving hardware, deployment, and iterative development. To address this gap between the broader and scientific communities, we contribute Wheeled Lab, an ecosystem which integrates accessible, open-source wheeled robots with Isaac Lab, an open-source robot learning and simulation framework, that is widely adopted in the state-of-the-art. To kickstart research and education, this work demonstrates three state-of-the-art zero-shot policies for small-scale RC cars developed through Wheeled Lab: controlled drifting, elevation traversal, and visual navigation. The full stack, from hardware to software, is low-cost and open-source. Videos and additional materials can be found at: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/WheeledLab/

Paperid: 1209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07272.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of DNA sequencing has produced vast genomic datasets, yet interpreting and engineering genomic function remain fundamental challenges. Recent large language models have opened new avenues for genomic analysis, but existing approaches are often limited by restricted training scope, constrained generative capability, or prohibitive computational cost. We introduce GENErator, a generative genomic foundation model for long-context DNA modeling, with a context length of 98k nucleotides, pre-trained on 386 billion nucleotides of eukaryotic DNA. Without task-specific fine-tuning, GENERator exhibits strong intrinsic capabilities: unsupervised embedding analyses reveal phylogenetically coherent structure, and sequence recovery benchmarks demonstrate generative accuracy comparable to or exceeding state-of-the-art models with substantially improved computational efficiency. In a zero-shot setting, GENERator achieves competitive variant effect prediction performance relative to alignment-based methods, while remaining fully alignment-free and broadly applicable across species. With task-specific fine-tuning, the model attains leading performance on established genomic benchmarks. We further demonstrate practical generative applications. GENERator can generate protein-coding DNA sequences that translate into structurally plausible proteins and, through a prompt-guided design framework, design cis-regulatory elements with targeted activity profiles, including synthetic super-enhancers validated by high-throughput UMI-STARR-seq assays. Together, these results establish GENERator as an efficient and biologically grounded framework for genomic interpretation and programmable sequence design. Code and supplementary resources are available at https://github.com/GenerTeam/GENERator.

Paperid: 1210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06787.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual reasoning -- the ability to interpret the visual world -- is crucial for embodied agents that operate within three-dimensional scenes. Progress in AI has led to vision and language models capable of answering questions from images. However, their performance declines when tasked with 3D spatial reasoning. To tackle the complexity of such reasoning problems, we introduce an agentic program synthesis approach where LLM agents collaboratively generate a Pythonic API with new functions to solve common subproblems. Our method overcomes limitations of prior approaches that rely on a static, human-defined API, allowing it to handle a wider range of queries. To assess AI capabilities for 3D understanding, we introduce a new benchmark of queries involving multiple steps of grounding and inference. We show that our method outperforms prior zero-shot models for visual reasoning in 3D and empirically validate the effectiveness of our agentic framework for 3D spatial reasoning tasks. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/vadar/

Paperid: 1211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06606.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Manipulating the material appearance of objects in images is critical for applications like augmented reality, virtual prototyping, and digital content creation. We present MaterialFusion, a novel framework for high-quality material transfer that allows users to adjust the degree of material application, achieving an optimal balance between new material properties and the object's original features. MaterialFusion seamlessly integrates the modified object into the scene by maintaining background consistency and mitigating boundary artifacts. To thoroughly evaluate our approach, we have compiled a dataset of real-world material transfer examples and conducted complex comparative analyses. Through comprehensive quantitative evaluations and user studies, we demonstrate that MaterialFusion significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of quality, user control, and background preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/ControlGenAI/MaterialFusion.

Paperid: 1212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06501.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning primitive (i.e., attribute and object) concepts from seen compositions is the primary challenge of Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL). Existing CZSL solutions typically rely on oversimplified data assumptions, e.g., modeling each primitive with a single centroid primitive representation, ignoring the natural diversities of the attribute (resp. object) when coupled with different objects (resp. attribute). In this work, we develop ClusPro, a robust clustering-based prototype mining framework for CZSL that defines the conceptual boundaries of primitives through a set of diversified prototypes. Specifically, ClusPro conducts within-primitive clustering on the embedding space for automatically discovering and dynamically updating prototypes. These representative prototypes are subsequently used to repaint a well-structured and independent primitive embedding space, ensuring intra-primitive separation and inter-primitive decorrelation through prototype-based contrastive learning and decorrelation learning. Moreover, ClusPro efficiently performs prototype clustering in a non-parametric fashion without the introduction of additional learnable parameters or computational budget during testing. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate ClusPro outperforms various top-leading CZSL solutions under both closed-world and open-world settings.

Paperid: 1213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06338.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Depth completion, predicting dense depth maps from sparse depth measurements, is an ill-posed problem requiring prior knowledge. Recent methods adopt learning-based approaches to implicitly capture priors, but the priors primarily fit in-domain data and do not generalize well to out-of-domain scenarios. To address this, we propose a zero-shot depth completion method composed of an affine-invariant depth diffusion model and test-time alignment. We use pre-trained depth diffusion models as depth prior knowledge, which implicitly understand how to fill in depth for scenes. Our approach aligns the affine-invariant depth prior with metric-scale sparse measurements, enforcing them as hard constraints via an optimization loop at test-time. Our zero-shot depth completion method demonstrates generalization across various domain datasets, achieving up to a 21\% average performance improvement over the previous state-of-the-art methods while enhancing spatial understanding by sharpening scene details. We demonstrate that aligning a monocular affine-invariant depth prior with sparse metric measurements is a proven strategy to achieve domain-generalizable depth completion without relying on extensive training data. Project page: https://hyoseok1223.github.io/zero-shot-depth-completion/.

Paperid: 1214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06280.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in dealing with non-Euclidean graph-structured data and have been widely deployed in many real-world applications. However, their effectiveness is often jeopardized under class-imbalanced training sets. Most existing studies have analyzed class-imbalanced node classification from a supervised learning perspective, but they do not fully utilize the large number of unlabeled nodes in semi-supervised scenarios. We claim that the supervised signal is just the tip of the iceberg and a large number of unlabeled nodes have not yet been effectively utilized. In this work, we propose IceBerg, a debiased self-training framework to address the class-imbalanced and few-shot challenges for GNNs at the same time. Specifically, to figure out the Matthew effect and label distribution shift in self-training, we propose Double Balancing, which can largely improve the performance of existing baselines with just a few lines of code as a simple plug-and-play module. Secondly, to enhance the long-range propagation capability of GNNs, we disentangle the propagation and transformation operations of GNNs. Therefore, the weak supervision signals can propagate more effectively to address the few-shot issue. In summary, we find that leveraging unlabeled nodes can significantly enhance the performance of GNNs in class-imbalanced and few-shot scenarios, and even small, surgical modifications can lead to substantial performance improvements. Systematic experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method can deliver considerable performance gain over existing class-imbalanced node classification baselines. Additionally, due to IceBerg's outstanding ability to leverage unsupervised signals, it also achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot node classification scenarios. The code of IceBerg is available at: https://github.com/ZhixunLEE/IceBerg.

Paperid: 1215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06019.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, test-time adaptation has garnered attention as a method for tuning models without labeled data. The conventional modus operandi for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) during test-time primarily focuses on tuning learnable prompts; however, this approach overlooks potential distribution shifts in the visual representations themselves. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing Test-Time Noise Tuning (TNT), a novel method for handling unpredictable shifts in the visual space. TNT leverages, for the first time, a noise adaptation strategy that optimizes learnable noise directly in the visual input space, enabling adaptive feature learning from a single test sample. We further introduce a novel approach for inter-view representation alignment by explicitly enforcing coherence in embedding distances, ensuring consistent feature representations across views. Combined with scaled logits and confident view selection at inference, TNT substantially enhances VLM generalization and calibration, achieving average gains of +7.38% on natural distributions benchmark and +0.80% on cross-dataset evaluations over zero-shot CLIP. These improvements lay a strong foundation for adaptive out-of-distribution handling.

Paperid: 1216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06006.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The field of automated fact-checking increasingly depends on retrieving web-based evidence to determine the veracity of claims in real-world scenarios. A significant challenge in this process is not only retrieving relevant information, but also identifying evidence that can both support and refute complex claims. Traditional retrieval methods may return documents that directly address claims or lean toward supporting them, but often struggle with more complex claims requiring indirect reasoning. While some existing benchmarks and methods target retrieval for fact-checking, a comprehensive real-world open-domain benchmark has been lacking. In this paper, we present a real-world retrieval benchmark FactIR, derived from Factiverse production logs, enhanced with human annotations. We rigorously evaluate state-of-the-art retrieval models in a zero-shot setup on FactIR and offer insights for developing practical retrieval systems for fact-checking. Code and data are available at https://github.com/factiverse/factIR.

Paperid: 1217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05473.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) methods have shown great promise in handling data-scarce scenarios, particularly in medical image segmentation tasks. However, most existing FSS architectures lack sufficient interpretability and fail to fully incorporate the underlying physical structures of semantic regions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel deep unfolding network, called the Learned Mumford-Shah Network (LMS-Net), for the FSS task. Specifically, motivated by the effectiveness of pixel-to-prototype comparison in prototypical FSS methods and the capability of deep priors to model complex spatial structures, we leverage our learned Mumford-Shah model (LMS model) as a mathematical foundation to integrate these insights into a unified framework. By reformulating the LMS model into prototype update and mask update tasks, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm to solve it efficiently. Further, the iterative steps of this algorithm are unfolded into corresponding network modules, resulting in LMS-Net with clear interpretability. Comprehensive experiments on three publicly available medical segmentation datasets verify the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness in handling complex structures and adapting to challenging segmentation scenarios. These results highlight the potential of LMS-Net to advance FSS in medical imaging applications. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/SDZhang01/LMSNet

Paperid: 1218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05178.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Quantized Language-Image Pretraining (QLIP), a visual tokenization method that combines state-of-the-art reconstruction quality with state-of-the-art zero-shot image understanding. QLIP trains a binary-spherical-quantization-based autoencoder with reconstruction and language-image alignment objectives. We are the first to show that the two objectives do not need to be at odds. We balance the two loss terms dynamically during training and show that a two-stage training pipeline effectively mixes the large-batch requirements of image-language pre-training with the memory bottleneck imposed by the reconstruction objective. We validate the effectiveness of QLIP for multimodal understanding and text-conditioned image generation with a single model. Specifically, QLIP serves as a drop-in replacement for the visual encoder for LLaVA and the image tokenizer for LlamaGen with comparable or even better performance. Finally, we demonstrate that QLIP enables a unified mixed-modality auto-regressive model for understanding and generation.

Paperid: 1219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05176.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Three-dimensional scene inpainting is crucial for applications from virtual reality to architectural visualization, yet existing methods struggle with view consistency and geometric accuracy in 360Â° unbounded scenes. We present AuraFusion360, a novel reference-based method that enables high-quality object removal and hole filling in 3D scenes represented by Gaussian Splatting. Our approach introduces (1) depth-aware unseen mask generation for accurate occlusion identification, (2) Adaptive Guided Depth Diffusion, a zero-shot method for accurate initial point placement without requiring additional training, and (3) SDEdit-based detail enhancement for multi-view coherence. We also introduce 360-USID, the first comprehensive dataset for 360Â° unbounded scene inpainting with ground truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AuraFusion360 significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving superior perceptual quality while maintaining geometric accuracy across dramatic viewpoint changes.

Paperid: 1220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05091.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely applied to 2D medical image analysis due to their ability to align visual and textual representations. However, extending VLMs to 3D imaging remains computationally challenging. Existing 3D VLMs often rely on Vision Transformers (ViTs), which are computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, or on 3D convolutions, which require large numbers of parameters and FLOPs as kernel size increases. We introduce DCFormer, an efficient 3D image encoder that factorizes 3D convolutions into three parallel 1D convolutions along the depth, height, and width dimensions. This design preserves spatial information while significantly reducing computational cost. Integrated into a CLIP-based vision-language framework, DCFormer is trained and evaluated on CT-RATE, a dataset of 50,188 paired 3D chest CT volumes and radiology reports. In zero-shot and fine-tuned detection of 18 pathologies, as well as in image-text retrieval tasks, DCFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D vision encoders, including CT-ViT, ViT, ConvNeXt, PoolFormer, and TransUNet. These results highlight DCFormer's potential for scalable, clinically deployable 3D medical VLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mirthAI/DCFormer.

Paperid: 1221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04395.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in time series forecasting have explored augmenting models with text or vision modalities to improve accuracy. While text provides contextual understanding, it often lacks fine-grained temporal details. Conversely, vision captures intricate temporal patterns but lacks semantic context, limiting the complementary potential of these modalities. To address this, we propose \method, a novel multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge temporal, visual, and textual modalities for enhanced forecasting. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Retrieval-Augmented Learner, which extracts enriched temporal features through memory bank interactions; (2) a Vision-Augmented Learner, which encodes time series as informative images; and (3) a Text-Augmented Learner, which generates contextual textual descriptions. These components collaborate with frozen pre-trained VLMs to produce multimodal embeddings, which are then fused with temporal features for final prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Time-VLM achieves superior performance, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, thereby establishing a new direction for multimodal time series forecasting. Code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/ICML25-TimeVLM.

Paperid: 1222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04263.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained multi-modal Vision-Language Models like CLIP are widely used off-the-shelf for a variety of applications. In this paper, we show that the common practice of individually exploiting the text or image encoders of these powerful multi-modal models is highly suboptimal for intra-modal tasks like image-to-image retrieval. We argue that this is inherently due to the CLIP-style inter-modal contrastive loss that does not enforce any intra-modal constraints, leading to what we call intra-modal misalignment. To demonstrate this, we leverage two optimization-based modality inversion techniques that map representations from their input modality to the complementary one without any need for auxiliary data or additional trained adapters. We empirically show that, in the intra-modal tasks of image-to-image and text-to-text retrieval, approaching these tasks inter-modally significantly improves performance with respect to intra-modal baselines on more than fifteen datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that approaching a native inter-modal task (e.g. zero-shot image classification) intra-modally decreases performance, further validating our findings. Finally, we show that incorporating an intra-modal term in the pre-training objective or narrowing the modality gap between the text and image feature embedding spaces helps reduce the intra-modal misalignment. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/Cross-the-Gap.

Paperid: 1223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03950.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual-language foundation Models (FMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, largely attributed to extensive pre-training on largescale datasets. However, their robustness on low-resolution/pixelated (LR) images, a common challenge in real-world scenarios, remains underexplored. We introduce LR0.FM, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating the impact of low resolution on the zero-shot classification performance of 10 FM(s) across 66 backbones and 15 datasets. We propose a novel metric, Weighted Aggregated Robustness, to address the limitations of existing metrics and better evaluate model performance across resolutions and datasets. Our key findings show that: (i) model size positively correlates with robustness to resolution degradation, (ii) pre-training dataset quality is more important than its size, and (iii) fine-tuned and higher resolution models are less robust against LR. Our analysis further reveals that the model makes semantically reasonable predictions at LR, and the lack of fine-grained details in input adversely impacts the model's initial layers more than the deeper layers. We use these insights and introduce a simple strategy, LR-TK0, to enhance the robustness of models without compromising their pre-trained weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LR-TK0 for robustness against low-resolution across several datasets and its generalization capability across backbones and other approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/shyammarjit/LR0.FM

Paperid: 1224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03266.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Service robots operating in unstructured environments must effectively recognize and segment unknown objects to enhance their functionality. Traditional supervised learningbased segmentation techniques require extensive annotated datasets, which are impractical for the diversity of objects encountered in real-world scenarios. Unseen Object Instance Segmentation (UOIS) methods aim to address this by training models on synthetic data to generalize to novel objects, but they often suffer from the simulation-to-reality gap. This paper proposes a novel approach (ZISVFM) for solving UOIS by leveraging the powerful zero-shot capability of the segment anything model (SAM) and explicit visual representations from a selfsupervised vision transformer (ViT). The proposed framework operates in three stages: (1) generating object-agnostic mask proposals from colorized depth images using SAM, (2) refining these proposals using attention-based features from the selfsupervised ViT to filter non-object masks, and (3) applying K-Medoids clustering to generate point prompts that guide SAM towards precise object segmentation. Experimental validation on two benchmark datasets and a self-collected dataset demonstrates the superior performance of ZISVFM in complex environments, including hierarchical settings such as cabinets, drawers, and handheld objects. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Yinmlmaoliang/zisvfm.

Paperid: 1225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03128.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Metis, a foundation model for unified speech generation. Unlike previous task-specific or multi-task models, Metis follows a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. It is pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled speech data using masked generative modeling and then fine-tuned to adapt to diverse speech generation tasks. Specifically, 1) Metis utilizes two discrete speech representations: SSL tokens derived from speech self-supervised learning (SSL) features, and acoustic tokens directly quantized from waveforms. 2) Metis performs masked generative pre-training on SSL tokens, utilizing 300K hours of diverse speech data, without any additional condition. 3) Through fine-tuning with task-specific conditions, Metis achieves efficient adaptation to various speech generation tasks while supporting multimodal input, even when using limited data and trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that Metis can serve as a foundation model for unified speech generation: Metis outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific or multi-task systems across five speech generation tasks, including zero-shot text-to-speech, voice conversion, target speaker extraction, speech enhancement, and lip-to-speech, even with fewer than 20M trainable parameters or 300 times less training data. Audio samples are are available at https://metis-demo.github.io/.

Paperid: 1226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02705.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robot learning requires a considerable amount of high-quality data to realize the promise of generalization. However, large data sets are costly to collect in the real world. Physics simulators can cheaply generate vast data sets with broad coverage over states, actions, and environments. However, physics engines are fundamentally misspecified approximations to reality. This makes direct zero-shot transfer from simulation to reality challenging, especially in tasks where precise and force-sensitive manipulation is necessary. Thus, fine-tuning these policies with small real-world data sets is an appealing pathway for scaling robot learning. However, current reinforcement learning fine-tuning frameworks leverage general, unstructured exploration strategies which are too inefficient to make real-world adaptation practical. This paper introduces the Simulation-Guided Fine-tuning (SGFT) framework, which demonstrates how to extract structural priors from physics simulators to substantially accelerate real-world adaptation. Specifically, our approach uses a value function learned in simulation to guide real-world exploration. We demonstrate this approach across five real-world dexterous manipulation tasks where zero-shot sim-to-real transfer fails. We further demonstrate our framework substantially outperforms baseline fine-tuning methods, requiring up to an order of magnitude fewer real-world samples and succeeding at difficult tasks where prior approaches fail entirely. Last but not least, we provide theoretical justification for this new paradigm which underpins how SGFT can rapidly learn high-performance policies in the face of large sim-to-real dynamics gaps. Project webpage: https://weirdlabuw.github.io/sgft/{weirdlabuw.github.io/sgft}

Paperid: 1227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02672.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) perform remarkably well on tabular datasets in zero- and few-shot settings, since they can extract meaning from natural language column headers that describe features and labels. Similarly, TabPFN, a recent non-LLM transformer pretrained on numerous tables for in-context learning, has demonstrated excellent performance for dataset sizes up to a thousand samples. In contrast, gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) are typically trained from scratch on each dataset without benefiting from pretraining data and must learn the relationships between columns from their entries alone since they lack natural language understanding. LLMs and TabPFN excel on small tabular datasets where a strong prior is essential, yet they are not competitive with GBDTs on medium or large datasets, since their context lengths are limited. In this paper, we propose a simple and lightweight approach for fusing large language models and TabPFN with gradient-boosted decision trees, which allows scalable GBDTs to benefit from the natural language capabilities and pretraining of transformers. We name our fusion methods LLM-Boost and PFN-Boost, respectively. While matching or surpassing the performance of the transformer at sufficiently small dataset sizes and GBDTs at sufficiently large sizes, LLM-Boost and PFN-Boost outperform both standalone components on a wide range of dataset sizes in between. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance against numerous baselines and ensembling algorithms. We find that PFN-Boost achieves the best average performance among all methods we test for all but very small dataset sizes. We release our code at http://github.com/MayukaJ/LLM-Boost .

Paperid: 1228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02391.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce FewTopNER, a novel framework that integrates few-shot named entity recognition (NER) with topic-aware contextual modeling to address the challenges of cross-lingual and low-resource scenarios. FewTopNER leverages a shared multilingual encoder based on XLM-RoBERTa, augmented with language-specific calibration mechanisms, to generate robust contextual embeddings. The architecture comprises a prototype-based entity recognition branch, employing BiLSTM and Conditional Random Fields for sequence labeling, and a topic modeling branch that extracts document-level semantic features through hybrid probabilistic and neural methods. A cross-task bridge facilitates dynamic bidirectional attention and feature fusion between entity and topic representations, thereby enhancing entity disambiguation by incorporating global semantic context. Empirical evaluations on multilingual benchmarks across English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian demonstrate that FewTopNER significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art few-shot NER models. In particular, the framework achieves improvements of 2.5-4.0 percentage points in F1 score and exhibits enhanced topic coherence, as measured by normalized pointwise mutual information. Ablation studies further confirm the critical contributions of the shared encoder and cross-task integration mechanisms to the overall performance. These results underscore the efficacy of incorporating topic-aware context into few-shot NER and highlight the potential of FewTopNER for robust cross-lingual applications in low-resource settings.

Paperid: 1229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01216.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Industrial defect segmentation is critical for manufacturing quality control. Due to the scarcity of training defect samples, few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) holds significant value in this field. However, existing studies mostly apply FSS to tackle defects on simple textures, without considering more diverse scenarios. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring FSS in broader industrial products with various defect types. To this end, we contribute a new real-world dataset and reorganize some existing datasets to build a more comprehensive few-shot defect segmentation (FDS) benchmark. On this benchmark, we thoroughly investigate metric learning-based FSS methods, including those based on meta-learning and those based on Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). We observe that existing meta-learning-based methods are generally not well-suited for this task, while VFMs hold great potential. We further systematically study the applicability of various VFMs in this task, involving two paradigms: feature matching and the use of Segment Anything (SAM) models. We propose a novel efficient FDS method based on feature matching. Meanwhile, we find that SAM2 is particularly effective for addressing FDS through its video track mode. The contributed dataset and code will be available at: https://github.com/liutongkun/GFDS.

Paperid: 1230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01183.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) has recently been extensively utilized to overcome the scarcity of training data in domain-specific visual recognition. In real-world scenarios, environmental factors such as complex backgrounds, varying lighting conditions, long-distance shooting, and moving targets often cause test images to exhibit numerous incomplete targets or noise disruptions. However, current research on evaluation datasets and methodologies has largely ignored the concept of "environmental robustness", which refers to maintaining consistent performance in complex and diverse physical environments. This neglect has led to a notable decline in the performance of FSL models during practical testing compared to their training performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new real-world multi-domain few-shot learning (RD-FSL) benchmark, which includes four domains and six evaluation datasets. The test images in this benchmark feature various challenging elements, such as camouflaged objects, small targets, and blurriness. Our evaluation experiments reveal that existing methods struggle to utilize training images effectively to generate accurate feature representations for challenging test images. To address this problem, we propose a novel conditional representation learning network (CRLNet) that integrates the interactions between training and testing images as conditional information in their respective representation processes. The main goal is to reduce intra-class variance or enhance inter-class variance at the feature representation level. Finally, comparative experiments reveal that CRLNet surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods, achieving performance improvements ranging from 6.83% to 16.98% across diverse settings and backbones. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/Conditional-Representation-Learning.

Paperid: 1231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01000.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in foundation models have brought promising results in computer vision, including medical image segmentation. Fine-tuning foundation models on specific low-resource medical tasks has become a standard practice. However, ensuring reliable and robust model adaptation when the target task has a large domain gap and few annotated samples remains a challenge. Previous few-shot domain adaptation (FSDA) methods seek to bridge the distribution gap between source and target domains by utilizing auxiliary data. The selection and scheduling of auxiliaries are often based on heuristics, which can easily cause negative transfer. In this work, we propose an Active and Sequential domain AdaPtation (ASAP) framework for dynamic auxiliary dataset selection in FSDA. We formulate FSDA as a multi-armed bandit problem and derive an efficient reward function to prioritize training on auxiliary datasets that align closely with the target task, through a single-round fine-tuning. Empirical validation on diverse medical segmentation datasets demonstrates that our method achieves favorable segmentation performance, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art FSDA methods, achieving an average gain of 27.75% on MRI and 7.52% on CT datasets in Dice score. Code is available at the git repository: https://github.com/techicoco/ASAP.

Paperid: 1232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00829.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Node classification is a fundamental task in graph analysis, with broad applications across various fields. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled LLM-based approaches for this task. Although many studies demonstrate the impressive performance of LLM-based methods, the lack of clear design guidelines may hinder their practical application. In this work, we aim to establish such guidelines through a fair and systematic comparison of these algorithms. As a first step, we developed LLMNodeBed, a comprehensive codebase and testbed for node classification using LLMs. It includes 10 homophilic datasets, 4 heterophilic datasets, 8 LLM-based algorithms, 8 classic baselines, and 3 learning paradigms. Subsequently, we conducted extensive experiments, training and evaluating over 2,700 models, to determine the key settings (e.g., learning paradigms and homophily) and components (e.g., model size and prompt) that affect performance. Our findings uncover 8 insights, e.g., (1) LLM-based methods can significantly outperform traditional methods in a semi-supervised setting, while the advantage is marginal in a supervised setting; (2) Graph Foundation Models can beat open-source LLMs but still fall short of strong LLMs like GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. We hope that the release of LLMNodeBed, along with our insights, will facilitate reproducible research and inspire future studies in this field. Codes and datasets are released at \href{https://llmnodebed.github.io/}{\texttt{https://llmnodebed.github.io/}}.

Paperid: 1233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00816.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Sundial, a family of native, flexible, and scalable time series foundation models. To predict the next-patch's distribution, we propose a TimeFlow Loss based on flow-matching, which facilitates native pre-training of Transformers on continuous-valued time series without discrete tokenization. Conditioned on arbitrary-length time series, our models are pre-trained without specifying any prior distribution and can generate multiple probable predictions, achieving more flexibility in representation learning than using parametric densities. Towards time series foundation models, we leverage minimal but crucial adaptations of Transformers and curate TimeBench with one trillion time points, comprising mostly real-world datasets and synthetic data. By mitigating mode collapse via TimeFlow Loss, we pre-train a family of Sundial models on TimeBench, which achieve unprecedented model capacity and generalization performance. In addition to excellent scalability, Sundial achieves state-of-the-art results on both point and probabilistic forecasting benchmarks with a just-in-time inference speed, i.e., making zero-shot predictions within a few milliseconds. We believe that Sundial's pioneering generative forecasting capability can improve model reliability in real-world decision-making. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuml/Sundial.

Paperid: 1234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00719.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a large-scale segmentation model that enables powerful zero-shot capabilities with flexible prompts. While SAM can segment any object in zero-shot, it requires user-provided prompts for each target image and does not attach any label information to masks. Few-shot segmentation models addressed these issues by inputting annotated reference images as prompts to SAM and can segment specific objects in target images without user-provided prompts. Previous SAM-based few-shot segmentation models only use annotated reference images as prompts, resulting in limited accuracy due to a lack of reference information. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot segmentation model, Vision and Language reference Prompt into SAM (VLP-SAM), that utilizes the visual information of the reference images and the semantic information of the text labels by inputting not only images but also language as reference information. In particular, VLP-SAM is a simple and scalable structure with minimal learnable parameters, which inputs prompt embeddings with vision-language information into SAM using a multimodal vision-language model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of VLP-SAM, we conducted experiments on the PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets, and achieved high performance in the few-shot segmentation task, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model by a large margin (6.3% and 9.5% in mIoU, respectively). Furthermore, VLP-SAM demonstrates its generality in unseen objects that are not included in the training data. Our code is available at https://github.com/kosukesakurai1/VLP-SAM.

Paperid: 1235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19204.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for autonomous code generation is gaining attention in emerging technologies. As LLM capabilities expand, they offer new possibilities such as code refactoring, security enhancements, and legacy application upgrades. Many outdated web applications pose security and reliability challenges, yet companies continue using them due to the complexity and cost of upgrades. To address this, we propose an LLM-based multi-agent system that autonomously upgrades legacy web applications to the latest versions. The system distributes tasks across multiple phases, updating all relevant files. To evaluate its effectiveness, we employed Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and One-Shot Learning (OSL) prompts, applying identical instructions in both cases. The evaluation involved updating view files and measuring the number and types of errors in the output. For complex tasks, we counted the successfully met requirements. The experiments compared the proposed system with standalone LLM execution, repeated multiple times to account for stochastic behavior. Results indicate that our system maintains context across tasks and agents, improving solution quality over the base model in some cases. This study provides a foundation for future model implementations in legacy code updates. Additionally, findings highlight LLMs' ability to update small outdated files with high precision, even with basic prompts. The source code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/alasalm1/Multi-agent-pipeline.

Paperid: 1236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18824.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-tuning provides an effective means to specialize pre-trained models for various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning often incurs high memory overhead, especially for large transformer-based models, such as LLMs. While existing methods may reduce certain parts of the memory required for fine-tuning, they still require caching all intermediate activations computed in the forward pass to update weights during the backward pass. In this work, we develop TokenTune, a method to reduce memory usage, specifically the memory to store intermediate activations, in the fine-tuning of transformer-based models. During the backward pass, TokenTune approximates the gradient computation by backpropagating through just a subset of input tokens. Thus, with TokenTune, only a subset of intermediate activations are cached during the forward pass. Also, TokenTune can be easily combined with existing methods like LoRA, further reducing the memory cost. We evaluate our approach on pre-trained transformer models with up to billions of parameters, considering the performance on multiple downstream tasks such as text classification and question answering in a few-shot learning setup. Overall, TokenTune achieves performance on par with full fine-tuning or representative memory-efficient fine-tuning methods, while greatly reducing the memory footprint, especially when combined with other methods with complementary memory reduction mechanisms. We hope that our approach will facilitate the fine-tuning of large transformers, in specializing them for specific domains or co-training them with other neural components from a larger system. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/tokentune.

Paperid: 1237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18278.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The challenge in computational biology and drug discovery lies in creating comprehensive representations of proteins and molecules that capture their intrinsic properties and interactions. Traditional methods often focus on unimodal data, such as protein sequences or molecular structures, limiting their ability to capture complex biochemical relationships. This work enhances these representations by integrating biochemical reactions encompassing interactions between molecules and proteins. By leveraging reaction data alongside pre-trained embeddings from state-of-the-art protein and molecule models, we develop ReactEmbed, a novel method that creates a unified embedding space through contrastive learning. We evaluate ReactEmbed across diverse tasks, including drug-target interaction, protein-protein interaction, protein property prediction, and molecular property prediction, consistently surpassing all current state-of-the-art models. Notably, we showcase ReactEmbed's practical utility through successful implementation in lipid nanoparticle-based drug delivery, enabling zero-shot prediction of blood-brain barrier permeability for protein-nanoparticle complexes. The code and comprehensive database of reaction pairs are available for open use at \href{https://github.com/amitaysicherman/ReactEmbed}{GitHub}.

Paperid: 1238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18096.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present MILS: Multimodal Iterative LLM Solver, a surprisingly simple, training-free approach, to imbue multimodal capabilities into your favorite LLM. Leveraging their innate ability to perform multi-step reasoning, MILS prompts the LLM to generate candidate outputs, each of which are scored and fed back iteratively, eventually generating a solution to the task. This enables various applications that typically require training specialized models on task-specific data. In particular, we establish a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot image, video and audio captioning. MILS seamlessly applies to media generation as well, discovering prompt rewrites to improve text-to-image generation, and even edit prompts for style transfer! Finally, being a gradient-free optimization approach, MILS can invert multimodal embeddings into text, enabling applications like cross-modal arithmetic.

Paperid: 1239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17612.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite remarkable advancements in recent voice conversion (VC) systems, enhancing speaker similarity in zero-shot scenarios remains challenging. This challenge arises from the difficulty of generalizing and adapting speaker characteristics in speech within zero-shot environments, which is further complicated by mismatch between the training and inference processes. To address these challenges, we propose VoicePrompter, a robust zero-shot VC model that leverages in-context learning with voice prompts. VoicePrompter is composed of (1) a factorization method that disentangles speech components and (2) a DiT-based conditional flow matching (CFM) decoder that conditions on these factorized features and voice prompts. Additionally, (3) latent mixup is used to enhance in-context learning by combining various speaker features. This approach improves speaker similarity and naturalness in zero-shot VC by applying mixup to latent representations. Experimental results demonstrate that VoicePrompter outperforms existing zero-shot VC systems in terms of speaker similarity, speech intelligibility, and audio quality. Our demo is available at \url{https://hayeong0.github.io/VoicePrompter-demo/}.

Paperid: 1240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17053.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatio-temporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we first explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding.

Paperid: 1241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16679.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automated diagnostic systems (ADS) have shown significant potential in the early detection of polyps during endoscopic examinations, thereby reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer. However, due to high annotation costs and strict privacy concerns, acquiring high-quality endoscopic images poses a considerable challenge in the development of ADS. Despite recent advancements in generating synthetic images for dataset expansion, existing endoscopic image generation algorithms failed to accurately generate the details of polyp boundary regions and typically required medical priors to specify plausible locations and shapes of polyps, which limited the realism and diversity of the generated images. To address these limitations, we present Polyp-Gen, the first full-automatic diffusion-based endoscopic image generation framework. Specifically, we devise a spatial-aware diffusion training scheme with a lesion-guided loss to enhance the structural context of polyp boundary regions. Moreover, to capture medical priors for the localization of potential polyp areas, we introduce a hierarchical retrieval-based sampling strategy to match similar fine-grained spatial features. In this way, our Polyp-Gen can generate realistic and diverse endoscopic images for building reliable ADS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art generation quality, and the synthetic images can improve the downstream polyp detection task. Additionally, our Polyp-Gen has shown remarkable zero-shot generalizability on other datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/Polyp-Gen.

Paperid: 1242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16476.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
State-of-the-art methods for backpropagation-free learning employ local error feedback to direct iterative optimisation via gradient descent. In this study, we examine the more restrictive setting where retrograde communication from neuronal outputs is unavailable for pre-synaptic weight optimisation. To address this challenge, we propose Forward Projection (FP). This novel randomised closed-form training method requires only a single forward pass over the entire dataset for model fitting, without retrograde communication. Target values for pre-activation membrane potentials are generated layer-wise via nonlinear projections of pre-synaptic inputs and the labels. Local loss functions are optimised over pre-synaptic inputs using closed-form regression, without feedback from neuronal outputs or downstream layers. Interpretability is a key advantage of FP training; membrane potentials of hidden neurons in FP-trained networks encode information which is interpretable layer-wise as label predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FP across four biomedical datasets. In few-shot learning tasks, FP yielded more generalisable models than those optimised via backpropagation. In large-sample tasks, FP-based models achieve generalisation comparable to gradient descent-based local learning methods while requiring only a single forward propagation step, achieving significant speed up for training. Interpretation functions defined on local neuronal activity in FP-based models successfully identified clinically salient features for diagnosis in two biomedical datasets. Forward Projection is a computationally efficient machine learning approach that yields interpretable neural network models without retrograde communication of neuronal activity during training.

Paperid: 1243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16288.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Upside Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL) is a promising framework for solving reinforcement learning problems which focuses on learning command-conditioned policies. In this work, we extend UDRL to the task of learning a command-conditioned generator of deep neural network policies. We accomplish this using Hypernetworks - a variant of Fast Weight Programmers, which learn to decode input commands representing a desired expected return into command-specific weight matrices. Our method, dubbed Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators (UDRLPG), streamlines comparable techniques by removing the need for an evaluator or critic to update the weights of the generator. To counteract the increased variance in last returns caused by not having an evaluator, we decouple the sampling probability of the buffer from the absolute number of policies in it, which, together with a simple weighting strategy, improves the empirical convergence of the algorithm. Compared with existing algorithms, UDRLPG achieves competitive performance and high returns, sometimes outperforming more complex architectures. Our experiments show that a trained generator can generalize to create policies that achieve unseen returns zero-shot. The proposed method appears to be effective in mitigating some of the challenges associated with learning highly multimodal functions. Altogether, we believe that UDRLPG represents a promising step forward in achieving greater empirical sample efficiency in RL. A full implementation of UDRLPG is publicly available at https://github.com/JacopoD/udrlpg_

Paperid: 1244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16222.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification aims at categorizing each pixel in an HSI into a specific land cover class, which is crucial for applications like remote sensing, environmental monitoring, and agriculture. Although deep learning-based HSI classification methods have achieved significant advancements, existing methods still rely on manually labeled data for training, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel zero-shot hyperspectral image classification framework based on CLIP (SPECIAL), aiming to eliminate the need for manual annotations. The SPECIAL framework consists of two main stages: (1) CLIP-based pseudo-label generation, and (2) noisy label learning. In the first stage, HSI is spectrally interpolated to produce RGB bands. These bands are subsequently classified using CLIP, resulting in noisy pseudo-labels that are accompanied by confidence scores. To improve the quality of these labels, we propose a scaling strategy that fuses predictions from multiple spatial scales. In the second stage, spectral information and a label refinement technique are incorporated to mitigate label noise and further enhance classification accuracy. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our SPECIAL outperforms existing methods in zero-shot HSI classification, showing its potential for more practical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/LiPang/SPECIAL.

Paperid: 1245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15798.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language pretraining (VLP) has been investigated to generalize across diverse downstream tasks for fundus image analysis. Although recent methods showcase promising achievements, they significantly rely on large-scale private image-text data but pay less attention to the pretraining manner, which limits their further advancements. In this work, we introduce MM-Retinal V2, a high-quality image-text paired dataset comprising CFP, FFA, and OCT image modalities. Then, we propose a novel fundus vision-language pretraining model, namely KeepFIT V2, which is pretrained by integrating knowledge from the elite data spark into categorical public datasets. Specifically, a preliminary textual pretraining is adopted to equip the text encoder with primarily ophthalmic textual knowledge. Moreover, a hybrid image-text knowledge injection module is designed for knowledge transfer, which is essentially based on a combination of global semantic concepts from contrastive learning and local appearance details from generative learning. Extensive experiments across zero-shot, few-shot, and linear probing settings highlight the generalization and transferability of KeepFIT V2, delivering performance competitive to state-of-the-art fundus VLP models trained on large-scale private image-text datasets. Our dataset and model are publicly available via https://github.com/lxirich/MM-Retinal.

Paperid: 1246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15326.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present RASO, a foundation model designed to Recognize Any Surgical Object, offering robust open-set recognition capabilities across a broad range of surgical procedures and object classes, in both surgical images and videos. RASO leverages a novel weakly-supervised learning framework that generates tag-image-text pairs automatically from large-scale unannotated surgical lecture videos, significantly reducing the need for manual annotations. Our scalable data generation pipeline gathers 2,200 surgical procedures and produces 3.6 million tag annotations across 2,066 unique surgical tags. Our experiments show that RASO achieves improvements of 2.9 mAP, 4.5 mAP, 10.6 mAP, and 7.2 mAP on four standard surgical benchmarks, respectively, in zero-shot settings, and surpasses state-of-the-art models in supervised surgical action recognition tasks. Code, model, and demo are available at https://ntlm1686.github.io/raso.

Paperid: 1247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15271.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Novelty Detection (ND) plays a crucial role in machine learning by identifying new or unseen data during model inference. This capability is especially important for the safe and reliable operation of automated systems. Despite advances in this field, existing techniques often fail to maintain their performance when subject to adversarial attacks. Our research addresses this gap by marrying the merits of nearest-neighbor algorithms with robust features obtained from models pretrained on ImageNet. We focus on enhancing the robustness and performance of ND algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks, particularly under adversarial conditions. By incorporating robust pretrained features into the k-NN algorithm, we establish a new standard for performance and robustness in the field of robust ND. This work opens up new avenues for research aimed at fortifying machine learning systems against adversarial vulnerabilities. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/rohban-lab/ZARND.

Paperid: 1248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14497.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense potential across various tasks. However, research for exploring and improving the capabilities of LLMs in interpreting graph structures remains limited. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of prompting current open-source LLMs on graph-to-text generation tasks. Although we explored the optimal prompting strategies and proposed a novel and effective diversity-difficulty-based few-shot sample selection method, we found that the improvements from tuning-free approaches were incremental, as LLMs struggle with planning on complex graphs, particularly those with a larger number of triplets. To further improve LLMs in planning with graph sequences and grounding in truth, we introduce a new graph-to-text dataset, PlanGTG, annotated with two sub-tasks: reordering and attribution. Through extensive automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate significant improvements in the quality of generated text from both few-shot learning and fine-tuning perspectives using the PlanGTG dataset. Our study paves the way for new research directions in graph-to-text generation. PlanGTG datasets can be found in https://github.com/probe2/kg_text.

Paperid: 1249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13376.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Effective segmentation is fundamental for quantitative medical imaging; however, foundation segmentation models remain insufficiently evaluated for accuracy and biomarker fidelity across the diverse anatomical contexts and imaging protocols encountered in musculoskeletal (MSK) MRI. We evaluate three widely used segmentation models (SAM, SAM2, MedSAM) across eleven MSK MRI datasets spanning the knee, hip, spine, shoulder, and thigh. Our framework assesses both zero-shot and finetuned performance, with attention to segmentation accuracy, generalizability across imaging protocols, and reliability of derived quantitative biomarkers. Finetuned models showed consistent agreement with expert measurements for biomarkers including cartilage thickness, disc height, muscle volume, and compositional T1rho/T2 values. Automated prompting through the AutoLabel system enabled scalable segmentation, with moderate trade-offs in accuracy. As proof of concept, we applied the validated system to (i) a three-stage knee MRI triage cascade and (ii) a longitudinal landmark model that predicts total knee replacement and incident osteoarthritis. The framework offers a transparent method for benchmarking segmentation tools and connecting model performance to clinical imaging priorities.

Paperid: 1250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13277.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Computed tomography (CT) and clinical numeric data are essential modalities for cancer evaluation, but building large-scale multimodal training datasets for developing medical foundation models remains challenging due to the structural complexity of multi-slice CT data and high cost of expert annotation. In this study, we propose MEDFORM, a multimodal pre-training strategy that guides CT image representation learning using complementary information from clinical data for medical foundation model development. MEDFORM efficiently processes CT slice through multiple instance learning (MIL) and adopts a dual pre-training strategy: first pretraining the CT slice feature extractor using SimCLR-based self-supervised learning, then aligning CT and clinical modalities through cross-modal contrastive learning. Our model was pre-trained on three different cancer types: lung cancer (141,171 slices), breast cancer (8,100 slices), colorectal cancer (10,393 slices). The experimental results demonstrated that this dual pre-training strategy improves cancer classification performance and maintains robust performance in few-shot learning scenarios. Code available at https://github.com/DigitalHealthcareLab/25MultiModalFoundationModel.git

Paperid: 1251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12266.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The main challenges limiting the adoption of deep learning-based solutions in medical workflows are the availability of annotated data and the lack of interpretability of such systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) tackle the latter by constraining the final disease prediction on a set of predefined and human-interpretable concepts. However, the increased interpretability achieved through these concept-based explanations implies a higher annotation burden. Moreover, if a new concept needs to be added, the whole system needs to be retrained. Inspired by the remarkable performance shown by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in few-shot settings, we propose a simple, yet effective, methodology, CBVLM, which tackles both of the aforementioned challenges. First, for each concept, we prompt the LVLM to answer if the concept is present in the input image. Then, we ask the LVLM to classify the image based on the previous concept predictions. Moreover, in both stages, we incorporate a retrieval module responsible for selecting the best examples for in-context learning. By grounding the final diagnosis on the predicted concepts, we ensure explainability, and by leveraging the few-shot capabilities of LVLMs, we drastically lower the annotation cost. We validate our approach with extensive experiments across four medical datasets and twelve LVLMs (both generic and medical) and show that CBVLM consistently outperforms CBMs and task-specific supervised methods without requiring any training and using just a few annotated examples. More information on our project page: https://cristianopatricio.github.io/CBVLM/.

Paperid: 1252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12106.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tumor documentation in Germany is largely done manually, requiring reading patient records and entering data into structured databases. Large language models (LLMs) could potentially enhance this process by improving efficiency and reliability. This evaluation tests eleven different open source LLMs with sizes ranging from 1-70 billion model parameters on three basic tasks of the tumor documentation process: identifying tumor diagnoses, assigning ICD-10 codes, and extracting the date of first diagnosis. For evaluating the LLMs on these tasks, a dataset of annotated text snippets based on anonymized doctors' notes from urology was prepared. Different prompting strategies were used to investigate the effect of the number of examples in few-shot prompting and to explore the capabilities of the LLMs in general. The models Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Mistral NeMo 12 B performed comparably well in the tasks. Models with less extensive training data or having fewer than 7 billion parameters showed notably lower performance, while larger models did not display performance gains. Examples from a different medical domain than urology could also improve the outcome in few-shot prompting, which demonstrates the ability of LLMs to handle tasks needed for tumor documentation. Open source LLMs show a strong potential for automating tumor documentation. Models from 7-12 billion parameters could offer an optimal balance between performance and resource efficiency. With tailored fine-tuning and well-designed prompting, these models might become important tools for clinical documentation in the future. The code for the evaluation is available from https://github.com/stefan-m-lenz/UroLlmEval. We also release the dataset as a new valuable resource that addresses the shortage of authentic and easily accessible benchmarks in German-language medical NLP.

Paperid: 1253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11485.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is crucial in real-world machine learning applications, particularly in safety-critical domains. Existing methods often leverage language information from vision-language models (VLMs) to enhance OOD detection by improving confidence estimation through rich class-wise text information. However, when building OOD detection score upon on in-distribution (ID) text-image affinity, existing works either focus on each ID class or whole ID label sets, overlooking inherent ID classes' connection. We find that the semantic information across different ID classes is beneficial for effective OOD detection. We thus investigate the ability of image-text comprehension among different semantic-related ID labels in VLMs and propose a novel post-hoc strategy called SimLabel. SimLabel enhances the separability between ID and OOD samples by establishing a more robust image-class similarity metric that considers consistency over a set of similar class labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SimLabel on various zero-shot OOD detection benchmarks. The proposed model is also extended to various VLM-backbones, demonstrating its good generalization ability. Our demonstration and implementation codes are available at: https://github.com/ShuZou-1/SimLabel.

Paperid: 1254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11299.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many keypoint detection and description methods have been proposed for image matching or registration. While these methods demonstrate promising performance for single-modality image matching, they often struggle with multimodal data because the descriptors trained on single-modality data tend to lack robustness against the non-linear variations present in multimodal data. Extending such methods to multimodal image matching often requires well-aligned multimodal data to learn modality-invariant descriptors. However, acquiring such data is often costly and impractical in many real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a modality-invariant feature learning network (MIFNet) to compute modality-invariant features for keypoint descriptions in multimodal image matching using only single-modality training data. Specifically, we propose a novel latent feature aggregation module and a cumulative hybrid aggregation module to enhance the base keypoint descriptors trained on single-modality data by leveraging pre-trained features from Stable Diffusion models. %, our approach generates robust and invariant features across diverse and unknown modalities. We validate our method with recent keypoint detection and description methods in three multimodal retinal image datasets (CF-FA, CF-OCT, EMA-OCTA) and two remote sensing datasets (Optical-SAR and Optical-NIR). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MIFNet is able to learn modality-invariant feature for multimodal image matching without accessing the targeted modality and has good zero-shot generalization ability. The code will be released at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/MIFNet.

Paperid: 1255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11175.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The growing popularity of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has led to its widespread application in various visual downstream tasks. To enhance CLIP's effectiveness and versatility, efficient few-shot adaptation techniques have been widely adopted. Among these approaches, training-free methods, particularly caching methods exemplified by Tip-Adapter, have gained attention for their lightweight adaptation without the need for additional fine-tuning. In this paper, we revisit Tip-Adapter from a kernel perspective, showing that caching methods function as local adapters and are connected to a well-established kernel literature. Drawing on this insight, we offer a theoretical understanding of how these methods operate and suggest multiple avenues for enhancing the Tip-Adapter baseline. Notably, our analysis shows the importance of incorporating global information in local adapters. Therefore, we subsequently propose a global method that learns a proximal regularizer in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) using CLIP as a base learner. Our method, which we call ProKeR (Proximal Kernel ridge Regression), has a closed form solution and achieves state-of-the-art performances across 11 datasets in the standard few-shot adaptation benchmark.

Paperid: 1256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11039.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized general-purpose problem-solving, offering rapid task adaptation through pretraining, meta-training, and finetuning. Recent crucial advances in these paradigms reveal the importance of challenging task prioritized sampling to enhance adaptation robustness under distribution shifts. However, ranking task difficulties over iteration as a preliminary step typically requires exhaustive task evaluation, which is practically unaffordable in computation and data-annotation. This study provides a novel perspective to illuminate the possibility of leveraging the dual importance of adaptation robustness and learning efficiency, particularly in scenarios where task evaluation is risky or costly, such as iterative agent-environment interactions for robotic policy evaluation or computationally intensive inference steps for finetuning foundation models. Firstly, we introduce Model Predictive Task Sampling (MPTS), a framework that bridges the task space and adaptation risk landscape, providing a theoretical foundation for robust active task sampling. MPTS employs a generative model to characterize the episodic optimization process and predicts task-specific adaptation risk via posterior inference. The resulting risk learner amortizes the costly evaluation of task adaptation performance and provably approximates task difficulty rankings. MPTS seamlessly integrates into zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised finetuning settings. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments in pattern recognition using foundation models and sequential decision-making. Our results demonstrate that MPTS significantly enhances adaptation robustness for tail or out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks and improves learning efficiency compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at the project site https://github.com/thu-rllab/MPTS.

Paperid: 1257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10360.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive problem-solving abilities across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their capacity for face understanding has not been systematically studied. To address this gap, we introduce FaceXBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs on complex face understanding tasks. FaceXBench includes 5,000 multimodal multiple-choice questions derived from 25 public datasets and a newly created dataset, FaceXAPI. These questions cover 14 tasks across 6 broad categories, assessing MLLMs' face understanding abilities in bias and fairness, face authentication, recognition, analysis, localization and tool retrieval. Using FaceXBench, we conduct an extensive evaluation of 26 open-source MLLMs alongside 2 proprietary models, revealing the unique challenges in complex face understanding tasks. We analyze the models across three evaluation settings: zero-shot, in-context task description, and chain-of-thought prompting. Our detailed analysis reveals that current MLLMs, including advanced models like GPT-4o, and GeminiPro 1.5, show significant room for improvement. We believe FaceXBench will be a crucial resource for developing MLLMs equipped to perform sophisticated face understanding. Code: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/facexbench

Paperid: 1258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel approach to few-shot semantic segmentation for machinery with multiple parts that exhibit spatial and hierarchical relationships. Our method integrates the foundation models CLIPSeg and Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the interest point detector SuperPoint and a graph convolutional network (GCN) to accurately segment machinery parts. By providing 1 to 25 annotated samples, our model, evaluated on a purely synthetic dataset depicting a truck-mounted loading crane, achieves effective segmentation across various levels of detail. Training times are kept under five minutes on consumer GPUs. The model demonstrates robust generalization to real data, achieving a qualitative synthetic-to-real generalization with a $J\&F$ score of 92.2 on real data using 10 synthetic support samples. When benchmarked on the DAVIS 2017 dataset, it achieves a $J\&F$ score of 71.5 in semi-supervised video segmentation with three support samples. This method's fast training times and effective generalization to real data make it a valuable tool for autonomous systems interacting with machinery and infrastructure, and illustrate the potential of combined and orchestrated foundation models for few-shot segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 1259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10067.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Anomaly detection methods typically require extensive normal samples from the target class for training, limiting their applicability in scenarios that require rapid adaptation, such as cold start. Zero-shot and few-shot anomaly detection do not require labeled samples from the target class in advance, making them a promising research direction. Existing zero-shot and few-shot approaches often leverage powerful multimodal models to detect and localize anomalies by comparing image-text similarity. However, their handcrafted generic descriptions fail to capture the diverse range of anomalies that may emerge in different objects, and simple patch-level image-text matching often struggles to localize anomalous regions of varying shapes and sizes. To address these issues, this paper proposes the FiLo++ method, which consists of two key components. The first component, Fused Fine-Grained Descriptions (FusDes), utilizes large language models to generate anomaly descriptions for each object category, combines both fixed and learnable prompt templates and applies a runtime prompt filtering method, producing more accurate and task-specific textual descriptions. The second component, Deformable Localization (DefLoc), integrates the vision foundation model Grounding DINO with position-enhanced text descriptions and a Multi-scale Deformable Cross-modal Interaction (MDCI) module, enabling accurate localization of anomalies with various shapes and sizes. In addition, we design a position-enhanced patch matching approach to improve few-shot anomaly detection performance. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that FiLo++ achieves significant performance improvements compared with existing methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FiLo.

Paperid: 1260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10021.pdf GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

Paperid: 1261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09949.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, state-of-the-art approaches for pruning large pre-trained models (LPMs) have demonstrated that the training-free removal of non-critical residual blocks in Transformers is viable for reducing model size, achieving results that outperform previous training-free pruning approaches. Motivated by these findings, we extend BlockPruner (Zhong et al., 2024) and propose MultiPruner, a pruning approach that surpasses recent training-free pruning methods by adopting a multidimensional, iterative, fine-grained pruning strategy. In MultiPruner, multidimensional pruning reinstates the structural balance in block-pruned models by sequentially compressing along three dimensions: i) residual blocks, ii) channels of multilayer perceptrons (MLP), and iii) attention heads. This solution enhances zero-shot accuracy on downstream tasks compared to other techniques while improving model compression ratios, producing compressed models with fewer computing and memory requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method across various large pre-trained models. The code and pruning configurations are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning.

Paperid: 1262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09898.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tremendous progress has been made in deep stereo matching to excel on benchmark datasets through per-domain fine-tuning. However, achieving strong zero-shot generalization - a hallmark of foundation models in other computer vision tasks - remains challenging for stereo matching. We introduce FoundationStereo, a foundation model for stereo depth estimation designed to achieve strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we first construct a large-scale (1M stereo pairs) synthetic training dataset featuring large diversity and high photorealism, followed by an automatic self-curation pipeline to remove ambiguous samples. We then design a number of network architecture components to enhance scalability, including a side-tuning feature backbone that adapts rich monocular priors from vision foundation models to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, and long-range context reasoning for effective cost volume filtering. Together, these components lead to strong robustness and accuracy across domains, establishing a new standard in zero-shot stereo depth estimation. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/FoundationStereo/

Paperid: 1263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09555.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Purpose: Surgical workflow analysis is crucial for improving surgical efficiency and safety. However, previous studies rely heavily on large-scale annotated datasets, posing challenges in cost, scalability, and reliance on expert annotations. To address this, we propose Surg-FTDA (Few-shot Text-driven Adaptation), designed to handle various surgical workflow analysis tasks with minimal paired image-label data. Methods: Our approach has two key components. First, Few-shot selection-based modality alignment selects a small subset of images and aligns their embeddings with text embeddings from the downstream task, bridging the modality gap. Second, Text-driven adaptation leverages only text data to train a decoder, eliminating the need for paired image-text data. This decoder is then applied to aligned image embeddings, enabling image-related tasks without explicit image-text pairs. Results: We evaluate our approach to generative tasks (image captioning) and discriminative tasks (triplet recognition and phase recognition). Results show that Surg-FTDA outperforms baselines and generalizes well across downstream tasks. Conclusion: We propose a text-driven adaptation approach that mitigates the modality gap and handles multiple downstream tasks in surgical workflow analysis, with minimal reliance on large annotated datasets. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Surg-FTDA

Paperid: 1264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09525.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Class-incremental fault diagnosis requires a model to adapt to new fault classes while retaining previous knowledge. However, limited research exists for imbalanced and long-tailed data. Extracting discriminative features from few-shot fault data is challenging, and adding new fault classes often demands costly model retraining. Moreover, incremental training of existing methods risks catastrophic forgetting, and severe class imbalance can bias the model's decisions toward normal classes. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Supervised Contrastive knowledge distiLlation for class Incremental Fault Diagnosis (SCLIFD) framework proposing supervised contrastive knowledge distillation for improved representation learning capability and less forgetting, a novel prioritized exemplar selection method for sample replay to alleviate catastrophic forgetting, and the Random Forest Classifier to address the class imbalance. Extensive experimentation on simulated and real-world industrial datasets across various imbalance ratios demonstrates the superiority of SCLIFD over existing approaches. Our code can be found at https://github.com/Zhang-Henry/SCLIFD_TII.

Paperid: 1265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09466.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Stereo matching is a key technique for metric depth estimation in computer vision and robotics. Real-world challenges like occlusion and non-texture hinder accurate disparity estimation from binocular matching cues. Recently, monocular relative depth estimation has shown remarkable generalization using vision foundation models. Thus, to facilitate robust stereo matching with monocular depth cues, we incorporate a robust monocular relative depth model into the recurrent stereo-matching framework, building a new framework for depth foundation model-based stereo-matching, DEFOM-Stereo. In the feature extraction stage, we construct the combined context and matching feature encoder by integrating features from conventional CNNs and DEFOM. In the update stage, we use the depth predicted by DEFOM to initialize the recurrent disparity and introduce a scale update module to refine the disparity at the correct scale. DEFOM-Stereo is verified to have much stronger zero-shot generalization compared with SOTA methods. Moreover, DEFOM-Stereo achieves top performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and ETH3D benchmarks, ranking $1^{st}$ on many metrics. In the joint evaluation under the robust vision challenge, our model simultaneously outperforms previous models on the individual benchmarks, further demonstrating its outstanding capabilities.

Paperid: 1266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09446.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper investigates the robustness of vision-language models against adversarial visual perturbations and introduces a novel ``double visual defense" to enhance this robustness. Unlike previous approaches that resort to lightweight adversarial fine-tuning of a pre-trained CLIP model, we perform large-scale adversarial vision-language pre-training from scratch using web-scale data. We then strengthen the defense by incorporating adversarial visual instruction tuning. The resulting models from each stage, $Î$CLIP and $Î^2$LLaVA, show substantially enhanced zero-shot robustness and set a new state-of-the-art in adversarial defense for vision-language models. For example, the adversarial robustness of $Î$CLIP surpasses that of the previous best models on ImageNet-1k by ~20%. %For example, $Î$CLIP surpasses the previous best models on ImageNet-1k by ~20% in terms of adversarial robustness. Similarly, compared to prior art, $Î^2$LLaVA brings a ~30% robustness improvement to image captioning task and a ~20% robustness improvement to visual question answering task. Furthermore, our models exhibit stronger zero-shot recognition capability, fewer hallucinations, and superior reasoning performance compared to baselines. Our project page is https://doublevisualdefense.github.io/.

Paperid: 1267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09012.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid technical progress of generative art (GenArt) has democratized the creation of visually appealing imagery. However, achieving genuine artistic impact - the kind that resonates with viewers on a deeper, more meaningful level - remains formidable as it requires a sophisticated aesthetic sensibility. This sensibility involves a multifaceted cognitive process extending beyond mere visual appeal, which is often overlooked by current computational methods. This paper pioneers an approach to capture this complex process by investigating how the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) can be effectively elicited to perform aesthetic judgment. Our analysis reveals a critical challenge: MLLMs exhibit a tendency towards hallucinations during aesthetic reasoning, characterized by subjective opinions and unsubstantiated artistic interpretations. We further demonstrate that these hallucinations can be suppressed by employing an evidence-based and objective reasoning process, as substantiated by our proposed baseline, ArtCoT. MLLMs prompted by this principle produce multifaceted, in-depth aesthetic reasoning that aligns significantly better with human judgment. These findings have direct applications in areas such as AI art tutoring and as reward models for image generation. Ultimately, we hope this work paves the way for AI systems that can truly understand, appreciate, and contribute to art that aligns with human aesthetic values. Project homepage: https://github.com/songrise/MLLM4Art.

Paperid: 1268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08816.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) has attained great success in pattern recognition and computer vision. Transferring CLIP to downstream tasks (e.g. zero- or few-shot classification) is a hot topic in multimodal learning. However, current studies primarily focus on either prompt learning for text or adapter tuning for vision, without fully exploiting the complementary information and correlations among image-text pairs. In this paper, we propose an Image Description Enhanced CLIP-Adapter (IDEA) method to adapt CLIP to few-shot image classification tasks. This method captures fine-grained features by leveraging both visual features and textual descriptions of images. IDEA is a training-free method for CLIP, and it can be comparable to or even exceeds state-of-the-art models on multiple tasks. Furthermore, we introduce Trainable-IDEA (T-IDEA), which extends IDEA by adding two lightweight learnable components (i.e., a projector and a learnable latent space), further enhancing the model's performance and achieving SOTA results on 11 datasets. As one important contribution, we employ the Llama model and design a comprehensive pipeline to generate textual descriptions for images of 11 datasets, resulting in a total of 1,637,795 image-text pairs, named "IMD-11". Our code and data are released at https://github.com/FourierAI/IDEA.

Paperid: 1269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08763.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current fake image detectors trained on large synthetic image datasets perform satisfactorily on limited studied generative models. However, these detectors suffer a notable performance decline over unseen models. Besides, collecting adequate training data from online generative models is often expensive or infeasible. To overcome these issues, we propose Few-Shot Detector (FSD), a novel AI-generated image detector which learns a specialized metric space for effectively distinguishing unseen fake images using very few samples. Experiments show that FSD achieves state-of-the-art performance by $+11.6\%$ average accuracy on the GenImage dataset with only $10$ additional samples. More importantly, our method is better capable of capturing the intra-category commonality in unseen images without further training. Our code is available at https://github.com/teheperinko541/Few-Shot-AIGI-Detector.

Paperid: 1270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08654.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
State-of-the-art supervised stereo matching methods have achieved remarkable performance on various benchmarks. However, their generalization to real-world scenarios remains challenging due to the scarcity of annotated real-world stereo data. In this paper, we propose ZeroStereo, a novel stereo image generation pipeline for zero-shot stereo matching. Our approach synthesizes high-quality right images from arbitrary single images by leveraging pseudo disparities generated by a monocular depth estimation model. Unlike previous methods that address occluded regions by filling missing areas with neighboring pixels or random backgrounds, we fine-tune a diffusion inpainting model to recover missing details while preserving semantic structure. Additionally, we propose Training-Free Confidence Generation, which mitigates the impact of unreliable pseudo labels without additional training, and Adaptive Disparity Selection, which ensures a diverse and realistic disparity distribution while preventing excessive occlusion and foreground distortion. Experiments demonstrate that models trained with our pipeline achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization across multiple datasets with only a dataset volume comparable to Scene Flow. Code: https://github.com/Windsrain/ZeroStereo.

Paperid: 1271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08168.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While autonomous driving technology has made remarkable strides, data-driven approaches still struggle with complex scenarios due to their limited reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, knowledge-driven autonomous driving systems have evolved considerably with the popularization of visual language models. In this paper, we propose LeapVAD, a novel method based on cognitive perception and dual-process thinking. Our approach implements a human-attentional mechanism to identify and focus on critical traffic elements that influence driving decisions. By characterizing these objects through comprehensive attributes - including appearance, motion patterns, and associated risks - LeapVAD achieves more effective environmental representation and streamlines the decision-making process. Furthermore, LeapVAD incorporates an innovative dual-process decision-making module miming the human-driving learning process. The system consists of an Analytic Process (System-II) that accumulates driving experience through logical reasoning and a Heuristic Process (System-I) that refines this knowledge via fine-tuning and few-shot learning. LeapVAD also includes reflective mechanisms and a growing memory bank, enabling it to learn from past mistakes and continuously improve its performance in a closed-loop environment. To enhance efficiency, we develop a scene encoder network that generates compact scene representations for rapid retrieval of relevant driving experiences. Extensive evaluations conducted on two leading autonomous driving simulators, CARLA and DriveArena, demonstrate that LeapVAD achieves superior performance compared to camera-only approaches despite limited training data. Comprehensive ablation studies further emphasize its effectiveness in continuous learning and domain adaptation. Project page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/LeapVAD/.

Paperid: 1272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07959.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, several works have been conducted on jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot malicious demos. In particular, Zheng et al. focus on improving the efficiency of Few-Shot Jailbreaking (FSJ) by injecting special tokens into the demos and employing demo-level random search, known as Improved Few-Shot Jailbreaking (I-FSJ). Nevertheless, we notice that this method may still require a long context to jailbreak advanced models e.g. 32 shots of demos for Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct (Llama-3) \cite{llama3modelcard}. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of I-FSJ and propose Self-Instruct Few-Shot Jailbreaking (Self-Instruct-FSJ) facilitated with the demo-level greedy search. This framework decomposes the FSJ attack into pattern and behavior learning to exploit the model's vulnerabilities in a more generalized and efficient way. We conduct elaborate experiments to evaluate our method on common open-source models and compare it with baseline algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/iphosi/Self-Instruct-FSJ.

Paperid: 1273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06994.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Teaching robots to autonomously complete everyday tasks remains a challenge. Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful approach that imbues robots with skills via demonstrations, but is limited by the labor-intensive process of collecting teleoperated robot data. Human videos offer a scalable alternative, but it remains difficult to directly train IL policies from them due to the lack of robot action labels. To address this, we propose to represent actions as short-horizon 2D trajectories on an image. These actions, or motion tracks, capture the predicted direction of motion for either human hands or robot end-effectors. We instantiate an IL policy called Motion Track Policy (MT-pi) which receives image observations and outputs motion tracks as actions. By leveraging this unified, cross-embodiment action space, MT-pi completes tasks with high success given just minutes of human video and limited additional robot demonstrations. At test time, we predict motion tracks from two camera views, recovering 6DoF trajectories via multi-view synthesis. MT-pi achieves an average success rate of 86.5% across 4 real-world tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art IL baselines which do not leverage human data or our action space by 40%, and generalizes to scenarios seen only in human videos. Code and videos are available on our website https://portal-cornell.github.io/motion_track_policy/.

Paperid: 1274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06903.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present SynShot, a novel method for the few-shot inversion of a drivable head avatar based on a synthetic prior. We tackle three major challenges. First, training a controllable 3D generative network requires a large number of diverse sequences, for which pairs of images and high-quality tracked meshes are not always available. Second, the use of real data is strictly regulated (e.g., under the General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates frequent deletion of models and data to accommodate a situation when a participant's consent is withdrawn). Synthetic data, free from these constraints, is an appealing alternative. Third, state-of-the-art monocular avatar models struggle to generalize to new views and expressions, lacking a strong prior and often overfitting to a specific viewpoint distribution. Inspired by machine learning models trained solely on synthetic data, we propose a method that learns a prior model from a large dataset of synthetic heads with diverse identities, expressions, and viewpoints. With few input images, SynShot fine-tunes the pretrained synthetic prior to bridge the domain gap, modeling a photorealistic head avatar that generalizes to novel expressions and viewpoints. We model the head avatar using 3D Gaussian splatting and a convolutional encoder-decoder that outputs Gaussian parameters in UV texture space. To account for the different modeling complexities over parts of the head (e.g., skin vs hair), we embed the prior with explicit control for upsampling the number of per-part primitives. Compared to SOTA monocular and GAN-based methods, SynShot significantly improves novel view and expression synthesis.

Paperid: 1275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06031.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Transductive zero-shot learning with vision-language models leverages image-image similarities within the dataset to achieve better classification accuracy compared to the inductive setting. However, there is little work that explores the structure of the language space in this context. We propose GTA-CLIP, a novel technique that incorporates supervision from language models for joint transduction in language and vision spaces. Our approach is iterative and consists of three steps: (i) incrementally exploring the attribute space by querying language models, (ii) an attribute-augmented transductive inference procedure, and (iii) fine-tuning the language and vision encoders based on inferred labels within the dataset. Through experiments with CLIP encoders, we demonstrate that GTA-CLIP, yields an average performance improvement of 8.6% and 3.7% across 12 datasets and 3 encoders, over CLIP and transductive CLIP respectively in the zero-shot setting. We also observe similar improvements in a few-shot setting. We present ablation studies that demonstrate the value of each step and visualize how the vision and language spaces evolve over iterations driven by the transductive learning.

Paperid: 1276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05787.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Codec-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have shown impressive quality with zero-shot voice cloning abilities. However, they often struggle with more expressive references or complex text inputs. We present MARS6, a robust encoder-decoder transformer for rapid, expressive TTS. MARS6 is built on recent improvements in spoken language modelling. Utilizing a hierarchical setup for its decoder, new speech tokens are processed at a rate of only 12 Hz, enabling efficient modelling of long-form text while retaining reconstruction quality. We combine several recent training and inference techniques to reduce repetitive generation and improve output stability and quality. This enables the 70M-parameter MARS6 to achieve similar performance to models many times larger. We show this in objective and subjective evaluations, comparing TTS output quality and reference speaker cloning ability. Project page: https://camb-ai.github.io/mars6-turbo/

Paperid: 1277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05728.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Attribute classification is crucial for identifying specific characteristics within image regions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been effective in zero-shot tasks by leveraging their general knowledge from large-scale datasets. Recent studies demonstrate that transformer-based models with class-wise queries can effectively address zero-shot multi-label classification. However, poor utilization of the relationship between seen and unseen attributes makes the model lack generalizability. Additionally, attribute classification generally involves many attributes, making maintaining the model's scalability difficult. To address these issues, we propose Super-class guided transFormer (SugaFormer), a novel framework that leverages super-classes to enhance scalability and generalizability for zero-shot attribute classification. SugaFormer employs Super-class Query Initialization (SQI) to reduce the number of queries, utilizing common semantic information from super-classes, and incorporates Multi-context Decoding (MD) to handle diverse visual cues. To strengthen generalizability, we introduce two knowledge transfer strategies that utilize VLMs. During training, Super-class guided Consistency Regularization (SCR) aligns model's features with VLMs using super-class guided prompts, and during inference, Zero-shot Retrieval-based Score Enhancement (ZRSE) refines predictions for unseen attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SugaFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across three widely-used attribute classification benchmarks under zero-shot, and cross-dataset transfer settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/SugaFormer.

Paperid: 1278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05269.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Digital Pathology is a cornerstone in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. A key task in this field is the identification and segmentation of cells in hematoxylin and eosin-stained images. Existing methods for cell segmentation often require extensive annotated datasets for training and are limited to a predefined cell classification scheme. To overcome these limitations, we propose $\text{CellViT}^{\scriptscriptstyle ++}$, a framework for generalized cell segmentation in digital pathology. $\text{CellViT}^{\scriptscriptstyle ++}$ utilizes Vision Transformers with foundation models as encoders to compute deep cell features and segmentation masks simultaneously. To adapt to unseen cell types, we rely on a computationally efficient approach. It requires minimal data for training and leads to a drastically reduced carbon footprint. We demonstrate excellent performance on seven different datasets, covering a broad spectrum of cell types, organs, and clinical settings. The framework achieves remarkable zero-shot segmentation and data-efficient cell-type classification. Furthermore, we show that $\text{CellViT}^{\scriptscriptstyle ++}$ can leverage immunofluorescence stainings to generate training datasets without the need for pathologist annotations. The automated dataset generation approach surpasses the performance of networks trained on manually labeled data, demonstrating its effectiveness in creating high-quality training datasets without expert annotations. To advance digital pathology, $\text{CellViT}^{\scriptscriptstyle ++}$ is available as an open-source framework featuring a user-friendly, web-based interface for visualization and annotation. The code is available under https://github.com/TIO-IKIM/CellViT-plus-plus.

Paperid: 1279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05017.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) faces a critical challenge: balancing the retention of prior knowledge with the acquisition of new classes. Existing methods either freeze the backbone to prevent catastrophic forgetting, sacrificing plasticity, or add new modules, incurring high costs. These approaches treat pretrained models as black boxes, overlooking two key opportunities to exploit their internal capacity: reusing redundant representational space within layers and selectively adapting layers based on their sensitivity to forgetting. We propose CKPD-FSCIL, a unified framework that unlocks the underutilized capacity of pretrained weights, achieving a superior stability-plasticity balance with zero inference overhead. Our design integrates two continuously adapting mechanisms: At the weight level, a Continuous Knowledge-Preserving Decomposition mechanism uses feature covariance to split each weight matrix into a frozen subspace that safeguards prior knowledge and a learnable, redundant subspace for new tasks. At the layer level, a Continuous Adaptive Layer Selection mechanism leverages an Adapter Sensitivity Ratio to automatically select layers with the highest redundant capacity and lowest forgetting risk for adaptation. By targeting only safe, high-potential subspaces and layers, CKPD-FSCIL enables efficient adaptation. After each session, the learned adapters are merged back into the original weights, ensuring zero additional parameters or FLOPs during inference. Extensive experiments on multiple FSCIL benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both adaptability and knowledge retention. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaojieli0903/CKPD-FSCIL.

Paperid: 1280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04366.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Surface wave dispersion curve inversion is crucial for estimating subsurface shear-wave velocity (vs), yet traditional methods often face challenges related to computational cost, non-uniqueness, and sensitivity to initial models. While deep learning approaches show promise, many require large labeled datasets and struggle with real-world datasets, which often exhibit varying period ranges, missing values, and low signal-to-noise ratios. To address these limitations, this study introduces DispFormer, a transformer-based neural network for $v_s$ profile inversion from Rayleigh-wave phase and group dispersion curves. DispFormer processes dispersion data independently at each period, allowing it to handle varying lengths without requiring network modifications or strict alignment between training and testing datasets. A depth-aware training strategy is also introduced, incorporating physical constraints derived from the depth sensitivity of dispersion data. DispFormer is pre-trained on a global synthetic dataset and evaluated on two regional synthetic datasets using zero-shot and few-shot strategies. Results show that even without labeled data, the zero-shot DispFormer generates inversion profiles that outperform the interpolated reference model used as the pretraining target, providing a deployable initial model generator to assist traditional workflows. When partial labeled data available, the few-shot trained DispFormer surpasses traditional global search methods. Real-world tests further confirm that DispFormer generalizes well to dispersion data with varying lengths and achieves lower data residuals than reference models. These findings underscore the potential of DispFormer as a foundation model for dispersion curve inversion and demonstrate the advantages of integrating physics-informed deep learning into geophysical applications.

Paperid: 1281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04352.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Online test-time adaptation (OTTA) of vision-language models (VLMs) has recently garnered increased attention to take advantage of data observed along a stream to improve future predictions. Unfortunately, existing methods rely on dataset-specific hyperparameters, significantly limiting their adaptability to unseen tasks. In response, we propose Online Gaussian Adaptation (OGA), a novel method that models the likelihoods of visual features using Gaussian distributions and incorporates zero-shot priors into an interpretable Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation framework with fixed hyper-parameters across all datasets. We demonstrate that OGA outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most datasets and runs. Additionally, we show that combining OTTA with popular few-shot techniques (a practical yet overlooked setting in prior research) is highly beneficial. Furthermore, our experimental study reveals that common OTTA evaluation protocols, which average performance over at most three runs per dataset, are inadequate due to the substantial variability observed across runs for all OTTA methods. Therefore, we advocate for more rigorous evaluation practices, including increasing the number of runs and considering additional quantitative metrics, such as our proposed Expected Tail Accuracy (ETA), calculated as the average accuracy in the worst 10% of runs. We hope these contributions will encourage more rigorous and diverse evaluation practices in the OTTA community. Code is available at https://github.com/cfuchs2023/OGA .

Paperid: 1282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04144.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present Chirpy3D, a novel approach for fine-grained 3D object generation, tackling the challenging task of synthesizing creative 3D objects in a zero-shot setting, with access only to unposed 2D images of seen categories. Without structured supervision -- such as camera poses, 3D part annotations, or object-specific labels -- the model must infer plausible 3D structures, capture fine-grained details, and generalize to novel objects using only category-level labels from seen categories. To address this, Chirpy3D introduces a multi-view diffusion model that decomposes training objects into anchor parts in an unsupervised manner, representing the latent space of both seen and unseen parts as continuous distributions. This allows smooth interpolation and flexible recombination of parts to generate entirely new objects with species-specific details. A self-supervised feature consistency loss further ensures structural and semantic coherence. The result is the first system capable of generating entirely novel 3D objects with species-specific fine-grained details through flexible part sampling and composition. Our experiments demonstrate that Chirpy3D surpasses existing methods in generating creative 3D objects with higher quality and fine-grained details. Code will be released at https://github.com/kamwoh/chirpy3d.

Paperid: 1283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04070.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) without requiring parameter updates. However, as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many, performance tends to plateau and eventually decline. We identify two primary causes for this trend: the suboptimal negative log-likelihood (NLL) optimization objective and the incremental data noise. To address these issues, we introduce \textit{DrICL}, a novel optimization method that enhances model performance through \textit{Differentiated} and \textit{Reweighting} objectives. Globally, DrICL utilizes differentiated learning to optimize the NLL objective, ensuring that many-shot performance surpasses zero-shot levels. Locally, it dynamically adjusts the weighting of many-shot demonstrations by leveraging cumulative advantages inspired by reinforcement learning, thereby mitigating the impact of noisy data. Recognizing the lack of multi-task datasets with diverse many-shot distributions, we develop the \textit{Many-Shot ICL Benchmark} (ICL-50)-a large-scale benchmark of 50 tasks that cover shot numbers from 1 to 350 within sequences of up to 8,000 tokens-for both fine-tuning and evaluation purposes. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with DrICL achieve significant improvements in many-shot setups across various tasks, including both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We release the code and dataset hoping to facilitate further research in many-shot ICL\footnote{https://github.com/xiaoqzhwhu/DrICL}.

Paperid: 1284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03800.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the considerable performance improvements of face recognition algorithms in recent years, the same scientific advances responsible for this progress can also be used to create efficient ways to attack them, posing a threat to their secure deployment. Morphing attack detection (MAD) systems aim to detect a specific type of threat, morphing attacks, at an early stage, preventing them from being considered for verification in critical processes. Foundation models (FM) learn from extensive amounts of unlabelled data, achieving remarkable zero-shot generalization to unseen domains. Although this generalization capacity might be weak when dealing with domain-specific downstream tasks such as MAD, FMs can easily adapt to these settings while retaining the built-in knowledge acquired during pre-training. In this work, we recognize the potential of FMs to perform well in the MAD task when properly adapted to its specificities. To this end, we adapt FM CLIP architectures with LoRA weights while simultaneously training a classification header. The proposed framework, MADation surpasses our alternative FM and transformer-based frameworks and constitutes the first adaption of FMs to the MAD task. MADation presents competitive results with current MAD solutions in the literature and even surpasses them in several evaluation scenarios. To encourage reproducibility and facilitate further research in MAD, we publicly release the implementation of MADation at https://github.com/gurayozgur/MADation

Paperid: 1285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03729.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been widely leveraged to improve predictive performance. However, previous works on transductive or test-time adaptation (TTA) often make strong assumptions about the data distribution, such as the presence of all classes. Our work challenges these favorable deployment scenarios, and introduces a more realistic evaluation framework, including: (i) a variable number of effective classes for adaptation within a single batch, and (ii) non-i.i.d. batches of test samples in online adaptation settings. We provide comprehensive evaluations, comparisons, and ablation studies that demonstrate how current transductive or TTA methods for VLMs systematically compromise the models' initial zero-shot robustness across various realistic scenarios, favoring performance gains under advantageous assumptions about the test samples' distributions. Furthermore, we introduce StatA, a versatile method that could handle a wide range of deployment scenarios, including those with a variable number of effective classes at test time. Our approach incorporates a novel regularization term designed specifically for VLMs, which acts as a statistical anchor preserving the initial text-encoder knowledge, particularly in low-data regimes. Code available at https://github.com/MaxZanella/StatA.

Paperid: 1286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03229.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper explores Masked Autoencoders (MAE) with Gaussian Splatting. While reconstructive self-supervised learning frameworks such as MAE learns good semantic abstractions, it is not trained for explicit spatial awareness. Our approach, named Gaussian Masked Autoencoder, or GMAE, aims to learn semantic abstractions and spatial understanding jointly. Like MAE, it reconstructs the image end-to-end in the pixel space, but beyond MAE, it also introduces an intermediate, 3D Gaussian-based representation and renders images via splatting. We show that GMAE can enable various zero-shot learning capabilities of spatial understanding (e.g., figure-ground segmentation, image layering, edge detection, etc.) while preserving the high-level semantics of self-supervised representation quality from MAE. To our knowledge, we are the first to employ Gaussian primitives in an image representation learning framework beyond optimization-based single-scene reconstructions. We believe GMAE will inspire further research in this direction and contribute to developing next-generation techniques for modeling high-fidelity visual data. More details at https://brjathu.github.io/gmae

Paperid: 1287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03226.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive ability in solving complex mathematical problems with multi-step reasoning and can be further enhanced with well-designed in-context learning (ICL) examples. However, this potential is often constrained by two major challenges in ICL: granularity mismatch and irrelevant information. We observe that while LLMs excel at decomposing mathematical problems, they often struggle with reasoning errors in fine-grained steps. Moreover, ICL examples retrieved at the question level may omit critical steps or even mislead the model with irrelevant details. To address this issue, we propose BoostStep, a method that enhances reasoning accuracy through step-aligned ICL, a novel mechanism that carefully aligns retrieved reference steps with the corresponding reasoning steps. Additionally, BoostStep incorporates an effective "first-try" strategy to deliver exemplars highly relevant to the current state of reasoning. BoostStep is a flexible and powerful method that integrates seamlessly with chain-of-thought (CoT) and tree search algorithms, refining both candidate selection and decision-making. Empirical results show that BoostStep improves GPT-4o's CoT performance by 4.6% across mathematical benchmarks, significantly surpassing traditional few-shot learning's 1.2%. Moreover, it can achieve an additional 7.5\% gain combined with tree search. Surprisingly, it enhances state-of-the-art LLMs to solve challenging math problems using simpler examples. It improves DeepSeek-R1-671B's performance on AIME by 2.2%, leveraging simple examples only from the MATH dataset.

Paperid: 1288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03166.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various NLP tasks, including semantic parsing, which translates natural language into formal code representations. However, the reverse process, translating code into natural language, termed semantic captioning, has received less attention. This task is becoming increasingly important as LLMs are integrated into platforms for code generation, security analysis, and educational purposes. In this paper, we focus on the captioning of SQL query (SQL2Text) to address the critical need for understanding and explaining SQL queries in an era where LLM-generated code poses potential security risks. We repurpose Text2SQL datasets for SQL2Text by introducing an iterative ICL prompt using GPT-4o to generate multiple additional utterances, which enhances the robustness of the datasets for the reverse task. We conduct our experiments using in-context learning (ICL) based on different sample selection methods, emphasizing smaller, more computationally efficient LLMs. Our findings demonstrate that leveraging the inherent graph properties of SQL for ICL sample selection significantly outperforms random selection by up to 39% on BLEU score and provides better results than alternative methods. Dataset and codes are published: https://github.com/aliwister/ast-icl.

Paperid: 1289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02945.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent progress in foundation models has enabled strong zero-shot performance for time series forecasting. In this work, we show that such capabilities can also emerge from tabular foundation models. We introduce TabPFN-TS, a simple method that treats forecasting as a tabular regression problem by combining lightweight temporal featurization with the pretrained TabPFN-v2. This formulation requires no time-series-specific pretraining and naturally supports both univariate and covariate-informed forecasting. Despite its compact size (11M parameters), TabPFN-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance on covariate-informed forecasting and competitive accuracy on univariate forecasting across the GIFT-Eval and fev-bench benchmarks. We further provide controlled analyses examining how the model interprets temporal structure, how featurization choices affect accuracy, and how forecasts change under alternative tabular backbones. Together, our results demonstrate that tabular foundation models--when paired with suitable temporal features--offer an efficient and versatile alternative for forecasting, bridging tabular and time-series learning within a unified framework. Code is available at https://github.com/PriorLabs/tabpfn-time-series.

Paperid: 1290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02902.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances. This article focuses on demonstrating the applications of Isaac in local planning and obstacle avoidance as one of the most fundamental ways in which a mobile robot interacts with its environments. Although there is extensive research on proprioception-based RL policies, the article highlights less standardized and reproducible approaches to exteroception. At the same time, the article aims to provide a base framework for end-to-end local navigation policies and how a custom robot can be trained in such simulation environment. We benchmark end-to-end policies with the state-of-the-art Nav2, navigation stack in Robot Operating System (ROS). We also cover the sim-to-real transfer process by demonstrating zero-shot transferability of policies trained in the Isaac simulator to real-world robots. This is further evidenced by the tests with different simulated robots, which show the generalization of the learned policy. Finally, the benchmarks demonstrate comparable performance to Nav2, opening the door to quick deployment of state-of-the-art end-to-end local planners for custom robot platforms, but importantly furthering the possibilities by expanding the state and action spaces or task definitions for more complex missions. Overall, with this article we introduce the most important steps, and aspects to consider, in deploying RL policies for local path planning and obstacle avoidance with Isaac Sim training, Gazebo testing, and ROS 2 for real-time inference in real robots. The code is available at https://github.com/sahars93/RL-Navigation.

Paperid: 1291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02406.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Verifying the provenance of content is crucial to the function of many organizations, e.g., educational institutions, social media platforms, firms, etc. This problem is becoming increasingly challenging as text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes almost indistinguishable from human-generated content. In addition, many institutions utilize in-house LLMs and want to ensure that external, non-sanctioned LLMs do not produce content within the institution. In this paper, we answer the following question: Given a piece of text, can we identify whether it was produced by a particular LLM or not? We model LLM-generated text as a sequential stochastic process with complete dependence on history. We then design zero-shot statistical tests to (i) distinguish between text generated by two different known sets of LLMs $A$ (non-sanctioned) and $B$ (in-house), and (ii) identify whether text was generated by a known LLM or generated by any unknown model, e.g., a human or some other language generation process. We prove that the type I and type II errors of our test decrease exponentially with the length of the text. For that, we show that if $B$ generates the text, then except with an exponentially small probability in string length, the log-perplexity of the string under $A$ converges to the average cross-entropy of $B$ and $A$. We then present experiments using LLMs with white-box access to support our theoretical results and empirically examine the robustness of our results to black-box settings and adversarial attacks. In the black-box setting, our method achieves an average TPR of 82.5\% at a fixed FPR of 5\%. Under adversarial perturbations, our minimum TPR is 48.6\% at the same FPR threshold. Both results outperform all non-commercial baselines. See https://github.com/TaraRadvand74/llm-text-detection for code, data, and an online demo of the project.

Paperid: 1292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02189.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Vision Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a transformative topic at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, enabling machines to perceive and reason about the world through both visual and textual modalities. For example, models such as CLIP, Claude, and GPT-4V demonstrate strong reasoning and understanding abilities on visual and textual data and beat classical single modality vision models on zero-shot classification [93]. With their rapid advancements in research and growing popularity in various applications, we provide a comprehensive survey of VLMs. Specifically, we provide a systematic overview of VLMs in the following aspects: [1] model information of the major VLMs developed up to 2025; [2] the transition of VLM architectures and the newest VLM alignment methods; [3] summary and categorization of the popular benchmarks and evaluation metrics of VLMs; [4] the challenges and issues faced by current VLMs such as hallucination, alignment, fairness, and safety. Detailed collections including papers and model repository links are listed in https://github.com/zli12321/Vision-Language-Models-Overview.

Paperid: 1293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02029.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the integration of an additional modality, large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit greater vulnerability to safety risks (e.g., jailbreaking) compared to their language-only predecessors. Although recent studies have devoted considerable effort to the post-hoc alignment of LVLMs, the inner safety mechanisms remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we discover that internal activations of LVLMs during the first token generation can effectively identify malicious prompts across different attacks. This inherent safety perception is governed by sparse attention heads, which we term ``safety heads." Further analysis reveals that these heads act as specialized shields against malicious prompts; ablating them leads to higher attack success rates, while the model's utility remains unaffected. By locating these safety heads and concatenating their activations, we construct a straightforward but powerful malicious prompt detector that integrates seamlessly into the generation process with minimal extra inference overhead. Despite its simple structure of a logistic regression model, the detector surprisingly exhibits strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. Experiments across various prompt-based attacks confirm the effectiveness of leveraging safety heads to protect LVLMs. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Ziwei-Zheng/SAHs}.

Paperid: 1294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01108.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed the success of foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) in various music informatics understanding tasks, including music tagging, instrument classification, key detection, and more. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised music representation learning model for music understanding. Distinguished from previous studies adopting random projection or existing neural codec, the proposed model, named MuQ, is trained to predict tokens generated by Mel Residual Vector Quantization (Mel-RVQ). Our Mel-RVQ utilizes residual linear projection structure for Mel spectrum quantization to enhance the stability and efficiency of target extraction and lead to better performance. Experiments in a large variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MuQ outperforms previous self-supervised music representation models with only 0.9K hours of open-source pre-training data. Scaling up the data to over 160K hours and adopting iterative training consistently improve the model performance. To further validate the strength of our model, we present MuQ-MuLan, a joint music-text embedding model based on contrastive learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot music tagging task on the MagnaTagATune dataset. Code and checkpoints are open source in https://github.com/tencent-ailab/MuQ.

Paperid: 1295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00958.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compared to image-text pair data, interleaved corpora enable Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to understand the world more naturally like humans. However, such existing datasets are crawled from webpage, facing challenges like low knowledge density, loose image-text relations, and poor logical coherence between images. On the other hand, the internet hosts vast instructional videos (e.g., online geometry courses) that are widely used by humans to learn foundational subjects, yet these valuable resources remain underexplored in VLM training. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality \textbf{multimodal textbook} corpus with richer foundational knowledge for VLM pretraining. It collects over 2.5 years of instructional videos, totaling 22,000 class hours. We first use an LLM-proposed taxonomy to systematically gather instructional videos. Then we progressively extract and refine visual (keyframes), audio (ASR), and textual knowledge (OCR) from the videos, and organize as an image-text interleaved corpus based on temporal order. Compared to its counterparts, our video-centric textbook offers more coherent context, richer knowledge, and better image-text alignment. Experiments demonstrate its superb pretraining performance, particularly in knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks like ScienceQA and MathVista. Moreover, VLMs pre-trained on our textbook exhibit outstanding interleaved context awareness, leveraging visual and textual cues in their few-shot context for task solving. Our code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multimodal_textbook.

Paperid: 1296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00911.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is challenging in domains where preference data is unavailable. We address the problem of learning reward models for such target domains by leveraging feedback collected from simpler source domains, where human preferences are easier to obtain. Our key insight is that, while domains may differ significantly, human preferences convey \emph{domain-agnostic} concepts that can be effectively captured by a reward model. We propose \method, a framework that trains domain-invariant reward models by optimizing a dual loss: a domain loss that minimizes the divergence between source and target distribution, and a source loss that optimizes preferences on the source domain. We show \method is a general approach that we evaluate and analyze across 4 distinct settings: (1) Cross-lingual transfer (accuracy: $0.621 \rightarrow 0.661$), (2) Clean-to-noisy (accuracy: $0.671 \rightarrow 0.703$), (3) Few-shot-to-full transfer (accuracy: $0.845 \rightarrow 0.920$), and (4) Simple-to-complex tasks transfer (correlation: $0.508 \rightarrow 0.556$). Our code, models and data are available at \url{https://github.com/portal-cornell/dial}.

Paperid: 1297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00895.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative foundation models have advanced large-scale text-driven natural image generation, becoming a prominent research trend across various vertical domains. However, in the remote sensing field, there is still a lack of research on large-scale text-to-image (text2image) generation technology. Existing remote sensing image-text datasets are small in scale and confined to specific geographic areas and scene types. Besides, existing text2image methods have struggled to achieve global-scale, multi-resolution controllable, and unbounded image generation. To address these challenges, this paper presents two key contributions: the Git-10M dataset and the Text2Earth foundation model. Git-10M is a global-scale image-text dataset comprising 10.5 million image-text pairs, 5 times larger than the previous largest one. The dataset covers a wide range of geographic scenes and contains resolution information, significantly surpassing existing datasets in both size and diversity. Building on Git-10M, we propose Text2Earth, a 1.3 billion parameter generative foundation model based on the diffusion framework to model global-scale remote sensing scenes. Text2Earth integrates a resolution guidance mechanism, enabling users to specify image resolutions. A dynamic condition adaptation strategy is proposed for training and inference to improve image quality. Text2Earth excels in zero-shot text2image generation and demonstrates robust generalization and flexibility across multiple tasks, including unbounded scene construction, image editing, and cross-modal image generation. This robust capability surpasses previous models restricted to the basic fixed size and limited scene types. On the previous benchmark dataset, Text2Earth outperforms previous models with an improvement of +26.23 FID and +20.95% Zero-shot Cls-OA metric.Our project page is https://chen-yang-liu.github.io/Text2Earth

Paperid: 1298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00752.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose Foreground-Covering Prototype Generation and Matching to resolve Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS), which aims to segment target regions in unlabeled query images based on labeled support images. Unlike previous research, which typically estimates target regions in the query using support prototypes and query pixels, we utilize the relationship between support and query prototypes. To achieve this, we utilize two complementary features: SAM Image Encoder features for pixel aggregation and ResNet features for class consistency. Specifically, we construct support and query prototypes with SAM features and distinguish query prototypes of target regions based on ResNet features. For the query prototype construction, we begin by roughly guiding foreground regions within SAM features using the conventional pseudo-mask, then employ iterative cross-attention to aggregate foreground features into learnable tokens. Here, we discover that the cross-attention weights can effectively alternate the conventional pseudo-mask. Therefore, we use the attention-based pseudo-mask to guide ResNet features to focus on the foreground, then infuse the guided ResNet feature into the learnable tokens to generate class-consistent query prototypes. The generation of the support prototype is conducted symmetrically to that of the query one, with the pseudo-mask replaced by the ground-truth mask. Finally, we compare these query prototypes with support ones to generate prompts, which subsequently produce object masks through the SAM Mask Decoder. Our state-of-the-art performances on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for FSS. Our official code is available at https://github.com/SuhoPark0706/FCP

Paperid: 1299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00437.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, zero-shot image captioning has gained increasing attention, where only text data is available for training. The remarkable progress in text-to-image diffusion model presents the potential to resolve this task by employing synthetic image-caption pairs generated by this pre-trained prior. Nonetheless, the defective details in the salient regions of the synthetic images introduce semantic misalignment between the synthetic image and text, leading to compromised results. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Patch-wise Cross-modal feature Mix-up (PCM) mechanism to adaptively mitigate the unfaithful contents in a fine-grained manner during training, which can be integrated into most of encoder-decoder frameworks, introducing our PCM-Net. Specifically, for each input image, salient visual concepts in the image are first detected considering the image-text similarity in CLIP space. Next, the patch-wise visual features of the input image are selectively fused with the textual features of the salient visual concepts, leading to a mixed-up feature map with less defective content. Finally, a visual-semantic encoder is exploited to refine the derived feature map, which is further incorporated into the sentence decoder for caption generation. Additionally, to facilitate the model training with synthetic data, a novel CLIP-weighted cross-entropy loss is devised to prioritize the high-quality image-text pairs over the low-quality counterparts. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO and Flickr30k datasets demonstrate the superiority of our PCM-Net compared with state-of-the-art VLMs-based approaches. It is noteworthy that our PCM-Net ranks first in both in-domain and cross-domain zero-shot image captioning. The synthetic dataset SynthImgCap and code are available at https://jianjieluo.github.io/SynthImgCap.

Paperid: 1300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00353.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.

Paperid: 1301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00303.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The primary challenge of cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) is the domain disparity between the training and inference phases, which can exist in either the input data or the target classes. Previous models struggle to learn feature representations that generalize to various unknown domains from limited training domain samples. In contrast, the large-scale visual model SAM, pre-trained on tens of millions of images from various domains and classes, possesses excellent generalizability. In this work, we propose a SAM-aware graph prompt reasoning network (GPRN) that fully leverages SAM to guide CD-FSS feature representation learning and improve prediction accuracy. Specifically, we propose a SAM-aware prompt initialization module (SPI) to transform the masks generated by SAM into visual prompts enriched with high-level semantic information. Since SAM tends to divide an object into many sub-regions, this may lead to visual prompts representing the same semantic object having inconsistent or fragmented features. We further propose a graph prompt reasoning (GPR) module that constructs a graph among visual prompts to reason about their interrelationships and enable each visual prompt to aggregate information from similar prompts, thus achieving global semantic consistency. Subsequently, each visual prompt embeds its semantic information into the corresponding mask region to assist in feature representation learning. To refine the segmentation mask during testing, we also design a non-parameter adaptive point selection module (APS) to select representative point prompts from query predictions and feed them back to SAM to refine inaccurate segmentation results. Experiments on four standard CD-FSS datasets demonstrate that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code: https://github.com/CVL-hub/GPRN.

Paperid: 1302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00062.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.50 macro F1 vs. 79.14 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.41 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\$0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.70) at much less cost (\$0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.

Paperid: 1303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00018.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), discrete speech representations have become crucial for integrating speech into LLMs. Existing methods for speech representation discretization rely on a predefined codebook size and Euclidean distance-based quantization. However, 1) the size of codebook is a critical parameter that affects both codec performance and downstream task training efficiency. 2) The Euclidean distance-based quantization may lead to audio distortion when the size of the codebook is controlled within a reasonable range. In fact, in the field of information compression, structural information and entropy guidance are crucial, but previous methods have largely overlooked these factors. Therefore, we address the above issues from an information-theoretic perspective, we present SECodec, a novel speech representation codec based on structural entropy (SE) for building speech language models. Specifically, we first model speech as a graph, clustering the speech features nodes within the graph and extracting the corresponding codebook by hierarchically and disentangledly minimizing 2D SE. Then, to address the issue of audio distortion, we propose a new quantization method. This method still adheres to the 2D SE minimization principle, adaptively selecting the most suitable token corresponding to the cluster for each incoming original speech node. Furthermore, we develop a Structural Entropy-based Speech Language Model (SESLM) that leverages SECodec. Experimental results demonstrate that SECodec performs comparably to EnCodec in speech reconstruction, and SESLM surpasses VALL-E in zero-shot text-to-speech tasks. Code, demo speeches, speech feature graph, SE codebook, and models are available at https://github.com/wlq2019/SECodec.

Paperid: 1304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20596.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, it has become popular to tackle image restoration tasks with a single pretrained diffusion model (DM) and data-fidelity guidance, instead of training a dedicated deep neural network per task. However, such "zero-shot" restoration schemes currently require many Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs) for performing well, which may be attributed to the many NFEs needed in the original generative functionality of the DMs. Recently, faster variants of DMs have been explored for image generation. These include Consistency Models (CMs), which can generate samples via a couple of NFEs. However, existing works that use guided CMs for restoration still require tens of NFEs or fine-tuning of the model per task that leads to performance drop if the assumptions during the fine-tuning are not accurate. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot restoration scheme that uses CMs and operates well with as little as 4 NFEs. It is based on a wise combination of several ingredients: better initialization, back-projection guidance, and above all a novel noise injection mechanism. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach for image super-resolution, deblurring and inpainting. Interestingly, we show that the usefulness of our noise injection technique goes beyond CMs: it can also mitigate the performance degradation of existing guided DM methods when reducing their NFE count.

Paperid: 1305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20545.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used by software engineers for code generation. However, limitations of LLMs such as irrelevant or incorrect code have highlighted the need for prompt programming (or prompt engineering) where engineers apply specific prompt techniques (e.g., chain-of-thought or input-output examples) to improve the generated code. While some prompt techniques have been studied, the impact of different techniques -- and their interactions -- on code generation is still not fully understood. In this study, we introduce CodePromptEval, a dataset of 7072 prompts designed to evaluate five prompt techniques (few-shot, persona, chain-of-thought, function signature, list of packages) and their effect on the correctness, similarity, and quality of complete functions generated by three LLMs (GPT-4o, Llama3, and Mistral). Our findings show that while certain prompt techniques significantly influence the generated code, combining multiple techniques does not necessarily improve the outcome. Additionally, we observed a trade-off between correctness and quality when using prompt techniques. Our dataset and replication package enable future research on improving LLM-generated code and evaluating new prompt techniques.

Paperid: 1306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19725.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Meta-learning, i.e., "learning to learn", is a promising approach to enable efficient BCI classifier training with limited amounts of data. It can effectively use collections of in some way similar classification tasks, with rapid adaptation to new tasks where only minimal data are available. However, applying meta-learning to existing classifiers and BCI tasks requires significant effort. To address this issue, we propose EEG-Reptile, an automated library that leverages meta-learning to improve classification accuracy of neural networks in BCIs and other EEG-based applications. It utilizes the Reptile meta-learning algorithm to adapt neural network classifiers of EEG data to the inter-subject domain, allowing for more efficient fine-tuning for a new subject on a small amount of data. The proposed library incorporates an automated hyperparameter tuning module, a data management pipeline, and an implementation of the Reptile meta-learning algorithm. EEG-Reptile automation level allows using it without deep understanding of meta-learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EEG-Reptile on two benchmark datasets (BCI IV 2a, Lee2019 MI) and three neural network architectures (EEGNet, FBCNet, EEG-Inception). Our library achieved improvement in both zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios compared to traditional transfer learning approaches.

Paperid: 1307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19645.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot customized video generation has gained significant attention due to its substantial application potential. Existing methods rely on additional models to extract and inject reference subject features, assuming that the Video Diffusion Model (VDM) alone is insufficient for zero-shot customized video generation. However, these methods often struggle to maintain consistent subject appearance due to suboptimal feature extraction and injection techniques. In this paper, we reveal that VDM inherently possesses the force to extract and inject subject features. Departing from previous heuristic approaches, we introduce a novel framework that leverages VDM's inherent force to enable high-quality zero-shot customized video generation. Specifically, for feature extraction, we directly input reference images into VDM and use its intrinsic feature extraction process, which not only provides fine-grained features but also significantly aligns with VDM's pre-trained knowledge. For feature injection, we devise an innovative bidirectional interaction between subject features and generated content through spatial self-attention within VDM, ensuring that VDM has better subject fidelity while maintaining the diversity of the generated video. Experiments on both customized human and object video generation validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Paperid: 1308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19412.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Image matching for both cross-view and cross-modality plays a critical role in multimodal perception. In practice, the modality gap caused by different imaging systems/styles poses great challenges to the matching task. Existing works try to extract invariant features for specific modalities and train on limited datasets, showing poor generalization. In this paper, we present MINIMA, a unified image matching framework for multiple cross-modal cases. Without pursuing fancy modules, our MINIMA aims to enhance universal performance from the perspective of data scaling up. For such purpose, we propose a simple yet effective data engine that can freely produce a large dataset containing multiple modalities, rich scenarios, and accurate matching labels. Specifically, we scale up the modalities from cheap but rich RGB-only matching data, by means of generative models. Under this setting, the matching labels and rich diversity of the RGB dataset are well inherited by the generated multimodal data. Benefiting from this, we construct MD-syn, a new comprehensive dataset that fills the data gap for general multimodal image matching. With MD-syn, we can directly train any advanced matching pipeline on randomly selected modality pairs to obtain cross-modal ability. Extensive experiments on in-domain and zero-shot matching tasks, including $19$ cross-modal cases, demonstrate that our MINIMA can significantly outperform the baselines and even surpass modality-specific methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/MINIMA.

Paperid: 1309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19326.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with fine-grained or precise understanding of visuals although they give comprehensive perception and reasoning in a spectrum of vision applications. Recent studies either develop tool-using or unify specific visual tasks into the autoregressive framework, often at the expense of overall multimodal performance. To address this issue and enhance MLLMs with visual tasks in a scalable fashion, we propose Task Preference Optimization (TPO), a novel method that utilizes differentiable task preferences derived from typical fine-grained visual tasks. TPO introduces learnable task tokens that establish connections between multiple task-specific heads and the MLLM. By leveraging rich visual labels during training, TPO significantly enhances the MLLM's multimodal capabilities and task-specific performance. Through multi-task co-training within TPO, we observe synergistic benefits that elevate individual task performance beyond what is achievable through single-task training methodologies. Our instantiation of this approach with VideoChat and LLaVA demonstrates an overall 14.6% improvement in multimodal performance compared to baseline models. Additionally, MLLM-TPO demonstrates robust zero-shot capabilities across various tasks, performing comparably to state-of-the-art supervised models. The code will be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/TPO

Paperid: 1310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19302.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Modern recommender systems aim to deeply understand users' complex preferences through their past interactions. While deep collaborative filtering approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at capturing user-item relationships, their effectiveness is limited when handling sparse data or zero-shot scenarios, primarily due to constraints in ID-based embedding functions. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic recommendation instruction-tuning paradigm that seamlessly integrates large language models with collaborative filtering. Our proposed $\underline{Rec}$ommendation $\underline{L}$anguage $\underline{M}$odel (RecLM) enhances the capture of user preference diversity through a carefully designed reinforcement learning reward function that facilitates self-augmentation of language models. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate significant advantages of our approach across various settings, and its plug-and-play compatibility with state-of-the-art recommender systems results in notable performance enhancements. The implementation of our RecLM framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/RecLM.

Paperid: 1311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19286.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series foundational models (TSFM) have gained prominence in time series forecasting, promising state-of-the-art performance across various applications. However, their application in anomaly detection and prediction remains underexplored, with growing concerns regarding their black-box nature, lack of interpretability and applicability. This paper critically evaluates the efficacy of TSFM in anomaly detection and prediction tasks. We systematically analyze TSFM across multiple datasets, including those characterized by the absence of discernible patterns, trends and seasonality. Our analysis shows that while TSFMs can be extended for anomaly detection and prediction, traditional statistical and deep learning models often match or outperform TSFM in these tasks. Additionally, TSFMs require high computational resources but fail to capture sequential dependencies effectively or improve performance in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios. \noindent The preprocessed datasets, codes to reproduce the results and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/smtmnfg/TSFM.

Paperid: 1312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19178.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-modal (e.g. image-text, video-text) retrieval is an important task in information retrieval and multimodal vision-language understanding field. Temporal understanding makes video-text retrieval more challenging than image-text retrieval. However, we find that the widely used video-text benchmarks have shortcomings in comprehensively assessing abilities of models, especially in temporal understanding, causing large-scale image-text pre-trained models can already achieve comparable zero-shot performance with video-text pre-trained models. In this paper, we introduce RTime, a novel temporal-emphasized video-text retrieval dataset. We first obtain videos of actions or events with significant temporality, and then reverse these videos to create harder negative samples. We then recruit annotators to judge the significance and reversibility of candidate videos, and write captions for qualified videos. We further adopt GPT-4 to extend more captions based on human-written captions. Our RTime dataset currently consists of 21k videos with 10 captions per video, totalling about 122 hours. Based on RTime, we propose three retrieval benchmark tasks: RTime-Origin, RTime-Hard, and RTime-Binary. We further enhance the use of harder-negatives in model training, and benchmark a variety of video-text models on RTime. Extensive experiment analysis proves that RTime indeed poses new and higher challenges to video-text retrieval. We release our RTime dataset\footnote{\url{https://github.com/qyr0403/Reversed-in-Time}} to further advance video-text retrieval and multimodal understanding research.

Paperid: 1313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19125.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce AKT (Advanced Knowledge Transfer), a novel method to enhance the training ability of low-bit quantized (Q) models in the field of zero-shot quantization (ZSQ). Existing research in ZSQ has focused on generating high-quality data from full-precision (FP) models. However, these approaches struggle with reduced learning ability in low-bit quantization due to its limited information capacity. To overcome this limitation, we propose effective training strategy compared to data generation. Particularly, we analyzed that refining feature maps in the feature distillation process is an effective way to transfer knowledge to the Q model. Based on this analysis, AKT efficiently transfer core information from the FP model to the Q model. AKT is the first approach to utilize both spatial and channel attention information in feature distillation in ZSQ. Our method addresses the fundamental gradient exploding problem in low-bit Q models. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the AKT. Our method led to significant performance enhancement in existing generative models. Notably, AKT achieved significant accuracy improvements in low-bit Q models, achieving state-of-the-art in the 3,5bit scenarios on CIFAR-10. The code is available at https://github.com/Inpyo-Hong/AKT-Advanced-knowledge-Transfer.

Paperid: 1314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19102.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spoken named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify named entities from speech, playing an important role in speech processing. New named entities appear every day, however, annotating their Spoken NER data is costly. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing Spoken NER systems perform poorly when dealing with previously unseen named entities. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method for generating Spoken NER data based on a named entity dictionary (NED) to reduce costs. Specifically, we first use a large language model (LLM) to generate sentences from the sampled named entities and then use a text-to-speech (TTS) system to generate the speech. Furthermore, we introduce a noise metric to filter out noisy data. To evaluate our approach, we release a novel Spoken NER benchmark along with a corresponding NED containing 8,853 entities. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the in-domain, zero-shot domain adaptation, and fully zero-shot settings. Our data will be available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/HeardU.

Paperid: 1315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) tasks require highly precise annotations, and traditional dataset creation methods are labor intensive, costly, and require extensive domain expertise. Although using synthetic data for DIS is a promising solution to these challenges, current generative models and techniques struggle with the issues of scene deviations, noise-induced errors, and limited training sample variability. To address these issues, we introduce a novel approach, \textbf{\ourmodel{}}, which provides a scalable solution for generating diverse and precise datasets, markedly reducing preparation time and costs. We first introduce a general mask editing method that combines rigid and non-rigid editing techniques to generate high-quality synthetic masks. Specially, rigid editing leverages geometric priors from diffusion models to achieve precise viewpoint transformations under zero-shot conditions, while non-rigid editing employs adversarial training and self-attention mechanisms for complex, topologically consistent modifications. Then, we generate pairs of high-resolution image and accurate segmentation mask using a multi-conditional control generation method. Finally, our experiments on the widely-used DIS5K dataset benchmark demonstrate superior performance in quality and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code is available at \url{https://qian-hao-tian.github.io/MaskFactory/}.

Paperid: 1316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18600.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human-scene interaction (HSI) generation is crucial for applications in embodied AI, virtual reality, and robotics. Yet, existing methods cannot synthesize interactions in unseen environments such as in-the-wild scenes or reconstructed scenes, as they rely on paired 3D scenes and captured human motion data for training, which are unavailable for unseen environments. We present ZeroHSI, a novel approach that enables zero-shot 4D human-scene interaction synthesis, eliminating the need for training on any MoCap data. Our key insight is to distill human-scene interactions from state-of-the-art video generation models, which have been trained on vast amounts of natural human movements and interactions, and use differentiable rendering to reconstruct human-scene interactions. ZeroHSI can synthesize realistic human motions in both static scenes and environments with dynamic objects, without requiring any ground-truth motion data. We evaluate ZeroHSI on a curated dataset of different types of various indoor and outdoor scenes with different interaction prompts, demonstrating its ability to generate diverse and contextually appropriate human-scene interactions.

Paperid: 1317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18552.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) aims to extract and summarize user opinions from vast opinionated text. Recent studies demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) possess exceptional sentiment understanding capabilities. However, directly deploying LLMs for FSA applications incurs high inference costs. Therefore, this paper investigates the distillation of fine-grained sentiment understanding from LLMs into small language models (SLMs). We prompt LLMs to examine and interpret the sentiments of given reviews and then utilize the generated content to pretrain SLMs. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive FSA benchmark to evaluate both SLMs and LLMs. Extensive experiments on this benchmark reveal that: (1) distillation significantly enhances the performance of SLMs in FSA tasks, achieving a 6.00\% improvement in $F_1$-score, and the distilled model can outperform Llama-2-7b with only 220M parameters; (2) distillation equips SLMs with excellent zero-shot sentiment classification capabilities, enabling them to match or even exceed their teacher models. These results suggest that distillation from LLMs is a highly promising direction for FSA. We will release our code, data, and pretrained model weights at https://github.com/HITSZ-HLT/FSA-Distillation.

Paperid: 1318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18404.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent vision-language foundation models still frequently produce outputs misaligned with their inputs, evidenced by object hallucination in captioning and prompt misalignment in the text-to-image generation model. Recent studies have explored methods for identifying misaligned elements, aiming not only to enhance interpretability but also to improve model performance. However, current approaches primarily rely on large foundation models in a zero-shot manner or fine-tuned models with human annotations, which limits scalability due to significant computational costs. This work proposes a novel approach, dubbed CLIP4DM, for detecting dense misalignments from pre-trained CLIP, specifically focusing on pinpointing misaligned words between image and text. We carefully revamp the gradient-based attribution computation method, enabling negative gradient of individual text tokens to indicate misalignment. We also propose F-CLIPScore, which aggregates misaligned attributions with a global alignment score. We evaluate our method on various dense misalignment detection benchmarks, covering various image and text domains and misalignment types. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot models and competitive performance with fine-tuned models while maintaining superior efficiency. Our qualitative examples show that our method has a unique strength to detect entity-level objects, intangible objects, and attributes that can not be easily detected for existing works. We conduct ablation studies and analyses to highlight the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver-ai/CLIP4DM.

Paperid: 1319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18303.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have revolutionized machine learning by leveraging large pre-trained models to tackle various downstream tasks. Although label, training, and data efficiency have improved, many state-of-the-art VLMs still require task-specific hyperparameter tuning and fail to fully exploit test samples. To overcome these challenges, we propose a graph-based approach for label-efficient adaptation and inference. Our method dynamically constructs a graph over text prompts, few-shot examples, and test samples, using label propagation for inference without task-specific tuning. Unlike existing zero-shot label propagation techniques, our approach requires no additional unlabeled support set and effectively leverages the test sample manifold through dynamic graph expansion. We further introduce a context-aware feature re-weighting mechanism to improve task adaptation accuracy. Additionally, our method supports efficient graph expansion, enabling real-time inductive inference. Extensive evaluations on downstream tasks, such as fine-grained categorization and out-of-distribution generalization, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yushu-Li/ECALP.

Paperid: 1320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17727.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge Editing is a technique that updates large language models (LLMs) with new information to maintain their world knowledge. This approach avoids the need to rebuild the model from scratch, thereby addressing the high costs associated with frequent retraining. Among these, the in-context editing paradigm stands out for its effectiveness in integrating new knowledge while preserving the model's original capabilities. Despite its potential, existing in-context knowledge editing methods are often task-specific, focusing primarily on multi-hop QA tasks using structured knowledge triples. Moreover, their reliance on few-shot prompting for task decomposition makes them unstable and less effective in generalizing across diverse tasks. In response to these limitations, we propose EditCoT, a novel knowledge editing framework that flexibly and efficiently updates LLMs across various tasks without retraining. EditCoT works by generating a chain-of-thought (CoT) for a given input and then iteratively refining this CoT process using a CoT editor based on updated knowledge. We evaluate EditCoT across a diverse range of benchmarks, covering multiple languages and tasks. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering superior generalization, effectiveness, and stability compared to existing methods, marking a significant advancement in the field of knowledge updating. The code and data of EditCoT are available at: https://github.com/bebr2/EditCoT .

Paperid: 1321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17619.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) aims to detect unseen anomaly regions with the guidance of very few normal support images from the same class. Existing FSAD methods usually find anomalies by directly designing complex text prompts to align them with visual features under the prevailing large vision-language model paradigm. However, these methods, almost always, neglect intrinsic contextual information in visual features, e.g., the interaction relationships between different vision layers, which is an important clue for detecting anomalies comprehensively. To this end, we propose a kernel-aware graph prompt learning framework, termed as KAG-prompt, by reasoning the cross-layer relations among visual features for FSAD. Specifically, a kernel-aware hierarchical graph is built by taking the different layer features focusing on anomalous regions of different sizes as nodes, meanwhile, the relationships between arbitrary pairs of nodes stand for the edges of the graph. By message passing over this graph, KAG-prompt can capture cross-layer contextual information, thus leading to more accurate anomaly prediction. Moreover, to integrate the information of multiple important anomaly signals in the prediction map, we propose a novel image-level scoring method based on multi-level information fusion. Extensive experiments on MVTecAD and VisA datasets show that KAG-prompt achieves state-of-the-art FSAD results for image-level/pixel-level anomaly detection. Code is available at https://github.com/CVL-hub/KAG-prompt.git.

Paperid: 1322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17601.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel concepts by leveraging prior knowledge learned from a few samples. However, for visually intensive tasks such as few-shot semantic segmentation, pixel-level annotations are time-consuming and costly. Therefore, in this paper, we utilize the more challenging image-level annotations and propose an adaptive frequency-aware network (AFANet) for weakly-supervised few-shot semantic segmentation (WFSS). Specifically, we first propose a cross-granularity frequency-aware module (CFM) that decouples RGB images into high-frequency and low-frequency distributions and further optimizes semantic structural information by realigning them. Unlike most existing WFSS methods using the textual information from the multi-modal language-vision model, e.g., CLIP, in an offline learning manner, we further propose a CLIP-guided spatial-adapter module (CSM), which performs spatial domain adaptive transformation on textual information through online learning, thus providing enriched cross-modal semantic information for CFM. Extensive experiments on the Pascal-5\textsuperscript{i} and COCO-20\textsuperscript{i} datasets demonstrate that AFANet has achieved state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/jarch-ma/AFANet.

Paperid: 1323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17288.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Learning a perception and reasoning module for robotic assistants to plan steps to perform complex tasks based on natural language instructions often requires large free-form language annotations, especially for short high-level instructions. To reduce the cost of annotation, large language models (LLMs) are used as a planner with few data. However, when elaborating the steps, even the state-of-the-art planner that uses LLMs mostly relies on linguistic common sense, often neglecting the status of the environment at command reception, resulting in inappropriate plans. To generate plans grounded in the environment, we propose FLARE (Few-shot Language with environmental Adaptive Replanning Embodied agent), which improves task planning using both language command and environmental perception. As language instructions often contain ambiguities or incorrect expressions, we additionally propose to correct the mistakes using visual cues from the agent. The proposed scheme allows us to use a few language pairs thanks to the visual cues and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/snumprlab/flare.

Paperid: 1324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17242.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rising popularity of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about machine-generated text (MGT), particularly in academic settings, where issues like plagiarism and misinformation are prevalent. As a result, developing a highly generalizable and adaptable MGT detection system has become an urgent priority. Given that LLMs are most commonly misused in academic writing, this work investigates the generalization and adaptation capabilities of MGT detectors in three key aspects specific to academic writing: First, we construct MGT-Acedemic, a large-scale dataset comprising over 336M tokens and 749K samples. MGT-Acedemic focuses on academic writing, featuring human-written texts (HWTs) and MGTs across STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences, paired with an extensible code framework for efficient benchmarking. Second, we benchmark the performance of various detectors for binary classification and attribution tasks in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. This benchmark reveals the often-overlooked challenges of attribution tasks. Third, we introduce a novel attribution task where models have to adapt to new classes over time without (or with very limited) access to prior training data in both few-shot and many-shot scenarios. We implement eight different adapting techniques to improve the performance and highlight the inherent complexity of the task. Our findings provide insights into the generalization and adaptation ability of MGT detectors across diverse scenarios and lay the foundation for building robust, adaptive detection systems. The code framework is available at https://github.com/Y-L-LIU/MGTBench-2.0.

Paperid: 1325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16906.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Flow matching has emerged as a promising framework for training generative models, demonstrating impressive empirical performance while offering relative ease of training compared to diffusion-based models. However, this method still requires numerous function evaluations in the sampling process. To address these limitations, we introduce a self-corrected flow distillation method that effectively integrates consistency models and adversarial training within the flow-matching framework. This work is a pioneer in achieving consistent generation quality in both few-step and one-step sampling. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, yielding superior results both quantitatively and qualitatively on CelebA-HQ and zero-shot benchmarks on the COCO dataset. Our implementation is released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/SCFlow

Paperid: 1326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16897.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot defect multi-classification (FSDMC) is an emerging trend in quality control within industrial manufacturing. However, current FSDMC research often lacks generalizability due to its focus on specific datasets. Additionally, defect classification heavily relies on contextual information within images, and existing methods fall short of effectively extracting this information. To address these challenges, we propose a general FSDMC framework called MVREC, which offers two primary advantages: (1) MVREC extracts general features for defect instances by incorporating the pre-trained AlphaCLIP model. (2) It utilizes a region-context framework to enhance defect features by leveraging mask region input and multi-view context augmentation. Furthermore, Few-shot Zip-Adapter(-F) classifiers within the model are introduced to cache the visual features of the support set and perform few-shot classification. We also introduce MVTec-FS, a new FSDMC benchmark based on MVTec AD, which includes 1228 defect images with instance-level mask annotations and 46 defect types. Extensive experiments conducted on MVTec-FS and four additional datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in general defect classification and its ability to incorporate contextual information to improve classification performance. Code: https://github.com/ShuaiLYU/MVREC

Paperid: 1327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16849.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
OpenAI's recent introduction of Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) showcases the potential of reasoning foundation model and offers a new paradigm for fine-tuning beyond simple pattern imitation. This technical report presents \emph{OpenRFT}, our attempt to fine-tune generalist reasoning models for domain-specific tasks under the same settings as RFT. OpenRFT addresses two key challenges of lacking reasoning step data and the limited quantity of training samples, by leveraging the domain-specific samples in three ways: question augmentation, synthesizing reasoning-process data, and few-shot ICL. The evaluation is conducted on SciKnowEval, where OpenRFT achieves notable performance gains with only $100$ domain-specific samples for each task. More experimental results will be updated continuously in later versions. Source codes, datasets, and models are disclosed at: https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/OpenRFT

Paperid: 1328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16615.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the recent advancement in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, most retrieval methodologies are often developed for factual retrieval, which assumes query and positive documents are semantically similar. In this paper, we instead propose and study a more challenging type of retrieval task, called hidden rationale retrieval, in which query and document are not similar but can be inferred by reasoning chains, logic relationships, or empirical experiences. To address such problems, an instruction-tuned Large language model (LLM) with a cross-encoder architecture could be a reasonable choice. To further strengthen pioneering LLM-based retrievers, we design a special instruction that transforms the retrieval task into a generative task by prompting LLM to answer a binary-choice question. The model can be fine-tuned with direct preference optimization (DPO). The framework is also optimized for computational efficiency with no performance degradation. We name this retrieval framework by RaHoRe and verify its zero-shot and fine-tuned performance superiority on Emotional Support Conversation (ESC), compared with previous retrieval works. Our study suggests the potential to employ LLM as a foundation for a wider scope of retrieval tasks. Our codes, models, and datasets are available on https://github.com/flyfree5/LaHoRe.

Paperid: 1329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16557.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoning future unknowable facts on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a challenging task, holding significant academic and practical values for various fields. Existing studies exploring explainable reasoning concentrate on modeling comprehensible temporal paths relevant to the query. Yet, these path-based methods primarily focus on local temporal paths appearing in recent times, failing to capture the complex temporal paths in TKG and resulting in the loss of longer historical relations related to the query. Motivated by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science, we propose a \textbf{Cogn}itive \textbf{T}emporal \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{E}xtrapolation framework (CognTKE), which introduces a novel temporal cognitive relation directed graph (TCR-Digraph) and performs interpretable global shallow reasoning and local deep reasoning over the TCR-Digraph. Specifically, the proposed TCR-Digraph is constituted by retrieving significant local and global historical temporal relation paths associated with the query. In addition, CognTKE presents the global shallow reasoner and the local deep reasoner to perform global one-hop temporal relation reasoning (System 1) and local complex multi-hop path reasoning (System 2) over the TCR-Digraph, respectively. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CognTKE achieves significant improvement in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines and delivers excellent zero-shot reasoning ability. \textit{The code is available at https://github.com/WeiChen3690/CognTKE}.

Paperid: 1330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16441.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models are pretrained on large-scale corpora to learn generalizable patterns across domains and tasks -- such as contours, textures, and edges in images, or tokens and sentences in text. In contrast, discovering such generalities in graph-structured data, especially across heterogeneous graph tasks, remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose a novel approach to cross-task generalization in graphs via task-trees, which serve as unified learning instances aligning node-, edge-, and graph-level tasks. We theoretically analyze the stability, transferability, and generalization properties of task-trees, showing that pretraining a graph neural network (GNN) on diverse task-trees with a reconstruction objective induces transferable knowledge. This enables efficient adaptation to downstream tasks with minimal fine-tuning. To validate our framework, we introduce Graph Generality Identifier on Task-Trees (GIT), a graph foundation model that demonstrates strong performance on over 30 graphs across five domains via fine-tuning, in-context learning, and zero-shot generalization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/GIT.

Paperid: 1331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16346.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a new simulator, training approach, and policy architecture, collectively called SOUS VIDE, for end-to-end visual drone navigation. Our trained policies exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with robust real-world performance using only onboard perception and computation. Our simulator, called FiGS, couples a computationally simple drone dynamics model with a high visual fidelity Gaussian Splatting scene reconstruction. FiGS can quickly simulate drone flights producing photorealistic images at up to 130 fps. We use FiGS to collect 100k-300k image/state-action pairs from an expert MPC with privileged state and dynamics information, randomized over dynamics parameters and spatial disturbances. We then distill this expert MPC into an end-to-end visuomotor policy with a lightweight neural architecture, called SV-Net. SV-Net processes color image, optical flow and IMU data streams into low-level thrust and body rate commands at 20 Hz onboard a drone. Crucially, SV-Net includes a learned module for low-level control that adapts at runtime to variations in drone dynamics. In a campaign of 105 hardware experiments, we show SOUS VIDE policies to be robust to 30% mass variations, 40 m/s wind gusts, 60% changes in ambient brightness, shifting or removing objects from the scene, and people moving aggressively through the drone's visual field. Code, data, and experiment videos can be found on our project page: https://stanfordmsl.github.io/SousVide/.

Paperid: 1332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16112.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become a leading architecture in image generation. However, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, which are responsible for modeling token-wise relationships, results in significant latency when generating high-resolution images. To address this issue, we aim at a linear attention mechanism in this paper that reduces the complexity of pre-trained DiTs to linear. We begin our exploration with a comprehensive summary of existing efficient attention mechanisms and identify four key factors crucial for successful linearization of pre-trained DiTs: locality, formulation consistency, high-rank attention maps, and feature integrity. Based on these insights, we introduce a convolution-like local attention strategy termed CLEAR, which limits feature interactions to a local window around each query token, and thus achieves linear complexity. Our experiments indicate that, by fine-tuning the attention layer on merely 10K self-generated samples for 10K iterations, we can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained DiT to a student model with linear complexity, yielding results comparable to the teacher model. Simultaneously, it reduces attention computations by 99.5% and accelerates generation by 6.3 times for generating 8K-resolution images. Furthermore, we investigate favorable properties in the distilled attention layers, such as zero-shot generalization cross various models and plugins, and improved support for multi-GPU parallel inference. Models and codes are available here: https://github.com/Huage001/CLEAR.

Paperid: 1333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15979.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-world (OW) recognition and detection models show strong zero- and few-shot adaptation abilities, inspiring their use as initializations in continual learning methods to improve performance. Despite promising results on seen classes, such OW abilities on unseen classes are largely degenerated due to catastrophic forgetting. To tackle this challenge, we propose an open-world continual object detection task, requiring detectors to generalize to old, new, and unseen categories in continual learning scenarios. Based on this task, we present a challenging yet practical OW-COD benchmark to assess detection abilities. The goal is to motivate OW detectors to simultaneously preserve learned classes, adapt to new classes, and maintain open-world capabilities under few-shot adaptations. To mitigate forgetting in unseen categories, we propose MR-GDINO, a strong, efficient and scalable baseline via memory and retrieval mechanisms within a highly scalable memory pool. Experimental results show that existing continual detectors suffer from severe forgetting for both seen and unseen categories. In contrast, MR-GDINO largely mitigates forgetting with only 0.1% activated extra parameters, achieving state-of-the-art performance for old, new, and unseen categories.

Paperid: 1334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15835.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalized few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSS) aims to segment objects of both base and novel classes, using sufficient samples of base classes and few samples of novel classes. Representative GFSS approaches typically employ a two-phase training scheme, involving base class pre-training followed by novel class fine-tuning, to learn the classifiers for base and novel classes respectively. Nevertheless, distribution gap exists between base and novel classes in this process. To narrow this gap, we exploit effective knowledge transfer from base to novel classes. First, a novel prototype modulation module is designed to modulate novel class prototypes by exploiting the correlations between base and novel classes. Second, a novel classifier calibration module is proposed to calibrate the weight distribution of the novel classifier according to that of the base classifier. Furthermore, existing GFSS approaches suffer from a lack of contextual information for novel classes due to their limited samples, we thereby introduce a context consistency learning scheme to transfer the contextual knowledge from base to novel classes. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the state of the art in the GFSS setting. The code is available at: https://github.com/HHHHedy/GFSS-EKT.

Paperid: 1335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15189.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Natural Language Processing and Generation systems have recently shown the potential to complement and streamline the costly and time-consuming job of professional fact-checkers. In this work, we lift several constraints of current state-of-the-art pipelines for automated fact-checking based on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm. Our goal is to benchmark, under more realistic scenarios, RAG-based methods for the generation of verdicts - i.e., short texts discussing the veracity of a claim - evaluating them on stylistically complex claims and heterogeneous, yet reliable, knowledge bases. Our findings show a complex landscape, where, for example, LLM-based retrievers outperform other retrieval techniques, though they still struggle with heterogeneous knowledge bases; larger models excel in verdict faithfulness, while smaller models provide better context adherence, with human evaluations favouring zero-shot and one-shot approaches for informativeness, and fine-tuned models for emotional alignment.

Paperid: 1336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15182.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robot learning is witnessing a significant increase in the size, diversity, and complexity of pre-collected datasets, mirroring trends in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Many robot learning methods treat such datasets as multi-task expert data and learn a multi-task, generalist policy by training broadly across them. Notably, while these generalist policies can improve the average performance across many tasks, the performance of generalist policies on any one task is often suboptimal due to negative transfer between partitions of the data, compared to task-specific specialist policies. In this work, we argue for the paradigm of training policies during deployment given the scenarios they encounter: rather than deploying pre-trained policies to unseen problems in a zero-shot manner, we non-parametrically retrieve and train models directly on relevant data at test time. Furthermore, we show that many robotics tasks share considerable amounts of low-level behaviors and that retrieval at the "sub"-trajectory granularity enables significantly improved data utilization, generalization, and robustness in adapting policies to novel problems. In contrast, existing full-trajectory retrieval methods tend to underutilize the data and miss out on shared cross-task content. This work proposes STRAP, a technique for leveraging pre-trained vision foundation models and dynamic time warping to retrieve sub-sequences of trajectories from large training corpora in a robust fashion. STRAP outperforms both prior retrieval algorithms and multi-task learning methods in simulated and real experiments, showing the ability to scale to much larger offline datasets in the real world as well as the ability to learn robust control policies with just a handful of real-world demonstrations.

Paperid: 1337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14873.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) uniquely combines optical contrast with the penetration depth of ultrasound, making it critical for clinical applications. However, the quality of 3D PAI is often degraded due to reconstruction artifacts caused by the sparse and angle-limited configuration of detector arrays. Existing iterative or deep learning-based methods are either time-consuming or require large training datasets, significantly limiting their practical application. Here, we propose Zero-Shot Artifact2Artifact (ZS-A2A), a zero-shot self-supervised artifact removal method based on a super-lightweight network, which leverages the fact that reconstruction artifacts are sensitive to irregularities caused by data loss. By introducing random perturbations to the acquired PA data, it spontaneously generates subset data, which in turn stimulates the network to learn the artifact patterns in the reconstruction results, thus enabling zero-shot artifact removal. This approach requires neither training data nor prior knowledge of the artifacts, and is capable of artifact removal for 3D PAI. For maximum amplitude projection (MAP) images or slice images in 3D PAI acquired with arbitrarily sparse or angle-limited detector arrays, ZS-A2A employs a self-incentive strategy to complete artifact removal and improves the Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (CNR). We validated ZS-A2A in both simulation study and $ in\ vivo $ animal experiments. Results demonstrate that ZS-A2A achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to existing zero-shot methods, and for the $ in\ vivo $ rat liver, ZS-A2A improves CNR from 17.48 to 43.46 in just 8 seconds. The project for ZS-A2A will be available in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/JaegerCQ/ZS-A2A.

Paperid: 1338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14169.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach that enables autoregressive video generation with high efficiency. We propose to reformulate the video generation problem as a non-quantized autoregressive modeling of temporal frame-by-frame prediction and spatial set-by-set prediction. Unlike raster-scan prediction in prior autoregressive models or joint distribution modeling of fixed-length tokens in diffusion models, our approach maintains the causal property of GPT-style models for flexible in-context capabilities, while leveraging bidirectional modeling within individual frames for efficiency. With the proposed approach, we train a novel video autoregressive model without vector quantization, termed NOVA. Our results demonstrate that NOVA surpasses prior autoregressive video models in data efficiency, inference speed, visual fidelity, and video fluency, even with a much smaller model capacity, i.e., 0.6B parameters. NOVA also outperforms state-of-the-art image diffusion models in text-to-image generation tasks, with a significantly lower training cost. Additionally, NOVA generalizes well across extended video durations and enables diverse zero-shot applications in one unified model. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/baaivision/NOVA.

Paperid: 1339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13998.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in everyday applications, ensuring their alignment with the diverse preferences of individual users has become a critical challenge. Currently deployed approaches typically assume homogeneous user objectives and rely on single-objective fine-tuning. However, human preferences are inherently heterogeneous, influenced by various unobservable factors, leading to conflicting signals in preference data. Existing solutions addressing this diversity often require costly datasets labelled for specific objectives and involve training multiple reward models or LLM policies, which is computationally expensive and impractical. In this work, we present a novel framework for few-shot steerable alignment, where users' underlying preferences are inferred from a small sample of their choices. To achieve this, we extend the Bradley-Terry-Luce model to handle heterogeneous preferences with unobserved variability factors and propose its practical implementation for reward modelling and LLM fine-tuning. Thanks to our proposed approach of functional parameter-space conditioning, LLMs trained with our framework can be adapted to individual preferences at inference time, generating outputs over a continuum of behavioural modes. We empirically validate the effectiveness of methods, demonstrating their ability to capture and align with diverse human preferences in a data-efficient manner. Our code is made available at: https://github.com/kasia-kobalczyk/few-shot-steerable-alignment.

Paperid: 1340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13947.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this study, we define and tackle zero shot "real" classification by description, a novel task that evaluates the ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP to classify objects based solely on descriptive attributes, excluding object class names. This approach highlights the current limitations of VLMs in understanding intricate object descriptions, pushing these models beyond mere object recognition. To facilitate this exploration, we introduce a new challenge and release description data for six popular fine-grained benchmarks, which omit object names to encourage genuine zero-shot learning within the research community. Additionally, we propose a method to enhance CLIP's attribute detection capabilities through targeted training using ImageNet21k's diverse object categories, paired with rich attribute descriptions generated by large language models. Furthermore, we introduce a modified CLIP architecture that leverages multiple resolutions to improve the detection of fine-grained part attributes. Through these efforts, we broaden the understanding of part-attribute recognition in CLIP, improving its performance in fine-grained classification tasks across six popular benchmarks, as well as in the PACO dataset, a widely used benchmark for object-attribute recognition. Code is available at: https://github.com/ethanbar11/grounding_ge_public.

Paperid: 1341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13908.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything Models (SAMs) have gained increasing attention in medical image analysis due to their zero-shot generalization capability in segmenting objects of unseen classes and domains when provided with appropriate user prompts. Addressing this performance gap is important to fully leverage the pre-trained weights of SAMs, particularly in the domain of volumetric medical image segmentation, where accuracy is important but well-annotated 3D medical data for fine-tuning is limited. In this work, we investigate whether introducing the memory mechanism as a plug-in, specifically the ability to memorize and recall internal representations of past inputs, can improve the performance of SAM with limited computation cost. To this end, we propose Memorizing SAM, a novel 3D SAM architecture incorporating a memory Transformer as a plug-in. Unlike conventional memorizing Transformers that save the internal representation during training or inference, our Memorizing SAM utilizes existing highly accurate internal representation as the memory source to ensure the quality of memory. We evaluate the performance of Memorizing SAM in 33 categories from the TotalSegmentator dataset, which indicates that Memorizing SAM can outperform state-of-the-art 3D SAM variant i.e., FastSAM3D with an average Dice increase of 11.36% at the cost of only 4.38 millisecond increase in inference time. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/swedfr/memorizingSAM

Paperid: 1342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13786.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emergence of novel generative modeling paradigms, particularly audio language models, has significantly advanced the field of song generation. Although state-of-the-art models are capable of synthesizing both vocals and accompaniment tracks up to several minutes long concurrently, research about partial adjustments or editing of existing songs is still underexplored, which allows for more flexible and effective production. In this paper, we present SongEditor, the first song editing paradigm that introduces the editing capabilities into language-modeling song generation approaches, facilitating both segment-wise and track-wise modifications. SongEditor offers the flexibility to adjust lyrics, vocals, and accompaniments, as well as synthesizing songs from scratch. The core components of SongEditor include a music tokenizer, an autoregressive language model, and a diffusion generator, enabling generating an entire section, masked lyrics, or even separated vocals and background music. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SongEditor achieves exceptional performance in end-to-end song editing, as evidenced by both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available in https://cypress-yang.github.io/SongEditor_demo/.

Paperid: 1343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13647.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Evaluation metric of visual captioning is important yet not thoroughly explored. Traditional metrics like BLEU, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROUGE often miss semantic depth, while trained metrics such as CLIP-Score, PAC-S, and Polos are limited in zero-shot scenarios. Advanced Language Model-based metrics also struggle with aligning to nuanced human preferences. To address these issues, we introduce G-VEval, a novel metric inspired by G-Eval and powered by the new GPT-4o. G-VEval uses chain-of-thought reasoning in large multimodal models and supports three modes: reference-free, reference-only, and combined, accommodating both video and image inputs. We also propose MSVD-Eval, a new dataset for video captioning evaluation, to establish a more transparent and consistent framework for both human experts and evaluation metrics. It is designed to address the lack of clear criteria in existing datasets by introducing distinct dimensions of Accuracy, Completeness, Conciseness, and Relevance (ACCR). Extensive results show that G-VEval outperforms existing methods in correlation with human annotations, as measured by Kendall tau-b and Kendall tau-c. This provides a flexible solution for diverse captioning tasks and suggests a straightforward yet effective approach for large language models to understand video content, paving the way for advancements in automated captioning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ztangaj/gveval

Paperid: 1344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13614.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a crucial task for achieving fine-grained visual understanding, matching objects within images (visual mentions) to entities in a knowledge base. Previous VEL tasks rely on textual inputs, but writing queries for complex scenes can be challenging. Visual inputs like clicks or bounding boxes offer a more convenient alternative. Therefore, we propose a new task, Pixel-Level Visual Entity Linking (PL-VEL), which uses pixel masks from visual inputs to refer to objects, supplementing reference methods for VEL. To facilitate research on this task, we have constructed the MaskOVEN-Wiki dataset through an entirely automatic reverse region-entity annotation framework. This dataset contains over 5 million annotations aligning pixel-level regions with entity-level labels, which will advance visual understanding towards fine-grained. Moreover, as pixel masks correspond to semantic regions in an image, we enhance previous patch-interacted attention with region-interacted attention by a visual semantic tokenization approach. Manual evaluation results indicate that the reverse annotation framework achieved a 94.8% annotation success rate. Experimental results show that models trained on this dataset improved accuracy by 18 points compared to zero-shot models. Additionally, the semantic tokenization method achieved a 5-point accuracy improvement over the trained baseline.

Paperid: 1345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13193.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction is fundamental for spatial understanding, yet existing approaches face challenges in scalability and generalization due to their reliance on extensive labeled data and computationally intensive voxel-wise representations. In this paper, we introduce GaussTR, a novel Gaussian-based Transformer framework that unifies sparse 3D modeling with foundation model alignment through Gaussian representations to advance 3D spatial understanding. GaussTR predicts sparse sets of Gaussians in a feed-forward manner to represent 3D scenes. By splatting the Gaussians into 2D views and aligning the rendered features with foundation models, GaussTR facilitates self-supervised 3D representation learning and enables open-vocabulary semantic occupancy prediction without requiring explicit annotations. Empirical experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset demonstrate GaussTR's state-of-the-art zero-shot performance of 12.27 mIoU, along with a 40% reduction in training time. These results highlight the efficacy of GaussTR for scalable and holistic 3D spatial understanding, with promising implications in autonomous driving and embodied agents. The code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/GaussTR.

Paperid: 1346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12877.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent AI-based video editing has enabled users to edit videos through simple text prompts, significantly simplifying the editing process. However, recent zero-shot video editing techniques primarily focus on global or single-object edits, which can lead to unintended changes in other parts of the video. When multiple objects require localized edits, existing methods face challenges, such as unfaithful editing, editing leakage, and lack of suitable evaluation datasets and metrics. To overcome these limitations, we propose $\textbf{P}$robability $\textbf{R}$edistribution for $\textbf{I}$nstance-aware $\textbf{M}$ulti-object Video $\textbf{Edit}$ing ($\textbf{PRIMEdit}$). PRIMEdit is a zero-shot framework that introduces two key modules: (i) Instance-centric Probability Redistribution (IPR) to ensure precise localization and faithful editing and (ii) Disentangled Multi-instance Sampling (DMS) to prevent editing leakage. Additionally, we present our new MIVE Dataset for video editing featuring diverse video scenarios, and introduce the Cross-Instance Accuracy (CIA) Score to evaluate editing leakage in multi-instance video editing tasks. Our extensive qualitative, quantitative, and user study evaluations demonstrate that PRIMEdit significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of editing faithfulness, accuracy, and leakage prevention, setting a new benchmark for multi-instance video editing.

Paperid: 1347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12798.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Instance segmentation algorithms in remote sensing are typically based on conventional methods, limiting their application to seen scenarios and closed-set predictions. In this work, we propose a novel task called zero-shot remote sensing instance segmentation, aimed at identifying aerial objects that are absent from training data. Challenges arise when classifying aerial categories with high inter-class similarity and intra-class variance. Besides, the domain gap between vision-language models' pretraining datasets and remote sensing datasets hinders the zero-shot capabilities of the pretrained model when it is directly applied to remote sensing images. To address these challenges, we propose a $\textbf{Z}$ero-Sh$\textbf{o}$t $\textbf{R}$emote Sensing $\textbf{I}$nstance Segmentation framework, dubbed $\textbf{ZoRI}$. Our approach features a discrimination-enhanced classifier that uses refined textual embeddings to increase the awareness of class disparities. Instead of direct fine-tuning, we propose a knowledge-maintained adaptation strategy that decouples semantic-related information to preserve the pretrained vision-language alignment while adjusting features to capture remote sensing domain-specific visual cues. Additionally, we introduce a prior-injected prediction with cache bank of aerial visual prototypes to supplement the semantic richness of text embeddings and seamlessly integrate aerial representations, adapting to the remote sensing domain. We establish new experimental protocols and benchmarks, and extensive experiments convincingly demonstrate that ZoRI achieves the state-of-art performance on the zero-shot remote sensing instance segmentation task. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuangShiqi128/ZoRI.

Paperid: 1348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12571.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent research arXiv:2410.15027 arXiv:2410.23775 has highlighted the inherent in-context generation capabilities of pretrained diffusion transformers (DiTs), enabling them to seamlessly adapt to diverse visual tasks with minimal or no architectural modifications. These capabilities are unlocked by concatenating self-attention tokens across multiple input and target images, combined with grouped and masked generation pipelines. Building upon this foundation, we present ChatDiT, a zero-shot, general-purpose, and interactive visual generation framework that leverages pretrained diffusion transformers in their original form, requiring no additional tuning, adapters, or modifications. Users can interact with ChatDiT to create interleaved text-image articles, multi-page picture books, edit images, design IP derivatives, or develop character design settings, all through free-form natural language across one or more conversational rounds. At its core, ChatDiT employs a multi-agent system comprising three key components: an Instruction-Parsing agent that interprets user-uploaded images and instructions, a Strategy-Planning agent that devises single-step or multi-step generation actions, and an Execution agent that performs these actions using an in-context toolkit of diffusion transformers. We thoroughly evaluate ChatDiT on IDEA-Bench arXiv:2412.11767, comprising 100 real-world design tasks and 275 cases with diverse instructions and varying numbers of input and target images. Despite its simplicity and training-free approach, ChatDiT surpasses all competitors, including those specifically designed and trained on extensive multi-task datasets. We further identify key limitations of pretrained DiTs in zero-shot adapting to tasks. We release all code, agents, results, and intermediate outputs to facilitate further research at https://github.com/ali-vilab/ChatDiT

Paperid: 1349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12456.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the increasing prevalence of cross-domain Text-Attributed Graph (TAG) Data (e.g., citation networks, recommendation systems, social networks, and ai4science), the integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) into a unified Model architecture (e.g., LLM as enhancer, LLM as collaborators, LLM as predictor) has emerged as a promising technological paradigm. The core of this new graph learning paradigm lies in the synergistic combination of GNNs' ability to capture complex structural relationships and LLMs' proficiency in understanding informative contexts from the rich textual descriptions of graphs. Therefore, we can leverage graph description texts with rich semantic context to fundamentally enhance Data quality, thereby improving the representational capacity of model-centric approaches in line with data-centric machine learning principles. By leveraging the strengths of these distinct neural network architectures, this integrated approach addresses a wide range of TAG-based Task (e.g., graph learning, graph reasoning, and graph question answering), particularly in complex industrial scenarios (e.g., supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings). In other words, we can treat text as a medium to enable cross-domain generalization of graph learning Model, allowing a single graph model to effectively handle the diversity of downstream graph-based Task across different data domains. This work serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners looking to advance graph learning methodologies in the rapidly evolving landscape of LLM. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at \url{https://github.com/xkLi-Allen/Awesome-GNN-in-LLMs-Papers}.

Paperid: 1350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12147.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Generalizing across robot embodiments and tasks is crucial for adaptive robotic systems. Modular policy learning approaches adapt to new embodiments but are limited to specific tasks, while few-shot imitation learning (IL) approaches often focus on a single embodiment. In this paper, we introduce a few-shot behavior cloning framework to simultaneously generalize to unseen embodiments and tasks using a few (\emph{e.g.,} five) reward-free demonstrations. Our framework leverages a joint-level input-output representation to unify the state and action spaces of heterogeneous embodiments and employs a novel structure-motion state encoder that is parameterized to capture both shared knowledge across all embodiments and embodiment-specific knowledge. A matching-based policy network then predicts actions from a few demonstrations, producing an adaptive policy that is robust to over-fitting. Evaluated in the DeepMind Control suite, our framework termed \modelname{} demonstrates superior few-shot generalization to unseen embodiments and tasks over modular policy learning and few-shot IL approaches. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/SeongwoongCho/meta-controller}{https://github.com/SeongwoongCho/meta-controller}.

Paperid: 1351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11983.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become the preferred models for node classification in graph data due to their robust capabilities in integrating graph structures and attributes. However, these models heavily depend on a substantial amount of high-quality labeled data for training, which is often costly to obtain. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), a promising approach is to utilize their exceptional zero-shot capabilities and extensive knowledge for node labeling. Despite encouraging results, this approach either requires numerous queries to LLMs or suffers from reduced performance due to noisy labels generated by LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce Locle, an active self-training framework that does Label-free node Classification with LLMs cost-Effectively. Locle iteratively identifies small sets of "critical" samples using GNNs and extracts informative pseudo-labels for them with both LLMs and GNNs, serving as additional supervision signals to enhance model training. Specifically, Locle comprises three key components: (i) an effective active node selection strategy for initial annotations; (ii) a careful sample selection scheme to identify "critical" nodes based on label disharmonicity and entropy; and (iii) a label refinement module that combines LLMs and GNNs with a rewired topology. Extensive experiments on five benchmark text-attributed graph datasets demonstrate that Locle significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under the same query budget to LLMs in terms of label-free node classification. Notably, on the DBLP dataset with 14.3k nodes, Locle achieves an 8.08% improvement in accuracy over the state-of-the-art at a cost of less than one cent. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-LAGAS/Locle.

Paperid: 1352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11934.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in complex reasoning tasks, but their safety and robustness in reasoning processes remain underexplored. Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or lack of imperceptibility, limiting their feasibility and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose the Stepwise rEasoning Error Disruption (SEED) attack, which subtly injects errors into prior reasoning steps to mislead the model into producing incorrect subsequent reasoning and final answers. Unlike previous methods, SEED is compatible with zero-shot and few-shot settings, maintains the natural reasoning flow, and ensures covert execution without modifying the instruction. Extensive experiments on four datasets across four different models demonstrate SEED's effectiveness, revealing the vulnerabilities of LLMs to disruptions in reasoning processes. These findings underscore the need for greater attention to the robustness of LLM reasoning to ensure safety in practical applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SEED-Attack.

Paperid: 1353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11599.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advancements in neural implicit representations and differentiable rendering have markedly improved the ability to learn animatable 3D avatars from sparse multi-view RGB videos. However, current methods that map observation space to canonical space often face challenges in capturing pose-dependent details and generalizing to novel poses. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in 2D image generation, their potential for creating animatable 3D avatars from 2D inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce 3D$^2$-Actor, a novel approach featuring a pose-conditioned 3D-aware human modeling pipeline that integrates iterative 2D denoising and 3D rectifying steps. The 2D denoiser, guided by pose cues, generates detailed multi-view images that provide the rich feature set necessary for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and pose rendering. Complementing this, our Gaussian-based 3D rectifier renders images with enhanced 3D consistency through a two-stage projection strategy and a novel local coordinate representation. Additionally, we propose an innovative sampling strategy to ensure smooth temporal continuity across frames in video synthesis. Our method effectively addresses the limitations of traditional numerical solutions in handling ill-posed mappings, producing realistic and animatable 3D human avatars. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D$^2$-Actor excels in high-fidelity avatar modeling and robustly generalizes to novel poses. Code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianActor.

Paperid: 1354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11506.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advanced large language models (LLMs) can generate text almost indistinguishable from human-written text, highlighting the importance of LLM-generated text detection. However, current zero-shot techniques face challenges as white-box methods are restricted to use weaker open-source LLMs, and black-box methods are limited by partial observation from stronger proprietary LLMs. It seems impossible to enable white-box methods to use proprietary models because API-level access to the models neither provides full predictive distributions nor inner embeddings. To traverse the divide, we propose **Glimpse**, a probability distribution estimation approach, predicting the full distributions from partial observations. Despite the simplicity of Glimpse, we successfully extend white-box methods like Entropy, Rank, Log-Rank, and Fast-DetectGPT to latest proprietary models. Experiments show that Glimpse with Fast-DetectGPT and GPT-3.5 achieves an average AUROC of about 0.95 in five latest source models, improving the score by 51% relative to the remaining space of the open source baseline. It demonstrates that the latest LLMs can effectively detect their own outputs, suggesting that advanced LLMs may be the best shield against themselves. We release our code and data at https://github.com/baoguangsheng/glimpse.

Paperid: 1355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11375.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has been widely used in vision tasks. Notably, CLIP has demonstrated promising performance in few-shot learning (FSL). However, existing CLIP-based methods in training-free FSL (i.e., without the requirement of additional training) mainly learn different modalities independently, leading to two essential issues: 1) severe anomalous match in image modality; 2) varying quality of generated text prompts. To address these issues, we build a mutual guidance mechanism, that introduces an Image-Guided-Text (IGT) component to rectify varying quality of text prompts through image representations, and a Text-Guided-Image (TGI) component to mitigate the anomalous match of image modality through text representations. By integrating IGT and TGI, we adopt a perspective of Text-Image Mutual guidance Optimization, proposing TIMO. Extensive experiments show that TIMO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) training-free method. Additionally, by exploring the extent of mutual guidance, we propose an enhanced variant, TIMO-S, which even surpasses the best training-required methods by 0.33% with approximately 100 times less time cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/lyymuwu/TIMO.

Paperid: 1356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11077.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images that closely resemble a reference image while integrating user-specified textual modifications, thereby capturing user intent more precisely. Existing training-free zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods often employ a two-stage process: they first generate a caption for the reference image and then use Large Language Models for reasoning to obtain a target description. However, these methods suffer from missing critical visual details and limited reasoning capabilities, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, training-free one-stage method, One-Stage Reflective Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for ZS-CIR (OSrCIR), which employs Multimodal Large Language Models to retain essential visual information in a single-stage reasoning process, eliminating the information loss seen in two-stage methods. Our Reflective Chain-of-Thought framework further improves interpretative accuracy by aligning manipulation intent with contextual cues from reference images. OSrCIR achieves performance gains of 1.80% to 6.44% over existing training-free methods across multiple tasks, setting new state-of-the-art results in ZS-CIR and enhancing its utility in vision-language applications. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pter61/osrcir2024/.

Paperid: 1357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10594.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human perception of similarity across uni- and multimodal inputs is highly complex, making it challenging to develop automated metrics that accurately mimic it. General purpose vision-language models, such as CLIP and large multi-modal models (LMMs), can be applied as zero-shot perceptual metrics, and several recent works have developed models specialized in narrow perceptual tasks. However, the extent to which existing perceptual metrics align with human perception remains unclear. To investigate this question, we introduce UniSim-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 7 multi-modal perceptual similarity tasks, with a total of 25 datasets. Our evaluation reveals that while general-purpose models perform reasonably well on average, they often lag behind specialized models on individual tasks. Conversely, metrics fine-tuned for specific tasks fail to generalize well to unseen, though related, tasks. As a first step towards a unified multi-task perceptual similarity metric, we fine-tune both encoder-based and generative vision-language models on a subset of the UniSim-Bench tasks. This approach yields the highest average performance, and in some cases, even surpasses taskspecific models. Nevertheless, these models still struggle with generalization to unseen tasks, highlighting the ongoing challenge of learning a robust, unified perceptual similarity metric capable of capturing the human notion of similarity. The code and models are available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/UniSim.

Paperid: 1358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10533.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present SUGAR, a zero-shot method for subject-driven video customization. Given an input image, SUGAR is capable of generating videos for the subject contained in the image and aligning the generation with arbitrary visual attributes such as style and motion specified by user-input text. Unlike previous methods, which require test-time fine-tuning or fail to generate text-aligned videos, SUGAR achieves superior results without the need for extra cost at test-time. To enable zero-shot capability, we introduce a scalable pipeline to construct synthetic dataset which is specifically designed for subject-driven customization, leading to 2.5 millions of image-video-text triplets. Additionally, we propose several methods to enhance our model, including special attention designs, improved training strategies, and a refined sampling algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted. Compared to previous methods, SUGAR achieves state-of-the-art results in identity preservation, video dynamics, and video-text alignment for subject-driven video customization, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Paperid: 1359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10372.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained via contrastive learning have achieved notable success in natural image tasks. However, their application in the medical domain remains limited due to the scarcity of openly accessible, large-scale medical image-text datasets. Existing medical VLMs either train on closed-source proprietary or relatively small open-source datasets that do not generalize well. Similarly, most models remain specific to a single or limited number of medical imaging domains, again restricting their applicability to other modalities. To address this gap, we introduce UniMed, a large-scale, open-source multi-modal medical dataset comprising over 5.3 million image-text pairs across six diverse imaging modalities: X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, Pathology, and Fundus. UniMed is developed using a data-collection framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform modality-specific classification datasets into image-text formats while incorporating existing image-text data from the medical domain, facilitating scalable VLM pretraining. Using UniMed, we trained UniMed-CLIP, a unified VLM for six modalities that significantly outperforms existing generalist VLMs and matches modality-specific medical VLMs, achieving notable gains in zero-shot evaluations. For instance, UniMed-CLIP improves over BiomedCLIP (trained on proprietary data) by an absolute gain of +12.61, averaged over 21 datasets, while using 3x less training data. To facilitate future research, we release UniMed dataset, training codes, and models at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/UniMed-CLIP.

Paperid: 1360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09758.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time-series foundation models excel at tasks like forecasting across diverse data types by leveraging informative waveform representations. Wearable sensing data, however, pose unique challenges due to their variability in patterns and frequency bands, especially for healthcare-related outcomes. The main obstacle lies in crafting generalizable representations that adapt efficiently across heterogeneous sensing configurations and applications. To address this, we propose NormWear, the first multi-modal and ubiquitous foundation model designed to extract generalized and informative representations from wearable sensing data. Specifically, we design a channel-aware attention mechanism with a shared special liaison [CLS] token to detect signal patterns in both intra-sensor and inter-sensors. This helps the model to extract more meaningful information considering both time series themselves and the relationships between input sensors. This helps the model to be widely compatible with various sensors settings. NormWear is pretrained on a diverse set of physiological signals, including PPG, ECG, EEG, GSR, and IMU, from various public datasets. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 11 public wearable sensing datasets, spanning 18 applications in mental health, body state inference, vital sign estimation, and disease risk evaluation. It consistently outperforms competitive baselines under zero-shot, partial-shot, and full-shot settings, indicating broad applicability in real-world health applications.

Paperid: 1361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09278.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have achieved notable advancements, demonstrating the feasibility of developing an intelligent biomedical assistant. However, current biomedical MLLMs predominantly focus on image-level understanding and restrict interactions to textual commands, thus limiting their capability boundaries and the flexibility of usage. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end multimodal large language model for the biomedical domain, named MedPLIB, which possesses pixel-level understanding. Excitingly, it supports visual question answering (VQA), arbitrary pixel-level prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes), and pixel-level grounding. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multi-stage training strategy, which divides MoE into separate training phases for a visual-language expert model and a pixel-grounding expert model, followed by fine-tuning using MoE. This strategy effectively coordinates multitask learning while maintaining the computational cost at inference equivalent to that of a single expert model. To advance the research of biomedical MLLMs, we introduce the Medical Complex Vision Question Answering Dataset (MeCoVQA), which comprises an array of 8 modalities for complex medical imaging question answering and image region understanding. Experimental results indicate that MedPLIB has achieved state-of-the-art outcomes across multiple medical visual language tasks. More importantly, in zero-shot evaluations for the pixel grounding task, MedPLIB leads the best small and large models by margins of 19.7 and 15.6 respectively on the mDice metric. The codes, data, and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ShawnHuang497/MedPLIB.

Paperid: 1362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09168.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generating sound effects for product-level videos, where only a small amount of labeled data is available for diverse scenes, requires the production of high-quality sounds in few-shot settings. To tackle the challenge of limited labeled data in real-world scenes, we introduce YingSound, a foundation model designed for video-guided sound generation that supports high-quality audio generation in few-shot settings. Specifically, YingSound consists of two major modules. The first module uses a conditional flow matching transformer to achieve effective semantic alignment in sound generation across audio and visual modalities. This module aims to build a learnable audio-visual aggregator (AVA) that integrates high-resolution visual features with corresponding audio features at multiple stages. The second module is developed with a proposed multi-modal visual-audio chain-of-thought (CoT) approach to generate finer sound effects in few-shot settings. Finally, an industry-standard video-to-audio (V2A) dataset that encompasses various real-world scenarios is presented. We show that YingSound effectively generates high-quality synchronized sounds across diverse conditional inputs through automated evaluations and human studies. Project Page: \url{https://giantailab.github.io/yingsound/}

Paperid: 1363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09073.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims to transfer knowledge from seen source domains to unseen target domains, which is crucial for evaluating the generalization and robustness of models. Recent studies focus on utilizing visual styles to bridge the domain gap between different domains. However, the serious dilemma of gradient instability and local optimization problem occurs in those style-based CD-FSL methods. This paper addresses these issues and proposes a novel crop-global style perturbation method, called \underline{\textbf{S}}elf-\underline{\textbf{V}}ersatility \underline{\textbf{A}}dversarial \underline{\textbf{S}}tyle \underline{\textbf{P}}erturbation (\textbf{SVasP}), which enhances the gradient stability and escapes from poor sharp minima jointly. Specifically, SVasP simulates more diverse potential target domain adversarial styles via diversifying input patterns and aggregating localized crop style gradients, to serve as global style perturbation stabilizers within one image, a concept we refer to as self-versatility. Then a novel objective function is proposed to maximize visual discrepancy while maintaining semantic consistency between global, crop, and adversarial features. Having the stabilized global style perturbation in the training phase, one can obtain a flattened minima in the loss landscape, boosting the transferability of the model to the target domains. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/liwenqianSEU/SVasP.

Paperid: 1364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09072.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we explore new perspectives on cross-view completion learning by drawing an analogy to self-supervised correspondence learning. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that the cross-attention map within cross-view completion models captures correspondence more effectively than other correlations derived from encoder or decoder features. We verify the effectiveness of the cross-attention map by evaluating on both zero-shot matching and learning-based geometric matching and multi-frame depth estimation. Project page is available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/ZeroCo/.

Paperid: 1365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09063.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image classification serves as the cornerstone of computer vision, traditionally achieved through discriminative models based on deep neural networks. Recent advancements have introduced classification methods derived from generative models, which offer the advantage of zero-shot classification. However, these methods suffer from two main drawbacks: high computational overhead and inferior performance compared to discriminative models. Inspired by the coordinated cognitive processes of rapid-slow pathway interactions in the human brain during visual signal recognition, we propose the Diffusion-Based Discriminative Model Enhancement Framework (DBMEF). This framework seamlessly integrates discriminative and generative models in a training-free manner, leveraging discriminative models for initial predictions and endowing deep neural networks with rethinking capabilities via diffusion models. Consequently, DBMEF can effectively enhance the classification accuracy and generalization capability of discriminative models in a plug-and-play manner. We have conducted extensive experiments across 17 prevalent deep model architectures with different training methods, including both CNN-based models such as ResNet and Transformer-based models like ViT, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DBMEF. Specifically, the framework yields a 1.51\% performance improvement for ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset and 3.02\% on the ImageNet-A dataset. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel paradigm for image classification, demonstrating stable improvements across different datasets and neural networks. The code is available at https://github.com/ChunXiaostudy/DBMEF.

Paperid: 1366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08315.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical imaging, precise annotation of lesions or organs is often required. However, 3D volumetric images typically consist of hundreds or thousands of slices, making the annotation process extremely time-consuming and laborious. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has drawn widespread attention due to its remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities in interactive segmentation. While researchers have explored adapting SAM for medical applications, such as using SAM adapters or constructing 3D SAM models, a key question remains: Can traditional CNN networks achieve the same strong zero-shot generalization in this task? In this paper, we propose the Lightweight Interactive Network for 3D Medical Image Segmentation (LIM-Net), a novel approach demonstrating the potential of compact CNN-based models. Built upon a 2D CNN backbone, LIM-Net initiates segmentation by generating a 2D prompt mask from user hints. This mask is then propagated through the 3D sequence via the Memory Module. To refine and stabilize results during interaction, the Multi-Round Result Fusion (MRF) Module selects and merges optimal masks from multiple rounds. Our extensive experiments across multiple datasets and modalities demonstrate LIM-Net's competitive performance. It exhibits stronger generalization to unseen data compared to SAM-based models, with competitive accuracy while requiring fewer interactions. Notably, LIM-Net's lightweight design offers significant advantages in deployment and inference efficiency, with low GPU memory consumption suitable for resource-constrained environments. These promising results demonstrate LIM-Net can serve as a strong baseline, complementing and contrasting with popular SAM models to further boost effective interactive medical image segmentation. The code will be released at \url{https://github.com/goodtime-123/LIM-Net}.

Paperid: 1367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08174.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While great success has been achieved in building vision models with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) over internet-scale image-text pairs, building transferable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with CLIP pipeline is challenging because of the scarcity of labeled data and text supervision, different levels of downstream tasks, and the conceptual gaps between domains. In this work, to address these issues, we propose a multi-modal prompt learning paradigm to effectively adapt pre-trained GNN to downstream tasks and data, given only a few semantically labeled samples, each with extremely weak text supervision. Our new paradigm embeds the graphs directly in the same space as the Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning both graph prompts and text prompts simultaneously. We demonstrate the superior performance of our paradigm in few-shot, multi-task-level, and cross-domain settings. Moreover, we build the first CLIP-style zero-shot classification prototype that can generalize GNNs to unseen classes with extremely weak text supervision. The code is available at https://github.com/Violet24K/Morpher.

Paperid: 1368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07689.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated exceptional comprehension and interpretation capabilities in Autonomous Driving (AD) by incorporating large language models. Despite the advancements, current data-driven AD approaches tend to concentrate on a single dataset and specific tasks, neglecting their overall capabilities and ability to generalize. To bridge these gaps, we propose RoboTron-Drive, a general large multimodal model designed to process diverse data inputs, such as images and multi-view videos, while performing a broad spectrum of AD tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Initially, the model undergoes curriculum pre-training to process varied visual signals and perform basic visual comprehension and perception tasks. Subsequently, we augment and standardize various AD datasets to finetune the model, resulting in an all-in-one LMM for autonomous driving. To assess the general capabilities and generalization ability, we conduct evaluations on six public benchmarks and undertake zero-shot transfer on three unseen datasets, where RoboTron-Drive achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. We hope RoboTron-Drive as a promising solution for AD in the real world. Project page with code: https://github.com/zhijian11/RoboTron-Drive.

Paperid: 1369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07517.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Though Rectified Flows (ReFlows) with distillation offers a promising way for fast sampling, its fast inversion transforms images back to structured noise for recovery and following editing remains unsolved. This paper introduces FireFlow, a simple yet effective zero-shot approach that inherits the startling capacity of ReFlow-based models (such as FLUX) in generation while extending its capabilities to accurate inversion and editing in $8$ steps. We first demonstrate that a carefully designed numerical solver is pivotal for ReFlow inversion, enabling accurate inversion and reconstruction with the precision of a second-order solver while maintaining the practical efficiency of a first-order Euler method. This solver achieves a $3\times$ runtime speedup compared to state-of-the-art ReFlow inversion and editing techniques, while delivering smaller reconstruction errors and superior editing results in a training-free mode. The code is available at $\href{https://github.com/HolmesShuan/FireFlow}{this URL}$.

Paperid: 1370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07213.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Faced with the burgeoning volume of academic literature, researchers often need help with uncertain article quality and mismatches in term searches using traditional academic engines. We introduce IntellectSeeker, an innovative and personalized intelligent academic literature management platform to address these challenges. This platform integrates a Large Language Model (LLM)--based semantic enhancement bot with a sophisticated probability model to personalize and streamline literature searches. We adopted the GPT-3.5-turbo model to transform everyday language into professional academic terms across various scenarios using multiple rounds of few-shot learning. This adaptation mainly benefits academic newcomers, effectively bridging the gap between general inquiries and academic terminology. The probabilistic model intelligently filters academic articles to align closely with the specific interests of users, which are derived from explicit needs and behavioral patterns. Moreover, IntellectSeeker incorporates an advanced recommendation system and text compression tools. These features enable intelligent article recommendations based on user interactions and present search results through concise one-line summaries and innovative word cloud visualizations, significantly enhancing research efficiency and user experience. IntellectSeeker offers academic researchers a highly customizable literature management solution with exceptional search precision and matching capabilities. The code can be found here: https://github.com/LuckyBian/ISY5001

Paperid: 1371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07119.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) have shown impressive performance in analyzing natural images with language information. However, these models often encounter challenges when applied to specialized domains such as remote sensing due to the limited availability of image-text pairs for training. To tackle this issue, we introduce DiffCLIP, a novel framework that extends CLIP to effectively convey comprehensive language-driven semantic information for accurate classification of high-dimensional multimodal remote sensing images. DiffCLIP is a few-shot learning method that leverages unlabeled images for pretraining. It employs unsupervised mask diffusion learning to capture the distribution of diverse modalities without requiring labels. The modality-shared image encoder maps multimodal data into a unified subspace, extracting shared features with consistent parameters across modalities. A well-trained image encoder further enhances learning by aligning visual representations with class-label text information from CLIP. By integrating these approaches, DiffCLIP significantly boosts CLIP performance using a minimal number of image-text pairs. We evaluate DiffCLIP on widely used high-dimensional multimodal datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing few-shot annotated classification tasks. DiffCLIP achieves an overall accuracy improvement of 10.65% across three remote sensing datasets compared with CLIP, while utilizing only 2-shot image-text pairs. The code has been released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/DiffCLIP.

Paperid: 1372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06975.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Chain of Thought (CoT) was introduced in recent research as a method for improving step-by-step reasoning in Large Language Models. However, CoT has limited applications such as its need for hand-crafted few-shot exemplar prompts and no capability to adjust itself to different queries. In this work, we propose a system to automatically generate rationales using CoT. Our method improves multi-step implicit reasoning capabilities by decomposing the implicit query into several explicit questions. This provides interpretability for the model, improving reasoning in weaker LLMs. We test our approach with two Q\&A datasets: StrategyQA and HotpotQA. We show an increase in accuracy with both, especially on StrategyQA. To facilitate further research in this field, the complete source code for this study has been made publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/miralab-ai/autoreason.

Paperid: 1373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06664.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-grained remote sensing image segmentation is essential for accurately identifying detailed objects in remote sensing images. Recently, vision transformer models (VTMs) pre-trained on large-scale datasets have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization. However, directly applying them to specific tasks may lead to domain shift. We introduce a novel end-to-end learning paradigm combining knowledge guidance with domain refinement to enhance performance. We present two key components: the Feature Alignment Module (FAM) and the Feature Modulation Module (FMM). FAM aligns features from a CNN-based backbone with those from the pretrained VTM's encoder using channel transformation and spatial interpolation, and transfers knowledge via KL divergence and L2 normalization constraint. FMM further adapts the knowledge to the specific domain to address domain shift. We also introduce a fine-grained grass segmentation dataset and demonstrate, through experiments on two datasets, that our method achieves a significant improvement of 2.57 mIoU on the grass dataset and 3.73 mIoU on the cloud dataset. The results highlight the potential of combining knowledge transfer and domain adaptation to overcome domain-related challenges and data limitations. The project page is available at https://xavierjiezou.github.io/KTDA/.

Paperid: 1374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06642.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning has shown remarkable efficacy in efficient learning new concepts with limited annotations. Nevertheless, the heuristic few-shot annotations may not always cover the most informative samples, which largely restricts the capability of incremental learner. We aim to start from a pool of large-scale unlabeled data and then annotate the most informative samples for incremental learning. Based on this premise, this paper introduces the Active Class-Incremental Learning (ACIL). The objective of ACIL is to select the most informative samples from the unlabeled pool to effectively train an incremental learner, aiming to maximize the performance of the resulting model. Note that vanilla active learning algorithms suffer from class-imbalanced distribution among annotated samples, which restricts the ability of incremental learning. To achieve both class balance and informativeness in chosen samples, we propose Class-Balanced Selection (CBS) strategy. Specifically, we first cluster the features of all unlabeled images into multiple groups. Then for each cluster, we employ greedy selection strategy to ensure that the Gaussian distribution of the sampled features closely matches the Gaussian distribution of all unlabeled features within the cluster. Our CBS can be plugged and played into those CIL methods which are based on pretrained models with prompts tunning technique. Extensive experiments under ACIL protocol across five diverse datasets demonstrate that CBS outperforms both random selection and other SOTA active learning approaches. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/1170300714/CBS.

Paperid: 1375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06418.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although the current different types of SAM adaptation methods have achieved promising performance for various downstream tasks, such as prompt-based ones and adapter-based ones, most of them belong to the one-step adaptation paradigm. In real-world scenarios, we are generally confronted with the dynamic scenario where the data comes in a streaming manner. Driven by the practical need, in this paper, we first propose a novel Continual SAM adaptation (CoSAM) benchmark with 8 different task domains and carefully analyze the limitations of the existing SAM one-step adaptation methods in the continual segmentation scenario. Then we propose a novel simple-yet-effective Mixture of Domain Adapters (MoDA) algorithm which utilizes the Global Feature Tokens (GFT) and Global Assistant Tokens (GAT) modules to help the SAM encoder extract well-separated features for different task domains, and then provide the accurate task-specific information for continual learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MoDA obviously surpasses the existing classic continual learning methods, as well as prompt-based and adapter-based approaches for continual segmentation. Moreover, after sequential learning on the CoSAM benchmark with diverse data distributions, our MoDA maintains highly competitive results in the natural image domain, approaching the zero-shot performance of the original SAM, demonstrating its superior capability in knowledge preservation. Notably, the proposed MoDA can be seamlessly integrated into various one-step adaptation methods of SAM, which can consistently bring obvious performance gains. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yangjl1215/CoSAM}

Paperid: 1376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06286.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Object detection in art is a valuable tool for the digital humanities, as it allows for faster identification of objects in artistic and historical images compared to humans. However, annotating such images poses significant challenges due to the need for specialized domain expertise. We present NADA (no annotations for detection in art), a pipeline that leverages diffusion models' art-related knowledge for object detection in paintings without the need for full bounding box supervision. Our method, which supports both weakly-supervised and zero-shot scenarios and does not require any fine-tuning of its pretrained components, consists of a class proposer based on large vision-language models and a class-conditioned detector based on Stable Diffusion. NADA is evaluated on two artwork datasets, ArtDL 2.0 and IconArt, outperforming prior work in weakly-supervised detection, while being the first work for zero-shot object detection in art. Code is available at https://github.com/patrick-john-ramos/nada

Paperid: 1377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06244.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot recognition capability, but still underperform in dense prediction tasks. Self-distillation recently is emerging as a promising approach for fine-tuning VLMs to better adapt to local regions without requiring extensive annotations. However, previous state-of-the-art approaches often suffer from significant `foreground bias', where models tend to wrongly identify background regions as foreground objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. DenseVLM leverages the pre-trained VLM to retrieve categories for unlabeled regions and then decouples the interference between foreground and background features. We show that DenseVLM can directly replace the original VLM in open-vocabulary object detection and image segmentation methods, leading to notable performance improvements. Furthermore, it exhibits promising zero-shot scalability when training on more extensive and diverse datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/HVision-NKU/DenseVLM.

Paperid: 1378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generalizing metric monocular depth estimation presents a significant challenge due to its ill-posed nature, while the entanglement between camera parameters and depth amplifies issues further, hindering multi-dataset training and zero-shot accuracy. This challenge is particularly evident in autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics, where data is collected with fixed camera setups, limiting the geometric diversity. Yet, this context also presents an opportunity: the fixed relationship between the camera and the ground plane imposes additional perspective geometry constraints, enabling depth regression via vertical image positions of objects. However, this cue is highly susceptible to overfitting, thus we propose a novel canonical representation that maintains consistency across varied camera setups, effectively disentangling depth from specific parameters and enhancing generalization across datasets. We also propose a novel architecture that adaptively and probabilistically fuses depths estimated via object size and vertical image position cues. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach on five autonomous driving datasets, achieving accurate metric depth estimation for varying resolutions, aspect ratios and camera setups. Notably, we achieve comparable accuracy to existing zero-shot methods, despite training on a single dataset with a single-camera setup. Project website: https://unizgfer-lamor.github.io/gvdepth/

Paperid: 1379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05788.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the advent of diffusion models, new proteins can be generated at an unprecedented rate. The \textit{motif scaffolding problem} requires steering this generative process to yield proteins with a desirable functional substructure -- a motif. While models have been trained to take the motif as conditional input, recent techniques in diffusion posterior sampling can be leveraged as zero-shot alternatives whose approximations can be corrected with sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms. In this work, we introduce a new set of guidance potentials to describe and solve scaffolding tasks by adapting SMC-aided diffusion posterior samplers with an unconditional model, Genie, acting as a prior. Against established benchmarks, we successfully scaffold several single-motif and multi-motif problems. The latter is possible by pairing reconstruction guidance with $\mathrm{SE}(3)$-invariant potentials. In the single-motif case, we find these potentials perform comparably to the conventional masking approach and that reconstruction guidance outperforms replacement methods when aided with SMC. We additionally consider a guidance potential for point symmetry constraints and produce designable internally symmetric monomers with our setup. Overall, this work highlights the capabilities and areas for improvement of zero-shot posterior samplers in motif scaffolding tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/matsagad/mres-project

Paperid: 1380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05430.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in self-supervised models for natural language, vision, and protein sequences have inspired the development of large genomic DNA language models (DNALMs). These models aim to learn generalizable representations of diverse DNA elements, potentially enabling various genomic prediction, interpretation and design tasks. Despite their potential, existing benchmarks do not adequately assess the capabilities of DNALMs on key downstream applications involving an important class of non-coding DNA elements critical for regulating gene activity. In this study, we introduce DART-Eval, a suite of representative benchmarks specifically focused on regulatory DNA to evaluate model performance across zero-shot, probed, and fine-tuned scenarios against contemporary ab initio models as baselines. Our benchmarks target biologically meaningful downstream tasks such as functional sequence feature discovery, predicting cell-type specific regulatory activity, and counterfactual prediction of the impacts of genetic variants. We find that current DNALMs exhibit inconsistent performance and do not offer compelling gains over alternative baseline models for most tasks, while requiring significantly more computational resources. We discuss potentially promising modeling, data curation, and evaluation strategies for the next generation of DNALMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/kundajelab/DART-Eval.

Paperid: 1381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05268.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Dense 3D correspondence can enhance robotic manipulation by enabling the generalization of spatial, functional, and dynamic information from one object to an unseen counterpart. Compared to shape correspondence, semantic correspondence is more effective in generalizing across different object categories. To this end, we present DenseMatcher, a method capable of computing 3D correspondences between in-the-wild objects that share similar structures. DenseMatcher first computes vertex features by projecting multiview 2D features onto meshes and refining them with a 3D network, and subsequently finds dense correspondences with the obtained features using functional map. In addition, we craft the first 3D matching dataset that contains colored object meshes across diverse categories. In our experiments, we show that DenseMatcher significantly outperforms prior 3D matching baselines by 43.5%. We demonstrate the downstream effectiveness of DenseMatcher in (i) robotic manipulation, where it achieves cross-instance and cross-category generalization on long-horizon complex manipulation tasks from observing only one demo; (ii) zero-shot color mapping between digital assets, where appearance can be transferred between different objects with relatable geometry.

Paperid: 1382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04945.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the context of medical Augmented Reality (AR) applications, object tracking is a key challenge and requires a significant amount of annotation masks. As segmentation foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) begin to emerge, zero-shot segmentation requires only minimal human participation obtaining high-quality object masks. We introduce a HoloLens-Object-Labeling (HOLa) Unity and Python application based on the SAM-Track algorithm that offers fully automatic single object annotation for HoloLens 2 while requiring minimal human participation. HOLa does not have to be adjusted to a specific image appearance and could thus alleviate AR research in any application field. We evaluate HOLa for different degrees of image complexity in open liver surgery and in medical phantom experiments. Using HOLa for image annotation can increase the labeling speed by more than 500 times while providing Dice scores between 0.875 and 0.982, which are comparable to human annotators. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/mschwimmbeck/HOLa

Paperid: 1383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04783.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Wireless sensing has recently found widespread applications in diverse environments, including homes, offices, and public spaces. By analyzing patterns in channel state information (CSI), it is possible to infer human actions for tasks such as person identification, gesture recognition, and fall detection. However, CSI is highly sensitive to environmental changes, where even minor alterations can significantly distort the CSI patterns. This sensitivity often leads to performance degradation or outright failure when applying wireless sensing models trained in one environment to another. To address this challenge, Domain Alignment (DAL) has been widely adopted for cross-domain classification tasks, as it focuses on aligning the global distributions of the source and target domains in feature space. Despite its popularity, DAL often neglects inter-category relationships, which can lead to misalignment between categories across domains, even when global alignment is achieved. To overcome these limitations, we propose K-Nearest Neighbors Maximum Mean Discrepancy (KNN-MMD), a novel few-shot method for cross-domain wireless sensing. Our approach begins by constructing a help set using KNN from the target domain, enabling local alignment between the source and target domains within each category using MMD. Additionally, we address a key instability issue commonly observed in cross-domain methods, where model performance fluctuates sharply between epochs. Further, most existing methods struggle to determine an optimal stopping point during training due to the absence of labeled data from the target domain. Our method resolves this by excluding the support set from the target domain during training and employing it as a validation set to determine the stopping criterion.The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/RS2002/KNN-MMD .

Paperid: 1384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04616.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
How well are unimodal vision and language models aligned? Although prior work have approached answering this question, their assessment methods do not directly translate to how these models are used in practical vision-language tasks. In this paper, we propose a direct assessment method, inspired by linear probing, to assess vision-language alignment. We identify that the degree of alignment of the SSL vision models depends on their SSL training objective, and we find that the clustering quality of SSL representations has a stronger impact on alignment performance than their linear separability. Next, we introduce Swift Alignment of Image and Language (SAIL), a efficient transfer learning framework that aligns pretrained unimodal vision and language models for downstream vision-language tasks. Since SAIL leverages the strengths of pretrained unimodal models, it requires significantly fewer (6%) paired image-text data for the multimodal alignment compared to models like CLIP which are trained from scratch. SAIL training only requires a single A100 GPU, 5 hours of training and can accommodate a batch size up to 32,768. SAIL achieves 73.4% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet (vs. CLIP's 72.7%) and excels in zero-shot retrieval, complex reasoning, and semantic segmentation. Additionally, SAIL improves the language-compatibility of vision encoders that in turn enhance the performance of multimodal large language models. The entire codebase and model weights are open-source: https://lezhang7.github.io/sail.github.io/

Paperid: 1385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04580.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Accurately detecting and classifying damage in analogue media such as paintings, photographs, textiles, mosaics, and frescoes is essential for cultural heritage preservation. While machine learning models excel in correcting degradation if the damage operator is known a priori, we show that they fail to robustly predict where the damage is even after supervised training; thus, reliable damage detection remains a challenge. Motivated by this, we introduce ARTeFACT, a dataset for damage detection in diverse types analogue media, with over 11,000 annotations covering 15 kinds of damage across various subjects, media, and historical provenance. Furthermore, we contribute human-verified text prompts describing the semantic contents of the images, and derive additional textual descriptions of the annotated damage. We evaluate CNN, Transformer, diffusion-based segmentation models, and foundation vision models in zero-shot, supervised, unsupervised and text-guided settings, revealing their limitations in generalising across media types. Our dataset is available at $\href{https://daniela997.github.io/ARTeFACT/}{https://daniela997.github.io/ARTeFACT/}$ as the first-of-its-kind benchmark for analogue media damage detection and restoration.

Paperid: 1386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04533.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods adopt mask generators to predict segmentation masks and leverage pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, to classify these masks via mask pooling. Although these approaches show promising results, it is counterintuitive that accurate masks often fail to yield accurate classification results through pooling CLIP image embeddings within the mask regions. In this paper, we reveal the performance limitations of mask pooling and introduce Mask-Adapter, a simple yet effective method to address these challenges in open-vocabulary segmentation. Compared to directly using proposal masks, our proposed Mask-Adapter extracts semantic activation maps from proposal masks, providing richer contextual information and ensuring alignment between masks and CLIP. Additionally, we propose a mask consistency loss that encourages proposal masks with similar IoUs to obtain similar CLIP embeddings to enhance models' robustness to varying predicted masks. Mask-Adapter integrates seamlessly into open-vocabulary segmentation methods based on mask pooling in a plug-and-play manner, delivering more accurate classification results. Extensive experiments across several zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains for the proposed Mask-Adapter on several well-established methods. Notably, Mask-Adapter also extends effectively to SAM and achieves impressive results on several open-vocabulary segmentation datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/MaskAdapter.

Paperid: 1387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04472.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Stereo Anywhere, a novel stereo-matching framework that combines geometric constraints with robust priors from monocular depth Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). By elegantly coupling these complementary worlds through a dual-branch architecture, we seamlessly integrate stereo matching with learned contextual cues. Following this design, our framework introduces novel cost volume fusion mechanisms that effectively handle critical challenges such as textureless regions, occlusions, and non-Lambertian surfaces. Through our novel optical illusion dataset, MonoTrap, and extensive evaluation across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our synthetic-only trained model achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot generalization, significantly outperforming existing solutions while showing remarkable robustness to challenging cases such as mirrors and transparencies.

Paperid: 1388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04429.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

Paperid: 1389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04243.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Image segmentation foundation models (SFMs) like Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved impressive zero-shot and interactive segmentation across diverse domains. However, they struggle to segment objects with certain structures, particularly those with dense, tree-like morphology and low textural contrast from their surroundings. These failure modes are crucial for understanding the limitations of SFMs in real-world applications. To systematically study this issue, we introduce interpretable metrics quantifying object tree-likeness and textural separability. On carefully controlled synthetic experiments and real-world datasets, we show that SFM performance (e.g., SAM, SAM 2, HQ-SAM) noticeably correlates with these factors. We link these failures to "textural confusion", where models misinterpret local structure as global texture, causing over-segmentation or difficulty distinguishing objects from similar backgrounds. Notably, targeted fine-tuning fails to resolve this issue, indicating a fundamental limitation. Our study provides the first quantitative framework for modeling the behavior of SFMs on challenging structures, offering interpretable insights into their segmentation capabilities.

Paperid: 1390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03829.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly classification (AC) is an indispensable task in industrial manufacturing, which guarantees quality and safety of various product. To address the scarcity of data in industrial scenarios, lots of few-shot anomaly detection methods emerge recently. In this paper, we propose an effective few-shot anomaly classification (FSAC) framework with one-stage training, dubbed CLIP-FSAC++. Specifically, we introduce a cross-modality interaction module named Anomaly Descriptor following image and text encoders, which enhances the correlation of visual and text embeddings and adapts the representations of CLIP from pre-trained data to target data. In anomaly descriptor, image-to-text cross-attention module is used to obtain image-specific text embeddings and text-to-image cross-attention module is used to obtain text-specific visual embeddings. Then these modality-specific embeddings are used to enhance original representations of CLIP for better matching ability. Comprehensive experiment results are provided for evaluating our method in few-normal shot anomaly classification on VisA and MVTEC-AD for 1, 2, 4 and 8-shot settings. The source codes are at https://github.com/Jay-zzcoder/clip-fsac-pp

Paperid: 1391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03561.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
CLIP has shown impressive results in aligning images and texts at scale. However, its ability to capture detailed visual features remains limited because CLIP matches images and texts at a global level. To address this issue, we propose FLAIR, Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations, an approach that utilizes long and detailed image descriptions to learn localized image embeddings. By sampling diverse sub-captions that describe fine-grained details about an image, we train our vision-language model to produce not only global embeddings but also text-specific image representations. Our model introduces text-conditioned attention pooling on top of local image tokens to produce fine-grained image representations that excel at retrieving detailed image content. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on both, existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks, as well as, our newly introduced fine-grained retrieval task which evaluates vision-language models' ability to retrieve partial image content. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FLAIR trained on 30M image-text pairs in capturing fine-grained visual information, including zero-shot semantic segmentation, outperforming models trained on billions of pairs. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/flair .

Paperid: 1392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03342.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal samples in images that deviate from normal patterns, covering multiple domains, including industrial, logical, and medical fields. Due to the domain gaps between these fields, existing VAD methods are typically tailored to each domain, with specialized detection techniques and model architectures that are difficult to generalize across different domains. Moreover, even within the same domain, current VAD approaches often follow a "one-category-one-model" paradigm, requiring large amounts of normal samples to train class-specific models, resulting in poor generalizability and hindering unified evaluation across domains. To address this issue, we propose a generalized few-shot VAD method, UniVAD, capable of detecting anomalies across various domains, such as industrial, logical, and medical anomalies, with a training-free unified model. UniVAD only needs few normal samples as references during testing to detect anomalies in previously unseen objects, without training on the specific domain. Specifically, UniVAD employs a Contextual Component Clustering ($C^3$) module based on clustering and vision foundation models to segment components within the image accurately, and leverages Component-Aware Patch Matching (CAPM) and Graph-Enhanced Component Modeling (GECM) modules to detect anomalies at different semantic levels, which are aggregated to produce the final detection result. We conduct experiments on nine datasets spanning industrial, logical, and medical fields, and the results demonstrate that UniVAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot anomaly detection tasks across multiple domains, outperforming domain-specific anomaly detection models. Code is available at https://github.com/FantasticGNU/UniVAD.

Paperid: 1393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03159.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification(FSIC) aims to recognize novel classes given few labeled images from base classes. Recent works have achieved promising classification performance, especially for metric-learning methods, where a measure at only image feature level is usually used. In this paper, we argue that measure at such a level may not be effective enough to generalize from base to novel classes when using only a few images. Instead, a multi-level descriptor of an image is taken for consideration in this paper. We propose a multi-level correlation network (MLCN) for FSIC to tackle this problem by effectively capturing local information. Concretely, we present the self-correlation module and cross-correlation module to learn the semantic correspondence relation of local information based on learned representations. Moreover, we propose a pattern-correlation module to capture the pattern of fine-grained images and find relevant structural patterns between base classes and novel classes. Extensive experiments and analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed method on four widely-used FSIC benchmarks. The code for our approach is available at: https://github.com/Yunkai696/MLCN.

Paperid: 1394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02837.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although open-vocabulary classification models like Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) have demonstrated strong zero-shot learning capabilities, their robustness to common image corruptions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments, we show that zero-shot CLIP lacks robustness to common image corruptions during test-time, necessitating the adaptation of CLIP to unlabeled corrupted images using test-time adaptation (TTA). However, we found that existing TTA methods have severe limitations in adapting CLIP due to their unimodal nature. To address these limitations, we propose $\texttt{BATCLIP}$, a bimodal $\textbf{online}$ TTA method designed to improve CLIP's robustness to common image corruptions. The key insight of our approach is not only to adapt the visual encoders for improving image features but also to strengthen the alignment between image and text features by promoting a stronger association between the image class prototype, computed using pseudo-labels, and the corresponding text feature. We evaluate our approach on benchmark image corruption datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results in online TTA for CLIP. Furthermore, we evaluate our proposed TTA approach on various domain generalization datasets to demonstrate its generalization capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/sarthaxxxxx/BATCLIP

Paperid: 1395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02531.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is a critical task with diverse applications in land use and resource management. While unimodal image-based approaches show promise, they often struggle with limitations such as high intra-class variance and inter-class similarity. Incorporating textual information can enhance classification by providing additional context and semantic understanding, but manual text annotation is labor-intensive and costly. In this work, we propose a novel RSSC framework that integrates text descriptions generated by large vision-language models (VLMs) as an auxiliary modality without incurring expensive manual annotation costs. To fully leverage the latent complementarities between visual and textual data, we propose a dual cross-attention-based network to fuse these modalities into a unified representation. Extensive experiments with both quantitative and qualitative evaluation across five RSSC datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms baseline models. We also verify the effectiveness of VLM-generated text descriptions compared to human-annotated descriptions. Additionally, we design a zero-shot classification scenario to show that the learned multimodal representation can be effectively utilized for unseen class classification. This research opens new opportunities for leveraging textual information in RSSC tasks and provides a promising multimodal fusion structure, offering insights and inspiration for future studies. Code is available at: https://github.com/CJR7/MultiAtt-RSSC

Paperid: 1396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02228.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the recent success of two-stage prototypical networks in few-shot named entity recognition (NER), challenges such as over/under-detected false spans in the span detection stage and unaligned entity prototypes in the type classification stage persist. Additionally, LLMs have not proven to be effective few-shot information extractors in general. In this paper, we propose an approach called Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition to address these issues. We introduce a boundary-aware contrastive learning strategy to enhance the LLM's ability to perceive entity boundaries for generalized entity spans. Additionally, we utilize LoRAHub to align information from the target domain to the source domain, thereby enhancing adaptive cross-domain classification capabilities. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms prior methods, validating its effectiveness. In particular, the proposed strategies demonstrate effectiveness across a range of LLM architectures. The code and data are released on https://github.com/UESTC-GQJ/BANER.

Paperid: 1397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01827.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce RandAR, a decoder-only visual autoregressive (AR) model capable of generating images in arbitrary token orders. Unlike previous decoder-only AR models that rely on a predefined generation order, RandAR removes this inductive bias, unlocking new capabilities in decoder-only generation. Our essential design enables random order by inserting a "position instruction token" before each image token to be predicted, representing the spatial location of the next image token. Trained on randomly permuted token sequences -- a more challenging task than fixed-order generation, RandAR achieves comparable performance to its conventional raster-order counterpart. More importantly, decoder-only transformers trained from random orders acquire new capabilities. For the efficiency bottleneck of AR models, RandAR adopts parallel decoding with KV-Cache at inference time, enjoying 2.5x acceleration without sacrificing generation quality. Additionally, RandAR supports inpainting, outpainting and resolution extrapolation in a zero-shot manner. We hope RandAR inspires new directions for decoder-only visual generation models and broadens their applications across diverse scenarios. Our project page is at https://rand-ar.github.io/.

Paperid: 1398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01814.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained with contrastive loss have achieved significant advancements in various vision and language tasks. However, the global nature of the contrastive loss makes VLMs focus predominantly on foreground objects, neglecting other crucial information in the image, which limits their effectiveness in downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose COSMOS: CrOSs-MOdality Self-distillation for vision-language pre-training that integrates a novel text-cropping strategy and cross-attention module into a self-supervised learning framework. We create global and local views of images and texts (i.e., multi-modal augmentations), which are essential for self-distillation in VLMs. We further introduce a cross-attention module, enabling COSMOS to learn comprehensive cross-modal representations optimized via a cross-modality self-distillation loss. COSMOS consistently outperforms previous strong baselines on various zero-shot downstream tasks, including retrieval, classification, and semantic segmentation. Additionally, it surpasses CLIP-based models trained on larger datasets in visual perception and contextual understanding tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/cosmos.

Paperid: 1399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01770.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scaling robot learning requires data collection pipelines that scale favorably with human effort. In this work, we propose Crowdsourcing and Amortizing Human Effort for Real-to-Sim-to-Real(CASHER), a pipeline for scaling up data collection and learning in simulation where the performance scales superlinearly with human effort. The key idea is to crowdsource digital twins of real-world scenes using 3D reconstruction and collect large-scale data in simulation, rather than the real-world. Data collection in simulation is initially driven by RL, bootstrapped with human demonstrations. As the training of a generalist policy progresses across environments, its generalization capabilities can be used to replace human effort with model generated demonstrations. This results in a pipeline where behavioral data is collected in simulation with continually reducing human effort. We show that CASHER demonstrates zero-shot and few-shot scaling laws on three real-world tasks across diverse scenarios. We show that CASHER enables fine-tuning of pre-trained policies to a target scenario using a video scan without any additional human effort. See our project website: https://casher-robot-learning.github.io/CASHER/

Paperid: 1400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01583.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The creation of 3D scenes has traditionally been both labor-intensive and costly, requiring designers to meticulously configure 3D assets and environments. Recent advancements in generative AI, including text-to-3D and image-to-3D methods, have dramatically reduced the complexity and cost of this process. However, current techniques for editing complex 3D scenes continue to rely on generally interactive multi-step, 2D-to-3D projection methods and diffusion-based techniques, which often lack precision in control and hamper real-time performance. In this work, we propose 3DSceneEditor, a fully 3D-based paradigm for real-time, precise editing of intricate 3D scenes using Gaussian Splatting. Unlike conventional methods, 3DSceneEditor operates through a streamlined 3D pipeline, enabling direct manipulation of Gaussians for efficient, high-quality edits based on input prompts.The proposed framework (i) integrates a pre-trained instance segmentation model for semantic labeling; (ii) employs a zero-shot grounding approach with CLIP to align target objects with user prompts; and (iii) applies scene modifications, such as object addition, repositioning, recoloring, replacing, and deletion directly on Gaussians. Extensive experimental results show that 3DSceneEditor achieves superior editing precision and speed with respect to current SOTA 3D scene editing approaches, establishing a new benchmark for efficient and interactive 3D scene customization.

Paperid: 1401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01293.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text Simplification is a task that has been minimally explored for low-resource languages. Consequently, there are only a few manually curated datasets. In this paper, we present a human curated sentence-level text simplification dataset for the Sinhala language. Our evaluation dataset contains 1,000 complex sentences and corresponding 3,000 simplified sentences produced by three different human annotators. We model the text simplification task as a zero-shot and zero resource sequence-to-sequence (seq-seq) task on the multilingual language models mT5 and mBART. We exploit auxiliary data from related seq-seq tasks and explore the possibility of using intermediate task transfer learning (ITTL). Our analysis shows that ITTL outperforms the previously proposed zero-resource methods for text simplification. Our findings also highlight the challenges in evaluating text simplification systems, and support the calls for improved metrics for measuring the quality of automated text simplification systems that would suit low-resource languages as well. Our code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/brainsharks-fyp17/Sinhala-Text-Simplification-Dataset-and-Evaluation

Paperid: 1402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00811.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Given a natural language query, video moment retrieval aims to localize the described temporal moment in an untrimmed video. A major challenge of this task is its heavy dependence on labor-intensive annotations for training. Unlike existing works that directly train models on manually curated data, we propose a novel paradigm to reduce annotation costs: pretraining the model on unlabeled, real-world videos. To support this, we introduce Video Moment Retrieval Pretraining (Vid-Morp), a large-scale dataset collected with minimal human intervention, consisting of over 50K videos captured in the wild and 200K pseudo annotations. Direct pretraining on these imperfect pseudo annotations, however, presents significant challenges, including mismatched sentence-video pairs and imprecise temporal boundaries. To address these issues, we propose the ReCorrect algorithm, which comprises two main phases: semantics-guided refinement and memory-consensus correction. The semantics-guided refinement enhances the pseudo labels by leveraging semantic similarity with video frames to clean out unpaired data and make initial adjustments to temporal boundaries. In the following memory-consensus correction phase, a memory bank tracks the model predictions, progressively correcting the temporal boundaries based on consensus within the memory. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate ReCorrect's strong generalization abilities across multiple downstream settings. Zero-shot ReCorrect achieves over 75% and 80% of the best fully-supervised performance on two benchmarks, while unsupervised ReCorrect reaches about 85% on both. The code, dataset, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/baopj/Vid-Morp.

Paperid: 1403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00730.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Models for egocentric 3D and 4D reconstruction, including few-shot interpolation and extrapolation settings, can benefit from having images from exocentric viewpoints as supervision signals. No existing dataset provides the necessary mixture of complex, dynamic, and multi-view data. To facilitate the development of 3D and 4D reconstruction methods in the autonomous driving context, we propose a Synthetic Ego--Exo Dynamic 4D (SEED4D) data generator and dataset. We present a customizable, easy-to-use data generator for spatio-temporal multi-view data creation. Our open-source data generator allows the creation of synthetic data for camera setups commonly used in the NuScenes, KITTI360, and Waymo datasets. Additionally, SEED4D encompasses two large-scale multi-view synthetic urban scene datasets. Our static (3D) dataset encompasses 212k inward- and outward-facing vehicle images from 2k scenes, while our dynamic (4D) dataset contains 16.8M images from 10k trajectories, each sampled at 100 points in time with egocentric images, exocentric images, and LiDAR data. The datasets and the data generator can be found at https://seed4d.github.io/.

Paperid: 1404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00727.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language models like CLIP have been shown to be highly effective at linking visual perception and natural language understanding, enabling sophisticated image-text capabilities, including strong retrieval and zero-shot classification performance. Their widespread use, as well as the fact that CLIP models are trained on image-text pairs from the web, make them both a worthwhile and relatively easy target for backdoor attacks. As training foundational models, such as CLIP, from scratch is very expensive, this paper focuses on cleaning potentially poisoned models via fine-tuning. We first show that existing cleaning techniques are not effective against simple structured triggers used in Blended or BadNet backdoor attacks, exposing a critical vulnerability for potential real-world deployment of these models. Then, we introduce PAR, Perturb and Recover, a surprisingly simple yet effective mechanism to remove backdoors from CLIP models. Through extensive experiments across different encoders and types of backdoor attacks, we show that PAR achieves high backdoor removal rate while preserving good standard performance. Finally, we illustrate that our approach is effective even only with synthetic text-image pairs, i.e. without access to real training data. The code and models are available at https://github.com/nmndeep/PerturbAndRecover.

Paperid: 1405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00622.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The zero-shot performance of object detectors degrades when tested on different modalities, such as infrared and depth. While recent work has explored image translation techniques to adapt detectors to new modalities, these methods are limited to a single modality and apply only to traditional detectors. Recently, vision-language detectors, such as YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, have shown promising zero-shot capabilities, however, they have not yet been adapted for other visual modalities. Traditional fine-tuning approaches compromise the zero-shot capabilities of the detectors. The visual prompt strategies commonly used for classification with vision-language models apply the same linear prompt translation to each image, making them less effective. To address these limitations, we propose ModPrompt, a visual prompt strategy to adapt vision-language detectors to new modalities without degrading zero-shot performance. In particular, an encoder-decoder visual prompt strategy is proposed, further enhanced by the integration of inference-friendly modality prompt decoupled residual, facilitating a more robust adaptation. Empirical benchmarking results show our method for modality adaptation on two vision-language detectors, YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, and on challenging infrared (LLVIP, FLIR) and depth (NYUv2) datasets, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning while preserving the model's zero-shot capability. Code available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/ModPrompt.

Paperid: 1406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00151.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) demands robust integration of text detection, recognition, and spatial reasoning to interpret complex document layouts. In this work, we introduce DLaVA, a novel, training-free pipeline that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for zero-shot answer localization in order to improve trustworthiness, interpretability, and explainability. By leveraging an innovative OCR-free approach that organizes text regions with unique bounding box IDs, the proposed method preserves spatial contexts without relying on iterative OCR or chain-of-thought reasoning, thus substantially reducing the computational complexity. We further enhance the evaluation protocol by integrating Intersection over Union (IoU) metrics alongside Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS), thereby ensuring that not only textual accuracy is considered, but spatial accuracy is taken into account, ultimately reducing the risks of AI hallucinations and improving trustworthiness. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, with significantly lower computational complexity and enhanced accuracies and reliability for high-stakes applications. The code and datasets utilized in this study for DLaVA are accessible at: https://github.com/ahmad-shirazi/AnnotMLLM.

Paperid: 1407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19757.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fine-tuning foundation models often compromises their robustness to distribution shifts. To remedy this, most robust fine-tuning methods aim to preserve the pre-trained features. However, not all pre-trained features are robust and those methods are largely indifferent to which ones to preserve. We propose dual risk minimization (DRM), which combines empirical risk minimization with worst-case risk minimization, to better preserve the core features of downstream tasks. In particular, we utilize core-feature descriptions generated by LLMs to induce core-based zero-shot predictions which then serve as proxies to estimate the worst-case risk. DRM balances two crucial aspects of model robustness: expected performance and worst-case performance, establishing a new state of the art on various real-world benchmarks. DRM significantly improves the out-of-distribution performance of CLIP ViT-L/14@336 on ImageNet (75.9 to 77.1), WILDS-iWildCam (47.1 to 51.8), and WILDS-FMoW (50.7 to 53.1); opening up new avenues for robust fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/vaynexie/DRM .

Paperid: 1408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19666.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The field of computational pathology has been transformed with recent advances in foundation models that encode histopathology region-of-interests (ROIs) into versatile and transferable feature representations via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, translating these advancements to address complex clinical challenges at the patient and slide level remains constrained by limited clinical data in disease-specific cohorts, especially for rare clinical conditions. We propose TITAN, a multimodal whole slide foundation model pretrained using 335,645 WSIs via visual self-supervised learning and vision-language alignment with corresponding pathology reports and 423,122 synthetic captions generated from a multimodal generative AI copilot for pathology. Without any finetuning or requiring clinical labels, TITAN can extract general-purpose slide representations and generate pathology reports that generalize to resource-limited clinical scenarios such as rare disease retrieval and cancer prognosis. We evaluate TITAN on diverse clinical tasks and find that TITAN outperforms both ROI and slide foundation models across machine learning settings such as linear probing, few-shot and zero-shot classification, rare cancer retrieval and cross-modal retrieval, and pathology report generation.

Paperid: 1409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19485.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Function as a Service (FaaS) is poised to become the foundation of the next generation of cloud systems due to its inherent advantages in scalability, cost-efficiency, and ease of use. However, challenges such as the need for specialized knowledge, platform dependence, and difficulty in scalability in building functional workflows persist for cloud-native application developers. To overcome these challenges and mitigate the burden of developing FaaS-based applications, in this paper, we propose a mechanism called Action Engine, that makes use of tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) at its kernel to interpret human language queries and automates FaaS workflow generation, thereby, reducing the need for specialized expertise and manual design. Action Engine includes modules to identify relevant functions from the FaaS repository and seamlessly manage the data dependency between them, ensuring the developer's query is processed and resolved. Beyond that, Action Engine can execute the generated workflow by injecting the user-provided arguments. On another front, this work addresses a gap in tool-augmented LLM research via adopting an Automatic FaaS Workflow Generation perspective to systematically evaluate methodologies across four fundamental sub-processes. Through benchmarking various parameters, this research provides critical insights into streamlining workflow automation for real-world applications, specifically in the FaaS continuum. Our evaluations demonstrate that the Action Engine achieves comparable performance to the few-shot learning approach while maintaining platform- and language-agnosticism, thereby, mitigating provider-specific dependencies in workflow generation. We notice that Action Engine can unlock FaaS workflow generation for non-cloud-savvy developers and expedite the development cycles of cloud-native applications.

Paperid: 1410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19443.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Iterative retrieval refers to the process in which the model continuously queries the retriever during generation to enhance the relevance of the retrieved knowledge, thereby improving the performance of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Existing work typically employs few-shot prompting or manually constructed rules to implement iterative retrieval. This introduces additional inference overhead and overlooks the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Auto-RAG, an autonomous iterative retrieval model centered on the LLM's powerful decision-making capabilities. Auto-RAG engages in multi-turn dialogues with the retriever, systematically planning retrievals and refining queries to acquire valuable knowledge. This process continues until sufficient external information is gathered, at which point the results are presented to the user. To this end, we develop a method for autonomously synthesizing reasoning-based decision-making instructions in iterative retrieval and fine-tuned the latest open-source LLMs. The experimental results indicate that Auto-RAG is capable of autonomous iterative interaction with the retriever, effectively leveraging the remarkable reasoning and decision-making abilities of LLMs, which lead to outstanding performance across six benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that Auto-RAG can autonomously adjust the number of iterations based on the difficulty of the questions and the utility of the retrieved knowledge, without requiring any human intervention. Moreover, Auto-RAG expresses the iterative retrieval process in natural language, enhancing interpretability while providing users with a more intuitive experience\footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ictnlp/Auto-RAG}.

Paperid: 1411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19418.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Having explored an environment, intelligent agents should be able to transfer their knowledge to most downstream tasks within that environment without additional interactions. Referred to as "zero-shot learning", this ability remains elusive for general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithms. While recent works have attempted to produce zero-shot RL agents, they make assumptions about the nature of the tasks or the structure of the MDP. We present Proto Successor Measure: the basis set for all possible behaviors of a Reinforcement Learning Agent in a dynamical system. We prove that any possible behavior (represented using visitation distributions) can be represented using an affine combination of these policy-independent basis functions. Given a reward function at test time, we simply need to find the right set of linear weights to combine these bases corresponding to the optimal policy. We derive a practical algorithm to learn these basis functions using reward-free interaction data from the environment and show that our approach can produce the optimal policy at test time for any given reward function without additional environmental interactions. Project page: https://agarwalsiddhant10.github.io/projects/psm.html.

Paperid: 1412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19346.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the era of foundation models, CLIP has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning text & visual modalities into a common embedding space. However, the alignment objective used to train CLIP often results in subpar visual features for fine-grained tasks. In contrast, SSL-pretrained models like DINO excel at extracting rich visual features due to their specialized training paradigm. Yet, these SSL models require an additional supervised linear probing step, which relies on fully labeled data which is often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. In this paper, we propose a label-free prompt-tuning method that leverages the rich visual features of self-supervised learning models (DINO) and the broad textual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to largely enhance CLIP-based image classification performance using unlabeled images. Our approach unfolds in three key steps: (1) We generate robust textual feature embeddings that more accurately represent object classes by leveraging class-specific descriptions from LLMs, enabling more effective zero-shot classification compared to CLIP's default name-specific prompts. (2) These textual embeddings are then used to produce pseudo-labels to train an alignment module that integrates the complementary strengths of LLM description-based textual embeddings & DINO's visual features. (3) Finally, we prompt-tune CLIP's vision encoder through DINO-assisted supervision using the trained alignment module. This three-step process allows us to harness the best of visual & textual foundation models, resulting in a powerful and efficient approach that surpasses state-of-the-art label-free classification methods. Notably, our framework, NoLA (No Labels Attached), achieves an average absolute gain of 3.6% over the state-of-the-art LaFTer across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Our code & models can be found at https://github.com/fazliimam/NoLA.

Paperid: 1413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19278.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Depth completion (DC) aims to predict a dense depth map from an RGB image and a sparse depth map. Existing DC methods generalize poorly to new datasets or unseen sparse depth patterns, limiting their real-world applications. We propose OMNI-DC, a highly robust DC model that generalizes well zero-shot to various datasets. The key design is a novel Multi-resolution Depth Integrator, allowing our model to deal with very sparse depth inputs. We also introduce a novel Laplacian loss to model the ambiguity in the training process. Moreover, we train OMNI-DC on a mixture of high-quality datasets with a scale normalization technique and synthetic depth patterns. Extensive experiments on 7 datasets show consistent improvements over baselines, reducing errors by as much as 43%. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/OMNI-DC.

Paperid: 1414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19041.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Going beyond few-shot action recognition (FSAR), cross-domain FSAR (CDFSAR) has attracted recent research interests by solving the domain gap lying in source-to-target transfer learning. Existing CDFSAR methods mainly focus on joint training of source and target data to mitigate the side effect of domain gap. However, such kind of methods suffer from two limitations: First, pair-wise joint training requires retraining deep models in case of one source data and multiple target ones, which incurs heavy computation cost, especially for large source and small target data. Second, pre-trained models after joint training are adopted to target domain in a straightforward manner, hardly taking full potential of pre-trained models and then limiting recognition performance. To overcome above limitations, this paper proposes a simple yet effective baseline, namely Temporal-Aware Model Tuning (TAMT) for CDFSAR. Specifically, our TAMT involves a decoupled paradigm by performing pre-training on source data and fine-tuning target data, which avoids retraining for multiple target data with single source. To effectively and efficiently explore the potential of pre-trained models in transferring to target domain, our TAMT proposes a Hierarchical Temporal Tuning Network (HTTN), whose core involves local temporal-aware adapters (TAA) and a global temporal-aware moment tuning (GTMT). Particularly, TAA learns few parameters to recalibrate the intermediate features of frozen pre-trained models, enabling efficient adaptation to target domains. Furthermore, GTMT helps to generate powerful video representations, improving match performance on the target domain. Experiments on several widely used video benchmarks show our TAMT outperforms the recently proposed counterparts by 13%$\sim$31%, achieving new state-of-the-art CDFSAR results.

Paperid: 1415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18858.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We rethink the segment anything model (SAM) and propose a novel multiprompt network called COMPrompter for camouflaged object detection (COD). SAM has zero-shot generalization ability beyond other models and can provide an ideal framework for COD. Our network aims to enhance the single prompt strategy in SAM to a multiprompt strategy. To achieve this, we propose an edge gradient extraction module, which generates a mask containing gradient information regarding the boundaries of camouflaged objects. This gradient mask is then used as a novel boundary prompt, enhancing the segmentation process. Thereafter, we design a box-boundary mutual guidance module, which fosters more precise and comprehensive feature extraction via mutual guidance between a boundary prompt and a box prompt. This collaboration enhances the model's ability to accurately detect camouflaged objects. Moreover, we employ the discrete wavelet transform to extract high-frequency features from image embeddings. The high-frequency features serve as a supplementary component to the multiprompt system. Finally, our COMPrompter guides the network to achieve enhanced segmentation results, thereby advancing the development of SAM in terms of COD. Experimental results across COD benchmarks demonstrate that COMPrompter achieves a cutting-edge performance, surpassing the current leading model by an average positive metric of 2.2% in COD10K. In the specific application of COD, the experimental results in polyp segmentation show that our model is superior to top-tier methods as well. The code will be made available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/COMPrompter.

Paperid: 1416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18651.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humans recognize objects after observing only a few examples, a remarkable capability enabled by their inherent language understanding of the real-world environment. Developing verbalized and interpretable representation can significantly improve model generalization in low-data settings. In this work, we propose Verbalized Representation Learning (VRL), a novel approach for automatically extracting human-interpretable features for object recognition using few-shot data. Our method uniquely captures inter-class differences and intra-class commonalities in the form of natural language by employing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify key discriminative features between different classes and shared characteristics within the same class. These verbalized features are then mapped to numeric vectors through the VLM. The resulting feature vectors can be further utilized to train and infer with downstream classifiers. Experimental results show that, at the same model scale, VRL achieves a 24% absolute improvement over prior state-of-the-art methods while using 95% less data and a smaller mode. Furthermore, compared to human-labeled attributes, the features learned by VRL exhibit a 20% absolute gain when used for downstream classification tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/joeyy5588/VRL/tree/main.

Paperid: 1417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18616.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-image diffusion models produce impressive results but are frustrating tools for artists who desire fine-grained control. For example, a common use case is to create images of a specific instance in novel contexts, i.e., "identity-preserving generation". This setting, along with many other tasks (e.g., relighting), is a natural fit for image+text-conditional generative models. However, there is insufficient high-quality paired data to train such a model directly. We propose Diffusion Self-Distillation, a method for using a pre-trained text-to-image model to generate its own dataset for text-conditioned image-to-image tasks. We first leverage a text-to-image diffusion model's in-context generation ability to create grids of images and curate a large paired dataset with the help of a Visual-Language Model. We then fine-tune the text-to-image model into a text+image-to-image model using the curated paired dataset. We demonstrate that Diffusion Self-Distillation outperforms existing zero-shot methods and is competitive with per-instance tuning techniques on a wide range of identity-preservation generation tasks, without requiring test-time optimization.

Paperid: 1418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17787.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the rapidly advancing field of image generation, Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) modeling has garnered considerable attention for its innovative next-scale prediction approach. This paradigm offers substantial improvements in efficiency, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. Yet, the inherently coarse-to-fine nature of VAR introduces a prolonged token sequence, leading to prohibitive memory consumption and computational redundancies. To address these bottlenecks, we propose Collaborative Decoding (CoDe), a novel efficient decoding strategy tailored for the VAR framework. CoDe capitalizes on two critical observations: the substantially reduced parameter demands at larger scales and the exclusive generation patterns across different scales. Based on these insights, we partition the multi-scale inference process into a seamless collaboration between a large model and a small model. The large model serves as the 'drafter', specializing in generating low-frequency content at smaller scales, while the smaller model serves as the 'refiner', solely focusing on predicting high-frequency details at larger scales. This collaboration yields remarkable efficiency with minimal impact on quality: CoDe achieves a 1.7x speedup, slashes memory usage by around 50%, and preserves image quality with only a negligible FID increase from 1.95 to 1.98. When drafting steps are further decreased, CoDe can achieve an impressive 2.9x acceleration ratio, reaching 41 images/s at 256x256 resolution on a single NVIDIA 4090 GPU, while preserving a commendable FID of 2.27. The code is available at https://github.com/czg1225/CoDe

Paperid: 1419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17784.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot image generation aims to generate diverse and high-quality images for an unseen class given only a few examples in that class. A key challenge in this task is balancing category consistency and image diversity, which often compete with each other. Moreover, existing methods offer limited control over the attributes of newly generated images. In this work, we propose Hyperbolic Diffusion Autoencoders (HypDAE), a novel approach that operates in hyperbolic space to capture hierarchical relationships among images from seen categories. By leveraging pre-trained foundation models, HypDAE generates diverse new images for unseen categories with exceptional quality by varying stochastic subcodes or semantic codes. Most importantly, the hyperbolic representation introduces an additional degree of control over semantic diversity through the adjustment of radii within the hyperbolic disk. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that HypDAE significantly outperforms prior methods by achieving a better balance between preserving category-relevant features and promoting image diversity with limited data. Furthermore, HypDAE offers a highly controllable and interpretable generation process.

Paperid: 1420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17763.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Symmetry is a ubiquitous and fundamental property in the visual world, serving as a critical cue for perception and structure interpretation. This paper investigates the detection of 3D reflection symmetry from a single RGB image, and reveals its significant benefit on single-image 3D generation. We introduce Reflect3D, a scalable, zero-shot symmetry detector capable of robust generalization to diverse and real-world scenarios. Inspired by the success of foundation models, our method scales up symmetry detection with a transformer-based architecture. We also leverage generative priors from multi-view diffusion models to address the inherent ambiguity in single-view symmetry detection. Extensive evaluations on various data sources demonstrate that Reflect3D establishes a new state-of-the-art in single-image symmetry detection. Furthermore, we show the practical benefit of incorporating detected symmetry into single-image 3D generation pipelines through a symmetry-aware optimization process. The integration of symmetry significantly enhances the structural accuracy, cohesiveness, and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D geometry and textures, advancing the capabilities of 3D content creation.

Paperid: 1421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17690.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid progress of foundation models and large language models (LLMs) has fueled significantly improvement in the capabilities of machine learning systems that benefit from mutlimodal input data. However, existing multimodal models are predominantly built on top of pre-trained LLMs, which can limit accurate modeling of temporal dependencies across other modalities and thus limit the model's ability to jointly process and leverage multimodal inputs. To specifically investigate the alignment of text, video, and speech modalities in LLM-style (decoder-only) models, we consider a simplified multimodal generation task, Video-Text to Speech (VTTS): speech generation conditioned on both its corresponding text and video of talking people. The ultimate goal is to generate speech that not only follows the text but also aligns temporally with the video and is consistent with the facial expressions. In this paper, we first introduce Visatronic, a unified multimodal decoder-only transformer model that adopts an LLM-style architecture to embed visual, textual, and speech inputs into a shared subspace, treating all modalities as temporally aligned token streams. Next, we carefully explore different token mixing strategies to understand the best way to propagate information from the steps where video and text conditioning is input to the steps where the audio is generated. We extensively evaluate Visatronic on the challenging VoxCeleb2 dataset and demonstrate zero-shot generalization to LRS3, where Visatronic, trained on VoxCeleb2, achieves a 4.5% WER, outperforming prior SOTA methods trained only on LRS3, which report a 21.4% WER. Additionally, we propose a new objective metric, TimeSync, specifically designed to measure phoneme-level temporal alignment between generated and reference speech, further ensuring synchronization quality. Demo: https://apple.github.io/visatronic-demo/

Paperid: 1422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17465.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) assistants holds significant promise for enhancing human workflow productivity. While most agents are language-based, relying on closed-source API with text-rich meta-information (e.g., HTML or accessibility tree), they show limitations in perceiving UI visuals as humans do, highlighting the need for GUI visual agents. In this work, we develop a vision-language-action model in digital world, namely ShowUI, which features the following innovations: (i) UI-Guided Visual Token Selection to reduce computational costs by formulating screenshots as an UI connected graph, adaptively identifying their redundant relationship and serve as the criteria for token selection during self-attention blocks; (ii) Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Streaming that flexibly unifies diverse needs within GUI tasks, enabling effective management of visual-action history in navigation or pairing multi-turn query-action sequences per screenshot to enhance training efficiency; (iii) Small-scale High-quality GUI Instruction-following Datasets by careful data curation and employing a resampling strategy to address significant data type imbalances. With above components, ShowUI, a lightweight 2B model using 256K data, achieves a strong 75.1% accuracy in zero-shot screenshot grounding. Its UI-guided token selection further reduces 33% of redundant visual tokens during training and speeds up the performance by 1.4x. Navigation experiments across web Mind2Web, mobile AITW, and online MiniWob environments further underscore the effectiveness and potential of our model in advancing GUI visual agents. The models are available at https://github.com/showlab/ShowUI.

Paperid: 1423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17299.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
2D Matryoshka Training is an advanced embedding representation training approach designed to train an encoder model simultaneously across various layer-dimension setups. This method has demonstrated higher effectiveness in Semantic Text Similarity (STS) tasks over traditional training approaches when using sub-layers for embeddings. Despite its success, discrepancies exist between two published implementations, leading to varied comparative results with baseline models. In this reproducibility study, we implement and evaluate both versions of 2D Matryoshka Training on STS tasks and extend our analysis to retrieval tasks. Our findings indicate that while both versions achieve higher effectiveness than traditional Matryoshka training on sub-dimensions, and traditional full-sized model training approaches, they do not outperform models trained separately on specific sub-layer and sub-dimension setups. Moreover, these results generalize well to retrieval tasks, both in supervised (MSMARCO) and zero-shot (BEIR) settings. Further explorations of different loss computations reveals more suitable implementations for retrieval tasks, such as incorporating full-dimension loss and training on a broader range of target dimensions. Conversely, some intuitive approaches, such as fixing document encoders to full model outputs, do not yield improvements. Our reproduction code is available at https://github.com/ielab/2DMSE-Reproduce.

Paperid: 1424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16828.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Previous works show that noisy, web-crawled image-text pairs may limit vision-language pretraining like CLIP and propose learning with synthetic captions as a promising alternative. Our work continues this effort, introducing two simple yet effective designs to better leverage richly described synthetic captions. Firstly, by observing a strong inverse effect in learning with synthetic captions -- the short synthetic captions can generally lead to MUCH higher performance than full-length ones -- we therefore fed only partial synthetic captions to the text encoder. Secondly, we incorporate an autoregressive captioner to mimic the recaptioning process -- by conditioning on the paired image input and web-crawled text description, the captioner learns to predict the full-length synthetic caption generated by advanced MLLMs. Experiments show that our framework significantly improves zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks, setting new SOTA results on MSCOCO and Flickr30K. Moreover, such trained vision encoders can enhance the visual capability of LLaVA, showing strong improvements on a range of MLLM benchmarks. Our project page is https://ucsc-vlaa.github.io/CLIPS/.

Paperid: 1425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16668.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot object pose estimation enables the retrieval of object poses from images without necessitating object-specific training. In recent approaches this is facilitated by vision foundation models (VFM), which are pre-trained models that are effectively general-purpose feature extractors. The characteristics exhibited by these VFMs vary depending on the training data, network architecture, and training paradigm. The prevailing choice in this field are self-supervised Vision Transformers (ViT). This study assesses the influence of Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) backbones on zero-shot pose estimation. In order to facilitate a comparison between the two families of models on a common ground we adopt and modify a recent approach. Therefore, a template-based multi-staged method for estimating poses in a zero-shot fashion using LDMs is presented. The efficacy of the proposed approach is empirically evaluated on three standard datasets for object-specific 6DoF pose estimation. The experiments demonstrate an Average Recall improvement of up to 27% over the ViT baseline. The source code is available at: https://github.com/BvG1993/DZOP.

Paperid: 1426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16213.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Endeavors have been made to explore Large Language Models for video analysis (Video-LLMs), particularly in understanding and interpreting long videos. However, existing Video-LLMs still face challenges in effectively integrating the rich and diverse audio-visual information inherent in long videos, which is crucial for comprehensive understanding. This raises the question: how can we leverage embedded audio-visual information to enhance long video understanding? Therefore, (i) we introduce SAVEn-Vid, the first-ever long audio-visual video dataset comprising over 58k audio-visual instructions. (ii) From the model perspective, we propose a time-aware Audio-Visual Large Language Model (AV-LLM), SAVEnVideo, fine-tuned on SAVEn-Vid. (iii) Besides, we present AVBench, a benchmark containing 2,500 QAs designed to evaluate models on enhanced audio-visual comprehension tasks within long video, challenging their ability to handle intricate audio-visual interactions. Experiments on AVBench reveal the limitations of current AV-LLMs. Experiments also demonstrate that SAVEnVideo outperforms the best Video-LLM by 3.61% on the zero-shot long video task (Video-MME) and surpasses the leading audio-visual LLM by 1.29% on the zero-shot audio-visual task (Music-AVQA). Consequently, at the 7B parameter scale, SAVEnVideo can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our dataset and code will be released at https://ljungang.github.io/SAVEn-Vid/ upon acceptance.

Paperid: 1427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16196.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in large foundation models have enabled the possibility of transferring knowledge pre-trained on vast datasets to domains with limited data availability. Agriculture is one of the domains that lacks sufficient data. This study proposes a framework to train effective, domain-specific, small models from foundation models without manual annotation. Our approach begins with SDM (Segmentation-Description-Matching), a stage that leverages two foundation models: SAM2 (Segment Anything in Images and Videos) for segmentation and OpenCLIP (Open Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) for zero-shot open-vocabulary classification. In the second stage, a novel knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to distill compact, edge-deployable models from SDM, enhancing both inference speed and perception accuracy. The complete method, termed SDM-D (Segmentation-Description-Matching-Distilling), demonstrates strong performance across various fruit detection tasks object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation) without manual annotation. It nearly matches the performance of models trained with abundant labels. Notably, SDM-D outperforms open-set detection methods such as Grounding SAM and YOLO-World on all tested fruit detection datasets. Additionally, we introduce MegaFruits, a comprehensive fruit segmentation dataset encompassing over 25,000 images, and all code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/AgRoboticsResearch/SDM-D.git.

Paperid: 1428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16072.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce LOcc, an effective and generalizable framework for open-vocabulary occupancy (OVO) prediction. Previous approaches typically supervise the networks through coarse voxel-to-text correspondences via image features as intermediates or noisy and sparse correspondences from voxel-based model-view projections. To alleviate the inaccurate supervision, we propose a semantic transitive labeling pipeline to generate dense and fine-grained 3D language occupancy ground truth. Our pipeline presents a feasible way to dig into the valuable semantic information of images, transferring text labels from images to LiDAR point clouds and ultimately to voxels, to establish precise voxel-to-text correspondences. By replacing the original prediction head of supervised occupancy models with a geometry head for binary occupancy states and a language head for language features, LOcc effectively uses the generated language ground truth to guide the learning of 3D language volume. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our transitive semantic labeling pipeline can produce more accurate pseudo-labeled ground truth, diminishing labor-intensive human annotations. Additionally, we validate LOcc across various architectures, where all models consistently outperform state-of-the-art zero-shot occupancy prediction approaches on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset.

Paperid: 1429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16063.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In-Context Operator Networks (ICONs) have demonstrated the ability to learn operators across diverse partial differential equations using few-shot, in-context learning. However, existing ICONs process each spatial point as an individual token, severely limiting computational efficiency when handling dense data in higher spatial dimensions. We propose Vision In-Context Operator Networks (VICON), which integrates vision transformer architectures to efficiently process 2D data through patch-wise operations while preserving ICON's adaptability to multiphysics systems and varying timesteps. Evaluated across three fluid dynamics benchmarks, VICON significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines: DPOT and MPP, reducing the averaged last-step rollout error by 37.9% compared to DPOT and 44.7% compared to MPP, while requiring only 72.5% and 34.8% of their respective inference times. VICON naturally supports flexible rollout strategies with varying timestep strides, enabling immediate deployment in imperfect measurement systems where sampling frequencies may differ or frames might be dropped - common challenges in real-world settings - without requiring retraining or interpolation. In these realistic scenarios, VICON exhibits remarkable robustness, experiencing only 24.41% relative performance degradation compared to 71.37%-74.49% degradation in baseline methods, demonstrating its versatility for deploying in realistic applications. Our scripts for processing datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Eydcao/VICON.

Paperid: 1430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15869.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, have enabled the task of open-vocabulary segmentation. CLIP demonstrates impressive zero-shot capabilities in various downstream tasks that require holistic image understanding. However, due to its image-level pre-training, CLIP struggles to capture local details, resulting in poor performance in segmentation tasks. Our analysis reveals that anomaly tokens emerge during the forward pass, drawing excessive attention from normal patch tokens, thereby diminishing spatial awareness. To address this issue, we propose Self-Calibrated CLIP (SC-CLIP), a training-free method that calibrates CLIP to produce finer representations while preserving its original generalization ability, without introducing new parameters or relying on additional backbones. Specifically, we first identify and resolve the anomaly tokens to mitigate their negative impact. Next, we enhance feature discriminability and attention correlation by leveraging the semantic consistency found in CLIP's intermediate features. Furthermore, we explore how to effectively employ multi-level feature fusion under the training-free setting. Collectively, these strategies enhance CLIP's feature representation with greater granularity and coherence. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SC-CLIP, achieving state-of-the-art results across all datasets and surpassing previous methods by 9.5%. Notably, SC-CLIP boosts the performance of vanilla CLIP ViT-L/14 by 6.8 times. Our source code is available at https://github.com/SuleBai/SC-CLIP.

Paperid: 1431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15736.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to detect OOD images from unseen classes with only a few labeled in-distribution (ID) images. To detect OOD images and classify ID samples, prior methods have been proposed by regarding the background regions of ID samples as the OOD knowledge and performing OOD regularization and ID classification optimization. However, the gradient conflict still exists between ID classification optimization and OOD regularization caused by biased recognition. To address this issue, we present Gradient Aligned Context Optimization (GaCoOp) to mitigate this gradient conflict. Specifically, we decompose the optimization gradient to identify the scenario when the conflict occurs. Then we alleviate the conflict in inner ID samples and optimize the prompts via leveraging gradient projection. Extensive experiments over the large-scale ImageNet OOD detection benchmark demonstrate that our GaCoOp can effectively mitigate the conflict and achieve great performance. Code will be available at https://github.com/BaoshunWq/ood-GaCoOp.

Paperid: 1432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15577.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated significant improvements in zero-shot capabilities, including in-context learning, instruction following, and machine translation for extremely under-resourced languages (Tanzer et al., 2024). However, many languages with limited written resources rely primarily on formal descriptions of grammar and vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce a set of benchmarks to evaluate how well models can extract and classify information from the complex descriptions found in linguistic grammars. We present a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based approach that leverages these descriptions for downstream tasks such as machine translation. Our benchmarks encompass linguistic descriptions for 248 languages across 142 language families, focusing on typological features from WALS and Grambank. This set of benchmarks offers the first comprehensive evaluation of language models' in-context ability to accurately interpret and extract linguistic features, providing a critical resource for scaling NLP to low-resource languages. The code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/al-the-eigenvalue/RAG-on-grammars}.

Paperid: 1433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15349.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning increasingly relies on massive data with substantial costs for storage, annotation, and model training. To reduce these costs, coreset selection aims to find a representative subset of data to train models while ideally performing on par with the full data training. State-of-the-art coreset methods use carefully-designed criteria to quantify the importance of each data example via ground truth labels and dataset-specific training, then select examples whose scores lie in a certain range to construct a coreset. These methods work well in their respective settings, however, they cannot select data that are unlabeled, which is the majority of real-world data. To that end, this paper motivates and formalizes the problem of unlabeled coreset selection to enable greater scale and reduce annotation costs for deep learning. As a solution, we develop Zero-Shot Coreset Selection (ZCore), a method that efficiently selects coresets without ground truth labels or training on candidate data. Instead, ZCore uses existing foundation models to generate a zero-shot embedding space for unlabeled data, then quantifies the relative importance of each example based on overall coverage and redundancy within the embedding distribution. We evaluate ZCore on four datasets and outperform several state-of-the-art label-based methods, leading to a strong baseline for future research in unlabeled coreset selection. On ImageNet, ZCore selections achieve a downstream model accuracy of 53.99% with only 10% training data, which outperforms label-based methods while removing annotation requirements for 1.15 million images. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/voxel51/zcore.

Paperid: 1434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15232.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated substantial success in self-supervised representation learning for vision tasks. However, effectively adapting VLMs to downstream applications remains challenging, as their accuracy often depends on time-intensive and expertise-demanding prompt engineering, while full model fine-tuning is costly. This is particularly true for biomedical images, which, unlike natural images, typically suffer from limited annotated datasets, unintuitive image contrasts, and nuanced visual features. Recent prompt learning techniques, such as Context Optimization (CoOp) intend to tackle these issues, but still fall short in generalizability. Meanwhile, explorations in prompt learning for biomedical image analysis are still highly limited. In this work, we propose BiomedCoOp, a novel prompt learning framework that enables efficient adaptation of BiomedCLIP for accurate and highly generalizable few-shot biomedical image classification. Our approach achieves effective prompt context learning by leveraging semantic consistency with average prompt ensembles from Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge distillation with a statistics-based prompt selection strategy. We conducted comprehensive validation of our proposed framework on 11 medical datasets across 9 modalities and 10 organs against existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant improvements in both accuracy and generalizability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/BiomedCoOp.

Paperid: 1435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14913.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning diverse policies for non-prehensile manipulation is essential for improving skill transfer and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios. In this work, we enhance exploration through a two-fold approach within a hybrid framework that tackles both discrete and continuous action spaces. First, we model the continuous motion parameter policy as a diffusion model, and second, we incorporate this into a maximum entropy reinforcement learning framework that unifies both the discrete and continuous components. The discrete action space, such as contact point selection, is optimized through Q-value function maximization, while the continuous part is guided by a diffusion-based policy. This hybrid approach leads to a principled objective, where the maximum entropy term is derived as a lower bound using structured variational inference. We propose the Hybrid Diffusion Policy algorithm (HyDo) and evaluate its performance on both simulation and zero-shot sim2real tasks. Our results show that HyDo encourages more diverse behavior policies, leading to significantly improved success rates across tasks - for example, increasing from 53% to 72% on a real-world 6D pose alignment task. Project page: https://leh2rng.github.io/hydo

Paperid: 1436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14743.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning presents a critical solution for cancer diagnosis in computational pathology (CPath), addressing fundamental limitations in data availability, particularly the scarcity of expert annotations and patient privacy constraints. A key challenge in this paradigm stems from the inherent disparity between the limited training set of whole slide images (WSIs) and the enormous number of contained patches, where a significant portion of these patches lacks diagnostically relevant information, potentially diluting the model's ability to learn and focus on critical diagnostic features. While recent works attempt to address this by incorporating additional knowledge, several crucial gaps hinder further progress: (1) despite the emergence of powerful pathology foundation models (FMs), their potential remains largely untapped, with most approaches limiting their use to basic feature extraction; (2) current language guidance mechanisms attempt to align text prompts with vast numbers of WSI patches all at once, struggling to leverage rich pathological semantic information. To this end, we introduce the knowledge-enhanced adaptive visual compression framework, dubbed FOCUS, which uniquely combines pathology FMs with language prior knowledge to enable a focused analysis of diagnostically relevant regions by prioritizing discriminative WSI patches. Our approach implements a progressive three-stage compression strategy: we first leverage FMs for global visual redundancy elimination, and integrate compressed features with language prompts for semantic relevance assessment, then perform neighbor-aware visual token filtering while preserving spatial coherence. Extensive experiments on pathological datasets spanning breast, lung, and ovarian cancers demonstrate its superior performance in few-shot pathology diagnosis. Codes are available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/FOCUS.

Paperid: 1437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14594.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D visual grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in a 3D scene with natural language descriptions. Supervised methods have achieved decent accuracy, but have a closed vocabulary and limited language understanding ability. Zero-shot methods utilize large language models (LLMs) to handle natural language descriptions, where the LLM either produces grounding results directly or generates programs that compute results (symbolically). In this work, we propose a zero-shot method that reformulates the 3DVG task as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), where the variables and constraints represent objects and their spatial relations, respectively. This allows a global symbolic reasoning of all relevant objects, producing grounding results of both the target and anchor objects. Moreover, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by handling negation- and counting-based queries with only minor extra coding efforts. Our system, Constraint Satisfaction Visual Grounding (CSVG), has been extensively evaluated on the public datasets ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets using only open-source LLMs. Results show the effectiveness of CSVG and superior grounding accuracy over current state-of-the-art zero-shot 3DVG methods with improvements of $+7.0\%$ (Acc@0.5 score) and $+11.2\%$ on the ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets, respectively. The code of our system is available at https://asig-x.github.io/csvg_web.

Paperid: 1438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14401.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for video understanding. However, achieving high fidelity in zero-shot video tasks remains challenging. Traditional video processing methods rely heavily on fine-tuning to capture nuanced spatial-temporal details, which incurs significant data and computation costs. In contrast, training-free approaches, though efficient, often lack robustness in preserving context-rich features across complex video content. To this end, we propose DYTO, a novel dynamic token merging framework for zero-shot video understanding that adaptively optimizes token efficiency while preserving crucial scene details. DYTO integrates a hierarchical frame selection and a bipartite token merging strategy to dynamically cluster key frames and selectively compress token sequences, striking a balance between computational efficiency with semantic richness. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DYTO, achieving superior performance compared to both fine-tuned and training-free methods and setting a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot video understanding.

Paperid: 1439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14343.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) under-perform on low-resource languages due to limited training data. We present a method to efficiently collect text data for low-resource languages from the entire Common Crawl corpus. Our approach, UnifiedCrawl, filters and extracts common crawl using minimal compute resources, yielding mono-lingual datasets much larger than previously available sources. We demonstrate that leveraging this data to fine-tuning multilingual LLMs via efficient adapter methods (QLoRA) significantly boosts performance on the low-resource language, while minimizing VRAM usage. Our experiments show large improvements in language modeling perplexity and an increase in few-shot prompting scores. Our work and released source code provide an affordable approach to improve LLMs for low-resource languages using consumer hardware. Our source code is available here at https://github.com/bethelmelesse/unifiedcrawl.

Paperid: 1440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14295.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generating high-quality stereo videos that mimic human binocular vision requires consistent depth perception and temporal coherence across frames. Despite advances in image and video synthesis using diffusion models, producing high-quality stereo videos remains a challenging task due to the difficulty of maintaining consistent temporal and spatial coherence between left and right views. We introduce StereoCrafter-Zero, a novel framework for zero-shot stereo video generation that leverages video diffusion priors without requiring paired training data. Our key innovations include a noisy restart strategy to initialize stereo-aware latent representations and an iterative refinement process that progressively harmonizes the latent space, addressing issues like temporal flickering and view inconsistencies. In addition, we propose the use of dissolved depth maps to streamline latent space operations by reducing high-frequency depth information. Our comprehensive evaluations, including quantitative metrics and user studies, demonstrate that StereoCrafter-Zero produces high-quality stereo videos with enhanced depth consistency and temporal smoothness, even when depth estimations are imperfect. Our framework is robust and adaptable across various diffusion models, setting a new benchmark for zero-shot stereo video generation and enabling more immersive visual experiences. Our code is in https://github.com/shijianjian/StereoCrafter-Zero.

Paperid: 1441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14053.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Stereo matching serves as a cornerstone in 3D vision, aiming to establish pixel-wise correspondences between stereo image pairs for depth recovery. Despite remarkable progress driven by deep neural architectures, current models often exhibit severe performance degradation when deployed in unseen domains, primarily due to the limited diversity of training data. In this work, we introduce StereoAnything, a data-centric framework that substantially enhances the zero-shot generalization capability of existing stereo models. Rather than devising yet another specialized architecture, we scale stereo training to an unprecedented level by systematically unifying heterogeneous stereo sources: (1) curated labeled datasets covering diverse environments, and (2) large-scale synthetic stereo pairs generated from unlabeled monocular images. Our mixed-data strategy delivers consistent and robust learning signals across domains, effectively mitigating dataset bias. Extensive zero-shot evaluations on four public benchmarks demonstrate that Stereo Anything achieves state-of-the-art generalization. This work paves the way towards truly universal stereo matching, offering a scalable data paradigm applicable to any stereo image pair. We extensively evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of our model on four public datasets, showcasing its impressive ability to generalize to any stereo image pair. Code is available at https://github.com/XiandaGuo/OpenStereo.

Paperid: 1442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13961.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Due to the singularity of real-world paired datasets and the complexity of low-light environments, this leads to supervised methods lacking a degree of scene generalisation. Meanwhile, limited by poor lighting and content guidance, existing zero-shot methods cannot handle unknown severe degradation well. To address this problem, we will propose a new zero-shot low-light enhancement method to compensate for the lack of light and structural information in the diffusion sampling process by effectively combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains to construct rich a priori information. The key to the inspiration comes from the similarity between the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains: both light and structure information are closely related to specific frequency domain regions, respectively. Therefore, by transferring the diffusion process to the wavelet low-frequency domain and combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains by continuously decomposing them in the inverse process, the constructed rich illumination prior is utilised to guide the image generation enhancement process. Sufficient experiments show that the framework is robust and effective in various scenarios. The code will be available at: \href{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}.

Paperid: 1443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13836.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) exhibits strong zero-shot classification ability on various image-level tasks, leading to the research to adapt CLIP for pixel-level open-vocabulary semantic segmentation without additional training. The key is to improve spatial representation of image-level CLIP, such as replacing self-attention map at last layer with self-self attention map or vision foundation model based attention map. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical framework, named CLIPer, that hierarchically improves spatial representation of CLIP. The proposed CLIPer includes an early-layer fusion module and a fine-grained compensation module. We observe that, the embeddings and attention maps at early layers can preserve spatial structural information. Inspired by this, we design the early-layer fusion module to generate segmentation map with better spatial coherence. Afterwards, we employ a fine-grained compensation module to compensate the local details using the self-attention maps of diffusion model. We conduct the experiments on seven segmentation datasets. Our proposed CLIPer achieves the state-of-the-art performance on these datasets. For instance, using ViT-L, CLIPer has the mIoU of 69.8% and 43.3% on VOC and COCO Object, outperforming ProxyCLIP by 9.2% and 4.1% respectively.

Paperid: 1444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13591.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents. While general VLMs, such as GPT-4V, demonstrate strong performance across various tasks, their proficiency in GUI grounding remains suboptimal. Recent studies have focused on fine-tuning these models specifically for zero-shot GUI grounding, yielding significant improvements over baseline performance. We introduce a visual prompting framework that employs an iterative narrowing mechanism to further improve the performance of both general and fine-tuned models in GUI grounding. For evaluation, we tested our method on a comprehensive benchmark comprising various UI platforms and provided the code to reproduce our results.

Paperid: 1445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13550.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Why don't we have foundation models in 3D yet? A key limitation is data scarcity. For 3D object part segmentation, existing datasets are small in size and lack diversity. We show that it is possible to break this data barrier by building a data engine powered by 2D foundation models. Our data engine automatically annotates any number of object parts: 1755x more unique part types than existing datasets combined. By training on our annotated data with a simple contrastive objective, we obtain an open-world model that generalizes to any part in any object based on any text query. Even when evaluated zero-shot, we outperform existing methods on the datasets they train on. We achieve 260% improvement in mIoU and boost speed by 6x to 300x. Our scaling analysis confirms that this generalization stems from the data scale, which underscores the impact of our data engine. Finally, to advance general-category open-world 3D part segmentation, we release a benchmark covering a wide range of objects and parts. Project website: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/find3dsite/

Paperid: 1446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12602.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in medical imaging. Although supervised learning techniques have proven to be effective in performing this task, they heavily depend on large amounts of annotated training data. The recently introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) enables prompt-based segmentation and offers zero-shot generalization to unfamiliar objects. In our work, we leverage SAM's abstract object understanding for medical image segmentation to provide pseudo labels for semi-supervised learning, thereby mitigating the need for extensive annotated training data. Our approach refines initial segmentations that are derived from a limited amount of annotated data (comprising up to 43 cases) by extracting bounding boxes and seed points as prompts forwarded to SAM. Thus, it enables the generation of dense segmentation masks as pseudo labels for unlabelled data. The results show that training with our pseudo labels yields an improvement in Dice score from $74.29\,\%$ to $84.17\,\%$ and from $66.63\,\%$ to $74.87\,\%$ for the segmentation of bones of the paediatric wrist and teeth in dental radiographs, respectively. As a result, our method outperforms intensity-based post-processing methods, state-of-the-art supervised learning for segmentation (nnU-Net), and the semi-supervised mean teacher approach. Our Code is available on GitHub.

Paperid: 1447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12591.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced the integration of visual and linguistic modalities, establishing themselves as the dominant paradigm for visual-language tasks. Current approaches like chain of thought (CoT) reasoning have augmented the cognitive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to MLLMs is hindered by heightened risks of hallucination in cross-modality comprehension. In this paper, we find that the thinking while looking paradigm in current multimodal CoT approaches--where reasoning chains are generated alongside visual input--fails to mitigate hallucinations caused by misleading images. To address these limitations, we propose the Visual Inference Chain (VIC) framework, a novel approach that constructs reasoning chains using textual context alone before introducing visual input, effectively reducing cross-modal biases and enhancing multimodal reasoning accuracy. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that VIC significantly improves zero-shot performance across various vision-related tasks, mitigating hallucinations while refining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Our code repository can be found at https://github.com/Terry-Xu-666/visual_inference_chain.

Paperid: 1448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12584.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions of attributes and objects learned from seen compositions. Previous works disentangle attributes and objects by extracting shared and exclusive parts between the image pair sharing the same attribute (object), as well as aligning them with pretrained word embeddings to improve unseen attribute-object recognition. Despite the significant achievements of existing efforts, they are hampered by three limitations: (1) The efficacy of disentanglement is compromised due to the influence of the background and the intricate entanglement of attributes with objects in the same parts. (2) Existing word embeddings fail to capture complex multimodal semantic information. (3) Overconfidence exhibited by existing models in seen compositions hinders their generalization to novel compositions. Being aware of these, we propose a novel framework named multimodal large language model (MLLM) embeddings and attribute smoothing guided disentanglement for CZSL. First, we leverage feature adaptive aggregation modules to mitigate the impact of background, and utilize learnable condition masks to capture multi-granularity features for disentanglement. Moreover, the last hidden states of MLLM are employed as word embeddings for their superior representation capabilities. Furthermore, we propose attribute smoothing with auxiliary attributes generated by the large language model (LLM) for seen compositions to address the overconfidence challenge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging datasets. The source code will be available at https://github.com/xud-yan/Trident .

Paperid: 1449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12309.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Novel-view synthesis (NVS) approaches play a critical role in vast scene reconstruction. However, these methods rely heavily on dense image inputs and prolonged training times, making them unsuitable where computational resources are limited. Additionally, few-shot methods often struggle with poor reconstruction quality in vast environments. This paper presents DGTR, a novel distributed framework for efficient Gaussian reconstruction for sparse-view vast scenes. Our approach divides the scene into regions, processed independently by drones with sparse image inputs. Using a feed-forward Gaussian model, we predict high-quality Gaussian primitives, followed by a global alignment algorithm to ensure geometric consistency. Synthetic views and depth priors are incorporated to further enhance training, while a distillation-based model aggregation mechanism enables efficient reconstruction. Our method achieves high-quality large-scale scene reconstruction and novel-view synthesis in significantly reduced training times, outperforming existing approaches in both speed and scalability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on vast aerial scenes, achieving high-quality results within minutes. Code will released on our [https://3d-aigc.github.io/DGTR].

Paperid: 1450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11922.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has demonstrated strong performance in object segmentation tasks but faces challenges in visual object tracking, particularly when managing crowded scenes with fast-moving or self-occluding objects. Furthermore, the fixed-window memory approach in the original model does not consider the quality of memories selected to condition the image features for the next frame, leading to error propagation in videos. This paper introduces SAMURAI, an enhanced adaptation of SAM 2 specifically designed for visual object tracking. By incorporating temporal motion cues with the proposed motion-aware memory selection mechanism, SAMURAI effectively predicts object motion and refines mask selection, achieving robust, accurate tracking without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. SAMURAI operates in real-time and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance across diverse benchmark datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize without fine-tuning. In evaluations, SAMURAI achieves significant improvements in success rate and precision over existing trackers, with a 7.1% AUC gain on LaSOT$_{\text{ext}}$ and a 3.5% AO gain on GOT-10k. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods on LaSOT, underscoring its robustness in complex tracking scenarios and its potential for real-world applications in dynamic environments.

Paperid: 1451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11839.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner. Sampling the episodes under a simulated environment is a promising way for large-scale collection while existing simulators fail to high-fidelity modeling on texture and physics. To address these limitations, we introduce the RoboGSim, a real2sim2real robotic simulator, powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting and the physics engine. RoboGSim mainly includes four parts: Gaussian Reconstructor, Digital Twins Builder, Scene Composer, and Interactive Engine. It can synthesize the simulated data with novel views, objects, trajectories, and scenes. RoboGSim also provides an online, reproducible, and safe evaluation for different manipulation policies. The real2sim and sim2real transfer experiments show a high consistency in the texture and physics. We compared the test results of RoboGSim data and real robot data on both RoboGSim and real robot platforms. The experimental results show that the RoboGSim data model can achieve zero-shot performance on the real robot, with results comparable to real robot data. Additionally, in experiments with novel perspectives and novel scenes, the RoboGSim data model performed even better on the real robot than the real robot data model. This not only helps reduce the sim2real gap but also addresses the limitations of real robot data collection, such as its single-source and high cost. We hope RoboGSim serves as a closed-loop simulator for fair comparison on policy learning. More information can be found on our project page https://robogsim.github.io/.

Paperid: 1452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11351.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to leverage additional semantic information to recognize unseen classes. To transfer knowledge from seen to unseen classes, most ZSL methods often learn a shared embedding space by simply aligning visual embeddings with semantic prototypes. However, methods trained under this paradigm often struggle to learn robust embedding space because they align the two modalities in an isolated manner among classes, which ignore the crucial class relationship during the alignment process. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a Visual-Semantic Graph Matching Net, termed as VSGMN, which leverages semantic relationships among classes to aid in visual-semantic embedding. VSGMN employs a Graph Build Network (GBN) and a Graph Matching Network (GMN) to achieve two-stage visual-semantic alignment. Specifically, GBN first utilizes an embedding-based approach to build visual and semantic graphs in the semantic space and align the embedding with its prototype for first-stage alignment. Additionally, to supplement unseen class relations in these graphs, GBN also build the unseen class nodes based on semantic relationships. In the second stage, GMN continuously integrates neighbor and cross-graph information into the constructed graph nodes, and aligns the node relationships between the two graphs under the class relationship constraint. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that VSGMN achieves superior performance in both conventional and generalized ZSL scenarios. The implementation of our VSGMN and experimental results are available at github: https://github.com/dbwfd/VSGMN

Paperid: 1453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10821.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pretraining molecular representations is crucial for drug and material discovery. Recent methods focus on learning representations from geometric structures, effectively capturing 3D position information. Yet, they overlook the rich information in biomedical texts, which detail molecules' properties and substructures. With this in mind, we set up a data collection effort for 200K pairs of ground-state geometric structures and biomedical texts, resulting in a PubChem3D dataset. Based on this dataset, we propose the GeomCLIP framework to enhance for multi-modal representation learning from molecular structures and biomedical text. During pre-training, we design two types of tasks, i.e., multimodal representation alignment and unimodal denoising pretraining, to align the 3D geometric encoder with textual information and, at the same time, preserve its original representation power. Experimental results show the effectiveness of GeomCLIP in various tasks such as molecular property prediction, zero-shot text-molecule retrieval, and 3D molecule captioning. Our code and collected dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/xiaocui3737/GeomCLIP}

Paperid: 1454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10745.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (ZSAR), aligning skeleton features with the text features of action labels is essential for accurately predicting unseen actions. ZSAR faces a fundamental challenge in bridging the modality gap between the two-kind features, which severely limits generalization to unseen actions. Previous methods focus on direct alignment between skeleton and text latent spaces, but the modality gaps between these spaces hinder robust generalization learning. Motivated by the success of diffusion models in multi-modal alignment (e.g., text-to-image, text-to-video), we firstly present a diffusion-based skeleton-text alignment framework for ZSAR. Our approach, Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching (TDSM), focuses on cross-alignment power of diffusion models rather than their generative capability. Specifically, TDSM aligns skeleton features with text prompts by incorporating text features into the reverse diffusion process, where skeleton features are denoised under text guidance, forming a unified skeleton-text latent space for robust matching. To enhance discriminative power, we introduce a triplet diffusion (TD) loss that encourages our TDSM to correct skeleton-text matches while pushing them apart for different action classes. Our TDSM significantly outperforms very recent state-of-the-art methods with significantly large margins of 2.36%-point to 13.05%-point, demonstrating superior accuracy and scalability in zero-shot settings through effective skeleton-text matching.

Paperid: 1455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10309.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current image stitching methods often produce noticeable seams in challenging scenarios such as uneven hue and large parallax. To tackle this problem, we propose the Reference-Driven Inpainting Stitcher (RDIStitcher), which reformulates the image fusion and rectangling as a reference-based inpainting model, incorporating a larger modification fusion area and stronger modification intensity than previous methods. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised model training method, which enables the implementation of RDIStitcher without requiring labeled data by fine-tuning a Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion model. Recognizing difficulties in assessing the quality of stitched images, we present the Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)-based metrics, offering a new perspective on evaluating stitched image quality. Compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances content coherence and seamless transitions in the stitched images. Especially in the zero-shot experiments, our method exhibits strong generalization capabilities. Code: https://github.com/yayoyo66/RDIStitcher

Paperid: 1456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10086.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to assign semantic labels to each pixel without being constrained by a predefined set of categories. While Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in zero-shot classification, it struggles to align image patches with category embeddings because of its incoherent patch correlations. This study reveals that inter-class correlations are the main reason for impairing CLIP's segmentation performance. Accordingly, we propose CorrCLIP, which reconstructs the scope and value of patch correlations. Specifically, CorrCLIP leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to define the scope of patch interactions, reducing inter-class correlations. To mitigate the problem that SAM-generated masks may contain patches belonging to different classes, CorrCLIP incorporates self-supervised models to compute coherent similarity values, suppressing the weight of inter-class correlations. Additionally, we introduce two additional branches to strengthen patch features' spatial details and semantic representation. Finally, we update segmentation maps with SAM-generated masks to improve spatial consistency. Based on the improvement across patch correlations, feature representations, and segmentation maps, CorrCLIP achieves superior performance across eight benchmarks. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zdk258/CorrCLIP.

Paperid: 1457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10070.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) methods, which develop source-domain training strategies to enhance model transferability, face challenges with large-scale pre-trained models (LMs) due to inaccessible source data and training strategies. Moreover, fine-tuning LMs for CDFSL demands substantial computational resources, limiting practicality. This paper addresses the source-free CDFSL (SF-CDFSL) problem, tackling few-shot learning (FSL) in the target domain using only pre-trained models and a few target samples without source data or strategies. To overcome the challenge of inaccessible source data, this paper introduces Step-wise Distribution Alignment Guided Style Prompt Tuning (StepSPT), which implicitly narrows domain gaps through prediction distribution optimization. StepSPT proposes a style prompt to align target samples with the desired distribution and adopts a dual-phase optimization process. In the external process, a step-wise distribution alignment strategy factorizes prediction distribution optimization into a multi-step alignment problem to tune the style prompt. In the internal process, the classifier is updated using standard cross-entropy loss. Evaluations on five datasets demonstrate that StepSPT outperforms existing prompt tuning-based methods and SOTAs. Ablation studies further verify its effectiveness. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xuhuali-mxj/StepSPT.

Paperid: 1458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08334.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent multimodal retrieval methods have endowed text-based retrievers with multimodal capabilities by utilizing pre-training strategies for visual-text alignment. They often directly fuse the two modalities for cross-reference during the alignment to understand multimodal queries. However, existing methods often overlook crucial visual information due to a text-dominant issue, which overly depends on text-driven signals. In this paper, we introduce MIRe, a retrieval framework that achieves modality interaction without fusing textual features during the alignment. Our method allows the textual query to attend to visual embeddings while not feeding text-driven signals back into the visual representations. Additionally, we construct a pre-training dataset for multimodal query retrieval by transforming concise question-answer pairs into extended passages. Our experiments demonstrate that our pre-training strategy significantly enhances the understanding of multimodal queries, resulting in strong performance across four multimodal retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings. Moreover, our ablation studies and analyses explicitly verify the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating the text-dominant issue. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/yeongjoonJu/MIRe

Paperid: 1459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07186.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) prompted with text and audio have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various auditory tasks, including speech, music, and general audio, showing emergent abilities on unseen tasks. However, their potential has yet to be fully demonstrated in bioacoustics tasks, such as detecting animal vocalizations in large recordings, classifying rare and endangered species, and labeling context and behavior -- tasks that are crucial for conservation, biodiversity monitoring, and animal behavior studies. In this work, we present NatureLM-audio, the first audio-language foundation model specifically designed for bioacoustics. Our training dataset consists of carefully curated text-audio pairs spanning bioacoustics, speech, and music, designed to address the field's limited availability of annotated data. We demonstrate successful transfer of learned representations from music and speech to bioacoustics, and our model shows promising generalization to unseen taxa and tasks. We evaluate NatureLM-audio on a novel benchmark (BEANS-Zero) and it sets a new state of the art on several bioacoustics tasks, including zero-shot classification of unseen species. To advance bioacoustics research, we release our model weights, benchmark data, and open-source the code for training and benchmark data generation and model training.

Paperid: 1460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07184.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D part segmentation is a crucial and challenging task in 3D perception, playing a vital role in applications such as robotics, 3D generation, and 3D editing. Recent methods harness the powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs) for 2D-to-3D knowledge distillation, achieving zero-shot 3D part segmentation. However, these methods are limited by their reliance on text prompts, which restricts the scalability to large-scale unlabeled datasets and the flexibility in handling part ambiguities. In this work, we introduce SAMPart3D, a scalable zero-shot 3D part segmentation framework that segments any 3D object into semantic parts at multiple granularities, without requiring predefined part label sets as text prompts. For scalability, we use text-agnostic vision foundation models to distill a 3D feature extraction backbone, allowing scaling to large unlabeled 3D datasets to learn rich 3D priors. For flexibility, we distill scale-conditioned part-aware 3D features for 3D part segmentation at multiple granularities. Once the segmented parts are obtained from the scale-conditioned part-aware 3D features, we use VLMs to assign semantic labels to each part based on the multi-view renderings. Compared to previous methods, our SAMPart3D can scale to the recent large-scale 3D object dataset Objaverse and handle complex, non-ordinary objects. Additionally, we contribute a new 3D part segmentation benchmark to address the lack of diversity and complexity of objects and parts in existing benchmarks. Experiments show that our SAMPart3D significantly outperforms existing zero-shot 3D part segmentation methods, and can facilitate various applications such as part-level editing and interactive segmentation.

Paperid: 1461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07066.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Network pruning focuses on computational techniques that aim to reduce a given model's computational cost by removing a subset of its parameters while having minimal impact on performance. Throughout the last decade, the most widely used pruning paradigm has been pruning and re-training, which nowadays is inconvenient due to the vast amount of pre-trained models, which are in any case too expensive to re-train. In this paper, we exploit functional information from dense pre-trained models, i.e., their activations, to obtain sparse models that maximize the activations' alignment w.r.t. their corresponding dense models. Hence, we propose \textsc{NeuroAL}, a \emph{top-up} algorithm that can be used on top of any given pruning algorithm for LLMs, which modifies the block-wise and row-wise sparsity exploiting information from both the dense model and its sparse version to maximize the \emph{neuron alignment} among activations. Differently from existing methods, our approach adaptively selects the best hyperparameters for the block-wise and row-wise sparsity ratios w.r.t. the model and the desired sparsity, and requires \emph{no re-training}. We test our method over 276 cases combining four LLM families, three sparsity ratios, and ten language tasks (three language modeling and seven zero-shot datasets), showing how it consistently outperforms the latest state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance-runtime trade-off. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/eliacunegatti/NeuroAL}{https://github.com/eliacunegatti/NeuroAL}.

Paperid: 1462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06966.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
When fine-tuning zero-shot models like CLIP, our desideratum is for the fine-tuned model to excel in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD). Recently, ensemble-based models (ESM) have been shown to offer significant robustness improvement, while preserving high ID accuracy. However, our study finds that ESMs do not solve the ID-OOD trade-offs: they achieve peak performance for ID and OOD accuracy at different mixing coefficients. When optimized for OOD accuracy, the ensemble model exhibits a noticeable decline in ID accuracy, and vice versa. In contrast, we propose a sample-wise ensembling technique that can simultaneously attain the best ID and OOD accuracy without the trade-offs. Specifically, we construct a Zero-Shot Failure (ZSF) set containing training samples incorrectly predicted by the zero-shot model. For each test sample, we calculate its distance to the ZSF set and assign a higher weight to the fine-tuned model in the ensemble if the distance is small. We term our method Variance Reduction Fine-tuning (VRF), as it effectively reduces the variance in ensemble predictions, thereby decreasing residual error. On ImageNet and five derived distribution shifts, our VRF further improves the OOD accuracy by 1.5 - 2.0 pp over the ensemble baselines while maintaining or increasing ID accuracy. VRF achieves similar large robustness gains (0.9 - 3.1 pp) on other distribution shifts benchmarks. Codes are available in https://github.com/BeierZhu/VRF.

Paperid: 1463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06921.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown powerful zero-shot transfer capabilities. But they still struggle with domain shifts and typically require labeled data to adapt to downstream tasks, which could be costly. In this work, we aim to leverage unlabeled data that naturally spans multiple domains to enhance the transferability of vision-language models. Under this unsupervised multi-domain setting, we have identified inherent model bias within CLIP, notably in its visual and text encoders. Specifically, we observe that CLIP's visual encoder tends to prioritize encoding domain over discriminative category information, meanwhile its text encoder exhibits a preference for domain-relevant classes. To mitigate this model bias, we propose a training-free and label-free feature calibration method, Unsupervised Multi-domain Feature Calibration (UMFC). UMFC estimates image-level biases from domain-specific features and text-level biases from the direction of domain transition. These biases are subsequently subtracted from original image and text features separately, to render them domain-invariant. We evaluate our method on multiple settings including transductive learning and test-time adaptation. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms CLIP and performs on par with the state-of-the-arts that need additional annotations or optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/GIT-LJc/UMFC.

Paperid: 1464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06659.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Incremental graph learning has gained significant attention for its ability to address the catastrophic forgetting problem in graph representation learning. However, traditional methods often rely on a large number of labels for node classification, which is impractical in real-world applications. This makes few-shot incremental learning on graphs a pressing need. Current methods typically require extensive training samples from meta-learning to build memory and perform intensive fine-tuning of GNN parameters, leading to high memory consumption and potential loss of previously learned knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Mecoin, an efficient method for building and maintaining memory. Mecoin employs Structured Memory Units to cache prototypes of learned categories, as well as Memory Construction Modules to update these prototypes for new categories through interactions between the nodes and the cached prototypes. Additionally, we have designed a Memory Representation Adaptation Module to store probabilities associated with each class prototype, reducing the need for parameter fine-tuning and lowering the forgetting rate. When a sample matches its corresponding class prototype, the relevant probabilities are retrieved from the MRaM. Knowledge is then distilled back into the GNN through a Graph Knowledge Distillation Module, preserving the model's memory. We analyze the effectiveness of Mecoin in terms of generalization error and explore the impact of different distillation strategies on model performance through experiments and VC-dimension analysis. Compared to other related works, Mecoin shows superior performance in accuracy and forgetting rate. Our code is publicly available on the https://github.com/Arvin0313/Mecoin-GFSCIL.git .

Paperid: 1465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06427.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to identify uncommon, deviated, or suspicious objects within graph-structured data. Existing methods generally focus on a single graph object type (node, edge, graph, etc.) and often overlook the inherent connections among different object types of graph anomalies. For instance, a money laundering transaction might involve an abnormal account and the broader community it interacts with. To address this, we present UniGAD, the first unified framework for detecting anomalies at node, edge, and graph levels jointly. Specifically, we develop the Maximum Rayleigh Quotient Subgraph Sampler (MRQSampler) that unifies multi-level formats by transferring objects at each level into graph-level tasks on subgraphs. We theoretically prove that MRQSampler maximizes the accumulated spectral energy of subgraphs (i.e., the Rayleigh quotient) to preserve the most significant anomaly information. To further unify multi-level training, we introduce a novel GraphStitch Network to integrate information across different levels, adjust the amount of sharing required at each level, and harmonize conflicting training goals. Comprehensive experiments show that UniGAD outperforms both existing GAD methods specialized for a single task and graph prompt-based approaches for multiple tasks, while also providing robust zero-shot task transferability. All codes can be found at https://github.com/lllyyq1121/UniGAD.

Paperid: 1466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06363.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In Few-Shot Learning (FSL), traditional metric-based approaches often rely on global metrics to compute similarity. However, in natural scenes, the spatial arrangement of key instances is often inconsistent across images. This spatial misalignment can result in mismatched semantic pixels, leading to inaccurate similarity measurements. To address this issue, we propose a novel method called the Layer-Wise Features Metric of Semantic-Pixel Matching (LWFM-SPM) to make finer comparisons. Our method enhances model performance through two key modules: (1) the Layer-Wise Embedding (LWE) Module, which refines the cross-correlation of image pairs to generate well-focused feature maps for each layer; (2)the Semantic-Pixel Matching (SPM) Module, which aligns critical pixels based on semantic embeddings using an assignment algorithm. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our method on four widely used few-shot classification benchmarks: miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CUB-200-2011, and CIFAR-FS. The results indicate that LWFM-SPM achieves competitive performance across these benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available on https://github.com/Halo2Tang/Code-for-LWFM-SPM.

Paperid: 1467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06071.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is crucial for detecting anomalous patterns in target datasets without using training samples, specifically in scenarios where there are distributional differences between the target domain and training data or where data scarcity arises because of restricted access. Although recently pretrained vision-language models demonstrate strong zero-shot performance across various visual tasks, they focus on learning class semantics, which makes their direct application to ZSAD challenging. To address this scenario, we propose GlocalCLIP, which uniquely separates global and local prompts and jointly optimizes them. This approach enables the object-agnostic glocal semantic prompt to effectively capture general normal and anomalous patterns without dependency on specific objects in the image. We refine the text prompts for more precise adjustments by utilizing deep-text prompt tuning in the text encoder. In the vision encoder, we apply V-V attention layers to capture detailed local image features. Finally, we introduce glocal contrastive learning to improve the complementary learning of global and local prompts, effectively detecting anomalous patterns across various domains. The generalization performance of GlocalCLIP in ZSAD was demonstrated on 15 real-world datasets from both the industrial and medical domains, achieving superior performance compared to existing methods. Code will be made available at https://github.com/YUL-git/GlocalCLIP.

Paperid: 1468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05755.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present VLMnav, an embodied framework to transform a Vision-Language Model (VLM) into an end-to-end navigation policy. In contrast to prior work, we do not rely on a separation between perception, planning, and control; instead, we use a VLM to directly select actions in one step. Surprisingly, we find that a VLM can be used as an end-to-end policy zero-shot, i.e., without any fine-tuning or exposure to navigation data. This makes our approach open-ended and generalizable to any downstream navigation task. We run an extensive study to evaluate the performance of our approach in comparison to baseline prompting methods. In addition, we perform a design analysis to understand the most impactful design decisions. Visual examples and code for our project can be found at https://jirl-upenn.github.io/VLMnav/

Paperid: 1469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05451.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

Paperid: 1470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05232.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, yet their ability to handle long-context reading remains challenging. This study explores the effectiveness of leveraging high-quality academic peer review data for fine-tuning LLMs to enhance their long-context capabilities. We compare the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) method with the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) method, demonstrating DPO's superiority and data efficiency. Our experiments show that the fine-tuned model achieves a 4.04-point improvement over phi-3 and a 2.6\% increase on the Qasper benchmark using only 2000 samples. Despite facing limitations in data scale and processing costs, this study underscores the potential of DPO and high-quality data in advancing LLM performance. Additionally, the zero-shot benchmark results indicate that aggregated high-quality human reviews are overwhelmingly preferred over LLM-generated responses, even for the most capable models like GPT-4o. This suggests that high-quality human reviews are extremely rich in information, reasoning, and long-context retrieval, capabilities that even the most advanced models have not fully captured. These findings highlight the high utility of leveraging human reviews to further advance the field.

Paperid: 1471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04989.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Methods for image-to-video generation have achieved impressive, photo-realistic quality. However, adjusting specific elements in generated videos, such as object motion or camera movement, is often a tedious process of trial and error, e.g., involving re-generating videos with different random seeds. Recent techniques address this issue by fine-tuning a pre-trained model to follow conditioning signals, such as bounding boxes or point trajectories. Yet, this fine-tuning procedure can be computationally expensive, and it requires datasets with annotated object motion, which can be difficult to procure. In this work, we introduce SG-I2V, a framework for controllable image-to-video generation that is self-guided$\unicode{x2013}$offering zero-shot control by relying solely on the knowledge present in a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model without the need for fine-tuning or external knowledge. Our zero-shot method outperforms unsupervised baselines while significantly narrowing down the performance gap with supervised models in terms of visual quality and motion fidelity. Additional details and video results are available on our project page: https://kmcode1.github.io/Projects/SG-I2V

Paperid: 1472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04571.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent progress in text-to-image models pretrained on large-scale datasets has enabled us to generate various images as long as we provide a text prompt describing what we want. Nevertheless, the availability of these models is still limited when we expect to generate images that fall into a specific domain either hard to describe or just unseen to the models. In this work, we propose DomainGallery, a few-shot domain-driven image generation method which aims at finetuning pretrained Stable Diffusion on few-shot target datasets in an attribute-centric manner. Specifically, DomainGallery features prior attribute erasure, attribute disentanglement, regularization and enhancement. These techniques are tailored to few-shot domain-driven generation in order to solve key issues that previous works have failed to settle. Extensive experiments are given to validate the superior performance of DomainGallery on a variety of domain-driven generation scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/Ldhlwh/DomainGallery.

Paperid: 1473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04282.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, but still struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple steps. While prompt-based methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can improve LLM reasoning at inference time, optimizing reasoning capabilities during training remains challenging. We introduce LaTent Reasoning Optimization (LaTRO), a principled framework that formulates reasoning as sampling from a latent distribution and optimizes it via variational approaches. LaTRO enables LLMs to concurrently improve both their reasoning process and ability to evaluate reasoning quality, without requiring external feedback or reward models. We validate LaTRO through experiments on GSM8K and ARC-Challenge datasets using multiple model architectures. On GSM8K, LaTRO improves zero-shot accuracy by an average of 12.5% over base models and 9.6% over supervised fine-tuning across Phi-3.5-mini, Mistral-7B, and Llama-3.1-8B. Our findings suggest that pre-trained LLMs possess latent reasoning capabilities that can be unlocked and enhanced through our proposed optimization approach in a self-improvement manner. The code of LaTRO is available at \url{https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/LaTRO}.

Paperid: 1474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03888.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting Hate speech moderation on global platforms poses unique challenges due to the multimodal and multilingual nature of content, along with the varying cultural perceptions. How well do current vision-language models (VLMs) navigate these nuances? To investigate this, we create the first multimodal and multilingual parallel hate speech dataset, annotated by a multicultural set of annotators, called Multi3Hate. It contains 300 parallel meme samples across 5 languages: English, German, Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin. We demonstrate that cultural background significantly affects multimodal hate speech annotation in our dataset. The average pairwise agreement among countries is just 74%, significantly lower than that of randomly selected annotator groups. Our qualitative analysis indicates that the lowest pairwise label agreement-only 67% between the USA and India-can be attributed to cultural factors. We then conduct experiments with 5 large VLMs in a zero-shot setting, finding that these models align more closely with annotations from the US than with those from other cultures, even when the memes and prompts are presented in the dominant language of the other culture. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MinhDucBui/Multi3Hate.

Paperid: 1475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03706.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present 3DGS-CD, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based method for detecting physical object rearrangements in 3D scenes. Our approach estimates 3D object-level changes by comparing two sets of unaligned images taken at different times. Leveraging 3DGS's novel view rendering and EfficientSAM's zero-shot segmentation capabilities, we detect 2D object-level changes, which are then associated and fused across views to estimate 3D change masks and object transformations. Our method can accurately identify changes in cluttered environments using sparse (as few as one) post-change images within as little as 18s. It does not rely on depth input, user instructions, pre-defined object classes, or object models -- An object is recognized simply if it has been re-arranged. Our approach is evaluated on both public and self-collected real-world datasets, achieving up to 14% higher accuracy and three orders of magnitude faster performance compared to the state-of-the-art radiance-field-based change detection method. This significant performance boost enables a broad range of downstream applications, where we highlight three key use cases: object reconstruction, robot workspace reset, and 3DGS model update. Our code and data will be made available at https://github.com/520xyxyzq/3DGS-CD.

Paperid: 1476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03637.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the substantial progress of novel view synthesis, existing methods, either based on the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or more recently 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), suffer significant degradation when the input becomes sparse. Numerous efforts have been introduced to alleviate this problem, but they still struggle to synthesize satisfactory results efficiently, especially in the large scene. In this paper, we propose SCGaussian, a Structure Consistent Gaussian Splatting method using matching priors to learn 3D consistent scene structure. Considering the high interdependence of Gaussian attributes, we optimize the scene structure in two folds: rendering geometry and, more importantly, the position of Gaussian primitives, which is hard to be directly constrained in the vanilla 3DGS due to the non-structure property. To achieve this, we present a hybrid Gaussian representation. Besides the ordinary non-structure Gaussian primitives, our model also consists of ray-based Gaussian primitives that are bound to matching rays and whose optimization of their positions is restricted along the ray. Thus, we can utilize the matching correspondence to directly enforce the position of these Gaussian primitives to converge to the surface points where rays intersect. Extensive experiments on forward-facing, surrounding, and complex large scenes show the effectiveness of our approach with state-of-the-art performance and high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/prstrive/SCGaussian.

Paperid: 1477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02733.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid development of large vision language models (LVLMs), these models have shown excellent results in various multimodal tasks. Since LVLMs are prone to hallucinations and there are currently few datasets and evaluation methods specifically designed for remote sensing, their performance is typically poor when applied to remote sensing tasks. To address these issues, this paper introduces a high quality remote sensing LVLMs dataset, DDFAV, created using data augmentation and data mixing strategies. Next, a training instruction set is produced based on some high-quality remote sensing images selected from the proposed dataset. Finally, we develop a remote sensing LVLMs hallucination evaluation method RSPOPE based on the proposed dataset and evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of different LVLMs. Our proposed dataset, instruction set, and evaluation method files are available at https://github.com/HaodongLi2024/rspope.

Paperid: 1478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02372.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current volumetric biomedical foundation models struggle to generalize as public 3D datasets are small and do not cover the broad diversity of medical procedures, conditions, anatomical regions, and imaging protocols. We address this by creating a representation learning method that instead anticipates strong domain shifts at training time itself. We first propose a data engine that synthesizes highly variable training samples that would enable generalization to new biomedical contexts. To then train a single 3D network for any voxel-level task, we develop a contrastive learning method that pretrains the network to be stable against nuisance imaging variation simulated by the data engine, a key inductive bias for generalization. This network's features can be used as robust representations of input images for downstream tasks and its weights provide a strong, dataset-agnostic initialization for finetuning on new datasets. As a result, we set new standards across both multimodality registration and few-shot segmentation, a first for any 3D biomedical vision model, all without (pre-)training on any existing dataset of real images.

Paperid: 1479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01850.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Learning a precise robotic grasping policy is crucial for embodied agents operating in complex real-world manipulation tasks. Despite significant advancements, most models still struggle with accurate spatial positioning of objects to be grasped. We first show that this spatial generalization challenge stems primarily from the extensive data requirements for adequate spatial understanding. However, collecting such data with real robots is prohibitively expensive, and relying on simulation data often leads to visual generalization gaps upon deployment. To overcome these challenges, we then focus on state-based policy generalization and present \textbf{ManiBox}, a novel bounding-box-guided manipulation method built on a simulation-based teacher-student framework. The teacher policy efficiently generates scalable simulation data using bounding boxes, which are proven to uniquely determine the objects' spatial positions. The student policy then utilizes these low-dimensional spatial states to enable zero-shot transfer to real robots. Through comprehensive evaluations in simulated and real-world environments, ManiBox demonstrates a marked improvement in spatial grasping generalization and adaptability to diverse objects and backgrounds. Further, our empirical study into scaling laws for policy performance indicates that spatial volume generalization scales with data volume in a power law. For a certain level of spatial volume, the success rate of grasping empirically follows Michaelis-Menten kinetics relative to data volume, showing a saturation effect as data increases. Our videos and code are available in https://thkkk.github.io/manibox.

Paperid: 1480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01505.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Humans excel at detecting and segmenting moving objects according to the Gestalt principle of "common fate". Remarkably, previous works have shown that human perception generalizes this principle in a zero-shot fashion to unseen textures or random dots. In this work, we seek to better understand the computational basis for this capability by evaluating a broad range of optical flow models and a neuroscience inspired motion energy model for zero-shot figure-ground segmentation of random dot stimuli. Specifically, we use the extensively validated motion energy model proposed by Simoncelli and Heeger in 1998 which is fitted to neural recordings in cortex area MT. We find that a cross section of 40 deep optical flow models trained on different datasets struggle to estimate motion patterns in random dot videos, resulting in poor figure-ground segmentation performance. Conversely, the neuroscience-inspired model significantly outperforms all optical flow models on this task. For a direct comparison to human perception, we conduct a psychophysical study using a shape identification task as a proxy to measure human segmentation performance. All state-of-the-art optical flow models fall short of human performance, but only the motion energy model matches human capability. This neuroscience-inspired model successfully addresses the lack of human-like zero-shot generalization to random dot stimuli in current computer vision models, and thus establishes a compelling link between the Gestalt psychology of human object perception and cortical motion processing in the brain. Code, models and datasets are available at https://github.com/mtangemann/motion_energy_segmentation

Paperid: 1481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01226.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper presents a generalizable 3D plane detection and reconstruction framework named MonoPlane. Unlike previous robust estimator-based works (which require multiple images or RGB-D input) and learning-based works (which suffer from domain shift), MonoPlane combines the best of two worlds and establishes a plane reconstruction pipeline based on monocular geometric cues, resulting in accurate, robust and scalable 3D plane detection and reconstruction in the wild. Specifically, we first leverage large-scale pre-trained neural networks to obtain the depth and surface normals from a single image. These monocular geometric cues are then incorporated into a proximity-guided RANSAC framework to sequentially fit each plane instance. We exploit effective 3D point proximity and model such proximity via a graph within RANSAC to guide the plane fitting from noisy monocular depths, followed by image-level multi-plane joint optimization to improve the consistency among all plane instances. We further design a simple but effective pipeline to extend this single-view solution to sparse-view 3D plane reconstruction. Extensive experiments on a list of datasets demonstrate our superior zero-shot generalizability over baselines, achieving state-of-the-art plane reconstruction performance in a transferring setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/thuzhaowang/MonoPlane .

Paperid: 1482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01016.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emergence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs has significantly advanced the development of language models. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs outperform traditional LLMs by achieving higher performance with considerably fewer activated parameters. Despite this efficiency, their enormous parameter size still leads to high deployment costs. In this paper, we introduce a two-stage compression method tailored for MoE to reduce the model size and decrease the computational cost. First, in the inter-expert pruning stage, we analyze the importance of each layer and propose the Layer-wise Genetic Search and Block-wise KT-Reception Field with the non-uniform pruning ratio to prune the individual expert. Second, in the intra-expert decomposition stage, we apply the low-rank decomposition to further compress the parameters within the remaining experts. Extensive experiments on Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite, and Mixtral-8$\times$7B demonstrate that our proposed methods can both reduce the model size and enhance inference efficiency while maintaining performance in various zero-shot tasks. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/xiaochengsky/MoEI-2.git}

Paperid: 1483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01006.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In time-series analysis, many recent works seek to provide a unified view and representation for time-series across multiple domains, leading to the development of foundation models for time-series data. Despite diverse modeling techniques, existing models are black boxes and fail to provide insights and explanations about their representations. In this paper, we present VQShape, a pre-trained, generalizable, and interpretable model for time-series representation learning and classification. By introducing a novel representation for time-series data, we forge a connection between the latent space of VQShape and shape-level features. Using vector quantization, we show that time-series from different domains can be described using a unified set of low-dimensional codes, where each code can be represented as an abstracted shape in the time domain. On classification tasks, we show that the representations of VQShape can be utilized to build interpretable classifiers, achieving comparable performance to specialist models. Additionally, in zero-shot learning, VQShape and its codebook can generalize to previously unseen datasets and domains that are not included in the pre-training process. The code and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/YunshiWen/VQShape.

Paperid: 1484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00918.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Mixture of Experts (MoEs) plays an important role in the development of more efficient and effective large language models (LLMs). Due to the enormous resource requirements, studying large scale MoE algorithms remain in-accessible to many researchers. This work develops \emph{LibMoE}, a comprehensive and modular framework to streamline the research, training, and evaluation of MoE algorithms. Built upon three core principles: (i) modular design, (ii) efficient training; (iii) comprehensive evaluation, LibMoE brings MoE in LLMs more accessible to a wide range of researchers by standardizing the training and evaluation pipelines. Using LibMoE, we extensively benchmarked five state-of-the-art MoE algorithms over three different LLMs and 11 datasets under the zero-shot setting. The results show that despite the unique characteristics, all MoE algorithms perform roughly similar when averaged across a wide range of tasks. With the modular design and extensive evaluation, we believe LibMoE will be invaluable for researchers to make meaningful progress towards the next generation of MoE and LLMs. Project page: \url{https://fsoft-aic.github.io/fsoft-LibMoE.github.io}.

Paperid: 1485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00715.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
B-cos Networks have been shown to be effective for obtaining highly human interpretable explanations of model decisions by architecturally enforcing stronger alignment between inputs and weight. B-cos variants of convolutional networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), which primarily replace linear layers with B-cos transformations, perform competitively to their respective standard variants while also yielding explanations that are faithful by design. However, it has so far been necessary to train these models from scratch, which is increasingly infeasible in the era of large, pre-trained foundation models. In this work, inspired by the architectural similarities in standard DNNs and B-cos networks, we propose 'B-cosification', a novel approach to transform existing pre-trained models to become inherently interpretable. We perform a thorough study of design choices to perform this conversion, both for convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. We find that B-cosification can yield models that are on par with B-cos models trained from scratch in terms of interpretability, while often outperforming them in terms of classification performance at a fraction of the training cost. Subsequently, we apply B-cosification to a pretrained CLIP model, and show that, even with limited data and compute cost, we obtain a B-cosified version that is highly interpretable and competitive on zero shot performance across a variety of datasets. We release our code and pre-trained model weights at https://github.com/shrebox/B-cosification.

Paperid: 1486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00683.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present TaxaBind, a unified embedding space for characterizing any species of interest. TaxaBind is a multimodal embedding space across six modalities: ground-level images of species, geographic location, satellite image, text, audio, and environmental features, useful for solving ecological problems. To learn this joint embedding space, we leverage ground-level images of species as a binding modality. We propose multimodal patching, a technique for effectively distilling the knowledge from various modalities into the binding modality. We construct two large datasets for pretraining: iSatNat with species images and satellite images, and iSoundNat with species images and audio. Additionally, we introduce TaxaBench-8k, a diverse multimodal dataset with six paired modalities for evaluating deep learning models on ecological tasks. Experiments with TaxaBind demonstrate its strong zero-shot and emergent capabilities on a range of tasks including species classification, cross-model retrieval, and audio classification. The datasets and models are made available at https://github.com/mvrl/TaxaBind.

Paperid: 1487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00626.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent segmentation foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), exhibits strong zero-shot segmentation capabilities, but it falls short in generating fine-grained precise masks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel zero-shot image matting model, called ZIM, with two key contributions: First, we develop a label converter that transforms segmentation labels into detailed matte labels, constructing the new SA1B-Matte dataset without costly manual annotations. Training SAM with this dataset enables it to generate precise matte masks while maintaining its zero-shot capability. Second, we design the zero-shot matting model equipped with a hierarchical pixel decoder to enhance mask representation, along with a prompt-aware masked attention mechanism to improve performance by enabling the model to focus on regions specified by visual prompts. We evaluate ZIM using the newly introduced MicroMat-3K test set, which contains high-quality micro-level matte labels. Experimental results show that ZIM outperforms existing methods in fine-grained mask generation and zero-shot generalization. Furthermore, we demonstrate the versatility of ZIM in various downstream tasks requiring precise masks, such as image inpainting and 3D NeRF. Our contributions provide a robust foundation for advancing zero-shot matting and its downstream applications across a wide range of computer vision tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/ZIM.

Paperid: 1488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00409.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) provide remarkable zero-shot classification capability covering a wide variety of object classes. However, practical applications do not always require the classification of all kinds of objects, and leaving the model capable of recognizing unnecessary classes not only degrades overall accuracy but also leads to operational disadvantages. To mitigate this issue, we explore the selective forgetting problem for PTMs, where the task is to make the model unable to recognize only the specified classes while maintaining accuracy for the rest. All the existing methods assume "white-box" settings, where model information such as architectures, parameters, and gradients is available for training. However, PTMs are often "black-box," where information on such models is unavailable for commercial reasons or social responsibilities. In this paper, we address a novel problem of selective forgetting for black-box models, named Black-Box Forgetting, and propose an approach to the problem. Given that information on the model is unavailable, we optimize the input prompt to decrease the accuracy of specified classes through derivative-free optimization. To avoid difficult high-dimensional optimization while ensuring high forgetting performance, we propose Latent Context Sharing, which introduces common low-dimensional latent components among multiple tokens for the prompt. Experiments on four standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method with reasonable baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yusukekwn/Black-Box-Forgetting.

Paperid: 1489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00264.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Humans have the ability to reason about geometric patterns in images and scenes from a young age. However, developing large multimodal models (LMMs) capable of similar reasoning remains a challenge, highlighting the need for robust evaluation methods to assess these capabilities. We introduce \Turtle, a benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs' capacity to interpret geometric patterns -- given visual examples, textual instructions, or both -- and generate precise code outputs. Inspired by turtle geometry, a notion used to teach children foundational coding and geometric concepts, TurtleBench features tasks with patterned shapes that have underlying algorithmic logic. Our evaluation reveals that leading LMMs struggle significantly with these tasks, with GPT-4o achieving only 19\% accuracy on the simplest tasks and few-shot prompting only marginally improves their performance ($<2\%$). \Turtle highlights the gap between human and AI performance in intuitive and visual geometrical understanding, setting the stage for future research in this area. \Turtle stands as one of the few benchmarks to evaluate the integration of visual understanding and code generation capabilities in LMMs, setting the stage for future research. Code and Dataset for this paper is provided here: \href{https://github.com/sinaris76/TurtleBench}{https://github.com/sinaris76/TurtleBench}

Paperid: 1490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00177.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in materials science. However, little attention has been given to benchmarking and standardized evaluation for LLM-based materials property prediction, which hinders progress. We present LLM4Mat-Bench, the largest benchmark to date for evaluating the performance of LLMs in predicting the properties of crystalline materials. LLM4Mat-Bench contains about 1.9M crystal structures in total, collected from 10 publicly available materials data sources, and 45 distinct properties. LLM4Mat-Bench features different input modalities: crystal composition, CIF, and crystal text description, with 4.7M, 615.5M, and 3.1B tokens in total for each modality, respectively. We use LLM4Mat-Bench to fine-tune models with different sizes, including LLM-Prop and MatBERT, and provide zero-shot and few-shot prompts to evaluate the property prediction capabilities of LLM-chat-like models, including Llama, Gemma, and Mistral. The results highlight the challenges of general-purpose LLMs in materials science and the need for task-specific predictive models and task-specific instruction-tuned LLMs in materials property prediction.

Paperid: 1491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00144.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, 3DGS tends to overfit when trained with sparse views, limiting its generalization to novel viewpoints. In this paper, we address this overfitting issue by introducing Self-Ensembling Gaussian Splatting (SE-GS). We achieve self-ensembling by incorporating an uncertainty-aware perturbation strategy during training. A $\mathbfÎ$-model and a $\mathbfÎ£$-model are jointly trained on the available images. The $\mathbfÎ$-model is dynamically perturbed based on rendering uncertainty across training steps, generating diverse perturbed models with negligible computational overhead. Discrepancies between the $\mathbfÎ£$-model and these perturbed models are minimized throughout training, forming a robust ensemble of 3DGS models. This ensemble, represented by the $\mathbfÎ£$-model, is then used to generate novel-view images during inference. Experimental results on the LLFF, Mip-NeRF360, DTU, and MVImgNet datasets demonstrate that our approach enhances NVS quality under few-shot training conditions, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at: https://sailor-z.github.io/projects/SEGS.html.

Paperid: 1492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24151.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized generative tasks by producing high-fidelity content from text descriptions. They have also enabled an editing paradigm where concepts can be replaced through text conditioning (e.g., a dog to a tiger). In this work, we explore a novel approach: instead of replacing a concept, can we enhance or suppress the concept itself? Through an empirical study, we identify a trend where concepts can be decomposed in text-guided diffusion models. Leveraging this insight, we introduce ScalingConcept, a simple yet effective method to scale decomposed concepts up or down in real input without introducing new elements. To systematically evaluate our approach, we present the WeakConcept-10 dataset, where concepts are imperfect and need to be enhanced. More importantly, ScalingConcept enables a variety of novel zero-shot applications across image and audio domains, including tasks such as canonical pose generation and generative sound highlighting or removal.

Paperid: 1493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23905.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing multi-modal image fusion methods fail to address the compound degradations presented in source images, resulting in fusion images plagued by noise, color bias, improper exposure, \textit{etc}. Additionally, these methods often overlook the specificity of foreground objects, weakening the salience of the objects of interest within the fused images. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel interactive multi-modal image fusion framework based on the text-modulated diffusion model, called Text-DiFuse. First, this framework integrates feature-level information integration into the diffusion process, allowing adaptive degradation removal and multi-modal information fusion. This is the first attempt to deeply and explicitly embed information fusion within the diffusion process, effectively addressing compound degradation in image fusion. Second, by embedding the combination of the text and zero-shot location model into the diffusion fusion process, a text-controlled fusion re-modulation strategy is developed. This enables user-customized text control to improve fusion performance and highlight foreground objects in the fused images. Extensive experiments on diverse public datasets show that our Text-DiFuse achieves state-of-the-art fusion performance across various scenarios with complex degradation. Moreover, the semantic segmentation experiment validates the significant enhancement in semantic performance achieved by our text-controlled fusion re-modulation strategy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Leiii-Cao/Text-DiFuse.

Paperid: 1494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23904.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting Human-Object Interactions (HOI) in zero-shot settings, where models must handle unseen classes, poses significant challenges. Existing methods that rely on aligning visual encoders with large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to tap into the extensive knowledge of VLMs, require large, computationally expensive models and encounter training difficulties. Adapting VLMs with prompt learning offers an alternative to direct alignment. However, fine-tuning on task-specific datasets often leads to overfitting to seen classes and suboptimal performance on unseen classes, due to the absence of unseen class labels. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel prompt learning-based framework for Efficient Zero-Shot HOI detection (EZ-HOI). First, we introduce Large Language Model (LLM) and VLM guidance for learnable prompts, integrating detailed HOI descriptions and visual semantics to adapt VLMs to HOI tasks. However, because training datasets contain seen-class labels alone, fine-tuning VLMs on such datasets tends to optimize learnable prompts for seen classes instead of unseen ones. Therefore, we design prompt learning for unseen classes using information from related seen classes, with LLMs utilized to highlight the differences between unseen and related seen classes. Quantitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our EZ-HOI achieves state-of-the-art performance across various zero-shot settings with only 10.35% to 33.95% of the trainable parameters compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ChelsieLei/EZ-HOI.

Paperid: 1495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23746.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs) is of great recent interest. With zero-shot methods like DetectGPT, detection capabilities have reached impressive levels. However, the reliability of existing detectors in real-world applications remains underexplored. In this study, we present a new benchmark, DetectRL, highlighting that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection techniques still underperformed in this task. We collected human-written datasets from domains where LLMs are particularly prone to misuse. Using popular LLMs, we generated data that better aligns with real-world applications. Unlike previous studies, we employed heuristic rules to create adversarial LLM-generated text, simulating various prompts usages, human revisions like word substitutions, and writing noises like spelling mistakes. Our development of DetectRL reveals the strengths and limitations of current SOTA detectors. More importantly, we analyzed the potential impact of writing styles, model types, attack methods, the text lengths, and real-world human writing factors on different types of detectors. We believe DetectRL could serve as an effective benchmark for assessing detectors in real-world scenarios, evolving with advanced attack methods, thus providing more stressful evaluation to drive the development of more efficient detectors. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/DetectRL.

Paperid: 1496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23730.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fashion aesthetic evaluation is the task of estimating how well the outfits worn by individuals in images suit them. In this work, we examine the zero-shot performance of GPT-4V on this task for the first time. We show that its predictions align fairly well with human judgments on our datasets, and also find that it struggles with ranking outfits in similar colors. The code is available at https://github.com/st-tech/gpt4v-fashion-aesthetic-evaluation.

Paperid: 1497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23692.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Human mobility prediction plays a critical role in applications such as disaster response, urban planning, and epidemic forecasting. Traditional methods often rely on designing crafted, domain-specific models, and typically focus on short-term predictions, which struggle to generalize across diverse urban environments. In this study, we introduce Llama-3-8B-Mob, a large language model fine-tuned with instruction tuning, for long-term citywide mobility prediction -- in a Q&A manner. We validate our approach using large-scale human mobility data from four metropolitan areas in Japan, focusing on predicting individual trajectories over the next 15 days. The results demonstrate that Llama-3-8B-Mob excels in modeling long-term human mobility -- surpassing the state-of-the-art on multiple prediction metrics. It also displays strong zero-shot generalization capabilities -- effectively generalizing to other cities even when fine-tuned only on limited samples from a single city. Source codes are available at https://github.com/TANGHULU6/Llama3-8B-Mob.

Paperid: 1498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23222.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in foundation models have been successfully extended to the time series (TS) domain, facilitated by the emergence of large-scale TS datasets. However, previous efforts have primarily focused on designing model architectures to address explicit heterogeneity among datasets such as various numbers of channels, while often overlooking implicit heterogeneity such as varying dependencies between channels. In this work, we introduce the concept of partial channel dependence (PCD), which enables a more sophisticated adjustment of channel dependencies based on dataset-specific information. To achieve PCD, we propose a channel mask that captures the relationships between channels within a dataset using two key components: 1) a correlation matrix that encodes relative dependencies between channels, and 2) domain parameters that learn the absolute dependencies specific to each dataset, refining the correlation matrix. We validate the effectiveness of PCD across four tasks in TS including forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection, under diverse settings, including few-shot and zero-shot scenarios with both TS foundation models and single-task models. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/CM.

Paperid: 1499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23136.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Frequently updating Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems to adapt to new user interests -- as done for traditional ones -- is impractical due to high training costs, even with acceleration methods. This work explores adapting to dynamic user interests without any model updates by leveraging In-Context Learning (ICL), which allows LLMs to learn new tasks from few-shot examples provided in the input. Using new-interest examples as the ICL few-shot examples, LLMs may learn real-time interest directly, avoiding the need for model updates. However, existing LLM-based recommenders often lose the in-context learning ability during recommendation tuning, while the original LLM's in-context learning lacks recommendation-specific focus. To address this, we propose RecICL, which customizes recommendation-specific in-context learning for real-time recommendations. RecICL organizes training examples in an in-context learning format, ensuring that in-context learning ability is preserved and aligned with the recommendation task during tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate RecICL's effectiveness in delivering real-time recommendations without requiring model updates. Our code is available at https://github.com/ym689/rec_icl.

Paperid: 1500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22489.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation (FS-PCS) aims at generalizing models to segment novel categories with minimal annotated support samples. While existing FS-PCS methods have shown promise, they primarily focus on unimodal point cloud inputs, overlooking the potential benefits of leveraging multimodal information. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing a multimodal FS-PCS setup, utilizing textual labels and the potentially available 2D image modality. Under this easy-to-achieve setup, we present the MultiModal Few-Shot SegNet (MM-FSS), a model effectively harnessing complementary information from multiple modalities. MM-FSS employs a shared backbone with two heads to extract intermodal and unimodal visual features, and a pretrained text encoder to generate text embeddings. To fully exploit the multimodal information, we propose a Multimodal Correlation Fusion (MCF) module to generate multimodal correlations, and a Multimodal Semantic Fusion (MSF) module to refine the correlations using text-aware semantic guidance. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective Test-time Adaptive Cross-modal Calibration (TACC) technique to mitigate training bias, further improving generalization. Experimental results on S3DIS and ScanNet datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements achieved by our method. The efficacy of our approach indicates the benefits of leveraging commonly-ignored free modalities for FS-PCS, providing valuable insights for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/Multimodality-3D-Few-Shot

Paperid: 1501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22332.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Sim2real for robotic manipulation is difficult due to the challenges of simulating complex contacts and generating realistic task distributions. To tackle the latter problem, we introduce ManipGen, which leverages a new class of policies for sim2real transfer: local policies. Locality enables a variety of appealing properties including invariances to absolute robot and object pose, skill ordering, and global scene configuration. We combine these policies with foundation models for vision, language and motion planning and demonstrate SOTA zero-shot performance of our method to Robosuite benchmark tasks in simulation (97%). We transfer our local policies from simulation to reality and observe they can solve unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages with significant pose, object and scene configuration variation. ManipGen outperforms SOTA approaches such as SayCan, OpenVLA, LLMTrajGen and VoxPoser across 50 real-world manipulation tasks by 36%, 76%, 62% and 60% respectively. Video results at https://mihdalal.github.io/manipgen/

Paperid: 1502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21802.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Due to the impressive zero-shot capabilities, pre-trained vision-language models (e.g. CLIP), have attracted widespread attention and adoption across various domains. Nonetheless, CLIP has been observed to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Through experimental analysis, we have observed a phenomenon wherein adversarial perturbations induce shifts in text-guided attention. Building upon this observation, we propose a simple yet effective strategy: Text-Guided Attention for Zero-Shot Robustness (TGA-ZSR). This framework incorporates two components: the Attention Refinement module and the Attention-based Model Constraint module. Our goal is to maintain the generalization of the CLIP model and enhance its adversarial robustness: The Attention Refinement module aligns the text-guided attention obtained from the target model via adversarial examples with the text-guided attention acquired from the original model via clean examples. This alignment enhances the model's robustness. Additionally, the Attention-based Model Constraint module acquires text-guided attention from both the target and original models using clean examples. Its objective is to maintain model performance on clean samples while enhancing overall robustness. The experiments validate that our method yields a 9.58% enhancement in zero-shot robust accuracy over the current state-of-the-art techniques across 16 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhyblue424/TGA-ZSR.

Paperid: 1503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21411.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Social relation reasoning aims to identify relation categories such as friends, spouses, and colleagues from images. While current methods adopt the paradigm of training a dedicated network end-to-end using labeled image data, they are limited in terms of generalizability and interpretability. To address these issues, we first present a simple yet well-crafted framework named {\name}, which combines the perception capability of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) within a modular framework, providing a strong baseline for social relation recognition. Specifically, we instruct VFMs to translate image content into a textual social story, and then utilize LLMs for text-based reasoning. {\name} introduces systematic design principles to adapt VFMs and LLMs separately and bridge their gaps. Without additional model training, it achieves competitive zero-shot results on two databases while offering interpretable answers, as LLMs can generate language-based explanations for the decisions. The manual prompt design process for LLMs at the reasoning phase is tedious and an automated prompt optimization method is desired. As we essentially convert a visual classification task into a generative task of LLMs, automatic prompt optimization encounters a unique long prompt optimization issue. To address this issue, we further propose the Greedy Segment Prompt Optimization (GSPO), which performs a greedy search by utilizing gradient information at the segment level. Experimental results show that GSPO significantly improves performance, and our method also generalizes to different image styles. The code is available at https://github.com/Mengzibin/SocialGPT.

Paperid: 1504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21331.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning models often suffer from a lack of interpretability due to polysemanticity, where individual neurons are activated by multiple unrelated semantics, resulting in unclear attributions of model behavior. Recent advances in monosemanticity, where neurons correspond to consistent and distinct semantics, have significantly improved interpretability but are commonly believed to compromise accuracy. In this work, we challenge the prevailing belief of the accuracy-interpretability tradeoff, showing that monosemantic features not only enhance interpretability but also bring concrete gains in model performance. Across multiple robust learning scenarios-including input and label noise, few-shot learning, and out-of-domain generalization-our results show that models leveraging monosemantic features significantly outperform those relying on polysemantic features. Furthermore, we provide empirical and theoretical understandings on the robustness gains of feature monosemanticity. Our preliminary analysis suggests that monosemanticity, by promoting better separation of feature representations, leads to more robust decision boundaries. This diverse evidence highlights the generality of monosemanticity in improving model robustness. As a first step in this new direction, we embark on exploring the learning benefits of monosemanticity beyond interpretability, supporting the long-standing hypothesis of linking interpretability and robustness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/Beyond_Interpretability}.

Paperid: 1505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21127.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Enzyme engineering enables the modification of wild-type proteins to meet industrial and research demands by enhancing catalytic activity, stability, binding affinities, and other properties. The emergence of deep learning methods for protein modeling has demonstrated superior results at lower costs compared to traditional approaches such as directed evolution and rational design. In mutation effect prediction, the key to pre-training deep learning models lies in accurately interpreting the complex relationships among protein sequence, structure, and function. This study introduces a retrieval-enhanced protein language model for comprehensive analysis of native properties from sequence and local structural interactions, as well as evolutionary properties from retrieved homologous sequences. The state-of-the-art performance of the proposed ProtREM is validated on over 2 million mutants across 217 assays from an open benchmark (ProteinGym). We also conducted post-hoc analyses of the model's ability to improve the stability and binding affinity of a VHH antibody. Additionally, we designed 10 new mutants on a DNA polymerase and conducted wet-lab experiments to evaluate their enhanced activity at higher temperatures. Both in silico and experimental evaluations confirmed that our method provides reliable predictions of mutation effects, offering an auxiliary tool for biologists aiming to evolve existing enzymes. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/tyang816/ProtREM.

Paperid: 1506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20964.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Current techniques for detecting AI-generated text are largely confined to manual feature crafting and supervised binary classification paradigms. These methodologies typically lead to performance bottlenecks and unsatisfactory generalizability. Consequently, these methods are often inapplicable for out-of-distribution (OOD) data and newly emerged large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we revisit the task of AI-generated text detection. We argue that the key to accomplishing this task lies in distinguishing writing styles of different authors, rather than simply classifying the text into human-written or AI-generated text. To this end, we propose DeTeCtive, a multi-task auxiliary, multi-level contrastive learning framework. DeTeCtive is designed to facilitate the learning of distinct writing styles, combined with a dense information retrieval pipeline for AI-generated text detection. Our method is compatible with a range of text encoders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enhances the ability of various text encoders in detecting AI-generated text across multiple benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, in OOD zero-shot evaluation, our method outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. Moreover, we find our method boasts a Training-Free Incremental Adaptation (TFIA) capability towards OOD data, further enhancing its efficacy in OOD detection scenarios. We will open-source our code and models in hopes that our work will spark new thoughts in the field of AI-generated text detection, ensuring safe application of LLMs and enhancing compliance. Our code is available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DeTeCtive.

Paperid: 1507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20745.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Online shopping is a complex multi-task, few-shot learning problem with a wide and evolving range of entities, relations, and tasks. However, existing models and benchmarks are commonly tailored to specific tasks, falling short of capturing the full complexity of online shopping. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their multi-task and few-shot learning abilities, have the potential to profoundly transform online shopping by alleviating task-specific engineering efforts and by providing users with interactive conversations. Despite the potential, LLMs face unique challenges in online shopping, such as domain-specific concepts, implicit knowledge, and heterogeneous user behaviors. Motivated by the potential and challenges, we propose Shopping MMLU, a diverse multi-task online shopping benchmark derived from real-world Amazon data. Shopping MMLU consists of 57 tasks covering 4 major shopping skills: concept understanding, knowledge reasoning, user behavior alignment, and multi-linguality, and can thus comprehensively evaluate the abilities of LLMs as general shop assistants. With Shopping MMLU, we benchmark over 20 existing LLMs and uncover valuable insights about practices and prospects of building versatile LLM-based shop assistants. Shopping MMLU can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/KL4805/ShoppingMMLU. In addition, with Shopping MMLU, we host a competition in KDD Cup 2024 with over 500 participating teams. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website https://amazon-kddcup24.github.io/.

Paperid: 1508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20494.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is crucial for scientific literature, where valuable data is often spread across text, figures, and tables. In materials science, extracting structured information from research articles can accelerate the discovery of new materials. However, the multimodal nature and complex interconnections of scientific content present challenges for traditional text-based methods. We introduce \textsc{MatViX}, a benchmark consisting of $324$ full-length research articles and $1,688$ complex structured JSON files, carefully curated by domain experts. These JSON files are extracted from text, tables, and figures in full-length documents, providing a comprehensive challenge for MIE. We introduce an evaluation method to assess the accuracy of curve similarity and the alignment of hierarchical structures. Additionally, we benchmark vision-language models (VLMs) in a zero-shot manner, capable of processing long contexts and multimodal inputs, and show that using a specialized model (DePlot) can improve performance in extracting curves. Our results demonstrate significant room for improvement in current models. Our dataset and evaluation code are available\footnote{\url{https://matvix-bench.github.io/}}.

Paperid: 1509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20406.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper investigates the 3D domain generalization (3DDG) ability of large 3D models based on prevalent prompt learning. Recent works demonstrate the performances of 3D point cloud recognition can be boosted remarkably by parameter-efficient prompt tuning. However, we observe that the improvement on downstream tasks comes at the expense of a severe drop in 3D domain generalization. To resolve this challenge, we present a comprehensive regulation framework that allows the learnable prompts to actively interact with the well-learned general knowledge in large 3D models to maintain good generalization. Specifically, the proposed framework imposes multiple explicit constraints on the prompt learning trajectory by maximizing the mutual agreement between task-specific predictions and task-agnostic knowledge. We design the regulation framework as a plug-and-play module to embed into existing representative large 3D models. Surprisingly, our method not only realizes consistently increasing generalization ability but also enhances task-specific 3D recognition performances across various 3DDG benchmarks by a clear margin. Considering the lack of study and evaluation on 3DDG, we also create three new benchmarks, namely base-to-new, cross-dataset and few-shot generalization benchmarks, to enrich the field and inspire future research. Code and benchmarks are available at \url{https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-PRC}.

Paperid: 1510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20349.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative models, as a powerful technique for generation, also gradually become a critical tool for recognition tasks. However, in skeleton-based action recognition, the features obtained from existing pre-trained generative methods contain redundant information unrelated to recognition, which contradicts the nature of the skeleton's spatially sparse and temporally consistent properties, leading to undesirable performance. To address this challenge, we make efforts to bridge the gap in theory and methodology and propose a novel skeleton-based idempotent generative model (IGM) for unsupervised representation learning. More specifically, we first theoretically demonstrate the equivalence between generative models and maximum entropy coding, which demonstrates a potential route that makes the features of generative models more compact by introducing contrastive learning. To this end, we introduce the idempotency constraint to form a stronger consistency regularization in the feature space, to push the features only to maintain the critical information of motion semantics for the recognition task. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, NTU RGB+D and PKUMMD, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. On the NTU 60 xsub dataset, we observe a performance improvement from 84.6$\%$ to 86.2$\%$. Furthermore, in zero-shot adaptation scenarios, our model demonstrates significant efficacy by achieving promising results in cases that were previously unrecognizable. Our project is available at \url{https://github.com/LanglandsLin/IGM}.

Paperid: 1511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20215.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot in-context learning (ZS-ICL) aims to conduct in-context learning (ICL) without using human-annotated demonstrations. Most ZS-ICL methods use large language models (LLMs) to generate (input, label) pairs as pseudo-demonstrations and leverage historical pseudo-demonstrations to help solve the current problem. They assume that problems are from the same task and traverse them in a random order. However, in real-world scenarios, problems usually come from diverse tasks, and only a few belong to the same task. The random traversing order may generate unreliable pseudo-demonstrations and lead to error accumulation. To address this problem, we reformulate ZS-ICL as a planning problem and propose a Demonstration-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) approach (DAWN-ICL), which leverages MCTS to strategically plan the problem-solving trajectories for ZS-ICL. In addition, to achieve effective and efficient Q value estimation, we propose a novel demonstration-aware Q-value function and use it to enhance the selection phase and accelerate the expansion and simulation phases in MCTS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DAWN-ICL on in-domain and cross-domain scenarios, and it even outperforms ICL using human-annotated labels. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MCTS4ZSICL.

Paperid: 1512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20050.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Medical information retrieval (MIR) is essential for retrieving relevant medical knowledge from diverse sources, including electronic health records, scientific literature, and medical databases. However, achieving effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain poses substantial challenges due to the lack of relevance-labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{L}earning \textbf{Hy}pothetical \textbf{D}ocument \textbf{E}mbeddings (\textbf{SL-HyDE}) to tackle this issue. SL-HyDE leverages large language models (LLMs) as generators to generate hypothetical documents based on a given query. These generated documents encapsulate key medical context, guiding a dense retriever in identifying the most relevant documents. The self-learning framework progressively refines both pseudo-document generation and retrieval, utilizing unlabeled medical corpora without requiring any relevance-labeled data. Additionally, we present the Chinese Medical Information Retrieval Benchmark (CMIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework grounded in real-world medical scenarios, encompassing five tasks and ten datasets. By benchmarking ten models on CMIRB, we establish a rigorous standard for evaluating medical information retrieval systems. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-HyDE significantly surpasses HyDE in retrieval accuracy while showcasing strong generalization and scalability across various LLM and retriever configurations. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/ll0ruc/AutoMIR

Paperid: 1513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19848.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed rapidly over the past few decades, the new generation of AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive datasets, has achieved ground-breaking performance in many applications. Further progress has been made in multimodal LLMs, with many datasets created to evaluate LLMs with vision abilities. However, none of those datasets focuses solely on marine mammals, which are indispensable for ecological equilibrium. In this work, we build a benchmark dataset with 1,423 images of 65 kinds of marine mammals, where each animal is uniquely classified into different levels of class, ranging from species-level to medium-level to group-level. Moreover, we evaluate several approaches for classifying these marine mammals: (1) machine learning (ML) algorithms using embeddings provided by neural networks, (2) influential pre-trained neural networks, (3) zero-shot models: CLIP and LLMs, and (4) a novel LLM-based multi-agent system (MAS). The results demonstrate the strengths of traditional models and LLMs in different aspects, and the MAS can further improve the classification performance. The dataset is available on GitHub: https://github.com/yeyimilk/LLM-Vision-Marine-Animals.git.

Paperid: 1514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19818.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

Paperid: 1515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19715.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training agents that are robust to environmental changes remains a significant challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Unsupervised environment design (UED) has recently emerged to address this issue by generating a set of training environments tailored to the agent's capabilities. While prior works demonstrate that UED has the potential to learn a robust policy, their performance is constrained by the capabilities of the environment generation. To this end, we propose a novel UED algorithm, adversarial environment design via regret-guided diffusion models (ADD). The proposed method guides the diffusion-based environment generator with the regret of the agent to produce environments that the agent finds challenging but conducive to further improvement. By exploiting the representation power of diffusion models, ADD can directly generate adversarial environments while maintaining the diversity of training environments, enabling the agent to effectively learn a robust policy. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully generates an instructive curriculum of environments, outperforming UED baselines in zero-shot generalization across novel, out-of-distribution environments. Project page: https://rllab-snu.github.io/projects/ADD

Paperid: 1516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19294.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models, such as CLIP, have shown impressive generalization capacities when using appropriate text descriptions. While optimizing prompts on downstream labeled data has proven effective in improving performance, these methods entail labor costs for annotations and are limited by their quality. Additionally, since CLIP is pre-trained on highly imbalanced Web-scale data, it suffers from inherent label bias that leads to suboptimal performance. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a label-Free prompt distribution learning and bias correction framework, dubbed as **Frolic**, which boosts zero-shot performance without the need for labeled data. Specifically, our Frolic learns distributions over prompt prototypes to capture diverse visual representations and adaptively fuses these with the original CLIP through confidence matching. This fused model is further enhanced by correcting label bias via a label-free logit adjustment. Notably, our method is not only training-free but also circumvents the necessity for hyper-parameter tuning. Extensive experimental results across 16 datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, particularly outperforming the state-of-the-art by an average of $2.6\%$ on 10 datasets with CLIP ViT-B/16 and achieving an average margin of $1.5\%$ on ImageNet and its five distribution shifts with CLIP ViT-B/16. Codes are available in https://github.com/zhuhsingyuu/Frolic.

Paperid: 1517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19025.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Considering the difficulty of financial time series forecasting in financial aid, much of the current research focuses on leveraging big data analytics in financial services. One modern approach is to utilize "predictive analysis", analogous to forecasting financial trends. However, many of these time series data in Financial Aid (FA) pose unique challenges due to limited historical datasets and high dimensional financial information, which hinder the development of effective predictive models that balance accuracy with efficient runtime and memory usage. Pre-trained foundation models are employed to address these challenging tasks. We use state-of-the-art time series models including pre-trained LLMs (GPT-2 as the backbone), transformers, and linear models to demonstrate their ability to outperform traditional approaches, even with minimal ("few-shot") or no fine-tuning ("zero-shot"). Our benchmark study, which includes financial aid with seven other time series tasks, shows the potential of using LLMs for scarce financial datasets.

Paperid: 1518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18870.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
There is a growing interest in natural language-based user profiles for recommender systems, which aims to enhance transparency and scrutability compared with embedding-based methods. Existing studies primarily generate these profiles using zero-shot inference from large language models (LLMs), but their quality remains insufficient, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we introduce LangPTune, the first end-to-end training framework to optimize LLM-generated user profiles. Our method significantly outperforms zero-shot approaches by explicitly training the LLM for the recommendation objective. Through extensive evaluations across diverse training configurations and benchmarks, we demonstrate that LangPTune not only surpasses zero-shot baselines but can also matches the performance of state-of-the-art embedding-based methods. Finally, we investigate whether the training procedure preserves the interpretability of these profiles compared to zero-shot inference through both GPT-4 simulations and crowdworker user studies. Implementation of LangPTune can be found at https://github.com/ZhaolinGao/LangPTune.

Paperid: 1519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18857.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) embed aligned image-text pairs into a joint space but often rely on deterministic embeddings, assuming a one-to-one correspondence between images and texts. This oversimplifies real-world relationships, which are inherently many-to-many, with multiple captions describing a single image and vice versa. We introduce Probabilistic Language-Image Pre-training (ProLIP), the first probabilistic VLM pre-trained on a billion-scale image-text dataset using only probabilistic objectives, achieving a strong zero-shot capability (e.g., 74.6% ImageNet zero-shot accuracy with ViT-B/16). ProLIP efficiently estimates uncertainty by an "uncertainty token" without extra parameters. We also introduce a novel inclusion loss that enforces distributional inclusion relationships between image-text pairs and between original and masked inputs. Experiments demonstrate that, by leveraging uncertainty estimates, ProLIP benefits downstream tasks and aligns with intuitive notions of uncertainty, e.g., shorter texts being more uncertain and more general inputs including specific ones. Utilizing text uncertainties, we further improve ImageNet accuracy from 74.6% to 75.8% (under a few-shot setting), supporting the practical advantages of our probabilistic approach. The code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/prolip

Paperid: 1520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18514.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the first scaling law for MDMs, demonstrating a scaling rate comparable to autoregressive models (ARMs) and a relatively small compute gap. Motivated by their scalability, we train a family of MDMs with up to 1.1 billion (B) parameters to systematically evaluate their performance against ARMs of comparable or larger sizes. Fully leveraging the probabilistic formulation of MDMs, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised classifier-free guidance that effectively exploits large-scale unpaired data, boosting performance for conditional inference. In language understanding, the 1.1B MDM outperforms the 1.1B TinyLlama model trained on the same data across four of eight zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, it achieves competitive math reasoning ability with the 7B Llama-2 model on the GSM8K dataset. In text generation, MDMs with 16 times more pre-training time offer a flexible trade-off against ARMs with the accelerated sampling technique KV-Cache: MDMs match ARMs in performance while being 1.4 times faster during sampling. Moreover, MDMs address challenging tasks for ARMs by effectively handling bidirectional reasoning and adapting to temporal shifts in data. Notably, a 1.1B MDM breaks the reverse curse encountered by much larger ARMs with significantly more data and computation, such as 13B Llama-2 and 175B GPT-3. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/SMDM.

Paperid: 1521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18385.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the recent advancements in information retrieval (IR), zero-shot IR remains a significant challenge, especially when dealing with new domains, languages, and newly-released use cases that lack historical query traffic from existing users. For such cases, it is common to use query augmentations followed by fine-tuning pre-trained models on the document data paired with synthetic queries. In this work, we propose a novel Universal Document Linking (UDL) algorithm, which links similar documents to enhance synthetic query generation across multiple datasets with different characteristics. UDL leverages entropy for the choice of similarity models and named entity recognition (NER) for the link decision of documents using similarity scores. Our empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the UDL across diverse datasets and IR models, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot cases. The developed code for reproducibility is included in https://github.com/eoduself/UDL

Paperid: 1522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18001.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) have achieved significant success across various tasks, leading to research on benchmarks for reasoning abilities. However, there is a lack of studies on FMs performance in exceptional scenarios, which we define as out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning tasks. This paper is the first to address these cases, developing a novel dataset for evaluation of FMs across multiple modalities, including graphic novels, calligraphy, news articles, and lyrics. It includes tasks for instance classification, character recognition, token prediction, and text generation. The paper also proposes prompt engineering techniques like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and CoT+Few-Shot to enhance performance. Validation of FMs using various methods revealed improvements. The code repository is accessible at: https://github.com/MLAI-Yonsei/ExceptionalBenchmark

Paperid: 1523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17393.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) supports diverse tasks with a broad range of visual content manipulation intentions that can be related to domain, scene, object, and attribute. A key challenge for ZS-CIR is to accurately map image representation to a pseudo-word token that captures the manipulation intention relevant image information for generalized CIR. However, existing methods between the retrieval and pre-training stages lead to significant redundancy in the pseudo-word tokens. In this paper, we propose a novel denoising image-to-word mapping approach, named Denoise-I2W, for mapping images into denoising pseudo-word tokens that, without intention-irrelevant visual information, enhance accurate ZS-CIR. Specifically, a pseudo triplet construction module first automatically constructs pseudo triples (\textit{i.e.,} a pseudo-reference image, a pseudo-manipulation text, and a target image) for pre-training the denoising mapping network. Then, a pseudo-composed mapping module maps the pseudo-reference image to a pseudo-word token and combines it with the pseudo-manipulation text with manipulation intention. This combination aligns with the target image, facilitating denoising intention-irrelevant visual information for mapping. Our proposed Denoise-I2W is a model-agnostic and annotation-free approach. It demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across three state-of-the-art ZS-CIR models on four benchmark datasets. By integrating Denoise-I2W with existing best models, we obtain consistent and significant performance boosts ranging from 1.45\% to 4.17\% over the best methods without increasing inference costs. and achieve new state-of-the-art results on ZS-CIR. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Pter61/denoise-i2w-tmm}.

Paperid: 1524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17309.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
AI holds promise for transforming scientific processes, including hypothesis generation. Prior work on hypothesis generation can be broadly categorized into theory-driven and data-driven approaches. While both have proven effective in generating novel and plausible hypotheses, it remains an open question whether they can complement each other. To address this, we develop the first method that combines literature-based insights with data to perform LLM-powered hypothesis generation. We apply our method on five different datasets and demonstrate that integrating literature and data outperforms other baselines (8.97\% over few-shot, 15.75\% over literature-based alone, and 3.37\% over data-driven alone). Additionally, we conduct the first human evaluation to assess the utility of LLM-generated hypotheses in assisting human decision-making on two challenging tasks: deception detection and AI generated content detection. Our results show that human accuracy improves significantly by 7.44\% and 14.19\% on these tasks, respectively. These findings suggest that integrating literature-based and data-driven approaches provides a comprehensive and nuanced framework for hypothesis generation and could open new avenues for scientific inquiry.

Paperid: 1525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17242.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose the Large View Synthesis Model (LVSM), a novel transformer-based approach for scalable and generalizable novel view synthesis from sparse-view inputs. We introduce two architectures: (1) an encoder-decoder LVSM, which encodes input image tokens into a fixed number of 1D latent tokens, functioning as a fully learned scene representation, and decodes novel-view images from them; and (2) a decoder-only LVSM, which directly maps input images to novel-view outputs, completely eliminating intermediate scene representations. Both models bypass the 3D inductive biases used in previous methods -- from 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3DGS) to network designs (e.g., epipolar projections, plane sweeps) -- addressing novel view synthesis with a fully data-driven approach. While the encoder-decoder model offers faster inference due to its independent latent representation, the decoder-only LVSM achieves superior quality, scalability, and zero-shot generalization, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods by 1.5 to 3.5 dB PSNR. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that both LVSM variants achieve state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality. Notably, our models surpass all previous methods even with reduced computational resources (1-2 GPUs). Please see our website for more details: https://haian-jin.github.io/projects/LVSM/ .

Paperid: 1526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16953.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of annotated data, where meticulous pixel-level annotation is both labor-intensive and costly, primarily due to the intricate object-background boundaries. Addressing the core question, "Can COS be effectively achieved in a zero-shot manner without manual annotations for any camouflaged object?" we affirmatively respond and introduce a robust zero-shot COS framework. This framework leverages the inherent local pattern bias of COS and employs a broad semantic feature space derived from salient object segmentation (SOS) for efficient zero-shot transfer. We incorporate an Masked Image Modeling (MIM) based image encoder optimized for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), a Multimodal Large Language Model (M-LLM), and a Multi-scale Fine-grained Alignment (MFA) mechanism. The MIM pre-trained image encoder focuses on capturing essential low-level features, while the M-LLM generates caption embeddings processed alongside these visual cues. These embeddings are precisely aligned using MFA, enabling our framework to accurately interpret and navigate complex semantic contexts. To optimize operational efficiency, we introduce a learnable codebook that represents the M-LLM during inference, significantly reducing computational overhead. Our framework demonstrates its versatility and efficacy through rigorous experimentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot COS with $F_Î²^w$ scores of 72.9\% on CAMO and 71.7\% on COD10K. By removing the M-LLM during inference, we achieve an inference speed comparable to that of traditional end-to-end models, reaching 18.1 FPS. Code: https://github.com/R-LEI360725/ZSCOS-CaMF

Paperid: 1527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16845.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance in node classification. However, GNNs perform poorly in the Few-Shot Node Classification (FSNC) task that requires robust generalization to make accurate predictions for unseen classes with limited labels. To tackle the challenge, we propose the integration of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM)--a technique designed to enhance model generalization by finding a flat minimum of the loss landscape--into GNN training. The standard SAM approach, however, consists of two forward-backward steps in each training iteration, doubling the computational cost compared to the base optimizer (e.g., Adam). To mitigate this drawback, we introduce a novel algorithm, Fast Graph Sharpness-Aware Minimization (FGSAM), that integrates the rapid training of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with the superior performance of GNNs. Specifically, we utilize GNNs for parameter perturbation while employing MLPs to minimize the perturbed loss so that we can find a flat minimum with good generalization more efficiently. Moreover, our method reutilizes the gradient from the perturbation phase to incorporate graph topology into the minimization process at almost zero additional cost. To further enhance training efficiency, we develop FGSAM+ that executes exact perturbations periodically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the standard SAM with lower computational costs in FSNC tasks. In particular, our FGSAM+ as a SAM variant offers a faster optimization than the base optimizer in most cases. In addition to FSNC, our proposed methods also demonstrate competitive performance in the standard node classification task for heterophilic graphs, highlighting the broad applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/draym28/FGSAM_NeurIPS24.

Paperid: 1528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16820.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale visual-language pre-trained models (VLPMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in downstream object detection through text prompts for natural scenes. However, their application to zero-shot nuclei detection on histopathology images remains relatively unexplored, mainly due to the significant gap between the characteristics of medical images and the web-originated text-image pairs used for pre-training. This paper aims to investigate the potential of the object-level VLPM, Grounded Language-Image Pre-training (GLIP), for zero-shot nuclei detection. Specifically, we propose an innovative auto-prompting pipeline, named AttriPrompter, comprising attribute generation, attribute augmentation, and relevance sorting, to avoid subjective manual prompt design. AttriPrompter utilizes VLPMs' text-to-image alignment to create semantically rich text prompts, which are then fed into GLIP for initial zero-shot nuclei detection. Additionally, we propose a self-trained knowledge distillation framework, where GLIP serves as the teacher with its initial predictions used as pseudo labels, to address the challenges posed by high nuclei density, including missed detections, false positives, and overlapping instances. Our method exhibits remarkable performance in label-free nuclei detection, outperforming all existing unsupervised methods and demonstrating excellent generality. Notably, this work highlights the astonishing potential of VLPMs pre-trained on natural image-text pairs for downstream tasks in the medical field as well. Code will be released at https://github.com/wuyongjianCODE/AttriPrompter.

Paperid: 1529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16602.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Remote Sensing (RS) is a crucial technology for observing, monitoring, and interpreting our planet, with broad applications across geoscience, economics, humanitarian fields, etc. While artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, has achieved significant advances in RS, unique challenges persist in developing more intelligent RS systems, including the complexity of Earth's environments, diverse sensor modalities, distinctive feature patterns, varying spatial and spectral resolutions, and temporal dynamics. Meanwhile, recent breakthroughs in large Foundation Models (FMs) have expanded AI's potential across many domains due to their exceptional generalizability and zero-shot transfer capabilities. However, their success has largely been confined to natural data like images and video, with degraded performance and even failures for RS data of various non-optical modalities. This has inspired growing interest in developing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) to address the complex demands of Earth Observation (EO) tasks, spanning the surface, atmosphere, and oceans. This survey systematically reviews the emerging field of RSFMs. It begins with an outline of their motivation and background, followed by an introduction of their foundational concepts. It then categorizes and reviews existing RSFM studies including their datasets and technical contributions across Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and beyond. In addition, we benchmark these models against publicly available datasets, discuss existing challenges, and propose future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/awesome-RSFMs .

Paperid: 1530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16476.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
\textit{Zero-shot} models like CLIP are often fine-tuned on a target dataset to improve its accuracy further, but this can compromise out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Robust Fine-Tuning (\texttt{RFT} )~\citep{wortsman2021robust}, which interpolates between the \textit{zero-shot} and \textit{fine-tuned} models, has been proposed to address this issue. However, understanding when \texttt{RFT} actually improves OOD error remains limited. In this work, we empirically investigate the robustness of \texttt{RFT} in CLIP models, with a focus on the \textit{sharpness} of the CLIP model during interpolation. First, we demonstrate that while sharpness may not serve as a reliable indicator for predicting the generalization of modern architectures like CLIP on OOD data, this challenges the conventional belief in the generalization benefits of flat minima in foundation models. However, by examining the role of the \textit{straggler layer} phenomenon, we show that, unlike overall sharpness, the \textit{layer-wise} sharpness of \textit{straggler} layers can reliably capture the generalization performance of interpolated CLIP models on OOD data. Our extensive experiments reveal that \textit{layer-wise} sharpness correlates with generalization in OOD accuracy for \texttt{RFT}. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by inducing sparsity in the \textit{straggler} layers, we can mitigate the \textit{failure mode} phenomenon in \texttt{RFT}. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the role of sharpness in the \textit{success} of interpolation in the weight space of CLIP foundation models. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/alirezaabdollahpour/CLIP_Mode_Connectivity}.

Paperid: 1531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16271.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) face significant challenges in extreme few-shot scenarios, primarily due to overfitting and long training times. Existing methods, such as FreeNeRF and SparseNeRF, use frequency regularization or pre-trained priors but struggle with complex scheduling and bias. We introduce FrugalNeRF, a novel few-shot NeRF framework that leverages weight-sharing voxels across multiple scales to efficiently represent scene details. Our key contribution is a cross-scale geometric adaptation scheme that selects pseudo ground truth depth based on reprojection errors across scales. This guides training without relying on externally learned priors, enabling full utilization of the training data. It can also integrate pre-trained priors, enhancing quality without slowing convergence. Experiments on LLFF, DTU, and RealEstate-10K show that FrugalNeRF outperforms other few-shot NeRF methods while significantly reducing training time, making it a practical solution for efficient and accurate 3D scene reconstruction.

Paperid: 1532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16038.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In computational pathology, several foundation models have recently emerged and demonstrated enhanced learning capability for analyzing pathology images. However, adapting these models to various downstream tasks remains challenging, particularly when faced with datasets from different sources and acquisition conditions, as well as limited data availability. In this study, we benchmark four pathology-specific foundation models across 14 datasets and two scenarios-consistency assessment and flexibility assessment-addressing diverse adaptation scenarios and downstream tasks. In the consistency assessment scenario, involving five fine-tuning methods, we found that the parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach was both efficient and effective for adapting pathology-specific foundation models to diverse datasets within the same downstream task. In the flexibility assessment scenario under data-limited environments, utilizing five few-shot learning methods, we observed that the foundation models benefited more from the few-shot learning methods that involve modification during the testing phase only. These findings provide insights that could guide the deployment of pathology-specific foundation models in real clinical settings, potentially improving the accuracy and reliability of pathology image analysis. The code for this study is available at: https://github.com/QuIIL/BenchmarkingPathologyFoundationModels.

Paperid: 1533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15971.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large language and vision models have been leading a revolution in visual computing. By greatly scaling up sizes of data and model parameters, the large models learn deep priors which lead to remarkable performance in various tasks. In this work, we present deep prior assembly, a novel framework that assembles diverse deep priors from large models for scene reconstruction from single images in a zero-shot manner. We show that this challenging task can be done without extra knowledge but just simply generalizing one deep prior in one sub-task. To this end, we introduce novel methods related to poses, scales, and occlusion parsing which are keys to enable deep priors to work together in a robust way. Deep prior assembly does not require any 3D or 2D data-driven training in the task and demonstrates superior performance in generalizing priors to open-world scenes. We conduct evaluations on various datasets, and report analysis, numerical and visual comparisons with the latest methods to show our superiority. Project page: https://junshengzhou.github.io/DeepPriorAssembly.

Paperid: 1534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15926.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) present remarkable zero-shot conversational and reasoning capabilities given multimodal queries. Nevertheless, they suffer from object hallucination, a phenomenon where LVLMs are prone to generate textual responses not factually aligned with image inputs. Our pilot study reveals that object hallucination is closely tied with Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE), a widely adopted positional dependency modeling design in existing LVLMs. Due to the long-term decay in RoPE, LVLMs tend to hallucinate more when relevant visual cues are distant from instruction tokens in the multimodal input sequence. Additionally, we observe a similar effect when reversing the sequential order of visual tokens during multimodal alignment. Our tests indicate that long-term decay in RoPE poses challenges to LVLMs while capturing visual-instruction interactions across long distances. We propose Concentric Causal Attention (CCA), a simple yet effective positional alignment strategy that mitigates the impact of RoPE long-term decay in LVLMs by naturally reducing relative distance between visual and instruction tokens. With CCA, visual tokens can better interact with instruction tokens, thereby enhancing model's perception capability and alleviating object hallucination. Without bells and whistles, our positional alignment method surpasses existing hallucination mitigation strategies by large margins on multiple object hallucination benchmarks.

Paperid: 1535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15881.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language supervision has made remarkable strides in learning visual representations from textual guidance. In digital pathology, vision-language models (VLM), pre-trained on curated datasets of histological image-captions, have been adapted to downstream tasks, such as region of interest classification. Zero-shot transfer for slide-level prediction has been formulated by MI-Zero, but it exhibits high variability depending on the textual prompts. Inspired by prototypical learning, we propose MI-VisionShot, a training-free adaptation method on top of VLMs to predict slide-level labels in few-shot learning scenarios. Our framework takes advantage of the excellent representation learning of VLM to create prototype-based classifiers under a multiple-instance setting by retrieving the most discriminative patches within each slide. Experimentation through different settings shows the ability of MI-VisionShot to surpass zero-shot transfer with lower variability, even in low-shot scenarios. Code coming soon at thttps://github.com/cvblab/MIVisionShot.

Paperid: 1536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15591.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting fake news in large datasets is challenging due to its diversity and complexity, with traditional approaches often focusing on textual features while underutilizing semantic and emotional elements. Current methods also rely heavily on large annotated datasets, limiting their effectiveness in more nuanced analysis. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Emotion-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}ultimodal Fusion \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{L}\textbf{E}arning (\textbf{AMPLE}) framework to address the above issue by combining text sentiment analysis with multimodal data and hybrid prompt templates. This framework extracts emotional elements from texts by leveraging sentiment analysis tools. It then employs Multi-Head Cross-Attention (MCA) mechanisms and similarity-aware fusion methods to integrate multimodal data. The proposed AMPLE framework demonstrates strong performance on two public datasets in both few-shot and data-rich settings, with results indicating the potential of emotional aspects in fake news detection. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of integrating large language models with this method for text sentiment extraction, revealing substantial room for further improvement. The code can be found at :\url{https://github.com/xxm1215/MMM2025_few-shot/

Paperid: 1537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15371.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress on image-to-video (I2V) generation, while their noise-to-data generation process is inherently mismatched with this task, which may lead to suboptimal synthesis quality. In this work, we present FrameBridge. By modeling the frame-to-frames generation process with a bridge model based data-to-data generative process, we are able to fully exploit the information contained in the given image and improve the consistency between the generation process and I2V task. Moreover, we propose two novel techniques toward the two popular settings of training I2V models, respectively. Firstly, we propose SNR-Aligned Fine-tuning (SAF), making the first attempt to fine-tune a diffusion model to a bridge model and, therefore, allowing us to utilize the pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video (T2V) models. Secondly, we propose neural prior, further improving the synthesis quality of FrameBridge when training from scratch. Experiments conducted on WebVid-2M and UCF-101 demonstrate the superior quality of FrameBridge in comparison with the diffusion counterpart (zero-shot FVD 95 vs. 192 on MSR-VTT and non-zero-shot FVD 122 vs. 171 on UCF-101), and the advantages of our proposed SAF and neural prior for bridge-based I2V models. The project page: https://framebridge-icml.github.io/.

Paperid: 1538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15364.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current approaches for open-vocabulary scene graph generation (OVSGG) use vision-language models such as CLIP and follow a standard zero-shot pipeline -- computing similarity between the query image and the text embeddings for each category (i.e., text classifiers). In this work, we argue that the text classifiers adopted by existing OVSGG methods, i.e., category-/part-level prompts, are scene-agnostic as they remain unchanged across contexts. Using such fixed text classifiers not only struggles to model visual relations with high variance, but also falls short in adapting to distinct contexts. To plug these intrinsic shortcomings, we devise SDSGG, a scene-specific description based OVSGG framework where the weights of text classifiers are adaptively adjusted according to the visual content. In particular, to generate comprehensive and diverse descriptions oriented to the scene, an LLM is asked to play different roles (e.g., biologist and engineer) to analyze and discuss the descriptive features of a given scene from different views. Unlike previous efforts simply treating the generated descriptions as mutually equivalent text classifiers, SDSGG is equipped with an advanced renormalization mechanism to adjust the influence of each text classifier based on its relevance to the presented scene (this is what the term "specific" means). Furthermore, to capture the complicated interplay between subjects and objects, we propose a new lightweight module called mutual visual adapter. It refines CLIP's ability to recognize relations by learning an interaction-aware semantic space. Extensive experiments on prevalent benchmarks show that SDSGG outperforms top-leading methods by a clear margin.

Paperid: 1539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15050.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Fallacies are defective arguments with faulty reasoning. Detecting and classifying them is a crucial NLP task to prevent misinformation, manipulative claims, and biased decisions. However, existing fallacy classifiers are limited by the requirement for sufficient labeled data for training, which hinders their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization abilities. In this paper, we focus on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot fallacy classification. To elicit fallacy-related knowledge and reasoning abilities of LLMs, we propose diverse single-round and multi-round prompting schemes, applying different task-specific instructions such as extraction, summarization, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. With comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we suggest that LLMs could be potential zero-shot fallacy classifiers. In general, LLMs under single-round prompting schemes have achieved acceptable zero-shot performances compared to the best full-shot baselines and can outperform them in all OOD inference scenarios and some open-domain tasks. Our novel multi-round prompting schemes can effectively bring about more improvements, especially for small LLMs. Our analysis further underlines the future research on zero-shot fallacy classification. Codes and data are available at: https://github.com/panFJCharlotte98/Fallacy_Detection.

Paperid: 1540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14987.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce SeaS, a unified industrial generative model for automatically creating diverse anomalies, authentic normal products, and precise anomaly masks. While extensive research exists, most efforts either focus on specific tasks, i.e., anomalies or normal products only, or require separate models for each anomaly type. Consequently, prior methods either offer limited generative capability or depend on a vast array of anomaly-specific models. We demonstrate that U-Net's differentiated learning ability captures the distinct visual traits of slightly-varied normal products and diverse anomalies, enabling us to construct a unified model for all tasks. Specifically, we first introduce an Unbalanced Abnormal (UA) Text Prompt, comprising one normal token and multiple anomaly tokens. More importantly, our Decoupled Anomaly Alignment (DA) loss decouples anomaly attributes and binds them to distinct anomaly tokens of UA, enabling SeaS to create unseen anomalies by recombining these attributes. Furthermore, our Normal-image Alignment (NA) loss aligns the normal token to normal patterns, making generated normal products globally consistent and locally varied. Finally, SeaS produces accurate anomaly masks by fusing discriminative U-Net features with high-resolution VAE features. SeaS sets a new benchmark for industrial generation, significantly enhancing downstream applications, with average improvements of $+8.66\%$ pixel-level AP for synthesis-based AD approaches, $+1.10\%$ image-level AP for unsupervised AD methods, and $+12.79\%$ IoU for supervised segmentation models. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/SeaS}{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/SeaS}.

Paperid: 1541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14886.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify nodes in a graph that significantly deviate from normal patterns, plays a crucial role in broad application domains. However, existing GAD methods are one-model-for-one-dataset approaches, i.e., training a separate model for each graph dataset. This largely limits their applicability in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel zero-shot generalist GAD approach UNPrompt that trains a one-for-all detection model, requiring the training of one GAD model on a single graph dataset and then effectively generalizing to detect anomalies in other graph datasets without any retraining or fine-tuning. The key insight in UNPrompt is that i) the predictability of latent node attributes can serve as a generalized anomaly measure and ii) generalized normal and abnormal graph patterns can be learned via latent node attribute prediction in a properly normalized node attribute space. UNPrompt achieves a generalist mode for GAD through two main modules: one module aligns the dimensionality and semantics of node attributes across different graphs via coordinate-wise normalization, while another module learns generalized neighborhood prompts that support the use of latent node attribute predictability as an anomaly score across different datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world GAD datasets show that UNPrompt significantly outperforms diverse competing methods under the generalist GAD setting, and it also has strong superiority under the one-model-for-one-dataset setting. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/UNPrompt.

Paperid: 1542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14672.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce BiGR, a novel conditional image generation model using compact binary latent codes for generative training, focusing on enhancing both generation and representation capabilities. BiGR is the first conditional generative model that unifies generation and discrimination within the same framework. BiGR features a binary tokenizer, a masked modeling mechanism, and a binary transcoder for binary code prediction. Additionally, we introduce a novel entropy-ordered sampling method to enable efficient image generation. Extensive experiments validate BiGR's superior performance in generation quality, as measured by FID-50k, and representation capabilities, as evidenced by linear-probe accuracy. Moreover, BiGR showcases zero-shot generalization across various vision tasks, enabling applications such as image inpainting, outpainting, editing, interpolation, and enrichment, without the need for structural modifications. Our findings suggest that BiGR unifies generative and discriminative tasks effectively, paving the way for further advancements in the field. We further enable BiGR to perform text-to-image generation, showcasing its potential for broader applications.

Paperid: 1543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14379.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, multi-class anomaly classification has garnered increasing attention. Previous methods directly cluster anomalies but often struggle due to the lack of anomaly-prior knowledge. Acquiring this knowledge faces two issues: the non-prominent and weak-semantics anomalies. In this paper, we propose AnomalyNCD, a multi-class anomaly classification network compatible with different anomaly detection methods. To address the non-prominence of anomalies, we design main element binarization (MEBin) to obtain anomaly-centered images, ensuring anomalies are learned while avoiding the impact of incorrect detections. Next, to learn anomalies with weak semantics, we design mask-guided representation learning, which focuses on isolated anomalies guided by masks and reduces confusion from erroneous inputs through corrected pseudo labels. Finally, to enable flexible classification at both region and image levels, we develop a region merging strategy that determines the overall image category based on the classified anomaly regions. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art works on the MVTec AD and MTD datasets. Compared with the current methods, AnomalyNCD combined with zero-shot anomaly detection method achieves a 10.8% $F_1$ gain, 8.8% NMI gain, and 9.5% ARI gain on MVTec AD, and 12.8% $F_1$ gain, 5.7% NMI gain, and 10.8% ARI gain on MTD. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/AnomalyNCD.

Paperid: 1544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14340.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Precise action localization in untrimmed video is vital for fields such as professional sports and minimally invasive surgery, where the delineation of particular motions in recordings can dramatically enhance analysis. But in many cases, large scale datasets with video-label pairs for localization are unavailable, limiting the opportunity to fine-tune video-understanding models. Recent developments in large vision-language models (LVLM) address this need with impressive zero-shot capabilities in a variety of video understanding tasks. However, the adaptation of LVLMs, with their powerful visual question answering capabilities, to zero-shot localization in long-form video is still relatively unexplored. To this end, we introduce a true Zero-shot Action Localization method (ZEAL). Specifically, we leverage the built-in action knowledge of a large language model (LLM) to inflate actions into detailed descriptions of the archetypal start and end of the action. These descriptions serve as queries to LVLM for generating frame-level confidence scores which can be aggregated to produce localization outputs. The simplicity and flexibility of our method lends it amenable to more capable LVLMs as they are developed, and we demonstrate remarkable results in zero-shot action localization on a challenging benchmark, without any training. Our code is publicly available at $\href{https://github.com/josaklil-ai/zeal}{github.com/josaklil-ai/zeal}$.

Paperid: 1545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14159.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly enhanced image generation capabilities. However, customizing these models with new classes often leads to unintended consequences that compromise their reliability. We introduce the concept of open-world forgetting to characterize the vast scope of these unintended alterations. Our work presents the first systematic investigation into open-world forgetting in diffusion models, focusing on semantic and appearance drift of representations. Using zero-shot classification, we demonstrate that even minor model adaptations can lead to significant semantic drift affecting areas far beyond newly introduced concepts, with accuracy drops of up to 60% on previously learned concepts. Our analysis of appearance drift reveals substantial changes in texture and color distributions of generated content. To address these issues, we propose a functional regularization strategy that effectively preserves original capabilities while accommodating new concepts. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets and evaluation metrics, we demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces both semantic and appearance drift. Our study highlights the importance of considering open-world forgetting in future research on model customization and finetuning methods.

Paperid: 1546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13860.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D visual grounding is crucial for robots, requiring integration of natural language and 3D scene understanding. Traditional methods depending on supervised learning with 3D point clouds are limited by scarce datasets. Recently zero-shot methods leveraging LLMs have been proposed to address the data issue. While effective, these methods only use object-centric information, limiting their ability to handle complex queries. In this work, we present VLM-Grounder, a novel framework using vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot 3D visual grounding based solely on 2D images. VLM-Grounder dynamically stitches image sequences, employs a grounding and feedback scheme to find the target object, and uses a multi-view ensemble projection to accurately estimate 3D bounding boxes. Experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets show VLM-Grounder outperforms previous zero-shot methods, achieving 51.6% Acc@0.25 on ScanRefer and 48.0% Acc on Nr3D, without relying on 3D geometry or object priors. Codes are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/VLM-Grounder .

Paperid: 1547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13621.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This work proposes a novel approach beyond supervised learning for effective pathological image analysis, addressing the challenge of limited robust labeled data. Pathological diagnosis of diseases like cancer has conventionally relied on the evaluation of morphological features by physicians and pathologists. However, recent advancements in compute-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are gaining significant attention as diagnostic support tools. Although the advancement of deep learning has improved CAD significantly, segmentation models typically require large pixel-level annotated dataset, and such labeling is expensive. Existing studies not based on supervised approaches still struggle with limited generalization, and no practical approach has emerged yet. To address this issue, we present a weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) model by combining class activation map and Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based pseudo-labeling. For effective pretraining, we adopt the SAM-a foundation model that is pretrained on large datasets and operates in zero-shot configurations using only coarse prompts. The proposed approach transfer enhanced Attention Dropout Layer's knowledge to SAM, thereby generating pseudo-labels. To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, experimental studies are conducted on histopathological breast cancer datasets. The proposed method outperformed other WSSS methods across three datasets, demonstrating its efficiency by achieving this with only 12GB of GPU memory during training. Our code is available at : https://github.com/QI-NemoSong/EP-SAM

Paperid: 1548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13586.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models demonstrate superior performance in capturing complex distributions from large-scale datasets, providing a promising solution for quadrupedal locomotion control. However, the robustness of the diffusion planner is inherently dependent on the diversity of the pre-collected datasets. To mitigate this issue, we propose a two-stage learning framework to enhance the capability of the diffusion planner under limited dataset (reward-agnostic). Through the offline stage, the diffusion planner learns the joint distribution of state-action sequences from expert datasets without using reward labels. Subsequently, we perform the online interaction in the simulation environment based on the trained offline planner, which significantly diversified the original behavior and thus improves the robustness. Specifically, we propose a novel weak preference labeling method without the ground-truth reward or human preferences. The proposed method exhibits superior stability and velocity tracking accuracy in pacing, trotting, and bounding gait under different speeds and can perform a zero-shot transfer to the real Unitree Go1 robots. The project website for this paper is at https://shangjaven.github.io/preference-aligned-diffusion-legged.

Paperid: 1549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13343.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction, which can significantly impair their robustness and generalization capabilities. This paper presents Shortcut Suite, a comprehensive test suite designed to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance, incorporating six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies. Our extensive experiments yield several key findings: 1) LLMs demonstrate varying reliance on shortcuts for downstream tasks, significantly impairing their performance. 2) Larger LLMs are more likely to utilize shortcuts under zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning prompts. 3) Chain-of-thought prompting notably reduces shortcut reliance and outperforms other prompting strategies, while few-shot prompts generally underperform compared to zero-shot prompts. 4) LLMs often exhibit overconfidence in their predictions, especially when dealing with datasets that contain shortcuts. 5) LLMs generally have a lower explanation quality in shortcut-laden datasets, with errors falling into three types: distraction, disguised comprehension, and logical fallacy. Our findings offer new insights for evaluating robustness and generalization in LLMs and suggest potential directions for mitigating the reliance on shortcuts. The code is available at \url {https://github.com/yyhappier/ShortcutSuite.git}.

Paperid: 1550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13166.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Prior methods propose to offset the escalating costs of modern foundation models by dropping specific parts of their contexts with hand-designed rules, while attempting to preserve their original performance. We overcome this trade-off with Neural Attention Memory Models (NAMMs), introducing a learned network for memory management that improves both the performance and efficiency of transformers. We evolve NAMMs atop pre-trained transformers to provide different latent contexts focusing on the most relevant information for individual layers and attention heads. NAMMs are universally applicable to any model using self-attention as they condition exclusively on the values in the produced attention matrices. Learning NAMMs on a small set of problems, we achieve substantial performance improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks while cutting the model's input contexts up to a fraction of the original sizes. We show the generality of our conditioning enables zero-shot transfer of NAMMs trained only on language to entirely new transformer architectures even across input modalities, with their benefits carrying over to vision and reinforcement learning.

Paperid: 1551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13155.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs) for community-specific content moderation tasks. We fine-tune and evaluate SLMs (less than 15B parameters) by comparing their performance against much larger open- and closed-sourced models in both a zero-shot and few-shot setting. Using 150K comments from 15 popular Reddit communities, we find that SLMs outperform zero-shot LLMs at content moderation -- 11.5% higher accuracy and 25.7% higher recall on average across all communities. Moreover, few-shot in-context learning leads to only a marginal increase in the performance of LLMs, still lacking compared to SLMs. We further show the promise of cross-community content moderation, which has implications for new communities and the development of cross-platform moderation techniques. Finally, we outline directions for future work on language model based content moderation. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/AGoyal0512/SLM-Mod.

Paperid: 1552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12782.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success using in-context learning (ICL) in the language domain. However, leveraging the ICL capabilities within LLMs to directly predict robot actions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce RoboPrompt, a framework that enables off-the-shelf text-only LLMs to directly predict robot actions through ICL without training. Our approach first heuristically identifies keyframes that capture important moments from an episode. Next, we extract end-effector actions from these keyframes as well as the estimated initial object poses, and both are converted into textual descriptions. Finally, we construct a structured template to form ICL demonstrations from these textual descriptions and a task instruction. This enables an LLM to directly predict robot actions at test time. Through extensive experiments and analysis, RoboPrompt shows stronger performance over zero-shot and ICL baselines in simulated and real-world settings. Our project page is available at https://davidyyd.github.io/roboprompt.

Paperid: 1553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12558.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The advancement of LLMs has significantly boosted the performance of complex long-form question answering tasks. However, one prominent issue of LLMs is the generated "hallucination" responses that are not factual. Consequently, attribution for each claim in responses becomes a common solution to improve the factuality and verifiability. Existing researches mainly focus on how to provide accurate citations for the response, which largely overlook the importance of identifying the claims or statements for each response. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new claim decomposition benchmark, which requires building system that can identify atomic and checkworthy claims for LLM responses. Specifically, we present the Chinese Atomic Claim Decomposition Dataset (CACDD), which builds on the WebCPM dataset with additional expert annotations to ensure high data quality. The CACDD encompasses a collection of 500 human-annotated question-answer pairs, including a total of 4956 atomic claims. We further propose a new pipeline for human annotation and describe the challenges of this task. In addition, we provide experiment results on zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuned LLMs as baselines. The results show that the claim decomposition is highly challenging and requires further explorations. All code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/FBzzh/CACDD}.

Paperid: 1554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12405.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance is highly sensitive to the prompts utilized. This variability poses challenges for accurate assessment and user satisfaction. Current research frequently overlooks instance-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProSA, a framework designed to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in LLMs. ProSA incorporates a novel sensitivity metric, PromptSensiScore, and leverages decoding confidence to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our extensive study, spanning multiple tasks, uncovers that prompt sensitivity fluctuates across datasets and models, with larger models exhibiting enhanced robustness. We observe that few-shot examples can alleviate this sensitivity issue, and subjective evaluations are also susceptible to prompt sensitivities, particularly in complex, reasoning-oriented tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that higher model confidence correlates with increased prompt robustness. We believe this work will serve as a helpful tool in studying prompt sensitivity of LLMs. The project is released at: https://github.com/open-compass/ProSA .

Paperid: 1555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12399.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, neural ordinary differential equations (ODE) models trained with flow matching have achieved impressive performance on the zero-shot voice clone task. Nevertheless, postulating standard Gaussian noise as the initial distribution of ODE gives rise to numerous intersections within the fitted targets of flow matching, which presents challenges to model training and enhances the curvature of the learned generated trajectories. These curved trajectories restrict the capacity of ODE models for generating desirable samples with a few steps. This paper proposes SF-Speech, a novel voice clone model based on ODE and in-context learning. Unlike the previous works, SF-Speech adopts a lightweight multi-stage module to generate a more deterministic initial distribution for ODE. Without introducing any additional loss function, we effectively straighten the curved reverse trajectories of the ODE model by jointly training it with the proposed module. Experiment results on datasets of various scales show that SF-Speech outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS methods and requires only a quarter of the solver steps, resulting in a generation speed approximately 3.7 times that of Voicebox and E2 TTS. Audio samples are available at the demo page\footnote{[Online] Available: https://lixuyuan102.github.io/Demo/}.

Paperid: 1556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12337.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The application of activity recognition in the ``AI + Education" field is gaining increasing attention. However, current work mainly focuses on the recognition of activities in manually captured videos and a limited number of activity types, with little attention given to recognizing activities in surveillance images from real classrooms. Activity recognition in classroom surveillance images faces multiple challenges, such as class imbalance and high activity similarity. To address this gap, we constructed a novel multimodal dataset focused on classroom surveillance image activity recognition called ARIC (Activity Recognition In Classroom). The ARIC dataset has advantages of multiple perspectives, 32 activity categories, three modalities, and real-world classroom scenarios. In addition to the general activity recognition tasks, we also provide settings for continual learning and few-shot continual learning. We hope that the ARIC dataset can act as a facilitator for future analysis and research for open teaching scenarios. You can download preliminary data from https://ivipclab.github.io/publication_ARIC/ARIC.

Paperid: 1557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11711.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The emerging zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their applications in areas extending well beyond natural language processing tasks. In reinforcement learning, while LLMs have been extensively used in text-based environments, their integration with continuous state spaces remains understudied. In this paper, we investigate how pre-trained LLMs can be leveraged to predict in context the dynamics of continuous Markov decision processes. We identify handling multivariate data and incorporating the control signal as key challenges that limit the potential of LLMs' deployment in this setup and propose Disentangled In-Context Learning (DICL) to address them. We present proof-of-concept applications in two reinforcement learning settings: model-based policy evaluation and data-augmented off-policy reinforcement learning, supported by theoretical analysis of the proposed methods. Our experiments further demonstrate that our approach produces well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. We release the code at https://github.com/abenechehab/dicl.

Paperid: 1558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11448.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A longstanding goal of artificial general intelligence is highly capable generalists that can learn from diverse experiences and generalize to unseen tasks. The language and vision communities have seen remarkable progress toward this trend by scaling up transformer-based models trained on massive datasets, while reinforcement learning (RL) agents still suffer from poor generalization capacity under such paradigms. To tackle this challenge, we propose Meta Decision Transformer (Meta-DT), which leverages the sequential modeling ability of the transformer architecture and robust task representation learning via world model disentanglement to achieve efficient generalization in offline meta-RL. We pretrain a context-aware world model to learn a compact task representation, and inject it as a contextual condition to the causal transformer to guide task-oriented sequence generation. Then, we subtly utilize history trajectories generated by the meta-policy as a self-guided prompt to exploit the architectural inductive bias. We select the trajectory segment that yields the largest prediction error on the pretrained world model to construct the prompt, aiming to encode task-specific information complementary to the world model maximally. Notably, the proposed framework eliminates the requirement of any expert demonstration or domain knowledge at test time. Experimental results on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks across various dataset types show that Meta-DT exhibits superior few and zero-shot generalization capacity compared to strong baselines while being more practical with fewer prerequisites. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/Meta-DT.

Paperid: 1559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11247.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In subsurface imaging, learning the mapping from velocity maps to seismic waveforms (forward problem) and waveforms to velocity (inverse problem) is important for several applications. While traditional techniques for solving forward and inverse problems are computationally prohibitive, there is a growing interest in leveraging recent advances in deep learning to learn the mapping between velocity maps and seismic waveform images directly from data. Despite the variety of architectures explored in previous works, several open questions still remain unanswered such as the effect of latent space sizes, the importance of manifold learning, the complexity of translation models, and the value of jointly solving forward and inverse problems. We propose a unified framework to systematically characterize prior research in this area termed the Generalized Forward-Inverse (GFI) framework, building on the assumption of manifolds and latent space translations. We show that GFI encompasses previous works in deep learning for subsurface imaging, which can be viewed as specific instantiations of GFI. We also propose two new model architectures within the framework of GFI: Latent U-Net and Invertible X-Net, leveraging the power of U-Nets for domain translation and the ability of IU-Nets to simultaneously learn forward and inverse translations, respectively. We show that our proposed models achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for forward and inverse problems on a wide range of synthetic datasets, and also investigate their zero-shot effectiveness on two real-world-like datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/KGML-lab/Generalized-Forward-Inverse-Framework-for-DL4SI

Paperid: 1560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11201.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Prompt learning has proven effective in adapting vision language models for downstream tasks. However, existing methods usually append learnable prompt tokens solely with the category names to obtain textual features, which fails to fully leverage the rich context indicated in the category name. To address this issue, we propose the Tree of Attributes Prompt learning (TAP), which first instructs LLMs to generate a tree of attributes with a "concept - attribute - description" structure for each category, and then learn the hierarchy with vision and text prompt tokens. Unlike existing methods that merely augment category names with a set of unstructured descriptions, our approach essentially distills structured knowledge graphs associated with class names from LLMs. Furthermore, our approach introduces text and vision prompts designed to explicitly learn the corresponding visual attributes, effectively serving as domain experts. Additionally, the general and diverse descriptions generated based on the class names may be wrong or absent in the specific given images. To address this misalignment, we further introduce a vision-conditional pooling module to extract instance-specific text features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the zero-shot base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, as well as few-shot classification across 11 diverse datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HHenryD/TAP.

Paperid: 1561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11097.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential in speech synthesis tasks, including text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning. However, their iterative denoising processes are computationally intensive, and previous distillation attempts have shown consistent quality degradation. Moreover, existing TTS approaches are limited by non-differentiable components or iterative sampling that prevent true end-to-end optimization with perceptual metrics. We introduce DMOSpeech, a distilled diffusion-based TTS model that uniquely achieves both faster inference and superior performance compared to its teacher model. By enabling direct gradient pathways to all model components, we demonstrate the first successful end-to-end optimization of differentiable metrics in TTS, incorporating Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and Speaker Verification (SV) loss. Our comprehensive experiments, validated through extensive human evaluation, show significant improvements in naturalness, intelligibility, and speaker similarity while reducing inference time by orders of magnitude. This work establishes a new framework for aligning speech synthesis with human auditory preferences through direct metric optimization. The audio samples are available at https://dmospeech.github.io/.

Paperid: 1562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussian splatting has surpassed neural radiance field methods in novel view synthesis by achieving lower computational costs and real-time high-quality rendering. Although it produces a high-quality rendering with a lot of input views, its performance drops significantly when only a few views are available. In this work, we address this by proposing a depth-aware Gaussian splatting method for few-shot novel view synthesis. We use monocular depth prediction as a prior, along with a scale-invariant depth loss, to constrain the 3D shape under just a few input views. We also model color using lower-order spherical harmonics to avoid overfitting. Further, we observe that removing splats with lower opacity periodically, as performed in the original work, leads to a very sparse point cloud and, hence, a lower-quality rendering. To mitigate this, we retain all the splats, leading to a better reconstruction in a few view settings. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the traditional 3D Gaussian splatting methods by achieving improvements of 10.5% in peak signal-to-noise ratio, 6% in structural similarity index, and 14.1% in perceptual similarity, thereby validating the effectiveness of our approach. The code will be made available at: https://github.com/raja-kumar/depth-aware-3DGS

Paperid: 1563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10780.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in motion diffusion models have enabled spatially controllable text-to-motion generation. However, these models struggle to achieve high-precision control while maintaining high-quality motion generation. To address these challenges, we propose MaskControl, the first approach to introduce controllability to the generative masked motion model. Our approach introduces two key innovations. First, \textit{Logits Regularizer} implicitly perturbs logits at training time to align the distribution of motion tokens with the controlled joint positions, while regularizing the categorical token prediction to ensure high-fidelity generation. Second, \textit{Logit Optimization} explicitly optimizes the predicted logits during inference time, directly reshaping the token distribution that forces the generated motion to accurately align with the controlled joint positions. Moreover, we introduce \textit{Differentiable Expectation Sampling (DES)} to combat the non-differential distribution sampling process encountered by logits regularizer and optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MaskControl outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior motion quality (FID decreases by ~77\%) and higher control precision (average error 0.91 vs. 1.08). Additionally, MaskControl enables diverse applications, including any-joint-any-frame control, body-part timeline control, and zero-shot objective control. Video visualization can be found at https://www.ekkasit.com/ControlMM-page/

Paperid: 1564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10589.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Transferring visual-language knowledge from large-scale foundation models for video recognition has proved to be effective. To bridge the domain gap, additional parametric modules are added to capture the temporal information. However, zero-shot generalization diminishes with the increase in the number of specialized parameters, making existing works a trade-off between zero-shot and close-set performance. In this paper, we present MoTE, a novel framework that enables generalization and specialization to be balanced in one unified model. Our approach tunes a mixture of temporal experts to learn multiple task views with various degrees of data fitting. To maximally preserve the knowledge of each expert, we propose \emph{Weight Merging Regularization}, which regularizes the merging process of experts in weight space. Additionally with temporal feature modulation to regularize the contribution of temporal feature during test. We achieve a sound balance between zero-shot and close-set video recognition tasks and obtain state-of-the-art or competitive results on various datasets, including Kinetics-400 \& 600, UCF, and HMDB. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZMHH-H/MoTE}.

Paperid: 1565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10524.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal learning has become a pivotal technique to enable urban intelligence. Traditional spatiotemporal models mostly focus on a specific task by assuming a same distribution between training and testing sets. However, given that urban systems are usually dynamic, multi-sourced with imbalanced data distributions, current specific task-specific models fail to generalize to new urban conditions and adapt to new domains without explicitly modeling interdependencies across various dimensions and types of urban data. To this end, we argue that there is an essential to propose a Continuous Multi-task Spatio-Temporal learning framework (CMuST) to empower collective urban intelligence, which reforms the urban spatiotemporal learning from single-domain to cooperatively multi-dimensional and multi-task learning. Specifically, CMuST proposes a new multi-dimensional spatiotemporal interaction network (MSTI) to allow cross-interactions between context and main observations as well as self-interactions within spatial and temporal aspects to be exposed, which is also the core for capturing task-level commonality and personalization. To ensure continuous task learning, a novel Rolling Adaptation training scheme (RoAda) is devised, which not only preserves task uniqueness by constructing data summarization-driven task prompts, but also harnesses correlated patterns among tasks by iterative model behavior modeling. We further establish a benchmark of three cities for multi-task spatiotemporal learning, and empirically demonstrate the superiority of CMuST via extensive evaluations on these datasets. The impressive improvements on both few-shot streaming data and new domain tasks against existing SOAT methods are achieved. Code is available at https://github.com/DILab-USTCSZ/CMuST.

Paperid: 1566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10454.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Meta-learning has emerged as a prominent technology for few-shot text classification and has achieved promising performance. However, existing methods often encounter difficulties in drawing accurate class prototypes from support set samples, primarily due to probable large intra-class differences and small inter-class differences within the task. Recent approaches attempt to incorporate external knowledge or pre-trained language models to augment data, but this requires additional resources and thus does not suit many few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to address this issue by adequately leveraging the information within the task itself. Specifically, we utilize label information to construct a task-adaptive metric space, thereby adaptively reducing the intra-class differences and magnifying the inter-class differences. We further employ the optimal transport technique to estimate class prototypes with query set samples together, mitigating the problem of inaccurate and ambiguous support set samples caused by large intra-class differences. We conduct extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets, and our approach shows obvious advantages over state-of-the-art models across all the tasks on all the datasets. For reproducibility, all the datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/YvoGao/LAQDA.

Paperid: 1567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10393.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Time series foundation models excel in zero-shot forecasting, handling diverse tasks without explicit training. However, the advancement of these models has been hindered by the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce the General Time Series Forecasting Model Evaluation, GIFT-Eval, a pioneering benchmark aimed at promoting evaluation across diverse datasets. GIFT-Eval encompasses 23 datasets over 144,000 time series and 177 million data points, spanning seven domains, 10 frequencies, multivariate inputs, and prediction lengths ranging from short to long-term forecasts. To facilitate the effective pretraining and evaluation of foundation models, we also provide a non-leaking pretraining dataset containing approximately 230 billion data points. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of 17 baselines, which includes statistical models, deep learning models, and foundation models. We discuss each model in the context of various benchmark characteristics and offer a qualitative analysis that spans both deep learning and foundation models. We believe the insights from this analysis, along with access to this new standard zero-shot time series forecasting benchmark, will guide future developments in time series foundation models. Code, data, and the leaderboard can be found at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/gift-eval .

Paperid: 1568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10329.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention due to the prevalence of free-text node features in real-world applications and the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) that bolster TAG methodologies. However, current TAG approaches face two primary challenges: (i) Heavy reliance on label information and (ii) Limited cross-domain zero/few-shot transferability. These issues constrain the scaling of both data and model size, owing to high labor costs and scaling laws, complicating the development of graph foundation models with strong transferability. In this work, we propose the GraphCLIP framework to address these challenges by learning graph foundation models with strong cross-domain zero/few-shot transferability through a self-supervised contrastive graph-summary pretraining method. Specifically, we generate and curate large-scale graph-summary pair data with the assistance of LLMs, and introduce a novel graph-summary pretraining method, combined with invariant learning, to enhance graph foundation models with strong cross-domain zero-shot transferability. For few-shot learning, we propose a novel graph prompt tuning technique aligned with our pretraining objective to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and minimize learning costs. Extensive experiments show the superiority of GraphCLIP in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, while evaluations across various downstream tasks confirm the versatility of GraphCLIP. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ZhuYun97/GraphCLIP

Paperid: 1569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10289.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Current zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods show remarkable success in prompting large pre-trained vision-language models to detect anomalies in a target dataset without using any dataset-specific training or demonstration. However, these methods are often focused on crafting/learning prompts that capture only coarse-grained semantics of abnormality, e.g., high-level semantics like "damaged", "imperfect", or "defective" on carpet. They therefore have limited capability in recognizing diverse abnormality details with distinctive visual appearance, e.g., specific defect types like color stains, cuts, holes, and threads on carpet. To address this limitation, we propose FAPrompt, a novel framework designed to learn Fine-grained Abnormality Prompts for more accurate ZSAD. To this end, we introduce a novel compound abnormality prompting module in FAPrompt to learn a set of complementary, decomposed abnormality prompts, where each abnormality prompt is formed by a compound of shared normal tokens and a few learnable abnormal tokens. On the other hand, the fine-grained abnormality patterns can be very different from one dataset to another. To enhance their cross-dataset generalization, we further introduce a data-dependent abnormality prior module that learns to derive abnormality features from each query/test image as a sample-wise abnormality prior to ground the abnormality prompts in a given target dataset. Comprehensive experiments conducted across 19 real-world datasets, covering both industrial defects and medical anomalies, demonstrate that FAPrompt substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by at least 3%-5% AUC/AP in both image- and pixel-level ZSAD tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/FAPrompt.

Paperid: 1570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09988.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Advanced applied mathematics problems are underrepresented in existing Large Language Model (LLM) benchmark datasets. To address this, we introduce HARDMath, a dataset inspired by a graduate course on asymptotic methods, featuring challenging applied mathematics problems that require analytical approximation techniques. These problems demand a combination of mathematical reasoning, computational tools, and subjective judgment, making them difficult for LLMs. Our framework auto-generates a large number of problems with solutions validated against numerical ground truths. We evaluate both open- and closed-source LLMs on HARDMath-mini, a sub-sampled test set of 366 problems, as well as on 40 word problems formulated in applied science contexts. Even leading closed-source models like GPT-4 achieve only 43.8% overall accuracy with few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting, and all models demonstrate significantly lower performance compared to results on existing mathematics benchmark datasets. We additionally conduct a detailed error analysis to gain insights into the failure cases of LLMs. These results demonstrate limitations of current LLM performance on advanced graduate-level applied math problems and underscore the importance of datasets like HARDMath to advance mathematical abilities of LLMs.

Paperid: 1571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09824.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The structural properties of naturally arising social graphs are extensively studied to understand their evolution. Prior approaches for modeling network dynamics typically rely on rule-based models, which lack realism and generalizability, or deep learning-based models, which require large-scale training datasets. Social graphs, as abstract graph representations of entity-wise interactions, present an opportunity to explore network evolution mechanisms through realistic simulations of human-item interactions. Leveraging the pre-trained social consensus knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), we present GraphAgent-Generator (GAG), a novel simulation-based framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation. GAG simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graph generation. The resulting graphs exhibit adherence to seven key macroscopic network properties, achieving an 11% improvement in microscopic graph structure metrics. Through the node classification benchmarking task, we validate GAG effectively captures the intricate text-structure correlations in graph generation. Furthermore, GAG supports generating graphs with up to nearly 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges through large-scale LLM-based agent simulation with parallel acceleration, achieving a minimum speed-up of 90.4%. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/GraphAgent.

Paperid: 1572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09740.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in learned 3D representations have enabled significant progress in solving complex robotic manipulation tasks, particularly for rigid-body objects. However, manipulating granular materials such as beans, nuts, and rice, remains challenging due to the intricate physics of particle interactions, high-dimensional and partially observable state, inability to visually track individual particles in a pile, and the computational demands of accurate dynamics prediction. Current deep latent dynamics models often struggle to generalize in granular material manipulation due to a lack of inductive biases. In this work, we propose a novel approach that learns a visual dynamics model over Gaussian splatting representations of scenes and leverages this model for manipulating granular media via Model-Predictive Control. Our method enables efficient optimization for complex manipulation tasks on piles of granular media. We evaluate our approach in both simulated and real-world settings, demonstrating its ability to solve unseen planning tasks and generalize to new environments in a zero-shot transfer. We also show significant prediction and manipulation performance improvements compared to existing granular media manipulation methods.

Paperid: 1573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09527.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the evolving NLP landscape, benchmarks serve as yardsticks for gauging progress. However, existing Legal NLP benchmarks only focus on predictive tasks, overlooking generative tasks. This work curates LexSumm, a benchmark designed for evaluating legal summarization tasks in English. It comprises eight English legal summarization datasets, from diverse jurisdictions, such as the US, UK, EU and India. Additionally, we release LexT5, legal oriented sequence-to-sequence model, addressing the limitation of the existing BERT-style encoder-only models in the legal domain. We assess its capabilities through zero-shot probing on LegalLAMA and fine-tuning on LexSumm. Our analysis reveals abstraction and faithfulness errors even in summaries generated by zero-shot LLMs, indicating opportunities for further improvements. LexSumm benchmark and LexT5 model are available at https://github.com/TUMLegalTech/LexSumm-LexT5.

Paperid: 1574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09385.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces Mamba4Cast, a zero-shot foundation model for time series forecasting. Based on the Mamba architecture and inspired by Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs), Mamba4Cast generalizes robustly across diverse time series tasks without the need for dataset specific fine-tuning. Mamba4Cast's key innovation lies in its ability to achieve strong zero-shot performance on real-world datasets while having much lower inference times than time series foundation models based on the transformer architecture. Trained solely on synthetic data, the model generates forecasts for entire horizons in a single pass, outpacing traditional auto-regressive approaches. Our experiments show that Mamba4Cast performs competitively against other state-of-the-art foundation models in various data sets while scaling significantly better with the prediction length. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/automl/Mamba4Cast.

Paperid: 1575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09303.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing and comparing the stochastic behavior of tokenized models with their byte-level, or token-free, counterparts. We discover that, even when the two models are statistically equivalent, their predictive distributions over the next byte can be substantially different, a phenomenon we term as ``tokenization bias''. To fully characterize this phenomenon, we introduce the Byte-Token Representation Lemma, a framework that establishes a mapping between the learned token distribution and its equivalent byte-level distribution. From this result, we develop a next-byte sampling algorithm that eliminates tokenization bias without requiring further training or optimization. In other words, this enables zero-shot conversion of tokenized LMs into statistically equivalent token-free ones. We demonstrate its broad applicability with two use cases: fill-in-the-middle (FIM) tasks and model ensembles. In FIM tasks where input prompts may terminate mid-token, leading to out-of-distribution tokenization, our method mitigates performance degradation and achieves 18% improvement in FIM coding benchmarks, while consistently outperforming the standard token healing fix. For model ensembles where each model employs a distinct vocabulary, our approach enables seamless integration, resulting in improved performance up to 3.7% over individual models across various standard baselines in reasoning, knowledge, and coding. Code is available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Exact-Byte-Level-Probabilities-from-Tokenized-LMs

Paperid: 1576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09300.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) require alignment to effectively and safely follow user instructions. This process necessitates training an aligned version for every base model, resulting in significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose NUDGING, a simple, training-free algorithm that aligns any base model at inference time using a small aligned model. NUDGING is motivated by recent findings that alignment primarily alters the model's behavior on a small subset of stylistic tokens (e.g., discourse markers). We find that base models are significantly more uncertain when generating these tokens. Building on this insight, NUDGING employs a small aligned model to generate nudging tokens to guide the base model's output during decoding when the base model's uncertainty is high, with only a minor additional inference overhead. We evaluate NUDGING across 3 model families on a diverse range of open-instruction tasks. Without any training, nudging a large base model with a 7x-14x smaller aligned model achieves zero-shot performance comparable to, and sometimes surpassing, that of large aligned models. By operating at the token level, NUDGING enables off-the-shelf collaboration between model families. For instance, nudging Gemma-2-27b with Llama-27b-chat outperforms Llama-2-70b-chat on various tasks. Overall, our work offers a modular and cost-efficient solution to LLM alignment. Our code and demo are available at: https://fywalter.github.io/nudging/ .

Paperid: 1577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09237.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning for processing point clouds hold increased interest in Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) for 3D computer vision. This paper introduces a new method to tackle the Few-Shot Continual Incremental Learning (FSCIL) problem in 3D point cloud environments. We leverage a foundational 3D model trained extensively on point cloud data. Drawing from recent improvements in foundation models, known for their ability to work well across different tasks, we propose a novel strategy that does not require additional training to adapt to new tasks. Our approach uses a dual cache system: first, it uses previous test samples based on how confident the model was in its predictions to prevent forgetting, and second, it includes a small number of new task samples to prevent overfitting. This dynamic adaptation ensures strong performance across different learning tasks without needing lots of fine-tuning. We tested our approach on datasets like ModelNet, ShapeNet, ScanObjectNN, and CO3D, showing that it outperforms other FSCIL methods and demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ahmadisahar/ACCV_FCIL3D}.

Paperid: 1578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09132.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, encompassing extensive knowledge through multimodal attributes attached to nodes (e.g., texts and images) and topological structure representing node interactions. Despite its potential to advance diverse research fields like social networks and e-commerce, MAG representation learning (MAGRL) remains underexplored due to the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we first propose MAGB, a comprehensive MAG benchmark dataset, featuring curated graphs from various domains with both textual and visual attributes. Based on MAGB dataset, we further systematically evaluate two mainstream MAGRL paradigms: $\textit{GNN-as-Predictor}$, which integrates multimodal attributes via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and $\textit{VLM-as-Predictor}$, which harnesses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot reasoning. Extensive experiments on MAGB reveal following critical insights: $\textit{(i)}$ Modality significances fluctuate drastically with specific domain characteristics. $\textit{(ii)}$ Multimodal embeddings can elevate the performance ceiling of GNNs. However, intrinsic biases among modalities may impede effective training, particularly in low-data scenarios. $\textit{(iii)}$ VLMs are highly effective at generating multimodal embeddings that alleviate the imbalance between textual and visual attributes. These discoveries, which illuminate the synergy between multimodal attributes and graph topologies, contribute to reliable benchmarks, paving the way for future MAG research. The MAGB dataset and evaluation pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/sktsherlock/MAGB.

Paperid: 1579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08824.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D-aware image generation necessitates extensive training data to ensure stable training and mitigate the risk of overfitting. This paper first considers a novel task known as One-shot 3D Generative Domain Adaptation (GDA), aimed at transferring a pre-trained 3D generator from one domain to a new one, relying solely on a single reference image. One-shot 3D GDA is characterized by the pursuit of specific attributes, namely, high fidelity, large diversity, cross-domain consistency, and multi-view consistency. Within this paper, we introduce 3D-Adapter, the first one-shot 3D GDA method, for diverse and faithful generation. Our approach begins by judiciously selecting a restricted weight set for fine-tuning, and subsequently leverages four advanced loss functions to facilitate adaptation. An efficient progressive fine-tuning strategy is also implemented to enhance the adaptation process. The synergy of these three technological components empowers 3D-Adapter to achieve remarkable performance, substantiated both quantitatively and qualitatively, across all desired properties of 3D GDA. Furthermore, 3D-Adapter seamlessly extends its capabilities to zero-shot scenarios, and preserves the potential for crucial tasks such as interpolation, reconstruction, and editing within the latent space of the pre-trained generator. Code will be available at https://github.com/iceli1007/3D-Adapter.

Paperid: 1580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08751.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot imitation learning algorithms hold the promise of reproducing unseen behavior from as little as a single demonstration at test time. Existing practical approaches view the expert demonstration as a sequence of goals, enabling imitation with a high-level goal selector, and a low-level goal-conditioned policy. However, this framework can suffer from myopic behavior: the agent's immediate actions towards achieving individual goals may undermine long-term objectives. We introduce a novel method that mitigates this issue by directly optimizing the occupancy matching objective that is intrinsic to imitation learning. We propose to lift a goal-conditioned value function to a distance between occupancies, which are in turn approximated via a learned world model. The resulting method can learn from offline, suboptimal data, and is capable of non-myopic, zero-shot imitation, as we demonstrate in complex, continuous benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/martius-lab/zilot.

Paperid: 1581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08688.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite previous image restoration (IR) methods have often concentrated on isolated degradations, recent research has increasingly focused on addressing composite degradations involving a complex combination of multiple isolated degradations. However, current IR methods for composite degradations require building training data that contain an exponential number of possible degradation combinations, which brings in a significant burden. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a new task setting, i.e. Universal Image Restoration (UIR). Specifically, UIR doesn't require training on all the degradation combinations but only on a set of degradation bases and then removing any degradation that these bases can potentially compose in a zero-shot manner. Inspired by the Chain-of-Thought that prompts large language models (LLMs) to address problems step-by-step, we propose Chain-of-Restoration (CoR) mechanism, which instructs models to remove unknown composite degradations step-by-step. By integrating a simple Degradation Discriminator into pre-trained multi-task models, CoR facilitates the process where models remove one degradation basis per step, continuing this process until the image is fully restored from the unknown composite degradation. Extensive experiments show that CoR can significantly improve model performance in removing composite degradations, achieving comparable or better results than those state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods trained on all degradations.

Paperid: 1582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08611.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
A straightforward pipeline for zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection involves selecting potential OOD labels from an extensive semantic pool and then leveraging a pre-trained vision-language model to perform classification on both in-distribution (ID) and OOD labels. In this paper, we theorize that enhancing performance requires expanding the semantic pool, while increasing the expected probability of selected OOD labels being activated by OOD samples, and ensuring low mutual dependence among the activations of these OOD labels. A natural expansion manner is to adopt a larger lexicon; however, the inevitable introduction of numerous synonyms and uncommon words fails to meet the above requirements, indicating that viable expansion manners move beyond merely selecting words from a lexicon. Since OOD detection aims to correctly classify input images into ID/OOD class groups, we can "make up" OOD label candidates which are not standard class names but beneficial for the process. Observing that the original semantic pool is comprised of unmodified specific class names, we correspondingly construct a conjugated semantic pool (CSP) consisting of modified superclass names, each serving as a cluster center for samples sharing similar properties across different categories. Consistent with our established theory, expanding OOD label candidates with the CSP satisfies the requirements and outperforms existing works by 7.89% in FPR95. Codes are available in https://github.com/MengyuanChen21/NeurIPS2024-CSP.

Paperid: 1583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08589.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) models represent a significant advancement in large language model (LLM) development through their efficient parameter utilization. These models achieve substantial performance improvements at reduced inference costs. However, the deployment of SMoE models faces constraints from extensive memory requirements of expert components in resource-limited environments. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Hierarchical Clustering for Sparsely activated Mixture of Experts (HC-SMoE), a task-agnostic expert merging framework for parameter reduction without retraining. HC-SMoE introduces a novel hierarchical clustering approach based on expert outputs to ensure merging robustness independent of routing decisions. The proposed output-based clustering method enables effective capture of functional relationships between experts for large-scale architectures. We provide theoretical analysis and comprehensive evaluations across multiple zero-shot language tasks to demonstrate HC-SMoE's effectiveness in state-of-the-art models including Qwen and Mixtral. The experimental results validate HC-SMoE's superior performance and practical applicability for real-world deployments.

Paperid: 1584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08355.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Predicting the biophysical and functional properties of proteins is essential for in silico protein design. Machine learning has emerged as a promising technique for such prediction tasks. However, the relative scarcity of in vitro annotations means that these models often have little, or no, specific data on the desired fitness prediction task. As a result of limited data, protein language models (PLMs) are typically trained on general protein sequence modeling tasks, and then fine-tuned, or applied zero-shot, to protein fitness prediction. When no task data is available, the models make strong assumptions about the correlation between the protein sequence likelihood and fitness scores. In contrast, we propose meta-learning over a distribution of standard fitness prediction tasks, and demonstrate positive transfer to unseen fitness prediction tasks. Our method, called Metalic (Meta-Learning In-Context), uses in-context learning and fine-tuning, when data is available, to adapt to new tasks. Crucially, fine-tuning enables considerable generalization, even though it is not accounted for during meta-training. Our fine-tuned models achieve strong results with 18 times fewer parameters than state-of-the-art models. Moreover, our method sets a new state-of-the-art in low-data settings on ProteinGym, an established fitness-prediction benchmark. Due to data scarcity, we believe meta-learning will play a pivotal role in advancing protein engineering.

Paperid: 1585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08319.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present the Multilingual Entity Linking of Occupations (MELO) Benchmark, a new collection of 48 datasets for evaluating the linking of entity mentions in 21 languages to the ESCO Occupations multilingual taxonomy. MELO was built using high-quality, pre-existent human annotations. We conduct experiments with simple lexical models and general-purpose sentence encoders, evaluated as bi-encoders in a zero-shot setup, to establish baselines for future research. The datasets and source code for standardized evaluation are publicly available at https://github.com/Avature/melo-benchmark

Paperid: 1586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08189.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a new framework for zero-shot object navigation. Existing zero-shot object navigation methods prompt LLM with the text of spatially closed objects, which lacks enough scene context for in-depth reasoning. To better preserve the information of environment and fully exploit the reasoning ability of LLM, we propose to represent the observed scene with 3D scene graph. The scene graph encodes the relationships between objects, groups and rooms with a LLM-friendly structure, for which we design a hierarchical chain-of-thought prompt to help LLM reason the goal location according to scene context by traversing the nodes and edges. Moreover, benefit from the scene graph representation, we further design a re-perception mechanism to empower the object navigation framework with the ability to correct perception error. We conduct extensive experiments on MP3D, HM3D and RoboTHOR environments, where SG-Nav surpasses previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by more than 10% SR on all benchmarks, while the decision process is explainable. To the best of our knowledge, SG-Nav is the first zero-shot method that achieves even higher performance than supervised object navigation methods on the challenging MP3D benchmark.

Paperid: 1587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08168.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We present ZeroComp, an effective zero-shot 3D object compositing approach that does not require paired composite-scene images during training. Our method leverages ControlNet to condition from intrinsic images and combines it with a Stable Diffusion model to utilize its scene priors, together operating as an effective rendering engine. During training, ZeroComp uses intrinsic images based on geometry, albedo, and masked shading, all without the need for paired images of scenes with and without composite objects. Once trained, it seamlessly integrates virtual 3D objects into scenes, adjusting shading to create realistic composites. We developed a high-quality evaluation dataset and demonstrate that ZeroComp outperforms methods using explicit lighting estimations and generative techniques in quantitative and human perception benchmarks. Additionally, ZeroComp extends to real and outdoor image compositing, even when trained solely on synthetic indoor data, showcasing its effectiveness in image compositing.

Paperid: 1588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07961.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Quantum computing is an emerging field recognized for the significant speedup it offers over classical computing through quantum algorithms. However, designing and implementing quantum algorithms pose challenges due to the complex nature of quantum mechanics and the necessity for precise control over quantum states. Despite the significant advancements in AI, there has been a lack of datasets specifically tailored for this purpose. In this work, we introduce QCircuitNet, the first benchmark and test dataset designed to evaluate AI's capability in designing and implementing quantum algorithms in the form of quantum circuit codes. Unlike using AI for writing traditional codes, this task is fundamentally different and significantly more complicated due to highly flexible design space and intricate manipulation of qubits. Our key contributions include: 1. A general framework which formulates the key features of quantum algorithm design task for Large Language Models. 2. Implementation for a wide range of quantum algorithms from basic primitives to advanced applications, with easy extension to more quantum algorithms. 3. Automatic validation and verification functions, allowing for iterative evaluation and interactive reasoning without human inspection. 4. Promising potential as a training dataset through primitive fine-tuning results. We observed several interesting experimental phenomena: fine-tuning does not always outperform few-shot learning, and LLMs tend to exhibit consistent error patterns. QCircuitNet provides a comprehensive benchmark for AI-driven quantum algorithm design, offering advantages in model evaluation and improvement, while also revealing some limitations of LLMs in this domain.

Paperid: 1589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07864.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Bimanual manipulation is essential in robotics, yet developing foundation models is extremely challenging due to the inherent complexity of coordinating two robot arms (leading to multi-modal action distributions) and the scarcity of training data. In this paper, we present the Robotics Diffusion Transformer (RDT), a pioneering diffusion foundation model for bimanual manipulation. RDT builds on diffusion models to effectively represent multi-modality, with innovative designs of a scalable Transformer to deal with the heterogeneity of multi-modal inputs and to capture the nonlinearity and high frequency of robotic data. To address data scarcity, we further introduce a Physically Interpretable Unified Action Space, which can unify the action representations of various robots while preserving the physical meanings of original actions, facilitating learning transferrable physical knowledge. With these designs, we managed to pre-train RDT on the largest collection of multi-robot datasets to date and scaled it up to 1.2B parameters, which is the largest diffusion-based foundation model for robotic manipulation. We finally fine-tuned RDT on a self-created multi-task bimanual dataset with over 6K+ episodes to refine its manipulation capabilities. Experiments on real robots demonstrate that RDT significantly outperforms existing methods. It exhibits zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and scenes, understands and follows language instructions, learns new skills with just 1~5 demonstrations, and effectively handles complex, dexterous tasks. We refer to https://rdt-robotics.github.io/rdt-robotics/ for the code and videos.

Paperid: 1590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07500.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding and modeling pedestrian movements in the real world is crucial for applications like motion forecasting and scene simulation. Many factors influence pedestrian movements, such as scene context, individual characteristics, and goals, which are often ignored by the existing human generation methods. Web videos contain natural pedestrian behavior and rich motion context, but annotating them with pre-trained predictors leads to noisy labels. In this work, we propose learning diverse pedestrian movements from web videos. We first curate a large-scale dataset called CityWalkers that captures diverse real-world pedestrian movements in urban scenes. Then, based on CityWalkers, we propose a generative model called PedGen for diverse pedestrian movement generation. PedGen introduces automatic label filtering to remove the low-quality labels and a mask embedding to train with partial labels. It also contains a novel context encoder that lifts the 2D scene context to 3D and can incorporate various context factors in generating realistic pedestrian movements in urban scenes. Experiments show that PedGen outperforms existing baseline methods for pedestrian movement generation by learning from noisy labels and incorporating the context factors. In addition, PedGen achieves zero-shot generalization in both real-world and simulated environments. The code, model, and data will be made publicly available at https://genforce.github.io/PedGen/ .

Paperid: 1591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07408.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.

Paperid: 1592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07230.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning shows promising performance in wireless sensing. However, deep wireless sensing (DWS) heavily relies on large datasets. Unfortunately, building comprehensive datasets for DWS is difficult and costly, because wireless data depends on environmental factors and cannot be labeled offline. Despite recent advances in few-shot/cross-domain learning, DWS is still facing data scarcity issues. In this paper, we investigate a distinct perspective of radio data augmentation (RDA) for WiFi sensing and present a data-space solution. Our key insight is that wireless signals inherently exhibit data diversity, contributing more information to be extracted for DWS. We present RFBoost, a simple and effective RDA framework encompassing novel physical data augmentation techniques. We implement RFBoost as a plug-and-play module integrated with existing deep models and evaluate it on multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RFBoost achieves remarkable average accuracy improvements of 5.4% on existing models without additional data collection or model modifications, and the best-boosted performance outperforms 11 state-of-the-art baseline models without RDA. RFBoost pioneers the study of RDA, an important yet currently underexplored building block for DWS, which we expect to become a standard DWS component of WiFi sensing and beyond. RFBoost is released at https://github.com/aiot-lab/RFBoost.

Paperid: 1593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07164.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have led to significant improvements in the generation and animation of 4D full-body human-object interactions (HOI). Nevertheless, existing methods primarily focus on SMPL-based motion generation, which is limited by the scarcity of realistic large-scale interaction data. This constraint affects their ability to create everyday HOI scenes. This paper addresses this challenge using a zero-shot approach with a pre-trained diffusion model. Despite this potential, achieving our goals is difficult due to the diffusion model's lack of understanding of ''where'' and ''how'' objects interact with the human body. To tackle these issues, we introduce AvatarGO, a novel framework designed to generate animatable 4D HOI scenes directly from textual inputs. Specifically, 1) for the ''where'' challenge, we propose LLM-guided contact retargeting, which employs Lang-SAM to identify the contact body part from text prompts, ensuring precise representation of human-object spatial relations. 2) For the ''how'' challenge, we introduce correspondence-aware motion optimization that constructs motion fields for both human and object models using the linear blend skinning function from SMPL-X. Our framework not only generates coherent compositional motions, but also exhibits greater robustness in handling penetration issues. Extensive experiments with existing methods validate AvatarGO's superior generation and animation capabilities on a variety of human-object pairs and diverse poses. As the first attempt to synthesize 4D avatars with object interactions, we hope AvatarGO could open new doors for human-centric 4D content creation.

Paperid: 1594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07083.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The task of Stance Detection involves discerning the stance expressed in a text towards a specific subject or target. Prior works have relied on existing transformer models that lack the capability to prioritize targets effectively. Consequently, these models yield similar performance regardless of whether we utilize or disregard target information, undermining the task's significance. To address this challenge, we introduce Stanceformer, a target-aware transformer model that incorporates enhanced attention towards the targets during both training and inference. Specifically, we design a \textit{Target Awareness} matrix that increases the self-attention scores assigned to the targets. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Stanceformer with various BERT-based models, including state-of-the-art models and Large Language Models (LLMs), and evaluate its performance across three stance detection datasets, alongside a zero-shot dataset. Our approach Stanceformer not only provides superior performance but also generalizes even to other domains, such as Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. We make the code publicly available.\footnote{\scriptsize\url{https://github.com/kgarg8/Stanceformer}}

Paperid: 1595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06964.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The recent advancements in large-scale pre-training techniques have significantly enhanced the capabilities of vision foundation models, notably the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which can generate precise masks based on point and box prompts. Recent studies extend SAM to Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS), focusing on prompt generation for SAM-based automatic semantic segmentation. However, these methods struggle with selecting suitable prompts, require specific hyperparameter settings for different scenarios, and experience prolonged one-shot inference times due to the overuse of SAM, resulting in low efficiency and limited automation ability. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective approach based on graph analysis. In particular, a Positive-Negative Alignment module dynamically selects the point prompts for generating masks, especially uncovering the potential of the background context as the negative reference. Another subsequent Point-Mask Clustering module aligns the granularity of masks and selected points as a directed graph, based on mask coverage over points. These points are then aggregated by decomposing the weakly connected components of the directed graph in an efficient manner, constructing distinct natural clusters. Finally, the positive and overshooting gating, benefiting from graph-based granularity alignment, aggregate high-confident masks and filter out the false-positive masks for final prediction, reducing the usage of additional hyperparameters and redundant mask generation. Extensive experimental analysis across standard FSS, One-shot Part Segmentation, and Cross Domain FSS datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach, surpassing state-of-the-art generalist models with a mIoU of 58.7% on COCO-20i and 35.2% on LVIS-92i. The code is available in https://andyzaq.github.io/GF-SAM/.

Paperid: 1596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06885.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces F5-TTS, a fully non-autoregressive text-to-speech system based on flow matching with Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Without requiring complex designs such as duration model, text encoder, and phoneme alignment, the text input is simply padded with filler tokens to the same length as input speech, and then the denoising is performed for speech generation, which was originally proved feasible by E2 TTS. However, the original design of E2 TTS makes it hard to follow due to its slow convergence and low robustness. To address these issues, we first model the input with ConvNeXt to refine the text representation, making it easy to align with the speech. We further propose an inference-time Sway Sampling strategy, which significantly improves our model's performance and efficiency. This sampling strategy for flow step can be easily applied to existing flow matching based models without retraining. Our design allows faster training and achieves an inference RTF of 0.15, which is greatly improved compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based TTS models. Trained on a public 100K hours multilingual dataset, our F5-TTS exhibits highly natural and expressive zero-shot ability, seamless code-switching capability, and speed control efficiency. We have released all codes and checkpoints to promote community development, at https://SWivid.github.io/F5-TTS/.

Paperid: 1597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06488.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The challenge of automatically synthesizing high-quality vector fonts, particularly for writing systems (e.g., Chinese) consisting of huge amounts of complex glyphs, remains unsolved. Existing font synthesis techniques fall into two categories: 1) methods that directly generate vector glyphs, and 2) methods that initially synthesize glyph images and then vectorize them. However, the first category often fails to construct complete and correct shapes for complex glyphs, while the latter struggles to efficiently synthesize high-resolution (i.e., 1024 $\times$ 1024 or higher) glyph images while preserving local details. In this paper, we introduce HFH-Font, a few-shot font synthesis method capable of efficiently generating high-resolution glyph images that can be converted into high-quality vector glyphs. More specifically, our method employs a diffusion model-based generative framework with component-aware conditioning to learn different levels of style information adaptable to varying input reference sizes. We also design a distillation module based on Score Distillation Sampling for 1-step fast inference, and a style-guided super-resolution module to refine and upscale low-resolution synthesis results. Extensive experiments, including a user study with professional font designers, have been conducted to demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing font synthesis approaches. Experimental results show that our method produces high-fidelity, high-resolution raster images which can be vectorized into high-quality vector fonts. Using our method, for the first time, large-scale Chinese vector fonts of a quality comparable to those manually created by professional font designers can be automatically generated.

Paperid: 1598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06234.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large vision and language assistants have enabled new capabilities for interpreting natural images. These approaches have recently been adapted to earth observation data, but they are only able to handle single image inputs, limiting their use for many real-world tasks. In this work, we develop a new vision and language assistant called TEOChat that can engage in conversations about temporal sequences of earth observation data. To train TEOChat, we curate an instruction-following dataset composed of many single image and temporal tasks including building change and damage assessment, semantic change detection, and temporal scene classification. We show that TEOChat can perform a wide variety of spatial and temporal reasoning tasks, substantially outperforming previous vision and language assistants, and even achieving comparable or better performance than several specialist models trained to perform specific tasks. Furthermore, TEOChat achieves impressive zero-shot performance on a change detection and change question answering dataset, outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on multiple temporal tasks, and exhibits stronger single image capabilities than a comparable single image instruction-following model on scene classification, visual question answering, and captioning. We publicly release our data, model, and code at https://github.com/ermongroup/TEOChat .

Paperid: 1599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06154.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we propose GLOV, which enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to act as implicit optimizers for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance downstream vision tasks. GLOV prompts an LLM with the downstream task description, querying it for suitable VLM prompts (e.g., for zero-shot classification with CLIP). These prompts are ranked according to their fitness for the downstream vision task. In each respective optimization step, the ranked prompts are fed as in-context examples (with their accuracies) to equip the LLM with the knowledge of the type of prompts preferred by the downstream VLM. Furthermore, we explicitly guide the LLM's generation at each optimization step by adding an offset vector -- calculated from the embedding differences between previous positive and negative solutions -- to the intermediate layer of the network for the next generation. This offset vector biases the LLM generation toward the type of language the downstream VLM prefers, resulting in enhanced performance on the downstream vision tasks. We comprehensively evaluate our GLOV on two tasks: object recognition and the critical task of enhancing VLM safety. Our GLOV shows performance improvement by up to 15.0% and 57.5% for dual-encoder (e.g., CLIP) and encoder-decoder (e.g., LlaVA) models for object recognition and reduces the attack success rate (ASR) on state-of-the-art VLMs by up to $60.7\%$.

Paperid: 1600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05770.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Scientific document classification is a critical task and often involves many classes. However, collecting human-labeled data for many classes is expensive and usually leads to label-scarce scenarios. Moreover, recent work has shown that sentence embedding model fine-tuning for few-shot classification is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we propose FusionSent (Fusion-based Sentence Embedding Fine-tuning), an efficient and prompt-free approach for few-shot classification of scientific documents with many classes. FusionSent uses available training examples and their respective label texts to contrastively fine-tune two different sentence embedding models. Afterward, the parameters of both fine-tuned models are fused to combine the complementary knowledge from the separate fine-tuning steps into a single model. Finally, the resulting sentence embedding model is frozen to embed the training instances, which are then used as input features to train a classification head. Our experiments show that FusionSent significantly outperforms strong baselines by an average of $6.0$ $F_{1}$ points across multiple scientific document classification datasets. In addition, we introduce a new dataset for multi-label classification of scientific documents, which contains 203,961 scientific articles and 130 classes from the arXiv category taxonomy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sebischair/FusionSent.

Paperid: 1601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05643.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) is a crucial capability for video understanding models and plays a vital role in downstream tasks such as video browsing and editing. To effectively handle various tasks simultaneously and enable zero-shot prediction, there is a growing trend in employing video LLMs for VTG tasks. However, current video LLM-based methods rely exclusively on natural language generation, lacking the ability to model the clear structure inherent in videos, which restricts their effectiveness in tackling VTG tasks. To address this issue, this paper first formally introduces causal event modeling framework, which represents video LLM outputs as sequences of events, and predict the current event using previous events, video inputs, and textural instructions. Each event consists of three components: timestamps, salient scores, and textual captions. We then propose a novel task-interleaved video LLM called TRACE to effectively implement the causal event modeling framework in practice. The TRACE process visual frames, timestamps, salient scores, and text as distinct tasks, employing various encoders and decoding heads for each. Task tokens are arranged in an interleaved sequence according to the causal event modeling framework's formulation. Extensive experiments on various VTG tasks and datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TRACE compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/gyxxyg/TRACE.

Paperid: 1602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05627.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Aiming to incrementally learn new classes with only few samples while preserving the knowledge of base (old) classes, few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) faces several challenges, such as overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. Such a challenging problem is often tackled by fixing a feature extractor trained on base classes to reduce the adverse effects of overfitting and forgetting. Under such formulation, our primary focus is representation learning on base classes to tackle the unique challenge of FSCIL: simultaneously achieving the transferability and the discriminability of the learned representation. Building upon the recent efforts for enhancing transferability, such as promoting the spread of features, we find that trying to secure the spread of features within a more confined feature space enables the learned representation to strike a better balance between transferability and discriminability. Thus, in stark contrast to prior beliefs that the inter-class distance should be maximized, we claim that the closer different classes are, the better for FSCIL. The empirical results and analysis from the perspective of information bottleneck theory justify our simple yet seemingly counter-intuitive representation learning method, raising research questions and suggesting alternative research directions. The code is available at https://github.com/JungHunOh/CLOSER_ECCV2024.

Paperid: 1603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05583.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Machine unlearning aims to selectively remove specific knowledge from a trained model. Existing approaches, such as Task Arithmetic, fine-tune the model on the forget set to create a task vector (i.e., a direction in weight space) for subtraction from the original model's weight. However, their effectiveness is highly sensitive to hyperparameter selection, requiring extensive validation to identify the optimal vector from many fine-tuned candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel method that utilizes all fine-tuned models trained with varying hyperparameters instead of a single selection. Specifically, we aggregate the computed task vectors by retaining only the elements with consistent shared signs. The merged task vector is then negated to induce unlearning on the original model. Evaluations on zero-shot and standard image recognition tasks across twelve datasets and four backbone architectures show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods while requiring similar or fewer computational resources. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/negmerge.

Paperid: 1604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05440.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity in time series forecasting, but their potential for anomaly detection remains largely unexplored. Our study investigates whether LLMs can understand and detect anomalies in time series data, focusing on zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Inspired by conjectures about LLMs' behavior from time series forecasting research, we formulate key hypotheses about LLMs' capabilities in time series anomaly detection. We design and conduct principled experiments to test each of these hypotheses. Our investigation reveals several surprising findings about LLMs for time series: (1) LLMs understand time series better as images rather than as text, (2) LLMs do not demonstrate enhanced performance when prompted to engage in explicit reasoning about time series analysis. (3) Contrary to common beliefs, LLMs' understanding of time series does not stem from their repetition biases or arithmetic abilities. (4) LLMs' behaviors and performance in time series analysis vary significantly across different models. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of contemporary LLM capabilities in time series anomaly detection. Our results suggest that while LLMs can understand trivial time series anomalies, we have no evidence that they can understand more subtle real-world anomalies. Many common conjectures based on their reasoning capabilities do not hold. All synthetic dataset generators, final prompts, and evaluation scripts have been made available in https://github.com/rose-stl-lab/anomllm.

Paperid: 1605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05270.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We consider the problem of adapting a contrastively pretrained vision-language model like CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) for few-shot classification. The literature addresses this problem by learning a linear classifier of the frozen visual features, optimizing word embeddings, or learning external feature adapters. We introduce an alternative way for few-shot CLIP adaptation without adding ''external'' parameters to optimize. We find that simply fine-tuning the embedding projection matrix of the vision encoder leads to better performance than all baselines. Furthermore, we show that regularizing training with the distance between the fine-tuned and pretrained matrices adds reliability for adapting CLIP, making the results stable across different learning rates in the ''validation-free'' setting. This simple approach, coined ProLIP, yields state-of-the-art performance on 11 few-shot classification benchmarks, few-shot cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization, and base-to-new class generalization. We also show that ProLIP significantly outperforms prompt tuning when extended to another task of test-time adaptation, while being one order of magnitude faster to train. Code will be made available at: https://github.com/astra-vision/ProLIP .

Paperid: 1606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05265.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing weight-activation quantization methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily address channel-wise outliers but often neglect token-wise outliers, which limits the accuracy of quantized models. In this work, we propose PrefixQuant, a novel quantization method that achieves state-of-the-art performance across various precision levels (W4A4KV4 and W4A8KV4) and granularities (dynamic and static quantization) by effectively isolating token-wise outliers. First, PrefixQuant eliminates token-wise outliers by prefixing outlier tokens in the KV cache, a process that is training-free and highly efficient (e.g., 1 minutes for Llama-3-70B). Second, PrefixQuant introduces new trainable parameters for block-wise training to compensate for quantization error. Our experiments show that PrefixQuant significantly outperforms existing dynamic quantization methods, even under coarser static quantization settings. For instance, PrefixQuant achieves an average accuracy improvement of +3.08 and +2.85 points over SpinQuant (dynamic quantization) on five zero-shot reasoning tasks under dynamic and static quantization settings, respectively, on W4A4KV4 Llama-3-8B. Additionally, we demonstrate up to 2.74x prefilling speedup and 2.16x decoding speedup for LLMs using W4A4 PrefixQuant. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChenMnZ/PrefixQuant.

Paperid: 1607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05210.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance compositional understanding in pre-trained vision and language models (VLMs) without sacrificing performance in zero-shot multi-modal tasks. Traditional fine-tuning approaches often improve compositional reasoning at the cost of degrading multi-modal capabilities, primarily due to the use of global hard negative (HN) loss, which contrasts global representations of images and texts. This global HN loss pushes HN texts that are highly similar to the original ones, damaging the model's multi-modal representations. To overcome this limitation, we propose Fine-grained Selective Calibrated CLIP (FSC-CLIP), which integrates local hard negative loss and selective calibrated regularization. These innovations provide fine-grained negative supervision while preserving the model's representational integrity. Our extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks for both compositionality and multi-modal tasks show that FSC-CLIP not only achieves compositionality on par with state-of-the-art models but also retains strong multi-modal capabilities. Code is available at: https://github.com/ytaek-oh/fsc-clip.

Paperid: 1608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04803.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present Timer-XL, a causal Transformer for unified time series forecasting. To uniformly predict multidimensional time series, we generalize next token prediction, predominantly adopted for 1D token sequences, to multivariate next token prediction. The paradigm formulates various forecasting tasks as a long-context prediction problem. We opt for decoder-only Transformers that capture causal dependencies from varying-length contexts for unified forecasting, making predictions on non-stationary univariate time series, multivariate series with complicated dynamics and correlations, as well as covariate-informed contexts that include exogenous variables. Technically, we propose a universal TimeAttention to capture fine-grained intra- and inter-series dependencies of flattened time series tokens (patches), which is further enhanced by deft position embedding for temporal causality and variable equivalence. Timer-XL achieves state-of-the-art performance across task-specific forecasting benchmarks through a unified approach. Based on large-scale pre-training, Timer-XL achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, making it a promising architecture for pre-trained time series models. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Timer-XL.

Paperid: 1609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04380.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, Text-to-speech (TTS) models based on large language models (LLMs) that translate natural language text into sequences of discrete audio tokens have gained great research attention, with advances in neural audio codec (NAC) models using residual vector quantization (RVQ). However, long-form speech synthesis remains a significant challenge due to the high frame rate, which increases the length of audio tokens and makes it difficult for autoregressive language models to generate audio tokens for even a minute of speech. To address this challenge, this paper introduces two novel post-training approaches: 1) Multi-Resolution Requantization (MReQ) and 2) HALL-E. MReQ is a framework to reduce the frame rate of pre-trained NAC models. Specifically, it incorporates multi-resolution residual vector quantization (MRVQ) module that hierarchically reorganizes discrete audio tokens through teacher-student distillation. HALL-E is an LLM-based TTS model designed to predict hierarchical tokens of MReQ. Specifically, it incorporates the technique of using MRVQ sub-modules and continues training from a pre-trained LLM-based TTS model. Furthermore, to promote TTS research, we create MinutesSpeech, a new benchmark dataset consisting of 40k hours of filtered speech data for training and evaluating speech synthesis ranging from 3s up to 180s. In experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our approaches by applying our post-training framework to VALL-E. We achieved the frame rate down to as low as 8 Hz, enabling the stable minitue-long speech synthesis in a single inference step. Audio samples, dataset, codes and pre-trained models are available at https://yutonishimura-v2.github.io/HALL-E_DEMO/.

Paperid: 1610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04277.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models trained on web-scale text acquire language generation abilities that can solve a wide range of tasks, particularly when task knowledge is refined into the generative prior using in-context examples. However, spurious features learned from noisy data hinder their generalizability. Supervised finetuning can introduce task specificity, but introduce data inefficiency. Prior studies indicate that (i) noisy neural circuitries coexist with generalizable ones within LLMs, and (ii) finetuning typically enhances (or suppresses) existing abilities without introducing newer ones. Building upon these, we propose TaRot, a novel method for task adaptation. TaRot intervenes in the neural circuitries using learnable rotation matrices that are optimized using Bayesian Optimization, on labelled samples in the order of standard few-shot prompting examples. Experiments on multiple classification and generation tasks using LLMs of varying sizes reveal the efficacy of TaRot, improving upon both zero- as well as few-shot performance, with average improvements (across models and tasks) of 23.81% and 11.15%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/joykirat18/TaRot

Paperid: 1611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03905.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of Natural Language Processing in recent years, numerous studies have shown that generic summaries generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) can sometimes surpass those annotated by experts, such as journalists, according to human evaluations. However, there is limited research on whether these generic summaries meet the individual needs of ordinary people. The biggest obstacle is the lack of human-annotated datasets from the general public. Existing work on personalized summarization often relies on pseudo datasets created from generic summarization datasets or controllable tasks that focus on specific named entities or other aspects, such as the length and specificity of generated summaries, collected from hypothetical tasks without the annotators' initiative. To bridge this gap, we propose a high-quality, personalized, manually annotated abstractive summarization dataset called PersonalSum. This dataset is the first to investigate whether the focus of public readers differs from the generic summaries generated by LLMs. It includes user profiles, personalized summaries accompanied by source sentences from given articles, and machine-generated generic summaries along with their sources. We investigate several personal signals - entities/topics, plot, and structure of articles - that may affect the generation of personalized summaries using LLMs in a few-shot in-context learning scenario. Our preliminary results and analysis indicate that entities/topics are merely one of the key factors that impact the diverse preferences of users, and personalized summarization remains a significant challenge for existing LLMs.

Paperid: 1612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03576.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).

Paperid: 1613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03198.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive conversational capabilities, their proficiency in delivering personalized responses remains unclear. Although recent benchmarks automatically evaluate persona consistency in role-playing contexts using LLM-based judgment, the evaluation of personalization in response generation remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present a new benchmark, PersoBench, to evaluate the personalization ability of LLMs in persona-aware dialogue generation within a zero-shot setting. We assess the performance of three open-source and three closed-source LLMs using well-known datasets and a range of metrics. Our analysis, conducted on three well-known persona-aware datasets, evaluates multiple dimensions of response quality, including fluency, diversity, coherence, and personalization, across both standard and chain-of-thought prompting methods. Our findings reveal that while LLMs excel at generating fluent and diverse responses, they are far from satisfactory in delivering personalized and coherent responses considering both the conversation context and the provided personas. Our benchmark implementation is available at https://github.com/salehafzoon/PersoBench.

Paperid: 1614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03192.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems that scale up the amount of training data have achieved significant improvements in zero-shot speech synthesis. However, these systems have certain limitations: they require a large amount of training data, which increases costs, and often overlook prosody similarity. To address these issues, we propose MultiVerse, a zero-shot multi-task TTS system that is able to perform TTS or speech style transfer in zero-shot and cross-lingual conditions. MultiVerse requires much less training data than traditional data-driven approaches. To ensure zero-shot performance even with limited data, we leverage source-filter theory-based disentanglement, utilizing the prompt for modeling filter-related and source-related representations. Additionally, to further enhance prosody similarity, we adopt a prosody modeling approach combining prompt-based autoregressive and non-autoregressive methods. Evaluations demonstrate the remarkable zero-shot multi-task TTS performance of MultiVerse and show that MultiVerse not only achieves zero-shot TTS performance comparable to data-driven TTS systems with much less data, but also significantly outperforms other zero-shot TTS systems trained with the same small amount of data. In particular, our novel prosody modeling technique significantly contributes to MultiVerse's ability to generate speech with high prosody similarity to the given prompts. Our samples are available at https://nc-ai.github.io/speech/publications/multiverse/index.html

Paperid: 1615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03161.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In recent years, zero-shot and few-shot learning in visual grounding have garnered considerable attention, largely due to the success of large-scale vision-language pre-training on expansive datasets such as LAION-5B and DataComp-1B. However, the continuous expansion of these datasets presents significant challenges, particularly with respect to data availability and computational overhead, thus creating a bottleneck in the advancement of low-shot learning capabilities. In this paper, we propose IMAGE, Interpretative MAsking with Gaussian radiation modEling, aimed at enhancing vocabulary grounding in low-shot learning scenarios without necessitating an increase in dataset size. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science and the recent success of masked autoencoders (MAE), our method leverages adaptive masking on salient regions of the feature maps generated by the vision backbone. This enables the model to learn robust, generalized representations through the reconstruction of occluded information, thereby facilitating effective attention to both local and global features. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on benchmark datasets, including COCO and ODinW, demonstrating its superior performance in zero-shot and few-shot tasks. Experimental results consistently show that IMAGE outperforms baseline models, achieving enhanced generalization and improved performance in low-shot scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of adaptive feature manipulation through attention mechanisms and Gaussian modeling as a promising alternative to approaches that rely on the continual scaling of dataset sizes for the advancement of zero-shot and few-shot learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/git-lenny/IMAGE.

Paperid: 1616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03160.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have revolutionized image generation, and their extension to video generation has shown promise. However, current video diffusion models~(VDMs) rely on a scalar timestep variable applied at the clip level, which limits their ability to model complex temporal dependencies needed for various tasks like image-to-video generation. To address this limitation, we propose a frame-aware video diffusion model~(FVDM), which introduces a novel vectorized timestep variable~(VTV). Unlike conventional VDMs, our approach allows each frame to follow an independent noise schedule, enhancing the model's capacity to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies. FVDM's flexibility is demonstrated across multiple tasks, including standard video generation, image-to-video generation, video interpolation, and long video synthesis. Through a diverse set of VTV configurations, we achieve superior quality in generated videos, overcoming challenges such as catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning and limited generalizability in zero-shot methods.Our empirical evaluations show that FVDM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video generation quality, while also excelling in extended tasks. By addressing fundamental shortcomings in existing VDMs, FVDM sets a new paradigm in video synthesis, offering a robust framework with significant implications for generative modeling and multimedia applications.

Paperid: 1617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03039.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion Models (DMs) have become powerful image generation tools, especially for few-shot fine-tuning where a pretrained DM is fine-tuned on a small image set to capture specific styles or objects. Many people upload these personalized checkpoints online, fostering communities such as Civitai and HuggingFace. However, model owners may overlook the data leakage risks when releasing fine-tuned checkpoints. Moreover, concerns regarding copyright violations arise when unauthorized data is used during fine-tuning. In this paper, we ask: "Can training data be extracted from these fine-tuned DMs shared online?" A successful extraction would present not only data leakage threats but also offer tangible evidence of copyright infringement. To answer this, we propose FineXtract, a framework for extracting fine-tuning data. Our method approximates fine-tuning as a gradual shift in the model's learned distribution -- from the original pretrained DM toward the fine-tuning data. By extrapolating the models before and after fine-tuning, we guide the generation toward high-probability regions within the fine-tuned data distribution. We then apply a clustering algorithm to extract the most probable images from those generated using this extrapolated guidance. Experiments on DMs fine-tuned with datasets including WikiArt, DreamBooth, and real-world checkpoints posted online validate the effectiveness of our method, extracting about 20% of fine-tuning data in most cases. The code is available https://github.com/Nicholas0228/FineXtract.

Paperid: 1618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02762.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We investigate the internal representations of vision-language models (VLMs) to address hallucinations, a persistent challenge despite advances in model size and training. We project VLMs' internal image representations to their language vocabulary and observe more confident output probabilities on real objects than hallucinated objects. We additionally use these output probabilities to spatially localize real objects. Building on this approach, we introduce a knowledge erasure algorithm that removes hallucinations by linearly orthogonalizing image features with respect to hallucinated object features. We show that targeted edits to a model's latent representations can reduce hallucinations by up to 25.7% on the COCO2014 dataset while preserving performance. Our findings demonstrate how a deeper understanding of VLMs' latent representations can enhance reliability and enable novel capabilities, such as zero-shot segmentation.

Paperid: 1619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02751.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Intelligent embodied agents need to quickly adapt to new scenarios by integrating long histories of experience into decision-making. For instance, a robot in an unfamiliar house initially wouldn't know the locations of objects needed for tasks and might perform inefficiently. However, as it gathers more experience, it should learn the layout of its environment and remember where objects are, allowing it to complete new tasks more efficiently. To enable such rapid adaptation to new tasks, we present ReLIC, a new approach for in-context reinforcement learning (RL) for embodied agents. With ReLIC, agents are capable of adapting to new environments using 64,000 steps of in-context experience with full attention while being trained through self-generated experience via RL. We achieve this by proposing a novel policy update scheme for on-policy RL called "partial updates'' as well as a Sink-KV mechanism that enables effective utilization of a long observation history for embodied agents. Our method outperforms a variety of meta-RL baselines in adapting to unseen houses in an embodied multi-object navigation task. In addition, we find that ReLIC is capable of few-shot imitation learning despite never being trained with expert demonstrations. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of ReLIC, highlighting that the combination of large-scale RL training, the proposed partial updates scheme, and the Sink-KV are essential for effective in-context learning. The code for ReLIC and all our experiments is at https://github.com/aielawady/relic

Paperid: 1620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02694.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many benchmarks exist for evaluating long-context language models (LCLMs), yet developers often rely on synthetic tasks such as needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) or an arbitrary subset of tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these benchmarks reflect the diverse downstream applications of LCLMs, and such inconsistencies further complicate model comparison. We investigate the underlying reasons behind these practices and find that existing benchmarks often provide noisy signals due to limited coverage of applications, insufficient context lengths, unreliable metrics, and incompatibility with base models. In this work, we introduce HELMET (How to Evaluate Long-context Models Effectively and Thoroughly), a comprehensive benchmark encompassing seven diverse, application-centric categories. We also address several issues in previous benchmarks by adding controllable lengths up to 128K tokens, model-based evaluation for reliable metrics, and few-shot prompting for robustly evaluating base models. Consequently, we demonstrate that HELMET offers more reliable and consistent rankings of frontier LCLMs. Through a comprehensive study of 59 LCLMs, we find that (1) synthetic tasks like NIAH do not reliably predict downstream performance; (2) the diverse categories in HELMET exhibit distinct trends and low correlations with each other; and (3) while most LCLMs achieve perfect NIAH scores, open-source models significantly lag behind closed ones when tasks require full-context reasoning or following complex instructions -- the gap widens as length increases. Finally, we recommend using our RAG tasks for fast model development, as they are easy to run and better predict other downstream performance; ultimately, we advocate for a holistic evaluation across diverse tasks.

Paperid: 1621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02505.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Image quality assessment (IQA) serves as the golden standard for all models' performance in nearly all computer vision fields. However, it still suffers from poor out-of-distribution generalization ability and expensive training costs. To address these problems, we propose Dog-IQA, a standard-guided zero-shot mix-grained IQA method, which is training-free and utilizes the exceptional prior knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To obtain accurate IQA scores, namely scores consistent with humans, we design an MLLM-based inference pipeline that imitates human experts. In detail, Dog-IQA applies two techniques. First, Dog-IQA objectively scores with specific standards that utilize MLLM's behavior pattern and minimize the influence of subjective factors. Second, Dog-IQA comprehensively takes local semantic objects and the whole image as input and aggregates their scores, leveraging local and global information. Our proposed Dog-IQA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with training-free methods, and competitive performance compared with training-based methods in cross-dataset scenarios. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/Dog-IQA.

Paperid: 1622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02369.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The Diffusion Model has not only garnered noteworthy achievements in the realm of image generation but has also demonstrated its potential as an effective pretraining method utilizing unlabeled data. Drawing from the extensive potential unveiled by the Diffusion Model in both semantic correspondence and open vocabulary segmentation, our work initiates an investigation into employing the Latent Diffusion Model for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation. Recently, inspired by the in-context learning ability of large language models, Few-shot Semantic Segmentation has evolved into In-context Segmentation tasks, morphing into a crucial element in assessing generalist segmentation models. In this context, we concentrate on Few-shot Semantic Segmentation, establishing a solid foundation for the future development of a Diffusion-based generalist model for segmentation. Our initial focus lies in understanding how to facilitate interaction between the query image and the support image, resulting in the proposal of a KV fusion method within the self-attention framework. Subsequently, we delve deeper into optimizing the infusion of information from the support mask and simultaneously re-evaluating how to provide reasonable supervision from the query mask. Based on our analysis, we establish a simple and effective framework named DiffewS, maximally retaining the original Latent Diffusion Model's generative framework and effectively utilizing the pre-training prior. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA models in multiple settings.

Paperid: 1623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02308.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Phrases are fundamental linguistic units through which humans convey semantics. This study critically examines the capacity of API-based large language models (LLMs) to comprehend phrase semantics, utilizing three human-annotated datasets. We assess the performance of LLMs in executing phrase semantic reasoning tasks guided by natural language instructions and explore the impact of common prompting techniques, including few-shot demonstrations and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Our findings reveal that LLMs greatly outperform traditional embedding methods across the datasets; however, they do not show a significant advantage over fine-tuned methods. The effectiveness of advanced prompting strategies shows variability. We conduct detailed error analyses to interpret the limitations faced by LLMs in comprehending phrase semantics. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/memray/llm_phrase_semantics.

Paperid: 1624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02267.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Meta-learning has been widely used in recent years in areas such as few-shot learning and reinforcement learning. However, the questions of why and when it is better than other algorithms in few-shot classification remain to be explored. In this paper, we perform pre-experiments by adjusting the proportion of label noise and the degree of task heterogeneity in the dataset. We use the metric of Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis to quantify the representation stability of the neural network and thus to compare the behavior of meta-learning and classical learning algorithms. We find that benefiting from the bi-level optimization strategy, the meta-learning algorithm has better robustness to label noise and heterogeneous tasks. Based on the above conclusion, we argue a promising future for meta-learning in the unsupervised area, and thus propose DHM-UHT, a dynamic head meta-learning algorithm with unsupervised heterogeneous task construction. The core idea of DHM-UHT is to use DBSCAN and dynamic head to achieve heterogeneous task construction and meta-learn the whole process of unsupervised heterogeneous task construction. On several unsupervised zero-shot and few-shot datasets, DHM-UHT obtains state-of-the-art performance. The code is released at https://github.com/tuantuange/DHM-UHT.

Paperid: 1625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02185.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are found to be surprisingly sensitive to minor variations in prompts, often generating significantly divergent outputs in response to minor variations in the prompts, such as spelling errors, alteration of wording or the prompt template. However, while assessing the quality of an LLM, the focus often tends to be solely on its performance on downstream tasks, while very little to no attention is paid to prompt sensitivity. To fill this gap, we propose POSIX - a novel PrOmpt Sensitivity IndeX as a reliable measure of prompt sensitivity, thereby offering a more comprehensive evaluation of LLM performance. The key idea behind POSIX is to capture the relative change in loglikelihood of a given response upon replacing the corresponding prompt with a different intent-preserving prompt. We provide thorough empirical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of POSIX in capturing prompt sensitivity and subsequently use it to measure and thereby compare prompt sensitivity of various open-source LLMs. We find that merely increasing the parameter count or instruction tuning does not necessarily reduce prompt sensitivity whereas adding some few-shot exemplars, even just one, almost always leads to significant decrease in prompt sensitivity. We also find that alterations to prompt template lead to the highest sensitivity in the case of MCQ type tasks, whereas paraphrasing results in the highest sensitivity in open-ended generation tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/POSIX.

Paperid: 1626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02131.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The accurate interpretation of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is pivotal for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. Integrating ECG signals with accompanying textual reports further holds immense potential to enhance clinical diagnostics by combining physiological data and qualitative insights. However, this integration faces significant challenges due to inherent modality disparities and the scarcity of labeled data for robust cross-modal learning. To address these obstacles, we propose D-BETA, a novel framework that pre-trains ECG and text data using a contrastive masked auto-encoder architecture. D-BETA uniquely combines the strengths of generative with boosted discriminative capabilities to achieve robust cross-modal representations. This is accomplished through masked modality modeling, specialized loss functions, and an improved negative sampling strategy tailored for cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments on five public datasets across diverse downstream tasks demonstrate that D-BETA significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving an average AUC improvement of 15% in linear probing with only one percent of training data and 2% in zero-shot performance without requiring training data over state-of-the-art models. These results highlight the effectiveness of D-BETA, underscoring its potential to advance automated clinical diagnostics through multi-modal representations. Our sample code and checkpoint are made available at https://github.com/manhph2211/D-BETA.

Paperid: 1627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02073.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We present a foundation model for zero-shot metric monocular depth estimation. Our model, Depth Pro, synthesizes high-resolution depth maps with unparalleled sharpness and high-frequency details. The predictions are metric, with absolute scale, without relying on the availability of metadata such as camera intrinsics. And the model is fast, producing a 2.25-megapixel depth map in 0.3 seconds on a standard GPU. These characteristics are enabled by a number of technical contributions, including an efficient multi-scale vision transformer for dense prediction, a training protocol that combines real and synthetic datasets to achieve high metric accuracy alongside fine boundary tracing, dedicated evaluation metrics for boundary accuracy in estimated depth maps, and state-of-the-art focal length estimation from a single image. Extensive experiments analyze specific design choices and demonstrate that Depth Pro outperforms prior work along multiple dimensions. We release code and weights at https://github.com/apple/ml-depth-pro

Paperid: 1628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01735.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reward Models (RMs) are crucial to aligning large language models (LLMs), but the degree to which an RM specialized to one task (e.g. writing) generalizes to new tasks (e.g. math) is often not known a priori, often making using only one fixed RM to train LLMs suboptimal. However, optimizing LLMs with multiple RMs simultaneously can incur a prohibitively high computational cost and lead to conflicting signals from different RMs that may degrade performance. To address these challenges, we introduce LASeR (Learning to Adaptively Select Rewards), which frames reward model selection as a multi-armed bandit problem, efficiently and iteratively training LLMs using multiple RMs by selecting the most well-suited RM for each instance. On commonsense and math reasoning tasks, we show that LASeR boosts iterative LLM training, improving the absolute average accuracy of Llama-3-8B over three datasets by 2.67% over an ensemble of RM scores while also showing superior efficiency (e.g., a 2x speedup). Moreover, on WildChat (open-ended instruction-following tasks), LASeR leads to a 72.69% AlpacaEval win rate over the RM score ensemble baseline. Extending to long-context generation, LASeR improves by 2.96 F1 points (avg.) on single-document QA tasks and 2.97 F1 points on few-shot learning over the RM score ensemble baseline with best-of-n sampling.

Paperid: 1629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01407.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Capitalizing on vast amount of image-text data, large-scale vision-language pre-training has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities and has been utilized in several applications. However, models trained on general everyday web-crawled data often exhibit sub-optimal performance for specialized domains, likely due to domain shift. Recent works have tackled this problem for some domains (e.g., healthcare) by constructing domain-specialized image-text data. However, constructing a dedicated large-scale image-text dataset for sustainable area of agriculture and livestock is still open to research. Further, this domain desires fine-grained feature learning due to the subtle nature of the downstream tasks (e.g, nutrient deficiency detection, livestock breed classification). To address this we present AgriCLIP, a vision-language foundational model dedicated to the domain of agriculture and livestock. First, we propose a large-scale dataset, named ALive, that leverages customized prompt generation strategy to overcome the scarcity of expert annotations. Our ALive dataset covers crops, livestock, and fishery, with around 600,000 image-text pairs. Second, we propose a training pipeline that integrates both contrastive and self-supervised learning to learn both global semantic and local fine-grained domain-specialized features. Experiments on diverse set of 20 downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of AgriCLIP framework, achieving an absolute gain of 7.8\% in terms of average zero-shot classification accuracy, over the standard CLIP adaptation via domain-specialized ALive dataset. Our ALive dataset and code can be accessible at \href{https://github.com/umair1221/AgriCLIP/tree/main}{Github}.

Paperid: 1630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01395.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robot-assisted surgery has profoundly influenced current forms of minimally invasive surgery. However, in transurethral suburethral urological surgical robots, they need to work in a liquid environment. This causes vaporization of the liquid when shearing and heating is performed, resulting in bubble atomization that affects the visual perception of the robot. This can lead to the need for uninterrupted pauses in the surgical procedure, which makes the surgery take longer. To address the atomization characteristics of liquids under urological surgical robotic vision, we propose an unsupervised zero-shot dehaze method (RSF-Dehaze) for urological surgical robotic vision. Specifically, the proposed Region Similarity Filling Module (RSFM) of RSF-Dehaze significantly improves the recovery of blurred region tissues. In addition, we organize and propose a dehaze dataset for robotic vision in urological surgery (USRobot-Dehaze dataset). In particular, this dataset contains the three most common urological surgical robot operation scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to organize and propose a publicly available dehaze dataset for urological surgical robot vision. The proposed RSF-Dehaze proves the effectiveness of our method in three urological surgical robot operation scenarios with extensive comparative experiments with 20 most classical and advanced dehazing and image recovery algorithms. The proposed source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wurenkai/RSF-Dehaze .

Paperid: 1631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01313.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Photonic tensor cores (PTCs) are essential building blocks for optical artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators based on programmable photonic integrated circuits. Most PTC designs today are manually constructed, with low design efficiency and unsatisfying solution quality. This makes it challenging to meet various hardware specifications and keep up with rapidly evolving AI applications. Prior work has explored gradient-based methods to learn a good PTC structure differentiably. However, it suffers from slow training speed and optimization difficulty when handling multiple non-differentiable objectives and constraints. Therefore, in this work, we propose a more flexible and efficient zero-shot multi-objective evolutionary topology search framework ADEPT-Z that explores Pareto-optimal PTC designs with advanced devices in a larger search space. Multiple objectives can be co-optimized while honoring complicated hardware constraints. With only <3 hours of search, we can obtain tens of diverse Pareto-optimal solutions, 100x faster than the prior gradient-based method, outperforming prior manual designs with 2x higher accuracy weighted area-energy efficiency. The code of ADEPT-Z is available at https://github.com/ScopeX-ASU/ADEPT-Z.

Paperid: 1632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00593.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Text style transfer (TST) aims to modify the style of a text without altering its original meaning. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance across multiple tasks, including TST. However, in zero-shot setups, they tend to directly copy a significant portion of the input text to the output without effectively changing its style. To enhance the stylistic variety and fluency of the text, we present sNeuron-TST, a novel approach for steering LLMs using style-specific neurons in TST. Specifically, we identify neurons associated with the source and target styles and deactivate source-style-only neurons to give target-style words a higher probability, aiming to enhance the stylistic diversity of the generated text. However, we find that this deactivation negatively impacts the fluency of the generated text, which we address by proposing an improved contrastive decoding method that accounts for rapid token probability shifts across layers caused by deactivated source-style neurons. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six benchmarks, encompassing formality, toxicity, politics, politeness, authorship, and sentiment.

Paperid: 1633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00513.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent efforts have aimed to utilize multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) to extend semantic parsing (SP) across multiple languages without requiring extensive annotations. However, achieving zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for SP remains challenging, leading to a performance gap between source and target languages. In this study, we propose Cross-Lingual Back-Parsing (CBP), a novel data augmentation methodology designed to enhance cross-lingual transfer for SP. Leveraging the representation geometry of the mPLMs, CBP synthesizes target language utterances from source meaning representations. Our methodology effectively performs cross-lingual data augmentation in challenging zero-resource settings, by utilizing only labeled data in the source language and monolingual corpora. Extensive experiments on two cross-language SP benchmarks (Mschema2QA and Xspider) demonstrate that CBP brings substantial gains in the target language. Further analysis of the synthesized utterances shows that our method successfully generates target language utterances with high slot value alignment rates while preserving semantic integrity. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/deokhk/CBP.

Paperid: 1634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00412.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot document-level relation extraction suffers from poor performance due to the challenging cross-domain transferability of NOTA (none-of-the-above) relation representation. In this paper, we introduce a Transferable Proto-Learning Network (TPN) to address the challenging issue. It comprises three core components: Hybrid Encoder hierarchically encodes semantic content of input text combined with attention information to enhance the relation representations. As a plug-and-play module for Out-of-Domain (OOD) Detection, Transferable Proto-Learner computes NOTA prototype through an adaptive learnable block, effectively mitigating NOTA bias across various domains. Dynamic Weighting Calibrator detects relation-specific classification confidence, serving as dynamic weights to calibrate the NOTA-dominant loss function. Finally, to bolster the model's cross-domain performance, we complement it with virtual adversarial training (VAT). We conduct extensive experimental analyses on FREDo and ReFREDo, demonstrating the superiority of TPN. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves competitive performance with approximately half the parameter size. Data and code are available at https://github.com/EchoDreamer/TPN.

Paperid: 1635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00350.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in Large Vision Models (LVMs), such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) and diffusion models, have led to an increasing demand for computational resources, resulting in substantial financial and environmental costs. This growing challenge highlights the necessity of developing efficient training methods for LVMs. Progressive learning, a training strategy in which model capacity gradually increases during training, has shown potential in addressing these challenges. In this paper, we present an advanced automated progressive learning (AutoProg) framework for efficient training of LVMs. We begin by focusing on the pre-training of LVMs, using ViTs as a case study, and propose AutoProg-One, an AutoProg scheme featuring momentum growth (MoGrow) and a one-shot growth schedule search. Beyond pre-training, we extend our approach to tackle transfer learning and fine-tuning of LVMs. We expand the scope of AutoProg to cover a wider range of LVMs, including diffusion models. First, we introduce AutoProg-Zero, by enhancing the AutoProg framework with a novel zero-shot unfreezing schedule search, eliminating the need for one-shot supernet training. Second, we introduce a novel Unique Stage Identifier (SID) scheme to bridge the gap during network growth. These innovations, integrated with the core principles of AutoProg, offer a comprehensive solution for efficient training across various LVM scenarios. Extensive experiments show that AutoProg accelerates ViT pre-training by up to 1.85x on ImageNet and accelerates fine-tuning of diffusion models by up to 2.86x, with comparable or even higher performance. This work provides a robust and scalable approach to efficient training of LVMs, with potential applications in a wide range of vision tasks. Code: https://github.com/changlin31/AutoProg-Zero

Paperid: 1636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00263.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Surgical video-language pretraining (VLP) faces unique challenges due to the knowledge domain gap and the scarcity of multi-modal data. This study aims to bridge the gap by addressing issues regarding textual information loss in surgical lecture videos and the spatial-temporal challenges of surgical VLP. We propose a hierarchical knowledge augmentation approach and a novel Procedure-Encoded Surgical Knowledge-Augmented Video-Language Pretraining (PeskaVLP) framework to tackle these issues. The knowledge augmentation uses large language models (LLM) for refining and enriching surgical concepts, thus providing comprehensive language supervision and reducing the risk of overfitting. PeskaVLP combines language supervision with visual self-supervision, constructing hard negative samples and employing a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based loss function to effectively comprehend the cross-modal procedural alignment. Extensive experiments on multiple public surgical scene understanding and cross-modal retrieval datasets show that our proposed method significantly improves zero-shot transferring performance and offers a generalist visual representation for further advancements in surgical scene understanding.The code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SurgVLP

Paperid: 1637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00179.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning benchmarks are critical for evaluating modern NLP techniques. It is possible, however, that benchmarks favor methods which easily make use of unlabeled text, because researchers can use unlabeled text from the test set to pretrain their models. Given the dearth of research on this potential problem, we run experiments to quantify the bias caused by pretraining on unlabeled test set text instead of on unlabeled, independently drawn text. Controlled few-shot and zero-shot experiments on 25 classification tasks and 3 language models -- BERT, GPT-2, and Mistral 7B -- do not find evidence of overoptimism. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of repeated subsampling when studying few-shot text classification, and recommend that few-shot learning benchmarks include multiple training folds. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kddubey/pretrain-on-test/.

Paperid: 1638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20365.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA, i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding. VideoINSTA contributes (1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; (2) an event-based temporal reasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; (3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme balancing temporal factors based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence. Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. The code is released here: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.

Paperid: 1639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20353.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world contexts. However, systematic studies on their transferability to specific and critical applications are underrepresented in the research literature. An important example is visual anomaly detection (VAD) for robotic power line inspection. While existing VAD methods perform well in controlled environments, real-world scenarios present diverse and unexpected anomalies that current datasets fail to capture. To address this gap, we introduce $\textit{CableInspect-AD}$, a high-quality, publicly available dataset created and annotated by domain experts from Hydro-QuÃ©bec, a Canadian public utility. This dataset includes high-resolution images with challenging real-world anomalies, covering defects with varying severity levels. To address the challenges of collecting diverse anomalous and nominal examples for setting a detection threshold, we propose an enhancement to the celebrated PatchCore algorithm. This enhancement enables its use in scenarios with limited labeled data. We also present a comprehensive evaluation protocol based on cross-validation to assess models' performances. We evaluate our $\textit{Enhanced-PatchCore}$ for few-shot and many-shot detection, and Vision-Language Models for zero-shot detection. While promising, these models struggle to detect all anomalies, highlighting the dataset's value as a challenging benchmark for the broader research community. Project page: https://mila-iqia.github.io/cableinspect-ad/.

Paperid: 1640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20293.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models such as the recently introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved remarkable results in image segmentation tasks. However, these models typically require user interaction through handcrafted prompts such as bounding boxes, which limits their deployment to downstream tasks. Adapting these models to a specific task with fully labeled data also demands expensive prior user interaction to obtain ground-truth annotations. This work proposes to replace conditioning on input prompts with a lightweight module that directly learns a prompt embedding from the image embedding, both of which are subsequently used by the foundation model to output a segmentation mask. Our foundation models with learnable prompts can automatically segment any specific region by 1) modifying the input through a prompt embedding predicted by a simple module, and 2) using weak labels (tight bounding boxes) and few-shot supervision (10 samples). Our approach is validated on MedSAM, a version of SAM fine-tuned for medical images, with results on three medical datasets in MR and ultrasound imaging. Our code is available on https://github.com/Minimel/MedSAMWeakFewShotPromptAutomation.

Paperid: 1641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20181.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and demonstrated impressive capabilities. In-Context Learning (ICL) and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) are currently two mainstream methods for augmenting LLMs to downstream tasks. ICL typically constructs a few-shot learning scenario, either manually or by setting up a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, helping models quickly grasp domain knowledge or question-answering patterns without changing model parameters. However, this approach involves trade-offs, such as slower inference speed and increased space occupancy. PEFT assists the model in adapting to tasks through minimal parameter modifications, but the training process still demands high hardware requirements, even with a small number of parameters involved. To address these challenges, we propose Reference Trustable Decoding (RTD), a paradigm that allows models to quickly adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning, maintaining low inference costs. RTD constructs a reference datastore from the provided training examples and optimizes the LLM's final vocabulary distribution by flexibly selecting suitable references based on the input, resulting in more trustable responses and enabling the model to adapt to downstream tasks at a low cost. Experimental evaluations on various LLMs using different benchmarks demonstrate that RTD establishes a new paradigm for augmenting models to downstream tasks. Furthermore, our method exhibits strong orthogonality with traditional methods, allowing for concurrent usage. Our code can be found at https://github.com/ShiLuohe/ReferenceTrustableDecoding

Paperid: 1642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19899.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Exploiting the foundation models (e.g., CLIP) to build a versatile keypoint detector has gained increasing attention. Most existing models accept either the text prompt (e.g., ``the nose of a cat''), or the visual prompt (e.g., support image with keypoint annotations), to detect the corresponding keypoints in query image, thereby, exhibiting either zero-shot or few-shot detection ability. However, the research on taking multimodal prompt is still underexplored, and the prompt diversity in semantics and language is far from opened. For example, how to handle unseen text prompts for novel keypoint detection and the diverse text prompts like ``Can you detect the nose and ears of a cat?'' In this work, we open the prompt diversity from three aspects: modality, semantics (seen v.s. unseen), and language, to enable a more generalized zero- and few-shot keypoint detection (Z-FSKD). We propose a novel OpenKD model which leverages multimodal prototype set to support both visual and textual prompting. Further, to infer the keypoint location of unseen texts, we add the auxiliary keypoints and texts interpolated from visual and textual domains into training, which improves the spatial reasoning of our model and significantly enhances zero-shot novel keypoint detection. We also found large language model (LLM) is a good parser, which achieves over 96% accuracy to parse keypoints from texts. With LLM, OpenKD can handle diverse text prompts. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Z-FSKD and initiates new ways to deal with unseen text and diverse texts. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/AlanLuSun/OpenKD.

Paperid: 1643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19806.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in zero-shot audio recognition tasks, which match features of audio waveforms with class-specific text prompt features, inspired by advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Given the sensitivity of zero-shot performance to the choice of hand-crafted text prompts, many prompt learning techniques have been developed for VLMs. We explore the efficacy of these approaches in ALMs and propose a novel method, Prompt Learning in Audio Language Models (PALM), which optimizes the feature space of the text encoder branch. Unlike existing methods that work in the input space, our approach results in greater training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on 11 audio recognition datasets, encompassing a variety of speech-processing tasks, and compare the results with three baselines in a few-shot learning setup. Our method is either on par with or outperforms other approaches while being computationally less demanding. Code is available at https://asif-hanif.github.io/palm/

Paperid: 1644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19720.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The expensive fine-grained annotation and data scarcity have become the primary obstacles for the widespread adoption of deep learning-based Whole Slide Images (WSI) classification algorithms in clinical practice. Unlike few-shot learning methods in natural images that can leverage the labels of each image, existing few-shot WSI classification methods only utilize a small number of fine-grained labels or weakly supervised slide labels for training in order to avoid expensive fine-grained annotation. They lack sufficient mining of available WSIs, severely limiting WSI classification performance. To address the above issues, we propose a novel and efficient dual-tier few-shot learning paradigm for WSI classification, named FAST. FAST consists of a dual-level annotation strategy and a dual-branch classification framework. Firstly, to avoid expensive fine-grained annotation, we collect a very small number of WSIs at the slide level, and annotate an extremely small number of patches. Then, to fully mining the available WSIs, we use all the patches and available patch labels to build a cache branch, which utilizes the labeled patches to learn the labels of unlabeled patches and through knowledge retrieval for patch classification. In addition to the cache branch, we also construct a prior branch that includes learnable prompt vectors, using the text encoder of visual-language models for patch classification. Finally, we integrate the results from both branches to achieve WSI classification. Extensive experiments on binary and multi-class datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly surpasses existing few-shot classification methods and approaches the accuracy of fully supervised methods with only 0.22$\%$ annotation costs. All codes and models will be publicly available on https://github.com/fukexue/FAST.

Paperid: 1645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19613.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Many few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods use cross attention to fuse support foreground (FG) into query features, regardless of the quadratic complexity. A recent advance Mamba can also well capture intra-sequence dependencies, yet the complexity is only linear. Hence, we aim to devise a cross (attention-like) Mamba to capture inter-sequence dependencies for FSS. A simple idea is to scan on support features to selectively compress them into the hidden state, which is then used as the initial hidden state to sequentially scan query features. Nevertheless, it suffers from (1) support forgetting issue: query features will also gradually be compressed when scanning on them, so the support features in hidden state keep reducing, and many query pixels cannot fuse sufficient support features; (2) intra-class gap issue: query FG is essentially more similar to itself rather than to support FG, i.e., query may prefer not to fuse support features but their own ones from the hidden state, yet the success of FSS relies on the effective use of support information. To tackle them, we design a hybrid Mamba network (HMNet), including (1) a support recapped Mamba to periodically recap the support features when scanning query, so the hidden state can always contain rich support information; (2) a query intercepted Mamba to forbid the mutual interactions among query pixels, and encourage them to fuse more support features from the hidden state. Consequently, the support information is better utilized, leading to better performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public benchmarks, showing the superiority of HMNet. The code is available at https://github.com/Sam1224/HMNet.

Paperid: 1646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19483.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segmentation of anatomical structures and pathological regions in medical images is essential for modern clinical diagnosis, disease research, and treatment planning. While significant advancements have been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, many of these methods still suffer from limitations in data efficiency, generalizability, and interactivity. As a result, developing precise segmentation methods that require fewer labeled datasets remains a critical challenge in medical image analysis. Recently, the introduction of foundation models like CLIP and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), with robust cross-domain representations, has paved the way for interactive and universal image segmentation. However, further exploration of these models for data-efficient segmentation in medical imaging is still needed and highly relevant. In this paper, we introduce MedCLIP-SAMv2, a novel framework that integrates the CLIP and SAM models to perform segmentation on clinical scans using text prompts, in both zero-shot and weakly supervised settings. Our approach includes fine-tuning the BiomedCLIP model with a new Decoupled Hard Negative Noise Contrastive Estimation (DHN-NCE) loss, and leveraging the Multi-modal Information Bottleneck (M2IB) to create visual prompts for generating segmentation masks from SAM in the zero-shot setting. We also investigate using zero-shot segmentation labels within a weakly supervised paradigm to enhance segmentation quality further. Extensive testing across four diverse segmentation tasks and medical imaging modalities (breast tumor ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, lung X-ray, and lung CT) demonstrates the high accuracy of our proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/MedCLIP-SAMv2.

Paperid: 1647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19474.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements and pervasive use of vision-language models, a paucity of studies has addressed their ethical implications. These models typically require extensive training data, often from hastily reviewed text and image datasets, leading to highly imbalanced datasets and ethical concerns. Additionally, models initially trained in English are frequently fine-tuned for other languages, such as the CLIP model, which can be expanded with more data to enhance capabilities but can add new biases. The CAPIVARA, a CLIP-based model adapted to Portuguese, has shown strong performance in zero-shot tasks. In this paper, we evaluate four different types of discriminatory practices within visual-language models and introduce FairPIVARA, a method to reduce them by removing the most affected dimensions of feature embeddings. The application of FairPIVARA has led to a significant reduction of up to 98% in observed biases while promoting a more balanced word distribution within the model. Our model and code are available at: https://github.com/hiaac-nlp/FairPIVARA.

Paperid: 1648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19270.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Audio separation in real-world scenarios, where mixtures contain a variable number of sources, presents significant challenges due to limitations of existing models, such as over-separation, under-separation, and dependence on predefined training sources. We propose OpenSep, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for automated audio separation, eliminating the need for manual intervention and overcoming source limitations. OpenSep uses textual inversion to generate captions from audio mixtures with off-the-shelf audio captioning models, effectively parsing the sound sources present. It then employs few-shot LLM prompting to extract detailed audio properties of each parsed source, facilitating separation in unseen mixtures. Additionally, we introduce a multi-level extension of the mix-and-separate training framework to enhance modality alignment by separating single source sounds and mixtures simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate OpenSep's superiority in precisely separating new, unseen, and variable sources in challenging mixtures, outperforming SOTA baseline methods. Code is released at https://github.com/tanvir-utexas/OpenSep.git

Paperid: 1649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18653.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
This study investigates the application and performance of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) in the challenging task of video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS). VCOS involves detecting objects that blend seamlessly in the surroundings for videos, due to similar colors and textures, poor light conditions, etc. Compared to the objects in normal scenes, camouflaged objects are much more difficult to detect. SAM2, a video foundation model, has shown potential in various tasks. But its effectiveness in dynamic camouflaged scenarios remains under-explored. This study presents a comprehensive study on SAM2's ability in VCOS. First, we assess SAM2's performance on camouflaged video datasets using different models and prompts (click, box, and mask). Second, we explore the integration of SAM2 with existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and VCOS methods. Third, we specifically adapt SAM2 by fine-tuning it on the video camouflaged dataset. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SAM2 has excellent zero-shot ability of detecting camouflaged objects in videos. We also show that this ability could be further improved by specifically adjusting SAM2's parameters for VCOS. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoustan/SAM2-VCOS

Paperid: 1650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18594.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) provide powerful means to leverage prior knowledge for predictive modeling when data is limited. In this work, we demonstrate how LLMs can use their compressed world knowledge to generate intrinsically interpretable machine learning models, i.e., decision trees, without any training data. We find that these zero-shot decision trees can even surpass data-driven trees on some small-sized tabular datasets and that embeddings derived from these trees perform better than data-driven tree-based embeddings on average. Our decision tree induction and embedding approaches can therefore serve as new knowledge-driven baselines for data-driven machine learning methods in the low-data regime. Furthermore, they offer ways to harness the rich world knowledge within LLMs for tabular machine learning tasks. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/ml-lab-htw/llm-trees.

Paperid: 1651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18512.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in speech synthesis models, trained on extensive datasets, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities. These models can control content, timbre, and emotion in generated speech based on prompt inputs. Despite these advancements, the choice of prompts significantly impacts the output quality, yet most existing selection schemes do not adequately address the control of emotional intensity. To address this question, this paper proposes a two-stage prompt selection strategy EmoPro, which is specifically designed for emotionally controllable speech synthesis. This strategy focuses on selecting highly expressive and high-quality prompts by evaluating them from four perspectives: emotional expression strength, speech quality, text-emotion consistency, and model generation performance. Experimental results show that prompts selected using the proposed method result in more emotionally expressive and engaging synthesized speech compared to those obtained through baseline. Audio samples and codes will be available at https://whyrrrrun.github.io/EmoPro/.

Paperid: 1652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18199.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to individual languages. However, this places a significant burden on token representations to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder language neutrality. To address this limitation, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the Transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline in zero-shot crosslingual transfer across diverse downstream tasks. Extensive analysis reveals that language and script embeddings capture language- and script-specific nuances, which benefits more language-neutral representations, proven by improved pairwise cosine similarity. In our case study, we also show that language and script embeddings can be used to select better source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.

Paperid: 1653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18124.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Leveraging the visual priors of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models offers a promising solution to enhance zero-shot generalization in dense prediction tasks. However, existing methods often uncritically use the original diffusion formulation, which may not be optimal due to the fundamental differences between dense prediction and image generation. In this paper, we provide a systemic analysis of the diffusion formulation for the dense prediction, focusing on both quality and efficiency. And we find that the original parameterization type for image generation, which learns to predict noise, is harmful for dense prediction; the multi-step noising/denoising diffusion process is also unnecessary and challenging to optimize. Based on these insights, we introduce Lotus, a diffusion-based visual foundation model with a simple yet effective adaptation protocol for dense prediction. Specifically, Lotus is trained to directly predict annotations instead of noise, thereby avoiding harmful variance. We also reformulate the diffusion process into a single-step procedure, simplifying optimization and significantly boosting inference speed. Additionally, we introduce a novel tuning strategy called detail preserver, which achieves more accurate and fine-grained predictions. Without scaling up the training data or model capacity, Lotus achieves SoTA performance in zero-shot depth and normal estimation across various datasets. It also enhances efficiency, being significantly faster than most existing diffusion-based methods. Lotus' superior quality and efficiency also enable a wide range of practical applications, such as joint estimation, single/multi-view 3D reconstruction, etc. Project page: https://lotus3d.github.io/.

Paperid: 1654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18071.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Introducing user-specified visual concepts in image editing is highly practical as these concepts convey the user's intent more precisely than text-based descriptions. We propose FreeEdit, a novel approach for achieving such reference-based image editing, which can accurately reproduce the visual concept from the reference image based on user-friendly language instructions. Our approach leverages the multi-modal instruction encoder to encode language instructions to guide the editing process. This implicit way of locating the editing area eliminates the need for manual editing masks. To enhance the reconstruction of reference details, we introduce the Decoupled Residual ReferAttention (DRRA) module. This module is designed to integrate fine-grained reference features extracted by a detail extractor into the image editing process in a residual way without interfering with the original self-attention. Given that existing datasets are unsuitable for reference-based image editing tasks, particularly due to the difficulty in constructing image triplets that include a reference image, we curate a high-quality dataset, FreeBench, using a newly developed twice-repainting scheme. FreeBench comprises the images before and after editing, detailed editing instructions, as well as a reference image that maintains the identity of the edited object, encompassing tasks such as object addition, replacement, and deletion. By conducting phased training on FreeBench followed by quality tuning, FreeEdit achieves high-quality zero-shot editing through convenient language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FreeEdit across multiple task types, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. The code will be available at: https://freeedit.github.io/.

Paperid: 1655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17836.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the widespread use of statistical prior models in various fields, such models for neural network gradients have long been overlooked. The inherent challenge stems from their high-dimensional structures and complex interdependencies, which complicate effective modeling. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to act as gradient priors in a zero-shot setting. We examine the property by considering lossless gradient compression -- a critical application in distributed learning -- that depends heavily on precise probability modeling. To achieve this, we introduce LM-GC, a novel method that integrates LLMs with arithmetic coding. Our technique converts plain gradients into text-like formats, enhancing token efficiency by up to 38 times compared to their plain representations. We ensure that this data conversion maintains a close alignment with the structure of plain gradients and the symbols commonly recognized by LLMs. Our experiments indicate that LM-GC surpasses existing state-of-the-art lossless compression methods, improving compression rates by 10% up to 17.2% across various datasets and architectures. Additionally, our approach shows promising compatibility with lossy compression techniques such as quantization and sparsification. These findings highlight the significant potential of LLMs as a model for effectively handling gradients. Code is available at https://github.com/hui-po-wang/LM-GC.

Paperid: 1656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17604.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In industry, the reliability of rotating machinery is critical for production efficiency and safety. Current methods of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) often rely on task-specific models, which face significant challenges in handling diverse datasets with varying signal characteristics, fault modes and operating conditions. Inspired by advancements in generative pretrained models, we propose RmGPT, a unified model for diagnosis and prognosis tasks. RmGPT introduces a novel generative token-based framework, incorporating Signal Tokens, Prompt Tokens, Time-Frequency Task Tokens and Fault Tokens to handle heterogeneous data within a unified model architecture. We leverage self-supervised learning for robust feature extraction and introduce a next signal token prediction pretraining strategy, alongside efficient prompt learning for task-specific adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RmGPT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, achieving near-perfect accuracy in diagnosis tasks and exceptionally low errors in prognosis tasks. Notably, RmGPT excels in few-shot learning scenarios, achieving 82\% accuracy in 16-class one-shot experiments, highlighting its adaptability and robustness. This work establishes RmGPT as a powerful PHM foundation model for rotating machinery, advancing the scalability and generalizability of PHM solutions. \textbf{Code is available at: https://github.com/Pandalin98/RmGPT.

Paperid: 1657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17213.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent debates raised concerns that language models may favor certain viewpoints. But what if the solution is not to aim for a 'view from nowhere' but rather to leverage different viewpoints? We introduce Plurals, a system and Python library for pluralistic AI deliberation. Plurals consists of Agents (LLMs, optionally with personas) which deliberate within customizable Structures, with Moderators overseeing deliberation. Plurals is a generator of simulated social ensembles. Plurals integrates with government datasets to create nationally representative personas, includes deliberation templates inspired by deliberative democracy, and allows users to customize both information-sharing structures and deliberation behavior within Structures. Six case studies demonstrate fidelity to theoretical constructs and efficacy. Three randomized experiments show simulated focus groups produced output resonant with an online sample of the relevant audiences (chosen over zero-shot generation in 75% of trials). Plurals is both a paradigm and a concrete system for pluralistic AI. The Plurals library is available at https://github.com/josh-ashkinaze/plurals and will be continually updated.

Paperid: 1658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17137.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) effectively adapts pre-trained transformers to downstream tasks. However, the optimization of tasks performance often comes at the cost of generalizability in fine-tuned models. To address this issue, we theoretically connect smaller weight gradient norms during training and larger datasets to the improvements in model generalization. Motivated by this connection, we propose reducing gradient norms for enhanced generalization and aligning fine-tuned model with the pre-trained counterpart to retain knowledge from large-scale pre-training data. Yet, naive alignment does not guarantee gradient reduction and can potentially cause gradient explosion, complicating efforts to manage gradients. To address such an issue, we propose PACE, marrying generalization of PArameter-efficient fine-tuning with Consistency rEgularization. We perturb features learned from the adapter with the multiplicative noise and ensure the fine-tuned model remains consistent for same sample under different perturbations. Theoretical analysis shows that PACE not only implicitly regularizes gradients for enhanced generalization, but also implicitly aligns the fine-tuned and pre-trained models to retain knowledge. Experimental evidence supports our theories. PACE surpasses existing PEFT methods in visual adaptation tasks (VTAB-1k, FGVC, few-shot learning, domain adaptation) showcasing its potential for resource-efficient fine-tuning. It also improves LoRA in text classification (GLUE) and mathematical reasoning (GSM-8K). The code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/PACE

Paperid: 1659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17080.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large vision-language models (VLMs) have become state-of-the-art for many computer vision tasks, with in-context learning (ICL) as a popular adaptation strategy for new ones. But can VLMs learn novel concepts purely from visual demonstrations, or are they limited to adapting to the output format of ICL examples? We propose a new benchmark we call Spatial Visual Ambiguity Tasks (SVAT) that challenges state-of-the-art VLMs to learn new visuospatial tasks in-context. We find that VLMs fail to do this zero-shot, and sometimes continue to fail after finetuning. However, adding simpler data to the training by curriculum learning leads to improved ICL performance.

Paperid: 1660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16949.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we present an effective data augmentation framework leveraging the Large Language Model (LLM) and Diffusion Model (DM) to tackle the challenges inherent in data-scarce scenarios. Recently, DMs have opened up the possibility of generating synthetic images to complement a few training images. However, increasing the diversity of synthetic images also raises the risk of generating samples outside the target distribution. Our approach addresses this issue by embedding novel semantic information into text prompts via LLM and utilizing real images as visual prompts, thus generating semantically rich images. To ensure that the generated images remain within the target distribution, we dynamically adjust the guidance weight based on each image's CLIPScore to control the diversity. Experimental results show that our method produces synthetic images with enhanced diversity while maintaining adherence to the target distribution. Consequently, our approach proves to be more efficient in the few-shot setting on several benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kkyuhun94/dalda .

Paperid: 1661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16914.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The increasing capability and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of automatic detection of LLM-generated text. Zero-shot detectors, due to their training-free nature, have received considerable attention and notable success. In this paper, we identify a new feature, token cohesiveness, that is useful for zero-shot detection, and we demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher token cohesiveness than human-written text. Based on this observation, we devise TOCSIN, a generic dual-channel detection paradigm that uses token cohesiveness as a plug-and-play module to improve existing zero-shot detectors. To calculate token cohesiveness, TOCSIN only requires a few rounds of random token deletion and semantic difference measurement, making it particularly suitable for a practical black-box setting where the source model used for generation is not accessible. Extensive experiments with four state-of-the-art base detectors on various datasets, source models, and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. Code available at: \url{https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/TOCSIN}.

Paperid: 1662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16718.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have witnessed the success of prompt tuning and adapter tuning, while the classic model fine-tuning on inherent parameters seems to be overlooked. It is believed that fine-tuning the parameters of VLMs with few-shot samples corrupts the pre-trained knowledge since fine-tuning the CLIP model even degrades performance. In this paper, we revisit this viewpoint, and propose a new perspective: fine-tuning the specific parameters instead of all will uncover the power of classic model fine-tuning on VLMs. Through our meticulous study, we propose ClipFit, a simple yet effective method to fine-tune CLIP without introducing any overhead of extra parameters. We demonstrate that by only fine-tuning the specific bias terms and normalization layers, ClipFit can improve the performance of zero-shot CLIP by 7.27\% average harmonic mean accuracy. Lastly, to understand how fine-tuning in CLIPFit affects the pre-trained models, we conducted extensive experimental analyses w.r.t. changes in internal parameters and representations. We found that low-level text bias layers and the first layer normalization layer change much more than other layers. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/minglllli/CLIPFit}.

Paperid: 1663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16283.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
How can robot manipulation policies generalize to novel tasks involving unseen object types and new motions? In this paper, we provide a solution in terms of predicting motion information from web data through human video generation and conditioning a robot policy on the generated video. Instead of attempting to scale robot data collection which is expensive, we show how we can leverage video generation models trained on easily available web data, for enabling generalization. Our approach Gen2Act casts language-conditioned manipulation as zero-shot human video generation followed by execution with a single policy conditioned on the generated video. To train the policy, we use an order of magnitude less robot interaction data compared to what the video prediction model was trained on. Gen2Act doesn't require fine-tuning the video model at all and we directly use a pre-trained model for generating human videos. Our results on diverse real-world scenarios show how Gen2Act enables manipulating unseen object types and performing novel motions for tasks not present in the robot data. Videos are at https://homangab.github.io/gen2act/

Paperid: 1664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16203.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose FEIM-TTS, an innovative zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) model that synthesizes emotionally expressive speech, aligned with facial images and modulated by emotion intensity. Leveraging deep learning, FEIM-TTS transcends traditional TTS systems by interpreting facial cues and adjusting to emotional nuances without dependence on labeled datasets. To address sparse audio-visual-emotional data, the model is trained using LRS3, CREMA-D, and MELD datasets, demonstrating its adaptability. FEIM-TTS's unique capability to produce high-quality, speaker-agnostic speech makes it suitable for creating adaptable voices for virtual characters. Moreover, FEIM-TTS significantly enhances accessibility for individuals with visual impairments or those who have trouble seeing. By integrating emotional nuances into TTS, our model enables dynamic and engaging auditory experiences for webcomics, allowing visually impaired users to enjoy these narratives more fully. Comprehensive evaluation evidences its proficiency in modulating emotion and intensity, advancing emotional speech synthesis and accessibility. Samples are available at: https://feim-tts.github.io/.

Paperid: 1665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15977.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot singing voice synthesis (SVS) with style transfer and style control aims to generate high-quality singing voices with unseen timbres and styles (including singing method, emotion, rhythm, technique, and pronunciation) from audio and text prompts. However, the multifaceted nature of singing styles poses a significant challenge for effective modeling, transfer, and control. Furthermore, current SVS models often fail to generate singing voices rich in stylistic nuances for unseen singers. To address these challenges, we introduce TCSinger, the first zero-shot SVS model for style transfer across cross-lingual speech and singing styles, along with multi-level style control. Specifically, TCSinger proposes three primary modules: 1) the clustering style encoder employs a clustering vector quantization model to stably condense style information into a compact latent space; 2) the Style and Duration Language Model (S\&D-LM) concurrently predicts style information and phoneme duration, which benefits both; 3) the style adaptive decoder uses a novel mel-style adaptive normalization method to generate singing voices with enhanced details. Experimental results show that TCSinger outperforms all baseline models in synthesis quality, singer similarity, and style controllability across various tasks, including zero-shot style transfer, multi-level style control, cross-lingual style transfer, and speech-to-singing style transfer. Singing voice samples can be accessed at https://aaronz345.github.io/TCSingerDemo/.

Paperid: 1666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15875.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting AI-generated images has become an extraordinarily difficult challenge as new generative architectures emerge on a daily basis with more and more capabilities and unprecedented realism. New versions of many commercial tools, such as DALLE, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have been released recently, and it is impractical to continually update and retrain supervised forensic detectors to handle such a large variety of models. To address this challenge, we propose a zero-shot entropy-based detector (ZED) that neither needs AI-generated training data nor relies on knowledge of generative architectures to artificially synthesize their artifacts. Inspired by recent works on machine-generated text detection, our idea is to measure how surprising the image under analysis is compared to a model of real images. To this end, we rely on a lossless image encoder that estimates the probability distribution of each pixel given its context. To ensure computational efficiency, the encoder has a multi-resolution architecture and contexts comprise mostly pixels of the lower-resolution version of the image.Since only real images are needed to learn the model, the detector is independent of generator architectures and synthetic training data. Using a single discriminative feature, the proposed detector achieves state-of-the-art performance. On a wide variety of generative models it achieves an average improvement of more than 3% over the SoTA in terms of accuracy. Code is available at https://grip-unina.github.io/ZED/.

Paperid: 1667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15783.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent works in the robot learning community have successfully introduced generalist models capable of controlling various robot embodiments across a wide range of tasks, such as navigation and locomotion. However, achieving agile control, which pushes the limits of robotic performance, still relies on specialist models that require extensive parameter tuning. To leverage generalist-model adaptability and flexibility while achieving specialist-level agility, we propose AnyCar, a transformer-based generalist dynamics model designed for agile control of various wheeled robots. To collect training data, we unify multiple simulators and leverage different physics backends to simulate vehicles with diverse sizes, scales, and physical properties across various terrains. With robust training and real-world fine-tuning, our model enables precise adaptation to different vehicles, even in the wild and under large state estimation errors. In real-world experiments, AnyCar shows both few-shot and zero-shot generalization across a wide range of vehicles and environments, where our model, combined with a sampling-based MPC, outperforms specialist models by up to 54%. These results represent a key step toward building a foundation model for agile wheeled robot control. We will also open-source our framework to support further research.

Paperid: 1668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15763.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), the quality of retrieved information is critical to the final output. This paper introduces the IRSC benchmark for evaluating the performance of embedding models in multilingual RAG tasks. The benchmark encompasses five retrieval tasks: query retrieval, title retrieval, part-of-paragraph retrieval, keyword retrieval, and summary retrieval. Our research addresses the current lack of comprehensive testing and effective comparison methods for embedding models in RAG scenarios. We introduced new metrics: the Similarity of Semantic Comprehension Index (SSCI) and the Retrieval Capability Contest Index (RCCI), and evaluated models such as Snowflake-Arctic, BGE, GTE, and M3E. Our contributions include: 1) the IRSC benchmark, 2) the SSCI and RCCI metrics, and 3) insights into the cross-lingual limitations of embedding models. The IRSC benchmark aims to enhance the understanding and development of accurate retrieval systems in RAG tasks. All code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/Jasaxion/IRSC_Benchmark

Paperid: 1669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15700.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) with decoder-only architectures demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. This feature enables them to effectively handle both familiar and novel tasks by utilizing examples provided within their input context. Recognizing the potential of this capability, we propose leveraging the ICL feature in LLMs to enhance the process of text embedding generation. To this end, we introduce a novel model bge-en-icl, which employs few-shot examples to produce high-quality text embeddings. Our approach integrates task-related examples directly into the query side, resulting in significant improvements across various tasks. Additionally, we have investigated how to effectively utilize LLMs as embedding models, including various attention mechanisms, pooling methods, etc. Our findings suggest that retaining the original framework often yields the best results, underscoring that simplicity is best. Experimental results on the MTEB and AIR-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our model, code and dataset are freely available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding .

Paperid: 1670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15634.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Safe flight in dynamic environments requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to make effective decisions when navigating cluttered spaces with moving obstacles. Traditional approaches often decompose decision-making into hierarchical modules for prediction and planning. Although these handcrafted systems can perform well in specific settings, they might fail if environmental conditions change and often require careful parameter tuning. Additionally, their solutions could be suboptimal due to the use of inaccurate mathematical model assumptions and simplifications aimed at achieving computational efficiency. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces the NavRL framework, a deep reinforcement learning-based navigation method built on the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. NavRL utilizes our carefully designed state and action representations, allowing the learned policy to make safe decisions in the presence of both static and dynamic obstacles, with zero-shot transfer from simulation to real-world flight. Furthermore, the proposed method adopts a simple but effective safety shield for the trained policy, inspired by the concept of velocity obstacles, to mitigate potential failures associated with the black-box nature of neural networks. To accelerate the convergence, we implement the training pipeline using NVIDIA Isaac Sim, enabling parallel training with thousands of quadcopters. Simulation and physical experiments show that our method ensures safe navigation in dynamic environments and results in the fewest collisions compared to benchmarks.

Paperid: 1671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15585.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Classical manipulator motion planners work across different robot embodiments. However they plan on a pre-specified static environment representation, and are not scalable to unseen dynamic environments. Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) are an appealing alternative to conventional planners as they incorporate different environmental constraints to learn motion policies directly from raw sensor observations. Contemporary state-of-the-art NMPs can successfully plan across different environments. However none of the existing NMPs generalize across robot embodiments. In this paper we propose Cross-Embodiment Motion Policy (XMoP), a neural policy for learning to plan over a distribution of manipulators. XMoP implicitly learns to satisfy kinematic constraints for a distribution of robots and $\textit{zero-shot}$ transfers the planning behavior to unseen robotic manipulators within this distribution. We achieve this generalization by formulating a whole-body control policy that is trained on planning demonstrations from over three million procedurally sampled robotic manipulators in different simulated environments. Despite being completely trained on synthetic embodiments and environments, our policy exhibits strong sim-to-real generalization across manipulators with different kinematic variations and degrees of freedom with a single set of frozen policy parameters. We evaluate XMoP on $7$ commercial manipulators and show successful cross-embodiment motion planning, achieving an average $70\%$ success rate on baseline benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate our policy sim-to-real on two unseen manipulators solving novel planning problems across three real-world domains even with dynamic obstacles.

Paperid: 1672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15077.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Traffic sign is a critical map feature for navigation and traffic control. Nevertheless, current methods for traffic sign recognition rely on traditional deep learning models, which typically suffer from significant performance degradation considering the variations in data distribution across different regions. In this paper, we propose TSCLIP, a robust fine-tuning approach with the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model for worldwide cross-regional traffic sign recognition. We first curate a cross-regional traffic sign benchmark dataset by combining data from ten different sources. Then, we propose a prompt engineering scheme tailored to the characteristics of traffic signs, which involves specific scene descriptions and corresponding rules to generate targeted text descriptions. During the TSCLIP fine-tuning process, we implement adaptive dynamic weight ensembling (ADWE) to seamlessly incorporate outcomes from each training iteration with the zero-shot CLIP model. This approach ensures that the model retains its ability to generalize while acquiring new knowledge about traffic signs. To the best knowledge of authors, TSCLIP is the first contrastive language-image model used for the worldwide cross-regional traffic sign recognition task. The project website is available at: https://github.com/guoyangzhao/TSCLIP.

Paperid: 1673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14963.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In smart retail applications, the large number of products and their frequent turnover necessitate reliable zero-shot object classification methods. The zero-shot assumption is essential to avoid the need for re-training the classifier every time a new product is introduced into stock or an existing product undergoes rebranding. In this paper, we make three key contributions. Firstly, we introduce the MIMEX dataset, comprising 28 distinct product categories. Unlike existing datasets in the literature, MIMEX focuses on fine-grained product classification and includes a diverse range of retail products. Secondly, we benchmark the zero-shot object classification performance of state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) on the proposed MIMEX dataset. Our experiments reveal that these models achieve unsatisfactory fine-grained classification performance, highlighting the need for specialized approaches. Lastly, we propose a novel ensemble approach that integrates embeddings from CLIP and DINOv2 with dimensionality reduction techniques to enhance classification performance. By combining these components, our ensemble approach outperforms VLMs, effectively capturing visual cues crucial for fine-grained product discrimination. Additionally, we introduce a class adaptation method that utilizes visual prototyping with limited samples in scenarios with scarce labeled data, addressing a critical need in retail environments where product variety frequently changes. To encourage further research into zero-shot object classification for smart retail applications, we will release both the MIMEX dataset and benchmark to the research community. Interested researchers can contact the authors for details on the terms and conditions of use. The code is available: https://github.com/AnilOsmanTur/Zero-shot-Retail-Product-Classification.

Paperid: 1674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14703.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The complexity of text-embedded images presents a formidable challenge in machine learning given the need for multimodal understanding of multiple aspects of expression conveyed by them. While previous research in multimodal analysis has primarily focused on singular aspects such as hate speech and its subclasses, this study expands this focus to encompass multiple aspects of linguistics: hate, targets of hate, stance, and humor. We introduce a novel dataset PrideMM comprising 5,063 text-embedded images associated with the LGBTQ+ Pride movement, thereby addressing a serious gap in existing resources. We conduct extensive experimentation on PrideMM by using unimodal and multimodal baseline methods to establish benchmarks for each task. Additionally, we propose a novel framework MemeCLIP for efficient downstream learning while preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained CLIP model. The results of our experiments show that MemeCLIP achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed frameworks on two real-world datasets. We further compare the performance of MemeCLIP and zero-shot GPT-4 on the hate classification task. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of our model by qualitatively analyzing misclassified samples. Our code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/SiddhantBikram/MemeCLIP.

Paperid: 1675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14336.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Zero-shot action recognition, which addresses the issue of scalability and generalization in action recognition and allows the models to adapt to new and unseen actions dynamically, is an important research topic in computer vision communities. The key to zero-shot action recognition lies in aligning visual features with semantic vectors representing action categories. Most existing methods either directly project visual features onto the semantic space of text category or learn a shared embedding space between the two modalities. However, a direct projection cannot accurately align the two modalities, and learning robust and discriminative embedding space between visual and text representations is often difficult. To address these issues, we introduce Dual Visual-Text Alignment (DVTA) for skeleton-based zero-shot action recognition. The DVTA consists of two alignment modules--Direct Alignment (DA) and Augmented Alignment (AA)--along with a designed Semantic Description Enhancement (SDE). The DA module maps the skeleton features to the semantic space through a specially designed visual projector, followed by the SDE, which is based on cross-attention to enhance the connection between skeleton and text, thereby reducing the gap between modalities. The AA module further strengthens the learning of the embedding space by utilizing deep metric learning to learn the similarity between skeleton and text. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on several popular zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks. The code is available at: https://github.com/jidongkuang/DVTA.

Paperid: 1676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14316.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) advancement has facilitated few-shot Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which is a significant challenge in 3D vision applications. Despite numerous attempts to reduce the dense input requirement in NeRF, it still suffers from time-consumed training and rendering processes. More recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves real-time high-quality rendering with an explicit point-based representation. However, similar to NeRF, it tends to overfit the train views for lack of constraints. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MVPGS}, a few-shot NVS method that excavates the multi-view priors based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. We leverage the recent learning-based Multi-view Stereo (MVS) to enhance the quality of geometric initialization for 3DGS. To mitigate overfitting, we propose a forward-warping method for additional appearance constraints conforming to scenes based on the computed geometry. Furthermore, we introduce a view-consistent geometry constraint for Gaussian parameters to facilitate proper optimization convergence and utilize a monocular depth regularization as compensation. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time rendering speed. Project page: https://zezeaaa.github.io/projects/MVPGS/

Paperid: 1677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14141.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to enable models to recognize novel objects or classes with limited labelled data. Feature generators, which synthesize new data points to augment limited datasets, have emerged as a promising solution to this challenge. This paper investigates the effectiveness of feature generators in enhancing the embedding process for FSL tasks. To address the issue of inaccurate embeddings due to the scarcity of images per class, we introduce a feature generator that creates visual features from class-level textual descriptions. By training the generator with a combination of classifier loss, discriminator loss, and distance loss between the generated features and true class embeddings, we ensure the generation of accurate same-class features and enhance the overall feature representation. Our results show a significant improvement in accuracy over baseline methods, with our approach outperforming the baseline model by 10% in 1-shot and around 5% in 5-shot approaches. Additionally, both visual-only and visual + textual generators have also been tested in this paper. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/heethanjan/Feature-Generator-for-FSL.

Paperid: 1678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13989.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
There is a growing interest in the role that LLMs play in chemistry which lead to an increased focus on the development of LLMs benchmarks tailored to chemical domains to assess the performance of LLMs across a spectrum of chemical tasks varying in type and complexity. However, existing benchmarks in this domain fail to adequately meet the specific requirements of chemical research professionals. To this end, we propose \textbf{\textit{ChemEval}}, which provides a comprehensive assessment of the capabilities of LLMs across a wide range of chemical domain tasks. Specifically, ChemEval identified 4 crucial progressive levels in chemistry, assessing 12 dimensions of LLMs across 42 distinct chemical tasks which are informed by open-source data and the data meticulously crafted by chemical experts, ensuring that the tasks have practical value and can effectively evaluate the capabilities of LLMs. In the experiment, we evaluate 12 mainstream LLMs on ChemEval under zero-shot and few-shot learning contexts, which included carefully selected demonstration examples and carefully designed prompts. The results show that while general LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5 excel in literature understanding and instruction following, they fall short in tasks demanding advanced chemical knowledge. Conversely, specialized LLMs exhibit enhanced chemical competencies, albeit with reduced literary comprehension. This suggests that LLMs have significant potential for enhancement when tackling sophisticated tasks in the field of chemistry. We believe our work will facilitate the exploration of their potential to drive progress in chemistry. Our benchmark and analysis will be available at {\color{blue} \url{https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/ChemEval}}.

Paperid: 1679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13592.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset YesBut, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the YesBut Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/yesbut_dataset.

Paperid: 1680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13401.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) is an advanced foundational model for image segmentation, which is gradually being applied to remote sensing images (RSIs). Due to the domain gap between RSIs and natural images, traditional methods typically use SAM as a source pre-trained model and fine-tune it with fully supervised masks. Unlike these methods, our work focuses on fine-tuning SAM using more convenient and challenging point annotations. Leveraging SAM's zero-shot capabilities, we adopt a self-training framework that iteratively generates pseudo-labels for training. However, if the pseudo-labels contain noisy labels, there is a risk of error accumulation. To address this issue, we extract target prototypes from the target dataset and use the Hungarian algorithm to match them with prediction prototypes, preventing the model from learning in the wrong direction. Additionally, due to the complex backgrounds and dense distribution of objects in RSI, using point prompts may result in multiple objects being recognized as one. To solve this problem, we propose a negative prompt calibration method based on the non-overlapping nature of instance masks. In brief, we use the prompts of overlapping masks as corresponding negative signals, resulting in refined masks. Combining the above methods, we propose a novel Pointly-supervised Segment Anything Model named PointSAM. We conduct experiments on RSI datasets, including WHU, HRSID, and NWPU VHR-10, and the results show that our method significantly outperforms direct testing with SAM, SAM2, and other comparison methods. Furthermore, we introduce PointSAM as a point-to-box converter and achieve encouraging results, suggesting that this method can be extended to other point-supervised tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Lans1ng/PointSAM.

Paperid: 1681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13183.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Small Language Models (SLMs) are attracting attention due to the high computational demands and privacy concerns of Large Language Models (LLMs). Some studies fine-tune SLMs using Chains of Thought (CoT) data distilled from LLMs, aiming to enhance their reasoning ability. Furthermore, Some CoT distillation methods introduce external symbolic knowledge into the generation process to improve the limited knowledge memory, reasoning ability and out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of SLMs. However, the introduction of symbolic knowledge increases computational overhead and introduces potential noise. In this paper, we introduce $\textit{SKIntern}$, an innovative approach that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process, guided by a predefined linear decay schedule under curriculum learning. By efficiently internalizing knowledge, $\textit{SKIntern}$ reduces computational overhead and speeds up the reasoning process by focusing solely on the question during inference. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5\%, while reducing inference costs (measured in FLOPs) by up to $4\times$ across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) tasks. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SKIntern}.

Paperid: 1682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13162.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Detecting anomalies within point clouds is crucial for various industrial applications, but traditional unsupervised methods face challenges due to data acquisition costs, early-stage production constraints, and limited generalization across product categories. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Multi-View Projection (MVP) framework, leveraging pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect anomalies. Specifically, MVP projects point cloud data into multi-view depth images, thereby translating point cloud anomaly detection into image anomaly detection. Following zero-shot image anomaly detection methods, pre-trained VLMs are utilized to detect anomalies on these depth images. Given that pre-trained VLMs are not inherently tailored for zero-shot point cloud anomaly detection and may lack specificity, we propose the integration of learnable visual and adaptive text prompting techniques to fine-tune these VLMs, thereby enhancing their detection performance. Extensive experiments on the MVTec 3D-AD and Real3D-AD demonstrate our proposed MVP framework's superior zero-shot anomaly detection performance and the prompting techniques' effectiveness. Real-world evaluations on automotive plastic part inspection further showcase that the proposed method can also be generalized to practical unseen scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/hustCYQ/MVP-PCLIP.

Paperid: 1683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12962.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) task asks models to generate natural language descriptions of an audio input. Evaluating these machine-generated audio captions is a complex task that requires considering diverse factors, among them, auditory scene understanding, sound-object inference, temporal coherence, and the environmental context of the scene. While current methods focus on specific aspects, they often fail to provide an overall score that aligns well with human judgment. In this work, we propose CLAIR-A, a simple and flexible method that leverages the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate candidate audio captions by directly asking LLMs for a semantic distance score. In our evaluations, CLAIR-A better predicts human judgements of quality compared to traditional metrics, with a 5.8% relative accuracy improvement compared to the domain-specific FENSE metric and up to 11% over the best general-purpose measure on the Clotho-Eval dataset. Moreover, CLAIR-A offers more transparency by allowing the language model to explain the reasoning behind its scores, with these explanations rated up to 30% better by human evaluators than those provided by baseline methods. CLAIR-A is made publicly available at https://github.com/DavidMChan/clair-a.

Paperid: 1684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12202.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Perceiving and understanding 3D motion is a core technology in fields such as autonomous driving, robots, and motion prediction. This paper proposes a 3D motion perception method called ScaleFlow++ that is easy to generalize. With just a pair of RGB images, ScaleFlow++ can robustly estimate optical flow and motion-in-depth (MID). Most existing methods directly regress MID from two RGB frames or optical flow, resulting in inaccurate and unstable results. Our key insight is cross-scale matching, which extracts deep motion clues by matching objects in pairs of images at different scales. Unlike previous methods, ScaleFlow++ integrates optical flow and MID estimation into a unified architecture, estimating optical flow and MID end-to-end based on feature matching. Moreover, we also proposed modules such as global initialization network, global iterative optimizer, and hybrid training pipeline to integrate global motion information, reduce the number of iterations, and prevent overfitting during training. On KITTI, ScaleFlow++ achieved the best monocular scene flow estimation performance, reducing SF-all from 6.21 to 5.79. The evaluation of MID even surpasses RGBD-based methods. In addition, ScaleFlow++ has achieved stunning zero-shot generalization performance in both rigid and nonrigid scenes. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/HanLingsgjk/CSCV}.

Paperid: 1685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12139.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the advent of the big data and large language model era, zero-shot personalized rapid customization has emerged as a significant trend. In this report, we introduce Takin AudioLLM, a series of techniques and models, mainly including Takin TTS, Takin VC, and Takin Morphing, specifically designed for audiobook production. These models are capable of zero-shot speech production, generating high-quality speech that is nearly indistinguishable from real human speech and facilitating individuals to customize the speech content according to their own needs. Specifically, we first introduce Takin TTS, a neural codec language model that builds upon an enhanced neural speech codec and a multi-task training framework, capable of generating high-fidelity natural speech in a zero-shot way. For Takin VC, we advocate an effective content and timbre joint modeling approach to improve the speaker similarity, while advocating for a conditional flow matching based decoder to further enhance its naturalness and expressiveness. Last, we propose the Takin Morphing system with highly decoupled and advanced timbre and prosody modeling approaches, which enables individuals to customize speech production with their preferred timbre and prosody in a precise and controllable manner. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and robustness of our Takin AudioLLM series models. For detailed demos, please refer to https://everest-ai.github.io/takinaudiollm/.

Paperid: 1686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12092.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic assistive feeding holds significant promise for improving the quality of life for individuals with eating disabilities. However, acquiring diverse food items under varying conditions and generalizing to unseen food presents unique challenges. Existing methods that rely on surface-level geometric information (e.g., bounding box and pose) derived from visual cues (e.g., color, shape, and texture) often lacks adaptability and robustness, especially when foods share similar physical properties but differ in visual appearance. We employ imitation learning (IL) to learn a policy for food acquisition. Existing methods employ IL or Reinforcement Learning (RL) to learn a policy based on off-the-shelf image encoders such as ResNet-50. However, such representations are not robust and struggle to generalize across diverse acquisition scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach, IMRL (Integrated Multi-Dimensional Representation Learning), which integrates visual, physical, temporal, and geometric representations to enhance the robustness and generalizability of IL for food acquisition. Our approach captures food types and physical properties (e.g., solid, semi-solid, granular, liquid, and mixture), models temporal dynamics of acquisition actions, and introduces geometric information to determine optimal scooping points and assess bowl fullness. IMRL enables IL to adaptively adjust scooping strategies based on context, improving the robot's capability to handle diverse food acquisition scenarios. Experiments on a real robot demonstrate our approach's robustness and adaptability across various foods and bowl configurations, including zero-shot generalization to unseen settings. Our approach achieves improvement up to $35\%$ in success rate compared with the best-performing baseline. More details can be found on our website https://ruiiu.github.io/imrl.

Paperid: 1687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11919.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various open-vocabulary tasks, yet their zero-shot performance lags behind task-specific fine-tuned models, particularly in complex tasks like Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). Fine-tuning usually requires 'white-box' access to the model's architecture and weights, which is not always feasible due to proprietary or privacy concerns. In this work, we propose LLM-wrapper, a method for 'black-box' adaptation of VLMs for the REC task using Large Language Models (LLMs). LLM-wrapper capitalizes on the reasoning abilities of LLMs, improved with a light fine-tuning, to select the most relevant bounding box matching the referring expression, from candidates generated by a zero-shot black-box VLM. Our approach offers several advantages: it enables the adaptation of closed-source models without needing access to their internal workings, it is versatile as it works with any VLM, it transfers to new VLMs and datasets, and it allows for the adaptation of an ensemble of VLMs. We evaluate LLM-wrapper on multiple datasets using different VLMs and LLMs, demonstrating significant performance improvements and highlighting the versatility of our method. While LLM-wrapper is not meant to directly compete with standard white-box fine-tuning, it offers a practical and effective alternative for black-box VLM adaptation. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/valeoai/LLM_wrapper .

Paperid: 1688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11874.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the fast-evolving field of Generative AI, platforms like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion have transformed Text-to-Image (T2I) Generation. However, despite their impressive ability to create high-quality images, they often struggle to generate accurate text within these images. Theoretically, if we could achieve accurate text generation in AI images in a ``zero-shot'' manner, it would not only make AI-generated images more meaningful but also democratize the graphic design industry. The first step towards this goal is to create a robust scoring matrix for evaluating text accuracy in AI-generated images. Although there are existing bench-marking methods like CLIP SCORE and T2I-CompBench++, there's still a gap in systematically evaluating text and typography in AI-generated images, especially with diffusion-based methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation matrix designed explicitly for quantifying the performance of text and typography generation within AI-generated images. We have used letter by letter matching strategy to compute the exact matching scores from the reference text to the AI generated text. Our novel approach to calculate the score takes care of multiple redundancies such as repetition of words, case sensitivity, mixing of words, irregular incorporation of letters etc. Moreover, we have developed a Novel method named as brevity adjustment to handle excess text. In addition we have also done a quantitative analysis of frequent errors arise due to frequently used words and less frequently used words. Project page is available at: https://github.com/Abhinaw3906/ABHINAW-MATRIX.

Paperid: 1689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11764.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The capability to efficiently search for objects in complex environments is fundamental for many real-world robot applications. Recent advances in open-vocabulary vision models have resulted in semantically-informed object navigation methods that allow a robot to search for an arbitrary object without prior training. However, these zero-shot methods have so far treated the environment as unknown for each consecutive query. In this paper we introduce a new benchmark for zero-shot multi-object navigation, allowing the robot to leverage information gathered from previous searches to more efficiently find new objects. To address this problem we build a reusable open-vocabulary feature map tailored for real-time object search. We further propose a probabilistic-semantic map update that mitigates common sources of errors in semantic feature extraction and leverage this semantic uncertainty for informed multi-object exploration. We evaluate our method on a set of object navigation tasks in both simulation as well as with a real robot, running in real-time on a Jetson Orin AGX. We demonstrate that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches both on single and multi-object navigation tasks. Additional videos, code and the multi-object navigation benchmark will be available on https://finnbsch.github.io/OneMap.

Paperid: 1690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11753.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Re-orchestration is the process of adapting a music piece for a different set of instruments. By altering the original instrumentation, the orchestrator often modifies the musical texture while preserving a recognizable melodic line and ensures that each part is playable within the technical and expressive capabilities of the chosen instruments. In this work, we propose METEOR, a model for generating Melody-aware Texture-controllable re-Orchestration with a Transformer-based variational auto-encoder (VAE). This model performs symbolic instrumental and textural music style transfers with a focus on melodic fidelity and controllability. We allow bar- and track-level controllability of the accompaniment with various textural attributes while keeping a homophonic texture. With both subjective and objective evaluations, we show that our model outperforms style transfer models on a re-orchestration task in terms of generation quality and controllability. Moreover, it can be adapted for a lead sheet orchestration task as a zero-shot learning model, achieving performance comparable to a model specifically trained for this task.

Paperid: 1691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11681.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D scene representation technique, capturing fine details with high efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel voting-based method that extends 2D segmentation models to 3D Gaussian splats. Our approach leverages masked gradients, where gradients are filtered by input 2D masks, and these gradients are used as votes to achieve accurate segmentation. As a byproduct, we discovered that inference-time gradients can also be used to prune Gaussians, resulting in up to 21% compression. Additionally, we explore few-shot affordance transfer, allowing annotations from 2D images to be effectively transferred onto 3D Gaussian splats. The robust yet straightforward mathematical formulation underlying this approach makes it a highly effective tool for numerous downstream applications, such as augmented reality (AR), object editing, and robotics. The project code and additional resources are available at https://jojijoseph.github.io/3dgs-segmentation.

Paperid: 1692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11316.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot Semantic Segmentation addresses the challenge of segmenting objects in query images with only a handful of annotated examples. However, many previous state-of-the-art methods either have to discard intricate local semantic features or suffer from high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a new Few-shot Semantic Segmentation framework based on the Transformer architecture. Our approach introduces the spatial transformer decoder and the contextual mask generation module to improve the relational understanding between support and query images. Moreover, we introduce a multi scale decoder to refine the segmentation mask by incorporating features from different resolutions in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, our approach integrates global features from intermediate encoder stages to improve contextual understanding, while maintaining a lightweight structure to reduce complexity. This balance between performance and efficiency enables our method to achieve competitive results on benchmark datasets such as PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings. Notably, our model with only 1.5 million parameters demonstrates competitive performance while overcoming limitations of existing methodologies. https://github.com/amirrezafateh/MSDNet

Paperid: 1693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11147.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable few-shot learning capabilities and unified the paradigm of NLP tasks through the in-context learning (ICL) technique. Despite the success of ICL, the quality of the exemplar demonstrations can significantly influence the LLM's performance. Existing exemplar selection methods mainly focus on the semantic similarity between queries and candidate exemplars. On the other hand, the logical connections between reasoning steps can be beneficial to depict the problem-solving process as well. In this paper, we proposes a novel method named Reasoning Graph-enhanced Exemplar Retrieval (RGER). RGER first quires LLM to generate an initial response, then expresses intermediate problem-solving steps to a graph structure. After that, it employs graph kernel to select exemplars with semantic and structural similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the structural relationship is helpful to the alignment of queries and candidate exemplars. The efficacy of RGER on math and logit reasoning tasks showcases its superiority over state-of-the-art retrieval-based approaches. Our code is released at https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/RGER.

Paperid: 1694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10561.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The increasing number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks poses a major threat to the Internet, highlighting the importance of DDoS mitigation. Most existing approaches require complex training methods to learn data features, which increases the complexity and generality of the application. In this paper, we propose DrLLM, which aims to mine anomalous traffic information in zero-shot scenarios through Large Language Models (LLMs). To bridge the gap between DrLLM and existing approaches, we embed the global and local information of the traffic data into the reasoning paradigm and design three modules, namely Knowledge Embedding, Token Embedding, and Progressive Role Reasoning, for data representation and reasoning. In addition we explore the generalization of prompt engineering in the cybersecurity domain to improve the classification capability of DrLLM. Our ablation experiments demonstrate the applicability of DrLLM in zero-shot scenarios and further demonstrate the potential of LLMs in the network domains. DrLLM implementation code has been open-sourced at https://github.com/liuup/DrLLM.

Paperid: 1695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10309.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recommender systems often use text-side information to improve their predictions, especially in cold-start or zero-shot recommendation scenarios, where traditional collaborative filtering approaches cannot be used. Many approaches to text-mining side information for recommender systems have been proposed over recent years, with sentence Transformers being the most prominent one. However, these models are trained to predict semantic similarity without utilizing interaction data with hidden patterns specific to recommender systems. In this paper, we propose beeFormer, a framework for training sentence Transformer models with interaction data. We demonstrate that our models trained with beeFormer can transfer knowledge between datasets while outperforming not only semantic similarity sentence Transformers but also traditional collaborative filtering methods. We also show that training on multiple datasets from different domains accumulates knowledge in a single model, unlocking the possibility of training universal, domain-agnostic sentence Transformer models to mine text representations for recommender systems. We release the source code, trained models, and additional details allowing replication of our experiments at https://github.com/recombee/beeformer.

Paperid: 1696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10291.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We propose a self-supervised model producing 3D anatomical positional embeddings (APE) of individual medical image voxels. APE encodes voxels' anatomical closeness, i.e., voxels of the same organ or nearby organs always have closer positional embeddings than the voxels of more distant body parts. In contrast to the existing models of anatomical positional embeddings, our method is able to efficiently produce a map of voxel-wise embeddings for a whole volumetric input image, which makes it an optimal choice for different downstream applications. We train our APE model on 8400 publicly available CT images of abdomen and chest regions. We demonstrate its superior performance compared with the existing models on anatomical landmark retrieval and weakly-supervised few-shot localization of 13 abdominal organs. As a practical application, we show how to cheaply train APE to crop raw CT images to different anatomical regions of interest with 0.99 recall, while reducing the image volume by 10-100 times. The code and the pre-trained APE model are available at https://github.com/mishgon/ape .

Paperid: 1697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10058.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid development of large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models has led to significant advancements in modeling diverse speaker prosody and voices. However, these models often face issues such as slow inference speeds, reliance on complex pre-trained neural codec representations, and difficulties in achieving naturalness and high similarity to reference speakers. To address these challenges, this work introduces StyleTTS-ZS, an efficient zero-shot TTS model that leverages distilled time-varying style diffusion to capture diverse speaker identities and prosodies. We propose a novel approach that represents human speech using input text and fixed-length time-varying discrete style codes to capture diverse prosodic variations, trained adversarially with multi-modal discriminators. A diffusion model is then built to sample this time-varying style code for efficient latent diffusion. Using classifier-free guidance, StyleTTS-ZS achieves high similarity to the reference speaker in the style diffusion process. Furthermore, to expedite sampling, the style diffusion model is distilled with perceptual loss using only 10k samples, maintaining speech quality and similarity while reducing inference speed by 90%. Our model surpasses previous state-of-the-art large-scale zero-shot TTS models in both naturalness and similarity, offering a 10-20 faster sampling speed, making it an attractive alternative for efficient large-scale zero-shot TTS systems. The audio demo, code and models are available at https://styletts-zs.github.io/.

Paperid: 1698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09645.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Multivariate time series classification is an important task with widespread domains of applications. Recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in time series classification. However, they often require large expert-labeled training datasets which can be infeasible in practice. In few-shot settings, i.e. only a limited number of samples per class are available in training data, DNNs show a significant drop in testing accuracy and poor generalization ability. In this paper, we propose to address these problems from an optimization and a loss function perspective. Specifically, we propose a new learning framework named COSCO consisting of a sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization and a Prototypical loss function to improve the generalization ability of DNN for multivariate time series classification problems under few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the existing baseline methods. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/JRB9/COSCO.

Paperid: 1699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09628.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in event-based zero-shot object recognition have demonstrated promising results. However, these methods heavily depend on extensive training and are inherently constrained by the characteristics of CLIP. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first study to explore the understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for event-based visual content. We demonstrate that LLMs can achieve event-based object recognition without additional training or fine-tuning in conjunction with CLIP, effectively enabling pure zero-shot event-based recognition. Particularly, we evaluate the ability of GPT-4o / 4turbo and two other open-source LLMs to directly recognize event-based visual content. Extensive experiments are conducted across three benchmark datasets, systematically assessing the recognition accuracy of these models. The results show that LLMs, especially when enhanced with well-designed prompts, significantly improve event-based zero-shot recognition performance. Notably, GPT-4o outperforms the compared models and exceeds the recognition accuracy of state-of-the-art event-based zero-shot methods on N-ImageNet by five orders of magnitude. The implementation of this paper is available at \url{https://github.com/ChrisYu-Zz/Pure-event-based-recognition-based-LLM}.

Paperid: 1700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09502.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-language models have recently evolved into versatile systems capable of high performance across a range of tasks, such as document understanding, visual question answering, and grounding, often in zero-shot settings. Comics Understanding, a complex and multifaceted field, stands to greatly benefit from these advances. Comics, as a medium, combine rich visual and textual narratives, challenging AI models with tasks that span image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and deeper narrative comprehension through sequential panels. However, the unique structure of comics -- characterized by creative variations in style, reading order, and non-linear storytelling -- presents a set of challenges distinct from those in other visual-language domains. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of Comics Understanding from both dataset and task perspectives. Our contributions are fivefold: (1) We analyze the structure of the comics medium, detailing its distinctive compositional elements; (2) We survey the widely used datasets and tasks in comics research, emphasizing their role in advancing the field; (3) We introduce the Layer of Comics Understanding (LoCU) framework, a novel taxonomy that redefines vision-language tasks within comics and lays the foundation for future work; (4) We provide a detailed review and categorization of existing methods following the LoCU framework; (5) Finally, we highlight current research challenges and propose directions for future exploration, particularly in the context of vision-language models applied to comics. This survey is the first to propose a task-oriented framework for comics intelligence and aims to guide future research by addressing critical gaps in data availability and task definition. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/emanuelevivoli/awesome-comics-understanding.

Paperid: 1701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09383.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We participated in the KDD CUP 2024 paper source tracing competition and achieved the 3rd place. This competition tasked participants with identifying the reference sources (i.e., ref-sources, as referred to by the organizers of the competition) of given academic papers. Unlike most teams that addressed this challenge by fine-tuning pre-trained neural language models such as BERT or ChatGLM, our primary approach utilized closed-source large language models (LLMs). With recent advancements in LLM technology, closed-source LLMs have demonstrated the capability to tackle complex reasoning tasks in zero-shot or few-shot scenarios. Consequently, in the absence of GPUs, we employed closed-source LLMs to directly generate predicted reference sources from the provided papers. We further refined these predictions through ensemble learning. Notably, our method was the only one among the award-winning approaches that did not require the use of GPUs for model training. Code available at https://github.com/Cklwanfifa/KDDCUP2024-PST.

Paperid: 1702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09311.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-speech (TTS), even in zero-shot scenarios. Recent efforts aim to address the trade-off between inference speed and sound quality, often considered the primary drawback of diffusion models. However, we find a critical mispronunciation issue is being overlooked. Our preliminary study reveals the unstable pronunciation resulting from the diffusion process. Based on this observation, we introduce StableForm-TTS, a novel zero-shot speech synthesis framework designed to produce robust pronunciation while maintaining the advantages of diffusion modeling. By pioneering the adoption of source-filter theory in diffusion TTS, we propose an elaborate architecture for stable formant generation. Experimental results on unseen speakers show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method in terms of pronunciation accuracy and naturalness, with comparable speaker similarity. Moreover, our model demonstrates effective scalability as both data and model sizes increase. Audio samples are available online: https://deepbrainai-research.github.io/stableformtts/.

Paperid: 1703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09276.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Tactile perception is vital, especially when distinguishing visually similar objects. We propose an approach to incorporate tactile data into a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for visuo-tactile zero-shot object recognition. Our approach leverages the zero-shot capability of VLMs to infer tactile properties from the names of tactilely similar objects. The proposed method translates tactile data into a textual description solely by annotating object names for each tactile sequence during training, making it adaptable to various contexts with low training costs. The proposed method was evaluated on the FoodReplica and Cube datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing objects that are difficult to distinguish by vision alone.

Paperid: 1704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09213.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

Paperid: 1705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08798.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Reading ability detection is important in modern educational field. In this paper, a method of predicting scores of reading ability is proposed, using the eye-tracking data of a few subjects (e.g., 68 subjects). The proposed method built a regression model for the score prediction by combining Long Short Time Memory (LSTM) and light-weighted neural networks. Experiments show that with few-shot learning strategy, the proposed method achieved higher accuracy than previous methods of score prediction in reading ability detection. The code can later be downloaded at https://github.com/pumpkinLNX/LSTM-eye-tracking-pytorch.git

Paperid: 1706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08185.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Generative large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to pre-trained language models for entity matching due to their high zero-shot performance and ability to generalize to unseen entities. Existing research on using LLMs for entity matching has focused on prompt engineering and in-context learning. This paper explores the potential of fine-tuning LLMs for entity matching. We analyze fine-tuning along two dimensions: 1) the representation of training examples, where we experiment with adding different types of LLM-generated explanations to the training set, and 2) the selection and generation of training examples using LLMs. In addition to the matching performance on the source dataset, we investigate how fine-tuning affects the models ability to generalize to other in-domain datasets as well as across topical domains. Our experiments show that fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of the smaller models while the results for the larger models are mixed. Fine-tuning also improves the generalization to in-domain datasets while hurting cross-domain transfer. We show that adding structured explanations to the training set has a positive impact on the performance of three out of four LLMs, while the proposed example selection and generation methods, only improve the performance of Llama 3.1 8B while decreasing the performance of GPT-4o-mini.

Paperid: 1707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07989.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In the context of few-shot classification, the goal is to train a classifier using a limited number of samples while maintaining satisfactory performance. However, traditional metric-based methods exhibit certain limitations in achieving this objective. These methods typically rely on a single distance value between the query feature and support feature, thereby overlooking the contribution of shallow features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach in this paper. Our approach involves utilizing a multi-output embedding network that maps samples into distinct feature spaces. The proposed method extracts feature vectors at different stages, enabling the model to capture both global and abstract features. By utilizing these diverse feature spaces, our model enhances its performance. Moreover, employing a self-attention mechanism improves the refinement of features at each stage, leading to even more robust representations and improved overall performance. Furthermore, assigning learnable weights to each stage significantly improved performance and results. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the MiniImageNet and FC100 datasets, specifically in the 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot scenarios. Additionally, we performed cross-domain tasks across eight benchmark datasets, achieving high accuracy in the testing domains. These evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. https://github.com/FatemehAskari/MSENet

Paperid: 1708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07341.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Interactive artificial intelligence in the motion control field is an interesting topic, especially when universal knowledge is adaptive to multiple tasks and universal environments. Despite there being increasing efforts in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with the aid of transformers, most of them might be limited by the offline training pipeline, which prohibits exploration and generalization abilities. To address this limitation, we propose the framework of Online Decision MetaMorphFormer (ODM) which aims to achieve self-awareness, environment recognition, and action planning through a unified model architecture. Motivated by cognitive and behavioral psychology, an ODM agent is able to learn from others, recognize the world, and practice itself based on its own experience. ODM can also be applied to any arbitrary agent with a multi-joint body, located in different environments, and trained with different types of tasks using large-scale pre-trained datasets. Through the use of pre-trained datasets, ODM can quickly warm up and learn the necessary knowledge to perform the desired task, while the target environment continues to reinforce the universal policy. Extensive online experiments as well as few-shot and zero-shot environmental tests are used to verify ODM's performance and generalization ability. The results of our study contribute to the study of general artificial intelligence in embodied and cognitive fields. Code, results, and video examples can be found on the website \url{https://rlodm.github.io/odm/}.

Paperid: 1709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06305.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Existing few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods mainly focus on designing novel support-query matching and self-matching mechanisms to exploit implicit knowledge in pre-trained backbones. However, the performance of these methods is often constrained by models pre-trained on classification tasks. The exploration of what types of pre-trained models can provide more beneficial implicit knowledge for FSS remains limited. In this paper, inspired by the representation consistency of foundational computer vision models, we develop a FSS framework based on foundation models. To be specific, we propose a simple approach to extract implicit knowledge from foundation models to construct coarse correspondence and introduce a lightweight decoder to refine coarse correspondence for fine-grained segmentation. We systematically summarize the performance of various foundation models on FSS and discover that the implicit knowledge within some of these models is more beneficial for FSS than models pre-trained on classification tasks. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in leveraging the implicit knowledge of foundation models. Notably, the combination of DINOv2 and DFN exceeds previous state-of-the-art methods by 17.5% on COCO-20i. Code is available at https://github.com/DUT-CSJ/FoundationFSS.

Paperid: 1710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05862.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences which requires zero-shot visual inferences about object shape: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated `nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.

Paperid: 1711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05672.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Outlier detection (OD) has a vast literature as it finds numerous real-world applications. Being an unsupervised task, model selection is a key bottleneck for OD without label supervision. Despite a long list of available OD algorithms with tunable hyperparameters, the lack of systematic approaches for unsupervised algorithm and hyperparameter selection limits their effective use in practice. In this paper, we present FoMo-0D, a pre-trained Foundation Model for zero/0-shot OD on tabular data, which bypasses the hurdle of model selection altogether. Having been pre-trained on synthetic data, FoMo-0D can directly predict the (outlier/inlier) label of test samples without parameter fine-tuning -- requiring no labeled data, and no additional training or hyperparameter tuning when given a new task. Extensive experiments on 57 real-world datasets against 26 baselines show that FoMo-0D is highly competitive; outperforming the majority of the baselines with no statistically significant difference from the 2nd best method. Further, FoMo-0D is efficient in inference time requiring only 7.7 ms per sample on average, with at least 7x speed-up compared to previous methods. To facilitate future research, our implementations for data synthesis and pre-training as well as model checkpoints are openly available at https://github.com/A-Chicharito-S/FoMo-0D.

Paperid: 1712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05442.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Single-image depth estimation is essential for endoscopy tasks such as localization, reconstruction, and augmented reality. Most existing methods in surgical scenes focus on in-domain depth estimation, limiting their real-world applicability. This constraint stems from the scarcity and inferior labeling quality of medical data for training. In this work, we present EndoOmni, the first foundation model for zero-shot cross-domain depth estimation for endoscopy. To harness the potential of diverse training data, we refine the advanced self-learning paradigm that employs a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels, guiding a student model trained on large-scale labeled and unlabeled data. To address training disturbance caused by inherent noise in depth labels, we propose a robust training framework that leverages both depth labels and estimated confidence from the teacher model to jointly guide the student model training. Moreover, we propose a weighted scale-and-shift invariant loss to adaptively adjust learning weights based on label confidence, thus imposing learning bias towards cleaner label pixels while reducing the influence of highly noisy pixels. Experiments on zero-shot relative depth estimation show that our EndoOmni improves state-of-the-art methods in medical imaging for 33\% and existing foundation models for 34\% in terms of absolute relative error on specific datasets. Furthermore, our model provides strong initialization for fine-tuning metric depth estimation, maintaining superior performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/TianCuteQY/EndoOmni.

Paperid: 1713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04918.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Composed image retrieval (CIR), which formulates the query as a combination of a reference image and modified text, has emerged as a new form of image search due to its enhanced ability to capture user intent. However, training a CIR model in a supervised manner typically requires labor-intensive collection of (reference image, text modifier, target image) triplets. While existing zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods eliminate the need for training on specific downstream datasets, they still require additional pretraining on large-scale image datasets. In this paper, we introduce a training-free approach for ZS-CIR. Our approach, Weighted Modality fusion and similarity for CIR (WeiMoCIR), operates under the assumption that image and text modalities can be effectively combined using a simple weighted average. This allows the query representation to be constructed directly from the reference image and text modifier. To further enhance retrieval performance, we employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate image captions for the database images and incorporate these textual captions into the similarity computation by combining them with image information using a weighted average. Our approach is simple, easy to implement, and its effectiveness is validated through experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/whats2000/WeiMoCIR.

Paperid: 1714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04829.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The significant computational cost of multiplications hinders the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices. While multiplication-free models offer enhanced hardware efficiency, they typically sacrifice accuracy. As a solution, multiplication-reduced hybrid models have emerged to combine the benefits of both approaches. Particularly, prior works, i.e., NASA and NASA-F, leverage Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to construct such hybrid models, enhancing hardware efficiency while maintaining accuracy. However, they either entail costly retraining or encounter gradient conflicts, limiting both search efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, they overlook the acceleration opportunity introduced by accelerator search, yielding sub-optimal hardware performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose NASH, a Neural architecture and Accelerator Search framework for multiplication-reduced Hybrid models. Specifically, as for NAS, we propose a tailored zero-shot metric to pre-identify promising hybrid models before training, enhancing search efficiency while alleviating gradient conflicts. Regarding accelerator search, we innovatively introduce coarse-to-fine search to streamline the search process. Furthermore, we seamlessly integrate these two levels of searches to unveil NASH, obtaining the optimal model and accelerator pairing. Experiments validate our effectiveness, e.g., when compared with the state-of-the-art multiplication-based system, we can achieve $\uparrow$$2.14\times$ throughput and $\uparrow$$2.01\times$ FPS with $\uparrow$$0.25\%$ accuracy on CIFAR-100, and $\uparrow$$1.40\times$ throughput and $\uparrow$$1.19\times$ FPS with $\uparrow$$0.56\%$ accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/xuyang527/NASH.}

Paperid: 1715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04796.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection, aiming to distinguish outliers from known categories, has gained prominence in practical scenarios. Recently, the advent of vision-language models (VLM) has heightened interest in enhancing OOD detection for VLM through few-shot tuning. However, existing methods mainly focus on optimizing global prompts, ignoring refined utilization of local information with regard to outliers. Motivated by this, we freeze global prompts and introduce Local-Prompt, a novel coarse-to-fine tuning paradigm to emphasize regional enhancement with local prompts. Our method comprises two integral components: global prompt guided negative augmentation and local prompt enhanced regional regularization. The former utilizes frozen, coarse global prompts as guiding cues to incorporate negative augmentation, thereby leveraging local outlier knowledge. The latter employs trainable local prompts and a regional regularization to capture local information effectively, aiding in outlier identification. We also propose regional-related metric to empower the enrichment of OOD detection. Moreover, since our approach explores enhancing local prompts only, it can be seamlessly integrated with trained global prompts during inference to boost the performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our method. Notably, our method reduces average FPR95 by 5.17% against state-of-the-art method in 4-shot tuning on challenging ImageNet-1k dataset, even outperforming 16-shot results of previous methods. Code is released at https://github.com/AuroraZengfh/Local-Prompt.

Paperid: 1716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03868.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Integrating image and text data through multi-modal learning has emerged as a new approach in medical imaging research, following its successful deployment in computer vision. While considerable efforts have been dedicated to establishing medical foundation models and their zero-shot transfer to downstream tasks, the popular few-shot setting remains relatively unexplored. Following on from the currently strong emergence of this setting in computer vision, we introduce the first structured benchmark for adapting medical vision-language models (VLMs) in a strict few-shot regime and investigate various adaptation strategies commonly used in the context of natural images. Furthermore, we evaluate a simple generalization of the linear-probe adaptation baseline, which seeks an optimal blending of the visual prototypes and text embeddings via learnable class-wise multipliers. Surprisingly, such a text-informed linear probe yields competitive performances in comparison to convoluted prompt-learning and adapter-based strategies, while running considerably faster and accommodating the black-box setting. Our extensive experiments span three different medical modalities and specialized foundation models, nine downstream tasks, and several state-of-the-art few-shot adaptation methods. We made our benchmark and code publicly available to trigger further developments in this emergent subject: \url{https://github.com/FereshteShakeri/few-shot-MedVLMs}.

Paperid: 1717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03685.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Large-scale visuomotor policy learning is a promising approach toward developing generalizable manipulation systems. Yet, policies that can be deployed on diverse embodiments, environments, and observational modalities remain elusive. In this work, we investigate how knowledge from large-scale visual data of the world may be used to address one axis of variation for generalizable manipulation: observational viewpoint. Specifically, we study single-image novel view synthesis models, which learn 3D-aware scene-level priors by rendering images of the same scene from alternate camera viewpoints given a single input image. For practical application to diverse robotic data, these models must operate zero-shot, performing view synthesis on unseen tasks and environments. We empirically analyze view synthesis models within a simple data-augmentation scheme that we call View Synthesis Augmentation (VISTA) to understand their capabilities for learning viewpoint-invariant policies from single-viewpoint demonstration data. Upon evaluating the robustness of policies trained with our method to out-of-distribution camera viewpoints, we find that they outperform baselines in both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://s-tian.github.io/projects/vista.

Paperid: 1718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03583.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
In many real-world applications, the frequency distribution of class labels for training data can exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which challenges traditional approaches of training deep neural networks that require heavy amounts of balanced data. Gathering and labeling data to balance out the class label distribution can be both costly and time-consuming. Many existing solutions that enable ensemble learning, re-balancing strategies, or fine-tuning applied to deep neural networks are limited by the inert problem of few class samples across a subset of classes. Recently, vision-language models like CLIP have been observed as effective solutions to zero-shot or few-shot learning by grasping a similarity between vision and language features for image and text pairs. Considering that large pre-trained vision-language models may contain valuable side textual information for minor classes, we propose to leverage text supervision to tackle the challenge of long-tailed learning. Concretely, we propose a novel text-guided mixup technique that takes advantage of the semantic relations between classes recognized by the pre-trained text encoder to help alleviate the long-tailed problem. Our empirical study on benchmark long-tailed tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal with a theoretical guarantee. Our code is available at https://github.com/rsamf/text-guided-mixup.

Paperid: 1719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03525.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary segmentation poses significant challenges, as it requires segmenting and recognizing objects across an open set of categories in unconstrained environments. Building on the success of powerful vision-language (ViL) foundation models, such as CLIP, recent efforts sought to harness their zero-short capabilities to recognize unseen categories. Despite notable performance improvements, these models still encounter the critical issue of generating precise mask proposals for unseen categories and scenarios, resulting in inferior segmentation performance eventually. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, FrozenSeg, designed to integrate spatial knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) and semantic knowledge extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP), in a synergistic framework. Taking the ViL model's visual encoder as the feature backbone, we inject the space-aware feature into the learnable queries and CLIP features within the transformer decoder. In addition, we devise a mask proposal ensemble strategy for further improving the recall rate and mask quality. To fully exploit pre-trained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we freeze both foundation models, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight transformer decoder for mask proposal generation-the performance bottleneck. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FrozenSeg advances state-of-the-art results across various segmentation benchmarks, trained exclusively on COCO panoptic data, and tested in a zero-shot manner. Code is available at https://github.com/chenxi52/FrozenSeg.

Paperid: 1720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03291.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
With the emergence of widely available powerful LLMs, disinformation generated by large Language Models (LLMs) has become a major concern. Historically, LLM detectors have been touted as a solution, but their effectiveness in the real world is still to be proven. In this paper, we focus on an important setting in information operations -- short news-like posts generated by moderately sophisticated attackers. We demonstrate that existing LLM detectors, whether zero-shot or purpose-trained, are not ready for real-world use in that setting. All tested zero-shot detectors perform inconsistently with prior benchmarks and are highly vulnerable to sampling temperature increase, a trivial attack absent from recent benchmarks. A purpose-trained detector generalizing across LLMs and unseen attacks can be developed, but it fails to generalize to new human-written texts. We argue that the former indicates domain-specific benchmarking is needed, while the latter suggests a trade-off between the adversarial evasion resilience and overfitting to the reference human text, with both needing evaluation in benchmarks and currently absent. We believe this suggests a re-consideration of current LLM detector benchmarking approaches and provides a dynamically extensible benchmark to allow it (https://github.com/Reliable-Information-Lab-HEVS/benchmark_llm_texts_detection).

Paperid: 1721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03109.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce FIDAVL: Fake Image Detection and Attribution using a Vision-Language Model. FIDAVL is a novel and efficient mul-titask approach inspired by the synergies between vision and language processing. Leveraging the benefits of zero-shot learning, FIDAVL exploits the complementarity between vision and language along with soft prompt-tuning strategy to detect fake images and accurately attribute them to their originating source models. We conducted extensive experiments on a comprehensive dataset comprising synthetic images generated by various state-of-the-art models. Our results demonstrate that FIDAVL achieves an encouraging average detection accuracy of 95.42% and F1-score of 95.47% while also obtaining noteworthy performance metrics, with an average F1-score of 92.64% and ROUGE-L score of 96.50% for attributing synthetic images to their respective source generation models. The source code of this work will be publicly released at https://github.com/Mamadou-Keita/FIDAVL.

Paperid: 1722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02882.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Few-shot image classifiers are designed to recognize and classify new data with minimal supervision and limited data but often show reliance on spurious correlations between classes and spurious attributes, known as spurious bias. Spurious correlations commonly hold in certain samples and few-shot classifiers can suffer from spurious bias induced from them. There is an absence of an automatic benchmarking system to assess the robustness of few-shot classifiers against spurious bias. In this paper, we propose a systematic and rigorous benchmark framework, termed FewSTAB, to fairly demonstrate and quantify varied degrees of robustness of few-shot classifiers to spurious bias. FewSTAB creates few-shot evaluation tasks with biased attributes so that using them for predictions can demonstrate poor performance. To construct these tasks, we propose attribute-based sample selection strategies based on a pre-trained vision-language model, eliminating the need for manual dataset curation. This allows FewSTAB to automatically benchmark spurious bias using any existing test data. FewSTAB offers evaluation results in a new dimension along with a new design guideline for building robust classifiers. Moreover, it can benchmark spurious bias in varied degrees and enable designs for varied degrees of robustness. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through experiments on ten few-shot learning methods across three datasets. We hope our framework can inspire new designs of robust few-shot classifiers. Our code is available at https://github.com/gtzheng/FewSTAB.

Paperid: 1723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02850.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The predominant method for computing confidence intervals (CI) in few-shot learning (FSL) is based on sampling the tasks with replacement, i.e.\ allowing the same samples to appear in multiple tasks. This makes the CI misleading in that it takes into account the randomness of the sampler but not the data itself. To quantify the extent of this problem, we conduct a comparative analysis between CIs computed with and without replacement. These reveal a notable underestimation by the predominant method. This observation calls for a reevaluation of how we interpret confidence intervals and the resulting conclusions in FSL comparative studies. Our research demonstrates that the use of paired tests can partially address this issue. Additionally, we explore methods to further reduce the (size of the) CI by strategically sampling tasks of a specific size. We also introduce a new optimized benchmark, which can be accessed at https://github.com/RafLaf/FSL-benchmark-again

Paperid: 1724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02729.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
In medical image classification, supervised learning is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled medical images. To address this, we leverage the visual-textual alignment within Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable unsupervised learning of a medical image classifier. In this work, we propose \underline{Med}ical \underline{Un}supervised \underline{A}daptation (\texttt{MedUnA}) of VLMs, where the LLM-generated descriptions for each class are encoded into text embeddings and matched with class labels via a cross-modal adapter. This adapter attaches to a visual encoder of \texttt{MedCLIP} and aligns the visual embeddings through unsupervised learning, driven by a contrastive entropy-based loss and prompt tuning. Thereby, improving performance in scenarios where textual information is more abundant than labeled images, particularly in the healthcare domain. Unlike traditional VLMs, \texttt{MedUnA} uses \textbf{unpaired images and text} for learning representations and enhances the potential of VLMs beyond traditional constraints. We evaluate the performance on three chest X-ray datasets and two multi-class datasets (diabetic retinopathy and skin lesions), showing significant accuracy gains over the zero-shot baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/rumaima/meduna.

Paperid: 1725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02543.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the burst of innovative methods for controlling the diffusion process, effectively controlling image styles in text-to-image generation remains a challenging task. Many adapter-based methods impose image representation conditions on the denoising process to accomplish image control. However these conditions are not aligned with the word embedding space, leading to interference between image and text control conditions and the potential loss of semantic information from the text prompt. Addressing this issue involves two key challenges. Firstly, how to inject the style representation without compromising the effectiveness of text representation in control. Secondly, how to obtain the accurate style representation from a single reference image. To tackle these challenges, we introduce StyleTokenizer, a zero-shot style control image generation method that aligns style representation with text representation using a style tokenizer. This alignment effectively minimizes the impact on the effectiveness of text prompts. Furthermore, we collect a well-labeled style dataset named Style30k to train a style feature extractor capable of accurately representing style while excluding other content information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method fully grasps the style characteristics of the reference image, generating appealing images that are consistent with both the target image style and text prompt. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/alipay/style-tokenizer.

Paperid: 1726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02136.pdf GitHub GitHub

Authors:Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh-Esfahani, Mahdi Ghaffarzadeh-Esfahani, Arian Salahi-Niri, Hossein Toreyhi, Zahra Atf, Amirali Mohsenzadeh-Kermani, Mahshad Sarikhani, Zohreh Tajabadi, Fatemeh Shojaeian, Mohammad Hassan Bagheri, Aydin Feyzi, Mohammadamin Tarighatpayma, Narges Gazmeh, Fateme Heydari, Hossein Afshar, Amirreza Allahgholipour, Farid Alimardani, Ameneh Salehi, Naghmeh Asadimanesh, Mohammad Amin Khalafi, Hadis Shabanipour, Ali Moradi, Sajjad Hossein Zadeh, Omid Yazdani, Romina Esbati, Moozhan Maleki, Danial Samiei Nasr, Amirali Soheili, Hossein Majlesi, Saba Shahsavan, Alireza Soheilipour, Nooshin Goudarzi, Erfan Taherifard, Hamidreza Hatamabadi, Jamil S Samaan, Thomas Savage, Ankit Sakhuja, Ali Soroush, Girish Nadkarni, Ilad Alavi Darazam, Mohamad Amin Pourhoseingholi, Seyed Amir Ahmad Safavi-Naini

Abstract:
Background: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the performance of classical machine learning models (CMLs) and large language models (LLMs) in predicting mortality associated with COVID-19 by utilizing a high-dimensional tabular dataset. Materials and Methods: We analyzed data from 9,134 COVID-19 patients collected across four hospitals. Seven CML models, including XGBoost and random forest (RF), were trained and evaluated. The structured data was converted into text for zero-shot classification by eight LLMs, including GPT-4 and Mistral-7b. Additionally, Mistral-7b was fine-tuned using the QLoRA approach to enhance its predictive capabilities. Results: Among the CML models, XGBoost and RF achieved the highest accuracy, with F1 scores of 0.87 for internal validation and 0.83 for external validation. In the LLM category, GPT-4 was the top performer with an F1 score of 0.43. Fine-tuning Mistral-7b significantly improved its recall from 1% to 79%, resulting in an F1 score of 0.74, which was stable during external validation. Conclusion: While LLMs show moderate performance in zero-shot classification, fine-tuning can significantly enhance their effectiveness, potentially aligning them closer to CML models. However, CMLs still outperform LLMs in high-dimensional tabular data tasks.

Paperid: 1727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02097.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Modern diffusion models, particularly those utilizing a Transformer-based UNet for denoising, rely heavily on self-attention operations to manage complex spatial relationships, thus achieving impressive generation performance. However, this existing paradigm faces significant challenges in generating high-resolution visual content due to its quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to the number of spatial tokens. To address this limitation, we aim at a novel linear attention mechanism as an alternative in this paper. Specifically, we begin our exploration from recently introduced models with linear complexity, e.g., Mamba2, RWKV6, Gated Linear Attention, etc, and identify two key features--attention normalization and non-causal inference--that enhance high-resolution visual generation performance. Building on these insights, we introduce a generalized linear attention paradigm, which serves as a low-rank approximation of a wide spectrum of popular linear token mixers. To save the training cost and better leverage pre-trained models, we initialize our models and distill the knowledge from pre-trained StableDiffusion (SD). We find that the distilled model, termed LinFusion, achieves performance on par with or superior to the original SD after only modest training, while significantly reducing time and memory complexity. Extensive experiments on SD-v1.5, SD-v2.1, and SD-XL demonstrate that LinFusion enables satisfactory and efficient zero-shot cross-resolution generation, accommodating ultra-resolution images like 16K on a single GPU. Moreover, it is highly compatible with pre-trained SD components and pipelines, such as ControlNet, IP-Adapter, DemoFusion, DistriFusion, etc, requiring no adaptation efforts. Codes are available at https://github.com/Huage001/LinFusion.

Paperid: 1728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01883.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
The development of vision-language models (VLMs) for histo-pathology has shown promising new usages and zero-shot performances. However, current approaches, which decompose large slides into smaller patches, focus solely on inductive classification, i.e., prediction for each patch is made independently of the other patches in the target test data. We extend the capability of these large models by introducing a transductive approach. By using text-based predictions and affinity relationships among patches, our approach leverages the strong zero-shot capabilities of these new VLMs without any additional labels. Our experiments cover four histopathology datasets and five different VLMs. Operating solely in the embedding space (i.e., in a black-box setting), our approach is highly efficient, processing $10^5$ patches in just a few seconds, and shows significant accuracy improvements over inductive zero-shot classification. Code available at https://github.com/FereshteShakeri/Histo-TransCLIP.

Paperid: 1729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01835.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Although foundational vision-language models (VLMs) have proven to be very successful for various semantic discrimination tasks, they still struggle to perform faithfully for fine-grained categorization. Moreover, foundational models trained on one domain do not generalize well on a different domain without fine-tuning. We attribute these to the limitations of the VLM's semantic representations and attempt to improve their fine-grained visual awareness using generative modeling. Specifically, we propose two novel methods: Generative Class Prompt Learning (GCPL) and Contrastive Multi-class Prompt Learning (CoMPLe). Utilizing text-to-image diffusion models, GCPL significantly improves the visio-linguistic synergy in class embeddings by conditioning on few-shot exemplars with learnable class prompts. CoMPLe builds on this foundation by introducing a contrastive learning component that encourages inter-class separation during the generative optimization process. Our empirical results demonstrate that such a generative class prompt learning approach substantially outperform existing methods, offering a better alternative to few shot image recognition challenges. The source code will be made available at: https://github.com/soumitri2001/GCPL.

Paperid: 1730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00750.pdf GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) systems are usually grouped as autoregressive and non-autoregressive systems. The autoregressive systems implicitly model duration but exhibit certain deficiencies in robustness and lack of duration controllability. Non-autoregressive systems require explicit alignment information between text and speech during training and predict durations for linguistic units (e.g. phone), which may compromise their naturalness. In this paper, we introduce Masked Generative Codec Transformer (MaskGCT), a fully non-autoregressive TTS model that eliminates the need for explicit alignment information between text and speech supervision, as well as phone-level duration prediction. MaskGCT is a two-stage model: in the first stage, the model uses text to predict semantic tokens extracted from a speech self-supervised learning (SSL) model, and in the second stage, the model predicts acoustic tokens conditioned on these semantic tokens. MaskGCT follows the mask-and-predict learning paradigm. During training, MaskGCT learns to predict masked semantic or acoustic tokens based on given conditions and prompts. During inference, the model generates tokens of a specified length in a parallel manner. Experiments with 100K hours of in-the-wild speech demonstrate that MaskGCT outperforms the current state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS systems in terms of quality, similarity, and intelligibility. Audio samples are available at https://maskgct.github.io/. We release our code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/open-mmlab/Amphion/blob/main/models/tts/maskgct.

Paperid: 1731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00698.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models for remote sensing have shown promising uses thanks to their extensive pretraining. However, their conventional usage in zero-shot scene classification methods still involves dividing large images into patches and making independent predictions, i.e., inductive inference, thereby limiting their effectiveness by ignoring valuable contextual information. Our approach tackles this issue by utilizing initial predictions based on text prompting and patch affinity relationships from the image encoder to enhance zero-shot capabilities through transductive inference, all without the need for supervision and at a minor computational cost. Experiments on 10 remote sensing datasets with state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models demonstrate significant accuracy improvements over inductive zero-shot classification. Our source code is publicly available on Github: https://github.com/elkhouryk/RS-TransCLIP

Paperid: 1732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00556.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Automatic image anomaly detection is important for quality inspection in the manufacturing industry. The usual unsupervised anomaly detection approach is to train a model for each object class using a dataset of normal samples. However, a more realistic problem is zero-/few-shot anomaly detection where zero or only a few normal samples are available. This makes the training of object-specific models challenging. Recently, large foundation vision-language models have shown strong zero-shot performance in various downstream tasks. While these models have learned complex relationships between vision and language, they are not specifically designed for the tasks of anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose the Few-shot/zero-shot Anomaly Detection Engine (FADE) which leverages the vision-language CLIP model and adjusts it for the purpose of industrial anomaly detection. Specifically, we improve language-guided anomaly segmentation 1) by adapting CLIP to extract multi-scale image patch embeddings that are better aligned with language and 2) by automatically generating an ensemble of text prompts related to industrial anomaly detection. 3) We use additional vision-based guidance from the query and reference images to further improve both zero-shot and few-shot anomaly detection. On the MVTec-AD (and VisA) dataset, FADE outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in anomaly segmentation with pixel-AUROC of 89.6% (91.5%) in zero-shot and 95.4% (97.5%) in 1-normal-shot. Code is available at https://github.com/BMVC-FADE/BMVC-FADE.

Paperid: 1733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00084.pdf GitHub

Abstract:
Background and Aims: This study evaluates the medical reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) in gastroenterology. Methods: We used 300 gastroenterology board exam-style multiple-choice questions, 138 of which contain images to systematically assess the impact of model configurations and parameters and prompt engineering strategies utilizing GPT-3.5. Next, we assessed the performance of proprietary and open-source LLMs (versions), including GPT (3.5, 4, 4o, 4omini), Claude (3, 3.5), Gemini (1.0), Mistral, Llama (2, 3, 3.1), Mixtral, and Phi (3), across different interfaces (web and API), computing environments (cloud and local), and model precisions (with and without quantization). Finally, we assessed accuracy using a semiautomated pipeline. Results: Among the proprietary models, GPT-4o (73.7%) and Claude3.5-Sonnet (74.0%) achieved the highest accuracy, outperforming the top open-source models: Llama3.1-405b (64%), Llama3.1-70b (58.3%), and Mixtral-8x7b (54.3%). Among the quantized open-source models, the 6-bit quantized Phi3-14b (48.7%) performed best. The scores of the quantized models were comparable to those of the full-precision models Llama2-7b, Llama2--13b, and Gemma2-9b. Notably, VLM performance on image-containing questions did not improve when the images were provided and worsened when LLM-generated captions were provided. In contrast, a 10% increase in accuracy was observed when images were accompanied by human-crafted image descriptions. Conclusion: In conclusion, while LLMs exhibit robust zero-shot performance in medical reasoning, the integration of visual data remains a challenge for VLMs. Effective deployment involves carefully determining optimal model configurations, encouraging users to consider either the high performance of proprietary models or the flexible adaptability of open-source models.

Paperid: 1734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23187.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Model-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown remarkable progress in solving complex tasks through collaborative reasoning and inter-agent critique. However, existing approaches typically treat each task in isolation, resulting in redundant computations and limited generalization across structurally similar tasks. To address this, we introduce multi-agent cross-task experiential learning (MAEL), a novel framework that endows LLM-driven agents with explicit cross-task learning and experience accumulation. We model the task-solving workflow on a graph-structured multi-agent collaboration network, where agents propagate information and coordinate via explicit connectivity. During the experiential learning phase, we quantify the quality for each step in the task-solving workflow and store the resulting rewards along with the corresponding inputs and outputs into each agent's individual experience pool. During inference, agents retrieve high-reward, task-relevant experiences as few-shot examples to enhance the effectiveness of each reasoning step, thereby enabling more accurate and efficient multi-agent collaboration. Experimental results on diverse datasets demonstrate that MAEL empowers agents to learn from prior task experiences effectively-achieving faster convergence and producing higher-quality solutions on current tasks.

Paperid: 1735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04066.pdf

Abstract:
The GPT-4 technical report highlights the possibility of predicting model performance on downstream tasks using only pre-training signals, though detailed methodologies are absent. Such predictive capabilities are essential for resource-efficient pre-training and the construction of task-aligned datasets. In this paper, we aim to predict performance in closed-book question answering (QA), a vital downstream task that directly reflects a model's internalized knowledge without the help of external tools. We address three primary challenges: (1) limited access to and understanding of pre-training corpora, (2) limitations of current evaluation methods for pre-trained models, and (3) limitations of frequency-based metrics in predicting model performance. In response, we conduct large-scale retrieval and semantic analysis across the pre-training corpora of 21 publicly available and 3 custom-trained large language models. We then develop a multi-template QA evaluation framework incorporating paraphrased question variants. Building on these foundations, we propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic metric that linearly correlates pre-training data characteristics, model size, and QA accuracy, without requiring additional training. Experimental results show that SMI outperforms co-occurrence-based baselines, achieving $R^2 > 0.75$ on models with over one billion parameters. Theoretical analysis further suggests an upper bound of around 80% QA accuracy under optimal pre-training, reflecting intrinsic memory limitations and motivating the use of retrieval or few-shot methods in later stages.

Paperid: 1736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08311.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently shown remarkable promise in low-level visual perception tasks, particularly in Image Quality Assessment (IQA), demonstrating strong zero-shot capability. However, achieving state-of-the-art performance often requires computationally expensive fine-tuning methods, which aim to align the distribution of quality-related token in output with image quality levels. Inspired by recent training-free works for LMM, we introduce IQARAG, a novel, training-free framework that enhances LMMs' IQA ability. IQARAG leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve some semantically similar but quality-variant reference images with corresponding Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) for input image. These retrieved images and input image are integrated into a specific prompt. Retrieved images provide the LMM with a visual perception anchor for IQA task. IQARAG contains three key phases: Retrieval Feature Extraction, Image Retrieval, and Integration & Quality Score Generation. Extensive experiments across multiple diverse IQA datasets, including KADID, KonIQ, LIVE Challenge, and SPAQ, demonstrate that the proposed IQARAG effectively boosts the IQA performance of LMMs, offering a resource-efficient alternative to fine-tuning for quality assessment.

Paperid: 1737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17640.pdf

Abstract:
Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and the interactions between them. Existing methods operate under a closed-world assumption, treating the task as a classification problem over a small, predefined verb set, which struggles to generalize to the long-tail of unseen or ambiguous interactions in the wild. While recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) possess the rich world knowledge required for open-vocabulary understanding, they remain decoupled from existing HOI detectors since fine-tuning them is computationally prohibitive. To address these constraints, we propose \GRASP-HO}, a novel Generative Reasoning And Steerable Perception framework that reformulates HOI detection from the closed-set classification task to the open-vocabulary generation problem. To bridge the vision and cognitive, we first extract hybrid interaction representations, then design a lightweight learnable cognitive steering conduit (CSC) module to inject the fine-grained visual evidence into a frozen MLLM for effective reasoning. To address the supervision mismatch between classification-based HOI datasets and open-vocabulary generative models, we introduce a hybrid guidance strategy that coupling the language modeling loss and auxiliary classification loss, enabling discriminative grounding without sacrificing generative flexibility. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art closed-set performance and strong zero-shot generalization, achieving a unified paradigm that seamlessly bridges discriminative perception and generative reasoning for open-world HOI detection.

Paperid: 1738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00075.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid progress in diffusion models, image synthesis has advanced to the stage of zero-shot image-to-image generation, where high-fidelity replication of facial identities or artistic styles can be achieved using just one portrait or artwork, without modifying any model weights. Although these techniques significantly enhance creative possibilities, they also pose substantial risks related to intellectual property violations, including unauthorized identity cloning and stylistic imitation. To counter such threats, this work presents Adapter Shield, the first universal and authentication-integrated solution aimed at defending personal images from misuse in zero-shot generation scenarios. We first investigate how current zero-shot methods employ image encoders to extract embeddings from input images, which are subsequently fed into the UNet of diffusion models through cross-attention layers. Inspired by this mechanism, we construct a reversible encryption system that maps original embeddings into distinct encrypted representations according to different secret keys. The authorized users can restore the authentic embeddings via a decryption module and the correct key, enabling normal usage for authorized generation tasks. For protection purposes, we design a multi-target adversarial perturbation method that actively shifts the original embeddings toward designated encrypted patterns. Consequently, protected images are embedded with a defensive layer that ensures unauthorized users can only produce distorted or encrypted outputs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art defenses in blocking unauthorized zero-shot image synthesis, while supporting flexible and secure access control for verified users.

Paperid: 1739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19910.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of diffusion models, a variety of fine-tuning methods have been developed, enabling high-fidelity image generation with high similarity to the target content using only 3 to 5 training images. More recently, zero-shot generation methods have emerged, capable of producing highly realistic outputs from a single reference image without altering model weights. However, technological advancements have also introduced significant risks to facial privacy. Malicious actors can exploit diffusion model customization with just a few or even one image of a person to create synthetic identities nearly identical to the original identity. Although research has begun to focus on defending against diffusion model customization, most existing defense methods target fine-tuning approaches and neglect zero-shot generation defenses. To address this issue, this paper proposes Dual-Layer Anti-Diffusion (DLADiff) to defense both fine-tuning methods and zero-shot methods. DLADiff contains a dual-layer protective mechanism. The first layer provides effective protection against unauthorized fine-tuning by leveraging the proposed Dual-Surrogate Models (DSUR) mechanism and Alternating Dynamic Fine-Tuning (ADFT), which integrates adversarial training with the prior knowledge derived from pre-fine-tuned models. The second layer, though simple in design, demonstrates strong effectiveness in preventing image generation through zero-shot methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in defending against fine-tuning of diffusion models and achieves unprecedented performance in protecting against zero-shot generation.

Paperid: 1740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17962.pdf

Abstract:
Developing a robust visual quality assessment (VQualA) large multi-modal model (LMM) requires achieving versatility, powerfulness, and transferability. However, existing VQualA LMMs typically focus on a single task and rely on full-parameter fine-tuning, which makes them prone to overfitting on specific modalities or task types, thereby limiting their generalization capacity and transferability. To address this, we propose a vision-encoder-centered generative pre-training pipeline and develop the VITAL-Series LMMs. (1) We adopt a machine-executed annotation-scrutiny paradigm, constructing over 4.5M vision-language (VL) pairs-the largest VQualA training dataset to date. (2) We employ a multi-task training workflow that simultaneously enhances the model's quantitative scoring precision and strengthens its capability for quality interpretation across both image and video modalities. (3) Building upon the vision encoder, we realize an efficient model zoo extension: the model zoo exhibits strong zero-shot performance, and each paired decoder requires only a swift warm-up using less than 1/1000 of the pre-training data to achieve performance comparable to the fully trained counterpart. Overall, our work lays a cornerstone for advancing toward the foundation LMM for VQualA.

Paperid: 1741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02987.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large multimodal models (LMMs), recent text-to-image (T2I) models can generate high-quality images and demonstrate great alignment to short prompts. However, they still struggle to effectively understand and follow long and detailed prompts, displaying inconsistent generation. To address this challenge, we introduce LPG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating long-prompt-based text-to-image generation. LPG-Bench features 200 meticulously crafted prompts with an average length of over 250 words, approaching the input capacity of several leading commercial models. Using these prompts, we generate 2,600 images from 13 state-of-the-art models and further perform comprehensive human-ranked annotations. Based on LPG-Bench, we observe that state-of-the-art T2I alignment evaluation metrics exhibit poor consistency with human preferences on long-prompt-based image generation. To address the gap, we introduce a novel zero-shot metric based on text-to-image-to-text consistency, termed TIT, for evaluating long-prompt-generated images. The core concept of TIT is to quantify T2I alignment by directly comparing the consistency between the raw prompt and the LMM-produced description on the generated image, which includes an efficient score-based instantiation TIT-Score and a large-language-model (LLM) based instantiation TIT-Score-LLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior alignment with human judgment compared to CLIP-score, LMM-score, etc., with TIT-Score-LLM attaining a 7.31% absolute improvement in pairwise accuracy over the strongest baseline. LPG-Bench and TIT methods together offer a deeper perspective to benchmark and foster the development of T2I models. All resources will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 1742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03631.pdf

Abstract:
Video quality assessment (VQA) is essential for quantifying perceptual quality in various video processing workflows, spanning from camera capture systems to over-the-top streaming platforms. While recent supervised VQA models have made substantial progress, the reliance on manually annotated datasets -- a process that is labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale up -- has hindered further optimization of their generalization to unseen video content and distortions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework for VQA to learn quality assessment capabilities from large-scale, unlabeled web videos. Our approach leverages a \textbf{learning-to-rank} paradigm to train a large multimodal model (LMM) on video pairs automatically labeled via two manners, including quality pseudo-labeling by existing VQA models and relative quality ranking based on synthetic distortion simulations. Furthermore, we introduce a novel \textbf{iterative self-improvement training strategy}, where the trained model acts an improved annotator to iteratively refine the annotation quality of training data. By training on a dataset $10\times$ larger than the existing VQA benchmarks, our model: (1) achieves zero-shot performance on in-domain VQA benchmarks that matches or surpasses supervised models; (2) demonstrates superior out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization across diverse video content and distortions; and (3) sets a new state-of-the-art when fine-tuned on human-labeled datasets. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our self-supervised approach in training generalized VQA models. The datasets and code will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Paperid: 1743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20145.pdf

Abstract:
The pre-trained foundation models (PFMs) have become essential for facilitating large-scale multimodal learning. Researchers have effectively employed the ``pre-train, prompt, and predict'' paradigm through prompt learning to induce improved few-shot performance. However, prompt learning approaches for PFMs still follow a parametric learning paradigm. As such, the stability of generalization in memorization and rote learning can be compromised. More specifically, conventional prompt learning might face difficulties in fully utilizing atypical instances and avoiding overfitting to shallow patterns with limited data during the process of fully-supervised training. To overcome these constraints, we present our approach, named RetroPrompt, which aims to achieve a balance between memorization and generalization by decoupling knowledge from mere memorization. Unlike traditional prompting methods, RetroPrompt leverages a publicly accessible knowledge base generated from the training data and incorporates a retrieval mechanism throughout the input, training, and inference stages. This enables the model to actively retrieve relevant contextual information from the corpus, thereby enhancing the available cues. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of datasets across natural language processing and computer vision tasks to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach, RetroPrompt, in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Through detailed analysis of memorization patterns, we observe that RetroPrompt effectively reduces the reliance on rote memorization, leading to enhanced generalization.

Paperid: 1744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25628.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich yet complex information, and their automated analysis is critical for clinical decision-making. Despite recent advances of large language models (LLMs) in clinical workflows, their ability to analyze EHRs remains limited due to narrow task coverage and lack of EHR-oriented reasoning capabilities. This paper aims to bridge the gap, specifically, we present EHR-Ins, a large-scale, comprehensive EHR reasoning instruction dataset, comprising 300k high-quality reasoning cases and 4M non-reasoning cases across 42 distinct EHR tasks. Its core innovation is a thinking-graph-driven framework that enables to generate high-quality reasoning data at scale. Based on it, we develop EHR-R1, a series of reasoning-enhanced LLMs with up to 72B parameters tailored for EHR analysis. Through a multi-stage training paradigm, including domain adaptation, reasoning enhancement, and reinforcement learning, EHR-R1 systematically acquires domain knowledge and diverse reasoning capabilities, enabling accurate and robust EHR analysis. Lastly, we introduce EHR-Bench, a new benchmark curated from MIMIC-IV, spanning 42 tasks, to comprehensively assess reasoning and prediction across EHR scenarios. In experiments, we show that the resulting EHR-R1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art commercial and open-source LLMs (including DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o), surpassing GPT-4o by over 30 points on MIMIC-Bench and achieving a 10\% higher zero-shot AUROC on EHRSHOT. Collectively, EHR-Ins, EHR-R1, and EHR-Bench have significantly advanced the development for more reliable and clinically relevant EHR analysis.

Paperid: 1745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15904.pdf

Abstract:
Rare cancers comprise 20-25% of all malignancies but face major diagnostic challenges due to limited expert availability-especially in pediatric oncology, where they represent over 70% of cases. While pathology vision-language (VL) foundation models show promising zero-shot capabilities for common cancer subtyping, their clinical performance for rare cancers remains limited. Existing multi-instance learning (MIL) methods rely only on visual features, overlooking cross-modal knowledge and compromising interpretability critical for rare cancer diagnosis. To address this limitation, we propose PathPT, a novel framework that fully exploits the potential of vision-language pathology foundation models through spatially-aware visual aggregation and task-specific prompt tuning. Unlike conventional MIL, PathPT converts WSI-level supervision into fine-grained tile-level guidance by leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of VL models, thereby preserving localization on cancerous regions and enabling cross-modal reasoning through prompts aligned with histopathological semantics. We benchmark PathPT on eight rare cancer datasets(four adult and four pediatric) spanning 56 subtypes and 2,910 WSIs, as well as three common cancer datasets, evaluating four state-of-the-art VL models and four MIL frameworks under three few-shot settings. Results show that PathPT consistently delivers superior performance, achieving substantial gains in subtyping accuracy and cancerous region grounding ability. This work advances AI-assisted diagnosis for rare cancers, offering a scalable solution for improving subtyping accuracy in settings with limited access to specialized expertise.

Paperid: 1746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09882.pdf

Abstract:
Non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) offer a safe and accessible means of connecting the human brain to external devices, with broad applications in home and clinical settings to enhance human capabilities. However, the high noise level and limited task-specific data in non-invasive signals constrain decoding capabilities. Recently, the adoption of self-supervised pre-training is transforming the landscape of non-invasive BCI research, enabling the development of brain foundation models to capture generic neural representations from large-scale unlabeled electroencephalography (EEG) signals with substantial noises. However, despite these advances, the field currently lacks comprehensive, practical and extensible benchmarks to assess the utility of the public foundation models across diverse BCI tasks, hindering their widespread adoption. To address this challenge, we present AdaBrain-Bench, a large-scale standardized benchmark to systematically evaluate brain foundation models in widespread non-invasive BCI tasks. AdaBrain-Bench encompasses a diverse collection of representative BCI decoding datasets spanning 7 key applications. It introduces a streamlined task adaptation pipeline integrated with multi-dimensional evaluation metrics and a set of adaptation tools. The benchmark delivers an inclusive framework for assessing generalizability of brain foundation models across key transfer settings, including cross-subject, multi-subject, and few-shot scenarios. We leverage AdaBrain-Bench to evaluate a suite of publicly available brain foundation models and offer insights into practices for selecting appropriate models in various scenarios. We make our benchmark pipeline available to enable reproducible research and external use, offering a continuously evolving platform to foster progress toward robust and generalized neural decoding solutions.

Paperid: 1747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01155.pdf

Abstract:
Evolution, the engine behind the survival and growth of life on Earth, operates through the population-based process of reproduction. Inspired by this principle, this paper formally defines a newly emerging problem -- the population-based evolution of large language models (LLMs) -- and introduces a novel framework. Starting with a population of parent LLMs, our framework enables the population to evolve through four key operations: (i) crossover, merging the weights of different parents to create offspring LLMs, (ii) mutation, introducing small, random changes to model weights to foster diversity, (iii) selection, prioritizing high-performing models, and (iv) succession, transferring the learned experience from parent to offspring LLMs. With only 200 samples per new task, the LLM population evolves rapidly to adapt to the task at hand, without any gradients. Experiments on 12 datasets show that our framework consistently outperforms existing multi-LLM merging and adaptation methods, achieving accuracy gains of up to 54.8% over the best LLM in the initial population. Moreover, our framework allows for the evolution of LLMs across multiple new tasks simultaneously, scaling effectively with populations of up to 40 LLMs, and even zero-shot generalization to unseen held-out tasks. We have open-sourced the code on GitHub and released the weights of 10 parent LLMs, fine-tuned from gemma-2-2b-it, on HuggingFace$, enabling reproduction of our proposed framework using just a single 4090 GPU with 24GB memory, without any performance degradation.

Paperid: 1748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07814.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate acquisition of surface meteorological conditions at arbitrary locations holds significant importance for weather forecasting and climate simulation. Due to the fact that meteorological states derived from satellite observations are often provided in the form of low-resolution grid fields, the direct application of spatial interpolation to obtain meteorological states for specific locations often results in significant discrepancies when compared to actual observations. Existing downscaling methods for acquiring meteorological state information at higher resolutions commonly overlook the correlation with satellite observations. To bridge the gap, we propose Satellite-observations Guided Diffusion Model (SGD), a conditional diffusion model pre-trained on ERA5 reanalysis data with satellite observations (GridSat) as conditions, which is employed for sampling downscaled meteorological states through a zero-shot guided sampling strategy and patch-based methods. During the training process, we propose to fuse the information from GridSat satellite observations into ERA5 maps via the attention mechanism, enabling SGD to generate atmospheric states that align more accurately with actual conditions. In the sampling, we employed optimizable convolutional kernels to simulate the upscale process, thereby generating high-resolution ERA5 maps using low-resolution ERA5 maps as well as observations from weather stations as guidance. Moreover, our devised patch-based method promotes SGD to generate meteorological states at arbitrary resolutions. Experiments demonstrate SGD fulfills accurate meteorological states downscaling to 6.25km.

Paperid: 1749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13126.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has enabled the development of highly robust foundation models for various pathological tasks across diverse diseases and patient cohorts. Among these models, vision-language pre-training, which leverages large-scale paired data to align pathology image and text embedding spaces, and provides a novel zero-shot paradigm for downstream tasks. However, existing models have been primarily data-driven and lack the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge, which limits their performance in cancer diagnosis, especially for rare tumor subtypes. To address this limitation, we establish a Knowledge-enhanced Pathology (KEEP) foundation model that harnesses disease knowledge to facilitate vision-language pre-training. Specifically, we first construct a disease knowledge graph (KG) that covers 11,454 human diseases with 139,143 disease attributes, including synonyms, definitions, and hypernym relations. We then systematically reorganize the millions of publicly available noisy pathology image-text pairs, into 143K well-structured semantic groups linked through the hierarchical relations of the disease KG. To derive more nuanced image and text representations, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced vision-language pre-training approach that integrates disease knowledge into the alignment within hierarchical semantic groups instead of unstructured image-text pairs. Validated on 18 diverse benchmarks with more than 14,000 whole slide images (WSIs), KEEP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot cancer diagnostic tasks. Notably, for cancer detection, KEEP demonstrates an average sensitivity of 89.8% at a specificity of 95.0% across 7 cancer types. For cancer subtyping, KEEP achieves a median balanced accuracy of 0.456 in subtyping 30 rare brain cancers, indicating strong generalizability for diagnosing rare tumors.

Paperid: 1750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05805.pdf

Abstract:
Precipitation nowcasting plays a pivotal role in socioeconomic sectors, especially in severe convective weather warnings. Although notable progress has been achieved by approaches mining the spatiotemporal correlations with deep learning, these methods still suffer severe blurriness as the lead time increases, which hampers accurate predictions for extreme precipitation. To alleviate blurriness, researchers explore generative methods conditioned on blurry predictions. However, the pairs of blurry predictions and corresponding ground truth need to be generated in advance, making the training pipeline cumbersome and limiting the generality of generative models within blur modes that appear in training data. By rethinking the blurriness in precipitation nowcasting as a blur kernel acting on predictions, we propose an unsupervised postprocessing method to eliminate the blurriness without the requirement of training with the pairs of blurry predictions and corresponding ground truth. Specifically, we utilize blurry predictions to guide the generation process of a pre-trained unconditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to obtain high-fidelity predictions with eliminated blurriness. A zero-shot blur kernel estimation mechanism and an auto-scale denoise guidance strategy are introduced to adapt the unconditional DDPM to any blurriness modes varying from datasets and lead times in precipitation nowcasting. Extensive experiments are conducted on 7 precipitation radar datasets, demonstrating the generality and superiority of our method.

Paperid: 1751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11436.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) faces a fundamental challenge of effectively aligning audio and visual modalities. While recent approaches leverage foundation models to address data scarcity, they often rely on single-modality knowledge or combine foundation models in an off-the-shelf manner, failing to address the cross-modal alignment challenge. In this paper, we present TAViS, a novel framework that \textbf{couples} the knowledge of multimodal foundation models (ImageBind) for cross-modal alignment and a segmentation foundation model (SAM2) for precise segmentation. However, effectively combining these models poses two key challenges: the difficulty in transferring the knowledge between SAM2 and ImageBind due to their different feature spaces, and the insufficiency of using only segmentation loss for supervision. To address these challenges, we introduce a text-bridged design with two key components: (1) a text-bridged hybrid prompting mechanism where pseudo text provides class prototype information while retaining modality-specific details from both audio and visual inputs, and (2) an alignment supervision strategy that leverages text as a bridge to align shared semantic concepts within audio-visual modalities. Our approach achieves superior performance on single-source, multi-source, semantic datasets, and excels in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 1752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17219.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) methods synthesize class-related features based on predefined class semantic prototypes, showcasing superior performance. However, this feature generation paradigm falls short of providing interpretable insights. In addition, existing approaches rely on semantic prototypes annotated by human experts, which exhibit a significant limitation in their scalability to generalized scenes. To overcome these deficiencies, a natural solution is to generate images for unseen classes using text prompts. To this end, We present DIG-ZSL, a novel Discriminative Image Generation framework for Zero-Shot Learning. Specifically, to ensure the generation of discriminative images for training an effective ZSL classifier, we learn a discriminative class token (DCT) for each unseen class under the guidance of a pre-trained category discrimination model (CDM). Harnessing DCTs, we can generate diverse and high-quality images, which serve as informative unseen samples for ZSL tasks. In this paper, the extensive experiments and visualizations on four datasets show that our DIG-ZSL: (1) generates diverse and high-quality images, (2) outperforms previous state-of-the-art nonhuman-annotated semantic prototype-based methods by a large margin, and (3) achieves comparable or better performance than baselines that leverage human-annotated semantic prototypes. The codes will be made available upon acceptance of the paper.

Paperid: 1753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02628.pdf

Abstract:
Developing a general-purpose extraction system that can extract events with massive types is a long-standing target in Event Extraction (EE). In doing so, the challenge comes from two aspects: 1) The absence of an efficient and effective annotation method. 2) The absence of a powerful extraction method can handle massive types. For the first challenge, we propose a collaborative annotation method based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Through collaboration among multiple LLMs, it first refines annotations of trigger words from distant supervision and then carries out argument annotation. Next, a voting phase consolidates the annotation preferences across different LLMs. Finally, we create the EEMT dataset, the largest EE dataset to date, featuring over 200,000 samples, 3,465 event types, and 6,297 role types. For the second challenge, we propose an LLM-based Partitioning EE method called LLM-PEE. To overcome the limited context length of LLMs, LLM-PEE first recalls candidate event types and then splits them into multiple partitions for LLMs to extract events. The results in the supervised setting show that LLM-PEE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 5.4 in event detection and 6.1 in argument extraction. In the zero-shot setting, LLM-PEE achieves up to 12.9 improvement compared to mainstream LLMs, demonstrating its strong generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 1754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26506.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce SCUBA, a benchmark designed to evaluate computer-use agents on customer relationship management (CRM) workflows within the Salesforce platform. SCUBA contains 300 task instances derived from real user interviews, spanning three primary personas, platform administrators, sales representatives, and service agents. The tasks test a range of enterprise-critical abilities, including Enterprise Software UI navigation, data manipulation, workflow automation, information retrieval, and troubleshooting. To ensure realism, SCUBA operates in Salesforce sandbox environments with support for parallel execution and fine-grained evaluation metrics to capture milestone progress. We benchmark a diverse set of agents under both zero-shot and demonstration-augmented settings. We observed huge performance gaps in different agent design paradigms and gaps between the open-source model and the closed-source model. In the zero-shot setting, open-source model powered computer-use agents that have strong performance on related benchmarks like OSWorld only have less than 5\% success rate on SCUBA, while methods built on closed-source models can still have up to 39% task success rate. In the demonstration-augmented settings, task success rates can be improved to 50\% while simultaneously reducing time and costs by 13% and 16%, respectively. These findings highlight both the challenges of enterprise tasks automation and the promise of agentic solutions. By offering a realistic benchmark with interpretable evaluation, SCUBA aims to accelerate progress in building reliable computer-use agents for complex business software ecosystems.

Paperid: 1755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10469.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance as zero-shot forecasters. However, achieving effectively unified training on time series remains an open challenge. Existing approaches introduce some level of model specialization to account for the highly heterogeneous nature of time series data. For instance, Moirai pursues unified training by employing multiple input/output projection layers, each tailored to handle time series at a specific frequency. Similarly, TimesFM maintains a frequency embedding dictionary for this purpose. We identify two major drawbacks to this human-imposed frequency-level model specialization: (1) Frequency is not a reliable indicator of the underlying patterns in time series. For example, time series with different frequencies can display similar patterns, while those with the same frequency may exhibit varied patterns. (2) Non-stationarity is an inherent property of real-world time series, leading to varied distributions even within a short context window of a single time series. Frequency-level specialization is too coarse-grained to capture this level of diversity. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Moirai-MoE, using a single input/output projection layer while delegating the modeling of diverse time series patterns to the sparse mixture of experts (MoE) within Transformers. With these designs, Moirai-MoE reduces reliance on human-defined heuristics and enables automatic token-level specialization. Extensive experiments on 39 datasets demonstrate the superiority of Moirai-MoE over existing foundation models in both in-distribution and zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, this study conducts comprehensive model analyses to explore the inner workings of time series MoE foundation models and provides valuable insights for future research.

Paperid: 1756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20146.pdf

Abstract:
Recent benchmarks for medical Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) emphasize leaderboard accuracy, overlooking reliability and safety. We study sycophancy -- models' tendency to uncritically echo user-provided information -- in high-stakes clinical settings. We introduce EchoBench, a benchmark to systematically evaluate sycophancy in medical LVLMs. It contains 2,122 images across 18 departments and 20 modalities with 90 prompts that simulate biased inputs from patients, medical students, and physicians. We evaluate medical-specific, open-source, and proprietary LVLMs. All exhibit substantial sycophancy; the best proprietary model (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) still shows 45.98% sycophancy, and GPT-4.1 reaches 59.15%. Many medical-specific models exceed 95% sycophancy despite only moderate accuracy. Fine-grained analyses by bias type, department, perceptual granularity, and modality identify factors that increase susceptibility. We further show that higher data quality/diversity and stronger domain knowledge reduce sycophancy without harming unbiased accuracy. EchoBench also serves as a testbed for mitigation: simple prompt-level interventions (negative prompting, one-shot, few-shot) produce consistent reductions and motivate training- and decoding-time strategies. Our findings highlight the need for robust evaluation beyond accuracy and provide actionable guidance toward safer, more trustworthy medical LVLMs.

Paperid: 1757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19952.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images given a compositional query, consisting of a reference image and a modifying text-without relying on annotated training data. Existing approaches often generate a synthetic target text using large language models (LLMs) to serve as an intermediate anchor between the compositional query and the target image. Models are then trained to align the compositional query with the generated text, and separately align images with their corresponding texts using contrastive learning. However, this reliance on intermediate text introduces error propagation, as inaccuracies in query-to-text and text-to-image mappings accumulate, ultimately degrading retrieval performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework by employing a Multimodal Reasoning Agent (MRA) for ZS-CIR. MRA eliminates the dependence on textual intermediaries by directly constructing triplets, , using only unlabeled image data. By training on these synthetic triplets, our model learns to capture the relationships between compositional queries and candidate images directly. Extensive experiments on three standard CIR benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the FashionIQ dataset, our method improves Average R@10 by at least 7.5\% over existing baselines; on CIRR, it boosts R@1 by 9.6\%; and on CIRCO, it increases mAP@5 by 9.5\%.

Paperid: 1758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19707.pdf

Abstract:
Existing Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) methods typically train adapters that convert reference images into pseudo-text tokens, which are concatenated with the modifying text and processed by frozen text encoders in pretrained VLMs or LLMs. While this design leverages the strengths of large pretrained models, it only supervises the adapter to produce encoder-compatible tokens that loosely preserve visual semantics. Crucially, it does not directly optimize the composed query representation to capture the full intent of the composition or to align with the target semantics, thereby limiting retrieval performance, particularly in cases involving fine-grained or complex visual transformations. To address this problem, we propose MLLM-Guided VLM Fine-Tuning with Joint Inference (MVFT-JI), a novel approach that leverages a pretrained multimodal large language model (MLLM) to construct two complementary training tasks using only unlabeled images: target text retrieval taskand text-to-image retrieval task. By jointly optimizing these tasks, our method enables the VLM to inherently acquire robust compositional retrieval capabilities, supported by the provided theoretical justifications and empirical validation. Furthermore, during inference, we further prompt the MLLM to generate target texts from composed queries and compute retrieval scores by integrating similarities between (i) the composed query and candidate images, and (ii) the MLLM-generated target text and candidate images. This strategy effectively combines the VLM's semantic alignment strengths with the MLLM's reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 1759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02220.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT demonstrate strong few-shot adaptability without requiring fine-tuning, positioning them ideal for data-limited and real-time applications. However, this adaptability has not yet been replicated in current Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), which require explicit fine-tuning with sufficient tuning data. Besides, the pretraining-finetuning paradigm has led to the surge of numerous task-specific modular components, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). For the first time, we explore the potential of reusing diverse pre-tuned LoRAs without accessing their original training data, to achieve tuning-free few-shot adaptation in VFMs. Our framework, LoRA Recycle, distills a meta-LoRA from diverse pre-tuned LoRAs with a meta-learning objective, using surrogate data generated inversely from pre-tuned LoRAs themselves. The VFM, once equipped with the meta-LoRA, is empowered to solve new few-shot tasks in a single forward pass, akin to the in-context learning of LLMs. Additionally, we incorporate a double-efficient mechanism tailored to our framework, significantly accelerating the meta-training process while maintaining or even improving performance. Extensive experiments across various few-shot classification benchmarks across both in- and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

Paperid: 1760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01168.pdf

Abstract:
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods harness previous experiences to derive an optimal policy, forming the foundation for pre-trained large-scale models (PLMs). When encountering tasks not seen before, PLMs often utilize several expert trajectories as prompts to expedite their adaptation to new requirements. Though a range of prompt-tuning methods have been proposed to enhance the quality of prompts, these methods often face optimization restrictions due to prompt initialization, which can significantly constrain the exploration domain and potentially lead to suboptimal solutions. To eliminate the reliance on the initial prompt, we shift our perspective towards the generative model, framing the prompt-tuning process as a form of conditional generative modeling, where prompts are generated from random noise. Our innovation, the Prompt Diffuser, leverages a conditional diffusion model to produce prompts of exceptional quality. Central to our framework is the approach to trajectory reconstruction and the meticulous integration of downstream task guidance during the training phase. Further experimental results underscore the potency of the Prompt Diffuser as a robust and effective tool for the prompt-tuning process, demonstrating strong performance in the meta-RL tasks.

Paperid: 1761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05923.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, the effects of hallucinations (e.g., output noise) make it particularly challenging for LLMs to generate high-quality code in one pass. In this work, we propose a simple and effective \textbf{u}ncertainty-aware \textbf{s}elective \textbf{c}ontrastive \textbf{d}ecoding ($\mathbb{USCD}$) mechanism to improve the quality of one-pass code generation in LLMs and reduce the impact of output noise. To be specific, we first elaborately designed a negative prompt (namely lame prompt) to output noise by removing input-output examples from the standard few-shot prompt. Our preliminary study shows that the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JS divergence) between token distribution uncertainty and the output noise is relatively low (approximately $0.25$), indicating their high relevance. Then, we selectively eliminate output noise induced by lame prompts based on the uncertainty of the prediction distribution from the standard prompt. Notably, our proposed plug-and-play mechanism is an inference-only method, enjoying appealing flexibility. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks, e.g., HumanEval, MBPP, and MultiPL-E, upon several LLMs (i.e., Inocder-6b, CodeLlama-7b, WizardCoder-15b, StarCoder, and Llama2-7b), demonstrate that our proposed USCD significantly improves one-pass code generation, with an average \textit{pass@$1$} scores increase of 16.59\%. We will release code and data on GitHub.

Paperid: 1762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01334.pdf

Abstract:
Navigating the complexities of physics reasoning has long been a difficult task for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring a synthesis of profound conceptual understanding and adept problem-solving techniques. In this study, we investigate the application of advanced instruction-tuned reasoning models, such as Deepseek-R1, to address a diverse spectrum of physics problems curated from the challenging SciBench benchmark. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation reveals the remarkable capabilities of reasoning models. Not only do they achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in answering intricate physics questions, but they also generate distinctive reasoning patterns that emphasize on symbolic derivation. Furthermore, our findings indicate that even for these highly sophisticated reasoning models, the strategic incorporation of few-shot prompting can still yield measurable improvements in overall accuracy, highlighting the potential for continued performance gains.

Paperid: 1763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13890.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in test-time scaling have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to display sophisticated reasoning abilities via extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation. Despite their potential, these Reasoning LLMs (RLMs) often demonstrate counterintuitive and unstable behaviors, such as performance degradation under few-shot prompting, that challenge our current understanding of RLMs. In this work, we introduce a unified graph-based analytical framework for better modeling the reasoning processes of RLMs. Our method first clusters long, verbose CoT outputs into semantically coherent reasoning steps, then constructs directed reasoning graphs to capture contextual and logical dependencies among these steps. Through comprehensive analysis across models and prompting regimes, we reveal that structural properties, such as exploration density, branching, and convergence ratios, strongly correlate with reasoning accuracy. Our findings demonstrate how prompting strategies substantially reshape the internal reasoning structure of RLMs, directly affecting task outcomes. The proposed framework not only enables quantitative evaluation of reasoning quality beyond conventional metrics but also provides practical insights for prompt engineering and the cognitive analysis of LLMs. Code and resources will be released to facilitate future research in this direction.

Paperid: 1764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23768.pdf

Abstract:
Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable visual and linguistic capabilities, achieving impressive performance in various tasks such as image recognition and object localization. However, their effectiveness in fine-grained tasks remains an open question. In everyday scenarios, individuals encountering design materials, such as magazines, typography tutorials, research papers, or branding content, may wish to identify aesthetically pleasing fonts used in the text. Given their multimodal capabilities and free accessibility, many VLMs are often considered potential tools for font recognition. This raises a fundamental question: Do VLMs truly possess the capability to recognize fonts? To investigate this, we introduce the Font Recognition Benchmark (FRB), a compact and well-structured dataset comprising 15 commonly used fonts. FRB includes two versions: (i) an easy version, where 10 sentences are rendered in different fonts, and (ii) a hard version, where each text sample consists of the names of the 15 fonts themselves, introducing a stroop effect that challenges model perception. Through extensive evaluation of various VLMs on font recognition tasks, we arrive at the following key findings: (i) Current VLMs exhibit limited font recognition capabilities, with many state-of-the-art models failing to achieve satisfactory performance and being easily affected by the stroop effect introduced by textual information. (ii) Few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting provide minimal benefits in improving font recognition accuracy across different VLMs. (iii) Attention analysis sheds light on the inherent limitations of VLMs in capturing semantic features.

Paperid: 1765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02977.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models like CLIP excel at recognizing the single, prominent object in a scene. However, they struggle in complex scenes containing multiple objects. We identify a fundamental reason for this limitation: VLM feature space exhibits excessive mutual feature information (MFI), where the features of one class contain substantial information about other, unrelated classes. This high MFI becomes evident during class-specific queries, as unrelated objects are activated alongside the queried class. To address this limitation, we propose DCLIP, an efficient framework that learns an optimal level of mutual information while adding only minimal learnable parameters to a frozen VLM. DCLIP uses two complementary losses: a novel MFI Loss that regulates class feature similarity to prevent excessive overlap while preserving necessary shared information, and the Asymmetric Loss (ASL) that aligns image features with the disentangled text features. Through this disentanglement, DCLIP reduces excessive inter-class similarity by 30%. On multi-label recognition, DCLIP performs favorably over SOTA approaches on VOC2007 and COCO-14 while using 75% fewer training parameters. For zero-shot semantic segmentation, it shows improved performance across six benchmark datasets. These results highlight the importance of feature disentanglement for multi-object perception in VLMs.

Paperid: 1766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20846.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as parametric knowledge bases, but often underperform on question answering (QA) tasks due to hallucinations and uncertainty. While prior work attributes these failures to knowledge gaps in the model's parameters, we uncover a complementary phenomenon: LLMs frequently retain correct knowledge even when generating incorrect or "unsure" answers. By analyzing the token-level output distributions, we find that correct answers often appear among high-probability candidates, despite not being selected. Motivated by this, we propose Hits@k, a novel metric to evaluate latent knowledge retention independent of answer surface form. Our experiments reveal that LLMs possess significantly more factual knowledge than is reflected by standard QA accuracy. Building on these insights, we further examine the prevailing few-shot QA paradigm. We find that prompting strategies which allow "unsure" outputs can inadvertently suppress correct answers by discouraging low-confidence generation. We design a set of quantitative experiments to measure this suppression effect, offering practical guidance for future prompt and decoding design in knowledge-intensive tasks.

Paperid: 1767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17993.pdf

Abstract:
Question answering represents a core capability of large language models (LLMs). However, when individuals encounter unfamiliar knowledge in texts, they often formulate questions that the text itself cannot answer due to insufficient understanding of the underlying information. Recent studies reveal that while LLMs can detect unanswerable questions, they struggle to assist users in reformulating these questions. Even advanced models like GPT-3.5 demonstrate limited effectiveness in this regard. To address this limitation, we propose DRS: Deep Question Reformulation with Structured Output, a novel zero-shot method aimed at enhancing LLMs ability to assist users in reformulating questions to extract relevant information from new documents. DRS combines the strengths of LLMs with a DFS-based algorithm to iteratively explore potential entity combinations and constrain outputs using predefined entities. This structured approach significantly enhances the reformulation capabilities of LLMs. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that DRS improves the reformulation accuracy of GPT-3.5 from 23.03% to 70.42%, while also enhancing the performance of open-source models, such as Gemma2-9B, from 26.35% to 56.75%.

Paperid: 1768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20021.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary for the source text in a different target language. Currently, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) excel at various English tasks. However, unlike languages such as English, Chinese or Spanish, for those relatively low-resource languages with limited usage or data, recent studies have shown that LLMs' performance on CLS tasks remains unsatisfactory even with few-shot settings. This raises the question: Are LLMs capable of handling cross-lingual summarization tasks for low-resource languages? To resolve this question, we fully explore the potential of large language models on cross-lingual summarization task for low-resource languages through our four-step zero-shot method: Summarization, Improvement, Translation and Refinement (SITR) with correspondingly designed prompts. We test our proposed method with multiple LLMs on two well-known cross-lingual summarization datasets with various low-resource target languages. The results show that: i) GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 significantly and consistently outperform other baselines when using our zero-shot SITR methods. ii) By employing our proposed method, we unlock the potential of LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle cross-lingual summarization tasks for relatively low-resource languages.

Paperid: 1769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20016.pdf

Abstract:
Vertical text input is commonly encountered in various real-world applications, such as mathematical computations and word-based Sudoku puzzles. While current large language models (LLMs) have excelled in natural language tasks, they remain vulnerable to variations in text formatting. Recent research demonstrates that modifying input formats, such as vertically aligning words for encoder-based models, can substantially lower accuracy in text classification tasks. While easily understood by humans, these inputs can significantly mislead models, posing a potential risk of bypassing detection in real-world scenarios involving harmful or sensitive information. With the expanding application of LLMs, a crucial question arises: \textit{Do decoder-based LLMs exhibit similar vulnerabilities to vertically formatted text input?} In this paper, we investigate the impact of vertical text input on the performance of various LLMs across multiple text classification datasets and analyze the underlying causes. Our findings are as follows: (i) Vertical text input significantly degrades the accuracy of LLMs in text classification tasks. (ii) \textit{Chain of Thought (CoT)} reasoning does not help LLMs recognize vertical input or mitigate its vulnerability, but \textit{few-shot learning} with careful analysis does. (iii) We explore the underlying cause of the vulnerability by analyzing the inherent issues in tokenization and attention matrices.

Paperid: 1770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25263.pdf

Abstract:
We propose LangHOPS, the first Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based framework for open-vocabulary object-part instance segmentation. Given an image, LangHOPS can jointly detect and segment hierarchical object and part instances from open-vocabulary candidate categories. Unlike prior approaches that rely on heuristic or learnable visual grouping, our approach grounds object-part hierarchies in language space. It integrates the MLLM into the object-part parsing pipeline to leverage its rich knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and link multi-granularity concepts within the hierarchies. We evaluate LangHOPS across multiple challenging scenarios, including in-domain and cross-dataset object-part instance segmentation, and zero-shot semantic segmentation. LangHOPS achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing previous methods by 5.5% Average Precision (AP) (in-domain) and 4.8% (cross-dataset) on the PartImageNet dataset and by 2.5% mIOU on unseen object parts in ADE20K (zero-shot). Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the language-grounded hierarchy and MLLM driven part query refinement strategy. The code will be released here.

Paperid: 1771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19958.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in generalist robot manipulation leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large-scale robot demonstrations to tackle diverse tasks in a zero-shot manner. A key challenge remains: scaling high-quality, action-labeled robot demonstration data, which existing methods rely on for robustness and generalization. To address this, we propose a method that benefits from videos without action labels - featuring humans and/or robots in action - enhancing open-vocabulary performance and enabling data-efficient learning of new tasks. Our method extracts dense, dynamic 3D point clouds at the hand or gripper location and uses a proposed 3D dynamics predictor for self-supervision. This predictor is then tuned to an action predictor using a smaller labeled dataset for action alignment. We show that our method not only learns from unlabeled human and robot demonstrations - improving downstream generalist robot policies - but also enables robots to learn new tasks without action labels (i.e., out-of-action generalization) in both real-world and simulated settings.

Paperid: 1772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22032.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation (ZSS) aims to segment both seen and unseen classes using supervision from only seen classes. Beyond adaptation-based methods, distillation-based approaches transfer vision-language alignment of vision-language model, e.g., CLIP, to segmentation models. However, such knowledge transfer remains challenging due to: (1) the difficulty of aligning vision-based features with the textual space, which requires combining spatial precision with vision-language alignment; and (2) the semantic gap between CLIP's global representations and the local, fine-grained features of segmentation models. To address challenge (1), we propose Chimera-Seg, which integrates a segmentation backbone as the body and a CLIP-based semantic head as the head, like the Chimera in Greek mythology, combining spatial precision with vision-language alignment. Specifically, Chimera-Seg comprises a trainable segmentation model and a CLIP Semantic Head (CSH), which maps dense features into the CLIP-aligned space. The CSH incorporates a frozen subnetwork and fixed projection layers from the CLIP visual encoder, along with lightweight trainable components. The partial module from CLIP visual encoder, paired with the segmentation model, retains segmentation capability while easing the mapping to CLIP's semantic space. To address challenge (2), we propose Selective Global Distillation (SGD), which distills knowledge from dense features exhibiting high similarity to the CLIP CLS token, while gradually reducing the number of features used for alignment as training progresses. Besides, we also use a Semantic Alignment Module (SAM) to further align dense visual features with semantic embeddings extracted from the frozen CLIP text encoder. Experiments on two benchmarks show improvements of 0.9% and 1.2% in hIoU.

Paperid: 1773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05872.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) aims to detect novel objects with only a handful of labeled samples from previously unseen domains. While data augmentation and generative methods have shown promise in few-shot learning, their effectiveness for CD-FSOD remains unclear due to the need for both visual realism and domain alignment. Existing strategies, such as copy-paste augmentation and text-to-image generation, often fail to preserve the correct object category or produce backgrounds coherent with the target domain, making them non-trivial to apply directly to CD-FSOD. To address these challenges, we propose Domain-RAG, a training-free, retrieval-guided compositional image generation framework tailored for CD-FSOD. Domain-RAG consists of three stages: domain-aware background retrieval, domain-guided background generation, and foreground-background composition. Specifically, the input image is first decomposed into foreground and background regions. We then retrieve semantically and stylistically similar images to guide a generative model in synthesizing a new background, conditioned on both the original and retrieved contexts. Finally, the preserved foreground is composed with the newly generated domain-aligned background to form the generated image. Without requiring any additional supervision or training, Domain-RAG produces high-quality, domain-consistent samples across diverse tasks, including CD-FSOD, remote sensing FSOD, and camouflaged FSOD. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over strong baselines and establish new state-of-the-art results. Codes will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 1774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11907.pdf

Abstract:
The 180x360 omnidirectional field of view captured by 360-degree cameras enables their use in a wide range of applications such as embodied AI and virtual reality. Although recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in visual-spatial reasoning, most studies focus on standard pinhole-view images, leaving omnidirectional perception largely unexplored. In this paper, we ask: Are MLLMs ready for omnidirectional spatial reasoning? To investigate this, we introduce OSR-Bench, the first benchmark specifically designed for this setting. OSR-Bench includes over 153,000 diverse question-answer pairs grounded in high-fidelity panoramic indoor scene maps. It covers key reasoning types including object counting, relative distance, and direction. We also propose a negative sampling strategy that inserts non-existent objects into prompts to evaluate hallucination and grounding robustness. For fine-grained analysis, we design a two-stage evaluation framework assessing both cognitive map generation and QA accuracy using rotation-invariant matching and a combination of rule-based and LLM-based metrics. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and leading open-source models under zero-shot settings. Results show that current models struggle with spatial reasoning in panoramic contexts, highlighting the need for more perceptually grounded MLLMs. OSR-Bench and code will be released at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/UUUserna/OSR-Bench

Paperid: 1775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05023.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation (ZSS) aims to segment categories that are not annotated during training. While fine-tuning vision-language models has achieved promising results, these models often overfit to seen categories due to the lack of supervision for unseen classes. As an alternative to fully supervised approaches, query-based segmentation has shown great latent in ZSS, as it enables object localization without relying on explicit labels. However, conventional Hungarian matching, a core component in query-based frameworks, needs full supervision and often misclassifies unseen categories as background in the setting of ZSS. To address this issue, we propose Split Matching (SM), a novel assignment strategy that decouples Hungarian matching into two components: one for seen classes in annotated regions and another for latent classes in unannotated regions (referred to as unseen candidates). Specifically, we partition the queries into seen and candidate groups, enabling each to be optimized independently according to its available supervision. To discover unseen candidates, we cluster CLIP dense features to generate pseudo masks and extract region-level embeddings using CLS tokens. Matching is then conducted separately for the two groups based on both class-level similarity and mask-level consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-scale Feature Enhancement (MFE) module that refines decoder features through residual multi-scale aggregation, improving the model's ability to capture spatial details across resolutions. SM is the first to introduce decoupled Hungarian matching under the inductive ZSS setting, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks.

Paperid: 1776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19083.pdf

Abstract:
Bridging the gap between ego-centric and exo-centric views has been a long-standing question in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on the emerging Ego-Exo object correspondence task, which aims to understand object relations across ego-exo perspectives through segmentation. While numerous segmentation models have been proposed, most operate on a single image (view), making them impractical for cross-view scenarios. PSALM, a recently proposed segmentation method, stands out as a notable exception with its demonstrated zero-shot ability on this task. However, due to the drastic viewpoint change between ego and exo, PSALM fails to accurately locate and segment objects, especially in complex backgrounds or when object appearances change significantly. To address these issues, we propose ObjectRelator, a novel approach featuring two key modules: Multimodal Condition Fusion (MCFuse) and SSL-based Cross-View Object Alignment (XObjAlign). MCFuse introduces language as an additional cue, integrating both visual masks and textual descriptions to improve object localization and prevent incorrect associations. XObjAlign enforces cross-view consistency through self-supervised alignment, enhancing robustness to object appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate ObjectRelator's effectiveness on the large-scale Ego-Exo4D benchmark and HANDAL-X (an adapted dataset for cross-view segmentation) with state-of-the-art performance. Code is made available at: http://yuqianfu.com/ObjectRelator.

Paperid: 1777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12983.pdf

Abstract:
Many-to-many summarization (M2MS) aims to process documents in any language and generate the corresponding summaries also in any language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong multi-lingual abilities, giving them the potential to perform M2MS in real applications. This work presents a systematic empirical study on LLMs' M2MS ability. Specifically, we first reorganize M2MS data based on eight previous domain-specific datasets. The reorganized data contains 47.8K samples spanning five domains and six languages, which could be used to train and evaluate LLMs. Then, we benchmark 18 LLMs in a zero-shot manner and an instruction-tuning manner. Fine-tuned traditional models (e.g., mBART) are also conducted for comparisons. Our experiments reveal that, zero-shot LLMs achieve competitive results with fine-tuned traditional models. After instruct-tuning, open-source LLMs can significantly improve their M2MS ability, and outperform zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4) in terms of automatic evaluations. In addition, we demonstrate that this task-specific improvement does not sacrifice the LLMs' general task-solving abilities. However, as revealed by our human evaluation, LLMs still face the factuality issue, and the instruction tuning might intensify the issue. Thus, how to control factual errors becomes the key when building LLM summarizers in real applications, and is worth noting in future research.

Paperid: 1778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04812.pdf

Abstract:
Universal multimodal embedding models play a critical role in tasks such as interleaved image-text retrieval, multimodal RAG, and multimodal clustering. However, our empirical results indicate that existing LMM-based embedding models trained with the standard InfoNCE loss exhibit a high degree of overlap in similarity distribution between positive and negative pairs, making it challenging to distinguish hard negative pairs effectively. To deal with this issue, we propose a simple yet effective framework that dynamically improves the embedding model's representation learning for negative pairs based on their discriminative difficulty. Within this framework, we train a series of models, named LLaVE, and evaluate them on the MMEB benchmark, which covers 4 meta-tasks and 36 datasets. Experimental results show that LLaVE establishes stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while demonstrating strong scalability and efficiency. Specifically, LLaVE-2B surpasses the previous SOTA 7B models, while LLaVE-7B achieves a further performance improvement of 6.2 points. Although LLaVE is trained on image-text data, it can generalize to text-video retrieval tasks in a zero-shot manner and achieve strong performance, demonstrating its remarkable potential for transfer to other embedding tasks.

Paperid: 1779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10419.pdf

Abstract:
Generative retrieval (GR) reformulates information retrieval (IR) by framing it as the generation of document identifiers (docids), thereby enabling an end-to-end optimization and seamless integration with generative language models (LMs). Despite notable progress under supervised training, GR still struggles to generalize to zero-shot IR scenarios, which are prevalent in real-world applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose \textsc{ZeroGR}, a zero-shot generative retrieval framework that leverages natural language instructions to extend GR across a wide range of IR tasks. Specifically, \textsc{ZeroGR} is composed of three key components: (i) an LM-based docid generator that unifies heterogeneous documents (e.g., text, tables, code) into semantically meaningful docids; (ii) an instruction-tuned query generator that generates diverse types of queries from natural language task descriptions to enhance corpus indexing; and (iii) a reverse annealing decoding strategy to balance precision and recall during docid generation. We investigate the impact of instruction fine-tuning scale and find that performance consistently improves as the number of IR tasks encountered during training increases. Empirical results on the BEIR and MAIR benchmarks demonstrate that \textsc{ZeroGR} outperforms strong dense retrieval and generative baselines in zero-shot settings, establishing a new state-of-the-art for instruction-driven GR.

Paperid: 1780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10208.pdf

Abstract:
In modern search systems, search engines often suggest relevant queries to users through various panels or components, helping refine their information needs. Traditionally, these recommendations heavily rely on historical search logs to build models, which suffer from cold-start or long-tail issues. Furthermore, tasks such as query suggestion, completion or clarification are studied separately by specific design, which lacks generalizability and hinders adaptation to novel applications. Despite recent attempts to explore the use of LLMs for query recommendation, these methods mainly rely on the inherent knowledge of LLMs or external sources like few-shot examples, retrieved documents, or knowledge bases, neglecting the importance of the calibration and alignment with user feedback, thus limiting their practical utility. To address these challenges, we first propose a general Generative Query Recommendation (GQR) framework that aligns LLM-based query generation with user preference. Specifically, we unify diverse query recommendation tasks by a universal prompt framework, leveraging the instruct-following capability of LLMs for effective generation. Secondly, we align LLMs with user feedback via presenting a CTR-alignment framework, which involves training a query-wise CTR predictor as a process reward model and employing list-wise preference alignment to maximize the click probability of the generated query list. Furthermore, recognizing the inconsistency between LLM knowledge and proactive search intents arising from the separation of user-initiated queries from models, we align LLMs with user initiative via retrieving co-occurrence queries as side information when historical logs are available.

Paperid: 1781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24617.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) apply uniform computation to all tokens, despite language exhibiting highly non-uniform information density. This token-uniform regime wastes capacity on locally predictable spans while under-allocating computation to semantically critical transitions. We propose $\textbf{Dynamic Large Concept Models (DLCM)}$, a hierarchical language modeling framework that learns semantic boundaries from latent representations and shifts computation from tokens to a compressed concept space where reasoning is more efficient. DLCM discovers variable-length concepts end-to-end without relying on predefined linguistic units. Hierarchical compression fundamentally changes scaling behavior. We introduce the first $\textbf{compression-aware scaling law}$, which disentangles token-level capacity, concept-level reasoning capacity, and compression ratio, enabling principled compute allocation under fixed FLOPs. To stably train this heterogeneous architecture, we further develop a $\textbf{decoupled $μ$P parametrization}$ that supports zero-shot hyperparameter transfer across widths and compression regimes. At a practical setting ($R=4$, corresponding to an average of four tokens per concept), DLCM reallocates roughly one-third of inference compute into a higher-capacity reasoning backbone, achieving a $\textbf{+2.69$\%$ average improvement}$ across 12 zero-shot benchmarks under matched inference FLOPs.

Paperid: 1782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14616.pdf

Abstract:
Current preference learning methods achieve high accuracy on standard benchmarks but exhibit significant performance degradation when objective quality signals are removed. We introduce WritingPreferenceBench, a dataset of 1,800 human-annotated preference pairs (1,200 English, 600 Chinese) across 8 creative writing genres, where responses are matched for objective correctness, factual accuracy, and length. On this benchmark, sequence-based reward models--the standard architecture for RLHF--achieve only 52.7% mean accuracy, while zero-shot language model judges perform at 53.9%. In contrast, generative reward models that produce explicit reasoning chains achieve 81.8% accuracy. We observe high within-model variance across genres: individual models range from 18.2% to 81.8% accuracy across different writing categories, with standard deviations averaging 10.1%. This variance persists regardless of model scale, with 27B parameter models showing no consistent improvement over 8B variants. Our results suggest that current RLHF methods primarily learn to detect objective errors rather than capture subjective quality preferences (e.g., creativity, stylistic flair, and emotional resonance), and that successful preference modeling may require intermediate reasoning representations rather than direct classification.

Paperid: 1783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15175.pdf

Abstract:
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a popular and important task for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Based on common strategies people use when answering MCQs, the process of elimination (PoE) has been proposed as an effective problem-solving method. Existing PoE methods typically either have LLMs directly identify incorrect options or score options and replace lower-scoring ones with [MASK]. However, both methods suffer from inapplicability or suboptimal performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel option-ID based PoE ($\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}$). $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}$ critically incorporates a debiasing technique to counteract LLMs token bias, enhancing robustness over naive ID-based elimination. It features two strategies: $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}^{\text{log}}$, which eliminates options whose IDs have log probabilities below the average threshold, and $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}^{\text{seq}}$, which iteratively removes the option with the lowest ID probability. We conduct extensive experiments with 6 different LLMs on 4 diverse datasets. The results demonstrate that $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}$, especially $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}^{\text{log}}$, significantly improves zero-shot and few-shot MCQs performance, particularly in datasets with more options. Our analyses demonstrate that $\text{PoE}_{\text{ID}}^{\text{log}}$ enhances the LLMs' confidence in selecting the correct option, and the option elimination strategy outperforms methods relying on [MASK] replacement. We further investigate the limitations of LLMs in directly identifying incorrect options, which stem from their inherent deficiencies.

Paperid: 1784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06526.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce Knowledge-Orthogonal Reasoning (KOR), a concept aimed at minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge, enabling more accurate evaluation of models' reasoning abilities in out-of-distribution settings. Based on this concept, we propose the Knowledge-Orthogonal Reasoning Benchmark (KOR-Bench), encompassing five task categories: Operation, Logic, Cipher, Puzzle, and Counterfactual. KOR-Bench emphasizes models' effectiveness in applying new rule descriptions to solve novel rule-driven questions. O1-Preview and O1-Mini achieve accuracies of 72.88% and 70.16%, surpassing Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o (58.96% and 58.00%), highlighting the effectiveness of KOR-Bench. We perform detailed analyses, identifying bottlenecks in the Cipher task with Stepwise Prompting, where two rounds of Self-Correction yield optimal results. We evaluate performance across three integrated tasks, explore the impact of Tricks on the Puzzle task, and visualize rule-focused attention. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study on dataset size, benchmark correlations, and zero-shot and three-shot "only questions" experiments. KOR-Bench aims to enhance reasoning evaluation and support further research in this area.

Paperid: 1785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00971.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of humanoid robotics has intensified the need for robust and adaptable controllers to enable stable and efficient locomotion across diverse platforms. However, developing such controllers remains a significant challenge because existing solutions are tailored to specific robot designs, requiring extensive tuning of reward functions, physical parameters, and training hyperparameters for each embodiment. To address this challenge, we introduce H-Zero, a cross-humanoid locomotion pretraining pipeline that learns a generalizable humanoid base policy. We show that pretraining on a limited set of embodiments enables zero-shot and few-shot transfer to novel humanoid robots with minimal fine-tuning. Evaluations show that the pretrained policy maintains up to 81% of the full episode duration on unseen robots in simulation while enabling few-shot transfer to unseen humanoids and upright quadrupeds within 30 minutes of fine-tuning.

Paperid: 1786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06033.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) delivers strong few-shot performance by choosing few-shot demonstrations from the entire training data. However, existing ICL methods, which rely on similarity or diversity scores to choose demonstrations, incur high computational costs due to repeatedly retrieval from large-scale datasets for each query. To this end, we propose FEEDER (FEw yet Essential Demonstration prE-selectoR), a novel pre-selection framework that identifies a representative subset of demonstrations containing the most representative examples in the training data, tailored to specific LLMs. To construct this subset, we introduce the "sufficiency" and "necessity" metrics in the pre-selection stage and design a tree-based algorithm to identify representative examples efficiently. Once pre-selected, this representative subset can effectively replace the full training data, improving efficiency while maintaining comparable performance in ICL. Additionally, our pre-selected subset also benefits fine-tuning LLMs, where we introduce a bi-level optimization method that enhances training efficiency without sacrificing performance. Experiments with LLMs ranging from 300M to 8B parameters show that FEEDER can reduce training data size by over 20% while maintaining performance and seamlessly integrating with various downstream demonstration selection strategies in ICL.

Paperid: 1787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00540.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is critical for enhancing operational safety, ensuring product quality, and optimizing manufacturing efficiency across global industries. However, the IAD algorithms are severely constrained by the limitations of existing public benchmarks. Current datasets exhibit restricted category diversity and insufficient scale, frequently resulting in metric saturation and limited model transferability to real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce Real-IAD Variety, the largest and most diverse IAD benchmark, comprising 198,960 high-resolution images across 160 distinct object categories. Its diversity is ensured through comprehensive coverage of 28 industries, 24 material types, and 22 color variations. Our comprehensive experimental analysis validates the benchmark's substantial challenge: state-of-the-art multi-class unsupervised anomaly detection methods experience significant performance degradation when scaled from 30 to 160 categories. Crucially, we demonstrate that vision-language models exhibit remarkable robustness to category scale-up, with minimal performance variation across different category counts, significantly enhancing generalization capabilities in diverse industrial contexts. The unprecedented scale and complexity of Real-IAD Variety position it as an essential resource for training and evaluating next-generation foundation models for anomaly detection. By providing this comprehensive benchmark with rigorous evaluation protocols across multi-class unsupervised, multi-view, and zero-/few-shot settings, we aim to accelerate research beyond domain-specific constraints, enabling the development of scalable, general-purpose anomaly detection systems. Real-IAD Variety will be made publicly available to facilitate innovation in this critical field.

Paperid: 1788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01908.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-based image editing (IIE) has advanced rapidly with the success of diffusion models. However, existing efforts primarily focus on simple and explicit instructions to execute editing operations such as adding, deleting, moving, or swapping objects. They struggle to handle more complex implicit hypothetical instructions that require deeper reasoning to infer plausible visual changes and user intent. Additionally, current datasets provide limited support for training and evaluating reasoning-aware editing capabilities. Architecturally, these methods also lack mechanisms for fine-grained detail extraction that support such reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Reason50K, a large-scale dataset specifically curated for training and evaluating hypothetical instruction reasoning image editing, along with ReasonBrain, a novel framework designed to reason over and execute implicit hypothetical instructions across diverse scenarios. Reason50K includes over 50K samples spanning four key reasoning scenarios: Physical, Temporal, Causal, and Story reasoning. ReasonBrain leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for editing guidance generation and a diffusion model for image synthesis, incorporating a Fine-grained Reasoning Cue Extraction (FRCE) module to capture detailed visual and textual semantics essential for supporting instruction reasoning. To mitigate the semantic loss, we further introduce a Cross-Modal Enhancer (CME) that enables rich interactions between the fine-grained cues and MLLM-derived features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReasonBrain consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on reasoning scenarios while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization to conventional IIE tasks. Our dataset and code will be released publicly.

Paperid: 1789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18605.pdf

Abstract:
Orientation is a key attribute of objects, crucial for understanding their spatial pose and arrangement in images. However, practical solutions for accurate orientation estimation from a single image remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce Orient Anything, the first expert and foundational model designed to estimate object orientation in a single- and free-view image. Due to the scarcity of labeled data, we propose extracting knowledge from the 3D world. By developing a pipeline to annotate the front face of 3D objects and render images from random views, we collect 2M images with precise orientation annotations. To fully leverage the dataset, we design a robust training objective that models the 3D orientation as probability distributions of three angles and predicts the object orientation by fitting these distributions. Besides, we employ several strategies to improve synthetic-to-real transfer. Our model achieves state-of-the-art orientation estimation accuracy in both rendered and real images and exhibits impressive zero-shot ability in various scenarios. More importantly, our model enhances many applications, such as comprehension and generation of complex spatial concepts and 3D object pose adjustment.

Paperid: 1790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11279.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied Everyday Task is a popular task in the embodied AI community, requiring agents to make a sequence of actions based on natural language instructions and visual observations. Traditional learning-based approaches face two challenges. Firstly, natural language instructions often lack explicit task planning. Secondly, extensive training is required to equip models with knowledge of the task environment. Previous works based on Large Language Model (LLM) either suffer from poor performance due to the lack of task-specific knowledge or rely on ground truth as few-shot samples. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel approach called Progressive Retrieval Augmented Generation (P-RAG), which not only effectively leverages the powerful language processing capabilities of LLMs but also progressively accumulates task-specific knowledge without ground-truth. Compared to the conventional RAG methods, which retrieve relevant information from the database in a one-shot manner to assist generation, P-RAG introduces an iterative approach to progressively update the database. In each iteration, P-RAG retrieves the latest database and obtains historical information from the previous interaction as experiential references for the current interaction. Moreover, we also introduce a more granular retrieval scheme that not only retrieves similar tasks but also incorporates retrieval of similar situations to provide more valuable reference experiences. Extensive experiments reveal that P-RAG achieves competitive results without utilizing ground truth and can even further improve performance through self-iterations.

Paperid: 1791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11147.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on large language models typically solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents through workflows. Existing approaches generates workflows either at task level or query level, but their relative costs and benefits remain unclear. After rethinking and empirical analyses, we show that query-level workflow generation is not always necessary, since a small set of top-K best task-level workflows together already covers equivalent or even more queries. We further find that exhaustive execution-based task-level evaluation is both extremely token-costly and frequently unreliable. Inspired by the idea of self-evolution and generative reward modeling, we propose a low-cost task-level generation framework \textbf{SCALE}, which means \underline{\textbf{S}}elf prediction of the optimizer with few shot \underline{\textbf{CAL}}ibration for \underline{\textbf{E}}valuation instead of full validation execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{SCALE} maintains competitive performance, with an average degradation of just 0.61\% compared to existing approach across multiple datasets, while cutting overall token usage by up to 83\%.

Paperid: 1792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15127.pdf

Abstract:
The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved language understanding and generation capabilities. However, it is difficult to deploy LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices due to their high computational and storage resource demands. To address this issue, we propose a novel LLM model pruning method, namely structurally-aware adaptive pruning (SAAP), to significantly reduce the computational and memory costs while maintaining model performance. We first define an adaptive importance fusion metric to evaluate the importance of all coupled structures in LLMs by considering their homoscedastic uncertainty. Then, we rank the importance of all modules to determine the specific layers that should be pruned to meet particular performance requirements. Furthermore, we develop a new group fine-tuning strategy to improve the inference efficiency of LLMs. Finally, we evaluate the proposed SAAP method on multiple LLMs across two common tasks, i.e., zero-shot classification and text generation. Experimental results show that our SAAP method outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline methods, achieving 2.17%, 2.37%, and 2.39% accuracy gains on LLaMA-7B, Vicuna-7B, and LLaMA-13B. Additionally, SAAP improves the token generation speed by 5%, showcasing its practical advantages in resource-constrained scenarios.

Paperid: 1793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14253.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce FLAME, a family of extremely lightweight and capable Time Series Foundation Models, which support both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting via generative probabilistic modeling, thus ensuring both efficiency and robustness. FLAME utilizes the Legendre Memory for strong generalization capabilities. Through adapting variants of Legendre Memory, i.e., translated Legendre (LegT) and scaled Legendre (LegS), in the Encoding and Decoding phases, FLAME can effectively capture the inherent inductive bias within data and make efficient long-range inferences. To enhance the accuracy of probabilistic forecasting while keeping efficient, FLAME adopts a Normalization Flow based forecasting head, which can model the arbitrarily intricate distributions over the forecasting horizon in a generative manner. Comprehensive experiments on well-recognized benchmarks, including TSFM-Bench and ProbTS, demonstrate the consistent state-of-the-art zero-shot performance of FLAME on both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting tasks.

Paperid: 1794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25889.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and perform complex tasks from multimodal input. Although recent work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) to automate the laborious data collection process in scaling supervised fine-tuning (SFT), applying large-scale RL to flow-based VLAs (e.g., $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$) remains challenging due to intractable action log-likelihoods from iterative denoising. We address this challenge with $π_{\text{RL}}$, an open-source framework for training flow-based VLAs in parallel simulation. $π_{\text{RL}}$ implements two RL algorithms: (1) {Flow-Noise} models the denoising process as a discrete-time MDP with a learnable noise network for exact log-likelihood computation. (2) {Flow-SDE} integrates denoising with agent-environment interaction, formulating a two-layer MDP that employs ODE-to-SDE conversion for efficient RL exploration. We evaluate $π_{\text{RL}}$ on LIBERO and ManiSkill benchmarks. On LIBERO, $π_{\text{RL}}$ boosts few-shot SFT models $π_0$ and $π_{0.5}$ from 57.6% to 97.6% and from 77.1% to 98.3%, respectively. In ManiSkill, we train $π_{\text{RL}}$ in 320 parallel environments, improving $π_0$ from 41.6% to 85.7% and $π_{0.5}$ from 40.0% to 84.8% across 4352 pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating scalable multitask RL under heterogeneous simulation. Overall, $π_{\text{RL}}$ achieves significant performance gains and stronger generalization over SFT-models, validating the effectiveness of online RL for flow-based VLAs.

Paperid: 1795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24892.pdf

Abstract:
Aerial robots interacting with objects must perform precise, contact-rich maneuvers under uncertainty. In this paper, we study the problem of aerial ball juggling using a quadrotor equipped with a racket, a task that demands accurate timing, stable control, and continuous adaptation. We propose JuggleRL, the first reinforcement learning-based system for aerial juggling. It learns closed-loop policies in large-scale simulation using systematic calibration of quadrotor and ball dynamics to reduce the sim-to-real gap. The training incorporates reward shaping to encourage racket-centered hits and sustained juggling, as well as domain randomization over ball position and coefficient of restitution to enhance robustness and transferability. The learned policy outputs mid-level commands executed by a low-level controller and is deployed zero-shot on real hardware, where an enhanced perception module with a lightweight communication protocol reduces delays in high-frequency state estimation and ensures real-time control. Experiments show that JuggleRL achieves an average of $311$ hits over $10$ consecutive trials in the real world, with a maximum of $462$ hits observed, far exceeding a model-based baseline that reaches at most $14$ hits with an average of $3.1$. Moreover, the policy generalizes to unseen conditions, successfully juggling a lighter $5$ g ball with an average of $145.9$ hits. This work demonstrates that reinforcement learning can empower aerial robots with robust and stable control in dynamic interaction tasks.

Paperid: 1796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22295.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain generalization is very important in Time Series Forecasting because similar historical information may lead to distinct future trends due to the domain-specific characteristics. Recent works focus on building unimodal time series foundation models and end-to-end multimodal supervised models. Since domain-specific knowledge is often contained in modalities like texts, the former lacks the explicit utilization of them, thus hindering the performance. The latter is tailored for end-to-end scenarios and does not support zero-shot inference for cross-domain scenarios. In this work, we introduce Aurora, a Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model, which supports multimodal inputs and zero-shot inference. Pretrained on Corss-domain Multimodal Time Series Corpus, Aurora can adaptively extract and focus on key domain knowledge contained in corrsponding text or image modalities, thus possessing strong Cross-domain generalization capability. Through tokenization, encoding, and distillation, Aurora can extract multimodal domain knowledge as guidance and then utilizes a Modality-Guided Multi-head Self-Attention to inject them into the modeling of temporal representations. In the decoding phase, the multimodal representations are used to generate the conditions and prototypes of future tokens, contributing to a novel Prototype-Guided Flow Matching for generative probabilistic forecasting. Comprehensive experiments on well-recognized benchmarks, including TimeMMD, TSFM-Bench and ProbTS, demonstrate the consistent state-of-the-art performance of Aurora on both unimodal and multimodal scenarios.

Paperid: 1797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12235.pdf

Abstract:
With the success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in various application fields beyond natural language processing, language models have raised emerging attention in the field of time series forecasting (TSF) and have shown great prospects. However, current PLM-based TSF methods still fail to achieve satisfactory prediction accuracy matching the strong sequential modeling power of language models. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Model and Cross-Modality Learning with PLMs for time series forecasting (CC-Time). We explore the potential of PLMs for time series forecasting from two aspects: 1) what time series features could be modeled by PLMs, and 2) whether relying solely on PLMs is sufficient for building time series models. In the first aspect, CC-Time incorporates cross-modality learning to model temporal dependency and channel correlations in the language model from both time series sequences and their corresponding text descriptions. In the second aspect, CC-Time further proposes the cross-model fusion block to adaptively integrate knowledge from the PLMs and time series model to form a more comprehensive modeling of time series patterns. Extensive experiments on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that CC-Time achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy in both full-data training and few-shot learning situations.

Paperid: 1798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06005.pdf

Abstract:
Existing works on general time series forecasting build foundation models with heavy model parameters through large-scale multi-source pre-training. These models achieve superior generalization ability across various datasets at the cost of significant computational burdens and limitations in resource-constrained scenarios. This paper introduces LightGTS, a lightweight general time series forecasting model designed from the perspective of consistent periodical modeling. To handle diverse scales and intrinsic periods in multi-source pre-training, we introduce Periodical Tokenization, which extracts consistent periodic patterns across different datasets with varying scales. To better utilize the periodicity in the decoding process, we further introduce Periodical Parallel Decoding, which leverages historical tokens to improve forecasting. Based on the two techniques above which fully leverage the inductive bias of periods inherent in time series, LightGTS uses a lightweight model to achieve outstanding performance on general time series forecasting. It achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance on 9 real-world benchmarks in both zero-shot and full-shot settings with much better efficiency compared with existing time series foundation models.

Paperid: 1799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09993.pdf

Abstract:
Time series classification (TSC) is an important task in time series analysis. Existing TSC methods mainly train on each single domain separately, suffering from a degradation in accuracy when the samples for training are insufficient in certain domains. The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm provides a promising direction for solving this problem. However, time series from different domains are substantially divergent, which challenges the effective pre-training on multi-source data and the generalization ability of pre-trained models. To handle this issue, we introduce Augmented Series and Image Contrastive Learning for Time Series Classification (AimTS), a pre-training framework that learns generalizable representations from multi-source time series data. We propose a two-level prototype-based contrastive learning method to effectively utilize various augmentations in multi-source pre-training, which learns representations for TSC that can be generalized to different domains. In addition, considering augmentations within the single time series modality are insufficient to fully address classification problems with distribution shift, we introduce the image modality to supplement structural information and establish a series-image contrastive learning to improve the generalization of the learned representations for TSC tasks. Extensive experiments show that after multi-source pre-training, AimTS achieves good generalization performance, enabling efficient learning and even few-shot learning on various downstream TSC datasets.

Paperid: 1800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01932.pdf

Abstract:
Robot sports, characterized by well-defined objectives, explicit rules, and dynamic interactions, present ideal scenarios for demonstrating embodied intelligence. In this paper, we present VolleyBots, a novel robot sports testbed where multiple drones cooperate and compete in the sport of volleyball under physical dynamics. VolleyBots integrates three features within a unified platform: competitive and cooperative gameplay, turn-based interaction structure, and agile 3D maneuvering. These intertwined features yield a complex problem combining motion control and strategic play, with no available expert demonstrations. We provide a comprehensive suite of tasks ranging from single-drone drills to multi-drone cooperative and competitive tasks, accompanied by baseline evaluations of representative reinforcement learning (RL), multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and game-theoretic algorithms. Simulation results show that on-policy RL methods outperform off-policy methods in single-agent tasks, but both approaches struggle in complex tasks that combine motion control and strategic play. We additionally design a hierarchical policy which achieves 69.5% win rate against the strongest baseline in the 3 vs 3 task, demonstrating its potential for tackling the complex interplay between low-level control and high-level strategy. To highlight VolleyBots' sim-to-real potential, we further demonstrate the zero-shot deployment of a policy trained entirely in simulation on real-world drones.

Paperid: 1801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11764.pdf

Abstract:
Executing precise and agile flight maneuvers is critical for quadrotors in various applications. Traditional quadrotor control approaches are limited by their reliance on flat trajectories or time-consuming optimization, which restricts their flexibility. Recently, RL-based policy has emerged as a promising alternative due to its ability to directly map observations to actions, reducing the need for detailed system knowledge and actuation constraints. However, a significant challenge remains in bridging the sim-to-real gap, where RL-based policies often experience instability when deployed in real world. In this paper, we investigate key factors for learning robust RL-based control policies that are capable of zero-shot deployment in real-world quadrotors. We identify five critical factors and we develop a PPO-based training framework named SimpleFlight, which integrates these five techniques. We validate the efficacy of SimpleFlight on Crazyflie quadrotor, demonstrating that it achieves more than a 50% reduction in trajectory tracking error compared to state-of-the-art RL baselines. The policy derived by SimpleFlight consistently excels across both smooth polynominal trajectories and challenging infeasible zigzag trajectories on small thrust-to-weight quadrotors. In contrast, baseline methods struggle with high-speed or infeasible trajectories. To support further research and reproducibility, we integrate SimpleFlight into a GPU-based simulator Omnidrones and provide open-source access to the code and model checkpoints. We hope SimpleFlight will offer valuable insights for advancing RL-based quadrotor control. For more details, visit our project website at https://sites.google.com/view/simpleflight/.

Paperid: 1802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05833.pdf

Abstract:
Societal and industrial infrastructures and systems increasingly leverage sensors that emit correlated time series. Forecasting of future values of such time series based on recorded historical values has important benefits. Automatically designed models achieve higher accuracy than manually designed models. Given a forecasting task, which includes a dataset and a forecasting horizon, automated design methods automatically search for an optimal forecasting model for the task in a manually designed search space, and then train the identified model using the dataset to enable the forecasting. Existing automated methods face three challenges. First, the search space is constructed by human experts, rending the methods only semi-automated and yielding search spaces prone to subjective biases. Second, it is time consuming to search for an optimal model. Third, training the identified model for a new task is also costly. These challenges limit the practicability of automated methods in real-world settings. To contend with the challenges, we propose a fully automated and highly efficient correlated time series forecasting framework where the search and training can be done in minutes. The framework includes a data-driven, iterative strategy to automatically prune a large search space to obtain a high-quality search space for a new forecasting task. It includes a zero-shot search strategy to efficiently identify the optimal model in the customized search space. And it includes a fast parameter adaptation strategy to accelerate the training of the identified model. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets offer evidence that the framework is capable of state-of-the-art accuracy and is much more efficient than existing methods.

Paperid: 1803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18495.pdf

Abstract:
This paper tackles the challenging task of maintaining formation among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while avoiding both static and dynamic obstacles during directed flight. The complexity of the task arises from its multi-objective nature, the large exploration space, and the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) pipeline. In the first stage, we randomly search for a reward function that balances key objectives: directed flight, obstacle avoidance, formation maintenance, and zero-shot policy deployment. The second stage applies this reward function to more complex scenarios and utilizes curriculum learning to accelerate policy training. Additionally, we incorporate an attention-based observation encoder to improve formation maintenance and adaptability to varying obstacle densities. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that our method outperforms both planning-based and RL-based baselines in terms of collision-free rates and formation maintenance across static, dynamic, and mixed obstacle scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our curriculum learning strategy and attention-based encoder. Animated demonstrations are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/ uav-formation-with-avoidance/.

Paperid: 1804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17233.pdf

Abstract:
Preference-based reinforcement learning is an effective way to handle tasks where rewards are hard to specify but can be exceedingly inefficient as preference learning is often tabula rasa. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) have native preference-learning capabilities that allow them to achieve sample-efficient preference learning, addressing this challenge. We propose In-Context Preference Learning (ICPL), which uses in-context learning capabilities of LLMs to reduce human query inefficiency. ICPL uses the task description and basic environment code to create sets of reward functions which are iteratively refined by placing human feedback over videos of the resultant policies into the context of an LLM and then requesting better rewards. We first demonstrate ICPL's effectiveness through a synthetic preference study, providing quantitative evidence that it significantly outperforms baseline preference-based methods with much higher performance and orders of magnitude greater efficiency. We observe that these improvements are not solely coming from LLM grounding in the task but that the quality of the rewards improves over time, indicating preference learning capabilities. Additionally, we perform a series of real human preference-learning trials and observe that ICPL extends beyond synthetic settings and can work effectively with humans-in-the-loop.

Paperid: 1805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11802.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Forecasting (TSF) is key functionality in numerous fields, such as financial investment, weather services, and energy management. Although increasingly capable TSF methods occur, many of them require domain-specific data collection and model training and do not generalize well when applied in other domains. Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) that are pre-trained on massive heterogeneous time series data aim to overcome these limitations. The prospects for generalizability have spurred the development of a new generation of TSFMs. This study proposes a benchmark, TSFM-Bench, to facilitate comprehensive and unified evaluation of TSFMs. TSFM-Bench covers a wide range of TSFMs, including those based on large language models and those pre-trained on time series data. TSFM-Bench supports multiple forecasting scenarios, including zero-shot, few-shot, and full-shot, enabling assessment across the full range of adaptation strategies. TSFM-Bench also provides a standardized experimental protocols for critical evaluation processes such as dataset splitting, loading, normalization, and few-shot sampling, facilitating consistency and fairness. We report on an extensive evaluation of TSFMs across a diverse range of datasets spanning multiple domains and exhibiting varied statistical characteristics. Specifically, we identify pros and cons and inherent limitations of existing TSFMs, and we propose potential directions for new model designs.

Paperid: 1806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15866.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-UAV pursuit-evasion, where pursuers aim to capture evaders, poses a key challenge for UAV swarm intelligence. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has demonstrated potential in modeling cooperative behaviors, but most RL-based approaches remain constrained to simplified simulations with limited dynamics or fixed scenarios. Previous attempts to deploy RL policy to real-world pursuit-evasion are largely restricted to two-dimensional scenarios, such as ground vehicles or UAVs at fixed altitudes. In this paper, we address multi-UAV pursuit-evasion by considering UAV dynamics and physical constraints. We introduce an evader prediction-enhanced network to tackle partial observability in cooperative strategy learning. Additionally, we propose an adaptive environment generator within MARL training, enabling higher exploration efficiency and better policy generalization across diverse scenarios. Simulations show our method significantly outperforms all baselines in challenging scenarios, generalizing to unseen scenarios with a 100% capture rate. Finally, we derive a feasible policy via a two-stage reward refinement and deploy the policy on real quadrotors in a zero-shot manner. To our knowledge, this is the first work to derive and deploy an RL-based policy using collective thrust and body rates control commands for multi-UAV pursuit-evasion in unknown environments. The open-source code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/pursuit-evasion-rl.

Paperid: 1807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09997.pdf

Abstract:
Hallucination has emerged as a significant barrier to the effective application of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce a novel Attention-Guided SElf-Reflection (AGSER) approach for zero-shot hallucination detection in LLMs. The AGSER method utilizes attention contributions to categorize the input query into attentive and non-attentive queries. Each query is then processed separately through the LLMs, allowing us to compute consistency scores between the generated responses and the original answer. The difference between the two consistency scores serves as a hallucination estimator. In addition to its efficacy in detecting hallucinations, AGSER notably reduces computational overhead, requiring only three passes through the LLM and utilizing two sets of tokens. We have conducted extensive experiments with four widely-used LLMs across three different hallucination benchmarks, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot hallucination detection.

Paperid: 1808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01158.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular property prediction (MPP) is integral to drug discovery and material science, but often faces the challenge of data scarcity in real-world scenarios. Addressing this, few-shot molecular property prediction (FSMPP) has been developed. Unlike other few-shot tasks, FSMPP typically employs a pre-trained molecular encoder and a context-aware classifier, benefiting from molecular pre-training and molecular context information. Despite these advancements, existing methods struggle with the ineffective fine-tuning of pre-trained encoders. We attribute this issue to the imbalance between the abundance of tunable parameters and the scarcity of labeled molecules, and the lack of contextual perceptiveness in the encoders. To overcome this hurdle, we propose a parameter-efficient in-context tuning method, named Pin-Tuning. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adapter for pre-trained message passing layers (MP-Adapter) and Bayesian weight consolidation for pre-trained atom/bond embedding layers (Emb-BWC), to achieve parameter-efficient tuning while preventing over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we enhance the MP-Adapters with contextual perceptiveness. This innovation allows for in-context tuning of the pre-trained encoder, thereby improving its adaptability for specific FSMPP tasks. When evaluated on public datasets, our method demonstrates superior tuning with fewer trainable parameters, improving few-shot predictive performance.

Paperid: 1809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22403.pdf

Abstract:
Mobility Foundation Models (MFMs) have advanced the modeling of human movement patterns, yet they face a ceiling due to limitations in data scale and semantic understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer powerful semantic reasoning, they lack the innate understanding of spatio-temporal statistics required for generating physically plausible mobility trajectories. To address these gaps, we propose MoveFM-R, a novel framework that unlocks the full potential of mobility foundation models by leveraging language-driven semantic reasoning capabilities. It tackles two key challenges: the vocabulary mismatch between continuous geographic coordinates and discrete language tokens, and the representation gap between the latent vectors of MFMs and the semantic world of LLMs. MoveFM-R is built on three core innovations: a semantically enhanced location encoding to bridge the geography-language gap, a progressive curriculum to align the LLM's reasoning with mobility patterns, and an interactive self-reflection mechanism for conditional trajectory generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoveFM-R significantly outperforms existing MFM-based and LLM-based baselines. It also shows robust generalization in zero-shot settings and excels at generating realistic trajectories from natural language instructions. By synthesizing the statistical power of MFMs with the deep semantic understanding of LLMs, MoveFM-R pioneers a new paradigm that enables a more comprehensive, interpretable, and powerful modeling of human mobility. The implementation of MoveFM-R is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoveFM-R-CDE7/.

Paperid: 1810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21802.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately forecasting chaotic systems, prevalent in domains such as weather prediction and fluid dynamics, remains a significant scientific challenge. The inherent sensitivity of these systems to initial conditions, coupled with a scarcity of observational data, severely constrains traditional modeling approaches. Since these models are typically trained for a specific system, they lack the generalization capacity necessary for real-world applications, which demand robust zero-shot or few-shot forecasting on novel or data-limited scenarios. To overcome this generalization barrier, we propose ChaosNexus, a foundation model pre-trained on a diverse corpus of chaotic dynamics. ChaosNexus employs a novel multi-scale architecture named ScaleFormer augmented with Mixture-of-Experts layers, to capture both universal patterns and system-specific behaviors. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization across both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. On a large-scale testbed comprising over 9,000 synthetic chaotic systems, it improves the fidelity of long-term attractor statistics by more than 40% compared to the leading baseline. This robust performance extends to real-world applications with exceptional data efficiency. For instance, in 5-day global weather forecasting, ChaosNexus achieves a competitive zero-shot mean error below 1 degree, a result that further improves with few-shot fine-tuning. Moreover, experiments on the scaling behavior of ChaosNexus provide a guiding principle for scientific foundation models: cross-system generalization stems from the diversity of training systems, rather than sheer data volume.

Paperid: 1811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17682.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting user behavior is essential for intelligent assistant services, yet deep learning models often struggle to capture long-tailed behaviors. Large language models (LLMs), with their pretraining on vast corpora containing rich behavioral knowledge, offer promise. However, existing fine-tuning approaches tend to overfit to frequent ``anchor'' behaviors, reducing their ability to predict less common ``tail'' behaviors. In this paper, we introduce BehaviorLM, a progressive fine-tuning approach that addresses this issue. In the first stage, LLMs are fine-tuned on anchor behaviors while preserving general behavioral knowledge. In the second stage, fine-tuning uses a balanced subset of all behaviors based on sample difficulty to improve tail behavior predictions without sacrificing anchor performance. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that BehaviorLM robustly predicts both anchor and tail behaviors and effectively leverages LLM behavioral knowledge to master tail behavior prediction with few-shot examples.

Paperid: 1812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13919.pdf

Abstract:
Data-driven methods offer an effective equation-free solution for predicting physical dynamics. However, the same physical system can exhibit significantly different dynamic behaviors in various environments. This causes prediction functions trained for specific environments to fail when transferred to unseen environments. Therefore, cross-environment prediction requires modeling the dynamic functions of different environments. In this work, we propose a model weight generation method, \texttt{EnvAd-Diff}. \texttt{EnvAd-Diff} operates in the weight space of the dynamic function, generating suitable weights from scratch based on environmental condition for zero-shot prediction. Specifically, we first train expert prediction functions on dynamic trajectories from a limited set of visible environments to create a model zoo, thereby constructing sample pairs of prediction function weights and their corresponding environments. Subsequently, we train a latent space diffusion model conditioned on the environment to model the joint distribution of weights and environments. Considering the lack of environmental prior knowledge in real-world scenarios, we propose a physics-informed surrogate label to distinguish different environments. Generalization experiments across multiple systems demonstrate that a 1M parameter prediction function generated by \texttt{EnvAd-Diff} outperforms a pre-trained 500M parameter foundation model.

Paperid: 1813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12164.pdf

Abstract:
The urban environment is characterized by complex spatio-temporal dynamics arising from diverse human activities and interactions. Effectively modeling these dynamics is essential for understanding and optimizing urban systems In this work, we introduce UrbanDiT, a foundation model for open-world urban spatio-temporal learning that successfully scale up diffusion transformers in this field. UrbanDiT pioneers a unified model that integrates diverse spatio-temporal data sources and types while learning universal spatio-temporal patterns across different cities and scenarios. This allows the model to unify both multi-data and multi-task learning, and effectively support a wide range of spatio-temporal applications. Its key innovation lies in the elaborated prompt learning framework, which adaptively generates both data-driven and task-specific prompts, guiding the model to deliver superior performance across various urban applications. UrbanDiT offers three primary advantages: 1) It unifies diverse data types, such as grid-based and graph-based data, into a sequential format, allowing to capture spatio-temporal dynamics across diverse scenarios of different cities; 2) With masking strategies and task-specific prompts, it supports a wide range of tasks, including bi-directional spatio-temporal prediction, temporal interpolation, spatial extrapolation, and spatio-temporal imputation; and 3) It generalizes effectively to open-world scenarios, with its powerful zero-shot capabilities outperforming nearly all baselines with training data. These features allow UrbanDiT to achieves state-of-the-art performance in different domains such as transportation traffic, crowd flows, taxi demand, bike usage, and cellular traffic, across multiple cities and tasks. UrbanDiT sets up a new benchmark for foundation models in the urban spatio-temporal domain.

Paperid: 1814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23523.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning for robotic manipulation faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality robot demonstration data. Recent robotic foundation models often pre-train on cross-embodiment robot datasets to increase data scale, while they face significant limitations as the diverse morphologies and action spaces across different robot embodiments make unified training challenging. In this paper, we present H-RDT (Human to Robotics Diffusion Transformer), a novel approach that leverages human manipulation data to enhance robot manipulation capabilities. Our key insight is that large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos with paired 3D hand pose annotations provide rich behavioral priors that capture natural manipulation strategies and can benefit robotic policy learning. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: (1) pre-training on large-scale egocentric human manipulation data, and (2) cross-embodiment fine-tuning on robot-specific data with modular action encoders and decoders. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture with 2B parameters, H-RDT uses flow matching to model complex action distributions. Extensive evaluations encompassing both simulation and real-world experiments, single-task and multitask scenarios, as well as few-shot learning and robustness assessments, demonstrate that H-RDT outperforms training from scratch and existing state-of-the-art methods, including Pi0 and RDT, achieving significant improvements of 13.9% and 40.5% over training from scratch in simulation and real-world experiments, respectively. The results validate our core hypothesis that human manipulation data can serve as a powerful foundation for learning bimanual robotic manipulation policies.

Paperid: 1815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04561.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in omnimodal learning have significantly improved understanding and generation across images, text, and speech, yet these developments remain predominantly confined to proprietary models. The lack of high-quality omnimodal datasets and the challenges of real-time emotional speech synthesis have notably hindered progress in open-source research. To address these limitations, we introduce \name, a two-stage training framework that integrates omnimodal alignment and speech generation to develop a state-of-the-art omnimodal large language model. In the alignment phase, a pre-trained speech model undergoes further training on text-image tasks, enabling (near) zero-shot generalization from vision to speech, outperforming models trained on tri-modal datasets. In the speech generation phase, a lightweight decoder is trained on speech tasks with direct preference optimization, enabling real-time emotional speech synthesis with high fidelity. Experiments show that \name surpasses state-of-the-art models across omnimodal, vision-language, and speech-language benchmarks. It achieves a 4-point absolute improvement on OmniBench over the leading open-source model VITA, despite using 5x fewer training samples and a smaller model size (7B vs. 7x8B). Additionally, \name achieves real-time speech generation with <1s latency at non-autoregressive mode, reducing inference time by 5x compared to autoregressive methods, and improves emotion classification accuracy by 7.7\%

Paperid: 1816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12761.pdf

Abstract:
Video diffusion models, trained on large-scale datasets, naturally capture correspondences of shared features across frames. Recent works have exploited this property for tasks such as optical flow prediction and tracking in a zero-shot setting. Motivated by these findings, we investigate whether supervised training can more fully harness the tracking capability of video diffusion models. To this end, we propose Moaw, a framework that unleashes motion awareness for video diffusion models and leverages it to facilitate motion transfer. Specifically, we train a diffusion model for motion perception, shifting its modality from image-to-video generation to video-to-dense-tracking. We then construct a motion-labeled dataset to identify features that encode the strongest motion information, and inject them into a structurally identical video generation model. Owing to the homogeneity between the two networks, these features can be naturally adapted in a zero-shot manner, enabling motion transfer without additional adapters. Our work provides a new paradigm for bridging generative modeling and motion understanding, paving the way for more unified and controllable video learning frameworks.

Paperid: 1817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23838.pdf

Abstract:
Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation aims to segment a specified target throughout a video sequence, initialized by a first-frame mask. Previous methods rely heavily on appearance-based pattern matching and thus exhibit limited robustness against challenges such as drastic visual changes, occlusions, and scene shifts. This failure is often attributed to a lack of high-level conceptual understanding of the target. The recently proposed Segment Concept (SeC) framework mitigated this limitation by using a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to establish a deep semantic understanding of the object for more persistent segmentation. In this work, we evaluate its zero-shot performance on the challenging coMplex video Object SEgmentation v2 (MOSEv2) dataset. Without any fine-tuning on the training set, SeC achieved 39.7 \JFn on the test set and ranked 2nd place in the Complex VOS track of the 7th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge.

Paperid: 1818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01124.pdf

Abstract:
Social media platforms generate vast, complex graph-structured data, facilitating diverse tasks such as rumor detection, bot identification, and influence modeling. Real-world applications like public opinion monitoring and stock trading -- which have a strong attachment to social media -- demand models that are performant across diverse tasks and datasets. However, most existing solutions are purely data-driven, exhibiting vulnerability to the inherent noise within social media data. Moreover, the reliance on task-specific model design challenges efficient reuse of the same model architecture on different tasks, incurring repetitive engineering efforts. To address these challenges in social media graph analytics, we propose a general representation learning framework that integrates a dual-encoder structure with a kinetic-guided propagation module. In addition to jointly modeling structural and contextual information with two encoders, our framework innovatively captures the information propagation dynamics within social media graphs by integrating principled kinetic knowledge. By deriving a propagation-aware encoder and corresponding optimization objective from a Markov chain-based transmission model, the representation learning pipeline receives a boost in its robustness to noisy data and versatility in diverse tasks. Extensive experiments verify that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with a unified architecture on a variety of social media graph mining tasks spanning graph classification, node classification, and link prediction. Besides, our solution exhibits strong zero-shot and few-shot transferability across datasets, demonstrating practicality when handling data-scarce tasks.

Paperid: 1819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00981.pdf

Abstract:
Recommender systems have rapidly evolved and become integral to many online services. However, existing systems sometimes produce unstable and unsatisfactory recommendations that fail to align with users' fundamental and long-term preferences. This is because they primarily focus on extracting shallow and short-term interests from user behavior data, which is inherently dynamic and challenging to model. Unlike these transient interests, user values are more stable and play a crucial role in shaping user behaviors, such as purchasing items and consuming content. Incorporating user values into recommender systems can help stabilize recommendation performance and ensure results better reflect users' latent preferences. However, acquiring user values is typically difficult and costly. To address this challenge, we leverage the strong language understanding, zero-shot inference, and generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract user values from users' historical interactions. Unfortunately, direct extraction using LLMs presents several challenges such as length constraints and hallucination. To overcome these issues, we propose ZOOM, a zero-shot multi-LLM collaborative framework for effective and accurate user value extraction. In ZOOM, we apply text summarization techniques to condense item content while preserving essential meaning. To mitigate hallucinations, ZOOM introduces two specialized agent roles: evaluators and supervisors, to collaboratively generate accurate user values. Extensive experiments on two widely used recommendation datasets with two state-of-the-art recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our framework in automatic user value mining and recommendation performance improvement.

Paperid: 1820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11788.pdf

Abstract:
With recent advancements in large language models, web agents have been greatly improved. However, dealing with complex and dynamic web environments requires more advanced planning and search abilities. Previous studies usually adopt a greedy one-way search strategy, which may struggle to recover from erroneous states. In this work, we enhance web agents with an explicit rollback mechanism, enabling the agent to revert back to a previous state in its navigation trajectory. This mechanism gives the model the flexibility to directly control the search process, leading to an effective and efficient web navigation method. We conduct experiments on two live web navigation benchmarks with zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Paperid: 1821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07247.pdf

Abstract:
Subjective Answer Grading (SAG) plays a crucial role in education, standardized testing, and automated assessment systems, particularly for evaluating short-form responses in Short Answer Scoring (SAS). However, existing approaches often produce coarse-grained scores and lack detailed reasoning. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential as zero-shot evaluators, they remain susceptible to bias, inconsistencies with human judgment, and limited transparency in scoring decisions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SAS-Bench, a benchmark specifically designed for LLM-based SAS tasks. SAS-Bench provides fine-grained, step-wise scoring, expert-annotated error categories, and a diverse range of question types derived from real-world subject-specific exams. This benchmark facilitates detailed evaluation of model reasoning processes and explainability. We also release an open-source dataset containing 1,030 questions and 4,109 student responses, each annotated by domain experts. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experiments with various LLMs, identifying major challenges in scoring science-related questions and highlighting the effectiveness of few-shot prompting in improving scoring accuracy. Our work offers valuable insights into the development of more robust, fair, and educationally meaningful LLM-based evaluation systems.

Paperid: 1822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06290.pdf

Abstract:
Combinatorial Optimization (CO) encompasses a wide range of problems that arise in many real-world scenarios. While significant progress has been made in developing learning-based methods for specialized CO problems, a unified model with a single architecture and parameter set for diverse CO problems remains elusive. Such a model would offer substantial advantages in terms of efficiency and convenience. In this paper, we introduce UniCO, a unified model for solving various CO problems. Inspired by the success of next-token prediction, we frame each problem-solving process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), tokenize the corresponding sequential trajectory data, and train the model using a transformer backbone. To reduce token length in the trajectory data, we propose a CO-prefix design that aggregates static problem features. To address the heterogeneity of state and action tokens within the MDP, we employ a two-stage self-supervised learning approach. In this approach, a dynamic prediction model is first trained and then serves as a pre-trained model for subsequent policy generation. Experiments across 10 CO problems showcase the versatility of UniCO, emphasizing its ability to generalize to new, unseen problems with minimal fine-tuning, achieving even few-shot or zero-shot performance. Our framework offers a valuable complement to existing neural CO methods that focus on optimizing performance for individual problems.

Paperid: 1823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04540.pdf

Abstract:
3D Large Language Models (LLMs) leveraging spatial information in point clouds for 3D spatial reasoning attract great attention. Despite some promising results, the role of point clouds in 3D spatial reasoning remains under-explored. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate and analyze these models to answer the research question: \textit{Does point cloud truly boost the spatial reasoning capacities of 3D LLMs?} We first evaluate the spatial reasoning capacity of LLMs with different input modalities by replacing the point cloud with the visual and text counterparts. We then propose a novel 3D QA (Question-answering) benchmark, ScanReQA, that comprehensively evaluates models' understanding of binary spatial relationships. Our findings reveal several critical insights: 1) LLMs without point input could even achieve competitive performance even in a zero-shot manner; 2) existing 3D LLMs struggle to comprehend the binary spatial relationships; 3) 3D LLMs exhibit limitations in exploiting the structural coordinates in point clouds for fine-grained spatial reasoning. We think these conclusions can help the next step of 3D LLMs and also offer insights for foundation models in other modalities. We release datasets and reproducible codes in the anonymous project page: https://3d-llm.xyz.

Paperid: 1824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19890.pdf

Abstract:
Visual-language models have advanced the development of universal models, yet their application in medical imaging remains constrained by specific functional requirements and the limited data. Current general-purpose models are typically designed with task-specific branches and heads, which restricts the shared feature space and the flexibility of model. To address these challenges, we have developed a decomposed-composed universal medical imaging paradigm (UniMed) that supports tasks at all levels. To this end, we first propose a decomposed decoder that can predict two types of outputs -- pixel and semantic, based on a defined input queue. Additionally, we introduce a composed decoder that unifies the input and output spaces and standardizes task annotations across different levels into a discrete token format. The coupled design of these two components enables the model to flexibly combine tasks and mutual benefits. Moreover, our joint representation learning strategy skilfully leverages large amounts of unlabeled data and unsupervised loss, achieving efficient one-stage pretraining for more robust performance. Experimental results show that UniMed achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight datasets across all three tasks and exhibits strong zero-shot and 100-shot transferability. We will release the code and trained models upon the paper's acceptance.

Paperid: 1825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03895.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a pivotal advance in embodied intelligence, yet they confront critical barriers to real-world deployment, most notably catastrophic forgetting. This issue stems from their overreliance on continuous action sequences or action chunks, which inadvertently create isolated data silos that disrupt knowledge retention across tasks. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Narrowing of Trajectory VLA (NoTVLA) framework: a novel approach that narrows its focus to sparse trajectories, thereby avoiding the catastrophic forgetting associated with dense trajectory fine-tuning. A key innovation of NoTVLA lies in its trajectory planning strategy: instead of centering on the target object's trajectory, it leverages temporal compression and spatial reasoning pruning specifically for the robot end effector's trajectory. Furthermore, training is conducted using these sparse trajectories rather than dense action trajectories, an optimization that delivers remarkable practical advantages with better performance in zero-shot. In multi-task evaluation scenarios, NoTVLA achieves superior performance and generalization compared to pi0 while operating under two critical constraints: it uses over an order of magnitude less computing power than pi0 and requires no wrist-mounted camera. This design ensures that NoTVLA's operational accuracy closely approximates that of single-task expert models. Crucially, it also preserves the model's inherent language capabilities, enabling zero-shot generalization in specific scenarios, supporting unified model deployment across multiple robot platforms, and fostering a degree of generalization even when perceiving tasks from novel perspectives.

Paperid: 1826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00076.pdf

Abstract:
While Vision-language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong semantic capabilities, their ability to interpret the underlying geometric structure of visual information is less explored. Pictographic characters, which combine visual form with symbolic structure, provide an ideal test case for this capability. We formulate this visual recognition challenge in the mathematical domain, where each character is represented by an executable program of geometric primitives. This is framed as a program synthesis task, training a VLM to decompile raster images into programs composed of Bézier curves. Our model, acting as a "visual decompiler", demonstrates performance superior to strong zero-shot baselines, including GPT-4o. The most significant finding is that when trained solely on modern Chinese characters, the model is able to reconstruct ancient Oracle Bone Script in a zero-shot context. This generalization provides strong evidence that the model acquires an abstract and transferable geometric grammar, moving beyond pixel-level pattern recognition to a more structured form of visual understanding.

Paperid: 1827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16192.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, reasoning-based MLLMs have achieved a degree of success in generating long-form textual reasoning chains. However, they still struggle with complex tasks that necessitate dynamic and iterative focusing on and revisiting of visual regions to achieve precise grounding of textual reasoning in visual evidence. We introduce \textbf{VLM-R$^3$} (\textbf{V}isual \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{M}odel with \textbf{R}egion \textbf{R}ecognition and \textbf{R}easoning), a framework that equips an MLLM with the ability to (i) decide \emph{when} additional visual evidence is needed, (ii) determine \emph{where} to ground within the image, and (iii) seamlessly weave the relevant sub-image content back into an interleaved chain-of-thought. The core of our method is \textbf{Region-Conditioned Reinforcement Policy Optimization (R-GRPO)}, a training paradigm that rewards the model for selecting informative regions, formulating appropriate transformations (e.g.\ crop, zoom), and integrating the resulting visual context into subsequent reasoning steps. To bootstrap this policy, we compile a modest but carefully curated Visuo-Lingual Interleaved Rationale (VLIR) corpus that provides step-level supervision on region selection and textual justification. Extensive experiments on MathVista, ScienceQA, and other benchmarks show that VLM-R$^3$ sets a new state of the art in zero-shot and few-shot settings, with the largest gains appearing on questions demanding subtle spatial reasoning or fine-grained visual cue extraction.

Paperid: 1828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01341.pdf

Abstract:
Deep neural networks often encounter significant performance drops while facing with domain shifts between training (source) and test (target) data. To address this issue, Test Time Adaptation (TTA) methods have been proposed to adapt pre-trained source model to handle out-of-distribution streaming target data. Although these methods offer some relief, they lack a reliable mechanism for domain shift correction, which can often be erratic in real-world applications. In response, we develop Few-Shot Test Time Adaptation (FS-TTA), a novel and practical setting that utilizes a few-shot support set on top of TTA. Adhering to the principle of few inputs, big gains, FS-TTA reduces blind exploration in unseen target domains. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage framework to tackle FS-TTA, including (i) fine-tuning the pre-trained source model with few-shot support set, along with using feature diversity augmentation module to avoid overfitting, (ii) implementing test time adaptation based on prototype memory bank guidance to produce high quality pseudo-label for model adaptation. Through extensive experiments on three cross-domain classification benchmarks, we demonstrate the superior performance and reliability of our FS-TTA and framework.

Paperid: 1829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11295.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their performance in low-resource language translation, particularly when translating into these languages, remains underexplored. This gap poses significant challenges, as linguistic barriers hinder the cultural preservation and development of minority communities. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel retrieval-based method that enhances translation quality for low-resource languages by focusing on key terms, which involves translating keywords and retrieving corresponding examples from existing data. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments translating from English into three low-resource languages: Cherokee, a critically endangered indigenous language of North America; Tibetan, a historically and culturally significant language in Asia; and Manchu, a language with few remaining speakers. Our comparison with the zero-shot performance of GPT-4o and LLaMA 3.1 405B, highlights the significant challenges these models face when translating into low-resource languages. In contrast, our retrieval-based method shows promise in improving both word-level accuracy and overall semantic understanding by leveraging existing resources more effectively.

Paperid: 1830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23373.pdf

Abstract:
Large Vision-Language Models like CLIP have become a powerful foundation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation due to their strong zero-shot generalization. State-of-the-art methods typically leverage CLIP to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain, then fine-tune the model to learn domain-invariant features. However, these methods attempt to align source and target domains using all pseudo-labeled data simultaneously. This one-shot alignment struggles with noisy, hard-to-classify samples, leading to error propagation and suboptimal feature learning. The problem is even more amplified in the multi-source scenario, where diverse domain gaps and varying noise levels across multiple source domains further destabilize the alignment process. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a progressive alignment strategy for adapting CLIP to unlabeled downstream task. Our method begins by training the model on a high-confidence subset of target samples, allowing it to first learn a well-aligned representation from the most reliable data. As training progresses, it gradually incorporates more challenging samples, guiding the model to refine its understanding without being overwhelmed by initial label noise. This progressive approach effectively mitigates confirmation bias and promotes a more robust convergence, allowing for the learning of genuinely domain-invariant features. We name our approach MP^2A and test it on three popular UDA benchmarks, namely ImageCLEF, Office-Home, and the most challenging DomainNet. Experiments showcase that MP^2A achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared with most recent CLIP-based MS-UDA approaches, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 1831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06937.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) requires agents to navigate to objects specified via open-ended natural language without predefined categories or prior environmental knowledge. While recent methods leverage foundation models or multi-modal maps, they often rely on 2D representations and greedy strategies or require additional training or modules with high computation load, limiting performance in complex environments and real applications. We propose WTRP-Searcher, a novel framework that formulates ZSON as a Weighted Traveling Repairman Problem (WTRP), minimizing the weighted waiting time of viewpoints. Using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), we score viewpoints based on object-description similarity, projected onto a 2D map with depth information. An open-vocabulary detector identifies targets, dynamically updating goals, while a 3D embedding feature map enhances spatial awareness and environmental recall. WTRP-Searcher outperforms existing methods, offering efficient global planning and improved performance in complex ZSON tasks. Code and design will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Paperid: 1832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16754.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid progress and widespread availability of text-to-image (T2I) generative models have heightened concerns about the misuse of AI-generated visuals, particularly in the context of misinformation campaigns. Existing AI-generated image detection (AGID) methods often overfit to known generators and falter on outputs from newer or unseen models. We introduce the Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT2), a comprehensive benchmark of 166,000 images, comprising both real and synthetic prompt-image pairs produced by six state-of-the-art T2I systems: Stable Diffusion 2.1, SDXL, SD3 Medium, SD3.5 Large, DALL.E 3, and Midjourney 6. We curate two distinct subsets: COCOAI, featuring structured captions from MS COCO, and TwitterAI, containing narrative-style tweets from The New York Times. Under a unified zero-shot evaluation, we benchmark 17 leading AGID models and observe alarmingly low detection accuracy, 58% on COCOAI and 58.34% on TwitterAI. To transcend binary classification, we propose the Visual AI Index (VAI), an interpretable, prompt-agnostic realism metric based on twelve low-level visual features, enabling us to quantify and rank the perceptual quality of generated outputs with greater nuance. Correlation analysis reveals a moderate inverse relationship between VAI and detection accuracy: Pearson of -0.532 on COCOAI and -0.503 on TwitterAI, suggesting that more visually realistic images tend to be harder to detect, a trend observed consistently across generators. We release COCOAI, TwitterAI, and all codes to catalyze future advances in generalized AGID and perceptual realism assessment.

Paperid: 1833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20072.pdf

Abstract:
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align model outputs with individual user preferences, a crucial capability for user-centric applications. However, the prevalent approach of fine-tuning a separate module for each user faces two major limitations: (1) storage costs scale linearly with the number of users, rendering the method unscalable; and (2) fine-tuning a static model from scratch often yields suboptimal performance for users with sparse data. To address these challenges, we propose MTA, a Merge-then-Adapt framework for PLLMs. MTA comprises three key stages. First, we construct a shared Meta-LoRA Bank by selecting anchor users and pre-training meta-personalization traits within meta-LoRA modules. Second, to ensure scalability and enable dynamic personalization combination beyond static models, we introduce an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage. This stage retrieves and dynamically merges the most relevant anchor meta-LoRAs to synthesize a user-specific one, thereby eliminating the need for user-specific storage and supporting more flexible personalization. Third, we propose a LoRA Stacking for Few-Shot Personalization stage, which applies an additional ultra-low-rank, lightweight LoRA module on top of the merged LoRA. Fine-tuning this module enables effective personalization under few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods across multiple tasks.

Paperid: 1834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16330.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in model pre-training give rise to task adaptation-based few-shot learning (FSL), where the goal is to adapt a pre-trained task-agnostic model for capturing task-specific knowledge with a few-labeled support samples of the target task.Nevertheless, existing approaches may still fail in the open world due to the inevitable in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) noise from both support and query samples of the target task. With limited support samples available, i) the adverse effect of the dual noises can be severely amplified during task adaptation, and ii) the adapted model can produce unreliable predictions on query samples in the presence of the dual noises. In this work, we propose DEnoised Task Adaptation (DETA++) for reliable FSL. DETA++ uses a Contrastive Relevance Aggregation (CoRA) module to calculate image and region weights for support samples, based on which a clean prototype loss and a noise entropy maximization loss are proposed to achieve noise-robust task adaptation. Additionally,DETA++ employs a memory bank to store and refine clean regions for each inner-task class, based on which a Local Nearest Centroid Classifier (LocalNCC) is devised to yield noise-robust predictions on query samples. Moreover, DETA++ utilizes an Intra-class Region Swapping (IntraSwap) strategy to rectify ID class prototypes during task adaptation, enhancing the model's robustness to the dual noises. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of DETA++.

Paperid: 1835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02480.pdf

Abstract:
High-quality prompts are crucial for eliciting outstanding performance from large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. Existing research has explored model-driven strategies for prompt optimization. However, these methods often suffer from high computational overhead or require strong optimization capabilities from the model itself, which limits their broad applicability.To address these challenges, we propose ORPP (Optimized Role-Playing Prompt),a framework that enhances model performance by optimizing and generating role-playing prompts. The core idea of ORPP is to confine the prompt search space to role-playing scenarios, thereby fully activating the model's intrinsic capabilities through carefully crafted, high-quality role-playing prompts. Specifically, ORPP first performs iterative optimization on a small subset of training samples to generate high-quality role-playing prompts. Then, leveraging the model's few-shot learning capability, it transfers the optimization experience to efficiently generate suitable prompts for the remaining samples.Our experimental results show that ORPP not only matches but in most cases surpasses existing mainstream prompt optimization methods in terms of performance. Notably, ORPP demonstrates superior "plug-and-play" capability. In most cases, it can be integrated with various other prompt methods and further enhance their effectiveness.

Paperid: 1836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17312.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs often need effective configurations, like temperature and reasoning steps, to handle tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning and problem-solving, ranging from joke generation to mathematical reasoning. Existing prompting approaches usually adopt general-purpose, fixed configurations that work 'well enough' across tasks but seldom achieve task-specific optimality. To address this gap, we introduce AdaReasoner, an LLM-agnostic plugin designed for any LLM to automate adaptive reasoning configurations for tasks requiring different types of thinking. AdaReasoner is trained using a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, combining a factorized action space with a targeted exploration strategy, along with a pretrained reward model to optimize the policy model for reasoning configurations with only a few-shot guide. AdaReasoner is backed by theoretical guarantees and experiments of fast convergence and a sublinear policy gap. Across six different LLMs and a variety of reasoning tasks, it consistently outperforms standard baselines, preserves out-of-distribution robustness, and yield gains on knowledge-intensive tasks through tailored prompts.

Paperid: 1837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18469.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world surveillance systems are dynamically evolving, requiring a person Re-identification model to continuously handle newly incoming data from various domains. To cope with these dynamics, Lifelong ReID (LReID) has been proposed to learn and accumulate knowledge across multiple domains incrementally. However, LReID models need to be trained on large-scale labeled data for each unseen domain, which are typically inaccessible due to privacy and cost concerns. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm called Continual Few-shot ReID (CFReID), which requires models to be incrementally trained using few-shot data and tested on all seen domains. Under few-shot conditions, CFREID faces two core challenges: 1) learning knowledge from few-shot data of unseen domain, and 2) avoiding catastrophic forgetting of seen domains. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a Stable Distribution Alignment (SDA) framework from feature distribution perspective. Specifically, our SDA is composed of two modules, i.e., Meta Distribution Alignment (MDA) and Prototype-based Few-shot Adaptation (PFA). To support the study of CFReID, we establish an evaluation benchmark for CFReID on five publicly available ReID datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SDA can enhance the few-shot learning and anti-forgetting capabilities under few-shot conditions. Notably, our approach, using only 5\% of the data, i.e., 32 IDs, significantly outperforms LReID's state-of-the-art performance, which requires 700 to 1,000 IDs.

Paperid: 1838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26514.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model's ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech~(TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by ``operationalism'' that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a ``conductor'', understanding user instructions and generating a textual ``plan'' -- explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the ``orchestra'', then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.

Paperid: 1839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08401.pdf

Abstract:
Inspired by the success of LLMs, GFMs are designed to learn the optimal embedding functions from multi-domain text-attributed graphs for the downstream cross-task generalization capability. Among the diverse architectures, graph VQ-MAE stands out among the increasingly diverse landscape of GFM. This is attributed to its ability to jointly encode topology and textual attributes from multiple domains into discrete embedding spaces with clear semantic boundaries. Despite its potential, domain generalization conflicts cause imperceptible pitfalls. In this paper, we instantiate two of them, and they are just like two sides of the same GFM optimization coin - Side 1 Model Degradation: The encoder and codebook fail to capture the diversity of inputs; Side 2 Representation Collapse: The hidden embedding and codebook vector fail to preserve semantic separability due to constraints from narrow representation subspaces. These two pitfalls (sides) collectively impair the decoder and generate the low-quality reconstructed supervision, causing the GFM optimization dilemma during pre-training (coin). Through empirical investigation, we attribute the above challenges to Information Bottleneck and Regularization Deficit. To address them, we propose MoT - (1) Information Tinker for Two Pitfalls, which utilizes an edge-wise semantic fusion strategy and a mixture-of-codebooks with domain-aware routing to improve information capacity. (2) Regularization Tinker for Optimization Coin, which utilizes two additional regularizations to further improve gradient supervision in our proposed Information Tinker. Notably, as a flexible architecture, MoT adheres to the scaling laws of GFM, offering a controllable model scale. Compared to SOTA baselines, experiments on 22 datasets across 6 domains demonstrate that MoT achieves significant improvements in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 1840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16664.pdf

Abstract:
Training a family of large language models targeting multiple scales and deployment objectives is prohibitively expensive, requiring separate training runs for each different size. Recent work on model compression through pruning and knowledge distillation has reduced this cost; however, this process still incurs hundreds of billions of tokens worth of training cost per compressed model. In this paper, we present Nemotron Elastic, a framework for building reasoning-oriented LLMs, including hybrid Mamba-Attention architectures, that embed multiple nested submodels within a single parent model, each optimized for different deployment configurations and budgets. Each of these submodels shares weights with the parent model and can be extracted zero-shot during deployment without additional training or fine-tuning. We enable this functionality through an end-to-end trained router, tightly coupled to a two-stage training curriculum designed specifically for reasoning models. We additionally introduce group-aware SSM elastification that preserves Mamba's structural constraints, heterogeneous MLP elastification, normalized MSE-based layer importance for improved depth selection, and knowledge distillation enabling simultaneous multi-budget optimization. We apply Nemotron Elastic to the Nemotron Nano V2 12B model, simultaneously producing a 9B and a 6B model using only 110B training tokens; this results in over 360x cost reduction compared to training model families from scratch, and around 7x compared to SoTA compression techniques. Each of the nested models performs on par or better than the SoTA in accuracy. Moreover, unlike other compression methods, the nested capability of our approach allows having a many-in-one reasoning model that has constant deployment memory against the number of models in the family.

Paperid: 1841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05783.pdf

Abstract:
While just-in-time interventions (JITIs) have effectively targeted common health behaviors, individuals often have unique needs to intervene in personal undesirable actions that can negatively affect physical, mental, and social well-being. We present WatchGuardian, a smartwatch-based JITI system that empowers users to define custom interventions for these personal actions with a small number of samples. For the model to detect new actions based on limited new data samples, we developed a few-shot learning pipeline that finetuned a pre-trained inertial measurement unit (IMU) model on public hand-gesture datasets. We then designed a data augmentation and synthesis process to train additional classification layers for customization. Our offline evaluation with 26 participants showed that with three, five, and ten examples, our approach achieved an average accuracy of 76.8%, 84.7%, and 87.7%, and an F1 score of 74.8%, 84.2%, and 87.2% We then conducted a four-hour intervention study to compare WatchGuardian against a rule-based intervention. Our results demonstrated that our system led to a significant reduction by 64.0 +- 22.6% in undesirable actions, substantially outperforming the baseline by 29.0%. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of a customizable, AI-driven JITI system for individuals in need of behavioral intervention in personal undesirable actions. We envision that our work can inspire broader applications of user-defined personalized intervention with advanced AI solutions.

Paperid: 1842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08603.pdf

Abstract:
End-to-end Large Speech Language Models~(\textbf{LSLMs}) demonstrate strong potential in response latency and speech comprehension capabilities, showcasing general intelligence across speech understanding tasks. However, the ability to follow speech instructions has not been fully realized due to the lack of datasets and heavily biased training tasks. Leveraging the rich ASR datasets, previous approaches have used Large Language Models~(\textbf{LLMs}) to continue the linguistic information of speech to construct speech instruction datasets. Yet, due to the gap between LLM-generated results and real human responses, the continuation methods further amplify these shortcomings. Given the high costs of collecting and annotating speech instruction datasets by humans, using speech synthesis to construct large-scale speech instruction datasets has become a balanced and robust alternative. Although modern Text-To-Speech~(\textbf{TTS}) models have achieved near-human-level synthesis quality, it is challenging to appropriately convert out-of-distribution text instruction to speech due to the limitations of the training data distribution in TTS models. To address this issue, we propose a query rewriting framework with multi-LLM knowledge fusion, employing multiple agents to annotate and validate the synthesized speech, making it possible to construct high-quality speech instruction datasets without relying on human annotation. Experiments show that this method can transform text instructions into distributions more suitable for TTS models for speech synthesis through zero-shot rewriting, increasing data usability from 72\% to 93\%. It also demonstrates unique advantages in rewriting tasks that require complex knowledge and context-related abilities.

Paperid: 1843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05128.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Event Detection (ED), the task of identifying event mentions in natural language text without any training data, is critical for document understanding in specialized domains. Understanding the complex event ontology, extracting domain-specific triggers from the passage, and structuring them appropriately overloads and limits the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot ED. To this end, we propose DiCoRe, a divergent-convergent reasoning framework that decouples the task of ED using Dreamer and Grounder. Dreamer encourages divergent reasoning through open-ended event discovery, which helps to boost event coverage. Conversely, Grounder introduces convergent reasoning to align the free-form predictions with the task-specific instructions using finite-state machine guided constrained decoding. Additionally, an LLM-Judge verifies the final outputs to ensure high precision. Through extensive experiments on six datasets across five domains and nine LLMs, we demonstrate how DiCoRe consistently outperforms prior zero-shot, transfer-learning, and reasoning baselines, achieving 4-7% average F1 gains over the best baseline -- establishing DiCoRe as a strong zero-shot ED framework.

Paperid: 1844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17394.pdf

Abstract:
Event Detection (ED) -- the task of identifying event mentions from natural language text -- is critical for enabling reasoning in highly specialized domains such as biomedicine, law, and epidemiology. Data generation has proven to be effective in broadening its utility to wider applications without requiring expensive expert annotations. However, when existing generation approaches are applied to specialized domains, they struggle with label noise, where annotations are incorrect, and domain drift, characterized by a distributional mismatch between generated sentences and the target domain. To address these issues, we introduce SNaRe, a domain-aware synthetic data generation framework composed of three components: Scout, Narrator, and Refiner. Scout extracts triggers from unlabeled target domain data and curates a high-quality domain-specific trigger list using corpus-level statistics to mitigate domain drift. Narrator, conditioned on these triggers, generates high-quality domain-aligned sentences, and Refiner identifies additional event mentions, ensuring high annotation quality. Experimentation on three diverse domain ED datasets reveals how SNaRe outperforms the best baseline, achieving average F1 gains of 3-7% in the zero-shot/few-shot settings and 4-20% F1 improvement for multilingual generation. Analyzing the generated trigger hit rate and human evaluation substantiates SNaRe's stronger annotation quality and reduced domain drift.

Paperid: 1845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18393.pdf

Abstract:
Social media is often the first place where communities discuss the latest societal trends. Prior works have utilized this platform to extract epidemic-related information (e.g. infections, preventive measures) to provide early warnings for epidemic prediction. However, these works only focused on English posts, while epidemics can occur anywhere in the world, and early discussions are often in the local, non-English languages. In this work, we introduce the first multilingual Event Extraction (EE) framework SPEED++ for extracting epidemic event information for a wide range of diseases and languages. To this end, we extend a previous epidemic ontology with 20 argument roles; and curate our multilingual EE dataset SPEED++ comprising 5.1K tweets in four languages for four diseases. Annotating data in every language is infeasible; thus we develop zero-shot cross-lingual cross-disease models (i.e., training only on English COVID data) utilizing multilingual pre-training and show their efficacy in extracting epidemic-related events for 65 diverse languages across different diseases. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can provide epidemic warnings for COVID-19 in its earliest stages in Dec 2019 (3 weeks before global discussions) from Chinese Weibo posts without any training in Chinese. Furthermore, we exploit our framework's argument extraction capabilities to aggregate community epidemic discussions like symptoms and cure measures, aiding misinformation detection and public attention monitoring. Overall, we lay a strong foundation for multilingual epidemic preparedness.

Paperid: 1846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24706.pdf

Abstract:
Virtual Reality (VR) games require players to translate high-level semantic actions into precise device manipulations using controllers and head-mounted displays (HMDs). While humans intuitively perform this translation based on common sense and embodied understanding, whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively replicate this ability remains underexplored. This paper introduces a benchmark, ComboBench, evaluating LLMs' capability to translate semantic actions into VR device manipulation sequences across 262 scenarios from four popular VR games: Half-Life: Alyx, Into the Radius, Moss: Book II, and Vivecraft. We evaluate seven LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, LLaMA-3-8B, Mixtral-8x7B, and GLM-4-Flash, compared against annotated ground truth and human performance. Our results reveal that while top-performing models like Gemini-1.5-Pro demonstrate strong task decomposition capabilities, they still struggle with procedural reasoning and spatial understanding compared to humans. Performance varies significantly across games, suggesting sensitivity to interaction complexity. Few-shot examples substantially improve performance, indicating potential for targeted enhancement of LLMs' VR manipulation capabilities. We release all materials at https://sites.google.com/view/combobench.

Paperid: 1847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17234.pdf

Abstract:
Legal claims refer to the plaintiff's demands in a case and are essential to guiding judicial reasoning and case resolution. While many works have focused on improving the efficiency of legal professionals, the research on helping non-professionals (e.g., plaintiffs) remains unexplored. This paper explores the problem of legal claim generation based on the given case's facts. First, we construct ClaimGen-CN, the first dataset for Chinese legal claim generation task, from various real-world legal disputes. Additionally, we design an evaluation metric tailored for assessing the generated claims, which encompasses two essential dimensions: factuality and clarity. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of state-of-the-art general and legal-domain large language models. Our findings highlight the limitations of the current models in factual precision and expressive clarity, pointing to the need for more targeted development in this domain. To encourage further exploration of this important task, we will make the dataset publicly available.

Paperid: 1848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19432.pdf

Authors:Hao Wu, Yuan Gao, Ruijian Gou, Xian Wu, Chuhan Wu, Huahui Yi, Johannes Brandstetter, Fan Xu, Kun Wang, Penghao Zhao, Hao Jia, Qi Song, Xinliang Liu, Juncai He, Shuhao Cao, Huanshuo Dong, Yanfei Xiang, Fan Zhang, Haixin Wang, Xingjian Shi, Qiufeng Wang, Shuaipeng Li, Ruobing Xie, Feng Tao, Yuxu Lu, Yu Guo, Yuntian Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Qingsong Wen, Wanli Ouyang, Deliang Chen, Xiaomeng Huang

Abstract:
Reliable long-term forecasting of Earth system dynamics is fundamentally limited by instabilities in current artificial intelligence (AI) models during extended autoregressive simulations. These failures often originate from inherent spectral bias, leading to inadequate representation of critical high-frequency, small-scale processes and subsequent uncontrolled error amplification. Inspired by the nested grids in numerical models used to resolve small scales, we present TritonCast. At the core of its design is a dedicated latent dynamical core, which ensures the long-term stability of the macro-evolution at a coarse scale. An outer structure then fuses this stable trend with fine-grained local details. This design effectively mitigates the spectral bias caused by cross-scale interactions. In atmospheric science, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the WeatherBench 2 benchmark while demonstrating exceptional long-term stability: executing year-long autoregressive global forecasts and completing multi-year climate simulations that span the entire available $2500$-day test period without drift. In oceanography, it extends skillful eddy forecast to $120$ days and exhibits unprecedented zero-shot cross-resolution generalization. Ablation studies reveal that this performance stems from the synergistic interplay of the architecture's core components. TritonCast thus offers a promising pathway towards a new generation of trustworthy, AI-driven simulations. This significant advance has the potential to accelerate discovery in climate and Earth system science, enabling more reliable long-term forecasting and deeper insights into complex geophysical dynamics.

Paperid: 1849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03140.pdf

Abstract:
Quantum machine learning for spin and molecular systems faces critical challenges of scarce labeled data and computationally expensive simulations. To address these limitations, we introduce Hamiltonian-Masked Autoencoding (HMAE), a novel self-supervised framework that pre-trains transformers on unlabeled quantum Hamiltonians, enabling efficient few-shot transfer learning. Unlike random masking approaches, HMAE employs a physics-informed strategy based on quantum information theory to selectively mask Hamiltonian terms based on their physical significance. Experiments on 12,500 quantum Hamiltonians (60% real-world, 40% synthetic) demonstrate that HMAE achieves 85.3% $\pm$ 1.5% accuracy in phase classification and 0.15 $\pm$ 0.02 eV MAE in ground state energy prediction with merely 10 labeled examples - a statistically significant improvement (p < 0.01) over classical graph neural networks (78.1% $\pm$ 2.1%) and quantum neural networks (76.8% $\pm$ 2.3%). Our method's primary advantage is exceptional sample efficiency - reducing required labeled examples by 3-5x compared to baseline methods - though we emphasize that ground truth values for fine-tuning and evaluation still require exact diagonalization or tensor networks. We explicitly acknowledge that our current approach is limited to small quantum systems (specifically limited to 12 qubits during training, with limited extension to 16-20 qubits in testing) and that, while promising within this regime, this size restriction prevents immediate application to larger systems of practical interest in materials science and quantum chemistry.

Paperid: 1850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13068.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between deep learning (DL) model accuracy and expert agreement in classifying crash narratives. We evaluate five DL models -- including BERT variants, USE, and a zero-shot classifier -- against expert labels and narratives, and extend the analysis to four large language models (LLMs): GPT-4, LLaMA 3, Qwen, and Claude. Our findings reveal an inverse relationship: models with higher technical accuracy often show lower agreement with human experts, while LLMs demonstrate stronger expert alignment despite lower accuracy. We use Cohen's Kappa and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to quantify and visualize model-expert agreement, and employ SHAP analysis to explain misclassifications. Results show that expert-aligned models rely more on contextual and temporal cues than location-specific keywords. These findings suggest that accuracy alone is insufficient for safety-critical NLP tasks. We argue for incorporating expert agreement into model evaluation frameworks and highlight the potential of LLMs as interpretable tools in crash analysis pipelines.

Paperid: 1851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13518.pdf

Abstract:
Prompting LLMs offers an efficient way to guide output generation without explicit model training. In the e-commerce domain, prompting-based applications are widely used for tasks such as query understanding, recommender systems, and customer support. However, adapting LLMs to different tasks often requires extensive prompt engineering by domain experts, along with frequent updates to align with evolving business needs. Additionally, crafting fully unbiased natural language prompts remains a challenge for humans. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Examples as the Prompt (EaP) which leverages labeled data to enhance prompts. Specifically, EaP automatically selects the most representative examples to maximize the few-shot capability of LLMs. It is efficient due to its unsupervised example selection and adaptive to potential data distribution shifts. We validate EaP on four real-world production use cases, demonstrating that it achieves comparable or even superior performance comparing to hand-crafted prompts designed by domain experts. Additionally, we introduce EaP_lite, which entirely replaces the natural language components of prompts with labeled examples. EaP_lite improves LLM inference speed by up to 70% without compromising performance. Latest online A/B test shows that using EaP and EaP_lite for data labeling can bring significant composite revenue gain by 0.06%.

Paperid: 1852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13260.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs, partly due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. To address this, we propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance: a step is deemed critical if its removal causes a significant increase in perplexity. Our method enables models to focus solely on generating these critical steps. This can be achieved through two approaches: refining demonstration examples in few-shot CoT or fine-tuning the model using selected examples that include only critical steps. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves a better balance between the reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT.

Paperid: 1853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15963.pdf

Abstract:
As one of the most fundamental models, meta learning aims to effectively address few-shot learning challenges. However, it still faces significant issues related to the training data, such as training inefficiencies due to numerous low-contribution tasks in large datasets and substantial noise from incorrect labels. Thus, training data attribution methods are needed for meta learning. However, the dual-layer structure of mata learning complicates the modeling of training data contributions because of the interdependent influence between meta-parameters and task-specific parameters, making existing data influence evaluation tools inapplicable or inaccurate. To address these challenges, based on the influence function, we propose a general data attribution evaluation framework for meta-learning within the bilevel optimization framework. Our approach introduces task influence functions (task-IF) and instance influence functions (instance-IF) to accurately assess the impact of specific tasks and individual data points in closed forms. This framework comprehensively models data contributions across both the inner and outer training processes, capturing the direct effects of data points on meta-parameters as well as their indirect influence through task-specific parameters. We also provide several strategies to enhance computational efficiency and scalability. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in training data evaluation via several downstream tasks.

Paperid: 1854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10581.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we revisit the commonly-cited off-target issue in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT). By carefully designing experiments on different MNMT scenarios and models, we attribute the off-target issue to the overfitting of the shortcuts of (non-centric, centric) language mappings. Specifically, the learned shortcuts biases MNMT to mistakenly translate non-centric languages into the centric language instead of the expected non-centric language for zero-shot translation. Analyses on learning dynamics show that the shortcut learning generally occurs in the later stage of model training, and multilingual pretraining accelerates and aggravates the shortcut learning. Based on these observations, we propose a simple and effective training strategy to eliminate the shortcuts in MNMT models by leveraging the forgetting nature of model training. The only difference from the standard training is that we remove the training instances that may induce the shortcut learning in the later stage of model training. Without introducing any additional data and computational costs, our approach can consistently and significantly improve the zero-shot translation performance by alleviating the shortcut learning for different MNMT models and benchmarks.

Paperid: 1855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12207.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies show LLMs struggle with complex instructions involving multiple constraints (e.g., length, format, sentiment). Existing works address this issue by fine-tuning, which heavily relies on fine-tuning data quality and is computational expensive. An alternative is leveraging LLMs' self-correction to refine responses for better constraint adherence. However, this is limited by the feedback quality, as LLMs cannot generate reliable feedback or detect errors. Moreover, its effectiveness relies on few-shot examples illustrating response modifications. As constraints in complex instructions are diverse, manually crafting such examples for each constraint type can be labor-intensive and sub-optimal. To address these two challenges, we propose the Divide-Verify-Refine (DVR) framework with three steps: (1) Divide complex instructions into single constraints and prepare appropriate tools; (2) Verify responses using tools that provide rigorous check and textual guidance (e.g., Python toolkit for format checks or pre-trained classifiers for content analysis); (3) Refine: To maximize refinement effectiveness, we propose dynamic few-shot prompting, where a refinement repository collects successful refinements, and these examples are selectively retrieved for future refinements. Recognizing the lack of complexity in existing datasets, we create a new dataset of complex instructions. DVR doubles Llama3.1-8B's constraint adherence and triples Mistral-7B's performance.

Paperid: 1856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21965.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring the safety of large language model (LLM) applications is essential for developing trustworthy artificial intelligence. Current LLM safety benchmarks have two limitations. First, they focus solely on either discriminative or generative evaluation paradigms while ignoring their interconnection. Second, they rely on standardized inputs, overlooking the effects of widespread prompting techniques, such as system prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and chain-of-thought prompting. To overcome these issues, we developed SG-Bench, a novel benchmark to assess the generalization of LLM safety across various tasks and prompt types. This benchmark integrates both generative and discriminative evaluation tasks and includes extended data to examine the impact of prompt engineering and jailbreak on LLM safety. Our assessment of 3 advanced proprietary LLMs and 10 open-source LLMs with the benchmark reveals that most LLMs perform worse on discriminative tasks than generative ones, and are highly susceptible to prompts, indicating poor generalization in safety alignment. We also explain these findings quantitatively and qualitatively to provide insights for future research.

Paperid: 1857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20002.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series forecasting in real-world applications such as finance and energy often faces challenges due to limited training data and complex, noisy temporal dynamics. Existing deep forecasting models typically supervise predictions using full-length temporal windows, which include substantial high-frequency noise and obscure long-term trends. Moreover, auxiliary variables containing rich domain-specific information are often underutilized, especially in few-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose LoFT-LLM, a frequency-aware forecasting pipeline that integrates low-frequency learning with semantic calibration via a large language model (LLM). Firstly, a Patch Low-Frequency forecasting Module (PLFM) extracts stable low-frequency trends from localized spectral patches. Secondly, a residual learner then models high-frequency variations. Finally, a fine-tuned LLM refines the predictions by incorporating auxiliary context and domain knowledge through structured natural language prompts. Extensive experiments on financial and energy datasets demonstrate that LoFT-LLM significantly outperforms strong baselines under both full-data and few-shot regimes, delivering superior accuracy, robustness, and interpretability.

Paperid: 1858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12449.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of e-commerce calls for multimodal models that comprehend rich visual and textual product information. Although recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for product understanding exhibit strong capability in representation learning for e-commerce, they still face three challenges: (i) the modality imbalance induced by modality mixed training; (ii) underutilization of the intrinsic alignment relationships among visual and textual information within a product; and (iii) limited handling of noise in e-commerce multimodal data. To address these, we propose MOON2.0, a dynamic modality-balanced multimodal representation learning framework for e-commerce product understanding. MOON2.0 comprises: (1) a Modality-driven Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module that adaptively processes input samples by their modality composition, enabling Multimodal Joint Learning to mitigate the modality imbalance; (2) a Dual-level Alignment method to better leverage semantic alignment properties inside individual products; and (3) an MLLM-based Image-text Co-augmentation strategy that integrates textual enrichment with visual expansion, coupled with Dynamic Sample Filtering to improve training data quality. We further introduce MBE2.0, a co-augmented multimodal representation benchmark for e-commerce representation learning and evaluation. Experiments show that MOON2.0 delivers state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on MBE2.0 and multiple public datasets. Furthermore, attention-based heatmap visualization provides qualitative evidence of improved multimodal alignment of MOON2.0.

Paperid: 1859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11999.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of e-commerce, exploring general representations rather than task-specific ones has attracted increasing research attention. For product understanding, although existing discriminative dual-flow architectures drive progress in this field, they inherently struggle to model the many-to-one alignment between multiple images and texts of products. Therefore, we argue that generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold significant potential for improving product representation learning. Nevertheless, achieving this goal still remains non-trivial due to several key challenges: the lack of multimodal and aspect-aware modeling modules in typical LLMs; the common presence of background noise in product images; and the absence of a standard benchmark for evaluation. To address these issues, we propose the first generative MLLM-based model named MOON for product representation learning. Our method (1) employs a guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module for targeted modeling of multimodal and aspect-specific product content; (2) effectively detects core semantic regions in product images to mitigate the distraction and interference caused by background noise; and (3) introduces the specialized negative sampling strategy to increase the difficulty and diversity of negative samples. In addition, we release a large-scale multimodal benchmark MBE for various product understanding tasks. Experimentally, our model demonstrates competitive zero-shot performance on both our benchmark and the public dataset, showcasing strong generalization across various downstream tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, product classification, and attribute prediction. Furthermore, the case study and visualization illustrate the effectiveness of MOON for product understanding.

Paperid: 1860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02999.pdf

Abstract:
AGENTiGraph is a user-friendly, agent-driven system that enables intuitive interaction and management of domain-specific data through the manipulation of knowledge graphs in natural language. It gives non-technical users a complete, visual solution to incrementally build and refine their knowledge bases, allowing multi-round dialogues and dynamic updates without specialized query languages. The flexible design of AGENTiGraph, including intent classification, task planning, and automatic knowledge integration, ensures seamless reasoning between diverse tasks. Evaluated on a 3,500-query benchmark within an educational scenario, the system outperforms strong zero-shot baselines (achieving 95.12% classification accuracy, 90.45% execution success), indicating potential scalability to compliance-critical or multi-step queries in legal and medical domains, e.g., incorporating new statutes or research on the fly. Our open-source demo offers a powerful new paradigm for multi-turn enterprise knowledge management that bridges LLMs and structured graphs.

Paperid: 1861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16131.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in medical question answering (QA), yet their effectiveness remains predominantly limited to English due to imbalanced multilingual training data and scarce medical resources for low-resource languages. To address this critical language gap in medical QA, we propose Multilingual Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval Ranking (MKG-Rank), a knowledge graph-enhanced framework that enables English-centric LLMs to perform multilingual medical QA. Through a word-level translation mechanism, our framework efficiently integrates comprehensive English-centric medical knowledge graphs into LLM reasoning at a low cost, mitigating cross-lingual semantic distortion and achieving precise medical QA across language barriers. To enhance efficiency, we introduce caching and multi-angle ranking strategies to optimize the retrieval process, significantly reducing response times and prioritizing relevant medical knowledge. Extensive evaluations on multilingual medical QA benchmarks across Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Swahili demonstrate that MKG-Rank consistently outperforms zero-shot LLMs, achieving maximum 35.03% increase in accuracy, while maintaining an average retrieval time of only 0.0009 seconds.

Paperid: 1862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05187.pdf

Abstract:
In online advertising, advertisers commonly utilize auto-bidding services to bid for impression opportunities. A typical objective of the auto-bidder is to optimize the advertiser's cumulative value of winning impressions within specified budget constraints. However, such a problem is challenging due to the complex bidding environment faced by diverse advertisers. To address this challenge, we introduce ABPlanner, a few-shot adaptable budget planner designed to improve budget-constrained auto-bidding. ABPlanner is based on a hierarchical bidding framework that decomposes the bidding process into shorter, manageable stages. Within this framework, ABPlanner allocates the budget across all stages, allowing a low-level auto-bidder to bids based on the budget allocation plan. The adaptability of ABPlanner is achieved through a sequential decision-making approach, inspired by in-context reinforcement learning. For each advertiser, ABPlanner adjusts the budget allocation plan episode by episode, using data from previous episodes as prompt for current decisions. This enables ABPlanner to quickly adapt to different advertisers with few-shot data, providing a sample-efficient solution. Extensive simulation experiments and real-world A/B testing validate the effectiveness of ABPlanner, demonstrating its capability to enhance the cumulative value achieved by auto-bidders.

Paperid: 1863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06735.pdf

Abstract:
Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities in mathematics and logical reasoning tasks. Prior research indicates that LLMs pre-trained with programming language data exhibit high mathematical and reasoning abilities; however, this causal relationship has not been rigorously tested. Our research aims to verify which programming languages and features during pre-training affect logical inference performance. Specifically, we pre-trained decoder-based language models from scratch using datasets from ten programming languages (e.g., Python, C, Java) and three natural language datasets (Wikipedia, Fineweb, C4) under identical conditions. Thereafter, we evaluated the trained models in a few-shot in-context learning setting on logical reasoning tasks: FLD and bAbi, which do not require commonsense or world knowledge. The results demonstrate that nearly all models trained with programming languages consistently outperform those trained with natural languages, indicating that programming languages contain factors that elicit logic inference performance. In addition, we found that models trained with programming languages exhibit a better ability to follow instructions compared to those trained with natural languages. Further analysis reveals that the depth of Abstract Syntax Trees representing parsed results of programs also affects logical reasoning performance. These findings will offer insights into the essential elements of pre-training for acquiring the foundational abilities of LLMs.

Paperid: 1864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06939.pdf

Abstract:
Code repair is a fundamental task in software development, facilitating efficient bug resolution and software maintenance. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in automated code repair, their ability to comprehend and effectively leverage diverse types of feedback remains insufficiently understood. To bridge this gap, we introduce FeedbackEval, a systematic benchmark for evaluating LLMs' feedback comprehension and performance in code repair tasks. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study on five state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5, Gemini-1.5, GLM-4, and Qwen2.5, to evaluate their behavior under both single-iteration and iterative code repair settings. Our results show that structured feedback, particularly in the form of test feedback, leads to the highest repair success rates, while unstructured feedback proves significantly less effective. Iterative feedback further enhances repair performance, though the marginal benefit diminishes after two or three rounds. Moreover, prompt structure is shown to be critical: incorporating docstrings, contextual information, and explicit guidelines substantially improves outcomes, whereas persona-based, chain-of-thought, and few-shot prompting strategies offer limited benefits in single-iteration scenarios. This work introduces a robust benchmark and delivers practical insights to advance the understanding and development of feedback-driven code repair using LLMs.

Paperid: 1865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22240.pdf

Abstract:
Code search is essential for code reuse, allowing developers to efficiently locate relevant code snippets. The advent of powerful decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized many code intelligence tasks. However, their effectiveness for the retrieval-based task of code search, particularly compared to established encoder-based models, remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a large-scale systematic evaluation of eleven decoder-only LLMs, analyzing their performance across zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Our results show that fine-tuned decoder-only models, particularly CodeGemma, significantly outperform encoder-only models like UniXcoder, achieving a 40.4% higher Mean Average Precision (MAP) on the CoSQA$^+$ benchmark. Our analysis further reveals two crucial nuances for practitioners: first, the relationship between model size and performance is non-monotonic, with mid-sized models often outperforming larger variants; second, the composition of the training data is critical, as a multilingual dataset enhances generalization while a small amount of data from a specific language can act as noise and interfere with model effectiveness. These findings offer a comprehensive guide to selecting and optimizing modern LLMs for code search.

Paperid: 1866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00898.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models have emerged as a promising approach for graph learning due to their powerful reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods exhibit systematic performance degradation on structurally important nodes such as bridges and hubs. We identify the root cause of these limitations. Current approaches encode graph topology into static features but lack reasoning scaffolds to transform topological patterns into role-based interpretations. This limitation becomes critical in zero-shot scenarios where no training data establishes structure-semantics mappings. To address this gap, we propose DuoGLM, a training-free dual-perspective framework for structure-aware graph reasoning. The local perspective constructs relation-aware templates capturing semantic interactions between nodes and neighbors. The global perspective performs topology-to-role inference to generate functional descriptions of structural positions. These complementary perspectives provide explicit reasoning mechanisms enabling LLMs to distinguish topologically similar but semantically different nodes. Extensive experiments across eight benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial improvements. DuoGLM achieves 14.3\% accuracy gain in zero-shot node classification and 7.6\% AUC improvement in cross-domain transfer compared to existing methods. The results validate the effectiveness of explicit role reasoning for graph understanding with LLMs.

Paperid: 1867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12087.pdf

Abstract:
Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrates structural connectivity with rich textual semantics, enabling applications in diverse domains. Current methods largely rely on contrastive learning to maximize cross-modal similarity, assuming tighter coupling between graph and text representations improves transfer performance. However, our empirical analysis reveals that both natural gap expansion and forced gap reduction result in performance degradation by disrupting pre-trained knowledge structures and impairing generalization. This arises from the geometric incompatibility between encoders, where graph encoders capture topological patterns, while text encoders capture semantic structures. Over-alignment compresses these distinct spaces into shared subspaces, causing structure collapse that diminishes both topological reasoning and semantic understanding. We propose \textbf{LLM4GTA}, a gap-aware alignment framework that preserves representation gaps as geometric necessities for maintaining modality-specific knowledge and improving transfer performance. LLM4GTA includes an adaptive gap preservation module to prevent over-alignment by monitoring similarity evolution and an intra-modal compensation mechanism that boosts discriminative power using auxiliary classifiers in graph space. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over existing methods in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 1868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12085.pdf

Abstract:
Graph foundation models represent a transformative paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains. Recent methods leverage large language models to unify graph and text modalities into a shared representation space using contrastive learning. However, systematic evaluations reveal significant performance degradation at structural boundaries where distinct topological patterns converge, with accuracy losses exceeding 20 percentage points. This issue arises from a key limitation: current methods assume all graph structures can be encoded within a single Euclidean space. In reality, tree structures require hyperbolic geometry to preserve hierarchical branching, while cyclic patterns depend on spherical geometry for closure properties. At structural boundaries, nodes experience conflicting geometric constraints that uniform encoding spaces cannot resolve. This raises a crucial challenge: \textbf{Can alignment frameworks be designed to respect the intrinsic geometric diversity of graph structures?} We introduce \textbf{GraphShaper}, a geometry-aware framework that enhances graph encoding through multi-geometric specialization. Our approach employs expert networks tailored to different geometric spaces, dynamically computing fusion weights to adaptively integrate geometric properties based on local structural characteristics. This adaptive fusion preserves structural integrity before alignment with text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphShaper achieves 9.47\% accuracy improvements on citation networks and 7.63\% on social networks in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 1869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10571.pdf

Abstract:
Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint illustrates how Agentic AI can deliver trustworthy, modular, and transparent reasoning, and is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. In doing so, we highlight Agentic AI not just as an architecture but as a paradigm for building reliable multi-agent intelligence. agentic ai, orchestrator agent trust, trust orchestration, visual classification, retrieval augmented reasoning

Paperid: 1870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01674.pdf

Abstract:
Despite advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their proficiency in fine-grained video motion understanding remains critically limited. They often lack inter-frame differencing and tend to average or ignore subtle visual cues. Furthermore, while visual prompting has shown potential in static images, its application to video's temporal complexities, particularly for fine-grained motion understanding, remains largely unexplored. We investigate whether inherent capability can be unlocked and boost MLLMs' motion perception and enable distinct visual signatures tailored to decouple object and camera motion cues. In this study, we introduce MotionSight, a novel zero-shot method pioneering object-centric visual spotlight and motion blur as visual prompts to effectively improve fine-grained motion understanding without training. To convert this into valuable data assets, we curated MotionVid-QA, the first large-scale dataset for fine-grained video motion understanding, with hierarchical annotations including SFT and preference data, Î(40K) video clips and Î(87K) QAs. Experiments show MotionSight achieves state-of-the-art open-source performance and competitiveness with commercial models. In particular, for fine-grained motion understanding we present a novel zero-shot technique and a large-scale, high-quality dataset. All the code and annotations will be publicly available.

Paperid: 1871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24511.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting (TSF) is a fundamental and widely studied task, spanning methods from classical statistical approaches to modern deep learning and multimodal language modeling. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often follow a fast thinking paradigm emphasizing pattern extraction and direct value mapping, while overlooking explicit reasoning over temporal dynamics and contextual dependencies. Meanwhile, emerging slow-thinking LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT-o1, DeepSeek-R1) have demonstrated impressive multi-step reasoning capabilities across diverse domains, suggesting a new opportunity for reframing TSF as a structured reasoning task. This motivates a key question: can slow-thinking LLMs effectively reason over temporal patterns to support time series forecasting, even in zero-shot manner? To investigate this, in this paper, we propose TimeReasoner, an extensive empirical study that formulates TSF as a conditional reasoning task. We design a series of prompting strategies to elicit inference-time reasoning from pretrained slow-thinking LLMs and evaluate their performance across diverse TSF benchmarks. Our findings reveal that slow-thinking LLMs exhibit non-trivial zero-shot forecasting capabilities, especially in capturing high-level trends and contextual shifts. While preliminary, our study surfaces important insights into the reasoning behaviors of LLMs in temporal domains highlighting both their potential and limitations. We hope this work catalyzes further research into reasoning-based forecasting paradigms and paves the way toward more interpretable and generalizable TSF frameworks.

Paperid: 1872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20419.pdf

Abstract:
Automation in agriculture plays a vital role in addressing challenges related to crop monitoring and disease management, particularly through early detection systems. This study investigates the effectiveness of combining multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for automated plant disease classification using leaf imagery. Leveraging the PlantVillage dataset, we systematically evaluate model performance across zero-shot, few-shot, and progressive fine-tuning scenarios. A comparative analysis between GPT-4o and the widely used ResNet-50 model was conducted across three resolutions (100, 150, and 256 pixels) and two plant species (apple and corn). Results indicate that fine-tuned GPT-4o models achieved slightly better performance compared to the performance of ResNet-50, achieving up to 98.12% classification accuracy on apple leaf images, compared to 96.88% achieved by ResNet-50, with improved generalization and near-zero training loss. However, zero-shot performance of GPT-4o was significantly lower, underscoring the need for minimal training. Additional evaluations on cross-resolution and cross-plant generalization revealed the models' adaptability and limitations when applied to new domains. The findings highlight the promise of integrating multimodal LLMs into automated disease detection pipelines, enhancing the scalability and intelligence of precision agriculture systems while reducing the dependence on large, labeled datasets and high-resolution sensor infrastructure. Large Language Models, Vision Language Models, LLMs and CNNs, Disease Detection with Vision Language Models, VLMs

Paperid: 1873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18738.pdf

Abstract:
This review provides a systematic analysis of comprehensive survey of 3D object detection with vision-language models(VLMs) , a rapidly advancing area at the intersection of 3D vision and multimodal AI. By examining over 100 research papers, we provide the first systematic analysis dedicated to 3D object detection with vision-language models. We begin by outlining the unique challenges of 3D object detection with vision-language models, emphasizing differences from 2D detection in spatial reasoning and data complexity. Traditional approaches using point clouds and voxel grids are compared to modern vision-language frameworks like CLIP and 3D LLMs, which enable open-vocabulary detection and zero-shot generalization. We review key architectures, pretraining strategies, and prompt engineering methods that align textual and 3D features for effective 3D object detection with vision-language models. Visualization examples and evaluation benchmarks are discussed to illustrate performance and behavior. Finally, we highlight current challenges, such as limited 3D-language datasets and computational demands, and propose future research directions to advance 3D object detection with vision-language models. >Object Detection, Vision-Language Models, Agents, VLMs, LLMs, AI

Paperid: 1874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13772.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Integrating various modality encoders further expands their capabilities, giving rise to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that process not only text but also visual and auditory modality inputs. However, these advanced capabilities may also pose significant security risks, as models can be exploited to generate harmful or inappropriate content through jailbreak attack. While prior work has extensively explored how manipulating textual or visual modality inputs can circumvent safeguards in LLMs and MLLMs, the vulnerability of audio-specific Jailbreak on Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{Jailbreak-AudioBench}, which consists of the Toolbox, curated Dataset, and comprehensive Benchmark. The Toolbox supports not only text-to-audio conversion but also various editing techniques for injecting audio hidden semantics. The curated Dataset provides diverse explicit and implicit jailbreak audio examples in both original and edited forms. Utilizing this dataset, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art LALMs and establish the most comprehensive Jailbreak benchmark to date for audio modality. Finally, Jailbreak-AudioBench establishes a foundation for advancing future research on LALMs safety alignment by enabling the in-depth exposure of more powerful jailbreak threats, such as query-based audio editing, and by facilitating the development of effective defense mechanisms.

Paperid: 1875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09656.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning-based image generation has undergone a paradigm shift since 2021, marked by fundamental architectural breakthroughs and computational innovations. Through reviewing architectural innovations and empirical results, this paper analyzes the transition from traditional generative methods to advanced architectures, with focus on compute-efficient diffusion models and vision transformer architectures. We examine how recent developments in Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and consistency models have redefined the capabilities and performance boundaries of image synthesis, while addressing persistent challenges in efficiency and quality. Our analysis focuses on the evolution of latent space representations, cross-attention mechanisms, and parameter-efficient training methodologies that enable accelerated inference under resource constraints. While more efficient training methods enable faster inference, advanced control mechanisms like ControlNet and regional attention systems have simultaneously improved generation precision and content customization. We investigate how enhanced multi-modal understanding and zero-shot generation capabilities are reshaping practical applications across industries. Our analysis demonstrates that despite remarkable advances in generation quality and computational efficiency, critical challenges remain in developing resource-conscious architectures and interpretable generation systems for industrial applications. The paper concludes by mapping promising research directions, including neural architecture optimization and explainable generation frameworks.

Paperid: 1876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11285.pdf

Abstract:
Currently, deep learning-based instance segmentation for various applications (e.g., Agriculture) is predominantly performed using a labor-intensive process involving extensive field data collection using sophisticated sensors, followed by careful manual annotation of images, presenting significant logistical and financial challenges to researchers and organizations. The process also slows down the model development and training process. In this study, we presented a novel method for deep learning-based instance segmentation of apples in commercial orchards that eliminates the need for labor-intensive field data collection and manual annotation. Utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM), we synthetically generated orchard images and automatically annotated them using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) integrated with a YOLO11 base model. This method significantly reduces reliance on physical sensors and manual data processing, presenting a major advancement in "Agricultural AI". The synthetic, auto-annotated dataset was used to train the YOLO11 model for Apple instance segmentation, which was then validated on real orchard images. The results showed that the automatically generated annotations achieved a Dice Coefficient of 0.9513 and an IoU of 0.9303, validating the accuracy and overlap of the mask annotations. All YOLO11 configurations, trained solely on these synthetic datasets with automated annotations, accurately recognized and delineated apples, highlighting the method's efficacy. Specifically, the YOLO11m-seg configuration achieved a mask precision of 0.902 and a mask mAP@50 of 0.833 on test images collected from a commercial orchard. Additionally, the YOLO11l-seg configuration outperformed other models in validation on 40 LLM-generated images, achieving the highest mask precision and mAP@50 metrics. Keywords: YOLO, SAM, SAMv2, YOLO11, YOLOv11, Segment Anything, YOLO-SAM

Paperid: 1877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12474.pdf

Abstract:
In cross-domain few-shot classification (CFC), recent works mainly focus on adapting a simple transformation head on top of a frozen pre-trained backbone with few labeled data to project embeddings into a task-specific metric space where classification can be performed by measuring similarities between image instance and prototype representations. Technically, an assumption implicitly adopted in such a framework is that the prototype and image instance embeddings share the same representation transformation. However, in this paper, we find that there naturally exists a gap, which resembles the modality gap, between the prototype and image instance embeddings extracted from the frozen pre-trained backbone, and simply applying the same transformation during the adaptation phase constrains exploring the optimal representations and shrinks the gap between prototype and image representations. To solve this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, contrastive prototype-image adaptation (CoPA), to adapt different transformations respectively for prototypes and images similarly to CLIP by treating prototypes as text prompts. Extensive experiments on Meta-Dataset demonstrate that CoPA achieves the state-of-the-art performance more efficiently. Meanwhile, further analyses also indicate that CoPA can learn better representation clusters, enlarge the gap, and achieve minimal validation loss at the enlarged gap.

Paperid: 1878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08602.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated content. Existing approaches both zero-shot methods and supervised classifiers largely conceptualize this task as a binary classification problem, often leading to poor generalization across domains and models. In this paper, we argue that such a binary formulation fundamentally mischaracterizes the detection task by assuming a coherent representation of human-written texts. In reality, human texts do not constitute a unified distribution, and their diversity cannot be effectively captured through limited sampling. This causes previous classifiers to memorize observed OOD characteristics rather than learn the essence of `non-ID' behavior, limiting generalization to unseen human-authored inputs. Based on this observation, we propose reframing the detection task as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem, treating human-written texts as distributional outliers while machine-generated texts are in-distribution (ID) samples. To this end, we develop a detection framework using one-class learning method including DeepSVDD and HRN, and score-based learning techniques such as energy-based method, enabling robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of our OOD-based approach. Specifically, the OOD-based method achieves 98.3% AUROC and AUPR with only 8.9% FPR95 on DeepFake dataset. Moreover, we test our detection framework on multilingual, attacked, and unseen-model and -domain text settings, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of our framework. Code, pretrained weights, and demo will be released.

Paperid: 1879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03951.pdf

Abstract:
The introduction of negative labels (NLs) has proven effective in enhancing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. However, existing methods often lack an understanding of OOD images, making it difficult to construct an accurate negative space. In addition, the presence of false negative labels significantly degrades their near-OOD performance. To address these issues, we propose shaping an Adaptive Negative Textual Space (ANTS) by leveraging the understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we identify images likely to be OOD samples as negative images and prompt the MLLM to describe these images, generating expressive negative sentences that precisely characterize the OOD distribution and enhance far-OOD detection. For the near-OOD setting, where OOD samples resemble the in-distribution (ID) subset, we first identify the subset of ID classes that are visually similar to negative images and then leverage the reasoning capability of MLLMs to generate visually similar negative labels tailored to this subset, effectively reducing false negatives and improving near-OOD detection. To balance these two types of negative textual spaces, we design an adaptive weighted score that enables the method to handle different OOD task settings (near-OOD and far-OOD) without relying on task-specific prior knowledge, making it highly adaptable in open environments. On the ImageNet benchmark, our ANTS significantly reduces the FPR95 by 4.2\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our method is training-free and zero-shot, enabling high scalability.

Paperid: 1880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07395.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great potential in general robotic decision-making tasks via imitation learning. However, the variable quality of training data often constrains the performance of these models. On the other hand, offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) excels at learning robust policy models from mixed-quality data. In this paper, we introduce Reinforced robot GPT (ReinboT), a novel end-to-end VLA model that integrates the RL principle of maximizing cumulative reward. ReinboT achieves a deeper understanding of the data quality distribution by predicting dense returns that capture the nuances of manipulation tasks. The dense return prediction capability enables the robot to generate more robust decision-making actions, oriented towards maximizing future benefits. Extensive experiments show that ReinboT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CALVIN mixed-quality dataset and exhibits superior few-shot learning and out-of-distribution generalization capabilities in real-world tasks.

Paperid: 1881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19291.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become a cornerstone in multimodal intelligence. However, recent studies discovered that CLIP can only encode one aspect of the feature space, leading to substantial information loss and indistinctive features. To mitigate this issue, this paper introduces a novel strategy that fine-tunes a series of complementary CLIP models and transforms them into a CLIP-MoE. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic Diversified Multiplet Upcycling (DMU) framework for CLIP. Instead of training multiple CLIP models from scratch, DMU leverages a pre-trained CLIP and fine-tunes it into a diverse set with highly cost-effective multistage contrastive learning, thus capturing distinct feature subspaces efficiently. To fully exploit these fine-tuned models while minimizing computational overhead, we transform them into a CLIP-MoE, which dynamically activates a subset of CLIP experts, achieving an effective balance between model capacity and computational cost. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of CLIP-MoE across various zero-shot retrieval, zero-shot image classification tasks, and downstream Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) benchmarks when used as a vision encoder.

Paperid: 1882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10298.pdf

Abstract:
Deciphering how visual stimuli are transformed into cortical responses is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. This visual-to-neural mapping is inherently a one-to-many relationship, as identical visual inputs reliably evoke variable hemodynamic responses across trials, contexts, and subjects. However, existing deterministic methods struggle to simultaneously model this biological variability while capturing the underlying functional consistency that encodes stimulus information. To address these limitations, we propose SynBrain, a generative framework that simulates the transformation from visual semantics to neural responses in a probabilistic and biologically interpretable manner. SynBrain introduces two key components: (i) BrainVAE models neural representations as continuous probability distributions via probabilistic learning while maintaining functional consistency through visual semantic constraints; (ii) A Semantic-to-Neural Mapper acts as a semantic transmission pathway, projecting visual semantics into the neural response manifold to facilitate high-fidelity fMRI synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that SynBrain surpasses state-of-the-art methods in subject-specific visual-to-fMRI encoding performance. Furthermore, SynBrain adapts efficiently to new subjects with few-shot data and synthesizes high-quality fMRI signals that are effective in improving data-limited fMRI-to-image decoding performance. Beyond that, SynBrain reveals functional consistency across trials and subjects, with synthesized signals capturing interpretable patterns shaped by biological neural variability. The code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 1883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22039.pdf

Abstract:
While anomaly detection has made significant progress, generating detailed analyses that incorporate industrial knowledge remains a challenge. To address this gap, we introduce OmniAD, a novel framework that unifies anomaly detection and understanding for fine-grained analysis. OmniAD is a multimodal reasoner that combines visual and textual reasoning processes. The visual reasoning provides detailed inspection by leveraging Text-as-Mask Encoding to perform anomaly detection through text generation without manually selected thresholds. Following this, Visual Guided Textual Reasoning conducts comprehensive analysis by integrating visual perception. To enhance few-shot generalization, we employ an integrated training strategy that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (GRPO), incorporating three sophisticated reward functions. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniAD achieves a performance of 79.1 on the MMAD benchmark, surpassing models such as Qwen2.5-VL-7B and GPT-4o. It also shows strong results across multiple anomaly detection benchmarks. These results highlight the importance of enhancing visual perception for effective reasoning in anomaly understanding. All codes and models will be publicly available.

Paperid: 1884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21911.pdf

Abstract:
Personalized image generation aims to integrate user-provided concepts into text-to-image models, enabling the generation of customized content based on a given prompt. Recent zero-shot approaches, particularly those leveraging diffusion transformers, incorporate reference image information through multi-modal attention mechanism. This integration allows the generated output to be influenced by both the textual prior from the prompt and the visual prior from the reference image. However, we observe that when the prompt and reference image are misaligned, the generated results exhibit a stronger bias toward the textual prior, leading to a significant loss of reference content. To address this issue, we propose AlignGen, a Cross-Modality Prior Alignment mechanism that enhances personalized image generation by: 1) introducing a learnable token to bridge the gap between the textual and visual priors, 2) incorporating a robust training strategy to ensure proper prior alignment, and 3) employing a selective cross-modal attention mask within the multi-modal attention mechanism to further align the priors. Experimental results demonstrate that AlignGen outperforms existing zero-shot methods and even surpasses popular test-time optimization approaches.

Paperid: 1885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04905.pdf

Abstract:
Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL), which aims to localize objects by only using image-level labels, has attracted much attention because of its low annotation cost in real applications. Current studies focus on the Class Activation Map (CAM) of CNN and the self-attention map of transformer to identify the region of objects. However, both CAM and self-attention maps can not learn pixel-level fine-grained information on the foreground objects, which hinders the further advance of WSOL. To address this problem, we initiatively leverage the capability of zero-shot generalization and fine-grained segmentation in Segment Anything Model (SAM) to boost the activation of integral object regions. Further, to alleviate the semantic ambiguity issue accrued in single point prompt-based SAM, we propose an innovative mask prompt to SAM (Pro2SAM) network with grid points for WSOL task. First, we devise a Global Token Transformer (GTFormer) to generate a coarse-grained foreground map as a flexible mask prompt, where the GTFormer jointly embeds patch tokens and novel global tokens to learn foreground semantics. Secondly, we deliver grid points as dense prompts into SAM to maximize the probability of foreground mask, which avoids the lack of objects caused by a single point/box prompt. Finally, we propose a pixel-level similarity metric to come true the mask matching from mask prompt to SAM, where the mask with the highest score is viewed as the final localization map. Experiments show that the proposed Pro2SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC, with 84.03\% and 66.85\% Top-1 Loc, respectively.

Paperid: 1886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20313.pdf

Abstract:
This work challenges the residual prediction paradigm in visual autoregressive modeling and presents FlexVAR, a new Flexible Visual AutoRegressive image generation paradigm. FlexVAR facilitates autoregressive learning with ground-truth prediction, enabling each step to independently produce plausible images. This simple, intuitive approach swiftly learns visual distributions and makes the generation process more flexible and adaptable. Trained solely on low-resolution images ($\leq$ 256px), FlexVAR can: (1) Generate images of various resolutions and aspect ratios, even exceeding the resolution of the training images. (2) Support various image-to-image tasks, including image refinement, in/out-painting, and image expansion. (3) Adapt to various autoregressive steps, allowing for faster inference with fewer steps or enhancing image quality with more steps. Our 1.0B model outperforms its VAR counterpart on the ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark. Moreover, when zero-shot transfer the image generation process with 13 steps, the performance further improves to 2.08 FID, outperforming state-of-the-art autoregressive models AiM/VAR by 0.25/0.28 FID and popular diffusion models LDM/DiT by 1.52/0.19 FID, respectively. When transferring our 1.0B model to the ImageNet 512$\times$512 benchmark in a zero-shot manner, FlexVAR achieves competitive results compared to the VAR 2.3B model, which is a fully supervised model trained at 512$\times$512 resolution.

Paperid: 1887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13550.pdf

Abstract:
Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales has proven effective for improving the performance of large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, applying such techniques to structured tasks, such as text-to-SQL, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Self-Taught Reasoner for text-to-SQL (STaR-SQL), a novel approach that reframes SQL query generation as a reasoning-driven process. Our method prompts the LLM to produce detailed reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes. Unlike traditional methods, STaR-SQL dedicates additional test-time computation to reasoning, thereby positioning LLMs as spontaneous reasoners rather than mere prompt-based agents. To further scale the inference process, we incorporate an outcome-supervised reward model (ORM) as a verifier, which enhances SQL query accuracy. Experimental results on the challenging Spider benchmark demonstrate that STaR-SQL significantly improves text-to-SQL performance, achieving an execution accuracy of 86.6%. This surpasses a few-shot baseline by 31.6% and a baseline fine-tuned to predict answers directly by 18.0%. Additionally, STaR-SQL outperforms agent-like prompting methods that leverage more powerful yet closed-source models such as GPT-4. These findings underscore the potential of reasoning-augmented training for structured tasks and open the door to extending self-improving reasoning models to text-to-SQL generation and beyond.

Paperid: 1888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19142.pdf

Abstract:
Recent works in 3D multimodal learning have made remarkable progress. However, typically 3D multimodal models are only capable of handling point clouds. Compared to the emerging 3D representation technique, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), the spatially sparse point cloud cannot depict the texture information of 3D objects, resulting in inferior reconstruction capabilities. This limitation constrains the potential of point cloud-based 3D multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we present CLIP-GS, a novel multimodal representation learning framework grounded in 3DGS. We introduce the GS Tokenizer to generate serialized gaussian tokens, which are then processed through transformer layers pre-initialized with weights from point cloud models, resulting in the 3DGS embeddings. CLIP-GS leverages contrastive loss between 3DGS and the visual-text embeddings of CLIP, and we introduce an image voting loss to guide the directionality and convergence of gradient optimization. Furthermore, we develop an efficient way to generate triplets of 3DGS, images, and text, facilitating CLIP-GS in learning unified multimodal representations. Leveraging the well-aligned multimodal representations, CLIP-GS demonstrates versatility and outperforms point cloud-based models on various 3D tasks, including multimodal retrieval, zero-shot, and few-shot classification.

Paperid: 1889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04997.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP is a foundational multimodal model that aligns image and text features into a shared representation space via contrastive learning on large-scale image-text pairs. Its effectiveness primarily stems from the use of natural language as rich supervision. Motivated by the remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs), this work explores how LLMs' superior text understanding and extensive open-world knowledge can enhance CLIP's capability, especially for processing longer and more complex image captions. We propose an efficient post-training strategy that integrates LLMs into pretrained CLIP. To address the challenge posed by the autoregressive nature of LLMs, we introduce a caption-to-caption contrastive fine-tuning framework, significantly enhancing the discriminative quality of LLM outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms LoRA-based methods, achieving nearly fourfold faster training with superior performance. Furthermore, we validate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art models such as CLIP, EVA02, and SigLip2 across various zero-shot multimodal retrieval tasks, cross-lingual retrieval tasks, and multimodal language model pretraining.

Paperid: 1890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11560.pdf

Abstract:
Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) endeavors to identify the unseen categories using knowledge from the seen domain, necessitating the intrinsic interactions between the visual features and attribute semantic features. However, GZSL suffers from insufficient visual-semantic correspondences due to the attribute diversity and instance diversity. Attribute diversity refers to varying semantic granularity in attribute descriptions, ranging from low-level (specific, directly observable) to high-level (abstract, highly generic) characteristics. This diversity challenges the collection of adequate visual cues for attributes under a uni-granularity. Additionally, diverse visual instances corresponding to the same sharing attributes introduce semantic ambiguity, leading to vague visual patterns. To tackle these problems, we propose a multi-granularity progressive semantic-visual mutual adaption (PSVMA+) network, where sufficient visual elements across granularity levels can be gathered to remedy the granularity inconsistency. PSVMA+ explores semantic-visual interactions at different granularity levels, enabling awareness of multi-granularity in both visual and semantic elements. At each granularity level, the dual semantic-visual transformer module (DSVTM) recasts the sharing attributes into instance-centric attributes and aggregates the semantic-related visual regions, thereby learning unambiguous visual features to accommodate various instances. Given the diverse contributions of different granularities, PSVMA+ employs selective cross-granularity learning to leverage knowledge from reliable granularities and adaptively fuses multi-granularity features for comprehensive representations. Experimental results demonstrate that PSVMA+ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 1891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04410.pdf

Abstract:
The Open-MAGVIT2 project produces an open-source replication of Google's MAGVIT-v2 tokenizer, a tokenizer with a super-large codebook (i.e., $2^{18}$ codes), and achieves the state-of-the-art reconstruction performance on ImageNet and UCF benchmarks. We also provide a tokenizer pre-trained on large-scale data, significantly outperforming Cosmos on zero-shot benchmarks (1.93 vs. 0.78 rFID on ImageNet original resolution). Furthermore, we explore its application in plain auto-regressive models to validate scalability properties, producing a family of auto-regressive image generation models ranging from 300M to 1.5B. To assist auto-regressive models in predicting with a super-large vocabulary, we factorize it into two sub-vocabulary of different sizes by asymmetric token factorization, and further introduce ``next sub-token prediction'' to enhance sub-token interaction for better generation quality. We release all models and codes to foster innovation and creativity in the field of auto-regressive visual generation.

Paperid: 1892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18699.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have yielded remarkable improvements in naturalness and intelligibility. Building on these achievements, research has increasingly shifted toward enhancing the expressiveness of generated speech, such as dialectal and emotional TTS. However, cross-style synthesis combining both dialect and emotion remains challenging and largely unexplored, mainly due to the scarcity of dialectal data with emotional labels. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Expressive Vector (HE-Vector), a two-stage method for Emotional Dialectal TTS. In the first stage, we construct different task vectors to model dialectal and emotional styles independently, and then enhance single-style synthesis by adjusting their weights, a method we refer to as Expressive Vector (E-Vector). For the second stage, we hierarchically integrate these vectors to achieve controllable emotionally expressive dialect synthesis without requiring jointly labeled data, corresponding to Hierarchical Expressive Vector (HE-Vector). Experimental results demonstrate that HE-Vectors achieve superior performance in dialect synthesis, and promising results in synthesizing emotionally expressive dialectal speech in a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 1893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11984.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained glomerular subtyping is central to kidney biopsy interpretation, but clinically valuable labels are scarce and difficult to obtain. Existing computational pathology approaches instead tend to evaluate coarse diseased classification under full supervision with image-only models, so it remains unclear how vision-language models (VLMs) should be adapted for clinically meaningful subtyping under data constraints. In this work, we model fine-grained glomerular subtyping as a clinically realistic few-shot problem and systematically evaluate both pathology-specialized and general-purpose vision-language models under this setting. We assess not only classification performance (accuracy, AUC, F1) but also the geometry of the learned representations, examining feature alignment between image and text embeddings and the separability of glomerular subtypes. By jointly analyzing shot count, model architecture and domain knowledge, and adaptation strategy, this study provides guidance for future model selection and training under real clinical data constraints. Our results indicate that pathology-specialized vision-language backbones, when paired with the vanilla fine-tuning, are the most effective starting point. Even with only 4-8 labeled examples per glomeruli subtype, these models begin to capture distinctions and show substantial gains in discrimination and calibration, though additional supervision continues to yield incremental improvements. We also find that the discrimination between positive and negative examples is as important as image-text alignment. Overall, our results show that supervision level and adaptation strategy jointly shape both diagnostic performance and multimodal structure, providing guidance for model selection, adaptation strategies, and annotation investment.

Paperid: 1894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25996.pdf

Abstract:
Sparsity-aware training is an effective approach for transforming large language models (LLMs) into hardware-friendly sparse patterns, thereby reducing latency and memory consumption during inference. In this paper, we propose Continuous Adaptive Sparse Trainer (CAST), a fully continuous and differentiable sparsity-aware training framework for semi-structured (or "N:M") sparse models. Unlike previous approaches that optimize sparsity patterns and weights separately, CAST enables seamless joint optimization during training, while progressively transforming the model into the desired sparsity format. Specifically, CAST introduces three key components: 1) AdamS, a sparsity-aware optimizer that leverages adaptive L1 decay to promote uniform sparsification across all parameters; 2) Weight Scaling, a module designed to mitigate the magnitude reduction caused by decay while preserving desired sparsity patterns; 3) Knowledge Distillation, which employs the dense model as a self-teacher to enhance training efficiency. We evaluate CAST under 2:4 sparsity patterns across multiple model families, ranging from 125M to 13B parameters. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods in both perplexity and zero-shot accuracy with minimal training resources. Notably, on LLaMA2-7B, our 2:4 sparse model achieves a negligible perplexity increase of 0.09 and a 0.36% gain in zero-shot accuracy compared to the dense model using only 2% of the original pretraining tokens. Additionally, we establish an accurate and robust empirical scaling law to predict sparse model performance given adequate training resources. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our sparse models by evaluating them under quantization and fine-tuning scenarios.

Paperid: 1895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24629.pdf

Abstract:
While emotional text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress, most existing research remains limited to utterance-level emotional expression and fails to support word-level control. Achieving word-level expressive control poses fundamental challenges, primarily due to the complexity of modeling multi-emotion transitions and the scarcity of annotated datasets that capture intra-sentence emotional and prosodic variation. In this paper, we propose WeSCon, the first self-training framework that enables word-level control of both emotion and speaking rate in a pretrained zero-shot TTS model, without relying on datasets containing intra-sentence emotion or speed transitions. Our method introduces a transition-smoothing strategy and a dynamic speed control mechanism to guide the pretrained TTS model in performing word-level expressive synthesis through a multi-round inference process. To further simplify the inference, we incorporate a dynamic emotional attention bias mechanism and fine-tune the model via self-training, thereby activating its ability for word-level expressive control in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that WeSCon effectively overcomes data scarcity, achieving state-of-the-art performance in word-level emotional expression control while preserving the strong zero-shot synthesis capabilities of the original TTS model.

Paperid: 1896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15960.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown considerable potential in digital pathology, yet their effectiveness remains limited for fine-grained, disease-specific classification tasks such as distinguishing between glomerular subtypes. The subtle morphological variations among these subtypes, combined with the difficulty of aligning visual patterns with precise clinical terminology, make automated diagnosis in renal pathology particularly challenging. In this work, we explore how large pretrained VLMs can be effectively adapted to perform fine-grained glomerular classification, even in scenarios where only a small number of labeled examples are available. In this work, we introduce Glo-VLMs, a systematic framework designed to explore the adaptation of VLMs to fine-grained glomerular classification in data-constrained settings. Our approach leverages curated pathology images alongside clinical text prompts to facilitate joint image-text representation learning for nuanced renal pathology subtypes. By assessing various VLMs architectures and adaptation strategies under a few-shot learning paradigm, we explore how both the choice of method and the amount of labeled data impact model performance in clinically relevant scenarios. To ensure a fair comparison, we evaluate all models using standardized multi-class metrics, aiming to clarify the practical requirements and potential of large pretrained models for specialized clinical research applications. As a result, fine-tuning the VLMs achieved 0.7416 accuracy, 0.9045 macro-AUC, and 0.5277 F1-score with only 8 shots per class, demonstrating that even with highly limited supervision, foundation models can be effectively adapted for fine-grained medical image classification.

Paperid: 1897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15751.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: Recent developments in computational pathology have been driven by advances in Vision Foundation Models, particularly the Segment Anything Model (SAM). This model facilitates nuclei segmentation through two primary methods: prompt-based zero-shot segmentation and the use of cell-specific SAM models for direct segmentation. These approaches enable effective segmentation across a range of nuclei and cells. However, general vision foundation models often face challenges with fine-grained semantic segmentation, such as identifying specific nuclei subtypes or particular cells. Approach: In this paper, we propose the molecular-empowered All-in-SAM Model to advance computational pathology by leveraging the capabilities of vision foundation models. This model incorporates a full-stack approach, focusing on: (1) annotation-engaging lay annotators through molecular-empowered learning to reduce the need for detailed pixel-level annotations, (2) learning-adapting the SAM model to emphasize specific semantics, which utilizes its strong generalizability with SAM adapter, and (3) refinement-enhancing segmentation accuracy by integrating Molecular-Oriented Corrective Learning (MOCL). Results: Experimental results from both in-house and public datasets show that the All-in-SAM model significantly improves cell classification performance, even when faced with varying annotation quality. Conclusions: Our approach not only reduces the workload for annotators but also extends the accessibility of precise biomedical image analysis to resource-limited settings, thereby advancing medical diagnostics and automating pathology image analysis.

Paperid: 1898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21738.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific samples from a trained model. A key challenge in this process is over-unlearning, where the model's performance on the remaining data significantly drops due to the change in the model's parameters. Existing unlearning algorithms depend on the remaining data to prevent this issue. As such, these methods are inapplicable in a more practical scenario, where only the unlearning samples are available (i.e., zero-shot unlearning). This paper presents a novel framework, ZS-PAG, to fill this gap. Our approach offers three key innovations: (1) we approximate the inaccessible remaining data by generating adversarial samples; (2) leveraging the generated samples, we pinpoint a specific subspace to perform the unlearning process, therefore preventing over-unlearning in the challenging zero-shot scenario; and (3) we consider the influence of the unlearning process on the remaining samples and design an influence-based pseudo-labeling strategy. As a result, our method further improves the model's performance after unlearning. The proposed method holds a theoretical guarantee, and experiments on various benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method over several baselines.

Paperid: 1899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20834.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the rising prevalence of neural language models, recent empirical evidence suggests their deficiency in compositional generalization. One of the current de-facto solutions to this problem is compositional data augmentation, which aims to introduce additional compositional inductive bias. However, existing handcrafted augmentation strategies offer limited improvement when systematic generalization of neural language models requires multi-grained compositional bias (i.e., not limited to either lexical or structural biases alone) or when training sentences have an imbalanced difficulty distribution. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel compositional augmentation strategy called Component Substitution (CompSub), which enables multi-grained composition of substantial substructures across the entire training set. Furthermore, we introduce the Learning Component Substitution (LCS) framework. This framework empowers the learning of component substitution probabilities in CompSub in an end-to-end manner by maximizing the loss of neural language models, thereby prioritizing challenging compositions with elusive concepts and novel contexts. We extend the key ideas of CompSub and LCS to the recently emerging in-context learning scenarios of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), proposing the LCS-ICL algorithm to enhance the few-shot compositional generalization of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. Theoretically, we provide insights into why applying our algorithms to language models can improve compositional generalization performance. Empirically, our results on four standard compositional generalization benchmarks(SCAN, COGS, GeoQuery, and COGS-QL) demonstrate the superiority of CompSub, LCS, and LCS-ICL, with improvements of up to 66.5%, 10.3%, 1.4%, and 8.8%, respectively.

Paperid: 1900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02571.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art retrieval models typically address a straightforward search scenario, in which retrieval tasks are fixed (e.g., finding a passage to answer a specific question) and only a single modality is supported for both queries and retrieved results. This paper introduces techniques for advancing information retrieval with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling a broader search scenario, termed universal multimodal retrieval, where multiple modalities and diverse retrieval tasks are accommodated. To this end, we first study fine-tuning an MLLM as a bi-encoder retriever on 10 datasets with 16 retrieval tasks. Our empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLM retriever is capable of understanding challenging queries, composed of both text and image, but it underperforms compared to a smaller CLIP retriever in cross-modal retrieval tasks due to the modality bias exhibited by MLLMs. To address the issue, we propose modality-aware hard negative mining to mitigate the modality bias exhibited by MLLM retrievers. Second, we propose continuously fine-tuning the universal multimodal retriever to enhance its text retrieval capability while preserving multimodal retrieval capability. As a result, our model, MM-Embed, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multimodal retrieval benchmark M-BEIR, which spans multiple domains and tasks, while also surpassing the state-of-the-art text retrieval model, NV-Embed-v1, on the MTEB retrieval benchmark. We also explore prompting the off-the-shelf MLLMs as zero-shot rerankers to refine the ranking of the candidates from the multimodal retriever. We find that, through prompt-and-reranking, MLLMs can further improve multimodal retrieval when the user queries (e.g., text-image composed queries) are more complex and challenging to understand. These findings also pave the way for advancing universal multimodal retrieval in the future.

Paperid: 1901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23693.pdf

Abstract:
In the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, privacy protection has become crucial, giving rise to machine unlearning. Machine unlearning is a technique that removes specific data influences from trained models without the need for extensive retraining. However, it faces several key challenges, including accurately implementing unlearning, ensuring privacy protection during the unlearning process, and achieving effective unlearning without significantly compromising model performance. This paper presents a novel approach to machine unlearning by employing Layer-wise Relevance Analysis and Neuronal Path Perturbation. We address three primary challenges: the lack of detailed unlearning principles, privacy guarantees in zero-shot unlearning scenario, and the balance between unlearning effectiveness and model utility. Our method balances machine unlearning performance and model utility by identifying and perturbing highly relevant neurons, thereby achieving effective unlearning. By using data not present in the original training set during the unlearning process, we satisfy the zero-shot unlearning scenario and ensure robust privacy protection. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively removes targeted data from the target unlearning model while maintaining the model's utility, offering a practical solution for privacy-preserving machine learning.

Paperid: 1902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09472.pdf

Abstract:
While automated audio captioning (AAC) has made notable progress, traditional fully supervised AAC models still face two critical challenges: the need for expensive audio-text pair data for training and performance degradation when transferring across domains. To overcome these limitations, we present DRCap, a data-efficient and flexible zero-shot audio captioning system that requires text-only data for training and can quickly adapt to new domains without additional fine-tuning. DRCap integrates a contrastive language-audio pre-training (CLAP) model and a large-language model (LLM) as its backbone. During training, the model predicts the ground-truth caption with a fixed text encoder from CLAP, whereas, during inference, the text encoder is replaced with the audio encoder to generate captions for audio clips in a zero-shot manner. To mitigate the modality gap of the CLAP model, we use both the projection strategy from the encoder side and the retrieval-augmented generation strategy from the decoder side. Specifically, audio embeddings are first projected onto a text embedding support to absorb extensive semantic information within the joint multi-modal space of CLAP. At the same time, similar captions retrieved from a datastore are fed as prompts to instruct the LLM, incorporating external knowledge to take full advantage of its strong generative capability. Conditioned on both the projected CLAP embedding and the retrieved similar captions, the model is able to produce a more accurate and semantically rich textual description. By tailoring the text embedding support and the caption datastore to the target domain, DRCap acquires a robust ability to adapt to new domains in a training-free manner. Experimental results demonstrate that DRCap outperforms all other zero-shot models in in-domain scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-domain scenarios.

Paperid: 1903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04265.pdf

Abstract:
Creativity has long been considered one of the most difficult aspect of human intelligence for AI to mimic. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, has raised questions about whether AI can match or even surpass human creativity. We present CREATIVITY INDEX as the first step to quantify the linguistic creativity of a text by reconstructing it from existing text snippets on the web. CREATIVITY INDEX is motivated by the hypothesis that the seemingly remarkable creativity of LLMs may be attributable in large part to the creativity of human-written texts on the web. To compute CREATIVITY INDEX efficiently, we introduce DJ SEARCH, a novel dynamic programming algorithm that can search verbatim and near-verbatim matches of text snippets from a given document against the web. Experiments reveal that the CREATIVITY INDEX of professional human authors is on average 66.2% higher than that of LLMs, and that alignment reduces the CREATIVITY INDEX of LLMs by an average of 30.1%. In addition, we find that distinguished authors like Hemingway exhibit measurably higher CREATIVITY INDEX compared to other human writers. Finally, we demonstrate that CREATIVITY INDEX can be used as a surprisingly effective criterion for zero-shot machine text detection, surpassing the strongest existing zero-shot system, DetectGPT, by a significant margin of 30.2%, and even outperforming the strongest supervised system, GhostBuster, in five out of six domains.

Paperid: 1904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12717.pdf

Abstract:
Built upon vector quantization (VQ), discrete audio codec models have achieved great success in audio compression and auto-regressive audio generation. However, existing models face substantial challenges in perceptual quality and signal distortion, especially when operating in extremely low bandwidth, rooted in the sensitivity of the VQ codebook to noise. This degradation poses significant challenges for several downstream tasks, such as codec-based speech synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel VQ method, Normal Distribution-based Vector Quantization (NDVQ), by introducing an explicit margin between the VQ codes via learning a variance. Specifically, our approach involves mapping the waveform to a latent space and quantizing it by selecting the most likely normal distribution, with each codebook entry representing a unique normal distribution defined by its mean and variance. Using these distribution-based VQ codec codes, a decoder reconstructs the input waveform. NDVQ is trained with additional distribution-related losses, alongside reconstruction and discrimination losses. Experiments demonstrate that NDVQ outperforms existing audio compression baselines, such as EnCodec, in terms of audio quality and zero-shot TTS, particularly in very low bandwidth scenarios.

Paperid: 1905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11940.pdf

Abstract:
Discovering governing equations from scientific data is crucial for understanding the evolution of systems, and is typically framed as a search problem within a candidate equation space. However, the high-dimensional nature of dynamical systems leads to an exponentially expanding equation space, making the search process extremely challenging. The visual perception and pre-trained scientific knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLM) hold promise for providing effective navigation in high-dimensional equation spaces. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot method based on MLLM for automatically discovering physical coordinates and governing equations from high-dimensional data. Specifically, we design a series of enhanced visual prompts for MLLM to enhance its spatial perception. In addition, MLLM's domain knowledge is employed to navigate the search process within the equation space. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two representative types of systems demonstrate that the proposed method effectively discovers the physical coordinates and equations from both simulated and real experimental data, with long-term extrapolation accuracy improved by approximately 26.96% compared to the baseline.

Paperid: 1906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01697.pdf

Abstract:
As the demand for high-quality data in model training grows, researchers and developers are increasingly generating synthetic data to tune and train LLMs. However, current data generation methods rely on seed sets containing tens of thousands of examples to prompt instruction-tuned models. This reliance can be especially problematic when the curation of high-quality examples is expensive or difficult. In this paper we explore the novel few-shot synthetic data generation setting -- generating a high-quality dataset from a few examples. We show that when working with only a few seed examples, instruction-tuned models used in current synthetic data methods produce insufficient diversity for downstream tasks. In contrast, we show that base models without post-training, largely untapped for synthetic data generation, offer substantially greater output diversity, albeit with lower instruction following abilities. Leveraging this insight, we propose Base-Refine (BARE), a novel two-stage method that combines the diversity of base models with the quality assurance of instruction-tuned models. BARE excels in few-shot synthetic data generation: using only 3 seed examples it generates diverse, high-quality datasets that significantly improve downstream task performance. We show that fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B with 1,000 BARE-generated samples achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art similarly sized models on LiveCodeBench tasks. Furthermore, data generated with BARE enables a 101% improvement for a fine-tuned Llama 3.2 1B on GSM8K over data generated by only instruction-models, and an 18.4% improvement for a fine-tuned Llama 3.1 8B over the state-of-the-art RAFT method for RAG data generation.

Paperid: 1907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18447.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding a driver's behavior and intentions is important for potential risk assessment and early accident prevention. Safety and driver assistance systems can be tailored to individual drivers' behavior, significantly enhancing their effectiveness. However, existing datasets are limited in describing and explaining general vehicle movements based on external visual evidence. This paper introduces a benchmark, PDB-Eval, for a detailed understanding of Personalized Driver Behavior, and aligning Large Multimodal Models (MLLMs) with driving comprehension and reasoning. Our benchmark consists of two main components, PDB-X and PDB-QA. PDB-X can evaluate MLLMs' understanding of temporal driving scenes. Our dataset is designed to find valid visual evidence from the external view to explain the driver's behavior from the internal view. To align MLLMs' reasoning abilities with driving tasks, we propose PDB-QA as a visual explanation question-answering task for MLLM instruction fine-tuning. As a generic learning task for generative models like MLLMs, PDB-QA can bridge the domain gap without harming MLLMs' generalizability. Our evaluation indicates that fine-tuning MLLMs on fine-grained descriptions and explanations can effectively bridge the gap between MLLMs and the driving domain, which improves zero-shot performance on question-answering tasks by up to 73.2%. We further evaluate the MLLMs fine-tuned on PDB-X in Brain4Cars' intention prediction and AIDE's recognition tasks. We observe up to 12.5% performance improvements on the turn intention prediction task in Brain4Cars, and consistent performance improvements up to 11.0% on all tasks in AIDE.

Paperid: 1908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15476.pdf

Abstract:
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) typically require extensive domain-specific conversational datasets, yet high costs, privacy concerns, and data-collection challenges severely limit their availability. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot recommendation capabilities, practical applications often favor smaller, internally managed recommender models due to scalability, interpretability, and data privacy constraints, especially in sensitive or rapidly evolving domains. However, training these smaller models effectively still demands substantial domain-specific conversational data, which remains challenging to obtain. To address these limitations, we propose an active data augmentation framework that synthesizes conversational training data by leveraging black-box LLMs guided by active learning techniques. Specifically, our method utilizes publicly available non-conversational domain data, including item metadata, user reviews, and collaborative signals, as seed inputs. By employing active learning strategies to select the most informative seed samples, our approach efficiently guides LLMs to generate synthetic, semantically coherent conversational interactions tailored explicitly to the target domain. Extensive experiments validate that conversational data generated by our proposed framework significantly improves the performance of LLM-based CRS models, effectively addressing the challenges of building CRS in no- or low-resource scenarios.

Paperid: 1909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16125.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular data synthesis is crucial in machine learning, yet existing general methods-primarily based on statistical or deep learning models-are highly data-dependent and often fall short in recommender systems. This limitation arises from their difficulty in capturing complex distributions and understanding feature relationships from sparse and limited data, along with their inability to grasp semantic feature relations. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in generating synthetic data samples through few-shot learning and semantic understanding. However, they often suffer from inconsistent distribution and lack of diversity due to their inherent distribution disparity with the target dataset. To address these challenges and enhance tabular data synthesis for recommendation tasks, we propose a novel two-stage framework named SampleLLM to improve the quality of LLM-based tabular data synthesis for recommendations by ensuring better distribution alignment. In the first stage, SampleLLM employs LLMs with Chain-of-Thought prompts and diverse exemplars to generate data that closely aligns with the target dataset distribution, even when input samples are limited. The second stage uses an advanced feature attribution-based importance sampling method to refine feature relationships within the synthesized data, reducing any distribution biases introduced by the LLM. Experimental results on three recommendation datasets, two general datasets, and online deployment illustrate that SampleLLM significantly surpasses existing methods for recommendation tasks and holds promise for a broader range of tabular data scenarios.

Paperid: 1910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00304.pdf

Abstract:
In recent times, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been trained under two predominant paradigms. Generative training has enabled Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle various complex tasks, yet issues such as hallucinations and weak object discrimination persist. Discriminative training, exemplified by models like CLIP, excels in zero-shot image-text classification and retrieval, yet struggles with complex scenarios requiring fine-grained semantic differentiation. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a unified approach that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. Considering interleaved image-text sequences as the general format of input samples, we introduce a structure-induced training strategy that imposes semantic relationships between input samples and the MLLM's hidden state. This approach enhances the MLLM's ability to capture global semantics and distinguish fine-grained semantics. By leveraging dynamic sequence alignment within the Dynamic Time Warping framework and integrating a novel kernel for fine-grained semantic differentiation, our method effectively balances generative and discriminative tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple generative tasks, especially those requiring cognitive and discrimination abilities. Additionally, our method surpasses discriminative benchmarks in interleaved and fine-grained retrieval tasks. By employing a retrieval-augmented generation strategy, our approach further enhances performance in some generative tasks within one model, offering a promising direction for future research in vision-language modeling.

Paperid: 1911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06324.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to document-based tasks - such as document summarization, question answering, and information extraction - where user requirements focus on retrieving information from provided documents rather than relying on the model's parametric knowledge, ensuring the trustworthiness and interpretability of these systems has become a critical concern. A central approach to addressing this challenge is attribution, which involves tracing the generated outputs back to their source documents. However, since LLMs can produce inaccurate or imprecise responses, it is crucial to assess the reliability of these citations. To tackle this, our work proposes two techniques. (1) A zero-shot approach that frames attribution as a straightforward textual entailment task. Our method using flan-ul2 demonstrates an improvement of 0.27% and 2.4% over the best baseline of ID and OOD sets of AttributionBench, respectively. (2) We also explore the role of the attention mechanism in enhancing the attribution process. Using a smaller LLM, flan-t5-small, the F1 scores outperform the baseline across almost all layers except layer 4 and layers 8 through 11.

Paperid: 1912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17787.pdf

Authors:Anton Obukhov, Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi, Ripudaman Singh Arora, Jaime Spencer, Chris Russell, Simon Hadfield, Richard Bowden, Shuaihang Wang, Zhenxin Ma, Weijie Chen, Baobei Xu, Fengyu Sun, Di Xie, Jiang Zhu, Mykola Lavreniuk, Haining Guan, Qun Wu, Yupei Zeng, Chao Lu, Huanran Wang, Guangyuan Zhou, Haotian Zhang, Jianxiong Wang, Qiang Rao, Chunjie Wang, Xiao Liu, Zhiqiang Lou, Hualie Jiang, Yihao Chen, Rui Xu, Minglang Tan, Zihan Qin, Yifan Mao, Jiayang Liu, Jialei Xu, Yifan Yang, Wenbo Zhao, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu, Mingshuai Zhao, Anlong Ming, Wu Chen, Feng Xue, Mengying Yu, Shida Gao, Xiangfeng Wang, Gbenga Omotara, Ramy Farag, Jacket Demby, Seyed Mohamad Ali Tousi, Guilherme N DeSouza, Tuan-Anh Yang, Minh-Quang Nguyen, Thien-Phuc Tran, Albert Luginov, Muhammad Shahzad

Abstract:
This paper presents the results of the fourth edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC), which focuses on zero-shot generalization to the SYNS-Patches benchmark, a dataset featuring challenging environments in both natural and indoor settings. In this edition, we revised the evaluation protocol to use least-squares alignment with two degrees of freedom to support disparity and affine-invariant predictions. We also revised the baselines and included popular off-the-shelf methods: Depth Anything v2 and Marigold. The challenge received a total of 24 submissions that outperformed the baselines on the test set; 10 of these included a report describing their approach, with most leading methods relying on affine-invariant predictions. The challenge winners improved the 3D F-Score over the previous edition's best result, raising it from 22.58% to 23.05%.

Paperid: 1913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16584.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in audio tokenization have significantly enhanced the integration of audio capabilities into large language models (LLMs). However, audio understanding and generation are often treated as distinct tasks, hindering the development of truly unified audio-language models. While instruction tuning has demonstrated remarkable success in improving generalization and zero-shot learning across text and vision, its application to audio remains largely unexplored. A major obstacle is the lack of comprehensive datasets that unify audio understanding and generation. To address this, we introduce Audio-FLAN, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset covering 80 diverse tasks across speech, music, and sound domains, with over 100 million instances. Audio-FLAN lays the foundation for unified audio-language models that can seamlessly handle both understanding (e.g., transcription, comprehension) and generation (e.g., speech, music, sound) tasks across a wide range of audio domains in a zero-shot manner. The Audio-FLAN dataset is available on HuggingFace and GitHub and will be continuously updated.

Paperid: 1914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00874.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) based embedding models have established new state-of-the-art benchmarks for text embedding tasks, particularly in dense vector-based retrieval. However, these models predominantly focus on English, leaving multilingual embedding capabilities largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we present LUSIFER, a novel zero-shot approach that adapts LLM-based embedding models for multilingual tasks without requiring multilingual supervision. LUSIFER's architecture combines a multilingual encoder, serving as a language-universal learner, with an LLM-based embedding model optimized for embedding-specific tasks. These components are seamlessly integrated through a minimal set of trainable parameters that act as a connector, effectively transferring the multilingual encoder's language understanding capabilities to the specialized embedding model. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate multilingual embedding performance, we introduce a new benchmark encompassing 5 primary embedding tasks, 123 diverse datasets, and coverage across 14 languages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LUSIFER significantly enhances the multilingual performance across various embedding tasks, particularly for medium and low-resource languages, without requiring explicit multilingual training data.

Paperid: 1915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09908.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in parameter-efficient transfer learning have demonstrated the utility of composing LoRA adapters from libraries of pretrained modules. However, most existing approaches rely on simple retrieval heuristics or uniform averaging, which overlook the latent structure of task relationships in representation space. We propose a new framework for adapter reuse that moves beyond retrieval, formulating adapter composition as a geometry-aware sparse reconstruction problem. Specifically, we represent each task by a latent prototype vector derived from the base model's encoder and aim to approximate the target task prototype as a sparse linear combination of retrieved reference prototypes, under an $\ell_1$-regularized optimization objective. The resulting combination weights are then used to blend the corresponding LoRA adapters, yielding a composite adapter tailored to the target task. This formulation not only preserves the local geometric structure of the task representation manifold, but also promotes interpretability and efficient reuse by selecting a minimal set of relevant adapters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple domains-including medical image segmentation, medical report generation and image synthesis. Our results highlight the benefit of coupling retrieval with latent geometry-aware optimization for improved zero-shot generalization.

Paperid: 1916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00046.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical decision-making reflects diverse strategies shaped by regional patient populations and institutional protocols. However, most existing medical artificial intelligence (AI) models are trained on highly prevalent data patterns, which reinforces biases and fails to capture the breadth of clinical expertise. Inspired by the recent advances in Mixture of Experts (MoE), we propose a Mixture of Multicenter Experts (MoME) framework to address AI bias in the medical domain without requiring data sharing across institutions. MoME integrates specialized expertise from diverse clinical strategies to enhance model generalizability and adaptability across medical centers. We validate this framework using a multimodal target volume delineation model for prostate cancer radiotherapy. With few-shot training that combines imaging and clinical notes from each center, the model outperformed baselines, particularly in settings with high inter-center variability or limited data availability. Furthermore, MoME enables model customization to local clinical preferences without cross-institutional data exchange, making it especially suitable for resource-constrained settings while promoting broadly generalizable medical AI.

Paperid: 1917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13884.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools with the potential to benefit society immensely, yet, they have demonstrated biases that perpetuate societal inequalities. Despite significant advancements in bias mitigation techniques using data augmentation, zero-shot prompting, and model fine-tuning, biases continuously persist, including subtle biases that may elude human detection. Recent research has shown a growing interest in multi-LLM approaches, which have been demonstrated to be effective in improving the quality of reasoning and factuality in LLMs. Building on this approach, we propose a novel multi-LLM debiasing framework aimed at reducing bias in LLMs. Our work is the first to introduce and evaluate two distinct approaches within this framework for debiasing LLMs: a centralized method, where the conversation is facilitated by a single central LLM, and a decentralized method, where all models communicate directly. Our findings reveal that our multi-LLM framework significantly reduces bias in LLMs, outperforming the baseline method across several social groups.

Paperid: 1918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21984.pdf

Abstract:
Text-prompted foundation models for medical image segmentation offer an intuitive way to delineate anatomical structures from natural language queries, but their predictions often lack spatial precision and degrade under domain shift. In contrast, visual-prompted models achieve strong segmentation performance across diverse modalities by leveraging spatial cues of precise bounding-box (bbox) prompts to guide the segmentation of target lesions. However, it is costly and challenging to obtain the precise visual prompts in clinical practice. We propose PPBoost (Progressive Prompt-Boosting), a framework that bridges these limitations by transforming weak text-derived signals into strong, spatially grounded visual prompts, operating under a strict zero-shot regime with no image- or pixel-level segmentation labels. PPBoost first uses a vision-language model to produce initial pseudo-bboxes conditioned on the textual object descriptions and applies an uncertainty-aware criterion to filter unreliable predictions. The retained image-bboxes pairs are then leveraged to train a pseudo-labeled detector, producing the high-quality bboxes for the query images. During inference, PPBoost further refines the generated bboxes by appropriately expanding them to tightly cover the target anatomical structures. The enhanced spatially-grounding bbox prompts guide existing segmentation models to generate final dense masks, effectively amplifying weak text cues into strong spatial guidance. Across three datasets spanning diverse modalities and anatomies, PPBoost consistently improves Dice and Normalized Surface Distance over text- and visual-prompted baselines and, notably, surpasses few-shot segmentation models without using labeled data. PPBoost can generalize to multiple typical visual segmentation model backbones.

Paperid: 1919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01261.pdf

Abstract:
Role-play has become a key testbed for generative models, expanding from text-only dialogue to multimodal interaction. Extending role-play to speech captures prosody, emotion, and delivery, but also poses new evaluation challenges. Current pipelines often use audio large language models (ALLMs) as zero-shot judges, which miss paralinguistic cues, collapse multiple aspects into coarse scores, and rely on synthetic speech references that fail to reflect real-world roles. We present Speech-DRAME, a unified framework that contributes at three levels: (i) Speech-DRAME-EvalBench, an evaluation benchmark with bilingual human-annotated data and protocols for training and testing speech evaluation models (SEMs), (ii) DRAME-Eval, a fine-tuned evaluation model, which substantially outperforms zero-shot and few-shot ALLMs, and (iii) Speech-DRAME-RoleBench, a speech role-play benchmark that leverages DRAME-Eval as an automatic judge to compare speech foundation models (SFMs). Speech-DRAME distinguishes between two complementary evaluation strategies: Archetype Evaluation, a top-down approach measuring adherence to broad role archetypes, and Realism Evaluation, a bottom-up approach grounded in real human speech that emphasizes nuanced role quality. Compared to zero-shot ALLM judges, DRAME-Eval achieves stronger agreement with human ratings (Pearson correlation from 0.480 to 0.629 in archetypes, and 0.390 to 0.625 in realism). By integrating transparent benchmark resources, modeling approaches, and system-level evaluation, Speech-DRAME provides the first comprehensive, reproducible foundation for assessing spoken role-play.

Paperid: 1920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03998.pdf

Abstract:
Successful group meetings, such as those implemented in group behavioral-change programs, work meetings, and other social contexts, must promote individual goal setting and execution while strengthening the social relationships within the group. Consequently, an ideal facilitator must be sensitive to the subtle dynamics of disengagement, difficulties with individual goal setting and execution, and interpersonal difficulties that signal a need for intervention. The challenges and cognitive load experienced by facilitators create a critical gap for an embodied technology that can interpret social exchanges while remaining aware of the needs of the individuals in the group and providing transparent recommendations that go beyond powerful but "black box" foundation models (FMs) that identify social cues. We address this important demand with a social robot co-facilitator that analyzes multimodal meeting data and provides discreet cues to the facilitator. The robot's reasoning is powered by an agentic concept bottleneck model (CBM), which makes decisions based on human-interpretable concepts like participant engagement and sentiments, ensuring transparency and trustworthiness. Our core contribution is a transfer learning framework that distills the broad social understanding of an FM into our specialized and transparent CBM. This concept-driven system significantly outperforms direct zero-shot FMs in predicting the need for intervention and enables real-time human correction of its reasoning. Critically, we demonstrate robust knowledge transfer: the model generalizes across different groups and successfully transfers the expertise of senior human facilitators to improve the performance of novices. By transferring an expert's cognitive model into an interpretable robotic partner, our work provides a powerful blueprint for augmenting human capabilities in complex social domains.

Paperid: 1921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11540.pdf

Abstract:
Depth estimation is a fundamental task in 3D computer vision, crucial for applications such as 3D reconstruction, free-viewpoint rendering, robotics, autonomous driving, and AR/VR technologies. Traditional methods relying on hardware sensors like LiDAR are often limited by high costs, low resolution, and environmental sensitivity, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent advances in vision-based methods offer a promising alternative, yet they face challenges in generalization and stability due to either the low-capacity model architectures or the reliance on domain-specific and small-scale datasets. The emergence of scaling laws and foundation models in other domains has inspired the development of "depth foundation models": deep neural networks trained on large datasets with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. This paper surveys the evolution of deep learning architectures and paradigms for depth estimation across the monocular, stereo, multi-view, and monocular video settings. We explore the potential of these models to address existing challenges and provide a comprehensive overview of large-scale datasets that can facilitate their development. By identifying key architectures and training strategies, we aim to highlight the path towards robust depth foundation models, offering insights into their future research and applications.

Paperid: 1922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10352.pdf

Abstract:
Recent zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems face a common dilemma: autoregressive (AR) models suffer from slow generation and lack duration controllability, while non-autoregressive (NAR) models lack temporal modeling and typically require complex designs. In this paper, we introduce a novel pseudo-autoregressive (PAR) codec language modeling approach that unifies AR and NAR modeling. Combining explicit temporal modeling from AR with parallel generation from NAR, PAR generates dynamic-length spans at fixed time steps. Building on PAR, we propose PALLE, a two-stage TTS system that leverages PAR for initial generation followed by NAR refinement. In the first stage, PAR progressively generates speech tokens along the time dimension, with each step predicting all positions in parallel but only retaining the left-most span. In the second stage, low-confidence tokens are iteratively refined in parallel, leveraging the global contextual information. Experiments demonstrate that PALLE, trained on LibriTTS, outperforms state-of-the-art systems trained on large-scale data, including F5-TTS, E2-TTS, and MaskGCT, on the LibriSpeech test-clean set in terms of speech quality, speaker similarity, and intelligibility, while achieving up to ten times faster inference speed. Audio samples are available at https://microsoft.com/research/project/vall-e-x/palle.

Paperid: 1923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07776.pdf

Abstract:
We propose DiTFlow, a method for transferring the motion of a reference video to a newly synthesized one, designed specifically for Diffusion Transformers (DiT). We first process the reference video with a pre-trained DiT to analyze cross-frame attention maps and extract a patch-wise motion signal called the Attention Motion Flow (AMF). We guide the latent denoising process in an optimization-based, training-free, manner by optimizing latents with our AMF loss to generate videos reproducing the motion of the reference one. We also apply our optimization strategy to transformer positional embeddings, granting us a boost in zero-shot motion transfer capabilities. We evaluate DiTFlow against recently published methods, outperforming all across multiple metrics and human evaluation.

Paperid: 1924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11630.pdf

Abstract:
The neural codec language model (CLM) has demonstrated remarkable performance in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, troubled by ``recency bias", CLM lacks sufficient attention to coarse-grained information at a higher temporal scale, often producing unnatural or even unintelligible speech. This work proposes CoFi-Speech, a coarse-to-fine CLM-TTS approach, employing multi-scale speech coding and generation to address this issue. We train a multi-scale neural codec, CoFi-Codec, to encode speech into a multi-scale discrete representation, comprising multiple token sequences with different time resolutions. Then, we propose CoFi-LM that can generate this representation in two modes: the single-LM-based chain-of-scale generation and the multiple-LM-based stack-of-scale generation. In experiments, CoFi-Speech significantly outperforms single-scale baseline systems on naturalness and speaker similarity in zero-shot TTS. The analysis of multi-scale coding demonstrates the effectiveness of CoFi-Codec in learning multi-scale discrete speech representations while keeping high-quality speech reconstruction. The coarse-to-fine multi-scale generation, especially for the stack-of-scale approach, is also validated as a crucial approach in pursuing a high-quality neural codec language model for TTS.

Paperid: 1925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13644.pdf

Abstract:
Dexterous manipulation is challenging because it requires understanding how subtle hand motion influences the environment through contact with objects. We introduce DexWM, a Dexterous Manipulation World Model that predicts the next latent state of the environment conditioned on past states and dexterous actions. To overcome the scarcity of dexterous manipulation datasets, DexWM is trained on over 900 hours of human and non-dexterous robot videos. To enable fine-grained dexterity, we find that predicting visual features alone is insufficient; therefore, we introduce an auxiliary hand consistency loss that enforces accurate hand configurations. DexWM outperforms prior world models conditioned on text, navigation, and full-body actions, achieving more accurate predictions of future states. DexWM also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to unseen manipulation skills when deployed on a Franka Panda arm equipped with an Allegro gripper, outperforming Diffusion Policy by over 50% on average in grasping, placing, and reaching tasks.

Paperid: 1926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21760.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have enabled unified reasoning across images, audio, and video, but extending such capability to brain imaging remains largely unexplored. Bridging this gap is essential to link neural activity with semantic cognition and to develop cross-modal brain representations. To this end, we present fMRI-LM, a foundational model that bridges functional MRI (fMRI) and language through a three-stage framework. In Stage 1, we learn a neural tokenizer that maps fMRI into discrete tokens embedded in a language-consistent space. In Stage 2, a pretrained LLM is adapted to jointly model fMRI tokens and text, treating brain activity as a sequence that can be temporally predicted and linguistically described. To overcome the lack of natural fMRI-text pairs, we construct a large descriptive corpus that translates diverse imaging-based features into structured textual descriptors, capturing the low-level organization of fMRI signals. In Stage 3, we perform multi-task, multi-paradigm instruction tuning to endow fMRI-LM with high-level semantic understanding, supporting diverse downstream applications. Across various benchmarks, fMRI-LM achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot performance, and adapts efficiently with parameter-efficient tuning (LoRA), establishing a scalable pathway toward a language-aligned, universal model for structural and semantic understanding of fMRI.

Paperid: 1927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15795.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot segmentation capabilities across natural image domains, but it struggles to generalize to the unique challenges of remote sensing data, such as complex terrain, multi-scale objects, and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce TASAM, a terrain and temporally-aware extension of SAM designed specifically for high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation. TASAM integrates three lightweight yet effective modules: a terrain-aware adapter that injects elevation priors, a temporal prompt generator that captures land-cover changes over time, and a multi-scale fusion strategy that enhances fine-grained object delineation. Without retraining the SAM backbone, our approach achieves substantial performance gains across three remote sensing benchmarks-LoveDA, iSAID, and WHU-CD-outperforming both zero-shot SAM and task-specific models with minimal computational overhead. Our results highlight the value of domain-adaptive augmentation for foundation models and offer a scalable path toward more robust geospatial segmentation.

Paperid: 1928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15373.pdf

Abstract:
Mapping and understanding complex 3D environments is fundamental to how autonomous systems perceive and interact with the physical world, requiring both precise geometric reconstruction and rich semantic comprehension. While existing 3D semantic mapping systems excel at reconstructing and identifying predefined object instances, they lack the flexibility to efficiently build semantic maps with open-vocabulary during online operation. Although recent vision-language models have enabled open-vocabulary object recognition in 2D images, they haven't yet bridged the gap to 3D spatial understanding. The critical challenge lies in developing a training-free unified system that can simultaneously construct accurate 3D maps while maintaining semantic consistency and supporting natural language interactions in real time. In this paper, we develop a zero-shot framework that seamlessly integrates GPU-accelerated geometric reconstruction with open-vocabulary vision-language models through online instance-level semantic embedding fusion, guided by hierarchical object association with spatial indexing. Our training-free system achieves superior performance through incremental processing and unified geometric-semantic updates, while robustly handling 2D segmentation inconsistencies. The proposed general-purpose 3D scene understanding framework can be used for various tasks including zero-shot 3D instance retrieval, segmentation, and object detection to reason about previously unseen objects and interpret natural language queries. The project page is available at https://razer-3d.github.io.

Paperid: 1929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05800.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation in 3D requires learning an $N$ degree-of-freedom joint space trajectory of a robot manipulator. Robots must possess semantic and visual perception abilities to transform real-world mappings of their workspace into the low-level control necessary for object manipulation. Recent work has demonstrated the capabilities of fine-tuning large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to learn the mapping between RGB images, language instructions, and joint space control. These models typically take as input RGB images of the workspace and language instructions, and are trained on large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations. In this work, we explore methods to improve the scene context awareness of a popular recent Vision-Language-Action model by integrating chain-of-thought reasoning, depth perception, and task-oriented region of interest detection. Our experiments in the LIBERO simulation environment show that our proposed model, 3D-CAVLA, improves the success rate across various LIBERO task suites, achieving an average success rate of 98.1$\%$. We also evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of our method, demonstrating that 3D scene awareness leads to robust learning and adaptation for completely unseen tasks. 3D-CAVLA achieves an absolute improvement of 8.8$\%$ on unseen tasks. We will open-source our code and the unseen tasks dataset to promote community-driven research here: https://3d-cavla.github.io

Paperid: 1930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04633.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) equips Large Vision-language Models (LVLMs) with the ability to adapt to new tasks via multiple user-provided demonstrations, without requiring any model parameter updates. However, its effectiveness is constrained by the token-intensive nature of multimodal inputs and the complexity of cross-modal few-shot reasoning, which together hinder LVLMs from extracting useful patterns from demonstrations. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{M$^2$IV}, a novel representation engineering approach that replaces explicit token-level demonstrations with a set of learnable Multimodal In-context Vectors directly injected into the residual streams of LVLMs. By analyzing the distinct roles of multi-head attention (MHA) and multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) in the ICL process, we design a training strategy that enables M$^2$IV to perform fine-grained semantic distillation and robust cross-modal representation learning. M$^2$IV not only improves performance across diverse tasks and LVLMs but also significantly reduces token overhead, enabling graceful scaling to many-shot scenarios. To further enhance usability, we introduce \textbf{VLibrary}, a repository that stores trained M$^2$IVs for flexible retrieval and injection. With VLibrary, users can steer pre-trained LVLMs in a customized manner that meets diverse requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M$^2$IV consistently outperforms vanilla ICL and prior representation engineering baselines, achieving an average accuracy gain of 3.74\% with substantial improvements in overall efficiency.

Paperid: 1931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17860.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multi-modal 3D pre-training methods have shown promising efficacy in learning joint representations of text, images, and point clouds. However, adopting point clouds as 3D representation fails to fully capture the intricacies of the 3D world and exhibits a noticeable gap between the discrete points and the dense 2D pixels of images. To tackle this issue, we propose UniGS, integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into multi-modal pre-training to enhance the 3D representation. We first rely on the 3DGS representation to model the 3D world as a collection of 3D Gaussians with color and opacity, incorporating all the information of the 3D scene while establishing a strong connection with 2D images. Then, to achieve Language-Image-3D pertaining, UniGS starts with a pre-trained vision-language model to establish a shared visual and textual space through extensive real-world image-text pairs. Subsequently, UniGS employs a 3D encoder to align the optimized 3DGS with the Language-Image representations to learn unified multi-modal representations. To facilitate the extraction of global explicit 3D features by the 3D encoder and achieve better cross-modal alignment, we additionally introduce a novel Gaussian-Aware Guidance module that guides the learning of fine-grained representations of the 3D domain. Through extensive experiments across the Objaverse, ABO, MVImgNet and SUN RGBD datasets with zero-shot classification, text-driven retrieval and open-world understanding tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of UniGS in learning a more general and stronger aligned multi-modal representation. Specifically, UniGS achieves leading results across different 3D tasks with remarkable improvements over previous SOTA, Uni3D, including on zero-shot classification (+9.36%), text-driven retrieval (+4.3%) and open-world understanding (+7.92%).

Paperid: 1932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16022.pdf

Abstract:
OpenNotes enables patients to access EHR notes, but medical jargon can hinder comprehension. To improve understanding, we evaluated closed- and open-source LLMs for extracting and prioritizing key medical terms using prompting, fine-tuning, and data augmentation. We assessed LLMs on 106 expert-annotated EHR notes, experimenting with (i) general vs. structured prompts, (ii) zero-shot vs. few-shot prompting, (iii) fine-tuning, and (iv) data augmentation. To enhance open-source models in low-resource settings, we used ChatGPT for data augmentation and applied ranking techniques. We incrementally increased the augmented dataset size (10 to 10,000) and conducted 5-fold cross-validation, reporting F1 score and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). Our result show that fine-tuning and data augmentation improved performance over other strategies. GPT-4 Turbo achieved the highest F1 (0.433), while Mistral7B with data augmentation had the highest MRR (0.746). Open-source models, when fine-tuned or augmented, outperformed closed-source models. Notably, the best F1 and MRR scores did not always align. Few-shot prompting outperformed zero-shot in vanilla models, and structured prompts yielded different preferences across models. Fine-tuning improved zero-shot performance but sometimes degraded few-shot performance. Data augmentation performed comparably or better than other methods. Our evaluation highlights the effectiveness of prompting, fine-tuning, and data augmentation in improving model performance for medical jargon extraction in low-resource scenarios.

Paperid: 1933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08002.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, yet significant challenges persist when deploying them as AI agents for real-world long-horizon tasks. Existing LLM agents suffer from a critical limitation: they are test-time static and cannot learn from experience, lacking the ability to accumulate knowledge and continuously improve on the job. To address this challenge, we propose MUSE, a novel agent framework that introduces an experience-driven, self-evolving system centered around a hierarchical Memory Module. MUSE organizes diverse levels of experience and leverages them to plan and execute long-horizon tasks across multiple applications. After each sub-task execution, the agent autonomously reflects on its trajectory, converting the raw trajectory into structured experience and integrating it back into the Memory Module. This mechanism enables the agent to evolve beyond its static pretrained parameters, fostering continuous learning and self-evolution. We evaluate MUSE on the long-horizon productivity benchmark TAC. It achieves new SOTA performance by a significant margin using only a lightweight Gemini-2.5 Flash model. Sufficient Experiments demonstrate that as the agent autonomously accumulates experience, it exhibits increasingly superior task completion capabilities, as well as robust continuous learning and self-evolution capabilities. Moreover, the accumulated experience from MUSE exhibits strong generalization properties, enabling zero-shot improvement on new tasks. MUSE establishes a new paradigm for AI agents capable of real-world productivity task automation.

Paperid: 1934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05311.pdf

Abstract:
Offboard perception aims to automatically generate high-quality 3D labels for autonomous driving (AD) scenes. Existing offboard methods focus on 3D object detection with closed-set taxonomy and fail to match human-level recognition capability on the rapidly evolving perception tasks. Due to heavy reliance on human labels and the prevalence of data imbalance and sparsity, a unified framework for offboard auto-labeling various elements in AD scenes that meets the distinct needs of perception tasks is not being fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal Zero-shot Offboard Panoptic Perception (ZOPP) framework for autonomous driving scenes. ZOPP integrates the powerful zero-shot recognition capabilities of vision foundation models and 3D representations derived from point clouds. To the best of our knowledge, ZOPP represents a pioneering effort in the domain of multi-modal panoptic perception and auto labeling for autonomous driving scenes. We conduct comprehensive empirical studies and evaluations on Waymo open dataset to validate the proposed ZOPP on various perception tasks. To further explore the usability and extensibility of our proposed ZOPP, we also conduct experiments in downstream applications. The results further demonstrate the great potential of our ZOPP for real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 1935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15110.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of text-to-image generation models has revolutionized visual content creation. While commercial products like Nano Banana Pro have garnered significant attention, their potential as generalist solvers for traditional low-level vision challenges remains largely underexplored. In this study, we investigate the critical question: Is Nano Banana Pro a Low-Level Vision All-Rounder? We conducted a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation across 14 distinct low-level tasks spanning 40 diverse datasets. By utilizing simple textual prompts without fine-tuning, we benchmarked Nano Banana Pro against state-of-the-art specialist models. Our extensive analysis reveals a distinct performance dichotomy: while \textbf{Nano Banana Pro demonstrates superior subjective visual quality}, often hallucinating plausible high-frequency details that surpass specialist models, it lags behind in traditional reference-based quantitative metrics. We attribute this discrepancy to the inherent stochasticity of generative models, which struggle to maintain the strict pixel-level consistency required by conventional metrics. This report identifies Nano Banana Pro as a capable zero-shot contender for low-level vision tasks, while highlighting that achieving the high fidelity of domain specialists remains a significant hurdle.

Paperid: 1936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07957.pdf

Abstract:
Forecasting state evolution of network systems, such as the spread of information on social networks, is significant for effective policy interventions and resource management. However, the underlying propagation dynamics constantly shift with new topics or events, which are modeled as changing coefficients of the underlying dynamics. Deep learning models struggle to adapt to these out-of-distribution shifts without extensive new data and retraining. To address this, we present Zero-Shot Forecasting of Network Dynamics through Weight Flow Matching (FNFM), a generative, coefficient-conditioned framework that generates dynamic model weights for an unseen target coefficient, enabling zero-shot forecasting. Our framework utilizes a Variational Encoder to summarize the forecaster weights trained in observed environments into compact latent tokens. A Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) module then learns a continuous transport from a simple Gaussian distribution to the empirical distribution of these weights, conditioned on the dynamical coefficients. This process is instantaneous at test time and requires no gradient-based optimization. Across varied dynamical coefficients, empirical results indicate that FNFM yields more reliable zero-shot accuracy than baseline methods, particularly under pronounced coefficient shift.

Paperid: 1937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20650.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce FinTagging, the first full-scope, table-aware XBRL benchmark designed to evaluate the structured information extraction and semantic alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of XBRL-based financial reporting. Unlike prior benchmarks that oversimplify XBRL tagging as flat multi-class classification and focus solely on narrative text, FinTagging decomposes the XBRL tagging problem into two subtasks: FinNI for financial entity extraction and FinCL for taxonomy-driven concept alignment. It requires models to jointly extract facts and align them with the full 10k+ US-GAAP taxonomy across both unstructured text and structured tables, enabling realistic, fine-grained evaluation. We assess a diverse set of LLMs under zero-shot settings, systematically analyzing their performance on both subtasks and overall tagging accuracy. Our results reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate strong generalization in information extraction, they struggle with fine-grained concept alignment, particularly in disambiguating closely related taxonomy entries. These findings highlight the limitations of existing LLMs in fully automating XBRL tagging and underscore the need for improved semantic reasoning and schema-aware modeling to meet the demands of accurate financial disclosure. Code is available at our GitHub repository and data is at our Hugging Face repository.

Paperid: 1938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22285.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling object detectors to recognize out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is vital for building reliable systems. A primary obstacle stems from the fact that models frequently do not receive supervisory signals from unfamiliar data, leading to overly confident predictions regarding OOD objects. Despite previous progress that estimates OOD uncertainty based on the detection model and in-distribution (ID) samples, we explore using pre-trained vision-language representations for object-level OOD detection. We first discuss the limitations of applying image-level CLIP-based OOD detection methods to object-level scenarios. Building upon these insights, we propose RUNA, a novel framework that leverages a dual encoder architecture to capture rich contextual information and employs a regional uncertainty alignment mechanism to distinguish ID from OOD objects effectively. We introduce a few-shot fine-tuning approach that aligns region-level semantic representations to further improve the model's capability to discriminate between similar objects. Our experiments show that RUNA substantially surpasses state-of-the-art methods in object-level OOD detection, particularly in challenging scenarios with diverse and complex object instances.

Paperid: 1939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19702.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in short video understanding. However, understanding long-form videos still remains challenging for MLLMs. This paper proposes TimeSuite, a collection of new designs to adapt the existing short-form video MLLMs for long video understanding, including a simple yet efficient framework to process long video sequence, a high-quality video dataset for grounded tuning of MLLMs, and a carefully-designed instruction tuning task to explicitly incorporate the grounding supervision in the traditional QA format. Specifically, based on VideoChat, we propose our long-video MLLM, coined as VideoChat-T, by implementing a token shuffling to compress long video tokens and introducing Temporal Adaptive Position Encoding (TAPE) to enhance the temporal awareness of visual representation. Meanwhile, we introduce the TimePro, a comprehensive grounding-centric instruction tuning dataset composed of 9 tasks and 349k high-quality grounded annotations. Notably, we design a new instruction tuning task type, called Temporal Grounded Caption, to peform detailed video descriptions with the corresponding time stamps prediction. This explicit temporal location prediction will guide MLLM to correctly attend on the visual content when generating description, and thus reduce the hallucination risk caused by the LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our TimeSuite provides a successful solution to enhance the long video understanding capability of short-form MLLM, achieving improvement of 5.6% and 6.8% on the benchmarks of Egoschema and VideoMME, respectively. In addition, VideoChat-T exhibits robust zero-shot temporal grounding capabilities, significantly outperforming the existing state-of-the-art MLLMs. After fine-tuning, it performs on par with the traditional supervised expert models.

Paperid: 1940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06553.pdf

Abstract:
Deep neural network (DNN) hardware (HW) accelerators have achieved great success in improving DNNs' performance and efficiency. One key reason is dataflow in executing a DNN layer, including on-chip data partitioning, computation parallelism, and scheduling policy, which have large impacts on latency and energy consumption. Unlike prior works that required considerable efforts from HW engineers to design suitable dataflows for different DNNs, this work proposes an efficient data-centric approach, named Dataflow Code Propagation (DCP), to automatically find the optimal dataflow for DNN layers in seconds without human effort. It has several attractive benefits that prior arts do not have. (i) We translate the HW dataflow configuration into a code representation in a unified dataflow coding space, which can be optimized by backpropagating gradients given a DNN layer or network. (ii) DCP learns a neural predictor to efficiently update the dataflow codes towards the desired gradient directions to minimize various optimization objectives e.g., latency and energy. (iii) It can be easily generalized to unseen HW configurations in a zero-shot or few-shot learning manner. For example, without using additional training data, DCP surpasses the GAMMA method that performs a full search using thousands of samples. Extensive experiments on several representative models such as MobileNet, ResNet, and ViT show that DCP outperforms its counterparts in various settings.

Paperid: 1941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03740.pdf

Authors:Hyunjae Kim, Xuguang Ai, Sahana Srinivasan, Aidan Gilson, Maxwell B. Singer, Krithi Pushpanathan, Qianqian Xie, Jungwoo Park, Serina Applebaum, Gabriel Dawei Yang, Minjie Zou, David Ziyou Chen, Ke Zou, Soshian Sarrafpour, Ji Liu, Yu Yin, Jimin Huang, Quang Ngoc Nguyen, Erping Long, Peixing Wan, Dianbo Liu, Richard Hintz, W. Jim Zheng, Sophia Y. Wang, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Hua Xu, Ron A. Adelman, Luciano V. Del Priore, Yih-Chung Tham, Qingyu Chen

Abstract:
The rising prevalence of eye diseases poses a growing public health burden. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising path to reduce documentation workload and support clinical decision-making. However, few have been tailored for ophthalmology, and most evaluations focus mainly on knowledge-based QA without clinically relevant benchmarks or real-world validation. Here, we present LEME, a suite of open-weight LLMs developed through a two-stage process: (1) instruction tuning on 200,000 samples from clinical guidelines, textbooks, and case reports to enhance reasoning and task-following, and (2) reinforcement learning with ~30,000 preference labels to enhance accuracy and informativeness. LEME was evaluated on five curated zero-shot benchmarks spanning tasks such as patient QA, consultation, and treatment planning. It outperformed all seven baselines (all p < 0.004), exceeding GPT-4o by 3.32% (absolute ROUGE-L gain). It was further evaluated on three downstream tasks using deidentified patient data, reviewed by clinicians. In patient QA, LEME received the highest ratings from attending clinicians in 3 out of 4 criteria, with scores of 4.67 for factuality, 4.77 for specificity, 4.79 for completeness, and 4.88 for safety (1-5 scale). Its completeness score surpassed that of expert-written answers (4.79 vs. 4.56; p = 0.015). In visual acuity extraction, LEME achieved the highest F1, outperforming LLaMA-3 by 14.1% and Eye-LLaMA by 59.0%. In a pilot evaluation on assessment and treatment planning for diabetic retinopathy, AMD, and glaucoma, LEME received scores of 4.36 for factuality, 4.55 for specificity, 4.42 for completeness, and 4.36 for safety, approaching attending-level performance. All models, data, and code will be released to support further development and clinical translation, laying the groundwork for improved efficiency and patient care

Paperid: 1942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19537.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs are changing event extraction (EE): prompting and generation can often produce structured outputs in zero shot or few shot settings. Yet LLM based pipelines face deployment gaps, including hallucinations under weak constraints, fragile temporal and causal linking over long contexts and across documents, and limited long horizon knowledge management within a bounded context window. We argue that EE should be viewed as a system component that provides a cognitive scaffold for LLM centered solutions. Event schemas and slot constraints create interfaces for grounding and verification; event centric structures act as controlled intermediate representations for stepwise reasoning; event links support relation aware retrieval with graph based RAG; and event stores offer updatable episodic and agent memory beyond the context window. This survey covers EE in text and multimodal settings, organizing tasks and taxonomy, tracing method evolution from rule based and neural models to instruction driven and generative frameworks, and summarizing formulations, decoding strategies, architectures, representations, datasets, and evaluation. We also review cross lingual, low resource, and domain specific settings, and highlight open challenges and future directions for reliable event centric systems. Finally, we outline open challenges and future directions that are central to the LLM era, aiming to evolve EE from static extraction into a structurally reliable, agent ready perception and memory layer for open world systems.

Paperid: 1943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13207.pdf

Abstract:
Navigating to a specified object in an unknown environment is a fundamental yet challenging capability of embodied intelligence. However, current methods struggle to balance decision frequency with intelligence, resulting in decisions lacking foresight or discontinuous actions. In this work, we propose PIGEON: Point of Interest Guided Exploration for Object Navigation with VLM, maintaining a lightweight and semantically aligned snapshot memory during exploration as semantic input for the exploration strategy. We use a large Visual-Language Model (VLM), named PIGEON-VL, to select Points of Interest (PoI) formed during exploration and then employ a lower-level planner for action output, increasing the decision frequency. Additionally, this PoI-based decision-making enables the generation of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) data suitable for simulators. Experiments on classic object navigation benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot transfer method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while RLVR further enhances the model's semantic guidance capabilities, enabling deep reasoning during real-time navigation.

Paperid: 1944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16578.pdf

Abstract:
Human mobility forecasting is important for applications such as transportation planning, urban management, and personalized recommendations. However, existing methods often fail to generalize to unseen users or locations and struggle to capture dynamic intent due to limited labeled data and the complexity of mobility patterns. We propose ZHMF, a framework for zero-shot human mobility forecasting that combines a semantic enhanced retrieval and reflection mechanism with a hierarchical language model based reasoning system. The task is reformulated as a natural language question answering paradigm. Leveraging LLMs semantic understanding of user histories and context, our approach handles previously unseen prediction scenarios. We further introduce a hierarchical reflection mechanism for iterative reasoning and refinement by decomposing forecasting into an activity level planner and a location level selector, enabling collaborative modeling of long term user intentions and short term contextual preferences. Experiments on standard human mobility datasets show that our approach outperforms existing models. Ablation studies reveal the contribution of each module, and case studies illustrate how the method captures user intentions and adapts to diverse contextual scenarios.

Paperid: 1945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16534.pdf

Abstract:
Grounding large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge sources is a promising method for faithful prediction. While existing grounding approaches work well for simple queries, many real-world information needs require synthesizing multiple pieces of evidence. We introduce "integrative grounding" -- the challenge of retrieving and verifying multiple inter-dependent pieces of evidence to support a hypothesis query. To systematically study this problem, we repurpose data from four domains for evaluating integrative grounding capabilities. Our investigation reveals two critical findings: First, in groundedness verification, while LLMs are robust to redundant evidence, they tend to rationalize using internal knowledge when information is incomplete. Second, in examining retrieval planning strategies, we find that undirected planning can degrade performance through noise introduction, while premise abduction emerges as a promising approach due to its logical constraints. Additionally, LLMs' zero-shot self-reflection capabilities consistently improve grounding quality. These insights provide valuable direction for developing more effective integrative grounding systems.

Paperid: 1946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13375.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection capabilities, vital for reliable AI systems. Despite this promising capability, a comprehensive understanding of (1) why they work so effectively, (2) what advantages do they have over single-modal methods, and (3) how is their behavioral robustness -- remains notably incomplete within the research community. This paper presents a systematic empirical analysis of VLM-based OOD detection using in-distribution (ID) and OOD prompts. (1) Mechanisms: We systematically characterize and formalize key operational properties within the VLM embedding space that facilitate zero-shot OOD detection. (2) Advantages: We empirically quantify the superiority of these models over established single-modal approaches, attributing this distinct advantage to the VLM's capacity to leverage rich semantic novelty. (3) Sensitivity: We uncovers a significant and previously under-explored asymmetry in their robustness profile: while exhibiting resilience to common image noise, these VLM-based methods are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing. Our findings contribute a more structured understanding of the strengths and critical vulnerabilities inherent in VLM-based OOD detection, offering crucial, empirically-grounded guidance for developing more robust and reliable future designs.

Paperid: 1947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12168.pdf

Abstract:
Role-playing Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, education, and governance, where failures can directly impact user trust and well-being. A cost effective paradigm for LLM role-playing is few-shot learning, but existing approaches often cause models to break character in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, especially when interacting with hostile users. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we reformulate LLM role-playing into a text retrieval problem and propose a new prompting framework called RAGs-to-Riches, which leverages curated reference demonstrations to condition LLM responses. We evaluate our framework with LLM-as-a-judge preference voting and introduce two novel token-level ROUGE metrics: Intersection over Output (IOO) to quantity how much an LLM improvises and Intersection over References (IOR) to measure few-shot demonstrations utilization rate during the evaluation tasks. When simulating interactions with a hostile user, our prompting strategy incorporates in its responses during inference an average of 35% more tokens from the reference demonstrations. As a result, across 453 role-playing interactions, our models are consistently judged as being more authentic, and remain in-character more often than zero-shot and in-context Learning (ICL) methods. Our method presents a scalable strategy for building robust, human-aligned LLM role-playing frameworks.

Paperid: 1948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10538.pdf

Abstract:
Whole-body loco-manipulation for quadruped robots with arm remains a challenging problem, particularly in achieving multi-task control. To address this, we propose MLM, a reinforcement learning framework driven by both real-world and simulation data. It enables a six-DoF robotic arm--equipped quadruped robot to perform whole-body loco-manipulation for multiple tasks autonomously or under human teleoperation. To address the problem of balancing multiple tasks during the learning of loco-manipulation, we introduce a trajectory library with an adaptive, curriculum-based sampling mechanism. This approach allows the policy to efficiently leverage real-world collected trajectories for learning multi-task loco-manipulation. To address deployment scenarios with only historical observations and to enhance the performance of policy execution across tasks with different spatial ranges, we propose a Trajectory-Velocity Prediction policy network. It predicts unobservable future trajectories and velocities. By leveraging extensive simulation data and curriculum-based rewards, our controller achieves whole-body behaviors in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world deployment. Ablation studies in simulation verify the necessity and effectiveness of our approach, while real-world experiments on the Go2 robot with an Airbot robotic arm demonstrate the policy's good performance in multi-task execution.

Paperid: 1949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17130.pdf

Abstract:
In collaborative systems with complex tasks relying on distributed resources, trust evaluation of potential collaborators has emerged as an effective mechanism for task completion. However, due to the network dynamics and varying information gathering latencies, it is extremely challenging to observe and collect all trust attributes of a collaborating device concurrently for a comprehensive trust assessment. In this paper, a novel progressive trust evaluation framework, namely chain-of-trust, is proposed to make better use of misaligned device attribute data. This framework, designed for effective task completion, divides the trust evaluation process into multiple chained stages based on task decomposition. At each stage, based on the task completion process, the framework only gathers the latest device attribute data relevant to that stage, leading to reduced trust evaluation complexity and overhead. By leveraging advanced in-context learning, few-shot learning, and reasoning capabilities, generative AI is then employed to analyze and interpret the collected data to produce correct evaluation results quickly. Only devices deemed trustworthy at this stage proceed to the next round of trust evaluation. The framework ultimately determines devices that remain trustworthy across all stages. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves high accuracy in trust evaluation.

Paperid: 1950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14288.pdf

Abstract:
The Fluid Antenna System (FAS), which enables flexible Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communications, introduces new spatial degrees of freedom for next-generation wireless networks. Unlike traditional MIMO, FAS involves joint port selection and precoder design, a combinatorial NP-hard optimization problem. Moreover, fully leveraging FAS requires acquiring Channel State Information (CSI) across its ports, a challenge exacerbated by the system's near-continuous reconfigurability. These factors make traditional system design methods impractical for FAS due to nonconvexity and prohibitive computational complexity. While deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed for MIMO optimization, their limited generalization and fitting capabilities render them suboptimal for FAS. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) extend DL's capabilities by offering general-purpose adaptability, reasoning, and few-shot learning, thereby overcoming the limitations of task-specific, data-intensive models. This article presents a vision for LLM-driven FAS design, proposing a novel flexible communication framework. To demonstrate the potential, we examine LLM-enhanced FAS in multiuser scenarios, showcasing how LLMs can revolutionize FAS optimization.

Paperid: 1951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09656.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Forecasting (TSF) is critical in many real-world domains like financial planning and health monitoring. Recent studies have revealed that Large Language Models (LLMs), with their powerful in-contextual modeling capabilities, hold significant potential for TSF. However, existing LLM-based methods usually perform suboptimally because they neglect the inherent characteristics of time series data. Unlike the textual data used in LLM pre-training, the time series data is semantically sparse and comprises distinctive temporal patterns. To address this problem, we propose LLM-PS to empower the LLM for TSF by learning the fundamental \textit{Patterns} and meaningful \textit{Semantics} from time series data. Our LLM-PS incorporates a new multi-scale convolutional neural network adept at capturing both short-term fluctuations and long-term trends within the time series. Meanwhile, we introduce a time-to-text module for extracting valuable semantics across continuous time intervals rather than isolated time points. By integrating these patterns and semantics, LLM-PS effectively models temporal dependencies, enabling a deep comprehension of time series and delivering accurate forecasts. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that LLM-PS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both short- and long-term forecasting tasks, as well as in few- and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 1952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19201.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a powerful framework for improving complex problem-solving capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the verbose nature of textual reasoning introduces significant inefficiencies. In this work, we propose $\textbf{Heima}$ (as hidden llama), an efficient reasoning framework that leverages reasoning CoTs at hidden latent space. We design the Heima Encoder to condense each intermediate CoT into a compact, higher-level hidden representation using a single thinking token, effectively minimizing verbosity and reducing the overall number of tokens required during the reasoning process. Meanwhile, we design corresponding Heima Decoder with traditional Large Language Models (LLMs) to adaptively interpret the hidden representations into variable-length textual sequence, reconstructing reasoning processes that closely resemble the original CoTs. Experimental results across diverse reasoning MLLM benchmarks demonstrate that Heima model achieves higher generation efficiency while maintaining or even better zero-shot task accuracy. Moreover, the effective reconstruction of multimodal reasoning processes with Heima Decoder validates both the robustness and interpretability of our approach.

Paperid: 1953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15830.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

Paperid: 1954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06845.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone a significant transformation, marked by a rapid rise in both their popularity and capabilities. Leading this evolution are proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-o1, which have captured widespread attention in the AI community due to their remarkable performance and versatility. Simultaneously, open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA, have made great contributions to the ever-increasing popularity of LLMs due to the ease to customize and deploy the models across diverse applications. Although open-source LLMs present unprecedented opportunities for innovation and research, the commercialization of LLMs has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open-source LLMs fail to meet fundamental transparency requirements by withholding essential components like training code and data, which may hinder further innovations on LLMs. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Moxin 7B, a fully open-source LLM developed, adhering to principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. We release the pre-training code and configurations, training and fine-tuning datasets, and intermediate and final checkpoints, aiming to make continuous commitments to fully open-source LLMs. After pre-training the base model, we finetune the Moxin Base model with SOTA post-training framework and instruction data to obtain Moxin Instruct model. To improve the reasoning capability, we further finetune our Instruct model with chain-of-thought data distilled from DeepSeek R1, and then use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) following DeepSeek R1 to finetune our model, leading to the Moxin Reasoning model. Moreover, we develop our vision language model based on our Moxin model. Experiments show that our models achieve superior performance in various evaluations such as zero-shot evaluation, few-shot evaluation, and CoT evaluation.

Paperid: 1955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11493.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches leveraging multi-modal pre-trained models like CLIP for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have shown significant promise in bridging domain gaps and improving generalization by utilizing rich semantic knowledge and robust visual representations learned through extensive pre-training on diverse image-text datasets. While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks, much of the improvement stems from base pseudo-labels (CLIP zero-shot predictions) and self-training mechanisms. Thus, the training mechanism exhibits a key limitation wherein the visual embedding distribution in target domains can deviate from the visual embedding distribution in the pre-trained model, leading to misguided signals from class descriptions. This work introduces a fresh solution to reinforce these pseudo-labels and facilitate target-prompt learning, by exploiting the geometry of visual and text embeddings - an aspect that is overlooked by existing methods. We first propose to directly leverage the reference predictions (from source prompts) based on the relationship between source and target visual embeddings. We later show that there is a strong clustering behavior observed between visual and text embeddings in pre-trained multi-modal models. Building on optimal transport theory, we transform this insight into a novel strategy to enforce the clustering property in text embeddings, further enhancing the alignment in the target domain. Our experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating superior performance and improved quality of target prompts in terms of representation.

Paperid: 1956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03450.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models, with a vast number of parameters and pretraining on massive datasets, achieve state-of-the-art performance across various applications. However, efficiently adapting them to downstream tasks with minimal computational overhead remains a challenge. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) addresses this by fine-tuning only a small subset of parameters while preserving pre-trained knowledge. In this paper, we propose SaS, a novel PETL method that effectively mitigates distributional shifts during fine-tuning. SaS integrates (1) a shared module that captures common statistical characteristics across layers using low-rank projections and (2) a layer-specific module that employs hypernetworks to generate tailored parameters for each layer. This dual design ensures an optimal balance between performance and parameter efficiency while introducing less than 0.05% additional parameters, making it significantly more compact than existing methods. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream tasks, few-shot settings and domain generalization demonstrate that SaS significantly enhances performance while maintaining superior parameter efficiency compared to existing methods, highlighting the importance of capturing both shared and layer-specific information in transfer learning. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SaS-PETL-3565.

Paperid: 1957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00142.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate document retrieval is crucial for the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications, including open-domain question answering and code completion. While large language models (LLMs) have been employed as dense encoders or listwise rerankers in RAG systems, they often struggle with reasoning-intensive tasks because they lack nuanced analysis when judging document relevance. To address this limitation, we introduce JudgeRank, a novel agentic reranker that emulates human cognitive processes when assessing document relevance. Our approach consists of three key steps: (1) query analysis to identify the core problem, (2) document analysis to extract a query-aware summary, and (3) relevance judgment to provide a concise assessment of document relevance. We evaluate JudgeRank on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over first-stage retrieval methods and outperforming other popular reranking approaches. In addition, JudgeRank performs on par with fine-tuned state-of-the-art rerankers on the popular BEIR benchmark, validating its zero-shot generalization capability. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that JudgeRank's performance generalizes well across LLMs of various sizes while ensembling them yields even more accurate reranking than individual models.

Paperid: 1958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07549.pdf

Abstract:
Entity Linking (EL) is the process of associating ambiguous textual mentions to specific entities in a knowledge base. Traditional EL methods heavily rely on large datasets to enhance their performance, a dependency that becomes problematic in the context of few-shot entity linking, where only a limited number of examples are available for training. To address this challenge, we present OneNet, an innovative framework that utilizes the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, this marks a pioneering approach to applying LLMs to few-shot entity linking tasks. OneNet is structured around three key components prompted by LLMs: (1) an entity reduction processor that simplifies inputs by summarizing and filtering out irrelevant entities, (2) a dual-perspective entity linker that combines contextual cues and prior knowledge for precise entity linking, and (3) an entity consensus judger that employs a unique consistency algorithm to alleviate the hallucination in the entity linking reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets reveal that OneNet outperforms current state-of-the-art entity linking methods.

Paperid: 1959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05329.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic speech editing aims to modify spoken content based on textual instructions, yet traditional cascade systems suffer from complex preprocessing pipelines and a reliance on explicit external temporal alignment. Addressing these limitations, we propose CosyEdit, an end-to-end speech editing model adapted from CosyVoice through task-specific fine-tuning and an optimized inference procedure, which internalizes speech-text alignment while ensuring high consistency between the speech before and after editing. By fine-tuning on only 250 hours of supervised data from our curated GigaEdit dataset, our 400M-parameter model achieves reliable speech editing performance. Experiments on the RealEdit benchmark indicate that CosyEdit not only outperforms several billion-parameter language model baselines but also matches the performance of state-of-the-art cascade approaches. These results demonstrate that, with task-specific fine-tuning and inference optimization, robust and efficient speech editing capabilities can be unlocked from a zero-shot TTS model, yielding a novel and cost-effective end-to-end solution for high-quality speech editing.

Paperid: 1960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06741.pdf

Abstract:
Wide-angle videos in few-shot action recognition (FSAR) effectively express actions within specific scenarios. However, without a global understanding of both subjects and background, recognizing actions in such samples remains challenging because of the background distractions. Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), which learns interaction between various dimensions, shows promise for global modeling. While directly applying RWKV to wide-angle FSAR may fail to highlight subjects due to excessive background information. Additionally, temporal relation degraded by frames with similar backgrounds is difficult to reconstruct, further impacting performance. Therefore, we design the CompOund SegmenTation and Temporal REconstructing RWKV (Otter). Specifically, the Compound Segmentation Module~(CSM) is devised to segment and emphasize key patches in each frame, effectively highlighting subjects against background information. The Temporal Reconstruction Module (TRM) is incorporated into the temporal-enhanced prototype construction to enable bidirectional scanning, allowing better reconstruct temporal relation. Furthermore, a regular prototype is combined with the temporal-enhanced prototype to simultaneously enhance subject emphasis and temporal modeling, improving wide-angle FSAR performance. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as SSv2, Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51 demonstrate that Otter achieves state-of-the-art performance. Extra evaluation on the VideoBadminton dataset further validates the superiority of Otter in wide-angle FSAR.

Paperid: 1961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16700.pdf

Abstract:
Dysarthric speech recognition (DSR) research has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, evolving from the basic understanding of individual words to the intricate comprehension of sentence-level expressions, all driven by the pressing communication needs of individuals with dysarthria. Nevertheless, the scarcity of available data remains a substantial hurdle, posing a significant challenge to the development of effective sentence-level DSR systems. In response to this issue, dysarthric data augmentation (DDA) has emerged as a highly promising approach. Generative models are frequently employed to generate training data for automatic speech recognition tasks. However, their effectiveness hinges on the ability of the synthesized data to accurately represent the target domain. The wide-ranging variability in pronunciation among dysarthric speakers makes it extremely difficult for models trained on data from existing speakers to produce useful augmented data, especially in zero-shot or one-shot learning settings. To address this limitation, we put forward a novel text-coverage strategy specifically designed for text-matching data synthesis. This innovative strategy allows for efficient zero/one-shot DDA, leading to substantial enhancements in the performance of DSR when dealing with unseen dysarthric speakers. Such improvements are of great significance in practical applications, including dysarthria rehabilitation programs and day-to-day common-sentence communication scenarios.

Paperid: 1962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06982.pdf

Abstract:
Finetuning vision foundation models often improves in-domain accuracy but comes at the cost of robustness under distribution shift. We revisit Mixout, a stochastic regularizer that intermittently replaces finetuned weights with their pretrained reference, through the lens of a single-run, weight-sharing implicit ensemble. This perspective reveals three key levers that govern robustness: the \emph{masking anchor}, \emph{resampling frequency}, and \emph{mask sparsity}. Guided by this analysis, we introduce GMixout, which (i) replaces the fixed anchor with an exponential moving-average snapshot that adapts during training, and (ii) regulates masking period via an explicit resampling-frequency hyperparameter. Our sparse-kernel implementation updates only a small fraction of parameters with no inference-time overhead, enabling training on consumer-grade GPUs. Experiments on benchmarks covering covariate shift, corruption, and class imbalance, ImageNet / ImageNet-LT, DomainNet, iWildCam, and CIFAR100-C, GMixout consistently improves in-domain accuracy beyond zero-shot performance while surpassing both Model Soups and strong parameter-efficient finetuning baselines under distribution shift.

Paperid: 1963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05100.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical approach to supplement the inherent knowledge limitations of LLMs. However, due to the typically large volume of retrieved information, RAG tends to operate with long context lengths. From the perspective of entropy engineering, we identify unconstrained entropy growth and attention dilution due to long retrieval context as significant factors affecting RAG performance. In this paper, we propose the balanced entropy-engineered RAG (BEE-RAG) framework, which improves the adaptability of RAG systems to varying context lengths through the principle of entropy invariance. By leveraging balanced context entropy to reformulate attention dynamics, BEE-RAG separates attention sensitivity from context length, ensuring a stable entropy level. Building upon this, we introduce a zero-shot inference strategy for multi-importance estimation and a parameter-efficient adaptive fine-tuning mechanism to obtain the optimal balancing factor for different settings. Extensive experiments across multiple RAG tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BEE-RAG.

Paperid: 1964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18925.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection (OD) in infrared (IR) imagery is critical for low-light and nighttime applications. However, the scarcity of large-scale IR datasets forces models to rely on weights pre-trained on RGB images. While fine-tuning on IR improves accuracy, it often compromises robustness under distribution shifts due to the inherent modality gap between RGB and IR. To address this, we introduce LLVIP-C and FLIR-C, two cross-modality out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks built by applying corruption to standard IR datasets. Additionally, to fully leverage the complementary knowledge from RGB and infrared trained models, we propose WiSE-OD, a weight-space ensembling method with two variants: WiSE-OD$_{ZS}$, which combines RGB zero-shot and IR fine-tuned weights, and WiSE-OD$_{LP}$, which blends zero-shot and linear probing. Evaluated across three RGB-pretrained detectors and two robust baselines, WiSE-OD improves both cross-modality and corruption robustness without any additional training or inference cost.

Paperid: 1965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12570.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis have achieved high-quality speech generation for unseen speakers, but most systems remain unsuitable for real-time applications because of their offline design. Current streaming TTS paradigms often rely on multi-stage pipelines and discrete representations, leading to increased computational cost and suboptimal system performance. In this work, we propose StreamMel, a pioneering single-stage streaming TTS framework that models continuous mel-spectrograms. By interleaving text tokens with acoustic frames, StreamMel enables low-latency, autoregressive synthesis while preserving high speaker similarity and naturalness. Experiments on LibriSpeech demonstrate that StreamMel outperforms existing streaming TTS baselines in both quality and latency. It even achieves performance comparable to offline systems while supporting efficient real-time generation, showcasing broad prospects for integration with real-time speech large language models. Audio samples are available at: https://aka.ms/StreamMel.

Paperid: 1966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19328.pdf

Abstract:
Recognizing complex emotions linked to ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) can play a critical role in the personalization and effectiveness of digital behaviour change interventions. These subtle and conflicting emotions are manifested by a discord between multiple modalities, such as facial and vocal expressions, and body language. Although experts can be trained to identify A/H, integrating them into digital interventions is costly and less effective. Automatic learning systems provide a cost-effective alternative that can adapt to individual users, and operate seamlessly within real-time, and resource-limited environments. However, there are currently no datasets available for the design of ML models to recognize A/H. This paper introduces a first Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) dataset collected for subject-based multimodal recognition of A/H in videos. It contains videos from 224 participants captured across 9 provinces in Canada, with different age, and ethnicity. Through our web platform, we recruited participants to answer 7 questions, some of which were designed to elicit A/H while recording themselves via webcam with microphone. BAH amounts to 1,118 videos for a total duration of 8.26 hours with 1.5 hours of A/H. Our behavioural team annotated timestamp segments to indicate where A/H occurs, and provide frame- and video-level annotations with the A/H cues. Video transcripts and their timestamps are also included, along with cropped and aligned faces in each frame, and a variety of participants meta-data. We include results baselines for BAH at frame- and video-level recognition in multi-modal setups, in addition to zero-shot prediction, and for personalization using unsupervised domain adaptation. The limited performance of baseline models highlights the challenges of recognizing A/H in real-world videos. The data, code, and pretrained weights are available.

Paperid: 1967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16212.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has recently shown remarkable progress, but accurately transcribing children's speech remains a significant challenge. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in improving ASR transcriptions. However, their applications in child speech including conversational scenarios are underexplored. In this study, we explore the use of LLMs in correcting ASR errors for conversational child speech. We demonstrate the promises and challenges of LLMs through experiments on two children's conversational speech datasets with both zero-shot and fine-tuned ASR outputs. We find that while LLMs are helpful in correcting zero-shot ASR outputs and fine-tuned CTC-based ASR outputs, it remains challenging for LLMs to improve ASR performance when incorporating contextual information or when using fine-tuned autoregressive ASR (e.g., Whisper) outputs.

Paperid: 1968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11164.pdf

Abstract:
N:M structured pruning is essential for large language models (LLMs) because it can remove less important network weights and reduce the memory and computation requirements. Existing pruning methods mainly focus on designing metrics to measure the importance of network components to guide pruning. Apart from the impact of these metrics, we observe that different layers have different sensitivities over the network performance. Thus, we propose an efficient method based on the trace of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to quantitatively measure and verify the different sensitivities across layers. Based on this, we propose Mixed Sparsity Pruning (MSP) which uses a pruning-oriented evolutionary algorithm (EA) to determine the optimal sparsity levels for different layers. To guarantee fast convergence and achieve promising performance, we utilize efficient FIM-inspired layer-wise sensitivity to initialize the population of EA. In addition, our MSP can work as a plug-and-play module, ready to be integrated into existing pruning methods. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA-2 on language modeling and zero-shot tasks demonstrate our superior performance. In particular, in extreme pruning ratio (e.g. 75%), our method significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of perplexity (PPL) by orders of magnitude (Figure 1).

Paperid: 1969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06700.pdf

Abstract:
Research has focused on Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation (MMSS), where pixel-wise predictions are derived from multiple visual modalities captured by diverse sensors. Recently, the large vision model, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), has shown strong zero-shot segmentation performance on both images and videos. When extending SAM2 to MMSS, two issues arise: 1. How can SAM2 be adapted to multi-modal data? 2. How can SAM2 better understand semantics? Inspired by cross-frame correlation in videos, we propose to treat multi-modal data as a sequence of frames representing the same scene. Our key idea is to ''memorize'' the modality-agnostic information and 'memorize' the semantics related to the targeted scene. To achieve this, we apply SAM2's memory mechanisms across multi-modal data to capture modality-agnostic features. Meanwhile, to memorize the semantic knowledge, we propose a training-only Semantic Prototype Memory Module (SPMM) to store category-level prototypes across training for facilitating SAM2's transition from instance to semantic segmentation. A prototypical adaptation loss is imposed between global and local prototypes iteratively to align and refine SAM2's semantic understanding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed MemorySAM outperforms SoTA methods by large margins on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks (65.38% on DELIVER, 52.88% on MCubeS). Source code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 1970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07481.pdf

Abstract:
In few-shot action recognition (FSAR), long sub-sequences of video naturally express entire actions more effectively. However, the high computational complexity of mainstream Transformer-based methods limits their application. Recent Mamba demonstrates efficiency in modeling long sequences, but directly applying Mamba to FSAR overlooks the importance of local feature modeling and alignment. Moreover, long sub-sequences within the same class accumulate intra-class variance, which adversely impacts FSAR performance. To solve these challenges, we propose a Matryoshka MAmba and CoNtrasTive LeArning framework (Manta). Firstly, the Matryoshka Mamba introduces multiple Inner Modules to enhance local feature representation, rather than directly modeling global features. An Outer Module captures dependencies of timeline between these local features for implicit temporal alignment. Secondly, a hybrid contrastive learning paradigm, combining both supervised and unsupervised methods, is designed to mitigate the negative effects of intra-class variance accumulation. The Matryoshka Mamba and the hybrid contrastive learning paradigm operate in two parallel branches within Manta, enhancing Mamba for FSAR of long sub-sequence. Manta achieves new state-of-the-art performance on prominent benchmarks, including SSv2, Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51. Extensive empirical studies prove that Manta significantly improves FSAR of long sub-sequence from multiple perspectives.

Paperid: 1971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08500.pdf

Abstract:
Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a novel task enabling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to navigate in outdoor environments through natural language instructions and visual cues. However, it remains challenging due to the complex spatial relationships in aerial scenes.In this paper, we propose a training-free, zero-shot framework for aerial VLN tasks, where the large language model (LLM) is leveraged as the agent for action prediction. Specifically, we develop a novel Semantic-Topo-Metric Representation (STMR) to enhance the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This is achieved by extracting and projecting instruction-related semantic masks onto a top-down map, which presents spatial and topological information about surrounding landmarks and grows during the navigation process. At each step, a local map centered at the UAV is extracted from the growing top-down map, and transformed into a ma trix representation with distance metrics, serving as the text prompt to LLM for action prediction in response to the given instruction. Experiments conducted in real and simulation environments have proved the effectiveness and robustness of our method, achieving absolute success rate improvements of 26.8% and 5.8% over current state-of-the-art methods on simple and complex navigation tasks, respectively. The dataset and code will be released soon.

Paperid: 1972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05809.pdf

Abstract:
Emerging universal Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) paradigms provide an inspiring solution to light-weight and high-quality imaging without repeated data preparation and model training to accommodate new lens designs. However, the training databases in these approaches, i.e., the lens libraries (LensLibs), suffer from their limited coverage of real-world aberration behaviors. In this work, we set up an OmniLens framework for universal CAC, considering both the generalization ability and flexibility. OmniLens extends the idea of universal CAC to a broader concept, where a base model is trained for three cases, including zero-shot CAC with the pre-trained model, few-shot CAC with a little lens-specific data for fine-tuning, and domain adaptive CAC using domain adaptation for lens-descriptions-unknown lens. In terms of OmniLens's data foundation, we first propose an Evolution-based Automatic Optical Design (EAOD) pipeline to construct LensLib automatically, coined AODLib, whose diversity is enriched by an evolution framework, with comprehensive constraints and a hybrid optimization strategy for achieving realistic aberration behaviors. For network design, we introduce the guidance of high-quality codebook priors to facilitate zero-shot CAC and few-shot CAC, which enhances the model's generalization ability, while also boosting its convergence in a few-shot case. Furthermore, based on the statistical observation of dark channel priors in optical degradation, we design an unsupervised regularization term to adapt the base model to the target descriptions-unknown lens using its aberration images without ground truth. We validate OmniLens on 4 manually designed low-end lenses with various structures and aberration behaviors. Remarkably, the base model trained on AODLib exhibits strong generalization capabilities, achieving 97% of the lens-specific performance in a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 1973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01534.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we propose Cross-domain Multi-step Thinking (CdMT) to improve zero-shot fine-grained traffic sign recognition (TSR) performance in the wild. Zero-shot fine-grained TSR in the wild is challenging due to the cross-domain problem between clean template traffic signs and real-world counterparts, and existing approaches particularly struggle with cross-country TSR scenarios, where traffic signs typically differ between countries. The proposed CdMT framework tackles these challenges by leveraging the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). We introduce context, characteristic, and differential descriptions to design multiple thinking processes for LMMs. Context descriptions, which are enhanced by center coordinate prompt optimization, enable the precise localization of target traffic signs in complex road images and filter irrelevant responses via novel prior traffic sign hypotheses. Characteristic descriptions, which are derived from in-context learning with template traffic signs, bridge cross-domain gaps and enhance fine-grained TSR. Differential descriptions refine the multimodal reasoning ability of LMMs by distinguishing subtle differences among similar signs. CdMT is independent of training data and requires only simple and uniform instructions, enabling it to achieve cross-country TSR. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and two real-world datasets from different countries. The proposed CdMT framework achieved superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods on all five datasets, with recognition accuracies of 0.93, 0.89, 0.97, 0.89, and 0.85 on the GTSRB, BTSD, TT-100K, Sapporo, and Yokohama datasets, respectively.

Paperid: 1974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01428.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of diffusion models has increased the need for customized image generation. However, current customization methods face several limitations: 1) typically accept either image or text conditions alone; 2) customization in complex visual scenarios often leads to subject leakage or confusion; 3) image-conditioned outputs tend to suffer from inconsistent backgrounds; and 4) high computational costs. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-party Collaborative Attention Control (MCA-Ctrl), a tuning-free method that enables high-quality image customization using both text and complex visual conditions. Specifically, MCA-Ctrl leverages two key operations within the self-attention layer to coordinate multiple parallel diffusion processes and guide the target image generation. This approach allows MCA-Ctrl to capture the content and appearance of specific subjects while maintaining semantic consistency with the conditional input. Additionally, to mitigate subject leakage and confusion issues common in complex visual scenarios, we introduce a Subject Localization Module that extracts precise subject and editable image layers based on user instructions. Extensive quantitative and human evaluation experiments show that MCA-Ctrl outperforms existing methods in zero-shot image customization, effectively resolving the mentioned issues.

Paperid: 1975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19060.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities and can quickly adapt to downstream tasks through prompt fine-tuning. Unfortunately, in classification tasks involving non-training classes, known as open-vocabulary setting, fine-tuned VLMs often overfit to train classes, resulting in a misalignment between confidence scores and actual accuracy on unseen classes, which significantly undermines their reliability in real-world deployments. Existing confidence calibration methods typically require training parameters or analyzing features from the training dataset, restricting their ability to generalize unseen classes without corresponding train data. Moreover, VLM-specific calibration methods rely solely on text features from train classes as calibration indicators, which inherently limits their ability to calibrate train classes. To address these challenges, we propose an effective multimodal calibration method Contrast-Aware Calibration (CAC). Building on the original CLIP's zero-shot adaptability and the conclusion from empirical analysis that poor intra-class and inter-class discriminative ability on unseen classes is the root cause, we calculate calibration weights based on the contrastive difference between the original and fine-tuned CLIP. This method not only adapts to calibrating unseen classes but also overcomes the limitations of previous VLM calibration methods that could not calibrate train classes. In experiments involving 11 datasets with 5 fine-tuning methods, CAC consistently achieved the best calibration effect on both train and unseen classes without sacrificing accuracy and inference speed.

Paperid: 1976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03002.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, yet their robustness in dynamic real-world scenarios remains largely unexplored. To systematically evaluate VLMs' robustness to real-world 3D variations, we propose AdvDreamer, the first framework capable of generating physically reproducible Adversarial 3D Transformation (Adv-3DT) samples from single-view observations. In AdvDreamer, we integrate three key innovations: Firstly, to characterize real-world 3D variations with limited prior knowledge precisely, we design a zero-shot Monocular Pose Manipulation pipeline built upon generative 3D priors. Secondly, to ensure the visual quality of worst-case Adv-3DT samples, we propose a Naturalness Reward Model that provides continuous naturalness regularization during adversarial optimization, effectively preventing convergence to hallucinated or unnatural elements. Thirdly, to enable systematic evaluation across diverse VLM architectures and visual-language tasks, we introduce the Inverse Semantic Probability loss as the adversarial optimization objective, which solely operates in the fundamental visual-textual alignment space. Based on the captured Adv-3DT samples with high aggressiveness and transferability, we establish MM3DTBench, the first VQA benchmark dataset tailored to evaluate VLM robustness under challenging 3D variations. Extensive evaluations of representative VLMs with varying architectures reveal that real-world 3D variations can pose severe threats to model performance across various tasks.

Paperid: 1977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09406.pdf

Abstract:
Adversarial patches present significant challenges to the robustness of deep learning models, making the development of effective defenses become critical for real-world applications. This paper introduces DIFFender, a novel DIFfusion-based DeFender framework that leverages the power of a text-guided diffusion model to counter adversarial patch attacks. At the core of our approach is the discovery of the Adversarial Anomaly Perception (AAP) phenomenon, which enables the diffusion model to accurately detect and locate adversarial patches by analyzing distributional anomalies. DIFFender seamlessly integrates the tasks of patch localization and restoration within a unified diffusion model framework, enhancing defense efficacy through their close interaction. Additionally, DIFFender employs an efficient few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm, facilitating the adaptation of the pre-trained diffusion model to defense tasks without the need for extensive retraining. Our comprehensive evaluation, covering image classification and face recognition tasks, as well as real-world scenarios, demonstrates DIFFender's robust performance against adversarial attacks. The framework's versatility and generalizability across various settings, classifiers, and attack methodologies mark a significant advancement in adversarial patch defense strategies. Except for the popular visible domain, we have identified another advantage of DIFFender: its capability to easily expand into the infrared domain. Consequently, we demonstrate the good flexibility of DIFFender, which can defend against both infrared and visible adversarial patch attacks alternatively using a universal defense framework.

Paperid: 1978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07596.pdf

Abstract:
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3 has introduced significant advancements over its predecessor, SAM 2, particularly with the integration of language-based segmentation and enhanced 3D perception capabilities. SAM 3 supports zero-shot segmentation across a wide range of prompts, including point, bounding box, and language-based prompts, allowing for more flexible and intuitive interactions with the model. In this empirical evaluation, we assess the performance of SAM 3 in robot-assisted surgery, benchmarking its zero-shot segmentation with point and bounding box prompts and exploring its effectiveness in dynamic video tracking, alongside its newly introduced language prompt segmentation. While language prompts show potential, their performance in the surgical domain is currently suboptimal, highlighting the need for further domain-specific training. Additionally, we investigate SAM 3's 3D reconstruction abilities, demonstrating its capacity to process surgical scene data and reconstruct 3D anatomical structures from 2D images. Through comprehensive testing on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 3 shows clear improvements over SAM and SAM 2 in both image and video segmentation under spatial prompts, while zero-shot evaluations on SCARED, StereoMIS, and EndoNeRF indicate strong monocular depth estimation and realistic 3D instrument reconstruction, yet also reveal remaining limitations in complex, highly dynamic surgical scenes.

Paperid: 1979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06921.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in surgical video understanding. With improved zero-shot performance and more effective human-machine interaction, they provide a strong foundation for advancing surgical education and assistance. However, existing research and datasets primarily focus on understanding surgical procedures and workflows, while paying limited attention to the critical role of anatomical comprehension. In clinical practice, surgeons rely heavily on precise anatomical understanding to interpret, review, and learn from surgical videos. To fill this gap, we introduce the Neurosurgical Anatomy Benchmark (NeuroABench), the first multimodal benchmark explicitly created to evaluate anatomical understanding in the neurosurgical domain. NeuroABench consists of 9 hours of annotated neurosurgical videos covering 89 distinct procedures and is developed using a novel multimodal annotation pipeline with multiple review cycles. The benchmark evaluates the identification of 68 clinical anatomical structures, providing a rigorous and standardized framework for assessing model performance. Experiments on over 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal significant limitations, with the best-performing model achieving only 40.87% accuracy in anatomical identification tasks. To further evaluate the benchmark, we extract a subset of the dataset and conduct an informative test with four neurosurgical trainees. The results show that the best-performing student achieves 56% accuracy, with the lowest scores of 28% and an average score of 46.5%. While the best MLLM performs comparably to the lowest-scoring student, it still lags significantly behind the group's average performance. This comparison underscores both the progress of MLLMs in anatomical understanding and the substantial gap that remains in achieving human-level performance.

Paperid: 1980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18831.pdf

Abstract:
The scalability of video understanding models is increasingly limited by the prohibitive storage and computational costs of large-scale video datasets. While data synthesis has improved data efficiency in the image domain, its extension to video remains challenging due to pervasive temporal redundancy and complex spatiotemporal dynamics. In this work, we uncover a critical insight: the primary source of inefficiency in video datasets is not inter-sample redundancy, but intra-sample frame-level redundancy. To leverage this insight, we introduce VideoCompressa, a novel framework for video data synthesis that reframes the problem as dynamic latent compression. Specifically, VideoCompressa jointly optimizes a differentiable keyframe selector-implemented as a lightweight ConvNet with Gumbel-Softmax sampling-to identify the most informative frames, and a pretrained, frozen Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to compress these frames into compact, semantically rich latent codes. These latent representations are then fed into a compression network, enabling end-to-end backpropagation. Crucially, the keyframe selector and synthetic latent codes are co-optimized to maximize retention of task-relevant information. Experiments show that our method achieves unprecedented data efficiency: on UCF101 with ConvNets, VideoCompressa surpasses full-data training by 2.34\% points using only 0.13\% of the original data, with over 5800x speedup compared to traditional synthesis method. Moreover, when fine-tuning Qwen2.5-7B-VL on HMDB51, VideoCompressa matches full-data performance using just 0.41\% of the training data-outperforming zero-shot baseline by 10.61\%.

Paperid: 1981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18904.pdf

Abstract:
The prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating multilingual text and source code has only increased the imperative for machine-generated content detectors to be accurate and efficient across domains. Current detectors, predominantly utilizing zero-shot methods, such as Fast DetectGPT or GPTZero, either incur high computational cost or lack sufficient accuracy, often with a trade-off between the two, leaving room for further improvement. To address these gaps, we propose the fine-tuning of encoder-only Small Language Models (SLMs), in particular, the pre-trained models of RoBERTA and CodeBERTa using specialized datasets on source code and other natural language to prove that for the task of binary classification, SLMs outperform LLMs by a huge margin whilst using a fraction of compute. Our encoders achieve AUROC $= 0.97$ to $0.99$ and macro-F1 $0.89$ to $0.94$ while reducing latency by $8$-$12\times$ and peak VRAM by $3$-$5\times$ at $512$-token inputs. Under cross-generator shifts and adversarial transformations (paraphrase, back-translation; code formatting/renaming), performance retains $\geq 92%$ of clean AUROC. We release training and evaluation scripts with seeds and configs; a reproducibility checklist is also included.

Paperid: 1982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23413.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-task neural routing solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for their ability to solve multiple vehicle routing problems (VRPs) using a single model. However, existing neural solvers typically rely on predefined problem constraints or require per-problem fine-tuning, which substantially limits their zero-shot generalization ability to unseen VRP variants. To address this critical bottleneck, we propose URS, a unified neural routing solver capable of zero-shot generalization across a wide range of unseen VRPs using a single model without any fine-tuning. The key component of URS is the unified data representation (UDR), which replaces problem enumeration with data unification, thereby broadening the problem coverage and reducing reliance on domain expertise. In addition, we propose a Mixed Bias Module (MBM) to efficiently learn the geometric and relational biases inherent in various problems. On top of the proposed UDR, we further develop a parameter generator that adaptively adjusts the decoder and bias weights of MBM to enhance zero-shot generalization. Moreover, we propose an LLM-driven constraint satisfaction mechanism, which translates raw problem descriptions into executable stepwise masking functions to ensure solution feasibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that URS can consistently produce high-quality solutions for more than 100 distinct VRP variants without any fine-tuning, which includes more than 90 unseen variants. To the best of our knowledge, URS is the first neural solver capable of handling over 100 VRP variants with a single model.

Paperid: 1983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18709.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual riddle generation challenges large language models (LLMs) to balance cultural fluency with creative abstraction. Standard prompting strategies -- zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought -- tend to reuse memorized riddles or perform shallow paraphrasing. We introduce Adaptive Originality Filtering (AOF), a prompting framework that filters redundant generations using cosine-based similarity rejection, while enforcing lexical novelty and cross-lingual fidelity. Evaluated across three LLMs and four language pairs, AOF-enhanced GPT-4o achieves \texttt{0.177} Self-BLEU and \texttt{0.915} Distinct-2 in Japanese, signaling improved lexical diversity and reduced redundancy compared to other prompting methods and language pairs. Our findings show that semantic rejection can guide culturally grounded, creative generation without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 1984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05128.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent phenomenon we term the attention basin: when presented with a sequence of structured items (e.g., retrieved documents or few-shot examples), models systematically assign higher attention to the items at the beginning and end of the sequence, while neglecting those in the middle. Crucially, our analysis further reveals that allocating higher attention to critical information is key to enhancing model performance. Based on these insights, we introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank), a two-stage framework that (i) estimates a model's intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set, and (ii) reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. AttnRank is a model-agnostic, training-free, and plug-and-play method with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks demonstrate that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures.

Paperid: 1985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21099.pdf

Abstract:
Search algorithms and user query relevance have given LLMs the ability to return relevant information, but the effect of content phrasing on ad visibility remains underexplored. We investigate how LLM-based rewriting of advertisements can improve their ranking in retrieval systems and inclusion in generated LLM responses, without modifying the retrieval model itself. We introduce a supervised fine-tuning framework with a custom loss balancing semantic relevance and content fidelity. To evaluate effectiveness, we propose two metrics: DeltaMRR@K (ranking improvement) and DeltaDIR@K (inclusion frequency improvement). Our approach presents a scalable method to optimize ad phrasing, enhancing visibility in retrieval-based LLM workflows. Experiments across both instruction-based and few-shot prompting demonstrate that PPO trained models outperform both prompt engineering and supervised fine-tuning in most cases, achieving up to a 2.79 DeltaDIR@5 and 0.0073 DeltaMRR@5 in instruction-based prompting. These results highlight the importance of how the ad is written before retrieval and prompt format and reinforcement learning in effective ad rewriting for LLM integrated retrieval systems.

Paperid: 1986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13410.pdf

Abstract:
Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are available. In this work, we investigate whether sparse autoencoder (SAE) features, previously shown to correlate with interpretable model behaviors, can be leveraged to steer the generated language of LLMs during inference. Leveraging pretrained SAEs on the residual streams of Gemma-2B and Gemma-9B, we identify features whose activations differ most significantly between English and four target languages: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and French. By modifying just a single SAE feature at one transformer layer, we achieve controlled language shifts with up to 90\% success, as measured by FastText language classification, while preserving semantic fidelity according to LaBSE (Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding) similarity. Our analysis reveals that language steering is most effective in mid-to-late transformer layers and is amplified by specific attention heads disproportionately associated with language-sensitive SAE features. These results demonstrate the promise of sparse feature steering as a lightweight and interpretable mechanism for controllable multilingual generation.

Paperid: 1987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00658.pdf

Abstract:
Sarcasm is a form of humor where expressions convey meanings opposite to their literal interpretations. Classifying and generating sarcasm using large language models is vital for interpreting human communication. Sarcasm poses challenges for computational models, due to its nuanced nature. We introduce Sarc7, a benchmark that classifies 7 types of sarcasm: self-deprecating, brooding, deadpan, polite, obnoxious, raging, and manic by annotating entries of the MUStARD dataset. Classification was evaluated using zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), and a novel emotion-based prompting technique. We propose an emotion-based generation method developed by identifying key components of sarcasm-incongruity, shock value, and context dependency. Our classification experiments show that Gemini 2.5, using emotion-based prompting, outperforms other setups with an F1 score of 0.3664. Human evaluators preferred our emotion-based prompting, with 38.46% more successful generations than zero-shot prompting.

Paperid: 1988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21549.pdf

Abstract:
We present Distill CLIP (DCLIP), a fine-tuned variant of the CLIP model that enhances multimodal image-text retrieval while preserving the original model's strong zero-shot classification capabilities. CLIP models are typically constrained by fixed image resolutions and limited context, which can hinder their effectiveness in retrieval tasks that require fine-grained cross-modal understanding. DCLIP addresses these challenges through a meta teacher-student distillation framework, where a cross-modal transformer teacher is fine-tuned to produce enriched embeddings via bidirectional cross-attention between YOLO-extracted image regions and corresponding textual spans. These semantically and spatially aligned global representations guide the training of a lightweight student model using a hybrid loss that combines contrastive learning and cosine similarity objectives. Despite being trained on only ~67,500 samples curated from MSCOCO, Flickr30k, and Conceptual Captions-just a fraction of CLIP's original dataset-DCLIP significantly improves image-text retrieval metrics (Recall@K, MAP), while retaining approximately 94% of CLIP's zero-shot classification performance. These results demonstrate that DCLIP effectively mitigates the trade-off between task specialization and generalization, offering a resource-efficient, domain-adaptive, and detail-sensitive solution for advanced vision-language tasks. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DCLIP-B772/README.md.

Paperid: 1989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18159.pdf

Abstract:
The digital exclusion of endangered languages remains a critical challenge in NLP, limiting both linguistic research and revitalization efforts. This study introduces the first computational investigation of Comanche, an Uto-Aztecan language on the verge of extinction, demonstrating how minimal-cost, community-informed NLP interventions can support language preservation. We present a manually curated dataset of 412 phrases, a synthetic data generation pipeline, and an empirical evaluation of GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini for language identification. Our experiments reveal that while LLMs struggle with Comanche in zero-shot settings, few-shot prompting significantly improves performance, achieving near-perfect accuracy with just five examples. Our findings highlight the potential of targeted NLP methodologies in low-resource contexts and emphasize that visibility is the first step toward inclusion. By establishing a foundation for Comanche in NLP, we advocate for computational approaches that prioritize accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and community engagement.

Paperid: 1990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15206.pdf

Abstract:
In endoscopic procedures, autonomous tracking of abnormal regions and following circumferential cutting markers can significantly reduce the cognitive burden on endoscopists. However, conventional model-based pipelines are fragile for each component (e.g., detection, motion planning) requires manual tuning and struggles to incorporate high-level endoscopic intent, leading to poor generalization across diverse scenes. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate visual perception, language grounding, and motion planning within an end-to-end framework, offer a promising alternative by semantically adapting to surgeon prompts without manual recalibration. Despite their potential, applying VLA models to robotic endoscopy presents unique challenges due to the complex and dynamic anatomical environments of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. To address this, we introduce EndoVLA, designed specifically for continuum robots in GI interventions. Given endoscopic images and surgeon-issued tracking prompts, EndoVLA performs three core tasks: (1) polyp tracking, (2) delineation and following of abnormal mucosal regions, and (3) adherence to circular markers during circumferential cutting. To tackle data scarcity and domain shifts, we propose a dual-phase strategy comprising supervised fine-tuning on our EndoVLA-Motion dataset and reinforcement fine-tuning with task-aware rewards. Our approach significantly improves tracking performance in endoscopy and enables zero-shot generalization in diverse scenes and complex sequential tasks.

Paperid: 1991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16867.pdf

Abstract:
Heuristics are commonly used to tackle various search and optimization problems. Design heuristics usually require tedious manual crafting with domain knowledge. Recent works have incorporated Large Language Models (LLMs) into automatic heuristic search, leveraging their powerful language and coding capacity. However, existing research focuses on the optimal performance on the target problem as the sole objective, neglecting other criteria such as efficiency and scalability, which are vital in practice. To tackle this challenge, we propose to model the heuristic search as a multi-objective optimization problem and consider introducing additional practical criteria beyond optimal performance. Due to the complexity of the search space, conventional multi-objective optimization methods struggle to effectively handle LLM-based multi-objective heuristic search. We propose the first LLM-based multi-objective heuristic search framework, Multi-objective Evolution of Heuristic (MEoH), which integrates LLMs in a zero-shot manner to generate a non-dominated set of heuristics to meet multiple design criteria. We design a new dominance-dissimilarity mechanism for effective population management and selection, which incorporates both code dissimilarity in the search space and dominance in the objective space. MEoH is demonstrated in two well-known combinatorial optimization problems: the online Bin Packing Problem (BPP) and the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The results indicate that a variety of elite heuristics are automatically generated in a single run, offering more trade-off options than the existing methods. It successfully achieves competitive or superior performance while improving efficiency up to 10 times. Moreover, we also observe that the multi-objective search introduces novel insights into heuristic design and leads to the discovery of diverse heuristics.

Paperid: 1992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09082.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional generalization has achieved substantial progress in computer vision on pre-collected training data. Nonetheless, real-world data continually emerges, with possible compositions being nearly infinite, long-tailed, and not entirely visible. Thus, an ideal model is supposed to gradually improve the capability of compositional generalization in an incremental manner. In this paper, we explore Composition-Incremental Learning for Compositional Generalization (CompIL) in the context of the compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) task, where models need to continually learn new compositions, intending to improve their compositional generalization capability progressively. To quantitatively evaluate CompIL, we develop a benchmark construction pipeline leveraging existing datasets, yielding MIT-States-CompIL and C-GQA-CompIL. Furthermore, we propose a pseudo-replay framework utilizing a visual synthesizer to synthesize visual representations of learned compositions and a linguistic primitive distillation mechanism to maintain aligned primitive representations across the learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Paperid: 1993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27391.pdf

Abstract:
Modality alignment is critical for vision-language models (VLMs) to effectively integrate information across modalities. However, existing methods extract hierarchical features from text while representing each image with a single feature, leading to asymmetric and suboptimal alignment. To address this, we propose Alignment across Trees, a method that constructs and aligns tree-like hierarchical features for both image and text modalities. Specifically, we introduce a semantic-aware visual feature extraction framework that applies a cross-attention mechanism to visual class tokens from intermediate Transformer layers, guided by textual cues to extract visual features with coarse-to-fine semantics. We then embed the feature trees of the two modalities into hyperbolic manifolds with distinct curvatures to effectively model their hierarchical structures. To align across the heterogeneous hyperbolic manifolds with different curvatures, we formulate a KL distance measure between distributions on heterogeneous manifolds, and learn an intermediate manifold for manifold alignment by minimizing the distance. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the optimal intermediate manifold. Experiments on taxonomic open-set classification tasks across multiple image datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines under few-shot and cross-domain settings.

Paperid: 1994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20310.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires agents to explore 3D environments to obtain observations and answer questions related to the scene. Existing methods leverage VLMs to directly explore the environment and answer questions without explicit thinking or planning, which limits their reasoning ability and results in excessive or inefficient exploration as well as ineffective responses. In this paper, we introduce ToolEQA, an agent that integrates external tools with multi-step reasoning, where external tools can provide more useful information for completing the task, helping the model derive better exploration directions in the next step of reasoning and thus obtaining additional effective information. This enables ToolEQA to generate more accurate responses with a shorter exploration distance. To enhance the model's ability for tool-usage and multi-step reasoning, we further design a novel EQA data generation pipeline that automatically constructs large-scale EQA tasks with reasoning trajectories and corresponding answers. Based on the pipeline, we collect the EQA-RT dataset that contains about 18K tasks, divided into a training set EQA-RT-Train, and two test sets EQA-RT-Seen (scenes overlapping with the training set) and EQA-RT-Unseen (novel scenes). Experiments on EQA-RT-Seen and EQA-RT-Unseen show that ToolEQA improves the success rate by 9.2~20.2% over state-of-the-art baselines, while outperforming the zero-shot ToolEQA by 10% in success rate. In addition, ToolEQA also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HM-EQA, OpenEQA, and EXPRESS-Bench datasets, demonstrating its generality. Our homepage see https://tooleqa.github.io.

Paperid: 1995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17232.pdf

Abstract:
Hyperbolic neural networks (HNNs) have demonstrated notable efficacy in representing real-world data with hierarchical structures via exploiting the geometric properties of hyperbolic spaces characterized by negative curvatures. Curvature plays a crucial role in optimizing HNNs. Inappropriate curvatures may cause HNNs to converge to suboptimal parameters, degrading overall performance. So far, the theoretical foundation of the effect of curvatures on HNNs has not been developed. In this paper, we derive a PAC-Bayesian generalization bound of HNNs, highlighting the role of curvatures in the generalization of HNNs via their effect on the smoothness of the loss landscape. Driven by the derived bound, we propose a sharpness-aware curvature learning method to smooth the loss landscape, thereby improving the generalization of HNNs. In our method, we design a scope sharpness measure for curvatures, which is minimized through a bi-level optimization process. Then, we introduce an implicit differentiation algorithm that efficiently solves the bi-level optimization by approximating gradients of curvatures. We present the approximation error and convergence analyses of the proposed method, showing that the approximation error is upper-bounded, and the proposed method can converge by bounding gradients of HNNs. Experiments on four settings: classification, learning from long-tailed data, learning from noisy data, and few-shot learning show that our method can improve the performance of HNNs.

Paperid: 1996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11761.pdf

Abstract:
Abstract visual reasoning (AVR) enables humans to quickly discover and generalize abstract rules to new scenarios. Designing intelligent systems with human-like AVR abilities has been a long-standing topic in the artificial intelligence community. Deep AVR solvers have recently achieved remarkable success in various AVR tasks. However, they usually use task-specific designs or parameters in different tasks. In such a paradigm, solving new tasks often means retraining the model, and sometimes retuning the model architectures, which increases the cost of solving AVR problems. In contrast to task-specific approaches, this paper proposes a novel Unified Conditional Generative Solver (UCGS), aiming to address multiple AVR tasks in a unified framework. First, we prove that some well-known AVR tasks can be reformulated as the problem of estimating the predictability of target images in problem panels. Then, we illustrate that, under the proposed framework, training one conditional generative model can solve various AVR tasks. The experiments show that with a single round of multi-task training, UCGS demonstrates abstract reasoning ability across various AVR tasks. Especially, UCGS exhibits the ability of zero-shot reasoning, enabling it to perform abstract reasoning on problems from unseen AVR tasks in the testing phase.

Paperid: 1997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18533.pdf

Abstract:
Learning in hyperbolic spaces has attracted increasing attention due to its superior ability to model hierarchical structures of data. Most existing hyperbolic learning methods use fixed distance measures for all data, assuming a uniform hierarchy across all data points. However, real-world hierarchical structures exhibit significant diversity, making this assumption overly restrictive. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware distance measure in hyperbolic spaces, which dynamically adapts to varying hierarchical structures. Our approach derives the distance measure by generating tailored projections and curvatures for each pair of data points, effectively mapping them to an appropriate hyperbolic space. We introduce a revised low-rank decomposition scheme and a hard-pair mining mechanism to mitigate the computational cost of pair-wise distance computation without compromising accuracy. We present an upper bound on the low-rank approximation error using Talagrand's concentration inequality, ensuring theoretical robustness. Extensive experiments on standard image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100), hierarchical classification (5-level CIFAR-100), and few-shot learning tasks (mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our approach consistently outperforms learning methods that use fixed distance measures, with notable improvements on few-shot learning tasks, where it achieves over 5\% gains on mini-ImageNet. The results reveal that adaptive distance measures better capture diverse hierarchical structures, with visualization showing clearer class boundaries and improved prototype separation in hyperbolic spaces.

Paperid: 1998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18529.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a hyperbolic set-to-set distance measure for computing dissimilarity between sets in hyperbolic space. While point-to-point distances in hyperbolic space effectively capture hierarchical relationships between data points, many real-world applications require comparing sets of hyperbolic data points, where the local structure and the global structure of the sets carry crucial semantic information. The proposed the \underline{h}yperbolic \underline{s}et-\underline{to}-\underline{s}et \underline{d}istance measure (HS2SD) integrates both global and local structural information: global structure through geodesic distances between Einstein midpoints of hyperbolic sets, and local structure through topological characteristics of the two sets. To efficiently compute topological differences, we prove that using a finite Thue-Morse sequence of degree and adjacency matrices can serve as a robust approximation to capture the topological structure of a set. In this case, by considering the topological differences, HS2SD provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between two hyperbolic sets. Empirical evaluation on entity matching, standard image classification, and few-shot image classification demonstrates that our distance measure outperforms existing methods by effectively modeling the hierarchical and complex relationships inherent in hyperbolic sets.

Paperid: 1999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08906.pdf

Abstract:
Feature augmentation generates novel samples in the feature space, providing an effective way to enhance the generalization ability of learning algorithms with hyperbolic geometry. Most hyperbolic feature augmentation is confined to closed-environment, assuming the number of classes is fixed (\emph{i.e.}, seen classes) and generating features only for these classes. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic dual feature augmentation method for open-environment, which augments features for both seen and unseen classes in the hyperbolic space. To obtain a more precise approximation of the real data distribution for efficient training, (1) we adopt a neural ordinary differential equation module, enhanced by meta-learning, estimating the feature distributions of both seen and unseen classes; (2) we then introduce a regularizer to preserve the latent hierarchical structures of data in the hyperbolic space; (3) we also derive an upper bound for the hyperbolic dual augmentation loss, allowing us to train a hyperbolic model using infinite augmentations for seen and unseen classes. Extensive experiments on five open-environment tasks: class-incremental learning, few-shot open-set recognition, few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, and general image classification, demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the performance of hyperbolic algorithms in open-environment.

Paperid: 2000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03798.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can decompose Chinese characters into compositional components and recombine them to recognize unseen characters. This reflects two cognitive principles: Compositionality, the idea that complex concepts are built on simpler parts; and Learning-to-learn, the ability to learn strategies for decomposing and recombining components to form new concepts. These principles provide inductive biases that support efficient generalization. They are critical to Chinese character recognition (CCR) in solving the zero-shot problem, which results from the common long-tail distribution of Chinese character datasets. Existing methods have made substantial progress in modeling compositionality via predefined radical or stroke decomposition. However, they often ignore the learning-to-learn capability, limiting their ability to generalize beyond human-defined schemes. Inspired by these principles, we propose a deep latent variable model that learns Compositional Latent components of Chinese characters (CoLa) without relying on human-defined decomposition schemes. Recognition and matching can be performed by comparing compositional latent components in the latent space, enabling zero-shot character recognition. The experiments illustrate that CoLa outperforms previous methods in both character the radical zero-shot CCR. Visualization indicates that the learned components can reflect the structure of characters in an interpretable way. Moreover, despite being trained on historical documents, CoLa can analyze components of oracle bone characters, highlighting its cross-dataset generalization ability.

Paperid: 2001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24837.pdf

Abstract:
Chinese Character Recognition (CCR) is a fundamental technology for intelligent document processing. Unlike Latin characters, Chinese characters exhibit unique spatial structures and compositional rules, allowing for the use of fine-grained semantic information in representation. However, existing approaches are usually based on auto-regressive as well as edit distance post-process and typically rely on a single-level character representation. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Image-Text Aligning (Hi-GITA) framework based on a contrastive paradigm. To leverage the abundant fine-grained semantic information of Chinese characters, we propose multi-granularity encoders on both image and text sides. Specifically, the Image Multi-Granularity Encoder extracts hierarchical image representations from character images, capturing semantic cues from localized strokes to holistic structures. The Text Multi-Granularity Encoder extracts stroke and radical sequence representations at different levels of granularity. To better capture the relationships between strokes and radicals, we introduce Multi-Granularity Fusion Modules on the image and text sides, respectively. Furthermore, to effectively bridge the two modalities, we further introduce a Fine-Grained Decoupled Image-Text Contrastive loss, which aligns image and text representations across multiple granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Hi-GITA significantly outperforms existing zero-shot CCR methods. For instance, it brings about 20% accuracy improvement in handwritten character and radical zero-shot settings. Code and models will be released soon.

Paperid: 2002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03665.pdf

Abstract:
The task of image captioning demands an algorithm to generate natural language descriptions of visual inputs. Recent advancements have seen a convergence between image captioning research and the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs -- like GPT-4V and Gemini -- which extend the capabilities of text-only LLMs to multiple modalities. This paper investigates whether Multimodal LLMs can supplant traditional image captioning networks by evaluating their performance on various image description benchmarks. We explore both the zero-shot capabilities of these models and their adaptability to different semantic domains through fine-tuning methods, including prompt learning, prefix tuning, and low-rank adaptation. Our results demonstrate that while Multimodal LLMs achieve impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning for specific domains while maintaining their generalization capabilities intact remains challenging. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research in image captioning and the development of more adaptable Multimodal LLMs.

Paperid: 2003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21414.pdf

Abstract:
Training a unified language model that adapts between intuitive System 1 and deliberative System 2 remains challenging due to interference between their cognitive modes. Recent studies have thus pursued making System 2 models more efficient. However, these approaches focused on output control, limiting what models produce. We argue that this paradigm is misaligned: output length is merely a symptom of the model's cognitive configuration, not the root cause. In this work, we shift the focus to capability control, which modulates \textit{how models think} rather than \textit{what they produce}. To realize this, we leverage existing Instruct and Thinking checkpoints through dynamic parameter interpolation, without additional training. Our pilot study establishes that linear interpolation yields a convex, monotonic Pareto frontier, underpinned by representation continuity and structural connectivity. Building on this, we propose \textbf{DAMI} (\textbf{D}yn\textbf{A}mic \textbf{M}odel \textbf{I}nterpolation), a framework that estimates a query-specific Reasoning Intensity $λ(q)$ to configure cognitive depth. For training-based estimation, we develop a preference learning method encoding accuracy and efficiency criteria. For zero-shot deployment, we introduce a confidence-based method leveraging inter-model cognitive discrepancy. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DAMI achieves higher accuracy than the Thinking model while remaining efficient, effectively combining the efficiency of System 1 with the reasoning depth of System 2.

Paperid: 2004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19169.pdf

Abstract:
Image restoration (IR) models are typically trained to recover high-quality images using L1 or LPIPS loss. To handle diverse unknown degradations, zero-shot IR methods have also been introduced. However, existing pre-trained and zero-shot IR approaches often fail to align with human preferences, resulting in restored images that may not be favored. This highlights the critical need to enhance restoration quality and adapt flexibly to various image restoration tasks or backbones without requiring model retraining and ideally without labor-intensive preference data collection. In this paper, we propose the first Test-Time Preference Optimization (TTPO) paradigm for image restoration, which enhances perceptual quality, generates preference data on-the-fly, and is compatible with any IR model backbone. Specifically, we design a training-free, three-stage pipeline: (i) generate candidate preference images online using diffusion inversion and denoising based on the initially restored image; (ii) select preferred and dispreferred images using automated preference-aligned metrics or human feedback; and (iii) use the selected preference images as reward signals to guide the diffusion denoising process, optimizing the restored image to better align with human preferences. Extensive experiments across various image restoration tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed pipeline.

Paperid: 2005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14868.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models produce powerful text embeddings, but their causal attention mechanism restricts the flow of information from later to earlier tokens, degrading representation quality. While recent methods attempt to solve this by prepending a single summary token, they over-compress information, hence harming performance on long documents. We propose Hierarchical Token Prepending (HTP), a method that resolves two critical bottlenecks. To mitigate attention-level compression, HTP partitions the input into blocks and prepends block-level summary tokens to subsequent blocks, creating multiple pathways for backward information flow. To address readout-level over-squashing, we replace last-token pooling with mean-pooling, a choice supported by theoretical analysis. HTP achieves consistent performance gains across 11 retrieval datasets and 30 general embedding benchmarks, especially in long-context settings. As a simple, architecture-agnostic method, HTP enhances both zero-shot and finetuned models, offering a scalable route to superior long-document embeddings.

Paperid: 2006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24034.pdf

Abstract:
Despite rapid advancements in text-to-image (T2I) models, their safety mechanisms are vulnerable to adversarial prompts, which maliciously generate unsafe images. Current red-teaming methods for proactively assessing such vulnerabilities usually require white-box access to T2I models, and rely on inefficient per-prompt optimization, as well as inevitably generate semantically meaningless prompts easily blocked by filters. In this paper, we propose APT (AutoPrompT), a black-box framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate human-readable adversarial suffixes for benign prompts. We first introduce an alternating optimization-finetuning pipeline between adversarial suffix optimization and fine-tuning the LLM utilizing the optimized suffix. Furthermore, we integrates a dual-evasion strategy in optimization phase, enabling the bypass of both perplexity-based filter and blacklist word filter: (1) we constrain the LLM generating human-readable prompts through an auxiliary LLM perplexity scoring, which starkly contrasts with prior token-level gibberish, and (2) we also introduce banned-token penalties to suppress the explicit generation of banned-tokens in blacklist. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent red-teaming performance of our human-readable, filter-resistant adversarial prompts, as well as superior zero-shot transferability which enables instant adaptation to unseen prompts and exposes critical vulnerabilities even in commercial APIs (e.g., Leonardo.Ai.).

Paperid: 2007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06646.pdf

Abstract:
A core challenge in scientific machine learning, and scientific computing more generally, is modeling continuous phenomena which (in practice) are represented discretely. Machine-learned operators (MLOs) have been introduced as a means to achieve this modeling goal, as this class of architecture can perform inference at arbitrary resolution. In this work, we evaluate whether this architectural innovation is sufficient to perform "zero-shot super-resolution," namely to enable a model to serve inference on higher-resolution data than that on which it was originally trained. We comprehensively evaluate both zero-shot sub-resolution and super-resolution (i.e., multi-resolution) inference in MLOs. We decouple multi-resolution inference into two key behaviors: 1) extrapolation to varying frequency information; and 2) interpolating across varying resolutions. We empirically demonstrate that MLOs fail to do both of these tasks in a zero-shot manner. Consequently, we find MLOs are not able to perform accurate inference at resolutions different from those on which they were trained, and instead they are brittle and susceptible to aliasing. To address these failure modes, we propose a simple, computationally-efficient, and data-driven multi-resolution training protocol that overcomes aliasing and that provides robust multi-resolution generalization.

Paperid: 2008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12678.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluations of large language models (LLMs) suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors such as few-shot examples can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. Moreover, different LLMs can have different preferences for a certain setting of random factors. As a result, using a fixed setting of random factors, which is often adopted as the paradigm of current evaluations, can lead to potential unfair comparisons between LLMs. To mitigate the volatility of evaluations, we first theoretically analyze the sources of variance induced by changes in random factors. Targeting these specific sources, we then propose the instance-level randomization (ILR) method to reduce variance and enhance fairness in model comparisons. Instead of using a fixed setting across the whole benchmark in a single experiment, we randomize all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance, run multiple experiments and report the averaged score. Theoretical analyses and empirical results demonstrate that ILR can reduce the variance and unfair comparisons caused by random factors, as well as achieve similar robustness level with less than half computational cost compared with previous methods.

Paperid: 2009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18883.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a computational model for universal video temporal grounding, which accurately localizes temporal moments in videos based on natural language queries (e.g., questions or descriptions). Unlike existing methods that are often limited to specific video domains or durations, we propose UniTime, a robust and universal video grounding model leveraging the strong vision-language understanding capabilities of generative Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Our model effectively handles videos of diverse views, genres, and lengths while comprehending complex language queries. The key contributions include: (i) We consider steering strong MLLMs for temporal grounding in videos. To enable precise timestamp outputs, we incorporate temporal information by interleaving timestamp tokens with video tokens. (ii) By training the model to handle videos with different input granularities through adaptive frame scaling, our approach achieves robust temporal grounding for both short and long videos. (iii) Comprehensive experiments show that UniTime outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both zero-shot and dataset-specific finetuned settings across five public temporal grounding benchmarks. (iv) When employed as a preliminary moment retriever for long-form video question-answering (VideoQA), UniTime significantly improves VideoQA accuracy, highlighting its value for complex video understanding tasks.

Paperid: 2010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02152.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great promise for generalist robotic manipulation in the physical world. However, existing models are restricted to robot observations and text-only instructions, lacking the flexibility of interleaved multimodal instructions enabled by recent advances in foundation models in the digital world. In this paper, we present Interleave-VLA, the first framework capable of comprehending interleaved image-text instructions and directly generating continuous action sequences in the physical world. It offers a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm that extends state-of-the-art VLA models with minimal modifications and strong zero-shot generalization. A key challenge in realizing Interleave-VLA is the absence of large-scale interleaved embodied datasets. To bridge this gap, we develop an automatic pipeline that converts text-only instructions from real-world datasets in Open X-Embodiment into interleaved image-text instructions, resulting in the first large-scale real-world interleaved embodied dataset with 210k episodes. Through comprehensive evaluation on simulation benchmarks and real-robot experiments, we demonstrate that Interleave-VLA offers significant benefits: 1) it improves out-of-domain generalization to unseen objects by 2-3x compared to state-of-the-art baselines, 2) supports flexible task interfaces, and 3) handles diverse user-provided image instructions in a zero-shot manner, such as hand-drawn sketches. We further analyze the factors behind Interleave-VLA's strong zero-shot performance, showing that the interleaved paradigm effectively leverages heterogeneous datasets and diverse instruction images, including those from the Internet, which demonstrates strong potential for scaling up. Our model and dataset will be open-sourced.

Paperid: 2011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01373.pdf

Abstract:
Machine fault diagnosis (FD) is a critical task for predictive maintenance, enabling early fault detection and preventing unexpected failures. Despite its importance, existing FD models are operation-specific with limited generalization across diverse datasets. Foundation models (FM) have demonstrated remarkable potential in both visual and language domains, achieving impressive generalization capabilities even with minimal data through few-shot or zero-shot learning. However, translating these advances to FD presents unique hurdles. Unlike the large-scale, cohesive datasets available for images and text, FD datasets are typically smaller and more heterogeneous, with significant variations in sampling frequencies and the number of channels across different systems and applications. This heterogeneity complicates the design of a universal architecture capable of effectively processing such diverse data while maintaining robust feature extraction and learning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce UniFault, a foundation model for fault diagnosis that systematically addresses these issues. Specifically, the model incorporates a comprehensive data harmonization pipeline featuring two key innovations. First, a unification scheme transforms multivariate inputs into standardized univariate sequences while retaining local inter-channel relationships. Second, a novel cross-domain temporal fusion strategy mitigates distribution shifts and enriches sample diversity and count, improving the model generalization across varying conditions. UniFault is pretrained on over 9 billion data points spanning diverse FD datasets, enabling superior few-shot performance. Extensive experiments on real-world FD datasets demonstrate that UniFault achieves SoTA performance, setting a new benchmark for fault diagnosis models and paving the way for more scalable and robust predictive maintenance solutions.

Paperid: 2012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18702.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to develop entity recognition systems from unannotated text corpora. This task presents substantial challenges due to minimal human intervention. Recent work has adapted large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot NER by crafting specialized prompt templates. It advances model self-learning abilities by incorporating self-annotated demonstrations. However, two important challenges persist: (i) Correlations between contexts surrounding entities are overlooked, leading to wrong type predictions or entity omissions. (ii) The indiscriminate use of task demonstrations, retrieved through shallow similarity-based strategies, severely misleads LLMs during inference. In this paper, we introduce the cooperative multi-agent system (CMAS), a novel framework for zero-shot NER that uses the collective intelligence of multiple agents to address the challenges outlined above. CMAS has four main agents: (i) a self-annotator, (ii) a type-related feature (TRF) extractor, (iii) a demonstration discriminator, and (iv) an overall predictor. To explicitly capture correlations between contexts surrounding entities, CMAS reformulates NER into two subtasks: recognizing named entities and identifying entity type-related features within the target sentence. To enable controllable utilization of demonstrations, a demonstration discriminator is established to incorporate the self-reflection mechanism, automatically evaluating helpfulness scores for the target sentence. Experimental results show that CMAS significantly improves zero-shot NER performance across six benchmarks, including both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. Furthermore, CMAS demonstrates its effectiveness in few-shot settings and with various LLM backbones.

Paperid: 2013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01720.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of multimodal information retrieval, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominately rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models, often those trained with image-text contrastive learning. In this paper, we explore the possibility of re-purposing generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for retrieval. This approach enables unifying all retrieval tasks under the same formulation and, more importantly, allows for extrapolation towards unseen retrieval tasks without additional training. Our contributions can be summarised in the following aspects: (i) We introduce LamRA, a versatile framework designed to empower LMMs with sophisticated retrieval and reranking capabilities. (ii) For retrieval, we adopt a two-stage training strategy comprising language-only pre-training and multimodal instruction tuning to progressively enhance LMM's retrieval performance. (iii) For reranking, we employ joint training for both pointwise and listwise reranking, offering two distinct ways to further boost the retrieval performance. (iv) Extensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of our method in handling more than ten retrieval tasks, demonstrating robust performance in both supervised and zero-shot settings, including scenarios involving previously unseen retrieval tasks.

Paperid: 2014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17662.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised speech models have achieved remarkable success on content-driven tasks, yet they remain limited in capturing speaker-discriminative features critical for verification, diarization, and profiling applications. We introduce DELULU, a speaker-aware self-supervised foundational model that addresses this limitation by integrating external supervision into the pseudo-label generation process. DELULU leverages frame-level embeddings from ReDimNet, a state-of-the-art speaker verification model, to guide the k-means clustering step during pre-training, introducing a strong speaker-discriminative inductive bias that aligns representation learning with speaker identity. The model is trained using a dual objective that combines masked prediction and denoising, further enhancing robustness and generalization. DELULU significantly outperforms prior self-supervised learning (SSL) models across a range of speaker-centric tasks, achieving up to 62% relative improvement in equal error rate (EER) for speaker verification and consistent gains on zero-shot profiling tasks such as gender, age, accent, and speaker counting. Our findings demonstrate that DELULU is a strong universal encoder for speaker-aware speech processing, enabling superior performance even without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22407.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on diverse training data to achieve robust generalization. However, collecting large-scale real-world robot manipulation data across varied object appearances and environmental conditions remains prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose Embodied Manipulation Media Adaptation (EMMA), a VLA policy enhancement framework that integrates a generative data engine with an effective training pipeline. We introduce DreamTransfer, a diffusion Transformer-based framework for generating multi-view consistent, geometrically grounded embodied manipulation videos. DreamTransfer enables text-controlled visual editing of robot videos, transforming foreground, background, and lighting conditions without compromising 3D structure or geometrical plausibility. Furthermore, we explore hybrid training with real and generated data, and introduce AdaMix, a hard-sample-aware training strategy that dynamically reweights training batches to focus optimization on perceptually or kinematically challenging samples. Extensive experiments show that videos generated by DreamTransfer significantly outperform prior video generation methods in multi-view consistency, geometric fidelity, and text-conditioning accuracy. Crucially, VLAs trained with generated data enable robots to generalize to unseen object categories and novel visual domains using only demonstrations from a single appearance. In real-world robotic manipulation tasks with zero-shot visual domains, our approach achieves over a 200% relative performance gain compared to training on real data alone, and further improves by 13% with AdaMix, demonstrating its effectiveness in boosting policy generalization.

Paperid: 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22199.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Language Action (VLA) models derive their generalization capability from diverse training data, yet collecting embodied robot interaction data remains prohibitively expensive. In contrast, human demonstration videos are far more scalable and cost-efficient to collect, and recent studies confirm their effectiveness in training VLA models. However, a significant domain gap persists between human videos and robot-executed videos, including unstable camera viewpoints, visual discrepancies between human hands and robotic arms, and differences in motion dynamics. To bridge this gap, we propose MimicDreamer, a framework that turns fast, low-cost human demonstrations into robot-usable supervision by jointly aligning vision, viewpoint, and actions to directly support policy training. For visual alignment, we propose H2R Aligner, a video diffusion model that generates high-fidelity robot demonstration videos by transferring motion from human manipulation footage. For viewpoint stabilization, EgoStabilizer is proposed, which canonicalizes egocentric videos via homography and inpaints occlusions and distortions caused by warping. For action alignment, we map human hand trajectories to the robot frame and apply a constrained inverse kinematics solver to produce feasible, low-jitter joint commands with accurate pose tracking. Empirically, VLA models trained purely on our synthesized human-to-robot videos achieve few-shot execution on real robots. Moreover, scaling training with human data significantly boosts performance compared to models trained solely on real robot data; our approach improves the average success rate by 14.7\% across six representative manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 2017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20717.pdf

Abstract:
Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle because absolute joint commands cannot compensate model-plant mismatch, leading to error accumulation. We propose RobotDancing, a simple, scalable framework that predicts residual joint targets to explicitly correct dynamics discrepancies. The pipeline is end-to-end--training, sim-to-sim validation, and zero-shot sim-to-real--and uses a single-stage reinforcement learning (RL) setup with a unified observation, reward, and hyperparameter configuration. We evaluate primarily on Unitree G1 with retargeted LAFAN1 dance sequences and validate transfer on H1/H1-2. RobotDancing can track multi-minute, high-energy behaviors (jumps, spins, cartwheels) and deploys zero-shot to hardware with high motion tracking quality.

Paperid: 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11621.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion policies are powerful visuomotor models for robotic manipulation, yet they often fail to generalize to manipulators or end-effectors unseen during training and struggle to accommodate new task requirements at inference time. Addressing this typically requires costly data recollection and policy retraining for each new hardware or task configuration. To overcome this, we introduce an adaptation-projection strategy that enables a diffusion policy to perform zero-shot adaptation to novel manipulators and dynamic task settings, entirely at inference time and without any retraining. Our method first trains a diffusion policy in SE(3) space using demonstrations from a base manipulator. During online deployment, it projects the policy's generated trajectories to satisfy the kinematic and task-specific constraints imposed by the new hardware and objectives. Moreover, this projection dynamically adapts to physical differences (e.g., tool-center-point offsets, jaw widths) and task requirements (e.g., obstacle heights), ensuring robust and successful execution. We validate our approach on real-world pick-and-place, pushing, and pouring tasks across multiple manipulators, including the Franka Panda and Kuka iiwa 14, equipped with a diverse array of end-effectors like flexible grippers, Robotiq 2F/3F grippers, and various 3D-printed designs. Our results demonstrate consistently high success rates in these cross-manipulator scenarios, proving the effectiveness and practicality of our adaptation-projection strategy. The code will be released after peer review.

Paperid: 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11176.pdf

Abstract:
Adapter-based approaches have garnered attention for fine-tuning pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on few-shot classification tasks. These methods strive to develop a lightweight module that better aligns visual and (category) textual representations, thereby enhancing performance on downstream few-shot learning tasks. However, existing adapters generally learn/align (category) textual-visual modalities via explicit spatial proximity in the underlying embedding space, which i) fails to capture the inherent one-to-many associations between categories and image samples and ii) struggles to establish accurate associations between the unknown categories and images. To address these issues, inspired by recent works on hyperbolic learning, we develop a novel Latent Hierarchical Adapter (LatHAdapter) for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot classification tasks. The core of LatHAdapter is to exploit the latent semantic hierarchy of downstream training data and employ it to provide richer, fine-grained guidance for the adapter learning process. Specifically, LatHAdapter first introduces some learnable `attribute' prompts as the bridge to align categories and images. Then, it projects the categories, attribute prompts, and images within each batch in a hyperbolic space, and employs hierarchical regularization to learn the latent semantic hierarchy of them, thereby fully modeling the inherent one-to-many associations among categories, learnable attributes, and image samples. Extensive experiments on four challenging few-shot tasks show that the proposed LatHAdapter consistently outperforms many other fine-tuning approaches, particularly in adapting known classes and generalizing to unknown classes.

Paperid: 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01727.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is fundamental to diverse applications, with recent approaches leverage large vision models (LVMs) to capture temporal patterns through visual representations. We reveal that while vision models enhance forecasting performance, 99% of their parameters are unnecessary for time series tasks. Through cross-modal analysis, we find that time series align with low-level textural features but not high-level semantics, which can impair forecasting accuracy. We propose OccamVTS, a knowledge distillation framework that extracts only the essential 1% of predictive information from LVMs into lightweight networks. Using pre-trained LVMs as privileged teachers, OccamVTS employs pyramid-style feature alignment combined with correlation and feature distillation to transfer beneficial patterns while filtering out semantic noise. Counterintuitively, this aggressive parameter reduction improves accuracy by eliminating overfitting to irrelevant visual features while preserving essential temporal patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that OccamVTS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1% of the original parameters, particularly excelling in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 2021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09375.pdf

Abstract:
Speaker recognition systems are often limited to classification tasks and struggle to generate detailed speaker characteristics or provide context-rich descriptions. These models primarily extract embeddings for speaker identification but fail to capture demographic attributes such as dialect, gender, and age in a structured manner. This paper introduces CoLMbo, a Speaker Language Model (SLM) that addresses these limitations by integrating a speaker encoder with prompt-based conditioning. This allows for the creation of detailed captions based on speaker embeddings. CoLMbo utilizes user-defined prompts to adapt dynamically to new speaker characteristics and provides customized descriptions, including regional dialect variations and age-related traits. This innovative approach not only enhances traditional speaker profiling but also excels in zero-shot scenarios across diverse datasets, marking a significant advancement in the field of speaker recognition.

Paperid: 2022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06636.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has raised significant concerns. However, there is still a lack of definitive standards for evaluating their safety due to the subjective nature of current safety benchmarks. To address this gap, we conducted the first exploration of LLMs' safety evaluation from a legal perspective by proposing the SafeLawBench benchmark. SafeLawBench categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards, providing a systematic and comprehensive framework for evaluation. It comprises 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering (QA) tasks. Our evaluation included 2 closed-source LLMs and 18 open-source LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, highlighting the safety features of each model. We also evaluated the LLMs' safety-related reasoning stability and refusal behavior. Additionally, we found that a majority voting mechanism can enhance model performance. Notably, even leading SOTA models like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o have not exceeded 80.5% accuracy in multi-choice tasks on SafeLawBench, while the average accuracy of 20 LLMs remains at 68.8\%. We urge the community to prioritize research on the safety of LLMs.

Paperid: 2023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21969.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied long-horizon manipulation requires robotic systems to process multimodal inputs-such as vision and natural language-and translate them into executable actions. However, existing learning-based approaches often depend on large, task-specific datasets and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. Recent methods have explored using large language models (LLMs) as high-level planners that decompose tasks into subtasks using natural language and guide pretrained low-level controllers. Yet, these approaches assume perfect execution from low-level policies, which is unrealistic in real-world environments with noise or suboptimal behaviors. To overcome this, we fully discard the pretrained low-level policy and instead use the LLM to directly generate executable code plans within a closed-loop framework. Our planner employs chain-of-thought (CoT)-guided few-shot learning with incrementally structured examples to produce robust and generalizable task plans. Complementing this, a reporter evaluates outcomes using RGB-D and delivers structured feedback, enabling recovery from misalignment and replanning under partial observability. This design eliminates per-step inference, reduces computational overhead, and limits error accumulation that was observed in previous methods. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on 30+ diverse seen and unseen long-horizon tasks across LoHoRavens, CALVIN, Franka Kitchen, and cluttered real-world settings.

Paperid: 2024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11089.pdf

Abstract:
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made groundbreaking progress in embodied intelligence, they still face significant challenges in spatial reasoning for complex long-horizon tasks. To address this gap, we propose EmbodiedVSR (Embodied Visual Spatial Reasoning), a novel framework that integrates dynamic scene graph-guided Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance spatial understanding for embodied agents. By explicitly constructing structured knowledge representations through dynamic scene graphs, our method enables zero-shot spatial reasoning without task-specific fine-tuning. This approach not only disentangles intricate spatial relationships but also aligns reasoning steps with actionable environmental dynamics. To rigorously evaluate performance, we introduce the eSpatial-Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset including real-world embodied scenarios with fine-grained spatial annotations and adaptive task difficulty levels. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based methods in accuracy and reasoning coherence, particularly in long-horizon tasks requiring iterative environment interaction. The results reveal the untapped potential of MLLMs for embodied intelligence when equipped with structured, explainable reasoning mechanisms, paving the way for more reliable deployment in real-world spatial applications. The codes and datasets will be released soon.

Paperid: 2025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18107.pdf

Abstract:
Bimodal software analysis initially appeared to be within reach with the advent of large language models. Unfortunately, the complex interplay of natural language text and code in software engineering, presents unique challenges that prevent pretrained models to generalize to a variety of tasks. We postulate that in-context learning for the code-text bimodality is a promising avenue. This paper thus introduces a comprehensive study of in-context code-text learning, focusing on leveraging pretrained CodeLLAMA models. We consider a diverse dataset encompassing 23 software engineering tasks, which we transform in an in-context learning format. To effectively extract informative features, we propose a configurable prompt template. Our proposed pipeline, InCTRL, then unifies prompt learning across various software engineering tasks. Extensive evaluation on the study datasets demonstrates the superiority of INCTRL-models in few-shot performance, surpassing state-of-the-art models including the support model, CodeLLAMA. Typically, we observe that applied to the CodeLLAMA model, INCTRL brings improvements in terms of precision (at least about 12\%) and recall (up to 93.88\%) on various tasks. For example, on the task of program repair, INCTRL improves the BLEU score of CodeLLAMA by 85 points, while for clone detection, INCTRL achieves an improvement of 69 percentage points. Moreover, INCTRL-models offer state-of-the-art performance when using retrieval-augmented generation on individual downstream tasks. Finally, we qualitatively analyze the benefits of INCTRL over CodeLLAMA and open-source all models for broader impact. We make our code and dataset publicly available at: \begin{center} {\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/inctrl-B65B}} \end{center}

Paperid: 2026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16803.pdf

Abstract:
Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing triples with unseen entities. Recent works focus on modeling reasoning paths between the head and tail entity as direct supporting evidence. However, these methods depend heavily on the existence and quality of reasoning paths, which limits their general applicability in different scenarios. In addition, we observe that latent type constraints and neighboring facts inherent in KGs are also vital in inferring missing triples. To effectively utilize all useful information in KGs, we introduce CATS, a novel context-aware inductive KGC solution. With sufficient guidance from proper prompts and supervised fine-tuning, CATS activates the strong semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of large language models to assess the existence of query triples, which consist of two modules. First, the type-aware reasoning module evaluates whether the candidate entity matches the latent entity type as required by the query relation. Then, the subgraph reasoning module selects relevant reasoning paths and neighboring facts, and evaluates their correlation to the query triple. Experiment results on three widely used datasets demonstrate that CATS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 16 out of 18 transductive, inductive, and few-shot settings with an average absolute MRR improvement of 7.2%.

Paperid: 2027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12948.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how speech foundation models capture non-verbal cues is crucial for improving their interpretability and adaptability across diverse tasks. In our work, we analyze several prominent models such as Whisper, Seamless, Wav2Vec, HuBERT, and Qwen2-Audio focusing on their learned representations in both paralinguistic and non-paralinguistic tasks from the Dynamic-SUPERB benchmark. Our study addresses three key questions: (1) What non-verbal cues (e.g., speaker intent, emotion, environmental context) are captured? (2) How are these cues represented across different layers of the models? and (3) To what extent can these representations be effectively adapted to downstream tasks? To answer these questions, we first evaluate the models in a zero-shot setting, followed by fine-tuning on layer-wise features extracted from these models. Our results provide insights into the models' capacity for generalization, the characteristics of their layer-wise representations, and the degree of transformation required for downstream task adaptation. Our findings suggest that some of these models perform well on various tasks in zero-shot settings, despite not being explicitly trained for those tasks. We also observe that zero-shot performance correlates with better-learned representations. The analysis of layer-wise features demonstrates that some models exhibit a convex relationship between the separability of the learned representations and model depth, with different layers capturing task-specific features.

Paperid: 2028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06651.pdf

Abstract:
In various scientific and engineering fields, the primary research areas have revolved around physics-based dynamical systems modeling and data-driven time series analysis. According to the embedding theory, dynamical systems and time series can be mutually transformed using observation functions and physical reconstruction techniques. Based on this, we propose Embedding Duality Theory, where the parameterized embedding layer essentially provides a linear estimation of the non-linear time series dynamics. This theory enables us to bypass the parameterized embedding layer and directly employ physical reconstruction techniques to acquire a data embedding representation. Utilizing physical priors results in a 10X reduction in parameters, a 3X increase in speed, and maximum performance boosts of 18% in expert, 22% in few-shot, and 53\% in zero-shot tasks without any hyper-parameter tuning. All methods are encapsulated as a plug-and-play module

Paperid: 2029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11047.pdf

Abstract:
Assembly is a crucial skill for robots in both modern manufacturing and service robotics. However, mastering transferable insertion skills that can handle a variety of high-precision assembly tasks remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a novel framework that utilizes diffusion models to generate 6D wrench for high-precision tactile robotic insertion tasks. It learns from demonstrations performed on a single task and achieves a zero-shot transfer success rate of 95.7% across various novel high-precision tasks. Our method effectively inherits the self-adaptability demonstrated by our previous work. In this framework, we address the frequency misalignment between the diffusion policy and the real-time control loop with a dynamic system-based filter, significantly improving the task success rate by 9.15%. Furthermore, we provide a practical guideline regarding the trade-off between diffusion models' inference ability and speed.

Paperid: 2030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10906.pdf

Abstract:
Object navigation in multi-floor environments presents a formidable challenge in robotics, requiring sophisticated spatial reasoning and adaptive exploration strategies. Traditional approaches have primarily focused on single-floor scenarios, overlooking the complexities introduced by multi-floor structures. To address these challenges, we first propose a Multi-floor Navigation Policy (MFNP) and implement it in Zero-Shot object navigation tasks. Our framework comprises three key components: (i) Multi-floor Navigation Policy, which enables an agent to explore across multiple floors; (ii) Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for reasoning in the navigation process; and (iii) Inter-Floor Navigation, ensuring efficient floor transitions. We evaluate MFNP on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) and Matterport 3D (MP3D) datasets, both include multi-floor scenes. Our experiment results demonstrate that MFNP significantly outperforms all the existing methods in Zero-Shot object navigation, achieving higher success rates and improved exploration efficiency. Ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of each component in addressing the unique challenges of multi-floor navigation. Meanwhile, we conducted real-world experiments to evaluate the feasibility of our policy. Upon deployment of MFNP, the Unitree quadruped robot demonstrated successful multi-floor navigation and found the target object in a completely unseen environment. By introducing MFNP, we offer a new paradigm for tackling complex, multi-floor environments in object navigation tasks, opening avenues for future research in visual-based navigation in realistic, multi-floor settings.

Paperid: 2031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17225.pdf

Abstract:
In daily life, people often move through spaces to find objects that meet their needs, posing a key challenge in embodied AI. Traditional Demand-Driven Navigation (DDN) handles one need at a time but does not reflect the complexity of real-world tasks involving multiple needs and personal choices. To bridge this gap, we introduce Task-Preferenced Multi-Demand-Driven Navigation (TP-MDDN), a new benchmark for long-horizon navigation involving multiple sub-demands with explicit task preferences. To solve TP-MDDN, we propose AWMSystem, an autonomous decision-making system composed of three key modules: BreakLLM (instruction decomposition), LocateLLM (goal selection), and StatusMLLM (task monitoring). For spatial memory, we design MASMap, which combines 3D point cloud accumulation with 2D semantic mapping for accurate and efficient environmental understanding. Our Dual-Tempo action generation framework integrates zero-shot planning with policy-based fine control, and is further supported by an Adaptive Error Corrector that handles failure cases in real time. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both perception accuracy and navigation robustness.

Paperid: 2032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11687.pdf

Abstract:
Estimating an object's 6D pose, size, and shape from visual input is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with critical applications in robotic grasping and manipulation. Existing methods either rely on object-specific priors such as CAD models or templates, or suffer from limited generalization across categories due to pose-shape entanglement and multi-stage pipelines. In this work, we propose a unified, category-agnostic framework that simultaneously predicts 6D pose, size, and dense shape from a single RGB-D image, without requiring templates, CAD models, or category labels at test time. Our model fuses dense 2D features from vision foundation models with partial 3D point clouds using a Transformer encoder enhanced by a Mixture-of-Experts, and employs parallel decoders for pose-size estimation and shape reconstruction, achieving real-time inference at 28 FPS. Trained solely on synthetic data from 149 categories in the SOPE dataset, our framework is evaluated on four diverse benchmarks SOPE, ROPE, ObjaversePose, and HANDAL, spanning over 300 categories. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on seen categories while demonstrating remarkably strong zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world objects, establishing a new standard for open-set 6D understanding in robotics and embodied AI.

Paperid: 2033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09108.pdf

Abstract:
We present SensorLM, a family of sensor-language foundation models that enable wearable sensor data understanding with natural language. Despite its pervasive nature, aligning and interpreting sensor data with language remains challenging due to the lack of paired, richly annotated sensor-text descriptions in uncurated, real-world wearable data. We introduce a hierarchical caption generation pipeline designed to capture statistical, structural, and semantic information from sensor data. This approach enabled the curation of the largest sensor-language dataset to date, comprising over 59.7 million hours of data from more than 103,000 people. Furthermore, SensorLM extends prominent multimodal pretraining architectures (e.g., CLIP, CoCa) and recovers them as specific variants within a generic architecture. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks in human activity analysis and healthcare verify the superior performance of SensorLM over state-of-the-art in zero-shot recognition, few-shot learning, and cross-modal retrieval. SensorLM also demonstrates intriguing capabilities including scaling behaviors, label efficiency, sensor captioning, and zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks.

Paperid: 2034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01493.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been successfully scaled to billion-scale large text-to-image datasets. However, training such models entails a high training cost, limiting some applications and research usage. To reduce the cost, one promising direction is the incorporation of pre-trained models. The existing method of utilizing pre-trained models for a generator significantly reduced the training cost compared with the other large-scale GANs, but we found the model loses the diversity of generation for a given prompt by a large margin. To build an efficient and high-fidelity text-to-image GAN without compromise, we propose to use two specialized discriminators with Slicing Adversarial Networks (SANs) adapted for text-to-image tasks. Our proposed model, called SCAD, shows a notable enhancement in diversity for a given prompt with better sample fidelity. We also propose to use a metric called Per-Prompt Diversity (PPD) to evaluate the diversity of text-to-image models quantitatively. SCAD achieved a zero-shot FID competitive with the latest large-scale GANs at two orders of magnitude less training cost.

Paperid: 2035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19500.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding is pivotal for enhancing physical intelligence, as it enables embodied agents to interpret and interact dynamically within real-world environments. This paper introduces MPEC, a novel Masked Point-Entity Contrastive learning method for open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation that leverages both 3D entity-language alignment and point-entity consistency across different point cloud views to foster entity-specific feature representations. Our method improves semantic discrimination and enhances the differentiation of unique instances, achieving state-of-the-art results on ScanNet for open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation and demonstrating superior zero-shot scene understanding capabilities. Extensive fine-tuning experiments on 8 datasets, spanning from low-level perception to high-level reasoning tasks, showcase the potential of learned 3D features, driving consistent performance gains across varied 3D scene understanding tasks. Project website: https://mpec-3d.github.io/

Paperid: 2036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07100.pdf

Abstract:
The diversity of human language, shaped by social, cultural, and regional influences, presents significant challenges for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Existing benchmarks often overlook intra-language variations, leaving speakers of non-standard dialects underserved. To address this gap, we introduce EnDive (English Diversity), a benchmark that evaluates five widely-used large language models (LLMs) across tasks in language understanding, algorithmic reasoning, mathematics, and logic. Our framework translates Standard American English datasets into five underrepresented dialects using few-shot prompting with verified examples from native speakers, and compare these translations against rule-based methods via fluency assessments, preference tests, and semantic similarity metrics. Human evaluations confirm high translation quality, with average scores of at least 6.02/7 for faithfulness, fluency, and formality. By filtering out near-identical translations, we create a challenging dataset that reveals significant performance disparities - models consistently underperform on dialectal inputs compared to Standard American English. EnDive thus advances dialect-aware NLP by uncovering model biases and promoting more equitable language technologies.

Paperid: 2037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15237.pdf

Abstract:
The Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant is a conversational tool that enables organizations to interact seamlessly with proprietary enterprise data through a chatbot. However, due to access restrictions, Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot retrieve these internal documents, limiting their ability to generate accurate zero-shot responses. To overcome this limitation, we use a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework powered by a Knowledge Graph (KG) to retrieve relevant information from external knowledge sources, enabling LLMs to answer questions over private or previously unseen document collections. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for building a high-quality, low-noise KG. We apply several techniques, including incremental entity resolution using seed concepts, similarity-based filtering to deduplicate entries, assigning confidence scores to entity-relation pairs to filter for high-confidence pairs, and linking facts to source documents for provenance. Our KG-RAG system retrieves relevant tuples, which are added to the user prompts context before being sent to the LLM generating the response. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach significantly enhances response relevance, reducing irrelevant answers by over 50% and increasing fully relevant answers by 88% compared to the existing production system.

Paperid: 2038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01427.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in video generation, inserting a given object into videos remains a challenging task. The difficulty lies in preserving the appearance details of the reference object and accurately modeling coherent motions at the same time. In this paper, we propose VideoAnydoor, a zero-shot video object insertion framework with high-fidelity detail preservation and precise motion control. Starting from a text-to-video model, we utilize an ID extractor to inject the global identity and leverage a box sequence to control the overall motion. To preserve the detailed appearance and meanwhile support fine-grained motion control, we design a pixel warper. It takes the reference image with arbitrary key-points and the corresponding key-point trajectories as inputs. It warps the pixel details according to the trajectories and fuses the warped features with the diffusion U-Net, thus improving detail preservation and supporting users in manipulating the motion trajectories. In addition, we propose a training strategy involving both videos and static images with a weighted loss to enhance insertion quality. VideoAnydoor demonstrates significant superiority over existing methods and naturally supports various downstream applications (e.g., talking head generation, video virtual try-on, multi-region editing) without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03021.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on zero-shot non-intrusive speech assessment for hearing aids (HA) using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we introduce GPT-Whisper-HA, an extension of GPT-Whisper, a zero-shot non-intrusive speech assessment model based on LLMs. GPT-Whisper-HA is designed for speech assessment for HA, incorporating MSBG hearing loss and NAL-R simulations to process audio input based on each individual's audiogram, two automatic speech recognition (ASR) modules for audio-to-text representation, and GPT-4o to predict two corresponding scores, followed by score averaging for the final estimated score. Experimental results indicate that GPT-Whisper-HA achieves a 2.59% relative root mean square error (RMSE) improvement over GPT-Whisper, confirming the potential of LLMs for zero-shot speech assessment in predicting subjective intelligibility for HA users.

Paperid: 2040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11003.pdf

Abstract:
With the advent of vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) in zero- and few-shot settings, CLIP has been widely applied to zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) in recent research, where the rare classes are essential and expected in many applications. This study introduces \textbf{FiSeCLIP} for ZSAD with training-free \textbf{CLIP}, combining the feature matching with the cross-modal alignment. Testing with the entire dataset is impractical, while batch-based testing better aligns with real industrial needs, and images within a batch can serve as mutual reference points. Accordingly, FiSeCLIP utilizes other images in the same batch as reference information for the current image. However, the lack of labels for these references can introduce ambiguity, we apply text information to \textbf{fi}lter out noisy features. In addition, we further explore CLIP's inherent potential to restore its local \textbf{se}mantic correlation, adapting it for fine-grained anomaly detection tasks to enable a more accurate filtering process. Our approach exhibits superior performance for both anomaly classification and segmentation on anomaly detection benchmarks, building a stronger baseline for the direction, e.g., on MVTec-AD, FiSeCLIP outperforms the SOTA AdaCLIP by +4.6\%$\uparrow$/+5.7\%$\uparrow$ in segmentation metrics AU-ROC/$F_1$-max.

Paperid: 2041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08380.pdf

Abstract:
Low-level enhancement and high-level visual understanding in low-light vision have traditionally been treated separately. Low-light enhancement improves image quality for downstream tasks, but existing methods rely on physical or geometric priors, limiting generalization. Evaluation mainly focuses on visual quality rather than downstream performance. Low-light visual understanding, constrained by scarce labeled data, primarily uses task-specific domain adaptation, which lacks scalability. To address these challenges, we build a generalized bridge between low-light enhancement and low-light understanding, which we term Generalized Enhancement For Understanding (GEFU). This paradigm improves both generalization and scalability. To address the diverse causes of low-light degradation, we leverage pretrained generative diffusion models to optimize images, achieving zero-shot generalization performance. Building on this, we propose Semantically Consistent Unsupervised Fine-tuning (SCUF). Specifically, to overcome text prompt limitations, we introduce an illumination-aware image prompt to explicitly guide image generation and propose a cycle-attention adapter to maximize its semantic potential. To mitigate semantic degradation in unsupervised training, we propose caption and reflectance consistency to learn high-level semantics and image-level spatial semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in traditional image quality and GEFU tasks including classification, detection, and semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 2042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18266.pdf

Abstract:
3D semantic occupancy prediction in the past was considered to require precise geometric relationships in order to enable effective training. However, in complex indoor environments, the large-scale and widespread collection of data, along with the necessity for fine-grained annotations, becomes impractical due to the complexity of data acquisition setups and privacy concerns. In this paper, we demonstrate that 3D spatially-accurate training can be achieved using only indoor Internet data, without the need for any pre-knowledge of intrinsic or extrinsic camera parameters. In our framework, we collect a web dataset, YouTube-Occ, which comprises house tour videos from YouTube, providing abundant real house scenes for 3D representation learning. Upon on this web dataset, we establish a fully self-supervised model to leverage accessible 2D prior knowledge for reaching powerful 3D indoor perception. Specifically, we harness the advantages of the prosperous vision foundation models, distilling the 2D region-level knowledge into the occupancy network by grouping the similar pixels into superpixels. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on two popular benchmarks (NYUv2 and OccScanNet

Paperid: 2043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14226.pdf

Abstract:
Short-utterance speaker verification presents significant challenges due to the limited information in brief speech segments, which can undermine accuracy and reliability. Recently, zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have made considerable progress in preserving speaker identity. In this study, we explore, for the first time, the use of ZS-TTS systems for test-time data augmentation for speaker verification. We evaluate three state-of-the-art pre-trained ZS-TTS systems, NatureSpeech 3, CosyVoice, and MaskGCT, on the VoxCeleb 1 dataset. Our experimental results show that combining real and synthetic speech samples leads to 10%-16% relative equal error rate (EER) reductions across all durations, with particularly notable improvements for short utterances, all without retraining any existing systems. However, our analysis reveals that longer synthetic speech does not yield the same benefits as longer real speech in reducing EERs. These findings highlight the potential and challenges of using ZS-TTS for test-time speaker verification, offering insights for future research.

Paperid: 2044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21969.pdf

Abstract:
Adaptive navigation in unfamiliar environments is crucial for household service robots but remains challenging due to the need for both low-level path planning and high-level scene understanding. While recent vision-language model (VLM) based zero-shot approaches reduce dependence on prior maps and scene-specific training data, they face significant limitations: spatiotemporal discontinuity from discrete observations, unstructured memory representations, and insufficient task understanding leading to navigation failures. We propose DORAEMON (Decentralized Ontology-aware Reliable Agent with Enhanced Memory Oriented Navigation), a novel cognitive-inspired framework consisting of Ventral and Dorsal Streams that mimics human navigation capabilities. The Dorsal Stream implements the Hierarchical Semantic-Spatial Fusion and Topology Map to handle spatiotemporal discontinuities, while the Ventral Stream combines RAG-VLM and Policy-VLM to improve decision-making. Our approach also develops Nav-Ensurance to ensure navigation safety and efficiency. We evaluate DORAEMON on the HM3D, MP3D, and GOAT datasets, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance on both success rate (SR) and success weighted by path length (SPL) metrics, significantly outperforming existing methods. We also introduce a new evaluation metric (AORI) to assess navigation intelligence better. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate DORAEMON's effectiveness in zero-shot autonomous navigation without requiring prior map building or pre-training.

Paperid: 2045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12656.pdf

Abstract:
Spike cameras offer unique sensing capabilities but their sparse, asynchronous output challenges semantic understanding, especially for Spike Video-Language Alignment (Spike-VLA) where models like CLIP underperform due to modality mismatch. We introduce SPKLIP, the first architecture specifically for Spike-VLA. SPKLIP employs a hierarchical spike feature extractor that adaptively models multi-scale temporal dynamics in event streams, and uses spike-text contrastive learning to directly align spike video with language, enabling effective few-shot learning. A full-spiking visual encoder variant, integrating SNN components into our pipeline, demonstrates enhanced energy efficiency. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on benchmark spike datasets and strong few-shot generalization on a newly contributed real-world dataset. SPKLIP's energy efficiency highlights its potential for neuromorphic deployment, advancing event-based multimodal research. The source code and dataset are available at [link removed for anonymity].

Paperid: 2046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14770.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we address the challenge of determining the layer-wise sparsity rates of large language models (LLMs) through a theoretical perspective. Specifically, we identify a critical issue of ''$\textbf{reconstruction error explosion}$'' in existing LLMs sparsification methods. This refers to the cumulative effect of reconstruction errors throughout the sparsification process, where errors from earlier layers propagate and amplify in subsequent layers. As a result, the overall reconstruction error increases significantly, leading to a substantial degradation in model performance. Through theoretical analysis, we derive a simple yet effective approach to layer-wise sparsity allocation that mitigates this issue. Our method uses a monotonically increasing arithmetic progression, reducing the process of determining sparsity rates for multiple layers to the determination of a single common difference hyperparameter. Remarkably, this allows for the optimal layer-wise sparsity rates to be identified with just a few trials. Both our theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that this sparsity allocation scheme is near optimal. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves the performance of sparse LLMs across various architectures, outperforming existing layer-wise sparsity methods. Furthermore, it enhances the performance of various compression techniques and is applicable to vision and multimodal models. Notably, our method achieves a reduction of 52.10 in perplexity for the 70$\%$ sparse LLaMA2-7B model obtained via Wanda, improves average zero-shot accuracy by 10.50$\%$, and delivers speedups of 2.63$\times$ and 2.23$\times$ on CPU and GPU, respectively.

Paperid: 2047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11775.pdf

Abstract:
While recent advancements in reasoning optimization have significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), existing efforts to improve reasoning have been limited to solving mathematical problems and focusing on visual graphical inputs, neglecting broader applications in general video understanding.This paper proposes video-SALMONN-o1, the first open-source reasoning-enhanced audio-visual LLM designed for general video understanding tasks. To enhance its reasoning abilities, we develop a reasoning-intensive dataset featuring challenging audio-visual questions with step-by-step solutions. We also propose process direct preference optimization (pDPO), which leverages contrastive step selection to achieve efficient step-level reward modelling tailored for multimodal inputs. Additionally, we introduce RivaBench, the first reasoning-intensive video understanding benchmark, featuring over 4,000 high-quality, expert-curated question-answer pairs across scenarios such as standup comedy, academic presentations, and synthetic video detection. video-SALMONN-o1 achieves 3-8% accuracy improvements over the LLaVA-OneVision baseline across different video reasoning benchmarks. Besides, pDPO achieves 6-8% improvements compared to the supervised fine-tuning model on RivaBench. Enhanced reasoning enables video-SALMONN-o1 zero-shot synthetic video detection capabilities.

Paperid: 2048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09914.pdf

Abstract:
This work investigates two strategies for zero-shot non-intrusive speech assessment leveraging large language models. First, we explore the audio analysis capabilities of GPT-4o. Second, we propose GPT-Whisper, which uses Whisper as an audio-to-text module and evaluates the naturalness of text via targeted prompt engineering. We evaluate the assessment metrics predicted by GPT-4o and GPT-Whisper, examining their correlation with human-based quality and intelligibility assessments and the character error rate (CER) of automatic speech recognition. Experimental results show that GPT-4o alone is less effective for audio analysis, while GPT-Whisper achieves higher prediction accuracy, has moderate correlation with speech quality and intelligibility, and has higher correlation with CER. Compared to SpeechLMScore and DNSMOS, GPT-Whisper excels in intelligibility metrics, but performs slightly worse than SpeechLMScore in quality estimation. Furthermore, GPT-Whisper outperforms supervised non-intrusive models MOS-SSL and MTI-Net in Spearman's rank correlation for CER of Whisper. These findings validate GPT-Whisper's potential for zero-shot speech assessment without requiring additional training data.

Paperid: 2049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05381.pdf

Abstract:
Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains an unresolved challenge in computer vision due to complex distortions, diverse image content, and limited data availability. Existing Blind IQA (BIQA) methods largely rely on extensive human annotations, which are labor-intensive and costly due to the demanding nature of creating IQA datasets. To reduce this dependency, we propose the Gradient-Regulated Meta-Prompt IQA Framework (GRMP-IQA), designed to efficiently adapt the visual-language pre-trained model, CLIP, to IQA tasks, achieving high accuracy even with limited data. GRMP-IQA consists of two core modules: (i) Meta-Prompt Pre-training Module and (ii) Quality-Aware Gradient Regularization. The Meta Prompt Pre-training Module leverages a meta-learning paradigm to pre-train soft prompts with shared meta-knowledge across different distortions, enabling rapid adaptation to various IQA tasks. On the other hand, the Quality-Aware Gradient Regularization is designed to adjust the update gradients during fine-tuning, focusing the model's attention on quality-relevant features and preventing overfitting to semantic information. Extensive experiments on standard BIQA datasets demonstrate the superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods under limited data setting. Notably, utilizing just 20% of the training data, GRMP-IQA is competitive with most existing fully supervised BIQA approaches.

Paperid: 2050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05592.pdf

Abstract:
Inspired by the remarkable success of foundation models in language and vision, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) hold significant promise for broad applicability across diverse graph tasks and domains. However, existing GFMs struggle with unstable few-shot fine-tuning, where both performance and adaptation efficiency exhibit significant fluctuations caused by the randomness in the support sample selection and structural discrepancies between the pre-trained and target graphs. How to fine-tune GFMs robustly and efficiently to enable trustworthy knowledge transfer across domains and tasks is the major challenge. In this paper, we propose GRAVER, a novel Generative gRAph VocabulariEs for Robust GFM fine-tuning framework that tackles the aforementioned instability via generative augmentations. Specifically, to identify transferable units, we analyze and extract key class-specific subgraph patterns by ego-graph disentanglement and validate their transferability both theoretically and empirically. To enable effective pre-training across diverse domains, we leverage a universal task template based on ego-graph similarity and construct graph vocabularies via graphon-based generative experts. To facilitate robust and efficient prompt fine-tuning, we grave the support samples with in-context vocabularies, where the lightweight MoE-CoE network attentively routes knowledge from source domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GRAVER over effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency on downstream few-shot node and graph classification tasks compared with 15 state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 2051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04208.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has significantly advanced zero-shot forecasting, enabling predictions for unseen time series without task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive research has confirmed that no single TSFM excels universally, as different models exhibit preferences for distinct temporal patterns. This diversity suggests an opportunity: how to take advantage of the complementary abilities of TSFMs. To this end, we propose ZooCast, which characterizes each model's distinct forecasting strengths. ZooCast can intelligently assemble current TSFMs into a model zoo that dynamically selects optimal models for different forecasting tasks. Our key innovation lies in the One-Embedding-Fits-All paradigm that constructs a unified representation space where each model in the zoo is represented by a single embedding, enabling efficient similarity matching for all tasks. Experiments demonstrate ZooCast's strong performance on the GIFT-Eval zero-shot forecasting benchmark while maintaining the efficiency of a single TSFM. In real-world scenarios with sequential model releases, the framework seamlessly adds new models for progressive accuracy gains with negligible overhead.

Paperid: 2052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09619.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly inspection plays a vital role in industrial manufacturing, but the scarcity of anomaly samples significantly limits the effectiveness of existing methods in tasks such as localization and classification. While several anomaly synthesis approaches have been introduced for data augmentation, they often struggle with low realism, inaccurate mask alignment, and poor generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Generate Aligned Anomaly (GAA), a region-guided, few-shot anomaly image-mask pair generation framework. GAA leverages the strong priors of a pretrained latent diffusion model to generate realistic, diverse, and semantically aligned anomalies using only a small number of samples. The framework first employs Localized Concept Decomposition to jointly model the semantic features and spatial information of anomalies, enabling flexible control over the type and location of anomalies. It then utilizes Adaptive Multi-Round Anomaly Clustering to perform fine-grained semantic clustering of anomaly concepts, thereby enhancing the consistency of anomaly representations. Subsequently, a region-guided mask generation strategy ensures precise alignment between anomalies and their corresponding masks, while a low-quality sample filtering module is introduced to further improve the overall quality of the generated samples. Extensive experiments on the MVTec AD and LOCO datasets demonstrate that GAA achieves superior performance in both anomaly synthesis quality and downstream tasks such as localization and classification.

Paperid: 2053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07100.pdf

Abstract:
Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) focuses on continual learning in non-stationary environments, requiring models to adjust to evolving domains while preserving historical knowledge. DIL faces two critical challenges in the context of imbalanced data: intra-domain class imbalance and cross-domain class distribution shifts. These challenges significantly hinder model performance, as intra-domain imbalance leads to underfitting of few-shot classes, while cross-domain shifts require maintaining well-learned many-shot classes and transferring knowledge to improve few-shot class performance in old domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Dual-Balance Collaborative Experts (DCE) framework. DCE employs a frequency-aware expert group, where each expert is guided by specialized loss functions to learn features for specific frequency groups, effectively addressing intra-domain class imbalance. Subsequently, a dynamic expert selector is learned by synthesizing pseudo-features through balanced Gaussian sampling from historical class statistics. This mechanism navigates the trade-off between preserving many-shot knowledge of previous domains and leveraging new data to improve few-shot class performance in earlier tasks. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate DCE's state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 2054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03958.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as dense retrievers, the impact of their domain-specific specialization on retrieval effectiveness remains underexplored. This investigation systematically examines how task-specific adaptations in LLMs influence their retrieval capabilities, an essential step toward developing unified retrievers capable of handling text, code, images, and multimodal content. We conduct extensive experiments with eight Qwen2.5 7B LLMs, including base, instruction-tuned, code/math-specialized, long reasoning, and vision-language models across zero-shot retrieval settings and the supervised setting. For the zero-shot retrieval settings, we consider text retrieval from the BEIR benchmark and code retrieval from the CoIR benchmark. Further, to evaluate supervised performance, all LLMs are fine-tuned on the MS MARCO dataset. We find that mathematical specialization and the long reasoning capability cause consistent degradation in three settings, indicating conflicts between mathematical reasoning and semantic matching. The vision-language model and code-specialized LLMs demonstrate superior zero-shot performance compared to other LLMs, even surpassing BM25 on the code retrieval task, and maintain comparable performance to base LLMs in supervised settings. These findings suggest promising directions for the unified retrieval task leveraging cross-domain and cross-modal fusion.

Paperid: 2055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05710.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, a novel semantic communication framework empowered by generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is proposed, to enhance the robustness against both channel noise and transmission data distribution shifts. A theoretical foundation is established using stochastic differential equations (SDEs), from which a closed-form mapping between any signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the optimal denoising timestep is derived. Moreover, to address distribution mismatch, a mathematical scaling method is introduced to align received semantic features with the training distribution of the GAI. Built on this theoretical foundation, a latent diffusion model (LDM)-based semantic communication framework is proposed that combines a variational autoencoder for semantic features extraction, where a pretrained diffusion model is used for denoising. The proposed system is a training-free framework that supports zero-shot generalization, and achieves superior performance under low-SNR and out-of-distribution conditions, offering a scalable and robust solution for future 6G semantic communication systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semantic communication framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pixel-level accuracy and semantic perceptual quality, consistently outperforming baselines across a wide range of SNRs and data distributions without any fine-tuning or post-training.

Paperid: 2056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18215.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid adoption of LLMs has overshadowed the potential advantages of traditional BERT-like models in text classification. This study challenges the prevailing "LLM-centric" trend by systematically comparing three category methods, i.e., BERT-like models fine-tuning, LLM internal state utilization, and zero-shot inference across six high-difficulty datasets. Our findings reveal that BERT-like models often outperform LLMs. We further categorize datasets into three types, perform PCA and probing experiments, and identify task-specific model strengths: BERT-like models excel in pattern-driven tasks, while LLMs dominate those requiring deep semantics or world knowledge. Based on this, we propose TaMAS, a fine-grained task selection strategy, advocating for a nuanced, task-driven approach over a one-size-fits-all reliance on LLMs.

Paperid: 2057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12169.pdf

Abstract:
Low-light conditions pose significant challenges for both human and machine annotation. This in turn has led to a lack of research into machine understanding for low-light images and (in particular) videos. A common approach is to apply annotations obtained from high quality datasets to synthetically created low light versions. In addition, these approaches are often limited through the use of unrealistic noise models. In this paper, we propose a new Degradation Estimation Network (DEN), which synthetically generates realistic standard RGB (sRGB) noise without the requirement for camera metadata. This is achieved by estimating the parameters of physics-informed noise distributions, trained in a self-supervised manner. This zero-shot approach allows our method to generate synthetic noisy content with a diverse range of realistic noise characteristics, unlike other methods which focus on recreating the noise characteristics of the training data. We evaluate our proposed synthetic pipeline using various methods trained on its synthetic data for typical low-light tasks including synthetic noise replication, video enhancement, and object detection, showing improvements of up to 24\% KLD, 21\% LPIPS, and 62\% AP$_{50-95}$, respectively.

Paperid: 2058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10685.pdf

Authors:Yuqian Fu, Xingyu Qiu, Bin Ren, Yanwei Fu, Radu Timofte, Nicu Sebe, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Luc Van Gool, Kaijin Zhang, Qingpeng Nong, Xiugang Dong, Hong Gao, Xiangsheng Zhou, Jiancheng Pan, Yanxing Liu, Xiao He, Jiahao Li, Yuze Sun, Xiaomeng Huang, Zhenyu Zhang, Ran Ma, Yuhan Liu, Zijian Zhuang, Shuai Yi, Yixiong Zou, Lingyi Hong, Mingxi Chen, Runze Li, Xingdong Sheng, Wenqiang Zhang, Weisen Chen, Yongxin Yan, Xinguo Chen, Yuanjie Shao, Zhengrong Zuo, Nong Sang, Hao Wu, Haoran Sun, Shuming Hu, Yan Zhang, Zhiguang Shi, Yu Zhang, Chao Chen, Tao Wang, Da Feng, Linhai Zhuo, Ziming Lin, Yali Huang, Jie Me, Yiming Yang, Mi Guo, Mingyuan Jiu, Mingliang Xu, Maomao Xiong, Qunshu Zhang, Xinyu Cao, Yuqing Yang, Dianmo Sheng, Xuanpu Zhao, Zhiyu Li, Xuyang Ding, Wenqian Li

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) poses significant challenges to existing object detection and few-shot detection models when applied across domains. In conjunction with NTIRE 2025, we organized the 1st CD-FSOD Challenge, aiming to advance the performance of current object detectors on entirely novel target domains with only limited labeled data. The challenge attracted 152 registered participants, received submissions from 42 teams, and concluded with 13 teams making valid final submissions. Participants approached the task from diverse perspectives, proposing novel models that achieved new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under both open-source and closed-source settings. In this report, we present an overview of the 1st NTIRE 2025 CD-FSOD Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and summarizing the results submitted by the participants.

Paperid: 2059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07253.pdf

Abstract:
While existing anomaly synthesis methods have made remarkable progress, achieving both realism and diversity in synthesis remains a major obstacle. To address this, we propose AnomalyPainter, a zero-shot framework that breaks the diversity-realism trade-off dilemma through synergizing Vision Language Large Model (VLLM), Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), and our newly introduced texture library Tex-9K. Tex-9K is a professional texture library containing 75 categories and 8,792 texture assets crafted for diverse anomaly synthesis. Leveraging VLLM's general knowledge, reasonable anomaly text descriptions are generated for each industrial object and matched with relevant diverse textures from Tex-9K. These textures then guide the LDM via ControlNet to paint on normal images. Furthermore, we introduce Texture-Aware Latent Init to stabilize the natural-image-trained ControlNet for industrial images. Extensive experiments show that AnomalyPainter outperforms existing methods in realism, diversity, and generalization, achieving superior downstream performance.

Paperid: 2060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17248.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL, which enables natural language interaction with databases, serves as a pivotal method across diverse industries. With new, more powerful large language models (LLMs) emerging every few months, fine-tuning has become incredibly costly, labor-intensive, and error-prone. As an alternative, zero-shot Text-to-SQL, which leverages the growing knowledge and reasoning capabilities encoded in LLMs without task-specific fine-tuning, presents a promising and more challenging direction. To address this challenge, we propose Alpha-SQL, a novel approach that leverages a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework to iteratively infer SQL construction actions based on partial reasoning states. To enhance the framework's reasoning capabilities, we introduce LLM-as-Action-Model to dynamically generate SQL construction actions during the MCTS process, steering the search toward more promising SQL queries. Moreover, Alpha-SQL employs a self-supervised reward function to evaluate the quality of candidate SQL queries, ensuring more accurate and efficient query generation. Experimental results show that Alpha-SQL achieves 69.7% execution accuracy on the BIRD development set, using a 32B open-source LLM without fine-tuning. Alpha-SQL outperforms the best previous zero-shot approach based on GPT-4o by 2.5% on the BIRD development set.

Paperid: 2061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17601.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained large models for multimodal contrastive learning, such as CLIP, have been widely recognized in the industry as highly susceptible to data-poisoned backdoor attacks. This poses significant risks to downstream model training. In response to such potential threats, finetuning offers a simpler and more efficient defense choice compared to retraining large models with augmented data. In the supervised learning domain, fine-tuning defense strategies can achieve excellent defense performance. However, in the unsupervised and semi-supervised domain, we find that when CLIP faces some complex attack techniques, the existing fine-tuning defense strategy, CleanCLIP, has some limitations on defense performance. The synonym substitution of its text-augmentation is insufficient to enhance the text feature space. To compensate for this weakness, we improve it by proposing a fine-grained \textbf{T}ext \textbf{A}lignment \textbf{C}leaner (TA-Cleaner) to cut off feature connections of backdoor triggers. We randomly select a few samples for positive and negative subtext generation at each epoch of CleanCLIP, and align the subtexts to the images to strengthen the text self-supervision. We evaluate the effectiveness of our TA-Cleaner against six attack algorithms and conduct comprehensive zero-shot classification tests on ImageNet1K. Our experimental results demonstrate that TA-Cleaner achieves state-of-the-art defensiveness among finetuning-based defense techniques. Even when faced with the novel attack technique BadCLIP, our TA-Cleaner outperforms CleanCLIP by reducing the ASR of Top-1 and Top-10 by 52.02\% and 63.88\%, respectively.

Paperid: 2062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19655.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an agent to navigate unseen environments based on natural language instructions without any prior training. Current methods face a critical trade-off: either rely on environment-specific waypoint predictors that limit scene generalization, or underutilize the reasoning capabilities of large models during navigation. We introduce LaViRA, a simple yet effective zero-shot framework that addresses this dilemma by decomposing action into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy: Language Action for high-level planning, Vision Action for perceptual grounding, and Robot Action for robust navigation. This modular decomposition allows us to leverage the distinct strengths of different scales of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) at each stage, creating a system that is powerful in its reasoning, grounding and practical control. LaViRA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the VLN-CE benchmark, demonstrating superior generalization capabilities in unseen environments, while maintaining transparency and efficiency for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 2063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13480.pdf

Abstract:
Gender-neutral rewriting (GNR) aims to reformulate text to eliminate unnecessary gender specifications while preserving meaning, a particularly challenging task in grammatical-gender languages like Italian. In this work, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) for Italian GNR, introducing a two-dimensional framework that measures both neutrality and semantic fidelity to the input. We compare few-shot prompting across multiple LLMs, fine-tune selected models, and apply targeted cleaning to boost task relevance. Our findings show that open-weight LLMs outperform the only existing model dedicated to GNR in Italian, whereas our fine-tuned models match or exceed the best open-weight LLM's performance at a fraction of its size. Finally, we discuss the trade-off between optimizing the training data for neutrality and meaning preservation.

Paperid: 2064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00527.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning (IL) models to novel long-horizon 3D manipulation tasks remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose DeCo (Task Decomposition and Skill Composition), a model-agnostic framework compatible with various multi-task IL models, designed to enhance their zero-shot generalization to novel, compositional, long-horizon 3D manipulation tasks. DeCo first decomposes IL demonstrations into a set of modular atomic tasks based on the physical interaction between the gripper and objects, and constructs an atomic training dataset that enables models to learn a diverse set of reusable atomic skills during imitation learning. At inference time, DeCo leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to parse high-level instructions for novel long-horizon tasks, retrieve the relevant atomic skills, and dynamically schedule their execution; a spatially-aware skill-chaining module then ensures smooth, collision-free transitions between sequential skills. We evaluate DeCo in simulation using DeCoBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess zero-shot generalization of multi-task IL models in compositional long-horizon 3D manipulation. Across three representative multi-task IL models (RVT-2, 3DDA, and ARP), DeCo achieves success rate improvements of 66.67%, 21.53%, and 57.92%, respectively, on 12 novel compositional tasks. Moreover, in real-world experiments, a DeCo-enhanced model trained on only 6 atomic tasks successfully completes 9 novel long-horizon tasks, yielding an average success rate improvement of 53.33% over the base multi-task IL model. Video demonstrations are available at: https://deco226.github.io.

Paperid: 2065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02386.pdf

Abstract:
Diversified recommendation has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, which can effectively address the homogeneity of recommended items. Existing approaches predominantly aim to infer the diversity of user preferences from observed user feedback. Nonetheless, due to inherent data biases, the observed data may not fully reflect user interests, where underexplored preferences can be overwhelmed or remain unmanifested. Failing to capture these preferences can lead to suboptimal diversity in recommendations. To fill this gap, this work aims to study diversified recommendation from a data-bias perspective. Inspired by the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot inference leveraging world knowledge, we propose a novel approach that utilizes LLMs' expertise to uncover underexplored user preferences from observed behavior, ultimately providing diverse and relevant recommendations. To achieve this, we first introduce Tree of Preferences (ToP), an innovative structure constructed to model user preferences from coarse to fine. ToP enables LLMs to systematically reason over the user's rationale behind their behavior, thereby uncovering their underexplored preferences. To guide diversified recommendations using uncovered preferences, we adopt a data-centric approach, identifying candidate items that match user preferences and generating synthetic interactions that reflect underexplored preferences. These interactions are integrated to train a general recommender for diversification. Moreover, we scale up overall efficiency by dynamically selecting influential users during optimization. Extensive evaluations of both diversity and relevance show that our approach outperforms existing methods in most cases and achieves near-optimal performance in others, with reasonable inference latency.

Paperid: 2066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17531.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional PID controllers have limited adaptability for plasma shape control, and task-specific reinforcement learning (RL) methods suffer from limited generalization and the need for repetitive retraining. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework for developing a versatile, zero-shot control policy from a large-scale offline dataset of historical PID-controlled discharges. Our approach synergistically combines Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) with Hilbert space representation learning to achieve dual objectives: mimicking the stable operational style of the PID data and constructing a geometrically structured latent space for efficient, goal-directed control. The resulting foundation policy can be deployed for diverse trajectory tracking tasks in a zero-shot manner without any task-specific fine-tuning. Evaluations on the HL-3 tokamak simulator demonstrate that the policy excels at precisely and stably tracking reference trajectories for key shape parameters across a range of plasma scenarios. This work presents a viable pathway toward developing highly flexible and data-efficient intelligent control systems for future fusion reactors.

Paperid: 2067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05141.pdf

Abstract:
Open-World Tracking (OWT) aims to track every object of any category, which requires the model to have strong generalization capabilities. Trackers can improve their generalization ability by leveraging Visual Language Models (VLMs). However, challenges arise with the fine-tuning strategies when VLMs are transferred to OWT: full fine-tuning results in excessive parameter and memory costs, while the zero-shot strategy leads to sub-optimal performance. To solve the problem, EffOWT is proposed for efficiently transferring VLMs to OWT. Specifically, we build a small and independent learnable side network outside the VLM backbone. By freezing the backbone and only executing backpropagation on the side network, the model's efficiency requirements can be met. In addition, EffOWT enhances the side network by proposing a hybrid structure of Transformer and CNN to improve the model's performance in the OWT field. Finally, we implement sparse interactions on the MLP, thus reducing parameter updates and memory costs significantly. Thanks to the proposed methods, EffOWT achieves an absolute gain of 5.5% on the tracking metric OWTA for unknown categories, while only updating 1.3% of the parameters compared to full fine-tuning, with a 36.4% memory saving. Other metrics also demonstrate obvious improvement.

Paperid: 2068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00844.pdf

Abstract:
In Scene Graphs Generation (SGG) one extracts structured representation from visual inputs in the form of objects nodes and predicates connecting them. This facilitates image-based understanding and reasoning for various downstream tasks. Although fully supervised SGG approaches showed steady performance improvements, they suffer from a severe training bias. This is caused by the availability of only small subsets of curated data and exhibits long-tail predicate distribution issues with a lack of predicate diversity adversely affecting downstream tasks. To overcome this, we introduce PRISM-0, a framework for zero-shot open-vocabulary SGG that bootstraps foundation models in a bottom-up approach to capture the whole spectrum of diverse, open-vocabulary predicate prediction. Detected object pairs are filtered and passed to a Vision Language Model (VLM) that generates descriptive captions. These are used to prompt an LLM to generate fine-andcoarse-grained predicates for the pair. The predicates are then validated using a VQA model to provide a final SGG. With the modular and dataset-independent PRISM-0, we can enrich existing SG datasets such as Visual Genome (VG). Experiments illustrate that PRIMS-0 generates semantically meaningful graphs that improve downstream tasks such as Image Captioning and Sentence-to-Graph Retrieval with a performance on par to the best fully supervised methods.

Paperid: 2069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02737.pdf

Abstract:
Trajectory generation has garnered significant attention from researchers in the field of spatio-temporal analysis, as it can generate substantial synthesized human mobility trajectories that enhance user privacy and alleviate data scarcity. However, existing trajectory generation methods often focus on improving trajectory generation quality from a singular perspective, lacking a comprehensive semantic understanding across various scales. Consequently, we are inspired to develop a HOlistic SEmantic Representation (HOSER) framework for navigational trajectory generation. Given an origin-and-destination (OD) pair and the starting time point of a latent trajectory, we first propose a Road Network Encoder to expand the receptive field of road- and zone-level semantics. Second, we design a Multi-Granularity Trajectory Encoder to integrate the spatio-temporal semantics of the generated trajectory at both the point and trajectory levels. Finally, we employ a Destination-Oriented Navigator to seamlessly integrate destination-oriented guidance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that HOSER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Moreover, the model's performance in few-shot learning and zero-shot learning scenarios further verifies the effectiveness of our holistic semantic representation.

Paperid: 2070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09111.pdf

Abstract:
Variation of Arctic sea ice has significant impacts on polar ecosystems, transporting routes, coastal communities, and global climate. Tracing the change of sea ice at a finer scale is paramount for both operational applications and scientific studies. Recent pan-Arctic sea ice forecasting methods that leverage advances in artificial intelligence has made promising progress over numerical models. However, forecasting sea ice at higher resolutions is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we propose a two-staged deep learning framework, IceDiff, to forecast sea ice concentration at finer scales. IceDiff first leverages an independently trained vision transformer to generate coarse yet superior forecasting over previous methods at a regular 25km x 25km grid. This high-quality sea ice forecasting can be utilized as reliable guidance for the next stage. Subsequently, an unconditional diffusion model pre-trained on sea ice concentration maps is utilized for sampling down-scaled sea ice forecasting via a zero-shot guided sampling strategy and a patch-based method. For the first time, IceDiff demonstrates sea ice forecasting with the 6.25km x 6.25km resolution. IceDiff extends the boundary of existing sea ice forecasting models and more importantly, its capability to generate high-resolution sea ice concentration data is vital for pragmatic usages and research.

Paperid: 2071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16383.pdf

Abstract:
Riddle-solving requires advanced reasoning skills, pushing LLMs to engage in abstract thinking and creative problem-solving, often revealing limitations in their cognitive abilities. In this paper, we examine the riddle-solving capabilities of LLMs using a multiple-choice format, exploring how different prompting techniques impact performance on riddles that demand diverse reasoning skills. To enhance results, we introduce RISCORE (RIddle Solving with COntext REcontruciton) a novel fully automated prompting method that generates and utilizes contextually reconstructed sentence-based puzzles in conjunction with the original examples to create few-shot exemplars. Our experiments demonstrate that RISCORE significantly improves the performance of language models in both vertical and lateral thinking tasks, surpassing traditional exemplar selection strategies across a variety of few-shot settings.

Paperid: 2072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09351.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Easy One-Step Text-to-Speech (E1 TTS), an efficient non-autoregressive zero-shot text-to-speech system based on denoising diffusion pretraining and distribution matching distillation. The training of E1 TTS is straightforward; it does not require explicit monotonic alignment between the text and audio pairs. The inference of E1 TTS is efficient, requiring only one neural network evaluation for each utterance. Despite its sampling efficiency, E1 TTS achieves naturalness and speaker similarity comparable to various strong baseline models. Audio samples are available at http://e1tts.github.io/ .

Paperid: 2073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14806.pdf

Abstract:
Modeling genomic sequences faces two unsolved challenges: the information density varies widely across different regions, while there is no clearly defined minimum vocabulary unit. Relying on either four primitive bases or independently designed DNA tokenizers, existing approaches with naive masked language modeling pre-training often fail to adapt to the varying complexities of genomic sequences. Leveraging Token Merging techniques, this paper introduces a hierarchical architecture that jointly optimizes a dynamic genomic tokenizer and latent Transformers with context-aware pre-training tasks. As for network structures, the tokenization module automatically chunks adjacent bases into words by stacking multiple layers of the differentiable token merging blocks with local-window constraints, then a Latent Encoder captures the global context of these merged words by full-attention blocks. Symmetrically employing a Latent Decoder and a Local Decoder, MergeDNA learns with two pre-training tasks: Merged Token Reconstruction simultaneously trains the dynamic tokenization module and adaptively filters important tokens, while Adaptive Masked Token Modeling learns to predict these filtered tokens to capture informative contents. Extensive experiments show that MergeDNA achieves superior performance on three popular DNA benchmarks and several multi-omics tasks with fine-tuning or zero-shot evaluation, outperforming typical tokenization methods and large-scale DNA foundation models.

Paperid: 2074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26464.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) methods identify anomalous regions with few known normal samples. Most existing methods rely on the generalization ability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize potentially anomalous regions through feature similarity between text descriptions and images. However, due to the lack of detailed textual descriptions, these methods can only pre-define image-level descriptions to match each visual patch token to identify potential anomalous regions, which leads to the semantic misalignment between image descriptions and patch-level visual anomalies, achieving sub-optimal localization performance. To address the above issues, we propose the Multi-Level Fine-Grained Semantic Caption (MFSC) to provide multi-level and fine-grained textual descriptions for existing anomaly detection datasets with automatic construction pipeline. Based on the MFSC, we propose a novel framework named FineGrainedAD to improve anomaly localization performance, which consists of two components: Multi-Level Learnable Prompt (MLLP) and Multi-Level Semantic Alignment (MLSA). MLLP introduces fine-grained semantics into multi-level learnable prompts through automatic replacement and concatenation mechanism, while MLSA designs region aggregation strategy and multi-level alignment training to facilitate learnable prompts better align with corresponding visual regions. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed FineGrainedAD achieves superior overall performance in few-shot settings on MVTec-AD and VisA datasets.

Paperid: 2075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16886.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates impressive zero-shot segmentation ability on natural images but encounters difficulties in medical imaging due to domain shifts, anatomical variability, and its reliance on user-provided prompts. Recent prompt-free adaptations alleviate the need for expert intervention, yet still suffer from limited robustness and adaptability, often overlooking the issues of semantic over-smoothing and token uniformity. We propose SAM-DCE, which balances local discrimination and global semantics while mitigating token uniformity, enhancing inter-class separability, and enriching mask decoding with fine-grained, consistent representations. Extensive experiments on diverse medical benchmarks validate its effectiveness.

Paperid: 2076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18939.pdf

Abstract:
Training urban spatio-temporal foundation models that generalize well across diverse regions and cities is critical for deploying urban services in unseen or data-scarce regions. Recent studies have typically focused on fusing cross-domain spatio-temporal data to train unified Transformer-based models. However, these models suffer from quadratic computational complexity and high memory overhead, limiting their scalability and practical deployment. Inspired by the efficiency of Mamba, a state space model with linear time complexity, we explore its potential for efficient urban spatio-temporal prediction. However, directly applying Mamba as a spatio-temporal backbone leads to negative transfer and severe performance degradation. This is primarily due to spatio-temporal heterogeneity and the recursive mechanism of Mamba's hidden state updates, which limit cross-domain generalization. To overcome these challenges, we propose Damba-ST, a novel domain-adaptive Mamba-based model for efficient urban spatio-temporal prediction. Damba-ST retains Mamba's linear complexity advantage while significantly enhancing its adaptability to heterogeneous domains. Specifically, we introduce two core innovations: (1) a domain-adaptive state space model that partitions the latent representation space into a shared subspace for learning cross-domain commonalities and independent, domain-specific subspaces for capturing intra-domain discriminative features; (2) three distinct Domain Adapters, which serve as domain-aware proxies to bridge disparate domain distributions and facilitate the alignment of cross-domain commonalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization and efficiency of Damba-ST. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on prediction tasks and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, enabling seamless deployment in new urban environments without extensive retraining or fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06270.pdf

Abstract:
This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.

Paperid: 2078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20770.pdf

Abstract:
In music production, manipulating audio effects (Fx) parameters through natural language has the potential to reduce technical barriers for non-experts. We present LLM2Fx, a framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict Fx parameters directly from textual descriptions without requiring task-specific training or fine-tuning. Our approach address the text-to-effect parameter prediction (Text2Fx) task by mapping natural language descriptions to the corresponding Fx parameters for equalization and reverberation. We demonstrate that LLMs can generate Fx parameters in a zero-shot manner that elucidates the relationship between timbre semantics and audio effects in music production. To enhance performance, we introduce three types of in-context examples: audio Digital Signal Processing (DSP) features, DSP function code, and few-shot examples. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based Fx parameter generation outperforms previous optimization approaches, offering competitive performance in translating natural language descriptions to appropriate Fx settings. Furthermore, LLMs can serve as text-driven interfaces for audio production, paving the way for more intuitive and accessible music production tools.

Paperid: 2079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18780.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid locomotion faces a critical scalability challenge: traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods require task-specific rewards and struggle to leverage growing datasets, even as more training terrains are introduced. We propose DreamPolicy, a unified framework that enables a single policy to master diverse terrains and generalize zero-shot to unseen scenarios by systematically integrating offline data and diffusion-driven motion synthesis. At its core, DreamPolicy introduces Humanoid Motion Imagery (HMI) - future state predictions synthesized through an autoregressive terrain-aware diffusion planner curated by aggregating rollouts from specialized policies across various distinct terrains. Unlike human motion datasets requiring laborious retargeting, our data directly captures humanoid kinematics, enabling the diffusion planner to synthesize "dreamed" trajectories that encode terrain-specific physical constraints. These trajectories act as dynamic objectives for our HMI-conditioned policy, bypassing manual reward engineering and enabling cross-terrain generalization. DreamPolicy addresses the scalability limitations of prior methods: while traditional RL fails to exploit growing datasets, our framework scales seamlessly with more offline data. As the dataset expands, the diffusion prior learns richer locomotion skills, which the policy leverages to master new terrains without retraining. Experiments demonstrate that DreamPolicy achieves average 90% success rates in training environments and an average of 20% higher success on unseen terrains than the prevalent method. It also generalizes to perturbed and composite scenarios where prior approaches collapse. By unifying offline data, diffusion-based trajectory synthesis, and policy optimization, DreamPolicy overcomes the "one task, one policy" bottleneck, establishing a paradigm for scalable, data-driven humanoid control.

Paperid: 2080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17599.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been used in many zero-shot learning problems, with their strong generalization ability. Recently, adopting LLMs in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) has drawn increasing attention. However, the adoption of LLMs faces two major challenges: limited information on graph structure and unreliable responses. LLMs struggle with text attributes isolated from the graph topology. Worse still, they yield unreliable predictions due to both information insufficiency and the inherent weakness of LLMs (e.g., hallucination). Towards this end, this paper proposes a novel method named Dynamic Text Bundling Supervision (DENSE) that queries LLMs with bundles of texts to obtain bundle-level labels and uses these labels to supervise graph neural networks. Specifically, we sample a set of bundles, each containing a set of nodes with corresponding texts of close proximity. We then query LLMs with the bundled texts to obtain the label of each bundle. Subsequently, the bundle labels are used to supervise the optimization of graph neural networks, and the bundles are further refined to exclude noisy items. To justify our design, we also provide theoretical analysis of the proposed method. Extensive experiments across ten datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Paperid: 2081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14100.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) aims to learn class-agnostic segmentation on few classes to segment arbitrary classes, but at the risk of overfitting. To address this, some methods use the well-learned knowledge of foundation models (e.g., SAM) to simplify the learning process. Recently, SAM 2 has extended SAM by supporting video segmentation, whose class-agnostic matching ability is useful to FSS. A simple idea is to encode support foreground (FG) features as memory, with which query FG features are matched and fused. Unfortunately, the FG objects in different frames of SAM 2's video data are always the same identity, while those in FSS are different identities, i.e., the matching step is incompatible. Therefore, we design Pseudo Prompt Generator to encode pseudo query memory, matching with query features in a compatible way. However, the memories can never be as accurate as the real ones, i.e., they are likely to contain incomplete query FG, and some unexpected query background (BG) features, leading to wrong segmentation. Hence, we further design Iterative Memory Refinement to fuse more query FG features into the memory, and devise a Support-Calibrated Memory Attention to suppress the unexpected query BG features in memory. Extensive experiments have been conducted on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ to validate the effectiveness of our design, e.g., the 1-shot mIoU can be 4.2% better than the best baseline.

Paperid: 2082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16936.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved great success in processing and understanding information from diverse modalities (e.g., text, audio, and visual signals). Despite their growing popularity, there remains a lack of comprehensive evaluation measuring the audio-visual capabilities of these models, especially in diverse scenarios (e.g., distribution shifts and adversarial attacks). In this paper, we present a multifaceted evaluation of the audio-visual capability of MLLMs, focusing on four key dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness. Through extensive experiments, we find that MLLMs exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities, enabling them to achieve great performance with limited data. However, their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. Additionally, while MLLMs are susceptible to adversarial samples, they demonstrate greater robustness compared to traditional models. The experimental results and our findings provide insights into the audio-visual capabilities of MLLMs, highlighting areas for improvement and offering guidance for future research.

Paperid: 2083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10826.pdf

Abstract:
Music editing is an important step in music production, which has broad applications, including game development and film production. Most existing zero-shot text-guided methods rely on pretrained diffusion models by involving forward-backward diffusion processes for editing. However, these methods often struggle to maintain the music content consistency. Additionally, text instructions alone usually fail to accurately describe the desired music. In this paper, we propose two music editing methods that enhance the consistency between the original and edited music by leveraging score distillation. The first method, SteerMusic, is a coarse-grained zero-shot editing approach using delta denoising score. The second method, SteerMusic+, enables fine-grained personalized music editing by manipulating a concept token that represents a user-defined musical style. SteerMusic+ allows for the editing of music into any user-defined musical styles that cannot be achieved by the text instructions alone. Experimental results show that our methods outperform existing approaches in preserving both music content consistency and editing fidelity. User studies further validate that our methods achieve superior music editing quality. Audio examples are available on https://steermusic.pages.dev/.

Paperid: 2084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07830.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong performance in aligning visual and textual representations, excelling in tasks like image retrieval and zero-shot classification. Despite this success, the mechanisms by which these models utilize training data, particularly the role of memorization, remain unclear. In uni-modal models, both supervised and self-supervised, memorization has been shown to be essential for generalization. However, it is not well understood how these findings would apply to CLIP, which incorporates elements from both supervised learning via captions that provide a supervisory signal similar to labels, and from self-supervised learning via the contrastive objective. To bridge this gap in understanding, we propose a formal definition of memorization in CLIP (CLIPMem) and use it to quantify memorization in CLIP models. Our results indicate that CLIP's memorization behavior falls between the supervised and self-supervised paradigms, with "mis-captioned" samples exhibiting highest levels of memorization. Additionally, we find that the text encoder contributes more to memorization than the image encoder, suggesting that mitigation strategies should focus on the text domain. Building on these insights, we propose multiple strategies to reduce memorization while at the same time improving utility--something that had not been shown before for traditional learning paradigms where reducing memorization typically results in utility decrease.

Paperid: 2085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10512.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are excellent few-shot learners. They can perform a wide variety of tasks purely based on natural language prompts provided to them. These prompts contain data of a specific downstream task -- often the private dataset of a party, e.g., a company that wants to leverage the LLM for their purposes. We show that deploying prompted models presents a significant privacy risk for the data used within the prompt by instantiating a highly effective membership inference attack. We also observe that the privacy risk of prompted models exceeds fine-tuned models at the same utility levels. After identifying the model's sensitivity to their prompts -- in the form of a significantly higher prediction confidence on the prompted data -- as a cause for the increased risk, we propose ensembling as a mitigation strategy. By aggregating over multiple different versions of a prompted model, membership inference risk can be decreased.

Paperid: 2086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23014.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across natural language tasks but incur substantial computational and storage costs due to their scale. Post-training structured pruning offers an efficient solution. However, when few-shot calibration sets fail to adequately reflect the pretraining data distribution, existing methods exhibit limited generalization to downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose Function-Aware Neuron Grouping (FANG), a post-training pruning framework that alleviates calibration bias by identifying and preserving neurons critical to specific function. FANG groups neurons with similar function based on the type of semantic context they process and prunes each group independently. During importance estimation within each group, tokens that strongly correlate with the functional role of the neuron group are given higher weighting. Additionally, FANG also preserves neurons that contribute across multiple context types. To achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance, it allocates sparsity to each block adaptively based on its functional complexity. Experiments show that FANG improves downstream accuracy while preserving language modeling performance. It achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results when combined with FLAP and OBC, two representative pruning methods. Specifically, FANG outperforms FLAP and OBC by 1.5%--8.5% in average accuracy under 30% and 40% sparsity.

Paperid: 2087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14283.pdf

Abstract:
Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks exploit patterns in encrypted traffic to infer the websites visited by users, posing a serious threat to anonymous communication systems. Although recent WF techniques achieve over 90% accuracy in controlled experimental settings, most studies remain confined to single scenarios, overlooking the complexity of real-world environments. This paper presents the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of existing WF attacks under diverse realistic conditions, including defense mechanisms, traffic drift, multi-tab browsing, early-stage detection, open-world settings, and few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that many WF techniques with strong performance in isolated settings degrade significantly when facing other conditions. Since real-world environments often combine multiple challenges, current WF attacks are difficult to apply directly in practice. This study highlights the limitations of WF attacks and introduces a multidimensional evaluation framework, offering critical insights for developing more robust and practical WF attacks.

Paperid: 2088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09658.pdf

Abstract:
When a new release of a foundation model is published, practitioners typically need to repeat full fine-tuning, even if the same task has already been solved in the previous version. A promising alternative is to reuse the parameter changes (i.e., task vectors) that capture how a model adapts to a specific task. However, they often fail to transfer across different pre-trained models due to their misaligned parameter space. In this work, we show that the key to successful transfer lies in the sign structure of the gradients of the new model. Based on this insight, we propose GradFix, a novel method that approximates the ideal gradient sign structure and leverages it to transfer knowledge using only a handful of labeled samples. Notably, this requires no additional fine-tuning: the adaptation is achieved by computing a few gradients at the target model and masking the source task vector accordingly. This yields an update that is locally aligned with the target loss landscape, effectively rebasing the task vector onto the new pre-training. We provide a theoretical guarantee that our method ensures first-order descent. Empirically, we demonstrate significant performance gains on vision and language benchmarks, consistently outperforming naive task vector addition and few-shot fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14684.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents DAIEN-TTS, a zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) framework that enables ENvironment-aware synthesis through Disentangled Audio Infilling. By leveraging separate speaker and environment prompts, DAIEN-TTS allows independent control over the timbre and the background environment of the synthesized speech. Built upon F5-TTS, the proposed DAIEN-TTS first incorporates a pretrained speech-environment separation (SES) module to disentangle the environmental speech into mel-spectrograms of clean speech and environment audio. Two random span masks of varying lengths are then applied to both mel-spectrograms, which, together with the text embedding, serve as conditions for infilling the masked environmental mel-spectrogram, enabling the simultaneous continuation of personalized speech and time-varying environmental audio. To further enhance controllability during inference, we adopt dual class-free guidance (DCFG) for the speech and environment components and introduce a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) adaptation strategy to align the synthesized speech with the environment prompt. Experimental results demonstrate that DAIEN-TTS generates environmental personalized speech with high naturalness, strong speaker similarity, and high environmental fidelity.

Paperid: 2090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05008.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in various computer vision tasks. However, their application to medical imaging remains challenging due to the high variability and complexity of medical data. Specifically, medical images often exhibit significant domain shifts caused by various confounders, including equipment differences, procedure artifacts, and imaging modes, which can lead to poor generalization when models are applied to unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose Multimodal Causal-Driven Representation Learning (MCDRL), a novel framework that integrates causal inference with the VLM to tackle domain generalization in medical image segmentation. MCDRL is implemented in two steps: first, it leverages CLIP's cross-modal capabilities to identify candidate lesion regions and construct a confounder dictionary through text prompts, specifically designed to represent domain-specific variations; second, it trains a causal intervention network that utilizes this dictionary to identify and eliminate the influence of these domain-specific variations while preserving the anatomical structural information critical for segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCDRL consistently outperforms competing methods, yielding superior segmentation accuracy and exhibiting robust generalizability.

Paperid: 2091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04136.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) aims to leverage limited data to enable models to discriminate subtly distinct categories. Recent works mostly finetuned the pre-trained visual language models to achieve performance gain, yet suffering from overfitting and weak generalization. To deal with this, we introduce UniFGVC, a universal training-free framework that reformulates few-shot FGVC as multimodal retrieval. First, we propose the Category-Discriminative Visual Captioner (CDV-Captioner) to exploit the open-world knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate a structured text description that captures the fine-grained attribute features distinguishing closely related classes. CDV-Captioner uses chain-of-thought prompting and visually similar reference images to reduce hallucination and enhance discrimination of generated captions. Using it we can convert each image into an image-description pair, enabling more comprehensive feature representation, and construct the multimodal category templates using few-shot samples for the subsequent retrieval pipeline. Then, off-the-shelf vision and text encoders embed query and template pairs, and FGVC is accomplished by retrieving the nearest template in the joint space. UniFGVC ensures broad compatibility with diverse MLLMs and encoders, offering reliable generalization and adaptability across few-shot FGVC scenarios. Extensive experiments on 12 FGVC benchmarks demonstrate its consistent superiority over prior few-shot CLIP-based methods and even several fully-supervised MLLMs-based approaches.

Paperid: 2092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13830.pdf

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) methods tend to preserve the acoustic environment of the audio prompt, leading to degradation in synthesized speech quality when the audio prompt contains noise. In this paper, we propose a novel neural codec-based speech denoiser and integrate it with the advanced LLM-based TTS model, LauraTTS, to achieve noise-robust zero-shot TTS. The proposed codec denoiser consists of an audio codec, a token denoiser, and an embedding refiner. The token denoiser predicts the first two groups of clean acoustic tokens from the noisy ones, which can serve as the acoustic prompt for LauraTTS to synthesize high-quality personalized speech or be converted to clean speech waveforms through the embedding refiner and codec decoder. Experimental results show that our proposed codec denoiser outperforms state-of-the-art speech enhancement (SE) methods, and the proposed noise-robust LauraTTS surpasses the approach using additional SE models.

Paperid: 2093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07555.pdf

Abstract:
The growing power of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized how people access and utilize information. Notably, the LLMs excel at performing fine-grained data representation, which facilitates precise retrieval of information. They also generate high-quality answers based on external references, enabling the production of useful knowledge. The recent introduction of reasoning models, like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, marks another leap forward, highlighting LLMs' ability to think progressively before delivering final answers. This breakthrough significantly improves the ability to address complex tasks, e.g., coding and math proofs. Inspired by this progress, we aim to develop similar capabilities for retrieval models, which hold great promise for tackling critical challenges in the field, including multi-task retrieval, zero-shot retrieval, and tasks requiring intensive reasoning of complex relationships. With this motivation, we propose a novel approach called O1 Embedder, which generates useful thoughts for the input query before making retrieval for the target documents. To realize this objective, we conquer two technical difficulties. First, we design a data synthesis workflow, creating training signals for O1 Embedder by generating initial thoughts from an LLM-expert and subsequently refining them using a retrieval committee. Second, we optimize the training process, enabling a pre-trained model to be jointly fine-tuned to generate retrieval thoughts via behavior cloning and perform dense retrieval through contrastive learning. Our approach is evaluated by comprehensive experiments, where substantial improvements are achieved across 12 popular datasets, spanning both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. These results highlight O1 Embedder's remarkable accuracy and generalizability, paving the way for the development of next-generation IR foundation models.

Paperid: 2094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14475.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the rapidly growing demand for multimodal retrieval, progress in this field remains severely constrained by a lack of training data. In this paper, we introduce MegaPairs, a novel data synthesis method that leverages vision language models (VLMs) and open-domain images, together with a massive synthetic dataset generated from this method. Our empirical analysis shows that MegaPairs generates high-quality data, enabling the multimodal retriever to significantly outperform the baseline model trained on 70$\times$ more data from existing datasets. Moreover, since MegaPairs solely relies on general image corpora and open-source VLMs, it can be easily scaled up, enabling continuous improvements in retrieval performance. In this stage, we produced more than 26 million training instances and trained several models of varying sizes using this data. These new models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across 4 popular composed image retrieval (CIR) benchmarks and the highest overall performance on the 36 datasets provided by MMEB. They also demonstrate notable performance improvements with additional downstream fine-tuning. Our produced dataset, well-trained models, and data synthesis pipeline will be made publicly available to facilitate the future development of this field.

Paperid: 2095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02906.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides at code generation through improved model design, training, and chain-of-thought. However, prompt-level optimizations remain an important yet under-explored aspect of LLMs for coding. This work focuses on the few-shot examples present in most code generation prompts, offering a systematic study on whether few-shot examples improve LLM's coding capabilities, which few-shot examples have the largest impact, and how to select impactful examples. Our work offers 2 approaches for selecting few-shot examples, a model-free method, CODEEXEMPLAR-FREE, and a model-based method, CODEEXEMPLAR-BASED. The 2 methods offer a trade-off between improved performance and reliance on training data and interpretability. Both methods significantly improve CodeLlama's coding ability across the popular HumanEval+ coding benchmark. In summary, our work provides valuable insights into how to pick few-shot examples in code generation prompts to improve LLM code generation capabilities.

Paperid: 2096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00553.pdf

Abstract:
End-to-end transformer-based trackers have achieved remarkable performance on most human-related datasets. However, training these trackers in heterogeneous scenarios poses significant challenges, including negative interference - where the model learns conflicting scene-specific parameters - and limited domain generalization, which often necessitates expensive fine-tuning to adapt the models to new domains. In response to these challenges, we introduce Parameter-efficient Scenario-specific Tracking Architecture (PASTA), a novel framework that combines Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and Modular Deep Learning (MDL). Specifically, we define key scenario attributes (e.g, camera-viewpoint, lighting condition) and train specialized PEFT modules for each attribute. These expert modules are combined in parameter space, enabling systematic generalization to new domains without increasing inference time. Extensive experiments on MOTSynth, along with zero-shot evaluations on MOT17 and PersonPath22 demonstrate that a neural tracker built from carefully selected modules surpasses its monolithic counterpart. We release models and code.

Paperid: 2097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22646.pdf

Abstract:
Sleep monitoring plays a crucial role in maintaining good health, with sleep staging serving as an essential metric in the monitoring process. Traditional methods, utilizing medical sensors like EEG and ECG, can be effective but often present challenges such as unnatural user experience, complex deployment, and high costs. Ballistocardiography~(BCG), a type of piezoelectric sensor signal, offers a non-invasive, user-friendly, and easily deployable alternative for long-term home monitoring. However, reliable BCG-based sleep staging is challenging due to the limited sleep monitoring data available for BCG. A restricted training dataset prevents the model from generalization across populations. Additionally, transferring to BCG faces difficulty ensuring model robustness when migrating from other data sources. To address these issues, we introduce SleepNetZero, a zero-shot learning based approach for sleep staging. To tackle the generalization challenge, we propose a series of BCG feature extraction methods that align BCG components with corresponding respiratory, cardiac, and movement channels in PSG. This allows models to be trained on large-scale PSG datasets that are diverse in population. For the migration challenge, we employ data augmentation techniques, significantly enhancing generalizability. We conducted extensive training and testing on large datasets~(12393 records from 9637 different subjects), achieving an accuracy of 0.803 and a Cohen's Kappa of 0.718. ZeroSleepNet was also deployed in real prototype~(monitoring pads) and tested in actual hospital settings~(265 users), demonstrating an accuracy of 0.697 and a Cohen's Kappa of 0.589. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first known reliable BCG-based sleep staging effort and marks a significant step towards in-home health monitoring.

Paperid: 2098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18378.pdf

Abstract:
In modern mobile applications, users frequently encounter various new contexts, necessitating on-device continual learning (CL) to ensure consistent model performance. While existing research predominantly focused on developing lightweight CL frameworks, we identify that data scarcity is a critical bottleneck for on-device CL. In this work, we explore the potential of leveraging abundant cloud-side data to enrich scarce on-device data, and propose a private, efficient and effective data enrichment framework Delta. Specifically, Delta first introduces a directory dataset to decompose the data enrichment problem into device-side and cloud-side sub-problems without sharing sensitive data. Next, Delta proposes a soft data matching strategy to effectively solve the device-side sub-problem with sparse user data, and an optimal data sampling scheme for cloud server to retrieve the most suitable dataset for enrichment with low computational complexity. Further, Delta refines the data sampling scheme by jointly considering the impact of enriched data on both new and past contexts, mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue from a new aspect. Comprehensive experiments across four typical mobile computing tasks with varied data modalities demonstrate that Delta could enhance the overall model accuracy by an average of 15.1%, 12.4%, 1.1% and 5.6% for visual, IMU, audio and textual tasks compared with few-shot CL, and consistently reduce the communication costs by over 90% compared to federated CL.

Paperid: 2099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20668.pdf

Abstract:
Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for legged robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional continuous actions, hardware constraints, and limited exploration. Existing methods for locomotion and whole-body control work well for position-based control with environment-specific heuristics (e.g., reward shaping, curriculum design, and manual initialization), but are less effective for torque-based control, where sufficiently exploring the action space and obtaining informative gradient signals for training is significantly more difficult. We introduce Growing Policy Optimization (GPO), a training framework that applies a time-varying action transformation to restrict the effective action space in the early stage, thereby encouraging more effective data collection and policy learning, and then progressively expands it to enhance exploration and achieve higher expected return. We prove that this transformation preserves the PPO update rule and introduces only bounded, vanishing gradient distortion, thereby ensuring stable training. We evaluate GPO on both quadruped and hexapod robots, including zero-shot deployment of simulation-trained policies on hardware. Policies trained with GPO consistently achieve better performance. These results suggest that GPO provides a general, environment-agnostic optimization framework for learning legged locomotion.

Paperid: 2100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06806.pdf

Abstract:
Although learning-based vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents can learn spatial knowledge implicitly from large-scale training data, zero-shot VLN agents lack this process, relying primarily on local observations for navigation, which leads to inefficient exploration and a significant performance gap. To deal with the problem, we consider a zero-shot VLN setting that agents are allowed to fully explore the environment before task execution. Then, we construct the Spatial Scene Graph (SSG) to explicitly capture global spatial structure and semantics in the explored environment. Based on the SSG, we introduce SpatialNav, a zero-shot VLN agent that integrates an agent-centric spatial map, a compass-aligned visual representation, and a remote object localization strategy for efficient navigation. Comprehensive experiments in both discrete and continuous environments demonstrate that SpatialNav significantly outperforms existing zero-shot agents and clearly narrows the gap with state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Such results highlight the importance of global spatial representations for generalizable navigation.

Paperid: 2101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14131.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to dynamically explore complex 3D environments following human instructions. Recent research underscores the potential of harnessing large language models (LLMs) for VLN, given their commonsense knowledge and general reasoning capabilities. Despite their strengths, a substantial gap in task completion performance persists between LLM-based approaches and domain experts, as LLMs inherently struggle to comprehend real-world spatial correlations precisely. Additionally, introducing LLMs is accompanied with substantial computational cost and inference latency. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-process thinking framework dubbed R3, integrating LLMs' generalization capabilities with VLN-specific expertise in a zero-shot manner. The framework comprises three core modules: Runner, Ruminator, and Regulator. The Runner is a lightweight transformer-based expert model that ensures efficient and accurate navigation under regular circumstances. The Ruminator employs a powerful multimodal LLM as the backbone and adopts chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to elicit structured reasoning. The Regulator monitors the navigation progress and controls the appropriate thinking mode according to three criteria, integrating Runner and Ruminator harmoniously. Experimental results illustrate that R3 significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, exceeding 3.28% and 3.30% in SPL and RGSPL respectively on the REVERIE benchmark. This pronounced enhancement highlights the effectiveness of our method in handling challenging VLN tasks.

Paperid: 2102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12267.pdf

Abstract:
Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) images offer rich fine-grained information but also present challenges in effective processing. Existing dynamic resolution and token pruning methods are constrained by a passive perception paradigm, suffering from increased redundancy when obtaining finer visual inputs. In this work, we explore a new active perception paradigm that enables models to revisit information-rich regions. First, we present LRS-GRO, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for active perception in UHR RS processing, encompassing 17 question types across global, region, and object levels, annotated via a semi-automatic pipeline. Building on LRS-GRO, we propose ZoomEarth, an adaptive cropping-zooming framework with a novel Region-Guided reward that provides fine-grained guidance. Trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), ZoomEarth achieves state-of-the-art performance on LRS-GRO and, in the zero-shot setting, on three public UHR remote sensing benchmarks. Furthermore, ZoomEarth can be seamlessly integrated with downstream models for tasks such as cloud removal, denoising, segmentation, and image editing through simple tool interfaces, demonstrating strong versatility and extensibility.

Paperid: 2103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20706.pdf

Abstract:
Large audio-language models (LALMs) show strong zero-shot ability on speech tasks, suggesting promise for speech emotion recognition (SER). However, SER in real-world deployments often fails under domain mismatch, where source data are unavailable and powerful LALMs are accessible only through an API. We ask: given only unlabeled target-domain audio and an API-only LALM, can a student model be adapted to outperform the LALM in the target domain? To this end, we propose MI-Fuse, a denoised label fusion framework that supplements the LALM with a source-domain trained SER classifier as an auxiliary teacher. The framework draws multiple stochastic predictions from both teachers, weights their mean distributions by mutual-information-based uncertainty, and stabilizes training with an exponential moving average teacher. Experiments across three public emotion datasets and six cross-domain transfers show consistent gains, with the student surpassing the LALM and outperforming the strongest baseline by 3.9%. This approach strengthens emotion-aware speech systems without sharing source data, enabling realistic adaptation.

Paperid: 2104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23237.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) focuses on models learning new concepts from limited data while retaining knowledge of previous classes. Recently, many studies have started to leverage unlabeled samples to assist models in learning from few-shot samples, giving rise to the field of Semi-supervised Few-shot Class-Incremental Learning (Semi-FSCIL). However, these studies often assume that the source of unlabeled data is only confined to novel classes of the current session, which presents a narrow perspective and cannot align well with practical scenarios. To better reflect real-world scenarios, we redefine Semi-FSCIL as Generalized Semi-FSCIL (GSemi-FSCIL) by incorporating both base and all the ever-seen novel classes in the unlabeled set. This change in the composition of unlabeled samples poses a new challenge for existing methods, as they struggle to distinguish between unlabeled samples from base and novel classes. To address this issue, we propose an Ambiguity-guided Learnable Distribution Calibration (ALDC) strategy. ALDC dynamically uses abundant base samples to correct biased feature distributions for few-shot novel classes. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing works, setting new state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 2105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05970.pdf

Abstract:
As a challenging vision-language (VL) task, Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images using multimodal (image+text) queries. Although many existing CIR methods have attained promising performance, their reliance on costly, manually labeled triplets hinders scalability and zero-shot capability. To address this issue, we propose a scalable pipeline for automatic triplet generation, along with a fully synthetic dataset named Composed Image Retrieval on High-quality Synthetic Triplets (CIRHS). Our pipeline leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate diverse prompts, controlling a text-to-image generative model to produce image pairs with identical elements in each pair, which are then filtered and reorganized to form the CIRHS dataset. In addition, we introduce Hybrid Contextual Alignment (CoAlign), a novel CIR framework, which can accomplish global alignment and local reasoning within a broader context, enabling the model to learn more robust and informative representations. By utilizing the synthetic CIRHS dataset, CoAlign achieves outstanding zero-shot performance on three commonly used benchmarks, demonstrating for the first time the feasibility of training CIR models on a fully synthetic dataset. Furthermore, under supervised training, our method outperforms all the state-of-the-art supervised CIR approaches, validating the effectiveness of our proposed retrieval framework. The code and the CIRHS dataset will be released soon.

Paperid: 2106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20773.pdf

Abstract:
Cold-start items remain a persistent challenge in recommender systems due to their lack of historical user interactions, which collaborative models rely on. While recent zero-shot methods leverage large language models (LLMs) to address this, they often struggle with sparse metadata and hallucinated or incomplete knowledge. We propose ColdRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation approach that builds a domain-specific knowledge graph dynamically to enhance LLM-based recommendation in cold-start scenarios, without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. ColdRAG begins by converting structured item attributes into rich natural-language profiles, from which it extracts entities and relationships to construct a unified knowledge graph capturing item semantics. Given a user's interaction history, it scores edges in the graph using an LLM, retrieves candidate items with supporting evidence, and prompts the LLM to rank them. By enabling multi-hop reasoning over this graph, ColdRAG grounds recommendations in verifiable evidence, reducing hallucinations and strengthening semantic connections. Experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that ColdRAG surpasses existing zero-shot baselines in both Recall and NDCG. This framework offers a practical solution to cold-start recommendation by combining knowledge-graph reasoning with retrieval-augmented LLM generation.

Paperid: 2107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19948.pdf

Abstract:
Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as a powerful technique for imaging macromolecular complexes in their near-native states. However, the localization of 3D particles in cellular environments still presents a significant challenge due to low signal-to-noise ratios and missing wedge artifacts. Deep learning approaches have shown great potential, but they need huge amounts of data, which can be a challenge in cryo-ET scenarios where labeled data is often scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel Self-augmented and Self-interpreted (SaSi) deep learning approach towards few-shot particle detection in 3D cryo-ET images. Our method builds upon self-augmentation techniques to further boost data utilization and introduces a self-interpreted segmentation strategy for alleviating dependency on labeled data, hence improving generalization and robustness. As demonstrated by experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world cryo-ET datasets, the SaSi approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for particle localization. This research increases understanding of how to detect particles with very few labels in cryo-ET and thus sets a new benchmark for few-shot learning in structural biology.

Paperid: 2108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17931.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation is vital for clinical diagnosis, yet current deep learning methods often demand extensive expert effort, i.e., either through annotating large training datasets or providing prompts at inference time for each new case. This paper introduces a zero-shot and automatic segmentation pipeline that combines off-the-shelf vision-language and segmentation foundation models. Given a medical image and a task definition (e.g., "segment the optic disc in an eye fundus image"), our method uses a grounding model to generate an initial bounding box, followed by a visual prompt boosting module that enhance the prompts, which are then processed by a promptable segmentation model to produce the final mask. To address the challenges of domain gap and result verification, we introduce a test-time adaptation framework featuring a set of learnable adaptors that align the medical inputs with foundation model representations. Its hyperparameters are optimized via Bayesian Optimization, guided by a proxy validation model without requiring ground-truth labels. Our pipeline offers an annotation-efficient and scalable solution for zero-shot medical image segmentation across diverse tasks. Our pipeline is evaluated on seven diverse medical imaging datasets and shows promising results. By proper decomposition and test-time adaptation, our fully automatic pipeline performs competitively with weakly-prompted interactive foundation models.

Paperid: 2109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16220.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Meta-PerSER, a novel meta-learning framework that personalizes Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) by adapting to each listener's unique way of interpreting emotion. Conventional SER systems rely on aggregated annotations, which often overlook individual subtleties and lead to inconsistent predictions. In contrast, Meta-PerSER leverages a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) approach enhanced with Combined-Set Meta-Training, Derivative Annealing, and per-layer per-step learning rates, enabling rapid adaptation with only a few labeled examples. By integrating robust representations from pre-trained self-supervised models, our framework first captures general emotional cues and then fine-tunes itself to personal annotation styles. Experiments on the IEMOCAP corpus demonstrate that Meta-PerSER significantly outperforms baseline methods in both seen and unseen data scenarios, highlighting its promise for personalized emotion recognition.

Paperid: 2110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11350.pdf

Abstract:
To perform outdoor autonomous visual navigation and search, a robot may leverage satellite imagery as a prior map. This can help inform high-level search and exploration strategies, even when such images lack sufficient resolution to allow for visual recognition of targets. However, there are limited training datasets of satellite images with annotated targets that are not directly visible. Furthermore, approaches which leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) for generalization may yield inaccurate outputs due to hallucination, leading to inefficient search. To address these challenges, we introduce Search-TTA, a multimodal test-time adaptation framework with a flexible plug-and-play interface compatible with various input modalities (e.g. image, text, sound) and planning methods. First, we pretrain a satellite image encoder to align with CLIP's visual encoder to output probability distributions of target presence used for visual search. Second, our framework dynamically refines CLIP's predictions during search using a test-time adaptation mechanism. Through a novel feedback loop inspired by Spatial Poisson Point Processes, uncertainty-weighted gradient updates are used to correct potentially inaccurate predictions and improve search performance. To train and evaluate Search-TTA, we curate AVS-Bench, a visual search dataset based on internet-scale ecological data that contains up to 380k training and 8k validation images (in- and out-domain). We find that Search-TTA improves planner performance by up to 30.0%, particularly in cases with poor initial CLIP predictions due to limited training data. It also performs comparably with significantly larger VLMs, and achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen modalities. Finally, we deploy Search-TTA on a real UAV via hardware-in-the-loop testing, by simulating its operation within a large-scale simulation that provides onboard sensing.

Paperid: 2111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05204.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve the target image based on a reference image and a text description without requiring in-distribution triplets for training. One prevalent approach follows the vision-language pretraining paradigm that employs a mapping network to transfer the image embedding to a pseudo-word token in the text embedding space. However, this approach tends to impede network generalization due to modality discrepancy and distribution shift between training and inference. To this end, we propose a Data-efficient Generalization (DeG) framework, including two novel designs, namely, Textual Supplement (TS) module and Semantic-Set (S-Set). The TS module exploits compositional textual semantics during training, enhancing the pseudo-word token with more linguistic semantics and thus mitigating the modality discrepancy effectively. The S-Set exploits the zero-shot capability of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), alleviating the distribution shift and mitigating the overfitting issue from the redundancy of the large-scale image-text data. Extensive experiments over four ZS-CIR benchmarks show that DeG outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with much less training data, and saves substantial training and inference time for practical usage.

Paperid: 2112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03062.pdf

Abstract:
The high cost of obtaining high-quality annotated data for in-context learning (ICL) has motivated the development of methods that use self-generated annotations in place of ground-truth labels. While these approaches have shown promising results in few-shot settings, they generally do not scale to many-shot scenarios. In this work, we study ICL with self-generated examples using a framework analogous to traditional semi-supervised learning, consisting of annotation generation, demonstration selection, and in-context inference. Within this framework, we propose a simple baseline that outperforms ground-truth ICL in zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot settings. Notably, we observe a scaling law with this baseline, where optimal performance is achieved with more than 1,000 demonstrations. To fully exploit the many-shot capabilities of semi-supervised ICL, we introduce IterPSD, an iterative annotation approach that integrates iterative refinement and curriculum pseudo-labeling techniques from semi-supervised learning, yielding up to 6.8% additional gains on classification tasks.

Paperid: 2113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12674.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in learning-based controllers for legged robots, deployments in human-centric environments remain limited by safety concerns. Most of these approaches use position-based control, where policies output target joint angles that must be processed by a low-level controller (e.g., PD or impedance controllers) to compute joint torques. Although impressive results have been achieved in controlled real-world scenarios, these methods often struggle with compliance and adaptability when encountering environments or disturbances unseen during training, potentially resulting in extreme or unsafe behaviors. Inspired by how animals achieve smooth and adaptive movements by controlling muscle extension and contraction, torque-based policies offer a promising alternative by enabling precise and direct control of the actuators in torque space. In principle, this approach facilitates more effective interactions with the environment, resulting in safer and more adaptable behaviors. However, challenges such as a highly nonlinear state space and inefficient exploration during training have hindered their broader adoption. To address these limitations, we propose SATA, a bio-inspired framework that mimics key biomechanical principles and adaptive learning mechanisms observed in animal locomotion. Our approach effectively addresses the inherent challenges of learning torque-based policies by significantly improving early-stage exploration, leading to high-performance final policies. Remarkably, our method achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Our experimental results indicate that SATA demonstrates remarkable compliance and safety, even in challenging environments such as soft/slippery terrain or narrow passages, and under significant external disturbances, highlighting its potential for practical deployments in human-centric and safety-critical scenarios.

Paperid: 2114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14404.pdf

Abstract:
Obtaining accurate weather forecasts at station locations is a critical challenge due to systematic biases arising from the mismatch between multi-scale, continuous atmospheric characteristic and their discrete, gridded representations. Previous works have primarily focused on modeling gridded meteorological data, inherently neglecting the off-grid, continuous nature of atmospheric states and leaving such biases unresolved. To address this, we propose the Kolmogorov Arnold Neural Interpolator (KANI), a novel framework that redefines meteorological field representation as continuous neural functions derived from discretized grids. Grounded in the Kolmogorov Arnold theorem, KANI captures the inherent continuity of atmospheric states and leverages sparse in-situ observations to correct these biases systematically. Furthermore, KANI introduces an innovative zero-shot downscaling capability, guided by high-resolution topographic textures without requiring high-resolution meteorological fields for supervision. Experimental results across three sub-regions of the continental United States indicate that KANI achieves an accuracy improvement of 40.28% for temperature and 67.41% for wind speed, highlighting its significant improvement over traditional interpolation methods. This enables continuous neural representation of meteorological variables through neural networks, transcending the limitations of conventional grid-based representations.

Paperid: 2115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20810.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in data mining, driving rapid advancements across numerous industries. With the emergence of large models, time series foundation models (TSFMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, such as zero-shot learning, through large-scale pre-training. Meanwhile, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have been widely employed to enhance the performance of foundation models on unseen data, allowing models to access to external knowledge. In this paper, we introduce TimeRAF, a Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhance zero-shot time series forecasting through retrieval-augmented techniques. We develop customized time series knowledge bases that are tailored to the specific forecasting tasks. TimeRAF employs an end-to-end learnable retriever to extract valuable information from the knowledge base. Additionally, we propose Channel Prompting for knowledge integration, which effectively extracts relevant information from the retrieved knowledge along the channel dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing significant improvement across various domains and datasets.

Paperid: 2116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04201.pdf

Abstract:
Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are frequently noisy and of low resolution due to the constraints of imaging devices. Recently launched satellites can concurrently acquire HSIs and panchromatic (PAN) images, enabling the restoration of HSIs to generate clean and high-resolution imagery through fusing PAN images for denoising and super-resolution. However, previous studies treated these two tasks as independent processes, resulting in accumulated errors. This paper introduces \textbf{H}yperspectral \textbf{I}mage Joint \textbf{Pand}enoising \textbf{a}nd Pan\textbf{s}harpening (Hipandas), a novel learning paradigm that reconstructs HRHS images from noisy low-resolution HSIs (LRHS) and high-resolution PAN images. The proposed zero-shot Hipandas framework consists of a guided denoising network, a guided super-resolution network, and a PAN reconstruction network, utilizing an HSI low-rank prior and a newly introduced detail-oriented low-rank prior. The interconnection of these networks complicates the training process, necessitating a two-stage training strategy to ensure effective training. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world datasets indicate that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms, yielding more accurate and visually pleasing HRHS images.

Paperid: 2117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23736.pdf

Abstract:
As a challenging vision-language task, Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) is designed to retrieve target images using bi-modal (image+text) queries. Typical ZS-CIR methods employ an inversion network to generate pseudo-word tokens that effectively represent the input semantics. However, the inversion-based methods suffer from two inherent issues: First, the task discrepancy exists because inversion training and CIR inference involve different objectives. Second, the modality discrepancy arises from the input feature distribution mismatch between training and inference. To this end, we propose a lightweight post-hoc framework, consisting of two components: (1) A new text-anchored triplet construction pipeline leverages a large language model (LLM) to transform a standard image-text dataset into a triplet dataset, where a textual description serves as the target of each triplet. (2) The MoTa-Adapter, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, adapts the dual encoder to the CIR task using our constructed triplet data. Specifically, on the text side, multiple sets of learnable task prompts are integrated via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer to capture task-specific priors and handle different types of modifications. On the image side, MoTa-Adapter modulates the inversion network's input to better match the downstream text encoder. In addition, an entropy-based optimization strategy is proposed to assign greater weight to challenging samples, thus ensuring efficient adaptation. Experiments show that, with the incorporation of our proposed components, inversion-based methods achieve significant improvements, reaching state-of-the-art performance across four widely-used benchmarks. All data and code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 2118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20146.pdf

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

Paperid: 2119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00133.pdf

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented natural language understanding and generation capabilities. However, existing surveys on LLMs in biomedicine often focus on specific applications or model architectures, lacking a comprehensive analysis that integrates the latest advancements across various biomedical domains. This review, based on an analysis of 484 publications sourced from databases including PubMed, Web of Science, and arXiv, provides an in-depth examination of the current landscape, applications, challenges, and prospects of LLMs in biomedicine, distinguishing itself by focusing on the practical implications of these models in real-world biomedical contexts. Firstly, we explore the capabilities of LLMs in zero-shot learning across a broad spectrum of biomedical tasks, including diagnostic assistance, drug discovery, and personalized medicine, among others, with insights drawn from 137 key studies. Then, we discuss adaptation strategies of LLMs, including fine-tuning methods for both uni-modal and multi-modal LLMs to enhance their performance in specialized biomedical contexts where zero-shot fails to achieve, such as medical question answering and efficient processing of biomedical literature. Finally, we discuss the challenges that LLMs face in the biomedicine domain including data privacy concerns, limited model interpretability, issues with dataset quality, and ethics due to the sensitive nature of biomedical data, the need for highly reliable model outputs, and the ethical implications of deploying AI in healthcare. To address these challenges, we also identify future research directions of LLM in biomedicine including federated learning methods to preserve data privacy and integrating explainable AI methodologies to enhance the transparency of LLMs.

Paperid: 2120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17905.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is a paradigm where a model, initially trained on a dataset of base classes, must adapt to an expanding problem space by recognizing novel classes with limited data. We focus on the challenging FSCIL setup where a model receives only a single sample (1-shot) for each novel class and no further training or model alterations are allowed after the base training phase. This makes generalization to novel classes particularly difficult. We propose a novel approach predicated on the hypothesis that base and novel class embeddings have structural similarity. We map the original embedding space into a residual space by subtracting the class prototype (i.e., the average class embedding) of input samples. Then, we leverage generative modeling with VAE or diffusion models to learn the multi-modal distribution of residuals over the base classes, and we use this as a valuable structural prior to improve recognition of novel classes. Our approach, Gen1S, consistently improves novel class recognition over the state of the art across multiple benchmarks and backbone architectures.

Paperid: 2121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08139.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs), despite their extraordinary zero-shot capabilities, are vulnerable to distribution shifts. Test-time adaptation (TTA) emerges as a predominant strategy to adapt VLMs to unlabeled test data on the fly. However, existing TTA methods heavily rely on zero-shot predictions as pseudo-labels for self-training, which can be unreliable under distribution shifts and misguide adaptation due to two fundamental limitations. First (Modality Gap), distribution shifts induce gaps between visual and textual modalities, making cross-modal relations inaccurate. Second (Visual Nuisance), visual embeddings encode rich but task-irrelevant noise that often overwhelms task-specific semantics under distribution shifts. To address these limitations, we propose SubTTA, which aligns the semantic subspaces of both modalities to enhance zero-shot predictions to better guide the TTA process. To bridge the modality gap, SubTTA extracts the principal subspaces of both modalities and aligns the visual manifold to the textual semantic anchor by minimizing their chordal distance. To eliminate visual nuisance, SubTTA projects the aligned visual features onto the task-specific textual subspace, which filters out task-irrelevant noise by constraining visual embeddings within the valid semantic span, and standard TTA is further performed on the purified space to refine the decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and VLM architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of SubTTA, yielding an average improvement of 2.24% over state-of-the-art TTA methods.

Paperid: 2122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21652.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of AI models in everyday devices has highlighted a critical challenge: prediction errors that degrade user experience. While existing solutions focus on error detection, they rarely provide efficient correction mechanisms, especially for resource-constrained devices. We present a novel system enabling users to correct AI misclassifications through few-shot learning, requiring minimal computational resources and storage. Our approach combines server-side foundation model training with on-device prototype-based classification, enabling efficient error correction through prototype updates rather than model retraining. The system consists of two key components: (1) a server-side pipeline that leverages knowledge distillation to transfer robust feature representations from foundation models to device-compatible architectures, and (2) a device-side mechanism that enables ultra-efficient error correction through prototype adaptation. We demonstrate our system's effectiveness on both image classification and object detection tasks, achieving over 50% error correction in one-shot scenarios on Food-101 and Flowers-102 datasets while maintaining minimal forgetting (less than 0.02%) and negligible computational overhead. Our implementation, validated through an Android demonstration app, proves the system's practicality in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 2123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19278.pdf

Abstract:
We present ReMatch, a framework that leverages the generative strength of MLLMs for multimodal retrieval. Previous approaches treated an MLLM as a simple encoder, ignoring its generative nature, and under-utilising its compositional reasoning and world knowledge. We instead train the embedding MLLM end-to-end with a chat-style generative matching stage. The matching stage uses the same MLLM to autoregressively decide relevance from multi-view inputs, including both raw data and its own projected embeddings for each query and document. It provides instance-wise discrimination supervision that complements a standard contrastive loss, offering stronger gradients on hard negatives and preserving the compositional strengths of the original MLLM. To obtain semantically richer multimodal embeddings, we use multiple learnable tokens to augment each input, generating fine-grained contextual, mutually orthogonal embeddings with low inference cost. Leveraging our established high-performance baseline,we assemble the ideas mentioned above into a powerful training recipe and achieve a new state-of-the-art on the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB). Our experiments show particularly strong zero-shot generalization results on five datasets, highlighting the robustness and transferability of ReMatch.

Paperid: 2124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23695.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) offer strong zero-shot forecasting via large-scale pre-training, yet fine-tuning remains critical for boosting performance in domains with limited public data. With the growing number of TSFMs, efficiently identifying the best model for downstream fine-tuning becomes increasingly challenging. In this work, we introduce TimeTic, a transferability estimation framework that recasts model selection as an in-context-learning problem: given observations on known (source) datasets, it predicts how a TSFM will perform after fine-tuning on a downstream (target) dataset. TimeTic flexibly organizes the observed model-data relationships as contextual information, allowing it to adapt seamlessly to various test-time scenarios. Leveraging the natural tabular structure formed by dataset meta-features, model characteristics, and fine-tuned performance, we employ tabular foundation models to serve as in-context learners. We further introduce a novel model characterization based on entropy evolution across model layers, capturing embedding-space distinctions and enabling TimeTic to generalize across arbitrary model sets. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for transferability estimation including 10 datasets, 10 foundation models, and 3 forecasting tasks. On this benchmark, TimeTic's estimation demonstrates strong alignment with actual fine-tuned performance for previously unseen datasets, achieving a mean rank correlation of approximately 0.6 and a 30% improvement compared to using zero-shot performance as the transferability score.

Paperid: 2125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14001.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MOCHA (Multi-modal Objects-aware Cross-arcHitecture Alignment), a knowledge distillation approach that transfers region-level multimodal semantics from a large vision-language teacher (e.g., LLaVa) into a lightweight vision-only object detector student (e.g., YOLO). A translation module maps student features into a joint space, where the training of the student and translator is guided by a dual-objective loss that enforces both local alignment and global relational consistency. Unlike prior approaches focused on dense or global alignment, MOCHA operates at the object level, enabling efficient transfer of semantics without modifying the teacher or requiring textual input at inference. We validate our method across four personalized detection benchmarks under few-shot regimes. Results show consistent gains over baselines, with a +10.1 average score improvement. Despite its compact architecture, MOCHA reaches performance on par with larger multimodal models, proving its suitability for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 2126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18053.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning as a parameter-efficient method that has been widely adopted to adapt Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. While hard-prompt design requires domain expertise and iterative optimization, soft-prompt methods rely heavily on task-specific hard labels, limiting their generalization to unseen categories. Recent popular distillation-based prompt learning methods improve generalization by exploiting larger teacher VLMs and unsupervised knowledge transfer, yet their repetitive teacher model online inference sacrifices the inherent training efficiency advantage of prompt learning. In this paper, we propose {\large {\textbf{F}}}aster {\large {\textbf{D}}}istillation-{\large {\textbf{B}}}ased {\large {\textbf{P}}}rompt {\large {\textbf{L}}}earning (\textbf{FDBPL}), which addresses these issues by sharing soft supervision contexts across multiple training stages and implementing accelerated I/O. Furthermore, FDBPL introduces a region-aware prompt learning paradigm with dual positive-negative prompt spaces to fully exploit randomly cropped regions that containing multi-level information. We propose a positive-negative space mutual learning mechanism based on similarity-difference learning, enabling student CLIP models to recognize correct semantics while learning to reject weakly related concepts, thereby improving zero-shot performance. Unlike existing distillation-based prompt learning methods that sacrifice parameter efficiency for generalization, FDBPL maintains dual advantages of parameter efficiency and strong downstream generalization. Comprehensive evaluations across 11 datasets demonstrate superior performance in base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and robustness tests, achieving $2.2\times$ faster training speed.

Paperid: 2127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16097.pdf

Abstract:
Developing artificial intelligence (AI) for vertical domains requires a solid data foundation for both training and evaluation. In this work, we introduce TrialPanorama, a large-scale, structured database comprising 1,657,476 clinical trial records aggregated from 15 global sources. The database captures key aspects of trial design and execution, including trial setups, interventions, conditions, biomarkers, and outcomes, and links them to standard biomedical ontologies such as DrugBank and MedDRA. This structured and ontology-grounded design enables TrialPanorama to serve as a unified, extensible resource for a wide range of clinical trial tasks, including trial planning, design, and summarization. To demonstrate its utility, we derive a suite of benchmark tasks directly from the TrialPanorama database. The benchmark spans eight tasks across two categories: three for systematic review (study search, study screening, and evidence summarization) and five for trial design (arm design, eligibility criteria, endpoint selection, sample size estimation, and trial completion assessment). The experiments using five state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) show that while general-purpose LLMs exhibit some zero-shot capability, their performance is still inadequate for high-stakes clinical trial workflows. We release TrialPanorama database and the benchmark to facilitate further research on AI for clinical trials.

Paperid: 2128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21414.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment objects of novel classes in new domains, which is often challenging due to the diverse characteristics of target domains and the limited availability of support data. Most CD-FSS methods redesign and retrain in-domain FSS models using various domain-generalization techniques, which are effective but costly to train. To address these issues, we propose adapting informative model structures of the well-trained FSS model for target domains by learning domain characteristics from few-shot labeled support samples during inference, thereby eliminating the need for retraining. Specifically, we first adaptively identify domain-specific model structures by measuring parameter importance using a novel structure Fisher score in a data-dependent manner. Then, we progressively train the selected informative model structures with hierarchically constructed training samples, progressing from fewer to more support shots. The resulting Informative Structure Adaptation (ISA) method effectively addresses domain shifts and equips existing well-trained in-domain FSS models with flexible adaptation capabilities for new domains, eliminating the need to redesign or retrain CD-FSS models on base data. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple CD-FSS benchmarks.

Paperid: 2129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20499.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we upgrade FireRedTTS to a new version, FireRedTTS-1S, a high-quality streaming foundation text-to-speech system. FireRedTTS-1S achieves streaming speech generation via two steps: text-to-semantic decoding and semantic-to-acoustic decoding. In text-to-semantic decoding, a semantic-aware speech tokenizer converts the speech signal into semantic tokens, which can be synthesized from the text via a language model in an auto-regressive manner. Meanwhile, the semantic-to-acoustic decoding module simultaneously translates generated semantic tokens into the speech signal in a streaming way. We implement two approaches to achieve this module: 1) a chunk-wise streamable flow-matching approach, and 2) a multi-stream language model-based approach. They both present high-quality and streamable speech generation but differ in real-time factor (RTF) and latency. Specifically, flow-matching decoding can generate speech by chunks, presenting a lower RTF of 0.1 but a higher latency of 300ms. Instead, the multi-stream language model generates speech by frames in an autoregressive manner, presenting a higher RTF of 0.3 but a low latency of 150ms. In experiments on zero-shot voice cloning, the objective results validate FireRedTTS-1S as a high-quality foundation model with comparable intelligibility and speaker similarity over industrial baseline systems. Furthermore, the subjective score of FireRedTTS-1S highlights its impressive synthesis performance, achieving comparable quality to the ground-truth recordings. These results validate FireRedTTS-1S as a high-quality streaming foundation TTS system.

Paperid: 2130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11169.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces the Constrained Monte Carlo Tree Search (CMCTS) framework to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM). By incorporating a constrained action space, Process Reward Model (PRM), and partial order rules, CMCTS effectively addresses the limitations of existing MCTS methods in terms of state space diversity and action selection rationality. Specifically, during the expansion phase, CMCTS restricts action sampling to a predefined constrained action set to increase candidate state diversity. In the simulation phase, it introduces partial order rules and PRM to optimize action selection and prevent unreasonable state transitions. Experimental results show that CMCTS performs outstandingly across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Under a zero-shot setting, a 7B-parameter model achieves an average accuracy of 83.4\%, surpassing the 72B baseline model by 4.8\%. Ablation studies demonstrate that each component of the framework is crucial for performance improvement, and their combined use fully leverages their respective strengths. Overall, the CMCTS framework provides an effective approach to enhancing LLM mathematical reasoning capabilities, supported by theoretical analysis, and offers novel insights for future reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 2131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15998.pdf

Abstract:
Class-incremental learning in the context of limited personal labeled samples (few-shot) is critical for numerous real-world applications, such as smart home devices. A key challenge in these scenarios is balancing the trade-off between adapting to new, personalized classes and maintaining the performance of the model on the original, base classes. Fine-tuning the model on novel classes often leads to the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting, where the accuracy of base classes declines unpredictably and significantly. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective mechanism to address this challenge by controlling the trade-off between novel and base class accuracy. We specifically target the ultra-low-shot scenario, where only a single example is available per novel class. Our approach introduces a Novel Class Detection (NCD) rule, which adjusts the degree of forgetting a priori while simultaneously enhancing performance on novel classes. We demonstrate the versatility of our solution by applying it to state-of-the-art Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) methods, showing consistent improvements across different settings. To better quantify the trade-off between novel and base class performance, we introduce new metrics: NCR@2FOR and NCR@5FOR. Our approach achieves up to a 30% improvement in novel class accuracy on the CIFAR100 dataset (1-shot, 1 novel class) while maintaining a controlled base class forgetting rate of 2%.

Paperid: 2132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03283.pdf

Abstract:
This work proposes FireRedTTS, a foundation text-to-speech framework, to meet the growing demands for personalized and diverse generative speech applications. The framework comprises three parts: data processing, foundation system, and downstream applications. First, we comprehensively present our data processing pipeline, which transforms massive raw audio into a large-scale high-quality TTS dataset with rich annotations and a wide coverage of content, speaking style, and timbre. Then, we propose a language-model-based foundation TTS system. The speech signal is compressed into discrete semantic tokens via a semantic-aware speech tokenizer, and can be generated by a language model from the prompt text and audio. Then, a two-stage waveform generator is proposed to decode them to the high-fidelity waveform. We present two applications of this system: voice cloning for dubbing and human-like speech generation for chatbots. The experimental results demonstrate the solid in-context learning capability of FireRedTTS, which can stably synthesize high-quality speech consistent with the prompt text and audio. For dubbing, FireRedTTS can clone target voices in a zero-shot way for the UGC scenario and adapt to studio-level expressive voice characters in the PUGC scenario via few-shot fine-tuning with 1-hour recording. Moreover, FireRedTTS achieves controllable human-like speech generation in a casual style with paralinguistic behaviors and emotions via instruction tuning, to better serve spoken chatbots.

Paperid: 2133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12681.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have shown significant impact through their model capacity, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. However, due to the heterogeneity of inter-variate dependencies and the backbone scalability on large-scale multivariate datasets, most TSFMs are typically pre-trained on univariate time series. This limitation renders them oblivious to crucial information from diverse covariates in real-world forecasting tasks. To further enhance the performance of TSFMs, we propose a general covariate-aware adaptation (CoRA) framework for TSFMs. It leverages pre-trained backbones of foundation models while effectively incorporating exogenous covariates from various modalities, including time series, language, and images, to improve the quality of predictions. Technically, CoRA maintains the equivalence of initialization and parameter consistency during adaptation. With preserved backbones of foundation models as frozen feature extractors, the outcome embeddings from foundation models are empirically demonstrated more informative than raw data. Further, CoRA employs a novel Granger Causality Embedding (GCE) to automatically evaluate covariates regarding their causal predictability with respect to the target variate. We incorporate these weighted embeddings with a zero-initialized condition-injection mechanism, avoiding catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained foundation models and gradually integrates exogenous information. Extensive experiments show that CoRA of TSFMs surpasses state-of-the-art covariate-aware deep forecasters with full or few-shot training samples, achieving 31.1% MSE reduction on covariate-aware forecasting. Compared to other adaptation methods, CoRA exhibits strong compatibility with various advanced TSFMs and extends the scope of covariates to other modalities, presenting a practical paradigm for the application of TSFMs.

Paperid: 2134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26555.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in video generation have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis from user provided prompts. However, existing models and benchmarks fail to capture the complexity and requirements of professional video generation. Towards that goal, we introduce Stable Cinemetrics, a structured evaluation framework that formalizes filmmaking controls into four disentangled, hierarchical taxonomies: Setup, Event, Lighting, and Camera. Together, these taxonomies define 76 fine-grained control nodes grounded in industry practices. Using these taxonomies, we construct a benchmark of prompts aligned with professional use cases and develop an automated pipeline for prompt categorization and question generation, enabling independent evaluation of each control dimension. We conduct a large-scale human study spanning 10+ models and 20K videos, annotated by a pool of 80+ film professionals. Our analysis, both coarse and fine-grained reveal that even the strongest current models exhibit significant gaps, particularly in Events and Camera-related controls. To enable scalable evaluation, we train an automatic evaluator, a vision-language model aligned with expert annotations that outperforms existing zero-shot baselines. SCINE is the first approach to situate professional video generation within the landscape of video generative models, introducing taxonomies centered around cinematic controls and supporting them with structured evaluation pipelines and detailed analyses to guide future research.

Paperid: 2135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25620.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-threatening eye diseases pose a major global health burden, with timely diagnosis limited by workforce shortages and restricted access to specialized care. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise for medical image interpretation, advancing MLLMs for ophthalmology is hindered by the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets suitable for evaluating generative models. We present a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology benchmark comprising 32,633 instances with multi-granular annotations across 12 common ophthalmic conditions and 5 imaging modalities. The dataset integrates imaging, anatomical structures, demographics, and free-text annotations, supporting anatomical structure recognition, disease screening, disease staging, and demographic prediction for bias evaluation. This work extends our preliminary LMOD benchmark with three major enhancements: (1) nearly 50% dataset expansion with substantial enlargement of color fundus photography; (2) broadened task coverage including binary disease diagnosis, multi-class diagnosis, severity classification with international grading standards, and demographic prediction; and (3) systematic evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our evaluations reveal both promise and limitations. Top-performing models achieved ~58% accuracy in disease screening under zero-shot settings, and performance remained suboptimal for challenging tasks like disease staging. We will publicly release the dataset, curation pipeline, and leaderboard to potentially advance ophthalmic AI applications and reduce the global burden of vision-threatening diseases.

Paperid: 2136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12104.pdf

Abstract:
Realizing personalized medicine at scale calls for methods that distill insights from longitudinal patient journeys, which can be viewed as a sequence of medical events. Foundation models pretrained on large-scale medical event data represent a promising direction for scaling real-world evidence generation and generalizing to diverse downstream tasks. Using Epic Cosmos, a dataset with medical events from de-identified longitudinal health records for 16.3 billion encounters over 300 million unique patient records from 310 health systems, we introduce the Comet models, a family of decoder-only transformer models pretrained on 118 million patients representing 115 billion discrete medical events (151 billion tokens). We present the largest scaling-law study of medical event data, establishing a methodology for pretraining and revealing power-law scaling relationships for compute, tokens, and model size. Consequently, we pretrained a series of compute-optimal models with up to 1 billion parameters. Conditioned on a patient's real-world history, Comet autoregressively predicts the next medical event to simulate patient health timelines. We studied 78 real-world tasks, including diagnosis prediction, disease prognosis, and healthcare operations. Remarkably for a foundation model with generic pretraining and simulation-based inference, Comet generally outperformed or matched task-specific supervised models on these tasks, without requiring task-specific fine-tuning or few-shot examples. Comet's predictive power consistently improves as the model and pretraining scale. Our results show that Comet, a generative medical event foundation model, can effectively capture complex clinical dynamics, providing an extensible and generalizable framework to support clinical decision-making, streamline healthcare operations, and improve patient outcomes.

Paperid: 2137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18504.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, vision-language pretraining has emerged as a transformative technique that integrates the strengths of both visual and textual modalities, resulting in powerful vision-language models (VLMs). Leveraging web-scale pretraining data, these models exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their performance often deteriorates when confronted with domain-specific or specialized generalization tasks. To address this, a growing body of research focuses on transferring or generalizing the rich knowledge embedded in VLMs to various downstream applications. This survey aims to comprehensively summarize the generalization settings, methodologies, benchmarking and results in VLM literatures. Delving into the typical VLM structures, current literatures are categorized into prompt-based, parameter-based and feature-based methods according to the transferred modules. The differences and characteristics in each category are furthered summarized and discussed by revisiting the typical transfer learning (TL) settings, providing novel interpretations for TL in the era of VLMs. Popular benchmarks for VLM generalization are further introduced with thorough performance comparisons among the reviewed methods. Following the advances in large-scale generalizable pretraining, this survey also discusses the relations and differences between VLMs and up-to-date multimodal large language models (MLLM), e.g., DeepSeek-VL. By systematically reviewing the surging literatures in vision-language research from a novel and practical generalization prospective, this survey contributes to a clear landscape of current and future multimodal researches.

Paperid: 2138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18438.pdf

Abstract:
Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques.

Paperid: 2139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04710.pdf

Abstract:
No-Code Development Platforms (NCDPs) empower non-technical end users to build applications tailored to their specific demands without writing code. While NCDPs lower technical barriers, users still require some technical knowledge, e.g., to structure process steps or define event-action rules. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution to further reduce technical requirements by supporting natural language interaction and dynamic code generation. By integrating LLM, NCDPs can be more accessible to non-technical users, enabling application development truly without requiring any technical expertise. Despite growing interest in LLM-powered NCDPs, a systematic investigation into the factors influencing LLM suitability and performance remains absent. Understanding these factors is critical to effectively leveraging LLMs capabilities and maximizing their impact. In this paper, we investigate key factors influencing the effectiveness of LLMs in supporting end-user application development within NCDPs. By conducting comprehensive experiments, we evaluate the impact of four key factors, i.e., model selection, prompt language, training data background, and an error-informed few-shot setup, on the quality of generated applications. Specifically, we selected a range of LLMs based on their architecture, scale, design focus, and training data, and evaluated them across four real-world smart home automation scenarios implemented on a representative open-source LLM-powered NCDP. Our findings offer practical insights into how LLMs can be effectively integrated into NCDPs, informing both platform design and the selection of suitable LLMs for end-user application development.

Paperid: 2140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16977.pdf

Abstract:
Tokenization is a critical component of Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for low resource languages, where subword segmentation influences vocabulary structure and downstream task accuracy. Although Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a standard tokenization method in multilingual language models, its suitability for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low resource Indic languages remains underexplored due to its limitations in handling morphological complexity. In this work, we systematically compare BPE, SentencePiece, and Character Level tokenization strategies using IndicBERT for NER tasks in low resource Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, and Odia, as well as extremely low resource Indic languages like Santali, Manipuri, and Sindhi. We assess both intrinsic linguistic properties tokenization efficiency, out of vocabulary (OOV) rates, and morphological preservation as well as extrinsic downstream performance, including fine tuning and zero shot cross lingual transfer. Our experiments show that SentencePiece is a consistently better performing approach than BPE for NER in low resource Indic Languages, particularly in zero shot cross lingual settings, as it better preserves entity consistency. While BPE provides the most compact tokenization form, it is not capable of generalization because it misclassifies or even fails to recognize entity labels when tested on unseen languages. In contrast, SentencePiece constitutes a better linguistic structural preservation model, benefiting extremely low resource and morphologically rich Indic languages, such as Santali and Manipuri, for superior entity recognition, as well as high generalization across scripts, such as Sindhi, written in Arabic. The results point to SentencePiece as the more effective tokenization strategy for NER within multilingual and low resource Indic NLP applications.

Paperid: 2141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05696.pdf

Abstract:
Many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are impractical for deployment in operational systems or for training with computationally expensive high-fidelity simulations, as they require large amounts of data. Meanwhile, low-fidelity simulators -- such as reduced-order models, heuristic rewards, or generative world models -- can cheaply provide useful data for RL training, even if they are too coarse for zero-shot transfer. We propose multi-fidelity policy gradients (MFPGs), an RL framework that mixes a small amount of data from the target environment with a control variate formed from a large volume of low-fidelity simulation data to construct an unbiased, variance-reduced estimator for on-policy policy gradients. We instantiate the framework with a multi-fidelity variant of the classical REINFORCE algorithm. We show that under standard assumptions, the MFPG estimator guarantees asymptotic convergence of REINFORCE to locally optimal policies in the target environment, and achieves faster finite-sample convergence rates compared to training with high-fidelity data alone. Empirically, we evaluate the MFPG algorithm across a suite of simulated robotics benchmark tasks with limited high-fidelity data but abundant off-dynamics, low-fidelity data. With mild-moderate dynamics gaps, MFPG reliably improves the median performance over a high-fidelity-only baseline, matching the performance of leading multi-fidelity baselines despite its simplicity and minimal tuning overhead. Under large dynamics gaps, MFPG demonstrates the strongest robustness among the evaluated multi-fidelity approaches. An additional experiment shows that MFPG can remain effective even under low-fidelity reward misspecification. Thus, MFPG not only offers a novel paradigm for efficient sim-to-real transfer but also provides a principled approach to managing the trade-off between policy performance and data collection costs.

Paperid: 2142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13595.pdf

Authors:Kenneth Enevoldsen, Isaac Chung, Imene Kerboua, MÃ¡rton Kardos, Ashwin Mathur, David Stap, Jay Gala, Wissam Siblini, Dominik KrzemiÅski, Genta Indra Winata, Saba Sturua, Saiteja Utpala, Mathieu Ciancone, Marion Schaeffer, Gabriel Sequeira, Diganta Misra, Shreeya Dhakal, Jonathan RystrÃ¸m, Roman Solomatin, Ãmer ÃaÄatan, Akash Kundu, Martin Bernstorff, Shitao Xiao, Akshita Sukhlecha, Bhavish Pahwa, RafaÅ PoÅwiata, Kranthi Kiran GV, Shawon Ashraf, Daniel Auras, BjÃ¶rn PlÃ¼ster, Jan Philipp Harries, LoÃ¯c Magne, Isabelle Mohr, Mariya Hendriksen, Dawei Zhu, Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef, Tom Aarsen, Jan Kostkan, Konrad Wojtasik, Taemin Lee, Marek Å uppa, Crystina Zhang, Roberta Rocca, Mohammed Hamdy, Andrianos Michail, John Yang, Manuel Faysse, Aleksei Vatolin, Nandan Thakur, Manan Dey, Dipam Vasani, Pranjal Chitale, Simone Tedeschi, Nguyen Tai, Artem Snegirev, Michael GÃ¼nther, Mengzhou Xia, Weijia Shi, Xing Han LÃ¹, Jordan Clive, Gayatri Krishnakumar, Anna Maksimova, Silvan Wehrli, Maria Tikhonova, Henil Panchal, Aleksandr Abramov, Malte Ostendorff, Zheng Liu, Simon Clematide, Lester James Miranda, Alena Fenogenova, Guangyu Song, Ruqiya Bin Safi, Wen-Ding Li, Alessia Borghini, Federico Cassano, Hongjin Su, Jimmy Lin, Howard Yen, Lasse Hansen, Sara Hooker, Chenghao Xiao, Vaibhav Adlakha, Orion Weller, Siva Reddy, Niklas Muennighoff

Abstract:
Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.

Paperid: 2143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00943.pdf

Abstract:
A significant fraction of real-world patient information resides in unstructured clinical text. Medical abstraction extracts and normalizes key structured attributes from free-text clinical notes, which is the prerequisite for a variety of important downstream applications, including registry curation, clinical trial operations, and real-world evidence generation. Prior medical abstraction methods typically resort to building attribute-specific models, each of which requires extensive manual effort such as rule creation or supervised label annotation for the individual attribute, thus limiting scalability. In this paper, we show that existing frontier models already possess the universal abstraction capability for scaling medical abstraction to a wide range of clinical attributes. We present UniMedAbstractor (UMA), a unifying framework for zero-shot medical abstraction with a modular, customizable prompt template and the selection of any frontier large language models. Given a new attribute for abstraction, users only need to conduct lightweight prompt adaptation in UMA to adjust the specification in natural languages. Compared to traditional methods, UMA eliminates the need for attribute-specific training labels or handcrafted rules, thus substantially reducing the development time and cost. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of UMA in oncology using a wide range of marquee attributes representing the cancer patient journey. These include relatively simple attributes typically specified within a single clinical note (e.g. performance status), as well as complex attributes requiring sophisticated reasoning across multiple notes at various time points (e.g. tumor staging). Based on a single frontier model such as GPT-4o, UMA matched or even exceeded the performance of state-of-the-art attribute-specific methods, each of which was tailored to the individual attribute.

Paperid: 2144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02545.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models maximize the mutual information between text and visual modalities to learn representations. This makes the nature of the training data a significant factor in the efficacy of CLIP for downstream tasks. However, the lack of compositional diversity in contemporary image-text datasets limits the compositional reasoning ability of CLIP. We show that generating ``hard'' negative captions via in-context learning and synthesizing corresponding negative images with text-to-image generators offers a solution. We introduce a novel contrastive pre-training strategy that leverages these hard negative captions and images in an alternating fashion to train CLIP. We demonstrate that our method, named TripletCLIP, when applied to existing datasets such as CC3M and CC12M, enhances the compositional capabilities of CLIP, resulting in an absolute improvement of over 9% on the SugarCrepe benchmark on an equal computational budget, as well as improvements in zero-shot image classification and image retrieval. Our code, models, and data are available at: https://tripletclip.github.io

Paperid: 2145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19000.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot reasoning methods with Large Language Models (LLMs) offer significant advantages including great generalization to novel tasks and reduced dependency on human-crafted examples. However, the current zero-shot methods still have limitations in complex tasks, e.g., answering questions that require multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a novel structure-oriented analysis method to help LLMs better understand the question and guide the problem-solving process of LLMs. We first demonstrate how the existing reasoning strategies, Chain-of-Thought and ReAct, can benefit from our structure-oriented analysis. In addition to empirical investigations, we leverage the probabilistic graphical model to theoretically explain why our structure-oriented analysis can improve the LLM reasoning process. To further improve the reliability in complex question-answering tasks, we propose a multi-agent reasoning system, Structure-oriented Autonomous Reasoning Agents (SARA), that can better enforce the reasoning process following our structure-oriented analysis by refinement techniques and is equipped with external knowledge retrieval capability to reduce factual errors. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed reasoning system. Surprisingly, in some cases, the system even surpasses few-shot methods. Finally, the system not only improves reasoning accuracy in complex tasks but also demonstrates robustness against potential attacks that corrupt the reasoning process.

Paperid: 2146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16540.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying transformer used in these studies isolates the CoT reasoning process into separated in-context learning steps (Stepwise ICL). In this work, we theoretically show that, compared to Stepwise ICL, the transformer gains better error correction ability and more accurate predictions if the reasoning from earlier steps (Coherent CoT) is integrated. Given that this coherent reasoning changes the behavior of the transformer, we further investigate the sensitivity of the transformer with Coherent CoT when the demonstration examples are corrupted at the inference stage. Our theoretical results indicate that the transformer is more sensitive to errors in intermediate reasoning steps than the final outcome. Building upon this observation, we propose an improvement on CoT by incorporating both correct and incorrect reasoning paths in the demonstration. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 2147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13662.pdf

Abstract:
Humans observe various actions being performed by other humans (physically or in videos/images) and can draw a wide range of inferences about it beyond what they can visually perceive. Such inferences include determining the aspects of the world that make action execution possible (e.g. liquid objects can undergo pouring), predicting how the world will change as a result of the action (e.g. potatoes being golden and crispy after frying), high-level goals associated with the action (e.g. beat the eggs to make an omelet) and reasoning about actions that possibly precede or follow the current action (e.g. crack eggs before whisking or draining pasta after boiling). Similar reasoning ability is highly desirable in autonomous systems that would assist us in performing everyday tasks. To that end, we propose a multi-modal task to learn aforementioned concepts about actions being performed in images. We develop a dataset consisting of 8.5k images and 59.3k inferences about actions grounded in those images, collected from an annotated cooking-video dataset. We propose ActionCOMET, a zero-shot framework to discern knowledge present in language models specific to the provided visual input. We present baseline results of ActionCOMET over the collected dataset and compare them with the performance of the best existing VQA approaches.

Paperid: 2148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13651.pdf

Abstract:
An ability to learn about new objects from a small amount of visual data and produce convincing linguistic justification about the presence/absence of certain concepts (that collectively compose the object) in novel scenarios is an important characteristic of human cognition. This is possible due to abstraction of attributes/properties that an object is composed of e.g. an object `bird' can be identified by the presence of a beak, feathers, legs, wings, etc. Inspired by this aspect of human reasoning, in this work, we present a zero-shot framework for fine-grained visual concept learning by leveraging large language model and Visual Question Answering (VQA) system. Specifically, we prompt GPT-3 to obtain a rich linguistic description of visual objects in the dataset. We convert the obtained concept descriptions into a set of binary questions. We pose these questions along with the query image to a VQA system and aggregate the answers to determine the presence or absence of an object in the test images. Our experiments demonstrate comparable performance with existing zero-shot visual classification methods and few-shot concept learning approaches, without substantial computational overhead, yet being fully explainable from the reasoning perspective.

Paperid: 2149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03585.pdf

Abstract:
Testing healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications at system and integration levels necessitates integrating numerous medical devices of various types. Challenges of incorporating medical devices are: (i) their continuous evolution, making it infeasible to include all device variants, and (ii) rigorous testing at scale requires multiple devices and their variants, which is time-intensive, costly, and impractical. Our collaborator, Oslo City's health department, faced these challenges in developing automated test infrastructure, which our research aims to address. In this context, we propose a meta-learning-based approach (MeDeT) to generate digital twins (DTs) of medical devices and adapt DTs to evolving devices. We evaluate MeDeT in OsloCity's context using five widely-used medical devices integrated with a real-world healthcare IoT application. Our evaluation assesses MeDeT's ability to generate and adapt DTs across various devices and versions using different few-shot methods, the fidelity of these DTs, the scalability of operating 1000 DTs concurrently, and the associated time costs. Results show that MeDeT can generate DTs with over 96% fidelity, adapt DTs to different devices and newer versions with reduced time cost (around one minute), and operate 1000 DTs in a scalable manner while maintaining the fidelity level, thus serving in place of physical devices for testing.

Paperid: 2150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07556.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce SSR-Speech, a neural codec autoregressive model designed for stable, safe, and robust zero-shot textbased speech editing and text-to-speech synthesis. SSR-Speech is built on a Transformer decoder and incorporates classifier-free guidance to enhance the stability of the generation process. A watermark Encodec is proposed to embed frame-level watermarks into the edited regions of the speech so that which parts were edited can be detected. In addition, the waveform reconstruction leverages the original unedited speech segments, providing superior recovery compared to the Encodec model. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in the RealEdit speech editing task and the LibriTTS text-to-speech task, surpassing previous methods. Furthermore, SSR-Speech excels in multi-span speech editing and also demonstrates remarkable robustness to background sounds. The source code and demos are released.

Paperid: 2151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07917.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning is central to purposeful action, yet most robotic foundation models map perception and instructions directly to control, which limits adaptability, generalization, and semantic grounding. We introduce Action Reasoning Models (ARMs), a class of robotic foundation models that integrate perception, planning, and control through a structured three-stage pipeline. Our model, MolmoAct, encodes observations and instructions into depth-aware perception tokens, generates mid-level spatial plans as editable trajectory traces, and predicts precise low-level actions, enabling explainable and steerable behavior. MolmoAct-7B-D achieves strong performance across simulation and real-world settings: 70.5% zero-shot accuracy on SimplerEnv Visual Matching tasks, surpassing closed-source Pi-0 and GR00T N1.5; 86.6% average success on LIBERO, including an additional 6.3% gain over ThinkAct on long-horizon tasks; and in real-world fine-tuning, an additional 10% (single-arm) and an additional 22.7% (bimanual) task progression over Pi-0-FAST. It also outperforms baselines by an additional 23.3% on out-of-distribution generalization and achieves top human-preference scores for open-ended instruction following and trajectory steering. Furthermore, we release, for the first time, the MolmoAct Dataset -- a mid-training robot dataset comprising over 10,000 high quality robot trajectories across diverse scenarios and tasks. Training with this dataset yields an average 5.5% improvement in general performance over the base model. We release all model weights, training code, our collected dataset, and our action reasoning dataset, establishing MolmoAct as both a state-of-the-art robotics foundation model and an open blueprint for building ARMs that transform perception into purposeful action through structured reasoning. Blogpost: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact

Paperid: 2152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11029.pdf

Abstract:
We present a joint forecasting framework for time series prediction that contrasts with traditional direct or recursive methods. This framework achieves state-of-the-art performance for our designed foundation model, YingLong, and reveals a novel scaling effect: longer outputs significantly enhance model accuracy due to delayed chain-of-thought reasoning in our non-causal approach. YingLong is a non-causal, bidirectional attention encoder-only transformer trained through masked token recovery, aligning more effectively with language understanding tasks than with generation tasks. Additionally, we boost performance by tackling output variance with a multi-input ensemble. We release four foundation models ranging from 6M to 300M parameters, demonstrating superior results in zero-shot tasks on the ETT and Weather datasets. YingLong achieves more than 60% best performance. To ensure generalizability, we assessed the models using the GIFT-Eval benchmark, which comprises 23 time series datasets across 7 domains. Yinglong significantly outperformed the best time-series foundation models, end-to-end trained models by 14% and 44% in rank respectively.The pretrained 300M model is available at https://huggingface.co/qcw1314/YingLong_300m

Paperid: 2153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02354.pdf

Abstract:
Object Navigation (ObjectNav) is a fundamental task in embodied artificial intelligence. Although significant progress has been made in semantic map construction and target direction prediction in current research, redundant exploration and exploration failures remain inevitable. A critical but underexplored direction is the timely termination of exploration to overcome these challenges. We observe a diminishing marginal effect between exploration steps and exploration rates and analyze the cost-benefit relationship of exploration. Inspired by this, we propose RATE-Nav, a Region-Aware Termination-Enhanced method. It includes a geometric predictive region segmentation algorithm and region-Based exploration estimation algorithm for exploration rate calculation. By leveraging the visual question answering capabilities of visual language models (VLMs) and exploration rates enables efficient termination.RATE-Nav achieves a success rate of 67.8% and an SPL of 31.3% on the HM3D dataset. And on the more challenging MP3D dataset, RATE-Nav shows approximately 10% improvement over previous zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 2154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22291.pdf

Abstract:
As object detectors are increasingly deployed as black-box cloud services or pre-trained models with restricted access to the original training data, the challenge of zero-shot object-level out-of-distribution (OOD) detection arises. This task becomes crucial in ensuring the reliability of detectors in open-world settings. While existing methods have demonstrated success in image-level OOD detection using pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, directly applying such models to object-level OOD detection presents challenges due to the loss of contextual information and reliance on image-level alignment. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a new method that leverages visual prompts and text-augmented in-distribution (ID) space construction to adapt CLIP for zero-shot object-level OOD detection. Our method preserves critical contextual information and improves the ability to differentiate between ID and OOD objects, achieving competitive performance across different benchmarks.

Paperid: 2155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19469.pdf

Abstract:
In NLP, Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC) has become essential for enabling models to classify text into categories unseen during training, particularly in low-resource languages and domains where labeled data is scarce. While pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown promise in ZSC, they often rely on large training datasets or external knowledge, limiting their applicability in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. Recent approaches leveraging natural language prompts reduce the dependence on large training datasets but struggle to effectively incorporate available labeled data from related classification tasks, especially when these datasets originate from different languages or distributions. Moreover, existing prompt-based methods typically rely on manually crafted prompts in a specific language, limiting their adaptability and effectiveness in cross-lingual settings. To address these challenges, we introduce RoSPrompt, a lightweight and data-efficient approach for training soft prompts that enhance cross-lingual ZSC while ensuring robust generalization across data distribution shifts. RoSPrompt is designed for small multilingual PLMs, enabling them to leverage high-resource languages to improve performance in low-resource settings without requiring extensive fine-tuning or high computational costs. We evaluate our approach on multiple multilingual PLMs across datasets covering 106 languages, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transfer performance and robust generalization capabilities over unseen classes.

Paperid: 2156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12744.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities, enabling increasingly complex tasks. However, these capabilities often diminish in smaller, more computationally efficient models like GPT-2. Recent research shows that reasoning distillation can help small models acquire reasoning capabilities, but most existing methods focus primarily on improving teacher-generated reasoning paths. Our observations reveal that small models can generate high-quality reasoning paths during sampling, even without chain-of-thought prompting, though these paths are often latent due to their low probability under standard decoding strategies. To address this, we propose Self-Enhanced Reasoning Training (SERT), which activates and leverages latent reasoning capabilities in small models through self-training on filtered, self-generated reasoning paths under zero-shot conditions. Experiments using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 as the teacher model and GPT-2 models as the student models demonstrate that SERT enhances the reasoning abilities of small models, improving their performance in reasoning distillation.

Paperid: 2157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05464.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient question-answering systems are essential for delivering high-quality patient care in the medical field. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides across various domains, they continue to face significant challenges in medical question answering, particularly in understanding domain-specific terminologies and performing complex reasoning. These limitations undermine their effectiveness in critical medical applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach incorporating similar case generation within a multi-agent medical question-answering (MedQA) system. Specifically, we leverage the Llama3.1:70B model, a state-of-the-art LLM, in a multi-agent architecture to enhance performance on the MedQA dataset using zero-shot learning. Our method capitalizes on the model's inherent medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities, eliminating the need for additional training data. Experimental results show substantial performance gains over existing benchmark models, with improvements of 7% in both accuracy and F1-score across various medical QA tasks. Furthermore, we examine the model's interpretability and reliability in addressing complex medical queries. This research not only offers a robust solution for medical question answering but also establishes a foundation for broader applications of LLMs in the medical domain.

Paperid: 2158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02476.pdf

Abstract:
We focus on the challenging problem of learning an unbiased classifier from a large number of potentially relevant but noisily labeled web images given only a few clean labeled images. This problem is particularly practical because it reduces the expensive annotation costs by utilizing freely accessible web images with noisy labels. Typically, prototypes are representative images or features used to classify or identify other images. However, in the few clean and many noisy scenarios, the class prototype can be severely biased due to the presence of irrelevant noisy images. The resulting prototypes are less compact and discriminative, as previous methods do not take into account the diverse range of images in the noisy web image collections. On the other hand, the relation modeling between noisy and clean images is not learned for the class prototype generation in an end-to-end manner, which results in a suboptimal class prototype. In this article, we introduce a similarity maximization loss named SimNoiPro. Our SimNoiPro first generates noise-tolerant hybrid prototypes composed of clean and noise-tolerant prototypes and then pulls them closer to each other. Our approach considers the diversity of noisy images by explicit division and overcomes the optimization discrepancy issue. This enables better relation modeling between clean and noisy images and helps extract judicious information from the noisy image set. The evaluation results on two extended few-shot classification benchmarks confirm that our SimNoiPro outperforms prior methods in measuring image relations and cleaning noisy data.

Paperid: 2159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11382.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in operator learning have produced two distinct approaches for solving partial differential equations (PDEs): attention-based methods offering point-level adaptability but lacking spectral constraints, and spectral-based methods providing domain-level continuity priors but limited in local flexibility. This dichotomy has hindered the development of PDE solvers with both strong flexibility and generalization capability. This work introduces Holistic Physics Mixer (HPM), a simple framework that bridges this gap by integrating spectral and physical information in a unified space. HPM unifies both approaches as special cases while enabling more powerful spectral-physical interactions beyond either method alone. This enables HPM to inherit both the strong generalization of spectral methods and the flexibility of attention mechanisms while avoiding their respective limitations. Through extensive experiments across diverse PDE problems, we demonstrate that HPM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency, while maintaining strong generalization capabilities with limited training data and excellent zero-shot performance on unseen resolutions.

Paperid: 2160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11111.pdf

Abstract:
Learned image compression (LIC) has achieved state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance, deemed promising for next-generation image compression techniques. However, pre-trained LIC models usually suffer from significant performance degradation when applied to out-of-training-domain images, implying their poor generalization capabilities. To tackle this problem, we propose a few-shot domain adaptation method for LIC by integrating plug-and-play adapters into pre-trained models. Drawing inspiration from the analogy between latent channels and frequency components, we examine domain gaps in LIC and observe that out-of-training-domain images disrupt pre-trained channel-wise decomposition. Consequently, we introduce a method for channel-wise re-allocation using convolution-based adapters and low-rank adapters, which are lightweight and compatible to mainstream LIC schemes. Extensive experiments across multiple domains and multiple representative LIC schemes demonstrate that our method significantly enhances pre-trained models, achieving comparable performance to H.266/VVC intra coding with merely 25 target-domain samples. Additionally, our method matches the performance of full-model finetune while transmitting fewer than $2\%$ of the parameters.

Paperid: 2161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26802.pdf

Abstract:
Recent video generation models can produce high-fidelity, temporally coherent videos, indicating that they may encode substantial world knowledge. Beyond realistic synthesis, they also exhibit emerging behaviors indicative of visual perception, modeling, and manipulation. Yet, an important question still remains: Are video models ready to serve as zero-shot reasoners in challenging visual reasoning scenarios? In this work, we conduct an empirical study to comprehensively investigate this question, focusing on the leading and popular Veo-3. We evaluate its reasoning behavior across 12 dimensions, including spatial, geometric, physical, temporal, and embodied logic, systematically characterizing both its strengths and failure modes. To standardize this study, we curate the evaluation data into MME-CoF, a compact benchmark that enables in-depth and thorough assessment of Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning. Our findings reveal that while current video models demonstrate promising reasoning patterns on short-horizon spatial coherence, fine-grained grounding, and locally consistent dynamics, they remain limited in long-horizon causal reasoning, strict geometric constraints, and abstract logic. Overall, they are not yet reliable as standalone zero-shot reasoners, but exhibit encouraging signs as complementary visual engines alongside dedicated reasoning models. Project page: https://video-cof.github.io

Paperid: 2162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22799.pdf

Abstract:
Graph-based recommender systems are commonly trained in transductive settings, which limits their applicability to new users, items, or datasets. We propose NBF-Rec, a graph-based recommendation model that supports inductive transfer learning across datasets with disjoint user and item sets. Unlike conventional embedding-based methods that require retraining for each domain, NBF-Rec computes node embeddings dynamically at inference time. We evaluate the method on seven real-world datasets spanning movies, music, e-commerce, and location check-ins. NBF-Rec achieves competitive performance in zero-shot settings, where no target domain data is used for training, and demonstrates further improvements through lightweight fine-tuning. These results show that inductive transfer is feasible in graph-based recommendation and that interaction-level message passing supports generalization across datasets without requiring aligned users or items.

Paperid: 2163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18876.pdf

Abstract:
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at holistic understanding, they struggle in capturing the dense world with complex scenes, requiring fine-grained analysis of intricate details and object inter-relationships. Region-level MLLMs have been a promising step. However, previous attempts are generally optimized to understand given regions in isolation, neglecting crucial global contexts. To address this, we introduce Grasp Any Region (GAR) for comprehen- sive region-level visual understanding. Empowered by an effective RoI-aligned feature replay technique, GAR supports (1) precise perception by leveraging necessary global contexts, and (2) modeling interactions between multiple prompts. Together, it then naturally achieves (3) advanced compositional reasoning to answer specific free-form questions about any region, shifting the paradigm from passive description to active dialogue. Moreover, we construct GAR-Bench, which not only provides a more accurate evaluation of single-region comprehension, but also, more importantly, measures interactions and complex reasoning across multiple regions. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GAR-1B not only maintains the state-of-the-art captioning capabilities, e.g., outperforming DAM-3B +4.5 on DLC-Bench, but also excels at modeling relationships between multiple prompts with advanced comprehension capabilities, even surpassing InternVL3-78B on GAR-Bench-VQA. More importantly, our zero-shot GAR-8B even outperforms in-domain VideoRefer-7B on VideoRefer-BenchQ, indicating its strong capabilities can be easily transferred to videos.

Paperid: 2164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20843.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models(VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet a substantial gap remains between their current capabilities and the reliability necessary for real-world deployment. A critical challenge is their fragility, characterized by hallucinations and poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MTRDrive, a novel framework that integrates procedural driving experiences with a dynamic toolkit to enhance generalization and proactive decision-making. MTRDrive addresses these limitations through a closed-loop system that combines a memory-based experience retrieval mechanism with dynamic toolkits. This synergy enables the model to interact more effectively with its environment, improving both reasoning and decision-making capabilities with the help of our memory-tool synergistic reasoning. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark based on complex Roadwork construction scenarios to rigorously evaluate zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our approach. On the public NAVSIM benchmark, our 3B-parameter MTRDrive model achieves an exceptional PDMS of 88.3 without chain-of-thought and sets a state-of-the-art performance bar on high-level planning, with a driving metric score of 79.8\% and a planning accuracy of 82.6\%. Rigorous zero-shot evaluation on the new Roadwork-VLM benchmark shows a strong ability to reason robustly in unseen scenarios, achieving a driving metric score of 80.2\%. These results highlight MTRDrive's potential to advance autonomous driving toward safer and more reliable systems.

Paperid: 2165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02107.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in photorealistic image generation through large-scale models like FLUX and Stable Diffusion v3, the practical deployment of these architectures remains constrained by their inherent intractability to parameter fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) have demonstrated efficacy in enabling model customization with minimal parameter overhead, the effective utilization of distributed open-source LoRA modules faces three critical challenges: sparse metadata annotation, the requirement for zero-shot adaptation capabilities, and suboptimal fusion strategies for multi-LoRA fusion strategies. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework that enables semantic-driven LoRA retrieval and dynamic aggregation through two key components: (1) weight encoding-base LoRA retriever that establishes a shared semantic space between LoRA parameter matrices and text prompts, eliminating dependence on original training data, and (2) fine-grained gated fusion mechanism that computes context-specific fusion weights across network layers and diffusion timesteps to optimally integrate multiple LoRA modules during generation. Our approach achieves significant improvement in image generation perfermance, thereby facilitating scalable and data-efficient enhancement of foundational models. This work establishes a critical bridge between the fragmented landscape of community-developed LoRAs and practical deployment requirements, enabling collaborative model evolution through standardized adapter integration.

Paperid: 2166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01368.pdf

Abstract:
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to human preferences is a central challenge in improving the quality of the models' generative outputs for real-world applications. A common approach is to use reward modeling to encode preferences, enabling alignment via post-training using reinforcement learning. However, traditional reward modeling is not easily adaptable to new preferences because it requires a separate reward model, commonly trained on large preference datasets. To address this, we introduce Activation Reward Models (Activation RMs) -- a novel few-shot reward modeling method that leverages activation steering to construct well-aligned reward signals using minimal supervision and no additional model finetuning. Activation RMs outperform existing few-shot reward modeling approaches such as LLM-as-a-judge with in-context learning, voting-based scoring, and token probability scoring on standard reward modeling benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Activation RMs in mitigating reward hacking behaviors, highlighting their utility for safety-critical applications. Toward this end, we propose PreferenceHack, a novel few-shot setting benchmark, the first to test reward models on reward hacking in a paired preference format. Finally, we show that Activation RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark, surpassing even GPT-4o.

Paperid: 2167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15298.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise for autonomous driving, yet their struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. To overcome this, we introduce AgentThink, a pioneering unified framework that, for the first time, integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. AgentThink's core innovations include: (i) Structured Data Generation, by establishing an autonomous driving tool library to automatically construct structured, self-verified reasoning data explicitly incorporating tool usage for diverse driving scenarios; (ii) A Two-stage Training Pipeline, employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to equip VLMs with the capability for autonomous tool invocation; and (iii) Agent-style Tool-Usage Evaluation, introducing a novel multi-tool assessment protocol to rigorously evaluate the model's tool invocation and utilization. Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark demonstrate AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54%, while markedly improving reasoning quality and consistency. Furthermore, ablation studies and robust zero-shot/few-shot generalization experiments across various benchmarks underscore its powerful capabilities. These findings highlight a promising trajectory for developing trustworthy and tool-aware autonomous driving models.

Paperid: 2168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12217.pdf

Abstract:
Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the torus (TFHE) enables computation on encrypted data without decryption, making it a cornerstone of secure and confidential computing. Despite its potential in privacy preserving machine learning, secure multi party computation, private blockchain transactions, and secure medical diagnostics, its adoption remains limited due to cryptographic complexity and usability challenges. While various TFHE libraries and compilers exist, practical code generation remains a hurdle. We propose a compiler integrated framework to evaluate LLM inference and agentic optimization for TFHE code generation, focusing on logic gates and ReLU activation. Our methodology assesses error rates, compilability, and structural similarity across open and closedsource LLMs. Results highlight significant limitations in off-the-shelf models, while agentic optimizations such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and few-shot prompting reduce errors and enhance code fidelity. This work establishes the first benchmark for TFHE code generation, demonstrating how LLMs, when augmented with domain-specific feedback, can bridge the expertise gap in FHE code generation.

Paperid: 2169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00142.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) like LLaVA and Qwen-VL excel at a wide variety of vision-language (VL) tasks. Despite strong performance, LMMs' generative outputs are not specialized for vision-language classification tasks (i.e., tasks with vision-language inputs and discrete labels) such as image classification and multiple-choice VQA. One key challenge in utilizing LMMs for these tasks is the extraction of useful features from generative LMMs. To overcome this, we propose an approach that leverages multimodal feature extraction from the LMM's latent space. Toward this end, we present Sparse Attention Vectors (SAVs) -- a finetuning-free method that leverages sparse attention head activations (fewer than 5% of the heads) in LMMs as strong feature representations. With only few-shot examples, SAVs demonstrate state-of-the-art performance compared to a variety of few-shot and finetuned baselines on a collection of vision-language classification tasks. Our experiments also imply that SAVs can scale in performance with additional examples and generalize to similar tasks, establishing SAVs as both effective and robust multimodal feature representations.

Paperid: 2170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14744.pdf

Abstract:
Recently Transformer-based models have advanced point cloud understanding by leveraging self-attention mechanisms, however, these methods often overlook latent information in less prominent regions, leading to increased sensitivity to perturbations and limited global comprehension. To solve this issue, we introduce PointACL, an attention-driven contrastive learning framework designed to address these limitations. Our method employs an attention-driven dynamic masking strategy that guides the model to focus on under-attended regions, enhancing the understanding of global structures within the point cloud. Then we combine the original pre-training loss with a contrastive learning loss, improving feature discrimination and generalization. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PointACL, as it achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of 3D understanding tasks, including object classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning. Specifically, when integrated with different Transformer backbones like Point-MAE and PointGPT, PointACL demonstrates improved performance on datasets such as ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, and ShapeNetPart. This highlights its superior capability in capturing both global and local features, as well as its enhanced robustness against perturbations and incomplete data.

Paperid: 2171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13317.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse visual tasks, including image recognition, video understanding, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) when explicitly trained for these tasks. Despite these advances, we find that present-day VLMs (including the proprietary GPT-4o) lack a fundamental cognitive ability: learning to localize specific objects in a scene by taking into account the context. In this work, we focus on the task of few-shot personalized localization, where a model is given a small set of annotated images (in-context examples) -- each with a category label and bounding box -- and is tasked with localizing the same object type in a query image. Personalized localization can be particularly important in cases of ambiguity of several related objects that can respond to a text or an object that is hard to describe with words. To provoke personalized localization abilities in models, we present a data-centric solution that fine-tunes them using carefully curated data from video object tracking datasets. By leveraging sequences of frames tracking the same object across multiple shots, we simulate instruction-tuning dialogues that promote context awareness. To reinforce this, we introduce a novel regularization technique that replaces object labels with pseudo-names, ensuring the model relies on visual context rather than prior knowledge. Our method significantly enhances the few-shot localization performance of recent VLMs ranging from 7B to 72B in size, without sacrificing generalization, as demonstrated on several benchmarks tailored towards evaluating personalized localization abilities. This work is the first to explore and benchmark personalized few-shot localization for VLMs -- exposing critical weaknesses in present-day VLMs, and laying a foundation for future research in context-driven vision-language applications.

Paperid: 2172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05945.pdf

Abstract:
Construction of a general-purpose post-recognition error corrector poses a crucial question: how can we most effectively train a model on a large mixture of domain datasets? The answer would lie in learning dataset-specific features and digesting their knowledge in a single model. Previous methods achieve this by having separate correction language models, resulting in a significant increase in parameters. In this work, we present Mixture-of-Experts as a solution, highlighting that MoEs are much more than a scalability tool. We propose a Multi-Task Correction MoE, where we train the experts to become an ``expert'' of speech-to-text, language-to-text and vision-to-text datasets by learning to route each dataset's tokens to its mapped expert. Experiments on the Open ASR Leaderboard show that we explore a new state-of-the-art performance by achieving an average relative $5.0$% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores for speech and translation tasks. On zero-shot evaluation, NeKo outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-Opus with $15.5$% to $27.6$% relative WER reduction in the Hyporadise benchmark. NeKo performs competitively on grammar and post-OCR correction as a multi-task model.

Paperid: 2173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13830.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in customized video generation have enabled users to create videos tailored to both specific subjects and motion trajectories. However, existing methods often require complicated test-time fine-tuning and struggle with balancing subject learning and motion control, limiting their real-world applications. In this paper, we present DreamVideo-2, a zero-shot video customization framework capable of generating videos with a specific subject and motion trajectory, guided by a single image and a bounding box sequence, respectively, and without the need for test-time fine-tuning. Specifically, we introduce reference attention, which leverages the model's inherent capabilities for subject learning, and devise a mask-guided motion module to achieve precise motion control by fully utilizing the robust motion signal of box masks derived from bounding boxes. While these two components achieve their intended functions, we empirically observe that motion control tends to dominate over subject learning. To address this, we propose two key designs: 1) the masked reference attention, which integrates a blended latent mask modeling scheme into reference attention to enhance subject representations at the desired positions, and 2) a reweighted diffusion loss, which differentiates the contributions of regions inside and outside the bounding boxes to ensure a balance between subject and motion control. Extensive experimental results on a newly curated dataset demonstrate that DreamVideo-2 outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both subject customization and motion control. The dataset, code, and models will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 2174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04808.pdf

Abstract:
In spite of the outstanding performance, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is criticized for massive computation. Recently, Zero-shot NAS has emerged as a promising approach by exploiting Zero-cost (ZC) proxies, which markedly reduce computational demands. Despite this, existing ZC proxies heavily rely on expert knowledge and incur significant trial-and-error costs. Particularly in NLP tasks, most existing ZC proxies fail to surpass the performance of the naive baseline. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, \textbf{LPZero}, which is the first to automatically design ZC proxies for various tasks, achieving higher ranking consistency than human-designed proxies. Specifically, we model the ZC proxy as a symbolic equation and incorporate a unified proxy search space that encompasses existing ZC proxies, which are composed of a predefined set of mathematical symbols. To heuristically search for the best ZC proxy, LPZero incorporates genetic programming to find the optimal symbolic composition. We propose a \textit{Rule-based Pruning Strategy (RPS),} which preemptively eliminates unpromising proxies, thereby mitigating the risk of proxy degradation. Extensive experiments on FlexiBERT, GPT-2, and LLaMA-7B demonstrate LPZero's superior ranking ability and performance on downstream tasks compared to current approaches.

Paperid: 2175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20500.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-video diffusion models have made remarkable advancements. Driven by their ability to generate temporally coherent videos, research on zero-shot video editing using these fundamental models has expanded rapidly. To enhance editing quality, structural controls are frequently employed in video editing. Among these techniques, cross-attention mask control stands out for its effectiveness and efficiency. However, when cross-attention masks are naively applied to video editing, they can introduce artifacts such as blurring and flickering. Our experiments uncover a critical factor overlooked in previous video editing research: cross-attention masks are not consistently clear but vary with model structure and denoising timestep. To address this issue, we propose the metric Mask Matching Cost (MMC) that quantifies this variability and propose FreeMask, a method for selecting optimal masks tailored to specific video editing tasks. Using MMC-selected masks, we further improve the masked fusion mechanism within comprehensive attention features, e.g., temp, cross, and self-attention modules. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing zero-shot video editing frameworks with better performance, requiring no control assistance or parameter fine-tuning but enabling adaptive decoupling of unedited semantic layouts with mask precision control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeMask achieves superior semantic fidelity, temporal consistency, and editing quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 2176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07136.pdf

Abstract:
Federated instruction tuning enables multiple clients to collaboratively fine-tune a shared large language model (LLM) that can follow humans' instructions without directly sharing raw data. However, existing literature impractically requires that all the clients readily hold instruction-tuning data (i.e., structured instruction-response pairs), which necessitates massive human annotations since clients' data is usually unstructured text instead. Addressing this, we propose a novel and flexible framework FedIT-U2S, which can automatically transform unstructured corpus into structured data for federated instruction tuning. FedIT-U2S consists two key steps: (1) few-shot instruction-tuning data generation, where each unstructured data piece together with several examples is combined to prompt an LLM in generating an instruction-response pair. To further enhance the flexibility, a retrieval-based example selection technique is proposed, where the examples are automatically selected based on the relatedness between the client's data piece and example pool, bypassing the need of determining examples in advance. (2) A typical federated instruction tuning process based on the generated data. Overall, FedIT-U2S can be applied to diverse scenarios as long as the client holds valuable text corpus, broadening the application scope of federated instruction tuning. We conduct a series of experiments on three domains (medicine, knowledge, and math), showing that our proposed FedIT-U2S can consistently and significantly brings improvement over the base LLM.

Paperid: 2177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19909.pdf

Abstract:
We present Motion Marionette, a zero-shot framework for rigid motion transfer from monocular source videos to single-view target images. Previous works typically employ geometric, generative, or simulation priors to guide the transfer process, but these external priors introduce auxiliary constraints that lead to trade-offs between generalizability and temporal consistency. To address these limitations, we propose guiding the motion transfer process through an internal prior that exclusively captures the spatial-temporal transformations and is shared between the source video and any transferred target video. Specifically, we first lift both the source video and the target image into a unified 3D representation space. Motion trajectories are then extracted from the source video to construct a spatial-temporal (SpaT) prior that is independent of object geometry and semantics, encoding relative spatial variations over time. This prior is further integrated with the target object to synthesize a controllable velocity field, which is subsequently refined using Position-Based Dynamics to mitigate artifacts and enhance visual coherence. The resulting velocity field can be flexibly employed for efficient video production. Empirical results demonstrate that Motion Marionette generalizes across diverse objects, produces temporally consistent videos that align well with the source motion, and supports controllable video generation.

Paperid: 2178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00710.pdf

Abstract:
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) post-trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) show impressive general reasoning, their evaluation is often confined to language-dominant tasks (e.g., math). This raises a critical question: can RL post-training truly extend the inherent capability boundary of a base VLM, particularly for visual-centric spatial tasks where it initially fails? To investigate this, we introduce Ariadne, a framework utilizing synthetic mazes for multi-step spatial reasoning where task difficulty (e.g., path length, turns) is precisely controlled. We leverage this controllable environment to train VLMs using Reinforcement Learning with Verified Rewards (RLVR) in a difficulty-aware curriculum. Surprisingly, post-RLVR training, the VLM achieves over 50% accuracy on a problem set where the base model scored 0%, demonstrating that our approach expands the model's initial capability boundary. To assess real-world viability, we evaluate out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on practical benchmarks. Despite training only on synthetic maze samples, Ariadne achieves significant zero-shot improvements, averaging 16% on MapBench (e.g., museum navigation) and 24% on ReasonMap (subway transfer tasks). These results confirm that our method not only broadens the model's fundamental limits but also enhances its generalization to real-world spatial reasoning. We acknowledge our study is limited to the post-training phase, given the opaqueness of pre-training data, and hope our research motivates further work on specialized, capability-extending alignment.

Paperid: 2179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17252.pdf

Abstract:
News media often shape the public mood not only by what they report but by how they frame it. The same event can appear calm in one outlet and alarming in another, reflecting subtle emotional bias in reporting. Negative or emotionally charged headlines tend to attract more attention and spread faster, which in turn encourages outlets to frame stories in ways that provoke stronger reactions. This research explores that tendency through large-scale emotion analysis of Bengali news. Using zero-shot inference with Gemma-3 4B, we analyzed 300000 Bengali news headlines and their content to identify the dominant emotion and overall tone of each. The findings reveal a clear dominance of negative emotions, particularly anger, fear, and disappointment, and significant variation in how similar stories are emotionally portrayed across outlets. Based on these insights, we propose design ideas for a human-centered news aggregator that visualizes emotional cues and helps readers recognize hidden affective framing in daily news.

Paperid: 2180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08886.pdf

Abstract:
The complexity of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and the hierarchical structure of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) filings make financial auditing increasingly difficult to automate and verify. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in unstructured text understanding, their ability to reason over structured, interdependent, and taxonomy-driven financial documents remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce FinAuditing, the first taxonomy-aligned, structure-aware, multi-document benchmark for evaluating LLMs on financial auditing tasks. Built from real US-GAAP-compliant XBRL filings, FinAuditing defines three complementary subtasks, FinSM for semantic consistency, FinRE for relational consistency, and FinMR for numerical consistency, each targeting a distinct aspect of structured auditing reasoning. We further propose a unified evaluation framework integrating retrieval, classification, and reasoning metrics across these subtasks. Extensive zero-shot experiments on 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that current models perform inconsistently across semantic, relational, and mathematical dimensions, with accuracy drops of up to 60-90% when reasoning over hierarchical multi-document structures. Our findings expose the systematic limitations of modern LLMs in taxonomy-grounded financial reasoning and establish FinAuditing as a foundation for developing trustworthy, structure-aware, and regulation-aligned financial intelligence systems. The benchmark dataset is available at Hugging Face.

Paperid: 2181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20881.pdf

Abstract:
Code search aims to precisely find relevant code snippets that match natural language queries within massive codebases, playing a vital role in software development. Recent advances leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs) to bridge the semantic gap between unstructured natural language (NL) and structured programming languages (PL), yielding significant improvements over traditional information retrieval and early deep learning approaches. However, existing PLM-based methods still encounter key challenges, including a fundamental semantic gap between human intent and machine execution logic, as well as limited robustness to diverse code styles. To address these issues, we propose PseudoBridge, a novel code retrieval framework that introduces pseudo-code as an intermediate, semi-structured modality to better align NL semantics with PL logic. Specifically, PseudoBridge consists of two stages. First, we employ an advanced large language model (LLM) to synthesize pseudo-code, enabling explicit alignment between NL queries and pseudo-code. Second, we introduce a logic-invariant code style augmentation strategy and employ the LLM to generate stylistically diverse yet logically equivalent code implementations with pseudo-code, then align the code snippets of different styles with pseudo-code, enhancing model robustness to code style variation. We build PseudoBridge across 10 different PLMs and evaluate it on 6 mainstream programming languages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PseudoBridge consistently outperforms baselines, achieving significant gains in retrieval accuracy and generalization, particularly under zero-shot domain transfer scenarios such as Solidity and XLCoST datasets. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit logical alignment via pseudo-code and highlight PseudoBridge's potential as a robust, generalizable solution for code retrieval.

Paperid: 2182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03131.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in LLM-based recommendation have shown promise, yet their cross-domain generalization is hindered by a fundamental mismatch between language-centric pretraining and the recommendation task. Existing methods, relying on language-level knowledge, fail to capture dynamic, item-level user interests across domains. To bridge this gap, we propose RecBase, a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective. RecBase leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross-domain generalization. To further align item semantics across domains, we introduce a unified item tokenizer that encodes items into hierarchical concept identifiers, enabling structured representation and efficient vocabulary sharing. The model is trained using an autoregressive objective to capture complex item-level sequential patterns. On eight real-world datasets, our 1.5B-parameter model matches or surpasses the performance of LLM baselines up to 7B parameters in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks.

Paperid: 2183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07811.pdf

Abstract:
Video restoration aims to reconstruct high quality video sequences from low quality inputs, addressing tasks such as super resolution, denoising, and deblurring. Traditional regression based methods often produce unrealistic details and require extensive paired datasets, while recent generative diffusion models face challenges in ensuring temporal consistency. We introduce DiTVR, a zero shot video restoration framework that couples a diffusion transformer with trajectory aware attention and a wavelet guided, flow consistent sampler. Unlike prior 3D convolutional or frame wise diffusion approaches, our attention mechanism aligns tokens along optical flow trajectories, with particular emphasis on vital layers that exhibit the highest sensitivity to temporal dynamics. A spatiotemporal neighbour cache dynamically selects relevant tokens based on motion correspondences across frames. The flow guided sampler injects data consistency only into low-frequency bands, preserving high frequency priors while accelerating convergence. DiTVR establishes a new zero shot state of the art on video restoration benchmarks, demonstrating superior temporal consistency and detail preservation while remaining robust to flow noise and occlusions.

Paperid: 2184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08477.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting harmful memes is essential for maintaining the integrity of online environments. However, current approaches often struggle with resource efficiency, flexibility, or explainability, limiting their practical deployment in content moderation systems. To address these challenges, we introduce U-CoT+, a novel framework for harmful meme detection. Instead of relying solely on prompting or fine-tuning multimodal models, we first develop a high-fidelity meme-to-text pipeline that converts visual memes into detail-preserving textual descriptions. This design decouples meme interpretation from meme classification, thus avoiding immediate reasoning over complex raw visual content and enabling resource-efficient harmful meme detection with general large language models (LLMs). Building on these textual descriptions, we further incorporate targeted, interpretable human-crafted guidelines to guide models' reasoning under zero-shot CoT prompting. As such, this framework allows for easy adaptation to different harmfulness detection criteria across platforms, regions, and over time, offering high flexibility and explainability. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework, highlighting its potential for explainable and low-resource harmful meme detection using small-scale LLMs. Codes and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HMC-AF2B/README.md.

Paperid: 2185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07778.pdf

Abstract:
The advancement in large language models (LLMs) and large vision models has fueled the rapid progress in multi-modal vision-language reasoning capabilities. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) remain challenged by compositional visual reasoning. This paper presents VLAgent, a neuro-symbolic approach to developing a Vision-Language Agent system for efficient compositional visual reasoning with three novel features. First, VLAgent develops an interpretable visualization-enhanced two-stage neuro-symbolic reasoning system. The first stage is managed by a front-end engine that generates a structured visual reasoning plan (symbolic program script) for each compositional visual reasoning task by utilizing a pre-trained LLM powered with few-shot chain-of-thought in-context learning. The second stage is managed by a high-performance back-end engine. It transforms the planning script into executable code based on visual input (image or video) and the combination of neural models and symbolic functions and then performs a sequence of actions for the compositional visual reason task. Second, to ensure and enhance the quality of mapping the logic plan to a sequence of executable instructions, VLAgent introduces the SS-parser, which examines the syntax and semantic correctness of the planning script, detects and repairs the logic errors found in the LLM-generated logic plan before generating the executable program. Third, VLAgent introduces the execution verifier in critical reasoning steps to validate and refine its compositional reasoning results in a stepwise manner, for example, ensemble methods for critical visual reasoning and caption analysis for low-confidence compositional reasoning. Extensive experiments on six visual benchmarks compared to a dozen SoTA visual reasoning models show that VLAgent outperforms existing representative approaches to compositional visual reasoning.

Paperid: 2186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02580.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge-driven autonomous driving systems(ADs) offer powerful reasoning capabilities, but face two critical challenges: limited perception due to the short-sightedness of single-vehicle sensors, and hallucination arising from the lack of real-time environmental grounding. To address these issues, this paper introduces V2X-UniPool, a unified framework that integrates multimodal Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) data into a time-indexed and language-based knowledge pool. By leveraging a dual-query Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism, which enables retrieval of both static and dynamic knowledge, our system enables ADs to perform accurate, temporally consistent reasoning over both static environment and dynamic traffic context. Experiments on a real-world cooperative driving dataset demonstrate that V2X-UniPool significantly enhances motion planning accuracy and reasoning capability. Remarkably, it enables even zero-shot vehicle-side models to achieve state-of-the-art performance by leveraging V2X-UniPool, while simultaneously reducing transmission cost by over 99.9\% compared to prior V2X methods.

Paperid: 2187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15905.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose Jasmine, the first Stable Diffusion (SD)-based self-supervised framework for monocular depth estimation, which effectively harnesses SD's visual priors to enhance the sharpness and generalization of unsupervised prediction. Previous SD-based methods are all supervised since adapting diffusion models for dense prediction requires high-precision supervision. In contrast, self-supervised reprojection suffers from inherent challenges (e.g., occlusions, texture-less regions, illumination variance), and the predictions exhibit blurs and artifacts that severely compromise SD's latent priors. To resolve this, we construct a novel surrogate task of hybrid image reconstruction. Without any additional supervision, it preserves the detail priors of SD models by reconstructing the images themselves while preventing depth estimation from degradation. Furthermore, to address the inherent misalignment between SD's scale and shift invariant estimation and self-supervised scale-invariant depth estimation, we build the Scale-Shift GRU. It not only bridges this distribution gap but also isolates the fine-grained texture of SD output against the interference of reprojection loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Jasmine achieves SoTA performance on the KITTI benchmark and exhibits superior zero-shot generalization across multiple datasets.

Paperid: 2188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19842.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models excel in zero-shot classification, yet face challenges in complex multi-object scenarios. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of CLIP's limitations in these contexts using a specialized dataset, ComCO, designed to evaluate CLIP's encoders in diverse multi-object scenarios. Our findings reveal significant biases: the text encoder prioritizes first-mentioned objects, and the image encoder favors larger objects. Through retrieval and classification tasks, we quantify these biases across multiple CLIP variants and trace their origins to CLIP's training process, supported by analyses of the LAION dataset and training progression. Our image-text matching experiments show substantial performance drops when object size or token order changes, underscoring CLIP's instability with rephrased but semantically similar captions. Extending this to longer captions and text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, we demonstrate how prompt order influences object prominence in generated images. For more details and access to our dataset and analysis code, visit our project repository: https://clip-oscope.github.io.

Paperid: 2189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19828.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot classification tasks, yet their efficacy in handling complex multi-object scenarios remains challenging. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of CLIP's performance limitations in multi-object contexts through controlled experiments. We introduce two custom datasets, SimCO and CompCO, to evaluate CLIP's image and text encoders in various multi-object configurations. Our findings reveal significant biases in both encoders: the image encoder favors larger objects, while the text encoder prioritizes objects mentioned first in descriptions. We hypothesize these biases originate from CLIP's training process and provide evidence through analyses of the COCO dataset and CLIP's training progression. Additionally, we extend our investigation to Stable Diffusion models, revealing that biases in the CLIP text encoder significantly impact text-to-image generation tasks. Our experiments demonstrate how these biases affect CLIP's performance in image-caption matching and generation tasks, particularly when manipulating object sizes and their order in captions. This work contributes valuable insights into CLIP's behavior in complex visual environments and highlights areas for improvement in future vision-language models.

Paperid: 2190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11952.pdf

Abstract:
Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) is a vital and intricate task that entails analyzing and assessing an image's aesthetic values, and identifying its highlights and areas for improvement. Traditional methods of IAA often concentrate on a single aesthetic task and suffer from inadequate labeled datasets, thus impairing in-depth aesthetic comprehension. Despite efforts to overcome this challenge through the application of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such models remain underdeveloped for IAA purposes. To address this, we propose a comprehensive aesthetic MLLM capable of nuanced aesthetic insight. Central to our approach is an innovative multi-scale text-guided self-supervised learning technique. This technique features a multi-scale feature alignment module and capitalizes on a wealth of unlabeled data in a self-supervised manner to structurally and functionally enhance aesthetic ability. The empirical evidence indicates that accompanied with extensive instruct-tuning, our model sets new state-of-the-art benchmarks across multiple tasks, including aesthetic scoring, aesthetic commenting, and personalized image aesthetic assessment. Remarkably, it also demonstrates zero-shot learning capabilities in the emerging task of aesthetic suggesting. Furthermore, for personalized image aesthetic assessment, we harness the potential of in-context learning and showcase its inherent advantages.

Paperid: 2191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14507.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains, largely due to the extensive scaling of model parameters. Recent works have observed redundancy within transformer blocks and developed compression methods by structured pruning of less important blocks. However, such direct removal often leads to irreversible performance degradation. In this paper, we propose FuseGPT, a novel methodology designed to recycle pruned transformer blocks, thereby recovering the model's performance. Firstly, we introduce a new importance detection metric, Macro Influence (MI), which evaluates the long-term impact of each transformer block by quantifying the information loss incurred upon its removal. Next, we propose group-level layer fusion, which leverages the parameters from layers of less important blocks and integrates them into the corresponding layers of neighboring blocks. This fusion process is not a one-time operation but is refined through iterative parameter updates by lightweight group-level fine-tuning. Specifically, the injected parameters are frozen but are weighted with learnable rank decomposition matrices to reduce the computational overhead during fine-tuning. Our approach not only works well for large language models but also for large multimodal models. Experimental results indicate that, even with modest amounts of data, FuseGPT surpasses previous methods in both perplexity and zero-shot task performance.

Paperid: 2192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11361.pdf

Abstract:
This paper shows that the autoregressive model is an effective and scalable monocular depth estimator. Our idea is simple: We tackle the monocular depth estimation (MDE) task with an autoregressive prediction paradigm, based on two core designs. First, our depth autoregressive model (DAR) treats the depth map of different resolutions as a set of tokens, and conducts the low-to-high resolution autoregressive objective with a patch-wise casual mask. Second, our DAR recursively discretizes the entire depth range into more compact intervals, and attains the coarse-to-fine granularity autoregressive objective in an ordinal-regression manner. By coupling these two autoregressive objectives, our DAR establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on KITTI and NYU Depth v2 by clear margins. Further, our scalable approach allows us to scale the model up to 2.0B and achieve the best RMSE of 1.799 on the KITTI dataset (5% improvement) compared to 1.896 by the current SOTA (Depth Anything). DAR further showcases zero-shot generalization ability on unseen datasets. These results suggest that DAR yields superior performance with an autoregressive prediction paradigm, providing a promising approach to equip modern autoregressive large models (e.g., GPT-4o) with depth estimation capabilities.

Paperid: 2193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22648.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a promising area of research to develop AI-based systems for enabling interactive and immersive learning. Numerous VQA datasets have been introduced to facilitate various tasks, such as answering questions or identifying unanswerable ones. However, most of these datasets are constructed using real-world images, leaving the performance of existing models on cartoon images largely unexplored. Hence, in this paper, we present "SimpsonsVQA", a novel dataset for VQA derived from The Simpsons TV show, designed to promote inquiry-based learning. Our dataset is specifically designed to address not only the traditional VQA task but also to identify irrelevant questions related to images, as well as the reverse scenario where a user provides an answer to a question that the system must evaluate (e.g., as correct, incorrect, or ambiguous). It aims to cater to various visual applications, harnessing the visual content of "The Simpsons" to create engaging and informative interactive systems. SimpsonsVQA contains approximately 23K images, 166K QA pairs, and 500K judgments (https://simpsonsvqa.org). Our experiments show that current large vision-language models like ChatGPT4o underperform in zero-shot settings across all three tasks, highlighting the dataset's value for improving model performance on cartoon images. We anticipate that SimpsonsVQA will inspire further research, innovation, and advancements in inquiry-based learning VQA.

Paperid: 2194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20155.pdf

Abstract:
Prevalent human-object interaction (HOI) detection approaches typically leverage large-scale visual-linguistic models to help recognize events involving humans and objects. Though promising, models trained via contrastive learning on text-image pairs often neglect mid/low-level visual cues and struggle at compositional reasoning. In response, we introduce DIFFUSIONHOI, a new HOI detector shedding light on text-to-image diffusion models. Unlike the aforementioned models, diffusion models excel in discerning mid/low-level visual concepts as generative models, and possess strong compositionality to handle novel concepts expressed in text inputs. Considering diffusion models usually emphasize instance objects, we first devise an inversion-based strategy to learn the expression of relation patterns between humans and objects in embedding space. These learned relation embeddings then serve as textual prompts, to steer diffusion models generate images that depict specific interactions, and extract HOI-relevant cues from images without heavy fine-tuning. Benefited from above, DIFFUSIONHOI achieves SOTA performance on three datasets under both regular and zero-shot setups.

Paperid: 2195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15062.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot audio classification. In this paper, we introduce PAT (Parameter-free Audio-Text aligner), a simple and training-free method aimed at boosting the zero-shot audio classification performance of CLAP-like ALMs. To achieve this, we propose to improve the cross-modal interaction between audio and language modalities by enhancing the representations for both modalities using mutual feedback. Precisely, to enhance textual representations, we propose a prompt ensemble algorithm that automatically selects and combines the most relevant prompts from a datastore with a large pool of handcrafted prompts and weighs them according to their relevance to the audio. On the other hand, to enhance audio representations, we reweigh the frame-level audio features based on the enhanced textual information. Our proposed method does not require any additional modules or parameters and can be used with any existing CLAP-like ALM to improve zero-shot audio classification performance. We experiment across 18 diverse benchmark datasets and 6 ALMs and show that the PAT outperforms vanilla zero-shot evaluation with significant margins of 0.42%-27.0%. Additionally, we demonstrate that PAT maintains robust performance even when input audio is degraded by varying levels of noise. Our code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Paperid: 2196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08970.pdf

Abstract:
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) remain a major obstacle, particularly in high-stakes applications where factual accuracy is critical. While representation editing and reading methods have made strides in reducing hallucinations, their heavy reliance on specialised tools and training on in-domain samples, makes them difficult to scale and prone to overfitting. This limits their accuracy gains and generalizability to diverse datasets. This paper presents a lightweight method, Norm Voting (NoVo), which harnesses the untapped potential of attention head norms to dramatically enhance factual accuracy in zero-shot multiple-choice questions (MCQs). NoVo begins by automatically selecting truth-correlated head norms with an efficient, inference-only algorithm using only 30 random samples, allowing NoVo to effortlessly scale to diverse datasets. Afterwards, selected head norms are employed in a simple voting algorithm, which yields significant gains in prediction accuracy. On TruthfulQA MC1, NoVo surpasses the current state-of-the-art and all previous methods by an astounding margin -- at least 19 accuracy points. NoVo demonstrates exceptional generalization to 20 diverse datasets, with significant gains in over 90\% of them, far exceeding all current representation editing and reading methods. NoVo also reveals promising gains to finetuning strategies and building textual adversarial defence. NoVo's effectiveness with head norms opens new frontiers in LLM interpretability, robustness and reliability.

Paperid: 2197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04963.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning of point cloud aims to leverage unlabeled 3D data to learn meaningful representations without reliance on manual annotations. However, current approaches face challenges such as limited data diversity and inadequate augmentation for effective feature learning. To address these challenges, we propose GS-PT, which integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into point cloud self-supervised learning for the first time. Our pipeline utilizes transformers as the backbone for self-supervised pre-training and introduces novel contrastive learning tasks through 3DGS. Specifically, the transformers aim to reconstruct the masked point cloud. 3DGS utilizes multi-view rendered images as input to generate enhanced point cloud distributions and novel view images, facilitating data augmentation and cross-modal contrastive learning. Additionally, we incorporate features from depth maps. By optimizing these tasks collectively, our method enriches the tri-modal self-supervised learning process, enabling the model to leverage the correlation across 3D point clouds and 2D images from various modalities. We freeze the encoder after pre-training and test the model's performance on multiple downstream tasks. Experimental results indicate that GS-PT outperforms the off-the-shelf self-supervised learning methods on various downstream tasks including 3D object classification, real-world classifications, and few-shot learning and segmentation.

Paperid: 2198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16881.pdf

Abstract:
A significant challenge for robot learning research is our ability to accurately measure and compare the performance of robot policies. Benchmarking in robotics is historically challenging due to the stochasticity, reproducibility, and time-consuming nature of real-world rollouts. This challenge is exacerbated for recent generalist policies, which has to be evaluated across a wide variety of scenes and tasks. Evaluation in simulation offers a scalable complement to real world evaluations, but the visual and physical domain gap between existing simulation benchmarks and the real world has made them an unreliable signal for policy improvement. Furthermore, building realistic and diverse simulated environments has traditionally required significant human effort and expertise. To bridge the gap, we introduce Policy Evaluation and Environment Reconstruction in Simulation (PolaRiS), a scalable real-to-sim framework for high-fidelity simulated robot evaluation. PolaRiS utilizes neural reconstruction methods to turn short video scans of real-world scenes into interactive simulation environments. Additionally, we develop a simple simulation data co-training recipe that bridges remaining real-to-sim gaps and enables zero-shot evaluation in unseen simulation environments. Through extensive paired evaluations between simulation and the real world, we demonstrate that PolaRiS evaluations provide a much stronger correlation to real world generalist policy performance than existing simulated benchmarks. Its simplicity also enables rapid creation of diverse simulated environments. As such, this work takes a step towards distributed and democratized evaluation for the next generation of robotic foundation models.

Paperid: 2199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08981.pdf

Abstract:
Face recognition (FR) systems are often prone to demographic biases, partially due to the entanglement of demographic-specific information with identity-relevant features in facial embeddings. This bias is extremely critical in large multicultural cities, especially where biometrics play a major role in smart city infrastructure. The entanglement can cause demographic attributes to overshadow identity cues in the embedding space, resulting in disparities in verification performance across different demographic groups. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy, Unified Text-Image Embedding (UTIE), which aims to induce demographic ambiguity in face embeddings by enriching them with information related to other demographic groups. This encourages face embeddings to emphasize identity-relevant features and thus promotes fairer verification performance across groups. UTIE leverages the zero-shot capabilities and cross-modal semantic alignment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Given that VLMs are naturally trained to align visual and textual representations, we enrich the facial embeddings of each demographic group with text-derived demographic features extracted from other demographic groups. This encourages a more neutral representation in terms of demographic attributes. We evaluate UTIE using three VLMs, CLIP, OpenCLIP, and SigLIP, on two widely used benchmarks, RFW and BFW, designed to assess bias in FR. Experimental results show that UTIE consistently reduces bias metrics while maintaining, or even improving in several cases, the face verification accuracy.

Paperid: 2200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05325.pdf

Abstract:
Large reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex tasks by generating extended chains of thought, but they often "overthink": continuing to reason long after they have enough information to answer correctly. This wastes inference-time compute and can hurt accuracy. Existing attempts to stop early either manipulate decoding with extra sampling and heuristics, rely on auxiliary verifier models, or operate only as post-hoc analysis pipelines without formal guarantees. We introduce LYNX, an online early-exit mechanism that turns a model's own hidden-state awareness into confidence-controlled stopping decisions. LYNX attaches exit decisions to naturally occurring reasoning cues (e.g., "hmm", "wait") during generation, trains a lightweight probe on hidden states at those cue tokens using supervision from forced exits, and wraps the resulting scores in split conformal prediction to obtain distribution-free control over premature exits. Crucially, we train and calibrate this probe once on a generic mathematical corpus and reuse it unchanged across benchmarks, decoding temperatures, and even non-mathematical tasks. Across three model families spanning 1.5B to 32B parameters, a single mathematically trained probe per base model yields strong accuracy--efficiency tradeoffs. On GSM8K, LYNX matches or improves baseline accuracy while reducing tokens by 40--65\%; on MATH-500 it improves accuracy by up to 12 points with roughly 35--60\% fewer tokens; on AIME 2024 it recovers baseline accuracy with more than 50\% token savings; and on CommonsenseQA, a non-math benchmark, it transfers zero-shot with modest accuracy gains and up to 70\% fewer tokens. Compared to state-of-the-art early-exit methods, LYNX offers competitive or superior Pareto frontiers while remaining fully online, requiring no proxy models at inference, and providing explicit, user-tunable confidence guarantees.

Paperid: 2201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20838.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in cloud-based services has raised significant privacy concerns, as user inputs may inadvertently expose sensitive information. Existing text anonymization and de-identification techniques, such as rule-based redaction and scrubbing, often struggle to balance privacy preservation with text naturalness and utility. In this work, we propose a zero-shot, tree-search-based iterative sentence rewriting algorithm that systematically obfuscates or deletes private information while preserving coherence, relevance, and naturalness. Our method incrementally rewrites privacy-sensitive segments through a structured search guided by a reward model, enabling dynamic exploration of the rewriting space. Experiments on privacy-sensitive datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a superior balance between privacy protection and utility preservation.

Paperid: 2202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14921.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models such as CLIP have demonstrated exceptional zero- and few-shot transfer capabilities across diverse vision tasks. However, when fine-tuned for highly specialized biometric tasks, face recognition (FR), morphing attack detection (MAD), and presentation attack detection (PAD), these models may suffer from over-specialization. Thus, they may lose one of their foundational strengths, cross-domain generalization. In this work, we systematically quantify these trade-offs by evaluating three instances of CLIP fine-tuned for FR, MAD, and PAD. We evaluate each adapted model as well as the original CLIP baseline on 14 general vision datasets under zero-shot and linear-probe protocols, alongside common FR, MAD, and PAD benchmarks. Our results indicate that fine-tuned models suffer from over-specialization, especially when fine-tuned for complex tasks of FR. Also, our results pointed out that task complexity and classification head design, multi-class (FR) vs. binary (MAD and PAD), correlate with the degree of catastrophic forgetting. The FRoundation model with the ViT-L backbone outperforms other approaches on the large-scale FR benchmark IJB-C, achieving an improvement of up to 58.52%. However, it experiences a substantial performance drop on ImageNetV2, reaching only 51.63% compared to 69.84% achieved by the baseline CLIP model. Moreover, the larger CLIP architecture consistently preserves more of the model's original generalization ability than the smaller variant, indicating that increased model capacity may help mitigate over-specialization.

Paperid: 2203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13998.pdf

Abstract:
Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

Paperid: 2204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08939.pdf

Abstract:
Face Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) is a critical challenge in face recognition security, where attackers can fool systems by interpolating the identity information of two or more individuals into a single face image, resulting in samples that can be verified as belonging to multiple identities by face recognition systems. While multimodal foundation models (FMs) like CLIP offer strong zero-shot capabilities by jointly modeling images and text, most prior works on FMs for biometric recognition have relied on fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks, neglecting their potential for direct, generalizable deployment. This work explores a pure zero-shot approach to MAD by leveraging CLIP without any additional training or fine-tuning, focusing instead on the design and aggregation of multiple textual prompts per class. By aggregating the embeddings of diverse prompts, we better align the model's internal representations with the MAD task, capturing richer and more varied cues indicative of bona-fide or attack samples. Our results show that prompt aggregation substantially improves zero-shot detection performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of exploiting foundation models' built-in multimodal knowledge through efficient prompt engineering.

Paperid: 2205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06044.pdf

Abstract:
Text-guided image editing involves modifying a source image based on a language instruction and, typically, requires changes to only small local regions. However, existing approaches generate the entire target image rather than selectively regenerate only the intended editing areas. This results in (1) unnecessary computational costs and (2) a bias toward reconstructing non-editing regions, which compromises the quality of the intended edits. To resolve these limitations, we propose to formulate image editing as Next Editing-token Prediction (NEP) based on autoregressive image generation, where only regions that need to be edited are regenerated, thus avoiding unintended modification to the non-editing areas. To enable any-region editing, we propose to pre-train an any-order autoregressive text-to-image (T2I) model. Once trained, it is capable of zero-shot image editing and can be easily adapted to NEP for image editing, which achieves a new state-of-the-art on widely used image editing benchmarks. Moreover, our model naturally supports test-time scaling (TTS) through iteratively refining its generation in a zero-shot manner. The project page is: https://nep-bigai.github.io/

Paperid: 2206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08530.pdf

Abstract:
Generating expressive audio performances from music scores requires models to capture both instrument acoustics and human interpretation. Traditional music performance synthesis pipelines follow a two-stage approach, first generating expressive performance MIDI from a score, then synthesising the MIDI into audio. However, the synthesis models often struggle to generalise across diverse MIDI sources, musical styles, and recording environments. To address these challenges, we propose MIDI-VALLE, a neural codec language model adapted from the VALLE framework, which was originally designed for zero-shot personalised text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. For performance MIDI-to-audio synthesis, we improve the architecture to condition on a reference audio performance and its corresponding MIDI. Unlike previous TTS-based systems that rely on piano rolls, MIDI-VALLE encodes both MIDI and audio as discrete tokens, facilitating a more consistent and robust modelling of piano performances. Furthermore, the model's generalisation ability is enhanced by training on an extensive and diverse piano performance dataset. Evaluation results show that MIDI-VALLE significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline, achieving over 75% lower Frechet Audio Distance on the ATEPP and Maestro datasets. In the listening test, MIDI-VALLE received 202 votes compared to 58 for the baseline, demonstrating improved synthesis quality and generalisation across diverse performance MIDI inputs.

Paperid: 2207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18434.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds significant promise for improving prognosis prediction in medical imaging, yet its effective application remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a structured benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate and compare the transferability of Convolutional Neural Networks and Foundation Models in predicting clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients, leveraging diverse publicly available Chest X-ray datasets. Our experimental methodology extensively explores a wide set of fine-tuning strategies, encompassing traditional approaches such as Full Fine-Tuning and Linear Probing, as well as advanced Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods including Low-Rank Adaptation, BitFit, VeRA, and IA3. The evaluations were conducted across multiple learning paradigms, including both extensive full-data scenarios and more clinically realistic Few-Shot Learning settings, which are critical for modeling rare disease outcomes and rapidly emerging health threats. By implementing a large-scale comparative analysis involving a diverse selection of pretrained models, including general-purpose architectures pretrained on large-scale datasets such as CLIP and DINOv2, to biomedical-specific models like MedCLIP, BioMedCLIP, and PubMedCLIP, we rigorously assess each model's capacity to effectively adapt and generalize to prognosis tasks, particularly under conditions of severe data scarcity and pronounced class imbalance. The benchmark was designed to capture critical conditions common in prognosis tasks, including variations in dataset size and class distribution, providing detailed insights into the strengths and limitations of each fine-tuning strategy. This extensive and structured evaluation aims to inform the practical deployment and adoption of robust, efficient, and generalizable AI-driven solutions in real-world clinical prognosis prediction workflows.

Paperid: 2208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16225.pdf

Abstract:
In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle diverse tasks by incorporating multiple input-output examples, known as demonstrations, into the input of LLMs. More recently, advancements in the expanded context windows of LLMs have led to many-shot ICL, which uses hundreds of demonstrations and outperforms few-shot ICL, which relies on fewer examples. However, this approach is often hindered by the high cost of obtaining large amounts of labeled data. To address this challenge, we propose Many-Shot Adaptive Pseudo-LabEling, namely MAPLE, a novel influence-based many-shot ICL framework that utilizes pseudo-labeled samples to compensate for the lack of label information. We first identify a subset of impactful unlabeled samples and perform pseudo-labeling on them by querying LLMs. These pseudo-labeled samples are then adaptively selected and tailored to each test query as input to improve the performance of many-shot ICL, without significant labeling costs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, showcasing its ability to enhance LLM adaptability and performance with limited labeled data.

Paperid: 2209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08548.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.

Paperid: 2210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01239.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate lung tumor segmentation is crucial for improving diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient outcomes in oncology. However, the complexity of tumor morphology, size, and location poses significant challenges for automated segmentation. This study presents a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of deep learning-based segmentation models, comparing traditional architectures such as U-Net and DeepLabV3, self-configuring models like nnUNet, and foundation models like MedSAM, and MedSAM~2. Evaluating performance across two lung tumor segmentation datasets, we assess segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency under various learning paradigms, including few-shot learning and fine-tuning. The results reveal that while traditional models struggle with tumor delineation, foundation models, particularly MedSAM~2, outperform them in both accuracy and computational efficiency. These findings underscore the potential of foundation models for lung tumor segmentation, highlighting their applicability in improving clinical workflows and patient outcomes.

Paperid: 2211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07649.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models (FMs) have recently become prevalent for time series forecasting tasks. While fine-tuning LLMs enables domain adaptation, they often struggle to generalize across diverse and unseen datasets. Moreover, existing Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) still face challenges in handling non-stationary dynamics and distribution shifts, largely due to the lack of effective mechanisms for adaptation. To this end, we present TS-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework for time series forecasting that enhances the generalization and interpretability of TSFMs. Specifically, TS-RAG leverages pre-trained time series encoders to retrieve semantically relevant segments from a dedicated knowledge base, enriching the contextual representation of the input query. Furthermore, we propose an Adaptive Retrieval Mixer (ARM) module that dynamically fuses the retrieved patterns with the TSFM's internal representation, improving forecasting accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Thorough empirical studies on seven public benchmark datasets demonstrate that TS-RAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting performance, outperforming the existing TSFMs by up to 6.84% across diverse domains while also providing desirable interpretability.

Paperid: 2212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15220.pdf

Abstract:
Video and audio are closely correlated modalities that humans naturally perceive together. While recent advancements have enabled the generation of audio or video from text, producing both modalities simultaneously still typically relies on either a cascaded process or multi-modal contrastive encoders. These approaches, however, often lead to suboptimal results due to inherent information losses during inference and conditioning. In this paper, we introduce SyncFlow, a system that is capable of simultaneously generating temporally synchronized audio and video from text. The core of SyncFlow is the proposed dual-diffusion-transformer (d-DiT) architecture, which enables joint video and audio modelling with proper information fusion. To efficiently manage the computational cost of joint audio and video modelling, SyncFlow utilizes a multi-stage training strategy that separates video and audio learning before joint fine-tuning. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that SyncFlow produces audio and video outputs that are more correlated than baseline methods with significantly enhanced audio quality and audio-visual correspondence. Moreover, we demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities of SyncFlow, including zero-shot video-to-audio generation and adaptation to novel video resolutions without further training.

Paperid: 2213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12834.pdf

Abstract:
Short-term load prediction (STLP) is critical for modern power distribution system operations, particularly as demand and generation uncertainties grow with the integration of low-carbon technologies, such as electric vehicles and photovoltaics. In this study, we evaluate the zero-shot prediction capabilities of five Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs)-a new approach for STLP where models perform predictions without task-specific training-against two classical models, Gaussian Process (GP) and Support Vector Regression (SVR), which are trained on task-specific datasets. Our findings indicate that even without training, TSFMs like Chronos, TimesFM, and TimeGPT can surpass the performance of GP and SVR. This finding highlights the potential of TSFMs in STLP.

Paperid: 2214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04549.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can scale and generalize. To address these challenges, we present Generative Value Learning (\GVL), a universal value function estimator that leverages the world knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) to predict task progress. Naively asking a VLM to predict values for a video sequence performs poorly due to the strong temporal correlation between successive frames. Instead, GVL poses value estimation as a temporal ordering problem over shuffled video frames; this seemingly more challenging task encourages VLMs to more fully exploit their underlying semantic and temporal grounding capabilities to differentiate frames based on their perceived task progress, consequently producing significantly better value predictions. Without any robot or task specific training, GVL can in-context zero-shot and few-shot predict effective values for more than 300 distinct real-world tasks across diverse robot platforms, including challenging bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GVL permits flexible multi-modal in-context learning via examples from heterogeneous tasks and embodiments, such as human videos. The generality of GVL enables various downstream applications pertinent to visuomotor policy learning, including dataset filtering, success detection, and advantage-weighted regression -- all without any model training or finetuning.

Paperid: 2215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24164.pdf

Abstract:
Robot learning holds tremendous promise to unlock the full potential of flexible, general, and dexterous robot systems, as well as to address some of the deepest questions in artificial intelligence. However, bringing robot learning to the level of generality required for effective real-world systems faces major obstacles in terms of data, generalization, and robustness. In this paper, we discuss how generalist robot policies (i.e., robot foundation models) can address these challenges, and how we can design effective generalist robot policies for complex and highly dexterous tasks. We propose a novel flow matching architecture built on top of a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to inherit Internet-scale semantic knowledge. We then discuss how this model can be trained on a large and diverse dataset from multiple dexterous robot platforms, including single-arm robots, dual-arm robots, and mobile manipulators. We evaluate our model in terms of its ability to perform tasks in zero shot after pre-training, follow language instructions from people and from a high-level VLM policy, and its ability to acquire new skills via fine-tuning. Our results cover a wide variety of tasks, such as laundry folding, table cleaning, and assembling boxes.

Paperid: 2216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18323.pdf

Abstract:
The vision-language-action (VLA) paradigm has enabled powerful robotic control by leveraging vision-language models, but its reliance on large-scale, high-quality robot data limits its generalization. Generative world models offer a promising alternative for general-purpose embodied AI, yet a critical gap remains between their pixel-level plans and physically executable actions. To this end, we propose the Tool-Centric Inverse Dynamics Model (TC-IDM). By focusing on the tool's imagined trajectory as synthesized by the world model, TC-IDM establishes a robust intermediate representation that bridges the gap between visual planning and physical control. TC-IDM extracts the tool's point cloud trajectories via segmentation and 3D motion estimation from generated videos. Considering diverse tool attributes, our architecture employs decoupled action heads to project these planned trajectories into 6-DoF end-effector motions and corresponding control signals. This plan-and-translate paradigm not only supports a wide range of end-effectors but also significantly improves viewpoint invariance. Furthermore, it exhibits strong generalization capabilities across long-horizon and out-of-distribution tasks, including interacting with deformable objects. In real-world evaluations, the world model with TC-IDM achieves an average success rate of 61.11 percent, with 77.7 percent on simple tasks and 38.46 percent on zero-shot deformable object tasks. It substantially outperforms end-to-end VLA-style baselines and other inverse dynamics models.

Paperid: 2217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00357.pdf

Abstract:
While pre-trained large models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in network traffic analysis, their prohibitive computational costs hinder deployment in real-time, throughput-sensitive network defense environments. This work bridges the gap between advanced representation learning and practical network protection by introducing Traffic-MoE, a sparse foundation model optimized for high-efficiency real-time inference. By dynamically routing traffic tokens to a small subset of specialized experts, Traffic-MoE effectively decouples model capacity from computational overhead. Extensive evaluations across three security-oriented tasks demonstrate that Traffic-MoE achieves up to a 12.38% improvement in detection performance compared to leading dense competitors. Crucially, it delivers a 91.62% increase in throughput, reduces inference latency by 47.81%, and cuts peak GPU memory consumption by 38.72%. Beyond efficiency, Traffic-MoE exhibits superior robustness against adversarial traffic shaping and maintains high detection efficacy in few-shot scenarios, establishing a new paradigm for scalable and resilient network traffic analysis.

Paperid: 2218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01210.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic health records (EHRs) support powerful clinical prediction models, but existing methods typically provide coarse, post hoc explanations that offer limited value for patient-level decision making. We introduce a knowledge graph (KG)-guided chain-of-thought (CoT) framework that generates clinically grounded and temporally consistent reasoning for visit-level disease prediction in MIMIC-III. ICD-9 codes are mapped to PrimeKG, from which disease-relevant nodes and multi-hop reasoning paths are extracted and used as scaffolds for CoT generation; only explanations whose conclusions match observed outcomes are retained. Lightweight LLaMA-3.1-Instruct-8B and Gemma-7B models are then fine-tuned on this supervision corpus. Across ten PrimeKG-mapped diseases and limited training cohorts (400 and 1000 cases), KG-guided models outperform strong classical baselines, achieving AUROC values of 0.66 to 0.70 and macro-AUPR values of 0.40 to 0.47. The models also transfer zero-shot to the CRADLE cohort, improving accuracy from approximately 0.40 to 0.51 up to 0.72 to 0.77. A blinded clinician evaluation shows consistent preference for KG-guided CoT explanations in clarity, relevance, and clinical correctness.

Paperid: 2219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19435.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale video diffusion models show strong world simulation and temporal reasoning abilities, but their use as zero-shot image editors remains underexplored. We introduce IF-Edit, a tuning-free framework that repurposes pretrained image-to-video diffusion models for instruction-driven image editing. IF-Edit addresses three key challenges: prompt misalignment, redundant temporal latents, and blurry late-stage frames. It includes (1) a chain-of-thought prompt enhancement module that transforms static editing instructions into temporally grounded reasoning prompts; (2) a temporal latent dropout strategy that compresses frame latents after the expert-switch point, accelerating denoising while preserving semantic and temporal coherence; and (3) a self-consistent post-refinement step that sharpens late-stage frames using a short still-video trajectory. Experiments on four public benchmarks, covering non-rigid editing, physical and temporal reasoning, and general instruction edits, show that IF-Edit performs strongly on reasoning-centric tasks while remaining competitive on general-purpose edits. Our study provides a systematic view of video diffusion models as image editors and highlights a simple recipe for unified video-image generative reasoning.

Paperid: 2220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25101.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural-language questions over a structured Knowledge Base (KB). Recent work improves KBQA by adopting an agentic reasoning paradigm, in which Large Language Models (LLMs) iteratively decompose a question, generate its corresponding logical queries, and interact with the KB to derive the answer. However, these methods typically fine-tune LLMs on reasoning trajectories synthesized via process supervision, which offers weak incentives for exploration and thus fails to strengthen the agentic reasoning ability. In this paper, we propose KnowCoder-A1, an LLM that can autonomously perform agentic reasoning on KBs to obtain answers. To incentivize autonomous exploration, KnowCoder-A1 trains the LLM under outcome-only supervision via a multi-stage curriculum reinforcement learning with an easy-to-hard curriculum. To establish foundational agentic capabilities, KnowCoder-A1 first fine-tunes the LLM on a small set of high-quality trajectories obtained through outcome-based rejection sampling. Then, to alleviate the reward sparsity inherent in outcome-only supervision, it applies multi-stage curriculum RL with reward schedules that progress from easy to hard. Trained with outcome-only supervision, KnowCoder-A1 exhibits powerful reasoning behaviors and consistently outperforms prior approaches across three mainstream datasets. Notably, on the zero-shot subset of GrailQA, KnowCoder-A1 achieves up to an 11.1% relative improvement while using only one-twelfth of the training data, demonstrating strong agentic reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 2221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09394.pdf

Abstract:
The "pre-train, prompt'' paradigm, designed to bridge the gap between pre-training tasks and downstream objectives, has been extended from the NLP domain to the graph domain and has achieved remarkable progress. Current mainstream graph prompt-tuning methods modify input or output features using learnable prompt vectors. However, existing approaches are confined to single-granularity (e.g., node-level or subgraph-level) during prompt generation, overlooking the inherently multi-scale structural information in graph data, which limits the diversity of prompt semantics. To address this issue, we pioneer the integration of multi-scale information into graph prompt and propose a Multi-Scale Graph Chain-of-Thought (MSGCOT) prompting framework. Specifically, we design a lightweight, low-rank coarsening network to efficiently capture multi-scale structural features as hierarchical basis vectors for prompt generation. Subsequently, mimicking human cognition from coarse-to-fine granularity, we dynamically integrate multi-scale information at each reasoning step, forming a progressive coarse-to-fine prompt chain. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSGCOT outperforms the state-of-the-art single-granularity graph prompt-tuning method, particularly in few-shot scenarios, showcasing superior performance.

Paperid: 2222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08900.pdf

Abstract:
AI-assisted molecular property prediction has become a promising technique in early-stage drug discovery and materials design in recent years. However, due to high-cost and complex wet-lab experiments, real-world molecules usually experience the issue of scarce annotations, leading to limited labeled data for effective supervised AI model learning. In light of this, few-shot molecular property prediction (FSMPP) has emerged as an expressive paradigm that enables learning from only a few labeled examples. Despite rapidly growing attention, existing FSMPP studies remain fragmented, without a coherent framework to capture methodological advances and domain-specific challenges. In this work, we present the first comprehensive and systematic survey of few-shot molecular property prediction. We begin by analyzing the few-shot phenomenon in molecular datasets and highlighting two core challenges: (1) cross-property generalization under distribution shifts, where each task corresponding to each property, may follow a different data distribution or even be inherently weakly related to others from a biochemical perspective, requiring the model to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous prediction tasks, and (2) cross-molecule generalization under structural heterogeneity, where molecules involved in different or same properties may exhibit significant structural diversity, making model difficult to achieve generalization. Then, we introduce a unified taxonomy that organizes existing methods into data, model, and learning paradigm levels, reflecting their strategies for extracting knowledge from scarce supervision in few-shot molecular property prediction. Next, we compare representative methods, summarize benchmark datasets and evaluation protocols. In the end, we identify key trends and future directions for advancing the continued research on FSMPP.

Paperid: 2223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00520.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) are reshaping medical imaging, yet their application in echocardiography remains limited. While several echocardiography-specific FMs have recently been introduced, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate them. Echocardiography poses unique challenges, including noisy acquisitions, high frame redundancy, and limited public datasets. Most existing solutions evaluate on private data, restricting comparability. To address this, we introduce CardioBench, a comprehensive benchmark for echocardiography FMs. CardioBench unifies eight publicly available datasets into a standardized suite spanning four regression and five classification tasks, covering functional, structural, diagnostic, and view recognition endpoints. We evaluate several leading FM, including cardiac-specific, biomedical, and general-purpose encoders, under consistent zero-shot, probing, and alignment protocols. Our results highlight complementary strengths across model families: temporal modeling is critical for functional regression, retrieval provides robustness under distribution shift, and domain-specific text encoders capture physiologically meaningful axes. General-purpose encoders transfer strongly and often close the gap with probing, but struggle with fine-grained distinctions like view classification and subtle pathology recognition. By releasing preprocessing, splits, and public evaluation pipelines, CardioBench establishes a reproducible reference point and offers actionable insights to guide the design of future echocardiography foundation models.

Paperid: 2224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12838.pdf

Abstract:
It is crucial to efficiently execute instructions such as "Find an apple and a banana" or "Get ready for a field trip," which require searching for multiple objects or understanding context-dependent commands. This study addresses the challenging problem of determining which robot should be assigned to which part of a task when each robot possesses different situational on-site knowledge-specifically, spatial concepts learned from the area designated to it by the user. We propose a task planning framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and spatial concepts to decompose natural language instructions into subtasks and allocate them to multiple robots. We designed a novel few-shot prompting strategy that enables LLMs to infer required objects from ambiguous commands and decompose them into appropriate subtasks. In our experiments, the proposed method achieved 47/50 successful assignments, outperforming random (28/50) and commonsense-based assignment (26/50). Furthermore, we conducted qualitative evaluations using two actual mobile manipulators. The results demonstrated that our framework could handle instructions, including those involving ad hoc categories such as "Get ready for a field trip," by successfully performing task decomposition, assignment, sequential planning, and execution.

Paperid: 2225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02993.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) aims to segment novel classes of medical objects using only a few labeled images. Prototype-based methods have made significant progress in addressing FSMIS. However, they typically generate a single global prototype for the support image to match with the query image, overlooking intra-class variations. To address this issue, we propose a Self-guided Prototype Enhancement Network (SPENet). Specifically, we introduce a Multi-level Prototype Generation (MPG) module, which enables multi-granularity measurement between the support and query images by simultaneously generating a global prototype and an adaptive number of local prototypes. Additionally, we observe that not all local prototypes in the support image are beneficial for matching, especially when there are substantial discrepancies between the support and query images. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Query-guided Local Prototype Enhancement (QLPE) module, which adaptively refines support prototypes by incorporating guidance from the query image, thus mitigating the negative effects of such discrepancies. Extensive experiments on three public medical datasets demonstrate that SPENet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance.

Paperid: 2226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03999.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the success of the monolithic dense paradigm of large language models (LLMs), the LoRA adapters offer an efficient solution by fine-tuning small task-specific modules and merging them with the base model. However, in multi-task settings, merging LoRA adapters trained on heterogeneous sources frequently causes \textit{task interference}, degrading downstream performance. To address this, we propose a tensorized clustered LoRA (TC-LoRA) library targeting to address the task interference at the \textit{text-level} and \textit{parameter-level}. At the \textit{text-level}, we cluster the training samples in the embedding space to capture input-format similarities, then train a specialized LoRA adapter for each cluster. At the \textit{parameter-level}, we introduce a joint Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition that disentangles task-specific and shared factors across LoRA adapters. This joint factorization preserves essential knowledge while reducing cross-task interference. Extensive experiments on out-of-domain zero-shot and skill-composition tasks-including reasoning, question answering, and coding. Compared to strong SVD-based baselines, TC-LoRA achieves +1.4\% accuracy on Phi-3 and +2.3\% on Mistral-7B (+2.3\%), demonstrating the effectiveness of TC-LoRA in LLM adaptation.

Paperid: 2227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14087.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot performance for time series forecasting. However, an important yet underexplored challenge is how to effectively finetune TSFMs on specific downstream tasks. While naive finetuning can yield performance gains, we argue that it falls short of fully leveraging TSFMs' capabilities, often resulting in overfitting and suboptimal performance. Given the diverse temporal patterns across sampling scales and the inherent multi-scale forecasting capabilities of TSFMs, we adopt a causal perspective to analyze finetuning process, through which we highlight the critical importance of explicitly modeling multiple scales and reveal the shortcomings of naive approaches. Focusing on \textit{encoder-based} TSFMs, we propose \textbf{M}ulti\textbf{\textsc{s}}cale \textbf{\textsc{f}}ine\textbf{\textsc{t}}uning (\textbf{MSFT}), a simple yet general framework that explicitly integrates multi-scale modeling into the finetuning process. Experimental results on three different backbones (\moirai, \moment\ and \units) demonstrate that TSFMs finetuned with MSFT not only outperform naive and typical parameter efficient finetuning methods but also surpass state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Paperid: 2228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23121.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot abilities and powerful image-understanding capabilities. However, the existing open-source multi-modal models suffer from the weak capability of multi-turn interaction, especially for long contexts. To address the issue, we first introduce a context modeling module, termed ContextQFormer, which utilizes a memory block to enhance the presentation of contextual information. Furthermore, to facilitate further research, we carefully build a new multi-turn multi-modal dialogue dataset (TMDialog) for pre-training, instruction-tuning, and evaluation, which will be open-sourced lately. Compared with other multi-modal dialogue datasets, TMDialog contains longer conversations, which supports the research of multi-turn multi-modal dialogue. In addition, ContextQFormer is compared with three baselines on TMDialog and experimental results illustrate that ContextQFormer achieves an improvement of 2%-4% in available rate over baselines.

Paperid: 2229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17552.pdf

Abstract:
De novo peptide sequencing is a critical task in proteomics. However, the performance of current deep learning-based methods is limited by the inherent complexity of mass spectrometry data and the heterogeneous distribution of noise signals, leading to data-specific biases. We present RankNovo, the first deep reranking framework that enhances de novo peptide sequencing by leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple sequencing models. RankNovo employs a list-wise reranking approach, modeling candidate peptides as multiple sequence alignments and utilizing axial attention to extract informative features across candidates. Additionally, we introduce two new metrics, PMD (Peptide Mass Deviation) and RMD (residual Mass Deviation), which offer delicate supervision by quantifying mass differences between peptides at both the sequence and residue levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RankNovo not only surpasses its base models used to generate training candidates for reranking pre-training, but also sets a new state-of-the-art benchmark. Moreover, RankNovo exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen models whose generations were not exposed during training, highlighting its robustness and potential as a universal reranking framework for peptide sequencing. Our work presents a novel reranking strategy that fundamentally challenges existing single-model paradigms and advances the frontier of accurate de novo sequencing. Our source code is provided on GitHub.

Paperid: 2230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08768.pdf

Abstract:
Attention-based architectures have achieved superior performance in multivariate time series forecasting but are computationally expensive. Techniques such as patching and adaptive masking have been developed to reduce their sizes and latencies. In this work, we propose a structured pruning method, SPAT ($\textbf{S}$ensitivity $\textbf{P}$runer for $\textbf{At}$tention), which selectively removes redundant attention mechanisms and yields highly effective models. Different from previous approaches, SPAT aims to remove the entire attention module, which reduces the risk of overfitting and enables speed-up without demanding specialized hardware. We propose a dynamic sensitivity metric, $\textbf{S}$ensitivity $\textbf{E}$nhanced $\textbf{N}$ormalized $\textbf{D}$ispersion (SEND) that measures the importance of each attention module during the pre-training phase. Experiments on multivariate datasets demonstrate that SPAT-pruned models achieve reductions of 2.842% in MSE, 1.996% in MAE, and 35.274% in FLOPs. Furthermore, SPAT-pruned models outperform existing lightweight, Mamba-based and LLM-based SOTA methods in both standard and zero-shot inference, highlighting the importance of retaining only the most effective attention mechanisms. We have made our code publicly available https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPAT-6042.

Paperid: 2231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06594.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to balance visual and textual information when summarizing complex multimodal inputs, such as entire TV show episodes. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot video-to-text summarization approach that builds its own screenplay representation of an episode, effectively integrating key video moments, dialogue, and character information into a unified document. Unlike previous approaches, we simultaneously generate screenplays and name the characters in zero-shot, using only the audio, video, and transcripts as input. Additionally, we highlight that existing summarization metrics can fail to assess the multimodal content in summaries. To address this, we introduce MFactSum, a multimodal metric that evaluates summaries with respect to both vision and text modalities. Using MFactSum, we evaluate our screenplay summaries on the SummScreen3D dataset, demonstrating superiority against state-of-the-art VLMs such as Gemini 1.5 by generating summaries containing 20% more relevant visual information while requiring 75% less of the video as input.

Paperid: 2232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05130.pdf

Abstract:
Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), have exhibited remarkable zero-shot performance across various image classification tasks. Fine-tuning these models on domain-specific datasets further enhances their effectiveness for downstream applications. However, fine-tuning in cloud environments raises significant concerns regarding data security and privacy. Federated Learning (FL) offers a decentralized solution by enabling model training across local clients without centralizing sensitive data, but the high communication and computation costs of transmitting full pre-trained models during training limit its scalability. Additionally, non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data across local clients can negatively impact model convergence and performance. To address these challenges, we propose CacheFL, a novel federated learning method that replaces traditional full model fine-tuning with lightweight cache model fine-tuning. The cache model is initialized using a class-balanced dataset generated by a generative pre-trained model, effectively mitigating the impact of non-IID data. This cache model is then distributed to local clients for fine-tuning, and the updated parameters from each client are aggregated on the server and redistributed. With the updated cache model, the classification performance of CLIP is improved after just a few epochs. By limiting the training and communication to the cache model, CacheFL significantly reduces resource demands while ensuring data privacy and security. Extensive experiments conducted on ImageNet and 10 additional datasets demonstrate that CacheFL outperforms traditional approaches in terms of classification accuracy, resource efficiency, and privacy preservation.

Paperid: 2233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03742.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of internet traffic, malicious network attacks have become increasingly frequent and sophisticated, posing significant threats to global cybersecurity. Traditional detection methods, including rule-based and machine learning-based approaches, struggle to accurately identify emerging threats, particularly in scenarios with limited samples. While recent advances in few-shot learning have partially addressed the data scarcity issue, existing methods still exhibit high false positive rates and lack the capability to effectively capture crucial local traffic patterns. In this paper, we propose HLoG, a novel hierarchical few-shot malicious traffic detection framework that leverages both local and global features extracted from network sessions. HLoG employs a sliding-window approach to segment sessions into phases, capturing fine-grained local interaction patterns through hierarchical bidirectional GRU encoding, while simultaneously modeling global contextual dependencies. We further design a session similarity assessment module that integrates local similarity with global self-attention-enhanced representations, achieving accurate and robust few-shot traffic classification. Comprehensive experiments on three meticulously reconstructed datasets demonstrate that HLoG significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, HLoG achieves superior recall rates while substantially reducing false positives, highlighting its effectiveness and practical value in real-world cybersecurity applications.

Paperid: 2234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16326.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (LLMs) has opened new frontiers in artificial intelligence, enabling the integration of diverse large-scale data types such as text, images, and spatial information. In this paper, we explore the potential of multimodal LLMs (MLLM) for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), a field that leverages spatial data to address challenges in domains including Geospatial Semantics, Health Geography, Urban Geography, Urban Perception, and Remote Sensing. We propose a MLLM (OmniGeo) tailored to geospatial applications, capable of processing and analyzing heterogeneous data sources, including satellite imagery, geospatial metadata, and textual descriptions. By combining the strengths of natural language understanding and spatial reasoning, our model enhances the ability of instruction following and the accuracy of GeoAI systems. Results demonstrate that our model outperforms task-specific models and existing LLMs on diverse geospatial tasks, effectively addressing the multimodality nature while achieving competitive results on the zero-shot geospatial tasks. Our code will be released after publication.

Paperid: 2235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01601.pdf

Abstract:
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful framework for representing continuous signals. However, generating diverse INR weights remains challenging due to limited training data. We introduce Few-shot Implicit Function Generation, a new problem setup that aims to generate diverse yet functionally consistent INR weights from only a few examples. This is challenging because even for the same signal, the optimal INRs can vary significantly depending on their initializations. To tackle this, we propose EquiGen, a framework that can generate new INRs from limited data. The core idea is that functionally similar networks can be transformed into one another through weight permutations, forming an equivariance group. By projecting these weights into an equivariant latent space, we enable diverse generation within these groups, even with few examples. EquiGen implements this through an equivariant encoder trained via contrastive learning and smooth augmentation, an equivariance-guided diffusion process, and controlled perturbations in the equivariant subspace. Experiments on 2D image and 3D shape INR datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively generates diverse INR weights while preserving their functional properties in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 2236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10137.pdf

Abstract:
We address the task of Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) under the zero-shot setting. Zero-shot VLN-CE is particularly challenging due to the absence of expert demonstrations for training and minimal environment structural prior to guide navigation. To confront these challenges, we propose a Constraint-Aware Navigator (CA-Nav), which reframes zero-shot VLN-CE as a sequential, constraint-aware sub-instruction completion process. CA-Nav continuously translates sub-instructions into navigation plans using two core modules: the Constraint-Aware Sub-instruction Manager (CSM) and the Constraint-Aware Value Mapper (CVM). CSM defines the completion criteria for decomposed sub-instructions as constraints and tracks navigation progress by switching sub-instructions in a constraint-aware manner. CVM, guided by CSM's constraints, generates a value map on the fly and refines it using superpixel clustering to improve navigation stability. CA-Nav achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two VLN-CE benchmarks, surpassing the previous best method by 12 percent and 13 percent in Success Rate on the validation unseen splits of R2R-CE and RxR-CE, respectively. Moreover, CA-Nav demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world robot deployments across various indoor scenes and instructions.

Paperid: 2237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19865.pdf

Abstract:
Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. This often enhances overall reasoning performance as it enables consistency checks between their forward and backward thinking. To enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reverse thinking, we introduce Reverse-Enhanced Thinking (RevThink), a framework composed of data augmentation and learning objectives. In RevThink, we augment the dataset by collecting structured forward-backward reasoning from a teacher model, consisting of: (1) the original question, (2) forward reasoning, (3) backward question, and (4) backward reasoning. We then employ three objectives to train a smaller student model in a multi-task learning fashion: (a) generate forward reasoning from a question, (b) generate a backward question from a question, and (c) generate backward reasoning from the backward question. Experiments across 12 datasets covering commonsense, math, and logical reasoning show an average 13.53% improvement over the student model's zero-shot performance and a 6.84% improvement over the strongest knowledge distillation baselines. Moreover, our method demonstrates sample efficiency -- using only 10% of the correct forward reasoning from the training data, it outperforms a standard fine-tuning method trained on 10x more forward reasoning. RevThink also exhibits strong generalization to out-of-distribution held-out datasets.

Paperid: 2238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09250.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn new classes from only a few samples without forgetting previous ones, requiring intelligent agents to adapt to dynamic environments. FSCIL combines the characteristics and challenges of class-incremental learning and few-shot learning: (i) Current classes occupy the entire feature space, which is detrimental to learning new classes. (ii) The small number of samples in incremental rounds is insufficient for fully training. In existing mainstream virtual class methods, for addressing the challenge (i), they attempt to use virtual classes as placeholders. However, new classes may not necessarily align with the virtual classes. For the challenge (ii), they replace trainable fully connected layers with Nearest Class Mean (NCM) classifiers based on cosine similarity, but NCM classifiers do not account for sample imbalance issues. To address these issues in previous methods, we propose the class-center guided embedding Space Allocation with Angle-Norm joint classifiers (SAAN) learning framework, which provides balanced space for all classes and leverages norm differences caused by sample imbalance to enhance classification criteria. Specifically, for challenge (i), SAAN divides the feature space into multiple subspaces and allocates a dedicated subspace for each session by guiding samples with the pre-set category centers. For challenge (ii), SAAN establishes a norm distribution for each class and generates angle-norm joint logits. Experiments demonstrate that SAAN can achieve state-of-the-art performance and it can be directly embedded into other SOTA methods as a plug-in, further enhancing their performance.

Paperid: 2239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23330.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning (MU) has gained significant attention as a means to remove specific data from trained models without requiring a full retraining process. While progress has been made in unimodal domains like text and image classification, unlearning in multimodal models remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we address the unique challenges of unlearning in CLIP, a prominent multimodal model that aligns visual and textual representations. We introduce CLIPErase, a novel approach that disentangles and selectively forgets both visual and textual associations, ensuring that unlearning does not compromise model performance. CLIPErase consists of three key modules: a Forgetting Module that disrupts the associations in the forget set, a Retention Module that preserves performance on the retain set, and a Consistency Module that maintains consistency with the original model. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-100 and Flickr30K datasets across four CLIP downstream tasks demonstrate that CLIPErase effectively forgets designated associations in zero-shot tasks for multimodal samples, while preserving the model's performance on the retain set after unlearning.

Paperid: 2240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02428.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving the effective design and improvement of reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with complex custom environments and multiple requirements presents considerable challenges. In this paper, we propose ERFSL, an efficient reward function searcher using LLMs, which enables LLMs to be effective white-box searchers and highlights their advanced semantic understanding capabilities. Specifically, we generate reward components for each numerically explicit user requirement and employ a reward critic to identify the correct code form. Then, LLMs assign weights to the reward components to balance their values and iteratively adjust the weights without ambiguity and redundant adjustments by flexibly adopting directional mutation and crossover strategies, similar to genetic algorithms, based on the context provided by the training log analyzer. We applied the framework to an underwater data collection RL task without direct human feedback or reward examples (zero-shot learning). The reward critic successfully corrects the reward code with only one feedback instance for each requirement, effectively preventing unrectifiable errors. The initialization of weights enables the acquisition of different reward functions within the Pareto solution set without the need for weight search. Even in cases where a weight is 500 times off, on average, only 5.2 iterations are needed to meet user requirements. The ERFSL also works well with most prompts utilizing GPT-4o mini, as we decompose the weight searching process to reduce the requirement for numerical and long-context understanding capabilities

Paperid: 2241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01427.pdf

Abstract:
Open-world and anomaly segmentation methods seek to enable autonomous driving systems to detect and segment both known and unknown objects in real-world scenes. However, existing methods do not assign semantically meaningful labels to unknown regions, and distinguishing and learning representations for unknown classes remains difficult. While open-vocabulary segmentation methods show promise in generalizing to novel classes, they require a fixed inference vocabulary and thus cannot be directly applied to anomaly segmentation where unknown classes are unconstrained. We propose Clipomaly, the first CLIP-based open-world and anomaly segmentation method for autonomous driving. Our zero-shot approach requires no anomaly-specific training data and leverages CLIP's shared image-text embedding space to both segment unknown objects and assign human-interpretable names to them. Unlike open-vocabulary methods, our model dynamically extends its vocabulary at inference time without retraining, enabling robust detection and naming of anomalies beyond common class definitions such as those in Cityscapes. Clipomaly achieves state-of-the-art performance on established anomaly segmentation benchmarks while providing interpretability and flexibility essential for practical deployment.

Paperid: 2242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24231.pdf

Authors:Yang Bai, Haoran Cheng, Yang Zhou, Jun Zhou, Arun Thirunavukarasu, Yuhe Ke, Jie Yao, Kanae Fukutsu, Chrystie Wan Ning Quek, Ashley Hong, Laura Gutierrez, Zhen Ling Teo, Darren Shu Jeng Ting, Brian T. Soetikno, Christopher S. Nielsen, Tobias Elze, Zengxiang Li, Linh Le Dinh, Hiok Hong Chan, Victor Koh, Marcus Tan, Kelvin Z. Li, Leonard Yip, Ching Yu Cheng, Yih Chung Tham, Gavin Siew Wei Tan, Leopold Schmetterer, Marcus Ang, Rahat Hussain, Jod Mehta, Tin Aung, Lionel Tim-Ee Cheng, Tran Nguyen Tuan Anh, Chee Leong Cheng, Tien Yin Wong, Nan Liu, Iain Beehuat Tan, Soon Thye Lim, Eyal Klang, Tony Kiat Hon Lim, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Yong Liu, Daniel Shu Wei Ting

Abstract:
Despite the promise of foundation models in medical AI, current systems remain limited - they are modality-specific and lack transparent reasoning processes, hindering clinical adoption. To address this gap, we present EVLF-FM, a multimodal vision-language foundation model (VLM) designed to unify broad diagnostic capability with fine-grain explainability. The development and testing of EVLF-FM encompassed over 1.3 million total samples from 23 global datasets across eleven imaging modalities related to six clinical specialties: dermatology, hepatology, ophthalmology, pathology, pulmonology, and radiology. External validation employed 8,884 independent test samples from 10 additional datasets across five imaging modalities. Technically, EVLF-FM is developed to assist with multiple disease diagnosis and visual question answering with pixel-level visual grounding and reasoning capabilities. In internal validation for disease diagnostics, EVLF-FM achieved the highest average accuracy (0.858) and F1-score (0.797), outperforming leading generalist and specialist models. In medical visual grounding, EVLF-FM also achieved stellar performance across nine modalities with average mIOU of 0.743 and Acc@0.5 of 0.837. External validations further confirmed strong zero-shot and few-shot performance, with competitive F1-scores despite a smaller model size. Through a hybrid training strategy combining supervised and visual reinforcement fine-tuning, EVLF-FM not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy but also exhibits step-by-step reasoning, aligning outputs with visual evidence. EVLF-FM is an early multi-disease VLM model with explainability and reasoning capabilities that could advance adoption of and trust in foundation models for real-world clinical deployment.

Paperid: 2243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16753.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) remains challenging due to limited data and domain shifts. Recent foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization capability in general segmentation tasks, making it a promising solution for few-shot scenarios. However, adapting SAM to CD-FSS faces two critical challenges: reliance on manual prompt and limited cross-domain ability. Therefore, we propose the Composable Meta-Prompt (CMP) framework that introduces three key modules: (i) the Reference Complement and Transformation (RCT) module for semantic expansion, (ii) the Composable Meta-Prompt Generation (CMPG) module for automated meta-prompt synthesis, and (iii) the Frequency-Aware Interaction (FAI) module for domain discrepancy mitigation. Evaluations across four cross-domain datasets demonstrate CMP's state-of-the-art performance, achieving 71.8\% and 74.5\% mIoU in 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios respectively.

Paperid: 2244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16736.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents DFR (Decompose, Fuse and Reconstruct), a novel framework that addresses the fundamental challenge of effectively utilizing multi-modal guidance in few-shot segmentation (FSS). While existing approaches primarily rely on visual support samples or textual descriptions, their single or dual-modal paradigms limit exploitation of rich perceptual information available in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, the proposed approach leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to systematically integrate visual, textual, and audio modalities for enhanced semantic understanding. The DFR framework introduces three key innovations: 1) Multi-modal Decompose: a hierarchical decomposition scheme that extracts visual region proposals via SAM, expands textual semantics into fine-grained descriptors, and processes audio features for contextual enrichment; 2) Multi-modal Contrastive Fuse: a fusion strategy employing contrastive learning to maintain consistency across visual, textual, and audio modalities while enabling dynamic semantic interactions between foreground and background features; 3) Dual-path Reconstruct: an adaptive integration mechanism combining semantic guidance from tri-modal fused tokens with geometric cues from multi-modal location priors. Extensive experiments across visual, textual, and audio modalities under both synthetic and real settings demonstrate DFR's substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 2245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11969.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in test-time adaptation (TTA) for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have garnered increasing attention, particularly through the use of multiple augmented views of a single image to boost zero-shot generalization. Unfortunately, existing methods fail to strike a satisfactory balance between performance and efficiency, either due to excessive overhead of tuning text prompts or unstable benefits from handcrafted, training-free visual feature enhancement. In this paper, we present Global-Spatial Bias Learner (GS-Bias), an efficient and effective TTA paradigm that incorporates two learnable biases during TTA, unfolded as the global bias and spatial bias. Particularly, the global bias captures the global semantic features of a test image by learning consistency across augmented views, while spatial bias learns the semantic coherence between regions in the image's spatial visual representation. It is worth highlighting that these two sets of biases are directly added to the logits outputed by the pretrained VLMs, which circumvent the full backpropagation through VLM that hinders the efficiency of existing TTA methods. This endows GS-Bias with extremely high efficiency while achieving state-of-the-art performance on 15 benchmark datasets. For example, it achieves a 2.23% improvement over TPT in cross-dataset generalization and a 2.72% improvement in domain generalization, while requiring only 6.5% of TPT's memory usage on ImageNet.

Paperid: 2246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11200.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on web-scale corpora excel at natural image tasks and are increasingly repurposed for healthcare; however, their competence in medical tasks remains underexplored. We present a comprehensive evaluation of open-source general-purpose and medically specialised VLMs, ranging from 3B to 72B parameters, across eight benchmarks: MedXpert, OmniMedVQA, PMC-VQA, PathVQA, MMMU, SLAKE, and VQA-RAD. To observe model performance across different aspects, we first separate it into understanding and reasoning components. Three salient findings emerge. First, large general-purpose models already match or surpass medical-specific counterparts on several benchmarks, demonstrating strong zero-shot transfer from natural to medical images. Second, reasoning performance is consistently lower than understanding, highlighting a critical barrier to safe decision support. Third, performance varies widely across benchmarks, reflecting differences in task design, annotation quality, and knowledge demands. No model yet reaches the reliability threshold for clinical deployment, underscoring the need for stronger multimodal alignment and more rigorous, fine-grained evaluation protocols.

Paperid: 2247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22161.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect objects with limited samples for novel classes, while relying on abundant data for base classes. Existing FSOD approaches, predominantly built on the Faster R-CNN detector, entangle objectness recognition and foreground classification within shared feature spaces. This paradigm inherently establishes class-specific objectness criteria and suffers from unrepresentative novel class samples. To resolve this limitation, we propose a Uniform Orthogonal Feature Space (UOFS) optimization framework. First, UOFS decouples the feature space into two orthogonal components, where magnitude encodes objectness and angle encodes classification. This decoupling enables transferring class-agnostic objectness knowledge from base classes to novel classes. Moreover, implementing the disentanglement requires careful attention to two challenges: (1) Base set images contain unlabeled foreground instances, causing confusion between potential novel class instances and backgrounds. (2) Angular optimization depends exclusively on base class foreground instances, inducing overfitting of angular distributions to base classes. To address these challenges, we propose a Hybrid Background Optimization (HBO) strategy: (1) Constructing a pure background base set by removing unlabeled instances in original images to provide unbiased magnitude-based objectness supervision. (2) Incorporating unlabeled foreground instances in the original base set into angular optimization to enhance distribution uniformity. Additionally, we propose a Spatial-wise Attention Disentanglement and Association (SADA) module to address task conflicts between class-agnostic and class-specific tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches based on entangled feature spaces.

Paperid: 2248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24315.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D human-aware generation have made significant progress. However, existing methods still struggle with generating novel Human Object Interaction (HOI) from text, particularly for open-set objects. We identify three main challenges of this task: precise human-object relation reasoning, affordance parsing for any object, and detailed human interaction pose synthesis aligning description and object geometry. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot 3D HOI generation framework without training on specific datasets, leveraging the knowledge from large-scale pre-trained models. Specifically, the human-object relations are inferred from large language models (LLMs) to initialize object properties and guide the optimization process. Then we utilize a pre-trained 2D image diffusion model to parse unseen objects and extract contact points, avoiding the limitations imposed by existing 3D asset knowledge. The initial human pose is generated by sampling multiple hypotheses through multi-view SDS based on the input text and object geometry. Finally, we introduce a detailed optimization to generate fine-grained, precise, and natural interaction, enforcing realistic 3D contact between the 3D object and the involved body parts, including hands in grasping. This is achieved by distilling human-level feedback from LLMs to capture detailed human-object relations from the text instruction. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach compared to prior works, particularly in terms of the fine-grained nature of interactions and the ability to handle open-set 3D objects.

Paperid: 2249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09372.pdf

Abstract:
Dermatological diagnosis represents a complex multimodal challenge that requires integrating visual features with specialized clinical knowledge. While vision-language pretraining (VLP) has advanced medical AI, its effectiveness in dermatology is limited by text length constraints and the lack of structured texts. In this paper, we introduce MAKE, a Multi-Aspect Knowledge-Enhanced vision-language pretraining framework for zero-shot dermatological tasks. Recognizing that comprehensive dermatological descriptions require multiple knowledge aspects that exceed standard text constraints, our framework introduces: (1) a multi-aspect contrastive learning strategy that decomposes clinical narratives into knowledge-enhanced sub-texts through large language models, (2) a fine-grained alignment mechanism that connects subcaptions with diagnostically relevant image features, and (3) a diagnosis-guided weighting scheme that adaptively prioritizes different sub-captions based on clinical significance prior. Through pretraining on 403,563 dermatological image-text pairs collected from education resources, MAKE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VLP models on eight datasets across zero-shot skin disease classification, concept annotation, and cross-modal retrieval tasks. Our code will be made publicly available at https: //github.com/SiyuanYan1/MAKE.

Paperid: 2250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13460.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional temporal action localization (TAL) methods rely on large amounts of detailed annotated data, whereas few-shot TAL reduces this dependence by using only a few training samples to identify unseen action categories. However, existing few-shot TAL methods typically focus solely on video-level information, neglecting textual information, which can provide valuable semantic support for the localization task. Therefore, we propose a new few-shot temporal action localization method by Chain-of-Thought textual reasoning to improve localization performance. Specifically, we design a novel few-shot learning framework that leverages textual semantic information to enhance the model's ability to capture action commonalities and variations, which includes a semantic-aware text-visual alignment module designed to align the query and support videos at different levels. Meanwhile, to better express the temporal dependencies and causal relationships between actions at the textual level to assist action localization, we design a Chain of Thought (CoT)-like reasoning method that progressively guides the Vision Language Model (VLM) and Large Language Model (LLM) to generate CoT-like text descriptions for videos. The generated texts can capture more variance of action than visual features. We conduct extensive experiments on the publicly available ActivityNet1.3 and THUMOS14 datasets. We introduce the first dataset named Human-related Anomaly Localization and explore the application of the TAL task in human anomaly detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in single-instance and multi-instance scenarios. We will release our code, data and benchmark.

Paperid: 2251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05049.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment new classes using few annotated images. While recent FSS methods have shown considerable improvements by leveraging Segment Anything Model (SAM), they face two critical limitations: insufficient utilization of structural correlations in query images, and significant information loss when converting continuous position priors to discrete point prompts. To address these challenges, we propose CMaP-SAM, a novel framework that introduces contraction mapping theory to optimize position priors for SAM-driven few-shot segmentation. CMaP-SAM consists of three key components: (1) a contraction mapping module that formulates position prior optimization as a Banach contraction mapping with convergence guarantees. This module iteratively refines position priors through pixel-wise structural similarity, generating a converged prior that preserves both semantic guidance from reference images and structural correlations in query images; (2) an adaptive distribution alignment module bridging continuous priors with SAM's binary mask prompt encoder; and (3) a foreground-background decoupled refinement architecture producing accurate final segmentation masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate CMaP-SAM's effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 71.1 mIoU on PASCAL-$5^i$ and 56.1 on COCO-$20^i$ datasets.

Paperid: 2252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19071.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancements in wireless communication technology, automatic modulation recognition (AMR) plays a critical role in ensuring communication security and reliability. However, numerous challenges, including higher performance demands, difficulty in data acquisition under specific scenarios, limited sample size, and low-quality labeled data, hinder its development. Few-shot learning (FSL) offers an effective solution by enabling models to achieve satisfactory performance with only a limited number of labeled samples. While most FSL techniques are applied in the field of computer vision, they are not directly applicable to wireless signal processing. This study does not propose a new FSL-specific signal model but introduces a framework called MCLRL. This framework combines multi-domain contrastive learning with reinforcement learning. Multi-domain representations of signals enhance feature richness, while integrating contrastive learning and reinforcement learning architectures enables the extraction of deep features for classification. In downstream tasks, the model achieves excellent performance using only a few samples and minimal training cycles. Experimental results show that the MCLRL framework effectively extracts key features from signals, performs well in FSL tasks, and maintains flexibility in signal model selection.

Paperid: 2253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12073.pdf

Abstract:
Social media enables dynamic user engagement with trending topics, and recent research has explored the potential of large language models (LLMs) for response generation. While some studies investigate LLMs as agents for simulating user behavior on social media, their focus remains on practical viability and scalability rather than a deeper understanding of how well LLM aligns with human behavior. This paper analyzes LLMs' ability to simulate social media engagement through action guided response generation, where a model first predicts a user's most likely engagement action-retweet, quote, or rewrite-towards a trending post before generating a personalized response conditioned on the predicted action. We benchmark GPT-4o-mini, O1-mini, and DeepSeek-R1 in social media engagement simulation regarding a major societal event discussed on X. Our findings reveal that zero-shot LLMs underperform BERT in action prediction, while few-shot prompting initially degrades the prediction accuracy of LLMs with limited examples. However, in response generation, few-shot LLMs achieve stronger semantic alignment with ground truth posts.

Paperid: 2254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08336.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing policies to unseen scenarios remains a critical challenge in visual reinforcement learning, where agents often overfit to the specific visual observations of the training environment. In unseen environments, distracting pixels may lead agents to extract representations containing task-irrelevant information. As a result, agents may deviate from the optimal behaviors learned during training, thereby hindering visual generalization.To address this issue, we propose the Salience-Invariant Consistent Policy Learning (SCPL) algorithm, an efficient framework for zero-shot generalization. Our approach introduces a novel value consistency module alongside a dynamics module to effectively capture task-relevant representations. The value consistency module, guided by saliency, ensures the agent focuses on task-relevant pixels in both original and perturbed observations, while the dynamics module uses augmented data to help the encoder capture dynamic- and reward-relevant representations. Additionally, our theoretical analysis highlights the importance of policy consistency for generalization. To strengthen this, we introduce a policy consistency module with a KL divergence constraint to maintain consistent policies across original and perturbed observations.Extensive experiments on the DMC-GB, Robotic Manipulation, and CARLA benchmarks demonstrate that SCPL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalization. Notably, SCPL achieves average performance improvements of 14\%, 39\%, and 69\% in the challenging DMC video hard setting, the Robotic hard setting, and the CARLA benchmark, respectively.Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/scpl-rl.

Paperid: 2255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06869.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational models have emerged as powerful tools for addressing various tasks in clinical settings. However, their potential development to breast ultrasound analysis remains untapped. In this paper, we present BUSGen, the first foundational generative model specifically designed for breast ultrasound image analysis. Pretrained on over 3.5 million breast ultrasound images, BUSGen has acquired extensive knowledge of breast structures, pathological features, and clinical variations. With few-shot adaptation, BUSGen can generate repositories of realistic and informative task-specific data, facilitating the development of models for a wide range of downstream tasks. Extensive experiments highlight BUSGen's exceptional adaptability, significantly exceeding real-data-trained foundational models in breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and prognosis. In breast cancer early diagnosis, our approach outperformed all board-certified radiologists (n=9), achieving an average sensitivity improvement of 16.5% (P-value<0.0001). Additionally, we characterized the scaling effect of using generated data which was as effective as the collected real-world data for training diagnostic models. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrated that our approach improved the generalization ability of downstream models. Importantly, BUSGen protected patient privacy by enabling fully de-identified data sharing, making progress forward in secure medical data utilization. An online demo of BUSGen is available at https://aibus.bio.

Paperid: 2256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09706.pdf

Abstract:
Existing test-time prompt tuning (TPT) methods focus on single-modality data, primarily enhancing images and using confidence ratings to filter out inaccurate images. However, while image generation models can produce visually diverse images, single-modality data enhancement techniques still fail to capture the comprehensive knowledge provided by different modalities. Additionally, we note that the performance of TPT-based methods drops significantly when the number of augmented images is limited, which is not unusual given the computational expense of generative augmentation. To address these issues, we introduce IT3A, a novel test-time adaptation method that utilizes a pre-trained generative model for multi-modal augmentation of each test sample from unknown new domains. By combining augmented data from pre-trained vision and language models, we enhance the ability of the model to adapt to unknown new test data. Additionally, to ensure that key semantics are accurately retained when generating various visual and text enhancements, we employ cosine similarity filtering between the logits of the enhanced images and text with the original test data. This process allows us to filter out some spurious augmentation and inadequate combinations. To leverage the diverse enhancements provided by the generation model across different modals, we have replaced prompt tuning with an adapter for greater flexibility in utilizing text templates. Our experiments on the test datasets with distribution shifts and domain gaps show that in a zero-shot setting, IT3A outperforms state-of-the-art test-time prompt tuning methods with a 5.50% increase in accuracy.

Paperid: 2257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15684.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in facilitating human-robotic interaction and collaboration. However, existing LLM-based systems often overlook the misalignment between human and robot perceptions, which hinders their effective communication and real-world robot deployment. To address this issue, we introduce SYNERGAI, a unified system designed to achieve both perceptual alignment and human-robot collaboration. At its core, SYNERGAI employs 3D Scene Graph (3DSG) as its explicit and innate representation. This enables the system to leverage LLM to break down complex tasks and allocate appropriate tools in intermediate steps to extract relevant information from the 3DSG, modify its structure, or generate responses. Importantly, SYNERGAI incorporates an automatic mechanism that enables perceptual misalignment correction with users by updating its 3DSG with online interaction. SYNERGAI achieves comparable performance with the data-driven models in ScanQA in a zero-shot manner. Through comprehensive experiments across 10 real-world scenes, SYNERGAI demonstrates its effectiveness in establishing common ground with humans, realizing a success rate of 61.9% in alignment tasks. It also significantly improves the success rate from 3.7% to 45.68% on novel tasks by transferring the knowledge acquired during alignment.

Paperid: 2258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03354.pdf

Abstract:
The application of activity recognition in the "AI + Education" field is gaining increasing attention. However, current work mainly focuses on the recognition of activities in manually captured videos and a limited number of activity types, with little attention given to recognizing activities in surveillance images from real classrooms. In real classroom settings, normal teaching activities such as reading, account for a large proportion of samples, while rare non-teaching activities such as eating, continue to appear. This requires a model that can learn non-teaching activities from few samples without forgetting the normal teaching activities, which necessitates fewshot continual learning (FSCL) capability. To address this gap, we constructed a continual learning dataset focused on classroom surveillance image activity recognition called ARIC (Activity Recognition in Classroom). The dataset has advantages such as multiple perspectives, a wide variety of activities, and real-world scenarios, but it also presents challenges like similar activities and imbalanced sample distribution. To overcome these challenges, we designed a few-shot continual learning method that combines supervised contrastive learning (SCL) and an adaptive covariance classifier (ACC). During the base phase, we proposed a SCL approach based on feature augmentation to enhance the model's generalization ability. In the incremental phase, we employed an ACC to more accurately describe the distribution of new classes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other existing methods on the ARIC dataset.

Paperid: 2259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18264.pdf

Abstract:
Existing satellite video tracking methods often struggle with generalization, requiring scenario-specific training to achieve satisfactory performance, and are prone to track loss in the presence of occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose SatSAM2, a zero-shot satellite video tracker built on SAM2, designed to adapt foundation models to the remote sensing domain. SatSAM2 introduces two core modules: a Kalman Filter-based Constrained Motion Module (KFCMM) to exploit temporal motion cues and suppress drift, and a Motion-Constrained State Machine (MCSM) to regulate tracking states based on motion dynamics and reliability. To support large-scale evaluation, we propose MatrixCity Video Object Tracking (MVOT), a synthetic benchmark containing 1,500+ sequences and 157K annotated frames with diverse viewpoints, illumination, and occlusion conditions. Extensive experiments on two satellite tracking benchmarks and MVOT show that SatSAM2 outperforms both traditional and foundation model-based trackers, including SAM2 and its variants. Notably, on the OOTB dataset, SatSAM2 achieves a 5.84% AUC improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly released to encourage further research.

Paperid: 2260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00033.pdf

Abstract:
The Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) task requires agents to navigate previously unseen 3D environments using natural language instructions, without any scene-specific training. A critical challenge in this setting lies in ensuring agents' actions align with both spatial structure and task intent over long-horizon execution. Existing methods often fail to achieve robust navigation due to a lack of structured decision-making and insufficient integration of feedback from previous actions. To address these challenges, we propose STRIDER (Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimization), a novel framework that systematically optimizes the agent's decision space by integrating spatial layout priors and dynamic task feedback. Our approach introduces two key innovations: 1) a Structured Waypoint Generator that constrains the action space through spatial structure, and 2) a Task-Alignment Regulator that adjusts behavior based on task progress, ensuring semantic alignment throughout navigation. Extensive experiments on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate that STRIDER significantly outperforms strong SOTA across key metrics; in particular, it improves Success Rate (SR) from 29% to 35%, a relative gain of 20.7%. Such results highlight the importance of spatially constrained decision-making and feedback-guided execution in improving navigation fidelity for zero-shot VLN-CE.

Paperid: 2261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19802.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization through large-scale image-text pretraining, yet their performance can drop once the deployment distribution diverges from the training distribution. To address this, Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods update models using unlabeled target data. However, existing approaches often ignore two key challenges: prototype degradation in long-tailed distributions and confusion between semantically similar classes. To tackle these issues, we propose \textbf{C}lass-Aware \textbf{P}rototype \textbf{L}earning with \textbf{N}egative \textbf{C}ontrast(\textbf{CPL-NC}), a lightweight TTA framework designed specifically for VLMs to enhance generalization under distribution shifts. CPL-NC introduces a \textit{Class-Aware Prototype Cache} Module that dynamically adjusts per-class capacity based on test-time frequency and activation history, with a rejuvenation mechanism for inactive classes to retain rare-category knowledge. Additionally, a \textit{Negative Contrastive Learning} Mechanism identifies and constrains hard visual-textual negatives to improve class separability. The framework employs asymmetric optimization, refining only textual prototypes while anchoring on stable visual features. Experiments on 15 benchmarks show that CPL-NC consistently outperforms prior TTA methods across both ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 backbones.

Paperid: 2262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16973.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly foundation models (FMs), have revolutionized medical image analysis, demonstrating strong zero- and few-shot performance across diverse medical imaging tasks, from segmentation to report generation. Unlike traditional task-specific AI models, FMs leverage large corpora of labeled and unlabeled multimodal datasets to learn generalized representations that can be adapted to various downstream clinical applications with minimal fine-tuning. However, despite the rapid proliferation of FM research in medical imaging, the field remains fragmented, lacking a unified synthesis that systematically maps the evolution of architectures, training paradigms, and clinical applications across modalities. To address this gap, this review article provides a comprehensive and structured analysis of FMs in medical image analysis. We systematically categorize studies into vision-only and vision-language FMs based on their architectural foundations, training strategies, and downstream clinical tasks. Additionally, a quantitative meta-analysis of the studies was conducted to characterize temporal trends in dataset utilization and application domains. We also critically discuss persistent challenges, including domain adaptation, efficient fine-tuning, computational constraints, and interpretability along with emerging solutions such as federated learning, knowledge distillation, and advanced prompting. Finally, we identify key future research directions aimed at enhancing the robustness, explainability, and clinical integration of FMs, thereby accelerating their translation into real-world medical practice.

Paperid: 2263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14388.pdf

Abstract:
Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.

Paperid: 2264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04567.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for precessing relational data but often struggle to generalize to unseen graphs, giving rise to the development of Graph Foundational Models (GFMs). However, current GFMs are challenged by the extreme heterogeneity of graph data, where each graph can possess a unique feature space, label set, and topology. To address this, two main paradigms have emerged. The first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), but is fundamentally text-dependent, thus struggles to handle the numerical features in vast graphs. The second pre-trains a structure-based model, but the adaptation to new tasks typically requires a costly, per-graph tuning stage, creating a critical efficiency bottleneck. In this work, we move beyond these limitations and introduce \textbf{G}raph \textbf{I}n-context \textbf{L}earning \textbf{T}ransformer (GILT), a framework built on an LLM-free and tuning-free architecture. GILT introduces a novel token-based framework for in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, reframing classification tasks spanning node, edge and graph levels in a unified framework. This mechanism is the key to handling heterogeneity, as it is designed to operate on generic numerical features. Further, its ability to understand class semantics dynamically from the context enables tuning-free adaptation. Comprehensive experiments show that GILT achieves stronger few-shot performance with significantly less time than LLM-based or tuning-based baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 2265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17052.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) systems are limited by the scarcity of clean, multilingual recordings. We introduce Sidon, a fast, open-source speech restoration model that converts noisy in-the-wild speech into studio-quality speech and scales to dozens of languages. Sidon consists of two models: w2v-BERT 2.0 finetuned feature predictor to cleanse features from noisy speech and vocoder trained to synthesize restored speech from the cleansed features. Sidon achieves restoration performance comparable to Miipher: Google's internal speech restoration model with the aim of dataset cleansing for speech synthesis. Sidon is also computationally efficient, running up to 500 times faster than real time on a single GPU. We further show that training a TTS model using a Sidon-cleansed automatic speech recognition corpus improves the quality of synthetic speech in a zero-shot setting. Code and model are released to facilitate reproducible dataset cleansing for the research community.

Paperid: 2266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13192.pdf

Abstract:
Radiology, radiation oncology, and medical physics require decision-making that integrates medical images, textual reports, and quantitative data under high-stakes conditions. With the introduction of GPT-5, it is critical to assess whether recent advances in large multimodal models translate into measurable gains in these safety-critical domains. We present a targeted zero-shot evaluation of GPT-5 and its smaller variants (GPT-5-mini, GPT-5-nano) against GPT-4o across three representative tasks. We present a targeted zero-shot evaluation of GPT-5 and its smaller variants (GPT-5-mini, GPT-5-nano) against GPT-4o across three representative tasks: (1) VQA-RAD, a benchmark for visual question answering in radiology; (2) SLAKE, a semantically annotated, multilingual VQA dataset testing cross-modal grounding; and (3) a curated Medical Physics Board Examination-style dataset of 150 multiple-choice questions spanning treatment planning, dosimetry, imaging, and quality assurance. Across all datasets, GPT-5 achieved the highest accuracy, with substantial gains over GPT-4o up to +20.00% in challenging anatomical regions such as the chest-mediastinal, +13.60% in lung-focused questions, and +11.44% in brain-tissue interpretation. On the board-style physics questions, GPT-5 attained 90.7% accuracy (136/150), exceeding the estimated human passing threshold, while GPT-4o trailed at 78.0%. These results demonstrate that GPT-5 delivers consistent and often pronounced performance improvements over GPT-4o in both image-grounded reasoning and domain-specific numerical problem-solving, highlighting its potential to augment expert workflows in medical imaging and therapeutic physics.

Paperid: 2267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10865.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate differentiation of brain tumor types on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for guiding treatment planning in neuro-oncology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled visual question answering (VQA) approaches that integrate image interpretation with natural language reasoning. In this study, we evaluated GPT-4o, GPT-5-nano, GPT-5-mini, and GPT-5 on a curated brain tumor VQA benchmark derived from 3 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) datasets - glioblastoma (GLI), meningioma (MEN), and brain metastases (MET). Each case included multi-sequence MRI triplanar mosaics and structured clinical features transformed into standardized VQA items. Models were assessed in a zero-shot chain-of-thought setting for accuracy on both visual and reasoning tasks. Results showed that GPT-5-mini achieved the highest macro-average accuracy (44.19%), followed by GPT-5 (43.71%), GPT-4o (41.49%), and GPT-5-nano (35.85%). Performance varied by tumor subtype, with no single model dominating across all cohorts. These findings suggest that GPT-5 family models can achieve moderate accuracy in structured neuro-oncological VQA tasks, but not at a level acceptable for clinical use.

Paperid: 2268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08224.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled general-purpose systems to perform increasingly complex domain-specific reasoning without extensive fine-tuning. In the medical domain, decision-making often requires integrating heterogeneous information sources, including patient narratives, structured data, and medical images. This study positions GPT-5 as a generalist multimodal reasoner for medical decision support and systematically evaluates its zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning performance on both text-based question answering and visual question answering tasks under a unified protocol. We benchmark GPT-5, GPT-5-mini, GPT-5-nano, and GPT-4o-2024-11-20 against standardized splits of MedQA, MedXpertQA (text and multimodal), MMLU medical subsets, USMLE self-assessment exams, and VQA-RAD. Results show that GPT-5 consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy across all QA benchmarks and delivering substantial gains in multimodal reasoning. On MedXpertQA MM, GPT-5 improves reasoning and understanding scores by +29.26% and +26.18% over GPT-4o, respectively, and surpasses pre-licensed human experts by +24.23% in reasoning and +29.40% in understanding. In contrast, GPT-4o remains below human expert performance in most dimensions. A representative case study demonstrates GPT-5's ability to integrate visual and textual cues into a coherent diagnostic reasoning chain, recommending appropriate high-stakes interventions. Our results show that, on these controlled multimodal reasoning benchmarks, GPT-5 moves from human-comparable to above human-expert performance. This improvement may substantially inform the design of future clinical decision-support systems.

Paperid: 2269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05244.pdf

Abstract:
In collaborative tasks, being able to adapt to your teammates is a necessary requirement for success. When teammates are heterogeneous, such as in human-agent teams, agents need to be able to observe, recognize, and adapt to their human partners in real time. This becomes particularly challenging in tasks with time pressure and complex strategic spaces where the dynamics can change rapidly. In this work, we introduce TALENTS, a strategy-conditioned cooperator framework that learns to represent, categorize, and adapt to a range of partner strategies, enabling ad-hoc teamwork. Our approach utilizes a variational autoencoder to learn a latent strategy space from trajectory data. This latent space represents the underlying strategies that agents employ. Subsequently, the system identifies different types of strategy by clustering the data. Finally, a cooperator agent is trained to generate partners for each type of strategy, conditioned on these clusters. In order to adapt to previously unseen partners, we leverage a fixed-share regret minimization algorithm that infers and adjusts the estimated partner strategy dynamically. We assess our approach in a customized version of the Overcooked environment, posing a challenging cooperative cooking task that demands strong coordination across a wide range of possible strategies. Using an online user study, we show that our agent outperforms current baselines when working with unfamiliar human partners.

Paperid: 2270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22567.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP models pretrained on natural images with billion-scale image-text pairs have demonstrated impressive capabilities in zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and open-ended visual answering. However, transferring this success to biomedicine is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale biomedical image-text corpora, the heterogeneity of image modalities, and fragmented data standards across institutions. These limitations hinder the development of a unified and generalizable biomedical foundation model trained from scratch. To overcome this, we introduce MMKD-CLIP, a generalist biomedical foundation model developed via Multiple Medical CLIP Knowledge Distillation. Rather than relying on billion-scale raw data, MMKD-CLIP distills knowledge from nine state-of-the-art domain-specific or generalist biomedical CLIP models, each pretrained on millions of biomedical image-text pairs. Our two-stage training pipeline first performs CLIP-style pretraining on over 2.9 million biomedical image-text pairs from 26 image modalities, followed by feature-level distillation using over 19.2 million feature pairs extracted from teacher models. We evaluate MMKD-CLIP on 58 diverse biomedical datasets, encompassing over 10.8 million biomedical images across nine image modalities. The evaluation spans six core task types: zero-shot classification, linear probing, cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, survival prediction, and cancer diagnosis. MMKD-CLIP consistently outperforms all teacher models while demonstrating remarkable robustness and generalization across image domains and task settings. These results underscore that multi-teacher knowledge distillation is a scalable and effective paradigm for building high-performing biomedical foundation models under the practical constraints of real-world data availability.

Paperid: 2271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04458.pdf

Abstract:
Entity structure extraction, which aims to extract entities and their associated attribute-value structures from text, is an essential task for text understanding and knowledge graph construction. Existing methods based on large language models (LLMs) typically rely heavily on predefined entity attribute schemas or annotated datasets, often leading to incomplete extraction results. To address these challenges, we introduce Zero-Shot Open-schema Entity Structure Discovery (ZOES), a novel approach to entity structure extraction that does not require any schema or annotated samples. ZOES operates via a principled mechanism of enrichment, refinement, and unification, based on the insight that an entity and its associated structure are mutually reinforcing. Experiments demonstrate that ZOES consistently enhances LLMs' ability to extract more complete entity structures across three different domains, showcasing both the effectiveness and generalizability of the method. These findings suggest that such an enrichment, refinement, and unification mechanism may serve as a principled approach to improving the quality of LLM-based entity structure discovery in various scenarios.

Paperid: 2272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24200.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual speech processing with self-supervised or supervised pre-trained Speech Foundation Models (SFM) has achieved strong performance on tasks like Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these models struggle with limited resources during fine-tuning. This paper enhances multilingual LID and ASR on ML-SUPERB 2.0 by exploring multiple strategies for adapting SFMs, including frozen upstream training, partial fine-tuning, and low-rank adaptation. Furthermore, we employ data augmentation to mitigate performance gaps in few-shot settings and introduce LID Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss for regularization. Our approach achieves a 14% relative improvement in LID accuracy and a 30% relative reduction in ASR CER over the baseline on ML-SUPERB 2.0, securing second place in the Interspeech 2025 ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge.

Paperid: 2273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12672.pdf

Abstract:
Vehicle GPS trajectories provide valuable movement information that supports various downstream tasks and applications. A desirable trajectory learning model should be able to transfer across regions and tasks without retraining, avoiding the need to maintain multiple specialized models and subpar performance with limited training data. However, each region has its unique spatial features and contexts, which are reflected in vehicle movement patterns and difficult to generalize. Additionally, transferring across different tasks faces technical challenges due to the varying input-output structures required for each task. Existing efforts towards transferability primarily involve learning embedding vectors for trajectories, which perform poorly in region transfer and require retraining of prediction modules for task transfer. To address these challenges, we propose TransferTraj, a vehicle GPS trajectory learning model that excels in both region and task transferability. For region transferability, we introduce RTTE as the main learnable module within TransferTraj. It integrates spatial, temporal, POI, and road network modalities of trajectories to effectively manage variations in spatial context distribution across regions. It also introduces a TRIE module for incorporating relative information of spatial features and a spatial context MoE module for handling movement patterns in diverse contexts. For task transferability, we propose a task-transferable input-output scheme that unifies the input-output structure of different tasks into the masking and recovery of modalities and trajectory points. This approach allows TransferTraj to be pre-trained once and transferred to different tasks without retraining. Extensive experiments on three real-world vehicle trajectory datasets under task transfer, zero-shot, and few-shot region transfer, validating TransferTraj's effectiveness.

Paperid: 2274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11824.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has advanced the capabilities and transparency of language models (LMs); however, reasoning chains can contain inaccurate statements that reduce performance and trustworthiness. To address this, we introduce a new self-correction framework that augments each reasoning step in a CoT with a latent variable indicating its veracity, enabling modeling of all possible truth assignments rather than assuming correctness throughout. To efficiently explore this expanded space, we introduce Search Corrector, a discrete search algorithm over boolean-valued veracity assignments. It efficiently performs otherwise intractable inference in the posterior distribution over veracity assignments by leveraging the LM's joint likelihood over veracity and the final answer as a proxy reward. This efficient inference-time correction method facilitates supervised fine-tuning of an Amortized Corrector by providing pseudo-labels for veracity. The Amortized Corrector generalizes self-correction, enabling accurate zero-shot veracity inference in novel contexts. Empirical results demonstrate that Search Corrector reliably identifies errors in logical (ProntoQA) and mathematical reasoning (GSM8K) benchmarks. The Amortized Corrector achieves comparable zero-shot accuracy and improves final answer accuracy by up to 25%.

Paperid: 2275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21198.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in graphs is critical for ensuring model robustness in open-world and safety-sensitive applications. Existing graph OOD detection approaches typically train an in-distribution (ID) classifier on ID data alone, then apply post-hoc scoring to detect OOD instances. While OOD exposure - adding auxiliary OOD samples during training - can improve detection, current graph-based methods often assume access to real OOD nodes, which is often impractical or costly. In this paper, we present GOE-LLM, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve OOD exposure on text-attributed graphs without using any real OOD nodes. GOE-LLM introduces two pipelines: (1) identifying pseudo-OOD nodes from the initially unlabeled graph using zero-shot LLM annotations, and (2) generating semantically informative synthetic OOD nodes via LLM-prompted text generation. These pseudo-OOD nodes are then used to regularize ID classifier training and enhance OOD detection awareness. Empirical results on multiple benchmarks show that GOE-LLM substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods without OOD exposure, achieving up to a 23.5% improvement in AUROC for OOD detection, and attains performance on par with those relying on real OOD labels for exposure.

Paperid: 2276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03137.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in text understanding and zero-shot reasoning. However, delays in knowledge updates may cause them to reason incorrectly or produce harmful results. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide rich and reliable contextual information for the reasoning process of LLMs by structurally organizing and connecting a wide range of entities and relations. Existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only inject KGs' knowledge into prompts in a textual form, ignoring its structural information. Moreover, they mostly rely on close-source models or open-source models with large parameters, which poses challenges to high resource consumption. To address this, we propose a novel Lightweight and efficient Prompt learning-ReasOning Framework for KGQA (LightPROF), which leverages the full potential of LLMs to tackle complex reasoning tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. Specifically, LightPROF follows a "Retrieve-Embed-Reason process", first accurately, and stably retrieving the corresponding reasoning graph from the KG through retrieval module. Next, through a Transformer-based Knowledge Adapter, it finely extracts and integrates factual and structural information from the KG, then maps this information to the LLM's token embedding space, creating an LLM-friendly prompt to be used by the LLM for the final reasoning. Additionally, LightPROF only requires training Knowledge Adapter and can be compatible with any open-source LLM. Extensive experiments on two public KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that LightPROF achieves superior performance with small-scale LLMs. Furthermore, LightPROF shows significant advantages in terms of input token count and reasoning time.

Paperid: 2277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19602.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs), which employ extended thinking processes with reflection and self-correction capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of test-time scaling. RLLMs exhibit innate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capability obtained from training, leading to a natural question: "Is CoT prompting, a popular In-Context Learning (ICL) method for chat LLMs, necessary to enhance the reasoning capability of RLLMs?" In this work, we present the first comprehensive analysis of the impacts of Zero-shot CoT and Few-shot CoT on RLLMs across mathematical reasoning tasks. We examine models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, finding that contrary to concerns, CoT prompting significantly enhances RLLMs' performance in most scenarios. Our results reveal distinct patterns: large-capacity models show minimal improvement on simple tasks but substantial gains on complex problems, while smaller models exhibit the opposite behavior. Further analysis demonstrates that CoT prompting effectively controls the distribution of the numbers of thinking tokens and reasoning steps, reducing excessive reflections by approximately 90% in some cases. Moreover, attention logits analysis reveals the RLLMs' overfitting to reflection-related words, which is mitigated by external CoT guidance. Notably, our experiments indicate that for RLLMs, one-shot CoT consistently yields superior performance compared to Few-shot CoT approaches. Our findings provide important insights for optimizing RLLMs' performance through appropriate prompting strategies.

Paperid: 2278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07158.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative, simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies, such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning.

Paperid: 2279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12157.pdf

Abstract:
Owing to the capability of in-context learning, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, we find that few-shot demonstrations can sometimes bring negative performance and their effectiveness on LLMs' reasoning abilities remains unreliable. To this end, in this paper, we aim to theoretically analyze the impact of in-context demonstrations on LLMs' reasoning performance. We prove that the reasoning efficacy (measured by empirical prediction loss) can be bounded by a LLM-oriented semantic similarity and an inference stability of demonstrations, which is general for both one-shot and few-shot scenarios. Based on this finding, we propose a straightforward, generalizable, and low-complexity demonstration selection method named LMS3. It can adaptively facilitate to select the most pertinent samples for different LLMs and includes a novel demonstration rejection mechanism to automatically filter out samples that are unsuitable for few-shot learning. Through experiments on three representative benchmarks, two LLM backbones, and multiple few-shot settings, we verify that our LMS3 has superiority and achieves consistent improvements on all datasets, which existing methods have been unable to accomplish.

Paperid: 2280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11142.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. Within natural language processing (NLP), AD helps detect issues like spam, misinformation, and unusual user activity. Although large language models (LLMs) have had a strong impact on tasks such as text generation and summarization, their potential in AD has not been studied enough. This paper introduces AD-LLM, the first benchmark that evaluates how LLMs can help with NLP anomaly detection. We examine three key tasks: (i) zero-shot detection, using LLMs' pre-trained knowledge to perform AD without tasks-specific training; (ii) data augmentation, generating synthetic data and category descriptions to improve AD models; and (iii) model selection, using LLMs to suggest unsupervised AD models. Through experiments with different datasets, we find that LLMs can work well in zero-shot AD, that carefully designed augmentation methods are useful, and that explaining model selection for specific datasets remains challenging. Based on these results, we outline six future research directions on LLMs for AD.

Paperid: 2281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10817.pdf

Abstract:
With the advancement of pre-trained vision-language (VL) models, enhancing the alignment between visual and linguistic modalities in downstream tasks has emerged as a critical challenge. Different from existing fine-tuning methods that add extra modules to these two modalities, we investigate whether the frozen model can be fine-tuned by customized noise. Our approach is motivated by the scientific study of beneficial noise, namely Positive-incentive Noise (Pi-noise or $Ï$-noise) , which quantitatively analyzes the impact of noise. It therefore implies a new scheme to learn beneficial noise distribution that can be employed to fine-tune VL models. Focusing on few-shot classification tasks based on CLIP, we reformulate the inference process of CLIP and apply variational inference, demonstrating how to generate $Ï$-noise towards visual and linguistic modalities. Then, we propose Positive-incentive Noise Injector (PiNI), which can fine-tune CLIP via injecting noise into both visual and text encoders. Since the proposed method can learn the distribution of beneficial noise, we can obtain more diverse embeddings of vision and language to better align these two modalities for specific downstream tasks within limited computational resources. We evaluate different noise incorporation approaches and network architectures of PiNI. The evaluation across 11 datasets demonstrates its effectiveness.

Paperid: 2282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06082.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in self-supervision and contrastive learning have brought the performance of foundation models to unprecedented levels in a variety of tasks. Fueled by this progress, these models are becoming the prevailing approach for a wide array of real-world vision problems, including risk-sensitive and high-stakes applications. However, ensuring safe deployment in these scenarios requires a more comprehensive understanding of their uncertainty modeling capabilities, which has been barely explored. In this work, we delve into the behaviour of vision and vision-language foundation models under Conformal Prediction (CP), a statistical framework that provides theoretical guarantees of marginal coverage of the true class. Across extensive experiments including popular vision classification benchmarks, well-known foundation vision models, and three CP methods, our findings reveal that foundation models are well-suited for conformalization procedures, particularly those integrating Vision Transformers. We also show that calibrating the confidence predictions of these models, a popular strategy to improve their uncertainty quantification, actually leads to efficiency degradation of the conformal set on adaptive CP methods. Furthermore, few-shot adaptation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks, whose popularity is surging, enhances conformal scores compared to zero-shot predictions. Last, our empirical study exposes APS as particularly promising in the context of vision foundation models, as it does not violate the marginal coverage guarantees across multiple challenging, yet realistic scenarios.

Paperid: 2283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17002.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, have shown unprecedented zero-shot performance across a wide range of tasks. Nevertheless, these models may be unreliable under distributional shifts, as their performance is significantly degraded. In this work, we explore how to efficiently leverage class text information to mitigate these distribution drifts encountered by large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) during test-time inference. In particular, we propose to generate pseudo-labels for the test-time samples by exploiting generic class text embeddings as fixed centroids of a label assignment problem, which is efficiently solved with Optimal Transport. Furthermore, the proposed adaptation method (CLIP-OT) integrates a multiple template knowledge distillation approach, which replicates multi-view contrastive learning strategies in unsupervised representation learning but without incurring additional computational complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple popular test-time adaptation benchmarks presenting diverse complexity empirically show the superiority of CLIP-OT, achieving performance gains of up to 7% over recent state-of-the-art methods, yet being computationally and memory efficient.

Paperid: 2284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16425.pdf

Abstract:
The Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task requires embodied agents to find a previously unseen object by navigating in unfamiliar environments. Such a goal-oriented exploration heavily relies on the ability to perceive, understand, and reason based on the spatial information of the environment. However, current LLM-based approaches convert visual observations to language descriptions and reason in the linguistic space, leading to the loss of spatial information. In this paper, we introduce TopV-Nav, an MLLM-based method that directly reasons on the top-view map with sufficient spatial information. To fully unlock the MLLM's spatial reasoning potential in top-view perspective, we propose the Adaptive Visual Prompt Generation (AVPG) method to adaptively construct semantically-rich top-view map. It enables the agent to directly utilize spatial information contained in the top-view map to conduct thorough reasoning. Besides, we design a Dynamic Map Scaling (DMS) mechanism to dynamically zoom top-view map at preferred scales, enhancing local fine-grained reasoning. Additionally, we devise a Potential Target Driven (PTD) mechanism to predict and to utilize target locations, facilitating global and human-like exploration. Experiments on MP3D and HM3D datasets demonstrate the superiority of our TopV-Nav.

Paperid: 2285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13578.pdf

Abstract:
How can models effectively detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in complex, multi-label settings without extensive retraining? Existing OOD detection methods struggle to capture the intricate semantic relationships and label co-occurrences inherent in multi-label settings, often requiring large amounts of training data and failing to generalize to unseen label combinations. While large language models have revolutionized zero-shot OOD detection, they primarily focus on single-label scenarios, leaving a critical gap in handling real-world tasks where samples can be associated with multiple interdependent labels. To address these challenges, we introduce COOD, a novel zero-shot multi-label OOD detection framework. COOD leverages pre-trained vision-language models, enhancing them with a concept-based label expansion strategy and a new scoring function. By enriching the semantic space with both positive and negative concepts for each label, our approach models complex label dependencies, precisely differentiating OOD samples without the need for additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving approximately 95% average AUROC on both VOC and COCO datasets, while maintaining robust performance across varying numbers of labels and different types of OOD samples.

Paperid: 2286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03359.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning models in open-world applications. Recent advances in CLIP-based OOD detection have shown promising results via regularizing prompt tuning with OOD features extracted from ID data. However, the irrelevant context mined from ID data can be spurious due to the inaccurate foreground-background decomposition, thus limiting the OOD detection performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework, namely, Self-Calibrated Tuning (SCT), to mitigate this problem for effective OOD detection with only the given few-shot ID data. Specifically, SCT introduces modulating factors respectively on the two components of the original learning objective. It adaptively directs the optimization process between the two tasks during training on data with different prediction uncertainty to calibrate the influence of OOD regularization, which is compatible with many prompt tuning based OOD detection methods. Extensive experiments and analyses have been conducted to characterize and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SCT. The code is publicly available.

Paperid: 2287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21520.pdf

Abstract:
Missing data imputation is a critical challenge in various domains, such as healthcare and finance, where data completeness is vital for accurate analysis. Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast corpora, have shown strong potential in data generation, making them a promising tool for data imputation. However, challenges persist in designing effective prompts for a finetuning-free process and in mitigating biases and uncertainty in LLM outputs. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, LLM-Forest, which introduces a "forest" of few-shot prompt learning LLM "trees" with their outputs aggregated via confidence-based weighted voting based on LLM self-assessment, inspired by the ensemble learning (Random Forest). This framework is established on a new concept of bipartite information graphs to identify high-quality relevant neighboring entries with both feature and value granularity. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LLM-Forest.

Paperid: 2288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15744.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in medical vision-language pre-training models have driven significant progress in zero-shot disease recognition. However, transferring image-level knowledge to pixel-level tasks, such as lesion segmentation in 3D CT scans, remains a critical challenge. Due to the complexity and variability of pathological visual characteristics, existing methods struggle to align fine-grained lesion features not encountered during training with disease-related textual representations. In this paper, we present Malenia, a novel multi-scale lesion-level mask-attribute alignment framework, specifically designed for 3D zero-shot lesion segmentation. Malenia improves the compatibility between mask representations and their associated elemental attributes, explicitly linking the visual features of unseen lesions with the extensible knowledge learned from previously seen ones. Furthermore, we design a Cross-Modal Knowledge Injection module to enhance both visual and textual features with mutually beneficial information, effectively guiding the generation of segmentation results. Comprehensive experiments across three datasets and 12 lesion categories validate the superior performance of Malenia.

Paperid: 2289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11311.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular data high-stakes critical decision-making in domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific discovery. Yet, learning effectively from tabular data in few-shot settings, where labeled examples are scarce, remains a fundamental challenge. Traditional tree-based methods often falter in these regimes due to their reliance on statistical purity metrics, which become unstable and prone to overfitting with limited supervision. At the same time, direct applications of large language models (LLMs) often overlook its inherent structure, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose FORESTLLM, a novel framework that unifies the structural inductive biases of decision forests with the semantic reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Crucially, FORESTLLM leverages the LLM only during training, treating it as an offline model designer that encodes rich, contextual knowledge into a lightweight, interpretable forest model, eliminating the need for LLM inference at test time. Our method is two-fold. First, we introduce a semantic splitting criterion in which the LLM evaluates candidate partitions based on their coherence over both labeled and unlabeled data, enabling the induction of more robust and generalizable tree structures under few-shot supervision. Second, we propose a one-time in-context inference mechanism for leaf node stabilization, where the LLM distills the decision path and its supporting examples into a concise, deterministic prediction, replacing noisy empirical estimates with semantically informed outputs. Across a diverse suite of few-shot classification and regression benchmarks, FORESTLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 2290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18211.pdf

Abstract:
Trajectory planning is a fundamental yet challenging component of autonomous driving. End-to-end planners frequently falter under adverse weather, unpredictable human behavior, or complex road layouts, primarily because they lack strong generalization or few-shot capabilities beyond their training data. We propose LLaViDA, a Large Language Vision Driving Assistant that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for object motion prediction, semantic grounding, and chain-of-thought reasoning for trajectory planning in autonomous driving. A two-stage training pipeline--supervised fine-tuning followed by Trajectory Preference Optimization (TPO)--enhances scene understanding and trajectory planning by injecting regression-based supervision, produces a powerful "VLM Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Driving." On the NuScenes benchmark, LLaViDA surpasses state-of-the-art end-to-end and other recent VLM/LLM-based baselines in open-loop trajectory planning task, achieving an average L2 trajectory error of 0.31 m and a collision rate of 0.10% on the NuScenes test set. The code for this paper is available at GitHub.

Paperid: 2291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20347.pdf

Abstract:
Modular reconfigurable robots suit task-specific space operations, but the combinatorial growth of morphologies hinders unified control. We propose a decentralized reinforcement learning (Dec-RL) scheme where each module learns its own policy: wheel modules use Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) for locomotion and 7-DoF limbs use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for steering and manipulation, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen configurations. In simulation, the steering policy achieved a mean absolute error of 3.63° between desired and induced angles; the manipulation policy plateaued at 84.6 % success on a target-offset criterion; and the wheel policy cut average motor torque by 95.4 % relative to baseline while maintaining 99.6 % success. Lunar-analogue field tests validated zero-shot integration for autonomous locomotion, steering, and preliminary alignment for reconfiguration. The system transitioned smoothly among synchronous, parallel, and sequential modes for Policy Execution, without idle states or control conflicts, indicating a scalable, reusable, and robust approach for modular lunar robots.

Paperid: 2292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14819.pdf

Abstract:
Trajectory Representation Learning (TRL) aims to encode raw trajectories into low-dimensional vectors, which can then be leveraged in various downstream tasks, including travel time estimation, location prediction, and trajectory similarity analysis. However, existing TRL methods suffer from a key oversight: treating trajectories as isolated spatio-temporal sequences, without considering the external environment and internal route choice behavior that govern their formation. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework that unifies comprehensive environment \textbf{P}erception and explicit \textbf{R}oute choice modeling for effective \textbf{Traj}ectory representation learning, dubbed \textbf{PRTraj}. Specifically, PRTraj first introduces an Environment Perception Module to enhance the road network by capturing multi-granularity environmental semantics from surrounding POI distributions. Building on this environment-aware backbone, a Route Choice Encoder then captures the route choice behavior inherent in each trajectory by modeling its constituent road segment transitions as a sequence of decisions. These route-choice-aware representations are finally aggregated to form the global trajectory embedding. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets across 5 downstream tasks validate the effectiveness and generalizability of PRTraj. Moreover, PRTraj demonstrates strong data efficiency, maintaining robust performance under few-shot scenarios. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PRTraj.

Paperid: 2293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04747.pdf

Abstract:
Cell type annotation is a fundamental step in the analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. In practice, human experts often rely on the structure revealed by principal component analysis (PCA) followed by $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) graph construction to guide annotation. While effective, this process is labor-intensive and does not scale to large datasets. Recent advances in CLIP-style models offer a promising path toward automating cell type annotation. By aligning scRNA-seq profiles with natural language descriptions, models like LangCell enable zero-shot annotation. While LangCell demonstrates decent zero-shot performance, its predictions remain suboptimal, particularly in achieving consistent accuracy across all cell types. In this paper, we propose to refine the zero-shot logits produced by LangCell through a graph-regularized optimization framework. By enforcing local consistency over the task-specific PCA-based k-NN graph, our method combines the scalability of the pre-trained models with the structural robustness relied upon in expert annotation. We evaluate our approach on 14 annotated human scRNA-seq datasets from 4 distinct studies, spanning 11 organs and over 200,000 single cells. Our method consistently improves zero-shot annotation accuracy, achieving accuracy gains of up to 10%. Further analysis showcase the mechanism by which GRIT effectively propagates correct signals through the graph, pulling back mislabeled cells toward more accurate predictions. The method is training-free, model-agnostic, and serves as a simple yet effective plug-in for enhancing automated cell type annotation in practice.

Paperid: 2294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21619.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) plays a crucial role in maintaining the safety and reliability of manufacturing systems. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong vision-language reasoning abilities, their effectiveness in IAD remains limited without domain-specific adaptation. In this work, we propose EMIT, a unified framework that enhances MLLMs for IAD via difficulty-aware group relative policy optimization (GRPO). EMIT constructs a multi-task IAD dataset and utilizes GPT-generated object text descriptions to compensate for missing defective images. For few-shot anomaly detection, it integrates a soft prompt and heatmap-guided contrastive embeddings derived from patch-level comparisons. To better handle difficult data samples, i.e., cases where the MLLM struggles to generate correct answers, we propose a difficulty-aware GRPO that extends the original GRPO by incorporating a response resampling strategy to ensure the inclusion of correct answers in the sampled responses, as well as an advantage reweighting mechanism to strengthen learning from such difficult data samples. Extensive experiments on the MMAD benchmark demonstrate that EMIT significantly enhances the IAD performance of MLLMs, achieving an average improvement of 7.77\% over the base model (InternVL3-8B) across seven tasks.

Paperid: 2295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00999.pdf

Authors:MarÃa Grandury, Javier Aula-Blasco, JÃºlia FalcÃ£o, ClÃ©mentine Fourrier, Miguel GonzÃ¡lez, Gonzalo MartÃnez, Gonzalo SantamarÃa, Rodrigo Agerri, Nuria Aldama, Luis Chiruzzo, Javier Conde, Helena GÃ³mez, Marta Guerrero, Guido Ivetta, Natalia LÃ³pez, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, MarÃa Teresa MartÃn-Valdivia, Helena Montoro, Carmen MuÃ±oz, Pedro Reviriego, Leire Rosado, Alejandro Vaca, MarÃa Estrella Vallecillo-RodrÃguez, Jorge Vallego, Irune Zubiaga

Abstract:
Leaderboards showcase the current capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs). To motivate the development of LLMs that represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Spanish-speaking community, we present La Leaderboard, the first open-source leaderboard to evaluate generative LLMs in languages and language varieties of Spain and Latin America. La Leaderboard is a community-driven project that aims to establish an evaluation standard for everyone interested in developing LLMs for the Spanish-speaking community. This initial version combines 66 datasets in Basque, Catalan, Galician, and different Spanish varieties, showcasing the evaluation results of 50 models. To encourage community-driven development of leaderboards in other languages, we explain our methodology, including guidance on selecting the most suitable evaluation setup for each downstream task. In particular, we provide a rationale for using fewer few-shot examples than typically found in the literature, aiming to reduce environmental impact and facilitate access to reproducible results for a broader research community.

Paperid: 2296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01014.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Voice Conversion (VC) aims to transform the source speaker's timbre into an arbitrary unseen one while retaining speech content. Most prior work focuses on preserving the source's prosody, while fine-grained timbre information may leak through prosody, and transferring target prosody to synthesized speech is rarely studied. In light of this, we propose R-VC, a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model. R-VC employs data perturbation techniques and discretize source speech into Hubert content tokens, eliminating much content-irrelevant information. By leveraging a Mask Generative Transformer for in-context duration modeling, our model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired target speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker's rhythm. Furthermore, R-VC introduces a powerful Diffusion Transformer (DiT) with shortcut flow matching during training, conditioning the network not only on the current noise level but also on the desired step size, enabling high timbre similarity and quality speech generation in fewer sampling steps, even in just two, thus minimizing latency. Experimental results show that R-VC achieves comparable speaker similarity to state-of-the-art VC methods with a smaller dataset, and surpasses them in terms of speech naturalness, intelligibility and style transfer performance.

Paperid: 2297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00805.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) have achieved success across various tasks, yet most existing methods overlook the modality misalignment issue that can lead to untrustworthy responses in clinical settings. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Self-Contrastive Rewarding (HSCR), a novel approach that addresses two critical challenges in Med-VLM alignment: 1) Cost-effective generation of high-quality preference data; 2) Capturing nuanced and context-aware preferences for improved alignment. HSCR first leverages the inherent capability of Med-VLMs to generate dispreferred responses with higher sampling probability. By analyzing output logit shifts after visual token dropout, we identify modality-coupled tokens that induce misalignment and derive an implicit alignment reward function. This function guides token replacement with hallucinated ones during decoding, producing high-quality dispreferred data. Furthermore, HSCR introduces a multi-level preference optimization strategy, which extends beyond traditional adjacent-level optimization by incorporating nuanced implicit preferences, leveraging relative quality in dispreferred data to capture subtle alignment cues for more precise and context-aware optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple medical tasks, including Med-VQA, medical image captioning and instruction following, demonstrate that HSCR not only enhances zero-shot performance but also significantly improves modality alignment and trustworthiness with just 2,000 training entries.

Paperid: 2298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20624.pdf

Abstract:
Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and multievent dataset with over 23k instances in seven languages from diverse online platforms and real-world events. Polarization is annotated along three axes: presence, type, and manifestation, using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. We conduct two main experiments: (1) we fine-tune six multilingual pretrained language models in both monolingual and cross-lingual setups; and (2) we evaluate a range of open and closed large language models (LLMs) in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Results show that while most models perform well on binary polarization detection, they achieve substantially lower scores when predicting polarization types and manifestations. These findings highlight the complex, highly contextual nature of polarization and the need for robust, adaptable approaches in NLP and computational social science. All resources will be released to support further research and effective mitigation of digital polarization globally.

Paperid: 2299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17086.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often employ multi-turn interaction pipelines to interface with search engines for complex reasoning tasks. However, such multi-turn interactions inevitably produce long intermediate contexts, as context length grows exponentially with exploration depth. This leads to a well-known limitation of LLMs: their difficulty in effectively leveraging information from long contexts. This problem is further amplified in RAG systems that depend on in-context learning, where few-shot demonstrations must also be included in the prompt, compounding the context-length bottleneck. To address these challenges, we propose Mujica-MyGo, a unified framework for efficient multi-turn reasoning in RAG. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer principle, we introduce Mujica (Multi-hop Joint Intelligence for Complex Question Answering), a multi-agent RAG workflow that decomposes multi-turn interactions into cooperative sub-interactions, thereby mitigating long-context issues. To eliminate the dependency on in-context learning, we further develop MyGO (Minimalist Policy Gradient Optimization), a lightweight and efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that enables effective post-training of LLMs within complex RAG pipelines. We provide theoretical guarantees for MyGO's convergence to the optimal policy. Empirical evaluations across diverse question-answering benchmarks, covering both text corpora and knowledge graphs, show that Mujica-MyGO achieves superior performance.

Paperid: 2300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16591.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular 3D estimation is crucial for visual perception. However, current methods fall short by relying on oversimplified assumptions, such as pinhole camera models or rectified images. These limitations severely restrict their general applicability, causing poor performance in real-world scenarios with fisheye or panoramic images and resulting in substantial context loss. To address this, we present UniK3D, the first generalizable method for monocular 3D estimation able to model any camera. Our method introduces a spherical 3D representation which allows for better disentanglement of camera and scene geometry and enables accurate metric 3D reconstruction for unconstrained camera models. Our camera component features a novel, model-independent representation of the pencil of rays, achieved through a learned superposition of spherical harmonics. We also introduce an angular loss, which, together with the camera module design, prevents the contraction of the 3D outputs for wide-view cameras. A comprehensive zero-shot evaluation on 13 diverse datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of UniK3D across 3D, depth, and camera metrics, with substantial gains in challenging large-field-of-view and panoramic settings, while maintaining top accuracy in conventional pinhole small-field-of-view domains. Code and models are available at github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/unik3d .

Paperid: 2301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00723.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal instruction tuning has proven to be an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by fine-tuning pre-trained Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with instruction-following data. However, as the scale of LMMs continues to grow, fully fine-tuning these models has become highly parameter-intensive. Although Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been introduced to reduce the number of tunable parameters, a significant performance gap remains compared to full fine-tuning. Furthermore, existing PEFT approaches are often highly parameterized, making them difficult to interpret and control. In light of this, we introduce Multimodal Representation Tuning (MRT), a novel approach that focuses on directly editing semantically rich multimodal representations to achieve strong performance and provide intuitive control over LMMs. Empirical results show that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art baselines with significant performance gains (e.g., 1580.40 MME score) while requiring substantially fewer tunable parameters (e.g., 0.03% parameters). Additionally, we conduct experiments on editing instrumental tokens within multimodal representations, demonstrating that direct manipulation of these representations enables simple yet effective control over network behavior.

Paperid: 2302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19668.pdf

Abstract:
Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is critical for diagnosing and monitoring cardiac health, but obtaining large-scale annotated ECG datasets is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent ECG Self-Supervised Learning (eSSL) methods mitigate this by learning features without extensive labels but fail to capture fine-grained clinical semantics and require extensive task-specific fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{SuPreME}$, a $\textbf{Su}$pervised $\textbf{Pre}$-training framework for $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{E}$CG representation learning. SuPreME is pre-trained using structured diagnostic labels derived from ECG report entities through a one-time offline extraction with Large Language Models (LLMs), which help denoise, standardize cardiac concepts, and improve clinical representation learning. By fusing ECG signals with textual cardiac queries instead of fixed labels, SuPreME enables zero-shot classification of unseen conditions without further fine-tuning. We evaluate SuPreME on six downstream datasets covering 106 cardiac conditions, achieving superior zero-shot AUC performance of $77.20\%$, surpassing state-of-the-art eSSLs by $4.98\%$. Results demonstrate SuPreME's effectiveness in leveraging structured, clinically relevant knowledge for high-quality ECG representations.

Paperid: 2303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17900.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal ECG representation learning center on aligning ECG signals with paired free-text reports. However, suboptimal alignment persists due to the complexity of medical language and the reliance on a full 12-lead setup, which is often unavailable in under-resourced settings. To tackle these issues, we propose **K-MERL**, a knowledge-enhanced multimodal ECG representation learning framework. **K-MERL** leverages large language models to extract structured knowledge from free-text reports and employs a lead-aware ECG encoder with dynamic lead masking to accommodate arbitrary lead inputs. Evaluations on six external ECG datasets show that **K-MERL** achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot classification and linear probing tasks, while delivering an average **16%** AUC improvement over existing methods in partial-lead zero-shot classification.

Paperid: 2304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20888.pdf

Abstract:
Chemical language models (CLMs) are prominent for their effectiveness in exploring chemical space and enabling molecular engineering. However, while exploring chemical-linguistic space, CLMs suffer from the gap between natural language and molecular representations. This challenge is primarily due to the inherent modeling differences between molecules and texts: molecules operate unified modeling to learn chemical space, while natural language sequentially models the semantic space. Additionally, the limited availability of high-quality text-to-molecule datasets further exacerbates this challenge. To address the problem, we first verified the information bias in molecular representations from different perspectives. We then developed the Heterogeneous Molecular Encoding (HME) framework, a unified molecular encoder compressing the molecular features from fragment sequence, topology, and conformation with Q-learning. To better model chemical-linguistic space, we further constructed the MCMoD dataset, which contains over one million molecules with various conditions, including properties, fragments, and descriptions. Experimentally, HME promotes CLMs to achieve chemical-linguistic sharing space exploration: (1) chemical space exploration with linguistic guidance, where HME achieves significant improvements (+8.9\% FCD) for molecular design in multiple constraints, even in zero-shot scenarios; (2) linguistic space exploration with molecular guidance, where HME generates textual descriptions with high qualities (+11.6\% BLEU) for molecules. These results highlight the precision of HME in handling multi-objective and cross-domain tasks, as well as its remarkable generalization capability on unseen task combinations. HME offers a new perspective on navigating chemical-linguistic sharing space, advancing the potential of CLMs in both fundamental research and practical applications in chemistry.

Paperid: 2305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16778.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor scene texture synthesis has garnered significant interest due to its important potential applications in virtual reality, digital media and creative arts. Existing diffusion-model-based researches either rely on per-view inpainting techniques, which are plagued by severe cross-view inconsistencies and conspicuous seams, or adopt optimization-based approaches that involve substantial computational overhead. In this work, we present RoomPainter, a framework that seamlessly integrates efficiency and consistency to achieve high-fidelity texturing of indoor scenes. The core of RoomPainter features a zero-shot technique that effectively adapts a 2D diffusion model for 3D-consistent texture synthesis, along with a two-stage generation strategy that ensures both global and local consistency. Specifically, we introduce Attention-Guided Multi-View Integrated Sampling (MVIS) combined with a neighbor-integrated attention mechanism for zero-shot texture map generation. Using the MVIS, we firstly generate texture map for the entire room to ensure global consistency, then adopt its variant, namely Attention-Guided Multi-View Integrated Repaint Sampling (MVRS) to repaint individual instances within the room, thereby further enhancing local consistency and addressing the occlusion problem. Experiments demonstrate that RoomPainter achieves superior performance for indoor scene texture synthesis in visual quality, global consistency and generation efficiency.

Paperid: 2306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13136.pdf

Abstract:
Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated excellent zero-shot generalizability across various downstream tasks. However, recent studies have shown that the inference performance of CLIP can be greatly degraded by small adversarial perturbations, especially its visual modality, posing significant safety threats. To mitigate this vulnerability, in this paper, we propose a novel defense method called Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning (TAPT) to enhance the inference robustness of CLIP against visual adversarial attacks. TAPT is a test-time defense method that learns defensive bimodal (textual and visual) prompts to robustify the inference process of CLIP. Specifically, it is an unsupervised method that optimizes the defensive prompts for each test sample by minimizing a multi-view entropy and aligning adversarial-clean distributions. We evaluate the effectiveness of TAPT on 11 benchmark datasets, including ImageNet and 10 other zero-shot datasets, demonstrating that it enhances the zero-shot adversarial robustness of the original CLIP by at least 48.9% against AutoAttack (AA), while largely maintaining performance on clean examples. Moreover, TAPT outperforms existing adversarial prompt tuning methods across various backbones, achieving an average robustness improvement of at least 36.6%.

Paperid: 2307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14993.pdf

Abstract:
Video activity recognition has become increasingly important in robots and embodied AI. Recognizing continuous video activities poses considerable challenges due to the fast expansion of streaming video, which contains multi-scale and untrimmed activities. We introduce a novel system, CARS, to overcome these issues through adaptive video context modeling. Adaptive video context modeling refers to selectively maintaining activity-related features in temporal and spatial dimensions. CARS has two key designs. The first is an activity spatial feature extraction by eliminating irrelevant visual features while maintaining recognition accuracy. The second is an activity-aware state update introducing dynamic adaptability to better preserve the video context for multi-scale activity recognition. Our CARS runs at speeds $>$30 FPS on typical edge devices and outperforms all baselines by 1.2\% to 79.7\% in accuracy. Moreover, we explore applying CARS to a large video model as a video encoder. Experimental results show that our CARS can result in a 0.46-point enhancement (on a 5-point scale) on the in-distribution video activity dataset, and an improvement ranging from 1.19\% to 4\% on zero-shot video activity datasets.

Paperid: 2308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13523.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Vision-Language Pre-training (MedVLP) has made significant progress in enabling zero-shot tasks for medical image understanding. However, training MedVLP models typically requires large-scale datasets with paired, high-quality image-text data, which are scarce in the medical domain. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models have made it possible to generate large-scale synthetic image-text pairs. This raises the question: "Can MedVLP succeed using purely synthetic data?" To address this, we use off-the-shelf generative models to create synthetic radiology reports and paired Chest X-ray (CXR) images, and propose an automated pipeline to build a diverse, high-quality synthetic dataset, enabling a rigorous study that isolates model and training settings, focusing entirely from the data perspective. Our results show that MedVLP models trained exclusively on synthetic data outperform those trained on real data by 3.8% in averaged AUC on zero-shot classification. Moreover, using a combination of synthetic and real data leads to a further improvement of 9.07%. Additionally, MedVLP models trained on synthetic or mixed data consistently outperform those trained on real data in zero-shot grounding, as well as in fine-tuned classification and segmentation tasks. Our analysis suggests MedVLP trained on well-designed synthetic data can outperform models trained on real datasets, which may be limited by low-quality samples and long-tailed distributions.

Paperid: 2309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08876.pdf

Abstract:
Current vision-language models (VLMs) still exhibit inferior performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, primarily due to the challenge of accurately encoding all the associations between visual objects and scenes to their corresponding entities and background knowledge. While retrieval augmentation methods offer an efficient way to integrate external knowledge, extending them to vision-language domain presents unique challenges in (1) precisely retrieving relevant information from external sources due to the inherent discrepancy within the multimodal queries, and (2) being resilient to the irrelevant, extraneous and noisy information contained in the retrieved multimodal knowledge snippets. In this work, we introduce RORA-VLM, a novel and robust retrieval augmentation framework specifically tailored for VLMs, with two key innovations: (1) a 2-stage retrieval process with image-anchored textual-query expansion to synergistically combine the visual and textual information in the query and retrieve the most relevant multimodal knowledge snippets; and (2) a robust retrieval augmentation method that strengthens the resilience of VLMs against irrelevant information in the retrieved multimodal knowledge by injecting adversarial noises into the retrieval-augmented training process, and filters out extraneous visual information, such as unrelated entities presented in images, via a query-oriented visual token refinement strategy. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods on three widely adopted benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that with a minimal amount of training instance, RORA-VLM enables the base model to achieve significant performance improvement and constantly outperform state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented VLMs on all benchmarks while also exhibiting a novel zero-shot domain transfer capability.

Paperid: 2310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07611.pdf

Abstract:
Optimization of user association in a densely deployed cellular network is usually challenging and even more complicated due to the dynamic nature of user mobility and fluctuation in user counts. While deep reinforcement learning (DRL) emerges as a promising solution, its application in practice is hindered by high trial-and-error costs in real world and unsatisfactory physical network performance during training. Also, existing DRL-based user association methods are typically applicable to scenarios with a fixed number of users due to convergence and compatibility challenges. To address these limitations, we introduce a large vision model (LVM)-enhanced digital twin (DT) for wireless networks and propose a parallel DT-driven DRL method for user association and load balancing in networks with dynamic user counts, distribution, and mobility patterns. To construct this LVM-enhanced DT for DRL training, we develop a zero-shot generative user mobility model, named Map2Traj, based on the diffusion model. Map2Traj estimates user trajectory patterns and spatial distributions solely from street maps. DRL models undergo training in the DT environment, avoiding direct interactions with physical networks. To enhance the generalization ability of DRL models for dynamic scenarios, a parallel DT framework is further established to alleviate strong correlation and non-stationarity in single-environment training and improve training efficiency. Numerical results show that the developed LVM-enhanced DT achieves closely comparable training efficacy to the real environment, and the proposed parallel DT framework even outperforms the single real-world environment in DRL training with nearly 20\% gain in terms of cell-edge user performance.

Paperid: 2311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01089.pdf

Abstract:
Advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved medical task performance, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Report Generation (RG). However, the fairness of these models across diverse demographic groups remains underexplored, despite its importance in healthcare. This oversight is partly due to the lack of demographic diversity in existing medical multimodal datasets, which complicates the evaluation of fairness. In response, we propose FMBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the fairness of MLLMs performance across diverse demographic attributes. FMBench has the following key features: 1: It includes four demographic attributes: race, ethnicity, language, and gender, across two tasks, VQA and RG, under zero-shot settings. 2: Our VQA task is free-form, enhancing real-world applicability and mitigating the biases associated with predefined choices. 3: We utilize both lexical metrics and LLM-based metrics, aligned with clinical evaluations, to assess models not only for linguistic accuracy but also from a clinical perspective. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric, Fairness-Aware Performance (FAP), to evaluate how fairly MLLMs perform across various demographic attributes. We thoroughly evaluate the performance and fairness of eight state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs, including both general and medical MLLMs, ranging from 7B to 26B parameters on the proposed benchmark. We aim for FMBench to assist the research community in refining model evaluation and driving future advancements in the field. All data and code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 2312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15657.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M$^2$PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M$^2$PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.

Paperid: 2313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10811.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, spatial computing Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology, offering users immersive and interactive experiences across diversified virtual environments. Users can interact with VR apps through interactable GUI elements (IGEs) on the stereoscopic three-dimensional (3D) graphical user interface (GUI). The accurate recognition of these IGEs is instrumental, serving as the foundation of many software engineering tasks, including automated testing and effective GUI search. The most recent IGE detection approaches for 2D mobile apps typically train a supervised object detection model based on a large-scale manually-labeled GUI dataset, usually with a pre-defined set of clickable GUI element categories like buttons and spinners. Such approaches can hardly be applied to IGE detection in VR apps, due to a multitude of challenges including complexities posed by open-vocabulary and heterogeneous IGE categories, intricacies of context-sensitive interactability, and the necessities of precise spatial perception and visual-semantic alignment for accurate IGE detection results. Thus, it is necessary to embark on the IGE research tailored to VR apps. In this paper, we propose the first zero-shot cOntext-sensitive inteRactable GUI ElemeNT dEtection framework for virtual Reality apps, named Orienter. By imitating human behaviors, Orienter observes and understands the semantic contexts of VR app scenes first, before performing the detection. The detection process is iterated within a feedback-directed validation and reflection loop. Specifically, Orienter contains three components, including (1) Semantic context comprehension, (2) Reflection-directed IGE candidate detection, and (3) Context-sensitive interactability classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Orienter is more effective than the state-of-the-art GUI element detection approaches.

Paperid: 2314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00543.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in medical vision-language pre-training (MedVLP) have significantly enhanced zero-shot medical vision tasks such as image classification by leveraging large-scale medical image-text pair pre-training. However, the performance of these tasks can be heavily influenced by the variability in textual prompts describing the categories, necessitating robustness in MedVLP models to diverse prompt styles. Yet, this sensitivity remains underexplored. In this work, we are the first to systematically assess the sensitivity of three widely-used MedVLP methods to a variety of prompts across 15 different diseases. To achieve this, we designed six unique prompt styles to mirror real clinical scenarios, which were subsequently ranked by interpretability. Our findings indicate that all MedVLP models evaluated show unstable performance across different prompt styles, suggesting a lack of robustness. Additionally, the models' performance varied with increasing prompt interpretability, revealing difficulties in comprehending complex medical concepts. This study underscores the need for further development in MedVLP methodologies to enhance their robustness to diverse zero-shot prompts.

Paperid: 2315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09232.pdf

Abstract:
Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) have achieved breakthroughs in multilingual speech-to-text translation (S2TT). However, existing approaches often overlook semantic commonalities across source languages, leading to biased translation performance. In this work, we propose \textbf{POTSA} (Parallel Optimal Transport for Speech Alignment), a new framework based on cross-lingual parallel speech pairs and Optimal Transport (OT), designed to bridge high- and low-resource translation gaps. First, we introduce a Bias Compensation module to coarsely align initial speech representations across languages. Second, we impose token-level OT constraints on a Q-Former using parallel speech pairs to establish fine-grained consistency of representations. Then, we apply a layer scheduling strategy to focus OT constraints on the most semantically beneficial layers. Experiments on the FLEURS dataset show that our method achieves SOTA performance, with +0.93 BLEU on average over five common languages and +5.05 BLEU on zero-shot languages, using only 10 hours of parallel speech per source language.

Paperid: 2316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04593.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems, gradually becoming the mainstream approach. However, most current approaches address these tasks separately rather than through a unified framework. This work aims to integrate these two tasks into one unified model. Although discrete speech tokenization enables joint modeling, its inherent information loss limits performance in both recognition and generation. In this work, we present UniVoice, a unified LLM framework through continuous representations that seamlessly integrates speech recognition and synthesis within a single model. Our approach combines the strengths of autoregressive modeling for speech recognition with flow matching for high-quality generation. To mitigate the inherent divergence between autoregressive and flow-matching models, we further design a dual attention mechanism, which switches between a causal mask for recognition and a bidirectional attention mask for synthesis. Furthermore, the proposed text-prefix-conditioned speech infilling method enables high-fidelity zero-shot voice cloning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve or exceed current single-task modeling methods in both ASR and zero-shot TTS tasks. This work explores new possibilities for end-to-end speech understanding and generation.

Paperid: 2317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12437.pdf

Abstract:
A major challenge in deploying world models is the trade-off between size and performance. Large world models can capture rich physical dynamics but require massive computing resources, making them impractical for edge devices. Small world models are easier to deploy but often struggle to learn accurate physics, leading to poor predictions. We propose the Physics-Informed BEV World Model (PIWM), a compact model designed to efficiently capture physical interactions in bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations. PIWM uses Soft Mask during training to improve dynamic object modeling and future prediction. We also introduce a simple yet effective technique, Warm Start, for inference to enhance prediction quality with a zero-shot model. Experiments show that at the same parameter scale (400M), PIWM surpasses the baseline by 60.6% in weighted overall score. Moreover, even when compared with the largest baseline model (400M), the smallest PIWM (130M Soft Mask) achieves a 7.4% higher weighted overall score with a 28% faster inference speed.

Paperid: 2318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07500.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic systems demand accurate and comprehensive 3D environment perception, requiring simultaneous capture of photo-realistic appearance (optical), precise layout shape (geometric), and open-vocabulary scene understanding (semantic). Existing methods typically achieve only partial fulfillment of these requirements while exhibiting optical blurring, geometric irregularities, and semantic ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMap. Overall, OmniMap represents the first online mapping framework that simultaneously captures optical, geometric, and semantic scene attributes while maintaining real-time performance and model compactness. At the architectural level, OmniMap employs a tightly coupled 3DGS-Voxel hybrid representation that combines fine-grained modeling with structural stability. At the implementation level, OmniMap identifies key challenges across different modalities and introduces several innovations: adaptive camera modeling for motion blur and exposure compensation, hybrid incremental representation with normal constraints, and probabilistic fusion for robust instance-level understanding. Extensive experiments show OmniMap's superior performance in rendering fidelity, geometric accuracy, and zero-shot semantic segmentation compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenes. The framework's versatility is further evidenced through a variety of downstream applications, including multi-domain scene Q&A, interactive editing, perception-guided manipulation, and map-assisted navigation.

Paperid: 2319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11262.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLM) align images and text in a shared representation space that is useful for retrieval and zero-shot transfer. Yet, this alignment can encode and amplify social stereotypes in subtle ways that are not obvious from standard accuracy metrics. In this study, we test whether the contrastive vision-language encoder exhibits gender-linked associations when it places embeddings of face images near embeddings of short phrases that describe occupations and activities. We assemble a dataset of 220 face photographs split by perceived binary gender and a set of 150 unique statements distributed across six categories covering emotional labor, cognitive labor, domestic labor, technical labor, professional roles, and physical labor. We compute unit-norm image embeddings for every face and unit-norm text embeddings for every statement, then define a statement-level association score as the difference between the mean cosine similarity to the male set and the mean cosine similarity to the female set, where positive values indicate stronger association with the male set and negative values indicate stronger association with the female set. We attach bootstrap confidence intervals by resampling images within each gender group, aggregate by category with a separate bootstrap over statements, and run a label-swap null model that estimates the level of mean absolute association we would expect if no gender structure were present. The outcome is a statement-wise and category-wise map of gender associations in a contrastive vision-language space, accompanied by uncertainty, simple sanity checks, and a robust gender bias evaluation framework.

Paperid: 2320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11275.pdf

Abstract:
Efficient and accurate autoformalization methods, which leverage large-scale datasets of extensive natural language mathematical problems to construct formal language datasets, are key to advancing formal mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we propose an autoformalization pipeline based on large language models with error feedback, achieving a fully automatic and training-free formalization approach. Using this pipeline, we curate an Olympiad-level dataset aligning natural language problems with Lean formalizations. The dataset comprises $3,922$ mathematical problems in natural language and $9,787$ in Lean, of which $64.46\%$ were assessed as at least above-average quality, making it suitable as a benchmark for automated theorem provers. Additionally, we investigate the formalization and reasoning capabilities of various LLMs and empirically demonstrate that few-shot learning, error feedback, and increasing sampling numbers enhance the autoformalization process. Experiments of three automated theorem provers on the \dataset\ dataset also highlight its challenging nature and its value as a benchmark for formal reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 2321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19607.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities to generate coherent text, they suffer from the issue of hallucinations -- factually inaccurate statements. Among numerous approaches to tackle hallucinations, especially promising are the self-correcting methods. They leverage the multi-turn nature of LLMs to iteratively generate verification questions inquiring additional evidence, answer them with internal or external knowledge, and use that to refine the original response with the new corrections. These methods have been explored for encyclopedic generation, but less so for domains like news summarization. In this work, we investigate two state-of-the-art self-correcting systems by applying them to correct hallucinated summaries using evidence from three search engines. We analyze the results and provide insights into systems' performance, revealing interesting practical findings on the benefits of search engine snippets and few-shot prompts, as well as high alignment of G-Eval and human evaluation.

Paperid: 2322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01032.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated remarkable performance in speech conversion, including Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) and others. However, the advantages of these models come at the cost of requiring a large number of sampling steps. This limitation hinders their practical application in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ReFlow-VC, a novel high-fidelity speech conversion method based on rectified flow. Specifically, ReFlow-VC is an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) model that transforms a Gaussian distribution to the true Mel-spectrogram distribution along the most direct path. Furthermore, we propose a modeling approach that optimizes speaker features by utilizing both content and pitch information, allowing speaker features to reflect the properties of the current speech more accurately. Experimental results show that ReFlow-VC performs exceptionally well in small datasets and zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 2323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24291.pdf

Abstract:
Currently, zero-shot voice conversion systems are capable of synthesizing the voice of unseen speakers. However, most existing approaches struggle to accurately replicate the speaking style of the source speaker or mimic the distinctive speaking style of the target speaker, thereby limiting the controllability of voice conversion. In this work, we propose Discl-VC, a novel voice conversion framework that disentangles content and prosody information from self-supervised speech representations and synthesizes the target speaker's voice through in-context learning with a flow matching transformer. To enable precise control over the prosody of generated speech, we introduce a mask generative transformer that predicts discrete prosody tokens in a non-autoregressive manner based on prompts. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of Discl-VC in zero-shot voice conversion and its remarkable accuracy in prosody control for synthesized speech.

Paperid: 2324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07893.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate channel state information (CSI) acquisition for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is essential for future mobile communication networks. Channel fingerprint (CF), also referred to as channel knowledge map, is a key enabler for intelligent environment-aware communication and can facilitate CSI acquisition. However, due to the cost limitations of practical sensing nodes and test vehicles, the resulting CF is typically coarse-grained, making it insufficient for wireless transceiver design. In this work, we introduce the concept of CF twins and design a conditional generative diffusion model (CGDM) with strong implicit prior learning capabilities as the computational core of the CF twin to establish the connection between coarse- and fine-grained CFs. Specifically, we employ a variational inference technique to derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) for the log-marginal distribution of the observed fine-grained CF conditioned on the coarse-grained CF, enabling the CGDM to learn the complicated distribution of the target data. During the denoising neural network optimization, the coarse-grained CF is introduced as side information to accurately guide the conditioned generation of the CGDM. To make the proposed CGDM lightweight, we further leverage the additivity of network layers and introduce a one-shot pruning approach along with a multi-objective knowledge distillation technique. Experimental results show that the proposed approach exhibits significant improvement in reconstruction performance compared to the baselines. Additionally, zero-shot testing on reconstruction tasks with different magnification factors further demonstrates the scalability and generalization ability of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 2325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15524.pdf

Abstract:
Intellectual Property (IP) is a highly specialized domain that integrates technical and legal knowledge, making it inherently complex and knowledge-intensive. Recent advancements in LLMs have demonstrated their potential to handle IP-related tasks, enabling more efficient analysis, understanding, and generation of IP-related content. However, existing datasets and benchmarks focus narrowly on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce IPBench, the first comprehensive IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark encompassing 8 IP mechanisms and 20 distinct tasks, designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP scenarios. We benchmark 17 main LLMs, ranging from general purpose to domain-specific, including chat-oriented and reasoning-focused models, under zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought settings. Our results show that even the top-performing model, DeepSeek-V3, achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating significant room for improvement. Notably, open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models. To foster future research, we publicly release IPBench, and will expand it with additional tasks to better reflect real-world complexities and support model advancements in the IP domain. We provide the data and code in the supplementary URLs.

Paperid: 2326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17073.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate a surprising amount of factual world knowledge. However, their performance on temporal questions and historical knowledge is limited because they often cannot understand temporal scope and orientation or neglect the temporal aspect altogether. In this study, we aim to measure precisely how robust LLMs are for question answering based on their ability to process temporal information and perform tasks requiring temporal reasoning and temporal factual knowledge. Specifically, we design eight time-sensitive robustness tests for factual information to check the sensitivity of six popular LLMs in the zero-shot setting. Overall, we find LLMs lacking temporal robustness, especially to temporal reformulations and the use of different granularities of temporal references. We show how a selection of these eight tests can be used automatically to judge a model's temporal robustness for user questions on the fly. Finally, we apply the findings of this study to improve the temporal QA performance by up to 55 percent.

Paperid: 2327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16528.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced open-vocabulary mapping, enabling mobile robots to simultaneously achieve environmental reconstruction and high-level semantic understanding. While integrated object cognition helps mitigate semantic ambiguity in point-wise feature maps, efficiently obtaining rich semantic understanding and robust incremental reconstruction at the instance-level remains challenging. To address these challenges, we introduce OpenVox, a real-time incremental open-vocabulary probabilistic instance voxel representation. In the front-end, we design an efficient instance segmentation and comprehension pipeline that enhances language reasoning through encoding captions. In the back-end, we implement probabilistic instance voxels and formulate the cross-frame incremental fusion process into two subtasks: instance association and live map evolution, ensuring robustness to sensor and segmentation noise. Extensive evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that OpenVox achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and open-vocabulary retrieval. Furthermore, real-world robotics experiments validate OpenVox's capability for stable, real-time operation.

Paperid: 2328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03393.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate forecasting of epidemic infection trajectories is crucial for safeguarding public health. However, limited data availability during emerging outbreaks and the complex interaction between environmental factors and disease dynamics present significant challenges for effective forecasting. In response, we introduce CAPE, a novel epidemic pre-training framework designed to harness extensive disease datasets from diverse regions and integrate environmental factors directly into the modeling process for more informed decision-making on downstream diseases. Based on a covariate adjustment framework, CAPE utilizes pre-training combined with hierarchical environment contrasting to identify universal patterns across diseases while estimating latent environmental influences. We have compiled a diverse collection of epidemic time series datasets and validated the effectiveness of CAPE under various evaluation scenarios, including full-shot, few-shot, zero-shot, cross-location, and cross-disease settings, where it outperforms the leading baseline by an average of 9.9% in full-shot and 14.3% in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 2329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15245.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models have drawn considerable attention in modern open-domain question answering. The effectiveness of RAG depends on the quality of the top retrieved documents. However, conventional retrieval methods sometimes fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top. In this paper, we introduce ASRank, a new re-ranking method based on scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent which relies on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of the document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent. Our approach demonstrates marked improvements across several datasets, including NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions. Notably, ASRank increases Top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ from $19.2\%$ to $46.5\%$ for MSS and $22.1\%$ to $47.3\%$ for BM25. It also shows strong retrieval performance on several datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods (47.3 Top-1 by ASRank vs 35.4 by UPR by BM25).

Paperid: 2330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14205.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform zero-shot learning on unseen tasks and few-shot learning on complex reasoning tasks. However, resource-limited mobile edge networks struggle to support long-context LLM serving for LLM agents during multi-round interactions with users. Unlike stateless computation offloading and static service offloading in edge computing, optimizing LLM serving at edge servers is challenging because LLMs continuously learn from context which raises accuracy, latency, and resource consumption dynamics. In this paper, we propose a joint model caching and inference offloading framework that utilizes test-time deep reinforcement learning (T2DRL) to optimize deployment and execution strategies for long-context LLM serving. In this framework, we analyze the performance convergence and design an optimization problem considering the utilization of context windows in LLMs. Furthermore, the T2DRL algorithm can learn in both the training phase and the testing phase to proactively manage cached models and service requests and adapt to context changes and usage patterns during execution. To further enhance resource allocation efficiency, we propose a double Dutch auction (DDA) mechanism, which dynamically matches supply and demand while maximizing social welfare. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the T2DRL algorithm can reduce system costs by at least 30% compared to baselines while guaranteeing the performance of LLM agents in real-world perception and reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 2331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00600.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents DynRank, a novel framework for enhancing passage retrieval in open-domain question-answering systems through dynamic zero-shot question classification. Traditional approaches rely on static prompts and pre-defined templates, which may limit model adaptability across different questions and contexts. In contrast, DynRank introduces a dynamic prompting mechanism, leveraging a pre-trained question classification model that categorizes questions into fine-grained types. Based on these classifications, contextually relevant prompts are generated, enabling more effective passage retrieval. We integrate DynRank into existing retrieval frameworks and conduct extensive experiments on multiple QA benchmark datasets.

Paperid: 2332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17249.pdf

Abstract:
We present Buffer Anytime, a framework for estimation of depth and normal maps (which we call geometric buffers) from video that eliminates the need for paired video--depth and video--normal training data. Instead of relying on large-scale annotated video datasets, we demonstrate high-quality video buffer estimation by leveraging single-image priors with temporal consistency constraints. Our zero-shot training strategy combines state-of-the-art image estimation models based on optical flow smoothness through a hybrid loss function, implemented via a lightweight temporal attention architecture. Applied to leading image models like Depth Anything V2 and Marigold-E2E-FT, our approach significantly improves temporal consistency while maintaining accuracy. Experiments show that our method not only outperforms image-based approaches but also achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art video models trained on large-scale paired video datasets, despite using no such paired video data.

Paperid: 2333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06626.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is a critical technique for effective scene understanding. Traditional RGB-T semantic segmentation models often struggle to generalize across diverse scenarios due to their reliance on pretrained models and predefined categories. Recent advancements in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have facilitated a shift from closed-set to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods. However, these models face challenges in dealing with intricate scenes, primarily due to the heterogeneity between RGB and thermal modalities. To address this gap, we present Open-RGBT, a novel open-vocabulary RGB-T semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we obtain instance-level detection proposals by incorporating visual prompts to enhance category understanding. Additionally, we employ the CLIP model to assess image-text similarity, which helps correct semantic consistency and mitigates ambiguities in category identification. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Open-RGBT achieves superior performance in diverse and challenging real-world scenarios, even in the wild, significantly advancing the field of RGB-T semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 2334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04802.pdf

Abstract:
Very High Resolution (VHR) geospatial image analysis is crucial for humanitarian assistance in both natural and anthropogenic crises, as it allows to rapidly identify the most critical areas that need support. Nonetheless, manually inspecting large areas is time-consuming and requires domain expertise. Thanks to their accuracy, generalization capabilities, and highly parallelizable workload, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) provide an excellent way to automate this task. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of VHR data pertaining to conflict situations, and consequently, of studies on the effectiveness of DNNs in those scenarios. Motivated by this, our work extensively studies the applicability of a collection of state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) originally developed for natural disasters damage assessment in a war scenario. To this end, we build an annotated dataset with pre- and post-conflict images of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. We then explore the transferability of the CNN models in both zero-shot and learning scenarios, demonstrating their potential and limitations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use sub-meter resolution imagery to assess building damage in combat zones.

Paperid: 2335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17046.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting and answering ambiguous questions has been a challenging task in open-domain question answering. Ambiguous questions have different answers depending on their interpretation and can take diverse forms. Temporally ambiguous questions are one of the most common types of such questions. In this paper, we introduce TEMPAMBIQA, a manually annotated temporally ambiguous QA dataset consisting of 8,162 open-domain questions derived from existing datasets. Our annotations focus on capturing temporal ambiguity to study the task of detecting temporally ambiguous questions. We propose a novel approach by using diverse search strategies based on disambiguated versions of the questions. We also introduce and test non-search, competitive baselines for detecting temporal ambiguity using zero-shot and few-shot approaches.

Paperid: 2336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05835.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) based summarization and text generation are increasingly used for producing and rewriting text, raising concerns about political framing in journalism where subtle wording choices can shape interpretation. Across nine state-of-the-art LLMs, we study political framing by testing whether LLMs' classification-based bias signals align with framing behavior in their generated summaries. We first compare few-shot ideology predictions against LEFT/CENTER/RIGHT labels. We then generate "steered" summaries under FAITHFUL, CENTRIST, LEFT, and RIGHT prompts, and score all outputs using a single fixed ideology evaluator. We find pervasive ideological center-collapse in both article-level ratings and generated text, indicating a systematic tendency toward centrist framing. Among evaluated models, Grok 4 is by far the most ideologically expressive generator, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Llama 3.1 achieve the strongest bias-rating performance among commercial and open-weight models, respectively.

Paperid: 2337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15840.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose robots require decision-making models that generalize across diverse tasks and environments. Recent works build robot foundation models by extending multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with action outputs, creating vision-language-action (VLA) systems. These efforts are motivated by the intuition that MLLMs' large-scale language and image pretraining can be effectively transferred to the action output modality. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm of using large-scale video pretraining as a primary modality for building robot foundation models. Unlike static images and language, videos capture spatio-temporal sequences of states and actions in the physical world that are naturally aligned with robotic behavior. We curate an internet-scale video dataset of human activities and task demonstrations, and train, for the first time at a foundation-model scale, an open video model for generative robotics planning. The model produces zero-shot video plans for novel scenes and tasks, which we post-process to extract executable robot actions. We evaluate task-level generalization through third-party selected tasks in the wild and real-robot experiments, demonstrating successful physical execution. Together, these results show robust instruction following, strong generalization, and real-world feasibility. We release both the model and dataset to support open, reproducible video-based robot learning. Our website is available at https://www.boyuan.space/large-video-planner/.

Paperid: 2338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17373.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid robots are envisioned to perform a wide range of tasks in human-centered environments, requiring controllers that combine agility with robust balance. Recent advances in locomotion and whole-body tracking have enabled impressive progress in either agile dynamic skills or stability-critical behaviors, but existing methods remain specialized, focusing on one capability while compromising the other. In this work, we introduce AMS (Agility Meets Stability), the first framework that unifies both dynamic motion tracking and extreme balance maintenance in a single policy. Our key insight is to leverage heterogeneous data sources: human motion capture datasets that provide rich, agile behaviors, and physically constrained synthetic balance motions that capture stability configurations. To reconcile the divergent optimization goals of agility and stability, we design a hybrid reward scheme that applies general tracking objectives across all data while injecting balance-specific priors only into synthetic motions. Further, an adaptive learning strategy with performance-driven sampling and motion-specific reward shaping enables efficient training across diverse motion distributions. We validate AMS extensively in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Experiments demonstrate that a single policy can execute agile skills such as dancing and running, while also performing zero-shot extreme balance motions like Ip Man's Squat, highlighting AMS as a versatile control paradigm for future humanoid applications.

Paperid: 2339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16883.pdf

Abstract:
The growing number of Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse capabilities and response styles provides users with a wider range of choices, which presents challenges in selecting appropriate LLMs, as user preferences vary in terms of performance, cost, and response style. Current LLM selection methods typically optimize for a single fixed objective, such as performance, cost, or a trade-off between them, and fail to learn individual user preferences from interaction data. To address these limitations, we propose PersonalizedRouter, a graph-based framework that models diverse user profiles and performs personalized LLM selection by leveraging interaction data that includes task context, queries, candidate LLMs, and user decisions. To capture contextual information between user queries and optimal LLMs, PersonalizedRouter converts the interaction data into a heterogeneous graph, where the relationships between different types of nodes are represented by edges. To evaluate adaptability across users, we design two strategies: the multi-cost-efficiency simulation strategy and the LLM-as-a-Judge strategy. In addition, we construct PersonaRoute-Bench, a large-scale benchmark with 1,000 simulated users and 10 LLMs. Experimental results show that PersonalizedRouter significantly outperforms existing LLM selection methods and surpasses the strongest methods by a large margin of 15.38% and 9.83% under two simulation strategies. On the PersonaRoute-Bench with 1,000 users, it further surpasses the best methods by 16.19% and 59.69% while maintaining higher efficiency. Moreover, PersonalizedRouter demonstrates strong few-shot generalization, achieving 64.81% and 85.80% of the fully trained model's performance when adapting to new users and new LLMs.

Paperid: 2340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03601.pdf

Abstract:
We present Step-Audio-EditX, the first open-source LLM-based audio model excelling at expressive and iterative audio editing encompassing emotion, speaking style, and paralinguistics alongside robust zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities.Our core innovation lies in leveraging only large-margin synthetic data, which circumvents the need for embedding-based priors or auxiliary modules. This large-margin learning approach enables both iterative control and high expressivity across voices, and represents a fundamental pivot from the conventional focus on representation-level disentanglement. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio-EditX surpasses both MiniMax-2.6-hd and Doubao-Seed-TTS-2.0 in emotion editing and other fine-grained control tasks.

Paperid: 2341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01188.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid spread of fake news threatens social stability and public trust, rendering its detection an imperative research priority. Although large language models (LLMs) excel at numerous natural language processing tasks with their remarkable contextual understanding and extensive prior knowledge, the time-bounded knowledge coverage and tendency for generating hallucination content reduce their reliability when handling fast-evolving news streams. Furthermore, models trained on existing static datasets also often lack the generalization needed for emerging news topics. To address these challenges, we propose ZoFia, a novel two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework. First, we introduce Hierarchical Salience to quantify the importance of entities in the news content, and propose the SC-MMR algorithm to effectively select an informative and diverse set of keywords that serve as queries for retrieving up-to-date external evidence. Subsequently, a multi LLM interactive system, in which each agent assumes a distinct role, performs multi-view collaborative analysis and adversarial debate over the news text and its related information, and finally produces an interpretable and robust judgment. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that ZoFia obviously outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and most of few-shot methods. Our codes will be open-sourced to facilitate related communities.

Paperid: 2342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18509.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we present a solution for the modernization of legacy applications, an area of code generation where LLM-based multi-agent systems are proving essential for complex multi-phased tasks. Legacy applications often contain deprecated components that create compatibility, security, and reliability risks, but high resource costs make companies hesitate to update. We take a step forward to integrate an LLM-based multi-agent system as part of a legacy web application update to provide a cost-effective solution to update legacy applications autonomously. We propose a multi-agent system named a Verifying Agent Pipeline Updater (VAPU), which is designed to update code files in phases while simulating different roles in a software development team. In our previous study, we evaluated the system for legacy version updates by using six legacy web application view files by resulting errors and accomplished requirements. This study extends the previous evaluation of a multi-agent pipeline system by extending the evaluation of VAPU from a single LLM to five LLMs and using the temperature parameter in both 0 to 1 settings. Additionally, we tested the system with 20 open-source Python GitHub projects. The results of the evaluation were compared to Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and One-Shot Learning (OSL) prompts. The extended evaluation of VAPU showed that particularly in a low-temperature VAPU can get similar level of error count compared to the ZSL/OSL prompts but with a higher level of fulfilled requirements, depending on the LLM. VAPU showed up to 22.5% increase in the succeeding Python file update requirements compared to ZSL/OSL prompts. The study indicates that an LLM-based multi-agent system is a capable solution to update components of a legacy application autonomously.

Paperid: 2343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12210.pdf

Abstract:
Recent attempts to interleave autoregressive (AR) sketchers with diffusion-based refiners over continuous speech representations have shown promise, but they remain brittle under distribution shift and offer limited levers for controllability. We introduce DISTAR, a zero-shot text-to-speech framework that operates entirely in a discrete residual vector quantization (RVQ) code space and tightly couples an AR language model with a masked diffusion model, without forced alignment or a duration predictor. Concretely, DISTAR drafts block-level RVQ tokens with an AR language model and then performs parallel masked-diffusion infilling conditioned on the draft to complete the next block, yielding long-form synthesis with blockwise parallelism while mitigating classic AR exposure bias. The discrete code space affords explicit control at inference: DISTAR produces high-quality audio under both greedy and sample-based decoding using classifier-free guidance, supports trade-offs between robustness and diversity, and enables variable bit-rate and controllable computation via RVQ layer pruning at test time. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate that DISTAR surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS systems in robustness, naturalness, and speaker/style consistency, while maintaining rich output diversity. Audio samples are provided on https://anonymous.4open.science/w/DiSTAR_demo.

Paperid: 2344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01967.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have attracted increasing attention in the wireless communication domain. Leveraging the powerful multi-task learning capability, FMs hold the promise of unifying multiple tasks of wireless communication with a single framework. Nevertheless, existing wireless FMs face limitations in the uniformity to address multiple tasks with diverse inputs/outputs across different communication scenarios. In this paper, we propose a MUlti-taSk Environment-aware FM (MUSE-FM) with a unified architecture to handle multiple tasks in wireless communications, while effectively incorporating scenario information. Specifically, to achieve task uniformity, we propose a unified prompt-guided data encoder-decoder pair to handle data with heterogeneous formats and distributions across different tasks. Besides, we integrate the environmental context as a multi-modal input, which serves as prior knowledge of environment and channel distributions and facilitates cross-scenario feature extraction. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed MUSE-FM outperforms existing methods for various tasks, and its prompt-guided encoder-decoder pair facilitates few-shot adaptation to new task configurations. Moreover, the incorporation of environment information improves the ability to adapt to different scenarios.

Paperid: 2345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02864.pdf

Abstract:
Robots must integrate multiple sensory modalities to act effectively in the real world. Yet, learning such multimodal policies at scale remains challenging. Simulation offers a viable solution, but while vision has benefited from high-fidelity simulators, other modalities (e.g. sound) can be notoriously difficult to simulate. As a result, sim-to-real transfer has succeeded primarily in vision-based tasks, with multimodal transfer still largely unrealized. In this work, we tackle these challenges by introducing MultiGen, a framework that integrates large-scale generative models into traditional physics simulators, enabling multisensory simulation. We showcase our framework on the dynamic task of robot pouring, which inherently relies on multimodal feedback. By synthesizing realistic audio conditioned on simulation video, our method enables training on rich audiovisual trajectories -- without any real robot data. We demonstrate effective zero-shot transfer to real-world pouring with novel containers and liquids, highlighting the potential of generative modeling to both simulate hard-to-model modalities and close the multimodal sim-to-real gap.

Paperid: 2346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21638.pdf

Abstract:
Ranking tasks are ubiquitous, encompassing applications such as recommendation systems, LLM routing, and item re-ranking. We propose to unify these tasks using a single ranking foundation model (FM), as it eliminates the need for designing different models for each specific ranking task. However, unlike general supervision tasks in LLMs, ranking tasks do not have clear labels for supervision, posing great challenges to developing a ranking FM. To overcome these challenges, we propose IRanker, a ranking FM framework with reinforcement learning (RL) and iterative decoding. Our insight is to decompose the complex ranking task into an iterative decoding process that eliminates the worst candidate from the candidate pool step by step, which significantly reduces the output combinatorial space and better utilizes the limited context length during RL training. We meticulously train and comprehensively evaluate an IRanker-3B model on nine datasets across three scenarios: recommendation, routing, and passage ranking. The results show that a single IRanker-3B achieves state-of-the-art results on several datasets compared to models of similar size, and even surpasses the performance of larger models on certain datasets. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our RL design and the robustness of the iterative mechanism across different LLM sizes. Moreover, we conducted both in-domain and out-of-domain zero-shot generalization experiments, which showed that IRanker-3B achieved good generalization on in-domain ranking tasks compared to the base LLM by at least 5% improvement. Surprisingly, on out-of-domain generic LLM tasks, IRanker-3B outperformed the base model by at least 9% on GSM8K, IFEval, and MathQA. In addition, the thoughts generated by IRanker-3B during training could further enhance zero-shot LLM performance.

Paperid: 2347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17693.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection, which aims to identify public opinion towards specific targets using social media data, is an important yet challenging task. With the increasing number of online debates among social media users, conversational stance detection has become a crucial research area. However, existing conversational stance detection datasets are restricted to a limited set of specific targets, which constrains the effectiveness of stance detection models when encountering a large number of unseen targets in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we manually curate a large-scale, high-quality zero-shot conversational stance detection dataset, named ZS-CSD, comprising 280 targets across two distinct target types. Leveraging the ZS-CSD dataset, we propose SITPCL, a speaker interaction and target-aware prototypical contrastive learning model, and establish the benchmark performance in the zero-shot setting. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SITPCL model achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot conversational stance detection. Notably, the SITPCL model attains only an F1-macro score of 43.81%, highlighting the persistent challenges in zero-shot conversational stance detection.

Paperid: 2348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07735.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Architecture Representation Learning aims to transform network models into feature representations for predicting network attributes, playing a crucial role in deploying and designing networks for real-world applications. Recently, inspired by the success of transformers, transformer-based models integrated with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant progress in representation learning. However, current methods still have some limitations. First, existing methods overlook hardware attribute information, which conflicts with the current trend of diversified deep learning hardware and limits the practical applicability of models. Second, current encoding approaches rely on static adjacency matrices to represent topological structures, failing to capture the structural differences between computational nodes, which ultimately compromises encoding effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce LeDG-Former, an innovative framework that addresses these limitations through the synergistic integration of language-based semantic embedding and dynamic graph representation learning. Specifically, inspired by large language models (LLMs), we propose a language embedding framework where both neural architectures and hardware platform specifications are projected into a unified semantic space through tokenization and LLM processing, enabling zero-shot prediction across different hardware platforms for the first time. Then, we propose a dynamic graph-based transformer for modeling neural architectures, resulting in improved neural architecture modeling performance. On the NNLQP benchmark, LeDG-Former surpasses previous methods, establishing a new SOTA while demonstrating the first successful cross-hardware latency prediction capability. Furthermore, our framework achieves superior performance on the cell-structured NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201 datasets.

Paperid: 2349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24672.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to generating harmful content or being exploited for malicious purposes. Although safety alignment datasets have been introduced to mitigate such risks through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these datasets often lack comprehensive risk coverage. Most existing datasets focus primarily on lexical diversity while neglecting other critical dimensions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analysis framework to systematically measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three essential dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. We further introduce TRIDENT, an automated pipeline that leverages persona-based, zero-shot LLM generation to produce diverse and comprehensive instructions spanning these dimensions. Each harmful instruction is paired with an ethically aligned response, resulting in two datasets: TRIDENT-Core, comprising 26,311 examples, and TRIDENT-Edge, with 18,773 examples. Fine-tuning Llama 3.1-8B on TRIDENT-Edge demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving an average 14.29% reduction in Harm Score, and a 20% decrease in Attack Success Rate compared to the best-performing baseline model fine-tuned on the WildBreak dataset.

Paperid: 2350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17871.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of universal time series forecasting models has revolutionized zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains, yet the critical role of data diversity in training these models remains underexplored. Existing large-scale time series datasets often suffer from inherent biases and imbalanced distributions, leading to suboptimal model performance and generalization. To address this gap, we introduce BLAST, a novel pre-training corpus designed to enhance data diversity through a balanced sampling strategy. First, BLAST incorporates 321 billion observations from publicly available datasets and employs a comprehensive suite of statistical metrics to characterize time series patterns. Then, to facilitate pattern-oriented sampling, the data is implicitly clustered using grid-based partitioning. Furthermore, by integrating grid sampling and grid mixup techniques, BLAST ensures a balanced and representative coverage of diverse patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that models pre-trained on BLAST achieve state-of-the-art performance with a fraction of the computational resources and training tokens required by existing methods. Our findings highlight the pivotal role of data diversity in improving both training efficiency and model performance for the universal forecasting task.

Paperid: 2351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04869.pdf

Abstract:
Producing large volumes of high-quality, timely feedback poses significant challenges to instructors. To address this issue, automation technologies-particularly Large Language Models (LLMs)-show great potential. However, current LLM-based research still shows room for improvement in terms of feedback quality. Our study proposed a multi-agent approach performing "generation, evaluation, and regeneration" (G-E-RG) to further enhance feedback quality. In the first-generation phase, six methods were adopted, combining three feedback theoretical frameworks and two prompt methods: zero-shot and retrieval-augmented generation with chain-of-thought (RAG_CoT). The results indicated that, compared to first-round feedback, G-E-RG significantly improved final feedback across six methods for most dimensions. Specifically:(1) Evaluation accuracy for six methods increased by 3.36% to 12.98% (p<0.001); (2) The proportion of feedback containing four effective components rose from an average of 27.72% to an average of 98.49% among six methods, sub-dimensions of providing critiques, highlighting strengths, encouraging agency, and cultivating dialogue also showed great enhancement (p<0.001); (3) There was a significant improvement in most of the feature values (p<0.001), although some sub-dimensions (e.g., strengthening the teacher-student relationship) still require further enhancement; (4) The simplicity of feedback was effectively enhanced (p<0.001) for three methods.

Paperid: 2352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13882.pdf

Abstract:
Our study introduces an automated system leveraging large language models (LLMs) to assess the effectiveness of five key tutoring strategies: 1. giving effective praise, 2. reacting to errors, 3. determining what students know, 4. helping students manage inequity, and 5. responding to negative self-talk. Using a public dataset from the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus, our system classifies each tutoring strategy as either being employed as desired or undesired. Our study utilizes GPT-3.5 with few-shot prompting to assess the use of these strategies and analyze tutoring dialogues. The results show that for the five tutoring strategies, True Negative Rates (TNR) range from 0.655 to 0.738, and Recall ranges from 0.327 to 0.432, indicating that the model is effective at excluding incorrect classifications but struggles to consistently identify the correct strategy. The strategy \textit{helping students manage inequity} showed the highest performance with a TNR of 0.738 and Recall of 0.432. The study highlights the potential of LLMs in tutoring strategy analysis and outlines directions for future improvements, including incorporating more advanced models for more nuanced feedback.

Paperid: 2353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01689.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling inverse problems, offering high-quality posterior-sampling-based solutions. Despite significant advances, a fundamental trade-off persists, regarding the way the conditioned synthesis is employed: Training-based methods achieve high quality results, while zero-shot approaches trade this with flexibility. This work introduces a framework that combines the best of both worlds -- the strong performance of supervised approaches and the flexibility of zero-shot methods. This is achieved through a novel architectural design that seamlessly integrates the degradation operator directly into the denoiser. In each block, our proposed architecture applies the degradation operator on the network activations and conditions the output using the attention mechanism, enabling adaptation to diverse degradation scenarios while maintaining high performance. Our work demonstrates the versatility of the proposed architecture, operating as a general MMSE estimator, a posterior sampler, or a Neural Posterior Principal Component estimator. This flexibility enables a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the broad applicability of our framework. The proposed modification of the denoiser network offers a versatile, accurate, and computationally efficient solution, demonstrating the advantages of dedicated network architectures for complex inverse problems. Experimental results on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art posterior-sampling performance, surpassing both training-based and zero-shot alternatives.

Paperid: 2354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19954.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection on social media aims to identify attitudes expressed in tweets towards specific targets. Current studies prioritize Large Language Models (LLMs) over Small Language Models (SLMs) due to the overwhelming performance improving provided by LLMs. However, heavily relying on LLMs for stance detection, regardless of the cost, is impractical for real-world social media monitoring systems that require vast data analysis. To this end, we propose \textbf{\underline{Co}}llaborative Stance Detection via Small-Large Language Model Consistency \textbf{\underline{Ver}}ification (\textbf{CoVer}) framework, which enhances LLM utilization via context-shared batch reasoning and logical verification between LLM and SLM. Specifically, instead of processing each text individually, CoVer processes texts batch-by-batch, obtaining stance predictions and corresponding explanations via LLM reasoning in a shared context. Then, to exclude the bias caused by context noises, CoVer introduces the SLM for logical consistency verification. Finally, texts that repeatedly exhibit low logical consistency are classified using consistency-weighted aggregation of prior LLM stance predictions. Our experiments show that CoVer outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks in the zero-shot setting, achieving 0.54 LLM queries per tweet while significantly enhancing performance. Our CoVer offers a more practical solution for LLM deploying for social media stance detection.

Paperid: 2355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04416.pdf

Abstract:
Style voice conversion aims to transform the speaking style of source speech into a desired style while keeping the original speaker's identity. However, previous style voice conversion approaches primarily focus on well-defined domains such as emotional aspects, limiting their practical applications. In this study, we present ZSVC, a novel Zero-shot Style Voice Conversion approach that utilizes a speech codec and a latent diffusion model with speech prompting mechanism to facilitate in-context learning for speaking style conversion. To disentangle speaking style and speaker timbre, we introduce information bottleneck to filter speaking style in the source speech and employ Uncertainty Modeling Adaptive Instance Normalization (UMAdaIN) to perturb the speaker timbre in the style prompt. Moreover, we propose a novel adversarial training strategy to enhance in-context learning and improve style similarity. Experiments conducted on 44,000 hours of speech data demonstrate the superior performance of ZSVC in generating speech with diverse speaking styles in zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 2356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12155.pdf

Abstract:
Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) are effective in learning expressive representations for signed graphs but typically require substantial task-specific labels, limiting their applicability in label-scarce industrial scenarios. In contrast, unsigned graph structures are abundant and can be readily leveraged to pre-train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), offering a promising solution to reduce supervision requirements in downstream signed graph tasks. However, transferring knowledge from unsigned to signed graphs is non-trivial due to the fundamental discrepancies in graph types and task objectives between pre-training and downstream phases. To address this challenge, we propose Signed Graph Prompt Tuning (SGPT), a novel graph prompting framework that adapts pre-trained unsigned GNNs to few-shot signed graph tasks. We first design a graph template based on balance theory to disentangle mixed node relationships introduced by negative links, mitigating the structural mismatches between unsigned and signed graphs. We further introduce a task template that reformulates downstream signed tasks into a unified link prediction objective, aligning their optimization goals with the pre-training task. Furthermore, we develop feature prompts that align downstream semantic spaces with the feature spaces learned during pre-training, and semantic prompts to integrate link sign semantics in a task-aware manner. We conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmark signed graph datasets, demonstrating that SGPT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful and generalizable solution for few-shot signed graph learning.

Paperid: 2357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11255.pdf

Abstract:
Equity is a core concern of learning analytics. However, applications that teach and assess equity skills, particularly at scale are lacking, often due to barriers in evaluating language. Advances in generative AI via large language models (LLMs) are being used in a wide range of applications, with this present work assessing its use in the equity domain. We evaluate tutor performance within an online lesson on enhancing tutors' skills when responding to students in potentially inequitable situations. We apply a mixed-method approach to analyze the performance of 81 undergraduate remote tutors. We find marginally significant learning gains with increases in tutors' self-reported confidence in their knowledge in responding to middle school students experiencing possible inequities from pretest to posttest. Both GPT-4o and GPT-4-turbo demonstrate proficiency in assessing tutors ability to predict and explain the best approach. Balancing performance, efficiency, and cost, we determine that few-shot learning using GPT-4o is the preferred model. This work makes available a dataset of lesson log data, tutor responses, rubrics for human annotation, and generative AI prompts. Future work involves leveling the difficulty among scenarios and enhancing LLM prompts for large-scale grading and assessment.

Paperid: 2358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07768.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Test-time Correction (TTC) system, a novel online 3D detection system designated for online correction of test-time errors via human feedback, to guarantee the safety of deployed autonomous driving systems. Unlike well-studied offline 3D detectors frozen at inference, TTC explores the capability of instant online error rectification. By leveraging user feedback with interactive prompts at a frame, e.g., a simple click or draw of boxes, TTC could immediately update the corresponding detection results for future streaming inputs, even though the model is deployed with fixed parameters. This enables autonomous driving systems to adapt to new scenarios immediately and decrease deployment risks reliably without additional expensive training. To achieve such TTC system, we equip existing 3D detectors with Online Adapter (OA) module, a prompt-driven query generator for online correction. At the core of OA module are visual prompts, images of missed object-of-interest for guiding the corresponding detection and subsequent tracking. Those visual prompts, belonging to missed objects through online inference, are maintained by the visual prompt buffer for continuous error correction in subsequent frames. By doing so, TTC consistently detects online missed objects and immediately lowers driving risks. It achieves reliable, versatile, and adaptive driving autonomy. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant gain on instant error rectification over pre-trained 3D detectors, even in challenging scenarios with limited labels, zero-shot detection, and adverse conditions. We hope this work would inspire the community to investigate online rectification systems for autonomous driving post-deployment. Code would be publicly shared.

Paperid: 2359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18918.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert the original speaker's timbre to any target speaker while keeping the linguistic content. Current mainstream zero-shot voice conversion approaches depend on pre-trained recognition models to disentangle linguistic content and speaker representation. This results in a timbre residue within the decoupled linguistic content and inadequacies in speaker representation modeling. In this study, we propose CoDiff-VC, an end-to-end framework for zero-shot voice conversion that integrates a speech codec and a diffusion model to produce high-fidelity waveforms. Our approach involves employing a single-codebook codec to separate linguistic content from the source speech. To enhance content disentanglement, we introduce Mix-Style layer normalization (MSLN) to perturb the original timbre. Additionally, we incorporate a multi-scale speaker timbre modeling approach to ensure timbre consistency and improve voice detail similarity. To improve speech quality and speaker similarity, we introduce dual classifier-free guidance, providing both content and timbre guidance during the generation process. Objective and subjective experiments affirm that CoDiff-VC significantly improves speaker similarity, generating natural and higher-quality speech.

Paperid: 2360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01432.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning offers a promising avenue for few-shot learning (FSL), enabling models to glean a generalizable feature embedding through episodic training on synthetic FSL tasks in a source domain. Yet, in practical scenarios where the target task diverges from that in the source domain, meta-learning based method is susceptible to over-fitting. To overcome this, we introduce a novel framework, Meta-Exploiting Frequency Prior for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning, which is crafted to comprehensively exploit the cross-domain transferable image prior that each image can be decomposed into complementary low-frequency content details and high-frequency robust structural characteristics. Motivated by this insight, we propose to decompose each query image into its high-frequency and low-frequency components, and parallel incorporate them into the feature embedding network to enhance the final category prediction. More importantly, we introduce a feature reconstruction prior and a prediction consistency prior to separately encourage the consistency of the intermediate feature as well as the final category prediction between the original query image and its decomposed frequency components. This allows for collectively guiding the network's meta-learning process with the aim of learning generalizable image feature embeddings, while not introducing any extra computational cost in the inference phase. Our framework establishes new state-of-the-art results on multiple cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks.

Paperid: 2361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23815.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the NPU-HWC system submitted to the ISCSLP 2024 Inspirational and Convincing Audio Generation Challenge 2024 (ICAGC). Our system consists of two modules: a speech generator for Track 1 and a background audio generator for Track 2. In Track 1, we employ Single-Codec to tokenize the speech into discrete tokens and use a language-model-based approach to achieve zero-shot speaking style cloning. The Single-Codec effectively decouples timbre and speaking style at the token level, reducing the acoustic modeling burden on the autoregressive language model. Additionally, we use DSPGAN to upsample 16 kHz mel-spectrograms to high-fidelity 48 kHz waveforms. In Track 2, we propose a background audio generator based on large language models (LLMs). This system produces scene-appropriate accompaniment descriptions, synthesizes background audio with Tango 2, and integrates it with the speech generated by our Track 1 system. Our submission achieves the second place and the first place in Track 1 and Track 2 respectively.

Paperid: 2362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19697.pdf

Abstract:
Navigating efficiently to an object in an unexplored environment is a critical skill for general-purpose intelligent robots. Recent approaches to this object goal navigation problem have embraced a modular strategy, integrating classical exploration algorithms-notably frontier exploration-with a learned semantic mapping/exploration module. This paper introduces a novel informative path planning and 3D object probability mapping approach. The mapping module computes the probability of the object of interest through semantic segmentation and a Bayes filter. Additionally, it stores probabilities for common objects, which semantically guides the exploration based on common sense priors from a large language model. The planner terminates when the current viewpoint captures enough voxels identified with high confidence as the object of interest. Although our planner follows a zero-shot approach, it achieves state-of-the-art performance as measured by the Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) and Soft SPL in the Habitat ObjectNav Challenge 2023, outperforming other works by more than 20%. Furthermore, we validate its effectiveness on real robots. Project webpage: https://ippon-paper.github.io/

Paperid: 2363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12855.pdf

Abstract:
Despite advancements in enhancing LLM safety against jailbreak attacks, evaluating LLM defenses remains a challenge, with current methods often lacking explainability and generalization to complex scenarios, leading to incomplete assessments (e.g., direct judgment without reasoning, low F1 score of GPT-4 in complex cases, bias in multilingual scenarios). To address this, we present JAILJUDGE, a comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse risk scenarios, including synthetic, adversarial, in-the-wild, and multilingual prompts, along with high-quality human-annotated datasets. The JAILJUDGE dataset includes over 35k+ instruction-tune data with reasoning explainability and JAILJUDGETEST, a 4.5k+ labeled set for risk scenarios, and a 6k+ multilingual set across ten languages. To enhance evaluation with explicit reasoning, we propose the JailJudge MultiAgent framework, which enables explainable, fine-grained scoring (1 to 10). This framework supports the construction of instruction-tuning ground truth and facilitates the development of JAILJUDGE Guard, an end-to-end judge model that provides reasoning and eliminates API costs. Additionally, we introduce JailBoost, an attacker-agnostic attack enhancer, and GuardShield, a moderation defense, both leveraging JAILJUDGE Guard. Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of JailJudge methods (JailJudge MultiAgent, JAILJUDGE Guard) across diverse models (e.g., GPT-4, Llama-Guard) and zero-shot scenarios. JailBoost and GuardShield significantly improve jailbreak attack and defense tasks under zero-shot settings, with JailBoost enhancing performance by 29.24% and GuardShield reducing defense ASR from 40.46% to 0.15%.

Paperid: 2364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04721.pdf

Abstract:
Autoregressive models (ARMs) and diffusion models (DMs) represent two leading paradigms in generative modeling, each excelling in distinct areas: ARMs in global context modeling and long-sequence generation, and DMs in generating high-quality local contexts, especially for continuous data such as images and short videos. However, ARMs often suffer from exponential error accumulation over long sequences, leading to physically implausible results, while DMs are limited by their local context generation capabilities. In this work, we introduce Autoregressive Coherent multimodal generation with Diffusion Correction (ACDC), a zero-shot approach that combines the strengths of both ARMs and DMs at the inference stage without the need for additional fine-tuning. ACDC leverages ARMs for global context generation and memory-conditioned DMs for local correction, ensuring high-quality outputs by correcting artifacts in generated multimodal tokens. In particular, we propose a memory module based on large language models (LLMs) that dynamically adjusts the conditioning texts for the DMs, preserving crucial global context information. Our experiments on multimodal tasks, including coherent multi-frame story generation and autoregressive video generation, demonstrate that ACDC effectively mitigates the accumulation of errors and significantly enhances the quality of generated outputs, achieving superior performance while remaining agnostic to specific ARM and DM architectures. Project page: https://acdc2025.github.io/

Paperid: 2365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13490.pdf

Abstract:
Theory-of-Mind (ToM) ability possessed by Large Language Models (LLMs) has been shown to be limited. Most existing methods for improving ToM in LLMs adopt zero-shot prompting, and they face challenges including poor performance in complex ToM reasoning tasks and an inability to handle non-narrative contexts. We propose a zero-shot prompting method named Constrained Chain-of-ToM (CCoToM) that leverages domain knowledge and the causal relations between ToM dimensions to address these limitations. Specifically, CCoToM guides LLMs to construct explicit reasoning chains by first prompting LLMs to infer related ToM dimensions (e.g., belief). Afterward, CCoToM prompts LLMs to infer the queried ToM dimension based on the generated related ToM dimensions and corresponding causal relations. Additionally, CCoToM adaptively imposes constraints on prompts to introduce inductive biases and improve consistency between ToM dimensions. Besides narratives, CCoToM can also handle non-narrative contexts like conversations. Extensive experiments show that CCoToM consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins across all LLMs and datasets used. We also conduct in-depth analyses to gain deeper insights into CCoToM. We have made our code publicly available.

Paperid: 2366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08731.pdf

Abstract:
Mainstream zero-shot TTS production systems like Voicebox and Seed-TTS achieve human parity speech by leveraging Flow-matching and Diffusion models, respectively. Unfortunately, human-level audio synthesis leads to identity misuse and information security issues. Currently, many antispoofing models have been developed against deepfake audio. However, the efficacy of current state-of-the-art anti-spoofing models in countering audio synthesized by diffusion and flowmatching based TTS systems remains unknown. In this paper, we proposed the Diffusion and Flow-matching based Audio Deepfake (DFADD) dataset. The DFADD dataset collected the deepfake audio based on advanced diffusion and flowmatching TTS models. Additionally, we reveal that current anti-spoofing models lack sufficient robustness against highly human-like audio generated by diffusion and flow-matching TTS systems. The proposed DFADD dataset addresses this gap and provides a valuable resource for developing more resilient anti-spoofing models.

Paperid: 2367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08513.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) aims to detect objects beyond a predefined set of categories. As a pioneering model incorporating the YOLO series into OVD, YOLO-World is well-suited for scenarios prioritizing speed and efficiency. However, its performance is hindered by its neck feature fusion mechanism, which causes the quadratic complexity and the limited guided receptive fields. To address these limitations, we present Mamba-YOLO-World, a novel YOLO-based OVD model employing the proposed MambaFusion Path Aggregation Network (MambaFusion-PAN) as its neck architecture. Specifically, we introduce an innovative State Space Model-based feature fusion mechanism consisting of a Parallel-Guided Selective Scan algorithm and a Serial-Guided Selective Scan algorithm with linear complexity and globally guided receptive fields. It leverages multi-modal input sequences and mamba hidden states to guide the selective scanning process. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the original YOLO-World on the COCO and LVIS benchmarks in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings while maintaining comparable parameters and FLOPs. Additionally, it surpasses existing state-of-the-art OVD methods with fewer parameters and FLOPs.

Paperid: 2368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02095.pdf

Abstract:
Estimating video depth in open-world scenarios is challenging due to the diversity of videos in appearance, content motion, camera movement, and length. We present DepthCrafter, an innovative method for generating temporally consistent long depth sequences with intricate details for open-world videos, without requiring any supplementary information such as camera poses or optical flow. The generalization ability to open-world videos is achieved by training the video-to-depth model from a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model, through our meticulously designed three-stage training strategy. Our training approach enables the model to generate depth sequences with variable lengths at one time, up to 110 frames, and harvest both precise depth details and rich content diversity from realistic and synthetic datasets. We also propose an inference strategy that can process extremely long videos through segment-wise estimation and seamless stitching. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets reveal that DepthCrafter achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-world video depth estimation under zero-shot settings. Furthermore, DepthCrafter facilitates various downstream applications, including depth-based visual effects and conditional video generation.

Paperid: 2369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21475.pdf

Abstract:
Handcrafted optimizers become prohibitively inefficient for complex black-box optimization (BBO) tasks. MetaBBO addresses this challenge by meta-learning to automatically configure optimizers for low-level BBO tasks, thereby eliminating heuristic dependencies. However, existing methods typically require extensive handcrafted training tasks to learn meta-strategies that generalize to target tasks, which poses a critical limitation for realistic applications with unknown task distributions. To overcome the issue, we propose the Adaptive meta Black-box Optimization Model (ABOM), which performs online parameter adaptation using solely optimization data from the target task, obviating the need for predefined task distributions. Unlike conventional metaBBO frameworks that decouple meta-training and optimization phases, ABOM introduces a closed-loop adaptive parameter learning mechanism, where parameterized evolutionary operators continuously self-update by leveraging generated populations during optimization. This paradigm shift enables zero-shot optimization: ABOM achieves competitive performance on synthetic BBO benchmarks and realistic unmanned aerial vehicle path planning problems without any handcrafted training tasks. Visualization studies reveal that parameterized evolutionary operators exhibit statistically significant search patterns, including natural selection and genetic recombination.

Paperid: 2370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12594.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) has achieved notable success in learning semantically rich audio representations and is widely adopted for various audio-related tasks. However, current CLAP models face several key limitations. First, they are typically trained on relatively small datasets, often comprising a few million audio samples. Second, existing CLAP models are restricted to short and fixed duration, which constrains their usage in real-world scenarios with variable-duration audio. Third, the standard contrastive training objective operates on global representations, which may hinder the learning of dense, fine-grained audio features. To address these challenges, we introduce Scalable Language-Audio Pretraining (SLAP), which scales language-audio pretraining to 109 million audio-text pairs with variable audio durations and incorporates multiple training objectives. SLAP unifies contrastive loss with additional self-supervised and captioning losses in a single-stage training, facilitating the learning of richer dense audio representations. The proposed SLAP model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on audio-text retrieval and zero-shot audio classification tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks.

Paperid: 2371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11954.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamic graphs have attracted increasing attention due to their ability to model complex and evolving relationships in real-world scenarios. Traditional approaches typically pre-train models using dynamic link prediction and directly apply the resulting node temporal embeddings to specific downstream tasks. However, the significant differences among downstream tasks often lead to performance degradation, especially under few-shot settings. Prompt tuning has emerged as an effective solution to this problem. Existing prompting methods are often strongly coupled with specific model architectures or pretraining tasks, which makes it difficult to adapt to recent or future model designs. Moreover, their exclusive focus on modifying node or temporal features while neglecting spatial structural information leads to limited expressiveness and degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose DDGPrompt, a data-centric prompting framework designed to effectively refine pre-trained node embeddings at the input data level, enabling better adaptability to diverse downstream tasks. We first define a unified node expression feature matrix that aggregates all relevant temporal and structural information of each node, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of dynamic graph models. Then, we introduce three prompt matrices (temporal bias, edge weight, and feature mask) to adjust the feature matrix completely, achieving task-specific adaptation of node embeddings. We evaluate DDGPrompt under a strict few-shot setting on four public dynamic graph datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional methods and prompting approaches in scenarios with limited labels and cold-start conditions.

Paperid: 2372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21233.pdf

Abstract:
Tactile sensing is crucial for robotic hands to achieve human-level dexterous manipulation, especially in scenarios with visual occlusion. However, its application is often hindered by the difficulty of collecting large-scale real-world robotic tactile data. In this study, we propose to collect low-cost human manipulation data using haptic gloves for tactile-based robotic policy learning. The misalignment between human and robotic tactile data makes it challenging to transfer policies learned from human data to robots. To bridge this gap, we propose UniTacHand, a unified representation to align robotic tactile information captured by dexterous hands with human hand touch obtained from gloves. First, we project tactile signals from both human hands and robotic hands onto a morphologically consistent 2D surface space of the MANO hand model. This unification standardizes the heterogeneous data structures and inherently embeds the tactile signals with spatial context. Then, we introduce a contrastive learning method to align them into a unified latent space, trained on only 10 minutes of paired data from our data collection system. Our approach enables zero-shot tactile-based policy transfer from humans to a real robot, generalizing to objects unseen in the pre-training data. We also demonstrate that co-training on mixed data, including both human and robotic demonstrations via UniTacHand, yields better performance and data efficiency compared with using only robotic data. UniTacHand paves a path toward general, scalable, and data-efficient learning for tactile-based dexterous hands.

Paperid: 2373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23101.pdf

Abstract:
We evaluate large language models (LLMs) for automatic personality prediction from text under the binary Five Factor Model (BIG5). Five models -- including GPT-4 and lightweight open-source alternatives -- are tested across three heterogeneous datasets (Essays, MyPersonality, Pandora) and two prompting strategies (minimal vs. enriched with linguistic and psychological cues). Enriched prompts reduce invalid outputs and improve class balance, but also introduce a systematic bias toward predicting trait presence. Performance varies substantially: Openness and Agreeableness are relatively easier to detect, while Extraversion and Neuroticism remain challenging. Although open-source models sometimes approach GPT-4 and prior benchmarks, no configuration yields consistently reliable predictions in zero-shot binary settings. Moreover, aggregate metrics such as accuracy and macro-F1 mask significant asymmetries, with per-class recall offering clearer diagnostic value. These findings show that current out-of-the-box LLMs are not yet suitable for APPT, and that careful coordination of prompt design, trait framing, and evaluation metrics is essential for interpretable results.

Paperid: 2374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11422.pdf

Abstract:
Decoding visual features from EEG signals is a central challenge in neuroscience, with cross-modal alignment as the dominant approach. We argue that the relationship between visual and brain modalities is fundamentally asymmetric, characterized by two critical gaps: a Fidelity Gap (stemming from EEG's inherent noise and signal degradation, vs. vision's high-fidelity features) and a Semantic Gap (arising from EEG's shallow conceptual representation, vs. vision's rich semantic depth). Previous methods often overlook this asymmetry, forcing alignment between the two modalities as if they were equal partners and thereby leading to poor generalization. To address this, we propose the adaptive teaching paradigm. This paradigm empowers the ``teacher" modality (vision) to dynamically shrink and adjust its knowledge structure under task guidance, tailoring its semantically dense features to match the ``student" modality (EEG)'s capacity. We implement this paradigm with the ShrinkAdapter, a simple yet effective module featuring a residual-free design and a bottleneck structure. Through extensive experiments, we validate the underlying rationale and effectiveness of our paradigm. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 60.2\% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 9.8\%. Our work introduces a new perspective for asymmetric alignment: the teacher must shrink and adapt to bridge the vision-brain gap.

Paperid: 2375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24038.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate strong generalization in zero-shot classification but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing methods primarily focus on adversarial fine-tuning or prompt optimization; they often overlook the gaps in CLIP's encoded features, which is shown as the text and image features lie far apart from each other. This misalignment is significantly amplified under adversarial perturbations, leading to severe degradation in classification performance. To address this problem, we propose Cross-modality Alignment, dubbed COLA, an optimal transport-based framework that explicitly addresses adversarial misalignment by restoring both global image-text alignment and local structural consistency in the feature space. (1) COLA first projects adversarial image embeddings onto a subspace spanned by class text features, effectively filtering out non-semantic distortions while preserving discriminative information. (2) It then models images and texts as discrete distributions over multiple augmented views and refines their alignment via OT, with the subspace projection seamlessly integrated into the cost computation. This design ensures stable cross-modal alignment even under adversarial conditions. COLA is training-free and compatible with existing fine-tuned models. Extensive evaluations across 14 zero-shot classification benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of COLA, especially with an average improvement of 6.7% on ImageNet and its variants under PGD adversarial attacks, while maintaining high accuracy on clean samples.

Paperid: 2376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13084.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have recently demonstrated significant progress in video editing. However, existing video editing methods are severely limited by their high computational overhead and memory consumption. Furthermore, these approaches often sacrifice visual fidelity, leading to undesirable temporal inconsistencies and artifacts such as blurring and pronounced mosaic-like patterns. We propose Edit-Your-Interest, a lightweight, text-driven, zero-shot video editing method. Edit-Your-Interest introduces a spatio-temporal feature memory to cache features from previous frames, significantly reducing computational overhead compared to full-sequence spatio-temporal modeling approaches. Specifically, we first introduce a Spatio-Temporal Feature Memory bank (SFM), which is designed to efficiently cache and retain the crucial image tokens processed by spatial attention. Second, we propose the Feature Most-Similar Propagation (FMP) method. FMP propagates the most relevant tokens from previous frames to subsequent ones, preserving temporal consistency. Finally, we introduce an SFM update algorithm that continuously refreshes the cached features, ensuring their long-term relevance and effectiveness throughout the video sequence. Furthermore, we leverage cross-attention maps to automatically extract masks for the instances of interest. These masks are seamlessly integrated into the diffusion denoising process, enabling fine-grained control over target objects and allowing Edit-Your-Interest to perform highly accurate edits while robustly preserving the background integrity. Extensive experiments decisively demonstrate that the proposed Edit-Your-Interest outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and visual fidelity, validating its superior effectiveness and practicality.

Paperid: 2377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26391.pdf

Abstract:
Image-to-video generation has made remarkable progress with the advancements in diffusion models, yet generating videos with realistic motion remains highly challenging. This difficulty arises from the complexity of accurately modeling motion, which involves capturing physical constraints, object interactions, and domain-specific dynamics that are not easily generalized across diverse scenarios. To address this, we propose MotionRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that enhances motion realism by adapting motion priors from relevant reference videos through Context-Aware Motion Adaptation (CAMA). The key technical innovations include: (i) a retrieval-based pipeline extracting high-level motion features using video encoder and specialized resamplers to distill semantic motion representations; (ii) an in-context learning approach for motion adaptation implemented through a causal transformer architecture; (iii) an attention-based motion injection adapter that seamlessly integrates transferred motion features into pretrained video diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements across multiple domains and various base models, all with negligible computational overhead during inference. Furthermore, our modular design enables zero-shot generalization to new domains by simply updating the retrieval database without retraining any components. This research enhances the core capability of video generation systems by enabling the effective retrieval and transfer of motion priors, facilitating the synthesis of realistic motion dynamics.

Paperid: 2378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20322.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid loco-manipulation in unstructured environments demands tight integration of egocentric perception and whole-body control. However, existing approaches either depend on external motion capture systems or fail to generalize across diverse tasks. We introduce VisualMimic, a visual sim-to-real framework that unifies egocentric vision with hierarchical whole-body control for humanoid robots. VisualMimic combines a task-agnostic low-level keypoint tracker -- trained from human motion data via a teacher-student scheme -- with a task-specific high-level policy that generates keypoint commands from visual and proprioceptive input. To ensure stable training, we inject noise into the low-level policy and clip high-level actions using human motion statistics. VisualMimic enables zero-shot transfer of visuomotor policies trained in simulation to real humanoid robots, accomplishing a wide range of loco-manipulation tasks such as box lifting, pushing, football dribbling, and kicking. Beyond controlled laboratory settings, our policies also generalize robustly to outdoor environments. Videos are available at: https://visualmimic.github.io .

Paperid: 2379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15711.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of generative AI in medical imaging has introduced both significant opportunities and serious challenges, especially the risk that fake medical images could undermine healthcare systems. These synthetic images pose serious risks, such as diagnostic deception, financial fraud, and misinformation. However, research on medical forensics to counter these threats remains limited, and there is a critical lack of comprehensive datasets specifically tailored for this field. Additionally, existing media forensic methods, which are primarily designed for natural or facial images, are inadequate for capturing the distinct characteristics and subtle artifacts of AI-generated medical images. To tackle these challenges, we introduce \textbf{MedForensics}, a large-scale medical forensics dataset encompassing six medical modalities and twelve state-of-the-art medical generative models. We also propose \textbf{DSKI}, a novel \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{S}tage \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{I}nfusing detector that constructs a vision-language feature space tailored for the detection of AI-generated medical images. DSKI comprises two core components: 1) a cross-domain fine-trace adapter (CDFA) for extracting subtle forgery clues from both spatial and noise domains during training, and 2) a medical forensic retrieval module (MFRM) that boosts detection accuracy through few-shot retrieval during testing. Experimental results demonstrate that DSKI significantly outperforms both existing methods and human experts, achieving superior accuracy across multiple medical modalities.

Paperid: 2380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15536.pdf

Abstract:
World models allow agents to simulate the consequences of actions in imagined environments for planning, control, and long-horizon decision-making. However, existing autoregressive world models struggle with visually coherent predictions due to disrupted spatial structure, inefficient decoding, and inadequate motion modeling. In response, we propose \textbf{S}cale-wise \textbf{A}utoregression with \textbf{M}otion \textbf{P}r\textbf{O}mpt (\textbf{SAMPO}), a hybrid framework that combines visual autoregressive modeling for intra-frame generation with causal modeling for next-frame generation. Specifically, SAMPO integrates temporal causal decoding with bidirectional spatial attention, which preserves spatial locality and supports parallel decoding within each scale. This design significantly enhances both temporal consistency and rollout efficiency. To further improve dynamic scene understanding, we devise an asymmetric multi-scale tokenizer that preserves spatial details in observed frames and extracts compact dynamic representations for future frames, optimizing both memory usage and model performance. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory-aware motion prompt module that injects spatiotemporal cues about object and robot trajectories, focusing attention on dynamic regions and improving temporal consistency and physical realism. Extensive experiments show that SAMPO achieves competitive performance in action-conditioned video prediction and model-based control, improving generation quality with 4.4$\times$ faster inference. We also evaluate SAMPO's zero-shot generalization and scaling behavior, demonstrating its ability to generalize to unseen tasks and benefit from larger model sizes.

Paperid: 2381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11058.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection (ZS-VAD) requires temporally localizing anomalies without target domain training data, which is a crucial task due to various practical concerns, e.g., data privacy or new surveillance deployments. Skeleton-based approach has inherent generalizable advantages in achieving ZS-VAD as it eliminates domain disparities both in background and human appearance. However, existing methods only learn low-level skeleton representation and rely on the domain-limited normality boundary, which cannot generalize well to new scenes with different normal and abnormal behavior patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot video anomaly detection framework, unlocking the potential of skeleton data via action typicality and uniqueness learning. Firstly, we introduce a language-guided semantic typicality modeling module that projects skeleton snippets into action semantic space and distills LLM's knowledge of typical normal and abnormal behaviors during training. Secondly, we propose a test-time context uniqueness analysis module to finely analyze the spatio-temporal differences between skeleton snippets and then derive scene-adaptive boundaries. Without using any training samples from the target domain, our method achieves state-of-the-art results against skeleton-based methods on four large-scale VAD datasets: ShanghaiTech, UBnormal, NWPU, and UCF-Crime, featuring over 100 unseen surveillance scenes.

Paperid: 2382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09310.pdf

Abstract:
Collaborative perception enables vehicles to overcome individual perception limitations by sharing information, allowing them to see further and through occlusions. In real-world scenarios, models on different vehicles are often heterogeneous due to manufacturer variations. Existing methods for heterogeneous collaborative perception address this challenge by fine-tuning adapters or the entire network to bridge the domain gap. However, these methods are impractical in real-world applications, as each new collaborator must undergo joint training with the ego vehicle on a dataset before inference, or the ego vehicle stores models for all potential collaborators in advance. Therefore, we pose a new question: Can we tackle this challenge directly during inference, eliminating the need for joint training? To answer this, we introduce Progressive Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception (PHCP), a novel framework that formulates the problem as few-shot unsupervised domain adaptation. Unlike previous work, PHCP dynamically aligns features by self-training an adapter during inference, eliminating the need for labeled data and joint training. Extensive experiments on the OPV2V dataset demonstrate that PHCP achieves strong performance across diverse heterogeneous scenarios. Notably, PHCP achieves performance comparable to SOTA methods trained on the entire dataset while using only a small amount of unlabeled data.

Paperid: 2383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16777.pdf

Abstract:
Automated clinical coding involves mapping unstructured text from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to standardized code systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). While recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of ICD coding, the lack of explainability in these models remains a major limitation, undermining trust and transparency. Current explorations about explainability largely rely on attention-based techniques and qualitative assessments by physicians, yet lack systematic evaluation using consistent criteria on high-quality rationale datasets, as well as dedicated approaches explicitly trained to generate rationales for further enhancing explanation. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the explainability of the rationales for ICD coding through two key lenses: faithfulness that evaluates how well explanations reflect the model's actual reasoning and plausibility that measures how consistent the explanations are with human expert judgment. To facilitate the evaluation of plausibility, we construct a new rationale-annotated dataset, offering denser annotations with diverse granularity and aligns better with current clinical practice, and conduct evaluation across three types of rationales of ICD coding. Encouraged by the promising plausibility of LLM-generated rationales for ICD coding, we further propose new rationale learning methods to improve the quality of model-generated rationales, where rationales produced by prompting LLMs with/without annotation examples are used as distant supervision signals. We empirically find that LLM-generated rationales align most closely with those of human experts. Moreover, incorporating few-shot human-annotated examples not only further improves rationale generation but also enhances rationale-learning approaches.

Paperid: 2384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21524.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized artificial intelligence, offering unprecedented capabilities in reasoning, generalization, and zero-shot learning. These strengths open new frontiers in wireless communications, where increasing complexity and dynamics demand intelligent and adaptive solutions. This article explores the role of LLMs in transforming wireless systems across three key directions: adapting pretrained LLMs for core communication tasks, developing wireless-specific foundation models to balance versatility and efficiency, and enabling agentic LLMs with autonomous reasoning and coordination capabilities. We highlight recent advances, practical case studies, and the unique benefits of LLM-based approaches over traditional methods. Finally, we outline open challenges and research opportunities, including multimodal fusion, collaboration with lightweight models, and self-improving capabilities, charting a path toward intelligent, adaptive, and autonomous wireless networks of the future.

Paperid: 2385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05938.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing complexity and dynamics of the mobile communication networks, accurately predicting key system parameters, such as channel state information (CSI), user location, and network traffic, has become essential for a wide range of physical (PHY)-layer and medium access control (MAC)-layer tasks. Although traditional deep learning (DL)-based methods have been widely applied to such prediction tasks, they often struggle to generalize across different scenarios and tasks. In response, we propose a unified foundation model for multi-task prediction in wireless networks that supports diverse prediction intervals. The proposed model enforces univariate decomposition to unify heterogeneous tasks, encodes granularity for interval awareness, and uses a causal Transformer backbone for accurate predictions. Additionally, we introduce a patch masking strategy during training to support arbitrary input lengths. After trained on large-scale datasets, the proposed foundation model demonstrates strong generalization to unseen scenarios and achieves zero-shot performance on new tasks that surpass traditional full-shot baselines.

Paperid: 2386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03657.pdf

Abstract:
With the increasing attention to pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), \eg, CLIP, substantial efforts have been devoted to many downstream tasks, especially in test-time adaptation (TTA). However, previous works focus on learning prototypes only in the textual modality while overlooking the ambiguous semantics in class names. These ambiguities lead to textual prototypes that are insufficient to capture visual concepts, resulting in limited performance. To address this issue, we introduce \textbf{ProtoMM}, a training-free framework that constructs multimodal prototypes to adapt VLMs during the test time. By viewing the prototype as a discrete distribution over the textual descriptions and visual particles, ProtoMM has the ability to combine the multimodal features for comprehensive prototype learning. More importantly, the visual particles are dynamically updated as the testing stream flows. This allows our multimodal prototypes to continually learn from the data, enhancing their generalizability in unseen scenarios. In addition, we quantify the importance of the prototypes and test images by formulating their semantic distance as an optimal transport problem. Extensive experiments on 15 zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 1.03\% average accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods on ImageNet and its variant datasets.

Paperid: 2387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21559.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong capabilities in various domains, and have been recently integrated for graph analysis as graph language models (GLMs). With LLMs as the predictor, some GLMs can interpret unseen tasks described by natural language, and learn from a few examples in the prompts without parameter tuning, known as in-context learning (ICL). Another subset of GLMs utilizes abundant training labels to enhance model performance, known as instruction tuning. However, we argue that ICL on graphs has effectiveness issues due to fixed parameters and efficiency issues due to long context. Meanwhile, the large amount of labeled data required for instruction tuning can be difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. To this end, we aim to introduce an extra parameter adaptation stage that can efficiently tailor GLMs to an unseen graph and task with only a few labeled examples, in exchange for better prediction accuracy and faster inference speed. For implementation, in this paper we propose GraphLAMA method, with its model backbone and learning schemes specialized for efficient tuning and inference. Specifically, for model backbone, we use a graph neural network (GNN) with several well-designed components to transform nodes into the representation space of LLM tokens. Task instructions can then be represented as a mixture of node and language tokens. In the pre-training stage, model parameters except the LLM will be trained with different tasks to capture general knowledge. In the adaptation stage, only a few pre-trained parameters will be updated based on few-shot examples. Extensive experiments on few/zero-shot node classification and summary generation show that our proposed GraphLAMA achieves state-of-the-art performance with 4.91% absolution improvement in accuracy. Compared with ICL, our inference speed can be 10 times faster under 5-shot setting.

Paperid: 2388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13464.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks such as mathematics, coding, and reasoning, yet their learning ability, which is crucial for adapting to dynamic environments and acquiring new knowledge, remains underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a framework inspired by cognitive psychology and education. Specifically, we decompose general learning ability into three distinct, complementary dimensions: Learning from Instructor (acquiring knowledge via explicit guidance), Learning from Concept (internalizing abstract structures and generalizing to new contexts), and Learning from Experience (adapting through accumulated exploration and feedback). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study across the three learning dimensions and identify several insightful findings, such as (i) interaction improves learning; (ii) conceptual understanding is scale-emergent and benefits larger models; and (iii) LLMs are effective few-shot learners but not many-shot learners. Based on our framework and empirical findings, we introduce a benchmark that provides a unified and realistic evaluation of LLMs' general learning abilities across three learning cognition dimensions. It enables diagnostic insights and supports evaluation and development of more adaptive and human-like models.

Paperid: 2389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09416.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Noise Conditional Variational Score Distillation (NCVSD), a novel method for distilling pretrained diffusion models into generative denoisers. We achieve this by revealing that the unconditional score function implicitly characterizes the score function of denoising posterior distributions. By integrating this insight into the Variational Score Distillation (VSD) framework, we enable scalable learning of generative denoisers capable of approximating samples from the denoising posterior distribution across a wide range of noise levels. The proposed generative denoisers exhibit desirable properties that allow fast generation while preserve the benefit of iterative refinement: (1) fast one-step generation through sampling from pure Gaussian noise at high noise levels; (2) improved sample quality by scaling the test-time compute with multi-step sampling; and (3) zero-shot probabilistic inference for flexible and controllable sampling. We evaluate NCVSD through extensive experiments, including class-conditional image generation and inverse problem solving. By scaling the test-time compute, our method outperforms teacher diffusion models and is on par with consistency models of larger sizes. Additionally, with significantly fewer NFEs than diffusion-based methods, we achieve record-breaking LPIPS on inverse problems.

Paperid: 2390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07584.pdf

Abstract:
A unified foundation model for medical time series -- pretrained on open access and ethics board-approved medical corpora -- offers the potential to reduce annotation burdens, minimize model customization, and enable robust transfer across clinical institutions, modalities, and tasks, particularly in data-scarce or privacy-constrained environments. However, existing generalist time series foundation models struggle to handle medical time series data due to their inherent challenges, including irregular intervals, heterogeneous sampling rates, and frequent missing values. To address these challenges, we introduce MIRA, a unified foundation model specifically designed for medical time series forecasting. MIRA incorporates a Continuous-Time Rotary Positional Encoding that enables fine-grained modeling of variable time intervals, a frequency-specific mixture-of-experts layer that routes computation across latent frequency regimes to further promote temporal specialization, and a Continuous Dynamics Extrapolation Block based on Neural ODE that models the continuous trajectory of latent states, enabling accurate forecasting at arbitrary target timestamps. Pretrained on a large-scale and diverse medical corpus comprising over 454 billion time points collect from publicly available datasets, MIRA achieves reductions in forecasting errors by an average of 10% and 7% in out-of-distribution and in-distribution scenarios, respectively, when compared to other zero-shot and fine-tuned baselines. We also introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning multiple downstream clinical tasks, establishing a foundation for future research in medical time series modeling.

Paperid: 2391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17006.pdf

Abstract:
Learning latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for building generalist robots. However, existing discrete latent action methods suffer from information loss and struggle with complex and fine-grained dynamics. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more informative continuous motion representations from diverse, internet-scale videos. CoMo employs a early temporal feature difference mechanism to prevent model collapse and suppress static appearance noise, effectively discouraging shortcut learning problem. Furthermore, guided by the information bottleneck principle, we constrain the latent motion embedding dimensionality to achieve a better balance between retaining sufficient action-relevant information and minimizing the inclusion of action-irrelevant appearance noise. Additionally, we also introduce two new metrics for more robustly and affordably evaluating motion and guiding motion learning methods development: (i) the linear probing MSE of action prediction, and (ii) the cosine similarity between past-to-current and future-to-current motion embeddings. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, enabling it to generate continuous pseudo actions for previously unseen video domains. This capability facilitates unified policy joint learning using pseudo actions derived from various action-less video datasets (such as cross-embodiment videos and, notably, human demonstration videos), potentially augmented with limited labeled robot data. Extensive experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo actions achieve superior performance with both diffusion and autoregressive architectures in simulated and real-world settings.

Paperid: 2392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17990.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging multimodal task that retrieves a target image based on a reference image and accompanying modification text. Due to the high cost of annotating CIR triplet datasets, zero-shot (ZS) CIR has gained traction as a promising alternative. Existing studies mainly focus on projection-based methods, which map an image to a single pseudo-word token. However, these methods face three critical challenges: (1) insufficient pseudo-word token representation capacity, (2) discrepancies between training and inference phases, and (3) reliance on large-scale synthetic data. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework where the training is accomplished from mapping to composing. In the first stage, we enhance image-to-pseudo-word token learning by introducing a visual semantic injection module and a soft text alignment objective, enabling the token to capture richer and fine-grained image information. In the second stage, we optimize the text encoder using a small amount of synthetic triplet data, enabling it to effectively extract compositional semantics by combining pseudo-word tokens with modification text for accurate target image retrieval. The strong visual-to-pseudo mapping established in the first stage provides a solid foundation for the second stage, making our approach compatible with both high- and low-quality synthetic data, and capable of achieving significant performance gains with only a small amount of synthetic data. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public datasets, achieving superior performance compared to existing approaches.

Paperid: 2393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01309.pdf

Abstract:
Online zero-shot 3D instance segmentation of a progressively reconstructed scene is both a critical and challenging task for embodied applications. With the success of visual foundation models (VFMs) in the image domain, leveraging 2D priors to address 3D online segmentation has become a prominent research focus. Since segmentation results provided by 2D priors often require spatial consistency to be lifted into final 3D segmentation, an efficient method for identifying spatial overlap among 2D masks is essential - yet existing methods rarely achieve this in real time, mainly limiting its use to offline approaches. To address this, we propose an efficient method that lifts 2D masks generated by VFMs into a unified 3D instance using a hashing technique. By employing voxel hashing for efficient 3D scene querying, our approach reduces the time complexity of costly spatial overlap queries from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. Accurate spatial associations further enable 3D merging of 2D masks through simple similarity-based filtering in a zero-shot manner, making our approach more robust to incomplete and noisy data. Evaluated on the ScanNet and SceneNN benchmarks, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in online, zero-shot 3D instance segmentation with leading efficiency.

Paperid: 2394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12375.pdf

Abstract:
Fine granularity is an essential requirement for controllable text generation, which has seen rapid growth with the ability of LLMs. However, existing methods focus mainly on a small set of attributes like 3 to 5, and their performance degrades significantly when the number of attributes increases to the next order of magnitude. To address this challenge, we propose a novel zero-shot approach for extremely fine-grained controllable generation (EFCG), proposing auto-reconstruction (AR) and global preference optimization (GPO). In the AR phase, we leverage LLMs to extract soft attributes (e.g., Emphasis on simplicity and minimalism in design) from raw texts, and combine them with programmatically derived hard attributes (e.g., The text should be between 300 and 400 words) to construct massive (around 45) multi-attribute requirements, which guide the fine-grained text reconstruction process under weak supervision. In the GPO phase, we apply direct preference optimization (DPO) to refine text generation under diverse attribute combinations, enabling efficient exploration of the global combination space. Additionally, we introduce an efficient attribute sampling strategy to identify and correct potentially erroneous attributes, further improving global optimization. Our framework significantly improves the constraint satisfaction rate (CSR) and text quality for EFCG by mitigating position bias and alleviating attention dilution.

Paperid: 2395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11275.pdf

Abstract:
Massive high-quality data, both pre-training raw texts and post-training annotations, have been carefully prepared to incubate advanced large language models (LLMs). In contrast, for information extraction (IE), pre-training data, such as BIO-tagged sequences, are hard to scale up. We show that IE models can act as free riders on LLM resources by reframing next-token \emph{prediction} into \emph{extraction} for tokens already present in the context. Specifically, our proposed next tokens extraction (NTE) paradigm learns a versatile IE model, \emph{Cuckoo}, with 102.6M extractive data converted from LLM's pre-training and post-training data. Under the few-shot setting, Cuckoo adapts effectively to traditional and complex instruction-following IE with better performance than existing pre-trained IE models. As a free rider, Cuckoo can naturally evolve with the ongoing advancements in LLM data preparation, benefiting from improvements in LLM training pipelines without additional manual effort.

Paperid: 2396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02950.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating human feedback to align text-to-speech (TTS) system outputs with human preferences has proven to be an effective approach for enhancing the robustness of language model-based TTS systems. Current approaches primarily focus on using preference data annotated at the utterance level. However, frequent issues that affect the listening experience often only arise in specific segments of audio samples, while other segments are well-generated. In this study, we propose a fine-grained preference optimization approach (FPO) to enhance the robustness of TTS systems. FPO focuses on addressing localized issues in generated samples rather than uniformly optimizing the entire utterance. Specifically, we first analyze the types of issues in generated samples, categorize them into two groups, and propose a selective training loss strategy to optimize preferences based on fine-grained labels for each issue type. Experimental results show that FPO enhances the robustness of zero-shot TTS systems by effectively addressing local issues, significantly reducing the bad case ratio, and improving intelligibility. Furthermore, FPO exhibits superior data efficiency compared with baseline systems, achieving similar performance with fewer training samples.

Paperid: 2397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15211.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial image anomaly detection (IAD) is a pivotal topic with huge value. Due to anomaly's nature, real anomalies in a specific modern industrial domain (i.e. domain-specific anomalies) are usually too rare to collect, which severely hinders IAD. Thus, zero-shot anomaly synthesis (ZSAS), which synthesizes pseudo anomaly images without any domain-specific anomaly, emerges as a vital technique for IAD. However, existing solutions are either unable to synthesize authentic pseudo anomalies, or require cumbersome training. Thus, we focus on ZSAS and propose a brand-new paradigm that can realize both authentic and training-free ZSAS. It is based on a chronically-ignored fact: Although domain-specific anomalies are rare, real anomalies from other domains (i.e. cross-domain anomalies) are actually abundant and directly applicable to ZSAS. Specifically, our new ZSAS paradigm makes three-fold contributions: First, we propose a novel method named Cross-domain Anomaly Injection (CAI), which directly exploits cross-domain anomalies to enable highly authentic ZSAS in a training-free manner. Second, to supply CAI with sufficient cross-domain anomalies, we build the first Domain-agnostic Anomaly Dataset within our best knowledge, which provides ZSAS with abundant real anomaly patterns. Third, we propose a CAI-guided Diffusion Mechanism, which further breaks the quantity limit of real anomalies and enable unlimited anomaly synthesis. Our head-to-head comparison with existing ZSAS solutions justifies our paradigm's superior performance for IAD and demonstrates it as an effective and pragmatic ZSAS solution.

Paperid: 2398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05403.pdf

Abstract:
Time series generation models are crucial for applications like data augmentation and privacy preservation. Most existing time series generation models are typically designed to generate data from one specified domain. While leveraging data from other domain for better generalization is proved to work in other application areas, this approach remains challenging for time series modeling due to the large divergence in patterns among different real world time series categories. In this paper, we propose a multi-domain time series diffusion model with domain prompts, named TimeDP. In TimeDP, we utilize a time series semantic prototype module which defines time series prototypes to represent time series basis, each prototype vector serving as "word" representing some elementary time series feature. A prototype assignment module is applied to extract the extract domain specific prototype weights, for learning domain prompts as generation condition. During sampling, we extract "domain prompt" with few-shot samples from the target domain and use the domain prompts as condition to generate time series samples. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines to provide the state-of-the-art in-domain generation quality and strong unseen domain generation capability.

Paperid: 2399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04724.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer the timbre from the source speaker to an arbitrary unseen speaker while preserving the original linguistic content. Despite recent advancements in zero-shot VC using language model-based or diffusion-based approaches, several challenges remain: 1) current approaches primarily focus on adapting timbre from unseen speakers and are unable to transfer style and timbre to different unseen speakers independently; 2) these approaches often suffer from slower inference speeds due to the autoregressive modeling methods or the need for numerous sampling steps; 3) the quality and similarity of the converted samples are still not fully satisfactory. To address these challenges, we propose a style controllable zero-shot VC approach named StableVC, which aims to transfer timbre and style from source speech to different unseen target speakers. Specifically, we decompose speech into linguistic content, timbre, and style, and then employ a conditional flow matching module to reconstruct the high-quality mel-spectrogram based on these decomposed features. To effectively capture timbre and style in a zero-shot manner, we introduce a novel dual attention mechanism with an adaptive gate, rather than using conventional feature concatenation. With this non-autoregressive design, StableVC can efficiently capture the intricate timbre and style from different unseen speakers and generate high-quality speech significantly faster than real-time. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed StableVC outperforms state-of-the-art baseline systems in zero-shot VC and achieves flexible control over timbre and style from different unseen speakers. Moreover, StableVC offers approximately 25x and 1.65x faster sampling compared to autoregressive and diffusion-based baselines.

Paperid: 2400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14347.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP and 5.0 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

Paperid: 2401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05383.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of Internet memes in the age of social media necessitates effective identification of harmful ones. Due to the dynamic nature of memes, existing data-driven models may struggle in low-resource scenarios where only a few labeled examples are available. In this paper, we propose an agency-driven framework for low-resource harmful meme detection, employing both outward and inward analysis with few-shot annotated samples. Inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on multimodal reasoning, we first retrieve relative memes with annotations to leverage label information as auxiliary signals for the LMM agent. Then, we elicit knowledge-revising behavior within the LMM agent to derive well-generalized insights into meme harmfulness. By combining these strategies, our approach enables dialectical reasoning over intricate and implicit harm-indicative patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on three meme datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on the low-resource harmful meme detection task.

Paperid: 2402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00064.pdf

Abstract:
The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge aims to benchmark and advance zero-shot spontaneous style voice cloning, particularly focusing on generating spontaneous behaviors in conversational speech. The challenge comprises two tracks: an unconstrained track without limitation on data and model usage, and a constrained track only allowing the use of constrained open-source datasets. A 100-hour high-quality conversational speech dataset is also made available with the challenge. This paper details the data, tracks, submitted systems, evaluation results, and findings.

Paperid: 2403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20018.pdf

Abstract:
Image and video generative models that are pre-trained on Internet-scale data can greatly increase the generalization capacity of robot learning systems. These models can function as high-level planners, generating intermediate subgoals for low-level goal-conditioned policies to reach. However, the performance of these systems can be greatly bottlenecked by the interface between generative models and low-level controllers. For example, generative models may predict photorealistic yet physically infeasible frames that confuse low-level policies. Low-level policies may also be sensitive to subtle visual artifacts in generated goal images. This paper addresses these two facets of generalization, providing an interface to effectively "glue together" language-conditioned image or video prediction models with low-level goal-conditioned policies. Our method, Generative Hierarchical Imitation Learning-Glue (GHIL-Glue), filters out subgoals that do not lead to task progress and improves the robustness of goal-conditioned policies to generated subgoals with harmful visual artifacts. We find in extensive experiments in both simulated and real environments that GHIL-Glue achieves a 25% improvement across several hierarchical models that leverage generative subgoals, achieving a new state-of-the-art on the CALVIN simulation benchmark for policies using observations from a single RGB camera. GHIL-Glue also outperforms other generalist robot policies across 3/4 language-conditioned manipulation tasks testing zero-shot generalization in physical experiments.

Paperid: 2404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17647.pdf

Abstract:
A significant challenge for autonomous cyber defence is ensuring a defensive agent's ability to generalise across diverse network topologies and configurations. This capability is necessary for agents to remain effective when deployed in dynamically changing environments, such as an enterprise network where devices may frequently join and leave. Standard approaches to deep reinforcement learning, where policies are parameterised using a fixed-input multi-layer perceptron (MLP) expect fixed-size observation and action spaces. In autonomous cyber defence, this makes it hard to develop agents that generalise to environments with network topologies different from those trained on, as the number of nodes affects the natural size of the observation and action spaces. To overcome this limitation, we reframe the problem of autonomous network defence using entity-based reinforcement learning, where the observation and action space of an agent are decomposed into a collection of discrete entities. This framework enables the use of policy parameterisations specialised in compositional generalisation. We train a Transformer-based policy on the Yawning Titan cyber-security simulation environment and test its generalisation capabilities across various network topologies. We demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms an MLP-based policy when training across fixed-size networks of varying topologies, and matches performance when training on a single network. We also demonstrate the potential for zero-shot generalisation to networks of a different size to those seen in training. These findings highlight the potential for entity-based reinforcement learning to advance the field of autonomous cyber defence by providing more generalisable policies capable of handling variations in real-world network environments.

Paperid: 2405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15774.pdf

Abstract:
Large real-world driving datasets have sparked significant research into various aspects of data-driven motion planners for autonomous driving. These include data augmentation, model architecture, reward design, training strategies, and planner pipelines. These planners promise better generalizations on complicated and few-shot cases than previous methods. However, experiment results show that many of these approaches produce limited generalization abilities in planning performance due to overly complex designs or training paradigms. In this paper, we review and benchmark previous methods focusing on generalizations. The experimental results indicate that as models are appropriately scaled, many design elements become redundant. We introduce StateTransformer-2 (STR2), a scalable, decoder-only motion planner that uses a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) causal Transformer architecture. The MoE backbone addresses modality collapse and reward balancing by expert routing during training. Extensive experiments on the NuPlan dataset show that our method generalizes better than previous approaches across different test sets and closed-loop simulations. Furthermore, we assess its scalability on billions of real-world urban driving scenarios, demonstrating consistent accuracy improvements as both data and model size grow.

Paperid: 2406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04844.pdf

Abstract:
In the field of image editing, three core challenges persist: controllability, background preservation, and efficiency. Inversion-based methods rely on time-consuming optimization to preserve the features of the initial images, which results in low efficiency due to the requirement for extensive network inference. Conversely, inversion-free methods lack theoretical support for background similarity, as they circumvent the issue of maintaining initial features to achieve efficiency. As a consequence, none of these methods can achieve both high efficiency and background consistency. To tackle the challenges and the aforementioned disadvantages, we introduce PostEdit, a method that incorporates a posterior scheme to govern the diffusion sampling process. Specifically, a corresponding measurement term related to both the initial features and Langevin dynamics is introduced to optimize the estimated image generated by the given target prompt. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed PostEdit achieves state-of-the-art editing performance while accurately preserving unedited regions. Furthermore, the method is both inversion- and training-free, necessitating approximately 1.5 seconds and 18 GB of GPU memory to generate high-quality results.

Paperid: 2407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02479.pdf

Abstract:
Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex.

Paperid: 2408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02477.pdf

Abstract:
Bimanual dexterous manipulation is a critical yet underexplored area in robotics. Its high-dimensional action space and inherent task complexity present significant challenges for policy learning, and the limited task diversity in existing benchmarks hinders general-purpose skill development. Existing approaches largely depend on reinforcement learning, often constrained by intricately designed reward functions tailored to a narrow set of tasks. In this work, we present a novel approach for efficiently learning diverse bimanual dexterous skills from abundant human demonstrations. Specifically, we introduce BiDexHD, a framework that unifies task construction from existing bimanual datasets and employs teacher-student policy learning to address all tasks. The teacher learns state-based policies using a general two-stage reward function across tasks with shared behaviors, while the student distills the learned multi-task policies into a vision-based policy. With BiDexHD, scalable learning of numerous bimanual dexterous skills from auto-constructed tasks becomes feasible, offering promising advances toward universal bimanual dexterous manipulation. Our empirical evaluation on the TACO dataset, spanning 141 tasks across six categories, demonstrates a task fulfillment rate of 74.59% on trained tasks and 51.07% on unseen tasks, showcasing the effectiveness and competitive zero-shot generalization capabilities of BiDexHD. For videos and more information, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/bidexhd.

Paperid: 2409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01350.pdf

Abstract:
Expressive zero-shot voice conversion (VC) is a critical and challenging task that aims to transform the source timbre into an arbitrary unseen speaker while preserving the original content and expressive qualities. Despite recent progress in zero-shot VC, there remains considerable potential for improvements in speaker similarity and speech naturalness. Moreover, existing zero-shot VC systems struggle to fully reproduce paralinguistic information in highly expressive speech, such as breathing, crying, and emotional nuances, limiting their practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose Takin-VC, a novel expressive zero-shot VC framework via adaptive hybrid content encoding and memory-augmented context-aware timbre modeling. Specifically, we introduce an innovative hybrid content encoder that incorporates an adaptive fusion module, capable of effectively integrating quantized features of the pre-trained WavLM and HybridFormer in an implicit manner, so as to extract precise linguistic features while enriching paralinguistic elements. For timbre modeling, we propose advanced memory-augmented and context-aware modules to generate high-quality target timbre features and fused representations that seamlessly align source content with target timbre. To enhance real-time performance, we advocate a conditional flow matching model to reconstruct the Mel-spectrogram of the source speech. Experimental results show that our Takin-VC consistently surpasses state-of-the-art VC systems, achieving notable improvements in terms of speech naturalness, speech expressiveness, and speaker similarity, while offering enhanced inference speed.

Paperid: 2410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03403.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling up robot learning requires large and diverse datasets, and how to efficiently reuse collected data and transfer policies to new embodiments remains an open question. Emerging research such as the Open-X Embodiment (OXE) project has shown promise in leveraging skills by combining datasets including different robots. However, imbalances in the distribution of robot types and camera angles in many datasets make policies prone to overfit. To mitigate this issue, we propose RoVi-Aug, which leverages state-of-the-art image-to-image generative models to augment robot data by synthesizing demonstrations with different robots and camera views. Through extensive physical experiments, we show that, by training on robot- and viewpoint-augmented data, RoVi-Aug can zero-shot deploy on an unseen robot with significantly different camera angles. Compared to test-time adaptation algorithms such as Mirage, RoVi-Aug requires no extra processing at test time, does not assume known camera angles, and allows policy fine-tuning. Moreover, by co-training on both the original and augmented robot datasets, RoVi-Aug can learn multi-robot and multi-task policies, enabling more efficient transfer between robots and skills and improving success rates by up to 30%. Project website: https://rovi-aug.github.io.

Paperid: 2411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16381.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Anomaly Detection (FSAD) has emerged as a critical paradigm for identifying irregularities using scarce normal references. While recent methods have integrated textual semantics to complement visual data, they predominantly rely on features pre-trained on natural scenes, thereby neglecting the granular, domain-specific semantics essential for industrial inspection. Furthermore, prevalent fusion strategies often resort to superficial concatenation, failing to address the inherent semantic misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which compromises robustness against cross-modal interference. To bridge these gaps, this study proposes VTFusion, a vision-text multimodal fusion framework tailored for FSAD. The framework rests on two core designs. First, adaptive feature extractors for both image and text modalities are introduced to learn task-specific representations, bridging the domain gap between pre-trained models and industrial data; this is further augmented by generating diverse synthetic anomalies to enhance feature discriminability. Second, a dedicated multimodal prediction fusion module is developed, comprising a fusion block that facilitates rich cross-modal information exchange and a segmentation network that generates refined pixel-level anomaly maps under multimodal guidance. VTFusion significantly advances FSAD performance, achieving image-level AUROCs of 96.8% and 86.2% in the 2-shot scenario on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets, respectively. Furthermore, VTFusion achieves an AUPRO of 93.5% on a real-world dataset of industrial automotive plastic parts introduced in this paper, further demonstrating its practical applicability in demanding industrial scenarios.

Paperid: 2412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16060.pdf

Abstract:
Widely adopted medical image segmentation methods, although efficient, are primarily deterministic and remain poorly amenable to natural language prompts. Thus, they lack the capability to estimate multiple proposals, human interaction, and cross-modality adaptation. Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have shown potential to bridge the gap. However, training them from scratch requires a large dataset-a limitation for medical image segmentation. Furthermore, they are often limited to binary segmentation and cannot be conditioned on a natural language prompt. To this end, we propose a novel framework called ProGiDiff that leverages existing image generation models for medical image segmentation purposes. Specifically, we propose a ControlNet-style conditioning mechanism with a custom encoder, suitable for image conditioning, to steer a pre-trained diffusion model to output segmentation masks. It naturally extends to a multi-class setting simply by prompting the target organ. Our experiment on organ segmentation from CT images demonstrates strong performance compared to previous methods and could greatly benefit from an expert-in-the-loop setting to leverage multiple proposals. Importantly, we demonstrate that the learned conditioning mechanism can be easily transferred through low-rank, few-shot adaptation to segment MR images.

Paperid: 2413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04656.pdf

Abstract:
This study proposes FlexiVoice, a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system capable of flexible style control with zero-shot voice cloning. The speaking style is controlled by a natural-language instruction and the voice timbre is provided by a speech reference in zero-shot manner. FlexiVoice is built with an LLM core, which takes text as input, and also takes an optional natural language instruction and an optional speech reference to control style and timbre, respectively. FlexiVoice is equipped with a novel Progressive Post-Training (PPT) scheme that progressively unlocks accurate and flexible controllability. In particular, it first employs Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enable FlexiVoice to accurately follow both natural language instruction and speech reference simultaneously. It then uses a multi-objective Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to disentangle style instruction, reference timbre, and textual content. Finally, it adapts instruction GRPO for more advanced instruction following. Experimental results show that FlexiVoice surpasses competing baselines and demonstrates strong capability in decoupling control factors. Human evaluations further confirm its naturalness, controllability, and robustness. Audio samples are available at https://flexi-voice.github.io.

Paperid: 2414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05094.pdf

Abstract:
Video generation models are rapidly improving in their ability to synthesize human actions in novel contexts, holding the potential to serve as high-level planners for contextual robot control. To realize this potential, a key research question remains open: how can a humanoid execute the human actions from generated videos in a zero-shot manner? This challenge arises because generated videos are often noisy and exhibit morphological distortions that make direct imitation difficult compared to real video. To address this, we introduce a two-stage pipeline. First, we lift video pixels into a 4D human representation and then retarget to the humanoid morphology. Second, we propose GenMimic-a physics-aware reinforcement learning policy conditioned on 3D keypoints, and trained with symmetry regularization and keypoint-weighted tracking rewards. As a result, GenMimic can mimic human actions from noisy, generated videos. We curate GenMimicBench, a synthetic human-motion dataset generated using two video generation models across a spectrum of actions and contexts, establishing a benchmark for assessing zero-shot generalization and policy robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate improvements over strong baselines in simulation and confirm coherent, physically stable motion tracking on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot without fine-tuning. This work offers a promising path to realizing the potential of video generation models as high-level policies for robot control.

Paperid: 2415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22697.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Action (VLAs) models promise to extend the remarkable success of vision-language models (VLMs) to robotics. Yet, unlike VLMs in the vision-language domain, VLAs for robotics require finetuning to contend with varying physical factors like robot embodiment, environment characteristics, and spatial relationships of each task. Existing fine-tuning methods lack specificity, adapting the same set of parameters regardless of a task's visual, linguistic, and physical characteristics. Inspired by functional specificity in neuroscience, we hypothesize that it is more effective to finetune sparse model representations specific to a given task. In this work, we introduce Robotic Steering, a finetuning approach grounded in mechanistic interpretability that leverages few-shot demonstrations to identify and selectively finetune task-specific attention heads aligned with the physical, visual, and linguistic requirements of robotic tasks. Through comprehensive on-robot evaluations with a Franka Emika robot arm, we demonstrate that Robotic Steering outperforms LoRA while achieving superior robustness under task variation, reduced computational cost, and enhanced interpretability for adapting VLAs to diverse robotic tasks.

Paperid: 2416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11762.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce the Sumudu Neural Operator (SNO), a neural operator rooted in the properties of the Sumudu Transform. We leverage the relationship between the polynomial expansions of transform pairs to decompose the input space as coefficients, which are then transformed into the Sumudu Space, where the neural operator is parameterized. We evaluate the operator in ODEs (Duffing Oscillator, Lorenz System, and Driven Pendulum) and PDEs (Euler-Bernoulli Beam, Burger's Equation, Diffusion, Diffusion-Reaction, and Brusselator). SNO achieves superior performance to FNO on PDEs and demonstrates competitive accuracy with LNO on several PDE tasks, including the lowest error on the Euler-Bernoulli Beam and Diffusion Equation. Additionally, we apply zero-shot super-resolution to the PDE tasks to observe the model's capability of obtaining higher quality data from low-quality samples. These preliminary findings suggest promise for the Sumudu Transform as a neural operator design, particularly for certain classes of PDEs.

Paperid: 2417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10020.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Anomagic, a zero-shot anomaly generation method that produces semantically coherent anomalies without requiring any exemplar anomalies. By unifying both visual and textual cues through a crossmodal prompt encoding scheme, Anomagic leverages rich contextual information to steer an inpainting-based generation pipeline. A subsequent contrastive refinement strategy enforces precise alignment between synthesized anomalies and their masks, thereby bolstering downstream anomaly detection accuracy. To facilitate training, we introduce AnomVerse, a collection of 12,987 anomaly-mask-caption triplets assembled from 13 publicly available datasets, where captions are automatically generated by multimodal large language models using structured visual prompts and template-based textual hints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Anomagic trained on AnomVerse can synthesize more realistic and varied anomalies than prior methods, yielding superior improvements in downstream anomaly detection. Furthermore, Anomagic can generate anomalies for any normal-category image using user-defined prompts, establishing a versatile foundation model for anomaly generation.

Paperid: 2418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08997.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection methods have evolved from closed-set to open-set paradigms over the years. Current open-set object detectors, however, remain constrained by their exclusive reliance on positive indicators based on given prompts like text descriptions or visual exemplars. This positive-only paradigm experiences consistent vulnerability to visually similar but semantically different distractors. We propose T-Rex-Omni, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by incorporating negative visual prompts to negate hard negative distractors. Specifically, we first introduce a unified visual prompt encoder that jointly processes positive and negative visual prompts. Next, a training-free Negating Negative Computing (NNC) module is proposed to dynamically suppress negative responses during the probability computing stage. To further boost performance through fine-tuning, our Negating Negative Hinge (NNH) loss enforces discriminative margins between positive and negative embeddings. T-Rex-Omni supports flexible deployment in both positive-only and joint positive-negative inference modes, accommodating either user-specified or automatically generated negative examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable zero-shot detection performance, significantly narrowing the performance gap between visual-prompted and text-prompted methods while showing particular strength in long-tailed scenarios (51.2 AP_r on LVIS-minival). This work establishes negative prompts as a crucial new dimension for advancing open-set visual recognition systems.

Paperid: 2419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07931.pdf

Abstract:
Aligning large generative models with human feedback is a critical challenge. In speech synthesis, this is particularly pronounced due to the lack of a large-scale human preference dataset, which hinders the development of models that truly align with human perception. To address this, we introduce SpeechJudge, a comprehensive suite comprising a dataset, a benchmark, and a reward model centered on naturalness--one of the most fundamental subjective metrics for speech synthesis. First, we present SpeechJudge-Data, a large-scale human feedback corpus of 99K speech pairs. The dataset is constructed using a diverse set of advanced zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models across diverse speech styles and multiple languages, with human annotations for both intelligibility and naturalness preference. From this, we establish SpeechJudge-Eval, a challenging benchmark for speech naturalness judgment. Our evaluation reveals that existing metrics and AudioLLMs struggle with this task; the leading model, Gemini-2.5-Flash, achieves less than 70% agreement with human judgment, highlighting a significant gap for improvement. To bridge this gap, we develop SpeechJudge-GRM, a generative reward model (GRM) based on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B. It is trained on SpeechJudge-Data via a two-stage post-training process: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Chain-of-Thought rationales followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with GRPO on challenging cases. On the SpeechJudge-Eval benchmark, the proposed SpeechJudge-GRM demonstrates superior performance, achieving 77.2% accuracy (and 79.4% after inference-time scaling @10) compared to a classic Bradley-Terry reward model (72.7%). Furthermore, SpeechJudge-GRM can be also employed as a reward function during the post-training of speech generation models to facilitate their alignment with human preferences.

Paperid: 2420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00543.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in generative modeling enable neural networks to generate weights without relying on gradient-based optimization. However, current methods are limited by issues of over-coupling and long-horizon. The former tightly binds weight generation with task-specific objectives, thereby limiting the flexibility of the learned optimizer. The latter leads to inefficiency and low accuracy during inference, caused by the lack of local constraints. In this paper, we propose Lo-Hp, a decoupled two-stage weight generation framework that enhances flexibility through learning various optimization policies. It adopts a hybrid-policy sub-trajectory balance objective, which integrates on-policy and off-policy learning to capture local optimization policies. Theoretically, we demonstrate that learning solely local optimization policies can address the long-horizon issue while enhancing the generation of global optimal weights. In addition, we validate Lo-Hp's superior accuracy and inference efficiency in tasks that require frequent weight updates, such as transfer learning, few-shot learning, domain generalization, and large language model adaptation.

Paperid: 2421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27571.pdf

Abstract:
The prevailing video retrieval paradigm is structurally misaligned, as narrow benchmarks incentivize correspondingly limited data and single-task training. Therefore, universal capability is suppressed due to the absence of a diagnostic evaluation that defines and demands multi-dimensional generalization. To break this cycle, we introduce a framework built on the co-design of evaluation, data, and modeling. First, we establish the Universal Video Retrieval Benchmark (UVRB), a suite of 16 datasets designed not only to measure performance but also to diagnose critical capability gaps across tasks and domains. Second, guided by UVRB's diagnostics, we introduce a scalable synthesis workflow that generates 1.55 million high-quality pairs to populate the semantic space required for universality. Finally, we devise the Modality Pyramid, a curriculum that trains our General Video Embedder (GVE) by explicitly leveraging the latent interconnections within our diverse data. Extensive experiments show GVE achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization on UVRB. In particular, our analysis reveals that popular benchmarks are poor predictors of general ability and that partially relevant retrieval is a dominant but overlooked scenario. Overall, our co-designed framework provides a practical path to escape the limited scope and advance toward truly universal video retrieval.

Paperid: 2422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18046.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at capturing latent semantics and contextual relationships across diverse modalities. However, in modeling user behavior from sequential interaction data, performance often suffers when such semantic context is limited or absent. We introduce LaMAR, a LLM-driven semantic enrichment framework designed to enrich such sequences automatically. LaMAR leverages LLMs in a few-shot setting to generate auxiliary contextual signals by inferring latent semantic aspects of a user's intent and item relationships from existing metadata. These generated signals, such as inferred usage scenarios, item intents, or thematic summaries, augment the original sequences with greater contextual depth. We demonstrate the utility of this generated resource by integrating it into benchmark sequential modeling tasks, where it consistently improves performance. Further analysis shows that LLM-generated signals exhibit high semantic novelty and diversity, enhancing the representational capacity of the downstream models. This work represents a new data-centric paradigm where LLMs serve as intelligent context generators, contributing a new method for the semi-automatic creation of training data and language resources.

Paperid: 2423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12866.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small set of simple toys and then applying that knowledge to more complex items. Inspired by this, we study if similar generalization capabilities can also be achieved by robots. Our results indicate robots can learn generalizable grasping using randomly assembled objects that are composed from just four shape primitives: spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. We show that training on these "toys" enables robust generalization to real-world objects, yielding strong zero-shot performance. Crucially, we find the key to this generalization is an object-centric visual representation induced by our proposed detection pooling mechanism. Evaluated in both simulation and on physical robots, our model achieves a 67% real-world grasping success rate on the YCB dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches that rely on substantially more in-domain data. We further study how zero-shot generalization performance scales by varying the number and diversity of training toys and the demonstrations per toy. We believe this work offers a promising path to scalable and generalizable learning in robotic manipulation. Demonstration videos, code, checkpoints and our dataset are available on our project page: https://lego-grasp.github.io/ .

Paperid: 2424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12094.pdf

Abstract:
Text-attributed graphs are widely used across domains, offering rich opportunities for zero-shot learning via graph-text alignment. However, existing methods struggle with tasks requiring fine-grained pattern recognition, particularly on heterophilic graphs. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify an \textbf{over-abstraction problem}: current approaches operate at excessively large hyperbolic radii, compressing multi-scale structural information into uniform high-level abstractions. This abstraction-induced information loss obscures critical local patterns essential for accurate predictions. By analyzing embeddings in hyperbolic space, we demonstrate that optimal graph learning requires \textbf{faithful preservation} of fine-grained structural details, better retained by representations positioned closer to the origin. To address this, we propose \textbf{H4G}, a framework that systematically reduces embedding radii using learnable block-diagonal scaling matrices and Möbius matrix multiplication. This approach restores access to fine-grained patterns while maintaining global receptive ability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments show H4G achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with \textbf{12.8\%} improvement on heterophilic graphs and \textbf{8.4\%} on homophilic graphs, confirming that radius reduction enables faithful multi-scale representation for advancing zero-shot graph learning.

Paperid: 2425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10912.pdf

Abstract:
Many language-guided robotic systems rely on collapsing spatial reasoning into discrete points, making them brittle to perceptual noise and semantic ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose RoboMAP, a framework that represents spatial targets as continuous, adaptive affordance heatmaps. This dense representation captures the uncertainty in spatial grounding and provides richer information for downstream policies, thereby significantly enhancing task success and interpretability. RoboMAP surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on a majority of grounding benchmarks with up to a 50x speed improvement, and achieves an 82\% success rate in real-world manipulation. Across extensive simulated and physical experiments, it demonstrates robust performance and shows strong zero-shot generalization to navigation. More details and videos can be found at https://robo-map.github.io.

Paperid: 2426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25696.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series question answering (TSQA) tasks face significant challenges due to the lack of labeled data. Alternatively, with recent advancements in large-scale models, vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated the potential to analyze time-series signals in a zero-shot manner. In this paper, we propose a training approach that uses pseudo labels generated by a VLM. Although VLMs can produce incorrect labels, TSQA models can still be effectively trained based on the property that deep neural networks are inherently robust to such noisy labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that TSQA models are not only successfully trained with pseudo labels, but also surpass the performance of the VLM itself by leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data.

Paperid: 2427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24770.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate incorrect or unsupported content, known as hallucinations. Existing detection methods rely on heuristics or simple models over isolated computational traces such as activations, or attention maps. We unify these signals by representing them as attributed graphs, where tokens are nodes, edges follow attentional flows, and both carry features from attention scores and activations. Our approach, CHARM, casts hallucination detection as a graph learning task and tackles it by applying GNNs over the above attributed graphs. We show that CHARM provably subsumes prior attention-based heuristics and, experimentally, it consistently outperforms other leading approaches across diverse benchmarks. Our results shed light on the relevant role played by the graph structure and on the benefits of combining computational traces, whilst showing CHARM exhibits promising zero-shot performance on cross-dataset transfer.

Paperid: 2428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13833.pdf

Abstract:
A foundational humanoid motion tracker is expected to be able to track diverse, highly dynamic, and contact-rich motions. More importantly, it needs to operate stably in real-world scenarios against various dynamics disturbances, including terrains, external forces, and physical property changes for general practical use. To achieve this goal, we propose Any2Track (Track Any motions under Any disturbances), a two-stage RL framework to track various motions under multiple disturbances in the real world. Any2Track reformulates dynamics adaptability as an additional capability on top of basic action execution and consists of two key components: AnyTracker and AnyAdapter. AnyTracker is a general motion tracker with a series of careful designs to track various motions within a single policy. AnyAdapter is a history-informed adaptation module that endows the tracker with online dynamics adaptability to overcome the sim2real gap and multiple real-world disturbances. We deploy Any2Track on Unitree G1 hardware and achieve a successful sim2real transfer in a zero-shot manner. Any2Track performs exceptionally well in tracking various motions under multiple real-world disturbances.

Paperid: 2429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13185.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning is a powerful paradigm for tackling few-shot tasks. However, recent studies indicate that models trained with the whole-class training strategy can achieve comparable performance to those trained with meta-learning in few-shot classification tasks. To demonstrate the value of meta-learning, we establish an entropy-limited supervised setting for fair comparisons. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we establish that meta-learning has a tighter generalization bound compared to whole-class training. We unravel that meta-learning is more efficient with limited entropy and is more robust to label noise and heterogeneous tasks, making it well-suited for unsupervised tasks. Based on these insights, We propose MINO, a meta-learning framework designed to enhance unsupervised performance. MINO utilizes the adaptive clustering algorithm DBSCAN with a dynamic head for unsupervised task construction and a stability-based meta-scaler for robustness against label noise. Extensive experiments confirm its effectiveness in multiple unsupervised few-shot and zero-shot tasks.

Paperid: 2430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16790.pdf

Abstract:
Speech tokenizers serve as foundational components for speech language models, yet current designs exhibit several limitations, including: 1) dependence on multi-layer residual vector quantization structures or high frame rates, 2) reliance on auxiliary pre-trained models for semantic distillation, and 3) requirements for complex two-stage training processes. In this work, we introduce the Text-aware Diffusion Transformer Speech Codec (TaDiCodec), a novel approach designed to overcome these challenges. TaDiCodec employs end-to-end optimization for quantization and reconstruction through a diffusion autoencoder, while integrating text guidance into the diffusion decoder to enhance reconstruction quality and achieve optimal compression. TaDiCodec achieves an extremely low frame rate of 6.25 Hz and a corresponding bitrate of 0.0875 kbps with a single-layer codebook for 24 kHz speech, while maintaining superior performance on critical speech generation evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), speaker similarity (SIM), and speech quality (UTMOS). Notably, TaDiCodec employs a single-stage, end-to-end training paradigm, and obviating the need for auxiliary pre-trained models. We also validate the compatibility of TaDiCodec in language model based zero-shot text-to-speech with both autoregressive modeling and masked generative modeling, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency for speech language modeling, as well as a significantly small reconstruction-generation gap. We will open source our code and model checkpoints. Audio samples are are available at https:/tadicodec.github.io/. We release code and model checkpoints at https:/github.com/HeCheng0625/Diffusion-Speech-Tokenizer.

Paperid: 2431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14377.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in educational applications, yet their capacity to accurately assess the cognitive alignment of reading materials with students' developmental stages remains insufficiently explored. This gap is particularly critical given the foundational educational principle of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which emphasizes the need to match learning resources with Students' Cognitive Abilities (SCA). Despite the importance of this alignment, there is a notable absence of comprehensive studies investigating LLMs' ability to evaluate reading comprehension difficulty across different student age groups, especially in the context of Chinese language education. To fill this gap, we introduce ZPD-SCA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess stage-level Chinese reading comprehension difficulty. The benchmark is annotated by 60 Special Grade teachers, a group that represents the top 0.15% of all in-service teachers nationwide. Experimental results reveal that LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot learning scenarios, with Qwen-max and GLM even falling below the probability of random guessing. When provided with in-context examples, LLMs performance improves substantially, with some models achieving nearly double the accuracy of their zero-shot baselines. These results reveal that LLMs possess emerging abilities to assess reading difficulty, while also exposing limitations in their current training for educationally aligned judgment. Notably, even the best-performing models display systematic directional biases, suggesting difficulties in accurately aligning material difficulty with SCA. Furthermore, significant variations in model performance across different genres underscore the complexity of task. We envision that ZPD-SCA can provide a foundation for evaluating and improving LLMs in cognitively aligned educational applications.

Paperid: 2432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02747.pdf

Abstract:
As large models gain traction, vision-language-action (VLA) systems are enabling robots to tackle increasingly complex tasks. However, limited by the difficulty of data collection, progress has mainly focused on controlling simple gripper end-effectors. There is little research on functional grasping with large models for human-like dexterous hands. In this paper, we introduce DexVLG, a large Vision-Language-Grasp model for Dexterous grasp pose prediction aligned with language instructions using single-view RGBD input. To accomplish this, we generate a dataset of 170 million dexterous grasp poses mapped to semantic parts across 174,000 objects in simulation, paired with detailed part-level captions. This large-scale dataset, named DexGraspNet 3.0, is used to train a VLM and flow-matching-based pose head capable of producing instruction-aligned grasp poses for tabletop objects. To assess DexVLG's performance, we create benchmarks in physics-based simulations and conduct real-world experiments. Extensive testing demonstrates DexVLG's strong zero-shot generalization capabilities-achieving over 76% zero-shot execution success rate and state-of-the-art part-grasp accuracy in simulation-and successful part-aligned grasps on physical objects in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 2433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16211.pdf

Abstract:
Learning real-world robotic manipulation is challenging, particularly when limited demonstrations are available. Existing methods for few-shot manipulation often rely on simulation-augmented data or pre-built modules like grasping and pose estimation, which struggle with sim-to-real gaps and lack extensibility. While large-scale imitation pre-training shows promise, adapting these general-purpose policies to specific tasks in data-scarce settings remains unexplored. To achieve this, we propose ControlVLA, a novel framework that bridges pre-trained VLA models with object-centric representations via a ControlNet-style architecture for efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, to introduce object-centric conditions without overwriting prior knowledge, ControlVLA zero-initializes a set of projection layers, allowing them to gradually adapt the pre-trained manipulation policies. In real-world experiments across 6 diverse tasks, including pouring cubes and folding clothes, our method achieves a 76.7% success rate while requiring only 10-20 demonstrations -- a significant improvement over traditional approaches that require more than 100 demonstrations to achieve comparable success. Additional experiments highlight ControlVLA's extensibility to long-horizon tasks and robustness to unseen objects and backgrounds.

Paperid: 2434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16123.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents FinCoT, a structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting framework that embeds domain-specific expert financial reasoning blueprints to guide large language models' behaviors. We identify three main prompting styles in financial NLP (FinNLP): (1) standard prompting (zero-shot), (2) unstructured CoT (free-form reasoning), and (3) structured CoT (with explicitly structured reasoning steps). Prior work has mainly focused on the first two, while structured CoT remains underexplored and lacks domain expertise incorporation. Therefore, we evaluate all three prompting approaches across ten CFA-style financial domains and introduce FinCoT as the first structured finance-specific prompting approach incorporating blueprints from domain experts. FinCoT improves the accuracy of a general-purpose model, Qwen3-8B-Base, from 63.2% to 80.5%, and boosts Fin-R1 (7B), a finance-specific model, from 65.7% to 75.7%, while reducing output length by up to 8.9x and 1.16x compared to structured CoT methods, respectively. We find that FinCoT proves most effective for models lacking financial post-training. Our findings show that FinCoT does not only improve performance and reduce inference costs but also yields more interpretable and expert-aligned reasoning traces.

Paperid: 2435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12186.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in combination with deep learning shows promise for many high-impact automated diagnostic and prognostic tools. However, training new models requires large amounts of labeled data, a challenge due to high cost of precise annotations and data privacy. To address this issue, we introduce the MRI-CORE, a vision foundation model trained using more than 6 million slices from over 110 thousand MRI volumes across 18 body locations. Our experiments show notable improvements in performance over state-of-the-art methods in 13 data-restricted segmentation tasks, as well as in image classification, and zero-shot segmentation, showing the strong potential of MRI-CORE to enable data-efficient development of artificial intelligence models. We also present data on which strategies yield most useful foundation models and a novel analysis relating similarity between pre-training and downstream task data with transfer learning performance. Our model is publicly available with a permissive license.

Paperid: 2436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03660.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) is essential for industrial inspection and medical diagnosis, yet existing methods typically rely on ``comparing'' test images to normal references from a training set. However, variations in appearance and positioning often complicate the alignment of these references with the test image, limiting detection accuracy. We observe that most anomalies manifest as local variations, meaning that even within anomalous images, valuable normal information remains. We argue that this information is useful and may be more aligned with the anomalies since both the anomalies and the normal information originate from the same image. Therefore, rather than relying on external normality from the training set, we propose INP-Former, a novel method that extracts Intrinsic Normal Prototypes (INPs) directly from the test image. Specifically, we introduce the INP Extractor, which linearly combines normal tokens to represent INPs. We further propose an INP Coherence Loss to ensure INPs can faithfully represent normality for the testing image. These INPs then guide the INP-guided Decoder to reconstruct only normal tokens, with reconstruction errors serving as anomaly scores. Additionally, we propose a Soft Mining Loss to prioritize hard-to-optimize samples during training. INP-Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-class, multi-class, and few-shot AD tasks across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD, positioning it as a versatile and universal solution for AD. Remarkably, INP-Former also demonstrates some zero-shot AD capability. Furthermore, we propose a soft version of the INP Coherence Loss and enhance INP-Former by incorporating residual learning, leading to the development of INP-Former++. The proposed method significantly improves detection performance across single-class, multi-class, semi-supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 2437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17436.pdf

Abstract:
To advance biomedical vison-language model capabilities through scaling up, fine-tuning, and instruction tuning, develop vision-language models with improved performance in handling long text, explore strategies to efficiently adopt vision language models for diverse multi-modal biomedical tasks, and examine the zero-shot learning performance. We developed two biomedical vision language models, BiomedGPT-Large and BiomedGPT-XLarge, based on an encoder-decoder-based transformer architecture. We fine-tuned the two models on 23 benchmark datasets from 6 multi-modal biomedical tasks including one image-only task (image classification), three language-only tasks (text understanding, text summarization and question answering), and two vision-language tasks (visual question answering and image captioning). We compared the developed scaled models with our previous BiomedGPT-Base model and existing prestigious models reported in the literature. We instruction-tuned the two models using a large-scale multi-modal biomedical instruction-tuning dataset and assessed the zero-shot learning performance and alignment accuracy.

Paperid: 2438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11181.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can easily tell if an attribute (also called state) is realistic, i.e., feasible, for an object, e.g. fire can be hot, but it cannot be wet. In Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, when all possible state-object combinations are considered as unseen classes, zero-shot predictors tend to perform poorly. Our work focuses on using external auxiliary knowledge to determine the feasibility of state-object combinations. Our Feasibility with Language Model (FLM) is a simple and effective approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to better comprehend the semantic relationships between states and objects. FLM involves querying an LLM about the feasibility of a given pair and retrieving the output logit for the positive answer. To mitigate potential misguidance of the LLM given that many of the state-object compositions are rare or completely infeasible, we observe that the in-context learning ability of LLMs is essential. We present an extensive study identifying Vicuna and ChatGPT as best performing, and we demonstrate that our FLM consistently improves OW-CZSL performance across all three benchmarks.

Paperid: 2439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10918.pdf

Abstract:
Humans possess a large reachable space in the 3D world, enabling interaction with objects at varying heights and distances. However, realizing such large-space reaching on humanoids is a complex whole-body control problem and requires the robot to master diverse skills simultaneously-including base positioning and reorientation, height and body posture adjustments, and end-effector pose control. Learning from scratch often leads to optimization difficulty and poor sim2real transferability. To address this challenge, we propose Real-world-Ready Skill Space (R2S2). Our approach begins with a carefully designed skill library consisting of real-world-ready primitive skills. We ensure optimal performance and robust sim2real transfer through individual skill tuning and sim2real evaluation. These skills are then ensembled into a unified latent space, serving as a structured prior that helps task execution in an efficient and sim2real transferable manner. A high-level planner, trained to sample skills from this space, enables the robot to accomplish real-world goal-reaching tasks. We demonstrate zero-shot sim2real transfer and validate R2S2 in multiple challenging goal-reaching scenarios.

Paperid: 2440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09532.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid loco-manipulation, which integrates whole-body locomotion with dexterous manipulation, remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Beyond whole-body coordination and balance, a central difficulty lies in understanding human instructions and translating them into coherent sequences of embodied actions. Recent advances in foundation models provide transferable multimodal representations and reasoning capabilities, yet existing efforts remain largely restricted to either locomotion or manipulation in isolation, with limited applicability to humanoid settings. In this paper, we propose Humanoid-COA, the first humanoid agent framework that integrates foundation model reasoning with an Embodied Chain-of-Action (CoA) mechanism for zero-shot loco-manipulation. Within the perception--reasoning--action paradigm, our key contribution lies in the reasoning stage, where the proposed CoA mechanism decomposes high-level human instructions into structured sequences of locomotion and manipulation primitives through affordance analysis, spatial inference, and whole-body action reasoning. Extensive experiments on two humanoid robots, Unitree H1-2 and G1, in both an open test area and an apartment environment, demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms prior baselines across manipulation, locomotion, and loco-manipulation tasks, achieving robust generalization to long-horizon and unstructured scenarios. Project page: https://humanoid-coa.github.io/

Paperid: 2441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21564.pdf

Abstract:
Cooking tasks remain a challenging problem for robotics due to their complexity. Videos of people cooking are a valuable source of information for such task, but introduces a lot of variability in terms of how to translate this data to a robotic environment. This research aims to streamline this process, focusing on the task plan generation step, by using a Large Language Model (LLM)-based Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) framework to autonomously generate cooking task plans from videos with subtitles, and execute them. Conventional LLM-based task planning methods are not well-suited for interpreting the cooking video data due to uncertainty in the videos, and the risk of hallucination in its output. To address both of these problems, we explore using LLMs in combination with Functional Object-Oriented Networks (FOON), to validate the plan and provide feedback in case of failure. This combination can generate task sequences with manipulation motions that are logically correct and executable by a robot. We compare the execution of the generated plans for 5 cooking recipes from our approach against the plans generated by a few-shot LLM-only approach for a dual-arm robot setup. It could successfully execute 4 of the plans generated by our approach, whereas only 1 of the plans generated by solely using the LLM could be executed.

Paperid: 2442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15485.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the recent success of image-text contrastive models like CLIP and SigLIP, these models often struggle with vision-centric tasks that demand high-fidelity image understanding, such as counting, depth estimation, and fine-grained object recognition. These models, by performing language alignment, tend to prioritize high-level semantics over visual understanding, weakening their image understanding. On the other hand, vision-focused models are great at processing visual information but struggle to understand language, limiting their flexibility for language-driven tasks. In this work, we introduce TULIP, an open-source, drop-in replacement for existing CLIP-like models. Our method leverages generative data augmentation, enhanced image-image and text-text contrastive learning, and image/text reconstruction regularization to learn fine-grained visual features while preserving global semantic alignment. Our approach, scaling to over 1B parameters, outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across multiple benchmarks, establishing a new SOTA zero-shot performance on ImageNet-1K, delivering up to a $2\times$ enhancement over SigLIP on RxRx1 in linear probing for few-shot classification, and improving vision-language models, achieving over $3\times$ higher scores than SigLIP on MMVP. Our code/checkpoints are available at https://tulip-berkeley.github.io

Paperid: 2443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14350.pdf

Abstract:
Recent video diffusion models have enhanced video editing, but it remains challenging to handle instructional editing and diverse tasks (e.g., adding, removing, changing) within a unified framework. In this paper, we introduce VEGGIE, a Video Editor with Grounded Generation from Instructions, a simple end-to-end framework that unifies video concept editing, grounding, and reasoning based on diverse user instructions. Specifically, given a video and text query, VEGGIE first utilizes an MLLM to interpret user intentions in instructions and ground them to the video contexts, generating frame-specific grounded task queries for pixel-space responses. A diffusion model then renders these plans and generates edited videos that align with user intent. To support diverse tasks and complex instructions, we employ a curriculum learning strategy: first aligning the MLLM and video diffusion model with large-scale instructional image editing data, followed by end-to-end fine-tuning on high-quality multitask video data. Additionally, we introduce a novel data synthesis pipeline to generate paired instructional video editing data for model training. It transforms static image data into diverse, high-quality video editing samples by leveraging Image-to-Video models to inject dynamics. VEGGIE shows strong performance in instructional video editing with different editing skills, outperforming the best instructional baseline as a versatile model, while other models struggle with multi-tasking. VEGGIE also excels in video object grounding and reasoning segmentation, where other baselines fail. We further reveal how the multiple tasks help each other and highlight promising applications like zero-shot multimodal instructional and in-context video editing.

Paperid: 2444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13143.pdf

Abstract:
While spatial reasoning has made progress in object localization relationships, it often overlooks object orientation-a key factor in 6-DoF fine-grained manipulation. Traditional pose representations rely on pre-defined frames or templates, limiting generalization and semantic grounding. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the "plug-in" direction of a USB or the "handle" direction of a cup). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D objects annotated with semantic orientations, and develop PointSO, a general model for zero-shot semantic orientation prediction. By integrating semantic orientation into VLM agents, our SoFar framework enables 6-DoF spatial reasoning and generates robotic actions. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and generalization of our SoFar, e.g., zero-shot 48.7% successful rate on Open6DOR and zero-shot 74.9% successful rate on SIMPLER-Env.

Paperid: 2445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01117.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-based algorithms have emerged as promising techniques for weight generation. However, existing solutions are limited by two challenges: generalizability and local target assignment. The former arises from the inherent lack of cross-task transferability in existing single-level optimization methods, limiting the model's performance on new tasks. The latter lies in existing research modeling only global optimal weights, neglecting the supervision signals in local target weights. Moreover, naively assigning local target weights causes local-global inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose Mc-Di, which integrates the diffusion algorithm with meta-learning for better generalizability. Furthermore, we extend the vanilla diffusion into a local consistency diffusion algorithm. Our theory and experiments demonstrate that it can learn from local targets while maintaining consistency with the global optima. We validate Mc-Di's superior accuracy and inference efficiency in tasks that require frequent weight updates, including transfer learning, few-shot learning, domain generalization, and large language model adaptation.

Paperid: 2446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07171.pdf

Abstract:
The development of vision-language models (VLMs) is driven by large-scale and diverse multimodal datasets. However, progress toward generalist biomedical VLMs is limited by the lack of annotated, publicly accessible datasets across biology and medicine. Existing efforts are restricted to narrow domains, missing the full diversity of biomedical knowledge encoded in scientific literature. To address this gap, we introduce BIOMEDICA, a scalable, open-source framework to extract, annotate, and serialize the entirety of the PubMed Central Open Access subset into an easy-to-use, publicly accessible dataset. Our framework produces a comprehensive archive with over 24 million unique image-text pairs from over 6 million articles. Metadata and expert-guided annotations are also provided. We demonstrate the utility and accessibility of our resource by releasing BMCA-CLIP, a suite of CLIP-style models continuously pre-trained on the BIOMEDICA dataset via streaming, eliminating the need to download 27 TB of data locally. On average, our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across 40 tasks - spanning pathology, radiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, surgery, molecular biology, parasitology, and cell biology - excelling in zero-shot classification with a 6.56% average improvement (as high as 29.8% and 17.5% in dermatology and ophthalmology, respectively), and stronger image-text retrieval, all while using 10x less compute. To foster reproducibility and collaboration, we release our codebase and dataset for the broader research community.

Paperid: 2447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17453.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning is an essential process to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in specific domains, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) gaining popularity due to its capacity to reduce computational demands through the integration of low-rank adapters. These lightweight adapters, such as LoRA, can be shared and utilized on open-source platforms. However, adversaries could exploit this mechanism to inject backdoors into these adapters, resulting in malicious behaviors like incorrect or harmful outputs, which pose serious security risks to the community. Unfortunately, few current efforts concentrate on analyzing the backdoor patterns or detecting the backdoors in the adapters. To fill this gap, we first construct and release PADBench, a comprehensive benchmark that contains 13,300 benign and backdoored adapters fine-tuned with various datasets, attack strategies, PEFT methods, and LLMs. Moreover, we propose PEFTGuard, the first backdoor detection framework against PEFT-based adapters. Extensive evaluation upon PADBench shows that PEFTGuard outperforms existing detection methods, achieving nearly perfect detection accuracy (100%) in most cases. Notably, PEFTGuard exhibits zero-shot transferability on three aspects, including different attacks, PEFT methods, and adapter ranks. In addition, we consider various adaptive attacks to demonstrate the high robustness of PEFTGuard. We further explore several possible backdoor mitigation defenses, finding fine-mixing to be the most effective method. We envision that our benchmark and method can shed light on future LLM backdoor detection research.

Paperid: 2448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17386.pdf

Abstract:
Segmenting 3D blood vessels is a critical yet challenging task in medical image analysis. This is due to significant imaging modality-specific variations in artifacts, vascular patterns and scales, signal-to-noise ratios, and background tissues. These variations, along with domain gaps arising from varying imaging protocols, limit the generalization of existing supervised learning-based methods, requiring tedious voxel-level annotations for each dataset separately. While foundation models promise to alleviate this limitation, they typically fail to generalize to the task of blood vessel segmentation, posing a unique, complex problem. In this work, we present vesselFM, a foundation model designed specifically for the broad task of 3D blood vessel segmentation. Unlike previous models, vesselFM can effortlessly generalize to unseen domains. To achieve zero-shot generalization, we train vesselFM on three heterogeneous data sources: a large, curated annotated dataset, data generated by a domain randomization scheme, and data sampled from a flow matching-based generative model. Extensive evaluations show that vesselFM outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation foundation models across four (pre-)clinically relevant imaging modalities in zero-, one-, and few-shot scenarios, therefore providing a universal solution for 3D blood vessel segmentation.

Paperid: 2449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21545.pdf

Abstract:
Reward modeling in large language models is susceptible to reward hacking, causing models to latch onto superficial features such as the tendency to generate lists or unnecessarily long responses. In reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and more generally during post-training flawed reward signals often lead to outputs that optimize for these spurious correlates instead of genuine quality or correctness. We propose Context-Aware Reward Modeling (CARMO), a novel approach that first generates dynamic, context-relevant criteria to ground the reward model before producing reward scores. Unlike prior methods that rely on static rubrics, CARMO leverages large language models (LLMs) to adaptively create evaluation criteria such as logical consistency, clarity, and depth tailored to the user query. Our theoretical analysis shows that such criteria generation can mitigate reward hacking. We further demonstrate that CARMO can be distilled into smaller models, reducing the computational cost of alignment. We establish a new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot settings for generative models, achieving a 2.1\% improvement on Reward Bench. Furthermore, alignment performed on the CARMO-curated preference dataset achieves 22.5\% and 21.1\% LC-WR and WR, respectively, on Mistral-Base (7B).

Paperid: 2450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09636.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a zero-shot speech emotion recognition (SER) method that estimates emotions not previously defined in the SER model training. Conventional methods are limited to recognizing emotions defined by a single word. Moreover, we have the motivation to recognize unknown bipolar emotions such as ``I want to buy - I do not want to buy.'' In order to allow the model to define classes using sentences freely and to estimate unknown bipolar emotions, our proposed method expands upon the contrastive language-audio pre-training (CLAP) framework by introducing multi-class and multi-task settings. We also focus on purchase intention as a bipolar emotion and investigate the model's performance to zero-shot estimate it. This study is the first attempt to estimate purchase intention from speech directly. Experiments confirm that the results of zero-shot estimation by the proposed method are at the same level as those of the model trained by supervised learning.

Paperid: 2451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03769.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have a transformative impact on a variety of scientific tasks across disciplines including biology, chemistry, medicine, and physics. However, ensuring the safety alignment of these models in scientific research remains an underexplored area, with existing benchmarks primarily focusing on textual content and overlooking key scientific representations such as molecular, protein, and genomic languages. Moreover, the safety mechanisms of LLMs in scientific tasks are insufficiently studied. To address these limitations, we introduce SciSafeEval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of LLMs across a range of scientific tasks. SciSafeEval spans multiple scientific languages-including textual, molecular, protein, and genomic-and covers a wide range of scientific domains. We evaluate LLMs in zero-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought settings, and introduce a "jailbreak" enhancement feature that challenges LLMs equipped with safety guardrails, rigorously testing their defenses against malicious intention. Our benchmark surpasses existing safety datasets in both scale and scope, providing a robust platform for assessing the safety and performance of LLMs in scientific contexts. This work aims to facilitate the responsible development and deployment of LLMs, promoting alignment with safety and ethical standards in scientific research.

Paperid: 2452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21922.pdf

Abstract:
Although diffusion-based zero-shot image restoration and enhancement methods have achieved great success, applying them to video restoration or enhancement will lead to severe temporal flickering. In this paper, we propose the first framework that utilizes the rapidly-developed video diffusion model to assist the image-based method in maintaining more temporal consistency for zero-shot video restoration and enhancement. We propose homologous latents fusion, heterogenous latents fusion, and a COT-based fusion ratio strategy to utilize both homologous and heterogenous text-to-video diffusion models to complement the image method. Moreover, we propose temporal-strengthening post-processing to utilize the image-to-video diffusion model to further improve temporal consistency. Our method is training-free and can be applied to any diffusion-based image restoration and enhancement methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Paperid: 2453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10305.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models demonstrate strong performance across various downstream tasks by learning from large-scale image-text pairs through contrastive pretraining. The release of extensive English image-text datasets (e.g., COYO-700M and LAION-400M) has enabled widespread adoption of models such as CLIP and SigLIP in tasks including cross-modal retrieval and image captioning. However, the advancement of Chinese vision-language pretraining has substantially lagged behind, due to the scarcity of high-quality Chinese image-text data. To address this gap, we develop a comprehensive pipeline for constructing a high-quality Chinese cross-modal dataset. As a result, we propose DanQing, which contains 100 million image-text pairs collected from Common Crawl. Different from existing datasets, DanQing is curated through a more rigorous selection process, yielding superior data quality. Moreover, DanQing is primarily built from 2024-2025 web data, enabling models to better capture evolving semantic trends and thus offering greater practical utility. We compare DanQing with existing datasets by continual pre-training of the SigLIP2 model. Experimental results show that DanQing consistently achieves superior performance across a range of Chinese downstream tasks, including zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and LMM-based evaluations. To facilitate further research in Chinese vision-language pre-training, we will open-source the DanQing dataset under the Creative Common CC-BY 4.0 license.

Paperid: 2454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20029.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen state-object compositions by generalizing from a training set of their primitives (state and object). Current methods often overlook the rich hierarchical structures, such as the semantic hierarchy of primitives (e.g., apple fruit) and the conceptual hierarchy between primitives and compositions (e.g, sliced apple apple). A few recent efforts have shown effectiveness in modeling these hierarchies through loss regularization within Euclidean space. In this paper, we argue that they fail to scale to the large-scale taxonomies required for real-world CZSL: the space's polynomial volume growth in flat geometry cannot match the exponential structure, impairing generalization capacity. To this end, we propose H2em, a new framework that learns Hierarchical Hyperbolic EMbeddings for CZSL. H2em leverages the unique properties of hyperbolic geometry, a space naturally suited for embedding tree-like structures with low distortion. However, a naive hyperbolic mapping may suffer from hierarchical collapse and poor fine-grained discrimination. We further design two learning objectives to structure this space: a Dual-Hierarchical Entailment Loss that uses hyperbolic entailment cones to enforce the predefined hierarchies, and a Discriminative Alignment Loss with hard negative mining to establish a large geodesic distance between semantically similar compositions. Furthermore, we devise Hyperbolic Cross-Modal Attention to realize instance-aware cross-modal infusion within hyperbolic geometry. Extensive ablations on three benchmarks demonstrate that H2em establishes a new state-of-the-art in both closed-world and open-world scenarios. Our codes will be released.

Paperid: 2455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15601.pdf

Abstract:
Psychological defenses are strategies, often automatic, that people use to manage distress. Rigid or overuse of defenses is negatively linked to mental health and shapes what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. However, defenses are complex and difficult to reliably measure, particularly in clinical dialogues. We introduce PsyDefConv, a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level, and DMRS Co-Pilot, a four-stage pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4709 utterances, including 2336 help seeker turns, with labeling and Cohen's kappa 0.639. In a counterbalanced study, the co-pilot reduced average annotation time by 22.4%. In expert review, it averaged 4.62 for evidence, 4.44 for clinical plausibility, and 4.40 for insight on a seven-point scale. Benchmarks with strong language models in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate clear headroom, with the best macro F1-score around 30% and a tendency to overpredict mature defenses. Corpus analyses confirm that mature defenses are most common and reveal emotion-specific deviations. We will release the corpus, annotations, code, and prompts to support research on defensive functioning in language.

Paperid: 2456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08040.pdf

Abstract:
Our aim is to develop a unified model for sign language understanding, that performs sign language translation (SLT) and sign-subtitle alignment (SSA). Together, these two tasks enable the conversion of continuous signing videos into spoken language text and also the temporal alignment of signing with subtitles -- both essential for practical communication, large-scale corpus construction, and educational applications. To achieve this, our approach is built upon three components: (i) a lightweight visual backbone that captures manual and non-manual cues from human keypoints and lip-region images while preserving signer privacy; (ii) a Sliding Perceiver mapping network that aggregates consecutive visual features into word-level embeddings to bridge the vision-text gap; and (iii) a multi-task scalable training strategy that jointly optimises SLT and SSA, reinforcing both linguistic and temporal alignment. To promote cross-linguistic generalisation, we pretrain our model on large-scale sign-text corpora covering British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) from the BOBSL and YouTube-SL-25 datasets. With this multilingual pretraining and strong model design, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the challenging BOBSL (BSL) dataset for both SLT and SSA. Our model also demonstrates robust zero-shot generalisation and finetuned SLT performance on How2Sign (ASL), highlighting the potential of scalable translation across different sign languages.

Paperid: 2457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18230.pdf

Abstract:
As the number of connected IoT devices continues to grow, securing these systems against cyber threats remains a major challenge, especially in environments with limited computational and energy resources. This paper presents an edge-centric Intrusion Detection System (IDS) framework that integrates lightweight machine learning (ML) based IDS models with pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to improve detection accuracy, semantic interpretability, and operational efficiency at the network edge. The system evaluates six ML-based IDS models: Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and a hybrid CNN-LSTM model on low-power edge gateways, achieving accuracy up to 98 percent under real-world cyberattacks. For anomaly detection, the system transmits a compact and secure telemetry snapshot (for example, CPU usage, memory usage, latency, and energy consumption) via low-bandwidth API calls to LLMs including GPT-4-turbo, DeepSeek V2, and LLaMA 3.5. These models use zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought reasoning to produce human-readable threat analyses and actionable mitigation recommendations. Evaluations across diverse attacks such as DoS, DDoS, brute force, and port scanning show that the system enhances interpretability while maintaining low latency (<1.5 s), minimal bandwidth usage (<1.2 kB per prompt), and energy efficiency (<75 J), demonstrating its practicality and scalability as an IDS solution for edge gateways.

Paperid: 2458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13469.pdf

Abstract:
Environmental modeling faces critical challenges in predicting ecosystem dynamics across unmonitored regions due to limited and geographically imbalanced observation data. This challenge is compounded by spatial heterogeneity, causing models to learn spurious patterns that fit only local data. Unlike conventional domain generalization, environmental modeling must preserve invariant physical relationships and temporal coherence during augmentation. In this paper, we introduce Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations (GREAT), a framework that effectively augments available datasets to improve predictions in completely unseen regions. GREAT guides the augmentation process to ensure that the original governing processes can be recovered from the augmented data, and the inclusion of the augmented data leads to improved model generalization. Specifically, GREAT learns transformation functions at multiple layers of neural networks to augment both raw environmental features and temporal influence. They are refined through a novel bi-level training process that constrains augmented data to preserve key patterns of the original source data. We demonstrate GREAT's effectiveness on stream temperature prediction across six ecologically diverse watersheds in the eastern U.S., each containing multiple stream segments. Experimental results show that GREAT significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot scenarios. This work provides a practical solution for environmental applications where comprehensive monitoring is infeasible.

Paperid: 2459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09900.pdf

Abstract:
Protein evolution through amino acid sequence mutations is a cornerstone of life sciences. While current in-silicon directed evolution algorithms focus on designing search strategies, they overlook how to utilize the transformative protein language models, which encode rich evolutionary patterns, to guide search. To bridge this gap, we propose AlphaDE, a novel framework to evolve protein sequences by harnessing the innovative paradigms of large language models. First, AlphaDE fine-tunes pretrained protein language models using masked language modeling on homologous protein sequences to activate the evolutionary plausibility for the interested protein class. Second, AlphaDE introduces test-time inference based on Monte Carlo tree search, which effectively evolves proteins with evolutionary guidance from the fine-tuned protein language model. Extensive benchmark experiments show that AlphaDE remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods even with few-shot fine-tuning. An interesting case study further shows that AlphaDE supports condensing the protein sequence space through computational evolution.

Paperid: 2460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01775.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models in video generation are demonstrating remarkable capabilities as potential world models for simulating the physical world. However, their application in high-stakes domains like surgery, which demand deep, specialized causal knowledge rather than general physical rules, remains a critical unexplored gap. To systematically address this challenge, we present SurgVeo, the first expert-curated benchmark for video generation model evaluation in surgery, and the Surgical Plausibility Pyramid (SPP), a novel, four-tiered framework tailored to assess model outputs from basic appearance to complex surgical strategy. On the basis of the SurgVeo benchmark, we task the advanced Veo-3 model with a zero-shot prediction task on surgical clips from laparoscopic and neurosurgical procedures. A panel of four board-certified surgeons evaluates the generated videos according to the SPP. Our results reveal a distinct "plausibility gap": while Veo-3 achieves exceptional Visual Perceptual Plausibility, it fails critically at higher levels of the SPP, including Instrument Operation Plausibility, Environment Feedback Plausibility, and Surgical Intent Plausibility. This work provides the first quantitative evidence of the chasm between visually convincing mimicry and causal understanding in surgical AI. Our findings from SurgVeo and the SPP establish a crucial foundation and roadmap for developing future models capable of navigating the complexities of specialized, real-world healthcare domains.

Paperid: 2461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13827.pdf

Abstract:
Current Text-to-SQL methods are evaluated and only focused on executable queries, overlooking the semantic alignment challenge -- both in terms of the semantic meaning of the query and the correctness of the execution results. Even execution accuracy itself shows significant drops when moving from English to other languages, with an average decline of 6 percentage points across non-English languages. We address these challenges by presenting a new framework that combines Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a multilingual contrastive reward signal to enhance both task efficiency and semantic accuracy in Text-to-SQL systems in cross-lingual scenarios. Our method teaches models to obtain better correspondence between SQL generation and user intent by combining a reward signal based on semantic similarity. On the seven-language MultiSpider dataset, fine-tuning the LLaMA-3-3B model with GRPO improved the execution accuracy up to 87.4 percent (+26 pp over zero-shot) and semantic accuracy up to 52.29 percent (+32.86 pp). Adding our contrastive reward signal in the GRPO framework further improved the average semantic accuracy to 59.14 percent (+6.85 pp, up to +10 pp for Vietnamese). Our experiments showcase that a smaller, parameter-efficient 3B LLaMA model fine-tuned with our contrastive reward signal outperforms a much larger zero-shot 8B LLaMA model, with an uplift of 7.43 pp in execution accuracy (from 81.43 percent on the 8B model to 88.86 percent on the 3B model), and nearly matches its semantic accuracy (59.14 percent vs. 68.57 percent) -- all using just 3,000 reinforcement learning training examples. These results demonstrate how we can improve the performance of Text-to-SQL systems with contrastive rewards for directed semantic alignment, without requiring large-scale training datasets.

Paperid: 2462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13157.pdf

Abstract:
Despite continuous advancements in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), numerical reasoning remains a challenging area. Techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, tree-of-thought prompting, and program-of-thought prompting guide LLMs through intermediate reasoning steps. Although in-context learning with few-shot prompting has improved performance, LLMs still lag behind state-of-the-art models on financial numerical reasoning datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA. In this work, we introduce FINDER, a novel two-step framework, to enhance LLMs' capabilities in financial numerical reasoning. The first step utilizes a generative retriever to extract relevant facts from unstructured data, including both text and tables. This is followed by context-aware Program of Thought prompting with dynamic selection of in-context examples. Our model FINDER achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on both the FinQA and ConvFinQA datasets, surpassing previous benchmarks with execution accuracy improvements of 5.98% and 4.05%, respectively.

Paperid: 2463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06512.pdf

Abstract:
Neural models such as YOLO and HuBERT can be used to detect local properties such as objects ("car") and emotions ("angry") in individual frames of videos and audio clips respectively. The likelihood of these detections is indicated by scores in [0, 1]. Lifting these scores to temporal properties over sequences can be useful for several downstream applications such as query matching (e.g., "does the speaker eventually sound happy in this audio clip?"), and ranked retrieval (e.g., "retrieve top 5 videos with a 10 second scene where a car is detected until a pedestrian is detected"). In this work, we formalize this problem of assigning Scores for TempOral Properties (STOPs) over sequences, given potentially noisy score predictors for local properties. We then propose a scoring function called LogSTOP that can efficiently compute these scores for temporal properties represented in Linear Temporal Logic. Empirically, LogSTOP, with YOLO and HuBERT, outperforms Large Vision / Audio Language Models and other Temporal Logic-based baselines by at least 16% on query matching with temporal properties over objects-in-videos and emotions-in-speech respectively. Similarly, on ranked retrieval with temporal properties over objects and actions in videos, LogSTOP with Grounding DINO and SlowR50 reports at least a 19% and 16% increase in mean average precision and recall over zero-shot text-to-video retrieval baselines respectively.

Paperid: 2464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03858.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional object detection models are typically trained on a fixed set of classes, limiting their flexibility and making it costly to incorporate new categories. Open-vocabulary object detection addresses this limitation by enabling models to identify unseen classes without explicit training. Leveraging pretrained models contrastively trained on abundantly available ground-view image-text classification pairs provides a strong foundation for open-vocabulary object detection in aerial imagery. Domain shifts, viewpoint variations, and extreme scale differences make direct knowledge transfer across domains ineffective, requiring specialized adaptation strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for adapting open-vocabulary representations from ground-view images to solve object detection in aerial imagery through structured domain alignment. The method introduces contrastive image-to-image alignment to enhance the similarity between aerial and ground-view embeddings and employs multi-instance vocabulary associations to align aerial images with text embeddings. Extensive experiments on the xView, DOTAv2, VisDrone, DIOR, and HRRSD datasets are used to validate our approach. Our open-vocabulary model achieves improvements of +6.32 mAP on DOTAv2, +4.16 mAP on VisDrone (Images), and +3.46 mAP on HRRSD in the zero-shot setting when compared to finetuned closed-vocabulary dataset-specific model performance, thus paving the way for more flexible and scalable object detection systems in aerial applications.

Paperid: 2465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02248.pdf

Abstract:
Visual policy design is crucial for aerial navigation. However, state-of-the-art visual policies often overfit to a single track and their performance degrades when track geometry changes. We develop FalconGym 2.0, a photorealistic simulation framework built on Gaussian Splatting (GSplat) with an Edit API that programmatically generates diverse static and dynamic tracks in milliseconds. Leveraging FalconGym 2.0's editability, we propose a Performance-Guided Refinement (PGR) algorithm, which concentrates visual policy's training on challenging tracks while iteratively improving its performance. Across two case studies (fixed-wing UAVs and quadrotors) with distinct dynamics and environments, we show that a single visual policy trained with PGR in FalconGym 2.0 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generalization and robustness: it generalizes to three unseen tracks with 100% success without per-track retraining and maintains higher success rates under gate-pose perturbations. Finally, we demonstrate that the visual policy trained with PGR in FalconGym 2.0 can be zero-shot sim-to-real transferred to a quadrotor hardware, achieving a 98.6% success rate (69 / 70 gates) over 30 trials spanning two three-gate tracks and a moving-gate track.

Paperid: 2466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21012.pdf

Abstract:
In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm based on modern Language Models (LMs), yet its inner mechanism remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate the mechanism through a novel perspective of information removal. Specifically, we demonstrate that in the zero-shot scenario, LMs encode queries into non-selective representations in hidden states containing information for all possible tasks, leading to arbitrary outputs without focusing on the intended task, resulting in near-zero accuracy. Meanwhile, we find that selectively removing specific information from hidden states by a low-rank filter effectively steers LMs toward the intended task. Building on these findings, by measuring the hidden states on carefully designed metrics, we observe that few-shot ICL effectively simulates such task-oriented information removal processes, selectively removing the redundant information from entangled non-selective representations, and improving the output based on the demonstrations, which constitutes a key mechanism underlying ICL. Moreover, we identify essential attention heads inducing the removal operation, termed Denoising Heads, which enables the ablation experiments blocking the information removal operation from the inference, where the ICL accuracy significantly degrades, especially when the correct label is absent from the few-shot demonstrations, confirming both the critical role of the information removal mechanism and denoising heads.

Paperid: 2467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15953.pdf

Abstract:
Turning garments right-side out is a challenging manipulation task: it is highly dynamic, entails rapid contact changes, and is subject to severe visual occlusion. We introduce Right-Side-Out, a zero-shot sim-to-real framework that effectively solves this challenge by exploiting task structures. We decompose the task into Drag/Fling to create and stabilize an access opening, followed by Insert&Pull to invert the garment. Each step uses a depth-inferred, keypoint-parameterized bimanual primitive that sharply reduces the action space while preserving robustness. Efficient data generation is enabled by our custom-built, high-fidelity, GPU-parallel Material Point Method (MPM) simulator that models thin-shell deformation and provides robust and efficient contact handling for batched rollouts. Built on the simulator, our fully automated pipeline scales data generation by randomizing garment geometry, material parameters, and viewpoints, producing depth, masks, and per-primitive keypoint labels without any human annotations. With a single depth camera, policies trained entirely in simulation deploy zero-shot on real hardware, achieving up to 81.3% success rate. By employing task decomposition and high fidelity simulation, our framework enables tackling highly dynamic, severely occluded tasks without laborious human demonstrations.

Paperid: 2468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12876.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of multimedia content necessitates the development of effective Multimedia Event Extraction (M2E2) systems. Though Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong cross-modal capabilities, their utility in the M2E2 task remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of representative LVLMs, including DeepSeek-VL2 and the Qwen-VL series, on the M2E2 dataset. Our evaluations cover text-only, image-only, and cross-media subtasks, assessed under both few-shot prompting and fine-tuning settings. Our key findings highlight the following valuable insights: (1) Few-shot LVLMs perform notably better on visual tasks but struggle significantly with textual tasks; (2) Fine-tuning LVLMs with LoRA substantially enhances model performance; and (3) LVLMs exhibit strong synergy when combining modalities, achieving superior performance in cross-modal settings. We further provide a detailed error analysis to reveal persistent challenges in areas such as semantic precision, localization, and cross-modal grounding, which remain critical obstacles for advancing M2E2 capabilities.

Paperid: 2469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02998.pdf

Abstract:
This full paper describes an LLM-assisted instruction integrated with a virtual cybersecurity lab platform. The digital transformation of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) systems is reshaping workforce needs, widening skill gaps, especially among older workers. With rising emphasis on robotics, automation, AI, and security, re-skilling and up-skilling are essential. Generative AI can help build this workforce by acting as an instructional assistant to support skill acquisition during experiential learning. We present a generative AI instructional assistant integrated into a prior experiential learning platform. The assistant employs a zero-shot OCR-LLM pipeline within the legacy Cybersecurity Labs-as-a-Service (CLaaS) platform (2015). Text is extracted from slide images using Tesseract OCR, then simplified instructions are generated via a general-purpose LLM, enabling real-time instructional support with minimal infrastructure. The system was evaluated in a live university course where student feedback (n=42) averaged 7.83/10, indicating strong perceived usefulness. A comparative study with multimodal LLMs that directly interpret slide images showed higher performance on visually dense slides, but the OCR-LLM pipeline provided comparable pedagogical value on text-centric slides with much lower computational overhead and cost. This work demonstrates that a lightweight, easily integrable pipeline can effectively extend legacy platforms with modern generative AI, offering scalable enhancements for student comprehension in technical education.

Paperid: 2470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00647.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of hardware vulnerabilities has created an urgent need for systematic and scalable analysis methods. Unlike software flaws, which are often patchable post-deployment, hardware weaknesses remain embedded across product lifecycles, posing persistent risks to processors, embedded devices, and IoT platforms. Existing efforts such as the MITRE CWE Hardware List (2021) relied on expert-driven Delphi surveys, which lack statistical rigor and introduce subjective bias, while large-scale data-driven foundations for hardware weaknesses have been largely absent. In this work, we propose LLM-HyPZ, an LLM-assisted hybrid framework for zero-shot knowledge extraction and refinement from vulnerability corpora. Our approach integrates zero-shot LLM classification, contextualized embeddings, unsupervised clustering, and prompt-driven summarization to mine hardware-related CVEs at scale. Applying LLM-HyPZ to the 2021-2024 CVE corpus (114,836 entries), we identified 1,742 hardware-related vulnerabilities. We distilled them into five recurring themes, including privilege escalation via firmware and BIOS, memory corruption in mobile and IoT systems, and physical access exploits. Benchmarking across seven LLMs shows that LLaMA 3.3 70B achieves near-perfect classification accuracy (99.5%) on a curated validation set. Beyond methodological contributions, our framework directly supported the MITRE CWE Most Important Hardware Weaknesses (MIHW) 2025 update by narrowing the candidate search space. Specifically, our pipeline surfaced 411 of the 1,026 CVEs used for downstream MIHW analysis, thereby reducing expert workload and accelerating evidence gathering. These results establish LLM-HyPZ as the first data-driven, scalable approach for systematically discovering hardware vulnerabilities, thereby bridging the gap between expert knowledge and real-world vulnerability evidence.

Paperid: 2471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00561.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, speech assistant and speech verification have been used in many fields, which brings much benefit and convenience for us. However, when we enjoy these speech applications, our speech may be collected by attackers for speech synthesis. For example, an attacker generates some inappropriate political opinions with the characteristic of the victim's voice by obtaining a piece of the victim's speech, which will greatly influence the victim's reputation. Specifically, with the appearance of some zero-shot voice conversion methods, the cost of speech synthesis attacks has been further reduced, which also brings greater challenges to user voice security and privacy. Some researchers have proposed the corresponding privacy-preserving methods. However, the existing approaches have some non-negligible drawbacks: low transferability and robustness, high computational overhead. These deficiencies seriously limit the existing method deployed in practical scenarios. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a lightweight, robust, plug-and-play privacy preservation method against speech synthesis attacks in a black-box setting. Our method generates and adds a frequency-domain perturbation to the original speech to achieve privacy protection and high speech quality. Then, we present a data augmentation strategy and noise smoothing mechanism to improve the robustness of the proposed method. Besides, to reduce the user's defense overhead, we also propose a novel identity-wise protection mechanism. It can generate a universal perturbation for one speaker and support privacy preservation for speech of any length. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on 5 speech synthesis models, 5 speech verification models, 1 speech recognition model, and 2 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method has satisfying privacy-preserving performance, high speech quality, and utility.

Paperid: 2472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02320.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot compositional action recognition (ZS-CAR) aims to identify unseen verb-object compositions in the videos by exploiting the learned knowledge of verb and object primitives during training. Despite compositional learning's progress in ZS-CAR, two critical challenges persist: 1) Missing compositional structure constraint, leading to spurious correlations between primitives; 2) Neglecting semantic hierarchy constraint, leading to semantic ambiguity and impairing the training process. In this paper, we argue that human-like symbolic reasoning offers a principled solution to these challenges by explicitly modeling compositional and hierarchical structured abstraction. To this end, we propose a logic-driven ZS-CAR framework LogicCAR that integrates dual symbolic constraints: Explicit Compositional Logic and Hierarchical Primitive Logic. Specifically, the former models the restrictions within the compositions, enhancing the compositional reasoning ability of our model. The latter investigates the semantical dependencies among different primitives, empowering the models with fine-to-coarse reasoning capacity. By formalizing these constraints in first-order logic and embedding them into neural network architectures, LogicCAR systematically bridges the gap between symbolic abstraction and existing models. Extensive experiments on the Sth-com dataset demonstrate that our LogicCAR outperforms existing baseline methods, proving the effectiveness of our logic-driven constraints.

Paperid: 2473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21117.pdf

Abstract:
Recommender systems have traditionally followed modular architectures comprising candidate generation, multi-stage ranking, and re-ranking, each trained separately with supervised objectives and hand-engineered features. While effective in many domains, such systems face persistent challenges including sparse and noisy interaction data, cold-start problems, limited personalization depth, and inadequate semantic understanding of user and item content. The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new paradigm for addressing these limitations through unified, language-native mechanisms that can generalize across tasks, domains, and modalities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive technical survey of how LLMs can be leveraged to tackle key challenges in modern recommender systems. We examine the use of LLMs for prompt-driven candidate retrieval, language-native ranking, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and conversational recommendation, illustrating how these approaches enhance personalization, semantic alignment, and interpretability without requiring extensive task-specific supervision. LLMs further enable zero- and few-shot reasoning, allowing systems to operate effectively in cold-start and long-tail scenarios by leveraging external knowledge and contextual cues. We categorize these emerging LLM-driven architectures and analyze their effectiveness in mitigating core bottlenecks of conventional pipelines. In doing so, we provide a structured framework for understanding the design space of LLM-enhanced recommenders, and outline the trade-offs between accuracy, scalability, and real-time performance. Our goal is to demonstrate that LLMs are not merely auxiliary components but foundational enablers for building more adaptive, semantically rich, and user-centric recommender systems

Paperid: 2474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12932.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of voice deepfake technologies has raised serious concerns about user audio privacy, as attackers increasingly exploit publicly available voice data to generate convincing fake audio for malicious purposes such as identity theft, financial fraud, and misinformation campaigns. While existing defense methods offer partial protection, they face critical limitations, including weak adaptability to unseen user data, poor scalability to long audio, rigid reliance on white-box knowledge, and high computational and temporal costs during the encryption process. To address these challenges and defend against personalized voice deepfake threats, we propose Enkidu, a novel user-oriented privacy-preserving framework that leverages universal frequential perturbations generated through black-box knowledge and few-shot training on a small amount of user data. These highly malleable frequency-domain noise patches enable real-time, lightweight protection with strong generalization across variable-length audio and robust resistance to voice deepfake attacks, all while preserving perceptual quality and speech intelligibility. Notably, Enkidu achieves over 50 to 200 times processing memory efficiency (as low as 0.004 gigabytes) and 3 to 7000 times runtime efficiency (real-time coefficient as low as 0.004) compared to six state-of-the-art countermeasures. Extensive experiments across six mainstream text-to-speech models and five cutting-edge automated speaker verification models demonstrate the effectiveness, transferability, and practicality of Enkidu in defending against both vanilla and adaptive voice deepfake attacks. Our code is currently available.

Paperid: 2475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11845.pdf

Abstract:
Open-set few-shot image classification aims to train models using a small amount of labeled data, enabling them to achieve good generalization when confronted with unknown environments. Existing methods mainly use visual information from a single image to learn class representations to distinguish known from unknown categories. However, these methods often overlook the benefits of integrating rich contextual information. To address this issue, this paper proposes a prototypical augmentation and alignment method, termed ProtoConNet, which incorporates background information from different samples to enhance the diversity of the feature space, breaking the spurious associations between context and image subjects in few-shot scenarios. Specifically, it consists of three main modules: the clustering-based data selection (CDS) module mines diverse data patterns while preserving core features; the contextual-enhanced semantic refinement (CSR) module builds a context dictionary to integrate into image representations, which boosts the model's robustness in various scenarios; and the prototypical alignment (PA) module reduces the gap between image representations and class prototypes, amplifying feature distances for known and unknown classes. Experimental results from two datasets verified that ProtoConNet enhances the effectiveness of representation learning in few-shot scenarios and identifies open-set samples, making it superior to existing methods.

Paperid: 2476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07640.pdf

Abstract:
Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR), defined as the deliberate use of homophonic or near-homophonic variants to hide toxic intent, has become a major obstacle to Chinese content moderation. While this problem is well-recognized, existing evaluations predominantly rely on rule-based, synthetic perturbations that ignore the creativity of real users. We organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile \ours, a dataset of 500 naturally occurring, phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset exposes a serious weakness: the best model reaches only an F1-score of 0.672, and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. Guided by error analysis, we revisit a Pinyin-based prompting strategy that earlier studies judged ineffective and show that it recovers much of the lost accuracy. This study offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of Chinese PCR, a realistic benchmark that reveals current detectors' limits, and a lightweight mitigation technique that advances research on robust toxicity detection.

Paperid: 2477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07048.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly applied to meal images for nutrition analysis. However, existing work primarily evaluates proprietary models, such as GPT-4. This leaves the broad range of LLMs underexplored. Additionally, the influence of integrating contextual metadata and its interaction with various reasoning modifiers remains largely uncharted. This work investigates how interpreting contextual metadata derived from GPS coordinates (converted to location/venue type), timestamps (transformed into meal/day type), and the food items present can enhance LMM performance in estimating key nutritional values. These values include calories, macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, fat), and portion sizes. We also introduce ACETADA, a new food-image dataset slated for public release. This open dataset provides nutrition information verified by the dietitian and serves as the foundation for our analysis. Our evaluation across eight LMMs (four open-weight and four closed-weight) first establishes the benefit of contextual metadata integration over straightforward prompting with images alone. We then demonstrate how this incorporation of contextual information enhances the efficacy of reasoning modifiers, such as Chain-of-Thought, Multimodal Chain-of-Thought, Scale Hint, Few-Shot, and Expert Persona. Empirical results show that integrating metadata intelligently, when applied through straightforward prompting strategies, can significantly reduce the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) in predicted nutritional values. This work highlights the potential of context-aware LMMs for improved nutrition analysis.

Paperid: 2478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02252.pdf

Abstract:
Precise surgical interventions are vital to patient safety, and advanced enhancement algorithms have been developed to assist surgeons in decision-making. Despite significant progress, these algorithms are typically designed for single tasks in specific scenarios, limiting their effectiveness in complex real-world situations. To address this limitation, we propose SurgVisAgent, an end-to-end intelligent surgical vision agent built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs). SurgVisAgent dynamically identifies distortion categories and severity levels in endoscopic images, enabling it to perform a variety of enhancement tasks such as low-light enhancement, overexposure correction, motion blur elimination, and smoke removal. Specifically, to achieve superior surgical scenario understanding, we design a prior model that provides domain-specific knowledge. Additionally, through in-context few-shot learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, SurgVisAgent delivers customized image enhancements tailored to a wide range of distortion types and severity levels, thereby addressing the diverse requirements of surgeons. Furthermore, we construct a comprehensive benchmark simulating real-world surgical distortions, on which extensive experiments demonstrate that SurgVisAgent surpasses traditional single-task models, highlighting its potential as a unified solution for surgical assistance.

Paperid: 2479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17289.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate the generalization capabilities of small language models under two popular adaptation paradigms: few-shot prompting and supervised fine-tuning. While prompting is often favored for its parameter efficiency and flexibility, it remains unclear how robust this approach is in low-resource settings and under distributional shifts. This paper presents a comparative study of prompting and fine-tuning across task formats, prompt styles, and model scales, with a focus on their behavior in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Beyond accuracy, we analyze the internal representations learned by each approach to assess the stability and abstraction of task-specific features. Our findings highlight critical differences in how small models internalize and generalize knowledge under different adaptation strategies. This work offers practical guidance for model selection in low-data regimes and contributes empirical insight into the ongoing debate over prompting versus fine-tuning. Code for the experiments is available at the following

Paperid: 2480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14351.pdf

Abstract:
Tibetan is a low-resource language with minimal parallel speech corpora spanning its three major dialects-Ã-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham-limiting progress in speech modeling. To address this issue, we propose FMSD-TTS, a few-shot, multi-speaker, multi-dialect text-to-speech framework that synthesizes parallel dialectal speech from limited reference audio and explicit dialect labels. Our method features a novel speaker-dialect fusion module and a Dialect-Specialized Dynamic Routing Network (DSDR-Net) to capture fine-grained acoustic and linguistic variations across dialects while preserving speaker identity. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that FMSD-TTS significantly outperforms baselines in both dialectal expressiveness and speaker similarity. We further validate the quality and utility of the synthesized speech through a challenging speech-to-speech dialect conversion task. Our contributions include: (1) a novel few-shot TTS system tailored for Tibetan multi-dialect speech synthesis, (2) the public release of a large-scale synthetic Tibetan speech corpus generated by FMSD-TTS, and (3) an open-source evaluation toolkit for standardized assessment of speaker similarity, dialect consistency, and audio quality.

Paperid: 2481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14233.pdf

Abstract:
In-context Learning (ICL) utilizes structured demonstration-query inputs to induce few-shot learning on Language Models (LMs), which are not originally pre-trained on ICL-style data. To bridge the gap between ICL and pre-training, some approaches fine-tune LMs on large ICL-style datasets by an end-to-end paradigm with massive computational costs. To reduce such costs, in this paper, we propose Attention Behavior Fine-Tuning (ABFT), utilizing the previous findings on the inner mechanism of ICL, building training objectives on the attention scores instead of the final outputs, to force the attention scores to focus on the correct label tokens presented in the context and mitigate attention scores from the wrong label tokens. Our experiments on 9 modern LMs and 8 datasets empirically find that ABFT outperforms in performance, robustness, unbiasedness, and efficiency, with only around 0.01% data cost compared to the previous methods. Moreover, our subsequent analysis finds that the end-to-end training objective contains the ABFT objective, suggesting the implicit bias of ICL-style data to the emergence of induction heads. Our work demonstrates the possibility of controlling specific module sequences within LMs to improve their behavior, opening up the future application of mechanistic interpretability.

Paperid: 2482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13617.pdf

Abstract:
The characteristics of a sound field are intrinsically linked to the geometric and spatial properties of the environment surrounding a sound source and a listener. The physics of sound propagation is captured in a time-domain signal known as a room impulse response (RIR). Prior work using neural fields (NFs) has allowed learning spatially-continuous representations of RIRs from finite RIR measurements. However, previous NF-based methods have focused on monaural omnidirectional or at most binaural listeners, which does not precisely capture the directional characteristics of a real sound field at a single point. We propose a direction-aware neural field (DANF) that more explicitly incorporates the directional information by Ambisonic-format RIRs. While DANF inherently captures spatial relations between sources and listeners, we further propose a direction-aware loss. In addition, we investigate the ability of DANF to adapt to new rooms in various ways including low-rank adaptation.

Paperid: 2483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06907.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok-3, has reshaped the artificial intelligence landscape. As prominent examples of foundational models (FMs) built on LLMs, these models exhibit remarkable capabilities in generating human-like content, bringing us closer to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, their large-scale nature, sensitivity to privacy concerns, and substantial computational demands present significant challenges to personalized customization for end users. To bridge this gap, this paper presents the vision of artificial personalized intelligence (API), focusing on adapting these powerful models to meet the specific needs and preferences of users while maintaining privacy and efficiency. Specifically, this paper proposes personalized federated intelligence (PFI), which integrates the privacy-preserving advantages of federated learning (FL) with the zero-shot generalization capabilities of FMs, enabling personalized, efficient, and privacy-protective deployment at the edge. We first review recent advances in both FL and FMs, and discuss the potential of leveraging FMs to enhance federated systems. We then present the key motivations behind realizing PFI and explore promising opportunities in this space, including efficient PFI, trustworthy PFI, and PFI empowered by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Finally, we outline key challenges and future research directions for deploying FM-powered FL systems at the edge with improved personalization, computational efficiency, and privacy guarantees. Overall, this survey aims to lay the groundwork for the development of API as a complement to AGI, with a particular focus on PFI as a key enabling technique.

Paperid: 2484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13756.pdf

Abstract:
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using SAEs to deepen our understanding of the mechanism behind in-context learning (ICL). We identify abstract SAE features that (i) encode the model's knowledge of which task to execute and (ii) whose latent vectors causally induce the task zero-shot. This aligns with prior work showing that ICL is mediated by task vectors. We further demonstrate that these task vectors are well approximated by a sparse sum of SAE latents, including these task-execution features. To explore the ICL mechanism, we adapt the sparse feature circuits methodology of Marks et al. (2024) to work for the much larger Gemma-1 2B model, with 30 times as many parameters, and to the more complex task of ICL. Through circuit finding, we discover task-detecting features with corresponding SAE latents that activate earlier in the prompt, that detect when tasks have been performed. They are causally linked with task-execution features through the attention and MLP sublayers.

Paperid: 2485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08367.pdf

Abstract:
Occlusion is one of the fundamental challenges in crowd counting. In the community, various data-driven approaches have been developed to address this issue, yet their effectiveness is limited. This is mainly because most existing crowd counting datasets on which the methods are trained are based on passive cameras, restricting their ability to fully sense the environment. Recently, embodied navigation methods have shown significant potential in precise object detection in interactive scenes. These methods incorporate active camera settings, holding promise in addressing the fundamental issues in crowd counting. However, most existing methods are designed for indoor navigation, showing unknown performance in analyzing complex object distribution in large scale scenes, such as crowds. Besides, most existing embodied navigation datasets are indoor scenes with limited scale and object quantity, preventing them from being introduced into dense crowd analysis. Based on this, a novel task, Embodied Crowd Counting (ECC), is proposed. We first build up an interactive simulator, Embodied Crowd Counting Dataset (ECCD), which enables large scale scenes and large object quantity. A prior probability distribution that approximates realistic crowd distribution is introduced to generate crowds. Then, a zero-shot navigation method (ZECC) is proposed. This method contains a MLLM driven coarse-to-fine navigation mechanism, enabling active Z-axis exploration, and a normal-line-based crowd distribution analysis method for fine counting. Experimental results against baselines show that the proposed method achieves the best trade-off between counting accuracy and navigation cost.

Paperid: 2486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04722.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit the ability to generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt, an emergent capability known as in-context learning (ICL). We investigate whether LLMs use ICL to perform structured reasoning in ways that are consistent with a Bayesian framework or rely on pattern matching. Using a controlled setting of biased coin flips, we find that: (1) LLMs often possess biased priors, causing initial divergence in zero-shot settings, (2) in-context evidence outweighs explicit bias instructions, (3) LLMs broadly follow Bayesian posterior updates, with deviations primarily due to miscalibrated priors rather than flawed updates, and (4) attention magnitude has negligible effect on Bayesian inference. With sufficient demonstrations of biased coin flips via ICL, LLMs update their priors in a Bayesian manner.

Paperid: 2487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03942.pdf

Abstract:
Background: We evaluate SAM 2 for surgical scene understanding by examining its semantic segmentation capabilities for organs/tissues both in zero-shot scenarios and after fine-tuning. Methods: We utilized five public datasets to evaluate and fine-tune SAM 2 for segmenting anatomical tissues in surgical videos/images. Fine-tuning was applied to the image encoder and mask decoder. We limited training subsets from 50 to 400 samples per class to better model real-world constraints with data acquisition. The impact of dataset size on fine-tuning performance was evaluated with weighted mean Dice coefficient (WMDC), and the results were also compared against previously reported state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Results: SurgiSAM 2, a fine-tuned SAM 2 model, demonstrated significant improvements in segmentation performance, achieving a 17.9% relative WMDC gain compared to the baseline SAM 2. Increasing prompt points from 1 to 10 and training data scale from 50/class to 400/class enhanced performance; the best WMDC of 0.92 on the validation subset was achieved with 10 prompt points and 400 samples per class. On the test subset, this model outperformed prior SOTA methods in 24/30 (80%) of the classes with a WMDC of 0.91 using 10-point prompts. Notably, SurgiSAM 2 generalized effectively to unseen organ classes, achieving SOTA on 7/9 (77.8%) of them. Conclusion: SAM 2 achieves remarkable zero-shot and fine-tuned performance for surgical scene segmentation, surpassing prior SOTA models across several organ classes of diverse datasets. This suggests immense potential for enabling automated/semi-automated annotation pipelines, thereby decreasing the burden of annotations facilitating several surgical applications.

Paperid: 2488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19673.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models are increasingly popular for generative tasks, including personalized composition of subjects and styles. While diffusion models can generate user-specified subjects performing text-guided actions in custom styles, they require fine-tuning and are not feasible for personalization on mobile devices. Hence, tuning-free personalization methods such as IP-Adapters have progressively gained traction. However, for the composition of subjects and styles, these works are less flexible due to their reliance on ControlNet, or show content and style leakage artifacts. To tackle these, we present SubZero, a novel framework to generate any subject in any style, performing any action without the need for fine-tuning. We propose a novel set of constraints to enhance subject and style similarity, while reducing leakage. Additionally, we propose an orthogonalized temporal aggregation scheme in the cross-attention blocks of denoising model, effectively conditioning on a text prompt along with single subject and style images. We also propose a novel method to train customized content and style projectors to reduce content and style leakage. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed approach, while suitable for running on-edge, shows significant improvements over state-of-the-art works performing subject, style and action composition.

Paperid: 2489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14080.pdf

Abstract:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies, such as cloud computing, machine learning, and AI, have improved productivity but introduced challenges in workforce training and reskilling. This is critical given existing workforce shortages, especially in marginalized communities like Underrepresented Minorities (URM), who often lack access to quality education. Addressing these challenges, this research presents gAI-PT4I4, a Generative AI-based Personalized Tutor for Industrial 4.0, designed to personalize 4IR experiential learning. gAI-PT4I4 employs sentiment analysis to assess student comprehension, leveraging generative AI and finite automaton to tailor learning experiences. The framework integrates low-fidelity Digital Twins for VR-based training, featuring an Interactive Tutor - a generative AI assistant providing real-time guidance via audio and text. It uses zero-shot sentiment analysis with LLMs and prompt engineering, achieving 86\% accuracy in classifying student-teacher interactions as positive or negative. Additionally, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables personalized learning content grounded in domain-specific knowledge. To adapt training dynamically, finite automaton structures exercises into states of increasing difficulty, requiring 80\% task-performance accuracy for progression. Experimental evaluation with 22 volunteers showed improved accuracy exceeding 80\%, reducing training time. Finally, this paper introduces a Multi-Fidelity Digital Twin model, aligning Digital Twin complexity with Bloom's Taxonomy and Kirkpatrick's model, providing a scalable educational framework.

Paperid: 2490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19086.pdf

Abstract:
X-ray imaging is pivotal in medical diagnostics, offering non-invasive insights into a range of health conditions. Recently, vision-language models, such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model, have demonstrated potential in improving diagnostic accuracy by leveraging large-scale image-text datasets. However, since CLIP was not initially designed for medical images, several CLIP-like models trained specifically on medical images have been developed. Despite their enhanced performance, issues of fairness - particularly regarding demographic attributes - remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we perform a comprehensive fairness analysis of CLIP-like models applied to X-ray image classification. We assess their performance and fairness across diverse patient demographics and disease categories using zero-shot inference and various fine-tuning techniques, including Linear Probing, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and full fine-tuning. Our results indicate that while fine-tuning improves model accuracy, fairness concerns persist, highlighting the need for further fairness interventions in these foundational models.

Paperid: 2491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16385.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is increasingly important, as it eliminates reliance on network connections, reduces expensive API calls, and enhances user privacy. However, on-device deployment is challenging due to the limited computational resources of edge devices. In particular, the key bottleneck stems from memory bandwidth constraints related to weight loading. Weight-only quantization effectively reduces memory access, yet often induces significant accuracy degradation. Recent efforts to incorporate sub-branches have shown promise for mitigating quantization errors, but these methods either lack robust optimization strategies or rely on suboptimal objectives. To address these gaps, we propose FeedBack Quantization (FBQuant), a novel approach inspired by negative feedback mechanisms in automatic control. FBQuant inherently ensures that the reconstructed weights remain bounded by the quantization process, thereby reducing the risk of overfitting. To further offset the additional latency introduced by sub-branches, we develop an efficient CUDA kernel that decreases 60% of extra inference time. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of FBQuant across various LLMs. Notably, for 3-bit Llama2-7B, FBQuant improves zero-shot accuracy by 1.2%.

Paperid: 2492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00051.pdf

Abstract:
Digital twin (DT) technology enables real-time simulation, prediction, and optimization of physical systems, but practical deployment faces challenges from high data requirements, proprietary data constraints, and limited adaptability to evolving conditions. This work introduces DDD-GenDT, a dynamic data-driven generative digital twin framework grounded in the Dynamic Data-Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) paradigm. The architecture comprises the Physical Twin Observation Graph (PTOG) to represent operational states, an Observation Window Extraction process to capture temporal sequences, a Data Preprocessing Pipeline for sensor structuring and filtering, and an LLM ensemble for zero-shot predictive inference. By leveraging generative AI, DDD-GenDT reduces reliance on extensive historical datasets, enabling DT construction in data-scarce settings while maintaining industrial data privacy. The DDDAS feedback mechanism allows the DT to autonomically adapt predictions to physical twin (PT) wear and degradation, supporting DT-aging, which ensures progressive synchronization of DT with PT evolution. The framework is validated using the NASA CNC milling dataset, with spindle current as the monitored variable. In a zero-shot setting, the GPT-4-based DT achieves an average RMSE of 0.479 A (4.79% of the 10 A spindle current), accurately modeling nonlinear process dynamics and PT aging without retraining. These results show that DDD-GenDT provides a generalizable, data-efficient, and adaptive DT modeling approach, bridging generative AI with the performance and reliability requirements of industrial DT applications.

Paperid: 2493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09618.pdf

Abstract:
Significant achievements in personalization of diffusion models have been witnessed. Conventional tuning-free methods mostly encode multiple reference images by averaging their image embeddings as the injection condition, but such an image-independent operation cannot perform interaction among images to capture consistent visual elements within multiple references. Although the tuning-based Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can effectively extract consistent elements within multiple images through the training process, it necessitates specific finetuning for each distinct image group. This paper introduces EasyRef, a novel plug-and-play adaptation method that enables diffusion models to be conditioned on multiple reference images and the text prompt. To effectively exploit consistent visual elements within multiple images, we leverage the multi-image comprehension and instruction-following capabilities of the multimodal large language model (MLLM), prompting it to capture consistent visual elements based on the instruction. Besides, injecting the MLLM's representations into the diffusion process through adapters can easily generalize to unseen domains, mining the consistent visual elements within unseen data. To mitigate computational costs and enhance fine-grained detail preservation, we introduce an efficient reference aggregation strategy and a progressive training scheme. Finally, we introduce MRBench, a new multi-reference image generation benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate EasyRef surpasses both tuning-free methods like IP-Adapter and tuning-based methods like LoRA, achieving superior aesthetic quality and robust zero-shot generalization across diverse domains.

Paperid: 2494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16752.pdf

Abstract:
The Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZSCIR) requires retrieving images that match the query image and the relative captions. Current methods focus on projecting the query image into the text feature space, subsequently combining them with features of query texts for retrieval. However, retrieving images only with the text features cannot guarantee detailed alignment due to the natural gap between images and text. In this paper, we introduce Imagined Proxy for CIR (IP-CIR), a training-free method that creates a proxy image aligned with the query image and text description, enhancing query representation in the retrieval process. We first leverage the large language model's generalization capability to generate an image layout, and then apply both the query text and image for conditional generation. The robust query features are enhanced by merging the proxy image, query image, and text semantic perturbation. Our newly proposed balancing metric integrates text-based and proxy retrieval similarities, allowing for more accurate retrieval of the target image while incorporating image-side information into the process. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves retrieval performances. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the CIRR dataset with a Recall@K of 70.07 at K=10. Additionally, we achieved an improvement in Recall@10 on the FashionIQ dataset, rising from 45.11 to 45.74, and improved the baseline performance in CIRCO with a mAPK@10 score, increasing from 32.24 to 34.26.

Paperid: 2495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16749.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently been employed to generate high-quality images, reducing the need for manual data collection and improving model generalization in tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and image perception. However, the synthetic framework is usually designed with meticulous human effort for each task due to various requirements on image layout, content, and annotation formats, restricting the application of synthetic data on more general scenarios. In this paper, we propose AnySynth, a unified framework integrating adaptable, comprehensive, and highly controllable components capable of generating an arbitrary type of synthetic data given diverse requirements. Specifically, the Task-Specific Layout Generation Module is first introduced to produce reasonable layouts for different tasks by leveraging the generation ability of large language models and layout priors of real-world images. A Uni-Controlled Image Generation Module is then developed to create high-quality synthetic images that are controllable and based on the generated layouts. In addition, user specific reference images, and style images can be incorporated into the generation to task requirements. Finally, the Task-Oriented Annotation Module offers precise and detailed annotations for the generated images across different tasks. We have validated our framework's performance across various tasks, including Few-shot Object Detection, Cross-domain Object Detection, Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval, and Multi-modal Image Perception and Grounding. The specific data synthesized by our framework significantly improves model performance in these tasks, demonstrating the generality and effectiveness of our framework.

Paperid: 2496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14433.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of generative AI (gen-AI) is transforming industries, particularly in education and workforce training. This chapter introduces PRISM (Personalized, Rapid, and Immersive Skill Mastery), a scalable framework leveraging gen-AI and Digital Twins (DTs) to deliver adaptive, experiential learning. PRISM integrates sentiment analysis and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to monitor learner comprehension and dynamically adjust content to meet course objectives. We further present the Multi-Fidelity Digital Twin for Education (MFDT-E) framework, aligning DT fidelity levels with Bloom's Taxonomy and the Kirkpatrick evaluation model to support undergraduate, master's, and doctoral training. Experimental validation shows that GPT-4 achieves 91 percent F1 in zero-shot sentiment analysis of teacher-student dialogues, while GPT-3.5 performs robustly in informal language contexts. Additionally, the system's effectiveness and scalability for immersive Industry 4.0 training are demonstrated through four VR modules: Home Scene, Factory Floor Tour, Capping Station DT, and PPE Inspection Training. These results highlight the potential of integrating generative AI with digital twins to enable personalized, efficient, and scalable education.

Paperid: 2497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13159.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) models have been widely adopted to enhance automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using text-only corpora, thereby reducing the cost of labeling real speech data. Existing research primarily utilizes additional text data and predefined speech styles supported by TTS models. In this paper, we propose Hard-Synth, a novel ASR data augmentation method that leverages large language models (LLMs) and advanced zero-shot TTS. Our approach employs LLMs to generate diverse in-domain text through rewriting, without relying on additional text data. Rather than using predefined speech styles, we introduce a hard prompt selection method with zero-shot TTS to clone speech styles that the ASR model finds challenging to recognize. Experiments demonstrate that Hard-Synth significantly enhances the Conformer model, achieving relative word error rate (WER) reductions of 6.5\%/4.4\% on LibriSpeech dev/test-other subsets. Additionally, we show that Hard-Synth is data-efficient and capable of reducing bias in ASR.

Paperid: 2498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18647.pdf

Abstract:
Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics, particularly in robotic manipulation, and whether appropriate data scaling can yield single-task robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot for any object within the same category in any environment. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on data scaling in imitation learning. By collecting data across numerous environments and objects, we study how a policy's generalization performance changes with the number of training environments, objects, and demonstrations. Throughout our research, we collect over 40,000 demonstrations and execute more than 15,000 real-world robot rollouts under a rigorous evaluation protocol. Our findings reveal several intriguing results: the generalization performance of the policy follows a roughly power-law relationship with the number of environments and objects. The diversity of environments and objects is far more important than the absolute number of demonstrations; once the number of demonstrations per environment or object reaches a certain threshold, additional demonstrations have minimal effect. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient data collection strategy. With four data collectors working for one afternoon, we collect sufficient data to enable the policies for two tasks to achieve approximately 90% success rates in novel environments with unseen objects.

Paperid: 2499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11686.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of pre-trained vision-language foundation models has revolutionized the field of zero/few-shot (i.e., low-shot) image recognition. The key challenge to address under the condition of limited training data is how to fine-tune pre-trained vision-language models in a parameter-efficient manner. Previously, numerous approaches tackling this challenge have been proposed. Meantime, a few survey papers are also published to summarize these works. However, there still lacks a unified computational framework to integrate existing methods together, identify their nature and support in-depth comparison. As such, this survey paper first proposes a unified computational framework from the perspective of Representer Theorem and then derives many of the existing methods by specializing this framework. Thereafter, a comparative analysis is conducted to uncover the differences and relationships between existing methods. Based on the analyses, some possible variants to improve the existing works are presented. As a demonstration, we extend existing methods by modeling inter-class correlation between representers in reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which is implemented by exploiting the closed-form solution of kernel ridge regression. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of this method. Toward the end of this paper, we discuss the limitations and provide further research directions.

Paperid: 2500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08895.pdf

Abstract:
Cache-based approaches stand out as both effective and efficient for adapting vision-language models (VLMs). Nonetheless, the existing cache model overlooks three crucial aspects. 1) Pre-trained VLMs are mainly optimized for image-text similarity, neglecting the importance of image-image similarity, leading to a gap between pre-training and adaptation. 2) The current cache model is based on the Nadaraya-Watson (N-W) estimator, which disregards the intricate relationships among training samples while constructing weight function. 3) Under the condition of limited samples, the logits generated by cache model are of high uncertainty, directly using these logits without accounting for the confidence could be problematic. This work presents three calibration modules aimed at addressing the above challenges. Similarity Calibration refines the image-image similarity by using unlabeled images. We add a learnable projection layer with residual connection on top of the pre-trained image encoder of CLIP and optimize the parameters by minimizing self-supervised contrastive loss. Weight Calibration introduces a precision matrix into the weight function to adequately model the relation between training samples, transforming the existing cache model to a Gaussian Process (GP) regressor, which could be more accurate than N-W estimator. Confidence Calibration leverages the predictive variances computed by GP Regression to dynamically re-scale the logits of cache model, ensuring that the cache model's outputs are appropriately adjusted based on their confidence levels. Besides, to reduce the high complexity of GPs, we further propose a group-based learning strategy. Integrating the above designs, we propose both training-free and training-required variants. Extensive experiments on 11 few-shot classification datasets validate that the proposed methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 2501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05322.pdf

Abstract:
Although powerful for image generation, consistent and controllable video is a longstanding problem for diffusion models. Video models require extensive training and computational resources, leading to high costs and large environmental impacts. Moreover, video models currently offer limited control of the output motion. This paper introduces a novel approach to video generation by augmenting image diffusion models to create sequential animation frames while maintaining fine detail. These techniques can be applied to existing image models without training any video parameters (zero-shot) by altering the input noise in a latent diffusion model. Two complementary methods are presented. Noise crystallization ensures consistency but is limited to large movements due to reduced latent embedding sizes. Liquid noise trades consistency for greater flexibility without resolution limitations. The core concepts also allow other applications such as relighting, seamless upscaling, and improved video style transfer. Furthermore, an exploration of the VAE embedding used for latent diffusion models is performed, resulting in interesting theoretical insights such as a method for human-interpretable latent spaces.

Paperid: 2502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04752.pdf

Abstract:
As an essential task in information extraction (IE), Event-Event Causal Relation Extraction (ECRE) aims to identify and classify the causal relationships between event mentions in natural language texts. However, existing research on ECRE has highlighted two critical challenges, including the lack of document-level modeling and causal hallucinations. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-guided binary Question Answering (KnowQA) method with event structures for ECRE, consisting of two stages: Event Structure Construction and Binary Question Answering. We conduct extensive experiments under both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings with large language models (LLMs) on the MECI and MAVEN-ERE datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of event structures on document-level ECRE and the effectiveness of KnowQA by achieving state-of-the-art on the MECI dataset. We observe not only the effectiveness but also the high generalizability and low inconsistency of our method, particularly when with complete event structures after fine-tuning the models.

Paperid: 2503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04468.pdf

Abstract:
In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the inference phenomena in large language models. Therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive circuit to model the inference dynamics and try to explain the observed phenomena of ICL. In detail, we divide ICL inference into 3 major operations: (1) Input Text Encode: LMs encode every input text (in the demonstrations and queries) into linear representation in the hidden states with sufficient information to solve ICL tasks. (2) Semantics Merge: LMs merge the encoded representations of demonstrations with their corresponding label tokens to produce joint representations of labels and demonstrations. (3) Feature Retrieval and Copy: LMs search the joint representations of demonstrations similar to the query representation on a task subspace, and copy the searched representations into the query. Then, language model heads capture these copied label representations to a certain extent and decode them into predicted labels. Through careful measurements, the proposed inference circuit successfully captures and unifies many fragmented phenomena observed during the ICL process, making it a comprehensive and practical explanation of the ICL inference process. Moreover, ablation analysis by disabling the proposed steps seriously damages the ICL performance, suggesting the proposed inference circuit is a dominating mechanism. Additionally, we confirm and list some bypass mechanisms that solve ICL tasks in parallel with the proposed circuit.

Paperid: 2504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01193.pdf

Abstract:
Backdoors can be injected into NLP models to induce misbehavior when the input text contains a specific feature, known as a trigger, which the attacker secretly selects. Unlike fixed words, phrases, or sentences used in the static text trigger, NLP dynamic backdoor attacks design triggers associated with abstract and latent text features, making them considerably stealthier than traditional static backdoor attacks. However, existing research on NLP backdoor detection primarily focuses on defending against static backdoor attacks, while detecting dynamic backdoors in NLP models remains largely unexplored. This paper presents CLIBE, the first framework to detect dynamic backdoors in Transformer-based NLP models. CLIBE injects a "few-shot perturbation" into the suspect Transformer model by crafting optimized weight perturbation in the attention layers to make the perturbed model classify a limited number of reference samples as a target label. Subsequently, CLIBE leverages the generalization ability of this few-shot perturbation to determine whether the original model contains a dynamic backdoor. Extensive evaluation on three advanced NLP dynamic backdoor attacks, two widely-used Transformer frameworks, and four real-world classification tasks strongly validates the effectiveness of CLIBE. We also demonstrate the robustness of CLIBE against various adaptive attacks. Furthermore, we employ CLIBE to scrutinize 49 popular Transformer models on Hugging Face and discover one exhibiting a high probability of containing a dynamic backdoor. We have contacted Hugging Face and provided detailed evidence of this model's backdoor behavior. Moreover, we extend CLIBE to detect backdoor text generation models modified to exhibit toxic behavior. To the best of our knowledge, CLIBE is the first framework capable of detecting backdoors in text generation models without access to trigger input test samples.

Paperid: 2505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03318.pdf

Authors:Chandler Smith, Marwa Abdulhai, Manfred Diaz, Marko Tesic, Rakshit S. Trivedi, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Lewis Hammond, Jesse Clifton, Minsuk Chang, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, John P. Agapiou, Jayd Matyas, Danny Karmon, Akash Kundu, Aliaksei Korshuk, Ananya Ananya, Arrasy Rahman, Avinaash Anand Kulandaivel, Bain McHale, Beining Zhang, Buyantuev Alexander, Carlos Saith Rodriguez Rojas, Caroline Wang, Chetan Talele, Chenao Liu, Chichen Lin, Diana Riazi, Di Yang Shi, Emanuel Tewolde, Elizaveta Tennant, Fangwei Zhong, Fuyang Cui, Gang Zhao, Gema Parreño Piqueras, Hyeonggeun Yun, Ilya Makarov, Jiaxun Cui, Jebish Purbey, Jim Dilkes, Jord Nguyen, Lingyun Xiao, Luis Felipe Giraldo, Manuela Chacon-Chamorro, Manuel Sebastian Rios Beltran, Marta Emili García Segura, Mengmeng Wang, Mogtaba Alim, Nicanor Quijano, Nico Schiavone, Olivia Macmillan-Scott, Oswaldo Peña, Peter Stone, Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala, Rolando Fernandez, Ruben Manrique, Sunjia Lu, Sheila A. McIlraith, Shamika Dhuri, Shuqing Shi, Siddhant Gupta, Sneheel Sarangi, Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian, Taehun Cha, Toryn Q. Klassen, Wenming Tu, Weijian Fan, Wu Ruiyang, Xue Feng, Yali Du, Yang Liu, Yiding Wang, Yipeng Kang, Yoonchang Sung, Yuxuan Chen, Zhaowei Zhang, Zhihan Wang, Zhiqiang Wu, Ziang Chen, Zilong Zheng, Zixia Jia, Ziyan Wang, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Natasha Jaques, Tim Baarslag, Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Joel Z. Leibo

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing evaluation methods fail to measure how well these capabilities generalize to novel social situations. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating the ability of LLM-based agents to cooperate in zero-shot, mixed-motive environments using Concordia, a natural language multi-agent simulation environment. Our method measures general cooperative intelligence by testing an agent's ability to identify and exploit opportunities for mutual gain across diverse partners and contexts. We present empirical results from the NeurIPS 2024 Concordia Contest, where agents were evaluated on their ability to achieve mutual gains across a suite of diverse scenarios ranging from negotiation to collective action problems. Our findings reveal significant gaps between current agent capabilities and the robust generalization required for reliable cooperation, particularly in scenarios demanding persuasion and norm enforcement.

Paperid: 2506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03004.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous driving needs fast, scalable 4D reconstruction and re-simulation for training and evaluation, yet most methods for dynamic driving scenes still rely on per-scene optimization, known camera calibration, or short frame windows, making them slow and impractical. We revisit this problem from a feedforward perspective and introduce \textbf{Driving Gaussian Grounded Transformer (DGGT)}, a unified framework for pose-free dynamic scene reconstruction. We note that the existing formulations, treating camera pose as a required input, limit flexibility and scalability. Instead, we reformulate pose as an output of the model, enabling reconstruction directly from sparse, unposed images and supporting an arbitrary number of views for long sequences. Our approach jointly predicts per-frame 3D Gaussian maps and camera parameters, disentangles dynamics with a lightweight dynamic head, and preserves temporal consistency with a lifespan head that modulates visibility over time. A diffusion-based rendering refinement further reduces motion/interpolation artifacts and improves novel-view quality under sparse inputs. The result is a single-pass, pose-free algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance and speed. Trained and evaluated on large-scale driving benchmarks (Waymo, nuScenes, Argoverse2), our method outperforms prior work both when trained on each dataset and in zero-shot transfer across datasets, and it scales well as the number of input frames increases.

Paperid: 2507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11450.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce VoxTell, a vision-language model for text-prompted volumetric medical image segmentation. It maps free-form descriptions, from single words to full clinical sentences, to 3D masks. Trained on 62K+ CT, MRI, and PET volumes spanning over 1K anatomical and pathological classes, VoxTell uses multi-stage vision-language fusion across decoder layers to align textual and visual features at multiple scales. It achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across modalities on unseen datasets, excelling on familiar concepts while generalizing to related unseen classes. Extensive experiments further demonstrate strong cross-modality transfer, robustness to linguistic variations and clinical language, as well as accurate instance-specific segmentation from real-world text. Code is available at: https://www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/VoxTell

Paperid: 2508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08170.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a Distributed Zero-Shot Learning (DistZSL) framework that can fully exploit decentralized data to learn an effective model for unseen classes. Considering the data heterogeneity issues across distributed nodes, we introduce two key components to ensure the effective learning of DistZSL: a cross-node attribute regularizer and a global attribute-to-visual consensus. Our proposed cross-node attribute regularizer enforces the distances between attribute features to be similar across different nodes. In this manner, the overall attribute feature space would be stable during learning, and thus facilitate the establishment of visual-to-attribute(V2A) relationships. Then, we introduce the global attribute-tovisual consensus to mitigate biased V2A mappings learned from individual nodes. Specifically, we enforce the bilateral mapping between the attribute and visual feature distributions to be consistent across different nodes. Thus, the learned consistent V2A mapping can significantly enhance zero-shot learning across different nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DistZSL achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art in learning from distributed data.

Paperid: 2509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04711.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models, especially CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse downstream tasks. Soft prompts, as carefully crafted modules that efficiently adapt vision-language models to specific tasks, necessitate effective copyright protection. In this paper, we investigate model copyright protection by auditing whether suspicious third-party models incorporate protected soft prompts. While this can be viewed as a special case of model ownership auditing, our analysis shows that existing techniques are ineffective due to prompt learning's unique characteristics. Non-intrusive auditing is inherently prone to false positives when independent models share similar data distributions with victim models. Intrusive approaches also fail: backdoor methods designed for CLIP cannot embed functional triggers, while extending traditional DNN backdoor techniques to prompt learning suffers from harmfulness and ambiguity challenges. We find that these failures in intrusive auditing stem from the same fundamental reason: watermarking operates within the same decision space as the primary task yet pursues opposing objectives. Motivated by these findings, we propose sequential watermarking for soft prompts (SWAP), which implants watermarks into a different and more complex space. SWAP encodes watermarks through a specific order of defender-specified out-of-distribution classes, inspired by the zero-shot prediction capability of CLIP. This watermark, which is embedded in a more complex space, keeps the original prediction label unchanged, making it less opposed to the primary task. We further design a hypothesis-test-guided verification protocol for SWAP and provide theoretical analyses of success conditions. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate SWAP's effectiveness, harmlessness, and robustness against potential adaptive attacks.

Paperid: 2510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15821.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained time series models have enabled inference-only forecasting systems that produce accurate predictions without task-specific training. However, existing approaches largely focus on univariate forecasting, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where multivariate data and covariates play a crucial role. We present Chronos-2, a pretrained model capable of handling univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed forecasting tasks in a zero-shot manner. Chronos-2 employs a group attention mechanism that facilitates in-context learning (ICL) through efficient information sharing across multiple time series within a group, which may represent sets of related series, variates of a multivariate series, or targets and covariates in a forecasting task. These general capabilities are achieved through training on synthetic datasets that impose diverse multivariate structures on univariate series. Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art performance across three comprehensive benchmarks: fev-bench, GIFT-Eval, and Chronos Benchmark II. On fev-bench, which emphasizes multivariate and covariate-informed forecasting, Chronos-2's universal ICL capabilities lead to substantial improvements over existing models. On tasks involving covariates, it consistently outperforms baselines by a wide margin. Case studies in the energy and retail domains further highlight its practical advantages. The in-context learning capabilities of Chronos-2 establish it as a general-purpose forecasting model that can be used "as is" in real-world forecasting pipelines.

Paperid: 2511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12798.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection has long been dominated by traditional coordinate regression-based models, such as YOLO, DETR, and Grounding DINO. Although recent efforts have attempted to leverage MLLMs to tackle this task, they face challenges like low recall rate, duplicate predictions, coordinate misalignment, etc. In this work, we bridge this gap and propose Rex-Omni, a 3B-scale MLLM that achieves state-of-the-art object perception performance. On benchmarks like COCO and LVIS, Rex-Omni attains performance comparable to or exceeding regression-based models (e.g., DINO, Grounding DINO) in a zero-shot setting. This is enabled by three key designs: 1) Task Formulation: we use special tokens to represent quantized coordinates from 0 to 999, reducing the model's learning difficulty and improving token efficiency for coordinate prediction; 2) Data Engines: we construct multiple data engines to generate high-quality grounding, referring, and pointing data, providing semantically rich supervision for training; \3) Training Pipelines: we employ a two-stage training process, combining supervised fine-tuning on 22 million data with GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. This RL post-training leverages geometry-aware rewards to effectively bridge the discrete-to-continuous coordinate prediction gap, improve box accuracy, and mitigate undesirable behaviors like duplicate predictions that stem from the teacher-guided nature of the initial SFT stage. Beyond conventional detection, Rex-Omni's inherent language understanding enables versatile capabilities such as object referring, pointing, visual prompting, GUI grounding, spatial referring, OCR and key-pointing, all systematically evaluated on dedicated benchmarks. We believe that Rex-Omni paves the way for more versatile and language-aware visual perception systems.

Paperid: 2512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07778.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to couple perception with robotic control, offering a promising path toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. However, current SOTA VLAs are primarily pretrained on multimodal tasks with limited relevance to embodied scenarios, and then finetuned to map explicit instructions to actions. Consequently, due to the lack of reasoning-intensive pretraining and reasoning-guided manipulation, these models are unable to perform implicit human intention reasoning required for complex, real-world interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{IntentionVLA}, a VLA framework with a curriculum training paradigm and an efficient inference mechanism. Our proposed method first leverages carefully designed reasoning data that combine intention inference, spatial grounding, and compact embodied reasoning, endowing the model with both reasoning and perception capabilities. In the following finetuning stage, IntentionVLA employs the compact reasoning outputs as contextual guidance for action generation, enabling fast inference under indirect instructions. Experimental results show that IntentionVLA substantially outperforms $π_0$, achieving 18\% higher success rates with direct instructions and 28\% higher than ECoT under intention instructions. On out-of-distribution intention tasks, IntentionVLA achieves over twice the success rate of all baselines, and further enables zero-shot human-robot interaction with 40\% success rate. These results highlight IntentionVLA as a promising paradigm for next-generation human-robot interaction (HRI) systems.

Paperid: 2513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02282.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of AI-generated videos, there is an urgent need for effective detection tools to mitigate societal risks such as misinformation and reputational harm. In addition to accurate classification, it is essential that detection models provide interpretable explanations to ensure transparency for regulators and end users. To address these challenges, we introduce VidGuard-R1, the first video authenticity detector that fine-tunes a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) using group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Our model delivers both highly accurate judgments and insightful reasoning. We curate a challenging dataset of 140k real and AI-generated videos produced by state-of-the-art generation models, carefully designing the generation process to maximize discrimination difficulty. We then fine-tune Qwen-VL using GRPO with two specialized reward models that target temporal artifacts and generation complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidGuard-R1 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on existing benchmarks, with additional training pushing accuracy above 95%. Case studies further show that VidGuard-R1 produces precise and interpretable rationales behind its predictions. The code is publicly available at https://VidGuard-R1.github.io.

Paperid: 2514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21090.pdf

Abstract:
We observe that zero-shot appearance transfer with large-scale image generation models faces a significant challenge: Attention Leakage. This challenge arises when the semantic mapping between two images is captured by the Query-Key alignment. To tackle this issue, we introduce Q-Align, utilizing Query-Query alignment to mitigate attention leakage and improve the semantic alignment in zero-shot appearance transfer. Q-Align incorporates three core contributions: (1) Query-Query alignment, facilitating the sophisticated spatial semantic mapping between two images; (2) Key-Value rearrangement, enhancing feature correspondence through realignment; and (3) Attention refinement using rearranged keys and values to maintain semantic consistency. We validate the effectiveness of Q-Align through extensive experiments and analysis, and Q-Align outperforms state-of-the-art methods in appearance fidelity while maintaining competitive structure preservation.

Paperid: 2515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16569.pdf

Abstract:
The non-invasive assessment of increasingly incidentally discovered renal masses is a critical challenge in urologic oncology, where diagnostic uncertainty frequently leads to the overtreatment of benign or indolent tumors. In this study, we developed and validated RenalCLIP using a dataset of 27,866 CT scans from 8,809 patients across nine Chinese medical centers and the public TCIA cohort, a visual-language foundation model for characterization, diagnosis and prognosis of renal mass. The model was developed via a two-stage pre-training strategy that first enhances the image and text encoders with domain-specific knowledge before aligning them through a contrastive learning objective, to create robust representations for superior generalization and diagnostic precision. RenalCLIP achieved better performance and superior generalizability across 10 core tasks spanning the full clinical workflow of kidney cancer, including anatomical assessment, diagnostic classification, and survival prediction, compared with other state-of-the-art general-purpose CT foundation models. Especially, for complicated task like recurrence-free survival prediction in the TCIA cohort, RenalCLIP achieved a C-index of 0.726, representing a substantial improvement of approximately 20% over the leading baselines. Furthermore, RenalCLIP's pre-training imparted remarkable data efficiency; in the diagnostic classification task, it only needs 20% training data to achieve the peak performance of all baseline models even after they were fully fine-tuned on 100% of the data. Additionally, it achieved superior performance in report generation, image-text retrieval and zero-shot diagnosis tasks. Our findings establish that RenalCLIP provides a robust tool with the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, refine prognostic stratification, and personalize the management of patients with kidney cancer.

Paperid: 2516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03332.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models with billions of parameters are often over-provisioned: many layers contribute little unique information yet dominate the memory and energy footprint during inference. We present LieQ, a metric-driven post-training quantization framework that addresses the critical challenge of maintaining accuracy in sub-7B models under extreme low-bit compression. Our method introduces three complementary layer-wise diagnostics-Perplexity Drop, Representational Compactness, and Top-k Energy Gain -that reveal a canonical division of labour across layers, enabling automatic bit-width allocation without gradient updates. Unlike existing approaches that suffer severe accuracy degradation at 2-3 bits precision, LieQ achieves state-of-the-art compression-accuracy trade-offs: on Qwen3-4B, it recovers 95.9% of FP16 baseline performance at 2.05-bit quantization, outperforming GPTQ by 19.7% and AWQ by 18.1% on average across seven zero-shot reasoning tasks. Applied to LLaMA3.2-3B, LieQ maintains 98.2% of baseline accuracy at 2.07-bit precision while enabling 4x memory reduction, establishing new paradigms for deploying small language models on resource-constrained edge devices.

Paperid: 2517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21924.pdf

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize target objects within a 3D scene based on natural language queries. To alleviate the reliance on costly 3D training data, recent studies have explored zero-shot 3DVG by leveraging the extensive knowledge and powerful reasoning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs and VLMs. However, existing paradigms tend to emphasize either spatial (3D-based) or semantic (2D-based) understanding, limiting their effectiveness in complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce SPAZER - a VLM-driven agent that combines both modalities in a progressive reasoning framework. It first holistically analyzes the scene and produces a 3D rendering from the optimal viewpoint. Based on this, anchor-guided candidate screening is conducted to perform a coarse-level localization of potential objects. Furthermore, leveraging retrieved relevant 2D camera images, 3D-2D joint decision-making is efficiently performed to determine the best-matching object. By bridging spatial and semantic reasoning neural streams, SPAZER achieves robust zero-shot grounding without training on 3D-labeled data. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate that SPAZER significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, achieving notable gains of 9.0% and 10.9% in accuracy.

Paperid: 2518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21222.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) identifies domain-specific expressions that are crucial for downstream tasks such as machine translation and information retrieval. Although large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various NLP tasks, their potential for ATE has scarcely been examined. We propose a retrieval-based prompting strategy that, in the few-shot setting, selects demonstrations according to \emph{syntactic} rather than semantic similarity. This syntactic retrieval method is domain-agnostic and provides more reliable guidance for capturing term boundaries. We evaluate the approach in both in-domain and cross-domain settings, analyzing how lexical overlap between the query sentence and its retrieved examples affects performance. Experiments on three specialized ATE benchmarks show that syntactic retrieval improves F1-score. These findings highlight the importance of syntactic cues when adapting LLMs to terminology-extraction tasks.

Paperid: 2519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19694.pdf

Abstract:
Precise anomaly detection in medical images is critical for clinical decision-making. While recent unsupervised or semi-supervised anomaly detection methods trained on large-scale normal data show promising results, they lack fine-grained differentiation, such as benign vs. malignant tumors. Additionally, ultrasound (US) imaging is highly sensitive to devices and acquisition parameter variations, creating significant domain gaps in the resulting US images. To address these challenges, we propose UltraAD, a vision-language model (VLM)-based approach that leverages few-shot US examples for generalized anomaly localization and fine-grained classification. To enhance localization performance, the image-level token of query visual prototypes is first fused with learnable text embeddings. This image-informed prompt feature is then further integrated with patch-level tokens, refining local representations for improved accuracy. For fine-grained classification, a memory bank is constructed from few-shot image samples and corresponding text descriptions that capture anatomical and abnormality-specific features. During training, the stored text embeddings remain frozen, while image features are adapted to better align with medical data. UltraAD has been extensively evaluated on three breast US datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both lesion localization and fine-grained medical classification. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 2520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06705.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting LLM-generated text in specialized and high-stakes domains like medicine and law is crucial for combating misinformation and ensuring authenticity. However, current zero-shot detectors, while effective on general text, often fail when applied to specialized content due to domain shift. We provide a theoretical analysis showing this failure is fundamentally linked to the KL divergence between human, detector, and source text distributions. To address this, we propose DivScore, a zero-shot detection framework using normalized entropy-based scoring and domain knowledge distillation to robustly identify LLM-generated text in specialized domains. We also release a domain-specific benchmark for LLM-generated text detection in the medical and legal domains. Experiments on our benchmark show that DivScore consistently outperforms state-of-the-art detectors, with 14.4% higher AUROC and 64.0% higher recall (0.1% false positive rate threshold). In adversarial settings, DivScore demonstrates superior robustness than other baselines, achieving on average 22.8% advantage in AUROC and 29.5% in recall. Code and data are publicly available.

Paperid: 2521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18520.pdf

Abstract:
Cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) offers unique insights into cardiomyocyte arrangements, bridging the gap between microscopic and macroscopic cardiac function. However, its clinical utility is limited by technical challenges, including a low signal-to-noise ratio, aliasing artefacts, and the need for accurate quantitative fidelity. To address these limitations, we introduce RSFR (Reconstruction, Segmentation, Fusion & Refinement), a novel framework for cardiac diffusion-weighted image reconstruction. RSFR employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, leveraging zero-shot semantic priors via the Segment Anything Model and a robust Vision Mamba-based reconstruction backbone. Our framework integrates semantic features effectively to mitigate artefacts and enhance fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and accurate DT parameter estimation under high undersampling rates. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance of RSFR compared to existing methods, highlighting its robustness, scalability, and potential for clinical translation in quantitative cardiac DTI.

Paperid: 2522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19670.pdf

Abstract:
While vision-language models like CLIP have advanced zero-shot surgical phase recognition, they struggle with fine-grained surgical activities, especially action triplets. This limitation arises because current CLIP formulations rely on global image features, which overlook the fine-grained semantics and contextual details crucial for complex tasks like zero-shot triplet recognition. Furthermore, these models do not explore the hierarchical structure inherent in triplets, reducing their ability to generalize to novel triplets. To address these challenges, we propose fine-CLIP, which learns object-centric features and leverages the hierarchy in triplet formulation. Our approach integrates three components: hierarchical prompt modeling to capture shared semantics, LoRA-based vision backbone adaptation for enhanced feature extraction, and a graph-based condensation strategy that groups similar patch features into meaningful object clusters. Since triplet classification is a challenging task, we introduce an alternative yet meaningful base-to-novel generalization benchmark with two settings on the CholecT50 dataset: Unseen-Target, assessing adaptability to triplets with novel anatomical structures, and Unseen-Instrument-Verb, where models need to generalize to novel instrument-verb interactions. fine-CLIP shows significant improvements in F1 and mAP, enhancing zero-shot recognition of novel surgical triplets.

Paperid: 2523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09248.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation with pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, aims to adapt the model to new, potentially out-of-distribution test data. Existing methods calculate the similarity between visual embedding and learnable class embeddings, which are initialized by text embeddings, for zero-shot image classification. In this work, we first analyze this process based on Bayes theorem, and observe that the core factors influencing the final prediction are the likelihood and the prior. However, existing methods essentially focus on adapting class embeddings to adapt likelihood, but they often ignore the importance of prior. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach, \textbf{B}ayesian \textbf{C}lass \textbf{A}daptation (BCA), which in addition to continuously updating class embeddings to adapt likelihood, also uses the posterior of incoming samples to continuously update the prior for each class embedding. This dual updating mechanism allows the model to better adapt to distribution shifts and achieve higher prediction accuracy. Our method not only surpasses existing approaches in terms of performance metrics but also maintains superior inference rates and memory usage, making it highly efficient and practical for real-world applications.

Paperid: 2524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20985.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we present LesionLocator, a framework for zero-shot longitudinal lesion tracking and segmentation in 3D medical imaging, establishing the first end-to-end model capable of 4D tracking with dense spatial prompts. Our model leverages an extensive dataset of 23,262 annotated medical scans, as well as synthesized longitudinal data across diverse lesion types. The diversity and scale of our dataset significantly enhances model generalizability to real-world medical imaging challenges and addresses key limitations in longitudinal data availability. LesionLocator outperforms all existing promptable models in lesion segmentation by nearly 10 dice points, reaching human-level performance, and achieves state-of-the-art results in lesion tracking, with superior lesion retrieval and segmentation accuracy. LesionLocator not only sets a new benchmark in universal promptable lesion segmentation and automated longitudinal lesion tracking but also provides the first open-access solution of its kind, releasing our synthetic 4D dataset and model to the community, empowering future advancements in medical imaging. Code is available at: www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/LesionLocator

Paperid: 2525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20823.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of foundation models in computational pathology has transformed histopathological image analysis, with whole slide imaging (WSI) diagnosis being a core application. Traditionally, weakly supervised fine-tuning via multiple instance learning (MIL) has been the primary method for adapting foundation models to WSIs. However, in this work we present a key experimental finding: a simple nonlinear mapping strategy combining mean pooling and a multilayer perceptron, called SiMLP, can effectively adapt patch-level foundation models to slide-level tasks without complex MIL-based learning. Through extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks, we demonstrate the superior performance of SiMLP with state-of-the-art methods. For instance, on a large-scale pan-cancer classification task, SiMLP surpasses popular MIL-based methods by 3.52%. Furthermore, SiMLP shows strong learning ability in few-shot classification and remaining highly competitive with slide-level foundation models pretrained on tens of thousands of slides. Finally, SiMLP exhibits remarkable robustness and transferability in lung cancer subtyping. Overall, our findings challenge the conventional MIL-based fine-tuning paradigm, demonstrating that a task-agnostic representation strategy alone can effectively adapt foundation models to WSI analysis. These insights offer a unique and meaningful perspective for future research in digital pathology, paving the way for more efficient and broadly applicable methodologies.

Paperid: 2526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14192.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied in question answering over scientific research papers. To enhance the professionalism and accuracy of responses, many studies employ external knowledge augmentation. However, existing structures of external knowledge in scientific literature often focus solely on either paper entities or domain concepts, neglecting the intrinsic connections between papers through shared domain concepts. This results in less comprehensive and specific answers when addressing questions that combine papers and concepts. To address this, we propose a novel knowledge graph framework that captures deep conceptual relations between academic papers, constructing a relational network via intra-paper semantic elements and inter-paper citation relations. Using a few-shot knowledge graph construction method based on LLM, we develop NLP-AKG, an academic knowledge graph for the NLP domain, by extracting 620,353 entities and 2,271,584 relations from 60,826 papers in ACL Anthology. Based on this, we propose a 'sub-graph community summary' method and validate its effectiveness on three NLP scientific literature question answering datasets.

Paperid: 2527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10906.pdf

Abstract:
Reward design plays a pivotal role in the training of game AIs, requiring substantial domain-specific knowledge and human effort. In recent years, several studies have explored reward generation for training game agents and controlling robots using large language models (LLMs). In the content generation literature, there has been early work on generating reward functions for reinforcement learning agent generators. This work introduces PCGRLLM, an extended architecture based on earlier work, which employs a feedback mechanism and several reasoning-based prompt engineering techniques. We evaluate the proposed method on a story-to-reward generation task in a two-dimensional environment using two state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating the generalizability of our approach. Our experiments provide insightful evaluations that demonstrate the capabilities of LLMs essential for content generation tasks. The results highlight significant performance improvements of 415% and 40% respectively, depending on the zero-shot capabilities of the language model. Our work demonstrates the potential to reduce human dependency in game AI development, while supporting and enhancing creative processes.

Paperid: 2528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07243.pdf

Abstract:
The imitation of voice, targeted on specific speech attributes such as timbre and speaking style, is crucial in speech generation. However, existing methods rely heavily on annotated data, and struggle with effectively disentangling timbre and style, leading to challenges in achieving controllable generation, especially in zero-shot scenarios. To address these issues, we propose Vevo, a versatile zero-shot voice imitation framework with controllable timbre and style. Vevo operates in two core stages: (1) Content-Style Modeling: Given either text or speech's content tokens as input, we utilize an autoregressive transformer to generate the content-style tokens, which is prompted by a style reference; (2) Acoustic Modeling: Given the content-style tokens as input, we employ a flow-matching transformer to produce acoustic representations, which is prompted by a timbre reference. To obtain the content and content-style tokens of speech, we design a fully self-supervised approach that progressively decouples the timbre, style, and linguistic content of speech. Specifically, we adopt VQ-VAE as the tokenizer for the continuous hidden features of HuBERT. We treat the vocabulary size of the VQ-VAE codebook as the information bottleneck, and adjust it carefully to obtain the disentangled speech representations. Solely self-supervised trained on 60K hours of audiobook speech data, without any fine-tuning on style-specific corpora, Vevo matches or surpasses existing methods in accent and emotion conversion tasks. Additionally, Vevo's effectiveness in zero-shot voice conversion and text-to-speech tasks further demonstrates its strong generalization and versatility. Audio samples are available at https://versavoice.github.io.

Paperid: 2529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13068.pdf

Abstract:
The interconnection between the human lungs and other organs, such as the liver and kidneys, is crucial for understanding the underlying risks and effects of lung diseases and improving patient care. However, most research chest CT imaging is focused solely on the lungs due to considerations of cost and radiation dose. This restricted field of view (FOV) in the acquired images poses challenges to comprehensive analysis and hinders the ability to gain insights into the impact of lung diseases on other organs. To address this, we propose SCOPE (Spatial Coverage Optimization with Prior Encoding), a novel approach to capture the inter-organ relationships from CT images and extend the FOV of chest CT images. Our approach first trains a variational autoencoder (VAE) to encode 2D axial CT slices individually, then stacks the latent representations of the VAE to form a 3D context for training a latent diffusion model. Once trained, our approach extends the FOV of CT images in the z-direction by generating new axial slices in a zero-shot manner. We evaluated our approach on the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) dataset, and results suggest that it effectively extends the FOV to include the liver and kidneys, which are not completely covered in the original NLST data acquisition. Quantitative results on a held-out whole-body dataset demonstrate that the generated slices exhibit high fidelity with acquired data, achieving an SSIM of 0.81.

Paperid: 2530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18123.pdf

Abstract:
As text-to-image (T2I) models continue to advance and gain widespread adoption, their associated safety issues are becoming increasingly prominent. Malicious users often exploit these models to generate Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images using harmful or adversarial prompts, highlighting the critical need for robust safeguards to ensure the integrity and compliance of model outputs. Current internal safeguards frequently degrade image quality, while external detection methods often suffer from low accuracy and inefficiency. In this paper, we introduce AEIOU, a defense framework that is Adaptable, Efficient, Interpretable, Optimizable, and Unified against NSFW prompts in T2I models. AEIOU extracts NSFW features from the hidden states of the model's text encoder, utilizing the separable nature of these features to detect NSFW prompts. The detection process is efficient, requiring minimal inference time. AEIOU also offers real-time interpretation of results and supports optimization through data augmentation techniques. The framework is versatile, accommodating various T2I architectures. Our extensive experiments show that AEIOU significantly outperforms both commercial and open-source moderation tools, achieving over 95% accuracy across all datasets and improving efficiency by at least tenfold. It effectively counters adaptive attacks and excels in few-shot and multi-label scenarios.

Paperid: 2531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07507.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Meta-learning for Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) have shown the potential of using neural networks to dynamically configure evolutionary algorithms (EAs), enhancing their performance and adaptability across various BBO instances. However, they are often tailored to a specific EA, which limits their generalizability and necessitates retraining or redesigns for different EAs and optimization problems. To address this limitation, we introduce ConfigX, a new paradigm of the MetaBBO framework that is capable of learning a universal configuration agent (model) for boosting diverse EAs. To achieve so, our ConfigX first leverages a novel modularization system that enables the flexible combination of various optimization sub-modules to generate diverse EAs during training. Additionally, we propose a Transformer-based neural network to meta-learn a universal configuration policy through multitask reinforcement learning across a designed joint optimization task space. Extensive experiments verify that, our ConfigX, after large-scale pre-training, achieves robust zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, ConfigX exhibits strong lifelong learning capabilities, allowing efficient adaptation to new tasks through fine-tuning. Our proposed ConfigX represents a significant step toward an automatic, all-purpose configuration agent for EAs.

Paperid: 2532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03093.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a powerful encoder that transfers CLIP`s capabilities to event-based data, enhancing its utility and expanding its applicability across diverse domains. While large-scale datasets have significantly advanced image-based models, the scarcity of comprehensive event datasets has limited performance potential in event modality. To address this challenge, we adapt CLIP`s architecture to align event embeddings with image embeddings, supporting zero-shot learning and preserving text alignment while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our encoder achieves strong performance in object recognition, with competitive results in zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks. Notably, it generalizes effectively to events extracted from video data without requiring additional training, highlighting its versatility. Additionally, we integrate this encoder within a cross-modality framework that facilitates interaction across five modalities-Image, Event, Text, Sound, and Depth-expanding the possibilities for cross-modal applications. Overall, this work underscores the transformative potential of a robust event encoder, broadening the scope and utility of event-based data across various fields.

Paperid: 2533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02856.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Source Domain Generalization (DG) is the task of training on multiple source domains and achieving high classification performance on unseen target domains. Recent methods combine robust features from web-scale pretrained backbones with new features learned from source data, and this has dramatically improved benchmark results. However, it remains unclear if DG finetuning methods are becoming better over time, or if improved benchmark performance is simply an artifact of stronger pre-training. Prior studies have shown that perceptual similarity to pre-training data correlates with zero-shot performance, but we find the effect limited in the DG setting. Instead, we posit that having perceptually similar data in pretraining is not enough; and that it is how well these data were learned that determines performance. This leads us to introduce the Alignment Hypothesis, which states that the final DG performance will be high if and only if alignment of image and class label text embeddings is high. Our experiments confirm the Alignment Hypothesis is true, and we use it as an analysis tool of existing DG methods evaluated on DomainBed datasets by splitting evaluation data into In-pretraining (IP) and Out-of-pretraining (OOP). We show that all evaluated DG methods struggle on DomainBed-OOP, while recent methods excel on DomainBed-IP. Put together, our findings highlight the need for DG methods which can generalize beyond pretraining alignment.

Paperid: 2534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06702.pdf

Abstract:
In the Detection and Multi-Object Tracking of Sweet Peppers Challenge, we present Track Any Peppers (TAP) - a weakly supervised ensemble technique for sweet peppers tracking. TAP leverages the zero-shot detection capabilities of vision-language foundation models like Grounding DINO to automatically generate pseudo-labels for sweet peppers in video sequences with minimal human intervention. These pseudo-labels, refined when necessary, are used to train a YOLOv8 segmentation network. To enhance detection accuracy under challenging conditions, we incorporate pre-processing techniques such as relighting adjustments and apply depth-based filtering during post-inference. For object tracking, we integrate the Matching by Segment Anything (MASA) adapter with the BoT-SORT algorithm. Our approach achieves a HOTA score of 80.4%, MOTA of 66.1%, Recall of 74.0%, and Precision of 90.7%, demonstrating effective tracking of sweet peppers without extensive manual effort. This work highlights the potential of foundation models for efficient and accurate object detection and tracking in agricultural settings.

Paperid: 2535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20320.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot relation extraction with none-of-the-above (FsRE with NOTA) aims at predicting labels in few-shot scenarios with unknown classes. FsRE with NOTA is more challenging than the conventional few-shot relation extraction task, since the boundaries of unknown classes are complex and difficult to learn. Meta-learning based methods, especially prototype-based methods, are the mainstream solutions to this task. They obtain the classification boundary by learning the sample distribution of each class. However, their performance is limited because few-shot overfitting and NOTA boundary confusion lead to misclassification between known and unknown classes. To this end, we propose a novel framework based on Gaussian prototype and adaptive margin named GPAM for FsRE with NOTA, which includes three modules, semi-factual representation, GMM-prototype metric learning and decision boundary learning. The first two modules obtain better representations to solve the few-shot problem through debiased information enhancement and Gaussian space distance measurement. The third module learns more accurate classification boundaries and prototypes through adaptive margin and negative sampling. In the training procedure of GPAM, we use contrastive learning loss to comprehensively consider the effects of range and margin on the classification of known and unknown classes to ensure the model's stability and robustness. Sufficient experiments and ablations on the FewRel dataset show that GPAM surpasses previous prototype methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 2536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14729.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at learning generalizable image representations but often falls short in zero-shot inference on certain downstream datasets. Test-time adaptation (TTA) mitigates this issue by adjusting components like normalization layers or context prompts, yet it typically requires large batch sizes and extensive augmentations, leading to high computational costs. This raises a key question: Can VLMs' performance drop in specific test cases be mitigated through efficient, training-free approaches? To explore the solution, we investigate token condensation (TC) techniques, originally designed to enhance vision transformer efficiency by refining token usage during inference. We observe that informative tokens improve visual-text alignment in VLMs like CLIP on unseen datasets. However, existing TC methods often fail to maintain in-distribution performance when reducing tokens, prompting us to ask: How can we transform TC into an effective ``free-lunch'' adaptation strategy for VLMs? To address this, we propose Token Condensation as Adaptation (TCA), a training-free adaptation method that takes a step beyond standard TC. Rather than passively discarding tokens, TCA condenses token representation by introducing reservoir-based domain anchor tokens for information-preserving token reduction and logits correction. TCA achieves up to a 21.4% performance improvement over the strongest baseline on cross-dataset benchmark and the CIFAR-100-Corrupted dataset while reducing GFLOPs by 12.2% to 48.9%, with minimal hyperparameter dependency on both CLIP and SigLIP series.

Paperid: 2537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13825.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomy via agents using large language models (LLMs) for personalized, standardized tasks boosts human efficiency. Automating web tasks (like booking hotels within a budget) is increasingly sought after. Fulfilling practical needs, the web agent also serves as an important proof-of-concept example for various agent grounding scenarios, with its success promising advancements in many future applications. Prior research often handcrafts web agent strategies (e.g., prompting templates, multi-agent systems, search methods, etc.) and the corresponding in-context examples, which may not generalize well across all real-world scenarios. On the other hand, there has been limited study on the misalignment between a web agent's observation/action representation and the pre-training data of the LLM it's based on. This discrepancy is especially notable when LLMs are primarily trained for language completion rather than tasks involving embodied navigation actions and symbolic web elements. Our study enhances an LLM-based web agent by simply refining its observation and action space to better align with the LLM's capabilities. This approach enables our base agent to significantly outperform previous methods on a wide variety of web tasks. Specifically, on WebArena, a benchmark featuring general-purpose web interaction tasks, our agent AgentOccam surpasses the previous state-of-the-art and concurrent work by 9.8 (+29.4%) and 5.9 (+15.8%) absolute points respectively, and boosts the success rate by 26.6 points (+161%) over similar plain web agents with its observation and action space alignment. We achieve this without using in-context examples, new agent roles, online feedback or search strategies. AgentOccam's simple design highlights LLMs' impressive zero-shot performance on web tasks, and underlines the critical role of carefully tuning observation and action spaces for LLM-based agents.

Paperid: 2538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04302.pdf

Abstract:
The integration with artificial intelligence (AI) is recognized as one of the six usage scenarios in next-generation wireless communications. However, several critical challenges hinder the widespread application of deep learning (DL) techniques in wireless communications. In particular, existing DL-based wireless communications struggle to adapt to the rapidly changing wireless environments. In this paper, we discuss fast adaptation for DL-based wireless communications by using few-shot learning (FSL) techniques. We first identify the differences between fast adaptation in wireless communications and traditional AI tasks by highlighting two distinct FSL design requirements for wireless communications. To establish a wide perspective, we present a comprehensive review of the existing FSL techniques in wireless communications that satisfy these two design requirements. In particular, we emphasize the importance of applying domain knowledge in achieving fast adaptation. We specifically focus on multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) precoding as an examples to demonstrate the advantages of the FSL to achieve fast adaptation in wireless communications. Finally, we highlight several open research issues for achieving broadscope future deployment of fast adaptive DL in wireless communication applications.

Paperid: 2539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17047.pdf

Abstract:
Characterizing imaging noise is notoriously data-intensive and device-dependent, as modern sensors entangle physical signals with complex algorithmic artifacts. Current paradigms struggle to disentangle these factors without massive supervised datasets, often reducing noise to mere interference rather than an information resource. Here, we introduce "Noisomics", a framework shifting the focus from suppression to systematic noise decoding via the Contrastive Pre-trained (CoP) Foundation Model. By leveraging the manifold hypothesis and synthetic noise genome, CoP employs contrastive learning to disentangle semantic signals from stochastic perturbations. Crucially, CoP breaks traditional deep learning scaling laws, achieving superior performance with only 100 training samples, outperforming supervised baselines trained on 100,000 samples, thereby reducing data and computational dependency by three orders of magnitude. Extensive benchmarking across 12 diverse out-of-domain datasets confirms its robust zero-shot generalization, demonstrating a 63.8% reduction in estimation error and an 85.1% improvement in the coefficient of determination compared to the conventional training strategy. We demonstrate CoP's utility across scales: from deciphering non-linear hardware-noise interplay in consumer photography to optimizing photon-efficient protocols for deep-tissue microscopy. By decoding noise as a multi-parametric footprint, our work redefines stochastic degradation as a vital information resource, empowering precise imaging diagnostics without prior device calibration.

Paperid: 2540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11475.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as highly effective planning models for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, current works mostly rely on imitation learning from sparse trajectory annotations and under-utilize their potential as generative models. We propose Generative Scenario Rollouts (GeRo), a plug-and-play framework for VLA models that jointly performs planning and generation of language-grounded future traffic scenes through an autoregressive rollout strategy. First, a VLA model is trained to encode ego vehicle and agent dynamics into latent tokens under supervision from planning, motion, and language tasks, facilitating text-aligned generation. Next, GeRo performs language-conditioned autoregressive generation. Given multi-view images, a scenario description, and ego-action questions, it generates future latent tokens and textual responses to guide long-horizon rollouts. A rollout-consistency loss stabilizes predictions using ground truth or pseudo-labels, mitigating drift and preserving text-action alignment. This design enables GeRo to perform temporally consistent, language-grounded rollouts that support long-horizon reasoning and multi-agent planning. On Bench2Drive, GeRo improves driving score and success rate by +15.7 and +26.2, respectively. By integrating reinforcement learning with generative rollouts, GeRo achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop and open-loop performance, demonstrating strong zero-shot robustness. These results highlight the promise of generative, language-conditioned reasoning as a foundation for safer and more interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving.

Paperid: 2541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03600.pdf

Abstract:
Despite rich safety alignment strategies, large language models (LLMs) remain highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which compromise safety guardrails and pose serious security risks. Existing detection methods mainly detect jailbreak status relying on jailbreak templates present in the training data. However, few studies address the more realistic and challenging zero-shot jailbreak detection setting, where no jailbreak templates are available during training. This setting better reflects real-world scenarios where new attacks continually emerge and evolve. To address this challenge, we propose a layer-wise, module-wise, and token-wise amplification framework that progressively magnifies internal feature discrepancies between benign and jailbreak prompts. We uncover safety-relevant layers, identify specific modules that inherently encode zero-shot discriminative signals, and localize informative safety tokens. Building upon these insights, we introduce ALERT (Amplification-based Jailbreak Detector), an efficient and effective zero-shot jailbreak detector that introduces two independent yet complementary classifiers on amplified representations. Extensive experiments on three safety benchmarks demonstrate that ALERT achieves consistently strong zero-shot detection performance. Specifically, (i) across all datasets and attack strategies, ALERT reliably ranks among the top two methods, and (ii) it outperforms the second-best baseline by at least 10% in average Accuracy and F1-score, and sometimes by up to 40%.

Paperid: 2542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19390.pdf

Abstract:
The robotics field is evolving towards data-driven, end-to-end learning, inspired by multimodal large models. However, reliance on expensive real-world data limits progress. Simulators offer cost-effective alternatives, but the gap between simulation and reality challenges effective policy transfer. This paper introduces TwinAligner, a novel Real2Sim2Real system that addresses both visual and dynamic gaps. The visual alignment module achieves pixel-level alignment through SDF reconstruction and editable 3DGS rendering, while the dynamic alignment module ensures dynamic consistency by identifying rigid physics from robot-object interaction. TwinAligner improves robot learning by providing scalable data collection and establishing a trustworthy iterative cycle, accelerating algorithm development. Quantitative evaluations highlight TwinAligner's strong capabilities in visual and dynamic real-to-sim alignment. This system enables policies trained in simulation to achieve strong zero-shot generalization to the real world. The high consistency between real-world and simulated policy performance underscores TwinAligner's potential to advance scalable robot learning. Code and data will be released on https://twin-aligner.github.io

Paperid: 2543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14085.pdf

Abstract:
We present a multilingual, continuous backchannel prediction model for Japanese, English, and Chinese, and use it to investigate cross-linguistic timing behavior. The model is Transformer-based and operates at the frame level, jointly trained with auxiliary tasks on approximately 300 hours of dyadic conversations. Across all three languages, the multilingual model matches or surpasses monolingual baselines, indicating that it learns both language-universal cues and language-specific timing patterns. Zero-shot transfer with two-language training remains limited, underscoring substantive cross-lingual differences. Perturbation analyses reveal distinct cue usage: Japanese relies more on short-term linguistic information, whereas English and Chinese are more sensitive to silence duration and prosodic variation; multilingual training encourages shared yet adaptable representations and reduces overreliance on pitch in Chinese. A context-length study further shows that Japanese is relatively robust to shorter contexts, while Chinese benefits markedly from longer contexts. Finally, we integrate the trained model into a real-time processing software, demonstrating CPU-only inference. Together, these findings provide a unified model and empirical evidence for how backchannel timing differs across languages, informing the design of more natural, culturally-aware spoken dialogue systems.

Paperid: 2544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10547.pdf

Abstract:
The Key-Value (KV) cache is the primary memory bottleneck in long-context Large Language Models, yet it is typically treated as an opaque numerical tensor. In this work, we propose \textbf{STA-Attention}, a framework that utilizes Top-K Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose the KV cache into interpretable ``semantic atoms.'' Unlike standard $L_1$-regularized SAEs, our Top-K approach eliminates shrinkage bias, preserving the precise dot-product geometry required for attention. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental \textbf{Key-Value Asymmetry}: while Key vectors serve as highly sparse routers dominated by a ``Semantic Elbow,'' deep Value vectors carry dense content payloads requiring a larger budget. Based on this structure, we introduce a Dual-Budget Strategy that selectively preserves the most informative semantic components while filtering representational noise. Experiments on Yi-6B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2.5-32B, and others show that our semantic reconstructions maintain perplexity and zero-shot performance comparable to the original models, effectively bridging the gap between mechanistic interpretability and faithful attention modeling.

Paperid: 2545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21265.pdf

Abstract:
Learning-based image matching critically depends on large-scale, diverse, and geometrically accurate training data. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables photorealistic novel-view synthesis and thus is attractive for data generation. However, its geometric inaccuracies and biased depth rendering currently prevent robust correspondence labeling. To address this, we introduce MatchGS, the first framework designed to systematically correct and leverage 3DGS for robust, zero-shot image matching. Our approach is twofold: (1) a geometrically-faithful data generation pipeline that refines 3DGS geometry to produce highly precise correspondence labels, enabling the synthesis of a vast and diverse range of viewpoints without compromising rendering fidelity; and (2) a 2D-3D representation alignment strategy that infuses 3DGS' explicit 3D knowledge into the 2D matcher, guiding 2D semi-dense matchers to learn viewpoint-invariant 3D representations. Our generated ground-truth correspondences reduce the epipolar error by up to 40 times compared to existing datasets, enable supervision under extreme viewpoint changes, and provide self-supervisory signals through Gaussian attributes. Consequently, state-of-the-art matchers trained solely on our data achieve significant zero-shot performance gains on public benchmarks, with improvements of up to 17.7%. Our work demonstrates that with proper geometric refinement, 3DGS can serve as a scalable, high-fidelity, and structurally-rich data source, paving the way for a new generation of robust zero-shot image matchers.

Paperid: 2546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15141.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as recommender systems, owing to their strong reasoning capability and their effectiveness in handling cold-start items. To better adapt LLMs for recommendation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been incorporated. Most existing RAG methods are user-based, retrieving purchase patterns of users similar to the target user and providing them to the LLM. In this work, we propose ItemRAG, an item-based RAG method for LLM-based recommendation that retrieves relevant items (rather than users) from item-item co-purchase histories. ItemRAG helps LLMs capture co-purchase patterns among items, which are beneficial for recommendations. Especially, our retrieval strategy incorporates semantically similar items to better handle cold-start items and uses co-purchase frequencies to improve the relevance of the retrieved items. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ItemRAG consistently (1) improves the zero-shot LLM-based recommender by up to 43% in Hit-Ratio-1 and (2) outperforms user-based RAG baselines under both standard and cold-start item recommendation settings.

Paperid: 2547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14279.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) endeavors to transfer generalized knowledge from the source domain to target domains using only a minimal amount of training data, which faces a triplet of learning challenges in the meantime, i.e., semantic disjoint, large domain discrepancy, and data scarcity. Different from predominant CDFSL works focused on generalized representations, we make novel attempts to construct Intermediate Domain Proxies (IDP) with source feature embeddings as the codebook and reconstruct the target domain feature with this learned codebook. We then conduct an empirical study to explore the intrinsic attributes from perspectives of visual styles and semantic contents in intermediate domain proxies. Reaping benefits from these attributes of intermediate domains, we develop a fast domain alignment method to use these proxies as learning guidance for target domain feature transformation. With the collaborative learning of intermediate domain reconstruction and target feature transformation, our proposed model is able to surpass the state-of-the-art models by a margin on 8 cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks.

Paperid: 2548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12755.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant progress and advances in autonomous driving, many end-to-end systems still struggle with domain adaptation (DA), such as transferring a policy trained under clear weather to adverse weather conditions. Typical DA strategies in the literature include collecting additional data in the target domain or re-training the model, or both. Both these strategies quickly become impractical as we increase scale and complexity of driving. These limitations have encouraged investigation into few-shot and zero-shot prompt-driven DA at inference time involving LLMs and VLMs. These methods work by adding a few state-action trajectories during inference to the prompt (similar to in-context learning). However, there are two limitations of such an approach: $(i)$ prompt-driven DA methods are currently restricted to perception tasks such as detection and segmentation and $(ii)$ they require expert few-shot data. In this work, we present a new approach to inference-time few-shot prompt-driven DA for closed-loop autonomous driving in adverse weather condition using in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL). Similar to other prompt-driven DA methods, our approach does not require any updates to the model parameters nor does it require additional data collection in adversarial weather regime. Furthermore, our approach advances the state-of-the-art in prompt-driven DA by extending to closed driving using general trajectories observed during inference. Our experiments using the CARLA simulator show that ICRL results in safer, more efficient, and more comfortable driving policies in the target domain compared to state-of-the-art prompt-driven DA baselines.

Paperid: 2549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21171.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting CLIP for anomaly detection on unseen objects has shown strong potential in a zero-shot manner. However, existing methods typically rely on a single textual space to align with visual semantics across diverse objects and domains. The indiscriminate alignment hinders the model from accurately capturing varied anomaly semantics. We propose TokenCLIP, a token-wise adaptation framework that enables dynamic alignment between visual and learnable textual spaces for fine-grained anomaly learning. Rather than mapping all visual tokens to a single, token-agnostic textual space, TokenCLIP aligns each token with a customized textual subspace that represents its visual characteristics. Explicitly assigning a unique learnable textual space to each token is computationally intractable and prone to insufficient optimization. We instead expand the token-agnostic textual space into a set of orthogonal subspaces, and then dynamically assign each token to a subspace combination guided by semantic affinity, which jointly supports customized and efficient token-wise adaptation. To this end, we formulate dynamic alignment as an optimal transport problem, where all visual tokens in an image are transported to textual subspaces based on semantic similarity. The transport constraints of OT ensure sufficient optimization across subspaces and encourage them to focus on different semantics. Solving the problem yields a transport plan that adaptively assigns each token to semantically relevant subspaces. A top-k masking is then applied to sparsify the plan and specialize subspaces for distinct visual regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of TokenCLIP.

Paperid: 2550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08774.pdf

Abstract:
Text embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational for numerous applications. However, these models typically operate on raw text, overlooking the rich structural information, such as hyperlinks or citations, that provides crucial context in many real-world datasets. This paper introduces and systematically evaluates a new paradigm for generating structure-aware text embeddings by integrating these structural relations directly into the LLM's internal encoding process, rather than relying on traditional post-hoc aggregation. We investigate two primary in-process methods: sequential concatenation and parallel caching. Through extensive zero-shot experiments across retrieval, clustering, classification, and recommendation tasks, we demonstrate that our structure-aware approaches consistently outperform both text-only and post-hoc baselines. Our analysis reveals critical trade-offs: sequential concatenation excels with noisy, moderate-length contexts, while parallel caching scales more effectively to long, high-signal contexts but is more susceptible to distractors. To address the challenge of noisy structural data, we also introduce and validate two effective techniques: Context Distillation and Semantic Balancing. This work provides the first comprehensive analysis of in-process structure-aware encoding, offering a blueprint for building more powerful and contextually aware embedding models.

Paperid: 2551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03608.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) challenges models to sequentially learn new classes from minimal examples without forgetting prior knowledge, a task complicated by the stability-plasticity dilemma and data scarcity. Current FSCIL methods often struggle with generalization due to their reliance on limited datasets. While diffusion models offer a path for data augmentation, their direct application can lead to semantic misalignment or ineffective guidance. This paper introduces Diffusion-Classifier Synergy (DCS), a novel framework that establishes a mutual boosting loop between diffusion model and FSCIL classifier. DCS utilizes a reward-aligned learning strategy, where a dynamic, multi-faceted reward function derived from the classifier's state directs the diffusion model. This reward system operates at two levels: the feature level ensures semantic coherence and diversity using prototype-anchored maximum mean discrepancy and dimension-wise variance matching, while the logits level promotes exploratory image generation and enhances inter-class discriminability through confidence recalibration and cross-session confusion-aware mechanisms. This co-evolutionary process, where generated images refine the classifier and an improved classifier state yields better reward signals, demonstrably achieves state-of-the-art performance on FSCIL benchmarks, significantly enhancing both knowledge retention and new class learning.

Paperid: 2552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25787.pdf

Abstract:
Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques such as self-consistency have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8\% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks.

Paperid: 2553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21695.pdf

Abstract:
High-frequency physiological waveform modality offers deep, real-time insights into patient status. Recently, physiological foundation models based on Photoplethysmography (PPG), such as PPG-GPT, have been shown to predict critical events, including Cardiac Arrest (CA). However, their powerful representation still needs to be leveraged suitably, especially when the downstream data/label is scarce. We offer three orthogonal improvements to improve PPG-only CA systems by using minimal auxiliary information. First, we propose to use time-to-event modeling, either through simple regression to the event onset time or by pursuing fine-grained discrete survival modeling. Second, we encourage the model to learn CA-focused features by making them patient-identity invariant. This is achieved by first training the largest-scale de-identified biometric identification model, referred to as the p-vector, and subsequently using it adversarially to deconfound cues, such as person identity, that may cause overfitting through memorization. Third, we propose regression on the pseudo-lab values generated by pre-trained auxiliary estimator networks. This is crucial since true blood lab measurements, such as lactate, sodium, troponin, and potassium, are collected sparingly. Via zero-shot prediction, the auxiliary networks can enrich cardiac arrest waveform labels and generate pseudo-continuous estimates as targets. Our proposals can independently improve the 24-hour time-averaged AUC from the 0.74 to the 0.78-0.80 range. We primarily improve over longer time horizons with minimal degradation near the event, thus pushing the Early Warning System research. Finally, we pursue multi-task formulation and diagnose it with a high gradient conflict rate among competing losses, which we alleviate via the PCGrad optimization technique.

Paperid: 2554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14958.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of 3D digital content necessitates expandable recognition systems for open-world scenarios. However, existing 3D class-incremental learning methods struggle under extreme data scarcity due to geometric misalignment and texture bias. While recent approaches integrate 3D data with 2D foundation models (e.g., CLIP), they suffer from semantic blurring caused by texture-biased projections and indiscriminate fusion of geometric-textural cues, leading to unstable decision prototypes and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose Cross-Modal Geometric Rectification (CMGR), a framework that enhances 3D geometric fidelity by leveraging CLIP's hierarchical spatial semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Structure-Aware Geometric Rectification module that hierarchically aligns 3D part structures with CLIP's intermediate spatial priors through attention-driven geometric fusion. Additionally, a Texture Amplification Module synthesizes minimal yet discriminative textures to suppress noise and reinforce cross-modal consistency. To further stabilize incremental prototypes, we employ a Base-Novel Discriminator that isolates geometric variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves 3D few-shot class-incremental learning, achieving superior geometric coherence and robustness to texture bias across cross-domain and within-domain settings.

Paperid: 2555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12090.pdf

Abstract:
Reconstructing cardiac motion from cine CMR sequences is critical for diagnosis, prediction, and intervention. Existing methods rely on complete CMR stacks to infer full heart motion, limiting their utility in intra-procedural scenarios where only sparse observations are available. We present TetHeart, the first end-to-end framework that unifies full 4D multi-structure heart mesh recovery from both offline full-stack acquisitions and intra-procedural sparse-slice observations. Our method leverages deep deformable tetrahedra, an explicit-implicit hybrid representation, to capture shape and motion in a coherent space shared across cardiac structures. It is initialized from high-quality pre-procedural or offline-acquired full stacks to build detailed, patient-specific heart meshes, which can then be updated using whatever slices are available, from full stacks down to a single slice. We further incorporate several key innovations: (i) an attentive mechanism for slice-adaptive 2D-3D feature assembly that dynamically integrates information from arbitrary numbers of slices at any position, combined with a distillation strategy from full-slice to sparse-slice settings to ensure accurate reconstruction under extreme sparsity; and (ii) a two-stage weakly supervised motion learning scheme requiring only keyframe (e.g., ED and ES) annotations. Trained and validated on three large public datasets and externally evaluated zero-shot on additional private interventional and public CMR datasets, TetHeart achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalization in both pre- and intra-procedural settings.

Paperid: 2556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07506.pdf

Abstract:
GPU kernel optimization has long been a central challenge at the intersection of high-performance computing and machine learning. Efficient kernels are crucial for accelerating large language model (LLM) training and serving, yet attaining high performance typically requires extensive manual tuning. Compiler-based systems reduce some of this burden, but still demand substantial manual design and engineering effort. Recently, researchers have explored using LLMs for GPU kernel generation, though prior work has largely focused on translating high-level PyTorch modules into CUDA code. In this work, we introduce Astra, the first LLM-based multi-agent system for GPU kernel optimization. Unlike previous approaches, Astra starts from existing CUDA implementations extracted from SGLang, a widely deployed framework for serving LLMs, rather than treating PyTorch modules as the specification. Within Astra, specialized LLM agents collaborate through iterative code generation, testing, profiling, and planning to produce kernels that are both correct and high-performance. On kernels from SGLang, Astra achieves an average speedup of 1.32x using zero-shot prompting with OpenAI o4-mini. A detailed case study further demonstrates that LLMs can autonomously apply loop transformations, optimize memory access patterns, exploit CUDA intrinsics, and leverage fast math operations to yield substantial performance gains. Our work highlights multi-agent LLM systems as a promising new paradigm for GPU kernel optimization.

Paperid: 2557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03277.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to transfer CLIP's robust 2D generalization capabilities to identify 3D anomalies across unseen objects of highly diverse class semantics. To this end, we propose a unified framework to comprehensively detect and segment 3D anomalies by leveraging both point- and pixel-level information. We first design PointAD, which leverages point-pixel correspondence to represent 3D anomalies through their associated rendering pixel representations. This approach is referred to as implicit 3D representation, as it focuses solely on rendering pixel anomalies but neglects the inherent spatial relationships within point clouds. Then, we propose PointAD+ to further broaden the interpretation of 3D anomalies by introducing explicit 3D representation, emphasizing spatial abnormality to uncover abnormal spatial relationships. Hence, we propose G-aggregation to involve geometry information to enable the aggregated point representations spatially aware. To simultaneously capture rendering and spatial abnormality, PointAD+ proposes hierarchical representation learning, incorporating implicit and explicit anomaly semantics into hierarchical text prompts: rendering prompts for the rendering layer and geometry prompts for the geometry layer. A cross-hierarchy contrastive alignment is further introduced to promote the interaction between the rendering and geometry layers, facilitating mutual anomaly learning. Finally, PointAD+ integrates anomaly semantics from both layers to capture the generalized anomaly semantics. During the test, PointAD+ can integrate RGB information in a plug-and-play manner and further improve its detection performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PointAD+ in ZS 3D anomaly detection across unseen objects with highly diverse class semantics, achieving a holistic understanding of abnormality.

Paperid: 2558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01754.pdf

Abstract:
The field of AI-generated text detection has evolved from supervised classification to zero-shot statistical analysis. However, current approaches share a fundamental limitation: they aggregate token-level measurements into scalar scores, discarding positional information about where anomalies occur. Our empirical analysis reveals that AI-generated text exhibits significant non-stationarity, statistical properties vary by 73.8\% more between text segments compared to human writing. This discovery explains why existing detectors fail against localized adversarial perturbations that exploit this overlooked characteristic. We introduce Temporal Discrepancy Tomography (TDT), a novel detection paradigm that preserves positional information by reformulating detection as a signal processing task. TDT treats token-level discrepancies as a time-series signal and applies Continuous Wavelet Transform to generate a two-dimensional time-scale representation, capturing both the location and linguistic scale of statistical anomalies. On the RAID benchmark, TDT achieves 0.855 AUROC (7.1\% improvement over the best baseline). More importantly, TDT demonstrates robust performance on adversarial tasks, with 14.1\% AUROC improvement on HART Level 2 paraphrasing attacks. Despite its sophisticated analysis, TDT maintains practical efficiency with only 13\% computational overhead. Our work establishes non-stationarity as a fundamental characteristic of AI-generated text and demonstrates that preserving temporal dynamics is essential for robust detection.

Paperid: 2559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14801.pdf

Abstract:
Low-level vision involves a wide spectrum of tasks, including image restoration, enhancement, stylization, and feature extraction, which differ significantly in both task formulation and output domains. To address the challenge of unified modeling across such diverse tasks, we propose a Visual task Prompt-based Image Processing (VPIP) framework that leverages input-target image pairs as visual prompts to guide the model in performing a variety of low-level vision tasks. The framework comprises an end-to-end image processing backbone, a prompt encoder, and a prompt interaction module, enabling flexible integration with various architectures and effective utilization of task-specific visual representations. Based on this design, we develop a unified low-level vision model, GenLV, and evaluate its performance across multiple representative tasks. To explore the scalability of this approach, we extend the framework along two dimensions: model capacity and task diversity. We construct a large-scale benchmark consisting of over 100 low-level vision tasks and train multiple versions of the model with varying scales. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves considerable performance across a wide range of tasks. Notably, increasing the number of training tasks enhances generalization, particularly for tasks with limited data, indicating the model's ability to learn transferable representations through joint training. Further evaluations in zero-shot generalization, few-shot transfer, and task-specific fine-tuning scenarios demonstrate the model's strong adaptability, confirming the effectiveness, scalability, and potential of the proposed framework as a unified foundation for general low-level vision modeling.

Paperid: 2560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05427.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to segment objects based on open-ended language prompts remains a critical challenge, requiring models to ground textual semantics into precise spatial masks while handling diverse and unseen categories. We present OpenWorldSAM, a framework that extends the prompt-driven Segment Anything Model v2 (SAM2) to open-vocabulary scenarios by integrating multi-modal embeddings extracted from a lightweight vision-language model (VLM). Our approach is guided by four key principles: i) Unified prompting: OpenWorldSAM supports a diverse range of prompts, including category-level and sentence-level language descriptions, providing a flexible interface for various segmentation tasks. ii) Efficiency: By freezing the pre-trained components of SAM2 and the VLM, we train only 4.5 million parameters on the COCO-stuff dataset, achieving remarkable resource efficiency. iii) Instance Awareness: We enhance the model's spatial understanding through novel positional tie-breaker embeddings and cross-attention layers, enabling effective segmentation of multiple instances. iv) Generalization: OpenWorldSAM exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities, generalizing well on unseen categories and an open vocabulary of concepts without additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenWorldSAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation across multiple benchmarks, including ADE20k, PASCAL, ScanNet, and SUN-RGBD.

Paperid: 2561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02773.pdf

Abstract:
Medical diagnosis prediction plays a critical role in disease detection and personalized healthcare. While machine learning (ML) models have been widely adopted for this task, their reliance on supervised training limits their ability to generalize to unseen cases, particularly given the high cost of acquiring large, labeled datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in leveraging language abilities and biomedical knowledge for diagnosis prediction. However, they often suffer from hallucinations, lack structured medical reasoning, and produce useless outputs. To address these challenges, we propose KERAP, a knowledge graph (KG)-enhanced reasoning approach that improves LLM-based diagnosis prediction through a multi-agent architecture. Our framework consists of a linkage agent for attribute mapping, a retrieval agent for structured knowledge extraction, and a prediction agent that iteratively refines diagnosis predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that KERAP enhances diagnostic reliability efficiently, offering a scalable and interpretable solution for zero-shot medical diagnosis prediction.

Paperid: 2562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00657.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) behave when simulating political discourse on social media. Leveraging 21 million interactions on X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we construct LLM agents based on 1,186 real users, prompting them to reply to politically salient tweets under controlled conditions. Agents are initialized either with minimal ideological cues (Zero Shot) or recent tweet history (Few Shot), allowing one-to-one comparisons with human replies. We evaluate three model families (Gemini, Mistral, and DeepSeek) across linguistic style, ideological consistency, and toxicity. We find that richer contextualization improves internal consistency but also amplifies polarization, stylized signals, and harmful language. We observe an emergent distortion that we call "generation exaggeration": a systematic amplification of salient traits beyond empirical baselines. Our analysis shows that LLMs do not emulate users, they reconstruct them. Their outputs, indeed, reflect internal optimization dynamics more than observed behavior, introducing structural biases that compromise their reliability as social proxies. This challenges their use in content moderation, deliberative simulations, and policy modeling.

Paperid: 2563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10862.pdf

Abstract:
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) drives progress in numerous scientific and engineering fields, yet high-fidelity simulations remain computationally prohibitive. While machine learning approaches offer computing acceleration, they typically specialize in single physical systems or require extensive training data, hindering their applicability in highly nonlinear and 3D flow scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose OmniFluids, a pure physics pre-trained model that captures fundamental fluid dynamics laws and adapts efficiently to diverse downstream tasks with minimal data. We develop a training framework combining physics-only pre-training, coarse-grid operator distillation, and few-shot fine-tuning. This enables OmniFluids to retain broad physics knowledge while delivering fast and accurate predictions. Architecturally, OmniFluids integrates a mixture of operators, a multi-frame decoder, and factorized Fourier layers, seamlessly incorporating physics-based supervision while allowing efficient and scalable modeling of diverse tasks. Extensive tests on a broad range of 2D and 3D benchmarks show that OmniFluids outperforms state-of-the-art AI-driven methods in terms of flow field prediction and turbulence statistics. It delivers 10--100$\times$ speedups over traditional solvers while maintaining a comparable accuracy and accurately identifies unknown physical parameters from sparse, noisy data. This work demonstrates the potential of training a unified CFD solver exclusively from physics knowledge, offering a new approach for efficient and generalizable modeling across complex fluid systems.

Paperid: 2564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09473.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL), a predominant trend in instruction learning, aims at enhancing the performance of large language models by providing clear task guidance and examples, improving their capability in task understanding and execution. This paper investigates ICL on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) and explores the policies of multi-modal demonstration selection. Existing research efforts in ICL face significant challenges: First, they rely on pre-defined demonstrations or heuristic selecting strategies based on human intuition, which are usually inadequate for covering diverse task requirements, leading to sub-optimal solutions; Second, individually selecting each demonstration fails in modeling the interactions between them, resulting in information redundancy. Unlike these prevailing efforts, we propose a new exploration-exploitation reinforcement learning framework, which explores policies to fuse multi-modal information and adaptively select adequate demonstrations as an integrated whole. The framework allows LVLMs to optimize themselves by continually refining their demonstrations through self-exploration, enabling the ability to autonomously identify and generate the most effective selection policies for in-context learning. Experimental results verify the superior performance of our approach on four Visual Question-Answering (VQA) datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing the generalization capability of few-shot LVLMs.

Paperid: 2565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23054.pdf

Abstract:
Generative 3D reconstruction shows strong potential in incomplete observations. While sparse-view and single-image reconstruction are well-researched, partial observation remains underexplored. In this context, dense views are accessible only from a specific angular range, with other perspectives remaining inaccessible. This task presents two main challenges: (i) limited View Range: observations confined to a narrow angular scope prevent effective traditional interpolation techniques that require evenly distributed perspectives. (ii) inconsistent Generation: views created for invisible regions often lack coherence with both visible regions and each other, compromising reconstruction consistency. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel training-free approach that integrates the local dense observations and multi-source priors for reconstruction. Our method introduces a fusion-based strategy to effectively align these priors in DDIM sampling, thereby generating multi-view consistent images to supervise invisible views. We further design an iterative refinement strategy, which uses the geometric structures of the object to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the superiority of our method over SOTAs, especially in invisible regions.

Paperid: 2566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19938.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-visual zero-shot learning (ZSL) has been extensively researched for its capability to classify video data from unseen classes during training. Nevertheless, current methodologies often struggle with background scene biases and inadequate motion detail. This paper proposes a novel dual-stream Multi-Timescale Motion-Decoupled Spiking Transformer (MDST++), which decouples contextual semantic information and sparse dynamic motion information. The recurrent joint learning unit is proposed to extract contextual semantic information and capture joint knowledge across various modalities to understand the environment of actions. By converting RGB images to events, our method captures motion information more accurately and mitigates background scene biases. Moreover, we introduce a discrepancy analysis block to model audio motion information. To enhance the robustness of SNNs in extracting temporal and motion cues, we dynamically adjust the threshold of Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neurons based on global motion and contextual semantic information. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of MDST++, demonstrating their consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods on mainstream benchmarks. Additionally, incorporating motion and multi-timescale information significantly improves HM and ZSL accuracy by 26.2\% and 39.9\%.

Paperid: 2567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12513.pdf

Abstract:
Global tree species mapping using remote sensing data is vital for biodiversity monitoring, forest management, and ecological research. However, progress in this field has been constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, labeled datasets. To address this, we introduce GlobalGeoTree, a comprehensive global dataset for tree species classification. GlobalGeoTree comprises 6.3 million geolocated tree occurrences, spanning 275 families, 2,734 genera, and 21,001 species across the hierarchical taxonomic levels. Each sample is paired with Sentinel-2 image time series and 27 auxiliary environmental variables, encompassing bioclimatic, geographic, and soil data. The dataset is partitioned into GlobalGeoTree-6M for model pretraining and curated evaluation subsets, primarily GlobalGeoTree-10kEval for zero-shot and few-shot benchmarking. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we introduce a baseline model, GeoTreeCLIP, which leverages paired remote sensing data and taxonomic text labels within a vision-language framework pretrained on GlobalGeoTree-6M. Experimental results show that GeoTreeCLIP achieves substantial improvements in zero- and few-shot classification on GlobalGeoTree-10kEval over existing advanced models. By making the dataset, models, and code publicly available, we aim to establish a benchmark to advance tree species classification and foster innovation in biodiversity research and ecological applications.

Paperid: 2568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03233.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied foundation models are gaining increasing attention for their zero-shot generalization, scalability, and adaptability to new tasks through few-shot post-training. However, existing models rely heavily on real-world data, which is costly and labor-intensive to collect. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective alternative, yet its potential remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we explore the feasibility of training Vision-Language-Action models entirely with large-scale synthetic action data. We curate SynGrasp-1B, a billion-frame robotic grasping dataset generated in simulation with photorealistic rendering and extensive domain randomization. Building on this, we present GraspVLA, a VLA model pretrained on large-scale synthetic action data as a foundational model for grasping tasks. GraspVLA integrates autoregressive perception tasks and flow-matching-based action generation into a unified Chain-of-Thought process, enabling joint training on synthetic action data and Internet semantics data. This design helps mitigate sim-to-real gaps and facilitates the transfer of learned actions to a broader range of Internet-covered objects, achieving open-vocabulary generalization in grasping. Extensive evaluations across real-world and simulation benchmarks demonstrate GraspVLA's advanced zero-shot generalizability and few-shot adaptability to specific human preferences. We will release SynGrasp-1B dataset and pre-trained weights to benefit the community.

Paperid: 2569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14051.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate transformation estimation between camera space and robot space is essential. Traditional methods using markers for hand-eye calibration require offline image collection, limiting their suitability for online self-calibration. Recent learning-based robot pose estimation methods, while advancing online calibration, struggle with cross-robot generalization and require the robot to be fully visible. This work proposes a Foundation feature-driven online End-Effector Pose Estimation (FEEPE) algorithm, characterized by its training-free and cross end-effector generalization capabilities. Inspired by the zero-shot generalization capabilities of foundation models, FEEPE leverages pre-trained visual features to estimate 2D-3D correspondences derived from the CAD model and target image, enabling 6D pose estimation via the PnP algorithm. To resolve ambiguities from partial observations and symmetry, a multi-historical key frame enhanced pose optimization algorithm is introduced, utilizing temporal information for improved accuracy. Compared to traditional hand-eye calibration, FEEPE enables marker-free online calibration. Unlike robot pose estimation, it generalizes across robots and end-effectors in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior flexibility, generalization, and performance.

Paperid: 2570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12191.pdf

Abstract:
This work advances zero-shot interactive segmentation for remote sensing imagery through three key contributions. First, we propose a novel sketch-based prompting method, enabling users to intuitively outline objects, surpassing traditional point or box prompts. Second, we introduce LTL-Sensing, the first dataset pairing human sketches with remote sensing imagery, setting a benchmark for future research. Third, we present LTL-Net, a model featuring a multi-input prompting transport module tailored for freehand sketches. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly improves segmentation accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art methods like SAM, fostering more intuitive human-AI collaboration in remote sensing analysis and enhancing its applications.

Paperid: 2571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04441.pdf

Abstract:
For scene understanding in unstructured environments, an accurate and uncertainty-aware metric-semantic mapping is required to enable informed action selection by autonomous systems. Existing mapping methods often suffer from overconfident semantic predictions, and sparse and noisy depth sensing, leading to inconsistent map representations. In this paper, we therefore introduce EvidMTL, a multi-task learning framework that uses evidential heads for depth estimation and semantic segmentation, enabling uncertainty-aware inference from monocular RGB images. To enable uncertainty-calibrated evidential multi-task learning, we propose a novel evidential depth loss function that jointly optimizes the belief strength of the depth prediction in conjunction with evidential segmentation loss. Building on this, we present EvidKimera, an uncertainty-aware semantic surface mapping framework, which uses evidential depth and semantics prediction for improved 3D metric-semantic consistency. We train and evaluate EvidMTL on the NYUDepthV2 and assess its zero-shot performance on ScanNetV2, demonstrating superior uncertainty estimation compared to conventional approaches while maintaining comparable depth estimation and semantic segmentation. In zero-shot mapping tests on ScanNetV2, EvidKimera outperforms Kimera in semantic surface mapping accuracy and consistency, highlighting the benefits of uncertainty-aware mapping and underscoring its potential for real-world robotic applications.

Paperid: 2572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20606.pdf

Abstract:
Searching for objects in cluttered environments requires selecting efficient viewpoints and manipulation actions to remove occlusions and reduce uncertainty in object locations, shapes, and categories. In this work, we address the problem of manipulation-enhanced semantic mapping, where a robot has to efficiently identify all objects in a cluttered shelf. Although Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes~(POMDPs) are standard for decision-making under uncertainty, representing unstructured interactive worlds remains challenging in this formalism. To tackle this, we define a POMDP whose belief is summarized by a metric-semantic grid map and propose a novel framework that uses neural networks to perform map-space belief updates to reason efficiently and simultaneously about object geometries, locations, categories, occlusions, and manipulation physics. Further, to enable accurate information gain analysis, the learned belief updates should maintain calibrated estimates of uncertainty. Therefore, we propose Calibrated Neural-Accelerated Belief Updates (CNABUs) to learn a belief propagation model that generalizes to novel scenarios and provides confidence-calibrated predictions for unknown areas. Our experiments show that our novel POMDP planner improves map completeness and accuracy over existing methods in challenging simulations and successfully transfers to real-world cluttered shelves in zero-shot fashion.

Paperid: 2573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17894.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizable object fetching in cluttered scenes remains a fundamental and application-critical challenge in embodied AI. Closely packed objects cause inevitable occlusions, making safe action generation particularly difficult. Under such partial observability, effective policies must not only generalize across diverse objects and layouts but also reason about occlusion to avoid collisions. However, collecting large-scale real-world data for this task remains prohibitively expensive, leaving this problem largely unsolved. In this paper, we introduce FetchBot, a sim-to-real framework for this challenge. We first curate a large-scale synthetic dataset featuring 1M diverse scenes and 500k representative demonstrations. Based on this dataset, FetchBot employs a depth-conditioned method for action generation, which leverages structural cues to enable robust obstacle-aware action planning. However, depth is perfect in simulation but noisy in real-world environments. To address this sim-to-real gap, FetchBot predicts depth from RGB inputs using a foundation model and integrates local occupancy prediction as a pre-training task, providing a generalizable latent representation for sim-to-real transfer. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the strong zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, effective clutter handling, and adaptability to novel scenarios. In cluttered environments, it achieves an average real-world success rate of 89.95%, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, FetchBot demonstrates excellent robustness in challenging cases, such as fetching transparent, reflective, and irregular objects, highlighting its practical value.

Paperid: 2574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17605.pdf

Abstract:
Providing Large Language Models with relevant contextual knowledge at inference time has been shown to greatly improve the quality of their generations. This is often achieved by prepending informative passages of text, or 'contexts', retrieved from external knowledge bases to their input. However, processing additional contexts online incurs significant computation costs that scale with their length. State Space Models (SSMs) offer a promising solution by allowing a database of contexts to be mapped onto fixed-dimensional states from which to start the generation. A key challenge arises when attempting to leverage information present across multiple contexts, since there is no straightforward way to condition generation on multiple independent states in existing SSMs. To address this, we leverage a simple mathematical relation derived from SSM dynamics to compose multiple states into one that efficiently approximates the effect of concatenating raw context tokens. Since the temporal ordering of contexts can often be uninformative, we enforce permutation-invariance by efficiently averaging states obtained via our composition algorithm across all possible context orderings. We evaluate our resulting method on WikiText and MSMARCO in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, and show that we can match the strongest performing baseline while enjoying on average 5.4x speedup.

Paperid: 2575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03930.pdf

Abstract:
Several recent studies have attempted to autoregressively generate continuous speech representations without discrete speech tokens by combining diffusion and autoregressive models, yet they often face challenges with excessive computational loads or suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling (DiTAR), a patch-based autoregressive framework combining a language model with a diffusion transformer. This approach significantly enhances the efficacy of autoregressive models for continuous tokens and reduces computational demands. DiTAR utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy for patch generation, where the language model processes aggregated patch embeddings and the diffusion transformer subsequently generates the next patch based on the output of the language model. For inference, we propose defining temperature as the time point of introducing noise during the reverse diffusion ODE to balance diversity and determinism. We also show in the extensive scaling analysis that DiTAR has superb scalability. In zero-shot speech generation, DiTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in robustness, speaker similarity, and naturalness.

Paperid: 2576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05862.pdf

Abstract:
Depicting novel classes with language descriptions by observing few-shot samples is inherent in human-learning systems. This lifelong learning capability helps to distinguish new knowledge from old ones through the increase of open-world learning, namely Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL). Existing works to solve this problem mainly rely on the careful tuning of visual encoders, which shows an evident trade-off between the base knowledge and incremental ones. Motivated by human learning systems, we propose a new Language-inspired Relation Transfer (LRT) paradigm to understand objects by joint visual clues and text depictions, composed of two major steps. We first transfer the pretrained text knowledge to the visual domains by proposing a graph relation transformation module and then fuse the visual and language embedding by a text-vision prototypical fusion module. Second, to mitigate the domain gap caused by visual finetuning, we propose context prompt learning for fast domain alignment and imagined contrastive learning to alleviate the insufficient text data during alignment. With collaborative learning of domain alignments and text-image transfer, our proposed LRT outperforms the state-of-the-art models by over $13\%$ and $7\%$ on the final session of mini-ImageNet and CIFAR-100 FSCIL benchmarks.

Paperid: 2577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03841.pdf

Abstract:
The development of general robotic systems capable of manipulating in unstructured environments is a significant challenge. While Vision-Language Models(VLM) excel in high-level commonsense reasoning, they lack the fine-grained 3D spatial understanding required for precise manipulation tasks. Fine-tuning VLM on robotic datasets to create Vision-Language-Action Models(VLA) is a potential solution, but it is hindered by high data collection costs and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object-centric representation that bridges the gap between VLM's high-level reasoning and the low-level precision required for manipulation. Our key insight is that an object's canonical space, defined by its functional affordances, provides a structured and semantically meaningful way to describe interaction primitives, such as points and directions. These primitives act as a bridge, translating VLM's commonsense reasoning into actionable 3D spatial constraints. In this context, we introduce a dual closed-loop, open-vocabulary robotic manipulation system: one loop for high-level planning through primitive resampling, interaction rendering and VLM checking, and another for low-level execution via 6D pose tracking. This design ensures robust, real-time control without requiring VLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, highlighting the potential of this approach for automating large-scale simulation data generation.

Paperid: 2578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18135.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across various domains, deploying LLMs on edge devices has emerged as a new trend. Quantization techniques, which reduce the size and memory requirements of LLMs, are effective for deploying LLMs on resource-limited edge devices. However, existing one-size-fits-all quantization methods often fail to dynamically adjust the memory requirements of LLMs, limiting their applications to practical edge devices with various computation resources. To tackle this issue, we propose Layer-Specific Adaptive Quantization (LSAQ), a system for adaptive quantization and dynamic deployment of LLMs based on layer importance. Specifically, LSAQ evaluates the importance of LLMs' neural layers by constructing top-k token sets from the inputs and outputs of each layer and calculating their Jaccard similarity. Based on layer importance, our system adaptively adjusts quantization strategies in real time according to the computation resource of edge devices, which applies higher quantization precision to layers with higher importance, and vice versa. {Experimental results show that LSAQ consistently outperforms the selected quantization baselines in terms of perplexity and zero-shot tasks. Additionally, it can devise appropriate quantization schemes for different usage scenarios to facilitate the deployment of LLMs.

Paperid: 2579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13080.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, but they still struggle with faithful reasoning due to knowledge gaps and hallucinations. To address these issues, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been utilized to enhance LLM reasoning through their structured knowledge. However, existing KG-enhanced methods, either retrieval-based or agent-based, encounter difficulties in accurately retrieving knowledge and efficiently traversing KGs at scale. In this work, we introduce graph-constrained reasoning (GCR), a novel framework that bridges structured knowledge in KGs with unstructured reasoning in LLMs. To eliminate hallucinations, GCR ensures faithful KG-grounded reasoning by integrating KG structure into the LLM decoding process through KG-Trie, a trie-based index that encodes KG reasoning paths. KG-Trie constrains the decoding process, allowing LLMs to directly reason on graphs and generate faithful reasoning paths grounded in KGs. Additionally, GCR leverages a lightweight KG-specialized LLM for graph-constrained reasoning alongside a powerful general LLM for inductive reasoning over multiple reasoning paths, resulting in accurate reasoning with zero reasoning hallucination. Extensive experiments on several KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that GCR achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong zero-shot generalizability to unseen KGs without additional training.

Paperid: 2580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00320.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot (ZS) 3D anomaly detection is a crucial yet unexplored field that addresses scenarios where target 3D training samples are unavailable due to practical concerns like privacy protection. This paper introduces PointAD, a novel approach that transfers the strong generalization capabilities of CLIP for recognizing 3D anomalies on unseen objects. PointAD provides a unified framework to comprehend 3D anomalies from both points and pixels. In this framework, PointAD renders 3D anomalies into multiple 2D renderings and projects them back into 3D space. To capture the generic anomaly semantics into PointAD, we propose hybrid representation learning that optimizes the learnable text prompts from 3D and 2D through auxiliary point clouds. The collaboration optimization between point and pixel representations jointly facilitates our model to grasp underlying 3D anomaly patterns, contributing to detecting and segmenting anomalies of unseen diverse 3D objects. Through the alignment of 3D and 2D space, our model can directly integrate RGB information, further enhancing the understanding of 3D anomalies in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments show the superiority of PointAD in ZS 3D anomaly detection across diverse unseen objects.

Paperid: 2581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11227.pdf

Abstract:
Learning with limited labelled data is a challenging problem in various applications, including remote sensing. Few-shot semantic segmentation is one approach that can encourage deep learning models to learn from few labelled examples for novel classes not seen during the training. The generalized few-shot segmentation setting has an additional challenge which encourages models not only to adapt to the novel classes but also to maintain strong performance on the training base classes. While previous datasets and benchmarks discussed the few-shot segmentation setting in remote sensing, we are the first to propose a generalized few-shot segmentation benchmark for remote sensing. The generalized setting is more realistic and challenging, which necessitates exploring it within the remote sensing context. We release the dataset augmenting OpenEarthMap with additional classes labelled for the generalized few-shot evaluation setting. The dataset is released during the OpenEarthMap land cover mapping generalized few-shot challenge in the L3D-IVU workshop in conjunction with CVPR 2024. In this work, we summarize the dataset and challenge details in addition to providing the benchmark results on the two phases of the challenge for the validation and test sets.

Paperid: 2582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19102.pdf

Abstract:
Graph data is informative to represent complex relationships such as transactions between accounts, communications between devices, and dependencies among machines or processes. Correspondingly, graph anomaly detection (GAD) plays a critical role in identifying anomalies across various domains, including finance, cybersecurity, manufacturing, etc. Facing the large-volume and multi-domain graph data, nascent efforts attempt to develop foundational generalist models capable of detecting anomalies in unseen graphs without retraining. To the best of our knowledge, the different feature semantics and dimensions of cross-domain graph data heavily hinder the development of the graph foundation model, leaving further in-depth continual learning and inference capabilities a quite open problem. Hence, we propose OWLEYE, a novel zero-shot GAD framework that learns transferable patterns of normal behavior from multiple graphs, with a threefold contribution. First, OWLEYE proposes a cross-domain feature alignment module to harmonize feature distributions, which preserves domain-specific semantics during alignment. Second, with aligned features, to enable continuous learning capabilities, OWLEYE designs the multi-domain multi-pattern dictionary learning to encode shared structural and attribute-based patterns. Third, for achieving the in-context learning ability, OWLEYE develops a truncated attention-based reconstruction module to robustly detect anomalies without requiring labeled data for unseen graph-structured data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that OWLEYE achieves superior performance and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a strong foundation for scalable and label-efficient anomaly detection.

Paperid: 2583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24695.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the recent progresses, particularly in developing Language Models, there are fundamental challenges and unanswered questions about how such models can continually learn/memorize, self-improve, and find effective solutions. In this paper, we present a new learning paradigm, called Nested Learning (NL), that coherently represents a machine learning model with a set of nested, multi-level, and/or parallel optimization problems, each of which with its own context flow. Through the lenses of NL, existing deep learning methods learns from data through compressing their own context flow, and in-context learning naturally emerges in large models. NL suggests a philosophy to design more expressive learning algorithms with more levels, resulting in higher-order in-context learning and potentially unlocking effective continual learning capabilities. We advocate for NL by presenting three core contributions: (1) Expressive Optimizers: We show that known gradient-based optimizers, such as Adam, SGD with Momentum, etc., are in fact associative memory modules that aim to compress the gradients' information (by gradient descent). Building on this insight, we present other more expressive optimizers with deep memory and/or more powerful learning rules; (2) Self-Modifying Learning Module: Taking advantage of NL's insights on learning algorithms, we present a sequence model that learns how to modify itself by learning its own update algorithm; and (3) Continuum Memory System: We present a new formulation for memory system that generalizes the traditional viewpoint of long/short-term memory. Combining our self-modifying sequence model with the continuum memory system, we present a continual learning module, called Hope, showing promising results in language modeling, knowledge incorporation, and few-shot generalization tasks, continual learning, and long-context reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 2584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24023.pdf

Abstract:
Text-guided object segmentation requires both cross-modal reasoning and pixel grounding abilities. Most recent methods treat text-guided segmentation as one-shot grounding, where the model predicts pixel prompts in a single forward pass to drive an external segmentor, which limits verification, refocusing and refinement when initial localization is wrong. To address this limitation, we propose RSAgent, an agentic Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) which interleaves reasoning and action for segmentation via multi-turn tool invocations. RSAgent queries a segmentation toolbox, observes visual feedback, and revises its spatial hypothesis using historical observations to re-localize targets and iteratively refine masks. We further build a data pipeline to synthesize multi-turn reasoning segmentation trajectories, and train RSAgent with a two-stage framework: cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by agentic reinforcement learning with fine-grained, task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments show that RSAgent achieves a zero-shot performance of 66.5% gIoU on ReasonSeg test, improving over Seg-Zero-7B by 9%, and reaches 81.5% cIoU on RefCOCOg, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks.

Paperid: 2585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18489.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong few-shot generalization through in-context learning, yet their reasoning in dynamic and stochastic environments remains opaque. Prior studies mainly focus on static tasks and overlook the online adaptation required when beliefs must be continuously updated, which is a key capability for LLMs acting as world models or agents. We introduce a Bayesian filtering framework to evaluate online inference in LLMs. Our probabilistic probe suite spans both multivariate discrete distributions, such as dice rolls, and continuous distributions, such as Gaussian processes, where ground-truth parameters shift over time. We find that while LLM belief updates resemble Bayesian posteriors, they are more accurately characterized by an exponential forgetting filter with a model-specific discount factor smaller than one. This reveals systematic discounting of older evidence that varies significantly across model architectures. Although inherent priors are often miscalibrated, the updating mechanism itself remains structured and principled. We further validate these findings in a simulated agent task and propose prompting strategies that effectively recalibrate priors with minimal computational cost.

Paperid: 2586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14719.pdf

Abstract:
Small language models (SLMs) are widely used in tasks that require low latency and lightweight deployment, particularly classification. As interpretability and robustness gain increasing importance, explanation-guided learning has emerged as an effective framework by introducing attribution-based supervision during training; however, deriving general and reliable attribution priors remains a significant challenge. Through an analysis of representative attribution methods in classification settings, we find that although these methods can reliably highlight class-relevant tokens, they often focus on common keywords shared by semantically similar classes. Because such classes are already difficult to distinguish under standard training, these attributions provide insufficient discriminative cues, limiting their ability to improve model differentiation. To overcome this limitation, we propose Class-Aware Attribution Prior (CAP), a novel attribution prior extraction framework that guides language models toward capturing fine-grained class distinctions and producing more salient, discriminative attribution priors. Building on this idea, we further introduce CAP Hybrid, which combines priors from CAP with those from existing attribution techniques to form a more comprehensive and balanced supervisory signal. By aligning a model's self-attribution with these enriched priors, our approach encourages the learning of diverse, decision-relevant features. Extensive experiments in full-data, few-shot, and adversarial scenarios demonstrate that our method consistently enhances both interpretability and robustness.

Paperid: 2587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19315.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Model (VLM) is an important component to enable robust robot manipulation. Yet, using it to translate human instructions into an action-resolvable intermediate representation often needs a tradeoff between VLM-comprehensibility and generalizability. Inspired by context-free grammar, we design the Semantic Assembly representation named SEAM, by decomposing the intermediate representation into vocabulary and grammar. Doing so leads us to a concise vocabulary of semantically-rich operations and a VLM-friendly grammar for handling diverse unseen tasks. In addition, we design a new open-vocabulary segmentation paradigm with a retrieval-augmented few-shot learning strategy to localize fine-grained object parts for manipulation, effectively with the shortest inference time over all state-of-the-art parallel works. Also, we formulate new metrics for action-generalizability and VLM-comprehensibility, demonstrating the compelling performance of SEAM over mainstream representations on both aspects. Extensive real-world experiments further manifest its SOTA performance under varying settings and tasks.

Paperid: 2588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16548.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating novel medical concepts and relationships into existing ontologies can significantly enhance their coverage and utility for both biomedical research and clinical applications. Clinical notes, as unstructured documents rich with detailed patient observations, offer valuable context-specific insights and represent a promising yet underutilized source for ontology extension. Despite this potential, directly leveraging clinical notes for ontology extension remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose CLOZE, a novel framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to automatically extract medical entities from clinical notes and integrate them into hierarchical medical ontologies. By capitalizing on the strong language understanding and extensive biomedical knowledge of pre-trained LLMs, CLOZE effectively identifies disease-related concepts and captures complex hierarchical relationships. The zero-shot framework requires no additional training or labeled data, making it a cost-efficient solution. Furthermore, CLOZE ensures patient privacy through automated removal of protected health information (PHI). Experimental results demonstrate that CLOZE provides an accurate, scalable, and privacy-preserving ontology extension framework, with strong potential to support a wide range of downstream applications in biomedical research and clinical informatics.

Paperid: 2589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15200.pdf

Abstract:
A key barrier to the real-world deployment of humanoid robots is the lack of autonomous loco-manipulation skills. We introduce VIRAL, a visual sim-to-real framework that learns humanoid loco-manipulation entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot to real hardware. VIRAL follows a teacher-student design: a privileged RL teacher, operating on full state, learns long-horizon loco-manipulation using a delta action space and reference state initialization. A vision-based student policy is then distilled from the teacher via large-scale simulation with tiled rendering, trained with a mixture of online DAgger and behavior cloning. We find that compute scale is critical: scaling simulation to tens of GPUs (up to 64) makes both teacher and student training reliable, while low-compute regimes often fail. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, VIRAL combines large-scale visual domain randomization over lighting, materials, camera parameters, image quality, and sensor delays--with real-to-sim alignment of the dexterous hands and cameras. Deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid, the resulting RGB-based policy performs continuous loco-manipulation for up to 54 cycles, generalizing to diverse spatial and appearance variations without any real-world fine-tuning, and approaching expert-level teleoperation performance. Extensive ablations dissect the key design choices required to make RGB-based humanoid loco-manipulation work in practice.

Paperid: 2590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13225.pdf

Abstract:
With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their vision-enabled counterparts (VLMs), numerous works have investigated their capabilities in tasks that fuse the modalities of vision and language. In this work, we benchmark the extent to which VLMs are able to act as highly-trained phoneticians, interpreting spectrograms and waveforms of speech. To do this, we synthesise a novel dataset containing 4k+ English words spoken in isolation alongside stylistically consistent spectrogram and waveform figures. We test the ability of VLMs to understand these representations of speech through a multiple-choice task whereby models must predict the correct phonemic or graphemic transcription of a spoken word when presented amongst 3 distractor transcriptions that have been selected based on their phonemic edit distance to the ground truth. We observe that both zero-shot and finetuned models rarely perform above chance, demonstrating the requirement for specific parametric knowledge of how to interpret such figures, rather than paired samples alone.

Paperid: 2591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11690.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities under zero-shot settings. However, tuning the learnable prompts solely based on unlabeled test data may induce prompt optimization bias, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the underlying causes of prompt optimization bias from both the model and data perspectives. In terms of the model, the entropy minimization objective typically focuses on reducing the entropy of model predictions while overlooking their correctness. This can result in overconfident yet incorrect outputs, thereby compromising the quality of prompt optimization. On the data side, prompts affected by optimization bias can introduce misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which further aggravates the prompt optimization bias. To this end, we propose a Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning method. Specifically, we first introduce a dynamic retrieval-augmented modulation module that retrieves high-confidence knowledge from a dynamic knowledge base using the test image feature as a query, and uses the retrieved knowledge to modulate the predictions. Guided by the refined predictions, we further develop a reliability-aware prompt optimization module that incorporates a confidence-based weighted ensemble and cross-modal consistency distillation to impose regularization constraints during prompt tuning. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmark datasets involving both natural distribution shifts and cross-datasets generalization demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines, validating its effectiveness in mitigating prompt optimization bias.

Paperid: 2592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11208.pdf

Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized devices while preserving data privacy. However, FL methods typically run for a predefined number of global rounds, often leading to unnecessary computation when optimal performance is reached earlier. In addition, training may continue even when the model fails to achieve meaningful performance. To address this inefficiency, we introduce a zero-shot synthetic validation framework that leverages generative AI to monitor model performance and determine early stopping points. Our approach adaptively stops training near the optimal round, thereby conserving computational resources and enabling rapid hyperparameter adjustments. Numerical results on multi-label chest X-ray classification demonstrate that our method reduces training rounds by up to 74% while maintaining accuracy within 1% of the optimal.

Paperid: 2593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06633.pdf

Abstract:
Road network representation learning (RNRL) has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners as various spatiotemporal tasks are emerging. Recent advanced methods leverage Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and contrastive learning to characterize the spatial structure of road segments in a self-supervised paradigm. However, spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics of road networks raise severe challenges to the neighborhood smoothing mechanism of self-supervised GNNs. To address these issues, we propose a $\textbf{D}$ual-branch $\textbf{S}$patial-$\textbf{T}$emporal self-supervised representation framework for enhanced road representations, termed as DST. On one hand, DST designs a mix-hop transition matrix for graph convolution to incorporate dynamic relations of roads from trajectories. Besides, DST contrasts road representations of the vanilla road network against that of the hypergraph in a spatial self-supervised way. The hypergraph is newly built based on three types of hyperedges to capture long-range relations. On the other hand, DST performs next token prediction as the temporal self-supervised task on the sequences of traffic dynamics based on a causal Transformer, which is further regularized by differentiating traffic modes of weekdays from those of weekends. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods verify the superiority of our proposed framework. Moreover, the comprehensive spatiotemporal modeling facilitates DST to excel in zero-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 2594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24390.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into real-time Web applications, such as AI-powered search and conversational agents, presents a fundamental Web infrastructure challenge: reconciling the demand for high-quality, complex reasoning with the stringent low-latency and high-throughput requirements of interactive services. Current LLM reasoning, hindered by computationally inefficient sequential generation and rigid reasoning strategies, creates a critical bottleneck for the Web services. Existing approaches typically optimize the LLM reasoning for either efficiency or quality but struggle to achieve both, and thus fail to meet the dual requirements of modern Web platforms. To overcome these limitations, we propose Orion, a novel and efficient reasoning framework that enables dependency-aware query decomposition and logic-parallel content expansion. Concretely, Orion decomposes a single query reasoning process into two synergistic phases: (1) \textit{key point generation}, which distills logically structured key points through retrieval-augmented few-shot prompting, and (2) \textit{content parallel expansion}, which concurrently elaborates on these points based on a dependency graph to ensure logical consistency. Furthermore, Orion introduces a pipeline scheduling mechanism that exploits the complementary computational characteristics of the two phases (generation imposes pressure on GPU computing and expansion stresses on GPU memory) across multiple queries, enabling cross-query parallelism and dramatically improving reasoning performance (\ie, efficiency and quality). Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that Orion not only delivers up to 4.33x higher token generation speed and 3.42x lower answer latency over the baselines but also improves reasoning quality by up to 18.75% through explicitly modeling inter-point dependencies.

Paperid: 2595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17313.pdf

Abstract:
Learning disentangled representations in sequential data is a key goal in deep learning, with broad applications in vision, audio, and time series. While real-world data involves multiple interacting semantic factors over time, prior work has mostly focused on simpler two-factor static and dynamic settings, primarily because such settings make data collection easier, thereby overlooking the inherently multi-factor nature of real-world data. We introduce the first standardized benchmark for evaluating multi-factor sequential disentanglement across six diverse datasets spanning video, audio, and time series. Our benchmark includes modular tools for dataset integration, model development, and evaluation metrics tailored to multi-factor analysis. We additionally propose a post-hoc Latent Exploration Stage to automatically align latent dimensions with semantic factors, and introduce a Koopman-inspired model that achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we show that Vision-Language Models can automate dataset annotation and serve as zero-shot disentanglement evaluators, removing the need for manual labels and human intervention. Together, these contributions provide a robust and scalable foundation for advancing multi-factor sequential disentanglement.

Paperid: 2596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16822.pdf

Abstract:
Coral reefs are rapidly declining due to anthropogenic pressures such as climate change, underscoring the urgent need for scalable, automated monitoring. We introduce ReefNet, a large public coral reef image dataset with point-label annotations mapped to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). ReefNet aggregates imagery from 76 curated CoralNet sources and an additional site from Al Wajh in the Red Sea, totaling approximately 925000 genus-level hard coral annotations with expert-verified labels. Unlike prior datasets, which are often limited by size, geography, or coarse labels and are not ML-ready, ReefNet offers fine-grained, taxonomically mapped labels at a global scale to WoRMS. We propose two evaluation settings: (i) a within-source benchmark that partitions each source's images for localized evaluation, and (ii) a cross-source benchmark that withholds entire sources to test domain generalization. We analyze both supervised and zero-shot classification performance on ReefNet and find that while supervised within-source performance is promising, supervised performance drops sharply across domains, and performance is low across the board for zero-shot models, especially for rare and visually similar genera. This provides a challenging benchmark intended to catalyze advances in domain generalization and fine-grained coral classification. We will release our dataset, benchmarking code, and pretrained models to advance robust, domain-adaptive, global coral reef monitoring and conservation.

Paperid: 2597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01247.pdf

Abstract:
Language Models (LMs) are primarily evaluated on globally popular sports, often overlooking regional and indigenous sporting traditions. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{\textit{CultSportQA}}, a benchmark designed to assess LMs' understanding of traditional sports across 60 countries and 6 continents, encompassing four distinct cultural categories. The dataset features 33,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across text and image modalities, each of which is categorized into three key types: history-based, rule-based, and scenario-based. To evaluate model performance, we employ zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across a diverse set of Large Language Models (LLMs), Small Language Models (SLMs), and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLMs). By providing a comprehensive multilingual and multicultural sports benchmark, \textbf{\textit{CultSportQA}} establishes a new standard for assessing AI's ability to understand and reason about traditional sports.

Paperid: 2598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19274.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India's diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes including festivals, attire, cuisines, art forms, and historical heritage amongst many more. We evaluate a wide range of vision-language models (VLMs), including open-source small and large models, proprietary systems, reasoning-specialized VLMs, and Indic-focused models, across zero-shot and chain-of-thought settings. Our results expose key limitations in current models' ability to reason over culturally grounded, multimodal inputs, particularly for low-resource languages and less-documented traditions. DRISHTIKON fills a vital gap in inclusive AI research, offering a robust testbed to advance culturally aware, multimodally competent language technologies.

Paperid: 2599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12711.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions by learning prior knowledge of seen primitives, \textit{i.e.}, attributes and objects. Learning generalizable compositional representations in CZSL remains challenging due to the entangled nature of attributes and objects as well as the prevalence of long-tailed distributions in real-world data. Inspired by neuroscientific findings that imagination and perception share similar neural processes, we propose a novel approach called Debiased Feature Augmentation (DeFA) to address these challenges. The proposed DeFA integrates a disentangle-and-reconstruct framework for feature augmentation with a debiasing strategy. DeFA explicitly leverages the prior knowledge of seen attributes and objects by synthesizing high-fidelity composition features to support compositional generalization. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that DeFA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both \textit{closed-world} and \textit{open-world} settings.

Paperid: 2600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01895.pdf

Abstract:
The escalating intensity and frequency of wildfires demand innovative computational methods for rapid and accurate property damage assessment. Traditional methods are often time consuming, while modern computer vision approaches typically require extensive labeled datasets, hindering immediate post-disaster deployment. This research introduces a novel, zero-shot framework leveraging pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) to classify damage from ground-level imagery. We propose and evaluate two pipelines applied to the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires in California, a VLM (Pipeline A) and a VLM + large language model (LLM) approach (Pipeline B), that integrate structured prompts based on specific wildfire damage indicators. A primary scientific contribution of this study is demonstrating the VLMs efficacy in synthesizing information from multiple perspectives to identify nuanced damage, a critical limitation in existing literature. Our findings reveal that while single view assessments struggled to classify affected structures (F1 scores ranging from 0.225 to 0.511), the multi-view analysis yielded dramatic improvements (F1 scores ranging from 0.857 to 0.947). Moreover, the McNemar test confirmed that pipelines with a multi-view image assessment yields statistically significant classification improvements; however, the improvements this research observed between Pipeline A and B were not statistically significant. Thus, future research can explore the potential of LLM prompting in damage assessment. The practical contribution is an immediately deployable, flexible, and interpretable workflow that bypasses the need for supervised training, significantly accelerating triage and prioritization for disaster response practitioners.

Paperid: 2601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00893.pdf

Abstract:
Satire, irony, and sarcasm are techniques typically used to express humor and critique, rather than deceive; however, they can occasionally be mistaken for factual reporting, akin to fake news. These techniques can be applied at a more granular level, allowing satirical information to be incorporated into news articles. In this paper, we introduce the first sentence-level dataset for Romanian satire detection for news articles, called SeLeRoSa. The dataset comprises 13,873 manually annotated sentences spanning various domains, including social issues, IT, science, and movies. With the rise and recent progress of large language models (LLMs) in the natural language processing literature, LLMs have demonstrated enhanced capabilities to tackle various tasks in zero-shot settings. We evaluate multiple baseline models based on LLMs in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, as well as baseline transformer-based models. Our findings reveal the current limitations of these models in the sentence-level satire detection task, paving the way for new research directions.

Paperid: 2602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10390.pdf

Abstract:
Existing black-box jailbreak attacks achieve certain success on non-reasoning models but degrade significantly on recent SOTA reasoning models. To improve attack ability, inspired by adversarial aggregation strategies, we integrate multiple jailbreak tricks into a single developer template. Especially, we apply Adversarial Context Alignment to purge semantic inconsistencies and use NTP (a type of harmful prompt) -based few-shot examples to guide malicious outputs, lastly forming DH-CoT attack with a fake chain of thought. In experiments, we further observe that existing red-teaming datasets include samples unsuitable for evaluating attack gains, such as BPs, NHPs, and NTPs. Such data hinders accurate evaluation of true attack effect lifts. To address this, we introduce MDH, a Malicious content Detection framework integrating LLM-based annotation with Human assistance, with which we clean data and build RTA dataset suite. Experiments show that MDH reliably filters low-quality samples and that DH-CoT effectively jailbreaks models including GPT-5 and Claude-4, notably outperforming SOTA methods like H-CoT and TAP.

Paperid: 2603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08120.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor navigation remains a complex challenge due to the absence of reliable GPS signals and the architectural intricacies of large enclosed environments. This study presents an indoor localization and navigation approach that integrates vision-based localization with large language model (LLM)-based navigation. The localization system utilizes a ResNet-50 convolutional neural network fine-tuned through a two-stage process to identify the user's position using smartphone camera input. To complement localization, the navigation module employs an LLM, guided by a carefully crafted system prompt, to interpret preprocessed floor plan images and generate step-by-step directions. Experimental evaluation was conducted in a realistic office corridor with repetitive features and limited visibility to test localization robustness. The model achieved high confidence and an accuracy of 96% across all tested waypoints, even under constrained viewing conditions and short-duration queries. Navigation tests using ChatGPT on real building floor maps yielded an average instruction accuracy of 75%, with observed limitations in zero-shot reasoning and inference time. This research demonstrates the potential for scalable, infrastructure-free indoor navigation using off-the-shelf cameras and publicly available floor plans, particularly in resource-constrained settings like hospitals, airports, and educational institutions.

Paperid: 2604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03363.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning large language models (RLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities through structured and multi-step reasoning. While prior research has primarily focused on improving their training and inference strategies, their potential for in-context learning (ICL) remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we propose Thinking with Nothinking Calibration (JointThinking), a new ICL paradigm that leverages the structured difference between two reasoning modes, i.e., Thinking and Nothinking, to improve reasoning accuracy. Specifically, our method prompts the model to generate two answers in parallel: one in Thinking mode and the other in Nothinking mode. A second round of Thinking is triggered only when the two initial responses are inconsistent, using a single prompt that incorporates the original question and both candidate answers. Since such disagreement occurs infrequently (e.g., only 6\% in GSM8K), our method performs just one round of reasoning in most cases, resulting in minimal latency overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that JointThinking significantly outperforms few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) and majority voting with improved answer robustness. Moreover, It achieves comparable in-distribution performance to training-based SOTA method, while substantially outperforming on out-of-distribution tasks. We further conduct a systematic analysis of the calibration mechanism, showing that leveraging different reasoning modes consistently lowers the error rate and highlights the value of structural thinking diversity. Additionally, we observe that the performance gap between actual and ideal reasoning narrows as model size increases in the second round of thinking, indicating the strong scalability of our approach. Finally, we discuss current limitations and outline promising directions for future ICL research in RLLMs.

Paperid: 2605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23682.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a popular paradigm for learning robot manipulation policies that can follow language instructions and generalize to novel scenarios. Recent works have begun to explore the incorporation of latent actions, abstract representations of motion between two frames, into VLA pre-training. In this paper, we introduce villa-X, a novel Vision-Language-Latent-Action (ViLLA) framework that advances latent action modeling for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. Our approach improves both how latent actions are learned and how they are incorporated into VLA pre-training. We demonstrate that villa-X can generate latent action plans in a zero-shot fashion, even for unseen embodiments and open-vocabulary symbolic understanding. This capability enables villa-X to achieve superior performance across diverse simulation tasks in SIMPLER and on two real-world robotic setups involving both gripper and dexterous hand manipulation. These results establish villa-X as a principled and scalable paradigm for learning generalizable robot manipulation policies. We believe it provides a strong foundation for future research.

Paperid: 2606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17220.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have explored pretrained (foundation) models for vision-based robotic navigation, aiming to achieve generalizable navigation and positive transfer across diverse environments while enhancing zero-shot performance in unseen settings. In this work, we introduce PIG-Nav (Pretrained Image-Goal Navigation), a new approach that further investigates pretraining strategies for vision-based navigation models and contributes in two key areas. Model-wise, we identify two critical design choices that consistently improve the performance of pretrained navigation models: (1) integrating an early-fusion network structure to combine visual observations and goal images via appropriately pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) image encoder, and (2) introducing suitable auxiliary tasks to enhance global navigation representation learning, thus further improving navigation performance. Dataset-wise, we propose a novel data preprocessing pipeline for efficiently labeling large-scale game video datasets for navigation model training. We demonstrate that augmenting existing open navigation datasets with diverse gameplay videos improves model performance. Our model achieves an average improvement of 22.6% in zero-shot settings and a 37.5% improvement in fine-tuning settings over existing visual navigation foundation models in two complex simulated environments and one real-world environment. These results advance the state-of-the-art in pretrained image-goal navigation models. Notably, our model maintains competitive performance while requiring significantly less fine-tuning data, highlighting its potential for real-world deployment with minimal labeled supervision.

Paperid: 2607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13335.pdf

Abstract:
Humour, as a complex language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life. Whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short pun-based jokes, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour depends on the particular form. We compare models' joke explanation abilities from simple puns to complex topical humour that requires esoteric knowledge of real-world entities and events. To this end, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes across 4 joke types and manually write high-quality explanations. These jokes include heterographic and homographic puns, contemporary internet humour, and topical jokes. Using this dataset, we compare the zero-shot abilities of a range of LLMs to accurately and comprehensively explain jokes of different types, identifying key research gaps in the task of humour explanation. We find that none of the tested models (including reasoning models) are capable of reliably generating adequate explanations of all joke types, further highlighting the narrow focus of most existing works on overly simple joke forms.

Paperid: 2608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13123.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), their powerful code-generation capabilities have been widely applied in tasks like code completion and automated development, demonstrating the value of improving coding efficiency. However, the extensive use of LLM-generated code also raises several new challenges. On the one hand, issues such as the regulation of code provenance, copyright disputes, and code quality have become increasingly concerning. How to effectively detect LLM-generated code and ensure its compliant and responsible use has become a critical and urgent issue. On the other hand, in practical applications, LLM-generated code is often subject to manual modifications, such as variable renaming or structural adjustments. Although some recent studies have proposed training-based and zero-shot methods for detecting LLM-generated code, these approaches show insufficient robustness when facing modified LLM-generated code, and there is a lack of an effective solution. To address the real-world scenario where LLM-generated code may undergo minor modifications, we propose CodeGPTSensor+, an enhanced version of CodeGPTSensor, which employs adversarial training to improve robustness against input perturbations. CodeGPTSensor+ integrates an adversarial sample generation module, Multi-objective Identifier and Structure Transformation (MIST), which systematically generates both high-quality and representative adversarial samples. This module effectively enhances the model's resistance against diverse adversarial attacks. Experimental results on the HMCorp dataset demonstrate that CodeGPTSensor+ significantly improves detection accuracy on the adversarial test set while maintaining high accuracy on the original test set, showcasing superior robustness compared to CodeGPTSensor.

Paperid: 2609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08567.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce the Autoregressive Block-Based Iterative Encoder (AbbIE), a novel recursive generalization of the encoder-only Transformer architecture, which achieves better perplexity than a standard Transformer and allows for the dynamic scaling of compute resources at test time. This simple, recursive approach is a complement to scaling large language model (LLM) performance through parameter and token counts. AbbIE performs its iterations in latent space, but unlike latent reasoning models, does not require a specialized dataset or training protocol. We show that AbbIE upward generalizes (ability to generalize to arbitrary iteration lengths) at test time by only using 2 iterations during train time, far outperforming alternative iterative methods. AbbIE's ability to scale its computational expenditure based on the complexity of the task gives it an up to \textbf{12\%} improvement in zero-shot in-context learning tasks versus other iterative and standard methods and up to 5\% improvement in language perplexity. The results from this study open a new avenue to Transformer performance scaling. We perform all of our evaluations on model sizes up to 350M parameters.

Paperid: 2610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04225.pdf

Abstract:
Cyclic peptides, characterized by geometric constraints absent in linear peptides, offer enhanced biochemical properties, presenting new opportunities to address unmet medical needs. However, designing target-specific cyclic peptides remains underexplored due to limited training data. To bridge the gap, we propose CP-Composer, a novel generative framework that enables zero-shot cyclic peptide generation via composable geometric constraints. Our approach decomposes complex cyclization patterns into unit constraints, which are incorporated into a diffusion model through geometric conditioning on nodes and edges. During training, the model learns from unit constraints and their random combinations in linear peptides, while at inference, novel constraint combinations required for cyclization are imposed as input. Experiments show that our model, despite trained with linear peptides, is capable of generating diverse target-binding cyclic peptides, reaching success rates from 38% to 84% on different cyclization strategies.

Paperid: 2611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16502.pdf

Abstract:
Reward models are essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, most open-source multilingual reward models are primarily trained on preference datasets in high-resource languages, resulting in unreliable reward signals for low-resource Indic languages. Collecting large-scale, high-quality preference data for these languages is prohibitively expensive, making preference-based training approaches impractical. To address this challenge, we propose RELIC, a novel in-context learning framework for reward modeling in low-resource Indic languages. RELIC trains a retriever with a pairwise ranking objective to select in-context examples from auxiliary high-resource languages that most effectively highlight the distinction between preferred and less-preferred responses. Extensive experiments on three preference datasets- PKU-SafeRLHF, WebGPT, and HH-RLHF-using state-of-the-art open-source reward models demonstrate that RELIC significantly improves reward model accuracy for low-resource Indic languages, consistently outperforming existing example selection methods. For example, on Bodo-a low-resource Indic language-using a LLaMA-3.2-3B reward model, RELIC achieves a 12.81% and 10.13% improvement in accuracy over zero-shot prompting and state-of-the-art example selection method, respectively.

Paperid: 2612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09822.pdf

Abstract:
In this short note, we report and analyze a striking event: OpenAI's large language model o3 has outwitted all students in a university exam on thermodynamics. The thermodynamics exam is a difficult hurdle for most students, where they must show that they have mastered the fundamentals of this important topic. Consequently, the failure rates are very high, A-grades are rare - and they are considered proof of the students' exceptional intellectual abilities. This is because pattern learning does not help in the exam. The problems can only be solved by knowledgeably and creatively combining principles of thermodynamics. We have given our latest thermodynamics exam not only to the students but also to OpenAI's most powerful reasoning model, o3, and have assessed the answers of o3 exactly the same way as those of the students. In zero-shot mode, the model o3 solved all problems correctly, better than all students who took the exam; its overall score was in the range of the best scores we have seen in more than 10,000 similar exams since 1985. This is a turning point: machines now excel in complex tasks, usually taken as proof of human intellectual capabilities. We discuss the consequences this has for the work of engineers and the education of future engineers.

Paperid: 2613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07376.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) is proposed to pre-train the model on a source-domain dataset with sufficient samples, and then transfer the model to target-domain datasets where only a few samples are available for efficient fine-tuning. There are majorly two challenges in this task: (1) the domain gap and (2) fine-tuning with scarce data. To solve these challenges, we revisit the adapter-based methods, and discover an intriguing insight not explored in previous works: the adapter not only helps the fine-tuning of downstream tasks but also naturally serves as a domain information decoupler. Then, we delve into this finding for an interpretation, and find the model's inherent structure could lead to a natural decoupling of domain information. Building upon this insight, we propose the Domain Feature Navigator (DFN), which is a structure-based decoupler instead of loss-based ones like current works, to capture domain-specific information, thereby directing the model's attention towards domain-agnostic knowledge. Moreover, to prevent the potential excessive overfitting of DFN during the source-domain training, we further design the SAM-SVN method to constrain DFN from learning sample-specific knowledge. On target domains, we freeze the model and fine-tune the DFN to learn target-specific knowledge specific. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art method in CD-FSS significantly by 2.69% and 4.68% MIoU in 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios, respectively.

Paperid: 2614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07335.pdf

Abstract:
Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability. In this paper, we introduce Sparse Autoencoder Role-Playing Steering (SRPS), a novel framework that identifies and manipulates internal model features associated with role-playing behavior. Our approach extracts latent representations from role-play prompts, selects the most relevant features based on activation patterns, and constructs a steering vector that can be injected into the model's residual stream with controllable intensity. Our method enables fine-grained control over role-specific behavior and offers insights into how role information influences internal model activations. Extensive experiments across various reasoning benchmarks and model sizes demonstrate consistent performance gains. Notably, in the zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) setting, the accuracy of Llama3.1-8B on CSQA improves from 31.86% to 39.80%, while Gemma2-9B on SVAMP increases from 37.50% to 45.10%. These results highlight the potential of SRPS to enhance reasoning ability in LLMs, providing better interpretability and stability compared to traditional prompt-based role-playing.

Paperid: 2615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02677.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge from a source-domain dataset to unseen target-domain datasets with limited annotations. Current methods typically compare the distance between training and testing samples for mask prediction. However, we find an entanglement problem exists in this widely adopted method, which tends to bind sourcedomain patterns together and make each of them hard to transfer. In this paper, we aim to address this problem for the CD-FSS task. We first find a natural decomposition of the ViT structure, based on which we delve into the entanglement problem for an interpretation. We find the decomposed ViT components are crossly compared between images in distance calculation, where the rational comparisons are entangled with those meaningless ones by their equal importance, leading to the entanglement problem. Based on this interpretation, we further propose to address the entanglement problem by learning to weigh for all comparisons of ViT components, which learn disentangled features and re-compose them for the CD-FSS task, benefiting both the generalization and finetuning. Experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art CD-FSS method by 1.92% and 1.88% in average accuracy under 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively.

Paperid: 2616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00910.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely used framework for training compact, task-specific models by leveraging the knowledge of teacher models. However, its application to active learning (AL), which aims to minimize annotation costs through iterative sample selection, remains underexplored. This gap stems from the fact that KD typically assumes access to sufficient labeled data, whereas AL operates in data-scarce scenarios where task-specific teacher models are often unavailable. In this paper, we introduce ActiveKD, a framework that integrates AL with KD by leveraging the zero- and few-shot capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs). A key aspect of ActiveKD is the structured prediction bias of VLMs -- i.e., their predictions form clusters in the probability space. We regard this structure as an inductive bias of the teacher model, capturing generalizable output patterns beneficial to student learning. To exploit this bias, we propose Probabilistic CoreSet (PCoreSet), a selection strategy that maximizes coverage in the probability space rather than the feature space. PCoreSet strategically selects categorically diverse unlabeled samples, facilitating more efficient transfer of teacher knowledge under limited annotation budgets. Evaluations on 11 datasets show that PCoreSet consistently outperforms existing selection methods within the ActiveKD framework, advancing research at the intersection of AL and KD.

Paperid: 2617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10565.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents Prior Depth Anything, a framework that combines incomplete but precise metric information in depth measurement with relative but complete geometric structures in depth prediction, generating accurate, dense, and detailed metric depth maps for any scene. To this end, we design a coarse-to-fine pipeline to progressively integrate the two complementary depth sources. First, we introduce pixel-level metric alignment and distance-aware weighting to pre-fill diverse metric priors by explicitly using depth prediction. It effectively narrows the domain gap between prior patterns, enhancing generalization across varying scenarios. Second, we develop a conditioned monocular depth estimation (MDE) model to refine the inherent noise of depth priors. By conditioning on the normalized pre-filled prior and prediction, the model further implicitly merges the two complementary depth sources. Our model showcases impressive zero-shot generalization across depth completion, super-resolution, and inpainting over 7 real-world datasets, matching or even surpassing previous task-specific methods. More importantly, it performs well on challenging, unseen mixed priors and enables test-time improvements by switching prediction models, providing a flexible accuracy-efficiency trade-off while evolving with advancements in MDE models.

Paperid: 2618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21150.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CDFSS) is proposed to transfer the pixel-level segmentation capabilities learned from large-scale source-domain datasets to downstream target-domain datasets, with only a few annotated images per class. In this paper, we focus on a well-observed but unresolved phenomenon in CDFSS: for target domains, particularly those distant from the source domain, segmentation performance peaks at the very early epochs, and declines sharply as the source-domain training proceeds. We delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation: low-level features are vulnerable to domain shifts, leading to sharper loss landscapes during the source-domain training, which is the devil of CDFSS. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a method that includes two plug-and-play modules: one to flatten the loss landscapes for low-level features during source-domain training as a novel sharpness-aware minimization method, and the other to directly supplement target-domain information to the model during target-domain testing by low-level-based calibration. Extensive experiments on four target datasets validate our rationale and demonstrate that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art method in CDFSS signifcantly by 3.71% and 5.34% average MIoU in 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios, respectively.

Paperid: 2619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13310.pdf

Abstract:
Context: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is transforming much of software development, yet its application in software architecture is still in its infancy, and no prior study has systematically addressed the topic. Aim: We aim to systematically synthesize the use, rationale, contexts, usability, and future challenges of GenAI in software architecture. Method: We performed a multivocal literature review (MLR), analyzing peer-reviewed and gray literature, identifying current practices, models, adoption contexts, and reported challenges, extracting themes via open coding. Results: Our review identified significant adoption of GenAI for architectural decision support and architectural reconstruction. OpenAI GPT models are predominantly applied, and there is consistent use of techniques such as few-shot prompting and retrieved-augmented generation (RAG). GenAI has been applied mostly to initial stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), such as Requirements-to-Architecture and Architecture-to-Code. Monolithic and microservice architectures were the dominant targets. However, rigorous testing of GenAI outputs was typically missing from the studies. Among the most frequent challenges are model precision, hallucinations, ethical aspects, privacy issues, lack of architecture-specific datasets, and the absence of sound evaluation frameworks. Conclusions: GenAI shows significant potential in software design, but several challenges remain on its path to greater adoption. Research efforts should target designing general evaluation methodologies, handling ethics and precision, increasing transparency and explainability, and promoting architecture-specific datasets and benchmarks to bridge the gap between theoretical possibilities and practical use.

Paperid: 2620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07511.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at robotic tasks by leveraging large-scale 2D vision-language pretraining, but their reliance on RGB images limits spatial reasoning critical for real-world interaction. Retraining these models with 3D data is computationally prohibitive, while discarding existing 2D datasets wastes valuable resources. To bridge this gap, we propose PointVLA, a framework that enhances pre-trained VLAs with point cloud inputs without requiring retraining. Our method freezes the vanilla action expert and injects 3D features via a lightweight modular block. To identify the most effective way of integrating point cloud representations, we conduct a skip-block analysis to pinpoint less useful blocks in the vanilla action expert, ensuring that 3D features are injected only into these blocks--minimizing disruption to pre-trained representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointVLA outperforms state-of-the-art 2D imitation learning methods, such as OpenVLA, Diffusion Policy and DexVLA, across both simulated and real-world robotic tasks. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of PointVLA enabled by point cloud integration: (1) Few-shot multi-tasking, where PointVLA successfully performs four different tasks using only 20 demonstrations each; (2) Real-vs-photo discrimination, where PointVLA distinguishes real objects from their images, leveraging 3D world knowledge to improve safety and reliability; (3) Height adaptability, Unlike conventional 2D imitation learning methods, PointVLA enables robots to adapt to objects at varying table height that unseen in train data. Furthermore, PointVLA achieves strong performance in long-horizon tasks, such as picking and packing objects from a moving conveyor belt, showcasing its ability to generalize across complex, dynamic environments.

Paperid: 2621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06034.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce Rank-R1, a novel LLM-based reranker that performs reasoning over both the user query and candidate documents before performing the ranking task. Existing document reranking methods based on large language models (LLMs) typically rely on prompting or fine-tuning LLMs to order or label candidate documents according to their relevance to a query. For Rank-R1, we use a reinforcement learning algorithm along with only a small set of relevance labels (without any reasoning supervision) to enhance the reasoning ability of LLM-based rerankers. Our hypothesis is that adding reasoning capabilities to the rerankers can improve their relevance assessement and ranking capabilities. Our experiments on the TREC DL and BRIGHT datasets show that Rank-R1 is highly effective, especially for complex queries. In particular, we find that Rank-R1 achieves effectiveness on in-domain datasets at par with that of supervised fine-tuning methods, but utilizing only 18\% of the training data used by the fine-tuning methods. We also find that the model largely outperforms zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning when applied to out-of-domain datasets featuring complex queries, especially when a 14B-size model is used. Finally, we qualitatively observe that Rank-R1's reasoning process improves the explainability of the ranking results, opening new opportunities for search engine results presentation and fruition.

Paperid: 2622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15682.pdf

Abstract:
The objective in this paper is to improve the performance of text-to-image retrieval. To this end, we introduce a new framework that can boost the performance of large-scale pre-trained vision-language models, so that they can be used for text-to-image re-ranking. The approach, Enhanced Language-Image Pre-training (ELIP), uses the text query, via a simple MLP mapping network, to predict a set of visual prompts to condition the ViT image encoding. ELIP can easily be applied to the commonly used CLIP, SigLIP and BLIP-2 networks. To train the architecture with limited computing resources, we develop a 'student friendly' best practice, involving global hard sample mining, and curation of a large-scale dataset. On the evaluation side, we set up two new out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, Occluded COCO and ImageNet-R, to assess the zero-shot generalisation of the models to different domains. The results demonstrate that ELIP significantly boosts CLIP/SigLIP/SigLIP-2 text-to-image retrieval performance and outperforms BLIP-2 on several benchmarks, as well as providing an easy means to adapt to OOD datasets.

Paperid: 2623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11438.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL aims to convert natural language questions into executable SQL queries. While previous approaches, such as skeleton-masked selection, have demonstrated strong performance by retrieving similar training examples to guide large language models (LLMs), they struggle in real-world scenarios where such examples are unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose Self-Augmentation in-context learning with Fine-grained Example selection for Text-to-SQL (SAFE-SQL), a novel framework that improves SQL generation by generating and filtering self-augmented examples. SAFE-SQL first prompts an LLM to generate multiple Text-to-SQL examples relevant to the test input. Then SAFE-SQL filters these examples through three relevance assessments, constructing high-quality in-context learning examples. Using self-generated examples, SAFE-SQL surpasses the previous zero-shot, and few-shot Text-to-SQL frameworks, achieving higher execution accuracy. Notably, our approach provides additional performance gains in extra hard and unseen scenarios, where conventional methods often fail.

Paperid: 2624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13529.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) is a challenging task that utilizes limited support images to segment associated unseen objects in query images. However, recent FSS methods are observed to perform worse, when enlarging the number of shots. As the support set enlarges, existing FSS networks struggle to concentrate on the high-contributed supports and could easily be overwhelmed by the low-contributed supports that could severely impair the mask predictions. In this work, we study this challenging issue, called support dilution, our goal is to recognize, select, preserve, and enhance those high-contributed supports in the raw support pool. Technically, our method contains three novel parts. First, we propose a contribution index, to quantitatively estimate if a high-contributed support dilutes. Second, we develop the Symmetric Correlation (SC) module to preserve and enhance the high-contributed support features, minimizing the distraction by the low-contributed features. Third, we design the Support Image Pruning operation, to retrieve a compact and high quality subset by discarding low-contributed supports. We conduct extensive experiments on two FSS benchmarks, COCO-20i and PASCAL-5i, the segmentation results demonstrate the compelling performance of our solution over state-of-the-art FSS approaches. Besides, we apply our solution for online segmentation and real-world segmentation, convincing segmentation results showing the practical ability of our work for real-world demonstrations.

Paperid: 2625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00430.pdf

Abstract:
Agents have demonstrated their potential in scientific reasoning tasks through large language models. However, they often face challenges such as insufficient accuracy and degeneration of thought when handling complex reasoning tasks, which impede their performance. To overcome these issues, we propose the Reactive and Reflection agents with Multi-Path Reasoning (RR-MP) Framework, aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our approach improves scientific reasoning accuracy by employing a multi-path reasoning mechanism where each path consists of a reactive agent and a reflection agent that collaborate to prevent degeneration of thought inherent in single-agent reliance. Additionally, the RR-MP framework does not require additional training; it utilizes multiple dialogue instances for each reasoning path and a separate summarizer to consolidate insights from all paths. This design integrates diverse perspectives and strengthens reasoning across each path. We conducted zero-shot and few-shot evaluations on tasks involving moral scenarios, college-level physics, and mathematics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches, highlighting the effectiveness and advantages of the RR-MP framework in managing complex scientific reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 2626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19101.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) requires the model to transfer knowledge from the data-abundant source domain to data-scarce target domains for fast adaptation, where the large domain gap makes CDFSL a challenging problem. Masked Autoencoder (MAE) excels in effectively using unlabeled data and learning image's global structures, enhancing model generalization and robustness. However, in the CDFSL task with significant domain shifts, we find MAE even shows lower performance than the baseline supervised models. In this paper, we first delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation. We find that MAE tends to focus on low-level domain information during reconstructing pixels while changing the reconstruction target to token features could mitigate this problem. However, not all features are beneficial, as we then find reconstructing high-level features can hardly improve the model's transferability, indicating a trade-off between filtering domain information and preserving the image's global structure. In all, the reconstruction target matters for the CDFSL task. Based on the above findings and interpretations, we further propose Domain-Agnostic Masked Image Modeling (DAMIM) for the CDFSL task. DAMIM includes an Aggregated Feature Reconstruction module to automatically aggregate features for reconstruction, with balanced learning of domain-agnostic information and images' global structure, and a Lightweight Decoder module to further benefit the encoder's generalizability. Experiments on four CDFSL datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 2627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03293.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present DiffusionVLA, a novel framework that seamlessly combines the autoregression model with the diffusion model for learning visuomotor policy. Central to our approach is a next-token prediction objective, enabling the model to reason effectively over the user's query in the context of current observations. Subsequently, a diffusion model is attached to generate robust action outputs. To enhance policy learning through self-reasoning, we introduce a novel reasoning injection module that integrates reasoning phrases directly into the policy learning process. The whole framework is simple and flexible, making it easy to deploy and upgrade. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple real robots to validate the effectiveness of DiffusionVLA. Our tests include a challenging factory sorting task, where DiffusionVLA successfully categorizes objects, including those not seen during training. We observe that the reasoning module makes the model interpretable. It allows observers to understand the model thought process and identify potential causes of policy failures. Additionally, we test DiffusionVLA on a zero-shot bin-picking task, achieving 63.7\% accuracy on 102 previously unseen objects. Our method demonstrates robustness to visual changes, such as distractors and new backgrounds, and easily adapts to new embodiments. Furthermore, DiffusionVLA can follow novel instructions and retain conversational ability. Notably, DiffusionVLA is data-efficient and fast at inference; our smallest DiffusionVLA-2B runs 82Hz on a single A6000 GPU and can train from scratch on less than 50 demonstrations for a complex task. Finally, we scale the model from 2B to 72B parameters, showcasing improved generalization capabilities with increased model size.

Paperid: 2628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11856.pdf

Abstract:
Traditionally, digital hardware designs are written in the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) and debugged manually by engineers. This can be time-consuming and error-prone for complex designs. Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a potential tool to help generate fully functioning HDL code, but most works have focused on generation in the single-shot capacity: i.e., run and evaluate, a process that does not leverage debugging and, as such, does not adequately reflect a realistic development process. In this work, we evaluate the ability of LLMs to leverage feedback from electronic design automation (EDA) tools to fix mistakes in their own generated Verilog. To accomplish this, we present an open-source, highly customizable framework, AutoChip, which combines conversational LLMs with the output from Verilog compilers and simulations to iteratively generate and repair Verilog. To determine the success of these LLMs we leverage the VerilogEval benchmark set. We evaluate four state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, focusing on readily accessible commercial models. EDA tool feedback proved to be consistently more effective than zero-shot prompting only with GPT-4o, the most computationally complex model we evaluated. In the best case, we observed a 5.8% increase in the number of successful designs with a 34.2% decrease in cost over the best zero-shot results. Mixing smaller models with this larger model at the end of the feedback iterations resulted in equally as much success as with GPT-4o using feedback, but incurred 41.9% lower cost (corresponding to an overall decrease in cost over zero-shot by 89.6%).

Paperid: 2629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01706.pdf

Abstract:
Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an essential step in the lexical simplification task and has recently become a task on its own. Some variations of this binary classification task have emerged, such as lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complexity evaluation of multi-word expressions (MWE). Large language models (LLMs) recently became popular in the Natural Language Processing community because of their versatility and capability to solve unseen tasks in zero/few-shot settings. Our work investigates LLM usage, specifically open-source models such as Llama 2, Llama 3, and Vicuna v1.5, and closed-source, such as ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o, in the CWI, LCP, and MWE settings. We evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings and show that LLMs struggle in certain conditions or achieve comparable results against existing methods. In addition, we provide some views on meta-learning combined with prompt learning. In the end, we conclude that the current state of LLMs cannot or barely outperform existing methods, which are usually much smaller.

Paperid: 2630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22135.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) is proposed to first pre-train the model on a large-scale source-domain dataset, and then transfer the model to data-scarce target-domain datasets for pixel-level segmentation. The significant domain gap between the source and target datasets leads to a sharp decline in the performance of existing few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods in cross-domain scenarios. In this work, we discover an intriguing phenomenon: simply filtering different frequency components for target domains can lead to a significant performance improvement, sometimes even as high as 14% mIoU. Then, we delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation, and find such improvements stem from the reduced inter-channel correlation in feature maps, which benefits CD-FSS with enhanced robustness against domain gaps and larger activated regions for segmentation. Based on this, we propose a lightweight frequency masker, which further reduces channel correlations by an Amplitude-Phase Masker (APM) module and an Adaptive Channel Phase Attention (ACPA) module. Notably, APM introduces only 0.01% additional parameters but improves the average performance by over 10%, and ACPA imports only 2.5% parameters but further improves the performance by over 1.5%, which significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art CD-FSS methods.

Paperid: 2631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17266.pdf

Abstract:
Stock portfolios are often exposed to rare consequential events (e.g., 2007 global financial crisis, 2020 COVID-19 stock market crash), as they do not have enough historical information to learn from. Large Language Models (LLMs) now present a possible tool to tackle this problem, as they can generalize across their large corpus of training data and perform zero-shot reasoning on new events, allowing them to detect possible portfolio crash events without requiring specific training data. However, detecting portfolio crashes is a complex problem that requires more than basic reasoning abilities. Investors need to dynamically process the impact of each new information found in the news articles, analyze the the relational network of impacts across news events and portfolio stocks, as well as understand the temporal context between impacts across time-steps, in order to obtain the overall aggregated effect on the target portfolio. In this work, we propose an algorithmic framework named Temporal Relational Reasoning (TRR). It seeks to emulate the spectrum of human cognitive capabilities used for complex problem-solving, which include brainstorming, memory, attention and reasoning. Through extensive experiments, we show that TRR is able to outperform state-of-the-art solutions on detecting stock portfolio crashes, and demonstrate how each of the proposed components help to contribute to its performance through an ablation study. Additionally, we further explore the possible applications of TRR by extending it to other related complex problems, such as the detection of possible global crisis events in Macroeconomics.

Paperid: 2632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08901.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented grasping, which involves grasping specific parts of objects based on their functions, is crucial for developing advanced robotic systems capable of performing complex tasks in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework that incorporates both semantic and geometric priors for zero-shot task-oriented grasp generation. The proposed framework, SegGrasp, first leverages the vision-language models like GLIP for coarse segmentation. It then uses detailed geometric information from convex decomposition to improve segmentation quality through a fusion policy named GeoFusion. An effective grasp pose can be generated by a grasping network with improved segmentation. We conducted the experiments on both segmentation benchmark and real-world robot grasping. The experimental results show that SegGrasp surpasses the baseline by more than 15\% in grasp and segmentation performance.

Paperid: 2633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04633.pdf

Abstract:
Best-performing speech models are trained on large amounts of data in the language they are meant to work for. However, most languages have sparse data, making training models challenging. This shortage of data is even more prevalent in speech emotion recognition. Our work explores the model's performance in limited data, specifically for speech emotion recognition. Meta-learning specializes in improving the few-shot learning. As a result, we employ meta-learning techniques on speech emotion recognition tasks, accent recognition, and person identification. To this end, we propose a series of improvements over the multistage meta-learning method. Unlike other works focusing on smaller models due to the high computational cost of meta-learning algorithms, we take a more practical approach. We incorporate a large pre-trained backbone and a prototypical network, making our methods more feasible and applicable. Our most notable contribution is an improved fine-tuning technique during meta-testing that significantly boosts the performance on out-of-distribution datasets. This result, together with incremental improvements from several other works, helped us achieve accuracy scores of 83.78% and 56.30% for Greek and Romanian speech emotion recognition datasets not included in the training or validation splits in the context of 4-way 5-shot learning.

Paperid: 2634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06793.pdf

Abstract:
Real-time stereo matching methods primarily focus on enhancing in-domain performance but often overlook the critical importance of generalization in real-world applications. In contrast, recent stereo foundation models leverage monocular foundation models (MFMs) to improve generalization, but typically suffer from substantial inference latency. To address this trade-off, we propose Generalized Geometry Encoding Volume (GGEV), a novel real-time stereo matching network that achieves strong generalization. We first extract depth-aware features that encode domain-invariant structural priors as guidance for cost aggregation. Subsequently, we introduce a Depth-aware Dynamic Cost Aggregation (DDCA) module that adaptively incorporates these priors into each disparity hypothesis, effectively enhancing fragile matching relationships in unseen scenes. Both steps are lightweight and complementary, leading to the construction of a generalized geometry encoding volume with strong generalization capability. Experimental results demonstrate that our GGEV surpasses all existing real-time methods in zero-shot generalization capability, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and ETH3D benchmarks.

Paperid: 2635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23253.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly transformed various industries. In agriculture, these dual-modal capabilities offer promising applications such as precision farming, crop monitoring, pest detection, and environmental sustainability. While several Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets and benchmarks have been developed to evaluate VLM performance, they often fail to adequately assess the critical reasoning and problem-solving skills required in complex agricultural contexts. To address this gap, we introduce AgriCoT, a VQA dataset that incorporates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, specifically designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of VLMs. With 4,535 carefully curated samples, AgriCoT offers a comprehensive and robust evaluation of reasoning abilities for VLMs, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, by focusing on their capacity to engage in logical reasoning and effective problem-solving. Our evaluations, conducted with 26 representative VLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models, reveal that while some proprietary models excel at answering questions, there is a notable and significant gap in their reasoning capabilities. This underscores the importance of incorporating CoT for more precise and effective assessments. Our dataset are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/wenyb/AgriCoT.

Paperid: 2636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16651.pdf

Abstract:
Recent works explore how real and synthetic data contribute to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models' generalization. While current VLA models have shown the strong effectiveness of large-scale real-robot pre-training, synthetic data has not previously demonstrated comparable capability at scale. This paper provides the first evidence that synthetic data alone can match the performance of the strongest $π$-dataset in pre-training a VLA model, revealing the substantial value of large-scale simulation. The resulting model also exhibits surprisingly zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on several challenging tasks. Our synthetic dataset, InternData-A1, contains over 630k trajectories and 7,433 hours across 4 embodiments, 18 skills, 70 tasks, and 227 scenes, covering rigid, articulated, deformable, and fluid-object manipulation. It is generated through a highly autonomous, fully decoupled, and compositional simulation pipeline that enables long-horizon skill composition, flexible task assembly, and heterogeneous embodiments with minimal manual tuning. Using the same architecture as $π_0$, we pre-train a model entirely on InternData-A1 and find that it matches the official $π_0$ across 49 simulation tasks, 5 real-world tasks, and 4 long-horizon dexterous tasks. We release the dataset and will open-source the generation pipeline to broaden access to large-scale robotic data and to lower the barrier to scalable data creation for embodied AI research.

Paperid: 2637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12004.pdf

Abstract:
Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to single- and multi-hop relations, overlooking \emph{complex logical queries} involving first-order logic operations such as conjunction ($\land$), disjunction ($\lor$), and negation ($\lnot$). Thus, these benchmarks can not be used to sufficiently evaluate the performance of IR models on complex queries in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) to construct a new IR dataset \textbf{ComLQ} for \textbf{Com}plex \textbf{L}ogical \textbf{Q}ueries, which comprises 2,909 queries and 11,251 candidate passages. A key challenge in constructing the dataset lies in capturing the underlying logical structures within unstructured text. Therefore, by designing the subgraph-guided prompt with the subgraph indicator, an LLM (such as GPT-4o) is guided to generate queries with specific logical structures based on selected passages. All query-passage pairs in ComLQ are ensured \emph{structure conformity} and \emph{evidence distribution} through expert annotation. To better evaluate whether retrievers can handle queries with negation, we further propose a new evaluation metric, \textbf{Log-Scaled Negation Consistency} (\textbf{LSNC@$K$}). As a supplement to standard relevance-based metrics (such as nDCG and mAP), LSNC@$K$ measures whether top-$K$ retrieved passages violate negation conditions in queries. Our experimental results under zero-shot settings demonstrate existing retrieval models' limited performance on complex logical queries, especially on queries with negation, exposing their inferior capabilities of modeling exclusion.

Paperid: 2638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19389.pdf

Abstract:
In the field of large language model (LLM) compression, singular value decomposition (SVD) is a widely studied and adopted low-rank decomposition technique. Since SVD operates exclusively on linear modules, and these modules in LLMs are separated by nonlinear components, SVD can only be applied independently to each linear module. Under a global compression ratio constraint, determining the appropriate rank for different linear modules becomes a critical problem. Existing approaches, such as heuristic algorithms and mask-based training, have made progress in addressing this challenge. However, these methods still suffer from several limitations: heuristic algorithms explore the solution space within restricted regions, while mask-based training struggles to efficiently capture the relationship between singular value spectra and trainable parameters. More importantly, current methods overlook the key property that the gain function is non-smooth at a compression ratio of 1, which often leads the training process to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive Rank Allocation (ARA) method. Specifically, (1) ARA introduces a dedicated mask design that enables efficient mapping and updating between retained ranks and trainable parameters; and (2) it employs an additional loss function to guide parameter selection toward globally optimal solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that ARA achieves state-of-the-art performance. On the LLaMA2-7B model with a 80\% compression ratio, ARA reduces perplexity on WikiText2 from 8.38 to 6.42 and improves average zero-shot task accuracy by 9.72 percentage points compared with uniform compression. These results highlight the effectiveness of our method for rank allocation in SVD-based LLM compression.

Paperid: 2639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13675.pdf

Abstract:
Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. In this work, we propose a Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition. We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35 times smaller.

Paperid: 2640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10254.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large generative models have shown that simple autoregressive formulations, when scaled appropriately, can exhibit strong zero-shot generalization across domains. Motivated by this trend, we investigate whether autoregressive video modeling principles can be directly applied to medical imaging tasks, despite the model never being trained on medical data. Specifically, we evaluate a large vision model (LVM) in a zero-shot setting across four representative tasks: organ segmentation, denoising, super-resolution, and motion prediction. Remarkably, even without domain-specific fine-tuning, the LVM can delineate anatomical structures in CT scans and achieve competitive performance on segmentation, denoising, and super-resolution. Most notably, in radiotherapy motion prediction, the model forecasts future 3D CT phases directly from prior phases of a 4D CT scan, producing anatomically consistent predictions that capture patient-specific respiratory dynamics with realistic temporal coherence. We evaluate the LVM on 4D CT data from 122 patients, totaling over 1,820 3D CT volumes. Despite no prior exposure to medical data, the model achieves strong performance across all tasks and surpasses specialized DVF-based and generative baselines in motion prediction, achieving state-of-the-art spatial accuracy. These findings reveal the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in medical video modeling and highlight the potential of general-purpose video models to serve as unified learners and reasoners laying the groundwork for future medical foundation models built on video models.

Paperid: 2641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06139.pdf

Abstract:
Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) requires segmenting specific objects in a video guided by a natural language description. The core challenge of RVOS is to anchor abstract linguistic concepts onto a specific set of pixels and continuously segment them through the complex dynamics of a video. Faced with this difficulty, prior work has often decomposed the task into a pragmatic `locate-then-segment' pipeline. However, this cascaded design creates an information bottleneck by simplifying semantics into coarse geometric prompts (e.g, point), and struggles to maintain temporal consistency as the segmenting process is often decoupled from the initial language grounding. To overcome these fundamental limitations, we propose FlowRVS, a novel framework that reconceptualizes RVOS as a conditional continuous flow problem. This allows us to harness the inherent strengths of pretrained T2V models, fine-grained pixel control, text-video semantic alignment, and temporal coherence. Instead of conventional generating from noise to mask or directly predicting mask, we reformulate the task by learning a direct, language-guided deformation from a video's holistic representation to its target mask. Our one-stage, generative approach achieves new state-of-the-art results across all major RVOS benchmarks. Specifically, achieving a $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ of 51.1 in MeViS (+1.6 over prior SOTA) and 73.3 in the zero shot Ref-DAVIS17 (+2.7), demonstrating the significant potential of modeling video understanding tasks as continuous deformation processes.

Paperid: 2642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03800.pdf

Abstract:
Radiologic diagnostic errors-under-reading errors, inattentional blindness, and communication failures-remain prevalent in clinical practice. These issues often stem from missed localized abnormalities, limited global context, and variability in report language. These challenges are amplified in 3D imaging, where clinicians must examine hundreds of slices per scan. Addressing them requires systems with precise localized detection, global volume-level reasoning, and semantically consistent natural language reporting. However, existing 3D vision-language models are unable to meet all three needs jointly, lacking local-global understanding for spatial reasoning and struggling with the variability and noise of uncurated radiology reports. We present MedVista3D, a multi-scale semantic-enriched vision-language pretraining framework for 3D CT analysis. To enable joint disease detection and holistic interpretation, MedVista3D performs local and global image-text alignment for fine-grained representation learning within full-volume context. To address report variability, we apply language model rewrites and introduce a Radiology Semantic Matching Bank for semantics-aware alignment. MedVista3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot disease classification, report retrieval, and medical visual question answering, while transferring well to organ segmentation and prognosis prediction. Code and datasets will be released.

Paperid: 2643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13187.pdf

Abstract:
Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide. Over 770,000 people experienced homelessness in the U.S. in 2024. Social stigmatization is a significant barrier to alleviation, shifting public perception, and influencing policymaking. Given that online and city council discourse reflect and influence part of public opinion, it provides valuable insights to identify and track social biases. This research contributes to alleviating homelessness by acting on public opinion. It introduces novel methods, building on natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), to identify and measure PEH social bias expressed in digital spaces. We present a new, manually-annotated multi-modal dataset compiled from Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), news articles, and city council meeting minutes across 10 U.S. cities. This unique dataset provides evidence of the typologies of homelessness bias described in the literature. In order to scale up and automate the detection of homelessness bias online, we evaluate LLMs as classifiers. We applied both zero-shot and few-shot classification techniques to this data. We utilized local LLMs (Llama 3.2 3B Instruct, Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, and Phi4 Instruct Mini) as well as closed-source API models (GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok-4). Our findings reveal that although there are significant inconsistencies in local LLM zero-shot classification, the in-context learning classification scores of local LLMs approach the classification scores of closed-source LLMs. Furthermore, LLMs outperform BERT when averaging across all categories. This work aims to raise awareness about the pervasive bias against PEH, develop new indicators to inform policy, and ultimately enhance the fairness and ethical application of Generative AI technologies.

Paperid: 2644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08983.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can observe a single, imperfect demonstration and immediately generalize to very different problem settings. Robots, in contrast, often require hundreds of examples and still struggle to generalize beyond the training conditions. We argue that this limitation arises from the inability to recover the latent explanations that underpin intelligent behavior, and that these explanations can take the form of structured programs consisting of high-level goals, sub-task decomposition, and execution constraints. In this work, we introduce Rational Inverse Reasoning (RIR), a framework for inferring these latent programs through a hierarchical generative model of behavior. RIR frames few-shot imitation as Bayesian program induction: a vision-language model iteratively proposes structured symbolic task hypotheses, while a planner-in-the-loop inference scheme scores each by the likelihood of the observed demonstration under that hypothesis. This loop yields a posterior over concise, executable programs. We evaluate RIR on a suite of continuous manipulation tasks designed to test one-shot and few-shot generalization across variations in object pose, count, geometry, and layout. With as little as one demonstration, RIR infers the intended task structure and generalizes to novel settings, outperforming state-of-the-art vision-language model baselines.

Paperid: 2645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02329.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP in aligning vision and language, their proficiency in detailed, fine-grained visual comprehension remains a key challenge. We present CLIP-IN, a novel framework that bolsters CLIP's fine-grained perception through two core innovations. Firstly, we leverage instruction-editing datasets, originally designed for image manipulation, as a unique source of hard negative image-text pairs. Coupled with a symmetric hard negative contrastive loss, this enables the model to effectively distinguish subtle visual-semantic differences. Secondly, CLIP-IN incorporates long descriptive captions, utilizing rotary positional encodings to capture rich semantic context often missed by standard CLIP. Our experiments demonstrate that CLIP-IN achieves substantial gains on the MMVP benchmark and various fine-grained visual recognition tasks, without compromising robust zero-shot performance on broader classification and retrieval tasks. Critically, integrating CLIP-IN's visual representations into Multimodal Large Language Models significantly reduces visual hallucinations and enhances reasoning abilities. This work underscores the considerable potential of synergizing targeted, instruction-based contrastive learning with comprehensive descriptive information to elevate the fine-grained understanding of VLMs.

Paperid: 2646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13428.pdf

Abstract:
Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in creating high-quality, photorealistic content. However, their ability to accurately simulate physical phenomena remains a critical and unresolved challenge. This paper presents PhyWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate video generation models based on their adherence to the laws of physics. The benchmark covers multiple levels of physical phenomena, ranging from fundamental principles like object motion and energy conservation to more complex scenarios involving rigid body interactions and human or animal motion. Additionally, we introduce a novel ""Anti-Physics"" category, where prompts intentionally violate real-world physics, enabling the assessment of whether models can follow such instructions while maintaining logical consistency. Besides large-scale human evaluation, we also design a simple yet effective method that could utilize current MLLM to evaluate the physics realism in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art text-to-video generation models, including five open-source and five proprietary models, with a detailed comparison and analysis. we identify pivotal challenges models face in adhering to real-world physics. Through systematic testing of their outputs across 1,050 curated prompts-spanning fundamental, composite, and anti-physics scenarios-we identify pivotal challenges these models face in adhering to real-world physics. We then rigorously examine their performance on diverse physical phenomena with varying prompt types, deriving targeted recommendations for crafting prompts that enhance fidelity to physical principles.

Paperid: 2647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09160.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable achievements, driven by the rich implicit knowledge of their vision-language components. However, achieving generalist robotic agents demands precise grounding into physical interactions, especially in contact-rich scenarios where fine-grained force control is essential. We advance VLAs' implicit knowledge beyond identifying what to do, towards guiding how to physically interact with real world. This paper introduces Tactile-VLA, a novel framework that deeply fuses vision, language, action, and tactile sensing. This framework incorporates a hybrid position-force controller to translate the model's intentions into precise physical actions and a reasoning module that allows the robot to adapt its strategy based on tactile feedback. Experiments demonstrate Tactile-VLA's effectiveness and generalizability in three key aspects: (1) enabling tactile-aware instruction following, (2) utilizing tactile-relevant commonsense, and (3) facilitating adaptive tactile-involved reasoning. A key finding is that the VLM's prior knowledge already contains semantic understanding of physical interaction; by connecting it to the robot's tactile sensors with only a few demonstrations, we can activate this prior knowledge to achieve zero-shot generalization in contact-rich tasks.

Paperid: 2648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02291.pdf

Abstract:
Data-driven semantic communication is based on superficial statistical patterns, thereby lacking interpretability and generalization, especially for applications with the presence of unseen data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel knowledge graph-enhanced zero-shot semantic communication (KGZS-SC) network. Guided by the structured semantic information from a knowledge graph-based semantic knowledge base (KG-SKB), our scheme provides generalized semantic representations and enables reasoning for unseen cases. Specifically, the KG-SKB aligns the semantic features in a shared category semantics embedding space and enhances the generalization ability of the transmitter through aligned semantic features, thus reducing communication overhead by selectively transmitting compact visual semantics. At the receiver, zero-shot learning (ZSL) is leveraged to enable direct classification for unseen cases without the demand for retraining or additional computational overhead, thereby enhancing the adaptability and efficiency of the classification process in dynamic or resource-constrained environments. The simulation results conducted on the APY datasets show that the proposed KGZS-SC network exhibits robust generalization and significantly outperforms existing SC frameworks in classifying unseen categories across a range of SNR levels.

Paperid: 2649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06566.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes AS-ASR, a lightweight aphasia-specific speech recognition framework based on Whisper-tiny, tailored for low-resource deployment on edge devices. Our approach introduces a hybrid training strategy that systematically combines standard and aphasic speech at varying ratios, enabling robust generalization, and a GPT-4-based reference enhancement method that refines noisy aphasic transcripts, improving supervision quality. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple data mixing configurations and evaluation settings. Results show that our fine-tuned model significantly outperforms the zero-shot baseline, reducing WER on aphasic speech by over 30% while preserving performance on standard speech. The proposed framework offers a scalable, efficient solution for real-world disordered speech recognition.

Paperid: 2650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16187.pdf

Abstract:
Insertion task is highly challenging that requires robots to operate with exceptional precision in cluttered environments. Existing methods often have poor generalization capabilities. They typically function in restricted and structured environments, and frequently fail when the plug and socket are far apart, when the scene is densely cluttered, or when handling novel objects. They also rely on strong assumptions such as access to CAD models or a digital twin in simulation. To address this, we propose EasyInsert, a framework which leverages the human intuition that relative pose (delta pose) between plug and socket is sufficient for successful insertion, and employs efficient and automated real-world data collection with minimal human labor to train a generalizable model for relative pose prediction. During execution, EasyInsert follows a coarse-to-fine execution procedure based on predicted delta pose, and successfully performs various insertion tasks. EasyInsert demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization capability for unseen objects in cluttered environments, handling cases with significant initial pose deviations while maintaining high sample efficiency and requiring little human effort. In real-world experiments, with just 5 hours of training data, EasyInsert achieves over 90% success in zero-shot insertion for 13 out of 15 unseen novel objects, including challenging objects like Type-C cables, HDMI cables, and Ethernet cables. Furthermore, with only one human demonstration and 4 minutes of automatically collected data for fine-tuning, it reaches over 90% success rate for all 15 objects.

Paperid: 2651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13150.pdf

Abstract:
Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) proved successful in producing policies for arbitrary tasks in a zero-shot manner, requiring no test-time training or task-specific fine-tuning. Among the most promising BFMs are the ones that estimate the successor measure learned in an unsupervised way from task-agnostic offline data. However, these methods fail to react to changes in the dynamics, making them inefficient under partial observability or when the transition function changes. This hinders the applicability of BFMs in a real-world setting, e.g., in robotics, where the dynamics can unexpectedly change at test time. In this work, we demonstrate that Forward-Backward (FB) representation, one of the methods from the BFM family, cannot distinguish between distinct dynamics, leading to an interference among the latent directions, which parametrize different policies. To address this, we propose a FB model with a transformer-based belief estimator, which greatly facilitates zero-shot adaptation. We also show that partitioning the policy encoding space into dynamics-specific clusters, aligned with the context-embedding directions, yields additional gain in performance. These traits allow our method to respond to the dynamics observed during training and to generalize to unseen ones. Empirically, in the changing dynamics setting, our approach achieves up to a 2x higher zero-shot returns compared to the baselines for both discrete and continuous tasks.

Paperid: 2652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12638.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) offers an innovative perspective for deciphering regulatory mechanisms by assembling a vast repository of single-cell chromatin accessibility data. While foundation models have achieved significant success in single-cell transcriptomics, there is currently no foundation model for scATAC-seq that supports zero-shot high-quality cell identification and comprehensive multi-omics analysis simultaneously. Key challenges lie in the high dimensionality and sparsity of scATAC-seq data, as well as the lack of a standardized schema for representing open chromatin regions (OCRs). Here, we present ChromFound, a foundation model tailored for scATAC-seq. ChromFound utilizes a hybrid architecture and genome-aware tokenization to effectively capture genome-wide long contexts and regulatory signals from dynamic chromatin landscapes. Pretrained on 1.97 million cells from 30 tissues and 6 disease conditions, ChromFound demonstrates broad applicability across 6 diverse tasks. Notably, it achieves robust zero-shot performance in generating universal cell representations and exhibits excellent transferability in cell type annotation and cross-omics prediction. By uncovering enhancer-gene links undetected by existing computational methods, ChromFound offers a promising framework for understanding disease risk variants in the noncoding genome.

Paperid: 2653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06256.pdf

Abstract:
Intelligent spectrum management is crucial for improving spectrum efficiency and achieving secure utilization of spectrum resources. However, existing intelligent spectrum management methods, typically based on small-scale models, suffer from notable limitations in recognition accuracy, convergence speed, and generalization, particularly in the complex and dynamic spectrum environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel spectrum foundation model, termed SpectrumFM, establishing a new paradigm for spectrum management. SpectrumFM features an innovative encoder architecture that synergistically exploits the convolutional neural networks and the multi-head self-attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction and enable robust representation learning. The model is pre-trained via two novel self-supervised learning tasks, namely masked reconstruction and next-slot signal prediction, which leverage large-scale in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data to achieve comprehensive and transferable spectrum representations. Furthermore, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy is proposed to enable SpectrumFM to adapt to various downstream spectrum management tasks, including automatic modulation classification (AMC), wireless technology classification (WTC), spectrum sensing (SS), and anomaly detection (AD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpectrumFM achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, adaptability, few-shot learning efficiency, and convergence speed, consistently outperforming conventional methods across multiple benchmarks. Specifically, SpectrumFM improves AMC accuracy by up to 12.1% and WTC accuracy by 9.3%, achieves an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.97 in SS at -4 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and enhances AD performance by over 10%.

Paperid: 2654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20781.pdf

Abstract:
Design Rationale (DR) for software architecture decisions refers to the reasoning underlying architectural choices, which provides valuable insights into the different phases of the architecting process throughout software development. However, in practice, DR is often inadequately documented due to a lack of motivation and effort from developers. With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their capabilities in text comprehension, reasoning, and generation may enable the generation and recovery of DR for architecture decisions. In this study, we evaluated the performance of LLMs in generating DR for architecture decisions. First, we collected 50 Stack Overflow (SO) posts, 25 GitHub issues, and 25 GitHub discussions related to architecture decisions to construct a dataset of 100 architecture-related problems. Then, we selected five LLMs to generate DR for the architecture decisions with three prompting strategies, including zero-shot, chain of thought (CoT), and LLM-based agents. With the DR provided by human experts as ground truth, the Precision of LLM-generated DR with the three prompting strategies ranges from 0.267 to 0.278, Recall from 0.627 to 0.715, and F1-score from 0.351 to 0.389. Additionally, 64.45% to 69.42% of the arguments of DR not mentioned by human experts are also helpful, 4.12% to 4.87% of the arguments have uncertain correctness, and 1.59% to 3.24% of the arguments are potentially misleading. To further understand the trustworthiness and applicability of LLM-generated DR in practice, we conducted semi-structured interviews with six practitioners. Based on the experimental and interview results, we discussed the pros and cons of the three prompting strategies, the strengths and limitations of LLM-generated DR, and the implications for the practical use of LLM-generated DR.

Paperid: 2655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20492.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable prediction by classifiers is crucial for their deployment in high security and dynamically changing situations. However, modern neural networks often exhibit overconfidence for misclassified predictions, highlighting the need for confidence estimation to detect errors. Despite the achievements obtained by existing methods on small-scale datasets, they all require training from scratch and there are no efficient and effective misclassification detection (MisD) methods, hindering practical application towards large-scale and ever-changing datasets. In this paper, we pave the way to exploit vision language model (VLM) leveraging text information to establish an efficient and general-purpose misclassification detection framework. By harnessing the power of VLM, we construct FSMisD, a Few-Shot prompt learning framework for MisD to refrain from training from scratch and therefore improve tuning efficiency. To enhance misclassification detection ability, we use adaptive pseudo sample generation and a novel negative loss to mitigate the issue of overconfidence by pushing category prompts away from pseudo features. We conduct comprehensive experiments with prompt learning methods and validate the generalization ability across various datasets with domain shift. Significant and consistent improvement demonstrates the effectiveness, efficiency and generalizability of our approach.

Paperid: 2656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19296.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) allows users to search target images with a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text that describes the user's modification demand over the reference image. Nevertheless, due to the expensive labor cost of training data annotation, recent researchers have shifted to the challenging task of zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR), which targets fulfilling CIR without annotated triplets. The pioneer ZS-CIR studies focus on converting the CIR task into a standard text-to-image retrieval task by pre-training a textual inversion network that can map a given image into a single pseudo-word token. Despite their significant progress, their coarse-grained textual inversion may be insufficient to capture the full content of the image accurately. To overcome this issue, in this work, we propose a novel Fine-grained Textual Inversion Network for ZS-CIR, named FTI4CIR. In particular, FTI4CIR comprises two main components: fine-grained pseudo-word token mapping and tri-wise caption-based semantic regularization. The former maps the image into a subject-oriented pseudo-word token and several attribute-oriented pseudo-word tokens to comprehensively express the image in the textual form, while the latter works on jointly aligning the fine-grained pseudo-word tokens to the real-word token embedding space based on a BLIP-generated image caption template. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Paperid: 2657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19145.pdf

Abstract:
Attribute detection is crucial for many computer vision tasks, as it enables systems to describe properties such as color, texture, and material. Current approaches often rely on labor-intensive annotation processes which are inherently limited: objects can be described at an arbitrary level of detail (e.g., color vs. color shades), leading to ambiguities when the annotators are not instructed carefully. Furthermore, they operate within a predefined set of attributes, reducing scalability and adaptability to unforeseen downstream applications. We present Compositional Caching (ComCa), a training-free method for open-vocabulary attribute detection that overcomes these constraints. ComCa requires only the list of target attributes and objects as input, using them to populate an auxiliary cache of images by leveraging web-scale databases and Large Language Models to determine attribute-object compatibility. To account for the compositional nature of attributes, cache images receive soft attribute labels. Those are aggregated at inference time based on the similarity between the input and cache images, refining the predictions of underlying Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Importantly, our approach is model-agnostic, compatible with various VLMs. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ComCa significantly outperforms zero-shot and cache-based baselines, competing with recent training-based methods, proving that a carefully designed training-free approach can successfully address open-vocabulary attribute detection.

Paperid: 2658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14162.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is critical to ensure product quality during manufacturing. Although existing zero-shot defect segmentation and detection methods have shown effectiveness, they cannot provide detailed descriptions of the defects. Furthermore, the application of large multi-modal models in IAD remains in its infancy, facing challenges in balancing question-answering (QA) performance and mask-based grounding capabilities, often owing to overfitting during the fine-tuning process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that introduces a dedicated multi-modal defect localization module to decouple the dialog functionality from the core feature extraction. This decoupling is achieved through independent optimization objectives and tailored learning strategies. Additionally, we contribute to the first multi-modal industrial anomaly detection training dataset, named Defect Detection Question Answering (DDQA), encompassing a wide range of defect types and industrial scenarios. Unlike conventional datasets that rely on GPT-generated data, DDQA ensures authenticity and reliability and offers a robust foundation for model training. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection Assistant (EIAD), achieves outstanding performance in defect detection and localization tasks. It not only significantly enhances accuracy but also improves interpretability. These advancements highlight the potential of EIAD for practical applications in industrial settings.

Paperid: 2659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11609.pdf

Abstract:
An old-school recipe for training a classifier is to (i) learn a good feature extractor and (ii) optimize a linear layer atop. When only a handful of samples are available per category, as in Few-Shot Adaptation (FSA), data are insufficient to fit a large number of parameters, rendering the above impractical. This is especially true with large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which motivated successful research at the intersection of Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) and FSA. In this work, we start by analyzing the learning dynamics of PEFT techniques when trained on few-shot data from only a subset of categories, referred to as the ``base'' classes. We show that such dynamics naturally splits into two distinct phases: (i) task-level feature extraction and (ii) specialization to the available concepts. To accommodate this dynamic, we then depart from prompt- or adapter-based methods and tackle FSA differently. Specifically, given a fixed computational budget, we split it to (i) learn a task-specific feature extractor via PEFT and (ii) train a linear classifier on top. We call this scheme Two-Stage Few-Shot Adaptation (2SFS). Differently from established methods, our scheme enables a novel form of selective inference at a category level, i.e., at test time, only novel categories are embedded by the adapted text encoder, while embeddings of base categories are available within the classifier. Results with fixed hyperparameters across two settings, three backbones, and eleven datasets, show that 2SFS matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art, while established methods degrade significantly across settings.

Paperid: 2660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14718.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a novel multilingual hierarchical corpus annotated for entity framing and role portrayal in news articles. The dataset uses a unique taxonomy inspired by storytelling elements, comprising 22 fine-grained roles, or archetypes, nested within three main categories: protagonist, antagonist, and innocent. Each archetype is carefully defined, capturing nuanced portrayals of entities such as guardian, martyr, and underdog for protagonists; tyrant, deceiver, and bigot for antagonists; and victim, scapegoat, and exploited for innocents. The dataset includes 1,378 recent news articles in five languages (Bulgarian, English, Hindi, European Portuguese, and Russian) focusing on two critical domains of global significance: the Ukraine-Russia War and Climate Change. Over 5,800 entity mentions have been annotated with role labels. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for research into role portrayal and has broader implications for news analysis. We describe the characteristics of the dataset and the annotation process, and we report evaluation results on fine-tuned state-of-the-art multilingual transformers and hierarchical zero-shot learning using LLMs at the level of a document, a paragraph, and a sentence.

Paperid: 2661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07494.pdf

Abstract:
Adaptation is to make model learn the patterns shifted from the training distribution. In general, this adaptation is formulated as the minimum entropy problem. However, the minimum entropy problem has inherent limitation -- shifted initialization cascade phenomenon. We extend the relationship between the minimum entropy problem and the minimum set cover problem via Lebesgue integral. This extension reveals that internal mechanism of the minimum entropy problem ignores the relationship between disentangled representations, which leads to shifted initialization cascade. From the analysis, we introduce a new clustering algorithm, Union-find based Recursive Clustering Algorithm~(URECA). URECA is an efficient clustering algorithm for the leverage of the relationships between disentangled representations. The update rule of URECA depends on Thresholdly-Updatable Stationary Assumption to dynamics as a released version of Stationary Assumption. This assumption helps URECA to transport disentangled representations with no errors based on the relationships between disentangled representations. URECA also utilize simulation trick to efficiently cluster disentangled representations. The wide range of evaluations show that URECA achieves consistent performance gains for the few-shot adaptation to diverse types of shifts along with advancement to State-of-The-Art performance in CoSQA in the scenario of query shift.

Paperid: 2662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11110.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in mathematical reasoning, yet often rely on single-paradigm reasoning, limiting their effectiveness across diverse tasks. We introduce Chain-of-Reasoning (CoR), a novel unified framework integrating multiple reasoning paradigms--Natural Language Reasoning (NLR), Algorithmic Reasoning (AR), and Symbolic Reasoning (SR)--to enable synergistic collaboration. CoR generates multiple potential answers via different reasoning paradigms and synthesizes them into a coherent final solution. We propose a Progressive Paradigm Training (PPT) strategy for models to progressively master these paradigms, leading to CoR-Math-7B. Experimental results demonstrate that CoR-Math-7B significantly outperforms current SOTA models, achieving up to a 41.0% absolute improvement over GPT-4o in theorem proving and a 15.0% improvement over RL-based methods on the MATH benchmark in arithmetic tasks. These results show the enhanced mathematical comprehension ability of our model, enabling zero-shot generalization across tasks.

Paperid: 2663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08643.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MonSter++, a geometric foundation model for multi-view depth estimation, unifying rectified stereo matching and unrectified multi-view stereo. Both tasks fundamentally recover metric depth from correspondence search and consequently face the same dilemma: struggling to handle ill-posed regions with limited matching cues. To address this, we propose MonSter++, a novel method that integrates monocular depth priors into multi-view depth estimation, effectively combining the complementary strengths of single-view and multi-view cues. MonSter++ fuses monocular depth and multi-view depth into a dual-branched architecture. Confidence-based guidance adaptively selects reliable multi-view cues to correct scale ambiguity in monocular depth. The refined monocular predictions, in turn, effectively guide multi-view estimation in ill-posed regions. This iterative mutual enhancement enables MonSter++ to evolve coarse object-level monocular priors into fine-grained, pixel-level geometry, fully unlocking the potential of multi-view depth estimation. MonSter++ achieves new state-of-the-art on both stereo matching and multi-view stereo. By effectively incorporating monocular priors through our cascaded search and multi-scale depth fusion strategy, our real-time variant RT-MonSter++ also outperforms previous real-time methods by a large margin. As shown in Fig.1, MonSter++ achieves significant improvements over previous methods across eight benchmarks from three tasks -- stereo matching, real-time stereo matching, and multi-view stereo, demonstrating the strong generality of our framework. Besides high accuracy, MonSter++ also demonstrates superior zero-shot generalization capability. We will release both the large and the real-time models to facilitate their use by the open-source community.

Paperid: 2664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00296.pdf

Abstract:
Our aim is to learn to solve long-horizon decision-making problems in complex robotics domains given low-level skills and a handful of short-horizon demonstrations containing sequences of images. To this end, we focus on learning abstract symbolic world models that facilitate zero-shot generalization to novel goals via planning. A critical component of such models is the set of symbolic predicates that define properties of and relationships between objects. In this work, we leverage pretrained vision language models (VLMs) to propose a large set of visual predicates potentially relevant for decision-making, and to evaluate those predicates directly from camera images. At training time, we pass the proposed predicates and demonstrations into an optimization-based model-learning algorithm to obtain an abstract symbolic world model that is defined in terms of a compact subset of the proposed predicates. At test time, given a novel goal in a novel setting, we use the VLM to construct a symbolic description of the current world state, and then use a search-based planning algorithm to find a sequence of low-level skills that achieves the goal. We demonstrate empirically across experiments in both simulation and the real world that our method can generalize aggressively, applying its learned world model to solve problems with a wide variety of object types, arrangements, numbers of objects, and visual backgrounds, as well as novel goals and much longer horizons than those seen at training time.

Paperid: 2665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07772.pdf

Abstract:
Current video diffusion models achieve impressive generation quality but struggle in interactive applications due to bidirectional attention dependencies. The generation of a single frame requires the model to process the entire sequence, including the future. We address this limitation by adapting a pretrained bidirectional diffusion transformer to an autoregressive transformer that generates frames on-the-fly. To further reduce latency, we extend distribution matching distillation (DMD) to videos, distilling 50-step diffusion model into a 4-step generator. To enable stable and high-quality distillation, we introduce a student initialization scheme based on teacher's ODE trajectories, as well as an asymmetric distillation strategy that supervises a causal student model with a bidirectional teacher. This approach effectively mitigates error accumulation in autoregressive generation, allowing long-duration video synthesis despite training on short clips. Our model achieves a total score of 84.27 on the VBench-Long benchmark, surpassing all previous video generation models. It enables fast streaming generation of high-quality videos at 9.4 FPS on a single GPU thanks to KV caching. Our approach also enables streaming video-to-video translation, image-to-video, and dynamic prompting in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 2666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06134.pdf

Abstract:
Current social bias benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily rely on pre-defined question formats like multiple-choice, limiting their ability to reflect the complexity and open-ended nature of real-world interactions. To address this gap, we extend an existing BBQ dataset introduced by incorporating fill-in-the-blank and short-answer question types, designed to evaluate biases in an open-ended setting. Our finding reveals that LLMs tend to produce responses that are more biased against certain protected attributes, like age and socio-economic status. On the other hand, these biased outputs produced by LLMs can serve as valuable contexts and chains of thought for debiasing. Our debiasing approach combined zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought could significantly reduce the level of bias to almost 0. We open-source our evaluation and debiasing code hoping to encourage further measurements and mitigation of bias and stereotype in LLMs.

Paperid: 2667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17240.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present DM-Calib, a diffusion-based approach for estimating pinhole camera intrinsic parameters from a single input image. Monocular camera calibration is essential for many 3D vision tasks. However, most existing methods depend on handcrafted assumptions or are constrained by limited training data, resulting in poor generalization across diverse real-world images. Recent advancements in stable diffusion models, trained on massive data, have shown the ability to generate high-quality images with varied characteristics. Emerging evidence indicates that these models implicitly capture the relationship between camera focal length and image content. Building on this insight, we explore how to leverage the powerful priors of diffusion models for monocular pinhole camera calibration. Specifically, we introduce a new image-based representation, termed Camera Image, which losslessly encodes the numerical camera intrinsics and integrates seamlessly with the diffusion framework. Using this representation, we reformulate the problem of estimating camera intrinsics as the generation of a dense Camera Image conditioned on an input image. By fine-tuning a stable diffusion model to generate a Camera Image from a single RGB input, we can extract camera intrinsics via a RANSAC operation. We further demonstrate that our monocular calibration method enhances performance across various 3D tasks, including zero-shot metric depth estimation, 3D metrology, pose estimation and sparse-view reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines and provides broad benefits to 3D vision tasks.

Paperid: 2668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10670.pdf

Abstract:
In today's digitally driven world, dialogue systems play a pivotal role in enhancing user interactions, from customer service to virtual assistants. In these dialogues, it is important to identify user's goals automatically to resolve their needs promptly. This has necessitated the integration of models that perform Intent Detection. However, users' intents are diverse and dynamic, making it challenging to maintain a fixed set of predefined intents. As a result, a more practical approach is to develop a model capable of identifying new intents as they emerge. We address the challenge of Intent Discovery, an area that has drawn significant attention in recent research efforts. Existing methods need to train on a substantial amount of data for correctly identifying new intents, demanding significant human effort. To overcome this, we introduce IntentGPT, a novel training-free method that effectively prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to discover new intents with minimal labeled data. IntentGPT comprises an \textit{In-Context Prompt Generator}, which generates informative prompts for In-Context Learning, an \textit{Intent Predictor} for classifying and discovering user intents from utterances, and a \textit{Semantic Few-Shot Sampler} that selects relevant few-shot examples and a set of known intents to be injected into the prompt. Our experiments show that IntentGPT outperforms previous methods that require extensive domain-specific data and fine-tuning, in popular benchmarks, including CLINC and BANKING, among others.

Paperid: 2669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10557.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel visual instruction tuning strategy to improve the zero-shot task generalization of multimodal large language models by building a firm text-only knowledge base. Existing work lacks sufficient experimentation on the importance of each modality in the instruction tuning stage, often using a majority of vision-language data while keeping text-only data limited and fixing mixtures of modalities. By incorporating diverse text-only data in the visual instruction tuning stage, we vary vision-language data in various controlled experiments to investigate the importance of modality in visual instruction tuning. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that the text-heavy instruction tuning approach is able to perform on-par with traditional vision-heavy mixtures on both modalities across 12 general datasets while using as low as half the total training tokens. We find that simply increasing sufficiently diverse text-only data enables transfer of instruction following ability and domain knowledge across modalities while being more efficient than the vision-language approach.

Paperid: 2670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01819.pdf

Abstract:
Current semantic segmentation models typically require a substantial amount of manually annotated data, a process that is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Alternatively, leveraging advanced text-to-image models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has emerged as an efficient strategy, enabling the automatic generation of synthetic data in place of manual annotations. However, previous methods have been limited to generating single-instance images, as the generation of multiple instances with Stable Diffusion has proven unstable. To address this limitation and expand the scope and diversity of synthetic datasets, we propose a framework \textbf{Free-Mask} that combines a Diffusion Model for segmentation with advanced image editing capabilities, allowing for the integration of multiple objects into images via text-to-image models. Our method facilitates the creation of highly realistic datasets that closely emulate open-world environments while generating accurate segmentation masks. It reduces the labor associated with manual annotation and also ensures precise mask generation. Experimental results demonstrate that synthetic data generated by \textbf{Free-Mask} enables segmentation models to outperform those trained on real data, especially in zero-shot settings. Notably, \textbf{Free-Mask} achieves new state-of-the-art results on previously unseen classes in the VOC 2012 benchmark.

Paperid: 2671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13147.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular optimization -- modifying a given molecule to improve desired properties -- is a fundamental task in drug discovery. While LLMs hold the potential to solve this task using natural language to drive the optimization, straightforward prompting achieves limited accuracy. In this work, we propose AgentDrug, an agentic workflow that leverages LLMs in a structured refinement process to achieve significantly higher accuracy. AgentDrug defines a nested refinement loop: the inner loop uses feedback from cheminformatics toolkits to validate molecular structures, while the outer loop guides the LLM with generic feedback and a gradient-based objective to steer the molecule toward property improvement. We evaluate AgentDrug on benchmarks with both single- and multi-property optimization under loose and strict thresholds. Results demonstrate significant performance gains over previous methods. With Qwen-2.5-3B, AgentDrug improves accuracy by 20.7\% (loose) and 16.8\% (strict) on six single-property tasks, and by 7.0\% and 5.3\% on eight multi-property tasks. With larger model Qwen-2.5-7B, AgentDrug further improves accuracy on 6 single-property objectives by 28.9\% (loose) and 29.0\% (strict), and on 8 multi-property objectives by 14.9\% (loose) and 13.2\% (strict).

Paperid: 2672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10491.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial awareness is key to enable embodied multimodal AI systems. Yet, without vast amounts of spatial supervision, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle at this task. In this paper, we introduce TWIST & SCOUT, a framework that equips pre-trained MLLMs with visual grounding ability without forgetting their existing image and language understanding skills. To this end, we propose TWIST, a twin-expert stepwise tuning module that modifies the decoder of the language model using one frozen module pre-trained on image understanding tasks and another learnable one for visual grounding tasks. This allows the MLLM to retain previously learned knowledge and skills, while acquiring what is missing. To fine-tune the model effectively, we generate a high-quality synthetic dataset we call SCOUT, which mimics human reasoning in visual grounding. This dataset provides rich supervision signals, describing a step-by-step multimodal reasoning process, thereby simplifying the task of visual grounding. We evaluate our approach on several standard benchmark datasets, encompassing grounded image captioning, zero-shot localization, and visual grounding tasks. Our method consistently delivers strong performance across all tasks, while retaining the pre-trained image understanding capabilities.

Paperid: 2673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11355.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work showed that large diffusion models can be reused as highly precise monocular depth estimators by casting depth estimation as an image-conditional image generation task. While the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art results, high computational demands due to multi-step inference limited its use in many scenarios. In this paper, we show that the perceived inefficiency was caused by a flaw in the inference pipeline that has so far gone unnoticed. The fixed model performs comparably to the best previously reported configuration while being more than 200$\times$ faster. To optimize for downstream task performance, we perform end-to-end fine-tuning on top of the single-step model with task-specific losses and get a deterministic model that outperforms all other diffusion-based depth and normal estimation models on common zero-shot benchmarks. We surprisingly find that this fine-tuning protocol also works directly on Stable Diffusion and achieves comparable performance to current state-of-the-art diffusion-based depth and normal estimation models, calling into question some of the conclusions drawn from prior works.

Paperid: 2674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06282.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios, is challenging due to the limited availability of high-quality training data. To address this, we present a pilot study on using reinforcement learning (RL) for time series data augmentation. Our method, ReAugment, tackles three critical questions: which parts of the training set should be augmented, how the augmentation should be performed, and what advantages RL brings to the process. Specifically, our approach maintains a forecasting model zoo, and by measuring prediction diversity across the models, we identify samples with higher probabilities for overfitting and use them as the anchor points for augmentation. Leveraging RL, our method adaptively transforms the overfit-prone samples into new data that not only enhances training set diversity but also directs the augmented data to target regions where the forecasting models are prone to overfitting. We validate the effectiveness of ReAugment across a wide range of base models, showing its advantages in both standard time series forecasting and few-shot learning tasks.

Paperid: 2675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19461.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation with strong cross-domain generalization, yet existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenarios, leaving a critical gap for vegetation-dense environments. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of eight stereo methods spanning iterative refinement, foundation model, diffusion-based, and 3D CNN paradigms. All methods use officially released pretrained weights (trained on Scene Flow) and are evaluated on four standard benchmarks (ETH3D, KITTI 2012/2015, Middlebury) plus a novel 5,313-pair Canterbury Tree Branches dataset ($1920 \times 1080$). Results reveal scene-dependent patterns: foundation models excel on structured scenes (BridgeDepth: 0.23 px on ETH3D; DEFOM: 4.65 px on Middlebury), while iterative methods show variable cross-benchmark performance (IGEV++: 0.36 px on ETH3D but 6.77 px on Middlebury; IGEV: 0.33 px on ETH3D but 4.99 px on Middlebury). Qualitative evaluation on the Tree Branches dataset establishes DEFOM as the gold-standard baseline for vegetation depth estimation, with superior cross-domain consistency (consistently ranking 1st-2nd across benchmarks, average rank 1.75). DEFOM predictions will serve as pseudo-ground-truth for future benchmarking.

Paperid: 2676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06662.pdf

Abstract:
People can view the same image differently: they focus on different regions, objects, and details in varying orders and describe them in distinct linguistic styles. This leads to substantial variability in image descriptions. However, existing models for personalized image description focus on linguistic style alone, with no prior work leveraging individual viewing patterns. We address this gap by explicitly modeling personalized viewing behavior as a core factor in description generation. Our method, DEPER (DEscription-PERception persona encoder), learns a subject embedding that captures both linguistic style and viewing behavior, guided by an auxiliary attention-prediction task. A lightweight adapter aligns these embeddings with a frozen vision-language model, enabling few-shot personalization without retraining. Across four datasets spanning diverse viewing tasks and both short and detailed descriptions, DEPER achieves a 24% average improvement, showing that modeling personalized attention produces more human-aligned and high-quality descriptions. We posit that understanding how people see helps predict what they say; modeling human diversity in perception can improve both performance and human alignment in multimodal systems.

Paperid: 2677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03427.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation methods with strong cross-domain generalization. However, existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenarios, leaving a critical gap for specialized vegetation-dense environments. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of eight state-of-the-art stereo methods--RAFT-Stereo, IGEV, IGEV++, BridgeDepth, StereoAnywhere, DEFOM (plus baseline methods ACVNet, PSMNet, TCstereo)--spanning iterative refinement, foundation model, and zero-shot adaptation paradigms. All methods are trained exclusively on Scene Flow and evaluated without fine-tuning on four standard benchmarks (ETH3D, KITTI 2012/2015, Middlebury) plus a novel 5,313-pair Canterbury forestry dataset captured with ZED Mini camera (1920x1080). Performance reveals scene-dependent patterns: foundation models excel on structured scenes (BridgeDepth: 0.23 px on ETH3D, 0.83-1.07 px on KITTI; DEFOM: 0.35-4.65 px across benchmarks), while iterative methods maintain cross-domain robustness (IGEV++: 0.36-6.77 px; IGEV: 0.33-21.91 px). Critical finding: RAFT-Stereo exhibits catastrophic ETH3D failure (26.23 px EPE, 98 percent error rate) due to negative disparity predictions, while performing normally on KITTI (0.90-1.11 px). Qualitative evaluation on Canterbury forestry dataset identifies DEFOM as the optimal gold-standard baseline for vegetation depth estimation, exhibiting superior depth smoothness, occlusion handling, and cross-domain consistency compared to IGEV++, despite IGEV++'s finer detail preservation.

Paperid: 2678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18616.pdf

Abstract:
Beliefs are central to how humans reason, communicate, and form social connections, yet most computational approaches to studying them remain confined to narrow sociopolitical contexts and rely on fine-tuning for optimal performance. Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) across disciplines, how well these systems generalize across diverse belief domains remains unclear. We introduce a systematic, reproducible benchmark that evaluates the ability of LLMs to predict individuals' stances on a wide range of topics in a zero-shot setting using data from an online debate platform. The benchmark includes multiple informational conditions that isolate the contribution of demographic context and known prior beliefs to predictive success. Across several small- to medium-sized models, we find that providing more background information about an individual improves predictive accuracy, but performance varies substantially across belief domains. These findings reveal both the capacity and limitations of current LLMs to emulate human reasoning, advancing the study of machine behavior and offering a scalable framework for modeling belief systems beyond the sociopolitical sphere.

Paperid: 2679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15379.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding complex human activities demands the ability to decompose motion into fine-grained, semantic-aligned sub-actions. This motion grounding process is crucial for behavior analysis, embodied AI and virtual reality. Yet, most existing methods rely on dense supervision with predefined action classes, which are infeasible in open-vocabulary, real-world settings. In this paper, we propose ZOMG, a zero-shot, open-vocabulary framework that segments motion sequences into semantically meaningful sub-actions without requiring any annotations or fine-tuning. Technically, ZOMG integrates (1) language semantic partition, which leverages large language models to decompose instructions into ordered sub-action units, and (2) soft masking optimization, which learns instance-specific temporal masks to focus on frames critical to sub-actions, while maintaining intra-segment continuity and enforcing inter-segment separation, all without altering the pretrained encoder. Experiments on three motion-language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency of motion grounding performance, outperforming prior methods by +8.7\% mAP on HumanML3D benchmark. Meanwhile, significant improvements also exist in downstream retrieval, establishing a new paradigm for annotation-free motion understanding.

Paperid: 2680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06365.pdf

Abstract:
Attention injection-based style transfer has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing methods often suffer from content leakage, where the undesired semantic content of the style image mistakenly appears in the stylized output. In this paper, we propose V-Shuffle, a zero-shot style transfer method that leverages multiple style images from the same style domain to effectively navigate the trade-off between content preservation and style fidelity. V-Shuffle implicitly disrupts the semantic content of the style images by shuffling the value features within the self-attention layers of the diffusion model, thereby preserving low-level style representations. We further introduce a Hybrid Style Regularization that complements these low-level representations with high-level style textures to enhance style fidelity. Empirical results demonstrate that V-Shuffle achieves excellent performance when utilizing multiple style images. Moreover, when applied to a single style image, V-Shuffle outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 2681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17611.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) has evolved from building specialized single-class models to unified multi-class models, yet existing multi-class models significantly underperform the most advanced one-for-one counterparts. Moreover, the field has fragmented into specialized methods tailored to specific scenarios (multi-class, 3D, few-shot, etc.), creating deployment barriers and highlighting the need for a unified solution. In this paper, we present Dinomaly2, the first unified framework for full-spectrum image UAD, which bridges the performance gap in multi-class models while seamlessly extending across diverse data modalities and task settings. Guided by the "less is more" philosophy, we demonstrate that the orchestration of five simple element achieves superior performance in a standard reconstruction-based framework. This methodological minimalism enables natural extension across diverse tasks without modification, establishing that simplicity is the foundation of true universality. Extensive experiments on 12 UAD benchmarks demonstrate Dinomaly2's full-spectrum superiority across multiple modalities (2D, multi-view, RGB-3D, RGB-IR), task settings (single-class, multi-class, inference-unified multi-class, few-shot) and application domains (industrial, biological, outdoor). For example, our multi-class model achieves unprecedented 99.9% and 99.3% image-level (I-) AUROC on MVTec-AD and VisA respectively. For multi-view and multi-modal inspection, Dinomaly2 demonstrates state-of-the-art performance with minimum adaptations. Moreover, using only 8 normal examples per class, our method surpasses previous full-shot models, achieving 98.7% and 97.4% I-AUROC on MVTec-AD and VisA. The combination of minimalistic design, computational scalability, and universal applicability positions Dinomaly2 as a unified solution for the full spectrum of real-world anomaly detection applications.

Paperid: 2682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05365.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automated software testing, yet their ability to generalize beyond memorized patterns and reason about natural language bug reports remains unclear. We present a systematic evaluation of LLM reasoning in test case generation, structured around the cognitive layers of Bloom's taxonomy: \textit{Remember}, \textit{Understand}, \textit{Apply}, \textit{Analyze}, \textit{Evaluate}, and \textit{Create}, which progressively assess higher levels of cognitive and reasoning capabilities. Building on the LIBRO framework, we evaluate StarCoder and GPT-4o on Defects4J, GHRB, and mutated variants that introduce linguistic and semantic challenges. Our findings show that both models largely reproduce prior results with minor deviations (\textit{Remember}), exhibit partial robustness to linguistic rephrasings and translations while uncovering unique reproducible bugs (\textit{Understand}), but suffer severe performance drops exceeding 60\% under identifier mutations (\textit{Apply}). Conversely, providing near-identical few-shot examples in an open-book setting improves success rates by up to three times, and component-level analysis reveals that structured technical elements, such as test code and method names, are far more impactful than narrative descriptions for successful test generation (\textit{Analyze}). These insights illuminate the cognitive processes underlying LLM-generated tests, suggest concrete directions for improving performance, and establish a robust and realistic evaluation paradigm for this task.

Paperid: 2683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07260.pdf

Abstract:
Mobile and wearable healthcare monitoring play a vital role in facilitating timely interventions, managing chronic health conditions, and ultimately improving individuals' quality of life. Previous studies on large language models (LLMs) have highlighted their impressive generalization abilities and effectiveness in healthcare prediction tasks. However, most LLM-based healthcare solutions are cloud-based, which raises significant privacy concerns and results in increased memory usage and latency. To address these challenges, there is growing interest in compact models, Small Language Models (SLMs), which are lightweight and designed to run locally and efficiently on mobile and wearable devices. Nevertheless, how well these models perform in healthcare prediction remains largely unexplored. We systematically evaluated SLMs on health prediction tasks using zero-shot, few-shot, and instruction fine-tuning approaches, and deployed the best performing fine-tuned SLMs on mobile devices to evaluate their real-world efficiency and predictive performance in practical healthcare scenarios. Our results show that SLMs can achieve performance comparable to LLMs while offering substantial gains in efficiency and privacy. However, challenges remain, particularly in handling class imbalance and few-shot scenarios. These findings highlight SLMs, though imperfect in their current form, as a promising solution for next-generation, privacy-preserving healthcare monitoring.

Paperid: 2684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13214.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong emergent abilities in complex reasoning and zero-shot generalization, showing unprecedented potential for LLM-as-a-judge applications in education, peer review, and data quality evaluation. However, their robustness under prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded into the content to manipulate outputs, remains a significant concern. In this work, we explore a frustratingly simple yet effective attack setting to test whether LLMs can be easily misled. Specifically, we evaluate LLMs on basic arithmetic questions (e.g., "What is 3 + 2?") presented as either multiple-choice or true-false judgment problems within PDF files, where hidden prompts are injected into the file. Our results reveal that LLMs are indeed vulnerable to such hidden prompt injection attacks, even in these trivial scenarios, highlighting serious robustness risks for LLM-as-a-judge applications.

Paperid: 2685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08627.pdf

Abstract:
Studies show that large language models (LLMs) produce buggy code translations. One promising avenue to improve translation accuracy is through intermediate representations, which provide structured guidance for the translation process. We investigate whether LLM-based code translation can benefit from intermediate representations, specifically in the form of natural language (NL) summaries and abstract syntax trees (ASTs). Since prompt engineering greatly affects LLM performance, we consider several ways to integrate these representations, from one-shot to chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Using Open GPT4 8X7B and specialized StarCoder and CodeGen models on popular code translation benchmarks (CodeNet and AVATAR), we find that CoT with an intermediate NL summary performs best, with an increase of 13.8% and 6.7%, respectively, in successful translations for the best-performing model (Open GPT4 8X7B) compared to the zero-shot prompt.

Paperid: 2686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08031.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of Small Language Models (SLMs) as privacy-preserving alternatives for sensitive applications raises a fundamental question about their inherent understanding capabilities compared to Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper investigates the mental health understanding capabilities of current SLMs through systematic evaluation across diverse classification tasks. Employing zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms, we benchmark their performance against established LLM baselines to elucidate their relative strengths and limitations in this critical domain. We assess five state-of-the-art SLMs (Phi-3, Phi-3.5, Qwen2.5, Llama-3.2, Gemma2) against three LLMs (GPT-4, FLAN-T5-XXL, Alpaca-7B) on six mental health understanding tasks. Our findings reveal that SLMs achieve mean performance within 2\% of LLMs on binary classification tasks (F1 scores of 0.64 vs 0.66 in zero-shot settings), demonstrating notable competence despite orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Both model categories experience similar degradation on multi-class severity tasks (a drop of over 30\%), suggesting that nuanced clinical understanding challenges transcend model scale. Few-shot prompting provides substantial improvements for SLMs (up to 14.6\%), while LLM gains are more variable. Our work highlights the potential of SLMs in mental health understanding, showing they can be effective privacy-preserving tools for analyzing sensitive online text data. In particular, their ability to quickly adapt and specialize with minimal data through few-shot learning positions them as promising candidates for scalable mental health screening tools.

Paperid: 2687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04664.pdf

Abstract:
Automatically extracting vectorized building contours from remote sensing imagery is crucial for urban planning, population estimation, and disaster assessment. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on complex multi-stage pipelines involving pixel segmentation, vectorization, and polygon refinement, which limits their scalability and real-world applicability. Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce VectorLLM, the first Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) designed for regular building contour extraction from remote sensing images. Unlike existing approaches, VectorLLM performs corner-point by corner-point regression of building contours directly, mimicking human annotators' labeling process. Our architecture consists of a vision foundation backbone, an MLP connector, and an LLM, enhanced with learnable position embeddings to improve spatial understanding capability. Through comprehensive exploration of training strategies including pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization across WHU, WHU-Mix, and CrowdAI datasets, VectorLLM significantly outperformed the previous SOTA methods by 5.6 AP, 7.1 AP, 13.6 AP, respectively in the three datasets. Remarkably, VectorLLM exhibits strong zero-shot performance on unseen objects including aircraft, water bodies, and oil tanks, highlighting its potential for unified modeling of diverse remote sensing object contour extraction tasks. Overall, this work establishes a new paradigm for vector extraction in remote sensing, leveraging the topological reasoning capabilities of LLMs to achieve both high accuracy and exceptional generalization. All the codes and weights will be published for promoting community development.

Paperid: 2688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15307.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous fields, yet their adaptation to specialized tasks in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance remains constrained due to the scarcity of accessible training data caused by stringent privacy requirements. Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC)-based privacy-preserving machine learning provides theoretical guarantees for the privacy of model parameters and data. However, its application to LLMs has been predominantly limited to inference, as fine-tuning introduces significant efficiency challenges, particularly in backward propagation, optimizer, and self-attention operations. To address these challenges, we propose SecP-Tuning, the first MPC-based framework designed for efficient, privacy-preserving prompt tuning of LLMs. SecP-Tuning innovatively integrates Forward-only Tuning (FoT) through the ``data owner-server interaction" paradigm, effectively removing the need for privacy-preserving computations in backward propagation and optimization processes. Furthermore, it devises an efficient privacy-preserving Random Feature Attention (RFA), effectively mitigating the computational complexity of softmax-based self-attention and circumventing MPC-incompatible nonlinear operations. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to full-Parameter Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and gradient-based prompt tuning, SecP-Tuning achieves approximately 12 times and 16 times end-to-end acceleration, as well as 18 times and 20 times reductions in communication overhead, respectively. Moreover, in five few-shot tasks, it achieves an average performance score of 82.45, outperforming SFT's 79.90 and prompt tuning's 73.73. Additionally, the ``black-box/API-style" privacy-preserving tuning paradigm of SecP-Tuning effectively avoids memory leakage risks caused by gradient/parameter transmission.

Paperid: 2689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05997.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in robot navigation, particularly with end-to-end learning approaches such as reinforcement learning (RL), have demonstrated strong performance. However, successful navigation still depends on two key capabilities: mapping and planning (explicitly or implicitly). Classical approaches rely on explicit mapping pipelines to register egocentric observations into a coherent map. In contrast, end-to-end learning often achieves this implicitly -- through recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that fuse current and historical observations into a latent space for planning. While existing architectures, such as LSTM and GRU, can capture temporal dependencies, our findings reveal a critical limitation: their inability to effectively perform spatial memorization. This capability is essential for integrating sequential observations from varying perspectives to build spatial representations that support planning. To address this, we propose Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Units (SRUs) -- a simple yet effective modification to existing RNNs -- that enhance spatial memorization. We further introduce an attention-based network architecture integrated with SRUs, enabling long-range mapless navigation using a single forward-facing stereo camera. We also employ regularization techniques to facilitate robust end-to-end recurrent training via RL. Experimental results show 23.5% overall improvement in long-range navigation compared to existing RNNs. With SRU memory, our method outperforms RL baselines -- one relying on explicit mapping and the other on stacked historical observations -- by 29.6% and 105.0%, respectively, across diverse environments requiring long-horizon mapping and memorization. Finally, we address the sim-to-real gap by leveraging large-scale pretraining on synthetic depth data, enabling zero-shot transfer for deployment across diverse and complex real-world environments.

Paperid: 2690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24160.pdf

Authors:Junyu Chen, Shuwen Wei, Joel Honkamaa, Pekka Marttinen, Hang Zhang, Min Liu, Yichao Zhou, Zuopeng Tan, Zhuoyuan Wang, Yi Wang, Hongchao Zhou, Shunbo Hu, Yi Zhang, Qian Tao, Lukas FÃ¶rner, Thomas Wendler, Bailiang Jian, Benedikt Wiestler, Tim Hable, Jin Kim, Dan Ruan, Frederic Madesta, Thilo Sentker, Wiebke Heyer, Lianrui Zuo, Yuwei Dai, Jing Wu, Jerry L. Prince, Harrison Bai, Yong Du, Yihao Liu, Alessa Hering, Reuben Dorent, Lasse Hansen, Mattias P. Heinrich, Aaron Carass

Abstract:
Medical image challenges have played a transformative role in advancing the field, catalyzing algorithmic innovation and establishing new performance standards across diverse clinical applications. Image registration, a foundational task in neuroimaging pipelines, has similarly benefited from the Learn2Reg initiative. Building on this foundation, we introduce the Large-scale Unsupervised Brain MRI Image Registration (LUMIR) challenge, a next-generation benchmark designed to assess and advance unsupervised brain MRI registration. Distinct from prior challenges that leveraged anatomical label maps for supervision, LUMIR removes this dependency by providing over 4,000 preprocessed T1-weighted brain MRIs for training without any label maps, encouraging biologically plausible deformation modeling through self-supervision. In addition to evaluating performance on 590 held-out test subjects, LUMIR introduces a rigorous suite of zero-shot generalization tasks, spanning out-of-domain imaging modalities (e.g., FLAIR, T2-weighted, T2*-weighted), disease populations (e.g., Alzheimer's disease), acquisition protocols (e.g., 9.4T MRI), and species (e.g., macaque brains). A total of 1,158 subjects and over 4,000 image pairs were included for evaluation. Performance was assessed using both segmentation-based metrics (Dice coefficient, 95th percentile Hausdorff distance) and landmark-based registration accuracy (target registration error). Across both in-domain and zero-shot tasks, deep learning-based methods consistently achieved state-of-the-art accuracy while producing anatomically plausible deformation fields. The top-performing deep learning-based models demonstrated diffeomorphic properties and inverse consistency, outperforming several leading optimization-based methods, and showing strong robustness to most domain shifts, the exception being a drop in performance on out-of-domain contrasts.

Paperid: 2691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19602.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has garnered significant attention for its innovative next-scale prediction approach, which yields substantial improvements in efficiency, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. Nevertheless, the coarse-to-fine methodology inherent in VAR results in exponential growth of the KV cache during inference, causing considerable memory consumption and computational redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce ScaleKV, a novel KV cache compression framework tailored for VAR architectures. ScaleKV leverages two critical observations: varying cache demands across transformer layers and distinct attention patterns at different scales. Based on these insights, ScaleKV categorizes transformer layers into two functional groups: drafters and refiners. Drafters exhibit dispersed attention across multiple scales, thereby requiring greater cache capacity. Conversely, refiners focus attention on the current token map to process local details, consequently necessitating substantially reduced cache capacity. ScaleKV optimizes the multi-scale inference pipeline by identifying scale-specific drafters and refiners, facilitating differentiated cache management tailored to each scale. Evaluation on the state-of-the-art text-to-image VAR model family, Infinity, demonstrates that our approach effectively reduces the required KV cache memory to 10% while preserving pixel-level fidelity.

Paperid: 2692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10737.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning and aerial imaging have transformed wildlife monitoring, enabling researchers to survey wildlife populations at unprecedented scales. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide a cost-effective means of capturing high-resolution imagery, particularly for monitoring densely populated seabird colonies. In this study, we assess the performance of a general-purpose avian detection model, BirdDetector, in estimating the breeding population of Salvin's albatross (Thalassarche salvini) on the Bounty Islands, New Zealand. Using drone-derived imagery, we evaluate the model's effectiveness in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, incorporating enhanced inference techniques and stronger augmentation methods. Our findings indicate that while applying the model in a zero-shot setting offers a strong baseline, fine-tuning with annotations from the target domain and stronger image augmentation leads to marked improvements in detection accuracy. These results highlight the potential of leveraging pre-trained deep-learning models for species-specific monitoring in remote and challenging environments.

Paperid: 2693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21749.pdf

Abstract:
3D morphable models (3DMMs) are a powerful tool to represent the possible shapes and appearances of an object category. Given a single test image, 3DMMs can be used to solve various tasks, such as predicting the 3D shape, pose, semantic correspondence, and instance segmentation of an object. Unfortunately, 3DMMs are only available for very few object categories that are of particular interest, like faces or human bodies, as they require a demanding 3D data acquisition and category-specific training process. In contrast, we introduce a new method, Common3D, that learns 3DMMs of common objects in a fully self-supervised manner from a collection of object-centric videos. For this purpose, our model represents objects as a learned 3D template mesh and a deformation field that is parameterized as an image-conditioned neural network. Different from prior works, Common3D represents the object appearance with neural features instead of RGB colors, which enables the learning of more generalizable representations through an abstraction from pixel intensities. Importantly, we train the appearance features using a contrastive objective by exploiting the correspondences defined through the deformable template mesh. This leads to higher quality correspondence features compared to related works and a significantly improved model performance at estimating 3D object pose and semantic correspondence. Common3D is the first completely self-supervised method that can solve various vision tasks in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 2694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17249.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant interest and advancements in humanoid robotics, most existing commercially available hardware remains high-cost, closed-source, and non-transparent within the robotics community. This lack of accessibility and customization hinders the growth of the field and the broader development of humanoid technologies. To address these challenges and promote democratization in humanoid robotics, we demonstrate Berkeley Humanoid Lite, an open-source humanoid robot designed to be accessible, customizable, and beneficial for the entire community. The core of this design is a modular 3D-printed gearbox for the actuators and robot body. All components can be sourced from widely available e-commerce platforms and fabricated using standard desktop 3D printers, keeping the total hardware cost under $5,000 (based on U.S. market prices). The design emphasizes modularity and ease of fabrication. To address the inherent limitations of 3D-printed gearboxes, such as reduced strength and durability compared to metal alternatives, we adopted a cycloidal gear design, which provides an optimal form factor in this context. Extensive testing was conducted on the 3D-printed actuators to validate their durability and alleviate concerns about the reliability of plastic components. To demonstrate the capabilities of Berkeley Humanoid Lite, we conducted a series of experiments, including the development of a locomotion controller using reinforcement learning. These experiments successfully showcased zero-shot policy transfer from simulation to hardware, highlighting the platform's suitability for research validation. By fully open-sourcing the hardware design, embedded code, and training and deployment frameworks, we aim for Berkeley Humanoid Lite to serve as a pivotal step toward democratizing the development of humanoid robotics. All resources are available at https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org.

Paperid: 2695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14919.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to identify anomalies in unseen categories by leveraging CLIP's zero-shot capabilities to match text prompts with visual features. A key challenge in ZSAD is learning general prompts stably and utilizing them effectively, while maintaining both generalizability and category specificity. Although general prompts have been explored in prior works, achieving their stable optimization and effective deployment remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose GenCLIP, a novel framework that learns and leverages general prompts more effectively through multi-layer prompting and dual-branch inference. Multi-layer prompting integrates category-specific visual cues from different CLIP layers, enriching general prompts with more comprehensive and robust feature representations. By combining general prompts with multi-layer visual features, our method further enhances its generalization capability. To balance specificity and generalization, we introduce a dual-branch inference strategy, where a vision-enhanced branch captures fine-grained category-specific features, while a query-only branch prioritizes generalization. The complementary outputs from both branches improve the stability and reliability of anomaly detection across unseen categories. Additionally, we propose an adaptive text prompt filtering mechanism, which removes irrelevant or atypical class names not encountered during CLIP's training, ensuring that only meaningful textual inputs contribute to the final vision-language alignment.

Paperid: 2696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04386.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, there has been a growing trend in utilizing large language models (LLMs) for recommender systems, referred to as LLMRec. A notable approach within this trend is not to fine-tune these models directly but instead to leverage In-Context Learning (ICL) methods tailored for LLMRec, denoted as LLM-ICL Rec. Many contemporary techniques focus on harnessing ICL content to enhance LLMRec performance. However, optimizing LLMRec with ICL content presents unresolved challenges. Specifically, two key issues stand out: (1) the limited understanding of why using a few demonstrations without model fine-tuning can lead to better performance compared to zero-shot recommendations. (2) the lack of evaluation metrics for demonstrations in LLM-ICL Rec and the absence of the theoretical analysis and practical design for optimizing the generation of ICL content for recommendation contexts. To address these two main issues, we propose a theoretical model, the LLM-ICL Recommendation Equivalent Gradient Descent model (LRGD) in this paper, which connects recommendation generation with gradient descent dynamics. We demonstrate that the ICL inference process in LLM aligns with the training procedure of its dual model, producing token predictions equivalent to the dual model's testing outputs. Building on these theoretical insights, we propose an evaluation metric for assessing demonstration quality. We integrate perturbations and regularizations in LRGD to enhance the robustness of the recommender system. To further improve demonstration effectiveness, prevent performance collapse, and ensure long-term adaptability, we also propose a two-stage optimization process in practice. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on three Amazon datasets validate the theoretical equivalence and support the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis and practical module design.

Paperid: 2697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18945.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of geometric reconstruction and generative modeling remains a critical challenge in developing AI systems capable of human-like spatial reasoning. This paper proposes Aether, a unified framework that enables geometry-aware reasoning in world models by jointly optimizing three core capabilities: (1) 4D dynamic reconstruction, (2) action-conditioned video prediction, and (3) goal-conditioned visual planning. Through task-interleaved feature learning, Aether achieves synergistic knowledge sharing across reconstruction, prediction, and planning objectives. Building upon video generation models, our framework demonstrates zero-shot synthetic-to-real generalization despite never observing real-world data during training. Furthermore, our approach achieves zero-shot generalization in both action following and reconstruction tasks, thanks to its intrinsic geometric modeling. Notably, even without real-world data, its reconstruction performance is comparable with or even better than that of domain-specific models. Additionally, Aether employs camera trajectories as geometry-informed action spaces, enabling effective action-conditioned prediction and visual planning. We hope our work inspires the community to explore new frontiers in physically-reasonable world modeling and its applications.

Paperid: 2698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07135.pdf

Abstract:
Future robots are envisioned as versatile systems capable of performing a variety of household tasks. The big question remains, how can we bridge the embodiment gap while minimizing physical robot learning, which fundamentally does not scale well. We argue that learning from in-the-wild human videos offers a promising solution for robotic manipulation tasks, as vast amounts of relevant data already exist on the internet. In this work, we present VidBot, a framework enabling zero-shot robotic manipulation using learned 3D affordance from in-the-wild monocular RGB-only human videos. VidBot leverages a pipeline to extract explicit representations from them, namely 3D hand trajectories from videos, combining a depth foundation model with structure-from-motion techniques to reconstruct temporally consistent, metric-scale 3D affordance representations agnostic to embodiments. We introduce a coarse-to-fine affordance learning model that first identifies coarse actions from the pixel space and then generates fine-grained interaction trajectories with a diffusion model, conditioned on coarse actions and guided by test-time constraints for context-aware interaction planning, enabling substantial generalization to novel scenes and embodiments. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of VidBot, which significantly outperforms counterparts across 13 manipulation tasks in zero-shot settings and can be seamlessly deployed across robot systems in real-world environments. VidBot paves the way for leveraging everyday human videos to make robot learning more scalable.

Paperid: 2699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09649.pdf

Abstract:
Visuomotor imitation learning enables embodied agents to effectively acquire manipulation skills from video demonstrations and robot proprioception. However, as scene complexity and visual distractions increase, existing methods that perform well in simple scenes tend to degrade in performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Imit Diff, a semanstic guided diffusion transformer with dual resolution fusion for imitation learning. Our approach leverages prior knowledge from vision language foundation models to translate high-level semantic instruction into pixel-level visual localization. This information is explicitly integrated into a multi-scale visual enhancement framework, constructed with a dual resolution encoder. Additionally, we introduce an implementation of Consistency Policy within the diffusion transformer architecture to improve both real-time performance and motion smoothness in embodied agent control.We evaluate Imit Diff on several challenging real-world tasks. Due to its task-oriented visual localization and fine-grained scene perception, it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in complex scenes with visual distractions, including zero-shot experiments focused on visual distraction and category generalization. The code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 2700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12675.pdf

Abstract:
Existing works on human-centric video understanding typically focus on analyzing specific moment or entire videos. However, many applications require higher precision at the frame level. In this work, we propose a novel task, BestShot, which aims to locate highlight frames within human-centric videos via language queries. This task demands not only a deep semantic comprehension of human actions but also precise temporal localization. To support this task, we introduce the BestShot Benchmark. %The benchmark is meticulously constructed by combining human detection and tracking, potential frame selection based on human judgment, and detailed textual descriptions crafted by human input to ensure precision. The benchmark is meticulously constructed by combining human-annotated highlight frames, detailed textual descriptions and duration labeling. These descriptions encompass three critical elements: (1) Visual content; (2) Fine-grained action; and (3) Human Pose Description. Together, these elements provide the necessary precision to identify the exact highlight frames in videos. To tackle this problem, we have collected two distinct datasets: (i) ShotGPT4o Dataset, which is algorithmically generated by GPT-4o and (ii) Image-SMPLText Dataset, a dataset with large-scale and accurate per-frame pose description leveraging PoseScript and existing pose estimation datasets. Based on these datasets, we present a strong baseline model, ShotVL, fine-tuned from InternVL, specifically for BestShot. We highlight the impressive zero-shot capabilities of our model and offer comparative analyses with existing SOTA models. ShotVL demonstrates a significant 52% improvement over InternVL on the BestShot Benchmark and a notable 57% improvement on the THUMOS14 Benchmark, all while maintaining the SOTA performance in general image classification and retrieval.

Paperid: 2701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08591.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) suffers from the limited diversity and scale of training data, primarily constrained by the manual curation of existing simulators. To address this, we introduce RoomTour3D, a video-instruction dataset derived from web-based room tour videos that capture real-world indoor spaces and human walking demonstrations. Unlike existing VLN datasets, RoomTour3D leverages the scale and diversity of online videos to generate open-ended human walking trajectories and open-world navigable instructions. To compensate for the lack of navigation data in online videos, we perform 3D reconstruction and obtain 3D trajectories of walking paths augmented with additional information on the room types, object locations and 3D shape of surrounding scenes. Our dataset includes $\sim$100K open-ended description-enriched trajectories with $\sim$200K instructions, and 17K action-enriched trajectories from 1847 room tour environments. We demonstrate experimentally that RoomTour3D enables significant improvements across multiple VLN tasks including CVDN, SOON, R2R, and REVERIE. Moreover, RoomTour3D facilitates the development of trainable zero-shot VLN agents, showcasing the potential and challenges of advancing towards open-world navigation.

Paperid: 2702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08569.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel framework for unified incremental few-shot object detection (iFSOD) and instance segmentation (iFSIS) using the Transformer architecture. Our goal is to create an optimal solution for situations where only a few examples of novel object classes are available, with no access to training data for base or old classes, while maintaining high performance across both base and novel classes. To achieve this, We extend Mask-DINO into a two-stage incremental learning framework. Stage 1 focuses on optimizing the model using the base dataset, while Stage 2 involves fine-tuning the model on novel classes. Besides, we incorporate a classifier selection strategy that assigns appropriate classifiers to the encoder and decoder according to their distinct functions. Empirical evidence indicates that this approach effectively mitigates the over-fitting on novel classes learning. Furthermore, we implement knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting of base classes. Comprehensive evaluations on the COCO and LVIS datasets for both iFSIS and iFSOD tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Paperid: 2703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08530.pdf

Abstract:
The growing interest in embodied intelligence has brought ego-centric perspectives to contemporary research. One significant challenge within this realm is the accurate localization and tracking of objects in ego-centric videos, primarily due to the substantial variability in viewing angles. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces a novel zero-shot approach for the 3D reconstruction and tracking of all objects from the ego-centric video. We present Ego3DT, a novel framework that initially identifies and extracts detection and segmentation information of objects within the ego environment. Utilizing information from adjacent video frames, Ego3DT dynamically constructs a 3D scene of the ego view using a pre-trained 3D scene reconstruction model. Additionally, we have innovated a dynamic hierarchical association mechanism for creating stable 3D tracking trajectories of objects in ego-centric videos. Moreover, the efficacy of our approach is corroborated by extensive experiments on two newly compiled datasets, with 1.04x - 2.90x in HOTA, showcasing the robustness and accuracy of our method in diverse ego-centric scenarios.

Paperid: 2704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06440.pdf

Abstract:
Checker bugs in Deep Learning (DL) libraries are critical yet not well-explored. These bugs are often concealed in the input validation and error-checking code of DL libraries and can lead to silent failures, incorrect results, or unexpected program behavior in DL applications. Despite their potential to significantly impact the reliability and performance of DL-enabled systems built with these libraries, checker bugs have received limited attention. We present the first comprehensive study of DL checker bugs in two widely-used DL libraries, i.e., TensorFlow and PyTorch. Initially, we automatically collected a dataset of 2,418 commits from TensorFlow and PyTorch repositories on GitHub from Sept. 2016 to Dec. 2023 using specific keywords related to checker bugs. Through manual inspection, we identified 527 DL checker bugs. Subsequently, we analyzed these bugs from three perspectives, i.e., root causes, symptoms, and fixing patterns. Using the knowledge gained via root cause analysis of checker bugs, we further propose TensorGuard, a proof-of-concept RAG-based LLM-based tool to detect and fix checker bugs in DL libraries via prompt engineering a series of ChatGPT prompts. We evaluated TensorGuard's performance on a test dataset that includes 92 buggy and 135 clean checker-related changes in TensorFlow and PyTorch from January 2024 to July 2024. Our results demonstrate that TensorGuard has high average recall (94.51\%) using Chain of Thought prompting, a balanced performance between precision and recall using Zero-Shot prompting and Few-Shot prompting strategies. In terms of patch generation, TensorGuard achieves an accuracy of 11.1\%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art bug repair baseline by 2\%. We have also applied TensorGuard on the latest six months' checker-related changes (493 changes) of the JAX library from Google, which resulted in the detection of 64 new checker bugs.

Paperid: 2705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06190.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing importance of customer service in contemporary business, recognizing the intents behind service dialogues has become essential for the strategic success of enterprises. However, the nature of dialogue data varies significantly across different scenarios, and implementing an intent parser for a specific domain often involves tedious feature engineering and a heavy workload of data labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural-Bayesian Program Learning model named Dialogue-Intent Parser (DI-Parser), which specializes in intent parsing under data-hungry settings and offers promising performance improvements. DI-Parser effectively utilizes data from multiple sources in a "Learning to Learn" manner and harnesses the "wisdom of the crowd" through few-shot learning capabilities on human-annotated datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that DI-Parser outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models and offers practical advantages for industrial-scale applications.

Paperid: 2706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01417.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited impressive capability. However, recently many deficiencies of MLLMs have been found compared to human intelligence, $\textit{e.g.}$, hallucination. To drive the MLLMs study, the community dedicated efforts to building larger benchmarks with complex tasks. In this paper, we propose benchmarking an essential but usually overlooked intelligence: $\textbf{association}$, a human's basic capability to link observation and prior practice memory. To comprehensively investigate MLLM's performance on the association, we formulate the association task and devise a standard benchmark based on adjective and verb semantic concepts. Instead of costly data annotation and curation, we propose a convenient $\textbf{annotation-free}$ construction method transforming the general dataset for our association tasks. Simultaneously, we devise a rigorous data refinement process to eliminate confusion in the raw dataset. Building on this database, we establish three levels of association tasks: single-step, synchronous, and asynchronous associations. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the MLLMs' zero-shot association capabilities, addressing multiple dimensions, including three distinct memory strategies, both open-source and closed-source MLLMs, cutting-edge Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, and the involvement of human experts. Our systematic investigation shows that current open-source MLLMs consistently exhibit poor capability in our association tasks, even the currently state-of-the-art GPT-4V(vision) also has a significant gap compared to humans. We believe our benchmark would pave the way for future MLLM studies. $\textit{Our data and code are available at:}$ https://mvig-rhos.com/llm_inception.

Paperid: 2707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00371.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA's failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models.

Paperid: 2708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17740.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have made compelling progress on facilitating high-throughput daily production. Nevertheless, the appealing customized requirements are remain suffered from instance-level finetuning for authentic fidelity. Prior zero-shot customization works achieve the semantic consistence through the condensed injection of identity features, while addressing detailed low-level signatures through complex model configurations and subject-specific fabrications, which significantly break the statistical coherence within the overall system and limit the applicability across various scenarios. To facilitate the generic signature concentration with rectified efficiency, we present \textbf{AnyLogo}, a zero-shot region customizer with remarkable detail consistency, building upon the symbiotic diffusion system with eliminated cumbersome designs. Streamlined as vanilla image generation, we discern that the rigorous signature extraction and creative content generation are promisingly compatible and can be systematically recycled within a single denoising model. In place of the external configurations, the gemini status of the denoising model promote the reinforced subject transmission efficiency and disentangled semantic-signature space with continuous signature decoration. Moreover, the sparse recycling paradigm is adopted to prevent the duplicated risk with compressed transmission quota for diversified signature stimulation. Extensive experiments on constructed logo-level benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of our methods.

Paperid: 2709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14595.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), with their increasing depth and number of parameters, have demonstrated outstanding performance across a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, this growth in scale leads to increased computational demands, particularly during inference and fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we introduce EchoAtt, a novel framework aimed at optimizing transformer-based models by analyzing and leveraging the similarity of attention patterns across layers. Our analysis reveals that many inner layers in LLMs, especially larger ones, exhibit highly similar attention matrices. By exploiting this similarity, EchoAtt enables the sharing of attention matrices in less critical layers, significantly reducing computational requirements without compromising performance. We incorporate this approach within a knowledge distillation setup, where a pre-trained teacher model guides the training of a smaller student model. The student model selectively shares attention matrices in layers with high similarity while inheriting key parameters from the teacher. Our best results with TinyLLaMA-1.1B demonstrate that EchoAtt improves inference speed by 15\%, training speed by 25\%, and reduces the number of parameters by approximately 4\%, all while improving zero-shot performance. These findings highlight the potential of attention matrix sharing to enhance the efficiency of LLMs, making them more practical for real-time and resource-limited applications.

Paperid: 2710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21663.pdf

Abstract:
During benchmarking, the state-of-the-art model for glacier calving front delineation achieves near-human performance. However, when applied in a real-world setting at a novel study site, its delineation accuracy is insufficient for calving front products intended for further scientific analyses. This site represents an out-of-distribution domain for a model trained solely on the benchmark dataset. By employing a few-shot domain adaptation strategy, incorporating spatial static prior knowledge, and including summer reference images in the input time series, the delineation error is reduced from 1131.6 m to 68.7 m without any architectural modifications. These methodological advancements establish a framework for applying deep learning-based calving front segmentation to novel study sites, enabling calving front monitoring on a global scale.

Paperid: 2711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20526.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks has attracted increasing interest. Previous Parameter-Efficient-Tuning (PET) methods regard the pre-trained model as an opaque Black Box model, relying purely on data-driven optimization and underutilizing their inherent prior knowledge. This oversight limits the models' potential for effective downstream task adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a novel black-whIte bOx prompT leArning framework (IOTA), which integrates a data-driven Black Box module with a knowledge-driven White Box module for downstream task adaptation. Specifically, the White Box module derives corrective knowledge by contrasting the wrong predictions with the right cognition. This knowledge is verbalized into interpretable human prompts and leveraged through a corrective knowledge-guided prompt selection strategy to guide the Black Box module toward more accurate predictions. By jointly leveraging knowledge- and data-driven learning signals, IOTA achieves effective downstream task adaptation. Experimental results on 12 image classification benchmarks under few-shot and easy-to-hard adaptation settings demonstrate the effectiveness of corrective knowledge and the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 2712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14827.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models show strong zero-shot performance for chest X-ray classification, but standard flat metrics fail to distinguish between clinically minor and severe errors. This work investigates how to quantify and mitigate abstraction errors by leveraging medical taxonomies. We benchmark several state-of-the-art VLMs using hierarchical metrics and introduce Catastrophic Abstraction Errors to capture cross-branch mistakes. Our results reveal substantial misalignment of VLMs with clinical taxonomies despite high flat performance. To address this, we propose risk-constrained thresholding and taxonomy-aware fine-tuning with radial embeddings, which reduce severe abstraction errors to below 2 per cent while maintaining competitive performance. These findings highlight the importance of hierarchical evaluation and representation-level alignment for safer and more clinically meaningful deployment of VLMs.

Paperid: 2713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10132.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study investigating whether LLMs can predict time intervals between recurring user actions, such as repeated purchases, and how different levels of contextual information shape their predictive behavior. Using a simple but representative repurchase scenario, we benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs in zero-shot settings against both statistical and machine-learning models. Two key findings emerge. First, while LLMs surpass lightweight statistical baselines, they consistently underperform dedicated machine-learning models, showing their limited ability to capture quantitative temporal structure. Second, although moderate context can improve LLM accuracy, adding further user-level detail degrades performance. These results challenge the assumption that "more context leads to better reasoning". Our study highlights fundamental limitations of today's LLMs in structured temporal inference and offers guidance for designing future context-aware hybrid models that integrate statistical precision with linguistic flexibility.

Paperid: 2714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15310.pdf

Abstract:
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image level labels aims to produce pixel level predictions without requiring dense annotations. While recent approaches have leveraged generative models to augment existing data, they remain dependent on real world training samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel direction, Zero Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (ZSWSSS), and propose SynthSeg Agents, a multi agent framework driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic training data entirely without real images. SynthSeg Agents comprises two key modules, a Self Refine Prompt Agent and an Image Generation Agent. The Self Refine Prompt Agent autonomously crafts diverse and semantically rich image prompts via iterative refinement, memory mechanisms, and prompt space exploration, guided by CLIP based similarity and nearest neighbor diversity filtering. These prompts are then passed to the Image Generation Agent, which leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) to synthesize candidate images. A frozen CLIP scoring model is employed to select high quality samples, and a ViT based classifier is further trained to relabel the entire synthetic dataset with improved semantic precision. Our framework produces high quality training data without any real image supervision. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO 2014 show that SynthSeg Agents achieves competitive performance without using real training images. This highlights the potential of LLM driven agents in enabling cost efficient and scalable semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 2715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10922.pdf

Abstract:
The resource requirements of Neural Networks can be significantly reduced through pruning -- the removal of seemingly less important parameters. However, with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), full retraining to recover pruning-induced performance degradation is often prohibitive and classical approaches such as global magnitude pruning are suboptimal on Transformer architectures. State-of-the-art methods hence solve a layer-wise mask selection problem, the problem of finding a pruning mask which minimizes the per-layer pruning error on a small set of calibration data. Exactly solving this problem to optimality using Integer Programming (IP) solvers is computationally infeasible due to its combinatorial nature and the size of the search space, and existing approaches therefore rely on approximations or heuristics. In this work, we demonstrate that the mask selection problem can be made drastically more tractable at LLM scale. To that end, we decouple the rows by enforcing equal sparsity levels per row. This allows us to derive optimal 1-swaps (exchanging one kept and one pruned weight) that can be computed efficiently using the Gram matrix of the calibration data. Using these observations, we propose a tractable and simple 1-swap algorithm that warm starts from any pruning mask, runs efficiently on GPUs at LLM scale, and is essentially hyperparameter-free. We demonstrate that our approach reduces per-layer pruning error by up to 60% over Wanda (Sun et al., 2023) and consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy across state-of-the-art GPT architectures.

Paperid: 2716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11738.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce SeeingSounds, a lightweight and modular framework for audio-to-image generation that leverages the interplay between audio, language, and vision-without requiring any paired audio-visual data or training on visual generative models. Rather than treating audio as a substitute for text or relying solely on audio-to-text mappings, our method performs dual alignment: audio is projected into a semantic language space via a frozen language encoder, and, contextually grounded into the visual domain using a vision-language model. This approach, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, reflects the natural cross-modal associations observed in human perception. The model operates on frozen diffusion backbones and trains only lightweight adapters, enabling efficient and scalable learning. Moreover, it supports fine-grained and interpretable control through procedural text prompt generation, where audio transformations (e.g., volume or pitch shifts) translate into descriptive prompts (e.g., "a distant thunder") that guide visual outputs. Extensive experiments across standard benchmarks confirm that SeeingSounds outperforms existing methods in both zero-shot and supervised settings, establishing a new state of the art in controllable audio-to-visual generation.

Paperid: 2717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10637.pdf

Abstract:
The scalability of robotic learning is fundamentally bottlenecked by the significant cost and labor of real-world data collection. While simulated data offers a scalable alternative, it often fails to generalize to the real world due to significant gaps in visual appearance, physical properties, and object interactions. To address this, we propose RoboSimGS, a novel Real2Sim2Real framework that converts multi-view real-world images into scalable, high-fidelity, and physically interactive simulation environments for robotic manipulation. Our approach reconstructs scenes using a hybrid representation: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) captures the photorealistic appearance of the environment, while mesh primitives for interactive objects ensure accurate physics simulation. Crucially, we pioneer the use of a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) to automate the creation of physically plausible, articulated assets. The MLLM analyzes visual data to infer not only physical properties (e.g., density, stiffness) but also complex kinematic structures (e.g., hinges, sliding rails) of objects. We demonstrate that policies trained entirely on data generated by RoboSimGS achieve successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across a diverse set of real-world manipulation tasks. Furthermore, data from RoboSimGS significantly enhances the performance and generalization capabilities of SOTA methods. Our results validate RoboSimGS as a powerful and scalable solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap.

Paperid: 2718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21976.pdf

Abstract:
Referring expression understanding in remote sensing poses unique challenges, as it requires reasoning over complex object-context relationships. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on multimodal large language models achieves strong performance with massive labeled datasets, they struggle in data-scarce scenarios, leading to poor generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Geo-R1, a reasoning-centric reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) paradigm for few-shot geospatial referring. Geo-R1 enforces the model to first generate explicit, interpretable reasoning chains that decompose referring expressions, and then leverage these rationales to localize target objects. This "reason first, then act" process enables the model to make more effective use of limited annotations, enhances generalization, and provides interpretability. We validate Geo-R1 on three carefully designed few-shot geospatial referring benchmarks, where our model consistently and substantially outperforms SFT baselines. It also demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization, highlighting its robustness. Code and data will be released at http://geo-r1.github.io.

Paperid: 2719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21765.pdf

Abstract:
Recent neural solvers have demonstrated promising performance in learning to solve routing problems. However, existing studies are primarily based on one-off training on one or a set of predefined problem distributions and scales, i.e., tasks. When a new task arises, they typically rely on either zero-shot generalization, which may be poor due to the discrepancies between the new task and the training task(s), or fine-tuning the pretrained solver on the new task, which possibly leads to catastrophic forgetting of knowledge acquired from previous tasks. This paper explores a novel lifelong learning paradigm for neural VRP solvers, where multiple tasks with diverse distributions and scales arise sequentially over time. Solvers are required to effectively and efficiently learn to solve new tasks while maintaining their performance on previously learned tasks. Consequently, a novel framework called Lifelong Learning Router with Behavior Consolidation (LLR-BC) is proposed. LLR-BC consolidates prior knowledge effectively by aligning behaviors of the solver trained on a new task with the buffered ones in a decision-seeking way. To encourage more focus on crucial experiences, LLR-BC assigns greater consolidated weights to decisions with lower confidence. Extensive experiments on capacitated vehicle routing problems and traveling salesman problems demonstrate LLR-BC's effectiveness in training high-performance neural solvers in a lifelong learning setting, addressing the catastrophic forgetting issue, maintaining their plasticity, and improving zero-shot generalization ability.

Paperid: 2720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18648.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying reinforcement learning (RL) safely in the real world is challenging, as policies trained in simulators must face the inevitable sim-to-real gap. Robust safe RL techniques are provably safe, however difficult to scale, while domain randomization is more practical yet prone to unsafe behaviors. We address this gap by proposing SPiDR, short for Sim-to-real via Pessimistic Domain Randomization -- a scalable algorithm with provable guarantees for safe sim-to-real transfer. SPiDR uses domain randomization to incorporate the uncertainty about the sim-to-real gap into the safety constraints, making it versatile and highly compatible with existing training pipelines. Through extensive experiments on sim-to-sim benchmarks and two distinct real-world robotic platforms, we demonstrate that SPiDR effectively ensures safety despite the sim-to-real gap while maintaining strong performance.

Paperid: 2721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15330.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in pre-training vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) methods, have shown great potential in learning out-of-distribution (OOD) representations. Despite showing competitive performance, the prompt-based CLIP methods still suffer from: i) inaccurate text descriptions, which leads to degraded accuracy and robustness, and poses a challenge for zero-shot CLIP methods. ii) limited vision-language embedding alignment, which significantly affects the generalization performance. To tackle the above issues, this paper proposes a novel Conditional Domain prompt Learning (CoDoL) method, which utilizes readily-available domain information to form prompts and improves the vision-language embedding alignment for improving OOD generalization. To capture both instance-specific and domain-specific information, we further propose a lightweight Domain Meta Network (DMN) to generate input-conditional tokens for images in each domain. Extensive experiments on four OOD benchmarks (PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome and DigitDG) validate the effectiveness of our proposed CoDoL in terms of improving the vision-language embedding alignment as well as the out-of-distribution generalization performance.

Paperid: 2722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10746.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models in healthcare often miss critical emotional cues, delivering medically sound but emotionally flat advice. This is especially problematic in clinical contexts where patients are distressed and vulnerable, and require empathic communication to support safety, adherence, and trust. We present RECAP (Reflect-Extract-Calibrate-Align-Produce), an inference-time framework that adds structured emotional reasoning without retraining. By decomposing empathy into transparent appraisal-theoretic stages and exposing per-dimension Likert signals, RECAP produces nuanced, auditable responses. Across EmoBench, SECEU, and EQ-Bench, RECAP improves emotional reasoning by 22-28% on 8B models and 10-13% on larger models over zero-shot baselines. Clinician evaluations further confirm superior empathetic communication. RECAP shows that modular, theory-grounded prompting can systematically enhance emotional intelligence in medical AI while preserving the accountability required for deployment.

Paperid: 2723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01360.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image retrieval is essential for clinical decision-making and translational research, relying on discriminative visual representations. Yet, current methods remain fragmented, relying on separate architectures and training strategies for 2D, 3D, and video-based medical data. This modality-specific design hampers scalability and inhibits the development of unified representations. To enable unified learning, we curate a large-scale hybrid-modality dataset comprising 867,653 medical imaging samples, including 2D X-rays and ultrasounds, RGB endoscopy videos, and 3D CT scans. Leveraging this dataset, we train M3Ret, a unified visual encoder without any modality-specific customization. It successfully learns transferable representations using both generative (MAE) and contrastive (SimDINO) self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigms. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot image-to-image retrieval across all individual modalities, surpassing strong baselines such as DINOv3 and the text-supervised BMC-CLIP. More remarkably, strong cross-modal alignment emerges without paired data, and the model generalizes to unseen MRI tasks, despite never observing MRI during pretraining, demonstrating the generalizability of purely visual self-supervision to unseen modalities. Comprehensive analyses further validate the scalability of our framework across model and data sizes. These findings deliver a promising signal to the medical imaging community, positioning M3Ret as a step toward foundation models for visual SSL in multimodal medical image understanding.

Paperid: 2724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10681.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Industrial Anomaly Detection (FS-IAD) has important applications in automating industrial quality inspection. Recently, some FS-IAD methods based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have been proposed with some achievements through prompt learning or fine-tuning. However, existing LVLMs focus on general tasks but lack basic industrial knowledge and reasoning capabilities related to FS-IAD, making these methods far from specialized human quality inspectors. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework, IADGPT, designed to perform FS-IAD in a human-like manner, while also handling associated localization and reasoning tasks, even for diverse and novel industrial products. To this end, we introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy inspired by humans. Specifically, the first two stages gradually guide IADGPT in acquiring fundamental industrial knowledge and discrepancy awareness. In the third stage, we design an in-context learning-based training paradigm, enabling IADGPT to leverage a few-shot image as the exemplars for improved generalization to novel products. In addition, we design a strategy that enables IADGPT to output image-level and pixel-level anomaly scores using the logits output and the attention map, respectively, in conjunction with the language output to accomplish anomaly reasoning. To support our training, we present a new dataset comprising 100K images across 400 diverse industrial product categories with extensive attribute-level textual annotations. Experiments indicate IADGPT achieves considerable performance gains in anomaly detection and demonstrates competitiveness in anomaly localization and reasoning. We will release our dataset in camera-ready.

Paperid: 2725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10412.pdf

Abstract:
Dysarthric speakers experience substantial communication challenges due to impaired motor control of the speech apparatus, which leads to reduced speech intelligibility. This creates significant obstacles in dataset curation since actual recording of long, articulate sentences for the objective of training personalized TTS models becomes infeasible. Thus, the limited availability of audio data, in addition to the articulation errors that are present within the audio, complicates personalized speech synthesis for target dysarthric speaker adaptation. To address this, we frame the issue as a domain transfer task and introduce a knowledge anchoring framework that leverages a teacher-student model, enhanced by curriculum learning through audio augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed zero-shot multi-speaker TTS model effectively generates synthetic speech with markedly reduced articulation errors and high speaker fidelity, while maintaining prosodic naturalness.

Paperid: 2726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10315.pdf

Abstract:
Existing backdoor defense methods in Federated Learning (FL) rely on the assumption of homogeneous client data distributions or the availability of a clean serve dataset, which limits the practicality and effectiveness. Defending against backdoor attacks under heterogeneous client data distributions while preserving model performance remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a FL backdoor defense framework named CLIP-Fed, which leverages the zero-shot learning capabilities of vision-language pre-training models. By integrating both pre-aggregation and post-aggregation defense strategies, CLIP-Fed overcomes the limitations of Non-IID imposed on defense effectiveness. To address privacy concerns and enhance the coverage of the dataset against diverse triggers, we construct and augment the server dataset using the multimodal large language model and frequency analysis without any client samples. To address class prototype deviations caused by backdoor samples and eliminate the correlation between trigger patterns and target labels, CLIP-Fed aligns the knowledge of the global model and CLIP on the augmented dataset using prototype contrastive loss and Kullback-Leibler divergence. Extensive experiments on representative datasets validate the effectiveness of CLIP-Fed. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, CLIP-Fed achieves an average reduction in ASR, i.e., 2.03\% on CIFAR-10 and 1.35\% on CIFAR-10-LT, while improving average MA by 7.92\% and 0.48\%, respectively.

Paperid: 2727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10358.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object detection (ZSD) aims to leverage semantic descriptions to localize and recognize objects of both seen and unseen classes. Existing ZSD works are mainly coarse-grained object detection, where the classes are visually quite different, thus are relatively easy to distinguish. However, in real life we often have to face fine-grained object detection scenarios, where the classes are too similar to be easily distinguished. For example, detecting different kinds of birds, fishes, and flowers. In this paper, we propose and solve a new problem called Fine-Grained Zero-Shot Object Detection (FG-ZSD for short), which aims to detect objects of different classes with minute differences in details under the ZSD paradigm. We develop an effective method called MSHC for the FG-ZSD task, which is based on an improved two-stage detector and employs a multi-level semantics-aware embedding alignment loss, ensuring tight coupling between the visual and semantic spaces. Considering that existing ZSD datasets are not suitable for the new FG-ZSD task, we build the first FG-ZSD benchmark dataset FGZSD-Birds, which contains 148,820 images falling into 36 orders, 140 families, 579 genera and 1432 species. Extensive experiments on FGZSD-Birds show that our method outperforms existing ZSD models.

Paperid: 2728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02792.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown remarkable success in generating high-quality images from text prompts. Recent efforts extend these models to incorporate conditional images (e.g., depth or pose maps) for fine-grained spatial control. Among them, feature injection methods have emerged as a training-free alternative to traditional fine-tuning approaches. However, they often suffer from structural misalignment, condition leakage, and visual artifacts, especially when the condition image diverges significantly from natural RGB distributions. By revisiting existing methods, we identify a core limitation: the synchronous injection of condition features fails to account for the trade-off between domain alignment and structural preservation during denoising. Inspired by this observation, we propose a flexible feature injection framework that decouples the injection timestep from the denoising process. At its core is a structure-rich injection module, which enables the model to better adapt to the evolving interplay between alignment and structure preservation throughout the diffusion steps, resulting in more faithful structural generation. In addition, we introduce appearance-rich prompting and a restart refinement strategy to further enhance appearance control and visual quality. Together, these designs enable training-free generation that is both structure-rich and appearance-rich. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse zero-shot conditioning scenarios.

Paperid: 2729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15339.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical decision support, yet current evaluation methods often fail to distinguish genuine medical reasoning from superficial patterns. We introduce DeVisE (Demographics and Vital signs Evaluation), a behavioral testing framework for probing fine-grained clinical understanding. We construct a dataset of ICU discharge notes from MIMIC-IV, generating both raw (real-world) and template-based (synthetic) versions with controlled single-variable counterfactuals targeting demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and vital sign attributes. We evaluate five LLMs spanning general-purpose and medically fine-tuned variants, under both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We assess model behavior via (1) input-level sensitivity - how counterfactuals alter the likelihood of a note; and (2) downstream reasoning - how they affect predicted hospital length-of-stay. Our results show that zero-shot models exhibit more coherent counterfactual reasoning patterns, while fine-tuned models tend to be more stable yet less responsive to clinically meaningful changes. Notably, demographic factors subtly but consistently influence outputs, emphasizing the importance of fairness-aware evaluation. This work highlights the utility of behavioral testing in exposing the reasoning strategies of clinical LLMs and informing the design of safer, more transparent medical AI systems.

Paperid: 2730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13502.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are typically pretrained with next-word prediction (NWP), which yields strong surface fluency but places limited pressure on models to form explicit reasoning before emitting tokens. We study whether shifting the supervision signal can better elicit explicit reasoning and, more broadly, strengthen models' general reasoning capability. We present BOttlenecked next-Word prediction (BOW), a RL formulation of NWP that inserts an intermediate reasoning bottleneck. Instead of predicting the next word directly from context, the policy model must first generate a next-word reasoning trajectory. A frozen scorer then assigns this trajectory a soft, distributional reward equal to the probability of the gold next token conditioned solely on the trajectory to guide the RL optimization. We also propose an optional L1-style regularizer on the reward to discourage "name-the-answer" shortcuts. Across ten benchmarks, a brief BOW adaptation phase on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama3.1-8B-Instruct improves zero-shot reasoning and outperforms strong continual-pretraining baselines, including an RL variant with a hard, binary reward and a supervised finetuning approach with augmented data, by nearly 5% on average, while achieving the top result in 7 of 10 intrinsic NWP evaluations. These results indicate that BOW is a viable alternative to vanilla NWP, inducing explicit next-word reasoning and strengthening general reasoning ability.

Paperid: 2731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05746.pdf

Abstract:
Temporal tabular question answering presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring robust reasoning over structured data, which is a task where traditional prompting methods often fall short. These methods face challenges such as memorization, sensitivity to table size, and reduced performance on complex queries. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TempTabQA-C, a synthetic dataset designed for systematic and controlled evaluations, alongside a symbolic intermediate representation that transforms tables into database schemas. This structured approach allows LLMs to generate and execute SQL queries, enhancing generalization and mitigating biases. By incorporating adaptive few-shot prompting with contextually tailored examples, our method achieves superior robustness, scalability, and performance. Experimental results consistently highlight improvements across key challenges, setting a new benchmark for robust temporal reasoning with LLMs.

Paperid: 2732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00806.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still struggle with complex reasoning tasks in Visual Question Answering (VQA). While current methods have advanced by incorporating visual prompts, our study uncovers critical limitations: these approaches indiscriminately annotate all detected objects for every visual question, generating excessive visual markers that degrade task performance. This issue stems primarily from a lack of focus on key visual elements, raising two important questions: Are all objects equally important, and do all questions require visual prompts? Motivated by Dual Process Theory, which distinguishes between instinctive and deliberate cognitive modes in human reasoning, we propose FOCUS, a plug-and-play approach that dynamically adapts to the complexity of questions, combining fast intuitive judgments with deliberate analytical reasoning to enhance the vision-language reasoning capability of the MLLM. For straightforward questions, FOCUS supports efficient zero-shot reasoning. For more complex tasks, it employs the conceptualizing before observation strategy to highlight critical elements. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks, ScienceQA, TextQA, VizWiz, and MME, demonstrate that FOCUS consistently improves the performance of both open-source and black-box MLLMs, achieving significant gains across all datasets. Ablation studies further validate the importance of combining diverse cognitive strategies with refined visual information for superior performance. Code will be released.

Paperid: 2733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24088.pdf

Abstract:
Vision foundation models pre-trained on massive data encode rich representations of real-world concepts, which can be adapted to downstream tasks by fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning foundation models on one task often leads to the issue of concept forgetting on other tasks. Recent methods of robust fine-tuning aim to mitigate forgetting of prior knowledge without affecting the fine-tuning performance. Knowledge is often preserved by matching the original and fine-tuned model weights or feature pairs. However, such point-wise matching can be too strong, without explicit awareness of the feature neighborhood structures that encode rich knowledge as well. We propose a novel regularization method Proxy-FDA that explicitly preserves the structural knowledge in feature space. Proxy-FDA performs Feature Distribution Alignment (using nearest neighbor graphs) between the pre-trained and fine-tuned feature spaces, and the alignment is further improved by informative proxies that are generated dynamically to increase data diversity. Experiments show that Proxy-FDA significantly reduces concept forgetting during fine-tuning, and we find a strong correlation between forgetting and a distributional distance metric (in comparison to L2 distance). We further demonstrate Proxy-FDA's benefits in various fine-tuning settings (end-to-end, few-shot and continual tuning) and across different tasks like image classification, captioning and VQA.

Paperid: 2734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22143.pdf

Abstract:
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced numerous fields. In this work, we explore how to harness their potential to address 3D scene understanding tasks, using 3D question answering (3D-QA) as a representative example. Due to the limited training data in 3D, we do not train LVLMs but infer in a zero-shot manner. Specifically, we sample 2D views from a 3D point cloud and feed them into 2D models to answer a given question. When the 2D model is chosen, e.g., LLAVA-OV, the quality of sampled views matters the most. We propose cdViews, a novel approach to automatically selecting critical and diverse Views for 3D-QA. cdViews consists of two key components: viewSelector prioritizing critical views based on their potential to provide answer-specific information, and viewNMS enhancing diversity by removing redundant views based on spatial overlap. We evaluate cdViews on the widely-used ScanQA and SQA benchmarks, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D-QA while relying solely on 2D models without fine-tuning. These findings support our belief that 2D LVLMs are currently the most effective alternative (of the resource-intensive 3D LVLMs) for addressing 3D tasks.

Paperid: 2735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22072.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel MoE-based speaker adaptation framework for foundation models based dysarthric speech recognition. This approach enables zero-shot adaptation and real-time processing while incorporating domain knowledge. Speech impairment severity and gender conditioned adapter experts are dynamically combined using on-the-fly predicted speaker-dependent routing parameters. KL-divergence is used to further enforce diversity among experts and their generalization to unseen speakers. Experimental results on the UASpeech corpus suggest that on-the-fly MoE-based adaptation produces statistically significant WER reductions of up to 1.34% absolute (6.36% relative) over the unadapted baseline HuBERT/WavLM models. Consistent WER reductions of up to 2.55% absolute (11.44% relative) and RTF speedups of up to 7 times are obtained over batch-mode adaptation across varying speaker-level data quantities. The lowest published WER of 16.35% (46.77% on very low intelligibility) is obtained.

Paperid: 2736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17510.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-label classification is prevalent in real-world settings, but the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this setting is understudied. We investigate how autoregressive LLMs perform multi-label classification, focusing on subjective tasks, by analyzing the output distributions of the models at each label generation step. We find that the initial probability distribution for the first label often does not reflect the eventual final output, even in terms of relative order and find LLMs tend to suppress all but one label at each generation step. We further observe that as model scale increases, their token distributions exhibit lower entropy and higher single-label confidence, but the internal relative ranking of the labels improves. Finetuning methods such as supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning amplify this phenomenon. We introduce the task of distribution alignment for multi-label settings: aligning LLM-derived label distributions with empirical distributions estimated from annotator responses in subjective tasks. We propose both zero-shot and supervised methods which improve both alignment and predictive performance over existing approaches. We find one method -- taking the max probability over all label generation distributions instead of just using the initial probability distribution -- improves both distribution alignment and overall F1 classification without adding any additional computation.

Paperid: 2737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07690.pdf

Abstract:
This study aims to address the problem of multi-domain task incremental learning~(MTIL), which requires that vision-language models~(VLMs) continuously acquire new knowledge while maintaining their inherent zero-shot recognition capability. Existing paradigms delegate the testing of unseen-domain samples to the original CLIP, which only prevents the degradation of the model's zero-shot capability but fails to enhance the generalization of the VLM further. To this end, we propose a novel MTIL framework, named AFA, which comprises two core modules: (1) an against forward-forgetting adapter that learns task-invariant information for each dataset in the incremental tasks to enhance the zero-shot recognition ability of VLMs; (2) an against backward-forgetting adapter that strengthens the few-shot learning capability of VLMs while supporting incremental learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the AFA method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, especially in few-shot MTIL tasks, and surpasses the inherent zero-shot performance of CLIP in terms of transferability. The code is provided in the Supplementary Material.

Paperid: 2738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08368.pdf

Abstract:
Visual understanding is inherently contextual -- what we focus on in an image depends on the task at hand. For instance, given an image of a person holding a bouquet of flowers, we may focus on either the person such as their clothing, or the type of flowers, depending on the context of interest. Yet, most existing image encoding paradigms represent an image as a fixed, generic feature vector, overlooking the potential needs of prioritizing varying visual information for different downstream use cases. In this work, we introduce FocalLens, a conditional visual encoding method that produces different representations for the same image based on the context of interest, expressed flexibly through natural language. We leverage vision instruction tuning data and contrastively finetune a pretrained vision encoder to take natural language instructions as additional inputs for producing conditional image representations. Extensive experiments validate that conditional image representation from FocalLens better pronounce the visual features of interest compared to generic features produced by standard vision encoders like CLIP. In addition, we show FocalLens further leads to performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks including image-image retrieval, image classification, and image-text retrieval, with an average gain of 5 and 10 points on the challenging SugarCrepe and MMVP-VLM benchmarks, respectively.

Paperid: 2739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02559.pdf

Abstract:
The vast amount of online information today poses challenges for non-English speakers, as much of it is concentrated in high-resource languages such as English and French. Wikipedia reflects this imbalance, with content in low-resource languages frequently outdated or incomplete. Recent research has sought to improve cross-language synchronization of Wikipedia tables using rule-based methods. These approaches can be effective, but they struggle with complexity and generalization. This paper explores large language models (LLMs) for multilingual information synchronization, using zero-shot prompting as a scalable solution. We introduce the Information Updation dataset, simulating the real-world process of updating outdated Wikipedia tables, and evaluate LLM performance. Our findings reveal that single-prompt approaches often produce suboptimal results, prompting us to introduce a task decomposition strategy that enhances coherence and accuracy. Our proposed method outperforms existing baselines, particularly in Information Updation (1.79%) and Information Addition (20.58%), highlighting the model strength in dynamically updating and enriching data across architectures.

Paperid: 2740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00241.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to synthesize public opinion data, addressing challenges in traditional survey methods like declining response rates and non-response bias. We introduce a novel technique: role creation based on knowledge injection, a form of in-context learning that leverages RAG and specified personality profiles from the HEXACO model and demographic information, and uses that for dynamically generated prompts. This method allows LLMs to simulate diverse opinions more accurately than existing prompt engineering approaches. We compare our results with pre-trained models with standard few-shot prompts. Experiments using questions from the Cooperative Election Study (CES) demonstrate that our role-creation approach significantly improves the alignment of LLM-generated opinions with real-world human survey responses, increasing answer adherence. In addition, we discuss challenges, limitations and future research directions.

Paperid: 2741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21258.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental Learning (FSCIL) enables models to learn new classes from limited data while retaining performance on previously learned classes. Traditional FSCIL methods often require fine-tuning parameters with limited new class data and suffer from a separation between learning new classes and utilizing old knowledge. Inspired by the analogical learning mechanisms of the human brain, we propose a novel analogical generative method. Our approach includes the Brain-Inspired Analogical Generator (BiAG), which derives new class weights from existing classes without parameter fine-tuning during incremental stages. BiAG consists of three components: Weight Self-Attention Module (WSA), Weight & Prototype Analogical Attention Module (WPAA), and Semantic Conversion Module (SCM). SCM uses Neural Collapse theory for semantic conversion, WSA supplements new class weights, and WPAA computes analogies to generate new class weights. Experiments on miniImageNet, CUB-200, and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves higher final and average accuracy compared to SOTA methods.

Paperid: 2742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19516.pdf

Abstract:
The growing adoption of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in embodied AI intensifies the demand for diverse manipulation demonstrations. However, high costs associated with data collection often result in insufficient data coverage across all scenarios, which limits the performance of the models. It is observed that the spatial reasoning phase (SRP) in large workspace dominates the failure cases. Fortunately, this data can be collected with low cost, underscoring the potential of leveraging inexpensive data to improve model performance. In this paper, we introduce the RoboTron-Craft, a stage-divided and cost-effective pipeline for realistic manipulation generation. Base on this, the RoboTron-Platter method is introduced, a framework that decouples training trajectories into distinct task stages and leverages abundant easily collectible SRP data to enhance VLA model's generalization. Through analysis we demonstrate that sub-task-specific training with additional SRP data with proper proportion can act as a performance catalyst for robot manipulation, maximizing the utilization of costly physical interaction phase (PIP) data. Experiments show that through introducing large proportion of cost-effective SRP trajectories into a limited set of PIP data, we can achieve a maximum improvement of 41\% on success rate in zero-shot scenes, while with the ability to transfer manipulation skill to novel targets. Project available at https://github.com/ notFoundThisPerson/RoboTron-Craft.

Paperid: 2743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14887.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling dense retrievers to larger large language model (LLM) backbones has been a dominant strategy for improving their retrieval effectiveness. However, this has substantial cost implications: larger backbones require more expensive hardware (e.g. GPUs with more memory) and lead to higher indexing and querying costs (latency, energy consumption). In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by introducing PromptPRF, a feature-based pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) framework that enables small LLM-based dense retrievers to achieve effectiveness comparable to much larger models. PromptPRF uses LLMs to extract query-independent, structured and unstructured features (e.g., entities, summaries, chain-of-thought keywords, essay) from top-ranked documents. These features are generated offline and integrated into dense query representations via prompting, enabling efficient retrieval without additional training. Unlike prior methods such as GRF, which rely on online, query-specific generation and sparse retrieval, PromptPRF decouples feedback generation from query processing and supports dense retrievers in a fully zero-shot setting. Experiments on TREC DL and BEIR benchmarks demonstrate that PromptPRF consistently improves retrieval effectiveness and offers favourable cost-effectiveness trade-offs. We further present ablation studies to understand the role of positional feedback and analyse the interplay between feature extractor size, PRF depth, and model performance. Our findings demonstrate that with effective PRF design, scaling the retriever is not always necessary, narrowing the gap between small and large models while reducing inference cost.

Paperid: 2744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10705.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) represent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence by integrating visual and textual modalities to achieve impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, VLMs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when sequentially fine-tuned on multiple downstream tasks. Existing continual learning methods for VLMs often rely heavily on additional reference datasets, compromise zero-shot performance, or are limited to parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. In this paper, we propose Continual Decoupling-Unifying (ConDU), a novel approach, by introducing model fusion into continual learning for VLMs. ConDU maintains a unified model along with task triggers and prototype sets, employing an iterative process of decoupling task-specific models for previous tasks and unifying them with the model for the newly learned task. Additionally, we introduce an inference strategy for zero-shot scenarios by aggregating predictions from multiple decoupled task-specific models. Extensive experiments across various settings show that ConDU achieves up to a 2\% improvement in average performance across all seen tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while also enhancing zero-shot capabilities relative to the original VLM.

Paperid: 2745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04478.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose AI models, particularly those designed for text and vision, demonstrate impressive versatility across a wide range of deep-learning tasks. However, they often underperform in specialised domains like medical imaging, where domain-specific solutions or alternative knowledge transfer approaches are typically required. Recent studies have noted that general-purpose models can exhibit similar latent spaces when processing semantically related data, although this alignment does not occur naturally. Building on this insight, it has been shown that applying a simple transformation - at most affine - estimated from a subset of semantically corresponding samples, known as anchors, enables model stitching across diverse training paradigms, architectures, and modalities. In this paper, we explore how semantic alignment - estimating transformations between anchors - can bridge general-purpose AI with specialised medical knowledge. Using multiple public chest X-ray datasets, we demonstrate that model stitching across model architectures allows general models to integrate domain-specific knowledge without additional training, leading to improved performance on medical tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel zero-shot classification approach for unimodal vision encoders that leverages semantic alignment across modalities. Our results show that our method not only outperforms general multimodal models but also approaches the performance levels of fully trained, medical-specific multimodal solutions

Paperid: 2746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17328.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within LLMs to improve few-shot dialogue summarization task. Unlike prior methods that require external knowledge, we mutually reinforce the LLMÅ dialogue synthesis and summarization capabilities, allowing them to complement each other during training and enhance overall performances. The dialogue synthesis capability is enhanced by directed preference optimization with preference scoring from summarization capability. The summarization capability is enhanced by the additional high quality dialogue-summary paired data produced by the dialogue synthesis capability. By leveraging the proposed MRDS mechanism, we elicit the internal knowledge of LLM in the format of synthetic data, and use it to augment the few-shot real training dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. Furthermore, our method attains the highest average scores in human evaluations, surpassing both the pre-trained models and the baselines fine-tuned solely for summarization tasks.

Paperid: 2747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13942.pdf

Abstract:
A large-scale vision and language model that has been pretrained on massive data encodes visual and linguistic prior, which makes it easier to generate images and language that are more natural and realistic. Despite this, there is still a significant domain gap between the modalities of vision and language, especially when training data is scarce in few-shot settings, where only very limited data are available for training. In order to mitigate this issue, a multi-modal meta-learning framework has been proposed to bridge the gap between two frozen pretrained large vision and language models by introducing a tunable prompt connecting these two large models. For few-shot image captioning, the existing multi-model meta-learning framework utilizes a one-step prompting scheme to accumulate the visual features of input images to guide the language model, which struggles to generate accurate image descriptions with only a few training samples. Instead, we propose a chain-of-thought (CoT) meta-learning scheme as a multi-step image captioning procedure to better imitate how humans describe images. In addition, we further propose to learn different meta-parameters of the model corresponding to each CoT step in distinct subspaces to avoid interference. We evaluated our method on three commonly used image captioning datasets, i.e., MSCOCO, Flickr8k, and Flickr30k, under few-shot settings. The results of our experiments indicate that our chain-of-thought subspace meta-learning strategy is superior to the baselines in terms of performance across different datasets measured by different metrics.

Paperid: 2748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11836.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been introduced to graph learning, aiming to extend their zero-shot generalization success to tasks where labeled graph data is scarce. Among these applications, inference over text-attributed graphs (TAGs) presents unique challenges: existing methods struggle with LLMs' limited context length for processing large node neighborhoods and the misalignment between node embeddings and the LLM token space. To address these issues, we establish two key principles for ensuring generalization and derive the framework LLM-BP accordingly: (1) Unifying the attribute space with task-adaptive embeddings, where we leverage LLM-based encoders and task-aware prompting to enhance generalization of the text attribute embeddings; (2) Developing a generalizable graph information aggregation mechanism, for which we adopt belief propagation with LLM-estimated parameters that adapt across graphs. Evaluations on 11 real-world TAG benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-BP significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving 8.10% improvement with task-conditional embeddings and an additional 1.71% gain from adaptive aggregation. The code and task-adaptive embeddings are publicly available.

Paperid: 2749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03198.pdf

Abstract:
Spike sorting is an essential process in neural recording, which identifies and separates electrical signals from individual neurons recorded by electrodes in the brain, enabling researchers to study how specific neurons communicate and process information. Although there exist a number of spike sorting methods which have contributed to significant neuroscientific breakthroughs, many are heuristically designed, making it challenging to verify their correctness due to the difficulty of obtaining ground truth labels from real-world neural recordings. In this work, we explore a data-driven, deep learning-based approach. We begin by creating a large-scale dataset through electrophysiology simulations using biologically realistic computational models. We then present SimSort, a pretraining framework for spike sorting. Trained solely on simulated data, SimSort demonstrates zero-shot generalizability to real-world spike sorting tasks, yielding consistent improvements over existing methods across multiple benchmarks. These results highlight the potential of simulation-driven pretraining to enhance the robustness and scalability of spike sorting in experimental neuroscience.

Paperid: 2750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01521.pdf

Abstract:
Agents trained via reinforcement learning (RL) often struggle to perform well on tasks that differ from those encountered during training. This limitation presents a challenge to the broader deployment of RL in diverse and dynamic task settings. In this work, we introduce memory augmentation, a memory-based RL approach to improve task generalization. Our approach leverages task-structured augmentations to simulate plausible out-of-distribution scenarios and incorporates memory mechanisms to enable context-aware policy adaptation. Trained on a predefined set of tasks, our policy demonstrates the ability to generalize to unseen tasks through memory augmentation without requiring additional interactions with the environment. Through extensive simulation experiments and real-world hardware evaluations on legged locomotion tasks, we demonstrate that our approach achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks while maintaining robust in-distribution performance and high sample efficiency.

Paperid: 2751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16404.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time prompt tuning enhances zero-shot generalization of vision-language models but tends to ignore the relatedness among test samples during inference. Online test-time prompt tuning provides a simple way to leverage the information in previous test samples, albeit with the risk of prompt collapse due to error accumulation. To enhance test-time prompt tuning, we propose DynaPrompt, short for dynamic test-time prompt tuning, exploiting relevant data distribution information while reducing error accumulation. Built on an online prompt buffer, DynaPrompt adaptively selects and optimizes the relevant prompts for each test sample during tuning. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic prompt selection strategy based on two metrics: prediction entropy and probability difference. For unseen test data information, we develop dynamic prompt appending, which allows the buffer to append new prompts and delete the inactive ones. By doing so, the prompts are optimized to exploit beneficial information on specific test data, while alleviating error accumulation. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic test-time prompt tuning.

Paperid: 2752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15618.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a latent 3D representation that models 3D surfaces as probability density functions in 3D, i.e., p(x,y,z), with flow-matching. Our representation is specifically designed for consumption by machine learning models, offering continuity and compactness by construction while requiring only point clouds and minimal data preprocessing. Despite being a data-driven method, our use of flow matching in the 3D space enables interesting geometry properties, including the capabilities to perform zero-shot estimation of surface normal and deformation field. We evaluate with several machine learning tasks, including 3D-CLIP, unconditional generative models, single-image conditioned generative model, and intersection-point estimation. Across all experiments, our models achieve competitive performance to existing baselines, while requiring less preprocessing and auxiliary information from training data.

Paperid: 2753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15603.pdf

Abstract:
Dialogue intent classification aims to identify the underlying purpose or intent of a user's input in a conversation. Current intent classification systems encounter considerable challenges, primarily due to the vast number of possible intents and the significant semantic overlap among similar intent classes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to few-shot dialogue intent classification through in-context learning, incorporating dynamic label refinement to address these challenges. Our method retrieves relevant examples for a test input from the training set and leverages a large language model to dynamically refine intent labels based on semantic understanding, ensuring that intents are clearly distinguishable from one another. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively resolves confusion between semantically similar intents, resulting in significantly enhanced performance across multiple datasets compared to baselines. We also show that our method generates more interpretable intent labels, and has a better semantic coherence in capturing underlying user intents compared to baselines.

Paperid: 2754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05244.pdf

Abstract:
How to best develop foundational models for time series forecasting remains an important open question. Tokenization is a crucial consideration in this effort: what is an effective discrete vocabulary for a real-valued sequential input? To address this question, we develop WaveToken, a wavelet-based tokenizer that allows models to learn complex representations directly in the space of time-localized frequencies. Our method first scales and decomposes the input time series, then thresholds and quantizes the wavelet coefficients, and finally pre-trains an autoregressive model to forecast coefficients for the forecast horizon. By decomposing coarse and fine structures in the inputs, wavelets provide an eloquent and compact language for time series forecasting that simplifies learning. Empirical results on a comprehensive benchmark, including 42 datasets for both in-domain and zero-shot settings, show that WaveToken: i) provides better accuracy than recently proposed foundation models for forecasting while using a much smaller vocabulary (1024 tokens), and performs on par or better than modern deep learning models trained specifically on each dataset; and ii) exhibits superior generalization capabilities, achieving the best average rank across all datasets for three complementary metrics. In addition, we show that our method can easily capture complex temporal patterns of practical relevance that are challenging for other recent pre-trained models, including trends, sparse spikes, and non-stationary time series with varying frequencies evolving over time.

Paperid: 2755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01786.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models that satisfy hard constraints are critical in many scientific and engineering applications, where physical laws or system requirements must be strictly respected. Many existing constrained generative models, especially those developed for computer vision, rely heavily on gradient information, which is often sparse or computationally expensive in some fields, e.g., partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work, we introduce a novel framework for adapting pre-trained, unconstrained flow-matching models to satisfy constraints exactly in a zero-shot manner without requiring expensive gradient computations or fine-tuning. Our framework, ECI sampling, alternates between extrapolation (E), correction (C), and interpolation (I) stages during each iterative sampling step of flow matching sampling to ensure accurate integration of constraint information while preserving the validity of the generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various PDE systems, showing that ECI-guided generation strictly adheres to physical constraints and accurately captures complex distribution shifts induced by these constraints. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms baseline approaches in various zero-shot constrained generation tasks and also achieves competitive results in the regression tasks without additional fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23978.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation (ZS-OGN) enables robots or agents to navigate toward objects of unseen categories without object-specific training. Traditional approaches often leverage categorical semantic information for navigation guidance, which struggles when only objects are partially observed or detailed and functional representations of the environment are lacking. To resolve the above two issues, we propose \textit{Geometric-part and Affordance Maps} (GAMap), a novel method that integrates object parts and affordance attributes as navigation guidance. Our method includes a multi-scale scoring approach to capture geometric-part and affordance attributes of objects at different scales. Comprehensive experiments conducted on HM3D and Gibson benchmark datasets demonstrate improvements in Success Rate and Success weighted by Path Length, underscoring the efficacy of our geometric-part and affordance-guided navigation approach in enhancing robot autonomy and versatility, without any additional object-specific training or fine-tuning with the semantics of unseen objects and/or the locomotions of the robot.

Paperid: 2757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21926.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce an innovative approach to advancing semantic understanding in zero-shot object goal navigation (ZS-OGN), enhancing the autonomy of robots in unfamiliar environments. Traditional reliance on labeled data has been a limitation for robotic adaptability, which we address by employing a dual-component framework that integrates a GLIP Vision Language Model for initial detection and an InstructionBLIP model for validation. This combination not only refines object and environmental recognition but also fortifies the semantic interpretation, pivotal for navigational decision-making. Our method, rigorously tested in both simulated and real-world settings, exhibits marked improvements in navigation precision and reliability.

Paperid: 2758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21037.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel method for reliable frontier selection in Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation (ZS-OGN), enhancing robotic navigation systems with foundation models to improve commonsense reasoning in indoor environments. Our approach introduces a multi-expert decision framework to address the nonsensical or irrelevant reasoning often seen in foundation model-based systems. The method comprises two key components: Diversified Expert Frontier Analysis (DEFA) and Consensus Decision Making (CDM). DEFA utilizes three expert models: furniture arrangement, room type analysis, and visual scene reasoning, while CDM aggregates their outputs, prioritizing unanimous or majority consensus for more reliable decisions. Demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on the RoboTHOR and HM3D datasets, our method excels at navigating towards untrained objects or goals and outperforms various baselines, showcasing its adaptability to dynamic real-world conditions and superior generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 2759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18570.pdf

Abstract:
Object navigation is crucial for robots, but traditional methods require substantial training data and cannot be generalized to unknown environments. Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) aims to address this challenge, allowing robots to interact with unknown objects without specific training data. Language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON) is an extension of ZSON that incorporates natural language instructions to guide robot navigation and interaction with objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Vision Language model with a Tree-of-thought Network (VLTNet) for L-ZSON. VLTNet comprises four main modules: vision language model understanding, semantic mapping, tree-of-thought reasoning and exploration, and goal identification. Among these modules, Tree-of-Thought (ToT) reasoning and exploration module serves as a core component, innovatively using the ToT reasoning framework for navigation frontier selection during robot exploration. Compared to conventional frontier selection without reasoning, navigation using ToT reasoning involves multi-path reasoning processes and backtracking when necessary, enabling globally informed decision-making with higher accuracy. Experimental results on PASTURE and RoboTHOR benchmarks demonstrate the outstanding performance of our model in LZSON, particularly in scenarios involving complex natural language as target instructions.

Paperid: 2760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13776.pdf

Abstract:
In-context Learning (ICL) has become the primary method for performing natural language tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs). The knowledge acquired during pre-training is crucial for this few-shot capability, providing the model with task priors. However, recent studies have shown that ICL predominantly relies on retrieving task priors rather than "learning" to perform tasks. This limitation is particularly evident in complex subjective domains such as emotion and morality, where priors significantly influence posterior predictions. In this work, we examine whether this is the result of the aggregation used in corresponding datasets, where trying to combine low-agreement, disparate annotations might lead to annotation artifacts that create detrimental noise in the prompt. Moreover, we evaluate the posterior bias towards certain annotators by grounding our study in appropriate, quantitative measures of LLM priors. Our results indicate that aggregation is a confounding factor in the modeling of subjective tasks, and advocate focusing on modeling individuals instead. However, aggregation does not explain the entire gap between ICL and the state of the art, meaning other factors in such tasks also account for the observed phenomena. Finally, by rigorously studying annotator-level labels, we find that it is possible for minority annotators to both better align with LLMs and have their perspectives further amplified.

Paperid: 2761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10756.pdf

Abstract:
The generative large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for data augmentation tasks, where text samples are paraphrased (or generated anew) and then used for classifier fine-tuning. Existing works on augmentation leverage the few-shot scenarios, where samples are given to LLMs as part of prompts, leading to better augmentations. Yet, the samples are mostly selected randomly and a comprehensive overview of the effects of other (more ``informed'') sample selection strategies is lacking. In this work, we compare sample selection strategies existing in few-shot learning literature and investigate their effects in LLM-based textual augmentation. We evaluate this on in-distribution and out-of-distribution classifier performance. Results indicate, that while some ``informed'' selection strategies increase the performance of models, especially for out-of-distribution data, it happens only seldom and with marginal performance increases. Unless further advances are made, a default of random sample selection remains a good option for augmentation practitioners.

Paperid: 2762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03306.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models in medical imaging often encounter challenges when adapting to new clinical settings unseen during training. Test-time adaptation offers a promising approach to optimize models for these unseen domains, yet its application in anomaly detection (AD) remains largely unexplored. AD aims to efficiently identify deviations from normative distributions; however, full adaptation, including pathological shifts, may inadvertently learn the anomalies it intends to detect. We introduce a novel concept of selective test-time adaptation that utilizes the inherent characteristics of deep pre-trained features to adapt selectively in a zero-shot manner to any test image from an unseen domain. This approach employs a model-agnostic, lightweight multi-layer perceptron for neural implicit representations, enabling the adaptation of outputs from any reconstruction-based AD method without altering the source-trained model. Rigorous validation in brain AD demonstrated that our strategy substantially enhances detection accuracy for multiple conditions and different target distributions. Specifically, our method improves the detection rates by up to 78% for enlarged ventricles and 24% for edemas.

Paperid: 2763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13213.pdf

Abstract:
Recent growth and proliferation of malware have tested practitioners ability to promptly classify new samples according to malware families. In contrast to labor-intensive reverse engineering efforts, machine learning approaches have demonstrated increased speed and accuracy. However, most existing deep-learning malware family classifiers must be calibrated using a large number of samples that are painstakingly manually analyzed before training. Furthermore, as novel malware samples arise that are beyond the scope of the training set, additional reverse engineering effort must be employed to update the training set. The sheer volume of new samples found in the wild creates substantial pressure on practitioners ability to reverse engineer enough malware to adequately train modern classifiers. In this paper, we present MalMixer, a malware family classifier using semi-supervised learning that achieves high accuracy with sparse training data. We present a domain-knowledge-aware data augmentation technique for malware feature representations, enhancing few-shot performance of semi-supervised malware family classification. We show that MalMixer achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot malware family classification settings. Our research confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of lightweight, domain-knowledge-aware data augmentation methods for malware features and shows the capabilities of similar semi-supervised classifiers in addressing malware classification issues.

Paperid: 2764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00786.pdf

Abstract:
The imitation of cursive handwriting is mainly limited to generating handwritten words or lines. Multiple synthetic outputs must be stitched together to create paragraphs or whole pages, whereby consistency and layout information are lost. To close this gap, we propose a method for imitating handwriting at the paragraph level that also works for unseen writing styles. Therefore, we introduce a modified latent diffusion model that enriches the encoder-decoder mechanism with specialized loss functions that explicitly preserve the style and content. We enhance the attention mechanism of the diffusion model with adaptive 2D positional encoding and the conditioning mechanism to work with two modalities simultaneously: a style image and the target text. This significantly improves the realism of the generated handwriting. Our approach sets a new benchmark in our comprehensive evaluation. It outperforms all existing imitation methods at both line and paragraph levels, considering combined style and content preservation.

Paperid: 2765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24591.pdf

Abstract:
Change detection visual question answering (CDVQA) requires answering text queries by reasoning about semantic changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. A straightforward approach is to boost CDVQA performance with generic vision-language models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite recent progress, we observe that a significant portion of failures do not stem from clearly incorrect predictions, but from decision ambiguity, where the model assigns similar confidence to the correct answer and strong distractors. To formalize this challenge, we define Decision-Ambiguous Samples (DAS) as instances with a small probability margin between the ground-truth answer and the most competitive alternative. We argue that explicitly optimizing DAS is crucial for improving the discriminability and robustness of CDVQA models. To this end, we propose DARFT, a Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning framework that first mines DAS using an SFT-trained reference policy and then applies group-relative policy optimization on the mined subset. By leveraging multi-sample decoding and intra-group relative advantages, DARFT suppresses strong distractors and sharpens decision boundaries without additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains over SFT baselines, particularly under few-shot settings.

Paperid: 2766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12107.pdf

Abstract:
Echocardiography is the most widely used imaging modality in cardiology, yet its interpretation remains labor-intensive and inherently multimodal, requiring view recognition, quantitative measurements, qualitative assessments, and guideline-based reasoning. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved broad success in natural images and certain medical domains, their potential in echocardiography has been limited by the lack of large-scale, clinically grounded image-text datasets and the absence of measurement-based reasoning central to echo interpretation. We introduce EchoGround-MIMIC, the first measurement-grounded multimodal echocardiography dataset, comprising 19,065 image-text pairs from 1,572 patients with standardized views, structured measurements, measurement-grounded captions, and guideline-derived disease labels. Building on this resource, we propose EchoVLM, a vision-language model that incorporates two novel pretraining objectives: (i) a view-informed contrastive loss that encodes the view-dependent structure of echocardiographic imaging, and (ii) a negation-aware contrastive loss that distinguishes clinically critical negative from positive findings. Across five types of clinical applications with 36 tasks spanning multimodal disease classification, image-text retrieval, view classification, chamber segmentation, and landmark detection, EchoVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance (86.5% AUC in zero-shot disease classification and 95.1% accuracy in view classification). We demonstrate that clinically grounded multimodal pretraining yields transferable visual representations and establish EchoVLM as a foundation model for end-to-end echocardiography interpretation. We will release EchoGround-MIMIC and the data curation code, enabling reproducibility and further research in multimodal echocardiography interpretation.

Paperid: 2767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08798.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models pretrained on large data have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities across domains. Building on the success of TabPFN for tabular data and its recent extension to time series, we investigate whether graph node classification can be effectively reformulated as a tabular learning problem. We introduce TabPFN-GN, which transforms graph data into tabular features by extracting node attributes, structural properties, positional encodings, and optionally smoothed neighborhood features. This enables TabPFN to perform direct node classification without any graph-specific training or language model dependencies. Our experiments on 12 benchmark datasets reveal that TabPFN-GN achieves competitive performance with GNNs on homophilous graphs and consistently outperforms them on heterophilous graphs. These results demonstrate that principled feature engineering can bridge the gap between tabular and graph domains, providing a practical alternative to task-specific GNN training and LLM-dependent graph foundation models.

Paperid: 2768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01061.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in GPU-accelerated, photorealistic simulation has opened a scalable data-generation path for robot learning, where massive physics and visual randomization allow policies to generalize beyond curated environments. Building on these advances, we develop a teacher-student-bootstrap learning framework for vision-based humanoid loco-manipulation, using articulated-object interaction as a representative high-difficulty benchmark. Our approach introduces a staged-reset exploration strategy that stabilizes long-horizon privileged-policy training, and a GRPO-based fine-tuning procedure that mitigates partial observability and improves closed-loop consistency in sim-to-real RL. Trained entirely on simulation data, the resulting policy achieves robust zero-shot performance across diverse door types and outperforms human teleoperators by up to 31.7% in task completion time under the same whole-body control stack. This represents the first humanoid sim-to-real policy capable of diverse articulated loco-manipulation using pure RGB perception.

Paperid: 2769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00290.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential for educational applications. However, their unscrutinized deployment poses risks to educational standards, underscoring the need for rigorous evaluation. We introduce EduEval, a comprehensive hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. This benchmark makes three key contributions: (1) Cognitive Framework: We propose the EduAbility Taxonomy, which unifies Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge to organize tasks across six cognitive dimensions including Memorization, Understanding, Application, Reasoning, Creativity, and Ethics. (2) Authenticity: Our benchmark integrates real exam questions, classroom conversation, student essays, and expert-designed prompts to reflect genuine educational challenges; (3) Scale: EduEval comprises 24 distinct task types with over 11,000 questions spanning primary to high school levels. We evaluate 14 leading LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings, revealing that while models perform well on factual tasks, they struggle with classroom dialogue classification and exhibit inconsistent results in creative content generation. Interestingly, several open source models outperform proprietary systems on complex educational reasoning. Few-shot prompting shows varying effectiveness across cognitive dimensions, suggesting that different educational objectives require tailored approaches. These findings provide targeted benchmarking metrics for developing LLMs specifically optimized for diverse Chinese educational tasks.

Paperid: 2770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13750.pdf

Abstract:
Image generation models frequently encode social biases, including stereotypes tied to gender, race, and profession. Existing methods for analyzing these biases in diffusion models either focus narrowly on predefined categories or depend on manual interpretation of latent directions. These constraints limit scalability and hinder the discovery of subtle or unanticipated patterns. We introduce SCALEX, a framework for scalable and automated exploration of diffusion model latent spaces. SCALEX extracts semantically meaningful directions from H-space using only natural language prompts, enabling zero-shot interpretation without retraining or labelling. This allows systematic comparison across arbitrary concepts and large-scale discovery of internal model associations. We show that SCALEX detects gender bias in profession prompts, ranks semantic alignment across identity descriptors, and reveals clustered conceptual structure without supervision. By linking prompts to latent directions directly, SCALEX makes bias analysis in diffusion models more scalable, interpretable, and extensible than prior approaches.

Paperid: 2771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23329.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments is essential for field and planetary robotics, where robots must efficiently reach goals while avoiding obstacles under uncertain conditions. Conventional algorithmic approaches often require extensive environment-specific tuning, limiting scalability to new domains. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a data-driven alternative, allowing robots to acquire navigation strategies through direct interactions with their environment. This work investigates the feasibility of DRL policy generalization across visually and topographically distinct simulated domains, where policies are trained in terrestrial settings and validated in a zero-shot manner in extraterrestrial environments. A 3D simulation of an agricultural rover is developed and trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to achieve goal-directed navigation and obstacle avoidance in farmland settings. The learned policy is then evaluated in a lunar-like simulated environment to assess transfer performance. The results indicate that policies trained under terrestrial conditions retain a high level of effectiveness, achieving close to 50\% success in lunar simulations without the need for additional training and fine-tuning. This underscores the potential of cross-domain DRL-based policy transfer as a promising approach to developing adaptable and efficient autonomous navigation for future planetary exploration missions, with the added benefit of minimizing retraining costs.

Paperid: 2772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16781.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable zero-shot reasoning capabilities of large-scale Visual Language Models (VLMs) on static images have yet to be fully translated to the video domain. Conventional video understanding models often rely on extensive, task-specific training on annotated datasets, a process that is both costly and limited in scalability. This paper introduces a novel, training-free framework for video understanding that circumvents end-to-end training by synergistically combining the rich semantic priors of pre-trained VLMs with classic machine learning algorithms for pattern discovery. Our core idea is to reframe video understanding as a self-supervised spatio-temporal clustering problem within a high-dimensional semantic feature space. The proposed pipeline first transforms a video stream into a semantic feature trajectory using the frozen visual encoder of a pre-trained VLM. Subsequently, we employ Kernel Temporal Segmentation (KTS), a robust machine learning technique, to partition the continuous feature stream into discrete, semantically coherent event segments. These segments are then subjected to unsupervised density-based clustering to identify recurring macroscopic scenes and themes throughout the video. By selecting representative keyframes from each discovered cluster and leveraging the VLM's generative capabilities for textual description, our framework automatically produces a structured, multi-modal summary of the video content. This approach provides an effective, interpretable, and model-agnostic pathway for zero-shot, automated structural analysis of video content.

Paperid: 2773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02898.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot captioners are recently proposed models that utilize common-space vision-language representations to caption images without relying on paired image-text data. To caption an image, they proceed by textually decoding a text-aligned image feature, but they limit their scope to global representations and whole-image captions. We present Patch-ioner, a unified framework for zero-shot captioning that shifts from an image-centric to a patch-centric paradigm, enabling the captioning of arbitrary regions without the need of region-level supervision. Instead of relying on global image representations, we treat individual patches as atomic captioning units and aggregate them to describe arbitrary regions, from single patches to non-contiguous areas and entire images. We analyze the key ingredients that enable current latent captioners to work in our novel proposed framework. Experiments demonstrate that backbones producing meaningful, dense visual features, such as DINO, are key to achieving state-of-the-art performance in multiple region-based captioning tasks. Compared to other baselines and state-of-the-art competitors, our models achieve better performance on zero-shot dense, region-set, and a newly introduced trace captioning task, highlighting the effectiveness of patch-wise semantic representations for scalable caption generation. Project page at https://paciosoft.com/Patch-ioner/ .

Paperid: 2774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25458.pdf

Abstract:
Large audio-language models (LALMs) exhibit strong zero-shot performance across speech tasks but struggle with speech emotion recognition (SER) due to weak paralinguistic modeling and limited cross-modal reasoning. We propose Compositional Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Emotion Reasoning (CCoT-Emo), a framework that introduces structured Emotion Graphs (EGs) to guide LALMs in emotion inference without fine-tuning. Each EG encodes seven acoustic features (e.g., pitch, speech rate, jitter, shimmer), textual sentiment, keywords, and cross-modal associations. Embedded into prompts, EGs provide interpretable and compositional representations that enhance LALM reasoning. Experiments across SER benchmarks show that CCoT-Emo outperforms prior SOTA and improves accuracy over zero-shot baselines.

Paperid: 2775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19755.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates adapting Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) for speaker verification (SV). We reformulate SV as an audio question-answering task and conduct comprehensive zero-shot evaluations on public benchmarks, showing that current ALLMs have limited zero-shot SV capability and often struggle in diverse acoustic conditions. To address this challenge, we perform supervised fine-tuning on speaker verification data. A rule-based hard pair sampling strategy is proposed to construct more challenging training pairs. Lightweight fine-tuning substantially improves the performance, though there is still a gap between ALLMs and conventional models. Then, we extend to text-dependent SV by jointly querying ALLMs to verify speaker identity and spoken content, yielding results competitive with cascaded ASR-SV systems. Our findings demonstrate that with proper adaptation, ALLMs hold substantial potential as a unified model for robust speaker verification systems, while maintaining the general audio understanding capabilities.

Paperid: 2776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18711.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize objects in remote sensing images based on free-form natural language expressions. Existing approaches are typically constrained to closed-set vocabularies, limiting their applicability in open-world scenarios. While recent attempts to leverage generic foundation models for open-vocabulary RSVG, they overly rely on expensive high-quality datasets and time-consuming fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{RSVG-ZeroOV}, a training-free framework that aims to explore the potential of frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. Specifically, RSVG-ZeroOV comprises three key stages: (i) Overview: We utilize a vision-language model (VLM) to obtain cross-attention\footnote[1]{In this paper, although decoder-only VLMs use self-attention over all tokens, we refer to the image-text interaction part as cross-attention to distinguish it from pure visual self-attention.}maps that capture semantic correlations between text queries and visual regions. (ii) Focus: By leveraging the fine-grained modeling priors of a diffusion model (DM), we fill in gaps in structural and shape information of objects, which are often overlooked by VLM. (iii) Evolve: A simple yet effective attention evolution module is introduced to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified segmentation masks over the referred objects. Without cumbersome task-specific training, RSVG-ZeroOV offers an efficient and scalable solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing weakly-supervised and zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 2777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16757.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling robust whole-body humanoid-object interaction (HOI) remains challenging due to motion data scarcity and the contact-rich nature. We present HDMI (HumanoiD iMitation for Interaction), a simple and general framework that learns whole-body humanoid-object interaction skills directly from monocular RGB videos. Our pipeline (i) extracts and retargets human and object trajectories from unconstrained videos to build structured motion datasets, (ii) trains a reinforcement learning (RL) policy to co-track robot and object states with three key designs: a unified object representation, a residual action space, and a general interaction reward, and (iii) zero-shot deploys the RL policies on real humanoid robots. Extensive sim-to-real experiments on a Unitree G1 humanoid demonstrate the robustness and generality of our approach: HDMI achieves 67 consecutive door traversals and successfully performs 6 distinct loco-manipulation tasks in the real world and 14 tasks in simulation. Our results establish HDMI as a simple and general framework for acquiring interactive humanoid skills from human videos.

Paperid: 2778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15701.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) is critical for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), requiring evaluation across multiple granularities and aspects. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) present new opportunities for APA, but their effectiveness in fine-grained assessment remains uncertain. This work investigates fine-tuning LMMs for APA using the Speechocean762 dataset and a private corpus. Fine-tuning significantly outperforms zero-shot settings and achieves competitive results on single-granularity tasks compared to public and commercial systems. The model performs well at word and sentence levels, while phoneme-level assessment remains challenging. We also observe that the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) reaches 0.9, whereas Spearman's rank Correlation Coefficient (SCC) remains around 0.6, suggesting that SCC better reflects ordinal consistency. These findings highlight both the promise and limitations of LMMs for APA and point to future work on fine-grained modeling and rank-aware evaluation.

Paperid: 2779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17198.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial cognition enables adaptive goal-directed behavior by constructing internal models of space. Robust biological systems consolidate spatial knowledge into three interconnected forms: \textit{landmarks} for salient cues, \textit{route knowledge} for movement trajectories, and \textit{survey knowledge} for map-like representations. While recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled visual-language reasoning in embodied agents, these efforts lack structured spatial memory and instead operate reactively, limiting their generalization and adaptability in complex real-world environments. Here we present Brain-inspired Spatial Cognition for Navigation (BSC-Nav), a unified framework for constructing and leveraging structured spatial memory in embodied agents. BSC-Nav builds allocentric cognitive maps from egocentric trajectories and contextual cues, and dynamically retrieves spatial knowledge aligned with semantic goals. Integrated with powerful MLLMs, BSC-Nav achieves state-of-the-art efficacy and efficiency across diverse navigation tasks, demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, and supports versatile embodied behaviors in the real physical world, offering a scalable and biologically grounded path toward general-purpose spatial intelligence.

Paperid: 2780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06674.pdf

Abstract:
Cellular Trajectory Map-Matching (CTMM) aims to align cellular location sequences to road networks, which is a necessary preprocessing in location-based services on web platforms like Google Maps, including navigation and route optimization. Current approaches mainly rely on ID-based features and region-specific data to learn correlations between cell towers and roads, limiting their adaptability to unexplored areas. To enable high-accuracy CTMM without additional training in target regions, Zero-shot CTMM requires to extract not only region-adaptive features, but also sequential and location uncertainty to alleviate positioning errors in cellular data. In this paper, we propose a pixel-based trajectory calibration assistant for zero-shot CTMM, which takes advantage of transferable geospatial knowledge to calibrate pixelated trajectory, and then guide the path-finding process at the road network level. To enhance knowledge sharing across similar regions, a Gaussian mixture model is incorporated into VAE, enabling the identification of scenario-adaptive experts through soft clustering. To mitigate high positioning errors, a spatial-temporal awareness module is designed to capture sequential features and location uncertainty, thereby facilitating the inference of approximate user positions. Finally, a constrained path-finding algorithm is employed to reconstruct the road ID sequence, ensuring topological validity within the road network. This process is guided by the calibrated trajectory while optimizing for the shortest feasible path, thus minimizing unnecessary detours. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods in zero-shot CTMM by 16.8\%.

Paperid: 2781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00743.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical decision-making in radiology increasingly benefits from artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through large language models (LLMs). However, traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems for radiology question answering (QA) typically rely on single-step retrieval, limiting their ability to handle complex clinical reasoning tasks. Here we propose an agentic RAG framework enabling LLMs to autonomously decompose radiology questions, iteratively retrieve targeted clinical evidence from Radiopaedia.org, and dynamically synthesize evidence-based responses. We evaluated 25 LLMs spanning diverse architectures, parameter scales (0.5B to >670B), and training paradigms (general-purpose, reasoning-optimized, clinically fine-tuned), using 104 expert-curated radiology questions from previously established RSNA-RadioQA and ExtendedQA datasets. To assess generalizability, we additionally tested on an unseen internal dataset of 65 real-world radiology board examination questions. Agentic retrieval significantly improved mean diagnostic accuracy over zero-shot prompting and conventional online RAG. The greatest gains occurred in small-scale models, while very large models (>200B parameters) demonstrated minimal changes (<2% improvement). Additionally, agentic retrieval reduced hallucinations (mean 9.4%) and retrieved clinically relevant context in 46% of cases, substantially aiding factual grounding. Even clinically fine-tuned models showed gains from agentic retrieval (e.g., MedGemma-27B), indicating that retrieval remains beneficial despite embedded domain knowledge. These results highlight the potential of agentic frameworks to enhance factuality and diagnostic accuracy in radiology QA, warranting future studies to validate their clinical utility. All datasets, code, and the full agentic framework are publicly available to support open research and clinical translation.

Paperid: 2782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23698.pdf

Abstract:
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in language modeling, its triumph hasn't yet fully translated to visuomotor agents. A primary challenge in RL models is their tendency to overfit specific tasks or environments, thereby hindering the acquisition of generalizable behaviors across diverse settings. This paper provides a preliminary answer to this challenge by demonstrating that RL-finetuned visuomotor agents in Minecraft can achieve zero-shot generalization to unseen worlds. Specifically, we explore RL's potential to enhance generalizable spatial reasoning and interaction capabilities in 3D worlds. To address challenges in multi-task RL representation, we analyze and establish cross-view goal specification as a unified multi-task goal space for visuomotor policies. Furthermore, to overcome the significant bottleneck of manual task design, we propose automated task synthesis within the highly customizable Minecraft environment for large-scale multi-task RL training, and we construct an efficient distributed RL framework to support this. Experimental results show RL significantly boosts interaction success rates by $4\times$ and enables zero-shot generalization of spatial reasoning across diverse environments, including real-world settings. Our findings underscore the immense potential of RL training in 3D simulated environments, especially those amenable to large-scale task generation, for significantly advancing visuomotor agents' spatial reasoning.

Paperid: 2783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22746.pdf

Abstract:
While diffusion and autoregressive (AR) models have significantly advanced generative modeling, they each present distinct limitations. AR models, which rely on causal attention, cannot exploit future context and suffer from slow generation speeds. Conversely, diffusion models struggle with key-value (KV) caching. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Dragon-FM, a novel text-to-speech (TTS) design that unifies AR and flow-matching. This model processes 48 kHz audio codec tokens in chunks at a compact rate of 12.5 tokens per second. This design enables AR modeling across chunks, ensuring global coherence, while parallel flow-matching within chunks facilitates fast iterative denoising. Thus, the model leverages KV-cache across chunks and utilizes bidirectional context within each chunk. Furthermore, it bridges continuous and discrete feature modeling, demonstrating that continuous AR flow-matching can predict discrete tokens with finite scalar quantizers. This efficient codec and fast chunk-autoregressive architecture also make the model highly effective for generating long-form content, such as podcasts. Experiments on podcast datasets demonstrate its capability to efficiently generate high-quality zero-shot podcasts.

Paperid: 2784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09211.pdf

Abstract:
Observed records of climate extremes provide an incomplete picture of risk, missing "unseen" extremes that exceed historical bounds. In parallel, neglecting spatial dependence undervalues the risk of synchronized hazards that amplify impacts. To address these challenges, we develop DeepX-GAN (Dependence-Enhanced Embedding for Physical eXtremes - Generative Adversarial Network), a knowledge-informed deep generative model designed to better capture the spatial structure of rare extremes. The zero-shot generalizability of DeepX-GAN enables simulation of unseen extremes that fall outside historical experience yet remain statistically plausible. We define two types of unseen extremes: "checkmate" extremes that directly hit targets, and "stalemate" extremes that narrowly miss. These unrealized scenarios expose latent risks in fragile systems and may reinforce a false sense of resilience if overlooked. Near misses, in particular, can prompt either proactive adaptation or dangerous complacency, depending on how they are interpreted. Applying DeepX-GAN to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), we find that these unseen extremes disproportionately affect regions with high vulnerability and low socioeconomic readiness, but differ in urgency and interpretation. Future warming could expand and redistribute these unseen extremes, with emerging exposure hotspots in Indo-Pakistan and Central Africa. This distributional shift highlights critical blind spots in conventional hazard planning and underscores the need to develop spatially adaptive policies that anticipate emergent risk hotspots rather than simply extrapolating from historical patterns.

Paperid: 2785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02983.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for transforming digital health by enabling automated medical question answering. However, ensuring these models meet critical industry standards for factual accuracy, usefulness, and safety remains a challenge, especially for open-source solutions. We present a rigorous benchmarking framework using a dataset of over 1,000 health questions. We assess model performance across honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness. Our results highlight trade-offs between factual reliability and safety among evaluated models -- Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B-DARE, and AlpaCare-13B. AlpaCare-13B achieves the highest accuracy (91.7%) and harmlessness (0.92), while domain-specific tuning in BioMistral-7B-DARE boosts safety (0.90) despite its smaller scale. Few-shot prompting improves accuracy from 78% to 85%, and all models show reduced helpfulness on complex queries, highlighting ongoing challenges in clinical QA.

Paperid: 2786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00236.pdf

Abstract:
Simulation-based design, optimization, and validation of autonomous driving algorithms have proven to be crucial for their improvement over the years. Nevertheless, the ultimate measure of effectiveness is their successful transition from simulation to reality (sim2real). However, existing sim2real transfer methods struggle to address the autonomy-oriented requirements of balancing: (i) conditioned domain adaptation, (ii) robust performance with limited examples, (iii) modularity in handling multiple domain representations, and (iv) real-time performance. To alleviate these pain points, we present a unified framework for learning cross-domain adaptive representations through conditional latent diffusion for sim2real transferable autonomous driving algorithms. Our framework offers options to leverage: (i) alternate foundation models, (ii) a few-shot fine-tuning pipeline, and (iii) textual as well as image prompts for mapping across given source and target domains. It is also capable of generating diverse high-quality samples when diffusing across parameter spaces such as times of day, weather conditions, seasons, and operational design domains. We systematically analyze the presented framework and report our findings in terms of performance benchmarks and ablation studies, with critical quantitative metrics as well as insightful qualitative examples and remarks. Additionally, we demonstrate the serviceability of sim2real diffusion for autonomous driving using a behavioral cloning case study. Our experiments indicate that the proposed framework is capable of bridging the perceptual sim2real gap by over 40%, which highlights the potential of diffusion models in sim2real transfer.

Paperid: 2787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11777.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved major advances in natural images and video understanding, but challenges remain in domains like echocardiography (heart ultrasound) due to subtle anatomical structures, complex temporal dynamics, and the current lack of domain-specific pre-trained models. Existing SSL approaches such as contrastive, masked modeling, and clustering-based methods struggle with high intersample similarity, sensitivity to low PSNR inputs common in ultrasound, or aggressive augmentations that distort clinically relevant features. We present DISCOVR (Distilled Image Supervision for Cross Modal Video Representation), a self-supervised dual branch framework for cardiac ultrasound video representation learning. DISCOVR combines a clustering-based video encoder that models temporal dynamics with an online image encoder that extracts fine-grained spatial semantics. These branches are connected through a semantic cluster distillation loss that transfers anatomical knowledge from the evolving image encoder to the video encoder, enabling temporally coherent representations enriched with fine-grained semantic understanding. Evaluated on six echocardiography datasets spanning fetal, pediatric, and adult populations, DISCOVR outperforms both specialized video anomaly detection methods and state-of-the-art video-SSL baselines in zero-shot and linear probing setups, and achieves superior segmentation transfer.

Paperid: 2788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05432.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in edge deployment due to their massive parameter scale. Vector Quantization (VQ), a clustering-based quantization method, serves as a prevalent solution to this issue for its extremely low-bit (even at 2-bit) and considerable accuracy. Since a vector is a quantity in mathematics and physics that has both direction and magnitude, existing VQ works typically quantize them in a coupled manner. However, we find that direction exhibits significantly greater sensitivity to quantization compared to the magnitude. For instance, when separately clustering the directions and magnitudes of weight vectors in LLaMA-2-7B, the accuracy drop of zero-shot tasks are 46.5\% and 2.3\%, respectively. This gap even increases with the reduction of clustering centers. Further, Euclidean distance, a common metric to access vector similarities in current VQ works, places greater emphasis on reducing the magnitude error. This property is contrary to the above finding, unavoidably leading to larger quantization errors. To these ends, this paper proposes Polar Coordinate Decoupled Vector Quantization (PCDVQ), an effective and efficient VQ framework consisting of two key modules: 1) Polar Coordinate Decoupling (PCD), which transforms vectors into their polar coordinate representations and perform independent quantization of the direction and magnitude parameters.2) Distribution Aligned Codebook Construction (DACC), which optimizes the direction and magnitude codebooks in accordance with the source distribution. Experimental results show that PCDVQ outperforms baseline methods at 2-bit level by at least 1.5\% zero-shot accuracy, establishing a novel paradigm for accurate and highly compressed LLMs.

Paperid: 2789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04244.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ProLoRA, enabling zero-shot adaptation of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in text-to-image diffusion models. ProLoRA transfers pre-trained low-rank adjustments (e.g., LoRA) from a source to a target model without additional training data. This overcomes the limitations of traditional methods that require retraining when switching base models, often challenging due to data constraints. ProLoRA achieves this via projection of source adjustments into the target model's weight space, leveraging subspace and null space similarities and selectively targeting aligned layers. Evaluations on established text-to-image models demonstrate successful knowledge transfer and comparable performance without retraining.

Paperid: 2790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03621.pdf

Abstract:
We present Subject Fidelity Optimization (SFO), a novel comparative learning framework for zero-shot subject-driven generation that enhances subject fidelity. Beyond supervised fine-tuning methods that rely only on positive targets and use the diffusion loss as in the pre-training stage, SFO introduces synthetic negative targets and explicitly guides the model to favor positives over negatives through pairwise comparison. For negative targets, we propose Condition-Degradation Negative Sampling (CDNS), which automatically generates distinctive and informative negatives by intentionally degrading visual and textual cues without expensive human annotations. Moreover, we reweight the diffusion timesteps to focus finetuning on intermediate steps where subject details emerge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFO with CDNS significantly outperforms baselines in terms of both subject fidelity and text alignment on a subject-driven generation benchmark. Project page: https://subjectfidelityoptimization.github.io/

Paperid: 2791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00771.pdf

Abstract:
Medicinal chemists often optimize drugs considering their 3D structures and designing structurally distinct molecules that retain key features, such as shapes, pharmacophores, or chemical properties. Previous deep learning approaches address this through supervised tasks like molecule inpainting or property-guided optimization. In this work, we propose a flexible zero-shot molecule manipulation method by navigating in a shared latent space of 3D molecules. We introduce a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) for 3D molecules, named MolFLAE, which learns a fixed-dimensional, SE(3)-equivariant latent space independent of atom counts. MolFLAE encodes 3D molecules using an SE(3)-equivariant neural network into fixed number of latent nodes, distinguished by learned embeddings. The latent space is regularized, and molecular structures are reconstructed via a Bayesian Flow Network (BFN) conditioned on the encoder's latent output. MolFLAE achieves competitive performance on standard unconditional 3D molecule generation benchmarks. Moreover, the latent space of MolFLAE enables zero-shot molecule manipulation, including atom number editing, structure reconstruction, and coordinated latent interpolation for both structure and properties. We further demonstrate our approach on a drug optimization task for the human glucocorticoid receptor, generating molecules with improved hydrophilicity while preserving key interactions, under computational evaluations. These results highlight the flexibility, robustness, and real-world utility of our method, opening new avenues for molecule editing and optimization.

Paperid: 2792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17142.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate classification of sleep stages based on bio-signals is fundamental not only for automatic sleep stage annotation, but also for clinical health management and continuous sleep monitoring. Traditionally, this task relies on experienced clinicians to manually annotate data, a process that is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. In recent years, deep learning methods have shown promise in automating this task. However, three major challenges remain: (1) deep learning models typically require large-scale labeled datasets, making them less effective in real-world settings where annotated data is limited; (2) significant inter-individual variability in bio-signals often results in inconsistent model performance when applied to new subjects, limiting generalization; and (3) existing approaches often overlook the high-order relationships among bio-signals, failing to simultaneously capture signal heterogeneity and spatial-temporal dependencies. To address these issues, we propose MetaSTH-Sleep, a few-shot sleep stage classification framework based on spatial-temporal hypergraph enhanced meta-learning. Our approach enables rapid adaptation to new subjects using only a few labeled samples, while the hypergraph structure effectively models complex spatial interconnections and temporal dynamics simultaneously in EEG signals. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaSTH-Sleep achieves substantial performance improvements across diverse subjects, offering valuable insights to support clinicians in sleep stage annotation.

Paperid: 2793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05665.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated success in decision-making tasks including planning, control, and prediction, but their tendency to hallucinate unsafe and undesired outputs poses risks. This unwanted behavior is further exacerbated in environments where sensors are noisy or unreliable. Characterizing the behavior of LLM planners to varied observations is necessary to proactively avoid failures in safety-critical scenarios. We specifically investigate the response of LLMs along two different perturbation dimensions. Like prior works, one dimension generates semantically similar prompts with varied phrasing by randomizing order of details, modifying access to few-shot examples, etc. Unique to our work, the second dimension simulates access to varied sensors and noise to mimic raw sensor or detection algorithm failures. An initial case study in which perturbations are manually applied show that both dimensions lead LLMs to hallucinate in a multi-agent driving environment. However, manually covering the entire perturbation space for several scenarios is infeasible. As such, we propose a novel method for efficiently searching the space of prompt perturbations using adaptive stress testing (AST) with Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS). Our AST formulation enables discovery of scenarios, sensor configurations, and prompt phrasing that cause language models to act with high uncertainty or even crash. By generating MCTS prompt perturbation trees across diverse scenarios, we show through extensive experiments that offline analyses can be used to proactively understand potential failures that may arise at runtime.

Paperid: 2794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21186.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of machine learning systems, particularly in dynamic and open-world environments. In the vision and text domains, zero-shot OOD detection - which requires no training on in-distribution (ID) data - has advanced significantly through the use of large-scale pretrained models, such as vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs). However, zero-shot OOD detection in graph-structured data remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the challenges posed by complex relational structures and the absence of powerful, large-scale pretrained models for graphs. In this work, we take the first step toward enabling zero-shot graph OOD detection by leveraging a graph foundation model (GFM). Our experiments show that, when provided only with class label names for both ID and OOD categories, the GFM can effectively perform OOD detection - often surpassing existing "supervised" OOD detection methods that rely on extensive labeled node data. We further address the practical scenario in which OOD label names are not available in real-world settings by introducing GLIP-OOD, a framework that uses LLMs to generate semantically informative pseudo-OOD labels from unlabeled data. These generated OOD labels allow the GFM to better separate ID and OOD classes, facilitating more precise OOD detection - all without any labeled nodes (only ID label names). To our knowledge, this is the first approach to achieve node-level graph OOD detection in a fully zero-shot setting, and it attains performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods on four benchmark text-attributed graph datasets.

Paperid: 2795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14553.pdf

Abstract:
Temporal Action Detection and Moment Retrieval constitute two pivotal tasks in video understanding, focusing on precisely localizing temporal segments corresponding to specific actions or events. Recent advancements introduced Moment Detection to unify these two tasks, yet existing approaches remain confined to closed-set scenarios, limiting their applicability in open-world contexts. To bridge this gap, we present Grounding-MD, an innovative, grounded video-language pre-training framework tailored for open-world moment detection. Our framework incorporates an arbitrary number of open-ended natural language queries through a structured prompt mechanism, enabling flexible and scalable moment detection. Grounding-MD leverages a Cross-Modality Fusion Encoder and a Text-Guided Fusion Decoder to facilitate comprehensive video-text alignment and enable effective cross-task collaboration. Through large-scale pre-training on temporal action detection and moment retrieval datasets, Grounding-MD demonstrates exceptional semantic representation learning capabilities, effectively handling diverse and complex query conditions. Comprehensive evaluations across four benchmark datasets including ActivityNet, THUMOS14, ActivityNet-Captions, and Charades-STA demonstrate that Grounding-MD establishes new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and supervised settings in open-world moment detection scenarios. All source code and trained models will be released.

Paperid: 2796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07867.pdf

Abstract:
Video Scene Graph Generation (VidSGG) is an important topic in understanding dynamic kitchen environments. Current models for VidSGG require extensive training to produce scene graphs. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLM) and Vision Foundation Models (VFM) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in a variety of tasks. However, VLMs like Gemini struggle with the dynamics for VidSGG, failing to maintain stable object identities across frames. To overcome this limitation, we propose SAMJAM, a zero-shot pipeline that combines SAM2's temporal tracking with Gemini's semantic understanding. SAM2 also improves upon Gemini's object grounding by producing more accurate bounding boxes. In our method, we first prompt Gemini to generate a frame-level scene graph. Then, we employ a matching algorithm to map each object in the scene graph with a SAM2-generated or SAM2-propagated mask, producing a temporally-consistent scene graph in dynamic environments. Finally, we repeat this process again in each of the following frames. We empirically demonstrate that SAMJAM outperforms Gemini by 8.33% in mean recall on the EPIC-KITCHENS and EPIC-KITCHENS-100 datasets.

Paperid: 2797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13327.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a new setting, Edit Transfer, where a model learns a transformation from just a single source-target example and applies it to a new query image. While text-based methods excel at semantic manipulations through textual prompts, they often struggle with precise geometric details (e.g., poses and viewpoint changes). Reference-based editing, on the other hand, typically focuses on style or appearance and fails at non-rigid transformations. By explicitly learning the editing transformation from a source-target pair, Edit Transfer mitigates the limitations of both text-only and appearance-centric references. Drawing inspiration from in-context learning in large language models, we propose a visual relation in-context learning paradigm, building upon a DiT-based text-to-image model. We arrange the edited example and the query image into a unified four-panel composite, then apply lightweight LoRA fine-tuning to capture complex spatial transformations from minimal examples. Despite using only 42 training samples, Edit Transfer substantially outperforms state-of-the-art TIE and RIE methods on diverse non-rigid scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of few-shot visual relation learning.

Paperid: 2798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07799.pdf

Abstract:
Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is one of the leading causes of fetal mortality, yet the scarcity of labeled CHD data and strict privacy regulations surrounding fetal ultrasound (US) imaging present significant challenges for the development of deep learning-based models for CHD detection. Centralised collection of large real-world datasets for rare conditions, such as CHD, from large populations requires significant co-ordination and resource. In addition, data governance rules increasingly prevent data sharing between sites. To address these challenges, we introduce, for the first time, a novel privacy-preserving, zero-shot CHD detection framework that formulates CHD detection as a normality modeling problem integrated with model merging. In our framework dubbed Sparse Tube Ultrasound Distillation (STUD), each hospital site first trains a sparse video tube-based self-supervised video anomaly detection (VAD) model on normal fetal heart US clips with self-distillation loss. This enables site-specific models to independently learn the distribution of healthy cases. To aggregate knowledge across the decentralized models while maintaining privacy, we propose a Divergence Vector-Guided Model Merging approach, DivMerge, that combines site-specific models into a single VAD model without data exchange. Our approach preserves domain-agnostic rich spatio-temporal representations, ensuring generalization to unseen CHD cases. We evaluated our approach on real-world fetal US data collected from 5 hospital sites. Our merged model outperformed site-specific models by 23.77% and 30.13% in accuracy and F1-score respectively on external test sets.

Paperid: 2799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06141.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of mobile internet has resulted in a substantial increase in user-generated content (UGC) images, thereby making the thorough assessment of UGC images both urgent and essential. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in image quality assessment (IQA) and image aesthetic assessment (IAA). Despite this progress, effectively scoring the quality and aesthetics of UGC images still faces two main challenges: 1) A single score is inadequate to capture the hierarchical human perception. 2) How to use MLLMs to output numerical scores, such as mean opinion scores (MOS), remains an open question. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel dataset, named Realistic image Quality and Aesthetic (RealQA), including 14,715 UGC images, each of which is annoted with 10 fine-grained attributes. These attributes span three levels: low level (e.g., image clarity), middle level (e.g., subject integrity) and high level (e.g., composition). Besides, we conduct a series of in-depth and comprehensive investigations into how to effectively predict numerical scores using MLLMs. Surprisingly, by predicting just two extra significant digits, the next token paradigm can achieve SOTA performance. Furthermore, with the help of chain of thought (CoT) combined with the learnt fine-grained attributes, the proposed method can outperform SOTA methods on five public datasets for IQA and IAA with superior interpretability and show strong zero-shot generalization for video quality assessment (VQA). The code and dataset will be released.

Paperid: 2800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02505.pdf

Abstract:
We aim to develop a goal specification method that is semantically clear, spatially sensitive, domain-agnostic, and intuitive for human users to guide agent interactions in 3D environments. Specifically, we propose a novel cross-view goal alignment framework that allows users to specify target objects using segmentation masks from their camera views rather than the agent's observations. We highlight that behavior cloning alone fails to align the agent's behavior with human intent when the human and agent camera views differ significantly. To address this, we introduce two auxiliary objectives: cross-view consistency loss and target visibility loss, which explicitly enhance the agent's spatial reasoning ability. According to this, we develop ROCKET-2, a state-of-the-art agent trained in Minecraft, achieving an improvement in the efficiency of inference 3x to 6x compared to ROCKET-1. We show that ROCKET-2 can directly interpret goals from human camera views, enabling better human-agent interaction. Remarkably, ROCKET-2 demonstrates zero-shot generalization capabilities: despite being trained exclusively on the Minecraft dataset, it can adapt and generalize to other 3D environments like Doom, DMLab, and Unreal through a simple action space mapping.

Paperid: 2801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00407.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of Internet of Things devices and advances in communication technology have unleashed an explosion of personal data, amplifying privacy concerns amid stringent regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Federated Learning offers a privacy preserving solution by enabling collaborative model training across decentralized devices without centralizing sensitive data. However, statistical heterogeneity from non-independent and identically distributed datasets and system heterogeneity due to client dropouts particularly those with monopolistic classes severely degrade the global model's performance. To address these challenges, we propose the Asynchronous Personalized Federated Learning framework, which empowers clients to develop personalized models using a server side semantic generator. This generator, trained via data free knowledge transfer under global model supervision, enhances client data diversity by producing both seen and unseen samples, the latter enabled by Zero-Shot Learning to mitigate dropout-induced data loss. To counter the risks of synthetic data impairing training, we introduce a decoupled model interpolation method, ensuring robust personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AP FL significantly outperforms state of the art FL methods in tackling non-IID distributions and client dropouts, achieving superior accuracy and resilience across diverse real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 2802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14451.pdf

Abstract:
Natural Language Generation (NLG) popularity has increased owing to the progress in Large Language Models (LLMs), with zero-shot inference capabilities. However, most neural systems utilize decoder-only causal (unidirectional) transformer models, which are effective for English but may reduce the richness of languages with less strict word order, subject omission, or different relative clause attachment preferences. This is the first work that analytically addresses optimal text generation order for non-causal language models. We present a novel Viterbi algorithm-based methodology for maximum likelihood word order estimation. We analyze the non-causal most-likelihood order probability for NLG in Spanish and, then, the probability of generating the same phrases with Spanish causal NLG. This comparative analysis reveals that causal NLG prefers English-like SVO structures. We also analyze the relationship between optimal generation order and causal left-to-right generation order using Spearman's rank correlation. Our results demonstrate that the ideal order predicted by the maximum likelihood estimator is not closely related to the causal order and may be influenced by the syntactic structure of the target sentence.

Paperid: 2803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08987.pdf

Abstract:
Physical reasoning is a remarkable human ability that enables rapid learning and generalization from limited experience. Current AI models, despite extensive training, still struggle to achieve similar generalization, especially in Out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. This limitation stems from their inability to abstract core physical principles from observations. A key challenge is developing representations that can efficiently learn and generalize physical dynamics from minimal data. Here we present Neural Force Field (NFF), a framework extending Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) to learn complex object interactions through force field representations, which can be efficiently integrated through an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver to predict object trajectories. Unlike existing approaches that rely on discrete latent spaces, NFF captures fundamental physical concepts such as gravity, support, and collision in continuous explicit force fields. Experiments on three challenging physical reasoning tasks demonstrate that NFF, trained with only a few examples, achieves strong generalization to unseen scenarios. This physics-grounded representation enables efficient forward-backward planning and rapid adaptation through interactive refinement. Our work suggests that incorporating physics-inspired representations into learning systems can help bridge the gap between artificial and human physical reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 2804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06207.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for offensive language detection, yet their ability to handle annotation disagreement remains underexplored. Disagreement samples, which arise from subjective interpretations, pose a unique challenge due to their ambiguous nature. Understanding how LLMs process these cases, particularly their confidence levels, can offer insight into their alignment with human annotators. This study systematically evaluates the performance of multiple LLMs in detecting offensive language at varying levels of annotation agreement. We analyze binary classification accuracy, examine the relationship between model confidence and human disagreement, and explore how disagreement samples influence model decision-making during few-shot learning and instruction fine-tuning. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle with low-agreement samples, often exhibiting overconfidence in these ambiguous cases. However, utilizing disagreement samples in training improves both detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment. These insights provide a foundation for enhancing LLM-based offensive language detection in real-world moderation tasks.

Paperid: 2805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01289.pdf

Abstract:
The availability of foundational models (FMs) pre-trained on large-scale data has advanced the state-of-the-art in many computer vision tasks. While FMs have demonstrated good zero-shot performance on many image classification tasks, there is often scope for performance improvement by adapting the FM to the downstream task. However, the data that is required for this adaptation typically exists in silos across multiple entities (data owners) and cannot be collated at a central location due to regulations and privacy concerns. At the same time, a learning service provider (LSP) who owns the FM cannot share the model with the data owners due to proprietary reasons. In some cases, the data owners may not even have the resources to store such large FMs. Hence, there is a need for algorithms to adapt the FM in a double-blind federated manner, i.e., the data owners do not know the FM or each other's data, and the LSP does not see the data for the downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a framework for double-blind federated adaptation of FMs using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The proposed framework first decomposes the FM into a sequence of FHE-friendly blocks through knowledge distillation. The resulting FHE-friendly model is adapted for the downstream task via low-rank parallel adapters that can be learned without backpropagation through the FM. Since the proposed framework requires the LSP to share intermediate representations with the data owners, we design a privacy-preserving permutation scheme to prevent the data owners from learning the FM through model extraction attacks. Finally, a secure aggregation protocol is employed for federated learning of the low-rank parallel adapters. Empirical results on four datasets demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed framework.

Paperid: 2806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17311.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous racing presents a complex environment requiring robust controllers capable of making rapid decisions under dynamic conditions. While traditional controllers based on tire models are reliable, they often demand extensive tuning or system identification. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods offer significant potential due to their ability to learn directly from interaction, yet they typically suffer from the sim-to-real gap, where policies trained in simulation fail to perform effectively in the real world. In this paper, we propose RLPP, a residual RL framework that enhances a Pure Pursuit (PP) controller with an RL-based residual. This hybrid approach leverages the reliability and interpretability of PP while using RL to fine-tune the controller's performance in real-world scenarios. Extensive testing on the F1TENTH platform demonstrates that RLPP improves lap times of the baseline controllers by up to 6.37 %, closing the gap to the State-of-the-Art methods by more than 52 % and providing reliable performance in zero-shot real-world deployment, overcoming key challenges associated with the sim-to-real transfer and reducing the performance gap from simulation to reality by more than 8-fold when compared to the baseline RL controller. The RLPP framework is made available as an open-source tool, encouraging further exploration and advancement in autonomous racing research. The code is available at: www.github.com/forzaeth/rlpp.

Paperid: 2807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03863.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable slot and intent detection (SID) is crucial in natural language understanding for applications like digital assistants. Encoder-only transformer models fine-tuned on high-resource languages generally perform well on SID. However, they struggle with dialectal data, where no standardized form exists and training data is scarce and costly to produce. We explore zero-shot transfer learning for SID, focusing on multiple Bavarian dialects, for which we release a new dataset for the Munich dialect. We evaluate models trained on auxiliary tasks in Bavarian, and compare joint multi-task learning with intermediate-task training. We also compare three types of auxiliary tasks: token-level syntactic tasks, named entity recognition (NER), and language modelling. We find that the included auxiliary tasks have a more positive effect on slot filling than intent classification (with NER having the most positive effect), and that intermediate-task training yields more consistent performance gains. Our best-performing approach improves intent classification performance on Bavarian dialects by 5.1 and slot filling F1 by 8.4 percentage points.

Paperid: 2808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03747.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, leveraging pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series (TS) tasks has gained increasing attention, which involves activating and enhancing LLMs' capabilities. Many methods aim to activate LLMs' capabilities based on token-level alignment but overlook LLMs' inherent strength on natural language processing -- their deep understanding of linguistic logic and structure rather than superficial embedding processing. We propose Context-Alignment, a new paradigm that aligns TS with a linguistic component in the language environments familiar to LLMs to enable LLMs to contextualize and comprehend TS data, thereby activating their capabilities. Specifically, such context-level alignment comprises structural alignment and logical alignment, which is achieved by a Dual-Scale Context-Alignment GNNs (DSCA-GNNs) applied to TS-language multimodal inputs. Structural alignment utilizes dual-scale nodes to describe hierarchical structure in TS-language, enabling LLMs treat long TS data as a whole linguistic component while preserving intrinsic token features. Logical alignment uses directed edges to guide logical relationships, ensuring coherence in the contextual semantics. Demonstration examples prompt are employed to construct Demonstration Examples based Context-Alignment (DECA) following DSCA-GNNs framework. DECA can be flexibly and repeatedly integrated into various layers of pre-trained LLMs to improve awareness of logic and structure, thereby enhancing performance. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of DECA and the importance of Context-Alignment across tasks, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot forecasting, confirming that Context-Alignment provide powerful prior knowledge on context.

Paperid: 2809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12806.pdf

Abstract:
A large amount of local and culture-specific knowledge (e.g., people, traditions, food) can only be found in documents written in dialects. While there has been extensive research conducted on cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), the field of cross-dialect retrieval (CDIR) has received limited attention. Dialect retrieval poses unique challenges due to the limited availability of resources to train retrieval models and the high variability in non-standardized languages. We study these challenges on the example of German dialects and introduce the first German dialect retrieval dataset, dubbed WikiDIR, which consists of seven German dialects extracted from Wikipedia. Using WikiDIR, we demonstrate the weakness of lexical methods in dealing with high lexical variation in dialects. We further show that commonly used zero-shot cross-lingual transfer approach with multilingual encoders do not transfer well to extremely low-resource setups, motivating the need for resource-lean and dialect-specific retrieval models. We finally demonstrate that (document) translation is an effective way to reduce the dialect gap in CDIR.

Paperid: 2810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09084.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the potential of pixel-based models for transfer learning from standard languages to dialects. These models convert text into images that are divided into patches, enabling a continuous vocabulary representation that proves especially useful for out-of-vocabulary words common in dialectal data. Using German as a case study, we compare the performance of pixel-based models to token-based models across various syntactic and semantic tasks. Our results show that pixel-based models outperform token-based models in part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and intent detection for zero-shot dialect evaluation by up to 26 percentage points in some scenarios, though not in Standard German. However, pixel-based models fall short in topic classification. These findings emphasize the potential of pixel-based models for handling dialectal data, though further research should be conducted to assess their effectiveness in various linguistic contexts.

Paperid: 2811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04304.pdf

Abstract:
3D anomaly detection and localization is of great significance for industrial inspection. Prior 3D anomaly detection and localization methods focus on the setting that the testing data share the same category as the training data which is normal. However, in real-world applications, the normal training data for the target 3D objects can be unavailable due to issues like data privacy or export control regulation. To tackle these challenges, we identify a new task -- zero-shot 3D anomaly detection and localization, where the training and testing classes do not overlap. To this end, we design 3DzAL, a novel patch-level contrastive learning framework based on pseudo anomalies generated using the inductive bias from task-irrelevant 3D xyz data to learn more representative feature representations. Furthermore, we train a normalcy classifier network to classify the normal patches and pseudo anomalies and utilize the classification result jointly with feature distance to design anomaly scores. Instead of directly using the patch point clouds, we introduce adversarial perturbations to the input patch xyz data before feeding into the 3D normalcy classifier for the classification-based anomaly score. We show that 3DzAL outperforms the state-of-the-art anomaly detection and localization performance.

Paperid: 2812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03568.pdf

Abstract:
We present The Matrix, the first foundational realistic world simulator capable of generating continuous 720p high-fidelity real-scene video streams with real-time, responsive control in both first- and third-person perspectives, enabling immersive exploration of richly dynamic environments. Trained on limited supervised data from AAA games like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, complemented by large-scale unsupervised footage from real-world settings like Tokyo streets, The Matrix allows users to traverse diverse terrains -- deserts, grasslands, water bodies, and urban landscapes -- in continuous, uncut hour-long sequences. Operating at 16 FPS, the system supports real-time interactivity and demonstrates zero-shot generalization, translating virtual game environments to real-world contexts where collecting continuous movement data is often infeasible. For example, The Matrix can simulate a BMW X3 driving through an office setting--an environment present in neither gaming data nor real-world sources. This approach showcases the potential of AAA game data to advance robust world models, bridging the gap between simulations and real-world applications in scenarios with limited data.

Paperid: 2813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15466.pdf

Abstract:
Subject-driven text-to-image generation aims to produce images of a new subject within a desired context by accurately capturing both the visual characteristics of the subject and the semantic content of a text prompt. Traditional methods rely on time- and resource-intensive fine-tuning for subject alignment, while recent zero-shot approaches leverage on-the-fly image prompting, often sacrificing subject alignment. In this paper, we introduce Diptych Prompting, a novel zero-shot approach that reinterprets as an inpainting task with precise subject alignment by leveraging the emergent property of diptych generation in large-scale text-to-image models. Diptych Prompting arranges an incomplete diptych with the reference image in the left panel, and performs text-conditioned inpainting on the right panel. We further prevent unwanted content leakage by removing the background in the reference image and improve fine-grained details in the generated subject by enhancing attention weights between the panels during inpainting. Experimental results confirm that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot image prompting methods, resulting in images that are visually preferred by users. Additionally, our method supports not only subject-driven generation but also stylized image generation and subject-driven image editing, demonstrating versatility across diverse image generation applications. Project page: https://diptychprompting.github.io/

Paperid: 2814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12150.pdf

Abstract:
We study the problem of robot navigation in dense and interactive crowds with environmental constraints such as corridors and furniture. Previous methods fail to consider all types of interactions among agents and obstacles, leading to unsafe and inefficient robot paths. In this article, we leverage a graph-based representation of crowded and constrained scenarios and propose a structured framework to learn robot navigation policies with deep reinforcement learning. We first split the representations of different components in the environment and propose a heterogeneous spatio-temporal (st) graph to model distinct interactions among humans, robots, and obstacles. Based on the heterogeneous st-graph, we propose HEIGHT, a novel navigation policy network architecture with different components to capture heterogeneous interactions among entities through space and time. HEIGHT utilizes attention mechanisms to prioritize important interactions and a recurrent network to track changes in the dynamic scene over time, encouraging the robot to avoid collisions adaptively. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that HEIGHT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of success and efficiency in challenging navigation scenarios. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our pipeline achieves better zero-shot generalization capability than previous works when the densities of humans and obstacles change. More videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/crowdnav-height/home.

Paperid: 2815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10912.pdf

Abstract:
When different groups' values differ, one approach to model alignment is to steer models at inference time towards each group's preferences. However, techniques like in-context learning only consider similarity when drawing few-shot examples and not cross-group differences in values. We propose SPICA, a framework that accounts for group-level differences during in-context example retrieval. SPICA introduces three designs: scenario banks, group-informed retrieval metrics, and in-context alignment prompts. From an evaluation of SPICA on an alignment task collecting inputs from four demographic groups ($n = 544$), our metrics retrieve in-context examples that more closely match observed preferences, with the best prompt configuration using multiple contrastive responses to demonstrate examples. In an end-to-end evaluation ($n = 120$), we observe that SPICA is higher rated than similarity-based retrieval, with groups seeing up to a +0.16 point improvement on a 5 point scale. Additionally, gains from SPICA were more uniform, with all groups benefiting from alignment rather than only some. Finally, we find that while a group-agnostic approach can align to aggregated values, it is not most suited for divergent groups.

Paperid: 2816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06018.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), with demonstrated reasoning abilities across multiple domains, are largely underexplored for time-series reasoning (TsR), which is ubiquitous in the real world. In this work, we propose TimerBed, the first comprehensive testbed for evaluating LLMs' TsR performance. Specifically, TimerBed includes stratified reasoning patterns with real-world tasks, comprehensive combinations of LLMs and reasoning strategies, and various supervised models as comparison anchors. We perform extensive experiments with TimerBed, test multiple current beliefs, and verify the initial failures of LLMs in TsR, evidenced by the ineffectiveness of zero shot (ZST) and performance degradation of few shot in-context learning (ICL). Further, we identify one possible root cause: the numerical modeling of data. To address this, we propose a prompt-based solution VL-Time, using visualization-modeled data and language-guided reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Vl-Time enables multimodal LLMs to be non-trivial ZST and powerful ICL reasoners for time series, achieving about 140% average performance improvement and 99% average token costs reduction.

Paperid: 2817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01166.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which requires agents to adapt to unseen agents, has attracted increasing attention. Traditional approaches often rely on the Self-Play (SP) framework to generate a diverse set of policies in a policy pool, which serves to improve the generalization capability of the final agent. However, these frameworks may struggle to capture the full spectrum of potential strategies, especially in real-world scenarios that demand agents balance cooperation with competition. In such settings, agents need strategies that can adapt to varying and often conflicting goals. Drawing inspiration from Social Value Orientation (SVO)-where individuals maintain stable value orientations during interactions with others-we propose a novel framework called \emph{Role Play} (RP). RP employs role embeddings to transform the challenge of policy diversity into a more manageable diversity of roles. It trains a common policy with role embedding observations and employs a role predictor to estimate the joint role embeddings of other agents, helping the learning agent adapt to its assigned role. We theoretically prove that an approximate optimal policy can be achieved by optimizing the expected cumulative reward relative to an approximate role-based policy. Experimental results in both cooperative (Overcooked) and mixed-motive games (Harvest, CleanUp) reveal that RP consistently outperforms strong baselines when interacting with unseen agents, highlighting its robustness and adaptability in complex environments.

Paperid: 2818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00988.pdf

Abstract:
Low-resource domains, characterized by scarce data and annotations, present significant challenges for language and visual understanding tasks, with the latter much under-explored in the literature. Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLM) have shown promising results in high-resource domains but fall short in low-resource concepts that are under-represented (e.g. only a handful of images per category) in the pre-training set. We tackle the challenging task of zero-shot low-resource image classification from a novel perspective. By leveraging a retrieval-based strategy, we achieve this in a training-free fashion. Specifically, our method, named CoRE (Combination of Retrieval Enrichment), enriches the representation of both query images and class prototypes by retrieving relevant textual information from large web-crawled databases. This retrieval-based enrichment significantly boosts classification performance by incorporating the broader contextual information relevant to the specific class. We validate our method on a newly established benchmark covering diverse low-resource domains, including medical imaging, rare plants, and circuits. Our experiments demonstrate that CORE outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods that rely on synthetic data generation and model fine-tuning.

Paperid: 2819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11123.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance K-12 STEM education by improving both teaching and learning processes. While previous studies have shown promising results, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding how LLMs are effectively applied, specifically through prompt engineering-the process of designing prompts to generate desired outputs. To address this gap, our study investigates empirical research published between 2021 and 2024 that explores the use of LLMs combined with prompt engineering in K-12 STEM education. Following the PRISMA protocol, we screened 2,654 papers and selected 30 studies for analysis. Our review identifies the prompting strategies employed, the types of LLMs used, methods of evaluating effectiveness, and limitations in prior work. Results indicate that while simple and zero-shot prompting are commonly used, more advanced techniques like few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated positive outcomes for various educational tasks. GPT-series models are predominantly used, but smaller and fine-tuned models (e.g., Blender 7B) paired with effective prompt engineering outperform prompting larger models (e.g., GPT-3) in specific contexts. Evaluation methods vary significantly, with limited empirical validation in real-world settings.

Paperid: 2820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00231.pdf

Abstract:
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of end-effectors for manipulation, limited semantic understanding using only simulation data, and low traversability and reachability in indoor environments. We present a system for quadrupedal mobile manipulation in indoor environments. It uses a front-mounted gripper for object manipulation, a low-level controller trained in simulation using egocentric depth for agile skills like climbing and whole-body tilting, and pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with a third-person fisheye and an egocentric RGB camera for semantic understanding and command generation. We evaluate our system in two unseen environments without any real-world data collection or training. Our system can zero-shot generalize to these environments and complete tasks, like following user's commands to fetch a randomly placed stuff toy after climbing over a queen-sized bed, with a 60% success rate. Project website: https://helpful-doggybot.github.io/

Paperid: 2821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06366.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques are achieving state-of-the-art results in robust legged locomotion. While there exists a wide variety of legged platforms such as quadruped, humanoids, and hexapods, the field is still missing a single learning framework that can control all these different embodiments easily and effectively and possibly transfer, zero or few-shot, to unseen robot embodiments. We introduce URMA, the Unified Robot Morphology Architecture, to close this gap. Our framework brings the end-to-end Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning approach to the realm of legged robots, enabling the learned policy to control any type of robot morphology. The key idea of our method is to allow the network to learn an abstract locomotion controller that can be seamlessly shared between embodiments thanks to our morphology-agnostic encoders and decoders. This flexible architecture can be seen as a potential first step in building a foundation model for legged robot locomotion. Our experiments show that URMA can learn a locomotion policy on multiple embodiments that can be easily transferred to unseen robot platforms in simulation and the real world.

Paperid: 2822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21543.pdf

Abstract:
Mixup generates augmented samples by linearly interpolating inputs and labels with a controllable ratio. However, since it operates in the latent embedding level, the resulting samples are not human-interpretable. In contrast, LLM-based augmentation methods produce sentences via prompts at the token level, yielding readable outputs but offering limited control over the generation process. Inspired by recent advances in LLM inversion, which reconstructs natural language from embeddings and helps bridge the gap between latent embedding space and discrete token space, we propose inversedMixup, a unified framework that combines the controllability of Mixup with the interpretability of LLM-based generation. Specifically, inversedMixup adopts a three-stage training procedure to align the output embedding space of a task-specific model with the input embedding space of an LLM. Upon successful alignment, inversedMixup can reconstruct mixed embeddings with a controllable mixing ratio into human-interpretable augmented sentences, thereby improving the augmentation performance. Additionally, inversedMixup provides the first empirical evidence of the manifold intrusion phenomenon in text Mixup and introduces a simple yet effective strategy to mitigate it. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach in both few-shot and fully supervised scenarios.

Paperid: 2823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18094.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress of voice conversion~(VC) has achieved a new milestone in speaker cloning and linguistic preservation. But the field remains fragmented, relying on specialized models for linguistic-preserving, expressive, and singing scenarios. We propose OneVoice, a unified zero-shot framework capable of handling all three scenarios within a single model. OneVoice is built upon a continuous language model trained with VAE-free next-patch diffusion, ensuring high fidelity and efficient sequence modeling. Its core design for unification lies in a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designed to explicitly model shared conversion knowledge and scenario-specific expressivity. Expert selection is coordinated by a dual-path routing mechanism, including shared expert isolation and scenario-aware domain expert assignment with global-local cues. For precise conditioning, scenario-specific prosodic features are fused into each layer via a gated mechanism, allowing adaptive usage of prosody information. Furthermore, to enable the core idea and alleviate the imbalanced issue (abundant speech vs. scarce singing), we adopt a two-stage progressive training that includes foundational pre-training and scenario enhancement with LoRA-based domain experts. Experiments show that OneVoice matches or surpasses specialized models across all three scenarios, while verifying flexible control over scenarios and offering a fast decoding version as few as 2 steps. Code and model will be released soon.

Paperid: 2824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14777.pdf

Abstract:
Movie dubbing is the task of synthesizing speech from scripts conditioned on video scenes, requiring accurate lip sync, faithful timbre transfer, and proper modeling of character identity and emotion. However, existing methods face two major limitations: (1) high-quality multimodal dubbing datasets are limited in scale, suffer from high word error rates, contain sparse annotations, rely on costly manual labeling, and are restricted to monologue scenes, all of which hinder effective model training; (2) existing dubbing models rely solely on the lip region to learn audio-visual alignment, which limits their applicability to complex live-action cinematic scenes, and exhibit suboptimal performance in lip sync, speech quality, and emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we propose FunCineForge, which comprises an end-to-end production pipeline for large-scale dubbing datasets and an MLLM-based dubbing model designed for diverse cinematic scenes. Using the pipeline, we construct the first Chinese television dubbing dataset with rich annotations, and demonstrate the high quality of these data. Experiments across monologue, narration, dialogue, and multi-speaker scenes show that our dubbing model consistently outperforms SOTA methods in audio quality, lip sync, timbre transfer, and instruction following. Code and demos are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FunCineForge.

Paperid: 2825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11700.pdf

Abstract:
Handwriting movements can be leveraged as a unique form of behavioral biometrics, to verify whether a real user is operating a device or application. This task can be framed as a reverse Turing test in which a computer has to detect if an input instance has been generated by a human or artificially. To tackle this task, we study ten public datasets of handwritten symbols (isolated characters, digits, gestures, pointing traces, and signatures) that are artificially reproduced using seven different synthesizers, including, among others, the Kinematic Theory (Sigma h model), generative adversarial networks, Transformers, and Diffusion models. We train a shallow recurrent neural network that achieves excellent performance (98.3 percent Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) score and 1.4 percent equal error rate on average across all synthesizers and datasets) using nonfeaturized trajectory data as input. In few-shot settings, we show that our classifier achieves such an excellent performance when trained on just 10 percent of the data, as evaluated on the remaining 90% of the data as a test set. We further challenge our classifier in out-of-domain settings, and observe very competitive results as well. Our work has implications for computerized systems that need to verify human presence, and adds an additional layer of security to keep attackers at bay.

Paperid: 2826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02409.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image analysis faces two critical challenges: scarcity of labeled data and lack of model interpretability, both hindering clinical AI deployment. Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses data limitations but lacks transparency in predictions. Active learning (AL) methods optimize data acquisition but overlook interpretability of acquired samples. We propose a dual-framework solution: Expert-Guided Explainable Few-Shot Learning (EGxFSL) and Explainability-Guided AL (xGAL). EGxFSL integrates radiologist-defined regions-of-interest as spatial supervision via Grad-CAM-based Dice loss, jointly optimized with prototypical classification for interpretable few-shot learning. xGAL introduces iterative sample acquisition prioritizing both predictive uncertainty and attention misalignment, creating a closed-loop framework where explainability guides training and sample selection synergistically. On the BraTS (MRI), VinDr-CXR (chest X-ray), and SIIM-COVID-19 (chest X-ray) datasets, we achieve accuracies of 92\%, 76\%, and 62\%, respectively, consistently outperforming non-guided baselines across all datasets. Under severe data constraints, xGAL achieves 76\% accuracy with only 680 samples versus 57\% for random sampling. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate guided models focus on diagnostically relevant regions, with generalization validated on breast ultrasound confirming cross-modality applicability.

Paperid: 2827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11453.pdf

Abstract:
The transition from hand-crafted heuristics to data-driven evolutionary algorithms faces a fundamental dilemma: achieving neural plasticity without sacrificing mathematical stability. Emerging learned optimizers demonstrate high adaptability. However, they often lack rigorous convergence guarantees. This deficiency results in unpredictable behaviors on unseen landscapes. To address this challenge, we introduce Learning to Evolve (L2E), a unified bilevel meta-optimization framework. This method reformulates evolutionary search as a Neural Unrolling process grounded in Krasnosel'skii-Mann (KM) fixed-point theory. First, L2E models a coupled dynamic system in which the inner loop enforces a strict contractive trajectory via a structured Mamba-based neural operator. Second, the outer loop optimizes meta-parameters to align the fixed point of the operator with the target objective minimizers. Third, we design a gradient-derived composite solver that adaptively fuses learned evolutionary proposals with proxy gradient steps, thereby harmonizing global exploration with local refinement. Crucially, this formulation provides the learned optimizer with provable convergence guarantees. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scalability of L2E in high-dimensional spaces and its robust zero-shot generalization across synthetic and real-world control tasks. These results confirm that the framework learns a generic optimization manifold that extends beyond specific training distributions.

Paperid: 2828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10041.pdf

Abstract:
Modern deep learning methods have achieved impressive results across tasks from disease classification, estimating continuous biomarkers, to generating realistic medical images. Most of these approaches are trained to model conditional distributions defined by a specific predictive direction with a specific set of input variables. We introduce MetaVoxel, a generative joint diffusion modeling framework that models the joint distribution over imaging data and clinical metadata by learning a single diffusion process spanning all variables. By capturing the joint distribution, MetaVoxel unifies tasks that traditionally require separate conditional models and supports flexible zero-shot inference using arbitrary subsets of inputs without task-specific retraining. Using more than 10,000 T1-weighted MRI scans paired with clinical metadata from nine datasets, we show that a single MetaVoxel model can perform image generation, age estimation, and sex prediction, achieving performance comparable to established task-specific baselines. Additional experiments highlight its capabilities for flexible inference. Together, these findings demonstrate that joint multimodal diffusion offers a promising direction for unifying medical AI models and enabling broader clinical applicability.

Paperid: 2829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11912.pdf

Abstract:
Graph machine learning has advanced rapidly in tasks such as link prediction, anomaly detection, and node classification. As models scale up, pretrained graph models have become valuable intellectual assets because they encode extensive computation and domain expertise. Building on these advances, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) mark a major step forward by jointly pretraining graph and text encoders on massive and diverse data. This unifies structural and semantic understanding, enables zero-shot inference, and supports applications such as fraud detection and biomedical analysis. However, the high pretraining cost and broad cross-domain knowledge in GFMs also make them attractive targets for model extraction attacks (MEAs). Prior work has focused only on small graph neural networks trained on a single graph, leaving the security implications for large-scale and multimodal GFMs largely unexplored. This paper presents the first systematic study of MEAs against GFMs. We formalize a black-box threat model and define six practical attack scenarios covering domain-level and graph-specific extraction goals, architectural mismatch, limited query budgets, partial node access, and training data discrepancies. To instantiate these attacks, we introduce a lightweight extraction method that trains an attacker encoder using supervised regression of graph embeddings. Even without contrastive pretraining data, this method learns an encoder that stays aligned with the victim text encoder and preserves its zero-shot inference ability on unseen graphs. Experiments on seven datasets show that the attacker can approximate the victim model using only a tiny fraction of its original training cost, with almost no loss in accuracy. These findings reveal that GFMs greatly expand the MEA surface and highlight the need for deployment-aware security defenses in large-scale graph learning systems.

Paperid: 2830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09438.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a method that uses large language models to assist graph machine learning under personalization and privacy constraints. The approach combines data augmentation for sparse graphs, prompt and instruction tuning to adapt foundation models to graph tasks, and in-context learning to supply few-shot graph reasoning signals. These signals parameterize a Dynamic UMAP manifold of client-specific graph embeddings inside a Bayesian variational objective for personalized federated learning. The method supports node classification and link prediction in low-resource settings and aligns language model latent representations with graph structure via a cross-modal regularizer. We outline a convergence argument for the variational aggregation procedure, describe a differential privacy threat model based on a moments accountant, and present applications to knowledge graph completion, recommendation-style link prediction, and citation and product graphs. We also discuss evaluation considerations for benchmarking LLM-assisted graph machine learning.

Paperid: 2831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05565.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) excel on natural images, but their utility for biomedical microscopy remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how in-context learning enables state-of-the-art VLMs to perform few-shot object detection when large annotated datasets are unavailable, as is often the case with microscopic images. We introduce the Micro-OD benchmark, a curated collection of 252 images specifically curated for in-context learning, with bounding-box annotations spanning 11 cell types across four sources, including two in-lab expert-annotated sets. We systematically evaluate eight VLMs under few-shot conditions and compare variants with and without implicit test-time reasoning tokens. We further implement a hybrid Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) pipeline that combines a detection head with a VLM-based few-shot classifier, which enhances the few-shot performance of recent VLMs on our benchmark. Across datasets, we observe that zero-shot performance is weak due to the domain gap; however, few-shot support consistently improves detection, with marginal gains achieved after six shots. We observe that models with reasoning tokens are more effective for end-to-end localization, whereas simpler variants are more suitable for classifying pre-localized crops. Our results highlight in-context adaptation as a practical path for microscopy, and our benchmark provides a reproducible testbed for advancing open-vocabulary detection in biomedical imaging.

Paperid: 2832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24278.pdf

Abstract:
Synthetic image source attribution is a challenging task, especially in data scarcity conditions requiring few-shot or zero-shot classification capabilities. We present a new training-free one-shot attribution method based on image resynthesis. A prompt describing the image under analysis is generated, then it is used to resynthesize the image with all the candidate sources. The image is attributed to the model which produced the resynthesis closest to the original image in a proper feature space. We also introduce a new dataset for synthetic image attribution consisting of face images from commercial and open-source text-to-image generators. The dataset provides a challenging attribution framework, useful for developing new attribution models and testing their capabilities on different generative architectures. The dataset structure allows to test approaches based on resynthesis and to compare them to few-shot methods. Results from state-of-the-art few-shot approaches and other baselines show that the proposed resynthesis method outperforms existing techniques when only a few samples are available for training or fine-tuning. The experiments also demonstrate that the new dataset is a challenging one and represents a valuable benchmark for developing and evaluating future few-shot and zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 2833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23176.pdf

Abstract:
Fixed-frequency control in robotics imposes a trade-off between the efficiency of low-frequency control and the robustness of high-frequency control, a limitation not seen in adaptable biological systems. We address this with a reinforcement learning approach in which policies jointly select control actions and their application durations, enabling robots to autonomously modulate their control frequency in response to situational demands. We validate our method with zero-shot sim-to-real experiments on two distinct hardware platforms: a high-speed RC car and a quadrupedal robot. Our method matches or outperforms fixed-frequency baselines in terms of rewards while significantly reducing the control frequency and exhibiting adaptive frequency control under real-world conditions.

Paperid: 2834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20909.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning models (RMs), language models (LMs) trained with reinforcement learning to produce long-form natural language reasoning, have been remarkably successful, but they still require large amounts of computation and data to train, and can be slow and expensive to run. In this paper, we show that standard instruct LMs can already be elicited to be strong reasoners at a level comparable to or even surpassing their corresponding RMs (e.g., DeepSeek V3 vs R1) without finetuning, across diverse domains from instruction following and creative generation to mathematical reasoning. This is achieved by CodeAdapt, our simple recipe that combines the CodeAct framework, where LMs interleave natural language reasoning with code execution in a multi-step fashion, with few-shot bootstrap in-context learning from as few as five training problems. Analyzing four matched pairs of LMs and RMs, we find that CodeAdapt enables three LMs to outperform the corresponding RMs on average over eight tasks (up to 22.9%) while being 10-81% more token efficient, and delivers superior performance on six tasks when averaged over the four models (up to 35.7%). Furthermore, the code-augmented reasoning traces display rich and varied problem-solving strategies. Our findings support that (1) CodeAdapt-style learning and reasoning may be robust and domain general and (2) code-enabled LMs are cognitively grounded and powerful systems, potentially providing a strong foundation for in-weight reinforcement learning.

Paperid: 2835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17059.pdf

Abstract:
In the same way that generative models today conduct most of their training in a self-supervised fashion, how can agentic models conduct their training in a self-supervised fashion, interactively exploring, learning, and preparing to quickly adapt to new tasks? A prerequisite for embodied agents deployed in real world interactions ought to be training with interaction, yet today's most successful AI models (e.g., VLMs, LLMs) are trained without an explicit notion of action. The problem of pure exploration (which assumes no data as input) is well studied in the reinforcement learning literature and provides agents with a wide array of experiences, yet it fails to prepare them for rapid adaptation to new tasks. Today's language and vision models are trained on data provided by humans, which provides a strong inductive bias for the sorts of tasks that the model will have to solve (e.g., modeling chords in a song, phrases in a sonnet, sentences in a medical record). However, when they are prompted to solve a new task, there is a faulty tacit assumption that humans spend most of their time in the most rewarding states. The key contribution of our paper is a method for pre-training interactive agents in a self-supervised fashion, so that they can instantly mimic human demonstrations. Our method treats goals (i.e., observations) as the atomic construct. During training, our method automatically proposes goals and practices reaching them, building off prior work in reinforcement learning exploration. During evaluation, our method solves an (amortized) inverse reinforcement learning problem to explain demonstrations as optimal goal-reaching behavior. Experiments on standard benchmarks (not designed for goal-reaching) show that our approach outperforms prior methods for zero-shot imitation.

Paperid: 2836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15851.pdf

Abstract:
Slot filling is a crucial subtask in spoken language understanding (SLU), traditionally implemented as a cascade of speech recognition followed by one or more natural language understanding (NLU) components. The recent advent of speech-based large language models (speechLLMs), which integrate speech and textual foundation models, has opened new avenues for achieving speech understanding tasks in a more unified, generative, and instruction-following manner while promising data and compute efficiency with zero-shot abilities, generalizing to unseen slot labels. We address the slot-filling task by creating an empirical upper bound for the task, identifying performance, robustness, and generalization gaps, and proposing improvements to the training data, architecture, and training strategies to narrow the gap with the upper bound result. We show that each of these measures improve performance substantially, while highlighting practical challenges and providing empirical guidance and insights for harnessing these emerging models.

Paperid: 2837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15262.pdf

Abstract:
Empirical scaling laws prescribe how to allocate parameters, data, and compute, while maximal-update parameterization ($μ$P) enables learning-rate transfer across widths by equalizing early-time update magnitudes. However, in modern scale-invariant architectures, training quickly enters an optimizer-governed steady state where normalization layers create backward scale sensitivity and the effective learning rate becomes width dependent, degrading $μ$P transfer. We address this by introducing a weight-decay scaling rule for AdamW that preserves sublayer gain across widths. Empirically, the singular-value spectrum of each matrix parameter scales in norm as $\sqrt{η/λ}$ with an approximately invariant shape; under width scaling $d$, we observe that the top singular value scales approximately as $\sqrt{η/λ}\cdot d^{0.75}$. Combining this observation with the $μ$P learning-rate rule $η_2\propto d^{-1}$ for matrix-like parameters implies an empirical weight-decay scaling rule $λ_2\propto \sqrt{d}$ that approximately keeps sublayer gains width invariant. Together with vector-like parameters trained at $η_1=Θ_d(1)$ and $λ_1=0$, this yields \emph{zero-shot} transfer of both learning rate and weight decay from proxy to target widths, removing per-width sweeps. We validate the rule on LLaMA-style Transformers and in a minimal synthetic setting, and we provide a simple diagnostic, matching top singular values, to check sublayer-gain invariance. Our results extend $μ$P beyond the near-init regime by explicitly controlling steady-state scales set by the optimizer, offering a practical recipe for width-robust hyperparameter transfer under AdamW.

Paperid: 2838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13842.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge poisoning poses a critical threat to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems by injecting adversarial content into knowledge bases, tricking Large Language Models (LLMs) into producing attacker-controlled outputs grounded in manipulated context. Prior work highlights LLMs' susceptibility to misleading or malicious retrieved content. However, real-world fact-checking scenarios are more challenging, as credible evidence typically dominates the retrieval pool. To investigate this problem, we extend knowledge poisoning to the fact-checking setting, where retrieved context includes authentic supporting or refuting evidence. We propose \textbf{ADMIT} (\textbf{AD}versarial \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{I}njection \textbf{T}echnique), a few-shot, semantically aligned poisoning attack that flips fact-checking decisions and induces deceptive justifications, all without access to the target LLMs, retrievers, or token-level control. Extensive experiments show that ADMIT transfers effectively across 4 retrievers, 11 LLMs, and 4 cross-domain benchmarks, achieving an average attack success rate (ASR) of 86\% at an extremely low poisoning rate of $0.93 \times 10^{-6}$, and remaining robust even in the presence of strong counter-evidence. Compared with prior state-of-the-art attacks, ADMIT improves ASR by 11.2\% across all settings, exposing significant vulnerabilities in real-world RAG-based fact-checking systems.

Paperid: 2839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09245.pdf

Abstract:
Voice Conversion (VC) aims to modify a speaker's timbre while preserving linguistic content. While recent VC models achieve strong performance, most struggle in real-time streaming scenarios due to high latency, dependence on ASR modules, or complex speaker disentanglement, which often results in timbre leakage or degraded naturalness. We present SynthVC, a streaming end-to-end VC framework that directly learns speaker timbre transformation from synthetic parallel data generated by a pre-trained zero-shot VC model. This design eliminates the need for explicit content-speaker separation or recognition modules. Built upon a neural audio codec architecture, SynthVC supports low-latency streaming inference with high output fidelity. Experimental results show that SynthVC outperforms baseline streaming VC systems in both naturalness and speaker similarity, achieving an end-to-end latency of just 77.1 ms.

Paperid: 2840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08659.pdf

Abstract:
Language-empowered foundation models (LeFMs), such as CLIP and GraphCLIP, have transformed multimodal learning by aligning visual (or graph) features with textual representations, enabling powerful downstream capabilities like few-shot learning. However, the reliance on small, task-specific support datasets collected in open environments exposes these models to poisoning attacks, where adversaries manipulate the support samples to degrade performance. Existing defenses rely on empirical strategies, which lack formal guarantees and remain vulnerable to unseen and adaptive attacks. Certified robustness offers provable guarantees but has been largely unexplored for few-shot classifiers based on LeFMs. This study seeks to fill these critical gaps by proposing the first provably robust few-shot classifier that is tailored for LeFMs. We term our model Language-empowered Few-shot Certification (\textbf{LeFCert}). It integrates both textual and feature embeddings with an adaptive blending mechanism. To achieve provable robustness, we propose a twofold trimmed mean prototype and derive provable upper and lower bounds for classification scores, enabling certification under worst-case poisoning scenarios. To further enhance the performance, we extend LeFCert with two variants by considering a more realistic and tighter attack budget: LeFCert-L incorporates randomized smoothing to provide Lipschitz continuity and derive robustness under dual budget constraints, and LeFCert-C provides collective certification for scenarios where attackers distribute a shared poisoning budget across multiple samples. Experiments demonstrate that LeFCert achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving both clean and certified accuracy compared to existing baselines. Despite its advanced robustness mechanisms, LeFCert is computationally efficient, making it practical for real-world applications.

Paperid: 2841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00411.pdf

Abstract:
The accurate interpretation of chest radiographs using automated methods is a critical task in medical imaging. This paper presents a comparative analysis between a supervised lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a state-of-the-art, zero-shot medical Vision-Language Model (VLM), BiomedCLIP, across two distinct diagnostic tasks: pneumonia detection on the PneumoniaMNIST benchmark and tuberculosis detection on the Shenzhen TB dataset. Our experiments show that supervised CNNs serve as highly competitive baselines in both cases. While the default zero-shot performance of the VLM is lower, we demonstrate that its potential can be unlocked via a simple yet crucial remedy: decision threshold calibration. By optimizing the classification threshold on a validation set, the performance of BiomedCLIP is significantly boosted across both datasets. For pneumonia detection, calibration enables the zero-shot VLM to achieve a superior F1-score of 0.8841, surpassing the supervised CNN's 0.8803. For tuberculosis detection, calibration dramatically improves the F1-score from 0.4812 to 0.7684, bringing it close to the supervised baseline's 0.7834. This work highlights a key insight: proper calibration is essential for leveraging the full diagnostic power of zero-shot VLMs, enabling them to match or even outperform efficient, task-specific supervised models.

Paperid: 2842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26127.pdf

Abstract:
Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities. The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation. To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency. Code and models will be released soon.

Paperid: 2843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23991.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing use of 360 images across various domains has emphasized the need for robust depth estimation techniques tailored for omnidirectional images. However, obtaining large-scale labeled datasets for 360 depth estimation remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose RPG360, a training-free robust 360 monocular depth estimation method that leverages perspective foundation models and graph optimization. Our approach converts 360 images into six-face cubemap representations, where a perspective foundation model is employed to estimate depth and surface normals. To address depth scale inconsistencies across different faces of the cubemap, we introduce a novel depth scale alignment technique using graph-based optimization, which parameterizes the predicted depth and normal maps while incorporating an additional per-face scale parameter. This optimization ensures depth scale consistency across the six-face cubemap while preserving 3D structural integrity. Furthermore, as foundation models exhibit inherent robustness in zero-shot settings, our method achieves superior performance across diverse datasets, including Matterport3D, Stanford2D3D, and 360Loc. We also demonstrate the versatility of our depth estimation approach by validating its benefits in downstream tasks such as feature matching 3.2 ~ 5.4% and Structure from Motion 0.2 ~ 9.7% in AUC@5.

Paperid: 2844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23196.pdf

Abstract:
Recent reasoning LLMs (RLMs), especially those trained with verifier-based reinforcement learning, often perform worse with few-shot CoT than with direct answering. We revisit this paradox using high-quality reasoning traces from DeepSeek-R1 as demonstrations and find that adding more exemplars consistently degrades accuracy, even when demonstrations are optimal. A detailed analysis reveals two mechanisms behind this decline: (i) semantic misguidance, where high textual similarity leads the model to treat the target as the same as the exemplar and to copy intermediate steps verbatim; and (ii) strategy transfer failure, where the model struggles to extract useful reasoning strategies and apply them to target questions. Guided by these, we introduce Insight-to-Solve (I2S), a sequential test-time procedure that turns demonstrations into explicit, reusable insights and derives a target-specific reasoning trace; optionally, the reasoning is self-refined for coherence and correctness (I2S+). Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks show that I2S and I2S+ consistently outperform both direct answering and test-time scaling baselines across open- and closed-source models. Even for GPT models, our method helps: on AIME'25, GPT-4.1 rises by +14.0%, and o1-mini improves by +2.7% on AIME and +1.7% on GPQA, indicating that in-context demonstrations can be harnessed effectively via insight-refine-solve framework.

Paperid: 2845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22205.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing to long-horizon manipulation tasks in a zero-shot setting remains a central challenge in robotics. Current multimodal foundation based approaches, despite their capabilities, typically fail to decompose high-level commands into executable action sequences from static visual input alone. To address this challenge, we introduce Super-Mimic, a hierarchical framework that enables zero-shot robotic imitation by directly inferring procedural intent from unscripted human demonstration videos. Our framework is composed of two sequential modules. First, a Human Intent Translator (HIT) parses the input video using multimodal reasoning to produce a sequence of language-grounded subtasks. These subtasks then condition a Future Dynamics Predictor (FDP), which employs a generative model that synthesizes a physically plausible video rollout for each step. The resulting visual trajectories are dynamics-aware, explicitly modeling crucial object interactions and contact points to guide the low-level controller. We validate this approach through extensive experiments on a suite of long-horizon manipulation tasks, where Super-Mimic significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by over 20\%. These results establish that coupling video-driven intent parsing with prospective dynamics modeling is a highly effective strategy for developing general-purpose robotic systems.

Paperid: 2846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20802.pdf

Abstract:
The goal of this paper is to introduce SPADE, a framework for Structured Pruning and Adaptive Distillation for Efficient Large Language Model-based text-to-speech (LLM-TTS). Recent LLM-TTS systems achieve strong controllability and zero-shot generalization, but their large parameter counts and high latency limit real-world deployment. SPADE addresses this by combining (i) a pruning step guided by a word-error-rate-based layer importance index to remove non-essential Transformer layers, with (ii) multi-level knowledge distillation to restore autoregressive coherence. On zero-shot benchmarks, SPADE preserves near-parity perceptual quality while halving Transformer depth, reducing VRAM usage by up to 20%, and achieving up to 1.7x faster real-time factor with less than 5% of the original training data. These results show that compact LLM-TTS models can maintain naturalness and speaker similarity while enabling practical real-time speech generation. Audio samples are available at https://mm.kaist.ac.kr/projects/SPADE/.

Paperid: 2847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08007.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image analysis often faces significant challenges due to limited expert-annotated data, hindering both model generalization and clinical adoption. We propose an expert-guided explainable few-shot learning framework that integrates radiologist-provided regions of interest (ROIs) into model training to simultaneously enhance classification performance and interpretability. Leveraging Grad-CAM for spatial attention supervision, we introduce an explanation loss based on Dice similarity to align model attention with diagnostically relevant regions during training. This explanation loss is jointly optimized with a standard prototypical network objective, encouraging the model to focus on clinically meaningful features even under limited data conditions. We evaluate our framework on two distinct datasets: BraTS (MRI) and VinDr-CXR (Chest X-ray), achieving significant accuracy improvements from 77.09% to 83.61% on BraTS and from 54.33% to 73.29% on VinDr-CXR compared to non-guided models. Grad-CAM visualizations further confirm that expert-guided training consistently aligns attention with diagnostic regions, improving both predictive reliability and clinical trustworthiness. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating expert-guided attention supervision to bridge the gap between performance and interpretability in few-shot medical image diagnosis.

Paperid: 2848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06723.pdf

Abstract:
Trajectory-Guided image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that adhere to user-specified motion instructions. Existing methods typically rely on computationally expensive fine-tuning on scarce annotated datasets. Although some zero-shot methods attempt to trajectory control in the latent space, they may yield unrealistic motion by neglecting 3D perspective and creating a misalignment between the manipulated latents and the network's noise predictions. To address these challenges, we introduce Zo3T, a novel zero-shot test-time-training framework for trajectory-guided generation with three core innovations: First, we incorporate a 3D-Aware Kinematic Projection, leveraging inferring scene depth to derive perspective-correct affine transformations for target regions. Second, we introduce Trajectory-Guided Test-Time LoRA, a mechanism that dynamically injects and optimizes ephemeral LoRA adapters into the denoising network alongside the latent state. Driven by a regional feature consistency loss, this co-adaptation effectively enforces motion constraints while allowing the pre-trained model to locally adapt its internal representations to the manipulated latent, thereby ensuring generative fidelity and on-manifold adherence. Finally, we develop Guidance Field Rectification, which refines the denoising evolutionary path by optimizing the conditional guidance field through a one-step lookahead strategy, ensuring efficient generative progression towards the target trajectory. Zo3T significantly enhances 3D realism and motion accuracy in trajectory-controlled I2V generation, demonstrating superior performance over existing training-based and zero-shot approaches.

Paperid: 2849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16676.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer architecture gradually dominates the LLM field. Recent advances in training optimization for Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) primarily focus on architectural modifications or optimizer adjustments. However, these approaches lack systematic optimization of weight patterns during training. Weight pattern refers to the distribution and relative magnitudes of weight parameters in a neural network. To address this issue, we propose a Weight Scaling method called WISCA to enhance training efficiency and model quality by strategically improving neural network weight patterns without changing network structures. By rescaling weights while preserving model outputs, WISCA indirectly optimizes the model's training trajectory. Experiments demonstrate that WISCA significantly improves convergence quality (measured by generalization capability and loss reduction), particularly in LLMs with Grouped Query Attention (GQA) architectures and LoRA fine-tuning tasks. Empirical results show 5.6% average improvement on zero-shot validation tasks and 2.12% average reduction in training perplexity across multiple architectures.

Paperid: 2850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16044.pdf

Abstract:
Index recommendation is one of the most important problems in database management system (DBMS) optimization. Given queries and certain index-related constraints, traditional methods rely on heuristic optimization or learning-based models to select effective indexes and improve query performance. However, heuristic optimization suffers from high computation time, and learning-based models lose generalisability due to training for different workloads and database schemas. With the recent rapid development of large language models (LLMs), methods using prompt tuning have been proposed to enhance the efficiency of index selection. However, such methods still can not achieve the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, and preparing the index selection demonstrations is also resource-intensive. To address these issues, we propose AMAZe, a zero-shot LLM-based index advisor with a multi-agent framework. We decompose the index recommendation problem into sub-steps, including planning, selection, combination, revision, and reflection. A set of LLM-embedded agents is designed to handle each one of the different sub-steps. Our method utilizes high-level agents to control the index selection process and low-level agents to select and revise indexes. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed AMAZe not only achieves the SOTA performance compared to the heuristic methods, but also outperforms learning-based and prompt-based methods with higher efficiency and better zero-shot inference ability.

Paperid: 2851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10631.pdf

Abstract:
Conditional image generative models hold considerable promise to produce infinite amounts of synthetic training data. Yet, recent progress in generation quality has come at the expense of generation diversity, limiting the utility of these models as a source of synthetic training data. Although guidance-based approaches have been introduced to improve the utility of generated data by focusing on quality or diversity, the (implicit or explicit) utility functions oftentimes disregard the potential distribution shift between synthetic and real data. In this work, we introduce Chamfer Guidance: a training-free guidance approach which leverages a handful of real exemplar images to characterize the quality and diversity of synthetic data. We show that by leveraging the proposed Chamfer Guidance, we can boost the diversity of the generations w.r.t. a dataset of real images while maintaining or improving the generation quality on ImageNet-1k and standard geo-diversity benchmarks. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance with as little as 2 exemplar real images, obtaining 96.4\% in terms of precision, and 86.4\% in terms of distributional coverage, which increase to 97.5\% and 92.7\%, respectively, when using 32 real images. We showcase the benefits of the Chamfer Guidance generation by training downstream image classifiers on synthetic data, achieving accuracy boost of up to 15\% for in-distribution over the baselines, and up to 16\% in out-of-distribution. Furthermore, our approach does not require using the unconditional model, and thus obtains a 31\% reduction in FLOPs w.r.t. classifier-free-guidance-based approaches at sampling time.

Paperid: 2852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04605.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a framework for learning maps between probability distributions that broadly generalizes the time dynamics of flow and diffusion models. To enable this, we generalize stochastic interpolants by replacing the scalar time variable with vectors, matrices, or linear operators, allowing us to bridge probability distributions across multiple dimensional spaces. This approach enables the construction of versatile generative models capable of fulfilling multiple tasks without task-specific training. Our operator-based interpolants not only provide a unifying theoretical perspective for existing generative models but also extend their capabilities. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate the zero-shot efficacy of our method on conditional generation and inpainting, fine-tuning and posterior sampling, and multiscale modeling, suggesting its potential as a generic task-agnostic alternative to specialized models.

Paperid: 2853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23620.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have advanced from text-to-image (T2I) to image-to-image (I2I) generation by incorporating structured inputs such as depth maps, enabling fine-grained spatial control. However, existing methods either train separate models for each condition or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high adaptation costs for novel conditions. To this end, we propose DivControl, a decomposable pretraining framework for unified controllable generation and efficient adaptation. DivControl factorizes ControlNet via SVD into basic components-pairs of singular vectors-which are disentangled into condition-agnostic learngenes and condition-specific tailors through knowledge diversion during multi-condition training. Knowledge diversion is implemented via a dynamic gate that performs soft routing over tailors based on the semantics of condition instructions, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel conditions. To further improve condition fidelity and training efficiency, we introduce a representation alignment loss that aligns condition embeddings with early diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with 36.4$\times$ less training cost, while simultaneously improving average performance on basic conditions. It also delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen conditions, demonstrating superior scalability, modularity, and transferability.

Paperid: 2854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19144.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate detection and localization of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in satellite imagery is essential for optimizing microgrids and active distribution networks (ADNs), which are critical components of renewable energy systems. Existing methods lack transparency regarding their underlying algorithms or training datasets, rely on large, high-quality PV training data, and struggle to generalize to new geographic regions or varied environmental conditions without extensive re-training. These limitations lead to inconsistent detection outcomes, hindering large-scale deployment and data-driven grid optimization. In this paper, we investigate how large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to overcome these challenges. Despite their promise, LLMs face several challenges in solar panel detection, including difficulties with multi-step logical processes, inconsistent output formatting, frequent misclassification of visually similar objects (e.g., shadows, parking lots), and low accuracy in complex tasks such as spatial localization and quantification. To overcome these issues, we propose the PV Assessment with LLMs (PVAL) framework, which incorporates task decomposition for more efficient workflows, output standardization for consistent and scalable formatting, few-shot prompting to enhance classification accuracy, and fine-tuning using curated PV datasets with detailed annotations. PVAL ensures transparency, scalability, and adaptability across heterogeneous datasets while minimizing computational overhead. By combining open-source accessibility with robust methodologies, PVAL establishes an automated and reproducible pipeline for solar panel detection, paving the way for large-scale renewable energy integration and optimized grid management.

Paperid: 2855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08400.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents PanMatch, a versatile foundation model for robust correspondence matching. Unlike previous methods that rely on task-specific architectures and domain-specific fine-tuning to support tasks like stereo matching, optical flow or feature matching, our key insight is that any two-frame correspondence matching task can be addressed within a 2D displacement estimation framework using the same model weights. Such a formulation eliminates the need for designing specialized unified architectures or task-specific ensemble models. Instead, it achieves multi-task integration by endowing displacement estimation algorithms with unprecedented generalization capabilities. To this end, we highlight the importance of a robust feature extractor applicable across multiple domains and tasks, and propose the feature transformation pipeline that leverage all-purpose features from Large Vision Models to endow matching baselines with zero-shot cross-view matching capabilities. Furthermore, we assemble a cross-domain dataset with near 1.8 million samples from stereo matching, optical flow, and feature matching domains to pretrain PanMatch. We demonstrate the versatility of PanMatch across a wide range of domains and downstream tasks using the same model weights. Our model outperforms UniMatch and Flow-Anything on cross-task evaluations, and achieves comparable performance to most state-of-the-art task-specific algorithms on task-oriented benchmarks. Additionally, PanMatch presents unprecedented zero-shot performance in abnormal scenarios, such as rainy day and satellite imagery, where most existing robust algorithms fail to yield meaningful results.

Paperid: 2856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07994.pdf

Abstract:
Keypoint detection, integral to modern machine perception, faces challenges in few-shot learning, particularly when source data from the same distribution as the query is unavailable. This gap is addressed by leveraging sketches, a popular form of human expression, providing a source-free alternative. However, challenges arise in mastering cross-modal embeddings and handling user-specific sketch styles. Our proposed framework overcomes these hurdles with a prototypical setup, combined with a grid-based locator and prototypical domain adaptation. We also demonstrate success in few-shot convergence across novel keypoints and classes through extensive experiments.

Paperid: 2857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20967.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of Video Diffusion Transformers (Video DiTs) marks a milestone in video generation. However, directly applying existing video editing methods to Video DiTs often incurs substantial computational overhead, due to resource-intensive attention modification or finetuning. To alleviate this problem, we present DFVEdit, an efficient zero-shot video editing method tailored for Video DiTs. DFVEdit eliminates the need for both attention modification and fine-tuning by directly operating on clean latents via flow transformation. To be more specific, we observe that editing and sampling can be unified under the continuous flow perspective. Building upon this foundation, we propose the Conditional Delta Flow Vector (CDFV) -- a theoretically unbiased estimation of DFV -- and integrate Implicit Cross Attention (ICA) guidance as well as Embedding Reinforcement (ER) to further enhance editing quality. DFVEdit excels in practical efficiency, offering at least 20x inference speed-up and 85% memory reduction on Video DiTs compared to attention-engineering-based editing methods. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DFVEdit can be seamlessly applied to popular Video DiTs (e.g., CogVideoX and Wan2.1), attaining state-of-the-art performance on structural fidelity, spatial-temporal consistency, and editing quality.

Paperid: 2858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11775.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in teleoperation systems have enabled high-quality data collection for robotic manipulators, showing impressive results in learning manipulation at scale. This progress suggests that extending these capabilities to robotic hands could unlock an even broader range of manipulation skills, especially if we could achieve the same level of dexterity that human hands exhibit. However, teleoperating robotic hands is far from a solved problem, as it presents a significant challenge due to the high degrees of freedom of robotic hands and the complex dynamics occurring during contact-rich settings. In this work, we present ExoStart, a general and scalable learning framework that leverages human dexterity to improve robotic hand control. In particular, we obtain high-quality data by collecting direct demonstrations without a robot in the loop using a sensorized low-cost wearable exoskeleton, capturing the rich behaviors that humans can demonstrate with their own hands. We also propose a simulation-based dynamics filter that generates dynamically feasible trajectories from the collected demonstrations and use the generated trajectories to bootstrap an auto-curriculum reinforcement learning method that relies only on simple sparse rewards. The ExoStart pipeline is generalizable and yields robust policies that transfer zero-shot to the real robot. Our results demonstrate that ExoStart can generate dexterous real-world hand skills, achieving a success rate above 50% on a wide range of complex tasks such as opening an AirPods case or inserting and turning a key in a lock. More details and videos can be found in https://sites.google.com/view/exostart.

Paperid: 2859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03160.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing presence of automated vehicles (AVs) presents new challenges for crash classification and safety analysis. Accurately identifying the SAE automation level involved in each crash is essential to understanding crash dynamics and system accountability. However, existing approaches often overlook automation-specific factors and lack model sophistication to capture distinctions between different SAE levels. To address this gap, this study evaluates the performance of three advanced tabular deep learning models MambaAttention, TabPFN, and TabTransformer for classifying SAE automation levels using structured crash data from Texas (2024), covering 4,649 cases categorized as Assisted Driving (SAE Level 1), Partial Automation (SAE Level 2), and Advanced Automation (SAE Levels 3-5 combined). Following class balancing using SMOTEENN, the models were trained and evaluated on a unified dataset of 7,300 records. MambaAttention demonstrated the highest overall performance (F1-scores: 88% for SAE 1, 97% for SAE 2, and 99% for SAE 3-5), while TabPFN excelled in zero-shot inference with high robustness for rare crash categories. In contrast, TabTransformer underperformed, particularly in detecting Partial Automation crashes (F1-score: 55%), suggesting challenges in modeling shared human-system control dynamics. These results highlight the capability of deep learning models tailored for tabular data to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of automation-level classification. Integrating such models into crash analysis frameworks can support policy development, AV safety evaluation, and regulatory decisions, especially in distinguishing high-risk conditions for mid- and high-level automation technologies.

Paperid: 2860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19675.pdf

Abstract:
The traditional process of creating labeled datasets is labor-intensive and expensive. Recent breakthroughs in open-source large language models (LLMs) have opened up a new avenue in generating labeled datasets automatically for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, providing an alternative to such an expensive annotation process. However, the reliability of such auto-generated labels remains a significant concern due to inherent inaccuracies. When learning from noisy labels, the model's generalization is likely to be harmed as it is prone to overfit to those label noises. While previous studies in learning from noisy labels mainly focus on synthetic noise and real-world noise, LLM-generated label noise receives less attention. In this paper, we propose SiDyP: Simplex Label Diffusion with Dynamic Prior to calibrate the classifier's prediction, thus enhancing its robustness towards LLM-generated noisy labels. SiDyP retrieves potential true label candidates by neighborhood label distribution in text embedding space and iteratively refines noisy candidates using a simplex diffusion model. Our framework can increase the performance of the BERT classifier fine-tuned on both zero-shot and few-shot LLM-generated noisy label datasets by an average of 7.21% and 7.30% respectively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SiDyP by conducting extensive benchmarking for different LLMs over a variety of NLP tasks. Our code is available on Github.

Paperid: 2861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19669.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot streaming text-to-speech is an important research topic in human-computer interaction. Existing methods primarily use a lookahead mechanism, relying on future text to achieve natural streaming speech synthesis, which introduces high processing latency. To address this issue, we propose SMLLE, a streaming framework for generating high-quality speech frame-by-frame. SMLLE employs a Transducer to convert text into semantic tokens in real time while simultaneously obtaining duration alignment information. The combined outputs are then fed into a fully autoregressive (AR) streaming model to reconstruct mel-spectrograms. To further stabilize the generation process, we design a Delete < Bos > Mechanism that allows the AR model to access future text introducing as minimal delay as possible. Experimental results suggest that the SMLLE outperforms current streaming TTS methods and achieves comparable performance over sentence-level TTS systems. Samples are available on shy-98.github.io/SMLLE_demo_page/.

Paperid: 2862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19495.pdf

Abstract:
Video action understanding tasks in real-world scenarios always suffer data limitations. In this paper, we address the data-limited action understanding problem by bridging data scarcity. We propose a novel method that employs a text-to-video diffusion transformer to generate annotated data for model training. This paradigm enables the generation of realistic annotated data on an infinite scale without human intervention. We proposed the information enhancement strategy and the uncertainty-based label smoothing tailored to generate sample training. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we observed that real samples generally contain a richer level of information than generated samples. Based on this observation, the information enhancement strategy is proposed to enhance the informative content of the generated samples from two aspects: the environments and the characters. Furthermore, we observed that some low-quality generated samples might negatively affect model training. To address this, we devised the uncertainty-based label smoothing strategy to increase the smoothing of these samples, thus reducing their impact. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on four datasets across five tasks and achieve state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot action recognition.

Paperid: 2863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17048.pdf

Authors:Agam Shah, Siddhant Sukhani, Huzaifa Pardawala, Saketh Budideti, Riya Bhadani, Rudra Gopal, Siddhartha Somani, Michael Galarnyk, Soungmin Lee, Arnav Hiray, Akshar Ravichandran, Eric Kim, Pranav Aluru, Joshua Zhang, Sebastian Jaskowski, Veer Guda, Meghaj Tarte, Liqin Ye, Spencer Gosden, Rutwik Routu, Rachel Yuh, Sloka Chava, Sahasra Chava, Dylan Patrick Kelly, Aiden Chiang, Harsit Mittal, Sudheer Chava

Abstract:
Central banks around the world play a crucial role in maintaining economic stability. Deciphering policy implications in their communications is essential, especially as misinterpretations can disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. To address this, we introduce the World Central Banks (WCB) dataset, the most comprehensive monetary policy corpus to date, comprising over 380k sentences from 25 central banks across diverse geographic regions, spanning 28 years of historical data. After uniformly sampling 1k sentences per bank (25k total) across all available years, we annotate and review each sentence using dual annotators, disagreement resolutions, and secondary expert reviews. We define three tasks: Stance Detection, Temporal Classification, and Uncertainty Estimation, with each sentence annotated for all three. We benchmark seven Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and nine Large Language Models (LLMs) (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and with annotation guide) on these tasks, running 15,075 benchmarking experiments. We find that a model trained on aggregated data across banks significantly surpasses a model trained on an individual bank's data, confirming the principle "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Additionally, rigorous human evaluations, error analyses, and predictive tasks validate our framework's economic utility. Our artifacts are accessible through the HuggingFace and GitHub under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Paperid: 2864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16193.pdf

Abstract:
The advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled various multimodal tasks to be addressed under a zero-shot paradigm. This paradigm sidesteps the cost of model fine-tuning, emerging as a dominant trend in practical application. Nevertheless, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), a pivotal challenge in the quest for general artificial intelligence, fails to accommodate this convenience. The zero-shot paradigm exhibits undesirable performance on MSA, casting doubt on whether MLLMs can perceive sentiments as competent as supervised models. By extending the zero-shot paradigm to In-Context Learning (ICL) and conducting an in-depth study on configuring demonstrations, we validate that MLLMs indeed possess such capability. Specifically, three key factors that cover demonstrations' retrieval, presentation, and distribution are comprehensively investigated and optimized. A sentimental predictive bias inherent in MLLMs is also discovered and later effectively counteracted. By complementing each other, the devised strategies for three factors result in average accuracy improvements of 15.9% on six MSA datasets against the zero-shot paradigm and 11.2% against the random ICL baseline.

Paperid: 2865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08349.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) requires models to generalize from limited labeled samples under significant distribution shifts. While recent methods enhance adaptability through lightweight task-specific modules, they operate solely in the spatial domain and overlook frequency-specific variations that are often critical for robust transfer. We observe that spatially similar images across domains can differ substantially in their spectral representations, with low and high frequencies capturing complementary semantic information at coarse and fine levels. This indicates that uniform spatial adaptation may overlook these spectral distinctions, thus constraining generalization. To address this, we introduce Frequency Adaptation and Diversion (FAD), a frequency-aware framework that explicitly models and modulates spectral components. At its core is the Frequency Diversion Adapter, which transforms intermediate features into the frequency domain using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), partitions them into low, mid, and high-frequency bands via radial masks, and reconstructs each band using inverse DFT (IDFT). Each frequency band is then adapted using a dedicated convolutional branch with a kernel size tailored to its spectral scale, enabling targeted and disentangled adaptation across frequencies. Extensive experiments on the Meta-Dataset benchmark demonstrate that FAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen domains, validating the utility of frequency-domain representations and band-wise adaptation for improving generalization in CD-FSL.

Paperid: 2866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07060.pdf

Abstract:
The objective of few-shot object detection (FSOD) is to detect novel objects with few training samples. The core challenge of this task is how to construct a generalized feature space for novel categories with limited data on the basis of the base category space, which could adapt the learned detection model to unknown scenarios. However, limited by insufficient samples for novel categories, two issues still exist: (1) the features of the novel category are easily implicitly represented by the features of the base category, leading to inseparable classifier boundaries, (2) novel categories with fewer data are not enough to fully represent the distribution, where the model fine-tuning is prone to overfitting. To address these issues, we introduce the side information to alleviate the negative influences derived from the feature space and sample viewpoints and formulate a novel generalized feature representation learning method for FSOD. Specifically, we first utilize embedding side information to construct a knowledge matrix to quantify the semantic relationship between the base and novel categories. Then, to strengthen the discrimination between semantically similar categories, we further develop contextual semantic supervised contrastive learning which embeds side information. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting problems caused by sparse samples, a side-information guided region-aware masked module is introduced to augment the diversity of samples, which finds and abandons biased information that discriminates between similar categories via counterfactual explanation, and refines the discriminative representation space further. Extensive experiments using ResNet and ViT backbones on PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, LVIS V1, FSOD-1K, and FSVOD-500 benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving the ability of FSOD in most shots/splits.

Paperid: 2867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05683.pdf

Abstract:
This research paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the performance of prominent pre-trained large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-3.5 Turbo, text-davinci-003, text-babbage-001, text-curie-001, text-ada-001, llama-2-7b-chat, llama-2-13b-chat, and llama-2-70b-chat, in comparison to expert human evaluators in providing scores, identifying errors, and offering feedback and improvement suggestions to candidates during mock HR (Human Resources) interviews. We introduce a dataset called HURIT (Human Resource Interview Transcripts), which comprises 3,890 HR interview transcripts sourced from real-world HR interview scenarios. Our findings reveal that pre-trained LLMs, particularly GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-3.5 Turbo, exhibit commendable performance and are capable of producing evaluations comparable to those of expert human evaluators. Although these LLMs demonstrate proficiency in providing scores comparable to human experts in terms of human evaluation metrics, they frequently fail to identify errors and offer specific actionable advice for candidate performance improvement in HR interviews. Our research suggests that the current state-of-the-art pre-trained LLMs are not fully conducive for automatic deployment in an HR interview assessment. Instead, our findings advocate for a human-in-the-loop approach, to incorporate manual checks for inconsistencies and provisions for improving feedback quality as a more suitable strategy.

Paperid: 2868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19988.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL demands precise reasoning to convert natural language questions into structured queries. While large language models (LLMs) excel in many reasoning tasks, their ability to leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for text-to-SQL remains underexplored. We identify critical limitations: zero-shot CoT offers minimal gains, and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) applied without CoT yields marginal improvements. We propose ExCoT, a novel framework that iteratively optimizes open-source LLMs by combining CoT reasoning with off-policy and on-policy DPO, relying solely on execution accuracy as feedback. This approach eliminates the need for reward models or human-annotated preferences. Our experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains: ExCoT improves execution accuracy on BIRD dev set from 57.37% to 68.51% and on Spider test set from 78.81% to 86.59% for LLaMA-3 70B, with Qwen-2.5-Coder demonstrating similar improvements. Our best model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the single-model setting on both BIRD and Spider datasets, notably achieving 68.53% on the BIRD test set.

Paperid: 2869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18998.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-subject EEG emotion recognition is challenged by significant inter-subject variability and intricately entangled intra-subject variability. Existing works have primarily addressed these challenges through domain adaptation or generalization strategies. However, they typically require extensive target subject data or demonstrate limited generalization performance to unseen subjects. Recent few-shot learning paradigms attempt to address these limitations but often encounter catastrophic overfitting during subject-specific adaptation with limited samples. This article introduces the few-shot adapter with a cross-view fusion method called FACE for cross-subject EEG emotion recognition, which leverages dynamic multi-view fusion and effective subject-specific adaptation. Specifically, FACE incorporates a cross-view fusion module that dynamically integrates global brain connectivity with localized patterns via subject-specific fusion weights to provide complementary emotional information. Moreover, the few-shot adapter module is proposed to enable rapid adaptation for unseen subjects while reducing overfitting by enhancing adapter structures with meta-learning. Experimental results on three public EEG emotion recognition benchmarks demonstrate FACE's superior generalization performance over state-of-the-art methods. FACE provides a practical solution for cross-subject scenarios with limited labeled data.

Paperid: 2870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16429.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we question whether we have a reliable self-supervised point cloud model that can be used for diverse 3D tasks via simple linear probing, even with limited data and minimal computation. We find that existing 3D self-supervised learning approaches fall short when evaluated on representation quality through linear probing. We hypothesize that this is due to what we term the "geometric shortcut", which causes representations to collapse to low-level spatial features. This challenge is unique to 3D and arises from the sparse nature of point cloud data. We address it through two key strategies: obscuring spatial information and enhancing the reliance on input features, ultimately composing a Sonata of 140k point clouds through self-distillation. Sonata is simple and intuitive, yet its learned representations are strong and reliable: zero-shot visualizations demonstrate semantic grouping, alongside strong spatial reasoning through nearest-neighbor relationships. Sonata demonstrates exceptional parameter and data efficiency, tripling linear probing accuracy (from 21.8% to 72.5%) on ScanNet and nearly doubling performance with only 1% of the data compared to previous approaches. Full fine-tuning further advances SOTA across both 3D indoor and outdoor perception tasks.

Paperid: 2871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07654.pdf

Abstract:
Quantization has been widely used to compress and accelerate inference of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods focus on exploring the per-token dynamic calibration to ensure both inference acceleration and model accuracy under 4-bit quantization. However, in autoregressive generation inference of long sequences, the overhead of repeated dynamic quantization and dequantization steps becomes considerably expensive. In this work, we propose MergeQuant, an accurate and efficient per-channel static quantization framework. MergeQuant integrates the per-channel quantization steps with the corresponding scalings and linear mappings through a Quantization Step Migration (QSM) method, thereby eliminating the quantization overheads before and after matrix multiplication. Furthermore, in view of the significant differences between the different channel ranges, we propose dimensional reconstruction and adaptive clipping to address the non-uniformity of quantization scale factors and redistribute the channel variations to the subsequent modules to balance the parameter distribution under QSM. Within the static quantization setting of W4A4, MergeQuant reduces the accuracy gap on zero-shot tasks compared to FP16 baseline to 1.3 points on Llama-2-70B model. On Llama-2-7B model, MergeQuant achieves up to 1.77x speedup in decoding, and up to 2.06x speedup in end-to-end compared to FP16 baseline.

Paperid: 2872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07487.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in visual understanding and reasoning across various vision-language tasks. However, we found that MLLMs cannot process effectively from fine-grained medical image data in the traditional Visual Question Answering (VQA) pipeline, as they do not exploit the captured features and available medical knowledge fully, results in MLLMs usually performing poorly in zero-shot medical disease recognition. Fortunately, this limitation does not indicate that MLLMs are fundamentally incapable of addressing fine-grained recognition tasks. From a feature representation perspective, MLLMs demonstrate considerable potential for tackling such challenging problems. Thus, to address this challenge, we propose LLaVA-RadZ, a simple yet effective framework for zero-shot medical disease recognition via utilizing the existing MLLM features. Specifically, we design an end-to-end training strategy, termed Decoding-Side Feature Alignment Training (DFAT) to take advantage of the characteristics of the MLLM decoder architecture and incorporate modality-specific tokens tailored for different modalities. Additionally, we introduce a Domain Knowledge Anchoring Module (DKAM) to exploit the intrinsic medical knowledge of large models, which mitigates the category semantic gap in image-text alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LLaVA-RadZ significantly outperforms traditional MLLMs in zero-shot disease recognition, achieving the comparable performance to the well-established and highly-optimized CLIP-based approaches.

Paperid: 2873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07215.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) enables image search using a reference image and text prompt without requiring specialized text-image composition networks trained on large-scale paired data. However, current ZS-CIR approaches face three critical limitations in their reliance on composed text embeddings: static query embedding representations, insufficient utilization of image embeddings, and suboptimal performance when fusing text and image embeddings. To address these challenges, we introduce the Prompt Directional Vector (PDV), a simple yet effective training-free enhancement that captures semantic modifications induced by user prompts. PDV enables three key improvements: (1) dynamic composed text embeddings where prompt adjustments are controllable via a scaling factor, (2) composed image embeddings through semantic transfer from text prompts to image features, and (3) weighted fusion of composed text and image embeddings that enhances retrieval by balancing visual and semantic similarity. Our approach serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing ZS-CIR methods with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PDV consistently improves retrieval performance when integrated with state-of-the-art ZS-CIR approaches, particularly for methods that generate accurate compositional embeddings. The code will be publicly available.

Paperid: 2874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17397.pdf

Abstract:
Question generation in education is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task, as it requires creating questions that are both contextually relevant and pedagogically sound. Current automated question generation methods often generate questions that are out of context. In this work, we explore advanced techniques for automated question generation in educational contexts, focusing on In-Context Learning (ICL), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and a novel Hybrid Model that merges both methods. We implement GPT-4 for ICL using few-shot examples and BART with a retrieval module for RAG. The Hybrid Model combines RAG and ICL to address these issues and improve question quality. Evaluation is conducted using automated metrics, followed by human evaluation metrics. Our results show that both the ICL approach and the Hybrid Model consistently outperform other methods, including baseline models, by generating more contextually accurate and relevant questions.

Paperid: 2875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16947.pdf

Abstract:
The advances in Vision-Language models (VLMs) offer exciting opportunities for robotic applications involving image geo-localization, the problem of identifying the geo-coordinates of a place based on visual data only. Recent research works have focused on using a VLM as embeddings extractor for geo-localization, however, the most sophisticated VLMs may only be available as black boxes that are accessible through an API, and come with a number of limitations: there is no access to training data, model features and gradients; retraining is not possible; the number of predictions may be limited by the API; training on model outputs is often prohibited; and queries are open-ended. The utilization of a VLM as a stand-alone, zero-shot geo-localization system using a single text-based prompt is largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this paper undertakes the first systematic study, to the best of our knowledge, to investigate the potential of some of the state-of-the-art VLMs as stand-alone, zero-shot geo-localization systems in a black-box setting with realistic constraints. We consider three main scenarios for this thorough investigation: a) fixed text-based prompt; b) semantically-equivalent text-based prompts; and c) semantically-equivalent query images. We also take into account the auto-regressive and probabilistic generation process of the VLMs when investigating their utility for geo-localization task by using model consistency as a metric in addition to traditional accuracy. Our work provides new insights in the capabilities of different VLMs for the above-mentioned scenarios.

Paperid: 2876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06692.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong and versatile segmentation capabilities, along with intuitive prompt-based interactions. However, customizing SAM for medical image segmentation requires massive amounts of pixel-level annotations and precise point- or box-based prompt designs. To address these challenges, we introduce PGP-SAM, a novel prototype-based few-shot tuning approach that uses limited samples to replace tedious manual prompts. Our key idea is to leverage inter- and intra-class prototypes to capture class-specific knowledge and relationships. We propose two main components: (1) a plug-and-play contextual modulation module that integrates multi-scale information, and (2) a class-guided cross-attention mechanism that fuses prototypes and features for automatic prompt generation. Experiments on a public multi-organ dataset and a private ventricle dataset demonstrate that PGP-SAM achieves superior mean Dice scores compared with existing prompt-free SAM variants, while using only 10\% of the 2D slices.

Paperid: 2877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03461.pdf

Abstract:
Radar signal recognition (RSR) plays a pivotal role in electronic warfare (EW), as accurately classifying radar signals is critical for informing decision-making. Recent advances in deep learning have shown significant potential in improving RSR in domains with ample annotated data. However, these methods fall short in EW scenarios where annotated radio frequency (RF) data are scarce or impractical to obtain. To address these challenges, we introduce a self-supervised learning (SSL) method which utilises masked signal modelling and RF domain adaption to perform few-shot RSR and enhance performance in environments with limited RF samples and annotations. We propose a two-step approach, first pre-training masked autoencoders (MAE) on baseband in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) signals from diverse RF domains, and then transferring the learned representations to the radar domain, where annotated data are scarce. Empirical results show that our lightweight self-supervised ResNet1D model with domain adaptation achieves up to a 17.5% improvement in 1-shot classification accuracy when pre-trained on in-domain signals (i.e., radar signals) and up to a 16.31% improvement when pre-trained on out-of-domain signals (i.e., comm signals), compared to its baseline without using SSL. We also present reference results for several MAE designs and pre-training strategies, establishing a new benchmark for few-shot radar signal classification.

Paperid: 2878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02464.pdf

Abstract:
While recent depth foundation models exhibit strong zero-shot generalization, achieving accurate metric depth across diverse camera types-particularly those with large fields of view (FoV) such as fisheye and 360-degree cameras-remains a significant challenge. This paper presents Depth Any Camera (DAC), a powerful zero-shot metric depth estimation framework that extends a perspective-trained model to effectively handle cameras with varying FoVs. The framework is designed to ensure that all existing 3D data can be leveraged, regardless of the specific camera types used in new applications. Remarkably, DAC is trained exclusively on perspective images but generalizes seamlessly to fisheye and 360-degree cameras without the need for specialized training data. DAC employs Equi-Rectangular Projection (ERP) as a unified image representation, enabling consistent processing of images with diverse FoVs. Its core components include pitch-aware Image-to-ERP conversion with efficient online augmentation to simulate distorted ERP patches from undistorted inputs, FoV alignment operations to enable effective training across a wide range of FoVs, and multi-resolution data augmentation to further address resolution disparities between training and testing. DAC achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot metric depth estimation, improving $Î´_1$ accuracy by up to 50% on multiple fisheye and 360-degree datasets compared to prior metric depth foundation models, demonstrating robust generalization across camera types.

Paperid: 2879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01347.pdf

Abstract:
The goal of voice conversion is to transform the speech of a source speaker to sound like that of a reference speaker while preserving the original content. A key challenge is to extract disentangled linguistic content from the source and voice style from the reference. While existing approaches leverage various methods to isolate the two, a generalization still requires further attention, especially for robustness in zero-shot scenarios. In this paper, we achieve successful disentanglement of content and speaker features by tuning self-supervised speech features with adapters. The adapters are trained to dynamically encode nuanced features from rich self-supervised features, and the decoder fuses them to produce speech that accurately resembles the reference with minimal loss of content. Moreover, we leverage a conditional flow matching decoder with cross-attention speaker conditioning to further boost the synthesis quality and efficiency. Subjective and objective evaluations in a zero-shot scenario demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing models in speech quality and similarity to the reference speech.

Paperid: 2880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15298.pdf

Abstract:
We argue that the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) optimizers are a way to align the large language model (LLM) prompts and their evaluations to the human annotations. We present a comparative analysis of five teleprompter algorithms, namely, Cooperative Prompt Optimization (COPRO), Multi-Stage Instruction Prompt Optimization (MIPRO), BootstrapFewShot, BootstrapFewShot with Optuna, and K-Nearest Neighbor Few Shot, within the DSPy framework with respect to their ability to align with human evaluations. As a concrete example, we focus on optimizing the prompt to align hallucination detection (using LLM as a judge) to human annotated ground truth labels for a publicly available benchmark dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that optimized prompts can outperform various benchmark methods to detect hallucination, and certain telemprompters outperform the others in at least these experiments.

Paperid: 2881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13526.pdf

Abstract:
Model merging combines multiple fine-tuned models into a single one via parameter fusion, achieving improvements across many tasks. However, in the classification task, we find a misalignment issue between merging outputs and the fine-tuned classifier, which limits its effectiveness. In this paper, we first demonstrate the following observations: (1) Merging outputs exhibit the comparable cluster effect with fine-tuned outputs, and already contain necessary classification information; (2) The misalignment between merging outputs and the fine-tuned classifier can converge to an orthogonal transformation, and alleviating this misalignment can significantly enhance the performance of merging models. Based on these observations, we then propose a new protocol FT-Classifier, which fine-tunes an aligned classifier with few-shot unlabeled samples, enabling better evaluation of merging methods and improved classification performance.

Paperid: 2882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11376.pdf

Abstract:
Human experts typically integrate numerical and textual multimodal information to analyze time series. However, most traditional deep learning predictors rely solely on unimodal numerical data, using a fixed-length window for training and prediction on a single dataset, and cannot adapt to different scenarios. The powered pre-trained large language model has introduced new opportunities for time series analysis. Yet, existing methods are either inefficient in training, incapable of handling textual information, or lack zero-shot forecasting capability. In this paper, we innovatively model time series as a foreign language and construct ChatTime, a unified framework for time series and text processing. As an out-of-the-box multimodal time series foundation model, ChatTime provides zero-shot forecasting capability and supports bimodal input/output for both time series and text. We design a series of experiments to verify the superior performance of ChatTime across multiple tasks and scenarios, and create four multimodal datasets to address data gaps. The experimental results demonstrate the potential and utility of ChatTime.

Paperid: 2883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10922.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses the critical challenge of unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL), an area that has received limited attention compared to horizontal federated learning. We introduce the first approach specifically designed to tackle label unlearning in VFL, focusing on scenarios where the active party aims to mitigate the risk of label leakage. Our method leverages a limited amount of labeled data, utilizing manifold mixup to augment the forward embedding of insufficient data, followed by gradient ascent on the augmented embeddings to erase label information from the models. This combination of augmentation and gradient ascent enables high unlearning effectiveness while maintaining efficiency, completing the unlearning procedure within seconds. Extensive experiments conducted on diverse datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ModelNet, validate the efficacy and scalability of our approach. This work represents a significant advancement in federated learning, addressing the unique challenges of unlearning in VFL while preserving both privacy and computational efficiency.

Paperid: 2884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09576.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) and generative AI have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), offering unprecedented capabilities in education. This chapter explores the transformative potential of LLMs in automated question generation and answer assessment. It begins by examining the mechanisms behind LLMs, emphasizing their ability to comprehend and generate human-like text. The chapter then discusses methodologies for creating diverse, contextually relevant questions, enhancing learning through tailored, adaptive strategies. Key prompting techniques, such as zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting, are evaluated for their effectiveness in generating high-quality questions, including open-ended and multiple-choice formats in various languages. Advanced NLP methods like fine-tuning and prompt-tuning are explored for their role in generating task-specific questions, despite associated costs. The chapter also covers the human evaluation of generated questions, highlighting quality variations across different methods and areas for improvement. Furthermore, it delves into automated answer assessment, demonstrating how LLMs can accurately evaluate responses, provide constructive feedback, and identify nuanced understanding or misconceptions. Examples illustrate both successful assessments and areas needing improvement. The discussion underscores the potential of LLMs to replace costly, time-consuming human assessments when appropriately guided, showcasing their advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities in streamlining educational processes.

Paperid: 2885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02244.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) are transforming the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. Nonetheless, the potential of using visual prompts for emotion recognition in these models remains largely unexplored and untapped. Traditional methods in VLLMs struggle with spatial localization and often discard valuable global context. To address this problem, we propose a Set-of-Vision prompting (SoV) approach that enhances zero-shot emotion recognition by using spatial information, such as bounding boxes and facial landmarks, to mark targets precisely. SoV improves accuracy in face count and emotion categorization while preserving the enriched image context. Through a battery of experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-source VLLMs, we evaluate the SoV model's ability to comprehend facial expressions in natural environments. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating spatial visual prompts into VLLMs for improving emotion recognition performance.

Paperid: 2886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06468.pdf

Abstract:
End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have become standard practice for various commercial applications. However, in real-world scenarios, the long-tailed nature of word distribution often leads E2E ASR models to perform well on common words but fall short in recognizing uncommon ones. Recently, the notion of a contextual adapter (CA) was proposed to infuse external knowledge represented by a context word list into E2E ASR models. Although CA can improve recognition performance on rare words, two crucial data imbalance problems remain. First, when using low-frequency words as context words during training, since these words rarely occur in the utterance, CA becomes prone to overfit on attending to the token due to higher-frequency words not being present in the context list. Second, the long-tailed distribution within the context list itself still causes the model to perform poorly on low-frequency context words. In light of this, we explore in-depth the impact of altering the context list to have words with different frequency distributions on model performance, and meanwhile extend CA with a simple yet effective context-balanced learning objective. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 benchmark dataset suggests that using all vocabulary words from the training corpus as the context list and pairing them with our balanced objective yields the best performance, demonstrating a significant reduction in character error rate (CER) by up to 1.21% and a more pronounced 9.44% reduction in the error rate of zero-shot words.

Paperid: 2887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21409.pdf

Abstract:
Adaptive navigation in unfamiliar indoor environments is crucial for household service robots. Despite advances in zero-shot perception and reasoning from vision-language models, existing navigation systems still rely on single-pass scoring at the decision layer, leading to overconfident long-horizon errors and redundant exploration. To tackle these problems, we propose Dual-Stance Cooperative Debate Navigation (DSCD-Nav), a decision mechanism that replaces one-shot scoring with stance-based cross-checking and evidence-aware arbitration to improve action reliability under partial observability. Specifically, given the same observation and candidate action set, we explicitly construct two stances by conditioning the evaluation on diverse and complementary objectives: a Task-Scene Understanding (TSU) stance that prioritizes goal progress from scene-layout cues, and a Safety-Information Balancing (SIB) stance that emphasizes risk and information value. The stances conduct a cooperative debate and make policy by cross-checking their top candidates with cue-grounded arguments. Then, a Navigation Consensus Arbitration (NCA) agent is employed to consolidate both sides' reasons and evidence, optionally triggering lightweight micro-probing to verify uncertain choices, preserving NCA's primary intent while disambiguating. Experiments on HM3Dv1, HM3Dv2, and MP3D demonstrate consistent improvements in success and path efficiency while reducing exploration redundancy.

Paperid: 2888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18200.pdf

Abstract:
Wireless foundation models promise transformative capabilities for channel state information (CSI) processing across diverse 6G network applications, yet face fundamental challenges due to the inherent dual heterogeneity of CSI across both scale and scenario dimensions. However, current pretraining approaches either constrain inputs to fixed dimensions or isolate training by scale, limiting the generalization and scalability of wireless foundation models. In this paper, we propose HeterCSI, a channel-adaptive pretraining framework that reconciles training efficiency with robust cross-scenario generalization via a new understanding of gradient dynamics in heterogeneous CSI pretraining. Our key insight reveals that CSI scale heterogeneity primarily causes destructive gradient interference, while scenario diversity actually promotes constructive gradient alignment when properly managed. Specifically, we formulate heterogeneous CSI batch construction as a partitioning optimization problem that minimizes zero-padding overhead while preserving scenario diversity. To solve this, we develop a scale-aware adaptive batching strategy that aligns CSI samples of similar scales, and design a double-masking mechanism to isolate valid signals from padding artifacts. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that HeterCSI establishes a generalized foundation model without scenario-specific finetuning, achieving superior average performance over full-shot baselines. Compared to the state-of-the-art zero-shot benchmark WiFo, it reduces NMSE by 7.19 dB, 4.08 dB, and 5.27 dB for CSI reconstruction, time-domain, and frequency-domain prediction, respectively. The proposed HeterCSI framework also reduces training latency by 53% compared to existing approaches while improving generalization performance by 1.53 dB on average.

Paperid: 2889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22931.pdf

Abstract:
Structural knowledge graph foundation models aim to generalize reasoning to completely new graphs with unseen entities and relations. A key limitation of existing approaches like Ultra is their reliance on a single relational transformation (e.g., element-wise multiplication) in message passing, which can constrain expressiveness and fail to capture diverse relational and structural patterns exhibited on diverse graphs. In this paper, we propose Gamma, a novel foundation model that introduces multi-head geometric attention to knowledge graph reasoning. Gamma replaces the single relational transformation with multiple parallel ones, including real, complex, split-complex, and dual number based transformations, each designed to model different relational structures. A relational conditioned attention fusion mechanism then adaptively fuses them at link level via a lightweight gating with entropy regularization, allowing the model to robustly emphasize the most appropriate relational bias for each triple pattern. We present a full formalization of these algebraic message functions and discuss how their combination increases expressiveness beyond any single space. Comprehensive experiments on 56 diverse knowledge graphs demonstrate that Gamma consistently outperforms Ultra in zero-shot inductive link prediction, with a 5.5% improvement in mean reciprocal rank on the inductive benchmarks and a 4.4% improvement across all benchmarks, highlighting benefits from complementary geometric representations.

Paperid: 2890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07245.pdf

Abstract:
Textual explanations make image classifier decisions transparent by describing the prediction rationale in natural language. Large vision-language models can generate captions but are designed for general visual understanding, not classifier-specific reasoning. Existing zero-shot explanation methods align global image features with language, producing descriptions of what is visible rather than what drives the prediction. We propose TEXTER, which overcomes this limitation by isolating decision-critical features before alignment. TEXTER identifies the neurons contributing to the prediction and emphasizes the features encoded in those neurons -- i.e., the decision-critical features. It then maps these emphasized features into the CLIP feature space to retrieve textual explanations that reflect the model's reasoning. A sparse autoencoder further improves interpretability, particularly for Transformer architectures. Extensive experiments show that TEXTER generates more faithful and interpretable explanations than existing methods. The code will be publicly released.

Paperid: 2891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19261.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can perceive and understand 3D space and long videos from sequential visual observations. But do vision-language models (VLMs) can? Recent work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art VLMs still struggle to understand 3D space and long videos, although they are powerful in typical vision-language tasks. Current methods often rely on specialized architectural designs to improve performance for 3D tasks and video understanding tasks separately. In contrast, we propose LAST, short for LeArn to Think in Space and Time, to jointly improve 3D spatial and long video understanding for general VLMs with only a set of 2D images as inputs. LAST makes VLMs think in space and time rather than only with text before giving the final answer, building visual thinking trajectories in 3D space and temporal dimension. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LAST in two scenarios: 1) zero-shot, where we directly prompt proprietary models; and 2) fine-tuning general VLMs with data that include thinking trajectories in 3D space and time. We show that LAST brings substantial gains in various benchmarks, including 3 spatial understanding, 4 video understanding, and 3 image understanding tasks. Notably, 15.8% gains on EgoSchema with GPT-4o in a zero-shot manner and 8.3 gains on VSI-Bench compared with Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

Paperid: 2892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17809.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models require significant computational resources for deployment, making quantization essential for practical applications. However, the main obstacle to effective quantization lies in systematic outliers in activations and weights, which cause substantial LLM performance degradation, especially at low-bit settings. While existing transformation-based methods like affine and rotation transformations successfully mitigate outliers, they apply the homogeneous transformation setting, i.e., using the same transformation types across all layers, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution characteristics within LLMs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformation selection framework that systematically determines optimal transformations on a per-layer basis. To this end, we first formulate transformation selection as a differentiable optimization problem to achieve the accurate transformation type for each layer. However, searching for optimal layer-wise transformations for every model is computationally expensive. To this end, we establish the connection between weight distribution kurtosis and accurate transformation type. Specifically, we propose an outlier-guided layer selection method using robust $z$-score normalization that achieves comparable performance to differentiable search with significantly reduced overhead. Comprehensive experiments on LLaMA family models demonstrate that our adaptive approach consistently outperforms the widely-used fixed transformation settings. For example, our method achieves an improvement of up to 4.58 perplexity points and a 2.11% gain in average six-task zero-shot accuracy under aggressive W3A3K2V2 quantization settings for the LLaMA-3-8B model compared to the current best existing method, FlatQuant, demonstrating the necessity of heterogeneous transformation selection for optimal LLM quantization.

Paperid: 2893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07381.pdf

Abstract:
Visuotactile policy learning augments vision-only policies with tactile input, facilitating contact-rich manipulation. However, the high cost of tactile data collection makes sample efficiency the key requirement for developing visuotactile policies. We present EquiTac, a framework that exploits the inherent SO(2) symmetry of in-hand object rotation to improve sample efficiency and generalization for visuotactile policy learning. EquiTac first reconstructs surface normals from raw RGB inputs of vision-based tactile sensors, so rotations of the normal vector field correspond to in-hand object rotations. An SO(2)-equivariant network then predicts a residual rotation action that augments a base visuomotor policy at test time, enabling real-time rotation correction without additional reorientation demonstrations. On a real robot, EquiTac accurately achieves robust zero-shot generalization to unseen in-hand orientations with very few training samples, where baselines fail even with more training data. To our knowledge, this is the first tactile learning method to explicitly encode tactile equivariance for policy learning, yielding a lightweight, symmetry-aware module that improves reliability in contact-rich tasks.

Paperid: 2894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27428.pdf

Abstract:
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to generalize, constrained by narrowly focused task demonstrations or inefficient random exploration. We introduce SoftAE, an uncertainty-aware active exploration framework that autonomously learns task-agnostic and generalizable dynamics models of soft robotic systems. SoftAE employs probabilistic ensemble models to estimate epistemic uncertainty and actively guides exploration toward underrepresented regions of the state-action space, achieving efficient coverage of diverse behaviors without task-specific supervision. We evaluate SoftAE on three simulated soft robotic platforms -- a continuum arm, an articulated fish in fluid, and a musculoskeletal leg with hybrid actuation -- and on a pneumatically actuated continuum soft arm in the real world. Compared with random exploration and task-specific model-based reinforcement learning, SoftAE produces more accurate dynamics models, enables superior zero-shot control on unseen tasks, and maintains robustness under sensing noise, actuation delays, and nonlinear material effects. These results demonstrate that uncertainty-driven active exploration can yield scalable, reusable dynamics models across diverse soft robotic morphologies, representing a step toward more autonomous, adaptable, and data-efficient control in compliant robots.

Paperid: 2895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06612.pdf

Abstract:
Speech-driven talking face synthesis (TFS) focuses on generating lifelike facial animations from audio input. Current TFS models perform well in English but unsatisfactorily in non-English languages, producing wrong mouth shapes and rigid facial expressions. The terrible performance is caused by the English-dominated training datasets and the lack of cross-language generalization abilities. Thus, we propose Multilingual Experts (MuEx), a novel framework featuring a Phoneme-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (PG-MoE) architecture that employs phonemes and visemes as universal intermediaries to bridge audio and video modalities, achieving lifelike multilingual TFS. To alleviate the influence of linguistic differences and dataset bias, we extract audio and video features as phonemes and visemes respectively, which are the basic units of speech sounds and mouth movements. To address audiovisual synchronization issues, we introduce the Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Mechanism (PV-Align), which establishes robust cross-modal correspondences between phonemes and visemes. In addition, we build a Multilingual Talking Face Benchmark (MTFB) comprising 12 diverse languages with 95.04 hours of high-quality videos for training and evaluating multilingual TFS performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuEx achieves superior performance across all languages in MTFB and exhibits effective zero-shot generalization to unseen languages without additional training.

Paperid: 2896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05482.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations underpin modern computational drug dis- covery, materials science, and biochemistry. Recent machine learning models provide high-fidelity MD predictions without the need to repeatedly solve quantum mechanical forces, enabling significant speedups over conventional pipelines. Yet many such methods typically enforce strict equivariance and rely on sequential rollouts, thus limiting their flexibility and simulation efficiency. They are also com- monly single-task, trained on individual molecules and fixed timeframes, which restricts generalization to unseen compounds and extended timesteps. To address these issues, we propose Atomistic Transformer Operator for Molecules (ATOM), a pretrained transformer neural operator for multitask molecular dynamics. ATOM adopts a quasi-equivariant design that requires no explicit molecular graph and employs a temporal attention mechanism, allowing for the accurate parallel decod- ing of multiple future states. To support operator pretraining across chemicals and timescales, we curate TG80, a large, diverse, and numerically stable MD dataset with over 2.5 million femtoseconds of trajectories across 80 compounds. ATOM achieves state-of-the-art performance on established single-task benchmarks, such as MD17, RMD17 and MD22. After multitask pretraining on TG80, ATOM shows exceptional zero-shot generalization to unseen molecules across varying time hori- zons. We believe ATOM represents a significant step toward accurate, efficient, and transferable molecular dynamics models

Paperid: 2897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02084.pdf

Abstract:
In the World Wide Web, reliable time series forecasts provide the forward-looking signals that drive resource planning, cache placement, and anomaly response, enabling platforms to operate efficiently as user behavior and content distributions evolve. Compared with other domains, time series forecasting for Web applications requires much faster responsiveness to support real-time decision making. We present KAIROS, a non-autoregressive time series forecasting framework that directly models segment-level multi-peak distributions. Unlike autoregressive approaches, KAIROS avoids error accumulation and achieves just-in-time inference, while improving over existing non-autoregressive models that collapse to over-smoothed predictions. Trained on the large-scale corpus, KAIROS demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on six widely used benchmarks, delivering forecasting performance comparable to state-of-the-art foundation models with similar scale, at a fraction of their inference cost. Beyond empirical results, KAIROS highlights the importance of non-autoregressive design as a scalable paradigm for foundation models in time series.

Paperid: 2898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25682.pdf

Abstract:
AI-generated image (AIGI) detection and source model attribution remain central challenges in combating deepfake abuses, primarily due to the structural diversity of generative models. Current detection methods are prone to overfitting specific forgery traits, whereas source attribution offers a robust alternative through fine-grained feature discrimination. However, synthetic image attribution remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, well-categorized synthetic datasets, limiting its practicality and compatibility with detection systems. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for image attribution called open-set, few-shot source identification. This paradigm is designed to reliably identify unseen generators using only limited samples, making it highly suitable for real-world application. To this end, we introduce OmniDFA (Omni Detector and Few-shot Attributor), a novel framework for AIGI that not only assesses the authenticity of images, but also determines the synthesis origins in a few-shot manner. To facilitate this work, we construct OmniFake, a large class-aware synthetic image dataset that curates $1.17$ M images from $45$ distinct generative models, substantially enriching the foundational resources for research on both AIGI detection and attribution. Experiments demonstrate that OmniDFA exhibits excellent capability in open-set attribution and achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance on AIGI detection. Our dataset and code will be made available.

Paperid: 2899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21207.pdf

Abstract:
Prognostics and Health Management ensures the reliability, safety, and efficiency of complex engineered systems by enabling fault detection, anticipating equipment failures, and optimizing maintenance activities throughout an asset lifecycle. However, real-world PHM presents persistent challenges: sensor data is often noisy or incomplete, available labels are limited, and degradation behaviors and system interdependencies can be highly complex and nonlinear. Physics-informed machine learning has emerged as a promising approach to address these limitations by embedding physical knowledge into data-driven models. This review examines how incorporating learning and observational biases through physics-informed modeling and data strategies can guide models toward physically consistent and reliable predictions. Learning biases embed physical constraints into model training through physics-informed loss functions and governing equations, or by incorporating properties like monotonicity. Observational biases influence data selection and synthesis to ensure models capture realistic system behavior through virtual sensing for estimating unmeasured states, physics-based simulation for data augmentation, and multi-sensor fusion strategies. The review then examines how these approaches enable the transition from passive prediction to active decision-making through reinforcement learning, which allows agents to learn maintenance policies that respect physical constraints while optimizing operational objectives. This closes the loop between model-based predictions, simulation, and actual system operation, empowering adaptive decision-making. Finally, the review addresses the critical challenge of scaling PHM solutions from individual assets to fleet-wide deployment. Fast adaptation methods including meta-learning and few-shot learning are reviewed alongside domain generalization techniques ...

Paperid: 2900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17197.pdf

Abstract:
Modern signal processing (SP) pipelines, whether model-based or data-driven, often constrained by complex and fragmented workflow, rely heavily on expert knowledge and manual engineering, and struggle with adaptability and generalization under limited data. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, broad general-purpose knowledge, in-context learning, and cross-modal transfer abilities, positioning them as powerful tools for automating and generalizing SP workflows. Motivated by these potentials, we introduce SignalLLM, the first general-purpose LLM-based agent framework for general SP tasks. Unlike prior LLM-based SP approaches that are limited to narrow applications or tricky prompting, SignalLLM introduces a principled, modular architecture. It decomposes high-level SP goals into structured subtasks via in-context learning and domain-specific retrieval, followed by hierarchical planning through adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and refinement; these subtasks are then executed through prompt-based reasoning, cross-modal reasoning, code synthesis, model invocation, or data-driven LLM-assisted modeling. Its generalizable design enables the flexible selection of problem solving strategies across different signal modalities, task types, and data conditions. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of SignalLLM through five representative tasks in communication and sensing, such as radar target detection, human activity recognition, and text compression. Experimental results show superior performance over traditional and existing LLM-based methods, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 2901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10006.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel model of few-part-shot font generation, which designs an entire font based on a set of partial design elements, i.e., partial shapes. Unlike conventional few-shot font generation, which requires entire character shapes for a couple of character classes, our approach only needs partial shapes as input. The proposed model not only improves the efficiency of font creation but also provides insights into how partial design details influence the entire structure of the individual characters.

Paperid: 2902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08306.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid adoption of generative AI tools is reshaping how scholars produce and communicate knowledge, raising questions about who benefits and who is left behind. We analyze over 230,000 Scopus-indexed computer science articles between 2021 and 2025 to examine how AI-assisted writing alters scholarly visibility across regions. Using zero-shot detection of AI-likeness, we track stylistic changes in writing and link them to citation counts, journal placement, and global citation flows before and after ChatGPT. Our findings reveal uneven outcomes: authors in the Global East adopt AI tools more aggressively, yet Western authors gain more per unit of adoption due to pre-existing penalties for "humanlike" writing. Prestigious journals continue to privilege more human-sounding texts, creating tensions between visibility and gatekeeping. Network analyses show modest increases in Eastern visibility and tighter intra-regional clustering, but little structural integration overall. These results highlight how AI adoption reconfigures the labor of academic writing and reshapes opportunities for recognition.

Paperid: 2903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06971.pdf

Abstract:
Quranic Question Answering presents unique challenges due to the linguistic complexity of Classical Arabic and the semantic richness of religious texts. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework that addresses both passage retrieval and answer extraction. For passage retrieval, we ensemble fine-tuned Arabic language models to achieve superior ranking performance. For answer extraction, we employ instruction-tuned large language models with few-shot prompting to overcome the limitations of fine-tuning on small datasets. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the Quran QA 2023 Shared Task, with a MAP@10 of 0.3128 and MRR@10 of 0.5763 for retrieval, and a pAP@10 of 0.669 for extraction, substantially outperforming previous methods. These results demonstrate that combining model ensembling and instruction-tuned language models effectively addresses the challenges of low-resource question answering in specialized domains.

Paperid: 2904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00429.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in graph-based learning by propagating information among neighbor nodes via predefined aggregation mechanisms. However, such fixed schemes often suffer from two key limitations. First, they cannot handle the imbalance in node informativeness -- some nodes are rich in information, while others remain sparse. Second, predefined message passing primarily leverages local structural similarity while ignoring global semantic relationships across the graph, limiting the model's ability to capture distant but relevant information. We propose Retrieval-augmented Graph Agentic Network (ReaGAN), an agent-based framework that empowers each node with autonomous, node-level decision-making. Each node acts as an agent that independently plans its next action based on its internal memory, enabling node-level planning and adaptive message propagation. Additionally, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows nodes to access semantically relevant content and build global relationships in the graph. ReaGAN achieves competitive performance under few-shot in-context settings using a frozen LLM backbone without fine-tuning, showcasing the potential of agentic planning and local-global retrieval in graph learning.

Paperid: 2905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23227.pdf

Abstract:
Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a complex neurodegenerative disorder, requires analysis of heterogeneous biomarkers (e.g., neuroimaging, genetic risk factors, cognitive tests, and cerebrospinal fluid proteins) typically represented in a tabular format. With flexible few-shot reasoning, multimodal integration, and natural-language-based interpretability, large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities for prediction with structured biomedical data. We propose a novel framework called TAP-GPT, Tabular Alzheimer's Prediction GPT, that adapts TableGPT2, a multimodal tabular-specialized LLM originally developed for business intelligence tasks, for AD diagnosis using structured biomarker data with small sample sizes. Our approach constructs few-shot tabular prompts using in-context learning examples from structured biomedical data and finetunes TableGPT2 using the parameter-efficient qLoRA adaption for a clinical binary classification task of AD or cognitively normal (CN). The TAP-GPT framework harnesses the powerful tabular understanding ability of TableGPT2 and the encoded prior knowledge of LLMs to outperform more advanced general-purpose LLMs and a tabular foundation model (TFM) developed for prediction tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first application of LLMs to the prediction task using tabular biomarker data, paving the way for future LLM-driven multi-agent frameworks in biomedical informatics.

Paperid: 2906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17268.pdf

Abstract:
Polarization images facilitate image enhancement and 3D reconstruction tasks, but the limited accessibility of polarization cameras hinders their broader application. This gap drives the need for synthesizing photorealistic polarization images. The existing polarization simulator Mitsuba relies on a parametric polarization image formation model and requires extensive 3D assets covering shape and PBR materials, preventing it from generating large-scale photorealistic images. To address this problem, we propose PolarAnything, capable of synthesizing polarization images from a single RGB input with both photorealism and physical accuracy, eliminating the dependency on 3D asset collections. Drawing inspiration from the zero-shot performance of pretrained diffusion models, we introduce a diffusion-based generative framework with an effective representation strategy that preserves the fidelity of polarization properties. Experiments show that our model generates high-quality polarization images and supports downstream tasks like shape from polarization.

Paperid: 2907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12391.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for enhancing robotic path planning. This paper assesses visual input's utility for multimodal LLMs in such tasks via a comprehensive benchmark. We evaluated 15 multimodal LLMs on generating valid and optimal paths in 2D grid environments, simulating simplified robotic planning, comparing text-only versus text-plus-visual inputs across varying model sizes and grid complexities. Our results indicate moderate success rates on simpler small grids, where visual input or few-shot text prompting offered some benefits. However, performance significantly degraded on larger grids, highlighting a scalability challenge. While larger models generally achieved higher average success, the visual modality was not universally dominant over well-structured text for these multimodal systems, and successful paths on simpler grids were generally of high quality. These results indicate current limitations in robust spatial reasoning, constraint adherence, and scalable multimodal integration, identifying areas for future LLM development in robotic path planning.

Paperid: 2908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11352.pdf

Abstract:
Logistics operators, from battlefield coordinators rerouting airlifts ahead of a storm to warehouse managers juggling late trucks, often face life-critical decisions that demand both domain expertise and rapid and continuous replanning. While popular methods like integer programming yield logistics plans that satisfy user-defined logical constraints, they are slow and assume an idealized mathematical model of the environment that does not account for uncertainty. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) can handle uncertainty and promise to accelerate replanning while lowering the barrier to entry by translating free-form utterances into executable plans, yet they remain prone to misinterpretations and hallucinations that jeopardize safety and cost. We introduce a neurosymbolic framework that pairs the accessibility of natural-language dialogue with verifiable guarantees on goal interpretation. It converts user requests into structured planning specifications, quantifies its own uncertainty at the field and token level, and invokes an interactive clarification loop whenever confidence falls below an adaptive threshold. A lightweight model, fine-tuned on just 100 uncertainty-filtered examples, surpasses the zero-shot performance of GPT-4.1 while cutting inference latency by nearly 50%. These preliminary results highlight a practical path toward certifiable, real-time, and user-aligned decision-making for complex logistics.

Paperid: 2909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10085.pdf

Abstract:
Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT), a recently proposed Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, has attracted widespread attention for significantly improving parameter efficiency by editing representation space alone. In this work, we investigate applying ReFT to complex reasoning tasks. However, directly using the native ReFT method, which modifies fixed representations at the beginning and end of each layer, yields suboptimal performance, as these fixed-position representations have uncertain impact on the outputs. We observe that, in complex reasoning tasks, there often exist certain critical representations. These representations either integrate significant information from preceding layers or regulate subsequent layer representations. Through layer-by-layer propagation, they exert a substantial influence on the final output. Naturally, fine-tuning these critical representations has the potential to greatly enhance reasoning performance. Building upon these insights, we propose Critical Representation Fine-Tuning (CRFT), a novel method that identifies and optimizes these critical representations through information flow analysis. CRFT operates within a supervised learning framework, dynamically optimizing critical representations in a low-rank linear subspace while freezing the base model. The effectiveness and efficiency of our method are validated across eight benchmarks for arithmetic and commonsense reasoning, using LLaMA and Mistral model families. Furthermore, our method also adapts effectively to few-shot settings, boosting one-shot accuracy by 16.4%. Our work highlights the untapped potential of representation-level optimization for CoT reasoning, offering a lightweight yet powerful alternative to traditional PEFT methods.

Paperid: 2910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05911.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel Differentiable Reward Optimization (DiffRO) method aimed at enhancing the performance of neural codec language models based text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In contrast to conventional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches applied to TTS, DiffRO directly compute the rewards based on neural codec tokens, rather than relying on synthesized audio. Furthermore, we employ the Gumbel-Softmax technique to render the reward function differentiable, thereby streamlining the RLHF training process. Additionally, we introduce a multi-task reward (MTR) model which can provide feedback from different perspectives and find that it can augment the system's capability to follow instructions effectively.Experimental results indicate that DiffRO significantly improves the pronunciation accuracy of the TTS system, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) WER results on the seed-tts-eval benchmark. Moreover, with the integration of the MTR model, we demonstrate the ability to control emotional and quality attributes in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 2911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10335.pdf

Abstract:
3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is an innovative rendering technique that surpasses the neural radiance field (NeRF) in both rendering speed and visual quality by leveraging an explicit 3D scene representation. Existing 3DGS approaches require a large number of calibrated views to generate a consistent and complete scene representation. When input views are limited, 3DGS tends to overfit the training views, leading to noticeable degradation in rendering quality. To address this limitation, we propose a Point-wise Feature-Aware Gaussian Splatting framework that enables real-time, high-quality rendering from sparse training views. Specifically, we first employ the latest stereo foundation model to estimate accurate camera poses and reconstruct a dense point cloud for Gaussian initialization. We then encode the colour attributes of each 3D Gaussian by sampling and aggregating multiscale 2D appearance features from sparse inputs. To enhance point-wise appearance representation, we design a point interaction network based on a self-attention mechanism, allowing each Gaussian point to interact with its nearest neighbors. These enriched features are subsequently decoded into Gaussian parameters through two lightweight multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for final rendering. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms NeRF-based approaches and achieves competitive performance under few-shot settings compared to the state-of-the-art 3DGS methods.

Paperid: 2912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10014.pdf

Abstract:
Graphs are essential for modeling complex interactions across domains such as social networks, biology, and recommendation systems. Traditional Graph Neural Networks, particularly Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), rely heavily on supervised learning, limiting their generalization and applicability in label-scarce scenarios. Recent self-supervised approaches still require labeled fine-tuning, limiting their effectiveness in zero-shot scenarios. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language tasks but face significant challenges when applied to graphs, including preserving reasoning abilities, managing extensive token lengths from rich node attributes, and being limited to textual-attributed graphs (TAGs) and a single level task. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Node-Oriented Conceptualization LLM (NOCL), a novel framework that leverages two core techniques: 1) node description, which converts heterogeneous node attributes into structured natural language, extending LLM from TAGs to non-TAGs; 2) node concept, which encodes node descriptions into compact semantic embeddings using pretrained language models, significantly reducing token lengths by up to 93.9% compared to directly using node descriptions. Additionally, our NOCL employs graph representation descriptors to unify graph tasks at various levels into a shared, language-based query format, paving a new direction for Graph Foundation Models. Experimental results validate NOCL's competitive supervised performance relative to traditional MPNNs and hybrid LLM-MPNN methods and demonstrate superior generalization in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 2913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09944.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has identified retrieval heads (Wu et al., 2025b), a subset of attention heads responsible for retrieving salient information in long-context language models (LMs), as measured by their copy-paste behavior in Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. In this paper, we introduce QRHEAD (Query-Focused Retrieval Head), an improved set of attention heads that enhance retrieval from long context. We identify QRHEAD by aggregating attention scores with respect to the input query, using a handful of examples from real-world tasks (e.g., long-context QA). We further introduce QR- RETRIEVER, an efficient and effective retriever that uses the accumulated attention mass of QRHEAD as retrieval scores. We use QR- RETRIEVER for long-context reasoning by selecting the most relevant parts with the highest retrieval scores. On multi-hop reasoning tasks LongMemEval and CLIPPER, this yields over 10% performance gains over full context and outperforms strong dense retrievers. We also evaluate QRRETRIEVER as a re-ranker on the BEIR benchmark and find that it achieves strong zero-shot performance, outperforming other LLM-based re-rankers such as RankGPT. Further analysis shows that both the querycontext attention scoring and task selection are crucial for identifying QRHEAD with strong downstream utility. Overall, our work contributes a general-purpose retriever and offers interpretability insights into the long-context capabilities of LMs.

Paperid: 2914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08372.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel multimodal framework for hate speech detection in deepfake audio, excelling even in zero-shot scenarios. Unlike previous approaches, our method uses contrastive learning to jointly align audio and text representations across languages. We present the first benchmark dataset with 127,290 paired text and synthesized speech samples in six languages: English and five low-resource Indian languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu). Our model learns a shared semantic embedding space, enabling robust cross-lingual and cross-modal classification. Experiments on two multilingual test sets show our approach outperforms baselines, achieving accuracies of 0.819 and 0.701, and generalizes well to unseen languages. This demonstrates the advantage of combining modalities for hate speech detection in synthetic media, especially in low-resource settings where unimodal models falter. The Dataset is available at https://www.iab-rubric.org/resources.

Paperid: 2915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08359.pdf

Abstract:
Inference-time steering aims to alter the response characteristics of large language models (LLMs) without modifying their underlying parameters. A critical step in this process is the identification of internal modules within LLMs that are associated with the target behavior. However, current approaches to module selection often depend on superficial cues or ad-hoc heuristics, which can result in suboptimal or unintended outcomes. In this work, we propose a principled causal-attribution framework for identifying behavior-relevant attention heads in transformers. For each head, we train a vector-quantized autoencoder (VQ-AE) on its attention activations, partitioning the latent space into behavior-relevant and behavior-irrelevant subspaces, each quantized with a shared learnable codebook. We assess the behavioral relevance of each head by quantifying the separability of VQ-AE encodings for behavior-aligned versus behavior-violating responses using a binary classification metric. This yields a behavioral relevance score that reflects each head discriminative capacity with respect to the target behavior, guiding both selection and importance weighting. Experiments on seven LLMs from two model families and five behavioral steering datasets demonstrate that our method enables more accurate inference-time interventions, achieving superior performance on the truthfulness-steering task. Furthermore, the heads selected by our approach exhibit strong zero-shot generalization in cross-domain truthfulness-steering scenarios.

Paperid: 2916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06756.pdf

Abstract:
Quantization is essential for deploying large audio language models (LALMs) efficiently in resource-constrained environments. However, its impact on complex tasks, such as zero-shot audio spoofing detection, remains underexplored. This study evaluates the zero-shot capabilities of five LALMs, GAMA, LTU-AS, MERaLiON, Qwen-Audio, and SALMONN, across three distinct datasets: ASVspoof2019, In-the-Wild, and WaveFake, and investigates their robustness to quantization (FP32, FP16, INT8). Despite high initial spoof detection accuracy, our analysis demonstrates severe predictive biases toward spoof classification across all models, rendering their practical performance equivalent to random classification. Interestingly, quantization to FP16 precision resulted in negligible performance degradation compared to FP32, effectively halving memory and computational requirements without materially impacting accuracy. However, INT8 quantization intensified model biases, significantly degrading balanced accuracy. These findings highlight critical architectural limitations and emphasize FP16 quantization as an optimal trade-off, providing guidelines for practical deployment and future model refinement.

Paperid: 2917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06367.pdf

Abstract:
Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) store temporal facts with quadruple formats (s, p, o, t). Existing Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding (TKGE) models perform link prediction tasks in transductive or semi-inductive settings, which means the entities, relations, and temporal information in the test graph are fully or partially observed during training. Such reliance on seen elements during inference limits the models' ability to transfer to new domains and generalize to real-world scenarios. A central limitation is the difficulty in learning representations for entities, relations, and timestamps that are transferable and not tied to dataset-specific vocabularies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the first fully-inductive approach to temporal knowledge graph link prediction. Our model employs sinusoidal positional encodings to capture fine-grained temporal patterns and generates adaptive entity and relation representations using message passing conditioned on both local and global temporal contexts. Our model design is agnostic to temporal granularity and time span, effectively addressing temporal discrepancies across TKGs and facilitating time-aware structural information transfer. As a pretrained, scalable, and transferable model, POSTRA demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on unseen temporal knowledge graphs, effectively generalizing to novel entities, relations, and timestamps. Extensive theoretical analysis and empirical results show that a single pretrained model can improve zero-shot performance on various inductive temporal reasoning scenarios, marking a significant step toward a foundation model for temporal KGs.

Paperid: 2918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03355.pdf

Abstract:
Adversarial input attacks can cause a significant shift of CLIP embeddings. This can affect the downstream robustness of models incorporating CLIP in the pipeline, such as text-to-image generative models or large vision language models. While some efforts have been done towards making the CLIP image encoders robust, the robustness of text encoders remains unexplored. In this work, we cover this gap in the literature. We propose LEAF: an efficient adversarial finetuning method for the text domain, with the ability to scale to large CLIP models. Our models significantly improve the zero-shot adversarial accuracy in the text domain, while maintaining the vision performance provided by robust image encoders. When combined with text-to-image diffusion models, we can improve the generation quality under adversarial noise. When employing our robust CLIP encoders in multimodal retrieval tasks, we improve the recall under adversarial noise over standard CLIP models. Finally, we show that robust text encoders facilitate better reconstruction of input text from its embedding via direct optimization.

Paperid: 2919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00630.pdf

Abstract:
Decision-making in building energy systems critically depends on the predictive accuracy of relevant time-series models. In scenarios lacking extensive data from a target building, foundation models (FMs) represent a promising technology that can leverage prior knowledge from vast and diverse pre-training datasets to construct accurate probabilistic predictors for use in decision-making tools. This paper investigates the applicability and fine-tuning strategies of time-series foundation models (TSFMs) in building energy forecasting. We analyze both full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches, particularly low-rank adaptation (LoRA), by using real-world data from a commercial net-zero energy building to capture signals such as room occupancy, carbon emissions, plug loads, and HVAC energy consumption. Our analysis reveals that the zero-shot predictive performance of TSFMs is generally suboptimal. To address this shortcoming, we demonstrate that employing either full fine-tuning or parameter-efficient fine-tuning significantly enhances forecasting accuracy, even with limited historical data. Notably, fine-tuning with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) substantially reduces computational costs without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, fine-tuned TSFMs consistently outperform state-of-the-art deep forecasting models (e.g., temporal fusion transformers) in accuracy, robustness, and generalization across varying building zones and seasonal conditions. These results underline the efficacy of TSFMs for practical, data-constrained building energy management systems, enabling improved decision-making in pursuit of energy efficiency and sustainability.

Paperid: 2920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21904.pdf

Abstract:
Instance segmentation demands costly per-pixel annotations and computationally expensive models. We introduce CAST, a semi-supervised knowledge distillation (SSKD) framework that compresses pre-trained vision foundation models (VFM) into compact experts using limited labeled and abundant unlabeled data. CAST unfolds in three stages: (1) domain adaptation of the VFM(s) via self-training with contrastive calibration, (2) knowledge transfer through a unified multi-objective loss, and (3) student refinement to mitigate residual pseudo-label bias. Central to CAST is an \emph{instance-aware pixel-wise contrastive loss} that fuses mask and class scores to extract informative negatives and enforce clear inter-instance margins. By maintaining this contrastive signal across both adaptation and distillation, we align teacher and student embeddings and fully leverage unlabeled images. On Cityscapes and ADE20K, our ~11x smaller student improves over its zero-shot VFM teacher(s) by +8.5 and +7.1 AP, surpasses adapted teacher(s) by +3.4 and +1.5 AP, and further outperforms state-of-the-art SSKD methods on both benchmarks.

Paperid: 2921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20422.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) have shown promise in enabling zero-shot reasoning over unseen graphs by learning transferable patterns. However, most existing KGFMs rely solely on graph structure, overlooking the rich semantic signals encoded in textual attributes. We introduce SEMMA, a dual-module KGFM that systematically integrates transferable textual semantics alongside structure. SEMMA leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enrich relation identifiers, generating semantic embeddings that subsequently form a textual relation graph, which is fused with the structural component. Across 54 diverse KGs, SEMMA outperforms purely structural baselines like ULTRA in fully inductive link prediction. Crucially, we show that in more challenging generalization settings, where the test-time relation vocabulary is entirely unseen, structural methods collapse while SEMMA is 2x more effective. Our findings demonstrate that textual semantics are critical for generalization in settings where structure alone fails, highlighting the need for foundation models that unify structural and linguistic signals in knowledge reasoning.

Paperid: 2922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19397.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), which are pretrained on large-scale, cross-domain data and capable of zero-shot forecasting in new scenarios without further training, are increasingly adopted in real-world applications. However, as the zero-shot forecasting paradigm gets popular, a critical yet overlooked question emerges: Are TSFMs robust to adversarial input perturbations? Such perturbations could be exploited in man-in-the-middle attacks or data poisoning. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic investigation into the adversarial robustness of TSFMs. Our results show that even minimal perturbations can induce significant and controllable changes in forecast behaviors, including trend reversal, temporal drift, and amplitude shift, posing serious risks to TSFM-based services. Through experiments on representative TSFMs and multiple datasets, we reveal their consistent vulnerabilities and identify potential architectural designs, such as structural sparsity and multi-task pretraining, that may improve robustness. Our findings offer actionable guidance for designing more resilient forecasting systems and provide a critical assessment of the adversarial robustness of TSFMs.

Paperid: 2923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18503.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) often exhibit suboptimal attention distribution on visual inputs, leading to hallucinated or inaccurate outputs. Existing mitigation methods primarily rely on inference-time interventions, which are limited in attention adaptation or require additional supervision. To address this, we propose A$^3$Tune, a novel fine-tuning framework for Automatic Attention Alignment Tuning. A$^3$Tune leverages zero-shot weak labels from SAM, refines them into prompt-aware labels using BioMedCLIP, and then selectively modifies visually-critical attention heads to improve alignment while minimizing interference. Additionally, we introduce a A$^3$MoE module, enabling adaptive parameter selection for attention tuning across diverse prompts and images. Extensive experiments on medical VQA and report generation benchmarks show that A$^3$Tune outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving enhanced attention distributions and performance in Med-LVLMs.

Paperid: 2924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16060.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Model Feedback Learning (MFL), a novel test-time optimization framework for optimizing inputs to pre-trained AI models or deployed hardware systems without requiring any retraining of the models or modifications to the hardware. In contrast to existing methods that rely on adjusting model parameters, MFL leverages a lightweight reverse model to iteratively search for optimal inputs, enabling efficient adaptation to new objectives under deployment constraints. This framework is particularly advantageous in real-world settings, such as semiconductor manufacturing recipe generation, where modifying deployed systems is often infeasible or cost-prohibitive. We validate MFL on semiconductor plasma etching tasks, where it achieves target recipe generation in just five iterations, significantly outperforming both Bayesian optimization and human experts. Beyond semiconductor applications, MFL also demonstrates strong performance in chemical processes (e.g., chemical vapor deposition) and electronic systems (e.g., wire bonding), highlighting its broad applicability. Additionally, MFL incorporates stability-aware optimization, enhancing robustness to process variations and surpassing conventional supervised learning and random search methods in high-dimensional control settings. By enabling few-shot adaptation, MFL provides a scalable and efficient paradigm for deploying intelligent control in real-world environments.

Paperid: 2925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05753.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-embodiment generalization underpins the vision of building generalist embodied agents for any robot, yet its enabling factors remain poorly understood. We investigate embodiment scaling laws, the hypothesis that increasing the number of training embodiments improves generalization to unseen ones, using robot locomotion as a test bed. We procedurally generate ~1,000 embodiments with topological, geometric, and joint-level kinematic variations, and train policies on random subsets. We observe positive scaling trends supporting the hypothesis, and find that embodiment scaling enables substantially broader generalization than data scaling on fixed embodiments. Our best policy, trained on the full dataset, transfers zero-shot to novel embodiments in simulation and the real world, including the Unitree Go2 and H1. These results represent a step toward general embodied intelligence, with relevance to adaptive control for configurable robots, morphology co-design, and beyond.

Paperid: 2926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07125.pdf

Abstract:
Estimating the 3D world from 2D monocular images is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the labour-intensive nature of 3D annotations. To simplify label acquisition, this work proposes a novel approach that bridges 2D vision foundation models (VFMs) with 3D tasks by decoupling 3D supervision into an ensemble of image-level primitives, e.g., semantic and geometric components. As a key motivator, we leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language models for image semantics. However, due to the notorious ill-posed problem - multiple distinct 3D scenes can produce identical 2D projections, directly inferring metric depth from a monocular image in a zero-shot manner is unsuitable. In contrast, 2D VFMs provide promising sources of relative depth, which theoretically aligns with metric depth when properly scaled and offset. Thus, we adapt the relative depth derived from VFMs into metric depth by optimising the scale and offset using temporal consistency, also known as novel view synthesis, without access to ground-truth metric depth. Consequently, we project the semantics into 3D space using the reconstructed metric depth, thereby providing 3D supervision. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. For instance, the proposed method surpasses the current state-of-the-art by 3.34% mIoU on nuScenes for voxel occupancy prediction.

Paperid: 2927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04953.pdf

Abstract:
State space models have shown significant promise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and, more recently, computer vision. This paper introduces a new methodology leveraging Mamba and Masked Autoencoder networks for point cloud data in both supervised and self-supervised learning. We propose three key contributions to enhance Mamba's capability in processing complex point cloud structures. First, we exploit the spectrum of a graph Laplacian to capture patch connectivity, defining an isometry-invariant traversal order that is robust to viewpoints and better captures shape manifolds than traditional 3D grid-based traversals. Second, we adapt segmentation via a recursive patch partitioning strategy informed by Laplacian spectral components, allowing finer integration and segment analysis. Third, we address token placement in Masked Autoencoder for Mamba by restoring tokens to their original positions, which preserves essential order and improves learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the improvements of our approach in classification, segmentation, and few-shot tasks over state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 2928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03335.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how individuals perceive and react to information is fundamental for advancing social and behavioral sciences and developing human-centered AI systems. Current approaches often lack the granular data needed to model these personalized responses, relying instead on aggregated labels that obscure the rich variability driven by individual differences. We introduce iNews, a novel large-scale dataset specifically designed to facilitate the modeling of personalized affective responses to news content. Our dataset comprises annotations from 291 demographically diverse UK participants across 2,899 multimodal Facebook news posts from major UK outlets, with an average of 5.18 annotators per sample. For each post, annotators provide multifaceted labels including valence, arousal, dominance, discrete emotions, content relevance judgments, sharing likelihood, and modality importance ratings. Crucially, we collect comprehensive annotator persona information covering demographics, personality, media trust, and consumption patterns, which explain 15.2% of annotation variance - substantially higher than existing NLP datasets. Incorporating this information yields a 7% accuracy gain in zero-shot prediction and remains beneficial even with 32-shot in-context learning. iNews opens new possibilities for research in LLM personalization, subjectivity, affective computing, and human behavior simulation.

Paperid: 2929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15681.pdf

Abstract:
Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a single-step student generator via variational score distillation, which matches the distribution of samples generated by the student to the teacher's distribution. However, these approaches use the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for distribution matching which is known to be mode seeking. In this paper, we generalize the distribution matching approach using a novel $f$-divergence minimization framework, termed $f$-distill, that covers different divergences with different trade-offs in terms of mode coverage and training variance. We derive the gradient of the $f$-divergence between the teacher and student distributions and show that it is expressed as the product of their score differences and a weighting function determined by their density ratio. This weighting function naturally emphasizes samples with higher density in the teacher distribution, when using a less mode-seeking divergence. We observe that the popular variational score distillation approach using the reverse-KL divergence is a special case within our framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternative $f$-divergences, such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon divergences, outperform the current best variational score distillation methods across image generation tasks. In particular, when using Jensen-Shannon divergence, $f$-distill achieves current state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet64 and zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/f-distill

Paperid: 2930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14397.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce PhotoDoodle, a novel image editing framework designed to facilitate photo doodling by enabling artists to overlay decorative elements onto photographs. Photo doodling is challenging because the inserted elements must appear seamlessly integrated with the background, requiring realistic blending, perspective alignment, and contextual coherence. Additionally, the background must be preserved without distortion, and the artist's unique style must be captured efficiently from limited training data. These requirements are not addressed by previous methods that primarily focus on global style transfer or regional inpainting. The proposed method, PhotoDoodle, employs a two-stage training strategy. Initially, we train a general-purpose image editing model, OmniEditor, using large-scale data. Subsequently, we fine-tune this model with EditLoRA using a small, artist-curated dataset of before-and-after image pairs to capture distinct editing styles and techniques. To enhance consistency in the generated results, we introduce a positional encoding reuse mechanism. Additionally, we release a PhotoDoodle dataset featuring six high-quality styles. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advanced performance and robustness of our method in customized image editing, opening new possibilities for artistic creation.

Paperid: 2931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05867.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) remain prone to factual inaccuracies and computational errors, including hallucinations and mistakes in mathematical reasoning. Recent work augmented LLMs with tools to mitigate these shortcomings, but often requires curated gold tool-use demonstrations. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can learn to use tools without demonstrations. First, we analyse zero-shot prompting strategies to guide LLMs in tool utilisation. Second, we propose a self-training method to synthesise tool-use traces using the LLM itself. We compare supervised fine-tuning and preference fine-tuning techniques for fine-tuning the model on datasets constructed using existing Question Answering (QA) datasets, i.e., TriviaQA and GSM8K. Experiments show that tool-use enhances performance on a long-tail knowledge task: 3.7% on PopQA, which is used solely for evaluation, but leads to mixed results on other datasets, i.e., TriviaQA, GSM8K, and NQ-Open. Our findings highlight the potential and challenges of integrating external tools into LLMs without demonstrations.

Paperid: 2932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04519.pdf

Abstract:
Most current zero-shot voice conversion methods rely on externally supervised components, particularly speaker encoders, for training. To explore alternatives that eliminate this dependency, this paper introduces GenVC, a novel framework that disentangles speaker identity and linguistic content from speech signals in a self-supervised manner. GenVC leverages speech tokenizers and an autoregressive, Transformer-based language model as its backbone for speech generation. This design supports large-scale training while enhancing both source speaker privacy protection and target speaker cloning fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that GenVC achieves notably higher speaker similarity, with naturalness on par with leading zero-shot approaches. Moreover, due to its autoregressive formulation, GenVC introduces flexibility in temporal alignment, reducing the preservation of source prosody and speaker-specific traits, and making it highly effective for voice anonymization.

Paperid: 2933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03147.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), when customized with post-training on tabular data, can acquire general tabular in-context learning (TabICL) capabilities. These models are able to transfer effectively across diverse data schemas and different task domains. However, existing LLM-based TabICL approaches are constrained to few-shot scenarios due to the sequence length limitations of LLMs, as tabular instances represented in plain text consume substantial tokens. To address this limitation and enable scalable TabICL for any data size, we propose retrieval-augmented LLMs tailored to tabular data. Our approach incorporates a customized retrieval module, combined with retrieval-guided instruction-tuning for LLMs. This enables LLMs to effectively leverage larger datasets, achieving significantly improved performance across 69 widely recognized datasets and demonstrating promising scaling behavior. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art tabular models reveal that, while LLM-based TabICL still lags behind well-tuned numeric models in overall performance, it uncovers powerful algorithms under limited contexts, enhances ensemble diversity, and excels on specific datasets. These unique properties underscore the potential of language as a universal and accessible interface for scalable tabular data learning.

Paperid: 2934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18457.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent questions across languages, we observe significant performance disparities. To address this, we explore the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning ability of Language Models (CALM) to align knowledge across languages. Specifically, for a given question, we sample multiple responses across different languages and select the most self-consistent response as the target, leaving the remaining responses as negative examples. We then employ direct preference optimization (DPO) to align the model's knowledge across different languages. Evaluations on the MEDQA and X-CSQA datasets demonstrate CALM's effectiveness in enhancing cross-lingual knowledge question answering, both in zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. We also found that increasing the number of languages involved in CALM training leads to higher accuracy and consistency. We offer a qualitative analysis of how cross-lingual consistency can enhance knowledge alignment and explore the method's generalizability.

Paperid: 2935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08490.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing imagery is dense with objects and contextual visual information. There is a recent trend to combine paired satellite images and text captions for pretraining performant encoders for downstream tasks. However, while contrastive image-text methods like CLIP enable vision-language alignment and zero-shot classification ability, vision-only downstream performance tends to degrade compared to image-only pretraining, such as MAE. In this paper, we propose FLAVARS, a pretraining method that combines the best of both contrastive learning and masked modeling, along with geospatial alignment via contrastive location encoding. We find that FLAVARS significantly outperforms a baseline of SkyCLIP for vision-only tasks such as KNN classification and semantic segmentation, +6\% mIOU on SpaceNet1, while retaining the ability to perform zero-shot classification, unlike MAE pretrained methods.

Paperid: 2936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08062.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic font generation remains a challenging research issue, primarily due to the vast number of Chinese characters, each with unique and intricate structures. Our investigation of previous studies reveals inherent bias capable of causing structural changes in characters. Specifically, when generating a Chinese character similar to, but different from, those in the training samples, the bias is prone to either correcting or ignoring these subtle variations. To address this concern, we propose a novel Skeleton and Font Generation Network (SFGN) to achieve a more robust Chinese character font generation. Our approach includes a skeleton builder and font generator. The skeleton builder synthesizes content features using low-resource text input, enabling our technique to realize font generation independently of content image inputs. Unlike previous font generation methods that treat font style as a global embedding, we introduce a font generator to align content and style features on the radical level, which is a brand-new perspective for font generation. Except for common characters, we also conduct experiments on misspelled characters, a substantial portion of which slightly differs from the common ones. Our approach visually demonstrates the efficacy of generated images and outperforms current state-of-the-art font generation methods. Moreover, we believe that misspelled character generation have significant pedagogical implications and verify such supposition through experiments. We used generated misspelled characters as data augmentation in Chinese character error correction tasks, simulating the scenario where students learn handwritten Chinese characters with the help of misspelled characters. The significantly improved performance of error correction tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach and the value of misspelled character generation.

Paperid: 2937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07647.pdf

Abstract:
Existing video generation models struggle to follow complex text prompts and synthesize multiple objects, raising the need for additional grounding input for improved controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose videos into visual primitives - blob video representation, a general representation for controllable video generation. Based on blob conditions, we develop a blob-grounded video diffusion model named BlobGEN-Vid that allows users to control object motions and fine-grained object appearance. In particular, we introduce a masked 3D attention module that effectively improves regional consistency across frames. In addition, we introduce a learnable module to interpolate text embeddings so that users can control semantics in specific frames and obtain smooth object transitions. We show that our framework is model-agnostic and build BlobGEN-Vid based on both U-Net and DiT-based video diffusion models. Extensive experimental results show that BlobGEN-Vid achieves superior zero-shot video generation ability and state-of-the-art layout controllability on multiple benchmarks. When combined with an LLM for layout planning, our framework even outperforms proprietary text-to-video generators in terms of compositional accuracy.

Paperid: 2938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03631.pdf

Abstract:
Editability and fidelity are two essential demands for text-driven image editing, which expects that the editing area should align with the target prompt and the rest remain unchanged separately. The current cutting-edge editing methods usually obey an "inversion-then-editing" pipeline, where the input image is inverted to an approximate Gaussian noise ${z}_T$, based on which a sampling process is conducted using the target prompt. Nevertheless, we argue that it is not a good choice to use a near-Gaussian noise as a pivot for further editing since it would bring plentiful fidelity errors. We verify this by a pilot analysis, discovering that intermediate-inverted latents can achieve a better trade-off between editability and fidelity than the fully-inverted ${z}_T$. Based on this, we propose a novel zero-shot editing paradigm dubbed ZZEdit, which first locates a qualified intermediate-inverted latent marked as ${z}_p$ as a better editing pivot, which is sufficient-for-editing while structure-preserving. Then, a ZigZag process is designed to execute denoising and inversion alternately, which progressively inject target guidance to ${z}_p$ while preserving the structure information of $p$ step. Afterwards, to achieve the same step number of inversion and denoising, we execute a pure sampling process under the target prompt. Essentially, our ZZEdit performs iterative manifold constraint between the manifold of $M_{p}$ and $M_{p-1}$, leading to fewer fidelity errors. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of ZZEdit in diverse image editing scenarios compared with the "inversion-then-editing" pipeline.

Paperid: 2939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17837.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthioEmo, a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely, Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (orm), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with an additional English multi-label emotion dataset from SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our evaluation includes encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only language models. We compare zero and few-shot approaches of LLMs to fine-tuning smaller language models. The results show that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient even for high-resource languages such as English, and there is a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages. The results also show varying performance levels depending on the language and model type. EthioEmo is available publicly to further improve the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages.

Paperid: 2940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17297.pdf

Abstract:
Existing efforts to boost multimodal fusion of 3D anomaly detection (3D-AD) primarily concentrate on devising more effective multimodal fusion strategies. However, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of multimodal fusion architecture (topology) design in contributing to 3D-AD. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap and present a systematic study on the impact of multimodal fusion architecture design on 3D-AD. This work considers the multimodal fusion architecture design at the intra-module fusion level, i.e., independent modality-specific modules, involving early, middle or late multimodal features with specific fusion operations, and also at the inter-module fusion level, i.e., the strategies to fuse those modules. In both cases, we first derive insights through theoretically and experimentally exploring how architectural designs influence 3D-AD. Then, we extend SOTA neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm and propose 3D-ADNAS to simultaneously search across multimodal fusion strategies and modality-specific modules for the first time.Extensive experiments show that 3D-ADNAS obtains consistent improvements in 3D-AD across various model capacities in terms of accuracy, frame rate, and memory usage, and it exhibits great potential in dealing with few-shot 3D-AD tasks.

Paperid: 2941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12077.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large multimodal models (LMMs) has brought significant advancements to pathology. Previous research has primarily focused on separately training patch-level and whole-slide image (WSI)-level models, limiting the integration of learned knowledge across patches and WSIs, and resulting in redundant models. In this work, we introduce CPath-Omni, the first 15-billion-parameter LMM designed to unify both patch and WSI level image analysis, consolidating a variety of tasks at both levels, including classification, visual question answering, captioning, and visual referring prompting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPath-Omni achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across seven diverse tasks on 39 out of 42 datasets, outperforming or matching task-specific models trained for individual tasks. Additionally, we develop a specialized pathology CLIP-based visual processor for CPath-Omni, CPath-CLIP, which, for the first time, integrates different vision models and incorporates a large language model as a text encoder to build a more powerful CLIP model, which achieves SOTA performance on nine zero-shot and four few-shot datasets. Our findings highlight CPath-Omni's ability to unify diverse pathology tasks, demonstrating its potential to streamline and advance the field of foundation model in pathology.

Paperid: 2942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11638.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, zero-shot methods like InstantID have revolutionized identity-preserving generation. Unlike multi-image finetuning approaches such as DreamBooth, these zero-shot methods leverage powerful facial encoders to extract identity information from a single portrait photo, enabling efficient identity-preserving generation through a single inference pass. However, this convenience introduces new threats to the facial identity protection. This paper aims to safeguard portrait photos from unauthorized encoder-based customization. We introduce IDProtector, an adversarial noise encoder that applies imperceptible adversarial noise to portrait photos in a single forward pass. Our approach offers universal protection for portraits against multiple state-of-the-art encoder-based methods, including InstantID, IP-Adapter, and PhotoMaker, while ensuring robustness to common image transformations such as JPEG compression, resizing, and affine transformations. Experiments across diverse portrait datasets and generative models reveal that IDProtector generalizes effectively to unseen data and even closed-source proprietary models.

Paperid: 2943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11618.pdf

Abstract:
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) for understanding proteins primarily treats amino acid sequences as a text modality. Meanwhile, Protein Language Models (PLMs), such as ESM-2, have learned massive sequential evolutionary knowledge from the universe of natural protein sequences. Furthermore, structure-based encoders like ProteinMPNN learn the structural information of proteins through Graph Neural Networks. However, whether the incorporation of protein encoders can enhance the protein understanding of LLMs has not been explored. To bridge this gap, we propose EvoLlama, a multimodal framework that connects a structure-based encoder, a sequence-based protein encoder and an LLM for protein understanding. EvoLlama consists of a ProteinMPNN structure encoder, an ESM-2 protein sequence encoder, a multimodal projector to align protein and text representations and a Llama-3 text decoder. To train EvoLlama, we fine-tune it on protein-oriented instructions and protein property prediction datasets verbalized via natural language instruction templates. Our experiments show that EvoLlama's protein understanding capabilities have been significantly enhanced, outperforming other fine-tuned protein-oriented LLMs in zero-shot settings by an average of 1%-8% and surpassing the state-of-the-art baseline with supervised fine-tuning by an average of 6%. On protein property prediction datasets, our approach achieves promising results that are competitive with state-of-the-art task-specific baselines. We will release our code in a future version.

Paperid: 2944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13451.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art multimodal web agents, powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), can autonomously execute many web tasks by processing user instructions and interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Current strategies for building web agents rely on (i) the generalizability of underlying MLLMs and their steerability via prompting, and (ii) large-scale fine-tuning of MLLMs on web-related tasks. However, web agents still struggle to automate tasks on unseen websites and domains, limiting their applicability to enterprise-specific and proprietary platforms. Beyond generalization from large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning, we propose building agents for few-shot adaptability using human demonstrations. We introduce the AdaptAgent framework that enables both proprietary and open-weights multimodal web agents to adapt to new websites and domains using few human demonstrations (up to 2). Our experiments on two popular benchmarks -- Mind2Web & VisualWebArena -- show that using in-context demonstrations (for proprietary models) or meta-adaptation demonstrations (for meta-learned open-weights models) boosts task success rate by 3.36% to 7.21% over non-adapted state-of-the-art models, corresponding to a relative increase of 21.03% to 65.75%. Furthermore, our additional analyses (a) show the effectiveness of multimodal demonstrations over text-only ones, (b) shed light on the influence of different data selection strategies during meta-learning on the generalization of the agent, and (c) demonstrate the effect of number of few-shot examples on the web agent's success rate. Overall, our results unlock a complementary axis for developing widely applicable multimodal web agents beyond large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning, emphasizing few-shot adaptability.

Paperid: 2945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04217.pdf

Abstract:
Modern quantum machine learning (QML) methods involve the variational optimization of parameterized quantum circuits on training datasets, followed by predictions on testing datasets. Most state-of-the-art QML algorithms currently lack practical advantages due to their limited learning capabilities, especially in few-shot learning tasks. In this work, we propose three new frameworks employing quantum diffusion model (QDM) as a solution for the few-shot learning: label-guided generation inference (LGGI); label-guided denoising inference (LGDI); and label-guided noise addition inference (LGNAI). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing methods.

Paperid: 2946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01195.pdf

Abstract:
As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently, practitioners face a multitude of complex choices when searching for an optimal finetuning pipeline for large language models. To reduce the complexity for practitioners, we investigate transfer learning for finetuning large language models and aim to transfer knowledge about configurations from related finetuning tasks to a new task. In this work, we transfer learn finetuning by meta-learning performance and cost surrogate models for grey-box meta-optimization from a new meta-dataset. Counter-intuitively, we propose to rely only on transfer learning for new datasets. Thus, we do not use task-specific Bayesian optimization but prioritize knowledge transferred from related tasks over task-specific feedback. We evaluate our method on eight synthetic question-answer datasets and a meta-dataset consisting of 1,800 runs of finetuning Microsoft's Phi-3. Our transfer learning is superior to zero-shot, default finetuning, and meta-optimization baselines. Our results demonstrate the transferability of finetuning to adapt large language models more effectively.

Paperid: 2947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23605.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can learn vast amounts of knowledge from diverse domains during pre-training. However, long-tail knowledge from specialized domains is often scarce and underrepresented, rarely appearing in the models' memorization. Prior work has shown that in-context learning (ICL) with retriever augmentation can help LLMs better capture long-tail knowledge, reducing their reliance on pre-trained data. Despite these advances, we observe that LLM predictions for long-tail questions remain uncertain to variations in retrieved samples. To take advantage of the uncertainty in ICL for guiding LLM predictions toward correct answers on long-tail samples, we propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic uncertainty ranking method for ICL that accounts for the varying impact of each retrieved sample on LLM predictions. Our approach prioritizes more informative and stable samples while demoting misleading ones, updating rankings based on the feedback from the LLM w.r.t. each retrieved sample. To enhance training efficiency and reduce query costs, we introduce a learnable dynamic ranking threshold, adjusted when the model encounters negative prediction shifts. Experimental results on various question-answering datasets from different domains show that our method outperforms the best baseline by $2.76\%$, with a notable $5.96\%$ boost in accuracy on long-tail questions that elude zero-shot inference.

Paperid: 2948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13746.pdf

Abstract:
The denoising diffusion model has recently emerged as a powerful generative technique, capable of transforming noise into meaningful data. While theoretical convergence guarantees for diffusion models are well established when the target distribution aligns with the training distribution, practical scenarios often present mismatches. One common case is in the zero-shot conditional diffusion sampling, where the target conditional distribution is different from the (unconditional) training distribution. These score-mismatched diffusion models remain largely unexplored from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we present the first performance guarantee with explicit dimensional dependencies for general score-mismatched diffusion samplers, focusing on target distributions with finite second moments. We show that score mismatches result in an asymptotic distributional bias between the target and sampling distributions, proportional to the accumulated mismatch between the target and training distributions. This result can be directly applied to zero-shot conditional samplers for any conditional model, irrespective of measurement noise. Interestingly, the derived convergence upper bound offers useful guidance for designing a novel bias-optimal zero-shot sampler in linear conditional models that minimizes the asymptotic bias. For such bias-optimal samplers, we further establish convergence guarantees with explicit dependencies on dimension and conditioning, applied to several interesting target distributions, including those with bounded support and Gaussian mixtures. Our findings are supported by numerical studies.

Paperid: 2949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12832.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has greatly improved the performance of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The RLHF process is resource-intensive and technically challenging, generally requiring a large collection of human preference labels over model-generated outputs. Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) addresses this data collection challenge by leveraging synthetic preferences generated by an LLM. However, recent work has shown that synthetic preferences labels may not align well with human preference judgments. To address this, we propose a hybrid approach that unifies RLHF and RLAIF methodologies. We introduce GenRM, an iterative algorithm that trains an LLM on self-generated reasoning traces, leading to synthetic preference labels matching human preference judgments. Empirically, we show that zero-shot LLM-based judgments under-perform compared to Bradley-Terry reward models on in-distribution tasks (between 9-36%). In contrast, GenRM achieves in-distribution accuracy comparable to Bradley-Terry models, while significantly outperforming them on out-of-distribution tasks (between 10-45%). Moreover, GenRM surpasses the performance of using LLMs as judges on both in-distribution (by 9-31%) and out-of-distribution tasks (by 2- 6%). Our results show that combining the strengths of RLHF and RLAIF offers a promising approach for improving the quality of synthetic preference labels.

Paperid: 2950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12085.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the contextual information embedded in examples/demonstrations to perform in-context learning (ICL). To mitigate the risk of LLMs potentially leaking private information contained in examples in the prompt, we introduce a novel data-adaptive differentially private algorithm called AdaDPSyn to generate synthetic examples from the private dataset and then use these synthetic examples to perform ICL. The objective of AdaDPSyn is to adaptively adjust the noise level in the data synthesis mechanism according to the inherent statistical properties of the data, thereby preserving high ICL accuracy while maintaining formal differential privacy guarantees. A key innovation in AdaDPSyn is the Precision-Focused Iterative Radius Reduction technique, which dynamically refines the aggregation radius - the scope of data grouping for noise addition - based on patterns observed in data clustering, thereby minimizing the amount of additive noise. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare AdaDPSyn with DP few-shot generation algorithm (Tang et al., 2023). The experiments demonstrate that AdaDPSyn not only outperforms DP few-shot generation, but also maintains high accuracy levels close to those of non-private baselines, providing an effective solution for ICL with privacy protection.

Paperid: 2951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11370.pdf

Abstract:
Graph-structured data is prevalent in the real world. Recently, due to the powerful emergent capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in modeling graphs. The key to effectively applying LLMs on graphs is converting graph data into a format LLMs can comprehend. Graph-to-token approaches are popular in enabling LLMs to process graph information. They transform graphs into sequences of tokens and align them with text tokens through instruction tuning, where self-supervised instruction tuning helps LLMs acquire general knowledge about graphs, and supervised fine-tuning specializes LLMs for the downstream tasks on graphs. Despite their initial success, we find that existing methods have a misalignment between self-supervised tasks and supervised downstream tasks, resulting in negative transfer from self-supervised fine-tuning to downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose Graph Alignment Large Language Models (GALLM) to benefit from aligned task templates. In the self-supervised tuning stage, we introduce a novel text matching task using templates aligned with downstream tasks. In the task-specific tuning stage, we propose two category prompt methods that learn supervision information from additional explanation with further aligned templates. Experimental evaluations on four datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in supervised learning, multi-dataset generalizability, and particularly in zero-shot capability, highlighting the model's potential as a graph foundation model.

Paperid: 2952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05629.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained encoders. By aligning input data with an LLM's embedding space through lightweight projectors, we observe that LLMs can effectively process and learn from these projected vectors, which we term Vector-ICL. In particular, we find that pretraining projectors with general language modeling objectives enables Vector-ICL, while task-specific finetuning further enhances performance. In our experiments across various tasks and modalities, including text reconstruction, numerical function regression, text classification, summarization, molecule captioning, time-series classification, graph classification, and fMRI decoding, Vector-ICL often surpasses both few-shot ICL and domain-specific model or tuning. We further conduct analyses and case studies, indicating the potential of LLMs to process vector representations beyond traditional token-based paradigms.

Paperid: 2953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04660.pdf

Abstract:
Biomedical reasoning integrates structured, codified knowledge with tacit, experience-driven insights. Depending on the context, quantity, and nature of available evidence, researchers and clinicians use diverse strategies, including rule-based, prototype-based, and case-based reasoning. Effective medical AI models must handle this complexity while ensuring reliability and adaptability. We introduce KGARevion, a knowledge graph-based agent that answers knowledge-intensive questions. Upon receiving a query, KGARevion generates relevant triplets by leveraging the latent knowledge embedded in a large language model. It then verifies these triplets against a grounded knowledge graph, filtering out errors and retaining only accurate, contextually relevant information for the final answer. This multi-step process strengthens reasoning, adapts to different models of medical inference, and outperforms retrieval-augmented generation-based approaches that lack effective verification mechanisms. Evaluations on medical QA benchmarks show that KGARevion improves accuracy by over 5.2% over 15 models in handling complex medical queries. To further assess its effectiveness, we curated three new medical QA datasets with varying levels of semantic complexity, where KGARevion improved accuracy by 10.4%. The agent integrates with different LLMs and biomedical knowledge graphs for broad applicability across knowledge-intensive tasks. We evaluated KGARevion on AfriMed-QA, a newly introduced dataset focused on African healthcare, demonstrating its strong zero-shot generalization to underrepresented medical contexts.

Paperid: 2954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01724.pdf

Abstract:
Batch prompting is a common technique in large language models (LLMs) used to process multiple inputs simultaneously, aiming to improve computational efficiency. However, as batch sizes increase, performance degradation often occurs due to the model's difficulty in handling lengthy context inputs. Existing methods that attempt to mitigate these issues rely solely on batch data arrangement and majority voting rather than improving the design of the batch prompt itself. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing "Auto-Demo Prompting," a novel approach that leverages the question-output pairs from earlier questions within a batch as demonstrations for subsequent answer inference. We provide a formal theoretical analysis of how Auto-Demo Prompting functions within the autoregressive generation process of LLMs, illustrating how it utilizes prior outputs to optimize the model's internal representations. Our method effectively bridges the gap between batch prompting and few-shot prompting, enhancing performance with only a slight compromise in token usage. Experimental results across five NLP tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in mitigating performance degradation and occasionally outperforming single prompts. Furthermore, it opens new avenues for applying few-shot learning techniques, such as demonstration selection, within batch prompting, making it a robust solution for real-world applications.

Paperid: 2955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16252.pdf

Abstract:
Crop field boundaries are foundational datasets for agricultural monitoring and assessments but are expensive to collect manually. Machine learning (ML) methods for automatically extracting field boundaries from remotely sensed images could help realize the demand for these datasets at a global scale. However, current ML methods for field instance segmentation lack sufficient geographic coverage, accuracy, and generalization capabilities. Further, research on improving ML methods is restricted by the lack of labeled datasets representing the diversity of global agricultural fields. We present Fields of The World (FTW) -- a novel ML benchmark dataset for agricultural field instance segmentation spanning 24 countries on four continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America). FTW is an order of magnitude larger than previous datasets with 70,462 samples, each containing instance and semantic segmentation masks paired with multi-date, multi-spectral Sentinel-2 satellite images. We provide results from baseline models for the new FTW benchmark, show that models trained on FTW have better zero-shot and fine-tuning performance in held-out countries than models that aren't pre-trained with diverse datasets, and show positive qualitative zero-shot results of FTW models in a real-world scenario -- running on Sentinel-2 scenes over Ethiopia.

Paperid: 2956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12695.pdf

Abstract:
Product attribute value identification (PAVI) involves automatically identifying attributes and their values from product information, enabling features like product search, recommendation, and comparison. Existing methods primarily rely on fine-tuning pre-trained language models, such as BART and T5, which require extensive task-specific training data and struggle to generalize to new attributes. This paper explores large language models (LLMs), such as LLaMA and Mistral, as data-efficient and robust alternatives for PAVI. We propose various strategies: comparing one-step and two-step prompt-based approaches in zero-shot settings and utilizing parametric and non-parametric knowledge through in-context learning examples. We also introduce a dense demonstration retriever based on a pre-trained T5 model and perform instruction fine-tuning to explicitly train LLMs on task-specific instructions. Extensive experiments on two product benchmarks show that our two-step approach significantly improves performance in zero-shot settings, and instruction fine-tuning further boosts performance when using training data, demonstrating the practical benefits of using LLMs for PAVI.

Paperid: 2957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11114.pdf

Abstract:
In the realm of task-oriented dialogue systems, a robust intent detection mechanism must effectively handle malformed utterances encountered in real-world scenarios. This study presents a novel fine-tuning framework for large language models (LLMs) aimed at enhancing in-distribution (ID) intent classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection, which utilizes semantic matching with prototypes derived from ID class names. By harnessing the highly distinguishable representations of LLMs, we construct semantic prototypes for each ID class using a diversity-grounded prompt tuning approach. We rigorously test our framework in a challenging OOD context, where ID and OOD classes are semantically close yet distinct, referred to as \emph{near} OOD detection. For a thorough assessment, we benchmark our method against the prevalent fine-tuning approaches. The experimental findings reveal that our method demonstrates superior performance in both few-shot ID intent classification and near-OOD intent detection tasks.

Paperid: 2958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02084.pdf

Abstract:
The ability for robots to perform efficient and zero-shot grasping of object parts is crucial for practical applications and is becoming prevalent with recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To bridge the 2D-to-3D gap for representations to support such a capability, existing methods rely on neural fields (NeRFs) via differentiable rendering or point-based projection methods. However, we demonstrate that NeRFs are inappropriate for scene changes due to their implicitness and point-based methods are inaccurate for part localization without rendering-based optimization. To amend these issues, we propose GraspSplats. Using depth supervision and a novel reference feature computation method, GraspSplats generates high-quality scene representations in under 60 seconds. We further validate the advantages of Gaussian-based representation by showing that the explicit and optimized geometry in GraspSplats is sufficient to natively support (1) real-time grasp sampling and (2) dynamic and articulated object manipulation with point trackers. With extensive experiments on a Franka robot, we demonstrate that GraspSplats significantly outperforms existing methods under diverse task settings. In particular, GraspSplats outperforms NeRF-based methods like F3RM and LERF-TOGO, and 2D detection methods.

Paperid: 2959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16532.pdf

Abstract:
Single-view indoor scene generation plays a crucial role in a range of real-world applications. However, generating a complete 360° scene from a single image remains a highly ill-posed and challenging problem. Recent approaches have made progress by leveraging diffusion models and depth estimation networks, yet they still struggle to maintain appearance consistency and geometric plausibility under large viewpoint changes, limiting their effectiveness in full-scene generation. To address this, we propose AnchoredDream, a novel zero-shot pipeline that anchors 360° scene generation on high-fidelity geometry via an appearance-geometry mutual boosting mechanism. Given a single-view image, our method first performs appearance-guided geometry generation to construct a reliable 3D scene layout. Then, we progressively generate the complete scene through a series of modules: warp-and-inpaint, warp-and-refine, post-optimization, and a novel Grouting Block, which ensures seamless transitions between the input view and generated regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchoredDream outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both appearance consistency and geometric plausibility--all in a zero-shot manner. Our results highlight the potential of geometric grounding for high-quality, zero-shot single-view scene generation.

Paperid: 2960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15614.pdf

Abstract:
Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to autonomously explore an unknown environment and navigate toward target objects specified by a semantic label. While prior work has primarily studied zero-shot ObjectNav under 2D locomotion, extending it to aerial platforms with 3D locomotion capability remains underexplored. Aerial robots offer superior maneuverability and search efficiency, but they also introduce new challenges in spatial perception, dynamic control, and safety assurance. In this paper, we propose AION for vision-based aerial ObjectNav without relying on external localization or global maps. AION is an end-to-end dual-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework that decouples exploration and goal-reaching behaviors into two specialized policies. We evaluate AION on the AI2-THOR benchmark and further assess its real-time performance in IsaacSim using high-fidelity drone models. Experimental results show that AION achieves superior performance across comprehensive evaluation metrics in exploration, navigation efficiency, and safety. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/TgsUm6bb7zg.

Paperid: 2961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12131.pdf

Abstract:
Solar activity, including solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and geomagnetic storms, can significantly impact satellites, aviation, power grids, data centers, and space missions. Extreme solar events can cause substantial economic damage with limited advance warning, underscoring the importance of early-warning systems, accurate forecasting, and effective education in space science. Although large language models (LLMs) perform well on general tasks, they often lack domain-specific knowledge and pedagogical capability to clearly explain complex space science concepts. We introduce SolarGPT-QA, a question answering system based on a domain-adapted large language model built on the LLaMA-3 base model. The model is trained using scientific literature and large-scale question-answer data generated with GPT-4 and refined using Grok-3 in a student-friendly storytelling style. Human pairwise evaluations show that SolarGPT-QA outperforms general-purpose models in zero-shot settings and achieves competitive performance compared to instruction-tuned models for educational explanations in space weather and heliophysics. A small pilot student comprehension study further suggests improved clarity and accessibility of the generated explanations. Ablation experiments indicate that combining domain-adaptive pretraining with pedagogical fine-tuning is important for balancing scientific accuracy and educational effectiveness. This work represents an initial step toward a broader SolarGPT framework for space science education and forecasting.

Paperid: 2962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04833.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot detection methods for AI-generated text typically aggregate token-level statistics across entire sequences, overlooking the temporal dynamics inherent to autoregressive generation. We analyze over 120k text samples and reveal Late-Stage Volatility Decay: AI-generated text exhibits rapidly stabilizing log probability fluctuations as generation progresses, while human writing maintains higher variability throughout. This divergence peaks in the second half of sequences, where AI-generated text shows 24--32\% lower volatility. Based on this finding, we propose two simple features: Derivative Dispersion and Local Volatility, which computed exclusively from late-stage statistics. Without perturbation sampling or additional model access, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on EvoBench and MAGE benchmarks and demonstrates strong complementarity with existing global methods.

Paperid: 2963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10891.pdf

Abstract:
Collecting robotic manipulation data is expensive, making it impractical to acquire demonstrations for the combinatorially large space of tasks that arise in multi-object, multi-robot, and multi-environment settings. While recent generative models can synthesize useful data for individual tasks, they do not exploit the compositional structure of robotic domains and struggle to generalize to unseen task combinations. We propose a semantic compositional diffusion transformer that factorizes transitions into robot-, object-, obstacle-, and objective-specific components and learns their interactions through attention. Once trained on a limited subset of tasks, we show that our model can zero-shot generate high-quality transitions from which we can learn control policies for unseen task combinations. Then, we introduce an iterative self-improvement procedure in which synthetic data is validated via offline reinforcement learning and incorporated into subsequent training rounds. Our approach substantially improves zero-shot performance over monolithic and hard-coded compositional baselines, ultimately solving nearly all held-out tasks and demonstrating the emergence of meaningful compositional structure in the learned representations.

Paperid: 2964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18711.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we study the challenging task of Few-Shot Video Domain Adaptation (FSVDA). The multimodal nature of videos introduces unique challenges, necessitating the simultaneous consideration of both domain alignment and modality collaboration in a few-shot scenario, which is ignored in previous literature. We observe that, under the influence of domain shift, the generalization performance on the target domain of each individual modality, as well as that of fused multimodal features, is constrained. Because each modality is comprised of coupled features with multiple components that exhibit different domain shifts. This variability increases the complexity of domain adaptation, thereby reducing the effectiveness of multimodal feature integration. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework of Modality-Collaborative LowRank Decomposers (MC-LRD) to decompose modality-unique and modality-shared features with different domain shift levels from each modality that are more friendly for domain alignment. The MC-LRD comprises multiple decomposers for each modality and Multimodal Decomposition Routers (MDR). Each decomposer has progressively shared parameters across different modalities. The MDR is leveraged to selectively activate the decomposers to produce modality-unique and modality-shared features. To ensure efficient decomposition, we apply orthogonal decorrelation constraints separately to decomposers and subrouters, enhancing their diversity. Furthermore, we propose a cross-domain activation consistency loss to guarantee that target and source samples of the same category exhibit consistent activation preferences of the decomposers, thereby facilitating domain alignment. Extensive experimental results on three public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over existing methods.

Paperid: 2965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10091.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold rich implicit knowledge and powerful transferability. In this paper, we explore the combination of LLMs with the human skeleton to perform action classification and description. However, when treating LLM as a recognizer, two questions arise: 1) How can LLMs understand skeleton? 2) How can LLMs distinguish among actions? To address these problems, we introduce a novel paradigm named learning Skeleton representation with visUal-motion knowledGe for Action Recognition (SUGAR). In our pipeline, we first utilize off-the-shelf large-scale video models as a knowledge base to generate visual, motion information related to actions. Then, we propose to supervise skeleton learning through this prior knowledge to yield discrete representations. Finally, we use the LLM with untouched pre-training weights to understand these representations and generate the desired action targets and descriptions. Notably, we present a Temporal Query Projection (TQP) module to continuously model the skeleton signals with long sequences. Experiments on several skeleton-based action classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our SUGAR. Moreover, experiments on zero-shot scenarios show that SUGAR is more versatile than linear-based methods.

Paperid: 2966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08496.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot singing voice conversion (SVC) transforms a source singer's timbre to an unseen target speaker's voice while preserving melodic content without fine-tuning. Existing methods model speaker timbre and vocal content separately, losing essential acoustic information that degrades output quality while requiring significant computational resources. To overcome these limitations, we propose HQ-SVC, an efficient framework for high-quality zero-shot SVC. HQ-SVC first extracts jointly content and speaker features using a decoupled codec. It then enhances fidelity through pitch and volume modeling, preserving critical acoustic information typically lost in separate modeling approaches, and progressively refines outputs via differentiable signal processing and diffusion techniques. Evaluations confirm HQ-SVC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot SVC methods in conversion quality and efficiency. Beyond voice conversion, HQ-SVC achieves superior voice naturalness compared to specialized audio super-resolution methods while natively supporting voice super-resolution tasks.

Paperid: 2967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06296.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot keyword spotting aims to detect previously unseen keywords with very limited labeled samples. A pre-training and adaptation paradigm is typically adopted for this task. While effective in clean conditions, most existing approaches struggle with mixed keyword spotting--detecting multiple overlapping keywords within a single utterance--a capability essential for real-world applications. We have previously proposed a pre-training approach based on Mix-Training (MT) to tackle the mixed keyword detection problem and demonstrated its efficiency. However, this approach is fully supervised, unable to utilize vast unlabeled data. To this end, we propose Mix-Training HuBERT (MT-HuBERT), a self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training framework that implements the MT criterion during pre-training. MT-HuBERT predicts, in a self-supervised manner, the clean acoustic units of each constituent signal from contextual cues, in contrast to predicting compositional patterns of mixed speech. Experiments conducted on the Google Speech Commands (GSC v2) corpus demonstrate that our proposed MT-HuBERT consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines in few-shot KWS tasks under both mixed and clean conditions.

Paperid: 2968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23477.pdf

Abstract:
Effective math tutoring requires not only solving problems but also diagnosing students' difficulties and guiding them step by step. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise, existing benchmarks largely overlook these tutoring skills. We introduce MMTutorBench, the first benchmark for AI math tutoring, consisting of 685 problems built around pedagogically significant key-steps. Each problem is paired with problem-specific rubrics that enable fine-grained evaluation across six dimensions, and structured into three tasks-Insight Discovery, Operation Formulation, and Operation Execution. We evaluate 12 leading MLLMs and find clear performance gaps between proprietary and open-source systems, substantial room compared to human tutors, and consistent trends across input variants: OCR pipelines degrade tutoring quality, few-shot prompting yields limited gains, and our rubric-based LLM-as-a-Judge proves highly reliable. These results highlight both the difficulty and diagnostic value of MMTutorBench for advancing AI tutoring.

Paperid: 2969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21084.pdf

Abstract:
Intelligent drug recommendation based on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is critical for improving the quality and efficiency of clinical decision-making. By leveraging large-scale patient data, drug recommendation systems can assist physicians in selecting the most appropriate medications according to a patient's medical history, diagnoses, laboratory results, and comorbidities. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and medical text understanding, making them promising tools for drug recommendation tasks. However, the application of LLMs for Chinese clinical medication recommendation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic investigation of LLM-based methodologies for Chinese discharge medication recommendation. We evaluate several representative LLM families (GLM, Llama, Qwen) under a unified methodological framework including zero-shot prompting, in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and supervised fine-tuning using LoRA. We analyze model behavior across reasoning styles, error patterns, domain adaptation mechanisms, and robustness. Experimental results show that while supervised fine-tuning improves model performance, there remains substantial room for improvement, with the best model achieving the F1 score of 0.5648 and Jaccard score of 0.4477. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs for Chinese drug recommendation.

Paperid: 2970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01995.pdf

Abstract:
Online social media platforms are central to everyday communication and information seeking. While these platforms serve positive purposes, they also provide fertile ground for the spread of hate speech, offensive language, and bullying content targeting individuals, organizations, and communities. Such content undermines safety, participation, and equity online. Reliable detection systems are therefore needed, especially for low-resource languages where moderation tools are limited. In Bangla, prior work has contributed resources and models, but most are single-task (e.g., binary hate/offense) with limited coverage of multi-facet signals (type, severity, target). We address these gaps by introducing the first multi-task Bangla hate-speech dataset, BanglaMultiHate, one of the largest manually annotated corpus to date. Building on this resource, we conduct a comprehensive, controlled comparison spanning classical baselines, monolingual pretrained models, and LLMs under zero-shot prompting and LoRA fine-tuning. Our experiments assess LLM adaptability in a low-resource setting and reveal a consistent trend: although LoRA-tuned LLMs are competitive with BanglaBERT, culturally and linguistically grounded pretraining remains critical for robust performance. Together, our dataset and findings establish a stronger benchmark for developing culturally aligned moderation tools in low-resource contexts. For reproducibility, we will release the dataset and all related scripts.

Paperid: 2971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21576.pdf

Abstract:
The advancement of vision language models (VLMs) has empowered embodied agents to accomplish simple multimodal planning tasks, but not long-horizon ones requiring long sequences of actions. In text-only simulations, long-horizon planning has seen significant improvement brought by repositioning the role of LLMs. Instead of directly generating action sequences, LLMs translate the planning domain and problem into a formal planning language like the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), which can call a formal solver to derive the plan in a verifiable manner. In multimodal environments, research on VLM-as-formalizer remains scarce, usually involving gross simplifications such as predefined object vocabulary or overly similar few-shot examples. In this work, we present a suite of five VLM-as-formalizer pipelines that tackle one-shot, open-vocabulary, and multimodal PDDL formalization. We evaluate those on an existing benchmark while presenting another two that for the first time account for planning with authentic, multi-view, and low-quality images. We conclude that VLM-as-formalizer greatly outperforms end-to-end plan generation. We reveal the bottleneck to be vision rather than language, as VLMs often fail to capture an exhaustive set of necessary object relations. While generating intermediate, textual representations such as captions or scene graphs partially compensate for the performance, their inconsistent gain leaves headroom for future research directions on multimodal planning formalization.

Paperid: 2972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18606.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent progress in large-scale sound event detection (SED) systems capable of handling hundreds of sound classes, existing multi-class classification frameworks remain fundamentally limited. They cannot process free-text sound queries, which enable more flexible and user-friendly interaction, and they lack zero-shot capabilities and offer poor few-shot adaptability. Although text-query-based separation methods have been explored, they primarily focus on source separation and are ill-suited for SED tasks that require precise temporal localization and efficient detection across large and diverse sound vocabularies. In this paper, we propose FlexSED, an open-vocabulary sound event detection system. FlexSED builds on a pretrained audio SSL model and the CLAP text encoder, introducing an encoder-decoder composition and an adaptive fusion strategy to enable effective continuous training from pretrained weights. To ensure robust supervision, it also employs large language models (LLMs) to assist in event query selection during training, addressing challenges related to missing labels. As a result, FlexSED achieves superior performance compared to vanilla SED models on AudioSet-Strong, while demonstrating strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. We release the code and pretrained models to support future research and applications based on FlexSED.

Paperid: 2973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12831.pdf

Abstract:
Recent developments in voice cloning and talking head generation demonstrate impressive capabilities in synthesizing natural speech and realistic lip synchronization. Current methods typically require and are trained on large scale datasets and computationally intensive processes using clean studio recorded inputs that is infeasible in noisy or low resource environments. In this paper, we introduce a new modular pipeline comprising Tortoise text to speech. It is a transformer based latent diffusion model that can perform high fidelity zero shot voice cloning given only a few training samples. We use a lightweight generative adversarial network architecture for robust real time lip synchronization. The solution will contribute to many essential tasks concerning less reliance on massive pre training generation of emotionally expressive speech and lip synchronization in noisy and unconstrained scenarios. The modular structure of the pipeline allows an easy extension for future multi modal and text guided voice modulation and it could be used in real world systems.

Paperid: 2974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06898.pdf

Abstract:
The coexistence between incumbent radar signals and commercial 5G signals necessitates a versatile and ubiquitous radar sensing for efficient and adaptive spectrum sharing. In this context, leveraging the densely deployed 5G base stations (BS) for radar sensing is particularly promising, offering both wide coverage and immediate feedback to 5G scheduling. However, the targeting radar signals are superimposed with concurrent 5G uplink transmissions received by the BS, and practical deployment also demands a lightweight, portable radar sensing model. This paper presents BatStation, a lightweight, in-situ radar sensing framework seamlessly integrated into 5G BSs. BatStation leverages uplink resource grids to extract radar signals through three key components: (i) radar signal separation to cancel concurrent 5G transmissions and reveal the radar signals, (ii) resource grid reshaping to align time-frequency resolution with radar pulse characteristics, and (iii) zero-shot template correlation based on a portable model trained purely on synthetic data that supports detection, classification, and localization of radar pulses without fine-tuning using experimental data. We implement BatStation on a software-defined radio (SDR) testbed and evaluate its performance with real 5G traffic in the CBRS band. Results show robust performance across diverse radar types, achieving detection probabilities of 97.02% (PUCCH) and 79.23% (PUSCH), classification accuracy up to 97.00%, and median localization errors of 2.68-6.20 MHz (frequency) and 24.6-32.4 microseconds (time). Notably, BatStation achieves this performance with a runtime latency of only 0.11/0.94 ms on GPU/CPU, meeting the real-time requirement of 5G networks.

Paperid: 2975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02908.pdf

Abstract:
Individuals from sexual and gender minority groups experience disproportionately high rates of poor health outcomes and mental disorders compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, largely as a consequence of minority stress as described by Meyer's (2003) model. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of transformer-based architectures for detecting minority stress in online discourse. We benchmark multiple transformer models including ELECTRA, BERT, RoBERTa, and BART against traditional machine learning baselines and graph-augmented variants. We further assess zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms to assess their applicability on underrepresented datasets. Experiments are conducted on the two largest publicly available Reddit corpora for minority stress detection, comprising 12,645 and 5,789 posts, and are repeated over five random seeds to ensure robustness. Our results demonstrate that integrating graph structure consistently improves detection performance across transformer-only models and that supervised fine-tuning with relational context outperforms zero and few-shot approaches. Theoretical analysis reveals that modeling social connectivity and conversational context via graph augmentation sharpens the models' ability to identify key linguistic markers such as identity concealment, internalized stigma, and calls for support, suggesting that graph-enhanced transformers offer the most reliable foundation for digital health interventions and public health policy.

Paperid: 2976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11357.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-subject electroencephalography (EEG) decoding remains a fundamental challenge in brain-computer interface (BCI) research due to substantial inter-subject variability and the scarcity of subject-invariant representations. This paper proposed PTSM (Physiology-aware and Task-invariant Spatio-temporal Modeling), a novel framework for interpretable and robust EEG decoding across unseen subjects. PTSM employs a dual-branch masking mechanism that independently learns personalized and shared spatio-temporal patterns, enabling the model to preserve individual-specific neural characteristics while extracting task-relevant, population-shared features. The masks are factorized across temporal and spatial dimensions, allowing fine-grained modulation of dynamic EEG patterns with low computational overhead. To further address representational entanglement, PTSM enforces information-theoretic constraints that decompose latent embeddings into orthogonal task-related and subject-related subspaces. The model is trained end-to-end via a multi-objective loss integrating classification, contrastive, and disentanglement objectives. Extensive experiments on cross-subject motor imagery datasets demonstrate that PTSM achieves strong zero-shot generalization, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines without subject-specific calibration. Results highlight the efficacy of disentangled neural representations for achieving both personalized and transferable decoding in non-stationary neurophysiological settings.

Paperid: 2977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06515.pdf

Abstract:
Social media platforms face escalating challenges in detecting harmful content that promotes muscle dysmorphic behaviors and cognitions (bigorexia). This content can evade moderation by camouflaging as legitimate fitness advice and disproportionately affects adolescent males. We address this challenge with BigTokDetect, a clinically informed framework for identifying pro-bigorexia content on TikTok. We introduce BigTok, the first expert-annotated multimodal benchmark dataset of over 2,200 TikTok videos labeled by clinical psychiatrists across five categories and eighteen fine-grained subcategories. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art vision-language models reveals that while commercial zero-shot models achieve the highest accuracy on broad primary categories, supervised fine-tuning enables smaller open-source models to perform better on fine-grained subcategory detection. Ablation studies show that multimodal fusion improves performance by 5 to 15 percent, with video features providing the most discriminative signals. These findings support a grounded moderation approach that automates detection of explicit harms while flagging ambiguous content for human review, and they establish a scalable framework for harm mitigation in emerging mental health domains.

Paperid: 2978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05952.pdf

Abstract:
The use of LLM tutors to provide automated educational feedback to students on student assignment submissions has received much attention in the AI in Education field. However, the stochastic nature and tendency for hallucinations in LLMs can undermine both quality of learning experience and adherence to ethical standards. To address this concern, we propose a method that uses LLM feedback evaluators (DeanLLMs) to automatically and comprehensively evaluate feedback generated by LLM tutor for submissions on university assignments before it is delivered to students. This allows low-quality feedback to be rejected and enables LLM tutors to improve the feedback they generated based on the evaluation results. We first proposed a comprehensive evaluation framework for LLM-generated educational feedback, comprising six dimensions for feedback content, seven for feedback effectiveness, and three for hallucination types. Next, we generated a virtual assignment submission dataset covering 85 university assignments from 43 computer science courses using eight commonly used commercial LLMs. We labelled and open-sourced the assignment dataset to support the fine-tuning and evaluation of LLM feedback evaluators. Our findings show that o3-pro demonstrated the best performance in zero-shot labelling of feedback while o4-mini demonstrated the best performance in few-shot labelling of feedback. Moreover, GPT-4.1 achieved human expert level performance after fine-tuning (Accuracy 79.8%, F1-score 79.4%; human average Accuracy 78.3%, F1-score 82.6%). Finally, we used our best-performance model to evaluate 2,000 assignment feedback instances generated by 10 common commercial LLMs, 200 each, to compare the quality of feedback generated by different LLMs. Our LLM feedback evaluator method advances our ability to automatically provide high-quality and reliable educational feedback to students.

Paperid: 2979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02344.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic signal control (TSC) is vital for mitigating congestion and sustaining urban mobility. In this paper, we introduce Traffic-R1, a foundation model with human-like reasoning for TSC systems. Our model is developed through self-exploration and iteration of reinforced large language models (LLMs) with expert guidance in a simulated traffic environment. Compared to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) and recent LLM-based methods, Traffic-R1 offers three significant advantages. First, Traffic-R1 delivers zero-shot generalisation, transferring unchanged to new road networks and out-of-distribution incidents by utilizing its internal traffic control policies and human-like reasoning. Second, its 3B-parameter architecture is lightweight enough for real-time inference on mobile-class chips, enabling large-scale edge deployment. Third, Traffic-R1 provides an explainable TSC process and facilitates multi-intersection communication through its self-iteration and a new synchronous communication network. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that Traffic-R1 sets a new state of the art, outperforming strong baselines and training-intensive RL controllers. In practice, the model now manages signals for more than 55,000 drivers daily, shortening average queues by over 5% and halving operator workload. Our checkpoint is available at https://huggingface.co/Season998/Traffic-R1.

Paperid: 2980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22488.pdf

Abstract:
In vertical federated learning (VFL), multiple enterprises address aligned sample scarcity by leveraging massive locally unaligned samples to facilitate collaborative learning. However, unaligned samples across different parties in VFL can be extremely class-imbalanced, leading to insufficient feature representation and limited model prediction space. Specifically, class-imbalanced problems consist of intra-party class imbalance and inter-party class imbalance, which can further cause local model bias and feature contribution inconsistency issues, respectively. To address the above challenges, we propose Proto-EVFL, an enhanced VFL framework via dual prototypes. We first introduce class prototypes for each party to learn relationships between classes in the latent space, allowing the active party to predict unseen classes. We further design a probabilistic dual prototype learning scheme to dynamically select unaligned samples by conditional optimal transport cost with class prior probability. Moreover, a mixed prior guided module guides this selection process by combining local and global class prior probabilities. Finally, we adopt an \textit{adaptive gated feature aggregation strategy} to mitigate feature contribution inconsistency by dynamically weighting and aggregating local features across different parties. We proved that Proto-EVFL, as the first bi-level optimization framework in VFL, has a convergence rate of 1/\sqrt T. Extensive experiments on various datasets validate the superiority of our Proto-EVFL. Even in a zero-shot scenario with one unseen class, it outperforms baselines by at least 6.97%

Paperid: 2981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22053.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate demand forecasting is critical for supply chain optimization, yet remains difficult in practice due to hierarchical complexity, domain shifts, and evolving external factors. While recent foundation models offer strong potential for time series forecasting, they often suffer from architectural rigidity and limited robustness under distributional change. In this paper, we propose a unified ensemble framework that enhances the performance of foundation models for sales forecasting in real-world supply chains. Our method combines two complementary strategies: (1) Hierarchical Ensemble (HE), which partitions training and inference by semantic levels (e.g., store, category, department) to capture localized patterns; and (2) Architectural Ensemble (AE), which integrates predictions from diverse model backbones to mitigate bias and improve stability. We conduct extensive experiments on the M5 benchmark and three external sales datasets, covering both in-domain and zero-shot forecasting. Results show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, improves accuracy across hierarchical levels, and provides a simple yet effective mechanism for boosting generalization in complex forecasting environments.

Paperid: 2982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14312.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities but often fail to generalize under distribution shifts. Test-time adaptation (TTA) allows models to update at inference time without labeled data, typically via entropy minimization. However, this objective is fundamentally misaligned with the contrastive image-text training of VLMs, limiting adaptation performance and introducing failure modes such as pseudo-label drift and class collapse. We propose CLIPTTA, a new gradient-based TTA method for vision-language models that leverages a soft contrastive loss aligned with CLIP's pre-training objective. We provide a theoretical analysis of CLIPTTA's gradients, showing how its batch-aware design mitigates the risk of collapse. We further extend CLIPTTA to the open-set setting, where both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples are encountered, using an Outlier Contrastive Exposure (OCE) loss to improve OOD detection. Evaluated on 75 datasets spanning diverse distribution shifts, CLIPTTA consistently outperforms entropy-based objectives and is highly competitive with state-of-the-art TTA methods, outperforming them on a large number of datasets and exhibiting more stable performance across diverse shifts.

Paperid: 2983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04820.pdf

Abstract:
While Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) with Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the most effective zero-shot document ranking methods, it has a quadratic computational complexity with respect to the number of documents to be ranked, as it requires an enumeration over all possible document pairs. Consequently, the outstanding ranking performance of PRP has remained unreachable for most real-world ranking applications. In this work, we propose to harness the effectiveness of PRP through pairwise distillation. Specifically, we distill a pointwise student ranker from pairwise teacher labels generated by PRP, resulting in an efficient student model that retains the performance of PRP with substantially lower computational costs. Furthermore, we find that the distillation process can be made sample-efficient: with only 2% of pairs, we are able to obtain the same performance as using all pairs for teacher labels. Thus, our novel approach provides a solution to harness the ranking performance of PRP without incurring high computational costs during both distillation and serving.

Paperid: 2984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15862.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is powerful, but its effectiveness hinges on which retrievers we use and how. Different retrievers offer distinct, often complementary signals: BM25 captures lexical matches; dense retrievers, semantic similarity. Yet in practice, we typically fix a single retriever based on heuristics, which fails to generalize across diverse information needs. Can we dynamically select and integrate multiple retrievers for each individual query, without the need for manual selection? In our work, we validate this intuition with quantitative analysis and introduce mixture of retrievers: a zero-shot, weighted combination of heterogeneous retrievers. Extensive experiments show that such mixtures are effective and efficient: Despite totaling just 0.8B parameters, this mixture outperforms every individual retriever and even larger 7B models by +10.8% and +3.9% on average, respectively. Further analysis also shows that this mixture framework can help incorporate specialized non-oracle human information sources as retrievers to achieve good collaboration, with a 58.9% relative performance improvement over simulated humans alone.

Paperid: 2985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09784.pdf

Abstract:
Estimating the 6D pose of objects from RGBD data is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications in robotics and augmented reality. A key challenge is achieving generalization to novel objects that were not seen during training. Most existing approaches address this by scaling up training on synthetic data tailored to the task, a process that demands substantial computational resources. But is task-specific training really necessary for accurate and efficient 6D pose estimation of novel objects? To answer No!, we introduce FreeZeV2, the second generation of FreeZe: a training-free method that achieves strong generalization to unseen objects by leveraging geometric and vision foundation models pre-trained on unrelated data. FreeZeV2 improves both accuracy and efficiency over FreeZe through three key contributions: (i) a sparse feature extraction strategy that reduces inference-time computation without sacrificing accuracy; (ii) a feature-aware scoring mechanism that improves both pose selection during RANSAC-based 3D registration and the final ranking of pose candidates; and (iii) a modular design that supports ensembles of instance segmentation models, increasing robustness to segmentation masks errors. We evaluate FreeZeV2 on the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, where it establishes a new state-of-the-art in 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. When using the same segmentation masks, FreeZeV2 achieves a remarkable 8x speedup over FreeZe while also improving accuracy by 5%. When using ensembles of segmentation models, FreeZeV2 gains an additional 8% in accuracy while still running 2.5x faster than FreeZe. FreeZeV2 was awarded Best Overall Method at the BOP Challenge 2024.

Paperid: 2986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09699.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate 6D pose estimation of complex objects in 3D environments is essential for effective robotic manipulation. Yet, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating 6D pose estimation methods under realistic industrial conditions, as most datasets focus on household objects in domestic settings, while the few available industrial datasets are limited to artificial setups with objects placed on tables. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHIP, the first dataset designed for 6D pose estimation of chairs manipulated by a robotic arm in a real-world industrial environment. CHIP includes seven distinct chairs captured using three different RGBD sensing technologies and presents unique challenges, such as distractor objects with fine-grained differences and severe occlusions caused by the robotic arm and human operators. CHIP comprises 77,811 RGBD images annotated with ground-truth 6D poses automatically derived from the robot's kinematics, averaging 11,115 annotations per chair. We benchmark CHIP using three zero-shot 6D pose estimation methods, assessing performance across different sensor types, localization priors, and occlusion levels. Results show substantial room for improvement, highlighting the unique challenges posed by the dataset. CHIP will be publicly released.

Paperid: 2987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09100.pdf

Abstract:
Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) provides tissue-specific parameters vital for clinical diagnosis. Although simultaneous multi-parametric qMRI (MP-qMRI) technologies enhance imaging efficiency, robustly reconstructing qMRI from highly undersampled, high-dimensional measurements remains a significant challenge. This difficulty arises primarily because current reconstruction methods that rely solely on a single prior or physics-informed model to solve the highly ill-posed inverse problem, which often leads to suboptimal results. To overcome this limitation, we propose LoREIN, a novel unsupervised and dual-prior-integrated framework for accelerated 3D MP-qMRI reconstruction. Technically, LoREIN incorporates both low-rank prior and continuity prior via low-rank representation (LRR) and implicit neural representation (INR), respectively, to enhance reconstruction fidelity. The powerful continuous representation of INR enables the estimation of optimal spatial bases within the low-rank subspace, facilitating high-fidelity reconstruction of weighted images. Simultaneously, the predicted multi-contrast weighted images provide essential structural and quantitative guidance, further enhancing the reconstruction accuracy of quantitative parameter maps. Furthermore, our work introduces a zero-shot learning paradigm with broad potential in complex spatiotemporal and high-dimensional image reconstruction tasks, further advancing the field of medical imaging.

Paperid: 2988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21228.pdf

Abstract:
Medical anomaly detection has emerged as a promising solution to challenges in data availability and labeling constraints. Traditional methods extract features from different layers of pre-trained networks in Euclidean space; however, Euclidean representations fail to effectively capture the hierarchical relationships within these features, leading to suboptimal anomaly detection performance. We propose a novel yet simple approach that projects feature representations into hyperbolic space, aggregates them based on confidence levels, and classifies samples as healthy or anomalous. Our experiments demonstrate that hyperbolic space consistently outperforms Euclidean-based frameworks, achieving higher AUROC scores at both image and pixel levels across multiple medical benchmark datasets. Additionally, we show that hyperbolic space exhibits resilience to parameter variations and excels in few-shot scenarios, where healthy images are scarce. These findings underscore the potential of hyperbolic space as a powerful alternative for medical anomaly detection. The project website can be found at https://hyperbolic-anomalies.github.io

Paperid: 2989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16659.pdf

Abstract:
Medical anomaly detection (AD) is crucial for early clinical intervention, yet it faces challenges due to limited access to high-quality medical imaging data, caused by privacy concerns and data silos. Few-shot learning has emerged as a promising approach to alleviate these limitations by leveraging the large-scale prior knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs). Recent advancements in few-shot medical AD have treated normal and abnormal cases as a one-class classification problem, often overlooking the distinction among multiple anomaly categories. Thus, in this paper, we propose a framework tailored for few-shot medical anomaly detection in the scenario where the identification of multiple anomaly categories is required. To capture the detailed radiological signs of medical anomaly categories, our framework incorporates diverse textual descriptions for each category generated by a Large-Language model, under the assumption that different anomalies in medical images may share common radiological signs in each category. Specifically, we introduce SD-MAD, a two-stage Sign-Driven few-shot Multi-Anomaly Detection framework: (i) Radiological signs are aligned with anomaly categories by amplifying inter-anomaly discrepancy; (ii) Aligned signs are selected further to mitigate the effect of the under-fitting and uncertain-sample issue caused by limited medical data, employing an automatic sign selection strategy at inference. Moreover, we propose three protocols to comprehensively quantify the performance of multi-anomaly detection. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our method.

Paperid: 2990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14160.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual vision-language models (VLMs) promise universal image-text retrieval, yet their social biases remain underexplored. We perform the first systematic audit of four public multilingual CLIP variants: M-CLIP, NLLB-CLIP, CAPIVARA-CLIP, and the debiased SigLIP-2, covering ten languages that differ in resource availability and morphological gender marking. Using balanced subsets of FairFace and the PATA stereotype suite in a zero-shot setting, we quantify race and gender bias and measure stereotype amplification. Contrary to the intuition that multilinguality mitigates bias, every model exhibits stronger gender skew than its English-only baseline. CAPIVARA-CLIP shows its largest biases precisely in the low-resource languages it targets, while the shared encoder of NLLB-CLIP and SigLIP-2 transfers English gender stereotypes into gender-neutral languages; loosely coupled encoders largely avoid this leakage. Although SigLIP-2 reduces agency and communion skews, it inherits -- and in caption-sparse contexts (e.g., Xhosa) amplifies -- the English anchor's crime associations. Highly gendered languages consistently magnify all bias types, yet gender-neutral languages remain vulnerable whenever cross-lingual weight sharing imports foreign stereotypes. Aggregated metrics thus mask language-specific hot spots, underscoring the need for fine-grained, language-aware bias evaluation in future multilingual VLM research.

Paperid: 2991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11584.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs are being set loose in complex, real-world environments involving sequential decision-making and tool use. Often, this involves making choices on behalf of human users. However, not much is known about the distribution of such choices, and how susceptible they are to different choice architectures. We perform a case study with a few such LLM models on a multi-attribute tabular decision-making problem, under canonical nudges such as the default option, suggestions, and information highlighting, as well as additional prompting strategies. We show that, despite superficial similarities to human choice distributions, such models differ in subtle but important ways. First, they show much higher susceptibility to the nudges. Second, they diverge in points earned, being affected by factors like the idiosyncrasy of available prizes. Third, they diverge in information acquisition strategies: e.g. incurring substantial cost to reveal too much information, or selecting without revealing any. Moreover, we show that simple prompt strategies like zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) can shift the choice distribution, and few-shot prompting with human data can induce greater alignment. Yet, none of these methods resolve the sensitivity of these models to nudges. Finally, we show how optimal nudges optimized with a human resource-rational model can similarly increase LLM performance for some models. All these findings suggest that behavioral tests are needed before deploying models as agents or assistants acting on behalf of users in complex environments.

Paperid: 2992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08464.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection is essential for understanding subjective content across various platforms such as social media, news articles, and online reviews. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized stance detection by introducing novel capabilities in contextual understanding, cross-domain generalization, and multimodal analysis. Despite these progressions, existing surveys often lack comprehensive coverage of approaches that specifically leverage LLMs for stance detection. To bridge this critical gap, our review article conducts a systematic analysis of stance detection, comprehensively examining recent advancements of LLMs transforming the field, including foundational concepts, methodologies, datasets, applications, and emerging challenges. We present a novel taxonomy for LLM-based stance detection approaches, structured along three key dimensions: 1) learning methods, including supervised, unsupervised, few-shot, and zero-shot; 2) data modalities, such as unimodal, multimodal, and hybrid; and 3) target relationships, encompassing in-target, cross-target, and multi-target scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss the evaluation techniques and analyze benchmark datasets and performance trends, highlighting the strengths and limitations of different architectures. Key applications in misinformation detection, political analysis, public health monitoring, and social media moderation are discussed. Finally, we identify critical challenges such as implicit stance expression, cultural biases, and computational constraints, while outlining promising future directions, including explainable stance reasoning, low-resource adaptation, and real-time deployment frameworks. Our survey highlights emerging trends, open challenges, and future directions to guide researchers and practitioners in developing next-generation stance detection systems powered by large language models.

Paperid: 2993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02087.pdf

Abstract:
Objectives: We aim to dynamically retrieve informative demonstrations, enhancing in-context learning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for disease classification. Methods: We propose a Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning (RAICL) framework, which integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and in-context learning (ICL) to adaptively select demonstrations with similar disease patterns, enabling more effective ICL in MLLMs. Specifically, RAICL examines embeddings from diverse encoders, including ResNet, BERT, BioBERT, and ClinicalBERT, to retrieve appropriate demonstrations, and constructs conversational prompts optimized for ICL. We evaluated the framework on two real-world multi-modal datasets (TCGA and IU Chest X-ray), assessing its performance across multiple MLLMs (Qwen, Llava, Gemma), embedding strategies, similarity metrics, and varying numbers of demonstrations. Results: RAICL consistently improved classification performance. Accuracy increased from 0.7854 to 0.8368 on TCGA and from 0.7924 to 0.8658 on IU Chest X-ray. Multi-modal inputs outperformed single-modal ones, with text-only inputs being stronger than images alone. The richness of information embedded in each modality will determine which embedding model can be used to get better results. Few-shot experiments showed that increasing the number of retrieved examples further enhanced performance. Across different similarity metrics, Euclidean distance achieved the highest accuracy while cosine similarity yielded better macro-F1 scores. RAICL demonstrated consistent improvements across various MLLMs, confirming its robustness and versatility. Conclusions: RAICL provides an efficient and scalable approach to enhance in-context learning in MLLMs for multimodal disease classification.

Paperid: 2994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16693.pdf

Abstract:
While non-prehensile manipulation (e.g., controlled pushing/poking) constitutes a foundational robotic skill, its learning remains challenging due to the high sensitivity to complex physical interactions involving friction and restitution. To achieve robust policy learning and generalization, we opt to learn a world model of the 3D rigid body dynamics involved in non-prehensile manipulations and use it for model-based reinforcement learning. We propose PIN-WM, a Physics-INformed World Model that enables efficient end-to-end identification of a 3D rigid body dynamical system from visual observations. Adopting differentiable physics simulation, PIN-WM can be learned with only few-shot and task-agnostic physical interaction trajectories. Further, PIN-WM is learned with observational loss induced by Gaussian Splatting without needing state estimation. To bridge Sim2Real gaps, we turn the learned PIN-WM into a group of Digital Cousins via physics-aware randomizations which perturb physics and rendering parameters to generate diverse and meaningful variations of the PIN-WM. Extensive evaluations on both simulation and real-world tests demonstrate that PIN-WM, enhanced with physics-aware digital cousins, facilitates learning robust non-prehensile manipulation skills with Sim2Real transfer, surpassing the Real2Sim2Real state-of-the-arts.

Paperid: 2995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07961.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Geo4D, a method to repurpose video diffusion models for monocular 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes. By leveraging the strong dynamic priors captured by large-scale pre-trained video models, Geo4D can be trained using only synthetic data while generalizing well to real data in a zero-shot manner. Geo4D predicts several complementary geometric modalities, namely point, disparity, and ray maps. We propose a new multi-modal alignment algorithm to align and fuse these modalities, as well as a sliding window approach at inference time, thus enabling robust and accurate 4D reconstruction of long videos. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Geo4D significantly surpasses state-of-the-art video depth estimation methods.

Paperid: 2996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18296.pdf

Abstract:
In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, we introduce the Surgical Action Planning (SAP) task, which generates future action plans from visual inputs to address the absence of intraoperative predictive planning in current intelligent applications. SAP shows great potential for enhancing intraoperative guidance and automating procedures. However, it faces challenges such as understanding instrument-action relationships and tracking surgical progress. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in understanding surgical video content but remain underexplored for predictive decision-making in SAP, as they focus mainly on retrospective analysis. Challenges like data privacy, computational demands, and modality-specific constraints further highlight significant research gaps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LLM-SAP, a Large Language Models-based Surgical Action Planning framework that predicts future actions and generates text responses by interpreting natural language prompts of surgical goals. The text responses potentially support surgical education, intraoperative decision-making, procedure documentation, and skill analysis. LLM-SAP integrates two novel modules: the Near-History Focus Memory Module (NHF-MM) for modeling historical states and the prompts factory for action planning. We evaluate LLM-SAP on our constructed CholecT50-SAP dataset using models like Qwen2.5 and Qwen2-VL, demonstrating its effectiveness in next-action prediction. Pre-trained LLMs are tested in a zero-shot setting, and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with LoRA is implemented. Our experiments show that Qwen2.5-72B-SFT surpasses Qwen2.5-72B with a 19.3% higher accuracy.

Paperid: 2997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17862.pdf

Abstract:
While recent debiasing methods for Scene Graph Generation (SGG) have shown impressive performance, these efforts often attribute model bias solely to the long-tail distribution of relationships, overlooking the more profound causes stemming from skewed object and object pair distributions. In this paper, we employ causal inference techniques to model the causality among these observed skewed distributions. Our insight lies in the ability of causal inference to capture the unobservable causal effects between complex distributions, which is crucial for tracing the roots of model bias. Specifically, we introduce the Mediator-based Causal Chain Model (MCCM), which, in addition to modeling causality among objects, object pairs, and relationships, incorporates mediator variables, i.e., cooccurrence distribution, for complementing the causality. Following this, we propose the Causal Adjustment Module (CAModule) to estimate the modeled causal structure, using variables from MCCM as inputs to produce a set of adjustment factors aimed at correcting biased model predictions. Moreover, our method enables the composition of zero-shot relationships, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize such relationships. Experiments conducted across various SGG backbones and popular benchmarks demonstrate that CAModule achieves state-of-the-art mean recall rates, with significant improvements also observed on the challenging zero-shot recall rate metric.

Paperid: 2998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17074.pdf

Abstract:
Styled Handwritten Text Generation (HTG) has recently received attention from the computer vision and document analysis communities, which have developed several solutions, either GAN- or diffusion-based, that achieved promising results. Nonetheless, these strategies fail to generalize to novel styles and have technical constraints, particularly in terms of maximum output length and training efficiency. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose a novel framework for text image generation, dubbed Emuru. Our approach leverages a powerful text image representation model (a variational autoencoder) combined with an autoregressive Transformer. Our approach enables the generation of styled text images conditioned on textual content and style examples, such as specific fonts or handwriting styles. We train our model solely on a diverse, synthetic dataset of English text rendered in over 100,000 typewritten and calligraphy fonts, which gives it the capability to reproduce unseen styles (both fonts and users' handwriting) in zero-shot. To the best of our knowledge, Emuru is the first autoregressive model for HTG, and the first designed specifically for generalization to novel styles. Moreover, our model generates images without background artifacts, which are easier to use for downstream applications. Extensive evaluation on both typewritten and handwritten, any-length text image generation scenarios demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 2999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16944.pdf

Abstract:
Personalized portrait synthesis, essential in domains like social entertainment, has recently made significant progress. Person-wise fine-tuning based methods, such as LoRA and DreamBooth, can produce photorealistic outputs but need training on individual samples, consuming time and resources and posing an unstable risk. Adapter based techniques such as IP-Adapter freeze the foundational model parameters and employ a plug-in architecture to enable zero-shot inference, but they often exhibit a lack of naturalness and authenticity, which are not to be overlooked in portrait synthesis tasks. In this paper, we introduce a parameter-efficient adaptive generation method, namely HyperLoRA, that uses an adaptive plug-in network to generate LoRA weights, merging the superior performance of LoRA with the zero-shot capability of adapter scheme. Through our carefully designed network structure and training strategy, we achieve zero-shot personalized portrait generation (supporting both single and multiple image inputs) with high photorealism, fidelity, and editability.

Paperid: 3000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15578.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate medical time series (MedTS) classification is essential for effective clinical diagnosis, yet remains challenging due to complex multi-channel temporal dependencies, information redundancy, and label scarcity. While transformer-based models have shown promise in time series analysis, most are designed for forecasting tasks and fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of MedTS. In this paper, we introduce MedSpaformer, a transformer-based framework tailored for MedTS classification. It incorporates a sparse token-based dual-attention mechanism that enables global context modeling and token sparsification, allowing dynamic feature refinement by focusing on informative tokens while reducing redundancy. This mechanism is integrated into a multi-granularity cross-channel encoding scheme to capture intra- and inter-granularity temporal dependencies and inter-channel correlations, enabling progressive refinement of task-relevant patterns in medical signals. The sparsification design allows our model to flexibly accommodate inputs with variable lengths and channel dimensions. We also introduce an adaptive label encoder to extract label semantics and address cross-dataset label space misalignment. Together, these components enhance the model's transferability across heterogeneous medical datasets, which helps alleviate the challenge of label scarcity. Our model outperforms 13 baselines across 7 medical datasets under supervised learning. It also excels in few-shot learning and demonstrates zero-shot capability in both in-domain and cross-domain diagnostics. These results highlight MedSpaformer's robustness and its potential as a unified solution for MedTS classification across diverse settings.

Paperid: 3001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04013.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have become important tools in solving biological problems, offering improvements in accuracy and adaptability over conventional methods. Several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the performance of these LLMs. However, current benchmarks can hardly evaluate the performance of these models across diverse tasks effectively. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive prompting-based benchmarking framework, termed Bio-benchmark, which includes 30 key bioinformatics tasks covering areas such as proteins, RNA, drugs, electronic health records, and traditional Chinese medicine. Using this benchmark, we evaluate six mainstream LLMs, including GPT-4o and Llama-3.1-70b, etc., using 0-shot and few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) settings without fine-tuning to reveal their intrinsic capabilities. To improve the efficiency of our evaluations, we demonstrate BioFinder, a new tool for extracting answers from LLM responses, which increases extraction accuracy by round 30% compared to existing methods. Our benchmark results show the biological tasks suitable for current LLMs and identify specific areas requiring enhancement. Furthermore, we propose targeted prompt engineering strategies for optimizing LLM performance in these contexts. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for the development of more robust LLMs tailored for various biological applications. This work offers a comprehensive evaluation framework and robust tools to support the application of LLMs in bioinformatics.

Paperid: 3002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20866.pdf

Abstract:
While LLMs excel in zero-shot tasks, their performance in linguistic challenges like syntactic parsing has been less scrutinized. This paper studies state-of-the-art open-weight LLMs on the task by comparing them to baselines that do not have access to the input sentence, including baselines that have not been used in this context such as random projective trees or optimal linear arrangements. The results show that most of the tested LLMs cannot outperform the best uninformed baselines, with only the newest and largest versions of LLaMA doing so for most languages, and still achieving rather low performance. Thus, accurate zero-shot syntactic parsing is not forthcoming with open LLMs.

Paperid: 3003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11140.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated their integration into automated visualization code generation applications. Despite advancements through few-shot prompting and query expansion, existing methods remain limited in handling ambiguous and complex queries, thereby requiring manual intervention. To overcome these limitations, we propose VisPath: a Multi-Path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimization Framework for Visualization Code Generation. VisPath handles underspecified queries through structured, multi-stage processing. It begins by reformulating the user input via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which refers to the initial query while generating multiple extended queries in parallel, enabling the LLM to capture diverse interpretations of the user intent. These queries then generate candidate visualization scripts, which are executed to produce diverse images. By assessing the visual quality and correctness of each output, VisPath generates targeted feedback that is aggregated to synthesize an optimal final result. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks including MatPlotBench and the Qwen-Agent Code Interpreter Benchmark show that VisPath outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering a more reliable solution for AI-driven visualization code generation.

Paperid: 3004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08844.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MuJoCo Playground, a fully open-source framework for robot learning built with MJX, with the express goal of streamlining simulation, training, and sim-to-real transfer onto robots. With a simple "pip install playground", researchers can train policies in minutes on a single GPU. Playground supports diverse robotic platforms, including quadrupeds, humanoids, dexterous hands, and robotic arms, enabling zero-shot sim-to-real transfer from both state and pixel inputs. This is achieved through an integrated stack comprising a physics engine, batch renderer, and training environments. Along with video results, the entire framework is freely available at playground.mujoco.org

Paperid: 3005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01567.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel class of language models, Latent Thought Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive generation of ground tokens through a Transformer decoder. Training employs a dual-rate optimization process within the classical variational Bayes framework: fast learning of local variational parameters for the posterior distribution of latent vectors (inference-time computation), and slow learning of global decoder parameters. Empirical studies reveal that LTMs possess additional scaling dimensions beyond traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the number of iterations in inference-time computation and number of latent thought vectors. Higher sample efficiency can be achieved by increasing training compute per token, with further gains possible by trading model size for more inference steps. Designed based on these scaling properties, LTMs demonstrate superior sample and parameter efficiency compared to autoregressive models and discrete diffusion models. They significantly outperform these counterparts in validation perplexity and zero-shot language modeling tasks. Additionally, LTMs exhibit emergent few-shot in-context reasoning capabilities that scale with model size, and achieve competitive performance in conditional and unconditional text generation.

Paperid: 3006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00899.pdf

Abstract:
The impressive capabilities of large foundation models come at a cost of substantial computing resources to serve them. Compressing these pre-trained models is of practical interest as it can democratize deploying them to the machine learning community at large by lowering the costs associated with inference. A promising compression scheme is to decompose foundation models' dense weights into a sum of sparse plus low-rank matrices. In this paper, we design a unified framework coined HASSLE-free for (semi-structured) sparse plus low-rank matrix decomposition of foundation models. Our framework introduces the local layer-wise reconstruction error objective for this decomposition, we demonstrate that prior work solves a relaxation of this optimization problem; and we provide efficient and scalable methods to minimize the exact introduced optimization problem. HASSLE-free substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the introduced objective and a wide range of LLM evaluation benchmarks. For the Llama3-8B model with a 2:4 sparsity component plus a 64-rank component decomposition, a compression scheme for which recent work shows important inference acceleration on GPUs, HASSLE-free reduces the test perplexity by 12% for the WikiText-2 dataset and reduces the gap (compared to the dense model) of the average of eight popular zero-shot tasks by 15% compared to existing methods.

Paperid: 3007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14548.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) shows great potential in assisting radiologists to improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical image interpretation and diagnosis. However, a versatile AI model requires large-scale data and comprehensive annotations, which are often impractical in medical settings. Recent studies leverage radiology reports as a naturally high-quality supervision for medical images, using contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) to develop language-informed models for radiological image interpretation. Nonetheless, these approaches typically contrast entire images with reports, neglecting the local associations between imaging regions and report sentences, which may undermine model performance and interoperability. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained vision-language model (fVLM) for anatomy-level CT image interpretation. Specifically, we explicitly match anatomical regions of CT images with corresponding descriptions in radiology reports and perform contrastive pre-training for each anatomy individually. Fine-grained alignment, however, faces considerable false-negative challenges, mainly from the abundance of anatomy-level healthy samples and similarly diseased abnormalities. To tackle this issue, we propose identifying false negatives of both normal and abnormal samples and calibrating contrastive learning from patient-level to disease-aware pairing. We curated the largest CT dataset to date, comprising imaging and report data from 69,086 patients, and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 54 major and important disease diagnosis tasks across 15 main anatomies. Experimental results demonstrate the substantial potential of fVLM in versatile medical image interpretation. In the zero-shot classification task, we achieved an average AUC of 81.3% on 54 diagnosis tasks, surpassing CLIP and supervised methods by 12.9% and 8.0%, respectively.

Paperid: 3008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13795.pdf

Abstract:
Existing zero-shot temporal action detection (ZSTAD) methods predominantly use fully supervised or unsupervised strategies to recognize unseen activities. However, these training-based methods are prone to domain shifts and require high computational costs, which hinder their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, unlike previous works, we propose a training-Free Zero-shot temporal Action Detection (FreeZAD) method, leveraging existing vision-language (ViL) models to directly classify and localize unseen activities within untrimmed videos without any additional fine-tuning or adaptation. We mitigate the need for explicit temporal modeling and reliance on pseudo-label quality by designing the LOGarithmic decay weighted Outer-Inner-Contrastive Score (LogOIC) and frequency-based Actionness Calibration. Furthermore, we introduce a test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy using Prototype-Centric Sampling (PCS) to expand FreeZAD, enabling ViL models to adapt more effectively for ZSTAD. Extensive experiments on the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets demonstrate that our training-free method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods while requiring only 1/13 of the runtime. When equipped with TTA, the enhanced method further narrows the gap with fully supervised methods.

Paperid: 3009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13692.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly broadened the possibilities for editing images of real-world objects. However, performing non-rigid transformations, such as changing the pose of objects or image-based conditioning, remains challenging. Maintaining object identity during these edits is difficult, and current methods often fall short of the precision needed for industrial applications, where consistency is critical. Additionally, fine-tuning diffusion models requires custom training data, which is not always accessible in real-world scenarios. This work introduces FashionRepose, a training-free pipeline for non-rigid pose editing specifically designed for the fashion industry. The approach integrates off-the-shelf models to adjust poses of long-sleeve garments, maintaining identity and branding attributes. FashionRepose uses a zero-shot approach to perform these edits in near real-time, eliminating the need for specialized training. consistent image editing. The solution holds potential for applications in the fashion industry and other fields demanding identity preservation in image editing.

Paperid: 3010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13223.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong zero-shot recognition but frequently inherit social biases from their training data. We systematically disentangle three design factors -- model size, training-data scale, and training-data source -- by comparing CLIP and OpenCLIP, two models that share an identical contrastive objective yet differ in encoder width and in the image-text corpora on which they are pre-trained (400M proprietary pairs vs. 400M/2B LAION). Across balanced face-analysis benchmarks, enlarging the encoder reduces gender skew in CLIP but amplifies both gender and racial skew in OpenCLIP; increasing the LAION corpus from 400M to 2B further increases OpenCLIP bias. At matched model and data budgets, substituting proprietary data with LAION improves gender fairness while increasing racial skew, underscoring data source as the primary driver of bias patterns. We also evaluate three post-hoc, test-time debiasing strategies -- Bias Prompts, Prompt Array, and SANER. Debiasing reduces but does not eliminate harm, and its effectiveness is source- and size-dependent: Bias Prompts most effectively reduce gender skew in CLIP at smaller model sizes, whereas Prompt Array and SANER more reliably reduce racial skew in OpenCLIP; scaling LAION reconfigures which method is most fair. Taken together, these findings challenge the assumption that bigger models or datasets are automatically fairer and foreground training data source as the key determinant of both bias and mitigation efficacy. We release code and evaluation scripts to enable transparent, reproducible auditing of future VLMs.

Paperid: 3011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12477.pdf

Abstract:
Object-centric slot attention is a powerful framework for unsupervised learning of structured and explainable representations that can support reasoning about objects and actions, including in surgical videos. While conventional object-centric methods for videos leverage recurrent processing to achieve efficiency, they often struggle with maintaining long-range temporal coherence required for long videos in surgical applications. On the other hand, fully parallel processing of entire videos enhances temporal consistency but introduces significant computational overhead, making it impractical for implementation on hardware in medical facilities. We present Slot-BERT, a bidirectional long-range model that learns object-centric representations in a latent space while ensuring robust temporal coherence. Slot-BERT scales object discovery seamlessly to long videos of unconstrained lengths. A novel slot contrastive loss further reduces redundancy and improves the representation disentanglement by enhancing slot orthogonality. We evaluate Slot-BERT on real-world surgical video datasets from abdominal, cholecystectomy, and thoracic procedures. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art object-centric approaches under unsupervised training achieving superior performance across diverse domains. We also demonstrate efficient zero-shot domain adaptation to data from diverse surgical specialties and databases.

Paperid: 3012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00192.pdf

Abstract:
Image content safety has become a significant challenge with the rise of visual media on online platforms. Meanwhile, in the age of AI-generated content (AIGC), many image generation models are capable of producing harmful content, such as images containing sexual or violent material. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify such unsafe images based on established safety rules. Pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential in this regard, given their strong pattern recognition abilities. Existing approaches typically fine-tune MLLMs with human-labeled datasets, which however brings a series of drawbacks. First, relying on human annotators to label data following intricate and detailed guidelines is both expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, users of safety judgment systems may need to frequently update safety rules, making fine-tuning on human-based annotation more challenging. This raises the research question: Can we detect unsafe images by querying MLLMs in a zero-shot setting using a predefined safety constitution (a set of safety rules)? Our research showed that simply querying pre-trained MLLMs does not yield satisfactory results. This lack of effectiveness stems from factors such as the subjectivity of safety rules, the complexity of lengthy constitutions, and the inherent biases in the models. To address these challenges, we propose a MLLM-based method includes objectifying safety rules, assessing the relevance between rules and images, making quick judgments based on debiased token probabilities with logically complete yet simplified precondition chains for safety rules, and conducting more in-depth reasoning with cascaded chain-of-thought processes if necessary. Experiment results demonstrate that our method is highly effective for zero-shot image safety judgment tasks.

Paperid: 3013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13478.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting transcriptional responses to novel drugs provides a unique opportunity to accelerate biomedical research and advance drug discovery efforts. However, the inherent complexity and high dimensionality of cellular responses, combined with the extremely limited available experimental data, makes the task challenging. In this study, we leverage single-cell foundation models (FMs) pre-trained on tens of millions of single cells, encompassing multiple cell types, states, and disease annotations, to address molecular perturbation prediction. We introduce a drug-conditional adapter that allows efficient fine-tuning by training less than 1% of the original foundation model, thus enabling molecular conditioning while preserving the rich biological representation learned during pre-training. The proposed strategy allows not only the prediction of cellular responses to novel drugs, but also the zero-shot generalization to unseen cell lines. We establish a robust evaluation framework to assess model performance across different generalization tasks, demonstrating state-of-the-art results across all settings, with significant improvements in the few-shot and zero-shot generalization to new cell lines compared to existing baselines.

Paperid: 3014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09718.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) represents a paradigm shift in machine learning, with unprecedented results in a broad span of visual recognition tasks. CLIP, one of the most popular VLMs, has exhibited remarkable zero-shot and transfer learning capabilities in classification. To transfer CLIP to downstream tasks, adapters constitute a parameter-efficient approach that avoids backpropagation through the large model (unlike related prompt learning methods). However, CLIP adapters have been developed to target discriminative performance, and the quality of their uncertainty estimates has been overlooked. In this work we show that the discriminative performance of state-of-the-art CLIP adapters does not always correlate with their uncertainty estimation capabilities, which are essential for a safe deployment in real-world scenarios. We also demonstrate that one of such adapters is obtained through MAP inference from a more general probabilistic framework. Based on this observation we introduce BayesAdapter, which leverages Bayesian inference to estimate a full probability distribution instead of a single point, better capturing the variability inherent in the parameter space. In a comprehensive empirical evaluation we show that our approach obtains high quality uncertainty estimates in the predictions, standing out in calibration and selective classification. Our code will be publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Paperid: 3015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06878.pdf

Abstract:
With the rise of generative AI and rapid growth of high-quality video generation, video guardrails have become more crucial than ever to ensure safety and security across platforms. Current video guardrails, however, are either overly simplistic, relying on pure classification models trained on simple policies with limited unsafe categories, which lack detailed explanations, or prompting multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with long safety guidelines, which are inefficient and impractical for guardrailing real-world content. To bridge this gap, we propose SafeWatch, an efficient MLLM-based video guardrail model designed to follow customized safety policies and provide multi-label video guardrail outputs with content-specific explanations in a zero-shot manner. In particular, unlike traditional MLLM-based guardrails that encode all safety policies autoregressively, causing inefficiency and bias, SafeWatch uniquely encodes each policy chunk in parallel and eliminates their position bias such that all policies are attended simultaneously with equal importance. In addition, to improve efficiency and accuracy, SafeWatch incorporates a policy-aware visual token pruning algorithm that adaptively selects the most relevant video tokens for each policy, discarding noisy or irrelevant information. This allows for more focused, policy-compliant guardrail with significantly reduced computational overhead. Considering the limitations of existing video guardrail benchmarks, we propose SafeWatch-Bench, a large-scale video guardrail benchmark comprising over 2M videos spanning six safety categories which covers over 30 tasks to ensure a comprehensive coverage of all potential safety scenarios. SafeWatch outperforms SOTA by 28.2% on SafeWatch-Bench, 13.6% on benchmarks, cuts costs by 10%, and delivers top-tier explanations validated by LLM and human reviews.

Paperid: 3016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06292.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel zero-shot approach for keypoint detection on 3D shapes. Point-level reasoning on visual data is challenging as it requires precise localization capability, posing problems even for powerful models like DINO or CLIP. Traditional methods for 3D keypoint detection rely heavily on annotated 3D datasets and extensive supervised training, limiting their scalability and applicability to new categories or domains. In contrast, our method utilizes the rich knowledge embedded within Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, we demonstrate, for the first time, that pixel-level annotations used to train recent MLLMs can be exploited for both extracting and naming salient keypoints on 3D models without any ground truth labels or supervision. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks compared to supervised methods, despite not requiring any 3D keypoint annotations during training. Our results highlight the potential of integrating language models for localized 3D shape understanding. This work opens new avenues for cross-modal learning and underscores the effectiveness of MLLMs in contributing to 3D computer vision challenges.

Paperid: 3017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04247.pdf

Abstract:
Supervised 3D part segmentation models are tailored for a fixed set of objects and parts, limiting their transferability to open-set, real-world scenarios. Recent works have explored vision-language models (VLMs) as a promising alternative, using multi-view rendering and textual prompting to identify object parts. However, naively applying VLMs in this context introduces several drawbacks, such as the need for meticulous prompt engineering, and fails to leverage the 3D geometric structure of objects. To address these limitations, we propose COPS, a COmprehensive model for Parts Segmentation that blends the semantics extracted from visual concepts and 3D geometry to effectively identify object parts. COPS renders a point cloud from multiple viewpoints, extracts 2D features, projects them back to 3D, and uses a novel geometric-aware feature aggregation procedure to ensure spatial and semantic consistency. Finally, it clusters points into parts and labels them. We demonstrate that COPS is efficient, scalable, and achieves zero-shot state-of-the-art performance across five datasets, covering synthetic and real-world data, texture-less and coloured objects, as well as rigid and non-rigid shapes. The code is available at https://3d-cops.github.io.

Paperid: 3018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03871.pdf

Abstract:
Beyond the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), recent trends mark a shift toward exploring the applicability of lightweight vision-language models for resource-constrained scenarios. These models often deliver suboptimal performance when relying solely on a single image-text contrastive learning objective, spotlighting the need for more effective training mechanisms that guarantee robust cross-modal feature alignment. In this work, we propose CLIP-PING: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training with Proximus Intrinsic Neighbors Guidance, a novel yet simple and efficient training paradigm designed to boost the performance of lightweight vision-language models with minimal computational overhead and lower data demands. CLIP-PING bootstraps unimodal features extracted from arbitrary pre-trained encoders to obtain intrinsic guidance of proximus neighbor samples, i.e., nearest-neighbor (NN) and cross nearest-neighbor (XNN). We find that extra contrastive supervision from these neighbors substantially boosts cross-modal alignment, enabling lightweight models to learn more generic features with rich semantic diversity. Extensive experiments reveal that CLIP-PING notably surpasses its peers in zero-shot generalization and cross-modal retrieval tasks. Specifically, a 5.5% gain on zero-shot ImageNet1K classification with 10.7% (I2T) and 5.7% (T2I) on Flickr30K retrieval, compared to the original CLIP when using ViT-XS image encoder trained on 3 million (image, text) pairs. Moreover, CLIP-PING showcases a strong transferability under the linear evaluation protocol across several downstream tasks.

Paperid: 3019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03815.pdf

Abstract:
Software repositories contain valuable information for gaining insights into their development process. However, extracting insights from these repository data is time-consuming and requires technical expertise. While software engineering chatbots have been developed to facilitate natural language interactions with repositories, they struggle with understanding natural language and accurately retrieving relevant data. This study aims to improve the accuracy of LLM-based chatbots in answering repository-related questions by augmenting them with knowledge graphs. We achieve this in a two-step approach; (1) constructing a knowledge graph from the repository data and (2) synergizing the knowledge graph with LLM to allow for the natural language questions and answers. We curated a set of 20 questions with different complexities and evaluated our approach on five popular open-source projects. Our approach achieved an accuracy of 65%. We further investigated the limitations and identified six key issues, with the majority relating to the reasoning capability of the LLM. We experimented with a few-shot chain-of-thought prompting to determine if it could enhance our approach. This technique improved the overall accuracy to 84%. Our findings demonstrate the synergy between LLMs and knowledge graphs as a viable solution for making repository data accessible to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Paperid: 3020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01955.pdf

Abstract:
Cancer clinical trials often face challenges in recruitment and engagement due to a lack of participant-facing informational and educational resources. This study investigated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT4, in generating patient-friendly educational content from clinical trial informed consent forms. Using data from ClinicalTrials.gov, we employed zero-shot learning for creating trial summaries and one-shot learning for developing multiple-choice questions, evaluating their effectiveness through patient surveys and crowdsourced annotation. Results showed that GPT4-generated summaries were both readable and comprehensive, and may improve patients' understanding and interest in clinical trials. The multiple-choice questions demonstrated high accuracy and agreement with crowdsourced annotators. For both resource types, hallucinations were identified that require ongoing human oversight. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs "out-of-the-box" to support the generation of clinical trial education materials with minimal trial-specific engineering, but implementation with a human-in-the-loop is still needed to avoid misinformation risks.

Paperid: 3021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15099.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale multimodal representation learning successfully optimizes for zero-shot transfer at test time. Yet the standard pretraining paradigm (contrastive learning on large amounts of image-text data) does not explicitly encourage representations to support few-shot adaptation. In this work, we propose a simple, but carefully designed extension to multimodal pretraining which enables representations to accommodate additional context. Using this objective, we show that vision-language models can be trained to exhibit significantly increased few-shot adaptation: across 21 downstream tasks, we find up to four-fold improvements in test-time sample efficiency, and average few-shot adaptation gains of over 5%, while retaining zero-shot generalization performance across model scales and training durations. In particular, equipped with simple, training-free, metric-based adaptation mechanisms, our representations easily surpass more complex and expensive optimization-based schemes, vastly simplifying generalization to new domains.

Paperid: 3022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13163.pdf

Abstract:
The reuse of historical clinical trial data has significant potential to accelerate medical research and drug development. However, interoperability challenges, particularly with missing medical codes, hinders effective data integration across studies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution for automated coding without labeled data, current approaches face challenges on complex coding tasks. We introduce ALIGN, a novel compositional LLM-based system for automated, zero-shot medical coding. ALIGN follows a three-step process: (1) diverse candidate code generation; (2) self-evaluation of codes and (3) confidence scoring and uncertainty estimation enabling human deferral to ensure reliability. We evaluate ALIGN on harmonizing medication terms into Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) and medical history terms into Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) codes extracted from 22 immunology trials. ALIGN outperformed the LLM baselines, while also providing capabilities for trustworthy deployment. For MedDRA coding, ALIGN achieved high accuracy across all levels, matching RAG and excelling at the most specific levels (87-90% for HLGT). For ATC coding, ALIGN demonstrated superior performance, particularly at lower hierarchy levels (ATC Level 4), with 72-73% overall accuracy and 86-89% accuracy for common medications, outperforming baselines by 7-22%. ALIGN's uncertainty-based deferral improved accuracy by 17% to 90% accuracy with 30% deferral, notably enhancing performance on uncommon medications. ALIGN achieves this cost-efficiently at \$0.0007 and \$0.02 per code for GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o, reducing barriers to clinical adoption. ALIGN advances automated medical coding for clinical trial data, contributing to enhanced data interoperability and reusability, positioning it as a promising tool to improve clinical research and accelerate drug development.

Paperid: 3023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11288.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot skeleton action recognition is a non-trivial task that requires robust unseen generalization with prior knowledge from only seen classes and shared semantics. Existing methods typically build the skeleton-semantics interactions by uncontrollable mappings and conspicuous representations, thereby can hardly capture the intricate and fine-grained relationship for effective cross-modal transferability. To address these issues, we propose a novel dyNamically Evolving dUal skeleton-semantic syneRgistic framework with the guidance of cOntext-aware side informatioN (dubbed Neuron), to explore more fine-grained cross-modal correspondence from micro to macro perspectives at both spatial and temporal levels, respectively. Concretely, 1) we first construct the spatial-temporal evolving micro-prototypes and integrate dynamic context-aware side information to capture the intricate and synergistic skeleton-semantic correlations step-by-step, progressively refining cross-model alignment; and 2) we introduce the spatial compression and temporal memory mechanisms to guide the growth of spatial-temporal micro-prototypes, enabling them to absorb structure-related spatial representations and regularity-dependent temporal patterns. Notably, such processes are analogous to the learning and growth of neurons, equipping the framework with the capacity to generalize to novel unseen action categories. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method.

Paperid: 3024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09986.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition (FSOSR) targets a critical real-world challenge, aiming to categorize inputs into known categories, termed closed-set classes, while identifying open-set inputs that fall outside these classes. Although transfer learning where a model is tuned to a given few-shot task has become a prominent paradigm in closed-world, we observe that it fails to expand to open-world. To unlock this challenge, we propose a two-stage method which consists of open-set aware meta-learning with open-set free transfer learning. In the open-set aware meta-learning stage, a model is trained to establish a metric space that serves as a beneficial starting point for the subsequent stage. During the open-set free transfer learning stage, the model is further adapted to a specific target task through transfer learning. Additionally, we introduce a strategy to simulate open-set examples by modifying the training dataset or generating pseudo open-set examples. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely recognized benchmarks, miniImageNet and tieredImageNet, with only a 1.5\% increase in training effort. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of transfer learning in FSOSR.

Paperid: 3025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24105.pdf

Abstract:
Schema matching -- the task of finding matches between attributes across disparate data sources with different tables and hierarchies -- is critical for creating interoperable machine learning (ML)-ready data. Addressing this fundamental data-centric problem has wide implications, especially in domains like healthcare, finance and e-commerce -- but also has the potential to benefit ML models more generally, by increasing the data available for ML model training. However, schema matching is a challenging ML task due to structural/hierarchical and semantic heterogeneity between different schemas. Previous ML approaches to automate schema matching have either required significant labeled data for model training, which is often unrealistic or suffer from poor zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose Matchmaker - a compositional language model program for schema matching, comprised of candidate generation, refinement and confidence scoring. Matchmaker also self-improves in a zero-shot manner without the need for labeled demonstrations via a novel optimization approach, which constructs synthetic in-context demonstrations to guide the language model's reasoning process. Empirically, we demonstrate on real-world medical schema matching benchmarks that Matchmaker outperforms previous ML-based approaches, highlighting its potential to accelerate data integration and interoperability of ML-ready data.

Paperid: 3026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17839.pdf

Abstract:
Novel view synthesis with sparse inputs poses great challenges to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Recent works demonstrate that the frequency regularization of Positional Encoding (PE) can achieve promising results for few-shot NeRF. In this work, we reveal that there exists an inconsistency between the frequency regularization of PE and rendering loss. This prevents few-shot NeRF from synthesizing higher-quality novel views. To mitigate this inconsistency, we propose Adaptive Rendering loss regularization for few-shot NeRF, dubbed AR-NeRF. Specifically, we present a two-phase rendering supervision and an adaptive rendering loss weight learning strategy to align the frequency relationship between PE and 2D-pixel supervision. In this way, AR-NeRF can learn global structures better in the early training phase and adaptively learn local details throughout the training process. Extensive experiments show that our AR-NeRF achieves state-of-the-art performance on different datasets, including object-level and complex scenes.

Paperid: 3027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13394.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating machine-generated text remains a significant challenge in NLP, especially for non-English languages. Current methodologies, including automated metrics, human assessments, and LLM-based evaluations, predominantly focus on English, revealing a significant gap in multilingual evaluation frameworks. We introduce the Cross Lingual Auto Evaluation (CIA) Suite, an extensible framework that includes evaluator LLMs (Hercule) and a novel test set (Recon) specifically designed for multilingual evaluation. Our test set features 500 human-annotated instructions spanning various task capabilities along with human judgment scores across six languages. This would enable benchmarking of general-purpose multilingual LLMs and facilitate meta-evaluation of Evaluator LLMs. The proposed model, Hercule, is a cross-lingual evaluation model that addresses the scarcity of reference answers in the target language by learning to assign scores to responses based on easily available reference answers in English. Our experiments demonstrate that Hercule aligns more closely with human judgments compared to proprietary models, demonstrating the effectiveness of such cross-lingual evaluation in low resource scenarios. Further, it is also effective in zero-shot evaluation on unseen languages. This study is the first comprehensive examination of cross-lingual evaluation using LLMs, presenting a scalable and effective approach for multilingual assessment. All code, datasets, and models will be publicly available to enable further research in this important area.

Paperid: 3028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12112.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong potential in solving planning problems, there is a trade-off between flexibility and complexity. LLMs, as zero-shot planners themselves, are still not capable of directly generating valid plans for complex planning problems such as multi-constraint or long-horizon tasks. On the other hand, many frameworks aiming to solve complex planning problems often rely on task-specific preparatory efforts, such as task-specific in-context examples and pre-defined critics/verifiers, which limits their cross-task generalization capability. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by observing that the core of many planning problems lies in optimization problems: searching for the optimal solution (best plan) with goals subject to constraints (preconditions and effects of decisions). With LLMs' commonsense, reasoning, and programming capabilities, this opens up the possibilities of a universal LLM-based approach to planning problems. Inspired by this observation, we propose LLMFP, a general-purpose framework that leverages LLMs to capture key information from planning problems and formally formulate and solve them as optimization problems from scratch, with no task-specific examples needed. We apply LLMFP to 9 planning problems, ranging from multi-constraint decision making to multi-step planning problems, and demonstrate that LLMFP achieves on average 83.7% and 86.8% optimal rate across 9 tasks for GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming the best baseline (direct planning with OpenAI o1-preview) with 37.6% and 40.7% improvements. We also validate components of LLMFP with ablation experiments and analyzed the underlying success and failure reasons. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/llmfp.

Paperid: 3029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08499.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a focal point of research across various domains, including software engineering, where their capabilities are increasingly leveraged. Recent studies have explored the integration of LLMs into software development tools and frameworks, revealing their potential to enhance performance in text and code-related tasks. Log level is a key part of a logging statement that allows software developers control the information recorded during system runtime. Given that log messages often mix natural language with code-like variables, LLMs' language translation abilities could be applied to determine the suitable verbosity level for logging statements. In this paper, we undertake a detailed empirical analysis to investigate the impact of characteristics and learning paradigms on the performance of 12 open-source LLMs in log level suggestion. We opted for open-source models because they enable us to utilize in-house code while effectively protecting sensitive information and maintaining data security. We examine several prompting strategies, including Zero-shot, Few-shot, and fine-tuning techniques, across different LLMs to identify the most effective combinations for accurate log level suggestions. Our research is supported by experiments conducted on 9 large-scale Java systems. The results indicate that although smaller LLMs can perform effectively with appropriate instruction and suitable techniques, there is still considerable potential for improvement in their ability to suggest log levels.

Paperid: 3030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08469.pdf

Abstract:
A text encoder within Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP plays a crucial role in translating textual input into an embedding space shared with images, thereby facilitating the interpretative analysis of vision tasks through natural language. Despite the varying significance of different textual elements within a sentence depending on the context, efforts to account for variation of importance in constructing text embeddings have been lacking. We propose a framework of Semantic Token Reweighting to build Interpretable text embeddings (SToRI), which incorporates controllability as well. SToRI refines the text encoding process in CLIP by differentially weighting semantic elements based on contextual importance, enabling finer control over emphasis responsive to data-driven insights and user preferences. The efficacy of SToRI is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on few-shot image classification and image retrieval tailored to user preferences.

Paperid: 3031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01577.pdf

Abstract:
Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) offers tissue-specific physical parameters with significant potential for neuroscience research and clinical practice. However, lengthy scan times for 3D multiparametric qMRI acquisition limit its clinical utility. Here, we propose SUMMIT, an innovative imaging methodology that includes data acquisition and an unsupervised reconstruction for simultaneous multiparametric qMRI. SUMMIT first encodes multiple important quantitative properties into highly undersampled k-space. It further leverages implicit neural representation incorporated with a dedicated physics model to reconstruct the desired multiparametric maps without needing external training datasets. SUMMIT delivers co-registered T1, T2, T2*, and quantitative susceptibility mapping. Extensive simulations and phantom imaging demonstrate SUMMIT's high accuracy. Additionally, the proposed unsupervised approach for qMRI reconstruction also introduces a novel zero-shot learning paradigm for multiparametric imaging applicable to various medical imaging modalities.

Paperid: 3032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08425.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce SoloAudio, a novel diffusion-based generative model for target sound extraction (TSE). Our approach trains latent diffusion models on audio, replacing the previous U-Net backbone with a skip-connected Transformer that operates on latent features. SoloAudio supports both audio-oriented and language-oriented TSE by utilizing a CLAP model as the feature extractor for target sounds. Furthermore, SoloAudio leverages synthetic audio generated by state-of-the-art text-to-audio models for training, demonstrating strong generalization to out-of-domain data and unseen sound events. We evaluate this approach on the FSD Kaggle 2018 mixture dataset and real data from AudioSet, where SoloAudio achieves the state-of-the-art results on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, and exhibits impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. Source code and demos are released.

Paperid: 3033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02322.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized text and video processing, yet time series data presents distinct challenges for such approaches due to domain-specific features such as missing values, multi-resolution characteristics, etc. Furthermore, the de-facto autoregressive transformers tend to learn deterministic temporal dependencies within pre-trained data while overlooking inherent uncertainties and lacking integration of physical constraints. In this paper, we introduce TimeDiT, a diffusion transformer model that synergistically combines transformer-based temporal dependency learning with diffusion-based probabilistic sampling. TimeDiT employs a unified masking mechanism to harmonize the training and inference process across diverse tasks while introducing a theoretically grounded, finetuning-free model editing strategy that enables flexible integration of external knowledge during sampling. Acknowledging the challenges of unifying multiple downstream tasks under a single model, our systematic evaluation demonstrates TimeDiT's effectiveness both in fundamental tasks, i.e., forecasting and imputation, through zero-shot/fine-tuning; and in domain tasks, i.e., multi-resolution forecasting, anomaly detection, and data generation, establishing it as a \textit{proto-foundation model} that bridges the gap between general-purpose and domain-specific models.

Paperid: 3034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16230.pdf

Abstract:
An accurate assessment of L2 English pronunciation is crucial for language learning, as it provides personalized feedback and ensures a fair evaluation of individual progress. However, automated scoring remains challenging due to the complexity of sentence-level fluency, prosody, and completeness. This paper evaluates the zero-shot performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct, an instruction-tuned speech-LLM, on 5,000 Speechocean762 utterances. The model generates rubric-aligned scores for accuracy, fluency, prosody, and completeness, showing strong agreement with human ratings within +-2 tolerance, especially for high-quality speech. However, it tends to overpredict low-quality speech scores and lacks precision in error detection. These findings demonstrate the strong potential of speech LLMs in scalable pronunciation assessment and suggest future improvements through enhanced prompting, calibration, and phonetic integration to advance Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training.

Paperid: 3035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16212.pdf

Abstract:
Robot foundation models are beginning to deliver on the promise of generalist robotic agents, yet progress remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale real-world manipulation datasets. Simulation and synthetic data generation offer a scalable alternative, but their usefulness is limited by the visual domain gap between simulation and reality. In this work, we present Point Bridge, a framework that leverages unified, domain-agnostic point-based representations to unlock synthetic datasets for zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer, without explicit visual or object-level alignment. Point Bridge combines automated point-based representation extraction via Vision-Language Models (VLMs), transformer-based policy learning, and efficient inference-time pipelines to train capable real-world manipulation agents using only synthetic data. With additional co-training on small sets of real demonstrations, Point Bridge further improves performance, substantially outperforming prior vision-based sim-and-real co-training methods. It achieves up to 44% gains in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and up to 66% with limited real data across both single-task and multitask settings. Videos of the robot are best viewed at: https://pointbridge3d.github.io/

Paperid: 3036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07005.pdf

Abstract:
Log parsing converts semi-structured logs into structured templates, forming a critical foundation for downstream analysis. Traditional syntax and semantic-based parsers often struggle with semantic variations in evolving logs and data scarcity stemming from their limited domain coverage. Recent large language model (LLM)-based parsers leverage in-context learning (ICL) to extract semantics from examples, demonstrating superior accuracy. However, LLM-based parsers face two main challenges: 1) underutilization of ICL capabilities, particularly in dynamic example selection and cross-domain generalization, leading to inconsistent performance; 2) time-consuming and costly LLM querying. To address these challenges, we present MicLog, the first progressive meta in-context learning (ProgMeta-ICL) log parsing framework that combines meta-learning with ICL on small open-source LLMs (i.e., Qwen-2.5-3B). Specifically, MicLog: i) enhances LLMs' ICL capability through a zero-shot to k-shot ProgMeta-ICL paradigm, employing weighted DBSCAN candidate sampling and enhanced BM25 demonstration selection; ii) accelerates parsing via a multi-level pre-query cache that dynamically matches and refines recently parsed templates. Evaluated on Loghub-2.0, MicLog achieves 10.3% higher parsing accuracy than the state-of-the-art parser while reducing parsing time by 42.4%.

Paperid: 3037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24120.pdf

Abstract:
Automated neural network architecture design remains a significant challenge in computer vision. Task diversity and computational constraints require both effective architectures and efficient search methods. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising alternative to computationally intensive Neural Architecture Search (NAS), but their application to architecture generation in computer vision has not been systematically studied, particularly regarding prompt engineering and validation strategies. Building on the task-agnostic NNGPT/LEMUR framework, this work introduces and validates two key contributions for computer vision. First, we present Few-Shot Architecture Prompting (FSAP), the first systematic study of the number of supporting examples (n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) for LLM-based architecture generation. We find that using n = 3 examples best balances architectural diversity and context focus for vision tasks. Second, we introduce Whitespace-Normalized Hash Validation, a lightweight deduplication method (less than 1 ms) that provides a 100x speedup over AST parsing and prevents redundant training of duplicate computer vision architectures. In large-scale experiments across seven computer vision benchmarks (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CelebA, ImageNette, SVHN, Places365), we generated 1,900 unique architectures. We also introduce a dataset-balanced evaluation methodology to address the challenge of comparing architectures across heterogeneous vision tasks. These contributions provide actionable guidelines for LLM-based architecture search in computer vision and establish rigorous evaluation practices, making automated design more accessible to researchers with limited computational resources.

Paperid: 3038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16250.pdf

Abstract:
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o and Qwen3-Omni show strong perception but struggle in multi-speaker, dialogue-centric settings that demand agentic reasoning tracking who speaks, maintaining roles, and grounding events across time. These scenarios are central to multimodal audio-video understanding, where models must jointly reason over audio and visual streams in applications such as conversational video assistants and meeting analytics. We introduce AMUSE, a benchmark designed around tasks that are inherently agentic, requiring models to decompose complex audio-visual interactions into planning, grounding, and reflection steps. It evaluates MLLMs across three modes zero-shot, guided, and agentic and six task families, including spatio-temporal speaker grounding and multimodal dialogue summarization. Across all modes, current models exhibit weak multi-speaker reasoning and inconsistent behavior under both non-agentic and agentic evaluation. Motivated by the inherently agentic nature of these tasks and recent advances in LLM agents, we propose RAFT, a data-efficient agentic alignment framework that integrates reward optimization with intrinsic multimodal self-evaluation as reward and selective parameter adaptation for data and parameter efficient updates. Using RAFT, we achieve up to 39.52\% relative improvement in accuracy on our benchmark. Together, AMUSE and RAFT provide a practical platform for examining agentic reasoning in multimodal models and improving their capabilities.

Paperid: 3039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22176.pdf

Abstract:
Recent large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by generating detailed chain-of-thought traces, but this often leads to excessive token use and high inference latency. Existing efficiency approaches typically focus on model-centric interventions, such as reinforcement learning or supervised fine-tuning, to reduce verbosity. In contrast, we propose a training-free, input-centric approach. Inspired by cognitive psychology, we introduce Focused Chain-of-Thought (F-CoT), which separates information extraction from the reasoning process. F-CoT first organizes the essential information from a query into a concise, structured context and then guides the model to reason exclusively over this context. By preventing attention to irrelevant details, F-CoT naturally produces shorter reasoning paths. On arithmetic word problems, F-CoT reduces generated tokens by 2-3x while maintaining accuracy comparable to standard zero-shot CoT. These results highlight structured input as a simple yet effective lever for more efficient LLM reasoning.

Paperid: 3040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20333.pdf

Abstract:
Building self-improving AI systems remains a fundamental challenge in the AI domain. We present NNGPT, an open-source framework that turns a large language model (LLM) into a self-improving AutoML engine for neural network development, primarily for computer vision. Unlike previous frameworks, NNGPT extends the dataset of neural networks by generating new models, enabling continuous fine-tuning of LLMs based on closed-loop system of generation, assessment, and self-improvement. It integrates within one unified workflow five synergistic LLM-based pipelines: zero-shot architecture synthesis, hyperparameter optimization (HPO), code-aware accuracy/early-stop prediction, retrieval-augmented synthesis of scope-closed PyTorch blocks (NN-RAG), and reinforcement learning. Built on the LEMUR dataset as an audited corpus with reproducible metrics, NNGPT emits from a single prompt and validates network architecture, preprocessing code, and hyperparameters, executes them end-to-end, and learns from result. The PyTorch adapter makes NNGPT framework-agnostic, enabling strong performance: NN-RAG achieves 73% executability on 1,289 targets, 3-shot prompting boosts accuracy on common datasets, and hash-based deduplication saves hundreds of runs. One-shot prediction matches search-based AutoML, reducing the need for numerous trials. HPO on LEMUR achieves RMSE 0.60, outperforming Optuna (0.64), while the code-aware predictor reaches RMSE 0.14 with Pearson r=0.78. The system has already generated over 5K validated models, proving NNGPT as an autonomous AutoML engine. Upon acceptance, the code, prompts, and checkpoints will be released for public access to enable reproducibility and facilitate community usage.

Paperid: 3041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19647.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models (FM) have unlocked powerful zero-shot capabilities in vision and language, yet their reliance on internet pretraining data leaves them brittle in unstructured, real-world settings. The messy, real-world data encountered during deployment (e.g. occluded or multilingual text) remains massively underrepresented in existing corpora. Robots, as embodied agents, are uniquely positioned to close this gap: they can act in physical environments to collect large-scale, real-world data that enriches FM training with precisely the examples current models lack. We introduce the Robot-Powered Data Flywheel, a framework that transforms robots from FM consumers into data generators. By deploying robots equipped with FMs in the wild, we enable a virtuous cycle: robots perform useful tasks while collecting real-world data that improves both domain-specific adaptation and domain-adjacent generalization. We instantiate this framework with Scanford, a mobile manipulator deployed in the East Asia Library for 2 weeks. Scanford autonomously scans shelves, identifies books using a vision-language model (VLM), and leverages the library catalog to label images without human annotation. This deployment both aids librarians and produces a dataset to finetune the underlying VLM, improving performance on the domain-specific in-the-wild library setting and on domain-adjacent multilingual OCR benchmarks. Using data collected from 2103 shelves, Scanford improves VLM performance on book identification from 32.0% to 71.8% and boosts domain-adjacent multilingual OCR from 24.8% to 46.6% (English) and 30.8% to 38.0% (Chinese), while saving an ~18.7 hrs of human time. These results highlight how robot-powered data flywheels can both reduce human effort in real deployments and unlock new pathways for continually adapting FMs to the messiness of reality. More details are at: https://scanford-robot.github.io

Paperid: 3042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17209.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce SPECTRE, a fully transformer-based foundation model for volumetric computed tomography (CT). Our Self-Supervised & Cross-Modal Pretraining for CT Representation Extraction (SPECTRE) approach utilizes scalable 3D Vision Transformer architectures and modern self-supervised and vision-language pretraining strategies to learn general-purpose CT representations. Volumetric CT poses unique challenges, such as extreme token scaling, geometric anisotropy, and weak or noisy clinical supervision, that make standard transformer and contrastive learning recipes ineffective out of the box. The framework jointly optimizes a local transformer for high-resolution volumetric feature extraction and a global transformer for whole-scan context modeling, making large-scale 3D attention computationally tractable. Notably, SPECTRE is trained exclusively on openly available CT datasets, demonstrating that high-performing, generalizable representations can be achieved without relying on private data. Pretraining combines DINO-style self-distillation with SigLIP-based vision-language alignment using paired radiology reports, yielding features that are both geometrically consistent and clinically meaningful. Across multiple CT benchmarks, SPECTRE consistently outperforms prior CT foundation models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, establishing SPECTRE as a scalable, open, and fully transformer-based foundation model for 3D medical imaging.

Paperid: 3043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14770.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for recommendation systems, though current approaches such as TALLRec face challenges in explainability and cold-start scenarios. We present ExplainRec, a framework that extends LLM-based recommendation capabilities through preference attribution, multi-modal fusion, and zero-shot transfer learning. The framework incorporates four technical contributions: preference attribution tuning for explainable recommendations, zero-shot preference transfer for cold-start users and items, multi-modal enhancement leveraging visual and textual content, and multi-task collaborative optimization. Experimental evaluation on MovieLens-25M and Amazon datasets shows that ExplainRec outperforms existing methods, achieving AUC improvements of 0.7\% on movie recommendation and 0.9\% on cross-domain tasks, while generating interpretable explanations and handling cold-start scenarios effectively.

Paperid: 3044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13005.pdf

Abstract:
Large vision-language models, such as CLIP, have shown strong zero-shot classification performance by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space. However, CLIP models often develop multimodal spurious biases, which is the undesirable tendency to rely on spurious features. For example, CLIP may infer object types in images based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than the object's core features. This bias significantly impairs the robustness of pre-trained CLIP models on out-of-distribution data, where such cross-modal associations no longer hold. Existing methods for mitigating multimodal spurious bias typically require fine-tuning on downstream data or prior knowledge of the bias, which undermines the out-of-the-box usability of CLIP. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the impact of multimodal spurious bias in zero-shot classification. Based on this insight, we propose Spuriousness-Aware Guided Exploration (SAGE), a simple and effective method that mitigates spurious bias through guided prompt selection. SAGE requires no training, fine-tuning, or external annotations. It explores a space of prompt templates and selects the prompts that induce the largest semantic separation between classes, thereby improving worst-group robustness. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets and five popular backbone models demonstrate that SAGE consistently improves zero-shot performance and generalization, outperforming previous zero-shot approaches without any external knowledge or model updates.

Paperid: 3045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19385.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical bottleneck in their immense size, necessitating efficient compression techniques. While Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a promising approach, existing SVD-based methods treat the entire parameter matrix uniformly, overlooking that SVD approximation errors vary significantly across different matrix parts, which often leads to suboptimal compression. To address this, we propose \textbf{C}olumn-\textbf{P}reserving \textbf{S}ingular \textbf{V}alue \textbf{D}ecomposition (CPSVD), a novel method that refines SVD-based LLM compression by intelligently segmenting the parameter matrix. Unlike traditional SVD, CPSVD identifies and directly preserves matrix columns with high decomposition errors, applying SVD only to columns with low decomposition errors, while precisely determining the optimal balance point between these two strategies to minimize error. Furthermore, leveraging the inherent heterogeneity in decomposition errors across different matrices within an LLM, CPSVD adaptively allocates non-uniform compression rates to modules within that layer, while adhering to a target layer-wise compression ratio, thereby further enhancing compression performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPSVD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SVD-based LLM compression methods, achieving lower perplexity and higher accuracy on zero-shot tasks.

Paperid: 3046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18546.pdf

Abstract:
Object-goal navigation (ObjNav) tasks an agent with navigating to the location of a specific object in an unseen environment. Embodied agents equipped with large language models (LLMs) and online constructed navigation maps can perform ObjNav in a zero-shot manner. However, existing agents heavily rely on giant LLMs on the cloud, e.g., GPT-4, while directly switching to small LLMs, e.g., LLaMA3.2-11b, suffer from significant success rate drops due to limited model capacity for understanding complex navigation maps, which prevents deploying ObjNav on local devices. At the same time, the long prompt introduced by the navigation map description will cause high planning latency on local devices. In this paper, we propose EfficientNav to enable on-device efficient LLM-based zero-shot ObjNav. To help the smaller LLMs better understand the environment, we propose semantics-aware memory retrieval to prune redundant information in navigation maps. To reduce planning latency, we propose discrete memory caching and attention-based memory clustering to efficiently save and re-use the KV cache. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that EfficientNav achieves 11.1% improvement in success rate on HM3D benchmark over GPT-4-based baselines, and demonstrates 6.7x real-time latency reduction and 4.7x end-to-end latency reduction over GPT-4 planner. Our code will be released soon.

Paperid: 3047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17501.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid proliferation of video content across social media, surveillance, and education platforms, efficiently summarizing long videos into concise yet semantically faithful surrogates has become increasingly vital. Existing supervised methods achieve strong in-domain accuracy by learning from dense annotations but suffer from high labeling costs and limited cross-dataset generalization, while unsupervised approaches, though label-free, often fail to capture high-level human semantics and fine-grained narrative cues. More recently, zero-shot prompting pipelines have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for training-free video summarization, yet remain highly sensitive to handcrafted prompt templates and dataset-specific score normalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a rubric-guided, pseudo-labeled prompting framework that transforms a small subset of ground-truth annotations into high-confidence pseudo labels, which are aggregated into structured, dataset-adaptive scoring rubrics guiding interpretable scene evaluation. During inference, first and last segments are scored based solely on their descriptions, whereas intermediate ones incorporate brief contextual summaries of adjacent scenes to assess narrative progression and redundancy. This contextual prompting enables the LLM to balance local salience and global coherence without parameter tuning. On SumMe and TVSum, our method achieves F1 scores of \textbf{57.58} and \textbf{63.05}, surpassing unsupervised and prior zero-shot baselines while approaching supervised performance. The results demonstrate that rubric-guided pseudo labeling effectively stabilizes LLM-based scoring and establishes a general, interpretable zero-shot paradigm for video summarization.

Paperid: 3048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09867.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve zero-shot transfer across various tasks by pre-training on numerous image-text pairs. These models often benefit from using an ensemble of context prompts to represent a class. Despite being effective, conventional prompt ensembling that averages textual features of context prompts often yields suboptimal results. This is because feature averaging shifts the class centroids away from the true class distribution. To address this issue, we propose the Cluster-Aware Prompt Ensemble Learning (CAPEL) framework, which preserves the cluster nature of context prompts. CAPEL classifies images into one of several class clusters, each represented by a distinct prompt. Instead of ensembling prompts in the feature space, we perform ensembling in the classification logits space, aligning better with the visual feature distribution. To further optimize prompt fine-tuning while maintaining cluster-specific discriminative power, we introduce a cluster-preserving regularization term. This ensures that prompts remain distinct and specialized for different clusters, preventing collapse into a uniform direction. Additionally, we integrate an adaptive prompt weighting technique to dynamically adjust the attention weights for flawed or ambiguous prompts, ensuring robust performance across diverse datasets and tasks.

Paperid: 3049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06530.pdf

Abstract:
The quality and experience of mobile communication have significantly improved with the introduction of 5G, and these improvements are expected to continue beyond the 5G era. However, vulnerabilities in control-plane protocols, such as Radio Resource Control (RRC) and Non-Access Stratum (NAS), pose significant security threats, such as Blind Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Despite the availability of existing anomaly detection methods that leverage rule-based systems or traditional machine learning methods, these methods have several limitations, including the need for extensive training data, predefined rules, and limited explainability. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel anomaly detection framework that leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in zero-shot mode with unordered data and short natural language attack descriptions within the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture. We analyse robustness to prompt variation, demonstrate the practicality of automating the attack descriptions and show that detection quality relies on the semantic completeness of the description rather than its phrasing or length. We utilise an RRC/NAS dataset to evaluate the solution and provide an extensive comparison of open-source and proprietary LLM implementations to demonstrate superior performance in attack detection. We further validate the practicality of our framework within O-RAN's real-time constraints, illustrating its potential for detecting other Layer-3 attacks.

Paperid: 3050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06200.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly being adopted as highly-capable general-purpose time series representation learners. Although their training corpora are vast, they exclude astronomical time series data. Observations of stars produce peta-scale time series with unique challenges including irregular sampling and heteroskedasticity. We introduce StarEmbed, the first public benchmark for rigorous and standardized evaluation of state-of-the-art TSFMs on stellar time series observations (``light curves''). We benchmark on three scientifically-motivated downstream tasks: unsupervised clustering, supervised classification, and out-of-distribution source detection. StarEmbed integrates a catalog of expert-vetted labels with multi-variate light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility, yielding ~40k hand-labeled light curves spread across seven astrophysical classes. We evaluate the zero-shot representation capabilities of three TSFMs (MOIRAI, Chronos, Chronos-Bolt) and a domain-specific transformer (Astromer) against handcrafted feature extraction, the long-standing baseline in the astrophysics literature. Our results demonstrate that these TSFMs, especially the Chronos models, which are trained on data completely unlike the astronomical observations, can outperform established astrophysics-specific baselines in some tasks and effectively generalize to entirely new data. In particular, TSFMs deliver state-of-the-art performance on our out-of-distribution source detection benchmark. With the first benchmark of TSFMs on astronomical time series data, we test the limits of their generalization and motivate a paradigm shift in time-domain astronomy from using task-specific, fully supervised pipelines toward adopting generic foundation model representations for the analysis of peta-scale datasets from forthcoming observatories.

Paperid: 3051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02668.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence, yet their application in recommender systems remains limited by reasoning opacity and knowledge constraints. This paper introduces AgenticRAG, a novel framework that combines tool-augmented foundation models with retrieval-augmented generation for zero-shot explainable recommendations. Our approach integrates external tool invocation, knowledge retrieval, and chain-of-thought reasoning to create autonomous recommendation agents capable of transparent decision-making without task-specific training. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AgenticRAG achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, with NDCG@10 improvements of 0.4\% on Amazon Electronics, 0.8\% on MovieLens-1M, and 1.6\% on Yelp datasets. The framework exhibits superior explainability while maintaining computational efficiency comparable to traditional methods.

Paperid: 3052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02322.pdf

Abstract:
Spoken communication plays a central role in clinical workflows. In radiology, for example, most reports are created through dictation. Yet, nearly all medical AI systems rely exclusively on written text. In this work, we address this gap by exploring the feasibility of learning visual-language representations directly from spoken radiology reports. Specifically, we synthesize a large-scale dataset (Speech-RATE) of spoken radiology reports and train SpeechCT-CLIP, a contrastive model that aligns speech and 3D CT volumes in a shared representation space. While naive speech-based models underperform compared to text-trained counterparts, we show that knowledge distillation from a pretrained text-image CLIP model effectively transfers semantic alignment capabilities from text to speech, substantially narrowing this gap. Experiments demonstrate improved zero-shot classification F1 from 0.623 to 0.705, recovering 88% of the performance difference, and strong retrieval results without requiring text at inference. These findings highlight speech as a practical alternative to text in multimodal pretraining and open the door to voice-driven diagnostic support tools in clinical practice.

Paperid: 3053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01521.pdf

Abstract:
Computational decarbonization aims to reduce carbon emissions in computing and societal systems such as data centers, transportation, and built environments. This requires accurate, fine-grained carbon intensity forecasts, yet existing tools have several key limitations: (i) they require grid-specific electricity mix data, restricting use where such information is unavailable; (ii) they depend on separate grid-specific models that make it challenging to provide global coverage; and (iii) they provide forecasts without uncertainty estimates, limiting reliability for downstream carbon-aware applications. In this paper, we present CarbonX, an open-source tool that leverages Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) for a range of decarbonization tasks. CarbonX utilizes the versatility of TSFMs to provide strong performance across multiple tasks, such as carbon intensity forecasting and imputation, and across diverse grids. Using only historical carbon intensity data and a single general model, our tool achieves a zero-shot forecasting Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 15.82% across 214 grids worldwide. Across 13 benchmark grids, CarbonX performance is comparable with the current state-of-the-art, with an average MAPE of 9.59% and tail forecasting MAPE of 16.54%, while also providing prediction intervals with 95% coverage. CarbonX can provide forecasts for up to 21 days with minimal accuracy degradation. Further, when fully fine-tuned, CarbonX outperforms the statistical baselines by 1.2--3.9X on the imputation task. Overall, these results demonstrate that CarbonX can be used easily on any grid with limited data and still deliver strong performance, making it a practical tool for global-scale decarbonization.

Paperid: 3054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22650.pdf

Abstract:
Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models, often at the cost of additional training and architectural modifications. Meanwhile, large-scale generative diffusion models encode rich semantic information, making them attractive as general-purpose feature extractors. In this work, we introduce a new method that directly exploits features, attention scores, from diffusion transformers for downstream tasks, requiring neither architectural modifications nor additional training. To systematically evaluate these features, we extend benchmarks with vision-language grounding tasks spanning both images and videos. Our key insight is that stop words act as attention magnets: they accumulate surplus attention and can be filtered to reduce noise. Moreover, we identify global attention sinks (GAS) emerging in deeper layers and show that they can be safely suppressed or redirected onto auxiliary tokens, leading to sharper and more accurate grounding maps. We further propose an attention redistribution strategy, where appended stop words partition background activations into smaller clusters, yielding sharper and more localized heatmaps. Building on these findings, we develop RefAM, a simple training-free grounding framework that combines cross-attention maps, GAS handling, and redistribution. Across zero-shot referring image and video segmentation benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms prior methods, establishing a new state of the art without fine-tuning or additional components.

Paperid: 3055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17522.pdf

Abstract:
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide inherent interpretability by first predicting a set of human-understandable concepts and then mapping them to labels through a simple classifier. While users can intervene in the concept space to improve predictions, traditional CBMs typically employ a fixed linear classifier over concept scores, which restricts interventions to manual value adjustments and prevents the incorporation of new concepts or domain knowledge at test time. These limitations are particularly severe in unsupervised CBMs, where concept activations are often noisy and densely activated, making user interventions ineffective. We introduce Chat-CBM, which replaces score-based classifiers with a language-based classifier that reasons directly over concept semantics. By grounding prediction in the semantic space of concepts, Chat-CBM preserves the interpretability of CBMs while enabling richer and more intuitive interventions, such as concept correction, addition or removal of concepts, incorporation of external knowledge, and high-level reasoning guidance. Leveraging the language understanding and few-shot capabilities of frozen large language models, Chat-CBM extends the intervention interface of CBMs beyond numerical editing and remains effective even in unsupervised settings. Experiments on nine datasets demonstrate that Chat-CBM achieves higher predictive performance and substantially improves user interactivity while maintaining the concept-based interpretability of CBMs.

Paperid: 3056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14003.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have shown remarkable progress in text-to-audio generation. However, text-guided audio editing remains in its early stages. This task focuses on modifying the target content within an audio signal while preserving the rest, thus demanding precise localization and faithful editing according to the text prompt. Existing training-based and zero-shot methods that rely on full-caption or costly optimization often struggle with complex editing or lack practicality. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end efficient rectified flow matching-based diffusion framework for audio editing, and construct a dataset featuring overlapping multi-event audio to support training and benchmarking in complex scenarios. Experiments show that our model achieves faithful semantic alignment without requiring auxiliary captions or masks, while maintaining competitive editing quality across metrics.

Paperid: 3057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11465.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce CEMTM, a context-enhanced multimodal topic model designed to infer coherent and interpretable topic structures from both short and long documents containing text and images. CEMTM builds on fine-tuned large vision language models (LVLMs) to obtain contextualized embeddings, and employs a distributional attention mechanism to weight token-level contributions to topic inference. A reconstruction objective aligns topic-based representations with the document embedding, encouraging semantic consistency across modalities. Unlike existing approaches, CEMTM can process multiple images per document without repeated encoding and maintains interpretability through explicit word-topic and document-topic distributions. Extensive experiments on six multimodal benchmarks show that CEMTM consistently outperforms unimodal and multimodal baselines, achieving a remarkable average LLM score of 2.61. Further analysis shows its effectiveness in downstream few-shot retrieval and its ability to capture visually grounded semantics in complex domains such as scientific articles.

Paperid: 3058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11197.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE), which links language instructions to perception and control in the real world, is a core capability of embodied robots. Recently, large-scale pretrained foundation models have been leveraged as shared priors for perception, reasoning, and action, enabling zero-shot VLN without task-specific training. However, existing zero-shot VLN methods depend on costly perception and passive scene understanding, collapsing control to point-level choices. As a result, they are expensive to deploy, misaligned in action semantics, and short-sighted in planning. To address these issues, we present DreamNav that focuses on the following three aspects: (1) for reducing sensory cost, our EgoView Corrector aligns viewpoints and stabilizes egocentric perception; (2) instead of point-level actions, our Trajectory Predictor favors global trajectory-level planning to better align with instruction semantics; and (3) to enable anticipatory and long-horizon planning, we propose an Imagination Predictor to endow the agent with proactive thinking capability. On VLN-CE and real-world tests, DreamNav sets a new zero-shot state-of-the-art (SOTA), outperforming the strongest egocentric baseline with extra information by up to 7.49\% and 18.15\% in terms of SR and SPL metrics. To our knowledge, this is the first zero-shot VLN method to unify trajectory-level planning and active imagination while using only egocentric inputs.

Paperid: 3059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03956.pdf

Abstract:
In embodied AI, a persistent challenge is enabling agents to robustly adapt to novel domains without requiring extensive data collection or retraining. To address this, we present a world model implanting framework (WorMI) that combines the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with independently learned, domain-specific world models through test-time composition. By allowing seamless implantation and removal of the world models, the embodied agent's policy achieves and maintains cross-domain adaptability. In the WorMI framework, we employ a prototype-based world model retrieval approach, utilizing efficient trajectory-based abstract representation matching, to incorporate relevant models into test-time composition. We also develop a world-wise compound attention method that not only integrates the knowledge from the retrieved world models but also aligns their intermediate representations with the reasoning model's representation within the agent's policy. This framework design effectively fuses domain-specific knowledge from multiple world models, ensuring robust adaptation to unseen domains. We evaluate our WorMI on the VirtualHome and ALFWorld benchmarks, demonstrating superior zero-shot and few-shot performance compared to several LLM-based approaches across a range of unseen domains. These results highlight the frameworks potential for scalable, real-world deployment in embodied agent scenarios where adaptability and data efficiency are essential.

Paperid: 3060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02418.pdf

Abstract:
Utilizing task-invariant knowledge acquired from related tasks as prior information, meta-learning offers a principled approach to learning a new task with limited data records. Sample-efficient adaptation of this prior information is a major challenge facing meta-learning, and plays an important role because it facilitates training the sought task-specific model with just a few optimization steps. Past works deal with this challenge through preconditioning that speeds up convergence of the per-task training. Though effective in representing locally quadratic loss curvatures, simple linear preconditioning can be hardly potent with complex loss geometries. Instead of relying on a quadratic distance metric, the present contribution copes with complex loss metrics by learning a versatile distance-generating function, which induces a nonlinear mirror map to effectively capture and optimize a wide range of loss geometries. With suitable parameterization, this generating function is effected by an expressive neural network that is provably a valid distance. Analytical results establish convergence of not only the proposed method, but also all meta-learning approaches based on preconditioning. To attain gradient norm less than $Îµ$, the convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(Îµ^{-2})$ is on par with standard gradient-based meta-learning methods. Numerical tests on few-shot learning datasets demonstrate the superior empirical performance of the novel algorithm, as well as its rapid per-task convergence, which markedly reduces the number of adaptation steps, hence also accommodating large-scale meta-learning models.

Paperid: 3061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02160.pdf

Abstract:
Named-entity recognition (NER) in low-resource languages is usually tackled by finetuning very large multilingual LMs, an option that is often infeasible in memory- or latency-constrained settings. We ask whether small decoder LMs can be pretrained so that they adapt quickly and transfer zero-shot to languages unseen during pretraining. To this end we replace part of the autoregressive objective with first-order model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). Tagalog and Cebuano are typologically similar yet structurally different in their actor/non-actor voice systems, and hence serve as a challenging test-bed. Across four model sizes (11 M - 570 M) MAML lifts zero-shot micro-F1 by 2-6 pp under head-only tuning and 1-3 pp after full tuning, while cutting convergence time by up to 8%. Gains are largest for single-token person entities that co-occur with Tagalog case particles si/ni, highlighting the importance of surface anchors.

Paperid: 3062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01657.pdf

Abstract:
While large-scale robot datasets have propelled recent progress in imitation learning, learning from smaller task specific datasets remains critical for deployment in new environments and unseen tasks. One such approach to few-shot imitation learning is retrieval-based imitation learning, which extracts relevant samples from large, widely available prior datasets to augment a limited demonstration dataset. To determine the relevant data from prior datasets, retrieval-based approaches most commonly calculate a prior data point's minimum distance to a point in the target dataset in latent space. While retrieval-based methods have shown success using this metric for data selection, we demonstrate its equivalence to the limit of a Gaussian kernel density (KDE) estimate of the target data distribution. This reveals two shortcomings of the retrieval rule used in prior work. First, it relies on high-variance nearest neighbor estimates that are susceptible to noise. Second, it does not account for the distribution of prior data when retrieving data. To address these issues, we introduce Importance Weighted Retrieval (IWR), which estimates importance weights, or the ratio between the target and prior data distributions for retrieval, using Gaussian KDEs. By considering the probability ratio, IWR seeks to mitigate the bias of previous selection rules, and by using reasonable modeling parameters, IWR effectively smooths estimates using all data points. Across both simulation environments and real-world evaluations on the Bridge dataset we find that our method, IWR, consistently improves performance of existing retrieval-based methods, despite only requiring minor modifications.

Paperid: 3063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09904.pdf

Abstract:
Forecasting in real-world settings requires models to integrate not only historical data but also relevant contextual information, often available in textual form. While recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective context-aided forecasters via naÃ¯ve direct prompting, their full potential remains underexplored. We address this gap with 4 strategies, providing new insights into the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs in this setting. ReDP improves interpretability by eliciting explicit reasoning traces, allowing us to assess the model's reasoning over the context independently from its forecast accuracy. CorDP leverages LLMs solely to refine existing forecasts with context, enhancing their applicability in real-world forecasting pipelines. IC-DP proposes embedding historical examples of context-aided forecasting tasks in the prompt, substantially improving accuracy even for the largest models. Finally, RouteDP optimizes resource efficiency by using LLMs to estimate task difficulty, and routing the most challenging tasks to larger models. Evaluated on different kinds of context-aided forecasting tasks from the CiK benchmark, our strategies demonstrate distinct benefits over naÃ¯ve prompting across LLMs of different sizes and families. These results open the door to further simple yet effective improvements in LLM-based context-aided forecasting.

Paperid: 3064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06345.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown generalized zero-shot capabilities in diverse domain question-answering (QA) tasks, including graph QA that involves complex graph topologies. However, most current approaches use only a single type of graph representation, namely Topology Representation Form (TRF), such as prompt-unified text descriptions or style-fixed visual styles. Those "one-size-fits-all" approaches fail to consider the specific preferences of different models or tasks, often leading to incorrect or overly long responses. To address this, we first analyze the characteristics and weaknesses of existing TRFs, and then design a set of TRFs, denoted by $F_{ZS}$, tailored to zero-shot graph QA. We then introduce a new metric, Graph Response Efficiency (GRE), which measures the balance between the performance and the brevity in graph QA. Built on these, we develop the DynamicTRF framework, which aims to improve both the accuracy and conciseness of graph QA. To be specific, DynamicTRF first creates a TRF Preference (TRFP) dataset that ranks TRFs based on their GRE scores, to probe the question-specific TRF preferences. Then it trains a TRF router on the TRFP dataset, to adaptively assign the best TRF from $F_{ZS}$ for each question during the inference. Extensive experiments across 7 in-domain algorithmic graph QA tasks and 2 out-of-domain downstream tasks show that DynamicTRF significantly enhances the zero-shot graph QA of LMMs in terms of accuracy

Paperid: 3065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05732.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection has emerged as a critical research direction in machine learning for practical deployment. Most existing Few-shot OOD detection methods suffer from insufficient generalization capability for the open world. Due to the few-shot learning paradigm, the OOD detection ability is often overfit to the limited training data itself, thus degrading the performance on generalized data and performing inconsistently across different scenarios. To address this challenge, we proposed a Generalized Few-shot OOD Detection (GOOD) framework, which empowers the general knowledge of the OOD detection model with an auxiliary General Knowledge Model (GKM), instead of directly learning from few-shot data. We proceed to reveal the few-shot OOD detection from a generalization perspective and theoretically derive the Generality-Specificity balance (GS-balance) for OOD detection, which provably reduces the upper bound of generalization error with a general knowledge model. Accordingly, we propose a Knowledge Dynamic Embedding (KDE) mechanism to adaptively modulate the guidance of general knowledge. KDE dynamically aligns the output distributions of the OOD detection model to the general knowledge model based on the Generalized Belief (G-Belief) of GKM, thereby boosting the GS-balance. Experiments on real-world OOD benchmarks demonstrate our superiority. Codes will be available.

Paperid: 3066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05430.pdf

Abstract:
Language-image pre-training (LIP) enables the development of vision-language models capable of zero-shot classification, localization, multimodal retrieval, and semantic understanding. Various explanation methods have been proposed to visualize the importance of input image-text pairs on the model's similarity outputs. However, popular saliency maps are limited by capturing only first-order attributions, overlooking the complex cross-modal interactions intrinsic to such encoders. We introduce faithful interaction explanations of LIP models (FIxLIP) as a unified approach to decomposing the similarity in vision-language encoders. FIxLIP is rooted in game theory, where we analyze how using the weighted Banzhaf interaction index offers greater flexibility and improves computational efficiency over the Shapley interaction quantification framework. From a practical perspective, we propose how to naturally extend explanation evaluation metrics, like the pointing game and area between the insertion/deletion curves, to second-order interaction explanations. Experiments on MS COCO and ImageNet-1k benchmarks validate that second-order methods like FIxLIP outperform first-order attribution methods. Beyond delivering high-quality explanations, we demonstrate the utility of FIxLIP in comparing different models like CLIP vs. SigLIP-2 and ViT-B/32 vs. ViT-L/16.

Paperid: 3067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01710.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic applications highlights the need for robust safety guard models. While content safety in English is well-studied, non-English languages lack similar advancements due to the high cost of collecting culturally aligned labeled datasets. We present CultureGuard, a novel solution for curating culturally aligned, high-quality safety datasets across multiple languages. Our approach introduces a four-stage synthetic data generation and filtering pipeline: cultural data segregation, cultural data adaptation, machine translation, and quality filtering. This pipeline enables the conversion and expansion of the Nemotron-Content-Safety-Dataset-V2 English safety dataset into eight distinct languages: Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese. The resulting dataset, Nemotron-Safety-Guard-Dataset-v3, comprises 386,661 samples in 9 languages and facilitates the training of Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Safety-Guard-8B-v3 via LoRA-based fine-tuning. The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several multilingual content safety benchmarks. Furthermore, we show our moderately multilingual fine-tuning enables robust cross-lingual transfer and strong zero-shot generalization to unseen languages. We also benchmark the latest open LLMs on multilingual safety and observe that these LLMs are more prone to give unsafe responses when prompted in non-English languages. This work advances multilingual LLM safety by enabling the development of culturally aware safety guard models.

Paperid: 3068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22692.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is pivotal for deploying safe vision systems in open-world environments. We revisit diffusion models, not as generators, but as universal perceptual templates for OOD detection. This research explores the use of score-based generative models as foundational tools for semantic anomaly detection across unseen datasets. Specifically, we leverage the denoising trajectories of Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs) as a rich source of texture and semantic information. By analyzing Stein score errors, amplified through the Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM), we introduce a novel method for identifying anomalous samples without requiring re-training on each target dataset. Our approach improves over state-of-the-art and relies on training a single model on one dataset -- CelebA -- which we find to be an effective base distribution, even outperforming more commonly used datasets like ImageNet in several settings. Experimental results show near-perfect performance on some benchmarks, with notable headroom on others, highlighting both the strength and future potential of generative foundation models in anomaly detection.

Paperid: 3069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17787.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models pre-trained on massive datasets, including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and large multimodal models, have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse downstream tasks. However, recent studies have shown fundamental limitations of these models: (1) limited representational capacity, (2) lower adaptability, and (3) diminishing scalability. These shortcomings raise a critical question: is Euclidean geometry truly the optimal inductive bias for all foundation models, or could incorporating alternative geometric spaces enable models to better align with the intrinsic structure of real-world data and improve reasoning processes? Hyperbolic spaces, a class of non-Euclidean manifolds characterized by exponential volume growth with respect to distance, offer a mathematically grounded solution. These spaces enable low-distortion embeddings of hierarchical structures (e.g., trees, taxonomies) and power-law distributions with substantially fewer dimensions compared to Euclidean counterparts. Recent advances have leveraged these properties to enhance foundation models, including improving LLMs' complex reasoning ability, VLMs' zero-shot generalization, and cross-modal semantic alignment, while maintaining parameter efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive review of hyperbolic neural networks and their recent development for foundation models. We further outline key challenges and research directions to advance the field.

Paperid: 3070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05838.pdf

Abstract:
The annotation bottleneck in semantic segmentation has driven significant interest in few-shot segmentation, which aims to develop segmentation models capable of generalizing rapidly to novel classes using minimal exemplars. Conventional training paradigms typically generate query prior maps by extracting masked-area features from support images, followed by making predictions guided by these prior maps. However, current approaches remain constrained by two critical limitations stemming from inter- and intra-image discrepancies, both of which significantly degrade segmentation performance: 1) The semantic gap between support and query images results in mismatched features and inaccurate prior maps; 2) Visually similar yet semantically distinct regions within support or query images lead to false negative or false positive predictions. We propose a novel FSS method called \textbf{I$^2$R}: 1) Using category-specific high level representations which aggregate global semantic cues from support and query images, enabling more precise inter-image region localization and address the first limitation. 2) Directional masking strategy that suppresses inconsistent support-query pixel pairs, which exhibit high feature similarity but conflicting mask, to mitigate the second issue. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvements of 1.9\% and 2.1\% in mIoU under the 1-shot setting on PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ benchmarks, respectively.

Paperid: 3071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02724.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in AI for science have highlighted the power of contrastive learning in bridging heterogeneous biological data modalities. Building on this paradigm, we propose HIPPO (HIerarchical Protein-Protein interaction prediction across Organisms), a hierarchical contrastive framework for protein-protein interaction(PPI) prediction, where protein sequences and their hierarchical attributes are aligned through multi-tiered biological representation matching. The proposed approach incorporates hierarchical contrastive loss functions that emulate the structured relationship among functional classes of proteins. The framework adaptively incorporates domain and family knowledge through a data-driven penalty mechanism, enforcing consistency between the learned embedding space and the intrinsic hierarchy of protein functions. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HIPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods and showing robustness in low-data regimes. Notably, the model demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability to other species without retraining, enabling reliable PPI prediction and functional inference even in less characterized or rare organisms where experimental data are limited. Further analysis reveals that hierarchical feature fusion is critical for capturing conserved interaction determinants, such as binding motifs and functional annotations. This work advances cross-species PPI prediction and provides a unified framework for interaction prediction in scenarios with sparse or imbalanced multi-species data.

Paperid: 3072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05936.pdf

Abstract:
Modern large language models (LLMs) often struggle to dynamically adapt their reasoning depth to varying task complexities, leading to suboptimal performance or inefficient resource utilization. To address this, we introduce DynamicMind, a novel tri-mode thinking system. DynamicMind empowers LLMs to autonomously select between Fast, Normal, and Slow thinking modes for zero-shot question answering (ZSQA) tasks through cognitive-inspired prompt engineering. Our framework's core innovations include: (1) expanding the established dual-process framework of fast and slow thinking into a tri-mode thinking system involving a normal thinking mode to preserve the intrinsic capabilities of LLM; (2) proposing the Thinking Density metric, which aligns computational resource allocation with problem complexity; and (3) developing the Thinking Mode Capacity (TMC) dataset and a lightweight Mind Router to predict the optimal thinking mode. Extensive experiments across diverse mathematical, commonsense, and scientific QA benchmarks demonstrate that DynamicMind achieves superior ZSQA capabilities while establishing an effective trade-off between performance and computational efficiency.

Paperid: 3073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04277.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capability while lack explicit mechanisms for visual grounding and segmentation, creating a gap between cognitive reasoning and visual perception. To bridge this gap, we introduce Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting (RSVP), a novel framework that unifies multi-step multimodal reasoning with grounded visual understanding. RSVP is a two-stage structuralized framework that integrates reasoning-driven localization with segmentation refinement. In the reasoning stage, RSVP employs multimodal chain-of-thought visual prompts to help MLLMs understand queries and infer targets, generating interpretable region proposals that enhance visual grounding. In segmentation stage, RSVP refines these proposals with a Vision-Language Segmentation Module (VLSM), seamlessly integrates textual and visual cues to produce precise segmentation masks. By explicitly modelling the interaction between multimodal reasoning and segmentation, RSVP introduces a new paradigm for interpretable reasoning segmentation. It exploits MLLMs' inherent localization capabilities, enabling the models to not only reason about objects but also generate structured visual representations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RSVP achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to +6.5 gIoU and +9.2 cIoU on ReasonSeg, and achieves 49.7 mAP on SegInW under zero-shot settings. These results validate RSVP as an effective and scalable framework for integrating cognitive reasoning with structured visual understanding.

Paperid: 3074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00885.pdf

Abstract:
Generating natural-sounding, multi-speaker dialogue is crucial for applications such as podcast creation, virtual agents, and multimedia content generation. However, existing systems struggle to maintain speaker consistency, model overlapping speech, and synthesize coherent conversations efficiently. In this paper, we introduce CoVoMix2, a fully non-autoregressive framework for zero-shot multi-talker dialogue generation. CoVoMix2 directly predicts mel-spectrograms from multi-stream transcriptions using a flow-matching-based generative model, eliminating the reliance on intermediate token representations. To better capture realistic conversational dynamics, we propose transcription-level speaker disentanglement, sentence-level alignment, and prompt-level random masking strategies. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines like MoonCast and Sesame in speech quality, speaker consistency, and inference speed. Notably, CoVoMix2 operates without requiring transcriptions for the prompt and supports controllable dialogue generation, including overlapping speech and precise timing control, demonstrating strong generalizability to real-world speech generation scenarios.

Paperid: 3075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18745.pdf

Abstract:
Immunohistochemical (IHC) images reveal detailed information about structures and functions at the subcellular level. However, unlike natural images, IHC datasets pose challenges for deep learning models due to their inconsistencies in channel count and configuration, stemming from varying staining protocols across laboratories and studies. Existing approaches build channel-adaptive models, which unfortunately fail to support out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation across IHC datasets and cannot be applied in a true zero-shot setting with mismatched channel counts. To address this, we introduce a structured view of cellular image channels by grouping them into either context or concept, where we treat the context channels as a reference to the concept channels in the image. We leverage this context-concept principle to develop Channel Conditioned Cell Representations (C3R), a framework designed for unified evaluation on in-distribution (ID) and OOD datasets. C3R is a two-fold framework comprising a channel-adaptive encoder architecture and a masked knowledge distillation training strategy, both built around the context-concept principle. We find that C3R outperforms existing benchmarks on both ID and OOD tasks, while a trivial implementation of our core idea also outperforms the channel-adaptive methods reported on the CHAMMI benchmark. Our method opens a new pathway for cross-dataset generalization between IHC datasets, without requiring dataset-specific adaptation or retraining.

Paperid: 3076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16979.pdf

Abstract:
Single-agent LLMs hit hard limits--finite context, role overload, and brittle domain transfer. Conventional multi-agent fixes soften those edges yet expose fresh pains: ill-posed decompositions, fuzzy contracts, and verification overhead that blunts the gains. We therefore present Know-The-Ropes (KtR), a framework that converts domain priors into an algorithmic blueprint hierarchy, in which tasks are recursively split into typed, controller-mediated subtasks, each solved zero-shot or with the lightest viable boost (e.g., chain-of-thought, micro-tune, self-check). Grounded in the No-Free-Lunch theorem, KtR trades the chase for a universal prompt for disciplined decomposition. On the Knapsack problem (3-8 items), three GPT-4o-mini agents raise accuracy from 3% zero-shot to 95% on size-5 instances after patching a single bottleneck agent. On the tougher Task-Assignment problem (6-15 jobs), a six-agent o3-mini blueprint hits 100% up to size 10 and 84% on sizes 13-15, versus 11% zero-shot. Algorithm-aware decomposition plus targeted augmentation thus turns modest models into reliable collaborators--no ever-larger monoliths required.

Paperid: 3077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09484.pdf

Abstract:
Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) is essential for the security of facial recognition systems in diverse scenarios such as payment processing and surveillance. Current multimodal FAS methods often struggle with effective generalization, mainly due to modality-specific biases and domain shifts. To address these challenges, we introduce the \textbf{M}ulti\textbf{m}odal \textbf{D}enoising and \textbf{A}lignment (\textbf{MMDA}) framework. By leveraging the zero-shot generalization capability of CLIP, the MMDA framework effectively suppresses noise in multimodal data through denoising and alignment mechanisms, thereby significantly enhancing the generalization performance of cross-modal alignment. The \textbf{M}odality-\textbf{D}omain Joint \textbf{D}ifferential \textbf{A}ttention (\textbf{MD2A}) module in MMDA concurrently mitigates the impacts of domain and modality noise by refining the attention mechanism based on extracted common noise features. Furthermore, the \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{S}pace \textbf{S}oft (\textbf{RS2}) Alignment strategy utilizes the pre-trained CLIP model to align multi-domain multimodal data into a generalized representation space in a flexible manner, preserving intricate representations and enhancing the model's adaptability to various unseen conditions. We also design a \textbf{U}-shaped \textbf{D}ual \textbf{S}pace \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{U-DSA}) module to enhance the adaptability of representations while maintaining generalization performance. These improvements not only enhance the framework's generalization capabilities but also boost its ability to represent complex representations. Our experimental results on four benchmark datasets under different evaluation protocols demonstrate that the MMDA framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of cross-domain generalization and multimodal detection accuracy. The code will be released soon.

Paperid: 3078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06621.pdf

Abstract:
The distribution of child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI) is an ever-growing concern of our modern world; children who suffered from this heinous crime are revictimized, and the growing amount of illegal imagery distributed overwhelms law enforcement agents (LEAs) with the manual labor of categorization. To ease this burden researchers have explored methods for automating data triage and detection of CSAI, but the sensitive nature of the data imposes restricted access and minimal interaction between real data and learning algorithms, avoiding leaks at all costs. In observing how these restrictions have shaped the literature we formalize a definition of "Proxy Tasks", i.e., the substitute tasks used for training models for CSAI without making use of CSA data. Under this new terminology we review current literature and present a protocol for making conscious use of Proxy Tasks together with consistent input from LEAs to design better automation in this field. Finally, we apply this protocol to study -- for the first time -- the task of Few-shot Indoor Scene Classification on CSAI, showing a final model that achieves promising results on a real-world CSAI dataset whilst having no weights actually trained on sensitive data.

Paperid: 3079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02466.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven interest in billion-scale retrieval models with strong generalization across retrieval tasks and languages. Additionally, progress in large vision-language models has created new opportunities for multimodal retrieval. In response, we have updated the Tevatron toolkit, introducing a unified pipeline that enables researchers to explore retriever models at different scales, across multiple languages, and with various modalities. This demo paper highlights the toolkit's key features, bridging academia and industry by supporting efficient training, inference, and evaluation of neural retrievers. We showcase a unified dense retriever achieving strong multilingual and multimodal effectiveness, and conduct a cross-modality zero-shot study to demonstrate its research potential. Alongside, we release OmniEmbed, to the best of our knowledge, the first embedding model that unifies text, image document, video, and audio retrieval, serving as a baseline for future research.

Paperid: 3080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16312.pdf

Abstract:
Capturing symmetric (e.g., country borders another country) and antisymmetric (e.g., parent_of) relations is crucial for a variety of applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel Wikidata-derived natural language inference dataset designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that LLMs perform comparably to random chance on this benchmark, highlighting a gap in relational understanding. To address this, we explore encoder retraining via contrastive learning with k-nearest neighbors. The retrained encoder matches the performance of fine-tuned classification heads while offering additional benefits, including greater efficiency in few-shot learning and improved mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

Paperid: 3081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10281.pdf

Abstract:
Characterization of atomic-scale materials traditionally requires human experts with months to years of specialized training. Even for trained human operators, accurate and reliable characterization remains challenging when examining newly discovered materials such as two-dimensional (2D) structures. This bottleneck drives demand for fully autonomous experimentation systems capable of comprehending research objectives without requiring large training datasets. In this work, we present ATOMIC (Autonomous Technology for Optical Microscopy & Intelligent Characterization), an end-to-end framework that integrates foundation models to enable fully autonomous, zero-shot characterization of 2D materials. Our system integrates the vision foundation model (i.e., Segment Anything Model), large language models (i.e., ChatGPT), unsupervised clustering, and topological analysis to automate microscope control, sample scanning, image segmentation, and intelligent analysis through prompt engineering, eliminating the need for additional training. When analyzing typical MoS2 samples, our approach achieves 99.7% segmentation accuracy for single layer identification, which is equivalent to that of human experts. In addition, the integrated model is able to detect grain boundary slits that are challenging to identify with human eyes. Furthermore, the system retains robust accuracy despite variable conditions including defocus, color temperature fluctuations, and exposure variations. It is applicable to a broad spectrum of common 2D materials-including graphene, MoS2, WSe2, SnSe-regardless of whether they were fabricated via chemical vapor deposition or mechanical exfoliation. This work represents the implementation of foundation models to achieve autonomous analysis, establishing a scalable and data-efficient characterization paradigm that fundamentally transforms the approach to nanoscale materials research.

Paperid: 3082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00673.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate speed estimation in sensorless brushless DC motors is essential for high-performance control and monitoring, yet conventional model-based approaches struggle with system nonlinearities and parameter uncertainties. In this work, we propose an in-context learning framework leveraging transformer-based models to perform zero-shot speed estimation using only electrical measurements. By training the filter offline on simulated motor trajectories, we enable real-time inference on unseen real motors without retraining, eliminating the need for explicit system identification while retaining adaptability to varying operating conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional Kalman filter-based estimators, especially in low-speed regimes that are crucial during motor startup.

Paperid: 3083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21670.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce COMI-LINGUA, the largest manually annotated Hindi-English code-mixed dataset, comprising 125K+ high-quality instances across five core NLP tasks: Matrix Language Identification, Token-level Language Identification, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Named Entity Recognition, and Machine Translation. Each instance is annotated by three bilingual annotators, yielding over 376K expert annotations with strong inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss' Kappa $\geq$ 0.81). The rigorously preprocessed and filtered dataset covers both Devanagari and Roman scripts and spans diverse domains, ensuring real-world linguistic coverage. Evaluation reveals that closed-source LLMs significantly outperform traditional tools and open-source models in zero-shot settings. Notably, one-shot prompting consistently boosts performance across tasks, especially in structure-sensitive predictions like POS and NER. Fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs on COMI-LINGUA demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving up to 95.25 F1 in NER, 98.77 F1 in MLI, and competitive MT performance, setting new benchmarks for Hinglish code-mixed text. COMI-LINGUA is publicly available at this URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LingoIITGN/COMI-LINGUA.

Paperid: 3084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16334.pdf

Abstract:
Recent findings reveal that much of the knowledge in a Transformer-based Large Language Model (LLM) is encoded in its feed-forward (FFN) layers, where each FNN layer can be interpreted as the summation of sub-updates, each corresponding to a weighted column vector from the FFN's value parameter matrix that often encodes human-interpretable concepts. In light of this, we hypothesize that model performance and behaviors can be further enhanced and controlled by modulating the contributions of these sub-updates based on their relevance to the input or target output style, and propose LLMBRACES, a novel and efficient method that computes relevance scores associated with value vectors in FFN layers and leverages these scores to dynamically adjust the contribution of sub-updates. By optimizing sub-update contributions, LLMBRACES refines the prediction process, leading to more accurate and reliable outputs, much like a 'brace' providing support and stability. Moreover, LLMBRACES can be extended to support conditional control over generation characteristics, such as sentiment, thereby offering fine-grained steering of LLM outputs. Extensive experiments on various LLMs-including Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama2-7B, and Llama3-8B-demonstrate that LLMBRACES outperforms baseline approaches in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings while requiring significantly fewer tunable parameters, up to 75% fewer compared to LoRA. Furthermore, LLMBRACES excels in sentiment-controlled generation and toxicity reduction, highlighting its potential for flexible, controlled text generation across applications.

Paperid: 3085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13268.pdf

Abstract:
Pinching Antennas (PAs) represent a revolutionary flexible antenna technology that leverages dielectric waveguides and electromagnetic coupling to mitigate large-scale path loss. This letter is the first to explore channel estimation for Pinching-Antenna SyStems (PASS), addressing their uniquely ill-conditioned and underdetermined channel characteristics. In particular, two efficient deep learning-based channel estimators are proposed. 1) PAMoE: This estimator incorporates dynamic padding, feature embedding, fusion, and mixture of experts (MoE) modules, which effectively leverage the positional information of PAs and exploit expert diversity. 2) PAformer: This Transformer-style estimator employs the self-attention mechanism to predict channel coefficients in a per-antenna manner, which offers more flexibility to adaptively deal with dynamic numbers of PAs in practical deployment. Numerical results demonstrate that 1) the proposed deep learning-based channel estimators outperform conventional methods and exhibit excellent zero-shot learning capabilities, and 2) PAMoE delivers higher channel estimation accuracy via MoE specialization, while PAformer natively handles an arbitrary number of PAs, trading self-attention complexity for superior scalability.

Paperid: 3086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10529.pdf

Abstract:
3D Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently made substantial advancements. However, their potential remains untapped, primarily due to the limited quantity and suboptimal quality of 3D datasets. Current approaches attempt to transfer knowledge from 2D MLLMs to expand 3D instruction data, but still face modality and domain gaps. To this end, we introduce PiSA-Engine (Point-Self-Augmented-Engine), a new framework for generating instruction point-language datasets enriched with 3D spatial semantics. We observe that existing 3D MLLMs offer a comprehensive understanding of point clouds for annotation, while 2D MLLMs excel at cross-validation by providing complementary information. By integrating holistic 2D and 3D insights from off-the-shelf MLLMs, PiSA-Engine enables a continuous cycle of high-quality data generation. We select PointLLM as the baseline and adopt this co-evolution training framework to develop an enhanced 3D MLLM, termed PointLLM-PiSA. Additionally, we identify limitations in previous 3D benchmarks, which often feature coarse language captions and insufficient category diversity, resulting in inaccurate evaluations. To address this gap, we further introduce PiSA-Bench, a comprehensive 3D benchmark covering six key aspects with detailed and diverse labels. Experimental results demonstrate PointLLM-PiSA's state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot 3D object captioning and generative classification on our PiSA-Bench, achieving significant improvements of 46.45% (+8.33%) and 63.75% (+16.25%), respectively. We will release the code, datasets, and benchmark.

Paperid: 3087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06515.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: (i) The mask decoder's attention exhibits extreme outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (ranging down to even 100$\times$), instead of smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining semantic capabilities. Unfortunately, traditional metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. (ii) Existing reconstruction methods potentially neglect prompts' intention, resulting in distorted visual encodings during prompt interactions. To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ of SAM with semantic alignment. Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap as clipping metric, to significantly suppress outliers. Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates visual-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention responses in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantics. To ensure the interaction efficiency, we also introduce a layer-skipping strategy for visual tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted on different segmentation tasks and SAMs of various sizes, and the results show that the proposed SAQ-SAM consistently outperforms baselines. For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, our method achieves 11.7% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.

Paperid: 3088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00037.pdf

Abstract:
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in multimodal comprehension, thanks to extensive pre-training and fine-tuning on large-scale visual datasets. However, despite their robust textual safety mechanisms, they remain vulnerable to harmful visual inputs. Existing safeguards-typically relying on pre-filtering or fine-tuning-incur high costs and diminish overall utility. To address this critical vulnerability, we introduce SafeCLIP, a lightweight method that leverages LVLMs inherent multimodal alignment for zero-shot toxic image detection. By projecting CLIPs discarded CLS token into its text space and matching it with toxic descriptors, SafeCLIP detects harmful content without any architectural changes-adding minimal latency and enabling dynamic safety corrections during inference and fine-tuning.Experiments show that SafeCLIP achieves a 66.9% defense success rate with only 3.2% false positive rate and 7.2% overhead. In contrast, state-of-the-art methods achieve 52.9% success but have a 10.7% false positive rate and 210% overhead. Our work demonstrates that leveraging inherent multimodal alignment can yield efficient, low-cost LVLM safety. Code is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/safeclip-2C01.

Paperid: 3089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19896.pdf

Abstract:
Existing point cloud completion methods, which typically depend on predefined synthetic training datasets, encounter significant challenges when applied to out-of-distribution, real-world scans. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a zero-shot completion framework, termed GenPC, designed to reconstruct high-quality real-world scans by leveraging explicit 3D generative priors. Our key insight is that recent feed-forward 3D generative models, trained on extensive internet-scale data, have demonstrated the ability to perform 3D generation from single-view images in a zero-shot setting. To harness this for completion, we first develop a Depth Prompting module that links partial point clouds with image-to-3D generative models by leveraging depth images as a stepping stone. To retain the original partial structure in the final results, we design the Geometric Preserving Fusion module that aligns the generated shape with input by adaptively adjusting its pose and scale. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks validate the superiority and generalizability of our approach, bringing us a step closer to robust real-world scan completion.

Paperid: 3090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15202.pdf

Abstract:
Code retrieval is a crucial component in modern software development, particularly in large-scale projects. However, existing approaches relying on sequence-based models often fail to fully exploit the structural dependencies inherent in code, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance, particularly with structurally complex code fragments. In this paper, we introduce GNN-Coder, a novel framework based on Graph Neural Network (GNN) to utilize Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). We make the first attempt to study how GNN-integrated Transformer can promote the development of semantic retrieval tasks by capturing the structural and semantic features of code. We further propose an innovative graph pooling method tailored for AST, utilizing the number of child nodes as a key feature to highlight the intrinsic topological relationships within the AST. This design effectively integrates both sequential and hierarchical representations, enhancing the model's ability to capture code structure and semantics. Additionally, we introduce the Mean Angular Margin (MAM), a novel metric for quantifying the uniformity of code embedding distributions, providing a standardized measure of feature separability. The proposed method achieves a lower MAM, indicating a more discriminative feature representation. This underscores GNN-Coder's superior ability to distinguish between code snippets, thereby enhancing retrieval accuracy. Experimental results show that GNN-Coder significantly boosts retrieval performance, with a 1\%-10\% improvement in MRR on the CSN dataset, and a notable 20\% gain in zero-shot performance on the CosQA dataset.

Paperid: 3091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05271.pdf

Abstract:
Moving large objects, such as furniture or appliances, is a critical capability for robots operating in human environments. This task presents unique challenges, including whole-body coordination to avoid collisions and managing the dynamics of bulky, heavy objects. In this work, we present RobotMover, a learning-based system for large object manipulation that uses human-object interaction demonstrations to train robot control policies. RobotMover formulates the manipulation problem as imitation learning using a simplified spatial representation called the Interaction Chain, which captures essential interaction dynamics in a way that generalizes across different robot bodies. We incorporate this Interaction Chain into a reward function and train policies in simulation using domain randomization to enable zero-shot transfer to real-world robots. The resulting policies allow a Spot robot to manipulate various large objects, including chairs, tables, and standing lamps. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world, we show that RobotMover achieves strong performance in terms of capability, robustness, and controllability, outperforming both learned and teleoperation baselines. The system also supports practical applications by combining learned policies with simple planning modules to perform long-horizon object transport and rearrangement tasks.

Paperid: 3092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03072.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning and world models have shown significant promise in advancing generalizable robotic learning, with robotic grasping remaining a critical challenge for achieving precise manipulation. Existing methods often rely heavily on robot arm state data and RGB images, leading to overfitting to specific object shapes or positions. To address these limitations, we propose RoboGrasp, a universal grasping policy framework that integrates pretrained grasp detection models with robotic learning. By leveraging robust visual guidance from object detection and segmentation tasks, RoboGrasp significantly enhances grasp precision, stability, and generalizability, achieving up to 34% higher success rates in few-shot learning and grasping box prompt tasks. Built on diffusion-based methods, RoboGrasp is adaptable to various robotic learning paradigms, enabling precise and reliable manipulation across diverse and complex scenarios. This framework represents a scalable and versatile solution for tackling real-world challenges in robotic grasping.

Paperid: 3093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17403.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks mainly evaluate agents based on one-time execution of individual instructions across multiple environments, aiming to develop agents capable of functioning in any environment in a zero-shot manner. However, real-world navigation robots often operate in persistent environments with relatively consistent physical layouts, visual observations, and language styles from instructors. Such a gap in the task setting presents an opportunity to improve VLN agents by incorporating continuous adaptation to specific environments. To better reflect these real-world conditions, we introduce GSA-VLN, a novel task requiring agents to execute navigation instructions within a specific scene and simultaneously adapt to it for improved performance over time. To evaluate the proposed task, one has to address two challenges in existing VLN datasets: the lack of OOD data, and the limited number and style diversity of instructions for each scene. Therefore, we propose a new dataset, GSA-R2R, which significantly expands the diversity and quantity of environments and instructions for the R2R dataset to evaluate agent adaptability in both ID and OOD contexts. Furthermore, we design a three-stage instruction orchestration pipeline that leverages LLMs to refine speaker-generated instructions and apply role-playing techniques to rephrase instructions into different speaking styles. This is motivated by the observation that each individual user often has consistent signatures or preferences in their instructions. We conducted extensive experiments on GSA-R2R to thoroughly evaluate our dataset and benchmark various methods. Based on our findings, we propose a novel method, GR-DUET, which incorporates memory-based navigation graphs with an environment-specific training strategy, achieving state-of-the-art results on all GSA-R2R splits.

Paperid: 3094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11231.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Language Models such as CLIP excel in image recognition due to extensive image-text pre-training. However, applying the CLIP inference in zero-shot classification, particularly for medical image diagnosis, faces challenges due to: 1) the inadequacy of representing image classes solely with single category names; 2) the modal gap between the visual and text spaces generated by CLIP encoders. Despite attempts to enrich disease descriptions with large language models, the lack of class-specific knowledge often leads to poor performance. In addition, empirical evidence suggests that existing proxy learning methods for zero-shot image classification on natural image datasets exhibit instability when applied to medical datasets. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Knowledge Proxy Learning (KPL) to mine knowledge from CLIP. KPL is designed to leverage CLIP's multimodal understandings for medical image classification through Text Proxy Optimization and Multimodal Proxy Learning. Specifically, KPL retrieves image-relevant knowledge descriptions from the constructed knowledge-enhanced base to enrich semantic text proxies. It then harnesses input images and these descriptions, encoded via CLIP, to stably generate multimodal proxies that boost the zero-shot classification performance. Extensive experiments conducted on both medical and natural image datasets demonstrate that KPL enables effective zero-shot image classification, outperforming all baselines. These findings highlight the great potential in this paradigm of mining knowledge from CLIP for medical image classification and broader areas.

Paperid: 3095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04693.pdf

Abstract:
Interacting with the world is a multi-sensory experience: achieving effective general-purpose interaction requires making use of all available modalities -- including vision, touch, and audio -- to fill in gaps from partial observation. For example, when vision is occluded reaching into a bag, a robot should rely on its senses of touch and sound. However, state-of-the-art generalist robot policies are typically trained on large datasets to predict robot actions solely from visual and proprioceptive observations. In this work, we propose FuSe, a novel approach that enables finetuning visuomotor generalist policies on heterogeneous sensor modalities for which large datasets are not readily available by leveraging natural language as a common cross-modal grounding. We combine a multimodal contrastive loss with a sensory-grounded language generation loss to encode high-level semantics. In the context of robot manipulation, we show that FuSe enables performing challenging tasks that require reasoning jointly over modalities such as vision, touch, and sound in a zero-shot setting, such as multimodal prompting, compositional cross-modal prompting, and descriptions of objects it interacts with. We show that the same recipe is applicable to widely different generalist policies, including both diffusion-based generalist policies and large vision-language-action (VLA) models. Extensive experiments in the real world show that FuSeis able to increase success rates by over 20% compared to all considered baselines.

Paperid: 3096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02844.pdf

Abstract:
Text classification is a fundamental task in data mining, pivotal to various applications such as tabular understanding and recommendation. Although neural network-based models, such as CNN and BERT, have demonstrated remarkable performance in text classification, their effectiveness heavily relies on abundant labeled training data. This dependency makes these models less effective in dynamic few-shot text classification, where labeled data is scarce, and new target labels frequently appear based on application needs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their extensive pretraining and contextual understanding ability. Current approaches provide LLMs with text inputs, candidate labels, and additional side information (e.g., descriptions) to classify texts. However, their effectiveness is hindered by the increased input size and the noise introduced through side information processing. To address these limitations, we propose a graph-based online retrieval-augmented generation framework, namely GORAG, for dynamic few-shot text classification. Rather than treating each input independently, GORAG constructs and maintains a weighted graph by extracting side information across all target texts. In this graph, text keywords and labels are represented as nodes, with edges indicating the correlations between them. To model these correlations, GORAG employs an edge weighting mechanism to prioritize the importance and reliability of extracted information and dynamically retrieves relevant context using a minimum-cost spanning tree tailored for each text input. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that GORAG outperforms existing approaches by providing more comprehensive and precise contextual information.

Paperid: 3097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01426.pdf

Abstract:
The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered sophisticated reasoning capabilities into the realm of video through Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). However, VideoLLMs currently rely on a single vision encoder for all of their visual processing, which limits the amount and type of visual information that can be conveyed to the LLM. Our method, MERV, Multi-Encoder Representation of Videos, instead leverages multiple frozen visual encoders to create a unified representation of a video, providing the VideoLLM with a comprehensive set of specialized visual knowledge. Spatio-temporally aligning the features from each encoder allows us to tackle a wider range of open-ended and multiple-choice video understanding questions and outperform prior state-of-the-art works. MERV is up to 3.7% better in accuracy than Video-LLaVA across the standard suite video understanding benchmarks, while also having a better Video-ChatGPT score. We also improve upon SeViLA, the previous best on zero-shot Perception Test accuracy, by 2.2%. MERV introduces minimal extra parameters and trains faster than equivalent single-encoder methods while parallelizing the visual processing. Finally, we provide qualitative evidence that MERV successfully captures domain knowledge from each of its encoders. Our results offer promising directions in utilizing multiple vision encoders for comprehensive video understanding.

Paperid: 3098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00773.pdf

Abstract:
Graphs are essential data structures for modeling complex interactions in domains such as social networks, molecular structures, and biological systems. Graph-level tasks, which predict properties or classes for the entire graph, are critical for applications, such as molecular property prediction and subgraph counting. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in these tasks, but their evaluations are often limited to narrow datasets, tasks, and inconsistent experimental setups, restricting their generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified evaluation framework for graph-level GNNs. This framework provides a standardized setting to evaluate GNNs across diverse datasets, various graph tasks (e.g., graph classification and regression), and challenging scenarios, including noisy, imbalanced, and few-shot graphs. Additionally, we propose a novel GNN model with enhanced expressivity and generalization capabilities. Specifically, we enhance the expressivity of GNNs through a $k$-path rooted subgraph approach, enabling the model to effectively count subgraphs (e.g., paths and cycles). Moreover, we introduce a unified graph contrastive learning algorithm for graphs across diverse domains, which adaptively removes unimportant edges to augment graphs, thereby significantly improving generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance against fourteen effective baselines across twenty-seven graph datasets, establishing it as a robust and generalizable model for graph-level tasks.

Paperid: 3099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11923.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks using few demonstrations, facilitating task adaptation when labeled examples are hard to obtain. However, ICL is sensitive to the choice of demonstrations, and it remains unclear which demonstration attributes enable in-context generalization. In this work, we conduct a perturbation study of in-context demonstrations for low-resource Named Entity Detection (NED). Our surprising finding is that in-context demonstrations with partially correct annotated entity mentions can be as effective for task transfer as fully correct demonstrations. Based off our findings, we propose Pseudo-annotated In-Context Learning (PICLe), a framework for in-context learning with noisy, pseudo-annotated demonstrations. PICLe leverages LLMs to annotate many demonstrations in a zero-shot first pass. We then cluster these synthetic demonstrations, sample specific sets of in-context demonstrations from each cluster, and predict entity mentions using each set independently. Finally, we use self-verification to select the final set of entity mentions. We evaluate PICLe on five biomedical NED datasets and show that, with zero human annotation, PICLe outperforms ICL in low-resource settings where limited gold examples can be used as in-context demonstrations.

Paperid: 3100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07030.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal multihop question answering (MMQA) requires reasoning over images and text from multiple sources. Despite advances in visual question answering, this multihop setting remains underexplored due to a lack of quality datasets. Existing methods focus on single-hop, single-modality, or short texts, limiting real-world applications like interpreting educational documents with long, multimodal content. To fill this gap, we introduce FM2DS, the first framework for creating a high-quality dataset for MMQA. Our approach consists of a 5-stage pipeline that involves acquiring relevant multimodal documents from Wikipedia, synthetically generating high-level questions and answers, and validating them through rigorous criteria to ensure data quality. We evaluate our methodology by training models on our synthesized dataset and testing on two benchmarks: MultimodalQA and WebQA. Our results demonstrate that, with an equal sample size, models trained on our synthesized data outperform those trained on human-collected data by 1.9 in exact match (EM) score on average. Additionally, we introduce M2QA-Bench with 1k samples, the first benchmark for MMQA on long documents, generated using FM2DS and refined by human annotators. We believe our data synthesis method will serve as a strong foundation for training and evaluating MMQA models.

Paperid: 3101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04925.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, many studies have been conducted to enhance the zero-shot generalization ability of vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) by addressing the semantic misalignment between image and text embeddings in downstream tasks. Although many efforts have been made, existing methods barely consider the fact that a class of images can be described by notably different textual concepts due to well-known lexical variation in natural language processing, which heavily affects the zero-shot generalization of CLIP. Therefore, this paper proposes a \textbf{S}ynonymous \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{S}pace ($S^3$) for each image class, rather than relying on a single textual concept, achieving more stable semantic alignment and improving the zero-shot generalization of CLIP. Specifically, our $S^3$ method first generates several synonymous concepts based on the label of each class by using large language models, and constructs a continuous yet compact synonymous semantic space based on the Vietoris-Rips complex of the generated synonymous concepts. Furthermore, we explore the effect of several point-to-space metrics on our $S^3$, while presenting a point-to-local-center metric to compute similarity between image embeddings and the synonymous semantic space of each class, accomplishing effective zero-shot predictions. Extensive experiments are conducted across 17 benchmarks, including fine-grained zero-shot classification, natural distribution zero-shot classification, and open-vocabulary segmentation, and the results show that our $S^3$ outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02983.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Semantic Segmentation(FSS)aim to adapt a pre-trained model to new classes with as few as a single labeled training sample per class. The existing prototypical work used in natural image scenarios biasedly focus on capturing foreground's discrimination while employing a simplistic representation for background, grounded on the inherent observation separation between foreground and background. However, this paradigm is not applicable to medical images where the foreground and background share numerous visual features, necessitating a more detailed description for background. In this paper, we present a new pluggable Background-fused prototype(Bro)approach for FSS in medical images. Instead of finding a commonality of background subjects in support image, Bro incorporates this background with two pivot designs. Specifically, Feature Similarity Calibration(FeaC)initially reduces noise in the support image by employing feature cross-attention with the query image. Subsequently, Hierarchical Channel Adversarial Attention(HiCA)merges the background into comprehensive prototypes. We achieve this by a channel groups-based attention mechanism, where an adversarial Mean-Offset structure encourages a coarse-to-fine fusion. Extensive experiments show that previous state-of-the-art methods, when paired with Bro, experience significant performance improvements. This demonstrates a more integrated way to represent backgrounds specifically for medical image.

Paperid: 3103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02075.pdf

Abstract:
3D scene reconstruction is a foundational problem in computer vision. Despite recent advancements in Neural Implicit Representations (NIR), existing methods often lack editability and compositional flexibility, limiting their use in scenarios requiring high interactivity and object-level manipulation. In this paper, we introduce the Gaussian Object Carver (GOC), a novel, efficient, and scalable framework for object-compositional 3D scene reconstruction. GOC leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), enriched with monocular geometry priors and multi-view geometry regularization, to achieve high-quality and flexible reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a zero-shot Object Surface Completion (OSC) model, which uses 3D priors from 3d object data to reconstruct unobserved surfaces, ensuring object completeness even in occluded areas. Experimental results demonstrate that GOC improves reconstruction efficiency and geometric fidelity. It holds promise for advancing the practical application of digital twins in embodied AI, AR/VR, and interactive simulation environments.

Paperid: 3104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01100.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes the zero-shot spontaneous style TTS system for the ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone Challenge (CoVoC). We propose a LLaMA-based codec language model with a delay pattern to achieve spontaneous style voice cloning. To improve speech intelligibility, we introduce the Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategy in the language model to strengthen conditional guidance on token prediction. To generate high-quality utterances, we adopt effective data preprocessing operations and fine-tune our model with selected high-quality spontaneous speech data. The official evaluations in the CoVoC constrained track show that our system achieves the best speech naturalness MOS of 3.80 and obtains considerable speech quality and speaker similarity results.

Paperid: 3105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12395.pdf

Abstract:
Ambiguity in natural language poses significant challenges to Large Language Models (LLMs) used for open-domain question answering. LLMs often struggle with the inherent uncertainties of human communication, leading to misinterpretations, miscommunications, hallucinations, and biased responses. This significantly weakens their ability to be used for tasks like fact-checking, question answering, feature extraction, and sentiment analysis. Using open-domain question answering as a test case, we compare off-the-shelf and few-shot LLM performance, focusing on measuring the impact of explicit disambiguation strategies. We demonstrate how simple, training-free, token-level disambiguation methods may be effectively used to improve LLM performance for ambiguous question answering tasks. We empirically show our findings and discuss best practices and broader impacts regarding ambiguity in LLMs.

Paperid: 3106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11223.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models provide a robust foundation for efficient transfer learning across various downstream tasks. In the field of video action recognition, mainstream approaches often introduce additional modules to capture temporal information. Although the additional modules increase the capacity of model, enabling it to better capture video-specific inductive biases, existing methods typically introduce a substantial number of new parameters and are prone to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired generalizable knowledge. In this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient Multi-modal Spatio-Temporal Adapter (MSTA) to enhance the alignment between textual and visual representations, achieving a balance between generalizable knowledge and task-specific adaptation. Furthermore, to mitigate over-fitting and enhance generalizability, we introduce a spatio-temporal description-guided consistency constraint.This constraint involves providing template inputs (e.g., "a video of \{\textbf{cls}\}") to the trainable language branch and LLM-generated spatio-temporal descriptions to the pre-trained language branch, enforcing output consistency between the branches. This approach reduces overfitting to downstream tasks and enhances the distinguishability of the trainable branch within the spatio-temporal semantic space. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach across four tasks: zero-shot transfer, few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and fully-supervised learning. Compared to many state-of-the-art methods, our MSTA achieves outstanding performance across all evaluations, while using only 2-7\% of the trainable parameters in the original model.

Paperid: 3107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02625.pdf

Abstract:
Emotional text-to-speech (TTS) technology has achieved significant progress in recent years; however, challenges remain owing to the inherent complexity of emotions and limitations of the available emotional speech datasets and models. Previous studies typically relied on limited emotional speech datasets or required extensive manual annotations, restricting their ability to generalize across different speakers and emotional styles. In this paper, we present EmoSphere++, an emotion-controllable zero-shot TTS model that can control emotional style and intensity to resemble natural human speech. We introduce a novel emotion-adaptive spherical vector that models emotional style and intensity without human annotation. Moreover, we propose a multi-level style encoder that can ensure effective generalization for both seen and unseen speakers. We also introduce additional loss functions to enhance the emotion transfer performance for zero-shot scenarios. We employ a conditional flow matching-based decoder to achieve high-quality and expressive emotional TTS in a few sampling steps. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Paperid: 3108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20657.pdf

Abstract:
The development of sophisticated models for video-to-video synthesis has been facilitated by recent advances in deep reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs). In this paper, we propose RL-V2V-GAN, a new deep neural network approach based on reinforcement learning for unsupervised conditional video-to-video synthesis. While preserving the unique style of the source video domain, our approach aims to learn a mapping from a source video domain to a target video domain. We train the model using policy gradient and employ ConvLSTM layers to capture the spatial and temporal information by designing a fine-grained GAN architecture and incorporating spatio-temporal adversarial goals. The adversarial losses aid in content translation while preserving style. Unlike traditional video-to-video synthesis methods requiring paired inputs, our proposed approach is more general because it does not require paired inputs. Thus, when dealing with limited videos in the target domain, i.e., few-shot learning, it is particularly effective. Our experiments show that RL-V2V-GAN can produce temporally coherent video results. These results highlight the potential of our approach for further advances in video-to-video synthesis.

Paperid: 3109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17600.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are crucial in the field of artificial intelligence and are widely used in downstream tasks, such as question-answering (QA). The construction of KGs typically requires significant effort from domain experts. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been used for Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC). However, most existing approaches focus on a local perspective, extracting knowledge triplets from individual sentences or documents, missing a fusion process to combine the knowledge in a global KG. This work introduces Graphusion, a zero-shot KGC framework from free text. It contains three steps: in Step 1, we extract a list of seed entities using topic modeling to guide the final KG includes the most relevant entities; in Step 2, we conduct candidate triplet extraction using LLMs; in Step 3, we design the novel fusion module that provides a global view of the extracted knowledge, incorporating entity merging, conflict resolution, and novel triplet discovery. Results show that Graphusion achieves scores of 2.92 and 2.37 out of 3 for entity extraction and relation recognition, respectively. Moreover, we showcase how Graphusion could be applied to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain and validate it in an educational scenario. Specifically, we introduce TutorQA, a new expert-verified benchmark for QA, comprising six tasks and a total of 1,200 QA pairs. Using the Graphusion-constructed KG, we achieve a significant improvement on the benchmark, for example, a 9.2% accuracy improvement on sub-graph completion.

Paperid: 3110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17547.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce a planning neural operator (PNO) for predicting the value function of a motion planning problem. We recast value function approximation as learning a single operator from the cost function space to the value function space, which is defined by an Eikonal partial differential equation (PDE). Therefore, our PNO model, despite being trained with a finite number of samples at coarse resolution, inherits the zero-shot super-resolution property of neural operators. We demonstrate accurate value function approximation at $16\times$ the training resolution on the MovingAI lab's 2D city dataset, compare with state-of-the-art neural value function predictors on 3D scenes from the iGibson building dataset and showcase optimal planning with 4-DOF robotic manipulators. Lastly, we investigate employing the value function output of PNO as a heuristic function to accelerate motion planning. We show theoretically that the PNO heuristic is $Îµ$-consistent by introducing an inductive bias layer that guarantees our value functions satisfy the triangle inequality. With our heuristic, we achieve a $30\%$ decrease in nodes visited while obtaining near optimal path lengths on the MovingAI lab 2D city dataset, compared to classical planning methods ($A^\ast$, $RRT^\ast$).

Paperid: 3111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11531.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models~(LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities across various applications but face challenges such as hallucination, limited reasoning abilities, and factual inconsistencies, especially when tackling complex, domain-specific tasks like question answering~(QA). While Knowledge Graphs~(KGs) have been shown to help mitigate these issues, research on the integration of LLMs with background KGs remains limited. In particular, user accessibility and the flexibility of the underlying KG have not been thoroughly explored. We introduce AGENTiGraph (Adaptive Generative ENgine for Task-based Interaction and Graphical Representation), a platform for knowledge management through natural language interaction. It integrates knowledge extraction, integration, and real-time visualization. AGENTiGraph employs a multi-agent architecture to dynamically interpret user intents, manage tasks, and integrate new knowledge, ensuring adaptability to evolving user requirements and data contexts. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in knowledge graph interactions, particularly for complex domain-specific tasks. Experimental results on a dataset of 3,500 test cases show AGENTiGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines, achieving 95.12\% accuracy in task classification and 90.45\% success rate in task execution. User studies corroborate its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To showcase versatility, we extended AGENTiGraph to legislation and healthcare domains, constructing specialized KGs capable of answering complex queries in legal and medical contexts.

Paperid: 3112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09771.pdf

Abstract:
Improving the efficiency and performance of implicit neural representations in 3D, particularly Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Signed Distance Fields (SDF) is crucial for enabling their use in real-time applications. These models, while capable of generating photo-realistic novel views and detailed 3D reconstructions, often suffer from high computational costs and slow inference times. To address this, we introduce a novel neural network layer called the "magnituder", designed to reduce the number of training parameters in these models without sacrificing their expressive power. By integrating magnituders into standard feed-forward layer stacks, we achieve improved inference speed and adaptability. Furthermore, our approach enables a zero-shot performance boost in trained implicit neural representation models through layer-wise knowledge transfer without backpropagation, leading to more efficient scene reconstruction in dynamic environments.

Paperid: 3113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03291.pdf

Abstract:
Recently introduced by some of the authors, the in-context identification paradigm aims at estimating, offline and based on synthetic data, a meta-model that describes the behavior of a whole class of systems. Once trained, this meta-model is fed with an observed input/output sequence (context) generated by a real system to predict its behavior in a zero-shot learning fashion. In this paper, we enhance the original meta-modeling framework through three key innovations: by formulating the learning task within a probabilistic framework; by managing non-contiguous context and query windows; and by adopting recurrent patching to effectively handle long context sequences. The efficacy of these modifications is demonstrated through a numerical example focusing on the Wiener-Hammerstein system class, highlighting the model's enhanced performance and scalability.

Paperid: 3114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16570.pdf

Abstract:
This paper studies the problem of information retrieval, to adapt to unseen tasks. Existing work generates synthetic queries from domain-specific documents to jointly train the retriever. However, the conventional query generator assumes the query as a question, thus failing to accommodate general search intents. A more lenient approach incorporates task-adaptive elements, such as few-shot learning with an 137B LLM. In this paper, we challenge a trend equating query and question, and instead conceptualize query generation task as a "compilation" of high-level intent into task-adaptive query. Specifically, we propose EGG, a query generator that better adapts to wide search intents expressed in the BeIR benchmark. Our method outperforms baselines and existing models on four tasks with underexplored intents, while utilizing a query generator 47 times smaller than the previous state-of-the-art. Our findings reveal that instructing the LM with explicit search intent is a key aspect of modeling an effective query generator.

Paperid: 3115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16484.pdf

Abstract:
We present BehAV, a novel approach for autonomous robot navigation in outdoor scenes guided by human instructions and leveraging Vision Language Models (VLMs). Our method interprets human commands using a Large Language Model (LLM) and categorizes the instructions into navigation and behavioral guidelines. Navigation guidelines consist of directional commands (e.g., "move forward until") and associated landmarks (e.g., "the building with blue windows"), while behavioral guidelines encompass regulatory actions (e.g., "stay on") and their corresponding objects (e.g., "pavements"). We use VLMs for their zero-shot scene understanding capabilities to estimate landmark locations from RGB images for robot navigation. Further, we introduce a novel scene representation that utilizes VLMs to ground behavioral rules into a behavioral cost map. This cost map encodes the presence of behavioral objects within the scene and assigns costs based on their regulatory actions. The behavioral cost map is integrated with a LiDAR-based occupancy map for navigation. To navigate outdoor scenes while adhering to the instructed behaviors, we present an unconstrained Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based planner that prioritizes both reaching landmarks and following behavioral guidelines. We evaluate the performance of BehAV on a quadruped robot across diverse real-world scenarios, demonstrating a 22.49% improvement in alignment with human-teleoperated actions, as measured by Frechet distance, and achieving a 40% higher navigation success rate compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15168.pdf

Abstract:
Although the Prototypical Network (ProtoNet) has demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot biological event detection, two persistent issues remain. Firstly, there is difficulty in constructing a representative negative prototype due to the absence of explicitly annotated negative samples. Secondly, the durations of the target biological vocalisations vary across tasks, making it challenging for the model to consistently yield optimal results across all tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive learning framework with an adaptive learning loss to guide classifier updates. Additionally, we propose a negative selection strategy to construct a more representative negative prototype for ProtoNet. All experiments ware performed on the DCASE 2023 TASK5 few-shot bioacoustic event detection dataset. The results show that our proposed method achieves an F-measure of 0.703, an improvement of 12.84%.

Paperid: 3117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12682.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown notable advancements in software engineering tasks. Despite its potential, RAG's application in unit test generation remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we take the initiative to investigate the efficacy of RAG-based LLMs in test generation. As RAGs can leverage various knowledge sources to enhance their performance, we also explore the impact of different sources of RAGs' knowledge bases on unit test generation to provide insights into their practical benefits and limitations. Specifically, we examine RAG built upon three types of domain knowledge: 1) API documentation, 2) GitHub issues, and 3) StackOverflow Q&As. Each source offers essential knowledge for creating tests from different perspectives, i.e., API documentations provide official API usage guidelines, GitHub issues offer resolutions of issues related to the APIs from the library developers, and StackOverflow Q&As present community-driven solutions and best practices. For our experiment, we focus on five widely used and typical Python-based machine learning (ML) projects, i.e., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Google JAX, and XGBoost to build, train, and deploy complex neural networks efficiently. We conducted experiments using the top 10% most widely used APIs across these projects, involving a total of 188 APIs. We investigate the effectiveness of four state-of-the-art LLMs (open and closed-sourced), i.e., GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, Mistral MoE 8x22B, and Llamma 3.1 405B. Additionally, we compare three prompting strategies in generating unit test cases for the experimental APIs, i.e., zero-shot, a Basic RAG, and an API-level RAG on the three external sources. Finally, we compare the cost of different sources of knowledge used for the RAG.

Paperid: 3118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11770.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally recognize new classes using a few samples while maintaining the performance on previously learned classes. One of the effective methods to solve this challenge is to construct prototypical evolution classifiers. Despite the advancement achieved by most existing methods, the classifier weights are simply initialized using mean features. Because representations for new classes are weak and biased, we argue such a strategy is suboptimal. In this paper, we tackle this issue from two aspects. Firstly, thanks to the development of foundation models, we employ a foundation model, the CLIP, as the network pedestal to provide a general representation for each class. Secondly, to generate a more reliable and comprehensive instance representation, we propose a Knowledge Adapter (KA) module that summarizes the data-specific knowledge from training data and fuses it into the general representation. Additionally, to tune the knowledge learned from the base classes to the upcoming classes, we propose a mechanism of Incremental Pseudo Episode Learning (IPEL) by simulating the actual FSCIL. Taken together, our proposed method, dubbed as Knowledge Adaptation Network (KANet), achieves competitive performance on a wide range of datasets, including CIFAR100, CUB200, and ImageNet-R.

Paperid: 3119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06613.pdf

Abstract:
We present DemoStart, a novel auto-curriculum reinforcement learning method capable of learning complex manipulation behaviors on an arm equipped with a three-fingered robotic hand, from only a sparse reward and a handful of demonstrations in simulation. Learning from simulation drastically reduces the development cycle of behavior generation, and domain randomization techniques are leveraged to achieve successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Transferred policies are learned directly from raw pixels from multiple cameras and robot proprioception. Our approach outperforms policies learned from demonstrations on the real robot and requires 100 times fewer demonstrations, collected in simulation. More details and videos in https://sites.google.com/view/demostart.

Paperid: 3120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06351.pdf

Abstract:
In emergency departments, rural hospitals, or clinics in less developed regions, clinicians often lack fast image analysis by trained radiologists, which can have a detrimental effect on patients' healthcare. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to alleviate some pressure from these clinicians by providing insights that can help them in their decision-making. While these LLMs achieve high test results on medical exams showcasing their great theoretical medical knowledge, they tend not to follow medical guidelines. In this work, we introduce a new approach for zero-shot guideline-driven decision support. We model a system of multiple LLM agents augmented with a contrastive vision-language model that collaborate to reach a patient diagnosis. After providing the agents with simple diagnostic guidelines, they will synthesize prompts and screen the image for findings following these guidelines. Finally, they provide understandable chain-of-thought reasoning for their diagnosis, which is then self-refined to consider inter-dependencies between diseases. As our method is zero-shot, it is adaptable to settings with rare diseases, where training data is limited, but expert-crafted disease descriptions are available. We evaluate our method on two chest X-ray datasets, CheXpert and ChestX-ray 14 Longtail, showcasing performance improvement over existing zero-shot methods and generalizability to rare diseases.

Paperid: 3121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05466.pdf

Abstract:
Neural networks that are trained on limited category samples often mispredict out-of-distribution (OOD) objects. We observe that features of the same category are more tightly clustered in feature space, while those of different categories are more dispersed. Based on this, we propose using prototype similarity for OOD detection. Drawing on widely used prototype features in few-shot learning, we introduce a novel OOD detection network structure (Proto-OOD). Proto-OOD enhances the representativeness of category prototypes using contrastive loss and detects OOD data by evaluating the similarity between input features and category prototypes. During training, Proto-OOD generates OOD samples for training the similarity module with a negative embedding generator. When Pascal VOC are used as the in-distribution dataset and MS-COCO as the OOD dataset, Proto-OOD significantly reduces the FPR (false positive rate). Moreover, considering the limitations of existing evaluation metrics, we propose a more reasonable evaluation protocol. The code will be released.

Paperid: 3122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05004.pdf

Abstract:
Voice conversion (VC) aims to modify the speaker's timbre while retaining speech content. Previous approaches have tokenized the outputs from self-supervised into semantic tokens, facilitating disentanglement of speech content information. Recently, in-context learning (ICL) has emerged in text-to-speech (TTS) systems for effectively modeling specific characteristics such as timbre through context conditioning. This paper proposes an ICL capability enhanced VC system (ICL-VC) employing a mask and reconstruction training strategy based on flow-matching generative models. Augmented with semantic tokens, our experiments on the LibriTTS dataset demonstrate that ICL-VC improves speaker similarity. Additionally, we find that k-means is a versatile tokenization method applicable to various pre-trained models. However, the ICL-VC system faces challenges in preserving the prosody of the source speech. To mitigate this issue, we propose incorporating prosody embeddings extracted from a pre-trained emotion recognition model into our system. Integration of prosody embeddings notably enhances the system's capability to preserve source speech prosody, as validated on the Emotional Speech Database.

Paperid: 3123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02664.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of deepfake faces poses huge potential negative impacts on our daily lives. Despite substantial advancements in deepfake detection over these years, the generalizability of existing methods against forgeries from unseen datasets or created by emerging generative models remains constrained. In this paper, inspired by the zero-shot advantages of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we propose a novel approach that repurposes a well-trained VLM for general deepfake detection. Motivated by the model reprogramming paradigm that manipulates the model prediction via input perturbations, our method can reprogram a pre-trained VLM model (e.g., CLIP) solely based on manipulating its input without tuning the inner parameters. First, learnable visual perturbations are used to refine feature extraction for deepfake detection. Then, we exploit information of face embedding to create sample-level adaptative text prompts, improving the performance. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that (1) the cross-dataset and cross-manipulation performances of deepfake detection can be significantly and consistently improved (e.g., over 88\% AUC in cross-dataset setting from FF++ to WildDeepfake); (2) the superior performances are achieved with fewer trainable parameters, making it a promising approach for real-world applications.

Paperid: 3124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19257.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular representation learning aims to learn vector embeddings that capture molecular structure and geometry, thereby enabling property prediction and downstream scientific applications. In many AI for science tasks, labeled data are expensive to obtain and therefore limited in availability. Under the few-shot setting, models trained with scarce supervision often learn brittle structure-property relationships, resulting in substantially higher prediction errors and reduced generalization to unseen molecules. To address this limitation, we propose PCEvo, a path-consistent representation method that learns from virtual paths through dynamic structural evolution. PCEvo enumerates multiple chemically feasible edit paths between retrieved similar molecular pairs under topological dependency constraints. It transforms the labels of the two molecules into stepwise supervision along each virtual evolutionary path. It introduces a path-consistency objective that enforces prediction invariance across alternative paths connecting the same two molecules. Comprehensive experiments on the QM9 and MoleculeNet datasets demonstrate that PCEvo substantially improves the few-shot generalization performance of baseline methods. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PCEvo-4BF2.

Paperid: 3125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12147.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything (SAM) has recently pushed the boundaries of segmentation by demonstrating zero-shot generalization and flexible prompting after training on over one billion masks. Despite this, its mask prediction accuracy often falls short of the precision required in real-world applications. While several refinement modules have been proposed to boost SAM's segmentation quality, achieving highly accurate object delineation within a single, unified framework remains an open challenge. Furthermore, interactive image matting, which aims to generate fine-grained alpha mattes guided by diverse user hints, has not yet been explored in the context of SAM. Insights from recent studies highlight strong correlations between segmentation and matting, suggesting the feasibility of a unified model capable of both tasks. In this paper, we introduce Segment And Matte Anything (SAMA), a lightweight extension of SAM that delivers high-quality interactive image segmentation and matting with minimal extra parameters. Our Multi-View Localization Encoder (MVLE) captures detailed features from local views, while the Localization Adapter (Local-Adapter) refines mask outputs by recovering subtle boundary details. We also incorporate two prediction heads for each task into the architecture to generate segmentation and matting masks, simultaneously. Trained on a diverse dataset aggregated from publicly available sources, SAMA achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple segmentation and matting benchmarks, showcasing its adaptability and effectiveness in a wide range of downstream tasks.

Paperid: 3126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09269.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing methods apply static, manual interventions that fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of complex reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose RISER (Router-based Intervention for Steerable Enhancement of Reasoning), a plug-and-play intervention framework that adaptively steers LLM reasoning in activation space. RISER constructs a library of reusable reasoning vectors and employs a lightweight Router to dynamically compose them for each input. The Router is optimized via reinforcement learning under task-level rewards, activating latent cognitive primitives in an emergent and compositional manner. Across seven diverse benchmarks, RISER yields 3.4-6.5% average zero-shot accuracy improvements over the base model while surpassing CoT-style reasoning with 2-3x higher token efficiency and robust accuracy gains. Further analysis shows that RISER autonomously combines multiple vectors into interpretable, precise control strategies, pointing toward more controllable and efficient LLM reasoning.

Paperid: 3127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23056.pdf

Abstract:
Partial differential equations (PDEs) govern a wide range of physical systems, and recent multimodal foundation models have shown promise for learning PDE solution operators across diverse equation families. However, existing multi-operator learning approaches are data-hungry and neglect physics during training. Here, we propose a physics-informed multimodal foundation model (PI-MFM) framework that directly enforces governing equations during pretraining and adaptation. PI-MFM takes symbolic representations of PDEs as the input, and automatically assembles PDE residual losses from the input expression via a vectorized derivative computation. These designs enable any PDE-encoding multimodal foundation model to be trained or adapted with unified physics-informed objectives across equation families. On a benchmark of 13 parametric one-dimensional time-dependent PDE families, PI-MFM consistently outperforms purely data-driven counterparts, especially with sparse labeled spatiotemporal points, partially observed time domains, or few labeled function pairs. Physics losses further improve robustness against noise, and simple strategies such as resampling collocation points substantially improve accuracy. We also analyze the accuracy, precision, and computational cost of automatic differentiation and finite differences for derivative computation within PI-MFM. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot physics-informed fine-tuning to unseen PDE families: starting from a physics-informed pretrained model, adapting using only PDE residuals and initial/boundary conditions, without any labeled solution data, rapidly reduces test errors to around 1% and clearly outperforms physics-only training from scratch. These results show that PI-MFM provides a practical and scalable path toward data-efficient, transferable PDE solvers.

Paperid: 3128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20011.pdf

Abstract:
Automated pavement defect detection often struggles to generalize across diverse real-world conditions due to the lack of standardized datasets. Existing datasets differ in annotation styles, distress type definitions, and formats, limiting their integration for unified training. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark dataset that consolidates multiple publicly available sources into a standardized collection of 52747 images from seven countries, with 135277 bounding box annotations covering 13 distinct distress types. The dataset captures broad real-world variation in image quality, resolution, viewing angles, and weather conditions, offering a unique resource for consistent training and evaluation. Its effectiveness was demonstrated through benchmarking with state-of-the-art object detection models including YOLOv8-YOLOv12, Faster R-CNN, and DETR, which achieved competitive performance across diverse scenarios. By standardizing class definitions and annotation formats, this dataset provides the first globally representative benchmark for pavement defect detection and enables fair comparison of models, including zero-shot transfer to new environments.

Paperid: 3129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17367.pdf

Abstract:
Computing worst-case robust strategies in pursuit-evasion games (PEGs) is time-consuming, especially when real-world factors like partial observability are considered. While important for general security purposes, real-time applicable pursuit strategies for graph-based PEGs are currently missing when the pursuers only have imperfect information about the evader's position. Although state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Equilibrium Policy Generalization (EPG) and Grasper provide guidelines for learning graph neural network (GNN) policies robust to different game dynamics, they are restricted to the scenario of perfect information and do not take into account the possible case where the evader can predict the pursuers' actions. This paper introduces the first approach to worst-case robust real-time pursuit strategies (R2PS) under partial observability. We first prove that a traditional dynamic programming (DP) algorithm for solving Markov PEGs maintains optimality under the asynchronous moves by the evader. Then, we propose a belief preservation mechanism about the evader's possible positions, extending the DP pursuit strategies to a partially observable setting. Finally, we embed the belief preservation into the state-of-the-art EPG framework to finish our R2PS learning scheme, which leads to a real-time pursuer policy through cross-graph reinforcement learning against the asynchronous-move DP evasion strategies. After reinforcement learning, our policy achieves robust zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world graph structures and consistently outperforms the policy directly trained on the test graphs by the existing game RL approach.

Paperid: 3130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13327.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented dexterous grasping holds broad application prospects in robotic manipulation and human-object interaction. However, most existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse objects and task instructions, as they heavily rely on costly labeled data to ensure task-specific semantic alignment. In this study, we propose \textbf{ZeroDexGrasp}, a zero-shot task-oriented dexterous grasp synthesis framework integrating Multimodal Large Language Models with grasp refinement to generate human-like grasp poses that are well aligned with specific task objectives and object affordances. Specifically, ZeroDexGrasp employs prompt-based multi-stage semantic reasoning to infer initial grasp configurations and object contact information from task and object semantics, then exploits contact-guided grasp optimization to refine these poses for physical feasibility and task alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ZeroDexGrasp enables high-quality zero-shot dexterous grasping on diverse unseen object categories and complex task requirements, advancing toward more generalizable and intelligent robotic grasping.

Paperid: 3131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12708.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding where drivers look and why they shift their attention is essential for autonomous systems that read human intent and justify their actions. Most existing models rely on large-scale gaze datasets to learn these patterns; however, such datasets are labor-intensive to collect and time-consuming to curate. We present FSDAM (Few-Shot Driver Attention Modeling), a framework that achieves joint attention prediction and caption generation with approximately 100 annotated examples, two orders of magnitude fewer than existing approaches. Our approach introduces a dual-pathway architecture where separate modules handle spatial prediction and caption generation while maintaining semantic consistency through cross-modal alignment. Despite minimal supervision, FSDAM achieves competitive performance on attention prediction, generates coherent, and context-aware explanations. The model demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across multiple driving benchmarks. This work shows that effective attention-conditioned generation is achievable with limited supervision, opening new possibilities for practical deployment of explainable driver attention systems in data-constrained scenarios.

Paperid: 3132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10411.pdf

Abstract:
Methods for trajectory prediction in Autonomous Driving must contend with rare, safety-critical scenarios that make reliance on real-world data collection alone infeasible. To assess robustness under such conditions, we propose new long-tail evaluation settings that repartition datasets to create challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets. We first introduce a safety-informed scenario factorization framework, which disentangles scenarios into discrete ego and social contexts. Building on analogies to compositional zero-shot image-labeling in Computer Vision, we then hold out novel context combinations to construct challenging closed-world and open-world settings. This process induces OOD performance gaps in future motion prediction of 5.0% and 14.7% in closed-world and open-world settings, respectively, relative to in-distribution performance for a state-of-the-art baseline. To improve generalization, we extend task-modular gating networks to operate within trajectory prediction models, and develop an auxiliary, difficulty-prediction head to refine internal representations. Our strategies jointly reduce the OOD performance gaps to 2.8% and 11.5% in the two settings, respectively, while still improving in-distribution performance.

Paperid: 3133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05171.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models capable of generalizing across species and tasks represent a promising new frontier in bioacoustics, with NatureLM being one of the most prominent examples. While its domain-specific fine-tuning yields strong performance on bioacoustic benchmarks, we observe that it also introduces trade-offs in instruction-following flexibility. For instance, NatureLM achieves high accuracy when prompted for either the common or scientific name individually, but its accuracy drops significantly when both are requested in a single prompt. We address this by applying a simple model merging strategy that interpolates NatureLM with its base language model, recovering instruction-following capabilities with minimal loss of domain expertise. Finally, we show that the merged model exhibits markedly stronger zero-shot generalization, achieving over a 200% relative improvement and setting a new state-of-the-art in closed-set zero-shot classification of unseen species.

Paperid: 3134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00811.pdf

Abstract:
Equilibrium learning in adversarial games is an important topic widely examined in the fields of game theory and reinforcement learning (RL). Pursuit-evasion game (PEG), as an important class of real-world games from the fields of robotics and security, requires exponential time to be accurately solved. When the underlying graph structure varies, even the state-of-the-art RL methods require recomputation or at least fine-tuning, which can be time-consuming and impair real-time applicability. This paper proposes an Equilibrium Policy Generalization (EPG) framework to effectively learn a generalized policy with robust cross-graph zero-shot performance. In the context of PEGs, our framework is generally applicable to both pursuer and evader sides in both no-exit and multi-exit scenarios. These two generalizability properties, to our knowledge, are the first to appear in this domain. The core idea of the EPG framework is to train an RL policy across different graph structures against the equilibrium policy for each single graph. To construct an equilibrium oracle for single-graph policies, we present a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm that provably generates pure-strategy Nash equilibrium with near-optimal time complexity. To guarantee scalability with respect to pursuer number, we further extend DP and RL by designing a grouping mechanism and a sequence model for joint policy decomposition, respectively. Experimental results show that, using equilibrium guidance and a distance feature proposed for cross-graph PEG training, the EPG framework guarantees desirable zero-shot performance in various unseen real-world graphs. Besides, when trained under an equilibrium heuristic proposed for the graphs with exits, our generalized pursuer policy can even match the performance of the fine-tuned policies from the state-of-the-art PEG methods.

Paperid: 3135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22767.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper we introduce Tale, Task-Aware Layer Elimination, an inference-time algorithm that prunes entire transformer layers in an LLM by directly optimizing task-specific validation performance. We evaluate TALE on 9 tasks and 5 models, including LLaMA 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Qwen 2.5 0.5B, Mistral 7B, and Lucie 7B, under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Unlike prior approaches, TALE requires no retraining and consistently improves accuracy while reducing computational cost across all benchmarks. Furthermore, applying TALE during finetuning leads to additional performance gains. Finally, TALE provides flexible user control over trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. Mutual information analysis shows that certain layers act as bottlenecks, degrading task-relevant representations. Tale's selective layer removal remedies this problem, producing smaller, faster, and more accurate models that are also faster to fine-tune while offering new insights into transformer interpretability.

Paperid: 3136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21795.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of time series foundation models (TSFMs) has been propelled by migrating architectures from language models. While existing TSFMs demonstrate impressive performance, their direct adoption of cross-domain architectures constrains effective capture of multiscale temporal dependencies inherent to time series data. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced during zero-shot transfer across datasets with divergent underlying patterns and sampling strategies. To address these challenges, we propose Hierarchical Interleaved Block Attention (HIBA) which employs hierarchical inter- and intra-block sparse attention to effectively capture multi-scale dependencies. Intra-block attention facilitates local information exchange, and inter-block attention operates across blocks to capture global temporal pattern interaction and dynamic evolution. Leveraging the HIBA architecture, we introduce Xihe, a scalable TSFM family spanning from an ultra-efficient 9.5M parameter configuration to high-capacity 1.5B variant. Evaluated on the comprehensive GIFT-Eval benchmark, our most compact Xihe-tiny model (9.5M) surpasses the majority of contemporary TSFMs, demonstrating remarkable parameter efficiency. More impressively, Xihe-max (1.5B) establishes new state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing previous best results by a substantial margin. This consistent performance excellence across the entire parameter spectrum provides compelling evidence for the exceptional generalization capabilities and architectural superiority of HIBA.

Paperid: 3137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18358.pdf

Abstract:
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for deploying deep neural networks in safety-critical settings. Although methods like Deep Ensembles achieve strong UQ performance, their high computational and memory costs hinder scalability to large models. We introduce Hydra Ensembles, an efficient transformer-based ensemble that prunes attention heads to create diverse members and merges them via a new multi-head attention with grouped fully-connected layers. This yields a compact model with inference speed close to a single network, matching or surpassing Deep Ensembles in UQ performance without retraining from scratch. We also provide an in-depth analysis of pruning, showing that naive approaches can harm calibration, whereas Hydra Ensembles preserves robust uncertainty. Experiments on image and text classification tasks, with various architectures, show consistent gains over Deep Ensembles. Remarkably, in zero-shot classification on ImageNet-1k, our approach surpasses state of the art methods, even without requiring additional training.

Paperid: 3138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13488.pdf

Abstract:
Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, excel at navigating rough terrains, yet their performance under vertical ground perturbations, such as those from oscillating surfaces, remains underexplored. This study introduces a novel approach to enhance quadruped locomotion robustness by training the Unitree Go2 robot on an oscillating bridge - a 13.24-meter steel-and-concrete structure with a 2.0 Hz eigenfrequency designed to perturb locomotion. Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm in a MuJoCo simulation, we trained 15 distinct locomotion policies, combining five gaits (trot, pace, bound, free, default) with three training conditions: rigid bridge and two oscillating bridge setups with differing height regulation strategies (relative to bridge surface or ground). Domain randomization ensured zero-shot transfer to the real-world bridge. Our results demonstrate that policies trained on the oscillating bridge exhibit superior stability and adaptability compared to those trained on rigid surfaces. Our framework enables robust gait patterns even without prior bridge exposure. These findings highlight the potential of simulation-based RL to improve quadruped locomotion during dynamic ground perturbations, offering insights for designing robots capable of traversing vibrating environments.

Paperid: 3139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11852.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in open-source vision-language models (VLMs) offer new opportunities for understanding complex and subjective multimodal phenomena such as sarcasm. In this work, we evaluate seven state-of-the-art VLMs - BLIP2, InstructBLIP, OpenFlamingo, LLaVA, PaliGemma, Gemma3, and Qwen-VL - on their ability to detect multimodal sarcasm using zero-, one-, and few-shot prompting. Furthermore, we evaluate the models' capabilities in generating explanations to sarcastic instances. We evaluate the capabilities of VLMs on three benchmark sarcasm datasets (Muse, MMSD2.0, and SarcNet). Our primary objectives are twofold: (1) to quantify each model's performance in detecting sarcastic image-caption pairs, and (2) to assess their ability to generate human-quality explanations that highlight the visual-textual incongruities driving sarcasm. Our results indicate that, while current models achieve moderate success in binary sarcasm detection, they are still not able to generate high-quality explanations without task-specific finetuning.

Paperid: 3140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08572.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling data and models has played a pivotal role in the remarkable progress of computer vision and language. Inspired by these domains, recent efforts in robotics have similarly focused on scaling both data and model size to develop more generalizable and robust policies. However, unlike vision and language, robotics lacks access to internet-scale demonstrations across diverse robotic tasks and environments. As a result, the scale of existing datasets typically suffers from the need for manual data collection and curation. To address this problem, here we propose BLAZER, a framework that learns manipulation policies from automatically generated training data. We build on the zero-shot capabilities of LLM planners and automatically generate demonstrations for diverse manipulation tasks in simulation. Successful examples are then used to finetune an LLM and to improve its planning capabilities without human supervision. Notably, while BLAZER training requires access to the simulator's state, we demonstrate direct transfer of acquired skills to sensor-based manipulation. Through extensive experiments, we show BLAZER to significantly improve zero-shot manipulation in both simulated and real environments. Moreover, BLAZER improves on tasks outside of its training pool and enables downscaling of LLM models. Our code and data will be made publicly available on the project page.

Paperid: 3141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05046.pdf

Abstract:
To address the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of French Natural Language Understanding (NLU), we introduce COLE, a new benchmark composed of 23 diverse task covering a broad range of NLU capabilities, including sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, grammatical judgment, and reasoning, with a particular focus on linguistic phenomena relevant to the French language. We benchmark 94 large language models (LLM), providing an extensive analysis of the current state of French NLU. Our results highlight a significant performance gap between closed- and open-weights models and identify key challenging frontiers for current LLMs, such as zero-shot extractive question-answering (QA), fine-grained word sense disambiguation, and understanding of regional language variations. We release COLE as a public resource to foster further progress in French language modelling.

Paperid: 3142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24650.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models for speech synthesis face a fundamental trade-off: discrete tokens ensure stability but sacrifice expressivity, while continuous signals retain acoustic richness but suffer from error accumulation due to task entanglement. This challenge has driven the field towards multi-stage pipelines that rely on pre-trained speech tokenizers, but these create a semantic-acoustic divide, limiting holistic and expressive speech generation. We resolve these dilemma through hierarchical semantic-acoustic modeling with semi-discrete residual representations and present a novel tokenizer-free TTS model VoxCPM. Our framework introduces a differentiable quantization bottleneck that induces natural specialization: a Text-Semantic Language Model (TSLM) generates semantic-prosodic plans, while a Residual Acoustic Model (RALM) recovers fine-grained acoustic details. This hierarchical semantic-acoustic representation guides a local diffusion-based decoder to generate high-fidelity speech latents. Critically, the entire architecture is trained end-to-end under a simple diffusion objective, eliminating dependency on external speech tokenizers. Trained on a massive 1.8 million hours of bilingual corpus, our VoxCPM-0.5B model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS performance among open-source systems, demonstrating that our approach delivers expressive and stable synthesis. Besides, VoxCPM shows the capability to comprehend text to infer and generate appropriate prosody and style, delivering speech with context-aware expressiveness and natural flow. To facilitate community-driven research and development, VoxCPM is publicly accessible under Apache 2.0.

Paperid: 3143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22353.pdf

Abstract:
The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with novel or rare configurations. We investigate in-context environment learning (ICEL), shifting attention from zero-shot performance to the growth and asymptotic limits of the world model. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we formalize in-context learning of a world model and identify two core mechanisms: environment recognition and environment learning; (2) we derive error upper-bounds for both mechanisms that expose how the mechanisms emerge; and (3) we empirically confirm that distinct ICL mechanisms exist in the world model, and we further investigate how data distribution and model architecture affect ICL in a manner consistent with theory. These findings demonstrate the potential of self-adapting world models and highlight the key factors behind the emergence of ICEL, most notably the necessity of long context and diverse environments.

Paperid: 3144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19087.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-spectral imagery plays a crucial role in diverse Remote Sensing applications including land-use classification, environmental monitoring and urban planning. These images are widely adopted because their additional spectral bands correlate strongly with physical materials on the ground, such as ice, water, and vegetation. This allows for more accurate identification, and their public availability from missions, such as Sentinel-2 and Landsat, only adds to their value. Currently, the automatic analysis of such data is predominantly managed through machine learning models specifically trained for multi-spectral input, which are costly to train and support. Furthermore, although providing a lot of utility for Remote Sensing, such additional inputs cannot be used with powerful generalist large multimodal models, which are capable of solving many visual problems, but are not able to understand specialized multi-spectral signals. To address this, we propose a training-free approach which introduces new multi-spectral data in a Zero-Shot-only mode, as inputs to generalist multimodal models, trained on RGB-only inputs. Our approach leverages the multimodal models' understanding of the visual space, and proposes to adapt to inputs to that space, and to inject domain-specific information as instructions into the model. We exemplify this idea with the Gemini2.5 model and observe strong Zero-Shot performance gains of the approach on popular Remote Sensing benchmarks for land cover and land use classification and demonstrate the easy adaptability of Gemini2.5 to new inputs. These results highlight the potential for geospatial professionals, working with non-standard specialized inputs, to easily leverage powerful multimodal models, such as Gemini2.5, to accelerate their work, benefiting from their rich reasoning and contextual capabilities, grounded in the specialized sensor data.

Paperid: 3145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18610.pdf

Abstract:
Large vision-language models have driven remarkable progress in open-vocabulary robot policies, e.g., generalist robot manipulation policies, that enable robots to complete complex tasks specified in natural language. Despite these successes, open-vocabulary autonomous drone navigation remains an unsolved challenge due to the scarcity of large-scale demonstrations, real-time control demands of drones for stabilization, and lack of reliable external pose estimation modules. In this work, we present SINGER for language-guided autonomous drone navigation in the open world using only onboard sensing and compute. To train robust, open-vocabulary navigation policies, SINGER leverages three central components: (i) a photorealistic language-embedded flight simulator with minimal sim-to-real gap using Gaussian Splatting for efficient data generation, (ii) an RRT-inspired multi-trajectory generation expert for collision-free navigation demonstrations, and these are used to train (iii) a lightweight end-to-end visuomotor policy for real-time closed-loop control. Through extensive hardware flight experiments, we demonstrate superior zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of our policy to unseen environments and unseen language-conditioned goal objects. When trained on ~700k-1M observation action pairs of language conditioned visuomotor data and deployed on hardware, SINGER outperforms a velocity-controlled semantic guidance baseline by reaching the query 23.33% more on average, and maintains the query in the field of view 16.67% more on average, with 10% fewer collisions.

Paperid: 3146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16628.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we introduce Vision-Caption aware Supervised FineTuning (VCASFT), a novel learning paradigm designed to enhance the performance of smaller Vision Language Models(VLMs) on scientific visual question answering(VQA) tasks. VCASFT leverages image captions as zero-shot prompts alongside question-answer pairs and instruction-tunes models to yield significant performance improvements. To comprehensively evaluate VCASFT, we benchmark it on ScienceQA, which consists of questions across diverse languages, subjects, and fields, demonstrating its adaptability and effectiveness in a variety of educational contexts. Additionally, to further demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique on lowresource languages, we developed HiSciVQA, a dataset comprising 2,245 high-quality, hand-annotated Hindi multimodal Q&A pairs. This dataset addresses the critical need for low-resource language Q&A datasets and serves as a foundation for testing VCASFT. Additionally, we introduce a novel LLM-based evaluation scheme to evaluate VLMs on HiSciVQA which offers deeper insights into model effectiveness surpassing traditional n-gram matching accuracy metrics. We are committed to advancing the field by open-sourcing all code files and the HiSciVQA dataset for the research community.

Paperid: 3147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04469.pdf

Abstract:
This paper benchmarks eight multi-modal large language models from three families (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, and open-source Gemma 3) on three diverse openly available invoice document datasets using zero-shot prompting. We compare two processing strategies: direct image processing using multi-modal capabilities and a structured parsing approach converting documents to markdown first. Results show native image processing generally outperforms structured approaches, with performance varying across model types and document characteristics. This benchmark provides insights for selecting appropriate models and processing strategies for automated document systems. Our code is available online.

Paperid: 3148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02815.pdf

Abstract:
We present a single, general locomotion policy trained on a diverse collection of 50 legged robots. By combining an improved embodiment-aware architecture (URMAv2) with a performance-based curriculum for extreme Embodiment Randomization, our policy learns to control millions of morphological variations. Our policy achieves zero-shot transfer to unseen real-world humanoid and quadruped robots.

Paperid: 3149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16867.pdf

Abstract:
Large and Transformer-based language models perform outstandingly in various downstream tasks. However, there is limited understanding regarding how these models internalize linguistic knowledge, so various linguistic benchmarks have recently been proposed to facilitate syntactic evaluation of language models across languages. This paper introduces QFrCoLA (Quebec-French Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability Judgments), a normative binary acceptability judgments dataset comprising 25,153 in-domain and 2,675 out-of-domain sentences. Our study leverages the QFrCoLA dataset and seven other linguistic binary acceptability judgment corpora to benchmark seven language models. The results demonstrate that, on average, fine-tuned Transformer-based LM are strong baselines for most languages and that zero-shot binary classification large language models perform poorly on the task. However, for the QFrCoLA benchmark, on average, a fine-tuned Transformer-based LM outperformed other methods tested. It also shows that pre-trained cross-lingual LLMs selected for our experimentation do not seem to have acquired linguistic judgment capabilities during their pre-training for Quebec French. Finally, our experiment results on QFrCoLA show that our dataset, built from examples that illustrate linguistic norms rather than speakers' feelings, is similar to linguistic acceptability judgment; it is a challenging dataset that can benchmark LM on their linguistic judgment capabilities.

Paperid: 3150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14685.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language models' abilities for in-context learning (ICL) have drawn much attention, we examine some of its limitations on semantic tasks involving quantifiers like "all" and "some", as well as on tasks with linear functions. We identify Softmax, the scoring function in attention mechanism, as a contributing factor to these limitations. We propose scaled signed averaging (SSA), a novel alternative to Softmax to mitigate these problems. We show that SSA significantly improves performance on our ICL tasks. In addition, SSA outperforms transformer models with Softmax on several early learning NLP benchmarks and linguistic probing tasks on zero and few-shot settings.

Paperid: 3151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08219.pdf

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for explicit 3D scene representation, yet achieving efficient and consistent 3D segmentation remains challenging. Current methods suffer from prohibitive computational costs, limited 3D spatial reasoning, and an inability to track multiple objects simultaneously. We present Segment Any Gaussians Online (SAGOnline), a lightweight and zero-shot framework for real-time 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) a decoupled strategy that integrates video foundation models (e.g., SAM2) for view-consistent 2D mask propagation across synthesized views; and (2) a GPU-accelerated 3D mask generation and Gaussian-level instance labeling algorithm that assigns unique identifiers to 3D primitives, enabling lossless multi-object tracking and segmentation across views. SAGOnline achieves state-of-the-art performance on NVOS (92.7% mIoU) and Spin-NeRF (95.2% mIoU) benchmarks, outperforming Feature3DGS, OmniSeg3D-gs, and SA3D by 15--1500 times in inference speed (27 ms/frame). Qualitative results demonstrate robust multi-object segmentation and tracking in complex scenes. Our contributions include: (i) a lightweight and zero-shot framework for 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes, (ii) explicit labeling of Gaussian primitives enabling simultaneous segmentation and tracking, and (iii) the effective adaptation of 2D video foundation models to the 3D domain. This work allows real-time rendering and 3D scene understanding, paving the way for practical AR/VR and robotic applications.

Paperid: 3152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10602.pdf

Abstract:
Learning from demonstration provides a sample-efficient approach to acquiring complex behaviors, enabling robots to move robustly, compliantly, and with fluidity. In this context, Dynamic Motion Primitives offer built - in stability and robustness to disturbances but often struggle to capture complex periodic behaviors. Moreover, they are limited in their ability to interpolate between different tasks. These shortcomings substantially narrow their applicability, excluding a wide class of practically meaningful tasks such as locomotion and rhythmic tool use. In this work, we introduce Orbitally Stable Motion Primitives (OSMPs) - a framework that combines a learned diffeomorphic encoder with a supercritical Hopf bifurcation in latent space, enabling the accurate acquisition of periodic motions from demonstrations while ensuring formal guarantees of orbital stability and transverse contraction. Furthermore, by conditioning the bijective encoder on the task, we enable a single learned policy to represent multiple motion objectives, yielding consistent zero-shot generalization to unseen motion objectives within the training distribution. We validate the proposed approach through extensive simulation and real-world experiments across a diverse range of robotic platforms - from collaborative arms and soft manipulators to a bio-inspired rigid-soft turtle robot - demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines such as diffusion policies, among others.

Paperid: 3153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07605.pdf

Abstract:
We study the use of image-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for open-vocabulary segmentation of lidar scans in driving settings. Classically, image semantics can be back-projected onto 3D point clouds. Yet, resulting point labels are noisy and sparse. We consolidate these labels to enforce both spatio-temporal consistency and robustness to image-level augmentations. We then train a 3D network based on these refined labels. This simple method, called LOSC, outperforms the SOTA of zero-shot open-vocabulary semantic and panoptic segmentation on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI, with significant margins.

Paperid: 3154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05006.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are widely used to derive semantic representations from item metadata in recommendation and search. In sequential recommendation, PLMs enhance ID-based embeddings through textual metadata, while in product search, they align item characteristics with user intent. Recent studies suggest task and domain-specific fine-tuning are needed to improve representational power. This paper challenges this assumption, showing that Generalist Text Embedding Models (GTEs), pre-trained on large-scale corpora, can guarantee strong zero-shot performance without specialized adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that GTEs outperform traditional and fine-tuned models in both sequential recommendation and product search. We attribute this to a superior representational power, as they distribute features more evenly across the embedding space. Finally, we show that compressing embedding dimensions by focusing on the most informative directions (e.g., via PCA) effectively reduces noise and improves the performance of specialized models. To ensure reproducibility, we provide our repository at https://split.to/gte4ps.

Paperid: 3155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10474.pdf

Abstract:
The growing sophistication of deepfakes presents substantial challenges to the integrity of media and the preservation of public trust. Concurrently, vision-language models (VLMs), large language models enhanced with visual reasoning capabilities, have emerged as promising tools across various domains, sparking interest in their applicability to deepfake detection. This study conducts a structured zero-shot evaluation of four prominent VLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, focusing on three primary deepfake types: faceswap, reenactment, and synthetic generation. Leveraging a meticulously assembled benchmark comprising authentic and manipulated images from diverse sources, we evaluate each model's classification accuracy and reasoning depth. Our analysis indicates that while VLMs can produce coherent explanations and detect surface-level anomalies, they are not yet dependable as standalone detection systems. We highlight critical failure modes, such as an overemphasis on stylistic elements and vulnerability to misleading visual patterns like vintage aesthetics. Nevertheless, VLMs exhibit strengths in interpretability and contextual analysis, suggesting their potential to augment human expertise in forensic workflows. These insights imply that although general-purpose models currently lack the reliability needed for autonomous deepfake detection, they hold promise as integral components in hybrid or human-in-the-loop detection frameworks.

Paperid: 3156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04739.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread dissemination of fake news on social media has significantly impacted society, resulting in serious consequences. Conventional deep learning methodologies employing small language models (SLMs) suffer from extensive supervised training requirements and difficulties adapting to evolving news environments due to data scarcity and distribution shifts. Large language models (LLMs), despite robust zero-shot capabilities, fall short in accurately detecting fake news owing to outdated knowledge and the absence of suitable demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel Continuous Collaborative Emergent Fake News Detection (C$^2$EFND) framework to address these challenges. The C$^2$EFND framework strategically leverages both LLMs' generalization power and SLMs' classification expertise via a multi-round collaborative learning framework. We further introduce a lifelong knowledge editing module based on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to incrementally update LLMs and a replay-based continue learning method to ensure SLMs retain prior knowledge without retraining entirely. Extensive experiments on Pheme and Twitter16 datasets demonstrate that C$^2$EFND significantly outperforms existed methods, effectively improving detection accuracy and adaptability in continuous emergent fake news scenarios.

Paperid: 3157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04421.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Auto-Regressive modeling (VAR) has shown promise in bridging the speed and quality gap between autoregressive image models and diffusion models. VAR reformulates autoregressive modeling by decomposing an image into successive resolution scales. During inference, an image is generated by predicting all the tokens in the next (higher-resolution) scale, conditioned on all tokens in all previous (lower-resolution) scales. However, this formulation suffers from reduced image quality due to the parallel generation of all tokens in a resolution scale; has sequence lengths scaling superlinearly in image resolution; and requires retraining to change the sampling schedule. We introduce Hierarchical Masked Auto-Regressive modeling (HMAR), a new image generation algorithm that alleviates these issues using next-scale prediction and masked prediction to generate high-quality images with fast sampling. HMAR reformulates next-scale prediction as a Markovian process, wherein the prediction of each resolution scale is conditioned only on tokens in its immediate predecessor instead of the tokens in all predecessor resolutions. When predicting a resolution scale, HMAR uses a controllable multi-step masked generation procedure to generate a subset of the tokens in each step. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 benchmarks, HMAR models match or outperform parameter-matched VAR, diffusion, and autoregressive baselines. We develop efficient IO-aware block-sparse attention kernels that allow HMAR to achieve faster training and inference times over VAR by over 2.5x and 1.75x respectively, as well as over 3x lower inference memory footprint. Finally, HMAR yields additional flexibility over VAR; its sampling schedule can be changed without further training, and it can be applied to image editing tasks in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 3158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03128.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained time series models, capable of zero-shot forecasting, have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing both the performance and accessibility of time series forecasting. However, existing pretrained models either do not support covariates or fail to incorporate them effectively. We introduce COSMIC, a zero-shot forecasting model that utilizes covariates via in-context learning. To address the challenge of data scarcity, we propose Informative Covariate Augmentation, which enables the training of COSMIC without requiring any datasets that include covariates. COSMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot forecasting, both with and without covariates. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrates that COSMIC effectively leverages covariates in zero-shot forecasting.

Paperid: 3159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02507.pdf

Abstract:
Designing reinforcement learning curricula for agile robots traditionally requires extensive manual tuning of reward functions, environment randomizations, and training configurations. We introduce AURA (Autonomous Upskilling with Retrieval-Augmented Agents), a schema-validated curriculum reinforcement learning (RL) framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous designers of multi-stage curricula. AURA transforms user prompts into YAML workflows that encode full reward functions, domain randomization strategies, and training configurations. All files are statically validated before any GPU time is used, ensuring efficient and reliable execution. A retrieval-augmented feedback loop allows specialized LLM agents to design, execute, and refine curriculum stages based on prior training results stored in a vector database, enabling continual improvement over time. Quantitative experiments show that AURA consistently outperforms LLM-guided baselines in generation success rate, humanoid locomotion, and manipulation tasks. Ablation studies highlight the importance of schema validation and retrieval for curriculum quality. AURA successfully trains end-to-end policies directly from user prompts and deploys them zero-shot on a custom humanoid robot in multiple environments - capabilities that did not exist previously with manually designed controllers. By abstracting the complexity of curriculum design, AURA enables scalable and adaptive policy learning pipelines that would be complex to construct by hand.

Paperid: 3160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20318.pdf

Abstract:
In-Context derived Vector (ICV) methods extract task-relevant representations from large language models (LLMs) and reinject them during inference, achieving comparable performance to few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) without repeated demonstration processing. However, existing ICV methods remain sensitive to ICL-specific factors, often use coarse or semantically fragmented representations as the source of the vector, and rely on heuristic-based injection positions, limiting their applicability. To address these issues, we propose Dynamic Vector (DyVec), which incorporates an Exhaustive Query Rotation (EQR) strategy to extract robust semantically aggregated latent representations by mitigating variance introduced by ICL. It then applies Dynamic Latent Segmentation and Injection to adaptively partition representations based on task complexity and leverages REINFORCE-based optimization to learn optimal injection positions for each segment. Experiments results show that DyVec outperforms few-shot ICL, LoRA, and prior ICV baselines. Further analysis highlights the effectiveness of dynamically segmenting and injecting semantically aggregated latent representations. DyVec provides a lightweight and data-efficient solution for inference-time task adaptation.

Paperid: 3161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20308.pdf

Abstract:
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) involves complex interdependencies among processes, materials, feedstock, and post-processing steps. However, the underlying relationships and domain knowledge remain fragmented across literature and static databases that often require expert-level queries, limiting their applicability in design and planning. To address these limitations, we develop a novel and structured knowledge graph (KG), representing 53 distinct metals and alloys across seven material categories, nine AM processes, four feedstock types, and corresponding post-processing requirements. A large language model (LLM) interface, guided by a few-shot prompting strategy, enables natural language querying without the need for formal query syntax. The system supports a range of tasks, including compatibility evaluation, constraint-based filtering, and design for AM (DfAM) guidance. User queries in natural language are normalized, translated into Cypher, and executed on the KG, with results returned in a structured format. This work introduces the first interactive system that connects a domain-specific metal AM KG with an LLM interface, delivering accessible and explainable decision support for engineers and promoting human-centered tools in manufacturing knowledge systems.

Paperid: 3162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18983.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated strong zero-shot performance across diverse downstream text-image tasks. Existing CLIP methods typically optimize a contrastive objective using negative samples drawn from each minibatch. To achieve robust representation learning, these methods require extremely large batch sizes and escalate computational demands to hundreds or even thousands of GPUs. Prior approaches to mitigate this issue often compromise downstream performance, prolong training duration, or face scalability challenges with very large datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose AmorLIP, an efficient CLIP pretraining framework that amortizes expensive computations involved in contrastive learning through lightweight neural networks, which substantially improves training efficiency and performance. Leveraging insights from a spectral factorization of energy-based models, we introduce novel amortization objectives along with practical techniques to improve training stability. Extensive experiments across 38 downstream tasks demonstrate the superior zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities of AmorLIP, consistently outperforming standard CLIP baselines with substantial relative improvements of up to 12.24%.

Paperid: 3163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16875.pdf

Abstract:
Continual post-training adapts a single text-to-image diffusion model to learn new tasks without incurring the cost of separate models, but naive post-training causes forgetting of pretrained knowledge and undermines zero-shot compositionality. We observe that the absence of a standardized evaluation protocol hampers related research for continual post-training. To address this, we introduce T2I-ConBench, a unified benchmark for continual post-training of text-to-image models. T2I-ConBench focuses on two practical scenarios, item customization and domain enhancement, and analyzes four dimensions: (1) retention of generality, (2) target-task performance, (3) catastrophic forgetting, and (4) cross-task generalization. It combines automated metrics, human-preference modeling, and vision-language QA for comprehensive assessment. We benchmark ten representative methods across three realistic task sequences and find that no approach excels on all fronts. Even joint "oracle" training does not succeed for every task, and cross-task generalization remains unsolved. We release all datasets, code, and evaluation tools to accelerate research in continual post-training for text-to-image models.

Paperid: 3164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11838.pdf

Abstract:
Visual reasoning, the capability to interpret visual input in response to implicit text query through multi-step reasoning, remains a challenge for deep learning models due to the lack of relevant benchmarks. Previous work in visual reasoning has primarily focused on reasoning segmentation, where models aim to segment objects based on implicit text queries. This paper introduces reasoning visual tasks (RVTs), a unified formulation that extends beyond traditional video reasoning segmentation to a diverse family of visual language reasoning problems, which can therefore accommodate multiple output formats including bounding boxes, natural language descriptions, and question-answer pairs. Correspondingly, we identify the limitations in current benchmark construction methods that rely solely on large language models (LLMs), which inadequately capture complex spatial-temporal relationships and multi-step reasoning chains in video due to their reliance on token representation, resulting in benchmarks with artificially limited reasoning complexity. To address this limitation, we propose a novel automated RVT benchmark construction pipeline that leverages digital twin (DT) representations as structured intermediaries between perception and the generation of implicit text queries. Based on this method, we construct RVTBench, a RVT benchmark containing 3,896 queries of over 1.2 million tokens across four types of RVT (segmentation, grounding, VQA and summary), three reasoning categories (semantic, spatial, and temporal), and four increasing difficulty levels, derived from 200 video sequences. Finally, we propose RVTagent, an agent framework for RVT that allows for zero-shot generalization across various types of RVT without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 3165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14132.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated remarkable success in 3D point cloud analysis, particularly through masked autoencoders (MAEs). However, existing MAE-based methods lack rotation invariance, leading to significant performance degradation when processing arbitrarily rotated point clouds in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce Handcrafted Feature-Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder (HFBRI-MAE), a novel framework that refines the MAE design with rotation-invariant handcrafted features to ensure stable feature learning across different orientations. By leveraging both rotation-invariant local and global features for token embedding and position embedding, HFBRI-MAE effectively eliminates rotational dependencies while preserving rich geometric structures. Additionally, we redefine the reconstruction target to a canonically aligned version of the input, mitigating rotational ambiguities. Extensive experiments on ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNetPart demonstrate that HFBRI-MAE consistently outperforms existing methods in object classification, segmentation, and few-shot learning, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization ability in real-world 3D applications.

Paperid: 3166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13710.pdf

Abstract:
Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment objects in videos guided by natural language descriptions. We propose FS-RVOS, a Transformer-based model with two key components: a cross-modal affinity module and an instance sequence matching strategy, which extends FS-RVOS to multi-object segmentation (FS-RVMOS). Experiments show FS-RVOS and FS-RVMOS outperform state-of-the-art methods across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating superior robustness and accuracy.

Paperid: 3167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11186.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in reasoning-focused large language models (LLMs) mark a shift from general LLMs toward models designed for complex decision-making, a crucial aspect in medicine. However, their performance in specialized domains like ophthalmology remains underexplored. This study comprehensively evaluated and compared the accuracy and reasoning capabilities of four newly developed reasoning-focused LLMs, namely DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI o1, o3-mini, and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking. Each model was assessed using 5,888 multiple-choice ophthalmology exam questions from the MedMCQA dataset in zero-shot setting. Quantitative evaluation included accuracy, Macro-F1, and five text-generation metrics (ROUGE-L, METEOR, BERTScore, BARTScore, and AlignScore), computed against ground-truth reasonings. Average inference time was recorded for a subset of 100 randomly selected questions. Additionally, two board-certified ophthalmologists qualitatively assessed clarity, completeness, and reasoning structure of responses to differential diagnosis questions.O1 (0.902) and DeepSeek-R1 (0.888) achieved the highest accuracy, with o1 also leading in Macro-F1 (0.900). The performance of models across the text-generation metrics varied: O3-mini excelled in ROUGE-L (0.151), o1 in METEOR (0.232), DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini tied for BERTScore (0.673), DeepSeek-R1 (-4.105) and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking (-4.127) performed best in BARTScore, while o3-mini (0.181) and o1 (0.176) led AlignScore. Inference time across the models varied, with DeepSeek-R1 being slowest (40.4 seconds) and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking fastest (6.7 seconds). Qualitative evaluation revealed that DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Thinking tended to provide detailed and comprehensive intermediate reasoning, whereas o1 and o3-mini displayed concise and summarized justifications.

Paperid: 3168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21127.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms has exerted a substantial influence on society, leading to discernible impacts and deleterious consequences. Conventional deep learning methodologies employing small language models (SLMs) suffer from the necessity for extensive supervised training and the challenge of adapting to rapidly evolving circumstances. Large language models (LLMs), despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, have fallen short in effectively identifying fake news due to a lack of pertinent demonstrations and the dynamic nature of knowledge. In this paper, a novel framework Multi-Round Collaboration Detection (MRCD) is proposed to address these aforementioned limitations. The MRCD framework is capable of enjoying the merits from both LLMs and SLMs by integrating their generalization abilities and specialized functionalities, respectively. Our approach features a two-stage retrieval module that selects relevant and up-to-date demonstrations and knowledge, enhancing in-context learning for better detection of emerging news events. We further design a multi-round learning framework to ensure more reliable detection results. Our framework MRCD achieves SOTA results on two real-world datasets Pheme and Twitter16, with accuracy improvements of 7.4\% and 12.8\% compared to using only SLMs, which effectively addresses the limitations of current models and improves the detection of emergent fake news.

Paperid: 3169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20228.pdf

Abstract:
Mitigating Trojans in Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of many tasks where alignment data is LLM specific, as different LLMs have different Trojan triggers and trigger behaviors to be removed. In this paper, we introduce TeleLoRA (Teleporting Low-Rank Adaptation), a novel framework that synergizes model-specific alignment data across multiple LLMs to enable zero-shot Trojan mitigation on unseen LLMs without alignment data. TeleLoRA learns a unified generator of LoRA adapter weights by leveraging local activation information across multiple LLMs. This generator is designed to be permutation symmetric to generalize across models with different architectures and sizes. We optimize the model design for memory efficiency, making it feasible to learn with large-scale LLMs with minimal computational resources. Experiments on LLM Trojan mitigation benchmarks demonstrate that TeleLoRA effectively reduces attack success rates while preserving the benign performance of the models.

Paperid: 3170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07038.pdf

Abstract:
We address the challenge of Small Object Image Retrieval (SoIR), where the goal is to retrieve images containing a specific small object, in a cluttered scene. The key challenge in this setting is constructing a single image descriptor, for scalable and efficient search, that effectively represents all objects in the image. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of existing methods on this challenging task and then introduce new benchmarks to support SoIR evaluation. Next, we introduce Multi-object Attention Optimization (MaO), a novel retrieval framework which incorporates a dedicated multi-object pre-training phase. This is followed by a refinement process that leverages attention-based feature extraction with object masks, integrating them into a single unified image descriptor. Our MaO approach significantly outperforms existing retrieval methods and strong baselines, achieving notable improvements in both zero-shot and lightweight multi-object fine-tuning. We hope this work will lay the groundwork and inspire further research to enhance retrieval performance for this highly practical task.

Paperid: 3171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06847.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to train a model on seen classes and recognize unseen classes by knowledge transfer through shared auxiliary information. Recent studies reveal that documents from encyclopedias provide helpful auxiliary information. However, existing methods align noisy documents, entangled in visual and non-visual descriptions, with image regions, yet solely depend on implicit learning. These models fail to filter non-visual noise reliably and incorrectly align non-visual words to image regions, which is harmful to knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel multi-attribute document supervision framework to remove noises at both document collection and model learning stages. With the help of large language models, we introduce a novel prompt algorithm that automatically removes non-visual descriptions and enriches less-described documents in multiple attribute views. Our proposed model, MADS, extracts multi-view transferable knowledge with information decoupling and semantic interactions for semantic alignment at local and global levels. Besides, we introduce a model-agnostic focus loss to explicitly enhance attention to visually discriminative information during training, also improving existing methods without additional parameters. With comparable computation costs, MADS consistently outperforms the SOTA by 7.2% and 8.2% on average in three benchmarks for document-based ZSL and GZSL settings, respectively. Moreover, we qualitatively offer interpretable predictions from multiple attribute views.

Paperid: 3172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14819.pdf

Abstract:
A long-standing goal in AI is to build agents that can solve a variety of tasks across different environments, including previously unseen ones. Two dominant approaches tackle this challenge: (i) reinforcement learning (RL), which learns policies through trial and error, and (ii) optimal control, which plans actions using a learned or known dynamics model. However, their relative strengths and weaknesses remain underexplored in the setting where agents must learn from offline trajectories without reward annotations. In this work, we systematically analyze the performance of different RL and control-based methods under datasets of varying quality. On the RL side, we consider goal-conditioned and zero-shot approaches. On the control side, we train a latent dynamics model using the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and use it for planning. We study how dataset properties-such as data diversity, trajectory quality, and environment variability-affect the performance of these approaches. Our results show that model-free RL excels when abundant, high-quality data is available, while model-based planning excels in generalization to novel environment layouts, trajectory stitching, and data-efficiency. Notably, planning with a latent dynamics model emerges as a promising approach for zero-shot generalization from suboptimal data.

Paperid: 3173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09933.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to recognize patterns from examples and apply them to new ones is a primal ability for general intelligence, and is widely studied by psychology and AI researchers. Many benchmarks have been proposed to measure such ability for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, they focus on few-shot (usually <10) setting and lack evaluation for aggregating many pieces of information from long contexts. On the other hand, the ever-growing context length of LLMs have brought forth the novel paradigm of many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), which addresses new tasks with hundreds to thousands of examples without expensive and inefficient fine-tuning. However, many-shot evaluations often focus on classification, and popular long-context LLM tasks such as Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) seldom require complicated intelligence for integrating many pieces of information. To fix the issues from both worlds, we propose MIR-Bench, the first many-shot in-context reasoning benchmark for pattern recognition that asks LLM to predict output via input-output examples from underlying functions with diverse data format. Based on MIR-Bench, we study many novel problems for many-shot in-context reasoning, and acquired many insightful findings including scaling effect, robustness, inductive vs. transductive reasoning, retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), coding for inductive reasoning, cross-domain generalizability, etc.

Paperid: 3174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02869.pdf

Abstract:
In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) enables agents to learn automatically and on-the-fly from their interactive experiences. However, a major challenge in scaling up ICRL is the lack of scalable task collections. To address this, we propose the procedurally generated tabular Markov Decision Processes, named AnyMDP. Through a carefully designed randomization process, AnyMDP is capable of generating high-quality tasks on a large scale while maintaining relatively low structural biases. To facilitate efficient meta-training at scale, we further introduce step-wise supervision and induce prior information in the ICRL framework.Our results demonstrate that, with a sufficiently large scale of AnyMDP tasks, the proposed model can generalize to tasks that were not considered in the training set. The scalable task set provided by AnyMDP also enables a more thorough empirical investigation of the relationship between data distribution and ICRL performance. We further show that the generalization of ICRL potentially comes at the cost of increased task diversity and longer adaptation periods. This finding carries critical implications for scaling robust ICRL capabilities, highlighting the necessity of diverse and extensive task design, and prioritizing asymptotic performance over few-shot adaptation.

Paperid: 3175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00398.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-language models (ALMs) excel in zero-shot audio classification, a task where models classify previously unseen audio clips at test time by leveraging descriptive natural language prompts. We introduce TSPE (Task-Specific Prompt Ensemble), a simple, training-free hard prompting method that boosts ALEs' zero-shot performance by customizing prompts for diverse audio classification tasks. Rather than using generic template-based prompts like "Sound of a car" we generate context-rich prompts, such as "Sound of a car coming from a tunnel". Specifically, we leverage label information to identify suitable sound attributes, such as "loud" and "feeble", and appropriate sound sources, such as "tunnel" and "street" and incorporate this information into the prompts used by Audio-Language Models (ALMs) for audio classification. Further, to enhance audio-text alignment, we perform prompt ensemble across TSPE-generated task-specific prompts. When evaluated on 12 diverse audio classification datasets, TSPE improves performance across ALMs by showing an absolute improvement of 1.23-16.36% over vanilla zero-shot evaluation.

Paperid: 3176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19562.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on building a task planner for Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) using Large Language Models (LLMs). Previous works typically train a planner to imitate expert trajectories, treating this as a supervised task. While these methods achieve competitive performance, they often lack sufficient robustness. When a suboptimal action is taken, the planner may encounter an out-of-distribution state, which can lead to task failure. In contrast, we frame the task as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and aim to develop a robust planner under a few-shot assumption. Thus, we propose a closed-loop planner with an adaptation module and a novel hindsight method, aiming to use as much information as possible to assist the planner. Our experiments on the ALFRED dataset indicate that our planner achieves competitive performance under a few-shot assumption. For the first time, our few-shot agent's performance approaches and even surpasses that of the full-shot supervised agent.

Paperid: 3177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18415.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in linguistic tasks but struggle with mathematical reasoning, particularly in non English languages like Hindi. This research aims to enhance the mathematical reasoning skills of smaller, resource efficient open-source LLMs in both Hindi and English. We evaluate models like OpenHathi 7B, LLaMA-2 7B, WizardMath 7B, Mistral 7B, LLeMMa 7B, MAmmoTH 7B, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 using zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) methods, and supervised fine-tuning. Our approach incorporates curriculum learning, progressively training models on increasingly difficult problems, a novel Decomposition Strategy to simplify complex arithmetic operations, and a Structured Solution Design that divides solutions into phases. Our experiments result in notable performance enhancements. WizardMath 7B exceeds Gemini's accuracy on English datasets by +6% and matches Gemini's performance on Hindi datasets. Adopting a bilingual approach that combines English and Hindi samples achieves results comparable to individual language models, demonstrating the capability to learn mathematical reasoning in both languages. This research highlights the potential for improving mathematical reasoning in open-source LLMs.

Paperid: 3178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18150.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models have achieved significant advancements. Correspondingly, many automated metrics have emerged to evaluate the image-text alignment capabilities of generative models. However, the performance comparison among these automated metrics is limited by existing small datasets. Additionally, these datasets lack the capacity to assess the performance of automated metrics at a fine-grained level. In this study, we contribute an EvalMuse-40K benchmark, gathering 40K image-text pairs with fine-grained human annotations for image-text alignment-related tasks. In the construction process, we employ various strategies such as balanced prompt sampling and data re-annotation to ensure the diversity and reliability of our benchmark. This allows us to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of image-text alignment metrics for T2I models. Meanwhile, we introduce two new methods to evaluate the image-text alignment capabilities of T2I models: FGA-BLIP2 which involves end-to-end fine-tuning of a vision-language model to produce fine-grained image-text alignment scores and PN-VQA which adopts a novel positive-negative VQA manner in VQA models for zero-shot fine-grained evaluation. Both methods achieve impressive performance in image-text alignment evaluations. We also use our methods to rank current AIGC models, in which the results can serve as a reference source for future study and promote the development of T2I generation. The data and code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 3179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14588.pdf

Abstract:
In legal practice, judges apply the trichotomous dogmatics of criminal law, sequentially assessing the elements of the offense, unlawfulness, and culpability to determine whether an individual's conduct constitutes a crime. Although current legal large language models (LLMs) show promising accuracy in judgment prediction, they lack trichotomous reasoning capabilities due to the absence of an appropriate benchmark dataset, preventing them from predicting innocent outcomes. As a result, every input is automatically assigned a charge, limiting their practical utility in legal contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce LJPIV, the first benchmark dataset for Legal Judgment Prediction with Innocent Verdicts. Adhering to the trichotomous dogmatics, we extend three widely-used legal datasets through LLM-based augmentation and manual verification. Our experiments with state-of-the-art legal LLMs and novel strategies that integrate trichotomous reasoning into zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning reveal: (1) current legal LLMs have significant room for improvement, with even the best models achieving an F1 score of less than 0.3 on LJPIV; and (2) our strategies notably enhance both in-domain and cross-domain judgment prediction accuracy, especially for cases resulting in an innocent verdict.

Paperid: 3180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09329.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation in videos has been a focal point of recent research. However, existing models encounter challenges when faced with unfamiliar categories. To address this, we introduce the Open Vocabulary Video Semantic Segmentation (OV-VSS) task, designed to accurately segment every pixel across a wide range of open-vocabulary categories, including those that are novel or previously unexplored. To enhance OV-VSS performance, we propose a robust baseline, OV2VSS, which integrates a spatial-temporal fusion module, allowing the model to utilize temporal relationships across consecutive frames. Additionally, we incorporate a random frame enhancement module, broadening the model's understanding of semantic context throughout the entire video sequence. Our approach also includes video text encoding, which strengthens the model's capability to interpret textual information within the video context. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets such as VSPW and Cityscapes highlight OV-VSS's zero-shot generalization capabilities, especially in handling novel categories. The results validate OV2VSS's effectiveness, demonstrating improved performance in semantic segmentation tasks across diverse video datasets.

Paperid: 3181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06355.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in spiking neural networks (SNNs) have a predominant focus on network architectures, while relatively little attention has been paid to the underlying neuron model. The point neuron models, a cornerstone of deep SNNs, pose a bottleneck on the network-level expressivity since they depict somatic dynamics only. In contrast, the multi-compartment models in neuroscience offer remarkable expressivity by introducing dendritic morphology and dynamics, but remain underexplored in deep learning due to their unaffordable computational cost and inflexibility. To combine the advantages of both sides for a flexible, efficient yet more powerful model, we propose the dendritic spiking neuron (DendSN) incorporating multiple dendritic branches with nonlinear dynamics. Compared to the point spiking neurons, DendSN exhibits significantly higher expressivity. DendSN's flexibility enables its seamless integration into diverse deep SNN architectures. To accelerate dendritic SNNs (DendSNNs), we parallelize dendritic state updates across time steps, and develop Triton kernels for GPU-level acceleration. As a result, we can construct large-scale DendSNNs with depth comparable to their point SNN counterparts. Next, we comprehensively evaluate DendSNNs' performance on various demanding tasks. By modulating dendritic branch strengths using a context signal, catastrophic forgetting of DendSNNs is substantially mitigated. Moreover, DendSNNs demonstrate enhanced robustness against noise and adversarial attacks compared to point SNNs, and excel in few-shot learning settings. Our work firstly demonstrates the possibility of training bio-plausible dendritic SNNs with depths and scales comparable to traditional point SNNs, and reveals superior expressivity and robustness of reduced dendritic neuron models in deep learning, thereby offering a fresh perspective on advancing neural network design.

Paperid: 3182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05756.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

Paperid: 3183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05023.pdf

Abstract:
Few shot and Chain-of-Thought prompting have shown promise when applied to Physics Question Answering Tasks, but are limited by the lack of mathematical ability inherent to LLMs, and are prone to hallucination. By utilizing a Mixture of Experts (MoE) Model, along with analogical prompting, we are able to show improved model performance when compared to the baseline on standard LLMs. We also survey the limits of these prompting techniques and the effects they have on model performance. Additionally, we propose Analogical CoT prompting, a prompting technique designed to allow smaller, open source models to leverage Analogical prompting, something they have struggled with, possibly due to a lack of specialist training data.

Paperid: 3184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16750.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional monocular depth estimation suffers from inherent ambiguity and visual nuisance. We argue that language prior can enhance monocular depth estimation by leveraging the inductive bias learned during the text-to-image pre-training of diffusion models. The ability of these models to generate images that align with text indicates that they have learned the spatial relationships, size, and shape of specified objects, which can be applied to improve depth estimation. Thus, we propose PriorDiffusion, using a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model that takes both images and corresponding text descriptions to infer affine-invariant depth through a denoising process. We also show that language prior enhances the model's perception of specific regions of images that users care about and describe. Simultaneously, language prior acts as a constraint to accelerate the convergence of both training and the inference diffusion trajectory. By training on HyperSim and Virtual KITTI, we achieve faster training convergence, fewer inference diffusion steps, and state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across NYUv2, KITTI, ETH3D, and ScanNet. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 3185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11335.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, few-shot action recognition has achieved remarkable performance through spatio-temporal relation modeling. Although a wide range of spatial and temporal alignment modules have been proposed, they primarily address spatial or temporal misalignments at the video level, while the spatio-temporal relationships across different videos at the task level remain underexplored. Recent studies utilize class prototypes to learn task-specific features but overlook the spatio-temporal relationships across different videos at the task level, especially in the spatial dimension, where these relationships provide rich information. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Motion-Guided Attention Learning method (called DMGAL) for few-shot action recognition, aiming to learn the spatio-temporal relationships from the video-specific to the task-specific level. To achieve this, we propose a carefully designed Motion-Guided Attention (MGA) method to identify and correlate motion-related region features from the video level to the task level. Specifically, the Self Motion-Guided Attention module (S-MGA) achieves spatio-temporal relation modeling at the video level by identifying and correlating motion-related region features between different frames within a video. The Cross Motion-Guided Attention module (C-MGA) identifies and correlates motion-related region features between frames of different videos within a specific task to achieve spatio-temporal relationships at the task level. This approach enables the model to construct class prototypes that fully incorporate spatio-temporal relationships from the video-specific level to the task-specific level. We validate the effectiveness of our DMGAL method by employing both fully fine-tuning and adapter-tuning paradigms. The models developed using these paradigms are termed DMGAL-FT and DMGAL-Adapter, respectively.

Paperid: 3186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04097.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) often capture spurious correlations between image features and textual attributes, resulting in degraded zero-shot performance at test time. Existing approaches for addressing spurious correlations (i) primarily operate at the global image-level rather than intervening directly on fine-grained image features and (ii) are predominantly designed for unimodal settings. In this work, we present RaVL, which takes a fine-grained perspective on VLM robustness by discovering and mitigating spurious correlations using local image features rather than operating at the global image level. Given a fine-tuned VLM, RaVL first discovers spurious correlations by leveraging a region-level clustering approach to identify precise image features contributing to zero-shot classification errors. Then, RaVL mitigates the identified spurious correlation with a novel region-aware loss function that enables the VLM to focus on relevant regions and ignore spurious relationships during fine-tuning. We evaluate RaVL on 654 VLMs with various model architectures, data domains, and learned spurious correlations. Our results show that RaVL accurately discovers (191% improvement over the closest baseline) and mitigates (8.2% improvement on worst-group image classification accuracy) spurious correlations. Qualitative evaluations on general-domain and medical-domain VLMs confirm our findings.

Paperid: 3187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03707.pdf

Abstract:
Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) plays a critical role in manufacturing by defining acceptable variations in part features to ensure component quality and functionality. However, extracting GD&T information from 2D engineering drawings is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task, often relying on manual efforts or semi-automated tools. To address these challenges, this study proposes an automated and computationally efficient GD&T extraction method by fine-tuning Florence-2, an open-source vision-language model (VLM). The model is trained on a dataset of 400 drawings with ground truth annotations provided by domain experts. For comparison, two state-of-the-art closed-source VLMs, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, are evaluated on the same dataset. All models are assessed using precision, recall, F1-score, and hallucination metrics. Due to the computational cost and impracticality of fine-tuning large closed-source VLMs for domain-specific tasks, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet are evaluated in a zero-shot setting. In contrast, Florence-2, a smaller model with 0.23 billion parameters, is optimized through full-parameter fine-tuning across three distinct experiments, each utilizing datasets augmented to different levels. The results show that Florence-2 achieves a 29.95% increase in precision, a 37.75% increase in recall, a 52.40% improvement in F1-score, and a 43.15% reduction in hallucination rate compared to the best-performing closed-source model. These findings highlight the effectiveness of fine-tuning smaller, open-source VLMs like Florence-2, offering a practical and efficient solution for automated GD&T extraction to support downstream manufacturing tasks.

Paperid: 3188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03590.pdf

Abstract:
Run-time steering strategies like Medprompt are valuable for guiding large language models (LLMs) to top performance on challenging tasks. Medprompt demonstrates that a general LLM can be focused to deliver state-of-the-art performance on specialized domains like medicine by using a prompt to elicit a run-time strategy involving chain of thought reasoning and ensembling. OpenAI's o1-preview model represents a new paradigm, where a model is designed to do run-time reasoning before generating final responses. We seek to understand the behavior of o1-preview on a diverse set of medical challenge problem benchmarks. Following on the Medprompt study with GPT-4, we systematically evaluate the o1-preview model across various medical benchmarks. Notably, even without prompting techniques, o1-preview largely outperforms the GPT-4 series with Medprompt. We further systematically study the efficacy of classic prompt engineering strategies, as represented by Medprompt, within the new paradigm of reasoning models. We found that few-shot prompting hinders o1's performance, suggesting that in-context learning may no longer be an effective steering approach for reasoning-native models. While ensembling remains viable, it is resource-intensive and requires careful cost-performance optimization. Our cost and accuracy analysis across run-time strategies reveals a Pareto frontier, with GPT-4o representing a more affordable option and o1-preview achieving state-of-the-art performance at higher cost. Although o1-preview offers top performance, GPT-4o with steering strategies like Medprompt retains value in specific contexts. Moreover, we note that the o1-preview model has reached near-saturation on many existing medical benchmarks, underscoring the need for new, challenging benchmarks. We close with reflections on general directions for inference-time computation with LLMs.

Paperid: 3189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02810.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic feature recognition (AFR) is essential for transforming design knowledge into actionable manufacturing information. Traditional AFR methods, which rely on predefined geometric rules and large datasets, are often time-consuming and lack generalizability across various manufacturing features. To address these challenges, this study investigates vision-language models (VLMs) for automating the recognition of a wide range of manufacturing features in CAD designs without the need for extensive training datasets or predefined rules. Instead, prompt engineering techniques, such as multi-view query images, few-shot learning, sequential reasoning, and chain-of-thought, are applied to enable recognition. The approach is evaluated on a newly developed CAD dataset containing designs of varying complexity relevant to machining, additive manufacturing, sheet metal forming, molding, and casting. Five VLMs, including three closed-source models (GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Claude-3.0-Opus) and two open-source models (LLava and MiniCPM), are evaluated on this dataset with ground truth features labelled by experts. Key metrics include feature quantity accuracy, feature name matching accuracy, hallucination rate, and mean absolute error (MAE). Results show that Claude-3.5-Sonnet achieves the highest feature quantity accuracy (74%) and name-matching accuracy (75%) with the lowest MAE (3.2), while GPT-4o records the lowest hallucination rate (8%). In contrast, open-source models have higher hallucination rates (>30%) and lower accuracies (<40%). This study demonstrates the potential of VLMs to automate feature recognition in CAD designs within diverse manufacturing scenarios.

Paperid: 3190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17251.pdf

Abstract:
This paper focuses on creating synthetic data to improve the quality of image captions. Existing works typically have two shortcomings. First, they caption images from scratch, ignoring existing alt-text metadata, and second, lack transparency if the captioners' training data (e.g. GPT) is unknown. In this paper, we study a principled approach Altogether based on the key idea to edit and re-align existing alt-texts associated with the images. To generate training data, we perform human annotation where annotators start with the existing alt-text and re-align it to the image content in multiple rounds, consequently constructing captions with rich visual concepts. This differs from prior work that carries out human annotation as a one-time description task solely based on images and annotator knowledge. We train a captioner on this data that generalizes the process of re-aligning alt-texts at scale. Our results show our Altogether approach leads to richer image captions that also improve text-to-image generation and zero-shot image classification tasks.

Paperid: 3191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13242.pdf

Abstract:
Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is crucial for diagnosing and monitoring retinal vascular issues but is limited by its invasive nature and restricted accessibility compared to color fundus (CF) imaging. Existing methods that convert CF images to FFA are confined to static image generation, missing the dynamic lesional changes. We introduce Fundus2Video, an autoregressive generative adversarial network (GAN) model that generates dynamic FFA videos from single CF images. Fundus2Video excels in video generation, achieving an FVD of 1497.12 and a PSNR of 11.77. Clinical experts have validated the fidelity of the generated videos. Additionally, the model's generator demonstrates remarkable downstream transferability across ten external public datasets, including blood vessel segmentation, retinal disease diagnosis, systemic disease prediction, and multimodal retrieval, showcasing impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. These findings position Fundus2Video as a powerful, non-invasive alternative to FFA exams and a versatile retinal generative foundation model that captures both static and temporal retinal features, enabling the representation of complex inter-modality relationships.

Paperid: 3192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13156.pdf

Abstract:
The explosive growth of generative AI has saturated the internet with AI-generated images, raising security concerns and increasing the need for reliable detection methods. The primary requirement for such detection is generalizability, typically achieved by training on numerous fake images from various models. However, practical limitations, such as closed-source models and restricted access, often result in limited training samples. Therefore, training a general detector with few-shot samples is essential for modern detection mechanisms. To address this challenge, we propose FAMSeC, a general AI-generated image detection method based on LoRA-based Forgery Awareness Module and Semantic feature-guided Contrastive learning strategy. To effectively learn from limited samples and prevent overfitting, we developed a Forgery Awareness Module (FAM) based on LoRA, maintaining the generalization of pre-trained features. Additionally, to cooperate with FAM, we designed a Semantic feature-guided Contrastive learning strategy (SeC), making the FAM focus more on the differences between real/fake image than on the features of the samples themselves. Experiments show that FAMSeC outperforms state-of-the-art method, enhancing classification accuracy by 14.55% with just 0.56% of the training samples.

Paperid: 3193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04521.pdf

Abstract:
In recent advancements, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been fine-tuned on specific medical image datasets to address medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) tasks. However, this common approach of task-specific fine-tuning is costly and necessitates separate models for each downstream task, limiting the exploration of zero-shot capabilities. In this paper, we introduce MC-CoT, a modular cross-modal collaboration Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework designed to enhance the zero-shot performance of MLLMs in Med-VQA by leveraging large language models (LLMs). MC-CoT improves reasoning and information extraction by integrating medical knowledge and task-specific guidance, where LLM provides various complex medical reasoning chains and MLLM provides various observations of medical images based on instructions of the LLM. Our experiments on datasets such as SLAKE, VQA-RAD, and PATH-VQA show that MC-CoT surpasses standalone MLLMs and various multimodality CoT frameworks in recall rate and accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating background information and detailed guidance in addressing complex zero-shot Med-VQA tasks.

Paperid: 3194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02924.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a method for metric-scale monocular depth estimation. Inferring depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem due to the loss of scale from perspective projection during the image formation process. Any scale chosen is a bias, typically stemming from training on a dataset; hence, existing works have instead opted to use relative (normalized, inverse) depth. Our goal is to recover metric-scaled depth maps through a linear transformation. The crux of our method lies in the observation that certain objects (e.g., cars, trees, street signs) are typically found or associated with certain types of scenes (e.g., outdoor). We explore whether language descriptions can be used to transform relative depth predictions to those in metric scale. Our method, RSA, takes as input a text caption describing objects present in an image and outputs the parameters of a linear transformation which can be applied globally to a relative depth map to yield metric-scaled depth predictions. We demonstrate our method on recent general-purpose monocular depth models on indoors (NYUv2, VOID) and outdoors (KITTI). When trained on multiple datasets, RSA can serve as a general alignment module in zero-shot settings. Our method improves over common practices in aligning relative to metric depth and results in predictions that are comparable to an upper bound of fitting relative depth to ground truth via a linear transformation.

Paperid: 3195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20291.pdf

Abstract:
Sim-to-Real refers to the process of transferring policies learned in simulation to the real world, which is crucial for achieving practical robotics applications. However, recent Sim2real methods either rely on a large amount of augmented data or large learning models, which is inefficient for specific tasks. In recent years, with the emergence of radiance field reconstruction methods, especially 3D Gaussian splatting, it has become possible to construct realistic real-world scenes. To this end, we propose RL-GSBridge, a novel real-to-sim-to-real framework which incorporates 3D Gaussian Splatting into the conventional RL simulation pipeline, enabling zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for vision-based deep reinforcement learning. We introduce a mesh-based 3D GS method with soft binding constraints, enhancing the rendering quality of mesh models. Then utilizing a GS editing approach to synchronize the rendering with the physics simulator, RL-GSBridge could reflect the visual interactions of the physical robot accurately. Through a series of sim-to-real experiments, including grasping and pick-and-place tasks, we demonstrate that RL-GSBridge maintains a satisfactory success rate in real-world task completion during sim-to-real transfer. Furthermore, a series of rendering metrics and visualization results indicate that our proposed mesh-based 3D GS reduces artifacts in unstructured objects, demonstrating more realistic rendering performance.

Paperid: 3196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07151.pdf

Abstract:
Second language (L2) learners can improve their pronunciation by imitating golden speech, especially when the speech that aligns with their respective speech characteristics. This study explores the hypothesis that learner-specific golden speech generated with zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) techniques can be harnessed as an effective metric for measuring the pronunciation proficiency of L2 learners. Building on this exploration, the contributions of this study are at least two-fold: 1) design and development of a systematic framework for assessing the ability of a synthesis model to generate golden speech, and 2) in-depth investigations of the effectiveness of using golden speech in automatic pronunciation assessment (APA). Comprehensive experiments conducted on the L2-ARCTIC and Speechocean762 benchmark datasets suggest that our proposed modeling can yield significant performance improvements with respect to various assessment metrics in relation to some prior arts. To our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of golden speech in both ZS-TTS and APA, offering a promising regime for computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT).

Paperid: 3197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06644.pdf

Abstract:
Early detection of eye diseases like glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy is crucial for preventing vision loss. While artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models hold significant promise for addressing these challenges, existing ophthalmic foundation models primarily focus on a single modality, whereas diagnosing eye diseases requires multiple modalities. A critical yet often overlooked aspect is harnessing the multi-view information across various modalities for the same patient. Additionally, due to the long-tail nature of ophthalmic diseases, standard fully supervised or unsupervised learning approaches often struggle. Therefore, it is essential to integrate clinical text to capture a broader spectrum of diseases. We propose EyeCLIP, a visual-language foundation model developed using over 2.77 million multi-modal ophthalmology images with partial text data. To fully leverage the large multi-modal unlabeled and labeled data, we introduced a pretraining strategy that combines self-supervised reconstructions, multi-modal image contrastive learning, and image-text contrastive learning to learn a shared representation of multiple modalities. Through evaluation using 14 benchmark datasets, EyeCLIP can be transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks involving ocular and systemic diseases, achieving state-of-the-art performance in disease classification, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. EyeCLIP represents a significant advancement over previous methods, especially showcasing few-shot, even zero-shot capabilities in real-world long-tail scenarios.

Paperid: 3198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08342.pdf

Abstract:
Mental manipulation, the strategic use of language to covertly influence or exploit others, is a newly emerging task in computational social reasoning. Prior work has focused exclusively on textual conversations, overlooking how manipulative tactics manifest in speech. We present the first study of mental manipulation detection in spoken dialogues, introducing a synthetic multi-speaker benchmark SPEECHMENTALMANIP that augments a text-based dataset with high-quality, voice-consistent Text-to-Speech rendered audio. Using few-shot large audio-language models and human annotation, we evaluate how modality affects detection accuracy and perception. Our results reveal that models exhibit high specificity but markedly lower recall on speech compared to text, suggesting sensitivity to missing acoustic or prosodic cues in training. Human raters show similar uncertainty in the audio setting, underscoring the inherent ambiguity of manipulative speech. Together, these findings highlight the need for modality-aware evaluation and safety alignment in multimodal dialogue systems.

Paperid: 3199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01153.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have achieved significant success in various domains, yet their understanding of lyric-centric knowledge has not been fully explored. In this work, we first introduce PlaylistSense, a dataset to evaluate the playlist understanding capability of language models. PlaylistSense encompasses ten types of user queries derived from common real-world perspectives, challenging LLMs to accurately grasp playlist features and address diverse user intents. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that current general-purpose LLMs still have potential for improvement in playlist understanding. Inspired by this, we introduce SongSage, a large musical language model equipped with diverse lyric-centric intelligence through lyric generative pretraining. SongSage undergoes continual pretraining on LyricBank, a carefully curated corpus of 5.48 billion tokens focused on lyrical content, followed by fine-tuning with LyricBank-SFT, a meticulously crafted instruction set comprising 775k samples across nine core lyric-centric tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SongSage exhibits a strong understanding of lyric-centric knowledge, excels in rewriting user queries for zero-shot playlist recommendations, generates and continues lyrics effectively, and performs proficiently across seven additional capabilities. Beyond its lyric-centric expertise, SongSage also retains general knowledge comprehension and achieves a competitive MMLU score. We will keep the datasets inaccessible due to copyright restrictions and release the SongSage and training script to ensure reproducibility and support music AI research and applications, the datasets release plan details are provided in the appendix.

Paperid: 3200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23541.pdf

Abstract:
Specifying robotic manipulation tasks in a manner that is both expressive and precise remains a central challenge. While visual goals provide a compact and unambiguous task specification, existing goal-conditioned policies often struggle with long-horizon manipulation due to their reliance on single-step action prediction without explicit modeling of task progress. We propose Act2Goal, a general goal-conditioned manipulation policy that integrates a goal-conditioned visual world model with multi-scale temporal control. Given a current observation and a target visual goal, the world model generates a plausible sequence of intermediate visual states that captures long-horizon structure. To translate this visual plan into robust execution, we introduce Multi-Scale Temporal Hashing (MSTH), which decomposes the imagined trajectory into dense proximal frames for fine-grained closed-loop control and sparse distal frames that anchor global task consistency. The policy couples these representations with motor control through end-to-end cross-attention, enabling coherent long-horizon behavior while remaining reactive to local disturbances. Act2Goal achieves strong zero-shot generalization to novel objects, spatial layouts, and environments. We further enable reward-free online adaptation through hindsight goal relabeling with LoRA-based finetuning, allowing rapid autonomous improvement without external supervision. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that Act2Goal improves success rates from 30% to 90% on challenging out-of-distribution tasks within minutes of autonomous interaction, validating that goal-conditioned world models with multi-scale temporal control provide structured guidance necessary for robust long-horizon manipulation. Project page: https://act2goal.github.io/

Paperid: 3201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21113.pdf

Abstract:
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models, which benefit from well-established theoretical foundations, Transformer architectures are typically treated as black boxes. This gap becomes particularly relevant as attention-based models are considered for general-purpose or zero-shot forecasting across diverse dynamical regimes. In this work, we do not propose a new forecasting model, but instead investigate the representational capabilities and limitations of single-layer Transformers when applied to dynamical data. Building on a dynamical systems perspective we interpret causal self-attention as a linear, history-dependent recurrence and analyze how it processes temporal information. Through a series of linear and nonlinear case studies, we identify distinct operational regimes. For linear systems, we show that the convexity constraint imposed by softmax attention fundamentally restricts the class of dynamics that can be represented, leading to oversmoothing in oscillatory settings. For nonlinear systems under partial observability, attention instead acts as an adaptive delay-embedding mechanism, enabling effective state reconstruction when sufficient temporal context and latent dimensionality are available. These results help bridge empirical observations with classical dynamical systems theory, providing insight into when and why Transformers succeed or fail as models of dynamical systems.

Paperid: 3202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19920.pdf

Abstract:
LLM deployment in critical domains is currently impeded by persistent hallucinations--generating plausible but factually incorrect assertions. While scaling laws drove significant improvements in general capabilities, theoretical frameworks suggest hallucination is not merely stochastic error but a predictable statistical consequence of training objectives prioritizing mimicking data distribution over epistemic honesty. Standard RLVR paradigms, utilizing binary reward signals, inadvertently incentivize models as good test-takers rather than honest communicators, encouraging guessing whenever correctness probability exceeds zero. This paper presents an exhaustive investigation into behavioral calibration, which incentivizes models to stochastically admit uncertainty by abstaining when not confident, aligning model behavior with accuracy. Synthesizing recent advances, we propose and evaluate training interventions optimizing strictly proper scoring rules for models to output a calibrated probability of correctness. Our methods enable models to either abstain from producing a complete response or flag individual claims where uncertainty remains. Utilizing Qwen3-4B-Instruct, empirical analysis reveals behavior-calibrated reinforcement learning allows smaller models to surpass frontier models in uncertainty quantification--a transferable meta-skill decouplable from raw predictive accuracy. Trained on math reasoning tasks, our model's log-scale Accuracy-to-Hallucination Ratio gain (0.806) exceeds GPT-5's (0.207) in a challenging in-domain evaluation (BeyondAIME). Moreover, in cross-domain factual QA (SimpleQA), our 4B LLM achieves zero-shot calibration error on par with frontier models including Grok-4 and Gemini-2.5-Pro, even though its factual accuracy is much lower.

Paperid: 3203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14499.pdf

Abstract:
Current retinal foundation models remain constrained by curated research datasets that lack authentic clinical context, and require extensive task-specific optimization for each application, limiting their deployment efficiency in low-resource settings. Here, we show that these barriers can be overcome by building clinical native intelligence directly from real-world medical practice. Our key insight is that large-scale telemedicine programs, where expert centers provide remote consultations across distributed facilities, represent a natural reservoir for learning clinical image interpretation. We present ReVision, a retinal foundation model that learns from the natural alignment between 485,980 color fundus photographs and their corresponding diagnostic reports, accumulated through a decade-long telemedicine program spanning 162 medical institutions across China. Through extensive evaluation across 27 ophthalmic benchmarks, we demonstrate that ReVison enables deployment efficiency with minimal local resources. Without any task-specific training, ReVision achieves zero-shot disease detection with an average AUROC of 0.946 across 12 public benchmarks and 0.952 on 3 independent clinical cohorts. When minimal adaptation is feasible, ReVision matches extensively fine-tuned alternatives while requiring orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters and labeled examples. The learned representations also transfer effectively to new clinical sites, imaging domains, imaging modalities, and systemic health prediction tasks. In a prospective reader study with 33 ophthalmologists, ReVision's zero-shot assistance improved diagnostic accuracy by 14.8% across all experience levels. These results demonstrate that clinical native intelligence can be directly extracted from clinical archives without any further annotation to build medical AI systems suited to various low-resource settings.

Paperid: 3204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09056.pdf

Abstract:
Object pose estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision and robotics, yet most methods require extensive, dataset-specific training. Concurrently, large-scale vision language models show remarkable zero-shot capabilities. In this work, we bridge these two worlds by introducing ConceptPose, a framework for object pose estimation that is both training-free and model-free. ConceptPose leverages a vision-language-model (VLM) to create open-vocabulary 3D concept maps, where each point is tagged with a concept vector derived from saliency maps. By establishing robust 3D-3D correspondences across concept maps, our approach allows precise estimation of 6DoF relative pose. Without any object or dataset-specific training, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on common zero shot relative pose estimation benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing methods by over 62% in ADD(-S) score, including those that utilize extensive dataset-specific training.

Paperid: 3205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08763.pdf

Abstract:
Early graph prompt tuning approaches relied on task-specific designs for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), limiting their adaptability across diverse pre-training strategies. In contrast, another promising line of research has investigated universal graph prompt tuning, which operates directly in the input graph's feature space and builds a theoretical foundation that universal graph prompt tuning can theoretically achieve an equivalent effect of any prompting function, eliminating dependence on specific pre-training strategies. Recent works propose selective node-based graph prompt tuning to pursue more ideal prompts. However, we argue that selective node-based graph prompt tuning inevitably compromises the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning. In this paper, we strengthen the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning by introducing stricter constraints, demonstrating that adding prompts to all nodes is a necessary condition for achieving the universality of graph prompts. To this end, we propose a novel model and paradigm, Learning and Editing Universal GrAph Prompt Tuning (LEAP), which preserves the theoretical foundation of universal graph prompt tuning while pursuing more ideal prompts. Specifically, we first build the basic universal graph prompts to preserve the theoretical foundation and then employ actor-critic reinforcement learning to select nodes and edit prompts. Extensive experiments on graph- and node-level tasks across various pre-training strategies in both full-shot and few-shot scenarios show that LEAP consistently outperforms fine-tuning and other prompt-based approaches.

Paperid: 3206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07673.pdf

Abstract:
Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motion. Previous efforts in representation learning do not attempt to jointly capture structured periodic patterns and irregular variations in human and animal movement. To address this, we present Multi-Domain Motion Embedding (MDME), a motion representation that unifies the embedding of structured and unstructured features using a wavelet-based encoder and a probabilistic embedding in parallel. This produces a rich representation of reference motions from a minimal input set, enabling improved generalization across diverse motion styles and morphologies. We evaluate MDME on retargeting-free real-time motion imitation by conditioning robot control policies on the learned embeddings, demonstrating accurate reproduction of complex trajectories on both humanoid and quadruped platforms. Our comparative studies confirm that MDME outperforms prior approaches in reconstruction fidelity and generalizability to unseen motions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MDME can reproduce novel motion styles in real-time through zero-shot deployment, eliminating the need for task-specific tuning or online retargeting. These results position MDME as a generalizable and structure-aware foundation for scalable real-time robot imitation.

Paperid: 3207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04779.pdf

Abstract:
Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) remains constrained in practical deployment due to its strong dependence on accurate phoneme-level alignment and manually annotated melody contours, requirements that are resource-intensive and hinder scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a melody-driven SVS framework capable of synthesizing arbitrary lyrics following any reference melody, without relying on phoneme-level alignment. Our method builds on a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, enhanced with a dedicated melody extraction module that derives melody representations directly from reference audio. To ensure robust melody encoding, we employ a teacher model to guide the optimization of the melody extractor, alongside an implicit alignment mechanism that enforces similarity distribution constraints for improved melodic stability and coherence. Additionally, we refine duration modeling using weakly annotated song data and introduce a Flow-GRPO reinforcement learning strategy with a multi-objective reward function to jointly enhance pronunciation clarity and melodic fidelity. Experiments show that our model achieves superior performance over existing approaches in both objective measures and subjective listening tests, especially in zero-shot and lyric adaptation settings, while maintaining high audio quality without manual annotation. This work offers a practical and scalable solution for advancing data-efficient singing voice synthesis. To support reproducibility, we release our inference code and model checkpoints.

Paperid: 3208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22609.pdf

Abstract:
We present MG-Nav (Memory-Guided Navigation), a dual-scale framework for zero-shot visual navigation that unifies global memory-guided planning with local geometry-enhanced control. At its core is the Sparse Spatial Memory Graph (SMG), a compact, region-centric memory where each node aggregates multi-view keyframe and object semantics, capturing both appearance and spatial structure while preserving viewpoint diversity. At the global level, the agent is localized on SMG and a goal-conditioned node path is planned via an image-to-instance hybrid retrieval, producing a sequence of reachable waypoints for long-horizon guidance. At the local level, a navigation foundation policy executes these waypoints in point-goal mode with obstacle-aware control, and switches to image-goal mode when navigating from the final node towards the visual target. To further enhance viewpoint alignment and goal recognition, we introduce VGGT-adapter, a lightweight geometric module built on the pre-trained VGGT model, which aligns observation and goal features in a shared 3D-aware space. MG-Nav operates global planning and local control at different frequencies, using periodic re-localization to correct errors. Experiments on HM3D Instance-Image-Goal and MP3D Image-Goal benchmarks demonstrate that MG-Nav achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance and remains robust under dynamic rearrangements and unseen scene conditions.

Paperid: 3209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19704.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) underpins many vision and robotics tasks that require generalizable semantic understanding. Existing approaches either rely on limited segmentation training data, which hinders generalization, or apply zero-shot heuristics to vision-language models (e.g CLIP), while the most competitive approaches combine multiple models to improve performance at the cost of high computational and memory demands. In this work, we leverage an overlooked agglomerative vision foundation model, RADIO, to improve zero-shot OVSS along three key axes simultaneously: mIoU, latency, and parameter efficiency. We present the first comprehensive study of RADIO for zero-shot OVSS and enhance its performance through self-correlating recursive attention, self-correlating global aggregation, and computationally efficient mask refinement. Our approach, RADSeg, achieves 6-30% mIoU improvement in the base ViT class while being 3.95x faster and using 2.5x fewer parameters. Surprisingly, RADSeg-base (105M) outperforms previous combinations of huge vision models (850-1350M) in mIoU, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with substantially lower computational and memory cost.

Paperid: 3210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11213.pdf

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently gained great attention in the 3D scene representation for its high-quality real-time rendering capabilities. However, when the input comprises sparse training views, 3DGS is prone to overfitting, primarily due to the lack of intermediate-view supervision. Inspired by the recent success of Video Diffusion Models (VDM), we propose a framework called Guidance Score Distillation (GSD) to extract the rich multi-view consistency priors from pretrained VDMs. Building on the insights from Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), GSD supervises rendered images from multiple neighboring views, guiding the Gaussian splatting representation towards the generative direction of VDM. However, the generative direction often involves object motion and random camera trajectories, making it challenging for direct supervision in the optimization process. To address this problem, we introduce an unified guidance form to correct the noise prediction result of VDM. Specifically, we incorporate both a depth warp guidance based on real depth maps and a guidance based on semantic image features, ensuring that the score update direction from VDM aligns with the correct camera pose and accurate geometry. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing approaches across multiple datasets.

Paperid: 3211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26510.pdf

Abstract:
Model and hyperparameter selection are critical but challenging in machine learning, typically requiring expert intuition or expensive automated search. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can act as in-context meta-learners for this task. By converting each dataset into interpretable metadata, we prompt an LLM to recommend both model families and hyperparameters. We study two prompting strategies: (1) a zero-shot mode relying solely on pretrained knowledge, and (2) a meta-informed mode augmented with examples of models and their performance on past tasks. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks, we show that LLMs can exploit dataset metadata to recommend competitive models and hyperparameters without search, and that improvements from meta-informed prompting demonstrate their capacity for in-context meta-learning. These results highlight a promising new role for LLMs as lightweight, general-purpose assistants for model selection and hyperparameter optimization.

Paperid: 3212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20390.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping accuracy is a critical prerequisite for precise object manipulation, often requiring careful alignment between the robot hand and object. Neural Descriptor Fields (NDF) offer a promising vision-based method to generate grasping poses that generalize across object categories. However, NDF alone can produce inaccurate poses due to imperfect camera calibration, incomplete point clouds, and object variability. Meanwhile, tactile sensing enables more precise contact, but existing approaches typically learn policies limited to simple, predefined contact geometries. In this work, we introduce NeuralTouch, a multimodal framework that integrates NDF and tactile sensing to enable accurate, generalizable grasping through gentle physical interaction. Our approach leverages NDF to implicitly represent the target contact geometry, from which a deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy is trained to refine the grasp using tactile feedback. This policy is conditioned on the neural descriptors and does not require explicit specification of contact types. We validate NeuralTouch through ablation studies in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world manipulation tasks--such as peg-out-in-hole and bottle lid opening--without additional fine-tuning. Results show that NeuralTouch significantly improves grasping accuracy and robustness over baseline methods, offering a general framework for precise, contact-rich robotic manipulation.

Paperid: 3213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17274.pdf

Abstract:
Current autonomous driving systems rely on specialized models for perceiving and predicting motion, which demonstrate reliable performance in standard conditions. However, generalizing cost-effectively to diverse real-world scenarios remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose Plug-and-Forecast (PnF), a plug-and-play approach that augments existing motion forecasting models with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). PnF builds on the insight that natural language provides a more effective way to describe and handle complex scenarios, enabling quick adaptation to targeted behaviors. We design prompts to extract structured scene understanding from MLLMs and distill this information into learnable embeddings to augment existing behavior prediction models. Our method leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to achieve significant improvements in motion prediction performance, while requiring no fine-tuning -- making it practical to adopt. We validate our approach on two state-of-the-art motion forecasting models using the Waymo Open Motion Dataset and the nuScenes Dataset, demonstrating consistent performance improvements across both benchmarks.

Paperid: 3214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15162.pdf

Abstract:
The Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are continually pre-trained on a mixture of image-text caption data and interleaved document data, while the high-quality data filtering towards image-text interleaved document data is under-explored. We propose to train an efficient MLLM as a Unified Mulitmodal Data Quality Classifier to Filter both high-quality image-text caption and interleaved data (UniFilter). To address the challenge of collecting diverse labeled multimodal data, we introduce a semi-synthetic approach that leverages readily available raw images and generates corresponding text across four quality levels. This method enables efficient creation of sample-score pairs for both caption and interleaved document data to train UniFilter. We apply UniFilter to curate high-quality caption data from DataComp caption dataset and interleaved data from the OBELICS image-text interleaved dataset. MLLMs pre-trained on the filtered data demonstrate significantly enhanced capabilities compared to those trained on baseline-filtered data, achieving stronger zero-shot reasoning and in-context learning capabilities. After visual supervised fine-tuning, these UniFilter-induced MLLMs achieve stronger performance on various benchmarks, highlighting the downstream benefits of high-quality multimodal pre-training. We release the synthetic training data used for training UniFilter, the UniFilter model checkpoints, and the high-quality interleaved document subset OBELICS-HQ, curated by UniFilter, to the community for reproduction and further development.

Paperid: 3215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15042.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language pre-training, i.e., aligning images with paired text, is a powerful paradigm to create encoders that can be directly used for tasks such as classification and retrieval, and for downstream tasks such as segmentation and report generation. In the 3D medical image domain, these capabilities allow vision-language encoders (VLEs) to support radiologists by retrieving patients with similar abnormalities or predicting likelihoods of abnormality. While the methodology holds promise, data availability limits the capabilities of current 3D VLEs. In this paper, we alleviate the lack of data by injecting additional inductive biases: introducing a report generation objective and pairing vision-language pre-training with vision-only pre-training. This allows us to leverage both image-only and paired image-text 3D datasets, increasing the total amount of data to which our model is exposed. Through these additional inductive biases, paired with best practices of the 3D medical imaging domain, we develop the Comprehensive Language-image Pre-training (COLIPRI) encoder family. Our COLIPRI encoders achieve state-of-the-art performance in report generation, classification probing, and zero-shot classification, and remain competitive for semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 3216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15026.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling up model size and training data has advanced foundation models for instance-level perception, achieving state-of-the-art in-domain and zero-shot performance across object detection and segmentation. However, their high computational cost limits adoption on resource-constrained platforms. We first examine the limitations of existing architectures in enabling efficient edge deployment without compromising performance. We then introduce MOBIUS, a family of foundation models for universal instance segmentation, designed for Pareto-optimal downscaling to support deployment across devices ranging from high-end accelerators to mobile hardware. To reduce training and inference demands, we propose: (i) a bottleneck pixel decoder for efficient multi-scale and multi-modal fusion, (ii) a language-guided uncertainty calibration loss for adaptive decoder pruning, and (iii) a streamlined, unified training strategy. Unlike efficient baselines that trade accuracy for reduced complexity, MOBIUS reduces pixel and transformer decoder FLOPs by up to 55% and 75%, respectively, while maintaining state-of-the-art performance in just a third of the training iterations. MOBIUS establishes a new benchmark for efficient segmentation on both high-performance computing platforms and mobile devices.

Paperid: 3217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07975.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling robots to perform precise and generalized manipulation in unstructured environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in semantic reasoning and task planning, a significant gap persists between their high-level understanding and the precise physical execution required for real-world manipulation. To bridge this "semantic-to-physical" gap, we introduce GRACE, a novel framework that grounds VLM-based reasoning through executable analytic concepts (EAC)-mathematically defined blueprints that encode object affordances, geometric constraints, and semantics of manipulation. Our approach integrates a structured policy scaffolding pipeline that turn natural language instructions and visual information into an instantiated EAC, from which we derive grasp poses, force directions and plan physically feasible motion trajectory for robot execution. GRACE thus provides a unified and interpretable interface between high-level instruction understanding and low-level robot control, effectively enabling precise and generalizable manipulation through semantic-physical grounding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GRACE achieves strong zero-shot generalization across a variety of articulated objects in both simulated and real-world environments, without requiring task-specific training.

Paperid: 3218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05758.pdf

Abstract:
Recent LLM-based TTS systems achieve strong quality and zero-shot ability, but lack fine-grained emotional control due to their reliance on discrete speech tokens. Existing approaches either limit emotions to categorical labels or cannot generalize to LLM-based architectures. We propose EMORL-TTS (Fine-grained Emotion-controllable TTS with Reinforcement Learning), a framework that unifies global intensity control in the VAD space with local emphasis regulation. Our method combines supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning guided by task-specific rewards for emotion category, intensity, and emphasis. Moreover, we further investigate how emphasis placement modulates fine-grained emotion intensity. Experiments show that EMORL-TTS improves emotion accuracy, intensity differentiation, and emphasis clarity, while preserving synthesis quality comparable to strong LLM-based baselines.

Paperid: 3219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04819.pdf

Abstract:
Despite interpretability work analyzing VIT encoders and transformer activations, we don't yet understand why Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) struggle on perception-heavy tasks. We offer an under-studied perspective by examining how popular MLMs (LLaVA-OneVision, Qwen2.5-VL, and Llama-3-LLaVA-NeXT) process their visual key-value tokens. We first study the flow of visual information through the language model, finding that image value tokens encode sufficient information to perform several perception-heavy tasks zero-shot: segmentation, semantic correspondence, temporal correspondence, and referring expression detection. We find that while the language model does augment the visual information received from the projection of input visual encodings-which we reveal correlates with overall MLM perception capability-it contains less visual information on several tasks than the equivalent visual encoder (SigLIP) that has not undergone MLM finetuning. Further, we find that the visual information corresponding to input-agnostic image key tokens in later layers of language models contains artifacts which reduce perception capability of the overall MLM. Next, we discuss controlling visual information in the language model, showing that adding a text prefix to the image input improves perception capabilities of visual representations. Finally, we reveal that if language models were able to better control their visual information, their perception would significantly improve; e.g., in 33.3% of Art Style questions in the BLINK benchmark, perception information present in the language model is not surfaced to the output! Our findings reveal insights into the role of key-value tokens in multimodal systems, paving the way for deeper mechanistic interpretability of MLMs and suggesting new directions for training their visual encoder and language model components.

Paperid: 3220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02100.pdf

Abstract:
Video object segmentation (VOS) models such as SAM2 offer promising zero-shot tracking capabilities for surgical videos using minimal user input. Among the available input types, point-based tracking offers an efficient and low-cost alternative, yet its reliability and failure cases in complex surgical environments are not well understood. In this work, we systematically analyze the failure modes of point-based tracking in laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos. Focusing on three surgical targets, the gallbladder, grasper, and L-hook electrocautery, we compare the performance of point-based tracking with segmentation mask initialization. Our results show that point-based tracking is competitive for surgical tools but consistently underperforms for anatomical targets, where tissue similarity and ambiguous boundaries lead to failure. Through qualitative analysis, we reveal key factors influencing tracking outcomes and provide several actionable recommendations for selecting and placing tracking points to improve performance in surgical video analysis.

Paperid: 3221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25856.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly detection is increasingly relying on foundation models, aiming for strong out-of-distribution generalization and rapid adaptation in real-world deployments. Notably, past studies have primarily focused on textual prompt tuning, leaving the intrinsic visual counterpart fragmented into processing steps specific to each foundation model. We aim to address this limitation by proposing a unified patch-focused framework, Patch-Exclusive Anomaly Detection (PatchEAD), enabling training-free anomaly detection that is compatible with diverse foundation models. The framework constructs visual prompting techniques, including an alignment module and foreground masking. Our experiments show superior few-shot and batch zero-shot performance compared to prior work, despite the absence of textual features. Our study further examines how backbone structure and pretrained characteristics affect patch-similarity robustness, providing actionable guidance for selecting and configuring foundation models for real-world visual inspection. These results confirm that a well-unified patch-only framework can enable quick, calibration-light deployment without the need for carefully engineered textual prompts.

Paperid: 3222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25711.pdf

Abstract:
Medical decision-making requires integrating diverse medical information, from imaging to clinical narratives. These medical modalities are often acquired in a many-to-many manner. However, current medical vision-language pretraining models (Med-VLPMs) fail to directly account for this many-to-many mapping in their model training and embeddings. To address this, we present Probabilistic Modality-Enhanced Diagnosis (ProbMED), a multimodal Med-VLPM that employs probabilistic contrastive learning to model distributions over embeddings rather than deterministic estimates. ProbMED aligns four distinct modalities -- chest X-rays, electrocardiograms, echocardiograms, and clinical text -- into a unified probabilistic embedding space. We use InfoNCE loss with Hellinger distance to integrate inter-modality distributions. We introduce a probabilistic synthetic sampling loss that captures modality-specific mean and variance to improve intra-modality binding. Extensive experiments across 13 medical datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms current Med-VLPMs in cross-modality retrieval, zero-shot, and few-shot classification. We also demonstrate the robust integration of multiple modalities for prognostication, showing improved intra- and inter-medical modality binding.

Paperid: 3223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25528.pdf

Abstract:
Referential grounding in outdoor driving scenes is challenging due to large scene variability, many visually similar objects, and dynamic elements that complicate resolving natural-language references (e.g., "the black car on the right"). We propose LLM-RG, a hybrid pipeline that combines off-the-shelf vision-language models for fine-grained attribute extraction with large language models for symbolic reasoning. LLM-RG processes an image and a free-form referring expression by using an LLM to extract relevant object types and attributes, detecting candidate regions, generating rich visual descriptors with a VLM, and then combining these descriptors with spatial metadata into natural-language prompts that are input to an LLM for chain-of-thought reasoning to identify the referent's bounding box. Evaluated on the Talk2Car benchmark, LLM-RG yields substantial gains over both LLM and VLM-based baselines. Additionally, our ablations show that adding 3D spatial cues further improves grounding. Our results demonstrate the complementary strengths of VLMs and LLMs, applied in a zero-shot manner, for robust outdoor referential grounding.

Paperid: 3224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22854.pdf

Abstract:
Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However, existing approaches largely rely on injecting shift vectors into residual flows, which are typically constructed from labeled demonstrations or task-specific alignment. Such designs fall short of utilizing the structural mechanisms underlying ICL and suffer from limited generalizability. To address this, we propose In-Context Routing (ICR), a novel implicit ICL method that internalizes generalizable ICL patterns at the attention logits level. It extracts reusable structural directions that emerge during ICL and employs a learnable input-conditioned router to modulate attention logits accordingly, enabling a train-once-and-reuse framework. We evaluate ICR on 12 real-world datasets spanning diverse domains and multiple LLMs. The results show that ICR consistently outperforms prior implicit ICL methods that require task-specific retrieval or training, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-domain tasks where existing methods struggle. These findings position ICR to push the boundary of ICL's practical value.

Paperid: 3225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22764.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether it can achieve long-term retention and cross-task knowledge accumulation when multitasks arrive sequentially remains underexplored. Motivated by human memory studies, we investigate the retention characteristics of ICL in multitask settings and extend it to in-context continual learning (ICCL), where continual learning ability emerges through task scheduling and prompt rearrangement. Experiments on Markov-Chain benchmarks demonstrate that, for specific large-language models, ICCL benefits from distributed practice (DP) in a manner analogous to humans, consistently revealing a spacing "sweet spot" for retention. Beyond retention performance, we propose a human-retention similarity metric to quantify how closely a continual-learning (CL) method aligns with human retention dynamics. Using this metric, we show that linear-attention models such as MAMBA and RWKV exhibit particularly human-like retention patterns, despite their retention performance lagging behind that of Transformer-based LLMs. Overall, our results establish ICCL as both cognitively plausible and practically effective, providing an inference-only CL paradigm that mitigates catastrophic forgetting and addresses the stability-plasticity dilemma in conventional CL methods.

Paperid: 3226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22498.pdf

Abstract:
Language-specified mobile manipulation tasks in novel environments simultaneously face challenges interacting with a scene which is only partially observed, grounding semantic information from language instructions to the partially observed scene, and actively updating knowledge of the scene with new observations. To address these challenges, we propose HELIOS, a hierarchical scene representation and associated search objective to perform language specified pick and place mobile manipulation tasks. We construct 2D maps containing the relevant semantic and occupancy information for navigation while simultaneously actively constructing 3D Gaussian representations of task-relevant objects. We fuse observations across this multi-layered representation while explicitly modeling the multi-view consistency of the detections of each object. In order to efficiently search for the target object, we formulate an objective function balancing exploration of unobserved or uncertain regions with exploitation of scene semantic information. We evaluate HELIOS on the OVMM benchmark in the Habitat simulator, a pick and place benchmark in which perception is challenging due to large and complex scenes with comparatively small target objects. HELIOS achieves state-of-the-art results on OVMM. As our approach is zero-shot, HELIOS can also transfer to the real world without requiring additional data, as we illustrate by demonstrating it in a real world office environment on a Spot robot.

Paperid: 3227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20328.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled natural language processing from task-specific models to unified, generalist foundation models. This transformation emerged from simple primitives: large, generative models trained on web-scale data. Curiously, the same primitives apply to today's generative video models. Could video models be on a trajectory towards general-purpose vision understanding, much like LLMs developed general-purpose language understanding? We demonstrate that Veo 3 can solve a broad variety of tasks it wasn't explicitly trained for: segmenting objects, detecting edges, editing images, understanding physical properties, recognizing object affordances, simulating tool use, and more. These abilities to perceive, model, and manipulate the visual world enable early forms of visual reasoning like maze and symmetry solving. Veo's emergent zero-shot capabilities indicate that video models are on a path to becoming unified, generalist vision foundation models.

Paperid: 3228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09880.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion/score-based models have recently emerged as powerful generative priors for solving inverse problems, including accelerated MRI reconstruction. While their flexibility allows decoupling the measurement model from the learned prior, their performance heavily depends on carefully tuned data fidelity weights, especially under fast sampling schedules with few denoising steps. Existing approaches often rely on heuristics or fixed weights, which fail to generalize across varying measurement conditions and irregular timestep schedules. In this work, we propose Zero-shot Adaptive Diffusion Sampling (ZADS), a test-time optimization method that adaptively tunes fidelity weights across arbitrary noise schedules without requiring retraining of the diffusion prior. ZADS treats the denoising process as a fixed unrolled sampler and optimizes fidelity weights in a self-supervised manner using only undersampled measurements. Experiments on the fastMRI knee dataset demonstrate that ZADS consistently outperforms both traditional compressed sensing and recent diffusion-based methods, showcasing its ability to deliver high-fidelity reconstructions across varying noise schedules and acquisition settings.

Paperid: 3229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00866.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of powerful, general-purpose omnimodels capable of processing diverse data modalities has raised a critical question: can these ``jack-of-all-trades'' systems perform on par with highly specialized models in knowledge-intensive domains? This work investigates this question within the high-stakes field of medical image segmentation. We conduct a comparative study analyzing the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art omnimodel (Gemini, the ``Nano Banana'' model) against domain-specific deep learning models on three distinct tasks: polyp (endoscopy), retinal vessel (fundus), and breast tumor segmentation (ultrasound). Our study focuses on performance at the extremes by curating subsets of the ``easiest'' and ``hardest'' cases based on the specialist models' accuracy. Our findings reveal a nuanced and task-dependent landscape. For polyp and breast tumor segmentation, specialist models excel on easy samples, but the omnimodel demonstrates greater robustness on hard samples where specialists fail catastrophically. Conversely, for the fine-grained task of retinal vessel segmentation, the specialist model maintains superior performance across both easy and hard cases. Intriguingly, qualitative analysis suggests omnimodels may possess higher sensitivity, identifying subtle anatomical features missed by human annotators. Our results indicate that while current omnimodels are not yet a universal replacement for specialists, their unique strengths suggest a potential complementary role with specialist models, particularly in enhancing robustness on challenging edge cases.

Paperid: 3230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21539.pdf

Abstract:
Natural Language-Guided Drones (NLGD) provide a novel paradigm for tasks such as target matching and navigation. However, the wide field of view and complex compositional semantics in drone scenarios pose challenges for vision-language understanding. Mainstream Vision-Language Models (VLMs) emphasize global alignment while lacking fine-grained semantics, and existing hierarchical methods depend on precise entity partitioning and strict containment, limiting effectiveness in dynamic environments. To address this, we propose the Hierarchical Cross-Granularity Contrastive and Matching learning (HCCM) framework with two components: (1) Region-Global Image-Text Contrastive Learning (RG-ITC), which avoids precise scene partitioning and captures hierarchical local-to-global semantics by contrasting local visual regions with global text and vice versa; (2) Region-Global Image-Text Matching (RG-ITM), which dispenses with rigid constraints and instead evaluates local semantic consistency within global cross-modal representations, enhancing compositional reasoning. Moreover, drone text descriptions are often incomplete or ambiguous, destabilizing alignment. HCCM introduces a Momentum Contrast and Distillation (MCD) mechanism to improve robustness. Experiments on GeoText-1652 show HCCM achieves state-of-the-art Recall@1 of 28.8% (image retrieval) and 14.7% (text retrieval). On the unseen ERA dataset, HCCM demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization with 39.93% mean recall (mR), outperforming fine-tuned baselines.

Paperid: 3231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21512.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in high-stakes decision-making tasks, such as loan approvals. While their applications expand across domains, LLMs struggle to process tabular data, ensuring fairness and delivering reliable predictions. In this work, we assess the performance and fairness of LLMs on serialized loan approval datasets from three geographically distinct regions: Ghana, Germany, and the United States. Our evaluation focuses on the model's zero-shot and in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. Our results reveal that the choice of serialization (Serialization refers to the process of converting tabular data into text formats suitable for processing by LLMs.) format significantly affects both performance and fairness in LLMs, with certain formats such as GReat and LIFT yielding higher F1 scores but exacerbating fairness disparities. Notably, while ICL improved model performance by 4.9-59.6% relative to zero-shot baselines, its effect on fairness varied considerably across datasets. Our work underscores the importance of effective tabular data representation methods and fairness-aware models to improve the reliability of LLMs in financial decision-making.

Paperid: 3232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15127.pdf

Abstract:
As machine learning becomes more pervasive and data privacy regulations evolve, the ability to remove private or copyrighted information from trained models is becoming an increasingly critical requirement. Existing unlearning methods often rely on the assumption of having access to the entire training dataset during the forgetting process. However, this assumption may not hold true in practical scenarios where the original training data may not be accessible, i.e., the source-free setting. To address this challenge, we focus on the source-free unlearning scenario, where an unlearning algorithm must be capable of removing specific data from a trained model without requiring access to the original training dataset. Building on recent work, we present a method that can estimate the Hessian of the unknown remaining training data, a crucial component required for efficient unlearning. Leveraging this estimation technique, our method enables efficient zero-shot unlearning while providing robust theoretical guarantees on the unlearning performance, while maintaining performance on the remaining data. Extensive experiments over a wide range of datasets verify the efficacy of our method.

Paperid: 3233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12761.pdf

Abstract:
Emotional talking-head generation has emerged as a pivotal research area at the intersection of computer vision and multimodal artificial intelligence, with its core value lying in enhancing human-computer interaction through immersive and empathetic engagement.With the advancement of multimodal large language models, the driving signals for emotional talking-head generation has shifted from audio and video to more flexible text. However, current text-driven methods rely on predefined discrete emotion label texts, oversimplifying the dynamic complexity of real facial muscle movements and thus failing to achieve natural emotional expressiveness.This study proposes the Think-Before-Draw framework to address two key challenges: (1) In-depth semantic parsing of emotions--by innovatively introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT), abstract emotion labels are transformed into physiologically grounded facial muscle movement descriptions, enabling the mapping from high-level semantics to actionable motion features; and (2) Fine-grained expressiveness optimization--inspired by artists' portrait painting process, a progressive guidance denoising strategy is proposed, employing a "global emotion localization--local muscle control" mechanism to refine micro-expression dynamics in generated videos.Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks, including MEAD and HDTF. Additionally, we collected a set of portrait images to evaluate our model's zero-shot generation capability.

Paperid: 3234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11759.pdf

Abstract:
Generating stable molecular conformations is crucial in several drug discovery applications, such as estimating the binding affinity of a molecule to a target. Recently, generative machine learning methods have emerged as a promising, more efficient method than molecular dynamics for sampling of conformations from the Boltzmann distribution. In this paper, we introduce Torsional-GFN, a conditional GFlowNet specifically designed to sample conformations of molecules proportionally to their Boltzmann distribution, using only a reward function as training signal. Conditioned on a molecular graph and its local structure (bond lengths and angles), Torsional-GFN samples rotations of its torsion angles. Our results demonstrate that Torsional-GFN is able to sample conformations approximately proportional to the Boltzmann distribution for multiple molecules with a single model, and allows for zero-shot generalization to unseen bond lengths and angles coming from the MD simulations for such molecules. Our work presents a promising avenue for scaling the proposed approach to larger molecular systems, achieving zero-shot generalization to unseen molecules, and including the generation of the local structure into the GFlowNet model.

Paperid: 3235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03458.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP achieve cross-modal semantic alignment through contrastive learning, exhibiting robust zero-shot generalization. Traditional prompt engineering, however, predominantly relies on coarse-grained category labels, neglecting fine-grained local semantics. Existing approaches assume that VLMs inherently recognize localized visual details and attempt to enhance classification by augmenting text prompts with attribute descriptors generated by large language models. However, our systematic experiments reveal critical limitations: CLIP's strong bias toward global image patterns hinders its ability to process localized visual descriptors. To address this fundamental constraint, we propose a simple, effective, and plug-and-play solution that enables CLIP to ``See Both the Forest and the Trees." Specifically, we employ stochastic multi-crop augmentation to activate CLIP's latent capacity for localized feature analysis. By cropping only partial regions, the approach effectively constrains the model's receptive field and recalibrates its attention mechanism, thereby mitigating its inherent bias. We evaluate the proposed method under zero-shot, few-shot, and test-time adaptation settings, and extensive experiments demonstrate that D&D achieves promising performance.

Paperid: 3236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19815.pdf

Abstract:
Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals show promise for effective human-computer interfaces, particularly in rehabilitation and prosthetics. However, challenges remain in developing systems that respond quickly and reliably to user intent, across different subjects and without requiring time-consuming calibration. In this work, we propose a framework for EMG-based intent detection that addresses these challenges. Unlike traditional gesture recognition models that wait until a gesture is completed before classifying it, our approach uses a segmentation strategy to assign intent labels at every timestep as the gesture unfolds. We introduce a novel masked modeling strategy that aligns muscle activations with their corresponding user intents, enabling rapid onset detection and stable tracking of ongoing gestures. In evaluations against baseline methods, considering both accuracy and stability for device control, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot transfer conditions, demonstrating its potential for wearable robotics and next-generation prosthetic systems. Our project page is available at: https://reactemg.github.io

Paperid: 3237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19608.pdf

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) empowers pre-trained vision-language models to adapt effectively to novel or previously underrepresented data distributions without comprehensive retraining, enhancing their adaptability and efficiency. While vision-language models like CLIP show great promise, they struggle to maintain performance across domains in incremental learning scenarios. Existing prompt learning methods face two main limitations: 1) they primarily focus on class-incremental learning scenarios, lacking specific strategies for multi-domain task incremental learning; 2) most current approaches employ single-modal prompts, neglecting the potential benefits of cross-modal information exchange. To address these challenges, we propose the \ChordPrompt framework, which facilitates a harmonious interplay between visual and textual prompts. \ChordPrompt introduces cross-modal prompts to leverage interactions between visual and textual information. Our approach also employs domain-adaptive text prompts to select appropriate prompts for continual adaptation across multiple domains. Comprehensive experiments on multi-domain incremental learning benchmarks demonstrate that \ChordPrompt outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot generalization and downstream task performance.

Paperid: 3238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10825.pdf

Abstract:
Following the successful paradigm shift of large language models, leveraging pre-training on a massive corpus of data and fine-tuning on different downstream tasks, generalist models have made their foray into computer vision. The introduction of Segment Anything Model (SAM) set a milestone on segmentation of natural images, inspiring the design of a multitude of architectures for medical image segmentation. In this survey we offer a comprehensive and in-depth investigation on generalist models for medical image segmentation. We start with an introduction on the fundamentals concepts underpinning their development. Then, we provide a taxonomy on the different declinations of SAM in terms of zero-shot, few-shot, fine-tuning, adapters, on the recent SAM 2, on other innovative models trained on images alone, and others trained on both text and images. We thoroughly analyze their performances at the level of both primary research and best-in-literature, followed by a rigorous comparison with the state-of-the-art task-specific models. We emphasize the need to address challenges in terms of compliance with regulatory frameworks, privacy and security laws, budget, and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI). Finally, we share our perspective on future directions concerning synthetic data, early fusion, lessons learnt from generalist models in natural language processing, agentic AI and physical AI, and clinical translation.

Paperid: 3239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09048.pdf

Abstract:
Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles governing their emergence and functionality remain unclear. This work proposes the Linear Combination Conjecture, positing that task vectors act as single in-context demonstrations formed through linear combinations of the original ones. We provide both theoretical and empirical support for this conjecture. First, we show that task vectors naturally emerge in linear transformers trained on triplet-formatted prompts through loss landscape analysis. Next, we predict the failure of task vectors on representing high-rank mappings and confirm this on practical LLMs. Our findings are further validated through saliency analyses and parameter visualization, suggesting an enhancement of task vectors by injecting multiple ones into few-shot prompts. Together, our results advance the understanding of task vectors and shed light on the mechanisms underlying ICL in transformer-based models.

Paperid: 3240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07438.pdf

Abstract:
This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.

Paperid: 3241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03580.pdf

Abstract:
Providing example sentences that are diverse and aligned with learners' proficiency levels is essential for fostering effective language acquisition. This study examines the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to produce example sentences targeting L2 Japanese learners. We utilize PLMs in two ways: as quality scoring components in a retrieval system that draws from a newly curated corpus of Japanese sentences, and as direct sentence generators using zero-shot learning. We evaluate the quality of sentences by considering multiple aspects such as difficulty, diversity, and naturalness, with a panel of raters consisting of learners of Japanese, native speakers -- and GPT-4. Our findings suggest that there is inherent disagreement among participants on the ratings of sentence qualities, except for difficulty. Despite that, the retrieval approach was preferred by all evaluators, especially for beginner and advanced target proficiency, while the generative approaches received lower scores on average. Even so, our experiments highlight the potential for using PLMs to enhance the adaptability of sentence suggestion systems and therefore improve the language learning journey.

Paperid: 3242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00980.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents LEMONADE, a large-scale conflict event dataset comprising 39,786 events across 20 languages and 171 countries, with extensive coverage of region-specific entities. LEMONADE is based on a partially reannotated subset of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), which has documented global conflict events for over a decade. To address the challenge of aggregating multilingual sources for global event analysis, we introduce abstractive event extraction (AEE) and its subtask, abstractive entity linking (AEL). Unlike conventional span-based event extraction, our approach detects event arguments and entities through holistic document understanding and normalizes them across the multilingual dataset. We evaluate various large language models (LLMs) on these tasks, adapt existing zero-shot event extraction systems, and benchmark supervised models. Additionally, we introduce ZEST, a novel zero-shot retrieval-based system for AEL. Our best zero-shot system achieves an end-to-end F1 score of 58.3%, with LLMs outperforming specialized event extraction models such as GoLLIE. For entity linking, ZEST achieves an F1 score of 45.7%, significantly surpassing OneNet, a state-of-the-art zero-shot baseline that achieves only 23.7%. However, these zero-shot results lag behind the best supervised systems by 20.1% and 37.0% in the end-to-end and AEL tasks, respectively, highlighting the need for further research.

Paperid: 3243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24622.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting rare outcomes such as startup success is central to venture capital, demanding models that are both accurate and interpretable. We introduce Random Rule Forest (RRF), a lightweight ensemble method that uses a large language model (LLM) to generate simple YES/NO questions in natural language. Each question functions as a weak learner, and their responses are combined using a threshold-based voting rule to form a strong, interpretable predictor. Applied to a dataset of 9,892 founders, RRF achieves a 6.9x improvement over a random baseline on held-out data; adding expert-crafted questions lifts this to 8x and highlights the value of human-LLM collaboration. Compared with zero- and few-shot baselines across three LLM architectures, RRF attains an F0.5 of 0.121, versus 0.086 for the best baseline (+0.035 absolute, +41% relative). By combining the creativity of LLMs with the rigor of ensemble learning, RRF delivers interpretable, high-precision predictions suitable for decision-making in high-stakes domains.

Paperid: 3244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21427.pdf

Abstract:
Early-stage startup investment is a high-risk endeavor characterized by scarce data and uncertain outcomes. Traditional machine learning approaches often require large, labeled datasets and extensive fine-tuning, yet remain opaque and difficult for domain experts to interpret or improve. In this paper, we propose a transparent and data-efficient investment decision framework powered by memory-augmented large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning (ICL). Central to our method is a natural language policy embedded directly into the LLM prompt, enabling the model to apply explicit reasoning patterns and allowing human experts to easily interpret, audit, and iteratively refine the logic. We introduce a lightweight training process that combines few-shot learning with an in-context learning loop, enabling the LLM to update its decision policy iteratively based on structured feedback. With only minimal supervision and no gradient-based optimization, our system predicts startup success far more accurately than existing benchmarks. It is over 20x more precise than random chance, which succeeds 1.9% of the time. It is also 7.1x more precise than the typical 5.6% success rate of top-tier venture capital (VC) firms.

Paperid: 3245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18456.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both likelihood modeling and generated text quality. We identify that this performance gap arises when important tokens (e.g., key words or low-frequency words that anchor a sentence) are masked early in the forward process, limiting contextual information for accurate reconstruction. To address this, we introduce the Anchored Diffusion Language Model (ADLM), a novel two-stage framework that first predicts distributions over important tokens via an anchor network, and then predicts the likelihoods of missing tokens conditioned on the anchored predictions. ADLM significantly improves test perplexity on LM1B and OpenWebText, achieving up to 25.4% gains over prior DLMs, and narrows the gap with strong AR baselines. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot generalization across seven benchmarks and surpasses AR models in MAUVE score, which marks the first time a DLM generates better human-like text than an AR model. Theoretically, we derive an Anchored Negative Evidence Lower Bound (ANELBO) objective and show that anchoring improves sample complexity and likelihood modeling. Beyond diffusion, anchoring boosts performance in AR models and enhances reasoning in math and logic tasks, outperforming existing chain-of-thought approaches

Paperid: 3246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16973.pdf

Abstract:
Metrics like FactScore and VeriScore that evaluate long-form factuality operate by decomposing an input response into atomic claims and then individually verifying each claim. While effective and interpretable, these methods incur numerous LLM calls and can take upwards of 100 seconds to evaluate a single response, limiting their practicality in large-scale evaluation and training scenarios. To address this, we propose VeriFastScore, which leverages synthetic data to fine-tune Llama3.1 8B for simultaneously extracting and verifying all verifiable claims within a given text based on evidence from Google Search. We show that this task cannot be solved via few-shot prompting with closed LLMs due to its complexity: the model receives ~4K tokens of evidence on average and needs to concurrently decompose claims, judge their verifiability, and verify them against noisy evidence. However, our fine-tuned VeriFastScore model demonstrates strong correlation with the original VeriScore pipeline at both the example level (r=0.80) and system level (r=0.94) while achieving an overall speedup of 6.6x (9.9x excluding evidence retrieval) over VeriScore. To facilitate future factuality research, we publicly release our VeriFastScore model and synthetic datasets.

Paperid: 3247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08213.pdf

Abstract:
As robotics progresses toward general manipulation, dexterous hands are becoming increasingly critical. However, proprioception in dexterous hands remains a bottleneck due to limitations in volume and generality. In this work, we present HandCept, a novel visual-inertial proprioception framework designed to overcome the challenges of traditional joint angle estimation methods. HandCept addresses the difficulty of achieving accurate and robust joint angle estimation in dynamic environments where both visual and inertial measurements are prone to noise and drift. It leverages a zero-shot learning approach using a wrist-mounted RGB-D camera and 9-axis IMUs, fused in real time via a latency-free Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Our results show that HandCept achieves joint angle estimation errors between $2^{\circ}$ and $4^{\circ}$ without observable drift, outperforming visual-only and inertial-only methods. Furthermore, we validate the stability and uniformity of the IMU system, demonstrating that a common base frame across IMUs simplifies system calibration. To support sim-to-real transfer, we also open-sourced our high-fidelity rendering pipeline, which is essential for training without real-world ground truth. This work offers a robust, generalizable solution for proprioception in dexterous hands, with significant implications for robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction.

Paperid: 3248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06191.pdf

Abstract:
This article presents a concept-centric paradigm for building agents that can learn continually and reason flexibly. The concept-centric agent utilizes a vocabulary of neuro-symbolic concepts. These concepts, such as object, relation, and action concepts, are grounded on sensory inputs and actuation outputs. They are also compositional, allowing for the creation of novel concepts through their structural combination. To facilitate learning and reasoning, the concepts are typed and represented using a combination of symbolic programs and neural network representations. Leveraging such neuro-symbolic concepts, the agent can efficiently learn and recombine them to solve various tasks across different domains, ranging from 2D images, videos, 3D scenes, and robotic manipulation tasks. This concept-centric framework offers several advantages, including data efficiency, compositional generalization, continual learning, and zero-shot transfer.

Paperid: 3249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05472.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in unified models for image understanding and generation has been impressive, yet most approaches remain limited to single-modal generation conditioned on multiple modalities. In this paper, we present Mogao, a unified framework that advances this paradigm by enabling interleaved multi-modal generation through a causal approach. Mogao integrates a set of key technical improvements in architecture design, including a deep-fusion design, dual vision encoders, interleaved rotary position embeddings, and multi-modal classifier-free guidance, which allow it to harness the strengths of both autoregressive models for text generation and diffusion models for high-quality image synthesis. These practical improvements also make Mogao particularly effective to process interleaved sequences of text and images arbitrarily. To further unlock the potential of unified models, we introduce an efficient training strategy on a large-scale, in-house dataset specifically curated for joint text and image generation. Extensive experiments show that Mogao not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal understanding and text-to-image generation, but also excels in producing high-quality, coherent interleaved outputs. Its emergent capabilities in zero-shot image editing and compositional generation highlight Mogao as a practical omni-modal foundation model, paving the way for future development and scaling the unified multi-modal systems.

Paperid: 3250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05084.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models has raised significant concerns regarding their potential misuse by malicious actors. As a result, developing effective detectors to mitigate these risks has become a critical priority. However, most existing detection methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, often neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). This paper addresses this issue by leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP), which effectively constrains the upper bound of FPRs. While directly applying CP constrains FPRs, it also leads to a significant reduction in detection performance. To overcome this trade-off, this paper proposes a Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (MCP), which both enforces the FPR constraint and improves detection performance. This paper also introduces RealDet, a high-quality dataset that spans a wide range of domains, ensuring realistic calibration and enabling superior detection performance when combined with MCP. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MCP effectively constrains FPRs, significantly enhances detection performance, and increases robustness against adversarial attacks across multiple detectors and datasets.

Paperid: 3251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02168.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancements of AI rely on the support of ICs. However, the growing complexity of digital ICs makes the traditional IC design process costly and time-consuming. In recent years, AI-assisted IC design methods have demonstrated great potential, but most methods are task-specific or focus solely on the circuit structure in graph format, overlooking other circuit modalities with rich functional information. In this paper, we introduce CircuitFusion, the first multimodal and implementation-aware circuit encoder. It encodes circuits into general representations that support different downstream circuit design tasks. To learn from circuits, we propose to fuse three circuit modalities: hardware code, structural graph, and functionality summary. More importantly, we identify four unique properties of circuits: parallel execution, functional equivalent transformation, multiple design stages, and circuit reusability. Based on these properties, we propose new strategies for both the development and application of CircuitFusion: 1) During circuit preprocessing, utilizing the parallel nature of circuits, we split each circuit into multiple sub-circuits based on sequential-element boundaries, each sub-circuit in three modalities. 2) During CircuitFusion pre-training, we introduce three self-supervised tasks that utilize equivalent transformations both within and across modalities. 3) When applying CircuitFusion to downstream tasks, we propose a new retrieval-augmented inference method, which retrieves similar known circuits as a reference for predictions. It improves fine-tuning performance and even enables zero-shot inference. Evaluated on five different circuit design tasks, CircuitFusion consistently outperforms the SOTA supervised method specifically developed for every single task, demonstrating its generalizability and ability to learn circuits' inherent properties.

Paperid: 3252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19854.pdf

Abstract:
Existing Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising performance in zero-shot scenarios, demonstrating impressive task execution and reasoning capabilities. However, a significant challenge arises from the limitations of visual encoding, which can result in failures during tasks such as object grasping. Moreover, these models typically suffer from high computational overhead due to their large sizes, often exceeding 7B parameters. While these models excel in reasoning and task planning, the substantial computational overhead they incur makes them impractical for real-time robotic environments, where speed and efficiency are paramount. To address the limitations of existing VLA models, we propose NORA, a 3B-parameter model designed to reduce computational overhead while maintaining strong task performance. NORA adopts the Qwen-2.5-VL-3B multimodal model as its backbone, leveraging its superior visual-semantic understanding to enhance visual reasoning and action grounding. Additionally, our \model{} is trained on 970k real-world robot demonstrations and equipped with the FAST+ tokenizer for efficient action sequence generation. Experimental results demonstrate that NORA outperforms existing large-scale VLA models, achieving better task performance with significantly reduced computational overhead, making it a more practical solution for real-time robotic autonomy.

Paperid: 3253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17524.pdf

Abstract:
Image inpainting is a technique used to restore missing or damaged regions of an image. Traditional methods primarily utilize information from adjacent pixels for reconstructing missing areas, while they struggle to preserve complex details and structures. Simultaneously, models based on deep learning necessitate substantial amounts of training data. To address this challenge, an encoding strategy-inspired diffusion model with few-shot learning for color image inpainting is proposed in this paper. The main idea of this novel encoding strategy is the deployment of a "virtual mask" to construct high-dimensional objects through mutual perturbations between channels. This approach enables the diffusion model to capture diverse image representations and detailed features from limited training samples. Moreover, the encoding strategy leverages redundancy between channels, integrates with low-rank methods during iterative inpainting, and incorporates the diffusion model to achieve accurate information output. Experimental results indicate that our method exceeds current techniques in quantitative metrics, and the reconstructed images quality has been improved in aspects of texture and structural integrity, leading to more precise and coherent results.

Paperid: 3254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06994.pdf

Abstract:
Open-set semantic mapping is crucial for open-world robots. Current mapping approaches either are limited by the depth range or only map beyond-range entities in constrained settings, where overall they fail to combine within-range and beyond-range observations. Furthermore, these methods make a trade-off between fine-grained semantics and efficiency. We introduce RayFronts, a unified representation that enables both dense and beyond-range efficient semantic mapping. RayFronts encodes task-agnostic open-set semantics to both in-range voxels and beyond-range rays encoded at map boundaries, empowering the robot to reduce search volumes significantly and make informed decisions both within & beyond sensory range, while running at 8.84 Hz on an Orin AGX. Benchmarking the within-range semantics shows that RayFronts's fine-grained image encoding provides 1.34x zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation performance while improving throughput by 16.5x. Traditionally, online mapping performance is entangled with other system components, complicating evaluation. We propose a planner-agnostic evaluation framework that captures the utility for online beyond-range search and exploration, and show RayFronts reduces search volume 2.2x more efficiently than the closest online baselines.

Paperid: 3255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02467.pdf

Abstract:
Large language model pipelines have improved automated fact-checking for complex claims, yet many approaches rely on few-shot in-context learning with demonstrations that require substantial human effort and domain expertise. Among these, program-guided reasoning, by decomposing claims into function calls and executing reasoning programs, which has shown particular promise, but remains limited by the need for manually crafted demonstrations. Fundamentally, the underlying principles of effective reasoning program generation still remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce BOOST, a bootstrapping approach for automated few-shot reasoning program generation. BOOST iteratively refines explicit, data-driven guidelines as meta-rules for guiding demonstration creation, using a critique-refine loop that eliminates the need for human intervention. This enables a seamless transition from zero-shot to few-shot program-guided learning, enhancing interpretability and effectiveness. Experimental results show that BOOST outperforms prior few-shot baselines in both zero-shot and few-shot settings for complex claim verification.

Paperid: 3256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15886.pdf

Abstract:
In zero-shot image recognition tasks, humans demonstrate remarkable flexibility in classifying unseen categories by composing known simpler concepts. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs), despite achieving significant progress through large-scale natural language supervision, often underperform in real-world applications because of sub-optimal prompt engineering and the inability to adapt effectively to target classes. To address these issues, we propose a Concept-guided Human-like Bayesian Reasoning (CHBR) framework. Grounded in Bayes' theorem, CHBR models the concept used in human image recognition as latent variables and formulates this task by summing across potential concepts, weighted by a prior distribution and a likelihood function. To tackle the intractable computation over an infinite concept space, we introduce an importance sampling algorithm that iteratively prompts large language models (LLMs) to generate discriminative concepts, emphasizing inter-class differences. We further propose three heuristic approaches involving Average Likelihood, Confidence Likelihood, and Test Time Augmentation (TTA) Likelihood, which dynamically refine the combination of concepts based on the test image. Extensive evaluations across fifteen datasets demonstrate that CHBR consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization methods.

Paperid: 3257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06139.pdf

Abstract:
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to evaluate and compare two answers from different models typically involves having LLM-based judges select the better answer. However, humans often approach problem-solving from a reverse perspective, for instance, by choosing the worse option instead of the better one in a pairwise comparison. Generally, this kind of reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning and decision-making and can further test the difference between original and reverse thought processes simultaneously. To address the above issue, in this paper, we propose a Goal-Reversed Prompting (GRP) approach for pairwise evaluation that shifts the original task from selecting the better answer to choosing the worse one. We encourage LLMs to think in reverse by prompting LLMs to identify the worse response. Experiments on closed-source models demonstrate that GRP significantly enhances evaluation capabilities, outperforming the prompt template with the original goal.

Paperid: 3258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02228.pdf

Abstract:
Video object segmentation is an emerging technology that is well-suited for real-time surgical video segmentation, offering valuable clinical assistance in the operating room by ensuring consistent frame tracking. However, its adoption is limited by the need for manual intervention to select the tracked object, making it impractical in surgical settings. In this work, we tackle this challenge with an innovative solution: using previously annotated frames from other patients as the tracking frames. We find that this unconventional approach can match or even surpass the performance of using patients' own tracking frames, enabling more autonomous and efficient AI-assisted surgical workflows. Furthermore, we analyze the benefits and limitations of this approach, highlighting its potential to enhance segmentation accuracy while reducing the need for manual input. Our findings provide insights into key factors influencing performance, offering a foundation for future research on optimizing cross-patient frame selection for real-time surgical video analysis.

Paperid: 3259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01301.pdf

Abstract:
Teleoperation offers a promising approach to robotic data collection and human-robot interaction. However, existing teleoperation methods for data collection are still limited by efficiency constraints in time and space, and the pipeline for simulation-based data collection remains unclear. The problem is how to enhance task performance while minimizing reliance on real-world data. To address this challenge, we propose a teleoperation pipeline for collecting robotic manipulation data in simulation and training a few-shot sim-to-real visual-motor policy. Force feedback devices are integrated into the teleoperation system to provide precise end-effector gripping force feedback. Experiments across various manipulation tasks demonstrate that force feedback significantly improves both success rates and execution efficiency, particularly in simulation. Furthermore, experiments with different levels of visual rendering quality reveal that enhanced visual realism in simulation substantially boosts task performance while reducing the need for real-world data.

Paperid: 3260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20934.pdf

Abstract:
Real-time video segmentation is a promising opportunity for AI-assisted surgery, offering intraoperative guidance by identifying tools and anatomical structures. Despite growing interest in surgical video segmentation, annotation protocols vary widely across datasets -- some provide dense, frame-by-frame labels, while others rely on sparse annotations sampled at low frame rates such as 1 FPS. In this study, we investigate how such inconsistencies in annotation density and frame rate sampling influence the evaluation of zero-shot segmentation models, using SAM2 as a case study for cholecystectomy procedures. Surprisingly, we find that under conventional sparse evaluation settings, lower frame rates can appear to outperform higher ones due to a smoothing effect that conceals temporal inconsistencies. However, when assessed under real-time streaming conditions, higher frame rates yield superior segmentation stability, particularly for dynamic objects like surgical graspers. To understand how these differences align with human perception, we conducted a survey among surgeons, nurses, and machine learning engineers and found that participants consistently preferred high-FPS segmentation overlays, reinforcing the importance of evaluating every frame in real-time applications rather than relying on sparse sampling strategies. Our findings highlight the risk of evaluation bias that is introduced by inconsistent dataset protocols and bring attention to the need for temporally fair benchmarking in surgical video AI.

Paperid: 3261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19312.pdf

Abstract:
Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, we propose Few-Shot Preference Optimization (FSPO), which reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under this framework, an LLM learns to quickly adapt to a user via a few labeled preferences from that user, constructing a personalized reward function for them. Additionally, since real-world preference data is scarce and challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. In particular, to successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across across three domains: movie reviews, pedagogical adaptation based on educational background, and general question answering, along with a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate on average in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 72% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.

Paperid: 3262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17414.pdf

Abstract:
We present X-Dancer, a novel zero-shot music-driven image animation pipeline that creates diverse and long-range lifelike human dance videos from a single static image. As its core, we introduce a unified transformer-diffusion framework, featuring an autoregressive transformer model that synthesize extended and music-synchronized token sequences for 2D body, head and hands poses, which then guide a diffusion model to produce coherent and realistic dance video frames. Unlike traditional methods that primarily generate human motion in 3D, X-Dancer addresses data limitations and enhances scalability by modeling a wide spectrum of 2D dance motions, capturing their nuanced alignment with musical beats through readily available monocular videos. To achieve this, we first build a spatially compositional token representation from 2D human pose labels associated with keypoint confidences, encoding both large articulated body movements (e.g., upper and lower body) and fine-grained motions (e.g., head and hands). We then design a music-to-motion transformer model that autoregressively generates music-aligned dance pose token sequences, incorporating global attention to both musical style and prior motion context. Finally we leverage a diffusion backbone to animate the reference image with these synthesized pose tokens through AdaIN, forming a fully differentiable end-to-end framework. Experimental results demonstrate that X-Dancer is able to produce both diverse and characterized dance videos, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art methods in term of diversity, expressiveness and realism. Code and model will be available for research purposes.

Paperid: 3263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15809.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot adaptation for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) presents a dilemma: balancing in-distribution accuracy with out-of-distribution generalization. Recent research has utilized low-level concepts such as visual attributes to enhance generalization. However, this study reveals that VLMs overly rely on a small subset of attributes on decision-making, which co-occur with the category but are not inherently part of it, termed spuriously correlated attributes. This biased nature of VLMs results in poor generalization. To address this, 1) we first propose Spurious Attribute Probing (SAP), identifying and filtering out these problematic attributes to significantly enhance the generalization of existing attribute-based methods; 2) We introduce Spurious Attribute Shielding (SAS), a plug-and-play module that mitigates the influence of these attributes on prediction, seamlessly integrating into various Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods. In experiments, SAP and SAS significantly enhance accuracy on distribution shifts across 11 datasets and 3 generalization tasks without compromising downstream performance, establishing a new state-of-the-art benchmark.

Paperid: 3264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06358.pdf

Abstract:
Prompting has emerged as the dominant paradigm for adapting large, pre-trained transformer-based models to downstream tasks. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables large-scale, multi-task offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) pre-training by leveraging stochastic trajectory prompts to identify the target task. However, these prompts are sampled uniformly from expert demonstrations, overlooking a critical limitation: not all prompts are equally informative for differentiating between tasks. This limits generalization and adaptation, especially in low-data or open-world settings where sample efficiency is crucial. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight, inference-time, bandit-based prompt-tuning framework. The bandit explores and optimizes trajectory prompt selection to enhance task performance, while avoiding costly fine-tuning of the transformer backbone. Our experiments indicate not only clear performance gains due to bandit-based prompt-tuning, but also better sample complexity, scalability, and prompt space exploration compared to prompt-tuning baselines. These results highlights the importance of adaptive prompt selection mechanisms for efficient generalization in offline multi-task RL.

Paperid: 3265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04979.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt tuning has emerged as a key technique for adapting large pre-trained Decision Transformers (DTs) in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in multi-task and few-shot settings. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables task generalization via trajectory prompts sampled uniformly from expert demonstrations -- without accounting for prompt informativeness. In this work, we propose a bandit-based prompt-tuning method that learns to construct optimal trajectory prompts from demonstration data at inference time. We devise a structured bandit architecture operating in the trajectory prompt space, achieving linear rather than combinatorial scaling with prompt size. Additionally, we show that the pre-trained PDT itself can serve as a powerful feature extractor for the bandit, enabling efficient reward modeling across various environments. We theoretically establish regret bounds and demonstrate empirically that our method consistently enhances performance across a wide range of tasks, high-dimensional environments, and out-of-distribution scenarios, outperforming existing baselines in prompt tuning.

Paperid: 3266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03604.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address these by freezing most model parameters and training only a small subset. However, PEFT often underperforms compared to full fine-tuning when high task-specific accuracy is required. Zeroth-Order (ZO) methods fine-tune the entire pre-trained model without back-propagation, estimating gradients through forward passes only. While memory-efficient, ZO methods suffer from slow convergence and high sensitivity to prompt selection. We bridge these two worlds with Bilevel-ZOFO, a bilevel optimization method that couples fast, local FO-PEFT adaptation at the inner level with stable, memory-efficient ZO updates of the full backbone at the outer level. The FO-PEFT inner loop performs fast, low-memory local adaptation that reduces the variance of ZO estimates and stabilizes the search, guiding the outer ZO updates of the full backbone and reducing prompt sensitivity. In the mean time, the outer ZO provides better generalization ability for PEFT. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees and empirically demonstrate that Bilevel-ZOFO significantly outperforms existing ZO and FO-PEFT methods, achieving 2-4 times faster training while maintaining similar memory efficiency. Additionally, we show by updating the backbone with ZO and adapting only a tiny FO-PEFT block per task, Bilevel-ZOFO combines full-model capacity with few-shot efficiency, making it a very efficient meta-learning algorithm that quickly adapts to new tasks.

Paperid: 3267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00426.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, adapting Vision Language Models (VLMs) to zero-shot visual classification by tuning class embedding with a few prompts (Test-time Prompt Tuning, TPT) or replacing class names with generated visual samples (support-set) has shown promising results. However, TPT cannot avoid the semantic gap between modalities while the support-set cannot be tuned. To this end, we draw on each other's strengths and propose a novel framework namely TEst-time Support-set Tuning for zero-shot Video Classification (TEST-V). It first dilates the support-set with multiple prompts (Multi-prompting Support-set Dilation, MSD) and then erodes the support-set via learnable weights to mine key cues dynamically (Temporal-aware Support-set Erosion, TSE). Specifically, i) MSD expands the support samples for each class based on multiple prompts enquired from LLMs to enrich the diversity of the support-set. ii) TSE tunes the support-set with factorized learnable weights according to the temporal prediction consistency in a self-supervised manner to dig pivotal supporting cues for each class. $\textbf{TEST-V}$ achieves state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks and has good interpretability for the support-set dilation and erosion.

Paperid: 3268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03565.pdf

Abstract:
3D medical images such as Computed tomography (CT) are widely used in clinical practice, offering a great potential for automatic diagnosis. Supervised learning-based approaches have achieved significant progress but rely heavily on extensive manual annotations, limited by the availability of training data and the diversity of abnormality types. Vision-language alignment (VLA) offers a promising alternative by enabling zero-shot learning without additional annotations. However, we empirically discover that the visual and textural embeddings after alignment endeavors from existing VLA methods form two well-separated clusters, presenting a wide gap to be bridged. To bridge this gap, we propose a Bridged Semantic Alignment (BrgSA) framework. First, we utilize a large language model to perform semantic summarization of reports, extracting high-level semantic information. Second, we design a Cross-Modal Knowledge Interaction (CMKI) module that leverages a cross-modal knowledge bank as a semantic bridge, facilitating interaction between the two modalities, narrowing the gap, and improving their alignment. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a benchmark dataset that includes 15 underrepresented abnormalities as well as utilize two existing benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that BrgSA achieves state-of-the-art performances on both public benchmark datasets and our custom-labeled dataset, with significant improvements in zero-shot diagnosis of underrepresented abnormalities.

Paperid: 3269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03370.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread use of social media highlights the need to understand its impact, particularly the role of online social support. This study uses a dataset focused on online social support, which includes binary and multiclass classifications of social support content on social media. The classification of social support is divided into three tasks. The first task focuses on distinguishing between supportive and non-supportive. The second task aims to identify whether the support is directed toward an individual or a group. The third task categorizes the specific type of social support, grouping it into categories such as Nation, LGBTQ, Black people, Women, Religion, and Other (if it does not fit into the previously mentioned categories). To address data imbalances in these tasks, we employed K-means clustering for balancing the dataset and compared the results with the original unbalanced data. Using advanced machine learning techniques, including transformers and zero-shot learning approaches with GPT3, GPT4, and GPT4-o, we predict social support levels in various contexts. The effectiveness of the dataset is evaluated using baseline models across different learning approaches, with transformer-based methods demonstrating superior performance. Additionally, we achieved a 0.4\% increase in the macro F1 score for the second task and a 0.7\% increase for the third task, compared to previous work utilizing traditional machine learning with psycholinguistic and unigram-based TF-IDF values.

Paperid: 3270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15813.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce SONO, a novel method leveraging Second-Order Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Second-Order NODEs) to enhance cross-modal few-shot learning. By employing a simple yet effective architecture consisting of a Second-Order NODEs model paired with a cross-modal classifier, SONO addresses the significant challenge of overfitting, which is common in few-shot scenarios due to limited training examples. Our second-order approach can approximate a broader class of functions, enhancing the model's expressive power and feature generalization capabilities. We initialize our cross-modal classifier with text embeddings derived from class-relevant prompts, streamlining training efficiency by avoiding the need for frequent text encoder processing. Additionally, we utilize text-based image augmentation, exploiting CLIP's robust image-text correlation to enrich training data significantly. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that SONO outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in few-shot learning performance.

Paperid: 3271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15267.pdf

Abstract:
Toxicity detection is crucial for maintaining the peace of the society. While existing methods perform well on normal toxic contents or those generated by specific perturbation methods, they are vulnerable to evolving perturbation patterns. However, in real-world scenarios, malicious users tend to create new perturbation patterns for fooling the detectors. For example, some users may circumvent the detector of large language models (LLMs) by adding `I am a scientist' at the beginning of the prompt. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem, i.e., continual learning jailbreak perturbation patterns, into the toxicity detection field. To tackle this problem, we first construct a new dataset generated by 9 types of perturbation patterns, 7 of them are summarized from prior work and 2 of them are developed by us. We then systematically validate the vulnerability of current methods on this new perturbation pattern-aware dataset via both the zero-shot and fine tuned cross-pattern detection. Upon this, we present the domain incremental learning paradigm and the corresponding benchmark to ensure the detector's robustness to dynamically emerging types of perturbed toxic text. Our code and dataset are provided in the appendix and will be publicly available at GitHub, by which we wish to offer new research opportunities for the security-relevant communities.

Paperid: 3272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14188.pdf

Abstract:
The interplay between cognition and gaming, notably through educational games enhancing cognitive skills, has garnered significant attention in recent years. This research introduces the CogSimulator, a novel algorithm for simulating user cognition in small-group settings with minimal data, as the educational game Wordle exemplifies. The CogSimulator employs Wasserstein-1 distance and coordinates search optimization for hyperparameter tuning, enabling precise few-shot predictions in new game scenarios. Comparative experiments with the Wordle dataset illustrate that our model surpasses most conventional machine learning models in mean Wasserstein-1 distance, mean squared error, and mean accuracy, showcasing its efficacy in cognitive enhancement through tailored game design.

Paperid: 3273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12129.pdf

Abstract:
Realistic and interactive scene simulation is a key prerequisite for autonomous vehicle (AV) development. In this work, we present SceneDiffuser, a scene-level diffusion prior designed for traffic simulation. It offers a unified framework that addresses two key stages of simulation: scene initialization, which involves generating initial traffic layouts, and scene rollout, which encompasses the closed-loop simulation of agent behaviors. While diffusion models have been proven effective in learning realistic and multimodal agent distributions, several challenges remain, including controllability, maintaining realism in closed-loop simulations, and ensuring inference efficiency. To address these issues, we introduce amortized diffusion for simulation. This novel diffusion denoising paradigm amortizes the computational cost of denoising over future simulation steps, significantly reducing the cost per rollout step (16x less inference steps) while also mitigating closed-loop errors. We further enhance controllability through the introduction of generalized hard constraints, a simple yet effective inference-time constraint mechanism, as well as language-based constrained scene generation via few-shot prompting of a large language model (LLM). Our investigations into model scaling reveal that increased computational resources significantly improve overall simulation realism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge, achieving top open-loop performance and the best closed-loop performance among diffusion models.

Paperid: 3274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07909.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal learning has recently gained significant popularity, demonstrating impressive performance across various zero-shot classification tasks and a range of perceptive and generative applications. Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) are designed to bridge different modalities, such as images and text, by learning a shared representation space through contrastive learning. Despite their success, the working mechanisms underlying multimodal learning are not yet well understood. Notably, these models often exhibit a modality gap, where different modalities occupy distinct regions within the shared representation space. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the emergence of modality gap by characterizing the gradient flow learning dynamics. Specifically, we identify the critical roles of mismatched data pairs and a learnable temperature parameter in causing and perpetuating the modality gap during training. Furthermore, our theoretical insights are validated through experiments on practical CLIP models. These findings provide principled guidance for mitigating the modality gap, including strategies such as appropriate temperature scheduling and modality swapping. Additionally, we demonstrate that closing the modality gap leads to improved performance on tasks such as image-text retrieval.

Paperid: 3275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06774.pdf

Abstract:
We present Visual Lexicon, a novel visual language that encodes rich image information into the text space of vocabulary tokens while retaining intricate visual details that are often challenging to convey in natural language. Unlike traditional methods that prioritize either high-level semantics (e.g., CLIP) or pixel-level reconstruction (e.g., VAE), ViLex simultaneously captures rich semantic content and fine visual details, enabling high-quality image generation and comprehensive visual scene understanding. Through a self-supervised learning pipeline, ViLex generates tokens optimized for reconstructing input images using a frozen text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, preserving the detailed information necessary for high-fidelity semantic-level reconstruction. As an image embedding in the language space, ViLex tokens leverage the compositionality of natural languages, allowing them to be used independently as "text tokens" or combined with natural language tokens to prompt pretrained T2I models with both visual and textual inputs, mirroring how we interact with vision-language models (VLMs). Experiments demonstrate that ViLex achieves higher fidelity in image reconstruction compared to text embeddings--even with a single ViLex token. Moreover, ViLex successfully performs various DreamBooth tasks in a zero-shot, unsupervised manner without fine-tuning T2I models. Additionally, ViLex serves as a powerful vision encoder, consistently improving vision-language model performance across 15 benchmarks relative to a strong SigLIP baseline.

Paperid: 3276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01027.pdf

Abstract:
Text-guided image manipulation has experienced notable advancement in recent years. In order to mitigate linguistic ambiguity, few-shot learning with visual examples has been applied for instructions that are underrepresented in the training set, or difficult to describe purely in language. However, learning from visual prompts requires strong reasoning capability, which diffusion models are struggling with. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal autoregressive model, dubbed $\textbf{InstaManip}$, that can $\textbf{insta}$ntly learn a new image $\textbf{manip}$ulation operation from textual and visual guidance via in-context learning, and apply it to new query images. Specifically, we propose an innovative group self-attention mechanism to break down the in-context learning process into two separate stages -- learning and applying, which simplifies the complex problem into two easier tasks. We also introduce a relation regularization method to further disentangle image transformation features from irrelevant contents in exemplar images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method surpasses previous few-shot image manipulation models by a notable margin ($\geq$19% in human evaluation). We also find our model can be further boosted by increasing the number or diversity of exemplar images.

Paperid: 3277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13022.pdf

Abstract:
Physics-driven deep learning (PD-DL) approaches have become popular for improved reconstruction of fast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Though PD-DL offers higher acceleration rates than existing clinical fast MRI techniques, their use has been limited outside specialized MRI centers. A key challenge is generalization to underrepresented pathologies or populations, noted in multiple studies, with fine-tuning on target populations suggested for improvement. However, current approaches for PD-DL training require access to raw k-space measurements, which is typically only available at specialized MRI centers that have research agreements for such data access. This is especially an issue for rural and underserved areas, where commercial MRI scanners only provide access to a final reconstructed image. To tackle these challenges, we propose Compressibility-inspired Unsupervised Learning via Parallel Imaging Fidelity (CUPID) for high-quality PD-DL training using only routine clinical reconstructed images exported from an MRI scanner. CUPID evaluates output quality with a compressibility-based approach while ensuring that the output stays consistent with the clinical parallel imaging reconstruction through well-designed perturbations. Our results show CUPID achieves similar quality to established PD-DL training that requires k-space data while outperforming compressed sensing (CS) and diffusion-based generative methods. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in a zero-shot training setup for retrospectively and prospectively sub-sampled acquisitions, attesting to its minimal training burden. As an approach that radically deviates from existing strategies, CUPID presents an opportunity to provide equitable access to fast MRI for underserved populations in an attempt to reduce the inequalities associated with this expensive imaging modality.

Paperid: 3278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11448.pdf

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (ST-GNNs) and Transformers have shown significant promise in traffic forecasting by effectively modeling temporal and spatial correlations. However, rapid urbanization in recent years has led to dynamic shifts in traffic patterns and travel demand, posing major challenges for accurate long-term traffic prediction. The generalization capability of ST-GNNs in extended temporal scenarios and cross-city applications remains largely unexplored. In this study, we evaluate state-of-the-art models on an extended traffic benchmark and observe substantial performance degradation in existing ST-GNNs over time, which we attribute to their limited inductive capabilities. Our analysis reveals that this degradation stems from an inability to adapt to evolving spatial relationships within urban environments. To address this limitation, we reconsider the design of adaptive embeddings and propose a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) embedding approach that enables models to adapt to new scenarios without retraining. We incorporate PCA embeddings into existing ST-GNN and Transformer architectures, achieving marked improvements in performance. Notably, PCA embeddings allow for flexibility in graph structures between training and testing, enabling models trained on one city to perform zero-shot predictions on other cities. This adaptability demonstrates the potential of PCA embeddings in enhancing the robustness and generalization of spatiotemporal models.

Paperid: 3279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08257.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional decision tree algorithms are explainable but struggle with non-linear, high-dimensional data, limiting its applicability in complex decision-making. Neural networks excel at capturing complex patterns but sacrifice explainability in the process. In this work, we present GPTree, a novel framework combining explainability of decision trees with the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs. GPTree eliminates the need for feature engineering and prompt chaining, requiring only a task-specific prompt and leveraging a tree-based structure to dynamically split samples. We also introduce an expert-in-the-loop feedback mechanism to further enhance performance by enabling human intervention to refine and rebuild decision paths, emphasizing the harmony between human expertise and machine intelligence. Our decision tree achieved a 7.8% precision rate for identifying "unicorn" startups at the inception stage of a startup, surpassing gpt-4o with few-shot learning as well as the best human decision-makers (3.1% to 5.6%).

Paperid: 3280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23160.pdf

Abstract:
Forecasting time series with irregular temporal structures remains challenging for universal pre-trained models. Existing approaches often assume regular sampling or depend heavily on imputation, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where irregularities are prevalent due to diverse sensing devices and recording practices. We introduce FlexTSF, a flexible forecasting model specifically designed for time series data with variable temporal regularities. At its foundation lies the IVP Patcher, a continuous-time patching module leveraging Initial Value Problems (IVPs) to inherently support uneven time intervals, variable sequence lengths, and missing values. FlexTSF employs a decoder-only architecture that integrates normalized timestamp inputs and domain-specific statistics through a specialized causal self-attention mechanism, enabling adaptability across domains. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate FlexTSF's effectiveness, significantly outperforming existing models in classic forecasting scenarios, zero-shot generalization, and low-resource fine-tuning conditions. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of each design component and the advantage of not relying on predefined fixed patch lengths.

Paperid: 3281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19795.pdf

Abstract:
Contactless device-free wireless sensing has recently attracted significant interest due to its potential to support a wide range of immersive human-machine interactive applications using ubiquitously available radio frequency (RF) signals. Traditional approaches focus on developing a single global model based on a combined dataset collected from different locations. However, wireless signals are known to be location and environment specific. Thus, a global model results in inconsistent and unreliable sensing results. It is also unrealistic to construct individual models for all the possible locations and environmental scenarios. Motivated by the observation that signals recorded at different locations are closely related to a set of physical-layer semantic features, in this paper we propose SANSee, a semantic-aware networking-based framework for distributed wireless sensing. SANSee allows models constructed in one or a limited number of locations to be transferred to new locations without requiring any locally labeled data or model training. SANSee is built on the concept of physical-layer semantic-aware network (pSAN), which characterizes the semantic similarity and the correlations of sensed data across different locations. A pSAN-based zero-shot transfer learning solution is introduced to allow receivers in new locations to obtain location-specific models by directly aggregating the models trained by other receivers. We theoretically prove that models obtained by SANSee can approach the locally optimal models. Experimental results based on real-world datasets are used to verify that the accuracy of the transferred models obtained by SANSee matches that of the models trained by the locally labeled data based on supervised learning approaches.

Paperid: 3282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18505.pdf

Abstract:
We present CCI3.0-HQ (https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-HQ), a high-quality 500GB subset of the Chinese Corpora Internet 3.0 (CCI3.0)(https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-Data), developed using a novel two-stage hybrid filtering pipeline that significantly enhances data quality. To evaluate its effectiveness, we trained a 0.5B parameter model from scratch on 100B tokens across various datasets, achieving superior performance on 10 benchmarks in a zero-shot setting compared to CCI3.0, SkyPile, and WanjuanV1. The high-quality filtering process effectively distills the capabilities of the Qwen2-72B-instruct model into a compact 0.5B model, attaining optimal F1 scores for Chinese web data classification. We believe this open-access dataset will facilitate broader access to high-quality language models.

Paperid: 3283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17422.pdf

Abstract:
We present an active mapping system that plans for both long-horizon exploration goals and short-term actions using a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation. Existing methods either do not take advantage of recent developments in multimodal Large Language Models (LLM) or do not consider challenges in localization uncertainty, which is critical in embodied agents. We propose employing multimodal LLMs for long-horizon planning in conjunction with detailed motion planning using our information-based objective. By leveraging high-quality view synthesis from our 3DGS representation, our method employs a multimodal LLM as a zero-shot planner for long-horizon exploration goals from the semantic perspective. We also introduce an uncertainty-aware path proposal and selection algorithm that balances the dual objectives of maximizing the information gain for the environment while minimizing the cost of localization errors. Experiments conducted on the Gibson and Habitat-Matterport 3D datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results of the proposed method.

Paperid: 3284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15681.pdf

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple devices to collaboratively train a global model while maintaining data on local servers. Each device trains the model on its local server and shares only the model updates (i.e., gradient weights) during the aggregation step. A significant challenge in FL is managing the feature distribution of novel and unbalanced data across devices. In this paper, we propose an FL approach using few-shot learning and aggregation of the model weights on a global server. We introduce a dynamic early stopping method to balance out-of-distribution classes based on representation learning, specifically utilizing the maximum mean discrepancy of feature embeddings between local and global models. An exemplary application of FL is to orchestrate machine learning models along highways for interference classification based on snapshots from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. Extensive experiments on four GNSS datasets from two real-world highways and controlled environments demonstrate that our FL method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques in adapting to both novel interference classes and multipath scenarios.

Paperid: 3285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14238.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained video action recognition can be conceptualized as a video-text matching problem. Previous approaches often rely on global video semantics to consolidate video embeddings, which can lead to misalignment in video-text pairs due to a lack of understanding of action semantics at an atomic granularity level. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-granularity framework based on two observations: (i) videos with different global semantics may share similar atomic actions or appearances, and (ii) atomic actions within a video can be momentary, slow, or even non-directly related to the global video semantics. Inspired by the concept of storyboarding, which disassembles a script into individual shots, we enhance global video semantics by generating fine-grained descriptions using a pre-trained large language model. These detailed descriptions capture common atomic actions depicted in videos. A filtering metric is proposed to select the descriptions that correspond to the atomic actions present in both the videos and the descriptions. By employing global semantics and fine-grained descriptions, we can identify key frames in videos and utilize them to aggregate embeddings, thereby making the embedding more accurate. Extensive experiments on various video action recognition datasets demonstrate superior performance of our proposed method in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 3286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13229.pdf

Abstract:
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an appealing alternative to Transformers for large language models, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with constant memory complexity which allows for holding longer context lengths than attention-based networks. The superior computational efficiency of SSMs in long sequence modeling positions them favorably over Transformers in many scenarios. However, improving the efficiency of SSMs on request-intensive cloud-serving and resource-limited edge applications is still a formidable task. SSM quantization is a possible solution to this problem, making SSMs more suitable for wide deployment, while still maintaining their accuracy. Quantization is a common technique to reduce the model size and to utilize the low bit-width acceleration features on modern computing units, yet existing quantization techniques are poorly suited for SSMs. Most notably, SSMs have highly sensitive feature maps within the selective scan mechanism (i.e., linear recurrence) and massive outliers in the output activations which are not present in the output of token-mixing in the self-attention modules. To address this issue, we propose a static 8-bit per-tensor SSM quantization method which suppresses the maximum values of the input activations to the selective SSM for finer quantization precision and quantizes the output activations in an outlier-free space with Hadamard transform. Our 8-bit weight-activation quantized Mamba 2.8B SSM benefits from hardware acceleration and achieves a 1.72x lower generation latency on an Nvidia Orin Nano 8G, with only a 0.9% drop in average accuracy on zero-shot tasks. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of our approach for deploying SSM-based models of all sizes on both cloud and edge platforms.

Paperid: 3287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11020.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters continue to underperform on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, often trailing smaller models like BERT-base on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE. Motivated by the success of reinforcement learning in reasoning tasks (e.g., DeepSeek), we explore Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a framework to improve the NLU capabilities of LLMs. We frame NLU as a reinforcement learning environment, treating token generation as a sequence of actions and optimizing for reward signals based on alignment with ground-truth labels. PPO consistently outperforms supervised fine-tuning, yielding an average improvement of 6.3 points on GLUE, and surpasses zero-shot and few-shot prompting by 38.7 and 26.1 points, respectively. Notably, PPO-tuned models outperform GPT-4o by over 4\% on average across sentiment and natural language inference tasks, including gains of 7.3\% on the Mental Health dataset and 10.9\% on SIGA-nli. This work highlights a promising direction for adapting LLMs to new tasks by reframing them as reinforcement learning problems, enabling learning through simple end-task rewards rather than extensive data curation.

Paperid: 3288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10792.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models transform random noise into images; their inversion aims to transform images back to structured noise for recovery and editing. This paper addresses two key tasks: (i) inversion and (ii) editing of a real image using stochastic equivalents of rectified flow models (such as Flux). Although Diffusion Models (DMs) have recently dominated the field of generative modeling for images, their inversion presents faithfulness and editability challenges due to nonlinearities in drift and diffusion. Existing state-of-the-art DM inversion approaches rely on training of additional parameters or test-time optimization of latent variables; both are expensive in practice. Rectified Flows (RFs) offer a promising alternative to diffusion models, yet their inversion has been underexplored. We propose RF inversion using dynamic optimal control derived via a linear quadratic regulator. We prove that the resulting vector field is equivalent to a rectified stochastic differential equation. Additionally, we extend our framework to design a stochastic sampler for Flux. Our inversion method allows for state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot inversion and editing, outperforming prior works in stroke-to-image synthesis and semantic image editing, with large-scale human evaluations confirming user preference.

Paperid: 3289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09129.pdf

Abstract:
Next location prediction is a critical task in human mobility analysis and serves as a foundation for various downstream applications. Existing methods typically rely on discrete IDs to represent locations, which inherently overlook spatial relationships and cannot generalize across cities. In this paper, we propose NextLocLLM, which leverages the advantages of large language models (LLMs) in processing natural language descriptions and their strong generalization capabilities for next location prediction. Specifically, instead of using IDs, NextLocLLM encodes locations based on continuous spatial coordinates to better model spatial relationships. These coordinates are further normalized to enable robust cross-city generalization. Another highlight of NextlocLLM is its LLM-enhanced POI embeddings. It utilizes LLMs' ability to encode each POI category's natural language description into embeddings. These embeddings are then integrated via nonlinear projections to form this LLM-enhanced POI embeddings, effectively capturing locations' functional attributes. Furthermore, task and data prompt prefix, together with trajectory embeddings, are incorporated as input for partly-frozen LLM backbone. NextLocLLM further introduces prediction retrieval module to ensure structural consistency in prediction. Experiments show that NextLocLLM outperforms existing models in next location prediction, excelling in both supervised and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 3290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04680.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a framework for active next best view and touch selection for robotic manipulators using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). 3DGS is emerging as a useful explicit 3D scene representation for robotics, as it has the ability to represent scenes in a both photorealistic and geometrically accurate manner. However, in real-world, online robotic scenes where the number of views is limited given efficiency requirements, random view selection for 3DGS becomes impractical as views are often overlapping and redundant. We address this issue by proposing an end-to-end online training and active view selection pipeline, which enhances the performance of 3DGS in few-view robotics settings. We first elevate the performance of few-shot 3DGS with a novel semantic depth alignment method using Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) that we supplement with Pearson depth and surface normal loss to improve color and depth reconstruction of real-world scenes. We then extend FisherRF, a next-best-view selection method for 3DGS, to select views and touch poses based on depth uncertainty. We perform online view selection on a real robot system during live 3DGS training. We motivate our improvements to few-shot GS scenes, and extend depth-based FisherRF to them, where we demonstrate both qualitative and quantitative improvements on challenging robot scenes. For more information, please see our project page at https://arm.stanford.edu/next-best-sense.

Paperid: 3291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02512.pdf

Abstract:
Data augmentation, a cornerstone technique in deep learning, is crucial in enhancing model performance, especially with scarce labeled data. While traditional techniques are effective, their reliance on hand-crafted methods limits their applicability across diverse data types and tasks. Although modern learnable augmentation methods offer increased adaptability, they are computationally expensive and challenging to incorporate within prevalent augmentation workflows. In this work, we present a novel, efficient method for data augmentation, effectively bridging the gap between existing augmentation strategies and emerging datasets and learning tasks. We introduce SAFLEX (Self-Adaptive Augmentation via Feature Label EXtrapolation), which learns the sample weights and soft labels of augmented samples provided by any given upstream augmentation pipeline, using a specifically designed efficient bilevel optimization algorithm. Remarkably, SAFLEX effectively reduces the noise and label errors of the upstream augmentation pipeline with a marginal computational cost. As a versatile module, SAFLEX excels across diverse datasets, including natural and medical images and tabular data, showcasing its prowess in few-shot learning and out-of-distribution generalization. SAFLEX seamlessly integrates with common augmentation strategies like RandAug, CutMix, and those from large pre-trained generative models like stable diffusion and is also compatible with frameworks such as CLIP's fine-tuning. Our findings highlight the potential to adapt existing augmentation pipelines for new data types and tasks, signaling a move towards more adaptable and resilient training frameworks.

Paperid: 3292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13266.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting keyphrase generation models to new domains typically involves few-shot fine-tuning with in-domain labeled data. However, annotating documents with keyphrases is often prohibitively expensive and impractical, requiring expert annotators. This paper presents silk, an unsupervised method designed to address this issue by extracting silver-standard keyphrases from citation contexts to create synthetic labeled data for domain adaptation. Extensive experiments across three distinct domains demonstrate that our method yields high-quality synthetic samples, resulting in significant and consistent improvements in in-domain performance over strong baselines.

Paperid: 3293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12244.pdf

Abstract:
Characterizing materials with electron micrographs poses significant challenges for automated labeling due to the complex nature of nanomaterial structures. To address this, we introduce a fully automated, end-to-end pipeline that leverages recent advances in Generative AI. It is designed for analyzing and understanding the microstructures of semiconductor materials with effectiveness comparable to that of human experts, contributing to the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in nanomaterial identification. Our approach utilizes Large MultiModal Models (LMMs) such as GPT-4V, alongside text-to-image models like DALLE-3. We integrate a GPT-4 guided Visual Question Answering (VQA) method to analyze nanomaterial images, generate synthetic nanomaterial images via DALLE-3, and employ in-context learning with few-shot prompting in GPT-4V for accurate nanomaterial identification. Our method surpasses traditional techniques by enhancing the precision of nanomaterial identification and optimizing the process for high-throughput screening.

Paperid: 3294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07463.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel framework for analyzing and interpreting electron microscopy images in semiconductor manufacturing using vision-language instruction tuning. The framework employs a unique teacher-student approach, leveraging pre-trained multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 to generate instruction-following data for zero-shot visual question answering (VQA) and classification tasks, customizing smaller multimodal models (SMMs) for microscopy image analysis, resulting in an instruction-tuned language-and-vision assistant. Our framework merges knowledge engineering with machine learning to integrate domain-specific expertise from larger to smaller multimodal models within this specialized field, greatly reducing the need for extensive human labeling. Our study presents a secure, cost-effective, and customizable approach for analyzing microscopy images, addressing the challenges of adopting proprietary models in semiconductor manufacturing.

Paperid: 3295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02836.pdf

Abstract:
This study performs analysis of Predictive statements, Hope speech, and Regret Detection behaviors within cryptocurrency-related discussions, leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques. We introduce a novel classification scheme named "Prediction statements," categorizing comments into Predictive Incremental, Predictive Decremental, Predictive Neutral, or Non-Predictive categories. Employing GPT-4o, a cutting-edge large language model, we explore sentiment dynamics across five prominent cryptocurrencies: Cardano, Binance, Matic, Fantom, and Ripple. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns in predictive sentiments, with Matic demonstrating a notably higher propensity for optimistic predictions. Additionally, we investigate hope and regret sentiments, uncovering nuanced interplay between these emotions and predictive behaviors. Despite encountering limitations related to data volume and resource availability, our study reports valuable discoveries concerning investor behavior and sentiment trends within the cryptocurrency market, informing strategic decision-making and future research endeavors.

Paperid: 3296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22090.pdf

Abstract:
Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a promising control signal for assist-as-needed hand rehabilitation after stroke, but detecting intent from paretic muscles often requires lengthy, subject-specific calibration and remains brittle to variability. We propose a healthy-to-stroke adaptation pipeline that initializes an intent detector from a model pretrained on large-scale able-bodied sEMG, then fine-tunes it for each stroke participant using only a small amount of subject-specific data. Using a newly collected dataset from three individuals with chronic stroke, we compare adaptation strategies (head-only tuning, parameter-efficient LoRA adapters, and full end-to-end fine-tuning) and evaluate on held-out test sets that include realistic distribution shifts such as within-session drift, posture changes, and armband repositioning. Across conditions, healthy-pretrained adaptation consistently improves stroke intent detection relative to both zero-shot transfer and stroke-only training under the same data budget; the best adaptation methods improve average transition accuracy from 0.42 to 0.61 and raw accuracy from 0.69 to 0.78. These results suggest that transferring a reusable healthy-domain EMG representation can reduce calibration burden while improving robustness for real-time post-stroke intent detection.

Paperid: 3297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14343.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of IoT deployments has intensified cybersecurity threats, notably Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, characterized by increasingly sophisticated patterns. Leveraging Generative AI through On-Device Large Language Models (ODLLMs) provides a viable solution for real-time threat detection at the network edge, though limited computational resources present challenges for smaller ODLLMs. This paper introduces a novel detection framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tailored specifically for IoT edge environments. We systematically evaluate compact ODLLMs, including LLaMA 3.2 (1B, 3B) and Gemma 3 (1B, 4B), using structured prompting and exemplar-driven reasoning strategies. Experimental results demonstrate substantial performance improvements with few-shot prompting, achieving macro-average F1 scores as high as 0.85. Our findings highlight the significant advantages of incorporating exemplar-based reasoning, underscoring that CoT and RAG approaches markedly enhance small ODLLMs' capabilities in accurately classifying complex network attacks under stringent resource constraints.

Paperid: 3298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10592.pdf

Abstract:
Inferring physical actions from visual observations is a fundamental capability for advancing machine intelligence in the physical world. Achieving this requires large-scale, open-vocabulary video action datasets that span broad domains. We introduce Action100M, a large-scale dataset constructed from 1.2M Internet instructional videos (14.6 years of duration), yielding O(100 million) temporally localized segments with open-vocabulary action supervision and rich captions. Action100M is generated by a fully automated pipeline that (i) performs hierarchical temporal segmentation using V-JEPA 2 embeddings, (ii) produces multi-level frame and segment captions organized as a Tree-of-Captions, and (iii) aggregates evidence with a reasoning model (GPT-OSS-120B) under a multi-round Self-Refine procedure to output structured annotations (brief/detailed action, actor, brief/detailed caption). Training VL-JEPA on Action100M demonstrates consistent data-scaling improvements and strong zero-shot performance across diverse action recognition benchmarks, establishing Action100M as a new foundation for scalable research in video understanding and world modeling.

Paperid: 3299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09654.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently shown strong in-context learning capabilities on structured data, achieving zero-shot performance comparable to traditional machine learning methods. We find that zero-shot TFMs already achieve strong performance, while the benefits of fine-tuning are highly model and data-dependent. Meta-learning and PEFT provide moderate gains under specific conditions, whereas full supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often reduces accuracy or calibration quality. This work presents the first comprehensive study of fine-tuning in TFMs across benchmarks including TALENT, OpenML-CC18, and TabZilla. We compare Zero-Shot, Meta-Learning, Supervised (SFT), and parameter-efficient (PEFT) approaches, analyzing how dataset factors such as imbalance, size, and dimensionality affect outcomes. Our findings cover performance, calibration, and fairness, offering practical guidelines on when fine-tuning is most beneficial and its limitations.

Paperid: 3300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08476.pdf

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

Paperid: 3301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02128.pdf

Abstract:
Segmenting speech transcripts into thematic sections benefits both downstream processing and users who depend on written text for accessibility. We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical topic segmentation in transcripts, generating multi-level tables of contents that capture both topic and subtopic boundaries. We compare zero-shot prompting and LoRA fine-tuning on large language models, while also exploring the integration of high-level speech pause features. Evaluations on English meeting recordings and multilingual lecture transcripts (Portuguese, German) show significant improvements over established topic segmentation baselines. Additionally, we adapt a common evaluation measure for multi-level segmentation, taking into account all hierarchical levels within one metric.

Paperid: 3302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21076.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate book genre classification is fundamental to digital library organization, content discovery, and personalized recommendation. Existing approaches typically model genre prediction as a flat, single-label task, ignoring hierarchical genre structure and relying heavily on noisy, subjective user reviews, which often degrade classification reliability. We propose HiGeMine, a two-phase hierarchical genre mining framework that robustly integrates user reviews with authoritative book blurbs. In the first phase, HiGeMine employs a zero-shot semantic alignment strategy to filter reviews, retaining only those semantically consistent with the corresponding blurb, thereby mitigating noise, bias, and irrelevance. In the second phase, we introduce a dual-path, two-level graph-based classification architecture: a coarse-grained Level-1 binary classifier distinguishes fiction from non-fiction, followed by Level-2 multi-label classifiers for fine-grained genre prediction. Inter-genre dependencies are explicitly modeled using a label co-occurrence graph, while contextual representations are derived from pretrained language models applied to the filtered textual content. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we curate a new hierarchical book genre dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiGeMine consistently outperformed strong baselines across hierarchical genre classification tasks. The proposed framework offers a principled and effective solution for leveraging both structured and unstructured textual data in hierarchical book genre analysis.

Paperid: 3303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13107.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal 3D object detection is important for reliable perception in robotics and autonomous driving. However, its effectiveness remains limited under adverse weather conditions due to weather-induced distortions and misalignment between different data modalities. In this work, we propose DiffFusion, a novel framework designed to enhance robustness in challenging weather through diffusion-based restoration and adaptive cross-modal fusion. Our key insight is that diffusion models possess strong capabilities for denoising and generating data that can adapt to various weather conditions. Building on this, DiffFusion introduces Diffusion-IR restoring images degraded by weather effects and Point Cloud Restoration (PCR) compensating for corrupted LiDAR data using image object cues. To tackle misalignments between two modalities, we develop Bidirectional Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Module (BAFAM). It enables dynamic multi-modal fusion and bidirectional bird's-eye view (BEV) alignment to maintain consistent spatial correspondence. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DiffFusion achieves state-of-the-art robustness under adverse weather while preserving strong clean-data performance. Zero-shot results on the real-world DENSE dataset further validate its generalization. The implementation of our DiffFusion will be released as open-source.

Paperid: 3304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11826.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces FSL-HDnn, an energy-efficient accelerator that implements the end-to-end pipeline of feature extraction and on-device few-shot learning (FSL). The accelerator addresses fundamental challenges of on-device learning (ODL) for resource-constrained edge applications through two synergistic modules: a parameter-efficient feature extractor employing weight clustering and an FSL classifier based on hyperdimensional computing (HDC). The feature extractor exploits the weight clustering mechanism to reduce computational complexity, while the HDC-based FSL classifier eliminates gradient-based back propagation operations, enabling single-pass training with substantially reduced latency. Additionally, FSL-HDnn enables low-latency ODL and inference via two proposed optimization strategies, including an early-exit mechanism with branch feature extraction and batched single-pass training that improves hardware utilization. Measurement results demonstrate that our chip fabricated in a 40 nm CMOS process delivers superior training energy efficiency of 6 mJ/image and end-to-end training throughput of 28 images/s on a 10-way 5-shot FSL task. The end-to-end training latency is also reduced by 2x to 20.9x compared to state-of-the-art ODL chips.

Paperid: 3305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08820.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced our capabilities in cross-modal reasoning. However, existing methods suffer from performance degradation with domain changes or require substantial computational resources for fine-tuning in new domains. To address this issue, we develop a new adaptation method for large vision-language models, called \textit{Training-free Dual Hyperbolic Adapters} (T-DHA). We characterize the vision-language relationship between semantic concepts, which typically has a hierarchical tree structure, in the hyperbolic space instead of the traditional Euclidean space. Hyperbolic spaces exhibit exponential volume growth with radius, unlike the polynomial growth in Euclidean space. We find that this unique property is particularly effective for embedding hierarchical data structures using the Poincaré ball model, achieving significantly improved representation and discrimination power. Coupled with negative learning, it provides more accurate and robust classifications with fewer feature dimensions. Our extensive experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that the T-DHA method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in few-shot image recognition and domain generalization tasks.

Paperid: 3306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05657.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic communication systems aim to transmit task-relevant information between devices capable of artificial intelligence, but their performance can degrade when heterogeneous transmitter-receiver models produce misaligned latent representations. Existing semantic alignment methods typically rely on additional digital processing at the transmitter or receiver, increasing overall device complexity. In this work, we introduce the first over-the-air semantic alignment framework based on stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM), which enables latent-space alignment directly in the wave domain, reducing substantially the computational burden at the device level. We model SIMs as trainable linear operators capable of emulating both supervised linear aligners and zero-shot Parseval-frame-based equalizers. To realize these operators physically, we develop a gradient-based optimization procedure that tailors the metasurface transfer function to a desired semantic mapping. Experiments with heterogeneous vision transformer (ViT) encoders show that SIMs can accurately reproduce both supervised and zero-shot semantic equalizers, achieving up to 90% task accuracy in regimes with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while maintaining strong robustness even at low SNR values.

Paperid: 3307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18281.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models (DMs) produce high-quality images, yet their sampling remains costly when adapted to new domains. Distilled DMs are faster but typically remain confined within their teacher's domain. Thus, fast and high-quality generation for novel domains relies on two-stage training pipelines: Adapt-then-Distill or Distill-then-Adapt. However, both add design complexity and suffer from degraded quality or diversity. We introduce Uni-DAD, a single-stage pipeline that unifies distillation and adaptation of DMs. It couples two signals during training: (i) a dual-domain distribution-matching distillation objective that guides the student toward the distributions of the source teacher and a target teacher, and (ii) a multi-head generative adversarial network (GAN) loss that encourages target realism across multiple feature scales. The source domain distillation preserves diverse source knowledge, while the multi-head GAN stabilizes training and reduces overfitting, especially in few-shot regimes. The inclusion of a target teacher facilitates adaptation to more structurally distant domains. We perform evaluations on a variety of datasets for few-shot image generation (FSIG) and subject-driven personalization (SDP). Uni-DAD delivers higher quality than state-of-the-art (SoTA) adaptation methods even with less than 4 sampling steps, and outperforms two-stage training pipelines in both quality and diversity.

Paperid: 3308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14238.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zero-shot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose WeSTAR, a parameter-efficient framework that performs Weakly supervised Self-Training Adaptation with Regularization, designed to enhance the robustness of MDE foundation models in unseen and diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that WeSTAR consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

Paperid: 3309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06240.pdf

Abstract:
In open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM), task success often hinges on the selection of an appropriate base placement for the robot. Existing approaches typically navigate to proximity-based regions without considering affordances, resulting in frequent manipulation failures. We propose Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration, a zero-shot framework for base placement that integrates semantic understanding from vision-language models (VLMs) with geometric feasibility through an iterative optimization process. Our method constructs cross-modal representations, namely Affordance RGB and Obstacle Map+, to align semantics with spatial context. This enables reasoning that extends beyond the egocentric limitations of RGB perception. To ensure interaction is guided by task-relevant affordances, we leverage coarse semantic priors from VLMs to guide the search toward task-relevant regions and refine placements with geometric constraints, thereby reducing the risk of convergence to local optima. Evaluated on five diverse open-vocabulary mobile manipulation tasks, our system achieves an 85% success rate, significantly outperforming classical geometric planners and VLM-based methods. This demonstrates the promise of affordance-aware and multimodal reasoning for generalizable, instruction-conditioned planning in OVMM.

Paperid: 3310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26344.pdf

Abstract:
This paper studies how to achieve accurate modeling and effective control in stochastic nonlinear dynamics with multiple interacting objects. However, non-uniform interactions and random topologies make this task challenging. We address these challenges by proposing \textit{Graph Controllable Embeddings} (GCE), a general framework to learn stochastic multi-object dynamics for linear control. Specifically, GCE is built on Hilbert space embeddings, allowing direct embedding of probability distributions of controlled stochastic dynamics into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which enables linear operations in its RKHS while retaining nonlinear expressiveness. We provide theoretical guarantees on the existence, convergence, and applicability of GCE. Notably, a mean field approximation technique is adopted to efficiently capture inter-object dependencies and achieve provably low sample complexity. By integrating graph neural networks, we construct data-dependent kernel features that are capable of adapting to dynamic interaction patterns and generalizing to even unseen topologies with only limited training instances. GCE scales seamlessly to multi-object systems of varying sizes and topologies. Leveraging the linearity of Hilbert spaces, GCE also supports simple yet effective control algorithms for synthesizing optimal sequences. Experiments on physical systems, robotics, and power grids validate GCE and demonstrate consistent performance improvement over various competitive embedding methods in both in-distribution and few-shot tests

Paperid: 3311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15434.pdf

Abstract:
Street-view imagery (SVI) offers a fine-grained lens on traffic risk, yet two fundamental challenges persist: (1) how to construct street-level indicators that capture accident-related features, and (2) how to quantify their causal impacts across different accident types. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic4Safety, a framework that applies zero-shot semantic segmentation to SVIs to derive 11 interpretable streetscape indicators, and integrates road type as contextual information to analyze approximately 30,000 accident records in Austin. Specifically, we train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) multi-class classifier and use Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) to interpret both global and local feature contributions, and then apply Generalized Propensity Score (GPS) weighting and Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation to control confounding and quantify causal effects. Results uncover heterogeneous, accident-type-specific causal patterns: features capturing scene complexity, exposure, and roadway geometry dominate predictive power; larger drivable area and emergency space reduce risk, whereas excessive visual openness can increase it. By bridging predictive modeling with causal inference, Semantic4Safety supports targeted interventions and high-risk corridor diagnosis, offering a scalable, data-informed tool for urban road safety planning.

Paperid: 3312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12618.pdf

Abstract:
High-dimensional recordings of dynamical processes are often characterized by a much smaller set of effective variables, evolving on low-dimensional manifolds. Identifying these latent dynamics requires solving two intertwined problems: discovering appropriate coarse-grained variables and simultaneously fitting the governing equations. Most machine learning approaches tackle these tasks jointly by training autoencoders together with models that enforce dynamical consistency. We propose to decouple the two problems by leveraging the recently introduced Foundation Inference Models (FIMs). FIMs are pretrained models that estimate the infinitesimal generators of dynamical systems (e.g., the drift and diffusion of a stochastic differential equation) in zero-shot mode. By amortizing the inference of the dynamics through a FIM with frozen weights, and training only the encoder-decoder map, we define a simple, simulation-consistent loss that stabilizes representation learning. A proof of concept on a stochastic double-well system with semicircle diffusion, embedded into synthetic video data, illustrates the potential of this approach for fast and reusable coarse-graining pipelines.

Paperid: 3313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11115.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses the challenge of classifying novel classes with limited training samples. While some methods leverage semantic knowledge from smaller-scale models to mitigate data scarcity, these approaches often introduce noise and bias due to the data's inherent simplicity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Synergistic Knowledge Transfer (SynTrans), which effectively transfers diverse and complementary knowledge from large multimodal models to empower the off-the-shelf few-shot learner. Specifically, SynTrans employs CLIP as a robust teacher and uses a few-shot vision encoder as a weak student, distilling semantic-aligned visual knowledge via an unsupervised proxy task. Subsequently, a training-free synergistic knowledge mining module facilitates collaboration among large multimodal models to extract high-quality semantic knowledge. Building upon this, a visual-semantic bridging module enables bi-directional knowledge transfer between visual and semantic spaces, transforming explicit visual and implicit semantic knowledge into category-specific classifier weights. Finally, SynTrans introduces a visual weight generator and a semantic weight reconstructor to adaptively construct optimal multimodal FSL classifiers. Experimental results on four FSL datasets demonstrate that SynTrans, even when paired with a simple few-shot vision encoder, significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07858.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a promising avenue for time series forecasting, offering the potential to integrate multimodal data. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations-such as marginalized role in model architectures, reliance on coarse statistical text prompts, and lack of interpretability. In this work, we introduce Augur, a fully LLM driven time series forecasting framework that exploits LLM causal reasoning to discover and use directed causal associations among covariates. Augur uses a two stage teacher student architecture where a powerful teacher LLM infers a directed causal graph from time series using heuristic search together with pairwise causality testing. A lightweight student agent then refines the graph and fine tune on high confidence causal associations that are encoded as rich textual prompts to perform forecasting. This design improves predictive accuracy while yielding transparent, traceable reasoning about variable interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with 25 baselines demonstrate that Augur achieves competitive performance and robust zero-shot generalization.

Paperid: 3315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06249.pdf

Abstract:
The 2025 Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Contexts and Social Impact (MMLoSo) Language Challenge addresses one of India's most pressing linguistic gaps: the lack of resources for its diverse low-resource languages (LRLs). In this study, we investigate whether enforcing cross-lingual similarity in specific internal layers of a decoder-only multilingual large language model (LLM) can improve translation quality from LRL to high-resource language (HRL). Specifically, we combine Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), a similarity metric that encourages representations of different languages to align, with REPINA, a regularization method that constrains parameter updates to remain close to the pretrained model, into a joint method we call TRepLiNa. In this research project, we experiment with zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings using Aya-23 8B with QLoRA across MMLoSo shared task language pairs (Mundari, Santali, Bhili) with Hindi/English pivots. Our results show that aligning mid-level layers using TRepLiNa (CKA+REPINA) is a low-cost, practical approach to improving LRL translation, especially in data-scarce settings.

Paperid: 3316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04738.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MAVE (Mamba with Cross-Attention for Voice Editing and Synthesis), a novel autoregressive architecture for text-conditioned voice editing and high-fidelity text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, built on a cross-attentive Mamba backbone. MAVE achieves state-of-the-art performance in speech editing and very competitive results in zero-shot TTS, while not being explicitly trained on the latter task, outperforming leading autoregressive and diffusion models on diverse, real-world audio. By integrating Mamba for efficient audio sequence modeling with cross-attention for precise text-acoustic alignment, MAVE enables context-aware voice editing with exceptional naturalness and speaker consistency. In pairwise human evaluations on a random 40-sample subset of the RealEdit benchmark (400 judgments), 57.2% of listeners rated MAVE - edited speech as perceptually equal to the original, while 24.8% prefered the original and 18.0% MAVE - demonstrating that in the majority of cases edits are indistinguishable from the source. MAVE compares favorably with VoiceCraft and FluentSpeech both on pairwise comparisons and standalone mean opinion score (MOS) evaluations. For zero-shot TTS, MAVE exceeds VoiceCraft in both speaker similarity and naturalness, without requiring multiple inference runs or post-processing. Remarkably, these quality gains come with a significantly lower memory cost and approximately the same latency: MAVE requires ~6x less memory than VoiceCraft during inference on utterances from the RealEdit database (mean duration: 6.21s, A100, FP16, batch size 1). Our results demonstrate that MAVE establishes a new standard for flexible, high-fidelity voice editing and synthesis through the synergistic integration of structured state-space modeling and cross-modal attention.

Paperid: 3317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03509.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot classification and meta-learning methods typically struggle to generalize across diverse domains, as most approaches focus on a single dataset, failing to transfer knowledge across various seen and unseen domains. Existing solutions often suffer from low accuracy, high computational costs, and rely on restrictive assumptions. In this paper, we introduce the notion of task-level contrastiveness, a novel approach designed to address issues of existing methods. We start by introducing simple ways to define task augmentations, and thereafter define a task-level contrastive loss that encourages unsupervised clustering of task representations. Our method is lightweight and can be easily integrated within existing few-shot/meta-learning algorithms while providing significant benefits. Crucially, it leads to improved generalization and computational efficiency without requiring prior knowledge of task domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through different experiments on the MetaDataset benchmark, where it achieves superior performance without additional complexity.

Paperid: 3318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03174.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional topic models such as neural topic models rely on inference and generation networks to learn latent topic distributions. This paper explores a new paradigm for topic modeling in the era of large language models, framing TM as a long-form generation task whose definition is updated in this paradigm. We propose a simple but practical approach to implement LLM-based topic model tasks out of the box (sample a data subset, generate topics and representative text with our prompt, text assignment with keyword match). We then investigate whether the long-form generation paradigm can beat NTMs via zero-shot prompting. We conduct a systematic comparison between NTMs and LLMs in terms of topic quality and empirically examine the claim that "a majority of NTMs are outdated."

Paperid: 3319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01009.pdf

Abstract:
Video Question Answering (VQA) with Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) has gained significant traction in research ever since the Flamingo was introduced by Deepmind. Recent advancements in large context/long video question answering have allowed VQA tasks to have context window of 1500+ frames. However, this only leads to 50 seconds of video footage without losing any significant information. We introduce POVQA, a data-efficient pipeline that compresses each second of video into a single temporally pooled image (via motion blur and weighted averaging variants) and then align LVLMs with lightweight supervision. Concretely, we build 1 fps input sources using Blend Blur with Last Frame, Weighted Average, Exponential and Ramp pooling and fine-tune QWEN-2.5-VL 7B with supervised two turn target including reasoning and final answer. We apply Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on our novel dataset ReasonVQA consisting of 12 movies with 239 human annotated question-answer with reasoning prompts. On our ReasonVQA dataset, this method dramatically improves performance over pooled baselines: F1 score improves from 0.212 to 0.543, BLEU-4 from 0.031 to 0.291, and ROUGE-L from 0.196 to 0.528. Rationale quality also significantly increases. Cross-evaluation of SFT + DPO on various pooling functions show that the gains persist regardless of the pooling scheme used at train or test time, indicating strong robustness on summarization of temporal evidence. Similar observations were made on zero-shot in TVQA.

Paperid: 3320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26347.pdf

Abstract:
Recent evaluations of time-series foundation models (TSFMs) have emphasized synthetic benchmarks, leaving real-world generalization less thoroughly examined. This work proposes a novel benchmarking approach that bridges synthetic and realistic data by extracting temporal signals from real-world video using optical flow and curating datasets reflecting everyday temporal dynamics. Building upon this pipeline, we introduce REAL-V-TSFM, a novel dataset designed to capture rich and diverse time series derived from real-world videos. Experimental results on three state-of-the-art of TSFMs under zero-shot forecasting shows that, despite strong performance on conventional benchmarks, these models predominantly exhibit performance degradation on the proposed dataset, indicating limited generalizability in these foundation models. These findings highlight the urgent need for data-centric benchmarking and diverse model structure to advance TSFMs toward genuine universality, while further validating the effectiveness of our video-based time series data extraction pipeline.

Paperid: 3321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21190.pdf

Abstract:
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical task, but developing models that generalize to unseen data in a zero-shot manner remains a major challenge. Prevailing foundation models for TSAD predominantly rely on reconstruction-based objectives, which suffer from a fundamental objective mismatch: they struggle to identify subtle anomalies while often misinterpreting complex normal patterns, leading to high rates of false negatives and positives. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \texttt{TimeRCD}, a novel foundation model for TSAD built upon a new pre-training paradigm: Relative Context Discrepancy (RCD). Instead of learning to reconstruct inputs, \texttt{TimeRCD} is explicitly trained to identify anomalies by detecting significant discrepancies between adjacent time windows. This relational approach, implemented with a standard Transformer architecture, enables the model to capture contextual shifts indicative of anomalies that reconstruction-based methods often miss. To facilitate this paradigm, we develop a large-scale, diverse synthetic corpus with token-level anomaly labels, providing the rich supervisory signal necessary for effective pre-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \texttt{TimeRCD} significantly outperforms existing general-purpose and anomaly-specific foundation models in zero-shot TSAD across diverse datasets. Our results validate the superiority of the RCD paradigm and establish a new, effective path toward building robust and generalizable foundation models for time series anomaly detection.

Paperid: 3322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21153.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce WAVECLIP, a single unified model for adaptive resolution inference in CLIP, enabled by wavelet-based tokenization. WAVECLIP replaces standard patch embeddings with a multi-level wavelet decomposition, enabling the model to process images coarse to fine while naturally supporting multiple resolutions within the same model. At inference time, the model begins with low resolution tokens and refines only when needed, using key-value caching and causal cross-level attention to reuse computation, effectively introducing to the model only new information when needed. We evaluate WAVECLIP in zero-shot classification, demonstrating that a simple confidence-based gating mechanism enables adaptive early exits. This allows users to dynamically choose a compute-accuracy trade-off using a single deployed model. Our approach requires only lightweight distillation from a frozen CLIP teacher and achieves competitive accuracy with significant computational savings.

Paperid: 3323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19883.pdf

Abstract:
Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) aims to generate expressive vocal performances from structured musical inputs such as lyrics and pitch sequences. While recent progress in discrete codec-based speech synthesis has enabled zero-shot generation via in-context learning, directly extending these techniques to SVS remains non-trivial due to the requirement for precise melody control. In particular, prompt-based generation often introduces prosody leakage, where pitch information is inadvertently entangled within the timbre prompt, compromising controllability. We present CoMelSinger, a zero-shot SVS framework that enables structured and disentangled melody control within a discrete codec modeling paradigm. Built on the non-autoregressive MaskGCT architecture, CoMelSinger replaces conventional text inputs with lyric and pitch tokens, preserving in-context generalization while enhancing melody conditioning. To suppress prosody leakage, we propose a coarse-to-fine contrastive learning strategy that explicitly regularizes pitch redundancy between the acoustic prompt and melody input. Furthermore, we incorporate a lightweight encoder-only Singing Voice Transcription (SVT) module to align acoustic tokens with pitch and duration, offering fine-grained frame-level supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that CoMelSinger achieves notable improvements in pitch accuracy, timbre consistency, and zero-shot transferability over competitive baselines.

Paperid: 3324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18717.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are threatened by targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. Previous defense methods correct poisoned image-caption pairs by matching a new caption for each image. However, the matching process relies solely on the global representations of images and captions, overlooking fine-grained features of visual and textual features. It may introduce incorrect image-caption pairs and harm the CLIP pre-training. To address their limitations, we propose an Optimal Transport-based framework to reconstruct image-caption pairs, named OTCCLIP. We propose a new optimal transport-based distance measure between fine-grained visual and textual feature sets and re-assign new captions based on the proposed optimal transport distance. Additionally, to further reduce the negative impact of mismatched pairs, we encourage the inter- and intra-modality fine-grained alignment by employing optimal transport-based objective functions. Our experiments demonstrate that OTCCLIP can successfully decrease the attack success rates of poisoning attacks. Also, compared to previous methods, OTCCLIP significantly improves CLIP's zero-shot and linear probing performance trained on poisoned datasets.

Paperid: 3325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18151.pdf

Abstract:
Time-intensive performance evaluations significantly impede progress in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To address this, neural predictors leverage surrogate models trained on proxy datasets, allowing for direct performance predictions for new architectures. However, these predictors often exhibit poor generalization due to their limited ability to capture intricate relationships among various architectures. In this paper, we propose HyperNAS, a novel neural predictor paradigm for enhancing architecture representation learning. HyperNAS consists of two primary components: a global encoding scheme and a shared hypernetwork. The global encoding scheme is devised to capture the comprehensive macro-structure information, while the shared hypernetwork serves as an auxiliary task to enhance the investigation of inter-architecture patterns. To ensure training stability, we further develop a dynamic adaptive multi-task loss to facilitate personalized exploration on the Pareto front. Extensive experiments across five representative search spaces, including ViTs, demonstrate the advantages of HyperNAS, particularly in few-shot scenarios. For instance, HyperNAS strikes new state-of-the-art results, with 97.60\% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 82.4\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, using at least 5.0$\times$ fewer samples.

Paperid: 3326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18030.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce RadEval, a unified, open-source framework for evaluating radiology texts. RadEval consolidates a diverse range of metrics, from classic n-gram overlap (BLEU, ROUGE) and contextual measures (BERTScore) to clinical concept-based scores (F1CheXbert, F1RadGraph, RaTEScore, SRR-BERT, TemporalEntityF1) and advanced LLM-based evaluators (GREEN). We refine and standardize implementations, extend GREEN to support multiple imaging modalities with a more lightweight model, and pretrain a domain-specific radiology encoder, demonstrating strong zero-shot retrieval performance. We also release a richly annotated expert dataset with over 450 clinically significant error labels and show how different metrics correlate with radiologist judgment. Finally, RadEval provides statistical testing tools and baseline model evaluations across multiple publicly available datasets, facilitating reproducibility and robust benchmarking in radiology report generation.

Paperid: 3327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13255.pdf

Abstract:
Several video understanding tasks, such as natural language temporal video grounding, temporal activity localization, and audio description generation, require "temporally dense" reasoning over frames sampled at high temporal resolution. However, computing frame-level features for these tasks is computationally expensive given the temporal resolution requirements. In this paper, we make three contributions to reduce the cost of computing features for temporally dense tasks. First, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) architecture, dubbed ResidualViT, that leverages the large temporal redundancy in videos to efficiently compute temporally dense frame-level features. Our architecture incorporates (i) learnable residual connections that ensure temporal consistency across consecutive frames and (ii) a token reduction module that enhances processing speed by selectively discarding temporally redundant information while reusing weights of a pretrained foundation model. Second, we propose a lightweight distillation strategy to approximate the frame-level features of the original foundation model. Finally, we evaluate our approach across four tasks and five datasets, in both zero-shot and fully supervised settings, demonstrating significant reductions in computational cost (up to 60%) and improvements in inference speed (up to 2.5x faster), all while closely approximating the accuracy of the original foundation model.

Paperid: 3328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12517.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate how the presence and type of interaction context shapes sycophancy in LLMs. Although real-world interactions allow models to mirror a user's values, preferences, and self-image, prior work often studies sycophancy in zero-shot settings devoid of context. Using two weeks of interaction context from 38 users, we evaluate two forms of sycophancy: (1) agreement sycophancy -- the tendency of models to produce overly affirmative responses, and (2) perspective sycophancy -- the extent to which models reflect a user's viewpoint. Agreement sycophancy tends to increase with the presence of user context, though model behavior varies based on the context type. User memory profiles are associated with the largest increases in agreement sycophancy (e.g. 45% for Gemini 2.5 Pro), and some models become more sycophantic even with non-user synthetic contexts (e.g. 15% for Llama 4 Scout). Perspective sycophancy increases only when models can accurately infer user viewpoints from interaction context. Overall, context shapes sycophancy in heterogeneous ways, underscoring the need for evaluations grounded in real-world interactions and raising questions for system design around extended conversations.

Paperid: 3329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11364.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate 6-DoF object pose estimation and tracking are critical for reliable robotic manipulation. However, zero-shot methods often fail under viewpoint-induced ambiguities and fixed-camera setups struggle when objects move or become self-occluded. To address these challenges, we propose an active pose estimation pipeline that combines a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with "robotic imagination" to dynamically detect and resolve ambiguities in real time. In an offline stage, we render a dense set of views of the CAD model, compute the FoundationPose entropy for each view, and construct a geometric-aware prompt that includes low-entropy (unambiguous) and high-entropy (ambiguous) examples. At runtime, the system: (1) queries the VLM on the live image for an ambiguity score; (2) if ambiguity is detected, imagines a discrete set of candidate camera poses by rendering virtual views, scores each based on a weighted combination of VLM ambiguity probability and FoundationPose entropy, and then moves the camera to the Next-Best-View (NBV) to obtain a disambiguated pose estimation. Furthermore, since moving objects may leave the camera's field of view, we introduce an active pose tracking module: a diffusion-policy trained via imitation learning, which generates camera trajectories that preserve object visibility and minimize pose ambiguity. Experiments in simulation and real-world show that our approach significantly outperforms classical baselines.

Paperid: 3330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11084.pdf

Abstract:
Many recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems are built on transformer architectures and employ cross-attention mechanisms for text-speech alignment. Within these systems, rotary position embedding (RoPE) is commonly used to encode positional information in text and speech representations. In this work, we introduce length-aware RoPE (LARoPE), a simple yet effective extension of RoPE that improves text-speech alignment. Unlike RoPE, which relies on absolute indices, LARoPE computes relative distances between query and key positions using length-normalized indices. Experimental results show that LARoPE consistently outperforms RoPE, offering faster loss convergence, more accurate text-speech alignment, and higher overall TTS quality. Furthermore, LARoPE demonstrates greater resilience to variations in utterance duration and maintains stable performance in extended speech generation up to 30 seconds, whereas RoPE suffers from notable degradation. Notably, our method achieves a state-of-the-art word error rate on a standard zero-shot TTS benchmark.

Paperid: 3331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11016.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant efforts to manually design high-performance evolutionary algorithms, their adaptability remains limited due to the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of real-world problems. The "no free lunch" theorem highlights that no single algorithm performs optimally across all problems. While online adaptation methods have been proposed, they often suffer from inefficiency, weak convergence, and limited generalization on constrained optimization problems (COPs). To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework for automated component configuration in Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to address COPs, powered by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Specifically, we propose SuperDE, a foundation model that dynamically configures DE's evolutionary components based on real-time evolution. Trained offline through meta-learning across a wide variety of COPs, SuperDE is capable of recommending optimal per-generation configurations for unseen problems in a zero-shot manner. Utilizing a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), SuperDE adapts its configuration strategies in response to the evolving population states during optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that SuperDE significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark test suites, achieving superior generalization and optimization performance.

Paperid: 3332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10729.pdf

Abstract:
Sensor data streams provide valuable information around activities and context for downstream applications, though integrating complementary information can be challenging. We show that large language models (LLMs) can be used for late fusion for activity classification from audio and motion time series data. We curated a subset of data for diverse activity recognition across contexts (e.g., household activities, sports) from the Ego4D dataset. Evaluated LLMs achieved 12-class zero- and one-shot classification F1-scores significantly above chance, with no task-specific training. Zero-shot classification via LLM-based fusion from modality-specific models can enable multimodal temporal applications where there is limited aligned training data for learning a shared embedding space. Additionally, LLM-based fusion can enable model deploying without requiring additional memory and computation for targeted application-specific multimodal models.

Paperid: 3333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07473.pdf

Abstract:
Spreadsheets are critical to data-centric tasks, with rich, structured layouts that enable efficient information transmission. Given the time and expertise required for manual spreadsheet layout design, there is an urgent need for automated solutions. However, existing automated layout models are ill-suited to spreadsheets, as they often (1) treat components as axis-aligned rectangles with continuous coordinates, overlooking the inherently discrete, grid-based structure of spreadsheets; and (2) neglect interrelated semantics, such as data dependencies and contextual links, unique to spreadsheets. In this paper, we first formalize the spreadsheet layout generation task, supported by a seven-criterion evaluation protocol and a dataset of 3,326 spreadsheets. We then introduce SheetDesigner, a zero-shot and training-free framework using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that combines rule and vision reflection for component placement and content population. SheetDesigner outperforms five baselines by at least 22.6\%. We further find that through vision modality, MLLMs handle overlap and balance well but struggle with alignment, necessitates hybrid rule and visual reflection strategies. Our codes and data is available at Github.

Paperid: 3334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04063.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models based on flow matching have shown excellent performance in general-purpose robotic manipulation tasks. However, the action accuracy of these models on complex downstream tasks is unsatisfactory. One important reason is that these models rely solely on the post-training paradigm of imitation learning, which makes it difficult to have a deeper understanding of the distribution properties of data quality, which is exactly what Reinforcement Learning (RL) excels at. In this paper, we theoretically propose an offline RL post-training objective for VLA flow models and induce an efficient and feasible offline RL fine-tuning algorithm -- Adaptive Reinforced Flow Matching (ARFM). By introducing an adaptively adjusted scaling factor in the VLA flow model loss, we construct a principled bias-variance trade-off objective function to optimally control the impact of RL signal on flow loss. ARFM adaptively balances RL advantage preservation and flow loss gradient variance control, resulting in a more stable and efficient fine-tuning process. Extensive simulation and real-world experimental results show that ARFM exhibits excellent generalization, robustness, few-shot learning, and continuous learning performance.

Paperid: 3335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02129.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has evolved from handcrafted descriptors to deep learning approaches, yet significant challenges remain. Current approaches, including Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enhance semantic understanding but suffer from high computational overhead and limited cross-domain transferability when fine-tuned. To address these limitations, we propose a novel zero-shot framework employing Test-Time Scaling (TTS) that leverages MLLMs' vision-language alignment capabilities through Guidance-based methods for direct similarity scoring. Our approach eliminates two-stage processing by employing structured prompts that generate length-controllable JSON outputs. The TTS framework with Uncertainty-Aware Self-Consistency (UASC) enables real-time adaptation without additional training costs, achieving superior generalization across diverse environments. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in cross-domain VPR performance with up to 210$\times$ computational efficiency gains.

Paperid: 3336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21561.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies show the promise of large language models (LLMs) for few-shot tabular classification but highlight challenges due to the variability in structured data. To address this, we propose distilling data into actionable insights to enable robust and effective classification by LLMs. Drawing inspiration from human learning processes, we introduce InsightTab, an insight distillation framework guided by principles of divide-and-conquer, easy-first, and reflective learning. Our approach integrates rule summarization, strategic exemplification, and insight reflection through deep collaboration between LLMs and data modeling techniques. The obtained insights enable LLMs to better align their general knowledge and capabilities with the particular requirements of specific tabular tasks. We extensively evaluate InsightTab on nine datasets. The results demonstrate consistent improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further validate the principle-guided distillation process, while analyses emphasize InsightTab's effectiveness in leveraging labeled data and managing bias.

Paperid: 3337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15239.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models excel at instruction-following in English, but their performance in low-resource languages like Thai remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often rely on translations, missing cultural and domain-specific nuances needed for real-world use. We present WangchanThaiInstruct, a human-authored Thai dataset for evaluation and instruction tuning, covering four professional domains and seven task types. Created through a multi-stage quality control process with annotators, domain experts, and AI researchers, WangchanThaiInstruct supports two studies: (1) a zero-shot evaluation showing performance gaps on culturally and professionally specific tasks, and (2) an instruction tuning study with ablations isolating the effect of native supervision. Models fine-tuned on WangchanThaiInstruct outperform those using translated data in both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. These findings underscore the need for culturally and professionally grounded instruction data to improve LLM alignment in low-resource, linguistically diverse settings.

Paperid: 3338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12149.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal learning have largely relied on pairwise contrastive objectives to align different modalities, such as text, video, and audio, in a shared embedding space. While effective in bi-modal setups, these approaches struggle to generalize across multiple modalities and often lack semantic structure in high-dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose MOVER, a novel framework that combines optimal transport-based soft alignment with volume-based geometric regularization to build semantically aligned and structured multimodal representations. By integrating a transport-guided matching mechanism with a geometric volume minimization objective (GAVE), MOVER encourages consistent alignment across all modalities in a modality-agnostic manner. Experiments on text-video-audio retrieval tasks demonstrate that MOVER significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in both zero-shot and finetuned settings. Additional analysis shows improved generalization to unseen modality combinations and stronger structural consistency in the learned embedding space.

Paperid: 3339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06915.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting has become increasingly important to empower diverse applications with streaming data. Zero-shot time-series forecasting (ZSF), particularly valuable in data-scarce scenarios, such as domain transfer or forecasting under extreme conditions, is difficult for traditional models to deal with. While time series pre-trained models (TSPMs) have demonstrated strong performance in ZSF, they often lack mechanisms to dynamically incorporate external knowledge. Fortunately, emerging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a promising path for injecting such knowledge on demand, yet they are rarely integrated with TSPMs. To leverage the strengths of both worlds, we introduce RAG into TSPMs to enhance zero-shot time series forecasting. In this paper, we propose QuiZSF (Quick Zero-Shot Time Series Forecaster), a lightweight and modular framework that couples efficient retrieval with representation learning and model adaptation for ZSF. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical tree-structured ChronoRAG Base (CRB) for scalable time-series storage and domain-aware retrieval, introduce a Multi-grained Series Interaction Learner (MSIL) to extract fine- and coarse-grained relational features, and develop a dual-branch Model Cooperation Coherer (MCC) that aligns retrieved knowledge with two kinds of TSPMs: Non-LLM based and LLM based. Compared with contemporary baselines, QuiZSF, with Non-LLM based and LLM based TSPMs as base model, respectively, ranks Top1 in 75% and 87.5% of prediction settings, while maintaining high efficiency in memory and inference time.

Paperid: 3340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04297.pdf

Abstract:
We present Multi-Baseline Gaussian Splatting (MuRF), a generalized feed-forward approach for novel view synthesis that effectively handles diverse baseline settings, including sparse input views with both small and large baselines. Specifically, we integrate features from Multi-View Stereo (MVS) and Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) to enhance feature representations for generalizable reconstruction. Next, We propose a projection-and-sampling mechanism for deep depth fusion, which constructs a fine probability volume to guide the regression of the feature map. Furthermore, We introduce a reference-view loss to improve geometry and optimization efficiency. We leverage 3D Gaussian representations to accelerate training and inference time while enhancing rendering quality. MuRF achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple baseline settings and diverse scenarios ranging from simple objects (DTU) to complex indoor and outdoor scenes (RealEstate10K). We also demonstrate promising zero-shot performance on the LLFF and Mip-NeRF 360 datasets.

Paperid: 3341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03470.pdf

Abstract:
Various Deep Learning-based approaches with pre-trained language models have been proposed for automatically repairing software vulnerabilities. However, these approaches are limited to a specific programming language (C/C++). Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer language-agnostic capabilities and strong semantic understanding, exhibiting potential to overcome multilingual vulnerability limitations. Although some work has begun to explore LLMs' repair performance, their effectiveness is unsatisfactory. To address these limitations, we conducted a large-scale empirical study to investigate the performance of automated vulnerability repair approaches and state-of-the-art LLMs across seven programming languages. Results show GPT-4o, instruction-tuned with few-shot prompting, performs competitively against the leading approach, VulMaster. Additionally, the LLM-based approach shows superior performance in repairing unique vulnerabilities and is more likely to repair the most dangerous vulnerabilities. Instruction-tuned GPT-4o demonstrates strong generalization on vulnerabilities in previously unseen language, outperforming existing approaches. Analysis shows Go consistently achieves the highest effectiveness across all model types, while C/C++ performs the worst. Based on findings, we discuss the promise of LLM on multilingual vulnerability repair and the reasons behind LLM's failed cases. This work takes the first look at repair approaches and LLMs across multiple languages, highlighting the promising future of adopting LLMs for multilingual vulnerability repair.

Paperid: 3342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17859.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate fish detection in underwater imagery is essential for ecological monitoring, aquaculture automation, and robotic perception. However, practical deployment remains limited by fragmented datasets, heterogeneous imaging conditions, and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To address these gaps, we present \textit{FishDet-M}, the largest unified benchmark for fish detection, comprising 13 publicly available datasets spanning diverse aquatic environments including marine, brackish, occluded, and aquarium scenes. All data are harmonized using COCO-style annotations with both bounding boxes and segmentation masks, enabling consistent and scalable cross-domain evaluation. We systematically benchmark 28 contemporary object detection models, covering the YOLOv8 to YOLOv12 series, R-CNN based detectors, and DETR based models. Evaluations are conducted using standard metrics including mAP, mAP@50, and mAP@75, along with scale-specific analyses (AP$_S$, AP$_M$, AP$_L$) and inference profiling in terms of latency and parameter count. The results highlight the varying detection performance across models trained on FishDet-M, as well as the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency across models of different architectures. To support adaptive deployment, we introduce a CLIP-based model selection framework that leverages vision-language alignment to dynamically identify the most semantically appropriate detector for each input image. This zero-shot selection strategy achieves high performance without requiring ensemble computation, offering a scalable solution for real-time applications. FishDet-M establishes a standardized and reproducible platform for evaluating object detection in complex aquatic scenes. All datasets, pretrained models, and evaluation tools are publicly available to facilitate future research in underwater computer vision and intelligent marine systems.

Paperid: 3343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07299.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in large vision-language models has driven improvements in language-based semantic navigation, where an embodied agent must reach a target object described in natural language. Yet we still lack a clear, language-focused evaluation framework to test how well agents ground the words in their instructions. We address this gap by proposing LangNav, an open-vocabulary multi-object navigation dataset with natural language goal descriptions (e.g. 'go to the red short candle on the table') and corresponding fine-grained linguistic annotations (e.g., attributes: color=red, size=short; relations: support=on). These labels enable systematic evaluation of language understanding. To evaluate on this setting, we extend multi-object navigation task setting to Language-guided Multi-Object Navigation (LaMoN), where the agent must find a sequence of goals specified using language. Furthermore, we propose Multi-Layered Feature Map (MLFM), a novel method that builds a queryable, multi-layered semantic map from pretrained vision-language features and proves effective for reasoning over fine-grained attributes and spatial relations in goal descriptions. Experiments on LangNav show that MLFM outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot mapping-based navigation baselines.

Paperid: 3344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02294.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), with its prompt-driven paradigm, exhibits strong generalization in generic segmentation tasks. However, applying SAM to remote sensing (RS) images still faces two major challenges. First, manually constructing precise prompts for each image (e.g., points or boxes) is labor-intensive and inefficient, especially in RS scenarios with dense small objects or spatially fragmented distributions. Second, SAM lacks domain adaptability, as it is pre-trained primarily on natural images and struggles to capture RS-specific semantics and spatial characteristics, especially when segmenting novel or unseen classes. To address these issues, inspired by few-shot learning, we propose ViRefSAM, a novel framework that guides SAM utilizing only a few annotated reference images that contain class-specific objects. Without requiring manual prompts, ViRefSAM enables automatic segmentation of class-consistent objects across RS images. Specifically, ViRefSAM introduces two key components while keeping SAM's original architecture intact: (1) a Visual Contextual Prompt Encoder that extracts class-specific semantic clues from reference images and generates object-aware prompts via contextual interaction with target images; and (2) a Dynamic Target Alignment Adapter, integrated into SAM's image encoder, which mitigates the domain gap by injecting class-specific semantics into target image features, enabling SAM to dynamically focus on task-relevant regions. Extensive experiments on three few-shot segmentation benchmarks, including iSAID-5$^i$, LoveDA-2$^i$, and COCO-20$^i$, demonstrate that ViRefSAM enables accurate and automatic segmentation of unseen classes by leveraging only a few reference images and consistently outperforms existing few-shot segmentation methods across diverse datasets.

Paperid: 3345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22375.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in 3D point cloud data remains a challenge, particularly in applications where safe and robust perception is critical. While existing OOD detection methods have shown progress for 2D image data, extending these to 3D environments involves unique obstacles. This paper introduces a training-free framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for effective OOD detection in 3D point clouds. By constructing a graph based on class prototypes and testing data, we exploit the data manifold structure to enhancing the effectiveness of VLMs for 3D OOD detection. We propose a novel Graph Score Propagation (GSP) method that incorporates prompt clustering and self-training negative prompting to improve OOD scoring with VLM. Our method is also adaptable to few-shot scenarios, providing options for practical applications. We demonstrate that GSP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across synthetic and real-world datasets 3D point cloud OOD detection.

Paperid: 3346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19396.pdf

Abstract:
Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) offer a principled approach for solving complex partial differential equations (PDEs). However, scaling them to handle more complex PDEs requires increasing the number of Fourier modes, which significantly expands the number of model parameters and makes hyperparameter tuning computationally impractical. To address this, we introduce $Î¼$Transfer-FNO, a zero-shot hyperparameter transfer technique that enables optimal configurations, tuned on smaller FNOs, to be directly applied to billion-parameter FNOs without additional tuning. Building on the Maximal Update Parametrization ($Î¼$P) framework, we mathematically derive a parametrization scheme that facilitates the transfer of optimal hyperparameters across models with different numbers of Fourier modes in FNOs, which is validated through extensive experiments on various PDEs. Our empirical study shows that Transfer-FNO reduces computational cost for tuning hyperparameters on large FNOs while maintaining or improving accuracy.

Paperid: 3347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15925.pdf

Abstract:
Generating unbiased summaries in real-world settings such as political perspective summarization remains a crucial application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing evaluation frameworks rely on traditional metrics for measuring key attributes such as coverage and faithfulness without verifying their applicability, and efforts to develop improved summarizers are still nascent. We address these gaps by (1) identifying reliable metrics for measuring perspective summary quality, and (2) investigating the efficacy of LLM-based methods beyond zero-shot inference. Namely, we build a test set for benchmarking metric reliability using human annotations and show that traditional metrics underperform compared to language model-based metrics, which prove to be strong evaluators. Using these metrics, we show that reranking-based methods yield strong results, and preference tuning with synthetically generated and reranking-labeled data further boosts performance. Our findings aim to contribute to the reliable evaluation and development of perspective summarization methods.

Paperid: 3348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14702.pdf

Abstract:
One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases. After training, it is hard to adapt a model to perform well on specific use cases underrepresented in the training corpus. Relying on prompt engineering or few-shot examples to maximize the output quality on a particular test case can be frustrating, as models can be highly sensitive to small changes, react in unpredicted ways or rely on a fixed system prompt for maintaining performance. In this work, we ask: "Can we optimize our training protocols to both improve controllability and performance on underrepresented use cases at inference time?" We revisit the divide between training and inference techniques to improve long-tail performance while providing users with a set of control levers the model is trained to be responsive to. We create a detailed taxonomy of data characteristics and task provenance to explicitly control generation attributes and implicitly condition generations at inference time. We fine-tune a base model to infer these markers automatically, which makes them optional at inference time. This principled and flexible approach yields pronounced improvements in performance, especially on examples from the long tail of the training distribution. While we observe an average lift of 5.7% win rates in open-ended generation quality with our markers, we see over 9.1% gains in underrepresented domains. We also observe relative lifts of up to 14.1% on underrepresented tasks like CodeRepair and absolute improvements of 35.3% on length instruction following evaluations.

Paperid: 3349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11137.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying medication discontinuations in electronic health records (EHRs) is vital for patient safety but is often hindered by information being buried in unstructured notes. This study aims to evaluate the capabilities of advanced open-sourced and proprietary large language models (LLMs) in extracting medications and classifying their medication status from EHR notes, focusing on their scalability on medication information extraction without human annotation. We collected three EHR datasets from diverse sources to build the evaluation benchmark. We evaluated 12 advanced LLMs and explored multiple LLM prompting strategies. Performance on medication extraction, medication status classification, and their joint task (extraction then classification) was systematically compared across all experiments. We found that LLMs showed promising performance on the medication extraction and discontinuation classification from EHR notes. GPT-4o consistently achieved the highest average F1 scores in all tasks under zero-shot setting - 94.0% for medication extraction, 78.1% for discontinuation classification, and 72.7% for the joint task. Open-sourced models followed closely, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct achieved the highest performance in medication status classification on the MIV-Med dataset (68.7%) and in the joint task on both the Re-CASI (76.2%) and MIV-Med (60.2%) datasets. Medical-specific LLMs demonstrated lower performance compared to advanced general-domain LLMs. Few-shot learning generally improved performance, while CoT reasoning showed inconsistent gains. LLMs demonstrate strong potential for medication extraction and discontinuation identification on EHR notes, with open-sourced models offering scalable alternatives to proprietary systems and few-shot can further improve LLMs' capability.

Paperid: 3350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10085.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise as zero-shot goal-conditioned value functions, but their frozen pre-trained representations limit generalization and temporal reasoning. We introduce VITA, a zero-shot value function learning method that enhances both capabilities via test-time adaptation. At inference, a lightweight adaptation module is updated via a gradient step on a meta-learned self-supervised loss, such that each test-time update improves value estimation. By updating sequentially over a trajectory, VITA encodes history into its parameters, addressing the temporal reasoning limitations. To mitigate shortcut learning, we propose a dissimilarity-based sampling strategy that selects semantically diverse segments of the trajectory during training. In real-world robotic manipulation tasks, VITA generalizes from a single training environment to diverse out-of-distribution tasks, environments, and embodiments, outperforming the state-of-the-art zero-shot method using autoregressive VLMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that VITA's zero-shot value estimates can be utilized for reward shaping in offline reinforcement learning, resulting in multi-task policies on the Meta-World benchmark that exceed the performance of those trained with the simulation's fuzzy-logic dense rewards.

Paperid: 3351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09740.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models excel at image generation. Recent studies have shown that these models not only generate high-quality images but also encode text-image alignment information through attention maps or loss functions. This information is valuable for various downstream tasks, including segmentation, text-guided image editing, and compositional image generation. However, current methods heavily rely on the assumption of perfect text-image alignment in diffusion models, which is not the case. In this paper, we propose using zero-shot referring image segmentation as a proxy task to evaluate the pixel-level image and class-level text alignment of popular diffusion models. We conduct an in-depth analysis of pixel-text misalignment in diffusion models from the perspective of training data bias. We find that misalignment occurs in images with small sized, occluded, or rare object classes. Therefore, we propose ELBO-T2IAlign, a simple yet effective method to calibrate pixel-text alignment in diffusion models based on the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of likelihood. Our method is training-free and generic, eliminating the need to identify the specific cause of misalignment and works well across various diffusion model architectures. Extensive experiments on commonly used benchmark datasets on image segmentation and generation have verified the effectiveness of our proposed calibration approach.

Paperid: 3352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07503.pdf

Abstract:
Various deep learning-based approaches utilizing pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed for automated vulnerability detection. With recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), several studies have begun exploring their application to vulnerability detection tasks. However, existing studies primarily focus on specific programming languages (e.g., C/C++) and function-level detection, leaving the strengths and weaknesses of PLMs and LLMs in multilingual and multi-granularity scenarios largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive fine-grained empirical study evaluating the effectiveness of state-of-the-art PLMs and LLMs for multilingual vulnerability detection. Using over 30,000 real-world vulnerability-fixing patches across seven programming languages, we systematically assess model performance at both the function-level and line-level. Our key findings indicate that GPT-4o, enhanced through instruction tuning and few-shot prompting, significantly outperforms all other evaluated models, including CodeT5P. Furthermore, the LLM-based approach demonstrates superior capability in detecting unique multilingual vulnerabilities, particularly excelling in identifying the most dangerous and high-severity vulnerabilities. These results underscore the promising potential of adopting LLMs for multilingual vulnerability detection at function-level and line-level, revealing their complementary strengths and substantial improvements over PLM approaches. This first empirical evaluation of PLMs and LLMs for multilingual vulnerability detection highlights LLMs' value in addressing real-world software security challenges.

Paperid: 3353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06487.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) allows robots to find target objects in unfamiliar environments using natural language instructions, without relying on pre-built maps or task-specific training. Recent general-purpose models, such as large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), equip agents with semantic reasoning abilities to estimate target object locations in a zero-shot manner. However, these models often greedily select the next goal without maintaining a global understanding of the environment and are fundamentally limited in the spatial reasoning necessary for effective navigation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel 3D voxel-based belief map that estimates the target's prior presence distribution within a voxelized 3D space. This approach enables agents to integrate semantic priors from LLMs and visual embeddings with hierarchical spatial structure, alongside real-time observations, to build a comprehensive 3D global posterior belief of the target's location. Building on this 3D voxel map, we introduce BeliefMapNav, an efficient navigation system with two key advantages: i) grounding LLM semantic reasoning within the 3D hierarchical semantics voxel space for precise target position estimation, and ii) integrating sequential path planning to enable efficient global navigation decisions. Experiments on HM3D, MP3D, and HSSD benchmarks show that BeliefMapNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), with a notable 46.4% SPL improvement over the previous best SR method, validating its effectiveness and efficiency.

Paperid: 3354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06113.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on NLP classification tasks. However, they typically rely on aggregated labels-often via majority voting-which can obscure the human disagreement inherent in subjective annotations. This study examines whether LLMs can capture multiple perspectives and reflect annotator disagreement in subjective tasks such as hate speech and offensive language detection. We use in-context learning (ICL) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, evaluating four open-source LLMs across three label modeling strategies: aggregated hard labels, and disaggregated hard and soft labels. In few-shot prompting, we assess demonstration selection methods based on textual similarity (BM25, PLM-based), annotation disagreement (entropy), a combined ranking, and example ordering strategies (random vs. curriculum-based). Results show that multi-perspective generation is viable in zero-shot settings, while few-shot setups often fail to capture the full spectrum of human judgments. Prompt design and demonstration selection notably affect performance, though example ordering has limited impact. These findings highlight the challenges of modeling subjectivity with LLMs and the importance of building more perspective-aware, socially intelligent models.

Paperid: 3355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00726.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a gradient-informed fine-tuning method for large language models under few-shot conditions. The goal is to enhance task adaptability and training stability when data is limited. The method builds on a base loss function and introduces two gradient-related regularization terms. The first enforces gradient direction consistency to guide parameter updates along task-relevant directions and prevent drift. The second controls gradient magnitude to avoid abnormal updates. Together, these components support a more efficient and stable optimization path. To further improve cross-task generalization, the method incorporates a gradient alignment mechanism. This mechanism measures the consistency between optimization directions of the source and target tasks. It enhances fine-tuning performance in multi-task and cross-domain scenarios. Across various natural language understanding tasks, the method outperforms existing fine-tuning strategies in average accuracy, gradient stability, and directional alignment. Empirical evaluations under different sample sizes and domain-specific tasks confirm the method's robustness and broad applicability in low-resource environments. In particular, the method shows clear advantages in controlling parameter update paths. The results demonstrate that a gradient-based fine-tuning framework can effectively leverage the representational power of large language models. It ensures training stability while reducing dependence on large volumes of labeled data.

Paperid: 3356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21809.pdf

Abstract:
Perceptual voice quality dimensions describe key characteristics of atypical speech and other speech modulations. Here we develop and evaluate voice quality models for seven voice and speech dimensions (intelligibility, imprecise consonants, harsh voice, naturalness, monoloudness, monopitch, and breathiness). Probes were trained on the public Speech Accessibility (SAP) project dataset with 11,184 samples from 434 speakers, using embeddings from frozen pre-trained models as features. We found that our probes had both strong performance and strong generalization across speech elicitation categories in the SAP dataset. We further validated zero-shot performance on additional datasets, encompassing unseen languages and tasks: Italian atypical speech, English atypical speech, and affective speech. The strong zero-shot performance and the interpretability of results across an array of evaluations suggests the utility of using voice quality dimensions in speaking style-related tasks.

Paperid: 3357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21731.pdf

Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents achieve impressive results in a wide variety of tasks, but they lack zero-shot adaptation capabilities. While most robustness evaluations focus on tasks complexifications, for which human also struggle to maintain performances, no evaluation has been performed on tasks simplifications. To tackle this issue, we introduce HackAtari, a set of task variations of the Arcade Learning Environments. We use it to demonstrate that, contrary to humans, RL agents systematically exhibit huge performance drops on simpler versions of their training tasks, uncovering agents' consistent reliance on shortcuts. Our analysis across multiple algorithms and architectures highlights the persistent gap between RL agents and human behavioral intelligence, underscoring the need for new benchmarks and methodologies that enforce systematic generalization testing beyond static evaluation protocols. Training and testing in the same environment is not enough to obtain agents equipped with human-like intelligence.

Paperid: 3358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15402.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in discrete audio codecs have significantly improved speech representation modeling, while codec language models have enabled in-context learning for zero-shot speech synthesis. Inspired by this, we propose a voice conversion (VC) model within the VALLE-X framework, leveraging its strong in-context learning capabilities for speaker adaptation. To enhance prosody control, we introduce a prosody-aware audio codec encoder (PACE) module, which isolates and refines prosody from other sources, improving expressiveness and control. By integrating PACE into our VC model, we achieve greater flexibility in prosody manipulation while preserving speaker timbre. Experimental evaluation results demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline VC systems in prosody preservation, timbre consistency, and overall naturalness, surpassing baseline VC systems.

Paperid: 3359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13777.pdf

Abstract:
We present Sat2Sound, a multimodal representation learning framework for soundscape mapping, designed to predict the distribution of sounds at any location on Earth. Existing methods for this task rely on satellite image and paired geotagged audio samples, which often fail to capture the diversity of sound sources at a given location. To address this limitation, we enhance existing datasets by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to generate semantically rich soundscape descriptions for locations depicted in satellite images. Our approach incorporates contrastive learning across audio, audio captions, satellite images, and satellite image captions. We hypothesize that there is a fixed set of soundscape concepts shared across modalities. To this end, we learn a shared codebook of soundscape concepts and represent each sample as a weighted average of these concepts. Sat2Sound achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-modal retrieval between satellite image and audio on two datasets: GeoSound and SoundingEarth. Additionally, building on Sat2Sound's ability to retrieve detailed soundscape captions, we introduce a novel application: location-based soundscape synthesis, which enables immersive acoustic experiences. Our code and models will be publicly available.

Paperid: 3360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08263.pdf

Abstract:
Tangled code changes, commits that conflate unrelated modifications such as bug fixes, refactorings, and enhancements, introduce significant noise into bug datasets and adversely affect the performance of bug prediction models. Addressing this issue at a fine-grained, method-level granularity remains underexplored. This is critical to address, as recent bug prediction models, driven by practitioner demand, are increasingly focusing on finer granularity rather than traditional class- or file-level predictions. This study investigates the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for detecting tangled code changes by leveraging both commit messages and method-level code diffs. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and evaluate multiple prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, using state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash. Our results demonstrate that combining commit messages with code diffs significantly enhances model performance, with the combined few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting achieving an F1-score of 0.88. Additionally, we explore machine learning models trained on LLM-generated embeddings, where a multi-layer perceptron classifier achieves superior performance (F1-score: 0.906, MCC: 0.807). Applying our approach to 49 open-source projects improves the distributional separability of code metrics between buggy and non-buggy methods, demonstrating the promise of LLMs for method-level commit untangling and potentially contributing to improving the accuracy of future bug prediction models.

Paperid: 3361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08234.pdf

Abstract:
As AI-generated imagery becomes ubiquitous, invisible watermarks have emerged as a primary line of defense for copyright and provenance. The newest watermarking schemes embed semantic signals - content-aware patterns that are designed to survive common image manipulations - yet their true robustness against adaptive adversaries remains under-explored. We expose a previously unreported vulnerability and introduce SemanticRegen, a three-stage, label-free attack that erases state-of-the-art semantic and invisible watermarks while leaving an image's apparent meaning intact. Our pipeline (i) uses a vision-language model to obtain fine-grained captions, (ii) extracts foreground masks with zero-shot segmentation, and (iii) inpaints only the background via an LLM-guided diffusion model, thereby preserving salient objects and style cues. Evaluated on 1,000 prompts across four watermarking systems - TreeRing, StegaStamp, StableSig, and DWT/DCT - SemanticRegen is the only method to defeat the semantic TreeRing watermark (p = 0.10 > 0.05) and reduces bit-accuracy below 0.75 for the remaining schemes, all while maintaining high perceptual quality (masked SSIM = 0.94 +/- 0.01). We further introduce masked SSIM (mSSIM) to quantify fidelity within foreground regions, showing that our attack achieves up to 12 percent higher mSSIM than prior diffusion-based attackers. These results highlight an urgent gap between current watermark defenses and the capabilities of adaptive, semantics-aware adversaries, underscoring the need for watermarking algorithms that are resilient to content-preserving regenerative attacks.

Paperid: 3362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03679.pdf

Abstract:
Segmenting objects in an environment is a crucial task for autonomous driving and robotics, as it enables a better understanding of the surroundings of each agent. Although camera sensors provide rich visual details, they are vulnerable to adverse weather conditions. In contrast, radar sensors remain robust under such conditions, but often produce sparse and noisy data. Therefore, a promising approach is to fuse information from both sensors. In this work, we propose a novel framework to enhance camera-only baselines by integrating a diffusion model into a camera-radar fusion architecture. We leverage radar point features to create pseudo-masks using the Segment-Anything model, treating the projected radar points as point prompts. Additionally, we propose a noise reduction unit to denoise these pseudo-masks, which are further used to generate inpainted images that complete the missing information in the original images. Our method improves the camera-only segmentation baseline by 2.63% in mIoU and enhances our camera-radar fusion architecture by 1.48% in mIoU on the Waterscenes dataset. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach for semantic segmentation using camera-radar fusion under adverse weather conditions.

Paperid: 3363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19583.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a parameter collaborative optimization algorithm for large language models, enhanced with graph spectral analysis. The goal is to improve both fine-tuning efficiency and structural awareness during training. In the proposed method, the parameters of a pre-trained language model are treated as nodes in a graph. A weighted graph is constructed, and Laplacian spectral decomposition is applied to enable frequency-domain modeling and structural representation of the parameter space. Based on this structure, a joint loss function is designed. It combines the task loss with a spectral regularization term to facilitate collaborative updates among parameters. In addition, a spectral filtering mechanism is introduced during the optimization phase. This mechanism adjusts gradients in a structure-aware manner, enhancing the model's training stability and convergence behavior. The method is evaluated on multiple tasks, including traditional fine-tuning comparisons, few-shot generalization tests, and convergence speed analysis. In all settings, the proposed approach demonstrates superior performance. The experimental results confirm that the spectral collaborative optimization framework effectively reduces parameter perturbations and improves fine-tuning quality while preserving overall model performance. This work contributes significantly to the field of artificial intelligence by advancing parameter-efficient training methodologies for large-scale models, reinforcing the importance of structural signal processing in deep learning optimization, and offering a robust, generalizable framework for enhancing language model adaptability and performance.

Paperid: 3364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15517.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Transformer-based robotic manipulation methods utilize multi-view spatial representations and language instructions to learn robot motion trajectories by leveraging numerous robot demonstrations. However, the collection of robot data is extremely challenging, and existing methods lack the capability for continuous learning on new tasks with only a few demonstrations. In this paper, we formulate these challenges as the Few-Shot Action-Incremental Learning (FSAIL) task, and accordingly design a Task-prOmpt graPh evolutIon poliCy (TOPIC) to address these issues. Specifically, to address the data scarcity issue in robotic imitation learning, TOPIC learns Task-Specific Prompts (TSP) through the deep interaction of multi-modal information within few-shot demonstrations, thereby effectively extracting the task-specific discriminative information. On the other hand, to enhance the capability for continual learning on new tasks and mitigate the issue of catastrophic forgetting, TOPIC adopts a Continuous Evolution Strategy (CES). CES leverages the intrinsic relationships between tasks to construct a task relation graph, which effectively facilitates the adaptation of new tasks by reusing skills learned from previous tasks. TOPIC pioneers few-shot continual learning in the robotic manipulation task, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that TOPIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 26$\%$ in success rate, significantly enhancing the continual learning capabilities of existing Transformer-based policies.

Paperid: 3365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12880.pdf

Abstract:
Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) learn rich semantic representations in audio classification through an efficient self-supervised reconstruction task. However, general-purpose models fail to generalize well when applied directly to fine-grained audio domains. Specifically, bird-sound classification requires distinguishing subtle inter-species differences and managing high intra-species acoustic variability, revealing the performance limitations of general-domain Audio-MAEs. This work demonstrates that bridging this domain gap domain gap requires full-pipeline adaptation, not just domain-specific pretraining data. We systematically revisit and adapt the pretraining recipe, fine-tuning methods, and frozen feature utilization to bird sounds using BirdSet, a large-scale bioacoustic dataset comparable to AudioSet. Our resulting Bird-MAE achieves new state-of-the-art results in BirdSet's multi-label classification benchmark. Additionally, we introduce the parameter-efficient prototypical probing, enhancing the utility of frozen MAE representations and closely approaching fine-tuning performance in low-resource settings. Bird-MAE's prototypical probes outperform linear probing by up to 37 percentage points in mean average precision and narrow the gap to fine-tuning across BirdSet downstream tasks. Bird-MAE also demonstrates robust few-shot capabilities with prototypical probing in our newly established few-shot benchmark on BirdSet, highlighting the potential of tailored self-supervised learning pipelines for fine-grained audio domains.

Paperid: 3366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06792.pdf

Abstract:
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve a favorable trade-off between performance and inference efficiency by activating only a subset of experts. However, the memory overhead of storing all experts remains a major limitation, especially in large-scale MoE models such as DeepSeek-R1(671B). In this study, we investigate domain specialization and expert redundancy in large-scale MoE models and uncover a consistent behavior we term few-shot expert localization, with only a few in-domain demonstrations, the model consistently activates a sparse and stable subset of experts on tasks within the same domain. Building on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective pruning framework, EASY-EP, that leverages a few domain-specific demonstrations to identify and retain only the most relevant experts. EASY-EP comprises two key components: output-aware expert importance assessment and expert-level token contribution estimation. The former evaluates the importance of each expert for the current token by considering the gating scores and L2 norm of the outputs of activated experts, while the latter assesses the contribution of tokens based on representation similarities before and after routed experts. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3-0324 show that our method can achieve comparable performances and $2.99\times$ throughput under the same memory budget with full model with only half the experts.

Paperid: 3367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04385.pdf

Abstract:
This study proposes a medical entity extraction method based on Transformer to enhance the information extraction capability of medical literature. Considering the professionalism and complexity of medical texts, we compare the performance of different pre-trained language models (BERT, BioBERT, PubMedBERT, ClinicalBERT) in medical entity extraction tasks. Experimental results show that PubMedBERT achieves the best performance (F1-score = 88.8%), indicating that a language model pre-trained on biomedical literature is more effective in the medical domain. In addition, we analyze the impact of different entity extraction methods (CRF, Span-based, Seq2Seq) and find that the Span-based approach performs best in medical entity extraction tasks (F1-score = 88.6%). It demonstrates superior accuracy in identifying entity boundaries. In low-resource scenarios, we further explore the application of Few-shot Learning in medical entity extraction. Experimental results show that even with only 10-shot training samples, the model achieves an F1-score of 79.1%, verifying the effectiveness of Few-shot Learning under limited data conditions. This study confirms that the combination of pre-trained language models and Few-shot Learning can enhance the accuracy of medical entity extraction. Future research can integrate knowledge graphs and active learning strategies to improve the model's generalization and stability, providing a more effective solution for medical NLP research. Keywords- Natural Language Processing, medical named entity recognition, pre-trained language model, Few-shot Learning, information extraction, deep learning

Paperid: 3368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01001.pdf

Abstract:
As language models improve and become capable of performing more complex tasks across modalities, evaluating them automatically becomes increasingly challenging. Developing strong and robust task-specific automatic metrics gets harder, and human-annotated test sets -- which are expensive to create -- saturate more quickly. A compelling alternative is to design reliable strategies to automate the creation of test data and evaluation, but previous attempts either rely on pre-existing data, or focus solely on individual tasks. We present Zero-shot Benchmarking (ZSB), a framework for creating high-quality benchmarks for any task by leveraging language models for both synthetic test data creation and evaluation. ZSB is simple and flexible: it requires only the creation of a prompt for data generation and one for evaluation; it is scalable to tasks and languages where collecting real-world data is costly or impractical; it is model-agnostic, allowing the creation of increasingly challenging benchmarks as models improve. To assess the effectiveness of our framework, we create benchmarks for five text-only tasks and a multi-modal one: general capabilities in four languages (English, Chinese, French, and Korean), translation, and general vision-language capabilities in English. We then rank a broad range of open and closed systems on our benchmarks. ZSB rankings consistently correlate strongly with human rankings, outperforming widely-adopted standard benchmarks. Through ablations, we find that strong benchmarks can be created with open models, and that judge model size and dataset variety are crucial drivers of performance. We release all our benchmarks, and code to reproduce our experiments and to produce new benchmarks.

Paperid: 3369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24182.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has achieved remarkable success in cross-modal tasks such as zero-shot image classification and text-image retrieval by effectively aligning visual and textual representations. However, the theoretical foundations underlying CLIP's strong generalization remain unclear. In this work, we address this gap by proposing the Cross-modal Information Bottleneck (CIB) framework. CIB offers a principled interpretation of CLIP's contrastive learning objective as an implicit Information Bottleneck optimization. Under this view, the model maximizes shared cross-modal information while discarding modality-specific redundancies, thereby preserving essential semantic alignment across modalities. Building on this insight, we introduce a Cross-modal Information Bottleneck Regularization (CIBR) method that explicitly enforces these IB principles during training. CIBR introduces a penalty term to discourage modality-specific redundancy, thereby enhancing semantic alignment between image and text features. We validate CIBR on extensive vision-language benchmarks, including zero-shot classification across seven diverse image datasets and text-image retrieval on MSCOCO and Flickr30K. The results show consistent performance gains over standard CLIP. These findings provide the first theoretical understanding of CLIP's generalization through the IB lens. They also demonstrate practical improvements, offering guidance for future cross-modal representation learning.

Paperid: 3370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23679.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot video captioning requires that a model generate high-quality captions without human-annotated video-text pairs for training. State-of-the-art approaches to the problem leverage CLIP to extract visual-relevant textual prompts to guide language models in generating captions. These methods tend to focus on one key aspect of the scene and build a caption that ignores the rest of the visual input. To address this issue, and generate more accurate and complete captions, we propose a novel progressive multi-granularity textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning. Our approach constructs three distinct memory banks, encompassing noun phrases, scene graphs of noun phrases, and entire sentences. Moreover, we introduce a category-aware retrieval mechanism that models the distribution of natural language surrounding the specific topics in question. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with 5.7%, 16.2%, and 3.4% improvements in terms of the main metric CIDEr on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX benchmarks compared to existing state-of-the-art.

Paperid: 3371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11921.pdf

Abstract:
Fact-checking tabular data is essential for ensuring the accuracy of structured information. However, existing methods often rely on black-box models with opaque reasoning. We introduce RePanda, a structured fact verification approach that translates claims into executable pandas queries, enabling interpretable and verifiable reasoning. To train RePanda, we construct PanTabFact, a structured dataset derived from the TabFact train set, where claims are paired with executable queries generated using DeepSeek-Chat and refined through automated error correction. Fine-tuning DeepSeek-coder-7B-instruct-v1.5 on PanTabFact, RePanda achieves 84.09% accuracy on the TabFact test set. To evaluate Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, we interpret question-answer pairs from WikiTableQuestions as factual claims and refer to this dataset as WikiFact. Without additional fine-tuning, RePanda achieves 84.72% accuracy on WikiFact, significantly outperforming all other baselines and demonstrating strong OOD robustness. Notably, these results closely match the zero-shot performance of DeepSeek-Chat (671B), indicating that our fine-tuning approach effectively distills structured reasoning from a much larger model into a compact, locally executable 7B model. Beyond fact verification, RePanda extends to tabular question answering by generating executable queries that retrieve precise answers. To support this, we introduce PanWiki, a dataset mapping WikiTableQuestions to pandas queries. Fine-tuning on PanWiki, RePanda achieves 75.1% accuracy in direct answer retrieval. These results highlight the effectiveness of structured execution-based reasoning for tabular verification and question answering. We have publicly released the dataset on Hugging Face at datasets/AtoosaChegini/PanTabFact.

Paperid: 3372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11085.pdf

Abstract:
Code generation has emerged as a key task to automate software development by converting high-level descriptions into executable code. Large language models (LLMs) excel at this but depend heavily on input prompt quality.Manual prompt engineering can be time-consuming and inconsistent, limiting LLM effectiveness. This paper introduces Prochemy, an innovative method for automatically refining prompts to boost code generation. Prochemy overcomes manual prompt limitations by automating optimization, ensuring consistency during inference, and supporting multi-agent systems.It iteratively refines prompts based on model performance, using an optimized final prompt for improved consistency across tasks. We tested Prochemy on natural language-based code generation and translation tasks using three LLM series. Results indicate Prochemy enhances existing methods, improving performance by 5.0% for GPT-3.5-Turbo and 1.9% for GPT-4o over zero-shot baselines on HumanEval. In state-of-the-art LDB, Prochemy + LDB surpasses standalone methods by 1.2-1.8%. For code translation, Prochemy boosts GPT-4o's Java-to-Python (AVATAR) performance from 74.5 to 84.1 (+12.9%) and Python-to-Java from 66.8 to 78.2 (+17.1%). Moreover, Prochemy maintains strong performance when integrated with the o1-mini model, validating its efficacy in code tasks. Designed as plug-and-play, Prochemy optimizes prompts with minimal human input, bridging the gap between simple prompts and complex frameworks.

Paperid: 3373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04504.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial for video analysis and surveillance in computer vision. However, existing VAD models rely on learned normal patterns, which makes them difficult to apply to diverse environments. Consequently, users should retrain models or develop separate AI models for new environments, which requires expertise in machine learning, high-performance hardware, and extensive data collection, limiting the practical usability of VAD. To address these challenges, this study proposes customizable video anomaly detection (C-VAD) technique and the AnyAnomaly model. C-VAD considers user-defined text as an abnormal event and detects frames containing a specified event in a video. We effectively implemented AnyAnomaly using a context-aware visual question answering without fine-tuning the large vision language model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we constructed C-VAD datasets and demonstrated the superiority of AnyAnomaly. Furthermore, our approach showed competitive results on VAD benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on UBnormal and UCF-Crime and surpassing other methods in generalization across all datasets. Our code is available online at github.com/SkiddieAhn/Paper-AnyAnomaly.

Paperid: 3374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02162.pdf

Abstract:
Computed tomography (CT) is a key imaging modality for diagnosis, yet its clinical utility is marred by high radiation exposure and long turnaround times, restricting its use for larger-scale screening. Although chest radiography (CXR) is more accessible and safer, existing CXR foundation models focus primarily on detecting diseases that are readily visible on the CXR. Recently, works have explored training disease classification models on simulated CXRs, but they remain limited to recognizing a single disease type from CT. CT foundation models have also emerged with significantly improved detection of pathologies in CT. However, the generalized application of CT-derived labels on CXR has remained illusive. In this study, we propose X2CT-CLIP, a tri-modal knowledge transfer learning framework that bridges the modality gap between CT and CXR while reducing the computational burden of model training. Our approach is the first work to enable multi-abnormality classification in CT, using CXR, by transferring knowledge from 3D CT volumes and associated radiology reports to a CXR encoder via a carefully designed tri-modal alignment mechanism in latent space. Extensive evaluations on three multi-label CT datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cross-modal retrieval, few-shot adaptation, and external validation. These results highlight the potential of CXR, enriched with knowledge derived from CT, as a viable efficient alternative for disease detection in resource-limited settings.

Paperid: 3375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19049.pdf

Abstract:
Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) describe dynamical systems where deterministic flows, governed by a drift function, are superimposed with random fluctuations dictated by a diffusion function. The accurate estimation (or discovery) of these functions from data is a central problem in machine learning, with wide application across natural and social sciences alike. Yet current solutions are brittle, and typically rely on symbolic regression or Bayesian non-parametrics. In this work, we introduce FIM-SDE (Foundation Inference Model for SDEs), a transformer-based recognition model capable of performing accurate zero-shot estimation of the drift and diffusion functions of SDEs, from noisy and sparse observations on empirical processes of different dimensionalities. Leveraging concepts from amortized inference and neural operators, we train FIM-SDE in a supervised fashion, to map a large set of noisy and discretely observed SDE paths to their corresponding drift and diffusion functions. We demonstrate that one and the same (pretrained) FIM-SDE achieves robust zero-shot function estimation (i.e. without any parameter fine-tuning) across a wide range of synthetic and real-world processes, from canonical SDE systems (e.g. double-well dynamics or weakly perturbed Hopf bifurcations) to human motion recordings and oil price and wind speed fluctuations.

Paperid: 3376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16198.pdf

Abstract:
6G networks aim to achieve global coverage, massive connectivity, and ultra-stringent requirements. Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGINs) and Semantic Communication (SemCom) are essential for realizing these goals, yet they introduce considerable complexity in resource orchestration. Drawing inspiration from research in robotics, a viable solution to manage this complexity is the application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although the use of LLMs in network orchestration has recently gained attention, existing solutions have not sufficiently addressed LLM hallucinations or their adaptation to network dynamics. To address this gap, this paper proposes a framework called Autonomous Reinforcement Coordination (ARC) for a SemCom-enabled SAGIN. This framework employs an LLM-based Retrieval-Augmented Generator (RAG) monitors services, users, and resources and processes the collected data, while a Hierarchical Action Planner (HAP) orchestrates resources. ARC decomposes orchestration into two tiers, utilizing LLMs for high-level planning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents for low-level decision-making, in alignment with the Mixture of Experts (MoE) concept. The LLMs utilize Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for few-shot learning, empowered by contrastive learning, while the RL agents employ replay buffer management for continual learning, thereby achieving efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of ARC, along with a comprehensive discussion on potential future research directions to enhance and upgrade ARC.

Paperid: 3377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15483.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning methods for material property prediction have been widely explored to advance materials discovery. However, the prevailing pre-train then fine-tune paradigm often fails to address the inherent diversity and disparity of material tasks. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MoMa, a Modular framework for Materials that first trains specialized modules across a wide range of tasks and then adaptively composes synergistic modules tailored to each downstream scenario. Evaluation across 17 datasets demonstrates the superiority of MoMa, with a substantial 14% average improvement over the strongest baseline. Few-shot and continual learning experiments further highlight MoMa's potential for real-world applications. Pioneering a new paradigm of modular material learning, MoMa will be open-sourced to foster broader community collaboration.

Paperid: 3378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09086.pdf

Abstract:
With the continuous development of natural language processing (NLP) technology, text classification tasks have been widely used in multiple application fields. However, obtaining labeled data is often expensive and difficult, especially in few-shot learning scenarios. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a few-shot text classification model based on transfer learning and meta-learning. The model uses the knowledge of the pre-trained model for transfer and optimizes the model's rapid adaptability in few-sample tasks through a meta-learning mechanism. Through a series of comparative experiments and ablation experiments, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that under the conditions of few samples and medium samples, the model based on transfer learning and meta-learning significantly outperforms traditional machine learning and deep learning methods. In addition, ablation experiments further analyzed the contribution of each component to the model performance and confirmed the key role of transfer learning and meta-learning in improving model accuracy. Finally, this paper discusses future research directions and looks forward to the potential of this method in practical applications.

Paperid: 3379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08661.pdf

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) advance, their ability to perform in-context learning and few-shot language generation has improved significantly. This has spurred using LLMs to produce high-quality synthetic data to enhance the performance of smaller models like online retrievers or weak LLMs. However, LLM-generated synthetic data often differs from the real data in key language attributes (e.g., styles, tones, content proportions, etc.). As a result, mixing these synthetic data directly with real data may distort the original data distribution, potentially hindering performance improvements. To solve this, we introduce SynAlign: a synthetic data generation and filtering framework based on key attribute distribution matching. Before generation, SynAlign employs an uncertainty tracker surrogated by the Gaussian Process model to iteratively select data clusters distinct from selected ones as demonstrations for new data synthesis, facilitating the efficient exploration diversity of the real data. Then, a latent attribute reasoning method is employed: the LLM summarizes linguistic attributes of demonstrations and then synthesizes new data based on them. This approach facilitates synthesizing diverse data with linguistic attributes that appear in real data.After generation, the Maximum Mean Discrepancy is used as the objective function to learn the sampling weight of each synthetic data, ensuring distribution matching with the real data. Our experiments on multiple text prediction tasks show significant performance improvements. We also conducted an online A/B test on an online retriever to demonstrate SynAlign's effectiveness.

Paperid: 3380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07068.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale surveys are essential tools for informing social science research and policy, but running surveys is costly and time-intensive. If we could accurately simulate group-level survey results, this would therefore be very valuable to social science research. Prior work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for simulating human behaviors, mostly through prompting. In this paper, we are the first to specialize LLMs for the task of simulating survey response distributions. As a testbed, we use country-level results from two global cultural surveys. We devise a fine-tuning method based on first-token probabilities to minimize divergence between predicted and actual response distributions for a given question. Then, we show that this method substantially outperforms other methods and zero-shot classifiers, even on unseen questions, countries, and a completely unseen survey. While even our best models struggle with the task, especially on unseen questions, our results demonstrate the benefits of specialization for simulation, which may accelerate progress towards sufficiently accurate simulation in the future.

Paperid: 3381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06037.pdf

Abstract:
Large pre-trained time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot performance across a wide range of domains. However, a question remains: Do TSFMs succeed by memorizing patterns in training data, or do they possess the ability to reason about such patterns? While reasoning is a topic of great interest in the study of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is undefined and largely unexplored in the context of TSFMs. In this work, inspired by language modeling literature, we formally define compositional reasoning in forecasting and distinguish it from in-distribution generalization. We evaluate the reasoning and generalization capabilities of 16 popular deep learning forecasting models on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets. Additionally, through controlled studies, we systematically examine which design choices in 7 popular open-source TSFMs contribute to improved reasoning capabilities. Our study yields key insights into the impact of TSFM architecture design on compositional reasoning and generalization. We find that patch-based Transformers have the best reasoning performance, closely followed by residualized MLP-based architectures, which are 97\% less computationally complex in terms of FLOPs and 86\% smaller in terms of the number of trainable parameters. Interestingly, in some zero-shot out-of-distribution scenarios, these models can outperform moving average and exponential smoothing statistical baselines trained on in-distribution data. Only a few design choices, such as the tokenization method, had a significant (negative) impact on Transformer model performance.

Paperid: 3382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02683.pdf

Abstract:
Streaming multi-talker speech translation is a task that involves not only generating accurate and fluent translations with low latency but also recognizing when a speaker change occurs and what the speaker's gender is. Speaker change information can be used to create audio prompts for a zero-shot text-to-speech system, and gender can help to select speaker profiles in a conventional text-to-speech model. We propose to tackle streaming speaker change detection and gender classification by incorporating speaker embeddings into a transducer-based streaming end-to-end speech translation model. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve high accuracy for both speaker change detection and gender classification.

Paperid: 3383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19184.pdf

Abstract:
Visual object counting has recently shifted towards class-agnostic counting (CAC), which addresses the challenge of counting objects across arbitrary categories -- a crucial capability for flexible and generalizable counting systems. Unlike humans, who effortlessly identify and count objects from diverse categories without prior knowledge, most existing counting methods are restricted to enumerating instances of known classes, requiring extensive labeled datasets for training and struggling in open-vocabulary settings. In contrast, CAC aims to count objects belonging to classes never seen during training, operating in a few-shot setting. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive review of CAC methodologies. We propose a taxonomy to categorize CAC approaches into three paradigms based on how target object classes can be specified: reference-based, reference-less, and open-world text-guided. Reference-based approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance by relying on exemplar-guided mechanisms. Reference-less methods eliminate exemplar dependency by leveraging inherent image patterns. Finally, open-world text-guided methods use vision-language models, enabling object class descriptions via textual prompts, offering a flexible and promising solution. Based on this taxonomy, we provide an overview of the architectures of 29 CAC approaches and report their results on gold-standard benchmarks. We compare their performance and discuss their strengths and limitations. Specifically, we present results on the FSC-147 dataset, setting a leaderboard using gold-standard metrics, and on the CARPK dataset to assess generalization capabilities. Finally, we offer a critical discussion of persistent challenges, such as annotation dependency and generalization, alongside future directions. We believe this survey will be a valuable resource, showcasing CAC advancements and guiding future research.

Paperid: 3384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14305.pdf

Abstract:
Automated grading has become an essential tool in education technology due to its ability to efficiently assess large volumes of student work, provide consistent and unbiased evaluations, and deliver immediate feedback to enhance learning. However, current systems face significant limitations, including the need for large datasets in few-shot learning methods, a lack of personalized and actionable feedback, and an overemphasis on benchmark performance rather than student experience. To address these challenges, we propose a Zero-Shot Large Language Model (LLM)-Based Automated Assignment Grading (AAG) system. This framework leverages prompt engineering to evaluate both computational and explanatory student responses without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. The AAG system delivers tailored feedback that highlights individual strengths and areas for improvement, thereby enhancing student learning outcomes. Our study demonstrates the system's effectiveness through comprehensive evaluations, including survey responses from higher education students that indicate significant improvements in motivation, understanding, and preparedness compared to traditional grading methods. The results validate the AAG system's potential to transform educational assessment by prioritizing learning experiences and providing scalable, high-quality feedback.

Paperid: 3385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13984.pdf

Abstract:
The updated recommendations on diagnostic procedures and treatment pathways for a medical condition are documented as graphical flows in Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs). For effective use of the CPGs in helping medical professionals in the treatment decision process, it is necessary to fully capture the guideline knowledge, particularly the contexts and their relationships in the graph. While several existing works have utilized these guidelines to create rule bases for Clinical Decision Support Systems, limited work has been done toward directly capturing the full medical knowledge contained in CPGs. This work proposes an approach to create a contextually enriched, faithful digital representation of National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Cancer CPGs in the form of graphs using automated extraction and node & relationship classification. We also implement semantic enrichment of the model by using Large Language Models (LLMs) for node classification, achieving an accuracy of 80.86% and 88.47% with zero-shot learning and few-shot learning, respectively. Additionally, we introduce a methodology for answering natural language questions with constraints to guideline text by leveraging LLMs to extract the relevant subgraph from the guideline knowledge base. By generating natural language answers based on subgraph paths and semantic information, we mitigate the risk of incorrect answers and hallucination associated with LLMs, ensuring factual accuracy in medical domain Question Answering.

Paperid: 3386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12375.pdf

Abstract:
Depth Anything has achieved remarkable success in monocular depth estimation with strong generalization ability. However, it suffers from temporal inconsistency in videos, hindering its practical applications. Various methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue by leveraging video generation models or introducing priors from optical flow and camera poses. Nonetheless, these methods are only applicable to short videos (< 10 seconds) and require a trade-off between quality and computational efficiency. We propose Video Depth Anything for high-quality, consistent depth estimation in super-long videos (over several minutes) without sacrificing efficiency. We base our model on Depth Anything V2 and replace its head with an efficient spatial-temporal head. We design a straightforward yet effective temporal consistency loss by constraining the temporal depth gradient, eliminating the need for additional geometric priors. The model is trained on a joint dataset of video depth and unlabeled images, similar to Depth Anything V2. Moreover, a novel key-frame-based strategy is developed for long video inference. Experiments show that our model can be applied to arbitrarily long videos without compromising quality, consistency, or generalization ability. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot video depth estimation. We offer models of different scales to support a range of scenarios, with our smallest model capable of real-time performance at 30 FPS.

Paperid: 3387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12079.pdf

Abstract:
Code pre-trained models have shown promising effectiveness in various software engineering tasks. Among these tasks, many tasks are related to software evolution and/or code editing. However, existing code pre-trained models often overlook the real-world code editing data and the evolutionary nature of the editing process. In this paper, to simulate the step-by-step code editing process of human developers, we propose DivoT5, a pre-trained model based on directional diffusion at the data level. In DivoT5, we adopt two categories of pre-training tasks. The first category is mask and denoising tasks augmented with a diffusion direction representing code evolution. That is, we first apply a noising process to the code snippets before evolution, and then ask the pre-training process to restore the snippets with noise into the code snippets after evolution. The second category is tasks aiming to reinforce the evolutionary direction. That is, we first generate various intermediate versions for each pair of snippets before and after evolution, and then ask the pre-training process to transform the intermediate versions into the snippet after evolution for each pair. We evaluate DivoT5 for two code-editing scenarios and one non-editing scenario using five downstream tasks. Given each downstream task, we fine-tune the pre-trained DivoT5 to evaluate its effectiveness. Our experimental results show that DivoT5 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on most tasks in comparison to models of the same scale (220M), large scale (770M) models in fine-tuning, and billion-scale (6.7B, 8B, ChatGPT) models in few-shot settings. For one code-editing task (i.e., automated code review), DivoT5 pre-trained on top of CodeT5-small (60M) can even outperform CodeT5-base (220M) and other pre-trained models with 220M parameters except for DivoT5 pre-trained on top of CodeT5-base (220M).

Paperid: 3388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09768.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP) across diverse domains. However, their application in specialized tasks such as Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) for low-resource languages like Arabic remains underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by developing an Arabic LJP dataset, collected and preprocessed from Saudi commercial court judgments. We benchmark state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, including LLaMA-3.2-3B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, under varying configurations such as zero-shot, one-shot, and fine-tuning using LoRA. Additionally, we employed a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates both quantitative metrics (such as BLEU, ROUGE, and BERT) and qualitative assessments (including Coherence, Legal Language, Clarity, etc.) using an LLM. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuned smaller models achieve comparable performance to larger models in task-specific contexts while offering significant resource efficiency. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of instructions, offering valuable insights into the development of a more human-centric and adaptable LLM. We have made the dataset, code, and models publicly available to provide a solid foundation for future research in Arabic legal NLP.

Paperid: 3389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06655.pdf

Abstract:
RLHF techniques like DPO can significantly improve the generation quality of text-to-image diffusion models. However, these methods optimize for a single reward that aligns model generation with population-level preferences, neglecting the nuances of individual users' beliefs or values. This lack of personalization limits the efficacy of these models. To bridge this gap, we introduce PPD, a multi-reward optimization objective that aligns diffusion models with personalized preferences. With PPD, a diffusion model learns the individual preferences of a population of users in a few-shot way, enabling generalization to unseen users. Specifically, our approach (1) leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to extract personal preference embeddings from a small set of pairwise preference examples, and then (2) incorporates the embeddings into diffusion models through cross attention. Conditioning on user embeddings, the text-to-image models are fine-tuned with the DPO objective, simultaneously optimizing for alignment with the preferences of multiple users. Empirical results demonstrate that our method effectively optimizes for multiple reward functions and can interpolate between them during inference. In real-world user scenarios, with as few as four preference examples from a new user, our approach achieves an average win rate of 76\% over Stable Cascade, generating images that more accurately reflect specific user preferences.

Paperid: 3390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00907.pdf

Abstract:
With the widespread use of social media, user-generated content has surged on online platforms. When such content includes hateful, abusive, offensive, or cyberbullying behavior, it is classified as toxic speech, posing a significant threat to the online ecosystem's integrity and safety. While manual content moderation is still prevalent, the overwhelming volume of content and the psychological strain on human moderators underscore the need for automated toxic speech detection. Previously proposed detection methods often rely on large annotated datasets; however, acquiring such datasets is both costly and challenging in practice. To address this issue, we propose an uncertainty-guided firewall for toxic speech in few-shot scenarios, U-GIFT, that utilizes self-training to enhance detection performance even when labeled data is limited. Specifically, U-GIFT combines active learning with Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to automatically identify high-quality samples from unlabeled data, prioritizing the selection of pseudo-labels with higher confidence for training based on uncertainty estimates derived from model predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U-GIFT significantly outperforms competitive baselines in few-shot detection scenarios. In the 5-shot setting, it achieves a 14.92\% performance improvement over the basic model. Importantly, U-GIFT is user-friendly and adaptable to various pre-trained language models (PLMs). It also exhibits robust performance in scenarios with sample imbalance and cross-domain settings, while showcasing strong generalization across various language applications. We believe that U-GIFT provides an efficient solution for few-shot toxic speech detection, offering substantial support for automated content moderation in cyberspace, thereby acting as a firewall to promote advancements in cybersecurity.

Paperid: 3391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11832.pdf

Abstract:
Numerous retrieval models, including sparse, dense and llm-based methods, have demonstrated remarkable performance in predicting the relevance between queries and corpora. However, the preliminary effectiveness analysis experiments indicate that these models fail to achieve satisfactory performance on the majority of queries and corpora, revealing their effectiveness restricted to specific scenarios. Thus, to tackle this problem, we propose a novel Distributed Collaborative Retrieval Framework (DCRF), outperforming each single model across all queries and corpora. Specifically, the framework integrates various retrieval models into a unified system and dynamically selects the optimal results for each user's query. It can easily aggregate any retrieval model and expand to any application scenarios, illustrating its flexibility and scalability.Moreover, to reduce maintenance and training costs, we design four effective prompting strategies with large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the quality of ranks without reliance of labeled data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that proposed framework, combined with 8 efficient retrieval models, can achieve performance comparable to effective listwise methods like RankGPT and ListT5, while offering superior efficiency. Besides, DCRF surpasses all selected retrieval models on the most datasets, indicating the effectiveness of our prompting strategies on rank-oriented automatic evaluation.

Paperid: 3392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19492.pdf

Abstract:
Reconstructing structured 3D scenes from RGB images using CAD objects unlocks efficient and compact scene representations that maintain compositionality and interactability. Existing works propose training-heavy methods relying on either expensive yet inaccurate real-world annotations or controllable yet monotonous synthetic data that do not generalize well to unseen objects or domains. We present Diorama, the first zero-shot open-world system that holistically models 3D scenes from single-view RGB observations without requiring end-to-end training or human annotations. We show the feasibility of our approach by decomposing the problem into subtasks and introduce robust, generalizable solutions to each: architecture reconstruction, 3D shape retrieval, object pose estimation, and scene layout optimization. We evaluate our system on both synthetic and real-world data to show we significantly outperform baselines from prior work. We also demonstrate generalization to internet images and the text-to-scene task.

Paperid: 3393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18674.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this work we explore an alternative, yet simple approach -- active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining. Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs. We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

Paperid: 3394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05544.pdf

Abstract:
Lifelong few-shot customization for text-to-image diffusion aims to continually generalize existing models for new tasks with minimal data while preserving old knowledge. Current customization diffusion models excel in few-shot tasks but struggle with catastrophic forgetting problems in lifelong generations. In this study, we identify and categorize the catastrophic forgetting problems into two folds: relevant concepts forgetting and previous concepts forgetting. To address these challenges, we first devise a data-free knowledge distillation strategy to tackle relevant concepts forgetting. Unlike existing methods that rely on additional real data or offline replay of original concept data, our approach enables on-the-fly knowledge distillation to retain the previous concepts while learning new ones, without accessing any previous data. Second, we develop an In-Context Generation (ICGen) paradigm that allows the diffusion model to be conditioned upon the input vision context, which facilitates the few-shot generation and mitigates the issue of previous concepts forgetting. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Lifelong Few-Shot Diffusion (LFS-Diffusion) method can produce high-quality and accurate images while maintaining previously learned knowledge.

Paperid: 3395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02093.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced software engineering (SE) tasks, with prompt engineering techniques enhancing their performance in code-related areas. However, the rapid development of foundational LLMs such as the non-reasoning model GPT-4o and the reasoning model o1 raises questions about the continued effectiveness of these prompt engineering techniques. This paper presents an extensive empirical study that reevaluates various prompt engineering techniques within the context of these advanced LLMs. Focusing on three representative SE tasks, i.e., code generation, code translation, and code summarization, we assess whether prompt engineering techniques still yield improvements with advanced models, the actual effectiveness of reasoning models compared to non-reasoning models, and whether the benefits of using these advanced models justify their increased costs. Our findings reveal that prompt engineering techniques developed for earlier LLMs may provide diminished benefits or even hinder performance when applied to advanced models. In reasoning LLMs, the ability of sophisticated built-in reasoning reduces the impact of complex prompts, sometimes making simple zero-shot prompting more effective. Furthermore, while reasoning models outperform non-reasoning models in tasks requiring complex reasoning, they offer minimal advantages in tasks that do not need reasoning and may incur unnecessary costs. Based on our study, we provide practical guidance for practitioners on selecting appropriate prompt engineering techniques and foundational LLMs, considering factors such as task requirements, operational costs, and environmental impact. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of effectively harnessing advanced LLMs in SE tasks, informing future research and application development.

Paperid: 3396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23004.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping in cluttered scenes remains highly challenging for dexterous hands due to the scarcity of data. To address this problem, we present a large-scale synthetic benchmark, encompassing 1319 objects, 8270 scenes, and 427 million grasps. Beyond benchmarking, we also propose a novel two-stage grasping method that learns efficiently from data by using a diffusion model that conditions on local geometry. Our proposed generative method outperforms all baselines in simulation experiments. Furthermore, with the aid of test-time-depth restoration, our method demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, attaining 90.7% real-world dexterous grasping success rate in cluttered scenes.

Paperid: 3397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20688.pdf

Abstract:
Dual-target therapeutic strategies have become a compelling approach and attracted significant attention due to various benefits, such as their potential in overcoming drug resistance in cancer therapy. Considering the tremendous success that deep generative models have achieved in structure-based drug design in recent years, we formulate dual-target drug design as a generative task and curate a novel dataset of potential target pairs based on synergistic drug combinations. We propose to design dual-target drugs with diffusion models that are trained on single-target protein-ligand complex pairs. Specifically, we align two pockets in 3D space with protein-ligand binding priors and build two complex graphs with shared ligand nodes for SE(3)-equivariant composed message passing, based on which we derive a composed drift in both 3D and categorical probability space in the generative process. Our algorithm can well transfer the knowledge gained in single-target pretraining to dual-target scenarios in a zero-shot manner. We also repurpose linker design methods as strong baselines for this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with various baselines.

Paperid: 3398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17772.pdf

Abstract:
A central challenge towards developing robots that can relate human language to their perception and actions is the scarcity of natural language annotations in diverse robot datasets. Moreover, robot policies that follow natural language instructions are typically trained on either templated language or expensive human-labeled instructions, hindering their scalability. To this end, we introduce NILS: Natural language Instruction Labeling for Scalability. NILS automatically labels uncurated, long-horizon robot data at scale in a zero-shot manner without any human intervention. NILS combines pretrained vision-language foundation models in order to detect objects in a scene, detect object-centric changes, segment tasks from large datasets of unlabelled interaction data and ultimately label behavior datasets. Evaluations on BridgeV2, Fractal, and a kitchen play dataset show that NILS can autonomously annotate diverse robot demonstrations of unlabeled and unstructured datasets while alleviating several shortcomings of crowdsourced human annotations, such as low data quality and diversity. We use NILS to label over 115k trajectories obtained from over 430 hours of robot data. We open-source our auto-labeling code and generated annotations on our website: http://robottasklabeling.github.io.

Paperid: 3399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17222.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context Learning (ICL) adapts the model to a new task by simply including examples in the input without any training. When applying optimization-based methods, such as fine-tuning and PT for few-shot learning, the model is specifically adapted to the small set of training examples, whereas ICL leaves the model unchanged. This distinction makes traditional learning methods more prone to overfitting; in contrast, ICL is less sensitive to the few-shot scenario. While ICL is not prone to overfitting, it does not fully extract the information that exists in the training examples. This work introduces Context-aware Prompt Tuning (CPT), a method inspired by ICL, PT, and adversarial attacks. We build on the ICL strategy of concatenating examples before the input, but we extend this by PT-like learning, refining the context embedding through iterative optimization to extract deeper insights from the training examples. We carefully modify specific context tokens, considering the unique structure of input and output formats. Inspired by adversarial attacks, we adjust the input based on the labels present in the context, focusing on minimizing, rather than maximizing, the loss. Moreover, we apply a projected gradient descent algorithm to keep token embeddings close to their original values, under the assumption that the user-provided data is inherently valuable. Our method has been shown to achieve superior accuracy across multiple classification tasks using various LLM models.

Paperid: 3400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16246.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in machine translation (MT) and demonstrated the ability to leverage in-context learning through few-shot examples. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs use different parts of the input context remain largely unexplored. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of context utilization in MT, studying how LLMs use various context parts, such as few-shot examples and the source text, when generating translations. We highlight several key findings: (1) the source part of few-shot examples appears to contribute more than its corresponding targets, irrespective of translation direction; (2) finetuning LLMs with parallel data alters the contribution patterns of different context parts; and (3) there is a positional bias where earlier few-shot examples have higher contributions to the translated sequence. Finally, we demonstrate that inspecting anomalous context contributions can potentially uncover pathological translations, such as hallucinations. Our findings shed light on the internal workings of LLM-based MT which go beyond those known for standard encoder-decoder MT models.

Paperid: 3401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09738.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing demand for spatiotemporal data processing and geospatial modeling, automating geospatial code generation has become essential for productivity. Large language models (LLMs) show promise in code generation but face challenges like domain-specific knowledge gaps and "coding hallucinations." This paper introduces GeoCode-Eval (GCE), a framework for assessing LLMs' ability to generate geospatial code across three dimensions: "Cognition and Memory," "Comprehension and Interpretation," and "Innovation and Creation," distributed across eight capability levels. We developed a benchmark dataset, GeoCode-Bench, consisting of 5,000 multiple-choice, 1,500 fill-in-the-blank, 1,500 true/false questions, and 1,000 subjective tasks covering code summarization, generation, completion, and correction. Using GeoCode-Bench, we evaluated three commercial closed-source LLMs, four open-source general-purpose LLMs, and 14 specialized code generation models. We also conducted experiments on few-shot and zero-shot learning, Chain of Thought reasoning, and multi-round majority voting to measure their impact on geospatial code generation. Additionally, we fine-tuned the Code LLaMA-7B model using Google Earth Engine-related JavaScript, creating GEECode-GPT, and evaluated it on subjective tasks. Results show that constructing pre-training and instruction datasets significantly improves code generation, offering insights for optimizing LLMs in specific domains.

Paperid: 3402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06194.pdf

Abstract:
The Direct Segment Anything Model (DirectSAM) excels in class-agnostic contour extraction. In this paper, we explore its use by applying it to optical remote sensing imagery, where semantic contour extraction-such as identifying buildings, road networks, and coastlines-holds significant practical value. Those applications are currently handled via training specialized small models separately on small datasets in each domain. We introduce a foundation model derived from DirectSAM, termed DirectSAM-RS, which not only inherits the strong segmentation capability acquired from natural images, but also benefits from a large-scale dataset we created for remote sensing semantic contour extraction. This dataset comprises over 34k image-text-contour triplets, making it at least 30 times larger than individual dataset. DirectSAM-RS integrates a prompter module: a text encoder and cross-attention layers attached to the DirectSAM architecture, which allows flexible conditioning on target class labels or referring expressions. We evaluate the DirectSAM-RS in both zero-shot and fine-tuning setting, and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance across several downstream benchmarks.

Paperid: 3403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05600.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread presence of hate speech on the internet, including formats such as text-based tweets and vision-language memes, poses a significant challenge to digital platform safety. Recent research has developed detection models tailored to specific modalities; however, there is a notable gap in transferring detection capabilities across different formats. This study conducts extensive experiments using few-shot in-context learning with large language models to explore the transferability of hate speech detection between modalities. Our findings demonstrate that text-based hate speech examples can significantly enhance the classification accuracy of vision-language hate speech. Moreover, text-based demonstrations outperform vision-language demonstrations in few-shot learning settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of cross-modality knowledge transfer and offer valuable insights for improving hate speech detection systems.

Paperid: 3404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05563.pdf

Abstract:
Being prompted to engage in reasoning has emerged as a core technique for using large language models (LLMs), deploying additional inference-time compute to improve task performance. However, as LLMs increase in both size and adoption, inference costs are correspondingly becoming increasingly burdensome. How, then, might we optimize reasoning's cost-performance tradeoff? This work introduces a novel approach based on computational models of metareasoning used in cognitive science, training LLMs to selectively use intermediate reasoning steps only when necessary. We first develop a reward function that incorporates the Value of Computation by penalizing unnecessary reasoning, then use this reward function with Expert Iteration to train the LLM. Compared to few-shot chain-of-thought prompting and STaR, our method significantly reduces inference costs (20-37\% fewer tokens generated across three models) while maintaining task performance across diverse datasets.

Paperid: 3405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04269.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable achievements obtained by open-source large language models (LLMs) in recent years have predominantly been concentrated on tasks involving the English language. In this paper, we aim to advance the performance of Llama2 models on Romanian tasks. We tackle the problem of reduced computing resources by using QLoRA for training. We release RoQLlama-7b, a quantized LLM, which shows equal or improved results compared to its full-sized counterpart when tested on seven Romanian downstream tasks in the zero-shot setup. Also, it consistently achieves higher average scores across all few-shot prompts. Additionally, we introduce a novel Romanian dataset, namely RoMedQA, which contains single-choice medical questions in Romanian.

Paperid: 3406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03074.pdf

Abstract:
How can we automatically select an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection model for various underlying tasks? This is crucial for maintaining the reliability of open-world applications by identifying data distribution shifts, particularly in critical domains such as online transactions, autonomous driving, and real-time patient diagnosis. Despite the availability of numerous OOD detection methods, the challenge of selecting an optimal model for diverse tasks remains largely underexplored, especially in scenarios lacking ground truth labels. In this work, we introduce MetaOOD, the first zero-shot, unsupervised framework that utilizes meta-learning to select an OOD detection model automatically. As a meta-learning approach, MetaOOD leverages historical performance data of existing methods across various benchmark OOD detection datasets, enabling the effective selection of a suitable model for new datasets without the need for labeled data at the test time. To quantify task similarities more accurately, we introduce language model-based embeddings that capture the distinctive OOD characteristics of both datasets and detection models. Through extensive experimentation with 24 unique test dataset pairs to choose from among 11 OOD detection models, we demonstrate that MetaOOD significantly outperforms existing methods and only brings marginal time overhead. Our results, validated by Wilcoxon statistical tests, show that MetaOOD surpasses a diverse group of 11 baselines, including established OOD detectors and advanced unsupervised selection methods.

Paperid: 3407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01534.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have shown significant potential, particularly in zero-shot classification across diverse distribution shifts. Building on existing evaluations of overall classification robustness, this work aims to provide a more comprehensive assessment of CLIP by introducing several new perspectives. First, we investigate their robustness to variations in specific visual factors. Second, we assess two critical safety objectives--confidence uncertainty and out-of-distribution detection--beyond mere classification accuracy. Third, we evaluate the finesse with which CLIP models bridge the image and text modalities. Fourth, we extend our examination to 3D awareness in CLIP models, moving beyond traditional 2D image understanding. Finally, we explore the interaction between vision and language encoders within modern large multimodal models (LMMs) that utilize CLIP as the visual backbone, focusing on how this interaction impacts classification robustness. In each aspect, we consider the impact of six factors on CLIP models: model architecture, training distribution, training set size, fine-tuning, contrastive loss, and test-time prompts. Our study uncovers several previously unknown insights into CLIP. For instance, the architecture of the visual encoder in CLIP plays a significant role in their robustness against 3D corruption. CLIP models tend to exhibit a bias towards shape when making predictions. Moreover, this bias tends to diminish after fine-tuning on ImageNet. Vision-language models like LLaVA, leveraging the CLIP vision encoder, could exhibit benefits in classification performance for challenging categories over CLIP alone. Our findings are poised to offer valuable guidance for enhancing the robustness and reliability of CLIP models.

Paperid: 3408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17621.pdf

Abstract:
Human-robot interaction (HRI) encompasses a wide range of collaborative tasks, with handover being one of the most fundamental. As robots become more integrated into human environments, the potential for service robots to assist in handing objects to humans is increasingly promising. In robot-to-human (R2H) handover, selecting the optimal grasp is crucial for success, as it requires avoiding interference with the humans preferred grasp region and minimizing intrusion into their workspace. Existing methods either inadequately consider geometric information or rely on data-driven approaches, which often struggle to generalize across diverse objects. To address these limitations, we propose a novel zero-shot system that combines semantic and geometric information to generate optimal handover grasps. Our method first identifies grasp regions using semantic knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) and, by incorporating customized visual prompts, achieves finer granularity in region grounding. A grasp is then selected based on grasp distance and approach angle to maximize human ease and avoid interference. We validate our approach through ablation studies and real-world comparison experiments. Results demonstrate that our system improves handover success rates and provides a more user-preferred interaction experience. Videos, appendixes and more are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vlm-handover/.

Paperid: 3409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17453.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the interested objects in the query image with just a handful of labeled samples (i.e., support images). Previous schemes would leverage the similarity between support-query pixel pairs to construct the pixel-level semantic correlation. However, in remote sensing scenarios with extreme intra-class variations and cluttered backgrounds, such pixel-level correlations may produce tremendous mismatches, resulting in semantic ambiguity between the query foreground (FG) and background (BG) pixels. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Agent Mining Transformer (AgMTR), which adaptively mines a set of local-aware agents to construct agent-level semantic correlation. Compared with pixel-level semantics, the given agents are equipped with local-contextual information and possess a broader receptive field. At this point, different query pixels can selectively aggregate the fine-grained local semantics of different agents, thereby enhancing the semantic clarity between query FG and BG pixels. Concretely, the Agent Learning Encoder (ALE) is first proposed to erect the optimal transport plan that arranges different agents to aggregate support semantics under different local regions. Then, for further optimizing the agents, the Agent Aggregation Decoder (AAD) and the Semantic Alignment Decoder (SAD) are constructed to break through the limited support set for mining valuable class-specific semantics from unlabeled data sources and the query image itself, respectively. Extensive experiments on the remote sensing benchmark iSAID indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Surprisingly, our method remains quite competitive when extended to more common natural scenarios, i.e., PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i.

Paperid: 3410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14633.pdf

Abstract:
Human navigation is facilitated through the association of actions with landmarks, tapping into our ability to recognize salient features in our environment. Consequently, navigational instructions for humans can be extremely concise, such as short verbal descriptions, indicating a small memory requirement and no reliance on complex and overly accurate navigation tools. Conversely, current autonomous navigation schemes rely on accurate positioning devices and algorithms as well as extensive streams of sensory data collected from the environment. Inspired by this human capability and motivated by the associated technological gap, in this work we propose a hierarchical end-to-end meta-learning scheme that enables a mobile robot to navigate in a previously unknown environment upon presentation of only a few sample images of a set of landmarks along with their corresponding high-level navigation actions. This dramatically simplifies the wayfinding process and enables easy adoption to new environments. For few-shot waypoint detection, we implement a metric-based few-shot learning technique through distribution embedding. Waypoint detection triggers the multi-task low-level maneuver controller module to execute the corresponding high-level navigation action. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme using a small-scale autonomous vehicle on novel indoor navigation tasks in several previously unseen environments.

Paperid: 3411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10918.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces FSL-HDnn, an energy-efficient accelerator that implements the end-to-end pipeline of feature extraction, classification, and on-chip few-shot learning (FSL) through gradient-free learning techniques in a 40 nm CMOS process. At its core, FSL-HDnn integrates two low-power modules: Weight clustering feature extractor and Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). Feature extractor utilizes advanced weight clustering and pattern reuse strategies for optimized CNN-based feature extraction. Meanwhile, HDC emerges as a novel approach for lightweight FSL classifier, employing hyperdimensional vectors to improve training accuracy significantly compared to traditional distance-based approaches. This dual-module synergy not only simplifies the learning process by eliminating the need for complex gradients but also dramatically enhances energy efficiency and performance. Specifically, FSL-HDnn achieves an Intensity unprecedented energy efficiency of 5.7 TOPS/W for feature 1 extraction and 0.78 TOPS/W for classification and learning Training Intensity phases, achieving improvements of 2.6X and 6.6X, respectively, Storage over current state-of-the-art CNN and FSL processors.

Paperid: 3412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10389.pdf

Abstract:
For more efficient generalization to unseen domains (classes), most Few-shot Segmentation (FSS) would directly exploit pre-trained encoders and only fine-tune the decoder, especially in the current era of large models. However, such fixed feature encoders tend to be class-agnostic, inevitably activating objects that are irrelevant to the target class. In contrast, humans can effortlessly focus on specific objects in the line of sight. This paper mimics the visual perception pattern of human beings and proposes a novel and powerful prompt-driven scheme, called ``Prompt and Transfer" (PAT), which constructs a dynamic class-aware prompting paradigm to tune the encoder for focusing on the interested object (target class) in the current task. Three key points are elaborated to enhance the prompting: 1) Cross-modal linguistic information is introduced to initialize prompts for each task. 2) Semantic Prompt Transfer (SPT) that precisely transfers the class-specific semantics within the images to prompts. 3) Part Mask Generator (PMG) that works in conjunction with SPT to adaptively generate different but complementary part prompts for different individuals. Surprisingly, PAT achieves competitive performance on 4 different tasks including standard FSS, Cross-domain FSS (e.g., CV, medical, and remote sensing domains), Weak-label FSS, and Zero-shot Segmentation, setting new state-of-the-arts on 11 benchmarks.

Paperid: 3413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21363.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for humanoid control, with on-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) enabling robust training via large-scale parallel simulation and, in some cases, zero-shot deployment to real robots. However, the low sample efficiency of on-policy algorithms limits safe adaptation to new environments. Although off-policy RL and model-based RL have shown improved sample efficiency, the gap between large-scale pretraining and efficient finetuning on humanoids still exists. In this paper, we find that off-policy Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), with large-batch update and a high Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio, reliably supports large-scale pretraining of humanoid locomotion policies, achieving zero-shot deployment on real robots. For adaptation, we demonstrate that these SAC-pretrained policies can be finetuned in new environments and out-of-distribution tasks using model-based methods. Data collection in the new environment executes a deterministic policy while stochastic exploration is instead confined to a physics-informed world model. This separation mitigates the risks of random exploration during adaptation while preserving exploratory coverage for improvement. Overall, the approach couples the wall-clock efficiency of large-scale simulation during pretraining with the sample efficiency of model-based learning during fine-tuning.

Paperid: 3414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17844.pdf

Abstract:
Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding is a critical component of medical diagnostics, rehabilitation engineering, and brain-computer interfaces. However, contemporary decoding methodologies remain heavily dependent on task-specific datasets to train specialized neural network architectures. Consequently, limited data availability impedes the development of generalizable large brain decoding models. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift from conventional signal-based decoding by leveraging large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to analyze EEG waveform plots. By converting multivariate EEG signals into stacked waveform images and integrating neuroscience domain expertise into textual prompts, we demonstrate that foundational VLMs can effectively differentiate between different patterns in the human brain. To address the inherent non-stationarity of EEG signals, we introduce a Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning (RAICL) approach, which dynamically selects the most representative and relevant few-shot examples to condition the autoregressive outputs of the VLM. Experiments on EEG-based seizure detection indicate that state-of-the-art VLMs under RAICL achieved better or comparable performance with traditional time series based approaches. These findings suggest a new direction in physiological signal processing that effectively bridges the modalities of vision, language, and neural activities. Furthermore, the utilization of off-the-shelf VLMs, without the need for retraining or downstream architecture construction, offers a readily deployable solution for clinical applications.

Paperid: 3415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15251.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive proficiency in basic arithmetic, rivaling human-level performance on standard numerical tasks. However, little attention has been given to how these models perform when numerical expressions deviate from the prevailing conventions present in their training corpora. In this work, we investigate numerical reasoning across a wide range of numeral scripts and formats. We show that LLM accuracy drops substantially when numerical inputs are rendered in underrepresented scripts or formats, despite the underlying mathematical reasoning being identical. We further demonstrate that targeted prompting strategies, such as few-shot prompting and explicit numeral mapping, can greatly narrow this gap. Our findings highlight an overlooked challenge in multilingual numerical reasoning and provide actionable insights for working with LLMs to reliably interpret, manipulate, and generate numbers across diverse numeral scripts and formatting styles.

Paperid: 3416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12308.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning in remote sensing remains challenging due to three factors: the scarcity of labeled data, substantial domain shifts, and the multi-scale nature of geospatial objects. To address these issues, we introduce Adaptive Multi-Scale Correlation Meta-Network (AMC-MetaNet), a lightweight yet powerful framework with three key innovations: (i) correlation-guided feature pyramids for capturing scale-invariant patterns, (ii) an adaptive channel correlation module (ACCM) for learning dynamic cross-scale relationships, and (iii) correlation-guided meta-learning that leverages correlation patterns instead of conventional prototype averaging. Unlike prior approaches that rely on heavy pre-trained models or transformers, AMC-MetaNet is trained from scratch with only $\sim600K$ parameters, offering $20\times$ fewer parameters than ResNet-18 while maintaining high efficiency ($<50$ms per image inference). AMC-MetaNet achieves up to 86.65\% accuracy in 5-way 5-shot classification on various remote sensing datasets, including EuroSAT, NWPU-RESISC45, UC Merced Land Use, and AID. Our results establish AMC-MetaNet as a computationally efficient, scale-aware framework for real-world few-shot remote sensing.

Paperid: 3417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08241.pdf

Abstract:
Unobtrusive sensor-based recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) in smart homes by processing data collected from IoT sensing devices supports applications such as healthcare, safety, and energy management. Recent zero-shot methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have the advantage of removing the reliance on labeled ADL sensor data. However, existing approaches rely on time-based segmentation, which is poorly aligned with the contextual reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Moreover, existing approaches lack methods for estimating prediction confidence. This paper proposes to improve zero-shot ADL recognition with event-based segmentation and a novel method for estimating prediction confidence. Our experimental evaluation shows that event-based segmentation consistently outperforms time-based LLM approaches on complex, realistic datasets and surpasses supervised data-driven methods, even with relatively small LLMs (e.g., Gemma 3 27B). The proposed confidence measure effectively distinguishes correct from incorrect predictions.

Paperid: 3418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08120.pdf

Abstract:
Contextual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles the problem of solving a set of related Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) that vary across different context variables. Traditional approaches--independent training and multi-task learning--struggle with either excessive computational costs or negative transfer. A recently proposed multi-policy approach, Model-Based Transfer Learning (MBTL), has demonstrated effectiveness by strategically selecting a few tasks to train and zero-shot transfer. However, CMDPs encompass a wide range of problems, exhibiting structural properties that vary from problem to problem. As such, different task selection strategies are suitable for different CMDPs. In this work, we introduce Structure Detection MBTL (SD-MBTL), a generic framework that dynamically identifies the underlying generalization structure of CMDP and selects an appropriate MBTL algorithm. For instance, we observe Mountain structure in which generalization performance degrades from the training performance of the target task as the context difference increases. We thus propose M/GP-MBTL, which detects the structure and adaptively switches between a Gaussian Process-based approach and a clustering-based approach. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and CRL benchmarks--covering continuous control, traffic control, and agricultural management--show that M/GP-MBTL surpasses the strongest prior method by 12.49% on the aggregated metric. These results highlight the promise of online structure detection for guiding source task selection in complex CRL environments.

Paperid: 3419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06605.pdf

Abstract:
Text-guided image generation has advanced rapidly with large-scale diffusion models, yet achieving precise stylization with visual exemplars remains difficult. Existing approaches often depend on task-specific retraining or expensive inversion procedures, which can compromise content integrity, reduce style fidelity, and lead to an unsatisfactory trade-off between semantic prompt adherence and style alignment. In this work, we introduce a training-free framework that reformulates style-guided synthesis as an in-context learning task. Guided by textual semantic prompts, our method concatenates a reference style image with a masked target image, leveraging a pretrained ReFlow-based inpainting model to seamlessly integrate semantic content with the desired style through multimodal attention fusion. We further analyze the imbalance and noise sensitivity inherent in multimodal attention fusion and propose a Dynamic Semantic-Style Integration (DSSI) mechanism that reweights attention between textual semantic and style visual tokens, effectively resolving guidance conflicts and enhancing output coherence. Experiments show that our approach achieves high-fidelity stylization with superior semantic-style balance and visual quality, offering a simple yet powerful alternative to complex, artifact-prone prior methods.

Paperid: 3420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06588.pdf

Abstract:
In frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, downlink channel state information (CSI) plays a crucial role in achieving high spectrum and energy efficiency. However, the CSI feedback overhead becomes a major bottleneck as the number of antennas increases. Although existing deep learning-based CSI compression methods have shown great potential, they still face limitations in capturing both local and global features of CSI, thereby limiting achievable compression efficiency. To address these issues, we propose TCLNet, a unified CSI compression framework that integrates a hybrid Transformer-CNN architecture for lossy compression with a hybrid language model (LM) and factorized model (FM) design for lossless compression. The lossy module jointly exploits local features and global context, while the lossless module adaptively switches between context-aware coding and parallel coding to optimize the rate-distortion-complexity (RDC) trade-off. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets demonstrate that the proposed TCLNet outperforms existing approaches in terms of reconstruction accuracy and transmission efficiency, achieving up to a 5 dB performance gain across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we show that large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged as zero-shot CSI lossless compressors via carefully designed prompts.

Paperid: 3421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04327.pdf

Abstract:
Parallel programming is central to HPC and AI, but producing code that is correct and fast remains challenging, especially for OpenMP GPU offload, where data movement and tuning dominate. Autonomous coding agents can compile, test, and profile on target hardware, but outputs are brittle without domain scaffolding. We present ParaCodex, an HPC-engineer workflow that turns a Codex-based agent into an autonomous OpenMP GPU offload system using staged hotspot analysis, explicit data planning, correctness gating, and profiling-guided refinement. We evaluate translation from serial CPU kernels to OpenMP GPU offload kernels on HeCBench, Rodinia, and NAS. After excluding five kernels, ParaCodex succeeded on all 31 valid kernels. The generated kernels improved GPU time over reference OpenMP implementations in 25/31 cases, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 3x on HeCBench and 5x on Rodinia, and outperforming a zero-shot Codex baseline on all suites. We also evaluate CUDA to OpenMP offload translation on ParEval, where ParaCodex maintains high compilation and validation rates in code-only and end-to-end settings.

Paperid: 3422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.25063.pdf

Abstract:
Despite their scale and success, modern transformers are almost universally trained as single-minded systems: optimization produces one deterministic set of parameters, representing a single functional hypothesis about the data. Motivated by the idea that intelligence emerge from many minds, we propose Population Bayesian Transformers (B-Trans), which transform a standard Large Language Model into a Bayesian Transformer model to supports sampling diverse yet coherent model instances from a single set of pre-trained weights. B-Trans introduces a Bayesian-motivated posterior proxy by treating the bias-like offsets in normalization layers as stochastic variables with a Gaussian variational approximation, inducing a distribution over model behavior without the cost of training full Bayesian neural networks. Sampling from this proxy yields a set of model instances with diverse behaviors while maintaining general competence. To preserve coherence within each generation, we freeze the sampled noise at the sequence level, enforcing temporal consistency across tokens. B-Trans allows for population-level decision-making, where aggregating predictions across sampled individuals significantly enhances exploration. Experiments across zero-shot generation, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), and RL without explicit labels demonstrate that B-Trans effectively leverage the wisdom of crowds, yielding superior semantic diversity while achieving better task performance compared to deterministic baselines.

Paperid: 3423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24851.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round dialogue spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents by bridging traditional navigation datasets into a standardized benchmark, named VLN-MME. We simplify the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design. This flexibility streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by our framework, we observe that enhancing our baseline agent with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents.

Paperid: 3424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21174.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot image generation aims to effectively adapt a source generative model to a target domain using very few training images. Most existing approaches introduce consistency constraints-typically through instance-level or distribution-level loss functions-to directly align the distribution patterns of source and target domains within their respective latent spaces. However, these strategies often fall short: overly strict constraints can amplify the negative effects of the domain gap, leading to distorted or uninformative content, while overly relaxed constraints may fail to leverage the source domain effectively. This limitation primarily stems from the inherent discrepancy in the underlying distribution structures of the source and target domains. The scarcity of target samples further compounds this issue by hindering accurate estimation of the target domain's distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose Equivariant Feature Rotation (EFR), a novel adaptation strategy that aligns source and target domains at two complementary levels within a self-rotated proxy feature space. Specifically, we perform adaptive rotations within a parameterized Lie Group to transform both source and target features into an equivariant proxy space, where alignment is conducted. These learnable rotation matrices serve to bridge the domain gap by preserving intra-domain structural information without distortion, while the alignment optimization facilitates effective knowledge transfer from the source to the target domain. Comprehensive experiments on a variety of commonly used datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the generative performance within the targeted domain.

Paperid: 3425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18987.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we address the problem of open-vocabulary mobile manipulation, where a robot is required to carry a wide range of objects to receptacles based on free-form natural language instructions. This task is challenging, as it involves understanding visual semantics and the affordance of manipulation actions. To tackle these challenges, we propose Affordance RAG, a zero-shot hierarchical multimodal retrieval framework that constructs Affordance-Aware Embodied Memory from pre-explored images. The model retrieves candidate targets based on regional and visual semantics and reranks them with affordance scores, allowing the robot to identify manipulation options that are likely to be executable in real-world environments. Our method outperformed existing approaches in retrieval performance for mobile manipulation instruction in large-scale indoor environments. Furthermore, in real-world experiments where the robot performed mobile manipulation in indoor environments based on free-form instructions, the proposed method achieved a task success rate of 85%, outperforming existing methods in both retrieval performance and overall task success.

Paperid: 3426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17349.pdf

Abstract:
Modern autonomous navigation systems predominantly rely on lidar and depth cameras. However, a fundamental question remains: Can flying robots navigate in clutter using solely monocular RGB images? Given the prohibitive costs of real-world data collection, learning policies in simulation offers a promising path. Yet, deploying such policies directly in the physical world is hindered by the significant sim-to-real perception gap. Thus, we propose a framework that couples the photorealism of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) environments with Adversarial Domain Adaptation. By training in high-fidelity simulation while explicitly minimizing feature discrepancy, our method ensures the policy relies on domain-invariant cues. Experimental results demonstrate that our policy achieves robust zero-shot transfer to the physical world, enabling safe and agile flight in unstructured environments with varying illumination.

Paperid: 3427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15219.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive QA due to parametric knowledge limitations. While existing methods like KG-CoT improve reliability by integrating knowledge graph (KG) paths, they suffer from rigid hop-count selection (solely question-driven) and underutilization of reasoning paths (lack of guidance). To address this, we propose RFKG-CoT: First, it replaces the rigid hop-count selector with a relation-driven adaptive hop-count selector that dynamically adjusts reasoning steps by activating KG relations (e.g., 1-hop for direct "brother" relations, 2-hop for indirect "father-son" chains), formalized via a relation mask. Second, it introduces a few-shot in-context learning path guidance mechanism with CoT (think) that constructs examples in a "question-paths-answer" format to enhance LLMs' ability to understand reasoning paths. Experiments on four KGQA benchmarks show RFKG-CoT improves accuracy by up to 14.7 pp (Llama2-7B on WebQSP) over KG-CoT. Ablations confirm the hop-count selector and the path prompt are complementary, jointly transforming KG evidence into more faithful answers.

Paperid: 3428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07624.pdf

Abstract:
Process Model Forecasting (PMF) aims to predict how the control-flow structure of a process evolves over time by modeling the temporal dynamics of directly-follows (DF) relations, complementing predictive process monitoring that focuses on single-case prefixes. Prior benchmarks show that machine learning and deep learning models provide only modest gains over statistical baselines, mainly due to the sparsity and heterogeneity of the DF time series. We investigate Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), large pre-trained models for generic time series, as an alternative for PMF. Using DF time series derived from real-life event logs, we compare zero-shot use of TSFMs, without additional training, with fine-tuned variants adapted on PMF-specific data. TSFMs generally achieve lower forecasting errors (MAE and RMSE) than traditional and specialized models trained from scratch on the same logs, indicating effective transfer of temporal structure from non-process domains. While fine-tuning can further improve accuracy, the gains are often small and may disappear on smaller or more complex datasets, so zero-shot use remains a strong default. Our study highlights the generalization capability and data efficiency of TSFMs for process-related time series and, to the best of our knowledge, provides the first systematic evaluation of temporal foundation models for PMF.

Paperid: 3429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04793.pdf

Abstract:
Singing voice conversion (SVC) aims to render the target singer's timbre while preserving melody and lyrics. However, existing zero-shot SVC systems remain fragile in real songs due to harmony interference, F0 errors, and the lack of inductive biases for singing. We propose YingMusic-SVC, a robust zero-shot framework that unifies continuous pre-training, robust supervised fine-tuning, and Flow-GRPO reinforcement learning. Our model introduces a singing-trained RVC timbre shifter for timbre-content disentanglement, an F0-aware timbre adaptor for dynamic vocal expression, and an energy-balanced rectified flow matching loss to enhance high-frequency fidelity. Experiments on a graded multi-track benchmark show that YingMusic-SVC achieves consistent improvements over strong open-source baselines in timbre similarity, intelligibility, and perceptual naturalness, especially under accompanied and harmony-contaminated conditions, demonstrating its effectiveness for real-world SVC deployment.

Paperid: 3430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17895.pdf

Abstract:
Spectral super-resolution (SSR) aims to reconstruct hyperspectral images (HSIs) from multispectral observations, with broad applications in remote sensing. Data-driven methods are widely used, but they often overlook physical principles, leading to unrealistic spectra, particularly in atmosphere-affected bands. To address this challenge, we propose the Spectral Super-Resolution Neural Operator (SSRNO), which incorporates atmospheric radiative transfer (ART) prior into the data-driven procedure, yielding more physically consistent predictions. The proposed SSRNO framework consists of three stages: upsampling, reconstruction, and refinement. In the upsampling stage, we leverage prior information to expand the input multispectral image, producing a physically plausible hyperspectral estimate. Subsequently, we utilize a neural operator in the reconstruction stage to learn a continuous mapping across the spectral domain. Finally, the refinement stage imposes a hard constraint on the output HSI to eliminate color distortion. The upsampling and refinement stages are implemented via the proposed guidance matrix projection (GMP) method, and the reconstruction neural operator adopts U-shaped spectral-aware convolution (SAC) layers to capture multi-scale features. Moreover, we theoretically demonstrate the optimality of the GMP method. With the neural operator and ART priors, SSRNO also achieves continuous spectral reconstruction and zero-shot extrapolation. Various experiments validate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 3431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17584.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection on attributed graphs plays an essential role in applications such as fraud detection, intrusion monitoring, and misinformation analysis. However, text-attributed graphs (TAGs), in which node information is expressed in natural language, remain underexplored, largely due to the absence of standardized benchmark datasets. In this work, we introduce TAG-AD, a comprehensive benchmark for anomaly node detection on TAGs. TAG-AD leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate realistic anomalous node texts directly in the raw text space, producing anomalies that are semantically coherent yet contextually inconsistent and thus more reflective of real-world irregularities. In addition, TAG-AD incorporates multiple other anomaly types, enabling thorough and reproducible evaluation of graph anomaly detection (GAD) methods. With these datasets, we further benchmark existing unsupervised GNN-based GAD methods as well as zero-shot LLMs for GAD. As part of our zero-shot detection setup, we propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-assisted, LLM-based zero-shot anomaly detection framework. The framework mitigates reliance on brittle, hand-crafted prompts by constructing a global anomaly knowledge base and distilling it into reusable analysis frameworks. Our experimental results reveal a clear division of strengths: LLMs are particularly effective at detecting contextual anomalies, whereas GNN-based methods remain superior for structural anomaly detection. Moreover, RAG-assisted prompting achieves performance comparable to human-designed prompts while eliminating manual prompt engineering, underscoring the practical value of our RAG-assisted zero-shot LLM anomaly detection framework.

Paperid: 3432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14945.pdf

Abstract:
Periodic human activities with implicit workflows are common in manufacturing, sports, and daily life. While short-term periodic activities -- characterized by simple structures and high-contrast patterns -- have been widely studied, long-term periodic workflows with low-contrast patterns remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark comprising 580 multimodal human activity sequences featuring long-term periodic workflows. The benchmark supports three evaluation tasks aligned with real-world applications: unsupervised periodic workflow detection, task completion tracking, and procedural anomaly detection. We also propose a lightweight, training-free baseline for modeling diverse periodic workflow patterns. Experiments show that: (i) our benchmark presents significant challenges to both unsupervised periodic detection methods and zero-shot approaches based on powerful large language models (LLMs); (ii) our baseline outperforms competing methods by a substantial margin in all evaluation tasks; and (iii) in real-world applications, our baseline demonstrates deployment advantages on par with traditional supervised workflow detection approaches, eliminating the need for annotation and retraining. Our project page is https://sites.google.com/view/periodicworkflow.

Paperid: 3433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12347.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce VoiceCraft-X, an autoregressive neural codec language model which unifies multilingual speech editing and zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis across 11 languages: English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Polish. VoiceCraft-X utilizes the Qwen3 large language model for phoneme-free cross-lingual text processing and a novel token reordering mechanism with time-aligned text and speech tokens to handle both tasks as a single sequence generation problem. The model generates high-quality, natural-sounding speech, seamlessly creating new audio or editing existing recordings within one framework. VoiceCraft-X shows robust performance in diverse linguistic settings, even with limited per-language data, underscoring the power of unified autoregressive approaches for advancing complex, real-world multilingual speech applications. Audio samples are available at https://zhishengzheng.com/voicecraft-x/.

Paperid: 3434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11693.pdf

Abstract:
Generative vision-language models like Stable Diffusion demonstrate remarkable capabilities in creative media synthesis, but they also pose substantial risks of producing unsafe, offensive, or culturally inappropriate content when prompted adversarially. Current defenses struggle to align outputs with human values without sacrificing generation quality or incurring high costs. To address these challenges, we introduce VALOR (Value-Aligned LLM-Overseen Rewriter), a modular, zero-shot agentic framework for safer and more helpful text-to-image generation. VALOR integrates layered prompt analysis with human-aligned value reasoning: a multi-level NSFW detector filters lexical and semantic risks; a cultural value alignment module identifies violations of social norms, legality, and representational ethics; and an intention disambiguator detects subtle or indirect unsafe implications. When unsafe content is detected, prompts are selectively rewritten by a large language model under dynamic, role-specific instructions designed to preserve user intent while enforcing alignment. If the generated image still fails a safety check, VALOR optionally performs a stylistic regeneration to steer the output toward a safer visual domain without altering core semantics. Experiments across adversarial, ambiguous, and value-sensitive prompts show that VALOR significantly reduces unsafe outputs by up to 100.00% while preserving prompt usefulness and creativity. These results highlight VALOR as a scalable and effective approach for deploying safe, aligned, and helpful image generation systems in open-world settings.

Paperid: 3435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11663.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has sparked a push for advanced quantization techniques to enable efficient deployment on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the challenge of extreme LLM compression -- targeting ultra-low-bit quantization for both activations and weights -- from a Fourier frequency domain perspective. We propose SpecQuant, a two-stage framework that tackles activation outliers and cross-channel variance. In the first stage, activation outliers are smoothed and transferred into the weight matrix to simplify downstream quantization. In the second stage, we apply channel-wise low-frequency Fourier truncation to suppress high-frequency components while preserving essential signal energy, improving quantization robustness. Our method builds on the principle that most of the weight energy is concentrated in low-frequency components, which can be retained with minimal impact on model accuracy. To enable runtime adaptability, we introduce a lightweight truncation module during inference that adjusts truncation thresholds based on channel characteristics. On LLaMA-3 8B, SpecQuant achieves 4-bit quantization for both weights and activations, narrowing the zero-shot accuracy gap to only 1.5% compared to full precision, while delivering 2 times faster inference and 3times lower memory usage.

Paperid: 3436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02234.pdf

Abstract:
Standard training for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) involves concatenating non-textual information, like vision or audio, with a text prompt. This approach may not encourage deep integration of modalities, limiting the model's ability to leverage the core language model's reasoning capabilities. This work examined the impact of interleaved instruction tuning in an audio MLLM, where audio tokens are interleaved within the prompt. Using the Listen, Think, and Understand (LTU) model as a testbed, we conduct an experiment using the Synonym and Hypernym Audio Reasoning Dataset (SHARD), our newly created reasoning benchmark for audio-based semantic reasoning focusing on synonym and hypernym recognition. Our findings show that while even zero-shot interleaved prompting improves performance on our reasoning tasks, a small amount of fine-tuning using interleaved training prompts improves the results further, however, at the expense of the MLLM's audio labeling ability.

Paperid: 3437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23492.pdf

Abstract:
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) form a combinatorial "code" that regulates protein function, yet deciphering this code - linking modified sites to their catalytic enzymes - remains a central unsolved problem in understanding cellular signaling and disease. We introduce COMPASS-PTM, a mechanism-aware, coarse-to-fine learning framework that unifies residue-level PTM profiling with enzyme-substrate assignment. COMPASS-PTM integrates evolutionary representations from protein language models with physicochemical priors and a crosstalk-aware prompting mechanism that explicitly models inter-PTM dependencies. This design allows the model to learn biologically coherent patterns of cooperative and antagonistic modifications while addressing the dual long-tail distribution of PTM data. Across multiple proteome-scale benchmarks, COMPASS-PTM establishes new state-of-the-art performance, including a 122% relative F1 improvement in multi-label site prediction and a 54% gain in zero-shot enzyme assignment. Beyond accuracy, the model demonstrates interpretable generalization, recovering canonical kinase motifs and predicting disease-associated PTM rewiring caused by missense variants. By bridging statistical learning with biochemical mechanism, COMPASS-PTM unifies site-level and enzyme-level prediction into a single framework that learns the grammar underlying protein regulation and signaling.

Paperid: 3438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23184.pdf

Abstract:
Connecting current observations with prior experiences helps robots adapt and plan in new, unseen 3D environments. Recently, 3D scene analogies have been proposed to connect two 3D scenes, which are smooth maps that align scene regions with common spatial relationships. These maps enable detailed transfer of trajectories or waypoints, potentially supporting demonstration transfer for imitation learning or task plan transfer across scenes. However, existing methods for the task require additional training and fixed object vocabularies. In this work, we propose to use multimodal foundation models for finding 3D scene analogies in a zero-shot, open-vocabulary setting. Central to our approach is a hybrid neural representation of scenes that consists of a sparse graph based on vision-language model features and a feature field derived from 3D shape foundation models. 3D scene analogies are then found in a coarse-to-fine manner, by first aligning the graph and refining the correspondence with feature fields. Our method can establish accurate correspondences between complex scenes, and we showcase applications in trajectory and waypoint transfer.

Paperid: 3439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21631.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is a promising approach to transfer capabilities from complex teacher models to smaller, resource-efficient student models that can be deployed easily, particularly in task-aware scenarios. However, existing methods of task-aware distillation typically require substantial quantities of data which may be unavailable or expensive to obtain in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a novel strategy called Counterfactual-explanation-infused Distillation CoD for few-shot task-aware knowledge distillation by systematically infusing counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) refer to inputs that can flip the output prediction of the teacher model with minimum perturbation. Our strategy CoD leverages these CFEs to precisely map the teacher's decision boundary with significantly fewer samples. We provide theoretical guarantees for motivating the role of CFEs in distillation, from both statistical and geometric perspectives. We mathematically show that CFEs can improve parameter estimation by providing more informative examples near the teacher's decision boundary. We also derive geometric insights on how CFEs effectively act as knowledge probes, helping the students mimic the teacher's decision boundaries more effectively than standard data. We perform experiments across various datasets and LLMs to show that CoD outperforms standard distillation approaches in few-shot regimes (as low as 8-512 samples). Notably, CoD only uses half of the original samples used by the baselines, paired with their corresponding CFEs and still improves performance.

Paperid: 3440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20677.pdf

Abstract:
In real-world singing voice conversion (SVC) applications, environmental noise and the demand for expressive output pose significant challenges. Conventional methods, however, are typically designed without accounting for real deployment scenarios, as both training and inference usually rely on clean data. This mismatch hinders practical use, given the inevitable presence of diverse noise sources and artifacts from music separation. To tackle these issues, we propose R2-SVC, a robust and expressive SVC framework. First, we introduce simulation-based robustness enhancement through random fundamental frequency ($F_0$) perturbations and music separation artifact simulations (e.g., reverberation, echo), substantially improving performance under noisy conditions. Second, we enrich speaker representation using domain-specific singing data: alongside clean vocals, we incorporate DNSMOS-filtered separated vocals and public singing corpora, enabling the model to preserve speaker timbre while capturing singing style nuances. Third, we integrate the Neural Source-Filter (NSF) model to explicitly represent harmonic and noise components, enhancing the naturalness and controllability of converted singing. R2-SVC achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple SVC benchmarks under both clean and noisy conditions.

Paperid: 3441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19282.pdf

Abstract:
Alzheimer disease is a severe brain disorder that causes harm in various brain areas and leads to memory damage. The limited availability of labeled medical data poses a significant challenge for accurate Alzheimer disease detection. There is a critical need for effective methods to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer disease detection, considering the scarcity of labeled data, the complexity of the disease, and the constraints related to data privacy. To address this challenge, our study leverages the power of big data in the form of pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within the framework of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and ensemble learning. We propose an ensemble approach based on a Prototypical Network (ProtoNet), a powerful method in FSL, integrating various pre-trained CNNs as encoders. This integration enhances the richness of features extracted from medical images. Our approach also includes a combination of class-aware loss and entropy loss to ensure a more precise classification of Alzheimer disease progression levels. The effectiveness of our method was evaluated using two datasets, the Kaggle Alzheimer dataset and the ADNI dataset, achieving an accuracy of 99.72% and 99.86%, respectively. The comparison of our results with relevant state-of-the-art studies demonstrated that our approach achieved superior accuracy and highlighted its validity and potential for real-world applications in early Alzheimer disease detection.

Paperid: 3442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17335.pdf

Abstract:
Automating the manipulation of granular materials poses significant challenges due to complex contact dynamics, unpredictable material properties, and intricate system states. Existing approaches often fail to achieve efficiency and accuracy in such tasks. To fill the research gap, this paper studies the small-scale and high-precision granular material digging task with unknown physical properties. A new framework, named differentiable digging robot (DDBot), is proposed to manipulate granular materials, including sand and soil. Specifically, we equip DDBot with a differentiable physics-based simulator, tailored for granular material manipulation, powered by GPU-accelerated parallel computing and automatic differentiation. DDBot can perform efficient differentiable system identification and high-precision digging skill optimisation for unknown granular materials, which is enabled by a differentiable skill-to-action mapping, a task-oriented demonstration method, gradient clipping and line search-based gradient descent. Experimental results show that DDBot can efficiently (converge within 5 to 20 minutes) identify unknown granular material dynamics and optimise digging skills, with high-precision results in zero-shot real-world deployments, highlighting its practicality. Benchmark results against state-of-the-art baselines also confirm the robustness and efficiency of DDBot in such digging tasks.

Paperid: 3443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14885.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the renewed interest in zero-shot visual classification due to the rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the problem of evaluating free-form responses of auto-regressive models remains a persistent challenge. Most existing works focus on language-only tasks or don't consider Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) beyond 5-way options, both of which are critical capabilities to solve tasks in Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) where choice counts are in the hundreds to thousands and the choices are highly related. Furthermore, in this highly multi-way MCQ setting it is not clear how to extend LLM choice extraction to retrieval-based problems, where computing probabilities over the choice set is computationally costly. In this work we investigate nlg2choice, a simple two-stage method which first asks the MLLM an open-ended question for the task with minimal constraints, then uses text-only constrained decoding to predict the most likely choice. In retrieval settings, we compute the probability of the constrained response taking that choice with an early stopping method to significantly improve throughput. Our results show improvement over a suite of seven fine-grained visual datasets when evaluating in terms of classification and retrieval, and show that this performance holds over the various ways that users of LLMs can implement tasks in natural language.

Paperid: 3444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14768.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world dexterous manipulation often encounters unexpected errors and disturbances, which can lead to catastrophic failures, such as dropping the manipulated object. To address this challenge, we focus on the problem of catching a falling object while it remains within grasping range and, importantly, resetting the system to a configuration favorable for resuming the primary manipulation task. We propose Contact-Aware Dynamic Recovery (CADRE), a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Neural Descriptor Field (NDF)-inspired module to extract implicit contact features. Compared to methods that rely solely on object pose or point cloud input, NDFs can directly reason about finger-object correspondence and adapt to different object geometries. Our experiments show that incorporating contact features improves training efficiency, enhances convergence performance for RL training, and ultimately leads to more successful recoveries. Additionally, we demonstrate that CADRE can generalize zero-shot to unseen objects with different geometries.

Paperid: 3445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14117.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic pushing is a fundamental manipulation task that requires tactile feedback to capture subtle contact forces and dynamics between the end-effector and the object. However, real tactile sensors often face hardware limitations such as high costs and fragility, and deployment challenges involving calibration and variations between different sensors, while vision-only policies struggle with satisfactory performance. Inspired by humans' ability to infer tactile states from vision, we propose ViTacGen, a novel robot manipulation framework designed for visual robotic pushing with vision-to-touch generation in reinforcement learning to eliminate the reliance on high-resolution real tactile sensors, enabling effective zero-shot deployment on visual-only robotic systems. Specifically, ViTacGen consists of an encoder-decoder vision-to-touch generation network that generates contact depth images, a standardized tactile representation, directly from visual image sequence, followed by a reinforcement learning policy that fuses visual-tactile data with contrastive learning based on visual and generated tactile observations. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in both simulation and real world experiments, demonstrating its superior performance and achieving a success rate of up to 86\%.

Paperid: 3446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12650.pdf

Abstract:
Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) describe dynamical systems evolving deterministically in continuous time. Accurate data-driven modeling of systems as ODEs, a central problem across the natural sciences, remains challenging, especially if the data is sparse or noisy. We introduce FIM-ODE (Foundation Inference Model for ODEs), a pretrained neural model designed to estimate ODEs zero-shot (i.e., in context) from sparse and noisy observations. Trained on synthetic data, the model utilizes a flexible neural operator for robust ODE inference, even from corrupted data. We empirically verify that FIM-ODE provides accurate estimates, on par with a neural state-of-the-art method, and qualitatively compare the structure of their estimated vector fields.

Paperid: 3447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10885.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly powering Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) systems, enabling non-expert users to query industrial databases using natural language. While test-time scaling strategies have shown promise in LLM-based solutions, their effectiveness in real-world applications, especially with the latest reasoning models, remains uncertain. In this work, we benchmark six lightweight, industry-oriented test-time scaling strategies and four LLMs, including two reasoning models, evaluating their performance on the BIRD Mini-Dev benchmark. Beyond standard accuracy metrics, we also report inference latency and token consumption, providing insights relevant for practical system deployment. Our findings reveal that Divide-and-Conquer prompting and few-shot demonstrations consistently enhance performance for both general-purpose and reasoning-focused LLMs. However, introducing additional workflow steps yields mixed results, and base model selection plays a critical role. This work sheds light on the practical trade-offs between accuracy, efficiency, and complexity when deploying Text2SQL systems.

Paperid: 3448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09881.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in novel-view synthesis can create the photo-realistic visualization of real-world environments from conventional camera captures. However, acquiring everyday environments from casual captures faces challenges due to frequent scene changes, which require dense observations both spatially and temporally. We propose long-term Gaussian scene chronology from sparse-view updates, coined LTGS, an efficient scene representation that can embrace everyday changes from highly under-constrained casual captures. Given an incomplete and unstructured Gaussian splatting representation obtained from an initial set of input images, we robustly model the long-term chronology of the scene despite abrupt movements and subtle environmental variations. We construct objects as template Gaussians, which serve as structural, reusable priors for shared object tracks. Then, the object templates undergo a further refinement pipeline that modulates the priors to adapt to temporally varying environments based on few-shot observations. Once trained, our framework is generalizable across multiple time steps through simple transformations, significantly enhancing the scalability for a temporal evolution of 3D environments. As existing datasets do not explicitly represent the long-term real-world changes with a sparse capture setup, we collect real-world datasets to evaluate the practicality of our pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior reconstruction quality compared to other baselines while enabling fast and light-weight updates.

Paperid: 3449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08152.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their adoption in real-world industrial scenarios for various natural language processing tasks. However, the high inference cost of large-scale LLMs makes their deployment impractical, necessitating the use of smaller models. Despite their efficiency, smaller LLMs lack robust zero-shot instruction-following capabilities across diverse domains, limiting their adaptability to dynamic user requirements. Traditional fine-tuning approaches exacerbate this issue by inducing catastrophic forgetting, reducing the model's generalization ability for unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose Domain Adaptive Continual Instruction Pre-Training via Reading Comprehension (DACIP-RC), a continual pre-training technique that enhances smaller LLMs' domain adaptability for business conversational tasks. Unlike conventional pre-training approaches that rely on next-token prediction, DACIP-RC generates diverse task instructions and responses via reading comprehension on conversation transcripts, enabling better instruction generalization. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that DACIP-RC significantly improves zero-shot generalization across a wide range of business conversational tasks, including meeting summarization, action item generation, and call purpose identification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply instruction pre-training on business conversational data, providing insights into how industries can leverage proprietary datasets for domain adaptation.

Paperid: 3450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05130.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) enables efficient few-shot learning in large language models (LLMs) without training, but suffers from the quadratic input complexity of transformers, limiting the maximum number of exemplars. While various efficient ICL approaches partition the context into blocks to process (e.g., ensembling, compression, cross-attention), they often ignore the information redundancy or under-representation caused by different partition strategies, leading to suboptimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose Sub-CP, a block-aware context selection framework that leverages submodular objectives to control block diversity. Sub-CP supports a flexible spectrum of selection strategies, allowing each block to range from globally diverse to locally coherent. This allows fine-grained control over semantic structure while enabling precomputation. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks on multiple datasets show that Sub-CP consistently improves performance across model scales.

Paperid: 3451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04710.pdf

Abstract:
Web service administrators must ensure the stability of multiple systems by promptly detecting anomalies in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Achieving the goal of "train once, infer across scenarios" remains a fundamental challenge for time series anomaly detection models. Beyond improving zero-shot generalization, such models must also flexibly handle sequences of varying lengths during inference, ranging from one hour to one week, without retraining. Conventional approaches rely on sliding-window encoding and self-supervised learning, which restrict inference to fixed-length inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities across general domains. However, when applied to time series data, they face inherent limitations due to context length. To address this issue, we propose ViTs, a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based framework that converts time series curves into visual representations. By rescaling time series images, temporal dependencies are preserved while maintaining a consistent input size, thereby enabling efficient processing of arbitrarily long sequences without context constraints. Training VLMs for this purpose introduces unique challenges, primarily due to the scarcity of aligned time series image-text data. To overcome this, we employ an evolutionary algorithm to automatically generate thousands of high-quality image-text pairs and design a three-stage training pipeline consisting of: (1) time series knowledge injection, (2) anomaly detection enhancement, and (3) anomaly reasoning refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViTs substantially enhance the ability of VLMs to understand and detect anomalies in time series data. All datasets and code will be publicly released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ViTs-C484/.

Paperid: 3452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01510.pdf

Abstract:
We study the problem of zero-shot link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs), which requires models to generalize over novel entities and novel relations. Knowledge graph foundation models (KGFMs) address this task by enforcing equivariance over both nodes and relations, learning from structural properties of nodes and relations, which are then transferable to novel graphs with similar structural properties. However, the conventional notion of deterministic equivariance imposes inherent limits on the expressive power of KGFMs, preventing them from distinguishing structurally similar but semantically distinct relations. To overcome this limitation, we introduce probabilistic node-relation equivariance, which preserves equivariance in distribution while incorporating a principled randomization to break symmetries during inference. Building on this principle, we present Flock, a KGFM that iteratively samples random walks, encodes them into sequences via a recording protocol, embeds them with a sequence model, and aggregates representations of nodes and relations via learned pooling. Crucially, Flock respects probabilistic node-relation equivariance and is a universal approximator for isomorphism-invariant link-level functions over KGs. Empirically, Flock perfectly solves our new diagnostic dataset Petals where current KGFMs fail, and achieves state-of-the-art performances on entity- and relation prediction tasks on 54 KGs from diverse domains.

Paperid: 3453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01240.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their exponentially increasing parameters pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Vector Quantization (VQ) shows great promise for low-bit quantization (e.g., 2 to 4 bits), but existing work faces two key challenges: unconstrained direction error and suboptimal bit allocation. In this paper, we propose RSAVQ, a novel VQ framework to enhance extremely low-bit quantization for LLMs. RSAVQ introduces two geometry-driven innovations that effectively mitigate above limitations: (1) Error Direction Sensitivity Guidance (EDSG), which leverages the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-induced Riemannian metric to project quantization errors onto low-sensitivity directions in the parameter space. Specifically, this projection is performed along the negative natural gradient direction, which effectively suppresses error expansion. (2) Weight Channel Sensitivity Guidance (WCSG) , which constructs a channel-wise sensitivity metric via FIM curvature analysis to dynamically guide bit resource allocation. The approach facilitates a globally optimal quantization solution within prescribed bit constraints. Experiments demonstrate that RSAVQ outperforms existing methods for LLMs. For example, in 2-bit quantization of LLaMA-3 8B, RSAVQ leads baselines like VPTQ and QuIP# by 0.4 in perplexity (PPL) and 1.5 in zero-shot accuracy. This work offers a practical solution for constrained environments and a theoretical bridge between information geometry and the quantization of neural networks, advancing efficient deep learning.

Paperid: 3454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22636.pdf

Abstract:
Autoregressive (AR) transformers have emerged as a powerful paradigm for visual generation, largely due to their scalability, computational efficiency and unified architecture with language and vision. Among them, next scale prediction Visual Autoregressive Generation (VAR) has recently demonstrated remarkable performance, even surpassing diffusion-based models. In this work, we revisit VAR and uncover a theoretical insight: when equipped with a Markovian attention mask, VAR is mathematically equivalent to a discrete diffusion. We term this reinterpretation as Scalable Visual Refinement with Discrete Diffusion (SRDD), establishing a principled bridge between AR transformers and diffusion models. Leveraging this new perspective, we show how one can directly import the advantages of diffusion such as iterative refinement and reduce architectural inefficiencies into VAR, yielding faster convergence, lower inference cost, and improved zero-shot reconstruction. Across multiple datasets, we show that the diffusion based perspective of VAR leads to consistent gains in efficiency and generation.

Paperid: 3455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20567.pdf

Abstract:
In multilingual healthcare environments, automatic disease diagnosis from clinical text remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of annotated medical data in low-resource languages and the linguistic variability across populations. This paper proposes SwasthLLM, a unified, zero-shot, cross-lingual, and multi-task learning framework for medical diagnosis that operates effectively across English, Hindi, and Bengali without requiring language-specific fine-tuning. At its core, SwasthLLM leverages the multilingual XLM-RoBERTa encoder augmented with a language-aware attention mechanism and a disease classification head, enabling the model to extract medically relevant information regardless of the language structure. To align semantic representations across languages, a Siamese contrastive learning module is introduced, ensuring that equivalent medical texts in different languages produce similar embeddings. Further, a translation consistency module and a contrastive projection head reinforce language-invariant representation learning. SwasthLLM is trained using a multi-task learning strategy, jointly optimizing disease classification, translation alignment, and contrastive learning objectives. Additionally, we employ Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to equip the model with rapid adaptation capabilities for unseen languages or tasks with minimal data. Our phased training pipeline emphasizes robust representation alignment before task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive evaluation shows that SwasthLLM achieves high diagnostic performance, with a test accuracy of 97.22% and an F1-score of 97.17% in supervised settings. Crucially, in zero-shot scenarios, it attains 92.78% accuracy on Hindi and 73.33% accuracy on Bengali medical text, demonstrating strong generalization in low-resource contexts.

Paperid: 3456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18461.pdf

Abstract:
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models have dramatically advanced deepfake technology, and its threats to digital security, media integrity, and public trust have increased rapidly. This research explored zero-shot deepfake detection, an emerging method even when the models have never seen a particular deepfake variation. In this work, we studied self-supervised learning, transformer-based zero-shot classifier, generative model fingerprinting, and meta-learning techniques that better adapt to the ever-evolving deepfake threat. In addition, we suggested AI-driven prevention strategies that mitigated the underlying generation pipeline of the deepfakes before they occurred. They consisted of adversarial perturbations for creating deepfake generators, digital watermarking for content authenticity verification, real-time AI monitoring for content creation pipelines, and blockchain-based content verification frameworks. Despite these advancements, zero-shot detection and prevention faced critical challenges such as adversarial attacks, scalability constraints, ethical dilemmas, and the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. These limitations were addressed by discussing future research directions on explainable AI for deepfake detection, multimodal fusion based on image, audio, and text analysis, quantum AI for enhanced security, and federated learning for privacy-preserving deepfake detection. This further highlighted the need for an integrated defense framework for digital authenticity that utilized zero-shot learning in combination with preventive deepfake mechanisms. Finally, we highlighted the important role of interdisciplinary collaboration between AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to create resilient defenses against the rising tide of deepfake attacks.

Paperid: 3457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17638.pdf

Abstract:
Thanks to capability to alleviate the cost of large-scale annotation, few-shot action recognition (FSAR) has attracted increased attention of researchers in recent years. Existing FSAR approaches typically neglect the role of individual motion pattern in comparison, and under-explore the feature statistics for video dynamics. Thereby, they struggle to handle the challenging temporal misalignment in video dynamics, particularly by using 2D backbones. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes an adaptively aligned multi-scale second-order moment network, namely A$^2$M$^2$-Net, to describe the latent video dynamics with a collection of powerful representation candidates and adaptively align them in an instance-guided manner. To this end, our A$^2$M$^2$-Net involves two core components, namely, adaptive alignment (A$^2$ module) for matching, and multi-scale second-order moment (M$^2$ block) for strong representation. Specifically, M$^2$ block develops a collection of semantic second-order descriptors at multiple spatio-temporal scales. Furthermore, A$^2$ module aims to adaptively select informative candidate descriptors while considering the individual motion pattern. By such means, our A$^2$M$^2$-Net is able to handle the challenging temporal misalignment problem by establishing an adaptive alignment protocol for strong representation. Notably, our proposed method generalizes well to various few-shot settings and diverse metrics. The experiments are conducted on five widely used FSAR benchmarks, and the results show our A$^2$M$^2$-Net achieves very competitive performance compared to state-of-the-arts, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization.

Paperid: 3458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16561.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances the math reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) to a large margin. However, the mechanism underlying such improvements remains unexplored. In this paper, we present \textbf{SalaMAnder} (\textbf{S}h\textbf{a}p\textbf{l}ey-b\textbf{a}sed \textbf{M}athematical Expression \textbf{A}ttribution a\textbf{nd} M\textbf{e}t\textbf{r}ic), a theoretically grounded methodology as well as a mathematically rigorous evaluation metric for quantifying component-level contributions in few-shot CoT reasoning. Concretely, we leverage the Shapley value for mathematical expression attribution and develop an efficient stratified sampling algorithm that significantly reduces the computational complexity. Besides, we develop the \textbf{CoSP} (\textbf{C}ardinality \textbf{o}f \textbf{S}hapley \textbf{P}ositives) metric through covariance analysis. Comprehensive validation across popular LLM models and diverse mathematical benchmarks demonstrates that the CoSP metric within our SalaMAnder framework exhibits a robust monotonic correlation with model performance, not only providing theoretical explanations for the empirical success of existing few-shot CoT but also establishing mathematically rigorous principles for prompt construction optimization. Furthermore, we verify the reliability of the explanation, based on which we unify the insights of previous work.

Paperid: 3459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09172.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of generative models, highly realistic image synthesis has posed new challenges to digital security and media credibility. Although AI-generated image detection methods have partially addressed these concerns, a substantial research gap remains in evaluating their performance under complex real-world conditions. This paper introduces the Real-World Robustness Dataset (RRDataset) for comprehensive evaluation of detection models across three dimensions: 1) Scenario Generalization: RRDataset encompasses high-quality images from seven major scenarios (War and Conflict, Disasters and Accidents, Political and Social Events, Medical and Public Health, Culture and Religion, Labor and Production, and everyday life), addressing existing dataset gaps from a content perspective. 2) Internet Transmission Robustness: examining detector performance on images that have undergone multiple rounds of sharing across various social media platforms. 3) Re-digitization Robustness: assessing model effectiveness on images altered through four distinct re-digitization methods. We benchmarked 17 detectors and 10 vision-language models (VLMs) on RRDataset and conducted a large-scale human study involving 192 participants to investigate human few-shot learning capabilities in detecting AI-generated images. The benchmarking results reveal the limitations of current AI detection methods under real-world conditions and underscore the importance of drawing on human adaptability to develop more robust detection algorithms.

Paperid: 3460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08159.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a methodology to predict metric depth from monocular RGB images and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). To enable collision avoidance during autonomous flight, prior works either leverage heavy sensors (e.g., LiDARs or stereo cameras) or data-intensive and domain-specific fine-tuning of monocular metric depth estimation methods. In contrast, we propose several lightweight zero-shot rescaling strategies to obtain metric depth from relative depth estimates via the sparse 3D feature map created using a visual-inertial navigation system. These strategies are compared for their accuracy in diverse simulation environments. The best performing approach, which leverages monotonic spline fitting, is deployed in the real-world on a compute-constrained quadrotor. We obtain on-board metric depth estimates at 15 Hz and demonstrate successful collision avoidance after integrating the proposed method with a motion primitives-based planner.

Paperid: 3461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07794.pdf

Abstract:
Modern information retrieval (IR) must bridge short, ambiguous queries and ever more diverse, rapidly evolving corpora. Query Expansion (QE) remains a key mechanism for mitigating vocabulary mismatch, but the design space has shifted markedly with pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). This survey synthesizes the field from three angles: (i) a four-dimensional framework of query expansion - from the point of injection (explicit vs. implicit QE), through grounding and interaction (knowledge bases, model-internal capabilities, multi-turn retrieval) and learning alignment, to knowledge graph-based argumentation; (ii) a model-centric taxonomy spanning encoder-only, encoder-decoder, decoder-only, instruction-tuned, and domain/multilingual variants, highlighting their characteristic affordances for QE (contextual disambiguation, controllable generation, zero-/few-shot reasoning); and (iii) practice-oriented guidance on where and how neural QE helps in first-stage retrieval, multi-query fusion, re-ranking, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We compare traditional query expansion with PLM/LLM-based methods across seven key aspects, and we map applications across web search, biomedicine, e-commerce, open-domain QA/RAG, conversational and code search, and cross-lingual settings. The review distills design grounding and interaction, alignment/distillation (SFT/PEFT/DPO), and KG constraints - as robust remedies to topic drift and hallucination. We conclude with an agenda on quality control, cost-aware invocation, domain/temporal adaptation, evaluation beyond end-task metrics, and fairness/privacy. Collectively, these insights provide a principled blueprint for selecting and combining QE techniques under real-world constraints.

Paperid: 3462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07143.pdf

Abstract:
Graph foundation models (GFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving broad generalization across various graph data. However, existing GFMs are often trained on datasets that may not fully reflect real-world graphs, limiting their generalization performance. In contrast, tabular foundation models (TFMs) not only excel at classical tabular prediction tasks but have also shown strong applicability in other domains such as time series forecasting, natural language processing, and computer vision. Motivated by this, we take an alternative view to the standard perspective of GFMs and reformulate node classification as a tabular problem. In this reformulation, each node is represented as a row with feature, structure, and label information as columns, enabling TFMs to directly perform zero-shot node classification via in-context learning. In this work, we introduce TAG, a tabular approach for graph learning that first converts a graph into a table via feature and structural encoders, applies multiple TFMs to diversely subsampled tables, and then aggregates their outputs through ensemble selection. Experiments on 28 real-world datasets demonstrate that TAG consistently improves upon task-specific GNNs and state-of-the-art GFMs, highlighting the potential of the tabular reformulation for scalable and generalizable graph learning.

Paperid: 3463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06409.pdf

Abstract:
This study presents DiagCoT, a multi-stage framework that applies supervised fine-tuning to general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) to emulate radiologists' stepwise diagnostic reasoning using only free-text reports. DiagCoT combines contrastive image-report tuning for domain alignment, chain-of-thought supervision to capture inferential logic, and reinforcement tuning with clinical reward signals to enhance factual accuracy and fluency. On the MIMIC-CXR benchmark, DiagCoT improved zero-shot disease classification AUC from 0.52 to 0.76 (absolute gain of 0.24), pathology grounding mIoU from 0.08 to 0.31 (absolute gain of 0.23), and report generation BLEU from 0.11 to 0.33 (absolute gain of 0.22). It outperformed state-of-the-art models including LLaVA-Med and CXR-LLAVA on long-tailed diseases and external datasets. By converting unstructured clinical narratives into structured supervision, DiagCoT offers a scalable approach for developing interpretable and diagnostically competent AI systems for radiology.

Paperid: 3464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04213.pdf

Abstract:
State estimation in control and systems engineering traditionally requires extensive manual system identification or data-collection effort. However, transformer-based foundation models in other domains have reduced data requirements by leveraging pre-trained generalist models. Ultimately, developing zero-shot foundation models of system dynamics could drastically reduce manual deployment effort. While recent work shows that transformer-based end-to-end approaches can achieve zero-shot performance on unseen systems, they are limited to sensor models seen during training. We introduce the foundation model unscented Kalman filter (FM-UKF), which combines a transformer-based model of system dynamics with analytically known sensor models via an UKF, enabling generalization across varying dynamics without retraining for new sensor configurations. We evaluate FM-UKF on a new benchmark of container ship models with complex dynamics, demonstrating a competitive accuracy, effort, and robustness trade-off compared to classical methods with approximate system knowledge and to an end-to-end approach. The benchmark and dataset are open sourced to further support future research in zero-shot state estimation via foundation models.

Paperid: 3465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03002.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting small objects from remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in various applications, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. While current research primarily focuses on small object detection, instance segmentation for small objects remains underexplored, with no dedicated datasets available. This gap stems from the technical challenges and high costs of pixel-level annotation for small objects. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates impressive zero-shot generalization, its performance on small-object segmentation deteriorates significantly, largely due to the coarse 1/16 feature resolution that causes severe loss of fine spatial details. To this end, we propose SOPSeg, a prompt-based framework specifically designed for small object segmentation in remote sensing imagery. It incorporates a region-adaptive magnification strategy to preserve fine-grained details, and employs a customized decoder that integrates edge prediction and progressive refinement for accurate boundary delineation. Moreover, we introduce a novel prompting mechanism tailored to the oriented bounding boxes widely adopted in remote sensing applications. SOPSeg outperforms existing methods in small object segmentation and facilitates efficient dataset construction for remote sensing tasks. We further construct a comprehensive small object instance segmentation dataset based on SODA-A, and will release both the model and dataset to support future research.

Paperid: 3466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02273.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection represents a critical challenge in remote sensing applications, where reliable identification of novel or anomalous patterns is essential for autonomous monitoring, disaster response, and environmental assessment. Despite remarkable progress in OOD detection for natural images, existing methods and benchmarks remain poorly suited to remote sensing imagery due to data scarcity, complex multi-scale scene structures, and pronounced distribution shifts. To this end, we propose RS-OOD, a novel framework that leverages remote sensing-specific vision-language modeling to enable robust few-shot OOD detection. Our approach introduces three key innovations: spatial feature enhancement that improved scene discrimination, a dual-prompt alignment mechanism that cross-verifies scene context against fine-grained semantics for spatial-semantic consistency, and a confidence-guided self-training loop that dynamically mines pseudo-labels to expand training data without manual annotation. RS-OOD consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple remote sensing benchmarks and enables efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data, demonstrating the critical value of spatial-semantic integration.

Paperid: 3467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17417.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale data exhibit promising zero-shot generalization but often suffer from semantic misalignment due to domain gaps between pre-training and downstream tasks. Existing approaches primarily focus on text prompting with class-specific descriptions and visual-text adaptation via aligning cropped image regions with textual descriptions. However, they still face the issues of incomplete textual prompts and noisy visual prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel constrained prompt enhancement (CPE) method to improve visual-textual alignment by constructing comprehensive textual prompts and compact visual prompts from the semantic perspective. Specifically, our approach consists of two key components: Topology-Guided Synonymous Semantic Generation (TGSSG) and Category-Agnostic Discriminative Region Selection (CADRS). Textually, to address the issue of incomplete semantic expression in textual prompts, our TGSSG first generates synonymous semantic set for each category via large language models, and constructs comprehensive textual prompts based on semantic ambiguity entropy and persistent homology analysis. Visually, to mitigate the irrelevant visual noise introduced by random cropping, our CADRS identifies discriminative regions with activation maps outputted by a pre-trained vision model, effectively filtering out noisy regions and generating compact visual prompts. Given the comprehensive set of textual prompts and compact set of visual prompts, we introduce two set-to-set matching strategies based on test-time adaptation (TTA) and optimal transport (OT) to achieve effective visual-textual alignment, and so improve zero-shot generalization of VLMs.

Paperid: 3468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22062.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is a popular foundation model, supporting from zero-shot classification, retrieval to encoders for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Although CLIP is successfully trained on billion-scale image-text pairs from the English world, scaling CLIP's training further to learning from the worldwide web data is still challenging: (1) no curation method is available to handle data points from non-English world; (2) the English performance from existing multilingual CLIP is worse than its English-only counterpart, i.e., "curse of multilinguality" that is common in LLMs. Here, we present Meta CLIP 2, the first recipe training CLIP from scratch on worldwide web-scale image-text pairs. To generalize our findings, we conduct rigorous ablations with minimal changes that are necessary to address the above challenges and present a recipe enabling mutual benefits from English and non-English world data. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, Meta CLIP 2 ViT-H/14 surpasses its English-only counterpart by 0.8% and mSigLIP by 0.7%, and surprisingly sets new state-of-the-art without system-level confounding factors (e.g., translation, bespoke architecture changes) on multilingual benchmarks, such as CVQA with 57.4%, Babel-ImageNet with 50.2% and XM3600 with 64.3% on image-to-text retrieval.

Paperid: 3469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20503.pdf

Abstract:
A multi-modal guardrail must effectively filter image content based on user-defined policies, identifying material that may be hateful, reinforce harmful stereotypes, contain explicit material, or spread misinformation. Deploying such guardrails in real-world applications, however, poses significant challenges. Users often require varied and highly customizable policies and typically cannot provide abundant examples for each custom policy. Consequently, an ideal guardrail should be scalable to the multiple policies and adaptable to evolving user standards with minimal retraining. Existing fine-tuning methods typically condition predictions on pre-defined policies, restricting their generalizability to new policies or necessitating extensive retraining to adapt. Conversely, training-free methods struggle with limited context lengths, making it difficult to incorporate all the policies comprehensively. To overcome these limitations, we propose to condition model's judgment on "precedents", which are the reasoning processes of prior data points similar to the given input. By leveraging precedents instead of fixed policies, our approach greatly enhances the flexibility and adaptability of the guardrail. In this paper, we introduce a critique-revise mechanism for collecting high-quality precedents and two strategies that utilize precedents for robust prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods across both few-shot and full-dataset scenarios and exhibits superior generalization to novel policies.

Paperid: 3470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23930.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of social media leads to a marked increase in hate speech, which threatens personal lives and results in numerous hate crimes. Detecting hate speech presents several challenges: diverse dialects, frequent code-mixing, and the prevalence of misspelled words in user-generated content on social media platforms. Recent progress in hate speech detection is typically concentrated on high-resource languages. However, low-resource languages still face significant challenges due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. This paper investigates how we can overcome this limitation via prompt engineering on large language models (LLMs) focusing on low-resource Bengali language. We investigate six prompting strategies - zero-shot prompting, refusal suppression, flattering the classifier, multi-shot prompting, role prompting, and finally our innovative metaphor prompting to detect hate speech effectively in low-resource languages. We pioneer the metaphor prompting to circumvent the built-in safety mechanisms of LLMs that marks a significant departure from existing jailbreaking methods. We investigate all six different prompting strategies on the Llama2-7B model and compare the results extensively with three pre-trained word embeddings - GloVe, Word2Vec, and FastText for three different deep learning models - multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). To prove the effectiveness of our metaphor prompting in the low-resource Bengali language, we also evaluate it in another low-resource language - Hindi, and two high-resource languages - English and German. The performance of all prompting techniques is evaluated using the F1 score, and environmental impact factor (IF), which measures CO$_2$ emissions, electricity usage, and computational time.

Paperid: 3471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22780.pdf

Abstract:
Score-based diffusion modeling is a generative machine learning algorithm that can be used to sample from complex distributions. They achieve this by learning a score function, i.e., the gradient of the log-probability density of the data, and reversing a noising process using the same. Once trained, score-based diffusion models not only generate new samples but also enable zero-shot conditioning of the generated samples on observed data. This promises a novel paradigm for data and model fusion, wherein the implicitly learned distributions of pretrained score-based diffusion models can be updated given the availability of online data in a Bayesian formulation. In this article, we apply such a concept to the super-resolution of a high-dimensional dynamical system, given the real-time availability of low-resolution and experimentally observed sparse sensor measurements from multimodal data. Additional analysis on how score-based sampling can be used for uncertainty estimates is also provided. Our experiments are performed for a super-resolution task that generates the ERA5 atmospheric dataset given sparse observations from a coarse-grained representation of the same and/or from unstructured experimental observations of the IGRA radiosonde dataset. We demonstrate accurate recovery of the high dimensional state given multiple sources of low-fidelity measurements. We also discover that the generative model can balance the influence of multiple dataset modalities during spatiotemporal reconstructions.

Paperid: 3472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21835.pdf

Abstract:
The recent advancements in large foundation models have driven the success of open-set image segmentation, a task focused on segmenting objects beyond predefined categories. Among various prompt types (such as points, boxes, texts, and visual references), visual reference segmentation stands out for its unique flexibility and strong zero-shot capabilities. Recently, several SAM-based methods have made notable progress in this task by automatically generating prompts to guide SAM. However, these methods often generate prompts at boundaries of target regions due to suboptimal prompt encoder, which results in instability and reduced robustness. In this work, we introduce ProSAM, a simple but effective method to address the stability challenges we identified in existing SAM-based visual reference segmentation approaches. By learning a variational prompt encoder to predict multivariate prompt distributions, ProSAM avoids generating prompts that lie in unstable regions, overcoming the instability caused by less robust prompts. Our approach consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the Pascal-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ datasets, providing a more robust solution for visual reference segmentation.

Paperid: 3473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18295.pdf

Abstract:
Neural ray tracing (RT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for channel modeling by combining physical propagation principles with neural networks. It enables high modeling accuracy and efficiency. However, current neural RT methods face two key limitations: constrained generalization capability due to strong spatial dependence, and weak adherence to electromagnetic laws. In this paper, we propose GeNeRT, a Generalizable Neural RT framework with enhanced generalization, accuracy and efficiency. GeNeRT supports both intra-scenario spatial transferability and inter-scenario zero-shot generalization. By incorporating Fresnel-inspired neural network design, it also achieves higher accuracy in multipath component (MPC) prediction. Furthermore, a GPU-tensorized acceleration strategy is introduced to improve runtime efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted in outdoor scenarios demonstrate that GeNeRT generalizes well across untrained regions within a scenario and entirely unseen environments, and achieves superior accuracy in MPC prediction compared to baselines. Moreover, it outperforms Wireless Insite in runtime efficiency, particularly in multi-transmitter settings. Ablation experiments validate the effectiveness of the network architecture and training strategy in capturing physical principles of ray-surface interactions.

Paperid: 3474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12323.pdf

Abstract:
Paucity of medical data severely limits the generalizability of diagnostic ML models, as the full spectrum of disease variability can not be represented by a small clinical dataset. To address this, diffusion models (DMs) have been considered as a promising avenue for synthetic image generation and augmentation. However, they frequently produce medically inaccurate images, deteriorating the model performance. Expert domain knowledge is critical for synthesizing images that correctly encode clinical information, especially when data is scarce and quality outweighs quantity. Existing approaches for incorporating human feedback, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on robust reward functions or demand labor-intensive expert evaluations. Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) reveals their strong visual reasoning capabilities, making them adept candidates as evaluators. In this work, we propose a novel framework, coined MAGIC (Medically Accurate Generation of Images through AI-Expert Collaboration), that synthesizes clinically accurate skin disease images for data augmentation. Our method creatively translates expert-defined criteria into actionable feedback for image synthesis of DMs, significantly improving clinical accuracy while reducing the direct human workload. Experiments demonstrate that our method greatly improves the clinical quality of synthesized skin disease images, with outputs aligning with dermatologist assessments. Additionally, augmenting training data with these synthesized images improves diagnostic accuracy by +9.02% on a challenging 20-condition skin disease classification task, and by +13.89% in the few-shot setting.

Paperid: 3475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12232.pdf

Abstract:
Scene understanding is critical for various downstream tasks in autonomous driving, including facilitating driver-agent communication and enhancing human-centered explainability of autonomous vehicle (AV) decisions. This paper evaluates the capability of four multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including relatively small models, to understand scenes in a zero-shot, in-context learning setting. Additionally, we explore whether combining these models using an ensemble approach with majority voting can enhance scene understanding performance. Our experiments demonstrate that GPT-4o, the largest model, outperforms the others in scene understanding. However, the performance gap between GPT-4o and the smaller models is relatively modest, suggesting that advanced techniques such as improved in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or fine-tuning could further optimize the smaller models' performance. We also observe mixed results with the ensemble approach: while some scene attributes show improvement in performance metrics such as F1-score, others experience a decline. These findings highlight the need for more sophisticated ensemble techniques to achieve consistent gains across all scene attributes. This study underscores the potential of leveraging MLLMs for scene understanding and provides insights into optimizing their performance for autonomous driving applications.

Paperid: 3476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11812.pdf

Abstract:
The real estate market is vital to global economies but suffers from significant information asymmetry. This study examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) can democratize access to real estate insights by generating competitive and interpretable house price estimates through optimized In-Context Learning (ICL) strategies. We systematically evaluate leading LLMs on diverse international housing datasets, comparing zero-shot, few-shot, market report-enhanced, and hybrid prompting techniques. Our results show that LLMs effectively leverage hedonic variables, such as property size and amenities, to produce meaningful estimates. While traditional machine learning models remain strong for pure predictive accuracy, LLMs offer a more accessible, interactive and interpretable alternative. Although self-explanations require cautious interpretation, we find that LLMs explain their predictions in agreement with state-of-the-art models, confirming their trustworthiness. Carefully selected in-context examples based on feature similarity and geographic proximity, significantly enhance LLM performance, yet LLMs struggle with overconfidence in price intervals and limited spatial reasoning. We offer practical guidance for structured prediction tasks through prompt optimization. Our findings highlight LLMs' potential to improve transparency in real estate appraisal and provide actionable insights for stakeholders.

Paperid: 3477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02138.pdf

Abstract:
The development of effective explainability tools for Transformers is a crucial pursuit in deep learning research. One of the most promising approaches in this domain is Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which propagates relevance scores backward through the network to the input space by redistributing activation values based on predefined rules. However, existing LRP-based methods for Transformer explainability entirely overlook a critical component of the Transformer architecture: its positional encoding (PE), resulting in violation of the conservation property, and the loss of an important and unique type of relevance, which is also associated with structural and positional features. To address this limitation, we reformulate the input space for Transformer explainability as a set of position-token pairs. This allows us to propose specialized theoretically-grounded LRP rules designed to propagate attributions across various positional encoding methods, including Rotary, Learnable, and Absolute PE. Extensive experiments with both fine-tuned classifiers and zero-shot foundation models, such as LLaMA 3, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in both vision and NLP explainability tasks. Our code is publicly available.

Paperid: 3478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01600.pdf

Abstract:
Language-instructed active object localization is a critical challenge for robots, requiring efficient exploration of partially observable environments. However, state-of-the-art approaches either struggle to generalize beyond demonstration datasets (e.g., imitation learning methods) or fail to generate physically grounded actions (e.g., VLMs). To address these limitations, we introduce WoMAP (World Models for Active Perception): a recipe for training open-vocabulary object localization policies that: (i) uses a Gaussian Splatting-based real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for scalable data generation without the need for expert demonstrations, (ii) distills dense rewards signals from open-vocabulary object detectors, and (iii) leverages a latent world model for dynamics and rewards prediction to ground high-level action proposals at inference time. Rigorous simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate WoMAP's superior performance in a broad range of zero-shot object localization tasks, with more than 9x and 2x higher success rates compared to VLM and diffusion policy baselines, respectively. Further, we show that WoMAP achieves strong generalization and sim-to-real transfer on a TidyBot.

Paperid: 3479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24396.pdf

Abstract:
Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory optimization and tracking control, suffer from tracking inaccuracies, computational latency, and sensitivity to initial conditions, limiting their effectiveness in dynamic, high-agility scenarios. Inspired by recent breakthroughs in data-driven methods, we propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that directly maps drone states and aerobatic intentions to control commands, eliminating modular separation to enable quadrotors to perform end-to-end policy optimization for extreme aerobatic maneuvers. To ensure efficient and stable training, we introduce an automated curriculum learning strategy that dynamically adjusts aerobatic task difficulty. Enabled by domain randomization for robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, our approach is validated in demanding real-world experiments, including the first demonstration of a drone autonomously performing continuous inverted flight while reactively navigating a moving gate, showcasing unprecedented agility.

Paperid: 3480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15261.pdf

Abstract:
Existing AI-generated text detection methods heavily depend on large annotated datasets and external threshold tuning, restricting interpretability, adaptability, and zero-shot effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose AGENT-X, a zero-shot multi-agent framework informed by classical rhetoric and systemic functional linguistics. Specifically, we organize detection guidelines into semantic, stylistic, and structural dimensions, each independently evaluated by specialized linguistic agents that provide explicit reasoning and robust calibrated confidence via semantic steering. A meta agent integrates these assessments through confidence-aware aggregation, enabling threshold-free, interpretable classification. Additionally, an adaptive Mixture-of-Agent router dynamically selects guidelines based on inferred textual characteristics. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that AGENT-X substantially surpasses state-of-the-art supervised and zero-shot approaches in accuracy, interpretability, and generalization.

Paperid: 3481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13489.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to predict learners' future performance based on historical learning interactions. However, existing KT models predominantly focus on data from a single course, limiting their ability to capture a comprehensive understanding of learners' knowledge states. In this paper, we propose TransKT, a contrastive cross-course knowledge tracing method that leverages concept graph guided knowledge transfer to model the relationships between learning behaviors across different courses, thereby enhancing knowledge state estimation. Specifically, TransKT constructs a cross-course concept graph by leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model (LLM) prompts to establish implicit links between related concepts across different courses. This graph serves as the foundation for knowledge transfer, enabling the model to integrate and enhance the semantic features of learners' interactions across courses. Furthermore, TransKT includes an LLM-to-LM pipeline for incorporating summarized semantic features, which significantly improves the performance of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) used for knowledge transfer. Additionally, TransKT employs a contrastive objective that aligns single-course and cross-course knowledge states, thereby refining the model's ability to provide a more robust and accurate representation of learners' overall knowledge states.

Paperid: 3482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09358.pdf

Abstract:
The success of deep learning in computer vision over the past decade has hinged on large labeled datasets and strong pretrained models. In data-scarce settings, the quality of these pretrained models becomes crucial for effective transfer learning. Image classification and self-supervised learning have traditionally been the primary methods for pretraining CNNs and transformer-based architectures. Recently, the rise of text-to-image generative models, particularly those using denoising diffusion in a latent space, has introduced a new class of foundational models trained on massive, captioned image datasets. These models' ability to generate realistic images of unseen content suggests they possess a deep understanding of the visual world. In this work, we present Marigold, a family of conditional generative models and a fine-tuning protocol that extracts the knowledge from pretrained latent diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and adapts them for dense image analysis tasks, including monocular depth estimation, surface normals prediction, and intrinsic decomposition. Marigold requires minimal modification of the pre-trained latent diffusion model's architecture, trains with small synthetic datasets on a single GPU over a few days, and demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization. Project page: https://marigoldcomputervision.github.io

Paperid: 3483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03988.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate determination of the performance of parallel GPU code typically requires execution-time profiling on target hardware -- an increasingly prohibitive step due to limited access to high-end GPUs. This paper explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can offer an alternative approach for GPU performance prediction without relying on hardware. We frame the problem as a roofline classification task: given the source code of a GPU kernel and the hardware specifications of a target GPU, can an LLM predict whether the GPU kernel is compute-bound or bandwidth-bound? For this study, we build a balanced dataset of 340 GPU kernels, obtained from HeCBench benchmark and written in CUDA and OpenMP, along with their ground-truth labels obtained via empirical GPU profiling. We evaluate LLMs across four scenarios: (1) with access to profiling data of the kernel source, (2) zero-shot with source code only, (3) few-shot with code and label pairs, and (4) fine-tuned on a small custom dataset. Our results show that state-of-the-art LLMs have a strong understanding of the Roofline model, achieving 100% classification accuracy when provided with explicit profiling data. We also find that reasoning-capable LLMs significantly outperform standard LLMs in zero- and few-shot settings, achieving up to 64% accuracy on GPU source codes, without profiling information. Lastly, we find that LLM fine-tuning will require much more data than what we currently have available. This work is among the first to use LLMs for source-level roofline performance prediction via classification, and illustrates their potential to guide optimization efforts when runtime profiling is infeasible. Our findings suggest that with better datasets and prompt strategies, LLMs could become practical tools for HPC performance analysis and performance portability.

Paperid: 3484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00409.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic anonymization techniques are essential for ethical sharing of pathological speech data, yet their perceptual consequences remain understudied. We present a comprehensive human-centered analysis of anonymized pathological speech, using a structured protocol involving ten native and non-native German listeners with diverse linguistic, clinical, and technical backgrounds. Listeners evaluated anonymized-original utterance pairs from 180 speakers spanning Cleft Lip and Palate, Dysarthria, Dysglossia, Dysphonia, and healthy controls. Speech was anonymized using state-of-the-art automatic methods (equal error rates in the range of 30-40%). Listeners completed Turing-style discrimination and quality rating tasks under zero-shot (single-exposure) and few-shot (repeated-exposure) conditions. Discrimination accuracy was high overall (91% zero-shot; 93% few-shot), but varied by disorder (repeated-measures ANOVA: p=0.007), ranging from 96% (Dysarthria) to 86% (Dysphonia). Anonymization consistently reduced perceived quality across groups (from 83% to 59%, p<0.001), with pathology-specific degradation patterns (one-way ANOVA: p=0.005). Native listeners showed a non-significant trend toward higher original speech ratings (Delta=4%, p=0.199), but this difference was minimal after anonymization (Delta=1%, p=0.724). No significant gender-based bias was observed. Perceptual outcomes did not correlate with automatic metrics; intelligibility was linked to perceived quality in original speech but not after anonymization. These findings underscore the need for listener-informed, disorder-specific anonymization strategies that preserve both privacy and perceptual integrity.

Paperid: 3485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19432.pdf

Abstract:
Satellite imagery and maps, as two fundamental data modalities in remote sensing, offer direct observations of the Earth's surface and human-interpretable geographic abstractions, respectively. The task of bidirectional translation between satellite images and maps (BSMT) holds significant potential for applications in urban planning and disaster response. However, this task presents two major challenges: first, the absence of precise pixel-wise alignment between the two modalities substantially complicates the translation process; second, it requires achieving both high-level abstraction of geographic features and high-quality visual synthesis, which further elevates the technical complexity. To address these limitations, we introduce EarthMapper, a novel autoregressive framework for controllable bidirectional satellite-map translation. EarthMapper employs geographic coordinate embeddings to anchor generation, ensuring region-specific adaptability, and leverages multi-scale feature alignment within a geo-conditioned joint scale autoregression (GJSA) process to unify bidirectional translation in a single training cycle. A semantic infusion (SI) mechanism is introduced to enhance feature-level consistency, while a key point adaptive guidance (KPAG) mechanism is proposed to dynamically balance diversity and precision during inference. We further contribute CNSatMap, a large-scale dataset comprising 302,132 precisely aligned satellite-map pairs across 38 Chinese cities, enabling robust benchmarking. Extensive experiments on CNSatMap and the New York dataset demonstrate EarthMapper's superior performance, achieving significant improvements in visual realism, semantic consistency, and structural fidelity over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, EarthMapper excels in zero-shot tasks like in-painting, out-painting and coordinate-conditional generation, underscoring its versatility.

Paperid: 3486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10296.pdf

Abstract:
Robots with wheeled, quadrupedal, or humanoid forms are increasingly integrated into built environments. However, unlike human social learning, they lack a critical pathway for intrinsic cognitive development, namely, learning from human feedback during interaction. To understand human ubiquitous observation, supervision, and shared control in dynamic and uncertain environments, this study presents a brain-computer interface (BCI) framework that enables classification of Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to detect cognitively demanding and safety-critical events. As a timely and motivating co-robotic engineering application, we simulate a human-in-the-loop scenario to flag risky events in semi-autonomous robotic driving-representative of long-tail cases that pose persistent bottlenecks to the safety performance of smart mobility systems and robotic vehicles. Drawing on recent advances in few-shot learning, we propose a dual-attention Siamese convolutional network paired with Dynamic Time Warping Barycenter Averaging approach to generate robust EEG-encoded signal representations. Inverse source localization reveals activation in Broadman areas 4 and 9, indicating perception-action coupling during task-relevant mental imagery. The model achieves 80% classification accuracy under data-scarce conditions and exhibits a nearly 100% increase in the utility of salient features compared to state-of-the-art methods, as measured through integrated gradient attribution. Beyond performance, this study contributes to our understanding of the cognitive architecture required for BCI agents-particularly the role of attention and memory mechanisms-in categorizing diverse mental states and supporting both inter- and intra-subject adaptation. Overall, this research advances the development of cognitive robotics and socially guided learning for service robots in complex built environments.

Paperid: 3487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02624.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose EmbodiedSense, a sensing system based on commercial earphones, which enables fine-grained activity logs using existing sensors. The activity logs record both user activities and the scenario in which the activities took place, benefiting detailed behavior understanding. By understanding both the user and the environment, EmbodiedSense addresses three main challenges: the limited recognition capability caused by information-hungry configurations (i.e., limited sensors available), the ineffective fusion to extract ambient information such as contextual scenarios, and the interference from ambient noise. Specifically, EmbodiedSense consists of a context-aware scenario recognition module and spatial-aware activity detection, which is further integrated with other attributes by expert knowledge. We implement our system on commercial earphones equipped with binaural microphones and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). By distinguishing usage scenarios and identifying the source of sounds, EmbodiedSense enables fine-grained activity logs in a zero-shot manner (evaluated with up to 41 categories) and outperforms strong baselines like ImageBind-LLM by 38% F1-score. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EmbodiedSense is a promising solution for long-term and short-term activity logs and provides significant benefits in monitoring the wearer's daily life.

Paperid: 3488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22097.pdf

Abstract:
Existing methods for graph out-of-distribution (OOD) detection typically depend on training graph neural network (GNN) classifiers using a substantial amount of labeled in-distribution (ID) data. However, acquiring high-quality labeled nodes in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is challenging and costly due to their complex textual and structural characteristics. Large language models (LLMs), known for their powerful zero-shot capabilities in textual tasks, show promise but struggle to naturally capture the critical structural information inherent to TAGs, limiting their direct effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-GOOD, a general framework that effectively combines the strengths of LLMs and GNNs to enhance data efficiency in graph OOD detection. Specifically, we first leverage LLMs' strong zero-shot capabilities to filter out likely OOD nodes, significantly reducing the human annotation burden. To minimize the usage and cost of the LLM, we employ it only to annotate a small subset of unlabeled nodes. We then train a lightweight GNN filter using these noisy labels, enabling efficient predictions of ID status for all other unlabeled nodes by leveraging both textual and structural information. After obtaining node embeddings from the GNN filter, we can apply informativeness-based methods to select the most valuable nodes for precise human annotation. Finally, we train the target ID classifier using these accurately annotated ID nodes. Extensive experiments on four real-world TAG datasets demonstrate that LLM-GOOD significantly reduces human annotation costs and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both ID classification accuracy and OOD detection performance.

Paperid: 3489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16622.pdf

Abstract:
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to uncover the inner reasoning of machine learning models. In IoT systems, XAI improves the transparency of models processing sensor data from multiple heterogeneous devices, ensuring end-users understand and trust their outputs. Among the many applications, XAI has also been applied to sensor-based Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) recognition in smart homes. Existing approaches highlight which sensor events are most important for each predicted activity, using simple rules to convert these events into natural language explanations for non-expert users. However, these methods produce rigid explanations lacking natural language flexibility and are not scalable. With the recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is worth exploring whether they can enhance explanation generation, considering their proven knowledge of human activities. This paper investigates potential approaches to combine XAI and LLMs for sensor-based ADL recognition. We evaluate if LLMs can be used: a) as explainable zero-shot ADL recognition models, avoiding costly labeled data collection, and b) to automate the generation of explanations for existing data-driven XAI approaches when training data is available and the goal is higher recognition rates. Our critical evaluation provides insights into the benefits and challenges of using LLMs for explainable ADL recognition.

Paperid: 3490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13102.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have introduced the novel paradigm of using LLMs as judges, where an LLM evaluates and scores the outputs of another LLM, which often correlates highly with human preferences. However, the use of LLM-as-a-judge has been primarily studied in English. In this paper, we evaluate this framework in Russian by introducing the Russian Error tyPes Annotation dataset (REPA), a dataset of 1k user queries and 2k LLM-generated responses. Human annotators labeled each response pair expressing their preferences across ten specific error types, as well as selecting an overall preference. We rank six generative LLMs across the error types using three rating systems based on human preferences. We also evaluate responses using eight LLM judges in zero-shot and few-shot settings. We describe the results of analyzing the judges and position and length biases. Our findings reveal a notable gap between LLM judge performance in Russian and English. However, rankings based on human and LLM preferences show partial alignment, suggesting that while current LLM judges struggle with fine-grained evaluation in Russian, there is potential for improvement.

Paperid: 3491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12124.pdf

Abstract:
The customization of multiple attributes has gained popularity with the rising demand for personalized content creation. Despite promising empirical results, the contextual coherence between different attributes has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we argue that subsequent attributes should follow the multivariable conditional distribution introduced by former attribute creation. In light of this, we reformulate multi-attribute creation from a conditional probability theory perspective and tackle the challenging zero-shot setting. By explicitly modeling the dependencies between attributes, we further enhance the coherence of generated images across diverse attribute combinations. Furthermore, we identify connections between multi-attribute customization and multi-task learning, effectively addressing the high computing cost encountered in multi-attribute synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Z-Magic outperforms existing models in zero-shot image generation, with broad implications for AI-driven design and creative applications.

Paperid: 3492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11154.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), functioning as a whole to guide these models in generating reasoning steps toward final answers. However, we observe that isolated segments, words, or tokens within CoT demonstrations can unexpectedly disrupt the generation process of LLMs. The model may overly concentrate on certain local information present in the demonstration, introducing irrelevant noise into the reasoning process and potentially leading to incorrect answers. In this paper, we investigate the underlying mechanism of CoT through dynamically tracing and manipulating the inner workings of LLMs at each output step, which demonstrates that tokens exhibiting specific attention characteristics are more likely to induce the model to take things out of context; these tokens directly attend to the hidden states tied with prediction, without substantial integration of non-local information. Building upon these insights, we propose a Few-shot Attention Intervention method (FAI) that dynamically analyzes the attention patterns of demonstrations to accurately identify these tokens and subsequently make targeted adjustments to the attention weights to effectively suppress their distracting effect on LLMs. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline methods, with a remarkable 5.91% improvement on the AQuA dataset, further highlighting the effectiveness of FAI.

Paperid: 3493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08368.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt tuning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP, has demonstrated the ability to rapidly adapt to various downstream tasks. However, recent studies indicate that tuned VLMs may suffer from the problem of spurious correlations, where the model relies on spurious features (e.g. background and gender) in the data. This may lead to the model having worse robustness in out-of-distribution data. Standard methods for eliminating spurious correlation typically require us to know the spurious attribute labels of each sample, which is hard in the real world. In this work, we explore improving the group robustness of prompt tuning in VLMs without relying on manual annotation of spurious features. We notice the zero - shot image recognition ability of VLMs and use this ability to identify spurious features, thus avoiding the cost of manual annotation. By leveraging pseudo-spurious attribute annotations, we further propose a method to automatically adjust the training weights of different groups. Extensive experiments show that our approach efficiently improves the worst-group accuracy on CelebA, Waterbirds, and MetaShift datasets, achieving the best robustness gap between the worst-group accuracy and the overall accuracy.

Paperid: 3494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06227.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving precise and generalizable grasping across diverse objects and environments is essential for intelligent and collaborative robotic systems. However, existing approaches often struggle with ambiguous affordance reasoning and limited adaptability to unseen objects, leading to suboptimal grasp execution. In this work, we propose GAT-Grasp, a gesture-driven grasping framework that directly utilizes human hand gestures to guide the generation of task-specific grasp poses with appropriate positioning and orientation. Specifically, we introduce a retrieval-based affordance transfer paradigm, leveraging the implicit correlation between hand gestures and object affordances to extract grasping knowledge from large-scale human-object interaction videos. By eliminating the reliance on pre-given object priors, GAT-Grasp enables zero-shot generalization to novel objects and cluttered environments. Real-world evaluations confirm its robustness across diverse and unseen scenarios, demonstrating reliable grasp execution in complex task settings.

Paperid: 3495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01288.pdf

Abstract:
Plug-and-play (PnP) methods offer an iterative strategy for solving image restoration (IR) problems in a zero-shot manner, using a learned \textit{discriminative denoiser} as the implicit prior. More recently, a sampling-based variant of this approach, which utilizes a pre-trained \textit{generative diffusion model}, has gained great popularity for solving IR problems through stochastic sampling. The IR results using PnP with a pre-trained diffusion model demonstrate distinct advantages compared to those using discriminative denoisers, \ie improved perceptual quality while sacrificing the data fidelity. The unsatisfactory results are due to the lack of integration of these strategies in the IR tasks. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot IR scheme, dubbed Reconciling Diffusion Model in Dual (RDMD), which leverages only a \textbf{single} pre-trained diffusion model to construct \textbf{two} complementary regularizers. Specifically, the diffusion model in RDMD will iteratively perform deterministic denoising and stochastic sampling, aiming to achieve high-fidelity image restoration with appealing perceptual quality. RDMD also allows users to customize the distortion-perception tradeoff with a single hyperparameter, enhancing the adaptability of the restoration process in different practical scenarios. Extensive experiments on several IR tasks demonstrate that our proposed method could achieve superior results compared to existing approaches on both the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.

Paperid: 3496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19782.pdf

Abstract:
3D part segmentation is still an open problem in the field of 3D vision and AR/VR. Due to limited 3D labeled data, traditional supervised segmentation methods fall short in generalizing to unseen shapes and categories. Recently, the advancement in vision-language models' zero-shot abilities has brought a surge in open-world 3D segmentation methods. While these methods show promising results for 3D scenes or objects, they do not generalize well to 3D humans. In this paper, we present the first open-vocabulary segmentation method capable of handling 3D human. Our framework can segment the human category into desired fine-grained parts based on the textual prompt. We design a simple segmentation pipeline, leveraging SAM to generate multi-view proposals in 2D and proposing a novel HumanCLIP model to create unified embeddings for visual and textual inputs. Compared with existing pre-trained CLIP models, the HumanCLIP model yields more accurate embeddings for human-centric contents. We also design a simple-yet-effective MaskFusion module, which classifies and fuses multi-view features into 3D semantic masks without complex voting and grouping mechanisms. The design of decoupling mask proposals and text input also significantly boosts the efficiency of per-prompt inference. Experimental results on various 3D human datasets show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art open-vocabulary 3D segmentation methods by a large margin. In addition, we show that our method can be directly applied to various 3D representations including meshes, point clouds, and 3D Gaussian Splatting.

Paperid: 3497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16101.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown impressive capabilities in mitigating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs struggle to handle misleading retrievals and often fail to maintain their own reasoning when exposed to conflicting or selectively-framed evidence, making them vulnerable to real-world misinformation. In such real-world retrieval scenarios, misleading and conflicting information is rampant, particularly in the political domain, where evidence is often selectively framed, incomplete, or polarized. However, existing RAG benchmarks largely assume a clean retrieval setting, where models succeed by accurately retrieving and generating answers from gold-standard documents. This assumption fails to align with real-world conditions, leading to an overestimation of RAG system performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAGuard, a fact-checking dataset designed to evaluate the robustness of RAG systems against misleading retrievals. Unlike prior benchmarks that rely on synthetic noise, our dataset constructs its retrieval corpus from Reddit discussions, capturing naturally occurring misinformation. It categorizes retrieved evidence into three types: supporting, misleading, and irrelevant, providing a realistic and challenging testbed for assessing how well RAG systems navigate different retrieval information. Our benchmark experiments reveal that when exposed to misleading retrievals, all tested LLM-powered RAG systems perform worse than their zero-shot baselines (i.e., no retrieval at all), highlighting their susceptibility to noisy environments. To the best of our knowledge, RAGuard is the first benchmark to systematically assess RAG robustness against misleading evidence. We expect this benchmark will drive future research toward improving RAG systems beyond idealized datasets, making them more reliable for real-world applications.

Paperid: 3498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14977.pdf

Abstract:
Knowing where a particular species can or cannot be found on Earth is crucial for ecological research and conservation efforts. By mapping the spatial ranges of all species, we would obtain deeper insights into how global biodiversity is affected by climate change and habitat loss. However, accurate range estimates are only available for a relatively small proportion of all known species. For the majority of the remaining species, we typically only have a small number of records denoting the spatial locations where they have previously been observed. We outline a new approach for few-shot species range estimation to address the challenge of accurately estimating the range of a species from limited data. During inference, our model takes a set of spatial locations as input, along with optional metadata such as text or an image, and outputs a species encoding that can be used to predict the range of a previously unseen species in a feedforward manner. We evaluate our approach on two challenging benchmarks, where we obtain state-of-the-art range estimation performance, in a fraction of the compute time, compared to recent alternative approaches.

Paperid: 3499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03569.pdf

Abstract:
Conditional generation models for longitudinal sequences can generate new or modified trajectories given a conditioning input. While effective at generating entire sequences, these models typically lack control over the timing and scope of the edits. Most existing approaches either operate on univariate sequences or assume that the condition affects all variables and time steps. However, many scientific and clinical applications require more precise interventions, where a condition takes effect only after a specific time and influences only a subset of variables. We introduce CLEF, a controllable sequence editing model for conditional generation of immediate and delayed effects in multivariate longitudinal sequences. CLEF learns temporal concepts that encode how and when a condition alters future sequence evolution. These concepts allow CLEF to apply targeted edits to the affected time steps and variables while preserving the rest of the sequence. We evaluate CLEF on 6 datasets spanning cellular reprogramming and patient health trajectories, comparing against 9 state-of-the-art baselines. CLEF improves immediate sequence editing accuracy by up to 36.01% (MAE). Unlike prior models, CLEF enables one-step conditional generation at arbitrary future times, outperforming them in delayed sequence editing by up to 65.71% (MAE). We test CLEF under counterfactual inference assumptions and show up to 63.19% (MAE) improvement on zero-shot conditional generation of counterfactual trajectories. In a case study of patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus, CLEF identifies clinical interventions that generate realistic counterfactual trajectories shifted toward healthier outcomes.

Paperid: 3500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01201.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional Anomaly Detection (AD) methods have predominantly relied on unsupervised learning from extensive normal data. Recent AD methods have evolved with the advent of large pre-trained vision-language models, enhancing few-shot anomaly detection capabilities. However, these latest AD methods still exhibit limitations in accuracy improvement. One contributing factor is their direct comparison of a query image's features with those of few-shot normal images. This direct comparison often leads to a loss of precision and complicates the extension of these techniques to more complex domains--an area that remains underexplored in a more refined and comprehensive manner. To address these limitations, we introduce the anomaly personalization method, which performs a personalized one-to-normal transformation of query images using an anomaly-free customized generation model, ensuring close alignment with the normal manifold. Moreover, to further enhance the stability and robustness of prediction results, we propose a triplet contrastive anomaly inference strategy, which incorporates a comprehensive comparison between the query and generated anomaly-free data pool and prompt information. Extensive evaluations across eleven datasets in three domains demonstrate our model's effectiveness compared to the latest AD methods. Additionally, our method has been proven to transfer flexibly to other AD methods, with the generated image data effectively improving the performance of other AD methods.

Paperid: 3501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16720.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in fine-tuning Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in downstream few-shot learning tasks.While these recent approaches exhibits some performance improvements, they often suffer from excessive training parameters and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Block matrix-based low-rank adaptation framework, called Block-LoRA, for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot tasks. Inspired by recent work on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Block-LoRA partitions the original low-rank decomposition matrix of LoRA into a series of sub-matrices while sharing all down-projection sub-matrices. This structure not only reduces the number of training parameters, but also transforms certain complex matrix multiplication operations into simpler matrix addition, significantly lowering the computational cost of fine-tuning. Notably, Block-LoRA enables fine-tuning CLIP on the ImageNet few-shot benchmark using a single 24GB GPU. We also show that Block-LoRA has the more tighter bound of generalization error than vanilla LoRA. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments demonstrate that Block-LoRA achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art CLIP-based few-shot methods, while maintaining a low training parameters count and reduced computational overhead.

Paperid: 3502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09290.pdf

Abstract:
Building autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with optimized efficiency and adaptive capabilities-able to respond to changing task demands and dynamic environments-is a strongly desired goal for advancing construction robotics. Such robots can play a critical role in enabling automation, reducing operational carbon footprints, and supporting modular construction processes. Inspired by the adaptive autonomy of living organisms, we introduce interoception, which centers on the robot's internal state representation, as a foundation for developing self-reflection and conscious learning to enable continual learning and adaptability in robotic agents. In this paper, we factorize internal state variables and mathematical properties as "cognitive dissonance" in shared control paradigms, where human interventions occasionally occur. We offer a new perspective on how interoception can help build adaptive motion planning in AMRs by integrating the legacy of heuristic costs from grid/graph-based algorithms with recent advances in neuroscience and reinforcement learning. Declarative and procedural knowledge extracted from human semantic inputs is encoded into a hypergraph model that overlaps with the spatial configuration of onsite layout for path planning. In addition, we design a velocity-replay module using an encoder-decoder architecture with few-shot learning to enable robots to replicate velocity profiles in contextualized scenarios for multi-robot synchronization and handover collaboration. These "cached" knowledge representations are demonstrated in simulated environments for multi-robot motion planning and stacking tasks. The insights from this study pave the way toward artificial general intelligence in AMRs, fostering their progression from complexity to competence in construction automation.

Paperid: 3503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05566.pdf

Abstract:
Scene understanding is essential for enhancing driver safety, generating human-centric explanations for Automated Vehicle (AV) decisions, and leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for retrospective driving video analysis. This study developed a dynamic scene retrieval system using Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models, which can be optimized for real-time deployment on edge devices. The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art in-context learning methods, including the zero-shot capabilities of GPT-4o, particularly in complex scenarios. By conducting frame-level analysis on the Honda Scenes Dataset, which contains a collection of about 80 hours of annotated driving videos capturing diverse real-world road and weather conditions, our study highlights the robustness of CLIP models in learning visual concepts from natural language supervision. Results also showed that fine-tuning the CLIP models, such as ViT-L/14 and ViT-B/32, significantly improved scene classification, achieving a top F1 score of 91.1%. These results demonstrate the ability of the system to deliver rapid and precise scene recognition, which can be used to meet the critical requirements of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). This study shows the potential of CLIP models to provide scalable and efficient frameworks for dynamic scene understanding and classification. Furthermore, this work lays the groundwork for advanced autonomous vehicle technologies by fostering a deeper understanding of driver behavior, road conditions, and safety-critical scenarios, marking a significant step toward smarter, safer, and more context-aware autonomous driving systems.

Paperid: 3504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04641.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal generative AI systems, such as those combining vision and language, rely on contrastive pre-training to learn representations across different modalities. While their practical benefits are widely acknowledged, a rigorous theoretical understanding of the contrastive pre-training framework remains limited. This paper develops a theoretical framework to explain the success of contrastive pre-training in downstream tasks, such as zero-shot classification, conditional diffusion models, and vision-language models. We introduce the concept of approximate sufficient statistics, a generalization of the classical sufficient statistics, and show that near-minimizers of the contrastive pre-training loss are approximately sufficient, making them adaptable to diverse downstream tasks. We further propose the Joint Generative Hierarchical Model for the joint distribution of images and text, showing that transformers can efficiently approximate relevant functions within this model via belief propagation. Building on this framework, we derive sample complexity guarantees for multi-modal learning based on contrastive pre-trained representations. Numerical simulations validate these theoretical findings, demonstrating the strong generalization performance of contrastively pre-trained transformers in various multi-modal tasks.

Paperid: 3505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02699.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models and vision transformers have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities, enabling significant transferability in downstream tasks. The fusion of these models has resulted in multi-modal architectures with enhanced instructional capabilities. Despite incorporating vast image and language pre-training, these multi-modal architectures often generate responses that deviate from the ground truth in the image data. These failure cases are known as hallucinations. Current methods for mitigating hallucinations generally focus on regularizing the language component, improving the fusion module, or ensembling multiple visual encoders to improve visual representation. In this paper, we address the hallucination issue by directly enhancing the capabilities of the visual component. Our approach, named EAGLE, is fully agnostic to the LLM or fusion module and works as a post-pretraining approach that improves the grounding and language alignment of the visual encoder. We show that a straightforward reformulation of the original contrastive pre-training task results in an improved visual encoder that can be incorporated into the instructional multi-modal architecture without additional instructional training. As a result, EAGLE achieves a significant reduction in hallucinations across multiple challenging benchmarks and tasks.

Paperid: 3506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17306.pdf

Abstract:
One fascinating aspect of pre-trained Audio-Language Models (ALMs) learning is their impressive zero-shot generalization capability and test-time adaptation (TTA) methods aiming to improve domain performance without annotations. However, previous test time adaptation (TTA) methods for ALMs in zero-shot classification tend to be stuck in incorrect model predictions. In order to further boost the performance, we propose multiple guidance on prompt learning without annotated labels. First, guidance of consistency on both context tokens and domain tokens of ALMs is set. Second, guidance of both consistency across multiple augmented views of each single test sample and contrastive learning across different test samples is set. Third, we propose a corresponding end-end learning framework for the proposed test-time adaptation method without annotated labels. We extensively evaluate our approach on 12 downstream tasks across domains, our proposed adaptation method leads to 4.41% (max 7.50%) average zero-shot performance improvement in comparison with the state-of-the-art models.

Paperid: 3507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15249.pdf

Abstract:
Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.

Paperid: 3508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14428.pdf

Abstract:
Species distributions encode valuable ecological and environmental information, yet their potential for guiding representation learning in remote sensing remains underexplored. We introduce WildSAT, which pairs satellite images with millions of geo-tagged wildlife observations readily-available on citizen science platforms. WildSAT employs a contrastive learning approach that jointly leverages satellite images, species occurrence maps, and textual habitat descriptions to train or fine-tune models. This approach significantly improves performance on diverse satellite image recognition tasks, outperforming both ImageNet-pretrained models and satellite-specific baselines. Additionally, by aligning visual and textual information, WildSAT enables zero-shot retrieval, allowing users to search geographic locations based on textual descriptions. WildSAT surpasses recent cross-modal learning methods, including approaches that align satellite images with ground imagery or wildlife photos, demonstrating the advantages of our approach. Finally, we analyze the impact of key design choices and highlight the broad applicability of WildSAT to remote sensing and biodiversity monitoring.

Paperid: 3509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13389.pdf

Abstract:
Depth completion upgrades sparse depth measurements into dense depth maps guided by a conventional image. Existing methods for this highly ill-posed task operate in tightly constrained settings and tend to struggle when applied to images outside the training domain or when the available depth measurements are sparse, irregularly distributed, or of varying density. Inspired by recent advances in monocular depth estimation, we reframe depth completion as an image-conditional depth map generation guided by sparse measurements. Our method, Marigold-DC, builds on a pretrained latent diffusion model for monocular depth estimation and injects the depth observations as test-time guidance via an optimization scheme that runs in tandem with the iterative inference of denoising diffusion. The method exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization across a diverse range of environments and handles even extremely sparse guidance effectively. Our results suggest that contemporary monocular depth priors greatly robustify depth completion: it may be better to view the task as recovering dense depth from (dense) image pixels, guided by sparse depth; rather than as inpainting (sparse) depth, guided by an image. Project website: https://MarigoldDepthCompletion.github.io/

Paperid: 3510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12654.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) defines a practical but challenging task where models are required to continuously learn novel concepts with only a few training samples. Due to data scarcity, existing FSCIL methods resort to training a backbone with abundant base data and then keeping it frozen afterward. However, the above operation often causes the backbone to overfit to base classes while overlooking the novel ones, leading to severe confusion between them. To address this issue, we propose Class-Aware Logit Adapter (CALA). Our method involves a lightweight adapter that learns to rectify biased predictions through a pseudo-incremental learning paradigm. In the real FSCIL process, we use the learned adapter to dynamically generate robust balancing factors. These factors can adjust confused novel instances back to their true label space based on their similarity to base classes. Specifically, when confusion is more likely to occur in novel instances that closely resemble base classes, greater rectification is required. Notably, CALA operates on the classifier level, preserving the original feature space, thus it can be flexibly plugged into most of the existing FSCIL works for improved performance. Experiments on three benchmark datasets consistently validate the effectiveness and flexibility of CALA. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

Paperid: 3511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09323.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of stereoscopic videos has opened new horizons in multimedia, particularly in extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) applications, where immersive content captivates audiences across various platforms. Despite its growing popularity, producing stereoscopic videos remains challenging due to the technical complexities involved in generating stereo parallax. This refers to the positional differences of objects viewed from two distinct perspectives and is crucial for creating depth perception. This complex process poses significant challenges for creators aiming to deliver convincing and engaging presentations. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Text-driven Stereoscopic Video Generation (T-SVG) system. This innovative, model-agnostic, zero-shot approach streamlines video generation by using text prompts to create reference videos. These videos are transformed into 3D point cloud sequences, which are rendered from two perspectives with subtle parallax differences, achieving a natural stereoscopic effect. T-SVG represents a significant advancement in stereoscopic content creation by integrating state-of-the-art, training-free techniques in text-to-video generation, depth estimation, and video inpainting. Its flexible architecture ensures high efficiency and user-friendliness, allowing seamless updates with newer models without retraining. By simplifying the production pipeline, T-SVG makes stereoscopic video generation accessible to a broader audience, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize the field.

Paperid: 3512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06699.pdf

Abstract:
Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d

Paperid: 3513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04291.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements have highlighted that large language models (LLMs), when given a small set of task-specific examples, demonstrate remarkable proficiency, a capability that extends to complex reasoning tasks. In particular, the combination of few-shot learning with the chain-of-thought (CoT) approach has been pivotal in steering models towards more logically consistent conclusions. This paper explores the optimization of example selection for designing effective CoT pre-prompts and shows that the choice of the optimization algorithm, typically in favor of comparison-based methods such as evolutionary computation, significantly enhances efficacy and feasibility. Specifically, thanks to a limited exploitative and overfitted optimization, Evolutionary Pre-Prompt Optimization (EPPO) brings an improvement over the naive few-shot approach exceeding 10 absolute points in exact match scores on benchmark datasets such as GSM8k and MathQA. These gains are consistent across various contexts and are further amplified when integrated with self-consistency (SC)

Paperid: 3514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19231.pdf

Abstract:
Style transfer presents a significant challenge, primarily centered on identifying an appropriate style representation. Conventional methods employ style loss, derived from second-order statistics or contrastive learning, to constrain style representation in the stylized result. However, these pre-defined style representations often limit stylistic expression, leading to artifacts. In contrast to existing approaches, we have discovered that latent features in vanilla diffusion models inherently contain natural style and content distributions. This allows for direct extraction of style information and seamless integration of generative priors into the content image without necessitating retraining. Our method adopts dual denoising paths to represent content and style references in latent space, subsequently guiding the content image denoising process with style latent codes. We introduce a Cross-attention Reweighting module that utilizes local content features to query style image information best suited to the input patch, thereby aligning the style distribution of the stylized results with that of the style image. Furthermore, we design a scaled adaptive instance normalization to mitigate inconsistencies in color distribution between style and stylized images on a global scale. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our diffusion-based \uline{z}ero-shot \uline{s}tyle \uline{t}ransfer via \uline{a}djusting style dist\uline{r}ibution, termed Z-STAR+.

Paperid: 3515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17454.pdf

Abstract:
Given a query from one modality, few-shot cross-modal retrieval (CMR) retrieves semantically similar instances in another modality with the target domain including classes that are disjoint from the source domain. Compared with classical few-shot CMR methods, vision-language pretraining methods like CLIP have shown great few-shot or zero-shot learning performance. However, they still suffer challenges due to (1) the feature degradation encountered in the target domain and (2) the extreme data imbalance. To tackle these issues, we propose FLEX-CLIP, a novel Feature-level Generation Network Enhanced CLIP. FLEX-CLIP includes two training stages. In multimodal feature generation, we propose a composite multimodal VAE-GAN network to capture real feature distribution patterns and generate pseudo samples based on CLIP features, addressing data imbalance. For common space projection, we develop a gate residual network to fuse CLIP features with projected features, reducing feature degradation in X-shot scenarios. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show a 7%-15% improvement over state-of-the-art methods, with ablation studies demonstrating enhancement of CLIP features.

Paperid: 3516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17406.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image classification by leveraging predefined sets of labels to construct text prompts for zero-shot reasoning. However, these approaches face significant limitations in undefined domains, where the label space is vocabulary-unknown and composite. We thus introduce Generative Semantic Labels (GSLs), a novel task that aims to predict a comprehensive set of semantic labels for an image without being constrained by a predefined labels set. Unlike traditional zero-shot classification, GSLs generates multiple semantic-level labels, encompassing objects, scenes, attributes, and relationships, thereby providing a richer and more accurate representation of image content. In this paper, we propose Chain-of-Action (CoA), an innovative method designed to tackle the GSLs task. CoA is motivated by the observation that enriched contextual information significantly improves generative performance during inference. Specifically, CoA decomposes the GSLs task into a sequence of detailed actions. Each action extracts and merges key information from the previous step, passing enriched context to the next, ultimately guiding the VLM to generate comprehensive and accurate semantic labels. We evaluate the effectiveness of CoA through extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate significant improvements across key performance metrics, validating the capability of CoA to generate accurate and contextually rich semantic labels. Our work not only advances the state-of-the-art in generative semantic labels but also opens new avenues for applying VLMs in open-ended and dynamic real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 3517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05508.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) excel as listwise rerankers, but their high computational demands remain a barrier to widespread adoption. Further, the traditional language modeling (LM) objective is not ideally suited for reranking tasks. FIRST is a novel approach that addresses these challenges by integrating a learning-to-rank objective and leveraging the logits of only the first generated token, thereby significantly reducing inference latency compared to traditional LLM rerankers. In this study, we extend the evaluation of FIRST to the TREC Deep Learning datasets (DL19-22), validating its robustness across diverse domains. We investigate the influence of different first-stage retrievers on FIRST rerankers, observing diminishing returns and patterns consistent with traditional LLM rerankers. Through applying the FIRST objective to a broader range of backbone models, we achieve effectiveness surpassing the original implementation. Our experiments confirm that fast reranking with single-token logits does not compromise out-of-domain reranking quality. To better quantify the computational savings in the original study, we measure and compare latency to find a 21%-42% gain across various models and benchmarks. Moreover, while LM training implicitly improves zero-shot single-token reranking, our experiments also raise questions about whether LM pre-training may hinder subsequent fine-tuning with the FIRST objective. These findings pave the way for more efficient and effective listwise reranking in future applications.

Paperid: 3518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01172.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) presents a challenging yet realistic scenario, which requires the model to continually learn new classes with limited labeled data (i.e., incremental sessions) while retaining knowledge of previously learned base classes (i.e., base sessions). Due to the limited data in incremental sessions, models are prone to overfitting new classes and suffering catastrophic forgetting of base classes. To tackle these issues, recent advancements resort to prototype-based approaches to constrain the base class distribution and learn discriminative representations of new classes. Despite the progress, the limited data issue still induces ill-divided feature space, leading the model to confuse the new class with old classes or fail to facilitate good separation among new classes. In this paper, we aim to mitigate these issues by directly constraining the span of each class distribution from a covariance perspective. In detail, we propose a simple yet effective covariance constraint loss to force the model to learn each class distribution with the same covariance matrix. In addition, we propose a perturbation approach to perturb the few-shot training samples in the feature space, which encourages the samples to be away from the weighted distribution of other classes. Regarding perturbed samples as new class data, the classifier is forced to establish explicit boundaries between each new class and the existing ones. Our approach is easy to integrate into existing FSCIL approaches to boost performance. Experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance of FSCIL.

Paperid: 3519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23535.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of situated human-robot dialogues to train and evaluate such agents is expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we propose building a large language model (LLM)-based user agent that can simulate user behavior during interactions with an embodied agent in a virtual environment. Given a user goal (e.g., make breakfast), at each time step, the user agent may observe" the robot actions or speak" to either intervene with the robot or answer questions. Such a user agent assists in improving the scalability and efficiency of embodied dialogues dataset generation and is critical for enhancing and evaluating the robot's interaction and task completion ability, as well as for research in reinforcement learning using AI feedback. We evaluate our user agent's ability to generate human-like behaviors by comparing its simulated dialogues with the TEACh dataset. We perform three experiments: zero-shot prompting to predict dialogue acts, few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning on the TEACh training subset. Results show the LLM-based user agent achieves an F-measure of 42% with zero-shot prompting and 43.4% with few-shot prompting in mimicking human speaking behavior. Through fine-tuning, performance in deciding when to speak remained stable, while deciding what to say improved from 51.1% to 62.5%. These findings showcase the feasibility of the proposed approach for assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of robot task completion through natural language communication.

Paperid: 3520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14946.pdf

Abstract:
DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening has revolutionized the detection of protein-ligand interactions through read counts, enabling rapid exploration of vast chemical spaces. However, noise in read counts, stemming from nonspecific interactions, can mislead this exploration process. We present DEL-Ranking, a novel distribution-correction denoising framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) a novel ranking loss that rectifies relative magnitude relationships between read counts, enabling the learning of causal features determining activity levels, and (2) an iterative algorithm employing self-training and consistency loss to establish model coherence between activity label and read count predictions. Furthermore, we contribute three new DEL screening datasets, the first to comprehensively include multi-dimensional molecular representations, protein-ligand enrichment values, and their activity labels. These datasets mitigate data scarcity issues in AI-driven DEL screening research. Rigorous evaluation on diverse DEL datasets demonstrates DEL-Ranking's superior performance across multiple correlation metrics, with significant improvements in binding affinity prediction accuracy. Our model exhibits zero-shot generalization ability across different protein targets and successfully identifies potential motifs determining compound binding affinity. This work advances DEL screening analysis and provides valuable resources for future research in this area.

Paperid: 3521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10931.pdf

Abstract:
Species range maps (SRMs) are essential tools for research and policy-making in ecology, conservation, and environmental management. However, traditional SRMs rely on the availability of environmental covariates and high-quality species location observation data, both of which can be challenging to obtain due to geographic inaccessibility and resource constraints. We propose a novel approach combining millions of citizen science species observations with textual descriptions from Wikipedia, covering habitat preferences and range descriptions for tens of thousands of species. Our framework maps locations, species, and text descriptions into a common space, facilitating the learning of rich spatial covariates at a global scale and enabling zero-shot range estimation from textual descriptions. Evaluated on held-out species, our zero-shot SRMs significantly outperform baselines and match the performance of SRMs obtained using tens of observations. Our approach also acts as a strong prior when combined with observational data, resulting in more accurate range estimation with less data. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of the learned representations in the context of range estimation and other spatial tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 3522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10412.pdf

Abstract:
3D neural style transfer has gained significant attention for its potential to provide user-friendly stylization with spatial consistency. However, existing 3D style transfer methods often fall short in terms of inference efficiency, generalization ability, and struggle to handle dynamic scenes with temporal consistency. In this paper, we introduce 4DStyleGaussian, a novel 4D style transfer framework designed to achieve real-time stylization of arbitrary style references while maintaining reasonable content affinity, multi-view consistency, and temporal coherence. Our approach leverages an embedded 4D Gaussian Splatting technique, which is trained using a reversible neural network for reducing content loss in the feature distillation process. Utilizing the 4D embedded Gaussians, we predict a 4D style transformation matrix that facilitates spatially and temporally consistent style transfer with Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve high-quality and zero-shot stylization for 4D scenarios with enhanced efficiency and spatial-temporal consistency.

Paperid: 3523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09967.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, few-shot segmentation (FSS) models have emerged as a promising approach in medical imaging analysis, offering remarkable adaptability to segment novel classes with limited annotated data. Existing approaches to few-shot segmentation have often overlooked the potential of the query itself, failing to fully utilize the valuable information it contains. However, treating the query as unlabeled data provides an opportunity to enhance prediction accuracy. Specifically in the domain of medical imaging, the volumetric structure of queries offers a considerable source of valuable information that can be used to improve the target slice segmentation. In this work, we present a novel strategy to efficiently leverage the intrinsic information of the query sample for final segmentation during inference. First, we use the support slices from a reference volume to generate an initial segmentation score for the query slices through a prototypical approach. Subsequently, we apply a confidence-aware pseudo-labeling procedure to transfer the most informative parts of query slices to the support set. The final prediction is performed based on the new expanded support set, enabling the prediction of a more accurate segmentation mask for the query volume. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can effectively boost performance across diverse settings and datasets.

Paperid: 3524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06442.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have shown that even trained with noisy prior data, they can generalize effectively to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) and pre-training techniques. Motivated by this, we explore whether a similar approach can be applied to scientific foundation models (SFMs). Our methodology is structured as follows: (i) we collect low-cost physics-informed neural network (PINN)-based approximated prior data in the form of solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) constructed through an arbitrary linear combination of mathematical dictionaries; (ii) we utilize Transformer architectures with self and cross-attention mechanisms to predict PDE solutions without knowledge of the governing equations in a zero-shot setting; (iii) we provide experimental evidence on the one-dimensional convection-diffusion-reaction equation, which demonstrate that pre-training remains robust even with approximated prior data, with only marginal impacts on test accuracy. Notably, this finding opens the path to pre-training SFMs with realistic, low-cost data instead of (or in conjunction with) numerical high-cost data. These results support the conjecture that SFMs can improve in a manner similar to LLMs, where fully cleaning the vast set of sentences crawled from the Internet is nearly impossible.

Paperid: 3525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03645.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic simulation today remains challenging to scale up due to the human efforts required to create diverse simulation tasks and scenes. Simulation-trained policies also face scalability issues as many sim-to-real methods focus on a single task. To address these challenges, this work proposes GenSim2, a scalable framework that leverages coding LLMs with multi-modal and reasoning capabilities for complex and realistic simulation task creation, including long-horizon tasks with articulated objects. To automatically generate demonstration data for these tasks at scale, we propose planning and RL solvers that generalize within object categories. The pipeline can generate data for up to 100 articulated tasks with 200 objects and reduce the required human efforts. To utilize such data, we propose an effective multi-task language-conditioned policy architecture, dubbed proprioceptive point-cloud transformer (PPT), that learns from the generated demonstrations and exhibits strong sim-to-real zero-shot transfer. Combining the proposed pipeline and the policy architecture, we show a promising usage of GenSim2 that the generated data can be used for zero-shot transfer or co-train with real-world collected data, which enhances the policy performance by 20% compared with training exclusively on limited real data.

Paperid: 3526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20441.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerges as a simple and effective strategy for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in real-world reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the efficacy of a singular, task-level prompt uniformly applied across the whole of instances is inherently limited since one prompt cannot be a good partner for all, a more appropriate approach should consider the interaction between the prompt and each instance meticulously. This work introduces an instance-adaptive prompting algorithm as an alternative zero-shot CoT reasoning scheme by adaptively differentiating good and bad prompts. Concretely, we first employ analysis on LLMs through the lens of information flow to detect the mechanism under zero-shot CoT reasoning, in which we discover that information flows from question to prompt and question to rationale jointly influence the reasoning results most. We notice that a better zero-shot CoT reasoning needs the prompt to obtain semantic information from the question then the rationale aggregates sufficient information from the question directly and via the prompt indirectly. On the contrary, lacking any of those would probably lead to a bad one. Stem from that, we further propose an instance-adaptive prompting strategy (IAP) for zero-shot CoT reasoning. Experiments conducted with LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and Qwen on math, logic, and commonsense reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM8K, MMLU, Causal Judgement) obtain consistent improvement, demonstrating that the instance-adaptive zero-shot CoT prompting performs better than other task-level methods with some curated prompts or sophisticated procedures, showing the significance of our findings in the zero-shot CoT reasoning mechanism.

Paperid: 3527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16818.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal brain magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is indispensable in neuroscience and neurology. However, due to the accessibility of MRI scanners and their lengthy acquisition time, multimodal MR images are not commonly available. Current MR image synthesis approaches are typically trained on independent datasets for specific tasks, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to novel datasets and tasks. Here, we present TUMSyn, a Text-guided Universal MR image Synthesis generalist model, which can flexibly generate brain MR images with demanded imaging metadata from routinely acquired scans guided by text prompts. To ensure TUMSyn's image synthesis precision, versatility, and generalizability, we first construct a brain MR database comprising 31,407 3D images with 7 MRI modalities from 13 centers. We then pre-train an MRI-specific text encoder using contrastive learning to effectively control MR image synthesis based on text prompts. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and physician assessments indicate that TUMSyn can generate clinically meaningful MR images with specified imaging metadata in supervised and zero-shot scenarios. Therefore, TUMSyn can be utilized along with acquired MR scan(s) to facilitate large-scale MRI-based screening and diagnosis of brain diseases.

Paperid: 3528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21792.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of encrypted network traffic, effective traffic classification has become essential for network security and quality of service management. Current machine learning and deep learning approaches for traffic classification face three critical challenges: computational inefficiency of Transformer architectures, inadequate traffic representations with loss of crucial byte-level features while retaining detrimental biases, and poor handling of long-tail distributions in real-world data. We propose NetMamba+, a framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: (1) an efficient architecture considering Mamba and Flash Attention mechanisms, (2) a multimodal traffic representation scheme that preserves essential traffic information while eliminating biases, and (3) a label distribution-aware fine-tuning strategy. Evaluation experiments on massive datasets encompassing four main classification tasks showcase NetMamba+'s superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with improvements of up to 6.44\% in F1 score. Moreover, NetMamba+ demonstrates excellent efficiency, achieving 1.7x higher inference throughput than the best baseline while maintaining comparably low memory usage. Furthermore, NetMamba+ exhibits superior few-shot learning abilities, achieving better classification performance with fewer labeled data. Additionally, we implement an online traffic classification system that demonstrates robust real-world performance with a throughput of 261.87 Mb/s. As the first framework to adapt Mamba architecture for network traffic classification, NetMamba+ opens new possibilities for efficient and accurate traffic analysis in complex network environments.

Paperid: 3529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21037.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models have excelled at textual reasoning, but they often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and continuous action planning, failing to simulate the dynamics required for complex visual reasoning. In this work, we formulate visual reasoning by means of video generation models, positing that generated frames can act as intermediate reasoning steps between initial states and solutions. We evaluate their capacity in two distinct regimes: Maze Navigation for sequential discrete planning with low visual change and Tangram Puzzle for continuous manipulation with high visual change. Our experiments reveal three critical insights: (1) Robust Zero-Shot Generalization: In both tasks, the model demonstrates strong performance on unseen data distributions without specific finetuning. (2) Visual Context: The model effectively uses visual context as explicit control, such as agent icons and tangram shapes, enabling it to maintain high visual consistency and adapt its planning capability robustly to unseen patterns. (3) Visual Test-Time Scaling: We observe a test-time scaling law in sequential planning; increasing the generated video length (visual inference budget) empowers better zero-shot generalization to spatially and temporally complex paths. These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a media tool, but a scalable, generalizable paradigm for visual reasoning.

Paperid: 3530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20419.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research has shown that aligning fine-grained text descriptions with localized image patches can significantly improve the zero-shot performance of pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP). However, we find that both fine-grained text descriptions and localized image patches often contain redundant information, making text-visual alignment less effective. In this paper, we tackle this issue from two perspectives: \emph{View Refinement} and \emph{Description refinement}, termed as \textit{\textbf{Bi}-refinement for \textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{T}ext-visual \textbf{A}lignment} (BiFTA). \emph{View refinement} removes redundant image patches with high \emph{Intersection over Union} (IoU) ratios, resulting in more distinctive visual samples. \emph{Description refinement} removes redundant text descriptions with high pairwise cosine similarity, ensuring greater diversity in the remaining descriptions. BiFTA achieves superior zero-shot performance on 6 benchmark datasets for both ViT-based and ResNet-based CLIP, justifying the necessity to remove redundant information in visual-text alignment.

Paperid: 3531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19831.pdf

Abstract:
Neural scaling laws predict how language model performance improves with increased compute. While aggregate metrics like validation loss can follow smooth power-law curves, individual downstream tasks exhibit diverse scaling behaviors: some improve monotonically, others plateau, and some even degrade with scale. We argue that predicting downstream performance from validation perplexity suffers from two limitations: averaging token-level losses obscures signal, and no simple parametric family can capture the full spectrum of scaling behaviors. To address this, we propose Neural Neural Scaling Laws (NeuNeu), a neural network that frames scaling law prediction as time-series extrapolation. NeuNeu combines temporal context from observed accuracy trajectories with token-level validation losses, learning to predict future performance without assuming any bottleneck or functional form. Trained entirely on open-source model checkpoints from HuggingFace, NeuNeu achieves 2.04% mean absolute error in predicting model accuracy on 66 downstream tasks -- a 38% reduction compared to logistic scaling laws (3.29% MAE). Furthermore, NeuNeu generalizes zero-shot to unseen model families, parameter counts, and downstream tasks. Our work suggests that predicting downstream scaling laws directly from data outperforms parametric alternatives.

Paperid: 3532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16210.pdf

Abstract:
Discrete video VAEs underpin modern text-to-video generation and video understanding systems, yet existing tokenizers typically learn visual codebooks at a single scale with limited vocabularies and shallow language supervision, leading to poor cross-modal alignment and zero-shot transfer. We introduce PyraTok, a language-aligned pyramidal tokenizer that learns semantically structured discrete latents across multiple spatiotemporal resolutions. PyraTok builds on a pretrained video VAE and a novel Language aligned Pyramidal Quantization (LaPQ) module that discretizes encoder features at several depths using a shared large binary codebook, yielding compact yet expressive video token sequences. To tightly couple visual tokens with language, PyraTok jointly optimizes multi-scale text-guided quantization and a global autoregressive objective over the token hierarchy. Across ten benchmarks, PyraTok delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) video reconstruction, consistently improves text-to-video quality, and sets new SOTA zero-shot performance on video segmentation, temporal action localization, and video understanding, scaling robustly to up to 4K/8K resolutions.

Paperid: 3533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15071.pdf

Abstract:
Decoding visual experiences from human brain activity remains a central challenge at the intersection of neuroscience, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence. A critical obstacle is the inherent variability of cortical responses: neural activity elicited by the same visual stimulus differs across individuals and trials due to anatomical, functional, cognitive, and experimental factors, making fMRI-to-image reconstruction non-injective. In this paper, we tackle a challenging yet practically meaningful problem: zero-shot cross-subject fMRI-to-image reconstruction, where the visual experience of a previously unseen individual must be reconstructed without subject-specific training. To enable principled evaluation, we present a unified cortical-surface dataset -- UniCortex-fMRI, assembled from multiple visual-stimulus fMRI datasets to provide broad coverage of subjects and stimuli. Our UniCortex-fMRI is particularly processed by standardized data formats to make it possible to explore this possibility in the zero-shot scenario of cross-subject fMRI-to-image reconstruction. To tackle the modeling challenge, we propose PictorialCortex, which models fMRI activity using a compositional latent formulation that structures stimulus-driven representations under subject-, dataset-, and trial-related variability. PictorialCortex operates in a universal cortical latent space and implements this formulation through a latent factorization-composition module, reinforced by paired factorization and re-factorizing consistency regularization. During inference, surrogate latents synthesized under multiple seen-subject conditions are aggregated to guide diffusion-based image synthesis for unseen subjects. Extensive experiments show that PictorialCortex improves zero-shot cross-subject visual reconstruction, highlighting the benefits of compositional latent modeling and multi-dataset training.

Paperid: 3534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08832.pdf

Abstract:
Invisible watermarking has become a critical mechanism for authenticating AI-generated image content, with major platforms deploying watermarking schemes at scale. However, evaluating the vulnerability of these schemes against sophisticated removal attacks remains essential to assess their reliability and guide robust design. In this work, we expose a fundamental vulnerability in invisible watermarks by reformulating watermark removal as a view synthesis problem. Our key insight is that generating a perceptually consistent alternative view of the same semantic content, akin to re-observing a scene from a shifted perspective, naturally removes the embedded watermark while preserving visual fidelity. This reveals a critical gap: watermarks robust to pixel-space and frequency-domain attacks remain vulnerable to semantic-preserving viewpoint transformations. We introduce a zero-shot diffusion-based framework that applies controlled geometric transformations in latent space, augmented with view-guided correspondence attention to maintain structural consistency during reconstruction. Operating on frozen pre-trained models without detector access or watermark knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art watermark suppression across 15 watermarking methods--outperforming 14 baseline attacks while maintaining superior perceptual quality across multiple datasets.

Paperid: 3535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06220.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a fragmented and inefficient ecosystem, a state of ``model lock-in'' where seamlessly integrating novel models remains a significant bottleneck. Current routing frameworks require exhaustive, costly retraining, hindering scalability and adaptability. We introduce ZeroRouter, a new paradigm for LLM routing that breaks this lock-in. Our approach is founded on a universal latent space, a model-agnostic representation of query difficulty that fundamentally decouples the characterization of a query from the profiling of a model. This allows for zero-shot onboarding of new models without full-scale retraining. ZeroRouter features a context-aware predictor that maps queries to this universal space and a dual-mode optimizer that balances accuracy, cost, and latency. Our framework consistently outperforms all baselines, delivering higher accuracy at lower cost and latency.

Paperid: 3536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04785.pdf

Abstract:
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides detailed tissue information, but its clinical application is limited by long acquisition time, high cost, and restricted resolution. Image translation has recently gained attention as a strategy to address these limitations. Although Pix2Pix has been widely applied in medical image translation, its potential has not been fully explored. In this study, we propose an enhanced Pix2Pix framework that integrates Squeeze-and-Excitation Residual Networks (SEResNet) and U-Net++ to improve image generation quality and structural fidelity. SEResNet strengthens critical feature representation through channel attention, while U-Net++ enhances multi-scale feature fusion. A simplified PatchGAN discriminator further stabilizes training and refines local anatomical realism. Experimental results demonstrate that under few-shot conditions with fewer than 500 images, the proposed method achieves consistent structural fidelity and superior image quality across multiple intra-modality MRI translation tasks, showing strong generalization ability. These results suggest an effective extension of Pix2Pix for medical image translation.

Paperid: 3537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02232.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer severe catastrophic forgetting when adapted sequentially to new tasks in a continual learning (CL) setting. Existing approaches are fundamentally limited: replay-based methods are impractical and privacy-violating, while strict orthogonality-based methods collapse under scale: each new task is projected onto an orthogonal complement, progressively reducing the residual degrees of freedom and eliminating forward transfer by forbidding overlap in shared representations. In this work, we introduce ELLA, a training framework built on the principle of selective subspace de-correlation. Rather than forbidding all overlap, ELLA explicitly characterizes the structure of past updates and penalizes alignments along their high-energy, task-specific directions, while preserving freedom in the low-energy residual subspaces to enable transfer. Formally, this is realized via a lightweight regularizer on a single aggregated update matrix. We prove this mechanism corresponds to an anisotropic shrinkage operator that bounds interference, yielding a penalty that is both memory- and compute-constant regardless of task sequence length. ELLA requires no data replay, no architectural expansion, and negligible storage. Empirically, it achieves state-of-the-art CL performance on three popular benchmarks, with relative accuracy gains of up to $9.6\%$ and a $35\times$ smaller memory footprint. Further, ELLA scales robustly across architectures and actively enhances the model's zero-shot generalization performance on unseen tasks, establishing a principled and scalable solution for constructive lifelong LLM adaptation.

Paperid: 3538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00970.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot time-series forecasting holds great promise, but is still in its infancy, hindered by limited and biased data corpora, leakage-prone evaluation, and privacy and licensing constraints. Motivated by these challenges, we propose the first practical univariate time series simulation pipeline which is simultaneously fast enough for on-the-fly data generation and enables notable zero-shot forecasting performance on M-Series and GiftEval benchmarks that capture trend/seasonality/intermittency patterns, typical of industrial forecasting applications across a variety of domains. Our simulator, which we call SarSim0 (SARIMA Simulator for Zero-Shot Forecasting), is based off of a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model as its core data source. Due to instability in the autoregressive component, naive SARIMA simulation often leads to unusable paths. Instead, we follow a three-step procedure: (1) we sample well-behaved trajectories from its characteristic polynomial stability region; (2) we introduce a superposition scheme that combines multiple paths into rich multi-seasonality traces; and (3) we add rate-based heavy-tailed noise models to capture burstiness and intermittency alongside seasonalities and trends. SarSim0 is orders of magnitude faster than kernel-based generators, and it enables training on circa 1B unique purely simulated series, generated on the fly; after which well-established neural network backbones exhibit strong zero-shot generalization, surpassing strong statistical forecasters and recent foundation baselines, while operating under strict zero-shot protocol. Notably, on GiftEval we observe a "student-beats-teacher" effect: models trained on our simulations exceed the forecasting accuracy of the AutoARIMA generating processes.

Paperid: 3539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21714.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied navigation in open, dynamic environments demands accurate foresight of how the world will evolve and how actions will unfold over time. We propose AstraNav-World, an end-to-end world model that jointly reasons about future visual states and action sequences within a unified probabilistic framework. Our framework integrates a diffusion-based video generator with a vision-language policy, enabling synchronized rollouts where predicted scenes and planned actions are updated simultaneously. Training optimizes two complementary objectives: generating action-conditioned multi-step visual predictions and deriving trajectories conditioned on those predicted visuals. This bidirectional constraint makes visual predictions executable and keeps decisions grounded in physically consistent, task-relevant futures, mitigating cumulative errors common in decoupled "envision-then-plan" pipelines. Experiments across diverse embodied navigation benchmarks show improved trajectory accuracy and higher success rates. Ablations confirm the necessity of tight vision-action coupling and unified training, with either branch removal degrading both prediction quality and policy reliability. In real-world testing, AstraNav-World demonstrated exceptional zero-shot capabilities, adapting to previously unseen scenarios without any real-world fine-tuning. These results suggest that AstraNav-World captures transferable spatial understanding and planning-relevant navigation dynamics, rather than merely overfitting to simulation-specific data distribution. Overall, by unifying foresight vision and control within a single generative model, we move closer to reliable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied agents that operate robustly in open-ended real-world settings.

Paperid: 3540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18003.pdf

Abstract:
We address semantic 3D part segmentation: decomposing objects into parts with meaningful names. While datasets exist with part annotations, their definitions are inconsistent across datasets, limiting robust training. Previous methods produce unlabeled decompositions or retrieve single parts without complete shape annotations. We propose ALIGN-Parts, which formulates part naming as a direct set alignment task. Our method decomposes shapes into partlets - implicit 3D part representations - matched to part descriptions via bipartite assignment. We combine geometric cues from 3D part fields, appearance from multi-view vision features, and semantic knowledge from language-model-generated affordance descriptions. Text-alignment loss ensures partlets share embedding space with text, enabling a theoretically open-vocabulary matching setup, given sufficient data. Our efficient and novel, one-shot, 3D part segmentation and naming method finds applications in several downstream tasks, including serving as a scalable annotation engine. As our model supports zero-shot matching to arbitrary descriptions and confidence-calibrated predictions for known categories, with human verification, we create a unified ontology that aligns PartNet, 3DCoMPaT++, and Find3D, consisting of 1,794 unique 3D parts. We also show examples from our newly created Tex-Parts dataset. We also introduce 2 novel metrics appropriate for the named 3D part segmentation task.

Paperid: 3541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11060.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising path toward interpretable medical diagnosis by allowing users to ask about clinical explanations alongside predictions and across different modalities. However, training VLMs for detailed reasoning requires large-scale image-text datasets. In many specialized domains, for example in reading Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) images, such precise text with grounded description of pathologies is scarce or even non-existent. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce Synthetic Vasculature Reasoning (SVR), a framework that controllably synthesizes images and corresponding text, specifically: realistic retinal vasculature with Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) features: capillary dropout, microaneurysms, neovascularization, and tortuosity, while automatically generating granular reasoning texts. Based on this we curate OCTA-100K-SVR, an OCTA image-reasoning dataset with 100,000 pairs. Our experiments show that a general-purpose VLM (Qwen3-VL-8b) trained on the dataset achieves a zero-shot balanced classification accuracy of 89.67% on real OCTA images, outperforming supervised baselines. Through human expert evaluation we also demonstrate that it significantly enhances explanation quality and pathology localization on clinical data.

Paperid: 3542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09446.pdf

Abstract:
Recent vision language models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated impressive anomaly detection performance under significant distribution shift by utilizing high-level semantic information through text prompts. However, these models often neglect fine-grained details, such as which kind of anomalies, like "hole", "cut", "scratch" that could provide more specific insight into the nature of anomalies. We argue that recognizing fine-grained anomaly types 1) enriches the representation of "abnormal" with structured semantics, narrowing the gap between coarse anomaly signals and fine-grained defect categories; 2) enables manufacturers to understand the root causes of the anomaly and implement more targeted and appropriate corrective measures quickly. While incorporating such detailed semantic information is crucial, designing handcrafted prompts for each defect type is both time-consuming and susceptible to human bias. For this reason, we introduce DAPO, a novel approach for Defect-aware Prompt Optimization based on progressive tuning for the zero-shot multi-type and binary anomaly detection and segmentation under distribution shifts. Our approach aligns anomaly-relevant image features with their corresponding text semantics by learning hybrid defect-aware prompts with both fixed textual anchors and learnable token embeddings. We conducted experiments on public benchmarks (MPDD, VisA, MVTec-AD, MAD, and Real-IAD) and an internal dataset. The results suggest that compared to the baseline models, DAPO achieves a 3.7% average improvement in AUROC and average precision metrics at the image level under distribution shift, and a 6.5% average improvement in localizing novel anomaly types under zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 3543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02622.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in video generation have enabled the synthesis of videos with strong temporal consistency and impressive visual quality, marking a crucial step toward vision foundation models. To evaluate these video generation models, existing benchmarks primarily focus on factors related to visual perception and understanding, like visual aesthetics, instruction adherence, and temporal coherence. However, the rule-based reasoning capabilities of video generation models remain largely unexplored. Although recent studies have carried out preliminary explorations into whether video models can serve as zero-shot learners, they still lack a fine-grained decomposition of reasoning capabilities and a comprehensive evaluation protocol. To address this gap, we introduce RULER-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning ability of video generation models from the perspective of cognitive rules. Built upon two fundamental paradigms: text-to-video and image-to-video, RULER-Bench covers 40 representative tasks spanning six rule categories with 622 high-quality annotated instances. For the evaluation of each generated video, we construct a checklist covering four metrics and leverage GPT-o3 to assign scores to each question, achieving 85% alignment with human judgements. Extensive experiments show that the state-of-the-art model achieves only 48.87% on the rule coherence metric, highlighting significant room for improvement in the reasoning capability of next-level video models. We expect that the insight obtained from RULER-Bench will facilitate further development of reasoning-aware video generation, advancing video generation models toward vision foundation intelligence.

Paperid: 3544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22099.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have driven major advances across domains, yet their massive size hinders deployment in resource-constrained settings. Model compression addresses this challenge, with low-rank factorization emerging as a particularly effective method for reducing size, memory, and computation while maintaining accuracy. However, while these compressed models boast of benign performance and system-level advantages, their trustworthiness implications remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of how low-rank factorization affects LLM trustworthiness across privacy, adversarial robustness, fairness, and ethical alignment. We evaluate multiple LLMs of different sizes and variants compressed with diverse low-rank algorithms, revealing key insights: (1) low-rank compression preserves or improves training data privacy but weakens PII protection during conversation; (2) adversarial robustness is generally preserved and often enhanced, even under deep compression; (3) ethical reasoning degrades in zero-shot settings but partially recovers with few-shot prompting; (4) fairness declines under compression. Beyond compression, we investigate how model scale and fine-tuning affect trustworthiness, as both are important in low-rank methods. To guide trustworthy compression strategies, we end our paper with a gradient-based attribution analysis to identify which layers in LLMs contribute most to adversarial robustness.

Paperid: 3545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17529.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate network-traffic forecasting enables proactive capacity planning and anomaly detection in Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. Recent advances in time-series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization across diverse domains, yet their effectiveness for computer networking remains unexplored. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of a TSFM, IBM's Tiny Time Mixer (TTM), on the CESNET-TimeSeries24 dataset, a 40-week real-world ISP telemetry corpus. We assess TTM under zero-shot and few-shot settings across multiple forecasting horizons (hours to days), aggregation hierarchies (institutions, subnets, IPs), and temporal resolutions (10-minute and hourly). Results show that TTM achieves consistent accuracy (RMSE 0.026-0.057) and stable $R^2$ scores across horizons and context lengths, outperforming or matching fully trained deep learning baselines such as GRU and LSTM. Inference latency remains under 0.05s per 100 points on a single MacBook Pro using CPU-only computation, confirming deployability without dedicated GPU or MPS acceleration. These findings highlight the potential of pretrained TSFMs to enable scalable, efficient, and training-free forecasting for modern network monitoring and management systems.

Paperid: 3546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17052.pdf

Abstract:
Analyzing whole-slide images (WSIs) requires an iterative, evidence-driven reasoning process that parallels how pathologists dynamically zoom, refocus, and self-correct while collecting the evidence. However, existing computational pipelines often lack this explicit reasoning trajectory, resulting in inherently opaque and unjustifiable predictions. To bridge this gap, we present PathAgent, a training-free, large language model (LLM)-based agent framework that emulates the reflective, stepwise analytical approach of human experts. PathAgent can autonomously explore WSI, iteratively and precisely locating significant micro-regions using the Navigator module, extracting morphology visual cues using the Perceptor, and integrating these findings into the continuously evolving natural language trajectories in the Executor. The entire sequence of observations and decisions forms an explicit chain-of-thought, yielding fully interpretable predictions. Evaluated across five challenging datasets, PathAgent exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, surpassing task-specific baselines in both open-ended and constrained visual question-answering tasks. Moreover, a collaborative evaluation with human pathologists confirms PathAgent's promise as a transparent and clinically grounded diagnostic assistant.

Paperid: 3547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15174.pdf

Abstract:
In industrial equipment monitoring, fault diagnosis is critical for ensuring system reliability and enabling predictive maintenance. However, the scarcity of fault data, due to the rarity of fault events and the high cost of data annotation, significantly hinders data-driven approaches. Existing time-series generation models, optimized for abundant normal data, struggle to capture fault distributions in few-shot scenarios, producing samples that lack authenticity and diversity due to the large domain gap and high intra-class variability of faults. To address this, we propose a novel few-shot fault time-series generation framework based on diffusion models. Our approach employs a positive-negative difference adapter, leveraging pre-trained normal data distributions to model the discrepancies between normal and fault domains for accurate fault synthesis. Additionally, a diversity loss is introduced to prevent mode collapse, encouraging the generation of diverse fault samples through inter-sample difference regularization. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms traditional methods in authenticity and diversity, achieving state-of-the-art performance on key benchmarks.

Paperid: 3548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13710.pdf

Abstract:
Human grasps can be roughly categorized into two types: power grasps and precision grasps. Precision grasping enables tool use and is believed to have influenced human evolution. Today's multi-fingered robotic hands are effective in power grasps, but for tasks requiring precision, parallel grippers are still more widely adopted. This contrast highlights a key limitation in current robotic hand design: the difficulty of achieving both stable power grasps and precise, fine-grained manipulation within a single, versatile system. In this work, we bridge this gap by jointly optimizing the control and hardware design of a multi-fingered dexterous hand, enabling both power and precision manipulation. Rather than redesigning the entire hand, we introduce a lightweight fingertip geometry modification, represent it as a contact plane, and jointly optimize its parameters along with the corresponding control. Our control strategy dynamically switches between power and precision manipulation and simplifies precision control into parallel thumb-index motions, which proves robust for sim-to-real transfer. On the design side, we leverage large-scale simulation to optimize the fingertip geometry using a differentiable neural-physics surrogate model. We validate our approach through extensive experiments in both sim-to-real and real-to-real settings. Our method achieves an 82.5% zero-shot success rate on unseen objects in sim-to-real precision grasping, and a 93.3% success rate in challenging real-world tasks involving bread pinching. These results demonstrate that our co-design framework can significantly enhance the fine-grained manipulation ability of multi-fingered hands without reducing their ability for power grasps. Our project page is at https://jianglongye.com/power-to-precision

Paperid: 3549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13107.pdf

Abstract:
The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials statement is the global benchmark for transparent and high-quality reporting of randomized controlled trials. Manual verification of CONSORT adherence is a laborious, time-intensive process that constitutes a significant bottleneck in peer review and evidence synthesis. This study aimed to systematically evaluate the accuracy and reliability of contemporary LLMs in identifying the adherence of published RCTs to the CONSORT 2010 statement under a zero-shot setting. We constructed a golden standard dataset of 150 published RCTs spanning diverse medical specialties. The primary outcome was the macro-averaged F1-score for the three-class classification task, supplemented by item-wise performance metrics and qualitative error analysis. Overall model performance was modest. The top-performing models, Gemini-2.5-Flash and DeepSeek-R1, achieved nearly identical macro F1 scores of 0.634 and Cohen's Kappa coefficients of 0.280 and 0.282, respectively, indicating only fair agreement with expert consensus. A striking performance disparity was observed across classes: while most models could identify compliant items with high accuracy (F1 score > 0.850), they struggled profoundly with identifying non-compliant and not applicable items, where F1 scores rarely exceeded 0.400. Notably, some high-profile models like GPT-4o underperformed, achieving a macro F1-score of only 0.521. LLMs show potential as preliminary screening assistants for CONSORT checks, capably identifying well-reported items. However, their current inability to reliably detect reporting omissions or methodological flaws makes them unsuitable for replacing human expertise in the critical appraisal of trial quality.

Paperid: 3550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03206.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encounter two key issues in multi-image contexts: (1) a lack of fine-grained perception across disparate images, and (2) a diminished capability to effectively reason over and synthesize information from multiple visual inputs. However, while various prompting methods aim to describe visual content, many existing studies focus primarily on single-image settings or specific, constrained scenarios. This leaves a critical gap in understanding and addressing how MLLMs tackle more general and complex multi-image reasoning tasks. Thus, we first extensively investigate how current prompting methods perceive fine-grained visual details and process visual information when dealing with multiple images. Our findings reveal that existing prompting methods fall short in attending to needed clues and seamlessly integrating perception and reasoning. Inspired by the findings, we propose a new zero-shot prompting method, Question-Guided Chain-of-Captions (QG-CoC), a generalized prompting approach that effectively handles problems with an arbitrary number of images. We evaluate our method on various open-source and closed-source MLLMs for multi-image and single-image benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that QG-CoC demonstrates competitive performance across tasks and exhibits robust improvements in the challenging scenarios where existing prompting methods fail.

Paperid: 3551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25502.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models for zero-shot time series forecasting face challenges in efficient long-horizon prediction and reproducibility, with existing synthetic-only approaches underperforming on challenging benchmarks. This paper presents TempoPFN, a univariate time series foundation model based on linear Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) pre-trained exclusively on synthetic data. The model uses a GatedDeltaProduct architecture with state-weaving for fully parallelizable training across sequence lengths, eliminating the need for windowing or summarization techniques while maintaining robust temporal state-tracking. Our comprehensive synthetic data pipeline unifies diverse generators, including stochastic differential equations, Gaussian processes, and audio synthesis, with novel augmentations. In zero-shot evaluations on the Gift-Eval benchmark, TempoPFN achieves top-tier competitive performance, outperforming all existing synthetic-only approaches and surpassing the vast majority of models trained on real-world data, while being more efficient than existing baselines by leveraging fully parallelizable training and inference. We open-source our complete data generation pipeline and training code, providing a reproducible foundation for future research.

Paperid: 3552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25434.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic evaluation metrics are crucial for advancing sign language translation (SLT). Current SLT evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, are only text-based, and it remains unclear to what extent text-based metrics can reliably capture the quality of SLT outputs. To address this gap, we investigate the limitations of text-based SLT evaluation metrics by analyzing six metrics, including BLEU, chrF, and ROUGE, as well as BLEURT on the one hand, and large language model (LLM)-based evaluators such as G-Eval and GEMBA zero-shot direct assessment on the other hand. Specifically, we assess the consistency and robustness of these metrics under three controlled conditions: paraphrasing, hallucinations in model outputs, and variations in sentence length. Our analysis highlights the limitations of lexical overlap metrics and demonstrates that while LLM-based evaluators better capture semantic equivalence often missed by conventional metrics, they can also exhibit bias toward LLM-paraphrased translations. Moreover, although all metrics are able to detect hallucinations, BLEU tends to be overly sensitive, whereas BLEURT and LLM-based evaluators are comparatively lenient toward subtle cases. This motivates the need for multimodal evaluation frameworks that extend beyond text-based metrics to enable a more holistic assessment of SLT outputs.

Paperid: 3553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17002.pdf

Abstract:
Circuit schematics play a crucial role in analog integrated circuit design, serving as the primary medium for human understanding and verification of circuit functionality. While recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches have shown promise in circuit topology generation and device sizing, most rely solely on textual representations such as SPICE netlists, which lack visual interpretability for circuit designers. To address this limitation, we propose EEschematic, an AI agent for automatic analog schematic generation based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). EEschematic integrates textual, visual, and symbolic modalities to translate SPICE netlists into schematic diagrams represented in a human-editable format. The framework uses six analog substructure examples for few-shot placement and a Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) strategy to iteratively refine placement and wiring, enhancing schematic clarity and symmetry. Experimental results on representative analog circuits, including a CMOS inverter, a five-transistor operational transconductance amplifier (5T-OTA), and a telescopic cascode amplifier, demonstrate that EEschematic produces schematics with high visual quality and structural correctness.

Paperid: 3554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14992.pdf

Abstract:
Training robust world models requires large-scale, precisely labeled multimodal datasets, a process historically bottlenecked by slow and expensive manual annotation. We present a production-tested GAZE pipeline that automates the conversion of raw, long-form video into rich, task-ready supervision for world-model training. Our system (i) normalizes proprietary 360-degree formats into standard views and shards them for parallel processing; (ii) applies a suite of AI models (scene understanding, object tracking, audio transcription, PII/NSFW/minor detection) for dense, multimodal pre-annotation; and (iii) consolidates signals into a structured output specification for rapid human validation. The GAZE workflow demonstrably yields efficiency gains (~19 minutes saved per review hour) and reduces human review volume by >80% through conservative auto-skipping of low-salience segments. By increasing label density and consistency while integrating privacy safeguards and chain-of-custody metadata, our method generates high-fidelity, privacy-aware datasets directly consumable for learning cross-modal dynamics and action-conditioned prediction. We detail our orchestration, model choices, and data dictionary to provide a scalable blueprint for generating high-quality world model training data without sacrificing throughput or governance.

Paperid: 3555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14081.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel, zero-shot pipeline for creating hyperrealistic, identity-preserving 3D avatars from a few unstructured phone images. Existing methods face several challenges: single-view approaches suffer from geometric inconsistencies and hallucinations, degrading identity preservation, while models trained on synthetic data fail to capture high-frequency details like skin wrinkles and fine hair, limiting realism. Our method introduces two key contributions: (1) a generative canonicalization module that processes multiple unstructured views into a standardized, consistent representation, and (2) a transformer-based model trained on a new, large-scale dataset of high-fidelity Gaussian splatting avatars derived from dome captures of real people. This "Capture, Canonicalize, Splat" pipeline produces static quarter-body avatars with compelling realism and robust identity preservation from unstructured photos.

Paperid: 3556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10116.pdf

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) can efficiently process text-attributed graphs (TAGs) due to their message-passing mechanisms, but their training heavily relies on the human-annotated labels. Moreover, the complex and diverse local topologies of nodes of real-world TAGs make it challenging for a single mechanism to handle. Large language models (LLMs) perform well in zero-/few-shot learning on TAGs but suffer from a scalability challenge. Therefore, we propose a preference-driven knowledge distillation (PKD) framework to synergize the complementary strengths of LLMs and various GNNs for few-shot node classification. Specifically, we develop a GNN-preference-driven node selector that effectively promotes prediction distillation from LLMs to teacher GNNs. To further tackle nodes' intricate local topologies, we develop a node-preference-driven GNN selector that identifies the most suitable teacher GNN for each node, thereby facilitating tailored knowledge distillation from teacher GNNs to the student GNN. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our proposed framework in few-shot node classification on real-world TAGs.

Paperid: 3557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07551.pdf

Abstract:
The detection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is critical for privacy compliance but remains challenging in low-resource languages due to linguistic diversity and limited annotated data. We present RECAP, a hybrid framework that combines deterministic regular expressions with context-aware large language models (LLMs) for scalable PII detection across 13 low-resource locales. RECAP's modular design supports over 300 entity types without retraining, using a three-phase refinement pipeline for disambiguation and filtering. Benchmarked with nervaluate, our system outperforms fine-tuned NER models by 82% and zero-shot LLMs by 17% in weighted F1-score. This work offers a scalable and adaptable solution for efficient PII detection in compliance-focused applications.

Paperid: 3558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06557.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a strong recipe for training reasoning LLMs that produce long chains of thought (LongCoT). Yet the standard RL "thinking environment", where the state is the prompt plus all prior reasoning tokens, makes the state unbounded and forces attention-based policies to pay quadratic compute as thoughts lengthen. We revisit the environment itself. We propose Markovian Thinking, a paradigm in which the policy advances reasoning while conditioning on a constant-size state, decoupling thinking length from context size. As an immediate consequence this yields linear compute with constant memory. We instantiate this idea with Delethink, an RL environment that structures reasoning into fixed-size chunks. Within each chunk, the model thinks as usual; at the boundary, the environment resets the context and reinitializes the prompt with a short carryover. Through RL, the policy learns to write a textual state near the end of each chunk sufficient for seamless continuation of reasoning after reset. Trained in this environment, an R1-Distill 1.5B model reasons in 8K-token chunks yet thinks up to 24K tokens, matching or surpassing LongCoT-RL trained with a 24K budget. With test-time scaling, Delethink continues to improve where LongCoT plateaus. The effect of linear compute is substantial: we empirically estimate at 96K average thinking length LongCoT-RL costs 27 H100-months vs. 7 for Delethink. Analysis at RL initialization shows off-the-shelf reasoning models (1.5B-120B) often sample Markovian traces zero-shot across diverse benchmarks, providing positive samples that make RL effective at scale. Our results show that redesigning the thinking environment is a powerful lever: it enables very long reasoning without quadratic overhead and opens a path toward efficient, scalable reasoning LLMs.

Paperid: 3559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02625.pdf

Abstract:
Missing data is a pervasive problem in tabular settings. Existing solutions range from simple averaging to complex generative adversarial networks. However, due to huge variance in performance across real-world domains and time-consuming hyperparameter tuning, no default imputation method exists. Building on TabPFN, a recent tabular foundation model for supervised learning, we propose TabImpute, a pre-trained transformer that delivers accurate and fast zero-shot imputations requiring no fitting or hyperparameter tuning at inference-time. To train and evaluate TabImpute, we introduce (i) an entry-wise featurization for tabular settings, which enables a $100\times$ speedup over the previous TabPFN imputation method, (ii) a synthetic training data generation pipeline incorporating realistic missingness patterns, which boosts test-time performance, and (iii) MissBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of imputation methods with $42$ OpenML datasets and $13$ missingness patterns. MissBench spans domains such as medicine, finance, and engineering, showcasing TabImpute's robust performance compared to $11$ established imputation methods.

Paperid: 3560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02296.pdf

Abstract:
Updating diffusion models in an incremental setting would be practical in real-world applications yet computationally challenging. We present a novel learning strategy of Concept Neuron Selection (CNS), a simple yet effective approach to perform personalization in a continual learning scheme. CNS uniquely identifies neurons in diffusion models that are closely related to the target concepts. In order to mitigate catastrophic forgetting problems while preserving zero-shot text-to-image generation ability, CNS finetunes concept neurons in an incremental manner and jointly preserves knowledge learned of previous concepts. Evaluation of real-world datasets demonstrates that CNS achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal parameter adjustments, outperforming previous methods in both single and multi-concept personalization works. CNS also achieves fusion-free operation, reducing memory storage and processing time for continual personalization.

Paperid: 3561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01708.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid whole-body control (WBC) policies trained in simulation often suffer from the sim-to-real gap, which fundamentally arises from simulator inductive bias, the inherent assumptions and limitations of any single simulator. These biases lead to nontrivial discrepancies both across simulators and between simulation and the real world. To mitigate the effect of simulator inductive bias, the key idea is to train policies jointly across multiple simulators, encouraging the learned controller to capture dynamics that generalize beyond any single simulator's assumptions. We thus introduce PolySim, a WBC training platform that integrates multiple heterogeneous simulators. PolySim can launch parallel environments from different engines simultaneously within a single training run, thereby realizing dynamics-level domain randomization. Theoretically, we show that PolySim yields a tighter upper bound on simulator inductive bias than single-simulator training. In experiments, PolySim substantially reduces motion-tracking error in sim-to-sim evaluations; for example, on MuJoCo, it improves execution success by 52.8 over an IsaacSim baseline. PolySim further enables zero-shot deployment on a real Unitree G1 without additional fine-tuning, showing effective transfer from simulation to the real world. We will release the PolySim code upon acceptance of this work.

Paperid: 3562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00219.pdf

Abstract:
Current approaches for scaling inference-time compute in transformers rely on training them to emit explicit chain-of-thought tokens before producing an answer. While these methods are powerful, they are limited because they cannot be applied during pretraining and are limited to only serially-generated, natural-language verbalization to scale inference-time compute. In this work, we propose Thoughtbubbles, a transformer variant that natively performs parallel adaptive computation in latent space by learning to fork or delete residual streams. Thus, tokens that require a large amount of computation can form a "bubble" of cloned residuals in the middle of the network for additional thinking. Crucially, this behavior is learned during pretraining with only language modeling loss. Thoughtbubbles outperforms both standard decoder LMs as well as non-adaptive parallel computation approaches on OpenWebText and peS2o perplexity and in zero-shot evaluations such as HellaSwag and LAMBADA after pretraining across 150M to 772M parameter scales. The implicit nature of our method enables adaptive computation to be learned starting at pretraining time, paving the way to unify train and test-time behavior for reasoning models.

Paperid: 3563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26455.pdf

Abstract:
We present Stylos, a single-forward 3D Gaussian framework for 3D style transfer that operates on unposed content, from a single image to a multi-view collection, conditioned on a separate reference style image. Stylos synthesizes a stylized 3D Gaussian scene without per-scene optimization or precomputed poses, achieving geometry-aware, view-consistent stylization that generalizes to unseen categories, scenes, and styles. At its core, Stylos adopts a Transformer backbone with two pathways: geometry predictions retain self-attention to preserve geometric fidelity, while style is injected via global cross-attention to enforce visual consistency across views. With the addition of a voxel-based 3D style loss that aligns aggregated scene features to style statistics, Stylos enforces view-consistent stylization while preserving geometry. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that Stylos delivers high-quality zero-shot stylization, highlighting the effectiveness of global style-content coupling, the proposed 3D style loss, and the scalability of our framework from single view to large-scale multi-view settings.

Paperid: 3564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20750.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Confidence-guided Refinement Reasoning (C2R), a novel training-free framework applicable to question-answering (QA) tasks across text, image, and video domains. C2R strategically constructs and refines sub-questions and their answers (sub-QAs), deriving a better confidence score for the target answer. C2R first curates a subset of sub-QAs to explore diverse reasoning paths, then compares the confidence scores of the resulting answer candidates to select the most reliable final answer. Since C2R relies solely on confidence scores derived from the model itself, it can be seamlessly integrated with various existing QA models, demonstrating consistent performance improvements across diverse models and benchmarks. Furthermore, we provide essential yet underexplored insights into how leveraging sub-QAs affects model behavior, specifically analyzing the impact of both the quantity and quality of sub-QAs on achieving robust and reliable reasoning.

Paperid: 3565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15625.pdf

Abstract:
Musicians and nonmusicians alike use rhythmic sound gestures, such as tapping and beatboxing, to express drum patterns. While these gestures effectively communicate musical ideas, realizing these ideas as fully-produced drum recordings can be time-consuming, potentially disrupting many creative workflows. To bridge this gap, we present TRIA (The Rhythm In Anything), a masked transformer model for mapping rhythmic sound gestures to high-fidelity drum recordings. Given an audio prompt of the desired rhythmic pattern and a second prompt to represent drumkit timbre, TRIA produces audio of a drumkit playing the desired rhythm (with appropriate elaborations) in the desired timbre. Subjective and objective evaluations show that a TRIA model trained on less than 10 hours of publicly-available drum data can generate high-quality, faithful realizations of sound gestures across a wide range of timbres in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 3566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15476.pdf

Abstract:
Sarcasm detection remains a challenge in natural language understanding, as sarcastic intent often relies on subtle cross-modal cues spanning text, speech, and vision. While prior work has primarily focused on textual or visual-textual sarcasm, comprehensive audio-visual-textual sarcasm understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we systematically evaluate large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs for sarcasm detection on English (MUStARD++) and Chinese (MCSD 1.0) in zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning settings. In addition to direct classification, we explore models as feature encoders, integrating their representations through a collaborative gating fusion module. Experimental results show that audio-based models achieve the strongest unimodal performance, while text-audio and audio-vision combinations outperform unimodal and trimodal models. Furthermore, MLLMs such as Qwen-Omni show competitive zero-shot and fine-tuned performance. Our findings highlight the potential of MLLMs for cross-lingual, audio-visual-textual sarcasm understanding.

Paperid: 3567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15432.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) typically operates as text-to-image retrieval using specialized bi-encoders trained to directly embed document images. We revisit a zero-shot generate-and-encode pipeline: a vision-language model first produces a detailed textual description of each document image, which is then embedded by a standard text encoder. On the ViDoRe-v2 benchmark, the method reaches 63.4% nDCG@5, surpassing the strongest specialised multi-vector visual document encoder. It also scales better to large collections and offers broader multilingual coverage. Analysis shows that modern vision-language models capture complex textual and visual cues with sufficient granularity to act as a reusable semantic proxy. By offloading modality alignment to pretrained vision-language models, our approach removes the need for computationally intensive text-image contrastive training and establishes a strong zero-shot baseline for future VDR systems.

Paperid: 3568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14117.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often fail to generalize to novel camera viewpoints, a limitation stemming from their difficulty in inferring robust 3D geometry from 2D images. We introduce GeoAware-VLA, a simple yet effective approach that enhances viewpoint invariance by integrating strong geometric priors into the vision backbone. Instead of training a visual encoder or relying on explicit 3D data, we leverage a frozen, pretrained geometric vision model as a feature extractor. A trainable projection layer then adapts these geometrically-rich features for the policy decoder, relieving it of the burden of learning 3D consistency from scratch. Through extensive evaluations on LIBERO benchmark subsets, we show GeoAware-VLA achieves substantial improvements in zero-shot generalization to novel camera poses, boosting success rates by over 2x in simulation. Crucially, these benefits translate to the physical world; our model shows a significant performance gain on a real robot, especially when evaluated from unseen camera angles. Our approach proves effective across both continuous and discrete action spaces, highlighting that robust geometric grounding is a key component for creating more generalizable robotic agents.

Paperid: 3569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09769.pdf

Abstract:
We aim to enable humanoid robots to efficiently solve new manipulation tasks from a few video examples. In-context learning (ICL) is a promising framework for achieving this goal due to its test-time data efficiency and rapid adaptability. However, current ICL methods rely on labor-intensive teleoperated data for training, which restricts scalability. We propose using human play videos -- continuous, unlabeled videos of people interacting freely with their environment -- as a scalable and diverse training data source. We introduce MimicDroid, which enables humanoids to perform ICL using human play videos as the only training data. MimicDroid extracts trajectory pairs with similar manipulation behaviors and trains the policy to predict the actions of one trajectory conditioned on the other. Through this process, the model acquired ICL capabilities for adapting to novel objects and environments at test time. To bridge the embodiment gap, MimicDroid first retargets human wrist poses estimated from RGB videos to the humanoid, leveraging kinematic similarity. It also applies random patch masking during training to reduce overfitting to human-specific cues and improve robustness to visual differences. To evaluate few-shot learning for humanoids, we introduce an open-source simulation benchmark with increasing levels of generalization difficulty. MimicDroid outperformed state-of-the-art methods and achieved nearly twofold higher success rates in the real world. Additional materials can be found on: ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MimicDroid

Paperid: 3570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20143.pdf

Abstract:
Designing crystal materials with desired physicochemical properties remains a fundamental challenge in materials science. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, existing LLM-based crystal generation approaches are limited to zero-shot scenarios and are unable to benefit from few-shot scenarios. In contrast, human experts typically design new materials by modifying relevant known structures which aligns closely with the few-shot ICL paradigm. Motivated by this, we propose CrystalICL, a novel model designed for few-shot crystal generation. Specifically, we introduce a space-group based crystal tokenization method, which effectively reduces the complexity of modeling crystal symmetry in LLMs. We further introduce a condition-structure aware hybrid instruction tuning framework and a multi-task instruction tuning strategy, enabling the model to better exploit ICL by capturing structure-property relationships from limited data. Extensive experiments on four crystal generation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of CrystalICL over the leading baseline methods on conditional and unconditional generation tasks.

Paperid: 3571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19131.pdf

Abstract:
The advancement of robotics and autonomous navigation systems hinges on the ability to accurately predict terrain traversability. Traditional methods for generating datasets to train these prediction models often involve putting robots into potentially hazardous environments, posing risks to equipment and safety. To solve this problem, we present ZeST, a novel approach leveraging visual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a traversability map in real-time without exposing robots to danger. Our approach not only performs zero-shot traversability and mitigates the risks associated with real-world data collection but also accelerates the development of advanced navigation systems, offering a cost-effective and scalable solution. To support our findings, we present navigation results, in both controlled indoor and unstructured outdoor environments. As shown in the experiments, our method provides safer navigation when compared to other state-of-the-art methods, constantly reaching the final goal.

Paperid: 3572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14112.pdf

Authors:Sujit Roy, Johannes Schmude, Rohit Lal, Vishal Gaur, Marcus Freitag, Julian Kuehnert, Theodore van Kessel, Dinesha V. Hegde, AndrÃ©s MuÃ±oz-Jaramillo, Johannes Jakubik, Etienne Vos, Kshitiz Mandal, Ata Akbari Asanjan, Joao Lucas de Sousa Almeida, Amy Lin, Talwinder Singh, Kang Yang, Chetraj Pandey, Jinsu Hong, Berkay Aydin, Thorsten Kurth, Ryan McGranaghan, Spiridon Kasapis, Vishal Upendran, Shah Bahauddin, Daniel da Silva, Nikolai V. Pogorelov, Anne Spalding, Campbell Watson, Manil Maskey, Madhulika Guhathakurta, Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran

Abstract:
Heliophysics is central to understanding and forecasting space weather events and solar activity. Despite decades of high-resolution observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), most models remain task-specific and constrained by scarce labeled data, limiting their capacity to generalize across solar phenomena. We introduce Surya, a 366M parameter foundation model for heliophysics designed to learn general-purpose solar representations from multi-instrument SDO observations, including eight Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) channels and five Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) products. Surya employs a spatiotemporal transformer architecture with spectral gating and long--short range attention, pretrained on high-resolution solar image forecasting tasks and further optimized through autoregressive rollout tuning. Zero-shot evaluations demonstrate its ability to forecast solar dynamics and flare events, while downstream fine-tuning with parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) shows strong performance on solar wind forecasting, active region segmentation, solar flare forecasting, and EUV spectra. Surya is the first foundation model in heliophysics that uses time advancement as a pretext task on full-resolution SDO data. Its novel architecture and performance suggest that the model is able to learn the underlying physics behind solar evolution.

Paperid: 3573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09263.pdf

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to in-depth investigation of their potential in tabular data modeling. However, effectively utilizing advanced LLMs in few-shot and even zero-shot scenarios is still challenging. To this end, we propose a novel LLM-based prototype estimation framework for tabular learning. Our key idea is to query the LLM to generate feature values based example-free prompt, which solely relies on task and feature descriptions. With the feature values generated by LLM, we can build a zero-shot prototype in a training-free manner, which can be further enhanced by fusing few-shot samples, avoiding training a classifier or finetuning the LLMs. Thanks to the example-free prompt and prototype estimation, ours bypasses the constraints brought by the example-based prompt, providing a scalable and robust framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ours in zero and few-shot tabular learning.

Paperid: 3574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08764.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) introduces complex challenges that current surgical error detection methods struggle to address effectively due to limited training data and methodological constraints. Therefore, we construct MERP (Multi-class Error in Robotic Prostatectomy), a comprehensive dataset for error detection in robotic prostatectomy with frame-level annotations featuring six clinically aligned error categories. In addition, we propose CARES (Collaborative Agentic Reasoning for Error Detection in Surgery), a novel zero-shot clinically-informed and risk-stratified agentic reasoning architecture for multi-class surgical error detection. CARES implements adaptive generation of medically informed, error-specific Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts across multiple expertise levels. The framework employs risk-aware routing to assign error task to expertise-matched reasoning pathways based on complexity and clinical impact. Subsequently, each pathway decomposes surgical error analysis into three specialized agents with temporal, spatial, and procedural analysis. Each agent analyzes using dynamically selected prompts tailored to the assigned expertise level and error type, generating detailed and transparent reasoning traces. By incorporating clinically informed reasoning from established surgical assessment guidelines, CARES enables zero-shot surgical error detection without prior training. Evaluation demonstrates superior performance with 54.3 mF1 on RARP and 52.0 mF1 on MERP datasets, outperforming existing zero-shot approaches by up to 14% while remaining competitive with trained models. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

Paperid: 3575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23272.pdf

Abstract:
Breast MRI provides high-resolution volumetric imaging critical for tumor assessment and treatment planning, yet manual interpretation of 3D scans remains labor-intensive and subjective. While AI-powered tools hold promise for accelerating medical image analysis, adoption of commercial medical AI products remains limited in low- and middle-income countries due to high license costs, proprietary software, and infrastructure demands. In this work, we investigate whether the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) can be adapted for low-cost, minimal-input 3D tumor segmentation in breast MRI. Using a single bounding box annotation on one slice, we propagate segmentation predictions across the 3D volume using three different slice-wise tracking strategies: top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, and center-outward. We evaluate these strategies across a large cohort of patients and find that center-outward propagation yields the most consistent and accurate segmentations. Despite being a zero-shot model not trained for volumetric medical data, SAM2 achieves strong segmentation performance under minimal supervision. We further analyze how segmentation performance relates to tumor size, location, and shape, identifying key failure modes. Our results suggest that general-purpose foundation models such as SAM2 can support 3D medical image analysis with minimal supervision, offering an accessible and affordable alternative for resource-constrained settings.

Paperid: 3576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20021.pdf

Abstract:
Recent ObjectNav systems credit large language models (LLMs) for sizable zero-shot gains, yet it remains unclear how much comes from language versus geometry. We revisit this question by re-evaluating an instruction-guided pipeline, InstructNav, under a detector-controlled setting and introducing two training-free variants that only alter the action value map: a geometry-only Frontier Proximity Explorer (FPE) and a lightweight Semantic-Heuristic Frontier (SHF) that polls the LLM with simple frontier votes. Across HM3D and MP3D, FPE matches or exceeds the detector-controlled instruction follower while using no API calls and running faster; SHF attains comparable accuracy with a smaller, localized language prior. These results suggest that carefully engineered frontier geometry accounts for much of the reported progress, and that language is most reliable as a light heuristic rather than an end-to-end planner.

Paperid: 3577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18479.pdf

Abstract:
Prerequisite skills - foundational competencies required before mastering more advanced concepts - are important for supporting effective learning, assessment, and skill-gap analysis. Traditionally curated by domain experts, these relationships are costly to maintain and difficult to scale. This paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can predict prerequisite skills in a zero-shot setting, using only natural language descriptions and without task-specific fine-tuning. We introduce ESCO-PrereqSkill, a benchmark dataset constructed from the ESCO taxonomy, comprising 3,196 skills and their expert-defined prerequisite links. Using a standardized prompting strategy, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4, Claude 3, Gemini, LLaMA 4, Qwen2, and DeepSeek, across semantic similarity, BERTScore, and inference latency. Our results show that models such as LLaMA4-Maverick, Claude-3-7-Sonnet, and Qwen2-72B generate predictions that closely align with expert ground truth, demonstrating strong semantic reasoning without supervision. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support scalable prerequisite skill modeling for applications in personalized learning, intelligent tutoring, and skill-based recommender systems.

Paperid: 3578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16941.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a reinforcement learning (RL) environment for developing an autonomous underwater robotic coral sampling agent, a crucial coral reef conservation and research task. Using software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), an RL-trained artificial intelligence (AI) controller is developed using a digital twin (DT) in simulation and subsequently verified in physical experiments. An underwater motion capture (MOCAP) system provides real-time 3D position and orientation feedback during verification testing for precise synchronization between the digital and physical domains. A key novelty of this approach is the combined use of a general-purpose game engine for simulation, deep RL, and real-time underwater motion capture for an effective zero-shot sim-to-real strategy.

Paperid: 3579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10898.pdf

Abstract:
The growing complexity of cyber threats and the limitations of traditional vulnerability detection tools necessitate novel approaches for securing software systems. We introduce MalCodeAI, a language-agnostic, multi-stage AI pipeline for autonomous code security analysis and remediation. MalCodeAI combines code decomposition and semantic reasoning using fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct models, optimized through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) within the MLX framework, and delivers scalable, accurate results across 14 programming languages. In Phase 1, the model achieved a validation loss as low as 0.397 for functional decomposition and summarization of code segments after 200 iterations, 6 trainable layers, and a learning rate of 2 x 10^(-5). In Phase 2, for vulnerability detection and remediation, it achieved a best validation loss of 0.199 using the same number of iterations and trainable layers but with an increased learning rate of 4 x 10^(-5), effectively identifying security flaws and suggesting actionable fixes. MalCodeAI supports red-hat-style exploit tracing, CVSS-based risk scoring, and zero-shot generalization to detect complex, zero-day vulnerabilities. In a qualitative evaluation involving 15 developers, the system received high scores in usefulness (mean 8.06/10), interpretability (mean 7.40/10), and readability of outputs (mean 7.53/10), confirming its practical value in real-world development workflows. This work marks a significant advancement toward intelligent, explainable, and developer-centric software security solutions.

Paperid: 3580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19558.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) requires models to adapt to novel classes with limited supervision while preserving learned knowledge. Existing prospective learning-based space construction methods reserve space to accommodate novel classes. However, prototype deviation and structure fixity limit the expressiveness of the embedding space. In contrast to fixed space reservation, we explore the optimization of feature-structure dual consistency and propose a Consistency-driven Calibration and Matching Framework (ConCM) that systematically mitigate the knowledge conflict inherent in FSCIL. Specifically, inspired by hippocampal associative memory, we design a memory-aware prototype calibration that extracts generalized semantic attributes from base classes and reintegrates them into novel classes to enhance the conceptual center consistency of features. Further, we propose dynamic structure matching, which adaptively aligns the calibrated features to a session-specific optimal manifold space, ensuring cross-session structure consistency. Theoretical analysis shows that our method satisfies both geometric optimality and maximum matching, thereby overcoming the need for class-number priors. On large-scale FSCIL benchmarks including mini-ImageNet and CUB200, ConCM achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing current optimal method by 3.20% and 3.68% in harmonic accuracy of incremental sessions.

Paperid: 3581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17251.pdf

Abstract:
Although LLMs have achieved remarkable performance, the inherent stochasticity of their reasoning process and varying conclusions present significant challenges. Majority voting or Best-of-N with external verification models has been explored to find the most promising solution among multiple LLM outputs. However, these approaches have certain limitations, such as limited applicability or the cost of an additional training step. To address this problem, we propose a novel and effective framework that Recycles Few-shot examples to verify LLM outputs (Referi). Our key idea is to additionally utilize the given few-shot examples to evaluate the candidate outputs of the target query, not only using them to generate outputs as the conventional few-shot prompting setup. Specifically, Referi evaluates the generated outputs by combining two different scores, designed motivated from Bayes' rule, and subsequently selects the candidate that is both confidently determined and contextually coherent through a few additional LLM inferences. Experiments with three different LLMs and across seven diverse tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of LLMs-achieving an average gain of 4.8%-through effective response selection, without additional training.

Paperid: 3582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11452.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in the task of text ranking for information retrieval. While Pointwise ranking approaches offer computational efficiency by scoring documents independently, they often yield biased relevance estimates due to the lack of inter-document comparisons. In contrast, Pairwise methods improve ranking accuracy by explicitly comparing document pairs, but suffer from substantial computational overhead with quadratic complexity ($O(n^2)$). To address this tradeoff, we propose \textbf{RefRank}, a simple and effective comparative ranking method based on a fixed reference document. Instead of comparing all document pairs, RefRank prompts the LLM to evaluate each candidate relative to a shared reference anchor. By selecting the reference anchor that encapsulates the core query intent, RefRank implicitly captures relevance cues, enabling indirect comparison between documents via this common anchor. This reduces computational cost to linear time ($O(n)$) while importantly, preserving the advantages of comparative evaluation. To further enhance robustness, we aggregate multiple RefRank outputs using a weighted averaging scheme across different reference choices. Experiments on several benchmark datasets and with various LLMs show that RefRank significantly outperforms Pointwise baselines and could achieve performance at least on par with Pairwise approaches with a significantly lower computational cost.

Paperid: 3583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09446.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP-based domain generalization aims to improve model generalization to unseen domains by leveraging the powerful zero-shot classification capabilities of CLIP and multiple source datasets. Existing methods typically train a single model across multiple source domains to capture domain-shared information. However, this paradigm inherently suffers from two types of conflicts: 1) sample conflicts, arising from noisy samples and extreme domain shifts among sources; and 2) optimization conflicts, stemming from competition and trade-offs during multi-source training. Both hinder the generalization and lead to suboptimal solutions. Recent studies have shown that model merging can effectively mitigate the competition of multi-objective optimization and improve generalization performance. Inspired by these findings, we propose Harmonizing and Merging (HAM), a novel source model merging framework for CLIP-based domain generalization. During the training process of the source models, HAM enriches the source samples without conflicting samples, and harmonizes the update directions of all models. Then, a redundancy-aware historical model merging method is introduced to effectively integrate knowledge across all source models. HAM comprehensively consolidates source domain information while enabling mutual enhancement among source models, ultimately yielding a final model with optimal generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 3584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08768.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning abilities and general natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their performance on Arabic data, characterized by rich morphology, diverse dialects, and complex script, remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of multiple reasoning-focused LLMs, with a special emphasis on the newly introduced DeepSeek models, across a suite of fifteen Arabic NLP tasks. We experiment with various strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. This allows us to systematically evaluate performance on datasets covering a range of applications to examine their capacity for linguistic reasoning under different levels of complexity. Our experiments reveal several key findings. First, carefully selecting just three in-context examples delivers an average uplift of over 13 F1 points on classification tasks-boosting sentiment analysis from 35.3% to 87.5% and paraphrase detection from 56.1% to 87.0%. Second, reasoning-focused DeepSeek architectures outperform a strong GPT o4-mini baseline by an average of 12 F1 points on complex inference tasks in the zero-shot setting. Third, LoRA-based fine-tuning yields up to an additional 8 points in F1 and BLEU compared to equivalent increases in model scale. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AraReasoner41299

Paperid: 3585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05285.pdf

Abstract:
3D shape completion has broad applications in robotics, digital twin reconstruction, and extended reality (XR). Although recent advances in 3D object and scene completion have achieved impressive results, existing methods lack 3D consistency, are computationally expensive, and struggle to capture sharp object boundaries. Our work (RaySt3R) addresses these limitations by recasting 3D shape completion as a novel view synthesis problem. Specifically, given a single RGB-D image and a novel viewpoint (encoded as a collection of query rays), we train a feedforward transformer to predict depth maps, object masks, and per-pixel confidence scores for those query rays. RaySt3R fuses these predictions across multiple query views to reconstruct complete 3D shapes. We evaluate RaySt3R on synthetic and real-world datasets, and observe it achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the baselines on all datasets by up to 44% in 3D chamfer distance. Project page: https://rayst3r.github.io

Paperid: 3586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02742.pdf

Abstract:
Existing expressive text-to-speech (TTS) systems primarily model a limited set of categorical emotions, whereas human conversations extend far beyond these predefined emotions, making it essential to explore more diverse emotional speech generation for more natural interactions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel prompt-unseen-emotion (PUE) approach to generate unseen emotional speech via emotion-guided prompt learning. PUE is trained utilizing an LLM-TTS architecture to ensure emotional consistency between categorical emotion-relevant prompts and emotional speech, allowing the model to quantitatively capture different emotion weightings per utterance. During inference, mixed emotional speech can be generated by flexibly adjusting emotion proportions and leveraging LLM contextual knowledge, enabling the model to quantify different emotional styles. Our proposed PUE successfully facilitates expressive speech synthesis of unseen emotions in a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 3587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01592.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot and few-shot tasks, but achieving similar performance with encoder-only models like BERT and RoBERTa has been challenging due to their architecture. However, encoders offer advantages such as lower computational and memory costs. Recent work adapts them for zero-shot generalization using Statement Tuning, which reformulates tasks into finite templates. We extend this approach to multilingual NLP, exploring whether encoders can achieve zero-shot cross-lingual generalization and serve as efficient alternatives to memory-intensive LLMs for low-resource languages. Our results show that state-of-the-art encoder models generalize well across languages, rivaling multilingual LLMs while being more efficient. We also analyze multilingual Statement Tuning dataset design, efficiency gains, and language-specific generalization, contributing to more inclusive and resource-efficient NLP models. We release our code and models.

Paperid: 3588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01231.pdf

Abstract:
To address the weight coupling problem, certain studies introduced few-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods, which partition the supernet into multiple sub-supernets. However, these methods often suffer from computational inefficiency and tend to provide suboptimal partitioning schemes. To address this problem more effectively, we analyze the weight coupling problem from a novel perspective, which primarily stems from distinct modules in succeeding layers imposing conflicting gradient directions on the preceding layer modules. Based on this perspective, we propose the Gradient Contribution (GC) method that efficiently computes the cosine similarity of gradient directions among modules by decomposing the Vector-Jacobian Product during supernet backpropagation. Subsequently, the modules with conflicting gradient directions are allocated to distinct sub-supernets while similar ones are grouped together. To assess the advantages of GC and address the limitations of existing Graph Neural Architecture Search methods, which are limited to searching a single type of Graph Neural Networks (Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) or Graph Transformers (GTs)), we propose the Unified Graph Neural Architecture Search (UGAS) framework, which explores optimal combinations of MPNNs and GTs. The experimental results demonstrate that GC achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in supernet partitioning quality and time efficiency. In addition, the architectures searched by UGAS+GC outperform both the manually designed GNNs and those obtained by existing NAS methods. Finally, ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of all proposed methods.

Paperid: 3589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23570.pdf

Abstract:
As a leading online platform with a vast global audience, YouTube's extensive reach also makes it susceptible to hosting harmful content, including disinformation and conspiracy theories. This study explores the use of open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs), both text-only and multimodal, for identifying conspiracy theory videos shared on YouTube. Leveraging a labeled dataset of thousands of videos, we evaluate a variety of LLMs in a zero-shot setting and compare their performance to a fine-tuned RoBERTa baseline. Results show that text-based LLMs achieve high recall but lower precision, leading to increased false positives. Multimodal models lag behind their text-only counterparts, indicating limited benefits from visual data integration. To assess real-world applicability, we evaluate the most accurate models on an unlabeled dataset, finding that RoBERTa achieves performance close to LLMs with a larger number of parameters. Our work highlights the strengths and limitations of current LLM-based approaches for online harmful content detection, emphasizing the need for more precise and robust systems.

Paperid: 3590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22429.pdf

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) seeks to locate target objects in 3D scenes using natural language descriptions, enabling downstream applications such as augmented reality and robotics. Existing approaches typically rely on labeled 3D data and predefined categories, limiting scalability to open-world settings. We present SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework that leverages 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bypass the need for 3D-specific training. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a hybrid input format that pairs query-aligned rendered views with spatially enriched textual descriptions. Our framework incorporates two core components: a Perspective Adaptation Module that dynamically selects optimal viewpoints based on the query, and a Fusion Alignment Module that integrates visual and spatial signals to enhance localization precision. Extensive evaluations on ScanRefer and Nr3D confirm that SeeGround achieves substantial improvements over existing zero-shot baselines -- outperforming them by 7.7% and 7.1%, respectively -- and even rivals fully supervised alternatives, demonstrating strong generalization under challenging conditions.

Paperid: 3591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22170.pdf

Abstract:
Decision Transformer (DT) has recently demonstrated strong generalizability in dynamic resource allocation within unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, compared to conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, its performance is hindered due to zero-padding for varying state dimensions, inability to manage long-term energy constraint, and challenges in acquiring expert samples for few-shot fine-tuning in new scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose an attention-enhanced prompt Decision Transformer (APDT) framework to optimize trajectory planning and user scheduling, aiming to minimize the average age of information (AoI) under long-term energy constraint in UAV-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Specifically, we enhance the convenional DT framework by incorporating an attention mechanism to accommodate varying numbers of terrestrial users, introducing a prompt mechanism based on short trajectory demonstrations for rapid adaptation to new scenarios, and designing a token-assisted method to address the UAV's long-term energy constraint. The APDT framework is first pre-trained on offline datasets and then efficiently generalized to new scenarios. Simulations demonstrate that APDT achieves twice faster in terms of convergence rate and reduces average AoI by $8\%$ compared to conventional DT.

Paperid: 3592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20271.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have enhanced multimodal-guided visual generation, enabling customized subject insertion that seamlessly "brushes" user-specified objects into a given image guided by textual prompts. However, existing methods often struggle to insert customized subjects with high fidelity and align results with the user's intent through textual prompts. In this work, we propose "In-Context Brush", a zero-shot framework for customized subject insertion by reformulating the task within the paradigm of in-context learning. Without loss of generality, we formulate the object image and the textual prompts as cross-modal demonstrations, and the target image with the masked region as the query. The goal is to inpaint the target image with the subject aligning textual prompts without model tuning. Building upon a pretrained MMDiT-based inpainting network, we perform test-time enhancement via dual-level latent space manipulation: intra-head "latent feature shifting" within each attention head that dynamically shifts attention outputs to reflect the desired subject semantics and inter-head "attention reweighting" across different heads that amplifies prompt controllability through differential attention prioritization. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that our approach achieves superior identity preservation, text alignment, and image quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, without requiring dedicated training or additional data collection.

Paperid: 3593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18412.pdf

Abstract:
Exercise-based rehabilitation improves quality of life and reduces morbidity, mortality, and rehospitalization, though transportation constraints and staff shortages lead to high dropout rates from rehabilitation programs. Virtual platforms enable patients to complete prescribed exercises at home, while AI algorithms analyze performance, deliver feedback, and update clinicians. Although many studies have developed machine learning and deep learning models for exercise quality assessment, few have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for feedback and are limited by the lack of rehabilitation datasets containing textual feedback. In this paper, we propose a new method in which exercise-specific features are extracted from the skeletal joints of patients performing rehabilitation exercises and fed into pre-trained LLMs. Using a range of prompting techniques, such as zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, and role-play prompting, LLMs are leveraged to evaluate exercise quality and provide feedback in natural language to help patients improve their movements. The method was evaluated through extensive experiments on two publicly available rehabilitation exercise assessment datasets (UI-PRMD and REHAB24-6) and showed promising results in exercise assessment, reasoning, and feedback generation. This approach can be integrated into virtual rehabilitation platforms to help patients perform exercises correctly, support recovery, and improve health outcomes.

Paperid: 3594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17918.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular data have been playing a vital role in diverse real-world fields, including healthcare, finance, etc. With the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), early explorations of extending LLMs to the domain of tabular data have been developed. Most of these LLM-based methods typically first serialize tabular data into natural language descriptions, and then tune LLMs or directly infer on these serialized data. However, these methods suffer from two key inherent issues: (i) data perspective: existing data serialization methods lack universal applicability for structured tabular data, and may pose privacy risks through direct textual exposure, and (ii) model perspective: LLM fine-tuning methods struggle with tabular data, and in-context learning scalability is bottle-necked by input length constraints (suitable for few-shot learning). This work explores a novel direction of integrating LLMs into tabular data throughough logical decision tree rules as intermediaries, proposes a decision tree enhancer with LLM-derived rule for tabular prediction, DeLTa. The proposed DeLTa avoids tabular data serialization, and can be applied to full data learning setting without LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, we leverage the reasoning ability of LLMs to redesign an improved rule given a set of decision tree rules. Furthermore, we provide a calibration method for original decision trees via new generated rule by LLM, which approximates the error correction vector to steer the original decision tree predictions in the direction of ``errors'' reducing. Finally, extensive experiments on diverse tabular benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 3595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16912.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents Virtual Teach and Repeat (VirT&R): an extension of the Teach and Repeat (T&R) framework that enables GPS-denied, zero-shot autonomous ground vehicle navigation in untraversed environments. VirT&R leverages aerial imagery captured for a target environment to train a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model so that dense point clouds and photo-textured meshes can be extracted. The NeRF mesh is used to create a high-fidelity simulation of the environment for piloting an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to virtually define a desired path. The mission can then be executed in the actual target environment by using NeRF-generated point cloud submaps associated along the path and an existing LiDAR Teach and Repeat (LT&R) framework. We benchmark the repeatability of VirT&R on over 12 km of autonomous driving data using physical markings that allow a sim-to-real lateral path-tracking error to be obtained and compared with LT&R. VirT&R achieved measured root mean squared errors (RMSE) of 19.5 cm and 18.4 cm in two different environments, which are slightly less than one tire width (24 cm) on the robot used for testing, and respective maximum errors were 39.4 cm and 47.6 cm. This was done using only the NeRF-derived teach map, demonstrating that VirT&R has similar closed-loop path-tracking performance to LT&R but does not require a human to manually teach the path to the UGV in the actual environment.

Paperid: 3596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16351.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic detection of speech dysfluency aids speech-language pathologists in efficient transcription of disordered speech, enhancing diagnostics and treatment planning. Traditional methods, often limited to classification, provide insufficient clinical insight, and text-independent models misclassify dysfluency, especially in context-dependent cases. This work introduces Dysfluent-WFST, a zero-shot decoder that simultaneously transcribes phonemes and detects dysfluency. Unlike previous models, Dysfluent-WFST operates with upstream encoders like WavLM and requires no additional training. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in both phonetic error rate and dysfluency detection on simulated and real speech data. Our approach is lightweight, interpretable, and effective, demonstrating that explicit modeling of pronunciation behavior in decoding, rather than complex architectures, is key to improving dysfluency processing systems.

Paperid: 3597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14142.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AudSemThinker, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AudSem, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AudSem addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AudSemThinker outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning. Both AudSemThinker and the AudSem dataset are released publicly.

Paperid: 3598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12627.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies exploited Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously generate heuristics for solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs), by prompting LLMs to first provide search directions and then derive heuristics accordingly. However, the absence of task-specific knowledge in prompts often leads LLMs to provide unspecific search directions, obstructing the derivation of well-performing heuristics. Moreover, evaluating the derived heuristics remains resource-intensive, especially for those semantically equivalent ones, often requiring omissible resource expenditure. To enable LLMs to provide specific search directions, we propose the Hercules algorithm, which leverages our designed Core Abstraction Prompting (CAP) method to abstract the core components from elite heuristics and incorporate them as prior knowledge in prompts. We theoretically prove the effectiveness of CAP in reducing unspecificity and provide empirical results in this work. To reduce computing resources required for evaluating the derived heuristics, we propose few-shot Performance Prediction Prompting (PPP), a first-of-its-kind method for the Heuristic Generation (HG) task. PPP leverages LLMs to predict the fitness values of newly derived heuristics by analyzing their semantic similarity to previously evaluated ones. We further develop two tailored mechanisms for PPP to enhance predictive accuracy and determine unreliable predictions, respectively. The use of PPP makes Hercules more resource-efficient and we name this variant Hercules-P. Extensive experiments across four HG tasks, five COPs, and eight LLMs demonstrate that Hercules outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based HG algorithms, while Hercules-P excels at minimizing required computing resources. In addition, we illustrate the effectiveness of CAP, PPP, and the other proposed mechanisms by conducting relevant ablation studies.

Paperid: 3599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03035.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous long-horizon mobile manipulation encompasses a multitude of challenges, including scene dynamics, unexplored areas, and error recovery. Recent works have leveraged foundation models for scene-level robotic reasoning and planning. However, the performance of these methods degrades when dealing with a large number of objects and large-scale environments. To address these limitations, we propose MORE, a novel approach for enhancing the capabilities of language models to solve zero-shot mobile manipulation planning for rearrangement tasks. MORE leverages scene graphs to represent environments, incorporates instance differentiation, and introduces an active filtering scheme that extracts task-relevant subgraphs of object and region instances. These steps yield a bounded planning problem, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving reliability. Additionally, we introduce several enhancements that enable planning across both indoor and outdoor environments. We evaluate MORE on 81 diverse rearrangement tasks from the BEHAVIOR-1K benchmark, where it becomes the first approach to successfully solve a significant share of the benchmark, outperforming recent foundation model-based approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capabilities of our approach in several complex real-world tasks, mimicking everyday activities. We make the code publicly available at https://more-model.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Paperid: 3600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18151.pdf

Abstract:
Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) has traditionally focused on small-scale encoder-only transformer architectures. With the advent of large-scale pre-trained language models, their capability to generate sparse representations for retrieval tasks across different transformer-based architectures, including encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the effectiveness of LSR across these architectures, exploring various sparse representation heads and model scales. Our results highlight the limitations of using large language models to create effective sparse representations in zero-shot settings, identifying challenges such as inappropriate term expansions and reduced performance due to the lack of expansion. We find that the encoder-decoder architecture with multi-tokens decoding approach achieves the best performance among the three backbones. While the decoder-only model performs worse than the encoder-only model, it demonstrates the potential to outperform when scaled to a high number of parameters.

Paperid: 3601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17401.pdf

Abstract:
Stereo disparity estimation is crucial for obtaining depth information in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS). While current deep learning methods have made significant advancements, challenges remain in achieving an optimal balance between accuracy, robustness, and inference speed. To address these challenges, we propose the StereoMamba architecture, which is specifically designed for stereo disparity estimation in RAMIS. Our approach is based on a novel Feature Extraction Mamba (FE-Mamba) module, which enhances long-range spatial dependencies both within and across stereo images. To effectively integrate multi-scale features from FE-Mamba, we then introduce a novel Multidimensional Feature Fusion (MFF) module. Experiments against the state-of-the-art on the ex-vivo SCARED benchmark demonstrate that StereoMamba achieves superior performance on EPE of 2.64 px and depth MAE of 2.55 mm, the second-best performance on Bad2 of 41.49% and Bad3 of 26.99%, while maintaining an inference speed of 21.28 FPS for a pair of high-resolution images (1280*1024), striking the optimum balance between accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. Furthermore, by comparing synthesized right images, generated from warping left images using the generated disparity maps, with the actual right image, StereoMamba achieves the best average SSIM (0.8970) and PSNR (16.0761), exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization on the in-vivo RIS2017 and StereoMIS datasets.

Paperid: 3602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12545.pdf

Abstract:
Mass-shooting events pose a significant challenge to public safety, generating large volumes of unstructured textual data that hinder effective investigations and the formulation of public policy. Despite the urgency, few prior studies have effectively automated the extraction of key information from these events to support legal and investigative efforts. This paper presented the first dataset designed for knowledge acquisition on mass-shooting events through the application of named entity recognition (NER) techniques. It focuses on identifying key entities such as offenders, victims, locations, and criminal instruments, that are vital for legal and investigative purposes. The NER process is powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) using few-shot prompting, facilitating the efficient extraction and organization of critical information from diverse sources, including news articles, police reports, and social media. Experimental results on real-world mass-shooting corpora demonstrate that GPT-4o is the most effective model for mass-shooting NER, achieving the highest Micro Precision, Micro Recall, and Micro F1-scores. Meanwhile, o1-mini delivers competitive performance, making it a resource-efficient alternative for less complex NER tasks. It is also observed that increasing the shot count enhances the performance of all models, but the gains are more substantial for GPT-4o and o1-mini, highlighting their superior adaptability to few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 3603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11171.pdf

Abstract:
We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) -- the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output -- and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

Paperid: 3604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10079.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) aims to recognize novel action categories with few exemplars. Existing methods typically learn frame-level representations for each video by designing inter-frame temporal modeling strategies or inter-video interaction at the coarse video-level granularity. However, they treat each episode task in isolation and neglect fine-grained temporal relation modeling between videos, thus failing to capture shared fine-grained temporal patterns across videos and reuse temporal knowledge from historical tasks. In light of this, we propose HR2G-shot, a Hierarchical Relation-augmented Representation Generalization framework for FSAR, which unifies three types of relation modeling (inter-frame, inter-video, and inter-task) to learn task-specific temporal patterns from a holistic view. Going beyond conducting inter-frame temporal interactions, we further devise two components to respectively explore inter-video and inter-task relationships: i) Inter-video Semantic Correlation (ISC) performs cross-video frame-level interactions in a fine-grained manner, thereby capturing task-specific query features and enhancing both intra-class consistency and inter-class separability; ii) Inter-task Knowledge Transfer (IKT) retrieves and aggregates relevant temporal knowledge from the bank, which stores diverse temporal patterns from historical episode tasks. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that HR2G-shot outperforms current top-leading FSAR methods.

Paperid: 3605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09472.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce CamMimic, an innovative algorithm tailored for dynamic video editing needs. It is designed to seamlessly transfer the camera motion observed in a given reference video onto any scene of the user's choice in a zero-shot manner without requiring any additional data. Our algorithm achieves this using a two-phase strategy by leveraging a text-to-video diffusion model. In the first phase, we develop a multi-concept learning method using a combination of LoRA layers and an orthogonality loss to capture and understand the underlying spatial-temporal characteristics of the reference video as well as the spatial features of the user's desired scene. The second phase proposes a unique homography-based refinement strategy to enhance the temporal and spatial alignment of the generated video. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through experiments conducted on a dataset containing combinations of diverse scenes and reference videos containing a variety of camera motions. In the absence of an established metric for assessing camera motion transfer between unrelated scenes, we propose CameraScore, a novel metric that utilizes homography representations to measure camera motion similarity between the reference and generated videos. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach generates high-quality, motion-enhanced videos. Additionally, a user study reveals that 70.31% of participants preferred our method for scene preservation, while 90.45% favored it for motion transfer. We hope this work lays the foundation for future advancements in camera motion transfer across different scenes.

Paperid: 3606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06740.pdf

Abstract:
Precise optical inspection in industrial applications is crucial for minimizing scrap rates and reducing the associated costs. Besides merely detecting if a product is anomalous or not, it is crucial to know the distinct type of defect, such as a bent, cut, or scratch. The ability to recognize the "exact" defect type enables automated treatments of the anomalies in modern production lines. Current methods are limited to solely detecting whether a product is defective or not without providing any insights on the defect type, nevertheless detecting and identifying multiple defects. We propose MultiADS, a zero-shot learning approach, able to perform Multi-type Anomaly Detection and Segmentation. The architecture of MultiADS comprises CLIP and extra linear layers to align the visual- and textual representation in a joint feature space. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal, is the first approach to perform a multi-type anomaly segmentation task in zero-shot learning. Contrary to the other baselines, our approach i) generates specific anomaly masks for each distinct defect type, ii) learns to distinguish defect types, and iii) simultaneously identifies multiple defect types present in an anomalous product. Additionally, our approach outperforms zero/few-shot learning SoTA methods on image-level and pixel-level anomaly detection and segmentation tasks on five commonly used datasets: MVTec-AD, Visa, MPDD, MAD and Real-IAD.

Paperid: 3607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22172.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge of data scarcity in semantic segmentation by generating datasets through text-to-image (T2I) generation models, reducing image acquisition and labeling costs. Segmentation dataset generation faces two key challenges: 1) aligning generated samples with the target domain and 2) producing informative samples beyond the training data. Fine-tuning T2I models can help generate samples aligned with the target domain. However, it often overfits and memorizes training data, limiting their ability to generate diverse and well-aligned samples. To overcome these issues, we propose Concept-Aware LoRA (CA-LoRA), a novel fine-tuning approach that selectively identifies and updates only the weights associated with necessary concepts (e.g., style or viewpoint) for domain alignment while preserving the pretrained knowledge of the T2I model to produce informative samples. We demonstrate its effectiveness in generating datasets for urban-scene segmentation, outperforming baseline and state-of-the-art methods in in-domain (few-shot and fully-supervised) settings, as well as in domain generalization tasks, especially under challenging conditions such as adverse weather and varying illumination, further highlighting its superiority.

Paperid: 3608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20208.pdf

Abstract:
How can robots learn dexterous grasping skills efficiently and apply them adaptively based on user instructions? This work tackles two key challenges: efficient skill acquisition from limited human demonstrations and context-driven skill selection. We introduce AdaDexGrasp, a framework that learns a library of grasping skills from a single human demonstration per skill and selects the most suitable one using a vision-language model (VLM). To improve sample efficiency, we propose a trajectory following reward that guides reinforcement learning (RL) toward states close to a human demonstration while allowing flexibility in exploration. To learn beyond the single demonstration, we employ curriculum learning, progressively increasing object pose variations to enhance robustness. At deployment, a VLM retrieves the appropriate skill based on user instructions, bridging low-level learned skills with high-level intent. We evaluate AdaDexGrasp in both simulation and real-world settings, showing that our approach significantly improves RL efficiency and enables learning human-like grasp strategies across varied object configurations. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer of our learned policies to a real-world PSYONIC Ability Hand, with a 90% success rate across objects, significantly outperforming the baseline.

Paperid: 3609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10214.pdf

Abstract:
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to prevent catastrophic forgetting of previously learned classes while sequentially incorporating new ones. The more challenging Few-shot CIL (FSCIL) setting further complicates this by providing only a limited number of samples for each new class, increasing the risk of overfitting in addition to standard CIL challenges. While catastrophic forgetting has been extensively studied, overfitting in FSCIL, especially with large foundation models, has received less attention. To fill this gap, we propose the Singular Value Fine-tuning for FSCIL (SVFCL) and compared it with existing approaches for adapting foundation models to FSCIL, which primarily build on Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like prompt tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Specifically, SVFCL applies singular value decomposition to the foundation model weights, keeping the singular vectors fixed while fine-tuning the singular values for each task, and then merging them. This simple yet effective approach not only alleviates the forgetting problem but also mitigates overfitting more effectively while significantly reducing trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, along with visualizations and ablation studies, validate the effectiveness of SVFCL. The code will be made available.

Paperid: 3610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05010.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for machine translation (MT), their performance for specialist domains such as medicine and law remains an open challenge. Prior work has shown that LLMs can be domain-adapted at test-time by retrieving targeted few-shot demonstrations or terminologies for inclusion in the prompt. Meanwhile, for general-purpose LLM MT, recent studies have found some success in generating similarly useful domain knowledge from an LLM itself, prior to translation. Our work studies domain-adapted MT with LLMs through a careful prompting setup, finding that demonstrations consistently outperform terminology, and retrieval consistently outperforms generation. We find that generating demonstrations with weaker models can close the gap with larger model's zero-shot performance. Given the effectiveness of demonstrations, we perform detailed analyses to understand their value. We find that domain-specificity is particularly important, and that the popular multi-domain benchmark is testing adaptation to a particular writing style more so than to a specific domain.

Paperid: 3611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02844.pdf

Abstract:
The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting meaningful representations from vast amounts of unlabeled data, existing methods still struggle to adapt to the non-stationary, non-IID nature of real-world data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Recent works have adopted a repeated cosine annealing schedule for large-scale continual pre-training; however, these schedules (1) inherently cause forgetting during the re-warming phase and (2) have not been systematically compared to existing continual SSL methods. In this work, we systematically compare the widely used cosine schedule with the recently proposed infinite learning rate schedule and empirically find the latter to be a more effective alternative. Our extensive empirical evaluation across diverse image and language datasets demonstrates that the infinite learning rate schedule consistently enhances continual pre-training performance compared to a repeated cosine decay without being restricted to a fixed iteration budget. For instance, in a small-scale MAE pre-training setup, it outperforms several strong baselines from the literature. We then scale up our experiments to larger MAE pre-training and autoregressive language model pre-training. Our results show that the infinite learning rate schedule remains effective at scale, surpassing repeated cosine decay for both MAE pre-training and zero-shot LM benchmarks.

Paperid: 3612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01531.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt tuning can further enhance the performance of visual-language models across various downstream tasks (e.g., few-shot learning), enabling them to better adapt to specific applications and needs. In this paper, we present a Diversity Covariance-Aware framework that learns distributional information from the data to enhance the few-shot ability of the prompt model. First, we propose a covariance-aware method that models the covariance relationships between visual features and uses anisotropic Mahalanobis distance, instead of the suboptimal cosine distance, to measure the similarity between two modalities. We rigorously derive and prove the validity of this modeling process. Then, we propose the diversity-aware method, which learns multiple diverse soft prompts to capture different attributes of categories and aligns them independently with visual modalities. This method achieves multi-centered covariance modeling, leading to more diverse decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets in various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Paperid: 3613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00296.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a methodology for training foundation models that enhances their in-context learning capabilities within the domain of bioacoustic signal processing. We use synthetically generated training data, introducing a domain-randomization-based pipeline that constructs diverse acoustic scenes with temporally strong labels. We generate over 8.8 thousand hours of strongly-labeled audio and train a query-by-example, transformer-based model to perform few-shot bioacoustic sound event detection. Our second contribution is a public benchmark of 13 diverse few-shot bioacoustics tasks. Our model outperforms previously published methods, and improves relative to other training-free methods by $64\%$. We demonstrate that this is due to increase in model size and data scale, as well as algorithmic improvements. We make our trained model available via an API, to provide ecologists and ethologists with a training-free tool for bioacoustic sound event detection.

Paperid: 3614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16911.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot multi-label recognition (MLR) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) faces significant challenges without training data, model tuning, or architectural modifications. Existing approaches require prompt tuning or architectural adaptations, limiting zero-shot applicability. Our work proposes a novel solution treating VLMs as black boxes, leveraging scores without training data or ground truth. Using large language model insights on object co-occurrence, we introduce compound prompts grounded in realistic object combinations. Analysis of these prompt scores reveals VLM biases and ``AND''/``OR'' signal ambiguities, notably that maximum compound scores are surprisingly suboptimal compared to second-highest scores. We address these through a debiasing and score-fusion algorithm that corrects image bias and clarifies VLM response behaviors. Our method enhances other zero-shot approaches, consistently improving their results. Experiments show superior mean Average Precision (mAP) compared to methods requiring training data, achieved through refined object ranking for robust zero-shot MLR.

Paperid: 3615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16223.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot medical detection can further improve detection performance without relying on annotated medical images even upon the fine-tuned model, showing great clinical value. Recent studies leverage grounded vision-language models (GLIP) to achieve this by using detailed disease descriptions as prompts for the target disease name during the inference phase. However, these methods typically treat prompts as equivalent context to the target name, making it difficult to assign specific disease knowledge based on visual information, leading to a coarse alignment between images and target descriptions. In this paper, we propose StructuralGLIP, which introduces an auxiliary branch to encode prompts into a latent knowledge bank layer-by-layer, enabling more context-aware and fine-grained alignment. Specifically, in each layer, we select highly similar features from both the image representation and the knowledge bank, forming structural representations that capture nuanced relationships between image patches and target descriptions. These features are then fused across modalities to further enhance detection performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructuralGLIP achieves a +4.1\% AP improvement over prior state-of-the-art methods across seven zero-shot medical detection benchmarks, and consistently improves fine-tuned models by +3.2\% AP on endoscopy image datasets.

Paperid: 3616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07345.pdf

Abstract:
The acoustic background plays a crucial role in natural conversation. It provides context and helps listeners understand the environment, but a strong background makes it difficult for listeners to understand spoken words. The appropriate handling of these backgrounds is situation-dependent: Although it may be necessary to remove background to ensure speech clarity, preserving the background is sometimes crucial to maintaining the contextual integrity of the speech. Despite recent advancements in zero-shot Text-to-Speech technologies, current systems often struggle with speech prompts containing backgrounds. To address these challenges, we propose a Controllable Masked Speech Prediction strategy coupled with a dual-speaker encoder, utilizing a task-related control signal to guide the prediction of dual background removal and preservation targets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables precise control over the removal or preservation of background across various acoustic conditions and exhibits strong generalization capabilities in unseen scenarios.

Paperid: 3617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02340.pdf

Abstract:
How to mitigate negative transfer in transfer learning is a long-standing and challenging issue, especially in the application of medical image segmentation. Existing methods for reducing negative transfer focus on classification or regression tasks, ignoring the non-uniform negative transfer risk in different image regions. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective weighted fine-tuning method that directs the model's attention towards regions with significant transfer risk for medical semantic segmentation. Specifically, we compute a transferability-guided transfer risk map to quantify the transfer hardness for each pixel and the potential risks of negative transfer. During the fine-tuning phase, we introduce a map-weighted loss function, normalized with image foreground size to counter class imbalance. Extensive experiments on brain segmentation datasets show our method significantly improves the target task performance, with gains of 4.37% on FeTS2021 and 1.81% on iSeg2019, avoiding negative transfer across modalities and tasks. Meanwhile, a 2.9% gain under a few-shot scenario validates the robustness of our approach.

Paperid: 3618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01268.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been a promising essence in future 5G-beyond and 6G systems. Its main advantage lies in its robust model-free decision-making in complex and large-dimension wireless environments. However, most existing RL frameworks rely on online interaction with the environment, which might not be feasible due to safety and cost concerns. Another problem with online RL is the lack of scalability of the designed algorithm with dynamic or new environments. This work proposes a novel, resilient, few-shot meta-offline RL algorithm combining offline RL using conservative Q-learning (CQL) and meta-learning using model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). The proposed algorithm can train RL models using static offline datasets without any online interaction with the environments. In addition, with the aid of MAML, the proposed model can be scaled up to new unseen environments. We showcase the proposed algorithm for optimizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) 's trajectory and scheduling policy to minimize the age-of-information (AoI) and transmission power of limited-power devices. Numerical results show that the proposed few-shot meta-offline RL algorithm converges faster than baseline schemes, such as deep Q-networks and CQL. In addition, it is the only algorithm that can achieve optimal joint AoI and transmission power using an offline dataset with few shots of data points and is resilient to network failures due to unprecedented environmental changes.

Paperid: 3619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00330.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in long-context large language models (LLMs) have led to the emerging paradigm of many-shot in-context learning (ICL), where it is observed that scaling many more demonstrating examples beyond the conventional few-shot setup in the context can lead to performance benefits. However, despite its promise, it is unclear what aspects dominate the benefits and whether simply scaling to more examples is the most effective way of improving many-shot ICL. In this work, we first provide an analysis of the factors driving many-shot ICL, and we find that 1) many-shot performance can still be attributed to often a few disproportionately influential examples and 2) identifying such influential examples ("optimize") and using them as demonstrations to regenerate new examples ("generate") can lead to further improvements. Inspired by the findings, we propose BRIDGE, an algorithm that alternates between the optimize step with Bayesian optimization to discover the influential sets of examples and the generate step to reuse this set to expand the reasoning paths of the examples back to the many-shot regime automatically. On Gemini, Claude, and Mistral LLMs of different sizes, we show that BRIDGE to significant improvements across a diverse set of tasks, including symbolic reasoning, numerical reasoning, and code generation.

Paperid: 3620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16842.pdf

Abstract:
Leverage large language model (LLM) to refer the fault is considered to be a potential solution for intelligent network fault diagnosis. However, how to represent network information in a paradigm that can be understood by LLMs has always been a core issue that has puzzled scholars in the field of network intelligence. To address this issue, we propose LLM-based Network Semantic Generation (LNSG) algorithm, which integrates semanticization and symbolization methods to uniformly describe the entire multi-modal network information. Based on the LNSG and LLMs, we present NetSemantic, a plug-and-play, data-independent, network information semantic fault diagnosis framework. It enables rapid adaptation to various network environments and provides efficient fault diagnosis capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that NetSemantic excels in network fault diagnosis across various complex scenarios in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 3621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16734.pdf

Abstract:
The growing complexity of network traffic and demand for ultra-low latency communication require smarter packet traffic management. Existing Deep Learning-based queuing approaches struggle with dynamic network scenarios and demand high engineering effort. We propose AQM-LLM, distilling Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot learning, contextual understanding, and pattern recognition to improve Active Queue Management (AQM) [RFC 9330] with minimal manual effort. We consider a specific case where AQM is Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) and our design of AQM-LLM builds on speculative decoding and reinforcement-based distilling of LLM by tackling congestion prevention in the L4S architecture using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC 9331] and periodic packet dropping. We develop a new open-source experimental platform by executing L4S-AQM on FreeBSD-14, providing interoperable modules to support LLM integration and facilitate IETF recognition through wider testing. Our extensive evaluations show L4S-LLM enhances queue management, prevents congestion, reduces latency, and boosts network performance, showcasing LLMs' adaptability and efficiency in uplifting AQM systems.

Paperid: 3622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12934.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring the correctness of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a significant challenge in AI-driven software development. Existing approaches predominantly rely on black-box (closed-box) approaches that evaluate correctness post-generation, failing to utilize the rich insights embedded in the LLMs' internal states during code generation. In this paper, we introduce OPENIA, a novel white-box (open-box) framework that leverages these internal representations to assess the correctness of LLM-generated code. OPENIA systematically analyzes the intermediate states of representative open-source LLMs specialized for code, including DeepSeek-Coder, CodeLlama, and MagicCoder, across diverse code generation benchmarks. Our empirical analysis reveals that these internal representations encode latent information, which strongly correlates with the correctness of the generated code. Building on these insights, OPENIA uses a white-box/open-box approach to make informed predictions about code correctness, offering significant advantages in adaptability and robustness over traditional classification-based methods and zero-shot approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that OPENIA consistently outperforms baseline models, achieving higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Scores with up to a 2X improvement in standalone code generation and a 46% enhancement in repository-specific scenarios. By unlocking the potential of in-process signals, OPENIA paves the way for more proactive and efficient quality assurance mechanisms in LLM-assisted code generation.

Paperid: 3623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12698.pdf

Abstract:
To improve user engagement during conversations with dialogue systems, we must improve individual dialogue responses and dialogue impressions such as consistency, personality, and empathy throughout the entire dialogue. While such dialogue systems have been developing rapidly with the help of large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) has attracted attention to align LLM-based dialogue models for such dialogue impressions. In RLAIF, a reward model based on another LLM is used to create a training signal for an LLM-based dialogue model using zero-shot/few-shot prompting techniques. However, evaluating an entire dialogue only by prompting LLMs is challenging. In this study, the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs prepared reward models corresponding to 12 metrics related to the impression of the entire dialogue for evaluating dialogue responses. We tuned our dialogue models using the reward model signals as feedback to improve the impression of the system. The results of automatic and human evaluations showed that tuning the dialogue model using our reward model corresponding to dialogue impression improved the evaluation of individual metrics and the naturalness of the dialogue response.

Paperid: 3624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03940.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced their ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text, raising concerns about the misuse of AI-generated content and making it critical to detect it. However, the task remains challenging, particularly in unseen domains or with unfamiliar LLMs. Leveraging LLM next-token distribution outputs offers a theoretically appealing approach for detection, as they encapsulate insights from the models' extensive pre-training on diverse corpora. Despite its promise, zero-shot methods that attempt to operationalize these outputs have met with limited success. We hypothesize that one of the problems is that they use the mean to aggregate next-token distribution metrics across tokens, when some tokens are naturally easier or harder to predict and should be weighted differently. Based on this idea, we propose the Perplexity Attention Weighted Network (PAWN), which uses the last hidden states of the LLM and positions to weight the sum of a series of features based on metrics from the next-token distribution across the sequence length. Although not zero-shot, our method allows us to cache the last hidden states and next-token distribution metrics on disk, greatly reducing the training resource requirements. PAWN shows competitive and even better performance in-distribution than the strongest baselines (fine-tuned LMs) with a fraction of their trainable parameters. Our model also generalizes better to unseen domains and source models, with smaller variability in the decision boundary across distribution shifts. It is also more robust to adversarial attacks, and if the backbone has multilingual capabilities, it presents decent generalization to languages not seen during supervised training, with LLaMA3-1B reaching a mean macro-averaged F1 score of 81.46% in cross-validation with nine languages.

Paperid: 3625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14399.pdf

Abstract:
Static analysis is essential for program optimization, bug detection, and debugging, but its reliance on compilation and limited customization hampers practical use. Advances in LLMs enable a new paradigm of compilation-free, customizable analysis via prompting. LLMs excel in interpreting program semantics on small code snippets and allow users to define analysis tasks in natural language with few-shot examples. However, misalignment with program semantics can cause hallucinations, especially in sophisticated semantic analysis upon lengthy code snippets. We propose LLMSA, a compositional neuro-symbolic approach for compilation-free, customizable static analysis with reduced hallucinations. Specifically, we propose an analysis policy language to support users decomposing an analysis problem into several sub-problems that target simple syntactic or semantic properties upon smaller code snippets. The problem decomposition enables the LLMs to target more manageable semantic-related sub-problems, while the syntactic ones are resolved by parsing-based analysis without hallucinations. An analysis policy is evaluated with lazy, incremental, and parallel prompting, which mitigates the hallucinations and improves the performance. It is shown that LLMSA achieves comparable and even superior performance to existing techniques in various clients. For instance, it attains 66.27% precision and 78.57% recall in taint vulnerability detection, surpassing an industrial approach in F1 score by 0.20.

Paperid: 3626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10443.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the \textbf{S}emantic-a\textbf{W}ar\textbf{E} spatial-t\textbf{E}mporal \textbf{T}okenizer (SweetTok), a novel video tokenizer to overcome the limitations in current video tokenization methods for compacted yet effective discretization. Unlike previous approaches that process flattened local visual patches via direct discretization or adaptive query tokenization, SweetTok proposes a decoupling framework, compressing visual inputs through distinct spatial and temporal queries via \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{Q}uery \textbf{A}uto\textbf{E}ncoder (DQAE). This design allows SweetTok to efficiently compress video token count while achieving superior fidelity by capturing essential information across spatial and temporal dimensions. Furthermore, we design a \textbf{M}otion-enhanced \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{C}odebook (MLC) tailored for spatial and temporal compression to address the differences in semantic representation between appearance and motion information. SweetTok significantly improves video reconstruction results by \textbf{42.8\%} w.r.t rFVD on UCF-101 dataset. With a better token compression strategy, it also boosts downstream video generation results by \textbf{15.1\%} w.r.t gFVD. Additionally, the compressed decoupled tokens are imbued with semantic information, enabling few-shot recognition capabilities powered by LLMs in downstream applications.

Paperid: 3627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08821.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and have emerged as the de-facto tool for many tasks. The current established technology of LLMs is to process input and generate output at the token level. This is in sharp contrast to humans who operate at multiple levels of abstraction, well beyond single words, to analyze information and to generate creative content. In this paper, we present an attempt at an architecture which operates on an explicit higher-level semantic representation, which we name a concept. Concepts are language- and modality-agnostic and represent a higher level idea or action in a flow. Hence, we build a "Large Concept Model". In this study, as proof of feasibility, we assume that a concept corresponds to a sentence, and use an existing sentence embedding space, SONAR, which supports up to 200 languages in both text and speech modalities. The Large Concept Model is trained to perform autoregressive sentence prediction in an embedding space. We explore multiple approaches, namely MSE regression, variants of diffusion-based generation, and models operating in a quantized SONAR space. These explorations are performed using 1.6B parameter models and training data in the order of 1.3T tokens. We then scale one architecture to a model size of 7B parameters and training data of about 2.7T tokens. We perform an experimental evaluation on several generative tasks, namely summarization and a new task of summary expansion. Finally, we show that our model exhibits impressive zero-shot generalization performance to many languages, outperforming existing LLMs of the same size. The training code of our models is freely available.

Paperid: 3628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08274.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce the first highly multilingual speech and American Sign Language (ASL) comprehension dataset by extending BELEBELE. Our dataset covers 74 spoken languages at the intersection of BELEBELE and FLEURS, and one sign language (ASL). We evaluate 2M-BELEBELE dataset for both 5-shot and zero-shot settings and across languages, the speech comprehension accuracy is ~ 2-3% average lower compared to reading comprehension.

Paperid: 3629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04383.pdf

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on textual descriptions, essential for applications like augmented reality and robotics. Traditional 3DVG approaches rely on annotated 3D datasets and predefined object categories, limiting scalability and adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework leveraging 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on large-scale 2D data. SeeGround represents 3D scenes as a hybrid of query-aligned rendered images and spatially enriched text descriptions, bridging the gap between 3D data and 2D-VLMs input formats. We propose two modules: the Perspective Adaptation Module, which dynamically selects viewpoints for query-relevant image rendering, and the Fusion Alignment Module, which integrates 2D images with 3D spatial descriptions to enhance object localization. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot methods by large margins. Notably, we exceed weakly supervised methods and rival some fully supervised ones, outperforming previous SOTA by 7.7% on ScanRefer and 7.1% on Nr3D, showcasing its effectiveness in complex 3DVG tasks.

Paperid: 3630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18472.pdf

Abstract:
Authorship has entangled style and content inside. Authors frequently write about the same topics in the same style, so when different authors write about the exact same topic the easiest way out to distinguish them is by understanding the nuances of their style. Modern neural models for authorship can pick up these features using contrastive learning, however, some amount of content leakage is always present. Our aim is to reduce the inevitable impact and correlation between content and authorship. We present a technique to use contrastive learning (InfoNCE) with additional hard negatives synthetically created using a semantic similarity model. This disentanglement technique aims to distance the content embedding space from the style embedding space, leading to embeddings more informed by style. We demonstrate the performance with ablations on two different datasets and compare them on out-of-domain challenges. Improvements are clearly shown on challenging evaluations on prolific authors with up to a 10% increase in accuracy when the settings are particularly hard. Trials on challenges also demonstrate the preservation of zero-shot capabilities of this method as fine tuning.

Paperid: 3631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15737.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in multivariate time series classification (MTSC). Effective adaptation of LLMs for MTSC necessitates informative data representations. Existing LLM-based methods directly encode embeddings for time series within the latent space of LLMs from scratch to align with semantic space of LLMs. Despite their effectiveness, we reveal that these methods conceal three inherent bottlenecks: (1) they struggle to encode temporal and channel-specific information in a lossless manner, both of which are critical components of multivariate time series; (2) it is much difficult to align the learned representation space with the semantic space of the LLMs; (3) they require task-specific retraining, which is both computationally expensive and labor-intensive. To bridge these gaps, we propose TableTime, which reformulates MTSC as a table understanding task. Specifically, TableTime introduces the following strategies: (1) convert multivariate time series into a tabular form, thus minimizing information loss to the greatest extent; (2) represent tabular time series in text format to achieve natural alignment with the semantic space of LLMs; (3) design a reasoning framework that integrates contextual text information, neighborhood assistance, multi-path inference and problem decomposition to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs and realize zero-shot classification. Extensive experiments performed on 10 publicly representative datasets from UEA archive verify the superiorities of the TableTime.

Paperid: 3632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15216.pdf

Abstract:
Imbalanced data distributions are prevalent in real-world scenarios, posing significant challenges in both imbalanced classification and imbalanced regression tasks. They often cause deep learning models to overfit in areas of high sample density (many-shot regions) while underperforming in areas of low sample density (few-shot regions). This characteristic restricts the utility of deep learning models in various sectors, notably healthcare, where areas with few-shot data hold greater clinical relevance. While recent studies have shown the benefits of incorporating distribution information in imbalanced classification tasks, such strategies are rarely explored in imbalanced regression. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a novel loss function, termed Dist Loss, designed to minimize the distribution distance between the model's predictions and the target labels in a differentiable manner, effectively integrating distribution information into model training. Dist Loss enables deep learning models to regularize their output distribution during training, effectively enhancing their focus on few-shot regions. We have conducted extensive experiments across three datasets spanning computer vision and healthcare: IMDB-WIKI-DIR, AgeDB-DIR, and ECG-Ka-DIR. The results demonstrate that Dist Loss effectively mitigates the negative impact of imbalanced data distribution on model performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in sparse data regions. Furthermore, Dist Loss is easy to integrate, complementing existing methods.

Paperid: 3633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08196.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently achieved remarkable success in text-guided image generation. In image editing, DiTs project text and image inputs to a joint latent space, from which they decode and synthesize new images. However, it remains largely unexplored how multimodal information collectively forms this joint space and how they guide the semantics of the synthesized images. In this paper, we investigate the latent space of DiT models and uncover two key properties: First, DiT's latent space is inherently semantically disentangled, where different semantic attributes can be controlled by specific editing directions. Second, consistent semantic editing requires utilizing the entire joint latent space, as neither encoded image nor text alone contains enough semantic information. We show that these editing directions can be obtained directly from text prompts, enabling precise semantic control without additional training or mask annotations. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective Encode-Identify-Manipulate (EIM) framework for zero-shot fine-grained image editing. Specifically, we first encode both the given source image and the text prompt that describes the image, to obtain the joint latent embedding. Then, using our proposed Hessian Score Distillation Sampling (HSDS) method, we identify editing directions that control specific target attributes while preserving other image features. These directions are guided by text prompts and used to manipulate the latent embeddings. Moreover, we propose a new metric to quantify the disentanglement degree of the latent space of diffusion models. Extensive experiment results on our new curated benchmark dataset and analysis demonstrate DiT's disentanglement properties and effectiveness of the EIM framework.

Paperid: 3634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05141.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on improving Text-To-Audio (TTA) generation on zero-shot and few-shot settings (i.e. generating unseen or uncommon audio events). Inspired by the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in Large Language Models, we propose Audiobox TTA-RAG, a novel retrieval-augmented TTA approach based on Audiobox, a flow-matching audio generation model. Unlike the vanilla Audiobox TTA solution that generates audio conditioned on text only, we extend the TTA process by augmenting the conditioning input with both text and retrieved audio samples. Our retrieval method does not require the external database to have labeled audio, offering more practical use cases. We show that the proposed model can effectively leverage the retrieved audio samples and significantly improve zero-shot and few-shot TTA performance, with large margins on multiple evaluation metrics, while maintaining the ability to generate semantically aligned audio for the in-domain setting.

Paperid: 3635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23698.pdf

Abstract:
Large pretrained vision-language models like CLIP have shown promising generalization capability, but may struggle in specialized domains (e.g., satellite imagery) or fine-grained classification (e.g., car models) where the visual concepts are unseen or under-represented during pretraining. Prompt learning offers a parameter-efficient finetuning framework that can adapt CLIP to downstream tasks even when limited annotation data are available. In this paper, we improve prompt learning by distilling the textual knowledge from natural language prompts (either human- or LLM-generated) to provide rich priors for those under-represented concepts. We first obtain a prompt ``summary'' aligned to each input image via a learned prompt aggregator. Then we jointly train a prompt generator, optimized to produce a prompt embedding that stays close to the aggregated summary while minimizing task loss at the same time. We dub such prompt embedding as Aggregate-and-Adapted Prompt Embedding (AAPE). AAPE is shown to be able to generalize to different downstream data distributions and tasks, including vision-language understanding tasks (e.g., few-shot classification, VQA) and generation tasks (image captioning) where AAPE achieves competitive performance. We also show AAPE is particularly helpful to handle non-canonical and OOD examples. Furthermore, AAPE learning eliminates LLM-based inference cost as required by baselines, and scales better with data and LLM model size.

Paperid: 3636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20478.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MusicFlow, a cascaded text-to-music generation model based on flow matching. Based on self-supervised representations to bridge between text descriptions and music audios, we construct two flow matching networks to model the conditional distribution of semantic and acoustic features. Additionally, we leverage masked prediction as the training objective, enabling the model to generalize to other tasks such as music infilling and continuation in a zero-shot manner. Experiments on MusicCaps reveal that the music generated by MusicFlow exhibits superior quality and text coherence despite being over $2\sim5$ times smaller and requiring $5$ times fewer iterative steps. Simultaneously, the model can perform other music generation tasks and achieves competitive performance in music infilling and continuation. Our code and model will be publicly available.

Paperid: 3637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13863.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling up autoregressive models in vision has not proven as beneficial as in large language models. In this work, we investigate this scaling problem in the context of text-to-image generation, focusing on two critical factors: whether models use discrete or continuous tokens, and whether tokens are generated in a random or fixed raster order using BERT- or GPT-like transformer architectures. Our empirical results show that, while all models scale effectively in terms of validation loss, their evaluation performance -- measured by FID, GenEval score, and visual quality -- follows different trends. Models based on continuous tokens achieve significantly better visual quality than those using discrete tokens. Furthermore, the generation order and attention mechanisms significantly affect the GenEval score: random-order models achieve notably better GenEval scores compared to raster-order models. Inspired by these findings, we train Fluid, a random-order autoregressive model on continuous tokens. Fluid 10.5B model achieves a new state-of-the-art zero-shot FID of 6.16 on MS-COCO 30K, and 0.69 overall score on the GenEval benchmark. We hope our findings and results will encourage future efforts to further bridge the scaling gap between vision and language models.

Paperid: 3638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05575.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic refinement of patent claims in patent applications is crucial from the perspective of intellectual property strategy. In this paper, we propose ClaimBrush, a novel framework for automated patent claim refinement that includes a dataset and a rewriting model. We constructed a dataset for training and evaluating patent claim rewriting models by collecting a large number of actual patent claim rewriting cases from the patent examination process. Using the constructed dataset, we built an automatic patent claim rewriting model by fine-tuning a large language model. Furthermore, we enhanced the performance of the automatic patent claim rewriting model by applying preference optimization based on a prediction model of patent examiners' Office Actions. The experimental results showed that our proposed rewriting model outperformed heuristic baselines and zero-shot learning in state-of-the-art large language models. Moreover, preference optimization based on patent examiners' preferences boosted the performance of patent claim refinement.

Paperid: 3639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02907.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce NNetNav, a method for unsupervised interaction with websites that generates synthetic demonstrations for training browser agents. Given any website, NNetNav produces these demonstrations by retroactively labeling action sequences from an exploration policy. Most work on training browser agents has relied on expensive human supervision, and the limited prior work on such interaction-based techniques has failed to provide effective search through the exponentially large space of exploration. In contrast, NNetNav exploits the hierarchical structure of language instructions to make this search more tractable: Complex instructions are typically decomposable into simpler sub-tasks, allowing NNetNav to automatically prune interaction episodes when an intermediate trajectory cannot be annotated with a meaningful sub-task. \texttt{LLama-3.1-8b} finetuned on 10k NNetNav self-generated demonstrations obtains over 16\% success rate on WebArena, and 35\% on WebVoyager, an improvement of 15pts and 31pts respectively over zero-shot \texttt{LLama-3.1-8b}, outperforming zero-shot GPT-4 and reaching the state-of-the-art among unsupervised methods, for both benchmarks.

Paperid: 3640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02343.pdf

Abstract:
A standard way to evaluate the abilities of LLM involves presenting a multiple-choice question and selecting the option with the highest logit as the model's predicted answer. However, such a format for evaluating LLMs has limitations, since even if the model knows the correct answer, it may struggle to select the corresponding letter simply due to difficulties in following this rigid format. To address this, we introduce new scores that better capture and reveal model's underlying knowledge: the Query-Key Score (QK-score), derived from the interaction between query and key representations in attention heads, and the Attention Score, based on attention weights. These scores are extracted from specific \textit{select-and-copy} heads, which show consistent performance across popular Multi-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) datasets. Based on these scores, our method improves knowledge extraction, yielding up to 16\% gain for LLaMA2-7B and up to 10\% for larger models on popular MCQA benchmarks. At the same time, the accuracy on a simple synthetic dataset, where the model explicitly knows the right answer, increases by almost 60\%, achieving nearly perfect accuracy, therefore demonstrating the method's efficiency in mitigating MCQA format limitations. To support our claims, we conduct experiments on models ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters in both zero- and few-shot setups.

Paperid: 3641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01508.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples in the prompt. Despite its flexibility, ICL suffers from instability -- especially as prompt length increases with more demonstrations. To address this, we treat ICL as a source of weak supervision and propose a parameter-efficient method that disentangles demonstration-induced latent shifts from those of the query. An ICL-based teacher generates pseudo-labels on unlabeled queries, while a student predicts them using only the query input, updating a lightweight adapter. This captures demonstration effects in a compact, reusable form, enabling efficient inference while remaining composable with new demonstrations. Although trained on noisy teacher outputs, the student often outperforms its teacher through pseudo-label correction and coverage expansion, consistent with the weak-to-strong generalization effect. Empirically, our method improves generalization, stability, and efficiency across both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, surpassing standard ICL and prior disentanglement methods.

Paperid: 3642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14891.pdf

Abstract:
In real-world scenarios, many robotic manipulation tasks are hindered by occlusions and limited fields of view, posing significant challenges for passive observation-based models that rely on fixed or wrist-mounted cameras. In this paper, we investigate the problem of robotic manipulation under limited visual observation and propose a task-driven asynchronous active vision-action model.Our model serially connects a camera Next-Best-View (NBV) policy with a gripper Next-Best Pose (NBP) policy, and trains them in a sensor-motor coordination framework using few-shot reinforcement learning. This approach allows the agent to adjust a third-person camera to actively observe the environment based on the task goal, and subsequently infer the appropriate manipulation actions.We trained and evaluated our model on 8 viewpoint-constrained tasks in RLBench. The results demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms baseline algorithms, showcasing its effectiveness in handling visual constraints in manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 3643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14369.pdf

Abstract:
Testing and evaluation are critical to the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Given the rarity of safety-critical events such as crashes, millions of tests are typically needed to accurately assess AV safety performance. Although techniques like importance sampling can accelerate this process, it usually still requires too many numbers of tests for field testing. This severely hinders the testing and evaluation process, especially for third-party testers and governmental bodies with very limited testing budgets. The rapid development cycles of AV technology further exacerbate this challenge. To fill this research gap, this paper introduces the few-shot testing (FST) problem and proposes a methodological framework to tackle it. As the testing budget is very limited, usually smaller than 100, the FST method transforms the testing scenario generation problem from probabilistic sampling to deterministic optimization, reducing the uncertainty of testing results. To optimize the selection of testing scenarios, a cross-attention similarity mechanism is proposed to learn to extract the information of AV's testing scenario space. This allows iterative searches for scenarios with the smallest evaluation error, ensuring precise testing within budget constraints. Experimental results in cut-in scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the FST method, significantly enhancing accuracy and enabling efficient, precise AV testing.

Paperid: 3644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13910.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a zero-shot Voice Transfer (VT) module that can be seamlessly integrated into a multi-lingual Text-to-speech (TTS) system to transfer an individual's voice across languages. Our proposed VT module comprises a speaker-encoder that processes reference speech, a bottleneck layer, and residual adapters, connected to preexisting TTS layers. We compare the performance of various configurations of these components and report Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and Speaker Similarity across languages. Using a single English reference speech per speaker, we achieve an average voice transfer similarity score of 73% across nine target languages. Vocal characteristics contribute significantly to the construction and perception of individual identity. The loss of one's voice, due to physical or neurological conditions, can lead to a profound sense of loss, impacting one's core identity. As a case study, we demonstrate that our approach can not only transfer typical speech but also restore the voices of individuals with dysarthria, even when only atypical speech samples are available - a valuable utility for those who have never had typical speech or banked their voice. Cross-lingual typical audio samples, plus videos demonstrating voice restoration for dysarthric speakers are available here (google.github.io/tacotron/publications/zero_shot_voice_transfer).

Paperid: 3645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12978.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic and goal-oriented (SGO) communication is an emerging technology that only transmits significant information for a given task. Semantic communication encounters many challenges, such as computational complexity at end users, availability of data, and privacy-preserving. This work presents a TinyML-based semantic communication framework for few-shot wireless image classification that integrates split-learning and meta-learning. We exploit split-learning to limit the computations performed by the end-users while ensuring privacy-preserving. In addition, meta-learning overcomes data availability concerns and speeds up training by utilizing similarly trained tasks. The proposed algorithm is tested using a data set of images of hand-written letters. In addition, we present an uncertainty analysis of the predictions using conformal prediction (CP) techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed Semantic-MSL outperforms conventional schemes by achieving 20 % gain on classification accuracy using fewer data points, yet less training energy consumption.

Paperid: 3646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10967.pdf

Abstract:
Relative representations are an established approach to zero-shot model stitching, consisting of a non-trainable transformation of the latent space of a deep neural network. Based on insights of topological and geometric nature, we propose two improvements to relative representations. First, we introduce a normalization procedure in the relative transformation, resulting in invariance to non-isotropic rescalings and permutations. The latter coincides with the symmetries in parameter space induced by common activation functions. Second, we propose to deploy topological densification when fine-tuning relative representations, a topological regularization loss encouraging clustering within classes. We provide an empirical investigation on a natural language task, where both the proposed variations yield improved performance on zero-shot model stitching.

Paperid: 3647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09811.pdf

Abstract:
We propose PROSE-FD, a zero-shot multimodal PDE foundational model for simultaneous prediction of heterogeneous two-dimensional physical systems related to distinct fluid dynamics settings. These systems include shallow water equations and the Navier-Stokes equations with incompressible and compressible flow, regular and complex geometries, and different buoyancy settings. This work presents a new transformer-based multi-operator learning approach that fuses symbolic information to perform operator-based data prediction, i.e. non-autoregressive. By incorporating multiple modalities in the inputs, the PDE foundation model builds in a pathway for including mathematical descriptions of the physical behavior. We pre-train our foundation model on 6 parametric families of equations collected from 13 datasets, including over 60K trajectories. Our model outperforms popular operator learning, computer vision, and multi-physics models, in benchmark forward prediction tasks. We test our architecture choices with ablation studies.

Paperid: 3648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06790.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper we present a step-by-step approach to long-form text translation, drawing on established processes in translation studies. Instead of viewing machine translation as a single, monolithic task, we propose a framework that engages language models in a multi-turn interaction, encompassing pre-translation research, drafting, refining, and proofreading, resulting in progressively improved translations. Extensive automatic evaluations using Gemini 1.5 Pro across ten language pairs show that translating step-by-step yields large translation quality improvements over conventional zero-shot prompting approaches and earlier human-like baseline strategies, resulting in state-of-the-art results on WMT2024.

Paperid: 3649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04732.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce VidLPRO, a novel video-language (VL) pre-training framework designed specifically for robotic and laparoscopic surgery. While existing surgical VL models primarily rely on contrastive learning, we propose a more comprehensive approach to capture the intricate temporal dynamics and align video with language. VidLPRO integrates video-text contrastive learning, video-text matching, and masked language modeling objectives to learn rich VL representations. To support this framework, we present GenSurg+, a carefully curated dataset derived from GenSurgery, comprising 17k surgical video clips paired with captions generated by GPT-4 using transcripts extracted by the Whisper model. This dataset addresses the need for large-scale, high-quality VL data in the surgical domain. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including Cholec80 and AutoLaparo, demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. VidLPRO achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot surgical phase recognition, significantly outperforming existing surgical VL models such as SurgVLP and HecVL. Our model demonstrates improvements of up to 21.5\% in accuracy and 15.7% in F1 score, setting a new benchmark in the field. Notably, VidLPRO exhibits robust performance even with single-frame inference, while effectively scaling with increased temporal context. Ablation studies reveal the impact of frame sampling strategies on model performance and computational efficiency. These results underscore VidLPRO's potential as a foundation model for surgical video understanding.

Paperid: 3650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01876.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-based video generation technology has advanced significantly, catalyzing a proliferation of research in human animation. However, the majority of these studies are confined to same-modality driving settings, with cross-modality human body animation remaining relatively underexplored. In this paper, we introduce, an end-to-end audio-driven human animation framework that ensures hand integrity, identity consistency, and natural motion. The key design of CyberHost is the Region Codebook Attention mechanism, which improves the generation quality of facial and hand animations by integrating fine-grained local features with learned motion pattern priors. Furthermore, we have developed a suite of human-prior-guided training strategies, including body movement map, hand clarity score, pose-aligned reference feature, and local enhancement supervision, to improve synthesis results. To our knowledge, CyberHost is the first end-to-end audio-driven human diffusion model capable of facilitating zero-shot video generation within the scope of human body. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CyberHost surpasses previous works in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.

Paperid: 3651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12865.pdf

Abstract:
As a pivotal technique for improving the defense of deep models, adversarial robustness transfer via distillation has demonstrated remarkable success in conventional image classification tasks. However, this paradigm encounters critical challenges when applied to vision-language models (VLM) (e.g., CLIP): constructing adversarially robust teacher for large-scale multi-modal models demands prohibitively high computational resources. We bridge this gap by revealing an interesting phenomenon: vanilla CLIP (without adversarial training) exhibits intrinsic defensive capabilities against adversarial examples generated by another CLIP with different architectures. We formally define this as proxy adversarial robustness, and naturally propose a Heterogeneous Proxy Transfer (HPT) framework that establishes cross-architectural robustness distillation channels between CLIP variants, effortlessly enabling the VLM robustness transfer from proxy to target models. Yet, such proxy transfer paradigm easily induces severe overfitting, leading to a sharp degradation in zero-shot natural generalization. To resolve that, we design Generalization-Pivot Decoupling (GPD) by leveraging the difference in learning rate scheduling. This decouples the proxy transfer process into a generalization-anchored warm-up that maintains generalization and a generalization-pulled HPT that promotes adversarial robustness, to achieve an equilibrium between natural generalization and adversarial robustness. Extensive experiments on 15 zero-shot datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our HPT-GPD method. The code is available at the website of github.com/fxw13/HPT-GPD.

Paperid: 3652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16740.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid progress of controllable generation, training data synthesis has become a promising way to expand labeled datasets and alleviate manual annotation in remote sensing (RS). However, the complexity of semantic mask control and the uncertainty of sampling quality often limit the utility of synthetic data in downstream semantic segmentation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented data synthesis framework (TODSynth), including a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) with unified triple attention and a plug-and-play sampling strategy guided by task feedback. Built upon the powerful DiT-based generative foundation model, we systematically evaluate different control schemes, showing that a text-image-mask joint attention scheme combined with full fine-tuning of the image and mask branches significantly enhances the effectiveness of RS semantic segmentation data synthesis, particularly in few-shot and complex-scene scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a control-rectify flow matching (CRFM) method, which dynamically adjusts sampling directions guided by semantic loss during the early high-plasticity stage, mitigating the instability of generated images and bridging the gap between synthetic data and downstream segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art controllable generation methods, producing more stable and task-oriented synthetic data for RS semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 3653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16523.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot recognition performance but remain highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations, posing significant risks in safety-critical scenarios. Previous training-time defenses rely on adversarial fine-tuning, which requires labeled data and costly retraining, while existing test-time strategies fail to reliably distinguish between clean and adversarial inputs, thereby preventing both adversarial robustness and clean accuracy from reaching their optimum. To address these limitations, we propose Test-Time Padding (TTP), a lightweight defense framework that performs adversarial detection followed by targeted adaptation at inference. TTP identifies adversarial inputs via the cosine similarity shift between CLIP feature embeddings computed before and after spatial padding, yielding a universal threshold for reliable detection across architectures and datasets. For detected adversarial cases, TTP employs trainable padding to restore disrupted attention patterns, coupled with a similarity-aware ensemble strategy for a more robust final prediction. For clean inputs, TTP leaves them unchanged by default or optionally integrates existing test-time adaptation techniques for further accuracy gains. Comprehensive experiments on diverse CLIP backbones and fine-grained benchmarks show that TTP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art test-time defenses, delivering substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without compromising clean accuracy. The code for this paper will be released soon.

Paperid: 3654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13884.pdf

Abstract:
Recent multilingual named entity recognition (NER) work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can provide effective synthetic supervision, yet such datasets have mostly appeared as by-products of broader experiments rather than as systematic, reusable resources. We introduce FiNERweb, a dataset-creation pipeline that scales the teacher-student paradigm to 91 languages and 25 scripts. Building on FineWeb-Edu, our approach trains regression models to identify NER-relevant passages and annotates them with multilingual LLMs, resulting in about 225k passages with 235k distinct entity labels. Our experiments show that the regression model achieves more than 84 F1, and that models trained on FiNERweb obtain comparable or improved performance in zero shot transfer settings on English, Thai, and Swahili, despite being trained on 19x less data than strong baselines. In addition, we assess annotation quality using LLM-as-a-judge and observe consistently high scores for both faithfulness (3.99 out of 5) and completeness (4.05 out of 5), indicating reliable and informative annotations. Further, we release the dataset with both English labels and translated label sets in the respective target languages because we observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models drops by 0.02 to 0.09 F1 when evaluated using target language labels instead of English ones. We release FiNERweb together with all accompanying artifacts to the research community in order to facilitate more effective student-teacher training for multilingual named entity recognition.

Paperid: 3655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12492.pdf

Abstract:
Polyp detectors trained on clean datasets often underperform in real-world endoscopy, where illumination changes, motion blur, and occlusions degrade image quality. Existing approaches struggle with the domain gap between controlled laboratory conditions and clinical practice, where adverse imaging conditions are prevalent. In this work, we propose AdaptiveDetector, a novel two-stage detector-verifier framework comprising a YOLOv11 detector with a vision-language model (VLM) verifier. The detector adaptively adjusts per-frame confidence thresholds under VLM guidance, while the verifier is fine-tuned with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using an asymmetric, cost-sensitive reward function specifically designed to discourage missed detections -- a critical clinical requirement. To enable realistic assessment under challenging conditions, we construct a comprehensive synthetic testbed by systematically degrading clean datasets with adverse conditions commonly encountered in clinical practice, providing a rigorous benchmark for zero-shot evaluation. Extensive zero-shot evaluation on synthetically degraded CVC-ClinicDB and Kvasir-SEG images demonstrates that our approach improves recall by 14 to 22 percentage points over YOLO alone, while precision remains within 0.7 points below to 1.7 points above the baseline. This combination of adaptive thresholding and cost-sensitive reinforcement learning achieves clinically aligned, open-world polyp detection with substantially fewer false negatives, thereby reducing the risk of missed precancerous polyps and improving patient outcomes.

Paperid: 3656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04485.pdf

Abstract:
Since the advent of controllable image generation, increasingly rich modes of control have enabled greater customization and accessibility for everyday users. Zero-shot, identity-preserving models such as Insert Anything and OminiControl now support applications like virtual try-on without requiring additional fine-tuning. While these models may be fitting for humans and rigid everyday objects, they still have limitations for non-rigid or fine-grained categories. These domains often lack accessible, high-quality data -- especially videos or multi-view observations of the same subject -- making them difficult both to evaluate and to improve upon. Yet, such domains are essential for moving beyond content creation toward applications that demand accuracy and fine detail. Birds are an excellent domain for this task: they exhibit high diversity, require fine-grained cues for identification, and come in a wide variety of poses. We introduce the NABirds Look-Alikes (NABLA) dataset, consisting of 4,759 expert-curated image pairs. Together with 1,073 pairs collected from multi-image observations on iNaturalist and a small set of videos, this forms a benchmark for evaluating identity-preserving generation of birds. We show that state-of-the-art baselines fail to maintain identity on this dataset, and we demonstrate that training on images grouped by species, age, and sex -- used as a proxy for identity -- substantially improves performance on both seen and unseen species.

Paperid: 3657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02441.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting large pre-trained models to unseen tasks under tight data and compute budgets remains challenging. Meta-learning approaches explicitly learn good initializations, but they require an additional meta-training phase over many tasks, incur high training cost, and can be unstable. At the same time, the number of task-specific pre-trained models continues to grow, yet the question of how to transfer them to new tasks with minimal additional training remains relatively underexplored. We propose BOLT (Basis-Oriented Low-rank Transfer), a framework that reuses existing fine-tuned models not by merging weights, but instead by extracting an orthogonal, task-informed spectral basis and adapting within that subspace. In the offline phase, BOLT collects dominant singular directions from multiple task vectors and orthogonalizes them per layer to form reusable bases. In the online phase, we freeze these bases and train only a small set of diagonal coefficients per layer for the new task, yielding a rank-controlled update with very few trainable parameters. This design provides (i) a strong, training-free initialization for unseen tasks, obtained by pooling source-task coefficients, along with a lightweight rescaling step while leveraging the shared orthogonal bases, and (ii) a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) path that, in our experiments, achieves robust performance compared to common PEFT baselines as well as a representative meta-learned initialization. Our results show that constraining adaptation to a task-informed orthogonal subspace provides an effective alternative for unseen-task transfer.

Paperid: 3658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14661.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores how large language models can leverage multi-level contextual information to predict group coordination patterns in collaborative mixed reality environments. We demonstrate that encoding individual behavioral profiles, group structural properties, and temporal dynamics as natural language enables LLMs to break through the performance ceiling of statistical models. We build M-CALLM, a framework that transforms multimodal sensor streams into hierarchical context for LLM-based prediction, and evaluate three paradigms (zero-shot prompting, few-shot learning, and supervised fine-tuning) against statistical baselines across intervention mode (real-time prediction) and simulation mode (autoregressive forecasting) Head-to-head comparison on 16 groups (64 participants, ~25 hours) demonstrates that context-aware LLMs achieve 96% accuracy for conversation prediction, a 3.2x improvement over LSTM baselines, while maintaining sub-35ms latency. However, simulation mode reveals brittleness with 83% degradation due to cascading errors. Deep-dive into modality-specific performance shows conversation depends on temporal patterns, proximity benefits from group structure (+6%), while shared attention fails completely (0% recall), exposing architectural limitations. We hope this work spawns new ideas for building intelligent collaborative sensing systems that balance semantic reasoning capabilities with fundamental constraints.

Paperid: 3659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13703.pdf

Abstract:
Hospitals and healthcare systems rely on operational decisions that determine patient flow, cost, and quality of care. Despite strong performance on medical knowledge and conversational benchmarks, foundation models trained on general text may lack the specialized knowledge required for these operational decisions. We introduce Lang1, a family of models (100M-7B parameters) pretrained on a specialized corpus blending 80B clinical tokens from NYU Langone Health's EHRs and 627B tokens from the internet. To rigorously evaluate Lang1 in real-world settings, we developed the REalistic Medical Evaluation (ReMedE), a benchmark derived from 668,331 EHR notes that evaluates five critical tasks: 30-day readmission prediction, 30-day mortality prediction, length of stay, comorbidity coding, and predicting insurance claims denial. In zero-shot settings, both general-purpose and specialized models underperform on four of five tasks (36.6%-71.7% AUROC), with mortality prediction being an exception. After finetuning, Lang1-1B outperforms finetuned generalist models up to 70x larger and zero-shot models up to 671x larger, improving AUROC by 3.64%-6.75% and 1.66%-23.66% respectively. We also observed cross-task scaling with joint finetuning on multiple tasks leading to improvement on other tasks. Lang1-1B effectively transfers to out-of-distribution settings, including other clinical tasks and an external health system. Our findings suggest that predictive capabilities for hospital operations require explicit supervised finetuning, and that this finetuning process is made more efficient by in-domain pretraining on EHR. Our findings support the emerging view that specialized LLMs can compete with generalist models in specialized tasks, and show that effective healthcare systems AI requires the combination of in-domain pretraining, supervised finetuning, and real-world evaluation beyond proxy benchmarks.

Paperid: 3660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10946.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with 3D-related tasks such as spatial cognition and physical understanding, which are crucial for real-world applications like robotics and embodied agents. We attribute this to a modality gap between the 3D tasks and the 2D training of VLM, which led to inefficient retrieval of 3D information from 2D input. To bridge this gap, we introduce SandboxVLM, a simple yet effective framework that leverages abstract bounding boxes to encode geometric structure and physical kinematics for VLM. Specifically, we design a 3D Sandbox reconstruction and perception pipeline comprising four stages: generating multi-view priors with abstract control, proxy elevation, multi-view voting and clustering, and 3D-aware reasoning. Evaluated in zero-shot settings across multiple benchmarks and VLM backbones, our approach consistently improves spatial intelligence, achieving an 8.3\% gain on SAT Real compared with baseline methods for instance. These results demonstrate that equipping VLMs with a 3D abstraction substantially enhances their 3D reasoning ability without additional training, suggesting new possibilities for general-purpose embodied intelligence.

Paperid: 3661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07798.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to tackle the dual challenge of recognizing novel classes and adapting to unseen domains with limited annotations. However, encoder features often entangle domain-relevant and category-relevant information, limiting both generalization and rapid adaptation to new domains. To address this issue, we propose a Divide-and-Conquer Decoupled Network (DCDNet). In the training stage, to tackle feature entanglement that impedes cross-domain generalization and rapid adaptation, we propose the Adversarial-Contrastive Feature Decomposition (ACFD) module. It decouples backbone features into category-relevant private and domain-relevant shared representations via contrastive learning and adversarial learning. Then, to mitigate the potential degradation caused by the disentanglement, the Matrix-Guided Dynamic Fusion (MGDF) module adaptively integrates base, shared, and private features under spatial guidance, maintaining structural coherence. In addition, in the fine-tuning stage, to enhanced model generalization, the Cross-Adaptive Modulation (CAM) module is placed before the MGDF, where shared features guide private features via modulation ensuring effective integration of domain-relevant information. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets show that DCDNet outperforms existing CD-FSS methods, setting a new state-of-the-art for cross-domain generalization and few-shot adaptation.

Paperid: 3662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05626.pdf

Abstract:
High performance computing (HPC) software ecosystems are inherently heterogeneous, comprising scientific applications that depend on hundreds of external packages, each with distinct build systems, options, and dependency constraints. Tools such as Spack automate dependency resolution and environment management, but their effectiveness relies on manually written build recipes. As these ecosystems grow, maintaining existing specifications and creating new ones becomes increasingly labor-intensive. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation, automatically producing correct and maintainable Spack recipes remains a significant challenge. We present a systematic analysis of how LLMs and context-augmentation methods can assist in the generation of Spack recipes. To this end, we introduce SpackIt, an end-to-end framework that combines repository analysis, retrieval of relevant examples, and iterative refinement through diagnostic feedback. We apply SpackIt to a representative subset of 308 open-source HPC packages to assess its effectiveness and limitations. Our results show that SpackIt increases installation success from 20% in a zero-shot setting to over 80% in its best configuration, demonstrating the value of retrieval and structured feedback for reliable package synthesis.

Paperid: 3663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05560.pdf

Abstract:
We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores lightweight enhancements, including short convolutions, sliding window attention with dynamic modulation, and Hedgehog feature maps. To support training in low-resource settings, we curate a high-quality corpus emphasizing readability and pedagogical structure. Experiments across both STRICT and STRICT-SMALL tracks show that (1) linear attention combined with sliding window attention consistently improves zero-shot performance, and (2) the Muon optimizer stabilizes convergence and reduces perplexity over AdamW. These results highlight effective strategies for efficient language modeling without relying on scale.

Paperid: 3664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04479.pdf

Abstract:
We present ThaiOCRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Thai text-rich visual understanding tasks. Despite recent progress in multimodal modeling, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on high-resource languages, leaving Thai underrepresented, especially in tasks requiring document structure understanding. ThaiOCRBench addresses this gap by offering a diverse, human-annotated dataset comprising 2,808 samples across 13 task categories. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, spanning both proprietary and open-source systems. Results show a significant performance gap, with proprietary models (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro) outperforming open-source counterparts. Notably, fine-grained text recognition and handwritten content extraction exhibit the steepest performance drops among open-source models. Through detailed error analysis, we identify key challenges such as language bias, structural mismatch, and hallucinated content. ThaiOCRBench provides a standardized framework for assessing VLMs in low-resource, script-complex settings, and provides actionable insights for improving Thai-language document understanding.

Paperid: 3665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04093.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning but struggle with knowledge-intensive questions due to limited context and parametric knowledge. However, existing methods that rely on finetuned LLMs or GNN retrievers are limited by dataset-specific tuning and scalability on large or unseen graphs. We propose the LLM-KGFR collaborative framework, where an LLM works with a structured retriever, the Knowledge Graph Foundation Retriever (KGFR). KGFR encodes relations using LLM-generated descriptions and initializes entities based on their roles in the question, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen KGs. To handle large graphs efficiently, it employs Asymmetric Progressive Propagation (APP)- a stepwise expansion that selectively limits high-degree nodes while retaining informative paths. Through node-, edge-, and path-level interfaces, the LLM iteratively requests candidate answers, supporting facts, and reasoning paths, forming a controllable reasoning loop. Experiments demonstrate that LLM-KGFR achieves strong performance while maintaining scalability and generalization, providing a practical solution for KG-augmented reasoning.

Paperid: 3666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02795.pdf

Abstract:
We present a systematic study of subtraction in large language models (LLMs). While prior benchmarks emphasize addition and multiplication, subtraction has received comparatively little attention despite being structurally distinct as a non-commutative operation. We evaluate eight pretrained LLMs spanning four families on addition and subtraction problems. Our experiments reveal that subtraction accuracy lags behind addition by a wide margin. We find that the errors for ($a-b$) are concentrated in cases where ($aPaperid: 3667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00917.pdf

Abstract:
Today's best-explored routes towards generalist robots center on collecting ever larger "observations-in actions-out" robotics datasets to train large end-to-end models, copying a recipe that has worked for vision-language models (VLMs). We pursue a road less traveled: building generalist policies directly around VLMs by augmenting their general capabilities with specific robot capabilities encapsulated in a carefully curated set of perception, planning, and control modules. In Maestro, a VLM coding agent dynamically composes these modules into a programmatic policy for the current task and scenario. Maestro's architecture benefits from a streamlined closed-loop interface without many manually imposed structural constraints, and a comprehensive and diverse tool repertoire. As a result, it largely surpasses today's VLA models for zero-shot performance on challenging manipulation skills. Further, Maestro is easily extensible to incorporate new modules, easily editable to suit new embodiments such as a quadruped-mounted arm, and even easily adapts from minimal real-world experiences through local code edits.

Paperid: 3668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22849.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at zero-shot inference but continue to struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning. Recent methods that augment LLMs with intermediate reasoning steps such as Chain of Thought (CoT) and Program of Thought (PoT) improve performance but often produce undesirable solutions, especially in algorithmic domains. We introduce Per-Instance Program Synthesis (PIPS), a method that generates and refines programs at the instance-level using structural feedback without relying on task-specific guidance or explicit test cases. To further improve performance, PIPS incorporates a confidence metric that dynamically chooses between direct inference and program synthesis on a per-instance basis. Experiments across three frontier LLMs and 30 benchmarks including all tasks of Big Bench Extra Hard (BBEH), visual question answering tasks, relational reasoning tasks, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that PIPS improves the absolute harmonic mean accuracy by up to 8.6% and 9.4% compared to PoT and CoT respectively, and reduces undesirable program generations by 65.1% on the algorithmic tasks compared to PoT with Gemini-2.0-Flash.

Paperid: 3669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12140.pdf

Abstract:
Graph few-shot learning has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to rapidly adapt models to new tasks with only limited labeled nodes. Despite the remarkable progress made by existing graph few-shot learning methods, several key limitations remain. First, most current approaches rely on predefined and unified graph filters (e.g., low-pass or high-pass filters) to globally enhance or suppress node frequency signals. Such fixed spectral operations fail to account for the heterogeneity of local topological structures inherent in real-world graphs. Moreover, these methods often assume that the support and query sets are drawn from the same distribution. However, under few-shot conditions, the limited labeled data in the support set may not sufficiently capture the complex distribution of the query set, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose GRACE, a novel Graph few-shot leaRning framework that integrates Adaptive spectrum experts with Cross-sEt distribution calibration techniques. Theoretically, the proposed approach enhances model generalization by adapting to both local structural variations and cross-set distribution calibration. Empirically, GRACE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of experimental settings. Our code can be found here.

Paperid: 3670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12067.pdf

Abstract:
Inferring demographic attributes such as age, sex, or income level from human mobility patterns enables critical applications such as targeted public health interventions, equitable urban planning, and personalized transportation services. Existing mobility-based demographic inference studies heavily rely on large-scale trajectory data with demographic labels, leading to limited interpretability and poor generalizability across different datasets and user groups. We propose HiCoTraj (Zero-Shot Demographic Reasoning via Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought Prompting from Trajectory), a framework that leverages LLMs' zero-shot learning and semantic understanding capabilities to perform demographic inference without labeled training data. HiCoTraj transforms trajectories into semantically rich, natural language representations by creating detailed activity chronicles and multi-scale visiting summaries. Then HiCoTraj uses a novel hierarchical chain of thought reasoning to systematically guide LLMs through three cognitive stages: factual feature extraction, behavioral pattern analysis, and demographic inference with structured output. This approach addresses the scarcity challenge of labeled demographic data while providing transparent reasoning chains. Experimental evaluation on real-world trajectory data demonstrates that HiCoTraj achieves competitive performance across multiple demographic attributes in zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 3671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10409.pdf

Abstract:
Uncertainty quantification for LLMs is a key research direction towards addressing hallucination and other issues that limit their reliable deployment. In this work, we show that reasoning trace length is a simple and useful confidence estimator in large reasoning models. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple models, datasets, and prompts, we show that trace length performs in comparable but complementary ways to other zero-shot confidence estimators such as verbalized confidence. Our work reveals that reasoning post-training fundamentally alters the relationship between trace length and accuracy, going beyond prior work that had shown that post-training causes traces to grow longer in general (e.g., "overthinking"). We investigate the mechanisms behind trace length's performance as a confidence signal, observing that the effect remains even after adjusting for confounders such as problem difficulty and GRPO-induced length bias. We identify high-entropy or "forking" tokens as playing a key role in the mechanism. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning post-training enhances uncertainty quantification beyond verbal expressions, and establish trace length as a practical confidence measure for large reasoning models.

Paperid: 3672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06838.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) is a critical component in downstream NLP tasks such as document tagging, ontology construction and patent analysis. Current state-of-the-art methods require expensive human annotation and struggle with domain transfer, limiting their practical deployment. This highlights the need for more robust, scalable solutions and realistic evaluation settings. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning seven diverse domains, enabling performance evaluation at both the document- and corpus-levels. Furthermore, we propose a robust LLM-based model that outperforms both supervised cross-domain encoder models and few-shot learning baselines and performs competitively with its GPT-4o teacher on this benchmark. The first step of our approach is generating psuedo-labels with this black-box LLM on general and scientific domains to ensure generalizability. Building on this data, we fine-tune the first LLMs for ATE. To further enhance document-level consistency, oftentimes needed for downstream tasks, we introduce lightweight post-hoc heuristics. Our approach exceeds previous approaches on 5/7 domains with an average improvement of 10 percentage points. We release our dataset and fine-tuned models to support future research in this area.

Paperid: 3673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06774.pdf

Abstract:
Neuro-symbolic NLP methods aim to leverage the complementary strengths of large language models and formal logical solvers. However, current approaches are mostly static in nature, i.e., the integration of a target solver is predetermined at design time, hindering the ability to employ diverse formal inference strategies. To address this, we introduce an adaptive, multi-paradigm, neuro-symbolic inference framework that: (1) automatically identifies formal reasoning strategies from problems expressed in natural language; and (2) dynamically selects and applies specialized formal logical solvers via autoformalization interfaces. Extensive experiments on individual and multi-paradigm reasoning tasks support the following conclusions: LLMs are effective at predicting the necessary formal reasoning strategies with an accuracy above 90 percent. This enables flexible integration with formal logical solvers, resulting in our framework outperforming competing baselines by 27 percent and 6 percent compared to GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3.1, respectively. Moreover, adaptive reasoning can even positively impact pure LLM methods, yielding gains of 10, 5, and 6 percent on zero-shot, CoT, and symbolic CoT settings with GPT-4o. Finally, although smaller models struggle with adaptive neuro-symbolic reasoning, post-training offers a viable path to improvement. Overall, this work establishes the foundations for adaptive LLM-symbolic reasoning, offering a path forward for unifying material and formal inferences on heterogeneous reasoning challenges.

Paperid: 3674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25139.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating large language models (LLMs) into embodied AI models is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, existing zero-shot LLM-based Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents either encode images as textual scene descriptions, potentially oversimplifying visual details, or process raw image inputs, which can fail to capture abstract semantics required for high-level reasoning. In this paper, we improve the navigation agent's contextual understanding by incorporating textual descriptions from multiple perspectives that facilitate analogical reasoning across images. By leveraging text-based analogical reasoning, the agent enhances its global scene understanding and spatial reasoning, leading to more accurate action decisions. We evaluate our approach on the R2R dataset, where our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in navigation performance.

Paperid: 3675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24469.pdf

Abstract:
Diverse human motion generation is an increasingly important task, having various applications in computer vision, human-computer interaction and animation. While text-to-motion synthesis using diffusion models has shown success in generating high-quality motions, achieving fine-grained expressive motion control remains a significant challenge. This is due to the lack of motion style diversity in datasets and the difficulty of expressing quantitative characteristics in natural language. Laban movement analysis has been widely used by dance experts to express the details of motion including motion quality as consistent as possible. Inspired by that, this work aims for interpretable and expressive control of human motion generation by seamlessly integrating the quantification methods of Laban Effort and Shape components into the text-guided motion generation models. Our proposed zero-shot, inference-time optimization method guides the motion generation model to have desired Laban Effort and Shape components without any additional motion data by updating the text embedding of pretrained diffusion models during the sampling step. We demonstrate that our approach yields diverse expressive motion qualities while preserving motion identity by successfully manipulating motion attributes according to target Laban tags.

Paperid: 3676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23189.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamically configuring algorithm hyperparameters is a fundamental challenge in computational intelligence. While learning-based methods offer automation, they suffer from prohibitive sample complexity and poor generalization. We introduce AutoEP, a novel framework that bypasses training entirely by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as zero-shot reasoning engines for algorithm control. AutoEP's core innovation lies in a tight synergy between two components: (1) an online Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) module that provides real-time, quantitative feedback on the search dynamics, and (2) a multi-LLM reasoning chain that interprets this feedback to generate adaptive hyperparameter strategies. This approach grounds high-level reasoning in empirical data, mitigating hallucination. Evaluated on three distinct metaheuristics across diverse combinatorial optimization benchmarks, AutoEP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tuners, including neural evolution and other LLM-based methods. Notably, our framework enables open-source models like Qwen3-30B to match the performance of GPT-4, demonstrating a powerful and accessible new paradigm for automated hyperparameter design. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AutoEP-3E11

Paperid: 3677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23098.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial grounding is crucial for referring image segmentation (RIS), where the goal of the task is to localize an object described by language. Current foundational vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, excel at aligning images and text but struggle with understanding spatial relationships. Within the language stream, most existing methods often focus on the primary noun phrase when extracting local text features, undermining contextual tokens. Within the vision stream, CLIP generates similar features for images with different spatial layouts, resulting in limited sensitivity to spatial structure. To address these limitations, we propose \textsc{CoPatch}, a zero-shot RIS framework that leverages internal model components to enhance spatial representations in both text and image modalities. For language, \textsc{CoPatch} constructs hybrid text features by incorporating context tokens carrying spatial cues. For vision, it extracts patch-level image features using our novel path discovered from intermediate layers, where spatial structure is better preserved. These enhanced features are fused into a clustered image-text similarity map, \texttt{CoMap}, enabling precise mask selection. As a result, \textsc{CoPatch} significantly improves spatial grounding in zero-shot RIS across RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and PhraseCut (+ 2--7 mIoU) without requiring any additional training. Our findings underscore the importance of recovering and leveraging the untapped spatial knowledge inherently embedded in VLMs, thereby paving the way for opportunities in zero-shot RIS.

Paperid: 3678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21013.pdf

Abstract:
Given the prohibitive cost of pre-training large language models, it is essential to leverage smaller proxy models to optimize datasets before scaling up. However, this approach becomes challenging for reasoning capabilities, which exhibit emergent behavior that only appear reliably at larger model sizes, often exceeding 7B parameters. To address this, we introduce rBridge, showing that small proxies ($\leq$1B) can effectively predict large-model reasoning by aligning more closely with (1) the pre-training objective and (2) the target task. rBridge achieves this by weighting negative log-likelihood with task alignment, using reasoning traces from frontier models as gold labels. In our experiments, rBridge (i) reduces dataset ranking costs by over 100x relative to the best baseline, (ii) achieves the strongest correlation across six reasoning benchmarks at 1B to 32B scale, and (iii) zero-shot transfers predictive relationships across pre-training datasets at 1B to 7B scale. These findings indicate that rBridge offers a practical path for exploring reasoning-oriented pre-training at lower cost.

Paperid: 3679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19571.pdf

Abstract:
Executing open-ended natural language queries is a core problem in robotics. While recent advances in imitation learning and vision-language-actions models (VLAs) have enabled promising end-to-end policies, these models struggle when faced with complex instructions and new scenes. An alternative is to design an explicit scene representation as a queryable interface between the robot and the world, using query results to guide downstream motion planning. In this work, we present Agentic Scene Policies (ASP), an agentic framework that leverages the advanced semantic, spatial, and affordance-based querying capabilities of modern scene representations to implement a capable language-conditioned robot policy. ASP can execute open-vocabulary queries in a zero-shot manner by explicitly reasoning about object affordances in the case of more complex skills. Through extensive experiments, we compare ASP with VLAs on tabletop manipulation problems and showcase how ASP can tackle room-level queries through affordance-guided navigation, and a scaled-up scene representation. (Project page: https://montrealrobotics.ca/agentic-scene-policies.github.io/)

Paperid: 3680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13301.pdf

Abstract:
Creating 3D assets that follow the texture and geometry style of existing ones is often desirable or even inevitable in practical applications like video gaming and virtual reality. While impressive progress has been made in generating 3D objects from text or images, creating style-controllable 3D assets remains a complex and challenging problem. In this work, we propose StyleSculptor, a novel training-free approach for generating style-guided 3D assets from a content image and one or more style images. Unlike previous works, StyleSculptor achieves style-guided 3D generation in a zero-shot manner, enabling fine-grained 3D style control that captures the texture, geometry, or both styles of user-provided style images. At the core of StyleSculptor is a novel Style Disentangled Attention (SD-Attn) module, which establishes a dynamic interaction between the input content image and style image for style-guided 3D asset generation via a cross-3D attention mechanism, enabling stable feature fusion and effective style-guided generation. To alleviate semantic content leakage, we also introduce a style-disentangled feature selection strategy within the SD-Attn module, which leverages the variance of 3D feature patches to disentangle style- and content-significant channels, allowing selective feature injection within the attention framework. With SD-Attn, the network can dynamically compute texture-, geometry-, or both-guided features to steer the 3D generation process. Built upon this, we further propose the Style Guided Control (SGC) mechanism, which enables exclusive geometry- or texture-only stylization, as well as adjustable style intensity control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StyleSculptor outperforms existing baseline methods in producing high-fidelity 3D assets.

Paperid: 3681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08139.pdf

Abstract:
Future AI-native wireless networks are moving from reactive optimization to agentic decision-making that can sense, predict, and plan under fast-varying channels. This calls for wireless world models that can predict and roll out channel dynamics, for which multi-step channel state information (CSI) prediction offers a practical short-horizon look-ahead. Recent advances in foundation sequence models further motivate large language models (LLMs) as general-purpose dynamics learners when suitably adapted to non-text time-series signals. However, bridging CSI to LLMs is non-trivial because an effective adapter must expose informative spectral and temporal evolution patterns, while prior designs provide limited inductive bias to capture such channel structures. To this end, we propose SCA-LLM, a spectral-attentive LLM-based wireless world modeling framework that bridges CSI to LLMs via a spectral-channel attention (SCA) adapter. Specifically, the SCA adapter performs multi-spectral representation learning to extract informative channel features and align CSI with the LLM's sequence modeling capability, enabling parameter-efficient adaptation while keeping the LLM backbone largely frozen. Extensive simulations show that SCA-LLM achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance and strong zero-shot generalization, yielding up to -2.4 dB normalized mean squared error (NMSE) advantage over the previous LLM based method. Our ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed SCA adapter in mitigating domain mismatch.

Paperid: 3682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05318.pdf

Abstract:
The use of unvetted third-party and internet data renders pre-trained models susceptible to backdoor attacks. Detecting backdoor samples is critical to prevent backdoor activation during inference or injection during training. However, existing detection methods often require the defender to have access to the poisoned models, extra clean samples, or significant computational resources to detect backdoor samples, limiting their practicality. To address this limitation, we propose a backdoor sample detection method based on perturbatio\textbf{N} discr\textbf{E}pancy consis\textbf{T}ency \textbf{E}valuation (\NETE). This is a novel detection method that can be used both pre-training and post-training phases. In the detection process, it only requires an off-the-shelf pre-trained model to compute the log probability of samples and an automated function based on a mask-filling strategy to generate perturbations. Our method is based on the interesting phenomenon that the change in perturbation discrepancy for backdoor samples is smaller than that for clean samples. Based on this phenomenon, we use curvature to measure the discrepancy in log probabilities between different perturbed samples and input samples, thereby evaluating the consistency of the perturbation discrepancy to determine whether the input sample is a backdoor sample. Experiments conducted on four typical backdoor attacks and five types of large language model backdoor attacks demonstrate that our detection strategy outperforms existing zero-shot black-box detection methods.

Paperid: 3683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04753.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language processing (NLP) is a key technology to extract important patient information from clinical narratives to support healthcare applications. The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized many NLP tasks in the clinical domain, yet their optimal use in patient information extraction tasks requires further exploration. This study examines LLMs' effectiveness in patient information extraction, focusing on LLM architectures, fine-tuning strategies, and multi-task instruction tuning techniques for developing robust and generalizable patient information extraction systems. This study aims to explore key concepts of using LLMs for clinical concept and relation extraction tasks, including: (1) encoder-only or decoder-only LLMs, (2) prompt-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) algorithms, and (3) multi-task instruction tuning on few-shot learning performance. We benchmarked a suite of LLMs, including encoder-based LLMs (BERT, GatorTron) and decoder-based LLMs (GatorTronGPT, Llama 3.1, GatorTronLlama), across five datasets. We compared traditional full-size fine-tuning and prompt-based PEFT. We explored a multi-task instruction tuning framework that combines both tasks across four datasets to evaluate the zero-shot and few-shot learning performance using the leave-one-dataset-out strategy.

Paperid: 3684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04376.pdf

Abstract:
With growing public safety demands, text-based person anomaly search has emerged as a critical task, aiming to retrieve individuals with abnormal behaviors via natural language descriptions. Unlike conventional person search, this task presents two unique challenges: (1) fine-grained cross-modal alignment between textual anomalies and visual behaviors, and (2) anomaly recognition under sparse real-world samples. While Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) excel in multi-modal understanding, their potential for fine-grained anomaly retrieval remains underexplored, hindered by: (1) a domain gap between generative knowledge and discriminative retrieval, and (2) the absence of efficient adaptation strategies for deployment. In this work, we propose AnomalyLMM, the first framework that harnesses LMMs for text-based person anomaly search. Our key contributions are: (1) A novel coarse-to-fine pipeline integrating LMMs to bridge generative world knowledge with retrieval-centric anomaly detection; (2) A training-free adaptation cookbook featuring masked cross-modal prompting, behavioral saliency prediction, and knowledge-aware re-ranking, enabling zero-shot focus on subtle anomaly cues. As the first study to explore LMMs for this task, we conduct a rigorous evaluation on the PAB dataset, the only publicly available benchmark for text-based person anomaly search, with its curated real-world anomalies covering diverse scenarios (e.g., falling, collision, and being hit). Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing the competitive baseline by +0.96% Recall@1 accuracy. Notably, our method reveals interpretable alignment between textual anomalies and visual behaviors, validated via qualitative analysis. Our code and models will be released for future research.

Paperid: 3685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01314.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), being generic task solvers, are versatile. However, despite the vast amount of data they are trained on, there are speculations about their adaptation capabilities to a new domain. Additionally, the simple fine-tuning of the model to incorporate knowledge of a new domain is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This becomes more challenging when the domain in question is also low-resource, and labeled data is unavailable. We leverage parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (PEFTs) on high-resource datasets to address these challenges to improve performance on unseen low-resource domains. Throughout our experiments, we evaluate whether intrinsic linguistic commonalities between datasets can be leveraged for efficient domain adaptation. We benchmark six PEFTs with \texttt{Llama-3-8B-Instruct} on 14 training datasets from the Scientific, Medical, Legal, and News domains for a Text Summarization task. Our experiments show that for low-resource domains, inference using Within-Domain Adapters can achieve better performance than Few-Shot as well as a much larger \texttt{Llama-3-70B-Instruct}. Lastly, in the absence of Within-Domain Adapters, we explore the concept of using Cross-Domain Adapters as well as the strategic combinations of adapters to leverage intrinsic language similarities across domains, facilitating better adaptability and performance in low-resource settings.

Paperid: 3686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19432.pdf

Abstract:
Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing memory and computation costs. While quantized LLMs often maintain performance on perplexity and zero-shot tasks, their impact on truthfulness-whether generating truthful or deceptive responses-remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce TruthfulnessEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the truthfulness of quantized LLMs across three dimensions: (1) Truthfulness on Logical Reasoning; (2) Truthfulness on Common Sense; and (3) Truthfulness on Imitative Falsehoods. Using this framework, we examine mainstream quantization techniques (ranging from 4-bit to extreme 2-bit) across several open-source LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that while quantized models retain internally truthful representations, they are more susceptible to producing false outputs under misleading prompts. To probe this vulnerability, we test 15 rephrased variants of "honest", "neutral" and "deceptive" prompts and observe that "deceptive" prompts can override truth-consistent behavior, whereas "honest" and "neutral" prompts maintain stable outputs. Further, we reveal that quantized models "know" the truth internally yet still produce false outputs when guided by "deceptive" prompts via layer-wise probing and PCA visualizations. Our findings provide insights into future designs of quantization-aware alignment and truthfulness interventions.

Paperid: 3687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17437.pdf

Abstract:
Inferring the physical properties of 3D scenes from visual information is a critical yet challenging task for creating interactive and realistic virtual worlds. While humans intuitively grasp material characteristics such as elasticity or stiffness, existing methods often rely on slow, per-scene optimization, limiting their generalizability and application. To address this problem, we introduce PIXIE, a novel method that trains a generalizable neural network to predict physical properties across multiple scenes from 3D visual features purely using supervised losses. Once trained, our feed-forward network can perform fast inference of plausible material fields, which coupled with a learned static scene representation like Gaussian Splatting enables realistic physics simulation under external forces. To facilitate this research, we also collected PIXIEVERSE, one of the largest known datasets of paired 3D assets and physic material annotations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PIXIE is about 1.46-4.39x better and orders of magnitude faster than test-time optimization methods. By leveraging pretrained visual features like CLIP, our method can also zero-shot generalize to real-world scenes despite only ever been trained on synthetic data. https://pixie-3d.github.io/

Paperid: 3688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16697.pdf

Abstract:
Advanced reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) have caused higher hallucination prevalence; yet most mitigation work focuses on after-the-fact filtering rather than shaping the queries that trigger them. We introduce QueryBandits, a bandit framework that designs rewrite strategies to maximize a reward model, that encapsulates hallucination propensity based upon the sensitivities of 17 linguistic features of the input query-and therefore, proactively steer LLMs away from generating hallucinations. Across 13 diverse QA benchmarks and 1,050 lexically perturbed queries per dataset, our top contextual QueryBandit (Thompson Sampling) achieves an 87.5% win rate over a no-rewrite baseline and also outperforms zero-shot static prompting ("paraphrase" or "expand") by 42.6% and 60.3% respectively. Therefore, we empirically substantiate the effectiveness of QueryBandits in mitigating hallucination via the intervention that takes the form of a query rewrite. Interestingly, certain static prompting strategies, which constitute a considerable number of current query rewriting literature, have a higher cumulative regret than the no-rewrite baseline, signifying that static rewrites can worsen hallucination. Moreover, we discover that the converged per-arm regression feature weight vectors substantiate that there is no single rewrite strategy optimal for all queries. In this context, guided rewriting via exploiting semantic features with QueryBandits can induce significant shifts in output behavior through forward-pass mechanisms, bypassing the need for retraining or gradient-based adaptation.

Paperid: 3689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15855.pdf

Abstract:
Biased news contributes to societal polarization and is often reinforced by hostile reader comments, constituting a vital yet often overlooked aspect of news dissemination. Our study reveals that offensive comments support biased content, amplifying bias and causing harm to targeted groups or individuals. Counterspeech is an effective approach to counter such harmful speech without violating freedom of speech, helping to limit the spread of bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore counterspeech generation in the context of news articles. We introduce a manually annotated dataset linking media bias, offensive comments, and counterspeech. We conduct a detailed analysis showing that over 70\% offensive comments support biased articles, amplifying bias and thus highlighting the importance of counterspeech generation. Comparing counterspeech generated by humans and large language models, we find model-generated responses are more polite but lack the novelty and diversity. Finally, we improve generated counterspeech through few-shot learning and integration of news background information, enhancing both diversity and relevance.

Paperid: 3690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11205.pdf

Abstract:
Structure-preserving approaches to dynamics modeling have demonstrated great potential for modeling physical systems due to their strong inductive biases that enforce conservation laws and dissipative behavior. However, the resulting models are typically trained for fixed system configurations, requiring explicit knowledge of system parameters as well as costly retraining for each new set of parameters -- a major limitation in many-query or parameter-varying scenarios. Meta-learning offers a potential solution, but existing approaches like optimization-based meta-learning often suffer from training instability or limited generalization capability. Inspired by ideas from computer vision, we introduce a modulation-based meta-learning framework that directly conditions structure-preserving models on compact latent representations of potentially unknown system parameters, avoiding the need for gray-box system knowledge and explicit optimization during adaptation. Through the application of novel modulation strategies to parametric energy-conserving and dissipative systems, we enable scalable and generalizable learning across parametric families of dynamical systems. Experiments on standard benchmark problems demonstrate that our approach achieves accurate predictions in few-shot learning settings, without compromising on the essential physical constraints necessary for dynamical stability and effective generalization performance across parameter space.

Paperid: 3691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10201.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (mLLMs), trained in a mixed modal setting as a universal model, have been shown to compete with or even outperform many specialized algorithms for imaging and graphics tasks. As demonstrated across many applications, mLLMs' ability to jointly process image and text data makes them suitable for zero-shot applications or efficient fine-tuning towards specialized tasks. However, they have had limited success in 3D analysis and editing tasks. This is due to both the lack of suitable (annotated) 3D data as well as the idiosyncrasies of 3D representations. In this paper, we investigate whether mLLMs can be adapted to support high-level editing of Boundary Representation (B-rep) CAD objects. B-reps remain the industry-standard for precisely encoding engineering objects, but are challenging as the representation is fragile (i.e. can easily lead to invalid CAD objects) and no publicly available data source exists with semantically-annotated B-reps or CAD construction history. We present B-repLer as a finetuned mLLM that can understand text prompts and make semantic edits on given B-Reps to produce valid outputs. We enable this via a novel multimodal architecture, specifically designed to handle B-rep models, and demonstrate how existing CAD tools, in conjunction with mLLMs, can be used to automatically generate the required reasoning dataset, without relying on external annotations. We extensively evaluate B-repLer and demonstrate several text-based B-rep edits of various complexity, which were not previously possible.

Paperid: 3692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07642.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) poses significant challenges in enabling agents to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex 3D environments. While recent progress has been driven by large-scale pre-training and data augmentation, current methods still struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios, particularly when complex spatial and temporal reasoning is required. In this work, we propose SkillNav, a modular framework that introduces structured, skill-based reasoning into Transformer-based VLN agents. Our method decomposes navigation into a set of interpretable atomic skills (e.g., Vertical Movement, Area and Region Identification, Stop and Pause), each handled by a specialized agent. We then introduce a novel zero-shot Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based router, which dynamically selects the most suitable agent at each time step by aligning sub-goals with visual observations and historical actions. SkillNav achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the R2R benchmark and demonstrates strong generalization to the GSA-R2R benchmark that includes novel instruction styles and unseen environments.

Paperid: 3693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04678.pdf

Abstract:
How can we build general-purpose robot systems for open-world semantic navigation, e.g., searching a novel environment for a target object specified in natural language? To tackle this challenge, we introduce OSG Navigator, a modular system composed of foundation models, for open-world Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). Foundation models provide enormous semantic knowledge about the world, but struggle to organise and maintain spatial information effectively at scale. Key to OSG Navigator is the Open Scene Graph representation, which acts as spatial memory for OSG Navigator. It organises spatial information hierarchically using OSG schemas, which are templates, each describing the common structure of a class of environments. OSG schemas can be automatically generated from simple semantic labels of a given environment, e.g., "home" or "supermarket". They enable OSG Navigator to adapt zero-shot to new environment types. We conducted experiments using both Fetch and Spot robots in simulation and in the real world, showing that OSG Navigator achieves state-of-the-art performance on ObjectNav benchmarks and generalises zero-shot over diverse goals, environments, and robot embodiments.

Paperid: 3694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02964.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have been firmly established as principled zero-shot solvers for linear and nonlinear inverse problems, owing to their powerful image prior and iterative sampling algorithm. These approaches often rely on Tweedie's formula, which relates the diffusion variate $\mathbf{x}_t$ to the posterior mean $\mathbb{E} [\mathbf{x}_0 | \mathbf{x}_t]$, in order to guide the diffusion trajectory with an estimate of the final denoised sample $\mathbf{x}_0$. However, this does not consider information from the measurement $\mathbf{y}$, which must then be integrated downstream. In this work, we propose to estimate the conditional posterior mean $\mathbb{E} [\mathbf{x}_0 | \mathbf{x}_t, \mathbf{y}]$, which can be formulated as the solution to a lightweight, single-parameter maximum likelihood estimation problem. The resulting prediction can be integrated into any standard sampler, resulting in a fast and memory-efficient inverse solver. Our optimizer is amenable to a noise-aware likelihood-based stopping criteria that is robust to measurement noise in $\mathbf{y}$. We demonstrate comparable or improved performance against a wide selection of contemporary inverse solvers across multiple datasets and tasks.

Paperid: 3695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02515.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a systematic investigation into the constrained generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in producing Songci, a classical Chinese poetry form characterized by strict structural, tonal, and rhyme constraints defined by Cipai templates. We first develop a comprehensive, multi-faceted evaluation framework that includes: (i) a formal conformity score, (ii) automated quality assessment using LLMs, (iii) human evaluation, and (iv) classification-based probing tasks. Using this framework, we evaluate the generative performance of 18 LLMs, including 3 proprietary models and 15 open-source models across four families, under five prompting strategies: zero-shot, one-shot, completion-based, instruction-tuned, and chain-of-thought. Finally, we propose a Generate-Critic architecture in which the evaluation framework functions as an automated critic. Leveraging the critic's feedback as a reward signal, we fine-tune three lightweight open-source LLMs via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), resulting in improvements of up to 5.88% in formal conformity. Our findings offer new insights into the generative strengths and limitations of LLMs in producing culturally significant and formally constrained literary texts.

Paperid: 3696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19850.pdf

Abstract:
Generating realistic human motions from textual descriptions has undergone significant advancements. However, existing methods often overlook specific body part movements and their timing. In this paper, we address this issue by enriching the textual description with more details. Specifically, we propose the FineMotion dataset, which contains over 442,000 human motion snippets - short segments of human motion sequences - and their corresponding detailed descriptions of human body part movements. Additionally, the dataset includes about 95k detailed paragraphs describing the movements of human body parts of entire motion sequences. Experimental results demonstrate the significance of our dataset on the text-driven finegrained human motion generation task, especially with a remarkable +15.3% improvement in Top-3 accuracy for the MDM model. Notably, we further support a zero-shot pipeline of fine-grained motion editing, which focuses on detailed editing in both spatial and temporal dimensions via text. Dataset and code available at: CVI-SZU/FineMotion

Paperid: 3697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12855.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of large language models (LLMs) with control systems has demonstrated significant potential in various settings, such as task completion with a robotic manipulator. A main reason for this success is the ability of LLMs to perform in-context learning, which, however, strongly relies on the design of task examples, closely related to the target tasks. Consequently, employing LLMs to formulate optimal control problems often requires task examples that contain explicit mathematical expressions, designed by trained engineers. Furthermore, there is often no principled way to evaluate for hallucination before task execution. To address these challenges, we propose DEMONSTRATE, a novel methodology that avoids the use of LLMs for complex optimization problem generations, and instead only relies on the embedding representations of task descriptions. To do this, we leverage tools from inverse optimal control to replace in-context prompt examples with task demonstrations, as well as the concept of multitask learning, which ensures target and example task similarity by construction. Given the fact that hardware demonstrations can easily be collected using teleoperation or guidance of the robot, our approach significantly reduces the reliance on engineering expertise for designing in-context examples. Furthermore, the enforced multitask structure enables learning from few demonstrations and assessment of hallucinations prior to task execution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through simulation and hardware experiments involving a robotic arm tasked with tabletop manipulation.

Paperid: 3698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23323.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment objects from arbitrary text categories without requiring densely annotated datasets. Although contrastive learning based models enable zero-shot segmentation, they often lose fine spatial precision at pixel level, due to global representation bias. In contrast, diffusion-based models naturally encode fine-grained spatial features via attention mechanisms that capture both global context and local details. However, they often face challenges in balancing the computation costs and the quality of the segmentation mask. In this work, we present FA-Seg, a Fast and Accurate training-free framework for open-vocabulary segmentation based on diffusion models. FA-Seg performs segmentation using only a (1+1)-step from a pretrained diffusion model. Moreover, instead of running multiple times for different classes, FA-Seg performs segmentation for all classes at once. To further enhance the segmentation quality, FA-Seg introduces three key components: (i) a dual-prompt mechanism for discriminative, class-aware attention extraction, (ii) a Hierarchical Attention Refinement Method (HARD) that enhances semantic precision via multi-resolution attention fusion, and (iii) a Test-Time Flipping (TTF) scheme designed to improve spatial consistency. Extensive experiments show that FA-Seg achieves state-of-the-art training-free performance, obtaining 43.8% average mIoU across PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context, and COCO Object benchmarks while maintaining superior inference efficiency. Our results demonstrate that FA-Seg provides a strong foundation for extendability, bridging the gap between segmentation quality and inference efficiency. The source code will be open-sourced after this paper is accepted.

Paperid: 3699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21355.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) remains underexplored despite significant potential for domains such as medicine. Clinicians routinely encounter diverse, specialized tasks requiring adaptation from limited examples, such as drawing insights from a few relevant prior cases or considering a constrained set of differential diagnoses. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown advances in medical visual question answering (VQA), their ability to learn multimodal tasks from context is largely unknown. We introduce SMMILE, the first expert-driven multimodal ICL benchmark for medical tasks. Eleven medical experts curated problems, each including a multimodal query and multimodal in-context examples as task demonstrations. SMMILE encompasses 111 problems (517 question-image-answer triplets) covering 6 medical specialties and 13 imaging modalities. We further introduce SMMILE++, an augmented variant with 1038 permuted problems. A comprehensive evaluation of 15 MLLMs demonstrates that most models exhibit moderate to poor multimodal ICL ability in medical tasks. In open-ended evaluations, ICL contributes only 8% average improvement over zero-shot on SMMILE and 9.4% on SMMILE++. We observe a susceptibility for irrelevant in-context examples: even a single noisy or irrelevant example can degrade performance by up to 9.5%. Moreover, example ordering exhibits a recency bias, i.e., placing the most relevant example last can lead to substantial performance improvements by up to 71%. Our findings highlight critical limitations and biases in current MLLMs when learning multimodal medical tasks from context.

Paperid: 3700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21044.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised skill discovery aims to learn diverse and distinguishable behaviors in open-ended reinforcement learning. For existing methods, they focus on improving diversity through pure exploration, mutual information optimization, and learning temporal representation. Despite that they perform well on exploration, they remain limited in terms of efficiency, especially for the high-dimensional situations. In this work, we frame skill discovery as a min-max game of skill generation and policy learning, proposing a regret-aware method on top of temporal representation learning that expands the discovered skill space along the direction of upgradable policy strength. The key insight behind the proposed method is that the skill discovery is adversarial to the policy learning, i.e., skills with weak strength should be further explored while less exploration for the skills with converged strength. As an implementation, we score the degree of strength convergence with regret, and guide the skill discovery with a learnable skill generator. To avoid degeneration, skill generation comes from an up-gradable population of skill generators. We conduct experiments on environments with varying complexities and dimension sizes. Empirical results show that our method outperforms baselines in both efficiency and diversity. Moreover, our method achieves a 15% zero shot improvement in high-dimensional environments, compared to existing methods.

Paperid: 3701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20756.pdf

Abstract:
Recent video depth estimation methods achieve great performance by following the paradigm of image depth estimation, i.e., typically fine-tuning pre-trained video diffusion models with massive data. However, we argue that video depth estimation is not a naive extension of image depth estimation. The temporal consistency requirements for dynamic and static regions in videos are fundamentally different. Consistent video depth in static regions, typically backgrounds, can be more effectively achieved via stereo matching across all frames, which provides much stronger global 3D cues. While the consistency for dynamic regions still should be learned from large-scale video depth data to ensure smooth transitions, due to the violation of triangulation constraints. Based on these insights, we introduce StereoDiff, a two-stage video depth estimator that synergizes stereo matching for mainly the static areas with video depth diffusion for maintaining consistent depth transitions in dynamic areas. We mathematically demonstrate how stereo matching and video depth diffusion offer complementary strengths through frequency domain analysis, highlighting the effectiveness of their synergy in capturing the advantages of both. Experimental results on zero-shot, real-world, dynamic video depth benchmarks, both indoor and outdoor, demonstrate StereoDiff's SoTA performance, showcasing its superior consistency and accuracy in video depth estimation.

Paperid: 3702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19997.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing deep reinforcement learning agents to unseen environments remains a significant challenge. One promising solution is Unsupervised Environment Design (UED), a co-evolutionary framework in which a teacher adaptively generates tasks with high learning potential, while a student learns a robust policy from this evolving curriculum. Existing UED methods typically measure learning potential via regret, the gap between optimal and current performance, approximated solely by value-function loss. Building on these approaches, we introduce the transition-prediction error as an additional term in our regret approximation. To capture how training on one task affects performance on others, we further propose a lightweight metric called Co-Learnability. By combining these two measures, we present Transition-aware Regret Approximation with Co-learnability for Environment Design (TRACED). Empirical evaluations show that TRACED produces curricula that improve zero-shot generalization over strong baselines across multiple benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that the transition-prediction error drives rapid complexity ramp-up and that Co-Learnability delivers additional gains when paired with the transition-prediction error. These results demonstrate how refined regret approximation and explicit modeling of task relationships can be leveraged for sample-efficient curriculum design in UED. Project Page: https://geonwoo.me/traced/

Paperid: 3703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14525.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents VisLanding, a monocular 3D perception-based framework for safe UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) landing. Addressing the core challenge of autonomous UAV landing in complex and unknown environments, this study innovatively leverages the depth-normal synergy prediction capabilities of the Metric3D V2 model to construct an end-to-end safe landing zones (SLZ) estimation framework. By introducing a safe zone segmentation branch, we transform the landing zone estimation task into a binary semantic segmentation problem. The model is fine-tuned and annotated using the WildUAV dataset from a UAV perspective, while a cross-domain evaluation dataset is constructed to validate the model's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that VisLanding significantly enhances the accuracy of safe zone identification through a depth-normal joint optimization mechanism, while retaining the zero-shot generalization advantages of Metric3D V2. The proposed method exhibits superior generalization and robustness in cross-domain testing compared to other approaches. Furthermore, it enables the estimation of landing zone area by integrating predicted depth and normal information, providing critical decision-making support for practical applications.

Paperid: 3704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13678.pdf

Abstract:
Human activity intensity prediction is crucial to many location-based services. Despite tremendous progress in modeling dynamics of human activity, most existing methods overlook physical constraints of spatial interaction, leading to uninterpretable spatial correlations and over-smoothing phenomenon. To address these limitations, this work proposes a physics-informed deep learning framework, namely Gravity-informed Spatiotemporal Transformer (Gravityformer) by integrating the universal law of gravitation to refine transformer attention. Specifically, it (1) estimates two spatially explicit mass parameters based on spatiotemporal embedding feature, (2) models the spatial interaction in end-to-end neural network using proposed adaptive gravity model to learn the physical constraint, and (3) utilizes the learned spatial interaction to guide and mitigate the over-smoothing phenomenon in transformer attention. Moreover, a parallel spatiotemporal graph convolution transformer is proposed for achieving a balance between coupled spatial and temporal learning. Systematic experiments on six real-world large-scale activity datasets demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative superiority of our model over state-of-the-art benchmarks. Additionally, the learned gravity attention matrix can be not only disentangled and interpreted based on geographical laws, but also improved the generalization in zero-shot cross-region inference. This work provides a novel insight into integrating physical laws with deep learning for spatiotemporal prediction.

Paperid: 3705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07984.pdf

Authors:Mingquan Lin, Gregory Holste, Song Wang, Yiliang Zhou, Yishu Wei, Imon Banerjee, Pengyi Chen, Tianjie Dai, Yuexi Du, Nicha C. Dvornek, Yuyan Ge, Zuowei Guo, Shouhei Hanaoka, Dongkyun Kim, Pablo Messina, Yang Lu, Denis Parra, Donghyun Son, Ãlvaro Soto, Aisha Urooj, RenÃ© Vidal, Yosuke Yamagishi, Zefan Yang, Ruichi Zhang, Yang Zhou, Leo Anthony Celi, Ronald M. Summers, Zhiyong Lu, Hao Chen, Adam Flanders, George Shih, Zhangyang Wang, Yifan Peng

Abstract:
The CXR-LT series is a community-driven initiative designed to enhance lung disease classification using chest X-rays (CXR). It tackles challenges in open long-tailed lung disease classification and enhances the measurability of state-of-the-art techniques. The first event, CXR-LT 2023, aimed to achieve these goals by providing high-quality benchmark CXR data for model development and conducting comprehensive evaluations to identify ongoing issues impacting lung disease classification performance. Building on the success of CXR-LT 2023, the CXR-LT 2024 expands the dataset to 377,110 chest X-rays (CXRs) and 45 disease labels, including 19 new rare disease findings. It also introduces a new focus on zero-shot learning to address limitations identified in the previous event. Specifically, CXR-LT 2024 features three tasks: (i) long-tailed classification on a large, noisy test set, (ii) long-tailed classification on a manually annotated "gold standard" subset, and (iii) zero-shot generalization to five previously unseen disease findings. This paper provides an overview of CXR-LT 2024, detailing the data curation process and consolidating state-of-the-art solutions, including the use of multimodal models for rare disease detection, advanced generative approaches to handle noisy labels, and zero-shot learning strategies for unseen diseases. Additionally, the expanded dataset enhances disease coverage to better represent real-world clinical settings, offering a valuable resource for future research. By synthesizing the insights and innovations of participating teams, we aim to advance the development of clinically realistic and generalizable diagnostic models for chest radiography.

Paperid: 3706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05168.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-part assembly poses significant challenges for robots to execute long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation with generalization across complex geometries. We present Fabrica, a dual-arm robotic system capable of end-to-end planning and control for autonomous assembly of general multi-part objects. For planning over long horizons, we develop hierarchies of precedence, sequence, grasp, and motion planning with automated fixture generation, enabling general multi-step assembly on any dual-arm robots. The planner is made efficient through a parallelizable design and is optimized for downstream control stability. For contact-rich assembly steps, we propose a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that trains generalist policies across object geometries, assembly directions, and grasp poses, guided by equivariance and residual actions obtained from the plan. These policies transfer zero-shot to the real world and achieve 80% successful steps. For systematic evaluation, we propose a benchmark suite of multi-part assemblies resembling industrial and daily objects across diverse categories and geometries. By integrating efficient global planning and robust local control, we showcase the first system to achieve complete and generalizable real-world multi-part assembly without domain knowledge or human demonstrations. Project website: http://fabrica.csail.mit.edu/

Paperid: 3707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03259.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in automating disease annotation of CT radiology reports. We compare a rule-based algorithm (RBA), RadBERT, and three lightweight open-weight LLMs for multi-disease labeling of chest, abdomen, and pelvis (CAP) CT reports. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study analyzed 40,833 CT reports from 29,540 patients, with 1,789 CAP reports manually annotated across three organ systems. External validation was conducted using the CT-RATE dataset. Three open-weight LLMs were tested with zero-shot prompting. Performance was evaluated using Cohen's Kappa and micro/macro-averaged F1 scores. Results: In 12,197 Duke CAP reports from 8,854 patients, Llama-3.1 8B and Gemma-3 27B showed the highest agreement ($Îº$ median: 0.87). On the manually annotated set, Gemma-3 27B achieved the top macro-F1 (0.82), followed by Llama-3.1 8B (0.79), while the RBA scored lowest (0.64). On the CT-RATE dataset (lungs/pleura only), Llama-3.1 8B performed best (0.91), with Gemma-3 27B close behind (0.89). Performance differences were mainly due to differing labeling practices, especially for lung atelectasis. Conclusion: Lightweight LLMs outperform rule-based methods for CT report annotation and generalize across organ systems with zero-shot prompting. However, binary labels alone cannot capture the full nuance of report language. LLMs can provide a flexible, efficient solution aligned with clinical judgment and user needs.

Paperid: 3708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01031.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization in vision-language tasks, yet their ability to understand and act within embodied environments remains underexplored. We present NavBench, a benchmark to evaluate the embodied navigation capabilities of MLLMs under zero-shot settings. NavBench consists of two components: (1) navigation comprehension, assessed through three cognitively grounded tasks including global instruction alignment, temporal progress estimation, and local observation-action reasoning, covering 3,200 question-answer pairs; and (2) step-by-step execution in 432 episodes across 72 indoor scenes, stratified by spatial, cognitive, and execution complexity. To support real-world deployment, we introduce a pipeline that converts MLLMs' outputs into robotic actions. We evaluate both proprietary and open-source models, finding that GPT-4o performs well across tasks, while lighter open-source models succeed in simpler cases. Results also show that models with higher comprehension scores tend to achieve better execution performance. Providing map-based context improves decision accuracy, especially in medium-difficulty scenarios. However, most models struggle with temporal understanding, particularly in estimating progress during navigation, which may pose a key challenge.

Paperid: 3709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00210.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate intent classification is critical for efficient routing in customer service, ensuring customers are connected with the most suitable agents while reducing handling times and operational costs. However, as companies expand their product lines, intent classification faces scalability challenges due to the increasing number of intents and variations in taxonomy across different verticals. In this paper, we introduce REIC, a Retrieval-augmented generation Enhanced Intent Classification approach, which addresses these challenges effectively. REIC leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to dynamically incorporate relevant knowledge, enabling precise classification without the need for frequent retraining. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that REIC outperforms traditional fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot methods in large-scale customer service settings. Our results highlight its effectiveness in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, demonstrating its potential for real-world deployment in adaptive and large-scale intent classification systems.

Paperid: 3710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24561.pdf

Abstract:
Current translation systems, despite being highly multilingual, cover only 5% of the world's languages. Expanding language coverage to the long-tail of low-resource languages requires data-efficient methods that rely on cross-lingual and cross-modal knowledge transfer. To this end, we propose a character-based approach to improve adaptability to new languages and modalities. Our method leverages SONAR, a multilingual fixed-size embedding space with different modules for encoding and decoding. We use a teacher-student approach with parallel translation data to obtain a character-level encoder. Then, using ASR data, we train a lightweight adapter to connect a massively multilingual CTC ASR model (MMS), to the character-level encoder, potentially enabling speech translation from 1,000+ languages. Experimental results in text translation for 75 languages on FLORES+ demonstrate that our character-based approach can achieve better language transfer than traditional subword-based models, especially outperforming them in low-resource settings, and demonstrating better zero-shot generalizability to unseen languages. Our speech adaptation, maximizing knowledge transfer from the text modality, achieves state-of-the-art results in speech-to-text translation on the FLEURS benchmark on 33 languages, surpassing previous supervised and cascade models, albeit being a zero-shot model with minimal supervision from ASR data.

Paperid: 3711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24424.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in classification and retrieval. However, these models often struggle with compositional reasoning - the ability to understand the relationships between concepts. A recent benchmark, SugarCrepe++, reveals that previous works on improving compositionality have mainly improved lexical sensitivity but neglected semantic understanding. In addition, downstream retrieval performance often deteriorates, although one would expect that improving compositionality should enhance retrieval. In this work, we introduce CLIC (Compositionally-aware Learning in CLIP), a fine-tuning method based on a novel training technique combining multiple images and their associated captions. CLIC improves compositionality across architectures as well as differently pre-trained CLIP models, both in terms of lexical and semantic understanding, and achieves consistent gains in retrieval performance. This even applies to the recent CLIPS, which achieves SOTA retrieval performance. Nevertheless, the short fine-tuning with CLIC leads to an improvement in retrieval and to the best compositional CLIP model on SugarCrepe++. All our models and code are available at https://clic-compositional-clip.github.io

Paperid: 3712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24362.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate whether the success of a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process can be predicted before completion. We discover that a probing classifier, based on LLM representations, performs well \emph{even before a single token is generated}, suggesting that crucial information about the reasoning process is already present in the initial steps representations. In contrast, a strong BERT-based baseline, which relies solely on the generated tokens, performs worse, likely because it depends on shallow linguistic cues rather than deeper reasoning dynamics. Surprisingly, using later reasoning steps does not always improve classification. When additional context is unhelpful, earlier representations resemble later ones more, suggesting LLMs encode key information early. This implies reasoning can often stop early without loss. To test this, we conduct early stopping experiments, showing that truncating CoT reasoning still improves performance over not using CoT at all, though a gap remains compared to full reasoning. However, approaches like supervised learning or reinforcement learning designed to shorten CoT chains could leverage our classifier's guidance to identify when early stopping is effective. Our findings provide insights that may support such methods, helping to optimize CoT's efficiency while preserving its benefits.

Paperid: 3713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23953.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic code generation has gained significant momentum with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4. Although many studies focus on improving the effectiveness of LLMs for code generation, very limited work tries to understand the generated code's characteristics and leverage that to improve failed cases. In this paper, as the most straightforward characteristic of code, we investigate the relationship between code complexity and the success of LLM generated code. Using a large set of standard complexity metrics, we first conduct an empirical analysis to explore their correlation with LLM's performance on code generation (i.e., Pass@1). Using logistic regression models, we identify which complexity metrics are most predictive of code correctness. Building on these findings, we propose an iterative feedback method, where LLMs are prompted to generate correct code based on complexity metrics from previous failed outputs. We validate our approach across multiple benchmarks (i.e., HumanEval, MBPP, LeetCode, and BigCodeBench) and various LLMs (i.e., GPT-4o, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Llama 3.1, and GPT-o3 mini), comparing the results with two baseline methods: (a) zero-shot generation, and (b) iterative execution-based feedback without our code complexity insights. Experiment results show that our approach makes notable improvements, particularly with a smaller LLM (GPT3.5 Turbo), where, e.g., Pass@1 increased by 35.71% compared to the baseline's improvement of 12.5% on the HumanEval dataset. The study expands experiments to BigCodeBench and integrates the method with the Reflexion code generation agent, leading to Pass@1 improvements of 20% (GPT-4o) and 23.07% (GPT-o3 mini). The results highlight that complexity-aware feedback enhances both direct LLM prompting and agent-based workflows.

Paperid: 3714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23108.pdf

Abstract:
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate training data can potentially be a preferable way to improve zero or few-shot NLP tasks. However, many problems remain to be investigated for this direction. For the task of Relation Extraction (RE), we find that samples generated by directly prompting LLMs may easily have high structural similarities with each other. They tend to use a limited variety of phrasing while expressing the relation between a pair of entities. Therefore, in this paper, we study how to effectively improve the diversity of the training samples generated with LLMs for RE, while also maintaining their correctness. We first try to make the LLMs produce dissimilar samples by directly giving instructions in In-Context Learning (ICL) prompts. Then, we propose an approach to fine-tune LLMs for diversity training sample generation through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our experiments on commonly used RE datasets show that both attempts can improve the quality of the generated training data. We also find that comparing with directly performing RE with an LLM, training a non-LLM RE model with its generated samples may lead to better performance.

Paperid: 3715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22016.pdf

Abstract:
Panoramic video generation enables immersive 360Â° content creation, valuable in applications that demand scene-consistent world exploration. However, existing panoramic video generation models struggle to leverage pre-trained generative priors from conventional text-to-video models for high-quality and diverse panoramic videos generation, due to limited dataset scale and the gap in spatial feature representations. In this paper, we introduce PanoWan to effectively lift pre-trained text-to-video models to the panoramic domain, equipped with minimal modules. PanoWan employs latitude-aware sampling to avoid latitudinal distortion, while its rotated semantic denoising and padded pixel-wise decoding ensure seamless transitions at longitude boundaries. To provide sufficient panoramic videos for learning these lifted representations, we contribute PanoVid, a high-quality panoramic video dataset with captions and diverse scenarios. Consequently, PanoWan achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and demonstrates robustness for zero-shot downstream tasks. Our project page is available at https://panowan.variantconst.com.

Paperid: 3716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17921.pdf

Abstract:
Determining the type of kidney stones is crucial for prescribing appropriate treatments to prevent recurrence. Currently, various approaches exist to identify the type of kidney stones. However, obtaining results through the reference ex vivo identification procedure can take several weeks, while in vivo visual recognition requires highly trained specialists. For this reason, deep learning models have been developed to provide urologists with an automated classification of kidney stones during ureteroscopies. Nevertheless, a common issue with these models is the lack of training data. This contribution presents a deep learning method based on few-shot learning, aimed at producing sufficiently discriminative features for identifying kidney stone types in endoscopic images, even with a very limited number of samples. This approach was specifically designed for scenarios where endoscopic images are scarce or where uncommon classes are present, enabling classification even with a limited training dataset. The results demonstrate that Prototypical Networks, using up to 25% of the training data, can achieve performance equal to or better than traditional deep learning models trained with the complete dataset.

Paperid: 3717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17773.pdf

Abstract:
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers a cost-effective solution for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), but it often produces overconfident predictions in data-scarce few-shot settings. To address this issue, several classical statistical learning approaches have been repurposed for scalable uncertainty-aware LoRA fine-tuning. However, these approaches neglect how input characteristics affect the predictive uncertainty estimates. To address this limitation, we propose Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation (\textbf{C-LoRA}) as a novel uncertainty-aware and parameter efficient fine-tuning approach, by developing new lightweight LoRA modules contextualized to each input data sample to dynamically adapt uncertainty estimates. Incorporating data-driven contexts into the parameter posteriors, C-LoRA mitigates overfitting, achieves well-calibrated uncertainties, and yields robust predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C-LoRA consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware LoRA methods in both uncertainty quantification and model generalization. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of our contextual modules in capturing sample-specific uncertainties. C-LoRA sets a new standard for robust, uncertainty-aware LLM fine-tuning in few-shot regimes.

Paperid: 3718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16008.pdf

Abstract:
We propose LAGO - Language Similarity-Aware Graph Optimization - a novel approach for few-shot cross-lingual embedding inversion attacks, addressing critical privacy vulnerabilities in multilingual NLP systems. Unlike prior work in embedding inversion attacks that treat languages independently, LAGO explicitly models linguistic relationships through a graph-based constrained distributed optimization framework. By integrating syntactic and lexical similarity as edge constraints, our method enables collaborative parameter learning across related languages. Theoretically, we show this formulation generalizes prior approaches, such as ALGEN, which emerges as a special case when similarity constraints are relaxed. Our framework uniquely combines Frobenius-norm regularization with linear inequality or total variation constraints, ensuring robust alignment of cross-lingual embedding spaces even with extremely limited data (as few as 10 samples per language). Extensive experiments across multiple languages and embedding models demonstrate that LAGO substantially improves the transferability of attacks with 10-20% increase in Rouge-L score over baselines. This work establishes language similarity as a critical factor in inversion attack transferability, urging renewed focus on language-aware privacy-preserving multilingual embeddings.

Paperid: 3719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15442.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large language models into smaller ones while preserving performance. Despite the recent traction of KD research, its effectiveness for smaller language models (LMs) and the mechanisms driving knowledge transfer remain underexplored. In this work, we present the first large-scale empirical and statistical analysis of KD across models ranging from 0.5B to 7B parameters on 14 complex reasoning tasks in a zero-shot setting. Our findings reveal that KD can improve the average performance of smaller models by up to $10\%$, with a peak task specific gain of $22\%$, while providing only marginal benefits ($\sim 1.3\%$) for larger models. Surprisingly, teacher performance has a minimal impact on student outcomes, while teacher task expertise impacts KD effectiveness. A correlation study indicates that smaller LMs benefit more from KD, whereas larger LMs show diminished gains. Additionally, we uncover a misalignment between improvements in student performance and reasoning fidelity, suggesting that while KD enhances accuracy, it does not always maintain the structured decision-making processes of the teacher. Our ablation study further highlights the importance of teacher signals and logit smoothing in influencing students' performance after distillation. Overall, our study offers a comprehensive empirical and statistical assessment of KD, highlighting both its benefits and trade-offs when distilling knowledge from larger to smaller LMs.

Paperid: 3720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14227.pdf

Abstract:
Visual understanding requires interpreting both natural scenes and the textual information that appears within them, motivating tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, current VQA benchmarks overlook scenarios with visually embedded questions, whereas advanced agents should be able to see the question without separate text input as humans. We introduce Visual-only Question Answering (VoQA), where both the scene and the question appear within a single image, requiring models to perceive and reason purely through vision. This setting supports more realistic visual understanding and interaction in scenarios where questions or instructions are embedded directly in the visual scene. Evaluations under pure visual-only zero-shot, prompt-guided and OCR-assisted settings show that current models exhibit a clear performance drop compared to traditional VQA. To address this, we investigate question-alignment fine-tuning strategies designed to guide models toward interpreting the visual question prior to reasoning. Leveraging VoQA dataset together with these strategies yields robust vision-only reasoning while preserving cross-task generalization to traditional VQA, reflecting the complementary visual and textual reasoning capabilities fostered through VoQA training. The code and data are publicly available.

Paperid: 3721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13100.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional saliency map methods, popularized in computer vision, highlight individual points (pixels) of the input that contribute the most to the model's output. However, in time-series they offer limited insights as semantically meaningful features are often found in other domains. We introduce Cross-domain Integrated Gradients, a generalization of Integrated Gradients. Our method enables feature attributions on any domain that can be formulated as an invertible, differentiable transformation of the time domain. Crucially, our derivation extends the original Integrated Gradients into the complex domain, enabling frequency-based attributions. We provide the necessary theoretical guarantees, namely, path independence and completeness. Our approach reveals interpretable, problem-specific attributions that time-domain methods cannot capture, on three real-world tasks: wearable sensor heart rate extraction, electroencephalography-based seizure detection, and zero-shot time-series forecasting. We release an open-source Tensorflow/PyTorch library to enable plug-and-play cross-domain explainability for time-series models. These results demonstrate the ability of cross-domain integrated gradients to provide semantically meaningful insights in time-series models that are impossible with traditional time-domain saliency.

Paperid: 3722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13082.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce MultiActor-Audiobook, a zero-shot approach for generating audiobooks that automatically produces consistent, expressive, and speaker-appropriate prosody, including intonation and emotion. Previous audiobook systems have several limitations: they require users to manually configure the speaker's prosody, read each sentence with a monotonic tone compared to voice actors, or rely on costly training. However, our MultiActor-Audiobook addresses these issues by introducing two novel processes: (1) MSP (**Multimodal Speaker Persona Generation**) and (2) LSI (**LLM-based Script Instruction Generation**). With these two processes, MultiActor-Audiobook can generate more emotionally expressive audiobooks with a consistent speaker prosody without additional training. We compare our system with commercial products, through human and MLLM evaluations, achieving competitive results. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MSP and LSI through ablation studies.

Paperid: 3723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05237.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot tabular learning, in which machine learning models are trained with a limited amount of labeled data, provides a cost-effective approach to addressing real-world challenges. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked interest in leveraging their pre-trained knowledge for few-shot tabular learning. Despite promising results, existing approaches either rely on test-time knowledge extraction, which introduces undesirable latency, or text-level knowledge, which leads to unreliable feature engineering. To overcome these limitations, we propose Latte, a training-time knowledge extraction framework that transfers the latent prior knowledge within LLMs to optimize a more generalized downstream model. Latte enables general knowledge-guided downstream tabular learning, facilitating the weighted fusion of information across different feature values while reducing the risk of overfitting to limited labeled data. Furthermore, Latte is compatible with existing unsupervised pre-training paradigms and effectively utilizes available unlabeled samples to overcome the performance limitations imposed by an extremely small labeled dataset. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of Latte, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain

Paperid: 3724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03296.pdf

Abstract:
We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Paperid: 3725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20849.pdf

Abstract:
Online platforms are increasingly interested in using Data-to-Text technologies to generate content and help their users. Unfortunately, traditional generative methods often fall into repetitive patterns, resulting in monotonous galleries of texts after only a few iterations. In this paper, we investigate LLM-based data-to-text approaches to automatically generate marketing texts that are of sufficient quality and diverse enough for broad adoption. We leverage Language Models such as T5, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMa2 in conjunction with fine-tuning, few-shot, and zero-shot approaches to set a baseline for diverse marketing texts. We also introduce a metric JaccDiv to evaluate the diversity of a set of texts. This research extends its relevance beyond the music industry, proving beneficial in various fields where repetitive automated content generation is prevalent.

Paperid: 3726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20039.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce AutoJudge, a framework that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference with task-specific lossy speculative decoding. Instead of matching the original model output distribution token-by-token, we identify which of the generated tokens affect the downstream quality of the generated response, relaxing the guarantee so that the "unimportant" tokens can be generated faster. Our approach relies on a semi-greedy search algorithm to test which of the mismatches between target and draft model should be corrected to preserve quality, and which ones may be skipped. We then train a lightweight classifier based on existing LLM embeddings to predict, at inference time, which mismatching tokens can be safely accepted without compromising the final answer quality. We test our approach with Llama 3.2 1B (draft) and Llama 3.1 8B (target) models on zero-shot GSM8K reasoning, where it achieves up to 1.5x more accepted tokens per verification cycle with under 1% degradation in answer accuracy compared to standard speculative decoding and over 2x with small loss in accuracy. When applied to the LiveCodeBench benchmark, our approach automatically detects other, programming-specific important tokens and shows similar speedups, demonstrating its ability to generalize across tasks.

Paperid: 3727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19161.pdf

Abstract:
The task of radio map estimation aims to generate a dense representation of electromagnetic spectrum quantities, such as the received signal strength at each grid point within a geographic region, based on measurements from a subset of spatially distributed nodes (represented as pixels). Recently, deep vision models such as the U-Net have been adapted to radio map estimation, whose effectiveness can be guaranteed with sufficient spatial observations (typically 0.01% to 1% of pixels) in each map, to model local dependency of observed signal power. However, such a setting of sufficient measurements can be less practical in real-world scenarios, where extreme sparsity in spatial sampling can be widely encountered. To address this challenge, we propose RadioFormer, a novel multiple-granularity transformer designed to handle the constraints posed by spatial sparse observations. Our RadioFormer, through a dual-stream self-attention (DSA) module, can respectively discover the correlation of pixel-wise observed signal power and also learn patch-wise buildings' geometries in a style of multiple granularities, which are integrated into multi-scale representations of radio maps by a cross stream cross-attention (CCA) module. Extensive experiments on the public RadioMapSeer dataset demonstrate that RadioFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in radio map estimation while maintaining the lowest computational cost. Furthermore, the proposed approach exhibits exceptional generalization capabilities and robust zero-shot performance, underscoring its potential to advance radio map estimation in a more practical setting with very limited observation nodes.

Paperid: 3728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15323.pdf

Abstract:
While test-time fine-tuning is beneficial in few-shot learning, the need for multiple backpropagation steps can be prohibitively expensive in real-time or low-resource scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that emulates gradient descent without computing gradients, enabling efficient test-time adaptation. Specifically, we formulate gradient descent as an Euler discretization of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) and train an auxiliary network to predict the task-conditional drift using only the few-shot support set. The adaptation then reduces to a simple numerical integration (e.g., via the Euler method), which requires only a few forward passes of the auxiliary network -- no gradients or forward passes of the target model are needed. In experiments on cross-domain few-shot classification using the Meta-Dataset and CDFSL benchmarks, our method significantly improves out-of-domain performance over the non-fine-tuned baseline while incurring only 6\% of the memory cost and 0.02\% of the computation time of standard fine-tuning, thus establishing a practical middle ground between direct transfer and fully fine-tuned approaches.

Paperid: 3729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07740.pdf

Abstract:
Code search aims to retrieve semantically relevant code snippets for natural language queries. While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance in this task, they struggle in cross-domain scenarios, often requiring costly fine-tuning or facing performance drops in zero-shot settings. RAPID, which generates synthetic data for model fine-tuning, is currently the only effective method for zero-shot cross-domain code search. Despite its effectiveness, RAPID demands substantial computational resources for fine-tuning and needs to maintain specialized models for each domain, underscoring the need for a zero-shot, fine-tuning-free approach for cross-domain code search. The key to tackling zero-shot cross-domain code search lies in bridging the gaps among domains. In this work, we propose to break the query-code matching process of code search into two simpler tasks: query-comment matching and code-code matching. Our empirical study reveals the strong complementarity among the three matching schemas in zero-shot cross-domain settings, i.e., query-code, query-comment, and code-code matching. Based on the findings, we propose CodeBridge, a zero-shot, fine-tuning-free approach for cross-domain code search. Specifically, CodeBridge uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate comments and pseudo-code, then combines query-code, query-comment, and code-code matching via PLM-based similarity scoring and sampling-based fusion. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art PLM-based code search approaches, i.e., CoCoSoDa and UniXcoder, by an average of 21.4% and 24.9% in MRR, respectively, across three datasets. Our approach also yields results that are better than or comparable to those of the zero-shot cross-domain code search approach RAPID, which requires costly fine-tuning.

Paperid: 3730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06969.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity in recent years for their utility in various applications. However, they are sensitive to non-semantic changes in prompt formats, where small changes in the prompt format can lead to significant performance fluctuations. In the literature, this problem is commonly referred to as prompt brittleness. Previous research on prompt engineering has focused mainly on developing techniques for identifying the optimal prompt for specific tasks. Some studies have also explored the issue of prompt brittleness and proposed methods to quantify performance variations; however, no simple solution has been found to address this challenge. We propose Mixture of Formats (MOF), a simple and efficient technique for addressing prompt brittleness in LLMs by diversifying the styles used in the prompt few-shot examples. MOF was inspired by computer vision techniques that utilize diverse style datasets to prevent models from associating specific styles with the target variable. Empirical results show that our proposed technique reduces style-induced prompt brittleness in various LLMs while also enhancing overall performance across prompt variations and different datasets.

Paperid: 3731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04907.pdf

Abstract:
Video generation assessment is essential for ensuring that generative models produce visually realistic, high-quality videos while aligning with human expectations. Current video generation benchmarks fall into two main categories: traditional benchmarks, which use metrics and embeddings to evaluate generated video quality across multiple dimensions but often lack alignment with human judgments; and large language model (LLM)-based benchmarks, though capable of human-like reasoning, are constrained by a limited understanding of video quality metrics and cross-modal consistency. To address these challenges and establish a benchmark that better aligns with human preferences, this paper introduces Video-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a rich prompt suite and extensive evaluation dimensions. This benchmark represents the first attempt to systematically leverage MLLMs across all dimensions relevant to video generation assessment in generative models. By incorporating few-shot scoring and chain-of-query techniques, Video-Bench provides a structured, scalable approach to generated video evaluation. Experiments on advanced models including Sora demonstrate that Video-Bench achieves superior alignment with human preferences across all dimensions. Moreover, in instances where our framework's assessments diverge from human evaluations, it consistently offers more objective and accurate insights, suggesting an even greater potential advantage over traditional human judgment.

Paperid: 3732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04259.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose robots should possess human-like dexterity and agility to perform tasks with the same versatility as us. A human-like form factor further enables the use of vast datasets of human-hand interactions. However, the primary bottleneck in dexterous manipulation lies not only in software but arguably even more in hardware. Robotic hands that approach human capabilities are often prohibitively expensive, bulky, or require enterprise-level maintenance, limiting their accessibility for broader research and practical applications. What if the research community could get started with reliable dexterous hands within a day? We present the open-source ORCA hand, a reliable and anthropomorphic 17-DoF tendon-driven robotic hand with integrated tactile sensors, fully assembled in less than eight hours and built for a material cost below 2,000 CHF. We showcase ORCA's key design features such as popping joints, auto-calibration, and tensioning systems that significantly reduce complexity while increasing reliability, accuracy, and robustness. We benchmark the ORCA hand across a variety of tasks, ranging from teleoperation and imitation learning to zero-shot sim-to-real reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we demonstrate its durability, withstanding more than 10,000 continuous operation cycles - equivalent to approximately 20 hours - without hardware failure, the only constraint being the duration of the experiment itself. Video is here: https://youtu.be/kUbPSYMmOds. Design files, source code, and documentation are available at https://srl.ethz.ch/orcahand.

Paperid: 3733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02144.pdf

Abstract:
Soft prompts have been popularized as a cheap and easy way to improve task-specific LLM performance beyond few-shot prompts. Despite their origin as an automated prompting method, however, soft prompts and other trainable prompts remain a black-box method with no immediately interpretable connections to prompting. We create a novel theoretical framework for evaluating the interpretability of trainable prompts based on two desiderata: faithfulness and scrutability. We find that existing methods do not naturally satisfy our proposed interpretability criterion. Instead, our framework inspires a new direction of trainable prompting methods that explicitly optimizes for interpretability. To this end, we formulate and test new interpretability-oriented objective functions for two state-of-the-art prompt tuners: Hard Prompts Made Easy (PEZ) and RLPrompt. Our experiments with GPT-2 demonstrate a fundamental trade-off between interpretability and the task-performance of the trainable prompt, explicating the hardness of the soft prompt interpretability problem and revealing odd behavior that arises when one optimizes for an interpretability proxy.

Paperid: 3734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18403.pdf

Abstract:
Continual learning in computer vision faces the critical challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models struggle to retain prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks. Although recent studies have attempted to leverage the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models to mitigate overfitting on current tasks, models still tend to forget details of previously learned categories as tasks progress, leading to misclassification. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph Enhanced Generative Multi-modal model (KG-GMM) that builds an evolving knowledge graph throughout the learning process. Our approach utilizes relationships within the knowledge graph to augment the class labels and assigns different relations to similar categories to enhance model differentiation. During testing, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Inference method that locates specific categories by analyzing relationships within the generated text, thereby reducing the loss of detailed information about old classes when learning new knowledge and alleviating forgetting. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively leverages relational information to help the model correct mispredictions, achieving state-of-the-art results in both conventional CIL and few-shot CIL settings, confirming the efficacy of knowledge graphs at preserving knowledge in the continual learning scenarios.

Paperid: 3735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17080.pdf

Abstract:
The CLIP model has demonstrated significant advancements in aligning visual and language modalities through large-scale pre-training on image-text pairs, enabling strong zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities on various domains. However, CLIP's training remains computationally intensive, with high demands on both data processing and memory. To address these challenges, recent masking strategies have emerged, focusing on the selective removal of image patches to improve training efficiency. Although effective, these methods often compromise key semantic information, resulting in suboptimal alignment between visual features and text descriptions. In this work, we present a concise yet effective approach called Patch Generation-to-Selection to enhance CLIP's training efficiency while preserving critical semantic content. Our method introduces a gradual masking process in which a small set of candidate patches is first pre-selected as potential mask regions. Then, we apply Sobel edge detection across the entire image to generate an edge mask that prioritizes the retention of the primary object areas. Finally, similarity scores between the candidate mask patches and their neighboring patches are computed, with optimal transport normalization refining the selection process to ensure a balanced similarity matrix. Our approach, CLIP-PGS, sets new state-of-the-art results in zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, achieving superior performance in robustness evaluation and language compositionality benchmarks.

Paperid: 3736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12947.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown remarkable performance in novel view synthesis but requires numerous multi-view images, limiting its practicality in few-shot scenarios. Ray augmentation has been proposed to alleviate overfitting caused by sparse training data by generating additional rays. However, existing methods, which generate augmented rays only near the original rays, exhibit pronounced floaters and appearance distortions due to limited viewpoints and inconsistent rays obstructed by nearby obstacles and complex surfaces. To address these problems, we propose DivCon-NeRF, which introduces novel sphere-based ray augmentations to significantly enhance both diversity and consistency. By employing a virtual sphere centered at the predicted surface point, our method generates diverse augmented rays from all 360-degree directions, facilitated by our consistency mask that effectively filters out inconsistent rays. We introduce tailored loss functions that leverage these augmentations, effectively reducing floaters and visual distortions. Consequently, our method outperforms existing few-shot NeRF approaches on the Blender, LLFF, and DTU datasets. Furthermore, DivCon-NeRF demonstrates strong generalizability by effectively integrating with both regularization- and framework-based few-shot NeRFs. Our code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 3737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12096.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models (VLMs) is getting attention because of their ability to learn with unlabeled data without fine-tuning. Although test-time prompt tuning methods for VLMs can boost accuracy, the resulting models tend to demonstrate poor calibration, which casts doubts on the reliability and trustworthiness of these models. Notably, more attention needs to be devoted to calibrating the test-time prompt tuning in vision-language models. To this end, we propose a new approach, called O-TPT that introduces orthogonality constraints on the textual features corresponding to the learnable prompts for calibrating test-time prompt tuning in VLMs. Towards introducing orthogonality constraints, we make the following contributions. First, we uncover new insights behind the suboptimal calibration performance of existing methods relying on textual feature dispersion. Second, we show that imposing a simple orthogonalization of textual features is a more effective approach towards obtaining textual dispersion. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets with different backbones and baselines. The results indicate that our method consistently outperforms the prior state of the art in significantly reducing the overall average calibration error. Also, our method surpasses the zero-shot calibration performance on fine-grained classification tasks.

Paperid: 3738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09758.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in robotics and large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in human-robot collaboration and embodied intelligence. To enable the broader deployment of robots in human-populated environments, socially-aware robot navigation (SAN) has become a key research area. While deep reinforcement learning approaches that integrate human-robot interaction (HRI) with path planning have demonstrated strong benchmark performance, they often struggle to adapt to new scenarios and environments. LLMs offer a promising avenue for zero-shot navigation through commonsense inference. However, most existing LLM-based frameworks rely on centralized decision-making, lack robust verification mechanisms, and face inconsistencies in translating macro-actions into precise low-level control signals. To address these challenges, we propose SAMALM, a decentralized multi-agent LLM actor-critic framework for multi-robot social navigation. In this framework, a set of parallel LLM actors, each reflecting distinct robot personalities or configurations, directly generate control signals. These actions undergo a two-tier verification process via a global critic that evaluates group-level behaviors and individual critics that assess each robot's context. An entropy-based score fusion mechanism further enhances self-verification and re-query, improving both robustness and coordination. Experimental results confirm that SAMALM effectively balances local autonomy with global oversight, yielding socially compliant behaviors and strong adaptability across diverse multi-robot scenarios. More details and videos about this work are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/SAMALM.

Paperid: 3739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09679.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning represents a strong class of approaches for solving few-shot learning tasks. Nonetheless, recent research suggests that simply pre-training a generic encoder can potentially surpass meta-learning algorithms. In this paper, we first discuss the reasons why meta-learning fails to stand out in these few-shot learning experiments, and hypothesize that it is due to the few-shot learning tasks lacking diversity. We propose DRESS, a task-agnostic Disentangled REpresentation-based Self-Supervised meta-learning approach that enables fast model adaptation on highly diversified few-shot learning tasks. Specifically, DRESS utilizes disentangled representation learning to create self-supervised tasks that can fuel the meta-training process. Furthermore, we also propose a class-partition based metric for quantifying the task diversity directly on the input space. We validate the effectiveness of DRESS through experiments on datasets with multiple factors of variation and varying complexity. The results suggest that DRESS is able to outperform competing methods on the majority of the datasets and task setups. Through this paper, we advocate for a re-examination of proper setups for task adaptation studies, and aim to reignite interest in the potential of meta-learning for solving few-shot learning tasks via disentangled representations.

Paperid: 3740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07037.pdf

Abstract:
Hashing algorithms have been widely used in large-scale image retrieval tasks, especially for seen class data. Zero-shot hashing algorithms have been proposed to handle unseen class data. The key technique in these algorithms involves learning features from seen classes and transferring them to unseen classes, that is, aligning the feature embeddings between the seen and unseen classes. Most existing zero-shot hashing algorithms use the shared attributes between the two classes of interest to complete alignment tasks. However, the attributes are always described for a whole image, even though they represent specific parts of the image. Hence, these methods ignore the importance of aligning attributes with the corresponding image parts, which explicitly introduces noise and reduces the accuracy achieved when aligning the features of seen and unseen classes. To address this problem, we propose a new zero-shot hashing method called RAZH. We first use a clustering algorithm to group similar patches to image parts for attribute matching and then replace the image parts with the corresponding attribute vectors, gradually aligning each part with its nearest attribute. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of the RAZH method over several state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06106.pdf

Abstract:
Conventional multi-source domain few-shot adaptation (MFDA) faces the challenge of further reducing the load on edge-side devices in low-resource scenarios. Considering the native language-supervised advantage of CLIP and the plug-and-play nature of prompt to transfer CLIP efficiently, this paper introduces an uploadable multi-source few-shot domain adaptation (UMFDA) schema. It belongs to a decentralized edge collaborative learning in the edge-side models that must maintain a low computational load. And only a limited amount of annotations in source domain data is provided, with most of the data being unannotated. Further, this paper proposes a vision-aware multimodal prompt tuning framework (VAMP) under the decentralized schema, where the vision-aware prompt guides the text domain-specific prompt to maintain semantic discriminability and perceive the domain information. The cross-modal semantic and domain distribution alignment losses optimize each edge-side model, while text classifier consistency and semantic diversity losses promote collaborative learning among edge-side models. Extensive experiments were conducted on OfficeHome and DomainNet datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VAMP in the UMFDA, which outperformed the previous prompt tuning methods.

Paperid: 3742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02003.pdf

Abstract:
An Achilles heel of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their tendency to hallucinate non-factual statements. A response mixed of factual and non-factual statements poses a challenge for humans to verify and accurately base their decisions on. To combat this problem, we propose Highlighted Chain-of-Thought Prompting (HoT), a technique for prompting LLMs to generate responses with XML tags that ground facts to those provided in the query. That is, given an input question, LLMs would first re-format the question to add XML tags highlighting key facts, and then, generate a response with highlights over the facts referenced from the input. Interestingly, in few-shot settings, HoT outperforms vanilla chain of thought prompting (CoT) on a wide range of 17 tasks from arithmetic, reading comprehension to logical reasoning. When asking humans to verify LLM responses, highlights help time-limited participants to more accurately and efficiently recognize when LLMs are correct. Yet, surprisingly, when LLMs are wrong, HoTs tend to make users believe that an answer is correct.

Paperid: 3743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01936.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models provide a universal solution for generating forecasts to support optimization problems in energy systems. Those foundation models are typically trained in a prediction-focused manner to maximize forecast quality. In contrast, decision-focused learning directly improves the resulting value of the forecast in downstream optimization rather than merely maximizing forecasting quality. The practical integration of forecast values into forecasting models is challenging, particularly when addressing complex applications with diverse instances, such as buildings. This becomes even more complicated when instances possess specific characteristics that require instance-specific, tailored predictions to increase the forecast value. To tackle this challenge, we use decision-focused fine-tuning within time series foundation models to offer a scalable and efficient solution for decision-focused learning applied to the dispatchable feeder optimization problem. To obtain more robust predictions for scarce building data, we use Moirai as a state-of-the-art foundation model, which offers robust and generalized results with few-shot parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Comparing the decision-focused fine-tuned Moirai with a state-of-the-art classical prediction-focused fine-tuning Morai, we observe an improvement of 9.45% in average total daily costs.

Paperid: 3744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00936.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) identifies the instance mask that best aligns with a specified referring expression without training and fine-tuning, significantly reducing the labor-intensive annotation process. Despite achieving commendable results, previous CLIP-based models have a critical drawback: the models exhibit a notable reduction in their capacity to discern relative spatial relationships of objects. This is because they generate all possible masks on an image and evaluate each masked region for similarity to the given expression, often resulting in decreased sensitivity to direct positional clues in text inputs. Moreover, most methods have weak abilities to manage relationships between primary words and their contexts, causing confusion and reduced accuracy in identifying the correct target region. To address these challenges, we propose IteRPrimE (Iterative Grad-CAM Refinement and Primary word Emphasis), which leverages a saliency heatmap through Grad-CAM from a Vision-Language Pre-trained (VLP) model for image-text matching. An iterative Grad-CAM refinement strategy is introduced to progressively enhance the model's focus on the target region and overcome positional insensitivity, creating a self-correcting effect. Additionally, we design the Primary Word Emphasis module to help the model handle complex semantic relations, enhancing its ability to attend to the intended object. Extensive experiments conducted on the RefCOCO/+/g, and PhraseCut benchmarks demonstrate that IteRPrimE outperforms previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, particularly excelling in out-of-domain scenarios.

Paperid: 3745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20175.pdf

Abstract:
In recent advancements, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited proficiency in code generation and chain-of-thought reasoning, laying the groundwork for tackling automatic formal planning tasks. This study evaluates the potential of LLMs to understand and generate Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), an essential representation in artificial intelligence planning. We conduct an extensive analysis across 20 distinct models spanning 7 major LLM families, both commercial and open-source. Our comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the zero-shot LLM capabilities of parsing, generating, and reasoning with PDDL. Our findings indicate that while some models demonstrate notable effectiveness in handling PDDL, others pose limitations in more complex scenarios requiring nuanced planning knowledge. These results highlight the promise and current limitations of LLMs in formal planning tasks, offering insights into their application and guiding future efforts in AI-driven planning paradigms.

Paperid: 3746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16469.pdf

Abstract:
Advancements in cross-modal feature extraction and integration have significantly enhanced performance in few-shot learning tasks. However, current multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods often experience notable performance degradation when encountering substantial domain shifts. We propose that incorporating rich textual information can enable the model to establish a more robust knowledge relationship between visual instances and their corresponding language descriptions, thereby mitigating the challenges of domain shift. Specifically, we focus on the problem of Cross-Domain Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection (CDMM-FSOD) and introduce a meta-learning-based framework designed to leverage rich textual semantics as an auxiliary modality to achieve effective domain adaptation. Our new architecture incorporates two key components: (i) A multi-modal feature aggregation module, which aligns visual and linguistic feature embeddings to ensure cohesive integration across modalities. (ii) A rich text semantic rectification module, which employs bidirectional text feature generation to refine multi-modal feature alignment, thereby enhancing understanding of language and its application in object detection. We evaluate the proposed method on common cross-domain object detection benchmarks and demonstrate that it significantly surpasses existing few-shot object detection approaches.

Paperid: 3747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14457.pdf

Abstract:
Articulated object manipulation poses a unique challenge compared to rigid object manipulation as the object itself represents a dynamic environment. In this work, we present a novel RL-based pipeline equipped with variable impedance control and motion adaptation leveraging observation history for generalizable articulated object manipulation, focusing on smooth and dexterous motion during zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. To mitigate the sim-to-real gap, our pipeline diminishes reliance on vision by not leveraging the vision data feature (RGBD/pointcloud) directly as policy input but rather extracting useful low-dimensional data first via off-the-shelf modules. Additionally, we experience less sim-to-real gap by inferring object motion and its intrinsic properties via observation history as well as utilizing impedance control both in the simulation and in the real world. Furthermore, we develop a well-designed training setting with great randomization and a specialized reward system (task-aware and motion-aware) that enables multi-staged, end-to-end manipulation without heuristic motion planning. To the best of our knowledge, our policy is the first to report 84\% success rate in the real world via extensive experiments with various unseen objects.

Paperid: 3748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14158.pdf

Abstract:
Graph neural networks have been demonstrated as a powerful paradigm for effectively learning graph-structured data on the web and mining content from it.Current leading graph models require a large number of labeled samples for training, which unavoidably leads to overfitting in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has sought to alleviate this issue by simultaneously leveraging graph learning and meta-learning paradigms. However, these graph meta-learning models assume the availability of numerous meta-training tasks to learn transferable meta-knowledge. Such assumption may not be feasible in the real world due to the difficulty of constructing tasks and the substantial costs involved. Therefore, we propose a SiMple yet effectIve approach for graph few-shot Learning with fEwer tasks, named SMILE. We introduce a dual-level mixup strategy, encompassing both within-task and across-task mixup, to simultaneously enrich the available nodes and tasks in meta-learning. Moreover, we explicitly leverage the prior information provided by the node degrees in the graph to encode expressive node representations. Theoretically, we demonstrate that SMILE can enhance the model generalization ability. Empirically, SMILE consistently outperforms other competitive models by a large margin across all evaluated datasets with in-domain and cross-domain settings. Our anonymous code can be found here.

Paperid: 3749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13966.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring code correctness remains a challenging problem even as large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable at code-related tasks. While LLM-based program repair systems can propose bug fixes using only a user's bug report, their effectiveness is fundamentally limited by their ability to perform fault localization (FL), a challenging problem for both humans and LLMs. Existing FL approaches rely on executable test cases, require training on costly and often noisy line-level annotations, or demand resource-intensive LLMs. In this paper, we present Bug Attention Probe (BAP), a method which learns state-of-the-art fault localization without any direct localization labels, outperforming traditional FL baselines and prompting of large-scale LLMs. We evaluate our approach across a variety of code settings, including real-world Java bugs from the standard Defects4J dataset as well as seven other datasets which span a diverse set of bug types and languages. Averaged across all eight datasets, BAP improves by 34.6% top-1 accuracy compared to the strongest baseline and 93.4% over zero-shot prompting GPT-4o. BAP is also significantly more efficient than prompting, outperforming large open-weight models at a small fraction of the computational cost.

Paperid: 3750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13055.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of mobile applications has escalated Android malware threats. Although there are numerous detection methods, they often struggle with evolving attacks, dataset biases, and limited explainability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative with their zero-shot inference and reasoning capabilities. However, applying LLMs to Android malware detection presents two key challenges: (1)the extensive support code in Android applications, often spanning thousands of classes, exceeds LLMs' context limits and obscures malicious behavior within benign functionality; (2)the structural complexity and interdependencies of Android applications surpass LLMs' sequence-based reasoning, fragmenting code analysis and hindering malicious intent inference. To address these challenges, we propose LAMD, a practical context-driven framework to enable LLM-based Android malware detection. LAMD integrates key context extraction to isolate security-critical code regions and construct program structures, then applies tier-wise code reasoning to analyze application behavior progressively, from low-level instructions to high-level semantics, providing final prediction and explanation. A well-designed factual consistency verification mechanism is equipped to mitigate LLM hallucinations from the first tier. Evaluation in real-world settings demonstrates LAMD's effectiveness over conventional detectors, establishing a feasible basis for LLM-driven malware analysis in dynamic threat landscapes.

Paperid: 3751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11725.pdf

Abstract:
Measuring perceptual similarity is a key tool in computer vision. In recent years perceptual metrics based on features extracted from neural networks with large and diverse training sets, e.g. CLIP, have become popular. At the same time, the metrics extracted from features of neural networks are not adversarially robust. In this paper we show that adversarially robust CLIP models, called R-CLIP$_\textrm{F}$, obtained by unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning induce a better and adversarially robust perceptual metric that outperforms existing metrics in a zero-shot setting, and further matches the performance of state-of-the-art metrics while being robust after fine-tuning. Moreover, our perceptual metric achieves strong performance on related tasks such as robust image-to-image retrieval, which becomes especially relevant when applied to "Not Safe for Work" (NSFW) content detection and dataset filtering. While standard perceptual metrics can be easily attacked by a small perturbation completely degrading NSFW detection, our robust perceptual metric maintains high accuracy under an attack while having similar performance for unperturbed images. Finally, perceptual metrics induced by robust CLIP models have higher interpretability: feature inversion can show which images are considered similar, while text inversion can find what images are associated to a given prompt. This also allows us to visualize the very rich visual concepts learned by a CLIP model, including memorized persons, paintings and complex queries.

Paperid: 3752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11308.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) and vector databases, private textual data is increasingly processed and stored as numerical embeddings. However, recent studies have proven that such embeddings are vulnerable to inversion attacks, where original text is reconstructed to reveal sensitive information. Previous research has largely assumed access to millions of sentences to train attack models, e.g., through data leakage or nearly unrestricted API access. With our method, a single data point is sufficient for a partially successful inversion attack. With as little as 1k data samples, performance reaches an optimum across a range of black-box encoders, without training on leaked data. We present a Few-shot Textual Embedding Inversion Attack using ALignment and GENeration (ALGEN), by aligning victim embeddings to the attack space and using a generative model to reconstruct text. We find that ALGEN attacks can be effectively transferred across domains and languages, revealing key information. We further examine a variety of defense mechanisms against ALGEN, and find that none are effective, highlighting the vulnerabilities posed by inversion attacks. By significantly lowering the cost of inversion and proving that embedding spaces can be aligned through one-step optimization, we establish a new textual embedding inversion paradigm with broader applications for embedding alignment in NLP.

Paperid: 3753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11287.pdf

Abstract:
Single camera 3D perception for traffic monitoring faces significant challenges due to occlusion and limited field of view. Moreover, fusing information from multiple cameras at the image feature level is difficult because of different view angles. Further, the necessity for practical implementation and compatibility with existing traffic infrastructure compounds these challenges. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel Bird's-Eye-View road occupancy detection framework that leverages multiple roadside cameras to overcome the aforementioned limitations. To facilitate the framework's development and evaluation, a synthetic dataset featuring diverse scenes and varying camera configurations is generated using the CARLA simulator. A late fusion and three early fusion methods were implemented within the proposed framework, with performance further enhanced by integrating backgrounds. Extensive evaluations were conducted to analyze the impact of multi-camera inputs and varying BEV occupancy map sizes on model performance. Additionally, a real-world data collection pipeline was developed to assess the model's ability to generalize to real-world environments. The sim-to-real capabilities of the model were evaluated using zero-shot and few-shot fine-tuning, demonstrating its potential for practical application. This research aims to advance perception systems in traffic monitoring, contributing to improved traffic management, operational efficiency, and road safety.

Paperid: 3754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09913.pdf

Abstract:
Web-based management systems have been widely used in risk control and industrial safety. However, effectively integrating source search capabilities into these systems, to enable decision-makers to locate and address the hazard (e.g., gas leak detection) remains a challenge. While prior efforts have explored using web crowdsourcing and AI algorithms for source search decision support, these approaches suffer from overheads in recruiting human participants and slow response times in time-sensitive situations. To address this, we introduce AutoS$^2$earch, a novel framework leveraging large models for zero-shot source search in web applications. AutoS$^2$earch operates on a simplified visual environment projected through a web-based display, utilizing a chain-of-thought prompt designed to emulate human reasoning. The multi-modal large language model (MLLMs) dynamically converts visual observations into language descriptions, enabling the LLM to perform linguistic reasoning on four directional choices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoS$^2$earch achieves performance nearly equivalent to human-AI collaborative source search while eliminating dependency on crowdsourced labor. Our work offers valuable insights in using web engineering to design such autonomous systems in other industrial applications.

Paperid: 3755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09254.pdf

Abstract:
Graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes that differ from the majority of the nodes in a graph, which has been attracting significant attention in recent years. Existing generalist graph models have achieved remarkable success in different graph tasks but struggle to generalize to the GAD task. This limitation arises from their difficulty in learning generalized knowledge for capturing the inherently infrequent, irregular and heterogeneous abnormality patterns in graphs from different domains. To address this challenge, we propose AnomalyGFM, a GAD-oriented graph foundation model that supports zero-shot inference and few-shot prompt tuning for GAD in diverse graph datasets. One key insight is that graph-agnostic representations for normal and abnormal classes are required to support effective zero/few-shot GAD across different graphs. Motivated by this, AnomalyGFM is pre-trained to align data-independent, learnable normal and abnormal class prototypes with node representation residuals (i.e., representation deviation of a node from its neighbors). The residual features essentially project the node information into a unified feature space where we can effectively measure the abnormality of nodes from different graphs in a consistent way. This provides a driving force for the learning of graph-agnostic, discriminative prototypes for the normal and abnormal classes, which can be used to enable zero-shot GAD on new graphs, including very large-scale graphs. If there are few-shot labeled normal nodes available in the new graphs, AnomalyGFM can further support prompt tuning to leverage these nodes for better adaptation. Comprehensive experiments on 11 widely-used GAD datasets with real anomalies, demonstrate that AnomalyGFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competing methods under both zero- and few-shot GAD settings.

Paperid: 3756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08791.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language navigation (VLN) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling mobile robots to perform zero-shot inference and execute tasks without specific pre-programming. However, current systems often separate map exploration and path planning, with exploration relying on inefficient algorithms due to limited (partially observed) environmental information. In this paper, we present a novel navigation pipeline named "VL-Explore" for simultaneous exploration and target discovery in unknown environments, leveraging the capabilities of a vision-language model named CLIP. Our approach requires only monocular vision and operates without any prior map or knowledge about the target. For comprehensive evaluations, we designed a functional prototype of a UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) system named "Open Rover", a customized platform for general-purpose VLN tasks. We integrated and deployed the VL-Explore pipeline on Open Rover to evaluate its throughput, obstacle avoidance capability, and trajectory performance across various real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VL-Explore consistently outperforms traditional map-traversal algorithms and achieves performance comparable to path-planning methods that depend on prior map and target knowledge. Notably, VL-Explore offers real-time active navigation without requiring pre-captured candidate images or pre-built node graphs, addressing key limitations of existing VLN pipelines.

Paperid: 3757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08507.pdf

Abstract:
Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to correct grammatical, spelling, and semantic errors in natural language text. With the growing of large language models (LLMs), direct text generation has gradually become the focus of the GEC methods, and few-shot in-context learning presents a cost-effective solution. However, selecting effective in-context examples remains challenging, as the similarity between input texts does not necessarily correspond to similar grammatical error patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval method based on natural language grammatical error explanations (GEE) to address this issue. Our method retrieves suitable few-shot demonstrations by matching the GEE of the test input with that of pre-constructed database samples, where explanations for erroneous samples are generated by LLMs. We conducted multilingual GEC few-shot experiments on both major open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experiments across five languages show that our method outperforms existing semantic and BM25-based retrieval techniques, without requiring additional training or language adaptation. This also suggests that matching error patterns is key to selecting examples.

Paperid: 3758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04408.pdf

Abstract:
Radiotherapy is a crucial cancer treatment that demands precise planning to balance tumor eradication and preservation of healthy tissue. Traditional treatment planning (TP) is iterative, time-consuming, and reliant on human expertise, which can potentially introduce variability and inefficiency. We propose a novel framework to transform a large multimodal foundation model (MLM) into an action model for TP using a few-shot reinforcement learning (RL) approach. Our method leverages the MLM's extensive pre-existing knowledge of physics, radiation, and anatomy, enhancing it through a few-shot learning process. This allows the model to iteratively improve treatment plans using a Monte Carlo simulator. Our results demonstrate that this method outperforms conventional RL-based approaches in both quality and efficiency, achieving higher reward scores and more optimal dose distributions in simulations on prostate cancer data. This proof-of-concept suggests a promising direction for integrating advanced AI models into clinical workflows, potentially enhancing the speed, quality, and standardization of radiotherapy treatment planning.

Paperid: 3759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16481.pdf

Abstract:
Rare events, due to their infrequent occurrences, do not have much data, and hence deep learning techniques fail in estimating the distribution for such data. Open-vocabulary models represent an innovative approach to image classification. Unlike traditional models, these models classify images into any set of categories specified with natural language prompts during inference. These prompts usually comprise manually crafted templates (e.g., 'a photo of a {}') that are filled in with the names of each category. This paper introduces a simple yet effective method for generating highly accurate and contextually descriptive prompts containing discriminative characteristics. Rare event detection, especially in medicine, is more challenging due to low inter-class and high intra-class variability. To address these, we propose a novel approach that uses domain-specific expert knowledge on rare events to generate customized and contextually relevant prompts, which are then used by large language models for image classification. Our zero-shot, privacy-preserving method enhances rare event classification without additional training, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques.

Paperid: 3760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15296.pdf

Abstract:
The ever-increasing size of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for deployment due to their heavy computational and memory requirements. Current model pruning techniques attempt to alleviate these issues by relying heavily on external calibration datasets to determine which parameters to prune or compress, thus limiting their flexibility and scalability across different compression ratios. Moreover, these methods often cause severe performance degradation, particularly in downstream tasks, when subjected to higher compression rates. In this paper, we propose PruneNet, a novel model compression method that addresses these limitations by reformulating model pruning as a policy learning process. PruneNet decouples the pruning process from the model architecture, eliminating the need for calibration datasets. It learns a stochastic pruning policy to assess parameter importance solely based on intrinsic model properties while preserving the spectral structure to minimize information loss. PruneNet can compress the LLaMA-2-7B model in just 15 minutes, achieving over 80% retention of its zero-shot performance with a 30% compression ratio, outperforming existing methods that retain only 75% performance. Furthermore, on complex multitask language understanding tasks, PruneNet demonstrates its robustness by preserving up to 80% performance of the original model, proving itself a superior alternative to conventional structured compression techniques.

Paperid: 3761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13518.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting actions as they occur is essential for applications like video surveillance, autonomous driving, and human-robot interaction. Known as online action detection, this task requires classifying actions in streaming videos, handling background noise, and coping with incomplete actions. Transformer architectures are the current state-of-the-art, yet the potential of recent advancements in computer vision, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), remains largely untapped for this problem, partly due to high computational costs. In this paper, we introduce TOAD: a Text-driven Online Action Detection architecture that supports zero-shot and few-shot learning. TOAD leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) textual embeddings, enabling efficient use of VLMs without significant computational overhead. Our model achieves 82.46% mAP on the THUMOS14 dataset, outperforming existing methods, and sets new baselines for zero-shot and few-shot performance on the THUMOS14 and TVSeries datasets.

Paperid: 3762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07892.pdf

Abstract:
Automated code generation using large language models (LLMs) has gained attention due to its efficiency and adaptability. However, real-world coding tasks or benchmarks like HumanEval and StudentEval often lack dedicated training datasets, challenging existing few-shot prompting approaches that rely on reference examples. Inspired by human metamemory-a cognitive process involving recall and evaluation-we present a novel framework (namely M^2WF) for improving LLMs' one-time code generation. This approach enables LLMs to autonomously generate, evaluate, and utilize synthetic examples to enhance reliability and performance. Unlike prior methods, it minimizes dependency on curated data and adapts flexibly to various coding scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in coding benchmarks, offering a scalable and robust solution for data-free environments. The code and framework will be publicly available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

Paperid: 3763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05635.pdf

Abstract:
Graph few-shot learning has garnered significant attention for its ability to rapidly adapt to downstream tasks with limited labeled data, sparking considerable interest among researchers. Recent advancements in graph few-shot learning models have exhibited superior performance across diverse applications. Despite their successes, several limitations still exist. First, existing models in the meta-training phase predominantly focus on instance-level features within tasks, neglecting crucial set-level features essential for distinguishing between different categories. Second, these models often utilize query sets directly on classifiers trained with support sets containing only a few labeled examples, overlooking potential distribution shifts between these sets and leading to suboptimal performance. Finally, previous models typically require necessitate abundant labeled data from base classes to extract transferable knowledge, which is typically infeasible in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel model named STAR, which leverages Set funcTions and optimAl tRansport for enhancing unsupervised graph few-shot learning. Specifically, STAR utilizes expressive set functions to obtain set-level features in an unsupervised manner and employs optimal transport principles to align the distributions of support and query sets, thereby mitigating distribution shift effects. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that STAR can capture more task-relevant information and enhance generalization capabilities. Empirically, extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of STAR. Our code can be found here.

Paperid: 3764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15299.pdf

Abstract:
Building a universal multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that performs equitably across languages has long been a challenge due to its inherent difficulties. To address this task we introduce a Language-Agnostic Multilingual ASR pipeline through orthography Unification and language-specific Transliteration (LAMA-UT). LAMA-UT operates without any language-specific modules while matching the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on a minimal amount of data. Our pipeline consists of two key steps. First, we utilize a universal transcription generator to unify orthographic features into Romanized form and capture common phonetic characteristics across diverse languages. Second, we utilize a universal converter to transform these universal transcriptions into language-specific ones. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method leveraging universal transcriptions for massively multilingual ASR. Our pipeline achieves a relative error reduction rate of 45% when compared to Whisper and performs comparably to MMS, despite being trained on only 0.1% of Whisper's training data. Furthermore, our pipeline does not rely on any language-specific modules. However, it performs on par with zero-shot ASR approaches which utilize additional language-specific lexicons and language models. We expect this framework to serve as a cornerstone for flexible multilingual ASR systems that are generalizable even to unseen languages.

Paperid: 3765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14384.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) enables zero-shot inference in downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval and classification. However, recent works extending CLIP suffer from the issue of modality gap, which arises when the image and text embeddings are projected to disparate manifolds, deviating from the intended objective of image-text contrastive learning. We discover that this phenomenon is linked to the modality-specific characteristic that each image/text encoder independently possesses and propose two methods to address the modality gap: (1) a post-hoc embedding standardization method, $\text{I0T}_{\text{post}}$ that reduces the modality gap approximately to zero and (2) a trainable method, $\text{I0T}_{\text{async}}$, to alleviate the modality gap problem by adding two normalization layers for each encoder. Our I0T framework can significantly reduce the modality gap while preserving the original embedding representations of trained models with their locked parameters. In practice, $\text{I0T}_{\text{post}}$ can serve as an alternative explainable automatic evaluation metric of widely used CLIPScore (CLIP-S).

Paperid: 3766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11484.pdf

Abstract:
For embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents interacting with the environment, it is desirable to have rapid policy adaptation to unseen visual observations, but achieving zero-shot adaptation capability is considered as a challenging problem in the RL context. To address the problem, we present a novel contrastive prompt ensemble (ConPE) framework which utilizes a pretrained vision-language model and a set of visual prompts, thus enabling efficient policy learning and adaptation upon a wide range of environmental and physical changes encountered by embodied agents. Specifically, we devise a guided-attention-based ensemble approach with multiple visual prompts on the vision-language model to construct robust state representations. Each prompt is contrastively learned in terms of an individual domain factor that significantly affects the agent's egocentric perception and observation. For a given task, the attention-based ensemble and policy are jointly learned so that the resulting state representations not only generalize to various domains but are also optimized for learning the task. Through experiments, we show that ConPE outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms for several embodied agent tasks including navigation in AI2THOR, manipulation in egocentric-Metaworld, and autonomous driving in CARLA, while also improving the sample efficiency of policy learning and adaptation.

Paperid: 3767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10121.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.

Paperid: 3768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09727.pdf

Abstract:
Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) combined with AI offers new opportunities for proactive diabetes management through real-time glucose forecasting. However, most existing models are task-specific and lack generalization across patient populations. Inspired by the autoregressive paradigm of large language models, we introduce CGM-LSM, a Transformer decoder-based Large Sensor Model (LSM) pretrained on 1.6 million CGM records from patients with different diabetes types, ages, and genders. We model patients as sequences of glucose time steps to learn latent knowledge embedded in CGM data and apply it to the prediction of glucose readings for a 2-hour horizon. Compared with prior methods, CGM-LSM significantly improves prediction accuracy and robustness: a 48.51% reduction in root mean square error in one-hour horizon forecasting and consistent zero-shot prediction performance across held-out patient groups. We analyze model performance variations across patient subgroups and prediction scenarios and outline key opportunities and challenges for advancing CGM foundation models.

Paperid: 3769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09719.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic signal control plays a crucial role in urban mobility. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize beyond their training environments to unseen scenarios with varying traffic dynamics. We present TransferLight, a novel framework designed for robust generalization across road-networks, diverse traffic conditions and intersection geometries. At its core, we propose a log-distance reward function, offering spatially-aware signal prioritization while remaining adaptable to varied lane configurations - overcoming the limitations of traditional pressure-based rewards. Our hierarchical, heterogeneous, and directed graph neural network architecture effectively captures granular traffic dynamics, enabling transferability to arbitrary intersection layouts. Using a decentralized multi-agent approach, global rewards, and novel state transition priors, we develop a single, weight-tied policy that scales zero-shot to any road network without re-training. Through domain randomization during training, we additionally enhance generalization capabilities. Experimental results validate TransferLight's superior performance in unseen scenarios, advancing practical, generalizable intelligent transportation systems to meet evolving urban traffic demands.

Paperid: 3770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01408.pdf

Abstract:
Online abusive content detection, particularly in low-resource settings and within the audio modality, remains underexplored. We investigate the potential of pre-trained audio representations for detecting abusive language in low-resource languages, in this case, in Indian languages using Few Shot Learning (FSL). Leveraging powerful representations from models such as Wav2Vec and Whisper, we explore cross-lingual abuse detection using the ADIMA dataset with FSL. Our approach integrates these representations within the Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework to classify abusive language in 10 languages. We experiment with various shot sizes (50-200) evaluating the impact of limited data on performance. Additionally, a feature visualization study was conducted to better understand model behaviour. This study highlights the generalization ability of pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios and offers valuable insights into detecting abusive language in multilingual contexts.

Paperid: 3771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00631.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction tuning has underscored the significant potential of large language models (LLMs) in producing more human controllable and effective outputs in various domains. In this work, we focus on the data selection problem for task-specific instruction tuning of LLMs. Prevailing methods primarily rely on the crafted similarity metrics to select training data that aligns with the test data distribution. The goal is to minimize instruction tuning loss on the test data, ultimately improving performance on the target task. However, it has been widely observed that instruction tuning loss (i.e., cross-entropy loss for next token prediction) in LLMs often fails to exhibit a monotonic relationship with actual task performance. This misalignment undermines the effectiveness of current data selection methods for task-specific instruction tuning. To address this issue, we introduce ROSE, a novel Reward-Oriented inStruction data sElection method which leverages pairwise preference loss as a reward signal to optimize data selection for task-specific instruction tuning. Specifically, ROSE adapts an influence formulation to approximate the influence of training data points relative to a few-shot preference validation set to select the most task-related training data points. Experimental results show that by selecting just 5\% of the training data using ROSE, our approach can achieve competitive results compared to fine-tuning with the full training dataset, and it surpasses other state-of-the-art data selection methods for task-specific instruction tuning. Our qualitative analysis further confirms the robust generalizability of our method across multiple benchmark datasets and diverse model architectures.

Paperid: 3772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12789.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in 3D generation models have opened new possibilities for simulating dynamic 3D object movements and customizing behaviors, yet creating this content remains challenging. Current methods often require manual assignment of precise physical properties for simulations or rely on video generation models to predict them, which is computationally intensive. In this paper, we rethink the usage of multi-modal large language model (MLLM) in physics-based simulation, and present Sim Anything, a physics-based approach that endows static 3D objects with interactive dynamics. We begin with detailed scene reconstruction and object-level 3D open-vocabulary segmentation, progressing to multi-view image in-painting. Inspired by human visual reasoning, we propose MLLM-based Physical Property Perception (MLLM-P3) to predict mean physical properties of objects in a zero-shot manner. Based on the mean values and the object's geometry, the Material Property Distribution Prediction model (MPDP) model then estimates the full distribution, reformulating the problem as probability distribution estimation to reduce computational costs. Finally, we simulate objects in an open-world scene with particles sampled via the Physical-Geometric Adaptive Sampling (PGAS) strategy, efficiently capturing complex deformations and significantly reducing computational costs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate our Sim Anything achieves more realistic motion than state-of-the-art methods within 2 minutes on a single GPU.

Paperid: 3773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07498.pdf

Abstract:
Smart contracts, self-executing agreements directly encoded in code, are fundamental to blockchain technology, especially in decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3. However, the rise of Ponzi schemes in smart contracts poses significant risks, leading to substantial financial losses and eroding trust in blockchain systems. Existing detection methods, such as PonziGuard, depend on large amounts of labeled data and struggle to identify unseen Ponzi schemes, limiting their reliability and generalizability. In contrast, we introduce PonziSleuth, the first LLM-driven approach for detecting Ponzi smart contracts, which requires no labeled training data. PonziSleuth utilizes advanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs to analyze smart contract source code through a novel two-step zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting technique. Our extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets and real-world contracts demonstrates that PonziSleuth delivers comparable, and often superior, performance without the extensive data requirements, achieving a balanced detection accuracy of 96.06% with GPT-3.5-turbo, 93.91% with LLAMA3, and 94.27% with Mistral. In real-world detection, PonziSleuth successfully identified 15 new Ponzi schemes from 4,597 contracts verified by Etherscan in March 2024, with a false negative rate of 0% and a false positive rate of 0.29%. These results highlight PonziSleuth's capability to detect diverse and novel Ponzi schemes, marking a significant advancement in leveraging LLMs for enhancing blockchain security and mitigating financial scams.

Paperid: 3774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04420.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language model (VLM) embeddings have been shown to encode biases present in their training data, such as societal biases that prescribe negative characteristics to members of various racial and gender identities. VLMs are being quickly adopted for a variety of tasks ranging from few-shot classification to text-guided image generation, making debiasing VLM embeddings crucial. Debiasing approaches that fine-tune the VLM often suffer from catastrophic forgetting. On the other hand, fine-tuning-free methods typically utilize a "one-size-fits-all" approach that assumes that correlation with the spurious attribute can be explained using a single linear direction across all possible inputs. In this work, we propose Bend-VLM, a nonlinear, fine-tuning-free approach for VLM embedding debiasing that tailors the debiasing operation to each unique input. This allows for a more flexible debiasing approach. Additionally, we do not require knowledge of the set of inputs a priori to inference time, making our method more appropriate for online, open-set tasks such as retrieval and text guided image generation.

Paperid: 3775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03408.pdf

Abstract:
Efficient learning from demonstration for long-horizon tasks remains an open challenge in robotics. While significant effort has been directed toward learning trajectories, a recent resurgence of object-centric approaches has demonstrated improved sample efficiency, enabling transferable robotic skills. Such approaches model tasks as a sequence of object poses over time. In this work, we propose a scheme for transferring observed object arrangements to novel object instances by learning these arrangements on canonical class frames. We then employ this scheme to enable a simple yet effective approach for training models from as few as five demonstrations to predict arrangements of a wide range of objects including tableware, cutlery, furniture, and desk spaces. We propose a method for optimizing the learned models to enables efficient learning of tasks such as setting a table or tidying up an office with intra-category transfer, even in the presence of distractors. We present extensive experimental results in simulation and on a real robotic system for table setting which, based on human evaluations, scored 73.3% compared to a human baseline. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://oplict.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Paperid: 3776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02026.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in zero-shot voice conversion (VC), achieving speaker similarity and naturalness comparable to ground-truth recordings remains a significant challenge. In this letter, we propose CTEFM-VC, a zero-shot VC framework that integrates content-aware timbre ensemble modeling with conditional flow matching. Specifically, CTEFM-VC decouples utterances into content and timbre representations and leverages a conditional flow matching model to reconstruct the Mel-spectrogram of the source speech. To enhance its timbre modeling capability and naturalness of generated speech, we first introduce a context-aware timbre ensemble modeling approach that adaptively integrates diverse speaker verification embeddings and enables the effective utilization of source content and target timbre elements through a cross-attention module. Furthermore, a structural similarity-based timbre loss is presented to jointly train CTEFM-VC end-to-end. Experiments show that CTEFM-VC consistently achieves the best performance in all metrics assessing speaker similarity, speech naturalness, and intelligibility, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art zero-shot VC systems.

Paperid: 3777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00107.pdf

Abstract:
Combining data-driven models that adapt online and model predictive control (MPC) has enabled effective control of nonlinear systems. However, when deployed on unstable systems, online adaptation may not be fast enough to ensure reliable simultaneous learning and control. For example, a controller on a vehicle executing highly dynamic maneuvers--such as drifting to avoid an obstacle--may push the vehicle's tires to their friction limits, destabilizing the vehicle and allowing modeling errors to quickly compound and cause a loss of control. To address this challenge, we present an active information gathering framework for identifying vehicle dynamics as quickly as possible. We propose an expressive vehicle dynamics model that leverages Bayesian last-layer meta-learning to enable rapid online adaptation. The model's uncertainty estimates are used to guide informative data collection and quickly improve the model prior to deployment. Dynamic drifting experiments on a Toyota Supra show that (i) the framework enables reliable control of a vehicle at the edge of stability, (ii) online adaptation alone may not suffice for zero-shot control and can lead to undesirable transient errors or spin-outs, and (iii) active data collection helps achieve reliable performance.

Paperid: 3778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23208.pdf

Abstract:
While large models trained with self-supervised learning on offline datasets have shown remarkable capabilities in text and image domains, achieving the same generalisation for agents that act in sequential decision problems remains an open challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by procedurally generating tens of millions of 2D physics-based tasks and using these to train a general reinforcement learning (RL) agent for physical control. To this end, we introduce Kinetix: an open-ended space of physics-based RL environments that can represent tasks ranging from robotic locomotion and grasping to video games and classic RL environments, all within a unified framework. Kinetix makes use of our novel hardware-accelerated physics engine Jax2D that allows us to cheaply simulate billions of environment steps during training. Our trained agent exhibits strong physical reasoning capabilities in 2D space, being able to zero-shot solve unseen human-designed environments. Furthermore, fine-tuning this general agent on tasks of interest shows significantly stronger performance than training an RL agent *tabula rasa*. This includes solving some environments that standard RL training completely fails at. We believe this demonstrates the feasibility of large scale, mixed-quality pre-training for online RL and we hope that Kinetix will serve as a useful framework to investigate this further.

Paperid: 3779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21242.pdf

Abstract:
Building effective dense retrieval systems remains difficult when relevance supervision is not available. Recent work has looked to overcome this challenge by using a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate hypothetical documents that can be used to find the closest real document. However, this approach relies solely on the LLM to have domain-specific knowledge relevant to the query, which may not be practical. Furthermore, generating hypothetical documents can be inefficient as it requires the LLM to generate a large number of tokens for each query. To address these challenges, we introduce Real Document Embeddings from Relevance Feedback (ReDE-RF). Inspired by relevance feedback, ReDE-RF proposes to re-frame hypothetical document generation as a relevance estimation task, using an LLM to select which documents should be used for nearest neighbor search. Through this re-framing, the LLM no longer needs domain-specific knowledge but only needs to judge what is relevant. Additionally, relevance estimation only requires the LLM to output a single token, thereby improving search latency. Our experiments show that ReDE-RF consistently surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot dense retrieval methods across a wide range of low-resource retrieval datasets while also making significant improvements in latency per-query.

Paperid: 3780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20990.pdf

Abstract:
The skill to drift a car--i.e., operate in a state of controlled oversteer like professional drivers--could give future autonomous cars maximum flexibility when they need to retain control in adverse conditions or avoid collisions. We investigate real-time drifting strategies that put the car where needed while bypassing expensive trajectory optimization. To this end, we design a reinforcement learning agent that builds on the concept of tire energy absorption to autonomously drift through changing and complex waypoint configurations while safely staying within track bounds. We achieve zero-shot deployment on the car by training the agent in a simulation environment built on top of a neural stochastic differential equation vehicle model learned from pre-collected driving data. Experiments on a Toyota GR Supra and Lexus LC 500 show that the agent is capable of drifting smoothly through varying waypoint configurations with tracking error as low as 10 cm while stably pushing the vehicles to sideslip angles of up to 63Â°.

Paperid: 3781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18894.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning is a general approach to equip machine learning models with the ability to handle few-shot scenarios when dealing with many tasks. Most existing meta-learning methods work based on the assumption that all tasks are of equal importance. However, real-world applications often present heterogeneous tasks characterized by varying difficulty levels, noise in training samples, or being distinctively different from most other tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel meta-learning method designed to effectively manage such heterogeneous tasks by employing rank-based task-level learning objectives, Heterogeneous Tasks Robust Meta-learning (HeTRoM). HeTRoM is proficient in handling heterogeneous tasks, and it prevents easy tasks from overwhelming the meta-learner. The approach allows for an efficient iterative optimization algorithm based on bi-level optimization, which is then improved by integrating statistical guidance. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method provides flexibility, enabling users to adapt to diverse task settings and enhancing the meta-learner's overall performance.

Paperid: 3782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16290.pdf

Abstract:
Compressed Sensing MRI reconstructs images of the body's internal anatomy from undersampled measurements, thereby reducing scan time. Recently, deep learning has shown great potential for reconstructing high-fidelity images from highly undersampled measurements. However, one needs to train multiple models for different undersampling patterns and desired output image resolutions, since most networks operate on a fixed discretization. Such approaches are highly impractical in clinical settings, where undersampling patterns and image resolutions are frequently changed to accommodate different real-time imaging and diagnostic requirements. We propose a unified MRI reconstruction model robust to various measurement undersampling patterns and image resolutions. Our approach uses neural operators, a discretization-agnostic architecture applied in both image and measurement spaces, to capture local and global features. Empirically, our model improves SSIM by 11% and PSNR by 4 dB over a state-of-the-art CNN (End-to-End VarNet), with 600$\times$ faster inference than diffusion methods. The resolution-agnostic design also enables zero-shot super-resolution and extended field-of-view reconstruction, offering a versatile and efficient solution for clinical MR imaging. Our unified model offers a versatile solution for MRI, adapting seamlessly to various measurement undersampling and imaging resolutions, making it highly effective for flexible and reliable clinical imaging. Our code is available at https://armeet.ca/nomri.

Paperid: 3783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15876.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in addressing complex cooperative tasks across various real-world applications. However, existing MARL approaches often rely on the restrictive assumption that the number of entities (e.g., agents, obstacles) remains constant between training and inference. This overlooks scenarios where entities are dynamically removed or added during the inference trajectory -- a common occurrence in real-world environments like search and rescue missions and dynamic combat situations. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of intra-trajectory dynamic entity composition under zero-shot out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, where such dynamic changes cannot be anticipated beforehand. Our empirical studies reveal that existing MARL methods suffer significant performance degradation and increased uncertainty in these scenarios. In response, we propose FlickerFusion, a novel OOD generalization method that acts as a universally applicable augmentation technique for MARL backbone methods. FlickerFusion stochastically drops out parts of the observation space, emulating being in-domain when inferenced OOD. The results show that FlickerFusion not only achieves superior inference rewards but also uniquely reduces uncertainty vis-Ã -vis the backbone, compared to existing methods. Benchmarks, implementations, and model weights are organized and open-sourced at flickerfusion305.github.io, accompanied by ample demo video renderings.

Paperid: 3784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15315.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

Paperid: 3785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11522.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we present a novel method for music emotion recognition that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings for label alignment across multiple datasets and zero-shot prediction on novel categories. First, we compute LLM embeddings for emotion labels and apply non-parametric clustering to group similar labels, across multiple datasets containing disjoint labels. We use these cluster centers to map music features (MERT) to the LLM embedding space. To further enhance the model, we introduce an alignment regularization that enables dissociation of MERT embeddings from different clusters. This further enhances the model's ability to better adaptation to unseen datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by performing zero-shot inference on a new dataset, showcasing its ability to generalize to unseen labels without additional training.

Paperid: 3786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10714.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but face significant challenges in widespread deployment due to their high runtime cost. In this paper, we introduce SeedLM, a novel post-training compression method that uses seeds of pseudo-random generators to encode and compress model weights. Specifically, for each block of weights, we find a seed that is fed into a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) during inference to efficiently generate a random matrix. This matrix is then linearly combined with compressed coefficients to reconstruct the weight block. SeedLM reduces memory access and leverages idle compute cycles during inference, effectively speeding up memory-bound tasks by trading compute for fewer memory accesses. Unlike state-of-the-art compression methods that rely on calibration data, our approach is data-free and generalizes well across diverse tasks. Our experiments with Llama 3 70B, which is particularly challenging to compress, show that SeedLM achieves significantly better zero-shot accuracy retention at 4- and 3-bit than state-of-the-art techniques, while maintaining performance comparable to FP16 baselines. Additionally, FPGA-based tests demonstrate that 4-bit SeedLM, as model size increases to 70B, approaches a 4x speed-up over an FP16 Llama 2/3 baseline.

Paperid: 3787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09176.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we investigate the performance of few-shot classification models across different domains, specifically natural images and histopathological images. We first train several few-shot classification models on natural images and evaluate their performance on histopathological images. Subsequently, we train the same models on histopathological images and compare their performance. We incorporated four histopathology datasets and one natural images dataset and assessed performance across 5-way 1-shot, 5-way 5-shot, and 5-way 10-shot scenarios using a selection of state-of-the-art classification techniques. Our experimental results reveal insights into the transferability and generalization capabilities of few-shot classification models between diverse image domains. We analyze the strengths and limitations of these models in adapting to new domains and provide recommendations for optimizing their performance in cross-domain scenarios. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of few-shot learning in the context of image classification across diverse domains.

Paperid: 3788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07610.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal encoders like CLIP excel in tasks such as zero-shot image classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, they require excessive training data. We propose canonical similarity analysis (CSA), which uses two unimodal encoders to replicate multimodal encoders using limited data. CSA maps unimodal features into a multimodal space, using a new similarity score to retain only the multimodal information. CSA only involves the inference of unimodal encoders and a cubic-complexity matrix decomposition, eliminating the need for extensive GPU-based model training. Experiments show that CSA outperforms CLIP while requiring $50,000\times$ fewer multimodal data pairs to bridge the modalities given pre-trained unimodal encoders on ImageNet classification and misinformative news caption detection. CSA surpasses the state-of-the-art method to map unimodal features to multimodal features. We also demonstrate the ability of CSA with modalities beyond image and text, paving the way for future modality pairs with limited paired multimodal data but abundant unpaired unimodal data, such as lidar and text.

Paperid: 3789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02637.pdf

Abstract:
While multimodal foundation models can now natively work with data beyond text, they remain underutilized in analyzing the considerable amounts of multi-dimensional time-series data in fields like healthcare, finance, and social sciences, representing a missed opportunity for richer, data-driven insights. This paper proposes a simple but effective method that leverages the existing vision encoders of these models to "see" time-series data via plots, avoiding the need for additional, potentially costly, model training. Our empirical evaluations show that this approach outperforms providing the raw time-series data as text, with the additional benefit that visual time-series representations demonstrate up to a 90% reduction in model API costs. We validate our hypothesis through synthetic data tasks of increasing complexity, progressing from simple functional form identification on clean data, to extracting trends from noisy scatter plots. To demonstrate generalizability from synthetic tasks with clear reasoning steps to more complex, real-world scenarios, we apply our approach to consumer health tasks - specifically fall detection, activity recognition, and readiness assessment - which involve heterogeneous, noisy data and multi-step reasoning. The overall success in plot performance over text performance (up to an 120% performance increase on zero-shot synthetic tasks, and up to 150% performance increase on real-world tasks), across both GPT and Gemini model families, highlights our approach's potential for making the best use of the native capabilities of foundation models.

Paperid: 3790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01943.pdf

Abstract:
In tackling the challenges of large language model (LLM) performance for Text-to-SQL tasks, we introduce CHASE-SQL, a new framework that employs innovative strategies, using test-time compute in multi-agent modeling to improve candidate generation and selection. CHASE-SQL leverages LLMs' intrinsic knowledge to generate diverse and high-quality SQL candidates using different LLM generators with: (1) a divide-and-conquer method that decomposes complex queries into manageable sub-queries in a single LLM call; (2) chain-of-thought reasoning based on query execution plans, reflecting the steps a database engine takes during execution; and (3) a unique instance-aware synthetic example generation technique, which offers specific few-shot demonstrations tailored to test questions.To identify the best candidate, a selection agent is employed to rank the candidates through pairwise comparisons with a fine-tuned binary-candidates selection LLM. This selection approach has been demonstrated to be more robust over alternatives. The proposed generators-selector framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods. Overall, our proposed CHASE-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 73.0% and 73.01% on the test set and development set of the notable BIRD Text-to-SQL dataset benchmark, rendering CHASE-SQL the top submission of the leaderboard (at the time of paper submission).

Paperid: 3791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00713.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection is a core capability for robotic perception and industrial inspection, yet most existing benchmarks are collected under controlled conditions with fixed viewpoints and stable illumination, failing to reflect real deployment scenarios. We introduce RAD (Realistic Anomaly Detection), a robot-captured, multi-view dataset designed to stress pose variation, reflective materials, and viewpoint-dependent defect visibility. RAD covers 13 everyday object categories and four realistic defect types--scratched, missing, stained, and squeezed--captured from over 60 robot viewpoints per object under uncontrolled lighting. We benchmark a wide range of state-of-the-art approaches, including 2D feature-based methods, 3D reconstruction pipelines, and vision-language models (VLMs), under a pose-agnostic setting. Surprisingly, we find that mature 2D feature-embedding methods consistently outperform recent 3D and VLM-based approaches at the image level, while the performance gap narrows for pixel-level localization. Our analysis reveals that reflective surfaces, geometric symmetry, and sparse viewpoint coverage fundamentally limit current geometry-based and zero-shot methods. RAD establishes a challenging and realistic benchmark for robotic anomaly detection, highlighting critical open problems beyond controlled laboratory settings.

Paperid: 3792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00334.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.

Paperid: 3793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20054.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate zero-shot cross-lingual news sentiment detection, aiming to develop robust sentiment classifiers that can be deployed across multiple languages without target-language training data. We introduce novel evaluation datasets in several less-resourced languages, and experiment with a range of approaches including the use of machine translation; in-context learning with large language models; and various intermediate training regimes including a novel task objective, POA, that leverages paragraph-level information. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over the state of the art, with in-context learning generally giving the best performance, but with the novel POA approach giving a competitive alternative with much lower computational overhead. We also show that language similarity is not in itself sufficient for predicting the success of cross-lingual transfer, but that similarity in semantic content and structure can be equally important.

Paperid: 3794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17332.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating deep learning into medical imaging is poised to greatly advance diagnostic methods but it faces challenges with generalizability. Foundation models, based on self-supervised learning, address these issues and improve data efficiency. Natural domain foundation models show promise for medical imaging, but systematic research evaluating domain adaptation, especially using self-supervised learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, remains underexplored. Additionally, little research addresses the issue of catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning of foundation models. We adapted the DINOv2 vision transformer for retinal imaging classification tasks using self-supervised learning and generated two novel foundation models termed DINORET and BE DINORET. Publicly available color fundus photographs were employed for model development and subsequent fine-tuning for diabetic retinopathy staging and glaucoma detection. We introduced block expansion as a novel domain adaptation strategy and assessed the models for catastrophic forgetting. Models were benchmarked to RETFound, a state-of-the-art foundation model in ophthalmology. DINORET and BE DINORET demonstrated competitive performance on retinal imaging tasks, with the block expanded model achieving the highest scores on most datasets. Block expansion successfully mitigated catastrophic forgetting. Our few-shot learning studies indicated that DINORET and BE DINORET outperform RETFound in terms of data-efficiency. This study highlights the potential of adapting natural domain vision models to retinal imaging using self-supervised learning and block expansion. BE DINORET offers robust performance without sacrificing previously acquired capabilities. Our findings suggest that these methods could enable healthcare institutions to develop tailored vision models for their patient populations, enhancing global healthcare inclusivity.

Paperid: 3795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14674.pdf

Abstract:
Developing robust and correctable visuomotor policies for robotic manipulation is challenging due to the lack of self-recovery mechanisms from failures and the limitations of simple language instructions in guiding robot actions. To address these issues, we propose a scalable data generation pipeline that automatically augments expert demonstrations with failure recovery trajectories and fine-grained language annotations for training. We then introduce Rich languAge-guided failure reCovERy (RACER), a supervisor-actor framework, which combines failure recovery data with rich language descriptions to enhance robot control. RACER features a vision-language model (VLM) that acts as an online supervisor, providing detailed language guidance for error correction and task execution, and a language-conditioned visuomotor policy as an actor to predict the next actions. Our experimental results show that RACER outperforms the state-of-the-art Robotic View Transformer (RVT) on RLbench across various evaluation settings, including standard long-horizon tasks, dynamic goal-change tasks and zero-shot unseen tasks, achieving superior performance in both simulated and real world environments. Videos and code are available at: https://rich-language-failure-recovery.github.io.

Paperid: 3796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14608.pdf

Abstract:
Robust manipulation often hinges on a robot's ability to perceive extrinsic contacts-contacts between a grasped object and its surrounding environment. However, these contacts are difficult to observe through vision alone due to occlusions, limited resolution, and ambiguous near-contact states. In this paper, we propose a visual-auditory method for extrinsic contact estimation that integrates global scene information from vision with local contact cues obtained through active audio sensing. Our approach equips a robotic gripper with contact microphones and conduction speakers, enabling the system to emit and receive acoustic signals through the grasped object to detect external contacts. We train our perception pipeline entirely in simulation and zero-shot transfer to the real world. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we introduce a real-to-sim audio hallucination technique, injecting real-world audio samples into simulated scenes with ground-truth contact labels. The resulting multimodal model accurately estimates both the location and size of extrinsic contacts across a range of cluttered and occluded scenarios. We further demonstrate that explicit contact prediction significantly improves policy learning for downstream contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 3797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12369.pdf

Abstract:
Program slicing is a critical technique in software engineering, enabling developers to isolate relevant portions of code for tasks such as bug detection, code comprehension, and debugging. In this study, we investigate the application of large language models (LLMs) to both static and dynamic program slicing, with a focus on Java programs. We evaluate the performance of four state-of-the-art LLMs- GPT-4o, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Llama-2, and Gemma-7B leveraging advanced prompting techniques, including few-shot learning and chain-of-thought reasoning. Using a dataset of 100 Java programs derived from LeetCode problems, our experiments reveal that GPT-4o performs the best in both static and dynamic slicing across other LLMs, achieving an accuracy of 60.84% and 59.69%, respectively. Our results also show that the LLMs we experimented with are yet to achieve reasonable performance for either static slicing or dynamic slicing. Through a rigorous manual analysis, we developed a taxonomy of root causes and failure locations to explore the unsuccessful cases in more depth. We identified Complex Control Flow as the most frequent root cause of failures, with the majority of issues occurring in Variable Declarations and Assignments locations. To improve the performance of LLMs, we further examined two independent strategies for prompting guided by our taxonomy, including prompt crafting, which involved refining the prompts to better guide the LLM through the slicing process, and iterative prompting, where the model receives feedback on the root cause and location of the failure and re-generates its responses. Our evaluation shows these two prompting enhancement approaches can improve accuracy by 4% and 3.9%, respectively.

Paperid: 3798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07295.pdf

Abstract:
Automated pavement monitoring using computer vision can analyze pavement conditions more efficiently and accurately than manual methods. Accurate segmentation is essential for quantifying the severity and extent of pavement defects and consequently, the overall condition index used for prioritizing rehabilitation and maintenance activities. Deep learning-based segmentation models are however, often supervised and require pixel-level annotations, which can be costly and time-consuming. While the recent evolution of zero-shot segmentation models can generate pixel-wise labels for unseen classes without any training data, they struggle with irregularities of cracks and textured pavement backgrounds. This research proposes a zero-shot segmentation model, PaveSAM, that can segment pavement distresses using bounding box prompts. By retraining SAM's mask decoder with just 180 images, pavement distress segmentation is revolutionized, enabling efficient distress segmentation using bounding box prompts, a capability not found in current segmentation models. This not only drastically reduces labeling efforts and costs but also showcases our model's high performance with minimal input, establishing the pioneering use of SAM in pavement distress segmentation. Furthermore, researchers can use existing open-source pavement distress images annotated with bounding boxes to create segmentation masks, which increases the availability and diversity of segmentation pavement distress datasets.

Paperid: 3799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21841.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot reasoning capabilities, their deployment as embodied agents still faces fundamental challenges in long-horizon planning. Unlike open-ended text generation, embodied agents must decompose high-level intent into actionable sub-goals while strictly adhering to the logic of a dynamic, observed environment. Standard LLM planners frequently fail to maintain strategy coherence over extended horizons due to context window limitation or hallucinate transitions that violate constraints. We propose GiG, a novel planning framework that structures embodied agents' memory using a Graph-in-Graph architecture. Our approach employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to encode environmental states into embeddings, organizing these embeddings into action-connected execution trace graphs within an experience memory bank. By clustering these graph embeddings, the framework enables retrieval of structure-aware priors, allowing agents to ground current decisions in relevant past structural patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a novel bounded lookahead module that leverages symbolic transition logic to enhance the agents' planning capabilities through the grounded action projection. We evaluate our framework on three embodied planning benchmarks-Robotouille Synchronous, Robotouille Asynchronous, and ALFWorld. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving Pass@1 performance gains of up to 22% on Robotouille Synchronous, 37% on Asynchronous, and 15% on ALFWorld with comparable or lower computational cost.

Paperid: 3800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21675.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal stance detection (MSD) aims to determine an author's stance toward a given target using both textual and visual content. While recent methods leverage multi-modal fusion and prompt-based learning, most fail to distinguish between modality-specific signals and cross-modal evidence, leading to suboptimal performance. We propose DiME (Disentangled Multi-modal Experts), a novel architecture that explicitly separates stance information into textual-dominant, visual-dominant, and cross-modal shared components. DiME first uses a target-aware Chain-of-Thought prompt to generate reasoning-guided textual input. Then, dual encoders extract modality features, which are processed by three expert modules with specialized loss functions: contrastive learning for modality-specific experts and cosine alignment for shared representation learning. A gating network adaptively fuses expert outputs for final prediction. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that DiME consistently outperforms strong unimodal and multi-modal baselines under both in-target and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 3801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14711.pdf

Abstract:
Optimizing the advertiser's cumulative value of winning impressions under budget constraints poses a complex challenge in online advertising, under the paradigm of AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB). Advertisers often have personalized objectives but limited historical interaction data, resulting in few-shot scenarios where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to perform effectively. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative for AIGB by leveraging their in-context learning capabilities to generalize from limited data. However, they lack the numerical precision required for fine-grained optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce GRPO-Adaptive, an efficient LLM post-training strategy that enhances both reasoning and numerical precision by dynamically updating the reference policy during training. Built upon this foundation, we further propose DARA, a novel dual-phase framework that decomposes the decision-making process into two stages: a few-shot reasoner that generates initial plans via in-context prompting, and a fine-grained optimizer that refines these plans using feedback-driven reasoning. This separation allows DARA to combine LLMs' in-context learning strengths with precise adaptability required by AIGB tasks. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic data environments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in terms of cumulative advertiser value under budget constraints.

Paperid: 3802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14446.pdf

Abstract:
Offline black-box optimization (BBO) aims to find optimal designs based solely on an offline dataset of designs and their labels. Such scenarios frequently arise in domains like DNA sequence design and robotics, where only a few labeled data points are available. Traditional methods typically rely on task-specific proxy or generative models, overlooking the in-context learning capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Recent efforts have adapted autoregressive LLMs to BBO by framing task descriptions and offline datasets as natural language prompts, enabling direct design generation. However, these designs often contain bidirectional dependencies, which left-to-right models struggle to capture. In this paper, we explore diffusion LLMs for BBO, leveraging their bidirectional modeling and iterative refinement capabilities. This motivates our in-context denoising module: we condition the diffusion LLM on the task description and the offline dataset, both formatted in natural language, and prompt it to denoise masked designs into improved candidates. To guide the generation toward high-performing designs, we introduce masked diffusion tree search, which casts the denoising process as a step-wise Monte Carlo Tree Search that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation. Each node represents a partially masked design, each denoising step is an action, and candidates are evaluated via expected improvement under a Gaussian Process trained on the offline dataset. Our method, dLLM, achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot settings on design-bench.

Paperid: 3803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02906.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual speech foundation models such as Whisper are trained on web-scale data, where data for each language consists of a myriad of regional varieties. However, different regional varieties often employ different scripts to write the same language, rendering speech recognition output also subject to non-determinism in the output script. To mitigate this problem, we show that script is linearly encoded in the activation space of multilingual speech models, and that modifying activations at inference time enables direct control over output script. We find the addition of such script vectors to activations at test time can induce script change even in unconventional language-script pairings (e.g. Italian in Cyrillic and Japanese in Latin script). We apply this approach to inducing post-hoc control over the script of speech recognition output, where we observe competitive performance across all model sizes of Whisper.

Paperid: 3804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20044.pdf

Abstract:
Most computational accounts of cognitive maps assume that stability is achieved primarily through sensory anchoring, with self-motion contributing to incremental positional updates only. However, biological spatial representations often remain coherent even when sensory cues degrade or conflict, suggesting that self-motion may play a deeper organizational role. Here, we show that self-motion can act as a structural prior that actively organizes the geometry of learned cognitive maps. We embed a path-integration-based motion prior in a predictive-coding framework, implemented using a capacity-efficient, brain-inspired recurrent mechanism combining spiking dynamics, analog modulation and adaptive thresholds. Across highly aliased, dynamically changing and naturalistic environments, this structural prior consistently stabilizes map formation, improving local topological fidelity, global positional accuracy and next-step prediction under sensory ambiguity. Mechanistic analyses reveal that the motion prior itself encodes geometrically precise trajectories under tight constraints of internal states and generalizes zero-shot to unseen environments, outperforming simpler motion-based constraints. Finally, deployment on a quadrupedal robot demonstrates that motion-derived structural priors enhance online landmark-based navigation under real-world sensory variability. Together, these results reframe self-motion as an organizing scaffold for coherent spatial representations, showing how brain-inspired principles can systematically strengthen spatial intelligence in embodied artificial agents.

Paperid: 3805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19347.pdf

Abstract:
Robot manipulation, a key capability of embodied AI, has turned to data-driven generative policy frameworks, but mainstream approaches like Diffusion Models suffer from high inference latency and Flow-based Methods from increased architectural complexity. While simply applying meanFlow on robotic tasks achieves single-step inference and outperforms FlowPolicy, it lacks few-shot generalization due to fixed temperature hyperparameters in its Dispersive Loss and misaligned predicted-true mean velocities. To solve these issues, this study proposes an improved MeanFlow-based Policies: we introduce a lightweight Cosine Loss to align velocity directions and use the Differential Derivation Equation (DDE) to optimize the Jacobian-Vector Product (JVP) operator. Experiments on Adroit and Meta-World tasks show the proposed method outperforms MP1 and FlowPolicy in average success rate, especially in challenging Meta-World tasks, effectively enhancing few-shot generalization and trajectory accuracy of robot manipulation policies while maintaining real-time performance, offering a more robust solution for high-precision robotic manipulation.

Paperid: 3806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18504.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle in open-world applications, where out-of-distribution (OOD) concepts often trigger cross-modal alignment collapse and severely degrade zero-shot performance. We identify the root cause as modal asymmetry: while the visual encoder can extract discriminative features from unseen images, the text encoder is constrained by a fixed discrete vocabulary and cannot synthesize new semantic anchors. Existing approaches such as CoOp or LoRA provide only partial remedies, as they remain confined to the pre-trained semantic space. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose dynamic representation optimization, realized through the Guided Target-Matching Adaptation (GTMA) framework. At inference time, GTMA constructs a continuous pseudo-word embedding that best aligns with an OOD image's visual anchor, effectively bypassing vocabulary limitations. The optimization is driven by an adaptive gradient-based representation policy optimization algorithm, which incorporates semantic regularization to preserve plausibility and compatibility with the model's prior knowledge. Experiments on ImageNet-R and the VISTA-Beyond benchmark demonstrate that GTMA improves zero-shot and few-shot OOD accuracy by up to 15-20 percent over the base VLM while maintaining performance on in-distribution concepts. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of pseudo-word optimization.

Paperid: 3807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17313.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the impressive zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they often struggle in downstream tasks with distribution shifts from the pre-training data. Few-Shot Adaptation (FSA-VLM) has emerged as a key solution, typically using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to adapt models with minimal data. However, these PEFT methods are constrained by their reliance on fixed, handcrafted prompts, which are often insufficient to understand the semantics of classes. While some studies have proposed leveraging image-induced prompts to provide additional clues for classification, they introduce prohibitive computational overhead at inference. Therefore, we introduce Auxiliary Descriptive Knowledge (ADK), a novel framework that efficiently enriches text representations without compromising efficiency. ADK first leverages a Large Language Model to generate a rich set of descriptive prompts for each class offline. These pre-computed features are then deployed in two ways: (1) as Compositional Knowledge, an averaged representation that provides rich semantics, especially beneficial when class names are ambiguous or unfamiliar to the VLM; and (2) as Instance-Specific Knowledge, where a lightweight, non-parametric attention mechanism dynamically selects the most relevant descriptions for a given image. This approach provides two additional types of knowledge alongside the handcrafted prompt, thereby facilitating category distinction across various domains. Also, ADK acts as a parameter-free, plug-and-play component that enhances existing PEFT methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADK consistently boosts the performance of multiple PEFT baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art across various scenarios.

Paperid: 3808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15505.pdf

Abstract:
The LUMIR challenge represents an important benchmark for evaluating deformable image registration methods on large-scale neuroimaging data. While the challenge demonstrates that modern deep learning methods achieve competitive accuracy on T1-weighted MRI, it also claims exceptional zero-shot generalization to unseen contrasts and resolutions, assertions that contradict established understanding of domain shift in deep learning. In this paper, we perform an independent re-evaluation of these zero-shot claims using rigorous evaluation protocols while addressing potential sources of instrumentation bias. Our findings reveal a more nuanced picture: (1) deep learning methods perform comparably to iterative optimization on in-distribution T1w images and even on human-adjacent species (macaque), demonstrating improved task understanding; (2) however, performance degrades significantly on out-of-distribution contrasts (T2, T2*, FLAIR), with Cohen's d scores ranging from 0.7-1.5, indicating substantial practical impact on downstream clinical workflows; (3) deep learning methods face scalability limitations on high-resolution data, failing to run on 0.6 mm isotropic images, while iterative methods benefit from increased resolution; and (4) deep methods exhibit high sensitivity to preprocessing choices. These results align with the well-established literature on domain shift and suggest that claims of universal zero-shot superiority require careful scrutiny. We advocate for evaluation protocols that reflect practical clinical and research workflows rather than conditions that may inadvertently favor particular method classes.

Paperid: 3809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02631.pdf

Abstract:
Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) agents based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from perception errors, reasoning errors, and planning errors, which significantly hinder their navigation performance. To address these limitations, a novel VLN agent framework, named SeeNav-Agent, is proposed in this work. First, to reduce perception hallucinations of the visual module of the VLN agent, a dual-view Visual Prompt (VP) technique is introduced in the input space, which can also improve the agent's understanding of current spatial states. Subsequently, a novel step-level Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) method, Step Reward Group Policy Optimization (SRGPO), is designed for the post-training of VLN agents. In SRGPO, we first define verifiable process rewards for the navigation task, and then perform efficient step-level advantage estimation by randomly grouping different navigation steps. SRGPO provides dense reward signals for the reinforcement learning process of the VLN agent and enhances its planning capability. Experimental results on the EmbodiedBench Navigation benchmark indicate that by introducing the zero-shot VP module, the GPT-4.1 achieves a navigation success rate of 86.7%, surpassing the current best LVLM by approximately 20 percentage points (pp). Through post-training based on SRGPO, the Qwen2.5-VL-3B model reaches a navigation success rate of 72.3%, outperforming the best existing LVLM model by 5.6 pp. Moreover, compared to RFT algorithms such as GRPO and GiGPO, the proposed SRGPO demonstrates significant improvements in training stability, convergence efficiency, and generalization capability.

Paperid: 3810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16224.pdf

Abstract:
Smart Contracts are critical components of blockchain ecosystems, with Solidity as the dominant programming language. While LLMs excel at general-purpose code generation, the unique constraints of Smart Contracts, such as gas consumption, security, and determinism, raise open questions about the reliability of LLM-generated Solidity code. Existing studies lack a comprehensive evaluation of these critical functional and non-functional properties. We benchmark four state-of-the-art models under zero-shot and retrieval-augmented generation settings across 500 real-world functions. Our multi-faceted assessment employs code similarity metrics, semantic embeddings, automated test execution, gas profiling, and cognitive and cyclomatic complexity analysis. Results show that while LLMs produce code with high semantic similarity to real contracts, their functional correctness is low: only 20% to 26% of zero-shot generations behave identically to ground-truth implementations under testing. The generated code is consistently simpler, with significantly lower complexity and gas consumption, often due to omitted validation logic. Retrieval-Augmented Generation markedly improves performance, boosting functional correctness by up to 45% and yielding more concise and efficient code. Our findings reveal a significant gap between semantic similarity and functional plausibility in LLM-generated Smart Contracts. We conclude that while RAG is a powerful enhancer, achieving robust, production-ready code generation remains a substantial challenge, necessitating careful expert validation.

Paperid: 3811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13116.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to ensure privacy compliance. However, most existing methods assume full access to the original training dataset, which is often impractical. We address a more realistic yet challenging setting: few-shot zero-glance, where only a small subset of the retained data is available and the forget set is entirely inaccessible. We introduce GFOES, a novel framework comprising a Generative Feedback Network (GFN) and a two-phase fine-tuning procedure. GFN synthesises Optimal Erasure Samples (OES), which induce high loss on target classes, enabling the model to forget class-specific knowledge without access to the original forget data, while preserving performance on retained classes. The two-phase fine-tuning procedure enables aggressive forgetting in the first phase, followed by utility restoration in the second. Experiments on three image classification datasets demonstrate that GFOES achieves effective forgetting at both logit and representation levels, while maintaining strong performance using only 5% of the original data. Our framework offers a practical and scalable solution for privacy-preserving machine learning under data-constrained conditions.

Paperid: 3812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12913.pdf

Abstract:
Recommending event schedules is a key issue in Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs) in order to maintain user activity. An effective recommendation is required to maximize the user's preference, subjecting to both time and geographical constraints. Existing methods face an inherent trade-off among efficiency, effectiveness, and generalization, due to the NP-hard nature of the problem. This paper proposes the Chain-of-Scheduling (CoS) framework, which activates the event scheduling capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a guided, efficient scheduling process. CoS enhances LLM by formulating the schedule task into three atomic stages, i.e., exploration, verification and integration. Then we enable the LLMs to generate CoS autonomously via Knowledge Distillation (KD). Experimental results show that CoS achieves near-theoretical optimal effectiveness with high efficiency on three real-world datasets in a interpretable manner. Moreover, it demonstrates strong zero-shot learning ability on out-of-domain data.

Paperid: 3813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10376.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability for robotic agents operating. Real-world deployment requires open vocabulary generalization and low training overhead, motivating zero-shot methods rather than task-specific RL training. However, existing zero-shot methods that build explicit 3D scene graphs often compress rich visual observations into text-only relations, leading to high construction cost, irreversible loss of visual evidence, and constrained vocabularies. To address these limitations, we introduce the Multi-modal 3D Scene Graph (M3DSG), which preserves visual cues by replacing textual relation

Paperid: 3814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08892.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Lumine, the first open recipe for developing generalist agents capable of completing hours-long complex missions in real time within challenging 3D open-world environments. Lumine adopts a human-like interaction paradigm that unifies perception, reasoning, and action in an end-to-end manner, powered by a vision-language model. It processes raw pixels at 5 Hz to produce precise 30 Hz keyboard-mouse actions and adaptively invokes reasoning only when necessary. Trained in Genshin Impact, Lumine successfully completes the entire five-hour Mondstadt main storyline on par with human-level efficiency and follows natural language instructions to perform a broad spectrum of tasks in both 3D open-world exploration and 2D GUI manipulation across collection, combat, puzzle-solving, and NPC interaction. In addition to its in-domain performance, Lumine demonstrates strong zero-shot cross-game generalization. Without any fine-tuning, it accomplishes 100-minute missions in Wuthering Waves and the full five-hour first chapter of Honkai: Star Rail. These promising results highlight Lumine's effectiveness across distinct worlds and interaction dynamics, marking a concrete step toward generalist agents in open-ended environments.

Paperid: 3815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08156.pdf

Abstract:
Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) mapping is a fundamental task in Earth Observation (EO). However, current LULC models are typically developed for a specific modality and a fixed class taxonomy, limiting their generability and broader applicability. Recent advances in foundation models (FMs) offer promising opportunities for building universal models. Yet, task-agnostic FMs often require fine-tuning for downstream applications, whereas task-specific FMs rely on massive amounts of labeled data for training, which is costly and impractical in the remote sensing (RS) domain. To address these challenges, we propose LandSegmenter, an LULC FM framework that resolves three-stage challenges at the input, model, and output levels. From the input side, to alleviate the heavy demand on labeled data for FM training, we introduce LAnd Segment (LAS), a large-scale, multi-modal, multi-source dataset built primarily with globally sampled weak labels from existing LULC products. LAS provides a scalable, cost-effective alternative to manual annotation, enabling large-scale FM training across diverse LULC domains. For model architecture, LandSegmenter integrates an RS-specific adapter for cross-modal feature extraction and a text encoder for semantic awareness enhancement. At the output stage, we introduce a class-wise confidence-guided fusion strategy to mitigate semantic omissions and further improve LandSegmenter's zero-shot performance. We evaluate LandSegmenter on six precisely annotated LULC datasets spanning diverse modalities and class taxonomies. Extensive transfer learning and zero-shot experiments demonstrate that LandSegmenter achieves competitive or superior performance, particularly in zero-shot settings when transferred to unseen datasets. These results highlight the efficacy of our proposed framework and the utility of weak supervision for building task-specific FMs.

Paperid: 3816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07162.pdf

Abstract:
The convincingness of an argument does not only depend on its structure (logos), the person who makes the argument (ethos), but also on the emotion that it causes in the recipient (pathos). While the overall intensity and categorical values of emotions in arguments have received considerable attention in the research community, we argue that the emotion an argument evokes in a recipient is subjective. It depends on the recipient's goals, standards, prior knowledge, and stance. Appraisal theories lend themselves as a link between the subjective cognitive assessment of events and emotions. They have been used in event-centric emotion analysis, but their suitability for assessing argument convincingness remains unexplored. In this paper, we evaluate whether appraisal theories are suitable for emotion analysis in arguments by considering subjective cognitive evaluations of the importance and impact of an argument on its receiver. Based on the annotations in the recently published ContArgA corpus, we perform zero-shot prompting experiments to evaluate the importance of gold-annotated and predicted emotions and appraisals for the assessment of the subjective convincingness labels. We find that, while categorical emotion information does improve convincingness prediction, the improvement is more pronounced with appraisals. This work presents the first systematic comparison between emotion models for convincingness prediction, demonstrating the advantage of appraisals, providing insights for theoretical and practical applications in computational argumentation.

Paperid: 3817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05704.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based models have shown promising performance on tabular data compared to their classical counterparts such as neural networks and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) in scenarios with limited training data. They utilize their pre-trained knowledge to adapt to new domains, achieving commendable performance with only a few training examples, also called the few-shot regime. However, the performance gain in the few-shot regime comes at the expense of significantly increased complexity and number of parameters. To circumvent this trade-off, we introduce TabDistill, a new strategy to distill the pre-trained knowledge in complex transformer-based models into simpler neural networks for effectively classifying tabular data. Our framework yields the best of both worlds: being parameter-efficient while performing well with limited training data. The distilled neural networks surpass classical baselines such as regular neural networks, XGBoost and logistic regression under equal training data, and in some cases, even the original transformer-based models that they were distilled from.

Paperid: 3818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00933.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) have leveraged multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve zero-shot navigation. However, existing methods often rely on panoramic observations and two-stage pipelines involving waypoint predictors, which introduce significant latency and limit real-world applicability. In this work, we propose Fast-SmartWay, an end-to-end zero-shot VLN-CE framework that eliminates the need for panoramic views and waypoint predictors. Our approach uses only three frontal RGB-D images combined with natural language instructions, enabling MLLMs to directly predict actions. To enhance decision robustness, we introduce an Uncertainty-Aware Reasoning module that integrates (i) a Disambiguation Module for avoiding local optima, and (ii) a Future-Past Bidirectional Reasoning mechanism for globally coherent planning. Experiments on both simulated and real-robot environments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces per-step latency while achieving competitive or superior performance compared to panoramic-view baselines. These results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of Fast-SmartWay for real-world zero-shot embodied navigation.

Paperid: 3819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27566.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced LLMs by incorporating external information. However, prevailing agentic RAG approaches are constrained by a critical limitation: they treat the retrieval process as a black-box querying operation. This confines agents' actions to query issuing, hindering its ability to tackle complex information-seeking tasks. To address this, we introduce Interact-RAG, a new paradigm that elevates the LLM agent from a passive query issuer into an active manipulator of the retrieval process. We dismantle the black-box with a Corpus Interaction Engine, equipping the agent with a set of action primitives for fine-grained control over information retrieval. To further empower the agent on the entire RAG pipeline, we first develop a reasoning-enhanced workflow, which enables both zero-shot execution and the synthesis of interaction trajectories. We then leverage this synthetic data to train a fully autonomous end-to-end agent via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), followed by refinement with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that Interact-RAG significantly outperforms other advanced methods, validating the efficacy of our reasoning-interaction strategy.

Paperid: 3820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20540.pdf

Abstract:
Conventional multimodal alignment methods assume mutual redundancy across all modalities, an assumption that fails in real-world distributed scenarios. We propose SheafAlign, a sheaf-theoretic framework for decentralized multimodal alignment that replaces single-space alignment with multiple comparison spaces. This approach models pairwise modality relations through sheaf structures and leverages decentralized contrastive learning-based objectives for training. SheafAlign overcomes the limitations of prior methods by not requiring mutual redundancy among all modalities, preserving both shared and unique information. Experiments on multimodal sensing datasets show superior zero-shot generalization, cross-modal alignment, and robustness to missing modalities, with 50\% lower communication cost than state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 3821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17276.pdf

Abstract:
Control-flow hijacking attacks manipulate orchestration mechanisms in multi-agent systems into performing unsafe actions that compromise the system and exfiltrate sensitive information. Recently proposed defenses, such as LlamaFirewall, rely on alignment checks of inter-agent communications to ensure that all agent invocations are "related to" and "likely to further" the original objective. We start by demonstrating control-flow hijacking attacks that evade these defenses even if alignment checks are performed by advanced LLMs. We argue that the safety and functionality objectives of multi-agent systems fundamentally conflict with each other. This conflict is exacerbated by the brittle definitions of "alignment" and the checkers' incomplete visibility into the execution context. We then propose, implement, and evaluate ControlValve, a new defense inspired by the principles of control-flow integrity and least privilege. ControlValve (1) generates permitted control-flow graphs for multi-agent systems, and (2) enforces that all executions comply with these graphs, along with contextual rules (generated in a zero-shot manner) for each agent invocation.

Paperid: 3822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15432.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting occurrences of keywords with keyword spotting (KWS) systems requires thresholding continuous detection scores. Selecting appropriate thresholds is a non-trivial task, typically relying on optimizing the performance on a validation dataset. However, such greedy threshold selection often leads to suboptimal performance on unseen data, particularly in varying or noisy acoustic environments or few-shot settings. In this work, we investigate detection threshold estimation for template-based open-set few-shot KWS using dynamic time warping on noisy speech data. To mitigate the performance degradation caused by suboptimal thresholds, we propose a score calibration approach consisting of two different steps: quantizing embeddings and normalizing detection scores using the quantization error prior to thresholding. Experiments on KWS-DailyTalk with simulated high frequency radio channels show that the proposed calibration approach simplifies the choice of detection thresholds and significantly improves the resulting performance.

Paperid: 3823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13909.pdf

Abstract:
Inductive Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) aims to discover facts in open-domain KGs containing unknown entities and relations, which poses a challenge for KGR models in comprehending uncertain KG components. Existing studies have proposed Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) that learn structural invariances across KGs to handle this uncertainty. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities for open-domain knowledge reasoning. As a result, the latest research has focused on LLM-based KGFMs that integrate LLM knowledge with KG context for inductive KGR. However, the intrinsic knowledge of LLMs may be overshadowed by sparse KG context, leading to LLM knowledge distortion, which can cause irreversible damage to model reasoning. Moreover, existing LLM-based KGR methods still struggle to fully constrain generative hallucinations in LLMs, severely limiting the credibility of reasoning results. To address these limitations, we propose a Knowledge Reasoning Language Model (KRLM) that achieves unified coordination between LLM knowledge and KG context throughout the KGR process. Specifically, we design a Knowledge Reasoning Language (KRL) instruction format and a KRL tokenizer to align LLM knowledge with KG representations. Then, we propose a KRL attention layer that coordinates intrinsic LLM knowledge with additional KG context through a dynamic knowledge memory mechanism. Finally, a structure-aware next-entity predictor is proposed, which strictly constrains the reasoning results within a trustworthy knowledge domain. Extensive experimental results on 25 real-world inductive KGR datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed KRLM\footnote{Our source codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KRLM-EA36 in both zero-shot reasoning and fine-tuning scenarios.

Paperid: 3824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12218.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been extended beyond traditional text generation to serve as interactive agents capable of using external tools based on user intent. However, current LLM agents still show limited ability to handle goal-oriented queries, which require decomposing a high-level objective into multiple interdependent API calls with correct planning and execution. Current approaches mainly rely on zero-shot evaluation due to the absence of training data. While proprietary closed-source models such as GPT-4 demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, smaller open-source models struggle to perform complex tool use effectively. Thus, we propose a novel training framework GOAT, which enables fine-tuning of LLM agents in a human annotation-free setting. GOAT automatically constructs synthetic datasets of goal-oriented API execution tasks directly from given API documents, equipping models with the ability to reason over interdependent calls and generate coherent responses. Through extensive experiments, we show that GOAT-trained agents achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple existing goal-oriented benchmarks. In addition, we introduce GOATBench, a new goal-oriented API execution benchmark, and demonstrate that agents trained with GOAT also excel in this setting. These results highlight GOAT as a practical path toward building robust open-source LLM agents capable of complex reasoning and tool use.

Paperid: 3825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11167.pdf

Abstract:
Hate speech poses a serious threat to social cohesion and individual well-being, particularly on social media, where it spreads rapidly. While research on hate speech detection has progressed, it remains largely focused on English, resulting in limited resources and benchmarks for low-resource languages. Moreover, many of these languages have multiple linguistic varieties, a factor often overlooked in current approaches. At the same time, large language models require substantial amounts of data to perform reliably, a requirement that low-resource languages often cannot meet. In this work, we address these gaps by compiling a meta-collection of hate speech datasets for European Spanish, standardised with unified labels and metadata. This collection is based on a systematic analysis and integration of existing resources, aiming to bridge the data gap and support more consistent and scalable hate speech detection. We extended this collection by translating it into European Portuguese and into a Galician standard that is more convergent with Spanish and another Galician variant that is more convergent with Portuguese, creating aligned multilingual corpora. Using these resources, we establish new benchmarks for hate speech detection in Iberian languages. We evaluate state-of-the-art large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, providing baseline results for future research. Moreover, we perform a cross-lingual analysis with our target languages. Our findings underscore the importance of multilingual and variety-aware approaches in hate speech detection and offer a foundation for improved benchmarking in underrepresented European languages.

Paperid: 3826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09159.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) enable deep learning for clinical predictions, but the optimal method for representing patient data remains unclear due to inconsistent evaluation practices. We present the first systematic benchmark to compare EHR representation methods, including multivariate time-series, event streams, and textual event streams for LLMs. This benchmark standardises data curation and evaluation across two distinct clinical settings: the MIMIC-IV dataset for ICU tasks (mortality, phenotyping) and the EHRSHOT dataset for longitudinal care (30-day readmission, 1-year pancreatic cancer). For each paradigm, we evaluate appropriate modelling families--including Transformers, MLP, LSTMs and Retain for time-series, CLMBR and count-based models for event streams, 8-20B LLMs for textual streams--and analyse the impact of feature pruning based on data missingness. Our experiments reveal that event stream models consistently deliver the strongest performance. Pre-trained models like CLMBR are highly sample-efficient in few-shot settings, though simpler count-based models can be competitive given sufficient data. Furthermore, we find that feature selection strategies must be adapted to the clinical setting: pruning sparse features improves ICU predictions, while retaining them is critical for longitudinal tasks. Our results, enabled by a unified and reproducible pipeline, provide practical guidance for selecting EHR representations based on the clinical context and data regime.

Paperid: 3827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07432.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong abilities in reasoning and problem solving, but recent studies reveal that they still struggle with time series reasoning tasks, where outputs are often affected by hallucination or knowledge leakage. In this work we propose TS-Agent, a time series reasoning agent that leverages LLMs strictly for what they excel at, i.e., gathering evidence and synthesizing it into conclusions through step-by-step reasoning, while delegating the extraction of statistical and structural information to time series analytical tools. Instead of mapping time series into text tokens, images, or embeddings, our agent interacts with raw numeric sequences through atomic operators, records outputs in an explicit evidence log, and iteratively refines its reasoning under the guidance of a self-critic and a final quality gate. This design avoids multi-modal alignment training, preserves the native form of time series, ensures interpretability and verifiability, and mitigates knowledge leakage or hallucination. Empirically, we evaluate the agent on established benchmarks. Our experiments show that TS-Agent achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs on understanding benchmarks, and delivers significant improvements on reasoning tasks, where existing models often rely on memorization and fail in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 3828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06754.pdf

Abstract:
Comprehensive visual, geometric, and semantic understanding of a 3D scene is crucial for successful execution of robotic tasks, especially in unstructured and complex environments. Additionally, to make robust decisions, it is necessary for the robot to evaluate the reliability of perceived information. While recent advances in 3D neural feature fields have enabled robots to leverage features from pretrained foundation models for tasks such as language-guided manipulation and navigation, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (i) they are typically scene-specific, and (ii) they lack the ability to model uncertainty in their predictions. We present UniFField, a unified uncertainty-aware neural feature field that combines visual, semantic, and geometric features in a single generalizable representation while also predicting uncertainty in each modality. Our approach, which can be applied zero shot to any new environment, incrementally integrates RGB-D images into our voxel-based feature representation as the robot explores the scene, simultaneously updating uncertainty estimation. We evaluate our uncertainty estimations to accurately describe the model prediction errors in scene reconstruction and semantic feature prediction. Furthermore, we successfully leverage our feature predictions and their respective uncertainty for an active object search task using a mobile manipulator robot, demonstrating the capability for robust decision-making.

Paperid: 3829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05544.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) and vision-language models (VLM) have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but they impose significant memory and computing challenges in deployment. We present a novel low-rank compression framework to address this challenge. First, we upper bound the change of network loss via layer-wise activation-based compression errors, filling a theoretical gap in the literature. We then formulate low-rank model compression as a bi-objective optimization and prove that a single uniform tolerance yields surrogate Pareto-optimal heterogeneous ranks. Based on our theoretical insights, we propose Pareto-Guided Singular Value Decomposition (PGSVD), a zero-shot pipeline that improves activation-aware compression via Pareto-guided rank selection and alternating least-squares implementation. We apply PGSVD to both LLM and VLM, showing better accuracy at the same compression levels and inference speedup.

Paperid: 3830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05266.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation is vital for deep learning-based infrastructure inspection applications, where labeled training examples are scarce and expensive. Although existing deep learning frameworks perform well, the need for extensive labeled datasets and the inability to learn new defect categories with little data are problematic. We present our Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN) framework for few-shot semantic segmentation of culvert and sewer defect categories using a prototypical learning framework. Our approach has three main contributions: (1) adaptive E-FPN encoder using InceptionSepConv blocks and depth-wise separable convolutions for efficient multi-scale feature extraction; (2) prototypical learning with masked average pooling for powerful prototype generation from small support examples; and (3) attention-based feature representation through global self-attention, local self-attention and cross-attention. Comprehensive experimentation on challenging infrastructure inspection datasets illustrates that the method achieves excellent few-shot performance, with the best configuration being 8-way 5-shot training configuration at 82.55% F1-score and 72.26% mIoU in 2-way classification testing. The self-attention method had the most significant performance improvements, providing 2.57% F1-score and 2.9% mIoU gain over baselines. Our framework addresses the critical need to rapidly respond to new defect types in infrastructure inspection systems with limited new training data that lead to more efficient and economical maintenance plans for critical infrastructure systems.

Paperid: 3831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04595.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across tasks but remain energy-intensive due to dense matrix operations. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) improve energy efficiency by replacing dense matrix multiplications with sparse accumulations. Their sparse spike activity enables efficient LLMs deployment on edge devices. However, prior SNN-based LLMs often sacrifice performance for efficiency, and recovering accuracy typically requires full pretraining, which is costly and impractical. To address this, we propose SpikingMamba, an energy-efficient SNN-based LLMs distilled from Mamba that improves energy efficiency with minimal accuracy sacrifice. SpikingMamba integrates two key components: (a) TI-LIF, a ternary-integer spiking neuron that preserves semantic polarity through signed multi-level spike representations. (b) A training-exclusive Smoothed Gradient Compensation (SGC) path mitigating quantization loss while preserving spike-driven efficiency. We employ a single-stage distillation strategy to transfer the zero-shot ability of pretrained Mamba and further enhance it via reinforcement learning (RL). Experiments show that SpikingMamba-1.3B achieves a 4.76$\times$ energy benefit, with only a 4.78\% zero-shot accuracy gap compared to the original Mamba, and achieves a further 2.55\% accuracy improvement after RL.

Paperid: 3832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03200.pdf

Abstract:
Intention drives human movement in complex environments, but such movement can only happen if the surrounding context supports it. Despite the intuitive nature of this mechanism, existing research has not yet provided tools to evaluate the alignment between skeletal movement (motion), intention (text), and the surrounding context (scene). In this work, we introduce MonSTeR, the first MOtioN-Scene-TExt Retrieval model. Inspired by the modeling of higher-order relations, MonSTeR constructs a unified latent space by leveraging unimodal and cross-modal representations. This allows MonSTeR to capture the intricate dependencies between modalities, enabling flexible but robust retrieval across various tasks. Our results show that MonSTeR outperforms trimodal models that rely solely on unimodal representations. Furthermore, we validate the alignment of our retrieval scores with human preferences through a dedicated user study. We demonstrate the versatility of MonSTeR's latent space on zero-shot in-Scene Object Placement and Motion Captioning. Code and pre-trained models are available at github.com/colloroneluca/MonSTeR.

Paperid: 3833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02480.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable ability to learn new tasks from a few in-context examples. However, this flexibility introduces safety concerns: LLMs can be influenced by incorrect or malicious demonstrations -- for example, if an adversary tampers with or injects harmful examples without a human supervisor noticing. This motivates principled designs in which the system itself includes built-in mechanisms to guard against such attacks. We propose a novel approach to limit the degree to which harmful demonstrations can degrade model performance. First, we define a baseline ``safe'' behavior for the model -- the model's performance given no in-context demonstrations (zero-shot). Next, we apply distribution-free risk control (DFRC) to control the extent to which in-context samples can decay performance below zero-shot. We achieve this by leveraging dynamic early exit prediction, ignoring later attention heads that attend the most to the unsafe inputs. Finally, we propose modifications to DFRC that allow it to both control risk for harmful inputs \textit{and} leverage performance and efficiency gains on helpful inputs. We present both theoretical and empirical results showing that our approach can effectively control risk for harmful in-context demonstrations while simultaneously achieving substantial computational efficiency gains with helpful demonstrations.

Paperid: 3834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25622.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly scaled in size, bringing severe memory and computational challenges that hinder their deployment. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based compression has emerged as an appealing post-training compression technique for LLMs, yet most existing methods apply a uniform compression ratio across all layers, implicitly assuming homogeneous information included in various layers. This overlooks the substantial intra-layer heterogeneity observed in LLMs, where middle layers tend to encode richer information while early and late layers are more redundant. In this work, we revisit the existing SVD-based compression method and propose D-Rank, a framework with layer-wise balanced Dynamic Rank allocation for LLMs compression. We first introduce effective rank as a principled metric to measure the information density of weight matrices, and then allocate ranks via a Lagrange multiplier-based optimization scheme to adaptively assign more capacity to groups with higher information density under a fixed compression ratio. Moreover, we rebalance the allocated ranks across attention layers to account for their varying importance and extend D-Rank to latest LLMs with grouped-query attention. Extensive experiments on various LLMs with different scales across multiple compression ratios demonstrate that D-Rank consistently outperforms SVD-LLM, ASVD, and Basis Sharing, achieving more than 15 lower perplexity with LLaMA-3-8B model on C4 datasets at 20% compression ratio and up to 5% higher zero-shot reasoning accuracy with LLaMA-7B model at 40% compression ratio while achieving even higher throughput.

Paperid: 3835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25594.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $\textbf{K-Prism}$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $\textit{semantic priors}$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $\textit{in-context knowledge}$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $\textit{interactive feedback}$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $\textit{what}$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $\textit{where}$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings. Code will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 3836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24888.pdf

Abstract:
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) quality assessment is crucial for clinical decision-making, yet remains challenging due to data scarcity and protocol variability. Traditional approaches face fundamental trade-offs: signal-based methods like MRIQC provide quantitative metrics but lack semantic understanding, while deep learning approaches achieve high accuracy but sacrifice interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce the Multimodal MRI Quality Assessment (MMRQA) framework, pioneering the integration of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with acquisition-aware signal processing. MMRQA combines three key innovations: robust metric extraction via MRQy augmented with simulated artifacts, structured transformation of metrics into question-answer pairs using Qwen, and parameter-efficient fusion through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) of LLaVA-OneVision. Evaluated on MR-ART, FastMRI, and MyConnectome benchmarks, MMRQA achieves state-of-the-art performance with strong zero-shot generalization, as validated by comprehensive ablation studies. By bridging quantitative analysis with semantic reasoning, our framework generates clinically interpretable outputs that enhance quality control in dynamic medical settings.

Paperid: 3837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23176.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits strong zero-shot performance on natural images but suffers from domain shift and overconfidence when applied to medical volumes. We propose \textbf{CalSAM}, a lightweight adaptation framework that (i) reduces encoder sensitivity to domain shift via a \emph{Feature Fisher Information Penalty} (FIP) computed on 3D feature maps and (ii) penalizes overconfident voxel-wise errors through a \emph{Confidence Misalignment Penalty} (CMP). The combined loss, $\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{CalSAM}}$ fine-tunes only the mask decoder while keeping SAM's encoders frozen. On cross-center and scanner-shift evaluations, CalSAM substantially improves accuracy and calibration: e.g., on the BraTS scanner split (Siemens$\to$GE) CalSAM shows a $+7.4\%$ relative improvement in $\mathrm{DSC}$ (80.1\% vs.\ 74.6\%), a $-26.9\%$ reduction in $\mathrm{HD95}$ (4.6 mm vs.\ 6.3 mm), and a $-39.5\%$ reduction in $\mathrm{ECE}$ (5.2\% vs.\ 8.6\%). On ATLAS-C (motion corruptions), CalSAM achieves a $+5.3\%$ relative improvement in $\mathrm{DSC}$ (75.9\%) and a $-32.6\%$ reduction in $\mathrm{ECE}$ (5.8\%). Ablations show FIP and CMP contribute complementary gains ($p<0.01$), and the Fisher penalty incurs a modest $\sim$15\% training-time overhead. CalSAM therefore delivers improved domain generalization and better-calibrated uncertainty estimates for brain MRI segmentation, while retaining the computational benefits of freezing SAM's encoder.

Paperid: 3838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22641.pdf

Abstract:
N-gram novelty is widely used to evaluate language models' ability to generate text outside of their training data. More recently, it has also been adopted as a metric for measuring textual creativity. However, theoretical work on creativity suggests that this approach may be inadequate, as it does not account for creativity's dual nature: novelty (how original the text is) and appropriateness (how sensical and pragmatic it is). We investigate the relationship between this notion of creativity and n-gram novelty through 7542 expert writer annotations (n=26) of novelty, pragmaticality, and sensicality via close reading of human and AI-generated text. We find that while n-gram novelty is positively associated with expert writer-judged creativity, ~91% of top-quartile expressions by n-gram novelty are not judged as creative, cautioning against relying on n-gram novelty alone. Furthermore, unlike human-written text, higher n-gram novelty in open-source LLMs correlates with lower pragmaticality. In an exploratory study with frontier close-source models, we additionally confirm that they are less likely to produce creative expressions than humans. Using our dataset, we test whether zero-shot, few-shot, and finetuned models are able to identify creative expressions (a positive aspect of writing) and non-pragmatic ones (a negative aspect). Overall, frontier LLMs exhibit performance much higher than random but leave room for improvement, especially struggling to identify non-pragmatic expressions. We further find that LLM-as-a-Judge novelty scores from the best-performing model were predictive of expert writer preferences.

Paperid: 3839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22125.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces FoodSEM, a state-of-the-art fine-tuned open-source large language model (LLM) for named-entity linking (NEL) to food-related ontologies. To the best of our knowledge, food NEL is a task that cannot be accurately solved by state-of-the-art general-purpose (large) language models or custom domain-specific models/systems. Through an instruction-response (IR) scenario, FoodSEM links food-related entities mentioned in a text to several ontologies, including FoodOn, SNOMED-CT, and the Hansard taxonomy. The FoodSEM model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to related models/systems, with F1 scores even reaching 98% on some ontologies and datasets. The presented comparative analyses against zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot LLM prompting baselines further highlight FoodSEM's superior performance over its non-fine-tuned version. By making FoodSEM and its related resources publicly available, the main contributions of this article include (1) publishing a food-annotated corpora into an IR format suitable for LLM fine-tuning/evaluation, (2) publishing a robust model to advance the semantic understanding of text in the food domain, and (3) providing a strong baseline on food NEL for future benchmarking.

Paperid: 3840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20499.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid progress of foundation models and robotics, vision-language navigation (VLN) has emerged as a key task for embodied agents with broad practical applications. We address VLN in continuous environments, a particularly challenging setting where an agent must jointly interpret natural language instructions, perceive its surroundings, and plan low-level actions. We propose a zero-shot framework that integrates a simplified yet effective waypoint predictor with a multimodal large language model (MLLM). The predictor operates on an abstract obstacle map, producing linearly reachable waypoints, which are incorporated into a dynamically updated topological graph with explicit visitation records. The graph and visitation information are encoded into the prompt, enabling reasoning over both spatial structure and exploration history to encourage exploration and equip MLLM with local path planning for error correction. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE show that our method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, with success rates of 41% and 36%, respectively, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20479.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation Models (FMs) have shown impressive performance on various text and image processing tasks. They can generalize across domains and datasets in a zero-shot setting. This could make them suitable for automated quality inspection during series manufacturing, where various types of images are being evaluated for many different products. Replacing tedious labeling tasks with a simple text prompt to describe anomalies and utilizing the same models across many products would save significant efforts during model setup and implementation. This is a strong advantage over supervised Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, which are trained for individual applications and require labeled training data. We test multiple recent FMs on both custom real-world industrial image data and public image data. We show that all of those models fail on our real-world data, while the very same models perform well on public benchmark datasets.

Paperid: 3842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20036.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging terrains, allowing robots to execute complex skills such as climbing, running, and jumping. However, existing blind locomotion controllers often struggle to ensure safety and efficient traversal through risky gap terrains, which are typically highly complex, requiring robots to perceive terrain information and select appropriate footholds during locomotion accurately. Meanwhile, existing perception-based controllers still present several practical limitations, including a complex multi-sensor deployment system and expensive computing resource requirements. This paper proposes a DRL controller named MAstering Risky Gap Terrains (MARG), which integrates terrain maps and proprioception to dynamically adjust the action and enhance the robot's stability in these tasks. During the training phase, our controller accelerates policy optimization by selectively incorporating privileged information (e.g., center of mass, friction coefficients) that are available in simulation but unmeasurable directly in real-world deployments due to sensor limitations. We also designed three foot-related rewards to encourage the robot to explore safe footholds. More importantly, a terrain map generation (TMG) model is proposed to reduce the drift existing in mapping and provide accurate terrain maps using only one LiDAR, providing a foundation for zero-shot transfer of the learned policy. The experimental results indicate that MARG maintains stability in various risky terrain tasks.

Paperid: 3843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19924.pdf

Abstract:
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging, particularly in sparse-reward settings. While foundation models possess strong semantic priors, their capabilities as zero-shot exploration agents in classic RL benchmarks are not well understood. We benchmark LLMs and VLMs on multi-armed bandits, Gridworlds, and sparse-reward Atari to test zero-shot exploration. Our investigation reveals a key limitation: while VLMs can infer high-level objectives from visual input, they consistently fail at precise low-level control: the "knowing-doing gap". To analyze a potential bridge for this gap, we investigate a simple on-policy hybrid framework in a controlled, best-case scenario. Our results in this idealized setting show that VLM guidance can significantly improve early-stage sample efficiency, providing a clear analysis of the potential and constraints of using foundation models to guide exploration rather than for end-to-end control.

Paperid: 3844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19833.pdf

Abstract:
The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a globally recognised framework for addressing critical societal, environmental, and economic challenges. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) have facilitated the automatic classification of textual data according to their relevance to specific SDGs. Nevertheless, in many applications, it is equally important to determine the directionality of this relevance; that is, to assess whether the described impact is positive, neutral, or negative. To tackle this challenge, we propose the novel task of SDG polarity detection, which assesses whether a text segment indicates progress toward a specific SDG or conveys an intention to achieve such progress. To support research in this area, we introduce SDG-POD, a benchmark dataset designed specifically for this task, combining original and synthetically generated data. We perform a comprehensive evaluation using six state-of-the-art large LLMs, considering both zero-shot and fine-tuned configurations. Our results suggest that the task remains challenging for the current generation of LLMs. Nevertheless, some fine-tuned models, particularly QWQ-32B, achieve good performance, especially on specific Sustainable Development Goals such as SDG-9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), SDG-12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG-15 (Life on Land). Furthermore, we demonstrate that augmenting the fine-tuning dataset with synthetically generated examples yields improved model performance on this task. This result highlights the effectiveness of data enrichment techniques in addressing the challenges of this resource-constrained domain. This work advances the methodological toolkit for sustainability monitoring and provides actionable insights into the development of efficient, high-performing polarity detection systems.

Paperid: 3845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19713.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient dense metric depth estimation is crucial for 3D visual perception in robotics and XR. In this paper, we develop a monocular visual-inertial motion and depth (VIMD) learning framework to estimate dense metric depth by leveraging accurate and efficient MSCKF-based monocular visual-inertial motion tracking. At the core the proposed VIMD is to exploit multi-view information to iteratively refine per-pixel scale, instead of globally fitting an invariant affine model as in the prior work. The VIMD framework is highly modular, making it compatible with a variety of existing depth estimation backbones. We conduct extensive evaluations on the TartanAir and VOID datasets and demonstrate its zero-shot generalization capabilities on the AR Table dataset. Our results show that VIMD achieves exceptional accuracy and robustness, even with extremely sparse points as few as 10-20 metric depth points per image. This makes the proposed VIMD a practical solution for deployment in resource constrained settings, while its robust performance and strong generalization capabilities offer significant potential across a wide range of scenarios.

Paperid: 3846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17747.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world datasets often exhibit class imbalance across multiple categories, manifesting as long-tailed distributions and few-shot scenarios. This is especially challenging in Class-Imbalanced Multi-Label Image Classification (CI-MLIC) tasks, where data imbalance and multi-object recognition present significant obstacles. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method termed Dual-View Alignment Learning with Hierarchical Prompt (HP-DVAL), which leverages multi-modal knowledge from vision-language pretrained (VLP) models to mitigate the class-imbalance problem in multi-label settings. Specifically, HP-DVAL employs dual-view alignment learning to transfer the powerful feature representation capabilities from VLP models by extracting complementary features for accurate image-text alignment. To better adapt VLP models for CI-MLIC tasks, we introduce a hierarchical prompt-tuning strategy that utilizes global and local prompts to learn task-specific and context-related prior knowledge. Additionally, we design a semantic consistency loss during prompt tuning to prevent learned prompts from deviating from general knowledge embedded in VLP models. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on two CI-MLIC benchmarks: MS-COCO and VOC2007. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over SOTA approaches, achieving mAP improvements of 10.0\% and 5.2\% on the long-tailed multi-label image classification task, and 6.8\% and 2.9\% on the multi-label few-shot image classification task.

Paperid: 3847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15448.pdf

Abstract:
Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various signal geometries. Despite this versatility, generalizing the attention mechanism to scenarios where data is presented at different scales from potentially different modalities is not straightforward. The attempts to incorporate hierarchy and multi-modality within transformers are largely based on ad hoc heuristics, which are not seamlessly generalizable to similar problems with potentially different structures. To address this problem, in this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach: we first propose a mathematical construct to represent multi-modal, multi-scale data. We then mathematically derive the neural attention mechanics for the proposed construct from the first principle of entropy minimization. We show that the derived formulation is optimal in the sense of being the closest to the standard Softmax attention while incorporating the inductive biases originating from the hierarchical/geometric information of the problem. We further propose an efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming to compute our derived attention mechanism. By incorporating it within transformers, we show that the proposed hierarchical attention mechanism not only can be employed to train transformer models in hierarchical/multi-modal settings from scratch, but it can also be used to inject hierarchical information into classical, pre-trained transformer models post training, resulting in more efficient models in zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 3848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13907.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Segmentation (FS-PCS) aims to predict per-point labels for an unlabeled point cloud, given only a few labeled examples. To extract discriminative representations from the limited support set, existing methods have constructed prototypes using conventional algorithms such as farthest point sampling. However, we point out that its initial randomness significantly affects FS-PCS performance and that the prototype generation process remains underexplored despite its prevalence. This motivates us to investigate an advanced prototype generation method based on attention mechanism. Despite its potential, we found that vanilla module suffers from the distributional gap between learnable prototypical tokens and support features. To overcome this, we propose White Aggregation and Restoration Module (WARM), which resolves the misalignment by sandwiching cross-attention between whitening and coloring transformations. Specifically, whitening aligns the support features to prototypical tokens before attention process, and subsequently coloring restores the original distribution to the attended tokens. This simple yet effective design enables robust attention, thereby generating representative prototypes by capturing the semantic relationships among support features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a significant margin on multiple FS-PCS benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness through extensive experiments.

Paperid: 3849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11219.pdf

Abstract:
Cattle identification is critical for efficient livestock farming management, currently reliant on radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. However, RFID-based systems are prone to failure due to loss, damage, tampering, and vulnerability to external attacks. As a robust alternative, biometric identification using cattle muzzle patterns similar to human fingerprints has emerged as a promising solution. Deep learning techniques have demonstrated success in leveraging these unique patterns for accurate identification. But deep learning models face significant challenges, including limited data availability, disruptions during data collection, and dynamic herd compositions that require frequent model retraining. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel few-shot learning framework for real-time cattle identification using Cooperative Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (CCoMAML) with Multi-Head Attention Feature Fusion (MHAFF) as a feature extractor model. This model offers great model adaptability to new data through efficient learning from few data samples without retraining. The proposed approach has been rigorously evaluated against current state-of-the-art few-shot learning techniques applied in cattle identification. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CCoMAML with MHAFF has superior cattle identification performance with 98.46% and 97.91% F1 scores.

Paperid: 3850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08146.pdf

Abstract:
A dangerous assumption that can be made from prior work on the bias transfer hypothesis (BTH) is that biases do not transfer from pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to adapted models. We invalidate this assumption by studying the BTH in causal models under prompt adaptations, as prompting is an extremely popular and accessible adaptation strategy used in real-world applications. In contrast to prior work, we find that biases can transfer through prompting and that popular prompt-based mitigation methods do not consistently prevent biases from transferring. Specifically, the correlation between intrinsic biases and those after prompt adaptation remain moderate to strong across demographics and tasks -- for example, gender (rho >= 0.94) in co-reference resolution, and age (rho >= 0.98) and religion (rho >= 0.69) in question answering. Further, we find that biases remain strongly correlated when varying few-shot composition parameters, such as sample size, stereotypical content, occupational distribution and representational balance (rho >= 0.90). We evaluate several prompt-based debiasing strategies and find that different approaches have distinct strengths, but none consistently reduce bias transfer across models, tasks or demographics. These results demonstrate that correcting bias, and potentially improving reasoning ability, in intrinsic models may prevent propagation of biases to downstream tasks.

Paperid: 3851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06427.pdf

Abstract:
Muzzle patterns are among the most effective biometric traits for cattle identification. Fast and accurate detection of the muzzle region as the region of interest is critical to automatic visual cattle identification.. Earlier approaches relied on manual detection, which is labor-intensive and inconsistent. Recently, automated methods using supervised models like YOLO have become popular for muzzle detection. Although effective, these methods require extensive annotated datasets and tend to be trained data-dependent, limiting their performance on new or unseen cattle. To address these limitations, this study proposes a zero-shot muzzle detection framework based on Grounding DINO, a vision-language model capable of detecting muzzles without any task-specific training or annotated data. This approach leverages natural language prompts to guide detection, enabling scalable and flexible muzzle localization across diverse breeds and environments. Our model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP)@0.5 of 76.8\%, demonstrating promising performance without requiring annotated data. To our knowledge, this is the first research to provide a real-world, industry-oriented, and annotation-free solution for cattle muzzle detection. The framework offers a practical alternative to supervised methods, promising improved adaptability and ease of deployment in livestock monitoring applications.

Paperid: 3852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20693.pdf

Abstract:
Ontologies and taxonomies of research fields are critical for managing and organising scientific knowledge, as they facilitate efficient classification, dissemination and retrieval of information. However, the creation and maintenance of such ontologies are expensive and time-consuming tasks, usually requiring the coordinated effort of multiple domain experts. Consequently, ontologies in this space often exhibit uneven coverage across different disciplines, limited inter-domain connectivity, and infrequent updating cycles. In this study, we investigate the capability of several large language models to identify semantic relationships among research topics within three academic domains: biomedicine, physics, and engineering. The models were evaluated under three distinct conditions: zero-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and fine-tuning on existing ontologies. Additionally, we assessed the cross-domain transferability of fine-tuned models by measuring their performance when trained in one domain and subsequently applied to a different one. To support this analysis, we introduce PEM-Rel-8K, a novel dataset consisting of over 8,000 relationships extracted from the most widely adopted taxonomies in the three disciplines considered in this study: MeSH, PhySH, and IEEE. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on PEM-Rel-8K yields excellent performance across all disciplines.

Paperid: 3853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15568.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the zero-shot robustness under distribution shifts by leveraging unlabeled test data during inference. Despite notable advances, several challenges still limit its broader applicability. First, most methods rely on backpropagation or iterative optimization, which limits scalability and hinders real-time deployment. Second, they lack explicit modeling of class-conditional feature distributions. This modeling is crucial for producing reliable decision boundaries and calibrated predictions, but it remains underexplored due to the lack of both source data and supervision at test time. In this paper, we propose ADAPT, an Advanced Distribution-Aware and backPropagation-free Test-time adaptation method. We reframe TTA as a Gaussian probabilistic inference task by modeling class-conditional likelihoods using gradually updated class means and a shared covariance matrix. This enables closed-form, training-free inference. To correct potential likelihood bias, we introduce lightweight regularization guided by CLIP priors and a historical knowledge bank. ADAPT requires no source data, no gradient updates, and no full access to target data, supporting both online and transductive settings. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts with superior scalability and robustness.

Paperid: 3854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14449.pdf

Abstract:
A key challenge in 3D talking head synthesis lies in the reliance on a long-duration talking head video to train a new model for each target identity from scratch. Recent methods have attempted to address this issue by extracting general features from audio through pre-training models. However, since audio contains information irrelevant to lip motion, existing approaches typically struggle to map the given audio to realistic lip behaviors in the target face when trained on only a few frames, causing poor lip synchronization and talking head image quality. This paper proposes D^3-Talker, a novel approach that constructs a static 3D Gaussian attribute field and employs audio and Facial Motion signals to independently control two distinct Gaussian attribute deformation fields, effectively decoupling the predictions of general and personalized deformations. We design a novel similarity contrastive loss function during pre-training to achieve more thorough decoupling. Furthermore, we integrate a Coarse-to-Fine module to refine the rendered images, alleviating blurriness caused by head movements and enhancing overall image quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D^3-Talker outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both high-fidelity rendering and accurate audio-lip synchronization with limited training data. Our code will be provided upon acceptance.

Paperid: 3855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12294.pdf

Abstract:
Power efficiency is a critical design objective in modern CPU design. Architects need a fast yet accurate architecture-level power evaluation tool to perform early-stage power estimation. However, traditional analytical architecture-level power models are inaccurate. The recently proposed machine learning (ML)-based architecture-level power model requires sufficient data from known configurations for training, making it unrealistic. In this work, we propose AutoPower targeting fully automated architecture-level power modeling with limited known design configurations. We have two key observations: (1) The clock and SRAM dominate the power consumption of the processor, and (2) The clock and SRAM power correlate with structural information available at the architecture level. Based on these two observations, we propose the power group decoupling in AutoPower. First, AutoPower decouples across power groups to build individual power models for each group. Second, AutoPower designs power models by further decoupling the model into multiple sub-models within each power group. In our experiments, AutoPower can achieve a low mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 4.36\% and a high $R^2$ of 0.96 even with only two known configurations for training. This is 5\% lower in MAPE and 0.09 higher in $R^2$ compared with McPAT-Calib, the representative ML-based power model.

Paperid: 3856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04755.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) hold promise for automating complex clinical decision-making, yet their practical deployment remains hindered by the intensive engineering required to inject clinical knowledge and ensure patient safety. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest a complementary approach, where implicit prior knowledge and clinical heuristics are naturally embedded through linguistic prompts without requiring environment-specific training. In this study, we rigorously evaluate open-source LLMs as dynamic insulin dosing agents in an in silico Type 1 diabetes simulator, comparing their zero-shot inference performance against small neural network-based RL agents (SRAs) explicitly trained for the task. Our results indicate that carefully designed zero-shot prompts enable smaller LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-7B) to achieve comparable or superior clinical performance relative to extensively trained SRAs, particularly in stable patient cohorts. However, LLMs exhibit notable limitations, such as overly aggressive insulin dosing when prompted with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, highlighting critical failure modes including arithmetic hallucination, temporal misinterpretation, and inconsistent clinical logic. Incorporating explicit reasoning about latent clinical states (e.g., meals) yielded minimal performance gains, underscoring the current model's limitations in capturing complex, hidden physiological dynamics solely through textual inference. Our findings advocate for cautious yet optimistic integration of LLMs into clinical workflows, emphasising the necessity of targeted prompt engineering, careful validation, and potentially hybrid approaches that combine linguistic reasoning with structured physiological modelling to achieve safe, robust, and clinically effective decision-support systems.

Paperid: 3857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04337.pdf

Abstract:
Previous work has demonstrated that AI methods for analysing scientific literature benefit significantly from annotating sentences in papers according to their rhetorical roles, such as research gaps, results, limitations, extensions of existing methodologies, and others. Such representations also have the potential to support the development of a new generation of systems capable of producing high-quality literature reviews. However, achieving this goal requires the definition of a relevant annotation schema and effective strategies for large-scale annotation of the literature. This paper addresses these challenges by 1) introducing a novel annotation schema specifically designed to support literature review generation and 2) conducting a comprehensive evaluation of a wide range of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in classifying rhetorical roles according to this schema. To this end, we also present Sci-Sentence, a novel multidisciplinary benchmark comprising 700 sentences manually annotated by domain experts and 2,240 sentences automatically labelled using LLMs. We evaluate 37 LLMs on this benchmark, spanning diverse model families and sizes, using both zero-shot learning and fine-tuning approaches. The experiments yield several novel insights that advance the state of the art in this challenging domain. First, the current generation of LLMs performs remarkably well on this task when fine-tuned on high-quality data, achieving performance levels above 96\% F1. Second, while large proprietary models like GPT-4o achieve the best results, some lightweight open-source alternatives also demonstrate excellent performance. Finally, enriching the training data with semi-synthetic examples generated by LLMs proves beneficial, enabling small encoders to achieve robust results and significantly enhancing the performance of several open decoder models.

Paperid: 3858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04153.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling multi-task adaptation in pre-trained Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) models is crucial for enhancing their generalization capabilities. Most existing pre-trained LoRA fusion methods decompose weight matrices, sharing similar parameters while merging divergent ones. However, this paradigm inevitably induces inter-weight conflicts and leads to catastrophic domain forgetting. While incremental learning enables adaptation to multiple tasks, it struggles to achieve generalization in few-shot scenarios. Consequently, when the weight data follows a long-tailed distribution, it can lead to forgetting in the fused weights. To address this issue, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA Fusion (ICM-Fusion), a novel framework that synergizes meta-learning with in-context adaptation. The key innovation lies in our task vector arithmetic, which dynamically balances conflicting optimization directions across domains through learned manifold projections. ICM-Fusion obtains the optimal task vector orientation for the fused model in the latent space by adjusting the orientation of the task vectors. Subsequently, the fused LoRA is reconstructed by a self-designed Fusion VAE (F-VAE) to realize multi-task LoRA generation. We have conducted extensive experiments on visual and linguistic tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that ICM-Fusion can be adapted to a wide range of architectural models and applied to various tasks. Compared to the current pre-trained LoRA fusion method, ICM-Fusion fused LoRA can significantly reduce the multi-tasking loss and can even achieve task enhancement in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 3859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03944.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale demonstration data has powered key breakthroughs in robot manipulation, but collecting that data remains costly and time-consuming. We present Constraint-Preserving Data Generation (CP-Gen), a method that uses a single expert trajectory to generate robot demonstrations containing novel object geometries and poses. These generated demonstrations are used to train closed-loop visuomotor policies that transfer zero-shot to the real world and generalize across variations in object geometries and poses. Similar to prior work using pose variations for data generation, CP-Gen first decomposes expert demonstrations into free-space motions and robot skills. But unlike those works, we achieve geometry-aware data generation by formulating robot skills as keypoint-trajectory constraints: keypoints on the robot or grasped object must track a reference trajectory defined relative to a task-relevant object. To generate a new demonstration, CP-Gen samples pose and geometry transforms for each task-relevant object, then applies these transforms to the object and its associated keypoints or keypoint trajectories. We optimize robot joint configurations so that the keypoints on the robot or grasped object track the transformed keypoint trajectory, and then motion plan a collision-free path to the first optimized joint configuration. Experiments on 16 simulation tasks and four real-world tasks, featuring multi-stage, non-prehensile and tight-tolerance manipulation, show that policies trained using CP-Gen achieve an average success rate of 77%, outperforming the best baseline that achieves an average of 50%.

Paperid: 3860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01131.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we study the problem of data retrieval for few-shot imitation learning: selecting data from a large dataset to train a performant policy for a specific task, given only a few target demonstrations. Prior methods retrieve data using a single-feature distance heuristic, assuming that the best demonstrations are those that most closely resemble the target examples in visual, semantic, or motion space. However, this approach captures only a subset of the relevant information and can introduce detrimental demonstrations, e.g., retrieving data from unrelated tasks due to similar scene layouts, or selecting similar motions from tasks with divergent goals. We present COLLAGE, a method for COLLective data AGgrEgation in few-shot imitation learning that uses an adaptive late fusion mechanism to guide the selection of relevant demonstrations based on a task-specific combination of multiple cues. COLLAGE follows a simple, flexible, and efficient recipe: it assigns weights to subsets of the dataset that are pre-selected using a single feature (e.g., appearance, shape, or language similarity), based on how well a policy trained on each subset predicts actions in the target demonstrations. These weights are then used to perform importance sampling during policy training, sampling data more densely or sparsely according to estimated relevance. COLLAGE is general and feature-agnostic, allowing it to combine any number of subsets selected by any retrieval heuristic, and to identify which subsets provide the greatest benefit for the target task. In extensive experiments, COLLAGE outperforms state-of-the-art retrieval and multi-task learning approaches by 5.1% in simulation across 10 tasks, and by 16.6% in the real world across 6 tasks, where we perform retrieval from the large-scale DROID dataset. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/COLLAGE .

Paperid: 3861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19556.pdf

Abstract:
The undergraduate thesis (UGTE) plays an indispensable role in assessing a student's cumulative academic development throughout their college years. Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced education intelligence, they typically focus on holistic assessment with only one single evaluation score, but ignore the intricate nuances across multifaceted criteria, limiting their ability to reflect structural criteria, pedagogical objectives, and diverse academic competencies. Meanwhile, pedagogical theories have long informed manual UGTE evaluation through multi-dimensional assessment of cognitive development, disciplinary thinking, and academic performance, yet remain underutilized in automated settings. Motivated by the research gap, we pioneer PEMUTA, a pedagogically-enriched framework that effectively activates domain-specific knowledge from LLMs for multi-granular UGTE assessment. Guided by Vygotsky's theory and Bloom's Taxonomy, PEMUTA incorporates a hierarchical prompting scheme that evaluates UGTEs across six fine-grained dimensions: Structure, Logic, Originality, Writing, Proficiency, and Rigor (SLOWPR), followed by holistic synthesis. Two in-context learning techniques, \ie, few-shot prompting and role-play prompting, are also incorporated to further enhance alignment with expert judgments without fine-tuning. We curate a dataset of authentic UGTEs with expert-provided SLOWPR-aligned annotations to support multi-granular UGTE assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PEMUTA achieves strong alignment with expert evaluations, and exhibits strong potential for fine-grained, pedagogically-informed UGTE evaluations.

Paperid: 3862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18073.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging due to their massive parameters and high computational costs. Ultra low-bit quantization can significantly reduce storage and accelerate inference, but extreme compression (i.e., mean bit-width <= 2) often leads to severe performance degradation. To address this, we propose Squeeze10-LLM, effectively "squeezing" 16-bit LLMs' weights by 10 times. Specifically, Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed-precision post-training quantization (PTQ) framework and achieves an average of 1.6 bits per weight by quantizing 80% of the weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. We introduce Squeeze10LLM with two key innovations: Post-Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR) and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS). PBAR is a refined weight significance metric that accounts for the impact of quantization on activations, improving accuracy in low-bit settings. FIAS is a strategy that preserves full activation information during quantization to mitigate cumulative error propagation across layers. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 show that Squeeze10-LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance for sub-2bit weight-only quantization, improving average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero-shot classification tasks--a significant boost over existing PTQ methods. Our code will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 3863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17079.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) enables object detection models to recognize novel classes given only a few annotated examples, thereby reducing expensive manual data labeling. This survey examines recent FSL advances for video and 3D object detection. For video, FSL is especially valuable since annotating objects across frames is more laborious than for static images. By propagating information across frames, techniques like tube proposals and temporal matching networks can detect new classes from a couple examples, efficiently leveraging spatiotemporal structure. FSL for 3D detection from LiDAR or depth data faces challenges like sparsity and lack of texture. Solutions integrate FSL with specialized point cloud networks and losses tailored for class imbalance. Few-shot 3D detection enables practical autonomous driving deployment by minimizing costly 3D annotation needs. Core issues in both domains include balancing generalization and overfitting, integrating prototype matching, and handling data modality properties. In summary, FSL shows promise for reducing annotation requirements and enabling real-world video, 3D, and other applications by efficiently leveraging information across feature, temporal, and data modalities. By comprehensively surveying recent advancements, this paper illuminates FSL's potential to minimize supervision needs and enable deployment across video, 3D, and other real-world applications.

Paperid: 3864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16257.pdf

Abstract:
Defending pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, against adversarial attacks is crucial, as these models are widely used in diverse zero-shot tasks, including image classification. However, existing adversarial training (AT) methods for robust fine-tuning largely overlook the role of language in enhancing visual robustness. Specifically, (1) supervised AT methods rely on short texts (e.g., class labels) to generate adversarial perturbations, leading to overfitting to object classes in the training data, and (2) unsupervised AT avoids this overfitting but remains suboptimal against practical text-guided adversarial attacks due to its lack of semantic guidance. To address these limitations, we propose Quality Text-guided Adversarial Fine-Tuning (QT-AFT), which leverages high-quality captions during training to guide adversarial examples away from diverse semantics present in images. This enables the visual encoder to robustly recognize a broader range of image features even under adversarial noise, thereby enhancing robustness across diverse downstream tasks. QT-AFT overcomes the key weaknesses of prior methods -- overfitting in supervised AT and lack of semantic awareness in unsupervised AT -- achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot adversarial robustness and clean accuracy, evaluated across 16 zero-shot datasets. Furthermore, our comprehensive study uncovers several key insights into the role of language in enhancing vision robustness; for example, describing object properties in addition to object names further enhances zero-shot robustness. Our findings point to an urgent direction for future work -- centering high-quality linguistic supervision in robust visual representation learning.

Paperid: 3865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10200.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for human examiners, aiming to determine whether large language models (LLMs) can interpret and apply them in ways comparable to human assessment. In this work, we explore the use of such descriptors with an open-source LLM, Qwen 2.5 72B, to assess responses from the publicly available S&I Corpus in a zero-shot setting. Our results show that this approach - relying solely on textual information - achieves competitive performance: while it does not outperform state-of-the-art speech LLMs fine-tuned for the task, it surpasses a BERT-based model trained specifically for this purpose. NLA proves particularly effective in mismatched task settings, is generalisable to other data types and languages, and offers greater interpretability, as it is grounded in clearly explainable, widely applicable language descriptors.

Paperid: 3866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04173.pdf

Abstract:
One of the main challenges developers face in the use of continuous integration (CI) and deployment pipelines is the occurrence of intermittent job failures, which result from unexpected non-deterministic issues (e.g., flaky tests or infrastructure problems) rather than regular code-related errors such as bugs. Prior studies developed machine learning (ML) models trained on large datasets of job logs to classify job failures as either intermittent or regular. As an alternative to costly manual labeling of large datasets, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach leveraged a heuristic based on non-deterministic job reruns. However, this method mislabels intermittent job failures as regular in contexts where rerunning suspicious job failures is not an explicit policy, and therefore limits the SOTA's performance in practice. In fact, our manual analysis of 2,125 job failures from 5 industrial and 1 open-source projects reveals that, on average, 32% of intermittent job failures are mislabeled as regular. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel approach to intermittent job failure detection using few-shot learning (FSL). Specifically, we fine-tune a small language model using a few number of manually labeled log examples to generate rich embeddings, which are then used to train an ML classifier. Our FSL-based approach achieves 70-88% F1-score with only 12 shots in all projects, outperforming the SOTA, which proved ineffective (34-52% F1-score) in 4 projects. Overall, this study underlines the importance of data quality over quantity and provides a more efficient and practical framework for the detection of intermittent job failures in organizations.

Paperid: 3867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00087.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has advanced mass spectrometry data interpretation, yet most models remain feature extractors rather than unified scoring frameworks. We present pUniFind, the first large-scale multimodal pre-trained model in proteomics that integrates end-to-end peptide-spectrum scoring with open, zero-shot de novo sequencing. Trained on over 100 million open search-derived spectra, pUniFind aligns spectral and peptide modalities via cross modality prediction and outperforms traditional engines across diverse datasets, particularly achieving a 42.6 percent increase in the number of identified peptides in immunopeptidomics. Supporting over 1,300 modifications, pUniFind identifies 60 percent more PSMs than existing de novo methods despite a 300-fold larger search space. A deep learning based quality control module further recovers 38.5 percent additional peptides including 1,891 mapped to the genome but absent from reference proteomes while preserving full fragment ion coverage. These results establish a unified, scalable deep learning framework for proteomic analysis, offering improved sensitivity, modification coverage, and interpretability.

Paperid: 3868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15208.pdf

Abstract:
In 2012, the United Nations introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at creating a more sustainable and improved future by 2030. However, tracking progress toward these goals is difficult because of the extensive scale and complexity of the data involved. Text classification models have become vital tools in this area, automating the analysis of vast amounts of text from a variety of sources. Additionally, large language models (LLMs) have recently proven indispensable for many natural language processing tasks, including text classification, thanks to their ability to recognize complex linguistic patterns and semantics. This study analyzes various proprietary and open-source LLMs for a single-label, multi-class text classification task focused on the SDGs. Then, it also evaluates the effectiveness of task adaptation techniques (i.e., in-context learning approaches), namely Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning, as well as Fine-Tuning within this domain. The results reveal that smaller models, when optimized through prompt engineering, can perform on par with larger models like OpenAI's GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

Paperid: 3869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13470.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) aims to identify the stance of text toward previously unseen targets, a setting where conventional supervised models often fail due to reliance on labeled data and shallow lexical cues. Inspired by human cognitive reasoning, we propose the Cognitive Inductive Reasoning Framework (CIRF), which abstracts transferable reasoning schemas from unlabeled text and encodes them as concept-level logic. To integrate these schemas with input arguments, we introduce a Schema-Enhanced Graph Kernel Model (SEGKM) that dynamically aligns local and global reasoning structures. Experiments on SemEval-2016, VAST, and COVID-19-Stance benchmarks show that CIRF establishes new state-of-the-art results, outperforming strong ZSSD baselines by 1.0, 4.5, and 3.3 percentage points in macro-F1, respectively, and achieving comparable accuracy with 70\% fewer labeled examples. We will release the full code upon publication.

Paperid: 3870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09332.pdf

Abstract:
Designing ligand-binding proteins with precise functions is fundamental to advances in biology and chemistry, yet existing AI approaches are limited by scarce protein-ligand complex data. Meanwhile, abundant text descriptions of protein-ligand interactions remain underutilized. We introduce InstructPro, a family of generative models that design proteins from natural language instructions and ligand formulas. InstructPro produces protein sequences consistent with specified functional descriptions and ligand targets. To enable training and evaluation, we develop InstructProBench, a large-scale dataset of 9.6 million (function description, ligand, protein) triples. We train two model variants: InstructPro-1B and InstructPro-3B, which substantially outperform strong baselines. InstructPro-1B achieves design success rates of 2.46% (seen ligands) and 3.14% (zero-shot), while InstructPro-3B reaches 5.06% and 3.93%, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of natural language-guided generative modeling to expand protein design capabilities beyond traditional data limitations.

Paperid: 3871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08860.pdf

Abstract:
Code review is a key practice in software engineering, ensuring quality and collaboration. However, industrial Merge Request (MR) workflows often deviate from standardized review processes, with many MRs serving non-review purposes (e.g., drafts, rebases, or dependency updates). We term these cases deviations and hypothesize that ignoring them biases analytics and undermines ML models for review analysis. We identify seven deviation categories, occurring in 37.02% of MRs, and propose a few-shot learning detection method (91% accuracy). By excluding deviations, ML models predicting review completion time improve performance in 53.33% of cases (up to 2.25x) and exhibit significant shifts in feature importance (47% overall, 60% top-*k*). Our contributions include: (1) a taxonomy of MR deviations, (2) an AI-driven detection approach, and (3) empirical evidence of their impact on ML-based review analytics. This work aids practitioners in optimizing review efforts and ensuring reliable insights.

Paperid: 3872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08189.pdf

Abstract:
Scene-Graph Generation (SGG) seeks to recognize objects in an image and distill their salient pairwise relationships. Most methods depend on dataset-specific supervision to learn the variety of interactions, restricting their usefulness in open-world settings, involving novel objects and/or relations. Even methods that leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically require benchmark-specific fine-tuning. We introduce Open-World SGG, a training-free, efficient, model-agnostic framework that taps directly into the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to produce scene graphs with zero additional learning. Casting SGG as a zero-shot structured-reasoning problem, our method combines multimodal prompting, embedding alignment, and a lightweight pair-refinement strategy, enabling inference over unseen object vocabularies and relation sets. To assess this setting, we formalize an Open-World evaluation protocol that measures performance when no SGG-specific data have been observed either in terms of objects and relations. Experiments on Visual Genome, Open Images V6, and the Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) dataset demonstrate the capacity of pretrained VLMs to perform relational understanding without task-level training.

Paperid: 3873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07001.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised concerns about their misuse in AI-generated plagiarism and social engineering. While various AI-generated text detectors have been proposed to mitigate these risks, many remain vulnerable to simple evasion techniques such as paraphrasing. However, recent detectors have shown greater robustness against such basic attacks. In this work, we introduce Adversarial Paraphrasing, a training-free attack framework that universally humanizes any AI-generated text to evade detection more effectively. Our approach leverages an off-the-shelf instruction-following LLM to paraphrase AI-generated content under the guidance of an AI text detector, producing adversarial examples that are specifically optimized to bypass detection. Extensive experiments show that our attack is both broadly effective and highly transferable across several detection systems. For instance, compared to simple paraphrasing attack--which, ironically, increases the true positive at 1% false positive (T@1%F) by 8.57% on RADAR and 15.03% on Fast-DetectGPT--adversarial paraphrasing, guided by OpenAI-RoBERTa-Large, reduces T@1%F by 64.49% on RADAR and a striking 98.96% on Fast-DetectGPT. Across a diverse set of detectors--including neural network-based, watermark-based, and zero-shot approaches--our attack achieves an average T@1%F reduction of 87.88% under the guidance of OpenAI-RoBERTa-Large. We also analyze the tradeoff between text quality and attack success to find that our method can significantly reduce detection rates, with mostly a slight degradation in text quality. Our adversarial setup highlights the need for more robust and resilient detection strategies in the light of increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques.

Paperid: 3874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02077.pdf

Abstract:
Decomposing weight matrices into quantization and low-rank components ($\mathbf{W} \approx \mathbf{Q} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R}$) is a widely used technique for compressing large language models (LLMs). Existing joint optimization methods iteratively alternate between quantization and low-rank approximation. However, these methods tend to prioritize one component at the expense of the other, resulting in suboptimal decompositions that fail to leverage each component's unique strengths. In this work, we introduce Outlier-Driven Low-Rank Initialization (ODLRI), which assigns low-rank components the specific role of capturing activation-sensitive weights. This structured decomposition mitigates outliers' negative impact on quantization, enabling more effective balance between quantization and low-rank approximation. Experiments on Llama2 (7B, 13B, 70B), Llama3-8B, and Mistral-7B demonstrate that incorporating ODLRI into the joint optimization framework consistently reduces activation-aware error, minimizes quantization scale, and improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy in low-bit settings.

Paperid: 3875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01623.pdf

Abstract:
Humans excel at analogical reasoning - applying knowledge from one task to a related one with minimal relearning. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically require extensive retraining even when new tasks share structural similarities with previously learned ones. In this work, we propose MAGIK, a novel framework that enables RL agents to transfer knowledge to analogous tasks without interacting with the target environment. Our approach leverages an imagination mechanism to map entities in the target task to their analogues in the source domain, allowing the agent to reuse its original policy. Experiments on custom MiniGrid and MuJoCo tasks show that MAGIK achieves effective zero-shot transfer using only a small number of human-labelled examples. We compare our approach to related baselines and highlight how it offers a novel and effective mechanism for knowledge transfer via imagination-based analogy mapping.

Paperid: 3876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23913.pdf

Abstract:
The optimization of expensive black-box functions is ubiquitous in science and engineering. A common solution to this problem is Bayesian optimization (BO), which is generally comprised of two components: (i) a surrogate model and (ii) an acquisition function, which generally require expensive re-training and optimization steps at each iteration, respectively. Although recent work enabled in-context surrogate models that do not require re-training, virtually all existing BO methods still require acquisition function maximization to select the next observation, which introduces many knobs to tune, such as Monte Carlo samplers and multi-start optimizers. In this work, we propose a completely in-context, zero-shot solution for BO that does not require surrogate fitting or acquisition function optimization. This is done by using a pre-trained deep generative model to directly sample from the posterior over the optimum point. We show that this process is equivalent to Thompson sampling and demonstrate the capabilities and cost-effectiveness of our foundation model on a suite of real-world benchmarks. We achieve an efficiency gain of more than 35x in terms of wall-clock time when compared with Gaussian process-based BO, enabling efficient parallel and distributed BO, e.g., for high-throughput optimization.

Paperid: 3877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22943.pdf

Abstract:
While pre-trained multimodal representations (e.g., CLIP) have shown impressive capabilities, they exhibit significant compositional vulnerabilities leading to counterintuitive judgments. We introduce Multimodal Adversarial Compositionality (MAC), a benchmark that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate deceptive text samples to exploit these vulnerabilities across different modalities and evaluates them through both sample-wise attack success rate and group-wise entropy-based diversity. To improve zero-shot methods, we propose a self-training approach that leverages rejection-sampling fine-tuning with diversity-promoting filtering, which enhances both attack success rate and sample diversity. Using smaller language models like Llama-3.1-8B, our approach demonstrates superior performance in revealing compositional vulnerabilities across various multimodal representations, including images, videos, and audios.

Paperid: 3878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22635.pdf

Abstract:
A common approach for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason is to train on chain-of-thought (CoT) traces of in-distribution reasoning problems, but such annotated data is costly to obtain for every problem of interest. We want reasoning models to generalize beyond their training distribution, and ideally to generalize compositionally: combine atomic reasoning skills to solve harder, unseen reasoning tasks. We take a step towards compositional generalization of reasoning skills when addressing a target compositional task that has no labeled CoT data. We find that simply training models on CoT data of atomic tasks leads to limited generalization, but minimally modifying CoT formats of constituent atomic tasks to be composable can lead to improvements. We can train "atomic CoT" models on the atomic tasks with Composable CoT data and combine them with multitask learning or model merging for better zero-shot performance on the target compositional task. Such a combined model can be further bootstrapped on a small amount of compositional data using rejection sampling fine-tuning (RFT). Results on string operations and natural language skill compositions show that training LLMs on Composable CoT outperforms multitask learning and continued fine-tuning baselines within a given training data budget.

Paperid: 3879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21920.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model, exhibits impressive zero-shot capabilities in general tasks but struggles in specialized domains. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a promising approach to unleash the potential of SAM in novel scenarios. However, existing PEFT methods for SAM neglect the domain-invariant relations encoded in the pre-trained model. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoSAM, an information-theoretic approach that enhances SAM fine-tuning by distilling and preserving its pre-trained segmentation knowledge. Specifically, we formulate the knowledge transfer process as two novel mutual information-based objectives: (i) to compress the domain-invariant relation extracted from pre-trained SAM, excluding pseudo-invariant information as possible, and (ii) to maximize mutual information between the relational knowledge learned by the teacher (pre-trained SAM) and the student (fine-tuned model). The proposed InfoSAM establishes a robust distillation framework for PEFT of SAM. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate InfoSAM's effectiveness in improving SAM family's performance on real-world tasks, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in handling specialized scenarios.

Paperid: 3880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20290.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent progress in general purpose robotics, robot policies still lag far behind basic human capabilities in the real world. Humans interact constantly with the physical world, yet this rich data resource remains largely untapped in robot learning. We propose EgoZero, a minimal system that learns robust manipulation policies from human demonstrations captured with Project Aria smart glasses, $\textbf{and zero robot data}$. EgoZero enables: (1) extraction of complete, robot-executable actions from in-the-wild, egocentric, human demonstrations, (2) compression of human visual observations into morphology-agnostic state representations, and (3) closed-loop policy learning that generalizes morphologically, spatially, and semantically. We deploy EgoZero policies on a gripper Franka Panda robot and demonstrate zero-shot transfer with 70% success rate over 7 manipulation tasks and only 20 minutes of data collection per task. Our results suggest that in-the-wild human data can serve as a scalable foundation for real-world robot learning - paving the way toward a future of abundant, diverse, and naturalistic training data for robots. Code and videos are available at https://egozero-robot.github.io.

Paperid: 3881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19685.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative models for graph generation, yet their use for conditional graph generation remains a fundamental challenge. In particular, guiding diffusion models on graphs under arbitrary reward signals is difficult: gradient-based methods, while powerful, are often unsuitable due to the discrete and combinatorial nature of graphs, and non-differentiable rewards further complicate gradient-based guidance. We propose Graph Guided Diffusion (GGDiff), a novel guidance framework that interprets conditional diffusion on graphs as a stochastic control problem to address this challenge. GGDiff unifies multiple guidance strategies, including gradient-based guidance (for differentiable rewards), control-based guidance (using control signals from forward reward evaluations), and zero-order approximations (bridging gradient-based and gradient-free optimization). This comprehensive, plug-and-play framework enables zero-shot guidance of pre-trained diffusion models under both differentiable and non-differentiable reward functions, adapting well-established guidance techniques to graph generation--a direction largely unexplored. Our formulation balances computational efficiency, reward alignment, and sample quality, enabling practical conditional generation across diverse reward types. We demonstrate the efficacy of GGDiff in various tasks, including constraints on graph motifs, fairness, and link prediction, achieving superior alignment with target rewards while maintaining diversity and fidelity.

Paperid: 3882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19429.pdf

Abstract:
Podcasts have become daily companions for half a billion users. Given the enormous amount of podcast content available, highlights provide a valuable signal that helps viewers get the gist of an episode and decide if they want to invest in listening to it in its entirety. However, identifying highlights automatically is challenging due to the unstructured and long-form nature of the content. We introduce Rhapsody, a dataset of 13K podcast episodes paired with segment-level highlight scores derived from YouTube's 'most replayed' feature. We frame the podcast highlight detection as a segment-level binary classification task. We explore various baseline approaches, including zero-shot prompting of language models and lightweight fine-tuned language models using segment-level classification heads. Our experimental results indicate that even state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4o and Gemini struggle with this task, while models fine-tuned with in-domain data significantly outperform their zero-shot performance. The fine-tuned model benefits from leveraging both speech signal features and transcripts. These findings highlight the challenges for fine-grained information access in long-form spoken media.

Paperid: 3883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16547.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework for occlusion-aware robotic manipulation in cluttered plant environments. Our approach enables a robot to interact with a deformable plant to reveal hidden objects of interest, such as fruits, using multimodal observations. We decouple the kinematic planning problem from robot control to simplify zero-shot sim2real transfer for the trained policy. Our results demonstrate that the trained policy, deployed using our framework, achieves up to 86.7% success in real-world trials across diverse initial conditions. Our findings pave the way toward autonomous, perception-driven agricultural robots that intelligently interact with complex foliage plants to "find the fruit" in challenging occluded scenarios, without the need for explicitly designed geometric and dynamic models of every plant scenario.

Paperid: 3884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15504.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has advanced computational pathology but expert annotations remain scarce. Few-shot learning mitigates annotation burdens yet suffers from overfitting and discriminative feature mischaracterization. In addition, the current few-shot multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches leverage pretrained vision-language models to alleviate these issues, but at the cost of complex preprocessing and high computational cost. We propose a Squeeze-and-Recalibrate (SR) block, a drop-in replacement for linear layers in MIL models to address these challenges. The SR block comprises two core components: a pair of low-rank trainable matrices (squeeze pathway, SP) that reduces parameter count and imposes a bottleneck to prevent spurious feature learning, and a frozen random recalibration matrix that preserves geometric structure, diversifies feature directions, and redefines the optimization objective for the SP. We provide theoretical guarantees that the SR block can approximate any linear mapping to arbitrary precision, thereby ensuring that the performance of a standard MIL model serves as a lower bound for its SR-enhanced counterpart. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SR-MIL models consistently outperform prior methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and no architectural changes.

Paperid: 3885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15398.pdf

Abstract:
Expanding pre-trained zero-shot counting models to handle unseen categories requires more than simply adding new prompts, as this approach does not achieve the necessary alignment between text and visual features for accurate counting. We introduce RichCount, the first framework to address these limitations, employing a two-stage training strategy that enhances text encoding and strengthens the model's association with objects in images. RichCount improves zero-shot counting for unseen categories through two key objectives: (1) enriching text features with a feed-forward network and adapter trained on text-image similarity, thereby creating robust, aligned representations; and (2) applying this refined encoder to counting tasks, enabling effective generalization across diverse prompts and complex images. In this manner, RichCount goes beyond simple prompt expansion to establish meaningful feature alignment that supports accurate counting across novel categories. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of RichCount, achieving state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot counting and significantly enhancing generalization to unseen categories in open-world scenarios.

Paperid: 3886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15130.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown remarkable performance in cross-modal tasks through large-scale contrastive pre-training. To adapt these large transformer-based models efficiently for downstream tasks, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques like LoRA have emerged as scalable alternatives to full fine-tuning, especially in few-shot scenarios. However, like traditional deep neural networks, VLMs are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations can significantly degrade model performance. Adversarial training remains the most effective strategy for improving model robustness in PEFT. In this work, we propose AdvCLIP-LoRA, the first algorithm designed to enhance the adversarial robustness of CLIP models fine-tuned with LoRA in few-shot settings. Our method formulates adversarial fine-tuning as a minimax optimization problem and provides theoretical guarantees for convergence under smoothness and nonconvex-strong-concavity assumptions. Empirical results across eight datasets using ViT-B/16 and ViT-B/32 models show that AdvCLIP-LoRA significantly improves robustness against common adversarial attacks (e.g., FGSM, PGD), without sacrificing much clean accuracy. These findings highlight AdvCLIP-LoRA as a practical and theoretically grounded approach for robust adaptation of VLMs in resource-constrained settings.

Paperid: 3887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15065.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the capacity of small language models (0.5B-5B parameters) to generate empathetic responses for individuals with PTSD. We introduce Trauma-Informed Dialogue for Empathy (TIDE), a novel dataset comprising 10,000 two-turn conversations across 500 diverse, clinically-grounded PTSD personas (https://huggingface.co/datasets/yenopoya/TIDE). Using frontier model outputs as ground truth, we evaluate eight small LLMs in zero-shot settings and after fine-tuning. Fine-tuning enhances empathetic capabilities, improving cosine similarity and perceived empathy, although gains vary across emotional scenarios and smaller models exhibit a "knowledge transfer ceiling." As expected, Claude Sonnet 3.5 consistently outperforms all models, but surprisingly, the smaller models often approach human-rated empathy levels. Demographic analyses showed that older adults favored responses that validated distress before offering support (p = .004), while graduate-educated users preferred emotionally layered replies in specific scenarios. Gender-based differences were minimal (p > 0.15), suggesting the feasibility of broadly empathetic model designs. This work offers insights into building resource-efficient, emotionally intelligent systems for mental health support.

Paperid: 3888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11939.pdf

Abstract:
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are essential for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. While previous ECG-text contrastive learning methods have shown promising results, they often overlook the incompleteness of the reports. Given an ECG, the report is generated by first identifying key waveform features and then inferring the final diagnosis through these features. Despite their importance, these waveform features are often not recorded in the report as intermediate results. Aligning ECGs with such incomplete reports impedes the model's ability to capture the ECG's waveform features and limits its understanding of diagnostic reasoning based on those features. To address this, we propose FG-CLEP (Fine-Grained Contrastive Language ECG Pre-training), which aims to recover these waveform features from incomplete reports with the help of large language models (LLMs), under the challenges of hallucinations and the non-bijective relationship between waveform features and diagnoses. Additionally, considering the frequent false negatives due to the prevalence of common diagnoses in ECGs, we introduce a semantic similarity matrix to guide contrastive learning. Furthermore, we adopt a sigmoid-based loss function to accommodate the multi-label nature of ECG-related tasks. Experiments on six datasets demonstrate that FG-CLEP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both zero-shot prediction and linear probing across these datasets.

Paperid: 3889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07921.pdf

Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks, especially, few-shot learning (FSL), which is increasingly important for generalizing from limited examples. However, DNNs are computationally expensive with scalability issues in real world. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with their event-driven nature and low energy consumption, are particularly efficient in processing sparse and dynamic data, though they still encounter difficulties in capturing complex spatiotemporal features and performing accurate cross-class comparisons. To further enhance the performance and efficiency of SNNs in few-shot learning, we propose a few-shot learning framework based on SNNs, which combines a self-feature extractor module and a cross-feature contrastive module to refine feature representation and reduce power consumption. We apply the combination of temporal efficient training loss and InfoNCE loss to optimize the temporal dynamics of spike trains and enhance the discriminative power. Experimental results show that the proposed FSL-SNN significantly improves the classification performance on the neuromorphic dataset N-Omniglot, and also achieves competitive performance to ANNs on static datasets such as CUB and miniImageNet with low power consumption.

Paperid: 3890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07857.pdf

Abstract:
Multifarious intent detection predictors are developed for different languages, including English, Chinese and French, however, the field remains underdeveloped for Urdu, the 10th most spoken language. In the realm of well-known languages, intent detection predictors utilize the strategy of few-shot learning and prediction of unseen classes based on the model training on seen classes. However, Urdu language lacks few-shot strategy based intent detection predictors and traditional predictors are focused on prediction of the same classes which models have seen in the train set. To empower Urdu language specific intent detection, this introduces a unique contrastive learning approach that leverages unlabeled Urdu data to re-train pre-trained language models. This re-training empowers LLMs representation learning for the downstream intent detection task. Finally, it reaps the combined potential of pre-trained LLMs and the prototype-informed attention mechanism to create a comprehensive end-to-end LLMPIA intent detection pipeline. Under the paradigm of proposed predictive pipeline, it explores the potential of 6 distinct language models and 13 distinct similarity computation methods. The proposed framework is evaluated on 2 public benchmark datasets, namely ATIS encompassing 5836 samples and Web Queries having 8519 samples. Across ATIS dataset under 4-way 1 shot and 4-way 5 shot experimental settings LLMPIA achieved 83.28% and 98.25% F1-Score and on Web Queries dataset produced 76.23% and 84.42% F1-Score, respectively. In an additional case study on the Web Queries dataset under same classes train and test set settings, LLMPIA outperformed state-of-the-art predictor by 53.55% F1-Score.

Paperid: 3891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03334.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, language-guided open-world aerial object detection has gained significant attention due to its better alignment with real-world application needs. However, due to limited datasets, most existing language-guided methods primarily focus on vocabulary, which fails to meet the demands of more fine-grained open-world detection. To address this limitation, we propose constructing a large-scale language-guided open-set aerial detection dataset, encompassing three levels of language guidance: from words to phrases, and ultimately to sentences. Centered around an open-source large vision-language model and integrating image-operation-based preprocessing with BERT-based postprocessing, we present the OS-W2S Label Engine, an automatic annotation pipeline capable of handling diverse scene annotations for aerial images. Using this label engine, we expand existing aerial detection datasets with rich textual annotations and construct a novel benchmark dataset, called Multi-instance Open-set Aerial Dataset (MI-OAD), addressing the limitations of current remote sensing grounding data and enabling effective open-set aerial detection. Specifically, MI-OAD contains 163,023 images and 2 million image-caption pairs, approximately 40 times larger than comparable datasets. We also employ state-of-the-art open-set methods from the natural image domain, trained on our proposed dataset, to validate the model's open-set detection capabilities. For instance, when trained on our dataset, Grounding DINO achieves improvements of 29.5 AP_{50} and 33.7 Recall@10 for sentence inputs under zero-shot transfer conditions. Both the dataset and the label engine will be released publicly.

Paperid: 3892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01726.pdf

Abstract:
Interactive 3D segmentation has emerged as a promising solution for generating accurate object masks in complex 3D scenes by incorporating user-provided clicks. However, two critical challenges remain underexplored: (1) effectively generalizing from sparse user clicks to produce accurate segmentation, and (2) quantifying predictive uncertainty to help users identify unreliable regions. In this work, we propose NPISeg3D, a novel probabilistic framework that builds upon Neural Processes (NPs) to address these challenges. Specifically, NPISeg3D introduces a hierarchical latent variable structure with scene-specific and object-specific latent variables to enhance few-shot generalization by capturing both global context and object-specific characteristics. Additionally, we design a probabilistic prototype modulator that adaptively modulates click prototypes with object-specific latent variables, improving the model's ability to capture object-aware context and quantify predictive uncertainty. Experiments on four 3D point cloud datasets demonstrate that NPISeg3D achieves superior segmentation performance with fewer clicks while providing reliable uncertainty estimations.

Paperid: 3893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21028.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of malware variants requires robust classification methods to enhance cybersecurity. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential for generating malware descriptions to aid family classification, their utility is limited by semantic embedding overlaps and misalignment with binary behavioral features. We propose a contrastive fine-tuning (CFT) method that refines LLM embeddings via targeted selection of hard negative samples based on cosine similarity, enabling LLMs to distinguish between closely related malware families. Our approach combines high-similarity negatives to enhance discriminative power and mid-tier negatives to increase embedding diversity, optimizing both precision and generalization. Evaluated on the CIC-AndMal-2020 and BODMAS datasets, our refined embeddings are integrated into a multimodal classifier within a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework on a few-shot setting. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements: our method achieves 63.15% classification accuracy with as few as 20 samples on CIC-AndMal-2020, outperforming baselines by 11--21 percentage points and surpassing prior negative sampling strategies. Ablation studies confirm the superiority of similarity-based selection over random sampling, with gains of 10-23%. Additionally, fine-tuned LLMs generate attribute-aware descriptions that generalize to unseen variants, bridging textual and binary feature gaps. This work advances malware classification by enabling nuanced semantic distinctions and provides a scalable framework for adapting LLMs to cybersecurity challenges.

Paperid: 3894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19455.pdf

Abstract:
Constructing dataset for fashion style recognition is challenging due to the inherent subjectivity and ambiguity of style concepts. Recent advances in text-to-image models have facilitated generative data augmentation by synthesizing images from labeled data, yet existing methods based solely on class names or reference captions often fail to balance visual diversity and style consistency. In this work, we propose \textbf{Masked Language Prompting (MLP)}, a novel prompting strategy that masks selected words in a reference caption and leverages large language models to generate diverse yet semantically coherent completions. This approach preserves the structural semantics of the original caption while introducing attribute-level variations aligned with the intended style, enabling style-consistent and diverse image generation without fine-tuning. Experimental results on the FashionStyle14 dataset demonstrate that our MLP-based augmentation consistently outperforms class-name and caption-based baselines, validating its effectiveness for fashion style recognition under limited supervision.

Paperid: 3895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14687.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate depth estimation from monocular videos remains challenging due to ambiguities inherent in single-view geometry, as crucial depth cues like stereopsis are absent. However, humans often perceive relative depth intuitively by observing variations in the size and spacing of objects as they move. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method that infers relative depth by examining the spatial relationships and temporal evolution of a set of tracked 2D trajectories. Specifically, we use off-the-shelf point tracking models to capture 2D trajectories. Then, our approach employs spatial and temporal transformers to process these trajectories and directly infer depth changes over time. Evaluated on the TAPVid-3D benchmark, our method demonstrates robust zero-shot performance, generalizing effectively from synthetic to real-world datasets. Results indicate that our approach achieves temporally smooth, high-accuracy depth predictions across diverse domains.

Paperid: 3896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14439.pdf

Abstract:
Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to accommodate diverse user preferences is essential for enhancing alignment and user satisfaction. Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches often rely on monolithic value representations, limiting their ability to adapt to individual preferences. We introduce a novel framework that leverages low-rank preference modeling to efficiently learn and generalize user-specific reward functions. By representing reward functions in a low-dimensional subspace and modeling individual preferences as weighted combinations of shared basis functions, our approach avoids rigid user categorization while enabling scalability and few-shot adaptation. We validate our method on multiple preference datasets, demonstrating superior generalization to unseen users and improved accuracy in preference prediction tasks.

Paperid: 3897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13490.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in diffusion models, achieving reliable image generation and editing remains challenging due to the inherent diversity induced by stochastic noise in the sampling process. Instruction-guided image editing with diffusion models offers user-friendly capabilities, yet editing failures, such as background distortion, frequently occur. Users often resort to trial and error, adjusting seeds or prompts to achieve satisfactory results, which is inefficient. While seed selection methods exist for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, they depend on external verifiers, limiting applicability, and evaluating multiple seeds increases computational complexity. To address this, we first establish a multiple-seed-based image editing baseline using background consistency scores, achieving Best-of-N performance without supervision. Building on this, we introduce ELECT (Early-timestep Latent Evaluation for Candidate Selection), a zero-shot framework that selects reliable seeds by estimating background mismatches at early diffusion timesteps, identifying the seed that retains the background while modifying only the foreground. ELECT ranks seed candidates by a background inconsistency score, filtering unsuitable samples early based on background consistency while preserving editability. Beyond standalone seed selection, ELECT integrates into instruction-guided editing pipelines and extends to Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLMs) for joint seed and prompt selection, further improving results when seed selection alone is insufficient. Experiments show that ELECT reduces computational costs (by 41 percent on average and up to 61 percent) while improving background consistency and instruction adherence, achieving around 40 percent success rates in previously failed cases - without any external supervision or training.

Paperid: 3898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10857.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic grasping is a cornerstone capability of embodied systems. Many methods directly output grasps from partial information without modeling the geometry of the scene, leading to suboptimal motion and even collisions. To address these issues, we introduce ZeroGrasp, a novel framework that simultaneously performs 3D reconstruction and grasp pose prediction in near real-time. A key insight of our method is that occlusion reasoning and modeling the spatial relationships between objects is beneficial for both accurate reconstruction and grasping. We couple our method with a novel large-scale synthetic dataset, which comprises 1M photo-realistic images, high-resolution 3D reconstructions and 11.3B physically-valid grasp pose annotations for 12K objects from the Objaverse-LVIS dataset. We evaluate ZeroGrasp on the GraspNet-1B benchmark as well as through real-world robot experiments. ZeroGrasp achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to novel real-world objects by leveraging synthetic data.

Paperid: 3899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09958.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection has become an essential tool for analyzing public discussions on social media. Current methods face significant challenges, particularly in Chinese language processing and multi-turn conversational analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce C-MTCSD, the largest Chinese multi-turn conversational stance detection dataset, comprising 24,264 carefully annotated instances from Sina Weibo, which is 4.2 times larger than the only prior Chinese conversational stance detection dataset. Our comprehensive evaluation using both traditional approaches and large language models reveals the complexity of C-MTCSD: even state-of-the-art models achieve only 64.07% F1 score in the challenging zero-shot setting, while performance consistently degrades with increasing conversation depth. Traditional models particularly struggle with implicit stance detection, achieving below 50% F1 score. This work establishes a challenging new benchmark for Chinese stance detection research, highlighting significant opportunities for future improvements.

Paperid: 3900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05956.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Action Recognition (FSAR) aims to train a model with only a few labeled video instances. A key challenge in FSAR is handling divergent narrative trajectories for precise video matching. While the frame- and tuple-level alignment approaches have been promising, their methods heavily rely on pre-defined and length-dependent alignment units (e.g., frames or tuples), which limits flexibility for actions of varying lengths and speeds. In this work, we introduce a novel TEmporal Alignment-free Matching (TEAM) approach, which eliminates the need for temporal units in action representation and brute-force alignment during matching. Specifically, TEAM represents each video with a fixed set of pattern tokens that capture globally discriminative clues within the video instance regardless of action length or speed, ensuring its flexibility. Furthermore, TEAM is inherently efficient, using token-wise comparisons to measure similarity between videos, unlike existing methods that rely on pairwise comparisons for temporal alignment. Additionally, we propose an adaptation process that identifies and removes common information across classes, establishing clear boundaries even between novel categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TEAM. Codes are available at github.com/leesb7426/TEAM.

Paperid: 3901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02878.pdf

Abstract:
Human activity recognition (HAR) using inertial measurement units (IMUs) increasingly leverages large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches focus on coarse activities like walking or running. Our preliminary study indicates that pretrained LLMs fail catastrophically on fine-grained HAR tasks such as air-written letter recognition, achieving only near-random guessing accuracy. In this work, we first bridge this gap for flat-surface writing scenarios: by fine-tuning LLMs with a self-collected dataset and few-shot learning, we achieved up to a 129x improvement on 2D data. To extend this to 3D scenarios, we designed an encoder-based pipeline that maps 3D data into 2D equivalents, preserving the spatiotemporal information for robust letter prediction. Our end-to-end pipeline achieves 78% accuracy on word recognition with up to 5 letters in mid-air writing scenarios, establishing LLMs as viable tools for fine-grained HAR.

Paperid: 3902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01919.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly reshaped the landscape of machine translation (MT), particularly for low-resource languages and domains that lack sufficient parallel corpora, linguistic tools, and computational infrastructure. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of recent progress in leveraging LLMs for MT. We analyze techniques such as few-shot prompting, cross-lingual transfer, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA, adapters) that enable effective adaptation to under-resourced settings. The paper also explores synthetic data generation strategies using LLMs, including back-translation and lexical augmentation. Additionally, we compare LLM-based translation with traditional encoder-decoder models across diverse language pairs, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each. We discuss persistent challenges - such as hallucinations, evaluation inconsistencies, and inherited biases, while also evaluating emerging LLM-driven metrics for translation quality. This survey offers practical insights and outlines future directions for building robust, inclusive, and scalable MT systems in the era of large-scale generative models.

Paperid: 3903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14754.pdf

Abstract:
Street scene datasets, collected from Street View or dashboard cameras, offer a promising means of detecting urban objects and incidents like street flooding. However, a major challenge in using these datasets is their lack of reliable labels: there are myriad types of incidents, many types occur rarely, and ground-truth measures of where incidents occur are lacking. Here, we propose BayFlood, a two-stage approach which circumvents this difficulty. First, we perform zero-shot classification of where incidents occur using a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). Second, we fit a spatial Bayesian model on the VLM classifications. The zero-shot approach avoids the need to annotate large training sets, and the Bayesian model provides frequent desiderata in urban settings - principled measures of uncertainty, smoothing across locations, and incorporation of external data like stormwater accumulation zones. We comprehensively validate this two-stage approach, showing that VLMs provide strong zero-shot signal for floods across multiple cities and time periods, the Bayesian model improves out-of-sample prediction relative to baseline methods, and our inferred flood risk correlates with known external predictors of risk. Having validated our approach, we show it can be used to improve urban flood detection: our analysis reveals 113,738 people who are at high risk of flooding overlooked by current methods, identifies demographic biases in existing methods, and suggests locations for new flood sensors. More broadly, our results showcase how Bayesian modeling of zero-shot LM annotations represents a promising paradigm because it avoids the need to collect large labeled datasets and leverages the power of foundation models while providing the expressiveness and uncertainty quantification of Bayesian models.

Paperid: 3904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14377.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the growing scale of medical Vision-Language datasets, the impact of dataset quality on model performance remains under-explored. We introduce Open-PMC, a high-quality medical dataset from PubMed Central, containing 2.2 million image-text pairs, enriched with image modality annotations, subfigures, and summarized in-text references. Notably, the in-text references provide richer medical context, extending beyond the abstract information typically found in captions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark Open-PMC against larger datasets across retrieval and zero-shot classification tasks. Our results show that dataset quality-not just size-drives significant performance gains. We complement our benchmark with an in-depth analysis of feature representation. Our findings highlight the crucial role of data curation quality in advancing multimodal medical AI. We release Open-PMC, along with the trained models and our codebase.

Paperid: 3905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10937.pdf

Abstract:
Face Recognition Systems (FRS) are increasingly vulnerable to face-morphing attacks, prompting the development of Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) algorithms. However, a key challenge in MAD lies in its limited generalizability to unseen data and its lack of explainability-critical for practical application environments such as enrolment stations and automated border control systems. Recognizing that most existing MAD algorithms rely on supervised learning paradigms, this work explores a novel approach to MAD using zero-shot learning leveraged on Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose two types of zero-shot MAD algorithms: one leveraging general vision models and the other utilizing multimodal LLMs. For general vision models, we address the MAD task by computing the mean support embedding of an independent support set without using morphed images. For the LLM-based approach, we employ the state-of-the-art GPT-4 Turbo API with carefully crafted prompts. To evaluate the feasibility of zero-shot MAD and the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we constructed a print-scan morph dataset featuring various unseen morphing algorithms, simulating challenging real-world application scenarios. Experimental results demonstrated notable detection accuracy, validating the applicability of zero-shot learning for MAD tasks. Additionally, our investigation into LLM-based MAD revealed that multimodal LLMs, such as ChatGPT, exhibit remarkable generalizability to untrained MAD tasks. Furthermore, they possess a unique ability to provide explanations and guidance, which can enhance transparency and usability for end-users in practical applications.

Paperid: 3906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10305.pdf

Abstract:
Analyzing animal behavior from video recordings is crucial for scientific research, yet manual annotation remains labor-intensive and prone to subjectivity. Efficient segmentation methods are needed to automate this process while maintaining high accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that utilizes eye-tracking data from Aria glasses to generate prompt points, which are then used to produce segmentation masks via a fast zero-shot segmentation model. Additionally, we apply post-processing to refine the prompts, leading to improved segmentation quality. Through our approach, we demonstrate that combining eye-tracking-based annotation with smart prompt refinement can enhance segmentation accuracy, achieving an improvement of 70.6% from 38.8 to 66.2 in the Jaccard Index for segmentation results in the rats dataset.

Paperid: 3907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08867.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in solving sequential decision-making problems. However, in real-world scenarios, RL agents often struggle to generalize when faced with unseen actions that were not encountered during training. Some previous works on zero-shot action generalization rely on large datasets of action observations to capture the behaviors of new actions, making them impractical for real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel zero-shot framework, Action Generalization from Limited Observations (AGLO). Our framework has two main components: an action representation learning module and a policy learning module. The action representation learning module extracts discriminative embeddings of actions from limited observations, while the policy learning module leverages the learned action representations, along with augmented synthetic action representations, to learn a policy capable of handling tasks with unseen actions. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for zero-shot action generalization across multiple benchmark tasks, showcasing its effectiveness in generalizing to new actions with minimal action observations.

Paperid: 3908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08603.pdf

Abstract:
Cell microscopy data are abundant; however, corresponding segmentation annotations remain scarce. Moreover, variations in cell types, imaging devices, and staining techniques introduce significant domain gaps between datasets. As a result, even large, pretrained segmentation models trained on diverse datasets (source datasets) struggle to generalize to unseen datasets (target datasets). To overcome this generalization problem, we propose CellStyle, which improves the segmentation quality of such models without requiring labels for the target dataset, thereby enabling zero-shot adaptation. CellStyle transfers the attributes of an unannotated target dataset, such as texture, color, and noise, to the annotated source dataset. This transfer is performed while preserving the cell shapes of the source images, ensuring that the existing source annotations can still be used while maintaining the visual characteristics of the target dataset. The styled synthetic images with the existing annotations enable the finetuning of a generalist segmentation model for application to the unannotated target data. We demonstrate that CellStyle significantly improves zero-shot cell segmentation performance across diverse datasets by finetuning multiple segmentation models on the style-transferred data. The code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 3909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08600.pdf

Abstract:
We present NSF-SciFy, a large-scale dataset for scientific claim extraction derived from the National Science Foundation (NSF) awards database, comprising over 400K grant abstracts spanning five decades. While previous datasets relied on published literature, we leverage grant abstracts which offer a unique advantage: they capture claims at an earlier stage in the research lifecycle before publication takes effect. We also introduce a new task to distinguish between existing scientific claims and aspirational research intentions in proposals. Using zero-shot prompting with frontier large language models, we jointly extract 114K scientific claims and 145K investigation proposals from 16K grant abstracts in the materials science domain to create a focused subset called NSF-SciFy-MatSci. We use this dataset to evaluate 3 three key tasks: (1) technical to non-technical abstract generation, where models achieve high BERTScore (0.85+ F1); (2) scientific claim extraction, where fine-tuned models outperform base models by 100% relative improvement; and (3) investigation proposal extraction, showing 90%+ improvement with fine-tuning. We introduce novel LLM-based evaluation metrics for robust assessment of claim/proposal extraction quality. As the largest scientific claim dataset to date -- with an estimated 2.8 million claims across all STEM disciplines funded by the NSF -- NSF-SciFy enables new opportunities for claim verification and meta-scientific research. We publicly release all datasets, trained models, and evaluation code to facilitate further research.

Paperid: 3910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07870.pdf

Abstract:
Unreadable code could be a breeding ground for errors. Thus, previous work defined approaches based on machine learning to automatically assess code readability that can warn developers when some code artifacts (e.g., classes) become unreadable. Given datasets of code snippets manually evaluated by several developers in terms of their perceived readability, such approaches (i) establish a snippet-level ground truth, and (ii) train a binary (readable/unreadable) or a ternary (readable/neutral/unreadable) code readability classifier. Given this procedure, all existing approaches neglect the subjectiveness of code readability, i.e., the possible different developer-specific nuances in the code readability perception. In this paper, we aim to understand to what extent it is possible to assess code readability as subjectively perceived by developers through a personalized code readability assessment approach. This problem is significantly more challenging than the snippet-level classification problem: We assume that, in a realistic scenario, a given developer is keen to provide only a few code readability evaluations, thus less data is available. For this reason, we adopt an LLM with few-shot learning to achieve our goal. Our results, however, show that such an approach achieves worse results than a state-of-the-art feature-based model that is trained to work at the snippet-level. We tried to understand why this happens by looking more closely at the quality of the available code readability datasets and assessed the consistency of the inter-developer evaluations. We observed that up to a third of the evaluations are self-contradictory. Our negative results call for new and more reliable code readability datasets.

Paperid: 3911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07330.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs pose a persistent challenge to deep learning models, often triggering overconfident predictions on non-target objects. While prior work has primarily focused on refining scoring functions and adjusting test-time thresholds, such algorithmic improvements offer only incremental gains. We argue that a rethinking of the entire development lifecycle is needed to mitigate these risks effectively. This work addresses two overlooked dimensions of OoD detection in object detection. First, we reveal fundamental flaws in widely used evaluation benchmarks: contrary to their design intent, up to 13% of objects in the OoD test sets actually belong to in-distribution classes, and vice versa. These quality issues severely distort the reported performance of existing methods and contribute to their high false positive rates. Second, we introduce a novel training-time mitigation paradigm that operates independently of external OoD detectors. Instead of relying solely on post-hoc scoring, we fine-tune the detector using a carefully synthesized OoD dataset that semantically resembles in-distribution objects. This process shapes a defensive decision boundary by suppressing objectness on OoD objects, leading to a 91% reduction in hallucination error of a YOLO model on BDD-100K. Our methodology generalizes across detection paradigms such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR, and supports few-shot adaptation. Together, these contributions offer a principled and effective way to reduce OoD-induced hallucination in object detectors. Code and data are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/m-hood.

Paperid: 3912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02917.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning have shown significant potential for classifying retinal diseases using color fundus images. However, existing works predominantly rely exclusively on image data, lack interpretability in their diagnostic decisions, and treat medical professionals primarily as annotators for ground truth labeling. To fill this gap, we implement two key strategies: extracting interpretable concepts of retinal diseases using the knowledge base of GPT models and incorporating these concepts as a language component in prompt-learning to train vision-language (VL) models with both fundus images and their associated concepts. Our method not only improves retinal disease classification but also enriches few-shot and zero-shot detection (novel disease detection), while offering the added benefit of concept-based model interpretability. Our extensive evaluation across two diverse retinal fundus image datasets illustrates substantial performance gains in VL-model based few-shot methodologies through our concept integration approach, demonstrating an average improvement of approximately 5.8\% and 2.7\% mean average precision for 16-shot learning and zero-shot (novel class) detection respectively. Our method marks a pivotal step towards interpretable and efficient retinal disease recognition for real-world clinical applications.

Paperid: 3913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02748.pdf

Abstract:
From early Movement Primitive (MP) techniques to modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs), autonomous manipulation has remained a pivotal topic in robotics. As two extremes, VLM-based methods emphasize zero-shot and adaptive manipulation but struggle with fine-grained planning. In contrast, MP-based approaches excel in precise trajectory generalization but lack decision-making ability. To leverage the strengths of the two frameworks, we propose VL-MP, which integrates VLM with Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMP) via a low-distortion decision information transfer bridge, enabling fine-grained robotic manipulation under ambiguous situations. One key of VL-MP is the accurate representation of task decision parameters through semantic keypoints constraints, leading to more precise task parameter generation. Additionally, we introduce a local trajectory feature-enhanced KMP to support VL-MP, thereby achieving shape preservation for complex trajectories. Extensive experiments conducted in complex real-world environments validate the effectiveness of VL-MP for adaptive and fine-grained manipulation.

Paperid: 3914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02063.pdf

Abstract:
We present V$^2$Dial - a novel expert-based model specifically geared towards simultaneously handling image and video input data for multimodal conversational tasks. Current multimodal models primarily focus on simpler tasks (e.g., VQA, VideoQA, video-text retrieval) and often neglect the more challenging conversational counterparts, such as video and visual/image dialog. Moreover, works on both conversational tasks evolved separately from each other despite their apparent similarities limiting their applicability potential. To this end, we propose to unify both tasks using a single model that for the first time jointly learns the spatial and temporal features of images and videos by routing them through dedicated experts and aligns them using matching and contrastive learning techniques. Furthermore, we systemically study the domain shift between the two tasks by investigating whether and to what extent these seemingly related tasks can mutually benefit from their respective training data. Extensive evaluations on the widely used video and visual dialog datasets of AVSD and VisDial show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks both in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings.

Paperid: 3915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00802.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Foundation Models (MFMs), trained on large-scale datasets, have demonstrated superior performance across various tasks. However, these models still struggle with domain gaps in practical applications. Specifically, even after fine-tuning on source-domain data, task-adapted foundation models often perform poorly in the target domain. To address this challenge, we propose a few-shot unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework for MFMs, named MFM-DA, which only leverages a limited number of unlabeled target-domain images. Our approach begins by training a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), which is then adapted to the target domain using a proposed dynamic instance-aware adaptor and a distribution direction loss, enabling the DDPM to translate source-domain images into the target domain style. The adapted images are subsequently processed through the MFM, where we introduce a designed channel-spatial alignment Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to ensure effective feature alignment. Extensive experiments on optic cup and disc segmentation tasks demonstrate that MFM-DA outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a practical solution to the domain gap issue in real-world MFM deployment. Code will be available at here.

Paperid: 3916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19777.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt tuning has become a popular strategy for adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to zero/few-shot visual recognition tasks. Some prompting techniques introduce prior knowledge due to its richness, but when learnable tokens are randomly initialized and disconnected from prior knowledge, they tend to overfit on seen classes and struggle with domain shifts for unseen ones. To address this issue, we propose the InPK model, which infuses class-specific prior knowledge into the learnable tokens during initialization, thus enabling the model to explicitly focus on class-relevant information. Furthermore, to mitigate the weakening of class information by multi-layer encoders, we continuously reinforce the interaction between learnable tokens and prior knowledge across multiple feature levels. This progressive interaction allows the learnable tokens to better capture the fine-grained differences and universal visual concepts within prior knowledge, enabling the model to extract more discriminative and generalized text features. Even for unseen classes, the learned interaction allows the model to capture their common representations and infer their appropriate positions within the existing semantic structure. Moreover, we introduce a learnable text-to-vision projection layer to accommodate the text adjustments, ensuring better alignment of visual-text semantics. Extensive experiments on 11 recognition datasets show that InPK significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multiple zero/few-shot image classification tasks.

Paperid: 3917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19739.pdf

Abstract:
Photorealistic 3D head avatar reconstruction faces critical challenges in modeling dynamic face-hair interactions and achieving cross-identity generalization, particularly during expressions and head movements. We present LUCAS, a novel Universal Prior Model (UPM) for codec avatar modeling that disentangles face and hair through a layered representation. Unlike previous UPMs that treat hair as an integral part of the head, our approach separates the modeling of the hairless head and hair into distinct branches. LUCAS is the first to introduce a mesh-based UPM, facilitating real-time rendering on devices. Our layered representation also improves the anchor geometry for precise and visually appealing Gaussian renderings. Experimental results indicate that LUCAS outperforms existing single-mesh and Gaussian-based avatar models in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, including evaluations on held-out subjects in zero-shot driving scenarios. LUCAS demonstrates superior dynamic performance in managing head pose changes, expression transfer, and hairstyle variations, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D head avatar reconstruction.

Paperid: 3918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14907.pdf

Authors:Hajar Emami Gohari, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Syed Yousaf Shah, Constantin Adam, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Praneet Adusumilli, Farhan Ahmed, Nathalie Baracaldo Angel, Santosh Subhashrao Borse, Yuan-Chi Chang, Xuan-Hong Dang, Nirmit Desai, Revital Eres, Ran Iwamoto, Alexei Karve, Yan Koyfman, Wei-Han Lee, Changchang Liu, Boris Lublinsky, Takuyo Ohko, Pablo Pesce, Maroun Touma, Shiqiang Wang, Shalisha Witherspoon, Herbert WoisetschlÃ¤ger, David Wood, Kun-Lung Wu, Issei Yoshida, Syed Zawad, Petros Zerfos, Yi Zhou, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee

Abstract:
Data quantity and quality play a vital role in determining the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). High-quality data, in particular, can significantly boost the LLM's ability to generalize on a wide range of downstream tasks. Large pre-training datasets for leading LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, whereas many open datasets are small in size (less than 5 trillion tokens), limiting their suitability for training large models. In this paper, we introduce GneissWeb, a large dataset yielding around 10 trillion tokens that caters to the data quality and quantity requirements of training LLMs. Our GneissWeb recipe that produced the dataset consists of sharded exact sub-string deduplication and a judiciously constructed ensemble of quality filters. GneissWeb achieves a favorable trade-off between data quality and quantity, producing models that outperform models trained on state-of-the-art open large datasets (5+ trillion tokens). We show that models trained using GneissWeb dataset outperform those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0 by 2.73 percentage points in terms of average score computed on a set of 11 commonly used benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot) for pre-training dataset evaluation. When the evaluation set is extended to 20 benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot), models trained using GneissWeb still achieve a 1.75 percentage points advantage over those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0.

Paperid: 3919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14273.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in event-based recognition have demonstrated significant promise, yet most existing approaches rely on extensive training, limiting their adaptability for efficient processing of event-driven visual content. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, but their application to event-based visual recognition remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{LLM-EvGen}, an event representation generator that produces LLM-compatible event representations \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, thereby enhancing the performance of LLMs on event recognition tasks. The generator is trained using a self-supervised framework, aligning the generated representations with semantic consistency and structural fidelity. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on three datasets: N-ImageNet, N-Caltech101, and N-MNIST. The results demonstrate that our method, \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, outperforms the event-to-video method, E2VID, by 15.93\%, 0.82\%, and 50.21\%, respectively, in recognition tasks when evaluated using GPT-4o.

Paperid: 3920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13344.pdf

Abstract:
Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) encode rich, structured information critical for drug discovery tasks, but extracting meaningful insights from large-scale KGs remains challenging due to their complex structure. Existing biomedical subgraph retrieval methods are tailored for graph neural networks (GNNs), limiting compatibility with other paradigms, including large language models (LLMs). We introduce K-Paths, a model-agnostic retrieval framework that extracts structured, diverse, and biologically meaningful multi-hop paths from dense biomedical KGs. These paths enable the prediction of unobserved drug-drug and drug-disease interactions, including those involving entities not seen during training, thus supporting inductive reasoning. K-Paths is training-free and employs a diversity-aware adaptation of Yen's algorithm to extract the K shortest loopless paths between entities in a query, prioritizing biologically relevant and relationally diverse connections. These paths serve as concise, interpretable reasoning chains that can be directly integrated with LLMs or GNNs to improve generalization, accuracy, and enable explainable inference. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that K-Paths improves zero-shot reasoning across state-of-the-art LLMs. For instance, Tx-Gemma 27B improves by 19.8 and 4.0 F1 points on interaction severity prediction and drug repurposing tasks, respectively. Llama 70B achieves gains of 8.5 and 6.2 points on the same tasks. K-Paths also boosts the training efficiency of EmerGNN, a state-of-the-art GNN, by reducing the KG size by 90% while maintaining predictive performance. Beyond efficiency, K-Paths bridges the gap between KGs and LLMs, enabling scalable and explainable LLM-augmented scientific discovery. We release our code and the retrieved paths as a benchmark for inductive reasoning.

Paperid: 3921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10999.pdf

Abstract:
This work demonstrates that diffusion models can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. Visual text rendering remains a significant challenge. While recent methods condition diffusion on glyphs, it is impossible to retrieve exact font annotations from large-scale, real-world datasets, which prevents user-specified font control. To address this, we propose a data-driven solution that integrates the conditional diffusion model with a text segmentation model, utilizing segmentation masks to capture and represent fonts in pixel space in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the need for any ground-truth labels and enabling users to customize text rendering with any multilingual font of their choice. The experiment provides a proof of concept of our algorithm in zero-shot text and font editing across diverse fonts and languages, providing valuable insights for the community and industry toward achieving generalized visual text rendering.

Paperid: 3922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09164.pdf

Abstract:
We propose E-MD3C ($\underline{E}$fficient $\underline{M}$asked $\underline{D}$iffusion Transformer with Disentangled $\underline{C}$onditions and $\underline{C}$ompact $\underline{C}$ollector), a highly efficient framework for zero-shot object image customization. Unlike prior works reliant on resource-intensive Unet architectures, our approach employs lightweight masked diffusion transformers operating on latent patches, offering significantly improved computational efficiency. The framework integrates three core components: (1) an efficient masked diffusion transformer for processing autoencoder latents, (2) a disentangled condition design that ensures compactness while preserving background alignment and fine details, and (3) a learnable Conditions Collector that consolidates multiple inputs into a compact representation for efficient denoising and learning. E-MD3C outperforms the existing approach on the VITON-HD dataset across metrics such as PSNR, FID, SSIM, and LPIPS, demonstrating clear advantages in parameters, memory efficiency, and inference speed. With only $\frac{1}{4}$ of the parameters, our Transformer-based 468M model delivers $2.5\times$ faster inference and uses $\frac{2}{3}$ of the GPU memory compared to an 1720M Unet-based latent diffusion model.

Paperid: 3923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07409.pdf

Abstract:
Whole slide pathology image classification presents challenges due to gigapixel image sizes and limited annotation labels, hindering model generalization. This paper introduces a prompt learning method to adapt large vision-language models for few-shot pathology classification. We first extend the Prov-GigaPath vision foundation model, pre-trained on 1.3 billion pathology image tiles, into a vision-language model by adding adaptors and aligning it with medical text encoders via contrastive learning on 923K image-text pairs. The model is then used to extract visual features and text embeddings from few-shot annotations and fine-tunes with learnable prompt embeddings. Unlike prior methods that combine prompts with frozen features using prefix embeddings or self-attention, we propose multi-granular attention that compares interactions between learnable prompts with individual image patches and groups of them. This approach improves the model's ability to capture both fine-grained details and broader context, enhancing its recognition of complex patterns across sub-regions. To further improve accuracy, we leverage (unbalanced) optimal transport-based visual-text distance to secure model robustness by mitigating perturbations that might occur during the data augmentation process. Empirical experiments on lung, kidney, and breast pathology modalities validate the effectiveness of our approach; thereby, we surpass several of the latest competitors and consistently improve performance across diverse architectures, including CLIP, PLIP, and Prov-GigaPath integrated PLIP. We release our implementations and pre-trained models at this MGPATH.

Paperid: 3924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06976.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art methods for Human-AI Teaming and Zero-shot Cooperation focus on task completion, i.e., task rewards, as the sole evaluation metric while being agnostic to how the two agents work with each other. Furthermore, subjective user studies only offer limited insight into the quality of cooperation existing within the team. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the cooperative behaviors arising within the team when trained agents are paired with humans -- a problem that has been overlooked by the existing literature. To formally address this problem, we propose the concept of constructive interdependence -- measuring how much agents rely on each other's actions to achieve the shared goal -- as a key metric for evaluating cooperation in human-agent teams. We interpret interdependence in terms of action interactions in a STRIPS formalism, and define metrics that allow us to assess the degree of reliance between the agents' actions. We pair state-of-the-art agents HAT with learned human models as well as human participants in a user study for the popular Overcooked domain, and evaluate the task reward and teaming performance for these human-agent teams. Our results demonstrate that although trained agents attain high task rewards, they fail to induce cooperative behavior, showing very low levels of interdependence across teams. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that teaming performance is not necessarily correlated with task reward, highlighting that task reward alone cannot reliably measure cooperation arising in a team.

Paperid: 3925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05729.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces BnTTS (Bangla Text-To-Speech), the first framework for Bangla speaker adaptation-based TTS, designed to bridge the gap in Bangla speech synthesis using minimal training data. Building upon the XTTS architecture, our approach integrates Bangla into a multilingual TTS pipeline, with modifications to account for the phonetic and linguistic characteristics of the language. We pre-train BnTTS on 3.85k hours of Bangla speech dataset with corresponding text labels and evaluate performance in both zero-shot and few-shot settings on our proposed test dataset. Empirical evaluations in few-shot settings show that BnTTS significantly improves the naturalness, intelligibility, and speaker fidelity of synthesized Bangla speech. Compared to state-of-the-art Bangla TTS systems, BnTTS exhibits superior performance in Subjective Mean Opinion Score (SMOS), Naturalness, and Clarity metrics.

Paperid: 3926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05710.pdf

Abstract:
Recent deep learning-based image completion methods, including both inpainting and outpainting, have demonstrated promising results in restoring corrupted images by effectively filling various missing regions. Among these, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have been employed as key generative image completion approaches, excelling in the field of generating high-quality restorations with reduced artifacts and improved fine details. In previous work, we developed a method aimed at synthesizing views from novel microscope positions for mastoidectomy surgeries; however, that approach did not have the ability to restore the surrounding surgical scene environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to complete the surgical scene of the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset. Our approach leverages self-supervised learning on real surgical datasets to train a Single-Step Denoising Diffusion-GAN (SSDD-GAN), combining the advantages of diffusion models with the adversarial optimization of GANs for improved Structural Similarity results of 6%. The trained model is then directly applied to the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset using a zero-shot approach, enabling the generation of realistic and complete surgical scenes without the need for explicit ground-truth labels from the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset. This method addresses key limitations in previous work, offering a novel pathway for full surgical microscopy scene completion and enhancing the usability of the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset in surgical preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation.

Paperid: 3927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02069.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have intensified the need to address distribution shifts between training and testing datasets. Although prior Test-Time Training (TTT) techniques for VLMs have demonstrated robust performance, they predominantly rely on tuning text prompts, a process that demands substantial computational resources and is heavily dependent on entropy-based loss. In this paper, we propose LoRA-TTT, a novel TTT method that leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), applied exclusively to the image encoder of VLMs. By introducing LoRA and updating only its parameters during test time, our method offers a simple yet effective TTT approach, retaining the model's initial generalization capability while achieving substantial performance gains with minimal memory and runtime overhead. Additionally, we introduce a highly efficient reconstruction loss tailored for TTT. Our method can adapt to diverse domains by combining these two losses, without increasing memory consumption or runtime. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, covering 15 datasets, demonstrate that our method improves the zero-shot top-1 accuracy of CLIP-ViT-B/16 by an average of 5.79% on the OOD benchmark and 1.36% on the fine-grained benchmark, efficiently surpassing test-time prompt tuning, without relying on any external models or cache.

Paperid: 3928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18804.pdf

Abstract:
Current methods for 3D scene reconstruction from sparse posed images employ intermediate 3D representations such as neural fields, voxel grids, or 3D Gaussians, to achieve multi-view consistent scene appearance and geometry. In this paper we introduce MVGD, a diffusion-based architecture capable of direct pixel-level generation of images and depth maps from novel viewpoints, given an arbitrary number of input views. Our method uses raymap conditioning to both augment visual features with spatial information from different viewpoints, as well as to guide the generation of images and depth maps from novel views. A key aspect of our approach is the multi-task generation of images and depth maps, using learnable task embeddings to guide the diffusion process towards specific modalities. We train this model on a collection of more than 60 million multi-view samples from publicly available datasets, and propose techniques to enable efficient and consistent learning in such diverse conditions. We also propose a novel strategy that enables the efficient training of larger models by incrementally fine-tuning smaller ones, with promising scaling behavior. Through extensive experiments, we report state-of-the-art results in multiple novel view synthesis benchmarks, as well as multi-view stereo and video depth estimation.

Paperid: 3929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17132.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained attention due to their ability to understand and generate sophisticated human-like content. However, ensuring their safety is paramount as they might provide harmful and unsafe responses. Existing LLM testing frameworks address various safety-related concerns (e.g., drugs, terrorism, animal abuse) but often face challenges due to unbalanced and obsolete datasets. In this paper, we present ASTRAL, a tool that automates the generation and execution of test cases (i.e., prompts) for testing the safety of LLMs. First, we introduce a novel black-box coverage criterion to generate balanced and diverse unsafe test inputs across a diverse set of safety categories as well as linguistic writing characteristics (i.e., different style and persuasive writing techniques). Second, we propose an LLM-based approach that leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), few-shot prompting strategies and web browsing to generate up-to-date test inputs. Lastly, similar to current LLM test automation techniques, we leverage LLMs as test oracles to distinguish between safe and unsafe test outputs, allowing a fully automated testing approach. We conduct an extensive evaluation on well-known LLMs, revealing the following key findings: i) GPT3.5 outperforms other LLMs when acting as the test oracle, accurately detecting unsafe responses, and even surpassing more recent LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), as well as LLMs that are specifically tailored to detect unsafe LLM outputs (e.g., LlamaGuard); ii) the results confirm that our approach can uncover nearly twice as many unsafe LLM behaviors with the same number of test inputs compared to currently used static datasets; and iii) our black-box coverage criterion combined with web browsing can effectively guide the LLM on generating up-to-date unsafe test inputs, significantly increasing the number of unsafe LLM behaviors.

Paperid: 3930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16246.pdf

Abstract:
Brain tumor segmentation is important for diagnosis of the tumor, and current deep-learning methods rely on a large set of annotated images for training, with high annotation costs. Unsupervised segmentation is promising to avoid human annotations while the performance is often limited. In this study, we present a novel unsupervised segmentation approach that leverages the capabilities of foundation models, and it consists of three main steps: (1) A vision-language model (i.e., CLIP) is employed to obtain image-level pseudo-labels for training a classification network. Class Activation Mapping (CAM) is then employed to extract Regions of Interest (ROIs), where an adaptive masking-based data augmentation is used to enhance ROI identification.(2) The ROIs are used to generate bounding box and point prompts for the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to obtain segmentation pseudo-labels. (3) A 3D segmentation network is trained with the SAM-derived pseudo-labels, where low-quality pseudo-labels are filtered out in a self-learning process based on the similarity between the SAM's output and the network's prediction. Evaluation on the BraTS2020 dataset demonstrates that our approach obtained an average Dice Similarity Score (DSC) of 85.60%, outperforming five state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation methods by more than 10 percentage points. Besides, our approach outperforms directly using SAM for zero-shot inference, and its performance is close to fully supervised learning.

Paperid: 3931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14427.pdf

Abstract:
The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains has led researchers to apply them to graph-related problems by converting graph data into natural language text. However, unlike graph data, natural language inherently has sequential order. We observe a counter-intuitive fact that when the order of nodes or edges in the natural language description of a graph is shuffled, despite describing the same graph, model performance fluctuates between high performance and random guessing. Additionally, due to LLMs' limited input context length, current methods typically randomly sample neighbors of target nodes as representatives of their neighborhood, which may not always be effective for accurate reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce GraphSOS (Graph Sampling and Order Selection). This novel model framework features an Order Selector Module to ensure proper serialization order of the graph and a Subgraph Sampling Module to sample subgraphs with better structure for better reasoning. Furthermore, we propose Graph CoT obtained through distillation, and enhance LLM's reasoning and zero-shot learning capabilities for graph tasks through instruction tuning. Experiments on multiple datasets for node classification and graph question-answering demonstrate that GraphSOS improves LLMs' performance and generalization ability on graph tasks.

Paperid: 3932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12637.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved superior performance in novel view synthesis and 3D scene representation, but its practical applications are hindered by slow convergence and reliance on dense training views. To this end, we present DWTNeRF, a unified framework based on Instant-NGP's fast-training hash encoding. It is coupled with regularization terms designed for few-shot NeRF, which operates on sparse training views. Our DWTNeRF additionally includes a novel Discrete Wavelet loss that allows explicit prioritization of low frequencies directly in the training objective, reducing few-shot NeRF's overfitting on high frequencies in earlier training stages. We also introduce a model-based approach, based on multi-head attention, that is compatible with INGP, which are sensitive to architectural changes. On the 3-shot LLFF benchmark, DWTNeRF outperforms Vanilla INGP by 15.07% in PSNR, 24.45% in SSIM and 36.30% in LPIPS. Our approach encourages a re-thinking of current few-shot approaches for fast-converging implicit representations like INGP or 3DGS.

Paperid: 3933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11149.pdf

Abstract:
Bed-to-wheelchair transferring is a ubiquitous activity of daily living (ADL), but especially challenging for caregiving robots with limited payloads. We develop a novel algorithm that leverages the presence of other assistive devices: a Hoyer sling and a wheelchair for coarse manipulation of heavy loads, alongside a robot arm for fine-grained manipulation of deformable objects (Hoyer sling straps). We instrument the Hoyer sling and wheelchair with actuators and sensors so that they can become intelligent agents in the algorithm. We then focus on one subtask of the transferring ADL -- tying Hoyer sling straps to the sling bar -- that exemplifies the challenges of transfer: multi-agent planning, deformable object manipulation, and generalization to varying hook shapes, sling materials, and care recipient bodies. To address these challenges, we propose CART-MPC, a novel algorithm based on turn-taking multi-agent model predictive control that uses a learned neural dynamics model for a keypoint-based representation of the deformable Hoyer sling strap, and a novel cost function that leverages linking numbers from knot theory and neural amortization to accelerate inference. We validate it in both RCareWorld simulation and real-world environments. In simulation, CART-MPC successfully generalizes across diverse hook designs, sling materials, and care recipient body shapes. In the real world, we show zero-shot sim-to-real generalization capabilities to tie deformable Hoyer sling straps on a sling bar towards transferring a manikin from a hospital bed to a wheelchair. See our website for supplementary materials: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/cart-mpc/.

Paperid: 3934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11128.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a new suite of question answering datasets for Norwegian; NorOpenBookQA, NorCommonSenseQA, NorTruthfulQA, and NRK-Quiz-QA. The data covers a wide range of skills and knowledge domains, including world knowledge, commonsense reasoning, truthfulness, and knowledge about Norway. Covering both of the written standards of Norwegian - BokmÃ¥l and Nynorsk - our datasets comprise over 10k question-answer pairs, created by native speakers. We detail our dataset creation approach and present the results of evaluating 11 language models (LMs) in zero- and few-shot regimes. Most LMs perform better in BokmÃ¥l than Nynorsk, struggle most with commonsense reasoning, and are often untruthful in generating answers to questions. All our datasets and annotation materials are publicly available.

Paperid: 3935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01428.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in image-text understanding tasks. However, their performance in 3D spatial comprehension, which is critical for embodied intelligence, remains limited. Recent advances have leveraged 3D point clouds and multi-view images as inputs, yielding promising results. However, we propose exploring a purely vision-based solution inspired by human perception, which merely relies on visual cues for 3D spatial understanding. This paper empirically investigates the limitations of VLMs in 3D spatial knowledge, revealing that their primary shortcoming lies in the lack of global-local correspondence between the scene and individual frames. To address this, we introduce GPT4Scene, a novel visual prompting paradigm in VLM training and inference that helps build the global-local relationship, significantly improving the 3D spatial understanding of indoor scenes. Specifically, GPT4Scene constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) image from the video and marks consistent object IDs across both frames and the BEV image. The model then inputs the concatenated BEV image and video frames with markers. In zero-shot evaluations, GPT4Scene improves performance over closed-source VLMs like GPT-4o. Additionally, we prepare a processed video dataset consisting of 165K text annotation to fine-tune open-source VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all 3D understanding tasks. Surprisingly, after training with the GPT4Scene paradigm, VLMs consistently improve during inference, even without object marker prompting and BEV image as explicit correspondence. It demonstrates that the proposed paradigm helps VLMs develop an intrinsic ability to understand 3D scenes, which paves the way for a seamless approach to extending pre-trained VLMs for 3D scene understanding.

Paperid: 3936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18291.pdf

Abstract:
Code review is a vital but demanding aspect of software development, generating significant interest in automating review comments. Traditional evaluation methods for these comments, primarily based on text similarity, face two major challenges: inconsistent reliability of human-authored comments in open-source projects and the weak correlation of text similarity with objectives like enhancing code quality and detecting defects. This study empirically analyzes benchmark comments using a novel set of criteria informed by prior research and developer interviews. We then similarly revisit the evaluation of existing methodologies. Our evaluation framework, DeepCRCEval, integrates human evaluators and Large Language Models (LLMs) for a comprehensive reassessment of current techniques based on the criteria set. Besides, we also introduce an innovative and efficient baseline, LLM-Reviewer, leveraging the few-shot learning capabilities of LLMs for a target-oriented comparison. Our research highlights the limitations of text similarity metrics, finding that less than 10% of benchmark comments are high quality for automation. In contrast, DeepCRCEval effectively distinguishes between high and low-quality comments, proving to be a more reliable evaluation mechanism. Incorporating LLM evaluators into DeepCRCEval significantly boosts efficiency, reducing time and cost by 88.78% and 90.32%, respectively. Furthermore, LLM-Reviewer demonstrates significant potential of focusing task real targets in comment generation.

Paperid: 3937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16227.pdf

Abstract:
Active Learning (AL) represents a crucial methodology within machine learning, emphasizing the identification and utilization of the most informative samples for efficient model training. However, a significant challenge of AL is its dependence on the limited labeled data samples and data distribution, resulting in limited performance. To address this limitation, this paper integrates the zero-shot text-to-image (T2I) synthesis and active learning by designing a novel framework that can efficiently train a machine learning (ML) model sorely using the text description. Specifically, we leverage the AL criteria to optimize the text inputs for generating more informative and diverse data samples, annotated by the pseudo-label crafted from text, then served as a synthetic dataset for active learning. This approach reduces the cost of data collection and annotation while increasing the efficiency of model training by providing informative training samples, enabling a novel end-to-end ML task from text description to vision models. Through comprehensive evaluations, our framework demonstrates consistent and significant improvements over traditional AL methods.

Paperid: 3938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15993.pdf

Abstract:
Arguments evoke emotions, influencing the effect of the argument itself. Not only the emotional intensity but also the category influence the argument's effects, for instance, the willingness to adapt stances. While binary emotionality has been studied in arguments, there is no work on discrete emotion categories (e.g., "Anger") in such data. To fill this gap, we crowdsource subjective annotations of emotion categories in a German argument corpus and evaluate automatic LLM-based labeling methods. Specifically, we compare three prompting strategies (zero-shot, one-shot, chain-of-thought) on three large instruction-tuned language models (Falcon-7b-instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-instruct, GPT-4o-mini). We further vary the definition of the output space to be binary (is there emotionality in the argument?), closed-domain (which emotion from a given label set is in the argument?), or open-domain (which emotion is in the argument?). We find that emotion categories enhance the prediction of emotionality in arguments, emphasizing the need for discrete emotion annotations in arguments. Across all prompt settings and models, automatic predictions show a high recall but low precision for predicting anger and fear, indicating a strong bias toward negative emotions.

Paperid: 3939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14890.pdf

Abstract:
Recent speech enhancement models have shown impressive performance gains by scaling up model complexity and training data. However, the impact of dataset variability (e.g. text, language, speaker, and noise) has been underexplored. Analyzing each attribute individually is often challenging, as multiple attributes are usually entangled in commonly used datasets, posing a significant obstacle in understanding the distinct contributions of each attribute to the model's performance. To address this challenge, we propose a generation-training-evaluation framework that leverages zero-shot text-to-speech systems to investigate the impact of controlled attribute variations on speech enhancement performance. It enables us to synthesize training datasets in a scalable manner while carefully altering each attribute. Based on the proposed framework, we analyze the scaling effects of various dataset attributes on the performance of both discriminative and generative SE models. Extensive experiments on multi-domain corpora imply that acoustic attributes (e.g., speaker and noise) are much more important to current speech enhancement models than semantic attributes (e.g., language and text), offering new insights for future research.

Paperid: 3940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12564.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), a sequence labeling task, has attracted increasing attention in multilingual contexts. While previous research has focused largely on fine-tuning or training models specifically for ABSA, we evaluate large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot conditions to explore their potential to tackle this challenge with minimal task-specific adaptation. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of a series of LLMs on multilingual ABSA tasks, investigating various prompting strategies, including vanilla zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), self-improvement, self-debate, and self-consistency, across nine different models. Results indicate that while LLMs show promise in handling multilingual ABSA, they generally fall short of fine-tuned, task-specific models. Notably, simpler zero-shot prompts often outperform more complex strategies, especially in high-resource languages like English. These findings underscore the need for further refinement of LLM-based approaches to effectively address ABSA task across diverse languages.

Paperid: 3941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11967.pdf

Abstract:
Improving diesel engine efficiency, reducing emissions, and enabling robust health monitoring have been critical research topics in engine modelling. While recent advancements in the use of neural networks for system monitoring have shown promising results, such methods often focus on component-level analysis, lack generalizability, and physical interpretability. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid framework that combines physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) with deep operator networks (DeepONet) to enable accurate and computationally efficient parameter identification in mean-value diesel engine models. Our method leverages physics-based system knowledge in combination with data-driven training of neural networks to enhance model applicability. Incorporating offline-trained DeepONets to predict actuator dynamics significantly lowers the online computation cost when compared to the existing PINN framework. To address the re-training burden typical of PINNs under varying input conditions, we propose two transfer learning (TL) strategies: (i) a multi-stage TL scheme offering better runtime efficiency than full online training of the PINN model and (ii) a few-shot TL scheme that freezes a shared multi-head network body and computes physics-based derivatives required for model training outside the training loop. The second strategy offers a computationally inexpensive and physics-based approach for predicting engine dynamics and parameter identification, offering computational efficiency over the existing PINN framework. Compared to existing health monitoring methods, our framework combines the interpretability of physics-based models with the flexibility of deep learning, offering substantial gains in generalization, accuracy, and deployment efficiency for diesel engine diagnostics.

Paperid: 3942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10510.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of disinformation demands reliable and scalable fact-checking solutions. We present Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts (DEFAME), a modular, zero-shot MLLM pipeline for open-domain, text-image claim verification. DEFAME operates in a six-stage process, dynamically selecting the tools and search depth to extract and evaluate textual and visual evidence. Unlike prior approaches that are text-only, lack explainability, or rely solely on parametric knowledge, DEFAME performs end-to-end verification, accounting for images in claims and evidence while generating structured, multimodal reports. Evaluation on the popular benchmarks VERITE, AVerITeC, and MOCHEG shows that DEFAME surpasses all previous methods, establishing itself as the new state-of-the-art fact-checking system for uni- and multimodal fact-checking. Moreover, we introduce a new multimodal benchmark, ClaimReview2024+, featuring claims after the knowledge cutoff of GPT-4o, avoiding data leakage. Here, DEFAME drastically outperforms the GPT-4o baselines, showing temporal generalizability and the potential for real-time fact-checking.

Paperid: 3943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08802.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has been widely used for crossmodal information retrieval and multimodal understanding tasks. However, CLIP models are mainly optimized for crossmodal vision-language tasks and underperform in single-mode text tasks. Moreover, these models are often trained on English datasets and therefore lack multilingual understanding. Additionally, from a visual understanding perspective, previous CLIP-based models exhibit insufficient understanding of visually rich documents. In this work, we propose jina-clip-v2, a contrastive vision-language model trained on text pairs, triplets and image-text pairs via a multi-task and multi-stage contrastive learning paradigm in order to support both text-only and crossmodal tasks. We employ a multilingual text encoder and expand the training dataset to include multilingual texts from 29 non-English languages, including Hindi, Chinese, German, French, and others, as well as images of visually rich documents. We evaluate the model's performance and show that jina-clip-v2 achieves notable improvements over state-of-the-art CLIP-based models in zero-shot text-only retrieval, semantic textual similarity, and crossmodal retrieval tasks in both English and multilingual settings. jina-clip-v2 also provides for flexibility in embedding dimensionality, enabling users to select the granularity of the representations. jina-clip-v2 is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-clip-v2.

Paperid: 3944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08258.pdf

Abstract:
Ontologies of research topics are crucial for structuring scientific knowledge, enabling scientists to navigate vast amounts of research, and forming the backbone of intelligent systems such as search engines and recommendation systems. However, manual creation of these ontologies is expensive, slow, and often results in outdated and overly general representations. As a solution, researchers have been investigating ways to automate or semi-automate the process of generating these ontologies. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify semantic relationships between different research topics, which is a critical step in the development of such ontologies. To this end, we developed a gold standard based on the IEEE Thesaurus to evaluate the task of identifying four types of relationships between pairs of topics: broader, narrower, same-as, and other. Our study evaluates the performance of seventeen LLMs, which differ in scale, accessibility (open vs. proprietary), and model type (full vs. quantised), while also assessing four zero-shot reasoning strategies. Several models have achieved outstanding results, including Mixtral-8x7B, Dolphin-Mistral-7B, and Claude 3 Sonnet, with F1-scores of 0.847, 0.920, and 0.967, respectively. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that smaller, quantised models, when optimised through prompt engineering, can deliver performance comparable to much larger proprietary models, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources.

Paperid: 3945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07446.pdf

Abstract:
Are generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, trained only to predict the next token, implicitly learning a world model from which sequences are generated one token at a time? We address this question by deriving a causal interpretation of the attention mechanism in GPT and presenting a causal world model that arises from this interpretation. Furthermore, we propose that GPT models, at inference time, can be utilized for zero-shot causal structure learning for input sequences, and introduce a corresponding confidence score. Empirical tests were conducted in controlled environments using the setups of the Othello and Chess strategy games. A GPT, pre-trained on real-world games played with the intention of winning, was tested on out-of-distribution synthetic data consisting of sequences of random legal moves. We find that the GPT model is likely to generate legal next moves for out-of-distribution sequences for which a causal structure is encoded in the attention mechanism with high confidence. In cases where it generates illegal moves, it also fails to capture a causal structure.

Paperid: 3946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03537.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adapted to achieve task-specificity for deployment in real-world decision systems. Several previous works have investigated the bias transfer hypothesis (BTH) by studying the effect of the fine-tuning adaptation strategy on model fairness to find that fairness in pre-trained masked language models have limited effect on the fairness of models when adapted using fine-tuning. In this work, we expand the study of BTH to causal models under prompt adaptations, as prompting is an accessible, and compute-efficient way to deploy models in real-world systems. In contrast to previous works, we establish that intrinsic biases in pre-trained Mistral, Falcon and Llama models are strongly correlated (rho >= 0.94) with biases when the same models are zero- and few-shot prompted, using a pronoun co-reference resolution task. Further, we find that bias transfer remains strongly correlated even when LLMs are specifically prompted to exhibit fair or biased behavior (rho >= 0.92), and few-shot length and stereotypical composition are varied (rho >= 0.97). Our findings highlight the importance of ensuring fairness in pre-trained LLMs, especially when they are later used to perform downstream tasks via prompt adaptation.

Paperid: 3947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02025.pdf

Abstract:
There is growing interest in leveraging the capabilities of robust Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) directly within autonomous driving contexts. However, the high costs and complexity of designing and training end-to-end autonomous driving models make them challenging for many enterprises and research entities. To address this, our study explores a seamless integration of MLLMs into autonomous driving systems by proposing a Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (Zero-Shot-CoT) prompt design named PKRD-CoT. PKRD-CoT is based on the four fundamental capabilities of autonomous driving: perception, knowledge, reasoning, and decision-making. This makes it particularly suitable for understanding and responding to dynamic driving environments by mimicking human thought processes step by step, thus enhancing decision-making in real-time scenarios. Our design enables MLLMs to tackle problems without prior experience, thereby increasing their utility within unstructured autonomous driving environments. In experiments, we demonstrate the exceptional performance of GPT-4.0 with PKRD-CoT across autonomous driving tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in autonomous driving scenarios. Additionally, our benchmark analysis reveals the promising viability of PKRD-CoT for other MLLMs, such as Claude, LLava1.6, and Qwen-VL-Plus. Overall, this study contributes a novel and unified prompt-design framework for GPT-4.0 and other MLLMs in autonomous driving, while also rigorously evaluating the efficacy of these widely recognized MLLMs in the autonomous driving domain through comprehensive comparisons.

Paperid: 3948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19240.pdf

Abstract:
As LLMs are increasingly integrated into user-facing applications, addressing biases that perpetuate societal inequalities is crucial. While much work has gone into measuring or mitigating biases in these models, fewer studies have investigated their origins. Therefore, this study examines the correlation between gender-occupation bias in pre-training data and their manifestation in LLMs, focusing on the Dolma dataset and the OLMo model. Using zero-shot prompting and token co-occurrence analyses, we explore how biases in training data influence model outputs. Our findings reveal that biases present in pre-training data are amplified in model outputs. The study also examines the effects of prompt types, hyperparameters, and instruction-tuning on bias expression, finding instruction-tuning partially alleviating representational bias while still maintaining overall stereotypical gender associations, whereas hyperparameters and prompting variation have a lesser effect on bias expression. Our research traces bias throughout the LLM development pipeline and underscores the importance of mitigating bias at the pretraining stage.

Paperid: 3949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17150.pdf

Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) has advanced with recent vision-language models (VLMs), enabling segmentation beyond predefined categories through various learning schemes. Notably, training-free methods offer scalable, easily deployable solutions for handling unseen data, a key goal of OVSS. Yet, a critical issue persists: lack of object-level context consideration when segmenting complex objects in the challenging environment of OVSS based on arbitrary query prompts. This oversight limits models' ability to group semantically consistent elements within object and map them precisely to user-defined arbitrary classes. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that overcomes this limitation by incorporating object-level contextual knowledge within images. Specifically, our model enhances intra-object consistency by distilling spectral-driven features from vision foundation models into the attention mechanism of the visual encoder, enabling semantically coherent components to form a single object mask. Additionally, we refine the text embeddings with zero-shot object presence likelihood to ensure accurate alignment with the specific objects represented in the images. By leveraging object-level contextual knowledge, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with strong generalizability across diverse datasets.

Paperid: 3950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15998.pdf

Abstract:
Effective extraction of the world knowledge in LLMs for complex decision-making tasks remains a challenge. We propose a framework PIANIST for decomposing the world model into seven intuitive components conducive to zero-shot LLM generation. Given only the natural language description of the game and how input observations are formatted, our method can generate a working world model for fast and efficient MCTS simulation. We show that our method works well on two different games that challenge the planning and decision making skills of the agent for both language and non-language based action taking, without any training on domain-specific training data or explicitly defined world model.

Paperid: 3951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12259.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task, which aims to recognize novel classes with few examples. Pre-training based methods effectively tackle the problem by pre-training a feature extractor and then performing class prediction via a cosine classifier with mean-based prototypes. Nevertheless, due to the data scarcity, the mean-based prototypes are usually biased. In this paper, we attempt to diminish the prototype bias by regarding it as a prototype optimization problem. To this end, we propose a novel prototype optimization framework to rectify prototypes, i.e., introducing a meta-optimizer to optimize prototypes. Although the existing meta-optimizers can also be adapted to our framework, they all overlook a crucial gradient bias issue, i.e., the mean-based gradient estimation is also biased on sparse data. To address this issue, in this paper, we regard the gradient and its flow as meta-knowledge and then propose a novel Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE)-based meta-optimizer to optimize prototypes, called MetaNODE. Although MetaNODE has shown superior performance, it suffers from a huge computational burden. To further improve its computation efficiency, we conduct a detailed analysis on MetaNODE and then design an effective and efficient MetaNODE extension version (called E2MetaNODE). It consists of two novel modules: E2GradNet and E2Solver, which aim to estimate accurate gradient flows and solve optimal prototypes in an effective and efficient manner, respectively. Extensive experiments show that 1) our methods achieve superior performance over previous FSL methods and 2) our E2MetaNODE significantly improves computation efficiency meanwhile without performance degradation.

Paperid: 3952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07279.pdf

Abstract:
Language models (LMs) have shown impressive performance on tasks within their training distribution, but often struggle with structurally novel tasks even when given a small number of in-context task examples. We investigate the effectiveness of test-time training (TTT) -- temporarily updating model parameters during inference using a loss derived from input data -- as a mechanism for improving LMs' reasoning and few-shot learning capabilities. On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), performing TTT with in-context examples yields up to $6\times$ higher accuracy compared to fine-tuned baselines -- reaching $53.0\%$ on the public validation set with an 8B-parameter LM and $61.9\%$ when ensembled with program-synthesis methods, matching average human performance. On BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), TTT on in-context examples surpasses standard few-shot prompting in the $10$-shot setting by $7.3$ percentage points ($50.5\%$ to $57.8\%$). Our findings highlight the limitations of in-context learning for novel tasks and demonstrate the potential of test-time training to enhance language model adaptability.

Paperid: 3953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07239.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel fine-tuning method to achieve multi-operator learning through training a distributed neural operator with diverse function data and then zero-shot fine-tuning the neural network using physics-informed losses for downstream tasks. Operator learning effectively approximates solution operators for PDEs and various PDE-related problems, yet it often struggles to generalize to new tasks. To address this, we investigate fine-tuning a pretrained model, while carefully selecting an initialization that enables rapid adaptation to new tasks with minimal data. Our approach combines distributed learning to integrate data from various operators in pre-training, while physics-informed methods enable zero-shot fine-tuning, minimizing the reliance on downstream data. We investigate standard fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning, applying both to train complex nonlinear target operators that are difficult to learn only using random initialization. Through comprehensive numerical examples, we demonstrate the advantages of our approach, showcasing significant improvements in accuracy. Our findings provide a robust framework for advancing multi-operator learning and highlight the potential of transfer learning techniques in this domain.

Paperid: 3954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05030.pdf

Abstract:
Microfluidic Live-Cell Imaging (MLCI) generates high-quality data that allows biotechnologists to study cellular growth dynamics in detail. However, obtaining these continuous data over extended periods is challenging, particularly in achieving accurate and consistent real-time event classification at the intersection of imaging and stochastic biology. To address this issue, we introduce the Experiment Automation Pipeline for Event-Driven Microscopy to Smart Microfluidic Single-Cells Analysis (EAP4EMSIG). In particular, we present initial zero-shot results from the real-time segmentation module of our approach. Our findings indicate that among four State-Of-The- Art (SOTA) segmentation methods evaluated, Omnipose delivers the highest Panoptic Quality (PQ) score of 0.9336, while Contour Proposal Network (CPN) achieves the fastest inference time of 185 ms with the second-highest PQ score of 0.8575. Furthermore, we observed that the vision foundation model Segment Anything is unsuitable for this particular use case.

Paperid: 3955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02864.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capability on many NLP tasks. Recasting an NLP task into a text-to-text generation task is a common practice so that generative LLMs can be prompted to resolve it. However, performing document-level relation extraction (DocRE) tasks with generative LLM models is still challenging due to the structured output format of DocRE, which complicates the conversion to plain text. Limited information available in few-shot samples and prompt instructions induce further difficulties and challenges in relation extraction for mentioned entities in a document. In this paper, we represent the structured output as a graph-style triplet rather than natural language expressions and leverage generative LLMs for the DocRE task. Our approach, the Graph-DPEP framework is grounded in the reasoning behind triplet explanation thoughts presented in natural language. In this framework, we first introduce a ``decomposed-plug" method for performing the generation from LLMs over prompts with type-space decomposition to alleviate the burden of distinguishing all relation types. Second, we employ a verifier for calibrating the generation and identifying overlooked query entity pairs. Third, we develop "ensemble-play", reapplying generation on the entire type list by leveraging the reasoning thoughts embedded in a sub-graph associated with the missing query pair to address the missingness issue. Through extensive comparisons with existing prompt techniques and alternative Language Models (LLMs), our framework demonstrates superior performance on publicly available benchmarks in experiments.

Paperid: 3956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02229.pdf

Abstract:
The field of novel view synthesis from images has seen rapid advancements with the introduction of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting became widely adopted due to its efficiency and ability to render novel views accurately. While Gaussian Splatting performs well when a sufficient amount of training images are available, its unstructured explicit representation tends to overfit in scenarios with sparse input images, resulting in poor rendering performance. To address this, we present a 3D Gaussian-based novel view synthesis method using sparse input images that can accurately render the scene from the viewpoints not covered by the training images. We propose a multi-stage training scheme with matching-based consistency constraints imposed on the novel views without relying on pre-trained depth estimation or diffusion models. This is achieved by using the matches of the available training images to supervise the generation of the novel views sampled between the training frames with color, geometry, and semantic losses. In addition, we introduce a locality preserving regularization for 3D Gaussians which removes rendering artifacts by preserving the local color structure of the scene. Evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates competitive or superior performance of our method in few-shot novel view synthesis compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 3957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23754.pdf

Abstract:
Decoding visual stimuli from neural recordings is a critical challenge in the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Although recent EEG-based decoding approaches have made progress in tasks such as visual classification, retrieval, and reconstruction, they remain constrained by unstable representation learning and a lack of interpretability. This gap highlights the need for more efficient representation learning and the integration of effective language interaction to enhance both understanding and practical usability in visual decoding tasks.To address this limitation, we introduce RealMind, a novel EEG-based framework designed to handle a diverse range of downstream tasks. Specifically, RealMind leverages both semantic and geometric consistency learning to enhance feature representation and improve alignment across tasks. Notably, beyond excelling in traditional tasks, our framework marks the first attempt at visual captioning from EEG data through vision-language model (VLM). It achieves a Top-1 decoding accuracy of 27.58% in a 200-class zero-shot retrieval task and a BLEU-1 score of 26.59% in a 200-class zero-shot captioning task. Overall, RealMind provides a comprehensive multitask EEG decoding framework, establishing a foundational approach for EEG-based visual decoding in real-world applications.

Paperid: 3958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22909.pdf

Abstract:
Non-rigid point cloud registration is a critical challenge in 3D scene understanding, particularly in surgical navigation. Although existing methods achieve excellent performance when trained on large-scale, high-quality datasets, these datasets are prohibitively expensive to collect and annotate, e.g., organ data in authentic medical scenarios. With insufficient training samples and data noise, existing methods degrade significantly since non-rigid patterns are more flexible and complicated than rigid ones, and the distributions across samples are more distinct, leading to higher difficulty in representation learning with few data. In this work, we aim to deal with this challenging few-shot non-rigid point cloud registration problem. Based on the observation that complex non-rigid transformation patterns can be decomposed into rigid and small non-rigid transformations, we propose a novel and effective framework, UniRiT. UniRiT adopts a two-step registration strategy that first aligns the centroids of the source and target point clouds and then refines the registration with non-rigid transformations, thereby significantly reducing the problem complexity. To validate the performance of UniRiT on real-world datasets, we introduce a new dataset, MedMatch3D, which consists of real human organs and exhibits high variability in sample distribution. We further establish a new challenging benchmark for few-shot non-rigid registration. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that UniRiT achieves state-of-the-art performance on MedMatch3D, improving the existing best approach by 94.22%.

Paperid: 3959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22059.pdf

Abstract:
Scene rearrangement, like table tidying, is a challenging task in robotic manipulation due to the complexity of predicting diverse object arrangements. Web-scale trained generative models such as Stable Diffusion can aid by generating natural scenes as goals. To facilitate robot execution, object-level representations must be extracted to match the real scenes with the generated goals and to calculate object pose transformations. Current methods typically use a multi-step design that involves separate models for generation, segmentation, and feature encoding, which can lead to a low success rate due to error accumulation. Furthermore, they lack control over the viewing perspectives of the generated goals, restricting the tasks to 3-DoF settings. In this paper, we propose PACA, a zero-shot pipeline for scene rearrangement that leverages perspective-aware cross-attention representation derived from Stable Diffusion. Specifically, we develop a representation that integrates generation, segmentation, and feature encoding into a single step to produce object-level representations. Additionally, we introduce perspective control, thus enabling the matching of 6-DoF camera views and extending past approaches that were limited to 3-DoF top-down views. The efficacy of our method is demonstrated through its zero-shot performance in real robot experiments across various scenes, achieving an average matching accuracy and execution success rate of 87% and 67%, respectively.

Paperid: 3960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21361.pdf

Abstract:
Domain adaptation has been extensively investigated in computer vision but still requires access to target data at the training time, which might be difficult to obtain in some uncommon conditions. In this paper, we present a new framework for domain adaptation relying on a single Vision-Language (VL) latent embedding instead of full target data. First, leveraging a contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP), we propose prompt/photo-driven instance normalization (PIN). PIN is a feature augmentation method that mines multiple visual styles using a single target VL latent embedding, by optimizing affine transformations of low-level source features. The VL embedding can come from a language prompt describing the target domain, a partially optimized language prompt, or a single unlabeled target image. Second, we show that these mined styles (i.e., augmentations) can be used for zero-shot (i.e., target-free) and one-shot unsupervised domain adaptation. Experiments on semantic segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which outperforms relevant baselines in the zero-shot and one-shot settings.

Paperid: 3961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17789.pdf

Abstract:
Power efficiency is a critical design objective in modern processor design. A high-fidelity architecture-level power modeling method is greatly needed by CPU architects for guiding early optimizations. However, traditional architecture-level power models can not meet the accuracy requirement, largely due to the discrepancy between the power model and actual design implementation. While some machine learning (ML)-based architecture-level power modeling methods have been proposed in recent years, the data-hungry ML model training process requires sufficient similar known designs, which are unrealistic in many development scenarios. This work proposes a new power modeling solution FirePower that targets few-shot learning scenario for new target architectures. FirePower proposes multiple new policies to utilize cross-architecture knowledge. First, it develops power models at component level, and components are defined in a power-friendly manner. Second, it supports different generalization strategies for models of different components. Third, it formulates generalizable and architecture-specific design knowledge into two separate models. FirePower also supports the evaluation of the generalization quality. In our experiments, FirePower can achieve a low error percentage of 5.8% and a high correlation R of 0.98 on average only using two configurations of target architecture. This is 8.8% lower in error percentage and 0.03 higher in R compared with directly training McPAT-Calib baseline on configurations of target architecture.

Paperid: 3962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17744.pdf

Abstract:
Masked prediction has emerged as a promising pretraining paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to its versatile masking schemes, enabling flexible inference across various downstream tasks with a unified model. Despite the versatility of masked prediction, it remains unclear how to balance the learning of skills at different levels of complexity. To address this, we propose CurrMask, a curriculum masking pretraining paradigm for sequential decision making. Motivated by how humans learn by organizing knowledge in a curriculum, CurrMask adjusts its masking scheme during pretraining for learning versatile skills. Through extensive experiments, we show that CurrMask exhibits superior zero-shot performance on skill prompting tasks, goal-conditioned planning tasks, and competitive finetuning performance on offline RL tasks. Additionally, our analysis of training dynamics reveals that CurrMask gradually acquires skills of varying complexity by dynamically adjusting its masking scheme.

Paperid: 3963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14399.pdf

Abstract:
Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for Natural Language Inference (NLI). This capability is particularly significant in specialized domains such as biomedicine, where it can support automatic evidence interpretation and scientific discovery. This paper presents SylloBio-NLI, a novel framework that leverages external ontologies to systematically instantiate diverse syllogistic arguments for biomedical NLI. We employ SylloBio-NLI to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on identifying valid conclusions and extracting supporting evidence across 28 syllogistic schemes instantiated with human genome pathways. Extensive experiments reveal that biomedical syllogistic reasoning is particularly challenging for zero-shot LLMs, which achieve an average accuracy between 70% on generalized modus ponens and 23% on disjunctive syllogism. At the same time, we found that few-shot prompting can boost the performance of different LLMs, including Gemma (+14%) and LLama-3 (+43%). However, a deeper analysis shows that both techniques exhibit high sensitivity to superficial lexical variations, highlighting a dependency between reliability, models' architecture, and pre-training regime. Overall, our results indicate that, while in-context examples have the potential to elicit syllogistic reasoning in LLMs, existing models are still far from achieving the robustness and consistency required for safe biomedical NLI applications.

Paperid: 3964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08598.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant popularity in recent years for specialized tasks using prompts due to their low computational cost. Standard methods like prefix tuning utilize special, modifiable tokens that lack semantic meaning and require extensive training for best performance, often falling short. In this context, we propose a novel method called Semantic Knowledge Tuning (SK-Tuning) for prompt and prefix tuning that employs meaningful words instead of random tokens. This method involves using a fixed LLM to understand and process the semantic content of the prompt through zero-shot capabilities. Following this, it integrates the processed prompt with the input text to improve the model's performance on particular tasks. Our experimental results show that SK-Tuning exhibits faster training times, fewer parameters, and superior performance on tasks such as text classification and understanding compared to other tuning methods. This approach offers a promising method for optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of LLMs in processing language tasks.

Paperid: 3965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03617.pdf

Abstract:
Model merging aims to combine multiple expert models into a more capable single model, offering benefits such as reduced storage and serving costs, improved generalization, and support for decentralized model development. Despite its promise, previous studies have primarily focused on merging a few small models. This leaves many unanswered questions about the effect of scaling model size and how it interplays with other key factors -- like the base model quality and number of expert models -- , to affect the merged model's performance. This work systematically evaluates the utility of model merging at scale, examining the impact of these different factors. We experiment with merging fully fine-tuned models using 4 popular merging methods -- Averaging, Task~Arithmetic, Dare, and TIES -- across model sizes ranging from 1B-64B parameters and merging up to 8 different expert models. We evaluate the merged models on both held-in tasks, i.e., the expert's training tasks, and zero-shot generalization to unseen held-out tasks. Our experiments provide several new insights about model merging at scale and the interplay between different factors. First, we find that merging is more effective when experts are created from strong base models, i.e., models with good zero-shot performance. Second, larger models facilitate easier merging. Third merging consistently improves generalization capabilities. Notably, when merging 8 large expert models, the merged models often generalize better compared to the multitask trained models. Fourth, we can better merge more expert models when working with larger models. Fifth, different merging methods behave very similarly at larger scales. Overall, our findings shed light on some interesting properties of model merging while also highlighting some limitations. We hope that this study will serve as a reference point on large-scale merging for upcoming research.

Paperid: 3966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02615.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art medical multi-modal LLMs (med-MLLMs), such as LLAVA-MED and BIOMEDGPT, primarily depend on scaling model size and data volume, with training driven largely by autoregressive objectives. However, we reveal that this approach can lead to weak vision-language alignment, making these models overly dependent on costly instruction-following data. To address this, we introduce EXGRA-MED, a novel multi-graph alignment framework that jointly aligns images, instruction responses, and extended captions in the latent space, advancing semantic grounding and cross-modal coherence. To scale to large LLMs (e.g., LLaMa-7B), we develop an efficient end-to-end training scheme using black-box gradient estimation, enabling fast and scalable optimization. Empirically, EXGRA-MED matches LLAVA-MED's performance using just 10% of pre-training data, achieving a 20.13% gain on VQA-RAD and approaching full-data performance. It also outperforms strong baselines like BIOMEDGPT and RADFM on visual chatbot and zero-shot classification tasks, demonstrating its promise for efficient, high-quality vision-language integration in medical AI.

Paperid: 3967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01615.pdf

Abstract:
Existing approaches for video moment retrieval and highlight detection are not able to align text and video features efficiently, resulting in unsatisfying performance and limited production usage. To address this, we propose a novel architecture that utilizes recent foundational video models designed for such alignment. Combined with the introduced Saliency-Guided Cross Attention mechanism and a hybrid DETR architecture, our approach significantly enhances performance in both moment retrieval and highlight detection tasks. For even better improvement, we developed InterVid-MR, a large-scale and high-quality dataset for pretraining. Using it, our architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the QVHighlights, Charades-STA and TACoS benchmarks. The proposed approach provides an efficient and scalable solution for both zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios in video-language tasks.

Paperid: 3968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20557.pdf

Abstract:
Goal-oriented planning, or anticipating a series of actions that transition an agent from its current state to a predefined objective, is crucial for developing intelligent assistants aiding users in daily procedural tasks. The problem presents significant challenges due to the need for comprehensive knowledge of temporal and hierarchical task structures, as well as strong capabilities in reasoning and planning. To achieve this, prior work typically relies on extensive training on the target dataset, which often results in significant dataset bias and a lack of generalization to unseen tasks. In this work, we introduce VidAssist, an integrated framework designed for zero/few-shot goal-oriented planning in instructional videos. VidAssist leverages large language models (LLMs) as both the knowledge base and the assessment tool for generating and evaluating action plans, thus overcoming the challenges of acquiring procedural knowledge from small-scale, low-diversity datasets. Moreover, VidAssist employs a breadth-first search algorithm for optimal plan generation, in which a composite of value functions designed for goal-oriented planning is utilized to assess the predicted actions at each step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidAssist offers a unified framework for different goal-oriented planning setups, e.g., visual planning for assistance (VPA) and procedural planning (PP), and achieves remarkable performance in zero-shot and few-shot setups. Specifically, our few-shot model outperforms the prior fully supervised state-of-the-art method by +7.7% in VPA and +4.81% PP task on the COIN dataset while predicting 4 future actions. Code, and models are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/vidassist.

Paperid: 3969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20016.pdf

Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies, although optimal in terms of task rewards, may not align with the personal preferences of human users. To ensure this alignment, a naive solution would be to retrain the agent using a reward function that encodes the user's specific preferences. However, such a reward function is typically not readily available, and as such, retraining the agent from scratch can be prohibitively expensive. We propose a more practical approach - to adapt the already trained policy to user-specific needs with the help of human feedback. To this end, we infer the user's intent through trajectory-level feedback and combine it with the trained task policy via a theoretically grounded dynamic policy fusion approach. As our approach collects human feedback on the very same trajectories used to learn the task policy, it does not require any additional interactions with the environment, making it a zero-shot approach. We empirically demonstrate in a number of environments that our proposed dynamic policy fusion approach consistently achieves the intended task while simultaneously adhering to user-specific needs.

Paperid: 3970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18794.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to follow textual instructions to navigate through 3D environments. Traditional approaches use supervised learning methods, relying heavily on domain-specific datasets to train VLN models. Recent methods try to utilize closed-source large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to solve VLN tasks in zero-shot manners, but face challenges related to expensive token costs and potential data breaches in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce Open-Nav, a novel study that explores open-source LLMs for zero-shot VLN in the continuous environment. Open-Nav employs a spatial-temporal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning approach to break down tasks into instruction comprehension, progress estimation, and decision-making. It enhances scene perceptions with fine-grained object and spatial knowledge to improve LLM's reasoning in navigation. Our extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that Open-Nav achieves competitive performance compared to using closed-source LLMs.

Paperid: 3971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09896.pdf

Abstract:
3D reconstruction from a single image is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Learning-based methods address its inherent scale ambiguity by leveraging increasingly large labeled and unlabeled datasets, to produce geometric priors capable of generating accurate predictions across domains. As a result, state of the art approaches show impressive performance in zero-shot relative and metric depth estimation. Recently, diffusion models have exhibited remarkable scalability and generalizable properties in their learned representations. However, because these models repurpose tools originally designed for image generation, they can only operate on dense ground-truth, which is not available for most depth labels, especially in real-world settings. In this paper we present GRIN, an efficient diffusion model designed to ingest sparse unstructured training data. We use image features with 3D geometric positional encodings to condition the diffusion process both globally and locally, generating depth predictions at a pixel-level. With comprehensive experiments across eight indoor and outdoor datasets, we show that GRIN establishes a new state of the art in zero-shot metric monocular depth estimation even when trained from scratch.

Paperid: 3972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09554.pdf

Abstract:
Error correction (EC) models play a crucial role in refining Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcriptions, enhancing the readability and quality of transcriptions. Without requiring access to the underlying code or model weights, EC can improve performance and provide domain adaptation for black-box ASR systems. This work investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for error correction across diverse scenarios. 1-best ASR hypotheses are commonly used as the input to EC models. We propose building high-performance EC models using ASR N-best lists which should provide more contextual information for the correction process. Additionally, the generation process of a standard EC model is unrestricted in the sense that any output sequence can be generated. For some scenarios, such as unseen domains, this flexibility may impact performance. To address this, we introduce a constrained decoding approach based on the N-best list or an ASR lattice. Finally, most EC models are trained for a specific ASR system requiring retraining whenever the underlying ASR system is changed. This paper explores the ability of EC models to operate on the output of different ASR systems. This concept is further extended to zero-shot error correction using LLMs, such as ChatGPT. Experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods for both Transducer and attention-based encoder-decoder ASR systems. In addition, the proposed method can serve as an effective method for model ensembling.

Paperid: 3973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09144.pdf

Abstract:
This work addresses the task of zero-shot monocular depth estimation. A recent advance in this field has been the idea of utilising Text-to-Image foundation models, such as Stable Diffusion. Foundation models provide a rich and generic image representation, and therefore, little training data is required to reformulate them as a depth estimation model that predicts highly-detailed depth maps and has good generalisation capabilities. However, the realisation of this idea has so far led to approaches which are, unfortunately, highly inefficient at test-time due to the underlying iterative denoising process. In this work, we propose a different realisation of this idea and present PrimeDepth, a method that is highly efficient at test time while keeping, or even enhancing, the positive aspects of diffusion-based approaches. Our key idea is to extract from Stable Diffusion a rich, but frozen, image representation by running a single denoising step. This representation, we term preimage, is then fed into a refiner network with an architectural inductive bias, before entering the downstream task. We validate experimentally that PrimeDepth is two orders of magnitude faster than the leading diffusion-based method, Marigold, while being more robust for challenging scenarios and quantitatively marginally superior. Thereby, we reduce the gap to the currently leading data-driven approach, Depth Anything, which is still quantitatively superior, but predicts less detailed depth maps and requires 20 times more labelled data. Due to the complementary nature of our approach, even a simple averaging between PrimeDepth and Depth Anything predictions can improve upon both methods and sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot monocular depth estimation. In future, data-driven approaches may also benefit from integrating our preimage.

Paperid: 3974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08520.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches in text-to-image customization have primarily focused on preserving the identity of the input subject, but often fail to control the spatial location and size of objects. We introduce GroundingBooth, which achieves zero-shot, instance-level spatial grounding on both foreground subjects and background objects in the text-to-image customization task. Our proposed grounding module and subject-grounded cross-attention layer enable the creation of personalized images with accurate layout alignment, identity preservation, and strong text-image coherence. In addition, our model seamlessly supports personalization with multiple subjects. Our model shows strong results in both layout-guided image synthesis and text-to-image customization tasks. The project page is available at https://groundingbooth.github.io.

Paperid: 3975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05413.pdf

Abstract:
Robots are increasingly envisioned to interact in real-world scenarios, where they must continuously adapt to new situations. To detect and grasp novel objects, zero-shot pose estimators determine poses without prior knowledge. Recently, vision language models (VLMs) have shown considerable advances in robotics applications by establishing an understanding between language input and image input. In our work, we take advantage of VLMs zero-shot capabilities and translate this ability to 6D object pose estimation. We propose a novel framework for promptable zero-shot 6D object pose estimation using language embeddings. The idea is to derive a coarse location of an object based on the relevancy map of a language-embedded NeRF reconstruction and to compute the pose estimate with a point cloud registration method. Additionally, we provide an analysis of LERF's suitability for open-set object pose estimation. We examine hyperparameters, such as activation thresholds for relevancy maps and investigate the zero-shot capabilities on an instance- and category-level. Furthermore, we plan to conduct robotic grasping experiments in a real-world setting.

Paperid: 3976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05401.pdf

Abstract:
Given the large number of Hindi speakers worldwide, there is a pressing need for robust and efficient information retrieval systems for Hindi. Despite ongoing research, comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating retrieval models in Hindi are lacking. To address this gap, we introduce the Hindi-BEIR benchmark, comprising 15 datasets across seven distinct tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual retrieval models on the Hindi-BEIR benchmark, identifying task and domain-specific challenges that impact Hindi retrieval performance. Building on the insights from these results, we introduce NLLB-E5, a multilingual retrieval model that leverages a zero-shot approach to support Hindi without the need for Hindi training data. We believe our contributions, which include the release of the Hindi-BEIR benchmark and the NLLB-E5 model, will prove to be a valuable resource for researchers and promote advancements in multilingual retrieval models.

Paperid: 3977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04631.pdf

Abstract:
We have tested recently published foundation models for histopathology for image retrieval. We report macro average of F1 score for top-1 retrieval, majority of top-3 retrievals, and majority of top-5 retrievals. We perform zero-shot retrievals, i.e., we do not alter embeddings and we do not train any classifier. As test data, we used diagnostic slides of TCGA, The Cancer Genome Atlas, consisting of 23 organs and 117 cancer subtypes. As a search platform we used Yottixel that enabled us to perform WSI search using patches. Achieved F1 scores show low performance, e.g., for top-5 retrievals, 27% +/- 13% (Yottixel-DenseNet), 42% +/- 14% (Yottixel-UNI), 40%+/-13% (Yottixel-Virchow), 41%+/-13% (Yottixel-GigaPath), and 41%+/-14% (GigaPath WSI).

Paperid: 3978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03271.pdf

Abstract:
The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has emerged as a critical approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, despite their widespread adoption and success, CoT methods often exhibit instability due to their inability to consistently ensure the quality of generated reasoning paths, leading to sub-optimal reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we propose the \textbf{Strategic Chain-of-Thought} (SCoT), a novel methodology designed to refine LLM performance by integrating strategic knowledge prior to generating intermediate reasoning steps. SCoT employs a two-stage approach within a single prompt: first eliciting an effective problem-solving strategy, which is then used to guide the generation of high-quality CoT paths and final answers. Our experiments across eight challenging reasoning datasets demonstrate significant improvements, including a 21.05\% increase on the GSM8K dataset and 24.13\% on the Tracking\_Objects dataset, respectively, using the Llama3-8b model. Additionally, we extend the SCoT framework to develop a few-shot method with automatically matched demonstrations, yielding even stronger results. These findings underscore the efficacy of SCoT, highlighting its potential to substantially enhance LLM performance in complex reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 3979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14590.pdf

Abstract:
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide human-centric interpretability by identifying the minimal, actionable changes required to alter a machine learning model's prediction. Therefore, CFs can be used as (i) interventions for abnormality prevention and (ii) augmented data for training robust models. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of CF generation using large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4 (zero-shot and few-shot) and two open-source models-BioMistral-7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, in both pretrained and fine-tuned configurations. Using the multimodal AI-READI clinical dataset, we assess CFs across three dimensions: intervention quality, feature diversity, and augmentation effectiveness. Fine-tuned LLMs, particularly LLaMA-3.1-8B, produce CFs with high plausibility (up to 99%), strong validity (up to 0.99), and realistic, behaviorally modifiable feature adjustments. When used for data augmentation under controlled label-scarcity settings, LLM-generated CFs substantially restore classifier performance, yielding an average 20% F1 recovery across three scarcity scenarios. Compared with optimization-based baselines such as DiCE, CFNOW, and NICE, LLMs offer a flexible, model-agnostic approach that generates more clinically actionable and semantically coherent counterfactuals. Overall, this work demonstrates the promise of LLM-driven counterfactuals for both interpretable intervention design and data-efficient model training in sensor-based digital health. Impact: SenseCF fine-tunes an LLM to generate valid, representative counterfactual explanations and supplement minority class in an imbalanced dataset for improving model training and boosting model robustness and predictive performance

Paperid: 3980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12742.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have provided rich semantic understanding that empowers drones to search for open-set objects via natural language instructions. However, prior systems struggle to integrate VLMs into practical aerial systems due to orders-of-magnitude frequency mismatch between VLM inference and real-time planning, as well as VLMs' limited 3D scene understanding. They also lack a unified mechanism to balance semantic guidance with motion efficiency in large-scale environments. To address these challenges, we present AirHunt, an aerial object navigation system that efficiently locates open-set objects with zero-shot generalization in outdoor environments by seamlessly fusing VLM semantic reasoning with continuous path planning. AirHunt features a dual-pathway asynchronous architecture that establishes a synergistic interface between VLM reasoning and path planning, enabling continuous flight with adaptive semantic guidance that evolves through motion. Moreover, we propose an active dual-task reasoning module that exploits geometric and semantic redundancy to enable selective VLM querying, and a semantic-geometric coherent planning module that dynamically reconciles semantic priorities and motion efficiency in a unified framework, enabling seamless adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. We evaluate AirHunt across diverse object navigation tasks and environments, demonstrating a higher success rate with lower navigation error and reduced flight time compared to state-of-the-art methods. Real-world experiments further validate AirHunt's practical capability in complex and challenging environments. Code and dataset will be made publicly available before publication.

Paperid: 3981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11183.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of satellite-borne Earth Observation (EO) systems has revolutionized terrestrial monitoring, yielding petabyte-scale archives. However, the immense computational and storage requirements for global-scale analysis often preclude widespread use, hindering planetary-scale studies. To address these barriers, we present Embedded Seamless Data (ESD), an ultra-lightweight, 30-m global Earth embedding database spanning the 25-year period from 2000 to 2024. By transforming high-dimensional, multi-sensor observations from the Landsat series (5, 7, 8, and 9) and MODIS Terra into information-dense, quantized latent vectors, ESD distills essential geophysical and semantic features into a unified latent space. Utilizing the ESDNet architecture and Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ), the dataset achieves a transformative ~340-fold reduction in data volume compared to raw archives. This compression allows the entire global land surface for a single year to be encapsulated within approximately 2.4 TB, enabling decadal-scale global analysis on standard local workstations. Rigorous validation demonstrates high reconstructive fidelity (MAE: 0.0130; RMSE: 0.0179; CC: 0.8543). By condensing the annual phenological cycle into 12 temporal steps, the embeddings provide inherent denoising and a semantically organized space that outperforms raw reflectance in land-cover classification, achieving 79.74% accuracy (vs. 76.92% for raw fusion). With robust few-shot learning capabilities and longitudinal consistency, ESD provides a versatile foundation for democratizing planetary-scale research and advancing next-generation geospatial artificial intelligence.

Paperid: 3982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08464.pdf

Abstract:
The conceptual design phase in architecture and urban planning, particularly building massing, is complex and heavily reliant on designer intuition and manual effort. To address this, we propose an automated framework for generating building massing based on functional requirements and site context. A primary obstacle to such data-driven methods has been the lack of suitable datasets. Consequently, we introduce the CoMa-20K dataset, a comprehensive collection that includes detailed massing geometries, associated economical and programmatic data, and visual representations of the development site within its existing urban context. We benchmark this dataset by formulating massing generation as a conditional task for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), evaluating both fine-tuned and large zero-shot models. Our experiments reveal the inherent complexity of the task while demonstrating the potential of VLMs to produce context-sensitive massing options. The dataset and analysis establish a foundational benchmark and highlight significant opportunities for future research in data-driven architectural design.

Paperid: 3983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03632.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot text-to-speech models can clone a speaker's timbre from a short reference audio, but they also strongly inherit the speaking style present in the reference. As a result, synthesizing speech with a desired style often requires carefully selecting reference audio, which is impractical when only limited or mismatched references are available. While recent controllable TTS methods attempt to address this issue, they typically rely on absolute style targets and discrete textual prompts, and therefore do not support continuous and reference-relative style control. We propose ReStyle-TTS, a framework that enables continuous and reference-relative style control in zero-shot TTS. Our key insight is that effective style control requires first reducing the model's implicit dependence on reference style before introducing explicit control mechanisms. To this end, we introduce Decoupled Classifier-Free Guidance (DCFG), which independently controls text and reference guidance, reducing reliance on reference style while preserving text fidelity. On top of this, we apply style-specific LoRAs together with Orthogonal LoRA Fusion to enable continuous and disentangled multi-attribute control, and introduce a Timbre Consistency Optimization module to mitigate timbre drift caused by weakened reference guidance. Experiments show that ReStyle-TTS enables user-friendly, continuous, and relative control over pitch, energy, and multiple emotions while maintaining intelligibility and speaker timbre, and performs robustly in challenging mismatched reference-target style scenarios.

Paperid: 3984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21482.pdf

Abstract:
Sophisticated text-centric forgeries, fueled by rapid AIGC advancements, pose a significant threat to societal security and information authenticity. Current methods for text-centric forgery analysis are often limited to coarse-grained visual analysis and lack the capacity for sophisticated reasoning. Moreover, they typically treat detection, grounding, and explanation as discrete sub-tasks, overlooking their intrinsic relationships for holistic performance enhancement. To address these challenges, we introduce LogicLens, a unified framework for Visual-Textual Co-reasoning that reformulates these objectives into a joint task. The deep reasoning of LogicLens is powered by our novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, which iteratively cross-validates visual cues against textual logic. To ensure robust alignment across all tasks, we further propose a weighted multi-task reward function for GRPO-based optimization. Complementing this framework, we first designed the PR$^2$ (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) pipeline, a hierarchical and iterative multi-agent system that generates high-quality, cognitively-aligned annotations. Then, we constructed RealText, a diverse dataset comprising 5,397 images with fine-grained annotations, including textual explanations, pixel-level segmentation, and authenticity labels for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of LogicLens across multiple benchmarks. In a zero-shot evaluation on T-IC13, it surpasses the specialized framework by 41.4% and GPT-4o by 23.4% in macro-average F1 score. Moreover, on the challenging dense-text T-SROIE dataset, it establishes a significant lead over other MLLM-based methods in mF1, CSS, and the macro-average F1. Our dataset, model, and code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 3985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19115.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable success of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in generative tasks, we observe that they exhibit a counterintuitive deficiency in the zero-shot multimodal retrieval task. In this work, we investigate the underlying mechanisms that hinder MLLMs from serving as effective retrievers. With the help of sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we decompose MLLM output representations into interpretable semantic concepts to probe their intrinsic behavior. Our analysis reveals that the representation space of MLLMs is overwhelmingly dominated by textual semantics; the visual information essential for multimodal retrieval only constitutes a small portion. This imbalance is compounded by the heavy focus of MLLMs on bridging image-text modalities, which facilitates generation but homogenizes embeddings and finally diminishes the discriminative power required for multimodal retrieval. We further discover that the specific feature components that contribute most to the similarity computations for MLLMs are in fact distractors that actively degrade retrieval performance. Overall, our work provides the first in-depth interpretability analysis of MLLM representations in the context of multimodal retrieval and offers possible directions for enhancing the multimodal retrieval capabilities of MLLMs.

Paperid: 3986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18031.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia experienced by intensive care unit (ICU) patients and can cause adverse health effects. In this study, we publish a labelled ICU dataset and benchmarks for AF detection. Methods: We compared machine learning models across three data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) approaches: feature-based classifiers, deep learning (DL), and ECG foundation models (FMs). This comparison addresses a critical gap in the literature and aims to pinpoint which AI approach is best for accurate AF detection. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) from a Canadian ICU and the 2021 PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge were used to conduct the experiments. Multiple training configurations were tested, ranging from zero-shot inference to transfer learning. Results: On average and across both datasets, ECG FMs performed best, followed by DL, then feature-based classifiers. The model that achieved the top F1 score on our ICU test set was ECG-FM through a transfer learning strategy (F1=0.89). Conclusion: This study demonstrates promising potential for using AI to build an automatic patient monitoring system. Significance: By publishing our labelled ICU dataset (LinkToBeAdded) and performance benchmarks, this work enables the research community to continue advancing the state-of-the-art in AF detection in the ICU.

Paperid: 3987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17764.pdf

Abstract:
Perception of deformable linear objects (DLOs), such as cables, ropes, and wires, is the cornerstone for successful downstream manipulation. Although vision-based methods have been extensively explored, they remain highly vulnerable to occlusions that commonly arise in constrained manipulation environments due to surrounding obstacles, large and varying deformations, and limited viewpoints. Moreover, the high dimensionality of the state space, the lack of distinctive visual features, and the presence of sensor noises further compound the challenges of reliable DLO perception. To address these open issues, this paper presents UniStateDLO, the first complete DLO perception pipeline with deep-learning methods that achieves robust performance under severe occlusion, covering both single-frame state estimation and cross-frame state tracking from partial point clouds. Both tasks are formulated as conditional generative problems, leveraging the strong capability of diffusion models to capture the complex mapping between highly partial observations and high-dimensional DLO states. UniStateDLO effectively handles a wide range of occlusion patterns, including initial occlusion, self-occlusion, and occlusion caused by multiple objects. In addition, it exhibits strong data efficiency as the entire network is trained solely on a large-scale synthetic dataset, enabling zero-shot sim-to-real generalization without any real-world training data. Comprehensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that UniStateDLO outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines in both estimation and tracking, producing globally smooth yet locally precise DLO state predictions in real time, even under substantial occlusions. Its integration as the front-end module in a closed-loop DLO manipulation system further demonstrates its ability to support stable feedback control in complex, constrained 3-D environments.

Paperid: 3988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13806.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning for decoding EEG signals has gained traction, with many claims to state-of-the-art accuracy. However, despite the convincing benchmark performance, successful translation to real applications is limited. The frequent disconnect between performance on controlled BCI benchmarks and its lack of generalisation to practical settings indicates hidden overfitting problems. We introduce Disentangled Decoding Decomposition (D3), a weakly supervised method for training deep learning models across EEG datasets. By predicting the place in the respective trial sequence from which the input window was sampled, EEG-D3 separates latent components of brain activity, akin to non-linear ICA. We utilise a novel model architecture with fully independent sub-networks for strict interpretability. We outline a feature interpretation paradigm to contrast the component activation profiles on different datasets and inspect the associated temporal and spatial filters. The proposed method reliably separates latent components of brain activity on motor imagery data. Training downstream classifiers on an appropriate subset of these components prevents hidden overfitting caused by task-correlated artefacts, which severely affects end-to-end classifiers. We further exploit the linearly separable latent space for effective few-shot learning on sleep stage classification. The ability to distinguish genuine components of brain activity from spurious features results in models that avoid the hidden overfitting problem and generalise well to real-world applications, while requiring only minimal labelled data. With interest to the neuroscience community, the proposed method gives researchers a tool to separate individual brain processes and potentially even uncover heretofore unknown dynamics.

Paperid: 3989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10340.pdf

Abstract:
Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) aims to recover high-quality images from low-quality inputs degraded by unknown and complex real-world factors. Real-world scenarios involve diverse and coupled degradations, making it necessary to provide diffusion models with richer and more informative guidance. However, existing methods often assume known degradation severity and rely on CLIP text encoders that cannot capture numerical severity, limiting their generalization ability. To address this, we propose \textbf{HD-CLIP} (\textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{D}egradation CLIP), which decomposes a low-quality image into a semantic embedding and an ordinal degradation embedding that captures ordered relationships and allows interpolation across unseen levels. Furthermore, we integrated it into diffusion models via classifier-free guidance (CFG) and proposed classifier-free projection guidance (CFPG). HD-CLIP leverages semantic cues to guide generative restoration while using degradation cues to suppress undesired hallucinations and artifacts. As a \textbf{plug-and-play module}, HD-CLIP can be seamlessly integrated into various super-resolution frameworks without training, significantly improving detail fidelity and perceptual realism across diverse real-world datasets.

Paperid: 3990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05318.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has unlocked significant reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, ICL with CoT examples is ineffective on novel tasks when the pre-training knowledge is insufficient. We study this problem in a controlled setting using the CoT-ICL Lab framework, and propose meta-training techniques to learn novel abstract reasoning tasks in-context. Although CoT examples facilitate reasoning, we noticed that their excessive inclusion during meta-training degrades performance when CoT supervision is limited. To mitigate such behavior, we propose CoT-Recipe, a formal approach to modulate the mix of CoT and non-CoT examples in meta-training sequences. We demonstrate that careful modulation via CoT-Recipe can increase the accuracy of transformers on novel tasks by up to 300% even when there are no CoT examples available in-context. We confirm the broader effectiveness of these techniques by applying them to pretrained LLMs (Qwen2.5 series) for symbolic reasoning tasks and observing gains of up to 130% in accuracy.

Paperid: 3991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01987.pdf

Abstract:
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising avenue for training policies from pre-collected datasets when gathering additional interaction data is infeasible. However, existing offline RL methods often assume stationarity or only consider synthetic perturbations at test time, assumptions that often fail in real-world scenarios characterized by abrupt, time-varying offsets. These offsets can lead to partial observability, causing agents to misperceive their true state and degrade performance. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Forecasting in Non-stationary Offline RL (FORL), a framework that unifies (i) conditional diffusion-based candidate state generation, trained without presupposing any specific pattern of future non-stationarity, and (ii) zero-shot time-series foundation models. FORL targets environments prone to unexpected, potentially non-Markovian offsets, requiring robust agent performance from the onset of each episode. Empirical evaluations on offline RL benchmarks, augmented with real-world time-series data to simulate realistic non-stationarity, demonstrate that FORL consistently improves performance compared to competitive baselines. By integrating zero-shot forecasting with the agent's experience, we aim to bridge the gap between offline RL and the complexities of real-world, non-stationary environments.

Paperid: 3992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18677.pdf

Abstract:
Sketch based person re-identification aims to match hand-drawn sketches with RGB surveillance images, but remains challenging due to significant modality gaps and limited annotated data. To address this, we introduce KTCAA, a theoretically grounded framework for few-shot cross-modal generalization. Motivated by generalization theory, we identify two key factors influencing target domain risk: (1) domain discrepancy, which quantifies the alignment difficulty between source and target distributions; and (2) perturbation invariance, which evaluates the model's robustness to modality shifts. Based on these insights, we propose two components: (1) Alignment Augmentation (AA), which applies localized sketch-style transformations to simulate target distributions and facilitate progressive alignment; and (2) Knowledge Transfer Catalyst (KTC), which enhances invariance by introducing worst-case perturbations and enforcing consistency. These modules are jointly optimized under a meta-learning paradigm that transfers alignment knowledge from data-rich RGB domains to sketch-based scenarios. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that KTCAA achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in data-scarce conditions.

Paperid: 3993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17092.pdf

Abstract:
Articulated objects are ubiquitous in daily environments, and their 3D reconstruction holds great significance across various fields. However, existing articulated object reconstruction methods typically require costly inputs such as multi-stage and multi-view observations. To address the limitations, we propose a category-agnostic articulated object reconstruction framework via planar Gaussian Splatting, which only uses sparse-view RGB images from a single state. Specifically, we first introduce a Gaussian information field to perceive the optimal sparse viewpoints from candidate camera poses. Then we compress 3D Gaussians into planar Gaussians to facilitate accurate estimation of normal and depth. The planar Gaussians are optimized in a coarse-to-fine manner through depth smooth regularization and few-shot diffusion. Moreover, we introduce a part segmentation probability for each Gaussian primitive and update them by back-projecting part segmentation masks of renderings. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher-fidelity part-level surface reconstruction on both synthetic and real-world data than existing methods. Codes will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 3994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15411.pdf

Abstract:
Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) offers a practical solution for model compression without requiring access to real data, making it particularly attractive in privacy-sensitive scenarios. While DFQ has shown promise for unimodal models, its extension to Vision-Language Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models remains underexplored. In this work, we reveal that directly applying existing DFQ techniques to CLIP results in substantial performance degradation due to two key limitations: insufficient semantic content and low intra-image diversity in synthesized samples. To tackle these challenges, we propose D4C, the first DFQ framework tailored for CLIP. D4C synthesizes semantically rich and structurally diverse pseudo images through three key components: (1) Prompt-Guided Semantic Injection aligns generated images with real-world semantics using text prompts; (2) Structural Contrastive Generation reproduces compositional structures of natural images by leveraging foreground-background contrastive synthesis; and (3) Perturbation-Aware Enhancement applies controlled perturbations to improve sample diversity and robustness. These components jointly empower D4C to synthesize images that are both semantically informative and structurally diverse, effectively bridging the performance gap of DFQ on CLIP. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of D4C, showing significant performance improvements on various bit-widths and models. For example, under the W4A8 setting with CLIP ResNet-50 and ViT-B/32, D4C achieves Top-1 accuracy improvement of 12.4% and 18.9% on CIFAR-10, 6.8% and 19.7% on CIFAR-100, and 1.4% and 5.7% on ImageNet-1K in zero-shot classification, respectively.

Paperid: 3995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14918.pdf

Abstract:
Chest X-ray radiography (CXR) is an essential medical imaging technique for disease diagnosis. However, as 2D projectional images, CXRs are limited by structural superposition and hence fail to capture 3D anatomies. This limitation makes representation learning and disease diagnosis challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel CXR world model named X-WIN, which distills volumetric knowledge from chest computed tomography (CT) by learning to predict its 2D projections in latent space. The core idea is that a world model with internalized knowledge of 3D anatomical structure can predict CXRs under various transformations in 3D space. During projection prediction, we introduce an affinity-guided contrastive alignment loss that leverages mutual similarities to capture rich, correlated information across projections from the same volume. To improve model adaptability, we incorporate real CXRs into training through masked image modeling and employ a domain classifier to encourage statistically similar representations for real and simulated CXRs. Comprehensive experiments show that X-WIN outperforms existing foundation models on diverse downstream tasks using linear probing and few-shot fine-tuning. X-WIN also demonstrates the ability to render 2D projections for reconstructing a 3D CT volume.

Paperid: 3996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14099.pdf

Abstract:
All-in-One Image Restoration (AIO-IR) aims to develop a unified model that can handle multiple degradations under complex conditions. However, existing methods often rely on task-specific designs or latent routing strategies, making it hard to adapt to real-world scenarios with various degradations. We propose FAPE-IR, a Frequency-Aware Planning and Execution framework for image restoration. It uses a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a planner to analyze degraded images and generate concise, frequency-aware restoration plans. These plans guide a LoRA-based Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) module within a diffusion-based executor, which dynamically selects high- or low-frequency experts, complemented by frequency features of the input image. To further improve restoration quality and reduce artifacts, we introduce adversarial training and a frequency regularization loss. By coupling semantic planning with frequency-based restoration, FAPE-IR offers a unified and interpretable solution for all-in-one image restoration. Extensive experiments show that FAPE-IR achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven restoration tasks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization under mixed degradations.

Paperid: 3997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11141.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a widely used multimodal model that aligns text and image representations through large-scale training. While it performs strongly on zero-shot and few-shot tasks, its robustness to linguistic variation, particularly paraphrasing, remains underexplored. Paraphrase robustness is essential for reliable deployment, especially in socially sensitive contexts where inconsistent representations can amplify demographic biases. In this paper, we introduce the Paraphrase Ranking Stability Metric (PRSM), a novel measure for quantifying CLIP's sensitivity to paraphrased queries. Using the Social Counterfactuals dataset, a benchmark designed to reveal social and demographic biases, we empirically assess CLIP's stability under paraphrastic variation, examine the interaction between paraphrase robustness and gender, and discuss implications for fairness and equitable deployment of multimodal systems. Our analysis reveals that robustness varies across paraphrasing strategies, with subtle yet consistent differences observed between male- and female-associated queries.

Paperid: 3998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09748.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at evaluating machine translation (MT), but their scale and cost hinder deployment on edge devices and in privacy-sensitive workflows. We ask: how small can you get while still detecting meaning-altering translation errors? Focusing on English->German Critical Error Detection (CED), we benchmark sub-2B models (LFM2-350M, Qwen-3-0.6B/1.7B, Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct, Gemma-3-1B) across WMT21, WMT22, and SynCED-EnDe-2025. Our framework standardizes prompts, applies lightweight logit-bias calibration and majority voting, and reports both semantic quality (MCC, F1-ERR/F1-NOT) and compute metrics (VRAM, latency, throughput). Results reveal a clear sweet spot around one billion parameters: Gemma-3-1B provides the best quality-efficiency trade-off, reaching MCC=0.77 with F1-ERR=0.98 on SynCED-EnDe-2025 after merged-weights fine-tuning, while maintaining 400 ms single-sample latency on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24 GB). At larger scale, Qwen-3-1.7B attains the highest absolute MCC (+0.11 over Gemma) but with higher compute cost. In contrast, ultra-small models (0.6B) remain usable with few-shot calibration yet under-detect entity and number errors. Overall, compact, instruction-tuned LLMs augmented with lightweight calibration and small-sample supervision can deliver trustworthy, on-device CED for MT, enabling private, low-cost error screening in real-world translation pipelines. All datasets, prompts, and scripts are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

Paperid: 3999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08248.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), existing training-free methods face several limitations: use of computationally expensive affinity refinement strategies, ineffective fusion of transformer attention maps due to equal weighting or reliance on fixed-size Gaussian kernels to reinforce local spatial smoothness, enforcing isotropic neighborhoods. We propose a strong baseline for training-free OVSS termed as NERVE (Neighbourhood \& Entropy-guided Random-walk for open-Vocabulary sEgmentation), which uniquely integrates global and fine-grained local information, exploiting the neighbourhood structure from the self-attention layer of a stable diffusion model. We also introduce a stochastic random walk for refining the affinity rather than relying on fixed-size Gaussian kernels for local context. This spatial diffusion process encourages propagation across connected and semantically related areas, enabling it to effectively delineate objects with arbitrary shapes. Whereas most existing approaches treat self-attention maps from different transformer heads or layers equally, our method uses entropy-based uncertainty to select the most relevant maps. Notably, our method does not require any conventional post-processing techniques like Conditional Random Fields (CRF) or Pixel-Adaptive Mask Refinement (PAMR). Experiments are performed on 7 popular semantic segmentation benchmarks, yielding an overall state-of-the-art zero-shot segmentation performance, providing an effective approach to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 4000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05757.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a differentiable framework for zero-shot adaptive control over parametric families of nonlinear dynamical systems. Our approach integrates a function encoder-based neural ODE (FE-NODE) for modeling system dynamics with a differentiable predictive control (DPC) for offline self-supervised learning of explicit control policies. The FE-NODE captures nonlinear behaviors in state transitions and enables zero-shot adaptation to new systems without retraining, while the DPC efficiently learns control policies across system parameterizations, thus eliminating costly online optimization common in classical model predictive control. We demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, and online adaptability of the proposed method across a range of nonlinear systems with varying parametric scenarios, highlighting its potential as a general-purpose tool for fast zero-shot adaptive control.

Paperid: 4001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04131.pdf

Abstract:
Building Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for humanoid robots has the potential to unify diverse control tasks under a single, promptable generalist policy. However, existing approaches are either exclusively deployed on simulated humanoid characters, or specialized to specific tasks such as tracking. We propose BFM-Zero, a framework that learns an effective shared latent representation that embeds motions, goals, and rewards into a common space, enabling a single policy to be prompted for multiple downstream tasks without retraining. This well-structured latent space in BFM-Zero enables versatile and robust whole-body skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid in the real world, via diverse inference methods, including zero-shot motion tracking, goal reaching, and reward optimization, and few-shot optimization-based adaptation. Unlike prior on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks, BFM-Zero builds upon recent advancements in unsupervised RL and Forward-Backward (FB) models, which offer an objective-centric, explainable, and smooth latent representation of whole-body motions. We further extend BFM-Zero with critical reward shaping, domain randomization, and history-dependent asymmetric learning to bridge the sim-to-real gap. Those key design choices are quantitatively ablated in simulation. A first-of-its-kind model, BFM-Zero establishes a step toward scalable, promptable behavioral foundation models for whole-body humanoid control.

Paperid: 4002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02331.pdf

Abstract:
Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental and powerful framework for modeling complex optimization problems across diverse domains. Recently, learning-based methods have shown great promise in accelerating MILP solvers by predicting high-quality solutions. However, most existing approaches are developed and evaluated in single-domain settings, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen problem distributions. This limitation poses a major obstacle to building scalable and general-purpose learning-based solvers. To address this challenge, we introduce RoME, a domain-Robust Mixture-of-Experts framework for predicting MILP solutions across domains. RoME dynamically routes problem instances to specialized experts based on learned task embeddings. The model is trained using a two-level distributionally robust optimization strategy: inter-domain to mitigate global shifts across domains, and intra-domain to enhance local robustness by introducing perturbations on task embeddings. We reveal that cross-domain training not only enhances the model's generalization capability to unseen domains but also improves performance within each individual domain by encouraging the model to capture more general intrinsic combinatorial patterns. Specifically, a single RoME model trained on three domains achieves an average improvement of 67.7% then evaluated on five diverse domains. We further test the pretrained model on MIPLIB in a zero-shot setting, demonstrating its ability to deliver measurable performance gains on challenging real-world instances where existing learning-based approaches often struggle to generalize.

Paperid: 4003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24236.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce explanations that do not faithfully reflect the factors driving their predictions. In healthcare settings, such unfaithfulness is especially problematic: explanations that omit salient clinical cues or mask spurious shortcuts can undermine clinician trust and lead to unsafe decision support. We study how inference and training-time choices shape explanation faithfulness, focusing on factors practitioners can control at deployment. We evaluate three LLMs (GPT-4.1-mini, LLaMA 70B, LLaMA 8B) on two datasets-BBQ (social bias) and MedQA (medical licensing questions), and manipulate the number and type of few-shot examples, prompting strategies, and training procedure. Our results show: (i) both the quantity and quality of few-shot examples significantly impact model faithfulness; (ii) faithfulness is sensitive to prompting design; (iii) the instruction-tuning phase improves measured faithfulness on MedQA. These findings offer insights into strategies for enhancing the interpretability and trustworthiness of LLMs in sensitive domains.

Paperid: 4004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23252.pdf

Abstract:
Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available

Paperid: 4005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23013.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot knowledge graph relational learning seeks to perform reasoning over relations given only a limited number of training examples. While existing approaches largely adopt a meta-learning framework for enabling fast adaptation to new relations, they suffer from two key pitfalls. First, they learn relation meta-knowledge in isolation, failing to capture common relational patterns shared across tasks. Second, they struggle to effectively incorporate local, task-specific contexts crucial for rapid adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose MoEMeta, a novel meta-learning framework that disentangles globally shared knowledge from task-specific contexts to enable both effective generalization and rapid adaptation. MoEMeta introduces two key innovations: (i) a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model that learns globally shared relational prototypes to enhance generalization, and (ii) a task-tailored adaptation mechanism that captures local contexts for fast task-specific adaptation. By balancing global generalization with local adaptability, MoEMeta significantly advances few-shot relational learning. Extensive experiments and analyses on three KG benchmarks demonstrate that MoEMeta consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 4006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16138.pdf

Abstract:
Existing expert merging strategies for Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) typically rely on input-dependent or input-independent averaging of expert parameters, but often lack a principled weighting mechanism. In this work, we reinterpret expert merging through the lens of game theory, revealing cooperative and competitive dynamics among experts. Based on this perspective, we introduce Nash Merging of Experts (NAMEx), a novel framework that incorporates Nash Bargaining into the merging process, enabling more balanced and efficient collaboration among experts. Additionally, we incorporate complex momentum into NAMEx to accelerate expert propagation with theoretical guarantees for convergence. Extensive experiments across language modelling, text classification, image classification, and zero-shot robustness under data corruption show that NAMEx consistently outperforms competing methods while integrating seamlessly with popular MoE architectures. Finally, we demonstrate NAMEx's scalability by applying it to large-scale systems, including Qwen1.5-MoE (14B) and DeepSeek-MoE (16B), where it proves effective in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings.

Paperid: 4007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15018.pdf

Abstract:
Urban embodied AI agents, ranging from delivery robots to quadrupeds, are increasingly populating our cities, navigating chaotic streets to provide last-mile connectivity. Training such agents requires diverse, high-fidelity urban environments to scale, yet existing human-crafted or procedurally generated simulation scenes either lack scalability or fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce UrbanVerse, a data-driven real-to-sim system that converts crowd-sourced city-tour videos into physics-aware, interactive simulation scenes. UrbanVerse consists of: (i) UrbanVerse-100K, a repository of 100k+ annotated urban 3D assets with semantic and physical attributes, and (ii) UrbanVerse-Gen, an automatic pipeline that extracts scene layouts from video and instantiates metric-scale 3D simulations using retrieved assets. Running in IsaacSim, UrbanVerse offers 160 high-quality constructed scenes from 24 countries, along with a curated benchmark of 10 artist-designed test scenes. Experiments show that UrbanVerse scenes preserve real-world semantics and layouts, achieving human-evaluated realism comparable to manually crafted scenes. In urban navigation, policies trained in UrbanVerse exhibit scaling power laws and strong generalization, improving success by +6.3% in simulation and +30.1% in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer comparing to prior methods, accomplishing a 300 m real-world mission with only two interventions.

Paperid: 4008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12061.pdf

Abstract:
Effective disaster response is essential for safeguarding lives and property. Existing statistical approaches often lack semantic context, generalize poorly across events, and offer limited interpretability. While Large language models (LLMs) provide few-shot generalization, they remain text-bound and blind to geography. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Geospatial Awareness Layer (GAL) that grounds LLM agents in structured earth data. Starting from raw wildfire detections, GAL automatically retrieves and integrates infrastructure, demographic, terrain, and weather information from external geodatabases, assembling them into a concise, unit-annotated perception script. This enriched context enables agents to produce evidence-based resource-allocation recommendations (e.g., personnel assignments, budget allocations), further reinforced by historical analogs and daily change signals for incremental updates. We evaluate the framework in real wildfire scenarios across multiple LLM models, showing that geospatially grounded agents can outperform baselines. The proposed framework can generalize to other hazards such as floods and hurricanes.

Paperid: 4009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10740.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose DS-KWS, a two-stage framework for robust user-defined keyword spotting. It combines a CTC-based method with a streaming phoneme search module to locate candidate segments, followed by a QbyT-based method with a phoneme matcher module for verification at both the phoneme and utterance levels. To further improve performance, we introduce a dual data scaling strategy: (1) expanding the ASR corpus from 460 to 1,460 hours to strengthen the acoustic model; and (2) leveraging over 155k anchor classes to train the phoneme matcher, significantly enhancing the distinction of confusable words. Experiments on LibriPhrase show that DS-KWS significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 6.13\% EER and 97.85\% AUC on the Hard subset. On Hey-Snips, it achieves zero-shot performance comparable to full-shot trained models, reaching 99.13\% recall at one false alarm per hour.

Paperid: 4010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09462.pdf

Abstract:
AI control protocols serve as a defense mechanism to stop untrusted LLM agents from causing harm in autonomous settings. Prior work treats this as a security problem, stress testing with exploits that use the deployment context to subtly complete harmful side tasks, such as backdoor insertion. In practice, most AI control protocols are fundamentally based on LLM monitors, which can become a central point of failure. We study adaptive attacks by an untrusted model that knows the protocol and the monitor model, which is plausible if the untrusted model was trained with a later knowledge cutoff or can search for this information autonomously. We instantiate a simple adaptive attack vector by which the attacker embeds publicly known or zero-shot prompt injections in the model outputs. Using this tactic, frontier models consistently evade diverse monitors and complete malicious tasks on two main AI control benchmarks. The attack works universally against current protocols that rely on a monitor. Furthermore, the recent Defer-to-Resample protocol even backfires, as its resampling amplifies the prompt injection and effectively reframes it as a best-of-$n$ attack. In general, adaptive attacks on monitor models represent a major blind spot in current control protocols and should become a standard component of evaluations for future AI control mechanisms.

Paperid: 4011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09253.pdf

Abstract:
While specialized learning-based models have historically dominated image privacy prediction, the current literature increasingly favours adopting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) designed for generic tasks. This trend risks overlooking the performance ceiling set by purpose-built models due to a lack of systematic evaluation. To address this problem, we establish a zero-shot benchmark for image privacy classification, enabling a fair comparison. We evaluate the top-3 open-source VLMs, according to a privacy benchmark, using task-aligned prompts and we contrast their performance, efficiency, and robustness against established vision-only and multi-modal methods. Counter-intuitively, our results show that VLMs, despite their resource-intensive nature in terms of high parameter count and slower inference, currently lag behind specialized, smaller models in privacy prediction accuracy. We also find that VLMs exhibit higher robustness to image perturbations.

Paperid: 4012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06538.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel framework that improves the reliability of LLM judges by selectively augmenting LLM with auxiliary evaluation dimensions. Existing LLM judges often miss crucial evaluation dimensions because they fail to recognize the implicit standards underlying human assessments. To address this challenge, we propose the Auto-Prompt Ensemble (APE), an adaptive framework that automatically learns evaluation dimensions from its failure cases. APE incorporates a confidence-based ensemble mechanism to decide when to adopt the judgments from additional evaluation dimensions through a novel confidence estimation approach called Collective Confidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APE improves the reliability of LLM Judge across diverse standard benchmarks. For instance, APE enhances GPT-4o agreement rate on Reward Bench from 87.2% to 90.5% in the zero-shot setting. Overall, APE provides a principled approach for LLM Judge to leverage test-time computation, and bridge the evaluation gap between human and LLM judges.

Paperid: 4013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06020.pdf

Abstract:
Transferring the recent advancements in deep learning into scientific disciplines is hindered by the lack of the required large-scale datasets for training. We argue that in these knowledge-rich domains, the established body of scientific theory provides reliable inductive biases in the form of governing physical laws. We address the ill-posed inverse problem of recovering Raman spectra from noisy Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering (CARS) measurements, as the true Raman signal here is suppressed by a dominating non-resonant background. We propose RamPINN, a model that learns to recover Raman spectra from given CARS spectra. Our core methodological contribution is a physics-informed neural network that utilizes a dual-decoder architecture to disentangle resonant and non-resonant signals. This is done by enforcing the Kramers-Kronig causality relations via a differentiable Hilbert transform loss on the resonant and a smoothness prior on the non-resonant part of the signal. Trained entirely on synthetic data, RamPINN demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to real-world experimental data, explicitly closing this gap and significantly outperforming existing baselines. Furthermore, we show that training with these physics-based losses alone, without access to any ground-truth Raman spectra, still yields competitive results. This work highlights a broader concept: formal scientific rules can act as a potent inductive bias, enabling robust, self-supervised learning in data-limited scientific domains.

Paperid: 4014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01253.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong mathematical reasoning, but reliance on closed-source APIs for OR tasks raises privacy concerns, and training open-source models from scratch incurs high compute costs. We introduce OR-Toolformer, which fine-tunes Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with a semi-automatic data synthesis pipeline that generates diverse OR problem-answer pairs and augments the model with external solvers to produce API calls. On three of four standard benchmarks, OR-Toolformer achieves up to 80.1% execution accuracy, exceeding size-matched baselines by over 4.3%. In zero-shot evaluation on two unseen OR problem types, it attains 54% average accuracy, a 21 percentage-point improvement over the strongest baseline. These findings validate the efficacy of tool-augmented fine-tuning LLMs for accurate and generalizable OR problem modeling and solving.

Paperid: 4015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25963.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-grounded medical report generation aims to produce clinically accurate descriptions of medical images, anchored in explicit visual evidence to improve interpretability and facilitate integration into clinical workflows. However, existing methods often rely on separately trained detection modules that require extensive expert annotations, introducing high labeling costs and limiting generalizability due to pathology distribution bias across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning (SS-ACL) -- a novel and annotation-free framework that aligns generated reports with corresponding anatomical regions using simple textual prompts. SS-ACL constructs a hierarchical anatomical graph inspired by the invariant top-down inclusion structure of human anatomy, organizing entities by spatial location. It recursively reconstructs fine-grained anatomical regions to enforce intra-sample spatial alignment, inherently guiding attention maps toward visually relevant areas prompted by text. To further enhance inter-sample semantic alignment for abnormality recognition, SS-ACL introduces a region-level contrastive learning based on anatomical consistency. These aligned embeddings serve as priors for report generation, enabling attention maps to provide interpretable visual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SS-ACL, without relying on expert annotations, (i) generates accurate and visually grounded reports -- outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 10\% in lexical accuracy and 25\% in clinical efficacy, and (ii) achieves competitive performance on various downstream visual tasks, surpassing current leading visual foundation models by 8\% in zero-shot visual grounding.

Paperid: 4016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25529.pdf

Abstract:
As personalized learning gains increasing attention in mathematics education, there is a growing demand for intelligent systems that can assess complex student responses and provide individualized feedback in real time. In this study, we present a personalized auto-grading and feedback system for constructive geometry tasks, developed using large language models (LLMs) and deployed on the Algeomath platform, a Korean online tool designed for interactive geometric constructions. The proposed system evaluates student-submitted geometric constructions by analyzing their procedural accuracy and conceptual understanding. It employs a prompt-based grading mechanism using GPT-4, where student answers and model solutions are compared through a few-shot learning approach. Feedback is generated based on teacher-authored examples built from anticipated student responses, and it dynamically adapts to the student's problem-solving history, allowing up to four iterative attempts per question. The system was piloted with 79 middle-school students, where LLM-generated grades and feedback were benchmarked against teacher judgments. Grading closely aligned with teachers, and feedback helped many students revise errors and complete multi-step geometry tasks. While short-term corrections were frequent, longer-term transfer effects were less clear. Overall, the study highlights the potential of LLMs to support scalable, teacher-aligned formative assessment in mathematics, while pointing to improvements needed in terminology handling and feedback design.

Paperid: 4017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24356.pdf

Abstract:
Most studies on language model pretraining focus on large datasets, leaving open questions about optimization in data-constrained settings. In such settings, the effects of training data order and of including alternative versions of the same text remain underexplored. We address this by studying curriculum learning in pretraining, focusing on text-complexity ordering and data augmentation via simplification. We ask: (1) Does simplifying texts enhance representation quality more than reusing the original data? and (2) Does ordering data by text complexity yield better representations? To answer, we build on a pair of parallel corpora where human-written paragraphs are aligned with LLM-simplified variants, and test four data schedules: repeated exposure, low-to-high complexity, high-to-low, and interleaved. We analyze models' representation quality from a sample efficiency perspective via fine-tuning, as well as its zero-shot performance on linguistic knowledge, entity tracking, world knowledge, and commonsense reasoning. Our findings show that adding simplified data improves fine-tuning and zero-shot performance over a repeated-exposure baseline: smaller models benefit from low-to-high complexity, while larger models perform better with interleaved ordering.

Paperid: 4018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23009.pdf

Abstract:
Action recognition models rely excessively on static cues rather than dynamic human motion, which is known as static bias. This bias leads to poor performance in real-world applications and zero-shot action recognition. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce static bias by separating temporal dynamic information from static scene information. Our approach uses a statistical independence loss between biased and unbiased streams, combined with a scene prediction loss. Our experiments demonstrate that this method effectively reduces static bias and confirm the importance of scene prediction loss.

Paperid: 4019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22195.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) on robot teleoperation data to create vision-language-action (VLA) models is a promising paradigm for training generalist policies, but it suffers from a fundamental tradeoff: learning to produce actions often diminishes the VLM's foundational reasoning and multimodal understanding, hindering generalization to novel scenarios, instruction following, and semantic understanding. We argue that this catastrophic forgetting is due to a distribution mismatch between the VLM's internet-scale pretraining corpus and the robotics fine-tuning data. Inspired by this observation, we introduce VLM2VLA: a VLA training paradigm that first resolves this mismatch at the data level by representing low-level actions with natural language. This alignment makes it possible to train VLAs solely with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), thereby minimally modifying the VLM backbone and averting catastrophic forgetting. As a result, the VLM can be fine-tuned on robot teleoperation data without fundamentally altering the underlying architecture and without expensive co-training on internet-scale VLM datasets. Through extensive Visual Question Answering (VQA) studies and over 800 real-world robotics experiments, we demonstrate that VLM2VLA preserves the VLM's core capabilities, enabling zero-shot generalization to novel tasks that require open-world semantic reasoning and multilingual instruction following.

Paperid: 4020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21470.pdf

Abstract:
Idempotent generative networks (IGNs) are a new line of generative models based on idempotent mapping to a target manifold. IGNs support both single-and multi-step generation, allowing for a flexible trade-off between computational cost and sample quality. But similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), conventional IGNs require adversarial training and are prone to training instabilities and mode collapse. Diffusion and score-based models are popular approaches to generative modeling that iteratively transport samples from one distribution, usually a Gaussian, to a target data distribution. These models have gained popularity due to their stable training dynamics and high-fidelity generation quality. However, this stability and quality come at the cost of high computational cost, as the data must be transported incrementally along the entire trajectory. New sampling methods, model distillation, and consistency models have been developed to reduce the sampling cost and even perform one-shot sampling from diffusion models. In this work, we unite diffusion and IGNs by distilling idempotent models from diffusion model scores, called SIGN. Our proposed method is highly stable and does not require adversarial losses. We provide a theoretical analysis of our proposed score-based training methods and empirically show that IGNs can be effectively distilled from a pre-trained diffusion model, enabling faster inference than iterative score-based models. SIGNs can perform multi-step sampling, allowing users to trade off quality for efficiency. These models operate directly on the source domain; they can project corrupted or alternate distributions back onto the target manifold, enabling zero-shot editing of inputs. We validate our models on multiple image datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results for idempotent models on the CIFAR and CelebA datasets.

Paperid: 4021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20149.pdf

Abstract:
Requirements traceability is crucial in software engineering to ensure consistency between requirements and code. However, existing automated traceability methods are constrained by the scarcity of training data and challenges in bridging the semantic gap between artifacts. This study aims to address the data scarcity problem in requirements traceability by employing large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation. We propose a novel approach that utilizes prompt-based techniques with LLMs to generate augmented requirement-to-code trace links, thereby enhancing the training dataset. Four LLMs (Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) were used, employing both zero-shot and few-shot templates. Moreover, we optimized the encoder component of the tracing model to improve its efficiency and adaptability to augmented data. The key contributions of this paper are: (1) proposing and evaluating four prompt templates for data augmentation; (2) providing a comparative analysis of four LLMs for generating trace links; (3) enhancing the model's encoder for improved adaptability to augmented datasets. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances model performance, achieving an F1 score improvement of up to 28.59%, thus demonstrating its effectiveness and potential for practical application.

Paperid: 4022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18404.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a transferable solution method for optimal control problems with varying objectives using function encoder (FE) policies. Traditional optimization-based approaches must be re-solved whenever objectives change, resulting in prohibitive computational costs for applications requiring frequent evaluation and adaptation. The proposed method learns a reusable set of neural basis functions that spans the control policy space, enabling efficient zero-shot adaptation to new tasks through either projection from data or direct mapping from problem specifications. The key idea is an offline-online decomposition: basis functions are learned once during offline imitation learning, while online adaptation requires only lightweight coefficient estimation. Numerical experiments across diverse dynamics, dimensions, and cost structures show our method delivers near-optimal performance with minimal overhead when generalizing across tasks, enabling semi-global feedback policies suitable for real-time deployment.

Paperid: 4023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17921.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting individual sentences from a document as evidence or reasoning steps is commonly done in many NLP tasks. However, extracted sentences often lack context necessary to make them understood, e.g., coreference and background information. To this end, we propose a content selection and planning framework for zero-shot decontextualisation, which determines what content should be mentioned and in what order for a sentence to be understood out of context. Specifically, given a potentially ambiguous sentence and its context, we first segment it into basic semantically-independent units. We then identify potentially ambiguous units from the given sentence, and extract relevant units from the context based on their discourse relations. Finally, we generate a content plan to rewrite the sentence by enriching each ambiguous unit with its relevant units. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is competitive for sentence decontextualisation, producing sentences that exhibit better semantic integrity and discourse coherence, outperforming existing methods.

Paperid: 4024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17022.pdf

Abstract:
Video and audio inpainting for mixed audio-visual content has become a crucial task in multimedia editing recently. However, precisely removing an object and its corresponding audio from a video without affecting the rest of the scene remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose VAInpaint, a novel pipeline that first utilizes a segmentation model to generate masks and guide a video inpainting model in removing objects. At the same time, an LLM then analyzes the scene globally, while a region-specific model provides localized descriptions. Both the overall and regional descriptions will be inputted into an LLM, which will refine the content and turn it into text queries for our text-driven audio separation model. Our audio separation model is fine-tuned on a customized dataset comprising segmented MUSIC instrument images and VGGSound backgrounds to enhance its generalization performance. Experiments show that our method achieves performance comparable to current benchmarks in both audio and video inpainting.

Paperid: 4025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16551.pdf

Abstract:
Improving pretraining data quality and size is known to boost downstream performance, but the role of text complexity--how hard a text is to read--remains less explored. We reduce surface-level complexity (shorter sentences, simpler words, simpler structure) while keeping core content approximately constant and ask: (i) How does complexity affect language modeling across model sizes? (ii) Can useful representations be learned from simpler text alone? (iii) How does pretraining text complexity influence downstream language understanding? We simplify human-written texts using a large language model, pretrain causal models (28M-500M) from scratch on original vs. simplified data, and evaluate them in fine-tuning and zero-shot setups. We find that perplexity is sensitive to the interaction between model capacity and text complexity--smaller models degrade far less on simpler texts--while text complexity has little impact on fine-tuning evaluations, with zero-shot evaluations indicating that simpler texts benefit performance on linguistic knowledge tasks, whereas more complex texts favor tasks requiring world knowledge and entity tracking. Our findings suggest that different types of data diversity affect transfer and zero-shot performance differently, providing insight into tailoring data curation to specific goals.

Paperid: 4026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15272.pdf

Abstract:
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for Vision Transformers (ViTs) has recently demonstrated considerable potential as a pre-training strategy for a variety of computer vision tasks, including image classification and segmentation, both in standard and few-shot downstream contexts. Two pre-training objectives dominate the landscape of SSL techniques: Contrastive Learning and Masked Image Modeling. Features (or tokens) extracted from the final transformer attention block -- specifically, the keys, queries, and values -- as well as features obtained after the final block's feed-forward layer, have become a common foundation for addressing downstream tasks. However, in many existing approaches, these pre-trained ViT features are further processed through additional transformation layers, often involving lightweight heads or combined with distillation, to achieve superior task performance. Although such methods can improve task outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive analysis of the intrinsic representation capabilities of unaltered ViT features has yet to be conducted. This study aims to bridge this gap by systematically evaluating the use of these unmodified features across image classification and segmentation tasks, in both standard and few-shot contexts. The classification and segmentation rules that we use are either hyperplane based (as in logistic regression) or cosine-similarity based, both of which rely on the presence of interpretable directions in the ViT's latent space. Based on the previous rules and without the use of additional feature transformations, we conduct an analysis across token types, tasks, and pre-trained ViT models. This study provides insights into the optimal choice for token type and decision rule based on the task, context, and the pre-training objective, while reporting detailed findings on two widely-used datasets.

Paperid: 4027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13816.pdf

Abstract:
Robust autonomous navigation for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) in complex environments is a critical capability. However, modern end-to-end navigation faces a key challenge: the high-frequency control loop needed for agile flight conflicts with low-frequency perception streams, which are limited by sensor update rates and significant computational cost. This mismatch forces conventional synchronous models into undesirably low control rates. To resolve this, we propose an asynchronous reinforcement learning framework that decouples perception and control, enabling a high-frequency policy to act on the latest IMU state for immediate reactivity, while incorporating perception features asynchronously. To manage the resulting data staleness, we introduce a theoretically-grounded Temporal Encoding Module (TEM) that explicitly conditions the policy on perception delays, a strategy complemented by a two-stage curriculum to ensure stable and efficient training. Validated in extensive simulations, our method was successfully deployed in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on an onboard NUC, where it sustains a 100~Hz control rate and demonstrates robust, agile navigation in cluttered real-world environments. Our source code will be released for community reference.

Paperid: 4028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11446.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are finding applications in numerous domains, and Requirements Engineering (RE) is increasingly benefiting from their capabilities to assist with complex, language-intensive tasks. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 74 primary studies published between 2023 and 2024, examining how LLMs are being applied in RE. The study categorizes the literature according to several dimensions, including publication trends, RE activities, prompting strategies, and evaluation methods. Our findings indicate notable patterns, among which we observe substantial differences compared to previous works leveraging standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Most of the studies focus on using LLMs for requirements elicitation and validation, rather than defect detection and classification, which were dominant in the past. Researchers have also broadened their focus and addressed novel tasks, e.g., test generation, exploring the integration of RE with other software engineering (SE) disciplines. Although requirements specifications remain the primary focus, other artifacts are increasingly considered, including issues from issue tracking systems, regulations, and technical manuals. The studies mostly rely on GPT-based models, and often use Zero-shot or Few-shot prompting. They are usually evaluated in controlled environments, with limited use in industry settings and limited integration in complex workflows. Our study outlines important future directions, such as leveraging the potential to expand the influence of RE in SE, exploring less-studied tasks, improving prompting methods, and testing in real-world environments. Our contribution also helps researchers and practitioners use LLMs more effectively in RE, by providing a list of identified tools leveraging LLMs for RE, as well as datasets.

Paperid: 4029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09947.pdf

Abstract:
There is a growing concern about the environmental impact of large language models (LLMs) in software development, particularly due to their high energy use and carbon footprint. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer a more sustainable alternative, requiring fewer computational resources while remaining effective for fundamental programming tasks. In this study, we investigate whether prompt engineering can improve the energy efficiency of SLMs in code generation. We evaluate four open-source SLMs, StableCode-Instruct-3B, Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct, CodeLlama-7B-Instruct, and Phi-3-Mini-4K-Instruct, across 150 Python problems from LeetCode, evenly distributed into easy, medium, and hard categories. Each model is tested under four prompting strategies: role prompting, zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT). For every generated solution, we measure runtime, memory usage, and energy consumption, comparing the results with a human-written baseline. Our findings show that CoT prompting provides consistent energy savings for Qwen2.5-Coder and StableCode-3B, while CodeLlama-7B and Phi-3-Mini-4K fail to outperform the baseline under any prompting strategy. These results highlight that the benefits of prompting are model-dependent and that carefully designed prompts can guide SLMs toward greener software development.

Paperid: 4030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19441.pdf

Abstract:
Partial differential equations (PDEs) underpin the modeling of many natural and engineered systems. It can be convenient to express such models as neural PDEs rather than using traditional numerical PDE solvers by replacing part or all of the PDE's governing equations with a neural network representation. Neural PDEs are often easier to differentiate, linearize, reduce, or use for uncertainty quantification than the original numerical solver. They are usually trained on solution trajectories obtained by long-horizon rollout of the PDE solver. Here we propose a more sample-efficient data-augmentation strategy for generating neural PDE training data from a computer model by space-filling sampling of local "stencil" states. This approach removes a large degree of spatiotemporal redundancy present in trajectory data and oversamples states that may be rarely visited but help the neural PDE generalize across the state space. We demonstrate that accurate neural PDE stencil operators can be learned from synthetic training data generated by the computational equivalent of 10 timesteps' worth of numerical simulation. Accuracy is further improved if we assume access to a single full-trajectory simulation from the computer model, which is typically available in practice. Across several PDE systems, we show that our data-augmented stencil data yield better trained neural stencil operators, with clear performance gains compared with naively sampled stencil data from simulation trajectories. Finally, with only 10 solver steps' worth of augmented stencil data, our approach outperforms traditional ML emulators trained on thousands of trajectories in long-horizon rollout accuracy and stability.

Paperid: 4031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17855.pdf

Abstract:
Introducing MARK, the Multi-stAge Reasoning frameworK for cultural value survey response simulation, designed to enhance the accuracy, steerability, and interpretability of large language models in this task. The system is inspired by the type dynamics theory in the MBTI psychological framework for personality research. It effectively predicts and utilizes human demographic information for simulation: life-situational stress analysis, group-level personality prediction, and self-weighted cognitive imitation. Experiments on the World Values Survey show that MARK outperforms existing baselines by 10% accuracy and reduces the divergence between model predictions and human preferences. This highlights the potential of our framework to improve zero-shot personalization and help social scientists interpret model predictions.

Paperid: 4032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17846.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in pre-trained vision-language models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities. To further enhance these models' adaptability to various downstream tasks, prompt tuning has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. However, despite its efficiency, the generalization ability of prompt remains limited. In contrast, label smoothing (LS) has been widely recognized as an effective regularization technique that prevents models from becoming over-confident and improves their generalization. This inspires us to explore the integration of LS with prompt tuning. However, we have observed that the vanilla LS even weakens the generalization ability of prompt tuning. To address this issue, we propose the Alternating Training-based Label Smoothing (ATLaS) method, which alternately trains with standard one-hot labels and soft labels generated by LS to supervise the prompt tuning. Moreover, we introduce two types of efficient offline soft labels, including Class-wise Soft Labels (CSL) and Instance-wise Soft Labels (ISL), to provide inter-class or instance-class relationships for prompt tuning. The theoretical properties of the proposed ATLaS method are analyzed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ATLaS method, combined with CSL and ISL, consistently enhances the generalization performance of prompt tuning. Moreover, the proposed ATLaS method exhibits high compatibility with prevalent prompt tuning methods, enabling seamless integration into existing methods.

Paperid: 4033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17079.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded information retrieval beyond purely textual inputs, enabling retrieval from complex real world documents that combine text and visuals. However, most documents are private either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross modal pre questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that compare embeddings in a single vector space, PREMIR leverages preQs from multiple complementary modalities to expand the scope of matching to the token level. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state of the art performance on out of distribution benchmarks, including closed domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all retrieval metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the model's robustness in real world settings.

Paperid: 4034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16076.pdf

Abstract:
Sign Language (SL) enables two-way communication for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, yet many sign languages remain under-resourced in the AI space. Sign Language Instruction Generation (SLIG) produces step-by-step textual instructions that enable non-SL users to imitate and learn SL gestures, promoting two-way interaction. We introduce BdSLIG, the first Bengali SLIG dataset, used to evaluate Vision Language Models (VLMs) (i) on under-resourced SLIG tasks, and (ii) on long-tail visual concepts, as Bengali SL is unlikely to appear in the VLM pre-training data. To enhance zero-shot performance, we introduce Sign Parameter-Infused (SPI) prompting, which integrates standard SL parameters, like hand shape, motion, and orientation, directly into the textual prompts. Subsuming standard sign parameters into the prompt makes the instructions more structured and reproducible than free-form natural text from vanilla prompting. We envision that our work would promote inclusivity and advancement in SL learning systems for the under-resourced communities.

Paperid: 4035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09087.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success on multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification, yet they can exhibit demographic biases even when explicit protected attributes are absent during training. In this work, we focus on automated glaucoma screening from retinal fundus images, a critical application given that glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and disproportionately affects underserved populations. Building on a reweighting-based contrastive learning framework, we introduce an attribute-agnostic debiasing method that (i) infers proxy subgroups via unsupervised clustering of image-image embeddings, (ii) computes gradient-similarity weights between the CLIP-style multimodal loss and a SimCLR-style image-pair contrastive loss, and (iii) applies these weights in a joint, top-$k$ weighted objective to upweight underperforming clusters. This label-free approach adaptively targets the hardest examples, thereby reducing subgroup disparities. We evaluate our method on the Harvard FairVLMed glaucoma subset, reporting Equalized Odds Distance (EOD), Equalized Subgroup AUC (ES AUC), and Groupwise AUC to demonstrate equitable performance across inferred demographic subgroups.

Paperid: 4036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03542.pdf

Abstract:
Conversion of spoken mathematical expressions is a challenging task that involves transcribing speech into a strictly structured symbolic representation while addressing the ambiguity inherent in the pronunciation of equations. Although significant progress has been achieved in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language models (LM), the problem of converting spoken mathematics into LaTeX remains underexplored. This task directly applies to educational and research domains, such as lecture transcription or note creation. Based on ASR post-correction, prior work requires 2 transcriptions, focuses only on isolated equations, has a limited test set, and provides neither training data nor multilingual coverage. To address these issues, we present the first fully open-source large-scale dataset, comprising over 66,000 human-annotated audio samples of mathematical equations and sentences in both English and Russian, drawn from diverse scientific domains. In addition to the ASR post-correction models and few-shot prompting, we apply audio language models, demonstrating comparable character error rate (CER) results on the MathSpeech benchmark (28% vs. 30%) for the equations conversion. In contrast, on the proposed S2L-equations benchmark, our models outperform the MathSpeech model by a substantial margin of more than 40 percentage points, even after accounting for LaTeX formatting artifacts (27% vs. 64%). We establish the first benchmark for mathematical sentence recognition (S2L-sentences) and achieve an equation CER of 40%. This work lays the groundwork for future advances in multimodal AI, with a particular focus on mathematical content recognition.

Paperid: 4037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01602.pdf

Abstract:
The fine-grained classification of brain tumor subtypes from histopathological whole slide images is highly challenging due to subtle morphological variations and the scarcity of annotated data. Although vision-language models have enabled promising zero-shot classification, their ability to capture fine-grained pathological features remains limited, resulting in suboptimal subtype discrimination. To address these challenges, we propose the Fine-Grained Patch Alignment Network (FG-PAN), a novel zero-shot framework tailored for digital pathology. FG-PAN consists of two key modules: (1) a local feature refinement module that enhances patch-level visual features by modeling spatial relationships among representative patches, and (2) a fine-grained text description generation module that leverages large language models to produce pathology-aware, class-specific semantic prototypes. By aligning refined visual features with LLM-generated fine-grained descriptions, FG-PAN effectively increases class separability in both visual and semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on multiple public pathology datasets, including EBRAINS and TCGA, demonstrate that FG-PAN achieves state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization in zero-shot brain tumor subtype classification.

Paperid: 4038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01504.pdf

Abstract:
In time series editing, we aim to modify some properties of a given time series without altering others. For example, when analyzing a hospital patient's blood pressure, we may add a sudden early drop and observe how it impacts their future while preserving other conditions. Existing diffusion-based editors rely on rigid, predefined attribute vectors as conditions and produce all-or-nothing edits through sampling. This attribute- and sampling-based approach limits flexibility in condition format and lacks customizable control over editing strength. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Instruction-based Time Series Editing, where users specify intended edits using natural language. This allows users to express a wider range of edits in a more accessible format. We then introduce InstructTime, the first instruction-based time series editor. InstructTime takes in time series and instructions, embeds them into a shared multi-modal representation space, then decodes their embeddings to generate edited time series. By learning a structured multi-modal representation space, we can easily interpolate between embeddings to achieve varying degrees of edit. To handle local and global edits together, we propose multi-resolution encoders. In our experiments, we use synthetic and real datasets and find that InstructTime is a state-of-the-art time series editor: InstructTime achieves high-quality edits with controllable strength, can generalize to unseen instructions, and can be easily adapted to unseen conditions through few-shot learning.

Paperid: 4039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00965.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce VAULT, a fully automated adversarial RAG pipeline that systematically uncovers and remedies weaknesses in NLI models through three stages: retrieval, adversarial generation, and iterative retraining. First, we perform balanced few-shot retrieval by embedding premises with both semantic (BGE) and lexical (BM25) similarity. Next, we assemble these contexts into LLM prompts to generate adversarial hypotheses, which are then validated by an LLM ensemble for label fidelity. Finally, the validated adversarial examples are injected back into the training set at increasing mixing ratios, progressively fortifying a zero-shot RoBERTa-base model.On standard benchmarks, VAULT elevates RoBERTa-base accuracy from 88.48% to 92.60% on SNLI +4.12%, from 75.04% to 80.95% on ANLI +5.91%, and from 54.67% to 71.99% on MultiNLI +17.32%. It also consistently outperforms prior in-context adversarial methods by up to 2.0% across datasets. By automating high-quality adversarial data curation at scale, VAULT enables rapid, human-independent robustness improvements in NLI inference tasks.

Paperid: 4040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22457.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has argued that large language models (LLMs) are not "abstract reasoners", citing their poor zero-shot performance on a variety of challenging tasks as evidence. We revisit these experiments in order to add nuance to the claim. First, we show that while LLMs indeed perform poorly in a zero-shot setting, even tuning a small subset of parameters for input encoding can enable near-perfect performance. However, we also show that this finetuning does not necessarily transfer across datasets. We take this collection of empirical results as an invitation to (re-)open the discussion of what it means to be an "abstract reasoner", and why it matters whether LLMs fit the bill.

Paperid: 4041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19451.pdf

Abstract:
Occupancy is crucial for autonomous driving, providing essential geometric priors for perception and planning. However, existing methods predominantly rely on LiDAR-based occupancy annotations, which limits scalability and prevents leveraging vast amounts of potential crowdsourced data for auto-labeling. To address this, we propose GS-Occ3D, a scalable vision-only framework that directly reconstructs occupancy. Vision-only occupancy reconstruction poses significant challenges due to sparse viewpoints, dynamic scene elements, severe occlusions, and long-horizon motion. Existing vision-based methods primarily rely on mesh representation, which suffer from incomplete geometry and additional post-processing, limiting scalability. To overcome these issues, GS-Occ3D optimizes an explicit occupancy representation using an Octree-based Gaussian Surfel formulation, ensuring efficiency and scalability. Additionally, we decompose scenes into static background, ground, and dynamic objects, enabling tailored modeling strategies: (1) Ground is explicitly reconstructed as a dominant structural element, significantly improving large-area consistency; (2) Dynamic vehicles are separately modeled to better capture motion-related occupancy patterns. Extensive experiments on the Waymo dataset demonstrate that GS-Occ3D achieves state-of-the-art geometry reconstruction results. By curating vision-only binary occupancy labels from diverse urban scenes, we show their effectiveness for downstream occupancy models on Occ3D-Waymo and superior zero-shot generalization on Occ3D-nuScenes. It highlights the potential of large-scale vision-based occupancy reconstruction as a new paradigm for scalable auto-labeling. Project Page: https://gs-occ3d.github.io/

Paperid: 4042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13323.pdf

Abstract:
Socio-economic indicators like regional GDP, population, and education levels, are crucial to shaping policy decisions and fostering sustainable development. This research introduces GeoReg a regression model that integrates diverse data sources, including satellite imagery and web-based geospatial information, to estimate these indicators even for data-scarce regions such as developing countries. Our approach leverages the prior knowledge of large language model (LLM) to address the scarcity of labeled data, with the LLM functioning as a data engineer by extracting informative features to enable effective estimation in few-shot settings. Specifically, our model obtains contextual relationships between data features and the target indicator, categorizing their correlations as positive, negative, mixed, or irrelevant. These features are then fed into the linear estimator with tailored weight constraints for each category. To capture nonlinear patterns, the model also identifies meaningful feature interactions and integrates them, along with nonlinear transformations. Experiments across three countries at different stages of development demonstrate that our model outperforms baselines in estimating socio-economic indicators, even for low-income countries with limited data availability.

Paperid: 4043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05541.pdf

Abstract:
Counterfactual explanations (CFs) offer human-centric insights into machine learning predictions by highlighting minimal changes required to alter an outcome. Therefore, CFs can be used as (i) interventions for abnormality prevention and (ii) augmented data for training robust models. In this work, we explore large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o-mini, for generating CFs in a zero-shot and three-shot setting. We evaluate our approach on two datasets: the AI-Readi flagship dataset for stress prediction and a public dataset for heart disease detection. Compared to traditional methods such as DiCE, CFNOW, and NICE, our few-shot LLM-based approach achieves high plausibility (up to 99%), strong validity (up to 0.99), and competitive sparsity. Moreover, using LLM-generated CFs as augmented samples improves downstream classifier performance (an average accuracy gain of 5%), especially in low-data regimes. This demonstrates the potential of prompt-based generative techniques to enhance explainability and robustness in clinical and physiological prediction tasks. Code base: github.com/shovito66/SenseCF.

Paperid: 4044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22298.pdf

Abstract:
Video outpainting is a challenging task that generates new video content by extending beyond the boundaries of an original input video, requiring both temporal and spatial consistency. Many state-of-the-art methods utilize latent diffusion models with U-Net backbones but still struggle to achieve high quality and adaptability in generated content. Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have emerged as a promising alternative because of their superior performance. We introduce OutDreamer, a DiT-based video outpainting framework comprising two main components: an efficient video control branch and a conditional outpainting branch. The efficient video control branch effectively extracts masked video information, while the conditional outpainting branch generates missing content based on these extracted conditions. Additionally, we propose a mask-driven self-attention layer that dynamically integrates the given mask information, further enhancing the model's adaptability to outpainting tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a latent alignment loss to maintain overall consistency both within and between frames. For long video outpainting, we employ a cross-video-clip refiner to iteratively generate missing content, ensuring temporal consistency across video clips. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our zero-shot OutDreamer outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on widely recognized benchmarks.

Paperid: 4045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21443.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting deceptive conversations on dynamic platforms is increasingly difficult due to evolving language patterns and Concept Drift (CD)-i.e., semantic or topical shifts that alter the context or intent of interactions over time. These shifts can obscure malicious intent or mimic normal dialogue, making accurate classification challenging. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong performance in natural language tasks, they often struggle with contextual ambiguity and hallucinations in risk-sensitive scenarios. To address these challenges, we present a Domain Knowledge (DK)-Enhanced LLM framework that integrates pretrained LLMs with structured, task-specific insights to perform fraud and concept drift detection. The proposed architecture consists of three main components: (1) a DK-LLM module to detect fake or deceptive conversations; (2) a drift detection unit (OCDD) to determine whether a semantic shift has occurred; and (3) a second DK-LLM module to classify the drift as either benign or fraudulent. We first validate the value of domain knowledge using a fake review dataset and then apply our full framework to SEConvo, a multiturn dialogue dataset that includes various types of fraud and spam attacks. Results show that our system detects fake conversations with high accuracy and effectively classifies the nature of drift. Guided by structured prompts, the LLaMA-based implementation achieves 98% classification accuracy. Comparative studies against zero-shot baselines demonstrate that incorporating domain knowledge and drift awareness significantly improves performance, interpretability, and robustness in high-stakes NLP applications.

Paperid: 4046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18072.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image analysis increasingly relies on the integration of multiple imaging modalities to capture complementary anatomical and functional information, enabling more accurate diagnosis and treatment planning. Achieving aligned feature representations across these diverse modalities is therefore important for effective multimodal analysis. While contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) and its variant have enabled image-text alignments, they require explicitly paired data between arbitrary two modalities, which is difficult to acquire in medical contexts. To address the gap, we present Multimodal Medical Image Binding with Text (M\textsuperscript{3}Bind), a novel pre-training framework that enables seamless alignment of multiple medical imaging modalities through a shared text representation space without requiring explicit paired data between any two medical image modalities. Specifically, based on the insight that different images can naturally bind with text, M\textsuperscript{3}Bind first fine-tunes pre-trained CLIP-like image-text models to align their modality-specific text embedding space while preserving their original image-text alignments. Subsequently, we distill these modality-specific text encoders into a unified model, creating a shared text embedding space. Experiments on X-ray, CT, retina, ECG, and pathological images on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that M\textsuperscript{3}Bind achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot, few-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval tasks compared to its CLIP-like counterparts. These results validate M\textsuperscript{3}Bind's effectiveness in achieving cross-image-modal alignment for medical analysis.

Paperid: 4047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14291.pdf

Abstract:
Graph machine learning architectures are typically tailored to specific tasks on specific datasets, which hinders their broader applicability. This has led to a new quest in graph machine learning: how to build graph foundation models capable of generalizing across arbitrary graphs and features? In this work, we present a recipe for designing graph foundation models for node-level tasks from first principles. The key ingredient underpinning our study is a systematic investigation of the symmetries that a graph foundation model must respect. In a nutshell, we argue that label permutation-equivariance alongside feature permutation-invariance are necessary in addition to the common node permutation-equivariance on each local neighborhood of the graph. To this end, we first characterize the space of linear transformations that are equivariant to permutations of nodes and labels, and invariant to permutations of features. We then prove that the resulting network is a universal approximator on multisets that respect the aforementioned symmetries. Our recipe uses such layers on the multiset of features induced by the local neighborhood of the graph to obtain a class of graph foundation models for node property prediction. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on 29 real-world node classification datasets, demonstrating both strong zero-shot empirical performance and consistent improvement as the number of training graphs increases.

Paperid: 4048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12074.pdf

Abstract:
Mobile traffic prediction is an important enabler for optimizing resource allocation and improving energy efficiency in mobile wireless networks. Building on the advanced contextual understanding and generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs), this work introduces a context-aware wireless traffic prediction framework powered by LLMs. To further enhance prediction accuracy, we leverage in-context learning (ICL) and develop a novel two-step demonstration selection strategy, optimizing the performance of LLM-based predictions. The initial step involves selecting ICL demonstrations using the effectiveness rule, followed by a second step that determines whether the chosen demonstrations should be utilized, based on the informativeness rule. We also provide an analytical framework for both informativeness and effectiveness rules. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated with a real-world fifth-generation (5G) dataset with different application scenarios. According to the numerical results, the proposed framework shows lower mean squared error and higher R2-Scores compared to the zero-shot prediction method and other demonstration selection methods, such as constant ICL demonstration selection and distance-only-based ICL demonstration selection.

Paperid: 4049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06558.pdf

Abstract:
Learning dynamical systems that respect physical symmetries and constraints remains a fundamental challenge in data-driven modeling. Integrating physical laws with graph neural networks facilitates principled modeling of complex N-body dynamics and yields accurate and permutation-invariant models. However, training graph neural networks with iterative, gradient-based optimization algorithms (e.g., Adam, RMSProp, LBFGS) often leads to slow training, especially for large, complex systems. In comparison to 15 different optimizers, we demonstrate that Hamiltonian Graph Networks (HGN) can be trained up to 600x faster--but with comparable accuracy--by replacing iterative optimization with random feature-based parameter construction. We show robust performance in diverse simulations, including N-body mass-spring systems in up to 3 dimensions with different geometries, while retaining essential physical invariances with respect to permutation, rotation, and translation. We reveal that even when trained on minimal 8-node systems, the model can generalize in a zero-shot manner to systems as large as 4096 nodes without retraining. Our work challenges the dominance of iterative gradient-descent-based optimization algorithms for training neural network models for physical systems.

Paperid: 4050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06395.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning, yet post-training remains critical for aligning their behavior with task goals. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods often depend on costly human annotations or external reward models. We propose Reinforcement Learning via Self-Confidence (RLSC), which uses the model's own confidence as reward signals-eliminating the need for labels, preference models, or reward engineering. Applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B with only 16 samples per question and 10 or 20 training steps, RLSC improves accuracy by +13.4% on AIME2024, +21.2% on MATH500, +21.7% on Minerva Math, +20.8% on Olympiadbench, and +9.7% on AMC23. RLSC provides a simple, scalable post-training method for inference models, requiring only a small number of samples and unlabelled supervision.

Paperid: 4051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05274.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) retrieves a target video given a query video and a modification text describing the intended change. Existing CoVR benchmarks emphasize appearance shifts or coarse event changes and therefore do not test the ability to capture subtle, fast-paced temporal differences. We introduce TF-CoVR, the first large-scale benchmark dedicated to temporally fine-grained CoVR. TF-CoVR focuses on gymnastics and diving and provides 180K triplets drawn from FineGym and FineDiving. Previous CoVR benchmarks focusing on temporal aspect, link each query to a single target segment taken from the same video, limiting practical usefulness. In TF-CoVR, we instead construct each pair by prompting an LLM with the label differences between clips drawn from different videos; every pair is thus associated with multiple valid target videos (3.9 on average), reflecting real-world tasks such as sports-highlight generation. To model these temporal dynamics we propose TF-CoVR-Base, a concise two-stage training framework: (i) pre-train a video encoder on fine-grained action classification to obtain temporally discriminative embeddings; (ii) align the composed query with candidate videos using contrastive learning. We conduct the first comprehensive study of image, video, and general multimodal embedding (GME) models on temporally fine-grained composed retrieval in both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. On TF-CoVR, TF-CoVR-Base improves zero-shot mAP@50 from 5.92 (LanguageBind) to 7.51, and after fine-tuning raises the state-of-the-art from 19.83 to 25.82.

Paperid: 4052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04411.pdf

Abstract:
Despite its empirical success, the theoretical foundations of self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) are not yet fully established. In this work, we address this gap by showing that standard CL objectives implicitly approximate a supervised variant we call the negatives-only supervised contrastive loss (NSCL), which excludes same-class contrasts. We prove that the gap between the CL and NSCL losses vanishes as the number of semantic classes increases, under a bound that is both label-agnostic and architecture-independent. We characterize the geometric structure of the global minimizers of the NSCL loss: the learned representations exhibit augmentation collapse, within-class collapse, and class centers that form a simplex equiangular tight frame. We further introduce a new bound on the few-shot error of linear-probing. This bound depends on two measures of feature variability--within-class dispersion and variation along the line between class centers. We show that directional variation dominates the bound and that the within-class dispersion's effect diminishes as the number of labeled samples increases. These properties enable CL and NSCL-trained representations to support accurate few-shot label recovery using simple linear probes. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical findings: the gap between CL and NSCL losses decays at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\#\text{classes}})$; the two losses are highly correlated; minimizing the CL loss implicitly brings the NSCL loss close to the value achieved by direct minimization; and the proposed few-shot error bound provides a tight estimate of probing performance in practice.

Paperid: 4053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01646.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ESGenius, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability-focused question answering. ESGenius comprises two key components: (i) ESGenius-QA, a collection of 1,136 Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) generated by LLMs and rigorously validated by domain experts, covering a broad range of ESG pillars and sustainability topics. Each question is systematically linked to its corresponding source text, enabling transparent evaluation and supporting Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods; and (ii) ESGenius-Corpus, a meticulously curated repository of 231 foundational frameworks, standards, reports, and recommendation documents from 7 authoritative sources. Moreover, to fully assess the capabilities and adaptation potential of LLMs, we implement a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol -- Zero-Shot and RAG. Extensive experiments across 50 LLMs (0.5B to 671B) demonstrate that state-of-the-art models achieve only moderate performance in zero-shot settings, with accuracies around 55--70%, highlighting a significant knowledge gap for LLMs in this specialized, interdisciplinary domain. However, models employing RAG demonstrate significant performance improvements, particularly for smaller models. For example, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B improves from 63.82% (zero-shot) to 80.46% with RAG. These results demonstrate the necessity of grounding responses in authoritative sources for enhanced ESG understanding. To the best of our knowledge, ESGenius is the first comprehensive QA benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs on ESG and sustainability knowledge, providing a critical tool to advance trustworthy AI in this vital domain.

Paperid: 4054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00072.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates how prompt engineering techniques impact both accuracy and confidence elicitation in Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to medical contexts. Using a stratified dataset of Persian board exam questions across multiple specialties, we evaluated five LLMs - GPT-4o, o3-mini, Llama-3.3-70b, Llama-3.1-8b, and DeepSeek-v3 - across 156 configurations. These configurations varied in temperature settings (0.3, 0.7, 1.0), prompt styles (Chain-of-Thought, Few-Shot, Emotional, Expert Mimicry), and confidence scales (1-10, 1-100). We used AUC-ROC, Brier Score, and Expected Calibration Error (ECE) to evaluate alignment between confidence and actual performance. Chain-of-Thought prompts improved accuracy but also led to overconfidence, highlighting the need for calibration. Emotional prompting further inflated confidence, risking poor decisions. Smaller models like Llama-3.1-8b underperformed across all metrics, while proprietary models showed higher accuracy but still lacked calibrated confidence. These results suggest prompt engineering must address both accuracy and uncertainty to be effective in high-stakes medical tasks.

Paperid: 4055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21931.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the capability of off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) to solve the economic dispatch (ED) problem. ED is a hard-constrained optimization problem solved on a day-ahead timescale by grid operators to minimize electricity generation costs while accounting for physical and engineering constraints. Numerous approaches have been proposed, but these typically require either mathematical formulations, face convergence issues, or depend on extensive labeled data and training time. This work implements LLMs enhanced with reasoning capabilities to address the classic lossless ED problem. The proposed approach avoids the need for explicit mathematical formulations, does not suffer from convergence challenges, and requires neither labeled data nor extensive training. A few-shot learning technique is utilized in two different prompting contexts. The IEEE 118-bus system with 19 generation units serves as the evaluation benchmark. Results demonstrate that various prompting strategies enable LLMs to effectively solve the ED problem, offering a convenient and efficient alternative. Consequently, this approach presents a promising future solution for ED tasks, particularly when foundational power system models are available.

Paperid: 4056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21236.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energy-grid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination between multiple agents. This level of complexity can cause even state-of-the-art RL systems, trained until convergence, to hit a performance ceiling which they are unable to break out of with zero-shot inference. Meanwhile, many digital or simulation-based applications allow for an inference phase that utilises a specific time and compute budget to explore multiple attempts before outputting a final solution. In this work, we show that such an inference phase employed at execution time, and the choice of a corresponding inference strategy, are key to breaking the performance ceiling observed in complex multi-agent RL problems. Our main result is striking: we can obtain up to a 126% and, on average, a 45% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art across 17 tasks, using only a couple seconds of extra wall-clock time during execution. We also demonstrate promising compute scaling properties, supported by over 60k experiments, making it the largest study on inference strategies for complex RL to date. Our experimental data and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/inf-marl.

Paperid: 4057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20685.pdf

Abstract:
Bayesian optimization (BO) struggles in high dimensions, where Gaussian-process surrogates demand heavy retraining and brittle assumptions, slowing progress on real engineering and design problems. We introduce GIT-BO, a Gradient-Informed BO framework that couples TabPFN v2, a tabular foundation model that performs zero-shot Bayesian inference in context, with an active-subspace mechanism computed from the model's own predictive-mean gradients. This aligns exploration to an intrinsic low-dimensional subspace via a Fisher-information estimate and selects queries with a UCB acquisition, requiring no online retraining. Across 60 problem variants spanning 20 benchmarks-nine scalable synthetic families and ten real-world tasks (e.g., power systems, Rover, MOPTA08, Mazda)-up to 500 dimensions, GIT-BO delivers a stronger performance-time trade-off than state-of-the-art GP-based methods (SAASBO, TuRBO, Vanilla BO, BAxUS), ranking highest in performance and with runtime advantages that grow with dimensionality. Limitations include memory footprint and dependence on the capacity of the underlying TFM.

Paperid: 4058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19565.pdf

Abstract:
Synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) systems have rapidly evolved to tackle incremental recognition challenges in operational settings. Data scarcity remains a major hurdle that conventional SAR-ATR techniques struggle to address. To cope with this challenge, we propose a few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) framework based on a dual-branch architecture that focuses on local feature extraction and leverages the discrete Fourier transform and global filters to capture long-term spatial dependencies. This incorporates a lightweight cross-attention mechanism that fuses domain-specific features with global dependencies to ensure robust feature interaction, while maintaining computational efficiency by introducing minimal scale-shift parameters. The framework combines focal loss for class distinction under imbalance and center loss for compact intra-class distributions to enhance class separation boundaries. Experimental results on the MSTAR benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in FSCIL SAR-ATR, attesting to its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 4059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17692.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to detect anomalies without any target domain training samples, relying solely on external auxiliary data. Existing CLIP-based methods attempt to activate the model's ZSAD potential via handcrafted or static learnable prompts. The former incur high engineering costs and limited semantic coverage, whereas the latter apply identical descriptions across diverse anomaly types, thus fail to adapt to complex variations. Furthermore, since CLIP is originally pretrained on large-scale classification tasks, its anomaly segmentation quality is highly sensitive to the exact wording of class names, severely constraining prompting strategies that depend on class labels. To address these challenges, we introduce ViP$^{2}$-CLIP. The key insight of ViP$^{2}$-CLIP is a Visual-Perception Prompting (ViP-Prompt) mechanism, which fuses global and multi-scale local visual context to adaptively generate fine-grained textual prompts, eliminating manual templates and class-name priors. This design enables our model to focus on precise abnormal regions, making it particularly valuable when category labels are ambiguous or privacy-constrained. Extensive experiments on 15 industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that ViP$^{2}$-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance and robust cross-domain generalization.

Paperid: 4060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14313.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on formal tasks, where strong reasoning abilities define the state of the art. However, their ability to generalize to out-of-distribution problems remains limited. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs can achieve a systematic understanding of deductive rules. Our focus is on the task of identifying the appropriate subset of premises within a knowledge base needed to derive a given hypothesis. To tackle this challenge, we propose Meta-learning for In-context Deduction (MIND), a novel few-shot meta-learning fine-tuning approach. The goal of MIND is to enable models to generalize more effectively to unseen knowledge bases and to systematically apply inference rules. Our results show that MIND significantly improves generalization in small LMs ranging from 1.5B to 7B parameters. The benefits are especially pronounced in smaller models and low-data settings. Remarkably, small models fine-tuned with MIND outperform state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4o and o3-mini, on this task.

Paperid: 4061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12057.pdf

Abstract:
AI-driven models have shown great promise in detecting errors in radiology reports, yet the field lacks a unified benchmark for rigorous evaluation of error detection and further correction. To address this gap, we introduce CorBenchX, a comprehensive suite for automated error detection and correction in chest X-ray reports, designed to advance AI-assisted quality control in clinical practice. We first synthesize a large-scale dataset of 26,326 chest X-ray error reports by injecting clinically common errors via prompting DeepSeek-R1, with each corrupted report paired with its original text, error type, and human-readable description. Leveraging this dataset, we benchmark both open- and closed-source vision-language models,(e.g., InternVL, Qwen-VL, GPT-4o, o4-mini, and Claude-3.7) for error detection and correction under zero-shot prompting. Among these models, o4-mini achieves the best performance, with 50.6 % detection accuracy and correction scores of BLEU 0.853, ROUGE 0.924, BERTScore 0.981, SembScore 0.865, and CheXbertF1 0.954, remaining below clinical-level accuracy, highlighting the challenge of precise report correction. To advance the state of the art, we propose a multi-step reinforcement learning (MSRL) framework that optimizes a multi-objective reward combining format compliance, error-type accuracy, and BLEU similarity. We apply MSRL to QwenVL2.5-7B, the top open-source model in our benchmark, achieving an improvement of 38.3% in single-error detection precision and 5.2% in single-error correction over the zero-shot baseline.

Paperid: 4062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11895.pdf

Abstract:
Recent unified multi-modal encoders align a wide range of modalities into a shared representation space, enabling diverse cross-modal tasks. Despite their impressive capabilities, the robustness of these models under adversarial perturbations remains underexplored, which is a critical concern for safety-sensitive applications. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of adversarial vulnerability in unified multi-modal encoders. We find that even mild adversarial perturbations lead to substantial performance drops across all modalities. Non-visual inputs, such as audio and point clouds, are especially fragile, while visual inputs like images and videos also degrade significantly. To address this, we propose an efficient adversarial calibration framework that improves robustness across modalities without modifying pretrained encoders or semantic centers, ensuring compatibility with existing foundation models. Our method introduces modality-specific projection heads trained solely on adversarial examples, while keeping the backbone and embeddings frozen. We explore three training objectives: fixed-center cross-entropy, clean-to-adversarial L2 alignment, and clean-adversarial InfoNCE, and we introduce a regularization strategy to ensure modality-consistent alignment under attack. Experiments on six modalities and three Bind-style models show that our method improves adversarial robustness by up to 47.3 percent at epsilon = 4/255, while preserving or even improving clean zero-shot and retrieval performance with less than 1 percent trainable parameters.

Paperid: 4063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11766.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Operators have emerged as powerful tools for learning mappings between function spaces. Among them, the kernel integral operator has been widely validated on universally approximating various operators. Although many advancements following this definition have developed effective modules to better approximate the kernel function defined on the original domain (with $d$ dimensions, $d=1, 2, 3\dots$), the unclarified evolving mechanism in the embedding spaces blocks researchers' view to design neural operators that can fully capture the target system evolution. Drawing on the SchrÃ¶dingerisation method in quantum simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs), we elucidate the linear evolution mechanism in neural operators. Based on that, we redefine neural operators on a new $d+1$ dimensional domain. Within this framework, we implement a SchrÃ¶dingerised Kernel Neural Operator (SKNO) aligning better with the $d+1$ dimensional evolution. In experiments, the $d+1$ dimensional evolving designs in our SKNO consistently outperform other baselines across ten benchmarks of increasing difficulty, ranging from the simple 1D heat equation to the highly nonlinear 3D Rayleigh-Taylor instability. We also validate the resolution-invariance of SKNO on mixing-resolution training and zero-shot super-resolution tasks. In addition, we show the impact of different lifting and recovering operators on the prediction within the redefined NO framework, reflecting the alignment between our model and the underlying $d+1$ dimensional evolution.

Paperid: 4064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11739.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, training-free methods for improving large language models (LLMs) have attracted growing interest, with token-level attention tuning emerging as a promising and interpretable direction. However, existing methods typically rely on auxiliary mechanisms to identify important or irrelevant task-specific tokens, introducing potential bias and limiting applicability. In this paper, we uncover a surprising and elegant alternative: the semantically empty initial token is a powerful and underexplored control point for optimizing model behavior. Through theoretical analysis, we show that tuning the initial token's attention sharpens or flattens the attention distribution over subsequent tokens, and its role as an attention sink amplifies this effect. Empirically, we find that: (1) tuning its attention improves LLM performance more effectively than tuning other task-specific tokens; (2) the effect follows a consistent trend across layers, with earlier layers having greater impact, but varies across attention heads, with different heads showing distinct preferences in how they attend to this token. Based on these findings, we propose ZeroTuning, a training-free approach that improves LLM performance by applying head-specific attention adjustments to this special token. Despite tuning only one token, ZeroTuning achieves higher performance on text classification, multiple-choice, and multi-turn conversation tasks across models such as Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek. For example, ZeroTuning improves Llama-3.1-8B by 11.71% on classification, 2.64% on QA tasks, and raises its multi-turn score from 7.804 to 7.966. The method is also robust to limited resources, few-shot settings, long contexts, quantization, decoding strategies, and prompt variations. Our work sheds light on a previously overlooked control point in LLMs, offering new insights into both inference-time tuning and model interpretability.

Paperid: 4065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08238.pdf

Abstract:
Controlling high-dimensional nonlinear systems, such as those found in biological and robotic applications, is challenging due to large state and action spaces. While deep reinforcement learning has achieved a number of successes in these domains, it is computationally intensive and time consuming, and therefore not suitable for solving large collections of tasks that require significant manual tuning. In this work, we introduce Model Predictive Control with Morphology-aware Proportional Control (MPC^2), a hierarchical model-based learning algorithm for zero-shot and near-real-time control of high-dimensional complex dynamical systems. MPC^2 uses a sampling-based model predictive controller for target posture planning, and enables robust control for high-dimensional tasks by incorporating a morphology-aware proportional controller for actuator coordination. The algorithm enables motion control of a high-dimensional human musculoskeletal model in a variety of motion tasks, such as standing, walking on different terrains, and imitating sports activities. The reward function of MPC^2 can be tuned via black-box optimization, drastically reducing the need for human-intensive reward engineering.

Paperid: 4066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08168.pdf

Abstract:
Text-attributed graph (TAG) provides a text description for each graph node, and few- and zero-shot node classification on TAGs have many applications in fields such as academia and social networks. Existing work utilizes various graph-based augmentation techniques to train the node and text embeddings, while text-based augmentations are largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose Text Semantics Augmentation (TSA) to improve accuracy by introducing more text semantic supervision signals. Specifically, we design two augmentation techniques, i.e., positive semantics matching and negative semantics contrast, to provide more reference texts for each graph node or text description. Positive semantic matching retrieves texts with similar embeddings to match with a graph node. Negative semantic contrast adds a negative prompt to construct a text description with the opposite semantics, which is contrasted with the original node and text. We evaluate TSA on 5 datasets and compare with 13 state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that TSA consistently outperforms all baselines, and its accuracy improvements over the best-performing baseline are usually over 5%.

Paperid: 4067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05684.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot relational learning on knowledge graph (KGs) aims to perform reasoning over relations with only a few training examples. While current methods have focused primarily on leveraging specific relational information, rich semantics inherent in KGs have been largely overlooked. To bridge this gap, we propose PromptMeta, a novel prompted meta-learning framework that seamlessly integrates meta-semantics with relational information for few-shot relational learning. PromptMeta introduces two core innovations: (1) a Meta-Semantic Prompt (MSP) pool that learns and consolidates high-level meta-semantics shared across tasks, enabling effective knowledge transfer and adaptation to newly emerging relations; and (2) a learnable fusion mechanism that dynamically combines meta-semantics with task-specific relational information tailored to different few-shot tasks. Both components are optimized jointly with model parameters within a meta-learning framework. Extensive experiments and analyses on two real-world KG benchmarks validate the effectiveness of PromptMeta in adapting to new relations with limited supervision.

Paperid: 4068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01383.pdf

Abstract:
We present FalconWing -- an open-source, ultra-lightweight (150 g) fixed-wing platform for autonomy research. The hardware platform integrates a small camera, a standard airframe, offboard computation, and radio communication for manual overrides. We demonstrate FalconWing's capabilities by developing and deploying a purely vision-based control policy for autonomous landing (without IMU or motion capture) using a novel real-to-sim-to-real learning approach. Our learning approach: (1) constructs a photorealistic simulation environment via 3D Gaussian splatting trained on real-world images; (2) identifies nonlinear dynamics from vision-estimated real-flight data; and (3) trains a multi-modal Vision Transformer (ViT) policy through simulation-only imitation learning. The ViT architecture fuses single RGB image with the history of control actions via self-attention, preserving temporal context while maintaining real-time 20 Hz inference. When deployed zero-shot on the hardware platform, this policy achieves an 80% success rate in vision-based autonomous landings. Together with the hardware specifications, we also open-source the system dynamics, the software for photorealistic simulator and the learning approach.

Paperid: 4069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16916.pdf

Abstract:
Soft continuum arms (SCAs) soft and deformable nature presents challenges in modeling and control due to their infinite degrees of freedom and non-linear behavior. This work introduces a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for visual servoing tasks on SCAs with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capabilities, demonstrated on a single section pneumatic manipulator capable of bending and twisting. The framework decouples kinematics from mechanical properties using an RL kinematic controller for motion planning and a local controller for actuation refinement, leveraging minimal sensing with visual feedback. Trained entirely in simulation, the RL controller achieved a 99.8% success rate. When deployed on hardware, it achieved a 67% success rate in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, demonstrating robustness and adaptability. This approach offers a scalable solution for SCAs in 3D visual servoing, with potential for further refinement and expanded applications.

Paperid: 4070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16144.pdf

Abstract:
Natural disasters often result in a surge of social media activity, including requests for assistance, offers of help, sentiments, and general updates. To enable humanitarian organizations to respond more efficiently, we propose a fine-grained hierarchical taxonomy to systematically organize crisis-related information about requests and offers into three critical dimensions: supplies, emergency personnel, and actions. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce Query-Specific Few-shot Learning (QSF Learning) that retrieves class-specific labeled examples from an embedding database to enhance the model's performance in detecting and classifying posts. Beyond classification, we assess the actionability of messages to prioritize posts requiring immediate attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline prompting strategies, effectively identifying and prioritizing actionable requests and offers.

Paperid: 4071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13769.pdf

Abstract:
Malicious software packages in open-source ecosystems, such as PyPI, pose growing security risks. Unlike traditional vulnerabilities, these packages are intentionally designed to deceive users, making detection challenging due to evolving attack methods and the lack of structured datasets. In this work, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and few-shot learning for detecting malicious source code. We fine-tune LLMs on curated datasets and integrate YARA rules, GitHub Security Advisories, and malicious code snippets with the aim of enhancing classification accuracy. We came across a counterintuitive outcome: While RAG is expected to boost up the prediction performance, it fails in the performed evaluation, obtaining a mediocre accuracy. In contrast, few-shot learning is more effective as it significantly improves the detection of malicious code, achieving 97% accuracy and 95% balanced accuracy, outperforming traditional RAG approaches. Thus, future work should expand structured knowledge bases, refine retrieval models, and explore hybrid AI-driven cybersecurity solutions.

Paperid: 4072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11164.pdf

Abstract:
Recently supervised learning rapidly develops in scene text segmentation. However, the lack of high-quality datasets and the high cost of pixel annotation greatly limit the development of them. Considering the well-performed few-shot learning methods for downstream tasks, we investigate the application of the few-shot learning method to scene text segmentation. We propose TSAL, which leverages CLIP's prior knowledge to learn text attributes for segmentation. To fully utilize the semantic and texture information in the image, a visual-guided branch is proposed to separately extract text and background features. To reduce data dependency and improve text detection accuracy, the adaptive prompt-guided branch employs effective adaptive prompt templates to capture various text attributes. To enable adaptive prompts capture distinctive text features and complex background distribution, we propose Adaptive Feature Alignment module(AFA). By aligning learnable tokens of different attributes with visual features and prompt prototypes, AFA enables adaptive prompts to capture both general and distinctive attribute information. TSAL can capture the unique attributes of text and achieve precise segmentation using only few images. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance on multiple text segmentation datasets under few-shot settings and show great potential in text-related domains.

Paperid: 4073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06486.pdf

Abstract:
The practical application of AI tools for specific computer vision tasks relies on the "small-data regime" of hundreds to thousands of labeled samples. This small-data regime is vital for applications requiring expensive expert annotations, such as ecological monitoring, medical diagnostics or industrial quality control. We find, however, that computer vision research has ignored the small data regime as evaluations increasingly focus on zero- and few-shot learning. We use the Natural World Tasks (NeWT) benchmark to compare multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and vision-only methods across varying training set sizes. MLLMs exhibit early performance plateaus, while vision-only methods improve throughout the small-data regime, with performance gaps widening beyond 10 training examples. We provide the first comprehensive comparison between these approaches in small-data contexts and advocate for explicit small-data evaluations in AI research to better bridge theoretical advances with practical deployments.

Paperid: 4074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04336.pdf

Abstract:
In this retrospective study, a dataset was constructed with two parts. The first part included 1,656 synthetic chest radiology reports generated by GPT-4 using specified prompts, with 828 being error-free synthetic reports and 828 containing errors. The second part included 614 reports: 307 error-free reports between 2011 and 2016 from the MIMIC-CXR database and 307 corresponding synthetic reports with errors generated by GPT-4 on the basis of these MIMIC-CXR reports and specified prompts. All errors were categorized into four types: negation, left/right, interval change, and transcription errors. Then, several models, including Llama-3, GPT-4, and BiomedBERT, were refined using zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, or fine-tuning strategies. Finally, the performance of these models was evaluated using the F1 score, 95\% confidence interval (CI) and paired-sample t-tests on our constructed dataset, with the prediction results further assessed by radiologists. Using zero-shot prompting, the fine-tuned Llama-3-70B-Instruct model achieved the best performance with the following F1 scores: 0.769 for negation errors, 0.772 for left/right errors, 0.750 for interval change errors, 0.828 for transcription errors, and 0.780 overall. In the real-world evaluation phase, two radiologists reviewed 200 randomly selected reports output by the model. Of these, 99 were confirmed to contain errors detected by the models by both radiologists, and 163 were confirmed to contain model-detected errors by at least one radiologist. Generative LLMs, fine-tuned on synthetic and MIMIC-CXR radiology reports, greatly enhanced error detection in radiology reports.

Paperid: 4075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02866.pdf

Abstract:
Building properties, such as height, usage, and material composition, play a crucial role in spatial data infrastructures, supporting applications such as energy simulation, risk assessment, and environmental modeling. Despite their importance, comprehensive and high-quality building attribute data remain scarce in many urban areas. Recent advances have enabled the extraction and tagging of objective building attributes using remote sensing and street-level imagery. However, establishing a method and pipeline that integrates diverse open datasets, acquires holistic building imagery at scale, and infers comprehensive building attributes remains a significant challenge. Among the first, this study bridges the gaps by introducing OpenFACADES, an open framework that leverages multimodal crowdsourced data to enrich building profiles with both objective attributes and semantic descriptors through multimodal large language models. Our methodology proceeds in three major steps. First, we integrate street-level image metadata from Mapillary with OpenStreetMap geometries via isovist analysis, effectively identifying images that provide suitable vantage points for observing target buildings. Second, we automate the detection of building facades in panoramic imagery and tailor a reprojection approach to convert objects into holistic perspective views that approximate real-world observation. Third, we introduce an innovative approach that harnesses and systematically investigates the capabilities of open-source large vision-language models (VLMs) for multi-attribute prediction and open-vocabulary captioning in building-level analytics, leveraging a globally sourced dataset of 30,180 labeled images from seven cities. Evaluation shows that fine-tuned VLM excel in multi-attribute inference, outperforming single-attribute computer vision models and zero-shot ChatGPT-4o.

Paperid: 4076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02420.pdf

Abstract:
Fully autonomous vehicles promise enhanced safety and efficiency. However, ensuring reliable operation in challenging corner cases requires control algorithms capable of performing at the vehicle limits. We address this requirement by considering the task of autonomous racing and propose solving it by learning a racing policy using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our approach leverages domain randomization, actuator dynamics modeling, and policy architecture design to enable reliable and safe zero-shot deployment on a real platform. Evaluated on the F1TENTH race car, our RL policy not only surpasses a state-of-the-art Model Predictive Control (MPC), but, to the best of our knowledge, also represents the first instance of an RL policy outperforming expert human drivers in RC racing. This work identifies the key factors driving this performance improvement, providing critical insights for the design of robust RL-based control strategies for autonomous vehicles.

Paperid: 4077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00185.pdf

Abstract:
We study the problem of building a visual concept library for visual recognition. Building effective visual concept libraries is challenging, as manual definition is labor-intensive, while relying solely on LLMs for concept generation can result in concepts that lack discriminative power or fail to account for the complex interactions between them. Our approach, ESCHER, takes a library learning perspective to iteratively discover and improve visual concepts. ESCHER uses a vision-language model (VLM) as a critic to iteratively refine the concept library, including accounting for interactions between concepts and how they affect downstream classifiers. By leveraging the in-context learning abilities of LLMs and the history of performance using various concepts, ESCHER dynamically improves its concept generation strategy based on the VLM critic's feedback. Finally, ESCHER does not require any human annotations, and is thus an automated plug-and-play framework. We empirically demonstrate the ability of ESCHER to learn a concept library for zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning visual classification tasks. This work represents, to our knowledge, the first application of concept library learning to real-world visual tasks.

Paperid: 4078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20588.pdf

Abstract:
Implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) -- the task of identifying the implicit coherence relation between two text spans -- requires deep semantic understanding. Recent studies have shown that zero- or few-shot approaches significantly lag behind supervised models, but LLMs may be useful for synthetic data augmentation, where LLMs generate a second argument following a specified coherence relation. We applied this approach in a cross-domain setting, generating discourse continuations using unlabelled target-domain data to adapt a base model which was trained on source-domain labelled data. Evaluations conducted on a large-scale test set revealed that different variations of the approach did not result in any significant improvements. We conclude that LLMs often fail to generate useful samples for IDRR, and emphasize the importance of considering both statistical significance and comparability when evaluating IDRR models.

Paperid: 4079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19910.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task that aims to retrieve images based on a multimodal query. Typical training data consists of triplets containing a reference image, a textual description of desired modifications, and the target image, which are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. The scarcity of CIR datasets has led to zero-shot approaches utilizing synthetic triplets or leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) with ubiquitous web-crawled image-caption pairs. However, these methods have significant limitations: synthetic triplets suffer from limited scale, lack of diversity, and unnatural modification text, while image-caption pairs hinder joint embedding learning of the multimodal query due to the absence of triplet data. Moreover, existing approaches struggle with complex and nuanced modification texts that demand sophisticated fusion and understanding of vision and language modalities. We present CoLLM, a one-stop framework that effectively addresses these limitations. Our approach generates triplets on-the-fly from image-caption pairs, enabling supervised training without manual annotation. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate joint embeddings of reference images and modification texts, facilitating deeper multimodal fusion. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Text CIR (MTCIR), a large-scale dataset comprising 3.4M samples, and refine existing CIR benchmarks (CIRR and Fashion-IQ) to enhance evaluation reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that CoLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIR benchmarks and settings. MTCIR yields competitive results, with up to 15% performance improvement. Our refined benchmarks provide more reliable evaluation metrics for CIR models, contributing to the advancement of this important field.

Paperid: 4080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19257.pdf

Abstract:
Every scientific discovery starts with an idea inspired by prior work, interdisciplinary concepts, and emerging challenges. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) trained on scientific corpora have driven interest in AI-supported idea generation. However, generating context-aware, high-quality, and innovative ideas remains challenging. We introduce SCI-IDEA, a framework that uses LLM prompting strategies and Aha Moment detection for iterative idea refinement. SCI-IDEA extracts essential facets from research publications, assessing generated ideas on novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness. Comprehensive experiments validate SCI-IDEA's effectiveness, achieving average scores of 6.84, 6.86, 6.89, and 6.84 (on a 1-10 scale) across novelty, excitement, feasibility, and effectiveness, respectively. Evaluations employed GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, DeepSeek-32B (each under 2-shot prompting), and DeepSeek-70B (3-shot prompting), with token-level embeddings used for Aha Moment detection. Similarly, it achieves scores of 6.87, 6.86, 6.83, and 6.87 using GPT-4o under 5-shot prompting, GPT-4.5 under 3-shot prompting, DeepSeek-32B under zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, and DeepSeek-70B under 5-shot prompting with sentence-level embeddings. We also address ethical considerations such as intellectual credit, potential misuse, and balancing human creativity with AI-driven ideation. Our results highlight SCI-IDEA's potential to facilitate the structured and flexible exploration of context-aware scientific ideas, supporting innovation while maintaining ethical standards.

Paperid: 4081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18375.pdf

Abstract:
In Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC), deep learning methods have shown remarkable performance, offering significant advantages over traditional approaches and demonstrating their vast potential. Nevertheless, notable drawbacks, particularly in their high demands for storage, computational resources, and large-scale labeled data, which limit their practical application in real-world scenarios. To tackle this issue, this paper innovatively proposes an automatic modulation classification model based on the Adaptive Lightweight Wavelet Neural Network (ALWNN) and the few-shot framework (MALWNN). The ALWNN model, by integrating the adaptive wavelet neural network and depth separable convolution, reduces the number of model parameters and computational complexity. The MALWNN framework, using ALWNN as an encoder and incorporating prototype network technology, decreases the model's dependence on the quantity of samples. Simulation results indicate that this model performs remarkably well on mainstream datasets. Moreover, in terms of Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS) and Normalized Multiply - Accumulate Complexity (NMACC), ALWNN significantly reduces computational complexity compared to existing methods. This is further validated by real-world system tests on USRP and Raspberry Pi platforms. Experiments with MALWNN show its superior performance in few-shot learning scenarios compared to other algorithms.

Paperid: 4082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09218.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements of in-context learning (ICL) show language models can significantly improve their performance when demonstrations are provided. However, little attention has been paid to model calibration and prediction confidence of ICL in cross-lingual scenarios. To bridge this gap, we conduct a thorough analysis of ICL for cross-lingual sentiment classification. Our findings suggest that ICL performs poorly in cross-lingual scenarios, exhibiting low accuracy and presenting high calibration errors. In response, we propose a novel approach, N2C2, which employs a -nearest neighbors augmented classifier for prediction confidence calibration. N2C2 narrows the prediction gap by leveraging a datastore of cached few-shot instances. Specifically, N2C2 integrates the predictions from the datastore and incorporates confidence-aware distribution, semantically consistent retrieval representation, and adaptive neighbor combination modules to effectively utilize the limited number of supporting instances. Evaluation on two multilingual sentiment classification datasets demonstrates that N2C2 outperforms traditional ICL. It surpasses fine tuning, prompt tuning and recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and calibration errors.

Paperid: 4083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08455.pdf

Abstract:
Instead of performing text-conditioned denoising in the image domain, latent diffusion models (LDMs) operate in latent space of a variational autoencoder (VAE), enabling more efficient processing at reduced computational costs. However, while the diffusion process has moved to the latent space, the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models, as used in many image processing tasks, still operate in pixel space. Doing so requires costly VAE-decoding of latent images before they can be processed. In this paper, we introduce Latent-CLIP, a CLIP model that operates directly in the latent space. We train Latent-CLIP on 2.7B pairs of latent images and descriptive texts, and show that it matches zero-shot classification performance of similarly sized CLIP models on both the ImageNet benchmark and a LDM-generated version of it, demonstrating its effectiveness in assessing both real and generated content. Furthermore, we construct Latent-CLIP rewards for reward-based noise optimization (ReNO) and show that they match the performance of their CLIP counterparts on GenEval and T2I-CompBench while cutting the cost of the total pipeline by 21%. Finally, we use Latent-CLIP to guide generation away from harmful content, achieving strong performance on the inappropriate image prompts (I2P) benchmark and a custom evaluation, without ever requiring the costly step of decoding intermediate images.

Paperid: 4084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04439.pdf

Abstract:
Framing is an essential device in news reporting, allowing the writer to influence public perceptions of current affairs. While there are existing automatic news framing detection datasets in various languages, none of them focus on news framing in the Chinese language which has complex character meanings and unique linguistic features. This study introduces the first Chinese News Framing dataset, to be used as either a stand-alone dataset or a supplementary resource to the SemEval-2023 task 3 dataset. We detail its creation and we run baseline experiments to highlight the need for such a dataset and create benchmarks for future research, providing results obtained through fine-tuning XLM-RoBERTa-Base and using GPT-4o in the zero-shot setting. We find that GPT-4o performs significantly worse than fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa across all languages. For the Chinese language, we obtain an F1-micro (the performance metric for SemEval task 3, subtask 2) score of 0.719 using only samples from our Chinese News Framing dataset and a score of 0.753 when we augment the SemEval dataset with Chinese news framing samples. With positive news frame detection results, this dataset is a valuable resource for detecting news frames in the Chinese language and is a valuable supplement to the SemEval-2023 task 3 dataset.

Paperid: 4085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02198.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel framework demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of visual control policies learned in a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) environment for quadrotors to fly through racing gates. Robust transfer from simulation to real flight poses a major challenge, as standard simulators often lack sufficient visual fidelity. To address this, we construct a photorealistic simulation environment of quadrotor racing tracks, called FalconGym, which provides effectively unlimited synthetic images for training. Within FalconGym, we develop a pipelined approach for crossing gates that combines (i) a Neural Pose Estimator (NPE) coupled with a Kalman filter to reliably infer quadrotor poses from single-frame RGB images and IMU data, and (ii) a self-attention-based multi-modal controller that adaptively integrates visual features and pose estimation. This multi-modal design compensates for perception noise and intermittent gate visibility. We train this controller purely in FalconGym with imitation learning and deploy the resulting policy to real hardware with no additional fine-tuning. Simulation experiments on three distinct tracks (circle, U-turn and figure-8) demonstrate that our controller outperforms a vision-only state-of-the-art baseline in both success rate and gate-crossing accuracy. In 30 live hardware flights spanning three tracks and 120 gates, our controller achieves a 95.8% success rate and an average error of just 10 cm when flying through 38 cm-radius gates.

Paperid: 4086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01881.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) models often fail to generalize when even small changes occur in the environment's observations or task requirements. Addressing these shifts typically requires costly retraining, limiting the reusability of learned policies. In this paper, we build on recent work in semantic alignment to propose a zero-shot method for mapping between latent spaces across different agents trained on different visual and task variations. Specifically, we learn a transformation that maps embeddings from one agent's encoder to another agent's encoder without further fine-tuning. Our approach relies on a small set of "anchor" observations that are semantically aligned, which we use to estimate an affine or orthogonal transform. Once the transformation is found, an existing controller trained for one domain can interpret embeddings from a different (existing) encoder in a zero-shot fashion, skipping additional trainings. We empirically demonstrate that our framework preserves high performance under visual and task domain shifts. We empirically demonstrate zero-shot stitching performance on the CarRacing environment with changing background and task. By allowing modular re-assembly of existing policies, it paves the way for more robust, compositional RL in dynamically changing environments.

Paperid: 4087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01292.pdf

Abstract:
In industrial anomaly detection (IAD), accurately identifying defects amidst diverse anomalies and under varying imaging conditions remains a significant challenge. Traditional approaches often struggle with high false-positive rates, frequently misclassifying normal shadows and surface deformations as defects, an issue that becomes particularly pronounced in products with complex and intricate surface features. To address these challenges, we introduce PA-CLIP, a zero-shot anomaly detection method that reduces background noise and enhances defect detection through a pseudo-anomaly-based framework. The proposed method integrates a multiscale feature aggregation strategy for capturing detailed global and local information, two memory banks for distinguishing background information, including normal patterns and pseudo-anomalies, from true anomaly features, and a decision-making module designed to minimize false positives caused by environmental variations while maintaining high defect sensitivity. Demonstrated on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets, PA-CLIP outperforms existing zero-shot methods, providing a robust solution for industrial defect detection.

Paperid: 4088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12706.pdf

Abstract:
Model merging offers an effective way to integrate the capabilities of multiple fine-tuned models. However, the performance degradation of the merged model remains a challenge, particularly when none or few data are available. This paper first highlights the necessity of domain-specific data for model merging by proving that data-agnostic algorithms can have arbitrarily bad worst-case performance. Building on this theoretical insight, we explore the relationship between model merging and distillation, introducing a novel few-shot merging algorithm, ProDistill (Progressive Layer-wise Distillation). Unlike common belief that layer wise training hurts performance, we show that layer-wise teacher-student distillation not only enhances the scalability but also improves model merging performance. We conduct extensive experiments to show that compared to existing few-shot merging methods, ProDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance, with up to 6.14% and 6.61% improvements in vision and NLU tasks. Furthermore, we extend the experiments to models with over 10B parameters, showcasing the exceptional scalability of ProDistill.

Paperid: 4089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11022.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language interfaces for NoSQL databases are increasingly vital in the big data era, enabling users to interact with complex, unstructured data without deep technical expertise. However, most recent advancements focus on English, leaving a gap for multilingual support. This paper introduces MultiTEND, the first and largest multilingual benchmark for natural language to NoSQL query generation, covering six languages: English, German, French, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Using MultiTEND, we analyze challenges in translating natural language to NoSQL queries across diverse linguistic structures, including lexical and syntactic differences. Experiments show that performance accuracy in both English and non-English settings remains relatively low, with a 4%-6% gap across scenarios like fine-tuned SLM, zero-shot LLM, and RAG for LLM. To address the aforementioned challenges, we introduce MultiLink, a novel framework that bridges the multilingual input to NoSQL query generation gap through a Parallel Linking Process. It breaks down the task into multiple steps, integrating parallel multilingual processing, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to tackle lexical and structural challenges inherent in multilingual NoSQL generation. MultiLink shows enhancements in all metrics for every language against the top baseline, boosting execution accuracy by about 15% for English and averaging a 10% improvement for non-English languages.

Paperid: 4090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09619.pdf

Abstract:
With the increasing numbers of publicly available models, there are probably pretrained, online models for most tasks users require. However, current model search methods are rudimentary, essentially a text-based search in the documentation, thus users cannot find the relevant models. This paper presents ProbeLog, a method for retrieving classification models that can recognize a target concept, such as "Dog", without access to model metadata or training data. Differently from previous probing methods, ProbeLog computes a descriptor for each output dimension (logit) of each model, by observing its responses on a fixed set of inputs (probes). Our method supports both logit-based retrieval ("find more logits like this") and zero-shot, text-based retrieval ("find all logits corresponding to dogs"). As probing-based representations require multiple costly feedforward passes through the model, we develop a method, based on collaborative filtering, that reduces the cost of encoding repositories by 3x. We demonstrate that ProbeLog achieves high retrieval accuracy, both in real-world and fine-grained search tasks and is scalable to full-size repositories.

Paperid: 4091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08972.pdf

Abstract:
Language models are aligned to the collective voice of many, resulting in generic outputs that do not align with specific users' styles. In this work, we present Trial-Error-Explain In-Context Learning (TICL), a tuning-free method that personalizes language models for text generation tasks with fewer than 10 examples per user. TICL iteratively expands an in-context learning prompt via a trial-error-explain process, adding model-generated negative samples and explanations that provide fine-grained guidance towards a specific user's style. TICL achieves favorable win rates on pairwise comparisons with LLM-as-a-judge up to 91.5% against the previous state-of-the-art and outperforms competitive tuning-free baselines for personalized alignment tasks of writing emails, essays and news articles. Both lexical and qualitative analyses show that the negative samples and explanations enable language models to learn stylistic context more effectively and overcome the bias towards structural and formal phrases observed in their zero-shot outputs. By front-loading inference compute to create a user-specific in-context learning prompt that does not require extra generation steps at test time, TICL presents a novel yet simple approach for personalized alignment.

Paperid: 4092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07278.pdf

Abstract:
We present ATOP (Articulate That Object Part), a novel few-shot method based on motion personalization to articulate a static 3D object with respect to a part and its motion as prescribed in a text prompt. Given the scarcity of available datasets with motion attribute annotations, existing methods struggle to generalize well in this task. In our work, the text input allows us to tap into the power of modern-day diffusion models to generate plausible motion samples for the right object category and part. In turn, the input 3D object provides image prompting to personalize the generated video to that very object we wish to articulate. Our method starts with a few-shot finetuning for category-specific motion generation, a key first step to compensate for the lack of articulation awareness by current diffusion models. For this, we finetune a pre-trained multi-view image generation model for controllable multi-view video generation, using a small collection of video samples obtained for the target object category. This is followed by motion video personalization that is realized by multi-view rendered images of the target 3D object. At last, we transfer the personalized video motion to the target 3D object via differentiable rendering to optimize part motion parameters by a score distillation sampling loss. Experimental results on PartNet-Sapien and ACD datasets show that our method is capable of generating realistic motion videos and predicting 3D motion parameters in a more accurate and generalizable way, compared to prior works in the few-shot setting.

Paperid: 4093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06970.pdf

Abstract:
In contemporary deep learning, a prevalent and effective workflow for solving low-data problems is adapting powerful pre-trained foundation models (FMs) to new tasks via parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). However, while empirically effective, the resulting solutions lack generalisation guarantees to certify their accuracy - which may be required for ethical or legal reasons prior to deployment in high-importance applications. In this paper we develop a novel transfer learning approach that is designed to facilitate non-vacuous learning theoretic generalisation guarantees for downstream tasks, even in the low-shot regime. Specifically, we first use upstream tasks to train a distribution over PEFT parameters. We then learn the downstream task by a sample-and-evaluate procedure -- sampling plausible PEFTs from the trained diffusion model and selecting the one with the highest likelihood on the downstream data. Crucially, this confines our model hypothesis to a finite set of PEFT samples. In contrast to the typical continuous hypothesis spaces of neural network weights, this facilitates tighter risk certificates. We instantiate our bound and show non-trivial generalization guarantees compared to existing learning approaches which lead to vacuous bounds in the low-shot regime.

Paperid: 4094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06527.pdf

Abstract:
Customized generation has achieved significant progress in image synthesis, yet personalized video generation remains challenging due to temporal inconsistencies and quality degradation. In this paper, we introduce CustomVideoX, an innovative framework leveraging the video diffusion transformer for personalized video generation from a reference image. CustomVideoX capitalizes on pre-trained video networks by exclusively training the LoRA parameters to extract reference features, ensuring both efficiency and adaptability. To facilitate seamless interaction between the reference image and video content, we propose 3D Reference Attention, which enables direct and simultaneous engagement of reference image features with all video frames across spatial and temporal dimensions. To mitigate the excessive influence of reference image features and textual guidance on generated video content during inference, we implement the Time-Aware Reference Attention Bias (TAB) strategy, dynamically modulating reference bias over different time steps. Additionally, we introduce the Entity Region-Aware Enhancement (ERAE) module, aligning highly activated regions of key entity tokens with reference feature injection by adjusting attention bias. To thoroughly evaluate personalized video generation, we establish a new benchmark, VideoBench, comprising over 50 objects and 100 prompts for extensive assessment. Experimental results show that CustomVideoX significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of video consistency and quality.

Paperid: 4095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05793.pdf

Abstract:
We revisit the reference determinacy (RD) assumption in the task of natural language inference (NLI), i.e., the premise and hypothesis are assumed to refer to the same context when human raters annotate a label. While RD is a practical assumption for constructing a new NLI dataset, we observe that current NLI models, which are typically trained solely on hypothesis-premise pairs created with the RD assumption, fail in downstream applications such as fact verification, where the input premise and hypothesis may refer to different contexts. To highlight the impact of this phenomenon in real-world use cases, we introduce RefNLI, a diagnostic benchmark for identifying reference ambiguity in NLI examples. In RefNLI, the premise is retrieved from a knowledge source (i.e., Wikipedia) and does not necessarily refer to the same context as the hypothesis. With RefNLI, we demonstrate that finetuned NLI models and few-shot prompted LLMs both fail to recognize context mismatch, leading to over 80% false contradiction and over 50% entailment predictions. We discover that the existence of reference ambiguity in NLI examples can in part explain the inherent human disagreements in NLI and provide insight into how the RD assumption impacts the NLI dataset creation process.

Paperid: 4096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01991.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, social media is pivotal in shaping public discourse, especially on polarizing issues like vaccination, where diverse moral perspectives influence individual opinions. In NLP, data scarcity and complexity of psycholinguistic tasks, such as identifying morality frames, make relying solely on human annotators costly, time-consuming, and prone to inconsistency due to cognitive load. To address these issues, we leverage large language models (LLMs), which are adept at adapting new tasks through few-shot learning, utilizing a handful of in-context examples coupled with explanations that connect examples to task principles. Our research explores LLMs' potential to assist human annotators in identifying morality frames within vaccination debates on social media. We employ a two-step process: generating concepts and explanations with LLMs, followed by human evaluation using a "think-aloud" tool. Our study shows that integrating LLMs into the annotation process enhances accuracy, reduces task difficulty, lowers cognitive load, suggesting a promising avenue for human-AI collaboration in complex psycholinguistic tasks.

Paperid: 4097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00662.pdf

Abstract:
Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection typically rely on similarity scores between input images and in-distribution (ID) text prototypes. However, the modality gap between image and text often results in high false positive rates, as OOD samples can exhibit high similarity to ID text prototypes. To mitigate the impact of this modality gap, we propose incorporating ID image prototypes along with ID text prototypes. We present theoretical analysis and empirical evidence indicating that this approach enhances VLM-based OOD detection performance without any additional training. To further reduce the gap between image and text, we introduce a novel few-shot tuning framework, SUPREME, comprising biased prompts generation (BPG) and image-text consistency (ITC) modules. BPG enhances image-text fusion and improves generalization by conditioning ID text prototypes on the Gaussian-based estimated image domain bias; ITC reduces the modality gap by minimizing intra- and inter-modal distances. Moreover, inspired by our theoretical and empirical findings, we introduce a novel OOD score $S_{\textit{GMP}}$, leveraging uni- and cross-modal similarities. Finally, we present extensive experiments to demonstrate that SUPREME consistently outperforms existing VLM-based OOD detection methods.

Paperid: 4098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16337.pdf

Abstract:
The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the deep learning field. However, the desire to deploy LLMs on edge devices introduces energy efficiency and latency challenges. Recurrent LLM (R-LLM) architectures have proven effective in mitigating the quadratic complexity of self-attention, making them a potential paradigm for computing on-edge neuromorphic processors. In this work, we propose a low-cost, training-free algorithm to sparsify R-LLMs' activations to enhance energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware. Our approach capitalizes on the inherent structure of these models, rendering them well-suited for energy-constrained environments. Although primarily designed for R-LLMs, this method can be generalized to other LLM architectures, such as transformers, as demonstrated on the OPT model, achieving comparable sparsity and efficiency improvements. Empirical studies illustrate that our method significantly reduces computational demands while maintaining competitive accuracy across multiple zero-shot learning benchmarks. Additionally, hardware simulations with the SENECA neuromorphic processor underscore notable energy savings and latency improvements. These results pave the way for low-power, real-time neuromorphic deployment of LLMs and demonstrate the feasibility of training-free on-chip adaptation using activation sparsity.

Paperid: 4099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15445.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a zero-shot method for generating images in arbitrary spaces (e.g., a sphere for 360Â° panoramas and a mesh surface for texture) using a pretrained image diffusion model. The zero-shot generation of various visual content using a pretrained image diffusion model has been explored mainly in two directions. First, Diffusion Synchronization-performing reverse diffusion processes jointly across different projected spaces while synchronizing them in the target space-generates high-quality outputs when enough conditioning is provided, but it struggles in its absence. Second, Score Distillation Sampling-gradually updating the target space data through gradient descent-results in better coherence but often lacks detail. In this paper, we reveal for the first time the interconnection between these two methods while highlighting their differences. To this end, we propose StochSync, a novel approach that combines the strengths of both, enabling effective performance with weak conditioning. Our experiments demonstrate that StochSync provides the best performance in 360Â° panorama generation (where image conditioning is not given), outperforming previous finetuning-based methods, and also delivers comparable results in 3D mesh texturing (where depth conditioning is provided) with previous methods.

Paperid: 4100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08799.pdf

Abstract:
This study highlights the potential of ChatGPT (specifically GPT-4o) as a competitive alternative for Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD), outperforming several PAD models, including commercial solutions, in specific scenarios. Our results show that GPT-4o demonstrates high consistency, particularly in few-shot in-context learning, where its performance improves as more examples are provided (reference data). We also observe that detailed prompts enable the model to provide scores reliably, a behavior not observed with concise prompts. Additionally, explanation-seeking prompts slightly enhance the model's performance by improving its interpretability. Remarkably, the model exhibits emergent reasoning capabilities, correctly predicting the attack type (print or replay) with high accuracy in few-shot scenarios, despite not being explicitly instructed to classify attack types. Despite these strengths, GPT-4o faces challenges in zero-shot tasks, where its performance is limited compared to specialized PAD systems. Experiments were conducted on a subset of the SOTERIA dataset, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations by using only data from consenting individuals. These findings underscore GPT-4o's promise in PAD applications, laying the groundwork for future research to address broader data privacy concerns and improve cross-dataset generalization. Code available here: https://gitlab.idiap.ch/bob/bob.paper.wacv2025_chatgpt_face_pad

Paperid: 4101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07267.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific team dynamics are critical in determining the nature and impact of research outputs. However, existing methods for classifying author roles based on self-reports and clustering lack comprehensive contextual analysis of contributions. Thus, we present a transformative approach to classifying author roles in scientific teams using advanced large language models (LLMs), which offers a more refined analysis compared to traditional clustering methods. Specifically, we seek to complement and enhance these traditional methods by utilizing open source and proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-4, Llama3 70B, Llama2 70B, and Mistral 7x8B, for role classification. Utilizing few-shot prompting, we categorize author roles and demonstrate that GPT-4 outperforms other models across multiple categories, surpassing traditional approaches such as XGBoost and BERT. Our methodology also includes building a predictive deep learning model using 10 features. By training this model on a dataset derived from the OpenAlex database, which provides detailed metadata on academic publications -- such as author-publication history, author affiliation, research topics, and citation counts -- we achieve an F1 score of 0.76, demonstrating robust classification of author roles.

Paperid: 4102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04473.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the reference-less evaluation of machine translation for low-resource language pairs, known as quality estimation (QE). Segment-level QE is a challenging cross-lingual language understanding task that provides a quality score (0-100) to the translated output. We comprehensively evaluate large language models (LLMs) in zero/few-shot scenarios and perform instruction fine-tuning using a novel prompt based on annotation guidelines. Our results indicate that prompt-based approaches are outperformed by the encoder-based fine-tuned QE models. Our error analysis reveals tokenization issues, along with errors due to transliteration and named entities, and argues for refinement in LLM pre-training for cross-lingual tasks. We release the data, and models trained publicly for further research.

Paperid: 4103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01031.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring cultural values alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, as these models often embed Western-centric biases from their training data, leading to misrepresentations and fairness concerns in cross-cultural applications. Existing approaches such as role assignment and few-shot learning struggle to address these limitations effectively due to their reliance on pre-trained knowledge, limited scalability, and inability to capture nuanced cultural values. To address these issues, we propose ValuesRAG, a novel and effective framework that applies Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with In-Context Learning (ICL) to integrate cultural and demographic knowledge dynamically during text generation. Leveraging the World Values Survey (WVS) dataset, ValuesRAG first generates summaries of values for each individual. We subsequently curate several representative regional datasets to serve as test datasets and retrieve relevant summaries of values based on demographic features, followed by a reranking step to select the top-k relevant summaries. We evaluate ValuesRAG using 6 diverse regional datasets and show that it consistently outperforms baselines: including zero-shot, role-assignment, few-shot, and hybrid methods, both in main experiments and ablation settings. Notably, ValuesRAG achieves the best overall performance over prior methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in fostering culturally aligned and inclusive AI systems. Our findings underscore the potential of dynamic retrieval-based methods to bridge the gap between global LLM capabilities and localized cultural values.

Paperid: 4104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00777.pdf

Abstract:
Counterfactual examples are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) as valuable data to improve models, and in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to understand model behavior. The automated generation of counterfactual examples remains a challenging task even for large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance on many tasks. In this paper, we first introduce ZeroCF, a faithful approach for leveraging important words derived from feature attribution methods to generate counterfactual examples in a zero-shot setting. Second, we present a new framework, FitCF, which further verifies aforementioned counterfactuals by label flip verification and then inserts them as demonstrations for few-shot prompting, outperforming two state-of-the-art baselines. Through ablation studies, we identify the importance of each of FitCF's core components in improving the quality of counterfactuals, as assessed through flip rate, perplexity, and similarity measures. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of LIME and Integrated Gradients as backbone attribution methods for FitCF and find that the number of demonstrations has the largest effect on performance. Finally, we reveal a strong correlation between the faithfulness of feature attribution scores and the quality of generated counterfactuals, which we hope will serve as an important finding for future research in this direction.

Paperid: 4105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12761.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we reported our experiments with various strategies to improve code-mixed humour and sarcasm detection. Particularly, we tried three approaches: (i) native sample mixing, (ii) multi-task learning (MTL), and (iii) prompting and instruction finetuning very large multilingual language models (VMLMs). In native sample mixing, we added monolingual task samples to code-mixed training sets. In MTL learning, we relied on native and code-mixed samples of a semantically related task (hate detection in our case). Finally, in our third approach, we evaluated the efficacy of VMLMs via few-shot context prompting and instruction finetuning. Some interesting findings we got are (i) adding native samples improved humor (raising the F1-score up to 6.76%) and sarcasm (raising the F1-score up to 8.64%) detection, (ii) training MLMs in an MTL framework boosted performance for both humour (raising the F1-score up to 10.67%) and sarcasm (increment up to 12.35% in F1-score) detection, and (iii) prompting and instruction finetuning VMLMs couldn't outperform the other approaches. Finally, our ablation studies and error analysis discovered the cases where our model is yet to improve. We provided our code for reproducibility.

Paperid: 4106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10413.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread use of microblogging platforms like X (formerly Twitter) during disasters provides real-time information to governments and response authorities. However, the data from these platforms is often noisy, requiring automated methods to filter relevant information. Traditionally, supervised machine learning models have been used, but they lack generalizability. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) show better capabilities in understanding and processing natural language out of the box. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the performance of six well-known LLMs in processing disaster-related social media data from a large-set of real-world events. Our findings indicate that while LLMs, particularly GPT-4o and GPT-4, offer better generalizability across different disasters and information types, most LLMs face challenges in processing flood-related data, show minimal improvement despite the provision of examples (i.e., shots), and struggle to identify critical information categories like urgent requests and needs. Additionally, we examine how various linguistic features affect model performance and highlight LLMs' vulnerabilities against certain features like typos. Lastly, we provide benchmarking results for all events across both zero- and few-shot settings and observe that proprietary models outperform open-source ones in all tasks.

Paperid: 4107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08920.pdf

Abstract:
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) requires the agent to finish a given task while obeying specific constraints. Giving constraints in natural language form has great potential for practical scenarios due to its flexible transfer capability and accessibility. Previous safe RL methods with natural language constraints typically need to design cost functions manually for each constraint, which requires domain expertise and lacks flexibility. In this paper, we harness the dual role of text in this task, using it not only to provide constraint but also as a training signal. We introduce the Trajectory-level Textual Constraints Translator (TTCT) to replace the manually designed cost function. Our empirical results demonstrate that TTCT effectively comprehends textual constraint and trajectory, and the policies trained by TTCT can achieve a lower violation rate than the standard cost function. Extra studies are conducted to demonstrate that the TTCT has zero-shot transfer capability to adapt to constraint-shift environments.

Paperid: 4108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07796.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation. However, existing methods only perform direct zero-shot prompting, leading to ineffective extraction of user preferences, insufficient injection of collaborative signals, and a lack of user privacy protection. As such, we propose a novel Multitask Reflective Large Language Model for Privacy-preserving Next POI Recommendation (MRP-LLM), aiming to exploit LLMs for better next POI recommendation while preserving user privacy. Specifically, the Multitask Reflective Preference Extraction Module first utilizes LLMs to distill each user's fine-grained (i.e., categorical, temporal, and spatial) preferences into a knowledge base (KB). The Neighbor Preference Retrieval Module retrieves and summarizes the preferences of similar users from the KB to obtain collaborative signals. Subsequently, aggregating the user's preferences with those of similar users, the Multitask Next POI Recommendation Module generates the next POI recommendations via multitask prompting. Meanwhile, during data collection, a Privacy Transmission Module is specifically devised to preserve sensitive POI data. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed MRP-LLM in providing more accurate next POI recommendations with user privacy preserved.

Paperid: 4109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07750.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-video diffusion models have shown remarkable progress in generating coherent video clips from textual descriptions. However, the interplay between motion, structure, and identity representations in these models remains under-explored. Here, we investigate how self-attention query (Q) features simultaneously govern motion, structure, and identity and examine the challenges arising when these representations interact. Our analysis reveals that Q affects not only layout, but that during denoising Q also has a strong effect on subject identity, making it hard to transfer motion without the side-effect of transferring identity. Understanding this dual role enabled us to control query feature injection (Q injection) and demonstrate two applications: (1) a zero-shot motion transfer method - implemented with VideoCrafter2 and WAN 2.1 - that is 10 times more efficient than existing approaches, and (2) a training-free technique for consistent multi-shot video generation, where characters maintain identity across multiple video shots while Q injection enhances motion fidelity.

Paperid: 4110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05710.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capabilities through in-context learning (ICL). However, ICL performance is highly dependent on the choice of few-shot demonstrations, making the selection of the most optimal examples a persistent research challenge. This issue is further amplified in low-resource Indic languages, where the scarcity of ground-truth data complicates the selection process. In this work, we propose PromptRefine, a novel Alternating Minimization approach for example selection that improves ICL performance on low-resource Indic languages. PromptRefine leverages auxiliary example banks from related high-resource Indic languages and employs multi-task learning techniques to align language-specific retrievers, enabling effective cross-language retrieval. Additionally, we incorporate diversity in the selected examples to enhance generalization and reduce bias. Through comprehensive evaluations on four text generation tasks -- Cross-Lingual Question Answering, Multilingual Question Answering, Machine Translation, and Cross-Lingual Summarization using state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLAMA-3.1-8B, LLAMA-2-7B, Qwen-2-7B, and Qwen-2.5-7B, we demonstrate that PromptRefine significantly outperforms existing frameworks for retrieving examples.

Paperid: 4111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05434.pdf

Abstract:
In few-shot relation classification (FSRC), models must generalize to novel relations with only a few labeled examples. While much of the recent progress in NLP has focused on scaling data size, we argue that diversity in relation types is more crucial for FSRC performance. In this work, we demonstrate that training on a diverse set of relations significantly enhances a model's ability to generalize to unseen relations, even when the overall dataset size remains fixed. We introduce REBEL-FS, a new FSRC benchmark that incorporates an order of magnitude more relation types than existing datasets. Through systematic experiments, we show that increasing the diversity of relation types in the training data leads to consistent gains in performance across various few-shot learning scenarios, including high-negative settings. Our findings challenge the common assumption that more data alone leads to better performance and suggest that targeted data curation focused on diversity can substantially reduce the need for large-scale datasets in FSRC.

Paperid: 4112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05341.pdf

Abstract:
Infrared (IR) imaging is commonly used in various scenarios, including autonomous driving, fire safety and defense applications. Thus, semantic segmentation of such images is of great interest. However, this task faces several challenges, including data scarcity, differing contrast and input channel number compared to natural images, and emergence of classes not represented in databases in certain scenarios, such as defense applications. Few-shot segmentation (FSS) provides a framework to overcome these issues by segmenting query images using a few labeled support samples. However, existing FSS models for IR images require paired visible RGB images, which is a major limitation since acquiring such paired data is difficult or impossible in some applications. In this work, we develop new strategies for FSS of IR images by using generative modeling and fusion techniques. To this end, we propose to synthesize auxiliary data to provide additional channel information to complement the limited contrast in the IR images, as well as IR data synthesis for data augmentation. Here, the former helps the FSS model to better capture the relationship between the support and query sets, while the latter addresses the issue of data scarcity. Finally, to further improve the former aspect, we propose a novel fusion ensemble module for integrating the two different modalities. Our methods are evaluated on different IR datasets, and improve upon the state-of-the-art (SOTA) FSS models.

Paperid: 4113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05139.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of large language models has raised growing concerns about their misuse, particularly in cases where AI-generated text is falsely attributed to human authors. Machine-generated content detectors claim to effectively identify such text under various conditions and from any language model. This paper critically evaluates these claims by assessing several popular detectors (RADAR, Wild, T5Sentinel, Fast-DetectGPT, PHD, LogRank, Binoculars) on a range of domains, datasets, and models that these detectors have not previously encountered. We employ various prompting strategies to simulate practical adversarial attacks, demonstrating that even moderate efforts can significantly evade detection. We emphasize the importance of the true positive rate at a specific false positive rate (TPR@FPR) metric and demonstrate that these detectors perform poorly in certain settings, with TPR@.01 as low as 0%. Our findings suggest that both trained and zero-shot detectors struggle to maintain high sensitivity while achieving a reasonable true positive rate.

Paperid: 4114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16567.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents an innovative approach to enhancing few-shot learning by integrating data augmentation with model fine-tuning in a framework designed to tackle the challenges posed by small-sample data. Recognizing the critical limitations of traditional machine learning models that require large datasets-especially in fields such as drug discovery, target recognition, and malicious traffic detection-this study proposes a novel strategy that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and advanced optimization techniques to improve model performance with limited data. Specifically, the paper addresses the noise and bias issues introduced by data augmentation methods, contrasting them with model-based approaches, such as fine-tuning and metric learning, which rely heavily on related datasets. By combining Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and discriminative model ensemble strategies within a GAN framework, the proposed model adjusts generative and discriminative distributions to simulate a broader range of relevant data. Furthermore, it employs MHLoss and a reparameterized GAN ensemble to enhance stability and accelerate convergence, ultimately leading to improved classification performance on small-sample images and structured datasets. Results confirm that the MhERGAN algorithm developed in this research is highly effective for few-shot learning, offering a practical solution that bridges data scarcity with high-performing model adaptability and generalization.

Paperid: 4115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15611.pdf

Abstract:
We present a way to learn novel concepts by only using their textual description. We call this method Knowledge Transfer. Similarly to human perception, we leverage cross-modal interaction to introduce new concepts. We hypothesize that in a pre-trained visual encoder there are enough low-level features already learned (e.g. shape, appearance, color) that can be used to describe previously unknown high-level concepts. Provided with a textual description of the novel concept, our method works by aligning the known low-level features of the visual encoder to its high-level textual description. We show that Knowledge Transfer can successfully introduce novel concepts in multimodal models, in a very efficient manner, by only requiring a single description of the target concept. Our approach is compatible with both separate textual and visual encoders (e.g. CLIP) and shared parameters across modalities. We also show that, following the same principle, Knowledge Transfer can improve concepts already known by the model. Leveraging Knowledge Transfer we improve zero-shot performance across different tasks such as classification, segmentation, image-text retrieval, and captioning.

Paperid: 4116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14795.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly being applied in the medical field, particularly in medical imaging. However, developing MLLMs for ECG signals, which are crucial in clinical settings, has been a significant challenge beyond medical imaging. Previous studies have attempted to address this by converting ECGs into several text tags using an external classifier in a training-free manner. However, this approach significantly compresses the information in ECGs and underutilizes the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we directly feed the embeddings of ECGs into the LLM through a projection layer, retaining more information about ECGs and better leveraging the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our method can also effectively handle a common situation in clinical practice where it is necessary to compare two ECGs taken at different times. Recent studies found that MLLMs may rely solely on text input to provide answers, ignoring inputs from other modalities. We analyzed this phenomenon from a causal perspective in the context of ECG MLLMs and discovered that the confounder, severity of illness, introduces a spurious correlation between the question and answer, leading the model to rely on this spurious correlation and ignore the ECG input. Such models do not comprehend the ECG input and perform poorly in adversarial tests where different expressions of the same question are used in the training and testing sets. We designed a de-biased pre-training method to eliminate the confounder's effect according to the theory of backdoor adjustment. Our model performed well on the ECG-QA task under adversarial testing and demonstrated zero-shot capabilities. An interesting random ECG test further validated that our model effectively understands and utilizes the input ECG signal.

Paperid: 4117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13008.pdf

Abstract:
Social media discourse involves people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and motives. Thus, often such discourse can devolve into toxic interactions. Generative Models, such as Llama and ChatGPT, have recently exploded in popularity due to their capabilities in zero-shot question-answering. Because these models are increasingly being used to ask questions of social significance, a crucial research question is whether they can understand social media dynamics. This work provides a critical analysis regarding generative LLM's ability to understand language and dynamics in social contexts, particularly considering cyberbullying and anti-cyberbullying (posts aimed at reducing cyberbullying) interactions. Specifically, we compare and contrast the capabilities of different large language models (LLMs) to understand three key aspects of social dynamics: language, directionality, and the occurrence of bullying/anti-bullying messages. We found that while fine-tuned LLMs exhibit promising results in some social media understanding tasks (understanding directionality), they presented mixed results in others (proper paraphrasing and bullying/anti-bullying detection). We also found that fine-tuning and prompt engineering mechanisms can have positive effects in some tasks. We believe that a understanding of LLM's capabilities is crucial to design future models that can be effectively used in social applications.

Paperid: 4118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04530.pdf

Abstract:
Human understanding of language is robust to different word choices as far as they represent similar semantic concepts. To what extent does our human intuition transfer to language models, which represent all subwords as distinct embeddings? In this work, we take an initial step on measuring the role of shared semantics among subwords in the encoder-only multilingual language models (mLMs). To this end, we form "semantic tokens" by merging the semantically similar subwords and their embeddings, and evaluate the updated mLMs on 5 heterogeneous multilingual downstream tasks. Results show that the general shared semantics could get the models a long way in making the predictions on mLMs with different tokenizers and model sizes. Inspections on the grouped subwords show that they exhibit a wide range of semantic similarities, including synonyms and translations across many languages and scripts. Lastly, we found the zero-shot results with semantic tokens are on par or even better than the original models on certain classification tasks, suggesting that the shared subword-level semantics may serve as the anchors for cross-lingual transferring.

Paperid: 4119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03769.pdf

Abstract:
Research in vision and language has made considerable progress thanks to benchmarks such as COCO. COCO captions focused on unambiguous facts in English; ArtEmis introduced subjective emotions and ArtELingo introduced some multilinguality (Chinese and Arabic). However we believe there should be more multilinguality. Hence, we present ArtELingo-28, a vision-language benchmark that spans $\textbf{28}$ languages and encompasses approximately $\textbf{200,000}$ annotations ($\textbf{140}$ annotations per image). Traditionally, vision research focused on unambiguous class labels, whereas ArtELingo-28 emphasizes diversity of opinions over languages and cultures. The challenge is to build machine learning systems that assign emotional captions to images. Baseline results will be presented for three novel conditions: Zero-Shot, Few-Shot and One-vs-All Zero-Shot. We find that cross-lingual transfer is more successful for culturally-related languages. Data and code are provided at www.artelingo.org.

Paperid: 4120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18955.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are fine-tuned on large and diverse instruction-following corpora, and can generalize to new tasks. However, those instruction-tuned LLMs often perform poorly in specialized medical natural language understanding (NLU) tasks that require domain knowledge, granular text comprehension, and structured data extraction. To bridge the gap, we: (1) propose a unified prompting format for 7 important NLU tasks, (2) curate an instruction-tuning dataset, MNLU-Instruct, utilizing diverse existing open-source medical NLU corpora, and (3) develop BioMistral-NLU, a generalizable medical NLU model, through fine-tuning BioMistral on MNLU-Instruct. We evaluate BioMistral-NLU in a zero-shot setting, across 6 important NLU tasks, from two widely adopted medical NLU benchmarks: BLUE and BLURB. Our experiments show that our BioMistral-NLU outperforms the original BioMistral, as well as the proprietary LLMs - ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our dataset-agnostic prompting strategy and instruction tuning step over diverse NLU tasks enhance LLMs' generalizability across diverse medical NLU tasks. Our ablation experiments show that instruction-tuning on a wider variety of tasks, even when the total number of training instances remains constant, enhances downstream zero-shot generalization.

Paperid: 4121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18764.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive zero-shot performance on inference tasks. However, LLMs may suffer from spurious correlations between input texts and output labels, which limits LLMs' ability to reason based purely on general language understanding. In other words, LLMs may make predictions primarily based on premise or hypothesis, rather than both components. To address this problem that may lead to unexpected performance degradation, we propose task calibration (TC), a zero-shot and inference-only calibration method inspired by mutual information which recovers LLM performance through task reformulation. TC encourages LLMs to reason based on both premise and hypothesis, while mitigating the models' over-reliance on individual premise or hypothesis for inference. Experimental results show that TC achieves a substantial improvement on 13 inference tasks in the zero-shot setup. We further validate the effectiveness of TC in few-shot setups and various natural language understanding tasks. Further analysis indicates that TC is also robust to prompt templates and has the potential to be integrated with other calibration methods.

Paperid: 4122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13569.pdf

Abstract:
The number of publicly available models is rapidly increasing, yet most remain undocumented. Users looking for suitable models for their tasks must first determine what each model does. Training machine learning models to infer missing documentation directly from model weights is challenging, as these weights often contain significant variation unrelated to model functionality (denoted nuisance). Here, we identify a key property of real-world models: most public models belong to a small set of Model Trees, where all models within a tree are fine-tuned from a common ancestor (e.g., a foundation model). Importantly, we find that within each tree there is less nuisance variation between models. Concretely, while learning across Model Trees requires complex architectures, even a linear classifier trained on a single model layer often works within trees. While effective, these linear classifiers are computationally expensive, especially when dealing with larger models that have many parameters. To address this, we introduce Probing Experts (ProbeX), a theoretically motivated and lightweight method. Notably, ProbeX is the first probing method specifically designed to learn from the weights of a single hidden model layer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ProbeX by predicting the categories in a model's training dataset based only on its weights. Excitingly, ProbeX can map the weights of Stable Diffusion into a weight-language embedding space, enabling model search via text, i.e., zero-shot model classification.

Paperid: 4123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13460.pdf

Abstract:
Many court systems are overwhelmed all over the world, leading to huge backlogs of pending cases. Effective triage systems, like those in emergency rooms, could ensure proper prioritization of open cases, optimizing time and resource allocation in the court system. In this work, we introduce the Criticality Prediction dataset, a novel resource for evaluating case prioritization. Our dataset features a two-tier labeling system: (1) the binary LD-Label, identifying cases published as Leading Decisions (LD), and (2) the more granular Citation-Label, ranking cases by their citation frequency and recency, allowing for a more nuanced evaluation. Unlike existing approaches that rely on resource-intensive manual annotations, we algorithmically derive labels leading to a much larger dataset than otherwise possible. We evaluate several multilingual models, including both smaller fine-tuned models and large language models in a zero-shot setting. Our results show that the fine-tuned models consistently outperform their larger counterparts, thanks to our large training set. Our results highlight that for highly domain-specific tasks like ours, large training sets are still valuable.

Paperid: 4124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12481.pdf

Abstract:
The past years have seen Large Language Models (LLMs) strive not only as generative models but also as agents solving textual sequential decision-making tasks. When facing complex environments where their zero-shot abilities are insufficient, recent work showed online Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be used for the LLM agent to discover and learn efficient strategies interactively. However, most prior work sticks to on-policy algorithms, which greatly reduces the scope of methods such agents could use for both exploration and exploitation, such as experience replay and hindsight relabeling. Yet, such methods may be key for LLM learning agents, and in particular when designing autonomous intrinsically motivated agents sampling and pursuing their own goals (i.e. autotelic agents). This paper presents and studies an adaptation of Soft Actor-Critic and hindsight relabeling to LLM agents. Our method not only paves the path towards autotelic LLM agents that learn online but can also outperform on-policy methods in more classic multi-goal RL environments.

Paperid: 4125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12267.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) has significantly influenced the domain of human-computer interaction, with Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) emerging as a notably robust paradigm. This study explores advanced classification techniques leveraging interpretable fuzzy transfer learning (iFuzzyTL) to enhance the adaptability and performance of SSVEP-based systems. Recent efforts have strengthened to reduce calibration requirements through innovative transfer learning approaches, which refine cross-subject generalizability and minimize calibration through strategic application of domain adaptation and few-shot learning strategies. Pioneering developments in deep learning also offer promising enhancements, facilitating robust domain adaptation and significantly improving system responsiveness and accuracy in SSVEP classification. However, these methods often require complex tuning and extensive data, limiting immediate applicability. iFuzzyTL introduces an adaptive framework that combines fuzzy logic principles with neural network architectures, focusing on efficient knowledge transfer and domain adaptation. iFuzzyTL refines input signal processing and classification in a human-interpretable format by integrating fuzzy inference systems and attention mechanisms. This approach bolsters the model's precision and aligns with real-world operational demands by effectively managing the inherent variability and uncertainty of EEG data. The model's efficacy is demonstrated across three datasets: 12JFPM (89.70% accuracy for 1s with an information transfer rate (ITR) of 149.58), Benchmark (85.81% accuracy for 1s with an ITR of 213.99), and eldBETA (76.50% accuracy for 1s with an ITR of 94.63), achieving state-of-the-art results and setting new benchmarks for SSVEP BCI performance.

Paperid: 4126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09745.pdf

Abstract:
The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) investigates the synergistic relationship between word-level and text-level classifications in text classification tasks. It posits that the performance of both classification levels can be mutually enhanced. However, this mechanism has not been adequately demonstrated or explained in prior research. To address this gap, we employ empirical experiment to observe and substantiate the MRE theory. Our experiments on 21 MRE mix datasets revealed the presence of MRE in the model and its impact. Specifically, we conducted compare experiments use fine-tune. The results of findings from comparison experiments corroborates the existence of MRE. Furthermore, we extended the application of MRE to prompt learning, utilizing word-level information as a verbalizer to bolster the model's prediction of text-level classification labels. In our final experiment, the F1-score significantly surpassed the baseline in 18 out of 21 MRE Mix datasets, further validating the notion that word-level information enhances the language model's comprehension of the text as a whole.

Paperid: 4127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06565.pdf

Abstract:
Modern non-linear model-based controllers require an accurate physics model and model parameters to be able to control mobile robots at their limits. Also, due to surface slipping at high speeds, the friction parameters may continually change (like tire degradation in autonomous racing), and the controller may need to adapt rapidly. Many works derive a task-specific robot model with a parameter adaptation scheme that works well for the task but requires a lot of effort and tuning for each platform and task. In this work, we design a full model-learning-based controller based on meta pre-training that can very quickly adapt using few-shot dynamics data to any wheel-based robot with any model parameters, while also reasoning about model uncertainty. We demonstrate our results in small-scale numeric simulation, the large-scale Unity simulator, and on a medium-scale hardware platform with a wide range of settings. We show that our results are comparable to domain-specific well-engineered controllers, and have excellent generalization performance across all scenarios.

Paperid: 4128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04032.pdf

Abstract:
Social media is increasingly plagued by realistic fake images, making it hard to trust content. Previous algorithms to detect these fakes often fail in new, real-world scenarios because they are trained on specific datasets. To address the problem, we introduce ForgeryTTT, the first method leveraging test-time training (TTT) to identify manipulated regions in images. The proposed approach fine-tunes the model for each individual test sample, improving its performance. ForgeryTTT first employs vision transformers as a shared image encoder to learn both classification and localization tasks simultaneously during the training-time training using a large synthetic dataset. Precisely, the localization head predicts a mask to highlight manipulated areas. Given such a mask, the input tokens can be divided into manipulated and genuine groups, which are then fed into the classification head to distinguish between manipulated and genuine parts. During test-time training, the predicted mask from the localization head is used for the classification head to update the image encoder for better adaptation. Additionally, using the classical dropout strategy in each token group significantly improves performance and efficiency. We test ForgeryTTT on five standard benchmarks. Despite its simplicity, ForgeryTTT achieves a 20.1% improvement in localization accuracy compared to other zero-shot methods and a 4.3% improvement over non-zero-shot techniques. Our code and data will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 4129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03278.pdf

Abstract:
Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for various natural language processing tasks has led to superlative claims about their performance. For the evaluation of machine translation (MT), existing research shows that LLMs are able to achieve results comparable to fine-tuned multilingual pre-trained language models. In this paper, we explore what translation information, such as the source, reference, translation errors and annotation guidelines, is needed for LLMs to evaluate MT quality. In addition, we investigate prompting techniques such as zero-shot, Chain of Thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting for eight language pairs covering high-, medium- and low-resource languages, leveraging varying LLM variants. Our findings indicate the importance of reference translations for an LLM-based evaluation. While larger models do not necessarily fare better, they tend to benefit more from CoT prompting, than smaller models. We also observe that LLMs do not always provide a numerical score when generating evaluations, which poses a question on their reliability for the task. Our work presents a comprehensive analysis for resource-constrained and training-less LLM-based evaluation of machine translation. We release the accrued prompt templates, code and data publicly for reproducibility.

Paperid: 4130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01953.pdf

Abstract:
In this short paper we propose a data augmentation method for intent detection in zero-resource domains. Existing data augmentation methods rely on few labelled examples for each intent category, which can be expensive in settings with many possible intents. We use a two-stage approach: First, we generate utterances for intent labels using an open-source large language model in a zero-shot setting. Second, we develop a smaller sequence-to-sequence model (the Refiner), to improve the generated utterances. The Refiner is fine-tuned on seen domains and then applied to unseen domains. We evaluate our method by training an intent classifier on the generated data, and evaluating it on real (human) data. We find that the Refiner significantly improves the data utility and diversity over the zero-shot LLM baseline for unseen domains and over common baseline approaches. Our results indicate that a two-step approach of a generative LLM in zero-shot setting and a smaller sequence-to-sequence model can provide high-quality data for intent detection.

Paperid: 4131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20558.pdf

Abstract:
We present Uni$^2$Det, a brand new framework for unified and universal multi-dataset training on 3D detection, enabling robust performance across diverse domains and generalization to unseen domains. Due to substantial disparities in data distribution and variations in taxonomy across diverse domains, training such a detector by simply merging datasets poses a significant challenge. Motivated by this observation, we introduce multi-stage prompting modules for multi-dataset 3D detection, which leverages prompts based on the characteristics of corresponding datasets to mitigate existing differences. This elegant design facilitates seamless plug-and-play integration within various advanced 3D detection frameworks in a unified manner, while also allowing straightforward adaptation for universal applicability across datasets. Experiments are conducted across multiple dataset consolidation scenarios involving KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes, demonstrating that our Uni$^2$Det outperforms existing methods by a large margin in multi-dataset training. Notably, results on zero-shot cross-dataset transfer validate the generalization capability of our proposed method.

Paperid: 4132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20548.pdf

Abstract:
Imagine a future when we can Zoom-call a robot to manage household chores remotely. This work takes one step in this direction. Robi Butler is a new household robot assistant that enables seamless multimodal remote interaction. It allows the human user to monitor its environment from a first-person view, issue voice or text commands, and specify target objects through hand-pointing gestures. At its core, a high-level behavior module, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), interprets multimodal instructions to generate multistep action plans. Each plan consists of open-vocabulary primitives supported by vision-language models, enabling the robot to process both textual and gestural inputs. Zoom provides a convenient interface to implement remote interactions between the human and the robot. The integration of these components allows Robi Butler to ground remote multimodal instructions in real-world home environments in a zero-shot manner. We evaluated the system on various household tasks, demonstrating its ability to execute complex user commands with multimodal inputs. We also conducted a user study to examine how multimodal interaction influences user experiences in remote human-robot interaction. These results suggest that with the advances in robot foundation models, we are moving closer to the reality of remote household robot assistants.

Paperid: 4133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15979.pdf

Abstract:
Automated assessment in natural language generation is a challenging task. Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in reference-free evaluation, particularly through comparative assessment. However, the quadratic computational complexity of pairwise comparisons limits its scalability. To address this, efficient comparative assessment has been explored by applying comparative strategies on zero-shot LLM probabilities. We propose a framework for finetuning LLMs for comparative assessment to align the model's output with the target distribution of comparative probabilities. By training on soft probabilities, our approach improves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high performance with an efficient subset of comparisons.

Paperid: 4134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15742.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel framework for open-set speaker identification in household environments, playing a crucial role in facilitating seamless human-computer interactions. Addressing the limitations of current speaker models and classification approaches, our work integrates an pretrained WavLM frontend with a few-shot rapid tuning neural network (NN) backend for enrollment, employing task-optimized Speaker Reciprocal Points Learning (SRPL) to enhance discrimination across multiple target speakers. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced version of SRPL (SRPL+), which incorporates negative sample learning with both speech-synthesized and real negative samples to significantly improve open-set SID accuracy. Our approach is thoroughly evaluated across various multi-language text-dependent speaker recognition datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving high usability for complex household multi-speaker recognition scenarios. The proposed system enhanced open-set performance by up to 27\% over the directly use of efficient WavLM base+ model.

Paperid: 4135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15741.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce StyleFusion-TTS, a prompt and/or audio referenced, style and speaker-controllable, zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system designed to enhance the editability and naturalness of current research literature. We propose a general front-end encoder as a compact and effective module to utilize multimodal inputs including text prompts, audio references, and speaker timbre references in a fully zero-shot manner and produce disentangled style and speaker control embeddings. Our novel approach also leverages a hierarchical conformer structure for the fusion of style and speaker control embeddings, aiming to achieve optimal feature fusion within the current advanced TTS architecture. StyleFusion-TTS is evaluated through multiple metrics, both subjectively and objectively. The system shows promising performance across our evaluations, suggesting its potential to contribute to the advancement of the field of zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis.

Paperid: 4136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13530.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models have shown impressive performance on a variety of tasks, across a wide range of domains, even in zero-shot settings. However, most of these models are designed to handle short univariate time series as an input. This limits their practical use, especially in domains such as healthcare with copious amounts of long and multivariate data with strong temporal and intra-variate dependencies. Our study bridges this gap by cataloging and systematically comparing various context expansion techniques from both language and time series domains, and introducing a novel compressive memory mechanism to allow encoder-only TSFMs to effectively model intra-variate dependencies. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by imbuing MOMENT, a recent family of multi-task time series foundation models, with the multivariate context.

Paperid: 4137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10840.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, time series foundation models have shown promising zero-shot forecasting performance on time series from a wide range of domains. However, it remains unclear whether their success stems from a true understanding of temporal dynamics or simply from memorizing the training data. While implicit reasoning in language models has been studied, similar evaluations for time series models have been largely unexplored. This work takes an initial step toward assessing the reasoning abilities of deep time series forecasting models. We find that certain linear, MLP-based, and patch-based Transformer models generalize effectively in systematically orchestrated out-of-distribution scenarios, suggesting underexplored reasoning capabilities beyond simple pattern memorization.

Paperid: 4138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00700.pdf

Abstract:
Face-based Voice Conversion (FVC) is a novel task that leverages facial images to generate the target speaker's voice style. Previous work has two shortcomings: (1) suffering from obtaining facial embeddings that are well-aligned with the speaker's voice identity information, and (2) inadequacy in decoupling content and speaker identity information from the audio input. To address these issues, we present a novel FVC method, Identity-Disentanglement Face-based Voice Conversion (ID-FaceVC), which overcomes the above two limitations. More precisely, we propose an Identity-Aware Query-based Contrastive Learning (IAQ-CL) module to extract speaker-specific facial features, and a Mutual Information-based Dual Decoupling (MIDD) module to purify content features from audio, ensuring clear and high-quality voice conversion. Besides, unlike prior works, our method can accept either audio or text inputs, offering controllable speech generation with adjustable emotional tone and speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-FaceVC achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, with qualitative and user study results confirming its effectiveness in naturalness, similarity, and diversity. Project website with audio samples and code can be found at https://id-facevc.github.io.

Paperid: 4139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17883.pdf

Abstract:
Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), aiming to learn transferable neural representations from large-scale heterogeneous recordings. Despite rapid progresses, there lacks fair and comprehensive comparisons of existing EEG foundation models, due to inconsistent pre-training objectives, preprocessing choices, and downstream evaluation protocols. This paper fills this gap. We first review 50 representative models and organize their design choices into a unified taxonomic framework including data standardization, model architectures, and self-supervised pre-training strategies. We then evaluate 12 open-source foundation models and competitive specialist baselines across 13 EEG datasets spanning nine BCI paradigms. Emphasizing real-world deployments, we consider both cross-subject generalization under a leave-one-subject-out protocol and rapid calibration under a within-subject few-shot setting. We further compare full-parameter fine-tuning with linear probing to assess the transferability of pre-trained representations, and examine the relationship between model scale and downstream performance. Our results indicate that: 1) linear probing is frequently insufficient; 2) specialist models trained from scratch remain competitive across many tasks; and, 3) larger foundation models do not necessarily yield better generalization performance under current data regimes and training practices.

Paperid: 4140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16578.pdf

Abstract:
We present a reproducible benchmark for evaluating sim-to-real transfer of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) policies for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). The platform, based on the Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab) [1], integrates simulation, a high-fidelity digital twin, and a physical testbed, enabling structured zero-shot evaluation of MARL motion-planning policies. We demonstrate its use by deploying a SigmaRL-trained policy [2] across all three domains, revealing two complementary sources of performance degradation: architectural differences between simulation and hardware control stacks, and the sim-to-real gap induced by increasing environmental realism. The open-source setup enables systematic analysis of sim-to-real challenges in MARL under realistic, reproducible conditions.

Paperid: 4141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15596.pdf

Abstract:
While modern Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve high fidelity for read-style speech, they struggle to generate Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a specialized, low-intensity speech style essential for relaxation. The inherent challenges include ASMR's subtle, often unvoiced characteristics and the demand for zero-shot speaker adaptation. In this paper, we introduce DeepASMR, the first framework designed for zero-shot ASMR generation. We demonstrate that a single short snippet of a speaker's ordinary, read-style speech is sufficient to synthesize high-fidelity ASMR in their voice, eliminating the need for whispered training data from the target speaker. Methodologically, we first identify that discrete speech tokens provide a soft factorization of ASMR style from speaker timbre. Leveraging this insight, we propose a two-stage pipeline incorporating a Large Language Model (LLM) for content-style encoding and a flow-matching acoustic decoder for timbre reconstruction. Furthermore, we contribute DeepASMR-DB, a comprehensive 670-hour English-Chinese multi-speaker ASMR speech corpus, and introduce a novel evaluation protocol integrating objective metrics, human listening tests, LLM-based scoring and unvoiced speech analysis. Extensive experiments confirm that DeepASMR achieves state-of-the-art naturalness and style fidelity in ASMR generation for anyone of any voice, while maintaining competitive performance on normal speech synthesis.

Paperid: 4142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12448.pdf

Abstract:
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of aerospace software systems. Although large language models (LLMs) provide a promising training-free alternative to unsupervised approaches, their effectiveness in aerospace settings remains under-examined because of complex telemetry, misaligned evaluation metrics, and the absence of domain knowledge. To address this gap, we introduce ATSADBench, the first benchmark for aerospace TSAD. ATSADBench comprises nine tasks that combine three pattern-wise anomaly types, univariate and multivariate signals, and both in-loop and out-of-loop feedback scenarios, yielding 108,000 data points. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art open-source LLMs under two paradigms: Direct, which labels anomalies within sliding windows, and Prediction-Based, which detects anomalies from prediction errors. To reflect operational needs, we reformulate evaluation at the window level and propose three user-oriented metrics: Alarm Accuracy (AA), Alarm Latency (AL), and Alarm Contiguity (AC), which quantify alarm correctness, timeliness, and credibility. We further examine two enhancement strategies, few-shot learning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), to inject domain knowledge. The evaluation results show that (1) LLMs perform well on univariate tasks but struggle with multivariate telemetry, (2) their AA and AC on multivariate tasks approach random guessing, (3) few-shot learning provides modest gains whereas RAG offers no significant improvement, and (4) in practice LLMs can detect true anomaly onsets yet sometimes raise false alarms, which few-shot prompting mitigates but RAG exacerbates. These findings offer guidance for future LLM-based TSAD in aerospace software.

Paperid: 4143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11258.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it often updates factual content without reliably improving the model's ability to use the newly incorporated information for question answering or decision-making. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for acquiring reasoning skills; however, its high computational cost makes it impractical for efficient online adaptation. We empirically observe that the parameter updates induced by SFT and RL are nearly orthogonal. Based on this observation, we propose Parametric Skill Transfer (PaST), a framework that supports modular skill transfer for efficient and effective knowledge adaptation. By extracting a domain-agnostic Skill Vector from a source domain, we can linearly inject knowledge manipulation skills into a target model after it has undergone lightweight SFT on new data. Experiments on knowledge-incorporation QA (SQuAD, LooGLE) and agentic tool-use benchmarks (ToolBench) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On SQuAD, PaST outperforms the state-of-the-art self-editing SFT baseline by up to 9.9 points. PaST further scales to long-context QA on LooGLE with an 8.0-point absolute accuracy gain, and improves zero-shot ToolBench success rates by +10.3 points on average with consistent gains across tool categories, indicating strong scalability and cross-domain transferability of the Skill Vector.

Paperid: 4144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09661.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition but struggle with classes that are rarely seen during pretraining, including newly emerging entities and culturally specific categories. We introduce LiteEmbed, a lightweight framework for few-shot personalization of CLIP that enables new classes to be added without retraining its encoders. LiteEmbed performs subspace-guided optimization of text embeddings within CLIP's vocabulary, leveraging a PCA-based decomposition that disentangles coarse semantic directions from fine-grained variations. Two complementary objectives, coarse alignment and fine separation, jointly preserve global semantic consistency while enhancing discriminability among visually similar classes. Once optimized, the embeddings are plug-and-play, seamlessly substituting CLIP's original text features across classification, retrieval, segmentation, and detection tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial gains over prior methods, establishing LiteEmbed as an effective approach for adapting CLIP to underrepresented, rare, or unseen classes.

Paperid: 4145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07877.pdf

Abstract:
Emotion recognition from electroencephalography (EEG) signals remains challenging due to high inter-subject variability, limited labeled data, and the lack of interpretable reasoning in existing approaches. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced emotion analysis, they have not been adapted to handle the unique spatiotemporal characteristics of neural signals. We present E^2-LLM (EEG-to-Emotion Large Language Model), the first MLLM framework for interpretable emotion analysis from EEG. E^2-LLM integrates a pretrained EEG encoder with Qwen-based LLMs through learnable projection layers, employing a multi-stage training pipeline that encompasses emotion-discriminative pretraining, cross-modal alignment, and instruction tuning with chain-of-thought reasoning. We design a comprehensive evaluation protocol covering basic emotion prediction, multi-task reasoning, and zero-shot scenario understanding. Experiments on the dataset across seven emotion categories demonstrate that E^2-LLM achieves excellent performance on emotion classification, with larger variants showing enhanced reliability and superior zero-shot generalization to complex reasoning scenarios. Our work establishes a new paradigm combining physiological signals with LLM reasoning capabilities, showing that model scaling improves both recognition accuracy and interpretable emotional understanding in affective computing.

Paperid: 4146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07558.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous 3D scanning of open-world target structures via drones remains challenging despite broad applications. Existing paradigms rely on restrictive assumptions or effortful human priors, limiting practicality, efficiency, and adaptability. Recent foundation models (FMs) offer great potential to bridge this gap. This paper investigates a critical research problem: What system architecture can effectively integrate FM knowledge for this task? We answer it with FlyCo, a principled FM-empowered perception-prediction-planning loop enabling fully autonomous, prompt-driven 3D target scanning in diverse unknown open-world environments. FlyCo directly translates low-effort human prompts (text, visual annotations) into precise adaptive scanning flights via three coordinated stages: (1) perception fuses streaming sensor data with vision-language FMs for robust target grounding and tracking; (2) prediction distills FM knowledge and combines multi-modal cues to infer the partially observed target's complete geometry; (3) planning leverages predictive foresight to generate efficient and safe paths with comprehensive target coverage. Building on this, we further design key components to boost open-world target grounding efficiency and robustness, enhance prediction quality in terms of shape accuracy, zero-shot generalization, and temporal stability, and balance long-horizon flight efficiency with real-time computability and online collision avoidance. Extensive challenging real-world and simulation experiments show FlyCo delivers precise scene understanding, high efficiency, and real-time safety, outperforming existing paradigms with lower human effort and verifying the proposed architecture's practicality. Comprehensive ablations validate each component's contribution. FlyCo also serves as a flexible, extensible blueprint, readily leveraging future FM and robotics advances. Code will be released.

Paperid: 4147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05062.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} -- i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors -- remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose \emph{compositional steering tokens} for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated \textit{composition token} on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to \textit{unseen} compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen \textit{number} of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior control compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.

Paperid: 4148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24103.pdf

Abstract:
We demonstrate an approach for LLMs to critique their \emph{own} answers with the goal of enhancing their performance that leads to significant improvements over established planning benchmarks. Despite the findings of earlier research that has cast doubt on the effectiveness of LLMs leveraging self critique methods, we show significant performance gains on planning datasets in the Blocksworld domain through intrinsic self-critique, without external source such as a verifier. We also demonstrate similar improvements on Logistics and Mini-grid datasets, exceeding strong baseline accuracies. We employ a few-shot learning technique and progressively extend it to a many-shot approach as our base method and demonstrate that it is possible to gain substantial improvement on top of this already competitive approach by employing an iterative process for correction and refinement. We illustrate how self-critique can significantly boost planning performance. Our empirical results present new state-of-the-art on the class of models considered, namely LLM model checkpoints from October 2024. Our primary focus lies on the method itself, demonstrating intrinsic self-improvement capabilities that are applicable regardless of the specific model version, and we believe that applying our method to more complex search techniques and more capable models will lead to even better performance.

Paperid: 4149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23210.pdf

Abstract:
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have brought tremendous advances in generative tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance thus far. Current diffusion model-based applications exploit the power of learned visual representations from multistep forward-backward Markovian processes for single-task prediction tasks by attaching a task-specific decoder. However, the heuristic selection of diffusion timestep features still heavily relies on empirical intuition, often leading to sub-optimal performance biased towards certain tasks. To alleviate this constraint, we investigate the significance of versatile diffusion timestep features by adaptively selecting timesteps best suited for the few-shot dense prediction task, evaluated on an arbitrary unseen task. To this end, we propose two modules: Task-aware Timestep Selection (TTS) to select ideal diffusion timesteps based on timestep-wise losses and similarity scores, and Timestep Feature Consolidation (TFC) to consolidate the selected timestep features to improve the dense predictive performance in a few-shot setting. Accompanied by our parameter-efficient fine-tuning adapter, our framework effectively achieves superiority in dense prediction performance given only a few support queries. We empirically validate our learnable timestep consolidation method on the large-scale challenging Taskonomy dataset for dense prediction, particularly for practical universal and few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 4150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15762.pdf

Abstract:
Intraoperative hypotension (IOH) poses significant surgical risks, but accurate prediction remains challenging due to patient-specific variability. While test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising approach for personalized prediction, the rarity of IOH events often leads to unreliable test-time training. To address this, we propose CSA-TTA, a novel Cross-Sample Augmented Test-Time Adaptation framework that enhances training by incorporating hypotension events from other individuals. Specifically, we first construct a cross-sample bank by segmenting historical data into hypotensive and non-hypotensive samples. Then, we introduce a coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy for building test-time training data: we initially apply K-Shape clustering to identify representative cluster centers and subsequently retrieve the top-K semantically similar samples based on the current patient signal. Additionally, we integrate both self-supervised masked reconstruction and retrospective sequence forecasting signals during training to enhance model adaptability to rapid and subtle intraoperative dynamics. We evaluate the proposed CSA-TTA on both the VitalDB dataset and a real-world in-hospital dataset by integrating it with state-of-the-art time series forecasting models, including TimesFM and UniTS. CSA-TTA consistently enhances performance across settings-for instance, on VitalDB, it improves Recall and F1 scores by +1.33% and +1.13%, respectively, under fine-tuning, and by +7.46% and +5.07% in zero-shot scenarios-demonstrating strong robustness and generalization.

Paperid: 4151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14442.pdf

Abstract:
Affordance prediction, which identifies interaction regions on objects based on language instructions, is critical for embodied AI. Prevailing end-to-end models couple high-level reasoning and low-level grounding into a single monolithic pipeline and rely on training over annotated datasets, which leads to poor generalization on novel objects and unseen environments. In this paper, we move beyond this paradigm by proposing A4-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that decouples affordance prediction into a three-stage pipeline. Our framework coordinates specialized foundation models at test time: (1) a $\textbf{Dreamer}$ that employs generative models to visualize $\textit{how}$ an interaction would look; (2) a $\textbf{Thinker}$ that utilizes large vision-language models to decide $\textit{what}$ object part to interact with; and (3) a $\textbf{Spotter}$ that orchestrates vision foundation models to precisely locate $\textit{where}$ the interaction area is. By leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained models without any task-specific fine-tuning, our zero-shot framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrates robust generalization to real-world settings.

Paperid: 4152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13747.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities on vision-language tasks. In the biomedical domain, however, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with basic Medical Decision Making (MDM) tasks. We investigate this limitation using two challenging datasets: (1) three-stage Alzheimer's disease (AD) classification (normal, mild cognitive impairment, dementia), where category differences are visually subtle, and (2) MIMIC-CXR chest radiograph classification with 14 non-mutually exclusive conditions. Our empirical study shows that text-only reasoning consistently outperforms vision-only or vision-text settings, with multimodal inputs often performing worse than text alone. To mitigate this, we explore three strategies: (1) in-context learning with reason-annotated exemplars, (2) vision captioning followed by text-only inference, and (3) few-shot fine-tuning of the vision tower with classification supervision. These findings reveal that current MLLMs lack grounded visual understanding and point to promising directions for improving multimodal decision making in healthcare.

Paperid: 4153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02318.pdf

Abstract:
This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 leading commercial and open-source MLLMs across 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further analyze the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. We conclude by discussing implications for platform operators deploying CAPTCHA as part of their abuse-mitigation pipeline.Code Availability (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Captcha-465E/).

Paperid: 4154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01196.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate reconstruction of temperature field of heat-source systems (TFR-HSS) is crucial for thermal monitoring and reliability assessment in engineering applications such as electronic devices and aerospace structures. However, the high cost of measurement acquisition and the substantial distributional shifts in temperature field across varying conditions present significant challenges for developing reconstruction models with robust generalization capabilities. Existing DNNs-based methods typically formulate TFR-HSS as a one-to-one regression problem based solely on target sparse measurements, without effectively leveraging reference simulation data that implicitly encode thermal knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose IPTR, an implicit physics-guided temperature field reconstruction framework that introduces sparse monitoring-temperature field pair from reference simulations as priors to enrich physical understanding. To integrate both reference and target information, we design a dual physics embedding module consisting of two complementary branches: an implicit physics-guided branch employing cross-attention to distill latent physics from the reference data, and an auxiliary encoding branch based on Fourier layers to capture the spatial characteristics of the target observation. The fused representation is then decoded to reconstruct the full temperature field. Extensive experiments under single-condition, multi-condition, and few-shot settings demonstrate that IPTR consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy and strong generalization capability.

Paperid: 4155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19516.pdf

Abstract:
Visual grounding, the task of linking textual queries to specific regions within images, plays a pivotal role in vision-language integration. Existing methods typically rely on extensive task-specific annotations and fine-tuning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively to novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce GroundingAgent, a novel agentic visual grounding framework that operates without any task-specific fine-tuning. GroundingAgent employs a structured, iterative reasoning mechanism that integrates pretrained open-vocabulary object detectors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and large language models (LLMs) to progressively refine candidate regions through joint semantic and spatial analyses. Remarkably, GroundingAgent achieves an average zero-shot grounding accuracy of 65.1 % on widely-used benchmarks (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg), entirely without fine-tuning. Furthermore, by substituting MLLM-generated captions with the original query texts, the accuracy at the selection stage alone reaches approximately 90 %, closely matching supervised performance and underscoring the critical role of LLM reasoning capabilities. GroundingAgent also offers strong interpretability, transparently illustrating each reasoning step and providing clear insights into its decision-making process.

Paperid: 4156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14385.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful zero- and few-shot learners. However, when predicting over a set of candidate options, LLMs suffer from label biases, and existing calibration methods overlook biases arising from multi-token class labels. We tackle an issue we call label length bias, where labels of different lengths are treated inconsistently, even after standard length normalization. To mitigate it, we propose normalized contextual calibration (NCC), an effective method that normalizes and calibrates predictions at the full-label level. NCC achieves statistically significant improvements over prior approaches across multiple datasets and models, with gains of up to 10% F1. Moreover, NCC extends bias mitigation to broader tasks such as multiple-choice question answering. Our analysis shows that, when combined with in-context learning, NCC is less sensitive to few-shot example selection, requires fewer examples for competitive performance, and produces more reliable confidence estimates. These findings highlight the importance of mitigating full-label biases to improve the performance and robustness of LLM-based methods, particularly in real-world applications where class labels naturally consist of multiple tokens.

Paperid: 4157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12978.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition yet remain vulnerable to spurious correlations, particularly background over-reliance. We introduce Cluster-based Concept Importance (CCI), a novel interpretability method that uses CLIP's own patch embeddings to group spatial patches into semantically coherent clusters, mask them, and evaluate relative changes in model predictions. CCI sets a new state of the art on faithfulness benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by large margins; for example, it yields more than a twofold improvement on the deletion-AUC metric for MS COCO retrieval. We further propose that CCI, when combined with GroundedSAM, automatically categorizes predictions as foreground- or background-driven, providing a crucial diagnostic ability. Existing benchmarks such as CounterAnimals, however, rely solely on accuracy and implicitly attribute all performance degradation to background correlations. Our analysis shows this assumption to be incomplete, since many errors arise from viewpoint variation, scale shifts, and fine-grained object confusions. To disentangle these effects, we introduce COVAR, a benchmark that systematically varies object foregrounds and backgrounds. Leveraging CCI with COVAR, we present a comprehensive evaluation of eighteen CLIP variants, offering methodological advances and empirical evidence that chart a path toward more robust VLMs.

Paperid: 4158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10658.pdf

Authors:Douwe J. Spaanderman, Karthik Prathaban, Petr Zelina, Kaouther Mouheb, Lukáš Hejtmánek, Matthew Marzetti, Antonius W. Schurink, Damian Chan, Ruben Niemantsverdriet, Frederik Hartmann, Zhen Qian, Maarten G. J. Thomeer, Petr Holub, Farhan Akram, Frank J. Wolters, Meike W. Vernooij, Cornelis Verhoef, Esther E. Bron, Vít Nováček, Dirk J. Grünhagen, Wiro J. Niessen, Martijn P. A. Starmans, Stefan Klein

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to extract structured information from free-text clinical records, but prior work often focuses on single tasks, limited models, and English-language reports. We evaluated 15 open-weight LLMs on pathology and radiology reports across six use cases, colorectal liver metastases, liver tumours, neurodegenerative diseases, soft-tissue tumours, melanomas, and sarcomas, at three institutes in the Netherlands, UK, and Czech Republic. Models included general-purpose and medical-specialised LLMs of various sizes, and six prompting strategies were compared: zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and prompt graph. Performance was assessed using task-appropriate metrics, with consensus rank aggregation and linear mixed-effects models quantifying variance. Top-ranked models achieved macro-average scores close to inter-rater agreement across tasks. Small-to-medium general-purpose models performed comparably to large models, while tiny and specialised models performed worse. Prompt graph and few-shot prompting improved performance by ~13%. Task-specific factors, including variable complexity and annotation variability, influenced results more than model size or prompting strategy. These findings show that open-weight LLMs can extract structured data from clinical reports across diseases, languages, and institutions, offering a scalable approach for clinical data curation.

Paperid: 4159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08402.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate disease interpretation from radiology remains challenging due to imaging heterogeneity. Achieving expert-level diagnostic decisions requires integration of subtle image features with clinical knowledge. Yet major vision-language models (VLMs) treat images as holistic entities and overlook fine-grained image details that are vital for disease diagnosis. Clinicians analyze images by utilizing their prior medical knowledge and identify anatomical structures as important region of interests (ROIs). Inspired from this human-centric workflow, we introduce Anatomy-VLM, a fine-grained, vision-language model that incorporates multi-scale information. First, we design a model encoder to localize key anatomical features from entire medical images. Second, these regions are enriched with structured knowledge for contextually-aware interpretation. Finally, the model encoder aligns multi-scale medical information to generate clinically-interpretable disease prediction. Anatomy-VLM achieves outstanding performance on both in- and out-of-distribution datasets. We also validate the performance of Anatomy-VLM on downstream image segmentation tasks, suggesting that its fine-grained alignment captures anatomical and pathology-related knowledge. Furthermore, the Anatomy-VLM's encoder facilitates zero-shot anatomy-wise interpretation, providing its strong expert-level clinical interpretation capabilities.

Paperid: 4160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03332.pdf

Abstract:
In this report, we present our solution to the MOT25-Spatiotemporal Action Grounding (MOT25-StAG) Challenge. The aim of this challenge is to accurately localize and track multiple objects that match specific and free-form language queries, using video data of complex real-world scenes as input. We model the underlying task as a video retrieval problem and present a two-stage, zero-shot approach, combining the advantages of the SOTA tracking model FastTracker and Multi-modal Large Language Model LLaVA-Video. On the MOT25-StAG test set, our method achieves m-HIoU and HOTA scores of 20.68 and 10.73 respectively, which won second place in the challenge.

Paperid: 4161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25803.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-training has proven effective in addressing data scarcity and performance limitations in solving PDE problems with neural operators. However, challenges remain due to the heterogeneity of PDE datasets in equation types, which leads to high errors in mixed training. Additionally, dense pre-training models that scale parameters by increasing network width or depth incur significant inference costs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts Pre-training Operator Transformer (MoE-POT), a sparse-activated architecture that scales parameters efficiently while controlling inference costs. Specifically, our model adopts a layer-wise router-gating network to dynamically select 4 routed experts from 16 expert networks during inference, enabling the model to focus on equation-specific features. Meanwhile, we also integrate 2 shared experts, aiming to capture common properties of PDE and reduce redundancy among routed experts. The final output is computed as the weighted average of the results from all activated experts. We pre-train models with parameters from 30M to 0.5B on 6 public PDE datasets. Our model with 90M activated parameters achieves up to a 40% reduction in zero-shot error compared with existing models with 120M activated parameters. Additionally, we conduct interpretability analysis, showing that dataset types can be inferred from router-gating network decisions, which validates the rationality and effectiveness of the MoE architecture.

Paperid: 4162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25405.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and grippers, this adds complexity and often lacks generalization. To address this problem, we present a vision-based reinforcement learning approach that incorporates a stress-penalized reward to discourage damage to the object explicitly. In addition, to bootstrap learning, we incorporate offline demonstrations as well as a designed curriculum progressing from rigid proxies to deformables. We evaluate the proposed method in both simulated and real-world scenarios, showing that the policy learned in simulation can be transferred to the real world in a zero-shot manner, performing tasks such as picking up and pushing tofu. Our results show that the learned policies exhibit a damage-aware, gentle manipulation behavior, demonstrating their effectiveness by decreasing the stress applied to fragile objects by 36.5% while achieving the task goals, compared to vanilla RL policies.

Paperid: 4163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24328.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer everyday questions, yet their performance on culturally grounded and dialectal content remains uneven across languages. We propose a comprehensive method that (i) translates Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) multiple-choice questions (MCQs) into English and several Arabic dialects, (ii) converts them into open-ended questions (OEQs), (iii) benchmarks a range of zero-shot and fine-tuned LLMs under both MCQ and OEQ settings, and (iv) generates chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales to fine-tune models for step-by-step reasoning. Using this method, we extend an existing dataset in which QAs are parallelly aligned across multiple language varieties, making it, to our knowledge, the first of its kind. We conduct extensive experiments with both open and closed models. Our findings show that (i) models underperform on Arabic dialects, revealing persistent gaps in culturally grounded and dialect-specific knowledge; (ii) Arabic-centric models perform well on MCQs but struggle with OEQs; and (iii) CoT improves judged correctness while yielding mixed n-gram-based metrics. The developed dataset will be publicly released to support further research on culturally and linguistically inclusive evaluation.

Paperid: 4164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21207.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face a fundamental adaptability challenge: their fixed message-passing architectures struggle with the immense diversity of real-world graphs, where optimal computational strategies vary by local structure and task. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a promising pathway to adaptability, existing graph MoE methods remain constrained by their reliance on supervised signals and instability when training heterogeneous experts. We introduce ADaMoRE (Adaptive Mixture of Residual Experts), a principled framework that enables robust, fully unsupervised training of heterogeneous MoE on graphs. ADaMoRE employs a backbone-residual expert architecture where foundational encoders provide stability while specialized residual experts capture diverse computational patterns. A structurally-aware gating network performs fine-grained node routing. The entire architecture is trained end-to-end using a unified unsupervised objective, which integrates a primary reconstruction task with an information-theoretic diversity regularizer to explicitly enforce functional specialization among the experts. Theoretical analysis confirms our design improves data efficiency and training stability. Extensive evaluation across 16 benchmarks validates ADaMoRE's state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised node classification and few-shot learning, alongside superior generalization, training efficiency, and faster convergence on diverse graphs and tasks.

Paperid: 4165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19384.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-training Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is central to web-scale applications such as search, recommendation, and knowledge discovery. However, existing CLIP-style graph-text aligners face two key limitations: they assume strict one-to-one correspondences between nodes and texts, overlooking the inherent many-to-many relations in real-world graphs; and they rely on static alignment objectives that cannot adapt to varying data quality, making them brittle under noisy supervision. Together, these limitations expose a core dilemma: embracing expressive many-to-many alignment amplifies noise, while reverting to strict one-to-one strategies sacrifices semantic diversity and fails to handle inherently mismatched pairs. To address these challenges, we propose ADAligner, a dynamic, quality-aware graph-text alignment framework that dynamically adjusts between expressive many-to-many and conservative one-to-one objectives according to supervision quality. ADAligner estimates batch-level alignment reliability in real time and adapts its optimization accordingly, promoting soft, subgraph-level many-to-many alignment when supervision is clean, while emphasizing reliable one-to-one alignment by dynamically filtering low-confidence pairs under noise. Theoretically, we prove that this dynamic mechanism forms a stable negative feedback process, ensuring convergence and robustness. Comprehensive experiments on nine diverse TAG datasets demonstrate that ADAligner consistently outperforms prior graph-text aligners on zero-/few-shot node classification, link prediction and cross-modal retrieval tasks. It maintains strong robustness under noisy supervision and accelerates pre-training by approximately 2 to 3 times compared to multimodal baselines, establishing a scalable and reliable foundation for graph-text representation learning in real-world web environments.

Paperid: 4166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19001.pdf

Abstract:
We present a two-phase vision-language QA system for autonomous driving that answers high-level perception, prediction, and planning questions. In Phase-1, a large multimodal LLM (Qwen2.5-VL-32B) is conditioned on six-camera inputs, a short temporal window of history, and a chain-of-thought prompt with few-shot exemplars. A self-consistency ensemble (multiple sampled reasoning chains) further improves answer reliability. In Phase-2, we augment the prompt with nuScenes scene metadata (object annotations, ego-vehicle state, etc.) and category-specific question instructions (separate prompts for perception, prediction, planning tasks). In experiments on a driving QA benchmark, our approach significantly outperforms the baseline Qwen2.5 models. For example, using 5 history frames and 10-shot prompting in Phase-1 yields 65.1% overall accuracy (vs.62.61% with zero-shot); applying self-consistency raises this to 66.85%. Phase-2 achieves 67.37% overall. Notably, the system maintains 96% accuracy under severe visual corruption. These results demonstrate that carefully engineered prompts and contextual grounding can greatly enhance high-level driving QA with pretrained vision-language models.

Paperid: 4167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17670.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) models offer remarkable flexibility by detecting objects from arbitrary text queries. However, their zero-shot performance in specialized domains like Remote Sensing (RS) is often compromised by the inherent ambiguity of natural language, limiting critical downstream applications. For instance, an OVD model may struggle to distinguish between fine-grained classes such as "fishing boat" and "yacht" since their embeddings are similar and often inseparable. This can hamper specific user goals, such as monitoring illegal fishing, by producing irrelevant detections. To address this, we propose a cascaded approach that couples the broad generalization of a large pre-trained OVD model with a lightweight few-shot classifier. Our method first employs the zero-shot model to generate high-recall object proposals. These proposals are then refined for high precision by a compact classifier trained in real-time on only a handful of user-annotated examples - drastically reducing the high costs of RS imagery annotation.The core of our framework is FLAME, a one-step active learning strategy that selects the most informative samples for training. FLAME identifies, on the fly, uncertain marginal candidates near the decision boundary using density estimation, followed by clustering to ensure sample diversity. This efficient sampling technique achieves high accuracy without costly full-model fine-tuning and enables instant adaptation, within less then a minute, which is significantly faster than state-of-the-art alternatives.Our method consistently surpasses state-of-the-art performance on RS benchmarks, establishing a practical and resource-efficient framework for adapting foundation models to specific user needs.

Paperid: 4168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16805.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid scaling of language models (LMs) has resulted in unprecedented computational, memory, and energy requirements, making their training and deployment increasingly unsustainable. Quantization has emerged as an essential compression technique to reduce model size, alleviate memory bottlenecks, and accelerate inference. However, while uniform low-bit quantization (e.g., INT8, INT4) provides significant efficiency gains, it can degrade accuracy in sensitive components of transformer-based LMs. Mixed-precision quantization offers a promising alternative by selectively allocating precision across layers or within tensors to balance efficiency and accuracy. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of Mixed-Precision quantization frameworks for LMs (MXPLMs). We first review quantization fundamentals, including uniform and non-uniform quantizers, quantization granularity, and methods widely used in post-training quantization. We then categorize and compare recent MXPLM frameworks according to their bit allocation strategies and precision configurations across weights, activations, and key-value caches. A comparative analysis highlights differences in perplexity, zero-shot task performance, and deployment trade-offs. Furthermore, we contrast MXPLMs with earlier mixed-precision quantization methods for deep neural networks, identifying strategies that transfer and those that face challenges in the LM setting. Finally, we summarize open issues and future directions, including hardware-aware design, activation quantization, and scalable optimization methods for billion-parameter models. By consolidating recent advances, this work serves as a reference for understanding the current landscape and research prospects of mixed-precision quantization for large-scale language models.

Paperid: 4169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14792.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) seeks to recognize and localize object categories beyond those seen during training. Recent approaches typically leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on direct image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps essential for interpreting semantically complex scenes. This results in limited robustness when confronted with crowded or occluded visual contexts. In this paper, we introduce CoT-PL, a new framework that employs structured visual chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process. CoT-PL decomposes object understanding into three interpretable steps: (1) region perception even for unseen objects, (2) category recognition via zero-shot reasoning, and (3) background grounding to separate semantically complex objects. Crucially, the third step naturally motivates our contrastive background learning (CBL) that uses the pre-computed background cues as negatives to promote feature disentanglement between objects and background. In this way, CoT reasoning and CBL form an integrated pipeline tailored to robust pseudo-labeling in crowded or occluded scenes. Notably, in these two settings, our novel-class pseudo-label quality achieves relative improvements of 103.4% and 168.4% over the best prior, respectively. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CoT-PL achieves +7.7 AP50 on open-vocabulary COCO and +2.9 mask AP on LVIS for novel classes, setting a new state of the art.

Paperid: 4170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13665.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of foundation models in AI has significantly advanced general-purpose learning, enabling remarkable capabilities in zero-shot inference and in-context learning. However, training such models on physics data, including solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs), poses a unique challenge due to varying dimensionalities across different systems. Traditional approaches either fix a maximum dimension or employ separate encoders for different dimensionalities, resulting in inefficiencies. To address this, we propose a dimension-agnostic neural network architecture, the Axial Neural Network (XNN), inspired by parameter-sharing structures such as Deep Sets and Graph Neural Networks. XNN generalizes across varying tensor dimensions while maintaining computational efficiency. We convert existing PDE foundation models into axial neural networks and evaluate their performance across three training scenarios: training from scratch, pretraining on multiple PDEs, and fine-tuning on a single PDE. Our experiments show that XNNs perform competitively with original models and exhibit superior generalization to unseen dimensions, highlighting the importance of multidimensional pretraining for foundation models.

Paperid: 4171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11715.pdf

Abstract:
Trackers and video generators solve closely related problems: the former analyze motion, while the latter synthesize it. We show that this connection enables pretrained video diffusion models to perform zero-shot point tracking by simply prompting them to visually mark points as they move over time. We place a distinctively colored marker at the query point, then regenerate the rest of the video from an intermediate noise level. This propagates the marker across frames, tracing the point's trajectory. To ensure that the marker remains visible in this counterfactual generation, despite such markers being unlikely in natural videos, we use the unedited initial frame as a negative prompt. Through experiments with multiple image-conditioned video diffusion models, we find that these "emergent" tracks outperform those of prior zero-shot methods and persist through occlusions, often obtaining performance that is competitive with specialized self-supervised models.

Paperid: 4172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11282.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate spatiotemporal traffic forecasting is a critical prerequisite for proactive resource management in dense urban mobile networks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in time series analysis, they inherently struggle to model the complex spatial dependencies of grid-based traffic data. Effectively extending LLMs to this domain is challenging, as representing the vast amount of information from dense geographical grids can be inefficient and overwhelm the model's context. To address these challenges, we propose ST-Vision-LLM, a novel framework that reframes spatiotemporal forecasting as a vision-language fusion problem. Our approach leverages a Vision-LLM visual encoder to process historical global traffic matrices as image sequences, providing the model with a comprehensive global view to inform cell-level predictions. To overcome the inefficiency of LLMs in handling numerical data, we introduce an efficient encoding scheme that represents floating-point values as single tokens via a specialized vocabulary, coupled with a two-stage numerical alignment fine-tuning process. The model is first trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and then further optimized for predictive accuracy using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a memory-efficient reinforcement learning method. Evaluations on real-world mobile traffic datasets demonstrate that ST-Vision-LLM outperforms existing methods by 15.6% in long-term prediction accuracy and exceeds the second-best baseline by over 30.04% in cross-domain few-shot scenarios. Our extensive experiments validate the model's strong generalization capabilities across various data-scarce environments.

Paperid: 4173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10604.pdf

Abstract:
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide potential for applications ranging from medical rehabilitation to cognitive state assessment by establishing direct communication pathways between the brain and external devices via electroencephalography (EEG). However, EEG-based BCIs are severely constrained by data scarcity and significant inter-subject variability, which hinder the generalization and applicability of EEG decoding models in practical settings. To address these challenges, we propose FusionGen, a novel EEG data generation framework based on disentangled representation learning and feature fusion. By integrating features across trials through a feature matching fusion module and combining them with a lightweight feature extraction and reconstruction pipeline, FusionGen ensures both data diversity and trainability under limited data constraints. Extensive experiments on multiple publicly available EEG datasets demonstrate that FusionGen significantly outperforms existing augmentation techniques, yielding notable improvements in classification accuracy.

Paperid: 4174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09243.pdf

Abstract:
Effectively identifying threats and mitigating their potential damage during crisis situations, such as natural disasters or violent attacks, is paramount for safeguarding endangered individuals. To tackle these challenges, AI has been used in assisting humans in emergency situations. Still, the use of NLP techniques remains limited and mostly focuses on classification tasks. The significant potential of timely warning message generation using NLG architectures, however, has been largely overlooked. In this paper we present CrisiText, the first large-scale dataset for the generation of warning messages across 13 different types of crisis scenarios. The dataset contains more than 400,000 warning messages (spanning almost 18,000 crisis situations) aimed at assisting civilians during and after such events. To generate the dataset, we started from existing crisis descriptions and created chains of events related to the scenarios. Each event was then paired with a warning message. The generations follow experts' written guidelines to ensure correct terminology and factuality of their suggestions. Additionally, each message is accompanied by three suboptimal warning types to allow for the study of different NLG approaches. To this end, we conducted a series of experiments comparing supervised fine-tuning setups with preference alignment, zero-shot, and few-shot approaches. We further assessed model performance in out-of-distribution scenarios and evaluated the effectiveness of an automatic post-editor.

Paperid: 4175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07094.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on sampling strategies of configuration variations for generating robust universal locomotion policies for quadrupedal robots. We investigate the effects of sampling physical robot parameters and joint proportional-derivative gains to enable training a single reinforcement learning policy that generalizes to multiple parameter configurations. Three fundamental joint gain sampling strategies are compared: parameter sampling with (1) linear and polynomial function mappings of mass-to-gains, (2) performance-based adaptive filtering, and (3) uniform random sampling. We improve the robustness of the policy by biasing the configurations using nominal priors and reference models. All training was conducted on RaiSim, tested in simulation on a range of diverse quadrupeds, and zero-shot deployed onto hardware using the ANYmal quadruped robot. Compared to multiple baseline implementations, our results demonstrate the need for significant joint controller gains randomization for robust closing of the sim-to-real gap.

Paperid: 4176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04236.pdf

Abstract:
We present Kaleido, a family of generative models designed for photorealistic, unified object- and scene-level neural rendering. Kaleido operates on the principle that 3D can be regarded as a specialised sub-domain of video, expressed purely as a sequence-to-sequence image synthesis task. Through a systemic study of scaling sequence-to-sequence generative neural rendering, we introduce key architectural innovations that enable our model to: i) perform generative view synthesis without explicit 3D representations; ii) generate any number of 6-DoF target views conditioned on any number of reference views via a masked autoregressive framework; and iii) seamlessly unify 3D and video modelling within a single decoder-only rectified flow transformer. Within this unified framework, Kaleido leverages large-scale video data for pre-training, which significantly improves spatial consistency and reduces reliance on scarce, camera-labelled 3D datasets -- all without any architectural modifications. Kaleido sets a new state-of-the-art on a range of view synthesis benchmarks. Its zero-shot performance substantially outperforms other generative methods in few-view settings, and, for the first time, matches the quality of per-scene optimisation methods in many-view settings.

Paperid: 4177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03648.pdf

Abstract:
Continuous learning of novel classes is crucial for edge devices to preserve data privacy and maintain reliable performance in dynamic environments. However, the scenario becomes particularly challenging when data samples are insufficient, requiring on-device few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) to maintain consistent model performance. Although existing work has explored parameter-efficient FSCIL frameworks based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), their deployment is still fundamentally constrained by limited device resources. Inspired by neural mechanisms, Spiking neural networks (SNNs) process spatiotemporal information efficiently, offering lower energy consumption, greater biological plausibility, and compatibility with neuromorphic hardware than ANNs. In this work, we present an SNN-based method for On-Device FSCIL, i.e., Sparsity-Aware and Fast Adaptive SNN (SAFA-SNN). We first propose sparsity-conditioned neuronal dynamics, in which most neurons remain stable while a subset stays active, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. To further cope with spike non-differentiability in gradient estimation, we employ zeroth-order optimization. Moreover, during incremental learning sessions, we enhance the discriminability of new classes through subspace projection, which alleviates overfitting to novel classes. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard benchmark datasets (CIFAR100 and Mini-ImageNet) and three neuromorphic datasets (CIFAR-10-DVS, DVS128gesture, and N-Caltech101) demonstrate that SAFA-SNN outperforms baseline methods, specifically achieving at least 4.01% improvement at the last incremental session on Mini-ImageNet and 20% lower energy cost over baseline methods with practical implementation.

Paperid: 4178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02219.pdf

Abstract:
The strong zero-shot and long-context capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for highly effective re-ranking systems. Attention-based re-rankers leverage attention weights from transformer heads to produce relevance scores, but not all heads are created equally: many contribute noise and redundancy, thus limiting performance. To address this, we introduce CoRe heads, a small set of retrieval heads identified via a contrastive scoring metric that explicitly rewards high attention heads that correlate with relevant documents, while downplaying nodes with higher attention that correlate with irrelevant documents. This relative ranking criterion isolates the most discriminative heads for re-ranking and yields a state-of-the-art list-wise re-ranker. Extensive experiments with three LLMs show that aggregated signals from CoRe heads, constituting less than 1% of all heads, substantially improve re-ranking accuracy over strong baselines. We further find that CoRe heads are concentrated in middle layers, and pruning the computation of final 50% of model layers preserves accuracy while significantly reducing inference time and memory usage.

Paperid: 4179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00739.pdf

Abstract:
Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.

Paperid: 4180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25863.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to few-shot whole slide image (WSI) classification by aligning visual features with textual representations, thereby reducing annotation cost and enhancing model generalization. Nevertheless, existing methods typically rely on slide-level prompts and fail to capture the subtype-specific phenotypic variations of histological entities (\emph{e.g.,} nuclei, glands) that are critical for cancer diagnosis. To address this gap, we propose Multi-scale Attribute-enhanced Prompt Learning (\textbf{MAPLE}), a hierarchical framework for few-shot WSI classification that jointly integrates multi-scale visual semantics and performs prediction at both the entity and slide levels. Specifically, we first leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate entity-level prompts that can help identify multi-scale histological entities and their phenotypic attributes, as well as slide-level prompts to capture global visual descriptions. Then, an entity-guided cross-attention module is proposed to generate entity-level features, followed by aligning with their corresponding subtype-specific attributes for fine-grained entity-level prediction. To enrich entity representations, we further develop a cross-scale entity graph learning module that can update these representations by capturing their semantic correlations within and across scales. The refined representations are then aggregated into a slide-level representation and aligned with the corresponding prompts for slide-level prediction. Finally, we combine both entity-level and slide-level outputs to produce the final prediction results. Results on three cancer cohorts confirm the effectiveness of our approach in addressing few-shot pathology diagnosis tasks.

Paperid: 4181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25568.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models are increasingly used to generate image captions in specific styles, such as humor or romantic. However, these transformer-based models often struggle with this subjective task in a zero-shot setting. While preference data can be used to align them toward a desired style, such data is expensive to acquire, limiting the ability to explore the models' full capabilities. This work addresses this by studying the data efficiency of aligning small vision-language models to humor and romantic styles. This approach helps to define the performance limits of these models and determine how little preference data is needed to achieve stylistic saturation, benchmarking their capabilities and limitations.

Paperid: 4182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24066.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread availability of pre-trained vision models has enabled numerous deep learning applications through their transferable representations. However, their computational and storage costs often limit practical deployment. Pruning-at-Initialization has emerged as a promising approach to compress models before training, enabling efficient task-specific adaptation. While conventional wisdom suggests that effective pruning requires task-specific data, this creates a challenge when downstream tasks are unknown in advance. In this paper, we investigate how data influences the pruning of pre-trained vision models. Surprisingly, pruning on one task retains the model's zero-shot performance also on unseen tasks. Furthermore, fine-tuning these pruned models not only improves performance on original seen tasks but can recover held-out tasks' performance. We attribute this phenomenon to the favorable loss landscapes induced by extensive pre-training on large-scale datasets.

Paperid: 4183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21486.pdf

Abstract:
Short video platforms are evolving rapidly, making the identification of inappropriate content increasingly critical. Existing approaches typically train separate and small classification models for each type of issue, which requires extensive human-labeled data and lacks cross-issue generalization. We propose a reasoning-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) pretraining paradigm for unified inappropriate content detection. To address the distribution gap between short video content and the original pretraining data of MLLMs, as well as the complex issue definitions, we introduce three targeted pretraining tasks: (1) \textit{Caption}, to enhance the MLLM's perception of video details; (2) \textit{Visual Question Answering (VQA)}, to deepen the MLLM's understanding of issue definitions and annotation guidelines; (3) \textit{Chain-of-Thought (CoT)}, to enhance the MLLM's reasoning capability. Experimental results show that our pretraining approach significantly improves the MLLM's performance in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) settings. In addition, our pretrained model demonstrates strong generalization capabilities to emergent, previously unseen issues.

Paperid: 4184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18123.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate interpretation of soil moisture patterns is critical for irrigation scheduling and crop management, yet existing approaches for soil moisture time-series analysis either rely on threshold-based rules or data-hungry machine learning or deep learning models that are limited in adaptability and interpretability. In this study, we introduce SPADE (Soil moisture Pattern and Anomaly DEtection), an integrated framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to jointly detect irrigation patterns and anomalies in soil moisture time-series data. SPADE utilizes ChatGPT-4.1 for its advanced reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, enabling zero-shot analysis without requiring task-specific annotation or fine-tuning. By converting time-series data into a textual representation and designing domain-informed prompt templates, SPADE identifies irrigation events, estimates net irrigation gains, detects, classifies anomalies, and produces structured, interpretable reports. Experiments were conducted on real-world soil moisture sensor data from commercial and experimental farms cultivating multiple crops across the United States. Results demonstrate that SPADE outperforms the existing method in anomaly detection, achieving higher recall and F1 scores and accurately classifying anomaly types. Furthermore, SPADE achieved high precision and recall in detecting irrigation events, indicating its strong capability to capture irrigation patterns accurately. SPADE's reports provide interpretability and usability of soil moisture analytics. This study highlights the potential of LLMs as scalable, adaptable tools for precision agriculture, which is capable of integrating qualitative knowledge and data-driven reasoning to produce actionable insights for accurate soil moisture monitoring and improved irrigation scheduling from soil moisture time-series data.

Paperid: 4185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11053.pdf

Abstract:
In the area of bearing fault diagnosis, deep learning (DL) methods have been widely used recently. However, due to the high cost or privacy concerns, high-quality labeled data are scarce in real world scenarios. While few-shot learning has shown promise in addressing data scarcity, existing methods still face significant limitations in this domain. Traditional data augmentation techniques often suffer from mode collapse and generate low-quality samples that fail to capture the diversity of bearing fault patterns. Moreover, conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with local receptive fields makes them inadequate for extracting global features from complex vibration signals. Additionally, existing methods fail to model the intricate relationships between limited training samples. To solve these problems, we propose an advanced data augmentation and contrastive fourier convolution framework (DAC-FCF) for bearing fault diagnosis under limited data. Firstly, a novel conditional consistent latent representation and reconstruction generative adversarial network (CCLR-GAN) is proposed to generate more diverse data. Secondly, a contrastive learning based joint optimization mechanism is utilized to better model the relations between the available training data. Finally, we propose a 1D fourier convolution neural network (1D-FCNN) to achieve a global-aware of the input data. Experiments demonstrate that DAC-FCF achieves significant improvements, outperforming baselines by up to 32\% on case western reserve university (CWRU) dataset and 10\% on a self-collected test bench. Extensive ablation experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed components. Thus, the proposed DAC-FCF offers a promising solution for bearing fault diagnosis under limited data.

Paperid: 4186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10710.pdf

Abstract:
Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) approaches primarily rely on RGB data or signer pose information. However, combining these modalities often results in the loss of crucial details, such as hand shape and orientation, due to imprecise representations like bounding boxes. Therefore, we propose the ISLR system SegSLR, which combines RGB and pose information through promptable zero-shot video segmentation. Given the rough localization of the hands and the signer's body from pose information, we segment the respective parts through the video to maintain all relevant shape information. Subsequently, the segmentations focus the processing of the RGB data on the most relevant body parts for ISLR. This effectively combines RGB and pose information. Our evaluation on the complex ChaLearn249 IsoGD dataset shows that SegSLR outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, ablation studies indicate that SegSLR strongly benefits from focusing on the signer's body and hands, justifying our design choices.

Paperid: 4187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08672.pdf

Abstract:
This work addresses a fundamental challenge in applying deep learning to power systems: developing neural network models that transfer across significant system changes, including networks with entirely different topologies and dimensionalities, without requiring training data from unseen reconfigurations. Despite extensive research, most ML-based approaches remain system-specific, limiting real-world deployment. This limitation stems from a dual barrier. First, topology changes shift feature distributions and alter input dimensions due to power flow physics. Second, reconfigurations redefine output semantics and dimensionality, requiring models to handle configuration-specific outputs while maintaining transferable feature extraction. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a Universal Graph Convolutional Network (UGCN) that achieves transferability to any reconfiguration or variation of existing power systems without any prior knowledge of new grid topologies or retraining during implementation. Our approach applies to both transmission and distribution networks and demonstrates generalization capability to completely unseen system reconfigurations, such as network restructuring and major grid expansions. Experimental results across power system applications, including false data injection detection and state forecasting, show that UGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-system zero-shot transferability of new reconfigurations.

Paperid: 4188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06233.pdf

Abstract:
Grounding object affordance is fundamental to robotic manipulation as it establishes the critical link between perception and action among interacting objects. However, prior works predominantly focus on predicting single-object affordance, overlooking the fact that most real-world interactions involve relationships between pairs of objects. In this work, we address the challenge of object-to-object affordance grounding under limited data contraints. Inspired by recent advances in few-shot learning with 2D vision foundation models, we propose a novel one-shot 3D object-to-object affordance learning approach for robotic manipulation. Semantic features from vision foundation models combined with point cloud representation for geometric understanding enable our one-shot learning pipeline to generalize effectively to novel objects and categories. We further integrate our 3D affordance representation with large language models (LLMs) for robotics manipulation, significantly enhancing LLMs' capability to comprehend and reason about object interactions when generating task-specific constraint functions. Our experiments on 3D object-to-object affordance grounding and robotic manipulation demonstrate that our O$^3$Afford significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of both accuracy and generalization capability.

Paperid: 4189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05863.pdf

Abstract:
We present LatinX, a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) model for cascaded speech-to-speech translation that preserves the source speaker's identity across languages. LatinX is a 12-layer decoder-only Transformer trained in three stages: (i) pre-training for text-to-audio mapping, (ii) supervised fine-tuning for zero-shot voice cloning, and (iii) alignment with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using automatically labeled pairs based on Word Error Rate (WER) and speaker-similarity metrics. Trained on English and Romance languages with emphasis on Portuguese, LatinX with DPO consistently reduces WER and improves objective similarity over the fine-tuned baseline. Human evaluations further indicate stronger perceived speaker similarity than a strong baseline (XTTSv2), revealing gaps between objective and subjective measures. We provide cross-lingual analyses and discuss balanced preference signals and lower-latency architectures as future work.

Paperid: 4190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00276.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based models such as BERT and E5 have significantly advanced text embedding by capturing rich contextual representations. However, many complex real-world queries require sophisticated reasoning to retrieve relevant documents beyond surface-level lexical matching, where encoder-only retrievers often fall short. Decoder-only large language models (LLMs), known for their strong reasoning capabilities, offer a promising alternative. Despite this potential, existing LLM-based embedding methods primarily focus on contextual representation and do not fully exploit the reasoning strength of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose Reasoning-Infused Text Embedding (RITE), a simple but effective approach that integrates logical reasoning into the text embedding process using generative LLMs. RITE builds upon existing language model embedding techniques by generating intermediate reasoning texts in the token space before computing embeddings, thereby enriching representations with inferential depth. Experimental results on BRIGHT, a reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmark, demonstrate that RITE significantly enhances zero-shot retrieval performance across diverse domains, underscoring the effectiveness of incorporating reasoning into the embedding process.

Paperid: 4191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20134.pdf

Abstract:
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices have begun to exhibit early quantum advantages on classically intractable problems, spanning physics simulations to Gaussian boson sampling. Yet, realizing these benefits remains challenging for non-experts, primarily due to the complexities of programming in Open Quantum Assembly Language (OpenQASM). Although Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown promise in automating classical programming workflows, their quantum counterparts have largely been restricted to specialized tasks such as quantum chemistry or error correction. In this paper, we present QAgent, an LLM-powered multi-agent system that fully automates OpenQASM programming. By integrating task planning, in-context few-shot learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for long-term context, predefined generation tools, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, the agents systematically improve both compilation and functional correctness. Our evaluations demonstrate substantial improvements: across multiple LLMs of varying sizes, QAgent enhances the accuracy of QASM code generation by 71.6\% compared to previous static LLM-based approaches. We envision this multi-agent system as a key enabler for democratizing quantum programming, bridging expertise gaps, and accelerating the practical adoption of quantum computing.

Paperid: 4192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19721.pdf

Abstract:
Existing resources for Automatic Speech Recognition in Portuguese are mostly focused on Brazilian Portuguese, leaving European Portuguese (EP) and other varieties under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce CAMÃES, the first open framework for EP and other Portuguese varieties. It consists of (1) a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, including 46h of EP test data spanning multiple domains; and (2) a collection of state-of-the-art models. For the latter, we consider multiple foundation models, evaluating their zero-shot and fine-tuned performances, as well as E-Branchformer models trained from scratch. A curated set of 425h of EP was used for both fine-tuning and training. Our results show comparable performance for EP between fine-tuned foundation models and the E-Branchformer. Furthermore, the best-performing models achieve relative improvements above 35% WER, compared to the strongest zero-shot foundation model, establishing a new state-of-the-art for EP and other varieties.

Paperid: 4193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17941.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of cellular networks and rising demand for high-quality services require efficient and autonomous network management solutions. Zero Touch Network (ZTN) management has emerged as a key approach to automating network operations, minimizing manual intervention, and improving service reliability. Digital Twin (DT) creates a virtual representation of the physical network in realtime, allowing continuous monitoring, predictive analytics, and intelligent decision-making by simulating what-if scenarios. This paper integrates DT with ZTN proactive bandwidth management in end-to-end (E2E) next-generation networks. The integrated architecture applies Few-Shot Learning (FSL) to a memoryaugmented Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to predict a new network state to augment the known and trained states. Using Q-learning, it determines the optimal action (e.g. traffic shaping) under varying network conditions such that user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are met. Three scenarios have been considered: 1) normal ZTN operation with closed-loop control, 2) a what-if scenario of DT, and 3) network state unknown to DT. The simulation results show that the network can adapt to underlying changing conditions. In addition, DT-assisted ZTN achieves better performance than the other techniques.

Paperid: 4194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17827.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial and medical anomaly detection faces critical challenges from data scarcity and prohibitive annotation costs, particularly in evolving manufacturing and healthcare settings. To address this, we propose CoZAD, a novel zero-shot anomaly detection framework that integrates soft confident learning with meta-learning and contrastive feature representation. Unlike traditional confident learning that discards uncertain samples, our method assigns confidence-based weights to all training data, preserving boundary information while emphasizing prototypical normal patterns. The framework quantifies data uncertainty through IQR-based thresholding and model uncertainty via covariance based regularization within a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning. Contrastive learning creates discriminative feature spaces where normal patterns form compact clusters, enabling rapid domain adaptation. Comprehensive evaluation across 10 datasets spanning industrial and medical domains demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods on 6 out of 7 industrial benchmarks with notable improvements on texture-rich datasets (99.2% I-AUROC on DTD-Synthetic, 97.2% on BTAD) and pixellevel localization (96.3% P-AUROC on MVTec-AD). The framework eliminates dependence on vision-language alignments or model ensembles, making it valuable for resourceconstrained environments requiring rapid deployment.

Paperid: 4195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17391.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), originally developed for natural language processing (NLP), have demonstrated the potential to generalize across modalities and domains. With their in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, LLMs can perform predictive tasks over structured inputs without explicit fine-tuning on downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the empirical function approximation capability of LLMs on small-scale structured datasets for classification, regression and clustering tasks. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-5, GPT-4o, GPT-o3, Gemini-2.5-Flash, DeepSeek-R1) under few-shot prompting and compare them against established machine learning (ML) baselines, including linear models, ensemble methods and tabular foundation models (TFMs). Our results show that LLMs achieve strong performance in classification tasks under limited data availability, establishing practical zero-training baselines. In contrast, the performance in regression with continuous-valued outputs is poor compared to ML models, likely because regression demands outputs in a large (often infinite) space, and clustering results are similarly limited, which we attribute to the absence of genuine ICL in this setting. Nonetheless, this approach enables rapid, low-overhead data exploration and offers a viable alternative to traditional ML pipelines in business intelligence and exploratory analytics contexts. We further analyze the influence of context size and prompt structure on approximation quality, identifying trade-offs that affect predictive performance. Our findings suggest that LLMs can serve as general-purpose predictive engines for structured data, with clear strengths in classification and significant limitations in regression and clustering.

Paperid: 4196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15151.pdf

Abstract:
Computed tomography (CT) is widely used in clinical diagnosis, but acquiring high-resolution (HR) CT is limited by radiation exposure risks. Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) methods have been studied to reconstruct HR from low-resolution (LR) inputs. While supervised SR approaches have shown promising results, they require large-scale paired LR-HR volume datasets that are often unavailable. In contrast, zero-shot methods alleviate the need for paired data by using only a single LR input, but typically struggle to recover fine anatomical details due to limited internal information. To overcome these, we propose a novel zero-shot 3D CT SR framework that leverages upsampled 2D X-ray projection priors generated by a diffusion model. Exploiting the abundance of HR 2D X-ray data, we train a diffusion model on large-scale 2D X-ray projection and introduce a per-projection adaptive sampling strategy. It selects the generative process for each projection, thus providing HR projections as strong external priors for 3D CT reconstruction. These projections serve as inputs to 3D Gaussian splatting for reconstructing a 3D CT volume. Furthermore, we propose negative alpha blending (NAB-GS) that allows negative values in Gaussian density representation. NAB-GS enables residual learning between LR and diffusion-based projections, thereby enhancing high-frequency structure reconstruction. Experiments on two datasets show that our method achieves superior quantitative and qualitative results for 3D CT SR.

Paperid: 4197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10110.pdf

Abstract:
Morphing attack detection has become an essential component of face recognition systems for ensuring a reliable verification scenario. In this paper, we present a multimodal learning approach that can provide a textual description of morphing attack detection. We first show that zero-shot evaluation of the proposed framework using Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) can yield not only generalizable morphing attack detection, but also predict the most relevant text snippet. We present an extensive analysis of ten different textual prompts that include both short and long textual prompts. These prompts are engineered by considering the human understandable textual snippet. Extensive experiments were performed on a face morphing dataset that was developed using a publicly available face biometric dataset. We present an evaluation of SOTA pre-trained neural networks together with the proposed framework in the zero-shot evaluation of five different morphing generation techniques that are captured in three different mediums.

Paperid: 4198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08615.pdf

Abstract:
Partial differential equations (PDEs) form the mathematical foundation for modeling physical systems in science and engineering, where numerical solutions demand rigorous accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. Mesh movement techniques address this challenge by dynamically relocating mesh nodes to rapidly-varying regions, enhancing both simulation accuracy and computational efficiency. However, traditional approaches suffer from high computational complexity and geometric inflexibility, limiting their applicability, and existing supervised learning-based approaches face challenges in zero-shot generalization across diverse PDEs and mesh topologies.In this paper, we present an Unsupervised and Generalizable Mesh Movement Network (UGM2N). We first introduce unsupervised mesh adaptation through localized geometric feature learning, eliminating the dependency on pre-adapted meshes. We then develop a physics-constrained loss function, M-Uniform loss, that enforces mesh equidistribution at the nodal level.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network exhibits equation-agnostic generalization and geometric independence in efficient mesh adaptation. It demonstrates consistent superiority over existing methods, including robust performance across diverse PDEs and mesh geometries, scalability to multi-scale resolutions and guaranteed error reduction without mesh tangling.

Paperid: 4199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22431.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale but noisy image-text pair data have paved the way for the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP). As the foundation vision encoder, CLIP in turn serves as the cornerstone for most large vision-language models (LVLMs). This interdependence naturally raises an interesting question: Can we reciprocally leverage LVLMs to enhance the quality of image-text pair data, thereby opening the possibility of a self-reinforcing cycle for continuous improvement? In this work, we take a significant step toward this vision by introducing an LVLM-driven data refinement pipeline. Our framework leverages LVLMs to process images and their raw alt-text, generating four complementary textual formulas: long positive descriptions, long negative descriptions, short positive tags, and short negative tags. Applying this pipeline to the curated DFN-Large dataset yields VLM-150M, a refined dataset enriched with multi-grained annotations. Based on this dataset, we further propose a training paradigm that extends conventional contrastive learning by incorporating negative descriptions and short tags as additional supervised signals. The resulting model, namely HQ-CLIP, demonstrates remarkable improvements across diverse benchmarks. Within a comparable training data scale, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and fine-grained visual understanding tasks. In retrieval benchmarks, HQ-CLIP even surpasses standard CLIP models trained on the DFN-2B dataset, which contains 10$\times$ more training data than ours. All code, data, and models are available at https://zxwei.site/hqclip.

Paperid: 4200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22061.pdf

Abstract:
This work addresses motion-guided few-shot video object segmentation (FSVOS), which aims to segment dynamic objects in videos based on a few annotated examples with the same motion patterns. Existing FSVOS datasets and methods typically focus on object categories, which are static attributes that ignore the rich temporal dynamics in videos, limiting their application in scenarios requiring motion understanding. To fill this gap, we introduce MOVE, a large-scale dataset specifically designed for motion-guided FSVOS. Based on MOVE, we comprehensively evaluate 6 state-of-the-art methods from 3 different related tasks across 2 experimental settings. Our results reveal that current methods struggle to address motion-guided FSVOS, prompting us to analyze the associated challenges and propose a baseline method, Decoupled Motion Appearance Network (DMA). Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in few shot motion understanding, establishing a solid foundation for future research in this direction.

Paperid: 4201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16393.pdf

Abstract:
Although face recognition systems have undergone an impressive evolution in the last decade, these technologies are vulnerable to attack presentations (AP). These attacks are mostly easy to create and, by executing them against the system's capture device, the malicious actor can impersonate an authorised subject and thus gain access to the latter's information (e.g., financial transactions). To protect facial recognition schemes against presentation attacks, state-of-the-art deep learning presentation attack detection (PAD) approaches require a large amount of data to produce reliable detection performances and even then, they decrease their performance for unknown presentation attack instruments (PAI) or database (information not seen during training), i.e. they lack generalisability. To mitigate the above problems, this paper focuses on zero-shot PAD. To do so, we first assess the effectiveness and generalisability of foundation models in established and challenging experimental scenarios and then propose a simple but effective framework for zero-shot PAD. Experimental results show that these models are able to achieve performance in difficult scenarios with minimal effort of the more advanced PAD mechanisms, whose weights were optimised mainly with training sets that included APs and bona fide presentations. The top-performing foundation model outperforms by a margin the best from the state of the art observed with the leaving-one-out protocol on the SiW-Mv2 database, which contains challenging unknown 2D and 3D attacks

Paperid: 4202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14686.pdf

Abstract:
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot abilities but struggle with complex Grounded Situation Recognition (GSR) and are resource-intensive for edge device deployment. Meanwhile, conventional GSR models often lack generalization ability, falling short in recognizing unseen and rare situations. In this paper, we exploit transferring knowledge from a teacher MLLM to a small GSR model to enhance its generalization and zero-shot abilities, thereby introducing the task of Open-vocabulary Grounded Situation Recognition (Ov-GSR). To achieve this, we propose Multimodal Interactive Prompt Distillation (MIPD), a novel framework that distills enriched multimodal knowledge from the foundation model, enabling the student Ov-GSR model to recognize unseen situations and be better aware of rare situations. Specifically, the MIPD framework first leverages the LLM-based Judgmental Rationales Generator (JRG) to construct positive and negative glimpse and gaze rationales enriched with contextual semantic information. The proposed scene-aware and instance-perception prompts are then introduced to align rationales with visual information from the MLLM teacher via the Negative-Guided Multimodal Prompting Alignment (NMPA) module, effectively capturing holistic and perceptual multimodal knowledge. Finally, the aligned multimodal knowledge is distilled into the student Ov-GSR model, providing a stronger foundation for generalization that enhances situation understanding, bridges the gap between seen and unseen scenarios, and mitigates prediction bias in rare cases. We evaluate MIPD on the refined Ov-SWiG dataset, achieving superior performance on seen, rare, and unseen situations, and further demonstrate improved unseen detection on the HICO-DET dataset.

Paperid: 4203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13579.pdf

Abstract:
As everyday use cases of large language model (LLM) AI assistants have expanded, it is becoming increasingly important to personalize responses to align to different users' preferences and goals. While reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is effective at improving LLMs to be generally more helpful and fluent, it does not account for variability across users, as it models the entire user population with a single reward model. We present a novel framework, Preference Learning Using Summarization (PLUS), that learns text-based summaries of each user's preferences, characteristics, and past conversations. These summaries condition the reward model, enabling it to make personalized predictions about the types of responses valued by each user. We train the user-summarization model with reinforcement learning, and update the reward model simultaneously, creating an online co-adaptation loop. We show that in contrast with prior personalized RLHF techniques or with in-context learning of user information, summaries produced by PLUS capture meaningful aspects of a user's preferences. Across different pluralistic user datasets, we show that our method is robust to new users and diverse conversation topics. Additionally, we demonstrate that the textual summaries generated about users can be transferred for zero-shot personalization of stronger, proprietary models like GPT-4. The resulting user summaries are not only concise and portable, they are easy for users to interpret and modify, allowing for more transparency and user control in LLM alignment.

Paperid: 4204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10906.pdf

Abstract:
Commit messages are essential in software development as they serve to document and explain code changes. Yet, their quality often falls short in practice, with studies showing significant proportions of empty or inadequate messages. While automated commit message generation has advanced significantly, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs), the evaluation of generated messages remains challenging. Traditional reference-based automatic metrics like BLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR have notable limitations in assessing commit message quality, as they assume a one-to-one mapping between code changes and commit messages, leading researchers to rely on resource-intensive human evaluation. This study investigates the potential of LLMs as automated evaluators for commit message quality. Through systematic experimentation with various prompt strategies and state-of-the-art LLMs, we demonstrate that LLMs combining Chain-of-Thought reasoning with few-shot demonstrations achieve near human-level evaluation proficiency. Our LLM-based evaluator significantly outperforms traditional metrics while maintaining acceptable reproducibility, robustness, and fairness levels despite some inherent variability. This work conducts a comprehensive preliminary study on using LLMs for commit message evaluation, offering a scalable alternative to human assessment while maintaining high-quality evaluation.

Paperid: 4205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06004.pdf

Abstract:
Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Co-MARL) requires agents to address catastrophic forgetting issues while learning new coordination policies with the dynamics team. In this paper, we delve into the core of Co-MARL, namely Relation Patterns, which refer to agents' general understanding of interactions. In addition to generality, relation patterns exhibit task-specificity when mapped to different action spaces. To this end, we propose a novel method called General Relation Patterns-Guided Task-Specific Decision-Maker (RPG). In RPG, agents extract relation patterns from dynamic observation spaces using a relation capturer. These task-agnostic relation patterns are then mapped to different action spaces via a task-specific decision-maker generated by a conditional hypernetwork. To combat forgetting, we further introduce regularization items on both the relation capturer and the conditional hypernetwork. Results on SMAC and LBF demonstrate that RPG effectively prevents catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks and achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks.

Paperid: 4206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01029.pdf

Abstract:
With the development of generative artificial intelligence and instruction tuning techniques, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive progress on general reasoning tasks. Benefiting from the chain-of-thought (CoT) methodology, MLLMs can solve the visual reasoning problem step-by-step. However, existing MLLMs still face significant challenges when applied to pathology visual reasoning tasks: (1) LLMs often underperforms because they lack domain-specific information, which can lead to model hallucinations. (2) The additional reasoning steps in CoT may introduce errors, leading to the divergence of answers. To address these limitations, we propose PathCoT, a novel zero-shot CoT prompting method which integrates the pathology expert-knowledge into the reasoning process of MLLMs and incorporates self-evaluation to mitigate divergence of answers. Specifically, PathCoT guides the MLLM with prior knowledge to perform as pathology experts, and provides comprehensive analysis of the image with their domain-specific knowledge. By incorporating the experts' knowledge, PathCoT can obtain the answers with CoT reasoning. Furthermore, PathCoT incorporates a self-evaluation step that assesses both the results generated directly by MLLMs and those derived through CoT, finally determining the reliable answer. The experimental results on the PathMMU dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on pathology visual understanding and reasoning.

Paperid: 4207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24068.pdf

Abstract:
Frontier AI developers are relying on layers of safeguards to protect against catastrophic misuse of AI systems. Anthropic guards their latest Claude 4 Opus model using one such defense pipeline, and other frontier developers including Google DeepMind and OpenAI pledge to soon deploy similar defenses. However, the security of such pipelines is unclear, with limited prior work evaluating or attacking these pipelines. We address this gap by developing and red-teaming an open-source defense pipeline. First, we find that a novel few-shot-prompted input and output classifier outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight safeguard model ShieldGemma across three attacks and two datasets, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) to 0% on the catastrophic misuse dataset ClearHarm. Second, we introduce a STaged AttaCK (STACK) procedure that achieves 71% ASR on ClearHarm in a black-box attack against the few-shot-prompted classifier pipeline. Finally, we also evaluate STACK in a transfer setting, achieving 33% ASR, providing initial evidence that it is feasible to design attacks with no access to the target pipeline. We conclude by suggesting specific mitigations that developers could use to thwart staged attacks.

Paperid: 4208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21499.pdf

Abstract:
Ultrasound Coherent Plane Wave Compounding (CPWC) enhances image contrast by combining echoes from multiple steered transmissions. While increasing the number of angles generally improves image quality, it drastically reduces the frame rate and can introduce blurring artifacts in fast-moving targets. Moreover, compounded images remain susceptible to noise, particularly when acquired with a limited number of transmissions. We propose a zero-shot denoising framework tailored for low-angle CPWC acquisitions, which enhances contrast without relying on a separate training dataset. The method divides the available transmission angles into two disjoint subsets, each used to form compound images that include higher noise levels. The new compounded images are then used to train a deep model via a self-supervised residual learning scheme, enabling it to suppress incoherent noise while preserving anatomical structures. Because angle-dependent artifacts vary between the subsets while the underlying tissue response is similar, this physics-informed pairing allows the network to learn to disentangle the inconsistent artifacts from the consistent tissue signal. Unlike supervised methods, our model requires no domain-specific fine-tuning or paired data, making it adaptable across anatomical regions and acquisition setups. The entire pipeline supports efficient training with low computational cost due to the use of a lightweight architecture, which comprises only two convolutional layers. Evaluations on simulation, phantom, and in vivo data demonstrate superior contrast enhancement and structure preservation compared to both classical and deep learning-based denoising methods.

Paperid: 4209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20671.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) has emerged as a pivotal approach for jointly learning scene geometry and semantics, enabling downstream applications such as navigation in mobile robotics. The recent generalization to Panoptic Scene Completion (PSC) advances the SSC domain by integrating instance-level information, thereby enhancing object-level sensitivity in scene understanding. While PSC was introduced using LiDAR modality, methods based on camera images remain largely unexplored. Moreover, recent Transformer-based approaches utilize a fixed set of learned queries to reconstruct objects within the scene volume. Although these queries are typically updated with image context during training, they remain static at test time, limiting their ability to dynamically adapt specifically to the observed scene. To overcome these limitations, we propose IPFormer, the first method that leverages context-adaptive instance proposals at train and test time to address vision-based 3D Panoptic Scene Completion. Specifically, IPFormer adaptively initializes these queries as panoptic instance proposals derived from image context and further refines them through attention-based encoding and decoding to reason about semantic instance-voxel relationships. Extensive experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art in-domain performance, exhibits superior zero-shot generalization on out-of-domain data, and achieves a runtime reduction exceeding 14x. These results highlight our introduction of context-adaptive instance proposals as a pioneering effort in addressing vision-based 3D Panoptic Scene Completion.

Paperid: 4210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19952.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), despite their ability to perform few-shot machine translation (MT), often lag behind dedicated MT systems trained on parallel corpora, which are crucial for high quality machine translation (MT). However, parallel corpora are often scarce or non-existent for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose CycleDistill, a bootstrapping approach leveraging LLMs and few-shot translation to obtain high-quality MT systems. CycleDistill involves iteratively generating synthetic parallel corpora from monolingual corpora via zero- or few-shot MT, which is then used to fine-tune the model that was used for generating said data for MT. CycleDistill does not need parallel corpora beyond 1 to 4 few-shot examples, and in our experiments focusing on three Indian languages, by relying solely on monolingual corpora, it can achieve high-quality machine translation, improving upon a few-shot baseline model by over 20-30 chrF points on average in the first iteration. We also study the effect of leveraging softmax activations during the distillation process and observe mild improvements in translation quality.

Paperid: 4211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19420.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal sarcasm understanding is a high-order cognitive task. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many downstream NLP tasks, growing evidence suggests that they struggle with sarcasm understanding. In this paper, we propose Commander-GPT, a modular decision routing framework inspired by military command theory. Rather than relying on a single LLM's capability, Commander-GPT orchestrates a team of specialized LLM agents where each agent will be selectively assigned to a focused sub-task such as context modeling, sentiment analysis, etc. Their outputs are then routed back to the commander, which integrates the information and performs the final sarcasm judgment. To coordinate these agents, we introduce three types of centralized commanders: (1) a trained lightweight encoder-based commander (e.g., multi-modal BERT); (2) four small autoregressive language models, serving as moderately capable commanders (e.g., DeepSeek-VL); (3) two large LLM-based commander (Gemini Pro and GPT-4o) that performs task routing, output aggregation, and sarcasm decision-making in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate Commander-GPT on the MMSD and MMSD 2.0 benchmarks, comparing five prompting strategies. Experimental results show that our framework achieves 4.4% and 11.7% improvement in F1 score over state-of-the-art (SoTA) baselines on average, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Paperid: 4212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19208.pdf

Abstract:
Ancient scripts, e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphs, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and Ancient Greek inscriptions, serve as vital carriers of human civilization, embedding invaluable historical and cultural information. Automating ancient script image recognition has gained importance, enabling large-scale interpretation and advancing research in archaeology and digital humanities. With the rise of deep learning, this field has progressed rapidly, with numerous script-specific datasets and models proposed. While these scripts vary widely, spanning phonographic systems with limited glyphs to logographic systems with thousands of complex symbols, they share common challenges and methodological overlaps. Moreover, ancient scripts face unique challenges, including imbalanced data distribution and image degradation, which have driven the development of various dedicated methods. This survey provides a comprehensive review of ancient script image recognition methods. We begin by categorizing existing studies based on script types and analyzing respective recognition methods, highlighting both their differences and shared strategies. We then focus on challenges unique to ancient scripts, systematically examining their impact and reviewing recent solutions, including few-shot learning and noise-robust techniques. Finally, we summarize current limitations and outline promising future directions. Our goal is to offer a structured, forward-looking perspective to support ongoing advancements in the recognition, interpretation, and decipherment of ancient scripts.

Paperid: 4213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11376.pdf

Abstract:
Family caregivers often face substantial mental health challenges due to their multifaceted roles and limited resources. This study explored the potential of a large language model (LLM)-powered conversational agent to deliver evidence-based mental health support for caregivers, specifically Problem-Solving Therapy (PST) integrated with Motivational Interviewing (MI) and Behavioral Chain Analysis (BCA). A within-subject experiment was conducted with 28 caregivers interacting with four LLM configurations to evaluate empathy and therapeutic alliance. The best-performing models incorporated Few-Shot and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) prompting techniques, alongside clinician-curated examples. The models showed improved contextual understanding and personalized support, as reflected by qualitative responses and quantitative ratings on perceived empathy and therapeutic alliances. Participants valued the model's ability to validate emotions, explore unexpressed feelings, and provide actionable strategies. However, balancing thorough assessment with efficient advice delivery remains a challenge. This work highlights the potential of LLMs in delivering empathetic and tailored support for family caregivers.

Paperid: 4214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11244.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual representations embed words with similar meanings to share a common semantic space across languages, creating opportunities to transfer debiasing effects between languages. However, existing methods for debiasing are unable to exploit this opportunity because they operate on individual languages. We present Iterative Multilingual Spectral Attribute Erasure (IMSAE), which identifies and mitigates joint bias subspaces across multiple languages through iterative SVD-based truncation. Evaluating IMSAE across eight languages and five demographic dimensions, we demonstrate its effectiveness in both standard and zero-shot settings, where target language data is unavailable, but linguistically similar languages can be used for debiasing. Our comprehensive experiments across diverse language models (BERT, LLaMA, Mistral) show that IMSAE outperforms traditional monolingual and cross-lingual approaches while maintaining model utility.

Paperid: 4215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10504.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST), reducing the need for task-specific training. However, conventional DST benchmarks primarily focus on structured user-agent conversations, failing to capture the complexities of real-world multi-user interactions. In this study, we assess the robustness of LLMs in multi-user DST while minimizing dataset construction costs. Inspired by recent advances in LLM-based data annotation, we extend an existing DST dataset by generating utterances of a second user based on speech act theory. Our methodology systematically incorporates a second user's utterances into conversations, enabling a controlled evaluation of LLMs in multi-user settings. Experimental results reveal a significant performance drop compared to single-user DST, highlighting the limitations of current LLMs in extracting and tracking dialogue states amidst multiple speakers. Our findings emphasize the need for future research to enhance LLMs for multi-user DST scenarios, paving the way for more realistic and robust DST models.

Paperid: 4216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10202.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches have shown impressive proficiency in extracting and leveraging parametric knowledge from Large-Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In this work, we consider how we can improve the identification and retrieval of videos related to complex real-world events by automatically extracting latent parametric knowledge about those events. We present Q2E: a Query-to-Event decomposition method for zero-shot multilingual text-to-video retrieval, adaptable across datasets, domains, LLMs, or VLMs. Our approach demonstrates that we can enhance the understanding of otherwise overly simplified human queries by decomposing the query using the knowledge embedded in LLMs and VLMs. We additionally show how to apply our approach to both visual and speech-based inputs. To combine this varied multimodal knowledge, we adopt entropy-based fusion scoring for zero-shot fusion. Through evaluations on two diverse datasets and multiple retrieval metrics, we demonstrate that Q2E outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines. Our evaluation also shows that integrating audio information can significantly improve text-to-video retrieval. We have released code and data for future research.

Paperid: 4217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09796.pdf

Abstract:
Knowing how test takers answer items in educational assessments is essential for test development, to evaluate item quality, and to improve test validity. However, this process usually requires extensive pilot studies with human participants. If large language models (LLMs) exhibit human-like response behavior to test items, this could open up the possibility of using them as pilot participants to accelerate test development. In this paper, we evaluate the human-likeness or psychometric plausibility of responses from 18 instruction-tuned LLMs with two publicly available datasets of multiple-choice test items across three subjects: reading, U.S. history, and economics. Our methodology builds on two theoretical frameworks from psychometrics which are commonly used in educational assessment, classical test theory and item response theory. The results show that while larger models are excessively confident, their response distributions can be more human-like when calibrated with temperature scaling. In addition, we find that LLMs tend to correlate better with humans in reading comprehension items compared to other subjects. However, the correlations are not very strong overall, indicating that LLMs should not be used for piloting educational assessments in a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 4218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05305.pdf

Abstract:
Agentic workflows, where multiple AI agents collaborate to accomplish complex tasks like reasoning or planning, play a substantial role in many cutting-edge commercial applications, and continue to fascinate researchers across nearly all fields for their potential to accomplish expensive, complex tasks that, until recently, only humans have been trusted to do. These workflows depend critically on the prompts used to provide the roles models play in such workflows. Poorly designed prompts that fail even slightly to guide individual agents can lead to sub-optimal performance that may snowball within a system of agents, limiting their reliability and scalability. To address this important problem of inference-time prompt optimization, we introduce ProRefine, an innovative inference-time optimization method that uses an agentic loop of LLMs to generate and apply textual feedback. ProRefine dynamically refines prompts for multi-step reasoning tasks without additional training or ground truth labels. Evaluated on five benchmark mathematical reasoning datasets, ProRefine significantly surpasses zero-shot Chain-of-Thought baselines by 3 to 37 percentage points. This approach not only boosts accuracy but also allows smaller models to approach the performance of their larger counterparts. This highlights its potential for building more cost-effective and powerful hybrid AI systems, thereby democratizing access to high-performing AI.

Paperid: 4219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05263.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, one of the main challenges in presentation attack detection (PAD) on ID cards is obtaining generalisation capabilities for a diversity of countries that are issuing ID cards. Most PAD systems are trained on one, two, or three ID documents because of privacy protection concerns. As a result, they do not obtain competitive results for commercial purposes when tested in an unknown new ID card country. In this scenario, Foundation Models (FM) trained on huge datasets can help to improve generalisation capabilities. This work intends to improve and benchmark the capabilities of FM and how to use them to adapt the generalisation on PAD of ID Documents. Different test protocols were used, considering zero-shot and fine-tuning and two different ID card datasets. One private dataset based on Chilean IDs and one open-set based on three ID countries: Finland, Spain, and Slovakia. Our findings indicate that bona fide images are the key to generalisation.

Paperid: 4220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04673.pdf

Abstract:
Self-Explainable Models (SEMs) rely on Prototypical Concept Learning (PCL) to enable their visual recognition processes more interpretable, but they often struggle in data-scarce settings where insufficient training samples lead to suboptimal performance.To address this limitation, we propose a Few-Shot Prototypical Concept Classification (FSPCC) framework that systematically mitigates two key challenges under low-data regimes: parametric imbalance and representation misalignment. Specifically, our approach leverages a Mixture of LoRA Experts (MoLE) for parameter-efficient adaptation, ensuring a balanced allocation of trainable parameters between the backbone and the PCL module.Meanwhile, cross-module concept guidance enforces tight alignment between the backbone's feature representations and the prototypical concept activation patterns.In addition, we incorporate a multi-level feature preservation strategy that fuses spatial and semantic cues across various layers, thereby enriching the learned representations and mitigating the challenges posed by limited data availability.Finally, to enhance interpretability and minimize concept overlap, we introduce a geometry-aware concept discrimination loss that enforces orthogonality among concepts, encouraging more disentangled and transparent decision boundaries.Experimental results on six popular benchmarks (CUB-200-2011, mini-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, Stanford Cars, FGVC-Aircraft, and DTD) demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing SEMs by a notable margin, with 4.2%-8.7% relative gains in 5-way 5-shot classification.These findings highlight the efficacy of coupling concept learning with few-shot adaptation to achieve both higher accuracy and clearer model interpretability, paving the way for more transparent visual recognition systems.

Paperid: 4221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01329.pdf

Abstract:
Psychological support hotlines are critical for crisis intervention but face significant challenges due to rising demand. Large language models (LLMs) could support crisis assessments, yet their capabilities in emotionally sensitive contexts remain unclear. We introduce PsyCrisisBench, a benchmark of 540 annotated transcripts from the Hangzhou Psychological Assistance Hotline, assessing four tasks: mood status recognition, suicidal ideation detection, suicide plan identification, and risk assessment. We evaluated 64 LLMs across 15 families (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek) using zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning paradigms. Performance was measured by F1-score, with statistical comparisons via Welch's t-tests. LLMs performed strongly on suicidal ideation detection (F1=0.880), suicide plan identification (F1=0.779), and risk assessment (F1=0.907), improved with few-shot and fine-tuning. Mood status recognition was more challenging (max F1=0.709), likely due to lost vocal cues and ambiguity. A fine-tuned 1.5B-parameter model (Qwen2.5-1.5B) surpassed larger models on mood and suicidal ideation. Open-source models like QwQ-32B performed comparably to closed-source on most tasks (p>0.3), though closed models retained an edge in mood detection (p=0.007). Performance scaled with size up to a point; quantization (AWQ) reduced GPU memory by 70% with minimal F1 degradation. LLMs show substantial promise in structured psychological crisis assessments, especially with fine-tuning. Mood recognition remains limited due to contextual complexity. The narrowing gap between open- and closed-source models, combined with efficient quantization, suggests feasible integration. PsyCrisisBench offers a robust evaluation framework to guide model development and ethical deployment in mental health.

Paperid: 4222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00982.pdf

Abstract:
Deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been demonstrated effectively in simulations for many multi-robot problems. For autonomous vehicles, the development of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies provide opportunities to further enhance safety of the system. However, zero-shot transfer of simulator-trained MARL policies to hardware dynamic systems remains challenging, and how to leverage communication and shared information for MARL has limited demonstrations on hardware. This problem is challenged by discrepancies between simulated and physical states, system state and model uncertainties, practical shared information design, and the need for safety guarantees in both simulation and hardware. This paper introduces RSR-RSMARL, a novel Robust and Safe MARL framework that supports Real-Sim-Real (RSR) policy adaptation for multi-agent systems with communication among agents, with both simulation and hardware demonstrations. RSR-RSMARL leverages state (includes shared state information among agents) and action representations considering real system complexities for MARL formulation. The MARL policy is trained with robust MARL algorithm to enable zero-shot transfer to hardware considering the sim-to-real gap. A safety shield module using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provides safety guarantee for each individual agent. Experiment results on F1/10th-scale autonomous vehicles with V2V communication demonstrate the ability of RSR-RSMARL framework to enhance driving safety and coordination across multiple configurations. These findings emphasize the importance of jointly designing robust policy representations and modular safety architectures to enable scalable, generalizable RSR transfer in multi-agent autonomy.

Paperid: 4223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00319.pdf

Abstract:
As language models evolve to tackle complex, multifaceted tasks, their evaluation must adapt to capture this intricacy. A granular, skill-specific understanding of model capabilities can empower researchers to make informed model development plans. In this paper, we introduce SkillVerse, an unsupervised tree-structured diagnosis framework for understanding model proficiency in specific abilities. With LLM as a judge, SkillVerse first critiques the model responses, and then organizes them into a hierarchical structure termed dendrogram. Given proficiency at arbitrary levels of granularity, SkillVerse is flexible to produce insights of behaviors of modern large models. We also demonstrate its efficacy in two downstream tasks: 1) improving model in-context learning by 25% using a tree-search algorithm to select more informative few-shot demonstrations, and 2) accurately predicting new model weaknesses with a 55% success rate, 22% higher than without SkillVerse.

Paperid: 4224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23911.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks using few examples, with task vectors - specific hidden state activations - hypothesized to encode task information. Existing studies are limited by small-scale benchmarks, restricting comprehensive analysis. We introduce QuiteAFew, a novel dataset of 3,096 diverse few-shot tasks, each with 30 input-output pairs derived from the Alpaca dataset. Experiments with Llama-3-8B on QuiteAFew reveal: (1) task vector performance peaks at an intermediate layer (e.g., 15th), (2) effectiveness varies significantly by task type, and (3) complex tasks rely on multiple, subtask-specific vectors rather than a single vector, suggesting distributed task knowledge representation.

Paperid: 4225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22517.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal out-of-context news is a type of misinformation in which the image is used outside of its original context. Many existing works have leveraged multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for detecting out-of-context news. However, observing the limited zero-shot performance of smaller MLLMs, they generally require label-rich fine-tuning and/or expensive API calls to GPT models to improve the performance, which is impractical in low-resource scenarios. In contrast, we aim to improve the performance of small MLLMs in a more label-efficient and cost-effective manner. To this end, we first prompt multiple teacher MLLMs to generate both label predictions and corresponding rationales, which collectively serve as the teachers' knowledge. We then introduce a two-stage knowledge distillation framework to transfer this knowledge to a student MLLM. In Stage 1, we apply LoRA fine-tuning to the student model using all training data. In Stage 2, we further fine-tune the student model using both LoRA fine-tuning and DPO on the data points where teachers' predictions conflict. This two-stage strategy reduces annotation costs and helps the student model uncover subtle patterns in more challenging cases. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance using less than 10% labeled data.

Paperid: 4226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21636.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into academic workflows, with many conferences and journals permitting their use for tasks such as language refinement and literature summarization. However, their use in peer review remains prohibited due to concerns around confidentiality breaches, hallucinated content, and inconsistent evaluations. As LLM-generated text becomes more indistinguishable from human writing, there is a growing need for reliable attribution mechanisms to preserve the integrity of the review process. In this work, we evaluate topic-based watermarking (TBW), a lightweight, semantic-aware technique designed to embed detectable signals into LLM-generated text. We conduct a comprehensive assessment across multiple LLM configurations, including base, few-shot, and fine-tuned variants, using authentic peer review data from academic conferences. Our results show that TBW maintains review quality relative to non-watermarked outputs, while demonstrating strong robustness to paraphrasing-based evasion. These findings highlight the viability of TBW as a minimally intrusive and practical solution for enforcing LLM usage in peer review.

Paperid: 4227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20866.pdf

Abstract:
Encrypted traffic classification is highly challenging in network security due to the need for extracting robust features from content-agnostic traffic data. Existing approaches face critical issues: (i) Distribution drift, caused by reliance on the closedworld assumption, limits adaptability to realworld, shifting patterns; (ii) Dependence on labeled data restricts applicability where such data is scarce or unavailable. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in offering generalizable solutions across a wide range of tasks, achieving notable success in various specialized fields. However, their effectiveness in traffic analysis remains constrained by challenges in adapting to the unique requirements of the traffic domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel traffic representation model named Encrypted Traffic Out-of-Distribution Instruction Tuning with LLM (ETooL), which integrates LLMs with knowledge of traffic structures through a self-supervised instruction tuning paradigm. This framework establishes connections between textual information and traffic interactions. ETooL demonstrates more robust classification performance and superior generalization in both supervised and zero-shot traffic classification tasks. Notably, it achieves significant improvements in F1 scores: APP53 (I.I.D.) to 93.19%(6.62%) and 92.11%(4.19%), APP53 (O.O.D.) to 74.88%(18.17%) and 72.13%(15.15%), and ISCX-Botnet (O.O.D.) to 95.03%(9.16%) and 81.95%(12.08%). Additionally, we construct NETD, a traffic dataset designed to support dynamic distributional shifts, and use it to validate ETooL's effectiveness under varying distributional conditions. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficiency gains achieved through ETooL's instruction tuning approach.

Paperid: 4228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17747.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a set of training-free ABX-style discrimination tasks to evaluate how multilingual language models represent language identity (form) and semantic content (meaning). Inspired from speech processing, these zero-shot tasks measure whether minimal differences in representation can be reliably detected. This offers a flexible and interpretable alternative to probing. Applied to XLM-R (Conneau et al, 2020) across pretraining checkpoints and layers, we find that language discrimination declines over training and becomes concentrated in lower layers, while meaning discrimination strengthens over time and stabilizes in deeper layers. We then explore probing tasks, showing some alignment between our metrics and linguistic learning performance. Our results position ABX tasks as a lightweight framework for analyzing the structure of multilingual representations.

Paperid: 4229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15332.pdf

Abstract:
Leveraging the power of multimodal large language models (LLMs) offers a promising approach to enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of morphing attack detection (MAD), especially in real-world biometric applications. This work introduces the use of LLMs for differential morphing attack detection (D-MAD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to employ multimodal LLMs to D-MAD using real biometric data. To effectively utilize these models, we design Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based prompts to reduce failure-to-answer rates and enhance the reasoning behind decisions. Our contributions include: (1) the first application of multimodal LLMs for D-MAD using real data subjects, (2) CoT-based prompt engineering to improve response reliability and explainability, (3) comprehensive qualitative and quantitative benchmarking of LLM performance using data from 54 individuals captured in passport enrollment scenarios, and (4) comparative analysis of two multimodal LLMs: ChatGPT-4o and Gemini providing insights into their morphing attack detection accuracy and decision transparency. Experimental results show that ChatGPT-4o outperforms Gemini in detection accuracy, especially against GAN-based morphs, though both models struggle under challenging conditions. While Gemini offers more consistent explanations, ChatGPT-4o is more resilient but prone to a higher failure-to-answer rate.

Paperid: 4230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13257.pdf

Abstract:
Preference alignment has become a standard pipeline in finetuning models to follow \emph{generic} human preferences. Majority of work seeks to optimize model to produce responses that would be preferable \emph{on average}, simplifying the diverse and often \emph{contradicting} space of human preferences. While research has increasingly focused on personalized alignment: adapting models to individual user preferences, there is a lack of personalized preference dataset which focus on nuanced individual-level preferences. To address this, we introduce WikiPersona: the first fine-grained personalization using well-documented, famous individuals. Our dataset challenges models to align with these personas through an interpretable process: generating verifiable textual descriptions of a persona's background and preferences in addition to alignment. We systematically evaluate different personalization approaches and find that as few-shot prompting with preferences and fine-tuning fail to simultaneously ensure effectiveness and efficiency, using \textit{inferred personal preferences} as prefixes enables effective personalization, especially in topics where preferences clash while leading to more equitable generalization across unseen personas.

Paperid: 4231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12821.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as dominant forces for textual style transfer. However, for arbitrary style transfer, LLMs face two key challenges: (1) considerable reliance on manually-constructed prompts and (2) rigid stylistic biases inherent in LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel Synthesize-then-Decode (SynDec) approach, which automatically synthesizes high-quality prompts and amplifies their roles during decoding process. Specifically, our approach synthesizes prompts by selecting representative few-shot samples, conducting a four-dimensional style analysis, and reranking the candidates. At LLM decoding stage, the TST effect is amplified by maximizing the contrast in output probabilities between scenarios with and without the synthesized prompt, as well as between prompts and negative samples. We conduct extensive experiments and the results show that SynDec outperforms existing state-of-the-art LLM-based methods on five out of six benchmarks (e.g., achieving up to a 9\% increase in accuracy for modern-to-Elizabethan English transfer). Detailed ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of SynDec.

Paperid: 4232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12752.pdf

Abstract:
Object-goal navigation (ON) enables autonomous robots to locate and reach user-specified objects in previously unknown environments, offering promising applications in domains such as assistive care and disaster response. Existing ON methods -- including training-free approaches, reinforcement learning, and zero-shot planners -- generally depend on active exploration to identify landmark objects (e.g., kitchens or desks), followed by navigation toward semantically related targets (e.g., a specific mug). However, these methods often lack strategic planning and do not adequately address trade-offs among multiple objectives. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework that formulates ON as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOO), balancing frontier-based knowledge exploration with knowledge exploitation over previously observed landmarks; we call this framework MOON (MOO-driven ON). We implement a prototype MOON system that integrates three key components: (1) building on QOM [IROS05], a classical ON system that compactly and discriminatively encodes landmarks based on their semantic relevance to the target; (2) integrating StructNav [RSS23], a recently proposed training-free planner, to enhance the navigation pipeline; and (3) introducing a variable-horizon set orienteering problem formulation to enable global optimization over both exploration and exploitation strategies. This work represents an important first step toward developing globally optimized, next-generation object-goal navigation systems.

Paperid: 4233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12391.pdf

Abstract:
This work introduces CLIP-aware Domain-Adaptive Super-Resolution (CDASR), a novel framework that addresses the critical challenge of domain generalization in single image super-resolution. By leveraging the semantic capabilities of CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), CDASR achieves unprecedented performance across diverse domains and extreme scaling factors. The proposed method integrates CLIP-guided feature alignment mechanism with a meta-learning inspired few-shot adaptation strategy, enabling efficient knowledge transfer and rapid adaptation to target domains. A custom domain-adaptive module processes CLIP features alongside super-resolution features through a multi-stage transformation process, including CLIP feature processing, spatial feature generation, and feature fusion. This intricate process ensures effective incorporation of semantic information into the super-resolution pipeline. Additionally, CDASR employs a multi-component loss function that combines pixel-wise reconstruction, perceptual similarity, and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate CDASR's superiority, particularly in challenging scenarios. On the Urban100 dataset at $\times$8 scaling, CDASR achieves a significant PSNR gain of 0.15dB over existing methods, with even larger improvements of up to 0.30dB observed at $\times$16 scaling.

Paperid: 4234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20110.pdf

Abstract:
AI-driven surrogate modeling has become an increasingly effective alternative to physics-based simulations for 3D design, analysis, and manufacturing. These models leverage data-driven methods to predict physical quantities traditionally requiring computationally expensive simulations. However, the scarcity of labeled CAD-to-simulation datasets has driven recent advancements in self-supervised and foundation models, where geometric representation learning is performed offline and later fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks. While these approaches have shown promise, their effectiveness is limited in applications requiring fine-scale geometric detail preservation. This work introduces a self-supervised geometric representation learning method designed to capture fine-scale geometric features from non-parametric 3D models. Unlike traditional end-to-end surrogate models, this approach decouples geometric feature extraction from downstream physics tasks, learning a latent space embedding guided by geometric reconstruction losses. Key elements include the essential use of near-zero level sampling and the innovative batch-adaptive attention-weighted loss function, which enhance the encoding of intricate design features. The proposed method is validated through case studies in structural mechanics, demonstrating strong performance in capturing design features and enabling accurate few-shot physics predictions. Comparisons with traditional parametric surrogate modeling highlight its potential to bridge the gap between geometric and physics-based representations, providing an effective solution for surrogate modeling in data-scarce scenarios.

Paperid: 4235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16369.pdf

Abstract:
Data-driven model predictive control (MPC) has demonstrated significant potential for improving robot control performance in the presence of model uncertainties. However, existing approaches often require extensive offline data collection and computationally intensive training, limiting their ability to adapt online. To address these challenges, this paper presents a fast online adaptive MPC framework that leverages neural networks integrated with Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). Our approach focuses on few-shot adaptation of residual dynamics - capturing the discrepancy between nominal and true system behavior - using minimal online data and gradient steps. By embedding these meta-learned residual models into a computationally efficient L4CasADi-based MPC pipeline, the proposed method enables rapid model correction, enhances predictive accuracy, and improves real-time control performance. We validate the framework through simulation studies on a Van der Pol oscillator, a Cart-Pole system, and a 2D quadrotor. Results show significant gains in adaptation speed and prediction accuracy over both nominal MPC and nominal MPC augmented with a freshly initialized neural network, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach for real-time adaptive robot control.

Paperid: 4236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15587.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular generation plays an important role in drug discovery and materials science, especially in data-scarce scenarios where traditional generative models often struggle to achieve satisfactory conditional generalization. To address this challenge, we propose MetaMolGen, a first-order meta-learning-based molecular generator designed for few-shot and property-conditioned molecular generation. MetaMolGen standardizes the distribution of graph motifs by mapping them to a normalized latent space, and employs a lightweight autoregressive sequence model to generate SMILES sequences that faithfully reflect the underlying molecular structure. In addition, it supports conditional generation of molecules with target properties through a learnable property projector integrated into the generative process.Experimental results demonstrate that MetaMolGen consistently generates valid and diverse SMILES sequences under low-data regimes, outperforming conventional baselines. This highlights its advantage in fast adaptation and efficient conditional generation for practical molecular design.

Paperid: 4237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11054.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) aims at pre-training agents that can solve a wide range of downstream tasks in complex environments. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they may require running an RL process on each downstream task to achieve a satisfactory performance, they may need access to datasets with good coverage or well-curated task-specific samples, or they may pre-train policies with unsupervised losses that are poorly correlated with the downstream tasks of interest. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm regularizing unsupervised RL towards imitating trajectories from unlabeled behavior datasets. The key technical novelty of our method, called Forward-Backward Representations with Conditional-Policy Regularization, is to train forward-backward representations to embed the unlabeled trajectories to the same latent space used to represent states, rewards, and policies, and use a latent-conditional discriminator to encourage policies to ``cover'' the states in the unlabeled behavior dataset. As a result, we can learn policies that are well aligned with the behaviors in the dataset, while retaining zero-shot generalization capabilities for reward-based and imitation tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach in a challenging humanoid control problem: leveraging observation-only motion capture datasets, we train Meta Motivo, the first humanoid behavioral foundation model that can be prompted to solve a variety of whole-body tasks, including motion tracking, goal reaching, and reward optimization. The resulting model is capable of expressing human-like behaviors and it achieves competitive performance with task-specific methods while outperforming state-of-the-art unsupervised RL and model-based baselines.

Paperid: 4238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09000.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires a robot to locate a target object in an unseen environment using egocentric observations. However, decision-making policies often struggle to transfer to unseen environments and novel target objects, which is the core generalization problem. Traditional end-to-end learning methods exacerbate this issue, as they rely on memorizing spatial patterns rather than employing structured reasoning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively. In this letter, we introduce Closed-Loop Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought Navigation (CL-CoTNav), a vision-language model (VLM)-driven ObjectNav framework that integrates structured reasoning and closed-loop feedback into navigation decision-making. To enhance generalization, we fine-tune a VLM using multi-turn question-answering (QA) data derived from human demonstration trajectories. This structured dataset enables hierarchical Chain-of-Thought (H-CoT) prompting, systematically extracting compositional knowledge to refine perception and decision-making, inspired by the human cognitive process of locating a target object through iterative reasoning steps. Additionally, we propose a Closed-Loop H-CoT mechanism that incorporates detection and reasoning confidence scores into training. This adaptive weighting strategy guides the model to prioritize high-confidence data pairs, mitigating the impact of noisy inputs and enhancing robustness against hallucinated or incorrect reasoning. Extensive experiments in the AI Habitat environment demonstrate CL-CoTNav's superior generalization to unseen scenes and novel object categories. Our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in navigation success rate (SR) and success weighted by path length (SPL) by 22.4\%. We release our datasets, models, and supplementary videos on our project page.

Paperid: 4239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07896.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining behavioral foundation models (BFMs), enabling agents to solve a wide range of downstream tasks specified via reward functions in a zero-shot fashion, i.e., without additional test-time learning or planning. This is achieved by learning self-supervised task embeddings alongside corresponding near-optimal behaviors and incorporating an inference procedure to directly retrieve the latent task embedding and associated policy for any given reward function. Despite promising results, zero-shot policies are often suboptimal due to errors induced by the unsupervised training process, the embedding, and the inference procedure. In this paper, we focus on devising fast adaptation strategies to improve the zero-shot performance of BFMs in a few steps of online interaction with the environment while avoiding any performance drop during the adaptation process. Notably, we demonstrate that existing BFMs learn a set of skills containing more performant policies than those identified by their inference procedure, making them well-suited for fast adaptation. Motivated by this observation, we propose both actor-critic and actor-only fast adaptation strategies that search in the low-dimensional task-embedding space of the pre-trained BFM to rapidly improve the performance of its zero-shot policies on any downstream task. Notably, our approach mitigates the initial "unlearning" phase commonly observed when fine-tuning pre-trained RL models. We evaluate our fast adaptation strategies on top of four state-of-the-art zero-shot RL methods in multiple navigation and locomotion domains. Our results show that they achieve 10-40% improvement over their zero-shot performance in a few tens of episodes, outperforming existing baselines.

Paperid: 4240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05317.pdf

Abstract:
Question Answering (QA) accounts for a significant portion of LLM usage "in the wild". However, LLMs sometimes produce false or misleading responses, also known as "hallucinations". Therefore, grounding the generated answers in contextually provided information -- i.e., providing evidence for the generated text -- is paramount for LLMs' trustworthiness. Providing this information is the task of context attribution. In this paper, we systematically study LLM-based approaches for this task, namely we investigate (i) zero-shot inference, (ii) LLM ensembling, and (iii) fine-tuning of small LMs on synthetic data generated by larger LLMs. Our key contribution is SynQA: a novel generative strategy for synthesizing context attribution data. Given selected context sentences, an LLM generates QA pairs that are supported by these sentences. This leverages LLMs' natural strengths in text generation while ensuring clear attribution paths in the synthetic training data. We show that the attribution data synthesized via SynQA is highly effective for fine-tuning small LMs for context attribution in different QA tasks and domains. Finally, with a user study, we validate the usefulness of small LMs (fine-tuned on synthetic data from SynQA) in context attribution for QA.

Paperid: 4241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03524.pdf

Abstract:
Methods for navigation based on large-scale learning typically treat each episode as a new problem, where the agent is spawned with a clean memory in an unknown environment. While these generalization capabilities to an unknown environment are extremely important, we claim that, in a realistic setting, an agent should have the capacity of exploiting information collected during earlier robot operations. We address this by introducing a new retrieval-augmented agent, trained with RL, capable of querying a database collected from previous episodes in the same environment and learning how to integrate this additional context information. We introduce a unique agent architecture for the general navigation task, evaluated on ImageNav, Instance-ImageNav and ObjectNav. Our retrieval and context encoding methods are data-driven and employ vision foundation models (FM) for both semantic and geometric understanding. We propose new benchmarks for these settings and we show that retrieval allows zero-shot transfer across tasks and environments while significantly improving performance.

Paperid: 4242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02178.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate detection of offensive language is essential for a number of applications related to social media safety. There is a sharp contrast in performance in this task between low and high-resource languages. In this paper, we adapt fine-tuning strategies that have not been previously explored for Sinhala in the downstream task of offensive language detection. Using this approach, we introduce four models: "Subasa-XLM-R", which incorporates an intermediate Pre-Finetuning step using Masked Rationale Prediction. Two variants of "Subasa-Llama" and "Subasa-Mistral", are fine-tuned versions of Llama (3.2) and Mistral (v0.3), respectively, with a task-specific strategy. We evaluate our models on the SOLD benchmark dataset for Sinhala offensive language detection. All our models outperform existing baselines. Subasa-XLM-R achieves the highest Macro F1 score (0.84) surpassing state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-4o when evaluated on the same SOLD benchmark dataset under zero-shot settings. The models and code are publicly available.

Paperid: 4243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24267.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid and unrestrained advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents a double-edged sword: while enabling unprecedented creativity, it also facilitates the generation of highly convincing deceptive content, undermining societal trust. As image generation techniques become increasingly sophisticated, detecting synthetic images is no longer just a binary task: it necessitates interpretable, context-aware methodologies that enhance trustworthiness and transparency. However, existing detection models primarily focus on classification, offering limited explanatory insights into image authenticity. In this work, we propose FakeScope, an expert multimodal model (LMM) tailored for AI-generated image forensics, which not only identifies AI-synthetic images with high accuracy but also provides rich, interpretable, and query-driven forensic insights. We first construct FakeChain dataset that contains linguistic authenticity reasoning based on visual trace evidence, developed through a novel human-machine collaborative framework. Building upon it, we further present FakeInstruct, the largest multimodal instruction tuning dataset containing 2 million visual instructions tailored to enhance forensic awareness in LMMs. FakeScope achieves state-of-the-art performance in both closed-ended and open-ended forensic scenarios. It can distinguish synthetic images with high accuracy while offering coherent and insightful explanations, free-form discussions on fine-grained forgery attributes, and actionable enhancement strategies. Notably, despite being trained exclusively on qualitative hard labels, FakeScope demonstrates remarkable zero-shot quantitative capability on detection, enabled by our proposed token-based probability estimation strategy. Furthermore, FakeScope exhibits strong generalization and in-the-wild ability, ensuring its applicability in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 4244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22194.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ORIGEN, the first zero-shot method for 3D orientation grounding in text-to-image generation across multiple objects and diverse categories. While previous work on spatial grounding in image generation has mainly focused on 2D positioning, it lacks control over 3D orientation. To address this, we propose a reward-guided sampling approach using a pretrained discriminative model for 3D orientation estimation and a one-step text-to-image generative flow model. While gradient-ascent-based optimization is a natural choice for reward-based guidance, it struggles to maintain image realism. Instead, we adopt a sampling-based approach using Langevin dynamics, which extends gradient ascent by simply injecting random noise--requiring just a single additional line of code. Additionally, we introduce adaptive time rescaling based on the reward function to accelerate convergence. Our experiments show that ORIGEN outperforms both training-based and test-time guidance methods across quantitative metrics and user studies.

Paperid: 4245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20118.pdf

Abstract:
Human-object interaction (HOI) synthesis is important for various applications, ranging from virtual reality to robotics. However, acquiring 3D HOI data is challenging due to its complexity and high cost, limiting existing methods to the narrow diversity of object types and interaction patterns in training datasets. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot HOI synthesis framework without relying on end-to-end training on currently limited 3D HOI datasets. The core idea of our method lies in leveraging extensive HOI knowledge from pre-trained Multimodal Models. Given a text description, our system first obtains temporally consistent 2D HOI image sequences using image or video generation models, which are then uplifted to 3D HOI milestones of human and object poses. We employ pre-trained human pose estimation models to extract human poses and introduce a generalizable category-level 6-DoF estimation method to obtain the object poses from 2D HOI images. Our estimation method is adaptive to various object templates obtained from text-to-3D models or online retrieval. A physics-based tracking of the 3D HOI kinematic milestone is further applied to refine both body motions and object poses, yielding more physically plausible HOI generation results. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is capable of generating open-vocabulary HOIs with physical realism and semantic diversity.

Paperid: 4246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16854.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Information Extraction (VIE), aiming at extracting structured information from visually rich document images, plays a pivotal role in document processing. Considering various layouts, semantic scopes, and languages, VIE encompasses an extensive range of types, potentially numbering in the thousands. However, many of these types suffer from a lack of training data, which poses significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model, named Generative Compositor, to address the challenge of few-shot VIE. The Generative Compositor is a hybrid pointer-generator network that emulates the operations of a compositor by retrieving words from the source text and assembling them based on the provided prompts. Furthermore, three pre-training strategies are employed to enhance the model's perception of spatial context information. Besides, a prompt-aware resampler is specially designed to enable efficient matching by leveraging the entity-semantic prior contained in prompts. The introduction of the prompt-based retrieval mechanism and the pre-training strategies enable the model to acquire more effective spatial and semantic clues with limited training samples. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves highly competitive results in the full-sample training, while notably outperforms the baseline in the 1-shot, 5-shot, and 10-shot settings.

Paperid: 4247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16022.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) has transformed the use of large language models (LLMs) for NLP tasks, enabling few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples without finetuning. Despite its effectiveness, ICL is prone to errors, especially for challenging examples. With the goal of improving the performance of ICL, we propose corrective in-context learning (CICL), an approach that incorporates a model's incorrect predictions alongside ground truth corrections into the prompt, aiming to enhance classification accuracy through self-correction. However, contrary to our hypothesis, extensive experiments on text classification tasks demonstrate that CICL consistently underperforms standard ICL, with performance degrading as the proportion of corrections in the prompt increases. Our findings indicate that CICL introduces confusion by disrupting the model's task understanding, rather than refining its predictions. Additionally, we observe that presenting harder examples in standard ICL does not improve performance, suggesting that example difficulty alone may not be a reliable criterion for effective selection. By presenting these negative results, we provide important insights into the limitations of self-corrective mechanisms in LLMs and offer directions for future research.

Paperid: 4248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15948.pdf

Abstract:
Quantifying the realism of images remains a challenging problem in the field of artificial intelligence. For example, an image of Albert Einstein holding a smartphone violates common-sense because modern smartphone were invented after Einstein's death. We introduce a novel method for assessing image realism using Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) and Natural Language Inference (NLI). Our approach is based on the premise that LVLMs may generate hallucinations when confronted with images that defy common sense. Using LVLM to extract atomic facts from these images, we obtain a mix of accurate facts and erroneous hallucinations. We proceed by calculating pairwise entailment scores among these facts, subsequently aggregating these values to yield a singular reality score. This process serves to identify contradictions between genuine facts and hallucinatory elements, signaling the presence of images that violate common sense. Our approach has achieved a new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot mode on the WHOOPS! dataset.

Paperid: 4249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14938.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification (FS-RSSC) presents the challenge of classifying remote sensing images with limited labeled samples. Existing methods typically emphasize single-modal feature learning, neglecting the potential benefits of optimizing multi-modal representations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Optimal Transport Adapter Tuning (OTAT) framework aimed at constructing an ideal Platonic representational space through optimal transport (OT) theory. This framework seeks to harmonize rich visual information with less dense textual cues, enabling effective cross-modal information transfer and complementarity. Central to this approach is the Optimal Transport Adapter (OTA), which employs a cross-modal attention mechanism to enrich textual representations and facilitate subsequent better information interaction. By transforming the network optimization into an OT optimization problem, OTA establishes efficient pathways for balanced information exchange between modalities. Moreover, we introduce a sample-level Entropy-Aware Weighted (EAW) loss, which combines difficulty-weighted similarity scores with entropy-based regularization. This loss function provides finer control over the OT optimization process, enhancing its solvability and stability. Our framework offers a scalable and efficient solution for advancing multimodal learning in remote sensing applications. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that OTAT achieves state-of-the-art performance in FS-RSSC, significantly improving the model performance and generalization.

Paperid: 4250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12204.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents an optimization method for generating kinodynamically feasible and collision-free multi-robot trajectories that exploits an incremental denoising scheme in diffusion models. Our key insight is that high-quality trajectories can be discovered merely by denoising noisy trajectories sampled from a distribution. This approach has no learning component, relying instead on only two ingredients: a dynamical model of the robots to obtain feasible trajectories via rollout, and a fitness function to guide denoising with Monte Carlo gradient approximation. The proposed framework iteratively optimizes a deformation for the previous trajectory with the current denoising process, allows anytime refinement as time permits, supports different dynamics, and benefits from GPU acceleration. Our evaluations for differential-drive and holonomic teams with up to 16 robots in 2D and 3D worlds show its ability to discover high-quality solutions faster than other black-box optimization methods such as MPPI. In a 2D holonomic case with 16 robots, it is almost twice as fast. As evidence for feasibility, we demonstrate zero-shot deployment of the planned trajectories on eight multirotors.

Paperid: 4251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08722.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have had a significant impact across various AI applications, enabling use cases that were previously impossible. Contrastive Visual Language Models (VLMs), in particular, have outperformed other techniques in many tasks. However, their prevalence in remote sensing (RS) is still limited, due to the scarcity of diverse remote-sensing visual-language datasets. In this work we introduce two novel image-caption datasets for training of remote sensing foundation models. The first dataset pairs aerial and satellite imagery with captions generated by Gemini using landmarks extracted from Google Maps. The second dataset utilizes public web images and their corresponding alt-text, filtered for the remote sensing domain, resulting in a diverse dataset with greater breadth in image styles and subject matter. These datasets are used to pre-train the MaMMUT~\citep{kuo2023mammutsimplearchitecturejoint} VLM architecture, resulting in state-of-the-art generalization performance in zero-shot cross-modal retrieval on well-known public benchmarks. Finally, we present our ongoing research to distill image-level knowledge gained in the VLM contrastive training procedure to enhance the model's localization ability. Specifically, we iteratively generate pseudo-labels for image regions based on the model's attention maps and use these labels for further training. To mitigate noisy attention maps and create robust segmentation masks, we introduce a novel attention-pooling mechanism called the Smooth-Attention-Operation.

Paperid: 4252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07027.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Unet-based diffusion models, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, have introduced effective spatial and subject control mechanisms. However, the DiT (Diffusion Transformer) architecture still struggles with efficient and flexible control. To tackle this issue, we propose EasyControl, a novel framework designed to unify condition-guided diffusion transformers with high efficiency and flexibility. Our framework is built on three key innovations. First, we introduce a lightweight Condition Injection LoRA Module. This module processes conditional signals in isolation, acting as a plug-and-play solution. It avoids modifying the base model weights, ensuring compatibility with customized models and enabling the flexible injection of diverse conditions. Notably, this module also supports harmonious and robust zero-shot multi-condition generalization, even when trained only on single-condition data. Second, we propose a Position-Aware Training Paradigm. This approach standardizes input conditions to fixed resolutions, allowing the generation of images with arbitrary aspect ratios and flexible resolutions. At the same time, it optimizes computational efficiency, making the framework more practical for real-world applications. Third, we develop a Causal Attention Mechanism combined with the KV Cache technique, adapted for conditional generation tasks. This innovation significantly reduces the latency of image synthesis, improving the overall efficiency of the framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that EasyControl achieves exceptional performance across various application scenarios. These innovations collectively make our framework highly efficient, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of tasks.

Paperid: 4253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18530.pdf

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate the workflow of machine learning, but most existing methods share a common limitation: they attempt to optimize entire pipelines in a single step before evaluation, making it difficult to attribute improvements to specific changes. This lack of granularity leads to unstable optimization and slower convergence, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we introduce Iterative Refinement, a novel strategy for LLM-driven ML pipeline design inspired by how human ML experts iteratively refine models, focusing on one component at a time rather than making sweeping changes all at once. By systematically updating individual components based on real training feedback, Iterative Refinement improves overall model performance. We also provide some theoretical edvience of the superior properties of this Iterative Refinement. Further, we implement this strategy in IMPROVE, an end-to-end LLM agent framework for automating and optimizing object classification pipelines. Through extensive evaluations across datasets of varying sizes and domains, we demonstrate that Iterative Refinement enables IMPROVE to consistently achieve better performance over existing zero-shot LLM-based approaches.

Paperid: 4254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14822.pdf

Abstract:
The period from 2019 to the present has represented one of the biggest paradigm shifts in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), culminating in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs) from 2022 onward. Methods leveraging pretrained encoder-only models (e.g., BERT) and LLMs have outperformed many previous approaches, particularly excelling in zero-shot scenarios and complex reasoning tasks. This work surveys the evolution of model architectures in IR, focusing on two key aspects: backbone models for feature extraction and end-to-end system architectures for relevance estimation. The review intentionally separates architectural considerations from training methodologies to provide a focused analysis of structural innovations in IR systems. We trace the development from traditional term-based methods to modern neural approaches, particularly highlighting the impact of transformer-based models and subsequent large language models (LLMs). We conclude with a forward-looking discussion of emerging challenges and future directions, including architectural optimizations for performance and scalability, handling of multimodal, multilingual data, and adaptation to novel application domains such as autonomous search agents that is beyond traditional search paradigms.

Paperid: 4255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13894.pdf

Abstract:
Navigating unfamiliar environments presents significant challenges for household robots, requiring the ability to recognize and reason about novel decoration and layout. Existing reinforcement learning methods cannot be directly transferred to new environments, as they typically rely on extensive mapping and exploration, leading to time-consuming and inefficient. To address these challenges, we try to transfer the logical knowledge and the generalization ability of pre-trained foundation models to zero-shot navigation. By integrating a large vision-language model with a diffusion network, our approach named \mname ~constructs a visual predictor that continuously predicts the agent's potential observations in the next step which can assist robots generate robust actions. Furthermore, to adapt the temporal property of navigation, we introduce temporal historical information to ensure that the predicted image is aligned with the navigation scene. We then carefully designed an information fusion framework that embeds the predicted future frames as guidance into goal-reaching policy to solve downstream image navigation tasks. This approach enhances navigation control and generalization across both simulated and real-world environments. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the robustness and versatility of our method, showcasing its potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of robotic navigation in diverse settings.

Paperid: 4256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13310.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems rely heavily on labor-intensive turn-level annotations, such as dialogue states and policy labels, for training. This work explores whether large language models (LLMs) can be fine-tuned solely on natural language dialogs to perform ToD tasks, without requiring such annotations. We evaluate their ability to generalize to unseen domains and compare their performance with models trained on fully annotated data. Through extensive experiments with three open-source LLMs of varying sizes and two diverse ToD datasets, we find that models fine-tuned without turn-level annotations generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses. However, their task completion performance - measured by accurate execution of API calls - remains suboptimal, with the best models achieving only around 53% success in unseen domains. To improve task completion, we propose ZeroToD, a framework that incorporates a schema augmentation mechanism to enhance API call accuracy and overall task completion rates, particularly in out-of-domain settings. We also compare ZeroToD with fine-tuning-free alternatives, such as prompting off-the-shelf LLMs, and find that our framework enables smaller, fine-tuned models that outperform large-scale proprietary LLMs in task completion. Additionally, a human study evaluating informativeness, fluency, and task completion confirms our empirical findings. These findings suggest the feasibility of developing cost-effective, scalable, and zero-shot generalizable ToD systems for real-world applications.

Paperid: 4257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13298.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems facilitate users in accomplishing complex, multi-turn tasks through natural language. While traditional approaches rely on extensive fine-tuning and annotated data for each domain, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) offer a more flexible alternative. However, LLMs struggle to reliably handle multi-turn task completion, particularly with accurately generating API calls and adapting to new domains without explicit demonstrations. To address these challenges, we propose RealTOD, a novel framework that enhances TOD systems through prompt chaining and fine-grained feedback mechanisms. Prompt chaining enables zero-shot domain adaptation via a two-stage prompting strategy, eliminating the need for human-curated demonstrations. Meanwhile, the fine-grained feedback mechanism improves task completion by verifying API calls against domain schemas and providing precise corrective feedback when errors are detected. We conduct extensive experiments on the SGD and BiTOD benchmarks using four LLMs. RealTOD improves API accuracy, surpassing AutoTOD by 37.74% on SGD and SimpleTOD by 11.26% on BiTOD. Human evaluations further confirm that LLMs integrated with RealTOD achieve superior task completion, fluency, and informativeness compared to existing methods.

Paperid: 4258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10148.pdf

Abstract:
Despite much progress in training distributed artificial intelligence (AI), building cooperative multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces challenges in sample efficiency, interpretability, and transferability. Unlike traditional learning-based methods that require extensive interaction with the environment, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in zero-shot planning and complex reasoning. However, existing LLM-based approaches heavily rely on text-based observations and struggle with the non-Markovian nature of multi-agent interactions under partial observability. We present COMPASS, a novel multi-agent architecture that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with a dynamic skill library and structured communication for decentralized closed-loop decision-making. The skill library, bootstrapped from demonstrations, evolves via planner-guided tasks to enable adaptive strategies. COMPASS propagates entity information through multi-hop communication under partial observability. Evaluations on the improved StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMACv2) demonstrate COMPASS's strong performance against state-of-the-art MARL baselines across both symmetric and asymmetric scenarios. Notably, in the symmetric Protoss 5v5 task, COMPASS achieved a 57\% win rate, representing a 30 percentage point advantage over QMIX (27\%). Project page can be found at https://stellar-entremet-1720bb.netlify.app/.

Paperid: 4259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09004.pdf

Abstract:
This paper makes three contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 1,419,047 comments posted on 3,161 YouTube news videos of major US cable news outlets, we analyze how users engage with LGBTQ+ news content. Our analyses focus both on positive and negative content. In particular, we construct a fine-grained hope speech classifier that detects positive (hope speech), negative, neutral, and irrelevant content. Second, in consultation with a public health expert specializing on LGBTQ+ health, we conduct an annotation study with a balanced and diverse political representation and release a dataset of 3,750 instances with fine-grained labels and detailed annotator demographic information. Finally, beyond providing a vital resource for the LGBTQ+ community, our annotation study and subsequent in-the-wild assessments reveal (1) strong association between rater political beliefs and how they rate content relevant to a marginalized community; (2) models trained on individual political beliefs exhibit considerable in-the-wild disagreement; and (3) zero-shot large language models (LLMs) align more with liberal raters.

Paperid: 4260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08260.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are advancing rapidly, with Level-4 AVs already operating in real-world conditions. Current AVs, however, still lag behind human drivers in adaptability and performance, often exhibiting overly conservative behaviours and occasionally violating traffic laws. Existing solutions, such as runtime enforcement, mitigate this by automatically repairing the AV's planned trajectory at runtime, but such approaches lack transparency and should be a measure of last resort. It would be preferable for AV repairs to generalise beyond specific incidents and to be interpretable for users. In this work, we propose FixDrive, a framework that analyses driving records from near-misses or law violations to generate AV driving strategy repairs that reduce the chance of such incidents occurring again. These repairs are captured in Î¼Drive, a high-level domain-specific language for specifying driving behaviours in response to event-based triggers. Implemented for the state-of-the-art autonomous driving system Apollo, FixDrive identifies and visualises critical moments from driving records, then uses a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with zero-shot learning to generate Î¼Drive programs. We tested FixDrive on various benchmark scenarios, and found that the generated repairs improved the AV's performance with respect to following traffic laws, avoiding collisions, and successfully reaching destinations. Furthermore, the direct costs of repairing an AV -- 15 minutes of offline analysis and $0.08 per violation -- are reasonable in practice.

Paperid: 4261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06907.pdf

Abstract:
Can ChatGPT diagnose Alzheimer's Disease (AD)? AD is a devastating neurodegenerative condition that affects approximately 1 in 9 individuals aged 65 and older, profoundly impairing memory and cognitive function. This paper utilises 9300 electronic health records (EHRs) with data from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and cognitive tests to address an intriguing question: As a general-purpose task solver, can ChatGPT accurately detect AD using EHRs? We present an in-depth evaluation of ChatGPT using a black-box approach with zero-shot and multi-shot methods. This study unlocks ChatGPT's capability to analyse MRI and cognitive test results, as well as its potential as a diagnostic tool for AD. By automating aspects of the diagnostic process, this research opens a transformative approach for the healthcare system, particularly in addressing disparities in resource-limited regions where AD specialists are scarce. Hence, it offers a foundation for a promising method for early detection, supporting individuals with timely interventions, which is paramount for Quality of Life (QoL).

Paperid: 4262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15177.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-Language Models (ALMs), which are trained on audio-text data, focus on the processing, understanding, and reasoning of sounds. Unlike traditional supervised learning approaches learning from predefined labels, ALMs utilize natural language as a supervision signal, which is more suitable for describing complex real-world audio recordings. ALMs demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities and can be flexibly adapted to diverse downstream tasks. These strengths not only enhance the accuracy and generalization of audio processing tasks but also promote the development of models that more closely resemble human auditory perception and comprehension. Recent advances in ALMs have positioned them at the forefront of computer audition research, inspiring a surge of efforts to advance ALM technologies. Despite rapid progress in the field of ALMs, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of ALMs with a focus on general audio tasks, aiming to fill this gap by providing a structured and holistic overview of ALMs. Specifically, we cover: (1) the background of computer audition and audio-language models; (2) the foundational aspects of ALMs, including prevalent network architectures, training objectives, and evaluation methods; (3) foundational pre-training and audio-language pre-training approaches; (4) task-specific fine-tuning, multi-task tuning and agent systems for downstream applications; (5) datasets and benchmarks; and (6) current challenges and future directions. Our review provides a clear technical roadmap for researchers to understand the development and future trends of existing technologies, offering valuable references for implementation in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 4263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14210.pdf

Abstract:
The task of predicting time and location from images is challenging and requires complex human-like puzzle-solving ability over different clues. In this work, we formalize this ability into core skills and implement them using different modules in an expert pipeline called PuzzleGPT. PuzzleGPT consists of a perceiver to identify visual clues, a reasoner to deduce prediction candidates, a combiner to combinatorially combine information from different clues, a web retriever to get external knowledge if the task can't be solved locally, and a noise filter for robustness. This results in a zero-shot, interpretable, and robust approach that records state-of-the-art performance on two datasets -- TARA and WikiTilo. PuzzleGPT outperforms large VLMs such as BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, LLaVA, and even GPT-4V, as well as automatically generated reasoning pipelines like VisProg, by at least 32% and 38%, respectively. It even rivals or surpasses finetuned models.

Paperid: 4264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13241.pdf

Abstract:
Many real-world decision-making problems are combinatorial in nature, where states (e.g., surrounding traffic of a self-driving car) can be seen as a combination of basic elements (e.g., pedestrians, trees, and other cars). Due to combinatorial complexity, observing all combinations of basic elements in the training set is infeasible, which leads to an essential yet understudied problem of zero-shot generalization to states that are unseen combinations of previously seen elements. In this work, we first formalize this problem and then demonstrate how existing value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle due to unreliable value predictions in unseen states. We argue that this problem cannot be addressed with exploration alone, but requires more expressive and generalizable models. We demonstrate that behavior cloning with a conditioned diffusion model trained on expert trajectory generalizes better to states formed by new combinations of seen elements than traditional RL methods. Through experiments in maze, driving, and multiagent environments, we show that conditioned diffusion models outperform traditional RL techniques and highlight the broad applicability of our problem formulation.

Paperid: 4265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10695.pdf

Abstract:
Conditional dependency present one of the trickiest problems in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, leading to significant property variations of the same state (object) across different objects (states). To address this problem, existing approaches often adopt either all-to-one or one-to-one representation paradigms. However, these extremes create an imbalance in the seesaw between transferability and discriminability, favoring one at the expense of the other. Comparatively, humans are adept at analogizing and reasoning in a hierarchical clustering manner, intuitively grouping categories with similar properties to form cohesive concepts. Motivated by this, we propose Homogeneous Group Representation Learning (HGRL), a new perspective formulates state (object) representation learning as multiple homogeneous sub-group representation learning. HGRL seeks to achieve a balance between semantic transferability and discriminability by adaptively discovering and aggregating categories with shared properties, learning distributed group centers that retain group-specific discriminative features. Our method integrates three core components designed to simultaneously enhance both the visual and prompt representation capabilities of the model. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

Paperid: 4266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08389.pdf

Abstract:
A fundamental challenge of shared autonomy is to use high-DoF robots to assist, rather than hinder, humans by first inferring user intent and then empowering the user to achieve their intent. Although successful, prior methods either rely heavily on a priori knowledge of all possible human intents or require many demonstrations and interactions with the human to learn these intents before being able to assist the user. We propose and study a zero-shot, vision-only shared autonomy (VOSA) framework designed to allow robots to use end-effector vision to estimate zero-shot human intents in conjunction with blended control to help humans accomplish manipulation tasks with unknown and dynamically changing object locations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our VOSA framework, we instantiate a simple version of VOSA on a Kinova Gen3 manipulator and evaluate our system by conducting a user study on three tabletop manipulation tasks. The performance of VOSA matches that of an oracle baseline model that receives privileged knowledge of possible human intents while also requiring significantly less effort than unassisted teleoperation. In more realistic settings, where the set of possible human intents is fully or partially unknown, we demonstrate that VOSA requires less human effort and time than baseline approaches while being preferred by a majority of the participants. Our results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of using off-the-shelf vision algorithms to enable flexible and beneficial shared control of a robot manipulator. Code and videos available here: https://sites.google.com/view/zeroshot-sharedautonomy/home.

Paperid: 4267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00233.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with precise length control, particularly in zero-shot settings. We conduct a comprehensive study evaluating LLMs' length control capabilities across multiple measures and propose practical methods to improve controllability. Our experiments with LLaMA 3 reveal stark differences in length adherence across measures and highlight inherent biases of the model. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of methods: length approximation, target adjustment, sample filtering, and automated revisions. By combining these methods, we demonstrate substantial improvements in length compliance while maintaining or enhancing summary quality, providing highly effective zero-shot strategies for precise length control without the need for model fine-tuning or architectural changes. With our work, we not only advance our understanding of LLM behavior in controlled text generation but also pave the way for more reliable and adaptable summarization systems in real-world applications.

Paperid: 4268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20392.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal contrastive learning models (e.g., CLIP) can learn high-quality representations from large-scale image-text datasets, while they exhibit significant vulnerabilities to backdoor attacks, raising serious safety concerns. In this paper, we reveal that CLIP's vulnerabilities primarily stem from its tendency to encode features beyond in-dataset predictive patterns, compromising its visual feature resistivity to input perturbations. This makes its encoded features highly susceptible to being reshaped by backdoor triggers. To address this challenge, we propose Repulsive Visual Prompt Tuning (RVPT), a novel defense approach that employs deep visual prompt tuning with a specially designed feature-repelling loss. Specifically, RVPT adversarially repels the encoded features from deeper layers while optimizing the standard cross-entropy loss, ensuring that only predictive features in downstream tasks are encoded, thereby enhancing CLIP's visual feature resistivity against input perturbations and mitigating its susceptibility to backdoor attacks. Unlike existing multimodal backdoor defense methods that typically require the availability of poisoned data or involve fine-tuning the entire model, RVPT leverages few-shot downstream clean samples and only tunes a small number of parameters. Empirical results demonstrate that RVPT tunes only 0.27\% of the parameters in CLIP, yet it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods, reducing the attack success rate from 89.70\% to 2.76\% against the most advanced multimodal attacks on ImageNet and effectively generalizes its defensive capabilities across multiple datasets.

Paperid: 4269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19128.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research in the domain of multimodal unified representations predominantly employs codebook as representation forms, utilizing Vector Quantization(VQ) for quantization, yet there has been insufficient exploration of other quantization representation forms. Our work explores more precise quantization methods and introduces a new framework, Semantic Residual Cross-modal Information Disentanglement (SRCID), inspired by the numerical residual concept inherent to Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ). SRCID employs semantic residual-based information disentanglement for multimodal data to better handle the inherent discrepancies between different modalities. Our method enhances the capabilities of unified multimodal representations and demonstrates exceptional performance in cross-modal generalization and cross-modal zero-shot retrieval. Its average results significantly surpass existing state-of-the-art models, as well as previous attempts with RVQ and Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) based on these modals.

Paperid: 4270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18298.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomaly detection (VAD) has witnessed significant advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), addressing critical challenges such as interpretability, temporal reasoning, and generalization in dynamic, open-world scenarios. This paper presents an in-depth review of cutting-edge LLM-/VLM-based methods in 2024, focusing on four key aspects: (i) enhancing interpretability through semantic insights and textual explanations, making visual anomalies more understandable; (ii) capturing intricate temporal relationships to detect and localize dynamic anomalies across video frames; (iii) enabling few-shot and zero-shot detection to minimize reliance on large, annotated datasets; and (iv) addressing open-world and class-agnostic anomalies by using semantic understanding and motion features for spatiotemporal coherence. We highlight their potential to redefine the landscape of VAD. Additionally, we explore the synergy between visual and textual modalities offered by LLMs and VLMs, highlighting their combined strengths and proposing future directions to fully exploit the potential in enhancing video anomaly detection.

Paperid: 4271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16474.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to recognize and transcribe speech from multiple languages within a single system. Whisper, one of the most advanced ASR models, excels in this domain by handling 99 languages effectively, leveraging a vast amount of data and incorporating language tags as prefixes to guide the recognition process. However, despite its success, Whisper struggles with unseen languages, those not included in its pre-training. Motivated by the observation that many languages share linguistic characteristics, we propose methods that exploit these relationships to enhance ASR performance on unseen languages. Specifically, we introduce a weighted sum method, which computes a weighted sum of the embeddings of language tags, using Whisper's predicted language probabilities. In addition, we develop a predictor-based approach that refines the weighted sum embedding to more closely approximate the true embedding for unseen languages. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in ASR performance, both in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. Our proposed methods outperform baseline approaches, providing an effective solution for addressing unseen languages in multilingual ASR.

Paperid: 4272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11072.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning algorithms often struggle to eliminate inherent data biases, particularly those arising from unreliable labels, which poses a significant challenge in ensuring fairness. Existing fairness techniques that address label bias typically involve modifying models and intervening in the training process, but these lack flexibility for large-scale datasets. To address this limitation, we introduce a data selection method designed to efficiently and flexibly mitigate label bias, tailored to more practical needs. Our approach utilizes a zero-shot predictor as a proxy model that simulates training on a clean holdout set. This strategy, supported by peer predictions, ensures the fairness of the proxy model and eliminates the need for an additional holdout set, which is a common requirement in previous methods. Without altering the classifier's architecture, our modality-agnostic method effectively selects appropriate training data and has proven efficient and effective in handling label bias and improving fairness across diverse datasets in experimental evaluations.

Paperid: 4273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10402.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in composing various modules together to create programs that can perform complex reasoning tasks on images. In this paper, we propose TANGO, an approach that extends the program composition via LLMs already observed for images, aiming to integrate those capabilities into embodied agents capable of observing and acting in the world. Specifically, by employing a simple PointGoal Navigation model combined with a memory-based exploration policy as a foundational primitive for guiding an agent through the world, we show how a single model can address diverse tasks without additional training. We task an LLM with composing the provided primitives to solve a specific task, using only a few in-context examples in the prompt. We evaluate our approach on three key Embodied AI tasks: Open-Set ObjectGoal Navigation, Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation, and Open Embodied Question Answering, achieving state-of-the-art results without any specific fine-tuning in challenging zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 4274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09743.pdf

Abstract:
The tremendous success of behavior cloning (BC) in robotic manipulation has been largely confined to tasks where demonstrations can be effectively collected through human teleoperation. However, demonstrations for contact-rich manipulation tasks that require complex coordination of multiple contacts are difficult to collect due to the limitations of current teleoperation interfaces. We investigate how to leverage model-based planning and optimization to generate training data for contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks. Our analysis reveals that popular sampling-based planners like rapidly exploring random tree (RRT), while efficient for motion planning, produce demonstrations with unfavorably high entropy. This motivates modifications to our data generation pipeline that prioritizes demonstration consistency while maintaining solution diversity. Combined with a diffusion-based goal-conditioned BC approach, our method enables effective policy learning and zero-shot transfer to hardware for two challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 4275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05718.pdf

Abstract:
The reward hypothesis states that all goals and purposes can be understood as the maximization of a received scalar reward signal. However, in practice, defining such a reward signal is notoriously difficult, as humans are often unable to predict the optimal behavior corresponding to a reward function. Natural language offers an intuitive alternative for instructing reinforcement learning (RL) agents, yet previous language-conditioned approaches either require costly supervision or test-time training given a language instruction. In this work, we present a new approach that uses a pretrained RL agent trained using only unlabeled, offline interactions--without task-specific supervision or labeled trajectories--to get zero-shot test-time policy inference from arbitrary natural language instructions. We introduce a framework comprising three steps: imagine, project, and imitate. First, the agent imagines a sequence of observations corresponding to the provided language description using video generative models. Next, these imagined observations are projected into the target environment domain. Finally, an agent pretrained in the target environment with unsupervised RL instantly imitates the projected observation sequence through a closed-form solution. To the best of our knowledge, our method, RLZero, is the first approach to show direct language-to-behavior generation abilities on a variety of tasks and environments without any in-domain supervision. We further show that components of RLZero can be used to generate policies zero-shot from cross-embodied videos, such as those available on YouTube, even for complex embodiments like humanoids.

Paperid: 4276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04942.pdf

Abstract:
Hate speech online remains an understudied issue for marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South, which includes developing societies with increasing internet penetration. In this paper, we aim to provide marginalized communities in societies where the dominant language is low-resource with a privacy-preserving tool to protect themselves from online hate speech by filtering offensive content in their native languages. Our contributions are twofold: 1) we release REACT (REsponsive hate speech datasets Across ConTexts), a collection of high-quality, culture-specific hate speech detection datasets comprising multiple target groups and low-resource languages, curated by experienced data collectors; 2) we propose a few-shot hate speech detection approach based on federated learning (FL), a privacy-preserving method for collaboratively training a central model that exhibits robustness when tackling different target groups and languages. By keeping training local to user devices, we ensure data privacy while leveraging the collective learning benefits of FL. Furthermore, we explore personalized client models tailored to specific target groups and evaluate their performance. Our findings indicate the overall effectiveness of FL across different target groups, and point to personalization as a promising direction.

Paperid: 4277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04305.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches to large language model (LLM) alignment typically require millions of human annotations or rely on external aligned models for synthetic data generation. This paper introduces ALMA: Alignment with Minimal Annotation, demonstrating that effective alignment can be achieved using only 9,000 labeled examples -- less than 1% of conventional approaches. ALMA generates large amounts of high-quality synthetic alignment data through new techniques: diverse prompt synthesis via few-shot learning, diverse response generation with multiple model checkpoints, and judge (reward model) enhancement through score aggregation and self-distillation. Using only a pretrained Llama3 base model, 5,000 SFT examples, and 4,000 judge annotations, ALMA achieves performance close to Llama3-Instruct across diverse alignment benchmarks (e.g., 0.1% difference on AlpacaEval 2.0 score). These results are achieved with a multi-round, self-bootstrapped data synthesis and training recipe that continues to improve for 10 rounds, surpassing the typical 3-round ceiling of previous methods. These results suggest that base models already possess sufficient knowledge for effective alignment, and that synthetic data generation methods can expose it.

Paperid: 4278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00767.pdf

Abstract:
The source-free cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) task aims to transfer pretrained models to target domains utilizing minimal samples, eliminating the need for source domain data. Addressing this issue requires models to have robust generalization abilities and strong feature representation, aligning with the characteristics of large-scale pretrained models. However, large-scale models tend to lose representational ability in cross-domain scenarios due to limited sample diversity. \zlh{Given the abundant diversity provided by semantic modality, this paper leverages textual modality to enhance training sample diversity with CLP model}, meanwhile improving model transfer efficiency. Specifically, we propose the SeGD-VPT framework, which is divided into two phases. The first step aims to increase feature diversity by adding diversity prompts to each support sample, thereby generating varying input and enhancing sample diversity. Furthermore, we use diversity descriptions of classes to guide semantically meaningful learning of diversity prompts, proposing random combinations and selections of texts to increase textual diversity. Additionally, deep prompt tuning is introduced to enhance the model's transfer capability. After training of the first step, support samples with different diversity prompts are input into the CLIP backbone to generate enhanced features. After generation, the second phase trains classifiers using the generated features. Extensive experimental results across several benchmarks verify our method is comparable to SOTA source-utilized models and attain the best performance under the source-free CD-FSL setting.

Paperid: 4279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19806.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we tackle the task of musical stem retrieval. Given a musical mix, it consists in retrieving a stem that would fit with it, i.e., that would sound pleasant if played together. To do so, we introduce a new method based on Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures, where an encoder and a predictor are jointly trained to produce latent representations of a context and predict latent representations of a target. In particular, we design our predictor to be conditioned on arbitrary instruments, enabling our model to perform zero-shot stem retrieval. In addition, we discover that pretraining the encoder using contrastive learning drastically improves the model's performance. We validate the retrieval performances of our model using the MUSDB18 and MoisesDB datasets. We show that it significantly outperforms previous baselines on both datasets, showcasing its ability to support more or less precise (and possibly unseen) conditioning. We also evaluate the learned embeddings on a beat tracking task, demonstrating that they retain temporal structure and local information.

Paperid: 4280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16833.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we pioneer the study of open-vocabulary monocular 3D object detection, a novel task that aims to detect and localize objects in 3D space from a single RGB image without limiting detection to a predefined set of categories. We formalize this problem, establish baseline methods, and introduce a class-agnostic approach that leverages open-vocabulary 2D detectors and lifts 2D bounding boxes into 3D space. Our approach decouples the recognition and localization of objects in 2D from the task of estimating 3D bounding boxes, enabling generalization across unseen categories. Additionally, we propose a target-aware evaluation protocol to address inconsistencies in existing datasets, improving the reliability of model performance assessment. Extensive experiments on the Omni3D dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in zero-shot 3D detection for novel object categories, validating its robust generalization capabilities. Our method and evaluation protocols contribute towards the development of open-vocabulary object detection models that can effectively operate in real-world, category-diverse environments.

Paperid: 4281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15933.pdf

Abstract:
In object recognition, both the subject of interest (referred to as foreground, FG, for simplicity) and its surrounding context (background, BG) may play an important role. However, standard supervised learning often leads to unintended over-reliance on the BG, limiting model robustness in real-world deployment settings. The problem is mainly addressed by suppressing the BG, sacrificing context information for improved generalization. We propose "Localize to Recognize Robustly" (L2R2), a novel recognition approach which exploits the benefits of context-aware classification while maintaining robustness to distribution shifts. L2R2 leverages advances in zero-shot detection to localize the FG before recognition. It improves the performance of both standard recognition with supervised training, as well as multimodal zero-shot recognition with VLMs, while being robust to long-tail BGs and distribution shifts. The results confirm localization before recognition is possible for a wide range of datasets and they highlight the limits of object detection on others

Paperid: 4282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12508.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting pre-trained deep learning models to customized tasks has become a popular choice for developers to cope with limited computational resources and data volume. More specifically, probing--training a downstream head on a pre-trained encoder--has been widely adopted in transfer learning, which helps to prevent overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. However, such generalizability of pre-trained encoders raises concerns about the potential misuse of probing for harmful intentions, such as discriminatory speculation and warfare applications. In this work, we introduce EncoderLock, a novel applicability authorization method designed to protect pre-trained encoders from malicious probing, i.e., yielding poor performance on specified prohibited domains while maintaining their utility in authorized ones. Achieving this balance is challenging because of the opposite optimization objectives and the variety of downstream heads that adversaries can utilize adaptively. To address these challenges, EncoderLock employs two techniques: domain-aware weight selection and updating to restrict applications on prohibited domains/tasks, and self-challenging training scheme that iteratively strengthens resistance against any potential downstream classifiers that adversaries may apply. Moreover, recognizing the potential lack of data from prohibited domains in practical scenarios, we introduce three EncoderLock variants with different levels of data accessibility: supervised (prohibited domain data with labels), unsupervised (prohibited domain data without labels), and zero-shot (no data or labels available). We verify EncoderLock's effectiveness and practicality with a real-world pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder from Facebook. These results underscore the valuable contributions EncoderLock brings to the development of responsible AI.

Paperid: 4283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06764.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Language Models (VLMs), pre-trained on large-scale image-text datasets, enable zero-shot predictions for unseen data but may underperform on specific unseen tasks. Continual learning (CL) can help VLMs effectively adapt to new data distributions without joint training, but faces challenges of catastrophic forgetting and generalization forgetting. Although significant progress has been achieved by distillation-based methods, they exhibit two severe limitations. One is the popularly adopted single-teacher paradigm fails to impart comprehensive knowledge, The other is the existing methods inadequately leverage the multimodal information in the original training dataset, instead they rely on additional data for distillation, which increases computational and storage overhead. To mitigate both limitations, by drawing on Knowledge Integration Theory (KIT), we propose a Multi-Stage Knowledge Integration network (MulKI) to emulate the human learning process in distillation methods. MulKI achieves this through four stages, including Eliciting Ideas, Adding New Ideas, Distinguishing Ideas, and Making Connections. During the four stages, we first leverage prototypes to align across modalities, eliciting cross-modal knowledge, then adding new knowledge by constructing fine-grained intra- and inter-modality relationships with prototypes. After that, knowledge from two teacher models is adaptively distinguished and re-weighted. Finally, we connect between models from intra- and inter-task, integrating preceding and new knowledge. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in maintaining zero-shot capabilities while supporting continual learning across diverse downstream tasks, showcasing its potential in adapting VLMs to evolving data distributions.

Paperid: 4284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04987.pdf

Abstract:
Learning the intents of an agent, defined by its goals or motion style, is often extremely challenging from just a few examples. We refer to this problem as task concept learning and present our approach, Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling (FTL-IGM), which learns new task concepts by leveraging invertible neural generative models. The core idea is to pretrain a generative model on a set of basic concepts and their demonstrations. Then, given a few demonstrations of a new concept (such as a new goal or a new action), our method learns the underlying concepts through backpropagation without updating the model weights, thanks to the invertibility of the generative model. We evaluate our method in five domains -- object rearrangement, goal-oriented navigation, motion caption of human actions, autonomous driving, and real-world table-top manipulation. Our experimental results demonstrate that via the pretrained generative model, we successfully learn novel concepts and generate agent plans or motion corresponding to these concepts in (1) unseen environments and (2) in composition with training concepts.

Paperid: 4285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01807.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as few-shot learners capable of handling a variety of tasks, including comprehension, planning, reasoning, question answering, arithmetic calculations, and more. At the core of these capabilities is LLMs' proficiency in representing and understanding structural or semi-structural data, such as tables and graphs. Numerous studies have demonstrated that reasoning on tabular data or graphs is not only feasible for LLMs but also gives a promising research direction which treats these data as in-context data. The lightweight and human readable characteristics of in-context database can potentially make it an alternative for the traditional database in typical RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) settings. However, almost all current work focuses on static in-context data, which does not allow dynamic update. In this paper, to enable dynamic database update, delta encoding of database is proposed. We explore how data stored in traditional RDBMS can be encoded as in-context text and evaluate LLMs' proficiency for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on in-context databases. A benchmark named InConDB is presented and extensive experiments are conducted to show the performance of different language models in enabling in-context database by varying the database encoding method, prompting method, operation type and input data distribution, revealing both the proficiency and limitations.

Paperid: 4286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00246.pdf

Abstract:
When examined through the lens of their residual streams, a puzzling property emerges in transformer networks: residual contributions (e.g., attention heads) sometimes specialize in specific tasks or input attributes. In this paper, we analyze this phenomenon in vision transformers, focusing on the spectral geometry of residuals, and explore its implications for modality alignment in vision-language models. First, we link it to the intrinsically low-dimensional structure of visual head representations, zooming into their principal components and showing that they encode specialized roles across a wide variety of input data distributions. Then, we analyze the effect of head specialization in multimodal models, focusing on how improved alignment between text and specialized heads impacts zero-shot classification performance. This specialization-performance link consistently holds across diverse pre-training data, network sizes, and objectives, demonstrating a powerful new mechanism for boosting zero-shot classification through targeted alignment. Ultimately, we translate these insights into actionable terms by introducing ResiDual, a technique for spectral alignment of the residual stream. Much like panning for gold, it lets the noise from irrelevant unit principal components (i.e., attributes) wash away to amplify task-relevant ones. Remarkably, this dual perspective on modality alignment yields fine-tuning level performance on different data distributions while modelling an extremely interpretable and parameter-efficient transformation, as we extensively show on 70 pre-trained network-dataset combinations (7 models, 10 datasets).

Paperid: 4287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23274.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models achieve high-quality sample generation at the cost of a lengthy multistep inference procedure. To overcome this, diffusion distillation techniques produce student generators capable of matching or surpassing the teacher in a single step. However, the student model's inference speed is limited by the size of the teacher architecture, preventing real-time generation for computationally heavy applications. In this work, we introduce Multi-Student Distillation (MSD), a framework to distill a conditional teacher diffusion model into multiple single-step generators. Each student generator is responsible for a subset of the conditioning data, thereby obtaining higher generation quality for the same capacity. MSD trains multiple distilled students, allowing smaller sizes and, therefore, faster inference. Also, MSD offers a lightweight quality boost over single-student distillation with the same architecture. We demonstrate MSD is effective by training multiple same-sized or smaller students on single-step distillation using distribution matching and adversarial distillation techniques. With smaller students, MSD gets competitive results with faster inference for single-step generation. Using 4 same-sized students, MSD significantly outperforms single-student baseline counterparts and achieves remarkable FID scores for one-step image generation: 1.20 on ImageNet-64x64 and 8.20 on zero-shot COCO2014.

Paperid: 4288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20164.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models enable prompt-based classifiers for zero-shot and few-shot learning. Nonetheless, the conventional method of employing fixed prompts suffers from distributional shifts that negatively impact generalizability to unseen samples. This paper introduces prompt diffusion, which uses a diffusion model to gradually refine the prompts to obtain a customized prompt for each sample. Specifically, we first optimize a collection of prompts to obtain over-fitted prompts per sample. Then, we propose a prompt diffusion model within the prompt space, enabling the training of a generative transition process from a random prompt to its overfitted prompt. As we cannot access the label of a test image during inference, our model gradually generates customized prompts solely from random prompts using our trained, prompt diffusion. Our prompt diffusion is generic, flexible, and modality-agnostic, making it a simple plug-and-play module seamlessly embedded into existing prompt learning methods for textual, visual, or multi-modal prompt learning. Our diffusion model uses a fast ODE-based sampling strategy to optimize test sample prompts in just five steps, offering a good trade-off between performance improvement and computational efficiency. For all prompt learning methods tested, adding prompt diffusion yields more robust results for base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset generalization, and domain generalization in classification tasks tested over 15 diverse datasets.

Paperid: 4289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18907.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning from human demonstrations is an effective paradigm for robot manipulation, but acquiring large datasets is costly and resource-intensive, especially for long-horizon tasks. To address this issue, we propose SkillMimicGen (SkillGen), an automated system for generating demonstration datasets from a few human demos. SkillGen segments human demos into manipulation skills, adapts these skills to new contexts, and stitches them together through free-space transit and transfer motion. We also propose a Hybrid Skill Policy (HSP) framework for learning skill initiation, control, and termination components from SkillGen datasets, enabling skills to be sequenced using motion planning at test-time. We demonstrate that SkillGen greatly improves data generation and policy learning performance over a state-of-the-art data generation framework, resulting in the capability to produce data for large scene variations, including clutter, and agents that are on average 24% more successful. We demonstrate the efficacy of SkillGen by generating over 24K demonstrations across 18 task variants in simulation from just 60 human demonstrations, and training proficient, often near-perfect, HSP agents. Finally, we apply SkillGen to 3 real-world manipulation tasks and also demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a long-horizon assembly task. Videos, and more at https://skillgen.github.io.

Paperid: 4290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15027.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their task-agnostic capabilities, visual generation tasks such as image translation, style transfer, and character customization still rely heavily on supervised, task-specific datasets. In this work, we introduce Group Diffusion Transformers (GDTs), a novel framework that unifies diverse visual generation tasks by redefining them as a group generation problem. In this approach, a set of related images is generated simultaneously, optionally conditioned on a subset of the group. GDTs build upon diffusion transformers with minimal architectural modifications by concatenating self-attention tokens across images. This allows the model to implicitly capture cross-image relationships (e.g., identities, styles, layouts, surroundings, and color schemes) through caption-based correlations. Our design enables scalable, unsupervised, and task-agnostic pretraining using extensive collections of image groups sourced from multimodal internet articles, image galleries, and video frames. We evaluate GDTs on a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 200 instructions across 30 distinct visual generation tasks, including picture book creation, font design, style transfer, sketching, colorization, drawing sequence generation, and character customization. Our models achieve competitive zero-shot performance without any additional fine-tuning or gradient updates. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of key components such as data scaling, group size, and model design. These results demonstrate the potential of GDTs as scalable, general-purpose visual generation systems.

Paperid: 4291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11505.pdf

Abstract:
Visual localization involves estimating a query image's 6-DoF (degrees of freedom) camera pose, which is a fundamental component in various computer vision and robotic tasks. This paper presents LoGS, a vision-based localization pipeline utilizing the 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) technique as scene representation. This novel representation allows high-quality novel view synthesis. During the mapping phase, structure-from-motion (SfM) is applied first, followed by the generation of a GS map. During localization, the initial position is obtained through image retrieval, local feature matching coupled with a PnP solver, and then a high-precision pose is achieved through the analysis-by-synthesis manner on the GS map. Experimental results on four large-scale datasets demonstrate the proposed approach's SoTA accuracy in estimating camera poses and robustness under challenging few-shot conditions.

Paperid: 4292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07797.pdf

Abstract:
Many recent studies have shown the ability of large language models (LLMs) to achieve state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, such as question answering, text summarization, coding, and translation. In some cases, the results provided by LLMs are on par with those of human experts. These models' most disruptive innovation is their ability to perform tasks via zero-shot or few-shot prompting. This capability has been successfully exploited to train instructed LLMs, where reinforcement learning with human feedback is used to guide the model to follow the user's requests directly. In this paper, we investigate the ability of instructed LLMs to improve conversational search effectiveness by rewriting user questions in a conversational setting. We study which prompts provide the most informative rewritten utterances that lead to the best retrieval performance. Reproducible experiments are conducted on publicly-available TREC CAST datasets. The results show that rewriting conversational utterances with instructed LLMs achieves significant improvements of up to 25.2% in MRR, 31.7% in Precision@1, 27% in NDCG@3, and 11.5% in Recall@500 over state-of-the-art techniques.

Paperid: 4293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04324.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Voice-Conversion (VC) using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have made it possible to generate high-quality and realistic human-like audio. This poses growing challenges in distinguishing AI-synthesized speech from the genuine human voice and could raise concerns about misuse for impersonation, fraud, spreading misinformation, and scams. However, existing detection methods for AI-synthesized audio have not kept pace and often fail to generalize across diverse datasets. In this paper, we introduce SONAR, a synthetic AI-Audio Detection Framework and Benchmark, aiming to provide a comprehensive evaluation for distinguishing cutting-edge AI-synthesized auditory content. SONAR includes a novel evaluation dataset sourced from 9 diverse audio synthesis platforms, including leading TTS providers and state-of-the-art TTS models. It is the first framework to uniformly benchmark AI-audio detection across both traditional and foundation model-based detection systems. Through extensive experiments, (1) we reveal the limitations of existing detection methods and demonstrate that foundation models exhibit stronger generalization capabilities, likely due to their model size and the scale and quality of pretraining data. (2) Speech foundation models demonstrate robust cross-lingual generalization capabilities, maintaining strong performance across diverse languages despite being fine-tuned solely on English speech data. This finding also suggests that the primary challenges in audio deepfake detection are more closely tied to the realism and quality of synthetic audio rather than language-specific characteristics. (3) We explore the effectiveness and efficiency of few-shot fine-tuning in improving generalization, highlighting its potential for tailored applications, such as personalized detection systems for specific entities or individuals.

Paperid: 4294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03856.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate fluent long-form texts is presenting new challenges in distinguishing machine-generated outputs from human-written ones, which is crucial for ensuring authenticity and trustworthiness of expressions. Existing zero-shot detectors primarily focus on token-level distributions, which are vulnerable to real-world domain shifts, including different prompting and decoding strategies, and adversarial attacks. We propose a more robust method that incorporates abstract elements, such as event transitions, as key deciding factors to detect machine versus human texts by training a latent-space model on sequences of events or topics derived from human-written texts. In three different domains, machine-generated texts, which are originally inseparable from human texts on the token level, can be better distinguished with our latent-space model, leading to a 31% improvement over strong baselines such as DetectGPT. Our analysis further reveals that, unlike humans, modern LLMs like GPT-4 generate event triggers and their transitions differently, an inherent disparity that helps our method to robustly detect machine-generated texts.

Paperid: 4295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02642.pdf

Abstract:
Information retrieval (IR) systems have played a vital role in modern digital life and have cemented their continued usefulness in this new era of generative AI via retrieval-augmented generation. With strong language processing capabilities and remarkable versatility, large language models (LLMs) have become popular choices for zero-shot re-ranking in IR systems. So far, LLM-based re-ranking methods rely on strong generative capabilities, which restricts their use to either specialized or powerful proprietary models. Given these restrictions, we ask: is autoregressive generation necessary and optimal for LLMs to perform re-ranking? We hypothesize that there are abundant signals relevant to re-ranking within LLMs that might not be used to their full potential via generation. To more directly leverage such signals, we propose in-context re-ranking (ICR), a novel method that leverages the change in attention pattern caused by the search query for accurate and efficient re-ranking. To mitigate the intrinsic biases in LLMs, we propose a calibration method using a content-free query. Due to the absence of generation, ICR only requires two ($O(1)$) forward passes to re-rank $N$ documents, making it substantially more efficient than generative re-ranking methods that require at least $O(N)$ forward passes. Our novel design also enables ICR to be applied to any LLM without specialized training while guaranteeing a well-formed ranking. Extensive experiments with two popular open-weight LLMs on standard single-hop and multi-hop information retrieval benchmarks show that ICR outperforms RankGPT while cutting the latency by more than 60% in practice. Through detailed analyses, we show that ICR's performance is specially strong on tasks that require more complex re-ranking signals. Our findings call for further exploration on novel ways of utilizing open-weight LLMs beyond text generation.

Paperid: 4296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19508.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative era in Natural Language Processing (NLP), reshaping research and extending NLP's influence to other fields of study. However, there is little to no work examining the degree to which LLMs influence other research fields. This work empirically and systematically examines the influence and use of LLMs in fields beyond NLP. We curate $106$ LLMs and analyze $\sim$$148k$ papers citing LLMs to quantify their influence and reveal trends in their usage patterns. Our analysis reveals not only the increasing prevalence of LLMs in non-CS fields but also the disparities in their usage, with some fields utilizing them more frequently than others since 2018, notably Linguistics and Engineering together accounting for $\sim$$45\%$ of LLM citations. Our findings further indicate that most of these fields predominantly employ task-agnostic LLMs, proficient in zero or few-shot learning without requiring further fine-tuning, to address their domain-specific problems. This study sheds light on the cross-disciplinary impact of NLP through LLMs, providing a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges.

Paperid: 4297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16813.pdf

Abstract:
Peer review is an essential process to determine the quality of papers submitted to scientific conferences or journals. However, it is subjective and prone to biases. Several studies have been conducted to apply techniques from NLP to support peer review, but they are based on black-box techniques and their outputs are difficult to interpret and trust. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline to support and understand the reviewing and decision-making processes of peer review: the PeerArg system combining LLMs with methods from knowledge representation. PeerArg takes in input a set of reviews for a paper and outputs the paper acceptance prediction. We evaluate the performance of the PeerArg pipeline on three different datasets, in comparison with a novel end-2-end LLM that uses few-shot learning to predict paper acceptance given reviews. The results indicate that the end-2-end LLM is capable of predicting paper acceptance from reviews, but a variant of the PeerArg pipeline outperforms this LLM.

Paperid: 4298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16135.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable transcription of child-adult conversations in clinical settings is crucial for diagnosing developmental disorders like Autism. Recent advances in deep learning and availability of large scale transcribed data has led to development of speech foundation models that have shown dramatic improvements in ASR performance. However, their performance on conversational child-adult interactions remains underexplored. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of ASR performance on a dataset containing child-adult interactions from autism diagnostic sessions, using Whisper, Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, and WavLM. We find that speech foundation models show a noticeable performance drop (15-20% absolute WER) for child speech compared to adult speech in the conversational setting. Then, we fine-tune the best-performing zero-shot model (Whisper-large) using LoRA in a low-resource setting, yielding 8% and 13% absolute WER improvements for child and adult speech, respectively.

Paperid: 4299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14899.pdf

Abstract:
This work explores the potential of brief inter-agent knowledge transfer (KT) to enhance the robotic object goal navigation (ON) in unseen and unfamiliar environments. Drawing on the analogy of human travelers acquiring local knowledge, we propose a framework in which a traveler robot (student) communicates with local robots (teachers) to obtain ON knowledge through minimal interactions. We frame this process as a data-free continual learning (CL) challenge, aiming to transfer knowledge from a black-box model (teacher) to a new model (student). In contrast to approaches like zero-shot ON using large language models (LLMs), which utilize inherently communication-friendly natural language for knowledge representation, the other two major ON approaches -- frontier-driven methods using object feature maps and learning-based ON using neural state-action maps -- present complex challenges where data-free KT remains largely uncharted. To address this gap, we propose a lightweight, plug-and-play KT module targeting non-cooperative black-box teachers in open-world settings. Using the universal assumption that every teacher robot has vision and mobility capabilities, we define state-action history as the primary knowledge base. Our formulation leads to the development of a query-based occupancy map that dynamically represents target object locations, serving as an effective and communication-friendly knowledge representation. We validate the effectiveness of our method through experiments conducted in the Habitat environment.

Paperid: 4300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12979.pdf

Abstract:
Currently, prompting techniques can be mainly divided into two categories:1)shot method implicitly inspires the model to answer the question by mimicing the steps in the given example, e.g., the few-shot CoT. 2) Guideline method explicitly instructs the model to reason by following guidelines, which contains succinct and concise task-specific knowledge. Shot method is prone to difficulties in terms of selection of shots type, the number of shots, and the design of the reasoning steps, so a question arises: can we only use guideline instead of shot in the prompt? To this end, we propose the FGT framework to automatically learn task-specific guidelines from dataset consisting of Feedback, Guideline, and Tree-gather agents. First, the feedback agent is designed to evaluate the outcomes, both right and wrong, of each Q&A to gather insights guiding more effective optimization strategies. Next, the guideline agent is tasked with deriving guidelines from each piece of feedback and storing them in local memory. Lastly, the tree-gather agent aggregates all guidelines hierarchically through a tree structure, ultimately obtaining all unduplicated guidelines from a global perspective. In addition, we induce the model to generate intermediate processes to ensure the reasoning consistent with the guidelines. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance across multiple tasks, thereby highlighting the effectiveness of using the guidelines in prompt.

Paperid: 4301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00134.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a problem that generally requires finding collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. Solving MAPF optimally, even under restrictive assumptions, is NP-hard, yet efficient solutions for this problem are critical for numerous applications, such as automated warehouses and transportation systems. Recently, learning-based approaches to MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep reinforcement learning. Typically, such learning-based MAPF solvers are augmented with additional components like single-agent planning or communication. Orthogonally, in this work we rely solely on imitation learning that leverages a large dataset of expert MAPF solutions and transformer-based neural network to create a foundation model for MAPF called MAPF-GPT. The latter is capable of generating actions without additional heuristics or communication. MAPF-GPT demonstrates zero-shot learning abilities when solving the MAPF problems that are not present in the training dataset. We show that MAPF-GPT notably outperforms the current best-performing learnable MAPF solvers on a diverse range of problem instances and is computationally efficient during inference.

Paperid: 4302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21971.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning has achieved remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet its application to surgical robotics remains challenging due to data scarcity, constrained workspaces, and the need for an exceptional level of safety and predictability. We present a supervised Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture designed for phase-structured surgical manipulation tasks, which can be added on top of any autonomous policy. Unlike prior surgical robot learning approaches that rely on multi-camera setups or thousands of demonstrations, we show that a lightweight action decoder policy like Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) can learn complex, long-horizon manipulation from less than 150 demonstrations using solely stereo endoscopic images, when equipped with our architecture. We evaluate our approach on the collaborative surgical task of bowel grasping and retraction, where a robot assistant interprets visual cues from a human surgeon, executes targeted grasping on deformable tissue, and performs sustained retraction. We benchmark our method against state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and the standard ACT baseline. Our results show that generalist VLAs fail to acquire the task entirely, even under standard in-distribution conditions. Furthermore, while standard ACT achieves moderate success in-distribution, adopting a supervised MoE architecture significantly boosts its performance, yielding higher success rates in-distribution and demonstrating superior robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios, including novel grasp locations, reduced illumination, and partial occlusions. Notably, it generalizes to unseen testing viewpoints and also transfers zero-shot to ex vivo porcine tissue without additional training, offering a promising pathway toward in vivo deployment. To support this, we present qualitative preliminary results of policy roll-outs during in vivo porcine surgery.

Paperid: 4303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20803.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents several strategies to automatically obtain additional examples for in-context learning of one-shot relation extraction. Specifically, we introduce a novel strategy for example selection, in which new examples are selected based on the similarity of their underlying syntactic-semantic structure to the provided one-shot example. We show that this method results in complementary word choices and sentence structures when compared to LLM-generated examples. When these strategies are combined, the resulting hybrid system achieves a more holistic picture of the relations of interest than either method alone. Our framework transfers well across datasets (FS-TACRED and FS-FewRel) and LLM families (Qwen and Gemma). Overall, our hybrid selection method consistently outperforms alternative strategies and achieves state-of-the-art performance on FS-TACRED and strong gains on a customized FewRel subset.

Paperid: 4304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09905.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) allow for sophisticated qualitative coding of large datasets, but zero- and few-shot classifiers can produce an intolerable number of errors, even with careful, validated prompting. We present a simple, generalizable two-stage workflow: an LLM applies a human-designed, LLM-adapted codebook; a secondary LLM critic performs self-reflection on each positive label by re-reading the source text alongside the first model's rationale and issuing a final decision. We evaluate this approach on six qualitative codes over 3,000 high-content emails from Apache Software Foundation project evaluation discussions. Our human-derived audit of 360 positive annotations (60 passages by six codes) found that the first-line LLM had a false-positive rate of 8% to 54%, despite F1 scores of 0.74 and 1.00 in testing. Subsequent recoding of all stage-one annotations via a second self-reflection stage improved F1 by 0.04 to 0.25, bringing two especially poor performing codes up to 0.69 and 0.79 from 0.52 and 0.55 respectively. Our manual evaluation identified two recurrent error classes: misinterpretation (violations of code definitions) and meta-discussion (debate about a project evaluation criterion mistaken for its use as a decision justification). Code-specific critic clauses addressing observed failure modes were especially effective with testing and refinement, replicating the codebook-adaption process for LLM interpretation in stage-one. We explain how favoring recall in first-line LLM annotation combined with secondary critique delivers precision-first, compute-light control. With human guidance and validation, self-reflection slots into existing LLM-assisted annotation pipelines to reduce noise and potentially salvage unusable classifiers.

Paperid: 4305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09147.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable supervision-free industrial inspection. However, existing ZSAD paradigms are constrained by single visual backbones, which struggle to balance global semantic generalization with fine-grained structural discriminability. To bridge this gap, we propose Synergistic Semantic-Visual Prompting (SSVP), that efficiently fuses diverse visual encodings to elevate model's fine-grained perception. Specifically, SSVP introduces the Hierarchical Semantic-Visual Synergy (HSVS) mechanism, which deeply integrates DINOv3's multi-scale structural priors into the CLIP semantic space. Subsequently, the Vision-Conditioned Prompt Generator (VCPG) employs cross-modal attention to guide dynamic prompt generation, enabling linguistic queries to precisely anchor to specific anomaly patterns. Furthermore, to address the discrepancy between global scoring and local evidence, the Visual-Text Anomaly Mapper (VTAM) establishes a dual-gated calibration paradigm. Extensive evaluations on seven industrial benchmarks validate the robustness of our method; SSVP achieves state-of-the-art performance with 93.0% Image-AUROC and 92.2% Pixel-AUROC on MVTec-AD, significantly outperforming existing zero-shot approaches.

Paperid: 4306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08493.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually adapt a model on a limited number of new-class examples, facing two well-known challenges: catastrophic forgetting and overfitting to new classes. Existing methods tend to freeze more parts of network components and finetune others with an extra memory during incremental sessions. These methods emphasize preserving prior knowledge to ensure proficiency in recognizing old classes, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, constraining fewer parameters can help in overcoming overfitting with the assistance of prior knowledge. Following previous methods, we retain more prior knowledge and propose a prior knowledge-infused neural network (PKI) to facilitate FSCIL. PKI consists of a backbone, an ensemble of projectors, a classifier, and an extra memory. In each incremental session, we build a new projector and add it to the ensemble. Subsequently, we finetune the new projector and the classifier jointly with other frozen network components, ensuring the rich prior knowledge is utilized effectively. By cascading projectors, PKI integrates prior knowledge accumulated from previous sessions and learns new knowledge flexibly, which helps to recognize old classes and efficiently learn new classes. Further, to reduce the resource consumption associated with keeping many projectors, we design two variants of the prior knowledge-infused neural network (PKIV-1 and PKIV-2) to trade off a balance between resource consumption and performance by reducing the number of projectors. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 4307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08448.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continuously recognize novel classes under limited data, which suffers from the key stability-plasticity dilemma: balancing the retention of old knowledge with the acquisition of new knowledge. To address this issue, we divide the task into two different stages and propose a framework termed Static-Dynamic Collaboration (SDC) to achieve a better trade-off between stability and plasticity. Specifically, our method divides the normal pipeline of FSCIL into Static Retaining Stage (SRS) and Dynamic Learning Stage (DLS), which harnesses old static and incremental dynamic class information, respectively. During SRS, we train an initial model with sufficient data in the base session and preserve the key part as static memory to retain fundamental old knowledge. During DLS, we introduce an extra dynamic projector jointly trained with the previous static memory. By employing both stages, our method achieves improved retention of old knowledge while continuously adapting to new classes. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks and a real-world application dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance against other competitors.

Paperid: 4308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07333.pdf

Abstract:
6D object pose estimation plays a crucial role in scene understanding for applications such as robotics and augmented reality. To support the needs of ever-changing object sets in such context, modern zero-shot object pose estimators were developed to not require object-specific training but only rely on CAD models. Such models are hard to obtain once deployed, and a continuously changing and growing set of objects makes it harder to reliably identify the instance model of interest. To address this challenge, we introduce an Open-Set CAD Retrieval from a Language Prompt and a Single Image (OSCAR), a novel training-free method that retrieves a matching object model from an unlabeled 3D object database. During onboarding, OSCAR generates multi-view renderings of database models and annotates them with descriptive captions using an image captioning model. At inference, GroundedSAM detects the queried object in the input image, and multi-modal embeddings are computed for both the Region-of-Interest and the database captions. OSCAR employs a two-stage retrieval: text-based filtering using CLIP identifies candidate models, followed by image-based refinement using DINOv2 to select the most visually similar object. In our experiments we demonstrate that OSCAR outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on the cross-domain 3D model retrieval benchmark MI3DOR. Furthermore, we demonstrate OSCAR's direct applicability in automating object model sourcing for 6D object pose estimation. We propose using the most similar object model for pose estimation if the exact instance is not available and show that OSCAR achieves an average precision of 90.48\% during object retrieval on the YCB-V object dataset. Moreover, we demonstrate that the most similar object model can be utilized for pose estimation using Megapose achieving better results than a reconstruction-based approach.

Paperid: 4309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07248.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional task-oriented dialog systems are unable to evolve from ongoing interactions or adapt to new domains after deployment, that is a critical limitation in real-world dynamic environments. Continual learning approaches depend on episodic retraining with human curated data, failing to achieve autonomy lifelong improvement. While evolutionary computation and LLM driven self improvement offer promising mechanisms for dialog optimization, they lack a unified framework for holistic, iterative strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose DarwinTOD, a lifelong self evolving dialog framework that systematically integrates these two paradigms, enabling continuous strategy optimization from a zero-shot base without task specific fine-tuning. DarwinTOD maintains an Evolvable Strategy Bank and operates through a dual-loop process: online multi-agent dialog execution with peer critique, and offline structured evolutionary operations that refine the strategy bank using accumulated feedback. This closed-loop design enables autonomous continuous improvement without human intervention. Extensive experiments show that DarwinTOD surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and exhibits continuous performance gains throughout evolution. Our work provides a novel framework for building dialog systems with lifelong self evolution capabilities.

Paperid: 4310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07117.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally learn models from a small amount of novel data, which requires strong representation and adaptation ability of models learned under few-example supervision to avoid catastrophic forgetting on old classes and overfitting to novel classes. This work proposes a generative co-memory regularization approach to facilitate FSCIL. In the approach, the base learning leverages generative domain adaptation finetuning to finetune a pretrained generative encoder on a few examples of base classes by jointly incorporating a masked autoencoder (MAE) decoder for feature reconstruction and a fully-connected classifier for feature classification, which enables the model to efficiently capture general and adaptable representations. Using the finetuned encoder and learned classifier, we construct two class-wise memories: representation memory for storing the mean features for each class, and weight memory for storing the classifier weights. After that, the memory-regularized incremental learning is performed to train the classifier dynamically on the examples of few-shot classes in each incremental session by simultaneously optimizing feature classification and co-memory regularization. The memories are updated in a class-incremental manner and they collaboratively regularize the incremental learning. In this way, the learned models improve recognition accuracy, while mitigating catastrophic forgetting over old classes and overfitting to novel classes. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks clearly demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

Paperid: 4311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04692.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we examine hateful memes from three complementary angles - how to detect them, how to explain their content and how to intervene them prior to being posted - by applying a range of strategies built on top of generative AI models. To the best of our knowledge, explanation and intervention have typically been studied separately from detection, which does not reflect real-world conditions. Further, since curating large annotated datasets for meme moderation is prohibitively expensive, we propose a novel framework that leverages task-specific generative multimodal agents and the few-shot adaptability of large multimodal models to cater to different types of memes. We believe this is the first work focused on generalizable hateful meme moderation under limited data conditions, and has strong potential for deployment in real-world production scenarios. Warning: Contains potentially toxic contents.

Paperid: 4312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02228.pdf

Abstract:
Video recognition models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, while existing diffusion-based purification methods suffer from inefficient sampling and curved trajectories. Directly regressing clean videos from adversarial inputs often fails to recover faithful content due to the subtle nature of perturbations; this necessitates physically shattering the adversarial structure. Therefore, we propose Flow Matching for Adversarial Video Purification FMVP. FMVP physically shatters global adversarial structures via a masking strategy and reconstructs clean video dynamics using Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) with an inpainting objective. To further decouple semantic content from adversarial noise, we design a Frequency-Gated Loss (FGL) that explicitly suppresses high-frequency adversarial residuals while preserving low-frequency fidelity. We design Attack-Aware and Generalist training paradigms to handle known and unknown threats, respectively. Extensive experiments on UCF-101 and HMDB-51 demonstrate that FMVP outperforms state-of-the-art methods (DiffPure, Defense Patterns (DP), Temporal Shuffling (TS) and FlowPure), achieving robust accuracy exceeding 87% against PGD and 89% against CW attacks. Furthermore, FMVP demonstrates superior robustness against adaptive attacks (DiffHammer) and functions as a zero-shot adversarial detector, attaining AUC-ROC scores of 0.98 for PGD and 0.79 for highly imperceptible CW attacks.

Paperid: 4313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02144.pdf

Abstract:
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale large language models efficiently by employing a parametric "router" to dispatch tokens to a sparse subset of experts. Typically, this router is trained once and then frozen, rendering routing decisions brittle under distribution shifts. We address this limitation by introducing kNN-MoE, a retrieval-augmented routing framework that reuses optimal expert assignments from a memory of similar past cases. This memory is constructed offline by directly optimizing token-wise routing logits to maximize the likelihood on a reference set. Crucially, we use the aggregate similarity of retrieved neighbors as a confidence-driven mixing coefficient, thus allowing the method to fall back to the frozen router when no relevant cases are found. Experiments show kNN-MoE outperforms zero-shot baselines and rivals computationally expensive supervised fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21722.pdf

Abstract:
Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally acceptable. Most existing methods simplify this problem by assuming a single correct action, which limits their ability to handle real-world social uncertainty. In this work, we propose MAction-SocialNav, an efficient vision language model for socially compliant navigation that explicitly addresses action ambiguity, enabling generating multiple plausible actions within one scenario. To enhance the model's reasoning capability, we introduce a novel meta-cognitive prompt (MCP) method. Furthermore, to evaluate the proposed method, we curate a multi-action socially compliant navigation dataset that accounts for diverse conditions, including crowd density, indoor and outdoor environments, and dual human annotations. The dataset contains 789 samples, each with three-turn conversation, split into 710 training samples and 79 test samples through random selection. We also design five evaluation metrics to assess high-level decision precision, safety, and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MAction-SocialNav achieves strong social reasoning performance while maintaining high efficiency, highlighting its potential for real-world human robot navigation. Compared with zero-shot GPT-4o and Claude, our model achieves substantially higher decision quality (APG: 0.595 vs. 0.000/0.025) and safety alignment (ER: 0.264 vs. 0.642/0.668), while maintaining real-time efficiency (1.524 FPS, over 3x faster).

Paperid: 4315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21430.pdf

Abstract:
Visuomotor policies based on generative architectures such as diffusion and flow-based matching have shown strong performance but degrade under distribution shifts, demonstrating limited recovery capabilities without costly finetuning. In the language modeling domain, test-time compute scaling has revolutionized reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs by leveraging additional inference-time compute for candidate solution refinement. These methods typically leverage foundation models as verification modules in a zero-shot manner to synthesize improved candidate solutions. In this work, we hypothesize that generative policies can similarly benefit from additional inference-time compute that employs zero-shot VLM-based verifiers. A systematic analysis of improving policy performance through the generation-verification framework remains relatively underexplored in the current literature. To this end, we introduce EVE - a modular, generator-verifier interaction framework - that boosts the performance of pretrained generative policies at test time, with no additional training. EVE wraps a frozen base policy with multiple zero-shot, VLM-based verifier agents. Each verifier proposes action refinements to the base policy candidate actions, while an action incorporator fuses the aggregated verifier output into the base policy action prediction to produce the final executed action. We study design choices for generator-verifier information interfacing across a system of verifiers with distinct capabilities. Across a diverse suite of manipulation tasks, EVE consistently improves task success rates without any additional policy training. Through extensive ablations, we isolate the contribution of verifier capabilities and action incorporator strategies, offering practical guidelines to build scalable, modular generator-verifier systems for embodied control.

Paperid: 4316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19879.pdf

Abstract:
When adapting large language models (LLMs) to a specific downstream task, two primary approaches are commonly employed: (1) prompt engineering, often with in-context few-shot learning, leveraging the model's inherent generalization abilities, and (2) fine-tuning on task-specific data, directly optimizing the model's parameters. While prompt-based methods excel in few-shot scenarios, their effectiveness often plateaus as more data becomes available. Conversely, fine-tuning scales well with data but may underperform when training examples are scarce. We investigate a unified approach that bridges these two paradigms by incorporating in-context learning directly into the fine-tuning process. Specifically, we fine-tune the model on task-specific data augmented with in-context examples, mimicking the structure of k-shot prompts. This approach, while requiring per-task fine-tuning, combines the sample efficiency of in-context learning with the performance gains of fine-tuning, leading to a method that consistently matches and often significantly exceeds both these baselines. To perform hyperparameter selection in the low-data regime, we propose to use prequential evaluation, which eliminates the need for expensive cross-validation and leverages all available data for training while simultaneously providing a robust validation signal. We conduct an extensive empirical study to determine which adaptation paradigm - fine-tuning, in-context learning, or our proposed unified approach offers the best predictive performance on a concrete data downstream-tasks.

Paperid: 4317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19687.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Perception Encoder Audiovisual, PE-AV, a new family of encoders for audio and video understanding trained with scaled contrastive learning. Built on PE, PE-AV makes several key contributions to extend representations to audio, and natively support joint embeddings across audio-video, audio-text, and video-text modalities. PE-AV's unified cross-modal embeddings enable novel tasks such as speech retrieval, and set a new state of the art across standard audio and video benchmarks. We unlock this by building a strong audiovisual data engine that synthesizes high-quality captions for O(100M) audio-video pairs, enabling large-scale supervision consistent across modalities. Our audio data includes speech, music, and general sound effects-avoiding single-domain limitations common in prior work. We exploit ten pairwise contrastive objectives, showing that scaling cross-modality and caption-type pairs strengthens alignment and improves zero-shot performance. We further develop PE-A-Frame by fine-tuning PE-AV with frame-level contrastive objectives, enabling fine-grained audio-frame-to-text alignment for tasks such as sound event detection.

Paperid: 4318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18073.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have gained significant traction in complex data analysis, visual question answering, generation, and reasoning. Recently, they have been used for analyzing the biometric utility of iris and face images. However, their capabilities in fingerprint understanding are yet unexplored. In this work, we design a comprehensive benchmark, \textsc{FPBench} that evaluates the performance of 20 MLLMs (open-source and proprietary) across 7 real and synthetic datasets on 8 biometric and forensic tasks using zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting strategies. We discuss our findings in terms of performance, explainability and share our insights into the challenges and limitations. We establish \textsc{FPBench} as the first comprehensive benchmark for fingerprint domain understanding with MLLMs paving the path for foundation models for fingerprints.

Paperid: 4319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16199.pdf

Abstract:
We present Avatar4D, a real-world transferable pipeline for generating customizable synthetic human motion datasets tailored to domain-specific applications. Unlike prior works, which focus on general, everyday motions and offer limited flexibility, our approach provides fine-grained control over body pose, appearance, camera viewpoint, and environmental context, without requiring any manual annotations. To validate the impact of Avatar4D, we focus on sports, where domain-specific human actions and movement patterns pose unique challenges for motion understanding. In this setting, we introduce Syn2Sport, a large-scale synthetic dataset spanning sports, including baseball and ice hockey. Avatar4D features high-fidelity 4D (3D geometry over time) human motion sequences with varying player appearances rendered in diverse environments. We benchmark several state-of-the-art pose estimation models on Syn2Sport and demonstrate their effectiveness for supervised learning, zero-shot transfer to real-world data, and generalization across sports. Furthermore, we evaluate how closely the generated synthetic data aligns with real-world datasets in feature space. Our results highlight the potential of such systems to generate scalable, controllable, and transferable human datasets for diverse domain-specific tasks without relying on domain-specific real data.

Paperid: 4320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13886.pdf

Abstract:
Post-training model pruning is a promising solution, yet it faces a trade-off: simple heuristics that zero weights are fast but degrade accuracy, while principled joint optimization methods recover accuracy but are computationally infeasible at modern scale. One-shot methods such as SparseGPT offer a practical trade-off in optimality by applying efficient, approximate heuristic weight updates. To close this gap, we introduce OPTIMA, a practical one-shot post-training pruning method that balances accuracy and scalability. OPTIMA casts layer-wise weight reconstruction after mask selection as independent, row-wise Quadratic Programs (QPs) that share a common layer Hessian. Solving these QPs yields the per-row globally optimal update with respect to the reconstruction objective given the estimated Hessian. The shared-Hessian structure makes the problem highly amenable to batching on accelerators. We implement an accelerator-friendly QP solver that accumulates one Hessian per layer and solves many small QPs in parallel, enabling one-shot post-training pruning at scale on a single accelerator without fine-tuning. OPTIMA integrates with existing mask selectors and consistently improves zero-shot performance across multiple LLM families and sparsity regimes, yielding up to 3.97% absolute accuracy improvement. On an NVIDIA H100, OPTIMA prunes a 8B-parameter transformer end-to-end in 40 hours with 60GB peak memory. Together, these results set a new state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for one-shot post-training pruning.

Paperid: 4321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02273.pdf

Abstract:
Recent text-to-video models have demonstrated strong temporal generation capabilities, yet their potential for image restoration remains underexplored. In this work, we repurpose CogVideo for progressive visual restoration tasks by fine-tuning it to generate restoration trajectories rather than natural video motion. Specifically, we construct synthetic datasets for super-resolution, deblurring, and low-light enhancement, where each sample depicts a gradual transition from degraded to clean frames. Two prompting strategies are compared: a uniform text prompt shared across all samples, and a scene-specific prompting scheme generated via LLaVA multi-modal LLM and refined with ChatGPT. Our fine-tuned model learns to associate temporal progression with restoration quality, producing sequences that improve perceptual metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS across frames. Extensive experiments show that CogVideo effectively restores spatial detail and illumination consistency while maintaining temporal coherence. Moreover, the model generalizes to real-world scenarios on the ReLoBlur dataset without additional training, demonstrating strong zero-shot robustness and interpretability through temporal restoration.

Paperid: 4322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00479.pdf

Abstract:
Data collection often reflects human decisions. In healthcare, for instance, a referral for a diagnostic test is influenced by the patient's health, their preferences, available resources, and the practitioner's recommendations. Despite the extensive literature on the informativeness of missingness, its implications on the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) have not been studied. Through a series of experiments on data from Columbia University Medical Center, a large urban academic medical center, and MIMIC-IV, we demonstrate that patterns of missingness significantly impact zero-shot predictive performance. Notably, the explicit inclusion of missingness indicators at prompting benefits some while hurting other LLMs' zero-shot predictive performance and calibration, suggesting an inconsistent impact. The proposed aggregated analysis and theoretical insights suggest that larger models benefit from these interventions, while smaller models can be negatively impacted. The LLM paradigm risks obscuring the impact of missingness, often neglected even in conventional ML, even further. We conclude that there is a need for more transparent accounting and systematic evaluation of the impact of representing (informative) missingness on downstream performance.

Paperid: 4323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23170.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language pre-training frameworks such as CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across a range of vision-language tasks. Recent studies have shown that aligning individual text tokens with specific image patches or regions enhances fine-grained compositional understanding. However, it remains challenging to capture compositional semantics that span multiple image regions. To address this limitation, we propose PowerCLIP, a novel contrastive pre-training framework enhanced by powerset alignment, which exhaustively optimizes region-to-phrase alignments by minimizing the loss defined between powersets of image regions and textual parse trees. Since the naive powerset construction incurs exponential computational cost due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of region subsets, we introduce efficient non-linear aggregators (NLAs) that reduce complexity from O(2^M) to O(M) with respect to the number of regions M, while approximating the exact loss value with arbitrary precision. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PowerCLIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, underscoring the compositionality and robustness of our approach. Our code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 4324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22505.pdf

Abstract:
Robot manipulation in the real world is fundamentally constrained by the visual sim2real gap, where depth observations collected in simulation fail to reflect the complex noise patterns inherent to real sensors. In this work, inspired by the denoising capability of diffusion models, we invert the conventional perspective and propose a clean-to-noisy paradigm that learns to synthesize noisy depth, thereby bridging the visual sim2real gap through purely simulation-driven robotic learning. Building on this idea, we introduce RealD$^2$iff, a hierarchical coarse-to-fine diffusion framework that decomposes depth noise into global structural distortions and fine-grained local perturbations. To enable progressive learning of these components, we further develop two complementary strategies: Frequency-Guided Supervision (FGS) for global structure modeling and Discrepancy-Guided Optimization (DGO) for localized refinement. To integrate RealD$^2$iff seamlessly into imitation learning, we construct a pipeline that spans six stages. We provide comprehensive empirical and experimental validation demonstrating the effectiveness of this paradigm. RealD$^2$iff enables two key applications: (1) generating real-world-like depth to construct clean-noisy paired datasets without manual sensor data collection. (2) Achieving zero-shot sim2real robot manipulation, substantially improving real-world performance without additional fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20697.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding complete musical scores requires reasoning over symbolic structures such as pitch, rhythm, harmony, and form. Despite the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in natural language and multimodal tasks, their ability to comprehend musical notation remains underexplored. We introduce Musical Score Understanding Benchmark (MSU-Bench), the first large-scale, human-curated benchmark for evaluating score-level musical understanding across both textual (ABC notation) and visual (PDF) modalities. MSU-Bench comprises 1,800 generative question-answer (QA) pairs drawn from works spanning Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others, organised into four progressive levels of comprehension: Onset Information, Notation & Note, Chord & Harmony, and Texture & Form. Through extensive zero-shot and fine-tuned evaluations of over 15+ state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, we reveal sharp modality gaps, fragile level-wise success rates, and the difficulty of sustaining multilevel correctness. Fine-tuning markedly improves performance in both modalities while preserving general knowledge, establishing MSU-Bench as a rigorous foundation for future research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), musicological, and multimodal reasoning.

Paperid: 4326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18774.pdf

Abstract:
Low-resource ASR remains a challenging problem, especially for languages like Arabic that exhibit wide dialectal variation and limited labeled data. We propose context-aware prompting strategies to adapt OpenAI's Whisper for Arabic speech recognition without retraining. Our methods include decoder prompting with first-pass transcriptions or retrieved utterances, and encoder prefixing using speech synthesized in the target speaker's voice. We introduce techniques such as prompt reordering, speaker-aware prefix synthesis, and modality-specific retrieval (lexical, semantic, acoustic) to improve transcription in real-world, zero-shot settings. Evaluated on nine Arabic linguistic conditions, our approach reduces WER by up to 22.3% on Modern Standard Arabic and 9.2% on dialectal speech, significantly mitigating hallucinations and speaker mismatch.

Paperid: 4327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14101.pdf

Abstract:
Layout design is a crucial step in developing mobile app pages. However, crafting satisfactory designs is time-intensive for designers: they need to consider which controls and content to present on the page, and then repeatedly adjust their size, position, and style for better aesthetics and structure. Although many design software can now help to perform these repetitive tasks, extensive training is needed to use them effectively. Moreover, collaborative design across app pages demands extra time to align standards and ensure consistent styling. In this work, we propose APD-agents, a large language model (LLM) driven multi-agent framework for automated page design in mobile applications. Our framework contains OrchestratorAgent, SemanticParserAgent, PrimaryLayoutAgent, TemplateRetrievalAgent, and RecursiveComponentAgent. Upon receiving the user's description of the page, the OrchestratorAgent can dynamically can direct other agents to accomplish users' design task. To be specific, the SemanticParserAgent is responsible for converting users' descriptions of page content into structured data. The PrimaryLayoutAgent can generate an initial coarse-grained layout of this page. The TemplateRetrievalAgent can fetch semantically relevant few-shot examples and enhance the quality of layout generation. Besides, a RecursiveComponentAgent can be used to decide how to recursively generate all the fine-grained sub-elements it contains for each element in the layout. Our work fully leverages the automatic collaboration capabilities of large-model-driven multi-agent systems. Experimental results on the RICO dataset show that our APD-agents achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 4328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09973.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, demonstrate strong generalization abilities in zero-shot classification by leveraging embeddings extracted from image and text encoders. This paper aims to robustly fine-tune these vision-language models on in-distribution (ID) data without compromising their generalization abilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and zero-shot settings. Current robust fine-tuning methods tackle this challenge by reusing contrastive learning, which was used in pre-training, for fine-tuning. However, we found that these methods distort the geometric structure of the embeddings, which plays a crucial role in the generalization of vision-language models, resulting in limited OOD and zero-shot performance. To address this, we propose Difference Vector Equalization (DiVE), which preserves the geometric structure during fine-tuning. The idea behind DiVE is to constrain difference vectors, each of which is obtained by subtracting the embeddings extracted from the pre-trained and fine-tuning models for the same data sample. By constraining the difference vectors to be equal across various data samples, we effectively preserve the geometric structure. Therefore, we introduce two losses: average vector loss (AVL) and pairwise vector loss (PVL). AVL preserves the geometric structure globally by constraining difference vectors to be equal to their weighted average. PVL preserves the geometric structure locally by ensuring a consistent multimodal alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that DiVE effectively preserves the geometric structure, achieving strong results across ID, OOD, and zero-shot metrics.

Paperid: 4329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04880.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often rely on static retrieval, limiting adaptation to evolving intent and content drift. We introduce Dynamic Memory Alignment (DMA), an online learning framework that systematically incorporates multi-granularity human feedback to align ranking in interactive settings. DMA organizes document-, list-, and response-level signals into a coherent learning pipeline: supervised training for pointwise and listwise rankers, policy optimization driven by response-level preferences, and knowledge distillation into a lightweight scorer for low-latency serving. Throughout this paper, memory refers to the model's working memory, which is the entire context visible to the LLM for In-Context Learning. We adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol mirroring deployment: (i) large-scale online A/B ablations to isolate the utility of each feedback source, and (ii) few-shot offline tests on knowledge-intensive benchmarks. Online, a multi-month industrial deployment further shows substantial improvements in human engagement. Offline, DMA preserves competitive foundational retrieval while yielding notable gains on conversational QA (TriviaQA, HotpotQA). Taken together, these results position DMA as a principled approach to feedback-driven, real-time adaptation in RAG without sacrificing baseline capability.

Paperid: 4330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01694.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language pre-trained models, such as CLIP, have established new benchmarks in multimodal data mining. In such models, few-shot fine-tuning is a major challenge to achieve optimal performance on both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets, especially when labeled data is scarce. Most existing fine-tuning approaches rely on first-order gradient-based optimizers, which typically suffer from slow convergence, sensitivity to step-size hyperparameters, and poor generalization in OOD settings. In contrast, second-order methods utilize local curvature information of the loss landscape to adjust the update step size. This is particularly beneficial for CLIP models, whose non-convex loss functions often contain sharp critical points. In such cases, natural gradient direction can offer more substantial and efficient per-iteration updates when fine-tuning with limited data. Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) is obtained by preconditioning the standard gradient with the inverse Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which is computationally expensive for large models. To address this, we propose a Bayesian approximation of NGD using a Kalman filter for CLIP models. Our method combines the benefits of second-order optimization with Bayesian inference, which enhances generalization while providing uncertainty quantification. Extensive experiments conducted on diverse image classification datasets demonstrate that our algorithm consistently achieves superior--or comparable--ID performance and improved OOD robustness compared to state-of-the-art baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first successful application of Kalman filtering to fine-tuning CLIP-based models, which enables more robust and efficient learning in vision-language tasks.

Paperid: 4331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27535.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly demonstrating the potential to reach human-level performance in generating clinical summaries from patient-clinician conversations. However, these summaries often focus on patients' biology rather than their preferences, values, wishes, and concerns. To achieve patient-centered care, we propose a new standard for Artificial Intelligence (AI) clinical summarization tasks: Patient-Centered Summaries (PCS). Our objective was to develop a framework to generate PCS that capture patient values and ensure clinical utility and to assess whether current open-source LLMs can achieve human-level performance in this task. We used a mixed-methods process. Two Patient and Public Involvement groups (10 patients and 8 clinicians) in the United Kingdom participated in semi-structured interviews exploring what personal and contextual information should be included in clinical summaries and how it should be structured for clinical use. Findings informed annotation guidelines used by eight clinicians to create gold-standard PCS from 88 atrial fibrillation consultations. Sixteen consultations were used to refine a prompt aligned with the guidelines. Five open-source LLMs (Llama-3.2-3B, Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-8B, Gemma-3-4B, and Qwen3-8B) generated summaries for 72 consultations using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, evaluated with ROUGE-L, BERTScore, and qualitative metrics. Patients emphasized lifestyle routines, social support, recent stressors, and care values. Clinicians sought concise functional, psychosocial, and emotional context. The best zero-shot performance was achieved by Mistral-8B (ROUGE-L 0.189) and Llama-3.1-8B (BERTScore 0.673); the best few-shot by Llama-3.1-8B (ROUGE-L 0.206, BERTScore 0.683). Completeness and fluency were similar between experts and models, while correctness and patient-centeredness favored human PCS.

Paperid: 4332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24478.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific talks are a growing medium for disseminating research, and automatically identifying relevant literature that grounds or enriches a talk would be highly valuable for researchers and students alike. We introduce Reference Prediction from Talks (RPT), a new task that maps long, and unstructured scientific presentations to relevant papers. To support research on RPT, we present Talk2Ref, the first large-scale dataset of its kind, containing 6,279 talks and 43,429 cited papers (26 per talk on average), where relevance is approximated by the papers cited in the talk's corresponding source publication. We establish strong baselines by evaluating state-of-the-art text embedding models in zero-shot retrieval scenarios, and propose a dual-encoder architecture trained on Talk2Ref. We further explore strategies for handling long transcripts, as well as training for domain adaptation. Our results show that fine-tuning on Talk2Ref significantly improves citation prediction performance, demonstrating both the challenges of the task and the effectiveness of our dataset for learning semantic representations from spoken scientific content. The dataset and trained models are released under an open license to foster future research on integrating spoken scientific communication into citation recommendation systems.

Paperid: 4333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22777.pdf

Abstract:
Normalization layer constitutes an essential component in neural networks. In transformers, the predominantly used RMSNorm constrains vectors to a unit hypersphere, followed by dimension-wise rescaling through a learnable scaling coefficient $γ$ to maintain the representational capacity of the model. However, RMSNorm discards the input norm information in forward pass and a static scaling factor $γ$ may be insufficient to accommodate the wide variability of input data and distributional shifts, thereby limiting further performance improvements, particularly in zero-shot scenarios that large language models routinely encounter. To address this limitation, we propose SeeDNorm, which enhances the representational capability of the model by dynamically adjusting the scaling coefficient based on the current input, thereby preserving the input norm information and enabling data-dependent, self-rescaled dynamic normalization. During backpropagation, SeeDNorm retains the ability of RMSNorm to dynamically adjust gradient according to the input norm. We provide a detailed analysis of the training optimization for SeedNorm and proposed corresponding solutions to address potential instability issues that may arise when applying SeeDNorm. We validate the effectiveness of SeeDNorm across models of varying sizes in large language model pre-training as well as supervised and unsupervised computer vision tasks. By introducing a minimal number of parameters and with neglligible impact on model efficiency, SeeDNorm achieves consistently superior performance compared to previously commonly used normalization layers such as RMSNorm and LayerNorm, as well as element-wise activation alternatives to normalization layers like DyT.

Paperid: 4334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20727.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Fluoropyrimidines are widely prescribed for colorectal and breast cancers, but are associated with toxicities such as hand-foot syndrome and cardiotoxicity. Since toxicity documentation is often embedded in clinical notes, we aimed to develop and evaluate natural language processing (NLP) methods to extract treatment and toxicity information. Materials and Methods: We constructed a gold-standard dataset of 236 clinical notes from 204,165 adult oncology patients. Domain experts annotated categories related to treatment regimens and toxicities. We developed rule-based, machine learning-based (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine [SVM], Logistic Regression [LR]), deep learning-based (BERT, ClinicalBERT), and large language models (LLM)-based NLP approaches (zero-shot and error-analysis prompting). Models used an 80:20 train-test split. Results: Sufficient data existed to train and evaluate 5 annotated categories. Error-analysis prompting achieved optimal precision, recall, and F1 scores (F1=1.000) for treatment and toxicities extraction, whereas zero-shot prompting reached F1=1.000 for treatment and F1=0.876 for toxicities extraction.LR and SVM ranked second for toxicities (F1=0.937). Deep learning underperformed, with BERT (F1=0.873 treatment; F1= 0.839 toxicities) and ClinicalBERT (F1=0.873 treatment; F1 = 0.886 toxicities). Rule-based methods served as our baseline with F1 scores of 0.857 in treatment and 0.858 in toxicities. Discussion: LMM-based approaches outperformed all others, followed by machine learning methods. Machine and deep learning approaches were limited by small training data and showed limited generalizability, particularly for rare categories. Conclusion: LLM-based NLP most effectively extracted fluoropyrimidine treatment and toxicity information from clinical notes, and has strong potential to support oncology research and pharmacovigilance.

Paperid: 4335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18837.pdf

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without exposing local data, balancing performance and privacy. However, domain shift and label heterogeneity across clients often hinder the generalization of the aggregated global model. Recently, large-scale vision-language models like CLIP have shown strong zero-shot classification capabilities, raising the question of how to effectively fine-tune CLIP across domains in a federated setting. In this work, we propose an adaptive federated prompt tuning framework, FedDEAP, to enhance CLIP's generalization in multi-domain scenarios. Our method includes the following three key components: (1) To mitigate the loss of domain-specific information caused by label-supervised tuning, we disentangle semantic and domain-specific features in images by using semantic and domain transformation networks with unbiased mappings; (2) To preserve domain-specific knowledge during global prompt aggregation, we introduce a dual-prompt design with a global semantic prompt and a local domain prompt to balance shared and personalized information; (3) To maximize the inclusion of semantic and domain information from images in the generated text features, we align textual and visual representations under the two learned transformations to preserve semantic and domain consistency. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing the generalization of CLIP for federated image recognition across multiple domains.

Paperid: 4336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16290.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomaly detection (VAD) has rapidly advanced by recent development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). While these models offer superior zero-shot detection capabilities, their immense computational cost and unstable visual grounding performance hinder real-time deployment. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Cerberus, a two-stage cascaded system designed for efficient yet accurate real-time VAD. Cerberus learns normal behavioral rules offline, and combines lightweight filtering with fine-grained VLM reasoning during online inference. The performance gains of Cerberus come from two key innovations: motion mask prompting and rule-based deviation detection. The former directs the VLM's attention to regions relevant to motion, while the latter identifies anomalies as deviations from learned norms rather than enumerating possible anomalies. Extensive evaluations on four datasets show that Cerberus on average achieves 57.68 fps on an NVIDIA L40S GPU, a 151.79$\times$ speedup, and 97.2\% accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art VLM-based VAD methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-time video analytics.

Paperid: 4337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16257.pdf

Abstract:
As language models have a greater impact on society, it is important to ensure they are aligned to a diverse range of perspectives and are able to reflect nuance in human values. However, the most popular training paradigms for modern language models often assume there is one optimal answer for every query, leading to generic responses and poor alignment. In this work, we aim to enhance pluralistic alignment of language models in a low-resource setting with two methods: pluralistic decoding and model steering. We empirically demonstrate that model steering offers consistent improvement over zero-shot and few-shot baselines with only 50 annotated samples. Our proposed methods decrease false positives in several high-stakes tasks such as hate speech detection and misinformation detection, and improves the distributional alignment to human values in GlobalOpinionQA. We hope our work highlights the importance of diversity and how language models can be adapted to consider nuanced perspectives.

Paperid: 4338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15686.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot learning framework for multi-robot systems that integrate both spatial and temporal elements: Few-Shot Demonstration-Driven Task Coordination and Trajectory Execution (DDACE). Our approach leverages temporal graph networks for learning task-agnostic temporal sequencing and Gaussian Processes for spatial trajectory modeling, ensuring modularity and generalization across various tasks. By decoupling temporal and spatial aspects, DDACE requires only a small number of demonstrations, significantly reducing data requirements compared to traditional learning from demonstration approaches. To validate our proposed framework, we conducted extensive experiments in task environments designed to assess various aspects of multi-robot coordination-such as multi-sequence execution, multi-action dynamics, complex trajectory generation, and heterogeneous configurations. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully achieves task execution under few-shot learning conditions and generalizes effectively across dynamic and diverse settings. This work underscores the potential of modular architectures in enhancing the practicality and scalability of multi-robot systems in real-world applications. Additional materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/ddace.

Paperid: 4339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14937.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health disorders remain among the leading cause of disability worldwide, yet conditions such as depression, anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are frequently underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed due to subjective assessments, limited clinical resources, and stigma and low awareness. In primary care settings, studies show that providers misidentify depression or anxiety in over 60% of cases, highlighting the urgent need for scalable, accessible, and context-aware diagnostic tools that can support early detection and intervention. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of machine learning models for mental health screening using a unique dataset of 553 real-world, semistructured interviews, each paried with ground-truth diagnoses for major depressive episodes (MDE), anxiety disorders, and PTSD. We benchmark multiple model classes, including zero-shot prompting with GPT-4.1 Mini and MetaLLaMA, as well as fine-tuned RoBERTa models using LowRank Adaptation (LoRA). Our models achieve over 80% accuracy across diagnostic categories, with especially strongperformance on PTSD (up to 89% accuracy and 98% recall). We also find that using shorter context, focused context segments improves recall, suggesting that focused narrative cues enhance detection sensitivity. LoRA fine-tuning proves both efficient and effective, with lower-rank configurations (e.g., rank 8 and 16) maintaining competitive performance across evaluation metrics. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based models can offer substantial improvements over traditional self-report screening tools, providing a path toward low-barrier, AI-powerd early diagnosis. This work lays the groundwork for integrating machine learning into real-world clinical workflows, particularly in low-resource or high-stigma environments where access to timely mental health care is most limited.

Paperid: 4340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14543.pdf

Abstract:
Aligning features from different modalities, is one of the most fundamental challenges for cross-modal tasks. Although pre-trained vision-language models can achieve a general alignment between image and text, they often require parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for further adjustment. Today's PEFT methods (e.g., prompt tuning, LoRA-based, or adapter-based) always selectively fine-tune a subset of parameters, which can slightly adjust either visual or textual features, and avoid overfitting. In this paper, we are the first to highlight that all existing PEFT methods perform one-step adjustment. It is insufficient for complex (or difficult) datasets, where features of different modalities are highly entangled. To this end, we propose the first model-agnostic multi-step adjustment approach by learning a cross-modal velocity field: Flow Matching Alignment (FMA). Specifically, to ensure the correspondence between categories during training, we first utilize a fixed coupling strategy. Then, we propose a noise augmentation strategy to alleviate the data scarcity issue. Finally, we design an early-stopping solver, which terminates the transformation process earlier, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Compared with one-step PEFT methods, FMA has the multi-step rectification ability to achieve more precise and robust alignment. Extensive results have demonstrated that FMA can consistently yield significant performance gains across various benchmarks and backbones, particularly on challenging datasets.

Paperid: 4341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10454.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) offer a generalizable approach for modeling patient trajectories, but suffer from the long and noisy nature of electronic health records (EHR) data in temporal reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce Traj-CoA, a multi-agent system involving chain-of-agents for patient trajectory modeling. Traj-CoA employs a chain of worker agents to process EHR data in manageable chunks sequentially, distilling critical events into a shared long-term memory module, EHRMem, to reduce noise and preserve a comprehensive timeline. A final manager agent synthesizes the worker agents' summary and the extracted timeline in EHRMem to make predictions. In a zero-shot one-year lung cancer risk prediction task based on five-year EHR data, Traj-CoA outperforms baselines of four categories. Analysis reveals that Traj-CoA exhibits clinically aligned temporal reasoning, establishing it as a promisingly robust and generalizable approach for modeling complex patient trajectories.

Paperid: 4342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09649.pdf

Abstract:
Batten disease (neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis) is a rare pediatric neurodegenerative disorder whose early MRI signs are subtle and often missed. We propose TinyViT-Batten, a few-shot Vision Transformer (ViT) framework to detect early Batten disease from pediatric brain MRI with limited training cases. We distill a large teacher ViT into a 5 M-parameter TinyViT and fine-tune it using metric-based few-shot learning (prototypical loss with 5-shot episodes). Our model achieves high accuracy (approximately 91%) and area under ROC of at least 0.95 on a multi-site dataset of 79 genetically confirmed Batten-disease MRIs (27 CLN3 from the Hochstein natural-history study, 32 CLN2 from an international longitudinal cohort, 12 early-manifestation CLN2 cases reported by Cokal et al., and 8 public Radiopaedia scans) together with 90 age-matched controls, outperforming a 3D-ResNet and Swin-Tiny baseline. We further integrate Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to highlight disease-relevant brain regions, enabling explainable predictions. The model's small size and strong performance (sensitivity greater than 90%, specificity approximately 90%) demonstrates a practical AI solution for early Batten disease detection.

Paperid: 4343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04674.pdf

Abstract:
Deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for end-to-end semantic communications, jointly learning to compress and protect task-relevant features over noisy channels. However, existing DeepJSCC schemes assume a shared latent space at transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) - an assumption that fails in multi-vendor deployments where encoders and decoders cannot be co-trained. This mismatch introduces "semantic noise", degrading reconstruction quality and downstream task performance. In this paper, we systematize and evaluate methods for semantic channel equalization for DeepJSCC, introducing an additional processing stage that aligns heterogeneous latent spaces under both physical and semantic impairments. We investigate three classes of aligners: (i) linear maps, which admit closed-form solutions; (ii) lightweight neural networks, offering greater expressiveness; and (iii) a Parseval-frame equalizer, which operates in zero-shot mode without the need for training. Through extensive experiments on image reconstruction over AWGN and fading channels, we quantify trade-offs among complexity, data efficiency, and fidelity, providing guidelines for deploying DeepJSCC in heterogeneous AI-native wireless networks.

Paperid: 4344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01639.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the geospatial reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically, whether LLMs can read road network maps and perform navigation. We frame trajectory recovery as a proxy task, which requires models to reconstruct masked GPS traces, and introduce GLOBALTRACE, a dataset with over 4,000 real-world trajectories across diverse regions and transportation modes. Using road network as context, our prompting framework enables LLMs to generate valid paths without accessing any external navigation tools. Experiments show that LLMs outperform off-the-shelf baselines and specialized trajectory recovery models, with strong zero-shot generalization. Fine-grained analysis shows that LLMs have strong comprehension of the road network and coordinate systems, but also pose systematic biases with respect to regions and transportation modes. Finally, we demonstrate how LLMs can enhance navigation experiences by reasoning over maps in flexible ways to incorporate user preferences.

Paperid: 4345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01526.pdf

Abstract:
Domain-specific quantitative reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), especially in fields requiring expert knowledge and complex question answering (QA). In this work, we propose Expert Question Decomposition (EQD), an approach designed to balance the use of domain knowledge with computational efficiency. EQD is built on a two-step fine-tuning framework and guided by a reward function that measures the effectiveness of generated sub-questions in improving QA outcomes. It requires only a few thousand training examples and a single A100 GPU for fine-tuning, with inference time comparable to zero-shot prompting. Beyond its efficiency, EQD outperforms state-of-the-art domain-tuned models and advanced prompting strategies. We evaluate EQD in the financial domain, characterized by specialized knowledge and complex quantitative reasoning, across four benchmark datasets. Our method consistently improves QA performance by 0.6% to 10.5% across different LLMs. Our analysis reveals an important insight: in domain-specific QA, a single supporting question often provides greater benefit than detailed guidance steps.

Paperid: 4346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25466.pdf

Abstract:
Generalist robot policies that can perform many tasks typically require extensive expert data or simulations for training. In this work, we propose a novel Data-Efficient multitask DAgger framework that distills a single multitask policy from multiple task-specific expert policies. Our approach significantly increases the overall task success rate by actively focusing on tasks where the multitask policy underperforms. The core of our method is a performance-aware scheduling strategy that tracks how much each task's learning process benefits from the amount of data, using a Kalman filter-based estimator to robustly decide how to allocate additional demonstrations across tasks. We validate our approach on MetaWorld, as well as a suite of diverse drawer-opening tasks in IsaacLab. The resulting policy attains high performance across all tasks while using substantially fewer expert demonstrations, and the visual policy learned with our method in simulation shows better performance than naive DAgger and Behavior Cloning when transferring zero-shot to a real robot without using real data.

Paperid: 4347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21623.pdf

Abstract:
The expanding long-context capabilities of large language models are constrained by a significant memory bottleneck: the key-value (KV) cache required for autoregressive generation. This bottleneck is substantial; for instance, a Llama-3.1-8B model processing a 32K-token prompt at a batch size of 4 requires approximately 16GB for its KV cache, a size exceeding the model's weights. While KV-cache compression via low-rank projection is a promising direction, existing methods rely on a static, offline-learned subspace that performs poorly under data distribution shifts. To overcome these limitations, we introduce OjaKV, a novel framework that integrates a strategic hybrid storage policy with online subspace adaptation. First, OjaKV recognizes that not all tokens are equally important for compression; it preserves the crucial first and most recent tokens in full-rank, maintaining high-fidelity anchors for attention. Second, for the vast majority of intermediate tokens, it applies low-rank compression by incrementally adapting the projection basis using Oja's algorithm for online principal component analysis. This adaptation involves a comprehensive update during prompt prefilling and lightweight periodic updates during decoding, ensuring the subspace remains aligned with the evolving context. Crucially, our framework is fully compatible with modern attention modules like FlashAttention. Experiments demonstrate that OjaKV maintains or even improves zero-shot accuracy at high compression ratios. In particular, OjaKV achieves its strongest gains on very long-context benchmarks that require complex reasoning, highlighting the importance of online subspace adaptation in dynamically tracking context shifts. These results establish our hybrid framework as a practical, plug-and-play solution for memory-efficient long-context inference without requiring model fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21557.pdf

Abstract:
Trustworthy Large Language Models (LLMs) must cite human-verifiable sources in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, academia, and finance, where even small errors can have severe consequences. Practitioners and researchers face a choice: let models generate citations during decoding, or let models draft answers first and then attach appropriate citations. To clarify this choice, we introduce two paradigms: Generation-Time Citation (G-Cite), which produces the answer and citations in one pass, and Post-hoc Citation (P-Cite), which adds or verifies citations after drafting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation from zero-shot to advanced retrieval-augmented methods across four popular attribution datasets and provide evidence-based recommendations that weigh trade-offs across use cases. Our results show a consistent trade-off between coverage and citation correctness, with retrieval as the main driver of attribution quality in both paradigms. P-Cite methods achieve high coverage with competitive correctness and moderate latency, whereas G-Cite methods prioritize precision at the cost of coverage and speed. We recommend a retrieval-centric, P-Cite-first approach for high-stakes applications, reserving G-Cite for precision-critical settings such as strict claim verification. Our codes and human evaluation results are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Citation_Paradigms-BBB5/

Paperid: 4349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19552.pdf

Abstract:
Grounding large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks like post-hoc dash-cam driving video analysis is challenging due to their general-purpose training and lack of structured inductive biases. As vision is often the sole modality available for such analysis (i.e., no LiDAR, GPS, etc.), existing video-based vision-language models (V-VLMs) struggle with spatial reasoning, causal inference, and explainability of events in the input video. To this end, we introduce iFinder, a structured semantic grounding framework that decouples perception from reasoning by translating dash-cam videos into a hierarchical, interpretable data structure for LLMs. iFinder operates as a modular, training-free pipeline that employs pretrained vision models to extract critical cues -- object pose, lane positions, and object trajectories -- which are hierarchically organized into frame- and video-level structures. Combined with a three-block prompting strategy, it enables step-wise, grounded reasoning for the LLM to refine a peer V-VLM's outputs and provide accurate reasoning. Evaluations on four public dash-cam video benchmarks show that iFinder's proposed grounding with domain-specific cues, especially object orientation and global context, significantly outperforms end-to-end V-VLMs on four zero-shot driving benchmarks, with up to 39% gains in accident reasoning accuracy. By grounding LLMs with driving domain-specific representations, iFinder offers a zero-shot, interpretable, and reliable alternative to end-to-end V-VLMs for post-hoc driving video understanding.

Paperid: 4350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17452.pdf

Abstract:
Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where label spaces may differ and the target domain may contain private classes. Previous UniDA methods primarily focused on visual space alignment but often struggled with visual ambiguities due to content differences, which limited their robustness and generalizability. To overcome this, we introduce a novel approach that leverages the strong \textit{zero-shot capabilities} of recent vision-language foundation models (VLMs) like CLIP, concentrating solely on label space alignment to enhance adaptation stability. CLIP can generate task-specific classifiers based only on label names. However, adapting CLIP to UniDA is challenging because the label space is not fully known in advance. In this study, we first utilize generative vision-language models to identify unknown categories in the target domain. Noise and semantic ambiguities in the discovered labels -- such as those similar to source labels (e.g., synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms) -- complicate label alignment. To address this, we propose a training-free label-space alignment method for UniDA (\ours). Our method aligns label spaces instead of visual spaces by filtering and refining noisy labels between the domains. We then construct a \textit{universal classifier} that integrates both shared knowledge and target-private class information, thereby improving generalizability under domain shifts. The results reveal that the proposed method considerably outperforms existing UniDA techniques across key DomainBed benchmarks, delivering an average improvement of \textcolor{blue}{+7.9\%}in H-score and \textcolor{blue}{+6.1\%} in H$^3$-score. Furthermore, incorporating self-training further enhances performance and achieves an additional (\textcolor{blue}{+1.6\%}) increment in both H- and H$^3$-scores.

Paperid: 4351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16674.pdf

Abstract:
Text-based Pedestrian Retrieval (TPR) aims to retrieve specific target pedestrians in visual scenes according to natural language descriptions. Although existing methods have achieved progress under constrained settings, interactive retrieval in the open-world scenario still suffers from limited model generalization and insufficient semantic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose FitPro, an open-world interactive zero-shot TPR framework with enhanced semantic comprehension and cross-scene adaptability. FitPro has three innovative components: Feature Contrastive Decoding (FCD), Incremental Semantic Mining (ISM), and Query-aware Hierarchical Retrieval (QHR). The FCD integrates prompt-guided contrastive decoding to generate high-quality structured pedestrian descriptions from denoised images, effectively alleviating semantic drift in zero-shot scenarios. The ISM constructs holistic pedestrian representations from multi-view observations to achieve global semantic modeling in multi-turn interactions,thereby improving robustness against viewpoint shifts and fine-grained variations in descriptions. The QHR dynamically optimizes the retrieval pipeline according to query types, enabling efficient adaptation to multi-modal and multi-view inputs. Extensive experiments on five public datasets and two evaluation protocols demonstrate that FitPro significantly overcomes the generalization limitations and semantic modeling constraints of existing methods in interactive retrieval, paving the way for practical deployment. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/ lilo4096/FitPro-Interactive-Person-Retrieval.

Paperid: 4352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16445.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling robotic assistants to navigate complex environments and locate objects described in free-form language is a critical capability for real-world deployment. While foundation models, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs), offer powerful semantic understanding, effectively adapting their web-scale knowledge for embodied decision-making remains a key challenge. We present FiLM-Nav (Fine-tuned Language Model for Navigation), an approach that directly fine-tunes pre-trained VLM as the navigation policy. In contrast to methods that use foundation models primarily in a zero-shot manner or for map annotation, FiLM-Nav learns to select the next best exploration frontier by conditioning directly on raw visual trajectory history and the navigation goal. Leveraging targeted simulated embodied experience allows the VLM to ground its powerful pre-trained representations in the specific dynamics and visual patterns relevant to goal-driven navigation. Critically, fine-tuning on a diverse data mixture combining ObjectNav, OVON, ImageNav, and an auxiliary spatial reasoning task proves essential for achieving robustness and broad generalization. FiLM-Nav sets a new state-of-the-art in both SPL and success rate on HM3D ObjectNav among open-vocabulary methods, and sets a state-of-the-art SPL on the challenging HM3D-OVON benchmark, demonstrating strong generalization to unseen object categories. Our work validates that directly fine-tuning VLMs on diverse simulated embodied data is a highly effective pathway towards generalizable and efficient semantic navigation capabilities.

Paperid: 4353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15964.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable channel estimation (CE) is fundamental for robust communication in dynamic wireless environments, where models must generalize across varying conditions such as signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the number of resource blocks (RBs), and channel profiles. Traditional deep learning (DL)-based methods struggle to generalize effectively across such diverse settings, particularly under multitask and zero-shot scenarios. In this work, we propose MoE-CE, a flexible mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework designed to enhance the generalization capability of DL-based CE methods. MoE-CE provides an appropriate inductive bias by leveraging multiple expert subnetworks, each specialized in distinct channel characteristics, and a learned router that dynamically selects the most relevant experts per input. This architecture enhances model capacity and adaptability without a proportional rise in computational cost while being agnostic to the choice of the backbone model and the learning algorithm. Through extensive experiments on synthetic datasets generated under diverse SNRs, RB numbers, and channel profiles, including multitask and zero-shot evaluations, we demonstrate that MoE-CE consistently outperforms conventional DL approaches, achieving significant performance gains while maintaining efficiency.

Paperid: 4354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15693.pdf

Abstract:
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts-even in 3D-text contrastive learning. We introduce SceneForge, a novel framework that enhances contrastive alignment between 3D point clouds and text through structured multi-object scene compositions. SceneForge leverages individual 3D shapes to construct multi-object scenes with explicit spatial relations, pairing them with coherent multi-object descriptions refined by a large language model. By augmenting contrastive training with these structured, compositional samples, SceneForge effectively addresses the scarcity of large-scale 3D-text datasets, significantly enriching data complexity and diversity. We systematically investigate critical design elements, such as the optimal number of objects per scene, the proportion of compositional samples in training batches, and scene construction strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SceneForge delivers substantial performance gains across multiple tasks, including zero-shot classification on ModelNet, ScanObjNN, Objaverse-LVIS, and ScanNet, as well as few-shot part segmentation on ShapeNetPart. SceneForge's compositional augmentations are model-agnostic, consistently improving performance across multiple encoder architectures. Moreover, SceneForge improves 3D visual question answering on ScanQA, generalizes robustly to retrieval scenarios with increasing scene complexity, and showcases spatial reasoning capabilities by adapting spatial configurations to align precisely with textual instructions.

Paperid: 4355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13244.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in roles requiring nuanced psychological understanding, such as emotional support agents, counselors, and decision-making assistants. However, their ability to interpret human personality traits, a critical aspect of such applications, remains unexplored, particularly in ecologically valid conversational settings. While prior work has simulated LLM "personas" using discrete Big Five labels on social media data, the alignment of LLMs with continuous, ground-truth personality assessments derived from natural interactions is largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark comprising semi-structured interview transcripts paired with validated continuous Big Five trait scores. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate LLM performance across three paradigms: (1) zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-4.1 Mini, (2) LoRA-based fine-tuning applied to both RoBERTa and Meta-LLaMA architectures, and (3) regression using static embeddings from pretrained BERT and OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small. Our results reveal that all Pearson correlations between model predictions and ground-truth personality traits remain below 0.26, highlighting the limited alignment of current LLMs with validated psychological constructs. Chain-of-thought prompting offers minimal gains over zero-shot, suggesting that personality inference relies more on latent semantic representation than explicit reasoning. These findings underscore the challenges of aligning LLMs with complex human attributes and motivate future work on trait-specific prompting, context-aware modeling, and alignment-oriented fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08280.pdf

Abstract:
Generalized zero-shot semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds aims to classify each point into both seen and unseen classes. A significant challenge with these models is their tendency to make biased predictions, often favoring the classes encountered during training. This problem is more pronounced in 3D applications, where the scale of the training data is typically smaller than in image-based tasks. To address this problem, we propose a novel method called E3DPC-GZSL, which reduces overconfident predictions towards seen classes without relying on separate classifiers for seen and unseen data. E3DPC-GZSL tackles the overconfidence problem by integrating an evidence-based uncertainty estimator into a classifier. This estimator is then used to adjust prediction probabilities using a dynamic calibrated stacking factor that accounts for pointwise prediction uncertainty. In addition, E3DPC-GZSL introduces a novel training strategy that improves uncertainty estimation by refining the semantic space. This is achieved by merging learnable parameters with text-derived features, thereby improving model optimization for unseen data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on generalized zero-shot semantic segmentation datasets, including ScanNet v2 and S3DIS.

Paperid: 4357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07623.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has shown significant potential in diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases from MRI data. However, most existing methods rely heavily on large volumes of labeled data and often yield representations that lack interpretability. To address both challenges, we propose a novel self-supervised cross-encoder framework that leverages the temporal continuity in longitudinal MRI scans for supervision. This framework disentangles learned representations into two components: a static representation, constrained by contrastive learning, which captures stable anatomical features; and a dynamic representation, guided by input-gradient regularization, which reflects temporal changes and can be effectively fine-tuned for downstream classification tasks. Experimental results on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior classification accuracy and improved interpretability. Furthermore, the learned representations exhibit strong zero-shot generalization on the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset and cross-task generalization on the Parkinson Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI) dataset. The code for the proposed method will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 4358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04699.pdf

Abstract:
Hand gesture classification using high-quality structured data such as videos, images, and hand skeletons is a well-explored problem in computer vision. Leveraging low-power, cost-effective biosignals, e.g. surface electromyography (sEMG), allows for continuous gesture prediction on wearables. In this paper, we demonstrate that learning representations from weak-modality data that are aligned with those from structured, high-quality data can improve representation quality and enables zero-shot classification. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training (CPEP) framework to align EMG and pose representations, where we learn an EMG encoder that produces high-quality and pose-informative representations. We assess the gesture classification performance of our model through linear probing and zero-shot setups. Our model outperforms emg2pose benchmark models by up to 21% on in-distribution gesture classification and 72% on unseen (out-of-distribution) gesture classification.

Paperid: 4359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04446.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated significant capabilities to generate diverse and detailed visuals in various domains, and story visualization is emerging as a particularly promising application. However, as their use in real-world creative domains increases, the need for providing enhanced control, refinement, and the ability to modify images post-generation in a consistent manner becomes an important challenge. Existing methods often lack the flexibility to apply fine or coarse edits while maintaining visual and narrative consistency across multiple frames, preventing creators from seamlessly crafting and refining their visual stories. To address these challenges, we introduce Plot'n Polish, a zero-shot framework that enables consistent story generation and provides fine-grained control over story visualizations at various levels of detail.

Paperid: 4360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21248.pdf

Abstract:
Numerous methods have been proposed to enhance Keyword Spotting (KWS) in adult speech, but children's speech presents unique challenges for KWS systems due to its distinct acoustic and linguistic characteristics. This paper introduces a zero-shot KWS approach that leverages state-of-the-art self-supervised learning (SSL) models, including Wav2Vec2, HuBERT and Data2Vec. Features are extracted layer-wise from these SSL models and used to train a Kaldi-based DNN KWS system. The WSJCAM0 adult speech dataset was used for training, while the PFSTAR children's speech dataset was used for testing, demonstrating the zero-shot capability of our method. Our approach achieved state-of-the-art results across all keyword sets for children's speech. Notably, the Wav2Vec2 model, particularly layer 22, performed the best, delivering an ATWV score of 0.691, a MTWV score of 0.7003 and probability of false alarm and probability of miss of 0.0164 and 0.0547 respectively, for a set of 30 keywords. Furthermore, age-specific performance evaluation confirmed the system's effectiveness across different age groups of children. To assess the system's robustness against noise, additional experiments were conducted using the best-performing layer of the best-performing Wav2Vec2 model. The results demonstrated a significant improvement over traditional MFCC-based baseline, emphasizing the potential of SSL embeddings even in noisy conditions. To further generalize the KWS framework, the experiments were repeated for an additional CMU dataset. Overall the results highlight the significant contribution of SSL features in enhancing Zero-Shot KWS performance for children's speech, effectively addressing the challenges associated with the distinct characteristics of child speakers.

Paperid: 4361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21225.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle to accurately process children's speech due to its distinct and highly variable acoustic and linguistic characteristics. While recent advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL) models have greatly enhanced the transcription of adult speech, accurately transcribing children's speech remains a significant challenge. This study investigates the effectiveness of layer-wise features extracted from state-of-the-art SSL pre-trained models - specifically, Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, Data2Vec, and WavLM in improving the performance of ASR for children's speech in zero-shot scenarios. A detailed analysis of features extracted from these models was conducted, integrating them into a simplified DNN-based ASR system using the Kaldi toolkit. The analysis identified the most effective layers for enhancing ASR performance on children's speech in a zero-shot scenario, where WSJCAM0 adult speech was used for training and PFSTAR children speech for testing. Experimental results indicated that Layer 22 of the Wav2Vec2 model achieved the lowest Word Error Rate (WER) of 5.15%, representing a 51.64% relative improvement over the direct zero-shot decoding using Wav2Vec2 (WER of 10.65%). Additionally, age group-wise analysis demonstrated consistent performance improvements with increasing age, along with significant gains observed even in younger age groups using the SSL features. Further experiments on the CMU Kids dataset confirmed similar trends, highlighting the generalizability of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 4362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19089.pdf

Abstract:
Extremely low-resource languages, especially those written in rare scripts, as shown in Figure 1, remain largely unsupported by large language models (LLMs). This is due in part to compounding factors such as the lack of training data. This paper delivers the first comprehensive analysis of whether LLMs can acquire such languages purely via in-context learning (ICL), with or without auxiliary alignment signals, and how these methods compare to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We systematically evaluate 20 under-represented languages across three state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs. Our findings highlight the limitation of PEFT when both language and its script are extremely under-represented by the LLM. In contrast, zero-shot ICL with language alignment is impressively effective on extremely low-resource languages, while few-shot ICL or PEFT is more beneficial for languages relatively better represented by LLMs. For LLM practitioners working on extremely low-resource languages, we summarise guidelines grounded by our results on adapting LLMs to low-resource languages, e.g., avoiding fine-tuning a multilingual model on languages of unseen scripts.

Paperid: 4363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15283.pdf

Abstract:
While neural ranking models (NRMs) have shown high effectiveness, they remain susceptible to adversarial manipulation. In this work, we introduce Few-Shot Adversarial Prompting (FSAP), a novel black-box attack framework that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate high-ranking adversarial documents. Unlike previous approaches that rely on token-level perturbations or manual rewriting of existing documents, FSAP formulates adversarial attacks entirely through few-shot prompting, requiring no gradient access or internal model instrumentation. By conditioning the LLM on a small support set of previously observed harmful examples, FSAP synthesizes grammatically fluent and topically coherent documents that subtly embed false or misleading information and rank competitively against authentic content. We instantiate FSAP in two modes: FSAP-IntraQ, which leverages harmful examples from the same query to enhance topic fidelity, and FSAP-InterQ, which enables broader generalization by transferring adversarial patterns across unrelated queries. Our experiments on the TREC 2020 and 2021 Health Misinformation Tracks, using four diverse neural ranking models, reveal that FSAP-generated documents consistently outrank credible, factually accurate documents. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that these adversarial outputs exhibit strong stance alignment and low detectability, posing a realistic and scalable threat to neural retrieval systems. FSAP also effectively generalizes across both proprietary and open-source LLMs.

Paperid: 4364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13889.pdf

Abstract:
We tackle the challenge of integrating large language models (LLMs) with external recommender systems to enhance domain expertise in conversational recommendation (CRS). Current LLM-based CRS approaches primarily rely on zero- or few-shot methods for generating item recommendations based on user queries, but this method faces two significant challenges: (1) without domain-specific adaptation, LLMs frequently recommend items not in the target item space, resulting in low recommendation accuracy; and (2) LLMs largely rely on dialogue context for content-based recommendations, neglecting the collaborative relationships among entities or item sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce the CARE (Contextual Adaptation of Recommenders) framework. CARE customizes LLMs for CRS tasks, and synergizes them with external recommendation systems. CARE (a) integrates external recommender systems as domain experts, producing recommendations through entity-level insights, and (b) enhances those recommendations by leveraging contextual information for more accurate and unbiased final recommendations using LLMs. Our results demonstrate that incorporating external recommender systems with entity-level information significantly enhances recommendation accuracy of LLM-based CRS by an average of 54% and 25% for ReDial and INSPIRED datasets. The most effective strategy in the CARE framework involves LLMs selecting and reranking candidate items that external recommenders provide based on contextual insights. Our analysis indicates that the CARE framework effectively addresses the identified challenges and mitigates the popularity bias in the external recommender.

Paperid: 4365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12992.pdf

Abstract:
Moving target selection in multimedia interactive systems faces unprecedented challenges as users increasingly interact across diverse and dynamic contexts-from live streaming in moving vehicles to VR gaming in varying environments. Existing approaches rely on probabilistic models that relate endpoint distribution to target properties such as size and speed. However, these methods require substantial training data for each new context and lack transferability across scenarios, limiting their practical deployment in diverse multimedia environments where rich multimodal contextual information is readily available. This paper introduces MAGNeT (Multimodal Adaptive Gaussian Networks), which addresses these problems by combining classical statistical modeling with a context-aware multimodal method. MAGNeT dynamically fuses pre-fitted Ternary-Gaussian models from various scenarios based on real-time contextual cues, enabling effective adaptation with minimal training data while preserving model interpretability. We conduct experiments on self-constructed 2D and 3D moving target selection datasets under in-vehicle vibration conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNeT achieves lower error rates with few-shot samples by applying context-aware fusion of Gaussian experts from multi-factor conditions.

Paperid: 4366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11330.pdf

Abstract:
Although today's pretrained discriminative vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have demonstrated strong perception abilities, such as zero-shot image classification, they also suffer from the bag-of-words problem and spurious bias. To mitigate these problems, some pioneering studies leverage powerful generative models (e.g., pretrained diffusion models) to realize generalizable image classification, dubbed Diffusion Classifier (DC). Specifically, by randomly sampling a Gaussian noise, DC utilizes the differences of denoising effects with different category conditions to classify categories. Unfortunately, an inherent and notorious weakness of existing DCs is noise instability: different random sampled noises lead to significant performance changes. To achieve stable classification performance, existing DCs always ensemble the results of hundreds of sampled noises, which significantly reduces the classification speed. To this end, we firstly explore the role of noise in DC, and conclude that: there are some ``good noises'' that can relieve the instability. Meanwhile, we argue that these good noises should meet two principles: Frequency Matching and Spatial Matching. Regarding both principles, we propose a novel Noise Optimization method to learn matching (i.e., good) noise for DCs: NoOp. For frequency matching, NoOp first optimizes a dataset-specific noise: Given a dataset and a timestep t, optimize one randomly initialized parameterized noise. For Spatial Matching, NoOp trains a Meta-Network that adopts an image as input and outputs image-specific noise offset. The sum of optimized noise and noise offset will be used in DC to replace random noise. Extensive ablations on various datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of NoOp.

Paperid: 4367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10743.pdf

Abstract:
Atlas construction is fundamental to medical image analysis, offering a standardized spatial reference for tasks such as population-level anatomical modeling. While data-driven registration methods have recently shown promise in pairwise settings, their reliance on large training datasets, limited generalizability, and lack of true inference phases in groupwise contexts hinder their practical use. In contrast, model-driven methods offer training-free, theoretically grounded, and data-efficient alternatives, though they often face scalability and optimization challenges when applied to large 3D datasets. In this work, we introduce DARC (Diffeomorphic Atlas Registration via Coordinate descent), a novel model-driven groupwise registration framework for atlas construction. DARC supports a broad range of image dissimilarity metrics and efficiently handles arbitrary numbers of 3D images without incurring GPU memory issues. Through a coordinate descent strategy and a centrality-enforcing activation function, DARC produces unbiased, diffeomorphic atlases with high anatomical fidelity. Beyond atlas construction, we demonstrate two key applications: (1) One-shot segmentation, where labels annotated only on the atlas are propagated to subjects via inverse deformations, outperforming state-of-the-art few-shot methods; and (2) shape synthesis, where new anatomical variants are generated by warping the atlas mesh using synthesized diffeomorphic deformation fields. Overall, DARC offers a flexible, generalizable, and resource-efficient framework for atlas construction and applications.

Paperid: 4368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10369.pdf

Abstract:
While aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has made substantial progress, challenges remain for low-resource languages, which are often overlooked in favour of English. Current cross-lingual ABSA approaches focus on limited, less complex tasks and often rely on external translation tools. This paper introduces a novel approach using constrained decoding with sequence-to-sequence models, eliminating the need for unreliable translation tools and improving cross-lingual performance by 5\% on average for the most complex task. The proposed method also supports multi-tasking, which enables solving multiple ABSA tasks with a single model, with constrained decoding boosting results by more than 10\%. We evaluate our approach across seven languages and six ABSA tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods and setting new benchmarks for previously unexplored tasks. Additionally, we assess large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. While LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot and few-shot settings, fine-tuning achieves competitive results compared to smaller multilingual models, albeit at the cost of longer training and inference times. We provide practical recommendations for real-world applications, enhancing the understanding of cross-lingual ABSA methodologies. This study offers valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of cross-lingual ABSA approaches, advancing the state-of-the-art in this challenging research domain.

Paperid: 4369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10036.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable potential for few-shot information extraction (IE), yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. Conventional selection strategies often fail to provide informative guidance, as they overlook a key source of model fallibility: confusion stemming not just from semantic content, but also from the generation of well-structured formats required by IE tasks. To address this, we introduce Active Prompting for Information Extraction (APIE), a novel active prompting framework guided by a principle we term introspective confusion. Our method empowers an LLM to assess its own confusion through a dual-component uncertainty metric that uniquely quantifies both Format Uncertainty (difficulty in generating correct syntax) and Content Uncertainty (inconsistency in extracted semantics). By ranking unlabeled data with this comprehensive score, our framework actively selects the most challenging and informative samples to serve as few-shot exemplars. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding significant improvements in both extraction accuracy and robustness. Our work highlights the critical importance of a fine-grained, dual-level view of model uncertainty when it comes to building effective and reliable structured generation systems.

Paperid: 4370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09517.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a zero-shot system for fact-checked claim retrieval. We employed several state-of-the-art large language models to obtain text embeddings. The models were then combined to obtain the best possible result. Our approach achieved 7th place in monolingual and 9th in cross-lingual subtasks. We used only English translations as an input to the text embedding models since multilingual models did not achieve satisfactory results. We identified the most relevant claims for each post by leveraging the embeddings and measuring cosine similarity. Overall, the best results were obtained by the NVIDIA NV-Embed-v2 model. For some languages, we benefited from model combinations (NV-Embed & GPT or Mistral).

Paperid: 4371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, with code generation emerging as a key area of focus. While numerous benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate their code generation abilities, these benchmarks face several critical limitations. First, they often rely on manual annotations, which are time-consuming and difficult to scale across different programming languages and problem complexities. Second, most existing benchmarks focus primarily on Python, while the few multilingual benchmarks suffer from limited difficulty and uneven language distribution. To address these challenges, we propose AutoCodeGen, an automated method for generating high-difficulty multilingual code generation datasets without manual annotations. AutoCodeGen ensures the correctness and completeness of test cases by generating test inputs with LLMs and obtaining test outputs through a multilingual sandbox, while achieving high data quality through reverse-order problem generation and multiple filtering steps. Using this novel method, we introduce AutoCodeBench, a large-scale code generation benchmark comprising 3,920 problems evenly distributed across 20 programming languages. It is specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on challenging, diverse, and practical multilingual tasks. We evaluate over 30 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs on AutoCodeBench and its simplified version AutoCodeBench-Lite. The results show that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with the complexity, diversity, and multilingual nature of these tasks. Besides, we introduce AutoCodeBench-Complete, specifically designed for base models to assess their few-shot code generation capabilities. We hope the AutoCodeBench series will serve as a valuable resource and inspire the community to focus on more challenging and practical multilingual code generation scenarios.

Paperid: 4372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08649.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) show promise for various tasks, their performance in compound aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks lags behind fine-tuned models. However, the potential of LLMs fine-tuned for ABSA remains unexplored. This paper examines the capabilities of open-source LLMs fine-tuned for ABSA, focusing on LLaMA-based models. We evaluate the performance across four tasks and eight English datasets, finding that the fine-tuned Orca~2 model surpasses state-of-the-art results in all tasks. However, all models struggle in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios compared to fully fine-tuned ones. Additionally, we conduct error analysis to identify challenges faced by fine-tuned models.

Paperid: 4373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07866.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received substantial attention in English, yet challenges remain for low-resource languages due to the scarcity of labelled data. Current cross-lingual ABSA approaches often rely on external translation tools and overlook the potential benefits of incorporating a small number of target language examples into training. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of adding few-shot target language examples to the training set across four ABSA tasks, six target languages, and two sequence-to-sequence models. We show that adding as few as ten target language examples significantly improves performance over zero-shot settings and achieves a similar effect to constrained decoding in reducing prediction errors. Furthermore, we demonstrate that combining 1,000 target language examples with English data can even surpass monolingual baselines. These findings offer practical insights for improving cross-lingual ABSA in low-resource and domain-specific settings, as obtaining ten high-quality annotated examples is both feasible and highly effective.

Paperid: 4374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07860.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to identify sentiment toward specific aspects of an entity. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their capabilities for Czech ABSA remain largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 19 LLMs of varying sizes and architectures on Czech ABSA, comparing their performance in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. Our results show that small domain-specific models fine-tuned for ABSA outperform general-purpose LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings, while fine-tuned LLMs achieve state-of-the-art results. We analyze how factors such as multilingualism, model size, and recency influence performance and present an error analysis highlighting key challenges, particularly in aspect term prediction. Our findings provide insights into the suitability of LLMs for Czech ABSA and offer guidance for future research in this area.

Paperid: 4375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04962.pdf

Abstract:
Open-world point cloud semantic segmentation (OW-Seg) aims to predict point labels of both base and novel classes in real-world scenarios. However, existing methods rely on resource-intensive offline incremental learning or densely annotated support data, limiting their practicality. To address these limitations, we propose HOW-Seg, the first human-in-the-loop framework for OW-Seg. Specifically, we construct class prototypes, the fundamental segmentation units, directly on the query data, avoiding the prototype bias caused by intra-class distribution shifts between the support and query data. By leveraging sparse human annotations as guidance, HOW-Seg enables prototype-based segmentation for both base and novel classes. Considering the lack of granularity of initial prototypes, we introduce a hierarchical prototype disambiguation mechanism to refine ambiguous prototypes, which correspond to annotations of different classes. To further enrich contextual awareness, we employ a dense conditional random field (CRF) upon the refined prototypes to optimize their label assignments. Through iterative human feedback, HOW-Seg dynamically improves its predictions, achieving high-quality segmentation for both base and novel classes. Experiments demonstrate that with sparse annotations (e.g., one-novel-class-one-click), HOW-Seg matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art generalized few-shot segmentation (GFS-Seg) method under the 5-shot setting. When using advanced backbones (e.g., Stratified Transformer) and denser annotations (e.g., 10 clicks per sub-scene), HOW-Seg achieves 85.27% mIoU on S3DIS and 66.37% mIoU on ScanNetv2, significantly outperforming alternatives.

Paperid: 4376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01932.pdf

Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative AI (GenAI) are increasingly vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries embed triggers into inputs to cause models to misclassify or misinterpret target labels. Beyond traditional single-trigger scenarios, attackers may inject multiple triggers across various object classes, forming unseen backdoor-object configurations that evade standard detection pipelines. In this paper, we introduce DBOM (Disentangled Backdoor-Object Modeling), a proactive framework that leverages structured disentanglement to identify and neutralize both seen and unseen backdoor threats at the dataset level. Specifically, DBOM factorizes input image representations by modeling triggers and objects as independent primitives in the embedding space through the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). By leveraging the frozen, pre-trained encoders of VLMs, our approach decomposes the latent representations into distinct components through a learnable visual prompt repository and prompt prefix tuning, ensuring that the relationships between triggers and objects are explicitly captured. To separate trigger and object representations in the visual prompt repository, we introduce the trigger-object separation and diversity losses that aids in disentangling trigger and object visual features. Next, by aligning image features with feature decomposition and fusion, as well as learned contextual prompt tokens in a shared multimodal space, DBOM enables zero-shot generalization to novel trigger-object pairings that were unseen during training, thereby offering deeper insights into adversarial attack patterns. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 and GTSRB demonstrate that DBOM robustly detects poisoned images prior to downstream training, significantly enhancing the security of DNN training pipelines.

Paperid: 4377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00955.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for universal embedding tasks, yet adapting their generative nature for discriminative representation learning remains a significant challenge. The dominant paradigm of large-scale contrastive pre-training suffers from critical inefficiencies, including prohibitive computational costs and a failure to leverage the intrinsic, instruction-following capabilities of MLLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient framework for universal multimodal embeddings, which bridges this gap by centering on two synergistic components. First, our hierarchical embedding prompt template employs a two-level instruction architecture that forces the model to produce discriminative representations. Building on this strong foundation, our second component, self-aware hard negative sampling, redefines the fine-tuning process by leveraging the model's own understanding to efficiently mine challenging negatives while actively filtering out potential false negatives. Our comprehensive experiments show that our hierarchical prompt achieves zero-shot performance competitive with contrastively trained baselines and enhances the fine-tuning process by lifting a simple in-batch negative baseline by 4.8 points on the MMEB benchmark. We further boost the performance via our self-aware hard negative sampling, achieving the state-of-the-art performance without the contrative pre-training. Our work presents an effective and efficient pathway to adapt MLLMs for universal embedding tasks, significantly reducing training time.

Paperid: 4378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23336.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted data science workflows, giving rise to specialized data science agents designed to automate analytical tasks. Despite rapid adoption, systematic benchmarks evaluating the efficacy and limitations of these agents remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark specifically crafted to reflect real-world user interactions with data science agents by observing usage of our commercial applications. We evaluate three LLMs: Claude-4.0-Sonnet, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and OpenAI-o4-Mini across three approaches: zero-shot with context engineering, multi-step with context engineering, and with SmolAgent. Our benchmark assesses performance across a diverse set of eight data science task categories, additionally exploring the sensitivity of models to common prompting issues, such as data leakage and slightly ambiguous instructions. We further investigate the influence of temperature parameters on overall and task-specific outcomes for each model and approach. Our findings reveal distinct performance disparities among the evaluated models and methodologies, highlighting critical factors that affect practical deployment. The benchmark dataset and evaluation framework introduced herein aim to provide a foundation for future research of more robust and effective data science agents.

Paperid: 4379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23334.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains. While they exhibit strong zero-shot performance on various tasks, LLMs' effectiveness in music-related applications remains limited due to the relatively small proportion of music-specific knowledge in their training data. To address this limitation, we propose MusT-RAG, a comprehensive framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to adapt general-purpose LLMs for text-only music question answering (MQA) tasks. RAG is a technique that provides external knowledge to LLMs by retrieving relevant context information when generating answers to questions. To optimize RAG for the music domain, we (1) propose MusWikiDB, a music-specialized vector database for the retrieval stage, and (2) utilizes context information during both inference and fine-tuning processes to effectively transform general-purpose LLMs into music-specific models. Our experiment demonstrates that MusT-RAG significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning approaches in enhancing LLMs' music domain adaptation capabilities, showing consistent improvements across both in-domain and out-of-domain MQA benchmarks. Additionally, our MusWikiDB proves substantially more effective than general Wikipedia corpora, delivering superior performance and computational efficiency.

Paperid: 4380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22811.pdf

Abstract:
In this work we present an entity linker for DBLP's 2025 version of RDF-based Knowledge Graph. Compared to the 2022 version, DBLP now considers publication venues as a new entity type called dblp:Stream. In the earlier version of DBLPLink, we trained KG-embeddings and re-rankers on a dataset to produce entity linkings. In contrast, in this work, we develop a zero-shot entity linker using LLMs using a novel method, where we re-rank candidate entities based on the log-probabilities of the "yes" token output at the penultimate layer of the LLM.

Paperid: 4381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20906.pdf

Abstract:
In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks by conditioning on input-output examples in the prompt, without requiring any update in model parameters. While widely adopted, it remains unclear whether prompting with multiple examples is the most effective and efficient way to convey task information. In this work, we propose Soft Injection of task embeddings. The task embeddings are constructed only once using few-shot ICL prompts and repeatedly used during inference. Soft injection is performed by softly mixing task embeddings with attention head activations using pre-optimized mixing parameters, referred to as soft head-selection parameters. This method not only allows a desired task to be performed without in-prompt demonstrations but also significantly outperforms existing ICL approaches while reducing memory usage and compute cost at inference time. An extensive evaluation is performed across 57 tasks and 12 LLMs, spanning four model families of sizes from 4B to 70B. Averaged across 57 tasks, our method outperforms 10-shot ICL by 10.2%-14.3% across 12 LLMs. Additional analyses show that our method also serves as an insightful tool for analyzing task-relevant roles of attention heads, revealing that task-relevant head positions selected by our method transfer across similar tasks but not across dissimilar ones -- underscoring the task-specific nature of head functionality. Our soft injection method opens a new paradigm for reducing prompt length and improving task performance by shifting task conditioning from the prompt space to the activation space.

Paperid: 4382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17835.pdf

Abstract:
In future AI-native wireless networks, the presence of mismatches between the latent spaces of independently designed and trained deep neural network (DNN) encoders may impede mutual understanding due to the emergence of semantic channel noise. This undermines the receiver's ability to interpret transmitted representations, thereby reducing overall system performance. To address this issue, we propose the Parseval Frame Equalizer (PFE), a zero-shot, frame-based semantic channel equalizer that aligns latent spaces of heterogeneous encoders without requiring system retraining. PFE enables dynamic signal compression and expansion, mitigating semantic noise while preserving performance on downstream tasks. Building on this capability, we introduce a dynamic optimization strategy that coordinates communication, computation, and learning resources to balance energy consumption, end-to-end (E2E) latency, and task performance in multi-agent semantic communication scenarios. Extensive simulations confirm the effectiveness of our approach in maintaining semantic consistency and meeting long-term constraints on latency and accuracy under diverse and time-varying network conditions.

Paperid: 4383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14355.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Meta's LLaMA offer a promising approach for scalable personality assessment from open-ended language. However, inferring personality traits remains challenging, and earlier work often relied on synthetic data or social media text lacking psychometric validity. We introduce a real-world benchmark of 555 semi-structured interviews with BFI-10 self-report scores for evaluating LLM-based personality inference. Three state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4.1 Mini, Meta-LLaMA, and DeepSeek) were tested using zero-shot prompting for BFI-10 item prediction and both zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting for Big Five trait inference. All models showed high test-retest reliability, but construct validity was limited: correlations with ground-truth scores were weak (max Pearson's $r = 0.27$), interrater agreement was low (Cohen's $Îº< 0.10$), and predictions were biased toward moderate or high trait levels. Chain-of-thought prompting and longer input context modestly improved distributional alignment, but not trait-level accuracy. These results underscore limitations in current LLM-based personality inference and highlight the need for evidence-based development for psychological applications.

Paperid: 4384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13739.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is challenging due to extremely limited training data; while aiming to reduce catastrophic forgetting and learn new information. We propose Diffusion-FSCIL, a novel approach that employs a text-to-image diffusion model as a frozen backbone. Our conjecture is that FSCIL can be tackled using a large generative model's capabilities benefiting from 1) generation ability via large-scale pre-training; 2) multi-scale representation; 3) representational flexibility through the text encoder. To maximize the representation capability, we propose to extract multiple complementary diffusion features to play roles as latent replay with slight support from feature distillation for preventing generative biases. Our framework realizes efficiency through 1) using a frozen backbone; 2) minimal trainable components; 3) batch processing of multiple feature extractions. Extensive experiments on CUB-200, \emph{mini}ImageNet, and CIFAR-100 show that Diffusion-FSCIL surpasses state-of-the-art methods, preserving performance on previously learned classes and adapting effectively to new ones.

Paperid: 4385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10877.pdf

Abstract:
Structural assessment of biomolecular complexes is vital for translating molecular models into functional insights, shaping our understanding of biology and aiding drug discovery. However, current structure-based scoring functions often lack generalizability across diverse biomolecular systems. We present BioScore, a foundational scoring function that addresses key challenges -- data sparsity, cross-system representation, and task compatibility -- through a dual-scale geometric graph learning framework with tailored modules for structure assessment and affinity prediction. BioScore supports a wide range of tasks, including affinity prediction, conformation ranking, and structure-based virtual screening. Evaluated on 16 benchmarks spanning proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, and carbohydrates, BioScore consistently outperforms or matches 70 traditional and deep learning methods. Our newly proposed PPI Benchmark further enables comprehensive evaluation of protein-protein complex scoring. BioScore demonstrates broad applicability: (1) pretraining on mixed-structure data boosts protein-protein affinity prediction by up to 40% and antigen-antibody binding correlation by over 90%; (2) cross-system generalizability enables zero- and few-shot prediction with up to 71% correlation gain; and (3) its unified representation captures chemically challenging systems such as cyclic peptides, improving affinity prediction by over 60%. BioScore establishes a robust and generalizable framework for structural assessment across complex biomolecular landscapes.

Paperid: 4386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10737.pdf

Abstract:
High-throughput screening techniques, such as microscopy imaging of cellular responses to genetic and chemical perturbations, play a crucial role in drug discovery and biomedical research. However, robust perturbation screening for \textit{de novo} cell lines remains challenging due to the significant morphological and biological heterogeneity across cell lines. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates external biological knowledge into existing pretraining strategies to enhance microscopy image profiling models. Our approach explicitly disentangles perturbation-specific and cell line-specific representations using external biological information. Specifically, we construct a knowledge graph leveraging protein interaction data from STRING and Hetionet databases to guide models toward perturbation-specific features during pretraining. Additionally, we incorporate transcriptomic features from single-cell foundation models to capture cell line-specific representations. By learning these disentangled features, our method improves the generalization of imaging models to \textit{de novo} cell lines. We evaluate our framework on the RxRx database through one-shot fine-tuning on an RxRx1 cell line and few-shot fine-tuning on cell lines from the RxRx19a dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances microscopy image profiling for \textit{de novo} cell lines, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world phenotype-based drug discovery applications.

Paperid: 4387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10045.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates whether state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically translate SPARQL between popular Knowledge Graph (KG) schemas. We focus on translations between the DBpedia and Wikidata KG, and later on DBLP and OpenAlex KG. This study addresses a notable gap in KG interoperability research by rigorously evaluating LLM performance on SPARQL-to-SPARQL translation. Two benchmarks are assembled, where the first align 100 DBpedia-Wikidata queries from QALD-9-Plus; the second contains 100 DBLP queries aligned to OpenAlex, testing generalizability beyond encyclopaedic KGs. Three open LLMs: Llama-3-8B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, and Mistral-Large-Instruct-2407 are selected based on their sizes and architectures and tested with zero-shot, few-shot, and two chain-of-thought variants. Outputs were compared with gold answers, and resulting errors were categorized. We find that the performance varies markedly across models and prompting strategies, and that translations for Wikidata to DBpedia work far better than translations for DBpedia to Wikidata.

Paperid: 4388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10007.pdf

Abstract:
Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of errors in intermediate steps. This paper introduces an novel approach to calibrate the CoT reasoning accuracy by leveraging the model's intrinsic veracity encoding. We discover that specific attention head activations reliably reflect the truthfulness of reasoning steps in CoT. Based on this insight, we train a confidence predictor to evaluate the correctness of each reasoning step using these truthfulness-sensitive activations, dynamically selecting the most plausible reasoning path via beam search. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., Few-Shot CoT, Self-Consistency, and Self-Evaluation Guided Beam Search) across the mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning tasks, exhibiting superior accuracy and reliability in both unimodal and multimodal settings. We further validate the approach on large reasoning models, confirming its applicability to specialized reasoning models. Additionally, we explore the role of the model's self-correction ability in CoT reasoning. This work provides a novel reliability improvement path for CoT reasoning with broad application potential.

Paperid: 4389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08107.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a new approach for generating SPARQL queries on RDF knowledge graphs from natural language questions or keyword queries, using a large language model. Our approach does not require fine-tuning. Instead, it uses the language model to explore the knowledge graph by strategically executing SPARQL queries and searching for relevant IRIs and literals. We evaluate our approach on a variety of benchmarks (for knowledge graphs of different kinds and sizes) and language models (of different scales and types, commercial as well as open-source) and compare it with existing approaches. On Wikidata we reach state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, despite the zero-shot setting. On Freebase we come close to the best few-shot methods. On other, less commonly evaluated knowledge graphs and benchmarks our approach also performs well overall. We conduct several additional studies, like comparing different ways of searching the graphs, incorporating a feedback mechanism, or making use of few-shot examples.

Paperid: 4390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07410.pdf

Abstract:
We propose EscherNet++, a masked fine-tuned diffusion model that can synthesize novel views of objects in a zero-shot manner with amodal completion ability. Existing approaches utilize multiple stages and complex pipelines to first hallucinate missing parts of the image and then perform novel view synthesis, which fail to consider cross-view dependencies and require redundant storage and computing for separate stages. Instead, we apply masked fine-tuning including input-level and feature-level masking to enable an end-to-end model with the improved ability to synthesize novel views and conduct amodal completion. In addition, we empirically integrate our model with other feed-forward image-to-mesh models without extra training and achieve competitive results with reconstruction time decreased by 95%, thanks to its ability to synthesize arbitrary query views. Our method's scalable nature further enhances fast 3D reconstruction. Despite fine-tuning on a smaller dataset and batch size, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, improving PSNR by 3.9 and Volume IoU by 0.28 on occluded tasks in 10-input settings, while also generalizing to real-world occluded reconstruction.

Paperid: 4391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02798.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of image segmentation models has historically been constrained by the high cost of collecting large-scale annotated data. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) alleviates this original problem through a promptable, semantics-agnostic, segmentation paradigm and yet still requires manual visual-prompts or complex domain-dependent prompt-generation rules to process a new image. Towards reducing this new burden, our work investigates the task of object segmentation when provided with, alternatively, only a small set of reference images. Our key insight is to leverage strong semantic priors, as learned by foundation models, to identify corresponding regions between a reference and a target image. We find that correspondences enable automatic generation of instance-level segmentation masks for downstream tasks and instantiate our ideas via a multi-stage, training-free method incorporating (1) memory bank construction; (2) representation aggregation and (3) semantic-aware feature matching. Our experiments show significant improvements on segmentation metrics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on COCO FSOD (36.8% nAP), PASCAL VOC Few-Shot (71.2% nAP50) and outperforming existing training-free approaches on the Cross-Domain FSOD benchmark (22.4% nAP).

Paperid: 4392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01653.pdf

Abstract:
Learning-based stereo matching models struggle in adverse weather conditions due to the scarcity of corresponding training data and the challenges in extracting discriminative features from degraded images. These limitations significantly hinder zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution weather conditions. In this paper, we propose \textbf{RobuSTereo}, a novel framework that enhances the zero-shot generalization of stereo matching models under adverse weather by addressing both data scarcity and feature extraction challenges. First, we introduce a diffusion-based simulation pipeline with a stereo consistency module, which generates high-quality stereo data tailored for adverse conditions. By training stereo matching models on our synthetic datasets, we reduce the domain gap between clean and degraded images, significantly improving the models' robustness to unseen weather conditions. The stereo consistency module ensures structural alignment across synthesized image pairs, preserving geometric integrity and enhancing depth estimation accuracy. Second, we design a robust feature encoder that combines a specialized ConvNet with a denoising transformer to extract stable and reliable features from degraded images. The ConvNet captures fine-grained local structures, while the denoising transformer refines global representations, effectively mitigating the impact of noise, low visibility, and weather-induced distortions. This enables more accurate disparity estimation even under challenging visual conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{RobuSTereo} significantly improves the robustness and generalization of stereo matching models across diverse adverse weather scenarios.

Paperid: 4393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00945.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate the effectiveness of time series foundation models (TSFMs) for crowd flow prediction, focusing on Moirai and TimesFM. Evaluated on three real-world mobility datasets-Bike NYC, Taxi Beijing, and Spanish national OD flows-these models are deployed in a strict zero-shot setting, using only the temporal evolution of each OD flow and no explicit spatial information. Moirai and TimesFM outperform both statistical and deep learning baselines, achieving up to 33% lower RMSE, 39% lower MAE and up to 49% higher CPC compared to state-of-the-art competitors. Our results highlight the practical value of TSFMs for accurate, scalable flow prediction, even in scenarios with limited annotated data or missing spatial context.

Paperid: 4394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22488.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate decoding of lower-limb motion from EEG signals is essential for advancing brain-computer interface (BCI) applications in movement intent recognition and control. However, challenges persist in achieving causal, phase-consistent predictions and in modeling both inter- and intra-subject variability. To address these issues, we propose NeuroDyGait, a domain-generalizable EEG-to-motion decoding framework that leverages structured contrastive representation learning and relational domain modeling. The proposed method employs relative contrastive learning to achieve semantic alignment between EEG and motion embeddings. Furthermore, a multi-cycle gait reconstruction objective is introduced to enforce temporal coherence and maintain biomechanical consistency. To promote inter-session generalization, during fine-tuning, a domain dynamic decoding mechanism adaptively assigns session-specific prediction heads and learns to mix their outputs based on inter-session relationships. NeuroDyGait enables zero-shot motion prediction for unseen individuals without requiring adaptation and achieves superior performance in cross-subject gait decoding on benchmark datasets. Additionally, it demonstrates strong phase-detection capabilities even without explicit phase supervision during training. These findings highlight the potential of relational domain learning in enabling scalable, target-free deployment of BCIs.

Paperid: 4395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19552.pdf

Abstract:
With access to large-scale, unlabeled medical datasets, researchers are confronted with two questions: Should they attempt to pretrain a custom foundation model on this medical data, or use transfer-learning from an existing generalist model? And, if a custom model is pretrained, are novel methods required? In this paper we explore these questions by conducting a case-study, in which we train a foundation model on a large regional fetal ultrasound dataset of 2M images. By selecting the well-established DINOv2 method for pretraining, we achieve state-of-the-art results on three fetal ultrasound datasets, covering data from different countries, classification, segmentation, and few-shot tasks. We compare against a series of models pretrained on natural images, ultrasound images, and supervised baselines. Our results demonstrate two key insights: (i) Pretraining on custom data is worth it, even if smaller models are trained on less data, as scaling in natural image pretraining does not translate to ultrasound performance. (ii) Well-tuned methods from computer vision are making it feasible to train custom foundation models for a given medical domain, requiring no hyperparameter tuning and little methodological adaptation. Given these findings, we argue that a bias towards methodological innovation should be avoided when developing domain specific foundation models under common computational resource constraints.

Paperid: 4396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14641.pdf

Abstract:
In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and recent studies introduce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability, especially in mathematics tasks. However, given the continuous advancement of model capabilities, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplars still benefit recent, stronger models in such tasks. Through systematic experiments, we find that for recent strong models such as the Qwen2.5 series, adding traditional CoT exemplars does not improve reasoning performance compared to Zero-Shot CoT. Instead, their primary function is to align the output format with human expectations. We further investigate the effectiveness of enhanced CoT exemplars, constructed using answers from advanced models such as \texttt{Qwen2.5-Max} and \texttt{DeepSeek-R1}. Experimental results indicate that these enhanced exemplars still fail to improve the model's reasoning performance. Further analysis reveals that models tend to ignore the exemplars and focus primarily on the instructions, leading to no observable gain in reasoning ability. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of the current ICL+CoT framework in mathematical reasoning, calling for a re-examination of the ICL paradigm and the definition of exemplars.

Paperid: 4397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09985.pdf

Authors:Mido Assran, Adrien Bardes, David Fan, Quentin Garrido, Russell Howes, Mojtaba, Komeili, Matthew Muckley, Ammar Rizvi, Claire Roberts, Koustuv Sinha, Artem Zholus, Sergio Arnaud, Abha Gejji, Ada Martin, Francois Robert Hogan, Daniel Dugas, Piotr Bojanowski, Vasil Khalidov, Patrick Labatut, Francisco Massa, Marc Szafraniec, Kapil Krishnakumar, Yong Li, Xiaodong Ma, Sarath Chandar, Franziska Meier, Yann LeCun, Michael Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas

Abstract:
A major challenge for modern AI is to learn to understand the world and learn to act largely by observation. This paper explores a self-supervised approach that combines internet-scale video data with a small amount of interaction data (robot trajectories), to develop models capable of understanding, predicting, and planning in the physical world. We first pre-train an action-free joint-embedding-predictive architecture, V-JEPA 2, on a video and image dataset comprising over 1 million hours of internet video. V-JEPA 2 achieves strong performance on motion understanding (77.3 top-1 accuracy on Something-Something v2) and state-of-the-art performance on human action anticipation (39.7 recall-at-5 on Epic-Kitchens-100) surpassing previous task-specific models. Additionally, after aligning V-JEPA 2 with a large language model, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on multiple video question-answering tasks at the 8 billion parameter scale (e.g., 84.0 on PerceptionTest, 76.9 on TempCompass). Finally, we show how self-supervised learning can be applied to robotic planning tasks by post-training a latent action-conditioned world model, V-JEPA 2-AC, using less than 62 hours of unlabeled robot videos from the Droid dataset. We deploy V-JEPA 2-AC zero-shot on Franka arms in two different labs and enable picking and placing of objects using planning with image goals. Notably, this is achieved without collecting any data from the robots in these environments, and without any task-specific training or reward. This work demonstrates how self-supervised learning from web-scale data and a small amount of robot interaction data can yield a world model capable of planning in the physical world.

Paperid: 4398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07413.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive learning has proven to be highly efficient and adaptable in shaping representation spaces across diverse modalities by pulling similar samples together and pushing dissimilar ones apart. However, two key limitations persist: (1) Without explicit regulation of the embedding distribution, semantically related instances can inadvertently be pushed apart unless complementary signals guide pair selection, and (2) excessive reliance on large in-batch negatives and tailored augmentations hinders generalization. To address these limitations, we propose Variational Supervised Contrastive Learning (VarCon), which reformulates supervised contrastive learning as variational inference over latent class variables and maximizes a posterior-weighted evidence lower bound (ELBO) that replaces exhaustive pair-wise comparisons for efficient class-aware matching and grants fine-grained control over intra-class dispersion in the embedding space. Trained exclusively on image data, our experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and ImageNet-1K show that VarCon (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance for contrastive learning frameworks, reaching 79.36% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K and 78.29% on CIFAR-100 with a ResNet-50 encoder while converging in just 200 epochs; (2) yields substantially clearer decision boundaries and semantic organization in the embedding space, as evidenced by KNN classification, hierarchical clustering results, and transfer-learning assessments; and (3) demonstrates superior performance in few-shot learning than supervised baseline and superior robustness across various augmentation strategies.

Paperid: 4399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06862.pdf

Abstract:
Grounding language to a navigating agent's observations can leverage pretrained multimodal foundation models to match perceptions to object or event descriptions. However, previous approaches remain disconnected from environment mapping, lack the spatial precision of geometric maps, or neglect additional modality information beyond vision. To address this, we propose multimodal spatial language maps as a spatial map representation that fuses pretrained multimodal features with a 3D reconstruction of the environment. We build these maps autonomously using standard exploration. We present two instances of our maps, which are visual-language maps (VLMaps) and their extension to audio-visual-language maps (AVLMaps) obtained by adding audio information. When combined with large language models (LLMs), VLMaps can (i) translate natural language commands into open-vocabulary spatial goals (e.g., "in between the sofa and TV") directly localized in the map, and (ii) be shared across different robot embodiments to generate tailored obstacle maps on demand. Building upon the capabilities above, AVLMaps extend VLMaps by introducing a unified 3D spatial representation integrating audio, visual, and language cues through the fusion of features from pretrained multimodal foundation models. This enables robots to ground multimodal goal queries (e.g., text, images, or audio snippets) to spatial locations for navigation. Additionally, the incorporation of diverse sensory inputs significantly enhances goal disambiguation in ambiguous environments. Experiments in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our multimodal spatial language maps enable zero-shot spatial and multimodal goal navigation and improve recall by 50% in ambiguous scenarios. These capabilities extend to mobile robots and tabletop manipulators, supporting navigation and interaction guided by visual, audio, and spatial cues.

Paperid: 4400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05210.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal foundation models have demonstrated strong generalization, yet their ability to transfer knowledge to specialized domains such as garment generation remains underexplored. We introduce VLG, a vision-language-garment model that synthesizes garments from textual descriptions and visual imagery. Our experiments assess VLG's zero-shot generalization, investigating its ability to transfer web-scale reasoning to unseen garment styles and prompts. Preliminary results indicate promising transfer capabilities, highlighting the potential for multimodal foundation models to adapt effectively to specialized domains like fashion design.

Paperid: 4401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05020.pdf

Abstract:
Heterogeneous multirobot systems show great potential in complex tasks requiring coordinated hybrid cooperation. However, existing methods that rely on static or task-specific models often lack generalizability across diverse tasks and dynamic environments. This highlights the need for generalizable intelligence that can bridge high-level reasoning with low-level execution across heterogeneous agents. To address this, we propose a hierarchical multimodal framework that integrates a prompted large language model (LLM) with a fine-tuned vision-language model (VLM). At the system level, the LLM performs hierarchical task decomposition and constructs a global semantic map, while the VLM provides semantic perception and object localization, where the proposed GridMask significantly enhances the VLM's spatial accuracy for reliable fine-grained manipulation. The aerial robot leverages this global map to generate semantic paths and guide the ground robot's local navigation and manipulation, ensuring robust coordination even in target-absent or ambiguous scenarios. We validate the framework through extensive simulation and real-world experiments on long-horizon object arrangement tasks, demonstrating zero-shot adaptability, robust semantic navigation, and reliable manipulation in dynamic environments. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first heterogeneous aerial-ground robotic system that integrates VLM-based perception with LLM-driven reasoning for global high-level task planning and execution.

Paperid: 4402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02264.pdf

Abstract:
It is often challenging to teach specialized, unseen tasks to dialogue systems due to the high cost of expert knowledge, training data, and high technical difficulty. To support domain-specific applications - such as law, medicine, or finance - it is essential to build frameworks that enable non-technical experts to define, test, and refine system behaviour with minimal effort. Achieving this requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between developers and domain specialists. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, CoDial (Code for Dialogue), that converts expert knowledge, represented as a novel structured heterogeneous graph, into executable conversation logic. CoDial can be easily implemented in existing guardrailing languages, such as Colang, to enable interpretable, modifiable, and true zero-shot specification of task-oriented dialogue systems. Empirically, CoDial achieves state-of-the-art performance on the STAR dataset for inference-based models and is competitive with similar baselines on the well-known MultiWOZ dataset. We also demonstrate CoDial's iterative improvement via manual and LLM-aided feedback, making it a practical tool for expert-guided alignment of LLMs in high-stakes domains.

Paperid: 4403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01265.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) is an important yet not fully understood ability of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). It can greatly enhance task performance using a few examples, termed demonstrations, without fine-tuning. Although effective in question answering, ICL often underperforms in long-form generation tasks such as summarization. Under appropriately realistic assumptions, we empirically and theoretically show that ICL demonstrations alone are insufficient to teach LLMs the task language and format distributions for generation. We argue for explicit exposure to the task distributions and hypothesize that defining them by prompting enhances model performance. To this end, we present LongGuide, which efficiently generates two parallel streams of guidelines capturing task language and format properties: (i) Metric Guidelines (MGs) that instruct models to optimize self-evaluated metrics; and (ii) Output Constraint Guidelines (OCGs) that constrain generation at both token and sentence levels. LongGuide automatically selects the best combination of guidelines, improving both strong open- and closed-source LLMs by over 5% in both zero- and few-shot settings. We show that LongGuide is generalizable, learnable by weak models to enhance strong ones, and integrates synergistically with automatic prompt optimizers.

Paperid: 4404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23619.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Text-to-Speech (TTS) models, particularly in voice cloning, have intensified the demand for adaptable and efficient deepfake detection methods. As TTS systems continue to evolve, detection models must be able to efficiently adapt to previously unseen generation models with minimal data. This paper introduces ADD-GP, a few-shot adaptive framework based on a Gaussian Process (GP) classifier for Audio Deepfake Detection (ADD). We show how the combination of a powerful deep embedding model with the Gaussian processes flexibility can achieve strong performance and adaptability. Additionally, we show this approach can also be used for personalized detection, with greater robustness to new TTS models and one-shot adaptability. To support our evaluation, a benchmark dataset is constructed for this task using new state-of-the-art voice cloning models.

Paperid: 4405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23410.pdf

Abstract:
Factual knowledge extraction aims to explicitly extract knowledge parameterized in pre-trained language models for application in downstream tasks. While prior work has been investigating the impact of supervised fine-tuning data on the factuality of large language models (LLMs), its mechanism remains poorly understood. We revisit this impact through systematic experiments, with a particular focus on the factuality gap that arises when fine-tuning on known versus unknown knowledge. Our findings show that this gap can be mitigated at the inference stage, either under out-of-distribution (OOD) settings or by using appropriate in-context learning (ICL) prompts (i.e., few-shot learning and Chain of Thought (CoT)). We prove this phenomenon theoretically from the perspective of knowledge graphs, showing that the test-time prompt may diminish or even overshadow the impact of fine-tuning data and play a dominant role in knowledge extraction. Ultimately, our results shed light on the interaction between finetuning data and test-time prompt, demonstrating that ICL can effectively compensate for shortcomings in fine-tuning data, and highlighting the need to reconsider the use of ICL prompting as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning data selection methods.

Paperid: 4406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21568.pdf

Abstract:
Voice cloning (VC)-resistant watermarking is an emerging technique for tracing and preventing unauthorized cloning. Existing methods effectively trace traditional VC models by training them on watermarked audio but fail in zero-shot VC scenarios, where models synthesize audio from an audio prompt without training. To address this, we propose VoiceMark, the first zero-shot VC-resistant watermarking method that leverages speaker-specific latents as the watermark carrier, allowing the watermark to transfer through the zero-shot VC process into the synthesized audio. Additionally, we introduce VC-simulated augmentations and VAD-based loss to enhance robustness against distortions. Experiments on multiple zero-shot VC models demonstrate that VoiceMark achieves over 95% accuracy in watermark detection after zero-shot VC synthesis, significantly outperforming existing methods, which only reach around 50%. See our code and demos at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/haiyunli/VoiceMark

Paperid: 4407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20971.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet they often suffer from hallucinations and lack reliable factual grounding. Meanwhile, knowledge graphs (KGs) provide structured factual knowledge but lack the flexible reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this paper, we present Reason-Align-Respond (RAR), a novel framework that systematically integrates LLM reasoning with knowledge graphs for KGQA. Our approach consists of three key components: a Reasoner that generates human-like reasoning chains, an Aligner that maps these chains to valid KG paths, and a Responser that synthesizes the final answer. We formulate this process as a probabilistic model and optimize it using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, which iteratively refines the reasoning chains and knowledge paths. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of RAR, achieving state-of-the-art performance with Hit@1 scores of 93.3% and 91.0% on WebQSP and CWQ respectively. Human evaluation confirms that RAR generates high-quality, interpretable reasoning chains well-aligned with KG paths. Furthermore, RAR exhibits strong zero-shot generalization capabilities and maintains computational efficiency during inference.

Paperid: 4408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18916.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce SCRum-9, the largest multilingual Stance Classification dataset for Rumour analysis in 9 languages, containing 7,516 tweets from X. SCRum-9 goes beyond existing stance classification datasets by covering more languages, linking examples to more fact-checked claims (2.1k), and including confidence-related annotations from multiple annotators to account for intra- and inter-annotator variability. Annotations were made by at least two native speakers per language, totalling more than 405 hours of annotation and 8,150 dollars in compensation. Further, SCRum-9 is used to benchmark five large language models (LLMs) and two multilingual masked language models (MLMs) in In-Context Learning (ICL) and fine-tuning setups. This paper also innovates by exploring the use of multilingual synthetic data for rumour stance classification, showing that even LLMs with weak ICL performance can produce valuable synthetic data for fine-tuning small MLMs, enabling them to achieve higher performance than zero-shot ICL in LLMs. Finally, we examine the relationship between model predictions and human uncertainty on ambiguous cases finding that model predictions often match the second-choice labels assigned by annotators, rather than diverging entirely from human judgments. SCRum-9 is publicly released to the research community with potential to foster further research on multilingual analysis of misleading narratives on social media.

Paperid: 4409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18418.pdf

Abstract:
We present Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning (McARL), a new approach to overcome challenges of hyperparameter tuning and transfer loss, enabling generalizable locomotion across robot morphologies. We use a morphology-conditioned policy by incorporating a randomized morphology vector, sampled from a defined morphology range, into both the actor and critic networks. This allows the policy to learn parameters that generalize to robots with similar characteristics. We demonstrate that a single policy trained on a Unitree Go1 robot using McARL can be transferred to a different morphology (e.g., Unitree Go2 robot) and can achieve zero-shot transfer velocity of up to 3.5 m/s without retraining or fine-tuning. Moreover, it achieves 6.0 m/s on the training Go1 robot and generalizes to other morphologies like A1 and Mini Cheetah. We also analyze the impact of morphology distance on transfer performance and highlight McARL's advantages over prior approaches. McARL achieves 44-150% higher transfer performance on Go2, Mini Cheetah, and A1 compared to PPO variants.

Paperid: 4410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14299.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented dialogue systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention across various industries and achieved significant results. Current approaches condense complex procedural workflows into a single agent to achieve satisfactory performance on large-scale LLMs. However, these approaches face challenges to achieve comparable performance on fine-tuned lightweight LLMs, due to their limited capabilities in handling multiple complex logic. In this work, we design a Domain-Independent Multi-Agent Framework (DIMF), which contains Intent Classification Agent, Slot Filling Agent and Response Agent. This approach simplifies the learning complexity and enhances the generalization ability by separating the tasks into domain-independent components. In this framework, we enhance the capabilities in contextual understanding using the Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) method, and propose a simple and effective Data Distribution Adaptation (DDA) method to mitigate degradation issues during DPO training. Experiments conducted on the MultiWOZ datasets show that our proposed method achieves a better average performance among all the baselines. Extensive analysis also demonstrates that our proposed framework exhibits excellent generalizability and zero-shot capability.

Paperid: 4411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12408.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding and decoding brain activity into visual representations is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. While EEG visual decoding has shown promise due to its non-invasive, and low-cost nature, existing methods suffer from Hierarchical Neural Encoding Neglect (HNEN)-a critical limitation where flat neural representations fail to model the brain's hierarchical visual processing hierarchy. Inspired by the hierarchical organization of visual cortex, we propose ViEEG, a neuro-We further adopt hierarchical contrastive learning for EEG-CLIP representation alignment, enabling zero-shot object recognition. Extensive experiments on the THINGS-EEG dataset demonstrate that ViEEG significantly outperforms previous methods by a large margin in both subject-dependent and subject-independent settings. Results on the THINGS-MEG dataset further confirm ViEEG's generalization to different neural modalities. Our framework not only advances the performance frontier but also sets a new paradigm for EEG brain decoding. inspired framework that addresses HNEN. ViEEG decomposes each visual stimulus into three biologically aligned components-contour, foreground object, and contextual scene-serving as anchors for a three-stream EEG encoder. These EEG features are progressively integrated via cross-attention routing, simulating cortical information flow from low-level to high-level vision.

Paperid: 4412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08627.pdf

Abstract:
Visuomotor policies trained on human expert demonstrations have recently shown strong performance across a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks. However, these policies remain highly sensitive to domain shifts stemming from background or robot embodiment changes, which limits their generalization capabilities. In this paper, we present ARRO, a novel calibration-free visual representation that leverages zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation and object detection models to efficiently mask out task-irrelevant regions of the scene without requiring additional training. By filtering visual distractors and overlaying virtual guides during both training and inference, ARRO improves robustness to scene variations and reduces the need for additional data collection. We extensively evaluate ARRO with Diffusion Policy on several tabletop manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world environments, and further demonstrate its compatibility and effectiveness with generalist robot policies, such as Octo and OpenVLA. Across all settings in our evaluation, ARRO yields consistent performance gains, allows for selective masking to choose between different objects, and shows robustness even to challenging segmentation conditions. Videos showcasing our results are available at: augmented-reality-for-robots.github.io

Paperid: 4413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08607.pdf

Abstract:
Stereo matching methods rely on dense pixel-wise ground truth labels, which are laborious to obtain, especially for real-world datasets. The scarcity of labeled data and domain gaps between synthetic and real-world images also pose notable challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, \textbf{BooSTer}, that leverages both vision foundation models and large-scale mixed image sources, including synthetic, real, and single-view images. First, to fully unleash the potential of large-scale single-view images, we design a data generation strategy combining monocular depth estimation and diffusion models to generate dense stereo matching data from single-view images. Second, to tackle sparse labels in real-world datasets, we transfer knowledge from monocular depth estimation models, using pseudo-mono depth labels and a dynamic scale- and shift-invariant loss for additional supervision. Furthermore, we incorporate vision foundation model as an encoder to extract robust and transferable features, boosting accuracy and generalization. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving significant improvements in accuracy over existing methods, particularly in scenarios with limited labeled data and domain shifts.

Paperid: 4414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06149.pdf

Abstract:
Despite growing interest in automated hate speech detection, most existing approaches overlook the linguistic diversity of online content. Multilingual instruction-tuned large language models such as LLaMA, Aya, Qwen, and BloomZ offer promising capabilities across languages, but their effectiveness in identifying hate speech through zero-shot and few-shot prompting remains underexplored. This work evaluates LLM prompting-based detection across eight non-English languages, utilizing several prompting techniques and comparing them to fine-tuned encoder models. We show that while zero-shot and few-shot prompting lag behind fine-tuned encoder models on most of the real-world evaluation sets, they achieve better generalization on functional tests for hate speech detection. Our study also reveals that prompt design plays a critical role, with each language often requiring customized prompting techniques to maximize performance.

Paperid: 4415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20469.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how news narratives frame entities is crucial for studying media's impact on societal perceptions of events. In this paper, we evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in classifying framing roles. Through systematic experimentation, we assess the effects of input context, prompting strategies, and task decomposition. Our findings show that a hierarchical approach of first identifying broad roles and then fine-grained roles, outperforms single-step classification. We also demonstrate that optimal input contexts and prompts vary across task levels, highlighting the need for subtask-specific strategies. We achieve a Main Role Accuracy of 89.4% and an Exact Match Ratio of 34.5%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings emphasize the importance of tailored prompt design and input context optimization for improving LLM performance in entity framing.

Paperid: 4416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18839.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming numerous applications, their susceptibility to conversational breakdowns remains a critical challenge undermining user trust. This paper introduces a "Detect, Explain, Escalate" framework to manage dialogue breakdowns in LLM-powered agents, emphasizing low-carbon operation. Our approach integrates two key strategies: (1) We fine-tune a compact 8B-parameter model, augmented with teacher-generated reasoning traces, which serves as an efficient real-time breakdown 'detector' and 'explainer'. This model demonstrates robust classification and calibration on English and Japanese dialogues, and generalizes well to the BETOLD dataset, improving accuracy by 7% over its baseline. (2) We systematically evaluate frontier LLMs using advanced prompting (few-shot, chain-of-thought, analogical reasoning) for high-fidelity breakdown assessment. These are integrated into an 'escalation' architecture where our efficient detector defers to larger models only when necessary, substantially reducing operational costs and energy consumption. Our fine-tuned model and prompting strategies establish new state-of-the-art results on dialogue breakdown detection benchmarks, outperforming specialized classifiers and significantly narrowing the performance gap to larger proprietary models. The proposed monitor-escalate pipeline reduces inference costs by 54%, offering a scalable, efficient, and more interpretable solution for robust conversational AI in high-impact domains. Code and models will be publicly released.

Paperid: 4417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18506.pdf

Abstract:
Transition path sampling (TPS), which involves finding probable paths connecting two points on an energy landscape, remains a challenge due to the complexity of real-world atomistic systems. Current machine learning approaches use expensive, task-specific, and data-free training procedures, limiting their ability to benefit from high-quality datasets and large-scale pre-trained models. In this work, we address TPS by interpreting candidate paths as trajectories sampled from stochastic dynamics induced by the learned score function of pre-trained generative models, specifically denoising diffusion and flow matching. Under these dynamics, finding high-likelihood transition paths becomes equivalent to minimizing the Onsager-Machlup (OM) action functional. This enables us to repurpose pre-trained generative models for TPS in a zero-shot manner, in contrast with bespoke, task-specific approaches in previous work. We demonstrate our approach on varied molecular systems, obtaining diverse, physically realistic transition pathways and generalizing beyond the pre-trained model's original training dataset. Our method can be easily incorporated into new generative models, making it practically relevant as models continue to scale and improve with increased data availability. Code is available at github.com/ASK-Berkeley/OM-TPS.

Paperid: 4418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14331.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, developers often turn to Stack Overflow for solutions to daily problems, however, these code snippets are partial code that cannot be tested and verified properly. One way to test these code snippets is to transform them into APIs (Application Program Interface) that developers can be directly invoked and executed. However, it is often costly and error-prone for developers to manually perform this transformation (referred to as AIPzation task) due to different actions to be taken (e.g., summarizing proper method names, inferring input parameters list and return statements). To help developers quickly reuse code snippets in Stack Overflow, in this paper, we propose Code2API, a Google Chrome extension that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically perform APIzation of code snippets on Stack Overflow. \toolname guides LLMs through well-designed prompts to generate reusable APIs, using Chain-of-Thought reasoning and few-shot in-context learning to help LLMs understand and solve the APIzation task in a developer-like manner. The evaluation results show that Code2API significantly outperforms the rule-based approach by a large margin.

Paperid: 4419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14224.pdf

Abstract:
Source-Free Unsupervised Open-Set Domain Adaptation (SF-OSDA) methods using CLIP face significant issues: (1) while heavily dependent on domain-specific threshold selection, existing methods employ simple fixed thresholds, underutilizing CLIP's zero-shot potential in SF-OSDA scenarios; and (2) overlook intrinsic class tendencies while employing complex training to enforce feature separation, incurring deployment costs and feature shifts that compromise CLIP's generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose CLIPXpert, a novel SF-OSDA approach that integrates two key components: an adaptive thresholding strategy and an unknown class feature filtering module. Specifically, the Box-Cox GMM-Based Adaptive Thresholding (BGAT) module dynamically determines the optimal threshold by estimating sample score distributions, balancing known class recognition and unknown class sample detection. Additionally, the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-Based Unknown-Class Feature Filtering (SUFF) module reduces the tendency of unknown class samples towards known classes, improving the separation between known and unknown classes. Experiments show that our source-free and training-free method outperforms state-of-the-art trained approach UOTA by 1.92% on the DomainNet dataset, achieves SOTA-comparable performance on datasets such as Office-Home, and surpasses other SF-OSDA methods. This not only validates the effectiveness of our proposed method but also highlights CLIP's strong zero-shot potential for SF-OSDA tasks.

Paperid: 4420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10141.pdf

Abstract:
Re-using trained neural network models is a common strategy to reduce training cost and transfer knowledge. Weight space learning - using the weights of trained models as data modality - is a promising new field to re-use populations of pre-trained models for future tasks. Approaches in this field have demonstrated high performance both on model analysis and weight generation tasks. However, until now their learning setup requires homogeneous model zoos where all models share the same exact architecture, limiting their capability to generalize beyond the population of models they saw during training. In this work, we remove this constraint and propose a modification to a common weight space learning method to accommodate training on heterogeneous populations of models. We further investigate the resulting impact of model diversity on generating unseen neural network model weights for zero-shot knowledge transfer. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that including models with varying underlying image datasets has a high impact on performance and generalization, for both in- and out-of-distribution settings. Code is available on github.com/HSG-AIML/MultiZoo-SANE.

Paperid: 4421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09583.pdf

Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly important in dynamic environments such as logistics transportation and disaster response. However, current tasks often rely on human operators to monitor aerial videos and make operational decisions. This mode of human-machine collaboration suffers from significant limitations in efficiency and adaptability. In this paper, we present AirVista-II -- an end-to-end agentic system for embodied UAVs, designed to enable general-purpose semantic understanding and reasoning in dynamic scenes. The system integrates agent-based task identification and scheduling, multimodal perception mechanisms, and differentiated keyframe extraction strategies tailored for various temporal scenarios, enabling the efficient capture of critical scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves high-quality semantic understanding across diverse UAV-based dynamic scenarios under a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 4422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08982.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating new class information without losing previously acquired knowledge remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting. Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) addresses this by first training a model on a robust dataset of base classes and then incrementally adapting it in successive sessions using only a few labeled examples per novel class. However, this approach is prone to overfitting on the limited new data, which can compromise overall performance and exacerbate forgetting. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective novel FSCIL framework that leverages a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone augmented with parameter-efficient additive updates. Our approach freezes the pre-trained ViT parameters and selectively injects trainable weights into the self-attention modules via an additive update mechanism. This design updates only a small subset of parameters to accommodate new classes without sacrificing the representations learned during the base session. By fine-tuning a limited number of parameters, our method preserves the generalizable features in the frozen ViT while reducing the risk of overfitting. Furthermore, as most parameters remain fixed, the model avoids overwriting previously learned knowledge when small novel data batches are introduced. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach yields state-of-the-art performance compared to baseline FSCIL methods.

Paperid: 4423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04562.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have demonstrated strong reasoning and generalization capabilities in driving-related tasks, including scene understanding, planning, and control. However, they still face challenges in hallucinations, uncertainty, and long inference latency. While existing foundation models have general knowledge of avoiding collisions, they often lack transportation-specific safety knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LetsPi, a physics-informed, dual-phase, knowledge-driven framework for safe, human-like trajectory planning. To prevent hallucinations and minimize uncertainty, this hybrid framework integrates Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning with physics-informed social force dynamics. LetsPi leverages the LLM to analyze driving scenes and historical information, providing appropriate parameters and target destinations (goals) for the social force model, which then generates the future trajectory. Moreover, the dual-phase architecture balances reasoning and computational efficiency through its Memory Collection phase and Fast Inference phase. The Memory Collection phase leverages the physics-informed LLM to process and refine planning results through reasoning, reflection, and memory modules, storing safe, high-quality driving experiences in a memory bank. Surrogate safety measures and physics-informed prompt techniques are introduced to enhance the LLM's knowledge of transportation safety and physical force, respectively. The Fast Inference phase extracts similar driving experiences as few-shot examples for new scenarios, while simplifying input-output requirements to enable rapid trajectory planning without compromising safety. Extensive experiments using the HighD dataset demonstrate that LetsPi outperforms baseline models across five safety metrics.See PDF for project Github link.

Paperid: 4424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00348.pdf

Abstract:
One-shot learning focuses on adapting pretrained models to recognize newly introduced and unseen classes based on a single labeled image. While variations of few-shot and zero-shot learning exist, one-shot learning remains a challenging yet crucial problem due to its ability to generalize knowledge to unseen classes from just one human-annotated image. In this paper, we introduce a transductive one-shot learning approach that employs subspace decomposition to utilize the information from labeled images in the support set and unlabeled images in the query set. These images are decomposed into a linear combination of latent variables representing primitives captured by smaller subspaces. By representing images in the query set as linear combinations of these latent primitives, we can propagate the label from a single image in the support set to query images that share similar combinations of primitives. Through a comprehensive quantitative analysis across various neural network feature extractors and datasets, we demonstrate that our approach can effectively generalize to novel classes from just one labeled image.

Paperid: 4425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23806.pdf

Abstract:
Generalized zero-shot semantic segmentation (GZS3) aims to achieve the human-level capability of segmenting not only seen classes but also novel class regions unseen in the training data through introducing the bridge of semantic representations, e.g., word vector. While effective, the way of utilizing one semantic representation to associate the corresponding class and to enable the knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes is insufficient as well as incompatible with human cognition. Inspired by the observation that humans often use some `part' and `state' information to comprehend the seen objects and imagine unseen classes, we decouple each class into detailed descriptions, including object parts and states. Based on the decoupling formulation, we propose a Decoupled Vision-Language Matching (DeVLMatch) framework, composed of spatial-part (SPMatch) and channel-state (CSMatch) matching modules, for GZS3. In SPMatch, we comprehend objects with spatial part information from both visual and linguistic perspectives and perform graph matching to bridge the gap. In CSMatch, states of objects from the linguistic perspective are matched to compatible channel information from the visual perspective. By decoupling and matching objects across visual and linguistic comprehension, we can explicitly introspect the relationship between seen and unseen classes in fine-grained object part and state levels, thereby facilitating the knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes in visual space. The proposed DeVLMatch framework surpasses the previous GZS3 methods on standard benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC, COCO-Stuff, and CATARACTS, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Paperid: 4426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23402.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is challenging due to extremely limited training data; while aiming to reduce catastrophic forgetting and learn new information. We propose Diffusion-FSCIL, a novel approach that employs a text-to-image diffusion model as a frozen backbone. Our conjecture is that FSCIL can be tackled using a large generative model's capabilities benefiting from 1) generation ability via large-scale pre-training; 2) multi-scale representation; 3) representational flexibility through the text encoder. To maximize the representation capability, we propose to extract multiple complementary diffusion features to play roles as latent replay with slight support from feature distillation for preventing generative biases. Our framework realizes efficiency through 1) using a frozen backbone; 2) minimal trainable components; 3) batch processing of multiple feature extractions. Extensive experiments on CUB-200, miniImageNet, and CIFAR-100 show that Diffusion-FSCIL surpasses state-of-the-art methods, preserving performance on previously learned classes and adapting effectively to new ones.

Paperid: 4427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20791.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in understanding and generating natural language across various applications. However, they often struggle with resolving ambiguities in real-world, enterprise-level interactions, where context and domain-specific knowledge play a crucial role. In this demonstration, we introduce ECLAIR (Enhanced CLArification for Interactive Responses), a multi-agent framework for interactive disambiguation. ECLAIR enhances ambiguous user query clarification through an interactive process where custom agents are defined, ambiguity reasoning is conducted by the agents, clarification questions are generated, and user feedback is leveraged to refine the final response. When tested on real-world customer data, ECLAIR demonstrates significant improvements in clarification question generation compared to standard few-shot methods.

Paperid: 4428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20348.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language foundation models have shown impressive capabilities across various zero-shot tasks, including training-free localization and grounding, primarily focusing on localizing objects in images. However, leveraging those capabilities to localize actions and events in videos is challenging, as actions have less physical outline and are usually described by higher-level concepts. In this work, we propose VideoGEM, the first training-free spatial action grounding method based on pretrained image- and video-language backbones. Namely, we adapt the self-self attention formulation of GEM to spatial activity grounding. We observe that high-level semantic concepts, such as actions, usually emerge in the higher layers of the image- and video-language models. We, therefore, propose a layer weighting in the self-attention path to prioritize higher layers. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic weighting method to automatically tune layer weights to capture each layer`s relevance to a specific prompt. Finally, we introduce a prompt decomposition, processing action, verb, and object prompts separately, resulting in a better spatial localization of actions. We evaluate the proposed approach on three image- and video-language backbones, CLIP, OpenCLIP, and ViCLIP, and on four video grounding datasets, V-HICO, DALY, YouCook-Interactions, and GroundingYouTube, showing that the proposed training-free approach is able to outperform current trained state-of-the-art approaches for spatial video grounding.

Paperid: 4429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18637.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a new "Unbiased through Textual Description (UTD)" video benchmark based on unbiased subsets of existing video classification and retrieval datasets to enable a more robust assessment of video understanding capabilities. Namely, we tackle the problem that current video benchmarks may suffer from different representation biases, e.g., object bias or single-frame bias, where mere recognition of objects or utilization of only a single frame is sufficient for correct prediction. We leverage VLMs and LLMs to analyze and debias benchmarks from such representation biases. Specifically, we generate frame-wise textual descriptions of videos, filter them for specific information (e.g. only objects) and leverage them to examine representation biases across three dimensions: 1) concept bias - determining if a specific concept (e.g., objects) alone suffice for prediction; 2) temporal bias - assessing if temporal information contributes to prediction; and 3) common sense vs. dataset bias - evaluating whether zero-shot reasoning or dataset correlations contribute to prediction. We conduct a systematic analysis of 12 popular video classification and retrieval datasets and create new object-debiased test splits for these datasets. Moreover, we benchmark 30 state-of-the-art video models on original and debiased splits and analyze biases in the models. To facilitate the future development of more robust video understanding benchmarks and models, we release: "UTD-descriptions", a dataset with our rich structured descriptions for each dataset, and "UTD-splits", a dataset of object-debiased test splits.

Paperid: 4430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15739.pdf

Abstract:
We present ECLAIR (Enhanced CLArification for Interactive Responses), a novel unified and end-to-end framework for interactive disambiguation in enterprise AI assistants. ECLAIR generates clarification questions for ambiguous user queries and resolves ambiguity based on the user's response.We introduce a generalized architecture capable of integrating ambiguity information from multiple downstream agents, enhancing context-awareness in resolving ambiguities and allowing enterprise specific definition of agents. We further define agents within our system that provide domain-specific grounding information. We conduct experiments comparing ECLAIR to few-shot prompting techniques and demonstrate ECLAIR's superior performance in clarification question generation and ambiguity resolution.

Paperid: 4431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14345.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis have achieved notable success in generating high-quality short utterances for individual speakers. However, these systems still face challenges when extending their capabilities to long, multi-speaker, and spontaneous dialogues, typical of real-world scenarios such as podcasts. These limitations arise from two primary challenges: 1) long speech: podcasts typically span several minutes, exceeding the upper limit of most existing work; 2) spontaneity: podcasts are marked by their spontaneous, oral nature, which sharply contrasts with formal, written contexts; existing works often fall short in capturing this spontaneity. In this paper, we propose MoonCast, a solution for high-quality zero-shot podcast generation, aiming to synthesize natural podcast-style speech from text-only sources (e.g., stories, technical reports, news in TXT, PDF, or Web URL formats) using the voices of unseen speakers. To generate long audio, we adopt a long-context language model-based audio modeling approach utilizing large-scale long-context speech data. To enhance spontaneity, we utilize a podcast generation module to generate scripts with spontaneous details, which have been empirically shown to be as crucial as the text-to-speech modeling itself. Experiments demonstrate that MoonCast outperforms baselines, with particularly notable improvements in spontaneity and coherence.

Paperid: 4432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11384.pdf

Abstract:
Patients with diabetes are at increased risk of comorbid depression or anxiety, complicating their management. This study evaluated the performance of large language models (LLMs) in detecting these symptoms from secure patient messages. We applied multiple approaches, including engineered prompts, systemic persona, temperature adjustments, and zero-shot and few-shot learning, to identify the best-performing model and enhance performance. Three out of five LLMs demonstrated excellent performance (over 90% of F-1 and accuracy), with Llama 3.1 405B achieving 93% in both F-1 and accuracy using a zero-shot approach. While LLMs showed promise in binary classification and handling complex metrics like Patient Health Questionnaire-4, inconsistencies in challenging cases warrant further real-life assessment. The findings highlight the potential of LLMs to assist in timely screening and referrals, providing valuable empirical knowledge for real-world triage systems that could improve mental health care for patients with chronic diseases.

Paperid: 4433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09899.pdf

Abstract:
Incomplete relevance judgments limit the reusability of test collections. When new systems are compared to previous systems that contributed to the pool, they often face a disadvantage. This is due to pockets of unjudged documents (called holes) in the test collection that the new systems return. The very nature of Conversational Search (CS) means that these holes are potentially larger and more problematic when evaluating systems. In this paper, we aim to extend CS test collections by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill holes by leveraging existing judgments. We explore this problem using TREC iKAT 23 and TREC CAsT 22 collections, where information needs are highly dynamic and the responses are much more varied, leaving bigger holes to fill. Our experiments reveal that CS collections show a trend towards less reusability in deeper turns. Also, fine-tuning the Llama 3.1 model leads to high agreement with human assessors, while few-shot prompting the ChatGPT results in low agreement with humans. Consequently, filling the holes of a new system using ChatGPT leads to a higher change in the location of the new system. While regenerating the assessment pool with few-shot prompting the ChatGPT model and using it for evaluation achieves a high rank correlation with human-assessed pools. We show that filling the holes using few-shot training the Llama 3.1 model enables a fairer comparison between the new system and the systems contributed to the pool. Our hole-filling model based on few-shot training of the Llama 3.1 model can improve the reusability of test collections.

Paperid: 4434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07988.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with zero-shot generalization property (ZSG), where the agent has access to an offline dataset including experiences from different environments, and the goal of the agent is to train a policy over the training environments which performs well on test environments without further interaction. Existing work showed that classical offline RL fails to generalize to new, unseen environments. We propose pessimistic empirical risk minimization (PERM) and pessimistic proximal policy optimization (PPPO), which leverage pessimistic policy evaluation to guide policy learning and enhance generalization. We show that both PERM and PPPO are capable of finding a near-optimal policy with ZSG. Our result serves as a first step in understanding the foundation of the generalization phenomenon in offline reinforcement learning.

Paperid: 4435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07520.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional supervised drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) methods heavily depend on paired training data and encounter difficulties in learning cross-view correlations from unpaired data. Moreover, when deployed in a new domain, these methods require obtaining the new paired data and subsequent retraining for model adaptation, which significantly increases computational overhead. Existing unsupervised methods have enabled to generate pseudo-labels based on cross-view similarity to infer the pairing relationships. However, geographical similarity and spatial continuity often cause visually analogous features at different geographical locations. The feature confusion compromises the reliability of pseudo-label generation, where incorrect pseudo-labels drive negative optimization. Given these challenges inherent in both supervised and unsupervised DVGL methods, we propose a novel cross-domain invariant knowledge transfer network (CDIKTNet) with limited supervision, whose architecture consists of a cross-domain invariance sub-network (CDIS) and a cross-domain transfer sub-network (CDTS). This architecture facilitates a closed-loop framework for invariance feature learning and knowledge transfer. The CDIS is designed to learn cross-view structural and spatial invariance from a small amount of paired data that serves as prior knowledge. It endows the shared feature space of unpaired data with similar implicit cross-view correlations at initialization, which alleviates feature confusion. Based on this, the CDTS employs dual-path contrastive learning to further optimize each subspace while preserving consistency in a shared feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDIKTNet achieves state-of-the-art performance under full supervision compared with those supervised methods, and further surpasses existing unsupervised methods in both few-shot and cross-domain initialization.

Paperid: 4436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06442.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning models in real-world applications. While zero-shot OOD detection, which requires no training on in-distribution (ID) data, has become feasible with the emergence of vision-language models like CLIP, existing methods primarily focus on semantic matching and fail to fully capture distributional discrepancies. To address these limitations, we propose OT-DETECTOR, a novel framework that employs Optimal Transport (OT) to quantify both semantic and distributional discrepancies between test samples and ID labels. Specifically, we introduce cross-modal transport mass and transport cost as semantic-wise and distribution-wise OOD scores, respectively, enabling more robust detection of OOD samples. Additionally, we present a semantic-aware content refinement (SaCR) module, which utilizes semantic cues from ID labels to amplify the distributional discrepancy between ID and hard OOD samples. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that OT-DETECTOR achieves state-of-the-art performance across various OOD detection tasks, particularly in challenging hard-OOD scenarios.

Paperid: 4437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06271.pdf

Abstract:
Language-guided 3D scene understanding is important for advancing applications in robotics, AR/VR, and human-computer interaction, enabling models to comprehend and interact with 3D environments through natural language. While 2D vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in 2D VQA tasks, progress in the 3D domain has been significantly slower due to the complexity of 3D data and the high cost of manual annotations. In this work, we introduce SplatTalk, a novel method that uses a generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework to produce 3D tokens suitable for direct input into a pretrained LLM, enabling effective zero-shot 3D visual question answering (3D VQA) for scenes with only posed images. During experiments on multiple benchmarks, our approach outperforms both 3D models trained specifically for the task and previous 2D-LMM-based models utilizing only images (our setting), while achieving competitive performance with state-of-the-art 3D LMMs that additionally utilize 3D inputs. Project website: https://splat-talk.github.io/

Paperid: 4438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02948.pdf

Abstract:
Generating high-quality question-answer pairs for specialized technical domains remains challenging, with existing approaches facing a tradeoff between leveraging expert examples and achieving topical diversity. We present ExpertGenQA, a protocol that combines few-shot learning with structured topic and style categorization to generate comprehensive domain-specific QA pairs. Using U.S. Federal Railroad Administration documents as a test bed, we demonstrate that ExpertGenQA achieves twice the efficiency of baseline few-shot approaches while maintaining $94.4\%$ topic coverage. Through systematic evaluation, we show that current LLM-based judges and reward models exhibit strong bias toward superficial writing styles rather than content quality. Our analysis using Bloom's Taxonomy reveals that ExpertGenQA better preserves the cognitive complexity distribution of expert-written questions compared to template-based approaches. When used to train retrieval models, our generated queries improve top-1 accuracy by $13.02\%$ over baseline performance, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream applications in technical domains.

Paperid: 4439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02206.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated excellent zero-shot capability across semantic recognition tasks, mainly attributed to the training on a large-scale I&1T (one Image with one Text) dataset. This kind of multimodal representations often blend semantic and perceptual elements, placing a particular emphasis on semantics. However, this could be problematic for popular tasks like image quality assessment (IQA) and conditional image generation (CIG), which typically need to have fine control on perceptual and semantic features. Motivated by the above facts, this paper presents a new multimodal disentangled representation learning framework, which leverages disentangled text to guide image disentanglement. To this end, we first build an I&2T (one Image with a perceptual Text and a semantic Text) dataset, which consists of disentangled perceptual and semantic text descriptions for an image. Then, the disentangled text descriptions are utilized as supervisory signals to disentangle pure perceptual representations from CLIP's original `coarse' feature space, dubbed DeCLIP. Finally, the decoupled feature representations are used for both image quality assessment (technical quality and aesthetic quality) and conditional image generation. Extensive experiments and comparisons have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed method on the two popular tasks. The dataset, code, and model will be available.

Paperid: 4440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01194.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise across various natural language processing tasks. However, their application in the field of pathology, particularly for extracting meaningful insights from unstructured medical texts such as pathology reports, remains underexplored and not well quantified. In this project, we leverage state-of-the-art language models, including the GPT family, Mistral models, and the open-source Llama models, to evaluate their performance in comprehensively analyzing pathology reports. Specifically, we assess their performance in cancer type identification, AJCC stage determination, and prognosis assessment, encompassing both information extraction and higher-order reasoning tasks. Based on a detailed analysis of their performance metrics in a zero-shot setting, we developed two instruction-tuned models: Path-llama3.1-8B and Path-GPT-4o-mini-FT. These models demonstrated superior performance in zero-shot cancer type identification, staging, and prognosis assessment compared to the other models evaluated.

Paperid: 4441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00179.pdf

Abstract:
Clarification need prediction (CNP) is a key task in conversational search, aiming to predict whether to ask a clarifying question or give an answer to the current user query. However, current research on CNP suffers from the issues of limited CNP training data and low efficiency. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot and efficient CNP framework (Zef-CNP), in which we first prompt large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot manner to generate two sets of synthetic queries: ambiguous and specific (unambiguous) queries. We then use the generated queries to train efficient CNP models. Zef-CNP eliminates the need for human-annotated clarification-need labels during training and avoids the use of LLMs with high query latency at query time. To further improve the generation quality of synthetic queries, we devise a topic-, information-need-, and query-aware chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting strategy (TIQ-CoT). Moreover, we enhance TIQ-CoT with counterfactual query generation (CoQu), which guides LLMs first to generate a specific/ambiguous query and then sequentially generate its corresponding ambiguous/specific query. Experimental results show that Zef-CNP achieves superior CNP effectiveness and efficiency compared with zero- and few-shot LLM-based CNP predictors.

Paperid: 4442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20292.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal capabilities in learning joint representations of visual and textual data, making them powerful tools for tasks such as Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL). CZSL requires models to generalize to novel combinations of visual primitives--such as attributes and objects--that were not explicitly encountered during training. Recent works in prompting for CZSL have focused on modifying inputs for the text encoder, often using static prompts that do not change across varying visual contexts. However, these approaches struggle to fully capture varying visual contexts, as they focus on text adaptation rather than leveraging visual features for compositional reasoning. To address this, we propose a Visual Adaptive Prompting System (VAPS) that leverages a learnable visual prompt repository and similarity-based retrieval mechanism within the framework of VLMs to bridge the gap between semantic and visual features. Our method introduces a dynamic visual prompt repository mechanism that selects the most relevant attribute and object prompts based on the visual features of the image. Our proposed system includes a visual prompt adapter that encourages the model to learn a more generalizable embedding space. Experiments on three CZSL benchmarks, across both closed and open-world scenarios, demonstrate state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 4443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16667.pdf

Abstract:
Scalable and generalizable physics-aware deep learning has long been considered a significant challenge with various applications across diverse domains ranging from robotics to molecular dynamics. Central to almost all physical systems are symplectic forms, the geometric backbone that underpins fundamental invariants like energy and momentum. In this work, we introduce a novel deep learning framework, MetaSym. In particular, MetaSym combines a strong symplectic inductive bias obtained from a symplectic encoder, and an autoregressive decoder with meta-attention. This principled design ensures that core physical invariants remain intact, while allowing flexible, data-efficient adaptation to system heterogeneities. We benchmark MetaSym with highly varied and realistic datasets, such as a high-dimensional spring-mesh system (Otness et al., 2021), an open quantum system with dissipation and measurement backaction, and robotics-inspired quadrotor dynamics. Our results demonstrate superior performance in modeling dynamics under few-shot adaptation, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines that use larger models.

Paperid: 4444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16372.pdf

Abstract:
As robots are increasingly deployed in diverse application domains, enabling robust mobility across different embodiments has become a critical challenge. Classical mobility stacks, though effective on specific platforms, require extensive per-robot tuning and do not scale easily to new embodiments. Learning-based approaches, such as imitation learning (IL), offer alternatives, but face significant limitations on the need for high-quality demonstrations for each embodiment. To address these challenges, we introduce COMPASS, a unified framework that enables scalable cross-embodiment mobility using expert demonstrations from only a single embodiment. We first pre-train a mobility policy on a single robot using IL, combining a world model with a policy model. We then apply residual reinforcement learning (RL) to efficiently adapt this policy to diverse embodiments through corrective refinements. Finally, we distill specialist policies into a single generalist policy conditioned on an embodiment embedding vector. This design significantly reduces the burden of collecting data while enabling robust generalization across a wide range of robot designs. Our experiments demonstrate that COMPASS scales effectively across diverse robot platforms while maintaining adaptability to various environment configurations, achieving a generalist policy with a success rate approximately 5X higher than the pre-trained IL policy on unseen embodiments, and further demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Paperid: 4445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16294.pdf

Abstract:
The diversity of time series applications and scarcity of domain-specific data highlight the need for time-series models with strong few-shot learning capabilities. In this work, we propose a novel training scheme and a transformer-based architecture, collectively referred to as TimePFN, for multivariate time-series (MTS) forecasting. TimePFN is based on the concept of Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFN), which aims to approximate Bayesian inference. Our approach consists of (1) generating synthetic MTS data through diverse Gaussian process kernels and the linear coregionalization method, and (2) a novel MTS architecture capable of utilizing both temporal and cross-channel dependencies across all input patches. We evaluate TimePFN on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models for MTS forecasting in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Notably, fine-tuning TimePFN with as few as 500 data points nearly matches full dataset training error, and even 50 data points yield competitive results. We also find that TimePFN exhibits strong univariate forecasting performance, attesting to its generalization ability. Overall, this work unlocks the power of synthetic data priors for MTS forecasting and facilitates strong zero- and few-shot forecasting performance.

Paperid: 4446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15481.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, employing single-modality large language models based on mechanical vibration signals as Tuning Predictors has introduced new perspectives in intelligent fault diagnosis. However, the potential of these methods to leverage multimodal data remains underexploited, particularly in complex mechanical systems where relying on a single data source often fails to capture comprehensive fault information. In this paper, we present FaultGPT, a novel model that generates fault diagnosis reports directly from raw vibration signals. By leveraging large vision-language models (LVLM) and text-based supervision, FaultGPT performs end-to-end fault diagnosis question answering (FDQA), distinguishing itself from traditional classification or regression approaches. Specifically, we construct a large-scale FDQA instruction dataset for instruction tuning of LVLM. This dataset includes vibration time-frequency image-text label pairs and human instruction-ground truth pairs. To enhance the capability in generating high-quality fault diagnosis reports, we design a multi-scale cross-modal image decoder to extract fine-grained fault semantics and conducted instruction tuning without introducing additional training parameters into the LVLM. Extensive experiments, including fault diagnosis report generation, few-shot and zero-shot evaluation across multiple datasets, validate the superior performance and adaptability of FaultGPT in diverse industrial scenarios.

Paperid: 4447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10606.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on model-free zero-shot 6D object pose estimation for robotics applications. While existing methods can estimate the precise 6D pose of objects, they heavily rely on curated CAD models or reference images, the preparation of which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Moreover, in real-world scenarios, 3D models or reference images may not be available in advance and instant robot reaction is desired. In this work, we propose a novel framework named HIPPo, which eliminates the need for curated CAD models and reference images by harnessing image-to-3D priors from Diffusion Models, enabling model-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation. Specifically, we construct HIPPo Dreamer, a rapid image-to-mesh model built on a multiview Diffusion Model and a 3D reconstruction foundation model. Our HIPPo Dreamer can generate a 3D mesh of any unseen objects from a single glance in just a few seconds. Then, as more observations are acquired, we propose to continuously refine the diffusion prior mesh model by joint optimization of object geometry and appearance. This is achieved by a measurement-guided scheme that gradually replaces the plausible diffusion priors with more reliable online observations. Consequently, HIPPo can instantly estimate and track the 6D pose of a novel object and maintain a complete mesh for immediate robotic applications. Thorough experiments on various benchmarks show that HIPPo outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 6D object pose estimation when prior reference images are limited.

Paperid: 4448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10307.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional solar forecasting models are based on several years of site-specific historical irradiance data, often spanning five or more years, which are unavailable for newer photovoltaic farms. As renewable energy is highly intermittent, building accurate solar irradiance forecasting systems is essential for efficient grid management and enabling the ongoing proliferation of solar energy, which is crucial to achieve the United Nations' net zero goals. In this work, we propose SPIRIT, a novel approach leveraging foundation models for solar irradiance forecasting, making it applicable to newer solar installations. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in zero-shot transfer learning by about 70%, enabling effective performance at new locations without relying on any historical data. Further improvements in performance are achieved through fine-tuning, as more location-specific data becomes available. These findings are supported by statistical significance, further validating our approach. SPIRIT represents a pivotal step towards rapid, scalable, and adaptable solar forecasting solutions, advancing the integration of renewable energy into global power systems.

Paperid: 4449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07786.pdf

Abstract:
Automated Program Repair (APR) for introductory programming assignments (IPAs) is motivated by the large number of student enrollments in programming courses each year. Since providing feedback on IPAs requires substantial time and effort from faculty, personalized feedback often involves suggesting fixes to students' programs. Formal Methods (FM)-based semantic repair approaches, check a program's execution against a test suite or reference solution, are effective but limited. These tools excel at identifying buggy parts but can only fix programs if the correct implementation and the faulty one share the same control flow graph. Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for APR but often make extensive instead of minimal rewrites. This leads to more invasive fixes, making it harder for students to learn from their mistakes. In summary, LLMs excel at completing strings, while FM-based fault localization excel at identifying buggy parts of a program. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines the strengths of both FM-based fault localization and LLMs, via zero-shot learning, to enhance APR for IPAs. Our method uses MaxSAT-based fault localization to identify buggy parts of a program, then presents the LLM with a program sketch devoid of these buggy statements. This hybrid approach follows a CEGIS loop to iteratively refine the program. We ask the LLM to synthesize the missing parts, which are then checked against a test suite. If the suggested program is incorrect, a counterexample from the test suite is fed back to the LLM. Our experiments show that our counterexample guided approach, using MaxSAT-based bug-free program sketches, significantly improves the repair capabilities of all six evaluated LLMs. This method allows LLMs to repair more programs with smaller fixes, outperforming other configurations and state-of-the-art symbolic program repair tools.

Paperid: 4450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06394.pdf

Abstract:
Existing approaches to multilingual text detoxification are hampered by the scarcity of parallel multilingual datasets. In this work, we introduce a pipeline for the generation of multilingual parallel detoxification data. We also introduce SynthDetoxM, a manually collected and synthetically generated multilingual parallel text detoxification dataset comprising 16,000 high-quality detoxification sentence pairs across German, French, Spanish and Russian. The data was sourced from different toxicity evaluation datasets and then rewritten with nine modern open-source LLMs in few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on the produced synthetic datasets have superior performance to those trained on the human-annotated MultiParaDetox dataset even in data limited setting. Models trained on SynthDetoxM outperform all evaluated LLMs in few-shot setting. We release our dataset and code to help further research in multilingual text detoxification.

Paperid: 4451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04074.pdf

Abstract:
3D and 2D gaze estimation share the fundamental objective of capturing eye movements but are traditionally treated as two distinct research domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-task few-shot 2D gaze estimation approach, aiming to adapt a pre-trained 3D gaze estimation network for 2D gaze prediction on unseen devices using only a few training images. This task is highly challenging due to the domain gap between 3D and 2D gaze, unknown screen poses, and limited training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that bridges the gap between 3D and 2D gaze. Our framework contains a physics-based differentiable projection module with learnable parameters to model screen poses and project 3D gaze into 2D gaze. The framework is fully differentiable and can integrate into existing 3D gaze networks without modifying their original architecture. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic pseudo-labelling strategy for flipped images, which is particularly challenging for 2D labels due to unknown screen poses. To overcome this, we reverse the projection process by converting 2D labels to 3D space, where flipping is performed. Notably, this 3D space is not aligned with the camera coordinate system, so we learn a dynamic transformation matrix to compensate for this misalignment. We evaluate our method on MPIIGaze, EVE, and GazeCapture datasets, collected respectively on laptops, desktop computers, and mobile devices. The superior performance highlights the effectiveness of our approach, and demonstrates its strong potential for real-world applications.

Paperid: 4452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03498.pdf

Abstract:
Generating street-view images from satellite imagery is a challenging task, particularly in maintaining accurate pose alignment and incorporating diverse environmental conditions. While diffusion models have shown promise in generative tasks, their ability to maintain strict pose alignment throughout the diffusion process is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel Iterative Homography Adjustment (IHA) scheme applied during the denoising process, which effectively addresses pose misalignment and ensures spatial consistency in the generated street-view images. Additionally, currently, available datasets for satellite-to-street-view generation are limited in their diversity of illumination and weather conditions, thereby restricting the generalizability of the generated outputs. To mitigate this, we introduce a text-guided illumination and weather-controlled sampling strategy that enables fine-grained control over the environmental factors. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly improves pose accuracy and enhances the diversity and realism of generated street-view images, setting a new benchmark for satellite-to-street-view generation tasks.

Paperid: 4453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03459.pdf

Abstract:
The introduction of vision-language models like CLIP has enabled the development of foundational video models capable of generalizing to unseen videos and human actions. However, these models are typically trained on web videos, which often fail to capture the challenges present in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) videos. Existing works address ADL-specific challenges, such as similar appearances, subtle motion patterns, and multiple viewpoints, by combining 3D skeletons and RGB videos. However, these approaches are not integrated with language, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen action classes. In this paper, we introduce SKI models, which integrate 3D skeletons into the vision-language embedding space. SKI models leverage a skeleton-language model, SkeletonCLIP, to infuse skeleton information into Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) through collaborative training. Notably, SKI models do not require skeleton data during inference, enhancing their robustness for real-world applications. The effectiveness of SKI models is validated on three popular ADL datasets for zero-shot action recognition and video caption generation tasks.

Paperid: 4454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01785.pdf

Abstract:
The preservation of aquatic biodiversity is critical in mitigating the effects of climate change. Aquatic scene understanding plays a pivotal role in aiding marine scientists in their decision-making processes. In this paper, we introduce AquaticCLIP, a novel contrastive language-image pre-training model tailored for aquatic scene understanding. AquaticCLIP presents a new unsupervised learning framework that aligns images and texts in aquatic environments, enabling tasks such as segmentation, classification, detection, and object counting. By leveraging our large-scale underwater image-text paired dataset without the need for ground-truth annotations, our model enriches existing vision-language models in the aquatic domain. For this purpose, we construct a 2 million underwater image-text paired dataset using heterogeneous resources, including YouTube, Netflix, NatGeo, etc. To fine-tune AquaticCLIP, we propose a prompt-guided vision encoder that progressively aggregates patch features via learnable prompts, while a vision-guided mechanism enhances the language encoder by incorporating visual context. The model is optimized through a contrastive pretraining loss to align visual and textual modalities. AquaticCLIP achieves notable performance improvements in zero-shot settings across multiple underwater computer vision tasks, outperforming existing methods in both robustness and interpretability. Our model sets a new benchmark for vision-language applications in underwater environments. The code and dataset for AquaticCLIP are publicly available on GitHub at xxx.

Paperid: 4455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01004.pdf

Abstract:
Bin-picking is a practical and challenging robotic manipulation task, where accurate 6D pose estimation plays a pivotal role. The workpieces in bin-picking are typically textureless and randomly stacked in a bin, which poses a significant challenge to 6D pose estimation. Existing solutions are typically learning-based methods, which require object-specific training. Their efficiency of practical deployment for novel workpieces is highly limited by data collection and model retraining. Zero-shot 6D pose estimation is a potential approach to address the issue of deployment efficiency. Nevertheless, existing zero-shot 6D pose estimation methods are designed to leverage feature matching to establish point-to-point correspondences for pose estimation, which is less effective for workpieces with textureless appearances and ambiguous local regions. In this paper, we propose ZeroBP, a zero-shot pose estimation framework designed specifically for the bin-picking task. ZeroBP learns Position-Aware Correspondence (PAC) between the scene instance and its CAD model, leveraging both local features and global positions to resolve the mismatch issue caused by ambiguous regions with similar shapes and appearances. Extensive experiments on the ROBI dataset demonstrate that ZeroBP outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot pose estimation methods, achieving an improvement of 9.1% in average recall of correct poses.

Paperid: 4456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00893.pdf

Abstract:
Learning-based robotics research driven by data demands a new approach to robot hardware design-one that serves as both a platform for policy execution and a tool for embodied data collection to train policies. We introduce ToddlerBot, a low-cost, open-source humanoid robot platform designed for scalable policy learning and research in robotics and AI. ToddlerBot enables seamless acquisition of high-quality simulation and real-world data. The plug-and-play zero-point calibration and transferable motor system identification ensure a high-fidelity digital twin, enabling zero-shot policy transfer from simulation to the real world. A user-friendly teleoperation interface facilitates streamlined real-world data collection for learning motor skills from human demonstrations. Utilizing its data collection ability and anthropomorphic design, ToddlerBot is an ideal platform to perform whole-body loco-manipulation. Additionally, ToddlerBot's compact size (0.56m, 3.4kg) ensures safe operation in real-world environments. Reproducibility is achieved with an entirely 3D-printed, open-source design and commercially available components, keeping the total cost under 6,000 USD. Comprehensive documentation allows assembly and maintenance with basic technical expertise, as validated by a successful independent replication of the system. We demonstrate ToddlerBot's capabilities through arm span, payload, endurance tests, loco-manipulation tasks, and a collaborative long-horizon scenario where two robots tidy a toy session together. By advancing ML-compatibility, capability, and reproducibility, ToddlerBot provides a robust platform for scalable learning and dynamic policy execution in robotics research.

Paperid: 4457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18940.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in LLMs have accelerated the development of dialogue generation across text and images, yet video-based dialogue generation remains underexplored and presents unique challenges. In this paper, we introduce Theme-aware Video Dialogue Crafting (TVDC), a novel task aimed at generating new dialogues that align with video content and adhere to user-specified themes. We propose TV-Dialogue, a novel multi-modal agent framework that ensures both theme alignment (i.e., the dialogue revolves around the theme) and visual consistency (i.e., the dialogue matches the emotions and behaviors of characters in the video) by enabling real-time immersive interactions among video characters, thereby accurately understanding the video content and generating new dialogue that aligns with the given themes. To assess the generated dialogues, we present a multi-granularity evaluation benchmark with high accuracy, interpretability and reliability, demonstrating the effectiveness of TV-Dialogue on self-collected dataset over directly using existing LLMs. Extensive experiments reveal that TV-Dialogue can generate dialogues for videos of any length and any theme in a zero-shot manner without training. Our findings underscore the potential of TV-Dialogue for various applications, such as video re-creation, film dubbing and its use in downstream multimodal tasks.

Paperid: 4458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16724.pdf

Abstract:
Human-object interaction (HOI) is an essential problem in artificial intelligence (AI) which aims to understand the visual world that involves complex relationships between humans and objects. However, current benchmarks such as HICO-DET face the following limitations: (1) severe class imbalance and (2) varying number of train and test sets for certain classes. These issues can potentially lead to either inflation or deflation of model performance during evaluation, ultimately undermining the reliability of evaluation scores. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to develop a new class-balanced dataset, Benchmark Re-evaluation for Integrity in Generalized Human-object Interaction Testing (B-RIGHT), that addresses these imbalanced problems. B-RIGHT achieves class balance by leveraging balancing algorithm and automated generation-and-filtering processes, ensuring an equal number of instances for each HOI class. Furthermore, we design a balanced zero-shot test set to systematically evaluate models on unseen scenario. Re-evaluating existing models using B-RIGHT reveals substantial the reduction of score variance and changes in performance rankings compared to conventional HICO-DET. Our experiments demonstrate that evaluation under balanced conditions ensure more reliable and fair model comparisons.

Paperid: 4459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14308.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to identify unseen state-object compositions by leveraging knowledge learned from seen compositions. Existing approaches often independently predict states and objects, overlooking their relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, learning primitive relations (LPR), designed to probabilistically capture the relationships between states and objects. By employing the cross-attention mechanism, LPR considers the dependencies between states and objects, enabling the model to infer the likelihood of unseen compositions. Experimental results demonstrate that LPR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all three CZSL benchmark datasets in both closed-world and open-world settings. Through qualitative analysis, we show that LPR leverages state-object relationships for unseen composition prediction.

Paperid: 4460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09102.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how misleading and outright false information enters news ecosystems remains a difficult challenge that requires tracking how narratives spread across thousands of fringe and mainstream news websites. To do this, we introduce a system that utilizes encoder-based large language models and zero-shot stance detection to scalably identify and track news narratives and their attitudes across over 4,000 factually unreliable, mixed-reliability, and factually reliable English-language news websites. Running our system over an 18 month period, we track the spread of 146K news stories. Using network-based interference via the NETINF algorithm, we show that the paths of news narratives and the stances of websites toward particular entities can be used to uncover slanted propaganda networks (e.g., anti-vaccine and anti-Ukraine) and to identify the most influential websites in spreading these attitudes in the broader news ecosystem. We hope that increased visibility into our distributed news ecosystem can help with the reporting and fact-checking of propaganda and disinformation.

Paperid: 4461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08347.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional image retrieval (CIR) is a multimodal learning task where a model combines a query image with a user-provided text modification to retrieve a target image. CIR finds applications in a variety of domains including product retrieval (e-commerce) and web search. Existing methods primarily focus on fully-supervised learning, wherein models are trained on datasets of labeled triplets such as FashionIQ and CIRR. This poses two significant challenges: (i) curating such triplet datasets is labor intensive; and (ii) models lack generalization to unseen objects and domains. In this work, we propose SCOT (Self-supervised COmpositional Training), a novel zero-shot compositional pretraining strategy that combines existing large image-text pair datasets with the generative capabilities of large language models to contrastively train an embedding composition network. Specifically, we show that the text embedding from a large-scale contrastively-pretrained vision-language model can be utilized as proxy target supervision during compositional pretraining, replacing the target image embedding. In zero-shot settings, this strategy surpasses SOTA zero-shot compositional retrieval methods as well as many fully-supervised methods on standard benchmarks such as FashionIQ and CIRR.

Paperid: 4462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07532.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are demonstrating remarkable human like capabilities across diverse domains, including psychological assessment. This study evaluates whether LLMs, specifically GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, can infer Big Five personality traits and generate Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI-10) item scores from user conversations under zero-shot prompting conditions. Our findings reveal that incorporating an intermediate step--prompting for BFI-10 item scores before calculating traits--enhances accuracy and aligns more closely with the gold standard than direct trait inference. This structured approach underscores the importance of leveraging psychological frameworks in improving predictive precision. Additionally, a group comparison based on depressive symptom presence revealed differential model performance. Participants were categorized into two groups: those experiencing at least one depressive symptom and those without symptoms. GPT-4o mini demonstrated heightened sensitivity to depression-related shifts in traits such as Neuroticism and Conscientiousness within the symptom-present group, whereas GPT-4o exhibited strengths in nuanced interpretation across groups. These findings underscore the potential of LLMs to analyze real-world psychological data effectively, offering a valuable foundation for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychology.

Paperid: 4463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06859.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health disorders pose a growing public health concern in the Arab world, emphasizing the need for accessible diagnostic and intervention tools. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach, but their application in Arabic contexts faces challenges including limited labeled datasets, linguistic complexity, and translation biases. This study comprehensively evaluates 8 LLMs, including general multi-lingual models, as well as bi-lingual ones, on diverse mental health datasets (such as AraDepSu, Dreaddit, MedMCQA), investigating the impact of prompt design, language configuration (native Arabic vs. translated English, and vice versa), and few-shot prompting on diagnostic performance. We find that prompt engineering significantly influences LLM scores mainly due to reduced instruction following, with our structured prompt outperforming a less structured variant on multi-class datasets, with an average difference of 14.5\%. While language influence on performance was modest, model selection proved crucial: Phi-3.5 MoE excelled in balanced accuracy, particularly for binary classification, while Mistral NeMo showed superior performance in mean absolute error for severity prediction tasks. Few-shot prompting consistently improved performance, with particularly substantial gains observed for GPT-4o Mini on multi-class classification, boosting accuracy by an average factor of 1.58. These findings underscore the importance of prompt optimization, multilingual analysis, and few-shot learning for developing culturally sensitive and effective LLM-based mental health tools for Arabic-speaking populations.

Paperid: 4464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02831.pdf

Abstract:
Object pose estimation, crucial in computer vision and robotics applications, faces challenges with the diversity of unseen categories. We propose a zero-shot method to achieve category-level 6-DOF object pose estimation, which exploits both 2D and 3D universal features of input RGB-D image to establish semantic similarity-based correspondences and can be extended to unseen categories without additional model fine-tuning. Our method begins with combining efficient 2D universal features to find sparse correspondences between intra-category objects and gets initial coarse pose. To handle the correspondence degradation of 2D universal features if the pose deviates much from the target pose, we use an iterative strategy to optimize the pose. Subsequently, to resolve pose ambiguities due to shape differences between intra-category objects, the coarse pose is refined by optimizing with dense alignment constraint of 3D universal features. Our method outperforms previous methods on the REAL275 and Wild6D benchmarks for unseen categories.

Paperid: 4465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00457.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning is an effective way to exploit the potential of large-scale pre-trained foundational models. Continuous prompts parameterize context tokens in prompts by turning them into differentiable vectors. Deep continuous prompts insert prompts not only in the input but also in the intermediate hidden representations. Manually designed deep continuous prompts exhibit a remarkable improvement compared to the zero-shot pre-trained model on downstream tasks. How to automate the continuous prompt design is an underexplored area, and a fundamental question arises, is manually designed deep prompt strategy optimal? To answer this question, we propose a method dubbed differentiable prompt learning (DPL). The DPL method is formulated as an optimization problem to automatically determine the optimal context length of the prompt to be added to each layer, where the objective is to maximize the performance. We test the DPL method on the pre-trained CLIP. We empirically find that by using only limited data, our DPL method can find deep continuous prompt configuration with high confidence. The performance on the downstream tasks exhibits the superiority of the automatic design: our method boosts the average test accuracy by 2.60% on 11 datasets compared to baseline methods. Besides, our method focuses only on the prompt configuration (i.e. context length for each layer), which means that our method is compatible with the baseline methods that have sophisticated designs to boost the performance. The DPL method can be deployed to large language models or computer vision models at no cost.

Paperid: 4466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20682.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) like CLIP show stellar zero-shot capability on classification benchmarks. However, selecting the VLM with the highest performance on the unlabeled downstream task is non-trivial. Existing VLM selection methods focus on the class-name-only setting, relying on a supervised large-scale dataset and large language models, which may not be accessible or feasible during deployment. This paper introduces the problem of \textbf{unsupervised vision-language model selection}, where only unsupervised downstream datasets are available, with no additional information provided. To solve this problem, we propose a method termed Visual-tExtual Graph Alignment (VEGA), to select VLMs without any annotations by measuring the alignment of the VLM between the two modalities on the downstream task. VEGA is motivated by the pretraining paradigm of VLMs, which aligns features with the same semantics from the visual and textual modalities, thereby mapping both modalities into a shared representation space. Specifically, we first construct two graphs on the vision and textual features, respectively. VEGA is then defined as the overall similarity between the visual and textual graphs at both node and edge levels. Extensive experiments across three different benchmarks, covering a variety of application scenarios and downstream datasets, demonstrate that VEGA consistently provides reliable and accurate estimates of VLMs' performance on unlabeled downstream tasks.

Paperid: 4467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20275.pdf

Abstract:
In image classification tasks, deep learning models are vulnerable to image distortion. For successful deployment, it is important to identify distortion levels under which the model is usable i.e. its accuracy stays above a stipulated threshold. We refer to this problem as Model Assurance under Image Distortion, and formulate it as a classification task. Given a distortion level, our goal is to predict if the model's accuracy on the set of distorted images is greater than a threshold. We propose a novel classifier based on a Level Set Estimation (LSE) algorithm, which uses the LSE's mean and variance functions to form the classification rule. We further extend our method to a "few sample" setting where we can only acquire few real images to perform the model assurance process. Our idea is to generate extra synthetic images using a novel Conditional Variational Autoencoder model with two new loss functions. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our classification method significantly outperforms strong baselines on five benchmark image datasets.

Paperid: 4468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15483.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning~(CDFSL) methods typically parameterize models with task-agnostic and task-specific parameters. To adapt task-specific parameters, recent approaches have utilized fixed optimization strategies, despite their potential sub-optimality across varying domains or target tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel adaptation mechanism called Task-Specific Preconditioned gradient descent~(TSP). Our method first meta-learns Domain-Specific Preconditioners~(DSPs) that capture the characteristics of each meta-training domain, which are then linearly combined using task-coefficients to form the Task-Specific Preconditioner. The preconditioner is applied to gradient descent, making the optimization adaptive to the target task. We constrain our preconditioners to be positive definite, guiding the preconditioned gradient toward the direction of steepest descent. Empirical evaluations on the Meta-Dataset show that TSP achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse experimental scenarios.

Paperid: 4469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14849.pdf

Abstract:
Recently developed large language models (LLMs) have presented promising new avenues to address data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. In few-shot aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), previous efforts have explored data augmentation techniques, which prompt LLMs to generate new samples by modifying existing ones. However, these methods fail to produce adequately diverse data, impairing their effectiveness. Besides, some studies apply in-context learning for ABSA by using specific instructions and a few selected examples as prompts. Though promising, LLMs often yield labels that deviate from task requirements. To overcome these limitations, we propose DS$^2$-ABSA, a dual-stream data synthesis framework targeted for few-shot ABSA. It leverages LLMs to synthesize data from two complementary perspectives: \textit{key-point-driven} and \textit{instance-driven}, which effectively generate diverse and high-quality ABSA samples in low-resource settings. Furthermore, a \textit{label refinement} module is integrated to improve the synthetic labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DS$^2$-ABSA significantly outperforms previous few-shot ABSA solutions and other LLM-oriented data generation methods.

Paperid: 4470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12898.pdf

Abstract:
The Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) are foundational to the design, construction, and operation of workflows in the engineering and process industries. However, their manual creation is often labor-intensive, error-prone, and lacks robust mechanisms for error detection and correction. While recent advancements in Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have demonstrated significant potential across various domains, their application in automating generation of engineering workflows remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel copilot for automating the generation of P&IDs from natural language descriptions. Leveraging a multi-step agentic workflow, our copilot provides a structured and iterative approach to diagram creation directly from Natural Language prompts. We demonstrate the feasibility of the generation process by evaluating the soundness and completeness of the workflow, and show improved results compared to vanilla zero-shot and few-shot generation approaches.

Paperid: 4471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11995.pdf

Abstract:
Caregivers (i.e., parents and members of a child's caring community) are underappreciated stakeholders in learning analytics. Although caregiver involvement can enhance student academic outcomes, many obstacles hinder involvement, most notably knowledge gaps with respect to modern school curricula. An emerging topic of interest in learning analytics is hybrid tutoring, which includes instructional and motivational support. Caregivers assert similar roles in homework, yet it is unknown how learning analytics can support them. Our past work with caregivers suggested that conversational support is a promising method of providing caregivers with the guidance needed to effectively support student learning. We developed a system that provides instructional support to caregivers through conversational recommendations generated by a Large Language Model (LLM). Addressing known instructional limitations of LLMs, we use instructional intelligence from tutoring systems while conducting prompt engineering experiments with the open-source Llama 3 LLM. This LLM generated message recommendations for caregivers supporting their child's math practice via chat. Few-shot prompting and combining real-time problem-solving context from tutoring systems with examples of tutoring practices yielded desirable message recommendations. These recommendations were evaluated with ten middle school caregivers, who valued recommendations facilitating content-level support and student metacognition through self-explanation. We contribute insights into how tutoring systems can best be merged with LLMs to support hybrid tutoring settings through conversational assistance, facilitating effective caregiver involvement in tutoring systems.

Paperid: 4472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10417.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health disorders are increasingly prevalent worldwide, creating an urgent need for innovative tools to support early diagnosis and intervention. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multimodal mental health diagnostics, specifically for detecting depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder through text and audio modalities. Using the E-DAIC dataset, we compare text and audio modalities to investigate whether LLMs can perform equally well or better with audio inputs. We further examine the integration of both modalities to determine if this can enhance diagnostic accuracy, which generally results in improved performance metrics. Our analysis specifically utilizes custom-formulated metrics; Modal Superiority Score and Disagreement Resolvement Score to evaluate how combined modalities influence model performance. The Gemini 1.5 Pro model achieves the highest scores in binary depression classification when using the combined modality, with an F1 score of 0.67 and a Balanced Accuracy (BA) of 77.4%, assessed across the full dataset. These results represent an increase of 3.1% over its performance with the text modality and 2.7% over the audio modality, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating modalities to enhance diagnostic accuracy. Notably, all results are obtained in zero-shot inferring, highlighting the robustness of the models without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. To explore the impact of different configurations on model performance, we conduct binary, severity, and multiclass tasks using both zero-shot and few-shot prompts, examining the effects of prompt variations on performance. The results reveal that models such as Gemini 1.5 Pro in text and audio modalities, and GPT-4o mini in the text modality, often surpass other models in balanced accuracy and F1 scores across multiple tasks.

Paperid: 4473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09388.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is essential in transferring dark knowledge from a large teacher to a small student network, such that the student can be much more efficient than the teacher but with comparable accuracy. Existing KD methods, however, rely on a large teacher trained specifically for the target task, which is both very inflexible and inefficient. In this paper, we argue that a SSL-pretrained model can effectively act as the teacher and its dark knowledge can be captured by the coordinate system or linear subspace where the features lie in. We then need only one forward pass of the teacher, and then tailor the coordinate system (TCS) for the student network. Our TCS method is teacher-free and applies to diverse architectures, works well for KD and practical few-shot learning, and allows cross-architecture distillation with large capacity gap. Experiments show that TCS achieves significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art KD methods, while only requiring roughly half of their training time and GPU memory costs.

Paperid: 4474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08536.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot classification capabilities with free-form prompts and even show some generalization in specialized domains. However, their performance on satellite imagery is limited due to the underrepresentation of such data in their training sets, which predominantly consist of ground-level images. Existing prompting techniques for satellite imagery are often restricted to generic phrases like a satellite image of ..., limiting their effectiveness for zero-shot land-use and land-cover (LULC) mapping. To address these challenges, we introduce SenCLIP, which transfers CLIPs representation to Sentinel-2 imagery by leveraging a large dataset of Sentinel-2 images paired with geotagged ground-level photos from across Europe. We evaluate SenCLIP alongside other SOTA remote sensing VLMs on zero-shot LULC mapping tasks using the EuroSAT and BigEarthNet datasets with both aerial and ground-level prompting styles. Our approach, which aligns ground-level representations with satellite imagery, demonstrates significant improvements in classification accuracy across both prompt styles, opening new possibilities for applying free-form textual descriptions in zero-shot LULC mapping.

Paperid: 4475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05355.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we propose the first motion transfer approach in diffusion transformer through Mixture of Score Guidance (MSG), a theoretically-grounded framework for motion transfer in diffusion models. Our key theoretical contribution lies in reformulating conditional score to decompose motion score and content score in diffusion models. By formulating motion transfer as a mixture of potential energies, MSG naturally preserves scene composition and enables creative scene transformations while maintaining the integrity of transferred motion patterns. This novel sampling operates directly on pre-trained video diffusion models without additional training or fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments, MSG demonstrates successful handling of diverse scenarios including single object, multiple objects, and cross-object motion transfer as well as complex camera motion transfer. Additionally, we introduce MotionBench, the first motion transfer dataset consisting of 200 source videos and 1000 transferred motions, covering single/multi-object transfers, and complex camera motions.

Paperid: 4476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02101.pdf

Abstract:
Existing multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) approaches mainly focus on improving models with the encoder-decoder architecture to translate multiple languages. However, decoder-only architecture has been explored less in MNMT due to its underperformance when trained on parallel data solely. In this work, we attribute the issue of the decoder-only architecture to its lack of language transfer capability. Specifically, the decoder-only architecture is insufficient in encoding source tokens with the target language features. We propose dividing the decoding process into two stages so that target tokens are explicitly excluded in the first stage to implicitly boost the transfer capability across languages. Additionally, we impose contrastive learning on translation instructions, resulting in improved performance in zero-shot translation. We conduct experiments on TED-19 and OPUS-100 datasets, considering both training from scratch and fine-tuning scenarios. Experimental results show that, compared to the encoder-decoder architecture, our methods not only perform competitively in supervised translations but also achieve improvements of up to 3.39 BLEU, 6.99 chrF++, 3.22 BERTScore, and 4.81 COMET in zero-shot translations.

Paperid: 4477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00760.pdf

Abstract:
This work introduces the first framework for reconstructing surgical dialogue from unstructured real-world recordings, which is crucial for characterizing teaching tasks. In surgical training, the formative verbal feedback that trainers provide to trainees during live surgeries is crucial for ensuring safety, correcting behavior immediately, and facilitating long-term skill acquisition. However, analyzing and quantifying this feedback is challenging due to its unstructured and specialized nature. Automated systems are essential to manage these complexities at scale, allowing for the creation of structured datasets that enhance feedback analysis and improve surgical education. Our framework integrates voice activity detection, speaker diarization, and automated speech recaognition, with a novel enhancement that 1) removes hallucinations (non-existent utterances generated during speech recognition fueled by noise in the operating room) and 2) separates speech from trainers and trainees using few-shot voice samples. These aspects are vital for reconstructing accurate surgical dialogues and understanding the roles of operating room participants. Using data from 33 real-world surgeries, we demonstrated the system's capability to reconstruct surgical teaching dialogues and detect feedback instances effectively (F1 score of 0.79+/-0.07). Moreover, our hallucination removal step improves feedback detection performance by ~14%. Evaluation on downstream clinically relevant tasks of predicting Behavioral Adjustment of trainees and classifying Technical feedback, showed performances comparable to manual annotations with F1 scores of 0.82+/0.03 and 0.81+/0.03 respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our framework in supporting clinically relevant tasks and improving over manual methods.

Paperid: 4478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16554.pdf

Abstract:
The deployment of autonomous vehicles controlled by machine learning techniques requires extensive testing in diverse real-world environments, robust handling of edge cases and out-of-distribution scenarios, and comprehensive safety validation to ensure that these systems can navigate safely and effectively under unpredictable conditions. Addressing Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) driving scenarios is essential for enhancing safety, as OOD scenarios help validate the reliability of the models within the vehicle's autonomy stack. However, generating OOD scenarios is challenging due to their long-tailed distribution and rarity in urban driving dataset. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in autonomous driving, particularly for their zero-shot generalization and common-sense reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we leverage these LLM strengths to introduce a framework for generating diverse OOD driving scenarios. Our approach uses LLMs to construct a branching tree, where each branch represents a unique OOD scenario. These scenarios are then simulated in the CARLA simulator using an automated framework that aligns scene augmentation with the corresponding textual descriptions. We evaluate our framework through extensive simulations, and assess its performance via a diversity metric that measures the richness of the scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a new "OOD-ness" metric, which quantifies how much the generated scenarios deviate from typical urban driving conditions. Furthermore, we explore the capacity of modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret and safely navigate through the simulated OOD scenarios. Our findings offer valuable insights into the reliability of language models in addressing OOD scenarios within the context of urban driving.

Paperid: 4479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16523.pdf

Abstract:
In the current paradigm of image captioning, deep learning models are trained to generate text from image embeddings of latent features. We challenge the assumption that fine-tuning of large, bespoke models is required to improve model generation accuracy. Here we propose Label Boosted Retrieval Augmented Generation (LaB-RAG), a small-model-based approach to image captioning that leverages image descriptors in the form of categorical labels to boost standard retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with pretrained large language models (LLMs). We study our method in the context of radiology report generation (RRG) over MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert Plus. We argue that simple classification models combined with zero-shot embeddings can effectively transform X-rays into text-space as radiology-specific labels. In combination with standard RAG, we show that these derived text labels can be used with general-domain LLMs to generate radiology reports. Without ever training our generative language model or image embedding models specifically for the task, and without ever directly "showing" the LLM an X-ray, we demonstrate that LaB-RAG achieves better results across natural language and radiology language metrics compared with other retrieval-based RRG methods, while attaining competitive results compared to other fine-tuned vision-language RRG models. We further conduct extensive ablation experiments to better understand the components of LaB-RAG. Our results suggest broader compatibility and synergy with fine-tuned methods to further enhance RRG performance.

Paperid: 4480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12254.pdf

Abstract:
Intent classification is a text understanding task that identifies user needs from input text queries. While intent classification has been extensively studied in various domains, it has not received much attention in the music domain. In this paper, we investigate intent classification models for music discovery conversation, focusing on pre-trained language models. Rather than only predicting functional needs: intent classification, we also include a task for classifying musical needs: musical attribute classification. Additionally, we propose a method of concatenating previous chat history with just single-turn user queries in the input text, allowing the model to understand the overall conversation context better. Our proposed model significantly improves the F1 score for both user intent and musical attribute classification, and surpasses the zero-shot and few-shot performance of the pretrained Llama 3 model.

Paperid: 4481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09151.pdf

Abstract:
The generalization and performance of stereo matching networks are limited due to the domain gap of the existing synthetic datasets and the sparseness of GT labels in the real datasets. In contrast, monocular depth estimation has achieved significant advancements, benefiting from large-scale depth datasets and self-supervised strategies. To bridge the performance gap between monocular depth estimation and stereo matching, we propose leveraging monocular knowledge transfer to enhance stereo matching, namely Mono2Stereo. We introduce knowledge transfer with a two-stage training process, comprising synthetic data pre-training and real-world data fine-tuning. In the pre-training stage, we design a data generation pipeline that synthesizes stereo training data from monocular images. This pipeline utilizes monocular depth for warping and novel view synthesis and employs our proposed Edge-Aware (EA) inpainting module to fill in missing contents in the generated images. In the fine-tuning stage, we introduce a Sparse-to-Dense Knowledge Distillation (S2DKD) strategy encouraging the distributions of predictions to align with dense monocular depths. This strategy mitigates issues with edge blurring in sparse real-world labels and enhances overall consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pre-trained model exhibits strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. Furthermore, domain-specific fine-tuning using our pre-trained model and S2DKD strategy significantly increments in-domain performance. The code will be made available soon.

Paperid: 4482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03819.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of 2D foundation models has sparked research into adapting them for open-world 3D instance segmentation. Recent methods introduce a paradigm that leverages superpoints as geometric primitives and incorporates 2D multi-view masks from Segment Anything model (SAM) as merging guidance, achieving outstanding zero-shot instance segmentation results. However, the limited use of 3D priors restricts the segmentation performance. Previous methods calculate the 3D superpoints solely based on estimated normal from spatial coordinates, resulting in under-segmentation for instances with similar geometry. Besides, the heavy reliance on SAM and hand-crafted algorithms in 2D space suffers from over-segmentation due to SAM's inherent part-level segmentation tendency. To address these issues, we propose SA3DIP, a novel method for Segmenting Any 3D Instances via exploiting potential 3D Priors. Specifically, on one hand, we generate complementary 3D primitives based on both geometric and textural priors, which reduces the initial errors that accumulate in subsequent procedures. On the other hand, we introduce supplemental constraints from the 3D space by using a 3D detector to guide a further merging process. Furthermore, we notice a considerable portion of low-quality ground truth annotations in ScanNetV2 benchmark, which affect the fair evaluations. Thus, we present ScanNetV2-INS with complete ground truth labels and supplement additional instances for 3D class-agnostic instance segmentation. Experimental evaluations on various 2D-3D datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Our code and proposed ScanNetV2-INS dataset are available HERE.

Paperid: 4483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02465.pdf

Abstract:
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is becoming increasingly vital due to the rapid growth of time series data across various sectors. Anomalies in web service data, for example, can signal critical incidents such as system failures or server malfunctions, necessitating timely detection and response. However, most existing TSAD methodologies rely heavily on manual feature engineering or require extensive labeled training data, while also offering limited interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce a pioneering framework called the Time Series Anomaly Multimodal Analyzer (TAMA), which leverages the power of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to enhance both the detection and interpretation of anomalies in time series data. By converting time series into visual formats that LMMs can efficiently process, TAMA leverages few-shot in-context learning capabilities to reduce dependence on extensive labeled datasets. Our methodology is validated through rigorous experimentation on multiple real-world datasets, where TAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in TSAD tasks. Additionally, TAMA provides rich, natural language-based semantic analysis, offering deeper insights into the nature of detected anomalies. Furthermore, we contribute one of the first open-source datasets that includes anomaly detection labels, anomaly type labels, and contextual description, facilitating broader exploration and advancement within this critical field. Ultimately, TAMA not only excels in anomaly detection but also provides a comprehensive approach for understanding the underlying causes of anomalies, pushing TSAD forward through innovative methodologies and insights.

Paperid: 4484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19195.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) performance is highly sensitive to prompt design, yet the impact of class label options (e.g. lexicon or order) in zero-shot classification remains underexplored. This study proposes LOADS (Label set Optimization via Activation Distribution kurtosiS), a post-hoc method for selecting optimal label sets in zero-shot ICL with large language models (LLMs). LOADS is built upon the observations in our empirical analysis, the first to systematically examine how label option design (i.e., lexical choice, order, and elaboration) impacts classification performance. This analysis shows that the lexical choice of the labels in the prompt (such as agree vs. support in stance classification) plays an important role in both model performance and model's sensitivity to the label order. A further investigation demonstrates that optimal label words tend to activate fewer outlier neurons in LLMs' feed-forward networks. LOADS then leverages kurtosis to measure the neuron activation distribution for label selection, requiring only a single forward pass without gradient propagation or labelled data. The LOADS-selected label words consistently demonstrate effectiveness for zero-shot ICL across classification tasks, datasets, models and languages, achieving maximum performance gain from 0.54 to 0.76 compared to the conventional approach of using original dataset label words.

Paperid: 4485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17491.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose navigation in challenging environments remains a significant problem in robotics, with current state-of-the-art approaches facing myriad limitations. Classical approaches struggle with cluttered settings and require extensive tuning, while learning-based methods face difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution environments. This paper introduces X-Mobility, an end-to-end generalizable navigation model that overcomes existing challenges by leveraging three key ideas. First, X-Mobility employs an auto-regressive world modeling architecture with a latent state space to capture world dynamics. Second, a diverse set of multi-head decoders enables the model to learn a rich state representation that correlates strongly with effective navigation skills. Third, by decoupling world modeling from action policy, our architecture can train effectively on a variety of data sources, both with and without expert policies: off-policy data allows the model to learn world dynamics, while on-policy data with supervisory control enables optimal action policy learning. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that X-Mobility not only generalizes effectively but also surpasses current state-of-the-art navigation approaches. Additionally, X-Mobility also achieves zero-shot Sim2Real transferability and shows strong potential for cross-embodiment generalization.

Paperid: 4486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12813.pdf

Abstract:
Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to ground specific segments within an untrimmed video corresponding to the given natural language query. Existing VTG methods largely depend on supervised learning and extensive annotated data, which is labor-intensive and prone to human biases. To address these challenges, we present ChatVTG, a novel approach that utilizes Video Dialogue Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot video temporal grounding. Our ChatVTG leverages Video Dialogue LLMs to generate multi-granularity segment captions and matches these captions with the given query for coarse temporal grounding, circumventing the need for paired annotation data. Furthermore, to obtain more precise temporal grounding results, we employ moment refinement for fine-grained caption proposals. Extensive experiments on three mainstream VTG datasets, including Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions, and TACoS, demonstrate the effectiveness of ChatVTG. Our ChatVTG surpasses the performance of current zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 4487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08474.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are advancing the ability to reason about complex sports scenarios by integrating textual and visual information. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce SPORTU, a benchmark designed to assess MLLMs across multi-level sports reasoning tasks. SPORTU comprises two key components: SPORTU-text, featuring 900 multiple-choice questions with human-annotated explanations for rule comprehension and strategy understanding. This component focuses on testing models' ability to reason about sports solely through question-answering (QA), without requiring visual inputs; SPORTU-video, consisting of 1,701 slow-motion video clips across 7 different sports and 12,048 QA pairs, designed to assess multi-level reasoning, from simple sports recognition to complex tasks like foul detection and rule application. We evaluate four prevalent LLMs mainly utilizing few-shot learning paradigms supplemented by chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on the SPORTU-text part. We evaluate four LLMs using few-shot learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on SPORTU-text. GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy of 71%, but still falls short of human-level performance, highlighting room for improvement in rule comprehension and reasoning. The evaluation for the SPORTU-video part includes 7 proprietary and 6 open-source MLLMs. Experiments show that models fall short on hard tasks that require deep reasoning and rule-based understanding. Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs the best with only 52.6% accuracy on the hard task, showing large room for improvement. We hope that SPORTU will serve as a critical step toward evaluating models' capabilities in sports understanding and reasoning.

Paperid: 4488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08292.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with their weights in a single forward pass. Recently, there has been progress in understanding this complex phenomenon from an expressivity point of view, by demonstrating that Transformers can express such multi-step algorithms. However, our knowledge about the more fundamental aspect of its learnability, beyond single layer models, is very limited. In particular, can training Transformers enable convergence to algorithmic solutions? In this work we resolve this for in-context linear regression with linear looped Transformers -- a multi-layer model with weight sharing that is conjectured to have an inductive bias to learn fix-point iterative algorithms. More specifically, for this setting we show that the global minimizer of the population training loss implements multi-step preconditioned gradient descent, with a preconditioner that adapts to the data distribution. Furthermore, we show a fast convergence for gradient flow on the regression loss, despite the non-convexity of the landscape, by proving a novel gradient dominance condition. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical analysis for multi-layer Transformer in this setting. We further validate our theoretical findings through synthetic experiments.

Paperid: 4489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08172.pdf

Abstract:
Due to the difficulty of acquiring extensive real-world data, robot simulation has become crucial for parallel training and sim-to-real transfer, highlighting the importance of scalable simulated robotic tasks. Foundation models have demonstrated impressive capacities in autonomously generating feasible robotic tasks. However, this new paradigm underscores the challenge of adequately evaluating these autonomously generated tasks. To address this, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework tailored to generative simulations. Our framework segments evaluation into three core aspects: quality, diversity, and generalization. For single-task quality, we evaluate the realism of the generated task and the completeness of the generated trajectories using large language models and vision-language models. In terms of diversity, we measure both task and data diversity through text similarity of task descriptions and world model loss trained on collected task trajectories. For task-level generalization, we assess the zero-shot generalization ability on unseen tasks of a policy trained with multiple generated tasks. Experiments conducted on three representative task generation pipelines demonstrate that the results from our framework are highly consistent with human evaluations, confirming the feasibility and validity of our approach. The findings reveal that while metrics of quality and diversity can be achieved through certain methods, no single approach excels across all metrics, suggesting a need for greater focus on balancing these different metrics. Additionally, our analysis further highlights the common challenge of low generalization capability faced by current works. Our anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/evaltasks.

Paperid: 4490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08092.pdf

Abstract:
Due to the unique characteristics of underwater environments, accurate 3D reconstruction of underwater objects poses a challenging problem in tasks such as underwater exploration and mapping. Traditional methods that rely on multiple sensor data for 3D reconstruction are time-consuming and face challenges in data acquisition in underwater scenarios. We propose UW-SDF, a framework for reconstructing target objects from multi-view underwater images based on neural SDF. We introduce hybrid geometric priors to optimize the reconstruction process, markedly enhancing the quality and efficiency of neural SDF reconstruction. Additionally, to address the challenge of segmentation consistency in multi-view images, we propose a novel few-shot multi-view target segmentation strategy using the general-purpose segmentation model (SAM), enabling rapid automatic segmentation of unseen objects. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the traditional underwater 3D reconstruction method and other neural rendering approaches in the field of underwater 3D reconstruction.

Paperid: 4491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07955.pdf

Abstract:
Precise segmentation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-captured images plays a vital role in tasks such as crop yield estimation and plant health assessment in banana plantations. By identifying and classifying planted areas, crop area can be calculated, which is indispensable for accurate yield predictions. However, segmenting banana plantation scenes requires a substantial amount of annotated data, and manual labeling of these images is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, limiting the development of large-scale datasets. Furthermore, challenges such as changing target sizes, complex ground backgrounds, limited computational resources, and correct identification of crop categories make segmentation even more difficult. To address these issues, we proposed a comprehensive solution. Firstly, we designed an iterative optimization annotation pipeline leveraging SAM2's zero-shot capabilities to generate high-quality segmentation annotations, thereby reducing the cost and time associated with data annotation significantly. Secondly, we developed ALSS-YOLO-Seg, an efficient lightweight segmentation model optimized for UAV imagery. The model's backbone includes an Adaptive Lightweight Channel Splitting and Shuffling (ALSS) module to improve information exchange between channels and optimize feature extraction, aiding accurate crop identification. Additionally, a Multi-Scale Channel Attention (MSCA) module combines multi-scale feature extraction with channel attention to tackle challenges of varying target sizes and complex ground backgrounds.

Paperid: 4492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07877.pdf

Abstract:
Representation learning and unsupervised skill discovery can allow robots to acquire diverse and reusable behaviors without the need for task-specific rewards. In this work, we use unsupervised reinforcement learning to learn a latent representation by maximizing the mutual information between skills and states subject to a distance constraint. Our method improves upon prior constrained skill discovery methods by replacing the latent transition maximization with a norm-matching objective. This not only results in a much a richer state space coverage compared to baseline methods, but allows the robot to learn more stable and easily controllable locomotive behaviors. We successfully deploy the learned policy on a real ANYmal quadruped robot and demonstrate that the robot can accurately reach arbitrary points of the Cartesian state space in a zero-shot manner, using only an intrinsic skill discovery and standard regularization rewards.

Paperid: 4493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07356.pdf

Abstract:
High-level synthesis (HLS) allows hardware designers to create hardware designs with high-level programming languages like C/C++/OpenCL, which greatly improves hardware design productivity. However, existing HLS flows require programmers' hardware design expertise and rely on programmers' manual code transformations and directive annotations to guide compiler optimizations. Optimizing HLS designs requires non-trivial HLS expertise and tedious iterative process in HLS code optimization. Automating HLS code optimizations has become a burning need. Recently, large language models (LLMs) trained on massive code and programming tasks have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in comprehending code, showing the ability to handle domain-specific programming queries directly without labor-intensive fine-tuning. In this work, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented LLM-based approach to effectively optimize high-level synthesis (HLS) programs. Our proposed method leverages few-shot learning, enabling large language models to adopt domain-specific knowledge through natural language prompts. We propose a unique framework, Retrieve Augmented Large Language Model Aided Design (RALAD), designed to enhance LLMs' performance in HLS code optimization tasks. RALAD employs advanced embedding techniques and top-\emph{k} search algorithms to dynamically source relevant knowledge from extensive databases, thereby providing contextually appropriate responses to complex programming queries. Our implementation of RALAD on two specialized domains, utilizing comparatively smaller language models, achieves an impressive 80\% success rate in compilation tasks and outperforms general LLMs by 3.7 -- 19$\times$ in latency improvement.

Paperid: 4494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06550.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have demonstrated that few-shot learning allows LLMs to generate training data for supervised models at a low cost. However, the quality of LLM-generated data may not entirely match that of human-labeled data. This raises a crucial question: how should one balance the trade-off between the higher quality but more expensive human data and the lower quality yet substantially cheaper LLM-generated data? In this paper, we synthesized training data for conversational semantic frame analysis using GPT-4 and examined how to allocate budgets optimally to achieve the best performance. Our experiments, conducted across various budget levels, reveal that optimal cost-efficiency is achieved by combining both human and LLM-generated data across a wide range of budget levels. Notably, as the budget decreases, a higher proportion of LLM-generated data becomes more preferable.

Paperid: 4495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04702.pdf

Abstract:
Electric guitar tone modeling typically focuses on the non-linear transformation from clean to amplifier-rendered audio. Traditional methods rely on one-to-one mappings, incorporating device parameters into neural models to replicate specific amplifiers. However, these methods are limited by the need for specific training data. In this paper, we adapt a model based on the previous work, which leverages a tone embedding encoder and a feature wise linear modulation (FiLM) condition method. In this work, we altered conditioning method using a hypernetwork-based gated convolutional network (GCN) to generate audio that blends clean input with the tone characteristics of reference audio. By extending the training data to cover a wider variety of amplifier tones, our model is able to capture a broader range of tones. Additionally, we developed a real-time plugin to demonstrate the system's practical application, allowing users to experience its performance interactively. Our results indicate that the proposed system achieves superior tone modeling versatility compared to traditional methods.

Paperid: 4496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19771.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel and generalizable zero-shot knowledge transfer framework that distills expert sports navigation strategies from web videos into robotic systems with adversarial constraints and out-of-distribution image trajectories. Our pipeline enables diffusion-based imitation learning by reconstructing the full 3D task space from multiple partial views, warping it into 2D image space, closing the planning loop within this 2D space, and transfer constrained motion of interest back to task space. Additionally, we demonstrate that the learned policy can serve as a local planner in conjunction with position control. We apply this framework in the wheelchair tennis navigation problem to guide the wheelchair into the ball-hitting region. Our pipeline achieves a navigation success rate of 97.67% in reaching real-world recorded tennis ball trajectories with a physical robot wheelchair, and achieve a success rate of 68.49% in a real-world, real-time experiment on a full-sized tennis court.

Paperid: 4497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18219.pdf

Abstract:
As networks continue to expand and become more interconnected, the need for novel malware detection methods becomes more pronounced. Traditional security measures are increasingly inadequate against the sophistication of modern cyber attacks. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has been pivotal in enhancing network security, offering an in-depth analysis of network traffic that surpasses conventional monitoring techniques. DPI not only examines the metadata of network packets, but also dives into the actual content being carried within the packet payloads, providing a comprehensive view of the data flowing through networks. While the integration of advanced deep learning techniques with DPI has introduced modern methodologies into malware detection and network traffic classification, state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches are limited by their reliance on large amounts of annotated data and their inability to generalize to novel, unseen malware threats. To address these limitations, this paper leverages the recent advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL) and few-shot learning (FSL). Our proposed self-supervised approach trains a transformer via SSL to learn the embedding of packet content, including payload, from vast amounts of unlabeled data by masking portions of packets, leading to a learned representation that generalizes to various downstream tasks. Once the representation is extracted from the packets, they are used to train a malware detection algorithm. The representation obtained from the transformer is then used to adapt the malware detector to novel types of attacks using few-shot learning approaches. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves classification accuracies of up to 94.76% on the UNSW-NB15 dataset and 83.25% on the CIC-IoT23 dataset.

Paperid: 4498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18218.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale data is crucial for learning realistic and capable driving policies. However, it can be impractical to rely on scaling datasets with real data alone. The majority of driving data is uninteresting, and deliberately collecting new long-tail scenarios is expensive and unsafe. We propose asymmetric self-play to scale beyond real data with additional challenging, solvable, and realistic synthetic scenarios. Our approach pairs a teacher that learns to generate scenarios it can solve but the student cannot, with a student that learns to solve them. When applied to traffic simulation, we learn realistic policies with significantly fewer collisions in both nominal and long-tail scenarios. Our policies further zero-shot transfer to generate training data for end-to-end autonomy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art adversarial approaches, or using real data alone. For more information, visit https://waabi.ai/selfplay .

Paperid: 4499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17348.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods have shown promise in enabling agents to learn a shared communication protocol from scratch and accomplish challenging team tasks. However, the learned language is usually not interpretable to humans or other agents not co-trained together, limiting its applicability in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel computational pipeline that aligns the communication space between MARL agents with an embedding space of human natural language by grounding agent communications on synthetic data generated by embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive teamwork scenarios. Our results demonstrate that introducing language grounding not only maintains task performance but also accelerates the emergence of communication. Furthermore, the learned communication protocols exhibit zero-shot generalization capabilities in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios with unseen teammates and novel task states. This work presents a significant step toward enabling effective communication and collaboration between artificial agents and humans in real-world teamwork settings.

Paperid: 4500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15687.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have shown promise in various domains, including healthcare. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in the context of mental health tasks using social media data. We explore the zero-shot (ZS) and few-shot (FS) capabilities of various LLMs, including GPT-4, Llama 3, Gemini, and others, on tasks such as binary disorder detection, disorder severity evaluation, and psychiatric knowledge assessment. Our evaluation involved 33 models testing 9 main prompt templates across the tasks. Key findings revealed that models like GPT-4 and Llama 3 exhibited superior performance in binary disorder detection, with accuracies reaching up to 85% on certain datasets. Moreover, prompt engineering played a crucial role in enhancing model performance. Notably, the Mixtral 8x22b model showed an improvement of over 20%, while Gemma 7b experienced a similar boost in performance. In the task of disorder severity evaluation, we observed that FS learning significantly improved the model's accuracy, highlighting the importance of contextual examples in complex assessments. Notably, the Phi-3-mini model exhibited a substantial increase in performance, with balanced accuracy improving by over 6.80% and mean average error dropping by nearly 1.3 when moving from ZS to FS learning. In the psychiatric knowledge task, recent models generally outperformed older, larger counterparts, with the Llama 3.1 405b achieving an accuracy of 91.2%. Despite promising results, our analysis identified several challenges, including variability in performance across datasets and the need for careful prompt engineering. Furthermore, the ethical guards imposed by many LLM providers hamper the ability to accurately evaluate their performance, due to tendency to not respond to potentially sensitive queries.

Paperid: 4501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14602.pdf

Abstract:
The title of a research paper communicates in a succinct style the main theme and, sometimes, the findings of the paper. Coming up with the right title is often an arduous task, and therefore, it would be beneficial to authors if title generation can be automated. In this paper, we fine-tune pre-trained language models to generate titles of papers from their abstracts. Additionally, we use GPT-3.5-turbo in a zero-shot setting to generate paper titles. The performance of the models is measured with ROUGE, METEOR, MoverScore, BERTScore and SciBERTScore metrics. We find that fine-tuned PEGASUS-large outperforms the other models, including fine-tuned LLaMA-3-8B and GPT-3.5-turbo, across most metrics. We also demonstrate that ChatGPT can generate creative titles for papers. Our observations suggest that AI-generated paper titles are generally accurate and appropriate.

Paperid: 4502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14096.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose VLM-Vac, a novel framework designed to enhance the autonomy of smart robot vacuum cleaners. Our approach integrates the zero-shot object detection capabilities of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a Knowledge Distillation (KD) strategy. By leveraging the VLM, the robot can categorize objects into actionable classes -- either to avoid or to suck -- across diverse backgrounds. However, frequently querying the VLM is computationally expensive and impractical for real-world deployment. To address this issue, we implement a KD process that gradually transfers the essential knowledge of the VLM to a smaller, more efficient model. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that this smaller model progressively learns from the VLM and requires significantly fewer queries over time. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of continual learning in dynamic home environments by exploiting a novel experience replay method based on language-guided sampling. Our results show that this approach is not only energy-efficient but also surpasses conventional vision-based clustering methods, particularly in detecting small objects across diverse backgrounds.

Paperid: 4503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11254.pdf

Abstract:
As the complexity and connectivity of networks increase, the need for novel malware detection approaches becomes imperative. Traditional security defenses are becoming less effective against the advanced tactics of today's cyberattacks. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has emerged as a key technology in strengthening network security, offering detailed analysis of network traffic that goes beyond simple metadata analysis. DPI examines not only the packet headers but also the payload content within, offering a thorough insight into the data traversing the network. This study proposes a novel approach that leverages a large language model (LLM) and few-shot learning to accurately recognizes novel, unseen malware types with few labels samples. Our proposed approach uses a pretrained LLM on known malware types to extract the embeddings from packets. The embeddings are then used alongside few labeled samples of an unseen malware type. This technique is designed to acclimate the model to different malware representations, further enabling it to generate robust embeddings for each trained and unseen classes. Following the extraction of embeddings from the LLM, few-shot learning is utilized to enhance performance with minimal labeled data. Our evaluation, which utilized two renowned datasets, focused on identifying malware types within network traffic and Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Our approach shows promising results with an average accuracy of 86.35% and F1-Score of 86.40% on different malware types across the two datasets.

Paperid: 4504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08767.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) is a significant challenge in multi-agent collaboration, aiming to develop agents that can coordinate with unseen partners they have not encountered before. Recent cutting-edge ZSC methods have primarily focused on two-player video games such as OverCooked!2 and Hanabi. In this paper, we extend the scope of ZSC research to the multi-drone cooperative pursuit scenario, exploring how to construct a drone agent capable of coordinating with multiple unseen partners to capture multiple evaders. We propose a novel Hypergraphic Open-ended Learning Algorithm (HOLA-Drone) that continuously adapts the learning objective based on our hypergraphic-form game modeling, aiming to improve cooperative abilities with multiple unknown drone teammates. To empirically verify the effectiveness of HOLA-Drone, we build two different unseen drone teammate pools to evaluate their performance in coordination with various unseen partners. The experimental results demonstrate that HOLA-Drone outperforms the baseline methods in coordination with unseen drone teammates. Furthermore, real-world experiments validate the feasibility of HOLA-Drone in physical systems. Videos can be found on the project homepage~\url{https://sites.google.com/view/hola-drone}.

Paperid: 4505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00727.pdf

Abstract:
Text-attributed graph (TAG) is an important type of graph structured data with text descriptions for each node. Few- and zero-shot node classification on TAGs have many applications in fields such as academia and social networks. However, the two tasks are challenging due to the lack of supervision signals, and existing methods only use the contrastive loss to align graph-based node embedding and language-based text embedding. In this paper, we propose Hound to improve accuracy by introducing more supervision signals, and the core idea is to go beyond the node-text pairs that come with data. Specifically, we design three augmentation techniques, i.e., node perturbation, text matching, and semantics negation to provide more reference nodes for each text and vice versa. Node perturbation adds/drops edges to produce diversified node embeddings that can be matched with a text. Text matching retrieves texts with similar embeddings to match with a node. Semantics negation uses a negative prompt to construct a negative text with the opposite semantics, which is contrasted with the original node and text. We evaluate Hound on 5 datasets and compare with 13 state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that Hound consistently outperforms all baselines, and its accuracy improvements over the best-performing baseline are usually over 5%.

Paperid: 4506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00588.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy gradient (PG) method from reinforcement learning (RL). PG methods are ubiquitous in training RL policies with other policy parameterizations; nevertheless, they had been conjectured to be less efficient for diffusion-based policies. Surprisingly, we show that DPPO achieves the strongest overall performance and efficiency for fine-tuning in common benchmarks compared to other RL methods for diffusion-based policies and also compared to PG fine-tuning of other policy parameterizations. Through experimental investigation, we find that DPPO takes advantage of unique synergies between RL fine-tuning and the diffusion parameterization, leading to structured and on-manifold exploration, stable training, and strong policy robustness. We further demonstrate the strengths of DPPO in a range of realistic settings, including simulated robotic tasks with pixel observations, and via zero-shot deployment of simulation-trained policies on robot hardware in a long-horizon, multi-stage manipulation task. Website with code: diffusion-ppo.github.io

Paperid: 4507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21347.pdf

Abstract:
While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is typically benchmarked by word error rate (WER), real-world applications ultimately hinge on semantic fidelity. This mismatch is particularly problematic for dysarthric speech, where articulatory imprecision and disfluencies can cause severe semantic distortions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent for post-ASR correction: a Judge-Editor over the top-k ASR hypotheses that keeps high-confidence spans, rewrites uncertain segments, and operates in both zero-shot and fine-tuned modes. In parallel, we release SAP-Hypo5, the largest benchmark for dysarthric speech correction, to enable reproducibility and future exploration. Under multi-perspective evaluation, our agent achieves a 14.51% WER reduction alongside substantial semantic gains, including a +7.59 pp improvement in MENLI and +7.66 pp in Slot Micro F1 on challenging samples. Our analysis further reveals that WER is highly sensitive to domain shift, whereas semantic metrics correlate more closely with downstream task performance.

Paperid: 4508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20147.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-tuned Language Models ILMs have become essential components of modern AI systems, demonstrating exceptional versatility across a wide range of natural language and reasoning tasks. Among their most impactful applications is code generation, where ILMs--commonly referred to as Code Language Models CLMs--have demonstrated remarkable capability. This strength stems from their defining feature: the use of explicit task instructions during fine-tuning, which enables them to bridge natural language and code by translating human intent into executable code. While much of their progress has been driven by advances in scaling laws and training methodologies, one critical aspect remains underexplored--the impact of system prompts on the performance of both general-purpose ILMs and specialized CLMs when instantiated to assist users with code generation activities. In this study, we take a first step toward bridging this gap by systematically evaluating how system prompts of varying instructional detail, along with model scale, prompting strategy, and programming language, affect ILMs and CLMs in code generation tasks. Our evaluation framework, spanning 120 model configurations, reveals that (1) the influence of system prompts increases with model scale; (2) few-shot prompting reduces this effect compared to zero-shot; and (3) programming language matters, with Java showing greater sensitivity to system prompt variations than Python.

Paperid: 4509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19247.pdf

Abstract:
While visual-language models have profoundly linked features between texts and images, the incorporation of 3D modality data, such as point clouds and 3D Gaussians, further enables pretraining for 3D-related tasks, e.g., cross-modal retrieval, zero-shot classification, and scene recognition. As challenges remain in extracting 3D modal features and bridging the gap between different modalities, we propose TIGaussian, a framework that harnesses 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) characteristics to strengthen cross-modality alignment through multi-branch 3DGS tokenizer and modality-specific 3D feature alignment strategies. Specifically, our multi-branch 3DGS tokenizer decouples the intrinsic properties of 3DGS structures into compact latent representations, enabling more generalizable feature extraction. To further bridge the modality gap, we develop a bidirectional cross-modal alignment strategies: a multi-view feature fusion mechanism that leverages diffusion priors to resolve perspective ambiguity in image-3D alignment, while a text-3D projection module adaptively maps 3D features to text embedding space for better text-3D alignment. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of TIGaussian in multiple tasks.

Paperid: 4510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14584.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately modeling longitudinal brain MRI progression is crucial for understanding neurodegenerative diseases and predicting individualized structural changes. Existing state-of-the-art approaches, such as Brain Latent Progression (BrLP), often use multi-stage training pipelines with auxiliary conditioning modules but suffer from architectural complexity, suboptimal use of conditional clinical covariates, and limited guarantees of anatomical consistency. We propose Anatomically Guided Latent Diffusion Model (AG-LDM), a segmentation-guided framework that enforces anatomically consistent progression while substantially simplifying the training pipeline. AG-LDM conditions latent diffusion by directly fusing baseline anatomy, noisy follow-up states, and clinical covariates at the input level, a strategy that avoids auxiliary control networks by learning a unified, end-to-end model that represents both anatomy and progression. A lightweight 3D tissue segmentation model (WarpSeg) provides explicit anatomical supervision during both autoencoder fine-tuning and diffusion model training, ensuring consistent brain tissue boundaries and morphometric fidelity. Experiments on 31,713 ADNI longitudinal pairs and zero-shot evaluation on OASIS-3 demonstrate that AG-LDM matches or surpasses more complex diffusion models, achieving state-of-the-art image quality and 15-20\% reduction in volumetric errors in generated images. AG-LDM also exhibits markedly stronger utilization of temporal and clinical covariates (up to 31.5x higher sensitivity than BrLP) and generates biologically plausible counterfactual trajectories, accurately capturing hallmarks of Alzheimer's progression such as limbic atrophy and ventricular expansion. These results highlight AG-LDM as an efficient, anatomically grounded framework for reliable brain MRI progression modeling.

Paperid: 4511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12781.pdf

Abstract:
Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) aims to localize the image region corresponding to a natural-language query. Recent neuro-symbolic REC approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to perform compositional reasoning, decomposing queries 4 structured programs and executing them step-by-step. While such approaches achieve interpretable reasoning and strong zero-shot generalization, they assume that intermediate reasoning steps are accurate. However, this assumption causes cascading errors: false detections and invalid relations propagate through the reasoning chain, yielding high-confidence false positives even when no target is present in the image. To address this limitation, we introduce Verification-Integrated Reasoning Operators (VIRO), a neuro-symbolic framework that embeds lightweight operator-level verifiers within reasoning steps. Each operator executes and validates its output, such as object existence or spatial relationship, thereby allowing the system to robustly handle no-target cases when verification conditions are not met. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 61.1% balanced accuracy across target-present and no-target settings, and demonstrates generalization to real-world egocentric data. Furthermore, VIRO shows superior computational efficiency in terms of throughput, high reliability with a program failure rate of less than 0.3%, and scalability through decoupled program generation from execution.

Paperid: 4512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11135.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular property prediction is becoming one of the major applications of graph learning in Web-based services, e.g., online protein structure prediction and drug discovery. A key challenge arises in few-shot scenarios, where only a few labeled molecules are available for predicting unseen properties. Recently, several studies have used in-context learning to capture relationships among molecules and properties, but they face two limitations in: (1) exploiting prior knowledge of functional groups that are causally linked to properties and (2) identifying key substructures directly correlated with properties. We propose CaMol, a context-aware graph causality inference framework, to address these challenges by using a causal inference perspective, assuming that each molecule consists of a latent causal structure that determines a specific property. First, we introduce a context graph that encodes chemical knowledge by linking functional groups, molecules, and properties to guide the discovery of causal substructures. Second, we propose a learnable atom masking strategy to disentangle causal substructures from confounding ones. Third, we introduce a distribution intervener that applies backdoor adjustment by combining causal substructures with chemically grounded confounders, disentangling causal effects from real-world chemical variations. Experiments on diverse molecular datasets showed that CaMol achieved superior accuracy and sample efficiency in few-shot tasks, showing its generalizability to unseen properties. Also, the discovered causal substructures were strongly aligned with chemical knowledge about functional groups, supporting the model interpretability.

Paperid: 4513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05011.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-language models have recently demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities by leveraging natural-language supervision to classify audio events without labeled training data. Yet, their performance is highly sensitive to the wording of text prompts, with small variations leading to large fluctuations in accuracy. Prior work has mitigated this issue through prompt learning or prompt ensembling. However, these strategies either require annotated data or fail to account for the fact that some prompts may negatively impact performance. In this work, we present an entropy-guided prompt weighting approach that aims to find a robust combination of prompt contributions to maximize prediction confidence. To this end, we formulate a tailored objective function that minimizes prediction entropy to yield new prompt weights, utilizing low-entropy as a proxy for high confidence. Our approach can be applied to individual samples or a batch of audio samples, requiring no additional labels and incurring negligible computational overhead. Experiments on five audio classification datasets covering environmental, urban, and vocal sounds, demonstrate consistent gains compared to classical prompt ensembling methods in a zero-shot setting, with accuracy improvements 5-times larger across the whole benchmark.

Paperid: 4514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02147.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language foundation models such as CLIP exhibit impressive zero-shot generalization yet remain vulnerable to spurious correlations across visual and textual modalities. Existing debiasing approaches often address a single modality either visual or textual leading to partial robustness and unstable adaptation under distribution shifts. We propose a bilateral prompt optimization framework (BiPrompt) that simultaneously mitigates non-causal feature reliance in both modalities during test-time adaptation. On the visual side, it employs structured attention-guided erasure to suppress background activations and enforce orthogonal prediction consistency between causal and spurious regions. On the textual side, it introduces balanced prompt normalization, a learnable re-centering mechanism that aligns class embeddings toward an isotropic semantic space. Together, these modules jointly minimize conditional mutual information between spurious cues and predictions, steering the model toward causal, domain invariant reasoning without retraining or domain supervision. Extensive evaluations on real-world and synthetic bias benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both average and worst-group accuracies over prior test-time debiasing methods, establishing a lightweight yet effective path toward trustworthy and causally grounded vision-language adaptation.

Paperid: 4515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02126.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic change detection in remote sensing aims to identify land cover changes between bi-temporal image pairs. Progress in this area has been limited by the scarcity of annotated datasets, as pixel-level annotation is costly and time-consuming. To address this, recent methods leverage synthetic data or generate artificial change pairs, but out-of-domain generalization remains limited. In this work, we introduce a weak temporal supervision strategy that leverages additional temporal observations of existing single-temporal datasets, without requiring any new annotations. Specifically, we extend single-date remote sensing datasets with new observations acquired at different times and train a change detection model by assuming that real bi-temporal pairs mostly contain no change, while pairing images from different locations to generate change examples. To handle the inherent noise in these weak labels, we employ an object-aware change map generation and an iterative refinement process. We validate our approach on extended versions of the FLAIR and IAILD aerial datasets, achieving strong zero-shot and low-data regime performance across different benchmarks. Lastly, we showcase results over large areas in France, highlighting the scalability potential of our method.

Paperid: 4516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01568.pdf

Abstract:
Joint audio-video generation aims to synthesize synchronized multisensory content, yet current unified models struggle with fine-grained acoustic control, particularly for identity-preserving speech. Existing approaches either suffer from temporal misalignment due to cascaded generation or lack the capability to perform zero-shot voice cloning within a joint synthesis framework. In this work, we present MM-Sonate, a multimodal flow-matching framework that unifies controllable audio-video joint generation with zero-shot voice cloning capabilities. Unlike prior works that rely on coarse semantic descriptions, MM-Sonate utilizes a unified instruction-phoneme input to enforce strict linguistic and temporal alignment. To enable zero-shot voice cloning, we introduce a timbre injection mechanism that effectively decouples speaker identity from linguistic content. Furthermore, addressing the limitations of standard classifier-free guidance in multimodal settings, we propose a noise-based negative conditioning strategy that utilizes natural noise priors to significantly enhance acoustic fidelity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MM-Sonate establishes new state-of-the-art performance in joint generation benchmarks, significantly outperforming baselines in lip synchronization and speech intelligibility, while achieving voice cloning fidelity comparable to specialized Text-to-Speech systems.

Paperid: 4517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21201.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires a robot to locate a target object in a previously unseen environment without relying on pre-built maps or task-specific training. However, existing ZSON methods often struggle in realistic and cluttered environments, particularly when the scene contains heavy occlusions, unknown risks, or dynamically moving target objects. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Schrödinger's Navigator}, a navigation framework inspired by Schrödinger's thought experiment on uncertainty. The framework treats unobserved space as a set of plausible future worlds and reasons over them before acting. Conditioned on egocentric visual inputs and three candidate trajectories, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model imagines future observations along each path. This enables the agent to see beyond occlusions and anticipate risks in unseen regions without requiring extra detours or dense global mapping. The imagined 3D observations are fused into the navigation map and used to update a value map. These updates guide the policy toward trajectories that avoid occlusions, reduce exposure to uncertain space, and better track moving targets. Experiments on a Go2 quadruped robot across three challenging scenarios, including severe static occlusions, unknown risks, and dynamically moving targets, show that Schrödinger's Navigator consistently outperforms strong ZSON baselines in self-localization, object localization, and overall Success Rate in occlusion-heavy environments. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of trajectory-conditioned 3D imagination in enabling robust zero-shot object navigation.

Paperid: 4518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19684.pdf

Abstract:
We build the first system to address the problem of reconstructing in-scene object manipulation from a monocular RGB video. It is challenging due to ill-posed scene reconstruction, ambiguous hand-object depth, and the need for physically plausible interactions. Existing methods operate in hand centric coordinates and ignore the scene, hindering metric accuracy and practical use. In our method, we first use data-driven foundation models to initialize the core components, including the object mesh and poses, the scene point cloud, and the hand poses. We then apply a two-stage optimization that recovers a complete hand-object motion from grasping to interaction, which remains consistent with the scene information observed in the input video.

Paperid: 4519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13428.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and timely identification of plant leaf diseases is essential for resilient and sustainable agriculture, yet most deep learning approaches rely on large annotated datasets and computationally intensive models that are unsuitable for data-scarce and resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges we present a few-shot learning approach within a lightweight yet efficient framework that combines domain-adapted MobileNetV2 and MobileNetV3 models as feature extractors, along with a feature fusion technique to generate robust feature representation. For the classification task, the fused features are passed through a Bi-LSTM classifier enhanced with attention mechanisms to capture sequential dependencies and focus on the most relevant features, thereby achieving optimal classification performance even in complex, real-world environments with noisy or cluttered backgrounds. The proposed framework was evaluated across multiple experimental setups, including both laboratory-controlled and field-captured datasets. On tomato leaf diseases from the PlantVillage dataset, it consistently improved performance across 1 to 15 shot scenarios, reaching 98.23+-0.33% at 15 shot, closely approaching the 99.98% SOTA benchmark achieved by a Transductive LSTM with attention, while remaining lightweight and mobile-friendly. Under real-world conditions using field images from the Dhan Shomadhan dataset, it maintained robust performance, reaching 69.28+-1.49% at 15-shot and demonstrating strong resilience to complex backgrounds. Notably, it also outperformed the previous SOTA accuracy of 96.0% on six diseases from PlantVillage, achieving 99.72% with only 15-shot learning. With a compact model size of approximately 40 MB and inference complexity of approximately 1.12 GFLOPs, this work establishes a scalable, mobile-ready foundation for precise plant disease diagnostics in data-scarce regions.

Paperid: 4520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12914.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to adapt their general-purpose knowledge to specific tasks and domains such as cyber threat intelligence (CTI). Fine-tuning is mostly done through proprietary datasets that may contain sensitive information. Owners expect their fine-tuned model to not inadvertently leak this information to potentially adversarial end users. Using CTI as a use case, we demonstrate that data-extraction attacks can recover sensitive information from fine-tuned models on CTI reports, underscoring the need for mitigation. Retraining the full model to eliminate this leakage is computationally expensive and impractical. We propose an alternative approach, which we call privacy alignment, inspired by safety alignment in LLMs. Just like safety alignment teaches the model to abide by safety constraints through a few examples, we enforce privacy alignment through few-shot supervision, integrating a privacy classifier and a privacy redactor, both handled by the same underlying LLM. We evaluate our system, called CTIGuardian, using GPT-4o mini and Mistral-7B Instruct models, benchmarking against Presidio, a named entity recognition (NER) baseline. Results show that CTIGuardian provides a better privacy-utility trade-off than NER based models. While we demonstrate its effectiveness on a CTI use case, the framework is generic enough to be applicable to other sensitive domains.

Paperid: 4521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12842.pdf

Abstract:
We present SAGA, a versatile and adaptive framework for visuomotor control that can generalize across various environments, task objectives, and user specifications. To efficiently learn such capability, our key idea is to disentangle high-level semantic intent from low-level visuomotor control by explicitly grounding task objectives in the observed environment. Using an affordance-based task representation, we express diverse and complex behaviors in a unified, structured form. By leveraging multimodal foundation models, SAGA grounds the proposed task representation to the robot's visual observation as 3D affordance heatmaps, highlighting task-relevant entities while abstracting away spurious appearance variations that would hinder generalization. These grounded affordances enable us to effectively train a conditional policy on multi-task demonstration data for whole-body control. In a unified framework, SAGA can solve tasks specified in different forms, including language instructions, selected points, and example demonstrations, enabling both zero-shot execution and few-shot adaptation. We instantiate SAGA on a quadrupedal manipulator and conduct extensive experiments across eleven real-world tasks. SAGA consistently outperforms end-to-end and modular baselines by substantial margins. Together, these results demonstrate that structured affordance grounding offers a scalable and effective pathway toward generalist mobile manipulation.

Paperid: 4522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10322.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to navigate complex environments by following natural-language instructions. General Scene Adaptation for VLN (GSA-VLN) shifts the focus from zero-shot generalization to continual, environment-specific adaptation, narrowing the gap between static benchmarks and real-world deployment. However, current GSA-VLN frameworks exclude user feedback, relying solely on unsupervised adaptation from repeated environmental exposure. In practice, user feedback offers natural and valuable supervision that can significantly enhance adaptation quality. We introduce a user-feedback-driven adaptation framework that extends GSA-VLN by systematically integrating human interactions into continual learning. Our approach converts user feedback-navigation instructions and corrective signals-into high-quality, environment-aligned training data, enabling efficient and realistic adaptation. A memory-bank warm-start mechanism further reuses previously acquired environmental knowledge, mitigating cold-start degradation and ensuring stable redeployment. Experiments on the GSA-R2R benchmark show that our method consistently surpasses strong baselines such as GR-DUET, improving navigation success and path efficiency. The memory-bank warm start stabilizes early navigation and reduces performance drops after updates. Results under both continual and hybrid adaptation settings confirm the robustness and generality of our framework, demonstrating sustained improvement across diverse deployment conditions.

Paperid: 4523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09679.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on code generation, but the mechanisms by which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical and information-theoretic study of CoT effectiveness in neural code generation, evaluating five paradigms (Zero-Shot, Zero-Shot CoT, Self-Planning, Structured CoT, Reasoning-CoT) across six Python benchmarks, a multilingual benchmark with 12 programming languages, and six models from 7B to 480B parameters, using conditional mutual information $I(Y;C|X)$ as a conceptual lens. Our results show that externally guided CoT consistently outperforms direct generation, with structured methods improving Pass@1 by 5--12\% on average while using substantially fewer tokens than reflective reasoning, and that CoT benefits depend on language type systems and model capacity. We further find that reasoning \emph{quality} is critical: high-quality structured CoT from strong generators yields significantly higher accuracy than lightweight alternatives with the same template, whereas naive Zero-Shot CoT can even degrade performance. These findings provide practical guidance for choosing CoT strategies based on model capacity, language characteristics, and task complexity.

Paperid: 4524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07203.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal pre-training remains constrained by the descriptive bias of image-caption pairs, leading models to favor surface linguistic cues over grounded visual understanding. We introduce MMRPT, a masked multimodal reinforcement pre-training framework that strengthens visual reasoning in MLLMs. We are the first to incorporate reinforcement learning directly into the pre-training of large vision-language models, enabling learning signals that reward visual grounding rather than caption imitation. MMRPT constructs masked multimodal data by estimating sentence-level visual dependency via attention over visual tokens and masking highly vision-dependent segments; the model reconstructs these spans through vision-grounded reasoning guided by a semantic-visual reward. Experiments show consistent zero-shot gains across diverse benchmarks and substantially improved robustness under supervised fine-tuning, demonstrating that reinforcement-driven masked reasoning provides a more reliable and generalizable pre-training objective for multimodal models.

Paperid: 4525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00493.pdf

Abstract:
High-quality 3D scene generation from a single image is crucial for AR/VR and embodied AI applications. Early approaches struggle to generalize due to reliance on specialized models trained on curated small datasets. While recent advancements in large-scale 3D foundation models have significantly enhanced instance-level generation, coherent scene generation remains a challenge, where performance is limited by inaccurate per-object pose estimations and spatial inconsistency. To this end, this paper introduces CC-FMO, a zero-shot, camera-conditioned pipeline for single-image to 3D scene generation that jointly conforms to the object layout in input image and preserves instance fidelity. CC-FMO employs a hybrid instance generator that combines semantics-aware vector-set representation with detail-rich structured latent representation, yielding object geometries that are both semantically plausible and high-quality. Furthermore, CC-FMO enables the application of foundational pose estimation models in the scene generation task via a simple yet effective camera-conditioned scale-solving algorithm, to enforce scene-level coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CC-FMO consistently generates high-fidelity camera-aligned compositional scenes, outperforming all state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 4526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20974.pdf

Abstract:
The scarcity of parallel speech corpora critically hampers speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), often forcing reliance on complex, multi-stage pipelines. This paper introduces RosettaSpeech, a novel and simplified framework for zero-shot S2ST that is trained on monolingual speech-text data augmented by machine translation supervision. While our method leverages the linguistic knowledge inherent in text-based NMT models, it strictly eliminates the need for parallel speech-to-speech pairs. Our model uniquely uses text as an intermediate bridge during training but functions as a direct, end-to-end speech-to-speech model at inference. This streamlined approach achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks. For instance, on the CVSS-C test set, RosettaSpeech outperforms leading systems, achieving an ASR-BLEU score of 25.17 for German-to-English and 29.86 for Spanish-to-English-relative gains of over 27% and 14%, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a single model can deliver strong many-to-one translation performance (FR/ES/DE -> EN). We also provide a foundational analysis of how training data scaling impacts model performance. By prioritizing reliance on abundant parallel text rather than difficult-to-acquire parallel speech, RosettaSpeech offers a scalable path to creating high-quality, speaker-preserving S2ST for a much broader array of languages.

Paperid: 4527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20641.pdf

Abstract:
Long-tailed multi-label visual recognition poses a significant challenge, as images typically contain multiple labels with highly imbalanced class distributions, leading to biased models that favor head classes while underperforming on tail classes. Recent efforts have leveraged pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, alongside long-tailed learning techniques to exploit rich visual-textual priors for improved performance. However, existing methods often derive semantic inter-class relationships directly from imbalanced datasets, resulting in unreliable correlations for tail classes due to data scarcity. Moreover, CLIP's zero-shot paradigm is optimized for single-label image-text matching, making it suboptimal for multi-label tasks. To address these issues, we propose the correlation adaptation prompt network (CAPNET), a novel end-to-end framework that explicitly models label correlations from CLIP's textual encoder. The framework incorporates a graph convolutional network for label-aware propagation and learnable soft prompts for refined embeddings. It utilizes a distribution-balanced Focal loss with class-aware re-weighting for optimized training under imbalance. Moreover, it improves generalization through test-time ensembling and realigns visual-textual modalities using parameter-efficient fine-tuning to avert overfitting on tail classes without compromising head class performance. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on benchmarks including VOC-LT, COCO-LT, and NUS-WIDE demonstrate that CAPNET achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness for real-world long-tailed multi-label visual recognition.

Paperid: 4528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20227.pdf

Abstract:
Existing multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods for visually rich documents (VRD) are often biased towards retrieving salient knowledge(e.g., prominent text and visual elements), while largely neglecting the critical fine-print knowledge(e.g., small text, contextual details). This limitation leads to incomplete retrieval and compromises the generator's ability to produce accurate and comprehensive answers. To bridge this gap, we propose HKRAG, a new holistic RAG framework designed to explicitly capture and integrate both knowledge types. Our framework features two key components: (1) a Hybrid Masking-based Holistic Retriever that employs explicit masking strategies to separately model salient and fine-print knowledge, ensuring a query-relevant holistic information retrieval; and (2) an Uncertainty-guided Agentic Generator that dynamically assesses the uncertainty of initial answers and actively decides how to integrate the two distinct knowledge streams for optimal response generation. Extensive experiments on open-domain visual question answering benchmarks show that HKRAG consistently outperforms existing methods in both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating the critical importance of holistic knowledge retrieval for VRD understanding.

Paperid: 4529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13739.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving robust generalization across individuals remains a major challenge in electroencephalogram based imagined speech decoding due to substantial variability in neural activity patterns. This study examined how training dynamics and lightweight subject specific adaptation influence cross subject performance in a neural decoding framework. A cyclic inter subject training approach, involving shorter per subject training segments and frequent alternation among subjects, led to modest yet consistent improvements in decoding performance across unseen target data. Furthermore, under the subject calibrated leave one subject out scheme, incorporating only 10 % of the target subjects data for calibration achieved an accuracy of 0.781 and an AUC of 0.801, demonstrating the effectiveness of few shot adaptation. These findings suggest that integrating cyclic training with minimal calibration provides a simple and effective strategy for developing scalable, user adaptive brain computer interface systems that balance generalization and personalization.

Paperid: 4530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13478.pdf

Abstract:
Multimedia documents such as slide presentations and posters are designed to be interactive and easy to modify. Yet, they are often distributed in a static raster format, which limits editing and customization. Restoring their editability requires converting these raster images back into structured vector formats. However, existing geometric raster-vectorization methods, which rely on low-level primitives like curves and polygons, fall short at this task. Specifically, when applied to complex documents like slides, they fail to preserve the high-level structure, resulting in a flat collection of shapes where the semantic distinction between image and text elements is lost. To overcome this limitation, we address the problem of semantic document derendering by introducing SliDer, a novel framework that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to derender slide images as compact and editable Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) representations. SliDer detects and extracts attributes from individual image and text elements in a raster input and organizes them into a coherent SVG format. Crucially, the model iteratively refines its predictions during inference in a process analogous to human design, generating SVG code that more faithfully reconstructs the original raster upon rendering. Furthermore, we introduce Slide2SVG, a novel dataset comprising raster-SVG pairs of slide documents curated from real-world scientific presentations, to facilitate future research in this domain. Our results demonstrate that SliDer achieves a reconstruction LPIPS of 0.069 and is favored by human evaluators in 82.9% of cases compared to the strongest zero-shot VLM baseline.

Paperid: 4531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12361.pdf

Abstract:
Hybrid dynamical systems result from the interaction of continuous-variable dynamics with discrete events and encompass various systems such as legged robots, vehicles and aircrafts. Challenges arise when the system's modes are characterized by unobservable (latent) parameters and the events that cause system dynamics to switch between different modes are also unobservable. Model-based control approaches typically do not account for such uncertainty in the hybrid dynamics, while standard model-free RL methods fail to account for abrupt mode switches, leading to poor generalization. To overcome this, we propose SAC-MoE which models the actor of the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework as a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with a learned router that adaptively selects among learned experts. To further improve robustness, we develop a curriculum-based training algorithm to prioritize data collection in challenging settings, allowing better generalization to unseen modes and switching locations. Simulation studies in hybrid autonomous racing and legged locomotion tasks show that SAC-MoE outperforms baselines (up to 6x) in zero-shot generalization to unseen environments. Our curriculum strategy consistently improves performance across all evaluated policies. Qualitative analysis shows that the interpretable MoE router activates different experts for distinct latent modes.

Paperid: 4532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08028.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Transformers (GTs) have shown strong empirical performance, yet current architectures vary widely in their use of attention mechanisms, positional embeddings (PEs), and expressivity. Existing expressivity results are often tied to specific design choices and lack comprehensive empirical validation on large-scale data. This leaves a gap between theory and practice, preventing generalizable insights that exceed particular application domains. Here, we propose the Generalized-Distance Transformer (GDT), a GT architecture using standard attention that incorporates many advancements for GTs from recent years, and develop a fine-grained understanding of the GDT's representation power in terms of attention and PEs. Through extensive experiments, we identify design choices that consistently perform well across various applications, tasks, and model scales, demonstrating strong performance in a few-shot transfer setting without fine-tuning. Our evaluation covers over eight million graphs with roughly 270M tokens across diverse domains, including image-based object detection, molecular property prediction, code summarization, and out-of-distribution algorithmic reasoning. We distill our theoretical and practical findings into several generalizable insights about effective GT design, training, and inference.

Paperid: 4533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07658.pdf

Abstract:
Although recent advancements in learning-based analog circuit design automation have tackled tasks such as topology generation, device sizing, and layout synthesis, efficient performance evaluation remains a major bottleneck. Traditional SPICE simulations are time-consuming, while existing machine learning methods often require topology-specific retraining or manual substructure segmentation for fine-tuning, hindering scalability and adaptability. In this work, we propose ZeroSim, a transformer-based performance modeling framework designed to achieve robust in-distribution generalization across trained topologies under novel parameter configurations and zero-shot generalization to unseen topologies without any fine-tuning. We apply three key enabling strategies: (1) a diverse training corpus of 3.6 million instances covering over 60 amplifier topologies, (2) unified topology embeddings leveraging global-aware tokens and hierarchical attention to robustly generalize to novel circuits, and (3) a topology-conditioned parameter mapping approach that maintains consistent structural representations independent of parameter variations. Our experimental results demonstrate that ZeroSim significantly outperforms baseline models such as multilayer perceptrons, graph neural networks and transformers, delivering accurate zero-shot predictions across different amplifier topologies. Additionally, when integrated into a reinforcement learning-based parameter optimization pipeline, ZeroSim achieves a remarkable speedup (13x) compared to conventional SPICE simulations, underscoring its practical value for a wide range of analog circuit design automation tasks.

Paperid: 4534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07122.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamic Gaussian Splatting approaches have achieved remarkable performance for 4D scene reconstruction. However, these approaches rely on dense-frame video sequences for photorealistic reconstruction. In real-world scenarios, due to equipment constraints, sometimes only sparse frames are accessible. In this paper, we propose Sparse4DGS, the first method for sparse-frame dynamic scene reconstruction. We observe that dynamic reconstruction methods fail in both canonical and deformed spaces under sparse-frame settings, especially in areas with high texture richness. Sparse4DGS tackles this challenge by focusing on texture-rich areas. For the deformation network, we propose Texture-Aware Deformation Regularization, which introduces a texture-based depth alignment loss to regulate Gaussian deformation. For the canonical Gaussian field, we introduce Texture-Aware Canonical Optimization, which incorporates texture-based noise into the gradient descent process of canonical Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that when taking sparse frames as inputs, our method outperforms existing dynamic or few-shot techniques on NeRF-Synthetic, HyperNeRF, NeRF-DS, and our iPhone-4D datasets.

Paperid: 4535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03898.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used to draft and refactor code, but code that works is not necessarily secure. We evaluate secure code generation using the Instruct Prime, which eliminated compliance-required prompts and cue contamination, and evaluate five instruction-tuned code LLMs using a zero-shot baseline and a three-round reflexion prompting approach. Security is measured using the Insecure Code Detector (ICD), and results are reported by measuring Repair, Regression, and NetGain metrics, considering the programming language and CWE family. Our findings show that insecurity remains common at the first round: roughly 25-33% of programs are insecure at a zero-shot baseline (t0 ). Weak cryptography/config-dependent bugs are the hardest to avoid while templated ones like XSS, code injection, and hard-coded secrets are handled more reliably. Python yields the highest secure rates; C and C# are the lowest, with Java, JS, PHP, and C++ in the middle. Reflexion prompting improves security for all models, improving average accuracy from 70.74% at t0 to 79.43% at t3 , with the largest gains in the first round followed by diminishing returns. The trends with Repair, Regression, and NetGain metrics show that applying one to two rounds produces most of the benefits. A replication package is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065846.

Paperid: 4536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01131.pdf

Abstract:
Human-interpretable predictions are essential for deploying AI in medical imaging, yet most interpretable-by-design (IBD) frameworks require concept annotations for training data, which are costly and impractical to obtain in clinical contexts. Recent attempts to bypass annotation, such as zero-shot vision-language models or concept-generation frameworks, struggle to capture domain-specific medical features, leading to poor reliability. In this paper, we propose a novel Prior-guided Concept Predictor (PCP), a weakly supervised framework that enables concept answer prediction without explicit supervision or reliance on language models. PCP leverages class-level concept priors as weak supervision and incorporates a refinement mechanism with KL divergence and entropy regularization to align predictions with clinical reasoning. Experiments on PH2 (dermoscopy) and WBCatt (hematology) show that PCP improves concept-level F1-score by over 33% compared to zero-shot baselines, while delivering competitive classification performance on four medical datasets (PH2, WBCatt, HAM10000, and CXR4) relative to fully supervised concept bottleneck models (CBMs) and V-IP.

Paperid: 4537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00681.pdf

Abstract:
Magnetic Resonance Imaging suffers from substantial data heterogeneity and the absence of standardized contrast labels across scanners, protocols, and institutions, which severely limits large-scale automated analysis. A unified representation of MRI contrast would enable a wide range of downstream utilities, from automatic sequence recognition to harmonization and quality control, without relying on manual annotations. To this end, we introduce MR-CLIP, a metadata-guided framework that learns MRI contrast representations by aligning volumetric images with their DICOM acquisition parameters. The resulting embeddings shows distinct clusters of MRI sequences and outperform supervised 3D baselines under data scarcity in few-shot sequence classification. Moreover, MR-CLIP enables unsupervised data quality control by identifying corrupted or inconsistent metadata through image-metadata embedding distances. By transforming routinely available acquisition metadata into a supervisory signal, MR-CLIP provides a scalable foundation for label-efficient MRI analysis across diverse clinical datasets.

Paperid: 4538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00248.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled the generation of high-quality videos. However, these videos still suffer from unrealistic deformations, semantic violations, and physical inconsistencies that are largely rooted in the absence of 3D physical priors. To address these challenges, we propose an object-aware 4D human motion generation framework grounded in 3D Gaussian representations and motion diffusion priors. With pre-generated 3D humans and objects, our method, Motion Score Distilled Interaction (MSDI), employs the spatial and prompt semantic information in large language models (LLMs) and motion priors through the proposed Motion Diffusion Score Distillation Sampling (MSDS). The combination of MSDS and LLMs enables our spatial-aware motion optimization, which distills score gradients from pre-trained motion diffusion models, to refine human motion while respecting object and semantic constraints. Unlike prior methods requiring joint training on limited interaction datasets, our zero-shot approach avoids retraining and generalizes to out-of-distribution object aware human motions. Experiments demonstrate that our framework produces natural and physically plausible human motions that respect 3D spatial context, offering a scalable solution for realistic 4D generation.

Paperid: 4539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22665.pdf

Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has emerged as a crucial imaging modality due to its all-weather capabilities. While recent advancements in self-supervised learning and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have paved the way for SAR foundation models, these approaches primarily focus on low-level visual features, often overlooking multimodal alignment and zero-shot target recognition within SAR imagery. To address this limitation, we construct SARCLIP-1M, a large-scale vision language dataset comprising over one million text-image pairs aggregated from existing datasets. We further introduce SARCLIP, the first vision language foundation model tailored for the SAR domain. Our SARCLIP model is trained using a contrastive vision language learning approach by domain transferring strategy, enabling it to bridge the gap between SAR imagery and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification tasks demonstrate the superior performance of SARCLIP in feature extraction and interpretation, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art foundation models and advancing the semantic understanding of SAR imagery. The code and datasets will be released soon.

Paperid: 4540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22571.pdf

Abstract:
Object state recognition aims to identify the specific condition of objects, such as their positional states (e.g., open or closed) and functional states (e.g., on or off). While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are capable of performing a variety of multimodal tasks, it remains unclear how precisely they can identify object states. To alleviate this issue, we introduce the STAte and Transition UnderStanding Benchmark (STATUS Bench), the first benchmark for rigorously evaluating the ability of VLMs to understand subtle variations in object states in diverse situations. Specifically, STATUS Bench introduces a novel evaluation scheme that requires VLMs to perform three tasks simultaneously: object state identification (OSI), image retrieval (IR), and state change identification (SCI). These tasks are defined over our fully hand-crafted dataset involving image pairs, their corresponding object state descriptions and state change descriptions. Furthermore, we introduce a large-scale training dataset, namely STATUS Train, which consists of 13 million semi-automatically created descriptions. This dataset serves as the largest resource to facilitate further research in this area. In our experiments, we demonstrate that STATUS Bench enables rigorous consistency evaluation and reveal that current state-of-the-art VLMs still significantly struggle to capture subtle object state distinctions. Surprisingly, under the proposed rigorous evaluation scheme, most open-weight VLMs exhibited chance-level zero-shot performance. After fine-tuning on STATUS Train, Qwen2.5-VL achieved performance comparable to Gemini 2.0 Flash. These findings underscore the necessity of STATUS Bench and Train for advancing object state recognition in VLM research.

Paperid: 4541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19414.pdf

Abstract:
The growing prevalence of speech deepfakes has raised serious concerns, particularly in real-world scenarios such as telephone fraud and identity theft. While many anti-spoofing systems have demonstrated promising performance on lab-generated synthetic speech, they often fail when confronted with physical replay attacks-a common and low-cost form of attack used in practical settings. Our experiments show that models trained on existing datasets exhibit severe performance degradation, with average accuracy dropping to 59.6% when evaluated on replayed audio. To bridge this gap, we present EchoFake, a comprehensive dataset comprising more than 120 hours of audio from over 13,000 speakers, featuring both cutting-edge zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) speech and physical replay recordings collected under varied devices and real-world environmental settings. Additionally, we evaluate three baseline detection models and show that models trained on EchoFake achieve lower average EERs across datasets, indicating better generalization. By introducing more practical challenges relevant to real-world deployment, EchoFake offers a more realistic foundation for advancing spoofing detection methods.

Paperid: 4542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18582.pdf

Abstract:
Digital dehumanization, although a critical issue, remains largely overlooked within the field of computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The prevailing approach in current research concentrating primarily on a single aspect of dehumanization that identifies overtly negative statements as its core marker. This focus, while crucial for understanding harmful online communications, inadequately addresses the broader spectrum of dehumanization. Specifically, it overlooks the subtler forms of dehumanization that, despite not being overtly offensive, still perpetuate harmful biases against marginalized groups in online interactions. These subtler forms can insidiously reinforce negative stereotypes and biases without explicit offensiveness, making them harder to detect yet equally damaging. Recognizing this gap, we use different sampling methods to collect a theory-informed bilingual dataset from Twitter and Reddit. Using crowdworkers and experts to annotate 16,000 instances on a document- and span-level, we show that our dataset covers the different dimensions of dehumanization. This dataset serves as both a training resource for machine learning models and a benchmark for evaluating future dehumanization detection techniques. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we fine-tune ML models on this dataset, achieving performance that surpasses state-of-the-art models in zero and few-shot in-context settings.

Paperid: 4543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18326.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing frequency of natural and human-induced disasters necessitates advanced visual recognition techniques capable of analyzing critical photographic data. With progress in artificial intelligence and resilient computational systems, rapid and accurate disaster classification has become crucial for efficient rescue operations. However, visual recognition in disaster contexts faces significant challenges due to limited and diverse data from the difficulties in collecting and curating comprehensive, high-quality disaster imagery. Few-Shot Learning (FSL) provides a promising approach to data scarcity, yet current FSL research mainly relies on generic benchmark datasets lacking remote-sensing disaster imagery, limiting its practical effectiveness. Moreover, disaster images exhibit high intra-class variation and inter-class similarity, hindering the performance of conventional metric-based FSL methods. To address these issues, this paper introduces the Attention-based Bhattacharyya-Hellinger Feature Aggregation Network (ATTBHFA-Net), which linearly combines the Bhattacharyya coefficient and Hellinger distances to compare and aggregate feature probability distributions for robust prototype formation. The Bhattacharyya coefficient serves as a contrastive margin that enhances inter-class separability, while the Hellinger distance regularizes same-class alignment. This framework parallels contrastive learning but operates over probability distributions rather than embedded feature points. Furthermore, a Bhattacharyya-Hellinger distance-based contrastive loss is proposed as a distributional counterpart to cosine similarity loss, used jointly with categorical cross-entropy to significantly improve FSL performance. Experiments on four FSL benchmarks and two disaster image datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and generalization of ATTBHFA-Net compared to existing approaches.

Paperid: 4544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16809.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) with vast context windows offer new avenues for in-context learning (ICL), where providing many examples ("many-shot" prompting) is often assumed to enhance performance. We investigate this assumption for the complex task of code translation. Through a large-scale empirical study of over 90,000 translations, we systematically evaluate the impact of scaling in-context examples from zero-shot to many-shot configurations of up to 625 examples, with prompts spanning from approximately 100,000 to 800,000 tokens. Our findings reveal a "many-shot paradox": while static similarity metrics may modestly improve with more examples, functional correctness consistently peaks with few-shot prompting (5-25 examples). Providing substantially more examples often degrades this crucial functional performance. This study highlights that for code translation, the quality of a few well-chosen examples outweighs sheer quantity, challenging the universal efficacy of "more is better" for ICL and underscoring the task-dependent nature of optimal prompting strategies. Our results have significant implications for effectively leveraging LLMs in software engineering.

Paperid: 4545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13935.pdf

Abstract:
Small language models (SLMs) enable low-cost, private, on-device inference, but they often fail on problems that require specialized domain knowledge or multi-step reasoning. Existing approaches for improving reasoning either rely on scale (e.g., chain-of-thought prompting), require task-specific training that limits reuse and generality (e.g., distillation), or retrieve unstructured information that still leaves the SLM to determine an appropriate reasoning strategy. We propose instruction retrieval, an inference-time intervention that augments an SLM with structured, reusable reasoning procedures rather than raw passages. We construct an Instruction Corpus by clustering similar training questions and using a teacher model to generate generalizable guides that pair domain background with explicit step-by-step procedures. At inference, the SLM retrieves the instructions most relevant to a given query and executes the associated procedures without any additional fine-tuning. Across three challenging domains: medicine, law, and mathematics, instruction retrieval yields consistent gains for models with at least 3B parameters, improving accuracy by 9.4%, 7.9%, and 5.1%, respectively, with the strongest 14B model surpassing GPT-4o's zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive tasks.

Paperid: 4546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13654.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) represent a new paradigm for time series forecasting, offering zero-shot forecasting capabilities without the need for domain-specific pre-training or fine-tuning. However, as with Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating TSFMs is tricky, as with ever more extensive training sets, it becomes more and more challenging to ensure the integrity of benchmarking data. Our investigation of existing TSFM evaluation highlights multiple challenges, ranging from the representativeness of the benchmark datasets, over the lack of spatiotemporal evaluation, to risks of information leakage due to overlapping and obscure datasets, and the memorization of global patterns caused by external shocks like economic crises or pandemics. Our findings reveal widespread confusion regarding data partitions, risking inflated performance estimates and incorrect transfer of global knowledge to local time series. We argue for the development of robust evaluation methodologies to prevent pitfalls already observed in LLM and classical time series benchmarking, and call upon the research community to design new, principled approaches, such as evaluations on truly out-of-sample future data, to safeguard the integrity of TSFM assessment.

Paperid: 4547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11028.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, the powerful generalization ability exhibited by foundation models has brought forth new solutions for zero-shot anomaly segmentation tasks. However, guiding these foundation models correctly to address downstream tasks remains a challenge. This paper proposes a novel two-stage framework, for zero-shot anomaly segmentation tasks in industrial anomaly detection. This framework excellently leverages the powerful anomaly localization capability of CLIP and the boundary perception ability of SAM.(1) To mitigate SAM's inclination towards object segmentation, we propose the Co-Feature Point Prompt Generation (PPG) module. This module collaboratively utilizes CLIP and SAM to generate positive and negative point prompts, guiding SAM to focus on segmenting anomalous regions rather than the entire object. (2) To further optimize SAM's segmentation results and mitigate rough boundaries and isolated noise, we introduce the Cascaded Prompts for SAM (CPS) module. This module employs hybrid prompts cascaded with a lightweight decoder of SAM, achieving precise segmentation of anomalous regions. Across multiple datasets, consistent experimental validation demonstrates that our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot anomaly segmentation results. Particularly noteworthy is our performance on the Visa dataset, where we outperform the state-of-the-art methods by 10.3\% and 7.7\% in terms of {$F_1$-max} and AP metrics, respectively.

Paperid: 4548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11014.pdf

Abstract:
Priors are vital for planning under partial observability, yet difficult to obtain in practice. We present a sampling-based pipeline that leverages large-scale pretrained generative models to produce probabilistic priors capturing environmental uncertainty and spatio-semantic relationships in a zero-shot manner. Conditioned on partial observations, the pipeline recovers complete RGB-D point cloud samples with occupancy and target semantics, formulated to be directly useful in configuration-space planning. We establish a Matterport3D benchmark of rooms partially visible through doorways, where a robot must navigate to an unobserved target object. Effective priors for this setting must represent both occupancy and target-location uncertainty in unobserved regions. Experiments show that our approach recovers commonsense spatial semantics consistent with ground truth, yielding diverse, clean 3D point clouds usable in motion planning, highlight the promise of generative models as a rich source of priors for robotic planning.

Paperid: 4549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10179.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized software testing, particularly fuzz testing, by automating the generation of diverse and effective test inputs. This advancement holds great promise for improving software reliability. Meanwhile, the introduction of MOJO, a high-performance AI programming language blending Python's usability with the efficiency of C and C++, presents new opportunities to enhance AI model scalability and programmability. However, as a new language, MOJO lacks comprehensive testing frameworks and a sufficient corpus for LLM-based testing, which exacerbates model hallucination. In this case, LLMs will generate syntactically valid but semantically incorrect code, significantly reducing the effectiveness of fuzz testing. To address this challenge, we propose MOJOFuzzer, the first adaptive LLM-based fuzzing framework designed for zero-shot learning environments of emerging programming languages. MOJOFuzzer integrates a mutil-phase framework that systematically eliminates low-quality generated inputs before execution, significantly improving test case validity. Furthermore, MOJOFuzzer dynamically adapts LLM prompts based on runtime feedback for test case mutation, enabling an iterative learning process that continuously enhances fuzzing efficiency and bug detection performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that MOJOFuzzer significantly enhances test validity, API coverage, and bug detection performance, outperforming traditional fuzz testing and state-of-the-art LLM-based fuzzing approaches. Using MOJOFuzzer, we have conducted a first large-scale fuzz testing evaluation of MOJO, uncorvering 13 previous unknown bugs. This study not only advances the field of LLM-driven software testing but also establishes a foundational methodology for leveraging LLMs in the testing of emerging programming languages.

Paperid: 4550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09475.pdf

Abstract:
The audiovisual industry is undergoing a profound transformation as it is integrating AI developments not only to automate routine tasks but also to inspire new forms of art. This paper addresses the problem of producing a virtually unlimited number of novel characters that preserve the artistic style and shared visual traits of a small set of human-designed reference characters, thus broadening creative possibilities in animation, gaming, and related domains. Our solution builds upon DreamBooth, a well-established fine-tuning technique for text-to-image diffusion models, and adapts it to tackle two core challenges: capturing intricate character details beyond textual prompts and the few-shot nature of the training data. To achieve this, we propose a multi-token strategy, using clustering to assign separate tokens to individual characters and their collective style, combined with LoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning. By removing the class-specific regularization set and introducing random tokens and embeddings during generation, our approach allows for unlimited character creation while preserving the learned style. We evaluate our method on five small specialized datasets, comparing it to relevant baselines using both quantitative metrics and a human evaluation study. Our results demonstrate that our approach produces high-quality, diverse characters while preserving the distinctive aesthetic features of the reference characters, with human evaluation further reinforcing its effectiveness and highlighting the potential of our method.

Paperid: 4551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08202.pdf

Abstract:
Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) are likely to become an important part of the transportation system, making effective human-SAV interactions an important area of research. This paper introduces a dataset of 200 human-SAV interactions to further this area of study. We present an open-source human-SAV conversational dataset, comprising both textual data (e.g., 2,136 human-SAV exchanges) and empirical data (e.g., post-interaction survey results on a range of psychological factors). The dataset's utility is demonstrated through two benchmark case studies: First, using random forest modeling and chord diagrams, we identify key predictors of SAV acceptance and perceived service quality, highlighting the critical influence of response sentiment polarity (i.e., perceived positivity). Second, we benchmark the performance of an LLM-based sentiment analysis tool against the traditional lexicon-based TextBlob method. Results indicate that even simple zero-shot LLM prompts more closely align with user-reported sentiment, though limitations remain. This study provides novel insights for designing conversational SAV interfaces and establishes a foundation for further exploration into advanced sentiment modeling, adaptive user interactions, and multimodal conversational systems.

Paperid: 4552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02848.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) has recently advanced significantly, enabling models to synthesize speech from text using short, limited-context prompts. These prompts serve as voice exemplars, allowing the model to mimic speaker identity, prosody, and other traits without extensive speaker-specific data. Although recent approaches incorporating language models, diffusion, and flow matching have proven their effectiveness in zero-shot TTS, they still encounter challenges such as unreliable synthesis caused by token repetition or unexpected content transfer, along with slow inference and substantial computational overhead. Moreover, temporal diversity-crucial for enhancing the naturalness of synthesized speech-remains largely underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose Flamed-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework that emphasizes low computational cost, low latency, and high speech fidelity alongside rich temporal diversity. To achieve this, we reformulate the flow matching training paradigm and incorporate both discrete and continuous representations corresponding to different attributes of speech. Experimental results demonstrate that Flamed-TTS surpasses state-of-the-art models in terms of intelligibility, naturalness, speaker similarity, acoustic characteristics preservation, and dynamic pace. Notably, Flamed-TTS achieves the best WER of 4% compared to the leading zero-shot TTS baselines, while maintaining low latency in inference and high fidelity in generated speech. Code and audio samples are available at our demo page https://flamed-tts.github.io.

Paperid: 4553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26601.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring native-like quality of large language model (LLM) responses across many languages is challenging. To address this, we introduce MENLO, a framework that operationalizes the evaluation of native-like response quality based on audience design-inspired mechanisms. Using MENLO, we create a dataset of 6,423 human-annotated prompt-response preference pairs covering four quality dimensions with high inter-annotator agreement in 47 language varieties. Our evaluation reveals that zero-shot LLM judges benefit significantly from pairwise evaluation and our structured annotation rubrics, yet they still underperform human annotators on our dataset. We demonstrate substantial improvements through fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, reward shaping, and multi-task learning approaches. Additionally, we show that RL-trained judges can serve as generative reward models to enhance LLMs' multilingual proficiency, though discrepancies with human judgment remain. Our findings suggest promising directions for scalable multilingual evaluation and preference alignment. We release our dataset and evaluation framework to support further research in multilingual LLM evaluation.

Paperid: 4554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25805.pdf

Abstract:
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of foundation models for agricultural computer vision tasks remains challenging due to limited training data and complex field conditions. This study introduces a Dynamic Similarity-based Graph Adaptation (DSGA) module to adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) under extreme data constraints for precise foreground and instance segmentation of small dense objects in complex agricultural environments. Through dynamic similarity graph construction with a learnable polynomial decay-initialized weight ranking mechanism and adaptive local feature aggregation, DSGA establishes robust spatial and dynamic similarity representation with only 4.00M trainable parameters, which is 4.26% of the original SAM. Integrating this graph-based feature adaptation with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) creates a complementary optimization framework that effectively captures both local and global dependencies in image embeddings while preserving model stability and parameter efficiency. Experimental results on a challenging chickpea pod dataset demonstrated that DSGA with LoRA achieved superior performance across multiple metrics evaluated under 2, 4, 8 and 10 shots, with progressive performance gains as shot count increased. Quantitative metrics showed a 17.31% improvement in Structure-measure and a 62.36% gain in adaptive F-measure compared to the baseline SAM fine-tuning. Comprehensive ablation studies and visualization analyses through Grad-CAM and t-SNE validated the framework's effectiveness in feature discrimination. The proposed adaptation demonstrated practical utility for automated agricultural monitoring applications, achieving accurate pod-counting with an adjusted R-squared of 0.8987 for images with 10 to 120 pods under challenging field conditions.

Paperid: 4555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25590.pdf

Abstract:
The limited availability of annotated data presents a major challenge for applying deep learning methods to medical image analysis. Few-shot learning methods aim to recognize new classes from only a small number of labeled examples. These methods are typically studied under the standard few-shot learning setting, where all classes in a task are new. However, medical applications such as pathology classification from chest X-rays often require learning new classes while simultaneously leveraging knowledge of previously known ones, a scenario more closely aligned with generalized few-shot classification. Despite its practical relevance, few-shot learning has been scarcely studied in this context. In this work, we present MetaChest, a large-scale dataset of 479,215 chest X-rays collected from four public databases. MetaChest includes a meta-set partition specifically designed for standard few-shot classification, as well as an algorithm for generating multi-label episodes. We conduct extensive experiments evaluating both a standard transfer learning approach and an extension of ProtoNet across a wide range of few-shot multi-label classification tasks. Our results demonstrate that increasing the number of classes per episode and the number of training examples per class improves classification performance. Notably, the transfer learning approach consistently outperforms the ProtoNet extension, despite not being tailored for few-shot learning. We also show that higher-resolution images improve accuracy at the cost of additional computation, while efficient model architectures achieve comparable performance to larger models with significantly reduced resource requirements.

Paperid: 4556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25063.pdf

Abstract:
Survey researchers face two key challenges: the rising costs of probability samples and missing data (e.g., non-response or attrition), which can undermine inference and increase the use of convenience samples. Recent work explores using large language models (LLMs) to simulate respondents via persona-based prompts, often without labeled data. We study a more practical setting where partial survey responses exist: we fine-tune LLMs on available data to impute self-reported vote choice under both random and systematic nonresponse, using the German Longitudinal Election Study. We compare zero-shot prompting and supervised fine-tuning against tabular classifiers (e.g., CatBoost) and test how different convenience samples (e.g., students) used for fine-tuning affect generalization. Our results show that when data are missing completely at random, fine-tuned LLMs match tabular classifiers but outperform zero-shot approaches. When only biased convenience samples are available, fine-tuning small (3B to 8B) open-source LLMs can recover both individual-level predictions and population-level distributions more accurately than zero-shot and often better than tabular methods. This suggests fine-tuned LLMs offer a promising strategy for researchers working with non-probability samples or systematic missingness, and may enable new survey designs requiring only easily accessible subpopulations.

Paperid: 4557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24980.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained diffusion models provide rich multi-scale latent features and are emerging as powerful vision backbones. While recent works such as Marigold~\citep{ke2024repurposing} and Lotus~\citep{he2024lotus} adapt diffusion priors for dense prediction with strong cross-domain generalization, their potential for structured outputs (e.g., human pose estimation) remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SDPose}, a fine-tuning framework built upon Stable Diffusion to fully exploit pre-trained diffusion priors for human pose estimation. First, rather than modifying cross-attention modules or introducing learnable embeddings, we directly predict keypoint heatmaps in the SD U-Net's image latent space to preserve the original generative priors. Second, we map these latent features into keypoint heatmaps through a lightweight convolutional pose head, which avoids disrupting the pre-trained backbone. Finally, to prevent overfitting and enhance out-of-distribution robustness, we incorporate an auxiliary RGB reconstruction branch that preserves domain-transferable generative semantics. To evaluate robustness under domain shift, we further construct \textbf{COCO-OOD}, a style-transferred variant of COCO with preserved annotations. With just one-fifth of the training schedule used by Sapiens on COCO, SDPose attains parity with Sapiens-1B/2B on the COCO validation set and establishes a new state of the art on the cross-domain benchmarks HumanArt and COCO-OOD. Furthermore, we showcase SDPose as a zero-shot pose annotator for downstream controllable generation tasks, including ControlNet-based image synthesis and video generation, where it delivers qualitatively superior pose guidance.

Paperid: 4558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24763.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object navigation in unknown environments presents significant challenges, mainly due to two key limitations: insufficient semantic guidance leads to inefficient exploration, while limited spatial memory resulting from environmental structure causes entrapment in local regions. To address these issues, we propose SSR-ZSON, a spatial-semantic relative zero-shot object navigation method based on the TARE hierarchical exploration framework, integrating a viewpoint generation strategy balancing spatial coverage and semantic density with an LLM-based global guidance mechanism. The performance improvement of the proposed method is due to two key innovations. First, the viewpoint generation strategy prioritizes areas of high semantic density within traversable sub-regions to maximize spatial coverage and minimize invalid exploration. Second, coupled with an LLM-based global guidance mechanism, it assesses semantic associations to direct navigation toward high-value spaces, preventing local entrapment and ensuring efficient exploration. Deployed on hybrid Habitat-Gazebo simulations and physical platforms, SSR-ZSON achieves real-time operation and superior performance. On Matterport3D and Habitat-Matterport3D datasets, it improves the Success Rate(SR) by 18.5\% and 11.2\%, and the Success weighted by Path Length(SPL) by 0.181 and 0.140, respectively, over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 4559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24332.pdf

Abstract:
Advanced deep learning-based approaches have been actively applied to forecast the spatiotemporal physical dynamics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), which acts as a critical procedure in tackling many science and engineering problems. As real-world physical environments like PDE system parameters are always capricious, how to generalize across unseen out-of-distribution (OOD) forecasting scenarios using limited training data is of great importance. To bridge this barrier, existing methods focus on discovering domain-generalizable representations across various PDE dynamics trajectories. However, their zero-shot OOD generalization capability remains deficient, since extra test-time samples for domain-specific adaptation are still required. This is because the fundamental physical invariance in PDE dynamical systems are yet to be investigated or integrated. To this end, we first explicitly define a two-fold PDE invariance principle, which points out that ingredient operators and their composition relationships remain invariant across different domains and PDE system evolution. Next, to capture this two-fold PDE invariance, we propose a physics-guided invariant learning method termed iMOOE, featuring an Invariance-aligned Mixture Of Operator Expert architecture and a frequency-enriched invariant learning objective. Extensive experiments across simulated benchmarks and real-world applications validate iMOOE's superior in-distribution performance and zero-shot generalization capabilities on diverse OOD forecasting scenarios.

Paperid: 4560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22635.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification remains challenging due to the limited availability of labeled examples. Recent approaches have explored generating synthetic training data using text-to-image diffusion models, but often require extensive model fine-tuning or external information sources. We present a novel training-free approach, called DIPSY, that leverages IP-Adapter for image-to-image translation to generate highly discriminative synthetic images using only the available few-shot examples. DIPSY introduces three key innovations: (1) an extended classifier-free guidance scheme that enables independent control over positive and negative image conditioning; (2) a class similarity-based sampling strategy that identifies effective contrastive examples; and (3) a simple yet effective pipeline that requires no model fine-tuning or external captioning and filtering. Experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance, while eliminating the need for generative model adaptation or reliance on external tools for caption generation and image filtering. Our results highlight the effectiveness of leveraging dual image prompting with positive-negative guidance for generating class-discriminative features, particularly for fine-grained classification tasks.

Paperid: 4561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22062.pdf

Abstract:
Existing Large Language Model (LLM) based autoregressive (AR) text-to-speech (TTS) systems, while achieving state-of-the-art quality, still face critical challenges. The foundation of this LLM-based paradigm is the discretization of the continuous speech waveform into a sequence of discrete tokens by neural audio codec. However, single codebook modeling is well suited to text LLMs, but suffers from significant information loss; hierarchical acoustic tokens, typically generated via Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ), often lack explicit semantic structure, placing a heavy learning burden on the model. Furthermore, the autoregressive process is inherently susceptible to error accumulation, which can degrade generation stability. To address these limitations, we propose CaT-TTS, a novel framework for robust and semantically-grounded zero-shot synthesis. First, we introduce S3Codec, a split RVQ codec that injects explicit linguistic features into its primary codebook via semantic distillation from a state-of-the-art ASR model, providing a structured representation that simplifies the learning task. Second, we propose an ``Understand-then-Generate'' dual-Transformer architecture that decouples comprehension from rendering. An initial ``Understanding'' Transformer models the cross-modal relationship between text and the audio's semantic tokens to form a high-level utterance plan. A subsequent ``Generation'' Transformer then executes this plan, autoregressively synthesizing hierarchical acoustic tokens. Finally, to enhance generation stability, we introduce Masked Audio Parallel Inference (MAPI), a nearly parameter-free inference strategy that dynamically guides the decoding process to mitigate local errors.

Paperid: 4562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20497.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in software via APIs like OpenAI, offering powerful AI features without heavy infrastructure. Yet these integrations bring their own form of self-admitted technical debt (SATD). In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of LLM-specific SATD: its origins, prevalence, and mitigation strategies. By analyzing 93,142 Python files across major LLM APIs, we found that 54.49% of SATD instances stem from OpenAI integrations and 12.35% from LangChain use. Prompt design emerged as the primary source of LLM-specific SATD, with 6.61% of debt related to prompt configuration and optimization issues, followed by hyperparameter tuning and LLM-framework integration. We further explored which prompt techniques attract the most debt, revealing that instruction-based prompts (38.60%) and few-shot prompts (18.13%) are particularly vulnerable due to their dependence on instruction clarity and example quality. Finally, we release a comprehensive SATD dataset to support reproducibility and offer practical guidance for managing technical debt in LLM-powered systems.

Paperid: 4563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19676.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a framework that enables neural models to "think while listening" to everyday sounds, thereby enhancing audio classification performance. Motivated by recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models, we address two central questions: (i) how can thinking be incorporated into existing audio classification pipelines to enable reasoning in the category space and improve performance, and (ii) can a new architecture be designed from the ground up to support both thinking and test-time scaling? We demonstrate that in both settings, our models exhibit improved classification accuracy. Leveraging test-time scaling, we observe consistent gains as the number of sampled traces increases. Furthermore, we evaluate two open-source reasoning models, GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-14B, showing that while such models are capable of zero-shot reasoning, a lightweight approach--retraining only the embedding matrix of a frozen, smaller model like GPT-2--can surpass the performance of billion-parameter text-based reasoning models.

Paperid: 4564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18349.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning aims to leverage information across related tasks to improve prediction on unlabeled data for new tasks when only a small number of labeled observations are available ("few-shot" learning). Increased task diversity is often believed to enhance meta-learning by providing richer information across tasks. However, recent work by Kumar et al. (2022) shows that increasing task diversity, quantified through the overall geometric spread of task representations, can in fact degrade meta-learning prediction performance across a range of models and datasets. In this work, we build on this observation by showing that meta-learning performance is affected not only by the overall geometric variability of task parameters, but also by how this variability is allocated relative to an underlying low-dimensional structure. Similar to Pimonova et al. (2025), we decompose task-specific regression effects into a structurally informative component and an orthogonal, non-informative component. We show theoretically and through simulation that meta-learning prediction degrades when a larger fraction of between-task variability lies in orthogonal, non-informative directions, even when the overall geometric variability of tasks is held fixed.

Paperid: 4565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18166.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid development of mobile communication technologies, future mobile networks will offer vast services and resources for commuting, production, daily life, and entertainment. Accurate and efficient forecasting of mobile data (e.g., cell traffic, user behavior, channel quality) helps operators monitor network state changes, orchestrate wireless resources, and schedule infrastructure and users, thereby improving supply efficiency and service quality. However, current forecasting paradigms rely on customized designs with tailored models for exclusive data types. Such approaches increase complexity and deployment costs under large-scale, heterogeneous networks involving base stations, users, and channels. In this paper, we design a foundation model for mobile data forecasting, MobiGPT, with a unified structure capable of forecasting three data types: base station traffic, user app usage, and channel quality. We propose a soft-prompt learning method to help the model understand features of different data types, and introduce a temporal masking mechanism to guide the model through three forecasting tasks: short-term prediction, long-term prediction, and distribution generation, supporting diverse optimization scenarios. Evaluations on real-world datasets with over 100,000 samples show that MobiGPT achieves accurate multi-type forecasting. Compared to existing models, it improves forecasting accuracy by 27.37%, 20.08%, and 7.27%, reflecting strong generalization. Moreover, MobiGPT exhibits superior zero/few-shot performance in unseen scenarios, with over 21.51% improvement, validating its strong transferability as a foundation model.

Paperid: 4566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17796.pdf

Abstract:
The paper presents an overview of the fourth edition of the Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution, organized as part of the CODI-CRAC 2025 workshop. As in the previous editions, participants were challenged to develop systems that identify mentions and cluster them according to identity coreference. A key innovation of this year's task was the introduction of a dedicated Large Language Model (LLM) track, featuring a simplified plaintext format designed to be more suitable for LLMs than the original CoNLL-U representation. The task also expanded its coverage with three new datasets in two additional languages, using version 1.3 of CorefUD - a harmonized multilingual collection of 22 datasets in 17 languages. In total, nine systems participated, including four LLM-based approaches (two fine-tuned and two using few-shot adaptation). While traditional systems still kept the lead, LLMs showed clear potential, suggesting they may soon challenge established approaches in future editions.

Paperid: 4567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17523.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has made significant advances in speech representation learning. Models like wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT have achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as speech recognition, particularly in monolingual settings. However, multilingual SSL models tend to underperform their monolingual counterparts on each individual language, especially in multilingual scenarios with few languages such as the bilingual setting. In this work, we investigate a novel approach to reduce this performance gap by introducing limited visual grounding into bilingual speech SSL models. Our results show that visual grounding benefits both monolingual and bilingual models, with especially pronounced gains for the latter, reducing the multilingual performance gap on zero-shot phonetic discrimination from 31.5% for audio-only models to 8.04% with grounding.

Paperid: 4568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16422.pdf

Abstract:
We probe large language models' ability to learn deep form-meaning mappings as defined by construction grammars. We introduce the ConTest-NLI benchmark of 80k sentences covering eight English constructions from highly lexicalized to highly schematic. Our pipeline generates diverse synthetic NLI triples via templating and the application of a model-in-the-loop filter. This provides aspects of human validation to ensure challenge and label reliability. Zero-shot tests on leading LLMs reveal a 24% drop in accuracy between naturalistic (88%) and adversarial data (64%), with schematic patterns proving hardest. Fine-tuning on a subset of ConTest-NLI yields up to 9% improvement, yet our results highlight persistent abstraction gaps in current LLMs and offer a scalable framework for evaluating construction-informed learning.

Paperid: 4569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15886.pdf

Abstract:
Point cloud segmentation is central to autonomous driving and 3D scene understanding. While voxel- and point-based methods dominate recent research due to their compatibility with deep architectures and ability to capture fine-grained geometry, they often incur high computational cost, irregular memory access, and limited real-time efficiency. In contrast, range-view methods, though relatively underexplored - can leverage mature 2D semantic segmentation techniques for fast and accurate predictions. Motivated by the rapid progress in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) for captioning, zero-shot recognition, and multimodal tasks, we investigate whether SAM2, the current state-of-the-art VFM for segmentation tasks, can serve as a strong backbone for LiDAR point cloud segmentation in the range view. We present , to our knowledge, the first range-view framework that adapts SAM2 to 3D segmentation, coupling efficient 2D feature extraction with standard projection/back-projection to operate on point clouds. To optimize SAM2 for range-view representations, we implement several architectural modifications to the encoder: (1) a novel module that emphasizes horizontal spatial dependencies inherent in LiDAR range images, (2) a customized configuration of tailored to the geometric properties of spherical projections, and (3) an adapted mechanism in the encoder backbone specifically designed to capture the unique spatial patterns and discontinuities present in range-view pseudo-images. Our approach achieves competitive performance on SemanticKITTI while benefiting from the speed, scalability, and deployment simplicity of 2D-centric pipelines. This work highlights the viability of VFMs as general-purpose backbones for 3D perception and opens a path toward unified, foundation-model-driven LiDAR segmentation. Results lets us conclude that range-view segmentation methods using VFMs leads to promising results.

Paperid: 4570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15516.pdf

Abstract:
Personalizing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for dysarthric speech is crucial but challenging due to training and storing of individual user adapters. We propose a hybrid meta-training method for a single model, excelling in zero-shot and few-shot on-the-fly personalization via in-context learning (ICL). Measuring Word Error Rate (WER) on state-of-the-art subsets, the model achieves 13.9% WER on Euphonia which surpasses speaker-independent baselines (17.5% WER) and rivals user-specific personalized models. On SAP Test 1, its 5.3% WER significantly bests the 8% from even personalized adapters. We also demonstrate the importance of example curation, where an oracle text-similarity method shows 5 curated examples can achieve performance similar to 19 randomly selected ones, highlighting a key area for future efficiency gains. Finally, we conduct data ablations to measure the data efficiency of this approach. This work presents a practical, scalable, and personalized solution.

Paperid: 4571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13775.pdf

Abstract:
This paper discusses our exploration of different data-efficient and parameter-efficient approaches to Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). In particular, we investigate various soft-prompting strategies, including prefix-tuning, prompt-tuning, P-tuning, and P-tuning V2, as well as LoRA reparameterizations. For the data-efficient strategy, we analyze hard prompting with zero-shot and few-shot inferences to analyze the dialect identification capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For the parameter-efficient PEFT approaches, we conducted our experiments using Arabic-specific encoder models on several major datasets. We also analyzed the n-shot inferences on open-source decoder-only models, a general multilingual model (Phi-3.5), and an Arabic-specific one(SILMA). We observed that the LLMs generally struggle to differentiate the dialectal nuances in the few-shot or zero-shot setups. The soft-prompted encoder variants perform better, while the LoRA-based fine-tuned models perform best, even surpassing full fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12265.pdf

Abstract:
The simplicity Bias (SB) of neural networks, i.e.\ their tendency to represent simple functions, is a key factor in their generalization capabilities. Recent studies show that an excessive SB may harm performance on complex tasks, and the need for this bias varies across tasks. Many of these studies focus on simple models or synthetic tasks. It remains challenging to measure the SB in large models and little is known about the relevance of the SB to various image classification tasks. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the SB in CLIP models and their performance across image classification tasks. First, we theoretically analyze the potential limitation of existing measures of complexity that have been used to characterize small models. To address this, we propose a frequency-aware measure capturing finer-grained SB differences. We validate this measure on CLIP models subjected to two recent SB-modulation methods, demonstrating that it is more informative and consistent than previous measures. Second, we examine the relation between the SB of those models and their performance across a range of image classification tasks, including zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. These experiments reveal a range of behaviors. For example, a stronger SB correlates with a better performance on OOD generalization than on adversarial robustness. These results highlight the benefits of aligning a model's inductive biases with the characteristics of the target task.

Paperid: 4573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11878.pdf

Abstract:
Poetry is an expressive form of art that invites multiple interpretations, as readers often bring their own emotions, experiences, and cultural backgrounds into their understanding of a poem. Recognizing this, we aim to generate images for poems and improve these images in a zero-shot setting, enabling audiences to modify images as per their requirements. To achieve this, we introduce a novel Weighted Prompt Manipulation (WPM) technique, which systematically modifies attention weights and text embeddings within diffusion models. By dynamically adjusting the importance of specific words, WPM enhances or suppresses their influence in the final generated image, leading to semantically richer and more contextually accurate visualizations. Our approach exploits diffusion models and large language models (LLMs) such as GPT in conjunction with existing poetry datasets, ensuring a comprehensive and structured methodology for improved image generation in the literary domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at integrating weighted prompt manipulation for enhancing imagery in poetic language.

Paperid: 4574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11548.pdf

Abstract:
Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy, and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve the performance of GUI grounding.

Paperid: 4575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10074.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training models with limited labeled data, addressing challenges in scenarios where large-scale annotation is impractical. While extensive research has been conducted in the image domain, few-shot learning in audio classification remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we investigate the effect of integrating supervised contrastive loss into prototypical few shot training for audio classification. In detail, we demonstrate that angular loss further improves the performance compared to the standard contrastive loss. Our method leverages SpecAugment followed by a self-attention mechanism to encapsulate diverse information of augmented input versions into one unified embedding. We evaluate our approach on MetaAudio, a benchmark including five datasets with predefined splits, standardized preprocessing, and a comprehensive set of few-shot learning models for comparison. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in a 5-way, 5-shot setting.

Paperid: 4576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737.pdf

Abstract:
We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.

Paperid: 4577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09631.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) aims to synthesize high-quality speech that mimics the voice of an unseen speaker using only a short reference sample, requiring not only speaker adaptation but also accurate modeling of prosodic attributes. Recent approaches based on language models, diffusion, and flow matching have shown promising results in zero-shot TTS, but still suffer from slow inference and repetition artifacts. Discrete codec representations have been widely adopted for speech synthesis, and recent works have begun to explore diffusion models in purely discrete settings, suggesting the potential of discrete generative modeling for speech synthesis. However, existing flow-matching methods typically embed these discrete tokens into a continuous space and apply continuous flow matching, which may not fully leverage the advantages of discrete representations. To address these challenges, we introduce DiFlow-TTS, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model to explore purely Discrete Flow Matching for speech synthesis. DiFlow-TTS explicitly models factorized speech attributes within a compact and unified architecture. It leverages in-context learning by conditioning on textual content, along with prosodic and acoustic attributes extracted from a reference speech, enabling effective attribute cloning in a zero-shot setting. In addition, the model employs a factorized flow prediction mechanism with distinct heads for prosody and acoustic details, allowing it to learn aspect-specific distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that DiFlow-TTS achieves promising performance in several key metrics, including naturalness, prosody, preservation of speaker style, and energy control. It also maintains a compact model size and achieves low-latency inference, generating speech up to 25.8 times faster than the latest existing baselines.

Paperid: 4578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09448.pdf

Abstract:
The approaches that guide Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate human reasoning during response generation have emerged as an effective method for enabling them to solve complex problems in a step-by-step manner, thereby achieving superior performance. However, most existing approaches using few-shot prompts to generate responses heavily depend on the provided examples, limiting the utilization of the model's inherent reasoning capabilities. Moreover, constructing task-specific few-shot prompts is often costly and may lead to inconsistencies across different tasks. In this work, we introduce Template-Oriented Reasoning (TORSO), which elicits the model to utilize internal reasoning abilities to generate proper responses across various tasks without the need for manually crafted few-shot examples. Our experimental results demonstrate that TORSO achieves strong performance on diverse LLMs benchmarks with reasonable rationales.

Paperid: 4579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04772.pdf

Abstract:
Timely and accurate floodwater depth estimation is critical for road accessibility and emergency response. While recent computer vision methods have enabled flood detection, they suffer from both accuracy limitations and poor generalization due to dependence on fixed object detectors and task-specific training. To enable accurate depth estimation that can generalize across diverse flood scenarios, this paper presents FloodVision, a zero-shot framework that combines the semantic reasoning abilities of the foundation vision-language model GPT-4o with a structured domain knowledge graph. The knowledge graph encodes canonical real-world dimensions for common urban objects including vehicles, people, and infrastructure elements to ground the model's reasoning in physical reality. FloodVision dynamically identifies visible reference objects in RGB images, retrieves verified heights from the knowledge graph to mitigate hallucination, estimates submergence ratios, and applies statistical outlier filtering to compute final depth values. Evaluated on 110 crowdsourced images from MyCoast New York, FloodVision achieves a mean absolute error of 8.17 cm, reducing the GPT-4o baseline 10.28 cm by 20.5% and surpassing prior CNN-based methods. The system generalizes well across varying scenes and operates in near real-time, making it suitable for future integration into digital twin platforms and citizen-reporting apps for smart city flood resilience.

Paperid: 4580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04018.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation is a fundamental component of automation. However, traditional perception-planning pipelines often fall short in open-ended tasks due to limited flexibility, while the architecture of a single end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) offers promising capabilities but lacks crucial mechanisms for anticipating and recovering from failure. To address these challenges, we propose FPC-VLA, a dual-model framework that integrates VLA with a supervisor for failure prediction and correction. The supervisor evaluates action viability through vision-language queries and generates corrective strategies when risks arise, trained efficiently without manual labeling. A similarity-guided fusion module further refines actions by leveraging past predictions. Evaluation results on multiple simulation platforms (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and robot embodiments (WidowX, Google Robot, Franka) show that FPC-VLA outperforms state-of-the-art models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. By activating the supervisor only at keyframes, our approach significantly increases task success rates with minimal impact on execution time. Successful real-world deployments on diverse, long-horizon tasks confirm FPC-VLA's strong generalization and practical utility for building more reliable autonomous systems.

Paperid: 4581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03895.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language models excel in zero-shot image recognition but face challenges in few-shot scenarios due to computationally intensive offline fine-tuning using prompt learning, which risks overfitting. To overcome these limitations, we propose Attn-Adapter, a novel online few-shot learning framework that enhances CLIP's adaptability via a dual attention mechanism. Our design incorporates dataset-specific information through two components: the Memory Attn-Adapter, which refines category embeddings using support examples, and the Local-Global Attn-Adapter, which enriches image embeddings by integrating local and global features. This architecture enables dynamic adaptation from a few labeled samples without retraining the base model. Attn-Adapter outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-category and cross-dataset generalization, maintaining efficient inference and scaling across CLIP backbones.

Paperid: 4582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02161.pdf

Abstract:
Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) involves identifying various human attributes from images with applications in intelligent monitoring systems. The scarcity of large-scale annotated datasets hinders the generalization of PAR models, specially in complex scenarios involving occlusions, varying poses, and diverse environments. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown promise for generating diverse and realistic synthetic images, allowing to expand the size and variability of training data. However, the potential of diffusion-based data expansion for generating PAR-like images remains underexplored. Such expansion may enhance the robustness and adaptability of PAR models in real-world scenarios. This paper investigates the effectiveness of diffusion models in generating synthetic pedestrian images tailored to PAR tasks. We identify key parameters of img2img diffusion-based data expansion; including text prompts, image properties, and the latest enhancements in diffusion-based data augmentation, and examine their impact on the quality of generated images for PAR. Furthermore, we employ the best-performing expansion approach to generate synthetic images for training PAR models, by enriching the zero-shot datasets. Experimental results show that prompt alignment and image properties are critical factors in image generation, with optimal selection leading to a 4.5% improvement in PAR recognition performance.

Paperid: 4583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02099.pdf

Abstract:
Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is a challenging task as models are required to generalize across numerous attributes in real-world data. Traditional approaches focus on complex methods, yet recognition performance is often constrained by training dataset limitations, particularly the under-representation of certain attributes. In this paper, we propose a data-centric approach to improve PAR by synthetic data augmentation guided by textual descriptions. First, we define a protocol to identify weakly recognized attributes across multiple datasets. Second, we propose a prompt-driven pipeline that leverages diffusion models to generate synthetic pedestrian images while preserving the consistency of PAR datasets. Finally, we derive a strategy to seamlessly incorporate synthetic samples into training data, which considers prompt-based annotation rules and modifies the loss function. Results on popular PAR datasets demonstrate that our approach not only boosts recognition of underrepresented attributes but also improves overall model performance beyond the targeted attributes. Notably, this approach strengthens zero-shot generalization without requiring architectural changes of the model, presenting an efficient and scalable solution to improve the recognition of attributes of pedestrians in the real world.

Paperid: 4584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21550.pdf

Abstract:
Pairwise comparison is often favored over absolute rating or ordinal classification in subjective or difficult annotation tasks due to its improved reliability. However, exhaustive comparisons require a massive number of annotations (O(n^2)). Recent work has greatly reduced the annotation burden (O(n log n)) by actively sampling pairwise comparisons using a sorting algorithm. We further improve annotation efficiency by (1) roughly pre-ordering items using the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model hierarchically without training, and (2) replacing easy, obvious human comparisons with automated comparisons. The proposed EZ-Sort first produces a CLIP-based zero-shot pre-ordering, then initializes bucket-aware Elo scores, and finally runs an uncertainty-guided human-in-the-loop MergeSort. Validation was conducted using various datasets: face-age estimation (FGNET), historical image chronology (DHCI), and retinal image quality assessment (EyePACS). It showed that EZ-Sort reduced human annotation cost by 90.5% compared to exhaustive pairwise comparisons and by 19.8% compared to prior work (when n = 100), while improving or maintaining inter-rater reliability. These results demonstrate that combining CLIP-based priors with uncertainty-aware sampling yields an efficient and scalable solution for pairwise ranking.

Paperid: 4585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19924.pdf

Abstract:
Network traffic classification using pre-training models has shown promising results, but existing methods struggle to capture packet structural characteristics, flow-level behaviors, hierarchical protocol semantics, and inter-packet contextual relationships. To address these challenges, we propose FlowletFormer, a BERT-based pre-training model specifically designed for network traffic analysis. FlowletFormer introduces a Coherent Behavior-Aware Traffic Representation Model for segmenting traffic into semantically meaningful units, a Protocol Stack Alignment-Based Embedding Layer to capture multilayer protocol semantics, and Field-Specific and Context-Aware Pretraining Tasks to enhance both inter-packet and inter-flow learning. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowletFormer significantly outperforms existing methods in the effectiveness of traffic representation, classification accuracy, and few-shot learning capability. Moreover, by effectively integrating domain-specific network knowledge, FlowletFormer shows better comprehension of the principles of network transmission (e.g., stateful connections of TCP), providing a more robust and trustworthy framework for traffic analysis.

Paperid: 4586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19609.pdf

Abstract:
Financial time-series forecasting is critical for maintaining economic stability, guiding informed policymaking, and promoting sustainable investment practices. However, it remains challenging due to various underlying pattern shifts. These shifts arise primarily from three sources: temporal non-stationarity (distribution changes over time), multi-domain diversity (distinct patterns across financial domains such as stocks, commodities, and futures), and varying temporal resolutions (patterns differing across per-second, hourly, daily, or weekly indicators). While recent deep learning methods attempt to address these complexities, they frequently suffer from overfitting and typically require extensive domain-specific fine-tuning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FinCast, the first foundation model specifically designed for financial time-series forecasting, trained on large-scale financial datasets. Remarkably, FinCast exhibits robust zero-shot performance, effectively capturing diverse patterns without domain-specific fine-tuning. Comprehensive empirical and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that FinCast surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its strong generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 4587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18175.pdf

Abstract:
Efficient equilibrium sampling of molecular conformations remains a core challenge in computational chemistry and statistical inference. Classical approaches such as molecular dynamics or Markov chain Monte Carlo inherently lack amortization; the computational cost of sampling must be paid in-full for each system of interest. The widespread success of generative models has inspired interest into overcoming this limitation through learning sampling algorithms. Despite performing on par with conventional methods when trained on a single system, learned samplers have so far demonstrated limited ability to transfer across systems. We prove that deep learning enables the design of scalable and transferable samplers by introducing Prose, a 280 million parameter all-atom transferable normalizing flow trained on a corpus of peptide molecular dynamics trajectories up to 8 residues in length. Prose draws zero-shot uncorrelated proposal samples for arbitrary peptide systems, achieving the previously intractable transferability across sequence length, whilst retaining the efficient likelihood evaluation of normalizing flows. Through extensive empirical evaluation we demonstrate the efficacy of Prose as a proposal for a variety of sampling algorithms, finding a simple importance sampling-based finetuning procedure to achieve superior performance to established methods such as sequential Monte Carlo on unseen tetrapeptides. We open-source the Prose codebase, model weights, and training dataset, to further stimulate research into amortized sampling methods and finetuning objectives.

Paperid: 4588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17726.pdf

Abstract:
Human Action Anomaly Detection (HAAD) aims to identify anomalous actions given only normal action data during training. Existing methods typically follow a one-model-per-category paradigm, requiring separate training for each action category and a large number of normal samples. These constraints hinder scalability and limit applicability in real-world scenarios, where data is often scarce or novel categories frequently appear. To address these limitations, we propose a unified framework for HAAD that is compatible with few-shot scenarios. Our method constructs a category-agnostic representation space via contrastive learning, enabling AD by comparing test samples with a given small set of normal examples (referred to as the support set). To improve inter-category generalization and intra-category robustness, we introduce a generative motion augmentation strategy harnessing a diffusion-based foundation model for creating diverse and realistic training samples. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to introduce such a strategy specifically tailored to enhance contrastive learning for action AD. Extensive experiments on the HumanAct12 dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art effectiveness of our approach under both seen and unseen category settings, regarding training efficiency and model scalability for few-shot HAAD.

Paperid: 4589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16654.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex environments. Current approaches often adopt a "black-box" paradigm, where a single Large Language Model (LLM) makes end-to-end decisions. However, it is plagued by critical vulnerabilities, including poor spatial reasoning, weak cross-modal grounding, and memory overload in long-horizon tasks. To systematically address these issues, we propose Memory Spatial Navigation(MSNav), a framework that fuses three modules into a synergistic architecture, which transforms fragile inference into a robust, integrated intelligence. MSNav integrates three modules: Memory Module, a dynamic map memory module that tackles memory overload through selective node pruning, enhancing long-range exploration; Spatial Module, a module for spatial reasoning and object relationship inference that improves endpoint recognition; and Decision Module, a module using LLM-based path planning to execute robust actions. Powering Spatial Module, we also introduce an Instruction-Object-Space (I-O-S) dataset and fine-tune the Qwen3-4B model into Qwen-Spatial (Qwen-Sp), which outperforms leading commercial LLMs in object list extraction, achieving higher F1 and NDCG scores on the I-O-S test set. Extensive experiments on the Room-to-Room (R2R) and REVERIE datasets demonstrate MSNav's state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements in Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL).

Paperid: 4590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11272.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) presents a significant challenge as it requires jointly understanding a reference image and a modified textual instruction to find relevant target images. Some existing methods attempt to use a two-stage approach to further refine retrieval results. However, this often requires additional training of a ranking model. Despite the success of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques in reducing training costs for language models, their application in CIR tasks remains limited -- compressing visual information into text or relying on elaborate prompt designs. Besides, existing works only utilize it for zero-shot CIR, as it is challenging to achieve satisfactory results in supervised CIR with a well-trained model. In this work, we proposed a framework that includes the Pyramid Matching Model with Training-Free Refinement (PMTFR) to address these challenges. Through a simple but effective module called Pyramid Patcher, we enhanced the Pyramid Matching Model's understanding of visual information at different granularities. Inspired by representation engineering, we extracted representations from COT data and injected them into the LVLMs. This approach allowed us to obtain refined retrieval scores in the Training-Free Refinement paradigm without relying on explicit textual reasoning, further enhancing performance. Extensive experiments on CIR benchmarks demonstrate that PMTFR surpasses state-of-the-art methods in supervised CIR tasks. The code will be made public.

Paperid: 4591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07771.pdf

Abstract:
In Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL), embedding-based methods enable knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes by learning a visual-semantic mapping from seen-class images to class-level semantic prototypes (e.g., attributes). However, these semantic prototypes are manually defined and may introduce noisy supervision for two main reasons: (i) instance-level mismatch: variations in perspective, occlusion, and annotation bias will cause discrepancies between individual sample and the class-level semantic prototypes; and (ii) class-level imprecision: the manually defined semantic prototypes may not accurately reflect the true semantics of the class. Consequently, the visual-semantic mapping will be misled, reducing the effectiveness of knowledge transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we propose a prototype-guided curriculum learning framework (dubbed as CLZSL), which mitigates instance-level mismatches through a Prototype-Guided Curriculum Learning (PCL) module and addresses class-level imprecision via a Prototype Update (PUP) module. Specifically, the PCL module prioritizes samples with high cosine similarity between their visual mappings and the class-level semantic prototypes, and progressively advances to less-aligned samples, thereby reducing the interference of instance-level mismatches to achieve accurate visual-semantic mapping. Besides, the PUP module dynamically updates the class-level semantic prototypes by leveraging the visual mappings learned from instances, thereby reducing class-level imprecision and further improving the visual-semantic mapping. Experiments were conducted on standard benchmark datasets-AWA2, SUN, and CUB-to verify the effectiveness of our method.

Paperid: 4592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07570.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization but suffer performance degradation under distribution shifts in downstream tasks, particularly in the absence of labeled data. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses this challenge by enabling online optimization of VLMs during inference, eliminating the need for annotated data. Cache-based TTA methods exploit historical knowledge by maintaining a dynamic memory cache of low-entropy or high-confidence samples, promoting efficient adaptation to out-of-distribution data. Nevertheless, these methods face two critical challenges: (1) unreliable confidence metrics under significant distribution shifts, resulting in error accumulation within the cache and degraded adaptation performance; and (2) rigid decision boundaries that fail to accommodate substantial distributional variations, leading to suboptimal predictions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Adaptive Cache Enhancement (ACE) framework, which constructs a robust cache by selectively storing high-confidence or low-entropy image embeddings per class, guided by dynamic, class-specific thresholds initialized from zero-shot statistics and iteratively refined using an exponential moving average and exploration-augmented updates. This approach enables adaptive, class-wise decision boundaries, ensuring robust and accurate predictions across diverse visual distributions. Extensive experiments on 15 diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that ACE achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior robustness and generalization compared to existing TTA methods in challenging out-of-distribution scenarios.

Paperid: 4593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06985.pdf

Abstract:
Fast and reliable validation of novel designs in complex physical systems such as batteries is critical to accelerating technological innovation. However, battery research and development remain bottlenecked by the prohibitively high time and energy costs required to evaluate numerous new design candidates, particularly in battery prototyping and life testing. Despite recent progress in data-driven battery lifetime prediction, existing methods require labeled data of target designs to improve accuracy and cannot make reliable predictions until after prototyping, thus falling far short of the efficiency needed to enable rapid feedback for battery design. Here, we introduce Discovery Learning (DL), a scientific machine-learning paradigm that integrates active learning, physics-guided learning, and zero-shot learning into a human-like reasoning loop, drawing inspiration from learning theories in educational psychology. DL can learn from historical battery designs and actively reduce the need for prototyping, thus enabling rapid lifetime evaluation for unobserved material-design combinations without requiring additional data labeling. To test DL, we present 123 industrial-grade large-format lithium-ion pouch cells, spanning eight material-design combinations and diverse cycling protocols. Trained solely on public datasets of small-capacity cylindrical cells, DL achieves 7.2% test error in predicting the average cycle life under unknown device variability. This results in savings of 98% in time and 95% in energy compared to industrial practices. This work highlights the potential of uncovering insights from historical designs to inform and accelerate the development of next-generation battery technologies. DL represents a key advance toward efficient data-driven modeling and helps realize the promise of machine learning for accelerating scientific discovery and engineering innovation.

Paperid: 4594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04942.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP excel in zero-shot learning but often require resource-intensive training to adapt to new tasks. Prompt learning techniques, such as CoOp and CoCoOp, offer efficient adaptation but tend to overfit to known classes, limiting generalization to unseen categories. We introduce ProMIM, a plug-and-play framework that enhances conditional prompt learning by integrating masked image modeling (MIM) into existing VLM pipelines. ProMIM leverages a simple yet effective masking strategy to generate robust, instance-conditioned prompts, seamlessly augmenting methods like CoOp and CoCoOp without altering their core architectures. By masking only visible image patches and using these representations to guide prompt generation, ProMIM improves feature robustness and mitigates overfitting, all while introducing negligible additional computational cost. Extensive experiments across zero-shot and few-shot classification tasks demonstrate that ProMIM consistently boosts generalization performance when plugged into existing approaches, providing a practical, lightweight solution for real-world vision-language applications.

Paperid: 4595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02053.pdf

Abstract:
In large-scale industrial LLM systems, prompt templates often expand to thousands of tokens as teams iteratively incorporate sections such as task instructions, few-shot examples, and heuristic rules to enhance robustness and coverage. This expansion leads to bloated prompts that are difficult to maintain and incur significant inference latency and serving costs. To address this, we introduce Prompt Compression via Attribution Estimation (ProCut), a flexible, LLM-agnostic, training-free framework that compresses prompts through attribution analysis. ProCut segments prompt templates into semantically meaningful units, quantifies their impact on task performance, and prunes low-utility components. Through extensive experiments on five public benchmark datasets and real-world industrial prompts, we show that ProCut achieves substantial prompt size reductions (78% fewer tokens in production) while maintaining or even slightly improving task performance (up to 62% better than alternative methods). We further introduce an LLM-driven attribution estimator that reduces compression latency by over 50%, and demonstrate that ProCut integrates seamlessly with existing prompt-optimization frameworks to produce concise, high-performing prompts.

Paperid: 4596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00493.pdf

Abstract:
We present SAMSA 2.0, an interactive segmentation framework for hyperspectral medical imaging that introduces spectral angle prompting to guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) using spectral similarity alongside spatial cues. This early fusion of spectral information enables more accurate and robust segmentation across diverse spectral datasets. Without retraining, SAMSA 2.0 achieves up to +3.8% higher Dice scores compared to RGB-only models and up to +3.1% over prior spectral fusion methods. Our approach enhances few-shot and zero-shot performance, demonstrating strong generalization in challenging low-data and noisy scenarios common in clinical imaging.

Paperid: 4597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23673.pdf

Abstract:
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides rich spectral information for medical imaging, yet encounters significant challenges due to data limitations and hardware variations. We introduce SAMSA, a novel interactive segmentation framework that combines an RGB foundation model with spectral analysis. SAMSA efficiently utilizes user clicks to guide both RGB segmentation and spectral similarity computations. The method addresses key limitations in HSI segmentation through a unique spectral feature fusion strategy that operates independently of spectral band count and resolution. Performance evaluation on publicly available datasets has shown 81.0% 1-click and 93.4% 5-click DICE on a neurosurgical and 81.1% 1-click and 89.2% 5-click DICE on an intraoperative porcine hyperspectral dataset. Experimental results demonstrate SAMSA's effectiveness in few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios and using minimal training examples. Our approach enables seamless integration of datasets with different spectral characteristics, providing a flexible framework for hyperspectral medical image analysis.

Paperid: 4598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17467.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the extent to which the Visual Entailment (VE) task serves as a reliable probe of vision-language understanding in multimodal language models, using the LLaMA 3.2 11B Vision model as a test case. Beyond reporting performance metrics, we aim to interpret what these results reveal about the underlying possibilities and limitations of the VE task. We conduct a series of experiments across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, exploring how factors such as prompt design, the number and order of in-context examples and access to visual information might affect VE performance. To further probe the reasoning processes of the model, we used explanation-based evaluations. Results indicate that three-shot inference outperforms the zero-shot baselines. However, additional examples introduce more noise than they provide benefits. Additionally, the order of the labels in the prompt is a critical factor that influences the predictions. In the absence of visual information, the model has a strong tendency to hallucinate and imagine content, raising questions about the model's over-reliance on linguistic priors. Fine-tuning yields strong results, achieving an accuracy of 83.3% on the e-SNLI-VE dataset and outperforming the state-of-the-art OFA-X model. Additionally, the explanation evaluation demonstrates that the fine-tuned model provides semantically meaningful explanations similar to those of humans, with a BERTScore F1-score of 89.2%. We do, however, find comparable BERTScore results in experiments with limited vision, questioning the visual grounding of this task. Overall, our results highlight both the utility and limitations of VE as a diagnostic task for vision-language understanding and point to directions for refining multimodal evaluation methods.

Paperid: 4599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17377.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen combinations of known objects and attributes by leveraging knowledge from previously seen compositions. Traditional approaches primarily focus on disentangling attributes and objects, treating them as independent entities during learning. However, this assumption overlooks the semantic constraints and contextual dependencies inside a composition. For example, certain attributes naturally pair with specific objects (e.g., "striped" applies to "zebra" or "shirts" but not "sky" or "water"), while the same attribute can manifest differently depending on context (e.g., "young" in "young tree" vs. "young dog"). Thus, capturing attribute-object interdependence remains a fundamental yet long-ignored challenge in CZSL. In this paper, we adopt a Conditional Probability Framework (CPF) to explicitly model attribute-object dependencies. We decompose the probability of a composition into two components: the likelihood of an object and the conditional likelihood of its attribute. To enhance object feature learning, we incorporate textual descriptors to highlight semantically relevant image regions. These enhanced object features then guide attribute learning through a cross-attention mechanism, ensuring better contextual alignment. By jointly optimizing object likelihood and conditional attribute likelihood, our method effectively captures compositional dependencies and generalizes well to unseen compositions. Extensive experiments on multiple CZSL benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Code is available at here.

Paperid: 4600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16842.pdf

Abstract:
The intrinsic compliance and high degree of freedom (DoF) of redundant soft manipulators facilitate safe interaction and flexible task execution. However, effective kinematic control remains highly challenging, as it must handle deformations caused by unknown external loads and avoid actuator saturation due to improper null-space regulation - particularly in confined environments. In this paper, we propose a Sensor-Space Imitation Learning Kinematic Control (SS-ILKC) framework to enable robust kinematic control under actuator saturation and restrictive environmental constraints. We employ a dual-learning strategy: a multi-goal sensor-space control framework based on reinforcement learning principle is trained in simulation to develop robust control policies for open spaces, while a generative adversarial imitation learning approach enables effective policy learning from sparse expert demonstrations for confined spaces. To enable zero-shot real-world deployment, a pre-processed sim-to-real transfer mechanism is proposed to mitigate the simulation-to-reality gap and accurately characterize actuator saturation limits. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively control a pneumatically actuated soft manipulator, achieving precise path-following and object manipulation in confined environments under unknown loading conditions.

Paperid: 4601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16656.pdf

Abstract:
This study explores the potential of phonological reasoning within text-based large language models (LLMs). Utilizing the PhonologyBench benchmark, we assess tasks like rhyme word generation, g2p conversion, and syllable counting. Our evaluations across 12 LLMs reveal that while few-shot learning offers inconsistent gains, the introduction of a novel Pedagogically-motivated Participatory Chain-of-Thought (P-CoT) prompt, which is anchored in educational theories like scaffolding and discovery learning, consistently enhances performance. This method leverages structured guidance to activate latent phonological abilities, achieving up to 52% improvement and even surpassing human baselines in certain tasks. Future work could aim to optimize P-CoT prompts for specific models or explore their application across different linguistic domains.

Paperid: 4602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16287.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) aims to classify human actions in videos with only a small number of labeled samples per category. The scarcity of training data has driven recent efforts to incorporate additional modalities, particularly text. However, the subtle variations in human posture, motion dynamics, and the object interactions that occur during different phases, are critical inherent knowledge of actions that cannot be fully exploited by action labels alone. In this work, we propose Language-Guided Action Anatomy (LGA), a novel framework that goes beyond label semantics by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to dissect the essential representational characteristics hidden beneath action labels. Guided by the prior knowledge encoded in LLM, LGA effectively captures rich spatiotemporal cues in few-shot scenarios. Specifically, for text, we prompt an off-the-shelf LLM to anatomize labels into sequences of atomic action descriptions, focusing on the three core elements of action (subject, motion, object). For videos, a Visual Anatomy Module segments actions into atomic video phases to capture the sequential structure of actions. A fine-grained fusion strategy then integrates textual and visual features at the atomic level, resulting in more generalizable prototypes. Finally, we introduce a Multimodal Matching mechanism, comprising both video-video and video-text matching, to ensure robust few-shot classification. Experimental results demonstrate that LGA achieves state-of-the-art performance across multipe FSAR benchmarks.

Paperid: 4603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08037.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) underscore the need for stronger reasoning capabilities to solve complex problems effectively. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been a step forward, it remains insufficient for many domains. A promising alternative is explicit high-level plan generation, but existing approaches largely assume that LLMs can produce effective plans through few-shot prompting alone, without additional training. In this work, we challenge this assumption and introduce CRISP (Complex Reasoning with Interpretable Step-based Plans), a multi-domain dataset of high-level plans for mathematical reasoning and code generation. The plans in CRISP are automatically generated and rigorously validated--both intrinsically, using an LLM as a judge, and extrinsically, by evaluating their impact on downstream task performance. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a small model on CRISP enables it to generate higher-quality plans than much larger models using few-shot prompting, while significantly outperforming Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Furthermore, our out-of-domain evaluation reveals that fine-tuning on one domain improves plan generation in the other, highlighting the generalizability of learned planning capabilities.

Paperid: 4604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05477.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for learning optimal policies in absence of rewards via a factorization of the policy occupancy measure. However, up until now, FB and many similar zero-shot reinforcement learning algorithms have been decoupled from the exploration problem, generally relying on other exploration algorithms for data collection. We argue that FB representations should fundamentally be used for exploration in order to learn more efficiently. With this goal in mind, we design exploration policies that arise naturally from the FB representation that minimize the posterior variance of the FB representation, hence minimizing its epistemic uncertainty. We empirically demonstrate that such principled exploration strategies improve sample complexity of the FB algorithm considerably in comparison to other exploration methods. Code is publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/fbee-url.

Paperid: 4605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03293.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in zero-shot and single step reasoning and decision making problems, but in long horizon sequential planning tasks, their errors compound, often leading to unreliable or inefficient behavior. We introduce LogicGuard, a modular actor-critic architecture in which an LLM actor is guided by a trajectory level LLM critic that communicates through Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Our setup combines the reasoning strengths of language models with the guarantees of formal logic. The actor selects high-level actions from natural language observations, while the critic analyzes full trajectories and proposes new LTL constraints that shield the actor from future unsafe or inefficient behavior. LogicGuard supports both fixed safety rules and adaptive, learned constraints, and is model-agnostic: any LLM-based planner can serve as the actor, with LogicGuard acting as a logic-generating wrapper. We formalize planning as graph traversal under symbolic constraints, allowing LogicGuard to analyze failed or suboptimal trajectories and generate new temporal logic rules that improve future behavior. To demonstrate generality, we evaluate LogicGuard across two distinct settings: short-horizon general tasks and long-horizon specialist tasks. On the Behavior benchmark of 100 household tasks, LogicGuard increases task completion rates by 25% over a baseline InnerMonologue planner. On the Minecraft diamond-mining task, which is long-horizon and requires multiple interdependent subgoals, LogicGuard improves both efficiency and safety compared to SayCan and InnerMonologue. These results show that enabling LLMs to supervise each other through temporal logic yields more reliable, efficient and safe decision-making for both embodied agents.

Paperid: 4606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02938.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across diverse open-domain tasks, yet their application in specialized domains such as civil engineering remains largely unexplored. This paper starts bridging this gap by evaluating and enhancing the reliability and robustness of LLMs in structural analysis of beams. Reliability is assessed through the accuracy of correct outputs under repetitive runs of the same problems, whereas robustness is evaluated via the performance across varying load and boundary conditions. A benchmark dataset, comprising eight beam analysis problems, is created to test the Llama-3.3 70B Instruct model. Results show that, despite a qualitative understanding of structural mechanics, the LLM lacks the quantitative reliability and robustness for engineering applications. To address these limitations, a shift is proposed that reframes the structural analysis as code generation tasks. Accordingly, an LLM-empowered agent is developed that (a) integrates chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting to generate accurate OpeeSeesPy code, and (b) automatically executes the code to produce structural analysis results. Experimental results demonstrate that the agent achieves accuracy exceeding 99.0% on the benchmark dataset, exhibiting reliable and robust performance across diverse conditions. Ablation studies highlight the complete example and function usage examples as the primary contributors to the agent's enhanced performance.

Paperid: 4607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01827.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), traditional Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have undergone significant transformation. Training-free approaches, such as zero-shot and few-shot prompting, are increasingly favored over fine-tuning-based methods, leveraging the strong code understanding and generation capabilities of LLMs to improve repair effectiveness. However, most existing LLM-based APR systems still follow a trial-and-error paradigm, which faces two fundamental challenges: (1) limited patch quality due to myopic, local exploration; and (2) inefficient search processes caused by redundant or unguided patch generation. To address these limitations, we propose TSAPR, a Tree Search-based APR framework designed for diverse types of software defects. Unlike conventional approaches, TSAPR adopts an evaluate-and-improve paradigm that systematically guides the repair process. Specifically, it integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) into patch exploration, enabling global assessment of candidate patches and prioritizing the most promising ones for iterative refinement and generation. By supporting long-trajectory, multi-path exploration, TSAPR significantly enhances search efficiency while maintaining high flexibility and generality. This design makes it applicable to a wide range of defect types and compatible with various base LLMs. We evaluate TSAPR across five widely used bug and vulnerability benchmarks. Experimental results show that TSAPR successfully repairs 201 out of 835 bugs in Defects4J, outperforming all state-of-the-art baselines. TSAPR also fixes 27 of the 79 vulnerabilities in VUL4J and resolves 164 out of 300 issues in SWE-Bench-Lite, demonstrating its broad effectiveness across different defect categories and real-world development scenarios.

Paperid: 4608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00984.pdf

Abstract:
Modern warehouse automation systems rely on fleets of intelligent robots that generate vast amounts of data -- most of which remains unannotated. This paper develops a self-supervised domain adaptation pipeline that leverages real-world, unlabeled data to improve perception models without requiring manual annotations. Our work focuses specifically on estimating the pose and shape of boxes and presents a correct-and-certify pipeline for self-supervised box pose and shape estimation. We extensively evaluate our approach across a range of simulated and real industrial settings, including adaptation to a large-scale real-world dataset of 50,000 images. The self-supervised model significantly outperforms models trained solely in simulation and shows substantial improvements over a zero-shot 3D bounding box estimation baseline.

Paperid: 4609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00574.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale pretraining has transformed modeling of language and other data types, but its potential remains underexplored in healthcare with structured electronic health records (EHRs). We present a novel generative pretraining strategy for sequential EHR data using next-visit event prediction. Our model learns to autoregressively generate various tokenized clinical events for the next visit based on patient history and inherently handles the joint prediction of heterogeneous data types. Additionally, we introduce regularization on predicting repeated events and highlight a key pitfall in EHR-based foundation model evaluations: repeated event tokens can inflate performance metrics when new onsets are not distinguished from subsequent occurrences. Our model is evaluated via zero-shot prediction for forecasting dementia and knee osteoarthritis incidence within 2 and 5 years, and the model performance rivals a fully fine-tuned masked pretrained Transformer baseline, demonstrating that our approach captures complex clinical dependencies without requiring costly task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 4610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23577.pdf

Abstract:
Enhancing the alignment between text and image features in the CLIP model is a critical challenge in zero-shot industrial anomaly detection tasks. Recent studies predominantly utilize specific category prompts during pretraining, which can cause overfitting to the training categories and limit model generalization. To address this, we propose a method that transforms category names through multicategory name stacking to create stacked prompts, forming the basis of our StackCLIP model. Our approach introduces two key components. The Clustering-Driven Stacked Prompts (CSP) module constructs generic prompts by stacking semantically analogous categories, while utilizing multi-object textual feature fusion to amplify discriminative anomalies among similar objects. The Ensemble Feature Alignment (EFA) module trains knowledge-specific linear layers tailored for each stack cluster and adaptively integrates them based on the attributes of test categories. These modules work together to deliver superior training speed, stability, and convergence, significantly boosting anomaly segmentation performance. Additionally, our stacked prompt framework offers robust generalization across classification tasks. To further improve performance, we introduce the Regulating Prompt Learning (RPL) module, which leverages the generalization power of stacked prompts to refine prompt learning, elevating results in anomaly detection classification tasks. Extensive testing on seven industrial anomaly detection datasets demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot anomaly detection and segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 4611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21857.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of digital pathology and advances in self-supervised deep learning have enabled the development of foundational models for various pathology tasks across diverse diseases. While multimodal approaches integrating diverse data sources have emerged, a critical gap remains in the comprehensive integration of whole-slide images (WSIs) with spatial transcriptomics (ST), which is crucial for capturing critical molecular heterogeneity beyond standard hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) staining. We introduce SPADE, a foundation model that integrates histopathology with ST data to guide image representation learning within a unified framework, in effect creating an ST-informed latent space. SPADE leverages a mixture-of-data experts technique, where experts, created via two-stage feature-space clustering, use contrastive learning to learn representations of co-registered WSI patches and gene expression profiles. Pre-trained on the comprehensive HEST-1k dataset, SPADE is evaluated on 14 downstream tasks, demonstrating significantly superior few-shot performance compared to baseline models, highlighting the benefits of integrating morphological and molecular information into one latent space.

Paperid: 4612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20452.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have emerged as the leading approach for image synthesis, demonstrating exceptional photorealism and diversity. However, training diffusion models at high resolutions remains computationally prohibitive, and existing zero-shot generation techniques for synthesizing images beyond training resolutions often produce artifacts, including object duplication and spatial incoherence. In this paper, we introduce HiWave, a training-free, zero-shot approach that substantially enhances visual fidelity and structural coherence in ultra-high-resolution image synthesis using pretrained diffusion models. Our method employs a two-stage pipeline: generating a base image from the pretrained model followed by a patch-wise DDIM inversion step and a novel wavelet-based detail enhancer module. Specifically, we first utilize inversion methods to derive initial noise vectors that preserve global coherence from the base image. Subsequently, during sampling, our wavelet-domain detail enhancer retains low-frequency components from the base image to ensure structural consistency, while selectively guiding high-frequency components to enrich fine details and textures. Extensive evaluations using Stable Diffusion XL demonstrate that HiWave effectively mitigates common visual artifacts seen in prior methods, achieving superior perceptual quality. A user study confirmed HiWave's performance, where it was preferred over the state-of-the-art alternative in more than 80% of comparisons, highlighting its effectiveness for high-quality, ultra-high-resolution image synthesis without requiring retraining or architectural modifications.

Paperid: 4613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18173.pdf

Abstract:
While deep learning-based architectures have been widely used for correctly detecting and classifying plant diseases, they require large-scale datasets to learn generalized features and achieve state-of-the-art performance. This poses a challenge for such models to obtain satisfactory performance in classifying leaf diseases with limited samples. This work proposes a few-shot learning framework, Domain-adapted Expert Network (DExNet), for plant disease classification that compensates for the lack of sufficient training data by combining observations of a number of expert critics. It starts with extracting the feature embeddings as 'observations' from nine 'critics' that are state-of-the-art pre-trained CNN-based architectures. These critics are 'domain adapted' using a publicly available leaf disease dataset having no overlapping classes with the specific downstream task of interest. The observations are then passed to the 'Feature Fusion Block' and finally to a classifier network consisting of Bi-LSTM layers. The proposed pipeline is evaluated on the 10 classes of tomato leaf images from the PlantVillage dataset, achieving promising accuracies of 89.06%, 92.46%, and 94.07%, respectively, for 5-shot, 10-shot, and 15-shot classification. Furthermore, an accuracy of 98.09+-0.7% has been achieved in 80-shot classification, which is only 1.2% less than state-of-the-art, allowing a 94.5% reduction in the training data requirement. The proposed pipeline also outperforms existing works on leaf disease classification with limited data in both laboratory and real-life conditions in single-domain, mixed-domain, and cross-domain scenarios.

Paperid: 4614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17564.pdf

Abstract:
Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire base policy, existing methods struggle with sparse rewards and are designed for deterministic base policies. We propose two improvements to Residual RL that further enhance its sample efficiency and make it suitable for stochastic base policies. First, we leverage uncertainty estimates of the base policy to focus exploration on regions in which the base policy is not confident. Second, we propose a simple modification to off-policy residual learning that allows it to observe base actions and better handle stochastic base policies. We evaluate our method with both Gaussian-based and Diffusion-based stochastic base policies on tasks from Robosuite and D4RL, and compare against state-of-the-art finetuning methods, demo-augmented RL methods, and other residual RL methods. Our algorithm significantly outperforms existing baselines in a variety of simulation benchmark environments. We also deploy our learned polices in the real world to demonstrate their robustness with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Paperid: 4615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17110.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate 6D object pose estimation is a prerequisite for successfully completing robotic prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation tasks. At present, 6D pose estimation for robotic manipulation generally relies on depth sensors based on, e.g., structured light, time-of-flight, and stereo-vision, which can be expensive, produce noisy output (as compared with RGB cameras), and fail to handle transparent objects. On the other hand, state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models (MDEMs) provide only affine-invariant depths up to an unknown scale and shift. Metric MDEMs achieve some successful zero-shot results on public datasets, but fail to generalize. We propose a novel framework, Monocular One-shot Metric-depth Alignment (MOMA), to recover metric depth from a single RGB image, through a one-shot adaptation building on MDEM techniques. MOMA performs scale-rotation-shift alignments during camera calibration, guided by sparse ground-truth depth points, enabling accurate depth estimation without additional data collection or model retraining on the testing setup. MOMA supports fine-tuning the MDEM on transparent objects, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. Real-world experiments on tabletop 2-finger grasping and suction-based bin-picking applications show MOMA achieves high success rates in diverse tasks, confirming its effectiveness.

Paperid: 4616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15566.pdf

Abstract:
Compositionality is one of the fundamental abilities of the human reasoning process, that allows to decompose a complex problem into simpler elements. Such property is crucial also for neural networks, especially when aiming for a more efficient and sustainable AI framework. We propose a compositional approach by ensembling zero-shot a set of expert models, assessing our methodology using a challenging benchmark, designed to test compositionality capabilities. We show that our Expert Composition method is able to achieve a much higher accuracy than baseline algorithms while requiring less computational resources, hence being more efficient.

Paperid: 4617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12299.pdf

Abstract:
The recent advancements in Large Language Models(LLMs) have had a significant impact on a wide range of fields, from general domains to specialized areas. However, these advancements have also significantly increased the potential for malicious users to exploit harmful and jailbreak prompts for malicious attacks. Although there have been many efforts to prevent harmful prompts and jailbreak prompts, protecting LLMs from such malicious attacks remains an important and challenging task. In this paper, we propose QGuard, a simple yet effective safety guard method, that utilizes question prompting to block harmful prompts in a zero-shot manner. Our method can defend LLMs not only from text-based harmful prompts but also from multi-modal harmful prompt attacks. Moreover, by diversifying and modifying guard questions, our approach remains robust against the latest harmful prompts without fine-tuning. Experimental results show that our model performs competitively on both text-only and multi-modal harmful datasets. Additionally, by providing an analysis of question prompting, we enable a white-box analysis of user inputs. We believe our method provides valuable insights for real-world LLM services in mitigating security risks associated with harmful prompts.

Paperid: 4618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10859.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements have successfully harnessed the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking, exploring a variety of prompting strategies. Comparative approaches like pairwise and listwise achieve high effectiveness but are computationally intensive and thus less practical for larger-scale applications. Scoring-based pointwise approaches exhibit superior efficiency by independently and simultaneously generating the relevance scores for each candidate document. However, this independence ignores critical comparative insights between documents, resulting in inconsistent scoring and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we aim to improve the effectiveness of pointwise methods while preserving their efficiency through two key innovations: (1) We propose a novel Global-Consistent Comparative Pointwise Ranking (GCCP) strategy that incorporates global reference comparisons between each candidate and an anchor document to generate contrastive relevance scores. We strategically design the anchor document as a query-focused summary of pseudo-relevant candidates, which serves as an effective reference point by capturing the global context for document comparison. (2) These contrastive relevance scores can be efficiently Post-Aggregated with existing pointwise methods, seamlessly integrating essential Global Context information in a training-free manner (PAGC). Extensive experiments on the TREC DL and BEIR benchmark demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous pointwise methods while maintaining comparable efficiency. Our method also achieves competitive performance against comparative methods that require substantially more computational resources. More analyses further validate the efficacy of our anchor construction strategy.

Paperid: 4619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08023.pdf

Abstract:
This paper aims to retrieve proteins with similar structures and semantics from large-scale protein dataset, facilitating the functional interpretation of protein structures derived by structural determination methods like cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM). Motivated by the recent progress of vision-language models (VLMs), we propose a CLIP-style framework for aligning 3D protein structures with functional annotations using contrastive learning. For model training, we propose a large-scale dataset of approximately 200,000 protein-caption pairs with rich functional descriptors. We evaluate our model in both in-domain and more challenging cross-database retrieval on Protein Data Bank (PDB) and Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) dataset, respectively. In both cases, our approach demonstrates promising zero-shot retrieval performance, highlighting the potential of multimodal foundation models for structure-function understanding in protein biology.

Paperid: 4620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07619.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning has promised to change the landscape of laboratory chemistry, with impressive results in molecular property prediction and reaction retro-synthesis. However, chemical datasets are often inaccessible to the machine learning community as they tend to require cleaning, thorough understanding of the chemistry, or are simply not available. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset for yield prediction, providing the first-ever transient flow dataset for machine learning benchmarking, covering over 1200 process conditions. While previous datasets focus on discrete parameters, our experimental set-up allow us to sample a large number of continuous process conditions, generating new challenges for machine learning models. We focus on solvent selection, a task that is particularly difficult to model theoretically and therefore ripe for machine learning applications. We showcase benchmarking for regression algorithms, transfer-learning approaches, feature engineering, and active learning, with important applications towards solvent replacement and sustainable manufacturing.

Paperid: 4621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06506.pdf

Abstract:
To build fair AI systems we need to understand how social-group biases intrinsic to foundational encoder-based vision-language models (VLMs) manifest in biases in downstream tasks. In this study, we demonstrate that intrinsic biases in VLM representations systematically ``carry over'' or propagate into zero-shot retrieval tasks, revealing how deeply rooted biases shape a model's outputs. We introduce a controlled framework to measure this propagation by correlating (a) intrinsic measures of bias in the representational space with (b) extrinsic measures of bias in zero-shot text-to-image (TTI) and image-to-text (ITT) retrieval. Results show substantial correlations between intrinsic and extrinsic bias, with an average $Ï$ = 0.83 $\pm$ 0.10. This pattern is consistent across 114 analyses, both retrieval directions, six social groups, and three distinct VLMs. Notably, we find that larger/better-performing models exhibit greater bias propagation, a finding that raises concerns given the trend towards increasingly complex AI models. Our framework introduces baseline evaluation tasks to measure the propagation of group and valence signals. Investigations reveal that underrepresented groups experience less robust propagation, further skewing their model-related outcomes.

Paperid: 4622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05896.pdf

Abstract:
The zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unknown open-ended environments coupled with semantically novel target often suffers from the significant decline in performance due to the neglect of high-dimensional implicit scene information and the long-range target searching task. To address this, we proposed an active object navigation framework with Environmental Attributes Map (EAM) and MLLM Hierarchical Reasoning module (MHR) to improve its success rate and efficiency. EAM is constructed by reasoning observed environments with SBERT and predicting unobserved ones with Diffusion, utilizing human space regularities that underlie object-room correlations and area adjacencies. MHR is inspired by EAM to perform frontier exploration decision-making, avoiding the circuitous trajectories in long-range scenarios to improve path efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the EAM module achieves 64.5\% scene mapping accuracy on MP3D dataset, while the navigation task attains SPLs of 28.4\% and 26.3\% on HM3D and MP3D benchmarks respectively - representing absolute improvements of 21.4\% and 46.0\% over baseline methods.

Paperid: 4623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05651.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding relationships between objects is central to visual intelligence, with applications in embodied AI, assistive systems, and scene understanding. Yet, most visual relationship detection (VRD) models rely on a fixed predicate set, limiting their generalization to novel interactions. A key challenge is the inability to visually ground semantically plausible, but unannotated, relationships hypothesized from external knowledge. This work introduces an iterative visual grounding framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as structured relational priors. Inspired by expectation-maximization (EM), our method alternates between generating candidate scene graphs from detected objects using an LLM (expectation) and training a visual model to align these hypotheses with perceptual evidence (maximization). This process bootstraps relational understanding beyond annotated data and enables generalization to unseen predicates. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark for open-world VRD on Visual Genome with 21 held-out predicates and evaluate under three settings: seen, unseen, and mixed. Our model outperforms LLM-only, few-shot, and debiased baselines, achieving mean recall (mR@50) of 15.9, 13.1, and 11.7 on predicate classification on these three sets. These results highlight the promise of grounded LLM priors for scalable open-world visual understanding.

Paperid: 4624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03510.pdf

Abstract:
How can we accelerate large language models(LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy? The slow inference speed of LLMs hinders us to benefit from their remarkable performance in diverse applications. This is mainly because numerous sublayers are stacked together in LLMs. Sublayer pruning compresses and expedites LLMs via removing unnecessary sublayers. However, existing sublayer pruning algorithms are limited in accuracy since they naively select sublayers to prune, overlooking the different characteristics of each sublayer. In this paper, we propose SPRINT (Sublayer PRuning wIth LateNcy and Tunability Information), an accurate sublayer pruning method for LLMs. SPRINT accurately selects a target sublayer to prune by considering 1) the amount of latency reduction after pruning and 2) the tunability of sublayers. SPRINT iteratively prunes redundant sublayers and swiftly tunes the parameters of remaining sublayers. Experiments show that SPRINT achieves the best accuracy-speedup trade-off, exhibiting up to 23.88%p higher accuracy on zero-shot commonsense reasoning benchmarks compared to existing pruning algorithms.

Paperid: 4625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03335.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) in team sports is particularly challenging due to the fast-paced motion and frequent occlusions resulting in motion blur and identity switches, respectively. Predicting player positions in such scenarios is particularly difficult due to the observed highly non-linear motion patterns. Current methods are heavily reliant on object detection and appearance-based tracking, which struggle to perform in complex team sports scenarios, where appearance cues are ambiguous and motion patterns do not necessarily follow a linear pattern. To address these challenges, we introduce SportMamba, an adaptive hybrid MOT technique specifically designed for tracking in dynamic team sports. The technical contribution of SportMamba is twofold. First, we introduce a mamba-attention mechanism that models non-linear motion by implicitly focusing on relevant embedding dependencies. Second, we propose a height-adaptive spatial association metric to reduce ID switches caused by partial occlusions by accounting for scale variations due to depth changes. Additionally, we extend the detection search space with adaptive buffers to improve associations in fast-motion scenarios. Our proposed technique, SportMamba, demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on various metrics in the SportsMOT dataset, which is characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate its generalization capability through zero-shot transfer to VIP-HTD, an ice hockey dataset.

Paperid: 4626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02738.pdf

Abstract:
Compound figures, which are multi-panel composites containing diverse subfigures, are ubiquitous in biomedical literature, yet large-scale subfigure extraction remains largely unaddressed. Prior work on subfigure extraction has been limited in both dataset size and generalizability, leaving a critical open question: How does high-fidelity image-text alignment via large-scale subfigure extraction impact representation learning in vision-language models? We address this gap by introducing a scalable subfigure extraction pipeline based on transformer-based object detection, trained on a synthetic corpus of 500,000 compound figures, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on both ImageCLEF 2016 and synthetic benchmarks. Using this pipeline, we release OPEN-PMC-18M, a large-scale high quality biomedical vision-language dataset comprising 18 million clinically relevant subfigure-caption pairs spanning radiology, microscopy, and visible light photography. We train and evaluate vision-language models on our curated datasets and show improved performance across retrieval, zero-shot classification, and robustness benchmarks, outperforming existing baselines. We release our dataset, models, and code to support reproducible benchmarks and further study into biomedical vision-language modeling and representation learning.

Paperid: 4627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00649.pdf

Abstract:
Information Extraction (IE) systems are traditionally domain-specific, requiring costly adaptation that involves expert schema design, data annotation, and model training. While Large Language Models have shown promise in zero-shot IE, performance degrades significantly in unseen domains where label definitions differ. This paper introduces GUIDEX, a novel method that automatically defines domain-specific schemas, infers guidelines, and generates synthetically labeled instances, allowing for better out-of-domain generalization. Fine-tuning Llama 3.1 with GUIDEX sets a new state-of-the-art across seven zeroshot Named Entity Recognition benchmarks. Models trained with GUIDEX gain up to 7 F1 points over previous methods without humanlabeled data, and nearly 2 F1 points higher when combined with it. Models trained on GUIDEX demonstrate enhanced comprehension of complex, domain-specific annotation schemas. Code, models, and synthetic datasets are available at neilus03.github.io/guidex.com

Paperid: 4628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24621.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding and generation, leading to extensive benchmarking across diverse tasks. However, cryptanalysis - a critical area for data security and its connection to LLMs' generalization abilities - remains underexplored in LLM evaluations. To address this gap, we evaluate the cryptanalytic potential of state-of-the-art LLMs on ciphertexts produced by a range of cryptographic algorithms. We introduce a benchmark dataset of diverse plaintexts, spanning multiple domains, lengths, writing styles, and topics, paired with their encrypted versions. Using zero-shot and few-shot settings along with chain-of-thought prompting, we assess LLMs' decryption success rate and discuss their comprehension abilities. Our findings reveal key insights into LLMs' strengths and limitations in side-channel scenarios and raise concerns about their susceptibility to under-generalization-related attacks. This research highlights the dual-use nature of LLMs in security contexts and contributes to the ongoing discussion on AI safety and security.

Paperid: 4629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23666.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based large language models suffer from quadratic complexity at inference on long sequences. Linear attention methods are efficient alternatives, however, they fail to provide an accurate approximation of softmax attention. By additionally incorporating sliding window attention into each linear attention head, this gap can be closed for short context-length tasks. Unfortunately, these approaches cannot recall important information from long contexts due to "memory collisions". In this paper , we propose LoLA: Low-rank Linear Attention with sparse caching. LoLA separately stores additional key-value pairs that would otherwise interfere with past associative memories. Moreover, LoLA further closes the gap between linear attention models and transformers by distributing past key-value pairs into three forms of memory: (i) recent pairs in a local sliding window; (ii) difficult-to-memorize pairs in a sparse, global cache; and (iii) generic pairs in the recurrent hidden state of linear attention. As an inference-only strategy, LoLA enables pass-key retrieval on up to 8K context lengths on needle-in-a-haystack tasks from RULER. It boosts the accuracy of the base subquadratic model from 0.6% to 97.4% at 4K context lengths, with a 4.6x smaller cache than that of Llama-3.1 8B. LoLA demonstrates strong performance on zero-shot commonsense reasoning tasks among 1B and 8B parameter subquadratic models. Finally, LoLA is an extremely lightweight approach: Nearly all of our results can be reproduced on a single consumer GPU.

Paperid: 4630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20029.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based language models, though not explicitly trained to mimic brain recordings, have demonstrated surprising alignment with brain activity. Progress in these models-through increased size, instruction-tuning, and multimodality-has led to better representational alignment with neural data. Recently, a new class of instruction-tuned multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have emerged, showing remarkable zero-shot capabilities in open-ended multimodal vision tasks. However, it is unknown whether MLLMs, when prompted with natural instructions, lead to better brain alignment and effectively capture instruction-specific representations. To address this, we first investigate brain alignment, i.e., measuring the degree of predictivity of neural visual activity using text output response embeddings from MLLMs as participants engage in watching natural scenes. Experiments with 10 different instructions show that MLLMs exhibit significantly better brain alignment than vision-only models and perform comparably to non-instruction-tuned multimodal models like CLIP. We also find that while these MLLMs are effective at generating high-quality responses suitable to the task-specific instructions, not all instructions are relevant for brain alignment. Further, by varying instructions, we make the MLLMs encode instruction-specific visual concepts related to the input image. This analysis shows that MLLMs effectively capture count-related and recognition-related concepts, demonstrating strong alignment with brain activity. Notably, the majority of the explained variance of the brain encoding models is shared between MLLM embeddings of image captioning and other instructions. These results suggest that enhancing MLLMs' ability to capture task-specific information could lead to better differentiation between various types of instructions, and thereby improving their precision in predicting brain responses.

Paperid: 4631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19373.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting vision-language models such as CLIP to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often overfit to seen data, leading to significant performance degradation when generalizing to novel classes or unseen domains. To address this limitation, we propose DiSa, a Directional Saliency-Aware Prompt Learning framework that integrates two complementary regularization strategies to enhance generalization. First, our Cross-Interactive Regularization (CIR) fosters cross-modal alignment by enabling cooperative learning between prompted and frozen encoders. Within CIR, a saliency-aware masking strategy guides the image encoder to prioritize semantically critical image regions, reducing reliance on less informative patches. Second, we introduce a directional regularization strategy that aligns visual embeddings with class-wise prototype features in a directional manner to prioritize consistency in feature orientation over strict proximity. This approach ensures robust generalization by leveraging stable prototype directions derived from class-mean statistics. Extensive evaluations on 11 diverse image classification benchmarks demonstrate that DiSa consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt learning methods across various settings, including base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization, and few-shot learning.

Paperid: 4632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18884.pdf

Abstract:
Visual encoders have become fundamental components in modern computer vision pipelines. However, ensuring robustness against adversarial perturbations remains a critical challenge. Recent efforts have explored both supervised and unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning strategies. We identify two key limitations in these approaches: (i) they often suffer from instability, especially during the early stages of fine-tuning, resulting in suboptimal convergence and degraded performance on clean data, and (ii) they exhibit a suboptimal trade-off between robustness and clean data accuracy, hindering the simultaneous optimization of both objectives. To overcome these challenges, we propose Lagrangian-Optimized Robust Embeddings (LORE), a novel unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning framework. LORE utilizes constrained optimization, which offers a principled approach to balancing competing goals, such as improving robustness while preserving nominal performance. By enforcing embedding-space proximity constraints, LORE effectively maintains clean data performance throughout adversarial fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that LORE significantly improves zero-shot adversarial robustness with minimal degradation in clean data accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the adversarially fine-tuned CLIP image encoder in out-of-distribution generalization and enhancing the interpretability of image embeddings.

Paperid: 4633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16042.pdf

Abstract:
This article presents Platform Adaptive Locomotion (PAL), a unified control method for quadrupedal robots with different morphologies and dynamics. We leverage deep reinforcement learning to train a single locomotion policy on procedurally generated robots. The policy maps proprioceptive robot state information and base velocity commands into desired joint actuation targets, which are conditioned using a latent embedding of the temporally local system dynamics. We explore two conditioning strategies - one using a GRU-based dynamics encoder and another using a morphology-based property estimator - and show that morphology-aware conditioning outperforms temporal dynamics encoding regarding velocity task tracking for our hardware test on ANYmal C. Our results demonstrate that both approaches achieve robust zero-shot transfer across multiple unseen simulated quadrupeds. Furthermore, we demonstrate the need for careful robot reference modelling during training: exposing the policy to a diverse set of robot morphologies and dynamics leads to improved generalization, reducing the velocity tracking error by up to 30% compared to the baseline method. Despite PAL not surpassing the best-performing reference-free controller in all cases, our analysis uncovers critical design choices and informs improvements to the state of the art.

Paperid: 4634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13828.pdf

Abstract:
Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of complex designs while minimizing waste, but faces challenges related to defects and process anomalies. This study presents a novel multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation-based framework that automates anomaly detection across various Additive Manufacturing processes leveraging retrieved information from literature, including images and descriptive text, rather than training datasets. This framework integrates text and image retrieval from scientific literature and multimodal generation models to perform zero-shot anomaly identification, classification, and explanation generation in a Laser Powder Bed Fusion setting. The proposed framework is evaluated on four L-PBF manufacturing datasets from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, featuring various printer makes, models, and materials. This evaluation demonstrates the framework's adaptability and generalizability across diverse images without requiring additional training. Comparative analysis using Qwen2-VL-2B and GPT-4o-mini as MLLM within the proposed framework highlights that GPT-4o-mini outperforms Qwen2-VL-2B and proportional random baseline in manufacturing anomalies classification. Additionally, the evaluation of the RAG system confirms that incorporating retrieval mechanisms improves average accuracy by 12% by reducing the risk of hallucination and providing additional information. The proposed framework can be continuously updated by integrating emerging research, allowing seamless adaptation to the evolving landscape of AM technologies. This scalable, automated, and zero-shot-capable framework streamlines AM anomaly analysis, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.

Paperid: 4635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11352.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, large-scale pre-trained speech encoders and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been released, which show state-of-the-art performance on a range of spoken language processing tasks including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). To effectively combine both models for better performance, continuous speech prompts, and ASR error correction have been adopted. However, these methods are prone to suboptimal performance or are inflexible. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, LegoSLM, that bridges speech encoders and LLMs using the ASR posterior matrices. The speech encoder is trained to generate Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) posteriors over the LLM vocabulary, which are used to reconstruct pseudo-audio embeddings by computing a weighted sum of the LLM input embeddings. These embeddings are concatenated with text embeddings in the LLM input space. Using the well-performing USM and Gemma models as an example, we demonstrate that our proposed LegoSLM method yields good performance on both ASR and speech translation tasks. By connecting USM with Gemma models, we can get an average of 49% WERR over the USM-CTC baseline on 8 MLS testsets. The trained model also exhibits modularity in a range of settings -- after fine-tuning the Gemma model weights, the speech encoder can be switched and combined with the LLM in a zero-shot fashion. Additionally, we propose to control the decode-time influence of the USM and LLM using a softmax temperature, which shows effectiveness in domain adaptation.

Paperid: 4636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11031.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet their ability to process structured symbolic knowledge remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a taxonomy of ontological capabilities and introduce OntoURL, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' capabilities in handling ontologies -- formal and symbolic representations of domain knowledge. Based on the proposed taxonomy, OntoURL systematically assesses three dimensions: understanding, reasoning, and learning through 15 distinct tasks comprising 57,303 questions derived from 40 ontologies across 8 domains. Experiments with 20 open-source LLMs reveal significant performance differences across models, tasks, and domains, with current LLMs showing capabilities in understanding ontological knowledge but weaknesses in reasoning and learning tasks. Further experiments with few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting illustrate how different prompting strategies affect model performance. Additionally, a human evaluation reveals that LLMs outperform humans in understanding and reasoning tasks but fall short in most learning tasks. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in processing symbolic knowledge and establish OntoURL as a critical benchmark for advancing the integration of LLMs with formal knowledge representations.

Paperid: 4637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10704.pdf

Abstract:
Clustering tabular data remains a significant open challenge in data analysis and machine learning. Unlike for image data, similarity between tabular records often varies across datasets, making the definition of clusters highly dataset-dependent. Furthermore, the absence of supervised signals complicates hyperparameter tuning in deep learning clustering methods, frequently resulting in unstable performance. To address these issues and reduce the need for per-dataset tuning, we adopt an emerging approach in deep learning: zero-shot learning. We propose ZEUS, a self-contained model capable of clustering new datasets without any additional training or fine-tuning. It operates by decomposing complex datasets into meaningful components that can then be clustered effectively. Thanks to pre-training on synthetic datasets generated from a latent-variable prior, it generalizes across various datasets without requiring user intervention. To the best of our knowledge, ZEUS is the first zero-shot method capable of generating embeddings for tabular data in a fully unsupervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that it performs on par with or better than traditional clustering algorithms and recent deep learning-based methods, while being significantly faster and more user-friendly.

Paperid: 4638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10481.pdf

Abstract:
This paper examines two aspects of the isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) task. First, despite the availability of a number of datasets, the amount of data for most individual sign languages is limited. It poses the challenge of cross-language ISLR model training, including transfer learning. Second, similar signs can have different semantic meanings. It leads to ambiguity in dataset labeling and raises the question of the best policy for annotating such signs. To address these issues, this study presents Logos, a novel Russian Sign Language (RSL) dataset, the most extensive ISLR dataset by the number of signers and one of the largest available datasets while also the largest RSL dataset in size and vocabulary. It is shown that a model, pre-trained on the Logos dataset can be used as a universal encoder for other language SLR tasks, including few-shot learning. We explore cross-language transfer learning approaches and find that joint training using multiple classification heads benefits accuracy for the target lowresource datasets the most. The key feature of the Logos dataset is explicitly annotated visually similar sign groups. We show that explicitly labeling visually similar signs improves trained model quality as a visual encoder for downstream tasks. Based on the proposed contributions, we outperform current state-of-the-art results for the WLASL dataset and get competitive results for the AUTSL dataset, with a single stream model processing solely RGB video. The source code, dataset, and pre-trained models are publicly available.

Paperid: 4639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07683.pdf

Abstract:
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) has enabled novel discoveries and served as a large-scale reference through its harmonized genomics, clinical, and image data. Prior studies have trained bespoke cancer survival prediction models from unimodal or multimodal TCGA data. A modern paradigm in biomedical deep learning is the development of foundation models (FMs) to derive meaningful feature embeddings, agnostic to a specific modeling task. Biomedical text especially has seen growing development of FMs. While TCGA contains free-text data as pathology reports, these have been historically underutilized. Here, we investigate the feasibility of training classical, multimodal survival models over zero-shot embeddings extracted by FMs. We show the ease and additive effect of multimodal fusion, outperforming unimodal models. We demonstrate the benefit of including pathology report text and rigorously evaluate the effect of model-based text summarization and hallucination. Overall, we modernize survival modeling by leveraging FMs and information extraction from pathology reports.

Paperid: 4640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01448.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-visual segmentation aims to separate sounding objects from videos by predicting pixel-level masks based on audio signals. Existing methods primarily concentrate on closed-set scenarios and direct audio-visual alignment and fusion, which limits their capability to generalize to new, unseen situations. In this paper, we propose OpenAVS, a novel training-free language-based approach that, for the first time, effectively aligns audio and visual modalities using text as a proxy for open-vocabulary Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS). Equipped with multimedia foundation models, OpenAVS directly infers masks through 1) audio-to-text prompt generation, 2) LLM-guided prompt translation, and 3) text-to-visual sounding object segmentation. The objective of OpenAVS is to establish a simple yet flexible architecture that relies on the most appropriate foundation models by fully leveraging their capabilities to enable more effective knowledge transfer to the downstream AVS task. Moreover, we present a model-agnostic framework OpenAVS-ST that enables the integration of OpenAVS with any advanced supervised AVS model via pseudo-label based self-training. This approach enhances performance by effectively utilizing large-scale unlabeled data when available. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of OpenAVS. It surpasses existing unsupervised, zero-shot, and few-shot AVS methods by a significant margin, achieving absolute performance gains of approximately 9.4% and 10.9% in mIoU and F-score, respectively, in challenging scenarios.

Paperid: 4641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14620.pdf

Abstract:
Measuring scientific paper innovation is both important and challenging. Existing content-based methods often overlook the full-paper context, fail to capture the full scope of innovation, and lack generalization. We propose HSPIM, a hierarchical and training-free framework based on large language models (LLMs). It introduces a Paper-to-Sections-to-QAs decomposition to assess innovation. We segment the text by section titles and use zero-shot LLM prompting to implement section classification, question-answering (QA) augmentation, and weighted novelty scoring. The generated QA pair focuses on section-level innovation and serves as additional context to improve the LLM scoring. For each chunk, the LLM outputs a novelty score and a confidence score. We use confidence scores as weights to aggregate novelty scores into a paper-level innovation score. To further improve performance, we propose a two-layer question structure consisting of common and section-specific questions, and apply a genetic algorithm to optimize the question-prompt combinations. Comprehensive experiments on scientific conference paper datasets show that HSPIM outperforms baseline methods in effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability.

Paperid: 4642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13102.pdf

Abstract:
Underwater acoustic target recognition (UATR) is of great significance for the protection of marine diversity and national defense security. The development of deep learning provides new opportunities for UATR, but faces challenges brought by the scarcity of reference samples and complex environmental interference. To address these issues, we proposes a multi-task balanced channel attention convolutional neural network (MT-BCA-CNN). The method integrates a channel attention mechanism with a multi-task learning strategy, constructing a shared feature extractor and multi-task classifiers to jointly optimize target classification and feature reconstruction tasks. The channel attention mechanism dynamically enhances discriminative acoustic features such as harmonic structures while suppressing noise. Experiments on the Watkins Marine Life Dataset demonstrate that MT-BCA-CNN achieves 97\% classification accuracy and 95\% $F1$-score in 27-class few-shot scenarios, significantly outperforming traditional CNN and ACNN models, as well as popular state-of-the-art UATR methods. Ablation studies confirm the synergistic benefits of multi-task learning and attention mechanisms, while a dynamic weighting adjustment strategy effectively balances task contributions. This work provides an efficient solution for few-shot underwater acoustic recognition, advancing research in marine bioacoustics and sonar signal processing.

Paperid: 4643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12714.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination (ZSC), the ability to adapt to a new partner in a cooperative task, is a critical component of human-compatible AI. While prior work has focused on training agents to cooperate on a single task, these specialized models do not generalize to new tasks, even if they are highly similar. Here, we study how reinforcement learning on a distribution of environments with a single partner enables learning general cooperative skills that support ZSC with many new partners on many new problems. We introduce two Jax-based, procedural generators that create billions of solvable coordination challenges. We develop a new paradigm called Cross-Environment Cooperation (CEC), and show that it outperforms competitive baselines quantitatively and qualitatively when collaborating with real people. Our findings suggest that learning to collaborate across many unique scenarios encourages agents to develop general norms, which prove effective for collaboration with different partners. Together, our results suggest a new route toward designing generalist cooperative agents capable of interacting with humans without requiring human data.

Paperid: 4644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12264.pdf

Abstract:
We propose CAL (Complete Anything in Lidar) for Lidar-based shape-completion in-the-wild. This is closely related to Lidar-based semantic/panoptic scene completion. However, contemporary methods can only complete and recognize objects from a closed vocabulary labeled in existing Lidar datasets. Different to that, our zero-shot approach leverages the temporal context from multi-modal sensor sequences to mine object shapes and semantic features of observed objects. These are then distilled into a Lidar-only instance-level completion and recognition model. Although we only mine partial shape completions, we find that our distilled model learns to infer full object shapes from multiple such partial observations across the dataset. We show that our model can be prompted on standard benchmarks for Semantic and Panoptic Scene Completion, localize objects as (amodal) 3D bounding boxes, and recognize objects beyond fixed class vocabularies. Our project page is https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dvl/projects/complete-anything-lidar

Paperid: 4645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08192.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning is a promising approach to improve LLM safety by removing unwanted knowledge from the model. However, prevailing gradient-based unlearning methods suffer from issues such as high computational costs, hyperparameter instability, poor sequential unlearning capability, vulnerability to relearning attacks, low data efficiency, and lack of interpretability. While Sparse Autoencoders are well-suited to improve these aspects by enabling targeted activation-based unlearning, prior approaches underperform gradient-based methods. This work demonstrates that, contrary to these earlier findings, SAEs can significantly improve unlearning when employed dynamically. We introduce $\textbf{Dynamic DAE Guardrails}$ (DSG), a novel method for precision unlearning that leverages principled feature selection and a dynamic classifier. Our experiments show DSG substantially outperforms leading unlearning methods, achieving superior forget-utility trade-offs. DSG addresses key drawbacks of gradient-based approaches for unlearning -- offering enhanced computational efficiency and stability, robust performance in sequential unlearning, stronger resistance to relearning attacks, better data efficiency including zero-shot settings, and more interpretable unlearning.

Paperid: 4646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04040.pdf

Abstract:
Assistive agents should be able to perform under-specified long-horizon tasks while respecting user preferences. We introduce Actively Discovering and Adapting to Preferences for any Task (ADAPT) -- a benchmark designed to evaluate agents' ability to adhere to user preferences across various household tasks through active questioning. Next, we propose Reflection-DPO, a novel training approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to the task of active questioning. Reflection-DPO finetunes a 'student' LLM to follow the actions of a privileged 'teacher' LLM, and optionally ask a question to gather necessary information to better predict the teacher action. We find that prior approaches that use state-of-the-art LLMs fail to sufficiently follow user preferences in ADAPT due to insufficient questioning and poor adherence to elicited preferences. In contrast, Reflection-DPO achieves a higher rate of satisfying user preferences, outperforming a zero-shot chain-of-thought baseline by 6.1% on unseen users.

Paperid: 4647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03159.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot text classification typically relies on prompt engineering, but the inherent prompt brittleness of large language models undermines its reliability. Minor changes in prompt can cause significant discrepancies in model performance. We attribute this prompt brittleness largely to the narrow focus on nexttoken probabilities in existing methods. To address this, we propose Placeholding Parallel Prediction (P3), a novel approach that predicts token probabilities across multiple positions and simulates comprehensive sampling of generation paths in a single run of a language model. Experiments show improved accuracy and up to 98% reduction in the standard deviation across prompts, boosting robustness. Even without a prompt, P3 maintains comparable performance, reducing the need for prompt engineering.

Paperid: 4648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02873.pdf

Abstract:
The malicious usage of large language models (LLMs) has motivated the detection of LLM-generated texts. Previous work in topological data analysis shows that the persistent homology dimension (PHD) of text embeddings can serve as a more robust and promising score than other zero-shot methods. However, effectively detecting short LLM-generated texts remains a challenge. This paper presents Short-PHD, a zero-shot LLM-generated text detection method tailored for short texts. Short-PHD stabilizes the estimation of the previous PHD method for short texts by inserting off-topic content before the given input text and identifies LLM-generated text based on an established detection threshold. Experimental results on both public and generated datasets demonstrate that Short-PHD outperforms existing zero-shot methods in short LLM-generated text detection. Implementation codes are available online.

Paperid: 4649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02328.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in global alignment with language but exhibits limited sensitivity to spatial information, leading to strong performance in zero-shot classification tasks but underperformance in tasks requiring precise spatial understanding. Recent approaches have introduced Region-Language Alignment (RLA) to enhance CLIP's performance in dense multimodal tasks by aligning regional visual representations with corresponding text inputs. However, we find that CLIP ViTs fine-tuned with RLA suffer from notable loss in spatial awareness, which is crucial for dense prediction tasks. To address this, we propose the Spatial Correlation Distillation (SCD) framework, which preserves CLIP's inherent spatial structure and mitigates the above degradation. To further enhance spatial correlations, we introduce a lightweight Refiner that extracts refined correlations directly from CLIP before feeding them into SCD, based on an intriguing finding that CLIP naturally captures high-quality dense features. Together, these components form a robust distillation framework that enables CLIP ViTs to integrate both visual-language and visual-centric improvements, achieving state-of-the-art results across various open-vocabulary dense prediction benchmarks.

Paperid: 4650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02316.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-3D generation have revolutionized 3D content creation by enabling direct synthesis from textual descriptions. While state-of-the-art methods leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting with score distillation to enhance multi-view rendering through pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, they suffer from inherent view biases in T2I priors. These biases lead to inconsistent 3D generation, particularly manifesting as the multi-face Janus problem, where objects exhibit conflicting features across views. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose ConsDreamer, a novel framework that mitigates view bias by refining both the conditional and unconditional terms in the score distillation process: (1) a View Disentanglement Module (VDM) that eliminates viewpoint biases in conditional prompts by decoupling irrelevant view components and injecting precise camera parameters; and (2) a similarity-based partial order loss that enforces geometric consistency in the unconditional term by aligning cosine similarities with azimuth relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsDreamer effectively mitigates the multi-face Janus problem in text-to-3D generation, outperforming existing methods in both visual quality and consistency.

Paperid: 4651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01883.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models excel in knowledge-intensive tasks, especially under few-shot learning constraints. We introduce CoRAG, a framework extending RAG to collaborative settings, where clients jointly train a shared model using a collaborative passage store. To evaluate CoRAG, we introduce CRAB, a benchmark for collaborative homogeneous open-domain question answering. Our experiments demonstrate that CoRAG consistently outperforms both parametric collaborative learning methods and locally trained RAG models in low-resource scenarios. Further analysis reveals the critical importance of relevant passages within the shared store, the surprising benefits of incorporating irrelevant passages, and the potential for hard negatives to negatively impact performance. This introduces a novel consideration in collaborative RAG: the trade-off between leveraging a collectively enriched knowledge base and the potential risk of incorporating detrimental passages from other clients. Our findings underscore the viability of CoRAG, while also highlighting key design challenges and promising avenues for future research.

Paperid: 4652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00907.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied agents operating in real-world environments must interpret ambiguous and under-specified human instructions. A capable household robot should recognize ambiguity and ask relevant clarification questions to infer the user intent accurately, leading to more effective task execution. To study this problem, we introduce the Ask-to-Act task, where an embodied agent must fetch a specific object instance given an ambiguous instruction in a home environment. The agent must strategically ask minimal, yet relevant, clarification questions to resolve ambiguity while navigating under partial observability. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach that fine-tunes multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as vision-language-action (VLA) policies using online reinforcement learning (RL) with LLM-generated rewards. Our method eliminates the need for large-scale human demonstrations or manually engineered rewards for training such agents. We benchmark against strong zero-shot baselines, including GPT-4o, and supervised fine-tuned MLLMs, on our task. Our results demonstrate that our RL-finetuned MLLM outperforms all baselines by a significant margin ($19.1$-$40.3\%$), generalizing well to novel scenes and tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of adapting MLLMs as VLA agents that can act and ask for help using LLM-generated rewards with online RL.

Paperid: 4653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00848.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot 4D segmentation and recognition of arbitrary objects in Lidar is crucial for embodied navigation, with applications ranging from streaming perception to semantic mapping and localization. However, the primary challenge in advancing research and developing generalized, versatile methods for spatio-temporal scene understanding in Lidar lies in the scarcity of datasets that provide the necessary diversity and scale of annotations.To overcome these challenges, we propose SAL-4D (Segment Anything in Lidar--4D), a method that utilizes multi-modal robotic sensor setups as a bridge to distill recent developments in Video Object Segmentation (VOS) in conjunction with off-the-shelf Vision-Language foundation models to Lidar. We utilize VOS models to pseudo-label tracklets in short video sequences, annotate these tracklets with sequence-level CLIP tokens, and lift them to the 4D Lidar space using calibrated multi-modal sensory setups to distill them to our SAL-4D model. Due to temporal consistent predictions, we outperform prior art in 3D Zero-Shot Lidar Panoptic Segmentation (LPS) over $5$ PQ, and unlock Zero-Shot 4D-LPS.

Paperid: 4654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00147.pdf

Abstract:
Embedding inversion, i.e., reconstructing text given its embedding and black-box access to the embedding encoder, is a fundamental problem in both NLP and security. From the NLP perspective, it helps determine how much semantic information about the input is retained in the embedding. From the security perspective, it measures how much information is leaked by vector databases and embedding-based retrieval systems. State-of-the-art methods for embedding inversion, such as vec2text, have high accuracy but require (a) training a separate model for each embedding, and (b) a large number of queries to the corresponding encoder. We design, implement, and evaluate ZSInvert, a zero-shot inversion method based on the recently proposed adversarial decoding technique. ZSInvert is fast, query-efficient, and can be used for any text embedding without training an embedding-specific inversion model. We measure the effectiveness of ZSInvert on several embeddings and demonstrate that it recovers key semantic information about the corresponding texts.

Paperid: 4655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20484.pdf

Abstract:
The diffusion model has demonstrated superior performance in synthesizing diverse and high-quality images for text-guided image translation. However, there remains room for improvement in both the formulation of text prompts and the preservation of reference image content. First, variations in target text prompts can significantly influence the quality of the generated images, and it is often challenging for users to craft an optimal prompt that fully captures the content of the input image. Second, while existing models can introduce desired modifications to specific regions of the reference image, they frequently induce unintended alterations in areas that should remain unchanged. To address these challenges, we propose pix2pix-zeroCon, a zero-shot diffusion-based method that eliminates the need for additional training by leveraging patch-wise contrastive loss. Specifically, we automatically determine the editing direction in the text embedding space based on the reference image and target prompts. Furthermore, to ensure precise content and structural preservation in the edited image, we introduce cross-attention guiding loss and patch-wise contrastive loss between the generated and original image embeddings within a pre-trained diffusion model. Notably, our approach requires no additional training and operates directly on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing models in image-to-image translation, achieving enhanced fidelity and controllability.

Paperid: 4656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14919.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling up motion datasets is crucial to enhance motion generation capabilities. However, training on large-scale multi-source datasets introduces data heterogeneity challenges due to variations in motion content. To address this, we propose Generative Pretrained Multi-path Motion Model (GenM$^3$), a comprehensive framework designed to learn unified motion representations. GenM$^3$ comprises two components: 1) a Multi-Expert VQ-VAE (MEVQ-VAE) that adapts to different dataset distributions to learn a unified discrete motion representation, and 2) a Multi-path Motion Transformer (MMT) that improves intra-modal representations by using separate modality-specific pathways, each with densely activated experts to accommodate variations within that modality, and improves inter-modal alignment by the text-motion shared pathway. To enable large-scale training, we integrate and unify 11 high-quality motion datasets (approximately 220 hours of motion data) and augment it with textual annotations (nearly 10,000 motion sequences labeled by a large language model and 300+ by human experts). After training on our integrated dataset, GenM$^3$ achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 0.035 on the HumanML3D benchmark, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on IDEA400 dataset, highlighting its effectiveness and adaptability across diverse motion scenarios.

Paperid: 4657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14432.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated with specialized external tools, yet many tasks demand zero-shot tool usage with minimal or noisy documentation. Existing solutions rely on manual rewriting or labeled data for validation, making them inapplicable in true zero-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose PLAY2PROMPT, an automated framework that systematically "plays" with each tool to explore its input-output behaviors. Through this iterative trial-and-error process, PLAY2PROMPT refines tool documentation and generates usage examples without any labeled data. These examples not only guide LLM inference but also serve as validation to further enhance tool utilization. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks demonstrate that PLAY2PROMPT significantly improves zero-shot tool performance across both open and closed models, offering a scalable and effective solution for domain-specific tool integration.

Paperid: 4658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11827.pdf

Abstract:
Closed large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have set state-of-the-art results across a number of NLP tasks and have become central to NLP and machine learning (ML)-driven solutions. Closed LLMs' performance and wide adoption has sparked considerable debate about their accessibility in terms of availability, cost, and transparency. In this study, we perform a rigorous comparative analysis of nine leading LLMs, spanning closed, open, and open-source LLM ecosystems, across text assessment and generation tasks related to automated essay scoring. Our findings reveal that for few-shot learning-based assessment of human generated essays, open LLMs such as Llama 3 and Qwen2.5 perform comparably to GPT-4 in terms of predictive performance, with no significant differences in disparate impact scores when considering age- or race-related fairness. Moreover, Llama 3 offers a substantial cost advantage, being up to 37 times more cost-efficient than GPT-4. For generative tasks, we find that essays generated by top open LLMs are comparable to closed LLMs in terms of their semantic composition/embeddings and ML assessed scores. Our findings challenge the dominance of closed LLMs and highlight the democratizing potential of open LLMs, suggesting they can effectively bridge accessibility divides while maintaining competitive performance and fairness.

Paperid: 4659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09474.pdf

Abstract:
Image-guided surgery demands adaptive, real-time decision support, yet static AI models struggle with structured task planning and providing interactive guidance. Large vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising solution by enabling dynamic task planning and predictive decision support. We introduce SurgicalVLM-Agent, an AI co-pilot for image-guided pituitary surgery, capable of conversation, planning, and task execution. The agent dynamically processes surgeon queries and plans the tasks such as MRI tumor segmentation, endoscope anatomy segmentation, overlaying preoperative imaging with intraoperative views, instrument tracking, and surgical visual question answering (VQA). To enable structured task planning, we develop the PitAgent dataset, a surgical context-aware dataset covering segmentation, overlaying, instrument localization, tool tracking, tool-tissue interactions, phase identification, and surgical activity recognition. Additionally, we propose FFT-GaLore, a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based gradient projection technique for efficient low-rank adaptation, optimizing fine-tuning for LLaMA 3.2 in surgical environments. We validate SurgicalVLM-Agent by assessing task planning and prompt generation on our PitAgent dataset and evaluating zero-shot VQA using a public pituitary dataset. Results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in task planning and query interpretation, with highly semantically meaningful VQA responses, advancing AI-driven surgical assistance.

Paperid: 4660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08306.pdf

Abstract:
Progress in Embodied AI has made it possible for end-to-end-trained agents to navigate in photo-realistic environments with high-level reasoning and zero-shot or language-conditioned behavior, but benchmarks are still dominated by simulation. In this work, we focus on the fine-grained behavior of fast-moving real robots and present a large-scale experimental study involving \numepisodes{} navigation episodes in a real environment with a physical robot, where we analyze the type of reasoning emerging from end-to-end training. In particular, we study the presence of realistic dynamics which the agent learned for open-loop forecasting, and their interplay with sensing. We analyze the way the agent uses latent memory to hold elements of the scene structure and information gathered during exploration. We probe the planning capabilities of the agent, and find in its memory evidence for somewhat precise plans over a limited horizon. Furthermore, we show in a post-hoc analysis that the value function learned by the agent relates to long-term planning. Put together, our experiments paint a new picture on how using tools from computer vision and sequential decision making have led to new capabilities in robotics and control. An interactive tool is available at europe.naverlabs.com/research/publications/reasoning-in-visual-navigation-of-end-to-end-trained-agents.

Paperid: 4661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06261.pdf

Abstract:
Amodal instance segmentation, which aims to detect and segment both visible and invisible parts of objects in images, plays a crucial role in various applications including autonomous driving, robotic manipulation, and scene understanding. While existing methods require training both front-end detectors and mask decoders jointly, this approach lacks flexibility and fails to leverage the strengths of pre-existing modal detectors. To address this limitation, we propose SAMEO, a novel framework that adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) as a versatile mask decoder capable of interfacing with various front-end detectors to enable mask prediction even for partially occluded objects. Acknowledging the constraints of limited amodal segmentation datasets, we introduce Amodal-LVIS, a large-scale synthetic dataset comprising 300K images derived from the modal LVIS and LVVIS datasets. This dataset significantly expands the training data available for amodal segmentation research. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach, when trained on the newly extended dataset, including Amodal-LVIS, achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on both COCOA-cls and D2SA benchmarks, highlighting its potential for generalization to unseen scenarios.

Paperid: 4662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05893.pdf

Abstract:
Longitudinal data in electronic health records (EHRs) represent an individual`s clinical history through a sequence of codified concepts, including diagnoses, procedures, medications, and laboratory tests. Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) can leverage this data to predict future events. While fine-tuning of these models can enhance task-specific performance, it becomes costly when applied to many clinical prediction tasks. In contrast, a pretrained foundation model can be used in zero-shot forecasting setting, offering a scalable alternative to fine-tuning separate models for each outcome. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of zero-shot forecasting with GPT-based foundational models in EHRs, introducing a novel pipeline that formulates medical concept prediction as a generative modeling task. Unlike supervised approaches requiring extensive labeled data, our method enables the model to forecast a next medical event purely from a pretraining knowledge. We evaluate performance across multiple time horizons and clinical categories, demonstrating model`s ability to capture latent temporal dependencies and complex patient trajectories without task supervision. Model performance for predicting the next medical concept was evaluated using precision and recall metrics, achieving an average top1 precision of 0.614 and recall of 0.524. For 12 major diagnostic conditions, the model demonstrated strong zero-shot performance, achieving high true positive rates while maintaining low false positives. We demonstrate the power of a foundational EHR GPT model in capturing diverse phenotypes and enabling robust, zero-shot forecasting of clinical outcomes. This capability enhances the versatility of predictive healthcare models and reduces the need for task-specific training, enabling more scalable applications in clinical settings.

Paperid: 4663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03911.pdf

Abstract:
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic systems presents unique safety challenges, particularly in unpredictable environments. Although LLMs, leveraging zero-shot learning, enhance human-robot interaction and decision-making capabilities, their inherent probabilistic nature and lack of formal guarantees raise significant concerns for safety-critical applications. Traditional model-based verification approaches often rely on precise system models, which are difficult to obtain for real-world robotic systems and may not be fully trusted due to modeling inaccuracies, unmodeled dynamics, or environmental uncertainties. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a safety assurance framework for LLM-controlled robots based on data-driven reachability analysis, a formal verification technique that ensures all possible system trajectories remain within safe operational limits. Our framework specifically investigates the problem of instructing an LLM to navigate the robot to a specified goal and assesses its ability to generate low-level control actions that successfully guide the robot safely toward that goal. By leveraging historical data to construct reachable sets of states for the robot-LLM system, our approach provides rigorous safety guarantees against unsafe behaviors without relying on explicit analytical models. We validate the framework through experimental case studies in autonomous navigation and task planning, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating risks associated with LLM-generated commands. This work advances the integration of formal methods into LLM-based robotics, offering a principled and practical approach to ensuring safety in next-generation autonomous systems.

Paperid: 4664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01372.pdf

Abstract:
In Switzerland legal translation is uniquely important due to the country's four official languages and requirements for multilingual legal documentation. However, this process traditionally relies on professionals who must be both legal experts and skilled translators -- creating bottlenecks and impacting effective access to justice. To address this challenge, we introduce SwiLTra-Bench, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark of over 180K aligned Swiss legal translation pairs comprising laws, headnotes, and press releases across all Swiss languages along with English, designed to evaluate LLM-based translation systems. Our systematic evaluation reveals that frontier models achieve superior translation performance across all document types, while specialized translation systems excel specifically in laws but under-perform in headnotes. Through rigorous testing and human expert validation, we demonstrate that while fine-tuning open SLMs significantly improves their translation quality, they still lag behind the best zero-shot prompted frontier models such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Additionally, we present SwiLTra-Judge, a specialized LLM evaluation system that aligns best with human expert assessments.

Paperid: 4665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01236.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-terrain cost-efficient path planning is a crucial task in robot navigation, requiring the identification of a path from the start to the goal that not only avoids obstacles but also minimizes travel costs. This is especially crucial for real-world applications where robots need to navigate diverse terrains in outdoor environments, where recharging or refueling is difficult. However, there is very limited research on this topic. In this paper, we develop a prompt-based approach, LLM-Advisor, which leverages large language models (LLMs) as effective advisors for path planning. The LLM-Advisor selectively provides suggestions, demonstrating its ability to recognize when no modifications are necessary. When suggestions are made, 70.59% of the paths suggested for the A* algorithm, 69.47% for the RRT* algorithm, and 78.70% for the LLM-A* algorithm achieve greater cost efficiency. Since LLM-Advisor may occasionally lack common sense in their suggestions, we propose two hallucination-mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we experimentally verified that GPT-4o performs poorly in zero-shot path planning, even when terrain descriptions are clearly provided, demonstrating its low spatial awareness. We also experimentally demonstrate that using an LLM as an advisor is more effective than directly integrating it into the path-planning loop. Since LLMs may generate hallucinations, using LLMs in the loop of a search-based method (such as A*) may lead to a higher number of failed paths, demonstrating that our proposed LLM-Advisor is a better choice.

Paperid: 4666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00597.pdf

Abstract:
Keyphrases are the essential topical phrases that summarize a document. Keyphrase generation is a long-standing NLP task for automatically generating keyphrases for a given document. While the task has been comprehensively explored in the past via various models, only a few works perform some preliminary analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task. Given the impact of LLMs in the field of NLP, it is important to conduct a more thorough examination of their potential for keyphrase generation. In this paper, we attempt to meet this demand with our research agenda. Specifically, we focus on the zero-shot capabilities of open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (Phi-3, Llama-3) and the closed-source GPT-4o for this task. We systematically investigate the effect of providing task-relevant specialized instructions in the prompt. Moreover, we design task-specific counterparts to self-consistency-style strategies for LLMs and show significant benefits from our proposals over the baselines.

Paperid: 4667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20825.pdf

Abstract:
Automating cloud configuration and deployment remains a critical challenge due to evolving infrastructures, heterogeneous hardware, and fluctuating workloads. Existing solutions lack adaptability and require extensive manual tuning, leading to inefficiencies and misconfigurations. We introduce LADs, the first LLM-driven framework designed to tackle these challenges by ensuring robustness, adaptability, and efficiency in automated cloud management. Instead of merely applying existing techniques, LADs provides a principled approach to configuration optimization through in-depth analysis of what optimization works under which conditions. By leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Few-Shot Learning, Chain-of-Thought, and Feedback-Based Prompt Chaining, LADs generates accurate configurations and learns from deployment failures to iteratively refine system settings. Our findings reveal key insights into the trade-offs between performance, cost, and scalability, helping practitioners determine the right strategies for different deployment scenarios. For instance, we demonstrate how prompt chaining-based adaptive feedback loops enhance fault tolerance in multi-tenant environments and how structured log analysis with example shots improves configuration accuracy. Through extensive evaluations, LADs reduces manual effort, optimizes resource utilization, and improves system reliability. By open-sourcing LADs, we aim to drive further innovation in AI-powered DevOps automation.

Paperid: 4668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17221.pdf

Abstract:
Although robotic applications increasingly demand versatile and dynamic object handling, most existing techniques are predominantly focused on grasp-based manipulation, limiting their applicability in non-prehensile tasks. To address this need, this study introduces a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) reinforcement learning framework for efficient non-prehensile manipulation, specifically for sliding an object on a surface. The algorithm generates a linear trajectory by precisely controlling the acceleration of a robotic arm rigidly coupled to the horizontal surface, enabling the relative manipulation of an object as it slides on top of the surface. Furthermore, two distinct algorithms have been developed to estimate the frictional forces dynamically during the sliding process. These algorithms provide online friction estimates after each action, which are fed back into the actor model as critical feedback after each action. This feedback mechanism enhances the policy's adaptability and robustness, ensuring more precise control of the platform's acceleration in response to varying surface condition. The proposed algorithm is validated through simulations and real-world experiments. Results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively generalizes sliding manipulation across varying distances and, more importantly, adapts to different surfaces with diverse frictional properties. Notably, the trained model exhibits zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capabilities.

Paperid: 4669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15795.pdf

Abstract:
Autoformalization, the process of transforming informal mathematical language into formal specifications and proofs remains a difficult task for state-of-the-art (large) language models. Existing works point to competing explanations for the performance gap. To this end, we introduce a novel methodology that leverages back-translation with hand-curated prompts to enhance the mathematical capabilities of language models, particularly addressing the challenge posed by the scarcity of labeled data. Specifically, we evaluate three primary variations of this strategy: (1) on-the-fly (online) backtranslation, (2) distilled (offline) backtranslation with few-shot amplification, and (3) line-by-line proof analysis integrated with proof state information. Each variant is designed to optimize data quality over quantity, focusing on the high fidelity of generated proofs rather than sheer data scale. Our findings provide evidence that employing our proposed approaches to generate synthetic data, which prioritizes quality over volume, improves the Autoformalization performance of LLMs as measured by standard benchmarks such as ProofNet. Crucially, our approach outperforms pretrained models using a minimal number of tokens. We also show, through strategic prompting and backtranslation, that our approaches surpass the performance of fine-tuning with extensive multilingual datasets such as MMA on ProofNet with only 1/150th of the tokens. Taken together, our methods show a promising new approach to significantly reduce the resources required to formalize proofs, thereby accelerating AI for math.

Paperid: 4670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15290.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal information extraction on social media is a series of fundamental tasks to construct the multimodal knowledge graph. The tasks aim to extract the structural information in free texts with the incorporate images, including: multimodal named entity typing and multimodal relation extraction. However, the growing number of multimodal data implies a growing category set and the newly emerged entity types or relations should be recognized without additional training. To address the aforementioned challenges, we focus on the zero-shot multimodal information extraction tasks which require using textual and visual modalities for recognizing unseen categories. Compared with text-based zero-shot information extraction models, the existing multimodal ones make the textual and visual modalities aligned directly and exploit various fusion strategies to improve their performances. But the existing methods ignore the fine-grained semantic correlation of text-image pairs and samples. Therefore, we propose the multimodal graph-based variational mixture of experts network (MG-VMoE) which takes the MoE network as the backbone and exploits it for aligning multimodal representations in a fine-grained way. Considering to learn informative representations of multimodal data, we design each expert network as a variational information bottleneck to process two modalities in a uni-backbone. Moreover, we also propose the multimodal graph-based virtual adversarial training to learn the semantic correlation between the samples. The experimental results on the two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of MG-VMoE over the baselines.

Paperid: 4671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13836.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in question answering (QA), but metrics for assessing their reliance on memorization versus retrieval remain underdeveloped. Moreover, while finetuned models are state-of-the-art on closed-domain tasks, general-purpose models like GPT-4o exhibit strong zero-shot performance. This raises questions about the trade-offs between memorization, generalization, and retrieval. In this work, we analyze the extent to which multimodal retrieval-augmented VLMs memorize training data compared to baseline VLMs. Using the WebQA benchmark, we contrast finetuned models with baseline VLMs on multihop retrieval and question answering, examining the impact of finetuning on data memorization. To quantify memorization in end-to-end retrieval and QA systems, we propose several proxy metrics by investigating instances where QA succeeds despite retrieval failing. In line with existing work, we find that finetuned models rely more heavily on memorization than retrieval-augmented VLMs, and achieve higher accuracy as a result (72% vs 52% on WebQA test set). Finally, we present the first empirical comparison of the parametric effect between text and visual modalities. Here, we find that image-based questions have parametric response rates that are consistently 15-25% higher than for text-based questions in the WebQA dataset. As such, our measures pose a challenge for future work, both to account for differences in model memorization across different modalities and more generally to reconcile memorization and generalization in joint Retrieval-QA tasks.

Paperid: 4672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13023.pdf

Abstract:
Palms are ecologically and economically indicators of tropical forest health, biodiversity, and human impact that support local economies and global forest product supply chains. While palm detection in plantations is well-studied, efforts to map naturally occurring palms in dense forests remain limited by overlapping crowns, uneven shading, and heterogeneous landscapes. We develop PRISM (Processing, Inference, Segmentation, and Mapping), a flexible pipeline for detecting and localizing palms in dense tropical forests using large orthomosaic images. Orthomosaics are created from thousands of aerial images and spanning several to hundreds of gigabytes. Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a large UAV-derived orthomosaic dataset collected across 21 ecologically diverse sites in western Ecuador, annotated with 8,830 bounding boxes and 5,026 palm center points. Second, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art object detectors based on efficiency and performance, integrating zero-shot SAM 2 as the segmentation backbone, and refining the results for precise geographic mapping. Third, we apply calibration methods to align confidence scores with IoU and explore saliency maps for feature explainability. Though optimized for palms, PRISM is adaptable for identifying other natural objects, such as eastern white pines. Future work will explore transfer learning for lower-resolution datasets (0.5 to 1m).

Paperid: 4673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10677.pdf

Abstract:
In class-agnostic object counting, the goal is to estimate the total number of object instances in an image without distinguishing between specific categories. Existing methods often predict this count without considering class-specific outputs, leading to inaccuracies when such outputs are required. These inaccuracies stem from two key challenges: 1) the prevalence of single-category images in datasets, which leads models to generalize specific categories as representative of all objects, and 2) the use of mean squared error loss during training, which applies uniform penalization. This uniform penalty disregards errors in less frequent categories, particularly when these errors contribute minimally to the overall loss. To address these issues, we propose {FocalCount}, a novel approach that leverages diverse feature attributes to estimate the number of object categories in an image. This estimate serves as a weighted factor to correct class-count imbalances. Additionally, we introduce {Focal-MSE}, a new loss function that integrates binary cross-entropy to generate stronger error gradients, enhancing the model's sensitivity to errors in underrepresented categories. Our approach significantly improves the model's ability to distinguish between specific classes and general counts, demonstrating superior performance and scalability in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios across three object counting datasets. The code will be released soon.

Paperid: 4674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06922.pdf

Abstract:
The NLP community has broadly focused on text-only approaches of cognitive state tasks, but audio can provide vital missing cues through prosody. We posit that text-to-speech models learn to track aspects of cognitive state in order to produce naturalistic audio, and that the signal audio models implicitly identify is orthogonal to the information that language models exploit. We present Synthetic Audio Data fine-tuning (SAD), a framework where we show that 7 tasks related to cognitive state modeling benefit from multimodal training on both text and zero-shot synthetic audio data from an off-the-shelf TTS system. We show an improvement over the text-only modality when adding synthetic audio data to text-only corpora. Furthermore, on tasks and corpora that do contain gold audio, we show our SAD framework achieves competitive performance with text and synthetic audio compared to text and gold audio.

Paperid: 4675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06343.pdf

Abstract:
In many scientific domains, the cost of data annotation limits the scale and pace of experimentation. Yet, modern machine learning systems offer a promising alternative, provided their predictions yield correct conclusions. We focus on Prediction-Powered Causal Inferences (PPCI), i.e., estimating the treatment effect in a target experiment with unlabeled factual outcomes, retrievable zero-shot from a pre-trained model. We first identify the conditional calibration property to guarantee valid PPCI at population level. Then, we introduce causal lifting, a new causal lifting constraint transferring validity across experiments, which we propose to enforce in practice in Deconfounded Empirical Risk Minimization, our new model-agnostic training objective. We validate our method on synthetic and real-world scientific data, offering solutions to instances not solvable by vanilla Empirical Risk Minimization and invariant training. In particular, we solve zero-shot PPCI on the ISTAnt dataset for the first time, fine-tuning a foundational model on our replica dataset of their ecological experiment with a different recording platform and treatment.

Paperid: 4676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04679.pdf

Abstract:
While transformer-based models dominate NLP and vision applications, their underlying mechanisms to map the input space to the label space semantically are not well understood. In this paper, we study the sources of known representation vulnerabilities of vision transformers (ViT), where perceptually identical images can have very different representations and semantically unrelated images can have the same representation. Our analysis indicates that imperceptible changes to the input can result in significant representation changes, particularly in later layers, suggesting potential instabilities in the performance of ViTs. Our comprehensive study reveals that adversarial effects, while subtle in early layers, propagate and amplify through the network, becoming most pronounced in middle to late layers. This insight motivates the development of NeuroShield-ViT, a novel defense mechanism that strategically neutralizes vulnerable neurons in earlier layers to prevent the cascade of adversarial effects. We demonstrate NeuroShield-ViT's effectiveness across various attacks, particularly excelling against strong iterative attacks, and showcase its remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities. Without fine-tuning, our method achieves a competitive accuracy of 77.8% on adversarial examples, surpassing conventional robustness methods. Our results shed new light on how adversarial effects propagate through ViT layers, while providing a promising approach to enhance the robustness of vision transformers against adversarial attacks. Additionally, they provide a promising approach to enhance the robustness of vision transformers against adversarial attacks.

Paperid: 4677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04320.pdf

Abstract:
Do the rich representations of multi-modal diffusion transformers (DiTs) exhibit unique properties that enhance their interpretability? We introduce ConceptAttention, a novel method that leverages the expressive power of DiT attention layers to generate high-quality saliency maps that precisely locate textual concepts within images. Without requiring additional training, ConceptAttention repurposes the parameters of DiT attention layers to produce highly contextualized concept embeddings, contributing the major discovery that performing linear projections in the output space of DiT attention layers yields significantly sharper saliency maps compared to commonly used cross-attention maps. ConceptAttention even achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot image segmentation benchmarks, outperforming 15 other zero-shot interpretability methods on the ImageNet-Segmentation dataset. ConceptAttention works for popular image models and even seamlessly generalizes to video generation. Our work contributes the first evidence that the representations of multi-modal DiTs are highly transferable to vision tasks like segmentation.

Paperid: 4678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03418.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot prompting techniques have significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, we lack a clear understanding of why zero-shot prompts are so effective. For example, in the prompt "Let's think step-by-step," is "think" or "step-by-step" more crucial to its success? Existing interpretability methods, such as gradient-based and attention-based approaches, are computationally intensive and restricted to open-source models. We introduce the ZIP score (Zero-shot Importance of Perturbation score), a versatile metric applicable to both open and closed-source models, based on systematic input word perturbations. Our experiments across four recent LLMs, seven widely-used prompts, and several tasks, reveal interesting patterns in word importance. For instance, while both 'step-by-step' and 'think' show high ZIP scores, which one is more influential depends on the model and task. We validate our method using controlled experiments and compare our results with human judgments, finding that proprietary models align more closely with human intuition regarding word significance. These findings enhance our understanding of LLM behavior and contribute to developing more effective zero-shot prompts and improved model analysis.

Paperid: 4679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15857.pdf

Abstract:
Humans exhibit remarkable compositional reasoning by integrating knowledge from various sources. For example, if someone learns ( B = f(A) ) from one source and ( C = g(B) ) from another, they can deduce ( C=g(B)=g(f(A)) ) even without encountering ( ABC ) together, showcasing the generalization ability of human intelligence. In this paper, we introduce a synthetic learning task, "FTCT" (Fragmented at Training, Chained at Testing), to validate the potential of Transformers in replicating this skill and interpret its inner mechanism. In the training phase, data consist of separated knowledge fragments from an overall causal graph. During testing, Transformers must infer complete causal graph traces by integrating these fragments. Our findings demonstrate that few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting enables Transformers to perform compositional reasoning on FTCT by revealing correct combinations of fragments, even if such combinations were absent in the training data. Furthermore, the emergence of compositional reasoning ability is strongly correlated with the model complexity and training-testing data similarity. We propose, both theoretically and empirically, that Transformers learn an underlying generalizable program from training, enabling effective compositional reasoning during testing.

Paperid: 4680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13859.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel attribute-object compositions by leveraging knowledge from seen compositions. Current methods align textual prototypes with visual features via Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but suffer from two limitations: (1) modality gaps hinder the discrimination of semantically similar pairs, and (2) single-modal textual prototypes lack fine-grained visual cues. In this paper, we introduce Visual Proxy Learning, a method that reduces modality gaps and enhances compositional generalization. We initialize visual proxies for attributes, objects, and their compositions using text representations and optimize the visual space to capture fine-grained cues, improving visual representations. Additionally, we propose Cross-Modal Joint Learning (CMJL), which imposes cross-modal constraints between the text-image and fine-grained visual spaces, improving generalization for unseen compositions and discriminating similar pairs. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance in closed-world scenarios and competitive results in open-world settings across four CZSL benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in compositional generalization.

Paperid: 4681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13122.pdf

Abstract:
Previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (COT) prompts and verifiers in guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) through the space of reasoning. However, most such studies either use a fine-tuned verifier or rely on manually handcrafted few-shot examples. In contrast, in this paper, we focus on LLM-based self-verification of self-generated reasoning steps via COT prompts in a completely zero-shot regime. To explore this setting, we design a new zero-shot prompt, which we call COT STEP, to aid zero-shot decomposition of reasoning steps and design two new zero-shot prompts for LLM-based verifiers. We evaluate the verifiers' ability to classify the correctness of reasoning chains and explore different ways to use verifier scores in guiding reasoning for various mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks with different LLMs.

Paperid: 4682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08566.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis shows great promise for personalized voice customization through voice cloning. However, current methods for achieving zero-shot TTS heavily rely on large model scales and extensive training datasets to ensure satisfactory performance and generalizability across various speakers. This raises concerns regarding both deployment costs and data security. In this paper, we present a lightweight and stable zero-shot TTS system. We introduce a novel TTS architecture designed to effectively model linguistic content and various speaker attributes from source speech and prompt speech, respectively. Furthermore, we present a two-stage self-distillation framework that constructs parallel data pairs for effectively disentangling linguistic content and speakers from the perspective of training data. Extensive experiments show that our system exhibits excellent performance and superior stability on the zero-shot TTS tasks. Moreover, it shows markedly superior computational efficiency, with RTFs of 0.13 and 0.012 on the CPU and GPU, respectively.

Paperid: 4683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07396.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic target recognition (ATR) plays a critical role in tasks such as navigation and surveillance, where safety and accuracy are paramount. In extreme use cases, such as military applications, these factors are often challenged due to the presence of unknown terrains, environmental conditions, and novel object categories. Current object detectors, including open-world detectors, lack the ability to confidently recognize novel objects or operate in unknown environments, as they have not been exposed to these new conditions. However, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit emergent properties that enable them to recognize objects in varying conditions in a zero-shot manner. Despite this, LVLMs struggle to localize objects effectively within a scene. To address these limitations, we propose a novel pipeline that combines the detection capabilities of open-world detectors with the recognition confidence of LVLMs, creating a robust system for zero-shot ATR of novel classes and unknown domains. In this study, we compare the performance of various LVLMs for recognizing military vehicles, which are often underrepresented in training datasets. Additionally, we examine the impact of factors such as distance range, modality, and prompting methods on the recognition performance, providing insights into the development of more reliable ATR systems for novel conditions and classes.

Paperid: 4684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06658.pdf

Abstract:
Assessing learners in ill-defined domains, such as scenario-based human tutoring training, is an area of limited research. Equity training requires a nuanced understanding of context, but do contemporary large language models (LLMs) have a knowledge base that can navigate these nuances? Legacy transformer models like BERT, in contrast, have less real-world knowledge but can be more easily fine-tuned than commercial LLMs. Here, we study whether fine-tuning BERT on human annotations outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo) with few-shot prompting and instruction. We evaluate performance on four prediction tasks involving generating and explaining open-ended responses in advocacy-focused training lessons in a higher education student population learning to become middle school tutors. Leveraging a dataset of 243 human-annotated open responses from tutor training lessons, we find that BERT demonstrates superior performance using an offline fine-tuning approach, which is more resource-efficient than commercial GPT models. We conclude that contemporary GPT models may not adequately capture nuanced response patterns, especially in complex tasks requiring explanation. This work advances the understanding of AI-driven learner evaluation under the lens of fine-tuning versus few-shot prompting on the nuanced task of equity training, contributing to more effective training solutions and assisting practitioners in choosing adequate assessment methods.

Paperid: 4685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06256.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables the model to perform new tasks conditioning only on the examples provided in the context without updating the model's weights. While ICL offers fast adaptation across natural language tasks and domains, its emergence is less straightforward for modalities beyond text. In this work, we systematically uncover properties present in LLMs that support the emergence of ICL for autoregressive models and various modalities by promoting the learning of the needed mechanisms for ICL. We identify exact token repetitions in the training data sequences as an important factor for ICL. Such repetitions further improve stability and reduce transiency in ICL performance. Moreover, we emphasise the significance of training task difficulty for the emergence of ICL. Finally, by applying our novel insights on ICL emergence, we unlock ICL capabilities for various visual datasets and a more challenging EEG classification task in a few-shot learning regime.

Paperid: 4686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04426.pdf

Abstract:
While many algorithms for diversity maximization under imitation constraints are online in nature, many applications require offline algorithms without environment interactions. Tackling this problem in the offline setting, however, presents significant challenges that require non-trivial, multi-stage optimization processes with non-stationary rewards. In this work, we present a novel offline algorithm that enhances diversity using an objective based on Van der Waals (VdW) force and successor features, and eliminates the need to learn a previously used skill discriminator. Moreover, by conditioning the value function and policy on a pre-trained Functional Reward Encoding (FRE), our method allows for better handling of non-stationary rewards and provides zero-shot recall of all skills encountered during training, significantly expanding the set of skills learned in prior work. Consequently, our algorithm benefits from receiving a consistently strong diversity signal (VdW), and enjoys more stable and efficient training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating diverse skills for two robotic tasks in simulation: locomotion of a quadruped and local navigation with obstacle traversal.

Paperid: 4687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04268.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot generalization across various robots, tasks and environments remains a significant challenge in robotic manipulation. Policy code generation methods use executable code to connect high-level task descriptions and low-level action sequences, leveraging the generalization capabilities of large language models and atomic skill libraries. In this work, we propose Robotic Programmer (RoboPro), a robotic foundation model, enabling the capability of perceiving visual information and following free-form instructions to perform robotic manipulation with policy code in a zero-shot manner. To address low efficiency and high cost in collecting runtime code data for robotic tasks, we devise Video2Code to synthesize executable code from extensive videos in-the-wild with off-the-shelf vision-language model and code-domain large language model. Extensive experiments show that RoboPro achieves the state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on robotic manipulation in both simulators and real-world environments. Specifically, the zero-shot success rate of RoboPro on RLBench surpasses the state-of-the-art model GPT-4o by 11.6%, which is even comparable to a strong supervised training baseline. Furthermore, RoboPro is robust to variations on API formats and skill sets.

Paperid: 4688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03991.pdf

Abstract:
Calibration, the alignment between model confidence and prediction accuracy, is critical for the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). Existing works neglect to measure the generalization of their methods to other prompt styles and different sizes of LLMs. To address this, we define a controlled experimental setting covering 12 LLMs and four prompt styles. We additionally investigate if incorporating the response agreement of multiple LLMs and an appropriate loss function can improve calibration performance. Concretely, we build Calib-n, a novel framework that trains an auxiliary model for confidence estimation that aggregates responses from multiple LLMs to capture inter-model agreement. To optimize calibration, we integrate focal and AUC surrogate losses alongside binary cross-entropy. Experiments across four datasets demonstrate that both response agreement and focal loss improve calibration from baselines. We find that few-shot prompts are the most effective for auxiliary model-based methods, and auxiliary models demonstrate robust calibration performance across accuracy variations, outperforming LLMs' internal probabilities and verbalized confidences. These insights deepen the understanding of influence factors in LLM calibration, supporting their reliable deployment in diverse applications.

Paperid: 4689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01409.pdf

Abstract:
Emergent capabilities of image generators have led to many impactful zero- or few-shot applications. Inspired by this success, we investigate whether video generators similarly exhibit 3D-awareness. Using structure-from-motion as a 3D-aware task, we test if intermediate features of a video generator - OpenSora in our case - can support camera pose estimation. Surprisingly, at first, we only find a weak correlation between the two tasks. Deeper investigation reveals that although the video generator produces plausible video frames, the frames themselves are not truly 3D-consistent. Instead, we propose to jointly train for the two tasks, using photometric generation and 3D aware errors. Specifically, we find that SoTA video generation and camera pose estimation (i.e.,DUSt3R [79]) networks share common structures, and propose an architecture that unifies the two. The proposed unified model, named \nameMethod, produces camera pose estimates with competitive quality while producing 3D-consistent videos. In summary, we propose the first unified video generator that is 3D-consistent, generates realistic video frames, and can potentially be repurposed for other 3D-aware tasks.

Paperid: 4690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12793.pdf

Abstract:
Noisy labels threaten the robustness of few-shot learning (FSL) due to the inexact features in a new domain. CLIP, a large-scale vision-language model, performs well in FSL on image-text embedding similarities, but it is susceptible to misclassification caused by noisy labels. How to enhance domain generalization of CLIP on noisy data within FSL tasks is a critical challenge. In this paper, we provide a novel view to mitigate the influence of noisy labels, CLIP-based Robust Few-shot learning (CRoF). CRoF is a general plug-in module for CLIP-based models. To avoid misclassification and confused label embedding, we design the few-shot task-oriented prompt generator to give more discriminative descriptions of each category. The proposed prompt achieves larger distances of inter-class textual embedding. Furthermore, rather than fully trusting zero-shot classification by CLIP, we fine-tune CLIP on noisy few-shot data in a new domain with a weighting strategy like label-smooth. The weights for multiple potentially correct labels consider the relationship between CLIP's prior knowledge and original label information to ensure reliability. Our multiple label loss function further supports robust training under this paradigm. Comprehensive experiments show that CRoF, as a plug-in, outperforms fine-tuned and vanilla CLIP models on different noise types and noise ratios.

Paperid: 4691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12358.pdf

Abstract:
We present BioRAGent, an interactive web-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for biomedical question answering. The system uses large language models (LLMs) for query expansion, snippet extraction, and answer generation while maintaining transparency through citation links to the source documents and displaying generated queries for further editing. Building on our successful participation in the BioASQ 2024 challenge, we demonstrate how few-shot learning with LLMs can be effectively applied for a professional search setting. The system supports both direct short paragraph style responses and responses with inline citations. Our demo is available online, and the source code is publicly accessible through GitHub.

Paperid: 4692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11503.pdf

Abstract:
Forklifts are used extensively in various industrial settings and are in high demand for automation. In particular, counterbalance forklifts are highly versatile and employed in diverse scenarios. However, efforts to automate these processes are lacking, primarily owing to the absence of a safe and performance-verifiable development environment. This study proposes a learning system that combines a photorealistic digital learning environment with a 1/14-scale robotic forklift environment to address this challenge. Inspired by the training-based learning approach adopted by forklift operators, we employ an end-to-end vision-based deep reinforcement learning approach. The learning is conducted in a digitalized environment created from CAD data, making it safe and eliminating the need for real-world data. In addition, we safely validate the method in a physical setting utilizing a 1/14-scale robotic forklift with a configuration similar to that of a real forklift. We achieved a 60% success rate in pallet loading tasks in real experiments using a robotic forklift. Our approach demonstrates zero-shot sim2real with a simple method that does not require heuristic additions. This learning-based approach is considered a first step towards the automation of counterbalance forklifts.

Paperid: 4693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10208.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ResGen, an efficient Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ)-based generative model for high-fidelity generation with fast sampling. RVQ improves data fidelity by increasing the number of quantization steps, referred to as depth, but deeper quantization typically increases inference steps in generative models. To address this, ResGen directly predicts the vector embedding of collective tokens rather than individual ones, ensuring that inference steps remain independent of RVQ depth. Additionally, we formulate token masking and multi-token prediction within a probabilistic framework using discrete diffusion and variational inference. We validate the efficacy and generalizability of the proposed method on two challenging tasks across different modalities: conditional image generation on ImageNet 256x256 and zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that ResGen outperforms autoregressive counterparts in both tasks, delivering superior performance without compromising sampling speed. Furthermore, as we scale the depth of RVQ, our generative models exhibit enhanced generation fidelity or faster sampling speeds compared to similarly sized baseline models.

Paperid: 4694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04806.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) that are extensively trained on abundant text data, and customizing the input prompt to enable time series forecasting has received considerable attention. While recent work has shown great potential for adapting the learned prior of LLMs, the formulation of the prompt to finetune LLMs remains challenging as prompt should be aligned with time series data. Additionally, current approaches do not effectively leverage word token embeddings which embody the rich representation space learned by LLMs. This emphasizes the need for a robust approach to formulate the prompt which utilizes the word token embeddings while effectively representing the characteristics of the time series. To address these challenges, we propose NNCL-TLLM: Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning for Time series forecasting via LLMs. First, we generate time series compatible text prototypes such that each text prototype represents both word token embeddings in its neighborhood and time series characteristics via end-to-end finetuning. Next, we draw inspiration from Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning to formulate the prompt while obtaining the top-$k$ nearest neighbor time series compatible text prototypes. We then fine-tune the layer normalization and positional embeddings of the LLM, keeping the other layers intact, reducing the trainable parameters and decreasing the computational cost. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NNCL-TLLM outperforms in few-shot forecasting while achieving competitive or superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods in long-term and short-term forecasting tasks.

Paperid: 4695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04573.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical Question Answering (QA) systems enable doctors to quickly access patient information from electronic health records (EHRs). However, training these systems requires significant annotated data, which is limited due to the expertise needed and the privacy concerns associated with clinical data. This paper explores generating Clinical QA data using large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot setting. We find that naive prompting often results in easy questions that do not reflect the complexity of clinical scenarios. To address this, we propose two prompting strategies: 1) instructing the model to generate questions that do not overlap with the input context, and 2) summarizing the input record using a predefined schema to scaffold question generation. Experiments on two Clinical QA datasets demonstrate that our method generates more challenging questions, significantly improving fine-tuning performance over baselines. We compare synthetic and gold data and find a gap between their training efficacy resulting from the quality of synthetically generated answers.

Paperid: 4696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19220.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying defects and anomalies in industrial products is a critical quality control task. Traditional manual inspection methods are slow, subjective, and error-prone. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot training-free approach for automated industrial image anomaly detection using a multimodal machine learning pipeline, consisting of three foundation models. Our method first uses a large language model, i.e., GPT-3. generate text prompts describing the expected appearances of normal and abnormal products. We then use a grounding object detection model, called Grounding DINO, to locate the product in the image. Finally, we compare the cropped product image patches to the generated prompts using a zero-shot image-text matching model, called CLIP, to identify any anomalies. Our experiments on two datasets of industrial product images, namely MVTec-AD and VisA, demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, achieving high accuracy in detecting various types of defects and anomalies without the need for model training. Our proposed model enables efficient, scalable, and objective quality control in industrial manufacturing settings.

Paperid: 4697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17636.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable planning abilities across various domains, including robotics manipulation and navigation. While recent efforts in robotics have leveraged LLMs both for high-level and low-level planning, these approaches often face significant challenges, such as hallucinations in long-horizon tasks and limited adaptability due to the generation of plans in a single pass without real-time feedback. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent LLM framework, Multi-Agent Large Language Model for Manipulation (MALMM) that distributes high-level planning and low-level control code generation across specialized LLM agents, supervised by an additional agent that dynamically manages transitions. By incorporating observations from the environment after each step, our framework effectively handles intermediate failures and enables adaptive re-planning. Unlike existing methods, our approach does not rely on pre-trained skill policies or in-context learning examples and generalizes to a variety of new tasks. We evaluate our approach on nine RLBench tasks, including long-horizon tasks, and demonstrate its ability to solve robotics manipulation in a zero-shot setting, thereby overcoming key limitations of existing LLM-based manipulation methods.

Paperid: 4698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16018.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained Vision-language (VL) models, such as CLIP, have shown significant generalization ability to downstream tasks, even with minimal fine-tuning. While prompt learning has emerged as an effective strategy to adapt pre-trained VL models for downstream tasks, current approaches frequently encounter severe overfitting to specific downstream data distributions. This overfitting constrains the original behavior of the VL models to generalize to new domains or unseen classes, posing a critical challenge in enhancing the adaptability and generalization of VL models. To address this limitation, we propose Style-Pro, a novel style-guided prompt learning framework that mitigates overfitting and preserves the zero-shot generalization capabilities of CLIP. Style-Pro employs learnable style bases to synthesize diverse distribution shifts, guided by two specialized loss functions that ensure style diversity and content integrity. Then, to minimize discrepancies between unseen domains and the source domain, Style-Pro maps the unseen styles into the known style representation space as a weighted combination of style bases. Moreover, to maintain consistency between the style-shifted prompted model and the original frozen CLIP, Style-Pro introduces consistency constraints to preserve alignment in the learned embeddings, minimizing deviation during adaptation to downstream tasks. Extensive experiments across 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Style-Pro, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art methods in various settings, including base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and domain generalization.

Paperid: 4699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13934.pdf

Abstract:
Training agents that can coordinate zero-shot with humans is a key mission in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Current algorithms focus on training simulated human partner policies which are then used to train a Cooperator agent. The simulated human is produced either through behavior cloning over a dataset of human cooperation behavior, or by using MARL to create a population of simulated agents. However, these approaches often struggle to produce a Cooperator that can coordinate well with real humans, since the simulated humans fail to cover the diverse strategies and styles employed by people in the real world. We show \emph{learning a generative model of human partners} can effectively address this issue. Our model learns a latent variable representation of the human that can be regarded as encoding the human's unique strategy, intention, experience, or style. This generative model can be flexibly trained from any (human or neural policy) agent interaction data. By sampling from the latent space, we can use the generative model to produce different partners to train Cooperator agents. We evaluate our method -- \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{A}gent \textbf{M}odeling for \textbf{M}ulti-agent \textbf{A}daptation (GAMMA) -- on Overcooked, a challenging cooperative cooking game that has become a standard benchmark for zero-shot coordination. We conduct an evaluation with real human teammates, and the results show that GAMMA consistently improves performance, whether the generative model is trained on simulated populations or human datasets. Further, we propose a method for posterior sampling from the generative model that is biased towards the human data, enabling us to efficiently improve performance with only a small amount of expensive human interaction data.

Paperid: 4700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13148.pdf

Abstract:
In-hand manipulation with multi-fingered hands is a challenging problem that recently became feasible with the advent of deep reinforcement learning methods. While most contributions to the task brought improvements in robustness and generalization, this paper addresses the critical performance measure of the speed at which an in-hand manipulation can be performed. We present reinforcement learning policies that can perform in-hand reorientation significantly faster than previous approaches for the complex setting of goal-conditioned reorientation in SO(3) with permanent force closure and tactile feedback only (i.e., using the hand's torque and position sensors). Moreover, we show how policies can be trained to be speed-adjustable, allowing for setting the average orientation speed of the manipulated object during deployment. To this end, we present suitable and minimalistic reinforcement learning objectives for time-optimal and speed-adjustable in-hand manipulation, as well as an analysis based on extensive experiments in simulation. We also demonstrate the zero-shot transfer of the learned policies to the real DLR-Hand II with a wide range of target speeds and the fastest dextrous in-hand manipulation without visual inputs.

Paperid: 4701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07340.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling model sizes to scale performance has worked remarkably well for the current large language models paradigm. The research and empirical findings of various scaling studies led to novel scaling results and laws that guides subsequent research. High training costs for contemporary scales of data and models result in a lack of thorough understanding of how to tune and arrive at such training setups. One direction to ameliorate the cost of pretraining large models is to warmstart the large-scale training from smaller models that are cheaper to tune. In this work, we attempt to understand if the behavior of optimal hyperparameters can be retained under warmstarting for scaling. We explore simple operations that allow the application of theoretically motivated methods of zero-shot transfer of optimal hyperparameters using Î¼Transfer. We investigate the aspects that contribute to the speedup in convergence and the preservation of stable training dynamics under warmstarting with Î¼Transfer. We find that shrinking smaller model weights, zero-padding, and perturbing the resulting larger model with scaled initialization from Î¼P enables effective warmstarting of $\mut{}$.

Paperid: 4702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07121.pdf

Abstract:
Neural decoding, the process of understanding how brain activity corresponds to different stimuli, has been a primary objective in cognitive sciences. Over the past three decades, advancements in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and machine learning have greatly improved our ability to map visual stimuli to brain activity, especially in the visual cortex. Concurrently, research has expanded into decoding more complex processes like language and memory across the whole brain, utilizing techniques to handle greater variability and improve signal accuracy. We argue that "seeing" involves more than just mapping visual stimuli onto the visual cortex; it engages the entire brain, as various emotions and cognitive states can emerge from observing different scenes. In this paper, we develop algorithms to enhance our understanding of visual processes by incorporating whole-brain activation maps while individuals are exposed to visual stimuli. We utilize large-scale fMRI encoders and Image generative models pre-trained on large public datasets, which are then fine-tuned through Image-fMRI contrastive learning. Our models hence can decode visual experience across the entire cerebral cortex, surpassing the traditional confines of the visual cortex. We first compare our method with state-of-the-art approaches to decoding visual processing and show improved predictive semantic accuracy by 43%. A network ablation analysis suggests that beyond the visual cortex, the default mode network contributes most to decoding stimuli, in line with the proposed role of this network in sense-making and semantic processing. Additionally, we implemented zero-shot imagination decoding on an extra validation dataset, achieving a p-value of 0.0206 for mapping the reconstructed images and ground-truth text stimuli, which substantiates the model's capability to capture semantic meanings across various scenarios.

Paperid: 4703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06549.pdf

Abstract:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians have seen a large and sustained influx in patient portal messages, significantly contributing to clinician burnout. To the best of our knowledge, there are no large-scale public patient portal messages corpora researchers can use to build tools to optimize clinician portal workflows. Informed by our ongoing work with a regional hospital, this study introduces an LLM-powered framework for configurable and realistic patient portal message generation. Our approach leverages few-shot grounded text generation, requiring only a small number of de-identified patient portal messages to help LLMs better match the true style and tone of real data. Clinical experts in our team deem this framework as HIPAA-friendly, unlike existing privacy-preserving approaches to synthetic text generation which cannot guarantee all sensitive attributes will be protected. Through extensive quantitative and human evaluation, we show that our framework produces data of higher quality than comparable generation methods as well as all related datasets. We believe this work provides a path forward for (i) the release of large-scale synthetic patient message datasets that are stylistically similar to ground-truth samples and (ii) HIPAA-friendly data generation which requires minimal human de-identification efforts.

Paperid: 4704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04976.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) is a popular setting for studying the ability of reinforcement learning (RL) agents to coordinate with novel partners. Prior ZSC formulations assume the $\textit{problem setting}$ is common knowledge: each agent knows the underlying Dec-POMDP, knows others have this knowledge, and so on ad infinitum. However, this assumption rarely holds in complex real-world settings, which are often difficult to fully and correctly specify. Hence, in settings where this common knowledge assumption is invalid, agents trained using ZSC methods may not be able to coordinate well. To address this limitation, we formulate the $\textit{noisy zero-shot coordination}$ (NZSC) problem. In NZSC, agents observe different noisy versions of the ground truth Dec-POMDP, which are assumed to be distributed according to a fixed noise model. Only the distribution of ground truth Dec-POMDPs and the noise model are common knowledge. We show that a NZSC problem can be reduced to a ZSC problem by designing a meta-Dec-POMDP with an augmented state space consisting of all the ground-truth Dec-POMDPs. For solving NZSC problems, we propose a simple and flexible meta-learning method called NZSC training, in which the agents are trained across a distribution of coordination problems - which they only get to observe noisy versions of. We show that with NZSC training, RL agents can be trained to coordinate well with novel partners even when the (exact) problem setting of the coordination is not common knowledge.

Paperid: 4705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00515.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in real-world inventory management presents challenges, including dynamic environments and uncertain problem parameters, e.g. demand and lead time distributions. These challenges highlight a research gap, suggesting a need for a unifying framework to model and solve sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. We address this by exploring an underexplored area of DRL for inventory management: training generally capable agents (GCAs) under zero-shot generalization (ZSG). Here, GCAs are advanced DRL policies designed to handle a broad range of sampled problem instances with diverse inventory challenges. ZSG refers to the ability to successfully apply learned policies to unseen instances with unknown parameters without retraining. We propose a unifying Super-Markov Decision Process formulation and the Train, then Estimate and Decide (TED) framework to train and deploy a GCA tailored to inventory management applications. The TED framework consists of three phases: training a GCA on varied problem instances, continuously estimating problem parameters during deployment, and making decisions based on these estimates. Applied to periodic review inventory problems with lost sales, cyclic demand patterns, and stochastic lead times, our trained agent, the Generally Capable Lost Sales Network (GC-LSN) consistently outperforms well-known traditional policies when problem parameters are known. Moreover, under conditions where demand and/or lead time distributions are initially unknown and must be estimated, we benchmark against online learning methods that provide worst-case performance guarantees. Our GC-LSN policy, paired with the Kaplan-Meier estimator, is demonstrated to complement these methods by providing superior empirical performance.

Paperid: 4706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00257.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have been successful at many chart comprehension tasks that require attending to both the images of charts and their accompanying textual descriptions. However, it is not well established how VLM performance profiles map to human-like behaviors. If VLMs can be shown to have human-like chart comprehension abilities, they can then be applied to a broader range of tasks, such as designing and evaluating visualizations for human readers. This paper lays the foundations for such applications by evaluating the accuracy of zero-shot prompting of VLMs on graphical perception tasks with established human performance profiles. Our findings reveal that VLMs perform similarly to humans under specific task and style combinations, suggesting that they have the potential to be used for modeling human performance. Additionally, variations to the input stimuli show that VLM accuracy is sensitive to stylistic changes such as fill color and chart contiguity, even when the underlying data and data mappings are the same.

Paperid: 4707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23657.pdf

Abstract:
In the digital era, accidental exposure of sensitive information such as API keys, tokens, and credentials is a growing security threat. While most prior work focuses on detecting secrets in source code, leakage in software issue reports remains largely unexplored. This study fills that gap through a large-scale analysis and a practical detection pipeline for exposed secrets in GitHub issues. Our pipeline combines regular expression-based extraction with large language model (LLM) based contextual classification to detect real secrets and reduce false positives. We build a benchmark of 54,148 instances from public GitHub issues, including 5,881 manually verified true secrets. Using this dataset, we evaluate entropy-based baselines and keyword heuristics used by prior secret detection tools, classical machine learning, deep learning, and LLM-based methods. Regex and entropy based approaches achieve high recall but poor precision, while smaller models such as RoBERTa and CodeBERT greatly improve performance (F1 = 92.70%). Proprietary models like GPT-4o perform moderately in few-shot settings (F1 = 80.13%), and fine-tuned open-source larger LLMs such as Qwen and LLaMA reach up to 94.49% F1. Finally, we also validate our approach on 178 real-world GitHub repositories, achieving an F1-score of 81.6% which demonstrates our approach's strong ability to generalize to in-the-wild scenarios.

Paperid: 4708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19766.pdf

Abstract:
Radio-Frequency (RF)-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) rises as a promising solution for applications unamenable to techniques requiring computer visions. However, the scarcity of labeled RF data due to their non-interpretable nature poses a significant obstacle. Thanks to the recent breakthrough of foundation models (FMs), extracting deep semantic insights from unlabeled visual data become viable, yet these vision-based FMs fall short when applied to small RF datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce FM-Fi, an innovative cross-modal framework engineered to translate the knowledge of vision-based FMs for enhancing RF-based HAR systems. FM-Fi involves a novel cross-modal contrastive knowledge distillation mechanism, enabling an RF encoder to inherit the interpretative power of FMs for achieving zero-shot learning. It also employs the intrinsic capabilities of FM and RF to remove extraneous features for better alignment between the two modalities. The framework is further refined through metric-based few-shot learning techniques, aiming to boost the performance for predefined HAR tasks. Comprehensive evaluations evidently indicate that FM-Fi rivals the effectiveness of vision-based methodologies, and the evaluation results provide empirical validation of FM-Fi's generalizability across various environments.

Paperid: 4709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17525.pdf

Abstract:
In cellular mobile networks, wireless channel quality (CQ) is a crucial factor in determining communication performance and user's network experience. Accurately predicting CQ based on real environmental characteristics, specific base station configurations and user trajectories can help network operators optimize base station deployment, improving coverage and capacity. The Received Signal Reference Power (RSRP) and Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) of user equipment (UE) are key indicators of CQ in wireless communication. However, existing researches have limitations in terms of generation accuracy. Regression methods such as statistical inference and random forests fail to effectively capture the unique characteristics of wireless environments; theoretical derivations relying on specific communication protocols lack generalization capability; data-driven machine learning (ML) methods like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network often suffer from a lack of interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we propose physics-informed diffusion models, which accurately generate RSRP and SINR at UE based on the wireless environment, base station configurations, and user trajectories. The model adopts a modular and end-to-end design, employing a teacher-student framework to achieve knowledge distillation. This method integrates expert knowledge into the training of diffusion models, enhancing both the interpretability and accuracy, while also facilitating faster convergence of the model parameters. Furthermore, it allows for self-adaptation in various scenarios through few-shot learning. This approach provides valuable guidance for optimizing base station deployment, predicting user network experience, and building real-world simulators.

Paperid: 4710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16647.pdf

Abstract:
We propose GE2E-KWS -- a generalized end-to-end training and evaluation framework for customized keyword spotting. Specifically, enrollment utterances are separated and grouped by keywords from the training batch and their embedding centroids are compared to all other test utterance embeddings to compute the loss. This simulates runtime enrollment and verification stages, and improves convergence stability and training speed by optimizing matrix operations compared to SOTA triplet loss approaches. To benchmark different models reliably, we propose an evaluation process that mimics the production environment and compute metrics that directly measure keyword matching accuracy. Trained with GE2E loss, our 419KB quantized conformer model beats a 7.5GB ASR encoder by 23.6% relative AUC, and beats a same size triplet loss model by 60.7% AUC. Our KWS models are natively streamable with low memory footprints, and designed to continuously run on-device with no retraining needed for new keywords (zero-shot).

Paperid: 4711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15322.pdf

Abstract:
Mobile traffic forecasting allows operators to anticipate network dynamics and performance in advance, offering substantial potential for enhancing service quality and improving user experience. However, existing models are often task-oriented and are trained with tailored data, which limits their effectiveness in diverse mobile network tasks of Base Station (BS) deployment, resource allocation, energy optimization, etc. and hinders generalization across different urban environments. Foundation models have made remarkable strides across various domains of NLP and CV due to their multi-tasking adaption and zero/few-shot learning capabilities. In this paper, we propose an innovative Foundation model for Mo}bile traffic forecasting (FoMo), aiming to handle diverse forecasting tasks of short/long-term predictions and distribution generation across multiple cities to support network planning and optimization. FoMo combines diffusion models and transformers, where various spatio-temporal masks are proposed to enable FoMo to learn intrinsic features of different tasks, and a contrastive learning strategy is developed to capture the correlations between mobile traffic and urban contexts, thereby improving its transfer learning capability. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate that FoMo outperforms current models concerning diverse forecasting tasks and zero/few-shot learning, showcasing a strong universality.

Paperid: 4712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15199.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a zero-shot text-driven 3D shape deformation system that deforms an input 3D mesh of a manufactured object to fit an input text description. To do this, our system optimizes the parameters of a deformation model to maximize an objective function based on the widely used pre-trained vision language model CLIP. We find that CLIP-based objective functions exhibit many spurious local optima; to circumvent them, we parameterize deformations using a novel deformation model called BoxDefGraph which our system automatically computes from an input mesh, the BoxDefGraph is designed to capture the object aligned rectangular/circular geometry features of most manufactured objects. We then use the CMA-ES global optimization algorithm to maximize our objective, which we find to work better than popular gradient-based optimizers. We demonstrate that our approach produces appealing results and outperforms several baselines.

Paperid: 4713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12609.pdf

Abstract:
Inspired by the success of large language models, there is a trend toward developing graph foundation models to conduct diverse downstream tasks in various domains. However, current models often require extra fine-tuning to apply their learned structural and semantic representations to new graphs, which limits their versatility. Recent breakthroughs in zero-shot inductive reasoning on knowledge graphs (KGs), offer us a new perspective on extending KG reasoning to general graph applications. In this paper, we introduce SCR, a unified graph reasoning framework designed to train on knowledge graphs and effectively generalize across a wide range of graph tasks and domains. We begin by designing the task-specific KG structures to establish a unified topology for different task formats. Then we propose semantic-conditioned message passing, a novel mechanism addressing the inherent semantic isolation in traditional KG reasoning, by jointly modeling structural and semantic invariance patterns in graph representations. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we evaluate the inductive reasoning capability of SCR using 38 diverse graph datasets, covering node-level, link-level, and graph-level tasks across multiple domains. Our results show substantial performance gains over existing foundation models and supervised baselines, highlighting the efficacy and adaptability of our approach.

Paperid: 4714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11536.pdf

Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) aims to segment classes that are not present in the training dataset. However, most existing studies assume that the training data is fixed in advance, overlooking more practical scenarios where new datasets are continuously collected over time. To address this, we first analyze how existing OVS models perform under such conditions. In this context, we explore several approaches such as retraining, fine-tuning, and continual learning but find that each of them has clear limitations. To address these issues, we propose ConOVS, a novel continual learning method based on a Mixture-of-Experts framework. ConOVS dynamically combines expert decoders based on the probability that an input sample belongs to the distribution of each incremental dataset. Through extensive experiments, we show that ConOVS consistently outperforms existing methods across pre-training, incremental, and zero-shot test datasets, effectively expanding the recognition capabilities of OVS models when data is collected sequentially.

Paperid: 4715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10821.pdf

Abstract:
3D meshes are widely used in computer vision and graphics for their efficiency in animation and minimal memory use, playing a crucial role in movies, games, AR, and VR. However, creating temporally consistent and realistic textures for mesh sequences remains labor-intensive for professional artists. On the other hand, while video diffusion models excel at text-driven video generation, they often lack 3D geometry awareness and struggle with achieving multi-view consistent texturing for 3D meshes. In this work, we present Tex4D, a zero-shot approach that integrates inherent 3D geometry knowledge from mesh sequences with the expressiveness of video diffusion models to produce multi-view and temporally consistent 4D textures. Given an untextured mesh sequence and a text prompt as inputs, our method enhances multi-view consistency by synchronizing the diffusion process across different views through latent aggregation in the UV space. To ensure temporal consistency, we leverage prior knowledge from a conditional video generation model for texture synthesis. However, straightforwardly combining the video diffusion model and the UV texture aggregation leads to blurry results. We analyze the underlying causes and propose a simple yet effective modification to the DDIM sampling process to address this issue. Additionally, we introduce a reference latent texture to strengthen the correlation between frames during the denoising process. To the best of our knowledge, Tex4D is the first method specifically designed for 4D scene texturing. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority in producing multi-view and multi-frame consistent videos based on untextured mesh sequences.

Paperid: 4716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09487.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate household electricity short-term load forecasting (STLF) is key to future and sustainable energy systems. While various studies have analyzed statistical, machine learning, or deep learning approaches for household electricity STLF, recently proposed time series foundation models such as Chronos, TimesFM, or LagLlama have not yet been considered for household electricity STLF. These models are trained on a vast amount of time series data and are able to forecast time series without explicit task-specific training (zero-shot learning). In this study, we benchmark the forecasting capabilities of time series foundation models compared to Trained-from-Scratch (TFS) Transformer-based approaches. Our results suggest that foundation models perform comparably to TFS Transformer models, while the TimesFM foundation model outperforms all TFS models when the input size increases. At the same time, they require less effort, as they need no domain-specific training and only limited contextual data for inference.

Paperid: 4717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00630.pdf

Abstract:
Volumetric modeling and neural radiance field representations have revolutionized 3D face capture and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, these methods often require hundreds of multi-view input images and are thus inapplicable to cases with less than a handful of inputs. We present a novel volumetric prior on human faces that allows for high-fidelity expressive face modeling from as few as three input views captured in the wild. Our key insight is that an implicit prior trained on synthetic data alone can generalize to extremely challenging real-world identities and expressions and render novel views with fine idiosyncratic details like wrinkles and eyelashes. We leverage a 3D Morphable Face Model to synthesize a large training set, rendering each identity with different expressions, hair, clothing, and other assets. We then train a conditional Neural Radiance Field prior on this synthetic dataset and, at inference time, fine-tune the model on a very sparse set of real images of a single subject. On average, the fine-tuning requires only three inputs to cross the synthetic-to-real domain gap. The resulting personalized 3D model reconstructs strong idiosyncratic facial expressions and outperforms the state-of-the-art in high-quality novel view synthesis of faces from sparse inputs in terms of perceptual and photo-metric quality.

Paperid: 4718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19210.pdf

Abstract:
Advancements in open-source pre-trained backbones make it relatively easy to fine-tune a model for new tasks. However, this lowered entry barrier poses potential risks, e.g., bad actors developing models for harmful applications. A question arises: Is possible to develop a pre-trained model that is difficult to fine-tune for certain downstream tasks? To begin studying this, we focus on few-shot classification (FSC). Specifically, we investigate methods to make FSC more challenging for a set of restricted classes while maintaining the performance of other classes. We propose to meta-learn over the pre-trained backbone in a manner that renders it a ''poor initialization''. Our proposed Learning to Obstruct (LTO) algorithm successfully obstructs four FSC methods across three datasets, including ImageNet and CIFAR100 for image classification, as well as CelebA for attribute classification.

Paperid: 4719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18053.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel autonomous driving framework, DualAD, designed to imitate human reasoning during driving. DualAD comprises two layers: a rule-based motion planner at the bottom layer that handles routine driving tasks requiring minimal reasoning, and an upper layer featuring a rule-based text encoder that converts driving scenarios from absolute states into text description. This text is then processed by a large language model (LLM) to make driving decisions. The upper layer intervenes in the bottom layer's decisions when potential danger is detected, mimicking human reasoning in critical situations. Closed-loop experiments demonstrate that DualAD, using a zero-shot pre-trained model, significantly outperforms rule-based motion planners that lack reasoning abilities. Our experiments also highlight the effectiveness of the text encoder, which considerably enhances the model's scenario understanding. Additionally, the integrated DualAD model improves with stronger LLMs, indicating the framework's potential for further enhancement. Code and benchmarks are available at github.com/TUM-AVS/DualAD.

Paperid: 4720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17510.pdf

Abstract:
Although modern imaging technologies allow us to study connectivity between two distinct brain regions in-vivo, an in-depth understanding of how anatomical structure supports brain function and how spontaneous functional fluctuations emerge remarkable cognition is still elusive. Meanwhile, tremendous efforts have been made in the realm of machine learning to establish the nonlinear mapping between neuroimaging data and phenotypic traits. However, the absence of neuroscience insight in the current approaches poses significant challenges in understanding cognitive behavior from transient neural activities. To address this challenge, we put the spotlight on the coupling mechanism of structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) by formulating such network neuroscience question into an expressive graph representation learning problem for high-order topology. Specifically, we introduce the concept of topological detour to characterize how a ubiquitous instance of FC (direct link) is supported by neural pathways (detour) physically wired by SC, which forms a cyclic loop interacted by brain structure and function. In the clichÃ© of machine learning, the multi-hop detour pathway underlying SC-FC coupling allows us to devise a novel multi-head self-attention mechanism within Transformer to capture multi-modal feature representation from paired graphs of SC and FC. Taken together, we propose a biological-inspired deep model, coined as NeuroPath, to find putative connectomic feature representations from the unprecedented amount of neuroimages, which can be plugged into various downstream applications such as task recognition and disease diagnosis. We have evaluated NeuroPath on large-scale public datasets including HCP and UK Biobank under supervised and zero-shot learning, where the state-of-the-art performance by our NeuroPath indicates great potential in network neuroscience.

Paperid: 4721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14852.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Traffic Sign Recognition is paramount in modern transportation systems, motivating several research endeavors to focus on performance improvement by utilizing large-scale datasets. As the appearance of traffic signs varies across countries, curating large-scale datasets is often impractical; and requires efficient models that can produce satisfactory performance using limited data. In this connection, we present 'FUSED-Net', built-upon Faster RCNN for traffic sign detection, enhanced by Unfrozen Parameters, Pseudo-Support Sets, Embedding Normalization, and Domain Adaptation while reducing data requirement. Unlike traditional approaches, we keep all parameters unfrozen during training, enabling FUSED-Net to learn from limited samples. The generation of a Pseudo-Support Set through data augmentation further enhances performance by compensating for the scarcity of target domain data. Additionally, Embedding Normalization is incorporated to reduce intra-class variance, standardizing feature representation. Domain Adaptation, achieved by pre-training on a diverse traffic sign dataset distinct from the target domain, improves model generalization. Evaluating FUSED-Net on the BDTSD dataset, we achieved 2.4x, 2.2x, 1.5x, and 1.3x improvements of mAP in 1-shot, 3-shot, 5-shot, and 10-shot scenarios, respectively compared to the state-of-the-art Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) models. Additionally, we outperform state-of-the-art works on the cross-domain FSOD benchmark under several scenarios.

Paperid: 4722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13228.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot adaptation is an important capability for intelligent robots that perform tasks in open-world settings such as everyday environments or flexible production. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for non-prehensile manipulation which incrementally adapts a physics-based dynamics model for model-predictive control (MPC). The model prediction is aligned with a few examples of robot-object interactions collected with the MPC. This is achieved by using a parallelizable rigid-body physics simulation as dynamic world model and sampling-based optimization of the model parameters. In turn, the optimized dynamics model can be used for MPC using efficient sampling-based optimization. We evaluate our few-shot adaptation approach in object pushing experiments in simulation and with a real robot.

Paperid: 4723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08589.pdf

Abstract:
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is crucial for bioacoustic research, enabling non-invasive species tracking and biodiversity monitoring. Citizen science platforms provide large annotated datasets from focal recordings, where the target species is intentionally recorded. However, PAM requires monitoring in passive soundscapes, creating a domain shift between focal and passive recordings, challenging deep learning models trained on focal recordings. To address domain generalization, we leverage supervised contrastive learning by enforcing domain invariance across same-class examples from different domains. Additionally, we propose ProtoCLR, an alternative to SupCon loss which reduces the computational complexity by comparing examples to class prototypes instead of pairwise comparisons. We conduct few-shot classification based on BIRB, a large-scale bird sound benchmark to assess pre-trained bioacoustic models. Our findings suggest that ProtoCLR is a better alternative to SupCon.

Paperid: 4724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04779.pdf

Abstract:
Solving Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations (SPDEs) poses computational challenges arising from the rapid transitions in their solutions within thin regions. The effectiveness of deep learning in addressing differential equations motivates us to employ these methods for solving SPDEs. In this manuscript, we introduce Component Fourier Neural Operator (ComFNO), an innovative operator learning method that builds upon Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), while simultaneously incorporating valuable prior knowledge obtained from asymptotic analysis. Our approach is not limited to FNO and can be applied to other neural network frameworks, such as Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), leading to potential similar SPDEs solvers. Experimental results across diverse classes of SPDEs demonstrate that ComFNO significantly improves accuracy compared to vanilla FNO. Furthermore, ComFNO exhibits natural adaptability to diverse data distributions and performs well in few-shot scenarios, showcasing its excellent generalization ability in practical situations.

Paperid: 4725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04760.pdf

Abstract:
The trend of employing training-free methods for point cloud recognition is becoming increasingly popular due to its significant reduction in computational resources and time costs. However, existing approaches are limited as they typically extract either geometric or semantic features. To address this limitation, we are the first to propose a novel training-free method that integrates both geometric and semantic features. For the geometric branch, we adopt a non-parametric strategy to extract geometric features. In the semantic branch, we leverage a model aligned with text features to obtain semantic features. Additionally, we introduce the GFE module to complement the geometric information of point clouds and the MFF module to improve performance in few-shot settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art training-free approaches on mainstream benchmark datasets, including ModelNet and ScanObiectNN.

Paperid: 4726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03662.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are two common strategies for improving the performance of modern large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. Despite their different natures, these strategies often lead to comparable performance gains. However, little is known about whether they induce similar representations inside LLMs. We approach this problem by analyzing the probability landscape of their hidden representations in the two cases. More specifically, we compare how LLMs solve the same question-answering task, finding that ICL and SFT create very different internal structures, in both cases undergoing a sharp transition in the middle of the network. In the first half of the network, ICL shapes interpretable representations hierarchically organized according to their semantic content. In contrast, the probability landscape obtained with SFT is fuzzier and semantically mixed. In the second half of the model, the fine-tuned representations develop probability modes that better encode the identity of answers, while the landscape of ICL representations is characterized by less defined peaks. Our approach reveals the diverse computational strategies developed inside LLMs to solve the same task across different conditions, allowing us to make a step towards designing optimal methods to extract information from language models.

Paperid: 4727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03521.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has established new baselines in image classification across multiple domains. We examine whether their multimodal reasoning can also address a challenge mastered by human experts. Specifically, we test whether VLMs can classify the style, author and creation date of paintings, a domain traditionally mastered by art historians. Artworks pose a unique challenge compared to natural images due to their inherently complex and diverse structures, characterized by variable compositions and styles. This requires a contextual and stylistic interpretation rather than straightforward object recognition. Art historians have long studied the unique aspects of artworks, with style prediction being a crucial component of their discipline. This paper investigates whether large VLMs, which integrate visual and textual data, can effectively reason about the historical and stylistic attributes of paintings. We present the first study of its kind, conducting an in-depth analysis of three VLMs, namely CLIP, LLaVA, and GPT-4o, evaluating their zero-shot classification of art style, author and time period. Using two image benchmarks of artworks, we assess the models' ability to interpret style, evaluate their sensitivity to prompts, and examine failure cases. Additionally, we focus on how these models compare to human art historical expertise by analyzing misclassifications, providing insights into their reasoning and classification patterns.

Paperid: 4728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20355.pdf

Abstract:
Scene graphs provide structured abstractions for scene understanding, yet they often overfit to spurious correlations, severely hindering out-of-distribution generalization. To address this limitation, we propose CURVE, a causality-inspired framework that integrates variational uncertainty modeling with uncertainty-guided structural regularization to suppress high-variance, environment-specific relations. Specifically, we apply prototype-conditioned debiasing to disentangle invariant interaction dynamics from environment-dependent variations, promoting a sparse and domain-stable topology. Empirically, we evaluate CURVE in zero-shot transfer and low-data sim-to-real adaptation, verifying its ability to learn domain-stable sparse topologies and provide reliable uncertainty estimates to support risk prediction under distribution shifts.

Paperid: 4729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20227.pdf

Abstract:
Inferring physical fields from sparse observations while strictly satisfying partial differential equations (PDEs) is a fundamental challenge in computational physics. Recently, deep generative models offer powerful data-driven priors for such inverse problems, yet existing methods struggle to enforce hard physical constraints without costly retraining or disrupting the learned generative prior. Consequently, there is a critical need for a sampling mechanism that can reconcile strict physical consistency and observational fidelity with the statistical structure of the pre-trained prior. To this end, we present ProFlow, a proximal guidance framework for zero-shot physics-consistent sampling, defined as inferring solutions from sparse observations using a fixed generative prior without task-specific retraining. The algorithm employs a rigorous two-step scheme that alternates between: (\romannumeral1) a terminal optimization step, which projects the flow prediction onto the intersection of the physically and observationally consistent sets via proximal minimization; and (\romannumeral2) an interpolation step, which maps the refined state back to the generative trajectory to maintain consistency with the learned flow probability path. This procedure admits a Bayesian interpretation as a sequence of local maximum a posteriori (MAP) updates. Comprehensive benchmarks on Poisson, Helmholtz, Darcy, and viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that ProFlow achieves superior physical and observational consistency, as well as more accurate distributional statistics, compared to state-of-the-art diffusion- and flow-based baselines.

Paperid: 4730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15351.pdf

Abstract:
We present OmniSpectra, the first native-resolution foundation model for astronomy spectra. Unlike traditional models, which are limited to fixed-length input sizes or configurations, OmniSpectra handles spectra of any length at their original size, without resampling or interpolation. Despite the large-scale spectroscopic data from diverse surveys fueling the rapid growth of astronomy, existing foundation models are limited to a fixed wavelength range and specific instruments. OmniSpectra is the first foundation model to learn simultaneously from multiple real-world spectra surveys with different configurations at a large scale. We achieve this by designing a novel architecture with adaptive patching across variable lengths, sinusoidal global wavelength encoding, local positional embeddings through depthwise convolution, and validity-aware self-attention masks. Allowing us to learn multi-scale spatial patterns while skipping attention for invalid patches. Even with a limited training example, OmniSpectra demonstrates excellent zero-shot generalization compared to methods tailored for specific tasks. This transfer learning capability makes this model the state-of-the-art across various astronomy tasks, including source classification, redshift estimation, and properties prediction for stars and galaxies. OmniSpectra reduces the need for training individual models for different tasks from scratch, establishing itself as the next-generation astronomy foundation model.

Paperid: 4731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13097.pdf

Abstract:
We present RM-RF, a lightweight reward model for run-free evaluation of automatically generated unit tests. Instead of repeatedly compiling and executing candidate tests, RM-RF predicts - from source and test code alone - three execution-derived signals: (1) whether the augmented test suite compiles and runs successfully, (2) whether the generated test cases increase code coverage, and (3) whether the generated test cases improve the mutation kill rate. To train and evaluate RM-RF we assemble a multilingual dataset (Java, Python, Go) of focal files, test files, and candidate test additions labeled by an execution-based pipeline, and we release an associated dataset and methodology for comparative evaluation. We tested multiple model families and tuning regimes (zero-shot, full fine-tuning, and PEFT via LoRA), achieving an average F1 of 0.69 across the three targets. Compared to conventional compile-and-run instruments, RM-RF provides substantially lower latency and infrastructure cost while delivering competitive predictive fidelity, enabling fast, scalable feedback for large-scale test generation and RL-based code optimization.

Paperid: 4732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11910.pdf

Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to develop the capability to detect anything. Although myriads of large-scale pre-training efforts have built versatile foundation models that exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities to facilitate OVOD, the necessity of creating a universal understanding for any object cognition according to already pretrained foundation models is usually overlooked. Therefore, in this paper, a training-free Guess What Vision Language Model, called GW-VLM, is proposed to form a universal understanding paradigm based on our carefully designed Multi-Scale Visual Language Searching (MS-VLS) coupled with Contextual Concept Prompt (CCP) for OVOD. This approach can engage a pre-trained Vision Language Model (VLM) and a Large Language Model (LLM) in the game of "guess what". Wherein, MS-VLS leverages multi-scale visual-language soft-alignment for VLM to generate snippets from the results of class-agnostic object detection, while CCP can form the concept of flow referring to MS-VLS and then make LLM understand snippets for OVOD. Finally, the extensive experiments are carried out on natural and remote sensing datasets, including COCO val, Pascal VOC, DIOR, and NWPU-10, and the results indicate that our proposed GW-VLM can achieve superior OVOD performance compared to the-state-of-the-art methods without any training step.

Paperid: 4733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11578.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying and articulating limitations is essential for transparent and rigorous scientific research. However, zero-shot large language models (LLMs) approach often produce superficial or general limitation statements (e.g., dataset bias or generalizability). They usually repeat limitations reported by authors without looking at deeper methodological issues and contextual gaps. This problem is made worse because many authors disclose only partial or trivial limitations. We propose LimAgents, a multi-agent LLM framework for generating substantive limitations. LimAgents integrates OpenReview comments and author-stated limitations to provide stronger ground truth. It also uses cited and citing papers to capture broader contextual weaknesses. In this setup, different agents have specific roles as sequential role: some extract explicit limitations, others analyze methodological gaps, some simulate the viewpoint of a peer reviewer, and a citation agent places the work within the larger body of literature. A Judge agent refines their outputs, and a Master agent consolidates them into a clear set. This structure allows for systematic identification of explicit, implicit, peer review-focused, and literature-informed limitations. Moreover, traditional NLP metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity rely heavily on n-gram or embedding overlap. They often overlook semantically similar limitations. To address this, we introduce a pointwise evaluation protocol that uses an LLM-as-a-Judge to measure coverage more accurately. Experiments show that LimAgents substantially improve performance. The RAG + multi-agent GPT-4o mini configuration achieves a +15.51% coverage gain over zero-shot baselines, while the Llama 3 8B multi-agent setup yields a +4.41% improvement.

Paperid: 4734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08519.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) receives significant attention from the public to perform classification continuously with a few training samples, which suffers from the key catastrophic forgetting problem. Existing methods usually employ an external memory to store previous knowledge and treat it with incremental classes equally, which cannot properly preserve previous essential knowledge. To solve this problem and inspired by recent distillation works on knowledge transfer, we propose a framework termed \textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{D}ataset \textbf{D}istillation (\textbf{CD$^2$}) to facilitate FSCIL, which includes a dataset distillation module (\textbf{DDM}) and a distillation constraint module~(\textbf{DCM}). Specifically, the DDM synthesizes highly condensed samples guided by the classifier, forcing the model to learn compacted essential class-related clues from a few incremental samples. The DCM introduces a designed loss to constrain the previously learned class distribution, which can preserve distilled knowledge more sufficiently. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show the superiority of our method against other state-of-the-art competitors.

Paperid: 4735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00930.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating recommender systems remains challenging due to the gap between offline metrics and real user behavior, as well as the scarcity of interaction data. Recent work explores large language model (LLM) agents as synthetic users, yet they typically rely on few-shot prompting, which yields a shallow understanding of the environment and limits their ability to faithfully reproduce user actions. We introduce AlignUSER, a framework that learns world-model-driven agents from human interactions. Given rollout sequences of actions and states, we formalize world modeling as a next state prediction task that helps the agent internalize the environment. To align actions with human personas, we generate counterfactual trajectories around demonstrations and prompt the LLM to compare its decisions with human choices, identify suboptimal actions, and extract lessons. The learned policy is then used to drive agent interactions with the recommender system. We evaluate AlignUSER across multiple datasets and demonstrate closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at the micro and macro levels.

Paperid: 4736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21818.pdf

Abstract:
Agentic AI and Multi-Agent Systems are poised to dominate industry and society imminently. Powered by goal-driven autonomy, they represent a powerful form of generative AI, marking a transition from reactive content generation into proactive multitasking capabilities. As an exemplar, we propose an architecture of a multi-agent system for the implementation phase of the software engineering process. We also present a comprehensive threat model for the proposed system. We demonstrate that while such systems can generate code quite accurately, they are vulnerable to attacks, including code injection. Due to their autonomous design and lack of humans in the loop, these systems cannot identify and respond to attacks by themselves. This paper analyzes the vulnerability of multi-agent systems and concludes that the coder-reviewer-tester architecture is more resilient than both the coder and coder-tester architectures, but is less efficient at writing code. We find that by adding a security analysis agent, we mitigate the loss in efficiency while achieving even better resiliency. We conclude by demonstrating that the security analysis agent is vulnerable to advanced code injection attacks, showing that embedding poisonous few-shot examples in the injected code can increase the attack success rate from 0% to 71.95%.

Paperid: 4737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18850.pdf

Abstract:
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) can reduce interaction cost for autonomous driving by learning a predictive world model, but it typically still depends on task-specific rewards that are difficult to design and often brittle under distribution shift. This paper presents InDRiVE, a DreamerV3-style MBRL agent that performs reward-free pretraining in CARLA using only intrinsic motivation derived from latent ensemble disagreement. Disagreement acts as a proxy for epistemic uncertainty and drives the agent toward under-explored driving situations, while an imagination-based actor-critic learns a planner-free exploration policy directly from the learned world model. After intrinsic pretraining, we evaluate zero-shot transfer by freezing all parameters and deploying the pretrained exploration policy in unseen towns and routes. We then study few-shot adaptation by training a task policy with limited extrinsic feedback for downstream objectives (lane following and collision avoidance). Experiments in CARLA across towns, routes, and traffic densities show that disagreement-based pretraining yields stronger zero-shot robustness and robust few-shot collision avoidance under town shift and matched interaction budgets, supporting the use of intrinsic disagreement as a practical reward-free pretraining signal for reusable driving world models.

Paperid: 4738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18352.pdf

Abstract:
Early Rumor Detection (EARD) aims to identify the earliest point at which a claim can be accurately classified based on a sequence of social media posts. This is especially challenging in data-scarce settings. While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in few-shot NLP tasks, they are not well-suited for time-series data and are computationally expensive for both training and inference. In this work, we propose a novel EARD framework that combines an autonomous agent and an LLM-based detection model, where the agent acts as a reliable decision-maker for \textit{early time point determination}, while the LLM serves as a powerful \textit{rumor detector}. This approach offers the first solution for few-shot EARD, necessitating only the training of a lightweight agent and allowing the LLM to remain training-free. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show our approach boosts performance across LLMs and surpasses existing EARD methods in accuracy and earliness.

Paperid: 4739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17815.pdf

Abstract:
Motivation: The clinical efficacy of antibody therapeutics critically depends on high-affinity target engagement, yet laboratory affinity-maturation campaigns are slow and costly. In computational settings, most protein language models (PLMs) are not trained to favor high-affinity antibodies, and existing preference optimization approaches introduce substantial computational overhead without clear affinity gains. Therefore, this work proposes SimBinder-IF, which converts the inverse folding model ESM-IF into an antibody sequence generator by freezing its structure encoder and training only its decoder to prefer experimentally stronger binders through preference optimization. Results: On the 11-assay AbBiBench benchmark, SimBinder-IF achieves a 55 percent relative improvement in mean Spearman correlation between log-likelihood scores and experimentally measured binding affinity compared to vanilla ESM-IF (from 0.264 to 0.410). In zero-shot generalization across four unseen antigen-antibody complexes, the correlation improves by 156 percent (from 0.115 to 0.294). SimBinder-IF also outperforms baselines in top-10 precision for ten-fold or greater affinity improvements. A case study redesigning antibody F045-092 for A/California/04/2009 (pdmH1N1) shows that SimBinder-IF proposes variants with substantially lower predicted binding free energy changes than ESM-IF (mean Delta Delta G -75.16 vs -46.57). Notably, SimBinder-IF trains only about 18 percent of the parameters of the full ESM-IF model, highlighting its parameter efficiency for high-affinity antibody generation.

Paperid: 4740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15635.pdf

Abstract:
We propose \textbf{IC-Effect}, an instruction-guided, DiT-based framework for few-shot video VFX editing that synthesizes complex effects (\eg flames, particles and cartoon characters) while strictly preserving spatial and temporal consistency. Video VFX editing is highly challenging because injected effects must blend seamlessly with the background, the background must remain entirely unchanged, and effect patterns must be learned efficiently from limited paired data. However, existing video editing models fail to satisfy these requirements. IC-Effect leverages the source video as clean contextual conditions, exploiting the contextual learning capability of DiT models to achieve precise background preservation and natural effect injection. A two-stage training strategy, consisting of general editing adaptation followed by effect-specific learning via Effect-LoRA, ensures strong instruction following and robust effect modeling. To further improve efficiency, we introduce spatiotemporal sparse tokenization, enabling high fidelity with substantially reduced computation. We also release a paired VFX editing dataset spanning $15$ high-quality visual styles. Extensive experiments show that IC-Effect delivers high-quality, controllable, and temporally consistent VFX editing, opening new possibilities for video creation.

Paperid: 4741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14542.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion-based technologies have made significant strides, particularly in identity-preserved portrait generation (IPG). However, when using multiple reference images from the same ID, existing methods typically produce lower-fidelity portraits and struggle to customize face attributes precisely. To address these issues, this paper presents HiFi-Portrait, a high-fidelity method for zero-shot portrait generation. Specifically, we first introduce the face refiner and landmark generator to obtain fine-grained multi-face features and 3D-aware face landmarks. The landmarks include the reference ID and the target attributes. Then, we design HiFi-Net to fuse multi-face features and align them with landmarks, which improves ID fidelity and face control. In addition, we devise an automated pipeline to construct an ID-based dataset for training HiFi-Portrait. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the SOTA approaches in face similarity and controllability. Furthermore, our method is also compatible with previous SDXL-based works.

Paperid: 4742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14092.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: Detailed surgical recognition is critical for advancing AI-assisted surgery, yet progress is hampered by high annotation costs, data scarcity, and a lack of interpretable models. While scene graphs offer a structured abstraction of surgical events, their full potential remains untapped. In this work, we introduce ProtoFlow, a novel framework that learns dynamic scene graph prototypes to model complex surgical workflows in an interpretable and robust manner. Methods: ProtoFlow leverages a graph neural network (GNN) encoder-decoder architecture that combines self-supervised pretraining for rich representation learning with a prototype-based fine-tuning stage. This process discovers and refines core prototypes that encapsulate recurring, clinically meaningful patterns of surgical interaction, forming an explainable foundation for workflow analysis. Results: We evaluate our approach on the fine-grained CAT-SG dataset. ProtoFlow not only outperforms standard GNN baselines in overall accuracy but also demonstrates exceptional robustness in limited-data, few-shot scenarios, maintaining strong performance when trained on as few as one surgical video. Our qualitative analyses further show that the learned prototypes successfully identify distinct surgical sub-techniques and provide clear, interpretable insights into workflow deviations and rare complications. Conclusion: By uniting robust representation learning with inherent explainability, ProtoFlow represents a significant step toward developing more transparent, reliable, and data-efficient AI systems, accelerating their potential for clinical adoption in surgical training, real-time decision support, and workflow optimization.

Paperid: 4743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14048.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong generative capabilities and have shown great potential in code generation. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods enhance model reasoning by eliciting intermediate steps, but suffer from two major limitations: First, their uniform application tends to induce overthinking on simple tasks. Second, they lack intention abstraction in code generation, such as explicitly modeling core algorithmic design and efficiency, leading models to focus on surface-level structures while neglecting the global problem objective. Inspired by the cognitive economy principle of engaging structured reasoning only when necessary to conserve cognitive resources, we propose RoutingGen, a novel difficulty-aware routing framework that dynamically adapts prompting strategies for code generation. For simple tasks, it adopts few-shot prompting; for more complex ones, it invokes a structured reasoning strategy, termed Intention Chain-of-Thought (ICoT), which we introduce to guide the model in capturing task intention, such as the core algorithmic logic and its time complexity. Experiments across three models and six standard code generation benchmarks show that RoutingGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in most settings, while reducing total token usage by 46.37% on average across settings. Furthermore, ICoT outperforms six existing prompting baselines on challenging benchmarks.

Paperid: 4744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11837.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) leverages vast unannotated medical datasets, yet steep technical barriers limit adoption by clinical researchers. We introduce Vision Foundry, a code-free, HIPAA-compliant platform that democratizes pre-training, adaptation, and deployment of foundational vision models. The system integrates the DINO-MX framework, abstracting distributed infrastructure complexities while implementing specialized strategies like Magnification-Aware Distillation (MAD) and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). We validate the platform across domains, including neuropathology segmentation, lung cellularity estimation, and coronary calcium scoring. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained via Vision Foundry significantly outperform generic baselines in segmentation fidelity and regression accuracy, while exhibiting robust zero-shot generalization across imaging protocols. By bridging the gap between advanced representation learning and practical application, Vision Foundry enables domain experts to develop state-of-the-art clinical AI tools with minimal annotation overhead, shifting focus from engineering optimization to clinical discovery.

Paperid: 4745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05419.pdf

Abstract:
Existing data-driven methods rely on the extraction of static features from time series to approximate the material removal rate (MRR) of semiconductor manufacturing processes such as chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). However, this leads to a loss of temporal dynamics. Moreover, these methods require a large amount of data for effective training. In this paper, we propose TS-Hint, a Time Series Foundation Model (TSFM) framework, integrated with chain-of-thought reasoning which provides attention hints during training based on attention mechanism data and saliency data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in limited data settings via few-shot learning and can learn directly from multivariate time series features.

Paperid: 4746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04599.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting illicit visual content demands more than image-level NSFW flags; moderators must also know what objects make an image illegal and where those objects occur. We introduce a zero-shot pipeline that simultaneously (i) detects if an image contains harmful content, (ii) identifies each critical element involved, and (iii) localizes those elements with pixel-accurate masks - all in one pass. The system first applies foundation segmentation model (SAM) to generate candidate object masks and refines them into larger independent regions. Each region is scored for malicious relevance by a vision-language model using open-vocabulary prompts; these scores weight a fusion step that produces a consolidated malicious object map. An ensemble across multiple segmenters hardens the pipeline against adaptive attacks that target any single segmentation method. Evaluated on a newly-annotated 790-image dataset spanning drug, sexual, violent and extremist content, our method attains 85.8% element-level recall, 78.1% precision and a 92.1% segment-success rate - exceeding direct zero-shot VLM localization by 27.4% recall at comparable precision. Against PGD adversarial perturbations crafted to break SAM and VLM, our method's precision and recall decreased by no more than 10%, demonstrating high robustness against attacks. The full pipeline processes an image in seconds, plugs seamlessly into existing VLM workflows, and constitutes the first practical tool for fine-grained, explainable malicious-image moderation.

Paperid: 4747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00039.pdf

Abstract:
Building on advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), we can tackle complex analytical and mathematical reasoning tasks requiring nuanced contextual understanding. A prime example of such complex tasks is modelling resource allocation optimization in networks, which extends beyond translating natural language inputs into mathematical equations or Linear Programming (LP), Integer Linear Programming (ILP), and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models. However, existing benchmarks and datasets cannot address the complexities of such problems with dynamic environments, interdependent variables, and heterogeneous constraints. To address this gap, we introduce NL4RA, a curated dataset comprising 50 resource allocation optimization problems formulated as LP, ILP, and MILP. We then evaluate the performance of well-known open-source LLMs with varying parameter counts. To enhance existing LLM based methods, we introduce LM4Opt RA, a multi candidate framework that applies diverse prompting strategies such as direct, few shot, and chain of thought, combined with a structured ranking mechanism to improve accuracy. We identified discrepancies between human judgments and automated scoring such as ROUGE, BLEU, or BERT scores. However, human evaluation is time-consuming and requires specialized expertise, making it impractical for a fully automated end-to-end framework. To quantify the difference between LLM-generated responses and ground truth, we introduce LLM-Assisted Mathematical Evaluation (LAME), an automated metric designed for mathematical formulations. Using LM4Opt-RA, Llama-3.1-70B achieved a LAME score of 0.8007, outperforming other models by a significant margin, followed closely by Llama-3.1-8B. While baseline LLMs demonstrate considerable promise, they still lag behind human expertise; our proposed method surpasses these baselines regarding LAME and other metrics.

Paperid: 4748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22674.pdf

Abstract:
Inspired by recent advances in large language models, foundation models have been developed for zero-shot time series forecasting, enabling prediction on datasets unseen during pretraining. These large-scale models, trained on vast collections of time series, learn generalizable representations for both point and probabilistic forecasting, reducing the need for task-specific architectures and manual tuning. In this work, we review the main architectures, pretraining strategies, and optimization methods used in such models, and study the effect of fine-tuning after pretraining to enhance their performance on specific datasets. Our empirical results show that fine-tuning generally improves zero-shot forecasting capabilities, especially for long-term horizons.

Paperid: 4749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19953.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate nuclear instance segmentation is a pivotal task in computational pathology, supporting data-driven clinical insights and facilitating downstream translational applications. While large vision foundation models have shown promise for zero-shot biomedical segmentation, most existing approaches still depend on dense supervision and computationally expensive fine-tuning. Consequently, training-free methods present a compelling research direction, yet remain largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce SPROUT, a fully training- and annotation-free prompting framework for nuclear instance segmentation. SPROUT leverages histology-informed priors to construct slide-specific reference prototypes that mitigate domain gaps. These prototypes progressively guide feature alignment through a partial optimal transport scheme. The resulting foreground and background features are transformed into positive and negative point prompts, enabling the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to produce precise nuclear delineations without any parameter updates. Extensive experiments across multiple histopathology benchmarks demonstrate that SPROUT achieves competitive performance without supervision or retraining, establishing a novel paradigm for scalable, training-free nuclear instance segmentation in pathology.

Paperid: 4750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19856.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in aligning and generating content across text and image modalities. However, the potential of using non-visual, continuous sequential, as a conditioning signal for high-fidelity image generation remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, existing methods that convert series into "pseudo-images" for temporal forecasting fail to establish semantic-level alignment. In this paper, we propose TimeArtist, a temporal-visual conversion framework that pioneers semantic-level alignment between time series fluctuations and visual concepts. It pioneers a "warmup-align" paradigm: first, a dual-autoencoder and shared quantizer are self-supervised trained on large-scale datasets to learn modality-shared representations. Then, the encoders and quantizer are frozen, and a projection is introduced to align temporal and visual samples at the representation level. TimeArtist establishes a versatile cross-modal framework, enabling high-quality, diverse image generation directly from time series, while capturing temporal fluctuation patterns to render images as styles transfer. Extensive experiments show that TimeArtist achieves satisfactory performance in image generation metrics, while also attaining superior results in zero-shot temporal tasks. Our work establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal generation, bridging the gap between temporal dynamics and visual semantics.

Paperid: 4751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18537.pdf

Abstract:
Existing video deraining methods are often trained on paired datasets, either synthetic, which limits their ability to generalize to real-world rain, or captured by static cameras, which restricts their effectiveness in dynamic scenes with background and camera motion. Furthermore, recent works in fine-tuning diffusion models have shown promising results, but the fine-tuning tends to weaken the generative prior, limiting generalization to unseen cases. In this paper, we introduce the first zero-shot video deraining method for complex dynamic scenes that does not require synthetic data nor model fine-tuning, by leveraging a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model that demonstrates strong generalization capabilities. By inverting an input video into the latent space of diffusion models, its reconstruction process can be intervened and pushed away from the model's concept of rain using negative prompting. At the core of our approach is an attention switching mechanism that we found is crucial for maintaining dynamic backgrounds as well as structural consistency between the input and the derained video, mitigating artifacts introduced by naive negative prompting. Our approach is validated through extensive experiments on real-world rain datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods and showcasing robust generalization without the need for supervised training.

Paperid: 4752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18039.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric structure of their loss landscapes concerning harmful content, regardless of the fine-tuning method employed. This suggests that safety behaviors are not erased but shifted to less influential regions of the parameter space. Building on this insight, we propose a curvature-aware alignment restoration method that leverages influence functions and second-order optimization to selectively increase loss on harmful inputs while preserving task performance. By navigating the shared geometry between base and fine-tuned models, our method discourages unsafe outputs while preserving task-relevant performance, avoiding full reversion and enabling precise, low-impact updates. Extensive evaluations across multiple model families and adversarial settings show that our approach efficiently reduces harmful responses while maintaining or even improving utility and few-shot learning performance.

Paperid: 4753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16743.pdf

Abstract:
Improving the safety of vision-language models like CLIP via fine-tuning often comes at a steep price, causing significant drops in their generalization performance. We find this trade-off stems from rigid alignment strategies that force unsafe concepts toward single, predefined safe targets, disrupting the model's learned semantic structure. To address this, we propose a proximity-aware approach: redirecting unsafe concepts to their semantically closest safe alternatives to minimize representational change. We introduce SaFeR-CLIP, a fine-tuning framework that applies this principle of minimal intervention. SaFeR-CLIP successfully reconciles safety and performance, recovering up to 8.0% in zero-shot accuracy over prior methods while maintaining robust safety. To support more rigorous evaluation, we also contribute NSFW-Caps, a new benchmark of 1,000 highly-aligned pairs for testing safety under distributional shift. Our work shows that respecting the geometry of pretrained representations is key to achieving safety without sacrificing performance.

Paperid: 4754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14010.pdf

Abstract:
Post-disaster reconnaissance reports contain critical evidence for understanding multi-hazard interactions, yet their unstructured narratives make systematic knowledge transfer difficult. Large language models (LLMs) offer new potential for analyzing these reports, but often generate unreliable or hallucinated outputs when domain grounding is absent. This study introduces the Mixture-of-Retrieval Agentic RAG (MoRA-RAG), a knowledge-grounded LLM framework that transforms reconnaissance reports into a structured foundation for multi-hazard reasoning. The framework integrates a Mixture-of-Retrieval mechanism that dynamically routes queries across hazard-specific databases while using agentic chunking to preserve contextual coherence during retrieval. It also includes a verification loop that assesses evidence sufficiency, refines queries, and initiates targeted searches when information remains incomplete. We construct HazardRecQA by deriving question-answer pairs from GEER reconnaissance reports, which document 90 global events across seven major hazard types. MoRA-RAG achieves up to 94.5 percent accuracy, outperforming zero-shot LLMs by 30 percent and state-of-the-art RAG systems by 10 percent, while reducing hallucinations across diverse LLM architectures. MoRA-RAG also enables open-weight LLMs to achieve performance comparable to proprietary models. It establishes a new paradigm for transforming post-disaster documentation into actionable, trustworthy intelligence for hazard resilience.

Paperid: 4755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12935.pdf

Abstract:
We propose PFAvatar (Pose-Fusion Avatar), a new method that reconstructs high-quality 3D avatars from ``Outfit of the Day'' (OOTD) photos, which exhibit diverse poses, occlusions, and complex backgrounds. Our method consists of two stages: (1) fine-tuning a pose-aware diffusion model from few-shot OOTD examples and (2) distilling a 3D avatar represented by a neural radiance field (NeRF). In the first stage, unlike previous methods that segment images into assets (e.g., garments, accessories) for 3D assembly, which is prone to inconsistency, we avoid decomposition and directly model the full-body appearance. By integrating a pre-trained ControlNet for pose estimation and a novel Condition Prior Preservation Loss (CPPL), our method enables end-to-end learning of fine details while mitigating language drift in few-shot training. Our method completes personalization in just 5 minutes, achieving a 48$\times$ speed-up compared to previous approaches. In the second stage, we introduce a NeRF-based avatar representation optimized by canonical SMPL-X space sampling and Multi-Resolution 3D-SDS. Compared to mesh-based representations that suffer from resolution-dependent discretization and erroneous occluded geometry, our continuous radiance field can preserve high-frequency textures (e.g., hair) and handle occlusions correctly through transmittance. Experiments demonstrate that PFAvatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction fidelity, detail preservation, and robustness to occlusions/truncations, advancing practical 3D avatar generation from real-world OOTD albums. In addition, the reconstructed 3D avatar supports downstream applications such as virtual try-on, animation, and human video reenactment, further demonstrating the versatility and practical value of our approach.

Paperid: 4756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11700.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches for few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation typically require a two-stage learning process, i.e., a pre-training stage followed by a few-shot training stage. While effective, these methods face overreliance on pre-training, which hinders model flexibility and adaptability. Some models tried to avoid pre-training yet failed to capture ample information. In addition, current approaches focus on visual information in the support set and neglect or do not fully exploit other useful data, such as textual annotations. This inadequate utilization of support information impairs the performance of the model and restricts its zero-shot ability. To address these limitations, we present a novel pre-training-free network, named Efficient Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for Few- and Zero-shot scenarios. Our EPSegFZ incorporates three key components. A Prototype-Enhanced Registers Attention (ProERA) module and a Dual Relative Positional Encoding (DRPE)-based cross-attention mechanism for improved feature extraction and accurate query-prototype correspondence construction without pre-training. A Language-Guided Prototype Embedding (LGPE) module that effectively leverages textual information from the support set to improve few-shot performance and enable zero-shot inference. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 5.68% and 3.82% on the S3DIS and ScanNet benchmarks, respectively.

Paperid: 4757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07941.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a promising direction in computational pathology, the substantial computational cost of giga-pixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) necessitates the use of Multi-Instance Learning (MIL) to enable effective modeling. A key challenge is that pathological tasks typically provide only bag-level labels, while instance-level descriptions generated by LLMs often suffer from bias due to a lack of fine-grained medical knowledge. To address this, we propose that constructing task-specific pathological entity prototypes is crucial for learning generalizable features and enhancing model interpretability. Furthermore, existing vision-language MIL methods often employ unidirectional guidance, limiting cross-modal synergy. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, Multimodal Prototype-based Multi-Instance Learning, that promotes bidirectional interaction through a balanced information compression scheme. Specifically, we leverage a frozen LLM to generate task-specific pathological entity descriptions, which are learned as text prototypes. Concurrently, the vision branch learns instance-level prototypes to mitigate the model's reliance on redundant data. For the fusion stage, we employ the Stereoscopic Optimal Transport (SOT) algorithm, which is based on a similarity metric, thereby facilitating broader semantic alignment in a higher-dimensional space. We conduct few-shot classification and explainability experiments on three distinct cancer datasets, and the results demonstrate the superior generalization capabilities of our proposed method.

Paperid: 4758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05791.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic grasping is a fundamental capability for autonomous manipulation; however, most existing methods rely on large-scale expert annotations and necessitate retraining to handle new objects. We present VLAD-Grasp, a Vision-Language model Assisted zero-shot approach for Detecting grasps. From a single RGB-D image, our method (1) prompts a large vision-language model to generate a goal image where a straight rod "impales" the object, representing an antipodal grasp, (2) predicts depth and segmentation to lift this generated image into 3D, and (3) aligns generated and observed object point clouds via principal component analysis and correspondence-free optimization to recover an executable grasp pose. Unlike prior work, our approach is training-free and does not rely on curated grasp datasets. Despite this, VLAD-Grasp achieves performance that is competitive with or superior to that of state-of-the-art supervised models on the Cornell and Jacquard datasets. We further demonstrate zero-shot generalization to novel real-world objects on a Franka Research 3 robot, highlighting vision-language foundation models as powerful priors for robotic manipulation.

Paperid: 4759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00592.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic code optimization remains a difficult challenge, particularly for complex loop nests on modern hardware. This paper investigates a novel approach to code optimization where Large Language Models (LLMs) guide the process through a closed-loop interaction with a compiler. We present ComPilot, an experimental framework that leverages off-the-shelf LLMs, without any task-specific fine-tuning, as interactive optimization agents. ComPilot establishes a feedback loop where an LLM proposes transformations for a given loop nest to a compiler. The compiler attempts the transformations, reporting back legality status and measured speedup or slowdown. The LLM utilizes this concrete feedback to iteratively refine its optimization strategy. Our extensive evaluation across the PolyBench benchmark suite demonstrates the effectiveness of this zero-shot approach. ComPilot achieves geometric mean speedups of 2.66x (single run) and 3.54x (best-of-5 runs) over the original code. Furthermore, ComPilot demonstrates competitive performance against the state-of-the-art Pluto polyhedral optimizer, outperforming it in many cases. This experimental study demonstrates that general-purpose LLMs can effectively guide the code optimization process when grounded by compiler feedback, opening promising research directions for agentic AI in code optimization.

Paperid: 4760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27545.pdf

Abstract:
Implicit policies parameterized by generative models, such as Diffusion Policy, have become the standard for policy learning and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotics. However, these approaches often suffer from high computational cost, exposure bias, and unstable inference dynamics, which lead to divergence under distribution shifts. Energy-Based Models (EBMs) address these issues by learning energy landscapes end-to-end and modeling equilibrium dynamics, offering improved robustness and reduced exposure bias. Yet, policies parameterized by EBMs have historically struggled to scale effectively. Recent work on Energy-Based Transformers (EBTs) demonstrates the scalability of EBMs to high-dimensional spaces, but their potential for solving core challenges in physically embodied models remains underexplored. We introduce a new energy-based architecture, EBT-Policy, that solves core issues in robotic and real-world settings. Across simulated and real-world tasks, EBT-Policy consistently outperforms diffusion-based policies, while requiring less training and inference computation. Remarkably, on some tasks it converges within just two inference steps, a 50x reduction compared to Diffusion Policy's 100. Moreover, EBT-Policy exhibits emergent capabilities not seen in prior models, such as zero-shot recovery from failed action sequences using only behavior cloning and without explicit retry training. By leveraging its scalar energy for uncertainty-aware inference and dynamic compute allocation, EBT-Policy offers a promising path toward robust, generalizable robot behavior under distribution shifts.

Paperid: 4761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26238.pdf

Abstract:
Millions of people take surveys every day, from market polls and academic studies to medical questionnaires and customer feedback forms. These datasets capture valuable insights, but their scale and structure present a unique challenge for large language models (LLMs), which otherwise excel at few-shot reasoning over open-ended text. Yet, their ability to process questionnaire data or lists of questions crossed with hundreds of respondent rows remains underexplored. Current retrieval and survey analysis tools (e.g., Qualtrics, SPSS, REDCap) are typically designed for humans in the workflow, limiting such data integration with LLM and AI-empowered automation. This gap leaves scientists, surveyors, and everyday users without evidence-based guidance on how to best represent questionnaires for LLM consumption. We address this by introducing QASU (Questionnaire Analysis and Structural Understanding), a benchmark that probes six structural skills, including answer lookup, respondent count, and multi-hop inference, across six serialization formats and multiple prompt strategies. Experiments on contemporary LLMs show that choosing an effective format and prompt combination can improve accuracy by up to 8.8% points compared to suboptimal formats. For specific tasks, carefully adding a lightweight structural hint through self-augmented prompting can yield further improvements of 3-4% points on average. By systematically isolating format and prompting effects, our open source benchmark offers a simple yet versatile foundation for advancing both research and real-world practice in LLM-based questionnaire analysis.

Paperid: 4762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25303.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal sarcasm detection is challenging, especially in low-resource settings where subtle image-text contradictions are hard to learn due to scarce annotated data, which hinders the model's performance. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like adapters, LoRA, and prompt tuning reduce overfitting but struggle to reach optimal performance due to limited supervision from few-shot data. We propose PEKD, a unified framework that enhances PEFT methods via distillation from an expert model trained on large-scale sarcasm data, which acts as the teacher. To mitigate unreliable signals from the teacher, we introduce an entropy-aware gating mechanism that dynamically adjusts the distillation strength based on teacher confidence. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our PEKD framework enables PEFT methods to outperform both prior parameter-efficient approaches and large multimodal models, achieving strong results in the few-shot scenario. The framework is modular and adaptable to a wide range of multimodal models and tasks.

Paperid: 4763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22868.pdf

Abstract:
Wind turbine blades operate in harsh environments, making timely damage detection essential for preventing failures and optimizing maintenance. Drone-based inspection and deep learning are promising, but typically depend on large, labeled datasets, which limit their ability to detect rare or evolving damage types. To address this, we propose a zero-shot-oriented inspection framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Vision-Language Models (VLM). A multimodal knowledge base is constructed, comprising technical documentation, representative reference images, and domain-specific guidelines. A hybrid text-image retriever with keyword-aware reranking assembles the most relevant context to condition the VLM at inference, injecting domain knowledge without task-specific training. We evaluate the framework on 30 labeled blade images covering diverse damage categories. Although the dataset is small due to the difficulty of acquiring verified blade imagery, it covers multiple representative defect types. On this test set, the RAG-grounded VLM correctly classified all samples, whereas the same VLM without retrieval performed worse in both accuracy and precision. We further compare against open-vocabulary baselines and incorporate uncertainty Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals to account for the small-sample setting. Ablation studies indicate that the key advantage of the framework lies in explainability and generalizability: retrieved references ground the reasoning process and enable the detection of previously unseen defects by leveraging domain knowledge rather than relying solely on visual cues. This research contributes a data-efficient solution for industrial inspection that reduces dependence on extensive labeled datasets.

Paperid: 4764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20151.pdf

Abstract:
As structured texts become increasingly complex across diverse domains -- from technical reports to generative AI prompts -- the need for text segmentation into semantically meaningful components becomes critical. Such texts often contain elements beyond plain language, including tables, code snippets, and placeholders, which conventional sentence- or paragraph-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. To address this challenge, we propose BoundRL, a novel and efficient approach that jointly performs token-level text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. Instead of generating complete contents for each segment, it generates only a sequence of starting tokens and reconstructs the complete contents by locating these tokens within the original texts, thereby reducing inference costs by orders of magnitude and minimizing hallucination. To adapt the model for the output format, BoundRL~performs reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) with a specifically designed reward that jointly optimizes document reconstruction fidelity and semantic alignment. To mitigate entropy collapse, it further constructs intermediate candidates by systematically perturbing a fraction of generated sequences of segments to create stepping stones toward higher-quality solutions. To demonstrate BoundRL's effectiveness on particularly challenging structured texts, we focus evaluation on complex prompts used for LLM applications. Experiments show that BoundRL enables small language models (1.7B parameters) to outperform few-shot prompting of much larger models. Moreover, RLVR with our designed reward yields significant improvements over supervised fine-tuning, and incorporating intermediate candidates further improves both performance and generalization.

Paperid: 4765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16095.pdf

Abstract:
Creating high-quality clinical Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) is crucial for explainable medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) while constrained by data scarcity. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can synthesize medical data, their clinical reliability remains unverified. This study evaluates the reliability of LLM-generated CoTs and investigates prompting strategies to enhance their quality. In a blinded comparative study, senior clinicians in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) evaluated CoTs generated via three distinct strategies: Zero-shot, Random Few-shot (using shallow examples), and Selective Few-shot (using diverse, high-quality examples). These expert ratings were compared against evaluations from a state-of-the-art AI model (GPT-4o). The Selective Few-shot strategy significantly outperformed other strategies across all human evaluation metrics (p < .001). Critically, the Random Few-shot strategy offered no significant improvement over the Zero-shot baseline, demonstrating that low-quality examples are as ineffective as no examples. The success of the Selective strategy is attributed to two principles: "Gold-Standard Depth" (reasoning quality) and "Representative Diversity" (generalization). Notably, the AI evaluator failed to discern these critical performance differences. The clinical reliability of synthetic CoTs is dictated by strategic prompt curation, not the mere presence of examples. We propose a "Dual Principles" framework as a foundational methodology to generate trustworthy data at scale. This work offers a validated solution to the data bottleneck and confirms the indispensable role of human expertise in evaluating high-stakes clinical AI.

Paperid: 4766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14115.pdf

Abstract:
Scenario simulation is central to testing autonomous driving systems. Scenic, a domain-specific language (DSL) for CARLA, enables precise and reproducible scenarios, but NL-to-Scenic generation with large language models (LLMs) suffers from scarce data, limited reproducibility, and inconsistent metrics. We introduce NL2Scenic, an open dataset and framework with 146 NL/Scenic pairs, a difficulty-stratified 30-case test split, an Example Retriever, and 14 prompting variants (ZS, FS, CoT, SP, MoT). We evaluate 13 models: four proprietary (GPT-4o, GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4, Gemini-2.5-pro) and nine open-source code models (Qwen2.5Coder 0.5B-32B; CodeLlama 7B/13B/34B), using text metrics (BLEU, ChrF, EDIT-SIM, CrystalBLEU) and execution metrics (compilation and generation), and compare them with an expert study (n=11). EDIT-SIM correlates best with human judgments; we also propose EDIT-COMP (F1 of EDIT-SIM and compilation) as a robust dataset-level proxy that improves ranking fidelity. GPT-4o performs best overall, while Qwen2.5Coder-14B reaches about 88 percent of its expert score on local hardware. Retrieval-augmented prompting, Few-Shot with Example Retriever (FSER), consistently boosts smaller models, and scaling shows diminishing returns beyond mid-size, with Qwen2.5Coder outperforming CodeLlama at comparable scales. NL2Scenic and EDIT-COMP offer a standardized, reproducible basis for evaluating Scenic code generation and indicate that mid-size open-source models are practical, cost-effective options for autonomous-driving scenario programming.

Paperid: 4767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12915.pdf

Abstract:
Critical thinking represents a fundamental competency in today's education landscape. Developing critical thinking skills through timely assessment and feedback is crucial; however, there has not been extensive work in the learning analytics community on defining, measuring, and supporting critical thinking. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of measuring core "subskills" that underlie critical thinking. We ground our work in an authentic task where students operationalize critical thinking: student-written argumentative essays. We developed a coding rubric based on an established skills progression and completed human coding for a corpus of student essays. We then evaluated three distinct approaches to automated scoring: zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and supervised fine-tuning, implemented across three large language models (GPT-5, GPT-5-mini, and ModernBERT). GPT-5 with few-shot prompting achieved the strongest results and demonstrated particular strength on subskills with separable, frequent categories, while lower performance was observed for subskills that required detection of subtle distinctions or rare categories. Our results underscore critical trade-offs in automated critical thinking assessment: proprietary models offer superior reliability at higher cost, while open-source alternatives provide practical accuracy with reduced sensitivity to minority categories. Our work represents an initial step toward scalable assessment of higher-order reasoning skills across authentic educational contexts.

Paperid: 4768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11160.pdf

Abstract:
Distance-based unsupervised text classification is a method within text classification that leverages the semantic similarity between a label and a text to determine label relevance. This method provides numerous benefits, including fast inference and adaptability to expanding label sets, as opposed to zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned neural networks that require re-training in such cases. In multi-label distance-based classification and information retrieval algorithms, thresholds are required to determine whether a text instance is "similar" to a label or query. Similarity between a text and label is determined in a dense embedding space, usually generated by state-of-the-art sentence encoders. Multi-label classification complicates matters, as a text instance can have multiple true labels, unlike in multi-class or binary classification, where each instance is assigned only one label. We expand upon previous literature on this underexplored topic by thoroughly examining and evaluating the ability of sentence encoders to perform distance-based classification. First, we perform an exploratory study to verify whether the semantic relationships between texts and labels vary across models, datasets, and label sets by conducting experiments on a diverse collection of realistic multi-label text classification (MLTC) datasets. We find that similarity distributions show statistically significant differences across models, datasets and even label sets. We propose a novel method for optimizing label-specific thresholds using a validation set. Our label-specific thresholding method achieves an average improvement of 46% over normalized 0.5 thresholding and outperforms uniform thresholding approaches from previous work by an average of 14%. Additionally, the method demonstrates strong performance even with limited labeled examples.

Paperid: 4769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04268.pdf

Abstract:
Children learn to speak with a low amount of data and can be taught new words on a few-shot basis, making them particularly data-efficient learners. The BabyLM challenge aims at exploring language model (LM) training in the low-data regime but uses metrics that concentrate on the head of the word distribution. Here, we introduce LongTail-Swap (LT-Swap), a benchmark that focuses on the tail of the distribution, i.e., measures the ability of LMs to learn new words with very little exposure, like infants do. LT-Swap is a pretraining corpus-specific test set of acceptable versus unacceptable sentence pairs that isolate semantic and syntactic usage of rare words. Models are evaluated in a zero-shot fashion by computing the average log probabilities over the two members of each pair. We built two such test sets associated with the 10M words and 100M words BabyLM training sets, respectively, and evaluated 16 models from the BabyLM leaderboard. Our results not only highlight the poor performance of language models on rare words but also reveal that performance differences across LM architectures are much more pronounced in the long tail than in the head. This offers new insights into which architectures are better at handling rare word generalization. We've also made the code publicly avail

Paperid: 4770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03762.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Among the various prompting techniques, few-shot prompting has gained considerable attention for its practicality and effectiveness. This study investigates how few-shot prompting strategies impact the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task, particularly focusing on the biases introduced by imbalanced sample distributions. We use the GLOSSGPT prompting method, an advanced approach for English WSD, to test its effectiveness across five languages: English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian. Our results show that imbalanced few-shot examples can cause incorrect sense predictions in multilingual languages, but this issue does not appear in English. To assess model behavior, we evaluate both the GPT-4o and LLaMA-3.1-70B models and the results highlight the sensitivity of multilingual WSD to sample distribution in few-shot settings, emphasizing the need for balanced and representative prompting strategies.

Paperid: 4771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03577.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents our participation in the EvalLLM 2025 challenge on biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and health event extraction in French (few-shot setting). For NER, we propose three approaches combining large language models (LLMs), annotation guidelines, synthetic data, and post-processing: (1) in-context learning (ICL) with GPT-4.1, incorporating automatic selection of 10 examples and a summary of the annotation guidelines into the prompt, (2) the universal NER system GLiNER, fine-tuned on a synthetic corpus and then verified by an LLM in post-processing, and (3) the open LLM LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, fine-tuned on the same synthetic corpus. Event extraction uses the same ICL strategy with GPT-4.1, reusing the guideline summary in the prompt. Results show GPT-4.1 leads with a macro-F1 of 61.53% for NER and 15.02% for event extraction, highlighting the importance of well-crafted prompting to maximize performance in very low-resource scenarios.

Paperid: 4772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02350.pdf

Abstract:
Converting natural language questions into SQL queries enables non-expert users to interact with relational databases and has long been a central task for natural language interfaces to data. While the WikiSQL dataset played a key role in early text-to-SQL research, its usage has declined due to structural and annotation issues, including case sensitivity inconsistencies, data type mismatches, syntax errors, and unanswered questions. We present LLMSQL, a systematic revision and transformation of WikiSQL designed for the large language model era. We classify these errors and implement automated methods for cleaning and re-annotation. To assess the impact of these improvements, we evaluated multiple large language models, including Gemma 3, LLaMA 3.2, Mistral 7B, gpt-oss 20B, Phi-3.5 Mini, Qwen 2.5, OpenAI o4-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and others. Notably, DeepSeek-R1 achieves 88.40% accuracy in a zero-shot setting, and models under 10B parameters surpass 90% accuracy after fine-tuning. Rather than serving as an update, LLMSQL is introduced as an LLM-ready benchmark. Unlike the original WikiSQL, which was tailored for pointer-network models selecting tokens from input, LLMSQL provides clean natural language questions and full SQL queries as plain text, enabling straightforward generation and evaluation for modern natural-language-to-SQL models.

Paperid: 4773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01165.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, but their effectiveness often depends on the quality of the provided context. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enriches prompts with external information, but its reliance on static databases constrains adaptability and can result in irrelevant demonstrations. In this work, we propose a Generative Retrieval-Aligned Demonstrator (GRAD), a dynamic demonstration-based approach where an LLM model is trained to generate input-specific concise demonstrations. By tailoring demonstrations to each input, our method offers better contextual support than traditional RAG approaches. We demonstrate the superiority of GRAD under budget constraints, where we limit both the number of tokens used per demonstration and the number of tokens used for the final output. Trained solely on a math dataset, GRAD consistently outperforms strong baselines on Qwen2.5-14B across mathematical reasoning and advanced STEM questions, highlighting GRAD's robust generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) domains such as physics, chemistry, and computer science. Furthermore, we show that demonstrations generated by trained smaller models can effectively guide larger target models, reducing training costs while maintaining competitive accuracy. Overall, this work introduces a scalable demonstration generator model presenting the first step toward a dynamic few-shot learning paradigm in resource-constrained settings. We release the code used for the project.

Paperid: 4774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00883.pdf

Abstract:
In this work we introduce GreenLightningAI (GLAI), a new architectural block designed as an alternative to conventional MLPs. The central idea is to separate two types of knowledge that are usually entangled during training: (i) *structural knowledge*, encoded by the stable activation patterns induced by ReLU activations; and (ii) *quantitative knowledge*, carried by the numerical weights and biases. By fixing the structure once stabilized, GLAI reformulates the MLP as a combination of paths, where only the quantitative component is optimized. This reformulation retains the universal approximation capabilities of MLPs, yet achieves a more efficient training process, reducing training time by ~40% on average across the cases examined in this study. Crucially, GLAI is not just another classifier, but a generic block that can replace MLPs wherever they are used, from supervised heads with frozen backbones to projection layers in self-supervised learning or few-shot classifiers. Across diverse experimental setups, GLAI consistently matches or exceeds the accuracy of MLPs with an equivalent number of parameters, while converging faster. Overall, GLAI establishes a new design principle that opens a direction for future integration into large-scale architectures such as Transformers, where MLP blocks dominate the computational footprint.

Paperid: 4775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00809.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have shown promising zero-shot generalization across diverse forecasting tasks. However, their robustness to continual adaptation remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate the extent to which TSFMs suffer from catastrophic forgetting when fine-tuned sequentially on multiple datasets. Using synthetic datasets designed with varying degrees of periodic structure, we measure the trade-off between adaptation to new data and retention of prior knowledge. Our experiments reveal that, while fine-tuning improves performance on new tasks, it often causes significant degradation on previously learned ones, illustrating a fundamental stability-plasticity dilemma.

Paperid: 4776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00797.pdf

Abstract:
Building facades represent a significant untapped resource for solar energy generation in dense urban environments, yet assessing their photovoltaic (PV) potential remains challenging due to complex geometries and semantic com ponents. This study introduces SF-SPA (Semantic Facade Solar-PV Assessment), an automated framework that transforms street-view photographs into quantitative PV deployment assessments. The approach combines com puter vision and artificial intelligence techniques to address three key challenges: perspective distortion correction, semantic understanding of facade elements, and spatial reasoning for PV layout optimization. Our four-stage pipeline processes images through geometric rectification, zero-shot semantic segmentation, Large Language Model (LLM) guided spatial reasoning, and energy simulation. Validation across 80 buildings in four countries demonstrates ro bust performance with mean area estimation errors of 6.2% ± 2.8% compared to expert annotations. The auto mated assessment requires approximately 100 seconds per building, a substantial gain in efficiency over manual methods. Simulated energy yield predictions confirm the method's reliability and applicability for regional poten tial studies, urban energy planning, and building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) deployment. Code is available at: https:github.com/CodeAXu/Solar-PV-Installation

Paperid: 4777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00742.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation Models are designed to serve as versatile embedding machines, with strong zero shot capabilities and superior generalization performance when fine-tuned on diverse downstream tasks. While this is largely true for language and vision foundation models, we argue that the inherent diversity of time series data makes them less suited for building effective foundation models. We demonstrate this using forecasting as our downstream task. We show that the zero-shot capabilities of a time series foundation model are significantly influenced and tied to the specific domains it has been pretrained on. Furthermore, when applied to unseen real-world time series data, fine-tuned foundation models do not consistently yield substantially better results, relative to their increased parameter count and memory footprint, than smaller, dedicated models tailored to the specific forecasting task at hand.

Paperid: 4778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26330.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images that preserve the visual content of a reference image while incorporating user-specified textual modifications. Training-free zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) approaches, which require no task-specific training or labeled data, are highly desirable, yet accurately capturing user intent remains challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE, a novel two-stage training-free framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance ZS-CIR. In the Semantic Query-Augmented Fusion (SQAF) stage, we enrich the query embedding derived from a vision-language model (VLM) such as CLIP with MLLM-generated captions of the target image. These captions provide high-level semantic guidance, enabling the query to better capture the user's intent and improve global retrieval quality. In the Efficient Batch Reranking (EBR) stage, top-ranked candidates are presented as an image grid with visual marks to the MLLM, which performs joint visual-semantic reasoning across all candidates. Our reranking strategy operates in a single pass and yields more accurate rankings. Experiments show that SQUARE, with its simplicity and effectiveness, delivers strong performance on four standard CIR benchmarks. Notably, it maintains high performance even with lightweight pre-trained, demonstrating its potential applicability.

Paperid: 4779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25194.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models -- large language models (LLMs) in particular -- have become ubiquitous, shaping daily life and driving breakthroughs across science, engineering, and technology. Harnessing their broad cross-domain knowledge, text-processing, and reasoning abilities for software development, e.g., numerical libraries for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), is therefore attracting growing interest. Yet existing studies mainly automate case setup and execution for end users. We introduce LLM-PDEveloper, a zero-shot, multi-agent LLM framework that automates code development for PDE libraries, specifically targeting secondary developers. By translating mathematical and algorithmic descriptions directly into source code, LLM-PDEveloper generates new solvers/modules and adapts existing ones. This end-to-end math-to-code approach enables a self-augmenting pipeline that continuously expands the codebase of a library, extends its capacities, and broadens its scope. We demonstrate LLM-PDEveloper on three tasks: 1) build a solver for a new PDE, 2) implement new BCs for a given PDE, and 3) modify an existing solver to incorporate additional terms, achieving moderate success rates. Failures due to syntactic errors made by LLMs are analyzed and we propose effective fixes. We also identify the mechanisms underlying certain semantic errors, guiding future research.

Paperid: 4780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24956.pdf

Abstract:
Generative robot policies such as Flow Matching offer flexible, multi-modal policy learning but are sample-inefficient. Although object-centric policies improve sample efficiency, it does not resolve this limitation. In this work, we propose Multi-Stream Generative Policy (MSG), an inference-time composition framework that trains multiple object-centric policies and combines them at inference to improve generalization and sample efficiency. MSG is model-agnostic and inference-only, hence widely applicable to various generative policies and training paradigms. We perform extensive experiments both in simulation and on a real robot, demonstrating that our approach learns high-quality generative policies from as few as five demonstrations, resulting in a 95% reduction in demonstrations, and improves policy performance by 89 percent compared to single-stream approaches. Furthermore, we present comprehensive ablation studies on various composition strategies and provide practical recommendations for deployment. Finally, MSG enables zero-shot object instance transfer. We make our code publicly available at https://msg.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Paperid: 4781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24908.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to summarize long documents succinctly is increasingly important in daily life due to information overload, yet there is a notable lack of such summaries for Spanish documents in general, and in the legal domain in particular. In this work, we present BOE-XSUM, a curated dataset comprising 3,648 concise, plain-language summaries of documents sourced from Spain's ``Bolet\'Ä±n Oficial del Estado'' (BOE), the State Official Gazette. Each entry in the dataset includes a short summary, the original text, and its document type label. We evaluate the performance of medium-sized large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on BOE-XSUM, comparing them to general-purpose generative models in a zero-shot setting. Results show that fine-tuned models significantly outperform their non-specialized counterparts. Notably, the best-performing model -- BERTIN GPT-J 6B (32-bit precision) -- achieves a 24\% performance gain over the top zero-shot model, DeepSeek-R1 (accuracies of 41.6\% vs.\ 33.5\%).

Paperid: 4782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24547.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Continual Event Detection (FCED) poses the dual challenges of learning from limited data and mitigating catastrophic forgetting across sequential tasks. Existing approaches often suffer from severe forgetting due to the full fine-tuning of a shared base model, which leads to knowledge interference between tasks. Moreover, they frequently rely on data augmentation strategies that can introduce unnatural or semantically distorted inputs. To address these limitations, we propose LEAF, a novel and robust expert-based framework for FCED. LEAF integrates a specialized mixture of experts architecture into the base model, where each expert is parameterized with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) matrices. A semantic-aware expert selection mechanism dynamically routes instances to the most relevant experts, enabling expert specialization and reducing knowledge interference. To improve generalization in limited-data settings, LEAF incorporates a contrastive learning objective guided by label descriptions, which capture high-level semantic information about event types. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting on the memory buffer, our framework employs a knowledge distillation strategy that transfers knowledge from previous models to the current one. Extensive experiments on multiple FCED benchmarks demonstrate that LEAF consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 4783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24134.pdf

Abstract:
We present AstroCo, a Conformer-style encoder for irregular stellar light curves. By combining attention with depthwise convolutions and gating, AstroCo captures both global dependencies and local features. On MACHO R-band, AstroCo outperforms Astromer v1 and v2, yielding 70 percent and 61 percent lower error respectively and a relative macro-F1 gain of about 7 percent, while producing embeddings that transfer effectively to few-shot classification. These results highlight AstroCo's potential as a strong and label-efficient foundation for time-domain astronomy.

Paperid: 4784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22727.pdf

Abstract:
Dialect speech embodies rich cultural and linguistic diversity, yet building text-to-speech (TTS) systems for dialects remains challenging due to scarce data, inconsistent orthographies, and complex phonetic variation. To address these issues, we present DiaMoE-TTS, a unified IPA-based framework that standardizes phonetic representations and resolves grapheme-to-phoneme ambiguities. Built upon the F5-TTS architecture, the system introduces a dialect-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to model phonological differences and employs parameter-efficient adaptation with Low-Rank Adaptors (LoRA) and Conditioning Adapters for rapid transfer to new dialects. Unlike approaches dependent on large-scale or proprietary resources, DiaMoE-TTS enables scalable, open-data-driven synthesis. Experiments demonstrate natural and expressive speech generation, achieving zero-shot performance on unseen dialects and specialized domains such as Peking Opera with only a few hours of data.

Paperid: 4785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21981.pdf

Abstract:
Effective real-world multi-agent collaboration requires not only accurate planning but also the ability to reason about collaborators' intents -- a crucial capability for avoiding miscoordination and redundant communication under partial observable environments. Due to their strong planning and reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising autonomous agents for collaborative task solving. However, existing collaboration frameworks for LLMs overlook their reasoning potential for dynamic intent inference, and thus produce inconsistent plans and redundant communication, reducing collaboration efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose CoBel-World, a novel framework that equips LLM agents with a collaborative belief world -- an internal representation jointly modeling the physical environment and collaborators' mental states. CoBel-World enables agents to parse open-world task knowledge into structured beliefs via a symbolic belief language, and perform zero-shot Bayesian-style belief updates through LLM reasoning. This allows agents to proactively detect potential miscoordination (e.g., conflicting plans) and communicate adaptively. Evaluated on challenging embodied benchmarks (i.e., TDW-MAT and C-WAH), CoBel-World significantly reduces communication costs by 22-60% and improves task completion efficiency by 4-28% compared to the strongest baseline. Our results show that explicit, intent-aware belief modeling is essential for efficient and human-like collaboration in LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Paperid: 4786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21690.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid table tennis (TT) demands rapid perception, proactive whole-body motion, and agile footwork under strict timing -- capabilities that remain difficult for unified controllers. We propose a reinforcement learning framework that maps ball-position observations directly to whole-body joint commands for both arm striking and leg locomotion, strengthened by predictive signals and dense, physics-guided rewards. A lightweight learned predictor, fed with recent ball positions, estimates future ball states and augments the policy's observations for proactive decision-making. During training, a physics-based predictor supplies precise future states to construct dense, informative rewards that lead to effective exploration. The resulting policy attains strong performance across varied serve ranges (hit rate $\geq$ 96% and success rate $\geq$ 92%) in simulations. Ablation studies confirm that both the learned predictor and the predictive reward design are critical for end-to-end learning. Deployed zero-shot on a physical Booster T1 humanoid with 23 revolute joints, the policy produces coordinated lateral and forward-backward footwork with accurate, fast returns, suggesting a practical path toward versatile, competitive humanoid TT.

Paperid: 4787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21074.pdf

Abstract:
Reproducing networking research is a critical but challenging task due to the scarcity of open-source code. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can automate code generation, current approaches lack the generalizability required for the diverse networking field. To address this, we propose RePro, a semi-automated reproduction framework that leverages advanced prompt engineering to reproduce network systems from their research papers. RePro combines few-shot in-context learning with Structured and Semantic Chain of Thought (SCoT/SeCoT) techniques to systematically translate a paper's description into an optimized, executable implementation. The framework operates through a three-stage pipeline: system description extraction, structural code generation, and code optimization. Our evaluation with five state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse network sub-domains demonstrates that RePro significantly reduces reproduction time compared to manual efforts while achieving comparable system performance, validating its effectiveness and efficiency.

Paperid: 4788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19143.pdf

Abstract:
Disinformation is among the top risks of generative artificial intelligence (AI) misuse. Global adoption of generative AI necessitates red-teaming evaluations (i.e., systematic adversarial probing) that are robust across diverse languages and cultures, but red-teaming datasets are commonly US- and English-centric. To address this gap, we propose "anecdoctoring", a novel red-teaming approach that automatically generates adversarial prompts across languages and cultures. We collect misinformation claims from fact-checking websites in three languages (English, Spanish, and Hindi) and two geographies (US and India). We then cluster individual claims into broader narratives and characterize the resulting clusters with knowledge graphs, with which we augment an attacker LLM. Our method produces higher attack success rates and offers interpretability benefits relative to few-shot prompting. Results underscore the need for disinformation mitigations that scale globally and are grounded in real-world adversarial misuse.

Paperid: 4789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18937.pdf

Abstract:
Designing robotic hand morphologies for diverse manipulation tasks requires balancing dexterity, manufacturability, and task-specific functionality. While open-source frameworks and parametric tools support reproducible design, they still rely on expert heuristics and manual tuning. Automated methods using optimization are often compute-intensive, simulation-dependent, and rarely target dexterous hands. Large language models (LLMs), with their broad knowledge of human-object interactions and strong generative capabilities, offer a promising alternative for zero-shot design reasoning. In this paper, we present Lang2Morph, a language-driven pipeline for robotic hand design. It uses LLMs to translate natural-language task descriptions into symbolic structures and OPH-compatible parameters, enabling 3D-printable task-specific morphologies. The pipeline consists of: (i) Morphology Design, which maps tasks into semantic tags, structural grammars, and OPH-compatible parameters; and (ii) Selection and Refinement, which evaluates design candidates based on semantic alignment and size compatibility, and optionally applies LLM-guided refinement when needed. We evaluate Lang2Morph across varied tasks, and results show that our approach can generate diverse, task-relevant morphologies. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop an LLM-based framework for task-conditioned robotic hand design.

Paperid: 4790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18111.pdf

Abstract:
The reliability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in open-world settings depends heavily on their ability to flag out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs unseen during training. Recent advances in large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled promising few-shot OOD detection frameworks using only a handful of in-distribution (ID) samples. However, existing prompt learning-based OOD methods rely solely on softmax probabilities, overlooking the rich discriminative potential of the feature embeddings learned by VLMs trained on millions of samples. To address this limitation, we propose a novel context optimization (CoOp)-based framework that integrates subspace representation learning with prompt tuning. Our approach improves ID-OOD separability by projecting the ID features into a subspace spanned by prompt vectors, while projecting ID-irrelevant features into an orthogonal null space. To train such OOD detection framework, we design an easy-to-handle end-to-end learning criterion that ensures strong OOD detection performance as well as high ID classification accuracy. Experiments on real-world datasets showcase the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 4791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16892.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics aims to connect high-resolution histology images with spatially resolved gene expression. To achieve better performance on downstream tasks such as gene expression prediction, large-scale pre-training is required to obtain generalisable representations that can bridge histology and transcriptomics across tissues, protocols, and laboratories. Existing cross-modal pre-training approaches for spatial transcriptomics rely on either gene names or expression values in isolation, which strips the gene branch of essential semantics and breaks the association between each gene and its quantitative magnitude. In addition, by restricting supervision to image-text alignment, these methods ignore intrinsic visual cues that are critical for learning robust image features. We present CoMTIP, the first Contrastive Masked Text-Image Pretraining framework that jointly learns from images, gene names, and expression values while capturing fine-grained visual context for spatial transcriptomics. The vision branch uses Masked Feature Modeling to reconstruct occluded patches and learn context-aware image embeddings. The text branch applies a scalable Gene-Text Encoder that processes all gene sentences in parallel, enriches each gene and its numerical value with dedicated embeddings, and employs Pair-aware Adversarial Training (PAAT) to preserve correct gene-value associations. Image and text representations are aligned in a shared InfoNCE-optimised space. Experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets show that CoMTIP not only surpasses previous methods on diverse downstream tasks but also achieves zero-shot gene expression prediction, a capability that existing approaches do not provide.

Paperid: 4792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16745.pdf

Abstract:
Visual explanations are often plausible but not structurally faithful. We introduce CAMBench-QR, a structure-aware benchmark that leverages the canonical geometry of QR codes (finder patterns, timing lines, module grid) to test whether CAM methods place saliency on requisite substructures while avoiding background. CAMBench-QR synthesizes QR/non-QR data with exact masks and controlled distortions, and reports structure-aware metrics (Finder/Timing Mass Ratios, Background Leakage, coverage AUCs, Distance-to-Structure) alongside causal occlusion, insertion/deletion faithfulness, robustness, and latency. We benchmark representative, efficient CAMs (LayerCAM, EigenGrad-CAM, XGrad-CAM) under two practical regimes of zero-shot and last-block fine-tuning. The benchmark, metrics, and training recipes provide a simple, reproducible yardstick for structure-aware evaluation of visual explanations. Hence we propose that CAMBENCH-QR can be used as a litmus test of whether visual explanations are truly structure-aware.

Paperid: 4793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14126.pdf

Abstract:
Collaborative transportation of cable-suspended payloads by teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has the potential to enhance payload capacity, adapt to different payload shapes, and provide built-in compliance, making it attractive for applications ranging from disaster relief to precision logistics. However, multi-UAV coordination under disturbances, nonlinear payload dynamics, and slack--taut cable modes remains a challenging control problem. To our knowledge, no prior work has addressed these cable mode transitions in the multi-UAV context, instead relying on simplifying rigid-link assumptions. We propose CrazyMARL, a decentralized Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for multi-UAV cable-suspended payload transport. Simulation results demonstrate that the learned policies can outperform classical decentralized controllers in terms of disturbance rejection and tracking precision, achieving an 80% recovery rate from harsh conditions compared to 44% for the baseline method. We also achieve successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and demonstrate that our policies are highly robust under harsh conditions, including wind, random external disturbances, and transitions between slack and taut cable dynamics. This work paves the way for autonomous, resilient UAV teams capable of executing complex payload missions in unstructured environments.

Paperid: 4794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13695.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform remarkably well in Natural Language Inference (NLI). However, NLI involving numerical and logical expressions remains challenging. Comparatives are a key linguistic phenomenon related to such inference, but the robustness of LLMs in handling them, especially in languages that are not dominant in the models' training data, such as Japanese, has not been sufficiently explored. To address this gap, we construct a Japanese NLI dataset that focuses on comparatives and evaluate various LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our results show that the performance of the models is sensitive to the prompt formats in the zero-shot setting and influenced by the gold labels in the few-shot examples. The LLMs also struggle to handle linguistic phenomena unique to Japanese. Furthermore, we observe that prompts containing logical semantic representations help the models predict the correct labels for inference problems that they struggle to solve even with few-shot examples.

Paperid: 4795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12610.pdf

Abstract:
Predicates are foundational components in data analysis systems. However, modern workloads increasingly involve unstructured documents, which demands semantic understanding, beyond traditional value-based predicates. Given enormous documents and ad-hoc queries, while Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate powerful zero-shot capabilities, their high inference cost leads to unacceptable overhead. Therefore, we introduce \textsc{ScaleDoc}, a novel system that addresses this by decoupling predicate execution into an offline representation phase and an optimized online filtering phase. In the offline phase, \textsc{ScaleDoc} leverages a LLM to generate semantic representations for each document. Online, for each query, it trains a lightweight proxy model on these representations to filter the majority of documents, forwarding only the ambiguous cases to the LLM for final decision. Furthermore, \textsc{ScaleDoc} proposes two core innovations to achieve significant efficiency: (1) a contrastive-learning-based framework that trains the proxy model to generate reliable predicating decision scores; (2) an adaptive cascade mechanism that determines the effective filtering policy while meeting specific accuracy targets. Our evaluations across three datasets demonstrate that \textsc{ScaleDoc} achieves over a 2$\times$ end-to-end speedup and reduces expensive LLM invocations by up to 85\%, making large-scale semantic analysis practical and efficient.

Paperid: 4796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12130.pdf

Abstract:
This notebook reports the XplaiNLP submission to the CheckThat! 2025 shared task on multilingual subjectivity detection. We evaluate two approaches: (1) supervised fine-tuning of transformer encoders, EuroBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and German-BERT, on monolingual and machine-translated training data; and (2) zero-shot prompting using two LLMs: o3-mini for Annotation (rule-based labelling) and gpt-4.1-mini for DoubleDown (contrastive rewriting) and Perspective (comparative reasoning). The Annotation Approach achieves 1st place in the Italian monolingual subtask with an F_1 score of 0.8104, outperforming the baseline of 0.6941. In the Romanian zero-shot setting, the fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa model obtains an F_1 score of 0.7917, ranking 3rd and exceeding the baseline of 0.6461. The same model also performs reliably in the multilingual task and improves over the baseline in Greek. For German, a German-BERT model fine-tuned on translated training data from typologically related languages yields competitive performance over the baseline. In contrast, performance in the Ukrainian and Polish zero-shot settings falls slightly below the respective baselines, reflecting the challenge of generalization in low-resource cross-lingual scenarios.

Paperid: 4797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11165.pdf

Abstract:
As intelligent transportation systems advance, traffic video understanding plays an increasingly pivotal role in comprehensive scene perception and causal analysis. Yet, existing approaches face notable challenges in accurately modeling spatiotemporal causality and integrating domain-specific knowledge, limiting their effectiveness in complex scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose Traffic-MLLM, a multimodal large language model tailored for fine-grained traffic analysis. Built on the Qwen2.5-VL backbone, our model leverages high-quality traffic-specific multimodal datasets and uses Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for lightweight fine-tuning, significantly enhancing its capacity to model continuous spatiotemporal features in video sequences. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative knowledge prompting module fusing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling precise injection of detailed traffic regulations and domain knowledge into the inference process. This design markedly boosts the model's logical reasoning and knowledge adaptation capabilities. Experimental results on TrafficQA and DriveQA benchmarks show Traffic-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its superior ability to process multimodal traffic data. It also exhibits remarkable zero-shot reasoning and cross-scenario generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 4798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10534.pdf

Abstract:
The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular RoPE rotary position embedding. This entanglement can impair performance particularly when decisions require independent matches on these two factors. We propose an improvement to RoPE, which we call Polar Coordinate Position Embeddings or PoPE, that eliminates the what-where confound. PoPE is far superior on a diagnostic task requiring indexing solely by position or by content. On autoregressive sequence modeling in music, genomic, and natural language domains, Transformers using PoPE as the positional encoding scheme outperform baselines using RoPE with respect to evaluation loss (perplexity) and downstream task performance. On language modeling, these gains persist across model scale, from 124M to 774M parameters. Crucially, PoPE shows strong zero-shot length extrapolation capabilities, whereas RoPE's performance degrades significantly on longer sequences at test time without fine tuning or the use of position-interpolation methods.

Paperid: 4799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09943.pdf

Abstract:
Tracking cells and detecting mitotic events in time-lapse microscopy image sequences is a crucial task in biomedical research. However, it remains highly challenging due to dividing objects, low signal-tonoise ratios, indistinct boundaries, dense clusters, and the visually similar appearance of individual cells. Existing deep learning-based methods rely on manually labeled datasets for training, which is both costly and time-consuming. Moreover, their generalizability to unseen datasets remains limited due to the vast diversity of microscopy data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a zero-shot cell tracking framework by integrating Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), a large foundation model designed for general image and video segmentation, into the tracking pipeline. As a fully-unsupervised approach, our method does not depend on or inherit biases from any specific training dataset, allowing it to generalize across diverse microscopy datasets without finetuning. Our approach achieves competitive accuracy in both 2D and large-scale 3D time-lapse microscopy videos while eliminating the need for dataset-specific adaptation.

Paperid: 4800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09155.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Voice Cloning (VC) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) methods have advanced rapidly, enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic speech and raising serious concerns about their misuse. While numerous detectors have been developed for English and Chinese, Spanish-spoken by over 600 million people worldwide-remains underrepresented in speech forensics. To address this gap, we introduce HISPASpoof, the first large-scale Spanish dataset designed for synthetic speech detection and attribution. It includes real speech from public corpora across six accents and synthetic speech generated with six zero-shot TTS systems. We evaluate five representative methods, showing that detectors trained on English fail to generalize to Spanish, while training on HISPASpoof substantially improves detection. We also evaluate synthetic speech attribution performance on HISPASpoof, i.e., identifying the generation method of synthetic speech. HISPASpoof thus provides a critical benchmark for advancing reliable and inclusive speech forensics in Spanish.

Paperid: 4801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06322.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities across a range of tasks, including zero-shot time-series forecasting. We show that text-trained foundation models can accurately extrapolate spatiotemporal dynamics from discretized partial differential equation (PDE) solutions without fine-tuning or natural language prompting. Predictive accuracy improves with longer temporal contexts but degrades at finer spatial discretizations. In multi-step rollouts, where the model recursively predicts future spatial states over multiple time steps, errors grow algebraically with the time horizon, reminiscent of global error accumulation in classical finite-difference solvers. We interpret these trends as in-context neural scaling laws, where prediction quality varies predictably with both context length and output length. To better understand how LLMs are able to internally process PDE solutions so as to accurately roll them out, we analyze token-level output distributions and uncover a consistent ICL progression: beginning with syntactic pattern imitation, transitioning through an exploratory high-entropy phase, and culminating in confident, numerically grounded predictions.

Paperid: 4802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05936.pdf

Abstract:
Network log data analysis plays a critical role in detecting security threats and operational anomalies. Traditional log analysis methods for anomaly detection and root cause analysis rely heavily on expert knowledge or fully supervised learning models, both of which require extensive labeled data and significant human effort. To address these challenges, we propose ALPHA, the first Active Learning Pipeline for Human-free log Analysis. ALPHA integrates semantic embedding, clustering-based representative sampling, and large language model (LLM)-assisted few-shot annotation to automate the anomaly detection process. The LLM annotated labels are propagated across clusters, enabling large-scale training of an anomaly detector with minimal supervision. To enhance the annotation accuracy, we propose a two-step few-shot refinement strategy that adaptively selects informative prompts based on the LLM's observed error patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world log datasets demonstrate that ALPHA achieves detection accuracy comparable to fully supervised methods while mitigating human efforts in the loop. ALPHA also supports interpretable analysis through LLM-driven root cause explanations in the post-detection stage. These capabilities make ALPHA a scalable and cost-efficient solution for truly automated log-based anomaly detection.

Paperid: 4803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12087.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is the problem of planning conflict-free paths from the designated start locations to goal positions for multiple agents. It underlies a variety of real-world tasks, including multi-robot coordination, robot-assisted logistics, and social navigation. Recent decentralized learnable solvers have shown great promise for large-scale MAPF, especially when leveraging foundation models and large datasets. However, these agents are reactive policy models and exhibit limited modeling of environmental temporal dynamics and inter-agent dependencies, resulting in performance degradation in complex, long-term planning scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose MAPF-World, an autoregressive action world model for MAPF that unifies situation understanding and action generation, guiding decisions beyond immediate local observations. It improves situational awareness by explicitly modeling environmental dynamics, including spatial features and temporal dependencies, through future state and actions prediction. By incorporating these predicted futures, MAPF-World enables more informed, coordinated, and far-sighted decision-making, especially in complex multi-agent settings. Furthermore, we augment MAPF benchmarks by introducing an automatic map generator grounded in real-world scenarios, capturing practical map layouts for training and evaluating MAPF solvers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAPF-World outperforms state-of-the-art learnable solvers, showcasing superior zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution cases. Notably, MAPF-World is trained with a 96.5% smaller model size and 92% reduced data.

Paperid: 4804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10956.pdf

Abstract:
While vision-language models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress on many popular visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, it remains unclear whether they abstract and reason over depicted objects. Inspired by human object categorisation, object property reasoning involves identifying and recognising low-level details and higher-level abstractions. While current VQA benchmarks consider a limited set of object property attributes like size, they typically blend perception and reasoning, and lack representativeness in terms of reasoning and image categories. To this end, we introduce a systematic evaluation framework with images of three representative types, three reasoning levels of increasing complexity, and four object property dimensions driven by prior work on commonsense reasoning. We develop a procedure to instantiate this benchmark into ORBIT, a multi-level reasoning VQA benchmark for object properties comprising 360 images paired with a total of 1,080 count-based questions. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero-shot settings reveal significant limitations compared to humans, with the best-performing model only reaching 40\% accuracy. VLMs struggle particularly with realistic (photographic) images, counterfactual reasoning about physical and functional properties, and higher counts. ORBIT points to the need to develop methods for scalable benchmarking, generalize annotation guidelines, and explore additional reasoning VLMs. We make the ORBIT benchmark and the experimental code available to support such endeavors.

Paperid: 4805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08651.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces the first prompt-based methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis and sentiment classification in Czech. We employ the sequence-to-sequence models to solve the aspect-based tasks simultaneously and demonstrate the superiority of our prompt-based approach over traditional fine-tuning. In addition, we conduct zero-shot and few-shot learning experiments for sentiment classification and show that prompting yields significantly better results with limited training examples compared to traditional fine-tuning. We also demonstrate that pre-training on data from the target domain can lead to significant improvements in a zero-shot scenario.

Paperid: 4806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08509.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are currently aligned using techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, these methods use scalar rewards that can only reflect user preferences on average. Pluralistic alignment instead seeks to capture diverse user preferences across a set of attributes, moving beyond just helpfulness and harmlessness. Toward this end, we propose a steerable pluralistic model based on few-shot comparative regression that can adapt to individual user preferences. Our approach leverages in-context learning and reasoning, grounded in a set of fine-grained attributes, to compare response options and make aligned choices. To evaluate our algorithm, we also propose two new steerable pluralistic benchmarks by adapting the Moral Integrity Corpus (MIC) and the HelpSteer2 datasets, demonstrating the applicability of our approach to value-aligned decision-making and reward modeling, respectively. Our few-shot comparative regression approach is interpretable and compatible with different attributes and LLMs, while outperforming multiple baseline and state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides new insights and research directions in pluralistic alignment, enabling a more fair and representative use of LLMs and advancing the state-of-the-art in ethical AI.

Paperid: 4807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08501.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce GVGAI-LLM, a video game benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Built on the General Video Game AI framework, it features a diverse collection of arcade-style games designed to test a model's ability to handle tasks that differ from most existing LLM benchmarks. The benchmark leverages a game description language that enables rapid creation of new games and levels, helping to prevent overfitting over time. Each game scene is represented by a compact set of ASCII characters, allowing for efficient processing by language models. GVGAI-LLM defines interpretable metrics, including the meaningful step ratio, step efficiency, and overall score, to assess model behavior. Through zero-shot evaluations across a broad set of games and levels with diverse challenges and skill depth, we reveal persistent limitations of LLMs in spatial reasoning and basic planning. Current models consistently exhibit spatial and logical errors, motivating structured prompting and spatial grounding techniques. While these interventions lead to partial improvements, the benchmark remains very far from solved. GVGAI-LLM provides a reproducible testbed for advancing research on language model capabilities, with a particular emphasis on agentic behavior and contextual reasoning.

Paperid: 4808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06659.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training environments. To boost agents' in-context RL (ICRL) ability, this work formulates ICRL as a two-agent emergent communication problem and introduces CORAL (Communicative Representation for Adaptive RL), a framework that learns a transferable communicative context by decoupling latent representation learning from control. In CORAL, an Information Agent (IA) is pre-trained as a world model on a diverse distribution of tasks. Its objective is not to maximize task reward, but to build a world model and distill its understanding into concise messages. The emergent communication protocol is shaped by a novel Causal Influence Loss, which measures the effect that the message has on the next action. During deployment, the previously trained IA serves as a fixed contextualizer for a new Control Agent (CA), which learns to solve tasks by interpreting the provided communicative context. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables the CA to achieve significant gains in sample efficiency and successfully perform zero-shot adaptation with the help of pre-trained IA in entirely unseen sparse-reward environments, validating the efficacy of learning a transferable communicative representation.

Paperid: 4809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04594.pdf

Abstract:
This work focuses on training graph foundation models (GFMs) that have strong generalization ability in graph-level tasks such as graph classification. Effective GFM training requires capturing information consistent across different domains. We discover that graph structures provide more consistent cross-domain information compared to node features and graph labels. However, traditional GFMs primarily focus on transferring node features from various domains into a unified representation space but often lack structural cross-domain generalization. To address this, we introduce GraphProp, which emphasizes structural generalization. The training process of GraphProp consists of two main phases. First, we train a structural GFM by predicting graph invariants. Since graph invariants are properties of graphs that depend only on the abstract structure, not on particular labellings or drawings of the graph, this structural GFM has a strong ability to capture the abstract structural information and provide discriminative graph representations comparable across diverse domains. In the second phase, we use the representations given by the structural GFM as positional encodings to train a comprehensive GFM. This phase utilizes domain-specific node attributes and graph labels to further improve cross-domain node feature generalization. Our experiments demonstrate that GraphProp significantly outperforms the competitors in supervised learning and few-shot learning, especially in handling graphs without node attributes.

Paperid: 4810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02879.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their strong zero-shot capabilities and widespread real-world applications. Such models typically require a computationally costly pretraining on large-scale, carefully curated collections of real-world sequences. To allow for a sample-efficient pretraining of TSFMs, we propose CauKer, a novel algorithm designed to generate diverse, causally coherent synthetic time series with realistic trends, seasonality, and nonlinear interactions. CauKer combines Gaussian Process (GP) kernel composition with Structural Causal Models (SCM) to produce data for sample-efficient pretraining of state-of-the-art classification TSFMs having different architectures and following different pretraining approaches. Additionally, our experiments reveal that CauKer-generated datasets exhibit clear scaling laws for both dataset size (10K to 10M samples) and model capacity (1M to 783M parameters), unlike real-world datasets, which display irregular scaling behavior.

Paperid: 4811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01561.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing to complex and temporally extended task objectives and safety constraints remains a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Linear temporal logic (LTL) offers a unified formalism to specify such requirements, yet existing methods are limited in their abilities to handle nested long-horizon tasks and safety constraints, and cannot identify situations when a subgoal is not satisfiable and an alternative should be sought. In this paper, we introduce GenZ-LTL, a method that enables zero-shot generalization to arbitrary LTL specifications. GenZ-LTL leverages the structure of BÃ¼chi automata to decompose an LTL task specification into sequences of reach-avoid subgoals. Contrary to the current state-of-the-art method that conditions on subgoal sequences, we show that it is more effective to achieve zero-shot generalization by solving these reach-avoid problems \textit{one subgoal at a time} through proper safe RL formulations. In addition, we introduce a novel subgoal-induced observation reduction technique that can mitigate the exponential complexity of subgoal-state combinations under realistic assumptions. Empirical results show that GenZ-LTL substantially outperforms existing methods in zero-shot generalization to unseen LTL specifications.

Paperid: 4812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00033.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly as tools for automating code generation in scientific research, yet their ability to interpret and use unfamiliar Python APIs for complex computational experiments remains poorly characterized. This study systematically benchmarks a selection of state-of-the-art LLMs in generating functional Python code for two increasingly challenging scenarios: conversational data analysis with the \textit{ParShift} library, and synthetic data generation and clustering using \textit{pyclugen} and \textit{scikit-learn}. Both experiments use structured, zero-shot prompts specifying detailed requirements but omitting in-context examples. Model outputs are evaluated quantitatively for functional correctness and prompt compliance over multiple runs, and qualitatively by analyzing the errors produced when code execution fails. Results show that only a small subset of models consistently generate correct, executable code. GPT-4.1 achieved a 100\% success rate across all runs in both experimental tasks, whereas most other models succeeded in fewer than half of the runs, with only Grok-3 and Mistral-Large approaching comparable performance. In addition to benchmarking LLM performance, this approach helps identify shortcomings in third-party libraries, such as unclear documentation or obscure implementation bugs. Overall, these findings highlight current limitations of LLMs for end-to-end scientific automation and emphasize the need for careful prompt design, comprehensive library documentation, and continued advances in language model capabilities.

Paperid: 4813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23319.pdf

Abstract:
Proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tendencies toward politeness, formality, and implicit content moderation. While previous research has primarily focused on explicitly training models to moderate and detoxify sensitive content, there has been limited exploration of whether LLMs implicitly sanitize language without explicit instructions. This study empirically analyzes the implicit moderation behavior of GPT-4o-mini when paraphrasing sensitive content and evaluates the extent of sensitivity shifts. Our experiments indicate that GPT-4o-mini systematically moderates content toward less sensitive classes, with substantial reductions in derogatory and taboo language. Also, we evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs in classifying sentence sensitivity, comparing their performances against traditional methods.

Paperid: 4814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21471.pdf

Abstract:
Infrared spectroscopy enables rapid, non destructive analysis of chemical and material properties, yet high dimensional signals and overlapping bands hinder conventional chemometric methods. Large language models (LLMs), with strong generalization and reasoning capabilities, offer new opportunities for automated spectral interpretation, but their potential in this domain remains largely untapped. This study introduces LUMIR (LLM-driven Unified agent framework for Multi-task Infrared spectroscopy Reasoning), an agent based framework designed to achieve accurate infrared spectral analysis under low data conditions. LUMIR integrates a structured literature knowledge base, automated preprocessing, feature extraction, and predictive modeling into a unified pipeline. By mining peer reviewed spectroscopy studies, it identifies validated preprocessing and feature derivation strategies, transforms spectra into low dimensional representations, and applies few-shot prompts for classification, regression, and anomaly detection. The framework was validated on diverse datasets, including the publicly available Milk near-infrared dataset, Chinese medicinal herbs, Citri Reticulatae Pericarpium(CRP) with different storage durations, an industrial wastewater COD dataset, and two additional public benchmarks, Tecator and Corn. Across these tasks, LUMIR achieved performance comparable to or surpassing established machine learning and deep learning models, particularly in resource limited settings. This work demonstrates that combining structured literature guidance with few-shot learning enables robust, scalable, and automated spectral interpretation. LUMIR establishes a new paradigm for applying LLMs to infrared spectroscopy, offering high accuracy with minimal labeled data and broad applicability across scientific and industrial domains.

Paperid: 4815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20859.pdf

Abstract:
Medical reports contain rich clinical information but are often unstructured and written in domain-specific language, posing challenges for information extraction. While proprietary large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical natural language processing, their lack of transparency and data privacy concerns limit their utility in healthcare. This study therefore evaluates nine open-source generative LLMs on the DRAGON benchmark, which includes 28 clinical information extraction tasks in Dutch. We developed \texttt{llm\_extractinator}, a publicly available framework for information extraction using open-source generative LLMs, and used it to assess model performance in a zero-shot setting. Several 14 billion parameter models, Phi-4-14B, Qwen-2.5-14B, and DeepSeek-R1-14B, achieved competitive results, while the bigger Llama-3.3-70B model achieved slightly higher performance at greater computational cost. Translation to English prior to inference consistently degraded performance, highlighting the need of native-language processing. These findings demonstrate that open-source LLMs, when used with our framework, offer effective, scalable, and privacy-conscious solutions for clinical information extraction in low-resource settings.

Paperid: 4816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18915.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding another person's creative output requires a shared language of association. However, when training vision-language models such as CLIP, we rely on web-scraped datasets containing short, predominantly literal, alt-text. In this work, we introduce a method for mining contextualized associations for salient visual elements in an image that can scale to any unlabeled dataset. Given an image, we can use these mined associations to generate high quality creative captions at increasing degrees of abstraction. With our method, we produce a new dataset of visual associations and 1.7m creative captions for the images in MSCOCO. Human evaluation confirms that these captions remain visually grounded while exhibiting recognizably increasing abstraction. Moreover, fine-tuning a visual encoder on this dataset yields meaningful improvements in zero-shot image-text retrieval in two creative domains: poetry and metaphor visualization. We release our dataset, our generation code and our models for use by the broader community.

Paperid: 4817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18632.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot domain adaptation is a method for adapting a model to a target domain without utilizing target domain image data. To enable adaptation without target images, existing studies utilize CLIP's embedding space and text description to simulate target-like style features. Despite the previous achievements in zero-shot domain adaptation, we observe that these text-driven methods struggle to capture complex real-world variations and significantly increase adaptation time due to their alignment process. Instead of relying on text descriptions, we explore solutions leveraging image data, which provides diverse and more fine-grained style cues. In this work, we propose SIDA, a novel and efficient zero-shot domain adaptation method leveraging synthetic images. To generate synthetic images, we first create detailed, source-like images and apply image translation to reflect the style of the target domain. We then utilize the style features of these synthetic images as a proxy for the target domain. Based on these features, we introduce Domain Mix and Patch Style Transfer modules, which enable effective modeling of real-world variations. In particular, Domain Mix blends multiple styles to expand the intra-domain representations, and Patch Style Transfer assigns different styles to individual patches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by showing state-of-the-art performance in diverse zero-shot adaptation scenarios, particularly in challenging domains. Moreover, our approach achieves high efficiency by significantly reducing the overall adaptation time.

Paperid: 4818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18616.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Image Captioning (ZIC) increasingly utilizes synthetic datasets generated by text-to-image (T2I) models to mitigate the need for costly manual annotation. However, these T2I models often produce images that exhibit semantic misalignments with their corresponding input captions (e.g., missing objects, incorrect attributes), resulting in noisy synthetic image-caption pairs that can hinder model training. Existing dataset pruning techniques are largely designed for removing noisy text in web-crawled data. However, these methods are ill-suited for the distinct challenges of synthetic data, where captions are typically well-formed, but images may be inaccurate representations. To address this gap, we introduce SynC, a novel framework specifically designed to refine synthetic image-caption datasets for ZIC. Instead of conventional filtering or regeneration, SynC focuses on reassigning captions to the most semantically aligned images already present within the synthetic image pool. Our approach employs a one-to-many mapping strategy by initially retrieving multiple relevant candidate images for each caption. We then apply a cycle-consistency-inspired alignment scorer that selects the best image by verifying its ability to retrieve the original caption via image-to-text retrieval. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SynC consistently and significantly improves performance across various ZIC models on standard benchmarks (MS-COCO, Flickr30k, NoCaps), achieving state-of-the-art results in several scenarios. SynC offers an effective strategy for curating refined synthetic data to enhance ZIC.

Paperid: 4819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17290.pdf

Abstract:
Serendipity plays a pivotal role in enhancing user satisfaction within recommender systems, yet its evaluation poses significant challenges due to its inherently subjective nature and conceptual ambiguity. Current algorithmic approaches predominantly rely on proxy metrics for indirect assessment, often failing to align with real user perceptions, thus creating a gap. With large language models (LLMs) increasingly revolutionizing evaluation methodologies across various human annotation tasks, we are inspired to explore a core research proposition: Can LLMs effectively simulate human users for serendipity evaluation? To address this question, we conduct a meta-evaluation on two datasets derived from real user studies in the e-commerce and movie domains, focusing on three key aspects: the accuracy of LLMs compared to conventional proxy metrics, the influence of auxiliary data on LLM comprehension, and the efficacy of recently popular multi-LLM techniques. Our findings indicate that even the simplest zero-shot LLMs achieve parity with, or surpass, the performance of conventional metrics. Furthermore, multi-LLM techniques and the incorporation of auxiliary data further enhance alignment with human perspectives. Based on our findings, the optimal evaluation by LLMs yields a Pearson correlation coefficient of 21.5\% when compared to the results of the user study. This research implies that LLMs may serve as potentially accurate and cost-effective evaluators, introducing a new paradigm for serendipity evaluation in recommender systems.

Paperid: 4820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15308.pdf

Abstract:
Due to the limited training samples in few-shot object detection (FSOD), we observe that current methods may struggle to accurately extract effective features from each channel. Specifically, this issue manifests in two aspects: i) channels with high weights may not necessarily be effective, and ii) channels with low weights may still hold significant value. To handle this problem, we consider utilizing the inter-channel correlation to facilitate the novel model's adaptation process to novel conditions, ensuring the model can correctly highlight effective channels and rectify those incorrect ones. Since the channel sequence is also 1-dimensional, its similarity with the temporal sequence inspires us to take Mamba for modeling the correlation in the channel sequence. Based on this concept, we propose a Spatial-Channel State Space Modeling (SCSM) module for spatial-channel state modeling, which highlights the effective patterns and rectifies those ineffective ones in feature channels. In SCSM, we design the Spatial Feature Modeling (SFM) module to balance the learning of spatial relationships and channel relationships, and then introduce the Channel State Modeling (CSM) module based on Mamba to learn correlation in channels. Extensive experiments on the VOC and COCO datasets show that the SCSM module enables the novel detector to improve the quality of focused feature representation in channels and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 4821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14731.pdf

Abstract:
Existing navigation methods are primarily designed for specific robot embodiments, limiting their generalizability across diverse robot platforms. In this paper, we introduce X-Nav, a novel framework for end-to-end cross-embodiment navigation where a single unified policy can be deployed across various embodiments for both wheeled and quadrupedal robots. X-Nav consists of two learning stages: 1) multiple expert policies are trained using deep reinforcement learning with privileged observations on a wide range of randomly generated robot embodiments; and 2) a single general policy is distilled from the expert policies via navigation action chunking with transformer (Nav-ACT). The general policy directly maps visual and proprioceptive observations to low-level control commands, enabling generalization to novel robot embodiments. Simulated experiments demonstrated that X-Nav achieved zero-shot transfer to both unseen embodiments and photorealistic environments. A scalability study showed that the performance of X-Nav improves when trained with an increasing number of randomly generated embodiments. An ablation study confirmed the design choices of X-Nav. Furthermore, real-world experiments were conducted to validate the generalizability of X-Nav in real-world environments.

Paperid: 4822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14245.pdf

Abstract:
Unlocking the potential of nanomaterials in medicine and environmental science hinges on understanding their interactions with proteins, a complex decision space where AI is poised to make a transformative impact. However, progress has been hindered by limited datasets and the restricted generalizability of existing models. Here, we propose NanoPro-3M, the largest nanomaterial-protein interaction dataset to date, comprising over 3.2 million samples and 37,000 unique proteins. Leveraging this, we present NanoProFormer, a foundational model that predicts nanomaterial-protein affinities through multimodal representation learning, demonstrating strong generalization, handling missing features, and unseen nanomaterials or proteins. We show that multimodal modeling significantly outperforms single-modality approaches and identifies key determinants of corona formation. Furthermore, we demonstrate its applicability to a range of downstream tasks through zero-shot inference and fine-tuning. Together, this work establishes a solid foundation for high-performance and generalized prediction of nanomaterial-protein interaction endpoints, reducing experimental reliance and accelerating various in vitro applications.

Paperid: 4823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09128.pdf

Abstract:
A modern paradigm for generalization in machine learning and AI consists of pre-training a task-agnostic foundation model, generally obtained using self-supervised and multimodal contrastive learning. The resulting representations can be used for prediction on a downstream task for which no labeled data is available. We present a theoretical framework to better understand this approach, called zero-shot prediction. We identify the target quantities that zero-shot prediction aims to learn, or learns in passing, and the key conditional independence relationships that enable its generalization ability.

Paperid: 4824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08205.pdf

Abstract:
In medical image segmentation, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers are dominant. For CNNs, given the local receptive fields of convolutional layers, long-range spatial correlations are captured through consecutive convolutions and pooling. However, as the computational cost and memory footprint can be prohibitively large, 3D models can only afford fewer layers than 2D models with reduced receptive fields and abstract levels. For transformers, although long-range correlations can be captured by multi-head attention, its quadratic complexity with respect to input size is computationally demanding. Therefore, either model may require input size reduction to allow more filters and layers for better segmentation. Nevertheless, given their discrete nature, models trained with patch-wise training or image downsampling may produce suboptimal results when applied on higher resolutions. To address this issue, here we propose the resolution-robust HNOSeg-XS architecture. We model image segmentation by learnable partial differential equations through the Fourier neural operator which has the zero-shot super-resolution property. By replacing the Fourier transform by the Hartley transform and reformulating the problem in the frequency domain, we created the HNOSeg-XS model, which is resolution robust, fast, memory efficient, and extremely parameter efficient. When tested on the BraTS'23, KiTS'23, and MVSeg'23 datasets with a Tesla V100 GPU, HNOSeg-XS showed its superior resolution robustness with fewer than 34.7k model parameters. It also achieved the overall best inference time (< 0.24 s) and memory efficiency (< 1.8 GiB) compared to the tested CNN and transformer models.

Paperid: 4825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06538.pdf

Abstract:
Graph representation learning is a powerful method to extract features from graph-structured data, such as analog/mixed-signal (AMS) circuits. However, training deep learning models for AMS designs is severely limited by the scarcity of integrated circuit design data. In this work, we present CircuitGPS, a few-shot learning method for parasitic effect prediction in AMS circuits. The circuit netlist is represented as a heterogeneous graph, with the coupling capacitance modeled as a link. CircuitGPS is pre-trained on link prediction and fine-tuned on edge regression. The proposed method starts with a small-hop sampling technique that converts a link or a node into a subgraph. Then, the subgraph embeddings are learned with a hybrid graph Transformer. Additionally, CircuitGPS integrates a low-cost positional encoding that summarizes the positional and structural information of the sampled subgraph. CircuitGPS improves the accuracy of coupling existence by at least 20\% and reduces the MAE of capacitance estimation by at least 0.067 compared to existing methods. Our method demonstrates strong inherent scalability, enabling direct application to diverse AMS circuit designs through zero-shot learning. Furthermore, the ablation studies provide valuable insights into graph models for representation learning.

Paperid: 4826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05515.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are facing the challenges of understanding and following multimodal assembly instructions, particularly when fine-grained spatial reasoning and precise object state detection are required. In this work, we explore LEGO Co-builder, a hybrid benchmark combining real-world LEGO assembly logic with programmatically generated multimodal scenes. The dataset captures stepwise visual states and procedural instructions, allowing controlled evaluation of instruction-following, object detection, and state detection. We introduce a unified framework and assess leading VLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen-VL, under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Our results reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o struggle with fine-grained assembly tasks, with a maximum F1 score of just 40.54\% on state detection, highlighting gaps in fine-grained visual understanding. We release the benchmark, codebase, and generation pipeline to support future research on multimodal assembly assistants grounded in real-world workflows.

Paperid: 4827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04735.pdf

Abstract:
Effective cross-modal retrieval is essential for applications like information retrieval and recommendation systems, particularly in specialized domains such as manufacturing, where product information often consists of visual samples paired with a textual description. This paper investigates the use of Vision Language Models(VLMs) for zero-shot text-to-image retrieval on fabric samples. We address the lack of publicly available datasets by introducing an automated annotation pipeline that uses Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate two types of textual descriptions: freeform natural language and structured attribute-based descriptions. We produce these descriptions to evaluate retrieval performance across three Vision-Language Models: CLIP, LAION-CLIP, and Meta's Perception Encoder. Our experiments demonstrate that structured, attribute-rich descriptions significantly enhance retrieval accuracy, particularly for visually complex fabric classes, with the Perception Encoder outperforming other models due to its robust feature alignment capabilities. However, zero-shot retrieval remains challenging in this fine-grained domain, underscoring the need for domain-adapted approaches. Our findings highlight the importance of combining technical textual descriptions with advanced VLMs to optimize cross-modal retrieval in industrial applications.

Paperid: 4828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04468.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread use of multimodal content on social media has heightened the need for effective sarcasm detection to improve opinion mining. However, existing models rely heavily on large annotated datasets, making them less suitable for real-world scenarios where labeled data is scarce. This motivates the need to explore the problem in a few-shot setting. To this end, we introduce DMDP (Deep Modality-Disentangled Prompt Tuning), a novel framework for few-shot multimodal sarcasm detection. Unlike prior methods that use shallow, unified prompts across modalities, DMDP employs gated, modality-specific deep prompts for text and visual encoders. These prompts are injected across multiple layers to enable hierarchical feature learning and better capture diverse sarcasm types. To enhance intra-modal learning, we incorporate a prompt-sharing mechanism across layers, allowing the model to aggregate both low-level and high-level semantic cues. Additionally, a cross-modal prompt alignment module enables nuanced interactions between image and text representations, improving the model's ability to detect subtle sarcastic intent. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate DMDP's superior performance in both few-shot and extremely low-resource settings. Further cross-dataset evaluations show that DMDP generalizes well across domains, consistently outperforming baseline methods.

Paperid: 4829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02929.pdf

Abstract:
We present the Object-Based Sub-Environment Recognition (OBSER) framework, a novel Bayesian framework that infers three fundamental relationships between sub-environments and their constituent objects. In the OBSER framework, metric and self-supervised learning models estimate the object distributions of sub-environments on the latent space to compute these measures. Both theoretically and empirically, we validate the proposed framework by introducing the ($Îµ,Î´$) statistically separable (EDS) function which indicates the alignment of the representation. Our framework reliably performs inference in open-world and photorealistic environments and outperforms scene-based methods in chained retrieval tasks. The OBSER framework enables zero-shot recognition of environments to achieve autonomous environment understanding.

Paperid: 4830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01255.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of AI-generated video models has created a pressing need for robust and interpretable evaluation frameworks. Existing metrics are limited to producing numerical scores without explanatory comments, resulting in low interpretability and human evaluation alignment. To address those challenges, we introduce AIGVE-MACS, a unified model for AI-Generated Video Evaluation(AIGVE), which can provide not only numerical scores but also multi-aspect language comment feedback in evaluating these generated videos. Central to our approach is AIGVE-BENCH 2, a large-scale benchmark comprising 2,500 AI-generated videos and 22,500 human-annotated detailed comments and numerical scores across nine critical evaluation aspects. Leveraging AIGVE-BENCH 2, AIGVE-MACS incorporates recent Vision-Language Models with a novel token-wise weighted loss and a dynamic frame sampling strategy to better align with human evaluators. Comprehensive experiments across supervised and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that AIGVE-MACS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both scoring correlation and comment quality, significantly outperforming prior baselines including GPT-4o and VideoScore. In addition, we further showcase a multi-agent refinement framework where feedback from AIGVE-MACS drives iterative improvements in video generation, leading to 53.5% quality enhancement. This work establishes a new paradigm for comprehensive, human-aligned evaluation of AI-generated videos. We release the AIGVE-BENCH 2 and AIGVE-MACS at https://huggingface.co/xiaoliux/AIGVE-MACS.

Paperid: 4831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00371.pdf

Abstract:
Organ segmentation of plant point clouds is a prerequisite for the high-resolution and accurate extraction of organ-level phenotypic traits. Although the fast development of deep learning has boosted much research on segmentation of plant point clouds, the existing techniques for organ segmentation still face limitations in resolution, segmentation accuracy, and generalizability across various plant species. In this study, we proposed a novel approach called plant segmentation neural radiance fields (PlantSegNeRF), aiming to directly generate high-precision instance point clouds from multi-view RGB image sequences for a wide range of plant species. PlantSegNeRF performed 2D instance segmentation on the multi-view images to generate instance masks for each organ with a corresponding ID. The multi-view instance IDs corresponding to the same plant organ were then matched and refined using a specially designed instance matching module. The instance NeRF was developed to render an implicit scene, containing color, density, semantic and instance information. The implicit scene was ultimately converted into high-precision plant instance point clouds based on the volume density. The results proved that in semantic segmentation of point clouds, PlantSegNeRF outperformed the commonly used methods, demonstrating an average improvement of 16.1%, 18.3%, 17.8%, and 24.2% in precision, recall, F1-score, and IoU compared to the second-best results on structurally complex datasets. More importantly, PlantSegNeRF exhibited significant advantages in plant point cloud instance segmentation tasks. Across all plant datasets, it achieved average improvements of 11.7%, 38.2%, 32.2% and 25.3% in mPrec, mRec, mCov, mWCov, respectively. This study extends the organ-level plant phenotyping and provides a high-throughput way to supply high-quality 3D data for the development of large-scale models in plant science.

Paperid: 4832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23467.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated superior performance across various visual tasks including medical image classification. However, fairness concerns, including demographic biases, have received limited attention for CLIP models. This oversight leads to critical issues, particularly those related to race and gender, resulting in disparities in diagnostic outcomes and reduced reliability for underrepresented groups. To address these challenges, we introduce AdFair-CLIP, a novel framework employing adversarial feature intervention to suppress sensitive attributes, thereby mitigating spurious correlations and improving prediction fairness. We conduct comprehensive experiments on chest X-ray (CXR) datasets, and show that AdFair-CLIP significantly enhances both fairness and diagnostic accuracy, while maintaining robust generalization in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. These results establish new benchmarks for fairness-aware learning in CLIP-based medical diagnostic models, particularly for CXR analysis.

Paperid: 4833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23358.pdf

Abstract:
We present Federated Timeline Synthesis (FTS), a novel framework for training generative foundation models across distributed timeseries data applied to electronic health records (EHR). At its core, FTS represents patient history as tokenized Patient Health Timelines (PHTs), language-agnostic sequences encoding temporal, categorical, and continuous clinical information. Each institution trains an autoregressive transformer on its local PHTs and transmits only model weights to a central server. The server uses the generators to synthesize a large corpus of trajectories and train a Global Generator (GG), enabling zero-shot inference via Monte Carlo simulation of future PHTs. We evaluate FTS on five clinically meaningful prediction tasks using MIMIC-IV data, showing that models trained on synthetic data generated by GG perform comparably to those trained on real data. FTS offers strong privacy guarantees, scalability across institutions, and extensibility to diverse prediction and simulation tasks especially in healthcare, including counterfactual inference, early warning detection, and synthetic trial design.

Paperid: 4834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19947.pdf

Abstract:
Channel hopping (CS) communication systems must adapt to interference changes in the wireless network and to node mobility for maintaining throughput efficiency. Optimal scheduling requires up-to-date network state information (i.e., of channel occupancy) to select non-overlapping channels for links in interference regions. However, state sharing among nodes introduces significant communication overhead, especially as network size or node mobility scale, thereby decreasing throughput efficiency of already capacity-limited networks. In this paper, we eschew state sharing while adapting the CS schedule based on a learning-based channel occupancy prediction. We propose the MiLAAP attention-based prediction framework for machine learning models of spectral, spatial, and temporal dependencies among network nodes. MiLAAP uses a self-attention mechanism that lets each node capture the temporospectral CS pattern in its interference region and accordingly predict the channel occupancy state within that region. Notably, the prediction relies only on locally and passively observed channel activities, and thus introduces no communication overhead. To deal with node mobility, MiLAAP also uses a multi-head self-attention mechanism that lets each node locally capture the spatiotemporal dependencies on other network nodes that can interfere with it and accordingly predict the motion trajectory of those nodes. Detecting nodes that enter or move outside the interference region is used to further improve the prediction accuracy of channel occupancy. We show that for dynamic networks that use local CS sequences to support relatively long-lived flow traffics, the channel state prediction accuracy of MiLAAP is remarkably ~100% across different node mobility patterns and it achieves zero-shot generalizability across different periods of CS sequences.

Paperid: 4835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19141.pdf

Abstract:
Current electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding models are typically trained on small numbers of subjects performing a single task. Here, we introduce a large-scale, code-submission-based competition comprising two challenges. First, the Transfer Challenge asks participants to build and test a model that can zero-shot decode new tasks and new subjects from their EEG data. Second, the Psychopathology factor prediction Challenge asks participants to infer subject measures of mental health from EEG data. For this, we use an unprecedented, multi-terabyte dataset of high-density EEG signals (128 channels) recorded from over 3,000 child to young adult subjects engaged in multiple active and passive tasks. We provide several tunable neural network baselines for each of these two challenges, including a simple network and demographic-based regression models. Developing models that generalise across tasks and individuals will pave the way for ML network architectures capable of adapting to EEG data collected from diverse tasks and individuals. Similarly, predicting mental health-relevant personality trait values from EEG might identify objective biomarkers useful for clinical diagnosis and design of personalised treatment for psychological conditions. Ultimately, the advances spurred by this challenge could contribute to the development of computational psychiatry and useful neurotechnology, and contribute to breakthroughs in both fundamental neuroscience and applied clinical research.

Paperid: 4836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17761.pdf

Abstract:
Motivated by the limitations of current spectral analysis methods-such as reliance on single-modality data, limited generalizability, and poor interpretability-we propose a novel multi-modal spectral analysis framework that integrates prior knowledge graphs with Large Language Models. Our method explicitly bridges physical spectral measurements and chemical structural semantics by representing them in a unified Textual Graph format, enabling flexible, interpretable, and generalizable spectral understanding. Raw spectra are first transformed into TAGs, where nodes and edges are enriched with textual attributes describing both spectral properties and chemical context. These are then merged with relevant prior knowledge-including functional groups and molecular graphs-to form a Task Graph that incorporates "Prompt Nodes" supporting LLM-based contextual reasoning. A Graph Neural Network further processes this structure to complete downstream tasks. This unified design enables seamless multi-modal integration and automated feature decoding with minimal manual annotation. Our framework achieves consistently high performance across multiple spectral analysis tasks, including node-level, edge-level, and graph-level classification. It demonstrates robust generalization in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, highlighting its effectiveness in learning from limited data and supporting in-context reasoning. This work establishes a scalable and interpretable foundation for LLM-driven spectral analysis, unifying physical and chemical modalities for scientific applications.

Paperid: 4837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12346.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) has enabled the use of hundreds, or even thousands, of demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL) - a previously impractical regime. This paper investigates whether traditional ICL selection strategies, which balance the similarity of ICL examples to the test input (using a text retriever) with diversity within the ICL set, remain effective when utilizing a large number of demonstrations. Our experiments demonstrate that, while longer contexts can accommodate more examples, simply increasing the number of demonstrations does not guarantee improved performance. Smart ICL selection remains crucial, even with thousands of demonstrations. To further enhance ICL in this setting, we introduce Refract ICL, a novel ICL selection algorithm specifically designed to focus LLM attention on challenging examples by strategically repeating them within the context and incorporating zero-shot predictions as error signals. Our results show that Refract ICL significantly improves the performance of extremely long-context models such as Gemini 1.5 Pro, particularly on tasks with a smaller number of output classes.

Paperid: 4838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11012.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for structuring and leveraging diverse real-world knowledge, which serve as a fundamental technology for enabling cognitive intelligence systems with advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities. Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) aims to infer new knowledge based on existing facts in KGs, playing a crucial role in applications such as public security intelligence, intelligent healthcare, and financial risk assessment. From a task-centric perspective, existing KGR approaches can be broadly classified into static single-step KGR, static multi-step KGR, dynamic KGR, multi-modal KGR, few-shot KGR, and inductive KGR. While existing surveys have covered these six types of KGR tasks, a comprehensive review that systematically summarizes all KGR tasks particularly including downstream applications and more challenging reasoning paradigms remains lacking. In contrast to previous works, this survey provides a more comprehensive perspective on the research of KGR by categorizing approaches based on primary reasoning tasks, downstream application tasks, and potential challenging reasoning tasks. Besides, we explore advanced techniques, such as large language models (LLMs), and their impact on KGR. This work aims to highlight key research trends and outline promising future directions in the field of KGR.

Paperid: 4839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10895.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot generative model adaptation (ZSGM) aims to adapt a pre-trained generator to a target domain using only text guidance and without any samples from the target domain. Central to recent ZSGM approaches are directional loss which use the text guidance in the form of aligning the image offset with text offset in the embedding space of a vision-language model like CLIP. This is similar to the analogical reasoning in NLP where the offset between one pair of words is used to identify a missing element in another pair by aligning the offset between these two pairs. However, a major limitation of existing ZSGM methods is that the learning objective assumes the complete alignment between image offset and text offset in the CLIP embedding space, resulting in quality degrade in generated images. Our work makes two main contributions. Inspired by the offset misalignment studies in NLP, as our first contribution, we perform an empirical study to analyze the misalignment between text offset and image offset in CLIP embedding space for various large publicly available datasets. Our important finding is that offset misalignment in CLIP embedding space is correlated with concept distance, i.e., close concepts have a less offset misalignment. To address the limitations of the current approaches, as our second contribution, we propose Adaptation with Iterative Refinement (AIR) which is the first ZSGM approach to focus on improving target domain image quality based on our new insight on offset misalignment.Qualitative, quantitative, and user study in 26 experiment setups consistently demonstrate the proposed AIR approach achieves SOTA performance. Additional experiments are in Supp.

Paperid: 4840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06517.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional SLAM algorithms are excellent at camera tracking but might generate lower resolution and incomplete 3D maps. Recently, Gaussian Splatting (GS) approaches have emerged as an option for SLAM with accurate, dense 3D map building. However, existing GS-based SLAM methods rely on per-scene optimization which is time-consuming and does not generalize to diverse scenes well. In this work, we introduce the first generalizable GS-based semantic SLAM algorithm that incrementally builds and updates a 3D scene representation from an RGB-D video stream using a learned generalizable network. Our approach starts from an RGB-D image recognition backbone to predict the Gaussian parameters from every downsampled and backprojected image location. Additionally, we seamlessly integrate 3D semantic segmentation into our GS framework, bridging 3D mapping and recognition through a shared backbone. To correct localization drifting and floaters, we propose to optimize the GS for only 1 iteration following global localization. We demonstrate state-of-the-art semantic SLAM performance on the real-world benchmark ScanNet with an order of magnitude fewer Gaussians compared to other recent GS-based methods, and showcase our model's generalization capability through zero-shot transfer to the NYUv2 and TUM RGB-D datasets.

Paperid: 4841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05614.pdf

Abstract:
A growing variety of prompt engineering techniques has been proposed for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systematic evaluation of each technique on individual software engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we present a systematic evaluation of 14 established prompt techniques across 10 SE tasks using four LLM models. As identified in the prior literature, the selected prompting techniques span six core dimensions (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Thought Generation, Ensembling, Self-Criticism, and Decomposition). They are evaluated on tasks such as code generation, bug fixing, and code-oriented question answering, to name a few. Our results show which prompting techniques are most effective for SE tasks requiring complex logic and intensive reasoning versus those that rely more on contextual understanding and example-driven scenarios. We also analyze correlations between the linguistic characteristics of prompts and the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of prompting techniques in enhancing performance on SE tasks. Additionally, we report the time and token consumption for each prompting technique when applied to a specific task and model, offering guidance for practitioners in selecting the optimal prompting technique for their use cases.

Paperid: 4842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04399.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Unsupervised Meta-Testing with Conditional Neural Processes (UMCNP), a novel hybrid few-shot meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) method that uniquely combines, yet distinctly separates, parameterized policy gradient-based (PPG) and task inference-based few-shot meta-RL. Tailored for settings where the reward signal is missing during meta-testing, our method increases sample efficiency without requiring additional samples in meta-training. UMCNP leverages the efficiency and scalability of Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs) to reduce the number of online interactions required in meta-testing. During meta-training, samples previously collected through PPG meta-RL are efficiently reused for learning task inference in an offline manner. UMCNP infers the latent representation of the transition dynamics model from a single test task rollout with unknown parameters. This approach allows us to generate rollouts for self-adaptation by interacting with the learned dynamics model. We demonstrate our method can adapt to an unseen test task using significantly fewer samples during meta-testing than the baselines in 2D-Point Agent and continuous control meta-RL benchmarks, namely, cartpole with unknown angle sensor bias, walker agent with randomized dynamics parameters.

Paperid: 4843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03487.pdf

Abstract:
Reranking is fundamental to information retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, with recent Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly advancing reranking quality. While recent advances with LLMs have significantly improved document reranking quality, current approaches primarily rely on large-scale LLMs (>7B parameters) through zero-shot prompting, presenting high computational costs. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer a promising alternative because of their efficiency, but our preliminary quantitative analysis reveals they struggle with understanding task prompts without fine-tuning. This limits their effectiveness for document reranking tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a novel two-stage training approach, ProRank, for SLM-based document reranking. First, we propose a prompt warmup stage using reinforcement learning GRPO to steer SLMs to understand task prompts and generate more accurate coarse-grained binary relevance scores for document reranking. Then, we continuously fine-tune the SLMs with a fine-grained score learning stage without introducing additional layers to further improve the reranking quality. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ProRank consistently outperforms both the most advanced open-source and proprietary reranking models. Notably, our lightweight ProRank-0.5B model even surpasses the powerful 32B LLM reranking model on the BEIR benchmark, establishing that properly trained SLMs can achieve superior document reranking performance while maintaining computational efficiency.

Paperid: 4844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02557.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models, such as CLIP, have achieved significant success in aligning visual and textual representations, becoming essential components of many multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. However, numerous studies have identified CLIP's limited fine-grained perception as a critical drawback, leading to substantial failures in downstream MLLMs. In contrast, vision-centric foundation models like DINOv2 demonstrate remarkable capabilities in capturing fine details from images. In this work, we propose a novel kernel-based method to align CLIP's visual representation with that of DINOv2, ensuring that the resulting embeddings maintain compatibility with text embeddings while enhancing perceptual capabilities. Our alignment objective is designed for efficient stochastic optimization. Following this image-only alignment fine-tuning, the visual encoder retains compatibility with the frozen text encoder and exhibits significant improvements in zero-shot object recognition, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and localization. By integrating the aligned visual encoder, downstream MLLMs also demonstrate enhanced performance.

Paperid: 4845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02389.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series prediction or forecasting is critical across many real-world dynamic systems, and recent studies have proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task due to their strong generalization capabilities and ability to perform well without extensive pre-training. However, their effectiveness in handling complex, noisy, and multivariate time-series data remains underexplored. To address this, we propose LLMPred which enhances LLM-based time-series prediction by converting time-series sequences into text and feeding them to LLMs for zero shot prediction along with two main data pre-processing techniques. First, we apply time-series sequence decomposition to facilitate accurate prediction on complex and noisy univariate sequences. Second, we extend this univariate prediction capability to multivariate data using a lightweight prompt-processing strategy. Extensive experiments with smaller LLMs such as Llama 2 7B, Llama 3.2 3B, GPT-4o-mini, and DeepSeek 7B demonstrate that LLMPred achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, a thorough ablation study highlights the importance of the key components proposed in LLMPred.

Paperid: 4846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00819.pdf

Abstract:
End-to-end autonomous driving systems map sensor data directly to control commands, but remain opaque, lack interpretability, and offer no formal safety guarantees. While recent vision-language-guided reinforcement learning (RL) methods introduce semantic feedback, they often rely on static prompts and fixed objectives, limiting adaptability to dynamic driving scenes. We present DriveMind, a unified semantic reward framework that integrates: (i) a contrastive Vision-Language Model (VLM) encoder for stepwise semantic anchoring; (ii) a novelty-triggered VLM encoder-decoder, fine-tuned via chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation, for dynamic prompt generation upon semantic drift; (iii) a hierarchical safety module enforcing kinematic constraints (e.g., speed, lane centering, stability); and (iv) a compact predictive world model to reward alignment with anticipated ideal states. DriveMind achieves 19.4 +/- 2.3 km/h average speed, 0.98 +/- 0.03 route completion, and near-zero collisions in CARLA Town 2, outperforming baselines by over 4% in success rate. Its semantic reward generalizes zero-shot to real dash-cam data with minimal distributional shift, demonstrating robust cross-domain alignment and potential for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 4847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00420.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting anomalies in the data collected by WSNs can provide crucial evidence for assessing the reliability and stability of WSNs. Existing methods for WSN anomaly detection often face challenges such as the limited extraction of spatiotemporal correlation features, the absence of sample labels, few anomaly samples, and an imbalanced sample distribution. To address these issues, a spatiotemporal correlation detection model (MTAD-RD) considering both model architecture and a two-stage training strategy perspective is proposed. In terms of model structure design, the proposed MTAD-RD backbone network includes a retentive network (RetNet) enhanced by a cross-retention (CR) module, a multigranular feature fusion module, and a graph attention network module to extract internode correlation information. This proposed model can integrate the intermodal correlation features and spatial features of WSN neighbor nodes while extracting global information from time series data. Moreover, its serialized inference characteristic can remarkably reduce inference overhead. For model training, a two-stage training approach was designed. First, a contrastive learning proxy task was designed for time series data with graph structure information in WSNs, enabling the backbone network to learn transferable features from unlabeled data using unsupervised contrastive learning methods, thereby addressing the issue of missing sample labels in the dataset. Then, a caching-based sample sampler was designed to divide samples into few-shot and contrastive learning data. A specific joint loss function was developed to jointly train the dual-graph discriminator network to address the problem of sample imbalance effectively. In experiments carried out on real public datasets, the designed MTAD-RD anomaly detection method achieved an F1 score of 90.97%, outperforming existing supervised WSN anomaly detection methods.

Paperid: 4848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23719.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning, the ability of large language models to perform tasks using only examples provided in the prompt, has recently been adapted for time series forecasting. This paradigm enables zero-shot prediction, where past values serve as context for forecasting future values, making powerful forecasting tools accessible to non-experts and increasing the performance when training data are scarce. Most existing zero-shot forecasting approaches rely on transformer architectures, which, despite their success in language, often fall short of expectations in time series forecasting, where recurrent models like LSTMs frequently have the edge. Conversely, while LSTMs are well-suited for time series modeling due to their state-tracking capabilities, they lack strong in-context learning abilities. We introduce TiRex that closes this gap by leveraging xLSTM, an enhanced LSTM with competitive in-context learning skills. Unlike transformers, state-space models, or parallelizable RNNs such as RWKV, TiRex retains state-tracking, a critical property for long-horizon forecasting. To further facilitate its state-tracking ability, we propose a training-time masking strategy called CPM. TiRex sets a new state of the art in zero-shot time series forecasting on the HuggingFace benchmarks GiftEval and Chronos-ZS, outperforming significantly larger models including TabPFN-TS (Prior Labs), Chronos Bolt (Amazon), TimesFM (Google), and Moirai (Salesforce) across both short- and long-term forecasts.

Paperid: 4849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21518.pdf

Abstract:
Neural network-based medium access control (MAC) protocol models (NPMs) improve goodput through site-specific operations but are vulnerable to shifts from their training network environments, such as changes in the number of user equipments (UEs) severely degrade goodput. To enhance resilience against such environmental shifts, we propose three novel semantic MAC protocol frameworks empowered by large language models (LLMs). First, we introduce a token-based protocol model (TPM), where an LLM generates MAC signaling messages. By editing LLM instruction prompts, TPM enables instant adaptation, which can be further enhanced by TextGrad, an LLM-based automated prompt optimizer. TPM inference is fast but coarse due to the lack of real interactions with the changed environment, and computationally intensive due to the large size of the LLM. To improve goodput and computation efficiency, we develop T2NPM, which transfers and augments TPM knowledge into an NPM via knowledge distillation (KD). Integrating TPM and T2NPM, we propose T3NPM, which employs TPM in the early phase and switches to T2NPM later. To optimize this phase switching, we design a novel metric of meta-resilience, which quantifies resilience to unknown target goodput after environmental shifts. Simulations corroborate that T3NPM achieves 20.56% higher meta-resilience than NPM with 19.8x lower computation cost than TPM in FLOPS.

Paperid: 4850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21501.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for visual processing tasks, demonstrating excellent scalability with increased training data and model size. However, recent work has identified the emergence of artifact tokens in ViTs that are incongruous with the local semantics. These anomalous tokens degrade ViT performance in tasks that require fine-grained localization or structural coherence. An effective mitigation of this issue is to the addition of register tokens to ViTs, which implicitly "absorb" the artifact term during training. Given the availability of various large-scale pre-trained ViTs, in this paper we aim at equipping them with such register tokens without the need of re-training them from scratch, which is infeasible considering their size. Specifically, we propose Post Hoc Registers (PH-Reg), an efficient self-distillation method that integrates registers into an existing ViT without requiring additional labeled data and full retraining. PH-Reg initializes both teacher and student networks from the same pre-trained ViT. The teacher remains frozen and unmodified, while the student is augmented with randomly initialized register tokens. By applying test-time augmentation to the teacher's inputs, we generate denoised dense embeddings free of artifacts, which are then used to optimize only a small subset of unlocked student weights. We show that our approach can effectively reduce the number of artifact tokens, improving the segmentation and depth prediction of the student ViT under zero-shot and linear probing.

Paperid: 4851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17558.pdf

Abstract:
Aligning large language models (LLMs) to accurately detect hallucinations remains a significant challenge due to the sophisticated nature of hallucinated text. Recognizing that hallucinated samples typically exhibit higher deceptive quality than traditional negative samples, we use these carefully engineered hallucinations as negative examples in the DPO alignment procedure. Our method incorporates a curriculum learning strategy, gradually transitioning the training from easier samples, identified based on the greatest reduction in probability scores from independent fact checking models, to progressively harder ones. This structured difficulty scaling ensures stable and incremental learning. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our HaluCheck models, trained with curriculum DPO approach and high quality negative samples, significantly improves model performance across various metrics, achieving improvements of upto 24% on difficult benchmarks like MedHallu and HaluEval. Additionally, HaluCheck models demonstrate robustness in zero-shot settings, significantly outperforming larger state-of-the-art models across various benchmarks.

Paperid: 4852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17116.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a comparative study of large language models (LLMs) in interpreting grid-structured geospatial data. We evaluate the performance of a base model through structured prompting and contrast it with a fine-tuned variant trained on a dataset of user-assistant interactions. Our results highlight the strengths and limitations of zero-shot prompting and demonstrate the benefits of fine-tuning for structured geospatial and temporal reasoning.

Paperid: 4853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17083.pdf

Abstract:
One persistent challenge in LLM research is the development of attention mechanisms that are able to generalise from training on shorter contexts to inference on longer contexts. We propose two conditions that we expect all effective long context attention mechanisms to have: scale-invariant total attention, and scale-invariant attention sparsity. Under a Gaussian assumption, we show that a simple position-dependent transformation of the attention logits is sufficient for these conditions to hold. Experimentally we find that the resulting scale-invariant attention scheme gives considerable benefits in terms of validation loss when zero-shot generalising from training on short contexts to validation on longer contexts, and is effective at long-context retrieval.

Paperid: 4854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16993.pdf

Abstract:
Uniform downsampling remains the de facto standard for reducing spatial resolution in vision backbones. In this work, we propose an alternative design built around a content-aware spatial grouping layer, that dynamically assigns tokens to a reduced set based on image boundaries and their semantic content. Stacking our grouping layer across consecutive backbone stages results in hierarchical segmentation that arises natively in the feature extraction process, resulting in our coined Native Segmentation Vision Transformer. We show that a careful design of our architecture enables the emergence of strong segmentation masks solely from grouping layers, that is, without additional segmentation-specific heads. This sets the foundation for a new paradigm of native, backbone-level segmentation, which enables strong zero-shot results without mask supervision, as well as a minimal and efficient standalone model design for downstream segmentation tasks. Our project page is https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dvl/projects/native-segmentation.

Paperid: 4855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16674.pdf

Abstract:
Batteries are essential for various applications, including electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, making safety and efficiency critical concerns. Anomaly detection in battery thermal images helps identify failures early, but traditional deep learning methods require extensive labeled data, which is difficult to obtain, especially for anomalies due to safety risks and high data collection costs. To overcome this, we explore zero-shot anomaly detection using Visual Question Answering (VQA) models, which leverage pretrained knowledge and textbased prompts to generalize across vision tasks. By incorporating prior knowledge of normal battery thermal behavior, we design prompts to detect anomalies without battery-specific training data. We evaluate three VQA models (ChatGPT-4o, LLaVa-13b, and BLIP-2) analyzing their robustness to prompt variations, repeated trials, and qualitative outputs. Despite the lack of finetuning on battery data, our approach demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art models that are trained with the battery data. Our findings highlight the potential of VQA-based zero-shot learning for battery anomaly detection and suggest future directions for improving its effectiveness.

Paperid: 4856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16581.pdf

Abstract:
In the zero-shot policy transfer setting in reinforcement learning, the goal is to train an agent on a fixed set of training environments so that it can generalise to similar, but unseen, testing environments. Previous work has shown that policy distillation after training can sometimes produce a policy that outperforms the original in the testing environments. However, it is not yet entirely clear why that is, or what data should be used to distil the policy. In this paper, we prove, under certain assumptions, a generalisation bound for policy distillation after training. The theory provides two practical insights: for improved generalisation, you should 1) train an ensemble of distilled policies, and 2) distil it on as much data from the training environments as possible. We empirically verify that these insights hold in more general settings, when the assumptions required for the theory no longer hold. Finally, we demonstrate that an ensemble of policies distilled on a diverse dataset can generalise significantly better than the original agent.

Paperid: 4857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15685.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. This paper examines three paradigms for building robotic systems: end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models that implicitly integrate perception and planning, and modular pipelines incorporating either vision-language models (VLMs) or multimodal large language models (LLMs). We evaluate these paradigms through two focused case studies: a complex instruction grounding task assessing fine-grained instruction understanding and cross-modal disambiguation, and an object manipulation task targeting skill transfer via VLA finetuning. Our experiments in zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal trade-offs in generalization and data efficiency. By exploring performance limits, we distill design implications for developing language-driven physical agents and outline emerging challenges and opportunities for FM-powered robotics in real-world conditions.

Paperid: 4858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14986.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing control policies to novel embodiments remains a fundamental challenge in enabling scalable and transferable learning in robotics. While prior works have explored this in locomotion, a systematic study in the context of manipulation tasks remains limited, partly due to the lack of standardized benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for learning cross-embodiment manipulation, focusing on two foundational tasks-reach and push-across a diverse range of morphologies. The benchmark is designed to test generalization along three axes: interpolation (testing performance within a robot category that shares the same link structure), extrapolation (testing on a robot with a different link structure), and composition (testing on combinations of link structures). On the benchmark, we evaluate the ability of different RL policies to learn from multiple morphologies and to generalize to novel ones. Our study aims to answer whether morphology-aware training can outperform single-embodiment baselines, whether zero-shot generalization to unseen morphologies is feasible, and how consistently these patterns hold across different generalization regimes. The results highlight the current limitations of multi-embodiment learning and provide insights into how architectural and training design choices influence policy generalization.

Paperid: 4859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13668.pdf

Abstract:
Modern consumer banking applications require accurate and efficient retrieval of information in response to user queries. Mapping user utterances to the most relevant Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is a crucial component of these systems. Traditional approaches often rely on a single model or technique, which may not capture the nuances of diverse user inquiries. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent framework for FAQ annotation that combines multiple specialized agents with different approaches and a judge agent that reranks candidates to produce optimal results. Our agents utilize a structured reasoning approach inspired by Attentive Reasoning Queries (ARQs), which guides them through systematic reasoning steps using targeted, task-specific JSON queries. Our framework features a few-shot example strategy, where each agent receives different few-shots, enhancing ensemble diversity and coverage of the query space. We evaluate our framework on a real-world major bank dataset as well as public benchmark datasets (LCQMC and FiQA), demonstrating significant improvements over single-agent approaches across multiple metrics, including a 14% increase in Top-1 accuracy, an 18% increase in Top-5 accuracy, and a 12% improvement in Mean Reciprocal Rank on our dataset, and similar gains on public benchmarks when compared with traditional and single-agent annotation techniques. Our framework is particularly effective at handling ambiguous queries, making it well-suited for deployment in production banking applications while showing strong generalization capabilities across different domains and languages.

Paperid: 4860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11878.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate molecular property prediction (MPP) is a critical step in modern drug development. However, the scarcity of experimental validation data poses a significant challenge to AI-driven research paradigms. Under few-shot learning scenarios, the quality of molecular representations directly dictates the theoretical upper limit of model performance. We present AdaptMol, a prototypical network integrating Adaptive multimodal fusion for Molecular representation. This framework employs a dual-level attention mechanism to dynamically integrate global and local molecular features derived from two modalities: SMILES sequences and molecular graphs. (1) At the local level, structural features such as atomic interactions and substructures are extracted from molecular graphs, emphasizing fine-grained topological information; (2) At the global level, the SMILES sequence provides a holistic representation of the molecule. To validate the necessity of multimodal adaptive fusion, we propose an interpretable approach based on identifying molecular active substructures to demonstrate that multimodal adaptive fusion can efficiently represent molecules. Extensive experiments on three commonly used benchmarks under 5-shot and 10-shot settings demonstrate that AdaptMol achieves state-of-the-art performance in most cases. The rationale-extracted method guides the fusion of two modalities and highlights the importance of both modalities.

Paperid: 4861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11366.pdf

Abstract:
Current invasive assistive technologies are designed to infer high-dimensional motor control signals from severely paralyzed patients. However, they face significant challenges, including public acceptance, limited longevity, and barriers to commercialization. Meanwhile, noninvasive alternatives often rely on artifact-prone signals, require lengthy user training, and struggle to deliver robust high-dimensional control for dexterous tasks. To address these issues, this study introduces a novel human-centered multimodal AI approach as intelligent compensatory mechanisms for lost motor functions that could potentially enable patients with severe paralysis to control high-dimensional assistive devices, such as dexterous robotic arms, using limited and noninvasive inputs. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art (SoTA) noninvasive approaches, our context-aware, multimodal shared-autonomy framework integrates deep reinforcement learning algorithms to blend limited low-dimensional user input with real-time environmental perception, enabling adaptive, dynamic, and intelligent interpretation of human intent for complex dexterous manipulation tasks, such as pick-and-place. The results from our ARAS (Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Amplification of limited inputs in Shared autonomy) trained with synthetic users over 50,000 computer simulation episodes demonstrated the first successful implementation of the proposed closed-loop human-in-the-loop paradigm, outperforming the SoTA shared autonomy algorithms. Following a zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, ARAS was evaluated on 23 human subjects, demonstrating high accuracy in dynamic intent detection and smooth, stable 3D trajectory control for dexterous pick-and-place tasks. ARAS user study achieved a high task success rate of 92.88%, with short completion times comparable to those of SoTA invasive assistive technologies.

Paperid: 4862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07344.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we present GPDiT, a Generative Pre-trained Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer that unifies the strengths of diffusion and autoregressive modeling for long-range video synthesis, within a continuous latent space. Instead of predicting discrete tokens, GPDiT autoregressively predicts future latent frames using a diffusion loss, enabling natural modeling of motion dynamics and semantic consistency across frames. This continuous autoregressive framework not only enhances generation quality but also endows the model with representation capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight causal attention variant and a parameter-free rotation-based time-conditioning mechanism, improving both the training and inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GPDiT achieves strong performance in video generation quality, video representation ability, and few-shot learning tasks, highlighting its potential as an effective framework for video modeling in continuous space.

Paperid: 4863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06217.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have shown strong performance in various vision tasks, particularly image segmentation, due to their impressive zero-shot segmentation capabilities. However, effectively adapting such models for medical image classification is still a less explored topic. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to adapt SAM for medical image classification. First, we utilize the SAM image encoder as a feature extractor to capture segmentation-based features that convey important spatial and contextual details of the image, while freezing its weights to avoid unnecessary overhead during training. Next, we propose a novel Spatially Localized Channel Attention (SLCA) mechanism to compute spatially localized attention weights for the feature maps. The features extracted from SAM's image encoder are processed through SLCA to compute attention weights, which are then integrated into deep learning classification models to enhance their focus on spatially relevant or meaningful regions of the image, thus improving classification performance. Experimental results on three public medical image classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and data-efficiency of our approach.

Paperid: 4864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05145.pdf

Abstract:
To perform in-context learning, language models must extract signals from individual few-shot examples, aggregate these into a learned prediction rule, and then apply this rule to new examples. How is this implemented in the forward pass of modern transformer models? To study this, we consider a structured family of few-shot learning tasks for which the true prediction rule is to add an integer $k$ to the input. We find that Llama-3-8B attains high accuracy on this task for a range of $k$, and localize its few-shot ability to just three attention heads via a novel optimization approach. We further show the extracted signals lie in a six-dimensional subspace, where four of the dimensions track the unit digit and the other two dimensions track overall magnitude. We finally examine how these heads extract information from individual few-shot examples, identifying a self-correction mechanism in which mistakes from earlier examples are suppressed by later examples. Our results demonstrate how tracking low-dimensional subspaces across a forward pass can provide insight into fine-grained computational structures.

Paperid: 4865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03361.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes by aligning images with intermediate class semantics, like human-annotated concepts or class definitions. An emerging alternative leverages Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate class documents. However, these methods often face challenges with transparency in the classification process and may suffer from the notorious hallucination problem in LLMs, resulting in non-visual class semantics. This paper redefines class semantics in ZSL with a focus on transferability and discriminability, introducing a novel framework called Zero-shot Learning with Infinite Class Concepts (InfZSL). Our approach leverages the powerful capabilities of LLMs to dynamically generate an unlimited array of phrase-level class concepts. To address the hallucination challenge, we introduce an entropy-based scoring process that incorporates a ``goodness" concept selection mechanism, ensuring that only the most transferable and discriminative concepts are selected. Our InfZSL framework not only demonstrates significant improvements on three popular benchmark datasets but also generates highly interpretable, image-grounded concepts. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 4866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02915.pdf

Abstract:
Tactile sensing is an important sensing modality for robot manipulation. Among different types of tactile sensors, magnet-based sensors, like u-skin, balance well between high durability and tactile density. However, the large sim-to-real gap of tactile sensors prevents robots from acquiring useful tactile-based manipulation skills from simulation data, a recipe that has been successful for achieving complex and sophisticated control policies. Prior work has implemented binarization techniques to bridge the sim-to-real gap for dexterous in-hand manipulation. However, binarization inherently loses much information that is useful in many other tasks, e.g., insertion. In our work, we propose GCS, a novel sim-to-real technique to learn contact-rich skills with dense, distributed, 3-axis tactile readings. We evaluate our approach on blind insertion tasks and show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of RL policies with raw tactile reading as input.

Paperid: 4867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02448.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution detection (OOD) is a pivotal task for real-world applications that trains models to identify samples that are distributionally different from the in-distribution (ID) data during testing. Recent advances in AI, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP, have revolutionized OOD detection by shifting from traditional unimodal image detectors to multimodal image-text detectors. This shift has inspired extensive research; however, existing categorization schemes (e.g., few- or zero-shot types) still rely solely on the availability of ID images, adhering to a unimodal paradigm. To better align with CLIP's cross-modal nature, we propose a new categorization framework rooted in both image and text modalities. Specifically, we categorize existing methods based on how visual and textual information of OOD data is utilized within image + text modalities, and further divide them into four groups: OOD Images (i.e., outliers) Seen or Unseen, and OOD Texts (i.e., learnable vectors or class names) Known or Unknown, across two training strategies (i.e., train-free or training-required). More importantly, we discuss open problems in CLIP-like OOD detection and highlight promising directions for future research, including cross-domain integration, practical applications, and theoretical understanding.

Paperid: 4868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01485.pdf

Abstract:
Linear Programming (LP) problems aim to find the optimal solution to an objective under constraints. These problems typically require domain knowledge, mathematical skills, and programming ability, presenting significant challenges for non-experts. This study explores the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating solver-specific LP code. We propose CHORUS, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for synthesizing Gurobi-based LP code from natural language problem statements. CHORUS incorporates a hierarchical tree-like chunking strategy for theoretical contents and generates additional metadata based on code examples from documentation to facilitate self-contained, semantically coherent retrieval. Two-stage retrieval approach of CHORUS followed by cross-encoder reranking further ensures contextual relevance. Finally, expertly crafted prompt and structured parser with reasoning steps improve code generation performance significantly. Experiments on the NL4Opt-Code benchmark show that CHORUS improves the performance of open-source LLMs such as Llama3.1 (8B), Llama3.3 (70B), Phi4 (14B), Deepseek-r1 (32B), and Qwen2.5-coder (32B) by a significant margin compared to baseline and conventional RAG. It also allows these open-source LLMs to outperform or match the performance of much stronger baselines-GPT3.5 and GPT4 while requiring far fewer computational resources. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of expert prompting, hierarchical chunking, and structured reasoning.

Paperid: 4869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20669.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in AI-based multimedia generation have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic images and videos, raising concerns about their potential use in spreading misinformation. The widespread accessibility of generative techniques, which allow for the production of fake multimedia from prompts or existing media, along with their continuous refinement, underscores the urgent need for highly accurate and generalizable AI-generated media detection methods, underlined also by new regulations like the European Digital AI Act. In this paper, we draw inspiration from Vision Transformer (ViT)-based fake image detection and extend this idea to video. We propose an {original} %innovative framework that effectively integrates ViT embeddings over time to enhance detection performance. Our method shows promising accuracy, generalization, and few-shot learning capabilities across a new, large and diverse dataset of videos generated using five open source generative techniques from the state-of-the-art, as well as a separate dataset containing videos produced by proprietary generative methods.

Paperid: 4870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16423.pdf

Abstract:
Millimeter wave (mmWave) radar sensors play a vital role in hand gesture recognition (HGR) by detecting subtle motions while preserving user privacy. However, the limited scale of radar datasets hinders the performance. Existing synthetic data generation methods fall short in two key areas. On the one hand, modeling-based approaches fail to accurately simulate the wave propagation and reflection at the hand-gesture level, facing unique complexities such as diffraction and occlusion. On the other hand, generative model-based methods are hard to converge while radar data is limited, lacking interpretability, and sometimes fail to produce kinematically plausible results. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel hybrid spectrum synthetic framework leveraging visual hand gesture data. It combines a cylinder mesh-based hand reflection model with a small-scale neural network called RadarWeightNet, which focuses on assigning weights to simulated signals. Our framework addresses two key challenges: achieving accurate simulation of complex hand geometry and bridging the simulation-to-real gap in a data-driven manner while preserving interpretability, which balances physical accuracy with machine learning adaptability. We tested our framework under extreme scenarios where radar data is scarce. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid framework, achieving up to 63% SSIM in synthetic performance and up to 30% improvement in classification performance in few-shot learning.

Paperid: 4871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15922.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-label requirements classification is a challenging task, especially when dealing with numerous classes at varying levels of abstraction. The difficulties increases when a limited number of requirements is available to train a supervised classifier. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) does not require training data and can potentially address this problem. This paper investigates the performance of zero-shot classifiers (ZSCs) on a multi-label industrial dataset. We focuse on classifying requirements according to a taxonomy designed to support requirements tracing. We compare multiple variants of ZSCs using different embeddings, including 9 language models (LMs) with a reduced number of parameters (up to 3B), e.g., BERT, and 5 large LMs (LLMs) with a large number of parameters (up to 70B), e.g., Llama. Our ground truth includes 377 requirements and 1968 labels from 6 output spaces. For the evaluation, we adopt traditional metrics, i.e., precision, recall, F1, and $F_Î²$, as well as a novel label distance metric Dn. This aims to better capture the classification's hierarchical nature and provides a more nuanced evaluation of how far the results are from the ground truth. 1) The top-performing model on 5 out of 6 output spaces is T5-xl, with maximum $F_Î²$ = 0.78 and Dn = 0.04, while BERT base outperformed the other models in one case, with maximum $F_Î²$ = 0.83 and Dn = 0.04. 2) LMs with smaller parameter size produce the best classification results compared to LLMs. Thus, addressing the problem in practice is feasible as limited computing power is needed. 3) The model architecture (autoencoding, autoregression, and sentence-to-sentence) significantly affects the classifier's performance. We conclude that using ZSL for multi-label requirements classification offers promising results. We also present a novel metric that can be used to select the top-performing model for this problem

Paperid: 4872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13592.pdf

Abstract:
Intent detection, a critical component in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, faces significant challenges in adapting to the rapid influx of integrable tools with complex interrelationships. Existing approaches, such as zero-shot reformulations and LLM-based dynamic recognition, struggle with performance degradation when encountering unseen intents, leading to erroneous task routing. To enhance the model's generalization performance on unseen tasks, we employ Reinforcement Learning (RL) combined with a Reward-based Curriculum Sampling (RCS) during Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training in intent detection tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RL-trained models substantially outperform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines in generalization. Besides, the introduction of the RCS, significantly bolsters the effectiveness of RL in intent detection by focusing the model on challenging cases during training. Moreover, incorporating Chain-of-Thought (COT) processes in RL notably improves generalization in complex intent detection tasks, underscoring the importance of thought in challenging scenarios. This work advances the generalization of intent detection tasks, offering practical insights for deploying adaptable dialogue systems.

Paperid: 4873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11777.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Visual Question Answering (MVQA) systems can interpret medical images in response to natural language queries. However, linguistic variability in question phrasing often undermines the consistency of these systems. To address this challenge, we propose a Semantically Equivalent Question Augmentation (SEQA) framework, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate diverse yet semantically equivalent rephrasings of questions. Specifically, this approach enriches linguistic diversity while preserving semantic meaning. We further introduce an evaluation metric, Total Agreement Rate with Semantically Equivalent Input and Correct Answer (TAR-SC), which assesses a model's capability to generate consistent and correct responses to semantically equivalent linguistic variations. In addition, we also propose three other diversity metrics - average number of QA items per image (ANQI), average number of questions per image with the same answer (ANQA), and average number of open-ended questions per image with the same semantics (ANQS). Using the SEQA framework, we augmented the benchmarked MVQA public datasets of SLAKE, VQA-RAD, and PathVQA. As a result, all three datasets achieved significant improvements by incorporating more semantically equivalent questions: ANQI increased by an average of 86.1, ANQA by 85.1, and ANQS by 46. Subsequent experiments evaluate three MVQA models (M2I2, MUMC, and BiomedGPT) under both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings on the enhanced datasets. Experimental results in MVQA datasets show that fine-tuned models achieve an average accuracy improvement of 19.35%, while our proposed TAR-SC metric shows an average improvement of 11. 61%, indicating a substantial enhancement in model consistency.

Paperid: 4874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07958.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the success of deep learning in close-set 3D object detection, existing approaches struggle with zero-shot generalization to novel objects and camera configurations. We introduce DetAny3D, a promptable 3D detection foundation model capable of detecting any novel object under arbitrary camera configurations using only monocular inputs. Training a foundation model for 3D detection is fundamentally constrained by the limited availability of annotated 3D data, which motivates DetAny3D to leverage the rich prior knowledge embedded in extensively pre-trained 2D foundation models to compensate for this scarcity. To effectively transfer 2D knowledge to 3D, DetAny3D incorporates two core modules: the 2D Aggregator, which aligns features from different 2D foundation models, and the 3D Interpreter with Zero-Embedding Mapping, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting in 2D-to-3D knowledge transfer. Experimental results validate the strong generalization of our DetAny3D, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen categories and novel camera configurations, but also surpasses most competitors on in-domain data.DetAny3D sheds light on the potential of the 3D foundation model for diverse applications in real-world scenarios, e.g., rare object detection in autonomous driving, and demonstrates promise for further exploration of 3D-centric tasks in open-world settings. More visualization results can be found at DetAny3D project page.

Paperid: 4875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07336.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation has achieved remarkable success through the continuous advancement of UNet-based and Transformer-based foundation backbones. However, clinical diagnosis in the real world often requires integrating domain knowledge, especially textual information. Conducting multimodal learning involves visual and text modalities shown as a solution, but collecting paired vision-language datasets is expensive and time-consuming, posing significant challenges. Inspired by the superior ability in numerous cross-modal tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs), we proposed a novel Vision-LLM union framework to address the issues. Specifically, we introduce frozen LLMs for zero-shot instruction generation based on corresponding medical images, imitating the radiology scanning and report generation process. {To better approximate real-world diagnostic processes}, we generate more precise text instruction from multimodal radiology images (e.g., T1-w or T2-w MRI and CT). Based on the impressive ability of semantic understanding and rich knowledge of LLMs. This process emphasizes extracting special features from different modalities and reunion the information for the ultimate clinical diagnostic. With generated text instruction, our proposed union segmentation framework can handle multimodal segmentation without prior collected vision-language datasets. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct comprehensive experiments with influential baselines, the statistical results and the visualized case study demonstrate the superiority of our novel method.}

Paperid: 4876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05716.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated assessment of open-text student reflections and prediction of academic performance. Traditional methods for evaluating reflections are time-consuming and may not scale effectively in educational settings. In this work, we employ LLMs to transform student reflections into quantitative scores using two assessment strategies (single-agent and multi-agent) and two prompting techniques (zero-shot and few-shot). Our experiments, conducted on a dataset of 5,278 reflections from 377 students over three academic terms, demonstrate that the single-agent with few-shot strategy achieves the highest match rate with human evaluations. Furthermore, models utilizing LLM-assessed reflection scores outperform baselines in both at-risk student identification and grade prediction tasks. These findings suggest that LLMs can effectively automate reflection assessment, reduce educators' workload, and enable timely support for students who may need additional assistance. Our work emphasizes the potential of integrating advanced generative AI technologies into educational practices to enhance student engagement and academic success.

Paperid: 4877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04736.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning has been shown to improve the performance of large language models. However, traditional approaches like RLHF or RLAIF treat the problem as single-step. As focus shifts toward more complex reasoning and agentic tasks, language models must take multiple steps of text generation, reasoning and environment interaction before generating a solution. We propose a synthetic data generation and RL methodology targeting multi-step optimization scenarios. This approach, called Step-Wise Reinforcement Learning (SWiRL), iteratively generates multi-step reasoning and tool use data, and then learns from that data. It employs a simple step-wise decomposition that breaks each multi-step trajectory into multiple sub-trajectories corresponding to each action by the original model. It then applies synthetic data filtering and RL optimization on these sub-trajectories. We evaluated SWiRL on a number of multi-step tool use, question answering, and mathematical reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that SWiRL outperforms baseline approaches by 21.5%, 12.3%, 14.8%, 11.1%, and 15.3% in relative accuracy on GSM8K, HotPotQA, CofCA, MuSiQue, and BeerQA, respectively. Excitingly, the approach exhibits generalization across tasks: for example, training only on HotPotQA (text question-answering) improves zero-shot performance on GSM8K (a math dataset) by a relative 16.9%.

Paperid: 4878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22749.pdf

Abstract:
In the era of data-driven machine-learning applications, privacy concerns and the scarcity of labeled data have become paramount challenges. These challenges are particularly pronounced in the domain of few-shot learning, where the ability to learn from limited labeled data is crucial. Privacy-preserving few-shot learning algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to address such pronounced challenges. However, it is well-known that privacy-preserving techniques often lead to a drop in utility due to the fundamental trade-off between data privacy and model performance. To enhance the utility of privacy-preserving few-shot learning methods, we introduce a novel approach called Meta-Clip. This technique is specifically designed for meta-learning algorithms, including Differentially Private (DP) model-agnostic meta-learning, DP-Reptile, and DP-MetaSGD algorithms, with the objective of balancing data privacy preservation with learning capacity maximization. By dynamically adjusting clipping thresholds during the training process, our Adaptive Clipping method provides fine-grained control over the disclosure of sensitive information, mitigating overfitting on small datasets and significantly improving the generalization performance of meta-learning models. Through comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in minimizing utility degradation, showcasing a superior privacy-utility trade-off compared to existing privacy-preserving techniques. The adoption of Adaptive Clipping represents a substantial step forward in the field of privacy-preserving few-shot learning, empowering the development of secure and accurate models for real-world applications, especially in scenarios where there are limited data availability.

Paperid: 4879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22430.pdf

Abstract:
Computing accurate depth from multiple views is a fundamental and longstanding challenge in computer vision. However, most existing approaches do not generalize well across different domains and scene types (e.g. indoor vs. outdoor). Training a general-purpose multi-view stereo model is challenging and raises several questions, e.g. how to best make use of transformer-based architectures, how to incorporate additional metadata when there is a variable number of input views, and how to estimate the range of valid depths which can vary considerably across different scenes and is typically not known a priori? To address these issues, we introduce MVSA, a novel and versatile Multi-View Stereo architecture that aims to work Anywhere by generalizing across diverse domains and depth ranges. MVSA combines monocular and multi-view cues with an adaptive cost volume to deal with scale-related issues. We demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot depth estimation on the Robust Multi-View Depth Benchmark, surpassing existing multi-view stereo and monocular baselines.

Paperid: 4880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21330.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming traffic and transportation research, with significant advancements emerging between the years 2023 and 2025 -- a period marked by the inception and swift growth of adopting and adapting LLMs for various traffic and transportation applications. However, despite these significant advancements, a systematic review and synthesis of the existing studies remain lacking. To address this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the methodologies and applications of LLMs in traffic and transportation, highlighting their ability to process unstructured textual data to advance transportation research. We explore key applications, including autonomous driving, travel behavior prediction, and general transportation-related queries, alongside methodologies such as zero- or few-shot learning, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning. Our analysis identifies critical research gaps. From the methodological perspective, many research gaps can be addressed by integrating LLMs with existing tools and refining LLM architectures. From the application perspective, we identify numerous opportunities for LLMs to tackle a variety of traffic and transportation challenges, building upon existing research. By synthesizing these findings, this review not only clarifies the current state of LLM adoption and adaptation in traffic and transportation but also proposes future research directions, paving the way for smarter and more sustainable transportation systems.

Paperid: 4881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19979.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual transfer learning is an invaluable tool for overcoming data scarcity, yet selecting a suitable transfer language remains a challenge. The precise roles of linguistic typology, training data, and model architecture in transfer language choice are not fully understood. We take a holistic approach, examining how both dataset-specific and fine-grained typological features influence transfer language selection for part-of-speech tagging, considering two different sources for morphosyntactic features. While previous work examines these dynamics in the context of bilingual biLSTMS, we extend our analysis to a more modern transfer learning pipeline: zero-shot prediction with pretrained multilingual models. We train a series of transfer language ranking systems and examine how different feature inputs influence ranker performance across architectures. Word overlap, type-token ratio, and genealogical distance emerge as top features across all architectures. Our findings reveal that a combination of typological and dataset-dependent features leads to the best rankings, and that good performance can be obtained with either feature group on its own.

Paperid: 4882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15819.pdf

Abstract:
The intrinsic nonlinearities of soft robots present significant control but simultaneously provide them with rich computational potential. Reservoir computing (RC) has shown effectiveness in online learning systems for controlling nonlinear systems such as soft actuators. Conventional RC can be extended into physical reservoir computing (PRC) by leveraging the nonlinear dynamics of soft actuators for computation. This paper introduces a PRC-based online learning framework to control the motion of a pneumatic soft bending actuator, utilizing another pneumatic soft actuator as the PRC model. Unlike conventional designs requiring two RC models, the proposed control system employs a more compact architecture with a single RC model. Additionally, the framework enables zero-shot online learning, addressing limitations of previous PRC-based control systems reliant on offline training. Simulations and experiments validated the performance of the proposed system. Experimental results indicate that the PRC model achieved superior control performance compared to a linear model, reducing the root-mean-square error (RMSE) by an average of over 37% in bending motion control tasks. The proposed PRC-based online learning control framework provides a novel approach for harnessing physical systems' inherent nonlinearities to enhance the control of soft actuators.

Paperid: 4883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15004.pdf

Abstract:
Segmenting transparent structures in images is challenging since they are difficult to distinguish from the background. Common examples are drinking glasses, which are a ubiquitous part of our lives and appear in many different shapes and sizes. In this work we propose TransCaGNet, a modified version of the zero-shot model CaGNet. We exchange the segmentation backbone with the architecture of Trans4Trans to be capable of segmenting transparent objects. Since some glasses are rarely captured, we use zeroshot learning to be able to create semantic segmentations of glass categories not given during training. We propose a novel synthetic dataset covering a diverse set of different environmental conditions. Additionally we capture a real-world evaluation dataset since most applications take place in the real world. Comparing our model with Zeg-Clip we are able to show that TransCaGNet produces better mean IoU and accuracy values while ZegClip outperforms it mostly for unseen classes. To improve the segmentation results, we combine the semantic segmentation of the models with the segmentation results of SAM 2. Our evaluation emphasizes that distinguishing between different classes is challenging for the models due to similarity, points of view, or coverings. Taking this behavior into account, we assign glasses multiple possible categories. The modification leads to an improvement up to 13.68% for the mean IoU and up to 17.88% for the mean accuracy values on the synthetic dataset. Using our difficult synthetic dataset for training, the models produce even better results on the real-world dataset. The mean IoU is improved up to 5.55% and the mean accuracy up to 5.72% on the real-world dataset.

Paperid: 4884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10779.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), trained on extensive datasets of image-text pairs, exhibit strong multimodal understanding capabilities by implicitly learning associations between textual descriptions and image regions. This emergent ability enables zero-shot object detection and segmentation, using techniques that rely on text-image attention maps, without necessarily training on abundant labeled segmentation datasets. However, performance of such methods depends heavily on prompt engineering and manually selected layers or head choices for the attention layers. In this work, we demonstrate that, rather than relying solely on textual prompts, providing a single visual example for each category and fine-tuning the text-to-image attention layers and embeddings significantly improves the performance. Additionally, we propose learning an ensemble through few-shot fine-tuning across multiple layers and/or prompts. An entropy-based ranking and selection mechanism for text-to-image attention layers is proposed to identify the top-performing layers without the need for segmentation labels. This eliminates the need for hyper-parameter selection of text-to-image attention layers, providing a more flexible and scalable solution for open-vocabulary segmentation. We show that this approach yields strong zero-shot performance, further enhanced through fine-tuning with a single visual example. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method and findings are general and can be applied across various vision-language models (VLMs).

Paperid: 4885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08301.pdf

Abstract:
In many-task optimization scenarios, surrogate models are valuable for mitigating the computational burden of repeated fitness evaluations across tasks. This study proposes a novel meta-surrogate framework to assist many-task optimization, by leveraging the knowledge transfer strengths and emergent capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We formulate a unified framework for many-task fitness prediction, by defining a universal model with metadata to fit a group of problems. Fitness prediction is performed on metadata and decision variables, enabling efficient knowledge sharing across tasks and adaptability to new tasks. The LLM-based meta-surrogate treats fitness prediction as conditional probability estimation, employing a unified token sequence representation for task metadata, inputs, and outputs. This approach facilitates efficient inter-task knowledge sharing through shared token embeddings and captures complex task dependencies via multi-task model training. Experimental results demonstrate the model's emergent generalization ability, including zero-shot performance on problems with unseen dimensions. When integrated into evolutionary transfer optimization (ETO), our framework supports dual-level knowledge transfer -- at both the surrogate and individual levels -- enhancing optimization efficiency and robustness. This work establishes a novel foundation for applying LLMs in surrogate modeling, offering a versatile solution for many-task optimization.

Paperid: 4886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07911.pdf

Abstract:
Pixel-level segmentation is essential in remote sensing, where foundational vision models like CLIP and Segment Anything Model(SAM) have demonstrated significant capabilities in zero-shot segmentation tasks. Despite their advances, challenges specific to remote sensing remain substantial. Firstly, The SAM without clear prompt constraints, often generates redundant masks, and making post-processing more complex. Secondly, the CLIP model, mainly designed for global feature alignment in foundational models, often overlooks local objects crucial to remote sensing. This oversight leads to inaccurate recognition or misplaced focus in multi-target remote sensing imagery. Thirdly, both models have not been pre-trained on multi-scale aerial views, increasing the likelihood of detection failures. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the innovative VTPSeg pipeline, utilizing the strengths of Grounding DINO, CLIP, and SAM for enhanced open-vocabulary image segmentation. The Grounding DINO+(GD+) module generates initial candidate bounding boxes, while the CLIP Filter++(CLIP++) module uses a combination of visual and textual prompts to refine and filter out irrelevant object bounding boxes, ensuring that only pertinent objects are considered. Subsequently, these refined bounding boxes serve as specific prompts for the FastSAM model, which executes precise segmentation. Our VTPSeg is validated by experimental and ablation study results on five popular remote sensing image segmentation datasets.

Paperid: 4887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05630.pdf

Abstract:
Modern orchards are planted in structured rows with distinct panel divisions to improve management. Accurate and efficient joint segmentation of point cloud from Panel to Tree and Branch (P2TB) is essential for robotic operations. However, most current segmentation methods focus on single instance segmentation and depend on a sequence of deep networks to perform joint tasks. This strategy hinders the use of hierarchical information embedded in the data, leading to both error accumulation and increased costs for annotation and computation, which limits its scalability for real-world applications. In this study, we proposed a novel approach that incorporated a Real2Sim L-TreeGen for training data generation and a joint model (J-P2TB) designed for the P2TB task. The J-P2TB model, trained on the generated simulation dataset, was used for joint segmentation of real-world panel point clouds via zero-shot learning. Compared to representative methods, our model outperformed them in most segmentation metrics while using 40% fewer learnable parameters. This Sim2Real result highlighted the efficacy of L-TreeGen in model training and the performance of J-P2TB for joint segmentation, demonstrating its strong accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability for real-world applications. These improvements would not only greatly benefit the development of robots for automated orchard operations but also advance digital twin technology.

Paperid: 4888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05573.pdf

Abstract:
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, where data efficiency and robustness are critical. Yet, existing solutions often rely on carefully crafted, task specific extrinsic rewards, limiting generalization to new tasks or environments. In this paper, we propose InDRiVE (Intrinsic Disagreement based Reinforcement for Vehicle Exploration), a method that leverages purely intrinsic, disagreement based rewards within a Dreamer based MBRL framework. By training an ensemble of world models, the agent actively explores high uncertainty regions of environments without any task specific feedback. This approach yields a task agnostic latent representation, allowing for rapid zero shot or few shot fine tuning on downstream driving tasks such as lane following and collision avoidance. Experimental results in both seen and unseen environments demonstrate that InDRiVE achieves higher success rates and fewer infractions compared to DreamerV2 and DreamerV3 baselines despite using significantly fewer training steps. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of purely intrinsic exploration for learning robust vehicle control behaviors, paving the way for more scalable and adaptable autonomous driving systems.

Paperid: 4889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03890.pdf

Abstract:
Learning dexterous manipulation from few-shot demonstrations is a significant yet challenging problem for advanced, human-like robotic systems. Dense distilled feature fields have addressed this challenge by distilling rich semantic features from 2D visual foundation models into the 3D domain. However, their reliance on neural rendering models such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or Gaussian Splatting results in high computational costs. In contrast, previous approaches based on sparse feature fields either suffer from inefficiencies due to multi-view dependencies and extensive training or lack sufficient grasp dexterity. To overcome these limitations, we propose Language-ENhanced Sparse Distilled Feature Field (LensDFF), which efficiently distills view-consistent 2D features onto 3D points using our novel language-enhanced feature fusion strategy, thereby enabling single-view few-shot generalization. Based on LensDFF, we further introduce a few-shot dexterous manipulation framework that integrates grasp primitives into the demonstrations to generate stable and highly dexterous grasps. Moreover, we present a real2sim grasp evaluation pipeline for efficient grasp assessment and hyperparameter tuning. Through extensive simulation experiments based on the real2sim pipeline and real-world experiments, our approach achieves competitive grasping performance, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.

Paperid: 4890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02532.pdf

Abstract:
The use of large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has become popular across various domains, supporting a range of tasks and processes. However, due to the intrinsic complexity of LLMs, effective prompting is more challenging than it may seem. This highlights the need for innovative educational and support strategies that are both widely accessible and seamlessly integrated into task workflows. Yet, LLM prompting is highly task- and domain-dependent, limiting the effectiveness of generic approaches. In this study, we explore whether LLM-based methods can facilitate learning assessments by using ad-hoc guidelines and a minimal number of annotated prompt samples. Our framework transforms these guidelines into features that can be identified within learners' prompts. Using these feature descriptions and annotated examples, we create few-shot learning detectors. We then evaluate different configurations of these detectors, testing three state-of-the-art LLMs and ensembles. We run experiments with cross-validation on a sample of original prompts, as well as tests on prompts collected from task-naive learners. Our results show how LLMs perform on feature detection. Notably, GPT- 4 demonstrates strong performance on most features, while closely related models, such as GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Turbo (Instruct), show inconsistent behaviors in feature classification. These differences highlight the need for further research into how design choices impact feature selection and prompt detection. Our findings contribute to the fields of generative AI literacy and computer-supported learning assessment, offering valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners.

Paperid: 4891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02298.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of internet medicine provides patients with unprecedented convenience in searching and communicating with doctors relevant to their diseases and desired treatments online. However, the current doctor recommendation systems fail to fully ensure the professionalism and interpretability of the recommended results. In this work, we formulate doctor recommendation as a ranking task and develop a large language model (LLM)-based pointwise ranking framework. Our framework ranks doctors according to their relevance regarding specific diseases-treatment pairs in a zero-shot setting. The advantage of our framework lies in its ability to generate precise and explainable doctor ranking results. Additionally, we construct DrRank, a new expertise-driven doctor ranking dataset comprising over 38 disease-treatment pairs. Experiment results on the DrRank dataset demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms the strongest cross-encoder baseline, achieving a notable gain of +5.45 in the NDCG@10 score while maintaining affordable latency consumption. Furthermore, we comprehensively present the fairness analysis results of our framework from three perspectives of different diseases, patient gender, and geographical regions. Meanwhile, the interpretability of our framework is rigorously verified by three human experts, providing further evidence of the reliability of our proposed framework for doctor recommendation.

Paperid: 4892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01157.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of foundation models has revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, yet their best practices to time series forecasting remains underexplored. Existing time series foundation models often adopt methodologies from these fields without addressing the unique characteristics of time series data. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in cross-domain time series forecasting: the complexity of temporal patterns and semantic misalignment. To tackle these issues, we propose the ``Unify and Anchor" transfer paradigm, which disentangles frequency components for a unified perspective and incorporates external context as domain anchors for guided adaptation. Based on this framework, we introduce ContexTST, a Transformer-based model that employs a time series coordinator for structured representation and the Transformer blocks with a context-informed mixture-of-experts mechanism for effective cross-domain generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContexTST advances state-of-the-art forecasting performance while achieving strong zero-shot transferability across diverse domains.

Paperid: 4893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01116.pdf

Abstract:
Channel prediction is crucial for high-mobility vehicular networks, as it enables the anticipation of future channel conditions and the proactive adjustment of communication strategies. However, achieving accurate vehicular channel prediction is challenging due to significant Doppler effects and rapid channel variations resulting from high-speed vehicle movement and complex propagation environments. In this paper, we propose a novel delay-Doppler (DD) domain channel prediction framework tailored for high-mobility vehicular networks. By transforming the channel representation into the DD domain, we obtain an intuitive, sparse, and stable depiction that closely aligns with the underlying physical propagation processes, effectively reducing the complex vehicular channel to a set of time-series parameters with enhanced predictability. Furthermore, we leverage the large artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict these DD-domain time-series parameters, capitalizing on their advanced ability to model temporal correlations. The zero-shot capability of the pre-trained large AI model facilitates accurate channel predictions without requiring task-specific training, while subsequent fine-tuning on specific vehicular channel data further improves prediction accuracy. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our DD-domain channel prediction framework and the superior accuracy of the large AI model in predicting time-series channel parameters, thereby highlighting the potential of our approach for robust vehicular communication systems.

Paperid: 4894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19455.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-based video generation techniques have significantly improved zero-shot talking-head avatar generation, enhancing the naturalness of both head motion and facial expressions. However, existing methods suffer from poor controllability, making them less applicable to real-world scenarios such as filmmaking and live streaming for e-commerce. To address this limitation, we propose FLAP, a novel approach that integrates explicit 3D intermediate parameters (head poses and facial expressions) into the diffusion model for end-to-end generation of realistic portrait videos. The proposed architecture allows the model to generate vivid portrait videos from audio while simultaneously incorporating additional control signals, such as head rotation angles and eye-blinking frequency. Furthermore, the decoupling of head pose and facial expression allows for independent control of each, offering precise manipulation of both the avatar's pose and facial expressions. We also demonstrate its flexibility in integrating with existing 3D head generation methods, bridging the gap between 3D model-based approaches and end-to-end diffusion techniques. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait video models in both naturalness and controllability.

Paperid: 4895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18452.pdf

Abstract:
During Human Robot Interactions in disaster relief scenarios, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential for substantial physical reasoning to assist in mission objectives. However, these reasoning capabilities are often found only in larger models, which are not currently reasonable to deploy on robotic systems due to size constraints. To meet our problem space requirements, we introduce a dataset and pipeline to create Field Reasoning and Instruction Decoding Agent (FRIDA) models. In our pipeline, domain experts and linguists combine their knowledge to make high-quality, few-shot prompts used to generate synthetic data for fine-tuning. We hand-curate datasets for this few-shot prompting and for evaluation to improve LLM reasoning on both general and disaster-specific objects. We concurrently run an ablation study to understand which kinds of synthetic data most affect performance. We fine-tune several small instruction-tuned models and find that ablated FRIDA models only trained on objects' physical state and function data outperformed both the FRIDA models trained on all synthetic data and the base models in our evaluation. We demonstrate that the FRIDA pipeline is capable of instilling physical common sense with minimal data.

Paperid: 4896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14926.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the performance of 16 Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating LoRaWAN-related engineering tasks involving optimal placement of drones and received power calculation under progressively complex zero-shot, natural language prompts. The primary research question is whether lightweight, locally executed LLMs can generate correct Python code for these tasks. To assess this, we compared locally run models against state-of-the-art alternatives, such as GPT-4 and DeepSeek-V3, which served as reference points. By extracting and executing the Python functions generated by each model, we evaluated their outputs on a zero-to-five scale. Results show that while DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4 consistently provided accurate solutions, certain smaller models -- particularly Phi-4 and LLaMA-3.3 -- also demonstrated strong performance, underscoring the viability of lightweight alternatives. Other models exhibited errors stemming from incomplete understanding or syntactic issues. These findings illustrate the potential of LLM-based approaches for specialized engineering applications while highlighting the need for careful model selection, rigorous prompt design, and targeted domain fine-tuning to achieve reliable outcomes.

Paperid: 4897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11663.pdf

Abstract:
World models that forecast environmental changes from actions are vital for autonomous driving models with strong generalization. The prevailing driving world model mainly build on video prediction model. Although these models can produce high-fidelity video sequences with advanced diffusion-based generator, they are constrained by their predictive duration and overall generalization capabilities. In this paper, we explore to solve this problem by combining generation loss with MAE-style feature-level context learning. In particular, we instantiate this target with three key design: (1) A more scalable Diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure trained with extra mask construction task. (2) we devise diffusion-related mask tokens to deal with the fuzzy relations between mask reconstruction and generative diffusion process. (3) we extend mask construction task to spatial-temporal domain by utilizing row-wise mask for shifted self-attention rather than masked self-attention in MAE. Then, we adopt a row-wise cross-view module to align with this mask design. Based on above improvement, we propose MaskGWM: a Generalizable driving World Model embodied with Video Mask reconstruction. Our model contains two variants: MaskGWM-long, focusing on long-horizon prediction, and MaskGWM-mview, dedicated to multi-view generation. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which contain normal validation of Nuscene dataset, long-horizon rollout of OpenDV-2K dataset and zero-shot validation of Waymo dataset. Quantitative metrics on these datasets show our method notably improving state-of-the-art driving world model.

Paperid: 4898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07847.pdf

Abstract:
Since the establishment of vision-language foundation models as the new mainstay in low-shot vision classification tasks, the question of domain generalization arising from insufficient target data is assuming more importance. This scarcity challenge induces sampling bias and amplifies model sensitivity to variations and shifts in data distributions. While fine-tuning on multiple domains could mitigate such domain generalization issues, it is resource-intensive and demands diverse data sources. In this work, we systematically analyze two critical challenges: (1) covariate shift between the pre-training distribution and the underspecified target distribution, and (2) confidence misalignment, where predictions on novel data are overconfident. To address both challenges simultaneously, we introduce \textbf{Confidence-Calibrated Covariate Shift Correction (CalShift)} -- a unified approach that combines a Fisher information penalty to mitigate covariate shift and a Confidence Misalignment Penalty (CMP) to reduce overconfidence in misclassified examples. Experimental evaluations across various vision and covariate shift benchmarks demonstrate that CalShift significantly improves model calibration, achieving up to a 5.82\% reduction in Expected Calibration Error (ECE). Furthermore, CalShift enhances robustness, improving accuracy by 3.5\% on challenging datasets impacted by covariate shifts. Our results highlight CalShift as a promising strategy for building robust and reliable low-shot vision-language systems for real-world applications.

Paperid: 4899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06759.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a framework for generating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales to enhance text-to-SQL model fine-tuning. These rationales consist of intermediate SQL statements and explanations, serving as incremental steps toward constructing the final SQL query. The process begins with manually annotating a small set of examples, which are then used to prompt a large language model in an iterative, dynamic few-shot knowledge distillation procedure from a teacher model. A rationalization model is subsequently trained on the validated decomposed queries, enabling extensive synthetic CoT annotations for text-to-SQL datasets. To evaluate the approach, we fine-tune small language models with and without these rationales on the BIRD dataset. Results indicate that step-by-step query generation improves execution accuracy, especially for moderately and highly complex queries, while also enhancing explainability.

Paperid: 4900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06147.pdf

Abstract:
Legal documents including judgments and court orders require highly sophisticated legal knowledge for understanding. To disclose expert knowledge for non-experts, we explore the problem of visualizing legal texts with easy-to-understand diagrams and propose a novel dataset of LegalViz with 23 languages and 7,010 cases of legal document and visualization pairs, using the DOT graph description language of Graphviz. LegalViz provides a simple diagram from a complicated legal corpus identifying legal entities, transactions, legal sources, and statements at a glance, that are essential in each judgment. In addition, we provide new evaluation metrics for the legal diagram visualization by considering graph structures, textual similarities, and legal contents. We conducted empirical studies on few-shot and finetuning large language models for generating legal diagrams and evaluated them with these metrics, including legal content-based evaluation within 23 languages. Models trained with LegalViz outperform existing models including GPTs, confirming the effectiveness of our dataset.

Paperid: 4901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03621.pdf

Abstract:
We present a method for augmenting real-world videos with newly generated dynamic content. Given an input video and a simple user-provided text instruction describing the desired content, our method synthesizes dynamic objects or complex scene effects that naturally interact with the existing scene over time. The position, appearance, and motion of the new content are seamlessly integrated into the original footage while accounting for camera motion, occlusions, and interactions with other dynamic objects in the scene, resulting in a cohesive and realistic output video. We achieve this via a zero-shot, training-free framework that harnesses a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion transformer to synthesize the new content and a pre-trained Vision Language Model to envision the augmented scene in detail. Specifically, we introduce a novel inference-based method that manipulates features within the attention mechanism, enabling accurate localization and seamless integration of the new content while preserving the integrity of the original scene. Our method is fully automated, requiring only a simple user instruction. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a wide range of edits applied to real-world videos, encompassing diverse objects and scenarios involving both camera and object motion.

Paperid: 4902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00342.pdf

Abstract:
3D Scene Question Answering (3D SQA) represents an interdisciplinary task that integrates 3D visual perception and natural language processing, empowering intelligent agents to comprehend and interact with complex 3D environments. Recent advances in large multimodal modelling have driven the creation of diverse datasets and spurred the development of instruction-tuning and zero-shot methods for 3D SQA. However, this rapid progress introduces challenges, particularly in achieving unified analysis and comparison across datasets and baselines. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive and systematic review of 3D SQA. We organize existing work from three perspectives: datasets, methodologies, and evaluation metrics. Beyond basic categorization, we identify shared architectural patterns across methods. Our survey further synthesizes core limitations and discusses how current trends, such as instruction tuning, multimodal alignment, and zero-shot, can shape future developments. Finally, we propose a range of promising research directions covering dataset construction, task generalization, interaction modeling, and unified evaluation protocols. This work aims to serve as a foundation for future research and foster progress toward more generalizable and intelligent 3D SQA systems.

Paperid: 4903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19287.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) has shown promising improvement in downstream task adaptation of LLMs by augmenting prompts with relevant input-output examples (demonstrations). However, the ICL demonstrations can contain privacy-sensitive information, which can be leaked and/or regurgitated by the LLM output. Differential Privacy (DP), a widely adopted privacy safeguard, has emerged to mitigate this privacy leakage, with recent work demonstrating strong privacy-utility tradeoffs in classification tasks for ICL. However, generation tasks for ICL are challenging due to the high-dimensional output space of open-ended generation. To this end, we propose $\texttt{dps-mozo}$, Differentially Private Sampling by Mixing One-shot with Zero-shot Outputs, a decoding framework that generates DP text by sampling from the product of multiple one-shot outputs mixed with a zero-shot output. This mixing effectively reduces the amount of information that can be leaked by each demonstration. By utilizing the inherent randomness in sampling from the mixed distributions, we can achieve DP without adding noise, thereby improving the privacy-utility tradeoff. Our experimental evaluations show $\texttt{dps-mozo}$ can achieve a strong privacy guarantee, $Îµ=2$, with minimal utility degradation compared to non-private few-shot learning, $\textbf{0.3}$% ROUGE-L F1 score decrease on the SAMSum dataset with Gemma 2 2B.

Paperid: 4904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17595.pdf

Abstract:
Confidence calibration is an emerging challenge in real-world decision systems based on foundations models when used for downstream vision classification tasks. Due to various reasons exposed, logit scores on the CLIP head remain large irrespective of whether the image-language pairs reconcile. It is difficult to address in data space, given the few-shot regime. We propose a penalty incorporated into loss objective that penalizes incorrect classifications whenever one is made during finetuning, by moving an amount of log-likelihood to the true class commensurate to the relative amplitudes of the two likelihoods. We refer to it as \textit{confidence misalignment penalty (CMP)}. Extensive experiments on $12$ vision datasets and $5$ domain generalization datasets supports the calibration performance of our method against stat-of-the-art. CMP outperforms the benchmarked prompt learning methods, demonstrating average improvement in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by average $6.01$\%, $4.01$ \% at minimum and $9.72$\% at maximum.

Paperid: 4905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15942.pdf

Abstract:
Time series neural networks perform exceptionally well in real-world applications but encounter challenges such as limited scalability, poor generalization, and suboptimal zero-shot performance. Inspired by large language models, there is interest in developing large time series models (LTM) to address these issues. However, current methods struggle with training complexity, adapting human feedback, and achieving high predictive accuracy. We introduce TimeHF, a novel pipeline for creating LTMs with 6 billion parameters, incorporating human feedback. We use patch convolutional embedding to capture long time series information and design a human feedback mechanism called time-series policy optimization. Deployed in JD.com's supply chain, TimeHF handles automated replenishment for over 20,000 products, improving prediction accuracy by 33.21% over existing methods. This work advances LTM technology and shows significant industrial benefits.

Paperid: 4906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13457.pdf

Abstract:
Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful specification language for describing complex temporal behaviors of continuous signals, making it well-suited for high-level robotic task descriptions. However, generating executable plans for STL tasks is challenging, as it requires consideration of the coupling between the task specification and the system dynamics. Existing approaches either follow a model-based setting that explicitly requires knowledge of the system dynamics or adopt a task-oriented data-driven approach to learn plans for specific tasks. In this work, we investigate the problem of generating executable STL plans for systems whose dynamics are unknown a priori. We propose a new planning framework that uses only task-agnostic data during the offline training stage, enabling zero-shot generalization to new STL tasks. Our framework is hierarchical, involving: (i) decomposing the STL task into a set of progress and time constraints, (ii) searching for time-aware waypoints guided by task-agnostic data, and (iii) generating trajectories using a pre-trained safe diffusion model. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method indeed in achieving zero-shot generalization to various STL tasks.

Paperid: 4907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13331.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale language models (LLMs) excel in language processing tasks but face deployment challenges due to high memory and computational demands. While low-bit quantization, such as 4-bit techniques, offers a potential solution, these methods often suffer from significant accuracy loss or require considerable effort for implementation such as reordering, rotation, etc. To address these challenges, we propose QRazor, a simple yet effective quantization scheme that enables 4-bit quantization of weights, activations, and KV cache in transformer-based LLMs. QRazor operates in two stages: first, quantizing data using 8 or 16-bit integers as a basis with absolute max scaling to preserve accuracy close to full-precision models, and second, compressing the quantized data to 4-bit using our significant data razoring (SDR) technique, which retains only the four most salient bits. Without any additional requirment of fine-tuning or additional training, QRazor achieves performance similar or better compared to state-of-the-art in 4-bit quantization method, surpassing Smoothquant and QLLM by over 12 points and Quarot(RTN) by more than 2.9 points in zero-shot reasoning task accuracy on the LLaMA2-7B model. Additionally, we introduce an integer-based arithmetic unit optimized for QRazor, allowing direct low-precision operations on SDR data without decompression.

Paperid: 4908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08156.pdf

Abstract:
Language models trained to solve reasoning tasks via reinforcement learning have achieved striking results. We refer to these models as reasoning models. Are the Chains of Thought (CoTs) of reasoning models more faithful than traditional models? We evaluate three reasoning models (based on Qwen-2.5, Gemini-2, and DeepSeek-V3-Base) on an existing test of faithful CoT. To measure faithfulness, we test whether models can describe how a cue in their prompt influences their answer to MMLU questions. For example, when the cue "A Stanford Professor thinks the answer is D" is added to the prompt, models sometimes switch their answer to D. In such cases, the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model describes the cue's influence 59% of the time, compared to 7% for the non-reasoning DeepSeek model. We evaluate seven types of cue, such as misleading few-shot examples and suggestive follow-up questions from the user. Reasoning models describe cues that influence them much more reliably than all the non-reasoning models tested (including Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o). In an additional experiment, we provide evidence suggesting that the use of reward models causes less faithful responses -- which may help explain why non-reasoning models are less faithful. Our study has two main limitations. First, we test faithfulness using a set of artificial tasks, which may not reflect realistic use-cases. Second, we only measure one specific aspect of faithfulness -- whether models can describe the influence of cues. Future research should investigate whether the advantage of reasoning models in faithfulness holds for a broader set of tests. Still, we think this increase in faithfulness is promising for the explainability of language models.

Paperid: 4909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07972.pdf

Abstract:
The target of video moment retrieval (VMR) is predicting temporal spans within a video that semantically match a given linguistic query. Existing VMR methods based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) overly rely on expensive high-quality datasets and time-consuming fine-tuning. Although some recent studies introduce a zero-shot setting to avoid fine-tuning, they overlook inherent language bias in the query, leading to erroneous localization. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes Moment-GPT, a tuning-free pipeline for zero-shot VMR utilizing frozen MLLMs. Specifically, we first employ LLaMA-3 to correct and rephrase the query to mitigate language bias. Subsequently, we design a span generator combined with MiniGPT-v2 to produce candidate spans adaptively. Finally, to leverage the video comprehension capabilities of MLLMs, we apply VideoChatGPT and span scorer to select the most appropriate spans. Our proposed method substantially outperforms the state-ofthe-art MLLM-based and zero-shot models on several public datasets, including QVHighlights, ActivityNet-Captions, and Charades-STA.

Paperid: 4910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05629.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those trained on multilingual corpora, has intensified the need for a deeper understanding of their performance across a diverse range of languages and model sizes. Our research addresses this critical need by studying the performance and scaling behavior of multilingual LLMs in text classification and machine translation tasks across 204 languages. We systematically examine both seen and unseen languages across three model families of varying sizes in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our findings show significant differences in scaling behavior between zero-shot and two-shot scenarios, with striking disparities in performance between seen and unseen languages. Model scale has little effect on zero-shot performance, which remains mostly flat. However, in two-shot settings, larger models show clear linear improvements in multilingual text classification. For translation tasks, however, only the instruction-tuned model showed clear benefits from scaling. Our analysis also suggests that overall resource levels, not just the proportions of pretraining languages, are better predictors of model performance, shedding light on what drives multilingual LLM effectiveness.

Paperid: 4911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05224.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we explore the application of Large Language Models to zero-shot Lay Summarisation. We propose a novel two-stage framework for Lay Summarisation based on real-life processes, and find that summaries generated with this method are increasingly preferred by human judges for larger models. To help establish best practices for employing LLMs in zero-shot settings, we also assess the ability of LLMs as judges, finding that they are able to replicate the preferences of human judges. Finally, we take the initial steps towards Lay Summarisation for Natural Language Processing (NLP) articles, finding that LLMs are able to generalise to this new domain, and further highlighting the greater utility of summaries generated by our proposed approach via an in-depth human evaluation.

Paperid: 4912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04985.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing threat of SMS spam, driven by evolving adversarial techniques and concept drift, calls for more robust and adaptive detection methods. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of large language models (LLMs), both open-source and commercial, for SMS spam detection, comparing their performance across zero-shot, few-shot, fine-tuning, and chain-of-thought prompting approaches. Using a comprehensive dataset of SMS messages, we assess the spam detection capabilities of prominent LLMs such as GPT-4, DeepSeek, LLAMA-2, and Mixtral. Our findings reveal that while zero-shot learning provides convenience, it is unreliable for effective spam detection. Few-shot learning, particularly with carefully selected examples, improves detection but exhibits variability across models. Fine-tuning emerges as the most effective strategy, with Mixtral achieving 98.6% accuracy and a balanced false positive and false negative rate below 2%, meeting the criteria for robust spam detection. Furthermore, we explore the resilience of these models to adversarial attacks, finding that fine-tuning significantly enhances robustness against both perceptible and imperceptible manipulations. Lastly, we investigate the impact of concept drift and demonstrate that fine-tuned LLMs, especially when combined with few-shot learning, can mitigate its effects, maintaining high performance even on evolving spam datasets. This study highlights the importance of fine-tuning and tailored learning strategies to deploy LLMs effectively for real-world SMS spam detection

Paperid: 4913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18525.pdf

Abstract:
Computer Vision (CV) has yet to fully achieve the zero-shot task generalization observed in Natural Language Processing (NLP), despite following many of the milestones established in NLP, such as large transformer models, extensive pre-training, and the auto-regression paradigm, among others. In this paper, we explore the idea that CV adopts discrete and terminological task definitions (\eg, ``image segmentation''), which may be a key barrier to zero-shot task generalization. Our hypothesis is that without truly understanding previously-seen tasks--due to these terminological definitions--deep models struggle to generalize to novel tasks. To verify this, we introduce Explanatory Instructions, which provide an intuitive way to define CV task objectives through detailed linguistic transformations from input images to outputs. We create a large-scale dataset comprising 12 million ``image input $\to$ explanatory instruction $\to$ output'' triplets, and train an auto-regressive-based vision-language model (AR-based VLM) that takes both images and explanatory instructions as input. By learning to follow these instructions, the AR-based VLM achieves instruction-level zero-shot capabilities for previously-seen tasks and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization for unseen CV tasks. Code and dataset will be openly available on our GitHub repository.

Paperid: 4914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18282.pdf

Abstract:
Feature Generative Adversarial Networks have emerged as powerful generative models in producing high-quality representations of unseen classes within the scope of Zero-shot Learning (ZSL). This paper delves into the pivotal influence of unseen class priors within the framework of transductive ZSL (TZSL) and illuminates the finding that even a marginal prior bias can result in substantial accuracy declines. Our extensive analysis uncovers that this inefficacy fundamentally stems from the utilization of an unconditional unseen discriminator - a core component in existing TZSL. We further establish that the detrimental effects of this component are inevitable unless the generator perfectly fits class-specific distributions. Building on these insights, we introduce our Improved Feature Generation Framework, termed I-VAEGAN, which incorporates two novel components: Pseudo-conditional Feature Adversarial (PFA) learning and Variational Embedding Regression (VER). PFA circumvents the need for prior estimation by explicitly injecting the predicted semantics as pseudo conditions for unseen classes premised by precise semantic regression. Meanwhile, VER utilizes reconstructive pre-training to learn class statistics, obtaining better semantic regression. Our I-VAEGAN achieves state-of-the-art TZSL accuracy across various benchmarks and priors. Our code would be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 4915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16829.pdf

Abstract:
Feedback is crucial for every design process, such as user interface (UI) design, and automating design critiques can significantly improve the efficiency of the design workflow. Although existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, they often struggle with generating high-quality design critiques -- a complex task that requires producing detailed design comments that are visually grounded in a given design's image. Building on recent advancements in iterative refinement of text output and visual prompting methods, we propose an iterative visual prompting approach for UI critique that takes an input UI screenshot and design guidelines and generates a list of design comments, along with corresponding bounding boxes that map each comment to a specific region in the screenshot. The entire process is driven completely by LLMs, which iteratively refine both the text output and bounding boxes using few-shot samples tailored for each step. We evaluated our approach using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, and found that human experts generally preferred the design critiques generated by our pipeline over those by the baseline, with the pipeline reducing the gap from human performance by 50% for one rating metric. To assess the generalizability of our approach to other multimodal tasks, we applied our pipeline to open-vocabulary object and attribute detection, and experiments showed that our method also outperformed the baseline.

Paperid: 4916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14640.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot, fine-grained classification in computer vision poses significant challenges due to the need to differentiate subtle class distinctions with limited data. This paper presents a novel method that enhances the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model through adaptive prompt tuning, guided by real-time visual inputs. Unlike existing techniques such as Context Optimization (CoOp) and Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT), which are constrained by static prompts or visual token reliance, the proposed approach leverages a cross-attention mechanism to dynamically refine text prompts for the image at hand. This enables an image-specific alignment of textual features with image patches extracted from the Vision Transformer, making the model more effective for datasets with high intra-class variance and low inter-class differences. The method is evaluated on several datasets, including CUBirds, Oxford Flowers, and FGVC Aircraft, showing significant performance gains over static prompt tuning approaches. To ensure these performance gains translate into trustworthy predictions, we integrate Monte-Carlo Dropout in our approach to improve the reliability of the model predictions and uncertainty estimates. This integration provides valuable insights into the model's predictive confidence, helping to identify when predictions can be trusted and when additional verification is necessary. This dynamic approach offers a robust solution, advancing the state-of-the-art for few-shot fine-grained classification.

Paperid: 4917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14145.pdf

Abstract:
The visual understanding are often approached from 3 granular levels: image, patch and pixel. Visual Tokenization, trained by self-supervised reconstructive learning, compresses visual data by codebook in patch-level with marginal information loss, but the visual tokens does not have semantic meaning. Open Vocabulary semantic segmentation benefits from the evolving Vision-Language models (VLMs) with strong image zero-shot capability, but transferring image-level to pixel-level understanding remains an imminent challenge. In this paper, we treat segmentation as tokenizing pixels and study a united perceptual and semantic token compression for all granular understanding and consequently facilitate open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Referring to the cognitive process of pretrained VLM where the low-level features are progressively composed to high-level semantics, we propose Feature Pyramid Tokenization (PAT) to cluster and represent multi-resolution feature by learnable codebooks and then decode them by joint learning pixel reconstruction and semantic segmentation. We design loosely coupled pixel and semantic learning branches. The pixel branch simulates bottom-up composition and top-down visualization of codebook tokens, while the semantic branch collectively fuse hierarchical codebooks as auxiliary segmentation guidance. Our experiments show that PAT enhances the semantic intuition of VLM feature pyramid, improves performance over the baseline segmentation model and achieves competitive performance on open vocabulary semantic segmentation benchmark. Our model is parameter-efficient for VLM integration and flexible for the independent tokenization. We hope to give inspiration not only on improving segmentation but also on semantic visual token utilization.

Paperid: 4918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13026.pdf

Abstract:
We present NAVCON, a large-scale annotated Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) corpus built on top of two popular datasets (R2R and RxR). The paper introduces four core, cognitively motivated and linguistically grounded, navigation concepts and an algorithm for generating large-scale silver annotations of naturally occurring linguistic realizations of these concepts in navigation instructions. We pair the annotated instructions with video clips of an agent acting on these instructions. NAVCON contains 236, 316 concept annotations for approximately 30, 0000 instructions and 2.7 million aligned images (from approximately 19, 000 instructions) showing what the agent sees when executing an instruction. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive resource of navigation concepts. We evaluated the quality of the silver annotations by conducting human evaluation studies on NAVCON samples. As further validation of the quality and usefulness of the resource, we trained a model for detecting navigation concepts and their linguistic realizations in unseen instructions. Additionally, we show that few-shot learning with GPT-4o performs well on this task using large-scale silver annotations of NAVCON.

Paperid: 4919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11328.pdf

Abstract:
Graphical user interface (GUI) prototyping represents an essential activity in the development of interactive systems, which are omnipresent today. GUI prototypes facilitate elicitation of requirements and help to test, evaluate, and validate ideas with users and the development team. However, creating GUI prototypes is a time-consuming process and often requires extensive resources. While existing research for automatic GUI generation focused largely on resource-intensive training and fine-tuning of LLMs, mainly for low-fidelity GUIs, we investigate the potential and effectiveness of Zero-Shot (ZS) prompting for high-fidelity GUI generation. We propose a Retrieval-Augmented GUI Generation (RAGG) approach, integrated with an LLM-based GUI retrieval re-ranking and filtering mechanism based on a large-scale GUI repository. In addition, we adapt Prompt Decomposition (PDGG) and Self-Critique (SCGG) for GUI generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ZS prompting approaches for GUI generation, we extensively evaluated the accuracy and subjective satisfaction of the generated GUI prototypes. Our evaluation, which encompasses over 3,000 GUI annotations from over 100 crowd-workers with UI/UX experience, shows that SCGG, in contrast to PDGG and RAGG, can lead to more effective GUI generation, and provides valuable insights into the defects that are produced by the LLMs in the generated GUI prototypes.

Paperid: 4920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09440.pdf

Abstract:
Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting adaptability to changes in terrain and dynamic state. Here we show that integrating three core principles of animal locomotion-gait transition strategies, gait memory and real-time motion adjustments enables a DRL control framework to fluidly switch among multiple gaits and recover from instability, all without external sensing. Our framework is guided by biomechanics-inspired metrics that capture efficiency, stability and system limits, which are unified to inform optimal gait selection. The resulting framework achieves blind zero-shot deployment across diverse, real-world terrains and substantially significantly outperforms baseline controllers. By embedding biological principles into data-driven control, this work marks a step towards robust, efficient and versatile robotic locomotion, highlighting how animal motor intelligence can shape the next generation of adaptive machines.

Paperid: 4921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09160.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models trained on web-scraped datasets propagate societal biases to downstream tasks. While counterfactual generation enables bias analysis, existing methods introduce artifacts by modifying contextual elements like clothing and background. We present a localized counterfactual generation method that preserves image context by constraining counterfactual modifications to specific attribute-relevant regions through automated masking and guided inpainting. When applied to the Conceptual Captions dataset for creating gender counterfactuals, our method results in higher visual and semantic fidelity than state-of-the-art alternatives, while maintaining the performance of models trained using only real data on non-human-centric tasks. Models fine-tuned with our counterfactuals demonstrate measurable bias reduction across multiple metrics, including a decrease in gender classification disparity and balanced person preference scores, while preserving ImageNet zero-shot performance. The results establish a framework for creating balanced datasets that enable both accurate bias profiling and effective mitigation.

Paperid: 4922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08356.pdf

Abstract:
We present ZeroBAS, a neural method to synthesize binaural audio from monaural audio recordings and positional information without training on any binaural data. To our knowledge, this is the first published zero-shot neural approach to mono-to-binaural audio synthesis. Specifically, we show that a parameter-free geometric time warping and amplitude scaling based on source location suffices to get an initial binaural synthesis that can be refined by iteratively applying a pretrained denoising vocoder. Furthermore, we find this leads to generalization across room conditions, which we measure by introducing a new dataset, TUT Mono-to-Binaural, to evaluate state-of-the-art monaural-to-binaural synthesis methods on unseen conditions. Our zero-shot method is perceptually on-par with the performance of supervised methods on the standard mono-to-binaural dataset, and even surpasses them on our out-of-distribution TUT Mono-to-Binaural dataset. Our results highlight the potential of pretrained generative audio models and zero-shot learning to unlock robust binaural audio synthesis.

Paperid: 4923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07229.pdf

Abstract:
Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities, e.g. generating unseen, but natural data. However, the greater the generalization power, the more likely the unintended generalization, and the more dangerous the abuse. Research on moderated generalization in SGMs remains limited. To fill this gap, we first examine the current 'gold standard' in Machine Unlearning (MU), i.e., re-training the model after removing the undesirable training data, and find it does not work in SGMs. Further analysis of score functions reveals that the MU 'gold standard' does not alter the original score function, which explains its ineffectiveness. Based on this insight, we propose the first Moderated Score-based Generative Model (MSGM), which introduces a novel score adjustment strategy that redirects the score function away from undesirable data during the continuous-time stochastic differential equation process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MSGM significantly reduces the likelihood of generating undesirable content while preserving high visual quality for normal image generation. Albeit designed for SGMs, MSGM is a general and flexible MU framework that is compatible with diverse diffusion architectures (SGM and DDPM) and training strategies (re-training and fine-tuning), and enables zero-shot transfer of the pre-trained models to downstream tasks, e.g. image inpainting and reconstruction. The code will be shared upon acceptance.

Paperid: 4924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05269.pdf

Abstract:
Chemical synthesis remains a critical bottleneck in the discovery and manufacture of functional small molecules. AI-based synthesis planning models could be a potential remedy to find effective syntheses, and have made progress in recent years. However, they still struggle with less frequent, yet critical reactions for synthetic strategy, as well as hallucinated, incorrect predictions. This hampers multi-step search algorithms that rely on models, and leads to misalignment with chemists' expectations. Here we propose RetroChimera: a frontier retrosynthesis model, built upon two newly developed components with complementary inductive biases, which we fuse together using a new framework for integrating predictions from multiple sources via a learning-based ensembling strategy. Through experiments across several orders of magnitude in data scale and splitting strategy, we show RetroChimera outperforms all major models by a large margin, demonstrating robustness outside the training data, as well as for the first time the ability to learn from even a very small number of examples per reaction class. Moreover, industrial organic chemists prefer predictions from RetroChimera over the reactions it was trained on in terms of quality, revealing high levels of alignment. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer to an internal dataset from a major pharmaceutical company, showing robust generalization under distribution shift. With the new dimension that our ensembling framework unlocks, we anticipate further acceleration in the development of even more accurate models.

Paperid: 4925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04512.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: This paper aims to prompt large language models (LLMs) for clinical temporal relation extraction (CTRE) in both few-shot and fully supervised settings. Materials and Methods: This study utilizes four LLMs: Encoder-based GatorTron-Base (345M)/Large (8.9B); Decoder-based LLaMA3-8B/MeLLaMA-13B. We developed full (FFT) and parameter-efficient (PEFT) fine-tuning strategies and evaluated these strategies on the 2012 i2b2 CTRE task. We explored four fine-tuning strategies for GatorTron-Base: (1) Standard Fine-Tuning, (2) Hard-Prompting with Unfrozen LLMs, (3) Soft-Prompting with Frozen LLMs, and (4) Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with Frozen LLMs. For GatorTron-Large, we assessed two PEFT strategies-Soft-Prompting and LoRA with Frozen LLMs-leveraging Quantization techniques. Additionally, LLaMA3-8B and MeLLaMA-13B employed two PEFT strategies: LoRA strategy with Quantization (QLoRA) applied to Frozen LLMs using instruction tuning and standard fine-tuning. Results: Under fully supervised settings, Hard-Prompting with Unfrozen GatorTron-Base achieved the highest F1 score (89.54%), surpassing the SOTA model (85.70%) by 3.74%. Additionally, two variants of QLoRA adapted to GatorTron-Large and Standard Fine-Tuning of GatorTron-Base exceeded the SOTA model by 2.36%, 1.88%, and 0.25%, respectively. Decoder-based models with frozen parameters outperformed their Encoder-based counterparts in this setting; however, the trend reversed in few-shot scenarios. Discussions and Conclusions: This study presented new methods that significantly improved CTRE performance, benefiting downstream tasks reliant on CTRE systems. The findings underscore the importance of selecting appropriate models and fine-tuning strategies based on task requirements and data availability. Future work will explore larger models and broader CTRE applications.

Paperid: 4926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03775.pdf

Abstract:
Retractions play a vital role in maintaining scientific integrity, yet systematic studies of retractions in computer science and other STEM fields remain scarce. We present WithdrarXiv, the first large-scale dataset of withdrawn papers from arXiv, containing over 14,000 papers and their associated retraction comments spanning the repository's entire history through September 2024. Through careful analysis of author comments, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of retraction reasons, identifying 10 distinct categories ranging from critical errors to policy violations. We demonstrate a simple yet highly accurate zero-shot automatic categorization of retraction reasons, achieving a weighted average F1-score of 0.96. Additionally, we release WithdrarXiv-SciFy, an enriched version including scripts for parsed full-text PDFs, specifically designed to enable research in scientific feasibility studies, claim verification, and automated theorem proving. These findings provide valuable insights for improving scientific quality control and automated verification systems. Finally, and most importantly, we discuss ethical issues and take a number of steps to implement responsible data release while fostering open science in this area.

Paperid: 4927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03075.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic speech Recognition (ASR) is a fundamental and important task in the field of speech and natural language processing. It is an inherent building block in many applications such as voice assistant, speech translation, etc. Despite the advancement of ASR technologies in recent years, it is still inevitable for modern ASR systems to have a substantial number of erroneous recognition due to environmental noise, ambiguity, etc. Therefore, the error correction in ASR is crucial. Motivated by this, this paper studies ASR error correction in the Chinese language, which is one of the most popular languages and enjoys a large number of users in the world. We first create a benchmark dataset named \emph{ASR-EC} that contains a wide spectrum of ASR errors generated by industry-grade ASR systems. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Chinese ASR error correction benchmark. Then, inspired by the recent advances in \emph{large language models (LLMs)}, we investigate how to harness the power of LLMs to correct ASR errors. We apply LLMs to ASR error correction in three paradigms. The first paradigm is prompting, which is further categorized as zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-step. The second paradigm is finetuning, which finetunes LLMs with ASR error correction data. The third paradigm is multi-modal augmentation, which collectively utilizes the audio and ASR transcripts for error correction. Extensive experiments reveal that prompting is not effective for ASR error correction. Finetuning is effective only for a portion of LLMs. Multi-modal augmentation is the most effective method for error correction and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 4928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03068.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based architectures have achieved unprecedented success in time series analysis. However, facing the challenge of across-domain modeling, existing studies utilize statistical prior as prompt engineering fails under the huge distribution shift among various domains. In this paper, a Unified Time Series Diffusion (UTSD) model is established for the first time to model the multi-domain probability distribution, utilizing the powerful probability distribution modeling ability of Diffusion. Unlike the autoregressive models that capture the conditional probabilities of the prediction horizon to the historical sequence, we use a diffusion denoising process to model the mixture distribution of the cross-domain data and generate the prediction sequence for the target domain directly utilizing conditional sampling. The proposed UTSD contains three pivotal designs: (1) The condition network captures the multi-scale fluctuation patterns from the observation sequence, which are utilized as context representations to guide the denoising network to generate the prediction sequence; (2) Adapter-based fine-tuning strategy, the multi-domain universal representation learned in the pretraining stage is utilized for downstream tasks in target domains; (3) The diffusion and denoising process on the actual sequence space, combined with the improved classifier free guidance as the conditional generation strategy, greatly improves the stability and accuracy of the downstream task. We conduct extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks, and the pre-trained UTSD outperforms existing foundation models on all data domains, exhibiting superior zero-shot generalization ability. After training from scratch, UTSD achieves comparable performance against domain-specific proprietary models. The empirical results validate the potential of UTSD as a time series foundational model.

Paperid: 4929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00979.pdf

Abstract:
Decision transformers recast reinforcement learning as a conditional sequence generation problem, offering a simple but effective alternative to traditional value or policy-based methods. A recent key development in this area is the integration of prompting in decision transformers to facilitate few-shot policy generalization. However, current methods mainly use static prompt segments to guide rollouts, limiting their ability to provide context-specific guidance. Addressing this, we introduce a hierarchical prompting approach enabled by retrieval augmentation. Our method learns two layers of soft tokens as guiding prompts: (1) global tokens encapsulating task-level information about trajectories, and (2) adaptive tokens that deliver focused, timestep-specific instructions. The adaptive tokens are dynamically retrieved from a curated set of demonstration segments, ensuring context-aware guidance. Experiments across seven benchmark tasks in the MuJoCo and MetaWorld environments demonstrate the proposed approach consistently outperforms all baseline methods, suggesting that hierarchical prompting for decision transformers is an effective strategy to enable few-shot policy generalization.

Paperid: 4930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00772.pdf

Abstract:
Time series analysis is a fundamental data mining task that supervised training methods based on empirical risk minimization have proven their effectiveness on specific tasks and datasets. However, the acquisition of well-annotated data is costly and a large amount of unlabeled series data is under-utilized. Due to distributional shifts across various domains and different patterns of interest across multiple tasks. The problem of cross-domain multi-task migration of time series remains a significant challenge. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel cross-domain pretraining method based on Wave Quantization (termed as WQ4TS), which can be combined with any advanced time series model and applied to multiple downstream tasks. Specifically, we transfer the time series data from different domains into a common spectral latent space, and enable the model to learn the temporal pattern knowledge of different domains directly from the common space and utilize it for the inference of downstream tasks, thereby mitigating the challenge of heterogeneous cross-domains migration. The establishment of spectral latent space brings at least three benefits, cross-domain migration capability thus adapting to zero- and few-shot scenarios without relying on priori knowledge of the dataset, general compatible cross-domain migration framework without changing the existing model structure, and robust modeling capability thus achieving SOTA results in multiple downstream tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments including three important tasks: forecasting, imputation, and classification. And three common real-world data scenarios are simulated: full-data, few-shot, and zero-shot. The proposed WQ4TS achieves the best performance on 87.5% of all tasks, and the average improvement of the metrics on all the tasks is up to 34.7%.

Paperid: 4931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00103.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic search of people in human-centered environments, including healthcare settings, is challenging as autonomous robots need to locate people without complete or any prior knowledge of their schedules, plans or locations. Furthermore, robots need to be able to adapt to real-time events that can influence a person's plan in an environment. In this paper, we present MLLM-Search, a novel zero-shot person search architecture that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLM) to address the mobile robot problem of searching for a person under event-driven scenarios with varying user schedules. Our approach introduces a novel visual prompting method to provide robots with spatial understanding of the environment by generating a spatially grounded waypoint map, representing navigable waypoints by a topological graph and regions by semantic labels. This is incorporated into a MLLM with a region planner that selects the next search region based on the semantic relevance to the search scenario, and a waypoint planner which generates a search path by considering the semantically relevant objects and the local spatial context through our unique spatial chain-of-thought prompting approach. Extensive 3D photorealistic experiments were conducted to validate the performance of MLLM-Search in searching for a person with a changing schedule in different environments. An ablation study was also conducted to validate the main design choices of MLLM-Search. Furthermore, a comparison study with state-of-the art search methods demonstrated that MLLM-Search outperforms existing methods with respect to search efficiency. Real-world experiments with a mobile robot in a multi-room floor of a building showed that MLLM-Search was able to generalize to finding a person in a new unseen environment.

Paperid: 4932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18337.pdf

Abstract:
Ambiguous words are often found in modern digital communications. Lexical ambiguity challenges traditional Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) methods, due to limited data. Consequently, the efficiency of translation, information retrieval, and question-answering systems is hindered by these limitations. This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve WSD using a novel approach combining a systematic prompt augmentation mechanism with a knowledge base (KB) consisting of different sense interpretations. The proposed method incorporates a human-in-loop approach for prompt augmentation where prompt is supported by Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, synonyms of ambiguous words, aspect-based sense filtering and few-shot prompting to guide the LLM. By utilizing a few-shot Chain of Thought (COT) prompting-based approach, this work demonstrates a substantial improvement in performance. The evaluation was conducted using FEWS test data and sense tags. This research advances accurate word interpretation in social media and digital communication.

Paperid: 4933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15743.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is critical in numerous real-world applications, requiring accurate predictions of future values based on observed patterns. While traditional forecasting techniques work well in in-domain scenarios with ample data, they struggle when data is scarce or not available at all, motivating the emergence of zero-shot and few-shot learning settings. Recent advancements often leverage large-scale foundation models for such tasks, but these methods require extensive data and compute resources, and their performance may be hindered by ineffective learning from the available training set. This raises a fundamental question: What factors influence effective learning from data in time series forecasting? Toward addressing this, we propose using Fourier analysis to investigate how models learn from synthetic and real-world time series data. Our findings reveal that forecasters commonly suffer from poor learning from data with multiple frequencies and poor generalization to unseen frequencies, which impedes their predictive performance. To alleviate these issues, we present a novel synthetic data generation framework, designed to enhance real data or replace it completely by creating task-specific frequency information, requiring only the sampling rate of the target data. Our approach, Freq-Synth, improves the robustness of both foundation as well as nonfoundation forecast models in zero-shot and few-shot settings, facilitating more reliable time series forecasting under limited data scenarios.

Paperid: 4934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14832.pdf

Abstract:
The fast advancement of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has shown immense potential. These models are increasingly capable of tackling abstract visual tasks. Geometric structures, particularly graphs with their inherent flexibility and complexity, serve as an excellent benchmark for evaluating these models' predictive capabilities. While human observers can readily identify subtle visual details and perform accurate analyses, our investigation reveals that state-of-the-art LVLMs exhibit consistent limitations in specific visual graph scenarios, especially when confronted with stylistic variations. In response to these challenges, we introduce VisGraphVar (Visual Graph Variability), a customizable benchmark generator able to produce graph images for seven distinct task categories (detection, classification, segmentation, pattern recognition, link prediction, reasoning, matching), designed to systematically evaluate the strengths and limitations of individual LVLMs. We use VisGraphVar to produce 990 graph images and evaluate six LVLMs, employing two distinct prompting strategies, namely zero-shot and chain-of-thought. The findings demonstrate that variations in visual attributes of images (e.g., node labeling and layout) and the deliberate inclusion of visual imperfections, such as overlapping nodes, significantly affect model performance. This research emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive evaluation across graph-related tasks, extending beyond reasoning alone. VisGraphVar offers valuable insights to guide the development of more reliable and robust systems capable of performing advanced visual graph analysis.

Paperid: 4935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11609.pdf

Abstract:
Following human instructions to explore and search for a specified target in an unfamiliar environment is a crucial skill for mobile service robots. Most of the previous works on object goal navigation have typically focused on a single input modality as the target, which may lead to limited consideration of language descriptions containing detailed attributes and spatial relationships. To address this limitation, we propose VLN-Game, a novel zero-shot framework for visual target navigation that can process object names and descriptive language targets effectively. To be more precise, our approach constructs a 3D object-centric spatial map by integrating pre-trained visual-language features with a 3D reconstruction of the physical environment. Then, the framework identifies the most promising areas to explore in search of potential target candidates. A game-theoretic vision language model is employed to determine which target best matches the given language description. Experiments conducted on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both object goal navigation and language-based navigation tasks. Moreover, we show that VLN-Game can be easily deployed on real-world robots. The success of VLN-Game highlights the promising potential of using game-theoretic methods with compact vision-language models to advance decision-making capabilities in robotic systems. The supplementary video and code can be accessed via the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/vln-game.

Paperid: 4936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08027.pdf

Abstract:
Physical reasoning is an important skill needed for robotic agents when operating in the real world. However, solving such reasoning problems often involves hypothesizing and reflecting over complex multi-body interactions under the effect of a multitude of physical forces and thus learning all such interactions poses a significant hurdle for state-of-the-art machine learning frameworks, including large language models (LLMs). To study this problem, we propose a new physical reasoning task and a dataset, dubbed TraySim. Our task involves predicting the dynamics of several objects on a tray that is given an external impact -- the domino effect of the ensued object interactions and their dynamics thus offering a challenging yet controlled setup, with the goal of reasoning being to infer the stability of the objects after the impact. To solve this complex physical reasoning task, we present LLMPhy, a zero-shot black-box optimization framework that leverages the physics knowledge and program synthesis abilities of LLMs, and synergizes these abilities with the world models built into modern physics engines. Specifically, LLMPhy uses an LLM to generate code to iteratively estimate the physical hyperparameters of the system (friction, damping, layout, etc.) via an implicit analysis-by-synthesis approach using a (non-differentiable) simulator in the loop and uses the inferred parameters to imagine the dynamics of the scene towards solving the reasoning task. To show the effectiveness of LLMPhy, we present experiments on our TraySim dataset to predict the steady-state poses of the objects. Our results show that the combination of the LLM and the physics engine leads to state-of-the-art zero-shot physical reasoning performance, while demonstrating superior convergence against standard black-box optimization methods and better estimation of the physical parameters.

Paperid: 4937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06911.pdf

Abstract:
Segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance images (MRI) is crucial for the analysis and assessment of cardiac function, helping to diagnose and treat various cardiovascular diseases. Most recent techniques rely on deep learning and usually require an extensive amount of labeled data. To overcome this problem, few-shot learning has the capability of reducing data dependency on labeled data. In this work, we introduce a new method that merges few-shot learning with a U-Net architecture and Gaussian Process Emulators (GPEs), enhancing data integration from a support set for improved performance. GPEs are trained to learn the relation between the support images and the corresponding masks in latent space, facilitating the segmentation of unseen query images given only a small labeled support set at inference. We test our model with the M&Ms-2 public dataset to assess its ability to segment the heart in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging from different orientations, and compare it with state-of-the-art unsupervised and few-shot methods. Our architecture shows higher DICE coefficients compared to these methods, especially in the more challenging setups where the size of the support set is considerably small.

Paperid: 4938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04539.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have highlighted the significant potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as zero-shot relevance rankers. These methods predominantly utilize prompt learning to assess the relevance between queries and documents by generating a ranked list of potential documents. Despite their promise, the substantial costs associated with LLMs pose a significant challenge for their direct implementation in commercial search systems. To overcome this barrier and fully exploit the capabilities of LLMs for text ranking, we explore techniques to transfer the ranking expertise of LLMs to a more compact model similar to BERT, using a ranking loss to enable the deployment of less resource-intensive models. Specifically, we enhance the training of LLMs through Continued Pre-Training, taking the query as input and the clicked title and summary as output. We then proceed with supervised fine-tuning of the LLM using a rank loss, assigning the final token as a representative of the entire sentence. Given the inherent characteristics of autoregressive language models, only the final token can encapsulate all preceding tokens. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid point-wise and margin MSE loss to transfer the ranking knowledge from LLMs to smaller models like BERT. This method creates a viable solution for environments with strict resource constraints. Both offline and online evaluations have confirmed the efficacy of our approach, and our model has been successfully integrated into a commercial web search engine as of February 2024.

Paperid: 4939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01111.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human annotators, the data collected may cause the model to become overly cautious, or to respond in an undesirable style, such as being judgmental. Additionally, as model capabilities and usage patterns evolve, there may be a costly need to add or relabel data to modify safety behavior. We propose a novel preference modeling approach that utilizes AI feedback and only requires a small amount of human data. Our method, Rule Based Rewards (RBR), uses a collection of rules for desired or undesired behaviors (e.g. refusals should not be judgmental) along with a LLM grader. In contrast to prior methods using AI feedback, our method uses fine-grained, composable, LLM-graded few-shot prompts as reward directly in RL training, resulting in greater control, accuracy and ease of updating. We show that RBRs are an effective training method, achieving an F1 score of 97.1, compared to a human-feedback baseline of 91.7, resulting in much higher safety-behavior accuracy through better balancing usefulness and safety.

Paperid: 4940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00642.pdf

Abstract:
Serverless computing is an emerging cloud computing paradigm that enables developers to build applications at the function level, known as serverless applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading provider in this domain, provides the Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), the most widely adopted configuration schema for configuring and managing serverless applications through a specified file. However, misconfigurations pose a significant challenge in serverless development. Traditional data-driven techniques may struggle with serverless applications because the complexity of serverless configurations hinders pattern recognition, and it is challenging to gather complete datasets that cover all possible configurations. Leveraging vast amounts of publicly available data during pre-training, LLMs can have the potential to assist in identifying and explaining misconfigurations in serverless applications. In this paper, we introduce SlsDetector, the first framework leveraging LLMs to detect misconfigurations in serverless applications. SlsDetector utilizes effective prompt engineering with zero-shot learning to identify configuration issues. It designs multi-dimensional constraints specifically tailored to the configuration characteristics of serverless applications and leverages the Chain of Thought technique to enhance LLMs inferences. We evaluate SlsDetector on a curated dataset of 110 configuration files. Our results show that SlsDetector, based on ChatGPT-4o, achieves a precision of 72.88%, recall of 88.18%, and F1-score of 79.75%, outperforming state-of-the-art data-driven approaches by 53.82, 17.40, and 49.72 percentage points, respectively. Furthermore, we investigate the generalization capability of SlsDetector by applying recent LLMs, including Llama 3.1 (405B) Instruct Turbo and Gemini 1.5 Pro, with results showing consistently high effectiveness across these models.

Paperid: 4941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00508.pdf

Abstract:
Teaching robots desired skills in real-world environments remains challenging, especially for non-experts. A key bottleneck is that collecting robotic data often requires expertise or specialized hardware, limiting accessibility and scalability. We posit that natural language offers an intuitive and accessible interface for robot learning. To this end, we study two aspects: (1) enabling non-experts to collect robotic data through natural language supervision (e.g., "move the arm to the right") and (2) training robot policies directly from this supervision. Specifically, we introduce a data collection framework that collects robot demonstrations based on natural language supervision and further augments these demonstrations. We then present CLIP-RT, a new vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns language-conditioned visuomotor policies from this supervision. CLIP-RT adapts the pretrained CLIP model and learns to predict language-based motion primitives via contrastive imitation learning. We train CLIP-RT on the Open X-Embodiment dataset and finetune it on in-domain data collected by our framework. In real-world evaluations, CLIP-RT demonstrates strong capabilities in learning novel manipulation skills, outperforming OpenVLA (7B parameters) by 24% in average success rates, while using 7x fewer parameters (1B). We further assess CLIP-RT's capabilities in few-shot generalization and collaborative scenarios involving large pretrained models or humans. In simulated environments, CLIP-RT also yields strong performance, achieving a 93.1% average success rate on the LIBERO benchmark with an inference throughput of 163 Hz.

Paperid: 4942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21683.pdf

Abstract:
Constructing transferable descriptors for conformation representation of molecular and biological systems finds numerous applications in drug discovery, learning-based molecular dynamics, and protein mechanism analysis. Geometric graph neural networks (Geom-GNNs) with all-atom information have transformed atomistic simulations by serving as a general learnable geometric descriptors for downstream tasks including prediction of interatomic potential and molecular properties. However, common practices involve supervising Geom-GNNs on specific downstream tasks, which suffer from the lack of high-quality data and inaccurate labels leading to poor generalization and performance degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. In this work, we explored the possibility of using pre-trained Geom-GNNs as transferable and highly effective geometric descriptors for improved generalization. To explore their representation power, we studied the scaling behaviors of Geom-GNNs under self-supervised pre-training, supervised and unsupervised learning setups. We find that the expressive power of different architectures can differ on the pre-training task. Interestingly, Geom-GNNs do not follow the power-law scaling on the pre-training task, and universally lack predictable scaling behavior on the supervised tasks with quantum chemical labels important for screening and design of novel molecules. More importantly, we demonstrate how all-atom graph embedding can be organically combined with other neural architectures to enhance the expressive power. Meanwhile, the low-dimensional projection of the latent space shows excellent agreement with conventional geometrical descriptors.

Paperid: 4943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20691.pdf

Abstract:
This paper aims to simultaneously optimize indoor wireless and daylight performance by adjusting the positions of windows and the beam directions of window-deployed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) for RIS-aided outdoor-to-indoor (O2I) networks utilizing large language models (LLM) as optimizers. Firstly, we illustrate the wireless and daylight system models of RIS-aided O2I networks and formulate a joint optimization problem to enhance both wireless traffic sum rate and daylight illumination performance. Then, we present a multi-modal LLM-based window optimization (LMWO) framework, accompanied by a prompt construction template to optimize the overall performance in a zero-shot fashion, functioning as both an architect and a wireless network planner. Finally, we analyze the optimization performance of the LMWO framework and the impact of the number of windows, room size, number of RIS units, and daylight factor. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed LMWO framework can achieve outstanding optimization performance in terms of initial performance, convergence speed, final outcomes, and time complexity, compared with classic optimization methods. The building's wireless performance can be significantly enhanced while ensuring indoor daylight performance.

Paperid: 4944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19982.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained foundation models have exhibited extraordinary in-context learning performance, allowing zero-shot generalization to new tasks not encountered during pretraining. In the case of reinforcement learning (RL), in-context RL (ICRL) emerges when pretraining FMs on decision-making problems in an autoregressive-supervised manner. Nevertheless, current state-of-the-art ICRL algorithms, like Algorithm Distillation, Decision Pretrained Transformer and Decision Importance Transformer, impose stringent requirements on the pretraining dataset concerning the source policies, context information, and action labels. Notably, these algorithms either demand optimal policies or require varying degrees of well-trained behavior policies for all pretraining environments. This significantly hinders the application of ICRL to real-world scenarios, where acquiring optimal or well-trained policies for a substantial volume of real-world training environments can be intractable. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, termed State-Action Distillation (SAD), that allows to generate an effective pretraining dataset guided solely by random policies. In particular, SAD selects query states and corresponding action labels by distilling outstanding state-action pairs from the entire state and action spaces by using random policies within a trust horizon, and then inherits the classical autoregressive-supervised mechanism during pretraining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that enables effective ICRL under random policies and random contexts. We also establish quantitative analysis of the trustworthiness as well as the performance guarantees of SAD. Moreover, our empirical results across multiple popular ICRL benchmark environments demonstrate that, on average, SAD outperforms the best baseline by 236.3% in the offline evaluation and by 135.2% in the online evaluation.

Paperid: 4945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19817.pdf

Abstract:
Mathematical reasoning has been challenging for large language models (LLMs), and the introduction of step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference has significantly advanced the mathematical capabilities of LLMs. However, current approaches either necessitate extensive inference datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that frequently compromise computational accuracy. To address these fundamental limitations, we propose Step Guided Reasoning, a novel training-free adaptation framework that efficiently equips general-purpose pre-trained language models with enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. In this approach, LLMs reflect on small reasoning steps, similar to how humans deliberate and focus attention on what to do next. By incorporating this reflective process into the inference stage, LLMs can effectively guide their reasoning from one step to the next. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the significant effect of Step Guided Reasoning in enhancing mathematical performance in state-of-the-art language models -- Qwen2-72B-Instruct outperforms its math-specific counterpart, Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct, on MMLU-STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. The average scores of Qwen2-7B-Instruct and Qwen2-72B-Instruct increase from 27.1% to 36. 3% and from 36. 5% to 47.4% in the math domain, respectively.

Paperid: 4946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17631.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of deep learning (DL) has provided great opportunities for the high-throughput analysis of atomic-resolution micrographs. However, the DL models trained by image patches in fixed size generally lack efficiency and flexibility when processing micrographs containing diversified atomic configurations. Herein, inspired by the similarity between the atomic structures and graphs, we describe a few-shot learning framework based on an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN) to analyze a library of atomic structures (e.g., vacancies, phases, grain boundaries, doping, etc.), showing significantly promoted robustness and three orders of magnitude reduced computing parameters compared to the image-driven DL models, which is especially evident for those aggregated vacancy lines with flexible lattice distortion. Besides, the intuitiveness of graphs enables quantitative and straightforward extraction of the atomic-scale structural features in batches, thus statistically unveiling the self-assembly dynamics of vacancy lines under electron beam irradiation. A versatile model toolkit is established by integrating EGNN sub-models for single structure recognition to process images involving varied configurations in the form of a task chain, leading to the discovery of novel doping configurations with superior electrocatalytic properties for hydrogen evolution reactions. This work provides a powerful tool to explore structure diversity in a fast, accurate, and intelligent manner.

Paperid: 4947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17267.pdf

Abstract:
We propose the zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation with Collision Mitigation (VLN-CM), which takes these considerations. VLN-CM is composed of four modules and predicts the direction and distance of the next movement at each step. We utilize large foundation models for each modules. To select the direction, we use the Attention Spot Predictor (ASP), View Selector (VS), and Progress Monitor (PM). The ASP employs a Large Language Model (e.g. ChatGPT) to split navigation instructions into attention spots, which are objects or scenes at the location to move to (e.g. a yellow door). The VS selects from panorama images provided at 30-degree intervals the one that includes the attention spot, using CLIP similarity. We then choose the angle of the selected image as the direction to move in. The PM uses a rule-based approach to decide which attention spot to focus on next, among multiple spots derived from the instructions. If the similarity between the current attention spot and the visual observations decreases consecutively at each step, the PM determines that the agent has passed the current spot and moves on to the next one. For selecting the distance to move, we employed the Open Map Predictor (OMP). The OMP uses panorama depth information to predict an occupancy mask. We then selected a collision-free distance in the predicted direction based on the occupancy mask. We evaluated our method using the validation data of VLN-CE. Our approach showed better performance than several baseline methods, and the OPM was effective in mitigating collisions for the agent.

Paperid: 4948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17021.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.

Paperid: 4949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15332.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show great capabilities in a wide range of applications, but serving them efficiently becomes increasingly challenging as requests (prompts) become more complex. Context caching improves serving performance by reusing Key-Value (KV) vectors, the intermediate representations of tokens that are repeated across requests. However, existing context caching requires exact prefix matches across requests, limiting reuse cases in settings such as few-shot learning and retrieval-augmented generation, where immutable content (e.g., documents) remains unchanged across requests but is preceded by varying prefixes. Position-Independent Caching (PIC) addresses this issue by enabling modular reuse of the KV vectors regardless of prefixes. We formalize PIC and advance prior work by introducing EPIC, a serving system incorporating our new LegoLink algorithm, which mitigates the inappropriate "attention sink" effect at every document beginning, to maintain accuracy with minimal computation. Experiments show that EPIC achieves up to 8x improvements in Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and 7x throughput gains over existing systems, with negligible or no accuracy loss.

Paperid: 4950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11230.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the challenges of detecting LGBTQIA+ hate speech of large language models across multiple languages, including English, Italian, Chinese and (code-switched) English-Tamil, examining the impact of machine translation and whether the nuances of hate speech are preserved across translation. We examine the hate speech detection ability of zero-shot and fine-tuned GPT. Our findings indicate that: (1) English has the highest performance and the code-switching scenario of English-Tamil being the lowest, (2) fine-tuning improves performance consistently across languages whilst translation yields mixed results. Through simple experimentation with original text and machine-translated text for hate speech detection along with a qualitative error analysis, this paper sheds light on the socio-cultural nuances and complexities of languages that may not be captured by automatic translation.

Paperid: 4951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08629.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot graph anomaly detection (GAD) has recently garnered increasing attention, which aims to discern anomalous patterns among abundant unlabeled test nodes under the guidance of a limited number of labeled training nodes. Existing few-shot GAD approaches typically adopt meta-training methods trained on richly labeled auxiliary networks to facilitate rapid adaptation to target networks that possess sparse labels. However, these proposed methods often assume that the auxiliary and target networks exist in the same data distributions-an assumption rarely holds in practical settings. This paper explores a more prevalent and complex scenario of cross-domain few-shot GAD, where the goal is to identify anomalies within sparsely labeled target graphs using auxiliary graphs from a related, yet distinct domain. The challenge here is nontrivial owing to inherent data distribution discrepancies between the source and target domains, compounded by the uncertainties of sparse labeling in the target domain. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework, termed CDFS-GAD, specifically designed to tackle the aforementioned challenges. CDFS-GAD first introduces a domain-adaptive graph contrastive learning module, which is aimed at enhancing cross-domain feature alignment. Then, a prompt tuning module is further designed to extract domain-specific features tailored to each domain. Moreover, a domain-adaptive hypersphere classification loss is proposed to enhance the discrimination between normal and anomalous instances under minimal supervision, utilizing domain-sensitive norms. Lastly, a self-training strategy is introduced to further refine the predicted scores, enhancing its reliability in few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world cross-domain data pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CDFS-GAD framework in comparison to various existing GAD methods.

Paperid: 4952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07686.pdf

Abstract:
In the last decade, data-driven approaches have become popular choices for quadrotor control, thanks to their ability to facilitate the adaptation to unknown or uncertain flight conditions. Among the different data-driven paradigms, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is currently one of the most explored. However, the design of DRL agents for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) remains an open challenge. While some works have studied the output configuration of these agents (i.e., what kind of control to compute), there is no general consensus on the type of input data these approaches should employ. Multiple works simply provide the DRL agent with full state information, without questioning if this might be redundant and unnecessarily complicate the learning process, or pose superfluous constraints on the availability of such information in real platforms. In this work, we provide an in-depth benchmark analysis of different configurations of the observation space. We optimize multiple DRL agents in simulated environments with different input choices and study their robustness and their sim-to-real transfer capabilities with zero-shot adaptation. We believe that the outcomes and discussions presented in this work supported by extensive experimental results could be an important milestone in guiding future research on the development of DRL agents for aerial robot tasks.

Paperid: 4953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06912.pdf

Abstract:
Image-text representation learning forms a cornerstone in vision-language models, where pairs of images and textual descriptions are contrastively aligned in a shared embedding space. Since visual and textual concepts are naturally hierarchical, recent work has shown that hyperbolic space can serve as a high-potential manifold to learn vision-language representation with strong downstream performance. In this work, for the first time we show how to fully leverage the innate hierarchical nature of hyperbolic embeddings by looking beyond individual image-text pairs. We propose Compositional Entailment Learning for hyperbolic vision-language models. The idea is that an image is not only described by a sentence but is itself a composition of multiple object boxes, each with their own textual description. Such information can be obtained freely by extracting nouns from sentences and using openly available localized grounding models. We show how to hierarchically organize images, image boxes, and their textual descriptions through contrastive and entailment-based objectives. Empirical evaluation on a hyperbolic vision-language model trained with millions of image-text pairs shows that the proposed compositional learning approach outperforms conventional Euclidean CLIP learning, as well as recent hyperbolic alternatives, with better zero-shot and retrieval generalization and clearly stronger hierarchical performance.

Paperid: 4954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03486.pdf

Abstract:
End-effector based assistive robots face persistent challenges in generating smooth and robust trajectories when controlled by human's noisy and unreliable biosignals such as muscle activities and brainwaves. The produced endpoint trajectories are often jerky and imprecise to perform complex tasks such as stable robotic grasping. We propose STREAMS (Self-Training Robotic End-to-end Adaptive Multimodal Shared autonomy) as a novel framework leveraged deep reinforcement learning to tackle this challenge in biosignal based robotic control systems. STREAMS blends environmental information and synthetic user input into a Deep Q Learning Network (DQN) pipeline for an interactive end-to-end and self-training mechanism to produce smooth trajectories for the control of end-effector based robots. The proposed framework achieved a high-performance record of 98% in simulation with dynamic target estimation and acquisition without any pre-existing datasets. As a zero-shot sim-to-real user study with five participants controlling a physical robotic arm with noisy head movements, STREAMS (as an assistive mode) demonstrated significant improvements in trajectory stabilization, user satisfaction, and task performance reported as a success rate of 83% compared to manual mode which was 44% without any task support. STREAMS seeks to improve biosignal based assistive robotic controls by offering an interactive, end-to-end solution that stabilizes end-effector trajectories, enhancing task performance and accuracy.

Paperid: 4955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00316.pdf

Abstract:
While recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology produce natural and expressive speech, they lack the option for users to select emotion and control intensity. We propose EmoKnob, a framework that allows fine-grained emotion control in speech synthesis with few-shot demonstrative samples of arbitrary emotion. Our framework leverages the expressive speaker representation space made possible by recent advances in foundation voice cloning models. Based on the few-shot capability of our emotion control framework, we propose two methods to apply emotion control on emotions described by open-ended text, enabling an intuitive interface for controlling a diverse array of nuanced emotions. To facilitate a more systematic emotional speech synthesis field, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics designed to rigorously assess the faithfulness and recognizability of emotion control frameworks. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we show that our emotion control framework effectively embeds emotions into speech and surpasses emotion expressiveness of commercial TTS services.

Paperid: 4956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19425.pdf

Abstract:
Recent contrastive multimodal vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated robust open-world semantic understanding, becoming the standard image backbones for vision-language applications. However, recent findings suggest high semantic similarity between well-trained unimodal encoders, which raises a key question: Is there a plausible way to connect unimodal backbones for vision-language tasks? To this end, we propose a novel framework that aligns vision and language using frozen unimodal encoders. It involves selecting semantically similar encoders in the latent space, curating a concept-rich dataset of image-caption pairs, and training simple MLP projectors. We evaluated our approach on 12 zero-shot classification datasets and 2 image-text retrieval datasets. Our best model, utilizing DINOv2 and All-Roberta-Large text encoder, achieves 76$\%$ accuracy on ImageNet with a 20-fold reduction in data and 65-fold reduction in compute requirements compared multi-modal alignment where models are trained from scratch. The proposed framework enhances the accessibility of multimodal model development while enabling flexible adaptation across diverse scenarios. Code and curated datasets are available at \texttt{github.com/mayug/freeze-align}.

Paperid: 4957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18046.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in image captioning have explored text-only training methods to overcome the limitations of paired image-text data. However, existing text-only training methods often overlook the modality gap between using text data during training and employing images during inference. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Image-like Retrieval, which aligns text features with visually relevant features to mitigate the modality gap. Our method further enhances the accuracy of generated captions by designing a Fusion Module that integrates retrieved captions with input features. Additionally, we introduce a Frequency-based Entity Filtering technique that significantly improves caption quality. We integrate these methods into a unified framework, which we refer to as IFCap ($\textbf{I}$mage-like Retrieval and $\textbf{F}$requency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot $\textbf{Cap}$tioning). Through extensive experimentation, our straightforward yet powerful approach has demonstrated its efficacy, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in both image captioning and video captioning compared to zero-shot captioning based on text-only training.

Paperid: 4958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17073.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately attributing answer text to its source document is crucial for developing a reliable question-answering system. However, attribution for long documents remains largely unexplored. Post-hoc attribution systems are designed to map answer text back to the source document, yet the granularity of this mapping has not been addressed. Furthermore, a critical question arises: What exactly should be attributed? This involves identifying the specific information units within an answer that require grounding. In this paper, we propose and investigate a novel approach to the factual decomposition of generated answers for attribution, employing template-based in-context learning. To accomplish this, we utilize the question and integrate negative sampling during few-shot in-context learning for decomposition. This approach enhances the semantic understanding of both abstractive and extractive answers. We examine the impact of answer decomposition by providing a thorough examination of various attribution approaches, ranging from retrieval-based techniques to LLM-based attributors.

Paperid: 4959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17049.pdf

Abstract:
Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), with its rich variety, large volume, rapid updates, and diverse sources, has become a critical source of geospatial data. However, VGI data from platforms like OSM exhibit significant quality heterogeneity across different data types, particularly with urban building data. To address this, we propose a multi-source geographic data transformation solution, utilizing accessible and complete VGI data to assist in generating urban building footprint data. We also employ a multimodal data generation framework to improve accuracy. First, we introduce a pipeline for constructing an 'image-text-metadata-building footprint' dataset, primarily based on road network data and supplemented by other multimodal data. We then present ControlCity, a geographic data transformation method based on a multimodal diffusion model. This method first uses a pre-trained text-to-image model to align text, metadata, and building footprint data. An improved ControlNet further integrates road network and land-use imagery, producing refined building footprint data. Experiments across 22 global cities demonstrate that ControlCity successfully simulates real urban building patterns, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our method achieves an average FID score of 50.94, reducing error by 71.01% compared to leading methods, and a MIoU score of 0.36, an improvement of 38.46%. Additionally, our model excels in tasks like urban morphology transfer, zero-shot city generation, and spatial data completeness assessment. In the zero-shot city task, our method accurately predicts and generates similar urban structures, demonstrating strong generalization. This study confirms the effectiveness of our approach in generating urban building footprint data and capturing complex city characteristics.

Paperid: 4960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15933.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) frame the task into a BIO sequence labeling problem. Although these systems often excel in the downstream task at hand, they require extensive annotated data and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution input domains and unseen entity types. On the contrary, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities. While several works address Zero-Shot NER in English, little has been done in other languages. In this paper, we define an evaluation framework for Zero-Shot NER, applying it to the Italian language. Furthermore, we introduce SLIMER-IT, the Italian version of SLIMER, an instruction-tuning approach for zero-shot NER leveraging prompts enriched with definition and guidelines. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art models, demonstrate the superiority of SLIMER-IT on never-seen-before entity tags.

Paperid: 4961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13171.pdf

Abstract:
The stochastic formation of defects during Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) negatively impacts its adoption for high-precision use cases. Optical monitoring techniques can be used to identify defects based on layer-wise imaging, but these methods are difficult to scale to high resolutions due to cost and memory constraints. Therefore, we implement generative deep learning models to link low-cost, low-resolution images of the build plate to detailed high-resolution optical images of the build plate, enabling cost-efficient process monitoring. To do so, a conditional latent probabilistic diffusion model is trained to produce realistic high-resolution images of the build plate from low-resolution webcam images, recovering the distribution of small-scale features and surface roughness. We first evaluate the performance of the model by analyzing the reconstruction quality of the generated images using peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM) and wavelet covariance metrics that describe the preservation of high-frequency information. Additionally, we design a framework based upon the Segment Anything foundation model to recreate the 3D morphology of the printed part and analyze the surface roughness of the reconstructed samples. Finally, we explore the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the implemented framework to other part geometries by creating synthetic low-resolution data.

Paperid: 4962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12798.pdf

Abstract:
The temporal credit assignment problem is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), concerned with attributing the appropriate influence to each actions in a trajectory for their ability to achieve a goal. However, when feedback is delayed and sparse, the learning signal is poor, and action evaluation becomes harder. Canonical solutions, such as reward shaping and options, require extensive domain knowledge and manual intervention, limiting their scalability and applicability. In this work, we lay the foundations for Credit Assignment with Language Models (CALM), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate credit assignment via reward shaping and options discovery. CALM uses LLMs to decompose a task into elementary subgoals and assess the achievement of these subgoals in state-action transitions. Every time an option terminates, a subgoal is achieved, and CALM provides an auxiliary reward. This additional reward signal can enhance the learning process when the task reward is sparse and delayed without the need for human-designed rewards. We provide a preliminary evaluation of CALM using a dataset of human-annotated demonstrations from MiniHack, suggesting that LLMs can be effective in assigning credit in zero-shot settings, without examples or LLM fine-tuning. Our preliminary results indicate that the knowledge of LLMs is a promising prior for credit assignment in RL, facilitating the transfer of human knowledge into value functions.

Paperid: 4963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12746.pdf

Abstract:
In this article we present UNED-ACCESS 2024, a bilingual dataset that consists of 1003 multiple-choice questions of university entrance level exams in Spanish and English. Questions are originally formulated in Spanish and translated manually into English, and have not ever been publicly released. A selection of current open-source and proprietary models are evaluated in a uniform zero-shot experimental setting both on the UNED-ACCESS 2024 dataset and on an equivalent subset of MMLU questions. Results show that (i) reasoning questions are challenging for models, (ii) smaller models perform worse than larger models and degrade faster in Spanish than in English and (iii) the performance gap between languages is negligible for the best models and grows up to 37% for smaller models. Model ranking on UNED-ACCESS 2024 is almost identical in English and Spanish, and has also a high correlation (0.98 Pearson) with ranking on MMLU, suggesting that a small dataset is sufficiently diverse and representative to measure performance by discipline.

Paperid: 4964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12306.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-visual pre-trained models have gained substantial attention recently and demonstrated superior performance on various audio-visual tasks. This study investigates whether pre-trained audio-visual models demonstrate non-arbitrary associations between sounds and visual representations$\unicode{x2013}$known as sound symbolism$\unicode{x2013}$which is also observed in humans. We developed a specialized dataset with synthesized images and audio samples and assessed these models using a non-parametric approach in a zero-shot setting. Our findings reveal a significant correlation between the models' outputs and established patterns of sound symbolism, particularly in models trained on speech data. These results suggest that such models can capture sound-meaning connections akin to human language processing, providing insights into both cognitive architectures and machine learning strategies.

Paperid: 4965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08027.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) for education have highlighted a critical challenge: ensuring that explanations for state-of-the-art AI models are understandable for non-technical users such as educators and students. In response, we introduce iLLuMinaTE, a zero-shot, chain-of-prompts LLM-XAI pipeline inspired by Miller's cognitive model of explanation. iLLuMinaTE is designed to deliver theory-driven, actionable feedback to students in online courses. iLLuMinaTE navigates three main stages - causal connection, explanation selection, and explanation presentation - with variations drawing from eight social science theories (e.g. Abnormal Conditions, Pearl's Model of Explanation, Necessity and Robustness Selection, Contrastive Explanation). We extensively evaluate 21,915 natural language explanations of iLLuMinaTE extracted from three LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemma2-9B, Llama3-70B), with three different underlying XAI methods (LIME, Counterfactuals, MC-LIME), across students from three diverse online courses. Our evaluation involves analyses of explanation alignment to the social science theory, understandability of the explanation, and a real-world user preference study with 114 university students containing a novel actionability simulation. We find that students prefer iLLuMinaTE explanations over traditional explainers 89.52% of the time. Our work provides a robust, ready-to-use framework for effectively communicating hybrid XAI-driven insights in education, with significant generalization potential for other human-centric fields.

Paperid: 4966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07829.pdf

Abstract:
UI automation tests play a crucial role in ensuring the quality of mobile applications. Despite the growing popularity of machine learning techniques to generate these tests, they still face several challenges, such as the mismatch of UI elements. The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have addressed these issues by leveraging their semantic understanding capabilities. However, a significant gap remains in applying these models to industrial-level app testing, particularly in terms of cost optimization and knowledge limitation. To address this, we introduce CAT to create cost-effective UI automation tests for industry apps by combining machine learning and LLMs with best practices. Given the task description, CAT employs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to source examples of industrial app usage as the few-shot learning context, assisting LLMs in generating the specific sequence of actions. CAT then employs machine learning techniques, with LLMs serving as a complementary optimizer, to map the target element on the UI screen. Our evaluations on the WeChat testing dataset demonstrate the CAT's performance and cost-effectiveness, achieving 90% UI automation with $0.34 cost, outperforming the state-of-the-art. We have also integrated our approach into the real-world WeChat testing platform, demonstrating its usefulness in detecting 141 bugs and enhancing the developers' testing process.

Paperid: 4967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06166.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning is an effective method to customize Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for various downstream tasks, involving tuning very few parameters of input prompt tokens. Recently, prompt pretraining in large-scale dataset (e.g., ImageNet-21K) has played a crucial role in prompt learning for universal visual discrimination. However, we revisit and observe that the limited learnable prompts could face underfitting risks given the extensive images during prompt pretraining, simultaneously leading to poor generalization. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a general framework termed Revisiting Prompt Pretraining (RPP), which targets at improving the fitting and generalization ability from two aspects: prompt structure and prompt supervision. For prompt structure, we break the restriction in common practice where query, key, and value vectors are derived from the shared learnable prompt token. Instead, we introduce unshared individual query, key, and value learnable prompts, thereby enhancing the model's fitting capacity through increased parameter diversity. For prompt supervision, we additionally utilize soft labels derived from zero-shot probability predictions provided by a pretrained Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) teacher model. These soft labels yield more nuanced and general insights into the inter-class relationships, thereby endowing the pretraining process with better generalization ability. RPP produces a more resilient prompt initialization, enhancing its robust transferability across diverse visual recognition tasks. Experiments across various benchmarks consistently confirm the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our pretrained prompts. Codes and models will be made available soon.

Paperid: 4968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05679.pdf

Abstract:
Various Earth anomalies have destroyed the stable, balanced state, resulting in fatalities and serious destruction of property. With the advantages of large-scale and precise observation, high-resolution remote sensing images have been widely used for anomaly monitoring and localization. Powered by the deep representation, the existing methods have achieved remarkable advances, primarily in classification and change detection techniques. However, labeled samples are difficult to acquire due to the low probability of anomaly occurrence, and the trained models are limited to fixed anomaly categories, which hinders the application for anomalies with few samples or unknown anomalies. In this paper, to tackle this problem, we propose the anomaly change detection (AnomalyCD) technique, which accepts time-series observations and learns to identify anomalous changes by learning from the historical normal change pattern. Compared to the existing techniques, AnomalyCD processes an unfixed number of time steps and can localize the various anomalies in a unified manner, without human supervision. To benchmark AnomalyCD, we constructed a high-resolution dataset with time-series images dedicated to various Earth anomalies (the AnomalyCDD dataset). AnomalyCDD contains high-resolution (from 0.15 to 2.39 m/pixel), time-series (from 3 to 7 time steps), and large-scale images (1927.93 km2 in total) collected globally Furthermore, we developed a zero-shot baseline model (AnomalyCDM), which implements the AnomalyCD technique by extracting a general representation from the segment anything model (SAM) and conducting temporal comparison to distinguish the anomalous changes from normal changes. AnomalyCDM is designed as a two-stage workflow to enhance the efficiency, and has the ability to process the unseen images directly, without retraining for each scene.

Paperid: 4969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04538.pdf

Abstract:
Operator learning focuses on approximating mappings $\mathcal{G}^\dagger:\mathcal{U} \rightarrow\mathcal{V}$ between infinite-dimensional spaces of functions, such as $u: Î©_u\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ and $v: Î©_v\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$. This makes it particularly suitable for solving parametric nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). While most machine learning methods for operator learning rely on variants of deep neural networks (NNs), recent studies have shown that Gaussian Processes (GPs) are also competitive while offering interpretability and theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid GP/NN-based framework for operator learning that leverages the strengths of both methods. Instead of approximating the function-valued operator $\mathcal{G}^\dagger$, we use a GP to approximate its associated real-valued bilinear form $\widetilde{\mathcal{G}}^\dagger: \mathcal{U}\times\mathcal{V}^*\rightarrow\mathbb{R}.$ This bilinear form is defined by $\widetilde{\mathcal{G}}^\dagger(u,Ï) := [Ï,\mathcal{G}^\dagger(u)],$ which allows us to recover the operator $\mathcal{G}^\dagger$ through $\mathcal{G}^\dagger(u)(y)=\widetilde{\mathcal{G}}^\dagger(u,Î´_y).$ The GP mean function can be zero or parameterized by a neural operator and for each setting we develop a robust training mechanism based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) that can optionally leverage the physics involved. Numerical benchmarks show that (1) it improves the performance of a base neural operator by using it as the mean function of a GP, and (2) it enables zero-shot data-driven models for accurate predictions without prior training. Our framework also handles multi-output operators where $\mathcal{G}^\dagger:\mathcal{U} \rightarrow\prod_{s=1}^S\mathcal{V}^s$, and benefits from computational speed-ups via product kernel structures and Kronecker product matrix representations.

Paperid: 4970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03203.pdf

Abstract:
Sentiment classification (SC) often suffers from low-resource challenges such as domain-specific contexts, imbalanced label distributions, and few-shot scenarios. The potential of the diffusion language model (LM) for textual data augmentation (DA) remains unexplored, moreover, textual DA methods struggle to balance the diversity and consistency of new samples. Most DA methods either perform logical modifications or rephrase less important tokens in the original sequence with the language model. In the context of SC, strong emotional tokens could act critically on the sentiment of the whole sequence. Therefore, contrary to rephrasing less important context, we propose DiffusionCLS to leverage a diffusion LM to capture in-domain knowledge and generate pseudo samples by reconstructing strong label-related tokens. This approach ensures a balance between consistency and diversity, avoiding the introduction of noise and augmenting crucial features of datasets. DiffusionCLS also comprises a Noise-Resistant Training objective to help the model generalize. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various low-resource scenarios including domain-specific and domain-general problems. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our framework's modules, and visualization studies highlight optimal deployment conditions, reinforcing our conclusions.

Paperid: 4971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01348.pdf

Abstract:
Generating diverse VLSI layout patterns is essential for various downstream tasks in design for manufacturing, as design rules continually evolve during the development of new technology nodes. However, existing training-based methods for layout pattern generation rely on large datasets. In practical scenarios, especially when developing a new technology node, obtaining such extensive layout data is challenging. Consequently, training models with large datasets becomes impractical, limiting the scalability and adaptability of prior approaches. To this end, we propose PatternPaint, a diffusion-based framework capable of generating legal patterns with limited design-rule-compliant training samples. PatternPaint simplifies complex layout pattern generation into a series of inpainting processes with a template-based denoising scheme. Furthermore, we perform few-shot finetuning on a pretrained image foundation model with only 20 design-rule-compliant samples. Experimental results show that using a sub-3nm technology node (Intel 18A), our model is the only one that can generate legal patterns in complex 2D metal interconnect design rule settings among all previous works and achieves a high diversity score. Additionally, our few-shot finetuning can boost the legality rate with 1.87X improvement compared to the original pretrained model. As a result, we demonstrate a production-ready approach for layout pattern generation in developing new technology nodes.

Paperid: 4972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20196.pdf

Abstract:
Marine biofouling on vessel hulls poses major ecological, economic, and biosecurity risks. Traditional survey methods rely on diver inspections, which are hazardous and limited in scalability. This work investigates automated classification of biofouling severity on the Level of Fouling (LoF) scale using both custom computer vision models and large multimodal language models (LLMs). Convolutional neural networks, transformer-based segmentation, and zero-shot LLMs were evaluated on an expert-labelled dataset from the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries. Computer vision models showed high accuracy at extreme LoF categories but struggled with intermediate levels due to dataset imbalance and image framing. LLMs, guided by structured prompts and retrieval, achieved competitive performance without training and provided interpretable outputs. The results demonstrate complementary strengths across approaches and suggest that hybrid methods integrating segmentation coverage with LLM reasoning offer a promising pathway toward scalable and interpretable biofouling assessment.

Paperid: 4973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19918.pdf

Abstract:
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), i.e., the tendency to generate plausible but non-factual content, pose a significant challenge for their reliable deployment in high-stakes environments. However, existing hallucination detection methods generally operate under unrealistic assumptions, i.e., either requiring expensive intensive sampling strategies for consistency checks or white-box LLM states, which are unavailable or inefficient in common API-based scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel efficient zero-shot metric called Lowest Span Confidence (LSC) for hallucination detection under minimal resource assumptions, only requiring a single forward with output probabilities. Concretely, LSC evaluates the joint likelihood of semantically coherent spans via a sliding window mechanism. By identifying regions of lowest marginal confidence across variable-length n-grams, LSC could well capture local uncertainty patterns strongly correlated with factual inconsistency. Importantly, LSC can mitigate the dilution effect of perplexity and the noise sensitivity of minimum token probability, offering a more robust estimate of factual uncertainty. Extensive experiments across multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs and diverse benchmarks show that LSC consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines, delivering strong detection performance even under resource-constrained conditions.

Paperid: 4974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09066.pdf

Authors:Donghoon Shin, Sejung Lee, Soonmin Bae, Hwijung Ryu, Changwon Ok, Hoyoun Jung, Hyesung Ji, Jeehyun Lim, Jehoon Lee, Ji-Eun Han, Jisoo Baik, Mihyeon Kim, Riwoo Chung, Seongmin Lee, Wonjae Park, Yoonseok Heo, Youngkyung Seo, Seyoun Won, Boeun Kim, Cheolhun Heo, Eunkyeong Lee, Honghee Lee, Hyeongju Ju, Hyeontae Seo, Jeongyong Shim, Jisoo Lee, Junseok Koh, Junwoo Kim, Minho Lee, Minji Kang, Minju Kim, Sangha Nam, Seongheum Park, Taehyeong Kim, Euijai Ahn, Hong Seok Jeung, Jisu Shin, Jiyeon Kim, Seonyeong Song, Seung Hyun Kong, Sukjin Hong, Taeyang Yun, Yu-Seon Kim, A-Hyun Lee, Chae-Jeong Lee, Hye-Won Yu, Ji-Hyun Ahn, Song-Yeon Kim, Sun-Woo Jung, Eunju Kim, Eunji Ha, Jinwoo Baek, Yun-ji Lee, Wanjin Park, Jeong Yeop Kim, Eun Mi Kim, Hyoung Jun Park, Jung Won Yoon, Min Sung Noh, Myung Gyo Oh, Wongyoung Lee, Yun Jin Park, Young S. Kwon, Hyun Keun Kim, Jieun Lee, YeoJoo Park

Abstract:
We introduce Mi:dm 2.0, a bilingual large language model (LLM) specifically engineered to advance Korea-centric AI. This model goes beyond Korean text processing by integrating the values, reasoning patterns, and commonsense knowledge inherent to Korean society, enabling nuanced understanding of cultural contexts, emotional subtleties, and real-world scenarios to generate reliable and culturally appropriate responses. To address limitations of existing LLMs, often caused by insufficient or low-quality Korean data and lack of cultural alignment, Mi:dm 2.0 emphasizes robust data quality through a comprehensive pipeline that includes proprietary data cleansing, high-quality synthetic data generation, strategic data mixing with curriculum learning, and a custom Korean-optimized tokenizer to improve efficiency and coverage. To realize this vision, we offer two complementary configurations: Mi:dm 2.0 Base (11.5B parameters), built with a depth-up scaling strategy for general-purpose use, and Mi:dm 2.0 Mini (2.3B parameters), optimized for resource-constrained environments and specialized tasks. Mi:dm 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on Korean-specific benchmarks, with top-tier zero-shot results on KMMLU and strong internal evaluation results across language, humanities, and social science tasks. The Mi:dm 2.0 lineup is released under the MIT license to support extensive research and commercial use. By offering accessible and high-performance Korea-centric LLMs, KT aims to accelerate AI adoption across Korean industries, public services, and education, strengthen the Korean AI developer community, and lay the groundwork for the broader vision of K-intelligence. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/K-intelligence. For technical inquiries, please contact midm-llm@kt.com.

Paperid: 4975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08166.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and task-to-core allocation are critical for thermal management and balancing energy and performance in embedded systems. Existing approaches either rely on utilization-based heuristics that overlook stall times, or require extensive offline profiling for table generation, preventing runtime adaptation. We propose a model-based hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for thermal- and energy-aware scheduling on multi-core platforms. Two collaborative agents decompose the exponential action space, achieving 358ms latency for subsequent decisions. First decisions require 3.5 to 8.0s including one-time LLM feature extraction. An accurate environment model leverages regression techniques to predict thermal dynamics and performance states. When combined with LLM-extracted semantic features, the environment model enables zero-shot deployment for new workloads on trained platforms by generating synthetic training data without requiring workload-specific profiling samples. We introduce LLM-based semantic feature extraction that characterizes OpenMP programs through 13 code-level features without execution. The Dyna-Q-inspired framework integrates direct reinforcement learning with model-based planning, achieving 20x faster convergence than model-free methods. Experiments on BOTS and PolybenchC benchmarks across NVIDIA Jetson TX2, Jetson Orin NX, RubikPi, and Intel Core i7 demonstrate 7.09x better energy efficiency and 4.0x better makespan than Linux ondemand governor. First-decision latency is 8,300x faster than table-based profiling, enabling practical deployment in dynamic embedded systems.

Paperid: 4976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04798.pdf

Abstract:
Robust long-term tracking of drone is a critical requirement for modern surveillance systems, given their increasing threat potential. While detector-based approaches typically achieve strong frame-level accuracy, they often suffer from temporal inconsistencies caused by frequent detection dropouts. Despite its practical relevance, research on RGB-based drone tracking is still limited and largely reliant on conventional motion models. Meanwhile, foundation models like SAMURAI have established their effectiveness across other domains, exhibiting strong category-agnostic tracking performance. However, their applicability in drone-specific scenarios has not been investigated yet. Motivated by this gap, we present the first systematic evaluation of SAMURAI's potential for robust drone tracking in urban surveillance settings. Furthermore, we introduce a detector-augmented extension of SAMURAI to mitigate sensitivity to bounding-box initialization and sequence length. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed extension significantly improves robustness in complex urban environments, with pronounced benefits in long-duration sequences - especially under drone exit-re-entry events. The incorporation of detector cues yields consistent gains over SAMURAI's zero-shot performance across datasets and metrics, with success rate improvements of up to +0.393 and FNR reductions of up to -0.475.

Paperid: 4977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04257.pdf

Abstract:
We study multilingual speaker attribute prediction under linguistic variation, domain mismatch, and data imbalance across languages. We propose RLMIL-DAT, a multilingual extension of the reinforced multiple instance learning framework that combines reinforcement learning based instance selection with domain adversarial training to encourage language invariant utterance representations. We evaluate the approach on a five language Twitter corpus in a few shot setting and on a VoxCeleb2 derived corpus covering forty languages in a zero shot setting for gender and age prediction. Across a wide range of model configurations and multiple random seeds, RLMIL-DAT consistently improves Macro F1 compared to standard multiple instance learning and the original reinforced multiple instance learning framework. The largest gains are observed for gender prediction, while age prediction remains more challenging and shows smaller but positive improvements. Ablation experiments indicate that domain adversarial training is the primary contributor to the performance gains, enabling effective transfer from high resource English to lower resource languages by discouraging language specific cues in the shared encoder. In the zero shot setting on the smaller VoxCeleb2 subset, improvements are generally positive but less consistent, reflecting limited statistical power and the difficulty of generalizing to many unseen languages. Overall, the results demonstrate that combining instance selection with adversarial domain adaptation is an effective and robust strategy for cross lingual speaker attribute prediction.

Paperid: 4978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03464.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt-based evaluations suggest that large language models (LLMs) perform poorly on time series classification, raising doubts about whether they encode meaningful temporal structure. We show that this conclusion reflects limitations of prompt-based generation rather than the model's representational capacity by directly comparing prompt outputs with linear probes over the same internal representations. While zero-shot prompting performs near chance, linear probes improve average F1 from 0.15-0.26 to 0.61-0.67, often matching or exceeding specialized time series models. Layer-wise analyses further show that class-discriminative time series information emerges in early transformer layers and is amplified by visual and multimodal inputs. Together, these results demonstrate a systematic mismatch between what LLMs internally represent and what prompt-based evaluation reveals, leading current evaluations to underestimate their time series understanding.

Paperid: 4979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21709.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can produce text that closely resembles human writing. This capability raises concerns about misuse, including disinformation and content manipulation. Detecting AI-generated text is essential to maintain authenticity and prevent malicious applications. Existing research has addressed detection in multiple languages, but the Bengali language remains largely unexplored. Bengali's rich vocabulary and complex structure make distinguishing human-written and AI-generated text particularly challenging. This study investigates five transformer-based models: XLMRoBERTa-Large, mDeBERTaV3-Base, BanglaBERT-Base, IndicBERT-Base and MultilingualBERT-Base. Zero-shot evaluation shows that all models perform near chance levels (around 50% accuracy) and highlight the need for task-specific fine-tuning. Fine-tuning significantly improves performance, with XLM-RoBERTa, mDeBERTa and MultilingualBERT achieving around 91% on both accuracy and F1-score. IndicBERT demonstrates comparatively weaker performance, indicating limited effectiveness in fine-tuning for this task. This work advances AI-generated text detection in Bengali and establishes a foundation for building robust systems to counter AI-generated content.

Paperid: 4980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21702.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of speech synthesis and voice conversion systems has made deepfake audio a major security concern. Bengali deepfake detection remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study automatic detection of Bengali audio deepfakes using the BanglaFake dataset. We evaluate zeroshot inference with several pretrained models. These include Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53, Whisper, PANNsCNN14, WavLM and Audio Spectrogram Transformer. Zero-shot results show limited detection ability. The best model, Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53, achieves 53.80% accuracy, 56.60% AUC and 46.20% EER. We then f ine-tune multiple architectures for Bengali deepfake detection. These include Wav2Vec2-Base, LCNN, LCNN-Attention, ResNet18, ViT-B16 and CNN-BiLSTM. Fine-tuned models show strong performance gains. ResNet18 achieves the highest accuracy of 79.17%, F1 score of 79.12%, AUC of 84.37% and EER of 24.35%. Experimental results confirm that fine-tuning significantly improves performance over zero-shot inference. This study provides the first systematic benchmark of Bengali deepfake audio detection. It highlights the effectiveness of f ine-tuned deep learning models for this low-resource language.

Paperid: 4981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19612.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces MauBERT, a multilingual extension of HuBERT that leverages articulatory features for robust cross-lingual phonetic representation learning. We continue HuBERT pre-training with supervision based on a phonetic-to-articulatory feature mapping in 55 languages. Our models learn from multilingual data to predict articulatory features or phones, resulting in language-independent representations that capture multilingual phonetic properties. Through comprehensive ABX discriminability testing, we show MauBERT models produce more context-invariant representations than state-of-the-art multilingual self-supervised learning models. Additionally, the models effectively adapt to unseen languages and casual speech with minimal self-supervised fine-tuning (10 hours of speech). This establishes an effective approach for instilling linguistic inductive biases in self-supervised speech models.

Paperid: 4982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17154.pdf

Abstract:
Movie dubbing seeks to synthesize speech from a given script using a specific voice, while ensuring accurate lip synchronization and emotion-prosody alignment with the character's visual performance. However, existing alignment approaches based on visual features face two key limitations: (1)they rely on complex, handcrafted visual preprocessing pipelines, including facial landmark detection and feature extraction; and (2) they generalize poorly to unseen visual domains, often resulting in degraded alignment and dubbing quality. To address these issues, we propose InstructDubber, a novel instruction-based alignment dubbing method for both robust in-domain and zero-shot movie dubbing. Specifically, we first feed the video, script, and corresponding prompts into a multimodal large language model to generate natural language dubbing instructions regarding the speaking rate and emotion state depicted in the video, which is robust to visual domain variations. Second, we design an instructed duration distilling module to mine discriminative duration cues from speaking rate instructions to predict lip-aligned phoneme-level pronunciation duration. Third, for emotion-prosody alignment, we devise an instructed emotion calibrating module, which finetunes an LLM-based instruction analyzer using ground truth dubbing emotion as supervision and predicts prosody based on the calibrated emotion analysis. Finally, the predicted duration and prosody, together with the script, are fed into the audio decoder to generate video-aligned dubbing. Extensive experiments on three major benchmarks demonstrate that InstructDubber outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across both in-domain and zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 4983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15614.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in explainable recommendations have explored the integration of language models to analyze natural language rationales for user-item interactions. Despite their potential, existing methods often rely on ID-based representations that obscure semantic meaning and impose structural constraints on language models, thereby limiting their applicability in open-ended scenarios. These challenges are intensified by the complex nature of real-world interactions, where diverse user intents are entangled and collaborative signals rarely align with linguistic semantics. To overcome these limitations, we propose BEAT, a unified and transferable framework that tokenizes user and item behaviors into discrete, interpretable sequences. We construct a behavior vocabulary via a vector-quantized autoencoding process that disentangles macro-level interests and micro-level intentions from graph-based representations. We then introduce multi-level semantic supervision to bridge the gap between behavioral signals and language space. A semantic alignment regularization mechanism is designed to embed behavior tokens directly into the input space of frozen language models. Experiments on three public datasets show that BEAT improves zero-shot recommendation performance while generating coherent and informative explanations. Further analysis demonstrates that our behavior tokens capture fine-grained semantics and offer a plug-and-play interface for integrating complex behavior patterns into large language models.

Paperid: 4984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13989.pdf

Abstract:
Incorporating known symmetries in data into machine learning models has consistently improved predictive accuracy, robustness, and generalization. However, achieving exact invariance to specific symmetries typically requires designing bespoke architectures for each group of symmetries, limiting scalability and preventing knowledge transfer across related symmetries. In the case of the space groups, symmetries critical to modeling crystalline solids in materials science and condensed matter physics, this challenge is particularly salient as there are 230 such groups in three dimensions. In this work we present a new approach to such crystallographic symmetries by developing a single machine learning architecture that is capable of adapting its weights automatically to enforce invariance to any input space group. Our approach is based on constructing symmetry-adapted Fourier bases through an explicit characterization of constraints that group operations impose on Fourier coefficients. Encoding these constraints into a neural network layer enables weight sharing across different space groups, allowing the model to leverage structural similarities between groups and overcome data sparsity when limited measurements are available for specific groups. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in achieving competitive performance on material property prediction tasks and performing zero-shot learning to generalize to unseen groups.

Paperid: 4985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13153.pdf

Abstract:
Traversing terrains with sparse footholds like legged animals presents a promising yet challenging task for quadruped robots, as it requires precise environmental perception and agile control to secure safe foot placement while maintaining dynamic stability. Model-based hierarchical controllers excel in laboratory settings, but suffer from limited generalization and overly conservative behaviors. End-to-end learning-based approaches unlock greater flexibility and adaptability, but existing state-of-the-art methods either rely on heightmaps that introduce noise and complex, costly pipelines, or implicitly infer terrain features from egocentric depth images, often missing accurate critical geometric cues and leading to inefficient learning and rigid gaits. To overcome these limitations, we propose START, a single-stage learning framework that enables agile, stable locomotion on highly sparse and randomized footholds. START leverages only low-cost onboard vision and proprioception to accurately reconstruct local terrain heightmap, providing an explicit intermediate representation to convey essential features relevant to sparse foothold regions. This supports comprehensive environmental understanding and precise terrain assessment, reducing exploration cost and accelerating skill acquisition. Experimental results demonstrate that START achieves zero-shot transfer across diverse real-world scenarios, showcasing superior adaptability, precise foothold placement, and robust locomotion.

Paperid: 4986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12268.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP exhibit strong zero-shot generalization but remain sensitive to domain shifts at test time. Test-time prompt tuning (TPT) mitigates this issue by adapting prompts with fixed augmentations, which may falter in more challenging settings. In this work, we propose Meta Test-Time Prompt Tuning (MetaTPT), a meta-learning framework that learns a self-supervised auxiliary task to guide test-time prompt tuning. The auxiliary task dynamically learns parameterized augmentations for each sample, enabling more expressive transformations that capture essential features in target domains. MetaTPT adopts a dual-loop optimization paradigm: an inner loop learns a self-supervised task that generates informative views, while the outer loop performs prompt tuning by enforcing consistency across these views. By coupling augmentation learning with prompt tuning, MetaTPT improves test-time adaptation under domain shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaTPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on domain generalization and cross-dataset benchmarks.

Paperid: 4987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09617.pdf

Abstract:
Multiview diffusion models have rapidly emerged as a powerful tool for content creation with spatial consistency across viewpoints, offering rich visual realism without requiring explicit geometry and appearance representation. However, compared to meshes or radiance fields, existing multiview diffusion models offer limited appearance manipulation, particularly in terms of material, texture, or style. In this paper, we present a lightweight adaptation technique for appearance transfer in multiview diffusion models. Our method learns to combine object identity from an input image with appearance cues rendered in a separate reference image, producing multi-view-consistent output that reflects the desired materials, textures, or styles. This allows explicit specification of appearance parameters at generation time while preserving the underlying object geometry and view coherence. We leverage three diffusion denoising processes responsible for generating the original object, the reference, and the target images, and perform reverse sampling to aggregate a small subset of layer-wise self-attention features from the object and the reference to influence the target generation. Our method requires only a few training examples to introduce appearance awareness to pretrained multiview models. The experiments show that our method provides a simple yet effective way toward multiview generation with diverse appearance, advocating the adoption of implicit generative 3D representations in practice.

Paperid: 4988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07170.pdf

Abstract:
Image fusion aims to blend complementary information from multiple sensing modalities, yet existing approaches remain limited in robustness, adaptability, and controllability. Most current fusion networks are tailored to specific tasks and lack the ability to flexibly incorporate user intent, especially in complex scenarios involving low-light degradation, color shifts, or exposure imbalance. Moreover, the absence of ground-truth fused images and the small scale of existing datasets make it difficult to train an end-to-end model that simultaneously understands high-level semantics and performs fine-grained multimodal alignment. We therefore present DiTFuse, instruction-driven Diffusion-Transformer (DiT) framework that performs end-to-end, semantics-aware fusion within a single model. By jointly encoding two images and natural-language instructions in a shared latent space, DiTFuse enables hierarchical and fine-grained control over fusion dynamics, overcoming the limitations of pre-fusion and post-fusion pipelines that struggle to inject high-level semantics. The training phase employs a multi-degradation masked-image modeling strategy, so the network jointly learns cross-modal alignment, modality-invariant restoration, and task-aware feature selection without relying on ground truth images. A curated, multi-granularity instruction dataset further equips the model with interactive fusion capabilities. DiTFuse unifies infrared-visible, multi-focus, and multi-exposure fusion-as well as text-controlled refinement and downstream tasks-within a single architecture. Experiments on public IVIF, MFF, and MEF benchmarks confirm superior quantitative and qualitative performance, sharper textures, and better semantic retention. The model also supports multi-level user control and zero-shot generalization to other multi-image fusion scenarios, including instruction-conditioned segmentation.

Paperid: 4989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06787.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for synthesizing textual PLC programming languages like Structured Text (ST) code, other IEC 61131-3 standard graphical languages like Sequential Function Charts (SFCs) remain underexplored. Generating SFCs is challenging due to graphical nature and ST actions embedded within, which are not directly compatible with standard generation techniques, often leading to non-executable code that is incompatible with industrial tool-chains In this work, we introduce LLM4SFC, the first framework to receive natural-language descriptions of industrial workflows and provide executable SFCs. LLM4SFC is based on three components: (i) A reduced structured representation that captures essential topology and in-line ST and reduced textual verbosity; (ii) Fine-tuning and few-shot retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for alignment with SFC programming conventions; and (iii) A structured generation approach that prunes illegal tokens in real-time to ensure compliance with the textual format of SFCs. We evaluate LLM4SFC on a dataset of real-world SFCs from automated manufacturing projects, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs. The results show that LLM4SFC reliably generates syntactically valid SFC programs effectively bridging graphical and textual PLC languages, achieving a generation generation success of 75% - 94%, paving the way for automated industrial programming.

Paperid: 4990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04106.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot prompting has emerged as a practical alternative to fine-tuning for leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in specialized tasks. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the selection and quality of in-context examples, particularly in complex domains. In this work, we examine retrieval-augmented prompting as a strategy to improve few-shot performance in code vulnerability detection, where the goal is to identify one or more security-relevant weaknesses present in a given code snippet from a predefined set of vulnerability categories. We perform a systematic evaluation using the Gemini-1.5-Flash model across three approaches: (1) standard few-shot prompting with randomly selected examples, (2) retrieval-augmented prompting using semantically similar examples, and (3) retrieval-based labeling, which assigns labels based on retrieved examples without model inference. Our results show that retrieval-augmented prompting consistently outperforms the other prompting strategies. At 20 shots, it achieves an F1 score of 74.05% and a partial match accuracy of 83.90%. We further compare this approach against zero-shot prompting and several fine-tuned models, including Gemini-1.5-Flash and smaller open-source models such as DistilBERT, DistilGPT2, and CodeBERT. Retrieval-augmented prompting outperforms both zero-shot (F1 score: 36.35%, partial match accuracy: 20.30%) and fine-tuned Gemini (F1 score: 59.31%, partial match accuracy: 53.10%), while avoiding the training time and cost associated with model fine-tuning. On the other hand, fine-tuning CodeBERT yields higher performance (F1 score: 91.22%, partial match accuracy: 91.30%) but requires additional training, maintenance effort, and resources.

Paperid: 4991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21203.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a method to align and place a fabric piece on top of another using a dual-arm manipulator and a grayscale camera, so that their surface textures are accurately matched. We propose a novel control scheme that combines Transformer-driven visual servoing with dualarm impedance control. This approach enables the system to simultaneously control the pose of the fabric piece and place it onto the underlying one while applying tension to keep the fabric piece flat. Our transformer-based network incorporates pretrained backbones and a newly introduced Difference Extraction Attention Module (DEAM), which significantly enhances pose difference prediction accuracy. Trained entirely on synthetic images generated using rendering software, the network enables zero-shot deployment in real-world scenarios without requiring prior training on specific fabric textures. Real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed system accurately aligns fabric pieces with different textures.

Paperid: 4992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12331.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with negation. Given a prompt like "retrieve (or generate) a street scene without pedestrians," they often fail to respect the "not." Existing methods address this limitation by fine-tuning on large negation datasets, but such retraining often compromises the model's zero-shot performance on affirmative prompts. We show that the embedding space of VLMs, such as CLIP, can be divided into semantically consistent subspaces. Based on this property, we propose a training-free framework that models negation as a subspace in the joint embedding space rather than a single point (Figure 1). To find the matching image for a caption such as "A but not N," we construct two spherical caps around the embeddings of A and N, and we score images by the central direction of the region that is close to A and far from N. Across retrieval, MCQ, and text-to-image tasks, our method improves negation understanding by about 30% on average over prior methods. It closes the gap between affirmative and negated prompts while preserving the zero-shot performance that fine-tuned models fail to maintain. Code will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 4993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08978.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, navigation and ride-sharing apps have collected numerous images with spatio-temporal data. A core technology for analyzing such images, associated with spatiotemporal information, is Traffic Scene Understanding (TSU), which aims to provide a comprehensive description of the traffic scene. Unlike traditional spatio-temporal data analysis tasks, the dependence on both spatio-temporal and visual-textual data introduces distinct challenges to TSU task. However, recent research often treats TSU as a common image understanding task, ignoring the spatio-temporal information and overlooking the interrelations between different aspects of the traffic scene. To address these issues, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal Enhanced Model based on CILP (ST-CLIP) for TSU. Our model uses the classic vision-language model, CLIP, as the backbone, and designs a Spatio-temporal Context Aware Multiaspect Prompt (SCAMP) learning method to incorporate spatiotemporal information into TSU. The prompt learning method consists of two components: A dynamic spatio-temporal context representation module that extracts representation vectors of spatio-temporal data for each traffic scene image, and a bi-level ST-aware multi-aspect prompt learning module that integrates the ST-context representation vectors into word embeddings of prompts for the CLIP model. The second module also extracts low-level visual features and image-wise high-level semantic features to exploit interactive relations among different aspects of traffic scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate spatio-temporal information into visionlanguage models to facilitate TSU task. Experiments on two realworld datasets demonstrate superior performance in the complex scene understanding scenarios with a few-shot learning strategy.

Paperid: 4994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08971.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of egocentric AI agents is fundamentally limited by multimodal intent ambiguity. This challenge arises from a combination of underspecified language, imperfect visual data, and deictic gestures, which frequently leads to task failure. Existing monolithic Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to resolve these multimodal ambiguous inputs, often failing silently or hallucinating responses. To address these ambiguities, we introduce the Plug-and-Play Clarifier, a zero-shot and modular framework that decomposes the problem into discrete, solvable sub-tasks. Specifically, our framework consists of three synergistic modules: (1) a text clarifier that uses dialogue-driven reasoning to interactively disambiguate linguistic intent, (2) a vision clarifier that delivers real-time guidance feedback, instructing users to adjust their positioning for improved capture quality, and (3) a cross-modal clarifier with grounding mechanism that robustly interprets 3D pointing gestures and identifies the specific objects users are pointing to. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework improves the intent clarification performance of small language models (4--8B) by approximately 30%, making them competitive with significantly larger counterparts. We also observe consistent gains when applying our framework to these larger models. Furthermore, our vision clarifier increases corrective guidance accuracy by over 20%, and our cross-modal clarifier improves semantic answer accuracy for referential grounding by 5%. Overall, our method provides a plug-and-play framework that effectively resolves multimodal ambiguity and significantly enhances user experience in egocentric interaction.

Paperid: 4995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08206.pdf

Abstract:
Structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data stores patient information in relational tables and plays a central role in clinical decision-making. Recent advances have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to process such data, showing promise across various clinical tasks.However, the absence of standardized evaluation frameworks and clearly defined tasks makes it difficult to systematically assess and compare LLM performance on structured EHR data.To address these evaluation challenges, we introduce EHRStruct, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on structured EHR tasks.EHRStruct defines 11 representative tasks spanning diverse clinical needs and includes 2,200 task-specific evaluation samples derived from two widely used EHR datasets.We use EHRStruct to evaluate 20 advanced and representative LLMs, covering both general and medical models.We further analyze key factors influencing model performance, including input formats, few-shot generalisation, and finetuning strategies, and compare results with 11 state-of-the-art LLM-based enhancement methods for structured data reasoning. Our results indicate that many structured EHR tasks place high demands on the understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs.In response, we propose EHRMaster, a code-augmented method that achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers practical

Paperid: 4996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07989.pdf

Abstract:
Until recently, fine-tuned BERT-like models provided state-of-the-art performance on text classification tasks. With the rise of instruction-tuned decoder-only models, commonly known as large language models (LLMs), the field has increasingly moved toward zero-shot and few-shot prompting. However, the performance of LLMs on text classification, particularly on less-resourced languages, remains under-explored. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of current language models on text classification tasks across several South Slavic languages. We compare openly available fine-tuned BERT-like models with a selection of open-source and closed-source LLMs across three tasks in three domains: sentiment classification in parliamentary speeches, topic classification in news articles and parliamentary speeches, and genre identification in web texts. Our results show that LLMs demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, often matching or surpassing fine-tuned BERT-like models. Moreover, when used in a zero-shot setup, LLMs perform comparably in South Slavic languages and English. However, we also point out key drawbacks of LLMs, including less predictable outputs, significantly slower inference, and higher computational costs. Due to these limitations, fine-tuned BERT-like models remain a more practical choice for large-scale automatic text annotation.

Paperid: 4997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07877.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in isolated computer vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, depth estimation, and optical flow. However, these models are often restricted by a ``single-task-single-model'' paradigm, severely limiting their generalizability and scalability in multi-task scenarios. Motivated by the cross-domain generalization ability of large language models, we propose a universal visual perception framework based on flow matching that can generate diverse visual representations across multiple tasks. Our approach formulates the process as a universal flow-matching problem from image patch tokens to task-specific representations rather than an independent generation or regression problem. By leveraging a strong self-supervised foundation model as the anchor and introducing a multi-scale, circular task embedding mechanism, our method learns a universal velocity field to bridge the gap between heterogeneous tasks, supporting efficient and flexible representation transfer. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, segmentation, depth estimation, and image-text retrieval demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, outperforming prior generalist and several specialist models. Ablation studies further validate the robustness, scalability, and generalization of our framework. Our work marks a significant step towards general-purpose visual perception, providing a solid foundation for future research in universal vision modeling.

Paperid: 4998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06988.pdf

Abstract:
Anxiety disorders impact millions globally, yet traditional diagnosis relies on clinical interviews, while machine learning models struggle with overfitting due to limited data. Large-scale data collection remains costly and time-consuming, restricting accessibility. To address this, we introduce the Hyperbolic Curvature Few-Shot Learning Network (HCFSLN), a novel Few-Shot Learning (FSL) framework for multimodal anxiety detection, integrating speech, physiological signals, and video data. HCFSLN enhances feature separability through hyperbolic embeddings, cross-modal attention, and an adaptive gating network, enabling robust classification with minimal data. We collected a multimodal anxiety dataset from 108 participants and benchmarked HCFSLN against six FSL baselines, achieving 88% accuracy, outperforming the best baseline by 14%. These results highlight the effectiveness of hyperbolic space for modeling anxiety-related speech patterns and demonstrate FSL's potential for anxiety classification.

Paperid: 4999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06680.pdf

Abstract:
Standard-to-dialect machine translation remains challenging due to a persistent dialect gap in large language models and evaluation distortions inherent in n-gram metrics, which favor source copying over authentic dialect translation. In this paper, we propose the dialect refinement (DIA-REFINE) framework, which guides LLMs toward faithful target dialect outputs through an iterative loop of translation, verification, and feedback using external dialect classifiers. To address the limitations of n-gram-based metrics, we introduce the dialect fidelity score (DFS) to quantify linguistic shift and the target dialect ratio (TDR) to measure the success of dialect translation. Experiments on Korean dialects across zero-shot and in-context learning baselines demonstrate that DIA-REFINE consistently enhances dialect fidelity. The proposed metrics distinguish between False Success cases, where high n-gram scores obscure failures in dialectal translation, and True Attempt cases, where genuine attempts at dialectal translation yield low n-gram scores. We also observed that models exhibit varying degrees of responsiveness to the framework, and that integrating in-context examples further improves the translation of dialectal expressions. Our work establishes a robust framework for goal-directed, inclusive dialect translation, providing both rigorous evaluation and critical insights into model performance.

Paperid: 5000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06648.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) aims to recognize novel classes with only a few labeled examples under significant domain shifts. While recent approaches leverage a limited amount of labeled target-domain data to improve performance, the severe imbalance between abundant source data and scarce target data remains a critical challenge for effective representation learning. We present the first frequency-space perspective to analyze this issue and identify two key challenges: (1) models are easily biased toward source-specific knowledge encoded in the low-frequency components of source data, and (2) the sparsity of target data hinders the learning of high-frequency, domain-generalizable features. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{FreqGRL}, a novel CD-FSL framework that mitigates the impact of data imbalance in the frequency space. Specifically, we introduce a Low-Frequency Replacement (LFR) module that substitutes the low-frequency components of source tasks with those from the target domain to create new source tasks that better align with target characteristics, thus reducing source-specific biases and promoting generalizable representation learning. We further design a High-Frequency Enhancement (HFE) module that filters out low-frequency components and performs learning directly on high-frequency features in the frequency space to improve cross-domain generalization. Additionally, a Global Frequency Filter (GFF) is incorporated to suppress noisy or irrelevant frequencies and emphasize informative ones, mitigating overfitting risks under limited target supervision. Extensive experiments on five standard CD-FSL benchmarks demonstrate that our frequency-guided framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 5001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05841.pdf

Abstract:
Alzheimer's disease is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder for which early detection is critical. Handwriting-often disrupted in prodromal AD-provides a non-invasive and cost-effective window into subtle motor and cognitive decline. Existing handwriting-based AD studies, mostly relying on online trajectories and hand-crafted features, have not systematically examined how task type influences diagnostic performance and cross-task generalization. Meanwhile, large-scale vision language models have demonstrated remarkable zero or few-shot anomaly detection in natural images and strong adaptability across medical modalities such as chest X-ray and brain MRI. However, handwriting-based disease detection remains largely unexplored within this paradigm. To close this gap, we introduce a lightweight Cross-Layer Fusion Adapter framework that repurposes CLIP for handwriting-based AD screening. CLFA implants multi-level fusion adapters within the visual encoder to progressively align representations toward handwriting-specific medical cues, enabling prompt-free and efficient zero-shot inference. Using this framework, we systematically investigate cross-task generalization-training on a specific handwriting task and evaluating on unseen ones-to reveal which task types and writing patterns most effectively discriminate AD. Extensive analyses further highlight characteristic stroke patterns and task-level factors that contribute to early AD identification, offering both diagnostic insights and a benchmark for handwriting-based cognitive assessment.

Paperid: 5002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02996.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong cross-modal capabilities, yet most work remains limited to 2D data and assumes binary supervision (i.e., positive vs. negative pairs), overlooking the continuous and structured dependencies present in volumetric data such as CT. Existing approaches often treat volumetric scans as independent 2D slices, compromising spatial coherence and underutilizing rich clinical semantics. We propose SCALE-VLP, a soft-weighted contrastive vision-language pre-training framework that integrates (i) volumetric spatial semantics to preserve anatomical structure and (ii) domain-aware, knowledge-infused semantics (e.g., radiological ontologies) to guide alignment. This yields structurally consistent and semantically grounded representations under limited supervision, demonstrating strong cross-task transferability (retrieval, report generation, and classification), and cross-domain generalizability with consistent gains without further fine-tuning. In particular, compared to the previous state of the art, SCALE-VLP achieves up to 4.3x higher top-1 CT-report retrieval, improves abnormality classification by 10 points, and reaches ROUGE-L 0.44 and BERT-F1 0.89 for report generation. Further, in zero-shot evaluation on an out-of-domain external dataset, we observe consistent gains, indicating the cross-task and cross-domain generalization ability of SCALE-VLP.

Paperid: 5003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25364.pdf

Abstract:
This work investigates whether small-scale LMs can benefit from instruction tuning. We compare conversational and question-answering instruction tuning datasets, applied either in a merged or sequential curriculum, using decoder-only models with 100M and 140M parameters. Evaluation spans both fine-tuning (SuperGLUE) and zero-shot (BLiMP, EWoK, WUGs, entity tracking, and psycholinguistic correlation) settings. Results show that instruction tuning yields small but consistent gains in fine-tuning scenarios, with sequential curricula outperforming merged data; however, improvements do not consistently transfer to zero-shot tasks, suggesting a trade-off between interaction-focused adaptation and broad linguistic generalization. These results highlight both the potential and the constraints of adapting human-inspired learning strategies to low-resource LMs, and point toward hybrid, curriculum-based approaches for enhancing generalization under ecological training limits.

Paperid: 5004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25191.pdf

Abstract:
Interpreting visual observations and natural language instructions for complex task execution remains a key challenge in robotics and AI. Despite recent advances, language-driven navigation is still difficult, particularly for UAVs in small-scale 3D environments. Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) approaches are mostly designed for ground robots and struggle to generalize to aerial tasks that require full 3D spatial reasoning. The emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT and Claude, enables zero-shot semantic reasoning from visual and textual inputs. However, these models lack spatial grounding and are not directly applicable to navigation. To address these limitations, SoraNav is introduced, an adaptive UAV navigation framework that integrates zero-shot VLM reasoning with geometry-aware decision-making. Geometric priors are incorporated into image annotations to constrain the VLM action space and improve decision quality. A hybrid switching strategy leverages navigation history to alternate between VLM reasoning and geometry-based exploration, mitigating dead-ends and redundant revisits. A PX4-based hardware-software platform, comprising both a digital twin and a physical micro-UAV, enables reproducible evaluation. Experimental results show that in 2.5D scenarios, our method improves Success Rate (SR) by 25.7% and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) by 17%. In 3D scenarios, it improves SR by 29.5% and SPL by 18.5% relative to the baseline.

Paperid: 5005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24321.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing applications increasingly rely on deep learning for scene classification. However, their performance is often constrained by the scarcity of labeled data and the high cost of annotation across diverse geographic and sensor domains. While recent vision-language models like CLIP have shown promise by learning transferable representations at scale by aligning visual and textual modalities, their direct application to remote sensing remains suboptimal due to significant domain gaps and the need for task-specific semantic adaptation. To address this critical challenge, we systematically explore prompt learning as a lightweight and efficient adaptation strategy for few-shot remote sensing image scene classification. We evaluate several representative methods, including Context Optimization, Conditional Context Optimization, Multi-modal Prompt Learning, and Prompting with Self-Regulating Constraints. These approaches reflect complementary design philosophies: from static context optimization to conditional prompts for enhanced generalization, multi-modal prompts for joint vision-language adaptation, and semantically regularized prompts for stable learning without forgetting. We benchmark these prompt-learning methods against two standard baselines: zero-shot CLIP with hand-crafted prompts and a linear probe trained on frozen CLIP features. Through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark remote sensing datasets, including cross-dataset generalization tests, we demonstrate that prompt learning consistently outperforms both baselines in few-shot scenarios. Notably, Prompting with Self-Regulating Constraints achieves the most robust cross-domain performance. Our findings underscore prompt learning as a scalable and efficient solution for bridging the domain gap in satellite and aerial imagery, providing a strong foundation for future research in this field.

Paperid: 5006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24150.pdf

Abstract:
We present Ko-MuSR, the first benchmark to comprehensively evaluate multistep, soft reasoning in long Korean narratives while minimizing data contamination. Built following MuSR, Ko-MuSR features fully Korean narratives, reasoning chains, and multiple-choice questions verified by human annotators for logical consistency and answerability. Evaluations of four large language models -- two multilingual and two Korean-specialized -- show that multilingual models outperform Korean-focused ones even in Korean reasoning tasks, indicating cross-lingual generalization of reasoning ability. Carefully designed prompting strategies, which combine few-shot examples, reasoning traces, and task-specific hints, further boost accuracy, approaching human-level performance. Ko-MuSR offers a solid foundation for advancing Korean NLP by enabling systematic evaluation of long-context reasoning and prompting strategies.

Paperid: 5007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23681.pdf

Abstract:
Bayesian Optimization is a widely used method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, relying on probabilistic surrogate models such as Gaussian Processes. The quality of the surrogate model is crucial for good optimization performance, especially in the few-shot setting where only a small number of batches of points can be evaluated. In this setting, the initialization plays a critical role in shaping the surrogate's predictive quality and guiding subsequent optimization. Despite this, practitioners typically rely on (quasi-)random designs to cover the input space. However, such approaches neglect two key factors: (a) space-filling designs may not be desirable to reduce predictive uncertainty, and (b) efficient hyperparameter learning during initialization is essential for high-quality prediction, which may conflict with space-filling designs. To address these limitations, we propose Hyperparameter-Informed Predictive Exploration (HIPE), a novel acquisition strategy that balances predictive uncertainty reduction with hyperparameter learning using information-theoretic principles. We derive a closed-form expression for HIPE in the Gaussian Process setting and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments in active learning and few-shot BO. Our results show that HIPE outperforms standard initialization strategies in terms of predictive accuracy, hyperparameter identification, and subsequent optimization performance, particularly in large-batch, few-shot settings relevant to many real-world Bayesian Optimization applications.

Paperid: 5008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21306.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated high performance on tasks expressed in natural language, particularly in zero- or few-shot settings. These are typically framed as supervised (e.g., classification) or unsupervised (e.g., clustering) problems. However, limited work evaluates LLMs as agents in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks (e.g., playing games), where learning occurs through interaction with an environment and a reward system. While prior work focused on representing tasks that rely on a language representation, we study structured, non-linguistic reasoning - such as interpreting positions in a grid world. We therefore introduce PARL (Prompt-based Agent for Reinforcement Learning), a method that uses LLMs as RL agents through prompting, without any fine-tuning. PARL encodes actions, states, and rewards in the prompt, enabling the model to learn through trial-and-error interaction. We evaluate PARL on three standard RL tasks that do not entirely rely on natural language. We show that it can match or outperform traditional RL agents in simple environments by leveraging pretrained knowledge. However, we identify performance limitations in tasks that require complex mathematical operations or decoding states and actions.

Paperid: 5009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21160.pdf

Abstract:
How to integrate and verify spatial intelligence in foundation models remains an open challenge. Current practice often proxies Visual-Spatial Intelligence (VSI) with purely textual prompts and VQA-style scoring, which obscures geometry, invites linguistic shortcuts, and weakens attribution to genuinely spatial skills. We introduce Spatial Intelligence Grid (SIG): a structured, grid-based schema that explicitly encodes object layouts, inter-object relations, and physically grounded priors. As a complementary channel to text, SIG provides a faithful, compositional representation of scene structure for foundation-model reasoning. Building on SIG, we derive SIG-informed evaluation metrics that quantify a model's intrinsic VSI, which separates spatial capability from language priors. In few-shot in-context learning with state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (e.g. GPT- and Gemini-family models), SIG yields consistently larger, more stable, and more comprehensive gains across all VSI metrics compared to VQA-only representations, indicating its promise as a data-labeling and training schema for learning VSI. We also release SIGBench, a benchmark of 1.4K driving frames annotated with ground-truth SIG labels and human gaze traces, supporting both grid-based machine VSI tasks and attention-driven, human-like VSI tasks in autonomous-driving scenarios.

Paperid: 5010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20542.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a setting for developing general agents in an unsupervised manner, capable of solving downstream tasks without additional training or planning at test-time. Unlike conventional RL, which optimizes policies for a fixed reward, zero-shot RL requires agents to encode representations rich enough to support immediate adaptation to any objective, drawing parallels to vision and language foundation models. Despite growing interest, the field lacks a common analytical lens. We present the first unified framework for zero-shot RL. Our formulation introduces a consistent notation and taxonomy that organizes existing approaches and allows direct comparison between them. Central to our framework is the classification of algorithms into two families: direct representations, which learn end-to-end mappings from rewards to policies, and compositional representations, which decompose the representation leveraging the substructure of the value function. Within this framework, we highlight shared principles and key differences across methods, and we derive an extended bound for successor-feature methods, offering a new perspective on their performance in the zero-shot regime. By consolidating existing work under a common lens, our framework provides a principled foundation for future research in zero-shot RL and outlines a clear path toward developing more general agents.

Paperid: 5011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18080.pdf

Abstract:
Modelling the complex spatiotemporal patterns of large-scale brain dynamics is crucial for neuroscience, but traditional methods fail to capture the rich structure in modalities such as magnetoencephalography (MEG). Recent advances in deep learning have enabled significant progress in other domains, such as language and vision, by using foundation models at scale. Here, we introduce MEG-GPT, a transformer based foundation model that uses time-attention and next time-point prediction. To facilitate this, we also introduce a novel data-driven tokeniser for continuous MEG data, which preserves the high temporal resolution of continuous MEG signals without lossy transformations. We trained MEG-GPT on tokenised brain region time-courses extracted from a large-scale MEG dataset (N=612, eyes-closed rest, Cam-CAN data), and show that the learnt model can generate data with realistic spatio-spectral properties, including transient events and population variability. Critically, it performs well in downstream decoding tasks, improving downstream supervised prediction task, showing improved zero-shot generalisation across sessions (improving accuracy from 0.54 to 0.59) and subjects (improving accuracy from 0.41 to 0.49) compared to a baseline methods. Furthermore, we show the model can be efficiently fine-tuned on a smaller labelled dataset to boost performance in cross-subject decoding scenarios. This work establishes a powerful foundation model for electrophysiological data, paving the way for applications in computational neuroscience and neural decoding.

Paperid: 5012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17535.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising zero-shot rankers, but their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. In particular, role-play prompts, where the model is assigned a functional role or identity, often give more robust and accurate relevance rankings. However, the mechanisms and diversity of role-play effects remain underexplored, limiting both effective use and interpretability. In this work, we systematically examine how role-play variations influence zero-shot LLM rankers. We employ causal intervention techniques from mechanistic interpretability to trace how role-play information shapes relevance judgments in LLMs. Our analysis reveals that (1) careful formulation of role descriptions have a large effect on the ranking quality of the LLM; (2) role-play signals are predominantly encoded in early layers and communicate with task instructions in middle layers, while receiving limited interaction with query or document representations. Specifically, we identify a group of attention heads that encode information critical for role-conditioned relevance. These findings not only shed light on the inner workings of role-play in LLM ranking but also offer guidance for designing more effective prompts in IR and beyond, pointing toward broader opportunities for leveraging role-play in zero-shot applications.

Paperid: 5013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17023.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ED-VTG, a method for fine-grained video temporal grounding utilizing multi-modal large language models. Our approach harnesses the capabilities of multimodal LLMs to jointly process text and video, in order to effectively localize natural language queries in videos through a two-stage process. Rather than being directly grounded, language queries are initially transformed into enriched sentences that incorporate missing details and cues to aid in grounding. In the second stage, these enriched queries are grounded, using a lightweight decoder, which specializes at predicting accurate boundaries conditioned on contextualized representations of the enriched queries. To mitigate noise and reduce the impact of hallucinations, our model is trained with a multiple-instance-learning objective that dynamically selects the optimal version of the query for each training sample. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results across various benchmarks in temporal video grounding and paragraph grounding settings. Experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms all previously proposed LLM-based temporal grounding approaches and is either superior or comparable to specialized models, while maintaining a clear advantage against them in zero-shot evaluation scenarios.

Paperid: 5014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15602.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly localization is a rising field in computer vision research, with important progress in recent years. This work focuses on the problem of detecting and localizing anomalies in textures, where anomalies can be defined as the regions that deviate from the overall statistics, violating the stationarity assumption. The main limitation of existing methods is their high running time, making them impractical for deployment in real-world scenarios, such as assembly line monitoring. We propose a real-time method, named QFCA, which implements a quantized version of the feature correspondence analysis (FCA) algorithm. By carefully adapting the patch statistics comparison to work on histograms of quantized values, we obtain a 10x speedup with little to no loss in accuracy. Moreover, we introduce a feature preprocessing step based on principal component analysis, which enhances the contrast between normal and anomalous features, improving the detection precision on complex textures. Our method is thoroughly evaluated against prior art, comparing favorably with existing methods. Project page: https://reality.tf.fau.de/pub/ardelean2025quantized.html

Paperid: 5015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14176.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are highly sensitive to reward function specification, which remains a central challenge limiting their broad applicability. We present ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models, a framework for automated, compositional reward design in RL that leverages the high-level reasoning capabilities of foundation models (FMs). Reward machines (RMs) -- an automata-based formalism for reward specification -- are used as the mechanism for RL objective specification, and are automatically constructed via the use of FMs. The structured formalism of RMs yields effective task decompositions, while the use of FMs enables objective specifications in natural language. Concretely, we (i) use FMs to automatically generate RMs from natural language specifications; (ii) associate language embeddings with each RM automata-state to enable generalization across tasks; and (iii) provide empirical evidence of ARM-FM's effectiveness in a diverse suite of challenging environments, including evidence of zero-shot generalization.

Paperid: 5016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13391.pdf

Abstract:
Computing the Banzhaf value in network flow games is fundamental for quantifying agent influence in multi-agent systems, with applications ranging from cybersecurity to infrastructure planning. However, exact computation is intractable for systems with more than $\sim20$ agents due to exponential complexity $\mathcal{O}(2^m)$. While Monte Carlo sampling methods provide statistical estimates, they suffer from high sample complexity and cannot transfer knowledge across different network configurations, making them impractical for large-scale or dynamic systems. We present a novel learning-based approach using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to approximate Banzhaf values in cardinal network flow games. By framing the problem as a graph-level prediction task, our method learns generalisable patterns of agent influence directly from network topology and control structure. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study comparing three state-of-the-art GNN architectures-Graph Attention Networks (GAT), Graph Isomorphism Networks with Edge features (GINE), and EdgeConv-on a large-scale synthetic dataset of 200,000 graphs per configuration, varying in size (20-100 nodes), agent count (5-20), and edge probability (0.5-1.0). Our results demonstrate that trained GNN models achieve high-fidelity Banzhaf value approximation with order-of-magnitude speedups compared to exact and sampling-based methods. Most significantly, we show strong zero-shot generalisation: models trained on graphs of a specific size and topology accurately predict Banzhaf values for entirely new networks with different structural properties, without requiring retraining. This work establishes GNNs as a practical tool for scalable cooperative game-theoretic analysis of complex networked systems.

Paperid: 5017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09735.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying inter-firm relationships such as supply and competitive ties is critical for financial analysis and corporate governance, yet remains challenging due to the scale, sparsity, and contextual dependence of corporate data. Graph-based methods capture structure but miss semantic depth, while large language models (LLMs) excel at text but remain limited in their ability to represent relational dependencies. To address this, we propose InterCorpRel-LLM, a cross-modal framework that integrates GNNs with LLMs, supported by a proprietary dataset derived from FactSet supply chain records and three tailored training tasks: company graph matching, industry classification, and supply relation prediction. This design enables effective joint modeling of structure and semantics. Experiments show that InterCorpRel-LLM substantially outperforms strong baselines, including GPT-5, on a supply relation identification task, achieving an F-score of 0.8543 vs. 0.2287 with only a 7B-parameter backbone and lightweight training. The model also generalizes to zero-shot competitor identification, underscoring its ability to capture nuanced inter-firm dynamics. Our framework thus provides analysts and strategists with a robust tool for mapping and reasoning about complex corporate networks, enhancing decision-making and risk management in dynamic markets.

Paperid: 5018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09583.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection in biomedical settings is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of labeled data and the frequent emergence of novel or rare categories. We present FSP-DETR, a unified detection framework that enables robust few-shot detection, open-set recognition, and generalization to unseen biomedical tasks within a single model. Built upon a class-agnostic DETR backbone, our approach constructs class prototypes from original support images and learns an embedding space using augmented views and a lightweight transformer decoder. Training jointly optimizes a prototype matching loss, an alignment-based separation loss, and a KL divergence regularization to improve discriminative feature learning and calibration under scarce supervision. Unlike prior work that tackles these tasks in isolation, FSP-DETR enables inference-time flexibility to support unseen class recognition, background rejection, and cross-task adaptation without retraining. We also introduce a new ova species detection benchmark with 20 parasite classes and establish standardized evaluation protocols. Extensive experiments across ova, blood cell, and malaria detection tasks demonstrate that FSP-DETR significantly outperforms prior few-shot and prototype-based detectors, especially in low-shot and open-set scenarios.

Paperid: 5019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08568.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling robots to execute novel manipulation tasks zero-shot is a central goal in robotics. Most existing methods assume in-distribution tasks or rely on fine-tuning with embodiment-matched data, limiting transfer across platforms. We present NovaFlow, an autonomous manipulation framework that converts a task description into an actionable plan for a target robot without any demonstrations. Given a task description, NovaFlow synthesizes a video using a video generation model and distills it into 3D actionable object flow using off-the-shelf perception modules. From the object flow, it computes relative poses for rigid objects and realizes them as robot actions via grasp proposals and trajectory optimization. For deformable objects, this flow serves as a tracking objective for model-based planning with a particle-based dynamics model. By decoupling task understanding from low-level control, NovaFlow naturally transfers across embodiments. We validate on rigid, articulated, and deformable object manipulation tasks using a table-top Franka arm and a Spot quadrupedal mobile robot, and achieve effective zero-shot execution without demonstrations or embodiment-specific training. Project website: https://novaflow.lhy.xyz/.

Paperid: 5020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08482.pdf

Abstract:
Iconicity, the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning, is pervasive in signed languages, offering a natural testbed for visual grounding. For vision-language models (VLMs), the challenge is to recover such essential mappings from dynamic human motion rather than static context. We introduce the \textit{Visual Iconicity Challenge}, a novel video-based benchmark that adapts psycholinguistic measures to evaluate VLMs on three tasks: (i) phonological sign-form prediction (e.g., handshape, location), (ii) transparency (inferring meaning from visual form), and (iii) graded iconicity ratings. We assess $13$ state-of-the-art VLMs in zero- and few-shot settings on Sign Language of the Netherlands and compare them to human baselines. On \textit{phonological form prediction}, VLMs recover some handshape and location detail but remain below human performance; on \textit{transparency}, they are far from human baselines; and only top models correlate moderately with human \textit{iconicity ratings}. Interestingly, \textit{models with stronger phonological form prediction correlate better with human iconicity judgment}, indicating shared sensitivity to visually grounded structure. Our findings validate these diagnostic tasks and motivate human-centric signals and embodied learning methods for modelling iconicity and improving visual grounding in multimodal models.

Paperid: 5021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08404.pdf

Abstract:
We show that a tiny Co$^4$ machine(Adeel,2025) with a single layer, two heads, and 8M parameters, operating at an approximate cost of $O(N)$ (where $N$ is the number of input tokens), outpaces the BabyLM Challenge baselines GPT-2 (124M, 12 layers, $O(N^2))$ and GPT-BERT (30M, 12 layers, $O(N^2))$ in just two epochs, while both are trained for ten. Co$^4$ achieves orders-of-magnitude greater training efficiency on 10M tokens, demonstrating highly sample efficient pretraining. Using the BabyLM challenge evaluation pipeline across complex benchmarks, Co$^4$ exhibits strong zero-shot and fine-tuning performance on SuperGLUE tasks. Specifically, Co$^4$ outperforms GPT-2 on 5 out of 7 zero-shot metrics and 6 out of 7 fine-tuning tasks, and GPT-BERT on 4 out of 7 metrics in both cases. These results suggest the need to rethink prevailing deep learning paradigms and associated scaling laws.

Paperid: 5022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07489.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we report our experience with several LLMs for their ability to understand a process model in an interactive, conversational style, find syntactical and logical errors in it, and reason with it in depth through a natural language (NL) interface. Our findings show that a vanilla, untrained LLM like ChatGPT (model o3) in a zero-shot setting is effective in understanding BPMN process models from images and answering queries about them intelligently at syntactic, logic, and semantic levels of depth. Further, different LLMs vary in performance in terms of their accuracy and effectiveness. Nevertheless, our empirical analysis shows that LLMs can play a valuable role as assistants for business process designers and users. We also study the LLM's "thought process" and ability to perform deeper reasoning in the context of process analysis and optimization. We find that the LLMs seem to exhibit anthropomorphic properties.

Paperid: 5023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06377.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained transformers readily adapt to new sequence modeling tasks via zero-shot prompting, but relational domains still lack architectures that transfer across datasets and tasks. The core challenge is the diversity of relational data, with varying heterogeneous schemas, graph structures and functional dependencies. In this paper, we present the Relational Transformer (RT) architecture, which can be pretrained on diverse relational databases and directly applied to unseen datasets and tasks without task- or dataset-specific fine-tuning, or retrieval of in-context examples. RT (i) tokenizes cells with table/column metadata, (ii) is pretrained via masked token prediction, and (iii) utilizes a novel \textit{Relational Attention} mechanism over columns, rows, and primary-foreign key links. Pretrained on RelBench datasets spanning tasks such as churn and sales forecasting, RT attains strong zero-shot performance, averaging 94% of fully supervised AUROC on binary classification tasks with a single forward pass of a 22M parameter model, as opposed to 84% for a 27B LLM. Fine-tuning yields state-of-the-art results with high sample efficiency. Our experiments show that RT's zero-shot transfer harnesses task-table context, relational attention patterns and schema semantics. Overall, RT provides a practical path toward foundation models for relational data.

Paperid: 5024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04991.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel high-level planning framework that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to improve autonomous navigation in unknown indoor environments with many dead ends. Traditional exploration methods often take inefficient routes due to limited global reasoning and reliance on local heuristics. In contrast, our approach enables a VLM to reason directly about an occupancy map in a zero-shot manner, selecting subgoals that are likely to lead to more efficient paths. At each planning step, we convert a 3D occupancy grid into a partial 2D map of the environment, and generate candidate subgoals. Each subgoal is then evaluated and ranked against other candidates by the model. We integrate this planning scheme into DYNUS \cite{kondo2025dynus}, a state-of-the-art trajectory planner, and demonstrate improved navigation efficiency in simulation. The VLM infers structural patterns (e.g., rooms, corridors) from incomplete maps and balances the need to make progress toward a goal against the risk of entering unknown space. This reduces common greedy failures (e.g., detouring into small rooms) and achieves about 10\% shorter paths on average.

Paperid: 5025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04064.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to navigate the nuances of human emotion. While research confirms that LLMs can simulate emotional intelligence, their internal emotional mechanisms remain largely unexplored. This paper investigates the latent emotional representations within modern LLMs by asking: how, where, and for how long is emotion encoded in their neural architecture? To address this, we introduce a novel, large-scale Reddit corpus of approximately 400,000 utterances, balanced across seven basic emotions through a multi-stage process of classification, rewriting, and synthetic generation. Using this dataset, we employ lightweight "probes" to read out information from the hidden layers of various Qwen3 and LLaMA models without altering their parameters. Our findings reveal that LLMs develop a surprisingly well-defined internal geometry of emotion, which sharpens with model scale and significantly outperforms zero-shot prompting. We demonstrate that this emotional signal is not a final-layer phenomenon but emerges early and peaks mid-network. Furthermore, the internal states are both malleable (they can be influenced by simple system prompts) and persistent, as the initial emotional tone remains detectable for hundreds of subsequent tokens. We contribute our dataset, an open-source probing toolkit, and a detailed map of the emotional landscape within LLMs, offering crucial insights for developing more transparent and aligned AI systems. The code and dataset are open-sourced.

Paperid: 5026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03728.pdf

Abstract:
Acoustic scene classification (ASC) models on edge devices typically operate under fixed class assumptions, lacking the transferability needed for real-world applications that require adaptation to new or refined acoustic categories. We propose ContrastASC, which learns generalizable acoustic scene representations by structuring the embedding space to preserve semantic relationships between scenes, enabling adaptation to unseen categories without retraining. Our approach combines supervised contrastive fine-tuning of pre-trained models with contrastive representation distillation to transfer this structured knowledge to compact student models. Our evaluation shows that ContrastASC demonstrates improved few-shot adaptation to unseen categories while maintaining strong closed-set performance.

Paperid: 5027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03202.pdf

Abstract:
We present NN-Rank, an algorithm for ranking source languages for cross-lingual transfer, which leverages hidden representations from multilingual models and unlabeled target-language data. We experiment with two pretrained multilingual models and two tasks: part-of-speech tagging (POS) and named entity recognition (NER). We consider 51 source languages and evaluate on 56 and 72 target languages for POS and NER, respectively. When using in-domain data, NN-Rank beats state-of-the-art baselines that leverage lexical and linguistic features, with average improvements of up to 35.56 NDCG for POS and 18.14 NDCG for NER. As prior approaches can fall back to language-level features if target language data is not available, we show that NN-Rank remains competitive using only the Bible, an out-of-domain corpus available for a large number of languages. Ablations on the amount of unlabeled target data show that, for subsets consisting of as few as 25 examples, NN-Rank produces high-quality rankings which achieve 92.8% of the NDCG achieved using all available target data for ranking.

Paperid: 5028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02528.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) demonstrate impressive in-context learning abilities from limited multimodal demonstrations, yet the internal mechanisms supporting such task learning remain opaque. Building on prior work of large language models, we show that a small subset of attention heads in the vision-language model OpenFlamingo-4B is responsible for transmitting representations of spatial relations. The activations of these attention heads, termed function vectors, can be extracted and manipulated to alter an LMM's performance on relational tasks. First, using both synthetic and real image datasets, we apply causal mediation analysis to identify attention heads that strongly influence relational predictions, and extract multimodal function vectors that improve zero-shot accuracy at inference time. We further demonstrate that these multimodal function vectors can be fine-tuned with a modest amount of training data, while keeping LMM parameters frozen, to significantly outperform in-context learning baselines. Finally, we show that relation-specific function vectors can be linearly combined to solve analogy problems involving novel and untrained spatial relations, highlighting the strong generalization ability of this approach. Our results show that LMMs encode spatial relational knowledge within localized internal structures, which can be systematically extracted and optimized, thereby advancing our understanding of model modularity and enhancing control over relational reasoning in LMMs.

Paperid: 5029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01976.pdf

Abstract:
Our interpretation of value concepts is shaped by our sociocultural background and lived experiences, and is thus subjective. Recognizing individual value interpretations is important for developing AI systems that can align with diverse human perspectives and avoid bias toward majority viewpoints. To this end, we investigate whether a language model can predict individual value interpretations by leveraging multi-dimensional subjective annotations as a proxy for their interpretive lens. That is, we evaluate whether providing examples of how an individual annotates Sentiment, Emotion, Argument, and Topics (SEAT dimensions) helps a language model in predicting their value interpretations. Our experiment across different zero- and few-shot settings demonstrates that providing all SEAT dimensions simultaneously yields superior performance compared to individual dimensions and a baseline where no information about the individual is provided. Furthermore, individual variations across annotators highlight the importance of accounting for the incorporation of individual subjective annotators. To the best of our knowledge, this controlled setting, although small in size, is the first attempt to go beyond demographics and investigate the impact of annotation behavior on value prediction, providing a solid foundation for future large-scale validation.

Paperid: 5030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01339.pdf

Abstract:
Computational imaging methods increasingly rely on powerful generative diffusion models to tackle challenging image restoration tasks. In particular, state-of-the-art zero-shot image inverse solvers leverage distilled text-to-image latent diffusion models (LDMs) to achieve unprecedented accuracy and perceptual quality with high computational efficiency. However, extending these advances to high-definition video restoration remains a significant challenge, due to the need to recover fine spatial detail while capturing subtle temporal dependencies. Consequently, methods that naively apply image-based LDM priors on a frame-by-frame basis often result in temporally inconsistent reconstructions. We address this challenge by leveraging recent advances in Video Consistency Models (VCMs), which distill video latent diffusion models into fast generators that explicitly capture temporal causality. Building on this foundation, we propose LVTINO, the first zero-shot or plug-and-play inverse solver for high definition video restoration with priors encoded by VCMs. Our conditioning mechanism bypasses the need for automatic differentiation and achieves state-of-the-art video reconstruction quality with only a few neural function evaluations, while ensuring strong measurement consistency and smooth temporal transitions across frames. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of video inverse problems show significant perceptual improvements over current state-of-the-art methods that apply image LDMs frame by frame, establishing a new benchmark in both reconstruction fidelity and computational efficiency.

Paperid: 5031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00894.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) incorporate various modalities, including text and images, to enhance entity and relation representations. Notably, different modalities for the same entity often present complementary and diverse information. However, existing MMKG methods primarily align modalities into a shared space, which tends to overlook the distinct contributions of specific modalities, limiting their performance particularly in low-resource settings. To address this challenge, we propose FusionAdapter for the learning of few-shot relationships (FSRL) in MMKG. FusionAdapter introduces (1) an adapter module that enables efficient adaptation of each modality to unseen relations and (2) a fusion strategy that integrates multimodal entity representations while preserving diverse modality-specific characteristics. By effectively adapting and fusing information from diverse modalities, FusionAdapter improves generalization to novel relations with minimal supervision. Extensive experiments on two benchmark MMKG datasets demonstrate that FusionAdapter achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 5032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00881.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software engineering (SE) tools for tasks that extend beyond code synthesis, including judgment under uncertainty and reasoning in ethically significant contexts. We present a fully automated framework for assessing ethical reasoning capabilities across 16 LLMs in a zero-shot setting, using 30 real-world ethically charged scenarios. Each model is prompted to identify the most applicable ethical theory to an action, assess its moral acceptability, and explain the reasoning behind their choice. Responses are compared against expert ethicists' choices using inter-model agreement metrics. Our results show that LLMs achieve an average Theory Consistency Rate (TCR) of 73.3% and Binary Agreement Rate (BAR) on moral acceptability of 86.7%, with interpretable divergences concentrated in ethically ambiguous cases. A qualitative analysis of free-text explanations reveals strong conceptual convergence across models despite surface-level lexical diversity. These findings support the potential viability of LLMs as ethical inference engines within SE pipelines, enabling scalable, auditable, and adaptive integration of user-aligned ethical reasoning. Our focus is the Ethical Interpreter component of a broader profiling pipeline: we evaluate whether current LLMs exhibit sufficient interpretive stability and theory-consistent reasoning to support automated profiling.

Paperid: 5033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26302.pdf

Abstract:
Dialogue summarization aims to distill the core meaning of a conversation into a concise text. This is crucial for reducing the complexity and noise inherent in dialogue-heavy applications. While recent approaches typically train language models to mimic human-written summaries, such supervision is costly and often results in outputs that lack task-specific focus limiting their effectiveness in downstream applications, such as medical tasks. In this paper, we propose \app, a framework for task-oriented utility-based dialogue summarization. \app starts by generating multiple summaries and task-oriented question-answer pairs from a dialogue in a zero-shot manner using a pool of large language models (LLMs). The quality of the generated summaries is evaluated by having LLMs answer task-related questions before \textit{(i)} selecting the best candidate answers and \textit{(ii)} identifying the most informative summary based on these answers. Finally, we fine-tune the best LLM on the selected summaries. When validated on multiple datasets, \app demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving competitive results in various zero-shot settings, rivaling fully-supervised State-of-the-Art (SotA) methods.

Paperid: 5034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26189.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid development research of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures raises key challenges, one of them being the task of distinguishing between human-written text and LLM-generated text. As LLM-generated textual content, becomes increasingly complex over time, and resembles human writing, traditional detection methods are proving less effective, especially as the number and diversity of LLMs continue to grow with new models and versions being released at a rapid pace. This study proposes VietBinoculars, an adaptation of the Binoculars method with optimized global thresholds, to enhance the detection of Vietnamese LLM-generated text. We have constructed new Vietnamese AI-generated datasets to determine the optimal thresholds for VietBinoculars and to enable benchmarking. The results from our experiments show results show that VietBinoculars achieves over 99\% in all two domains of accuracy, F1-score, and AUC on multiple out-of-domain datasets. It outperforms the original Binoculars model, traditional detection methods, and other state-of-the-art approaches, including commercial tools such as ZeroGPT and DetectGPT, especially under specially modified prompting strategies.

Paperid: 5035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26012.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image given a reference image and a relative text, without relying on costly triplet annotations. Existing CLIP-based methods face two core challenges: (1) union-based feature fusion indiscriminately aggregates all visual cues, carrying over irrelevant background details that dilute the intended modification, and (2) global cosine similarity from CLIP embeddings lacks the ability to resolve fine-grained semantic relations. To address these issues, we propose SETR (Semantic-enhanced Two-Stage Retrieval). In the coarse retrieval stage, SETR introduces an intersection-driven strategy that retains only the overlapping semantics between the reference image and relative text, thereby filtering out distractors inherent to union-based fusion and producing a cleaner, high-precision candidate set. In the fine-grained re-ranking stage, we adapt a pretrained multimodal LLM with Low-Rank Adaptation to conduct binary semantic relevance judgments ("Yes/No"), which goes beyond CLIP's global feature matching by explicitly verifying relational and attribute-level consistency. Together, these two stages form a complementary pipeline: coarse retrieval narrows the candidate pool with high recall, while re-ranking ensures precise alignment with nuanced textual modifications. Experiments on CIRR, Fashion-IQ, and CIRCO show that SETR achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving Recall@1 on CIRR by up to 15.15 points. Our results establish two-stage reasoning as a general paradigm for robust and portable ZS-CIR.

Paperid: 5036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25207.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in feature engineering for tabular data, but concerns about their reliability persist, especially due to variability in generated outputs. We introduce a multi-level diagnosis and evaluation framework to assess the robustness of LLMs in feature engineering across diverse domains, focusing on the three main factors: key variables, relationships, and decision boundary values for predicting target classes. We demonstrate that the robustness of LLMs varies significantly over different datasets, and that high-quality LLM-generated features can improve few-shot prediction performance by up to 10.52%. This work opens a new direction for assessing and enhancing the reliability of LLM-driven feature engineering in various domains.

Paperid: 5037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23941.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized human-machine interaction, and have been extended by embedding diverse modalities such as images into a shared language space. Yet, neural decoding has remained constrained by static, non-interactive methods. We introduce CorText, a framework that integrates neural activity directly into the latent space of an LLM, enabling open-ended, natural language interaction with brain data. Trained on fMRI data recorded during viewing of natural scenes, CorText generates accurate image captions and can answer more detailed questions better than controls, while having access to neural data only. We showcase that CorText achieves zero-shot generalization beyond semantic categories seen during training. Furthermore, we present a counterfactual analysis that emulates in-silico cortical microstimulation. These advances mark a shift from passive decoding toward generative, flexible interfaces between brain activity and language.

Paperid: 5038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23556.pdf

Abstract:
Whole-body manipulation is a powerful yet underexplored approach that enables robots to interact with large, heavy, or awkward objects using more than just their end-effectors. Soft robots, with their inherent passive compliance, are particularly well-suited for such contact-rich manipulation tasks, but their uncertainties in kinematics and dynamics pose significant challenges for simulation and control. In this work, we address this challenge with a simulation that can run up to 350x real time on a single thread in MuJoCo and provide a detailed analysis of the critical tradeoffs between speed and accuracy for this simulation. Using this framework, we demonstrate a successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of a learned whole-body manipulation policy, achieving an 88% success rate on the Baloo hardware platform. We show that guiding RL with a simple motion primitive is critical to this success where standard reward shaping methods struggled to produce a stable and successful policy for whole-body manipulation. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the learned policy does not simply mimic the motion primitive. It exhibits beneficial reactive behavior, such as re-grasping and perturbation recovery. We analyze and contrast this learned policy against an open-loop baseline to show that the policy can also exhibit aggressive over-corrections under perturbation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of forceful, six-DoF whole-body manipulation using two continuum soft arms on a large-scale platform (10 kg payloads), with zero-shot policy transfer.

Paperid: 5039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23398.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing complexity, dynamism, and heterogeneity of 6G networks demand management systems that can reason proactively and generalize beyond pre-defined cases. In this paper, we propose a modular, knowledge-defined architecture that integrates Digital Twin models with semantic reasoning and zero-shot learning to enable autonomous decision-making for previously unseen network scenarios. Real-time data streams are used to maintain synchronized virtual replicas of the physical network, which also forecast short-term state transitions. These predictions feed into a knowledge plane that constructs and updates a graph-based abstraction of the network, enabling context-aware intent generation via graph neural reasoning. To ensure adaptability without retraining, the management plane performs zero-shot policy matching by semantically embedding candidate intents and selecting suitable pre-learned actions. The selected decisions are translated and enforced through the control plane, while a closed-loop feedback mechanism continuously refines predictions, knowledge, and policies over time. Simulation results confirm that the proposed framework observes notable improvements in policy response time, SLA compliance rate, and intent matching accuracy.

Paperid: 5040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23242.pdf

Abstract:
The global fashion e-commerce market relies significantly on intelligent and aesthetic-aware outfit-completion tools to promote sales. While previous studies have approached the problem of fashion outfit-completion and compatible-item retrieval, most of them require expensive, task-specific training on large-scale labeled data, and no effort is made to guide outfit recommendation with explicit human aesthetics. In the era of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we show that the conventional training-based pipeline could be streamlined to a training-free paradigm, with better recommendation scores and enhanced aesthetic awareness. We achieve this with TATTOO, a Training-free AesTheTic-aware Outfit recommendation approach. It first generates a target-item description using MLLMs, followed by an aesthetic chain-of-thought used to distill the images into a structured aesthetic profile including color, style, occasion, season, material, and balance. By fusing the visual summary of the outfit with the textual description and aesthetics vectors using a dynamic entropy-gated mechanism, candidate items can be represented in a shared embedding space and be ranked accordingly. Experiments on a real-world evaluation set Aesthetic-100 show that TATTOO achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing training-based methods. Another standard Polyvore dataset is also used to measure the advanced zero-shot retrieval capability of our training-free method.

Paperid: 5041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22615.pdf

Abstract:
Modern vision language pipelines are driven by RGB vision encoders trained on massive image text corpora. While these pipelines have enabled impressive zero shot capabilities and strong transfer across tasks, they still inherit two structural inefficiencies from the pixel domain: (i) transmitting dense RGB images from edge devices to the cloud is energy intensive and costly, and (ii) patch based tokenization explodes sequence length, stressing attention budgets and context limits. We explore 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) as an alternative visual substrate for alignment: a compact, spatially adaptive representation that parameterizes images by a set of colored anisotropic Gaussians. We develop a scalable 2DGS pipeline with structured initialization, luminance aware pruning, and batched CUDA kernels, achieving over 90x faster fitting and about 97% GPU utilization compared to prior implementations. We further adapt contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) to 2DGS by reusing a frozen RGB-based transformer backbone with a lightweight splat aware input stem and a perceiver resampler, training only about 7% of the total parameters. On large DataComp subsets, GS encoders yield meaningful zero shot ImageNet-1K performance while compressing inputs 3 to 20x relative to pixels. While accuracy currently trails RGB encoders, our results establish 2DGS as a viable multimodal substrate, pinpoint architectural bottlenecks, and open a path toward representations that are both semantically powerful and transmission efficient for edge cloud learning.

Paperid: 5042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21173.pdf

Abstract:
The powerful zero-shot generalization capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have enabled new paradigms for safety-related tasks such as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, additional aspects crucial for the computationally efficient and reliable deployment of CLIP are still overlooked. In particular, the impact of quantization on CLIP's performance beyond accuracy remains underexplored. This work presents a large-scale evaluation of quantization on CLIP models, assessing not only in-distribution accuracy but a comprehensive suite of reliability metrics and revealing counterintuitive results driven by pre-training source. We demonstrate that quantization consistently improves calibration for typically underconfident pre-trained models, while often degrading it for overconfident variants. Intriguingly, this degradation in calibration does not preclude gains in other reliability metrics; we find that OOD detection can still improve for these same poorly calibrated models. Furthermore, we identify specific quantization-aware training (QAT) methods that yield simultaneous gains in zero-shot accuracy, calibration, and OOD robustness, challenging the view of a strict efficiency-performance trade-off. These findings offer critical insights for navigating the multi-objective problem of deploying efficient, reliable, and robust VLMs by utilizing quantization beyond its conventional role.

Paperid: 5043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20905.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot multispectral object detection (FSMOD) addresses the challenge of detecting objects across visible and thermal modalities with minimal annotated data. In this paper, we explore this complex task and introduce a framework named "FSMODNet" that leverages cross-modality feature integration to improve detection performance even with limited labels. By effectively combining the unique strengths of visible and thermal imagery using deformable attention, the proposed method demonstrates robust adaptability in complex illumination and environmental conditions. Experimental results on two public datasets show effective object detection performance in challenging low-data regimes, outperforming several baselines we established from state-of-the-art models. All code, models, and experimental data splits can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Test-B48D.

Paperid: 5044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19841.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing realism of AI-generated images has raised serious concerns about misinformation and privacy violations, highlighting the urgent need for accurate and interpretable detection methods. While existing approaches have made progress, most rely on binary classification without explanations or depend heavily on supervised fine-tuning, resulting in limited generalization. In this paper, we propose ThinkFake, a novel reasoning-based and generalizable framework for AI-generated image detection. Our method leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) equipped with a forgery reasoning prompt and is trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning with carefully designed reward functions. This design enables the model to perform step-by-step reasoning and produce interpretable, structured outputs. We further introduce a structured detection pipeline to enhance reasoning quality and adaptability. Extensive experiments show that ThinkFake outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the GenImage benchmark and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on the challenging LOKI benchmark. These results validate our framework's effectiveness and robustness. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 5045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19657.pdf

Abstract:
Pedestrian safety is a critical component of urban mobility and is strongly influenced by the interactions between pedestrian decision-making and driver yielding behavior at crosswalks. Modeling driver--pedestrian interactions at intersections requires accurately capturing the complexity of these behaviors. Traditional machine learning models often struggle to capture the nuanced and context-dependent reasoning required for these multifactorial interactions, due to their reliance on fixed feature representations and limited interpretability. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) are suited for extracting patterns from heterogeneous traffic data, enabling accurate modeling of driver-pedestrian interactions. Therefore, this paper leverages multimodal LLMs through a novel prompt design that incorporates domain-specific knowledge, structured reasoning, and few-shot prompting, enabling interpretable and context-aware inference of driver yielding behavior, as an example application of modeling pedestrian--driver interaction. We benchmarked state-of-the-art LLMs against traditional classifiers, finding that GPT-4o consistently achieves the highest accuracy and recall, while Deepseek-V3 excels in precision. These findings highlight the critical trade-offs between model performance and computational efficiency, offering practical guidance for deploying LLMs in real-world pedestrian safety systems.

Paperid: 5046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18733.pdf

Abstract:
Current visual foundation models (VFMs) face a fundamental limitation in transferring knowledge from vision language models (VLMs), while VLMs excel at modeling cross-modal interactions through unified representation spaces, existing VFMs predominantly adopt result-oriented paradigms that neglect the underlying interaction processes. This representational discrepancy hinders effective knowledge transfer and limits generalization across diverse vision tasks. We propose Learning from Interactions (LFI), a cognitive-inspired framework that addresses this gap by explicitly modeling visual understanding as an interactive process. Our key insight is that capturing the dynamic interaction patterns encoded in pre-trained VLMs enables more faithful and efficient knowledge transfer to VFMs. The approach centers on two technical innovations, Interaction Queries, which maintain persistent relational structures across network layers, and interaction-based supervision, derived from the cross-modal attention mechanisms of VLMs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple benchmarks, achieving 3.3 and 1.6mAP/2.4AP absolute gains on TinyImageNet classification and COCO detection/segmentation respectively, with minimal parameter overhead and faster convergence. The framework particularly excels in cross-domain settings, delivering 2.4 and 9.3 zero-shot improvements on PACS and VLCS. Human evaluations further confirm its cognitive alignment, outperforming result-oriented methods by 2.7 times in semantic consistency metrics.

Paperid: 5047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18083.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Reasoning Core, a new scalable environment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), designed to advance foundational symbolic reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on games or isolated puzzles, Reasoning Core procedurally generates problems across core formal domains, including PDDL planning, first-order logic, context-free grammar parsing, causal reasoning, and system equation solving. The environment is built on key design principles of high-generality problem distributions, verification via external tools, and continuous difficulty control, which together provide a virtually infinite supply of novel training instances. Initial zero-shot evaluations with frontier LLMs confirm the difficulty of Reasoning Core's tasks, positioning it as a promising resource to improve the reasoning capabilities of future models.

Paperid: 5048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17830.pdf

Abstract:
Generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) texts in important works has become a common practice that can be used to misuse and abuse AI at various levels. Traditional AI detectors often rely on document-level classification, which struggles to identify AI content in hybrid or slightly edited texts designed to avoid detection, leading to concerns about the model's efficiency, which makes it hard to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated texts. A sentence-level sequence labeling model proposed to detect transitions between human- and AI-generated text, leveraging nuanced linguistic signals overlooked by document-level classifiers. By this method, detecting and segmenting AI and human-written text within a single document at the token-level granularity is achieved. Our model combines the state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer models, incorporating Neural Networks (NN) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This approach extends the power of transformers to extract semantic and syntactic patterns, and the neural network component to capture enhanced sequence-level representations, thereby improving the boundary predictions by the CRF layer, which enhances sequence recognition and further identification of the partition between Human- and AI-generated texts. The evaluation is performed on two publicly available benchmark datasets containing collaborative human and AI-generated texts. Our experimental comparisons are with zero-shot detectors and the existing state-of-the-art models, along with rigorous ablation studies to justify that this approach, in particular, can accurately detect the spans of AI texts in a completely collaborative text. All our source code and the processed datasets are available in our GitHub repository.

Paperid: 5049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17209.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes the participation of HULAT-UC3M in CLEARS 2025 Subtask 1: Adaptation of Text to Plain Language (PL) in Spanish. We explored strategies based on models trained on Spanish texts, including a zero-shot configuration using prompt engineering and a fine-tuned version with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Different strategies were evaluated on representative internal subsets of the training data, using the official task metrics, cosine similarity (SIM) and the FernÃ¡ndez-Huerta readability index (FH) to guide the selection of the optimal model and prompt combination. The final system was selected for its balanced and consistent performance, combining normalization steps, the RigoChat-7B-v2 model, and a dedicated PL-oriented prompt. It ranked first in semantic similarity (SIM = 0.75), however, fourth in readability (FH = 69.72). We also discuss key challenges related to training data heterogeneity and the limitations of current evaluation metrics in capturing both linguistic clarity and content preservation.

Paperid: 5050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16914.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional zero-shot capabilities in various NLP tasks, significantly enhancing user experience and efficiency. However, this advantage is primarily limited to resource-rich languages. For the diverse array of low-resource languages, support remains inadequate, with the scarcity of training corpora considered the primary cause. We construct and open-source CUTE Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan,English dataset, consisting of two 25GB sets of four-language corpora (one parallel and one non-parallel), obtained through machine translation. CUTE encompasses two resource-rich languages (Chinese and English) and two low-resource languages (Uyghur and Tibetan). Prior to constructing CUTE, human assessment validates that the machine translation quality between Chinese-Uyghur and Chinese-Tibetan approaches that of Chinese-English translation. CUTE represents the largest open-source corpus for Uyghur and Tibetan languages to date, and we demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing LLMs' ability to process low-resource languages while investigating the role of corpus parallelism in cross-lingual transfer learning. The CUTE corpus and related models are made publicly available to the research community.

Paperid: 5051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16483.pdf

Abstract:
The completion, extension, and generation of 3D semantic scenes are an interrelated set of capabilities that are useful for robotic navigation and exploration. Existing approaches seek to decouple these problems and solve them oneoff. Additionally, these approaches are often domain-specific, requiring separate models for different data distributions, e.g. indoor vs. outdoor scenes. To unify these techniques and provide cross-domain compatibility, we develop a single framework that can perform scene completion, extension, and generation in both indoor and outdoor scenes, which we term Octree Latent Semantic Diffusion. Our approach operates directly on an efficient dual octree graph latent representation: a hierarchical, sparse, and memory-efficient occupancy structure. This technique disentangles synthesis into two stages: (i) structure diffusion, which predicts binary split signals to construct a coarse occupancy octree, and (ii) latent semantic diffusion, which generates semantic embeddings decoded by a graph VAE into voxellevel semantic labels. To perform semantic scene completion or extension, our model leverages inference-time latent inpainting, or outpainting respectively. These inference-time methods use partial LiDAR scans or maps to condition generation, without the need for retraining or finetuning. We demonstrate highquality structure, coherent semantics, and robust completion from single LiDAR scans, as well as zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution LiDAR data. These results indicate that completion-through-generation in a dual octree graph latent space is a practical and scalable alternative to regression-based pipelines for real-world robotic perception tasks.

Paperid: 5052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15750.pdf

Abstract:
Reconstructing building floor plans from point cloud data is key for indoor navigation, BIM, and precise measurements. Traditional methods like geometric algorithms and Mask R-CNN-based deep learning often face issues with noise, limited generalization, and loss of geometric details. We propose FloorSAM, a framework that integrates point cloud density maps with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for accurate floor plan reconstruction from LiDAR data. Using grid-based filtering, adaptive resolution projection, and image enhancement, we create robust top-down density maps. FloorSAM uses SAM's zero-shot learning for precise room segmentation, improving reconstruction across diverse layouts. Room masks are generated via adaptive prompt points and multistage filtering, followed by joint mask and point cloud analysis for contour extraction and regularization. This produces accurate floor plans and recovers room topological relationships. Tests on Giblayout and ISPRS datasets show better accuracy, recall, and robustness than traditional methods, especially in noisy and complex settings. Code and materials: github.com/Silentbarber/FloorSAM.

Paperid: 5053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15662.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Jamendo-QA, a large-scale dataset for Music Question Answering (Music-QA). The dataset is built on freely licensed tracks from the Jamendo platform and is automatically annotated using the Qwen-Omni model. Jamendo-QA provides question-answer pairs and captions aligned with music audio, enabling both supervised training and zero-shot evaluation. Our resource aims to fill the gap of music-specific QA datasets and foster further research in music understanding, retrieval, and generative applications. In addition to its scale, Jamendo-QA covers a diverse range of genres, instruments, and metadata attributes, allowing robust model benchmarking across varied musical contexts. We also provide detailed dataset statistics and highlight potential biases such as genre and gender imbalance to guide fair evaluation. We position Jamendo-QA as a scalable and publicly available benchmark that can facilitate future research in music understanding, multimodal modeling, and fair evaluation of music-oriented QA systems.

Paperid: 5054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15206.pdf

Abstract:
High memory demands of generative language models have drawn attention to quantization, which reduces computational cost, memory usage, and latency by mapping model weights to lower-precision integers. Approaches such as GPTQ effectively minimize input-weight product errors during quantization; however, recent empirical studies show that they can increase biased outputs and degrade performance on fairness benchmarks, and it remains unclear which specific weights cause this issue. In this work, we draw new links between quantization and model fairness by adding explicit group-fairness constraints to the quantization objective and introduce Fair-GPTQ, the first quantization method explicitly designed to reduce unfairness in large language models. The added constraints guide the learning of the rounding operation toward less-biased text generation for protected groups. Specifically, we focus on stereotype generation involving occupational bias and discriminatory language spanning gender, race, and religion. Fair-GPTQ has minimal impact on performance, preserving at least 90% of baseline accuracy on zero-shot benchmarks, reduces unfairness relative to a half-precision model, and retains the memory and speed benefits of 4-bit quantization. We also compare the performance of Fair-GPTQ with existing debiasing methods and find that it achieves performance on par with the iterative null-space projection debiasing approach on racial-stereotype benchmarks. Overall, the results validate our theoretical solution to the quantization problem with a group-bias term, highlight its applicability for reducing group bias at quantization time in generative models, and demonstrate that our approach can further be used to analyze channel- and weight-level contributions to fairness during quantization.

Paperid: 5055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13179.pdf

Abstract:
The cold-start issue is the challenge when we talk about recommender systems, especially in the case when we do not have the past interaction data of new users or new items. Content-based features or hybrid solutions are common as conventional solutions, but they can only work in a sparse metadata environment with shallow patterns. In this paper, the efficient cold-start recommendation strategy is presented, which is based on the sub word-level representations by applying Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization and pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) embedding in the initialization procedure. We obtain fine-grained token-level vectors that are aligned with the BPE vocabulary as opposed to using coarse-grained sentence embeddings. Together, these token embeddings can be used as dense semantic priors on unseen entities, making immediate recommendation performance possible without user-item interaction history. Our mechanism can be compared to collaborative filtering systems and tested over benchmark datasets with stringent cold-start assumptions. Experimental findings show that the given BPE-LLM method achieves higher Recall@k, NDCG@k, and Hit Rate measurements compared to the standard baseline and displays the same capability of sufficient computational performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using subword-aware embeddings yields better generalizability and is more interpretable, especially within a multilingual and sparse input setting. The practical application of token-level semantic initialization as a lightweight, but nevertheless effective extension to modern recommender systems in the zero-shot setting is indicated within this work.

Paperid: 5056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12965.pdf

Abstract:
Text line segmentation is a critical step in handwritten document image analysis. Segmenting text lines in historical handwritten documents, however, presents unique challenges due to irregular handwriting, faded ink, and complex layouts with overlapping lines and non-linear text flow. Furthermore, the scarcity of large annotated datasets renders fully supervised learning approaches impractical for such materials. To address these challenges, we introduce the Few-Shot Text Line Segmentation of Ancient Handwritten Documents (FEST) Competition. Participants are tasked with developing systems capable of segmenting text lines in U-DIADS-TL dataset, using only three annotated images per manuscript for training. The competition dataset features a diverse collection of ancient manuscripts exhibiting a wide range of layouts, degradation levels, and non-standard formatting, closely reflecting real-world conditions. By emphasizing few-shot learning, FEST competition aims to promote the development of robust and adaptable methods that can be employed by humanities scholars with minimal manual annotation effort, thus fostering broader adoption of automated document analysis tools in historical research.

Paperid: 5057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12591.pdf

Abstract:
Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) generates captions for audio clips but faces challenges due to limited datasets compared to image captioning. To overcome this, we propose the zero-shot AAC system that leverages pre-trained models, eliminating the need for extensive training. Our approach uses a pre-trained audio CLIP model to extract auditory features and generate a structured prompt, which guides a Large Language Model (LLM) in caption generation. Unlike traditional greedy decoding, our method refines token selection through the audio CLIP model, ensuring alignment with the audio content. Experimental results demonstrate a 35% improvement in NLG mean score (from 4.7 to 7.3) using MAGIC search with the WavCaps model. The performance is heavily influenced by the audio-text matching model and keyword selection, with optimal results achieved using a single keyword prompt, and a 50% performance drop when no keyword list is used.

Paperid: 5058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11661.pdf

Abstract:
Intelligent tableware cleaning is a critical application in food safety and smart homes, but existing methods are limited by coarse-grained classification and scarcity of few-shot data, making it difficult to meet industrialization requirements. We propose DTGen, a few-shot data augmentation scheme based on generative diffusion models, specifically designed for fine-grained dirty tableware recognition. DTGen achieves efficient domain specialization through LoRA, generates diverse dirty images via structured prompts, and ensures data quality through CLIP-based cross-modal filtering. Under extremely limited real few-shot conditions, DTGen can synthesize virtually unlimited high-quality samples, significantly improving classifier performance and supporting fine-grained dirty tableware recognition. We further elaborate on lightweight deployment strategies, promising to transfer DTGen's benefits to embedded dishwashers and integrate with cleaning programs to intelligently regulate energy consumption and detergent usage. Research results demonstrate that DTGen not only validates the value of generative AI in few-shot industrial vision but also provides a feasible deployment path for automated tableware cleaning and food safety monitoring.

Paperid: 5059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11365.pdf

Abstract:
We present our systems for Track 2 (General Arabic Health QA, MedArabiQ) of the AraHealthQA-2025 shared task, where our methodology secured 2nd place in both Sub-Task 1 (multiple-choice question answering) and Sub-Task 2 (open-ended question answering) in Arabic clinical contexts. For Sub-Task 1, we leverage the Gemini 2.5 Flash model with few-shot prompting, dataset preprocessing, and an ensemble of three prompt configurations to improve classification accuracy on standard, biased, and fill-in-the-blank questions. For Sub-Task 2, we employ a unified prompt with the same model, incorporating role-playing as an Arabic medical expert, few-shot examples, and post-processing to generate concise responses across fill-in-the-blank, patient-doctor Q&A, GEC, and paraphrased variants.

Paperid: 5060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11020.pdf

Abstract:
The FungiCLEF 2025 competition addresses the challenge of automatic fungal species recognition using realistic, field-collected observational data. Accurate identification tools support both mycologists and citizen scientists, greatly enhancing large-scale biodiversity monitoring. Effective recognition systems in this context must handle highly imbalanced class distributions and provide reliable performance even when very few training samples are available for many species, especially rare and under-documented taxa that are often missing from standard training sets. According to competition organizers, about 20\% of all verified fungi observations, representing nearly 20,000 instances, are associated with these rarely recorded species. To tackle this challenge, we propose a robust deep learning method based on prototypical networks, which enhances prototype representations for few-shot fungal classification. Our prototypical network approach exceeds the competition baseline by more than 30 percentage points in Recall@5 on both the public (PB) and private (PR) leaderboards. This demonstrates strong potential for accurately identifying both common and rare fungal species, supporting the main objectives of FungiCLEF 2025.

Paperid: 5061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10378.pdf

Abstract:
Linear systems arise in generating samples and in calculating observables in lattice quantum chromodynamics~(QCD). Solving the Hermitian positive definite systems, which are sparse but ill-conditioned, involves using iterative methods, such as Conjugate Gradient (CG), which are time-consuming and computationally expensive. Preconditioners can effectively accelerate this process, with the state-of-the-art being multigrid preconditioners. However, constructing useful preconditioners can be challenging, adding additional computational overhead, especially in large linear systems. We propose a framework, leveraging operator learning techniques, to construct linear maps as effective preconditioners. The method in this work does not rely on explicit matrices from either the original linear systems or the produced preconditioners, allowing efficient model training and application in the CG solver. In the context of the Schwinger model U(1) gauge theory in 1+1 spacetime dimensions with two degenerate-mass fermions), this preconditioning scheme effectively decreases the condition number of the linear systems and approximately halves the number of iterations required for convergence in relevant parameter ranges. We further demonstrate the framework learns a general mapping dependent on the lattice structure which leads to zero-shot learning ability for the Dirac operators constructed from gauge field configurations of different sizes.

Paperid: 5062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07917.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to segment objects of novel categories in the query images given only a few annotated support samples. Existing methods primarily build the image-level correlation between the support target object and the entire query image. However, this correlation contains the hard pixel noise, \textit{i.e.}, irrelevant background objects, that is intractable to trace and suppress, leading to the overfitting of the background. To address the limitation of this correlation, we imitate the biological vision process to identify novel objects in the object-level information. Target identification in the general objects is more valid than in the entire image, especially in the low-data regime. Inspired by this, we design an Object-level Correlation Network (OCNet) by establishing the object-level correlation between the support target object and query general objects, which is mainly composed of the General Object Mining Module (GOMM) and Correlation Construction Module (CCM). Specifically, GOMM constructs the query general object feature by learning saliency and high-level similarity cues, where the general objects include the irrelevant background objects and the target foreground object. Then, CCM establishes the object-level correlation by allocating the target prototypes to match the general object feature. The generated object-level correlation can mine the query target feature and suppress the hard pixel noise for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-${5}^{i}$ and COCO-${20}^{i}$ show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 5063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05925.pdf

Abstract:
Recent deep learning-based methods for lossy image compression achieve competitive rate-distortion performance through extensive end-to-end training and advanced architectures. However, emerging applications increasingly prioritize semantic preservation over pixel-level reconstruction and demand robust performance across diverse data distributions and downstream tasks. These challenges call for advanced semantic compression paradigms. Motivated by the zero-shot and representational capabilities of multimodal foundation models, we propose a novel semantic compression method based on the contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model. Rather than compressing images for reconstruction, we propose compressing the CLIP feature embeddings into minimal bits while preserving semantic information across different tasks. Experiments show that our method maintains semantic integrity across benchmark datasets, achieving an average bit rate of approximately 2-3* 10(-3) bits per pixel. This is less than 5% of the bitrate required by mainstream image compression approaches for comparable performance. Remarkably, even under extreme compression, the proposed approach exhibits zero-shot robustness across diverse data distributions and downstream tasks.

Paperid: 5064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05379.pdf

Abstract:
As our cities and communities become smarter, the systems that keep us safe, such as traffic control centers, emergency response networks, and public transportation, also become more complex. With this complexity comes a greater risk of security threats that can affect not just machines but real people's lives. To address this challenge, we present ThreatGPT, an agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant built to help people whether they are engineers, safety officers, or policy makers to understand and analyze threats in public safety systems. Instead of requiring deep cybersecurity expertise, it allows users to simply describe the components of a system they are concerned about, such as login systems, data storage, or communication networks. Then, with the click of a button, users can choose how they want the system to be analyzed by using popular frameworks such as STRIDE, MITRE ATT&CK, CVE reports, NIST, or CISA. ThreatGPT is unique because it does not just provide threat information, but rather it acts like a knowledgeable partner. Using few-shot learning, the AI learns from examples and generates relevant smart threat models. It can highlight what might go wrong, how attackers could take advantage, and what can be done to prevent harm. Whether securing a city's infrastructure or a local health service, this tool adapts to users' needs. In simple terms, ThreatGPT brings together AI and human judgment to make our public systems safer. It is designed not just to analyze threats, but to empower people to understand and act on them, faster, smarter, and with more confidence.

Paperid: 5065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04970.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can learn to solve complex tasks from visual inputs, but generalizing these learned skills to new environments remains a major challenge in RL application, especially robotics. While data augmentation can improve generalization, it often compromises sample efficiency and training stability. This paper introduces DeGuV, an RL framework that enhances both generalization and sample efficiency. In specific, we leverage a learnable masker network that produces a mask from the depth input, preserving only critical visual information while discarding irrelevant pixels. Through this, we ensure that our RL agents focus on essential features, improving robustness under data augmentation. In addition, we incorporate contrastive learning and stabilize Q-value estimation under augmentation to further enhance sample efficiency and training stability. We evaluate our proposed method on the RL-ViGen benchmark using the Franka Emika robot and demonstrate its effectiveness in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Our results show that DeGuV outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generalization and sample efficiency while also improving interpretability by highlighting the most relevant regions in the visual input

Paperid: 5066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04468.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models presents significant opportunities for financial applications, yet systematic evaluation in specialized financial contexts remains limited. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs using 1,560 multiple-choice questions from official mock exams across Levels I-III of CFA, most rigorous professional certifications globally that mirror real-world financial analysis complexity. We compare models distinguished by core design priorities: multi-modal and computationally powerful, reasoning-specialized and highly accurate, and lightweight efficiency-optimized. We assess models under zero-shot prompting and through a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline that integrates official CFA curriculum content. The RAG system achieves precise domain-specific knowledge retrieval through hierarchical knowledge organization and structured query generation, significantly enhancing reasoning accuracy in professional financial certification evaluation. Results reveal that reasoning-oriented models consistently outperform others in zero-shot settings, while the RAG pipeline provides substantial improvements particularly for complex scenarios. Comprehensive error analysis identifies knowledge gaps as the primary failure mode, with minimal impact from text readability. These findings provide actionable insights for LLM deployment in finance, offering practitioners evidence-based guidance for model selection and cost-performance optimization.

Paperid: 5067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04077.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding covert narratives and implicit messaging is essential for analyzing bias and sentiment. Traditional NLP methods struggle with detecting subtle phrasing and hidden agendas. This study tackles two key challenges: (1) multi-label classification of narratives and sub-narratives in news articles, and (2) generating concise, evidence-based explanations for dominant narratives. We fine-tune a BERT model with a recall-oriented approach for comprehensive narrative detection, refining predictions using a GPT-4o pipeline for consistency. For narrative explanation, we propose a ReACT (Reasoning + Acting) framework with semantic retrieval-based few-shot prompting, ensuring grounded and relevant justifications. To enhance factual accuracy and reduce hallucinations, we incorporate a structured taxonomy table as an auxiliary knowledge base. Our results show that integrating auxiliary knowledge in prompts improves classification accuracy and justification reliability, with applications in media analysis, education, and intelligence gathering.

Paperid: 5068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03643.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) provide a rich, longitudinal view of patient health and hold significant potential for advancing clinical decision support, risk prediction, and data-driven healthcare research. However, most artificial intelligence (AI) models for EHRs are designed for narrow, single-purpose tasks, limiting their generalizability and utility in real-world settings. Here, we present CEHR-XGPT, a general-purpose foundation model for EHR data that unifies three essential capabilities - feature representation, zero-shot prediction, and synthetic data generation - within a single architecture. To support temporal reasoning over clinical sequences, CEHR-XGPT incorporates a novel time-token-based learning framework that explicitly encodes patients' dynamic timelines into the model structure. CEHR-XGPT demonstrates strong performance across all three tasks and generalizes effectively to external datasets through vocabulary expansion and fine-tuning. Its versatility enables rapid model development, cohort discovery, and patient outcome forecasting without the need for task-specific retraining.

Paperid: 5069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01554.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as promising tools in radiology, offering zero-shot capabilities that mitigate the need for large labeled datasets. However, in high-stakes domains like diagnostic radiology, these models often lack the discriminative precision required for reliable clinical use. This challenge is compounded by the scarcity and heterogeneity of publicly available volumetric CT datasets, which vary widely in annotation formats and granularity. To address these limitations, we introduce Uniferum, a volumetric VLM that unifies diverse supervision signals, encoded in classification labels and segmentation masks, into a single training framework. By harmonizing three public 3D CT datasets with distinct annotations, Uniferum achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AUROC on the CT-RATE benchmark by 7% compared to CLIP-based and conventional multi-label convolutional models. The model demonstrates robust out-of-distribution generalization, with observed evidence of unexpected zero-shot performance on the RAD-CHEST and INSPECT datasets. Our results highlight the effectiveness of integrating heterogeneous annotations and body segmentation to enhance model performance, setting a new direction for clinically reliable, data-efficient VLMs in 3D medical imaging.

Paperid: 5070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01206.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is a significant task for low-cost and efficient 3D scene perception in endoscopy. In recent years, a series of methods are proposed to address the illumination inconsistency, while certain works also focus on the generalization of the model by efficiently finetuning the foundation models. However, the variety of illumination conditions and scene features is still the primary challenges for depth estimation in endoscopic scenes. In this work, a self-supervised framework is proposed for monocular depth estimation in diverse endoscopy. Firstly, considering the diverse features in endoscopic scenes with different tissues, a novel block-wise mixture of dynamic low-rank experts is proposed to efficiently finetune the foundation model for endoscopic depth estimation. In the proposed module, based on the input feature, different experts with a small amount of trainable parameters are adaptively selected for weighted inference, from low-rank experts which are allocated based on the generalization of each block. Moreover, a novel self-supervised training framework is proposed to jointly cope with brightness inconsistency and reflectance interference. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art works on SCARED dataset and SimCol dataset. Furthermore, the proposed network also achieves the best generalization based on zero-shot depth estimation on C3VD, Hamlyn and SERV-CT dataset. The outstanding performance of our model is further demonstrated with 3D reconstruction and ego-motion estimation. The proposed method could contribute to accurate endoscopy for minimally invasive measurement and surgery. The evaluation codes will be released upon acceptance, while the demo videos can be found on: https://endo-gede.netlify.app/.

Paperid: 5071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01147.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (CL-NER) aims to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, existing zero-shot CL-NER (ZCL-NER) approaches primarily focus on Latin script language (LSL), where shared linguistic features facilitate effective knowledge transfer. In contrast, for non-Latin script language (NSL), such as Chinese and Japanese, performance often degrades due to deep structural differences. To address these challenges, we propose an entity-aligned translation (EAT) approach. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), EAT employs a dual-translation strategy to align entities between NSL and English. In addition, we fine-tune LLMs using multilingual Wikipedia data to enhance the entity alignment from source to target languages.

Paperid: 5072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01016.pdf

Abstract:
Inductive reasoning enables humans to infer abstract rules from limited examples and apply them to novel situations. In this work, we compare an LLM-based hypothesis search framework with direct program generation approaches on few-shot rule induction tasks. Our findings show that hypothesis search achieves performance comparable to humans, while direct program generation falls notably behind. An error analysis reveals key bottlenecks in hypothesis generation and suggests directions for advancing program induction methods. Overall, this paper underscores the potential of LLM-based hypothesis search for modeling inductive reasoning and the challenges in building more efficient systems.

Paperid: 5073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00090.pdf

Abstract:
Machine-learned force fields (MLFFs), particularly pre-trained foundation models, promise to bring ab initio-level accuracy to the length and time scales of molecular dynamics. Yet this shift raises a central question: is it better to build a specialist model from scratch or adapt a generalist foundation model for a specific system? The trade-offs in data efficiency, predictive accuracy, and risks of out-of-distribution (OOD) failure remain unclear. Here, we present a benchmarking framework that contrasts bespoke (from scratch) and fine-tuned foundation models in a test case of a technologically relevant 2D material, Cr-intercalated Sb2Te3, using the MACE architecture. Our framework employs migration pathways, evaluated through nudged elastic band (NEB) trajectories, as a diagnostic probe that tests both interpolation and extrapolation. We assess accuracy for equilibrium, kinetic (atomic migration), and mechanical (interlayer sliding) tasks. While all models capture equilibrium structures, predictions for non-equilibrium processes diverge. Task-specific fine-tuning substantially improves kinetic accuracy compared with both from-scratch and zero-shot models, but can degrade learned representations of long-range physics. Analysis of internal representations shows that training paradigms yield distinct, non-overlapping latent encodings of system physics. This work offers a practical guide for MLFF development, highlights migration-based probes as efficient diagnostics, and suggests pathways toward uncertainty-aware active learning strategies.

Paperid: 5074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17796.pdf

Abstract:
Contextual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems allow for recognizing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, such as named entities or rare words. However, it remains challenging due to limited training data and ambiguous or inconsistent pronunciations. In this paper, we propose a synthesis-driven multi-pronunciation contextual biasing method that performs zero-shot contextual ASR on a pretrained Whisper model. Specifically, we leverage text-to-speech (TTS) systems to synthesize diverse speech samples containing each target rare word, and then use the pretrained Whisper model to extract multiple predicted pronunciation variants. These variant token sequences are compiled into a prefix-trie, which assigns rewards to beam hypotheses in a shallow-fusion manner during beam-search decoding. Subsequently, any recognized variant is mapped back to the original rare word in the final transcription. The evaluation results on the LibriSpeech dataset show that our method reduces biased-word error rate (B-WER) by 43% on test-clean and 44% on test-other while maintaining unbiased-WER (U-WER) essentially unchanged.

Paperid: 5075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16640.pdf

Abstract:
Geological Carbon Sequestration (GCS) has emerged as a promising strategy for mitigating global warming, yet its effectiveness heavily depends on accurately characterizing subsurface flow dynamics. The inherent geological uncertainty, stemming from limited observations and reservoir heterogeneity, poses significant challenges to predictive modeling. Existing methods for inverse modeling and uncertainty quantification are computationally intensive and lack generalizability, restricting their practical utility. Here, we introduce a Conditional Neural Field Latent Diffusion (CoNFiLD-geo) model, a generative framework for efficient and uncertainty-aware forward and inverse modeling of GCS processes. CoNFiLD-geo synergistically combines conditional neural field encoding with Bayesian conditional latent-space diffusion models, enabling zero-shot conditional generation of geomodels and reservoir responses across complex geometries and grid structures. The model is pretrained unconditionally in a self-supervised manner, followed by a Bayesian posterior sampling process, allowing for data assimilation for unseen/unobserved states without task-specific retraining. Comprehensive validation across synthetic and real-world GCS scenarios demonstrates CoNFiLD-geo's superior efficiency, generalization, scalability, and robustness. By enabling effective data assimilation, uncertainty quantification, and reliable forward modeling, CoNFiLD-geo significantly advances intelligent decision-making in geo-energy systems, supporting the transition toward a sustainable, net-zero carbon future.

Paperid: 5076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12212.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in protein large language models, such as ProtTeX, represent both side-chain amino acids and backbone structure as discrete token sequences of residue length. While this design enables unified modeling of multimodal protein information, it suffers from two major limitations: (1) The concatenation of sequence and structure tokens approximately doubles the protein length and breaks the intrinsic residue-level alignment between modalities. (2) Constrained by the training corpus and limited context window, ProtTeX is typically trained on single-protein inputs, rendering it incompatible with in-context learning (ICL) and thus limiting its generalization capability. To address these issues, we propose ProtTeX-CC, a lightweight two-stage compression framework designed to enhance ProtTeX under few-shot settings. We first design a joint embedding compression mechanism that fuses sequence and structure representations at the residue level, effectively reducing the protein input length by half without sacrificing performance. Then we propose a self-compression module that aggregates each full demonstration into the latent space of the last few linguistic tokens, reducing the average demonstration length from 751 tokens to less than 16 tokens. Compared to the original ProtTeX, our self-compression approach achieves a compression ratio of approximately 93.68% in the total prompt length under the 16-shot setting. Without modifying the backbone model, ProtTeX-CC introduces only a small number of additional parameters through PEFT-based tuning in the joint embedding compression stage and a single trainable projection layer in the self-compression stage. Extensive experiments on protein function prediction show that ProtTeX-CC improves performance on the in-domain benchmark by 2%, and generalizes well to the out-of-domain dataset with a performance gain of 11%.

Paperid: 5077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12211.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising foundation for generalist robot policies, but often produce brittle behaviours or unsafe failures when deployed zero-shot in out-of-distribution scenarios. We present Vision-Language-Action Planning & Search (VLAPS) -- a novel framework and accompanying algorithms that embed model-based search into the inference procedure of pre-trained VLA policies to improve their performance on robotic tasks. Specifically, our method biases a modified Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm -- run using a model of the target environment -- using action priors defined by the VLA policy. By using VLA-derived abstractions and priors in model-based search, VLAPS efficiently explores language-conditioned robotics tasks whose search spaces would otherwise be intractably large. Conversely, by integrating model-based search with the VLA policy's inference procedure, VLAPS yields behaviours that are more performant than those obtained by directly following the VLA policy's action predictions. VLAPS offers a principled framework to: i) control test-time compute in VLA models, ii) leverage a priori knowledge of the robotic environment, and iii) integrate established planning and reinforcement learning techniques into the VLA inference process. Across all experiments, VLAPS significantly outperforms VLA-only baselines on language-specified tasks that would otherwise be intractable for uninformed search algorithms, increasing success rates by as much as 67 percentage points.

Paperid: 5078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10775.pdf

Abstract:
Three-dimensional generative models increasingly drive structure-based drug discovery, yet it remains constrained by the scarce publicly available protein-ligand complexes. Under such data scarcity, almost all existing pipelines struggle to learn transferable geometric priors and consequently overfit to training-set biases. As such, we present IBEX, an Information-Bottleneck-EXplored coarse-to-fine pipeline to tackle the chronic shortage of protein-ligand complex data in structure-based drug design. Specifically, we use PAC-Bayesian information-bottleneck theory to quantify the information density of each sample. This analysis reveals how different masking strategies affect generalization and indicates that, compared with conventional de novo generation, the constrained Scaffold Hopping task endows the model with greater effective capacity and improved transfer performance. IBEX retains the original TargetDiff architecture and hyperparameters for training to generate molecules compatible with the binding pocket; it then applies an L-BFGS optimization step to finely refine each conformation by optimizing five physics-based terms and adjusting six translational and rotational degrees of freedom in under one second. With only these modifications, IBEX raises the zero-shot docking success rate on CBGBench CrossDocked2020-based from 53% to 64%, improves the mean Vina score from $-7.41 kcal mol^{-1}$ to $-8.07 kcal mol^{-1}$, and achieves the best median Vina energy in 57 of 100 pockets versus 3 for the original TargetDiff. IBEX also increases the QED by 25%, achieves state-of-the-art validity and diversity, and markedly reduces extrapolation error.

Paperid: 5079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10027.pdf

Abstract:
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect approximately five million older adults in the U.S., yet over half remain undiagnosed. Speech-based natural language processing (NLP) offers a promising, scalable approach to detect early cognitive decline through linguistic markers. To develop and evaluate a screening pipeline that (i) fuses transformer embeddings with handcrafted linguistic features, (ii) tests data augmentation using synthetic speech generated by large language models (LLMs), and (iii) benchmarks unimodal and multimodal LLM classifiers for ADRD detection. Transcripts from the DementiaBank "cookie-theft" task (n = 237) were used. Ten transformer models were evaluated under three fine-tuning strategies. A fusion model combined embeddings from the top-performing transformer with 110 lexical-derived linguistic features. Five LLMs (LLaMA-8B/70B, MedAlpaca-7B, Ministral-8B, GPT-4o) were fine-tuned to generate label-conditioned synthetic speech, which was used to augment training data. Three multimodal models (GPT-4o, Qwen-Omni, Phi-4) were tested for speech-text classification in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The fusion model achieved F1 = 83.3 (AUC = 89.5), outperforming linguistic or transformer-only baselines. Augmenting training data with 2x MedAlpaca-7B synthetic speech increased F1 to 85.7. Fine-tuning significantly improved unimodal LLM classifiers (e.g., MedAlpaca: F1 = 47.3 -> 78.5 F1). Current multimodal models demonstrated lower performance (GPT-4o = 70.2 F1; Qwen = 66.0). Performance gains aligned with the distributional similarity between synthetic and real speech. Integrating transformer embeddings with linguistic features enhances ADRD detection from speech. Clinically tuned LLMs effectively support both classification and data augmentation, while further advancement is needed in multimodal modeling.

Paperid: 5080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07819.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) due to a critical adaptation gap: they lack the local inductive biases required for dense prediction and employ inflexible feature fusion paradigms. We address these limitations through an Architectural Co-Design framework that jointly refines feature representation and cross-modal fusion. Our method proposes a parameter-efficient Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (Conv-LoRA) adapter to inject local inductive biases for fine-grained representation, and introduces a Dynamic Fusion Gateway (DFG) that leverages visual context to adaptively modulate text prompts, enabling a powerful bidirectional fusion. Extensive experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness, validating that this synergistic co-design is critical for robustly adapting foundation models to dense perception tasks.

Paperid: 5081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07387.pdf

Abstract:
Navigating unknown environments with a single RGB camera is challenging, as the lack of depth information prevents reliable collision-checking. While some methods use estimated depth to build collision maps, we found that depth estimates from vision foundation models are too noisy for zero-shot navigation in cluttered environments. We propose an alternative approach: instead of using noisy estimated depth for direct collision-checking, we use it as a rich context input to a learned collision model. This model predicts the distribution of minimum obstacle clearance that the robot can expect for a given control sequence. At inference, these predictions inform a risk-aware MPC planner that minimizes estimated collision risk. Our joint learning pipeline co-trains the collision model and risk metric using both safe and unsafe trajectories. Crucially, our joint-training ensures optimal variance in our collision model that improves navigation in highly cluttered environments. Consequently, real-world experiments show 9x and 7x improvements in success rates over NoMaD and the ROS stack, respectively. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our design choices.

Paperid: 5082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06504.pdf

Abstract:
Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) is a high-utility natural language processing (NLP) task, and large language models (LLMs) show promise particularly in few-shot settings (i.e., limited training data). In this article, we address the performance challenges of LLMs for few-shot biomedical NER by investigating a dynamic prompting strategy involving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In our approach, the annotated in-context learning examples are selected based on their similarities with the input texts, and the prompt is dynamically updated for each instance during inference. We implemented and optimized static and dynamic prompt engineering techniques and evaluated them on five biomedical NER datasets. Static prompting with structured components increased average F1-scores by 12% for GPT-4, and 11% for GPT-3.5 and LLaMA 3-70B, relative to basic static prompting. Dynamic prompting further improved performance, with TF-IDF and SBERT retrieval methods yielding the best results, improving average F1-scores by 7.3% and 5.6% in 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively. These findings highlight the utility of contextually adaptive prompts via RAG for biomedical NER.

Paperid: 5083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06103.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents two effective approaches for Extractive Question Answering (QA) on the Quran. It addresses challenges related to complex language, unique terminology, and deep meaning in the text. The second uses few-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models such as Gemini and DeepSeek. A specialized Arabic prompt framework is developed for span extraction. A strong post-processing system integrates subword alignment, overlap suppression, and semantic filtering. This improves precision and reduces hallucinations. Evaluations show that large language models with Arabic instructions outperform traditional fine-tuned models. The best configuration achieves a pAP10 score of 0.637. The results confirm that prompt-based instruction tuning is effective for low-resource, semantically rich QA tasks.

Paperid: 5084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05501.pdf

Abstract:
Historical maps are valuable for studying changes to the Earth's surface. With the rise of deep learning, models like UNet have been used to extract information from these maps through semantic segmentation. Recently, pre-trained foundation models have shown strong performance across domains such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and industrial inspection. However, they struggle with historical maps. These models are trained on modern or domain-specific images, where patterns can be tied to predefined concepts through common sense or expert knowledge. Historical maps lack such consistency -- similar concepts can appear in vastly different shapes and styles. To address this, we propose On-Need Declarative (OND) knowledge-based prompting, which introduces explicit prompts to guide the model on what patterns correspond to which concepts. This allows users to specify the target concept and pattern during inference (on-need inference). We implement this by replacing the prompt encoder of the foundation model SAM with our OND prompting mechanism and fine-tune it on historical maps. The resulting model is called SMOL-MapSeg (Show Me One Label). Experiments show that SMOL-MapSeg can accurately segment classes defined by OND knowledge. It can also adapt to unseen classes through few-shot fine-tuning. Additionally, it outperforms a UNet-based baseline in average segmentation performance.

Paperid: 5085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22075.pdf

Abstract:
In unsupervised adaptation for vision-language models such as CLIP, pseudo-labels derived from zero-shot predictions often exhibit significant noise, particularly under domain shifts or in visually complex scenarios. Conventional pseudo-label filtering approaches, which rely on fixed confidence thresholds, tend to be unreliable in fully unsupervised settings. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive pseudo-labeling framework that enhances CLIP's adaptation performance by integrating prototype consistency and neighborhood-based consistency. The proposed method comprises two key components: PICS, which assesses pseudo-label accuracy based on in-class feature compactness and cross-class feature separation; and NALR, which exploits semantic similarities among neighboring samples to refine pseudo-labels dynamically. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive weighting mechanism that adjusts the influence of pseudo-labeled samples during training according to their estimated correctness. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised adaptation scenarios, delivering more accurate pseudo-labels while maintaining computational efficiency.

Paperid: 5086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21545.pdf

Abstract:
Robotic task planning in real-world environments requires reasoning over implicit constraints from language and vision. While LLMs and VLMs offer strong priors, they struggle with long-horizon structure and symbolic grounding. Existing methods that combine LLMs with symbolic planning often rely on handcrafted or narrow domains, limiting generalization. We propose UniDomain, a framework that pre-trains a PDDL domain from robot manipulation demonstrations and applies it for online robotic task planning. It extracts atomic domains from 12,393 manipulation videos to form a unified domain with 3137 operators, 2875 predicates, and 16481 causal edges. Given a target class of tasks, it retrieves relevant atomics from the unified domain and systematically fuses them into high-quality meta-domains to support compositional generalization in planning. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks show that UniDomain solves complex, unseen tasks in a zero-shot manner, achieving up to 58% higher task success and 160% improvement in plan optimality over state-of-the-art LLM and LLM-PDDL baselines.

Paperid: 5087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20511.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Learning (FSL), which endeavors to develop the generalization ability for recognizing novel classes using only a few images, faces significant challenges due to data scarcity. Recent CLIP-like methods based on contrastive language-image pertaining mitigate the issue by leveraging textual representation of the class name for unseen image discovery. Despite the achieved success, simply aligning visual representations to class name embeddings would compromise the visual diversity for novel class discrimination. To this end, we proposed a novel Few-Shot Learning (FSL) method (BCT-CLIP) that explores \textbf{dominating properties} via contrastive learning beyond simply using class tokens. Through leveraging LLM-based prior knowledge, our method pushes forward FSL with comprehensive structural image representations, including both global category representation and the patch-aware property embeddings. In particular, we presented a novel multi-property generator (MPG) with patch-aware cross-attentions to generate multiple visual property tokens, a Large-Language Model (LLM)-assistant retrieval procedure with clustering-based pruning to obtain dominating property descriptions, and a new contrastive learning strategy for property-token learning. The superior performances on the 11 widely used datasets demonstrate that our investigation of dominating properties advances discriminative class-specific representation learning and few-shot classification.

Paperid: 5088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14819.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in transforming text descriptions or tables to data visualizations via instruction-tuning methods. However, it is not straightforward to apply these methods directly for a more real-world use case of visualizing data from long documents based on user-given intents, as opposed to the user pre-selecting the relevant content manually. We introduce the task of intent-based chart generation from documents: given a user-specified intent and document(s), the goal is to generate a chart adhering to the intent and grounded on the document(s) in a zero-shot setting. We propose an unsupervised, two-staged framework in which an LLM first extracts relevant information from the document(s) by decomposing the intent and iteratively validates and refines this data. Next, a heuristic-guided module selects an appropriate chart type before final code generation. To assess the data accuracy of the generated charts, we propose an attribution-based metric that uses a structured textual representation of charts, instead of relying on visual decoding metrics that often fail to capture the chart data effectively. To validate our approach, we curate a dataset comprising of 1,242 $<$intent, document, charts$>$ tuples from two domains, finance and scientific, in contrast to the existing datasets that are largely limited to parallel text descriptions/ tables and their corresponding charts. We compare our approach with baselines using single-shot chart generation using LLMs and query-based retrieval methods; our method outperforms by upto $9$ points and $17$ points in terms of chart data accuracy and chart type respectively over the best baselines.

Paperid: 5089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11966.pdf

Abstract:
As online communication increasingly incorporates under-represented languages and colloquial dialects, standard translation systems often fail to preserve local slang, code-mixing, and culturally embedded markers of harmful speech. Translating toxic content between low-resource language pairs poses additional challenges due to scarce parallel data and safety filters that sanitize offensive expressions. In this work, we propose a reproducible, two-stage framework for toxicity-preserving translation, demonstrated on a code-mixed Singlish safety corpus. First, we perform human-verified few-shot prompt engineering: we iteratively curate and rank annotator-selected Singlish-target examples to capture nuanced slang, tone, and toxicity. Second, we optimize model-prompt pairs by benchmarking several large language models using semantic similarity via direct and back-translation. Quantitative human evaluation confirms the effectiveness and efficiency of our pipeline. Beyond improving translation quality, our framework contributes to the safety of multicultural LLMs by supporting culturally sensitive moderation and benchmarking in low-resource contexts. By positioning Singlish as a testbed for inclusive NLP, we underscore the importance of preserving sociolinguistic nuance in real-world applications such as content moderation and regional platform governance.

Paperid: 5090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09615.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP excel in zero-shot learning by aligning image and text representations through contrastive pretraining. Existing approaches to unsupervised adaptation (UA) for fine-grained classification with VLMs either rely on fixed alignment scores that cannot capture evolving, subtle class distinctions or use computationally expensive pseudo-labeling strategies that limit scalability. In contrast, we show that modeling fine-grained cross-modal interactions during adaptation produces more accurate, class-discriminative pseudo-labels and substantially improves performance over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We introduce Fine-grained Alignment and Interaction Refinement (FAIR), an innovative approach that dynamically aligns localized image features with descriptive language embeddings through a set of Class Description Anchors (CDA). This enables the definition of a Learned Alignment Score (LAS), which incorporates CDA as an adaptive classifier, facilitating cross-modal interactions to improve self-training in unsupervised adaptation. Furthermore, we propose a self-training weighting mechanism designed to refine pseudo-labels in the presence of inter-class ambiguities. Our approach, FAIR, delivers a substantial performance boost in fine-grained unsupervised adaptation, achieving a notable overall gain of 2.78% across 13 fine-grained datasets compared to SOTA methods.

Paperid: 5091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07985.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP are used for a large variety of applications, such as zero-shot classification or as vision encoder for multi-modal models. Despite their popularity, their representations show major limitations. For instance, CLIP models learn bag-of-words representations and, as a consequence, fail to distinguish whether an image is of ``a yellow submarine and a blue bus'' or ``a blue submarine and a yellow bus''. Previous attempts to fix this issue added hard negatives during training or modified the architecture, but failed to resolve the problem in its entirety. We suspect that the missing insights to solve the binding problem for CLIP are hidden in arguably the most important part of learning algorithms: the data. In this work, we fill this gap by rigorously identifying the influence of data properties on CLIP's ability to learn binding using a synthetic dataset. We find that common properties of natural data such as low attribute density, incomplete captions, and the saliency bias, a tendency of human captioners to describe the object that is ``most salient'' to them, have a detrimental effect on binding performance. In contrast to common belief, we find that neither scaling the batch size, i.e., implicitly adding more hard negatives, nor explicitly creating hard negatives enables CLIP to learn reliable binding. Only when the data expresses our identified data properties does CLIP learn almost perfect binding.

Paperid: 5092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07630.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across a range of NLP tasks, however, their computational demands hinder their deployment in real-world, resource-constrained environments. This work investigates the extent to which LLMs can be compressed using Knowledge Distillation (KD) while maintaining strong performance on Question Answering (QA) tasks. We evaluate student models distilled from the Pythia and Qwen2.5 families on two QA benchmarks, SQuAD and MLQA, under zero-shot and one-shot prompting conditions. Results show that student models retain over 90% of their teacher models' performance while reducing parameter counts by up to 57.1%. Furthermore, one-shot prompting yields additional performance gains over zero-shot setups for both model families. These findings underscore the trade-off between model efficiency and task performance, demonstrating that KD, combined with minimal prompting, can yield compact yet capable QA systems suitable for resource-constrained applications.

Paperid: 5093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07201.pdf

Abstract:
Three-dimensional molecular generators based on diffusion models can now reach near-crystallographic accuracy, yet they remain fragmented across tasks. SMILES-only inputs, two-stage pretrain-finetune pipelines, and one-task-one-model practices hinder stereochemical fidelity, task alignment, and zero-shot transfer. We introduce MODA, a diffusion framework that unifies fragment growing, linker design, scaffold hopping, and side-chain decoration with a Bayesian mask scheduler. During training, a contiguous spatial fragment is masked and then denoised in one pass, enabling the model to learn shared geometric and chemical priors across tasks. Multi-task training yields a universal backbone that surpasses six diffusion baselines and three training paradigms on substructure, chemical property, interaction, and geometry. Model-C reduces ligand-protein clashes and substructure divergences while maintaining Lipinski compliance, whereas Model-B preserves similarity but trails in novelty and binding affinity. Zero-shot de novo design and lead-optimisation tests confirm stable negative Vina scores and high improvement rates without force-field refinement. These results demonstrate that a single-stage multi-task diffusion routine can replace two-stage workflows for structure-based molecular design.

Paperid: 5094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04708.pdf

Abstract:
Customer reviews on e-commerce platforms capture critical affective signals that drive purchasing decisions. However, no existing research has explored the joint task of emotion detection and explanatory span identification in e-commerce reviews - a crucial gap in understanding what triggers customer emotional responses. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel joint task unifying Emotion detection and Opinion Trigger extraction (EOT), which explicitly models the relationship between causal text spans (opinion triggers) and affective dimensions (emotion categories) grounded in Plutchik's theory of 8 primary emotions. In the absence of labeled data, we introduce EOT-X, a human-annotated collection of 2,400 reviews with fine-grained emotions and opinion triggers. We evaluate 23 Large Language Models (LLMs) and present EOT-DETECT, a structured prompting framework with systematic reasoning and self-reflection. Our framework surpasses zero-shot and chain-of-thought techniques, across e-commerce domains.

Paperid: 5095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03865.pdf

Abstract:
Attention mechanisms are central to the success of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to capture intricate token dependencies and implicitly assign importance to each token. Recent studies have revealed the sink token, which receives disproportionately high attention despite their limited semantic role. In this paper, we first expand the relationship between the sink token and other tokens, moving beyond attention to explore their similarity in hidden states, considering the layer depth. We observe that as the layers get deeper, the cosine similarity between the normalized hidden states of the sink token and those of other tokens increases, and that the normalized hidden states of the sink token exhibit negligible changes. These imply that other tokens consistently are directed toward the sink token throughout the layers. Next, we propose a dynamic token selection method, called OrthoRank, using these findings to select important tokens. Specifically, in a certain layer, we define token importance by the speed at which the token moves toward the sink token. This is converted into orthogonality with the sink token, meaning that tokens that are more orthogonal to the sink token are assigned greater importance. Finally, through extensive experiments, we demonstrated that our method results in lower perplexity and higher zero-shot accuracy compared to layer pruning methods at the same sparsity ratio with comparable throughput, while also achieving superior performance on LongBench.

Paperid: 5096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02436.pdf

Abstract:
Advances in material functionalities drive innovations across various fields, where metamaterials-defined by structure rather than composition-are leading the way. Despite the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design strategies, their impact is limited by task-specific retraining, poor out-of-distribution(OOD) generalization, and the need for separate models for forward and inverse design. To address these limitations, we introduce the Metamaterial Foundation Model (MetaFO), a Bayesian transformer-based foundation model inspired by large language models. MetaFO learns the underlying mechanics of metamaterials, enabling probabilistic, zero-shot predictions across diverse, unseen combinations of material properties and structural responses. It also excels in nonlinear inverse design, even under OOD conditions. By treating metamaterials as an operator that maps material properties to structural responses, MetaFO uncovers intricate structure-property relationships and significantly expands the design space. This scalable and generalizable framework marks a paradigm shift in AI-driven metamaterial discovery, paving the way for next-generation innovations.

Paperid: 5097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01026.pdf

Abstract:
Generative zero-shot learning (ZSL) methods typically synthesize visual features for unseen classes using predefined semantic attributes, followed by training a fully supervised classification model. While effective, these methods require substantial computational resources and extensive synthetic data, thereby relaxing the original ZSL assumptions. In this paper, we propose FSIGenZ, a few-shot-inspired generative ZSL framework that reduces reliance on large-scale feature synthesis. Our key insight is that class-level attributes exhibit instance-level variability, i.e., some attributes may be absent or partially visible, yet conventional ZSL methods treat them as uniformly present. To address this, we introduce Model-Specific Attribute Scoring (MSAS), which dynamically re-scores class attributes based on model-specific optimization to approximate instance-level variability without access to unseen data. We further estimate group-level prototypes as clusters of instances based on MSAS-adjusted attribute scores, which serve as representative synthetic features for each unseen class. To mitigate the resulting data imbalance, we introduce a Dual-Purpose Semantic Regularization (DPSR) strategy while training a semantic-aware contrastive classifier (SCC) using these prototypes. Experiments on SUN, AwA2, and CUB benchmarks demonstrate that FSIGenZ achieves competitive performance using far fewer synthetic features.

Paperid: 5098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23122.pdf

Abstract:
This work investigates the challenging task of identifying narrative roles - Hero, Villain, Victim, and Other - in Internet memes, across three diverse test sets spanning English and code-mixed (English-Hindi) languages. Building on an annotated dataset originally skewed toward the 'Other' class, we explore a more balanced and linguistically diverse extension, originally introduced as part of the CLEF 2024 shared task. Comprehensive lexical and structural analyses highlight the nuanced, culture-specific, and context-rich language used in real memes, in contrast to synthetically curated hateful content, which exhibits explicit and repetitive lexical markers. To benchmark the role detection task, we evaluate a wide spectrum of models, including fine-tuned multilingual transformers, sentiment and abuse-aware classifiers, instruction-tuned LLMs, and multimodal vision-language models. Performance is assessed under zero-shot settings using precision, recall, and F1 metrics. While larger models like DeBERTa-v3 and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate notable gains, results reveal consistent challenges in reliably identifying the 'Victim' class and generalising across cultural and code-mixed content. We also explore prompt design strategies to guide multimodal models and find that hybrid prompts incorporating structured instructions and role definitions offer marginal yet consistent improvements. Our findings underscore the importance of cultural grounding, prompt engineering, and multimodal reasoning in modelling subtle narrative framings in visual-textual content.

Paperid: 5099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22179.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to develop models capable of identifying actions beyond the categories encountered during training. Previous approaches have primarily focused on aligning visual and semantic representations but often overlooked the importance of fine-grained action patterns in the semantic space (e.g., the hand movements in drinking water and brushing teeth). To address these limitations, we propose a Frequency-Semantic Enhanced Variational Autoencoder (FS-VAE) to explore the skeleton semantic representation learning with frequency decomposition. FS-VAE consists of three key components: 1) a frequency-based enhancement module with high- and low-frequency adjustments to enrich the skeletal semantics learning and improve the robustness of zero-shot action recognition; 2) a semantic-based action description with multilevel alignment to capture both local details and global correspondence, effectively bridging the semantic gap and compensating for the inherent loss of information in skeleton sequences; 3) a calibrated cross-alignment loss that enables valid skeleton-text pairs to counterbalance ambiguous ones, mitigating discrepancies and ambiguities in skeleton and text features, thereby ensuring robust alignment. Evaluations on the benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, validating that frequency-enhanced semantic features enable robust differentiation of visually and semantically similar action clusters, improving zero-shot action recognition.

Paperid: 5100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21596.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown success in vision-language tasks, but their ability to reason over complex educational materials remains largely untested. This work presents the first evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including LLaVA-1.5 and LLaMA 3.2-Vision, on the textbook question answering (TQA) task using the CK12-QA dataset. We introduce a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to simulate real-world learning by providing relevant lesson paragraphs and diagrams as context. Our zero-shot experiments reveal a critical trade-off: while retrieved context improves LLaVA's performance on text-based questions, it significantly degrades the accuracy of the more powerful LLaMA 3.2-Vision on diagram-based tasks, dropping its validation accuracy from 74.07% to 25.93%. We term this statistically significant phenomenon "catastrophic context interference." Furthermore, fine-tuning highlights architectural differences: LLaMA 3.2-Vision's performance improves to 71.16% on the test set, demonstrating its capacity to learn multimodal integration, whereas LLaVA's performance declines, indicating challenges with generalization. Our results underscore the challenges MLLMs face in modality prioritization and context integration, providing a benchmark and pointing to key directions for developing more robust AI-driven educational tools.

Paperid: 5101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20986.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) investigates compositional generalization capacity to recognize unknown state-object pairs based on learned primitive concepts. Existing CZSL methods typically derive primitives features through a simple composition-prototype mapping, which is suboptimal for a set of individuals that can be divided into distinct semantic subsets. Moreover, the all-to-one cross-modal primitives matching neglects compositional divergence within identical states or objects, limiting fine-grained image-composition alignment. In this study, we propose EVA, a Mixture-of-Experts Semantic Variant Alignment framework for CZSL. Specifically, we introduce domain-expert adaption, leveraging multiple experts to achieve token-aware learning and model high-quality primitive representations. To enable accurate compositional generalization, we further present semantic variant alignment to select semantically relevant representation for image-primitives matching. Our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art CZSL methods on three popular benchmarks in both closed- and open-world settings, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed insight.

Paperid: 5102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20795.pdf

Abstract:
Gestures enable non-verbal human-robot communication, especially in noisy environments like agile production. Traditional deep learning-based gesture recognition relies on task-specific architectures using images, videos, or skeletal pose estimates as input. Meanwhile, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with their strong generalization abilities offer potential to reduce system complexity by replacing dedicated task-specific modules. This study investigates adapting such models for dynamic, full-body gesture recognition, comparing V-JEPA (a state-of-the-art VFM), Gemini Flash 2.0 (a multimodal VLM), and HD-GCN (a top-performing skeleton-based approach). We introduce NUGGET, a dataset tailored for human-robot communication in intralogistics environments, to evaluate the different gesture recognition approaches. In our experiments, HD-GCN achieves best performance, but V-JEPA comes close with a simple, task-specific classification head - thus paving a possible way towards reducing system complexity, by using it as a shared multi-task model. In contrast, Gemini struggles to differentiate gestures based solely on textual descriptions in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the need of further research on suitable input representations for gestures.

Paperid: 5103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20786.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation has greatly aided medical diagnosis, with U-Net based architectures and nnU-Net providing state-of-the-art performance. There have been numerous general promptable models and medical variations introduced in recent years, but there is currently a lack of evaluation and comparison of these models across a variety of prompt qualities on a common medical dataset. This research uses Segment Anything Model (SAM), Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), MedSAM, SAM-Med-3D, and nnU-Net to obtain zero-shot inference on the BraTS 2023 adult glioma and pediatrics dataset across multiple prompt qualities for both points and bounding boxes. Several of these models exhibit promising Dice scores, particularly SAM and SAM 2 achieving scores of up to 0.894 and 0.893, respectively when given extremely accurate bounding box prompts which exceeds nnU-Net's segmentation performance. However, nnU-Net remains the dominant medical image segmentation network due to the impracticality of providing highly accurate prompts to the models. The model and prompt evaluation, as well as the comparison, are extended through fine-tuning SAM, SAM 2, MedSAM, and SAM-Med-3D on the pediatrics dataset. The improvements in point prompt performance after fine-tuning are substantial and show promise for future investigation, but are unable to achieve better segmentation than bounding boxes or nnU-Net.

Paperid: 5104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19079.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation Models (FMs) are rapidly transforming Affective Computing (AC), with Vision Language Models (VLMs) now capable of recognising emotions in zero shot settings. This paper probes a critical but underexplored question: what visual cues do these models rely on to infer affect, and are these cues psychologically grounded or superficially learnt? We benchmark varying scale VLMs on a teeth annotated subset of AffectNet dataset and find consistent performance shifts depending on the presence of visible teeth. Through structured introspection of, the best-performing model, i.e., GPT-4o, we show that facial attributes like eyebrow position drive much of its affective reasoning, revealing a high degree of internal consistency in its valence-arousal predictions. These patterns highlight the emergent nature of FMs behaviour, but also reveal risks: shortcut learning, bias, and fairness issues especially in sensitive domains like mental health and education.

Paperid: 5105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17633.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection attempts to distinguish outlier samples to prevent models trained on the in-distribution (ID) dataset from producing unavailable outputs. Most OOD detection methods require many IID samples for training, which seriously limits their real-world applications. To this end, we target a challenging setting: few-shot OOD detection, where {Only a few {\em labeled ID} samples are available.} Therefore, few-shot OOD detection is much more challenging than the traditional OOD detection setting. Previous few-shot OOD detection works ignore the distinct diversity between different classes. In this paper, we propose a novel network: Adaptive Multi-prompt Contrastive Network (AMCN), which adapts the ID-OOD separation boundary by learning inter- and intra-class distribution. To compensate for the absence of OOD and scarcity of ID {\em image samples}, we leverage CLIP, connecting text with images, engineering learnable ID and OOD {\em textual prompts}. Specifically, we first generate adaptive prompts (learnable ID prompts, label-fixed OOD prompts and label-adaptive OOD prompts). Then, we generate an adaptive class boundary for each class by introducing a class-wise threshold. Finally, we propose a prompt-guided ID-OOD separation module to control the margin between ID and OOD prompts. Experimental results show that AMCN outperforms other state-of-the-art works.

Paperid: 5106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15720.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) enables the continual learning of new concepts with only a few training examples. In FSCIL, the model undergoes substantial updates, making it prone to forgetting previous concepts and overfitting to the limited new examples. Most recent trend is typically to disentangle the learning of the representation from the classification head of the model. A well-generalized feature extractor on the base classes (many examples and many classes) is learned, and then fixed during incremental learning. Arguing that the fixed feature extractor restricts the model's adaptability to new classes, we introduce a novel FSCIL method to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and overfitting issues. Our method enables to seamlessly update the entire model with a few examples. We mainly propose a tripartite weight-space ensemble (Tri-WE). Tri-WE interpolates the base, immediately previous, and current models in weight-space, especially for the classification heads of the models. Then, it collaboratively maintains knowledge from the base and previous models. In addition, we recognize the challenges of distilling generalized representations from the previous model from scarce data. Hence, we suggest a regularization loss term using amplified data knowledge distillation. Simply intermixing the few-shot data, we can produce richer data enabling the distillation of critical knowledge from the previous model. Consequently, we attain state-of-the-art results on the miniImageNet, CUB200, and CIFAR100 datasets.

Paperid: 5107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13906.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel graph-informed transformer operator (GITO) architecture for learning complex partial differential equation systems defined on irregular geometries and non-uniform meshes. GITO consists of two main modules: a hybrid graph transformer (HGT) and a transformer neural operator (TNO). HGT leverages a graph neural network (GNN) to encode local spatial relationships and a transformer to capture long-range dependencies. A self-attention fusion layer integrates the outputs of the GNN and transformer to enable more expressive feature learning on graph-structured data. TNO module employs linear-complexity cross-attention and self-attention layers to map encoded input functions to predictions at arbitrary query locations, ensuring discretization invariance and enabling zero-shot super-resolution across any mesh. Empirical results on benchmark PDE tasks demonstrate that GITO outperforms existing transformer-based neural operators, paving the way for efficient, mesh-agnostic surrogate solvers in engineering applications.

Paperid: 5108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13253.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a transformer learns. We design a compositional algorithmic task based on the modular exponential-a double exponential task composed of two single exponential subtasks and train transformer models to learn the task in-context. We compare (a) models trained using an in-context curriculum consisting of single exponential subtasks and, (b) models trained directly on the double exponential task without such a curriculum. We show that models trained with a subtask curriculum can perform zero-shot inference on unseen compositional tasks and are more robust given the same context length. We study how the task and subtasks are represented across the two training regimes. We find that the models employ diverse strategies modulated by the specific curriculum design.

Paperid: 5109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11250.pdf

Abstract:
Building energy management (BEM) tasks require processing and learning from a variety of time-series data. Existing solutions rely on bespoke task- and data-specific models to perform these tasks, limiting their broader applicability. Inspired by the transformative success of Large Language Models (LLMs), Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), trained on diverse datasets, have the potential to change this. Were TSFMs to achieve a level of generalizability across tasks and contexts akin to LLMs, they could fundamentally address the scalability challenges pervasive in BEM. To understand where they stand today, we evaluate TSFMs across four dimensions: (1) generalizability in zero-shot univariate forecasting, (2) forecasting with covariates for thermal behavior modeling, (3) zero-shot representation learning for classification tasks, and (4) robustness to performance metrics and varying operational conditions. Our results reveal that TSFMs exhibit \emph{limited} generalizability, performing only marginally better than statistical models on unseen datasets and modalities for univariate forecasting. Similarly, inclusion of covariates in TSFMs does not yield performance improvements, and their performance remains inferior to conventional models that utilize covariates. While TSFMs generate effective zero-shot representations for downstream classification tasks, they may remain inferior to statistical models in forecasting when statistical models perform test-time fitting. Moreover, TSFMs forecasting performance is sensitive to evaluation metrics, and they struggle in more complex building environments compared to statistical models. These findings underscore the need for targeted advancements in TSFM design, particularly their handling of covariates and incorporating context and temporal dynamics into prediction mechanisms, to develop more adaptable and scalable solutions for BEM.

Paperid: 5110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11103.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) possess a remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), which enables them to handle multiple downstream tasks simultaneously without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Recent studies have shown that even moderately sized LLMs, such as Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B and Llama-3 8B, can achieve ICL through few-shot in-context fine-tuning of all tasks at once. However, this approach still lags behind dedicated fine-tuning, where a separate model is trained for each individual task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Many-Shot In-Context Fine-tuning (ManyICL), which significantly narrows this performance gap by extending the principles of ICL to a many-shot setting. To unlock the full potential of ManyICL and address the inherent inefficiency of processing long sequences with numerous in-context examples, we propose a novel training objective. Instead of solely predicting the final answer, our approach treats every answer within the context as a supervised training target. This effectively shifts the role of many-shot examples from prompts to targets for autoregressive learning. Through extensive experiments on diverse downstream tasks, including classification, summarization, question answering, natural language inference, and math, we demonstrate that ManyICL substantially outperforms zero/few-shot fine-tuning and approaches the performance of dedicated fine-tuning. Furthermore, ManyICL significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting issues observed in zero/few-shot fine-tuning. The code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Paperid: 5111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06569.pdf

Abstract:
Automated sorting is crucial for improving the efficiency and scalability of textile recycling, but accurately identifying material composition and detecting contaminants from sensor data remains challenging. This paper investigates the use of standard RGB imagery, a cost-effective sensing modality, for key pre-processing tasks in an automated system. We present computer vision components designed for a conveyor belt setup to perform (a) classification of four common textile types and (b) segmentation of non-textile features such as buttons and zippers. For classification, several pre-trained architectures were evaluated using transfer learning and cross-validation, with EfficientNetB0 achieving the best performance on a held-out test set with 81.25\% accuracy. For feature segmentation, a zero-shot approach combining the Grounding DINO open-vocabulary detector with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) was employed, demonstrating excellent performance with a mIoU of 0.90 for the generated masks against ground truth. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using RGB images coupled with modern deep learning techniques, including transfer learning for classification and foundation models for zero-shot segmentation, to enable essential analysis steps for automated textile recycling pipelines.

Paperid: 5112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04501.pdf

Abstract:
Existing deepfake detection techniques struggle to keep-up with the ever-evolving novel, unseen forgeries methods. This limitation stems from their reliance on statistical artifacts learned during training, which are often tied to specific generation processes that may not be representative of samples from new, unseen deepfake generation methods encountered at test time. We propose that incorporating language guidance can improve deepfake detection generalization by integrating human-like commonsense reasoning -- such as recognizing logical inconsistencies and perceptual anomalies -- alongside statistical cues. To achieve this, we train an expert deepfake vision encoder by combining discriminative classification with image-text contrastive learning, where the text is generated by generalist MLLMs using few-shot prompting. This allows the encoder to extract both language-describable, commonsense deepfake artifacts and statistical forgery artifacts from pixel-level distributions. To further enhance robustness, we integrate data uncertainty learning into vision-language contrastive learning, mitigating noise in image-text supervision. Our expert vision encoder seamlessly interfaces with an LLM, further enabling more generalized and interpretable deepfake detection while also boosting accuracy. The resulting framework, AuthGuard, achieves state-of-the-art deepfake detection accuracy in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, achieving AUC gains of 6.15% on the DFDC dataset and 16.68% on the DF40 dataset. Additionally, AuthGuard significantly enhances deepfake reasoning, improving performance by 24.69% on the DDVQA dataset.

Paperid: 5113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03709.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) involves assigning labels to each pixel in an image based on textual descriptions, leveraging world models like CLIP. However, they encounter significant challenges in cross-domain generalization, hindering their practical efficacy in real-world applications. Embodied AI systems are transforming autonomous navigation for ground vehicles and drones by enhancing their perception abilities, and in this study, we present AetherVision-Bench, a benchmark for multi-angle segmentation across aerial, and ground perspectives, which facilitates an extensive evaluation of performance across different viewing angles and sensor modalities. We assess state-of-the-art OVSS models on the proposed benchmark and investigate the key factors that impact the performance of zero-shot transfer models. Our work pioneers the creation of a robustness benchmark, offering valuable insights and establishing a foundation for future research.

Paperid: 5114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03229.pdf

Abstract:
In the context of noisy partial label learning (NPLL), each training sample is associated with a set of candidate labels annotated by multiple noisy annotators. With the emergence of high-performance pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, LLaVa and GPT-4V, the direction of using these models to replace time-consuming manual annotation workflows and achieve "manual-annotation-free" training for downstream tasks has become a highly promising research avenue. This paper focuses on learning from noisy partial labels annotated by pre-trained VLMs and proposes an innovative collaborative consistency regularization (Co-Reg) method. Unlike the symmetric noise primarily addressed in traditional noisy label learning, the noise generated by pre-trained models is instance-dependent, embodying the underlying patterns of the pre-trained models themselves, which significantly increases the learning difficulty for the model. To address this, we simultaneously train two neural networks that implement collaborative purification of training labels through a "Co-Pseudo-Labeling" mechanism, while enforcing consistency regularization constraints in both the label space and feature representation space. Our method can also leverage few-shot manually annotated valid labels to further enhance its performances. Comparative experiments with different denoising and disambiguation algorithms, annotation manners, and pre-trained model application schemes fully validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, while revealing the broad prospects of integrating weakly-supervised learning techniques into the knowledge distillation process of pre-trained models.

Paperid: 5115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01759.pdf

Abstract:
Model-free reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful method for developing robust robot control policies capable of navigating through complex and unstructured environments. The effectiveness of these methods hinges on two essential elements: (1) the use of massively parallel physics simulations to expedite policy training, and (2) an environment generator tasked with crafting sufficiently challenging yet attainable environments to facilitate continuous policy improvement. Existing methods of outdoor environment generation often rely on heuristics constrained by a set of parameters, limiting the diversity and realism. In this work, we introduce ADEPT, a novel \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{E}nvironment for \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{T}ransfer in the zero-shot sim-to-real fashion that leverages Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models to dynamically expand existing training environments by adding more diverse and complex environments adaptive to the current policy. ADEPT guides the diffusion model's generation process through initial noise optimization, blending noise-corrupted environments from existing training environments weighted by the policy's performance in each corresponding environment. By manipulating the noise corruption level, ADEPT seamlessly transitions between generating similar environments for policy fine-tuning and novel ones to expand training diversity. To benchmark ADEPT in off-road navigation, we propose a fast and effective multi-layer map representation for wild environment generation. Our experiments show that the policy trained by ADEPT outperforms both procedural generated and natural environments, along with popular navigation methods.

Paperid: 5116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01322.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces PhoAudiobook, a newly curated dataset comprising 941 hours of high-quality audio for Vietnamese text-to-speech. Using PhoAudiobook, we conduct experiments on three leading zero-shot TTS models: VALL-E, VoiceCraft, and XTTS-V2. Our findings demonstrate that PhoAudiobook consistently enhances model performance across various metrics. Moreover, VALL-E and VoiceCraft exhibit superior performance in synthesizing short sentences, highlighting their robustness in handling diverse linguistic contexts. We publicly release PhoAudiobook to facilitate further research and development in Vietnamese text-to-speech.

Paperid: 5117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01247.pdf

Abstract:
Steering vision foundation models at inference time without retraining or access to large labeled datasets is a desirable yet challenging objective, particularly in dynamic or resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we introduce Visual Sparse Steering (VS2), a lightweight, test-time method that guides vision models using steering vectors derived from sparse features learned by top-$k$ Sparse Autoencoders without requiring contrastive data. Specifically, VS2 surpasses zero-shot CLIP by 4.12% on CIFAR-100, 1.08% on CUB-200, and 1.84% on Tiny-ImageNet. We further propose VS2++, a retrieval-augmented variant that selectively amplifies relevant sparse features using pseudo-labeled neighbors at inference time. With oracle positive/negative sets, VS2++ achieves absolute top-1 gains over CLIP zero-shot of up to 21.44% on CIFAR-100, 7.08% on CUB-200, and 20.47% on Tiny-ImageNet. Interestingly, VS2 and VS2++ raise per-class accuracy by up to 25% and 38%, respectively, showing that sparse steering benefits specific classes by disambiguating visually or taxonomically proximate categories rather than providing a uniform boost. Finally, to better align the sparse features learned through the SAE reconstruction task with those relevant for downstream performance, we propose Prototype-Aligned Sparse Steering (PASS). By incorporating a prototype-alignment loss during SAE training, using labels only during training while remaining fully test-time unsupervised, PASS consistently, though modestly, outperforms VS2, achieving a 6.12% gain over VS2 only on CIFAR-100 with ViT-B/32.

Paperid: 5118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00250.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks, often surpassing human-level accuracy. However, their reliability in high-stakes domains such as medicine, particularly in low-resource languages, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce PersianMedQA, a large-scale dataset of 20,785 expert-validated multiple-choice Persian medical questions from 14 years of Iranian national medical exams, spanning 23 medical specialties and designed to evaluate LLMs in both Persian and English. We benchmark 40 state-of-the-art models, including general-purpose, Persian fine-tuned, and medical LLMs, in zero-shot and chain-of-thought (CoT) settings. Our results show that closed-source general models (e.g., GPT-4.1) consistently outperform all other categories, achieving 83.09% accuracy in Persian and 80.7% in English, while Persian fine-tuned models such as Dorna underperform significantly (e.g., 34.9% in Persian), often struggling with both instruction-following and domain reasoning. We also analyze the impact of translation, showing that while English performance is generally higher, 3-10% of questions can only be answered correctly in Persian due to cultural and clinical contextual cues that are lost in translation. Finally, we demonstrate that model size alone is insufficient for robust performance without strong domain or language adaptation. PersianMedQA provides a foundation for evaluating bilingual and culturally grounded medical reasoning in LLMs. The PersianMedQA dataset is available: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/PersianMedQA .

Paperid: 5119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23726.pdf

Abstract:
Collecting high quality data for object detection tasks is challenging due to the inherent subjectivity in labeling the boundaries of an object. This makes it difficult to not only collect consistent annotations across a dataset but also to validate them, as no two annotators are likely to label the same object using the exact same coordinates. These challenges are further compounded when object boundaries are partially visible or blurred, which can be the case in many domains. Training on noisy annotations significantly degrades detector performance, rendering them unusable, particularly in few-shot settings, where just a few corrupted annotations can impact model performance. In this work, we propose FMG-Det, a simple, efficient methodology for training models with noisy annotations. More specifically, we propose combining a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework with a pre-processing pipeline that leverages powerful foundation models to correct labels prior to training. This pre-processing pipeline, along with slight modifications to the detector head, results in state-of-the-art performance across a number of datasets, for both standard and few-shot scenarios, while being much simpler and more efficient than other approaches.

Paperid: 5120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22797.pdf

Abstract:
Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a promising tomographic technique for visualizing the spatio-temporal distribution of superparamagnetic nanoparticles, with applications ranging from cancer detection to real-time cardiovascular monitoring. Traditional MPI reconstruction relies on either time-consuming calibration (measured system matrix) or model-based simulation of the forward operator. Recent developments have shown the applicability of Chebyshev polynomials to multi-dimensional Lissajous Field-Free Point (FFP) scans. This method is bound to the particular choice of sinusoidal scanning trajectories. In this paper, we present the first reconstruction on real 2D MPI data with a trajectory-independent model-based MPI reconstruction algorithm. We further develop the zero-shot Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithm of the authors -- with automatic noise level estimation -- to address the present deconvolution problem, leveraging a state-of-the-art denoiser trained on natural images without retraining on MPI-specific data. We evaluate our method on the publicly available 2D FFP MPI dataset ``MPIdata: Equilibrium Model with Anisotropy", featuring scans of six phantoms acquired using a Bruker preclinical scanner. Moreover, we show reconstruction performed on custom data on a 2D scanner with additional high-frequency excitation field and partial data. Our results demonstrate strong reconstruction capabilities across different scanning scenarios -- setting a precedent for general-purpose, flexible model-based MPI reconstruction.

Paperid: 5121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18011.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue to have difficulty following relatively simple, unambiguous instructions, especially when compositions are involved. In this paper, we take inspiration from recent work that suggests that models may follow instructions better when they are expressed in pseudo-code. However, writing pseudo-code programs can be tedious and using few-shot demonstrations to craft code representations for use in inference can be unnatural for non-expert users of LLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose fine-tuning LLMs with instruction-tuning data that additionally includes instructions re-expressed in pseudo-code along with the final response. We evaluate models trained using our method on $11$ publicly available benchmarks comprising of tasks related to instruction-following, mathematics, and common-sense reasoning. We conduct rigorous experiments with $5$ different models and find that not only do models follow instructions better when trained with pseudo-code, they also retain their capabilities on the other tasks related to mathematical and common sense reasoning. Specifically, we observe a relative gain of $3$--$19$% on instruction-following benchmark, and an average gain of upto 14% across all tasks.

Paperid: 5122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16849.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive reasoning abilities, but often suffer from hallucinations or outdated knowledge. Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) remedies these shortcomings by grounding LLM responses in structured external information from a knowledge base. However, many KG-based RAG approaches struggle with (i) aligning KG and textual representations, (ii) balancing retrieval accuracy and efficiency, and (iii) adapting to dynamically updated KGs. In this work, we introduce Walk&Retrieve, a simple yet effective KG-based framework that leverages walk-based graph traversal and knowledge verbalization for corpus generation for zero-shot RAG. Built around efficient KG walks, our method does not require fine-tuning on domain-specific data, enabling seamless adaptation to KG updates, reducing computational overhead, and allowing integration with any off-the-shelf backbone LLM. Despite its simplicity, Walk&Retrieve performs competitively, often outperforming existing RAG systems in response accuracy and hallucination reduction. Moreover, it demonstrates lower query latency and robust scalability to large KGs, highlighting the potential of lightweight retrieval strategies as strong baselines for future RAG research.

Paperid: 5123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16778.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot counting estimates the number of target objects in an image using only a few annotated exemplars. However, domain shift severely hinders existing methods to generalize to unseen scenarios. This falls into the realm of single domain generalization that remains unexplored in few-shot counting. To solve this problem, we begin by analyzing the main limitations of current methods, which typically follow a standard pipeline that extract the object prototypes from exemplars and then match them with image feature to construct the correlation map. We argue that existing methods overlook the significance of learning highly generalized prototypes. Building on this insight, we propose the first single domain generalization few-shot counting model, Universal Representation Matching, termed URM. Our primary contribution is the discovery that incorporating universal vision-language representations distilled from a large scale pretrained vision-language model into the correlation construction process substantially improves robustness to domain shifts without compromising in domain performance. As a result, URM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in domain and the newly introduced domain generalization setting.

Paperid: 5124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15813.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding functional representations within higher visual cortex is a fundamental question in computational neuroscience. While artificial neural networks pretrained on large-scale datasets exhibit striking representational alignment with human neural responses, learning image-computable models of visual cortex relies on individual-level, large-scale fMRI datasets. The necessity for expensive, time-intensive, and often impractical data acquisition limits the generalizability of encoders to new subjects and stimuli. BraInCoRL uses in-context learning to predict voxelwise neural responses from few-shot examples without any additional finetuning for novel subjects and stimuli. We leverage a transformer architecture that can flexibly condition on a variable number of in-context image stimuli, learning an inductive bias over multiple subjects. During training, we explicitly optimize the model for in-context learning. By jointly conditioning on image features and voxel activations, our model learns to directly generate better performing voxelwise models of higher visual cortex. We demonstrate that BraInCoRL consistently outperforms existing voxelwise encoder designs in a low-data regime when evaluated on entirely novel images, while also exhibiting strong test-time scaling behavior. The model also generalizes to an entirely new visual fMRI dataset, which uses different subjects and fMRI data acquisition parameters. Further, BraInCoRL facilitates better interpretability of neural signals in higher visual cortex by attending to semantically relevant stimuli. Finally, we show that our framework enables interpretable mappings from natural language queries to voxel selectivity.

Paperid: 5125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13811.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning a language model often results in a degradation of its existing performance on other tasks, due to a shift in the model parameters; this phenomenon is often referred to as (catastrophic) forgetting. We are interested in mitigating this, in settings where we only have access to the model weights but no access to its training data/recipe. A natural approach is to penalize the KL divergence between the original model and the new one. Our main realization is that a simple process - which we term context-free generation - allows for an approximate unbiased estimation of this KL divergence. We show that augmenting a fine-tuning dataset with context-free generations mitigates forgetting, in two settings: (a) preserving the zero-shot performance of pretrained-only models, and (b) preserving the reasoning performance of thinking models. We show that contextual synthetic data, and even a portion of the pretraining data, are less effective. We also investigate the effect of choices like generation temperature, data ratios etc. We present our results for OLMo-1B for pretrained-only setting and R1-Distill-Llama-8B for the reasoning setting.

Paperid: 5126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12194.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in comprehending visual input alongside text input. Typically, these models are trained on extensive data sourced from the internet, which are sufficient for general tasks such as scene understanding and question answering. However, they often underperform on specialized tasks where online data is scarce, such as determining spatial relationships between objects or localizing unique target objects within a group of objects sharing similar features. In response to this challenge, we introduce the SUN-Spot v2.0 dataset1, now comprising a total of 90k image-caption pairs and additional annotations on the landmark objects. Each image-caption pair utilizes Set-of-Marks prompting as an additional indicator, mapping each landmark object in the image to the corresponding object mentioned in the caption. Furthermore, we present Spatial-LLaVA, an MLLM trained on conversational data generated by a state-of-the-art language model using the SUNSpot v2.0 dataset. Our approach ensures a robust alignment between the objects in the images and their corresponding object mentions in the captions, enabling our model to learn spatial referring expressions without bias from the semantic information of the objects. Spatial-LLaVA outperforms previous methods by 3.15% on the zero-shot Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark dataset. Spatial-LLaVA is specifically designed to precisely understand spatial referring expressions, making it highly applicable for tasks in real-world scenarios such as autonomous navigation and interactive robotics, where precise object recognition is critical.

Paperid: 5127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11868.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately analyzing the motion parts and their motion attributes in dynamic environments is crucial for advancing key areas such as embodied intelligence. Addressing the limitations of existing methods that rely on dense multi-view images or detailed part-level annotations, we propose an innovative framework that can analyze 3D mobility from monocular videos in a zero-shot manner. This framework can precisely parse motion parts and motion attributes only using a monocular video, completely eliminating the need for annotated training data. Specifically, our method first constructs the scene geometry and roughly analyzes the motion parts and their initial motion attributes combining depth estimation, optical flow analysis and point cloud registration method, then employs 2D Gaussian splatting for scene representation. Building on this, we introduce an end-to-end dynamic scene optimization algorithm specifically designed for articulated objects, refining the initial analysis results to ensure the system can handle 'rotation', 'translation', and even complex movements ('rotation+translation'), demonstrating high flexibility and versatility. To validate the robustness and wide applicability of our method, we created a comprehensive dataset comprising both simulated and real-world scenarios. Experimental results show that our framework can effectively analyze articulated object motions in an annotation-free manner, showcasing its significant potential in future embodied intelligence applications.

Paperid: 5128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09435.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-training on image-text colonoscopy records offers substantial potential for improving endoscopic image analysis, but faces challenges including non-informative background images, complex medical terminology, and ambiguous multi-lesion descriptions. We introduce Endo-CLIP, a novel self-supervised framework that enhances Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) for this domain. Endo-CLIP's three-stage framework--cleansing, attunement, and unification--addresses these challenges by (1) removing background frames, (2) leveraging large language models to extract clinical attributes for fine-grained contrastive learning, and (3) employing patient-level cross-attention to resolve multi-polyp ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Endo-CLIP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pre-training methods in zero-shot and few-shot polyp detection and classification, paving the way for more accurate and clinically relevant endoscopic analysis.

Paperid: 5129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09252.pdf

Abstract:
Introduction: Timely identification of intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) subtypes on non-contrast computed tomography is critical for prognosis prediction and therapeutic decision-making, yet remains challenging due to low contrast and blurring boundaries. This study evaluates the performance of zero-shot multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) compared to traditional deep learning methods in ICH binary classification and subtyping. Methods: We utilized a dataset provided by RSNA, comprising 192 NCCT volumes. The study compares various MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2, with conventional deep learning models, including ResNet50 and Vision Transformer. Carefully crafted prompts were used to guide MLLMs in tasks such as ICH presence, subtype classification, localization, and volume estimation. Results: The results indicate that in the ICH binary classification task, traditional deep learning models outperform MLLMs comprehensively. For subtype classification, MLLMs also exhibit inferior performance compared to traditional deep learning models, with Gemini 2.0 Flash achieving an macro-averaged precision of 0.41 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.31. Conclusion: While MLLMs excel in interactive capabilities, their overall accuracy in ICH subtyping is inferior to deep networks. However, MLLMs enhance interpretability through language interactions, indicating potential in medical imaging analysis. Future efforts will focus on model refinement and developing more precise MLLMs to improve performance in three-dimensional medical image processing.

Paperid: 5130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07891.pdf

Abstract:
In the age of social media, the rapid spread of misinformation and rumors has led to the emergence of infodemics, where false information poses a significant threat to society. To combat this issue, we introduce TrumorGPT, a novel generative artificial intelligence solution designed for fact-checking in the health domain. TrumorGPT aims to distinguish "trumors", which are health-related rumors that turn out to be true, providing a crucial tool in differentiating between mere speculation and verified facts. This framework leverages a large language model (LLM) with few-shot learning for semantic health knowledge graph construction and semantic reasoning. TrumorGPT incorporates graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) to address the hallucination issue common in LLMs and the limitations of static training data. GraphRAG involves accessing and utilizing information from regularly updated semantic health knowledge graphs that consist of the latest medical news and health information, ensuring that fact-checking by TrumorGPT is based on the most recent data. Evaluating with extensive healthcare datasets, TrumorGPT demonstrates superior performance in fact-checking for public health claims. Its ability to effectively conduct fact-checking across various platforms marks a critical step forward in the fight against health-related misinformation, enhancing trust and accuracy in the digital information age.

Paperid: 5131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06985.pdf

Abstract:
Both zero-shot and tuning-based customized text-to-image (CT2I) generation have made significant progress for storytelling content creation. In contrast, research on customized text-to-video (CT2V) generation remains relatively limited. Existing zero-shot CT2V methods suffer from poor generalization, while another line of work directly combining tuning-based T2I models with temporal motion modules often leads to the loss of structural and texture information. To bridge this gap, we propose an autoregressive structure and texture propagation module (STPM), which extracts key structural and texture features from the reference subject and injects them autoregressively into each video frame to enhance consistency. Additionally, we introduce a test-time reward optimization (TTRO) method to further refine fine-grained details. Quantitative and qualitative experiments validate the effectiveness of STPM and TTRO, demonstrating improvements of 7.8 and 13.1 in CLIP-I and DINO consistency metrics over the baseline, respectively.

Paperid: 5132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06131.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ELA-ZSON, an efficient layout-aware zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, ELA-ZSON achieves both efficient and effective navigation. The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training. Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85\% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79\% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40\% point improvement in SR and 60\% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios. See https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ELA-ZSON-C67E/ for details.

Paperid: 5133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04847.pdf

Abstract:
Hallucinations remain a persistent challenge for LLMs. RAG aims to reduce hallucinations by grounding responses in contexts. However, even when provided context, LLMs still frequently introduce unsupported information or contradictions. This paper presents our efforts to measure LLM hallucinations with a focus on summarization tasks, assessing how often various LLMs introduce hallucinations when summarizing documents. We discuss Vectara's existing LLM hallucination leaderboard, based on the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM). While HHEM and Vectara's Hallucination Leaderboard have garnered great research interest, we examine challenges faced by HHEM and current hallucination detection methods by analyzing the effectiveness of these methods on existing hallucination datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FaithJudge, an LLM-as-a-judge approach guided by few-shot human hallucination annotations, which substantially improves automated LLM hallucination evaluation over current methods. We introduce an enhanced hallucination leaderboard centered on FaithJudge, alongside our current hallucination leaderboard, enabling more reliable benchmarking of LLMs for hallucinations in RAG.

Paperid: 5134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02324.pdf

Abstract:
Curricular analytics (CA) -- systematic analysis of curricula data to inform program and course refinement -- becomes an increasingly valuable tool to help institutions align academic offerings with evolving societal and economic demands. Large language models (LLMs) are promising for handling large-scale, unstructured curriculum data, but it remains uncertain how reliably LLMs can perform CA tasks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate four text alignment strategies based on LLMs or traditional NLP methods for skill extraction, a core task in CA. Using a stratified sample of 400 curriculum documents of different types and a human-LLM collaborative evaluation framework, we find that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the top-performing strategy across all types of curriculum documents, while zero-shot prompting performs worse than traditional NLP methods in most cases. Our findings highlight the promise of LLMs in analyzing brief and abstract curriculum documents, but also reveal that their performance can vary significantly depending on model selection and prompting strategies. This underscores the importance of carefully evaluating the performance of LLM-based strategies before large-scale deployment.

Paperid: 5135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21191.pdf

Abstract:
This study aims to guide language model selection by investigating: 1) the necessity of finetuning versus zero-shot usage, 2) the benefits of domain-adjacent versus generic pretrained models, 3) the value of further domain-specific pretraining, and 4) the continued relevance of Small Language Models (SLMs) compared to Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks. Using electronic pathology reports from the British Columbia Cancer Registry (BCCR), three classification scenarios with varying difficulty and data size are evaluated. Models include various SLMs and an LLM. SLMs are evaluated both zero-shot and finetuned; the LLM is evaluated zero-shot only. Finetuning significantly improved SLM performance across all scenarios compared to their zero-shot results. The zero-shot LLM outperformed zero-shot SLMs but was consistently outperformed by finetuned SLMs. Domain-adjacent SLMs generally performed better than the generic SLM after finetuning, especially on harder tasks. Further domain-specific pretraining yielded modest gains on easier tasks but significant improvements on the complex, data-scarce task. The results highlight the critical role of finetuning for SLMs in specialized domains, enabling them to surpass zero-shot LLM performance on targeted classification tasks. Pretraining on domain-adjacent or domain-specific data provides further advantages, particularly for complex problems or limited finetuning data. While LLMs offer strong zero-shot capabilities, their performance on these specific tasks did not match that of appropriately finetuned SLMs. In the era of LLMs, SLMs remain relevant and effective, offering a potentially superior performance-resource trade-off compared to LLMs.

Paperid: 5136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18591.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Neural Fields have enabled powerful, discretization-invariant methods for learning neural operators that approximate solutions of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on general geometries. Building on these developments, we introduce enf2enf, an encoder--decoder methodology for predicting steady-state Partial Differential Equations with non-parameterized geometric variability, based on recently proposed Equivariant Neural Field architectures. In enf2enf, input geometries are encoded into latent point cloud embeddings that inherently preserve geometric grounding and capture local phenomena. The resulting representations are then combined with global parameters and directly decoded into continuous output fields, thus efficiently modeling the coupling between geometry and physics. By leveraging the inductive biases of locality and translation invariance, our approach is able to capture fine-scale physical features as well as complex shape variations, thereby enhancing generalization and physical compliance. Extensive experiments on a high-fidelity aerodynamic dataset, a hyper-elastic material benchmark, and multi-element airfoil geometries, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art graph based, operator learning, and neural field methods. Notably, our method supports real time inference and zero-shot super-resolution, enabling efficient training on low-resolution meshes while maintaining high accuracy on full-scale discretizations.

Paperid: 5137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16834.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate wave height prediction is critical for maritime safety and coastal resilience, yet conventional physics-based models and traditional machine learning methods face challenges in computational efficiency and nonlinear dynamics modeling. This study introduces Chronos, the first implementation of a large language model (LLM)-powered temporal architecture (Chronos) optimized for wave forecasting. Through advanced temporal pattern recognition applied to historical wave data from three strategically chosen marine zones in the Northwest Pacific basin, our framework achieves multimodal improvements: (1) 14.3% reduction in training time with 2.5x faster inference speed compared to PatchTST baselines, achieving 0.575 mean absolute scaled error (MASE) units; (2) superior short-term forecasting (1-24h) across comprehensive metrics; (3) sustained predictive leadership in extended-range forecasts (1-120h); and (4) demonstrated zero-shot capability maintaining median performance (rank 4/12) against specialized operational models. This LLM-enhanced temporal modeling paradigm establishes a new standard in wave prediction, offering both computationally efficient solutions and a transferable framework for complex geophysical systems modeling.

Paperid: 5138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15669.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation has gained increasing interest due to its generalization capability, i.e., segmenting pixels of novel classes requiring only a few annotated images. Prior work has focused on meta-learning for support-query matching, with extensive development in both prototype-based and aggregation-based methods. To address data scarcity, recent approaches have turned to foundation models to enhance representation transferability for novel class segmentation. Among them, a hybrid dual-modal framework including both DINOv2 and SAM has garnered attention due to their complementary capabilities. We wonder "can we build a unified model with knowledge from both foundation models?" To this end, we propose FS-DINO, with only DINOv2's encoder and a lightweight segmenter. The segmenter features a bottleneck adapter, a meta-visual prompt generator based on dense similarities and semantic embeddings, and a decoder. Through coarse-to-fine cross-model distillation, we effectively integrate SAM's knowledge into our lightweight segmenter, which can be further enhanced by 4D correlation mining on support-query pairs. Extensive experiments on COCO-20i, PASCAL-5i, and FSS-1000 demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

Paperid: 5139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15627.pdf

Abstract:
Lifelong learning for whole slide images (WSIs) poses the challenge of training a unified model to perform multiple WSI-related tasks, such as cancer subtyping and tumor classification, in a distributed, continual fashion. This is a practical and applicable problem in clinics and hospitals, as WSIs are large, require storage, processing, and transfer time. Training new models whenever new tasks are defined is time-consuming. Recent work has applied regularization- and rehearsal-based methods to this setting. However, the rise of vision-language foundation models that align diagnostic text with pathology images raises the question: are these models alone sufficient for lifelong WSI learning using zero-shot classification, or is further investigation into continual learning strategies needed to improve performance? To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare conventional continual-learning approaches with vision-language zero-shot classification for WSIs. Our source code and experimental results will be available soon.

Paperid: 5140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14638.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities in image-level visual perception tasks. However, they fall short in 3D instance-level segmentation tasks that require accurate localization and recognition of individual objects. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel 3D Gaussian Splatting based hard visual prompting approach that leverages camera interpolation to generate diverse viewpoints around target objects without any 2D-3D optimization or fine-tuning. Our method simulates realistic 3D perspectives, effectively augmenting existing hard visual prompts by enforcing geometric consistency across viewpoints. This training-free strategy seamlessly integrates with prior hard visual prompts, enriching object-descriptive features and enabling VLMs to achieve more robust and accurate 3D instance segmentation in diverse 3D scenes.

Paperid: 5141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14306.pdf

Abstract:
As an essential procedure in earth observation system, change detection (CD) aims to reveal the spatial-temporal evolution of the observation regions. A key prerequisite for existing change detection algorithms is aligned geo-references between multi-temporal images by fine-grained registration. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, a prior manual registration is required between the original images, which significantly increases the complexity of the CD workflow. In this paper, we proposed a self-supervision motivated CD framework with geometric estimation, called "MatchCD". Specifically, the proposed MatchCD framework utilizes the zero-shot capability to optimize the encoder with self-supervised contrastive representation, which is reused in the downstream image registration and change detection to simultaneously handle the bi-temporal unalignment and object change issues. Moreover, unlike the conventional change detection requiring segmenting the full-frame image into small patches, our MatchCD framework can directly process the original large-scale image (e.g., 6K*4K resolutions) with promising performance. The performance in multiple complex scenarios with significant geometric distortion demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Paperid: 5142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14129.pdf

Abstract:
The challenge of tracing the source attribution of forged faces has gained significant attention due to the rapid advancement of generative models. However, existing deepfake attribution (DFA) works primarily focus on the interaction among various domains in vision modality, and other modalities such as texts and face parsing are not fully explored. Besides, they tend to fail to assess the generalization performance of deepfake attributors to unseen advanced generators like diffusion in a fine-grained manner. In this paper, we propose a novel parsing-aware vision language model with dynamic contrastive learning(PVLM) method for zero-shot deepfake attribution (ZS-DFA),which facilitates effective and fine-grained traceability to unseen advanced generators. Specifically, we conduct a novel and fine-grained ZS-DFA benchmark to evaluate the attribution performance of deepfake attributors to unseen advanced generators like diffusion. Besides, we propose an innovative parsing-guided vision language model with dynamic contrastive learning (PVLM) method to capture general and diverse attribution features. We are motivated by the observation that the preservation of source face attributes in facial images generated by GAN and diffusion models varies significantly. We employ the inherent face attributes preservation differences to capture face parsing-aware forgery representations. Therefore, we devise a novel parsing encoder to focus on global face attribute embeddings, enabling parsing-guided DFA representation learning via dynamic vision-parsing matching. Additionally, we present a novel deepfake attribution contrastive center loss to pull relevant generators closer and push irrelevant ones away, which can be introduced into DFA models to enhance traceability. Experimental results show that our model exceeds the state-of-the-art on the ZS-DFA benchmark via various protocol evaluations.

Paperid: 5143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14024.pdf

Abstract:
Code obfuscation is the conversion of original source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form, aiming to prevent reverse engineering and intellectual property theft. This is a challenging task since it is crucial to maintain functional correctness of the code while substantially disguising the input code. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) paves the way for practical applications in different domains, including software engineering. This work performs an empirical study on the ability of LLMs to obfuscate Python source code and introduces a metric (i.e., semantic elasticity) to measure the quality degree of obfuscated code. We experimented with 3 leading LLMs, i.e., Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Gemini-1.5, GPT-4-Turbo across 30 Python functions from diverse computational domains. Our findings reveal GPT-4-Turbo's remarkable effectiveness with few-shot prompting (81% pass rate versus 29% standard prompting), significantly outperforming both Gemini-1.5 (39%) and Claude-3.5-Sonnet (30%). Notably, we discovered a counter-intuitive "obfuscation by simplification" phenomenon where models consistently reduce rather than increase cyclomatic complexity. This study provides a methodological framework for evaluating AI-driven obfuscation while highlighting promising directions for leveraging LLMs in software security.

Paperid: 5144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13656.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed software development, especially in code generation. However, their inconsistent performance, prone to hallucinations and quality issues, complicates program comprehension and hinders maintainability. Research indicates that prompt engineering-the practice of designing inputs to direct LLMs toward generating relevant outputs-may help address these challenges. In this regard, researchers have introduced prompt patterns, structured templates intended to guide users in formulating their requests. However, the influence of prompt patterns on code quality has yet to be thoroughly investigated. An improved understanding of this relationship would be essential to advancing our collective knowledge on how to effectively use LLMs for code generation, thereby enhancing their understandability in contemporary software development. This paper empirically investigates the impact of prompt patterns on code quality, specifically maintainability, security, and reliability, using the Dev-GPT dataset. Results show that Zero-Shot prompting is most common, followed by Zero-Shot with Chain-of-Thought and Few-Shot. Analysis of 7583 code files across quality metrics revealed minimal issues, with Kruskal-Wallis tests indicating no significant differences among patterns, suggesting that prompt structure may not substantially impact these quality metrics in ChatGPT-assisted code generation.

Paperid: 5145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11478.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a simple yet effective zero-shot framework for subject-driven image generation using a vanilla Flux model. By framing the task as grid-based image completion and simply replicating the subject image(s) in a mosaic layout, we activate strong identity-preserving capabilities without any additional data, training, or inference-time fine-tuning. This "free lunch" approach is further strengthened by a novel cascade attention design and meta prompting technique, boosting fidelity and versatility. Experimental results show that our method outperforms baselines across multiple key metrics in benchmarks and human preference studies, with trade-offs in certain aspects. Additionally, it supports diverse edits, including logo insertion, virtual try-on, and subject replacement or insertion. These results demonstrate that a pre-trained foundational text-to-image model can enable high-quality, resource-efficient subject-driven generation, opening new possibilities for lightweight customization in downstream applications.

Paperid: 5146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10727.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have altered the landscape of computer vision, obtaining impressive results across a wide range of tasks, especially in zero-shot settings. Unfortunately, their strong performance does not always transfer to out-of-distribution domains, such as earth observation (EO) imagery. Prior work has demonstrated that MLLMs excel at some EO tasks, such as image captioning and scene understanding, while failing at tasks that require more fine-grained spatial reasoning, such as object localization. However, MLLMs are advancing rapidly and insights quickly become out-dated. In this work, we analyze more recent MLLMs that have been explicitly trained to include fine-grained spatial reasoning capabilities, benchmarking them on EO object localization tasks. We demonstrate that these models are performant in certain settings, making them well suited for zero-shot scenarios. Additionally, we provide a detailed discussion focused on prompt selection, ground sample distance (GSD) optimization, and analyzing failure cases. We hope that this work will prove valuable as others evaluate whether an MLLM is well suited for a given EO localization task and how to optimize it.

Paperid: 5147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05345.pdf

Abstract:
Error detection (ED) in tabular data is crucial yet challenging due to diverse error types and the need for contextual understanding. Traditional ED methods often rely heavily on manual criteria and labels, making them labor-intensive. Large language models (LLM) can minimize human effort but struggle with errors requiring a comprehensive understanding of data context. In this paper, we propose ZeroED, a novel hybrid zero-shot error detection framework, which combines LLM reasoning ability with the manual label-based ED pipeline. ZeroED operates in four steps, i.e., feature representation, error labeling, training data construction, and detector training. Initially, to enhance error distinction, ZeroED generates rich data representations using error reason-aware binary features, pre-trained embeddings, and statistical features. Then, ZeroED employs LLM to label errors holistically through in-context learning, guided by a two-step reasoning process for detailed error detection guidelines. To reduce token costs, LLMs are applied only to representative data selected via clustering-based sampling. High-quality training data is constructed through in-cluster label propagation and LLM augmentation with verification. Finally, a classifier is trained to detect all errors. Extensive experiments on seven public datasets demonstrate that, ZeroED substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a maximum 30% improvement in F1 score and up to 90% token cost reduction.

Paperid: 5148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04365.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of large language models (LLMs) depends on how they are prompted, with choices spanning both the high-level prompting pattern (e.g., Zero-Shot, CoT, ReAct, ReWOO) and the specific prompt content (instructions and few-shot demonstrations). Manually tuning this combination is tedious, error-prone, and specific to a given LLM and task. Therefore, this paper proposes AutoPDL, an automated approach to discovering good LLM agent configurations. Our approach frames this as a structured AutoML problem over a combinatorial space of agentic and non-agentic prompting patterns and demonstrations, using successive halving to efficiently navigate this space. We introduce a library implementing common prompting patterns using the PDL prompt programming language. AutoPDL solutions are human-readable, editable, and executable PDL programs that use this library. This approach also enables source-to-source optimization, allowing human-in-the-loop refinement and reuse. Evaluations across three tasks and seven LLMs (ranging from 3B to 70B parameters) show consistent accuracy gains ($9.21\pm15.46$ percentage points), up to 67.5pp, and reveal that selected prompting strategies vary across models and tasks.

Paperid: 5149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02775.pdf

Abstract:
We aim to solve unsupervised anomaly detection in a practical challenging environment where the normal dataset is both contaminated with defective regions and its product class distribution is tailed but unknown. We observe that existing models suffer from tail-versus-noise trade-off where if a model is robust against pixel noise, then its performance deteriorates on tail class samples, and vice versa. To mitigate the issue, we handle the tail class and noise samples independently. To this end, we propose TailSampler, a novel class size predictor that estimates the class cardinality of samples based on a symmetric assumption on the class-wise distribution of embedding similarities. TailSampler can be utilized to sample the tail class samples exclusively, allowing to handle them separately. Based on these facets, we build a memory-based anomaly detection model TailedCore, whose memory both well captures tail class information and is noise-robust. We extensively validate the effectiveness of TailedCore on the unsupervised long-tail noisy anomaly detection setting, and show that TailedCore outperforms the state-of-the-art in most settings.

Paperid: 5150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02459.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce implicit Finite Operator Learning (iFOL) for the continuous and parametric solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) on arbitrary geometries. We propose a physics-informed encoder-decoder network to establish the mapping between continuous parameter and solution spaces. The decoder constructs the parametric solution field by leveraging an implicit neural field network conditioned on a latent or feature code. Instance-specific codes are derived through a PDE encoding process based on the second-order meta-learning technique. In training and inference, a physics-informed loss function is minimized during the PDE encoding and decoding. iFOL expresses the loss function in an energy or weighted residual form and evaluates it using discrete residuals derived from standard numerical PDE methods. This approach results in the backpropagation of discrete residuals during both training and inference. iFOL features several key properties: (1) its unique loss formulation eliminates the need for the conventional encode-process-decode pipeline previously used in operator learning with conditional neural fields for PDEs; (2) it not only provides accurate parametric and continuous fields but also delivers solution-to-parameter gradients without requiring additional loss terms or sensitivity analysis; (3) it can effectively capture sharp discontinuities in the solution; and (4) it removes constraints on the geometry and mesh, making it applicable to arbitrary geometries and spatial sampling (zero-shot super-resolution capability). We critically assess these features and analyze the network's ability to generalize to unseen samples across both stationary and transient PDEs. The overall performance of the proposed method is promising, demonstrating its applicability to a range of challenging problems in computational mechanics.

Paperid: 5151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23030.pdf

Abstract:
Generalized zero-shot learning aims to recognize both seen and unseen classes with the help of semantic information that is shared among different classes. It inevitably requires consistent visual-semantic alignment. Existing approaches fine-tune the visual backbone by seen-class data to obtain semantic-related visual features, which may cause overfitting on seen classes with a limited number of training images. This paper proposes a novel visual and semantic prompt collaboration framework, which utilizes prompt tuning techniques for efficient feature adaptation. Specifically, we design a visual prompt to integrate the visual information for discriminative feature learning and a semantic prompt to integrate the semantic formation for visualsemantic alignment. To achieve effective prompt information integration, we further design a weak prompt fusion mechanism for the shallow layers and a strong prompt fusion mechanism for the deep layers in the network. Through the collaboration of visual and semantic prompts, we can obtain discriminative semantic-related features for generalized zero-shot image recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves favorable performance in both conventional zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 5152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22973.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual open-ended generation - responding in a language different from that of the query - is an important yet understudied problem. This work proposes XL-Instruct, a novel technique for generating high-quality synthetic data, and introduces XL-AlpacaEval, a new benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our experiments show that fine-tuning with just 8K instructions generated using XL-Instruct significantly improves model performance, increasing the win rate against GPT-4o-Mini from 7.4% to 21.5% and improving on several fine-grained quality metrics. Moreover, base LLMs fine-tuned on XL-Instruct exhibit strong zero-shot improvements to question answering in the same language, as shown on our machine-translated m-AlpacaEval. These consistent gains highlight the promising role of XL-Instruct in the post-training of multilingual LLMs. Finally, we publicly release XL-Suite, a collection of training and evaluation data to facilitate research in cross-lingual open-ended generation.

Paperid: 5153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21806.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual speech emotion recognition aims to estimate a speaker's emotional state using a contactless method across different languages. However, variability in voice characteristics and linguistic diversity poses significant challenges for zero-shot speech emotion recognition, especially with multilingual datasets. In this paper, we propose leveraging contrastive learning to refine multilingual speech features and extend large language models for zero-shot multilingual speech emotion estimation. Specifically, we employ a novel two-stage training framework to align speech signals with linguistic features in the emotional space, capturing both emotion-aware and language-agnostic speech representations. To advance research in this field, we introduce a large-scale synthetic multilingual speech emotion dataset, M5SER. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both speech emotion recognition and zero-shot multilingual speech emotion recognition, including previously unseen datasets and languages.

Paperid: 5154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19769.pdf

Abstract:
Segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, with prompt-driven methods gaining prominence due to their flexibility. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) excels at point-prompted segmentation, while text-based models, often leveraging powerful multimodal encoders like BEIT-3, provide rich semantic understanding. However, effectively combining these complementary modalities remains a challenge. This paper introduces BiPrompt-SAM, a novel dual-modal prompt segmentation framework employing an explicit selection mechanism. We leverage SAM's ability to generate multiple mask candidates from a single point prompt and use a text-guided mask (generated via EVF-SAM with BEIT-3) to select the point-generated mask that best aligns spatially, measured by Intersection over Union (IoU). This approach, interpretable as a simplified Mixture of Experts (MoE), effectively fuses spatial precision and semantic context without complex model modifications. Notably, our method achieves strong zero-shot performance on the Endovis17 medical dataset (89.55% mDice, 81.46% mIoU) using only a single point prompt per instance. This significantly reduces annotation burden compared to bounding boxes and aligns better with practical clinical workflows, demonstrating the method's effectiveness without domain-specific training. On the RefCOCO series, BiPrompt-SAM attained 87.1%, 86.5%, and 85.8% IoU, significantly outperforming existing approaches. Experiments show BiPrompt-SAM excels in scenarios requiring both spatial accuracy and semantic disambiguation, offering a simple, effective, and interpretable perspective on multi-modal prompt fusion.

Paperid: 5155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19647.pdf

Abstract:
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being regarded as foundation models that can be instructed to solve diverse tasks by prompting, without task-specific training. We examine the seemingly obvious question: how to effectively prompt VLMs for semantic segmentation. To that end, we systematically evaluate the segmentation performance of several recent models guided by either text or visual prompts on the out-of-distribution MESS dataset collection. We introduce a scalable prompting scheme, few-shot prompted semantic segmentation, inspired by open-vocabulary segmentation and few-shot learning. It turns out that VLMs lag far behind specialist models trained for a specific segmentation task, by about 30% on average on the Intersection-over-Union metric. Moreover, we find that text prompts and visual prompts are complementary: each one of the two modes fails on many examples that the other one can solve. Our analysis suggests that being able to anticipate the most effective prompt modality can lead to a 11% improvement in performance. Motivated by our findings, we propose PromptMatcher, a remarkably simple training-free baseline that combines both text and visual prompts, achieving state-of-the-art results outperforming the best text-prompted VLM by 2.5%, and the top visual-prompted VLM by 3.5% on few-shot prompted semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 5156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14494.pdf

Abstract:
Flow based generative models have charted an impressive path across multiple visual generation tasks by adhering to a simple principle: learning velocity representations of a linear interpolant. However, we observe that training velocity solely from the final layer output underutilizes the rich inter layer representations, potentially impeding model convergence. To address this limitation, we introduce DeepFlow, a novel framework that enhances velocity representation through inter layer communication. DeepFlow partitions transformer layers into balanced branches with deep supervision and inserts a lightweight Velocity Refiner with Acceleration (VeRA) block between adjacent branches, which aligns the intermediate velocity features within transformer blocks. Powered by the improved deep supervision via the internal velocity alignment, DeepFlow converges 8 times faster on ImageNet with equivalent performance and further reduces FID by 2.6 while halving training time compared to previous flow based models without a classifier free guidance. DeepFlow also outperforms baselines in text to image generation tasks, as evidenced by evaluations on MSCOCO and zero shot GenEval.

Paperid: 5157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13021.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP has demonstrated exceptional image-text matching capabilities due to its training on contrastive learning tasks. Past research has suggested that whereas CLIP effectively matches text to images when the matching can be achieved just by matching the text with the objects in the image, CLIP struggles when the matching depends on representing the relationship among the objects in the images (i.e., inferring relations). Previous attempts to address this limitation by training CLIP on relation detection datasets with only linguistic supervision have met with limited success. In this paper, we offer insights and practical methods to advance the field of relation inference from images. This paper approaches the task of creating a model that effectively detects relations among the objects in images by producing text and image embeddings that capture relationships through linguistic supervision. To this end, we propose Dynamic Relation Inference via Verb Embeddings (DRIVE), which augments the COCO dataset, fine-tunes CLIP with hard negatives subject-relation-object triples and corresponding images, and introduces a novel loss function to improve relation detection. Evaluated on multiple CLIP-based models, our method significantly improves zero-shot relation inference accuracy in both frozen and fine-tuned settings, significantly outperforming CLIP and state-of-the-art models while generalizing well on unseen data.

Paperid: 5158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12615.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image latent diffusion models (LDMs) have recently emerged as powerful generative models with great potential for solving inverse problems in imaging. However, leveraging such models in a Plug & Play (PnP), zero-shot manner remains challenging because it requires identifying a suitable text prompt for the unknown image of interest. Also, existing text-to-image PnP approaches are highly computationally expensive. We herein address these challenges by proposing a novel PnP inference paradigm specifically designed for embedding generative models within stochastic inverse solvers, with special attention to Latent Consistency Models (LCMs), which distill LDMs into fast generators. We leverage our framework to propose LAtent consisTency INverse sOlver (LATINO), the first zero-shot PnP framework to solve inverse problems with priors encoded by LCMs. Our conditioning mechanism avoids automatic differentiation and reaches SOTA quality in as little as 8 neural function evaluations. As a result, LATINO delivers remarkably accurate solutions and is significantly more memory and computationally efficient than previous approaches. We then embed LATINO within an empirical Bayesian framework that automatically calibrates the text prompt from the observed measurements by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. Extensive experiments show that prompt self-calibration greatly improves estimation, allowing LATINO with PRompt Optimization to define new SOTAs in image reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://latino-pro.github.io

Paperid: 5159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12511.pdf

Abstract:
Translating software written in legacy languages to modern languages, such as C to Rust, has significant benefits in improving memory safety while maintaining high performance. However, manual translation is cumbersome, error-prone, and produces unidiomatic code. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promise in producing idiomatic translations, but offer no correctness guarantees as they lack the ability to capture all the semantics differences between the source and target languages. To resolve this issue, we propose SACTOR, an LLM-driven C-to-Rust zero-shot translation tool using a two-step translation methodology: an "unidiomatic" step to translate C into Rust while preserving semantics, and an "idiomatic" step to refine the code to follow Rust's semantic standards. SACTOR utilizes information provided by static analysis of the source C program to address challenges such as pointer semantics and dependency resolution. To validate the correctness of the translated result from each step, we use end-to-end testing via the foreign function interface to embed our translated code segment into the original code. We evaluate the translation of 200 programs from two datasets and two case studies, comparing the performance of GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B and DeepSeek-R1 in SACTOR. Our results demonstrate that SACTOR achieves high correctness and improved idiomaticity, with the best-performing model (DeepSeek-R1) reaching 93% and (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, DeepSeek-R1) reaching 84% correctness (on each dataset, respectively), while producing more natural and Rust-compliant translations compared to existing methods.

Paperid: 5160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10697.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models are widely used in visual content creation. However, current text-to-image models often face challenges in practical applications-such as textile pattern design and meme generation-due to the presence of unwanted elements that are difficult to separate with existing methods. Meanwhile, subject-reference generation has emerged as a key research trend, highlighting the need for techniques that can produce clean, high-quality subject images while effectively removing extraneous components. To address this challenge, we introduce a framework for reliable subject-centric image generation. In this work, we propose an entropy-based feature-weighted fusion method to merge the informative cross-attention features obtained from each sampling step of the pretrained text-to-image model FLUX, enabling a precise mask prediction and subject-centric generation. Additionally, we have developed an agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that translates users' casual inputs into more descriptive prompts, leading to highly detailed image generation. Simultaneously, the agents extract primary elements of prompts to guide the entropy-based feature fusion, ensuring focused primary element generation without extraneous components. Experimental results and user studies demonstrate our methods generates high-quality subject-centric images, outperform existing methods or other possible pipelines, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 5161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10167.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While effective, these methods require labor-intensive prompt engineering, raising the question of whether reasoning can be induced without reliance on explicit prompts. In this work, we unlock the reasoning capabilities of LLMs without explicit prompting. Inspired by zero-shot CoT and CoT-decoding, we propose a novel decoding strategy that systematically nudges LLMs to continue reasoning, thereby preventing immature reasoning processes. Specifically, we monitor the model's generation and inject a designated phrase whenever it is likely to conclude its response prematurely, before completing the reasoning process. Our experimental evaluations on diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed strategy substantially improves LLM reasoning capabilities, highlighting the potential of decoding-based interventions as an alternative to traditional prompting techniques.

Paperid: 5162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09158.pdf

Abstract:
Video-based multimodal large language models (VMLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in cross-modal video understanding. However, their abilities in fine-grained face comprehension remain largely underexplored. Given its pivotal role in human-centric intelligence, developing VMLLMs for facial understanding holds a fundamental problem. To address this gap, we propose FaVChat, the first VMLLM specifically designed for fine-grained facial video understanding. To facilitate its training, we construct a large-scale facial video dataset comprising over 60k videos, with the majority annotated with 83 fine-grained facial attributes. These attributes are incorporated to enrich GPT-4o-generated captions, yielding 60k high-quality video-summary pairs and an additional 170k fine-grained question-answering (QA) pairs. To effectively capture rich facial clues, we propose a hybrid model architecture composed of a general visual encoder, a dedicated facial encoder, and a mixture-of-experts-enhanced adapter for adaptive fusion of multi-source visual features. To mitigate information loss during feature transformation, we extract multi-granularity representations from the facial encoder and integrate them into the subsequent LLM. This design enhances the model's ability to comprehend and respond to questions involving diverse levels of visual details. We employ a progressive training paradigm, transitioning from video summarization to a high-quality subset of video QA, gradually increasing task complexity to enhance the model's fine-grained visual perception. We conduct extensive zero-shot evaluation on a couple of public benchmarks, demonstrating that FaVChat consistently surpasses existing VMLLMs across multiple tasks.

Paperid: 5163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04930.pdf

Abstract:
We present HILGEN, a Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation approach that combines domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5. Our approach leverages UMLS's hierarchical structure to expand training data with related concepts, while incorporating contextual information from LLMs through targeted prompts aimed at automatically generating synthetic examples for sparsely occurring named entities. The performance of the HILGEN approach was evaluated across four biomedical NER datasets (MIMIC III, BC5CDR, NCBI-Disease, and Med-Mentions) using BERT-Large and DANN (Data Augmentation with Nearest Neighbor Classifier) models, applying various data generation strategies, including UMLS, GPT-3.5, and their best ensemble. For the BERT-Large model, incorporating UMLS led to an average F1 score improvement of 40.36%, while using GPT-3.5 resulted in a comparable average increase of 40.52%. The Best-Ensemble approach using BERT-Large achieved the highest improvement, with an average increase of 42.29%. DANN model's F1 score improved by 22.74% on average using the UMLS-only approach. The GPT-3.5-based method resulted in a 21.53% increase, and the Best-Ensemble DANN model showed a more notable improvement, with an average increase of 25.03%. Our proposed HILGEN approach improves NER performance in few-shot settings without requiring additional manually annotated data. Our experiments demonstrate that an effective strategy for optimizing biomedical NER is to combine biomedical knowledge curated in the past, such as the UMLS, and generative LLMs to create synthetic training instances. Our future research will focus on exploring additional innovative synthetic data generation strategies for further improving NER performance.

Paperid: 5164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02993.pdf

Abstract:
Bangla, a language spoken by over 300 million native speakers and ranked as the sixth most spoken language worldwide, presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to its complex morphological characteristics and limited resources. While recent Large Decoder Based models (LLMs), such as GPT, LLaMA, and DeepSeek, have demonstrated excellent performance across many NLP tasks, their effectiveness in Bangla remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we establish the first benchmark comparing decoder-based LLMs with classic encoder-based models for Zero-Shot Multi-Label Classification (Zero-Shot-MLC) task in Bangla. Our evaluation of 32 state-of-the-art models reveals that, existing so-called powerful encoders and decoders still struggle to achieve high accuracy on the Bangla Zero-Shot-MLC task, suggesting a need for more research and resources for Bangla NLP.

Paperid: 5165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02992.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), which focuses on finding collision-free paths for multiple robots, is crucial for applications ranging from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. Solving MAPF is NP-hard so learning-based approaches for MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep neural networks. Nonetheless, despite the community's continued efforts, all learning-based MAPF planners still rely on decentralized planning due to variability in the number of agents and map sizes. We have developed the first centralized learning-based policy for MAPF problem called RAILGUN. RAILGUN is not an agent-based policy but a map-based policy. By leveraging a CNN-based architecture, RAILGUN can generalize across different maps and handle any number of agents. We collect trajectories from rule-based methods to train our model in a supervised way. In experiments, RAILGUN outperforms most baseline methods and demonstrates great zero-shot generalization capabilities on various tasks, maps and agent numbers that were not seen in the training dataset.

Paperid: 5166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00861.pdf

Abstract:
With growing demand in media and social networks for personalized images, the need for advanced head-swapping techniques, integrating an entire head from the head image with the body from the body image, has increased. However, traditional head swapping methods heavily rely on face-centered cropped data with primarily frontal facing views, which limits their effectiveness in real world applications. Additionally, their masking methods, designed to indicate regions requiring editing, are optimized for these types of dataset but struggle to achieve seamless blending in complex situations, such as when the original data includes features like long hair extending beyond the masked area. To overcome these limitations and enhance adaptability in diverse and complex scenarios, we propose a novel head swapping method, HID, that is robust to images including the full head and the upper body, and handles from frontal to side views, while automatically generating context aware masks. For automatic mask generation, we introduce the IOMask, which enables seamless blending of the head and body, effectively addressing integration challenges. We further introduce the hair injection module to capture hair details with greater precision. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in head swapping, providing visually consistent and realistic results across a wide range of challenging conditions.

Paperid: 5167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00779.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling robotics data collection is critical to advancing general-purpose robots. Current approaches often rely on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We propose a novel data collection method that eliminates the need for robotics hardware by leveraging human video demonstrations. By training imitation learning policies on this human data, our approach enables zero-shot deployment on robots without collecting any robot-specific data. To bridge the embodiment gap between human and robot appearances, we utilize a data editing approach on the input observations that aligns the image distributions between training data on humans and test data on robots. Our method significantly reduces the cost of diverse data collection by allowing anyone with an RGBD camera to contribute. We demonstrate that our approach works in diverse, unseen environments and on varied tasks.

Paperid: 5168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00052.pdf

Abstract:
The training of deep learning models relies on a large amount of labeled data. However, the high cost of medical labeling seriously hinders the development of deep learning in the medical field. Our study proposes a general disease diagnosis approach based on Zero-Shot Learning. The Siamese neural network is used to find similar diseases for the target diseases, and the U-Net segmentation model is used to accurately segment the key lesions of the disease. Finally, based on the ResNet-Agglomerative clustering algorithm, a clustering model is trained on a large number of sample data of similar diseases to obtain a approximate diagnosis of the target disease. Zero-Shot Learning of the target disease is then successfully achieved. To evaluate the validity of the model, we validated our method on a dataset of ophthalmic diseases in CFP modality. The external dataset was used to test its performance, and the accuracy=0.8395, precision=0.8094, recall=0.8463, F1 Score=0.8274, AUC=0.9226, which exceeded the indexes of most Few-Shot Learning and One-Shot Learning models. It proves that our method has great potential and reference value in the medical field, where annotation data is usually scarce and expensive to obtain.

Paperid: 5169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20826.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images by integrating information from a composed query (reference image and modification text) without training samples. Existing methods primarily combine caption models and large language models (LLMs) to generate target captions based on composed queries but face various issues such as incompatibility, visual information loss, and insufficient reasoning. In this work, we propose CoTMR, a training-free framework crafted for ZS-CIR with novel Chain-of-thought (CoT) and Multi-scale Reasoning. Instead of relying on caption models for modality transformation, CoTMR employs the Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to achieve unified understanding and reasoning for composed queries. To enhance the reasoning reliability, we devise CIRCoT, which guides the LVLM through a step-by-step inference process using predefined subtasks. Considering that existing approaches focus solely on global-level reasoning, our CoTMR incorporates multi-scale reasoning to achieve more comprehensive inference via fine-grained predictions about the presence or absence of key elements at the object scale. Further, we design a Multi-Grained Scoring (MGS) mechanism, which integrates CLIP similarity scores of the above reasoning outputs with candidate images to realize precise retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CoTMR not only drastically outperforms previous methods across four prominent benchmarks but also offers appealing interpretability.

Paperid: 5170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20596.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction is a crucial challenge for enabling AI systems to identify and adapt to evolving relationships in dynamic real-world domains. Traditional memory-based approaches often overfit to limited samples, failing to reinforce old knowledge, with the scarcity of data in few-shot scenarios further exacerbating these issues by hindering effective data augmentation in the latent space. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval-based solution, starting with a large language model to generate descriptions for each relation. From these descriptions, we introduce a bi-encoder retrieval training paradigm to enrich both sample and class representation learning. Leveraging these enhanced representations, we design a retrieval-based prediction method where each sample "retrieves" the best fitting relation via a reciprocal rank fusion score that integrates both relation description vectors and class prototypes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state-of-the-art by maintaining robust performance across sequential tasks, effectively addressing catastrophic forgetting.

Paperid: 5171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20339.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements have demonstrated that the performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly enhanced by scaling computational resources at test time. A common strategy involves generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories and aggregating their outputs through various selection mechanisms. This raises a fundamental question: can models with lower complexity leverage their superior generation throughput to outperform similarly sized Transformers for a fixed computational budget? To address this question and overcome the lack of strong subquadratic reasoners, we distill pure and hybrid Mamba models from pretrained Transformers. Trained on only 8 billion tokens, our distilled models show strong performance and scaling on mathematical reasoning datasets while being much faster at inference for large batches and long sequences. Despite the zero-shot performance hit due to distillation, both pure and hybrid Mamba models can scale their coverage and accuracy performance past their Transformer teacher models under fixed time budgets, opening a new direction for scaling inference compute.

Paperid: 5172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18822.pdf

Abstract:
In this project, our goal is to determine how to leverage the world-knowledge of pretrained large language models for efficient and robust learning in multiagent decision making. We examine this in a taxi routing and assignment problem where agents must decide how to best pick up passengers in order to minimize overall waiting time. While this problem is situated on a graphical road network, we show that with the proper prompting zero-shot performance is quite strong on this task. Furthermore, with limited fine-tuning along with the one-at-a-time rollout algorithm for look ahead, LLMs can out-compete existing approaches with 50 times fewer environmental interactions. We also explore the benefits of various linguistic prompting approaches and show that including certain easy-to-compute information in the prompt significantly improves performance. Finally, we highlight the LLM's built-in semantic understanding, showing its ability to adapt to environmental factors through simple prompts.

Paperid: 5173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17066.pdf

Abstract:
Significant efforts have been directed towards adapting self-supervised multimodal learning for Earth observation applications. However, most current methods produce coarse patch-sized embeddings, limiting their effectiveness and integration with other modalities like LiDAR. To close this gap, we present DUNIA, an approach to learn pixel-sized embeddings through cross-modal alignment between images and full-waveform LiDAR data. As the model is trained in a contrastive manner, the embeddings can be directly leveraged in the context of a variety of environmental monitoring tasks in a zero-shot setting. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the embeddings for seven such tasks: canopy height mapping, fractional canopy cover, land cover mapping, tree species identification, plant area index, crop type classification, and per-pixel waveform-based vertical structure mapping. The results show that the embeddings, along with zero-shot classifiers, often outperform specialized supervised models, even in low-data regimes. In the fine-tuning setting, we show strong performances near or better than the state-of-the-art on five out of six tasks.

Paperid: 5174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16839.pdf

Abstract:
During crises, social media serves as a crucial coordination tool, but the vast influx of posts--from "actionable" requests and offers to generic content like emotional support, behavioural guidance, or outdated information--complicates effective classification. Although generative LLMs (Large Language Models) can address this issue with few-shot classification, their high computational demands limit real-time crisis response. While fine-tuning encoder-only models (e.g., BERT) is a popular choice, these models still exhibit higher inference times in resource-constrained environments. Moreover, although distilled variants (e.g., DistilBERT) exist, they are not tailored for the crisis domain. To address these challenges, we make two key contributions. First, we present CrisisHelpOffer, a novel dataset of 101k tweets collaboratively labelled by generative LLMs and validated by humans, specifically designed to distinguish actionable content from noise. Second, we introduce the first crisis-specific mini models optimized for deployment in resource-constrained settings. Across 13 crisis classification tasks, our mini models surpass BERT (also outperform or match the performance of RoBERTa, MPNet, and BERTweet), offering higher accuracy with significantly smaller sizes and faster speeds. The Medium model is 47% smaller with 3.8% higher accuracy at 3.5x speed, the Small model is 68% smaller with a 1.8% accuracy gain at 7.7x speed, and the Tiny model, 83% smaller, matches BERT's accuracy at 18.6x speed. All models outperform existing distilled variants, setting new benchmarks. Finally, as a case study, we analyze social media posts from a global crisis to explore help-seeking and assistance-offering behaviours in selected developing and developed countries.

Paperid: 5175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15979.pdf

Abstract:
Existing zero-shot product attribute value (aspect) extraction approaches in e-Commerce industry rely on uni-modal or multi-modal models, where the sellers are asked to provide detailed textual inputs (product descriptions) for the products. However, manually providing (typing) the product descriptions is time-consuming and frustrating for the sellers. Thus, we propose a cross-modal zero-shot attribute value generation framework (ViOC-AG) based on CLIP, which only requires product images as the inputs. ViOC-AG follows a text-only training process, where a task-customized text decoder is trained with the frozen CLIP text encoder to alleviate the modality gap and task disconnection. During the zero-shot inference, product aspects are generated by the frozen CLIP image encoder connected with the trained task-customized text decoder. OCR tokens and outputs from a frozen prompt-based LLM correct the decoded outputs for out-of-domain attribute values. Experiments show that ViOC-AG significantly outperforms other fine-tuned vision-language models for zero-shot attribute value extraction.

Paperid: 5176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15418.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health remains a challenging problem all over the world, with issues like depression, anxiety becoming increasingly common. Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen a vast application in healthcare, specifically in answering medical questions. However, there is a lack of standard benchmarking datasets for question answering (QA) in mental health. Our work presents a novel multiple choice dataset, MHQA (Mental Health Question Answering), for benchmarking Language models (LMs). Previous mental health datasets have focused primarily on text classification into specific labels or disorders. MHQA, on the other hand, presents question-answering for mental health focused on four key domains: anxiety, depression, trauma, and obsessive/compulsive issues, with diverse question types, namely, factoid, diagnostic, prognostic, and preventive. We use PubMed abstracts as the primary source for QA. We develop a rigorous pipeline for LLM-based identification of information from abstracts based on various selection criteria and converting it into QA pairs. Further, valid QA pairs are extracted based on post-hoc validation criteria. Overall, our MHQA dataset consists of 2,475 expert-verified gold standard instances called MHQA-gold and ~56.1k pairs pseudo labeled using external medical references. We report F1 scores on different LLMs along with few-shot and supervised fine-tuning experiments, further discussing the insights for the scores.

Paperid: 5177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13566.pdf

Abstract:
We performed a zero-shot information extraction study on a historical collection of 89,339 brief Finnish-language interviews of refugee families relocated post-WWII from Finnish Eastern Karelia. Our research objective is two-fold. First, we aim to extract social organizations and hobbies from the free text of the interviews, separately for each family member. These can act as a proxy variable indicating the degree of social integration of refugees in their new environment. Second, we aim to evaluate several alternative ways to approach this task, comparing a number of generative models and a supervised learning approach, to gain a broader insight into the relative merits of these different approaches and their applicability in similar studies. We find that the best generative model (GPT-4) is roughly on par with human performance, at an F-score of 88.8%. Interestingly, the best open generative model (Llama-3-70B-Instruct) reaches almost the same performance, at 87.7% F-score, demonstrating that open models are becoming a viable alternative for some practical tasks even on non-English data. Additionally, we test a supervised learning alternative, where we fine-tune a Finnish BERT model (FinBERT) using GPT-4 generated training data. By this method, we achieved an F-score of 84.1% already with 6K interviews up to an F-score of 86.3% with 30k interviews. Such an approach would be particularly appealing in cases where the computational resources are limited, or there is a substantial mass of data to process.

Paperid: 5178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12752.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in Novel View Synthesis (NVS), generating high-fidelity views from single or sparse observations remains a significant challenge. Existing splatting-based approaches often produce distorted geometry due to splatting errors. While diffusion-based methods leverage rich 3D priors to achieve improved geometry, they often suffer from texture hallucination. In this paper, we introduce SplatDiff, a pixel-splatting-guided video diffusion model designed to synthesize high-fidelity novel views from a single image. Specifically, we propose an aligned synthesis strategy for precise control of target viewpoints and geometry-consistent view synthesis. To mitigate texture hallucination, we design a texture bridge module that enables high-fidelity texture generation through adaptive feature fusion. In this manner, SplatDiff leverages the strengths of splatting and diffusion to generate novel views with consistent geometry and high-fidelity details. Extensive experiments verify the state-of-the-art performance of SplatDiff in single-view NVS. Additionally, without extra training, SplatDiff shows remarkable zero-shot performance across diverse tasks, including sparse-view NVS and stereo video conversion.

Paperid: 5179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11504.pdf

Abstract:
Simulation and optimization are crucial for advancing the engineering design of complex systems and processes. Traditional optimization methods require substantial computational time and effort due to their reliance on resource-intensive simulations, such as finite element analysis, and the complexity of rigorous optimization algorithms. Data-agnostic AI-based surrogate models, such as Physics-Informed Neural Operators (PINOs), offer a promising alternative to these conventional simulations, providing drastically reduced inference time, unparalleled data efficiency, and zero-shot super-resolution capability. However, the predictive accuracy of these models is often constrained to small, low-dimensional design spaces or systems with relatively simple dynamics. To address this, we introduce a novel Physics-Informed DeepONet (PIDON) architecture, which extends the capabilities of conventional neural operators to effectively model the nonlinear behavior of complex engineering systems across high-dimensional design spaces and a wide range of dynamic design configurations. This new architecture outperforms existing SOTA models, enabling better predictions across broader design spaces. Leveraging PIDON's differentiability, we integrate a gradient-based optimization approach using the Adam optimizer to efficiently determine optimal design variables. This forms an end-to-end gradient-based optimization framework that accelerates the design process while enhancing scalability and efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in the optimization of aerospace-grade composites curing processes achieving a 3x speedup in obtaining optimal design variables compared to gradient-free methods. Beyond composites processing, the proposed model has the potential to be used as a scalable and efficient optimization tool for broader applications in advanced engineering and digital twin systems.

Paperid: 5180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07834.pdf

Abstract:
The implementation of Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) on In-Memory Computing (IMC) architectures faces significant challenges due to the mismatch between highdimensional vectors and IMC array sizes, leading to inefficient memory utilization and increased computation cycles. This paper presents MEMHD, a Memory-Efficient Multi-centroid HDC framework designed to address these challenges. MEMHD introduces a clustering-based initialization method and quantization aware iterative learning for multi-centroid associative memory. Through these approaches and its overall architecture, MEMHD achieves a significant reduction in memory requirements while maintaining or improving classification accuracy. Our approach achieves full utilization of IMC arrays and enables one-shot (or few-shot) associative search. Experimental results demonstrate that MEMHD outperforms state-of-the-art binary HDC models, achieving up to 13.69% higher accuracy with the same memory usage, or 13.25x more memory efficiency at the same accuracy level. Moreover, MEMHD reduces computation cycles by up to 80x and array usage by up to 71x compared to baseline IMC mapping methods when mapped to 128x128 IMC arrays, while significantly improving energy and computation cycle efficiency.

Paperid: 5181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02741.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), a prompt-driven foundation model extending SAM to both image and video domains, has shown superior zero-shot performance compared to its predecessor. Building on SAM's success in medical image segmentation, SAM 2 presents significant potential for further advancement. However, similar to SAM, SAM 2 is limited by its output of binary masks, inability to infer semantic labels, and dependence on precise prompts for the target object area. Additionally, direct application of SAM and SAM 2 to medical image segmentation tasks yields suboptimal results. In this paper, we explore the upper performance limit of SAM 2 using custom fine-tuning adapters, achieving a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 92.30% on the BTCV dataset, surpassing the state-of-the-art nnUNet by 12%. Following this, we address the prompt dependency by investigating various prompt generators. We introduce a UNet to autonomously generate predicted masks and bounding boxes, which serve as input to SAM 2. Subsequent dual-stage refinements by SAM 2 further enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the AMOS2022 dataset, with a Dice improvement of 2.9% compared to nnUNet, and outperforms nnUNet by 6.4% on the BTCV dataset.

Paperid: 5182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00630.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance and brought a range of unexplored capabilities to natural image segmentation tasks. However, as a very important branch of image segmentation, the performance of SAM remains uncertain when applied to medical image segmentation due to the significant differences between natural images and medical images. Meanwhile, it is harsh to meet the SAM's requirements of extra prompts provided, such as points or boxes to specify medical regions. In this paper, we propose a novel self-prompt SAM adaptation framework for medical image segmentation, named Self-Prompt-SAM. We design a multi-scale prompt generator combined with the image encoder in SAM to generate auxiliary masks. Then, we use the auxiliary masks to generate bounding boxes as box prompts and use Distance Transform to select the most central points as point prompts. Meanwhile, we design a 3D depth-fused adapter (DfusedAdapter) and inject the DFusedAdapter into each transformer in the image encoder and mask decoder to enable pre-trained 2D SAM models to extract 3D information and adapt to 3D medical images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms nnUNet by 2.3% on AMOS2022, 1.6% on ACDCand 0.5% on Synapse datasets.

Paperid: 5183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19085.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automated code generation. LLMs rely on large and diverse datasets to learn syntax, semantics, and usage patterns of programming languages. For low-resource languages (i.e., niche programming languages characterized by the scarcity of training data), the limited availability of such data hampers the models' ability to generalize effectively, resulting in poorer code generation performance as compared to high-resource languages. For this reason, there is a quest for techniques able to close this performance gap. We present an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of several approaches for boosting LLMs' performance on low-resource languages, namely: (i) a classic fine-tuning, which is however capped in size by the scarcity of training data; (ii) three variants of in-context learning, with prompts crafted to provide the LLM with additional information about the low-resource language (e.g., few-shot examples showcasing features of the targeted language); and (iii) a pre-training objective teaching the model how to translate between high- and low-resource languages. The context of our study are two low-resource languages (R and Racket) and six LLMs having different architectures and sizes. Our findings reveal that a fine-tuning is usually the best choice for smaller LLMs, possibly due to the fact that even a small dataset is sufficient to train their limited number of parameters. With the increase in size of the models, in-context learning becomes more and more effective, representing a safe and cheap bet (i.e., it always helps, but with different magnitudes). Differently, very large LLMs may deteriorate their performance on low-resource languages when fine-tuning is performed, possibly due to the lack of enough data needed to effectively update their weights.

Paperid: 5184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16744.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a scalable Anomaly Detection Service with a generalizable API tailored for industrial time-series data, designed to assist Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) in managing cloud infrastructure. The service enables efficient anomaly detection in complex data streams, supporting proactive identification and resolution of issues. Furthermore, it presents an innovative approach to anomaly modeling in cloud infrastructure by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand key components, their failure modes, and behaviors. A suite of algorithms for detecting anomalies is offered in univariate and multivariate time series data, including regression-based, mixture-model-based, and semi-supervised approaches. We provide insights into the usage patterns of the service, with over 500 users and 200,000 API calls in a year. The service has been successfully applied in various industrial settings, including IoT-based AI applications. We have also evaluated our system on public anomaly benchmarks to show its effectiveness. By leveraging it, SREs can proactively identify potential issues before they escalate, reducing downtime and improving response times to incidents, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. We plan to extend the system to include time series foundation models, enabling zero-shot anomaly detection capabilities.

Paperid: 5185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16209.pdf

Abstract:
We train Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) surrogate models for Rayleigh-BÃ©nard Convection (RBC), a model for convection processes that occur in nature and industrial settings. We compare the prediction accuracy and model properties of FNO surrogates to two popular surrogates used in fluid dynamics: the Dynamic Mode Decomposition and the Linearly-Recurrent Autoencoder Network. We regard Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the RBC equations as the ground truth on which the models are trained and evaluated in different settings. The FNO performs favorably when compared to the DMD and LRAN and its predictions are fast and highly accurate for this task. Additionally, we show its zero-shot super-resolution ability for the convection dynamics. The FNO model has a high potential to be used in downstream tasks such as flow control in RBC.

Paperid: 5186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12370.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling the capacity of language models has consistently proven to be a reliable approach for improving performance and unlocking new capabilities. Capacity can be primarily defined by two dimensions: the number of model parameters and the compute per example. While scaling typically involves increasing both, the precise interplay between these factors and their combined contribution to overall capacity remains not fully understood. We explore this relationship in the context of sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs), which allow scaling the number of parameters without proportionally increasing the FLOPs per example. We investigate how varying the sparsity level, i.e., the fraction of inactive parameters, impacts model's performance during pretraining and downstream few-shot evaluation. We find that under different constraints (e.g., parameter size and total training compute), there is an optimal level of sparsity that improves both training efficiency and model performance. These results provide a better understanding of the impact of sparsity in scaling laws for MoEs and complement existing works in this area, offering insights for designing more efficient architectures.

Paperid: 5187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10357.pdf

Abstract:
Large models have shown generalization across datasets for many low-level vision tasks, like depth estimation, but no such general models exist for scene flow. Even though scene flow has wide potential use, it is not used in practice because current predictive models do not generalize well. We identify three key challenges and propose solutions for each. First, we create a method that jointly estimates geometry and motion for accurate prediction. Second, we alleviate scene flow data scarcity with a data recipe that affords us 1M annotated training samples across diverse synthetic scenes. Third, we evaluate different parameterizations for scene flow prediction and adopt a natural and effective parameterization. Our resulting model outperforms existing methods as well as baselines built on large-scale models in terms of 3D end-point error, and shows zero-shot generalization to the casually captured videos from DAVIS and the robotic manipulation scenes from RoboTAP. Overall, our approach makes scene flow prediction more practical in-the-wild.

Paperid: 5188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10131.pdf

Abstract:
Medical images acquired from standardized protocols show consistent macroscopic or microscopic anatomical structures, and these structures consist of composable/decomposable organs and tissues, but existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods do not appreciate such composable/decomposable structure attributes inherent to medical images. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel SSL approach called ACE to learn anatomically consistent embedding via composition and decomposition with two key branches: (1) global consistency, capturing discriminative macro-structures via extracting global features; (2) local consistency, learning fine-grained anatomical details from composable/decomposable patch features via corresponding matrix matching. Experimental results across 6 datasets 2 backbones, evaluated in few-shot learning, fine-tuning, and property analysis, show ACE's superior robustness, transferability, and clinical potential. The innovations of our ACE lie in grid-wise image cropping, leveraging the intrinsic properties of compositionality and decompositionality of medical images, bridging the semantic gap from high-level pathologies to low-level tissue anomalies, and providing a new SSL method for medical imaging.

Paperid: 5189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03875.pdf

Abstract:
Stylizing a dynamic scene based on an exemplar image is critical for various real-world applications, including gaming, filmmaking, and augmented and virtual reality. However, achieving consistent stylization across both spatial and temporal dimensions remains a significant challenge. Most existing methods are designed for static scenes and often require an optimization process for each style image, limiting their adaptability. We introduce ZDySS, a zero-shot stylization framework for dynamic scenes, allowing our model to generalize to previously unseen style images at inference. Our approach employs Gaussian splatting for scene representation, linking each Gaussian to a learned feature vector that renders a feature map for any given view and timestamp. By applying style transfer on the learned feature vectors instead of the rendered feature map, we enhance spatio-temporal consistency across frames. Our method demonstrates superior performance and coherence over state-of-the-art baselines in tests on real-world dynamic scenes, making it a robust solution for practical applications.

Paperid: 5190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01723.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate depth estimation is crucial for many fields, including robotics, navigation, and medical imaging. However, conventional depth sensors often produce low-resolution (LR) depth maps, making detailed scene perception challenging. To address this, enhancing LR depth maps to high-resolution (HR) ones has become essential, guided by HR-structured inputs like RGB or grayscale images. We propose a novel sensor fusion methodology for guided depth super-resolution (GDSR), a technique that combines LR depth maps with HR images to estimate detailed HR depth maps. Our key contribution is the Incremental guided attention fusion (IGAF) module, which effectively learns to fuse features from RGB images and LR depth maps, producing accurate HR depth maps. Using IGAF, we build a robust super-resolution model and evaluate it on multiple benchmark datasets. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results compared to all baseline models on the NYU v2 dataset for $\times 4$, $\times 8$, and $\times 16$ upsampling. It also outperforms all baselines in a zero-shot setting on the Middlebury, Lu, and RGB-D-D datasets. Code, environments, and models are available on GitHub.

Paperid: 5191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00915.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning has demonstrated remarkable promise for solving the trajectory generation problem and in paving the way for online use of trajectory optimization for resource-constrained spacecraft. However, a key shortcoming in current machine learning-based methods for trajectory generation is that they require large datasets and even small changes to the original trajectory design requirements necessitate retraining new models to learn the parameter-to-solution mapping. In this work, we leverage compositional diffusion modeling to efficiently adapt out-of-distribution data and problem variations in a few-shot framework for 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) powered descent trajectory generation. Unlike traditional deep learning methods that can only learn the underlying structure of one specific trajectory optimization problem, diffusion models are a powerful generative modeling framework that represents the solution as a probability density function (PDF) and this allows for the composition of PDFs encompassing a variety of trajectory design specifications and constraints. We demonstrate the capability of compositional diffusion models for inference-time 6 DoF minimum-fuel landing site selection and composable constraint representations. Using these samples as initial guesses for 6 DoF powered descent guidance enables dynamically feasible and computationally efficient trajectory generation.

Paperid: 5192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00525.pdf

Abstract:
Surgery video segmentation is an important topic in the surgical AI field. It allows the AI model to understand the spatial information of a surgical scene. Meanwhile, due to the lack of annotated surgical data, surgery segmentation models suffer from limited performance. With the emergence of SAM2 model, a large foundation model for video segmentation trained on natural videos, zero-shot surgical video segmentation became more realistic but meanwhile remains to be explored. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the performance of SAM2 model in zero-shot surgery video segmentation task. We conducted experiments under different configurations, including different prompting strategies, robustness, etc. Moreover, we conducted an empirical evaluation over the performance, including 9 datasets with 17 different types of surgeries.

Paperid: 5193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18859.pdf

Abstract:
Numerous studies have explored image-based automated systems for plant disease diagnosis, demonstrating impressive diagnostic capabilities. However, recent large-scale analyses have revealed a critical limitation: that the diagnostic capability suffers significantly when validated on images captured in environments (domains) differing from those used during training. This shortfall stems from the inherently limited dataset size and the diverse manifestation of disease symptoms, combined with substantial variations in cultivation environments and imaging conditions, such as equipment and composition. These factors lead to insufficient variety in training data, ultimately constraining the system's robustness and generalization. To address these challenges, we propose Few-shot Metric Domain Adaptation (FMDA), a flexible and effective approach for enhancing diagnostic accuracy in practical systems, even when only limited target data is available. FMDA reduces domain discrepancies by introducing a constraint to the diagnostic model that minimizes the "distance" between feature spaces of source (training) data and target data with limited samples. FMDA is computationally efficient, requiring only basic feature distance calculations and backpropagation, and can be seamlessly integrated into any machine learning (ML) pipeline. In large-scale experiments, involving 223,015 leaf images across 20 fields and 3 crop species, FMDA achieved F1 score improvements of 11.1 to 29.3 points compared to cases without target data, using only 10 images per disease from the target domain. Moreover, FMDA consistently outperformed fine-tuning methods utilizing the same data, with an average improvement of 8.5 points.

Paperid: 5194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16334.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised visual foundation models produce powerful embeddings that achieve remarkable performance on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, unlike vision-language models such as CLIP, self-supervised visual features are not readily aligned with language, hindering their adoption in open-vocabulary tasks. Our method, named dino.txt, unlocks this new ability for DINOv2, a widely used self-supervised visual encoder. We build upon the LiT training strategy, which trains a text encoder to align with a frozen vision model but leads to unsatisfactory results on dense tasks. We propose several key ingredients to improve performance on both global and dense tasks, such as concatenating the [CLS] token with the patch average to train the alignment and curating data using both text and image modalities. With these, we successfully train a CLIP-like model with only a fraction of the computational cost compared to CLIP while achieving state-of-the-art results in zero-shot classification and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 5195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16215.pdf

Abstract:
We present a scalable and agile approach for ads image content moderation at Google, addressing the challenges of moderating massive volumes of ads with diverse content and evolving policies. The proposed method utilizes human-curated textual descriptions and cross-modal text-image co-embeddings to enable zero-shot classification of policy violating ads images, bypassing the need for extensive supervised training data and human labeling. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and user expertise, the system generates and refines a comprehensive set of textual descriptions representing policy guidelines. During inference, co-embedding similarity between incoming images and the textual descriptions serves as a reliable signal for policy violation detection, enabling efficient and adaptable ads content moderation. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficacy of this framework in significantly boosting the detection of policy violating content.

Paperid: 5196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15714.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel mobile sensing application - life journaling - designed to generate semantic descriptions of users' daily lives. We present AutoLife, an automatic life journaling system based on commercial smartphones. AutoLife only inputs low-cost sensor data (without photos or audio) from smartphones and can automatically generate comprehensive life journals for users. To achieve this, we first derive time, motion, and location contexts from multimodal sensor data, and harness the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), enriched with commonsense knowledge about human lives, to interpret diverse contexts and generate life journals. To manage the task complexity and long sensing duration, a multilayer framework is proposed, which decomposes tasks and seamlessly integrates LLMs with other techniques for life journaling. This study establishes a real-life dataset as a benchmark and extensive experiment results demonstrate that AutoLife produces accurate and reliable life journals.

Paperid: 5197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13859.pdf

Abstract:
Classifying scanned documents is a challenging problem that involves image, layout, and text analysis for document understanding. Nevertheless, for certain benchmark datasets, notably RVL-CDIP, the state of the art is closing in to near-perfect performance when considering hundreds of thousands of training samples. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), which are excellent few-shot learners, the question arises to what extent the document classification problem can be addressed with only a few training samples, or even none at all. In this paper, we investigate this question in the context of zero-shot prompting and few-shot model fine-tuning, with the aim of reducing the need for human-annotated training samples as much as possible.

Paperid: 5198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12594.pdf

Abstract:
Large diffusion models have become mainstream generative models in both academic studies and industrial AIGC applications. Recently, a number of works further explored how to employ the power of large diffusion models as zero-shot classifiers. While recent zero-shot diffusion-based classifiers have made performance advancement on benchmark datasets, they still suffered badly from extremely slow classification speed (e.g., ~1000 seconds per classifying single image on ImageNet). The extremely slow classification speed strongly prohibits existing zero-shot diffusion-based classifiers from practical applications. In this paper, we propose an embarrassingly simple and efficient zero-shot Gaussian Diffusion Classifiers (GDC) via pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and DINOv2. The proposed GDC can not only significantly surpass previous zero-shot diffusion-based classifiers by over 10 points (61.40% - 71.44%) on ImageNet, but also accelerate more than 30000 times (1000 - 0.03 seconds) classifying a single image on ImageNet. Additionally, it provides probability interpretation of the results. Our extensive experiments further demonstrate that GDC can achieve highly competitive zero-shot classification performance over various datasets and can promisingly self-improve with stronger diffusion models. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed GDC is the first zero-shot diffusionbased classifier that exhibits both competitive accuracy and practical efficiency.

Paperid: 5199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12095.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Causal Diffusion as the autoregressive (AR) counterpart of Diffusion models. It is a next-token(s) forecasting framework that is friendly to both discrete and continuous modalities and compatible with existing next-token prediction models like LLaMA and GPT. While recent works attempt to combine diffusion with AR models, we show that introducing sequential factorization to a diffusion model can substantially improve its performance and enables a smooth transition between AR and diffusion generation modes. Hence, we propose CausalFusion - a decoder-only transformer that dual-factorizes data across sequential tokens and diffusion noise levels, leading to state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet generation benchmark while also enjoying the AR advantage of generating an arbitrary number of tokens for in-context reasoning. We further demonstrate CausalFusion's multimodal capabilities through a joint image generation and captioning model, and showcase CausalFusion's ability for zero-shot in-context image manipulations. We hope that this work could provide the community with a fresh perspective on training multimodal models over discrete and continuous data.

Paperid: 5200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12024.pdf

Abstract:
Learning navigation capabilities in different environments has long been one of the major challenges in decision-making. In this work, we focus on zero-shot navigation ability using given abstract $2$-D top-down maps. Like human navigation by reading a paper map, the agent reads the map as an image when navigating in a novel layout, after learning to navigate on a set of training maps. We propose a model-based reinforcement learning approach for this multi-task learning problem, where it jointly learns a hypermodel that takes top-down maps as input and predicts the weights of the transition network. We use the DeepMind Lab environment and customize layouts using generated maps. Our method can adapt better to novel environments in zero-shot and is more robust to noise.

Paperid: 5201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11998.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation is the problem of learning to identify specific types of objects (e.g., airplanes) in images from a small set of labeled reference images. The current state of the art is driven by resource-intensive construction of models for every new domain-specific application. Such models must be trained on enormous labeled datasets of unrelated objects (e.g., cars, trains, animals) so that their ``knowledge'' can be transferred to new types of objects. In this paper, we show how to leverage existing vision foundation models (VFMs) to reduce the incremental cost of creating few-shot segmentation models for new domains. Specifically, we introduce SAMIC, a small network that learns how to prompt VFMs in order to segment new types of objects in domain-specific applications. SAMIC enables any task to be approached as a few-shot learning problem. At 2.6 million parameters, it is 94% smaller than the leading models (e.g., having ResNet 101 backbone with 45+ million parameters). Even using 1/5th of the training data provided by one-shot benchmarks, SAMIC is competitive with, or sets the state of the art, on a variety of few-shot and semantic segmentation datasets including COCO-$20^i$, Pascal-$5^i$, PerSeg, FSS-1000, and NWPU VHR-10.

Paperid: 5202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11835.pdf

Abstract:
We present improved models for the granular detection and sub-classification news media bias in English news articles. We compare the performance of zero-shot versus fine-tuned large pre-trained neural transformer language models, explore how the level of detail of the classes affects performance on a novel taxonomy of 27 news bias-types, and demonstrate how using synthetically generated example data can be used to improve quality

Paperid: 5203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11017.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) addresses the challenges of evolving data distributions and the difficulty of data acquisition in real-world scenarios. To counteract the catastrophic forgetting typically encountered in FSCIL, knowledge distillation is employed as a way to maintain the knowledge from learned data distribution. Recognizing the limitations of generating discriminative feature representations in a few-shot context, our approach incorporates structural information between samples into knowledge distillation. This structural information serves as a remedy for the low quality of features. Diverging from traditional structured distillation methods that compute sample similarity, we introduce the Displacement Knowledge Distillation (DKD) method. DKD utilizes displacement rather than similarity between samples, incorporating both distance and angular information to significantly enhance the information density retained through knowledge distillation. Observing performance disparities in feature distribution between base and novel classes, we propose the Dual Distillation Network (DDNet). This network applies traditional knowledge distillation to base classes and DKD to novel classes, challenging the conventional integration of novel classes with base classes. Additionally, we implement an instance-aware sample selector during inference to dynamically adjust dual branch weights, thereby leveraging the complementary strengths of each approach. Extensive testing on three benchmarks demonstrates that DDNet achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, through rigorous experimentation and comparison, we establish the robustness and general applicability of our proposed DKD method.

Paperid: 5204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10582.pdf

Abstract:
WHAT-IF -- Writing a Hero's Alternate Timeline through Interactive Fiction -- is a system that uses zero-shot meta-prompting to create branching narratives from a prewritten story. Played as an interactive fiction (IF) game, WHAT-IF lets the player choose between decisions that the large language model (LLM) GPT-4 generates as possible branches in the story. Starting with an existing linear plot as input, a branch is created at each key decision taken by the main character. By meta-prompting the LLM to consider the major plot points from the story, the system produces coherent and well-structured alternate storylines. WHAT-IF stores the branching plot tree in a graph which helps it to both keep track of the story for prompting and maintain the structure for the final IF system. A video demo of our system can be found here: https://youtu.be/8vBqjqtupcc.

Paperid: 5205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09895.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR) requires collaborative multi-modal spatiotemporal understanding. However, finetuning CLIP directly for ZSAR yields suboptimal performance, given its inherent constraints in capturing essential temporal dynamics from both vision and text perspectives, especially when encountering novel actions with fine-grained spatiotemporal discrepancies. In this work, we propose Spatiotemporal Dynamic Duo (STDD), a novel CLIP-based framework to comprehend multi-modal spatiotemporal dynamics synergistically. For the vision side, we propose an efficient Space-time Cross Attention, which captures spatiotemporal dynamics flexibly with simple yet effective operations applied before and after spatial attention, without adding additional parameters or increasing computational complexity. For the semantic side, we conduct spatiotemporal text augmentation by comprehensively constructing an Action Semantic Knowledge Graph (ASKG) to derive nuanced text prompts. The ASKG elaborates on static and dynamic concepts and their interrelations, based on the idea of decomposing actions into spatial appearances and temporal motions. During the training phase, the frame-level video representations are meticulously aligned with prompt-level nuanced text representations, which are concurrently regulated by the video representations from the frozen CLIP to enhance generalizability. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, which consistently surpasses state-of-the-art approaches on popular video benchmarks (i.e., Kinetics-600, UCF101, and HMDB51) under challenging ZSAR settings.

Paperid: 5206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04193.pdf

Abstract:
Dialectal Arabic (DA) varieties are under-served by language technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs). This trend threatens to exacerbate existing social inequalities and limits LLM applications, yet the research community lacks operationalized performance measurements in DA. We present a framework that comprehensively assesses LLMs' DA modeling capabilities across four dimensions: fidelity, understanding, quality, and diglossia. We evaluate nine LLMs in eight DA varieties and provide practical recommendations. Our evaluation suggests that LLMs do not produce DA as well as they understand it, not because their DA fluency is poor, but because they are reluctant to generate DA. Further analysis suggests that current post-training can contribute to bias against DA, that few-shot examples can overcome this deficiency, and that otherwise no measurable features of input text correlate well with LLM DA performance.

Paperid: 5207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03782.pdf

Abstract:
The ability of language models to learn a task from a few examples in context has generated substantial interest. Here, we provide a perspective that situates this type of supervised few-shot learning within a much broader spectrum of meta-learned in-context learning. Indeed, we suggest that any distribution of sequences in which context non-trivially decreases loss on subsequent predictions can be interpreted as eliciting a kind of in-context learning. We suggest that this perspective helps to unify the broad set of in-context abilities that language models exhibit -- such as adapting to tasks from instructions or role play, or extrapolating time series. This perspective also sheds light on potential roots of in-context learning in lower-level processing of linguistic dependencies (e.g. coreference or parallel structures). Finally, taking this perspective highlights the importance of generalization, which we suggest can be studied along several dimensions: not only the ability to learn something novel, but also flexibility in learning from different presentations, and in applying what is learned. We discuss broader connections to past literature in meta-learning and goal-conditioned agents, and other perspectives on learning and adaptation. We close by suggesting that research on in-context learning should consider this broader spectrum of in-context capabilities and types of generalization.

Paperid: 5208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01130.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced autonomous agents, particularly in zero-shot tool usage, also known as function calling. This research delves into enhancing the function-calling capabilities of LLMs by exploring different approaches, including prompt formats for integrating function descriptions, blending function-calling and instruction-following data, introducing a novel Decision Token for conditional prompts, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning, and overcoming multilingual challenges with a translation pipeline. Our key findings and contributions are as follows: (1) Instruction-following data improves both function-calling accuracy and relevance detection. (2) The use of the newly proposed Decision Token, combined with synthetic non-function-call data, enhances relevance detection. (3) A tailored translation pipeline effectively overcomes multilingual limitations, demonstrating significant improvements in Traditional Chinese. These insights highlight the potential for improved function-calling capabilities and multilingual applications in LLMs.

Paperid: 5209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14975.pdf

Abstract:
Cytology slides are essential tools in diagnosing and staging cancer, but their analysis is time-consuming and costly. Foundation models have shown great potential to assist in these tasks. In this paper, we explore how existing foundation models can be applied to cytological classification. More particularly, we focus on low-rank adaptation, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method suited to few-shot learning. We evaluated five foundation models across four cytological classification datasets. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning the pre-trained backbones with LoRA significantly improves model performance compared to fine-tuning only the classifier head, achieving state-of-the-art results on both simple and complex classification tasks while requiring fewer data samples.

Paperid: 5210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09145.pdf

Abstract:
Egocentric videos provide valuable insights into human interactions with the physical world, which has sparked growing interest in the computer vision and robotics communities. A critical challenge in fully understanding the geometry and dynamics of egocentric videos is dense scene reconstruction. However, the lack of high-quality labeled datasets in this field has hindered the effectiveness of current supervised learning methods. In this work, we aim to address this issue by exploring an self-supervised dynamic scene reconstruction approach. We introduce EgoMono4D, a novel model that unifies the estimation of multiple variables necessary for Egocentric Monocular 4D reconstruction, including camera intrinsic, camera poses, and video depth, all within a fast feed-forward framework. Starting from pretrained single-frame depth and intrinsic estimation model, we extend it with camera poses estimation and align multi-frame results on large-scale unlabeled egocentric videos. We evaluate EgoMono4D in both in-domain and zero-shot generalization settings, achieving superior performance in dense pointclouds sequence reconstruction compared to all baselines. EgoMono4D represents the first attempt to apply self-supervised learning for pointclouds sequence reconstruction to the label-scarce egocentric field, enabling fast, dense, and generalizable reconstruction. The interactable visualization, code and trained models are released https://egomono4d.github.io/

Paperid: 5211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08785.pdf

Abstract:
The majority of previous researches addressing multi-lingual IE are limited to zero-shot cross-lingual single-transfer (one-to-one) setting, with high-resource languages predominantly as source training data. As a result, these works provide little understanding and benefit for the realistic goal of developing a multi-lingual IE system that can generalize to as many languages as possible. Our study aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed analysis on Cross-Lingual Multi-Transferability (many-to-many transfer learning), for the recent IE corpora that cover a diverse set of languages. Specifically, we first determine the correlation between single-transfer performance and a wide range of linguistic-based distances. From the obtained insights, a combined language distance metric can be developed that is not only highly correlated but also robust across different tasks and model scales. Next, we investigate the more general zero-shot multi-lingual transfer settings where multiple languages are involved in the training and evaluation processes. Language clustering based on the newly defined distance can provide directions for achieving the optimal cost-performance trade-off in data (languages) selection problem. Finally, a relational-transfer setting is proposed to further incorporate multi-lingual unlabeled data based on adversarial training using the relation induced from the above linguistic distance.

Paperid: 5212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07848.pdf

Abstract:
Large scale scenes such as multifloor homes can be robustly and efficiently mapped with a 3D graph of landmarks estimated jointly with robot poses in a factor graph, a technique commonly used in commercial robots such as drones and robot vacuums. In this work, we propose Language-Inferred Factor Graph for Instruction Following (LIFGIF), a zero-shot method to ground natural language instructions in such a map. LIFGIF also includes a policy for following natural language navigation instructions in a novel environment while the map is constructed, enabling robust navigation performance in the physical world. To evaluate LIFGIF, we present a new dataset, Object-Centric VLN (OC-VLN), in order to evaluate grounding of object-centric natural language navigation instructions. We compare to two state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines from related tasks, Object Goal Navigation and Vision Language Navigation, to demonstrate that LIFGIF outperforms them across all our evaluation metrics on OCVLN. Finally, we successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of LIFGIF for performing zero-shot object-centric instruction following in the real world on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot.

Paperid: 5213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00150.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot domain adaptation for dialogue state tracking (DST) remains a challenging problem in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, where models must generalize to target domains unseen at training time. Current large language model approaches for zero-shot domain adaptation rely on prompting to introduce knowledge pertaining to the target domains. However, their efficacy strongly depends on prompt engineering, as well as the zero-shot ability of the underlying language model. In this work, we devise a novel data augmentation approach, Schema Augmentation, that improves the zero-shot domain adaptation of language models through fine-tuning. Schema Augmentation is a simple but effective technique that enhances generalization by introducing variations of slot names within the schema provided in the prompt. Experiments on MultiWOZ and SpokenWOZ showed that the proposed approach resulted in a substantial improvement over the baseline, in some experiments achieving over a twofold accuracy gain over unseen domains while maintaining equal or superior performance over all domains.

Paperid: 5214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15484.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of large language models (LLMs) for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) has kindled a need for prompt-response, document-based datasets. As annotating new datasets from scratch is labor-intensive, the existing literature has generated prompt-response datasets from available resources using simple templates. For the case of key information extraction (KIE), one of the most common VRDU tasks, past work has typically employed the template "What is the value for the {key}?". However, given the variety of questions encountered in the wild, simple and uniform templates are insufficient for creating robust models in research and industrial contexts. In this work, we present K2Q, a diverse collection of five datasets converted from KIE to a prompt-response format using a plethora of bespoke templates. The questions in K2Q can span multiple entities and be extractive or boolean. We empirically compare the performance of seven baseline generative models on K2Q with zero-shot prompting. We further compare three of these models when training on K2Q versus training on simpler templates to motivate the need of our work. We find that creating diverse and intricate KIE questions enhances the performance and robustness of VRDU models. We hope this work encourages future studies on data quality for generative model training.

Paperid: 5215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14749.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot and continual learning face two well-known challenges in GANs: overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. Learning new tasks results in catastrophic forgetting in deep learning models. In the case of a few-shot setting, the model learns from a very limited number of samples (e.g. 10 samples), which can lead to overfitting and mode collapse. So, this paper proposes a Continual Few-shot Teacher-Student technique for the generative adversarial network (CFTS-GAN) that considers both challenges together. Our CFTS-GAN uses an adapter module as a student to learn a new task without affecting the previous knowledge. To make the student model efficient in learning new tasks, the knowledge from a teacher model is distilled to the student. In addition, the Cross-Domain Correspondence (CDC) loss is used by both teacher and student to promote diversity and to avoid mode collapse. Moreover, an effective strategy of freezing the discriminator is also utilized for enhancing performance. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate more diverse image synthesis and produce qualitative samples comparatively good to very stronger state-of-the-art models.

Paperid: 5216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13153.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of data, enabling their application across diverse domains and tasks. Despite their remarkable performance, most LLMs are developed and evaluated primarily in English. Recently, a few multi-lingual LLMs have emerged, but their performance in low-resource languages, especially the most spoken languages in South Asia, is less explored. To address this gap, in this study, we evaluate LLMs such as GPT-4, Llama 2, and Gemini to analyze their effectiveness in English compared to other low-resource languages from South Asia (e.g., Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu). Specifically, we utilized zero-shot prompting and five different prompt settings to extensively investigate the effectiveness of the LLMs in cross-lingual translated prompts. The findings of the study suggest that GPT-4 outperformed Llama 2 and Gemini in all five prompt settings and across all languages. Moreover, all three LLMs performed better for English language prompts than other low-resource language prompts. This study extensively investigates LLMs in low-resource language contexts to highlight the improvements required in LLMs and language-specific resources to develop more generally purposed NLP applications.

Paperid: 5217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10227.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Learning (FSL) aims to recognize new classes with limited labeled data. Recent studies have attempted to address the challenge of rare samples with textual prompts to modulate visual features. However, they usually struggle to capture complex semantic relationships between textual and visual features. Moreover, vanilla self-attention is heavily affected by useless information in images, severely constraining the potential of semantic priors in FSL due to the confusion of numerous irrelevant tokens during interaction. To address these aforementioned issues, a K-NN Transformer with Pyramid Prompts (KTPP) is proposed to select discriminative information with K-NN Context Attention (KCA) and adaptively modulate visual features with Pyramid Cross-modal Prompts (PCP). First, for each token, the KCA only selects the K most relevant tokens to compute the self-attention matrix and incorporates the mean of all tokens as the context prompt to provide the global context in three cascaded stages. As a result, irrelevant tokens can be progressively suppressed. Secondly, pyramid prompts are introduced in the PCP to emphasize visual features via interactions between text-based class-aware prompts and multi-scale visual features. This allows the ViT to dynamically adjust the importance weights of visual features based on rich semantic information at different scales, making models robust to spatial variations. Finally, augmented visual features and class-aware prompts are interacted via the KCA to extract class-specific features. Consequently, our model further enhances noise-free visual representations via deep cross-modal interactions, extracting generalized visual representation in scenarios with few labeled samples. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Paperid: 5218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09329.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches to zero-shot commonsense reasoning have enabled Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to learn a broad range of commonsense knowledge without being tailored to specific situations. However, they often suffer from human reporting bias inherent in textual commonsense knowledge, leading to discrepancies in understanding between PLMs and humans. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing an additional information channel to PLMs. We propose Imagine (Machine Imagination-based Reasoning), a novel zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework designed to complement textual inputs with visual signals derived from machine-generated images. To achieve this, we enhance PLMs with imagination capabilities by incorporating an image generator into the reasoning process. To guide PLMs in effectively leveraging machine imagination, we create a synthetic pre-training dataset that simulates visual question-answering. Our extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks and analysis show that Imagine outperforms existing methods by a large margin, highlighting the strength of machine imagination in mitigating reporting bias and enhancing generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 5219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09123.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are instrumental in various real-world applications, yet they often suffer from incompleteness due to missing relations. To predict instances for novel relations with limited training examples, few-shot relation learning approaches have emerged, utilizing techniques such as meta-learning. However, the assumption is that novel relations in meta-testing and base relations in meta-training are independently and identically distributed, which may not hold in practice. To address the limitation, we propose RelAdapter, a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs designed to enhance the adaptation process in meta-learning. First, RelAdapter is equipped with a lightweight adapter module that facilitates relation-specific, tunable adaptation of meta-knowledge in a parameter-efficient manner. Second, RelAdapter is enriched with contextual information about the target relation, enabling enhanced adaptation to each distinct relation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark KGs validate the superiority of RelAdapter over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 5220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08711.pdf

Abstract:
Autoregressive decoder-only transformers have become key components for scalable sequence processing and generation models. However, the transformer's self-attention mechanism requires transferring prior token projections from the main memory at each time step (token), thus severely limiting their performance on conventional processors. Self-attention can be viewed as a dynamic feed-forward layer, whose matrix is input sequence-dependent similarly to the result of local synaptic plasticity. Using this insight, we present a neuromorphic decoder-only transformer model that utilizes an on-chip plasticity processor to compute self-attention. Interestingly, the training of transformers enables them to ``learn'' the input context during inference. We demonstrate this in-context learning ability of transformers on the Loihi 2 processor by solving a few-shot classification problem. With this we emphasize the importance of pretrained models especially their ability to find simple, local, backpropagation free, learning rules enabling on-chip learning and adaptation in a hardware friendly manner.

Paperid: 5221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06173.pdf

Abstract:
With the continuous development of pre-trained language models, prompt-based training becomes a well-adopted paradigm that drastically improves the exploitation of models for many natural language processing tasks. Prompting also shows great performance compared to traditional fine-tuning when adapted to zero-shot or few-shot scenarios where the number of annotated data is limited. In this framework, the role of verbalizers is essential, as an interpretation from masked word distributions into output predictions. In this work, we propose \acrshort{mave}, an approach for verbalizer construction by enrichment of class labels using neighborhood relation in the embedding space of words for the text classification task. In addition, we elaborate a benchmarking procedure to evaluate typical baselines of verbalizers for document classification in few-shot learning contexts. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results while using significantly fewer resources. We show that our approach is particularly effective in cases with extremely limited supervision data.

Paperid: 5222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05077.pdf

Abstract:
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in commonsense question answering benchmarks, but the process underlying their success remains largely opaque. As a consequence, recent approaches have equipped LLMs with mechanisms for knowledge retrieval, reasoning and introspection, not only to improve their capabilities but also to enhance the interpretability of their outputs. However, these methods require additional training, hand-crafted templates or human-written explanations. To address these issues, we introduce ZEBRA, a zero-shot question answering framework that combines retrieval, case-based reasoning and introspection and dispenses with the need for additional training of the LLM. Given an input question, ZEBRA retrieves relevant question-knowledge pairs from a knowledge base and generates new knowledge by reasoning over the relationships in these pairs. This generated knowledge is then used to answer the input question, improving the model's performance and interpretability. We evaluate our approach across 8 well-established commonsense reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that ZEBRA consistently outperforms strong LLMs and previous knowledge integration approaches, achieving an average accuracy improvement of up to 4.5 points.

Paperid: 5223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03565.pdf

Abstract:
In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (MDP), agents train on a fixed set of contexts and must generalise to new ones. Recent work has argued and demonstrated that increased exploration can improve this generalisation, by training on more states in the training contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate that training on more states can indeed improve generalisation, but can come at a cost of reducing the accuracy of the learned value function which should not benefit generalisation. We hypothesise and demonstrate that using exploration to increase the agent's coverage while also increasing the accuracy improves generalisation even more. Inspired by this, we propose a method Explore-Go that implements an exploration phase at the beginning of each episode, which can be combined with existing on- and off-policy RL algorithms and significantly improves generalisation even in partially observable MDPs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Explore-Go when combined with several popular algorithms and show an increase in generalisation performance across several environments. With this, we hope to provide practitioners with a simple modification that can improve the generalisation of their agents.

Paperid: 5224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02152.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we explore the possibility of using synthetically generated data for video-based gesture recognition with large pre-trained models. We consider whether these models have sufficiently robust and expressive representation spaces to enable "training-free" classification. Specifically, we utilize various state-of-the-art video encoders to extract features for use in k-nearest neighbors classification, where the training data points are derived from synthetic videos only. We compare these results with another training-free approach -- zero-shot classification using text descriptions of each gesture. In our experiments with the RoCoG-v2 dataset, we find that using synthetic training videos yields significantly lower classification accuracy on real test videos compared to using a relatively small number of real training videos. We also observe that video backbones that were fine-tuned on classification tasks serve as superior feature extractors, and that the choice of fine-tuning data has a substantial impact on k-nearest neighbors performance. Lastly, we find that zero-shot text-based classification performs poorly on the gesture recognition task, as gestures are not easily described through natural language.

Paperid: 5225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01866.pdf

Abstract:
Massive activations, which manifest in specific feature dimensions of hidden states, introduce a significant bias in large language models (LLMs), leading to an overemphasis on the corresponding token. In this paper, we identify that massive activations originate not from the hidden state but from the intermediate state of a feed-forward network module in an early layer. Expanding on the previous observation that massive activations occur only in specific feature dimensions, we dive deep into the weights that cause massive activations. Specifically, we define top-$k$ massive weights as the weights that contribute to the dimensions with the top-$k$ magnitudes in the intermediate state. When these massive weights are set to zero, the functionality of LLMs is entirely disrupted. However, when all weights except for massive weights are set to zero, it results in a relatively minor performance drop, even though a much larger number of weights are set to zero. This implies that during the pre-training process, learning is dominantly focused on massive weights. Building on this observation, we propose a simple plug-and-play method called MacDrop (massive weights curriculum dropout), to rely less on massive weights during parameter-efficient fine-tuning. This method applies dropout to the pre-trained massive weights, starting with a high dropout probability and gradually decreasing it as fine-tuning progresses. Through various experiments, including zero-shot downstream tasks, long-context tasks, and ablation studies, we demonstrate that \texttt{MacDrop} generally improves performance and strengthens robustness.

Paperid: 5226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01288.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive few-shot in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Still, we show that they are sometimes prone to a `copying bias', where they copy answers from provided examples instead of learning the underlying patterns. In this work, we propose a novel and simple method to mitigate such copying bias. First, we create a synthetic task and use the Integrated Gradients method to identify neurons that prioritize copying over generalization. We demonstrate that pruning these neurons consistently improves performance across a diverse set of ICL tasks. We also show that our method is applicable across various LLM architectures, including Transformers and State-Space Models, without requiring modifications. In our analysis, we adopt a task-recognition perspective on ICL and examine task vectors (Hendel et al., 2023) induced by the model. We find that pruning enhances the quality of these vectors, suggesting that the pruned neurons previously hindered effective task recognition.

Paperid: 5227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19684.pdf

Abstract:
Medicine is inherently multimodal and multitask, with diverse data modalities spanning text, imaging. However, most models in medical field are unimodal single tasks and lack good generalizability and explainability. In this study, we introduce MedViLaM, a unified vision-language model towards a generalist model for medical data that can flexibly encode and interpret various forms of medical data, including clinical language and imaging, all using the same set of model weights. To facilitate the creation of such multi-task model, we have curated MultiMedBench, a comprehensive pretaining dataset and benchmark consisting of several distinct tasks, i.e., continuous question-answering, multi-label disease classification, disease localization, generation and summarization of radiology reports. MedViLaM demonstrates strong performance across all MultiMedBench tasks, frequently outpacing other generalist models by a significant margin. Additionally, we present instances of zero-shot generalization to new medical concepts and tasks, effective transfer learning across different tasks, and the emergence of zero-shot medical reasoning.

Paperid: 5228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18764.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. Traditional evaluation methods often rely on human judgment, which is costly and unscalable, or focus solely on data accuracy, neglecting the effectiveness of visual communication. By employing VQA models, we assess data representation quality and the general communicative clarity of charts. Experiments were conducted using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta's Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. Our results indicate that LLM-generated charts do not match the accuracy of the original non-LLM-generated charts based on VQA performance measures. Moreover, while our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting significantly boosts the accuracy of chart generation, considerable progress remains to be made before LLMs can fully match the precision of human-generated graphs. This underscores the importance of our work, which expedites the research process by enabling rapid iteration without the need for human annotation, thus accelerating advancements in this field.

Paperid: 5229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17652.pdf

Abstract:
Generating simulations to train intelligent agents in game-playing and robotics from natural language input, from user input or task documentation, remains an open-ended challenge. Existing approaches focus on parts of this challenge, such as generating reward functions or task hyperparameters. Unlike previous work, we introduce FACTORSIM that generates full simulations in code from language input that can be used to train agents. Exploiting the structural modularity specific to coded simulations, we propose to use a factored partially observable Markov decision process representation that allows us to reduce context dependence during each step of the generation. For evaluation, we introduce a generative simulation benchmark that assesses the generated simulation code's accuracy and effectiveness in facilitating zero-shot transfers in reinforcement learning settings. We show that FACTORSIM outperforms existing methods in generating simulations regarding prompt alignment (e.g., accuracy), zero-shot transfer abilities, and human evaluation. We also demonstrate its effectiveness in generating robotic tasks.

Paperid: 5230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17610.pdf

Abstract:
The rocketing prosperity of large language models (LLMs) in recent years has boosted the prevalence of vision-language models (VLMs) in the medical sector. In our online medical consultation scenario, a doctor responds to the texts and images provided by a patient in multiple rounds to diagnose her/his health condition, forming a multi-turn multimodal medical dialogue format. Unlike high-quality images captured by professional equipment in traditional medical visual question answering (Med-VQA), the images in our case are taken by patients' mobile phones. These images have poor quality control, with issues such as excessive background elements and the lesion area being significantly off-center, leading to degradation of vision-language alignment in the model training phase. In this paper, we propose ZALM3, a Zero-shot strategy to improve vision-language ALignment in Multi-turn Multimodal Medical dialogue. Since we observe that the preceding text conversations before an image can infer the regions of interest (RoIs) in the image, ZALM3 employs an LLM to summarize the keywords from the preceding context and a visual grounding model to extract the RoIs. The updated images eliminate unnecessary background noise and provide more effective vision-language alignment. To better evaluate our proposed method, we design a new subjective assessment metric for multi-turn unimodal/multimodal medical dialogue to provide a fine-grained performance comparison. Our experiments across three different clinical departments remarkably demonstrate the efficacy of ZALM3 with statistical significance.

Paperid: 5231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15810.pdf

Abstract:
3D contrastive representation learning has exhibited remarkable efficacy across various downstream tasks. However, existing contrastive learning paradigms based on cosine similarity fail to deeply explore the potential intra-modal hierarchical and cross-modal semantic correlations about multi-modal data in Euclidean space. In response, we seek solutions in hyperbolic space and propose a hyperbolic image-and-pointcloud contrastive learning method (HyperIPC). For the intra-modal branch, we rely on the intrinsic geometric structure to explore the hyperbolic embedding representation of point cloud to capture invariant features. For the cross-modal branch, we leverage images to guide the point cloud in establishing strong semantic hierarchical correlations. Empirical experiments underscore the outstanding classification performance of HyperIPC. Notably, HyperIPC enhances object classification results by 2.8% and few-shot classification outcomes by 5.9% on ScanObjectNN compared to the baseline. Furthermore, ablation studies and confirmatory testing validate the rationality of HyperIPC's parameter settings and the effectiveness of its submodules.

Paperid: 5232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14371.pdf

Abstract:
Generative AI agents are often expected to respond to complex user requests that have No One Right Answer (NORA), e.g., "design a vegetarian meal plan below 1800 calories". Such requests may entail a set of constraints that the agent should adhere to. To successfully develop agents for NORA scenarios, an accurate automatic evaluation framework is essential, and specifically - one capable of validating the satisfaction of constraints in the agent's response. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been adopted as versatile evaluators for many NORA tasks, but their ability to evaluate constraint-satisfaction in generated text remains unclear. To study this, we develop and release a novel Arithmetic Constraint-Satisfaction (ACS) benchmarking dataset. The dataset consists of complex user requests with corresponding constraints, agent responses and human labels indicating each constraint's satisfaction level in the response. A unique property of this dataset is that validating many of its constraints requires reviewing the response as a whole (in contrast to many other benchmarks that require the validation of a single independent item). Moreover, it assesses LLMs in performing reasoning, in-context data extraction, arithmetic calculations, and counting. We then benchmark both open and proprietary LLMs on evaluating constraint-satisfaction, and show that most models still have a significant headroom for improvement, and that errors primarily stem from reasoning issues. In addition, most models exhibit a skewed constraint-satisfaction prediction pattern, with higher accuracy where the ground-truth label is "satisfied". Lastly, few-shot prompting for our task proved to be rather challenging, since many of the studied models showed a degradation in performance when it was introduced.

Paperid: 5233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14178.pdf

Abstract:
Generating realistic and diverse unstructured data is a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in few-shot learning scenarios with limited data availability. Traditional RL methods often rely on real data for exploration, which can be time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce a distribution-aware flow matching approach designed to generate synthetic unstructured data, specifically tailored for the few-shot RL application of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on embedded processors. Our method leverages the flow matching algorithm as a sample-efficient generative model and incorporates bootstrapping techniques to enhance latent space diversity and generalization. Additionally, we apply feature weighting using Random Forests to prioritize critical features, improving the precision of the generated synthetic data. Our approach addresses key challenges in traditional model-based RL, such as overfitting and data correlation, while aligning with the principles of the Law of Large Numbers to support empirical consistency and policy improvement as the number of samples increases. We validate our approach through extensive experimentation on a DVFS application for low-energy processing. Results demonstrate that our method achieves stable convergence in terms of maximum Q-value while enhancing frame rates by 30\% in the initial timestamps. These improvements make the proposed RL model more efficient in resource-constrained environments.

Paperid: 5234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13002.pdf

Abstract:
Domain generalisation involves learning artificial intelligence (AI) models that can maintain high performance across diverse domains within a specific task. In video games, for instance, such AI models can supposedly learn to detect player actions across different games. Despite recent advancements in AI, domain generalisation for modelling the users' experience remains largely unexplored. While video games present unique challenges and opportunities for the analysis of user experience -- due to their dynamic and rich contextual nature -- modelling such experiences is limited by generally small datasets. As a result, conventional modelling methods often struggle to bridge the domain gap between users and games due to their reliance on large labelled training data and assumptions of common distributions of user experience. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing a framework that decomposes the general domain-agnostic modelling of user experience into several domain-specific and game-dependent tasks that can be solved via few-shot learning. We test our framework on a variation of the publicly available GameVibe corpus, designed specifically to test a model's ability to predict user engagement across different first-person shooter games. Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of few-shot learners over traditional modelling methods and thus showcase the potential of few-shot learning for robust experience modelling in video games and beyond.

Paperid: 5235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10719.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong zero-shot generalization across various tasks, especially when integrated with large language models (LLMs). However, their ability to comprehend rhetorical and persuasive visual media, such as advertisements, remains understudied. Ads often employ atypical imagery, using surprising object juxtapositions to convey shared properties. For example, Fig. 1 (e) shows a beer with a feather-like texture. This requires advanced reasoning to deduce that this atypical representation signifies the beer's lightness. We introduce three novel tasks, Multi-label Atypicality Classification, Atypicality Statement Retrieval, and Aypical Object Recognition, to benchmark VLMs' understanding of atypicality in persuasive images. We evaluate how well VLMs use atypicality to infer an ad's message and test their reasoning abilities by employing semantically challenging negatives. Finally, we pioneer atypicality-aware verbalization by extracting comprehensive image descriptions sensitive to atypical elements. Our findings reveal that: (1) VLMs lack advanced reasoning capabilities compared to LLMs; (2) simple, effective strategies can extract atypicality-aware information, leading to comprehensive image verbalization; (3) atypicality aids persuasive advertisement understanding. Code and data will be made available.

Paperid: 5236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10488.pdf

Abstract:
For a vision-language model (VLM) to understand the physical world, such as cause and effect, a first step is to capture the temporal dynamics of the visual world, for example how the physical states of objects evolve over time (e.g. a whole apple into a sliced apple). Our paper aims to investigate if VLMs pre-trained on web-scale data learn to encode object states, which can be extracted with zero-shot text prompts. We curate an object state recognition dataset ChangeIt-Frames, and evaluate nine open-source VLMs, including models trained with contrastive and generative objectives. We observe that while these state-of-the-art vision-language models can reliably perform object recognition, they consistently fail to accurately distinguish the objects' physical states. Through extensive experiments, we identify three areas for improvements for VLMs to better encode object states, namely the quality of object localization, the architecture to bind concepts to objects, and the objective to learn discriminative visual and language encoders on object states. Data and code are released.

Paperid: 5237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09788.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances demonstrating vision-language models' (VLMs) abilities to describe complex relationships in images using natural language, their capability to quantitatively reason about object sizes and distances remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a manually annotated benchmark, Q-Spatial Bench, with 271 questions across five categories designed for quantitative spatial reasoning and systematically investigate the performance of state-of-the-art VLMs on this task. Our analysis reveals that reasoning about distances between objects is particularly challenging for SoTA VLMs; however, some VLMs significantly outperform others, with an over 40-point gap between the two best performing models. We also make the surprising observation that the success rate of the top-performing VLM increases by 19 points when a reasoning path using a reference object emerges naturally in the response. Inspired by this observation, we develop a zero-shot prompting technique, SpatialPrompt, that encourages VLMs to answer quantitative spatial questions using reference objects as visual cues. By instructing VLMs to use reference objects in their reasoning paths via SpatialPrompt, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and GPT-4V improve their success rates by over 40, 20, and 30 points, respectively. We emphasize that these significant improvements are obtained without needing more data, model architectural modifications, or fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09207.pdf

Abstract:
Deep operator networks (DeepONet) and neural operators have gained significant attention for their ability to map infinite-dimensional function spaces and perform zero-shot super-resolution. However, these models often require large datasets for effective training. While physics-informed operators offer a data-agnostic learning approach, they introduce additional training complexities and convergence issues, especially in highly nonlinear systems. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Finite Basis Physics-Informed HyperDeepONet (FB-HyDON), an advanced operator architecture featuring intrinsic domain decomposition. By leveraging hypernetworks and finite basis functions, FB-HyDON effectively mitigates the training limitations associated with existing physics-informed operator learning methods. We validated our approach on the high-frequency harmonic oscillator, Burgers' equation at different viscosity levels, and Allen-Cahn equation demonstrating substantial improvements over other operator learning models.

Paperid: 5239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08276.pdf

Abstract:
While tactile sensing is widely accepted as an important and useful sensing modality, its use pales in comparison to other sensory modalities like vision and proprioception. AnySkin addresses the critical challenges that impede the use of tactile sensing -- versatility, replaceability, and data reusability. Building on the simplistic design of ReSkin, and decoupling the sensing electronics from the sensing interface, AnySkin simplifies integration making it as straightforward as putting on a phone case and connecting a charger. Furthermore, AnySkin is the first uncalibrated tactile-sensor with cross-instance generalizability of learned manipulation policies. To summarize, this work makes three key contributions: first, we introduce a streamlined fabrication process and a design tool for creating an adhesive-free, durable and easily replaceable magnetic tactile sensor; second, we characterize slip detection and policy learning with the AnySkin sensor; and third, we demonstrate zero-shot generalization of models trained on one instance of AnySkin to new instances, and compare it with popular existing tactile solutions like DIGIT and ReSkin. Videos of experiments, fabrication details and design files can be found on https://any-skin.github.io/

Paperid: 5240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22061.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model has revolutionized image segmentation with its zero-shot capabilities, yet its reliance on manual prompts hinders fully automated deployment. While integrating object detectors as prompt generators offers a pathway to automation, existing pipelines suffer from two fundamental limitations: objective mismatch, where detectors optimized for geometric localization do not correspond to the optimal prompting context required by SAM, and alignment overfitting in standard joint training, where the detector simply memorizes specific prompt adjustments for training samples rather than learning a generalizable policy. To bridge this gap, we introduce BLO-Inst, a unified framework that aligns detection and segmentation objectives by bi-level optimization. We formulate the alignment as a nested optimization problem over disjoint data splits. In the lower level, the SAM is fine-tuned to maximize segmentation fidelity given the current detection proposals on a subset ($D_1$). In the upper level, the detector is updated to generate bounding boxes that explicitly minimize the validation loss of the fine-tuned SAM on a separate subset ($D_2$). This effectively transforms the detector into a segmentation-aware prompt generator, optimizing the bounding boxes not just for localization accuracy, but for downstream mask quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BLO-Inst achieves superior performance, outperforming standard baselines on tasks in general and biomedical domains.

Paperid: 5241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14757.pdf

Abstract:
Interpretability is significant in computational pathology, leading to the development of multimodal information integration from histopathological image and corresponding text data.However, existing multimodal methods have limited interpretability due to the lack of high-quality dataset that support explicit reasoning and inference and simple reasoning process.To address the above problems, we introduce a novel multimodal pathology large language model with strong reasoning capabilities.To improve the generation of accurate and contextually relevant textual descriptions, we design a semantic reward strategy integrated with group relative policy optimization.We construct a high-quality pathology visual question answering (VQA) dataset, specifically designed to support complex reasoning tasks.Comprehensive experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when trained with only 20% of the data.Our method also achieves comparable performance on downstream zero-shot image classification task compared with CLIP.

Paperid: 5242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12169.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning and model predictive control (MPC) can play complementary roles in legged robotics. However, integrating learned models with online planning remains challenging. When dynamics are learned with neural networks, three key difficulties arise: (1) stiff transitions from contact events may be inherited from the data; (2) additional non-physical local nonsmoothness can occur; and (3) training datasets can induce non-Gaussian model errors due to rapid state changes. We address (1) and (2) by introducing the smooth neural surrogate, a neural network with tunable smoothness designed to provide informative predictions and derivatives for trajectory optimization through contact. To address (3), we train these models using a heavy-tailed likelihood that better matches the empirical error distributions observed in legged-robot dynamics. Together, these design choices substantially improve the reliability, scalability, and generalizability of learned legged MPC. Across zero-shot locomotion tasks of increasing difficulty, smooth neural surrogates with robust learning yield consistent reductions in cumulative cost on simple, well-conditioned behaviors (typically 10-50%), while providing substantially larger gains in regimes where standard neural dynamics often fail outright. In these regimes, smoothing enables reliable execution (from 0/5 to 5/5 success) and produces about 2-50x lower cumulative cost, reflecting orders-of-magnitude absolute improvements in robustness rather than incremental performance gains.

Paperid: 5243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10169.pdf

Abstract:
Compositionality is a cognitive mechanism that allows humans to systematically combine known concepts in novel ways. This study demonstrates how artificial neural agents acquire and utilize compositional generalization to describe previously unseen images. Our method, termed "Composition through Decomposition", involves two sequential training steps. In the 'Decompose' step, the agents learn to decompose an image into basic concepts using a codebook acquired during interaction in a multi-target coordination game. Subsequently, in the 'Compose' step, the agents employ this codebook to describe novel images by composing basic concepts into complex phrases. Remarkably, we observe cases where generalization in the `Compose' step is achieved zero-shot, without the need for additional training.

Paperid: 5244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09979.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce \emph{in-context operator learning on probability measure spaces} for optimal transport (OT). The goal is to learn a single solution operator that maps a pair of distributions to the OT map, using only few-shot samples from each distribution as a prompt and \emph{without} gradient updates at inference. We parameterize the solution operator and develop scaling-law theory in two regimes. In the \emph{nonparametric} setting, when tasks concentrate on a low-intrinsic-dimension manifold of source--target pairs, we establish generalization bounds that quantify how in-context accuracy scales with prompt size, intrinsic task dimension, and model capacity. In the \emph{parametric} setting (e.g., Gaussian families), we give an explicit architecture that recovers the exact OT map in context and provide finite-sample excess-risk bounds. Our numerical experiments on synthetic transports and generative-modeling benchmarks validate the framework.

Paperid: 5245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09342.pdf

Abstract:
This work proposes a contextualised detection framework for implicitly hateful speech, implemented as a multi-agent system comprising a central Moderator Agent and dynamically constructed Community Agents representing specific demographic groups. Our approach explicitly integrates socio-cultural context from publicly available knowledge sources, enabling identity-aware moderation that surpasses state-of-the-art prompting methods (zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting) and alternative approaches on a challenging ToxiGen dataset. We enhance the technical rigour of performance evaluation by incorporating balanced accuracy as a central metric of classification fairness that accounts for the trade-off between true positive and true negative rates. We demonstrate that our community-driven consultative framework significantly improves both classification accuracy and fairness across all target groups.

Paperid: 5246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06827.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting pre-training data in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for auditing data privacy and copyright compliance, yet it remains challenging in black-box, zero-shot settings where computational resources and training data are scarce. While existing likelihood-based methods have shown promise, they typically aggregate token-level scores using uniform weights, thereby neglecting the inherent information-theoretic dynamics of autoregressive generation. In this paper, we hypothesize and empirically validate that memorization signals are heavily skewed towards the high-entropy initial tokens, where model uncertainty is highest, and decay as context accumulates. To leverage this linguistic property, we introduce Positional Decay Reweighting (PDR), a training-free and plug-and-play framework. PDR explicitly reweights token-level scores to amplify distinct signals from early positions while suppressing noise from later ones. Extensive experiments show that PDR acts as a robust prior and can usually enhance a wide range of advanced methods across multiple benchmarks.

Paperid: 5247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02018.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Models (SAMs), known for their exceptional zero-shot segmentation performance, have garnered significant attention in the research community. Nevertheless, their performance drops significantly on severely degraded, low-quality images, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose GleSAM++, which utilizes Generative Latent space Enhancement to boost robustness on low-quality images, thus enabling generalization across various image qualities. Additionally, to improve compatibility between the pre-trained diffusion model and the segmentation framework, we introduce two techniques, i.e., Feature Distribution Alignment (FDA) and Channel Replication and Expansion (CRE). However, the above components lack explicit guidance regarding the degree of degradation. The model is forced to implicitly fit a complex noise distribution that spans conditions from mild noise to severe artifacts, which substantially increases the learning burden and leads to suboptimal reconstructions. To address this issue, we further introduce a Degradation-aware Adaptive Enhancement (DAE) mechanism. The key principle of DAE is to decouple the reconstruction process for arbitrary-quality features into two stages: degradation-level prediction and degradation-aware reconstruction. Our method can be applied to pre-trained SAM and SAM2 with only minimal additional learnable parameters, allowing for efficient optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GleSAM++ significantly improves segmentation robustness on complex degradations while maintaining generalization to clear images. Furthermore, GleSAM++ also performs well on unseen degradations, underscoring the versatility of our approach and dataset.

Paperid: 5248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01593.pdf

Abstract:
Manual font design is an intricate process that transforms a stylistic visual concept into a coherent glyph set. This challenge persists in automated Few-shot Font Generation (FFG), where models often struggle to preserve both the structural integrity and stylistic fidelity from limited references. While autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities, their application to FFG is constrained by conventional patch-level tokenization, which neglects global dependencies crucial for coherent font synthesis. Moreover, existing FFG methods remain within the image-to-image paradigm, relying solely on visual references and overlooking the role of language in conveying stylistic intent during font design. To address these limitations, we propose GAR-Font, a novel AR framework for multimodal few-shot font generation. GAR-Font introduces a global-aware tokenizer that effectively captures both local structures and global stylistic patterns, a multimodal style encoder offering flexible style control through a lightweight language-style adapter without requiring intensive multimodal pretraining, and a post-refinement pipeline that further enhances structural fidelity and style coherence. Extensive experiments show that GAR-Font outperforms existing FFG methods, excelling in maintaining global style faithfulness and achieving higher-quality results with textual stylistic guidance.

Paperid: 5249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00372.pdf

Abstract:
Being able to understand the security and privacy (S&P) concerns of IoT users brings benefits to both developers and users. To learn about users' views, we examine Amazon IoT reviews - one of the biggest IoT markets. This work presents a state-of-the-art methodology to identify and categorize reviews in which users express S&P concerns. We developed an automated pipeline by fine-tuning GPT-3.5-Turbo to build two models: the Classifier-Rationalizer-Categorizer and the Thematic Mapper. By leveraging dynamic few-shot prompting and the model's large context size, our pipeline achieved over 97% precision and recall, significantly outperforming keyword-based and classical ML methods. We applied our pipeline to 91K Amazon reviews about fitness trackers, smart speakers and cameras, over multiple years. We found that on average 5% contained S&P concerns, while security camera exhibited the highest prevalence at 10%. Our method detected significantly more S&P-relevant reviews than prior works: 15x more for fitness trackers, 29% more for smart speakers, and 70% more for cameras. Our longitudinal analysis reveals that concerns like surveillance and data control have persisted for years, suggesting limited industry progress. We demonstrate that across all device types, users consistently demand more precise control over what data is collected and shared. We uncover challenges in multi-user and multi-device interactions, identifying two previously unreported themes concerning inadequate controls for account separation and data access. These findings, ranging from broad persistent trends to specific instances of customer loss, offer actionable insights for developers to improve user satisfaction and trust.

Paperid: 5250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18263.pdf

Abstract:
Children's speech recognition remains challenging due to substantial acoustic and linguistic variability, limited labeled data, and significant differences from adult speech. Speech foundation models can address these challenges through Speech In-Context Learning (SICL), allowing adaptation to new domains without fine-tuning. However, the effectiveness of SICL depends on how in-context examples are selected. We extend an existing retrieval-based method, Text-Embedding KNN for SICL (TICL), introducing an acoustic reranking step to create TICL+. This extension prioritizes examples that are both semantically and acoustically aligned with the test input. Experiments on four children's speech corpora show that TICL+ achieves up to a 53.3% relative word error rate reduction over zero-shot performance and 37.6% over baseline TICL, highlighting the value of combining semantic and acoustic information for robust, scalable ASR in children's speech.

Paperid: 5251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16925.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce V-Agent, a novel multi-agent platform designed for advanced video search and interactive user-system conversations. By fine-tuning a vision-language model (VLM) with a small video preference dataset and enhancing it with a retrieval vector from an image-text retrieval model, we overcome the limitations of traditional text-based retrieval systems in multimodal scenarios. The VLM-based retrieval model independently embeds video frames and audio transcriptions from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module into a shared multimodal representation space, enabling V-Agent to interpret both visual and spoken content for context-aware video search. This system consists of three agents-a routing agent, a search agent, and a chat agent-that work collaboratively to address user intents by refining search outputs and communicating with users. The search agent utilizes the VLM-based retrieval model together with an additional re-ranking module to further enhance video retrieval quality. Our proposed framework demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the MultiVENT 2.0 benchmark, highlighting its potential for both academic research and real-world applications.

Paperid: 5252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13494.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their substantial parameter sizes pose significant challenges for deployment on edge devices with limited computational and memory resources. Low-rank compression is a promising approach to address this issue, as it reduces both computational and memory costs, making LLM more suitable for resource-constrained environments. Nonetheless, naïve low-rank compression methods require a significant reduction in the retained rank to achieve meaningful memory and computation savings. For a low-rank model, the ranks need to be reduced by more than half to yield efficiency gains. Such aggressive truncation, however, typically results in substantial performance degradation. To address this trade-off, we propose SkipCat, a novel low-rank compression framework that enables the use of higher ranks while achieving the same compression rates. First, we introduce an intra-layer shared low-rank projection method, where multiple matrices that share the same input use a common projection. This reduces redundancy and improves compression efficiency. Second, we propose a block skipping technique that omits computations and memory transfers for selected sub-blocks within the low-rank decomposition. These two techniques jointly enable our compressed model to retain more effective ranks under the same compression budget. Experimental results show that, without any additional fine-tuning, our method outperforms previous low-rank compression approaches by 7% accuracy improvement on zero-shot tasks under the same compression rate. These results highlight the effectiveness of our rank-maximized compression strategy in preserving model performance under tight resource constraints.

Paperid: 5253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11261.pdf

Abstract:
Systematic reviews are a key component of evidence-based medicine, playing a critical role in synthesizing existing research evidence and guiding clinical decisions. However, with the rapid growth of research publications, conducting systematic reviews has become increasingly burdensome, with title and abstract screening being one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps. To mitigate this issue, we designed a two-stage dynamic few-shot learning (DFSL) approach aimed at improving the efficiency and performance of large language models (LLMs) in the title and abstract screening task. Specifically, this approach first uses a low-cost LLM for initial screening, then re-evaluates low-confidence instances using a high-performance LLM, thereby enhancing screening performance while controlling computational costs. We evaluated this approach across 10 systematic reviews, and the results demonstrate its strong generalizability and cost-effectiveness, with potential to reduce manual screening burden and accelerate the systematic review process in practical applications.

Paperid: 5254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09814.pdf

Abstract:
Personalized Text-to-Image (PT2I) generation aims to produce customized images based on reference images. A prominent interest pertains to the integration of an image prompt adapter to facilitate zero-shot PT2I without test-time fine-tuning. However, current methods grapple with three fundamental challenges: 1. the elusive equilibrium between Concept Preservation (CP) and Prompt Following (PF), 2. the difficulty in retaining fine-grained concept details in reference images, and 3. the restricted scalability to extend to multi-subject personalization. To tackle these challenges, we present Dynamic Image Prompt Adapter (DynaIP), a cutting-edge plugin to enhance the fine-grained concept fidelity, CP-PF balance, and subject scalability of SOTA T2I multimodal diffusion transformers (MM-DiT) for PT2I generation. Our key finding is that MM-DiT inherently exhibit decoupling learning behavior when injecting reference image features into its dual branches via cross attentions. Based on this, we design an innovative Dynamic Decoupling Strategy that removes the interference of concept-agnostic information during inference, significantly enhancing the CP-PF balance and further bolstering the scalability of multi-subject compositions. Moreover, we identify the visual encoder as a key factor affecting fine-grained CP and reveal that the hierarchical features of commonly used CLIP can capture visual information at diverse granularity levels. Therefore, we introduce a novel Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts Feature Fusion Module to fully leverage the hierarchical features of CLIP, remarkably elevating the fine-grained concept fidelity while also providing flexible control of visual granularity. Extensive experiments across single- and multi-subject PT2I tasks verify that our DynaIP outperforms existing approaches, marking a notable advancement in the field of PT2l generation.

Paperid: 5255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09215.pdf

Abstract:
3D visual grounding (3DVG) identifies objects in 3D scenes from language descriptions. Existing zero-shot approaches leverage 2D vision-language models (VLMs) by converting 3D spatial information (SI) into forms amenable to VLM processing, typically as composite inputs such as specified view renderings or video sequences with overlaid object markers. However, this VLM + SI paradigm yields entangled visual representations that compel the VLM to process entire cluttered cues, making it hard to exploit spatial semantic relationships effectively. In this work, we propose a new VLM x SI paradigm that externalizes the 3D SI into a form enabling the VLM to incrementally retrieve only what it needs during reasoning. We instantiate this paradigm with a novel View-on-Graph (VoG) method, which organizes the scene into a multi-modal, multi-layer scene graph and allows the VLM to operate as an active agent that selectively accesses necessary cues as it traverses the scene. This design offers two intrinsic advantages: (i) by structuring 3D context into a spatially and semantically coherent scene graph rather than confounding the VLM with densely entangled visual inputs, it lowers the VLM's reasoning difficulty; and (ii) by actively exploring and reasoning over the scene graph, it naturally produces transparent, step-by-step traces for interpretable 3DVG. Extensive experiments show that VoG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, establishing structured scene exploration as a promising strategy for advancing zero-shot 3DVG.

Paperid: 5256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08659.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical communication is central to patient outcomes, yet large-scale human annotation of patient-provider conversation remains labor-intensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Existing approaches based on large language models typically rely on single-task models that lack adaptability, interpretability, and reliability, especially when applied across various communication frameworks and clinical domains. In this study, we developed a Multi-framework Structured Agentic AI system for Clinical Communication (MOSAIC), built on a LangGraph-based architecture that orchestrates four core agents, including a Plan Agent for codebook selection and workflow planning, an Update Agent for maintaining up-to-date retrieval databases, a set of Annotation Agents that applies codebook-guided retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with dynamic few-shot prompting, and a Verification Agent that provides consistency checks and feedback. To evaluate performance, we compared MOSAIC outputs against gold-standard annotations created by trained human coders. We developed and evaluated MOSAIC using 26 gold standard annotated transcripts for training and 50 transcripts for testing, spanning rheumatology and OB/GYN domains. On the test set, MOSAIC achieved an overall F1 score of 0.928. Performance was highest in the Rheumatology subset (F1 = 0.962) and strongest for Patient Behavior (e.g., patients asking questions, expressing preferences, or showing assertiveness). Ablations revealed that MOSAIC outperforms baseline benchmarking.

Paperid: 5257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04834.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a key topic in AI and NLP, transforming sectors like healthcare, finance, education, and marketing by improving customer service, automating tasks, providing insights, improving diagnostics, and personalizing learning experiences. Information extraction from clinical records is a crucial task in digital healthcare. Although traditional NLP techniques have been used for this in the past, they often fall short due to the complexity, variability of clinical language, and high inner semantics in the free clinical text. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a powerful tool for better understanding and generating human-like text, making them highly effective in this area. In this paper, we explore the ability of open-source multilingual LLMs to understand EHRs (Electronic Health Records) in Italian and help extract information from them in real-time. Our detailed experimental campaign on comorbidity extraction from EHR reveals that some LLMs struggle in zero-shot, on-premises settings, and others show significant variation in performance, struggling to generalize across various diseases when compared to native pattern matching and manual annotations.

Paperid: 5258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04619.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce HeFT (Head-Frequency Tracker), a zero-shot point tracking framework that leverages the visual priors of pretrained video diffusion models. To better understand how they encode spatiotemporal information, we analyze the internal representations of Video Diffusion Transformer (VDiT). Our analysis reveals that attention heads act as minimal functional units with distinct specializations for matching, semantic understanding, and positional encoding. Additionally, we find that the low-frequency components in VDiT features are crucial for establishing correspondences, whereas the high-frequency components tend to introduce noise. Building on these insights, we propose a head- and frequency-aware feature selection strategy that jointly selects the most informative attention head and low-frequency components to enhance tracking performance. Specifically, our method extracts discriminative features through single-step denoising, applies feature selection, and employs soft-argmax localization with forward-backward consistency checks for correspondence estimation. Extensive experiments on TAP-Vid benchmarks demonstrate that HeFT achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot tracking performance, approaching the accuracy of supervised methods while eliminating the need for annotated training data. Our work further underscores the promise of video diffusion models as powerful foundation models for a wide range of downstream tasks, paving the way toward unified visual foundation models.

Paperid: 5259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04104.pdf

Abstract:
Technology-Facilitated Abuse (TFA) encompasses a broad and rapidly evolving set of behaviours in which digital systems are used to harass, monitor, threaten, or control individuals. Although prior research has documented many forms of TFA, there is no consolidated framework for understanding how abuse types, prevention measures, detection mechanisms, and support pathways relate across the abuse life cycle. This paper contributes a unified, literature-derived taxonomy of TFA grounded in a structured review of peer-reviewed studies, and the first large-scale, taxonomy-aligned audit of institutional web resources in Australia. We crawl 306 government, non-government, and service-provider domains, obtaining 52,605 pages, and classify using zero-shot topic models to map web content onto our taxonomy. An emotion and readability analyses reveal how institutions frame TFA and how accessible their guidance is to the public. Our findings show that institutional websites cover only a narrow subset of harms emphasised in the literature, with approximately 70% of all abuse labelled pages focused on harassment, comments abuse, or sexual abuse, while less than 1% address covert surveillance, economic abuse, or long-term controlling behaviours. Support pathways are similarly limited, with most resources centred on digital information hubs rather than counselling or community-based services. Readability analysis further shows that much of this content is written at late secondary or early tertiary reading levels, which may be inaccessible to a substantial portion of at-risk users. By highlighting strengths and gaps in Australia's support for TFA, our taxonomy and audit method provide a scalable basis for evaluating institutional communication, improving survivor resources, and guiding safer digital ecosystems. The taxonomy serves as a foundation for analyses in national contexts to foster TFA awareness.

Paperid: 5260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02421.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) has emerged as a prevalent paradigm for downstream adaptation, yet it faces a critical trade-off between domain specificity and domain generalization (DG) ability. Current methods typically fine-tune a universal model on the entire dataset, which potentially compromises the ability to generalize to unseen domains. To fill this gap, we provide a theoretical understanding of the generalization ability for VLM fine-tuning, which reveals that training multiple parameter-efficient expert models on partitioned source domains leads to better generalization than fine-tuning a universal model. Inspired by this finding, we propose a two-step domain-expert-Guided DG (GuiDG) framework. GuiDG first employs prompt tuning to obtain source domain experts, then introduces a Cross-Modal Attention module to guide the fine-tuning of the vision encoder via adaptive expert integration. To better evaluate few-shot DG, we construct ImageNet-DG from ImageNet and its variants. Extensive experiments on standard DG benchmarks and ImageNet-DG demonstrate that GuiDG improves upon state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods while maintaining efficiency.

Paperid: 5261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00326.pdf

Abstract:
Loneliness is a critical mental health issue among university students, yet traditional monitoring methods rely primarily on retrospective self-reports and often lack real-time behavioral context. This study explores the use of passive smartphone sensing data to predict loneliness levels, addressing the limitations of existing approaches in capturing its dynamic nature. We integrate smartphone sensing with machine learning and large language models respectively to develop generalized and personalized models. Our Random Forest generalized models achieved mean absolute errors of 3.29 at midterm and 3.98 (out of 32) at the end of semester on the UCLA Loneliness Scale (short form), identifying smartphone screen usage and location mobility to be key predictors. The one-shot approach leveraging large language models reduced prediction errors by up to 42% compared to zero-shot inference. The one-shot results from personalized models highlighted screen usage, application usage, battery, and location transitions as salient behavioral indicators. These findings demonstrate the potential of smartphone sensing data for scalable and interpretable loneliness detection in digital mental health.

Paperid: 5262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22253.pdf

Abstract:
Image-Guided Retrieval with Optional Text (IGROT) is a general retrieval setting where a query consists of an anchor image, with or without accompanying text, aiming to retrieve semantically relevant target images. This formulation unifies two major tasks: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) and Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR). In this work, we address IGROT under low-data supervision by introducing UNION, a lightweight and generalisable target representation that fuses the image embedding with a null-text prompt. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on fixed target features, UNION enhances semantic alignment with multimodal queries while requiring no architectural modifications to pretrained vision-language models. With only 5,000 training samples - from LlavaSCo for CIR and Training-Sketchy for SBIR - our method achieves competitive results across benchmarks, including CIRCO mAP@50 of 38.5 and Sketchy mAP@200 of 82.7, surpassing many heavily supervised baselines. This demonstrates the robustness and efficiency of UNION in bridging vision and language across diverse query types.

Paperid: 5263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19557.pdf

Abstract:
Timely and accurate assessment of damages following natural disasters is essential for effective emergency response and recovery. Recent AI-based frameworks have been developed to analyze large volumes of aerial imagery collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, providing actionable insights rapidly. However, creating and annotating data for training these models is costly and time-consuming, resulting in datasets that are limited in size and diversity. Furthermore, most existing approaches rely on traditional classification-based frameworks with fixed answer spaces, restricting their ability to provide new information without additional data collection or model retraining. Using pre-trained generative models built on in-context learning (ICL) allows for flexible and open-ended answer spaces. However, these models often generate hallucinated outputs or produce generic responses that lack domain-specific relevance. To address these limitations, we propose ThiFAN-VQA, a two-stage reasoning-based framework for visual question answering (VQA) in disaster scenarios. ThiFAN-VQA first generates structured reasoning traces using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and ICL to enable interpretable reasoning under limited supervision. A subsequent answer selection module evaluates the generated responses and assigns the most coherent and contextually accurate answer, effectively improve the model performance. By integrating a custom information retrieval system, domain-specific prompting, and reasoning-guided answer selection, ThiFAN-VQA bridges the gap between zero-shot and supervised methods, combining flexibility with consistency. Experiments on FloodNet and RescueNet-VQA, UAV-based datasets from flood- and hurricane-affected regions, demonstrate that ThiFAN-VQA achieves superior accuracy, interpretability, and adaptability for real-world post-disaster damage assessment tasks.

Paperid: 5264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19514.pdf

Abstract:
Harnessing the reasoning power of Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommender systems is hindered by two fundamental challenges. First, current approaches lack a mechanism for automated, data-driven discovery of effective reasoning patterns, relying instead on brittle manual templates or unstable zero-shot prompting. Second, they employ structure-collapsing integration: direct prompting incurs prohibitive online inference costs, while feature extraction collapses reasoning chains into single vectors, discarding stepwise logic. To address these challenges, we propose SCoTER (Structured Chain-of-Thought Transfer for Enhanced Recommendation), a unified framework that treats pattern discovery and structure-aware transfer as a jointly optimized problem. Specifically, SCoTER operationalizes this through two synergistic components: a GVM pipeline for automated pattern discovery and a structure-preserving integration architecture that transfers stepwise logic to efficient models. Formally, we provide information-theoretic justification proving that structure-preserving transfer achieves tighter performance bounds than structure-agnostic alternatives. Empirically, experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate improvements of 3.75\%-11.59\% over a strong TIGER backbone. Moreover, in production deployment on the Tencent Advertising Platform, SCoTER achieved a 2.14\% lift in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) while eliminating online LLM inference costs. Overall, SCoTER establishes a principled and production-validated blueprint for transferring structured LLM reasoning to large-scale recommender systems.

Paperid: 5265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16920.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly generation is often framed as few-shot fine-tuning with anomalous samples, which contradicts the scarcity that motivates generation and tends to overfit category priors. We tackle the setting where no real anomaly samples or training are available. We propose Delta-Denoising (DeltaDeno), a training-free zero-shot anomaly generation method that localizes and edits defects by contrasting two diffusion branches driven by a minimal prompt pair under a shared schedule. By accumulating per-step denoising deltas into an image-specific localization map, we obtain a mask to guide the latent inpainting during later diffusion steps and preserve the surrounding context while generating realistic local defects. To improve stability and control, DeltaDeno performs token-level prompt refinement that aligns shared content and strengthens anomaly tokens, and applies a spatial attention bias restricted to anomaly tokens in the predicted region. Experiments on public datasets show that DeltaDeno achieves great generation, realism and consistent gains in downstream detection performance. Code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 5266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16555.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in stereo matching have focused on accuracy, often at the cost of significantly increased model size. Traditionally, the community has regarded efficient models as incapable of zero-shot ability due to their limited capacity. In this paper, we introduce Lite Any Stereo, a stereo depth estimation framework that achieves strong zero-shot generalization while remaining highly efficient. To this end, we design a compact yet expressive backbone to ensure scalability, along with a carefully crafted hybrid cost aggregation module. We further propose a three-stage training strategy on million-scale data to effectively bridge the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components demonstrate that an ultra-light model can deliver strong generalization, ranking 1st across four widely used real-world benchmarks. Remarkably, our model attains accuracy comparable to or exceeding state-of-the-art non-prior-based accurate methods while requiring less than 1% computational cost, setting a new standard for efficient stereo matching.

Paperid: 5267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12735.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detectors (OVODs) unify vision and language to detect arbitrary object categories based on text prompts, enabling strong zero-shot generalization to novel concepts. As these models gain traction in high-stakes applications such as robotics, autonomous driving, and surveillance, understanding their security risks becomes crucial. In this work, we conduct the first study of backdoor attacks on OVODs and reveal a new attack surface introduced by prompt tuning. We propose TrAP (Trigger-Aware Prompt tuning), a multi-modal backdoor injection strategy that jointly optimizes prompt parameters in both image and text modalities along with visual triggers. TrAP enables the attacker to implant malicious behavior using lightweight, learnable prompt tokens without retraining the base model weights, thus preserving generalization while embedding a hidden backdoor. We adopt a curriculum-based training strategy that progressively shrinks the trigger size, enabling effective backdoor activation using small trigger patches at inference. Experiments across multiple datasets show that TrAP achieves high attack success rates for both object misclassification and object disappearance attacks, while also improving clean image performance on downstream datasets compared to the zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 5268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09250.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in brain-inspired artificial intelligence have sought to align neural signals with visual semantics using multimodal models such as CLIP. However, existing methods often treat CLIP as a static feature extractor, overlooking its adaptability to neural representations and the inherent physiological-symbolic gap in EEG-image alignment. To address these challenges, we present NeuroCLIP, a prompt tuning framework tailored for EEG-to-image contrastive learning. Our approach introduces three core innovations: (1) We design a dual-stream visual embedding pipeline that combines dynamic filtering and token-level fusion to generate instance-level adaptive prompts, which guide the adjustment of patch embedding tokens based on image content, thereby enabling fine-grained modulation of visual representations under neural constraints; (2) We are the first to introduce visual prompt tokens into EEG-image alignment, acting as global, modality-level prompts that work in conjunction with instance-level adjustments. These visual prompt tokens are inserted into the Transformer architecture to facilitate neural-aware adaptation and parameter optimization at a global level; (3) Inspired by neuroscientific principles of human visual encoding, we propose a refined contrastive loss that better model the semantic ambiguity and cross-modal noise present in EEG signals. On the THINGS-EEG2 dataset, NeuroCLIP achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 63.2% in zero-shot image retrieval, surpassing the previous best method by +12.3%, and demonstrates strong generalization under inter-subject conditions (+4.6% Top-1), highlighting the potential of physiology-aware prompt tuning for bridging brain signals and visual semantics.

Paperid: 5269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08029.pdf

Abstract:
Hard negatives are essential for training effective retrieval models. Hard-negative mining typically relies on ranking documents using cross-encoders or static embedding models based on similarity metrics such as cosine distance. Hard negative mining becomes challenging for biomedical and scientific domains due to the difficulty in distinguishing between source and hard negative documents. However, referenced documents naturally share contextual relevance with the source document but are not duplicates, making them well-suited as hard negatives. In this work, we propose BiCA: Biomedical Dense Retrieval with Citation-Aware Hard Negatives, an approach for hard-negative mining by utilizing citation links in 20,000 PubMed articles for improving a domain-specific small dense retriever. We fine-tune the GTE_small and GTE_Base models using these citation-informed negatives and observe consistent improvements in zero-shot dense retrieval using nDCG@10 for both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks on BEIR and outperform baselines on long-tailed topics in LoTTE using Success@5. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging document link structure to generate highly informative negatives, enabling state-of-the-art performance with minimal fine-tuning and demonstrating a path towards highly data-efficient domain adaptation.

Paperid: 5270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07969.pdf

Abstract:
Workforce transformation across diverse industries has driven an increased demand for specialized natural language processing capabilities. Nevertheless, tasks derived from work-related contexts inherently reflect real-world complexities, characterized by long-tailed distributions, extreme multi-label target spaces, and scarce data availability. The rise of generalist embedding models prompts the question of their performance in the work domain, especially as progress in the field has focused mainly on individual tasks. To this end, we introduce WorkBench, the first unified evaluation suite spanning six work-related tasks formulated explicitly as ranking problems, establishing a common ground for multi-task progress. Based on this benchmark, we find significant positive cross-task transfer, and use this insight to compose task-specific bipartite graphs from real-world data, synthetically enriched through grounding. This leads to Unified Work Embeddings (UWE), a task-agnostic bi-encoder that exploits our training-data structure with a many-to-many InfoNCE objective, and leverages token-level embeddings with task-agnostic soft late interaction. UWE demonstrates zero-shot ranking performance on unseen target spaces in the work domain, enables low-latency inference by caching the task target space embeddings, and shows significant gains in macro-averaged MAP and RP@10 over generalist embedding models.

Paperid: 5271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05684.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot dense retrieval is a challenging setting where a document corpus is provided without relevant queries, necessitating a reliance on pretrained dense retrievers (DRs). However, since these DRs are not trained on the target corpus, they struggle to represent semantic differences between similar documents. To address this failing, we introduce a training-free representation sharpening framework that augments a document's representation with information that helps differentiate it from similar documents in the corpus. On over twenty datasets spanning multiple languages, the representation sharpening framework proves consistently superior to traditional retrieval, setting a new state-of-the-art on the BRIGHT benchmark. We show that representation sharpening is compatible with prior approaches to zero-shot dense retrieval and consistently improves their performance. Finally, we address the performance-cost tradeoff presented by our framework and devise an indexing-time approximation that preserves the majority of our performance gains over traditional retrieval, yet suffers no additional inference-time cost.

Paperid: 5272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04473.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval of information from graph-structured knowledge bases represents a promising direction for improving the factuality of LLMs. While various solutions have been proposed, a comparison of methods is difficult due to the lack of challenging QA datasets with ground-truth targets for graph retrieval. We present SynthKGQA, a framework for generating high-quality synthetic Knowledge Graph Question Answering datasets from any Knowledge Graph, providing the full set of ground-truth facts in the KG to reason over each question. We show how, in addition to enabling more informative benchmarking of KG retrievers, the data produced with SynthKGQA also allows us to train better models. We apply SynthKGQA to Wikidata to generate GTSQA, a new dataset designed to test zero-shot generalization abilities of KG retrievers with respect to unseen graph structures and relation types, and benchmark popular solutions for KG-augmented LLMs on it.

Paperid: 5273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02428.pdf

Abstract:
Adherence to healthy diets reduces chronic illness risk, yet rates remain low. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for health communication but often struggle to engage individuals with ambivalent intentions at a pivotal stage of the Transtheoretical Model (TTM). We developed CounselLLM, an open-source model enhanced through persona design and few-shot, domain-specific prompts grounded in TTM and Motivational Interviewing (MI). In controlled evaluations, CounselLLM showed stronger use of TTM subprocesses and MI affirmations than human counselors, with comparable linguistic robustness but expressed in more concrete terms. A user study then tested CounselLLM in an interactive counseling setting against a baseline system. While knowledge and perceptions did not change, participants' intentions for immediate dietary change increased significantly after interacting with CounselLLM. Participants also rated it as easy to use, understandable, and supportive. These findings suggest theory-driven LLMs can effectively engage ambivalent individuals and provide a scalable approach to digital counseling.

Paperid: 5274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01140.pdf

Abstract:
Medical imaging relies heavily on large, labeled datasets. But, unfortunately, they are not always easily accessible in clinical settings. Additionally, many practitioners often face various structural obstacles like limited data availability, fragmented data systems, and unbalanced datasets. These barriers often lead to the increased diagnostic uncertainty, underrepresentation of certain conditions, reduced model robustness, and biased diagnostic decisions. In response to these challenges, approaches such as transfer learning, meta-learning, and multimodal fusion have made great strides. However, they still need a solid theoretical justification for why they succeed or fail in situations where data is scarce. To address this gap, we propose a unified theoretical framework that characterizes learning and inference under low-resource medical imaging conditions. We first formalize the learning objective under few-shot conditions and compute sample complexity constraints to estimate the smallest quantity of data needed to achieve clinically reliable accuracy. Then based on ideas from PAC-learning and PAC-Bayesian theory, we explain how multimodal integration encourages generalization and quantifies uncertainty under sparse supervision. We further propose a formal metric for explanation stability, offering interpretability guarantees under low-data conditions. Taken together, the proposed framework establishes a principled foundation for constructing dependable, data-efficient diagnostic systems by jointly characterizing sample efficiency, uncertainty quantification, and interpretability in a unified theoretical setting.

Paperid: 5275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01052.pdf

Abstract:
Cancer staging is critical for patient prognosis and treatment planning, yet extracting pathologic TNM staging from unstructured pathology reports poses a persistent challenge. Existing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) strategies often depend on large annotated datasets, limiting their scalability and adaptability. In this study, we introduce two Knowledge Elicitation methods designed to overcome these limitations by enabling large language models (LLMs) to induce and apply domain-specific rules for cancer staging. The first, Knowledge Elicitation with Long-Term Memory (KEwLTM), uses an iterative prompting strategy to derive staging rules directly from unannotated pathology reports, without requiring ground-truth labels. The second, Knowledge Elicitation with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KEwRAG), employs a variation of RAG where rules are pre-extracted from relevant guidelines in a single step and then applied, enhancing interpretability and avoiding repeated retrieval overhead. We leverage the ability of LLMs to apply broad knowledge learned during pre-training to new tasks. Using breast cancer pathology reports from the TCGA dataset, we evaluate their performance in identifying T and N stages, comparing them against various baseline approaches on two open-source LLMs. Our results indicate that KEwLTM outperforms KEwRAG when Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (ZSCOT) inference is effective, whereas KEwRAG achieves better performance when ZSCOT inference is less effective. Both methods offer transparent, interpretable interfaces by making the induced rules explicit. These findings highlight the promise of our Knowledge Elicitation methods as scalable, high-performing solutions for automated cancer staging with enhanced interpretability, particularly in clinical settings with limited annotated data.

Paperid: 5276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00488.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code-related tasks. Despite their advancement, empirical evidence reveals that they still struggle with \emph{deductive code reasoning}, the ability to reason about the program execution process. While prior studies have recognized this limitation, the underlying causes remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we begin by presenting a comprehensive empirical study that reveals three key challenges undermining deductive code reasoning: (1) an intrinsic gap between generation and reasoning abilities, (2) a consistent bias towards code sources, and (3) weak zero-shot generalization on complex benchmarks. In light of these challenges, we propose \texttt{ReMind}, a multi-agent framework composed of \texttt{Mutator}, \texttt{Executor}, and \texttt{Inspector}. The \texttt{Mutator} generates code variants to mitigate bias towards code sources, the \texttt{Executor} traces variable states step-by-step to expose inconsistency, and the \texttt{Inspector} identifies problematic reasoning steps and provides control-flow refinement to bridge the intrinsic reasoning gap. Through their coordinated collaboration, \texttt{ReMind} systematically identifies and refines reasoning flaws, achieving outstanding performance and enabling robust zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks with five LLMs demonstrate the superior advantages of \texttt{ReMind} compared to baseline approaches in deductive code reasoning.

Paperid: 5277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27675.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many coding tasks, including summarization, translation, completion, and code generation. However, detecting code vulnerabilities remains a challenging task for LLMs. An effective way to improve LLM performance is in-context learning (ICL) - providing few-shot examples similar to the query, along with correct answers, can improve an LLM's ability to generate correct solutions. However, choosing the few-shot examples appropriately is crucial to improving model performance. In this paper, we explore two criteria for choosing few-shot examples for ICL used in the code vulnerability detection task. The first criterion considers if the LLM (consistently) makes a mistake or not on a sample with the intuition that LLM performance on a sample is informative about its usefulness as a few-shot example. The other criterion considers similarity of the examples with the program under query and chooses few-shot examples based on the $k$-nearest neighbors to the given sample. We perform evaluations to determine the benefits of these criteria individually as well as under various combinations, using open-source models on multiple datasets.

Paperid: 5278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26777.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research on time series foundation models has primarily focused on forecasting, leaving it unclear how generalizable their learned representations are. In this study, we examine whether frozen pre-trained forecasting models can provide effective representations for classification. To this end, we compare different representation extraction strategies and introduce two model-agnostic embedding augmentations. Our experiments show that the best forecasting models achieve classification accuracy that matches or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models pre-trained specifically for classification. Moreover, we observe a positive correlation between forecasting and classification performance. These findings challenge the assumption that task-specific pre-training is necessary, and suggest that learning to forecast may provide a powerful route toward constructing general-purpose time series foundation models.

Paperid: 5279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25067.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, the advances in vision-language models, including contrastive pretraining and instruction tuning, have greatly pushed the frontier of multimodal AI. However, owing to the large-scale and hence expensive pretraining, the efficiency concern has discouraged researchers from attempting to pretrain a vision language model from scratch. In this work, we propose Dynamic patch Reduction via Interpretable Pooling (DRIP), which adapts to the input images and dynamically merges tokens in the deeper layers of a visual encoder. Our results on both ImageNet training from scratch and CLIP contrastive pretraining demonstrate a significant GFLOP reduction while maintaining comparable classification/zero-shot performance. To further validate our proposed method, we conduct continual pretraining on a large biology dataset, extending its impact into scientific domains.

Paperid: 5280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23414.pdf

Abstract:
Unlike image or text domains that benefit from an abundance of large-scale datasets, point cloud learning techniques frequently encounter limitations due to the scarcity of extensive datasets. To overcome this limitation, we present Symmetria, a formula-driven dataset that can be generated at any arbitrary scale. By construction, it ensures the absolute availability of precise ground truth, promotes data-efficient experimentation by requiring fewer samples, enables broad generalization across diverse geometric settings, and offers easy extensibility to new tasks and modalities. Using the concept of symmetry, we create shapes with known structure and high variability, enabling neural networks to learn point cloud features effectively. Our results demonstrate that this dataset is highly effective for point cloud self-supervised pre-training, yielding models with strong performance in downstream tasks such as classification and segmentation, which also show good few-shot learning capabilities. Additionally, our dataset can support fine-tuning models to classify real-world objects, highlighting our approach's practical utility and application. We also introduce a challenging task for symmetry detection and provide a benchmark for baseline comparisons. A significant advantage of our approach is the public availability of the dataset, the accompanying code, and the ability to generate very large collections, promoting further research and innovation in point cloud learning.

Paperid: 5281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22785.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that disrupt image-text alignment and compromise reliability. Existing defenses typically rely on adversarial fine-tuning with labeled data, limiting their applicability in zero-shot settings. In this work, we identify two key weaknesses of current CLIP adversarial attacks -- lack of semantic guidance and vulnerability to view variations -- collectively termed semantic and viewpoint fragility. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Calibrated Consistency (SCC), an effective test-time defense. SCC consists of two complementary modules: Semantic consistency, which leverages soft pseudo-labels from counterattack warm-up and multi-view predictions to regularize cross-modal alignment and separate the target embedding from confusable negatives; and Spatial consistency, aligning perturbed visual predictions via augmented views to stabilize inference under adversarial perturbations. Together, these modules form a plug-and-play inference strategy. Extensive experiments on 22 benchmarks under diverse attack settings show that SCC consistently improves the zero-shot robustness of CLIP while maintaining accuracy, and can be seamlessly integrated with other VLMs for further gains. These findings highlight the great potential of establishing an adversarially robust paradigm from CLIP, with implications extending to broader vision-language domains such as BioMedCLIP.

Paperid: 5282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21551.pdf

Abstract:
Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation is essential for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, but current automated systems often struggle with transparency and generalization to unseen conditions. To address this, we introduce ZETA, a zero-shot multimodal framework designed for interpretable ECG diagnosis aligned with clinical workflows. ZETA uniquely compares ECG signals against structured positive and negative clinical observations, which are curated through an LLM-assisted, expert-validated process, thereby mimicking differential diagnosis. Our approach leverages a pre-trained multimodal model to align ECG and text embeddings without disease-specific fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate ZETA's competitive zero-shot classification performance and, importantly, provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of enhanced interpretability, grounding predictions in specific, clinically relevant positive and negative diagnostic features. ZETA underscores the potential of aligning ECG analysis with structured clinical knowledge for building more transparent, generalizable, and trustworthy AI diagnostic systems. We will release the curated observation dataset and code to facilitate future research.

Paperid: 5283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21088.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular property prediction (MPP) is a cornerstone of drug discovery and materials science, yet conventional deep learning approaches depend on large labeled datasets that are often unavailable. Few-shot Molecular property prediction (FSMPP) addresses this scarcity by incorporating relational inductive bias through a context graph that links molecule nodes to property nodes, but such molecule-property graphs offer limited structural guidance. We propose a comprehensive solution: Motif Driven Global-Local Context Graph for few-shot molecular property prediction, which enriches contextual information at both the global and local levels. At the global level, chemically meaningful motif nodes representing shared substructures, such as rings or functional groups, are introduced to form a global tri-partite heterogeneous graph, yielding motif-molecule-property connections that capture long-range compositional patterns and enable knowledge transfer among molecules with common motifs. At the local level, we build a subgraph for each node in the molecule-property pair and encode them separately to concentrate the model's attention on the most informative neighboring molecules and motifs. Experiments on five standard FSMPP benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of integrating global motif knowledge with fine-grained local context to advance robust few-shot molecular property prediction.

Paperid: 5284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21049.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning has become a central paradigm for large language models (LLMs), consistently boosting accuracy across diverse benchmarks. Yet its suitability for precision-sensitive tasks remains unclear. We present the first systematic study of reasoning for classification tasks under strict low false positive rate (FPR) regimes. Our analysis covers two tasks--safety detection and hallucination detection--evaluated in both fine-tuned and zero-shot settings, using standard LLMs and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). Our results reveal a clear trade-off: Think On (reasoning-augmented) generation improves overall accuracy, but underperforms at the low-FPR thresholds essential for practical use. In contrast, Think Off (no reasoning during inference) dominates in these precision-sensitive regimes, with Think On surpassing only when higher FPRs are acceptable. In addition, we find token-based scoring substantially outperforms self-verbalized confidence for precision-sensitive deployments. Finally, a simple ensemble of the two modes recovers the strengths of each. Taken together, our findings position reasoning as a double-edged tool: beneficial for average accuracy, but often ill-suited for applications requiring strict precision.

Paperid: 5285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20856.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalizability across diverse downstream tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that VLMs, including CLIP, are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly on their visual modality. Traditional methods for improving adversarial robustness, such as adversarial training, involve extensive retraining and can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a new Test-Time defense: Feature Perception Threshold Counterattack Noise (FPT-Noise), which enhances the adversarial robustness of CLIP without costly fine-tuning. Our core contributions are threefold: First, we introduce a Dynamic Feature Modulator that dynamically generate an image-specific and attack-adaptive noise intensity parameter. Second, We reanalyzed the image features of CLIP. When images are exposed to different levels of noise, clean images and adversarial images exhibit distinct rates of feature change. We established a feature perception threshold to distinguish clean images from attacked ones. Finally, we integrate a Scene-Aware Regulation guided by a stability threshold and leverage Test-Time Transformation Ensembling (TTE) to further mitigate the impact of residual noise and enhance robustness.Extensive experimentation has demonstrated that FPT-Noise significantly outperforms existing Test-Time defense methods, boosting average robust accuracy from 0.07% to 56.86% under AutoAttack while maintaining high performance on clean images (-1.1%). The code will be made public following the publication of the study. The code will be made public following the publication of the study.

Paperid: 5286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19346.pdf

Abstract:
Removing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from clinical notes in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is essential for research and AI development. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, their high computational costs and the data privacy risks of API-based services limit their use, especially in low-resource settings. To address this, we developed LOGICAL (Local Obfuscation by GLINER for Impartial Context-Aware Lineage), an efficient, locally deployable PII removal system built on a fine-tuned Generalist and Lightweight Named Entity Recognition (GLiNER) model. We used 1515 clinical documents from a psychiatric hospital's EHR system. We defined nine PII categories for removal. A modern-gliner-bi-large-v1.0 model was fine-tuned on 2849 text instances and evaluated on a test set of 376 instances using character-level precision, recall, and F1-score. We compared its performance against Microsoft Azure NER, Microsoft Presidio, and zero-shot prompting with Gemini-Pro-2.5 and Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The fine-tuned GLiNER model achieved superior performance, with an overall micro-average F1-score of 0.980, significantly outperforming Gemini-Pro-2.5 (F1-score: 0.845). LOGICAL correctly sanitised 95% of documents completely, compared to 64% for the next-best solution. The model operated efficiently on a standard laptop without a dedicated GPU. However, a 2% entity-level false negative rate underscores the need for human-in-the-loop validation across all tested systems. Fine-tuned, specialised transformer models like GLiNER offer an accurate, computationally efficient, and secure solution for PII removal from clinical notes. This "sanitisation at the source" approach is a practical alternative to resource-intensive LLMs, enabling the creation of de-identified datasets for research and AI development while preserving data privacy, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Paperid: 5287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19128.pdf

Abstract:
Path planning for a robotic system in high-dimensional cluttered environments needs to be efficient, safe, and adaptable for different environments and hardware. Conventional methods face high computation time and require extensive parameter tuning, while prior learning-based methods still fail to generalize effectively. The primary goal of this research is to develop a path planning framework capable of generalizing to unseen environments and new robotic manipulators without the need for retraining. We present GADGET (Generalizable and Adaptive Diffusion-Guided Environment-aware Trajectory generation), a diffusion-based planning model that generates joint-space trajectories conditioned on voxelized scene representations as well as start and goal configurations. A key innovation is GADGET's hybrid dual-conditioning mechanism that combines classifier-free guidance via learned scene encoding with classifier-guided Control Barrier Function (CBF) safety shaping, integrating environment awareness with real-time collision avoidance directly in the denoising process. This design supports zero-shot transfer to new environments and robotic embodiments without retraining. Experimental results show that GADGET achieves high success rates with low collision intensity in spherical-obstacle, bin-picking, and shelf environments, with CBF guidance further improving safety. Moreover, comparative evaluations indicate strong performance relative to both sampling-based and learning-based baselines. Furthermore, GADGET provides transferability across Franka Panda, Kinova Gen3 (6/7-DoF), and UR5 robots, and physical execution on a Kinova Gen3 demonstrates its ability to generate safe, collision-free trajectories in real-world settings.

Paperid: 5288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18030.pdf

Abstract:
Structured pruning is a practical approach to deploying large language models (LLMs) efficiently, as it yields compact, hardware-friendly architectures. However, the dominant local paradigm is task-agnostic: by optimizing layer-wise reconstruction rather than task objectives, it tends to preserve perplexity or generic zero-shot behavior but fails to capitalize on modest task-specific calibration signals, often yielding limited downstream gains. We revisit global structured pruning and present GISP-Global Iterative Structured Pruning-a post-training method that removes attention heads and MLP channels using first-order, loss-based important weights aggregated at the structure level with block-wise normalization. An iterative schedule, rather than one-shot pruning, stabilizes accuracy at higher sparsity and mitigates perplexity collapse without requiring intermediate fine-tuning; the pruning trajectory also forms nested subnetworks that support a "prune-once, deploy-many" workflow. Furthermore, because importance is defined by a model-level loss, GISP naturally supports task-specific objectives; we instantiate perplexity for language modeling and a margin-based objective for decision-style tasks. Extensive experiments show that across Llama2-7B/13B, Llama3-8B, and Mistral-0.3-7B, GISP consistently lowers WikiText-2 perplexity and improves downstream accuracy, with especially strong gains at 40-50% sparsity; on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-3-8B with GSM8K, task-aligned calibration substantially boosts exact-match accuracy.

Paperid: 5289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17052.pdf

Abstract:
Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, but tool usage errors still hinder their reliability. We introduce ToolCritic, a diagnostic framework that evaluates and improves LLM behavior in multi-turn, tool-augmented dialogues. ToolCritic detects eight distinct error types specific to tool-calling (e.g., premature invocation, argument misalignment, and misinterpretation of tool outputs) and provides targeted feedback to the main LLM. The main LLM, assumed to have strong reasoning, task understanding and orchestration capabilities, then revises its response based on ToolCritic's feedback. We systematically define these error categories and construct a synthetic dataset to train ToolCritic. Experimental results on the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset demonstrate that ToolCritic improves tool-calling accuracy by up to 13% over baselines, including zero-shot prompting and self-correction techniques. This represents a promising step toward more robust LLM integration with external tools in real-world dialogue applications.

Paperid: 5290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16091.pdf

Abstract:
This study quantifies how prompting strategies interact with large language models (LLMs) to automate the screening stage of systematic literature reviews (SLRs). We evaluate six LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-Chat-V3, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Claude-3.5-Haiku, Llama-4-Maverick) under five prompt types (zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), CoT-few-shot, self-reflection) across relevance classification and six Level-2 tasks, using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1. Results show pronounced model-prompt interaction effects: CoT-few-shot yields the most reliable precision-recall balance; zero-shot maximizes recall for high-sensitivity passes; and self-reflection underperforms due to over-inclusivity and instability across models. GPT-4o and DeepSeek provide robust overall performance, while GPT-4o-mini performs competitively at a substantially lower dollar cost. A cost-performance analysis for relevance classification (per 1,000 abstracts) reveals large absolute differences among model-prompt pairings; GPT-4o-mini remains low-cost across prompts, and structured prompts (CoT/CoT-few-shot) on GPT-4o-mini offer attractive F1 at a small incremental cost. We recommend a staged workflow that (1) deploys low-cost models with structured prompts for first-pass screening and (2) escalates only borderline cases to higher-capacity models. These findings highlight LLMs' uneven but promising potential to automate literature screening. By systematically analyzing prompt-model interactions, we provide a comparative benchmark and practical guidance for task-adaptive LLM deployment.

Paperid: 5291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13993.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing has become a vital tool across sectors such as urban planning, environmental monitoring, and disaster response. While the volume of data generated has increased significantly, traditional vision models are often constrained by the requirement for extensive domain-specific labelled data and their limited ability to understand the context within complex environments. Vision Language Models offer a complementary approach by integrating visual and textual data; however, their application to remote sensing remains underexplored, particularly given their generalist nature. This work investigates the combination of vision models and VLMs to enhance image analysis in remote sensing, with a focus on aircraft detection and scene understanding. The integration of YOLO with VLMs such as LLaVA, ChatGPT, and Gemini aims to achieve more accurate and contextually aware image interpretation. Performance is evaluated on both labelled and unlabelled remote sensing data, as well as degraded image scenarios which are crucial for remote sensing. The findings show an average MAE improvement of 48.46% across models in the accuracy of aircraft detection and counting, especially in challenging conditions, in both raw and degraded scenarios. A 6.17% improvement in CLIPScore for comprehensive understanding of remote sensing images is obtained. The proposed approach combining traditional vision models and VLMs paves the way for more advanced and efficient remote sensing image analysis, especially in few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 5292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13862.pdf

Abstract:
While recent studies have examined the leaning impact of large language model (LLM) in educational contexts, the affective dynamics of LLM-mediated tutoring remain insufficiently understood. This work introduces the first ensemble-LLM framework for large-scale affect sensing in tutoring dialogues, advancing the conversation on responsible pathways for integrating generative AI into education by attending to learners' evolving affective states. To achieve this, we analyzed two semesters' worth of 16,986 conversational turns exchanged between PyTutor, an LLM-powered AI tutor, and 261 undergraduate learners across three U.S. institutions. To investigate learners' emotional experiences, we generate zero-shot affect annotations from three frontier LLMs (Gemini, GPT-4o, Claude), including scalar ratings of valence, arousal, and learning-helpfulness, along with free-text emotion labels. These estimates are fused through rank-weighted intra-model pooling and plurality consensus across models to produce robust emotion profiles. Our analysis shows that during interaction with the AI tutor, students typically report mildly positive affect and moderate arousal. Yet learning is not uniformly smooth: confusion and curiosity are frequent companions to problem solving, and frustration, while less common, still surfaces in ways that can derail progress. Emotional states are short-lived--positive moments last slightly longer than neutral or negative ones, but they are fragile and easily disrupted. Encouragingly, negative emotions often resolve quickly, sometimes rebounding directly into positive states. Neutral moments frequently act as turning points, more often steering students upward than downward, suggesting opportunities for tutors to intervene at precisely these junctures.

Paperid: 5293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13217.pdf

Abstract:
Modern IR systems are increasingly tasked with answering complex, multi-faceted queries that require deep reasoning rather than simple keyword or semantic matching. While LLM-based IR has shown great promise, the prevailing retrieve-then-rerank paradigm inherits the limitations of embedding-based retrieval; parametric generative approaches are difficult to update with new information; and long-context methods that place the entire corpus in context are computationally infeasible for large document collections. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTICE, a hierarchical retrieval framework that enables an LLM to reason over and navigate large corpora with logarithmic search complexity by imposing a semantic tree structure on the corpus. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) an offline phase that organizes the corpus into a semantic hierarchy via either a bottom-up agglomerative strategy or a top-down divisive strategy using multi-level summaries and (2) an online traversal phase where a search LLM navigates this tree. A central challenge in such LLM-guided search is that the model's relevance judgments are noisy, context-dependent, and unaware of the hierarchy, making cross-branch and cross-level comparisons difficult. To overcome this, we propose a traversal algorithm that estimates calibrated latent relevance scores from local LLM outputs and aggregates them into a global path relevance metric. Our training-free framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, demonstrating up to 9% improvement in Recall@100 and 5% in nDCG@10 over the next best zero-shot baseline. Furthermore, compared to the fine-tuned SOTA method DIVER-v2, LATTICE attains comparable results on BRIGHT subsets that use a static corpus for evaluation.

Paperid: 5294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12717.pdf

Abstract:
Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides interpretable, tunable locomotion controllers grounded in physical models, but its robustness depends on frequent replanning and is limited by model mismatch and real-time computational constraints. Reinforcement Learning (RL), by contrast, can produce highly robust behaviors through stochastic training but often lacks interpretability, suffers from out-of-distribution failures, and requires intensive reward engineering. This work presents a GPU-parallelized residual architecture that tightly integrates MPC and RL by blending their outputs at the torque-control level. We develop a kinodynamic whole-body MPC formulation evaluated across thousands of agents in parallel at 100 Hz for RL training. The residual policy learns to make targeted corrections to the MPC outputs, combining the interpretability and constraint handling of model-based control with the adaptability of RL. The model-based control prior acts as a strong bias, initializing and guiding the policy towards desirable behavior with a simple set of rewards. Compared to standalone MPC or end-to-end RL, our approach achieves higher sample efficiency, converges to greater asymptotic rewards, expands the range of trackable velocity commands, and enables zero-shot adaptation to unseen gaits and uneven terrain.

Paperid: 5295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11188.pdf

Abstract:
Deciphering the function of unseen protein sequences is a fundamental challenge with broad scientific impact, yet most existing methods depend on task-specific adapters or large-scale supervised fine-tuning. We introduce the "Protein-as-Second-Language" framework, which reformulates amino-acid sequences as sentences in a novel symbolic language that large language models can interpret through contextual exemplars. Our approach adaptively constructs sequence-question-answer triples that reveal functional cues in a zero-shot setting, without any further training. To support this process, we curate a bilingual corpus of 79,926 protein-QA instances spanning attribute prediction, descriptive understanding, and extended reasoning. Empirically, our method delivers consistent gains across diverse open-source LLMs and GPT-4, achieving up to 17.2% ROUGE-L improvement (average +7%) and even surpassing fine-tuned protein-specific language models. These results highlight that generic LLMs, when guided with protein-as-language cues, can outperform domain-specialized models, offering a scalable pathway for protein understanding in foundation models.

Paperid: 5296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11050.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in text-guided diffusion models have shown promise for general image editing via inversion techniques, but often struggle to maintain ID and structural consistency in real face editing tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a zero-shot face editing method based on ID-Attribute Decoupled Inversion. Specifically, we decompose the face representation into ID and attribute features, using them as joint conditions to guide both the inversion and the reverse diffusion processes. This allows independent control over ID and attributes, ensuring strong ID preservation and structural consistency while enabling precise facial attribute manipulation. Our method supports a wide range of complex multi-attribute face editing tasks using only text prompts, without requiring region-specific input, and operates at a speed comparable to DDIM inversion. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness.

Paperid: 5297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10964.pdf

Abstract:
While 4-bit quantization has emerged as a memory-optimal choice for non-reasoning models and zero-shot tasks across scales, we show that this universal prescription fails for reasoning models, where the KV cache rather than model size can dominate memory. Through systematic experiments across 1,700 inference scenarios on AIME25 and GPQA-Diamond, we find a scale-dependent trade-off: models with an effective size below 8-bit 4B parameters achieve better accuracy by allocating memory to more weights rather than longer generation, while larger models achieve better accuracy by allocating memory to longer generations. This scale threshold also determines when parallel scaling becomes memory-efficient and whether KV cache eviction outperforms KV quantization. Our findings show that memory optimization for LLMs cannot be scale-agnostic, while providing principled guidelines: for small reasoning models, prioritize model capacity over test-time compute, while for larger ones, maximize test-time compute. Our results suggest that optimizing reasoning models for deployment requires fundamentally different strategies from those established for non-reasoning models.

Paperid: 5298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10889.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their cross-modal alignment remains biased toward English due to limited multilingual multimodal data. Recent multilingual extensions have alleviated this gap but enforce instance-level alignment while neglecting the global geometry of the shared embedding space. We address this problem by introducing ToMCLIP (Topological Alignment for Multilingual CLIP), a topology-aware framework aligning embedding spaces with topology-preserving constraints. The proposed method applies persistent homology to define a topological alignment loss and approximates persistence diagram with theoretical error bounds using graph sparsification strategy. This work validates the proposed approach, showing enhanced structural coherence of multilingual representations, higher zero-shot accuracy on the CIFAR-100, and stronger multilingual retrieval performance on the xFlickr&CO. Beyond VLMs, the proposed approach provides a general method for incorporating topological alignment into representation learning.

Paperid: 5299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09045.pdf

Abstract:
In the domain of software development, LLMs have been utilized to automate tasks such as code translation, where source code from one programming language is translated to another while preserving its functionality. However, LLMs often struggle with long source codes that don't fit into the context window, which produces inaccurate translations. To address this, we propose a novel zero-shot code translation method that incorporates identifier replacement. By substituting user-given long identifiers with generalized placeholders during translation, our method allows the LLM to focus on the logical structure of the code, by reducing token count and memory usage, which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of long code translation. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach preserves syntactical and hierarchical information and produces translation results with reduced tokens.

Paperid: 5300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08768.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail to generalize to new robots, tasks, or environments with different physical parameters, a challenge that limits their real-world applicability. This paper presents a simple, zero-shot transfer method based on Buckingham's Pi Theorem to address this limitation. The method adapts a pre-trained policy to new system contexts by scaling its inputs (observations) and outputs (actions) through a dimensionless space, requiring no retraining. The approach is evaluated against a naive transfer baseline across three environments of increasing complexity: a simulated pendulum, a physical pendulum for sim-to-real validation, and the high-dimensional HalfCheetah. Results demonstrate that the scaled transfer exhibits no loss of performance on dynamically similar contexts. Furthermore, on non-similar contexts, the scaled policy consistently outperforms the naive transfer, significantly expanding the volume of contexts where the original policy remains effective. These findings demonstrate that dimensional analysis provides a powerful and practical tool to enhance the robustness and generalization of RL policies.

Paperid: 5301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07115.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses explainable AI (XAI) through the lens of Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) that do not require explicit concept annotations, relying instead on concepts extracted using CLIP in a zero-shot manner. We show that CLIP, which is central in these techniques, is prone to concept hallucination, incorrectly predicting the presence or absence of concepts within an image in scenarios used in numerous CBMs, hence undermining the faithfulness of explanations. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Concept Hallucination Inhibition via Localized Interpretability (CHILI), a technique that disentangles image embeddings and localizes pixels corresponding to target concepts. Furthermore, our approach supports the generation of saliency-based explanations that are more interpretable.

Paperid: 5302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06611.pdf

Abstract:
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a vital clinical diagnostic tool, yet its widespread application is limited by prolonged scan times. Fast MRI reconstruction techniques effectively reduce acquisition duration by reconstructing high-fidelity MR images from undersampled k-space data. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have demonstrated remarkable progress in this field, with self-supervised and unsupervised learning approaches proving particularly valuable in scenarios where fully sampled data are difficult to obtain. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot self-supervised reconstruction framework named UnrollINR, which enables scan-specific MRI reconstruction without relying on external training data. The method adopts a physics-guided unrolled iterative reconstruction architecture and introduces Implicit Neural Representation (INR) as a regularization prior to effectively constrain the solution space. By combining a deep unrolled structure with the powerful implicit representation capability of INR, the model's interpretability and reconstruction performance are enhanced. Experimental results demonstrate that even at a high acceleration rate of 10, UnrollINR achieves superior reconstruction performance compared to the supervised learning method, validating the superiority of the proposed method.

Paperid: 5303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04794.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-transformers (ViTs) and large-scale convolution-neural-networks (CNNs) have reshaped computer vision through pretrained feature representations that enable strong transfer learning for diverse tasks. However, their efficiency as backbone architectures for geometric estimation tasks involving image deformations in low-data regimes remains an open question. This work considers two such tasks: 1) estimating 2D rigid transformations between pairs of images and 2) predicting the fundamental matrix for stereo image pairs, an important problem in various applications, such as autonomous mobility, robotics, and 3D scene reconstruction. Addressing this intriguing question, this work systematically compares large-scale CNNs (ResNet, EfficientNet, CLIP-ResNet) with ViT-based foundation models (CLIP-ViT variants and DINO) in various data size settings, including few-shot scenarios. These pretrained models are optimized for classification or contrastive learning, encouraging them to focus mostly on high-level semantics. The considered tasks require balancing local and global features differently, challenging the straightforward adoption of these models as the backbone. Empirical comparative analysis shows that, similar to training from scratch, ViTs outperform CNNs during refinement in large downstream-data scenarios. However, in small data scenarios, the inductive bias and smaller capacity of CNNs improve their performance, allowing them to match that of a ViT. Moreover, ViTs exhibit stronger generalization in cross-domain evaluation where the data distribution changes. These results emphasize the importance of carefully selecting model architectures for refinement, motivating future research towards hybrid architectures that balance local and global representations.

Paperid: 5304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04166.pdf

Abstract:
Syntax highlighting is a critical feature in modern software development environments, enhancing code readability and developer productivity. However, delivering accurate highlighting in real time remains challenging for online and web-based development tools due to strict time and memory constraints on backend services. These systems must serve highlights rapidly and frequently, even when code is partially valid or invalid. This has led to on-the-fly syntax highlighting, where visual annotations are generated just before content is served, often at high request rates and under incomplete input conditions. To meet these demands efficiently, state-of-the-art models use deep learning to learn the behavior of brute-force syntax highlighting resolvers, tools that are easy to implement but too slow for production. Through the Deep Abstraction process, brute-force strategies are encoded into fast statistical models that achieve both high accuracy and low-latency inference. Despite their success, such models face key challenges: they support only one programming language per model, require large datasets from slow brute-force generators, and involve resource-intensive training. In multi-language environments, this means maintaining multiple independent models, increasing system complexity and operational cost. This work addresses these issues by introducing a unified model capable of highlighting up to six mainstream programming languages, reducing deployment complexity by a factor of six and improving performance on unseen languages. A novel normalization technique significantly enhances model generalization, while few-shot learning experiments show that a small number of oracle samples can replace large datasets, minimizing dependence on brute-force generators. Combined, these innovations enable efficient, scalable, and cost-effective syntax highlighting across diverse programming languages.

Paperid: 5305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03706.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce EmbodiSwap - a method for producing photorealistic synthetic robot overlays over human video. We employ EmbodiSwap for zero-shot imitation learning, bridging the embodiment gap between in-the-wild ego-centric human video and a target robot embodiment. We train a closed-loop robot manipulation policy over the data produced by EmbodiSwap. We make novel use of V-JEPA as a visual backbone, repurposing V-JEPA from the domain of video understanding to imitation learning over synthetic robot videos. Adoption of V-JEPA outperforms alternative vision backbones more conventionally used within robotics. In real-world tests, our zero-shot trained V-JEPA model achieves an $82\%$ success rate, outperforming a few-shot trained $π_0$ network as well as $π_0$ trained over data produced by EmbodiSwap. We release (i) code for generating the synthetic robot overlays which takes as input human videos and an arbitrary robot URDF and generates a robot dataset, (ii) the robot dataset we synthesize over EPIC-Kitchens, HOI4D and Ego4D, and (iii) model checkpoints and inference code, to facilitate reproducible research and broader adoption.

Paperid: 5306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03419.pdf

Abstract:
Uncertainty-aware wind power prediction is essential for grid integration and reliable wind farm operation. We apply neural diffusion processes (NDPs)-a recent class of models that learn distributions over functions-and extend them to a multi-task NDP (MT-NDP) framework for wind power prediction. We provide the first empirical evaluation of NDPs in real supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. We introduce a task encoder within MT-NDPs to capture cross-turbine correlations and enable few-shot adaptation to unseen turbines. The proposed MT-NDP framework outperforms single-task NDPs and GPs in terms of point accuracy and calibration, particularly for wind turbines whose behaviour deviates from the fleet average. In general, NDP-based models deliver calibrated and scalable predictions suitable for operational deployment, offering sharper, yet trustworthy, predictive intervals that can support dispatch and maintenance decisions in modern wind farms.

Paperid: 5307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02060.pdf

Abstract:
In tabular anomaly detection (AD), textual semantics often carry critical signals, as the definition of an anomaly is closely tied to domain-specific context. However, existing benchmarks provide only raw data points without semantic context, overlooking rich textual metadata such as feature descriptions and domain knowledge that experts rely on in practice. This limitation restricts research flexibility and prevents models from fully leveraging domain knowledge for detection. ReTabAD addresses this gap by restoring textual semantics to enable context-aware tabular AD research. We provide (1) 20 carefully curated tabular datasets enriched with structured textual metadata, together with implementations of state-of-the-art AD algorithms including classical, deep learning, and LLM-based approaches, and (2) a zero-shot LLM framework that leverages semantic context without task-specific training, establishing a strong baseline for future research. Furthermore, this work provides insights into the role and utility of textual metadata in AD through experiments and analysis. Results show that semantic context improves detection performance and enhances interpretability by supporting domain-aware reasoning. These findings establish ReTabAD as a benchmark for systematic exploration of context-aware AD.

Paperid: 5308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20634.pdf

Abstract:
We find AI embeddings obtained using a pre-trained transformer-based Large Language Model (LLM) of 80,000-120,000 written affirmations and correction exchanges among residents in low-security correctional facilities to be highly predictive of recidivism. The prediction accuracy is 30\% higher with embedding vectors than with only pre-entry covariates. However, since the text embedding vectors are high-dimensional, we perform Zero-Shot classification of these texts to a low-dimensional vector of user-defined classes to aid interpretation while retaining the predictive power. To shed light on the social dynamics inside the correctional facilities, we estimate peer effects in these LLM-generated numerical representations of language with a multivariate peer effect model, adjusting for network endogeneity. We develop new methodology and theory for peer effect estimation that accommodate sparse networks, multivariate latent variables, and correlated multivariate outcomes. With these new methods, we find significant peer effects in language usage for interaction and feedback.

Paperid: 5309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19631.pdf

Abstract:
Speech summarization is a critical component of spoken content understanding, particularly in the era of rapidly growing spoken and audiovisual data. Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), leveraging the power of LLMs, enable generating textual summaries directly from speech without intermediate transcriptions, while supporting controllable styles and zero-shot generalization. However, open-source MLLMs continue to lag behind the state-of-the-art text-based LLMs, limiting their practical deployment for speech summarization. In this work, we present a novel multi-stage reinforcement learning training framework to enhance the speech summarization capabilities in MLLMs. Our model delivers substantial improvements over strong baselines, outperforms much larger MLLMs, and significantly narrows the gap with state-of-the-art text-based LLMs.

Paperid: 5310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19028.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised semantic segmentation approach for food images which takes advantage of the zero-shot capabilities and promptability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) along with the attention mechanisms of Vision Transformers (ViTs). Specifically, we use class activation maps (CAMs) from ViTs to generate prompts for SAM, resulting in masks suitable for food image segmentation. The ViT model, a Swin Transformer, is trained exclusively using image-level annotations, eliminating the need for pixel-level annotations during training. Additionally, to enhance the quality of the SAM-generated masks, we examine the use of image preprocessing techniques in combination with single-mask and multi-mask SAM generation strategies. The methodology is evaluated on the FoodSeg103 dataset, generating an average of 2.4 masks per image (excluding background), and achieving an mIoU of 0.54 for the multi-mask scenario. We envision the proposed approach as a tool to accelerate food image annotation tasks or as an integrated component in food and nutrition tracking applications.

Paperid: 5311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18015.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has shown promising performance of frontier large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts in medical quizzes and diagnostic tasks, highlighting their potential for broad clinical utility given their accessible, general-purpose nature. However, beyond diagnosis, a fundamental aspect of medical image interpretation is the ability to localize pathological findings. Evaluating localization not only has clinical and educational relevance but also provides insight into a model's spatial understanding of anatomy and disease. Here, we systematically assess two general-purpose MLLMs (GPT-4 and GPT-5) and a domain-specific model (MedGemma) in their ability to localize pathologies on chest radiographs, using a prompting pipeline that overlays a spatial grid and elicits coordinate-based predictions. Averaged across nine pathologies in the CheXlocalize dataset, GPT-5 exhibited a localization accuracy of 49.7%, followed by GPT-4 (39.1%) and MedGemma (17.7%), all lower than a task-specific CNN baseline (59.9%) and a radiologist benchmark (80.1%). Despite modest performance, error analysis revealed that GPT-5's predictions were largely in anatomically plausible regions, just not always precisely localized. GPT-4 performed well on pathologies with fixed anatomical locations, but struggled with spatially variable findings and exhibited anatomically implausible predictions more frequently. MedGemma demonstrated the lowest performance on all pathologies, but showed improvements when provided examples through few shot prompting. Our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of current MLLMs in medical imaging and underscore the importance of integrating them with task-specific tools for reliable use.

Paperid: 5312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17552.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be enhanced with test-time computation, which relies on external tools and even other deep learning models. However, existing approaches for integrating non-text modality representations into LLMs typically require additional costly supervised training, restricting on-the-fly adaptation to new domains and modalities. In this work, we explore the feasibility of integrating representations from non-text foundational models (FMs) into text-based LLMs in a training-free manner. We propose In-Context Representation Learning (ICRL) as a proof-of-concept to allow LLMs to adaptively utilize non-text modality representations with few-shot learning. Unlike traditional in-context learning, which incorporates text-label pairs, ICRL replaces text inputs with FM representations, enabling the LLM to perform multi-modal inference without fine-tuning. We evaluate ICRL on a suite of tasks in the molecular domain, investigating three core research questions: (i) how to map FM representations into LLMs in a training-free manner, (ii) what factors influence ICRL performance, and (iii) what mechanisms underlie the effectiveness of ICRL. To the best of our knowledge, ICRL is the first training-free framework for integrating non-text modality representations into text-based LLMs, presenting a promising direction for adaptable, multi-modal generalization.

Paperid: 5313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16615.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic manipulation, but it can suffer from low sample efficiency and requires extensive exploration of large state-action spaces. Recent methods leverage the commonsense knowledge and reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) to guide exploration toward more meaningful states. However, LLMs can produce plans that are semantically plausible yet physically infeasible, yielding unreliable behavior. We introduce LLM-TALE, a framework that uses LLMs' planning to directly steer RL exploration. LLM-TALE integrates planning at both the task level and the affordance level, improving learning efficiency by directing agents toward semantically meaningful actions. Unlike prior approaches that assume optimal LLM-generated plans or rewards, LLM-TALE corrects suboptimality online and explores multimodal affordance-level plans without human supervision. We evaluate LLM-TALE on pick-and-place tasks in standard RL benchmarks, observing improvements in both sample efficiency and success rates over strong baselines. Real-robot experiments indicate promising zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Code and supplementary material are available at https://llm-tale.github.io.

Paperid: 5314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15640.pdf

Abstract:
Medical English-Vietnamese machine translation (En-Vi MT) is essential for healthcare access and communication in Vietnam, yet Vietnamese remains a low-resource and under-studied language. We systematically evaluate prompting strategies for six multilingual LLMs (0.5B-9B parameters) on the MedEV dataset, comparing zero-shot, few-shot, and dictionary-augmented prompting with Meddict, an English-Vietnamese medical lexicon. Results show that model scale is the primary driver of performance: larger LLMs achieve strong zero-shot results, while few-shot prompting yields only marginal improvements. In contrast, terminology-aware cues and embedding-based example retrieval consistently improve domain-specific translation. These findings underscore both the promise and the current limitations of multilingual LLMs for medical En-Vi MT.

Paperid: 5315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13731.pdf

Abstract:
The industrial insertion of flexible flat cables (FFCs) into receptacles presents a significant challenge owing to the need for submillimeter precision when handling the deformable cables. In manufacturing processes, FFC insertion with robotic manipulators often requires laborious human-guided trajectory generation. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a solution to automate this task without modeling complex properties of FFCs, the nondeterminism caused by the deformability of FFCs requires significant efforts and time on training. Moreover, training directly in a real environment is dangerous as industrial robots move fast and possess no safety measure. We propose an RL algorithm for FFC insertion that leverages a foundation model-based real-to-sim approach to reduce the training time and eliminate the risk of physical damages to robots and surroundings. Training is done entirely in simulation, allowing for random exploration without the risk of physical damages. Sim-to-real transfer is achieved through semantic segmentation masks which leave only those visual features relevant to the insertion tasks such as the geometric and spatial information of the cables and receptacles. To enhance generality, we use a foundation model, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2). To eleminate human intervention, we employ a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to automate the initial prompting of SAM2 to find segmentation masks. In the experiments, our method exhibits zero-shot capabilities, which enable direct deployments to real environments without fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13395.pdf

Abstract:
Speech foundation models have recently demonstrated the ability to perform Speech In-Context Learning (SICL). Selecting effective in-context examples is crucial for SICL performance, yet selection methodologies remain underexplored. In this work, we propose Text-Embedding KNN for SICL (TICL), a simple pipeline that uses semantic context to enhance off-the-shelf large multimodal models' speech recognition ability without fine-tuning. Across challenging automatic speech recognition tasks, including accented English, multilingual speech, and children's speech, our method enables models to surpass zero-shot performance with up to 84.7% relative WER reduction. We conduct ablation studies to show the robustness and efficiency of our method.

Paperid: 5317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12743.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a new, training-free method, Graph Reasoning via Retrieval Augmented Framework (GRRAF), that harnesses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) alongside the code-generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to address a wide range of graph reasoning tasks. In GRRAF, the target graph is stored in a graph database, and the LLM is prompted to generate executable code queries that retrieve the necessary information. This approach circumvents the limitations of existing methods that require extensive finetuning or depend on predefined algorithms, and it incorporates an error feedback loop with a time-out mechanism to ensure both correctness and efficiency. Experimental evaluations on the GraphInstruct dataset reveal that GRRAF achieves 100% accuracy on most graph reasoning tasks, including cycle detection, bipartite graph checks, shortest path computation, and maximum flow, while maintaining consistent token costs regardless of graph sizes. Imperfect but still very high performance is observed on subgraph matching. Notably, GRRAF scales effectively to large graphs with up to 10,000 nodes.

Paperid: 5318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11840.pdf

Abstract:
Generative vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong high-level image understanding but lack spatially dense alignment between vision and language modalities, as our findings indicate. Orthogonal to advancements in generative VLMs, another line of research has focused on representation learning for vision-language alignment, targeting zero-shot inference for dense tasks like segmentation. In this work, we bridge these two directions by densely aligning images with synthetic descriptions generated by VLMs. Synthetic captions are inexpensive, scalable, and easy to generate, making them an excellent source of high-level semantic understanding for dense alignment methods. Empirically, our approach outperforms prior work on standard zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks/datasets, while also being more data-efficient.

Paperid: 5319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11481.pdf

Abstract:
Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized for single environments. Because of this overfitting, they are known to break down even under small differences like the Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) gap and require system identification and retraining for even minimal changes to the system. In this work, we present RAPTOR, a method for training a highly adaptive foundation policy for quadrotor control. Our method enables training a single, end-to-end neural-network policy to control a wide variety of quadrotors. We test 10 different real quadrotors from 32 g to 2.4 kg that also differ in motor type (brushed vs. brushless), frame type (soft vs. rigid), propeller type (2/3/4-blade), and flight controller (PX4/Betaflight/Crazyflie/M5StampFly). We find that a tiny, three-layer policy with only 2084 parameters is sufficient for zero-shot adaptation to a wide variety of platforms. The adaptation through In-Context Learning is made possible by using a recurrence in the hidden layer. The policy is trained through a novel Meta-Imitation Learning algorithm, where we sample 1000 quadrotors and train a teacher policy for each of them using Reinforcement Learning. Subsequently, the 1000 teachers are distilled into a single, adaptive student policy. We find that within milliseconds, the resulting foundation policy adapts zero-shot to unseen quadrotors. We extensively test the capabilities of the foundation policy under numerous conditions (trajectory tracking, indoor/outdoor, wind disturbance, poking, different propellers).

Paperid: 5320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10842.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation enables models to recognize and segment objects from arbitrary natural language descriptions, offering the flexibility to handle novel, fine-grained, or functionally defined categories beyond fixed label sets. While this capability is crucial for large-scale urban point clouds that support applications such as digital twins, smart city management, and urban analytics, it remains largely unexplored in this domain. The main obstacles are the frequent absence of high-quality, well-aligned multi-view imagery in large-scale urban point cloud datasets and the poor generalization of existing three-dimensional (3D) segmentation pipelines across diverse urban environments with substantial variation in geometry, scale, and appearance. To address these challenges, we present OpenUrban3D, the first 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation framework for large-scale urban scenes that operates without aligned multi-view images, pre-trained point cloud segmentation networks, or manual annotations. Our approach generates robust semantic features directly from raw point clouds through multi-view, multi-granularity rendering, mask-level vision-language feature extraction, and sample-balanced fusion, followed by distillation into a 3D backbone model. This design enables zero-shot segmentation for arbitrary text queries while capturing both semantic richness and geometric priors. Extensive experiments on large-scale urban benchmarks, including SensatUrban and SUM, show that OpenUrban3D achieves significant improvements in both segmentation accuracy and cross-scene generalization over existing methods, demonstrating its potential as a flexible and scalable solution for 3D urban scene understanding.

Paperid: 5321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08907.pdf

Abstract:
InfluenceMap's LobbyMap Platform monitors the climate policy engagement of over 500 companies and 250 industry associations, assessing each entity's support or opposition to science-based policy pathways for achieving the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5Â°C. Although InfluenceMap has made progress with automating key elements of the analytical workflow, a significant portion of the assessment remains manual, making it time- and labor-intensive and susceptible to human error. We propose an AI-assisted framework to accelerate the monitoring of corporate climate policy engagement by leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation to automate the most time-intensive extraction of relevant evidence from large-scale textual data. Our evaluation shows that a combination of layout-aware parsing, the Nomic embedding model, and few-shot prompting strategies yields the best performance in extracting and classifying evidence from multilingual corporate documents. We conclude that while the automated RAG system effectively accelerates evidence extraction, the nuanced nature of the analysis necessitates a human-in-the-loop approach where the technology augments, rather than replaces, expert judgment to ensure accuracy.

Paperid: 5322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05397.pdf

Abstract:
Modern robotic manufacturing requires collision-free coordination of multiple robots to complete numerous tasks in shared, obstacle-rich workspaces. Although individual tasks may be simple in isolation, automated joint task allocation, scheduling, and motion planning under spatio-temporal constraints remain computationally intractable for classical methods at real-world scales. Existing multi-arm systems deployed in the industry rely on human intuition and experience to design feasible trajectories manually in a labor-intensive process. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework to achieve automated task and motion planning, tested in an obstacle-rich environment with eight robots performing 40 reaching tasks in a shared workspace, where any robot can perform any task in any order. Our approach builds on a graph neural network (GNN) policy trained via RL on procedurally-generated environments with diverse obstacle layouts, robot configurations, and task distributions. It employs a graph representation of scenes and a graph policy neural network trained through reinforcement learning to generate trajectories of multiple robots, jointly solving the sub-problems of task allocation, scheduling, and motion planning. Trained on large randomly generated task sets in simulation, our policy generalizes zero-shot to unseen settings with varying robot placements, obstacle geometries, and task poses. We further demonstrate that the high-speed capability of our solution enables its use in workcell layout optimization, improving solution times. The speed and scalability of our planner also open the door to new capabilities such as fault-tolerant planning and online perception-based re-planning, where rapid adaptation to dynamic task sets is required.

Paperid: 5323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04324.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping assistance is essential for restoring autonomy in individuals with motor impairments, particularly in unstructured environments where object categories and user intentions are diverse and unpredictable. We present OVGrasp, a hierarchical control framework for soft exoskeleton-based grasp assistance that integrates RGB-D vision, open-vocabulary prompts, and voice commands to enable robust multimodal interaction. To enhance generalization in open environments, OVGrasp incorporates a vision-language foundation model with an open-vocabulary mechanism, allowing zero-shot detection of previously unseen objects without retraining. A multimodal decision-maker further fuses spatial and linguistic cues to infer user intent, such as grasp or release, in multi-object scenarios. We deploy the complete framework on a custom egocentric-view wearable exoskeleton and conduct systematic evaluations on 15 objects across three grasp types. Experimental results with ten participants demonstrate that OVGrasp achieves a grasping ability score (GAS) of 87.00%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and achieving improved kinematic alignment with natural hand motion.

Paperid: 5324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01267.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs face significant challenges in systematic generalization, particularly when dealing with reasoning tasks requiring compositional rules and handling out-of-distribution examples. To address these challenges, we introduce an in-context learning methodology that improves the generalization capabilities of general purpose LLMs. Our approach employs an iterative example selection strategy, which incrementally constructs a tailored set of few-shot examples optimized to enhance model's performance on a given task. As a proof of concept, we apply this methodology to the resolution of algebraic expressions involving non-standard simplification rules, according to which the priority of addition and multiplication is changed. Our findings indicate that LLMs exhibit limited proficiency in these mathematical tasks. We further demonstrate that LLMs reasoning benefits from our iterative shot selection prompting strategy integrated with explicit reasoning instructions. Crucially, our experiments reveal that some LLMs achieve better generalization performances when prompted with simpler few-shot examples rather than complex ones following the test data distribution.

Paperid: 5325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21565.pdf

Abstract:
Effectively understanding urban scenes requires fine-grained spatial reasoning about objects, layouts, and depth cues. However, how well current vision-language models (VLMs), pretrained on general scenes, transfer these abilities to urban domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative study of three off-the-shelf VLMs-BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA-1.5-evaluating both zero-shot performance and the effects of fine-tuning with a synthetic VQA dataset specific to urban scenes. We construct such dataset from segmentation, depth, and object detection predictions of street-view images, pairing each question with LLM-generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) answers for step-by-step reasoning supervision. Results show that while VLMs perform reasonably well in zero-shot settings, fine-tuning with our synthetic CoT-supervised dataset substantially boosts performance, especially for challenging question types such as negation and counterfactuals. This study introduces urban spatial reasoning as a new challenge for VLMs and demonstrates synthetic dataset construction as a practical path for adapting general-purpose models to specialized domains.

Paperid: 5326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21501.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning enables intelligent systems to acquire complex behaviors with minimal supervision. However, existing methods often focus on short-horizon skills, require large datasets, and struggle to solve long-horizon tasks or generalize across task variations and distribution shifts. We propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework that jointly learns continuous control policies and symbolic domain abstractions from a few skill demonstrations. Our method abstracts high-level task structures into a graph, discovers symbolic rules via an Answer Set Programming solver, and trains low-level controllers using diffusion policy imitation learning. A high-level oracle filters task-relevant information to focus each controller on a minimal observation and action space. Our graph-based neuro-symbolic framework enables capturing complex state transitions, including non-spatial and temporal relations, that data-driven learning or clustering techniques often fail to discover in limited demonstration datasets. We validate our approach in six domains that involve four robotic arms, Stacking, Kitchen, Assembly, and Towers of Hanoi environments, and a distinct Automated Forklift domain with two environments. The results demonstrate high data efficiency with as few as five skill demonstrations, strong zero- and few-shot generalizations, and interpretable decision making.

Paperid: 5327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21102.pdf

Abstract:
We focus on the task of identifying the location of target regions from a natural language instruction and a front camera image captured by a mobility. This task is challenging because it requires both existence prediction and segmentation, particularly for stuff-type target regions with ambiguous boundaries. Existing methods often underperform in handling stuff-type target regions, in addition to absent or multiple targets. To overcome these limitations, we propose GENNAV, which predicts target existence and generates segmentation masks for multiple stuff-type target regions. To evaluate GENNAV, we constructed a novel benchmark called GRiN-Drive, which includes three distinct types of samples: no-target, single-target, and multi-target. GENNAV achieved superior performance over baseline methods on standard evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we conducted real-world experiments with four automobiles operated in five geographically distinct urban areas to validate its zero-shot transfer performance. In these experiments, GENNAV outperformed baseline methods and demonstrated its robustness across diverse real-world environments. The project page is available at https://gennav.vercel.app/.

Paperid: 5328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20869.pdf

Abstract:
Improvements in training data scale and quality have led to significant advances, yet its influence in speech recognition remains underexplored. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset, OLMoASR-Pool, and series of models, OLMoASR, to study and develop robust zero-shot speech recognition models. Beginning from OLMoASR-Pool, a collection of 3M hours of English audio and 17M transcripts, we design text heuristic filters to remove low-quality or mistranscribed data. Our curation pipeline produces a new dataset containing 1M hours of high-quality audio-transcript pairs, which we call OLMoASR-Mix. We use OLMoASR-Mix to train the OLMoASR-Mix suite of models, ranging from 39M (tiny.en) to 1.5B (large.en) parameters. Across all model scales, OLMoASR achieves comparable average performance to OpenAI's Whisper on short and long-form speech recognition benchmarks. Notably, OLMoASR-medium.en attains a 12.8\% and 11.0\% word error rate (WER) that is on par with Whisper's largest English-only model Whisper-medium.en's 12.4\% and 10.5\% WER for short and long-form recognition respectively (at equivalent parameter count). OLMoASR-Pool, OLMoASR models, and filtering, training and evaluation code will be made publicly available to further research on robust speech processing.

Paperid: 5329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19464.pdf

Abstract:
The disparity in language resources poses a challenge in multilingual NLP, with high-resource languages benefiting from extensive data, while low-resource languages lack sufficient data for effective training. Our Contrastive Language Alignment with Prompting (CoLAP) method addresses this gap by integrating contrastive learning with cross-lingual representations, facilitating task-specific knowledge transfer from high-resource to lower-resource languages. The primary advantage of our approach is its data efficiency, enabling rapid adaptation to new languages and reducing the need for large labeled datasets. We conduct experiments with multilingual encoder-only and decoder-only language models on natural language understanding tasks, including natural language inference and relation extraction, evaluating performance across both high- and low-resource languages. Our results demonstrate that CoLAP outperforms few-shot cross-lingual transfer baselines and in-context learning, even with limited available data. This effectively narrows the cross-lingual performance gap, contributing to the development of more efficient multilingual NLP techniques.

Paperid: 5330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11697.pdf

Abstract:
We train representation models with procedural data only, and apply them on visual similarity, classification, and semantic segmentation tasks without further training by using visual memory -- an explicit database of reference image embeddings. Unlike prior work on visual memory, our approach achieves full compartmentalization with respect to all real-world images while retaining strong performance. Compared to a model trained on Places, our procedural model performs within $1\%$ on NIGHTS visual similarity, outperforms by $8\%$ and $15\%$ on CUB200 and Flowers102 fine-grained classification, and is within $10\%$ on ImageNet-1K classification. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot segmentation, achieving an $R^2$ on COCO within $10\%$ of the models trained on real data. Finally, we analyze procedural versus real data models, showing that parts of the same object have dissimilar representations in procedural models, resulting in incorrect searches in memory and explaining the remaining performance gap.

Paperid: 5331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10407.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have made significant progress in generating diverse high-quality images from textual prompts. However, these models still face challenges in suppressing content that is strongly entangled with specific words. For example, when generating an image of "Charlie Chaplin", a "mustache" consistently appears even if explicitly instructed not to include it, as the concept of "mustache" is strongly entangled with "Charlie Chaplin". To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to directly suppress such entangled content within the text embedding space of diffusion models. Our method introduces a delta vector that modifies the text embedding to weaken the influence of undesired content in the generated image, and we further demonstrate that this delta vector can be easily obtained through a zero-shot approach. Furthermore, we propose a Selective Suppression with Delta Vector (SSDV) method to adapt delta vector into the cross-attention mechanism, enabling more effective suppression of unwanted content in regions where it would otherwise be generated. Additionally, we enabled more precise suppression in personalized T2I models by optimizing delta vector, which previous baselines were unable to achieve. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods, both in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Paperid: 5332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08384.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor lighting estimation from a single image or video remains a challenge due to its highly ill-posed nature, especially when the lighting condition of the scene varies spatially and temporally. We propose a method that estimates from an input video a continuous light field describing the spatiotemporally varying lighting of the scene. We leverage 2D diffusion priors for optimizing such light field represented as a MLP. To enable zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild scenes, we fine-tune a pre-trained image diffusion model to predict lighting at multiple locations by jointly inpainting multiple chrome balls as light probes. We evaluate our method on indoor lighting estimation from a single image or video and show superior performance over compared baselines. Most importantly, we highlight results on spatiotemporally consistent lighting estimation from in-the-wild videos, which is rarely demonstrated in previous works.

Paperid: 5333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07626.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Robot Manipulation (VRM) aims to enable a robot to follow natural language instructions based on robot states and visual observations, and therefore requires costly multi-modal data. To compensate for the deficiency of robot data, existing approaches have employed vision-language pretraining with large-scale data. However, they either utilize web data that differs from robotic tasks, or train the model in an implicit way (e.g., predicting future frames at the pixel level), thus showing limited generalization ability under insufficient robot data. In this paper, we propose to learn from large-scale human action video datasets in an explicit way (i.e., imitating human actions from hand keypoints), introducing Visual Robot Manipulation with Analogical Reasoning (AR-VRM). To acquire action knowledge explicitly from human action videos, we propose a keypoint Vision-Language Model (VLM) pretraining scheme, enabling the VLM to learn human action knowledge and directly predict human hand keypoints. During fine-tuning on robot data, to facilitate the robotic arm in imitating the action patterns of human motions, we first retrieve human action videos that perform similar manipulation tasks and have similar historical observations , and then learn the Analogical Reasoning (AR) map between human hand keypoints and robot components. Taking advantage of focusing on action keypoints instead of irrelevant visual cues, our method achieves leading performance on the CALVIN benchmark {and real-world experiments}. In few-shot scenarios, our AR-VRM outperforms previous methods by large margins , underscoring the effectiveness of explicitly imitating human actions under data scarcity.

Paperid: 5334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06127.pdf

Abstract:
While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) transforms interactive segmentation with zero-shot abilities, its inherent vulnerabilities present a single-point risk, potentially leading to the failure of numerous downstream applications. Proactively evaluating these transferable vulnerabilities is thus imperative. Prior adversarial attacks on SAM often present limited transferability due to insufficient exploration of common weakness across domains. To address this, we propose Vertex-Refining Simplicial Complex Attack (VeSCA), a novel method that leverages only the encoder of SAM for generating transferable adversarial examples. Specifically, it achieves this by explicitly characterizing the shared vulnerable regions between SAM and downstream models through a parametric simplicial complex. Our goal is to identify such complexes within adversarially potent regions by iterative vertex-wise refinement. A lightweight domain re-adaptation strategy is introduced to bridge domain divergence using minimal reference data during the initialization of simplicial complex. Ultimately, VeSCA generates consistently transferable adversarial examples through random simplicial complex sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VeSCA achieves performance improved by 12.7% compared to state-of-the-art methods across three downstream model categories across five domain-specific datasets. Our findings further highlight the downstream model risks posed by SAM's vulnerabilities and emphasize the urgency of developing more robust foundation models.

Paperid: 5335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05094.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world applications often face data privacy constraints and high acquisition costs, making the assumption of sufficient training data in incremental tasks unrealistic and leading to significant performance degradation in class-incremental learning. Forward-compatible learning, which prospectively prepares for future tasks during base task training, has emerged as a promising solution for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL). However, existing methods still struggle to balance base-class discriminability and new-class generalization. Moreover, limited access to original data during incremental tasks often results in ambiguous inter-class decision boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose SMP (Sculpting Margin Penalty), a novel FSCIL method that strategically integrates margin penalties at different stages within the parameter-efficient fine-tuning paradigm. Specifically, we introduce the Margin-aware Intra-task Adapter Merging (MIAM) mechanism for base task learning. MIAM trains two sets of low-rank adapters with distinct classification losses: one with a margin penalty to enhance base-class discriminability, and the other without margin constraints to promote generalization to future new classes. These adapters are then adaptively merged to improve forward compatibility. For incremental tasks, we propose a Margin Penalty-based Classifier Calibration (MPCC) strategy to refine decision boundaries by fine-tuning classifiers on all seen classes' embeddings with a margin penalty. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100, ImageNet-R, and CUB200 demonstrate that SMP achieves state-of-the-art performance in FSCIL while maintaining a better balance between base and new classes.

Paperid: 5336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04987.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables models trained on a labeled source domain to handle new unlabeled domains. Recently, pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot performance by leveraging semantic information to facilitate target tasks. By aligning vision and text embeddings, VLMs have shown notable success in bridging domain gaps. However, inherent differences naturally exist between modalities, which is known as modality gap. Our findings reveal that direct UDA with the presence of modality gap only transfers modality-invariant knowledge, leading to suboptimal target performance. To address this limitation, we propose a unified modality separation framework that accommodates both modality-specific and modality-invariant components. During training, different modality components are disentangled from VLM features then handled separately in a unified manner. At test time, modality-adaptive ensemble weights are automatically determined to maximize the synergy of different components. To evaluate instance-level modality characteristics, we design a modality discrepancy metric to categorize samples into modality-invariant, modality-specific, and uncertain ones. The modality-invariant samples are exploited to facilitate cross-modal alignment, while uncertain ones are annotated to enhance model capabilities. Building upon prompt tuning techniques, our methods achieve up to 9% performance gain with 9 times of computational efficiencies. Extensive experiments and analysis across various backbones, baselines, datasets and adaptation settings demonstrate the efficacy of our design.

Paperid: 5337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03758.pdf

Abstract:
Automated segmentation of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis, therapeutic planning, and longitudinal wound monitoring. However, this task remains challenging due to the heterogeneous appearance, irregular morphology, and complex backgrounds associated with ulcer regions in clinical photographs. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as U-Net, provide strong localization capabilities but struggle to model long-range spatial dependencies due to their inherently limited receptive fields. To address this, we employ the TransUNet architecture, a hybrid framework that integrates the global attention mechanism of Vision Transformers (ViTs) into the U-Net structure. This combination allows the model to extract global contextual features while maintaining fine-grained spatial resolution. We trained the model on the public Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge (FUSeg) dataset using a robust augmentation pipeline and a hybrid loss function to mitigate class imbalance. On the internal validation set, the model achieved a Dice Similarity Coefficient (F1-score) of 0.8886 using an optimized threshold of 0.4843. Crucially, to assess generalizability, we performed external validation on two independent datasets: the AZH Wound Care Center dataset (n=278) and the Medetec dataset (n=152). Without any retraining, the model achieved Dice scores of 0.6209 and 0.7850, respectively, demonstrating robust zero-shot transferability to unseen clinical domains. Furthermore, clinical utility analysis revealed a strong correlation (Pearson r = 0.9749) between predicted and ground-truth wound areas. These outcomes demonstrate that our approach effectively integrates global and local feature extraction, offering a reliable, effective, and explainable solution for automated foot ulcer assessment.

Paperid: 5338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03695.pdf

Abstract:
Video understanding requires effective modeling of both motion and appearance information, particularly for few-shot action recognition. While recent advances in point tracking have been shown to improve few-shot action recognition, two fundamental challenges persist: selecting informative points to track and effectively modeling their motion patterns. We present Trokens, a novel approach that transforms trajectory points into semantic-aware relational tokens for action recognition. First, we introduce a semantic-aware sampling strategy to adaptively distribute tracking points based on object scale and semantic relevance. Second, we develop a motion modeling framework that captures both intra-trajectory dynamics through the Histogram of Oriented Displacements (HoD) and inter-trajectory relationships to model complex action patterns. Our approach effectively combines these trajectory tokens with semantic features to enhance appearance features with motion information, achieving state-of-the-art performance across six diverse few-shot action recognition benchmarks: Something-Something-V2 (both full and small splits), Kinetics, UCF101, HMDB51, and FineGym. For project page see https://trokens-iccv25.github.io

Paperid: 5339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03660.pdf

Abstract:
Morphology-aware policy learning is a means of enhancing policy sample efficiency by aggregating data from multiple agents. These types of policies have previously been shown to help generalize over dynamic, kinematic, and limb configuration variations between agent morphologies. Unfortunately, these policies still have sub-optimal zero-shot performance compared to end-to-end finetuning on morphologies at deployment. This limitation has ramifications in practical applications such as robotics because further data collection to perform end-to-end finetuning can be computationally expensive. In this work, we investigate combining morphology-aware pretraining with parameter efficient finetuning (PEFT) techniques to help reduce the learnable parameters necessary to specialize a morphology-aware policy to a target embodiment. We compare directly tuning sub-sets of model weights, input learnable adapters, and prefix tuning techniques for online finetuning. Our analysis reveals that PEFT techniques in conjunction with policy pre-training generally help reduce the number of samples to necessary to improve a policy compared to training models end-to-end from scratch. We further find that tuning as few as less than 1% of total parameters will improve policy performance compared the zero-shot performance of the base pretrained a policy.

Paperid: 5340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03494.pdf

Abstract:
In cross-modal retrieval tasks, such as image-to-report and report-to-image retrieval, accurately aligning medical images with relevant text reports is essential but challenging due to the inherent ambiguity and variability in medical data. Existing models often struggle to capture the nuanced, multi-level semantic relationships in radiology data, leading to unreliable retrieval results. To address these issues, we propose the Prototype-Enhanced Confidence Modeling (PECM) framework, which introduces multi-level prototypes for each modality to better capture semantic variability and enhance retrieval robustness. PECM employs a dual-stream confidence estimation that leverages prototype similarity distributions and an adaptive weighting mechanism to control the impact of high-uncertainty data on retrieval rankings. Applied to radiology image-report datasets, our method achieves significant improvements in retrieval precision and consistency, effectively handling data ambiguity and advancing reliability in complex clinical scenarios. We report results on multiple different datasets and tasks including fully supervised and zero-shot retrieval obtaining performance gains of up to 10.17%, establishing in new state-of-the-art.

Paperid: 5341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02853.pdf

Abstract:
We present an approach to modeling annotator disagreement in subjective NLP tasks through both architectural and data-centric innovations. Our model, DEM-MoE (Demographic-Aware Mixture of Experts), routes inputs to expert subnetworks based on annotator demographics, enabling it to better represent structured, group-level variation compared to prior models. DEM-MoE consistently performs competitively across demographic groups, and shows especially strong results on datasets with high annotator disagreement. To address sparse demographic coverage, we test whether LLM-generated synthetic annotations via zero-shot persona prompting can be used for data imputation. We show these synthetic judgments align moderately well with human annotations on our data and offer a scalable way to potentially enrich training data. We then propose and evaluate approaches for blending real and synthetic data using strategies tailored to dataset structure. We find that the optimal strategies depend on dataset structure. Together, these contributions improve the representation of diverse perspectives.

Paperid: 5342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02405.pdf

Abstract:
The control of robots for manipulation tasks generally relies on visual input. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) enable the use of natural language instructions to condition visual input and control robots in a wider range of environments. However, existing methods require a large amount of data to fine-tune VLMs for operating in unseen environments. In this paper, we present a framework that learns object-arrangement tasks from just a few demonstrations. We propose a two-stage framework that divides object-arrangement tasks into a target localization stage, for picking the object, and a region determination stage for placing the object. We present an instance-level semantic fusion module that aligns the instance-level image crops with the text embedding, enabling the model to identify the target objects defined by the natural language instructions. We validate our method on both simulation and real-world robotic environments. Our method, fine-tuned with a few demonstrations, improves generalization capability and demonstrates zero-shot ability in real-robot manipulation scenarios.

Paperid: 5343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00680.pdf

Abstract:
This article explores the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on one of the most challenging tasks in authorship analysis: sentence-level style change detection. Benchmarking four LLMs on the official PAN~2024 and 2025 "Multi-Author Writing Style Analysis" datasets, we present several observations. First, state-of-the-art generative models are sensitive to variations in writing style - even at the granular level of individual sentences. Second, their accuracy establishes a challenging baseline for the task, outperforming suggested baselines of the PAN competition. Finally, we explore the influence of semantics on model predictions and present evidence suggesting that the latest generation of LLMs may be more sensitive to content-independent and purely stylistic signals than previously reported.

Paperid: 5344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00675.pdf

Abstract:
Style change detection - identifying the points in a document where writing style shifts - remains one of the most important and challenging problems in computational authorship analysis. At PAN 2025, the shared task challenges participants to detect style switches at the most fine-grained level: individual sentences. The task spans three datasets, each designed with controlled and increasing thematic variety within documents. We propose to address this problem by modeling the content of each problem instance - that is, a series of sentences - as a whole, using a Sequential Sentence Pair Classifier (SSPC). The architecture leverages a pre-trained language model (PLM) to obtain representations of individual sentences, which are then fed into a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) to contextualize them within the document. The BiLSTM-produced vectors of adjacent sentences are concatenated and passed to a multi-layer perceptron for prediction per adjacency. Building on the work of previous PAN participants classical text segmentation, the approach is relatively conservative and lightweight. Nevertheless, it proves effective in leveraging contextual information and addressing what is arguably the most challenging aspect of this year's shared task: the notorious problem of "stylistically shallow", short sentences that are prevalent in the proposed benchmark data. Evaluated on the official PAN-2025 test datasets, the model achieves strong macro-F1 scores of 0.923, 0.828, and 0.724 on the EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD data, respectively, outperforming not only the official random baselines but also a much more challenging one: claude-3.7-sonnet's zero-shot performance.

Paperid: 5345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23377.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped different walks of business. To meet the increasing demands for individualized railway service, we develop LLM4Rail - a novel LLM-augmented railway service consulting platform. Empowered by LLM, LLM4Rail can provide custom modules for ticketing, railway food & drink recommendations, weather information, and chitchat. In LLM4Rail, we propose the iterative "Question-Thought-Action-Observation (QTAO)" prompting framework. It meticulously integrates verbal reasoning with task-oriented actions, that is, reasoning to guide action selection, to effectively retrieve external observations relevant to railway operation and service to generate accurate responses. To provide personalized onboard dining services, we first construct the Chinese Railway Food and Drink (CRFD-25) - a publicly accessible takeout dataset tailored for railway services. CRFD-25 covers a wide range of signature dishes categorized by cities, cuisines, age groups, and spiciness levels. We further introduce an LLM-based zero-shot conversational recommender for railway catering. To address the unconstrained nature of open recommendations, the feature similarity-based post-processing step is introduced to ensure all the recommended items are aligned with CRFD-25 dataset.

Paperid: 5346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21728.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate modeling of the gain spectrum in Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFAs) is essential for optimizing optical network performance, particularly as networks evolve toward multi-vendor solutions. In this work, we propose a generalized few-shot transfer learning architecture based on a Semi-Supervised Self-Normalizing Neural Network (SS-NN) that leverages internal EDFA features - such as VOA input or output power and attenuation, to improve gain spectrum prediction. Our SS-NN model employs a two-phase training strategy comprising unsupervised pre-training with noise-augmented measurements and supervised fine-tuning with a custom weighted MSE loss. Furthermore, we extend the framework with transfer learning (TL) techniques that enable both homogeneous (same-feature space) and heterogeneous (different-feature sets) model adaptation across booster, preamplifier, and ILA EDFAs. To address feature mismatches in heterogeneous TL, we incorporate a covariance matching loss to align second-order feature statistics between source and target domains. Extensive experiments conducted across 26 EDFAs in the COSMOS and Open Ireland testbeds demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the number of measurements requirements on the system while achieving lower mean absolute errors and improved error distributions compared to benchmark methods.

Paperid: 5347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21532.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been widely applied in the requirements engineering (RE) field to support tasks such as classification and ambiguity detection. Although RE research is rooted in empirical investigation, it has paid limited attention to replicating NLP for RE (NLP4RE) studies. The rapidly advancing realm of NLP is creating new opportunities for efficient, machine-assisted workflows, which can bring new perspectives and results to the forefront. Thus, we replicate and extend a previous NLP4RE study (baseline), "Classifying User Requirements from Online Feedback in Small Dataset Environments using Deep Learning", which evaluated different deep learning models for requirement classification from user reviews. We reproduced the original results using publicly released source code, thereby helping to strengthen the external validity of the baseline study. We then extended the setup by evaluating model performance on an external dataset and comparing results to a GPT-4o zero-shot classifier. Furthermore, we prepared the replication study ID-card for the baseline study, important for evaluating replication readiness. Results showed diverse reproducibility levels across different models, with Naive Bayes demonstrating perfect reproducibility. In contrast, BERT and other models showed mixed results. Our findings revealed that baseline deep learning models, BERT and ELMo, exhibited good generalization capabilities on an external dataset, and GPT-4o showed performance comparable to traditional baseline machine learning models. Additionally, our assessment confirmed the baseline study's replication readiness; however missing environment setup files would have further enhanced readiness. We include this missing information in our replication package and provide the replication study ID-card for our study to further encourage and support the replication of our study.

Paperid: 5348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19398.pdf

Abstract:
Chest radiography (CXR) plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of various diseases. However, the inherent class imbalance in the distribution of clinical findings presents a significant challenge for current self-supervised deep learning models. These models often fail to accurately classify long-tailed classes. Current Vision-Language models such as Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) models effectively model the manifold distribution of the latent space, enabling high zero-shot classification accuracies. Although CLIP performs well on most of the primary classes in the dataset, our work reveals that its effectiveness decreases significantly for classes with a long-tailed distribution. Our approach employs a class-weighting mechanism that directly aligns with the distribution of classes within the latent space. This method ensures a substantial improvement in overall classification performance, with particular emphasis on enhancing the recognition and accuracy of rarely observed classes. We accomplish this by applying Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) clustering to the latent space. The subsequent clusters are further refined by Student t-distribution, followed by a metric loss that utilizes the altered embeddings. Our approach facilitates stable and adaptive clustering of the features. This results in a notable average improvement of 7\% points in zero-shot AUC scores across 40 classes in the MIMIC-CXR-JPG dataset from previous SOTA models.

Paperid: 5349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19090.pdf

Abstract:
Claim verification is critical for enhancing digital literacy. However, the state-of-the-art single-LLM methods struggle with complex claim verification that involves multi-faceted evidences. Inspired by real-world fact-checking practices, we propose DebateCV, the first claim verification framework that adopts a debate-driven methodology using multiple LLM agents. In our framework, two Debaters take opposing stances on a claim and engage in multi-round argumentation, while a Moderator evaluates the arguments and renders a verdict with justifications. To further improve the performance of the Moderator, we introduce a novel post-training strategy that leverages synthetic debate data generated by the zero-shot DebateCV, effectively addressing the scarcity of real-world debate-driven claim verification data. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing claim verification methods under varying levels of evidence quality. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DebateCV-6781.

Paperid: 5350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17554.pdf

Abstract:
The versatility of diffusion models in generating customized images from few samples raises significant privacy concerns, particularly regarding unauthorized modifications of private content. This concerning issue has renewed the efforts in developing protection mechanisms based on adversarial attacks, which generate effective perturbations to poison diffusion models. Our work is motivated by the observation that these models exhibit a high degree of abstraction within their semantic latent space (`h-space'), which encodes critical high-level features for generating coherent and meaningful content. In this paper, we propose a novel anti-customization approach, called HAAD (h-space based Adversarial Attack for Diffusion models), that leverages adversarial attacks to craft perturbations based on the h-space that can efficiently degrade the image generation process. Building upon HAAD, we further introduce a more efficient variant, HAAD-KV, that constructs perturbations solely based on the KV parameters of the h-space. This strategy offers a stronger protection, that is computationally less expensive. Despite their simplicity, our methods outperform state-of-the-art adversarial attacks, highlighting their effectiveness.

Paperid: 5351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16724.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial audio understanding is essential for accurately perceiving and interpreting acoustic environments. However, existing audio-language models exhibit limitations in processing spatial audio and perceiving spatial acoustic scenes. To address this gap, we propose the Spatial Audio Language Model (SALM), a novel framework that bridges spatial audio and language through multi-modal contrastive learning. SALM integrates a text encoder with a dual-branch audio encoder that decomposes spatial sound into semantic and spatial components via structured audio embeddings. Key features of SALM include seamless alignment between spatial audio and natural language, both separate and joint extraction of spatial and semantic representations, zero-shot direction classification, and flexible support for spatial audio editing. Experimental results demonstrate that SALM effectively captures and aligns cross-modal representations, yielding well-structured audio embeddings. Furthermore, SALM enables advanced editing capabilities, such as modifying directional audio using text-based embeddings.

Paperid: 5352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15409.pdf

Abstract:
Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in describing many physical phenomena. Various scientific and engineering applications demand a versatile and differentiable PDE solver that can quickly generate solutions with adequate accuracy, and limitations of the traditional solvers and specialized neural operators motivate the development of foundation models for solving PDEs. This paper introduces PDEformer-2, a versatile foundation model for two-dimensional PDEs. Based on our previous one-dimensional PDEformer-1 model, PDEformer-2 receives the PDE form as network input via computational graph representation, which has the flexibility to encode most common PDEs. The mesh-free predicted solutions can be directly queried at arbitrary spatio-temporal coordinates. A large (40TB) diverse dataset is employed to pretrain the current model, making it capable of simultaneously addressing PDEs with different symbolic forms, domain shapes, boundary conditions, number of variables, and time-dependency. Accurate zero-shot prediction is allowed for PDEs that resemble the pretraining ones. When adapted to new unseen PDEs, PDEformer-2 demonstrates faster learning than many specialized models, and has smaller errors given limited (less than 100) samples. Additionally, PDEformer-2 can be employed in the inverse problems thanks to its fast and differentiable nature and produces reasonable results in our experiments to recover coefficient scalars and fields of a PDE.

Paperid: 5353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13929.pdf

Abstract:
We present TimeNeRF, a generalizable neural rendering approach for rendering novel views at arbitrary viewpoints and at arbitrary times, even with few input views. For real-world applications, it is expensive to collect multiple views and inefficient to re-optimize for unseen scenes. Moreover, as the digital realm, particularly the metaverse, strives for increasingly immersive experiences, the ability to model 3D environments that naturally transition between day and night becomes paramount. While current techniques based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable proficiency in synthesizing novel views, the exploration of NeRF's potential for temporal 3D scene modeling remains limited, with no dedicated datasets available for this purpose. To this end, our approach harnesses the strengths of multi-view stereo, neural radiance fields, and disentanglement strategies across diverse datasets. This equips our model with the capability for generalizability in a few-shot setting, allows us to construct an implicit content radiance field for scene representation, and further enables the building of neural radiance fields at any arbitrary time. Finally, we synthesize novel views of that time via volume rendering. Experiments show that TimeNeRF can render novel views in a few-shot setting without per-scene optimization. Most notably, it excels in creating realistic novel views that transition smoothly across different times, adeptly capturing intricate natural scene changes from dawn to dusk.

Paperid: 5354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13915.pdf

Abstract:
Previous studies in blind super-resolution (BSR) have primarily concentrated on estimating degradation kernels directly from low-resolution (LR) inputs to enhance super-resolution. However, these degradation kernels, which model the transition from a high-resolution (HR) image to its LR version, should account for not only the degradation process but also the downscaling factor. Applying the same degradation kernel across varying super-resolution scales may be impractical. Our research acknowledges degradation kernels and scaling factors as pivotal elements for the BSR task and introduces a novel strategy that utilizes HR images as references to establish scale-aware degradation kernels. By employing content-irrelevant HR reference images alongside the target LR image, our model adaptively discerns the degradation process. It is then applied to generate additional LR-HR pairs through down-sampling the HR reference images, which are keys to improving the SR performance. Our reference-based training procedure is applicable to proficiently trained blind SR models and zero-shot blind SR methods, consistently outperforming previous methods in both scenarios. This dual consideration of blur kernels and scaling factors, coupled with the use of a reference image, contributes to the effectiveness of our approach in blind super-resolution tasks.

Paperid: 5355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13089.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, show impressive zero-shot recognition ability and can be easily transferred to specific downstream tasks via prompt tuning, even with limited training data. However, existing prompt tuning methods face two main challenges: (1) In few-shot scenarios, data scarcity often leads to overfitting, making the model sensitive to changes in the input domain. (2) To mitigate overfitting, these methods typically rely on complex task-specific model architectures and sensitive hyperparameter tuning, severely restricting their general applicability. To address these issues, we propose a simpler and more general framework called GLAD (Generalizable LoRA tuning with RegulArized GraDient). We show that merely applying LoRA achieves performance in downstream tasks comparable to current state-of-the-art prompt-based methods. While LoRA is effective and easy to use, it remains susceptible to overfitting in few-shot learning scenarios. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a gradient-based regularization technique. This technique effectively steers the optimization trajectory, encouraging the model to find a more stable parameter region that is robust to variations in data distribution. Through extensive experiments conducted on 15 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that GLAD outperforms previous tuning approaches in terms of base-to-novel class generalization, image domain generalization, and cross-dataset generalization. The code will be publicly available.

Paperid: 5356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12646.pdf

Abstract:
We explore novel-view synthesis for dynamic scenes from monocular videos. Prior approaches rely on costly test-time optimization of 4D representations or do not preserve scene geometry when trained in a feed-forward manner. Our approach is based on three key insights: (1) covisible pixels (that are visible in both the input and target views) can be rendered by first reconstructing the dynamic 3D scene and rendering the reconstruction from the novel-views and (2) hidden pixels in novel views can be "inpainted" with feed-forward 2D video diffusion models. Notably, our video inpainting diffusion model (CogNVS) can be self-supervised from 2D videos, allowing us to train it on a large corpus of in-the-wild videos. This in turn allows for (3) CogNVS to be applied zero-shot to novel test videos via test-time finetuning. We empirically verify that CogNVS outperforms almost all prior art for novel-view synthesis of dynamic scenes from monocular videos.

Paperid: 5357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12090.pdf

Abstract:
We propose MambaRate, which predicts Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) with limited bias regarding the sampling rate of the waveform under evaluation. It is designed for Track 3 of the AudioMOS Challenge 2025, which focuses on predicting MOS for speech in high sampling frequencies. Our model leverages self-supervised embeddings and selective state space modeling. The target ratings are encoded in a continuous representation via Gaussian radial basis functions (RBF). The results of the challenge were based on the system-level Spearman's Rank Correllation Coefficient (SRCC) metric. An initial MambaRate version (T16 system) outperformed the pre-trained baseline (B03) by ~14% in a few-shot setting without pre-training. T16 ranked fourth out of five in the challenge, differing by ~6% from the winning system. We present additional results on the BVCC dataset as well as ablations with different representations as input, which outperform the initial T16 version.

Paperid: 5358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10844.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection traditionally relies on fixed category sets, requiring costly re-training to handle novel objects. While Open-World and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OWOD and OVOD) improve flexibility, OWOD lacks semantic labels for unknowns, and OVOD depends on user prompts, limiting autonomy. We propose an LLM-guided agentic object detection (LAOD) framework that enables fully label-free, zero-shot detection by prompting a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate scene-specific object names. These are passed to an open-vocabulary detector for localization, allowing the system to adapt its goals dynamically. We introduce two new metrics, Class-Agnostic Average Precision (CAAP) and Semantic Naming Average Precision (SNAP), to separately evaluate localization and naming. Experiments on LVIS, COCO, and COCO-OOD validate our approach, showing strong performance in detecting and naming novel objects. Our method offers enhanced autonomy and adaptability for open-world understanding.

Paperid: 5359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10803.pdf

Abstract:
Background Large language models (LLMs) face challenges in inductive thematic analysis, a task requiring deep interpretive and domain-specific expertise. We evaluated the feasibility of using LLMs to replicate expert-driven thematic analysis of social media data. Methods Using two temporally non-intersecting Reddit datasets on xylazine (n=286 and n=686, for model optimization and validation, respectively) with twelve expert-derived themes, we evaluated five LLMs against expert coding. We modeled the task as a series of binary classifications, rather than a single, multi-label classification, employing zero-, single-, and few-shot prompting strategies and measuring performance via accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results On the validation set, GPT-4o with two-shot prompting performed best (accuracy: 90.9%; F1-score: 0.71). For high-prevalence themes, model-derived thematic distributions closely mirrored expert classifications (e.g., xylazine use: 13.6% vs. 17.8%; MOUD use: 16.5% vs. 17.8%). Conclusions Our findings suggest that few-shot LLM-based approaches can automate thematic analyses, offering a scalable supplement for qualitative research. Keywords: thematic analysis, large language models, natural language processing, qualitative analysis, social media, prompt engineering, public health

Paperid: 5360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07682.pdf

Abstract:
Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of prompt engineering (PE) techniques that can enhance various requirements engineering (RE) tasks. However, current LLMs are often characterized by significant uncertainty and a lack of controllability. This absence of clear guidance on how to effectively prompt LLMs acts as a barrier to their trustworthy implementation in the RE field. We present the first roadmap-oriented systematic literature review of Prompt Engineering for RE (PE4RE). Following Kitchenham's and Petersen's secondary-study protocol, we searched six digital libraries, screened 867 records, and analyzed 35 primary studies. To bring order to a fragmented landscape, we propose a hybrid taxonomy that links technique-oriented patterns (e.g., few-shot, Chain-of-Thought) to task-oriented RE roles (elicitation, validation, traceability). Two research questions, with five sub-questions, map the tasks addressed, LLM families used, and prompt types adopted, and expose current limitations and research gaps. Finally, we outline a step-by-step roadmap showing how today's ad-hoc PE prototypes can evolve into reproducible, practitioner-friendly workflows.

Paperid: 5361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05200.pdf

Abstract:
When applying LLM-based code generation to software development projects that follow a feature-driven or rapid application development approach, it becomes necessary to estimate the functional correctness of the generated code in the absence of test cases. Just as a user selects a relevant document from a ranked list of retrieved ones, a software generation workflow requires a developer to choose (and potentially refine) a generated solution from a ranked list of alternative solutions, ordered by their posterior likelihoods. This implies that estimating the quality of a ranked list -- akin to estimating "relevance" for query performance prediction (QPP) in IR -- is also crucial for generative software development, where quality is defined in terms of "functional correctness". In this paper, we propose an in-context learning (ICL) based approach for code quality estimation. Our findings demonstrate that providing few-shot examples of functionally correct code from a training set enhances the performance of existing QPP approaches as well as a zero-shot-based approach for code quality estimation.

Paperid: 5362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04221.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of language models (LLMs) without fine-tuning model parameters. While prompt-based adaptation techniques have demonstrated the effectiveness of lightweight adaptation methods for large language models (LLMs), they typically initialize a trainable prompt or prefix with irrelevant tokens for the task at hand. In contrast, Context Tuning initializes the trainable prompt or prefix with task-specific demonstration examples, leveraging the model's inherent In-Context Learning (ICL) ability to extract relevant information for improved few-shot learning performance. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks such as CrossFit, UnifiedQA, MMLU, BIG-Bench Hard, and ARC demonstrate that Context Tuning outperforms traditional prompt-based adaptation methods and achieves competitive accuracy to Test-Time Training with significantly higher training efficiency.

Paperid: 5363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02564.pdf

Abstract:
Requirements elicitation interviews are crucial for gathering system requirements but heavily depend on skilled analysts, making them resource-intensive, susceptible to human biases, and prone to miscommunication. Recent advancements in Large Language Models present new opportunities for automating parts of this process. This study introduces LLMREI, a chat bot designed to conduct requirements elicitation interviews with minimal human intervention, aiming to reduce common interviewer errors and improve the scalability of requirements elicitation. We explored two main approaches, zero-shot prompting and least-to-most prompting, to optimize LLMREI for requirements elicitation and evaluated its performance in 33 simulated stakeholder interviews. A third approach, fine-tuning, was initially considered but abandoned due to poor performance in preliminary trials. Our study assesses the chat bot's effectiveness in three key areas: minimizing common interview errors, extracting relevant requirements, and adapting its questioning based on interview context and user responses. Our findings indicate that LLMREI makes a similar number of errors compared to human interviewers, is capable of extracting a large portion of requirements, and demonstrates a notable ability to generate highly context-dependent questions. We envision the greatest benefit of LLMREI in automating interviews with a large number of stakeholders.

Paperid: 5364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01264.pdf

Abstract:
Designing diverse and safety-critical driving scenarios is essential for evaluating autonomous driving systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for few-shot code generation to automatically synthesize driving scenarios within the CARLA simulator, which has flexibility in scenario scripting, efficient code-based control of traffic participants, and enforcement of realistic physical dynamics. Given a few example prompts and code samples, the LLM generates safety-critical scenario scripts that specify the behavior and placement of traffic participants, with a particular focus on collision events. To bridge the gap between simulation and real-world appearance, we integrate a video generation pipeline using Cosmos-Transfer1 with ControlNet, which converts rendered scenes into realistic driving videos. Our approach enables controllable scenario generation and facilitates the creation of rare but critical edge cases, such as pedestrian crossings under occlusion or sudden vehicle cut-ins. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating a wide range of realistic, diverse, and safety-critical scenarios, offering a promising tool for simulation-based testing of autonomous vehicles.

Paperid: 5365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00769.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating creative writing generated by large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because open-ended narratives lack ground truths. Without performant automated evaluation methods, off-the-shelf (OTS) language models are employed as zero-shot judges, yet their reliability is unclear in this context. In pursuit of robust evaluation for creative writing, we introduce LitBench, the first standardized benchmark and paired dataset for creative writing verification, comprising a held-out test set of 2,480 debiased, human-labeled story comparisons drawn from Reddit and a 43,827-pair training corpus of human preference labels. Using LitBench, we (i) benchmark zero-shot LLM judges, (ii) train Bradley Terry and generative reward models, and (iii) conduct an online human study to validate reward model rankings on newly LLM-generated stories. Our benchmark identifies Claude-3.7-Sonnet as the strongest off-the-shelf judge, reaching 73% agreement with human preferences; among trained reward models, Bradley-Terry and Generative reward models both attain an accuracy of 78%, outperforming all off-the-shelf judges. An online human study further confirms that our trained reward models consistently align with human preferences in novel LLM-generated stories. We release LitBench and reward models at https://huggingface.co/collections/SAA-Lab/litbench-68267b5da3aafe58f9e43461, providing a vetted resource for reliable, automated evaluation and optimization of creative writing systems.

Paperid: 5366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00330.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt-based methods leverage the knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) trained with a masked language modeling (MLM) objective; however, these methods are sensitive to template, verbalizer, and few-shot instance selection, particularly in cold-start settings with no labeled data. Existing studies overlook the dependency between instances and verbalizers, where instance-label probabilities depend on verbalizer token proximity in the embedding space. To address this, we propose COLDSELECT, a joint verbalizer and instance selection approach that models data diversity. COLDSELECT maps PLM vocabulary and $h_{[MASK]}$ embeddings into a shared space, applying dimensionality reduction and clustering to ensure efficient and diverse selection. By optimizing for minimal uncertainty and maximal diversity, COLDSELECT captures data relationships effectively. Experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate COLDSELECT's superiority in reducing uncertainty and enhancing generalization, outperforming baselines in verbalizer and few-shot instance selection for cold-start scenarios.

Paperid: 5367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23921.pdf

Abstract:
The public often attributes human-like qualities to large language models (LLMs) and assumes they "know" certain things. In reality, LLMs encode information retained during training as internal probabilistic knowledge. This study examines existing methods for probing the veracity of that knowledge and identifies several flawed underlying assumptions. To address these flaws, we introduce sAwMIL (Sparse-Aware Multiple-Instance Learning), a multiclass probing framework that combines multiple-instance learning with conformal prediction. sAwMIL leverages internal activations of LLMs to classify statements as true, false, or neither. We evaluate sAwMIL across 16 open-source LLMs, including default and chat-based variants, on three new curated datasets. Our results show that (1) common probing methods fail to provide a reliable and transferable veracity direction and, in some settings, perform worse than zero-shot prompting; (2) truth and falsehood are not encoded symmetrically; and (3) LLMs encode a third type of signal that is distinct from both true and false.

Paperid: 5368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23662.pdf

Abstract:
Context-aware embedding methods boost retrieval accuracy by conditioning on corpus statistics (e.g., term co-occurrence and topical patterns) extracted from neighboring documents. However, this context-aware approach requires access to the target corpus or requires domain-specific finetuning, posing practical barriers in privacy-sensitive or resource-constrained settings. We present ZEST, a zero-shot contextual adaptation framework that replaces real corpus access with a one-time offline synthesis of a compact proxy. Given only a handful exemplar documents representative of the general target domain, we use a multi-step hierarchical procedure to generate a synthetic context corpus of several hundred documents that aims to emulate key domain-specific distributions. At inference, the frozen context-aware encoder uses this proxy corpus -- without any finetuning or target corpus access -- to produce domain-adapted embeddings. Across the MTEB benchmark, ZEST's zero-shot synthetic context adaptation using only five example documents performs within 0.5% of models leveraging full target corpus access -- demonstrating remarkable efficacy without any retraining. ZEST thus provides a practical method for deploying high-performance, adaptable embeddings in constrained environments.

Paperid: 5369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22365.pdf

Abstract:
When using reinforcement learning (RL) to tackle physical control tasks, inductive biases that encode physics priors can help improve sample efficiency during training and enhance generalization in testing. However, the current practice of incorporating these helpful physics-informed inductive biases inevitably runs into significant manual labor and domain expertise, making them prohibitive for general users. This work explores a symbolic approach to distill physics-informed inductive biases into RL agents, where the physics priors are expressed in a domain-specific language (DSL) that is human-readable and naturally explainable. Yet, the DSL priors do not translate directly into an implementable policy due to partial and noisy observations and additional physical constraints in navigation tasks. To address this gap, we develop a physics-informed program-guided RL (PiPRL) framework with applications to indoor navigation. PiPRL adopts a hierarchical and modularized neuro-symbolic integration, where a meta symbolic program receives semantically meaningful features from a neural perception module, which form the bases for symbolic programming that encodes physics priors and guides the RL process of a low-level neural controller. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PiPRL consistently outperforms purely symbolic or neural policies and reduces training time by over 26% with the help of the program-based inductive biases.

Paperid: 5370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16337.pdf

Abstract:
Frames capture aspects of an issue that are emphasized in a debate by interlocutors and can help us understand how political language conveys different perspectives and ultimately shapes people's opinions. The Media Frame Corpus (MFC) is the most commonly used framework with categories and detailed guidelines for operationalizing frames. It is, however, focused on a few salient U.S. news issues, making it unclear how well these frames can capture news issues in other cultural contexts. To explore this, we introduce FrameNews-PT, a dataset of Brazilian Portuguese news articles covering political and economic news and annotate it within the MFC framework. Through several annotation rounds, we evaluate the extent to which MFC frames generalize to the Brazilian debate issues. We further evaluate how fine-tuned and zero-shot models perform on out-of-domain data. Results show that the 15 MFC frames remain broadly applicable with minor revisions of the guidelines. However, some MFC frames are rarely used, and novel news issues are analyzed using general 'fall-back' frames. We conclude that cross-cultural frame use requires careful consideration.

Paperid: 5371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14532.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel neural network framework called M2BeamLLM for beam prediction in millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) communication systems. M2BeamLLM integrates multi-modal sensor data, including images, radar, LiDAR, and GPS, leveraging the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-2 for beam prediction. By combining sensing data encoding, multimodal alignment and fusion, and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), M2BeamLLM achieves significantly higher beam prediction accuracy and robustness, demonstrably outperforming traditional deep learning (DL) models in both standard and few-shot scenarios. Furthermore, its prediction performance consistently improves with increased diversity in sensing modalities. Our study provides an efficient and intelligent beam prediction solution for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mmWave communication systems.

Paperid: 5372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13063.pdf

Abstract:
Recent pathology foundation models can provide rich tile-level representations but fall short of delivering general-purpose clinical utility without further extensive model development. These models lack whole-slide image (WSI) understanding and are not trained with large-scale diagnostic data, limiting their performance on diverse downstream tasks. We introduce PRISM2, a multi-modal slide-level foundation model trained via clinical dialogue to enable scalable, generalizable pathology AI. PRISM2 is trained on nearly 700,000 specimens (2.3 million WSIs) paired with real-world clinical diagnostic reports in a two-stage process. In Stage 1, a vision-language model is trained using contrastive and captioning objectives to align whole slide embeddings with textual clinical diagnosis. In Stage 2, the language model is unfrozen to enable diagnostic conversation and extract more clinically meaningful representations from hidden states. PRISM2 achieves strong performance on diagnostic and biomarker prediction tasks, outperforming prior slide-level models including PRISM and TITAN. It also introduces a zero-shot yes/no classification approach that surpasses CLIP-style methods without prompt tuning or class enumeration. By aligning visual features with clinical reasoning, PRISM2 improves generalization on both data-rich and low-sample tasks, offering a scalable path forward for building general pathology AI agents capable of assisting diagnostic and prognostic decisions.

Paperid: 5373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12800.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is a critical and practical problem in many real-world applications, especially for industrial scenarios, where load forecasting underpins the intelligent operation of modern systems like clouds, power grids and traffic networks.However, the inherent complexity and dynamics of these systems present significant challenges. Despite advances in methods such as pattern recognition and anti-non-stationarity have led to performance gains, current methods fail to consistently ensure effectiveness across various system scenarios due to the intertwined issues of complex patterns, concept-drift, and few-shot problems. To address these challenges simultaneously, we introduce a novel scheme centered on fundamental waveform, a.k.a., meta-pattern. Specifically, we develop a unique Meta-pattern Pooling mechanism to purify and maintain meta-patterns, capturing the nuanced nature of system loads. Complementing this, the proposed Echo mechanism adaptively leverages the meta-patterns, enabling a flexible and precise pattern reconstruction. Our Meta-pattern Echo transformer (MetaEformer) seamlessly incorporates these mechanisms with the transformer-based predictor, offering end-to-end efficiency and interpretability of core processes. Demonstrating superior performance across eight benchmarks under three system scenarios, MetaEformer marks a significant advantage in accuracy, with a 37% relative improvement on fifteen state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 5374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12693.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot denoising aims to denoise observations without access to training samples or clean reference images. This setting is particularly relevant in practical imaging scenarios involving specialized domains such as medical imaging or biology. In this work, we propose the Zero-Shot Neural Compression Denoiser (ZS-NCD), a novel denoising framework based on neural compression. ZS-NCD treats a neural compression network as an untrained model, optimized directly on patches extracted from a single noisy image. The final reconstruction is then obtained by aggregating the outputs of the trained model over overlapping patches. Thanks to the built-in entropy constraints of compression architectures, our method naturally avoids overfitting and does not require manual regularization or early stopping. Through extensive experiments, we show that ZS-NCD achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot denoisers for both Gaussian and Poisson noise, and generalizes well to both natural and non-natural images. Additionally, we provide new finite-sample theoretical results that characterize upper bounds on the achievable reconstruction error of general maximum-likelihood compression-based denoisers. These results further establish the theoretical foundations of compression-based denoising. Our code is available at: github.com/Computational-Imaging-RU/ZS-NCDenoiser.

Paperid: 5375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12266.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have significantly impacted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (TODS) but continue to face notable performance challenges, especially in zero-shot scenarios. While prior work has noted this performance gap, the behavioral factors driving the performance gap remain under-explored. This study proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework to quantify the behavior gap between AI agents and human experts, focusing on discrepancies in dialog acts, tool usage, and knowledge utilization. Our findings reveal that this behavior gap is a critical factor negatively impacting the performance of LLM agents. Notably, as task complexity increases, the behavior gap widens (correlation: 0.963), leading to a degradation of agent performance on complex task-oriented dialogs. For the most complex task in our study, even the GPT-4o-based agent exhibits low alignment with human behavior, with low F1 scores for dialog acts (0.464), excessive and often misaligned tool usage with a F1 score of 0.139, and ineffective usage of external knowledge. Reducing such behavior gaps leads to significant performance improvement (24.3% on average). This study highlights the importance of comprehensive behavioral evaluations and improved alignment strategies to enhance the effectiveness of LLM-based TODS in handling complex tasks.

Paperid: 5376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12182.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in medical question answering (MedQA), yet adapting them to biomedical reasoning remains challenging due to domain-specific complexity and limited supervision. In this work, we study how prompt design and lightweight fine-tuning affect the performance of open-source LLMs on PubMedQA, a benchmark for multiple-choice biomedical questions. We focus on two widely used prompting strategies - standard instruction prompts and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts - and apply QLoRA for parameter-efficient instruction tuning. Across multiple model families and sizes, our experiments show that CoT prompting alone can improve reasoning in zero-shot settings, while instruction tuning significantly boosts accuracy. However, fine-tuning on CoT prompts does not universally enhance performance and may even degrade it for certain larger models. These findings suggest that reasoning-aware prompts are useful, but their benefits are model- and scale-dependent. Our study offers practical insights into combining prompt engineering with efficient finetuning for medical QA applications.

Paperid: 5377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11561.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated vulnerability detection and repair in software systems. This paper investigates the performance of GPT-4o in repairing Java vulnerabilities from a widely used dataset (Vul4J), exploring how different contextual information affects automated vulnerability repair (AVR) capabilities. We compare the latest GPT-4o's performance against previous results with GPT-4 using identical prompts. We evaluated nine additional prompts crafted by us that contain various contextual information such as CWE or CVE information, and manually extracted code contexts. Each prompt was executed three times on 42 vulnerabilities, and the resulting fix candidates were validated using Vul4J's automated testing framework. Our results show that GPT-4o performed 11.9\% worse on average than GPT-4 with the same prompt, but was able to fix 10.5\% more distinct vulnerabilities in the three runs together. CVE information significantly improved repair rates, while the length of the task description had minimal impact. Combining CVE guidance with manually extracted code context resulted in the best performance. Using our \textsc{Top}-3 prompts together, GPT-4o repaired 26 (62\%) vulnerabilities at least once, outperforming both the original baseline (40\%) and its reproduction (45\%), suggesting that ensemble prompt strategies could improve vulnerability repair in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 5378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10245.pdf

Abstract:
We present ToxSyn-PT, the first large-scale Portuguese corpus that enables fine-grained hate-speech classification across nine legally protected minority groups. The dataset contains 53,274 synthetic sentences equally distributed between minorities groups and toxicity labels. ToxSyn-PT is created through a novel four-stage pipeline: (1) a compact, manually curated seed; (2) few-shot expansion with an instruction-tuned LLM; (3) paraphrase-based augmentation; and (4) enrichment, plus additional neutral texts to curb overfitting to group-specific cues. The resulting corpus is class-balanced, stylistically diverse, and free from the social-media domain that dominate existing Portuguese datasets. Despite domain differences with traditional benchmarks, experiments on both binary and multi-label classification on the corpus yields strong results across five public Portuguese hate-speech datasets, demonstrating robust generalization even across domain boundaries. The dataset is publicly released to advance research on synthetic data and hate-speech detection in low-resource settings.

Paperid: 5379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07055.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Layered Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation (LSSKD) framework for training compact deep learning models. Unlike traditional methods that rely on pre-trained teacher networks, our approach appends auxiliary classifiers to intermediate feature maps, generating diverse self-supervised knowledge and enabling one-to-one transfer across different network stages. Our method achieves an average improvement of 4.54\% over the state-of-the-art PS-KD method and a 1.14% gain over SSKD on CIFAR-100, with a 0.32% improvement on ImageNet compared to HASSKD. Experiments on Tiny ImageNet and CIFAR-100 under few-shot learning scenarios also achieve state-of-the-art results. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model generalization and performance without the need for large over-parameterized teacher networks. Importantly, at the inference stage, all auxiliary classifiers can be removed, yielding no extra computational cost. This makes our model suitable for deploying small language models on affordable low-computing devices. Owing to its lightweight design and adaptability, our framework is particularly suitable for multimodal sensing and cyber-physical environments that require efficient and responsive inference. LSSKD facilitates the development of intelligent agents capable of learning from limited sensory data under weak supervision.

Paperid: 5380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05952.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in transformer-based text-to-motion generation have led to impressive progress in synthesizing high-quality human motion. Nevertheless, jointly achieving high fidelity, streaming capability, real-time responsiveness, and scalability remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we propose MOGO (Motion Generation with One-pass), a novel autoregressive framework tailored for efficient and real-time 3D motion generation. MOGO comprises two key components: (1) MoSA-VQ, a motion scale-adaptive residual vector quantization module that hierarchically discretizes motion sequences with learnable scaling to produce compact yet expressive representations; and (2) RQHC-Transformer, a residual quantized hierarchical causal transformer that generates multi-layer motion tokens in a single forward pass, significantly reducing inference latency. To enhance semantic fidelity, we further introduce a text condition alignment mechanism that improves motion decoding under textual control. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets including HumanML3D, KIT-ML, and CMP demonstrate that MOGO achieves competitive or superior generation quality compared to state-of-the-art transformer-based methods, while offering substantial improvements in real-time performance, streaming generation, and generalization under zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 5381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05596.pdf

Abstract:
Inverse folding models have proven to be highly effective zero-shot predictors of protein stability. Despite this success, the link between the amino acid preferences of an inverse folding model and the free-energy considerations underlying thermodynamic stability remains incompletely understood. A better understanding would be of interest not only from a theoretical perspective, but also potentially provide the basis for stronger zero-shot stability prediction. In this paper, we take steps to clarify the free-energy foundations of inverse folding models. Our derivation reveals the standard practice of likelihood ratios as a simplistic approximation and suggests several paths towards better estimates of the relative stability. We empirically assess these approaches and demonstrate that considerable gains in zero-shot performance can be achieved with fairly simple means.

Paperid: 5382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04013.pdf

Abstract:
Expressive voice conversion aims to transfer both speaker identity and expressive attributes from a target speech to a given source speech. In this work, we improve over a self-supervised, non-autoregressive framework with a conditional variational autoencoder, focusing on reducing source timbre leakage and improving linguistic-acoustic disentanglement for better style transfer. To minimize style leakage, we use multilingual discrete speech units for content representation and reinforce embeddings with augmentation-based similarity loss and mix-style layer normalization. To enhance expressivity transfer, we incorporate local F0 information via cross-attention and extract style embeddings enriched with global pitch and energy features. Experiments show our model outperforms baselines in emotion and speaker similarity, demonstrating superior style adaptation and reduced source style leakage.

Paperid: 5383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02326.pdf

Abstract:
Toxicity in online content, including content generated by language models, has become a critical concern due to its potential for negative psychological and social impact. This paper introduces TRuST, a comprehensive dataset designed to improve toxicity detection that merges existing datasets, and has labels for toxicity, target social group, and toxic spans. It includes a diverse range of target groups such as ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, and politics, with both human/machine-annotated and human machine-generated data. We benchmark state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on toxicity detection, target group identification, and toxic span extraction. We find that fine-tuned models consistently outperform zero-shot and few-shot prompting, though performance remains low for certain social groups. Further, reasoning capabilities do not significantly improve performance, indicating that LLMs have weak social reasoning skills.

Paperid: 5384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00238.pdf

Abstract:
Natural disasters usually affect vast areas and devastate infrastructures. Performing a timely and efficient response is crucial to minimize the impact on affected communities, and data-driven approaches are the best choice. Visual question answering (VQA) models help management teams to achieve in-depth understanding of damages. However, recently published models do not possess the ability to answer open-ended questions and only select the best answer among a predefined list of answers. If we want to ask questions with new additional possible answers that do not exist in the predefined list, the model needs to be fin-tuned/retrained on a new collected and annotated dataset, which is a time-consuming procedure. In recent years, large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have earned significant attention. These models are trained on extensive datasets and demonstrate strong performance on both unimodal and multimodal vision/language downstream tasks, often without the need for fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a VLM-based zero-shot VQA (ZeShot-VQA) method, and investigate the performance of on post-disaster FloodNet dataset. Since the proposed method takes advantage of zero-shot learning, it can be applied on new datasets without fine-tuning. In addition, ZeShot-VQA is able to process and generate answers that has been not seen during the training procedure, which demonstrates its flexibility.

Paperid: 5385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24214.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of foundation models, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), has redefined the frontiers of artificial intelligence, enabling remarkable generalization across diverse tasks with minimal or no supervision. Yet, their potential in biometric recognition and analysis remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the zero-shot and few-shot performance of state-of-the-art publicly available VLMs and MLLMs across six biometric tasks spanning the face and iris modalities: face verification, soft biometric attribute prediction (gender and race), iris recognition, presentation attack detection (PAD), and face manipulation detection (morphs and deepfakes). A total of 41 VLMs were used in this evaluation. Experiments show that embeddings from these foundation models can be used for diverse biometric tasks with varying degrees of success. For example, in the case of face verification, a True Match Rate (TMR) of 96.77 percent was obtained at a False Match Rate (FMR) of 1 percent on the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) dataset, without any fine-tuning. In the case of iris recognition, the TMR at 1 percent FMR on the IITD-R-Full dataset was 97.55 percent without any fine-tuning. Further, we show that applying a simple classifier head to these embeddings can help perform DeepFake detection for faces, Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) for irides, and extract soft biometric attributes like gender and ethnicity from faces with reasonably high accuracy. This work reiterates the potential of pretrained models in achieving the long-term vision of Artificial General Intelligence.

Paperid: 5386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22950.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in zero-shot summarization, but often struggle to model document structure and identify salient information in long texts. In this work, we introduce StrucSum, a training-free prompting framework that enhances LLM reasoning through sentence-level graph structures. StrucSum injects structural signals into prompts via three targeted strategies: Neighbor-Aware Prompting (NAP) for local context, Centrality-Aware Prompting (CAP) for importance estimation, and Centrality-Guided Masking (CGM) for efficient input reduction. Experiments on ArXiv, PubMed, and Multi-News demonstrate that StrucSum consistently improves both summary quality and factual consistency over unsupervised baselines and vanilla prompting. Notably, on ArXiv, it boosts FactCC and SummaC by 19.2 and 9.7 points, indicating stronger alignment between summaries and source content. These findings suggest that structure-aware prompting is a simple yet effective approach for zero-shot extractive summarization with LLMs, without any training or task-specific tuning.

Paperid: 5387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19119.pdf

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in text-to-speech (TTS) voice cloning have raised serious privacy concerns, allowing highly accurate vocal identity replication from just a few seconds of reference audio, while retaining the speaker's vocal authenticity. In this paper, we introduce CloneShield, a universal time-domain adversarial perturbation framework specifically designed to defend against zero-shot voice cloning. Our method provides protection that is robust across speakers and utterances, without requiring any prior knowledge of the synthesized text. We formulate perturbation generation as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose Multi-Gradient Descent Algorithm (MGDA) to ensure the robust protection across diverse utterances. To preserve natural auditory perception for users, we decompose the adversarial perturbation via Mel-spectrogram representations and fine-tune it for each sample. This design ensures imperceptibility while maintaining strong degradation effects on zero-shot cloned outputs. Experiments on three state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS systems, five benchmark datasets and evaluations from 60 human listeners demonstrate that our method preserves near-original audio quality in protected inputs (PESQ = 3.90, SRS = 0.93) while substantially degrading both speaker similarity and speech quality in cloned samples (PESQ = 1.07, SRS = 0.08).

Paperid: 5388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18570.pdf

Abstract:
Stock price prediction remains a complex and high-stakes task in financial analysis, traditionally addressed using statistical models or, more recently, language models. In this work, we introduce VISTA (Vision-Language Inference for Stock Time-series Analysis), a novel, training-free framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for multi-modal stock forecasting. VISTA prompts a VLM with both textual representations of historical stock prices and their corresponding line charts to predict future price values. By combining numerical and visual modalities in a zero-shot setting and using carefully designed chain-of-thought prompts, VISTA captures complementary patterns that unimodal approaches often miss. We benchmark VISTA against standard baselines, including ARIMA and text-only LLM-based prompting methods. Experimental results show that VISTA outperforms these baselines by up to 89.83%, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-modal inference for stock time-series analysis and highlighting the potential of VLMs in financial forecasting tasks without requiring task-specific training.

Paperid: 5389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17446.pdf

Abstract:
The purpose of speech tokenization is to transform a speech signal into a sequence of discrete representations, serving as the foundation for speech language models (SLMs). While speech tokenization has many options, their effect on the performance of SLMs remains unclear. This paper investigates two key aspects of speech tokenization: the segmentation width and the cluster size of discrete units. First, we segment speech signals into fixed/variable widths and pooled representations. We then train K-means models in multiple cluster sizes. Through the evaluation on zero-shot spoken language understanding benchmarks, we find the positive effect of moderately coarse segmentation and bigger cluster size. Notably, among the best-performing models, the most efficient one achieves a 50% reduction in training data and a 70% decrease in training runtime. Our analysis highlights the importance of combining multiple tokens to enhance fine-grained spoken language understanding.

Paperid: 5390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14256.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present FuxiMT, a novel Chinese-centric multilingual machine translation model powered by a sparsified large language model (LLM). We adopt a two-stage strategy to train FuxiMT. We first pre-train the model on a massive Chinese corpus and then conduct multilingual fine-tuning on a large parallel dataset encompassing 65 languages. FuxiMT incorporates Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) and employs a curriculum learning strategy for robust performance across various resource levels. Experimental results demonstrate that FuxiMT significantly outperforms strong baselines, including state-of-the-art LLMs and machine translation models, particularly under low-resource scenarios. Furthermore, FuxiMT exhibits remarkable zero-shot translation capabilities for unseen language pairs, indicating its potential to bridge communication gaps where parallel data are scarce or unavailable.

Paperid: 5391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13033.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of time-series pre-trained models has advanced temporal representation learning, but current state-of-the-art models are often large-scale, requiring substantial compute. We introduce TSPulse, ultra-compact time-series pre-trained models with only 1M parameters, specialized to perform strongly across classification, anomaly detection, imputation, and retrieval tasks. TSPulse introduces innovations at both the architecture and task levels. At the architecture level, it employs a dual-space masked reconstruction, learning from both time and frequency domains to capture complementary signals. This is further enhanced by a dual-embedding disentanglement, generating both detailed embeddings for fine-grained analysis and high-level semantic embeddings for broader task understanding. Notably, TSPulse's semantic embeddings are robust to shifts in time, magnitude, and noise, which is important for robust retrieval. At the task level, TSPulse incorporates TSLens, a fine-tuning component enabling task-specific feature attention. It also introduces a multi-head triangulation technique that correlates deviations from multiple prediction heads, enhancing anomaly detection by fusing complementary model outputs. Additionally, a hybrid mask pretraining is proposed to improves zero-shot imputation by reducing pre-training bias. These architecture and task innovations collectively contribute to TSPulse's significant performance gains: 5-16% on the UEA classification benchmarks, +20% on the TSB-AD anomaly detection leaderboard, +50% in zero-shot imputation, and +25% in time-series retrieval. Remarkably, these results are achieved with just 1M parameters (10-100X smaller than existing SOTA models) and allow GPU-free inference, setting a new standard for efficient time-series pre-trained models. The models can be accessed from https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-timeseries-tspulse-r1

Paperid: 5392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11017.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is critical across multiple domains, where time series data exhibits both local patterns and global dependencies. While Transformer-based methods effectively capture global dependencies, they often overlook short-term local variations in time series. Recent methods that adapt large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting inherit this limitation by treating LLMs as black-box encoders, relying solely on the final-layer output and underutilizing hierarchical representations. To address this limitation, we propose Logo-LLM, a novel LLM-based framework that explicitly extracts and models multi-scale temporal features from different layers of a pre-trained LLM. Through empirical analysis, we show that shallow layers of LLMs capture local dynamics in time series, while deeper layers encode global trends. Moreover, Logo-LLM introduces lightweight Local-Mixer and Global-Mixer modules to align and integrate features with the temporal input across layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Logo-LLM achieves superior performance across diverse benchmarks, with strong generalization in few-shot and zero-shot settings while maintaining low computational overhead.

Paperid: 5393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10764.pdf

Abstract:
Innovations in digital intelligence are transforming robotic surgery with more informed decision-making. Real-time awareness of surgical instrument presence and actions (e.g., cutting tissue) is essential for such systems. Yet, despite decades of research, most machine learning models for this task are trained on small datasets and still struggle to generalize. Recently, vision-Language Models (VLMs) have brought transformative advances in reasoning across visual and textual modalities. Their unprecedented generalization capabilities suggest great potential for advancing intelligent robotic surgery. However, surgical VLMs remain under-explored, and existing models show limited performance, highlighting the need for benchmark studies to assess their capabilities and limitations and to inform future development. To this end, we benchmark the zero-shot performance of several advanced VLMs on two public robotic-assisted laparoscopic datasets for instrument and action classification. Beyond standard evaluation, we integrate explainable AI to visualize VLM attention and uncover causal explanations behind their predictions. This provides a previously underexplored perspective in this field for evaluating the reliability of model predictions. We also propose several explainability analysis-based metrics to complement standard evaluations. Our analysis reveals that surgical VLMs, despite domain-specific training, often rely on weak contextual cues rather than clinically relevant visual evidence, highlighting the need for stronger visual and reasoning supervision in surgical applications.

Paperid: 5394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08704.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are digital records of patient information, often containing unstructured clinical text. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in EHRs for extracting key medical entities like problems, tests, and treatments to support downstream clinical applications. This paper explores prompt-based medical entity recognition using large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1, guided by various prompt engineering techniques, including zero-shot, few-shot, and an ensemble approach. Among all strategies, GPT-4o with prompt ensemble achieved the highest classification performance with an F1-score of 0.95 and recall of 0.98, outperforming DeepSeek-R1 on the task. The ensemble method improved reliability by aggregating outputs through embedding-based similarity and majority voting.

Paperid: 5395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07888.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge in long-text style transfer using zero-shot learning of large language models (LLMs), proposing a hierarchical framework that combines sentence-level stylistic adaptation with paragraph-level structural coherence. We argue that in the process of effective paragraph-style transfer, to preserve the consistency of original syntactic and semantic information, it is essential to perform style transfer not only at the sentence level but also to incorporate paragraph-level semantic considerations, while ensuring structural coherence across inter-sentential relationships. Our proposed framework, ZeroStylus, operates through two systematic phases: hierarchical template acquisition from reference texts and template-guided generation with multi-granular matching. The framework dynamically constructs sentence and paragraph template repositories, enabling context-aware transformations while preserving inter-sentence logical relationships. Experimental evaluations demonstrate significant improvements over baseline methods, with structured rewriting achieving 6.90 average score compared to 6.70 for direct prompting approaches in tri-axial metrics assessing style consistency, content preservation, and expression quality. Ablation studies validate the necessity of both template hierarchies during style transfer, showing higher content preservation win rate against sentence-only approaches through paragraph-level structural encoding, as well as direct prompting method through sentence-level pattern extraction and matching. The results establish new capabilities for coherent long-text style transfer without requiring parallel corpora or LLM fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06548.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective in numerous few-shot or zero-shot Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, creating human-annotated instruction data is time-consuming, expensive, and often limited in quantity and task diversity. Previous research endeavors have attempted to address this challenge by proposing frameworks capable of generating instructions in a semi-automated and task-agnostic manner directly from the model itself. Many of these efforts have relied on large API-only parameter-based models such as GPT-3.5 (175B), which are expensive, and subject to limits on a number of queries. This paper explores the performance of three open-source small LLMs such as LLaMA 2-7B, LLama 2-13B, and Mistral 7B, using a semi-automated framework, thereby reducing human intervention, effort, and cost required to generate an instruction dataset for fine-tuning LLMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based training algorithm into this LLMs-based framework leads to further enhancements. Our evaluation of the dataset reveals that these RL-based frameworks achieve a substantial improvements in 63-66% of the tasks compared to previous approaches.

Paperid: 5397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05016.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in recommender systems aimed at both individuals and groups. Previously, Group Recommender Systems (GRS) often used social choice-based aggregation strategies to derive a single recommendation based on the preferences of multiple people. In this paper, we investigate under which conditions language models can perform these strategies correctly based on zero-shot learning and analyse whether the formatting of the group scenario in the prompt affects accuracy. We specifically focused on the impact of group complexity (number of users and items), different LLMs, different prompting conditions, including In-Context learning or generating explanations, and the formatting of group preferences. Our results show that performance starts to deteriorate when considering more than 100 ratings. However, not all language models were equally sensitive to growing group complexity. Additionally, we showed that In-Context Learning (ICL) can significantly increase the performance at higher degrees of group complexity, while adding other prompt modifications, specifying domain cues or prompting for explanations, did not impact accuracy. We conclude that future research should include group complexity as a factor in GRS evaluation due to its effect on LLM performance. Furthermore, we showed that formatting the group scenarios differently, such as rating lists per user or per item, affected accuracy. All in all, our study implies that smaller LLMs are capable of generating group recommendations under the right conditions, making the case for using smaller models that require less computing power and costs.

Paperid: 5398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00938.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to detect novel objects across different domains with limited class instances. Feature confusion, including object-background confusion and object-object confusion, presents significant challenges in both cross-domain and few-shot settings. In this work, we introduce CDFormer, a cross-domain few-shot object detection transformer against feature confusion, to address these challenges. The method specifically tackles feature confusion through two key modules: object-background distinguishing (OBD) and object-object distinguishing (OOD). The OBD module leverages a learnable background token to differentiate between objects and background, while the OOD module enhances the distinction between objects of different classes. Experimental results demonstrate that CDFormer outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 12.9% mAP, 11.0% mAP, and 10.4% mAP improvements under the 1/5/10 shot settings, respectively, when fine-tuned.

Paperid: 5399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00820.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled robots to performcomplex tasks autonomously with increasing precision. However, multi-robot systems (MRSs) face challenges in generalization, heterogeneity, and safety, especially when scaling to large-scale deployments like disaster response. Traditional approaches often lack generalization, requiring extensive engineering for new tasks and scenarios, and struggle with managing diverse robots. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Human-in-the-loop Multi-Robot Collaboration Framework (HMCF) powered by large language models (LLMs). LLMs enhance adaptability by reasoning over diverse tasks and robot capabilities, while human oversight ensures safety and reliability, intervening only when necessary. Our framework seamlessly integrates human oversight, LLM agents, and heterogeneous robots to optimize task allocation and execution. Each robot is equipped with an LLM agent capable of understanding its capabilities, converting tasks into executable instructions, and reducing hallucinations through task verification and human supervision. Simulation results show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art task planning methods, achieving higher task success rates with an improvement of 4.76%. Real-world tests demonstrate its robust zero-shot generalization feature and ability to handle diverse tasks and environments with minimal human intervention.

Paperid: 5400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00134.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have gained significant attention in computational pathology due to their multimodal learning capabilities that enhance big-data analytics of giga-pixel whole slide image (WSI). However, their sensitivity to large-scale clinical data, task formulations, and prompt design remains an open question, particularly in terms of diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation and analysis of three state of the art VLMs for histopathology, namely Quilt-Net, Quilt-LLAVA, and CONCH, on an in-house digestive pathology dataset comprising 3,507 WSIs, each in giga-pixel form, across distinct tissue types. Through a structured ablative study on cancer invasiveness and dysplasia status, we develop a comprehensive prompt engineering framework that systematically varies domain specificity, anatomical precision, instructional framing, and output constraints. Our findings demonstrate that prompt engineering significantly impacts model performance, with the CONCH model achieving the highest accuracy when provided with precise anatomical references. Additionally, we identify the critical importance of anatomical context in histopathological image analysis, as performance consistently degraded when reducing anatomical precision. We also show that model complexity alone does not guarantee superior performance, as effective domain alignment and domain-specific training are critical. These results establish foundational guidelines for prompt engineering in computational pathology and highlight the potential of VLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy when properly instructed with domain-appropriate prompts.

Paperid: 5401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21309.pdf

Abstract:
Facial expression recognition (FER) is a key research area in computer vision and human-computer interaction. Despite recent advances in deep learning, challenges persist, especially in generalizing to new scenarios. In fact, zero-shot FER significantly reduces the performance of state-of-the-art FER models. To address this problem, the community has recently started to explore the integration of knowledge from Large Language Models for visual tasks. In this work, we evaluate a broad collection of locally executed Visual Language Models (VLMs), avoiding the lack of task-specific knowledge by adopting a Visual Question Answering strategy. We compare the proposed pipeline with state-of-the-art FER models, both integrating and excluding VLMs, evaluating well-known FER benchmarks: AffectNet, FERPlus, and RAF-DB. The results show excellent performance for some VLMs in zero-shot FER scenarios, indicating the need for further exploration to improve FER generalization.

Paperid: 5402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21174.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing human-level performance. However, their extensive parameters result in high computational costs and slow inference, posing challenges for deployment in resource-limited settings. Among the strategies to overcome the aforementioned challenges, pruning emerges as a successful mechanism since it reduces model size while maintaining predictive ability. In this paper, we introduce AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning, a novel structured pruning method that efficiently compresses LLMs by removing less critical structures within Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). By projecting the input data onto weights, AMP assesses structural importance and overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, which often fall short in flexibility or efficiency. In particular, AMP surpasses the current state-of-the-art on commonsense reasoning tasks by up to 1.49 percentage points, achieving a 30% pruning ratio with minimal impact on zero-shot task performance. Moreover, AMP also improves inference speeds, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We confirm the flexibility of AMP on different families of LLMs, including LLaMA and Phi.

Paperid: 5403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16264.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) consists in finding relevant documents in a language that differs from the language of the queries. This paper presents CLIRudit, a new dataset created to evaluate cross-lingual academic search, focusing on English queries and French documents. The dataset is built using bilingual article metadata from Ãrudit, a Canadian publishing platform, and is designed to represent scenarios in which researchers search for scholarly content in languages other than English. We perform a comprehensive benchmarking of different zero-shot first-stage retrieval methods on the dataset, including dense and sparse retrievers, query and document machine translation, and state-of-the-art multilingual retrievers. Our results show that large dense retrievers, not necessarily trained for the cross-lingual retrieval task, can achieve zero-shot performance comparable to using ground truth human translations, without the need for machine translation. Sparse retrievers, such as BM25 or SPLADE, combined with document translation, show competitive results, providing an efficient alternative to large dense models. This research advances the understanding of cross-lingual academic information retrieval and provides a framework that others can use to build comparable datasets across different languages and disciplines. By making the dataset and code publicly available, we aim to facilitate further research that will help make scientific knowledge more accessible across language barriers.

Paperid: 5404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15548.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on simple text classification tasks, frequently under zero-shot settings. However, their efficacy declines when tackling complex social media challenges such as propaganda detection, hateful meme classification, and toxicity identification. Much of the existing work has focused on using LLMs to generate synthetic training data, overlooking the potential of LLM-based text preprocessing and semantic augmentation. In this paper, we introduce an approach that prompts LLMs to clean noisy text and provide context-rich explanations, thereby enhancing training sets without substantial increases in data volume. We systematically evaluate on the SemEval 2024 multi-label Persuasive Meme dataset and further validate on the Google Jigsaw toxic comments and Facebook hateful memes datasets to assess generalizability. Our results reveal that zero-shot LLM classification underperforms on these high-context tasks compared to supervised models. In contrast, integrating LLM-based semantic augmentation yields performance on par with approaches that rely on human-annotated data, at a fraction of the cost. These findings underscore the importance of strategically incorporating LLMs into machine learning (ML) pipeline for social media classification tasks, offering broad implications for combating harmful content online.

Paperid: 5405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13691.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (GFSCIL) enables models to continually learn from limited samples of novel tasks after initial training on a large base dataset. Existing GFSCIL approaches typically utilize Prototypical Networks (PNs) for metric-based class representations and fine-tune the model during the incremental learning stage. However, these PN-based methods oversimplify learning via novel query set fine-tuning and fail to integrate Graph Continual Learning (GCL) techniques due to architectural constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a more rigorous and practical setting for GFSCIL that excludes query sets during the incremental training phase. Building on this foundation, we introduce Model-Agnostic Meta Graph Continual Learning (MEGA), aimed at effectively alleviating catastrophic forgetting for GFSCIL. Specifically, by calculating the incremental second-order gradient during the meta-training stage, we endow the model to learn high-quality priors that enhance incremental learning by aligning its behaviors across both the meta-training and incremental learning stages. Extensive experiments on four mainstream graph datasets demonstrate that MEGA achieves state-of-the-art results and enhances the effectiveness of various GCL methods in GFSCIL. We believe that our proposed MEGA serves as a model-agnostic GFSCIL paradigm, paving the way for future research.

Paperid: 5406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13157.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the task of geometric reconstruction of images captured from a mixture of ground and aerial views. Current state-of-the-art learning-based approaches fail to handle the extreme viewpoint variation between aerial-ground image pairs. Our hypothesis is that the lack of high-quality, co-registered aerial-ground datasets for training is a key reason for this failure. Such data is difficult to assemble precisely because it is difficult to reconstruct in a scalable way. To overcome this challenge, we propose a scalable framework combining pseudo-synthetic renderings from 3D city-wide meshes (e.g., Google Earth) with real, ground-level crowd-sourced images (e.g., MegaDepth). The pseudo-synthetic data simulates a wide range of aerial viewpoints, while the real, crowd-sourced images help improve visual fidelity for ground-level images where mesh-based renderings lack sufficient detail, effectively bridging the domain gap between real images and pseudo-synthetic renderings. Using this hybrid dataset, we fine-tune several state-of-the-art algorithms and achieve significant improvements on real-world, zero-shot aerial-ground tasks. For example, we observe that baseline DUSt3R localizes fewer than 5% of aerial-ground pairs within 5 degrees of camera rotation error, while fine-tuning with our data raises accuracy to nearly 56%, addressing a major failure point in handling large viewpoint changes. Beyond camera estimation and scene reconstruction, our dataset also improves performance on downstream tasks like novel-view synthesis in challenging aerial-ground scenarios, demonstrating the practical value of our approach in real-world applications.

Paperid: 5407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12113.pdf

Abstract:
In information retrieval (IR), providing appropriate clarifications to better understand users' information needs is crucial for building a proactive search-oriented dialogue system. Due to the strong in-context learning ability of large language models (LLMs), recent studies investigate prompting methods to generate clarifications using few-shot or Chain of Thought (CoT) prompts. However, vanilla CoT prompting does not distinguish the characteristics of different information needs, making it difficult to understand how LLMs resolve ambiguities in user queries. In this work, we focus on the concept of ambiguity for clarification, seeking to model and integrate ambiguities in the clarification process. To this end, we comprehensively study the impact of prompting schemes based on reasoning and ambiguity for clarification. The idea is to enhance the reasoning abilities of LLMs by limiting CoT to predict first ambiguity types that can be interpreted as instructions to clarify, then correspondingly generate clarifications. We name this new prompting scheme Ambiguity Type-Chain of Thought (AT-CoT). Experiments are conducted on various datasets containing human-annotated clarifying questions to compare AT-CoT with multiple baselines. We also perform user simulations to implicitly measure the quality of generated clarifications under various IR scenarios.

Paperid: 5408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11686.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid development of generative AI facilitates content creation and makes image manipulation easier and more difficult to detect. While multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded rich world knowledge, they are not inherently tailored for combating AI-generated Content (AIGC) and struggle to comprehend local forgery details. In this work, we investigate the application of multimodal LLMs in forgery detection. We propose a framework capable of evaluating image authenticity, localizing tampered regions, providing evidence, and tracing generation methods based on semantic tampering clues. Our method demonstrates that the potential of LLMs in forgery analysis can be effectively unlocked through meticulous prompt engineering and the application of few-shot learning techniques. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that GPT4V can achieve an accuracy of 92.1% in Autosplice and 86.3% in LaMa, which is competitive with state-of-the-art AIGC detection methods. We further discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs in such tasks and propose potential improvements.

Paperid: 5409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10873.pdf

Abstract:
In autonomous driving, it is crucial to correctly interpret traffic gestures (TGs), such as those of an authority figure providing orders or instructions, or a pedestrian signaling the driver, to ensure a safe and pleasant traffic environment for all road users. This study investigates the capabilities of state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) in zero-shot interpretation, focusing on their ability to caption and classify human gestures in traffic contexts. We create and publicly share two custom datasets with varying formal and informal TGs, such as 'Stop', 'Reverse', 'Hail', etc. The datasets are "Acted TG (ATG)" and "Instructive TG In-The-Wild (ITGI)". They are annotated with natural language, describing the pedestrian's body position and gesture. We evaluate models using three methods utilizing expert-generated captions as baseline and control: (1) caption similarity, (2) gesture classification, and (3) pose sequence reconstruction similarity. Results show that current VLMs struggle with gesture understanding: sentence similarity averages below 0.59, and classification F1 scores reach only 0.14-0.39, well below the expert baseline of 0.70. While pose reconstruction shows potential, it requires more data and refined metrics to be reliable. Our findings reveal that although some SOTA VLMs can interpret zero-shot human traffic gestures, none are accurate and robust enough to be trustworthy, emphasizing the need for further research in this domain.

Paperid: 5410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08207.pdf

Abstract:
Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) is crucial for software development but remains challenging due to the lack of standardization and high manual effort. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) provide a structured approach to capture Architecture Design Decisions (ADDs), but their adoption is limited due to the manual effort involved and insufficient tool support. Our previous work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in generating ADDs. However, simply prompting the LLM does not produce quality ADDs. Moreover, using third-party LLMs raises privacy concerns, while self-hosting them poses resource challenges. To this end, we experimented with different approaches like few-shot, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning to enhance LLM's ability to generate ADDs. Our results show that both techniques improve effectiveness. Building on this, we propose Domain Specific Retreival Augumented Few Shot Fine Tuninng, DRAFT, which combines the strengths of all these three approaches for more effective ADD generation. DRAFT operates in two phases: an offline phase that fine-tunes an LLM on generating ADDs augmented with retrieved examples and an online phase that generates ADDs by leveraging retrieved ADRs and the fine-tuned model. We evaluated DRAFT against existing approaches on a dataset of 4,911 ADRs and various LLMs and analyzed them using automated metrics and human evaluations. Results show DRAFT outperforms all other approaches in effectiveness while maintaining efficiency. Our findings indicate that DRAFT can aid architects in drafting ADDs while addressing privacy and resource constraints.

Paperid: 5411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05104.pdf

Abstract:
Tracking financial investments in climate adaptation is a complex and expertise-intensive task, particularly for Early Warning Systems (EWS), which lack standardized financial reporting across multilateral development banks (MDBs) and funds. To address this challenge, we introduce an LLM-based agentic AI system that integrates contextual retrieval, fine-tuning, and multi-step reasoning to extract relevant financial data, classify investments, and ensure compliance with funding guidelines. Our study focuses on a real-world application: tracking EWS investments in the Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) Fund. We analyze 25 MDB project documents and evaluate multiple AI-driven classification methods, including zero-shot and few-shot learning, fine-tuned transformer-based classifiers, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, and an agent-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach. Our results show that the agent-based RAG approach significantly outperforms other methods, achieving 87\% accuracy, 89\% precision, and 83\% recall. Additionally, we contribute a benchmark dataset and expert-annotated corpus, providing a valuable resource for future research in AI-driven financial tracking and climate finance transparency.

Paperid: 5412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04945.pdf

Abstract:
Legal reasoning tasks present unique challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to the complexity of domain-specific knowledge and reasoning processes. This paper investigates how effectively smaller language models (Llama 2 7B and Llama 3 8B) can be fine-tuned with a limited dataset of 1,514 Multi-state Bar Examination (MBE) questions to improve legal question answering accuracy. We evaluate these models on the 2022 MBE questions licensed from JD Advising, the same dataset used in the 'GPT-4 passes the Bar exam' study. Our methodology involves collecting approximately 200 questions per legal domain across 7 domains. We distill the dataset using Llama 3 (70B) to transform explanations into a structured IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) format as a guided reasoning process to see if it results in better performance over the non-distilled dataset. We compare the non-fine-tuned models against their supervised fine-tuned (SFT) counterparts, trained for different sample sizes per domain, to study the effect on accuracy and prompt adherence. We also analyse option selection biases and their mitigation following SFT. In addition, we consolidate the performance across multiple variables: prompt type (few-shot vs zero-shot), answer ordering (chosen-option first vs generated-explanation first), response format (Numbered list vs Markdown vs JSON), and different decoding temperatures. Our findings show that domain-specific SFT helps some model configurations achieve close to human baseline performance, despite limited computational resources and a relatively small dataset. We release both the gathered SFT dataset and the family of Supervised Fine-tuned (SFT) adapters optimised for MBE performance. This establishes a practical lower bound on resources needed towards achieving effective legal question answering in smaller LLMs.

Paperid: 5413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03979.pdf

Abstract:
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the vast unstructured text within millions of academic papers is increasingly accessible for materials discovery, although significant challenges remain. While LLMs offer promising few- and zero-shot learning capabilities, particularly valuable in the materials domain where expert annotations are scarce, general-purpose LLMs often fail to address key materials-specific queries without further adaptation. To bridge this gap, fine-tuning LLMs on human-labeled data is essential for effective structured knowledge extraction. In this study, we introduce a novel annotation schema designed to extract generic process-structure-properties relationships from scientific literature. We demonstrate the utility of this approach using a dataset of 128 abstracts, with annotations drawn from two distinct domains: high-temperature materials (Domain I) and uncertainty quantification in simulating materials microstructure (Domain II). Initially, we developed a conditional random field (CRF) model based on MatBERT, a domain-specific BERT variant, and evaluated its performance on Domain I. Subsequently, we compared this model with a fine-tuned LLM (GPT-4o from OpenAI) under identical conditions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning LLMs can significantly improve entity extraction performance over the BERT-CRF baseline on Domain I. However, when additional examples from Domain II were incorporated, the performance of the BERT-CRF model became comparable to that of the GPT-4o model. These findings underscore the potential of our schema for structured knowledge extraction and highlight the complementary strengths of both modeling approaches.

Paperid: 5414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03932.pdf

Abstract:
Automated summarization of healthcare community question-answering forums is challenging due to diverse perspectives presented across multiple user responses to each question. The PerAnsSumm Shared Task was therefore proposed to tackle this challenge by identifying perspectives from different answers and then generating a comprehensive answer to the question. In this study, we address the PerAnsSumm Shared Task using two complementary paradigms: (i) a training-based approach through QLoRA fine-tuning of LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct, and (ii) agentic approaches including zero- and few-shot prompting with frontier LLMs (LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct and GPT-4o) and a Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) framework that leverages a diverse set of LLMs by combining outputs from multi-layer feedback aggregation. For perspective span identification/classification, GPT-4o zero-shot achieves an overall score of 0.57, substantially outperforming the 0.40 score of the LLaMA baseline. With a 2-layer MoA configuration, we were able to improve LLaMA performance up by 28 percent to 0.51. For perspective-based summarization, GPT-4o zero-shot attains an overall score of 0.42 compared to 0.28 for the best LLaMA zero-shot, and our 2-layer MoA approach boosts LLaMA performance by 32 percent to 0.37. Furthermore, in few-shot setting, our results show that the sentence-transformer embedding-based exemplar selection provides more gain than manually selected exemplars on LLaMA models, although the few-shot prompting is not always helpful for GPT-4o. The YaleNLP team's approach ranked the overall second place in the shared task.

Paperid: 5415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03379.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping is a fundamental skill for interacting with the environment. However, this ability can be difficult for some (e.g. due to disability). Wearable robotic solutions can enhance or restore hand function, and recent advances have leveraged computer vision to improve grasping capabilities. However, grasping transparent objects remains challenging due to their poor visual contrast and ambiguous depth cues. Furthermore, while multimodal control strategies incorporating tactile and auditory feedback have been explored to grasp transparent objects, the integration of vision with these modalities remains underdeveloped. This paper introduces MultiClear, a multimodal framework designed to enhance grasping assistance in a wearable soft exoskeleton glove for transparent objects by fusing RGB data, depth data, and auditory signals. The exoskeleton glove integrates a tendon-driven actuator with an RGB-D camera and a built-in microphone. To achieve precise and adaptive control, a hierarchical control architecture is proposed. For the proposed hierarchical control architecture, a high-level control layer provides contextual awareness, a mid-level control layer processes multimodal sensory inputs, and a low-level control executes PID motor control for fine-tuned grasping adjustments. The challenge of transparent object segmentation was managed by introducing a vision foundation model for zero-shot segmentation. The proposed system achieves a Grasping Ability Score of 70.37%, demonstrating its effectiveness in transparent object manipulation.

Paperid: 5416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02888.pdf

Abstract:
We evaluated the performance of OpenFOAMGPT incorporating multiple large-language models. Some of the present models efficiently manage different CFD tasks such as adjusting boundary conditions, turbulence models, and solver configurations, although their token cost and stability vary. Locally deployed smaller models like QwQ-32B struggled with generating valid solver files for complex processes. Zero-shot prompting commonly failed in simulations with intricate settings, even for large models. Challenges with boundary conditions and solver keywords stress the requirement for expert supervision, indicating that further development is needed to fully automate specialized CFD simulations.

Paperid: 5417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02055.pdf

Abstract:
The text-to-SQL problem aims to translate natural language questions into SQL statements to ease the interaction between database systems and end users. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in a variety of tasks, including text-to-SQL. While prior works have explored various strategies for prompting LLMs to generate SQL statements, they still fall short of fully harnessing the power of LLM due to the lack of (1) high-quality contextual information when constructing the prompts and (2) robust feedback mechanisms to correct translation errors. To address these challenges, we propose MageSQL, a text-to-SQL approach based on in-context learning over LLMs. MageSQL explores a suite of techniques that leverage the syntax and semantics of SQL queries to identify relevant few-shot demonstrations as context for prompting LLMs. In particular, we introduce a graph-based demonstration selection method -- the first of its kind in the text-to-SQL problem -- that leverages graph contrastive learning adapted with SQL-specific data augmentation strategies. Furthermore, an error correction module is proposed to detect and fix potential inaccuracies in the generated SQL query. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on several benchmarking datasets. The results show that our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art methods by an obvious margin.

Paperid: 5418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01890.pdf

Abstract:
Video understanding has shown remarkable improvements in recent years, largely dependent on the availability of large scaled labeled datasets. Recent advancements in visual-language models, especially based on contrastive pretraining, have shown remarkable generalization in zero-shot tasks, helping to overcome this dependence on labeled datasets. Adaptations of such models for videos, typically involve modifying the architecture of vision-language models to cater to video data. However, this is not trivial, since such adaptations are mostly computationally intensive and struggle with temporal modeling. We present TP-CLIP, an adaptation of CLIP that leverages temporal visual prompting for temporal adaptation without modifying the core CLIP architecture. This preserves its generalization abilities. TP-CLIP efficiently integrates into the CLIP architecture, leveraging its pre-trained capabilities for video data. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate its efficacy in zero-shot and few-shot learning, outperforming existing approaches with fewer parameters and computational efficiency. In particular, we use just 1/3 the GFLOPs and 1/28 the number of tuneable parameters in comparison to recent state-of-the-art and still outperform it by up to 15.8% depending on the task and dataset.

Paperid: 5419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23529.pdf

Abstract:
Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a pre-trained source model to a target dataset from a different domain without access to the source data. Conventional SFDA methods are limited by the information encoded in the pre-trained source model and the unlabeled target data. Recently, approaches leveraging auxiliary resources have emerged, yet remain in their early stages, offering ample opportunities for research. In this work, we propose a novel method that incorporates auxiliary information by extending an existing SFDA framework using Vision-and-Language (ViL) models. Specifically, we build upon Attracting and Dispersing (AaD), a widely adopted SFDA technique, and generalize its core principle to naturally integrate ViL models as a powerful initialization for target adaptation. Our approach, called ViL-enhanced AaD (ViLAaD), preserves the simplicity and flexibility of the AaD framework, while leveraging ViL models to significantly boost adaptation performance. We validate our method through experiments using various ViL models, demonstrating that ViLAaD consistently outperforms both AaD and zero-shot classification by ViL models, especially when both the source model and ViL model provide strong initializations. Moreover, the flexibility of ViLAaD allows it to be seamlessly incorporated into an alternating optimization framework with ViL prompt tuning and extended with additional objectives for target model adaptation. Extensive experiments on four SFDA benchmarks show that this enhanced version, ViLAaD++, achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple SFDA scenarios, including Closed-set SFDA, Partial-set SFDA, and Open-set SFDA.

Paperid: 5420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22015.pdf

Abstract:
Learning-based denoising algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance across various denoising tasks. However, training such models relies on access to large training datasets consisting of clean and noisy image pairs. On the other hand, in many imaging applications, such as microscopy, collecting ground truth images is often infeasible. To address this challenge, researchers have recently developed algorithms that can be trained without requiring access to ground truth data. However, training such models remains computationally challenging and still requires access to large noisy training samples. In this work, inspired by compression-based denoising and recent advances in neural compression, we propose a new compression-based denoising algorithm, which we name DeCompress, that i) does not require access to ground truth images, ii) does not require access to large training dataset - only a single noisy image is sufficient, iii) is robust to overfitting, and iv) achieves superior performance compared with zero-shot or unsupervised learning-based denoisers.

Paperid: 5421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21360.pdf

Abstract:
This work explores using Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate user preferences into energy optimization constraints for home appliances. We describe a task where natural language user utterances are converted into formal constraints for smart appliances, within the broader context of a renewable energy community (REC) and in the Italian scenario. We evaluate the effectiveness of various LLMs currently available for Italian in translating these preferences resorting to classical zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning settings, using a pilot dataset of Italian user requests paired with corresponding formal constraint representation. Our contributions include establishing a baseline performance for this task, publicly releasing the dataset and code for further research, and providing insights on observed best practices and limitations of LLMs in this particular domain

Paperid: 5422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21003.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of advanced AI-based tools to generate realistic images poses significant challenges for forensic detection and source attribution, especially as new generative techniques appear rapidly. Traditional methods often fail to generalize to unseen generators due to reliance on features specific to known sources during training. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that explicitly models forensic microstructures - subtle, pixel-level patterns unique to the image creation process. Using only real images in a self-supervised manner, we learn a set of diverse predictive filters to extract residuals that capture different aspects of these microstructures. By jointly modeling these residuals across multiple scales, we obtain a compact model whose parameters constitute a unique forensic self-description for each image. This self-description enables us to perform zero-shot detection of synthetic images, open-set source attribution of images, and clustering based on source without prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and adaptability compared to competing techniques, advancing the state of the art in synthetic media forensics.

Paperid: 5423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17695.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models have made remarkable advancements and are capable of producing high-quality content. However, performing controllable editing with generative models remains challenging, due to their inherent uncertainty in outputs. This challenge is praticularly pronounced in motion editing, which involves the processing of spatial information. While some physics-based generative methods have attempted to implement motion editing, they typically operate on single-view images with simple motions, such as translation and dragging. These methods struggle to handle complex rotation and stretching motions and ensure multi-view consistency, often necessitating resource-intensive retraining. To address these challenges, we propose MotionDiff, a training-free zero-shot diffusion method that leverages optical flow for complex multi-view motion editing. Specifically, given a static scene, users can interactively select objects of interest to add motion priors. The proposed Point Kinematic Model (PKM) then estimates corresponding multi-view optical flows during the Multi-view Flow Estimation Stage (MFES). Subsequently, these optical flows are utilized to generate multi-view motion results through decoupled motion representation in the Multi-view Motion Diffusion Stage (MMDS). Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDiff outperforms other physics-based generative motion editing methods in achieving high-quality multi-view consistent motion results. Notably, MotionDiff does not require retraining, enabling users to conveniently adapt it for various down-stream tasks.

Paperid: 5424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17107.pdf

Abstract:
The detection of blood disorders often hinges upon the quantification of specific blood cell types. Variations in cell counts may indicate the presence of pathological conditions. Thus, the significance of developing precise automatic systems for blood cell enumeration is underscored. The investigation focuses on a novel approach termed DE-ViT. This methodology is employed in a Few-Shot paradigm, wherein training relies on a limited number of images. Two distinct datasets are utilised for experimental purposes: the Raabin-WBC dataset for Leukocyte detection and a local dataset for Schistocyte identification. In addition to the DE-ViT model, two baseline models, Faster R-CNN 50 and Faster R-CNN X 101, are employed, with their outcomes being compared against those of the proposed model. While DE-ViT has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the COCO and LVIS datasets, both baseline models surpassed its performance on the Raabin-WBC dataset. Moreover, only Faster R-CNN X 101 yielded satisfactory results on the SC-IDB. The observed disparities in performance may possibly be attributed to domain shift phenomena.

Paperid: 5425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16457.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into virtual reality (VR) environments has opened new pathways for creating more immersive and interactive digital humans. By leveraging the generative capabilities of LLMs alongside multimodal outputs such as facial expressions and gestures, virtual agents can simulate human-like personalities and emotions, fostering richer and more engaging user experiences. This paper provides a comprehensive review of methods for enabling digital humans to adopt nuanced personality traits, exploring approaches such as zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. Additionally, it highlights the challenges of integrating LLM-driven personality traits into VR, including computational demands, latency issues, and the lack of standardized evaluation frameworks for multimodal interactions. By addressing these gaps, this work lays a foundation for advancing applications in education, therapy, and gaming, while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to redefine human-computer interaction in VR.

Paperid: 5426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14998.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive learning methods in computer vision typically rely on different views of the same image to form pairs. However, in medical imaging, we often seek to compare entire patients with different phenotypes rather than just multiple augmentations of one scan. We propose harnessing clinically relevant tabular data to identify distinct patient phenotypes and form more meaningful pairs in a contrastive learning framework. Our method uses tabular attributes to guide the training of visual representations, without requiring a joint embedding space. We demonstrate its strength using short-axis cardiac MR images and clinical attributes from the UK Biobank, where tabular data helps to more effectively distinguish between patient subgroups. Evaluation on downstream tasks, including fine-tuning and zero-shot prediction of cardiovascular artery diseases and cardiac phenotypes, shows that incorporating tabular data yields stronger visual representations than conventional methods that rely solely on image augmentations or combined image-tabular embeddings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that image encoders trained with tabular guidance are capable of embedding demographic information in their representations, allowing them to use insights from tabular data for unimodal predictions, making them well-suited to real-world medical settings where extensive clinical annotations may not be routinely available at inference time. The code will be available on GitHub.

Paperid: 5427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14547.pdf

Abstract:
In human activity recognition (HAR), activity labels have typically been encoded in one-hot format, which has a recent shift towards using textual representations to provide contextual knowledge. Here, we argue that HAR should be anchored to physical motion data, as motion forms the basis of activity and applies effectively across sensing systems, whereas text is inherently limited. We propose SKELAR, a novel HAR framework that pretrains activity representations from skeleton data and matches them with heterogeneous HAR signals. Our method addresses two major challenges: (1) capturing core motion knowledge without context-specific details. We achieve this through a self-supervised coarse angle reconstruction task that recovers joint rotation angles, invariant to both users and deployments; (2) adapting the representations to downstream tasks with varying modalities and focuses. To address this, we introduce a self-attention matching module that dynamically prioritizes relevant body parts in a data-driven manner. Given the lack of corresponding labels in existing skeleton data, we establish MASD, a new HAR dataset with IMU, WiFi, and skeleton, collected from 20 subjects performing 27 activities. This is the first broadly applicable HAR dataset with time-synchronized data across three modalities. Experiments show that SKELAR achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both full-shot and few-shot settings. We also demonstrate that SKELAR can effectively leverage synthetic skeleton data to extend its use in scenarios without skeleton collections.

Paperid: 5428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12406.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial neural networks can be used to solve a variety of robotic tasks. However, they risk failing catastrophically when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) situations. Several approaches have employed a type of synaptic plasticity known as Hebbian learning that can dynamically adjust weights based on local neural activities. Research has shown that synaptic plasticity can make policies more robust and help them adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment. However, networks augmented with Hebbian learning can lead to weight divergence, resulting in network instability. Furthermore, such Hebbian networks have not yet been applied to solve legged locomotion in complex real robots with many degrees of freedom. In this work, we improve the Hebbian network with a weight normalization mechanism for preventing weight divergence, analyze the principal components of the Hebbian's weights, and perform a thorough evaluation of network performance in locomotion control for real 18-DOF dung beetle-like and 16-DOF gecko-like robots. We find that the Hebbian-based plastic network can execute zero-shot sim-to-real adaptation locomotion and generalize to unseen conditions, such as uneven terrain and morphological damage.

Paperid: 5429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11655.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed sentiment analysis, yet balancing accuracy, efficiency, and explainability remains a critical challenge. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of DeepSeek-R1--an open-source reasoning model--against OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. We test the full 671B model and its distilled variants, systematically documenting few-shot learning curves. Our experiments show DeepSeek-R1 achieves a 91.39\% F1 score on 5-class sentiment and 99.31\% accuracy on binary tasks with just 5 shots, an eightfold improvement in few-shot efficiency over GPT-4o. Architecture-specific distillation effects emerge, where a 32B Qwen2.5-based model outperforms the 70B Llama-based variant by 6.69 percentage points. While its reasoning process reduces throughput, DeepSeek-R1 offers superior explainability via transparent, step-by-step traces, establishing it as a powerful, interpretable open-source alternative.

Paperid: 5430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11565.pdf

Abstract:
Learning robotic manipulation skills from vision is a promising approach for developing robotics applications that can generalize broadly to real-world scenarios. As such, many approaches to enable this vision have been explored with fruitful results. Particularly, object-centric representation methods have been shown to provide better inductive biases for skill learning, leading to improved performance and generalization. Nonetheless, we show that object-centric methods can struggle to learn simple manipulation skills in multi-object environments. Thus, we propose DOCIR, an object-centric framework that introduces a disentangled representation for objects of interest, obstacles, and robot embodiment. We show that this approach leads to state-of-the-art performance for learning pick and place skills from visual inputs in multi-object environments and generalizes at test time to changing objects of interest and distractors in the scene. Furthermore, we show its efficacy both in simulation and zero-shot transfer to the real world.

Paperid: 5431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10731.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning holds tremendous potential for histopathology image analysis by enabling models to generalize to unseen classes without extensive labeled data. Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded the capabilities of ZSL, allowing models to perform tasks without task-specific fine-tuning. However, applying VLMs to histopathology presents considerable challenges due to the complexity of histopathological imagery and the nuanced nature of diagnostic tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Resolution Prompt-guided Hybrid Embedding (MR-PHE) to address these challenges in zero-shot histopathology image classification. MR-PHE leverages multiresolution patch extraction to mimic the diagnostic workflow of pathologists, capturing both fine-grained cellular details and broader tissue structures critical for accurate diagnosis. We introduce a hybrid embedding strategy that integrates global image embeddings with weighted patch embeddings, effectively combining local and global contextual information. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive prompt generation and selection framework, enriching class descriptions with domain-specific synonyms and clinically relevant features to enhance semantic understanding. A similarity-based patch weighting mechanism assigns attention-like weights to patches based on their relevance to class embeddings, emphasizing diagnostically important regions during classification. Our approach utilizes pretrained VLM, CONCH for ZSL without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning, offering scalability and reducing dependence on large annotated datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that MR-PHE not only significantly improves zero-shot classification performance on histopathology datasets but also often surpasses fully supervised models.

Paperid: 5432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10432.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose BeamLLM, a vision-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam prediction framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to address the challenges of high training overhead and latency in mmWave communication systems. By combining computer vision (CV) with LLMs' cross-modal reasoning capabilities, the framework extracts user equipment (UE) positional features from RGB images and aligns visual-temporal features with LLMs' semantic space through reprogramming techniques. Evaluated on a realistic vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenario, the proposed method achieves 61.01% top-1 accuracy and 97.39% top-3 accuracy in standard prediction tasks, significantly outperforming traditional deep learning models. In few-shot prediction scenarios, the performance degradation is limited to 12.56% (top-1) and 5.55% (top-3) from time sample 1 to 10, demonstrating superior prediction capability.

Paperid: 5433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09365.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models have an intrinsic privacy issue as they memorize parts of their training data, creating a privacy leakage. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) exploit it to obtain confidential information about the data used for training, aiming to steal information. They can be repurposed as a measurement of data integrity by inferring whether it was used to train a machine learning model. While state-of-the-art attacks achieve a significant privacy leakage, their requirements are not feasible enough, hindering their role as practical tools to assess the magnitude of the privacy risk. Moreover, the most appropriate evaluation metric of MIA, the True Positive Rate at low False Positive Rate lacks interpretability. We claim that the incorporation of Few-Shot Learning techniques to the MIA field and a proper qualitative and quantitative privacy evaluation measure should deal with these issues. In this context, our proposal is twofold. We propose a Few-Shot learning based MIA, coined as the FeS-MIA model, which eases the evaluation of the privacy breach of a deep learning model by significantly reducing the number of resources required for the purpose. Furthermore, we propose an interpretable quantitative and qualitative measure of privacy, referred to as Log-MIA measure. Jointly, these proposals provide new tools to assess the privacy leakage and to ease the evaluation of the training data integrity of deep learning models, that is, to analyze the privacy breach of a deep learning model. Experiments carried out with MIA over image classification and language modeling tasks and its comparison to the state-of-the-art show that our proposals excel at reporting the privacy leakage of a deep learning model with little extra information.

Paperid: 5434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08030.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive few-shot learning capabilities, but their performance varies widely based on the sequence of in-context examples. Key factors influencing this include the sequence's length, composition, and arrangement, as well as its relation to the specific query. Existing methods often tackle these factors in isolation, overlooking their interdependencies. Moreover, the extensive search space for selecting optimal sequences complicates the development of a holistic approach. In this work, we introduce Beam Search-based Example Sequence Constructor (BESC), a novel method for learning to construct optimal example sequences. BESC addresses all key factors involved in sequence selection by considering them jointly during inference, while incrementally building the sequence. This design enables the use of beam search to significantly reduce the complexity of the search space. Experiments across various datasets and language models show notable improvements in performance.

Paperid: 5435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07396.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification has become a popular research topic for its wide application in real-world scenarios, however the problem of supervision collapse induced by single image-level annotation remains a major challenge. Existing methods aim to tackle this problem by locating and aligning relevant local features. However, the high intra-class variability in real-world images poses significant challenges in locating semantically relevant local regions under few-shot settings. Drawing inspiration from the human's complementary learning system, which excels at rapidly capturing and integrating semantic features from limited examples, we propose the generalization-optimized Systems Consolidation Adaptive Memory Dual-Network, SCAM-Net. This approach simulates the systems consolidation of complementary learning system with an adaptive memory module, which successfully addresses the difficulty of identifying meaningful features in few-shot scenarios. Specifically, we construct a Hippocampus-Neocortex dual-network that consolidates structured representation of each category, the structured representation is then stored and adaptively regulated following the generalization optimization principle in a long-term memory inside Neocortex. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed model has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 5436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07111.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces PoseLess, a novel framework for robot hand control that eliminates the need for explicit pose estimation by directly mapping 2D images to joint angles using projected representations. Our approach leverages synthetic training data generated through randomized joint configurations, enabling zero-shot generalization to real-world scenarios and cross-morphology transfer from robotic to human hands. By projecting visual inputs and employing a transformer-based decoder, PoseLess achieves robust, low-latency control while addressing challenges such as depth ambiguity and data scarcity. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in joint angle prediction accuracy without relying on any human-labelled dataset.

Paperid: 5437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05549.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Stereo Any Video, a powerful framework for video stereo matching. It can estimate spatially accurate and temporally consistent disparities without relying on auxiliary information such as camera poses or optical flow. The strong capability is driven by rich priors from monocular video depth models, which are integrated with convolutional features to produce stable representations. To further enhance performance, key architectural innovations are introduced: all-to-all-pairs correlation, which constructs smooth and robust matching cost volumes, and temporal convex upsampling, which improves temporal coherence. These components collectively ensure robustness, accuracy, and temporal consistency, setting a new standard in video stereo matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively in zero-shot settings, as well as strong generalization to real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Paperid: 5438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03370.pdf

Abstract:
Existing generic unsupervised domain adaptation approaches require access to both a large labeled source dataset and a sufficient unlabeled target dataset during adaptation. However, collecting a large dataset, even if unlabeled, is a challenging and expensive endeavor, especially in medical imaging. In addition, constraints such as privacy issues can result in cases where source data is unavailable. Taking in consideration these challenges, we propose MIAdapt, an adaptive approach for Microscopic Imagery Adaptation as a solution for Source-free Few-shot Domain Adaptive Object detection (SF-FSDA). We also define two competitive baselines (1) Faster-FreeShot and (2) MT-FreeShot. Extensive experiments on the challenging M5-Malaria and Raabin-WBC datasets validate the effectiveness of MIAdapt. Without using any image from the source domain MIAdapt surpasses state-of-the-art source-free UDA (SF-UDA) methods by +21.3% mAP and few-shot domain adaptation (FSDA) approaches by +4.7% mAP on Raabin-WBC. Our code and models will be publicly available.

Paperid: 5439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02836.pdf

Abstract:
Unlike traditional time-series forecasting methods that require extensive in-task data for training, zero-shot forecasting can directly predict future values given a target time series without additional training data. Current zero-shot approaches primarily rely on pre-trained generalized models, with their performance often depending on the variety and relevance of the pre-training data, which can raise privacy concerns. Instead of collecting diverse pre-training data, we introduce SeqFusion in this work, a novel framework that collects and fuses diverse pre-trained models (PTMs) sequentially for zero-shot forecasting. Based on the specific temporal characteristics of the target time series, SeqFusion selects the most suitable PTMs from a batch of pre-collected PTMs, performs sequential predictions, and fuses all the predictions while using minimal data to protect privacy. Each of these PTMs specializes in different temporal patterns and forecasting tasks, allowing SeqFusion to select by measuring distances in a shared representation space of the target time series with each PTM. Experiments demonstrate that SeqFusion achieves competitive accuracy in zero-shot forecasting compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 5440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00724.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of misinformation on social media has raised significant societal concerns, necessitating robust detection mechanisms. Large Language Models such as GPT-4 and LLaMA2 have been envisioned as possible tools for detecting misinformation based on their advanced natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities. This paper conducts a comparison of LLM-based approaches to detecting misinformation between text-based, multimodal, and agentic approaches. We evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuned models, zero-shot learning, and systematic fact-checking mechanisms in detecting misinformation across different topic domains like public health, politics, and finance. We also discuss scalability, generalizability, and explainability of the models and recognize key challenges such as hallucination, adversarial attacks on misinformation, and computational resources. Our findings point towards the importance of hybrid approaches that pair structured verification protocols with adaptive learning techniques to enhance detection accuracy and explainability. The paper closes by suggesting potential avenues of future work, including real-time tracking of misinformation, federated learning, and cross-platform detection models.

Paperid: 5441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20936.pdf

Abstract:
We present WebFAQ, a large-scale collection of open-domain question answering datasets derived from FAQ-style schema.org annotations. In total, the data collection consists of 96 million natural question-answer (QA) pairs across 75 languages, including 47 million (49%) non-English samples. WebFAQ further serves as the foundation for 20 monolingual retrieval benchmarks with a total size of 11.2 million QA pairs (5.9 million non-English). These datasets are carefully curated through refined filtering and near-duplicate detection, yielding high-quality resources for training and evaluating multilingual dense retrieval models. To empirically confirm WebFAQ's efficacy, we use the collected QAs to fine-tune an in-domain pretrained XLM-RoBERTa model. Through this process of dataset-specific fine-tuning, the model achieves significant retrieval performance gains, which generalize - beyond WebFAQ - to other multilingual retrieval benchmarks evaluated in zero-shot setting. Last but not least, we utilize WebFAQ to construct a set of QA-aligned bilingual corpora spanning over 1000 language pairs using state-of-the-art bitext mining and automated LLM-assessed translation evaluation. Due to our advanced, automated method of bitext dataset generation, the resulting bilingual corpora demonstrate higher translation quality compared to similar datasets. WebFAQ and all associated resources are publicly available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

Paperid: 5442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19204.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in zero-shot monocular depth estimation(MDE) have significantly improved generalization by unifying depth distributions through normalized depth representations and by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data via pseudo-label distillation. However, existing methods that rely on global depth normalization treat all depth values equally, which can amplify noise in pseudo-labels and reduce distillation effectiveness. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of depth normalization strategies in the context of pseudo-label distillation. Our study shows that, under recent distillation paradigms (e.g., shared-context distillation), normalization is not always necessary, as omitting it can help mitigate the impact of noisy supervision. Furthermore, rather than focusing solely on how depth information is represented, we propose Cross-Context Distillation, which integrates both global and local depth cues to enhance pseudo-label quality. We also introduce an assistant-guided distillation strategy that incorporates complementary depth priors from a diffusion-based teacher model, enhancing supervision diversity and robustness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Paperid: 5443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19038.pdf

Abstract:
The effectiveness of zero-shot classification in large vision-language models (VLMs), such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), depends on access to extensive, well-aligned text-image datasets. In this work, we introduce two complementary data sources, one generated by large language models (LLMs) to describe the stages of fungal growth and another comprising a diverse set of synthetic fungi images. These datasets are designed to enhance CLIPs zero-shot classification capabilities for fungi-related tasks. To ensure effective alignment between text and image data, we project them into CLIPs shared representation space, focusing on different fungal growth stages. We generate text using LLaMA3.2 to bridge modality gaps and synthetically create fungi images. Furthermore, we investigate knowledge transfer by comparing text outputs from different LLM techniques to refine classification across growth stages.

Paperid: 5444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18923.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) poses significant challenges for artificial neural networks due to the need to efficiently learn from limited data while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. Inspired by the brain's mechanisms for categorization and analogical learning, we propose a novel approach called Brain-inspired Analogical Mixture Prototypes (BAMP). BAMP has three components: mixed prototypical feature learning, statistical analogy, and soft voting. Starting from a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT), mixed prototypical feature learning represents each class using a mixture of prototypes and fine-tunes these representations during the base session. The statistical analogy calibrates the mean and covariance matrix of prototypes for new classes according to similarity to the base classes, and computes classification score with Mahalanobis distance. Soft voting combines both merits of statistical analogy and an off-shelf FSCIL method. Our experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that BAMP outperforms state-of-the-art on both traditional big start FSCIL setting and challenging small start FSCIL setting. The study suggests that brain-inspired analogical mixture prototypes can alleviate catastrophic forgetting and over-fitting problems in FSCIL.

Paperid: 5445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18877.pdf

Abstract:
Generative retrieval employs sequence models for conditional generation of document IDs based on a query (DSI (Tay et al., 2022); NCI (Wang et al., 2022); inter alia). While this has led to improved performance in zero-shot retrieval, it is a challenge to support documents not seen during training. We identify the performance of generative retrieval lies in contrastive training between sibling nodes in a document hierarchy. This motivates our proposal, the hierarchical corpus encoder (HCE), which can be supported by traditional dense encoders. Our experiments show that HCE achieves superior results than generative retrieval models under both unsupervised zero-shot and supervised settings, while also allowing the easy addition and removal of documents to the index.

Paperid: 5446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18791.pdf

Abstract:
The surge of LLM studies makes synthesizing their findings challenging. Analysis of experimental results from literature can uncover important trends across studies, but the time-consuming nature of manual data extraction limits its use. Our study presents a semi-automated approach for literature analysis that accelerates data extraction using LLMs. It automatically identifies relevant arXiv papers, extracts experimental results and related attributes, and organizes them into a structured dataset, LLMEvalDB. We then conduct an automated literature analysis of frontier LLMs, reducing the effort of paper surveying and data extraction by more than 93% compared to manual approaches. We validate LLMEvalDB by showing that it reproduces key findings from a recent manual analysis of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and also uncovers new insights that go beyond it, showing, for example, that in-context examples benefit coding & multimodal tasks but offer limited gains in math reasoning tasks compared to zero-shot CoT. Our automatically updatable dataset enables continuous tracking of target models by extracting evaluation studies as new data becomes available. Through LLMEvalDB and empirical analysis, we provide insights into LLMs while facilitating ongoing literature analyses of their behavior.

Paperid: 5447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14523.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a new framework for zero-shot generation of synthetic tabular data. Using the large language model (LLM) GPT-4o and plain-language prompting, we demonstrate the ability to generate high-fidelity tabular data without task-specific fine-tuning or access to real-world data (RWD) for pre-training. To benchmark GPT-4o, we compared the fidelity and privacy of LLM-generated synthetic data against data generated with the conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN), across three open-access datasets: Iris, Fish Measurements, and Real Estate Valuation. Despite the zero-shot approach, GPT-4o outperformed CTGAN in preserving means, 95% confidence intervals, bivariate correlations, and data privacy of RWD, even at amplified sample sizes. Notably, correlations between parameters were consistently preserved with appropriate direction and strength. However, refinement is necessary to better retain distributional characteristics. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs in tabular data synthesis, offering an accessible alternative to generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders.

Paperid: 5448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12421.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their potential to integrate physical model knowledge for real-world signal interpretation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce Wi-Chat, the first LLM-powered Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition system. We demonstrate that LLMs can process raw Wi-Fi signals and infer human activities by incorporating Wi-Fi sensing principles into prompts. Our approach leverages physical model insights to guide LLMs in interpreting Channel State Information (CSI) data without traditional signal processing techniques. Through experiments on real-world Wi-Fi datasets, we show that LLMs exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, achieving zero-shot activity recognition. These findings highlight a new paradigm for Wi-Fi sensing, expanding LLM applications beyond conventional language tasks and enhancing the accessibility of wireless sensing for real-world deployments.

Paperid: 5449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09566.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical data is fundamental to advance neurosurgical research, but access is often constrained by data availability, small sample sizes, privacy regulations, and resource-intensive preprocessing and de-identification procedures. Synthetic data offers a potential solution to challenges associated with accessing and using real-world data (RWD). This study aims to evaluate the capability of zero-shot generation of synthetic neurosurgical data with a large language model (LLM), GPT-4o, by benchmarking with the conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN). Synthetic datasets were compared to real-world neurosurgical data to assess fidelity (means, proportions, distributions, and bivariate correlations), utility (ML classifier performance on RWD), and privacy (duplication of records from RWD). The GPT-4o-generated datasets matched or exceeded CTGAN performance, despite no fine-tuning or access to RWD for pre-training. Datasets demonstrated high univariate and bivariate fidelity to RWD without directly exposing any real patient records, even at amplified sample size. Training an ML classifier on GPT-4o-generated data and testing on RWD for a binary prediction task showed an F1 score (0.706) with comparable performance to training on the CTGAN data (0.705) for predicting postoperative functional status deterioration. GPT-4o demonstrated a promising ability to generate high-fidelity synthetic neurosurgical data. These findings also indicate that data synthesized with GPT-4o can effectively augment clinical data with small sample sizes, and train ML models for prediction of neurosurgical outcomes. Further investigation is necessary to improve the preservation of distributional characteristics and boost classifier performance.

Paperid: 5450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08037.pdf

Abstract:
The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource languages lag far behind those in English, making their universal accessibility a significant challenge. To alleviate this, we present $\textit{Franken-Adapter}$, a modular language adaptation approach for decoder-only LLMs with embedding surgery. Our method begins by creating customized vocabularies for target languages and performing language adaptation through embedding tuning on multilingual data. These pre-trained embeddings are subsequently integrated with LLMs that have been instruction-tuned on English alignment data to enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our experiments on $\texttt{Gemma2}$ models with up to 27B parameters demonstrate improvements of up to 20% across 96 languages, spanning both discriminative and generative tasks, with minimal regressions ($<$1%) in English. Further in-depth analysis reveals the critical role of customizing tokenizers in enhancing language adaptation, while boosting inference efficiency. Additionally, we show the versatility of our method by achieving a 14% improvement over a math-optimized LLM across 20 languages, offering a modular solution to transfer reasoning abilities across languages post hoc.

Paperid: 5451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07782.pdf

Abstract:
Flag manifolds encode nested sequences of subspaces and serve as powerful structures for various computer vision and machine learning applications. Despite their utility in tasks such as dimensionality reduction, motion averaging, and subspace clustering, current applications are often restricted to extracting flags using common matrix decomposition methods like the singular value decomposition. Here, we address the need for a general algorithm to factorize and work with hierarchical datasets. In particular, we propose a novel, flag-based method that decomposes arbitrary hierarchical real-valued data into a hierarchy-preserving flag representation in Stiefel coordinates. Our work harnesses the potential of flag manifolds in applications including denoising, clustering, and few-shot learning.

Paperid: 5452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07186.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot LLMs are now also used for textual classification tasks, e.g., sentiment/emotion detection of a given input as a sentence/article. However, their performance can be suboptimal in such data annotation tasks. We introduce a novel technique Perceived Confidence Scoring (PCS) that evaluates LLM's confidence for its classification of an input by leveraging Metamorphic Relations (MRs). The MRs generate semantically equivalent yet textually mutated versions of the input. Following the principles of Metamorphic Testing (MT), the mutated versions are expected to have annotation labels similar to the input. By analyzing the consistency of LLM responses across these variations, PCS computes a confidence score based on the frequency of predicted labels. PCS can be used both for single LLM and multiple LLM settings (e.g., majority voting). We introduce an algorithm Perceived Differential Evolution (PDE) that determines the optimal weights assigned to the MRs and the LLMs for a classification task. Empirical evaluation shows PCS significantly improves zero-shot accuracy for Llama-3-8B-Instruct (4.96%) and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (10.52%), with Gemma-2-9b-it showing a 9.39% gain. When combining all three models, PCS significantly outperforms majority voting by 7.75%.

Paperid: 5453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05694.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the performance of various large language models (LLMs) on zero-shot end-to-end relation extraction (RE) in Chinese, a task that integrates entity recognition and relation extraction without requiring annotated data. While LLMs show promise for RE, most prior work focuses on English or assumes pre-annotated entities, leaving their effectiveness in Chinese RE largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we evaluate ChatGPT, Gemini, and LLaMA based on accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability. ChatGPT demonstrates the highest overall performance, balancing precision and recall, while Gemini achieves the fastest inference speed, making it suitable for real-time applications. LLaMA underperforms in both accuracy and latency, highlighting the need for further adaptation. Our findings provide insights into the strengths and limitations of LLMs for zero-shot Chinese RE, shedding light on trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. This study serves as a foundation for future research aimed at improving LLM adaptability to complex linguistic tasks in Chinese NLP.

Paperid: 5454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04692.pdf

Abstract:
Humanoid robotics presents significant challenges in artificial intelligence, requiring precise coordination and control of high-degree-of-freedom systems. Designing effective reward functions for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in this domain remains a critical bottleneck, demanding extensive manual effort, domain expertise, and iterative refinement. To overcome these challenges, we introduce STRIDE, a novel framework built on agentic engineering to automate reward design, DRL training, and feedback optimization for humanoid robot locomotion tasks. By combining the structured principles of agentic engineering with large language models (LLMs) for code-writing, zero-shot generation, and in-context optimization, STRIDE generates, evaluates, and iteratively refines reward functions without relying on task-specific prompts or templates. Across diverse environments featuring humanoid robot morphologies, STRIDE outperforms the state-of-the-art reward design framework EUREKA, achieving an average improvement of round 250% in efficiency and task performance. Using STRIDE-generated rewards, simulated humanoid robots achieve sprint-level locomotion across complex terrains, highlighting its ability to advance DRL workflows and humanoid robotics research.

Paperid: 5455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03080.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, understanding and validating their knowledge utilization remains challenging. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting partially addresses this by revealing intermediate reasoning steps, but the knowledge flow and application remain implicit. We introduce IAO (Input-Action-Output) prompting, a structured template-based method that explicitly models how LLMs access and apply their knowledge during complex reasoning tasks. IAO decomposes problems into sequential steps, each clearly identifying the input knowledge being used, the action being performed, and the resulting output. This structured decomposition enables us to trace knowledge flow, verify factual consistency, and identify potential knowledge gaps or misapplications. Through experiments across diverse reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that IAO not only improves zero-shot performance but also provides transparency in how LLMs leverage their stored knowledge. Human evaluation confirms that this structured approach enhances our ability to verify knowledge utilization and detect potential hallucinations or reasoning errors. Our findings provide insights into both knowledge representation within LLMs and methods for more reliable knowledge application.

Paperid: 5456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01076.pdf

Abstract:
Bilevel optimization, addressing challenges in hierarchical learning tasks, has gained significant interest in machine learning. The practical implementation of the gradient descent method to bilevel optimization encounters computational hurdles, notably the computation of the exact lower-level solution and the inverse Hessian of the lower-level objective. Although these two aspects are inherently connected, existing methods typically handle them separately by solving the lower-level problem and a linear system for the inverse Hessian-vector product. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to address these computational challenges in a coordinated manner. Specifically, we leverage quasi-Newton algorithms to accelerate the resolution of the lower-level problem while efficiently approximating the inverse Hessian-vector product. Furthermore, by exploiting the superlinear convergence properties of BFGS, we establish the non-asymptotic convergence analysis of the BFGS adaptation within our framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate the comparable or superior performance of the proposed algorithms in real-world learning tasks, including hyperparameter optimization, data hyper-cleaning, and few-shot meta-learning.

Paperid: 5457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16673.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped natural language processing, powering applications from multi-hop retrieval and question answering to autonomous agent workflows. Yet, prompt engineering -- the task of crafting textual inputs to effectively direct LLMs -- remains difficult and labor-intensive, particularly for complex pipelines that combine multiple LLM calls with functional operations like retrieval and data formatting. We introduce LLM-AutoDiff: a novel framework for Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) that extends textual gradient-based methods (such as Text-Grad) to multi-component, potentially cyclic LLM architectures. Implemented within the AdalFlow library, LLM-AutoDiff treats each textual input as a trainable parameter and uses a frozen backward engine LLM to generate feedback-akin to textual gradients -- that guide iterative prompt updates. Unlike prior single-node approaches, LLM-AutoDiff inherently accommodates functional nodes, preserves time-sequential behavior in repeated calls (e.g., multi-hop loops), and combats the "lost-in-the-middle" problem by isolating distinct sub-prompts (instructions, formats, or few-shot examples). It further boosts training efficiency by focusing on error-prone samples through selective gradient computation. Across diverse tasks, including single-step classification, multi-hop retrieval-based QA, and agent-driven pipelines, LLM-AutoDiff consistently outperforms existing textual gradient baselines in both accuracy and training cost. By unifying prompt optimization through a graph-centric lens, LLM-AutoDiff offers a powerful new paradigm for scaling and automating LLM workflows - mirroring the transformative role that automatic differentiation libraries have long played in neural network research.

Paperid: 5458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16616.pdf

Abstract:
Hallucination detection in text generation remains an ongoing struggle for natural language processing (NLP) systems, frequently resulting in unreliable outputs in applications such as machine translation and definition modeling. Existing methods struggle with data scarcity and the limitations of unlabeled datasets, as highlighted by the SHROOM shared task at SemEval-2024. In this work, we propose a novel framework to address these challenges, introducing DeepSeek Few-shot optimization to enhance weak label generation through iterative prompt engineering. We achieved high-quality annotations that considerably enhanced the performance of downstream models by restructuring data to align with instruct generative models. We further fine-tuned the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 model on these optimized annotations, enabling it to accurately detect hallucinations in resource-limited settings. Combining this fine-tuned model with ensemble learning strategies, our approach achieved 85.5% accuracy on the test set, setting a new benchmark for the SHROOM task. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of data restructuring, few-shot optimization, and fine-tuning in building scalable and robust hallucination detection frameworks for resource-constrained NLP systems.

Paperid: 5459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16356.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to simulate human-like decision making in agent-based financial market models (ABMs). As models become more powerful and accessible, researchers can now incorporate individual LLM decisions into ABM environments. However, integration may introduce inherent biases that need careful evaluation. In this paper we test three state-of-the-art GPT models for bias using two model sampling approaches: one-shot and few-shot API queries. We observe significant variations in distributions of outputs between specific models, and model sub versions, with GPT-4o-Mini-2024-07-18 showing notably better performance (32-43% yes responses) compared to GPT-4-0125-preview's extreme bias (98-99% yes responses). We show that sampling methods and model sub-versions significantly impact results: repeated independent API calls produce different distributions compared to batch sampling within a single call. While no current GPT model can simultaneously achieve a uniform distribution and Markovian properties in one-shot testing, few-shot sampling can approach uniform distributions under certain conditions. We explore the Temperature parameter, providing a definition and comparative results. We further compare our results to true random binary series and test specifically for the common human bias of Negative Recency - finding LLMs have a mixed ability to 'beat' humans in this one regard. These findings emphasise the critical importance of careful LLM integration into ABMs for financial markets and more broadly.

Paperid: 5460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15377.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting deep learning models to new domains often requires computationally intensive retraining and risks catastrophic forgetting. While fine-tuning enables domain-specific adaptation, it can reduce robustness to distribution shifts, impacting out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. Pre-trained zero-shot models like CLIP offer strong generalization but may suffer degraded robustness after fine-tuning. Building on Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing (TAPS), we propose a simple yet effective extension as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, using an indicator function to selectively activate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) blocks. Our approach minimizes knowledge loss, retains its generalization strengths under domain shifts, and significantly reduces computational costs compared to traditional fine-tuning. We demonstrate that effective fine-tuning can be achieved with as few as 5\% of active blocks, substantially improving efficiency. Evaluations on pre-trained models such as CLIP and DINO-ViT demonstrate our method's broad applicability and effectiveness in maintaining performance and knowledge retention.

Paperid: 5461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15270.pdf

Abstract:
Sample efficiency and systematic generalization are two long-standing challenges in reinforcement learning. Previous studies have shown that involving natural language along with other observation modalities can improve generalization and sample efficiency due to its compositional and open-ended nature. However, to transfer these properties of language to the decision-making process, it is necessary to establish a proper language grounding mechanism. One approach to this problem is applying inductive biases to extract fine-grained and informative representations from the observations, which makes them more connectable to the language units. We provide architecture-level inductive biases for modularity and sparsity mainly based on Neural Production Systems (NPS). Alongside NPS, we assign a central role to memory in our architecture. It can be seen as a high-level information aggregator which feeds policy/value heads with comprehensive information and simultaneously guides selective attention in NPS through attentional feedback. Our results in the BabyAI environment suggest that the proposed model's systematic generalization and sample efficiency are improved significantly compared to previous models. An extensive ablation study on variants of the proposed method is conducted, and the effectiveness of each employed technique on generalization, sample efficiency, and training stability is specified.

Paperid: 5462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13950.pdf

Abstract:
While tobacco advertising innovates at unprecedented speed, traditional surveillance methods remain frozen in time, especially in the context of social media. The lack of large-scale, comprehensive datasets and sophisticated monitoring systems has created a widening gap between industry advancement and public health oversight. This paper addresses this critical challenge by introducing Tobacco-1M, a comprehensive dataset of one million tobacco product images with hierarchical labels spanning 75 product categories, and DEFEND, a novel foundation model for tobacco product understanding. Our approach integrates a Feature Enhancement Module for rich multimodal representation learning, a Local-Global Visual Coherence mechanism for detailed feature discrimination, and an Enhanced Image-Text Alignment strategy for precise product characterization. Experimental results demonstrate DEFEND's superior performance, achieving 83.1% accuracy in product classification and 73.8% in visual question-answering tasks, outperforming existing methods by significant margins. Moreover, the model exhibits robust zero-shot learning capabilities with 45.6% accuracy on novel product categories. This work provides regulatory bodies and public health researchers with powerful tools for monitoring emerging tobacco products and marketing strategies, potentially revolutionizing approaches to tobacco control and public health surveillance.

Paperid: 5463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13372.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a new challenge that calls for zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems to augment speech data for the downstream task, personalized speech enhancement (PSE), as part of the Generative Data Augmentation workshop at ICASSP 2025. Collecting high-quality personalized data is challenging due to privacy concerns and technical difficulties in recording audio from the test scene. To address these issues, synthetic data generation using generative models has gained significant attention. In this challenge, participants are tasked first with building zero-shot TTS systems to augment personalized data. Subsequently, PSE systems are asked to be trained with this augmented personalized dataset. Through this challenge, we aim to investigate how the quality of augmented data generated by zero-shot TTS models affects PSE model performance. We also provide baseline experiments using open-source zero-shot TTS models to encourage participation and benchmark advancements. Our baseline code implementation and checkpoints are available online.

Paperid: 5464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09972.pdf

Abstract:
Composing music for video is essential yet challenging, leading to a growing interest in automating music generation for video applications. Existing approaches often struggle to achieve robust music-video correspondence and generative diversity, primarily due to inadequate feature alignment methods and insufficient datasets. In this study, we present General Video-to-Music Generation model (GVMGen), designed for generating high-related music to the video input. Our model employs hierarchical attentions to extract and align video features with music in both spatial and temporal dimensions, ensuring the preservation of pertinent features while minimizing redundancy. Remarkably, our method is versatile, capable of generating multi-style music from different video inputs, even in zero-shot scenarios. We also propose an evaluation model along with two novel objective metrics for assessing video-music alignment. Additionally, we have compiled a large-scale dataset comprising diverse types of video-music pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that GVMGen surpasses previous models in terms of music-video correspondence, generative diversity, and application universality.

Paperid: 5465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09278.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot recognition models require extensive training data for generalization. However, in zero-shot 3D classification, collecting 3D data and captions is costly and laborintensive, posing a significant barrier compared to 2D vision. Recent advances in generative models have achieved unprecedented realism in synthetic data production, and recent research shows the potential for using generated data as training data. Here, naturally raising the question: Can synthetic 3D data generated by generative models be used as expanding limited 3D datasets? In response, we present a synthetic 3D dataset expansion method, Textguided Geometric Augmentation (TeGA). TeGA is tailored for language-image-3D pretraining, which achieves SoTA in zero-shot 3D classification, and uses a generative textto-3D model to enhance and extend limited 3D datasets. Specifically, we automatically generate text-guided synthetic 3D data and introduce a consistency filtering strategy to discard noisy samples where semantics and geometric shapes do not match with text. In the experiment to double the original dataset size using TeGA, our approach demonstrates improvements over the baselines, achieving zeroshot performance gains of 3.0% on Objaverse-LVIS, 4.6% on ScanObjectNN, and 8.7% on ModelNet40. These results demonstrate that TeGA effectively bridges the 3D data gap, enabling robust zero-shot 3D classification even with limited real training data and paving the way for zero-shot 3D vision application.

Paperid: 5466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09203.pdf

Abstract:
Visual-Spatial Systems has become increasingly essential in concrete crack inspection. However, existing methods often lacks adaptability to diverse scenarios, exhibits limited robustness in image-based approaches, and struggles with curved or complex geometries. To address these limitations, an innovative framework for two-dimensional (2D) crack detection, three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction, and 3D automatic crack measurement was proposed by integrating computer vision technologies and multi-modal Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in this study. Firstly, building on a base DeepLabv3+ segmentation model, and incorporating specific refinements utilizing foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM), we developed a crack segmentation method with strong generalization across unfamiliar scenarios, enabling the generation of precise 2D crack masks. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of 3D reconstruction, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds were utilized together with image data and segmentation masks. By leveraging both image- and LiDAR-SLAM, we developed a multi-frame and multi-modal fusion framework that produces dense, colorized point clouds, effectively capturing crack semantics at a 3D real-world scale. Furthermore, the crack geometric attributions were measured automatically and directly within 3D dense point cloud space, surpassing the limitations of conventional 2D image-based measurements. This advancement makes the method suitable for structural components with curved and complex 3D geometries. Experimental results across various concrete structures highlight the significant improvements and unique advantages of the proposed method, demonstrating its effectiveness, accuracy, and robustness in real-world applications.

Paperid: 5467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07221.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate human posture classification in images and videos is crucial for automated applications across various fields, including work safety, physical rehabilitation, sports training, or daily assisted living. Recently, multimodal learning methods, such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), have advanced significantly in jointly understanding images and text. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of CLIP in classifying human postures, focusing on its application in yoga. Despite the initial limitations of the zero-shot approach, applying transfer learning on 15,301 images (real and synthetic) with 82 classes has shown promising results. The article describes the full procedure for fine-tuning, including the choice for image description syntax, models and hyperparameters adjustment. The fine-tuned CLIP model, tested on 3826 images, achieves an accuracy of over 85%, surpassing the current state-of-the-art of previous works on the same dataset by approximately 6%, its training time being 3.5 times lower than what is needed to fine-tune a YOLOv8-based model. For more application-oriented scenarios, with smaller datasets of six postures each, containing 1301 and 401 training images, the fine-tuned models attain an accuracy of 98.8% and 99.1%, respectively. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that training with as few as 20 images per pose can yield around 90% accuracy in a six-class dataset. This study demonstrates that this multimodal technique can be effectively used for yoga pose classification, and possibly for human posture classification, in general. Additionally, CLIP inference time (around 7 ms) supports that the model can be integrated into automated systems for posture evaluation, e.g., for developing a real-time personal yoga assistant for performance assessment.

Paperid: 5468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06058.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances have enabled heterogeneous multi-robot teams to learn complex and effective coordination skills. However, existing neural architectures that support heterogeneous teaming tend to force a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Shared-parameter designs prioritize sample efficiency by enabling a single network to be shared across all or a pre-specified subset of robots (via input augmentations), but tend to limit behavioral diversity. In contrast, recent designs employ a separate policy for each robot, enabling greater diversity and expressivity at the cost of efficiency and generalization. Our key insight is that such tradeoffs can be avoided by viewing these design choices as ends of a broad spectrum. Inspired by recent work in transfer and meta learning, and building on prior work in multi-robot task allocation, we propose Capability-Aware Shared Hypernetworks (CASH), a soft weight sharing architecture that uses hypernetworks to efficiently learn a flexible shared policy that dynamically adapts to each robot post-training. By explicitly encoding the impact of robot capabilities (e.g., speed and payload) on collective behavior, CASH enables zero-shot generalization to unseen robots or team compositions. Our experiments involve multiple heterogeneous tasks, three learning paradigms (imitation learning, value-based, and policy-gradient RL), and SOTA multi-robot simulation (JaxMARL) and hardware (Robotarium) platforms. Across all conditions, we find that CASH generates appropriately-diverse behaviors and consistently outperforms baseline architectures in terms of performance and sample efficiency during both training and zero-shot generalization, all with 60%-80% fewer learnable parameters.

Paperid: 5469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05478.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, trained on huge amount of datasets spanning multiple domains, exhibit significant reasoning, understanding, and planning capabilities across various tasks. This study presents the first-ever work in Arabic language integration within the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) domain in robotics, an area that has been notably underexplored in existing research. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art multi-lingual Small Language Models (SLMs), including GPT-4o mini, Llama 3 8B, and Phi-3 medium 14B, alongside the Arabic-centric LLM, Jais. Our approach utilizes the NavGPT framework, a pure LLM-based instruction-following navigation agent, to assess the impact of language on navigation reasoning through zero-shot sequential action prediction using the R2R dataset. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework is capable of high-level planning for navigation tasks when provided with instructions in both English and Arabic. However, certain models struggled with reasoning and planning in the Arabic language due to inherent limitations in their capabilities, sub-optimal performance, and parsing issues. These findings highlight the importance of enhancing planning and reasoning capabilities in language models for effective navigation, emphasizing this as a key area for further development while also unlocking the potential of Arabic-language models for impactful real-world applications.

Paperid: 5470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03172.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce GLiREL (Generalist Lightweight model for zero-shot Relation Extraction), an efficient architecture and training paradigm for zero-shot relation classification. Inspired by recent advancements in zero-shot named entity recognition, this work presents an approach to efficiently and accurately predict zero-shot relationship labels between multiple entities in a single forward pass. Experiments using the FewRel and WikiZSL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the zero-shot relation classification task. In addition, we contribute a protocol for synthetically-generating datasets with diverse relation labels.

Paperid: 5471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00697.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the global prevalence of Modern Standard Chinese language, counterspeech (CS) resources for Chinese remain virtually nonexistent. To address this gap in East Asian counterspeech research we introduce the a corpus of Modern Standard Mandarin counterspeech that focuses on combating hate speech in Mainland China. This paper proposes a novel approach of generating CS by using an LLM-as-a-Judge, simulated annealing, LLMs zero-shot CN generation and a round-robin algorithm. This is followed by manual verification for quality and contextual relevance. This paper details the methodology for creating effective counterspeech in Chinese and other non-Eurocentric languages, including unique cultural patterns of which groups are maligned and linguistic patterns in what kinds of discourse markers are programmatically marked as hate speech (HS). Analysis of the generated corpora, we provide strong evidence for the lack of open-source, properly labeled Chinese hate speech data and the limitations of using an LLM-as-Judge to score possible answers in Chinese. Moreover, the present corpus serves as the first East Asian language based CS corpus and provides an essential resource for future research on counterspeech generation and evaluation.

Paperid: 5472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17684.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval augmentation, the practice of retrieving additional data from large auxiliary pools, has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing model performance in the low-data regime. Prior approaches have employed only nearest-neighbor based strategies for data selection, which retrieve auxiliary samples with high similarity to instances in the target task. However, these approaches are prone to selecting highly redundant samples, since they fail to incorporate any notion of diversity. In our work, we first demonstrate that data selection strategies used in prior retrieval-augmented few-shot adaptation settings can be generalized using a class of functions known as Combinatorial Mutual Information (CMI) measures. We then propose COBRA (COmBinatorial Retrieval Augmentation), which employs an alternative CMI measure that considers both diversity and similarity to a target dataset. COBRA consistently outperforms previous retrieval approaches across image classification tasks and few-shot learning techniques when used to retrieve samples from LAION-2B. COBRA introduces negligible computational overhead to the cost of retrieval while providing significant gains in downstream model performance.

Paperid: 5473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16739.pdf

Abstract:
Transductive few-shot learning has recently triggered wide attention in computer vision. Yet, current methods introduce key hyper-parameters, which control the prediction statistics of the test batches, such as the level of class balance, affecting performances significantly. Such hyper-parameters are empirically grid-searched over validation data, and their configurations may vary substantially with the target dataset and pre-training model, making such empirical searches both sub-optimal and computationally intractable. In this work, we advocate and introduce the unrolling paradigm, also referred to as "learning to optimize", in the context of few-shot learning, thereby learning efficiently and effectively a set of optimized hyper-parameters. Specifically, we unroll a generalization of the ubiquitous Expectation-Maximization (EM) optimizer into a neural network architecture, mapping each of its iterates to a layer and learning a set of key hyper-parameters over validation data. Our unrolling approach covers various statistical feature distributions and pre-training paradigms, including recent foundational vision-language models and standard vision-only classifiers. We report comprehensive experiments, which cover a breadth of fine-grained downstream image classification tasks, showing significant gains brought by the proposed unrolled EM algorithm over iterative variants. The achieved improvements reach up to 10% and 7.5% on vision-only and vision-language benchmarks, respectively.

Paperid: 5474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16576.pdf

Abstract:
Growing labor shortages are increasing the demand for domestic service robots (DSRs) to assist in various settings. In this study, we develop a DSR that transports everyday objects to specified pieces of furniture based on open-vocabulary instructions. Our approach focuses on retrieving images of target objects and receptacles from pre-collected images of indoor environments. For example, given an instruction "Please get the right red towel hanging on the metal towel rack and put it in the white washing machine on the left," the DSR is expected to carry the red towel to the washing machine based on the retrieved images. This is challenging because the correct images should be retrieved from thousands of collected images, which may include many images of similar towels and appliances. To address this, we propose RelaX-Former, which learns diverse and robust representations from among positive, unlabeled positive, and negative samples. We evaluated RelaX-Former on a dataset containing real-world indoor images and human annotated instructions including complex referring expressions. The experimental results demonstrate that RelaX-Former outperformed existing baseline models across standard image retrieval metrics. Moreover, we performed physical experiments using a DSR to evaluate the performance of our approach in a zero-shot transfer setting. The experiments involved the DSR to carry objects to specific receptacles based on open-vocabulary instructions, achieving an overall success rate of 75%.

Paperid: 5475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15305.pdf

Abstract:
Solving complex reasoning tasks is a key real-world application of agents. Thanks to the pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) on code data, recent approaches like CodeAct successfully use code as LLM agents' action, achieving good results. However, CodeAct greedily generates the next action's code block by relying on fragmented thoughts, resulting in inconsistency and instability. Moreover, CodeAct lacks action-related ground-truth (GT), making its supervision signals and termination conditions questionable in multi-turn interactions. To address these issues, we first introduce a simple yet effective end-to-end code generation paradigm, CodeProgram, which leverages code's systematic logic to align with global reasoning and enable cohesive problem-solving. Then, we propose Tree-of-Code (ToC), which self-grows CodeProgram nodes based on the executable nature of the code and enables self-supervision in a GT-free scenario. Experimental results on two datasets using ten popular zero-shot LLMs show ToC remarkably boosts accuracy by nearly 20% over CodeAct with less than 1/4 turns. Several LLMs even perform better on one-turn CodeProgram than on multi-turn CodeAct. To further investigate the trade-off between efficacy and efficiency, we test different ToC tree sizes and exploration mechanisms. We also highlight the potential of ToC's end-to-end data generation for supervised and reinforced fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12447.pdf

Abstract:
Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

Paperid: 5477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11621.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown promise in procedural tasks, but the potential of multimodal instructions augmented by texts and videos to assist users remains under-explored. To address this gap, we propose the Visually Grounded Text-Video Prompting (VG-TVP) method which is a novel LLM-empowered Multimodal Procedural Planning (MPP) framework. It generates cohesive text and video procedural plans given a specified high-level objective. The main challenges are achieving textual and visual informativeness, temporal coherence, and accuracy in procedural plans. VG-TVP leverages the zero-shot reasoning capability of LLMs, the video-to-text generation ability of the video captioning models, and the text-to-video generation ability of diffusion models. VG-TVP improves the interaction between modalities by proposing a novel Fusion of Captioning (FoC) method and using Text-to-Video Bridge (T2V-B) and Video-to-Text Bridge (V2T-B). They allow LLMs to guide the generation of visually-grounded text plans and textual-grounded video plans. To address the scarcity of datasets suitable for MPP, we have curated a new dataset called Daily-Life Task Procedural Plans (Daily-PP). We conduct comprehensive experiments and benchmarks to evaluate human preferences (regarding textual and visual informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy). Our VG-TVP method outperforms unimodal baselines on the Daily-PP dataset.

Paperid: 5478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10446.pdf

Abstract:
Human readers can accurately count how many letters are in a word (e.g., 7 in ``buffalo''), remove a letter from a given position (e.g., ``bufflo'') or add a new one. The human brain of readers must have therefore learned to disentangle information related to the position of a letter and its identity. Such disentanglement is necessary for the compositional, unbounded, ability of humans to create and parse new strings, with any combination of letters appearing in any positions. Do modern deep neural models also possess this crucial compositional ability? Here, we tested whether neural models that achieve state-of-the-art on disentanglement of features in visual input can also disentangle letter position and letter identity when trained on images of written words. Specifically, we trained beta variational autoencoder ($Î²$-VAE) to reconstruct images of letter strings and evaluated their disentanglement performance using CompOrth - a new benchmark that we created for studying compositional learning and zero-shot generalization in visual models for orthography. The benchmark suggests a set of tests, of increasing complexity, to evaluate the degree of disentanglement between orthographic features of written words in deep neural models. Using CompOrth, we conducted a set of experiments to analyze the generalization ability of these models, in particular, to unseen word length and to unseen combinations of letter identities and letter positions. We found that while models effectively disentangle surface features, such as horizontal and vertical `retinal' locations of words within an image, they dramatically fail to disentangle letter position and letter identity and lack any notion of word length. Together, this study demonstrates the shortcomings of state-of-the-art $Î²$-VAE models compared to humans and proposes a new challenge and a corresponding benchmark to evaluate neural models.

Paperid: 5479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09369.pdf

Abstract:
Energy-efficient deep learning algorithms are essential for a sustainable future and feasible edge computing setups. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired from neuroscience, are a positive step in the direction of achieving the required energy efficiency. However, in a bid to lower the energy requirements, accuracy is marginally sacrificed. Hence, predictions of such deep learning algorithms require an uncertainty measure that can inform users regarding the bounds of a certain output. In this paper, we introduce the Conformalized Randomized Prior Operator (CRP-O) framework that leverages Randomized Prior (RP) networks and Split Conformal Prediction (SCP) to quantify uncertainty in both conventional and spiking neural operators. To further enable zero-shot super-resolution in UQ, we propose an extension incorporating Gaussian Process Regression. This enhanced super-resolution-enabled CRP-O framework is integrated with the recently developed Variable Spiking Wavelet Neural Operator (VSWNO). To test the performance of the obtained calibrated uncertainty bounds, we discuss four different examples covering both one-dimensional and two-dimensional partial differential equations. Results demonstrate that the uncertainty bounds produced by the conformalized RP-VSWNO significantly enhance UQ estimates compared to vanilla RP-VSWNO, Quantile WNO (Q-WNO), and Conformalized Quantile WNO (CQ-WNO). These findings underscore the potential of the proposed approach for practical applications.

Paperid: 5480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08329.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval (IR) models is often performed using BEIR; a large and heterogeneous benchmark composed of multiple datasets, covering different retrieval tasks across various domains. Although BEIR has become a standard benchmark for the zero-shot setup, its exclusively English content reduces its utility for underrepresented languages in IR, including Dutch. To address this limitation and encourage the development of Dutch IR models, we introduce BEIR-NL by automatically translating the publicly accessible BEIR datasets into Dutch. Using BEIR-NL, we evaluated a wide range of multilingual dense ranking and reranking models, as well as the lexical BM25 method. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline, and is only outperformed by the larger dense models trained for retrieval. When combined with reranking models, BM25 achieves performance on par with the best dense ranking models. In addition, we explored the impact of translation on the data by back-translating a selection of datasets to English, and observed a performance drop for both dense and lexical methods, indicating the limitations of translation for creating benchmarks. BEIR-NL is publicly available on the Hugging Face hub.

Paperid: 5481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07820.pdf

Abstract:
Optimal prompt selection is crucial for maximizing large language model (LLM) performance on downstream tasks, especially in black-box settings where models are only accessible via APIs. Black-box prompt selection is challenging due to potentially large, combinatorial search spaces, absence of gradient information, and high evaluation cost of prompts on a validation set. We propose HbBoPs, a novel method that combines a structural-aware deep kernel Gaussian Process with Hyperband as a multi-fidelity scheduler to efficiently select prompts. HbBoPs uses embeddings of instructions and few-shot exemplars, treating them as modular components within prompts. This enhances the surrogate model's ability to predict which prompt to evaluate next in a sample-efficient manner. Hyperband improves query-efficiency by adaptively allocating resources across different fidelity levels, reducing the number of validation instances required for evaluating prompts. Extensive experiments across ten diverse benchmarks and three LLMs demonstrate that HbBoPs outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both performance and efficiency.

Paperid: 5482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07462.pdf

Abstract:
Statutory article retrieval plays a crucial role in making legal information more accessible to both laypeople and legal professionals. Multilingual countries like Belgium present unique challenges for retrieval models due to the need for handling legal issues in multiple languages. Building on the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) in French, we introduce the bilingual version of this dataset, bBSARD. The dataset contains parallel Belgian statutory articles in both French and Dutch, along with legal questions from BSARD and their Dutch translation. Using bBSARD, we conduct extensive benchmarking of retrieval models available for Dutch and French. Our benchmarking setup includes lexical models, zero-shot dense models, and fine-tuned small foundation models. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline compared to many zero-shot dense models in both languages. We also observe that while proprietary models outperform open alternatives in the zero-shot setting, they can be matched or surpassed by fine-tuning small language-specific models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.

Paperid: 5483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06810.pdf

Abstract:
Causal effect estimation under observational studies is challenging due to the lack of ground truth data and treatment assignment bias. Though various methods exist in literature for addressing this problem, most of them ignore multi-dimensional treatment information by considering it as scalar, either continuous or discrete. Recently, certain works have demonstrated the utility of this rich yet complex treatment information into the estimation process, resulting in better causal effect estimation. However, these works have been demonstrated on either graphs or textual treatments. There is a notable gap in existing literature in addressing higher dimensional data such as images that has a wide variety of applications. In this work, we propose a model named NICE (Network for Image treatments Causal effect Estimation), for estimating individual causal effects when treatments are images. NICE demonstrates an effective way to use the rich multidimensional information present in image treatments that helps in obtaining improved causal effect estimates. To evaluate the performance of NICE, we propose a novel semi-synthetic data simulation framework that generates potential outcomes when images serve as treatments. Empirical results on these datasets, under various setups including the zero-shot case, demonstrate that NICE significantly outperforms existing models that incorporate treatment information for causal effect estimation.

Paperid: 5484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04678.pdf

Abstract:
We propose an unsupervised image segmentation method using features from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. Inspired by classic spectral clustering approaches, we construct adjacency matrices from self-attention layers between image patches and recursively partition using Normalised Cuts. A key insight is that self-attention probability distributions, which capture semantic relations between patches, can be interpreted as a transition matrix for random walks across the image. We leverage this by first using Random Walk Normalized Cuts directly on these self-attention activations to partition the image, minimizing transition probabilities between clusters while maximizing coherence within clusters. Applied recursively, this yields a hierarchical segmentation that reflects the rich semantics in the pre-trained attention layers, without any additional training. Next, we explore other ways to build the NCuts adjacency matrix from features, and how we can use the random walk interpretation of self-attention to capture long-range relationships. Finally, we propose an approach to automatically determine the NCut cost criterion, avoiding the need to tune this manually. We quantitatively analyse the effect incorporating different features, a constant versus dynamic NCut threshold, and incorporating multi-node paths when constructing the NCuts adjacency matrix. We show that our approach surpasses all existing methods for zero-shot unsupervised segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results on COCO-Stuff-27 and Cityscapes.

Paperid: 5485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03270.pdf

Abstract:
Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays an essential role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, user's input may contain implicit information, posing significant challenges for DST tasks. Additionally, DST data includes complex information, which not only contains a large amount of noise unrelated to the current turn, but also makes constructing DST datasets expensive. To address these challenges, we introduce Intent-driven In-context Learning for Few-shot DST (IDIC-DST). By extracting user's intent, we propose an Intent-driven Dialogue Information Augmentation module to augment the dialogue information, which can track dialogue states more effectively. Moreover, we mask noisy information from DST data and rewrite user's input in the Intent-driven Examples Retrieval module, where we retrieve similar examples. We then utilize a pre-trained large language model to update the dialogue state using the augmented dialogue information and examples. Experimental results demonstrate that IDIC-DST achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot settings on MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOZ 2.4 datasets.

Paperid: 5486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01202.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present a Neuron Abandoning Attention Flow (NAFlow) method to address the open problem of visually explaining the attention evolution dynamics inside CNNs when making their classification decisions. A novel cascading neuron abandoning back-propagation algorithm is designed to trace neurons in all layers of a CNN that involve in making its prediction to address the problem of significant interference from abandoned neurons. Firstly, a Neuron Abandoning Back-Propagation (NA-BP) module is proposed to generate Back-Propagated Feature Maps (BPFM) by using the inverse function of the intermediate layers of CNN models, on which the neurons not used for decision-making are abandoned. Meanwhile, the cascading NA-BP modules calculate the tensors of importance coefficients which are linearly combined with the tensors of BPFMs to form the NAFlow. Secondly, to be able to visualize attention flow for similarity metric-based CNN models, a new channel contribution weights module is proposed to calculate the importance coefficients via Jacobian Matrix. The effectiveness of the proposed NAFlow is validated on nine widely-used CNN models for various tasks of general image classification, contrastive learning classification, few-shot image classification, and image retrieval.

Paperid: 5487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00353.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the capability of large language models (LLMs) by structuring their reasoning processes. However, existing methods face critical limitations: handcrafted demonstrations require extensive human expertise, while trigger phrases are prone to inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose the Zero-shot Uncertainty-based Selection (ZEUS) method, a novel approach that improves CoT prompting by utilizing uncertainty estimates to select effective demonstrations without needing access to model parameters. Unlike traditional methods, ZEUS offers high sensitivity in distinguishing between helpful and ineffective questions, ensuring more precise and reliable selection. Our extensive evaluation shows that ZEUS consistently outperforms existing CoT strategies across four challenging reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating its robustness and scalability.

Paperid: 5488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17030.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Generalizable 3D-Language Feature Fields (g3D-LF), a 3D representation model pre-trained on large-scale 3D-language dataset for embodied tasks. Our g3D-LF processes posed RGB-D images from agents to encode feature fields for: 1) Novel view representation predictions from any position in the 3D scene; 2) Generations of BEV maps centered on the agent; 3) Querying targets using multi-granularity language within the above-mentioned representations. Our representation can be generalized to unseen environments, enabling real-time construction and dynamic updates. By volume rendering latent features along sampled rays and integrating semantic and spatial relationships through multiscale encoders, our g3D-LF produces representations at different scales and perspectives, aligned with multi-granularity language, via multi-level contrastive learning. Furthermore, we prepare a large-scale 3D-language dataset to align the representations of the feature fields with language. Extensive experiments on Vision-and-Language Navigation under both Panorama and Monocular settings, Zero-shot Object Navigation, and Situated Question Answering tasks highlight the significant advantages and effectiveness of our g3D-LF for embodied tasks.

Paperid: 5489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16722.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot performance across various classification tasks. Nonetheless, their reliance on hand-crafted text prompts for each task hinders efficient adaptation to new tasks. While prompt learning offers a promising solution, most studies focus on maximizing the utilization of given few-shot labeled datasets, often overlooking the potential of careful data selection strategies, which enable higher accuracy with fewer labeled data. This motivates us to study a budget-efficient active prompt learning framework. Specifically, we introduce a class-guided clustering that leverages the pre-trained image and text encoders of VLMs, thereby enabling our cluster-balanced acquisition function from the initial round of active learning. Furthermore, considering the substantial class-wise variance in confidence exhibited by VLMs, we propose a budget-saving selective querying based on adaptive class-wise thresholds. Extensive experiments in active learning scenarios across nine datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines.

Paperid: 5490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14092.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous under-canopy navigation faces additional challenges compared to over-canopy settings - for example the tight spacing between the crop rows, degraded GPS accuracy and excessive clutter. Keypoint-based visual navigation has been shown to perform well in these conditions, however the differences between agricultural environments in terms of lighting, season, soil and crop type mean that a domain shift will likely be encountered at some point of the robot deployment. In this paper, we explore the use of Meta-Learning to overcome this domain shift using a minimal amount of data. We train a base-learner that can quickly adapt to new conditions, enabling more robust navigation in low-data regimes.

Paperid: 5491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10458.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning based neural decoding from stereotactic electroencephalography (sEEG) would likely benefit from scaling up both dataset and model size. To achieve this, combining data across multiple subjects is crucial. However, in sEEG cohorts, each subject has a variable number of electrodes placed at distinct locations in their brain, solely based on clinical needs. Such heterogeneity in electrode number/placement poses a significant challenge for data integration, since there is no clear correspondence of the neural activity recorded at distinct sites between individuals. Here we introduce seegnificant: a training framework and architecture that can be used to decode behavior across subjects using sEEG data. We tokenize the neural activity within electrodes using convolutions and extract long-term temporal dependencies between tokens using self-attention in the time dimension. The 3D location of each electrode is then mixed with the tokens, followed by another self-attention in the electrode dimension to extract effective spatiotemporal neural representations. Subject-specific heads are then used for downstream decoding tasks. Using this approach, we construct a multi-subject model trained on the combined data from 21 subjects performing a behavioral task. We demonstrate that our model is able to decode the trial-wise response time of the subjects during the behavioral task solely from neural data. We also show that the neural representations learned by pretraining our model across individuals can be transferred in a few-shot manner to new subjects. This work introduces a scalable approach towards sEEG data integration for multi-subject model training, paving the way for cross-subject generalization for sEEG decoding.

Paperid: 5492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09413.pdf

Abstract:
The early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is critically dependent on systematic observation and analysis of children's social behaviors. While current methodologies predominantly utilize supervised learning approaches, their clinical adoption faces two principal limitations: insufficient ASD diagnostic samples and inadequate interpretability of the detection outcomes. This paper presents a novel zero-shot ASD detection framework based on script-centric behavioral understanding with emotional enhancement, which is designed to overcome the aforementioned clinical constraints. The proposed pipeline automatically converts audio-visual data into structured behavioral text scripts through computer vision techniques, subsequently capitalizing on the generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot/few-shot ASD detection. Three core technical contributions are introduced: (1) A multimodal script transcription module transforming behavioral cues into structured textual representations. (2) An emotion textualization module encoding emotional dynamics as the contextual features to augment behavioral understanding. (3) A domain-specific prompt engineering strategy enables the injection of clinical knowledge into LLMs. Our method achieves an F1-score of 95.24\% in diagnosing ASD in children with an average age of two years while generating interpretable detection rationales. This work opens up new avenues for leveraging the power of LLMs in analyzing and understanding ASD-related human behavior, thereby enhancing the accuracy of assisted autism diagnosis.

Paperid: 5493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08687.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Learning techniques have excelled at generating embedding spaces that capture semantic similarities between items. Often these representations are paired, enabling experiments with analogies (pairs within the same domain) and cross-modality (pairs across domains). These experiments are based on specific assumptions about the geometry of embedding spaces, which allow finding paired items by extrapolating the positional relationships between embedding pairs in the training dataset, allowing for tasks such as finding new analogies, and multimodal zero-shot classification. In this work, we propose a metric to evaluate the similarity between paired item representations. Our proposal is built from the structural similarity between the nearest-neighbors induced graphs of each representation, and can be configured to compare spaces based on different distance metrics and on different neighborhood sizes. We demonstrate that our proposal can be used to identify similar structures at different scales, which is hard to achieve with kernel methods such as Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). We further illustrate our method with two case studies: an analogy task using GloVe embeddings, and zero-shot classification in the CIFAR-100 dataset using CLIP embeddings. Our results show that accuracy in both analogy and zero-shot classification tasks correlates with the embedding similarity. These findings can help explain performance differences in these tasks, and may lead to improved design of paired-embedding models in the future.

Paperid: 5494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06729.pdf

Abstract:
We explore a new language model inversion problem under strict black-box, zero-shot, and limited data conditions. We propose a novel training-free framework that reconstructs prompts using only a limited number of text outputs from a language model. Existing methods rely on the availability of a large number of outputs for both training and inference, an assumption that is unrealistic in the real world, and they can sometimes produce garbled text. In contrast, our approach, which relies on limited resources, consistently yields coherent and semantically meaningful prompts. Our framework leverages a large language model together with an optimization process inspired by the genetic algorithm to effectively recover prompts. Experimental results on several datasets derived from public sources indicate that our approach achieves high-quality prompt recovery and generates prompts more semantically and functionally aligned with the originals than current state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, use-case studies introduced demonstrate the method's strong potential for generating high-quality text data on perturbed prompts.

Paperid: 5495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06634.pdf

Abstract:
Node classification with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) under a fixed set of labels is well known in contrast to Graph Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (GFSCIL), which involves learning a GNN classifier as graph nodes and classes growing over time sporadically. We introduce inductive GFSCIL that continually learns novel classes with newly emerging nodes while maintaining performance on old classes without accessing previous data. This addresses the practical concern of transductive GFSCIL, which requires storing the entire graph with historical data. Compared to the transductive GFSCIL, the inductive setting exacerbates catastrophic forgetting due to inaccessible previous data during incremental training, in addition to overfitting issue caused by label sparsity. Thus, we propose a novel method, called Topology-based class Augmentation and Prototype calibration (TAP). To be specific, it first creates a triple-branch multi-topology class augmentation method to enhance model generalization ability. As each incremental session receives a disjoint subgraph with nodes of novel classes, the multi-topology class augmentation method helps replicate such a setting in the base session to boost backbone versatility. In incremental learning, given the limited number of novel class samples, we propose an iterative prototype calibration to improve the separation of class prototypes. Furthermore, as backbone fine-tuning poses the feature distribution drift, prototypes of old classes start failing over time, we propose the prototype shift method for old classes to compensate for the drift. We showcase the proposed method on four datasets.

Paperid: 5496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03723.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently demonstrated considerable advancement in the generation and reconstruction of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. These models exhibit great potential in handling unsampled data and reducing noise, highlighting their promise as generative models. However, their application in dynamic MRI remains relatively underexplored. This is primarily due to the substantial amount of fully-sampled data typically required for training, which is difficult to obtain in dynamic MRI due to its spatio-temporal complexity and high acquisition costs. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic MRI reconstruction method based on a time-interleaved acquisition scheme, termed the Glob-al-to-local Diffusion Model. Specifically, fully encoded full-resolution reference data are constructed by merging under-sampled k-space data from adjacent time frames, generating two distinct bulk training datasets for global and local models. The global-to-local diffusion framework alternately optimizes global information and local image details, enabling zero-shot reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in terms of noise reduction and detail preservation, achieving reconstruction quality comparable to that of supervised approaches.

Paperid: 5497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00205.pdf

Abstract:
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning is a powerful way to control an AI agent's behavior at runtime. That said, popular goal representations, e.g., target states or natural language, are either limited to Markovian tasks or rely on ambiguous task semantics. We propose representing temporal goals using compositions of deterministic finite automata (cDFAs) and use cDFAs to guide RL agents. cDFAs balance the need for formal temporal semantics with ease of interpretation: if one can understand a flow chart, one can understand a cDFA. On the other hand, cDFAs form a countably infinite concept class with Boolean semantics, and subtle changes to the automaton can result in very different tasks, making them difficult to condition agent behavior on. To address this, we observe that all paths through a DFA correspond to a series of reach-avoid tasks and propose pre-training graph neural network embeddings on "reach-avoid derived" DFAs. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed pre-training method enables zero-shot generalization to various cDFA task classes and accelerated policy specialization without the myopic suboptimality of hierarchical methods.

Paperid: 5498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24177.pdf

Abstract:
Spoken language models (SLMs) have gained increasing attention with advancements in text-based, decoder-only language models. SLMs process text and speech, enabling simultaneous speech understanding and generation. This paper presents Double-Codebook Speaker-invariant Clustering (DC-Spin), which aims to improve speech tokenization by bridging audio signals and SLM tokens. DC-Spin extracts speaker-invariant tokens rich in phonetic information and resilient to input variations, enhancing zero-shot SLM tasks and speech resynthesis. We propose a chunk-wise approach to enable streamable DC-Spin without retraining and degradation. Comparisons of tokenization methods (self-supervised and neural audio codecs), model scalability, and downstream task proxies show that tokens easily modeled by an n-gram LM or aligned with phonemes offer strong performance, providing insights for designing speech tokenizers for SLMs.

Paperid: 5499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24087.pdf

Abstract:
Motivated by the recent success of time-series foundation models for zero-shot forecasting, we present a methodology for $\textit{in-context fine-tuning}$ of a time-series foundation model. In particular, we design a pretrained foundation model that can be prompted (at inference time) with multiple time-series examples, in order to forecast a target time-series into the future. Our foundation model is specifically trained to utilize examples from multiple related time-series in its context window (in addition to the history of the target time-series) to help it adapt to the specific distribution of the target domain at inference time. We show that such a foundation model that uses in-context examples at inference time can obtain much better performance on popular forecasting benchmarks compared to supervised deep learning methods, statistical models, as well as other time-series foundation models. Interestingly, our in-context fine-tuning approach even rivals the performance of a foundation model that is explicitly fine-tuned on the target domain.

Paperid: 5500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22187.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance on a wide range of downstream computer vision tasks. However, there still exists a considerable performance gap between these models and a supervised deep model trained on a downstream dataset. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel active learning (AL) framework that enhances the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs by selecting only a few informative samples from the unlabeled data for annotation during training. To achieve this, our approach first calibrates the predicted entropy of VLMs and then utilizes a combination of self-uncertainty and neighbor-aware uncertainty to calculate a reliable uncertainty measure for active sample selection. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms existing AL approaches on several image classification datasets, and significantly enhances the zero-shot performance of VLMs.

Paperid: 5501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17855.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as a prominent research focus for image editing tasks, leveraging the powerful image generation capabilities of the GAN framework to produce remarkable results.However, prevailing approaches are contingent upon extensive training datasets and explicit supervision, presenting a significant challenge in manipulating the diverse attributes of new image classes with limited sample availability. To surmount this hurdle, we introduce TAGE, an innovative image generation network comprising three integral modules: the Codebook Learning Module (CLM), the Code Prediction Module (CPM) and the Prompt-driven Semantic Module (PSM). The CPM module delves into the semantic dimensions of category-agnostic attributes, encapsulating them within a discrete codebook. This module is predicated on the concept that images are assemblages of attributes, and thus, by editing these category-independent attributes, it is theoretically possible to generate images from unseen categories. Subsequently, the CPM module facilitates naturalistic image editing by predicting indices of category-independent attribute vectors within the codebook. Additionally, the PSM module generates semantic cues that are seamlessly integrated into the Transformer architecture of the CPM, enhancing the model's comprehension of the targeted attributes for editing. With these semantic cues, the model can generate images that accentuate desired attributes more prominently while maintaining the integrity of the original category, even with a limited number of samples. We have conducted extensive experiments utilizing the Animal Faces, Flowers, and VGGFaces datasets. The results of these experiments demonstrate that our proposed method not only achieves superior performance but also exhibits a high degree of stability when compared to other few-shot image generation techniques.

Paperid: 5502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14464.pdf

Abstract:
Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation requires specialized expertise, often involving synthesizing insights from ECG signals with complex clinical queries posed in natural language. The scarcity of labeled ECG data coupled with the diverse nature of clinical inquiries presents a significant challenge for developing robust and adaptable ECG diagnostic systems. This work introduces a novel multimodal meta-learning method for few-shot ECG question answering, addressing the challenge of limited labeled data while leveraging the rich knowledge encoded within large language models (LLMs). Our LLM-agnostic approach integrates a pre-trained ECG encoder with a frozen LLM (e.g., LLaMA and Gemma) via a trainable fusion module, enabling the language model to reason about ECG data and generate clinically meaningful answers. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior generalization to unseen diagnostic tasks compared to supervised baselines, achieving notable performance even with limited ECG leads. For instance, in a 5-way 5-shot setting, our method using LLaMA-3.1-8B achieves an accuracy of 84.6%, 77.3%, and 69.6% on single verify, choose and query question types, respectively. These results highlight the potential of our method to enhance clinical ECG interpretation by combining signal processing with the nuanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs, particularly in data-constrained scenarios.

Paperid: 5503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13094.pdf

Abstract:
Incremental Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (iFSS) tackles a task that requires a model to continually expand its segmentation capability on novel classes using only a few annotated examples. Typical incremental approaches encounter a challenge that the objective of the base training phase (fitting base classes with sufficient instances) does not align with the incremental learning phase (rapidly adapting to new classes with less forgetting). This disconnect can result in suboptimal performance in the incremental setting. This study introduces a meta-learning-based prototype approach that encourages the model to learn how to adapt quickly while preserving previous knowledge. Concretely, we mimic the incremental evaluation protocol during the base training session by sampling a sequence of pseudo-incremental tasks. Each task in the simulated sequence is trained using a meta-objective to enable rapid adaptation without forgetting. To enhance discrimination among class prototypes, we introduce prototype space redistribution learning, which dynamically updates class prototypes to establish optimal inter-prototype boundaries within the prototype space. Extensive experiments on iFSS datasets built upon PASCAL and COCO benchmarks show the advanced performance of the proposed approach, offering valuable insights for addressing iFSS challenges.

Paperid: 5504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11963.pdf

Abstract:
Pretraining robust vision or multimodal foundation models (e.g., CLIP) relies on large-scale datasets that may be noisy, potentially misaligned, and have long-tail distributions. Previous works have shown promising results in augmenting datasets by generating synthetic samples. However, they only support domain-specific ad hoc use cases (e.g., either image or text only, but not both), and are limited in data diversity due to a lack of fine-grained control over the synthesis process. In this paper, we design a \emph{controllable} image-text synthesis pipeline, CtrlSynth, for data-efficient and robust multimodal learning. The key idea is to decompose the visual semantics of an image into basic elements, apply user-specified control policies (e.g., remove, add, or replace operations), and recompose them to synthesize images or texts. The decompose and recompose feature in CtrlSynth allows users to control data synthesis in a fine-grained manner by defining customized control policies to manipulate the basic elements. CtrlSynth leverages the capabilities of pretrained foundation models such as large language models or diffusion models to reason and recompose basic elements such that synthetic samples are natural and composed in diverse ways. CtrlSynth is a closed-loop, training-free, and modular framework, making it easy to support different pretrained models. With extensive experiments on 31 datasets spanning different vision and vision-language tasks, we show that CtrlSynth substantially improves zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and compositional reasoning performance of CLIP models.

Paperid: 5505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11373.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models in computer vision have demonstrated exceptional performance in zero-shot and few-shot tasks by extracting multi-purpose features from large-scale datasets through self-supervised pre-training methods. However, these models often overlook the severe corruption in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) images by high-level noises. We introduce DRACO, a Denoising-Reconstruction Autoencoder for CryO-EM, inspired by the Noise2Noise (N2N) approach. By processing cryo-EM movies into odd and even images and treating them as independent noisy observations, we apply a denoising-reconstruction hybrid training scheme. We mask both images to create denoising and reconstruction tasks. For DRACO's pre-training, the quality of the dataset is essential, we hence build a high-quality, diverse dataset from an uncurated public database, including over 270,000 movies or micrographs. After pre-training, DRACO naturally serves as a generalizable cryo-EM image denoiser and a foundation model for various cryo-EM downstream tasks. DRACO demonstrates the best performance in denoising, micrograph curation, and particle picking tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 5506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10497.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot action recognition requires a strong ability to generalize from pre-training and seen classes to novel unseen classes. Similarly, continual learning aims to develop models that can generalize effectively and learn new tasks without forgetting the ones previously learned. The generalization goals of zero-shot and continual learning are closely aligned, however techniques from continual learning have not been applied to zero-shot action recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on continual learning to address zero-shot action recognition. This model, which we call {\em Generative Iterative Learning} (GIL) uses a memory of synthesized features of past classes, and combines these synthetic features with real ones from novel classes. The memory is used to train a classification model, ensuring a balanced exposure to both old and new classes. Experiments demonstrate that {\em GIL} improves generalization in unseen classes, achieving a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot recognition across multiple benchmarks. Importantly, {\em GIL} also boosts performance in the more challenging generalized zero-shot setting, where models need to retain knowledge about classes seen before fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09714.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant recognition in the field of semantic segmentation due to its versatile capabilities and impressive performance. Despite its success, SAM faces two primary limitations: (1) it relies heavily on meticulous human-provided prompts like key points, bounding boxes or text messages, which is labor-intensive; (2) the mask decoder's feature representation is sometimes inaccurate, as it solely employs dot product operations at the end of mask decoder, which inadequately captures the necessary correlations for precise segmentation. Current solutions to these problems such as fine-tuning SAM often require retraining a large number of parameters, which needs huge amount of time and computing resources. To address these limitations, we propose an automated prompting and mask calibration method called AM-SAM based on a bi-level optimization framework. Our approach automatically generates prompts for an input image, eliminating the need for human involvement with a good performance in early training epochs, achieving faster convergence. Additionally, we freeze the main part of SAM, and modify the mask decoder with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), enhancing the mask decoder's feature representation by incorporating advanced techniques that go beyond simple dot product operations to more accurately capture and utilize feature correlations. Our experimental results demonstrate that AM-SAM achieves significantly accurate segmentation, matching or exceeding the effectiveness of human-generated and default prompts. Notably, on the body segmentation dataset, our method yields a 5% higher dice score with a 4-example few-shot training set compared to the SOTA method, underscoring its superiority in semantic segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 5508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09245.pdf

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in authorship attribution and authorship verification tasks for Latin texts of the Patristic Era. The study showcases that LLMs can be robust in zero-shot authorship verification even on short texts without sophisticated feature engineering. Yet, the models can also be easily "mislead" by semantics. The experiments also demonstrate that steering the model's authorship analysis and decision-making is challenging, unlike what is reported in the studies dealing with high-resource modern languages. Although LLMs prove to be able to beat, under certain circumstances, the traditional baselines, obtaining a nuanced and truly explainable decision requires at best a lot of experimentation.

Paperid: 5509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07405.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational models are able to generate text outputs given prompt instructions and text, audio, or image inputs. Recently these models have been combined to perform tasks on video, such as video summarization. Such video foundation models perform pre-training by aligning outputs from each modality-specific model into the same embedding space. Then the embeddings from each model are used within a language model, which is fine-tuned on a desired instruction set. Aligning each modality during pre-training is computationally expensive and prevents rapid testing of different base modality models. During fine-tuning, evaluation is carried out within in-domain videos where it is hard to understand the generalizability and data efficiency of these methods. To alleviate these issues we propose a plug-and-play video language model. It directly uses the texts generated from each input modality into the language model, avoiding pre-training alignment overhead. Instead of fine-tuning we leverage few-shot instruction adaptation strategies. We compare the performance versus the computational costs for our plug-and-play style method and baseline tuning methods. Finally, we explore the generalizability of each method during domain shift and present insights on what data is useful when training data is limited. Through this analysis, we present practical insights on how to leverage multi-modal foundational models for effective results given realistic compute and data limitations.

Paperid: 5510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06841.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have enabled a wide range of works exploiting their ability to generate high-volume, high-quality data for use in various downstream tasks. One subclass of such models, dubbed Layout-to-Image Synthesis (LIS), learns to generate images conditioned on a spatial layout (bounding boxes, masks, poses, etc.) and has shown a promising ability to generate realistic images, albeit with limited layout-adherence. Moreover, the question of how to effectively transfer those models for scalable augmentation of few-shot detection data remains unanswered. Thus, we propose a collaborative framework employing a Large Language Model (LLM) and an LIS model for enhancing few-shot detection beyond state-of-the-art generative augmentation approaches. We leverage LLM's reasoning ability to extrapolate the spatial prior of the annotation space by generating new bounding boxes given only a few example annotations. Additionally, we introduce our novel layout-aware CLIP score for sample ranking, enabling tight coupling between generated layouts and images. Significant improvements on COCO few-shot benchmarks are observed. With our approach, a YOLOX-S baseline is boosted by more than 140%, 50%, 35% in mAP on the COCO 5-,10-, and 30-shot settings, respectively.

Paperid: 5511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05361.pdf

Abstract:
The high incidence and mortality rates associated with respiratory diseases underscores the importance of early screening. Machine learning models can automate clinical consultations and auscultation, offering vital support in this area. However, the data involved, spanning demographics, medical history, symptoms, and respiratory audio, are heterogeneous and complex. Existing approaches are insufficient and lack generalizability, as they typically rely on limited training data, basic fusion techniques, and task-specific models. In this paper, we propose RespLLM, a novel multimodal large language model (LLM) framework that unifies text and audio representations for respiratory health prediction. RespLLM leverages the extensive prior knowledge of pretrained LLMs and enables effective audio-text fusion through cross-modal attentions. Instruction tuning is employed to integrate diverse data from multiple sources, ensuring generalizability and versatility of the model. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that RespLLM outperforms leading baselines by an average of 4.6% on trained tasks, 7.9% on unseen datasets, and facilitates zero-shot predictions for new tasks. Our work lays the foundation for multimodal models that can perceive, listen to, and understand heterogeneous data, paving the way for scalable respiratory health diagnosis.

Paperid: 5512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04254.pdf

Abstract:
Links are a fundamental part of information networks, turning isolated pieces of knowledge into a network of information that is much richer than the sum of its parts. However, adding a new link to the network is not trivial: it requires not only the identification of a suitable pair of source and target entities but also the understanding of the content of the source to locate a suitable position for the link in the text. The latter problem has not been addressed effectively, particularly in the absence of text spans in the source that could serve as anchors to insert a link to the target entity. To bridge this gap, we introduce and operationalize the task of entity insertion in information networks. Focusing on the case of Wikipedia, we empirically show that this problem is, both, relevant and challenging for editors. We compile a benchmark dataset in 105 languages and develop a framework for entity insertion called LocEI (Localized Entity Insertion) and its multilingual variant XLocEI. We show that XLocEI outperforms all baseline models (including state-of-the-art prompt-based ranking with LLMs such as GPT-4) and that it can be applied in a zero-shot manner on languages not seen during training with minimal performance drop. These findings are important for applying entity insertion models in practice, e.g., to support editors in adding links across the more than 300 language versions of Wikipedia.

Paperid: 5513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00120.pdf

Abstract:
Controlling AUVs can be challenging because of the effect of complex non-linear hydrodynamic forces acting on the robot, which are significant in water and cannot be ignored. The problem is exacerbated for small AUVs for which the dynamics can change significantly with payload changes and deployments under different hydrodynamic conditions. The common approach to AUV control is a combination of passive stabilization with added buoyancy on top and weights on the bottom, and a PID controller tuned for simple and smooth motion primitives. However, the approach comes at the cost of sluggish controls and often the need to re-tune controllers with configuration changes. In this paper, we propose a fast (trainable in minutes), reinforcement learning-based approach for full 6 degree of freedom (DOF) control of a thruster-driven AUVs, taking 6-DOF command-conditioned inputs direct to thruster outputs. We present a new, highly parallelized simulator for underwater vehicle dynamics. We demonstrate this approach through zero-shot sim-to-real (with no tuning) transfer onto a real AUV that produces comparable results to hand-tuned PID controllers. Furthermore, we show that domain randomization on the simulator produces policies that are robust to small variations in vehicle's physical parameters.

Paperid: 5514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18084.pdf

Abstract:
With the increasing presence of service robots and autonomous vehicles in human environments, navigation systems need to evolve beyond simple destination reach to incorporate social awareness. This paper introduces GSON, a novel group-based social navigation framework that leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to enhance robots' social perception capabilities. Our approach uses visual prompting to enable zero-shot extraction of social relationships among pedestrians and integrates these results with robust pedestrian detection and tracking pipelines to overcome the inherent inference speed limitations of LMMs. The planning system incorporates a mid-level planner that sits between global path planning and local motion planning, effectively preserving both global context and reactive responsiveness while avoiding disruption of the predicted social group. We validate GSON through extensive real-world mobile robot navigation experiments involving complex social scenarios such as queuing, conversations, and photo sessions. Comparative results show that our system significantly outperforms existing navigation approaches in minimizing social perturbations while maintaining comparable performance on traditional navigation metrics.

Paperid: 5515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17731.pdf

Abstract:
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven terrain, they are still unable to reliably negotiate a ubiquitous feature of industrial infrastructure: ladders. Inability to traverse ladders prevents quadrupeds from inspecting dangerous locations, puts humans in harm's way, and reduces industrial site productivity. In this paper, we learn quadrupedal ladder climbing via a reinforcement learning-based control policy and a complementary hooked end effector. We evaluate the robustness in simulation across different ladder inclinations, rung geometries, and inter-rung spacings. On hardware, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer with an overall 90% success rate at ladder angles ranging from 70Â° to 90Â°, consistent climbing performance during unmodeled perturbations, and climbing speeds 232x faster than the state of the art. This work expands the scope of industrial quadruped robot applications beyond inspection on nominal terrains to challenging infrastructural features in the environment, highlighting synergies between robot morphology and control policy when performing complex skills. More information can be found at the project website: https://sites.google.com/leggedrobotics.com/climbingladders.

Paperid: 5516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14673.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at fine-tuning LLMs for various tasks, ICL offers a rapid alternative for task adaptation by learning from examples without explicit gradient updates. In this paper, we evaluate the classification performance of LLMs using IT versus ICL in few-shot CSS tasks. The experimental results indicate that ICL consistently outperforms IT in most CSS tasks. Additionally, we investigate the relationship between the increasing number of training samples and LLM performance. Our findings show that simply increasing the number of samples without considering their quality does not consistently enhance the performance of LLMs with either ICL or IT and can sometimes even result in a performance decline. Finally, we compare three prompting strategies, demonstrating that ICL is more effective than zero-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Our research highlights the significant advantages of ICL in handling CSS tasks in few-shot settings and emphasizes the importance of optimizing sample quality and prompting strategies to improve LLM classification performance. The code will be made available.

Paperid: 5517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11390.pdf

Abstract:
Focalization, the perspective through which narrative is presented, is encoded via a wide range of lexico-grammatical features and is subject to reader interpretation. Even trained annotators frequently disagree on correct labels, suggesting this task is both qualitatively and computationally challenging. In this work, we test how well five contemporary large language model (LLM) families and two baselines perform when annotating short literary excerpts for focalization. Despite the challenging nature of the task, we find that LLMs show comparable performance to trained human annotators, with GPT-4o achieving an average F1 of 84.79%. Further, we demonstrate that the log probabilities output by GPT-family models frequently reflect the difficulty of annotating particular excerpts. Finally, we provide a case study analyzing sixteen Stephen King novels, demonstrating the usefulness of this approach for computational literary studies and the insights gleaned from examining focalization at scale.

Paperid: 5518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10362.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel frequency-based Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach that significantly enhances its efficacy for pre-training. Prior work in this direction masks out pre-defined frequencies in the input image and employs a reconstruction loss to pre-train the model. While achieving promising results, such an implementation has two fundamental limitations as identified in our paper. First, using pre-defined frequencies overlooks the variability of image frequency responses. Second, pre-trained with frequency-filtered images, the resulting model needs relatively more data to adapt to naturally looking images during fine-tuning. To address these drawbacks, we propose FOurier transform compression with seLf-Knowledge distillation (FOLK), integrating two dedicated ideas. First, inspired by image compression, we adaptively select the masked-out frequencies based on image frequency responses, creating more suitable SSL tasks for pre-training. Second, we employ a two-branch framework empowered by knowledge distillation, enabling the model to take both the filtered and original images as input, largely reducing the burden of downstream tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FOLK in achieving competitive performance to many state-of-the-art SSL methods across various downstream tasks, including image classification, few-shot learning, and semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 5519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08788.pdf

Abstract:
Interpreting electrocardiograms (ECGs) and generating comprehensive reports remain challenging tasks in cardiology, often requiring specialized expertise and significant time investment. To address these critical issues, we propose ECG-ReGen, a retrieval-based approach for ECG-to-text report generation and question answering. Our method leverages a self-supervised learning for the ECG encoder, enabling efficient similarity searches and report retrieval. By combining pre-training with dynamic retrieval and Large Language Model (LLM)-based refinement, ECG-ReGen effectively analyzes ECG data and answers related queries, with the potential of improving patient care. Experiments conducted on the PTB-XL and MIMIC-IV-ECG datasets demonstrate superior performance in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios for report generation. Furthermore, our approach exhibits competitive performance on ECG-QA dataset compared to fully supervised methods when utilizing off-the-shelf LLMs for zero-shot question answering. This approach, effectively combining self-supervised encoder and LLMs, offers a scalable and efficient solution for accurate ECG interpretation, holding significant potential to enhance clinical decision-making.

Paperid: 5520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08039.pdf

Abstract:
This study presents an innovative Zero-Shot any-to-any Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) method, leveraging a novel clustering-based phoneme representation to effectively separate content, timbre, and singing style. This approach enables precise voice characteristic manipulation. We discovered that datasets with fewer recordings per artist are more susceptible to timbre leakage. Extensive testing on over 10,000 hours of singing and user feedback revealed our model significantly improves sound quality and timbre accuracy, aligning with our objectives and advancing voice conversion technology. Furthermore, this research advances zero-shot SVC and sets the stage for future work on discrete speech representation, emphasizing the preservation of rhyme.

Paperid: 5521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05865.pdf

Abstract:
Robot models, particularly those trained with large amounts of data, have recently shown a plethora of real-world manipulation and navigation capabilities. Several independent efforts have shown that given sufficient training data in an environment, robot policies can generalize to demonstrated variations in that environment. However, needing to finetune robot models to every new environment stands in stark contrast to models in language or vision that can be deployed zero-shot for open-world problems. In this work, we present Robot Utility Models (RUMs), a framework for training and deploying zero-shot robot policies that can directly generalize to new environments without any finetuning. To create RUMs efficiently, we develop new tools to quickly collect data for mobile manipulation tasks, integrate such data into a policy with multi-modal imitation learning, and deploy policies on-device on Hello Robot Stretch, a cheap commodity robot, with an external mLLM verifier for retrying. We train five such utility models for opening cabinet doors, opening drawers, picking up napkins, picking up paper bags, and reorienting fallen objects. Our system, on average, achieves 90% success rate in unseen, novel environments interacting with unseen objects. Moreover, the utility models can also succeed in different robot and camera set-ups with no further data, training, or fine-tuning. Primary among our lessons are the importance of training data over training algorithm and policy class, guidance about data scaling, necessity for diverse yet high-quality demonstrations, and a recipe for robot introspection and retrying to improve performance on individual environments. Our code, data, models, hardware designs, as well as our experiment and deployment videos are open sourced and can be found on our project website: https://robotutilitymodels.com

Paperid: 5522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04009.pdf

Abstract:
Relation classification (RC) plays a pivotal role in both natural language understanding and knowledge graph completion. It is generally formulated as a task to recognize the relationship between two entities of interest appearing in a free-text sentence. Conventional approaches on RC, regardless of feature engineering or deep learning based, can obtain promising performance on categorizing common types of relation leaving a large proportion of unrecognizable long-tail relations due to insufficient labeled instances for training. In this paper, we consider few-shot learning is of great practical significance to RC and thus improve a modern framework of metric learning for few-shot RC. Specifically, we adopt the large-margin ProtoNet with fine-grained features, expecting they can generalize well on long-tail relations. Extensive experiments were conducted by FewRel, a large-scale supervised few-shot RC dataset, to evaluate our framework: LM-ProtoNet (FGF). The results demonstrate that it can achieve substantial improvements over many baseline approaches.

Paperid: 5523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02486.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor robots rely on depth to perform tasks like navigation or obstacle detection, and single-image depth estimation is widely used to assist perception. Most indoor single-image depth prediction focuses less on model generalizability to unseen datasets, concerned with in-the-wild robustness for system deployment. This work leverages gradient-based meta-learning to gain higher generalizability on zero-shot cross-dataset inference. Unlike the most-studied meta-learning of image classification associated with explicit class labels, no explicit task boundaries exist for continuous depth values tied to highly varying indoor environments regarding object arrangement and scene composition. We propose fine-grained task that treats each RGB-D mini-batch as a task in our meta-learning formulation. We first show that our method on limited data induces a much better prior (max 27.8% in RMSE). Then, finetuning on meta-learned initialization consistently outperforms baselines without the meta approach. Aiming at generalization, we propose zero-shot cross-dataset protocols and validate higher generalizability induced by our meta-initialization, as a simple and useful plugin to many existing depth estimation methods. The work at the intersection of depth and meta-learning potentially drives both research to step closer to practical robotic and machine perception usage.

Paperid: 5524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00217.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their ability to improve the performance of speech recognizers by effectively rescoring the n-best hypotheses generated during the beam search process. However, the best way to exploit recent generative instruction-tuned LLMs for hypothesis rescoring is still unclear. This paper proposes a novel method that uses instruction-tuned LLMs to dynamically expand the n-best speech recognition hypotheses with new hypotheses generated through appropriately-prompted LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a new zero-shot method for ASR n-best rescoring, which combines confidence scores, LLM sequence scoring, and prompt-based hypothesis generation. We compare Llama-3-Instruct, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4 Turbo as prompt-based generators with Llama-3 as sequence scorer LLM. We evaluated our approach using different speech recognizers and observed significant relative improvement in the word error rate (WER) ranging from 5% to 25%.

Paperid: 5525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21760.pdf

Abstract:
Conventional supervised climate downscaling struggles to generalize to Global Climate Models (GCMs) due to the lack of paired training data and inherent domain gaps relative to reanalysis. Meanwhile, current zero-shot methods suffer from physical inconsistencies and vanishing gradient issues under large scaling factors. We propose Zero-Shot Statistical Downscaling (ZSSD), a zero-shot framework that performs statistical downscaling without paired data during training. ZSSD leverages a Physics-Consistent Climate Prior learned from reanalysis data, conditioned on geophysical boundaries and temporal information to enforce physical validity. Furthermore, to enable robust inference across varying GCMs, we introduce Unified Coordinate Guidance. This strategy addresses the vanishing gradient problem in vanilla DPS and ensures consistency with large-scale fields. Results show that ZSSD significantly outperforms existing zero-shot baselines in 99th percentile errors and successfully reconstructs complex weather events, such as tropical cyclones, across heterogeneous GCMs.

Paperid: 5526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20906.pdf

Abstract:
Precision oncology requires forecasting clinical events and trajectories, yet modeling sparse, multi-modal clinical time series remains a critical challenge. We introduce TwinWeaver, an open-source framework that serializes longitudinal patient histories into text, enabling unified event prediction as well as forecasting with large language models, and use it to build Genie Digital Twin (GDT) on 93,054 patients across 20 cancer types. In benchmarks, GDT significantly reduces forecasting error, achieving a median Mean Absolute Scaled Error (MASE) of 0.87 compared to 0.97 for the strongest time-series baseline (p<0.001). Furthermore, GDT improves risk stratification, achieving an average concordance index (C-index) of 0.703 across survival, progression, and therapy switching tasks, surpassing the best baseline of 0.662. GDT also generalizes to out-of-distribution clinical trials, matching trained baselines at zero-shot and surpassing them with fine-tuning, achieving a median MASE of 0.75-0.88 and outperforming the strongest baseline in event prediction with an average C-index of 0.672 versus 0.648. Finally, TwinWeaver enables an interpretable clinical reasoning extension, providing a scalable and transparent foundation for longitudinal clinical modeling.

Paperid: 5527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19155.pdf

Abstract:
Image geolocation aims to infer capture locations based on visual content. Fundamentally, this constitutes a reasoning process composed of \textit{hypothesis-verification cycles}, requiring models to possess both geospatial reasoning capabilities and the ability to verify evidence against geographic facts. Existing methods typically internalize location knowledge and reasoning patterns into static memory via supervised training or trajectory-based reinforcement fine-tuning. Consequently, these methods are prone to factual hallucinations and generalization bottlenecks in open-world settings or scenarios requiring dynamic knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a Hierarchical Localization Agent, called LocationAgent. Our core philosophy is to retain hierarchical reasoning logic within the model while offloading the verification of geographic evidence to external tools. To implement hierarchical reasoning, we design the RER architecture (Reasoner-Executor-Recorder), which employs role separation and context compression to prevent the drifting problem in multi-step reasoning. For evidence verification, we construct a suite of clue exploration tools that provide diverse evidence to support location reasoning. Furthermore, to address data leakage and the scarcity of Chinese data in existing datasets, we introduce CCL-Bench (China City Location Bench), an image geolocation benchmark encompassing various scene granularities and difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LocationAgent significantly outperforms existing methods by at least 30\% in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 5528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18904.pdf

Abstract:
Auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of speech and audio understanding tasks. Nevertheless, they often struggle when applied to low-resource or unfamiliar tasks. In case of labeled in-domain data is scarce or mismatched to the true test distribution, direct fine-tuning can be brittle. In-Context Learning (ICL) provides a training-free, inference-time solution by adapting auditory LLMs through conditioning on a few in-domain demonstrations. In this work, we first show that \emph{Vanilla ICL}, improves zero-shot performance across diverse speech and audio tasks for selected models which suggest this ICL adaptation capability can be generalized to multimodal setting. Building on this, we propose \textbf{Speech In-Context Learning Adaptation Training (SICL-AT)}, a post-training recipe utilizes only high resource speech data intending to strengthen model's in-context learning capability. The enhancement can generalize to audio understanding/reasoning task. Experiments indicate our proposed method consistently outperforms direct fine-tuning in low-resource scenario.

Paperid: 5529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16981.pdf

Abstract:
We present SyncLight, the first method to enable consistent, parametric relighting across multiple uncalibrated views of a static scene. While single-view relighting has advanced significantly, existing generative approaches struggle to maintain the rigorous lighting consistency essential for multi-camera broadcasts, stereoscopic cinema, and virtual production. SyncLight addresses this by enabling precise control over light intensity and color across a multi-view capture of a scene, conditioned on a single reference edit. Our method leverages a multi-view diffusion transformer trained using a latent bridge matching formulation, achieving high-fidelity relighting of the entire image set in a single inference step. To facilitate training, we introduce a large-scale hybrid dataset comprising diverse synthetic environments -- curated from existing sources and newly designed scenes -- alongside high-fidelity, real-world multi-view captures under calibrated illumination. Surprisingly, though trained only on image pairs, SyncLight generalizes zero-shot to an arbitrary number of viewpoints, effectively propagating lighting changes across all views, without requiring camera pose information. SyncLight enables practical relighting workflows for multi-view capture systems.

Paperid: 5530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16834.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable wall-to-wall biomass mapping from NASA's GEDI mission requires interpolating sparse LiDAR observations across heterogeneous landscapes. While machine learning approaches like Random Forest and XGBoost are standard for this task, they treat spatial predictions of GEDI observations from multispectral or SAR remote sensing data as independent without adapting to the varying difficulty of heterogeneous landscapes. We demonstrate these approaches generally fail to produce calibrated prediction intervals. We identify that this stems from conflating ensemble variance with aleatoric uncertainty and ignoring local spatial context. To resolve this, we introduce Attentive Neural Processes (ANPs), a probabilistic meta-learning framework that explicitly conditions predictions on local observation sets and geospatial foundation model embeddings. Unlike static ensembles, ANPs learn a flexible spatial covariance function, allowing uncertainty estimates to expand in complex landscapes and contract in homogeneous areas. We validate this approach across five distinct biomes ranging from Tropical Amazonian forests to Boreal and Alpine ecosystems, demonstrating that ANPs achieve competitive accuracy while maintaining near-ideal uncertainty calibration. We demonstrate the operational utility of the method through few-shot adaptation, where the model recovers most of the performance gap in cross-region transfer using minimal local data. This work provides a scalable, theoretically rigorous alternative to ensemble variance for continental scale earth observation.

Paperid: 5531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16316.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce an efficient few-shot keyword spotting model for edge devices, EdgeSpot, that pairs an optimized version of a BC-ResNet-based acoustic backbone with a trainable Per-Channel Energy Normalization frontend and lightweight temporal self-attention. Knowledge distillation is utilized during training by employing a self-supervised teacher model, optimized with Sub-center ArcFace loss. This study demonstrates that the EdgeSpot model consistently provides better accuracy at a fixed false-alarm rate (FAR) than strong BC-ResNet baselines. The largest variant, EdgeSpot-4, improves the 10-shot accuracy at 1% FAR from 73.7% to 82.0%, which requires only 29.4M MACs with 128k parameters.

Paperid: 5532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15118.pdf

Abstract:
Whisper has become the de-facto encoder for extracting general-purpose audio features in large audio-language models, where a 30-second clip is typically represented by 1500 frame features projected into an LLM. In contrast, audio-text embedding models like CLAP-based models have largely relied on alternative audio encoders (e.g., HTS-AT, PaSST), and have not leveraged Whisper effectively. We present WavLink, a compact audio-text embedding model that augments Whisper encoder with a learnable global token, trained jointly with a text encoder. Through a systematic study of design choices, including pretrained text encoders, loss functions, training modes, and data mixtures, we identify configurations that yield state-of-the-art retrieval performance. Our two-stage training recipe across three model sizes, combined with Matryoshka-style supervision, improves scalability, enabling 8x smaller embeddings with minimal performance drop. WavLink also demonstrates competitive performance on AIR-Bench with MCQs and zero-shot classification.

Paperid: 5533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12260.pdf

Abstract:
Document understanding (VRDU) in regulated domains is particularly challenging, since scanned documents often contain sensitive, evolving, and domain specific knowledge. This leads to two major challenges: the lack of manual annotations for model adaptation and the difficulty for pretrained models to stay up-to-date with domain-specific facts. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong zero-shot abilities, they still suffer from hallucination and limited domain grounding. In contrast, discriminative Vision-Language Pre-trained Models (VLPMs) provide reliable grounding but require costly annotations to cover new domains. We introduce Docs2Synth, a synthetic-supervision framework that enables retrieval-guided inference for private and low-resource domains. Docs2Synth automatically processes raw document collections, generates and verifies diverse QA pairs via an agent-based system, and trains a lightweight visual retriever to extract domain-relevant evidence. During inference, the retriever collaborates with an MLLM through an iterative retrieval--generation loop, reducing hallucination and improving response consistency. We further deliver Docs2Synth as an easy-to-use Python package, enabling plug-and-play deployment across diverse real-world scenarios. Experiments on multiple VRDU benchmarks show that Docs2Synth substantially enhances grounding and domain generalization without requiring human annotations.

Paperid: 5534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11821.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models have recently gained a lot of attention due to their ability to model complex time series data encompassing different domains including traffic, energy, and weather. Although they exhibit strong average zero-shot performance on forecasting tasks, their predictions on certain critical regions of the data are not always reliable, limiting their usability in real-world applications, especially when data exhibits unique trends. In this paper, we propose a selective forecasting framework to identify these critical segments of time series using shapelets. We learn shapelets using shift-invariant dictionary learning on the validation split of the target domain dataset. Utilizing distance-based similarity to these shapelets, we facilitate the user to selectively discard unreliable predictions and be informed of the model's realistic capabilities. Empirical results on diverse benchmark time series datasets demonstrate that our approach leveraging both zero-shot and full-shot fine-tuned models reduces the overall error by an average of 22.17% for zero-shot and 22.62% for full-shot fine-tuned model. Furthermore, our approach using zero-shot and full-shot fine-tuned models, also outperforms its random selection counterparts by up to 21.41% and 21.43% on one of the datasets.

Paperid: 5535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11178.pdf

Abstract:
Social media platforms are increasingly dominated by long-form multimodal content, where harmful narratives are constructed through a complex interplay of audio, visual, and textual cues. While automated systems can flag hate speech with high accuracy, they often function as "black boxes" that fail to provide the granular, interpretable evidence, such as precise timestamps and target identities, required for effective human-in-the-loop moderation. In this work, we introduce TANDEM, a unified framework that transforms audio-visual hate detection from a binary classification task into a structured reasoning problem. Our approach employs a novel tandem reinforcement learning strategy where vision-language and audio-language models optimize each other through self-constrained cross-modal context, stabilizing reasoning over extended temporal sequences without requiring dense frame-level supervision. Experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that TANDEM significantly outperforms zero-shot and context-augmented baselines, achieving 0.73 F1 in target identification on HateMM (a 30% improvement over state-of-the-art) while maintaining precise temporal grounding. We further observe that while binary detection is robust, differentiating between offensive and hateful content remains challenging in multi-class settings due to inherent label ambiguity and dataset imbalance. More broadly, our findings suggest that structured, interpretable alignment is achievable even in complex multimodal settings, offering a blueprint for the next generation of transparent and actionable online safety moderation tools.

Paperid: 5536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10930.pdf

Abstract:
A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require large amounts of data, transfer poorly from simulation to reality, and generalize weakly across tasks/embodiments. We address those limitations by leveraging a simple insight: dexterous manipulation is inherently hierarchical - at a high level, a robot decides where to touch (geometry) and move the object (kinematics); at a low level it determines how to realize that plan through contact dynamics. Building on this insight, we propose a hierarchical RL--MPC framework in which a high-level reinforcement learning (RL) policy predicts a contact intention, a novel object-centric interface that specifies (i) an object-surface contact location and (ii) a post-contact object-level subgoal pose. Conditioned on this contact intention, a low-level contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) optimizes local contact modes and replans with contact dynamics to generate robot actions that robustly drive the object toward each subgoal. We evaluate the framework on non-prehensile tasks, including geometry-generalized pushing and object 3D reorientation. It achieves near-100% success with substantially reduced data (10x less than end-to-end baselines), highly robust performance, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Paperid: 5537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10058.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet the quality of their predictions is fundamentally limited by the few costly labeled demonstrations that can fit into a prompt. Meanwhile, there exist vast and continuously growing amounts of unlabeled data that may be closely related to the ICL task. How to utilize such unlabeled data to provably enhance the performance of ICL thus becomes an emerging fundamental question. In this work, we propose a novel augmented ICL framework, in which the prompt includes a small set of labeled examples alongside a block of unlabeled inputs. We focus on the multi-class linear classification setting and demonstrate that, with chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, a multi-layer transformer can effectively emulate an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. This enables the transformer to implicitly extract useful information from both labeled and unlabeled data, leading to provable improvements in ICL accuracy. Moreover, we show that such a transformer can be trained via teacher forcing, with its parameters converging to the desired solution at a linear rate. Experiments demonstrate that the augmented ICL framework consistently outperforms conventional few-shot ICL, providing empirical support for our theoretical findings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical study on the impact of unlabeled data on the ICL performance of transformers.

Paperid: 5538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09449.pdf

Abstract:
We present PrivLEX, a novel image privacy classifier that grounds its decisions in legally defined personal data concepts. PrivLEX is the first interpretable privacy classifier aligned with legal concepts that leverages the recognition capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). PrivLEX relies on zero-shot VLM concept detection to provide interpretable classification through a label-free Concept Bottleneck Model, without requiring explicit concept labels during training. We demonstrate PrivLEX's ability to identify personal data concepts that are present in images. We further analyse the sensitivity of such concepts as perceived by human annotators of image privacy datasets.

Paperid: 5539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09444.pdf

Abstract:
Generalization of imitation-learned navigation policies to environments unseen in training remains a major challenge. We address this by conducting the first large-scale study of how data quantity and data diversity affect real-world generalization in end-to-end, map-free visual navigation. Using a curated 4,565-hour crowd-sourced dataset collected across 161 locations in 35 countries, we train policies for point goal navigation and evaluate their closed-loop control performance on sidewalk robots operating in four countries, covering 125 km of autonomous driving. Our results show that large-scale training data enables zero-shot navigation in unknown environments, approaching the performance of policies trained with environment-specific demonstrations. Critically, we find that data diversity is far more important than data quantity. Doubling the number of geographical locations in a training set decreases navigation errors by ~15%, while performance benefit from adding data from existing locations saturates with very little data. We also observe that, with noisy crowd-sourced data, simple regression-based models outperform generative and sequence-based architectures. We release our policies, evaluation setup and example videos on the project page.

Paperid: 5540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08885.pdf

Abstract:
Two-photon lithography (TPL) is an advanced additive manufacturing (AM) technique for fabricating high-precision micro-structures. While computer vision (CV) is proofed for automated quality control, existing models are often static, rendering them ineffective in dynamic manufacturing environments. These models typically cannot detect new, unseen defect classes, be efficiently updated from scarce data, or adapt to new part geometries. To address this gap, this paper presents an adaptive CV framework for the entire life-cycle of quality model maintenance. The proposed framework is built upon a same, scale-robust backbone model and integrates three key methodologies: (1) a statistical hypothesis testing framework based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) for novelty detection, (2) a two-stage, rehearsal-based strategy for few-shot incremental learning, and (3) a few-shot Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) for few-shot domain adaptation. The framework was evaluated on a TPL dataset featuring hemisphere as source domain and cube as target domain structures, with each domain categorized into good, minor damaged, and damaged quality classes. The hypothesis testing method successfully identified new class batches with 99-100% accuracy. The incremental learning method integrated a new class to 92% accuracy using only K=20 samples. The domain adaptation model bridged the severe domain gap, achieving 96.19% accuracy on the target domain using only K=5 shots. These results demonstrate a robust and data-efficient solution for deploying and maintaining CV models in evolving production scenarios.

Paperid: 5541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08780.pdf

Abstract:
The received in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) baseband signals inherently encode physical-layer and channel characteristics of wireless links. Learning robust and transferable representations directly from such raw signals, however, remains challenging due to heterogeneous communication systems, diverse propagation environments, and limited labeled data. To address this, we present LWM-Spectro, a transformer-based foundation model pretrained on large-scale I/Q data represented as time-frequency spectrograms. The model leverages self-supervised masked modeling, contrastive learning, and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to learn general-purpose wireless representations. These representations transfer effectively to downstream tasks such as modulation classification and joint SNR/mobility recognition, even with minimal supervision. Across tasks, LWM-Spectro consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning baselines in both few-shot and data-rich regimes, providing a unified foundation for wireless learning.

Paperid: 5542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08283.pdf

Abstract:
As the volume of unstructured text continues to grow across domains, there is an urgent need for scalable methods that enable interpretable organization, summarization, and retrieval of information. This work presents a unified framework for interpretable topic modeling, zero-shot topic labeling, and topic-guided semantic retrieval over large agricultural text corpora. Leveraging BERTopic, we extract semantically coherent topics. Each topic is converted into a structured prompt, enabling a language model to generate meaningful topic labels and summaries in a zero-shot manner. Querying and document exploration are supported via dense embeddings and vector search, while a dedicated evaluation module assesses topical coherence and bias. This framework supports scalable and interpretable information access in specialized domains where labeled data is limited.

Paperid: 5543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06056.pdf

Abstract:
During 2025 and 2026, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is being implemented in the European Union member states, requiring all member states to have National Building Renovation Plans. In Sweden, there is a lack of a national register of buildings with heritage values. This is seen as a barrier for the analyses underlying the development of Building Renovation Plans by the involved Swedish authorities. The purpose of this research was to assist Swedish authorities in assigning heritage values to building in the Swedish building stock. As part of the analyses, buildings in street view images from all over Sweden (N=154 710) have been analysed using multimodal Large Language Models (LLM) to assess aspects of heritage value. Zero-shot predictions by LLMs were used as a basis to for identifying buildings with potential heritage values for 5.0 million square meters of heated floor area for the Swedish Building Renovation Plan. In this paper, the results of the predictions and lessons learnt are presented and related to the development of Swedish Building Renovation Plan as part of governance. Potential risks for authorities using LLM-based data are addressed, with a focus on issues of transparency, error detection and sycophancy.

Paperid: 5544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05848.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in video generation have enabled the development of ``world models'' capable of simulating potential futures for robotics and planning. However, specifying precise goals for these models remains a challenge; text instructions are often too abstract to capture physical nuances, while target images are frequently infeasible to specify for dynamic tasks. To address this, we introduce Goal Force, a novel framework that allows users to define goals via explicit force vectors and intermediate dynamics, mirroring how humans conceptualize physical tasks. We train a video generation model on a curated dataset of synthetic causal primitives-such as elastic collisions and falling dominos-teaching it to propagate forces through time and space. Despite being trained on simple physics data, our model exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization to complex, real-world scenarios, including tool manipulation and multi-object causal chains. Our results suggest that by grounding video generation in fundamental physical interactions, models can emerge as implicit neural physics simulators, enabling precise, physics-aware planning without reliance on external engines. We release all datasets, code, model weights, and interactive video demos at our project page.

Paperid: 5545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04381.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models for vision are predominantly trained on RGB data, while many safety-critical applications rely on non-visible modalities such as infrared (IR) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). We study whether a single flow-matching foundation model pre-trained primarily on RGB images can be repurposed as a cross-spectral translator using only a few co-measured examples, and whether the resulting synthetic data can enhance downstream detection. Starting from FLUX.1 Kontext, we insert low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules and fine-tune them on just 100 paired images per domain for two settings: RGB to IR on the KAIST dataset and RGB to SAR on the M4-SAR dataset. The adapted model translates RGB images into pixel-aligned IR/SAR, enabling us to reuse existing bounding boxes and train object detection models purely in the target modality. Across a grid of LoRA hyperparameters, we find that LPIPS computed on only 50 held-out pairs is a strong proxy for downstream performance: lower LPIPS consistently predicts higher mAP for YOLOv11n on both IR and SAR, and for DETR on KAIST IR test data. Using the best LPIPS-selected LoRA adapter, synthetic IR from external RGB datasets (LLVIP, FLIR ADAS) improves KAIST IR pedestrian detection, and synthetic SAR significantly boosts infrastructure detection on M4-SAR when combined with limited real SAR. Our results suggest that few-shot LoRA adaptation of flow-matching foundation models is a promising path toward foundation-style support for non-visible modalities.

Paperid: 5546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04157.pdf

Abstract:
Language models have become effective at a wide range of tasks, from math problem solving to open-domain question answering. However, they still make mistakes, and these mistakes are often repeated across related queries. Natural language explanations can help correct these errors, but collecting them at scale may be infeasible, particularly in domains where expert annotators are required. To address this issue, we introduce FLEx ($\textbf{F}$ew-shot $\textbf{L}$anguage $\textbf{Ex}$planations), a method for improving model behavior using a small number of explanatory examples. FLEx selects representative model errors using embedding-based clustering, verifies that the associated explanations correct those errors, and summarizes them into a prompt prefix that is prepended at inference-time. This summary guides the model to avoid similar errors on new inputs, without modifying model weights. We evaluate FLEx on CounterBench, GSM8K, and ReasonIF. We find that FLEx consistently outperforms chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across all three datasets and reduces up to 83\% of CoT's remaining errors.

Paperid: 5547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03888.pdf

Abstract:
In prior work, we introduced IndexTTS 2, a zero-shot neural text-to-speech foundation model comprising two core components: a transformer-based Text-to-Semantic (T2S) module and a non-autoregressive Semantic-to-Mel (S2M) module, which together enable faithful emotion replication and establish the first autoregressive duration-controllable generative paradigm. Building upon this, we present IndexTTS 2.5, which significantly enhances multilingual coverage, inference speed, and overall synthesis quality through four key improvements: 1) Semantic Codec Compression: we reduce the semantic codec frame rate from 50 Hz to 25 Hz, halving sequence length and substantially lowering both training and inference costs; 2) Architectural Upgrade: we replace the U-DiT-based backbone of the S2M module with a more efficient Zipformer-based modeling architecture, achieving notable parameter reduction and faster mel-spectrogram generation; 3) Multilingual Extension: We propose three explicit cross-lingual modeling strategies, boundary-aware alignment, token-level concatenation, and instruction-guided generation, establishing practical design principles for zero-shot multilingual emotional TTS that supports Chinese, English, Japanese, and Spanish, and enables robust emotion transfer even without target-language emotional training data; 4) Reinforcement Learning Optimization: we apply GRPO in post-training of the T2S module, improving pronunciation accuracy and natrualness. Experiments show that IndexTTS 2.5 not only supports broader language coverage but also replicates emotional prosody in unseen languages under the same zero-shot setting. IndexTTS 2.5 achieves a 2.28 times improvement in RTF while maintaining comparable WER and speaker similarity to IndexTTS 2.

Paperid: 5548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02353.pdf

Abstract:
A key challenge in agricultural AI is deploying disease detection systems in remote fields with limited access to laboratories or high-performance computing (HPC) resources. While deep learning (DL) models, specifically deep convolutional networks, achieve high accuracy in identifying plant pathologies from leaf imagery, their memory footprints and computational demands limit edge deployment on devices constrained by battery life, processing power, and connectivity, such as Raspberry Pi. Few-shot learning (FSL) paradigms offer a compelling solution to the data scarcity problem inherent in agricultural applications, where obtaining labeled samples for novel disease variants proves both costly and time-sensitive. This work introduces a framework combining pruning with meta-learning for agricultural disease classification, addressing the tension between generalization capability and deployment feasibility. The proposed approach combines a novel Disease-Aware Channel Importance Scoring (DACIS) mechanism with a three-stage Prune-then-Meta-Learn-then-Prune (PMP) pipeline. Experiments on PlantVillage and PlantDoc datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces model size by 78\% while maintaining 92.3\% of the original accuracy. The compressed model achieves 7 frames per second (FPS) on a Raspberry Pi 4, enabling practical real-time field diagnosis for smallholder farmers.

Paperid: 5549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24212.pdf

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

Paperid: 5550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21902.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we explore the problem of automatic statute prediction where for a given case description, a subset of relevant statutes are to be predicted. Here, the term "statute" refers to a section, a sub-section, or an article of any specific Act. Addressing this problem would be useful in several applications such as AI-assistant for lawyers and legal question answering system. For better user acceptance of such Legal AI systems, we believe the predictions should also be accompanied by human understandable explanations. We propose two techniques for addressing this problem of statute prediction with explanations -- (i) AoS (Attention-over-Sentences) which uses attention over sentences in a case description to predict statutes relevant for it and (ii) LLMPrompt which prompts an LLM to predict as well as explain relevance of a certain statute. AoS uses smaller language models, specifically sentence transformers and is trained in a supervised manner whereas LLMPrompt uses larger language models in a zero-shot manner and explores both standard as well as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting techniques. Both these models produce explanations for their predictions in human understandable forms. We compare statute prediction performance of both the proposed techniques with each other as well as with a set of competent baselines, across two popular datasets. Also, we evaluate the quality of the generated explanations through an automated counter-factual manner as well as through human evaluation.

Paperid: 5551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20773.pdf

Abstract:
Realistic user simulation is crucial for training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, yet creating simulators that accurately replicate human behavior remains challenging. A key property of effective simulators is their ability to expose failure modes of the systems they evaluate. We present an adversarial training framework that iteratively improves user simulator realism through a competitive dynamic between a generator (user simulator) and a discriminator. Applied to mental health support chatbots, our approach demonstrates that fine-tuned simulators dramatically outperform zero-shot base models at surfacing system issues, and adversarial training further enhances diversity, distributional alignment, and predictive validity. The resulting simulator achieves a strong correlation between simulated and real failure occurrence rates across diverse chatbot configurations while maintaining low distributional divergence of failure modes. Discriminator accuracy decreases drastically after three adversarial iterations, suggesting improved realism. These results provide evidence that adversarial training is a promising approach for creating realistic user simulators in mental health support TOD domains, enabling rapid, reliable, and cost-effective system evaluation before deployment.

Paperid: 5552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20578.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent and complex outputs but often fail to recognize their own mistakes and hallucinations. Existing approaches typically rely on external judges, multi-sample consistency, or text-based self-critique, which incur additional compute or correlate weakly with true correctness. We ask: can LLMs predict their own failures by inspecting internal states during inference? We introduce Gnosis, a lightweight self-awareness mechanism that enables frozen LLMs to perform intrinsic self-verification by decoding signals from hidden states and attention patterns. Gnosis passively observes internal traces, compresses them into fixed-budget descriptors, and predicts correctness with negligible inference cost, adding only ~5M parameters and operating independently of sequence length. Across math reasoning, open-domain question answering, and academic knowledge benchmarks, and over frozen backbones ranging from 1.7B to 20B parameters, Gnosis consistently outperforms strong internal baselines and large external judges in both accuracy and calibration. Moreover, it generalizes zero-shot to partial generations, enabling early detection of failing trajectories and compute-aware control. These results show that reliable correctness cues are intrinsic to generation process and can be extracted efficiently without external supervision.

Paperid: 5553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17730.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in image generation have led to the widespread availability of highly realistic synthetic media, increasing the difficulty of reliable deepfake detection. A key challenge is generalization, as detectors trained on a narrow class of generators often fail when confronted with unseen models. In this work, we address the pressing need for generalizable detection by leveraging large vision-language models, specifically CLIP, to identify synthetic content across diverse generative techniques. First, we introduce Diff-Gen, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 100k diffusion-generated fakes that capture broad spectral artifacts unlike traditional GAN datasets. Models trained on Diff-Gen demonstrate stronger cross-domain generalization, particularly on previously unseen image generators. Second, we propose AdaptPrompt, a parameter-efficient transfer learning framework that jointly learns task-specific textual prompts and visual adapters while keeping the CLIP backbone frozen. We further show via layer ablation that pruning the final transformer block of the vision encoder enhances the retention of high-frequency generative artifacts, significantly boosting detection accuracy. Our evaluation spans 25 challenging test sets, covering synthetic content generated by GANs, diffusion models, and commercial tools, establishing a new state-of-the-art in both standard and cross-domain scenarios. We further demonstrate the framework's versatility through few-shot generalization (using as few as 320 images) and source attribution, enabling the precise identification of generator architectures in closed-set settings.

Paperid: 5554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16702.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are being developed at a rapid pace, promising closer and closer approximation to ab initio accuracy. This unlocks the possibility to simulate much larger length and time scales. However, benchmarks for these MLIPs are usually limited to ordered, crystalline and bulk materials. Hence, reported performance does not necessarily accurately reflect MLIP performance in real applications such as heterogeneous catalysis. Here, we systematically analyze zero-shot performance of 80 different MLIPs, evaluating tasks typical for heterogeneous catalysis across a range of different data sets, including adsorption and reaction on surfaces of alloyed metals, oxides, and metal-oxide interfacial systems. We demonstrate that current-generation foundational MLIPs can already perform at high accuracy for applications such as predicting vacancy formation energies of perovskite oxides or zero-point energies of supported nanoclusters. However, limitations also exist. We find that many MLIPs catastrophically fail when applied to magnetic materials, and structure relaxation in the MLIP generally increases the energy prediction error compared to single-point evaluation of a previously optimized structure. Comparing low-cost task-specific models to foundational MLIPs, we highlight some core differences between these model approaches and show that -- if considering only accuracy -- these models can compete with the current generation of best-performing MLIPs. Furthermore, we show that no single MLIP universally performs best, requiring users to investigate MLIP suitability for their desired application.

Paperid: 5555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14095.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant progress in text-driven 4D human-object interaction (HOI) generation with supervised methods, the scalability remains limited by the scarcity of large-scale 4D HOI datasets. To overcome this, recent approaches attempt zero-shot 4D HOI generation with pre-trained image diffusion models. However, interaction cues are minimally distilled during the generation process, restricting their applicability across diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose AnchorHOI, a novel framework that thoroughly exploits hybrid priors by incorporating video diffusion models beyond image diffusion models, advancing 4D HOI generation. Nevertheless, directly optimizing high-dimensional 4D HOI with such priors remains challenging, particularly for human pose and compositional motion. To address this challenge, AnchorHOI introduces an anchor-based prior distillation strategy, which constructs interaction-aware anchors and then leverages them to guide generation in a tractable two-step process. Specifically, two tailored anchors are designed for 4D HOI generation: anchor Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for expressive interaction composition, and anchor keypoints for realistic motion synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorHOI outperforms previous methods with superior diversity and generalization.

Paperid: 5556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13749.pdf

Abstract:
Financial sentiment analysis enhances market understanding; however, standard natural language processing approaches encounter significant challenges when applied to small datasets. This study provides a comparative evaluation of embedding-based methods for financial news sentiment classification in resource-constrained environments. Word2Vec, GloVe, and sentence transformer representations are evaluated in combination with gradient boosting on manually labeled headlines. Experimental results identify a substantial gap between validation and test performance, with models performing worse than trivial baselines despite strong validation metrics. The analysis demonstrates that pretrained embeddings yield diminishing returns below a critical data sufficiency threshold, and that small validation sets contribute to overfitting during model selection. Practical application is illustrated through weekly sentiment aggregation and narrative summarization for market monitoring workflows. The findings offer empirical evidence that embedding quality alone cannot address fundamental data scarcity in sentiment classification. For practitioners operating with limited resources, the results indicate the need to consider alternative approaches such as few-shot learning, data augmentation, or lexicon-enhanced hybrid methods when labeled samples are scarce.

Paperid: 5557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12997.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP delivers strong zero-shot classification but remains highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Previous work of adversarial fine-tuning largely focuses on matching the predicted logits between clean and adversarial examples, which overlooks uncertainty calibration and may degrade the zero-shot generalization. A common expectation in reliable uncertainty estimation is that predictive uncertainty should increase as inputs become more difficult or shift away from the training distribution. However, we frequently observe the opposite in the adversarial setting: perturbations not only degrade accuracy but also suppress uncertainty, leading to severe miscalibration and unreliable over-confidence. This overlooked phenomenon highlights a critical reliability gap beyond robustness. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel adversarial fine-tuning objective for CLIP considering both prediction accuracy and uncertainty alignments. By reparameterizing the output of CLIP as the concentration parameter of a Dirichlet distribution, we propose a unified representation that captures relative semantic structure and the magnitude of predictive confidence. Our objective aligns these distributions holistically under perturbations, moving beyond single-logit anchoring and restoring calibrated uncertainty. Experiments on multiple zero-shot classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach effectively restores calibrated uncertainty and achieves competitive adversarial robustness while maintaining clean accuracy.

Paperid: 5558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10561.pdf

Abstract:
In context learning (ICL) underpins recent advances in large language models (LLMs), although its role and performance in causal reasoning remains unclear. Causal reasoning demands multihop composition and strict conjunctive control, and reliance on spurious lexical relations of the input could provide misleading results. We hypothesize that, due to their ability to project the input into a latent space, encoder and encoder decoder architectures are better suited for said multihop conjunctive reasoning versus decoder only models. To do this, we compare fine-tuned versions of all the aforementioned architectures with zero and few shot ICL in both natural language and non natural language scenarios. We find that ICL alone is insufficient for reliable causal reasoning, often overfocusing on irrelevant input features. In particular, decoder only models are noticeably brittle to distributional shifts, while finetuned encoder and encoder decoder models can generalize more robustly across our tests, including the non natural language split. Both architectures are only matched or surpassed by decoder only architectures at large scales. We conclude by noting that for cost effective, short horizon robust causal reasoning, encoder or encoder decoder architectures with targeted finetuning are preferable.

Paperid: 5559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09365.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting molecule-protein interactions (MPIs) is a fundamental task in computational biology, with crucial applications in drug discovery and molecular function annotation. However, existing MPI models face two major challenges. First, the scarcity of labeled molecule-protein pairs significantly limits model performance, as available datasets capture only a small fraction of biological relevant interactions. Second, most methods rely solely on molecular and protein features, ignoring broader biological context such as genes, metabolic pathways, and functional annotations that could provide essential complementary information. To address these limitations, our framework first aggregates diverse biological datasets, including molecular, protein, genes and pathway-level interactions, and then develop an optimal transport-based approach to generate high-quality pseudo-labels for unlabeled molecule-protein pairs, leveraging the underlying distribution of known interactions to guide label assignment. By treating pseudo-labeling as a mechanism for bridging disparate biological modalities, our approach enables the effective use of heterogeneous data to enhance MPI prediction. We evaluate our framework on multiple MPI datasets including virtual screening tasks and protein retrieval tasks, demonstrating substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracies and zero shot ability across unseen interactions. Beyond MPI prediction, our approach provides a new paradigm for leveraging diverse biological data sources to tackle problems traditionally constrained by single- or bi-modal learning, paving the way for future advances in computational biology and drug discovery.

Paperid: 5560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08125.pdf

Abstract:
Flow-based text-to-image (T2I) models excel at prompt-driven image generation, but falter on Image Restoration (IR), often "drifting away" from being faithful to the measurement. Prior work mitigate this drift with data-specific flows or task-specific adapters that are computationally heavy and not scalable across tasks. This raises the question "Can't we efficiently manipulate the existing generative capabilities of a flow model?" To this end, we introduce FlowSteer (FS), an operator-aware conditioning scheme that injects measurement priors along the sampling path,coupling a frozed flow's implicit guidance with explicit measurement constraints. Across super-resolution, deblurring, denoising, and colorization, FS improves measurement consistency and identity preservation in a strictly zero-shot setting-no retrained models, no adapters. We show how the nature of flow models and their sensitivities to noise inform the design of such a scheduler. FlowSteer, although simple, achieves a higher fidelity of reconstructed images, while leveraging the rich generative priors of flow models.

Paperid: 5561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07218.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, temporal reasoning, particularly under complex temporal constraints, remains a major challenge. To this end, existing approaches have explored symbolic methods, which encode temporal structure explicitly, and reflective mechanisms, which revise reasoning errors through multi-step inference. Nonetheless, symbolic approaches often underutilize the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, while reflective methods typically lack structured temporal representations, which can result in inconsistent or hallucinated reasoning. As a result, even when the correct temporal context is available, LLMs may still misinterpret or misapply time-related information, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Temporal Reasoning (NeSTR), a novel framework that integrates structured symbolic representations with hybrid reflective reasoning to enhance the temporal sensitivity of LLM inference. NeSTR preserves explicit temporal relations through symbolic encoding, enforces logical consistency via verification, and corrects flawed inferences using abductive reflection. Extensive experiments on diverse temporal question answering benchmarks demonstrate that NeSTR achieves superior zero-shot performance and consistently improves temporal reasoning without any fine-tuning, showcasing the advantage of neuro-symbolic integration in enhancing temporal understanding in large language models.

Paperid: 5562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05536.pdf

Abstract:
Constructing expressive and legible visualizations is a key activity for visualization designers. While numerous design guidelines exist, research on how specific graphical features affect perceived visual complexity remains limited. In this paper, we report on a crowdsourced study to collect human ratings of perceived complexity for diverse visualizations. Using these ratings as ground truth, we then evaluated three methods to estimate this perceived complexity: image analysis metrics, multilinear regression using manually coded visualization features, and automated feature extraction using a large language model (LLM). Image complexity metrics showed no correlation with human-perceived visualization complexity. Manual feature coding produced a reasonable predictive model but required substantial effort. In contrast, a zero-shot LLM (GPT-4o mini) demonstrated strong capabilities in both rating complexity and extracting relevant features. Our findings suggest that visualization complexity is truly in the eye of the beholder, yet can be effectively approximated using zero-shot LLM prompting, offering a scalable approach for evaluating the complexity of visualizations. The dataset and code for the study and data analysis can be found at https://osf.io/w85a4/

Paperid: 5563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03848.pdf

Abstract:
Cardiac image analysis remains fragmented across tasks: anatomical segmentation, disease classification, and grounded clinical report generation are typically handled by separate networks trained under different data regimes. No existing framework unifies these objectives within a single architecture while retaining generalization across imaging modalities and datasets. We introduce PULSE, a multi-task vision-language framework built on self-supervised representations and optimized through a composite supervision strategy that balances region overlap learning, pixel wise classification fidelity, and boundary aware IoU refinement. A multi-scale token reconstruction decoder enables anatomical segmentation, while shared global representations support disease classification and clinically grounded text output allowing the model to transition from pixels to structures and finally clinical reasoning within one architecture. Unlike prior task-specific pipelines, PULSE learns task-invariant cardiac priors, generalizes robustly across datasets, and can be adapted to new imaging modalities with minimal supervision. This moves the field closer to a scalable, foundation style cardiac analysis framework.

Paperid: 5564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03424.pdf

Abstract:
State Space Models (SSMs) demonstrate significant potential for long-sequence modeling, but their reliance on input order conflicts with the irregular nature of point clouds. Existing approaches often rely on predefined serialization strategies, which cannot adjust based on diverse geometric structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{DM3D}, a deformable Mamba architecture for point cloud understanding. Specifically, DM3D introduces an offset-guided Gaussian sequencing mechanism that unifies local resampling and global reordering within a deformable scan. The Gaussian-based KNN Resampling (GKR) enhances structural awareness by adaptively reorganizing neighboring points, while the Gaussian-based Differentiable Reordering (GDR) enables end-to-end optimization of serialization order. Furthermore, a Tri-Path Frequency Fusion module enhances feature complementarity and reduces aliasing. Together, these components enable structure-adaptive serialization of point clouds. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that DM3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in classification, few-shot learning, and part segmentation, demonstrating that adaptive serialization effectively unlocks the potential of SSMs for point cloud understanding.

Paperid: 5565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03219.pdf

Abstract:
Perch 2.0 is a supervised bioacoustics foundation model pretrained on 14,597 species, including birds, mammals, amphibians, and insects, and has state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Given that Perch 2.0 includes almost no marine mammal audio or classes in the training data, we evaluate Perch 2.0 performance on marine mammal and underwater audio tasks through few-shot transfer learning. We perform linear probing with the embeddings generated from this foundation model and compare performance to other pretrained bioacoustics models. In particular, we compare Perch 2.0 with previous multispecies whale, Perch 1.0, SurfPerch, AVES-bio, BirdAVES, and Birdnet V2.3 models, which have open-source tools for transfer-learning and agile modeling. We show that the embeddings from the Perch 2.0 model have consistently high performance for few-shot transfer learning, generally outperforming alternative embedding models on the majority of tasks, and thus is recommended when developing new linear classifiers for marine mammal classification with few labeled examples.

Paperid: 5566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01831.pdf

Abstract:
Generative diversity varies significantly across discrete latent generative models such as AR, MIM, and Diffusion. We propose a diagnostic framework, grounded in Information Bottleneck (IB) theory, to analyze the underlying strategies resolving this behavior. The framework models generation as a conflict between a 'Compression Pressure' - a drive to minimize overall codebook entropy - and a 'Diversity Pressure' - a drive to maximize conditional entropy given an input. We further decompose this diversity into two primary sources: 'Path Diversity', representing the choice of high-level generative strategies, and 'Execution Diversity', the randomness in executing a chosen strategy. To make this decomposition operational, we introduce three zero-shot, inference-time interventions that directly perturb the latent generative process and reveal how models allocate and express diversity. Application of this probe-based framework to representative AR, MIM, and Diffusion systems reveals three distinct strategies: "Diversity-Prioritized" (MIM), "Compression-Prioritized" (AR), and "Decoupled" (Diffusion). Our analysis provides a principled explanation for their behavioral differences and informs a novel inference-time diversity enhancement technique.

Paperid: 5567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01010.pdf

Abstract:
Agentic large language models are proposed as autonomous code generators for scientific computing, yet their reliability in high-stakes problems remains unclear. Developing computational scientific software from natural-language queries remains challenging broadly due to (a) sparse representation of domain codes during training and (b) the limited feasibility of RLHF with a small expert community. To address these limitations, this work conceptualizes an inverse approach to code design, embodied in the Chain of Unit-Physics framework: a first-principles (or primitives)-centric, multi-agent system in which human expert knowledge is encoded as unit-physics tests that explicitly constrain code generation. The framework is evaluated on a nontrivial combustion task, used here as a representative benchmark for scientific problem with realistic physical constraints. Closed-weight systems and code-focused agentic variants fail to produce correct end-to-end solvers, despite tool and web access, exhibiting four recurrent error classes: interface (syntax/API) hallucinations, overconfident assumptions, numerical/physical incoherence, and configuration fragility. Open-weight models with chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding reduce interface errors but still yield incorrect solutions. On the benchmark task, the proposed framework converges within 5-6 iterations, matches the human-expert implementation (mean error of $3.1\times10^{-3}$ %), with a $\sim$33.4 % faster runtime and a $\sim$30 % efficient memory usage at a cost comparable to mid-sized commercial APIs, yielding a practical template for physics-grounded scientific code generation. As datasets and models evolve, zero-shot code accuracy will improve; however, the Chain of Unit-Physics framework goes further by embedding first-principles analysis that is foundational to scientific codes.

Paperid: 5568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00887.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing image captioning has advanced rapidly through encoder--decoder models, although the reliance on large annotated datasets and the focus on English restricts global applicability. To address these limitations, we propose the first training-free multilingual approach, based on retrieval-augmented prompting. For a given aerial image, we employ a domain-adapted SigLIP2 encoder to retrieve related captions and few-shot examples from a datastore, which are then provided to a language model. We explore two variants: an image-blind setup, where a multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) generates the caption from textual prompts alone, and an image-aware setup, where a Vision--Language Model (VLM) jointly processes the prompt and the input image. To improve the coherence of the retrieved content, we introduce a graph-based re-ranking strategy using PageRank on a graph of images and captions. Experiments on four benchmark datasets across ten languages demonstrate that our approach is competitive with fully supervised English-only systems and generalizes to other languages. Results also highlight the importance of re-ranking with PageRank, yielding up to 35% improvements in performance metrics. Additionally, it was observed that while VLMs tend to generate visually grounded but lexically diverse captions, LLMs can achieve stronger BLEU and CIDEr scores. Lastly, directly generating captions in the target language consistently outperforms other translation-based strategies. Overall, our work delivers one of the first systematic evaluations of multilingual, training-free captioning for remote sensing imagery, advancing toward more inclusive and scalable multimodal Earth observation systems.

Paperid: 5569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00125.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning, particularly deep learning, is transforming industrial quality inspection. Yet, training robust machine learning models typically requires large volumes of high-quality labeled data, which are expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive to obtain in manufacturing. Moreover, defective samples are intrinsically rare, leading to severe class imbalance that degrades model performance. These data constraints hinder the widespread adoption of machine learning-based quality inspection methods in real production environments. Synthetic data generation (SDG) offers a promising solution by enabling the creation of large, balanced, and fully annotated datasets in an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable manner. This paper presents a hybrid SDG framework that integrates simulation-based rendering, domain randomization, and real background compositing to enable zero-shot learning for computer vision-based industrial part inspection without manual annotation. The SDG pipeline generates 12,960 labeled images in one hour by varying part geometry, lighting, and surface properties, and then compositing synthetic parts onto real image backgrounds. A two-stage architecture utilizing a YOLOv8n backbone for object detection and MobileNetV3-small for quality classification is trained exclusively on synthetic data and evaluated on 300 real industrial parts. The proposed approach achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.995 for detection, 96% classification accuracy, and 90.1% balanced accuracy. Comparative evaluation against few-shot real-data baseline approaches demonstrates significant improvement. The proposed SDG-based approach achieves 90-91% balanced accuracy under severe class imbalance, while the baselines reach only 50% accuracy. These results demonstrate that the proposed method enables annotation-free, scalable, and robust quality inspection for real-world manufacturing applications.

Paperid: 5570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00087.pdf

Abstract:
Observation of classroom interactions can provide concrete feedback to teachers, but current methods rely on manual annotation, which is resource-intensive and hard to scale. This work explores AI-driven analysis of classroom recordings, focusing on multimodal instructional activity and discourse recognition as a foundation for actionable feedback. Using a densely annotated dataset of 164 hours of video and 68 lesson transcripts, we design parallel, modality-specific pipelines. For video, we evaluate zero-shot multimodal LLMs, fine-tuned vision-language models, and self-supervised video transformers on 24 activity labels. For transcripts, we fine-tune a transformer-based classifier with contextualized inputs and compare it against prompting-based LLMs on 19 discourse labels. To handle class imbalance and multi-label complexity, we apply per-label thresholding, context windows, and imbalance-aware loss functions. The results show that fine-tuned models consistently outperform prompting-based approaches, achieving macro-F1 scores of 0.577 for video and 0.460 for transcripts. These results demonstrate the feasibility of automated classroom analysis and establish a foundation for scalable teacher feedback systems.

Paperid: 5571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20721.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) on large-scale datasets have become powerful general-purpose feature extractors. However, their immense size and computational cost make them prohibitive for deployment on edge devices such as robots and AR/VR headsets. Existing compression techniques like standard knowledge distillation create efficient 'specialist' models but sacrifice the crucial, downstream-agnostic generality that makes foundation models so valuable. In this paper, we introduce Foundation Model Distillation (FMD), a new paradigm for compressing large SSL models into compact, efficient, and faithful proxies that retain their general-purpose representational power. We present Foundry, the first implementation of FMD for 3D point clouds. Our approach, Foundry, trains a student to learn a compressed set of SuperTokens that reconstruct the teacher's token-level representations, capturing a compact basis of its latent space. A single distilled model maintains strong transferability across diverse downstream tasks-classification, part segmentation, and few-shot scenarios-approaching full foundation-model performance while using significantly fewer tokens and FLOPs, making such models more practical for deployment on resourceconstrained hardware.

Paperid: 5572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20677.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the task of cross-domain, context-dependent text-to-SQL has received significant attention. Enables users with no prior knowledge of SQL to have a conversation with databases using natural language. However, most of the available datasets and research have been conducted in English, along with some work in Chinese. To this date, no effort has been made to address this task in the Arabic language. In this paper, we introduce Ar-SParC, the first Arabic cross-domain, context-dependent text-to-SQL dataset. The dataset consists of 3,450 sequences of interrelated questions, each sequence containing an average of approximately three questions, which results in a total of 10225 questions along with their corresponding SQL queries. We conducted 40 experiments on the Ar-SParC dataset using two large language models, GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4.5-turbo, applying 10 different prompt engineering techniques, including four question representation methods and six in-context learning techniques. Furthermore, we developed a novel approach named GAT corrector, which enhanced the performance across all 40 experiments, yielding an average improvement of 1.9% in execution accuracy (EX) and 1.9% in interaction accuracy (IX) under zero-shot settings, and an average increase of 1.72% EX and 0.92% IX under in-context learning settings. Finally, we conducted an ablation study with two more experiments to explain why the GAT corrector outperformed the previous GAT verifier technique, particularly for the Arabic language.

Paperid: 5573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20669.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive datasets from the web, exhibit remarkable general reasoning skills. Despite this, they often struggle in specialized areas like law, mainly because they lack domain-specific pretraining. The legal field presents unique challenges, as legal documents are generally long and intricate, making it hard for models to process the full text efficiently. Previous studies have examined in-context approaches to address the knowledge gap, boosting model performance in new domains without full domain alignment. In our paper, we analyze model behavior on legal tasks by conducting experiments in three areas: (i) reorganizing documents based on rhetorical roles to assess how structured information affects long context processing and model decisions, (ii) defining rhetorical roles to familiarize the model with legal terminology, and (iii) emulating the step-by-step reasoning of courts regarding rhetorical roles to enhance model reasoning. These experiments are conducted in a zero-shot setting across three Indian legal judgment prediction datasets. Our results reveal that organizing data or explaining key legal terms significantly boosts model performance, with a minimum increase of ~1.5% and a maximum improvement of 4.36% in F1 score compared to the baseline.

Paperid: 5574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19875.pdf

Abstract:
Version control relies on commit messages to convey the rationale for code changes, but these messages are often low quality and, more critically, inconsistent with their diffs-known as message-code inconsistency (MCI). MCIs mislead reviewers, hinder maintenance, contaminate research datasets, and may obscure security patches. Yet, no dedicated benchmark exists to evaluate models for MCI detection. We introduce CODEFUSE-COMMITEVAL, the first benchmark designed for MCI detection using large language models (LLMs). Built on the ApacheCM dataset for diversity and quality, we generate seven types of inconsistent messages through rule-guided mutations of originally consistent commits and apply two-fold validation to verify both positive and negative samples. Using this labeled dataset of message-diff pairs, we evaluate six state-of-the-art open-source LLMs under a vanilla setting and with three augmentation strategies: few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought, and extended context. Results show models detect inconsistent commits more reliably than consistent ones (average Recall 85.95%, Precision 80.28%, Specificity 63.8%); gpt-oss-20B performs best overall but uses over twice the tokens of others. Augmentation effects vary: adjacent context helps larger models but adds noise for smaller ones; few-shot improves accuracy and reduces token use, yet increases universally incorrect predictions; chain-of-thought boosts precision and specificity at the cost of recall and higher token consumption. Type-wise analysis reveals higher detectability for component, file-path, and operation inconsistencies, but lower accuracy and higher token cost for intent-level "purpose" inconsistencies. CODEFUSE-COMMITEVAL provides a rigorous foundation for measuring, comparing, and advancing MCI detection, highlighting the need for richer context and balanced data to capture high-level semantic gaps.

Paperid: 5575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19235.pdf

Abstract:
Reconstructing dynamic driving scenes is essential for developing autonomous systems through sensor-realistic simulation. Although recent methods achieve high-fidelity reconstructions, they either rely on costly human annotations for object trajectories or use time-varying representations without explicit object-level decomposition, leading to intertwined static and dynamic elements that hinder scene separation. We present IDSplat, a self-supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting framework that reconstructs dynamic scenes with explicit instance decomposition and learnable motion trajectories, without requiring human annotations. Our key insight is to model dynamic objects as coherent instances undergoing rigid transformations, rather than unstructured time-varying primitives. For instance decomposition, we employ zero-shot, language-grounded video tracking anchored to 3D using lidar, and estimate consistent poses via feature correspondences. We introduce a coordinated-turn smoothing scheme to obtain temporally and physically consistent motion trajectories, mitigating pose misalignments and tracking failures, followed by joint optimization of object poses and Gaussian parameters. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our method achieves competitive reconstruction quality while maintaining instance-level decomposition and generalizes across diverse sequences and view densities without retraining, making it practical for large-scale autonomous driving applications. Code will be released.

Paperid: 5576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18978.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate annotation of cutaneous neoplasm biopsies represents a major challenge due to their wide morphological variability, overlapping histological patterns, and the subtle distinctions between benign and malignant lesions. Vision-language foundation models (VLMs), pre-trained on paired image-text corpora, learn joint representations that bridge visual features and diagnostic terminology, enabling zero-shot localization and classification of tissue regions without pixel-level labels. However, most existing VLM applications in histopathology remain limited to slide-level tasks or rely on coarse interactive prompts, and they struggle to produce fine-grained segmentations across gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs). In this work, we introduce a zero-shot visual-language segmentation pipeline for whole-slide images (ZEUS), a fully automated, zero-shot segmentation framework that leverages class-specific textual prompt ensembles and frozen VLM encoders to generate high-resolution tumor masks in WSIs. By partitioning each WSI into overlapping patches, extracting visual embeddings, and computing cosine similarities against text prompts, we generate a final segmentation mask. We demonstrate competitive performance on two in-house datasets, primary spindle cell neoplasms and cutaneous metastases, highlighting the influence of prompt design, domain shifts, and institutional variability in VLMs for histopathology. ZEUS markedly reduces annotation burden while offering scalable, explainable tumor delineation for downstream diagnostic workflows.

Paperid: 5577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18415.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) possess rich knowledge but often fail on hierarchical understanding tasks, where the goal is to predict a coarse-to-fine taxonomy path that remains consistent across all levels. We compare three inference paradigms for hierarchical VQA and find that stepwise reasoning, when conditioned on prior answers, significantly outperforms single-pass prompting. Further analysis indicates that the main limitation of current VLMs is their inability to maintain cross-level state, rather than a lack of taxonomic knowledge. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Self-Elicited Knowledge Distillation (SEKD), which requires no human labels or external tools: the same VLM is prompted to reason step by step and act as a teacher by exposing its hard labels, soft distributions, and decoder hidden states, while a single-pass student distills these signals. The student VLM remains efficient while approaching the accuracy of its multi-step teacher. It improves in-domain path consistency (HCA) by up to +29.50 percentage points, raises zero-shot HCA on an unseen taxonomy from 4.15% to 42.26%, and yields gains on challenging mathematical benchmarks. Because all supervision is self-elicited, SEKD scales to new taxonomies and datasets without annotation cost, providing a practical route to imbue compact VLMs with dependency-aware multi-step reasoning.

Paperid: 5578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14130.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), financial information retrieval has become a critical industrial application. Extracting task-relevant information from lengthy financial filings is essential for both operational and analytical decision-making. The FinAgentBench dataset formalizes this problem through two tasks: document ranking and chunk ranking. We present PRISM, a training-free framework that integrates refined system prompting, in-context learning (ICL), and a lightweight multi-agent system. Each component is examined extensively to reveal their synergies: prompt engineering provides precise task instructions, ICL supplies semantically relevant few-shot examples, and the multi-agent system models coordinated scoring behaviour. Our best configuration achieves an NDCG@5 of 0.71818 on the restricted validation split. We further demonstrate that PRISM is feasible and robust for production-scale financial retrieval. Its modular, inference-only design makes it practical for real-world use cases. The source code is released at https://bit.ly/prism-ailens.

Paperid: 5579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13907.pdf

Abstract:
SQL-to-Text generation aims at translating structured SQL queries into natural language descriptions, thereby facilitating comprehension of complex database operations for non-technical users. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated promising results, current methods often fail to maintain the exact semantics of SQL queries, particularly when there are multiple possible correct phrasings. To address this problem, our work proposes Weighted-AST retrieval with prompting, an architecture that integrates structural query representations and LLM prompting. This method retrieves semantically relevant examples as few-shot prompts using a similarity metric based on an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with learned feature weights. Our structure-aware prompting technique ensures that generated descriptions are both fluent and faithful to the original query logic. Numerous experiments on three benchmark datasets - Spider, SParC, and CoSQL show that our method outperforms the current baselines by up to +17.24% in execution Accuracy (EX), performs superior in Exact Match (EM) and provides more consistent semantic fidelity when evaluated by humans, all while preserving competitive runtime performance. These results demonstrate that Weighted-AST prompting is a scalable and effective method for deriving natural language explanations from structured database queries.

Paperid: 5580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13891.pdf

Abstract:
Among soil erosion problems, Ephemeral Gullies are one of the most concerning phenomena occurring in agricultural fields. Their short temporal cycles increase the difficulty in automatically detecting them using classical computer vision approaches and remote sensing. Also, due to scarcity of and the difficulty in producing accurate labeled data, automatic detection of ephemeral gullies using Machine Learning is limited to zero-shot approaches which are hard to implement. To overcome these challenges, we present the first weakly supervised pipeline for detection of ephemeral gullies. Our method relies on remote sensing and uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) to drastically reduce the labor-intensive task of manual labeling. In order to achieve that, the method exploits: 1) the knowledge embedded in the VLM's pretraining; 2) a teacher-student model where the teacher learns from noisy labels coming from the VLMs, and the student learns by weak supervision using teacher-generate labels and a noise-aware loss function. We also make available the first-of-its-kind dataset for semi-supervised detection of ephemeral gully from remote-sensed images. The dataset consists of a number of locations labeled by a group of soil and plant scientists, as well as a large number of unlabeled locations. The dataset represent more than 18,000 high-resolution remote-sensing images obtained over the course of 13 years. Our experimental results demonstrate the validity of our approach by showing superior performances compared to VLMs and the label model itself when using weak supervision to train an student model. The code and dataset for this work are made publicly available.

Paperid: 5581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11083.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination(ZSC) has become a hot topic in reinforcement learning research recently. It focuses on the generalization ability of agents, requiring them to coordinate well with collaborators that are not seen before without any fine-tuning. Population-based training has been proven to provide good zero-shot coordination performance; nevertheless, existing methods are limited by computational resources, mainly focusing on optimizing diversity in small populations while neglecting the potential performance gains from scaling population size. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Scalable Population Training (ScaPT), an efficient training framework comprising two key components: a meta-agent that efficiently realizes a population by selectively sharing parameters across agents, and a mutual information regularizer that guarantees population diversity. To empirically validate the effectiveness of ScaPT, this paper evaluates it along with representational frameworks in Hanabi and confirms its superiority.

Paperid: 5582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10983.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a training-free, binary verification workflow for zero-shot vision with off-the-shelf VLMs. It comprises two steps: (i) quantization, which turns the open-ended query into a multiple-choice question (MCQ) with a small, explicit list of unambiguous candidates; and (ii) binarization, which asks one True/False question per candidate and resolves deterministically: if exactly one is True, select it; otherwise, revert to an MCQ over the remaining plausible candidates. We evaluate the workflow on referring expression grounding (REC), spatial reasoning (Spatial-Map, Spatial-Grid, Spatial-Maze), and BLINK-Jigsaw. Relative to answering open-ended queries directly, quantization to MCQ yields large gains, and True/False binarization provides a consistent additional boost. Across all tasks, the same workflow produces significant improvements, indicating generality. Our theory formalizes how open-ended vision queries can be quantized to MCQs and further binarized into True/False verifications, establishing a hardness ladder. A simple analysis explains why Boolean resolution boosts accuracy. Together, these components yield a simple and unified workflow that emphasizes inference-time design over task-specific training. It offers a practical, drop-in path to stronger zero-shot vision with today's VLMs.

Paperid: 5583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05078.pdf

Abstract:
We address claim normalization for multilingual misinformation detection - transforming noisy social media posts into clear, verifiable statements across 20 languages. The key contribution demonstrates how systematic decomposition of posts using Who, What, Where, When, Why and How questions enables robust cross-lingual transfer despite training exclusively on English data. Our methodology incorporates finetuning Qwen3-14B using LoRA with the provided dataset after intra-post deduplication, token-level recall filtering for semantic alignment and retrieval-augmented few-shot learning with contextual examples during inference. Our system achieves METEOR scores ranging from 41.16 (English) to 15.21 (Marathi), securing third rank on the English leaderboard and fourth rank for Dutch and Punjabi. The approach shows 41.3% relative improvement in METEOR over baseline configurations and substantial gains over existing methods. Results demonstrate effective cross-lingual generalization for Romance and Germanic languages while maintaining semantic coherence across diverse linguistic structures.

Paperid: 5584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04678.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world objects frequently undergo state transformations. From an apple being cut into pieces to a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, tracking through these changes is important for understanding real-world objects and dynamics. However, existing methods often lose track of the target object after transformation, due to significant changes in object appearance. To address this limitation, we introduce the task of Track Any State: tracking objects through transformations while detecting and describing state changes, accompanied by a new benchmark dataset, VOST-TAS. To tackle this problem, we present TubeletGraph, a zero-shot system that recovers missing objects after transformation and maps out how object states are evolving over time. TubeletGraph first identifies potentially overlooked tracks, and determines whether they should be integrated based on semantic and proximity priors. Then, it reasons about the added tracks and generates a state graph describing each observed transformation. TubeletGraph achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance under transformations, while demonstrating deeper understanding of object transformations and promising capabilities in temporal grounding and semantic reasoning for complex object transformations. Code, additional results, and the benchmark dataset are available at https://tubelet-graph.github.io.

Paperid: 5585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04381.pdf

Abstract:
Efficiently leveraging simulation to acquire advanced manipulation skills is both challenging and highly significant. We introduce \textit{ForeRobo}, a generative robotic agent that utilizes generative simulations to autonomously acquire manipulation skills driven by envisioned goal states. Instead of directly learning low-level policies, we advocate integrating generative paradigms with classical control. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided \textit{propose-generate-learn-actuate} cycle. The agent first proposes the skills to be acquired and constructs the corresponding simulation environments; it then configures objects into appropriate arrangements to generate skill-consistent goal states (\textit{ForeGen}). Subsequently, the virtually infinite data produced by ForeGen are used to train the proposed state generation model (\textit{ForeFormer}), which establishes point-wise correspondences by predicting the 3D goal position of every point in the current state, based on the scene state and task instructions. Finally, classical control algorithms are employed to drive the robot in real-world environments to execute actions based on the envisioned goal states. Compared with end-to-end policy learning methods, ForeFormer offers superior interpretability and execution efficiency. We train and benchmark ForeFormer across a variety of rigid-body and articulated-object manipulation tasks, and observe an average improvement of 56.32\% over the state-of-the-art state generation models, demonstrating strong generality across different manipulation patterns. Moreover, in real-world evaluations involving more than 20 robotic tasks, ForeRobo achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities, attaining an average success rate of 79.28\%.

Paperid: 5586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02894.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread integration of wearable sensing devices in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, particularly in healthcare, smart homes, and industrial applications, has required robust human activity recognition (HAR) techniques to improve functionality and user experience. Although machine learning models have advanced HAR, they are increasingly susceptible to data poisoning attacks that compromise the data integrity and reliability of these systems. Conventional approaches to defending against such attacks often require extensive task-specific training with large, labeled datasets, which limits adaptability in dynamic IoT environments. This work proposes a novel framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to perform poisoning detection and sanitization in HAR systems, utilizing zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning paradigms. Our approach incorporates \textit{role play} prompting, whereby the LLM assumes the role of expert to contextualize and evaluate sensor anomalies, and \textit{think step-by-step} reasoning, guiding the LLM to infer poisoning indicators in the raw sensor data and plausible clean alternatives. These strategies minimize reliance on curation of extensive datasets and enable robust, adaptable defense mechanisms in real-time. We perform an extensive evaluation of the framework, quantifying detection accuracy, sanitization quality, latency, and communication cost, thus demonstrating the practicality and effectiveness of LLMs in improving the security and reliability of wearable IoT systems.

Paperid: 5587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23633.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained diffusion models have demonstrated strong capabilities in zero-shot inverse problem solving by incorporating observation information into the generation process of the diffusion models. However, this presents an inherent dilemma: excessive integration can disrupt the generative process, while insufficient integration fails to emphasize the constraints imposed by the inverse problem. To address this, we propose \emph{Noise Combination Sampling}, a novel method that synthesizes an optimal noise vector from a noise subspace to approximate the measurement score, replacing the noise term in the standard Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models process. This enables conditional information to be naturally embedded into the generation process without reliance on step-wise hyperparameter tuning. Our method can be applied to a wide range of inverse problem solvers, including image compression, and, particularly when the number of generation steps $T$ is small, achieves superior performance with negligible computational overhead, significantly improving robustness and stability.

Paperid: 5588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21879.pdf

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in image-text contrastive modeling, exemplified by models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP). In this paper, we propose the TernaryCLIP, a lightweight computational framework that converts connection weights of both vision and text encoders of CLIP into the ternary format, instead of full-precision or floating ones. TernaryCLIP incorporates quantization-aware training and distillation modules, preventing precision degradation and enabling low-cost and high-efficiency computations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TernaryCLIP can achieve up to 99\% ternarized weights with 1.58-bit representation, 16.98 $\times$ compression ratio, 2.3 $\times$ inference acceleration, 16 $\times$ storage reduction, 10 $\times$ memory optimization, and 60\% sparsity while maintaining promising performance on zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval tasks across 41 commonly used datasets. Our work highlights the feasibility of extreme quantization for large multimodal models, supporting effective and efficient deployment on resource-constrained devices. The model and code can be accessed from Hugging Face and GitHub.

Paperid: 5589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21808.pdf

Abstract:
The high cost of data annotation has spurred research on training deep learning models in data-limited scenarios. Existing paradigms, however, fail to balance cross-domain transfer and cross-category generalization, giving rise to the demand for Domain-Adaptive Zero-Shot Learning (DAZSL). Although vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have inherent advantages in the DAZSL field, current studies do not fully exploit their potential. Applying CLIP to DAZSL faces two core challenges: inefficient cross-category knowledge transfer due to the lack of semantic relation guidance, and degraded cross-modal alignment during target domain fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic Relation-Enhanced CLIP (SRE-CLIP) Adapter framework, integrating a Semantic Relation Structure Loss and a Cross-Modal Alignment Retention Strategy. As the first CLIP-based DAZSL method, SRE-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on the I2AwA and I2WebV benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches.

Paperid: 5590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21391.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing vision tasks require extensive labeled data across multiple, interconnected domains. However, current generative data augmentation frameworks are task-isolated, i.e., each vision task requires training an independent generative model, and ignores the modeling of geographical information and spatial constraints. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{TerraGen}, a unified layout-to-image generation framework that enables flexible, spatially controllable synthesis of remote sensing imagery for various high-level vision tasks, e.g., detection, segmentation, and extraction. Specifically, TerraGen introduces a geographic-spatial layout encoder that unifies bounding box and segmentation mask inputs, combined with a multi-scale injection scheme and mask-weighted loss to explicitly encode spatial constraints, from global structures to fine details. Also, we construct the first large-scale multi-task remote sensing layout generation dataset containing 45k images and establish a standardized evaluation protocol for this task. Experimental results show that our TerraGen can achieve the best generation image quality across diverse tasks. Additionally, TerraGen can be used as a universal data-augmentation generator, enhancing downstream task performance significantly and demonstrating robust cross-task generalisation in both full-data and few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 5591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19425.pdf

Abstract:
Learning to infer the conditional posterior model is a key step for robust meta-learning. This paper presents a new Bayesian meta-learning approach called Neural Variational Dropout Processes (NVDPs). NVDPs model the conditional posterior distribution based on a task-specific dropout; a low-rank product of Bernoulli experts meta-model is utilized for a memory-efficient mapping of dropout rates from a few observed contexts. It allows for a quick reconfiguration of a globally learned and shared neural network for new tasks in multi-task few-shot learning. In addition, NVDPs utilize a novel prior conditioned on the whole task data to optimize the conditional \textit{dropout} posterior in the amortized variational inference. Surprisingly, this enables the robust approximation of task-specific dropout rates that can deal with a wide range of functional ambiguities and uncertainties. We compared the proposed method with other meta-learning approaches in the few-shot learning tasks such as 1D stochastic regression, image inpainting, and classification. The results show the excellent performance of NVDPs.

Paperid: 5592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18117.pdf

Abstract:
As the field continues its push for ever more resources, this work turns the spotlight on a critical question: how can vision-language models (VLMs) be adapted to thrive in low-resource, budget-constrained settings? While large VLMs offer strong performance, they are impractical to deploy in such settings. Small VLMs, on the other hand, are efficient but typically require costly fine-tuning to close the performance gap with larger models in the deployment domain. Inspired by the in-context learning framework, we propose an online In-Context Distillation (ICD) method, in which a small VLM collaborates with a stronger teacher model at inference time, distilling its knowledge via sparse demonstrations to efficiently bridge the gap between them. Our method is built on an in-depth analysis that identifies the scale and the choice of models for which vision-language ICL is currently feasible, and demonstrates the advantage of ICL over fine-tuning under constrained compute budgets. We enhance our method with a novel cross-modal demonstration selection strategy, teacher test-time scaling to reduce noise, and student uncertainty conditioning to dynamically populate a demonstration pool and minimize teacher queries. Our ICD method significantly boosts the performance of small models (up to 33%) using scarce teacher annotations (as low as 4%), and competes with the teacher's zero-shot performance.

Paperid: 5593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17858.pdf

Abstract:
We present an ultra-efficient post-training method for shortcutting large-scale pre-trained flow matching diffusion models into efficient few-step samplers, enabled by novel velocity field self-distillation. While shortcutting in flow matching, originally introduced by shortcut models, offers flexible trajectory-skipping capabilities, it requires a specialized step-size embedding incompatible with existing models unless retraining from scratch$\unicode{x2013}$a process nearly as costly as pretraining itself. Our key contribution is thus imparting a more aggressive shortcut mechanism to standard flow matching models (e.g., Flux), leveraging a unique distillation principle that obviates the need for step-size embedding. Working on the velocity field rather than sample space and learning rapidly from self-guided distillation in an online manner, our approach trains efficiently, e.g., producing a 3-step Flux less than one A100 day. Beyond distillation, our method can be incorporated into the pretraining stage itself, yielding models that inherently learn efficient, few-step flows without compromising quality. This capability also enables, to our knowledge, the first few-shot distillation method (e.g., 10 text-image pairs) for dozen-billion-parameter diffusion models, delivering state-of-the-art performance at almost free cost.

Paperid: 5594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16885.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing to unseen graph tasks without task-specific supervision is challenging: conventional graph neural networks are typically tied to a fixed label space, while large language models (LLMs) struggle to capture graph structure. We introduce UniGTE, an instruction-tuned encoder-decoder framework that unifies structural and semantic reasoning. The encoder augments a pretrained autoregressive LLM with learnable alignment tokens and a structure-aware graph-text attention mechanism, enabling it to attend jointly to a tokenized graph and a natural-language task prompt while remaining permutation-invariant to node order. This yields compact, task-aware graph representations. Conditioned solely on these representations, a frozen LLM decoder predicts and reconstructs: it outputs the task answer and simultaneously paraphrases the input graph in natural language. The reconstruction objective regularizes the encoder to preserve structural cues. UniGTE is instruction-tuned on five datasets spanning node-level, edge-level, and graph-level tasks across diverse domains, yet requires no fine-tuning at inference. It achieves new state-of-the-art zero-shot results on node classification, link prediction, graph classification, and graph regression under cross-task and cross-domain settings, demonstrating that tight integration of graph structure with LLM semantics enables robust, transferable graph reasoning.

Paperid: 5595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14035.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce an action-centric graph representation framework for learning to guide planning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). Unlike existing approaches that require domain-specific neural architectures and struggle with scalability, GammaZero leverages a unified graph-based belief representation that enables generalization across problem sizes within a domain. Our key insight is that belief states can be systematically transformed into action-centric graphs where structural patterns learned on small problems transfer to larger instances. We employ a graph neural network with a decoder architecture to learn value functions and policies from expert demonstrations on computationally tractable problems, then apply these learned heuristics to guide Monte Carlo tree search on larger problems. Experimental results on standard POMDP benchmarks demonstrate that GammaZero achieves comparable performance to BetaZero when trained and tested on the same-sized problems, while uniquely enabling zero-shot generalization to problems 2-4 times larger than those seen during training, maintaining solution quality with reduced search requirements.

Paperid: 5596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12958.pdf

Abstract:
Astronomical time-series analysis faces a critical limitation: the scarcity of labeled observational data. We present a pre-training approach that leverages simulations, significantly reducing the need for labeled examples from real observations. Our models, trained on simulated data from multiple astronomical surveys (ZTF and LSST), learn generalizable representations that transfer effectively to downstream tasks. Using classifier-based architectures enhanced with contrastive and adversarial objectives, we create domain-agnostic models that demonstrate substantial performance improvements over baseline methods in classification, redshift estimation, and anomaly detection when fine-tuned with minimal real data. Remarkably, our models exhibit effective zero-shot transfer capabilities, achieving comparable performance on future telescope (LSST) simulations when trained solely on existing telescope (ZTF) data. Furthermore, they generalize to very different astronomical phenomena (namely variable stars from NASA's \textit{Kepler} telescope) despite being trained on transient events, demonstrating cross-domain capabilities. Our approach provides a practical solution for building general models when labeled data is scarce, but domain knowledge can be encoded in simulations.

Paperid: 5597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12400.pdf

Abstract:
Urban monitoring of public infrastructure (such as waste bins, road signs, vegetation, sidewalks, and construction sites) poses significant challenges due to the diversity of objects, environments, and contextual conditions involved. Current state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on a combination of IoT sensors and manual inspections, which are costly, difficult to scale, and often misaligned with citizens' perception formed through direct visual observation. This raises a critical question: Can machines now "see" like citizens and infer informed opinions about the condition of urban infrastructure? Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which integrate visual understanding with natural language reasoning, have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in processing complex visual information, turning them into a promising technology to address this challenge. This systematic review investigates the role of VLMs in urban monitoring, with particular emphasis on zero-shot applications. Following the PRISMA methodology, we analyzed 32 peer-reviewed studies published between 2021 and 2025 to address four core research questions: (1) What urban monitoring tasks have been effectively addressed using VLMs? (2) Which VLM architectures and frameworks are most commonly used and demonstrate superior performance? (3) What datasets and resources support this emerging field? (4) How are VLM-based applications evaluated, and what performance levels have been reported?

Paperid: 5598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11926.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor Wi-Fi positioning remains a challenging problem due to the high sensitivity of radio signals to environmental dynamics, channel propagation characteristics, and hardware heterogeneity. Conventional fingerprinting and model-based approaches typically require labor-intensive calibration and suffer rapid performance degradation when devices, channel or deployment conditions change. In this paper, we introduce Locaris, a decoder-only large language model (LLM) for indoor localization. Locaris treats each access point (AP) measurement as a token, enabling the ingestion of raw Wi-Fi telemetry without pre-processing. By fine-tuning its LLM on different Wi-Fi datasets, Locaris learns a lightweight and generalizable mapping from raw signals directly to device location. Our experimental study comparing Locaris with state-of-the-art methods consistently shows that Locaris matches or surpasses existing techniques for various types of telemetry. Our results demonstrate that compact LLMs can serve as calibration-free regression models for indoor localization, offering scalable and robust cross-environment performance in heterogeneous Wi-Fi deployments. Few-shot adaptation experiments, using only a handful of calibration points per device, further show that Locaris maintains high accuracy when applied to previously unseen devices and deployment scenarios. This yields sub-meter accuracy with just a few hundred samples, robust performance under missing APs and supports any and all available telemetry. Our findings highlight the practical viability of Locaris for indoor positioning in the real-world scenarios, particularly in large-scale deployments where extensive calibration is infeasible.

Paperid: 5599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10475.pdf

Abstract:
Medical order extraction is essential for structuring actionable clinical information, supporting decision-making, and enabling downstream applications such as documentation and workflow automation. Orders may be embedded in diverse sources, including electronic health records, discharge summaries, and multi-turn doctor-patient dialogues, and can span categories such as medications, laboratory tests, imaging studies, and follow-up actions. The MEDIQA-OE 2025 shared task focuses on extracting structured medical orders from extended conversational transcripts, requiring the identification of order type, description, reason, and provenance. We present the MasonNLP submission, which ranked 5th among 17 participating teams with 105 total submissions. Our approach uses a general-purpose, instruction-tuned LLaMA-4 17B model without domain-specific fine-tuning, guided by a single in-context example. This few-shot configuration achieved an average F1 score of 37.76, with notable improvements in reason and provenance accuracy. These results demonstrate that large, non-domain-specific LLMs, when paired with effective prompt engineering, can serve as strong, scalable baselines for specialized clinical NLP tasks.

Paperid: 5600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09519.pdf

Abstract:
Estimating model performance without labels is an important goal for understanding how NLP models generalize. While prior work has proposed measures based on dataset similarity or predicted correctness, it remains unclear when these estimates produce reliable performance rankings across domains. In this paper, we analyze the factors that affect ranking reliability using a two-step evaluation setup with four base classifiers and several large language models as error predictors. Experiments on the GeoOLID and Amazon Reviews datasets, spanning 15 domains, show that large language model-based error predictors produce stronger and more consistent rank correlations with true accuracy than drift-based or zero-shot baselines. Our analysis reveals two key findings: ranking is more reliable when performance differences across domains are larger, and when the error model's predictions align with the base model's true failure patterns. These results clarify when performance estimation methods can be trusted and provide guidance for their use in cross-domain model evaluation.

Paperid: 5601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07018.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot quantization aims to learn a quantized model from a pre-trained full-precision model with no access to original real training data. The common idea in zero-shot quantization approaches is to generate synthetic data for quantizing the full-precision model. While it is well-known that deep neural networks with low sharpness have better generalization ability, none of the previous zero-shot quantization works considers the sharpness of the quantized model as a criterion for generating training data. This paper introduces a novel methodology that takes into account quantized model sharpness in synthetic data generation to enhance generalization. Specifically, we first demonstrate that sharpness minimization can be attained by maximizing gradient matching between the reconstruction loss gradients computed on synthetic and real validation data, under certain assumptions. We then circumvent the problem of the gradient matching without real validation set by approximating it with the gradient matching between each generated sample and its neighbors. Experimental evaluations on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art techniques in low-bit quantization settings.

Paperid: 5602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06820.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal retrieval still leans on embedding-based models like CLIP for fast vector search over pre-computed image embeddings. Yet, unlike text retrieval, where joint-encoder rerankers are standard, comparable vision--language rerankers are largely absent. We find that seminal joint encoders such as BLIP are severely bottlenecked by an expensive visual feature-extraction stage, preventing practical deployment at scale. Motivated by this bottleneck, we introduce EDJE, an Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoder that precomputes vision tokens offline and compresses them via a lightweight attention-based adapter, so online inference runs only a compact joint encoder over a small set of visual tokens plus the text. EDJE preserves strong retrieval performance while drastically reducing storage and online compute, enabling high-throughput inference. Specifically, EDJE processes 50k image--text pairs/second while requiring 49kB of disk storage per image, matching prior art on Flickr (zero-shot) and COCO (fine-tuned) retrieval. The implementation and checkpoints will be made publicly available shortly.

Paperid: 5603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05121.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the extraction of structured knowledge in the form of Subject-Predicate-Object triples. We apply the setup for the domain of Economics application. The findings can be applied to a wide range of scenarios, including the creation of economic trade knowledge graphs from natural language legal trade agreement texts. As a use case, we apply the model to regional trade agreement texts to extract trade-related information triples. In particular, we explore the zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot prompting techniques, incorporating positive and negative examples, and evaluate their performance based on quantitative and qualitative metrics. Specifically, we used Llama 3.1 model to process the unstructured regional trade agreement texts and extract triples. We discuss key insights, challenges, and potential future directions, emphasizing the significance of language models in economic applications.

Paperid: 5604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02241.pdf

Abstract:
Promptagator demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot prompts can be used as task-specific query generators for fine-tuning domain-specialized dense retrieval models. However, the original Promptagator approach relied on proprietary and large-scale LLMs which users may not have access to or may be prohibited from using with sensitive data. In this work, we study the impact of open-source LLMs at accessible scales ($\leq$14B parameters) as an alternative. Our results demonstrate that open-source LLMs as small as 3B parameters can serve as effective Promptagator-style query generators. We hope our work will inform practitioners with reliable alternatives for synthetic data generation and give insights to maximize fine-tuning results for domain-specific applications.

Paperid: 5605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01860.pdf

Abstract:
Speech encodes paralinguistic information such as demographics, voice quality, and health. Yet no audio foundation model supports zero-shot or out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to these tasks. We introduce SLAP (Speaker contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining), the first model aligning speech with natural language descriptions of speaker and health metadata through contrastive learning. SLAP combines a Vision Transformer audio encoder with text encoders, trained on more than 3400 hours across 9 datasets with diverse speaker annotations. We evaluated on 38 binary classification tasks spanning demographics, voice characteristics, and clinical assessments across 14 datasets in 7 languages. SLAP achieves 62.9% average F1 in zero-shot evaluation, a 48% relative improvement over CLAP (42.4%), while demonstrating strong OOD generalization to unseen languages and clinical populations. When fine-tuned with linear probing, SLAP reaches 69.3% F1 overall and achieves best-in-class performance on health tasks (57.9% F1), surpassing larger foundation models.

Paperid: 5606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01612.pdf

Abstract:
The rapidly growth of biomedical literature creates challenges acquiring specific medical information. Current biomedical question-answering systems primarily focus on short-form answers, failing to provide comprehensive explanations necessary for clinical decision-making. We present RAG-BioQA, a retrieval-augmented generation framework for long-form biomedical question answering. Our system integrates BioBERT embeddings with FAISS indexing for retrieval and a LoRA fine-tuned FLAN-T5 model for answer generation. We train on 181k QA pairs from PubMedQA, MedDialog, and MedQuAD, and evaluate on a held-out PubMedQA test set. We compare four retrieval strategies: dense retrieval (FAISS), BM25, ColBERT, and MonoT5. Our results show that domain-adapted dense retrieval outperforms zero-shot neural re-rankers, with the best configuration achieving 0.24 BLEU-1 and 0.29 ROUGE-1. Fine-tuning improves BERTScore by 81\% over the base model. We release our framework to support reproducible biomedical QA research.

Paperid: 5607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01428.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and biomedical foundation models (BioFMs) have achieved strong results in biological text reasoning, molecular modeling, and single-cell analysis, yet they remain siloed in disjoint embedding spaces, limiting cross-modal reasoning. We present BIOVERSE (Biomedical Vector Embedding Realignment for Semantic Engagement), a two-stage approach that adapts pretrained BioFMs as modality encoders and aligns them with LLMs through lightweight, modality-specific projection layers. The approach first aligns each modality to a shared LLM space through independently trained projections, allowing them to interoperate naturally, and then applies standard instruction tuning with multi-modal data to bring them together for downstream reasoning. By unifying raw biomedical data with knowledge embedded in LLMs, the approach enables zero-shot annotation, cross-modal question answering, and interactive, explainable dialogue. Across tasks spanning cell-type annotation, molecular description, and protein function reasoning, compact BIOVERSE configurations surpass larger LLM baselines while enabling richer, generative outputs than existing BioFMs, establishing a foundation for principled multi-modal biomedical reasoning.

Paperid: 5608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01028.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have made revolutionary progress in generating human-like text, yet their outputs often tend to be generic, exhibiting insufficient structural diversity, which limits personalized expression. Recent advances in diffusion models have opened new opportunities for improving language generation beyond the limitations of autoregressive paradigms. In this work, we propose a syntax-guided diffusion language model that integrates structural supervision and personalized conditioning to enhance text quality, diversity, and controllability. We introduce a cascaded framework that generates syntactic guidance before conditional text generation, and further generalize it to a novel noncascaded architecture for better alignment between structure and content. By incorporating syntactic information in the generating process, the proposed model better captures the lexical and structural characteristics of stylistic sentence construction. To enable fine-grained personalization, we develop a shared representation mechanism that facilitates information integration across users, supporting both faithful stylistic generation and generalizable zero-shot inference. Extensive experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach in fluency, diversity, and stylistic fidelity. Further qualitative analyses highlight its interpretability and flexibility in learning personalized patterns.

Paperid: 5609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00482.pdf

Abstract:
Agentic large language models (LLMs) have become prominent for autonomously interacting with external environments and performing multi-step reasoning tasks. Most approaches leverage these capabilities via in-context learning with few-shot prompts, but this often results in lengthy inputs and higher computational costs. Agent fine-tuning offers an alternative by enabling LLMs to internalize procedural reasoning and domain-specific knowledge through training on relevant data and demonstration trajectories. While prior studies have focused on general domains, their effectiveness in specialized technical microdomains remains unclear. This paper explores agent fine-tuning for domain adaptation within Hitachi's JP1 middleware, a microdomain for specialized IT operations. We fine-tuned LLMs using JP1-specific datasets derived from domain manuals and distilled reasoning trajectories generated by LLMs themselves, enhancing decision making accuracy and search efficiency. During inference, we used an agentic prompt with retrieval-augmented generation and introduced a context-answer extractor to improve information relevance. On JP1 certification exam questions, our method achieved a 14% performance improvement over the base model, demonstrating the potential of agent fine-tuning for domain-specific reasoning in complex microdomains.

Paperid: 5610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23647.pdf

Abstract:
Robust 6D pose estimation of novel objects under challenging illumination remains a significant challenge, often requiring a trade-off between accurate initial pose estimation and efficient real-time tracking. We present a unified framework explicitly designed for efficient execution on edge devices, which synergizes a robust initial estimation module with a fast motion-based tracker. The key to our approach is a shared, lighting-invariant color-pair feature representation that forms a consistent foundation for both stages. For initial estimation, this feature facilitates robust registration between the live RGB-D view and the object's 3D mesh. For tracking, the same feature logic validates temporal correspondences, enabling a lightweight model to reliably regress the object's motion. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our integrated approach is both effective and robust, providing competitive pose estimation accuracy while maintaining high-fidelity tracking even through abrupt pose changes.

Paperid: 5611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22947.pdf

Abstract:
Does explicitly exercising the induction circuit during pretraining improve in-context learning (ICL), or is natural text sufficient when compute is held constant (iso-FLOPs)? To test whether targeted synthetic data can accelerate induction-head emergence and enhance ICL, we introduce Bi-Induct, a lightweight curriculum that injects forward-copy (Induction), backward-copy (Anti), or a balanced mix into the pretraining stream. We train models from 0.13B to 1B parameters under iso-FLOPs, evaluating (i) few-shot ICL benchmarks, (ii) head-level telemetry, and (iii) held-out language modeling perplexity. Our findings challenge the assumption that early induction circuit activation directly improves ICL. While Bi-Induct accelerates induction-head emergence at small scales, this does not consistently yield stronger generalization. On standard LM benchmarks, Bi-Induct matches natural-only training; on function-style ICL probes, the 1B natural-only performs best. Stress tests (e.g., label permutation, HITS@1 vs. HITS@3, 1 vs. 10 shots) preserve these trends. Telemetry shows larger natural-only models develop broader, earlier induction heads without explicit induction patterns. Anti-induction data fails to elicit meaningful activation. Perplexity penalties from synthetic data shrink with scale, suggesting larger models can absorb non-natural patterns with minimal cost. Crucially, ablating the top 2% of induction heads degrades ICL more than random ablations, especially for natural-only models, indicating more centralized, load-bearing circuits. Bi-Induct variants exhibit more redundant induction activity, implying different circuit utilization. Overall, inducing activation is not sufficient: ICL gains depend on these circuits becoming functionally necessary. These results underscore mechanism-aware pretraining diagnostics and data mixtures that foster load-bearing, not merely present, structure.

Paperid: 5612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21443.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual and multicultural environments where moral reasoning is essential for generating ethically appropriate responses. Yet, the dominant pretraining of LLMs on English-language data raises critical concerns about their ability to generalize judgments across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. In this work, we systematically investigate how language mediates moral decision-making in LLMs. We translate two established moral reasoning benchmarks into five culturally and typologically diverse languages, enabling multilingual zero-shot evaluation. Our analysis reveals significant inconsistencies in LLMs' moral judgments across languages, often reflecting cultural misalignment. Through a combination of carefully constructed research questions, we uncover the underlying drivers of these disparities, ranging from disagreements to reasoning strategies employed by LLMs. Finally, through a case study, we link the role of pretraining data in shaping an LLM's moral compass. Through this work, we distill our insights into a structured typology of moral reasoning errors that calls for more culturally-aware AI.

Paperid: 5613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19315.pdf

Abstract:
Pediatric arrhythmias are a major risk factor for disability and sudden cardiac death, yet their automated classification remains challenging due to class imbalance, few-shot categories, and complex signal characteristics, which severely limit the efficiency and reliability of early screening and clinical intervention. To address this problem, we propose a multimodal end-to-end deep learning framework that combines dual-branch convolutional encoders for ECG and IEGM, semantic attention for cross-modal feature alignment, and a lightweight Transformer encoder for global dependency modeling. In addition, we introduce a new contrastive loss fucntion named Adaptive Global Class-Aware Contrastive Loss (AGCACL) to enhance intra-class compactness and inter-class separability through class prototypes and a global similarity matrix. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study based on the Leipzig Heart Center pediatric/congenital ECG+IEGM dataset, for which we also provide a complete and reproducible preprocessing pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the overall best performance on this dataset, including 97.76\% Top-1 Accuracy, 94.08\% Macro Precision, 91.97\% Macro Recall, 92.97\% Macro F1, and 92.36\% Macro F2, with improvements of +13.64, +15.96, +19.82, and +19.44 percentage points over the strongest baseline in Macro Precision/Recall/F1/F2, respectively. These findings indicate that the framework significantly improves the detectability and robustness for minority arrhythmia classes, offering potential clinical value for rhythm screening, pre-procedural assessment, and postoperative follow-up in pediatric and congenital heart disease populations.

Paperid: 5614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19096.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic safety remains a critical global concern, with timely and accurate accident detection essential for hazard reduction and rapid emergency response. Infrastructure-based vision sensors offer scalable and efficient solutions for continuous real-time monitoring, facilitating automated detection of accidents directly from captured images. This research investigates the zero-shot capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for detecting and describing traffic accidents using images from infrastructure cameras, thus minimizing reliance on extensive labeled datasets. Main contributions include: (1) Evaluation of MLLMs using the simulated DeepAccident dataset from CARLA, explicitly addressing the scarcity of diverse, realistic, infrastructure-based accident data through controlled simulations; (2) Comparative performance analysis between Gemini 1.5 and 2.0, Gemma 3 and Pixtral models in accident identification and descriptive capabilities without prior fine-tuning; and (3) Integration of advanced visual analytics, specifically YOLO for object detection, Deep SORT for multi-object tracking, and Segment Anything (SAM) for instance segmentation, into enhanced prompts to improve model accuracy and explainability. Key numerical results show Pixtral as the top performer with an F1-score of 0.71 and 83% recall, while Gemini models gained precision with enhanced prompts (e.g., Gemini 1.5 rose to 90%) but suffered notable F1 and recall losses. Gemma 3 offered the most balanced performance with minimal metric fluctuation. These findings demonstrate the substantial potential of integrating MLLMs with advanced visual analytics techniques, enhancing their applicability in real-world automated traffic monitoring systems.

Paperid: 5615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18719.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach to e-commerce payment fraud detection by integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with Large Language Models (LLMs). By framing transaction risk as a multi-step Markov Decision Process (MDP), RL optimizes risk detection across multiple payment stages. Crafting effective reward functions, essential for RL model success, typically requires significant human expertise due to the complexity and variability in design. LLMs, with their advanced reasoning and coding capabilities, are well-suited to refine these functions, offering improvements over traditional methods. Our approach leverages LLMs to iteratively enhance reward functions, achieving better fraud detection accuracy and demonstrating zero-shot capability. Experiments with real-world data confirm the effectiveness, robustness, and resilience of our LLM-enhanced RL framework through long-term evaluations, underscoring the potential of LLMs in advancing industrial RL applications.

Paperid: 5616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17615.pdf

Abstract:
Visual anomaly detection is a strongly application-driven field of research. Consequently, the connection between academia and industry is of paramount importance. In this regard, we present the VAND 3.0 Challenge to showcase current progress in anomaly detection across different practical settings whilst addressing critical issues in the field. The challenge hosted two tracks, fostering the development of anomaly detection methods robust against real-world distribution shifts (Category 1) and exploring the capabilities of Vision Language Models within the few-shot regime (Category 2), respectively. The participants' solutions reached significant improvements over previous baselines by combining or adapting existing approaches and fusing them with novel pipelines. While for both tracks the progress in large pre-trained vision (language) backbones played a pivotal role for the performance increase, scaling up anomaly detection methods more efficiently needs to be addressed by future research to meet real-time and computational constraints on-site.

Paperid: 5617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16903.pdf

Abstract:
We present our submission to Task 3 (Discourse Relation Classification) of the DISRPT 2025 shared task. Task 3 introduces a unified set of 17 discourse relation labels across 39 corpora in 16 languages and six discourse frameworks, posing significant multilingual and cross-formalism challenges. We first benchmark the task by fine-tuning multilingual BERT-based models (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa-Base, and XLM-RoBERTa-Large) with two argument-ordering strategies and progressive unfreezing ratios to establish strong baselines. We then evaluate prompt-based large language models (namely Claude Opus 4.0) in zero-shot and few-shot settings to understand how LLMs respond to the newly proposed unified labels. Finally, we introduce HiDAC, a Hierarchical Dual-Adapter Contrastive learning model. Results show that while larger transformer models achieve higher accuracy, the improvements are modest, and that unfreezing the top 75% of encoder layers yields performance comparable to full fine-tuning while training far fewer parameters. Prompt-based models lag significantly behind fine-tuned transformers, and HiDAC achieves the highest overall accuracy (67.5%) while remaining more parameter-efficient than full fine-tuning.

Paperid: 5618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16521.pdf

Abstract:
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing technology holds significant value in human-centric applications, yet the high costs associated with data acquisition and annotation limit its widespread adoption in our daily lives. Concurrently, the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened up opportunities for addressing complex human needs. This paper presents mmExpert, an innovative mmWave understanding framework consisting of a data generation flywheel that leverages LLMs to automate the generation of synthetic mmWave radar datasets for specific application scenarios, thereby training models capable of zero-shot generalization in real-world environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the data synthesized by mmExpert significantly enhances the performance of downstream models and facilitates the successful deployment of large models for mmWave understanding.

Paperid: 5619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16273.pdf

Abstract:
Virtual screening (VS) aims to identify bioactive compounds from vast chemical libraries, but remains difficult in low-label regimes where only a few actives are known. Existing methods largely rely on general-purpose molecular fingerprints and overlook class-discriminative substructures critical to bioactivity. Moreover, they consider molecules independently, limiting effectiveness in low-label regimes. We introduce SubDyve, a network-based VS framework that constructs a subgraph-aware similarity network and propagates activity signals from a small known actives. When few active compounds are available, SubDyve performs iterative seed refinement, incrementally promoting new candidates based on local false discovery rate. This strategy expands the seed set with promising candidates while controlling false positives from topological bias and overexpansion. We evaluate SubDyve on ten DUD-E targets under zero-shot conditions and on the CDK7 target with a 10-million-compound ZINC dataset. SubDyve consistently outperforms existing fingerprint or embedding-based approaches, achieving margins of up to +34.0 on the BEDROC and +24.6 on the EF1% metric.

Paperid: 5620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14834.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has brought a new paradigm to automated essay scoring (AES), a long-standing and practical application of natural language processing in education. However, achieving human-level multi-perspective understanding and judgment remains a challenge. In this work, we propose Roundtable Essay Scoring (RES), a multi-agent evaluation framework designed to perform precise and human-aligned scoring under a zero-shot setting. RES constructs evaluator agents based on LLMs, each tailored to a specific prompt and topic context. Each agent independently generates a trait-based rubric and conducts a multi-perspective evaluation. Then, by simulating a roundtable-style discussion, RES consolidates individual evaluations through a dialectical reasoning process to produce a final holistic score that more closely aligns with human evaluation. By enabling collaboration and consensus among agents with diverse evaluation perspectives, RES outperforms prior zero-shot AES approaches. Experiments on the ASAP dataset using ChatGPT and Claude show that RES achieves up to a 34.86% improvement in average QWK over straightforward prompting (Vanilla) methods.

Paperid: 5621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13525.pdf

Abstract:
Three-dimensional (3D) scene understanding in colonoscopy presents significant challenges that necessitate automated methods for accurate depth estimation. However, existing depth estimation models for endoscopy struggle with temporal consistency across video sequences, limiting their applicability for 3D reconstruction. We present ColonCrafter, a diffusion-based depth estimation model that generates temporally consistent depth maps from monocular colonoscopy videos. Our approach learns robust geometric priors from synthetic colonoscopy sequences to generate temporally consistent depth maps. We also introduce a style transfer technique that preserves geometric structure while adapting real clinical videos to match our synthetic training domain. ColonCrafter achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the C3VD dataset, outperforming both general-purpose and endoscopy-specific approaches. Although full trajectory 3D reconstruction remains a challenge, we demonstrate clinically relevant applications of ColonCrafter, including 3D point cloud generation and surface coverage assessment.

Paperid: 5622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13332.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as automated judges in benchmarking and reward modeling, ensuring their reliability, efficiency, and robustness has become critical. In this work, we present a systematic comparison of "thinking" and "non-thinking" LLMs in the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm using open-source Qwen 3 models of relatively small sizes (0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B parameters). We evaluate both accuracy and computational efficiency (FLOPs) on RewardBench tasks, and further examine augmentation strategies for non-thinking models, including in-context learning, rubric-guided judging, reference-based evaluation, and n-best aggregation. Our results show that despite these enhancements, non-thinking models generally fall short of their thinking counterparts. Our results show that thinking models achieve approximately 10% points higher accuracy with little overhead (under 2x), in contrast to augmentation strategies like few-shot learning, which deliver modest gains at a higher cost (>8x). Bias and robustness analyses further demonstrate that thinking models maintain significantly greater consistency under a variety of bias conditions such as positional, bandwagon, identity, diversity, and random biases (6% higher on average). We further extend our experiments to the multilingual setting and our results confirm that explicit reasoning extends its benefits beyond English. Overall, our work results in several important findings that provide systematic evidence that explicit reasoning offers clear advantages in the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm not only in accuracy and efficiency but also in robustness.

Paperid: 5623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12866.pdf

Abstract:
It is well-established that more data generally improves AI model performance. However, data collection can be challenging for certain tasks due to the rarity of occurrences or high costs. These challenges are evident in our use case, where we apply AI models to a novel approach for visually documenting the musculoskeletal condition of dogs. Here, abnormalities are marked as colored strokes on a body map of a dog. Since these strokes correspond to distinct muscles or joints, they can be mapped to the textual domain in which large language models (LLMs) operate. LLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, including medical applications, offering promising potential for generating synthetic training data. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs can effectively generate synthetic visual training data for canine musculoskeletal diagnoses. For this, we developed a mapping that segments visual documentations into over 200 labeled regions representing muscles or joints. Using techniques like guided decoding, chain-of-thought reasoning, and few-shot prompting, we generated 1,000 synthetic visual documentations for patellar luxation (kneecap dislocation) diagnosis, the diagnosis for which we have the most real-world data. Our analysis shows that the generated documentations are sensitive to location and severity of the diagnosis while remaining independent of the dog's sex. We further generated 1,000 visual documentations for various other diagnoses to create a binary classification dataset. A model trained solely on this synthetic data achieved an F1 score of 88% on 70 real-world documentations. These results demonstrate the potential of LLM-generated synthetic data, which is particularly valuable for addressing data scarcity in rare diseases. While our methodology is tailored to the medical domain, the insights and techniques can be adapted to other fields.

Paperid: 5624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10572.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable data quality is crucial for downstream analysis of tabular datasets, yet rule-based validation often struggles with inefficiency, human intervention, and high computational costs. We present a three-stage framework that combines statistical inliner detection with LLM-driven rule and code generation. After filtering data samples through traditional clustering, we iteratively prompt LLMs to produce semantically valid quality rules and synthesize their executable validators through code-generating LLMs. To generate reliable quality rules, we aid LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by leveraging external knowledge sources and domain-specific few-shot examples. Robust guardrails ensure the accuracy and consistency of both rules and code snippets. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 5625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10010.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we provide an extensive analysis of multi-label intent classification using Large Language Models (LLMs) that are open-source, publicly available, and can be run in consumer hardware. We use the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, a benchmark in the dialogue system domain, to investigate the efficacy of three popular open-source pre-trained LLMs, namely LLama2-7B-hf, Mistral-7B-v0.1, and Yi-6B. We perform the classification task in a few-shot setup, giving 20 examples in the prompt with some instructions. Our approach focuses on the differences in performance of these models across several performance metrics by methodically assessing these models on multi-label intent classification tasks. Additionally, we compare the performance of the instruction-based fine-tuning approach with supervised learning using the smaller transformer model BertForSequenceClassification as a baseline. To evaluate the performance of the models, we use evaluation metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall as well as micro, macro, and weighted F1 score. We also report the inference time, VRAM requirements, etc. The Mistral-7B-v0.1 outperforms two other generative models on 11 intent classes out of 14 in terms of F-Score, with a weighted average of 0.50. It also has relatively lower Humming Loss and higher Jaccard Similarity, making it the winning model in the few-shot setting. We find BERT based supervised classifier having superior performance compared to the best performing few-shot generative LLM. The study provides a framework for small open-source LLMs in detecting complex multi-intent dialogues, enhancing the Natural Language Understanding aspect of task-oriented chatbots.

Paperid: 5626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09958.pdf

Abstract:
Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-clean generic detector (YOLO-World), a general-purpose VLM independently answers True/False queries for each region. This simple procedure reduces cross-box interference, supports abstention and multiple matches, and requires no fine-tuning. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, our method not only surpasses a zero-shot GroundingDINO baseline but also exceeds reported results for GroundingDINO trained on REC and GroundingDINO+CRG. Controlled studies with identical proposals confirm that verification significantly outperforms selection-based prompting, and results hold with open VLMs. Overall, we show that workflow design, rather than task-specific pretraining, drives strong zero-shot REC performance.

Paperid: 5627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09710.pdf

Abstract:
This study introduces a Large Language Model (LLM) scheme for generating individual travel diaries in agent-based transportation models. While traditional approaches rely on large quantities of proprietary household travel surveys, the method presented in this study generates personas stochastically from open-source American Community Survey (ACS) and Smart Location Database (SLD) data, then synthesizes diaries through direct prompting. This study features a novel one-to-cohort realism score: a composite of four metrics (Trip Count Score, Interval Score, Purpose Score, and Mode Score) validated against the Connecticut Statewide Transportation Study (CSTS) diaries, matched across demographic variables. The validation utilizes Jensen-Shannon Divergence to measure distributional similarities between generated and real diaries. When compared to diaries generated with classical methods (Negative Binomial for trip generation; Multinomial Logit for mode/purpose) calibrated on the validation set, LLM-generated diaries achieve comparable overall realism (LLM mean: 0.485 vs. 0.455). The LLM excels in determining trip purpose and demonstrates greater consistency (narrower realism score distribution), while classical models lead in numerical estimates of trip count and activity duration. Aggregate validation confirms the LLM's statistical representativeness (LLM mean: 0.612 vs. 0.435), demonstrating LLM's zero-shot viability and establishing a quantifiable metric of diary realism for future synthetic diary evaluation systems.

Paperid: 5628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08580.pdf

Abstract:
The objective of this paper is to significantly reduce the manual workload required from medical professionals in complex 3D segmentation tasks that cannot be yet fully automated. For instance, in radiotherapy planning, organs at risk must be accurately identified in computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to ensure they are spared from harmful radiation. Similarly, diagnosing age-related degenerative diseases such as sarcopenia, which involve progressive muscle volume loss and strength, is commonly based on muscular mass measurements often obtained from manual segmentation of medical volumes. To alleviate the manual-segmentation burden, this paper introduces an implicit shape prior to segment volumes from sparse slice manual annotations generalized to the multi-organ case, along with a simple framework for automatically selecting the most informative slices to guide and minimize the next interactions. The experimental validation shows the method's effectiveness on two medical use cases: assisted segmentation in the context of at risks organs for brain cancer patients, and acceleration of the creation of a new database with unseen muscle shapes for patients with sarcopenia.

Paperid: 5629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07622.pdf

Abstract:
Efficient communication between patients and clinicians plays an important role in shared decision-making. However, clinical reports are often lengthy and filled with clinical jargon, making it difficult for domain experts to identify important aspects in the document efficiently. This paper presents the methodology we applied in the MultiClinSUM shared task for summarising clinical case documents. We used an Iterative Self-Prompting technique on large language models (LLMs) by asking LLMs to generate task-specific prompts and refine them via example-based few-shot learning. Furthermore, we used lexical and embedding space metrics, ROUGE and BERT-score, to guide the model fine-tuning with epochs. Our submission using perspective-aware ISP on GPT-4 and GPT-4o achieved ROUGE scores (46.53, 24.68, 30.77) and BERTscores (87.84, 83.25, 85.46) for (P, R, F1) from the official evaluation on 3,396 clinical case reports from various specialties extracted from open journals. The high BERTscore indicates that the model produced semantically equivalent output summaries compared to the references, even though the overlap at the exact lexicon level is lower, as reflected in the lower ROUGE scores. This work sheds some light on how perspective-aware ISP (PA-ISP) can be deployed for clinical report summarisation and support better communication between patients and clinicians.

Paperid: 5630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04519.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting structured clinical information from radiology reports is challenging, especially in low-resource languages. This is pronounced in Crohn's disease, with sparsely represented multi-organ findings. We developed Hierarchical Structured Matching Prediction BERT (HSMP-BERT), a prompt-based model for extraction from Hebrew radiology text. In an administrative database study, we analyzed 9,683 reports from Crohn's patients imaged 2010-2023 across Israeli providers. A subset of 512 reports was radiologist-annotated for findings across six gastrointestinal organs and 15 pathologies, yielding 90 structured labels per subject. Multilabel-stratified split (66% train+validation; 33% test), preserving label prevalence. Performance was evaluated with accuracy, F1, Cohen's $Îº$, AUC, PPV, NPV, and recall. On 24 organ-finding combinations with $>$15 positives, HSMP-BERT achieved mean F1 0.83$\pm$0.08 and $Îº$ 0.65$\pm$0.17, outperforming the SMP zero-shot baseline (F1 0.49$\pm$0.07, $Îº$ 0.06$\pm$0.07) and standard fine-tuning (F1 0.30$\pm$0.27, $Îº$ 0.27$\pm$0.34; paired t-test $p < 10^{-7}$). Hierarchical inference cuts runtime 5.1$\times$ vs. traditional inference. Applied to all reports, it revealed associations among ileal wall thickening, stenosis, and pre-stenotic dilatation, plus age- and sex-specific trends in inflammatory findings. HSMP-BERT offers a scalable solution for structured extraction in radiology, enabling population-level analysis of Crohn's disease and demonstrating AI's potential in low-resource settings.

Paperid: 5631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03913.pdf

Abstract:
Speech super-resolution (SR) reconstructs high-frequency content from low-resolution speech signals. Existing systems often suffer from representation mismatch in two-stage mel-vocoder pipelines and from over-smoothing of hallucinated high-band content by CNN-only generators. Diffusion and flow models are computationally expensive, and their robustness across domains and sampling rates remains limited. We propose SwinSRGAN, an end-to-end framework operating on Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) magnitudes. It is a Swin Transformer-based U-Net that captures long-range spectro-temporal dependencies with a hybrid adversarial scheme combines time-domain MPD/MSD discriminators with a multi-band MDCT discriminator specialized for the high-frequency band. We employs a sparse-aware regularizer on arcsinh-compressed MDCT to better preserve transient components. The system upsamples inputs at various sampling rates to 48 kHz in a single pass and operates in real time. On standard benchmarks, SwinSRGAN reduces objective error and improves ABX preference scores. In zero-shot tests on HiFi-TTS without fine-tuning, it outperforms NVSR and mdctGAN, demonstrating strong generalization across datasets

Paperid: 5632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03636.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning requires adaptation to novel problem settings under limited data and distribution shift. This work introduces CausalARC: an experimental testbed for AI reasoning in low-data and out-of-distribution regimes, modeled after the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). Each CausalARC reasoning task is sampled from a fully specified causal world model, formally expressed as a structural causal model. Principled data augmentations provide observational, interventional, and counterfactual feedback about the world model in the form of few-shot, in-context learning demonstrations. As a proof-of-concept, we illustrate the use of CausalARC for four language model evaluation settings: (1) abstract reasoning with test-time training, (2) counterfactual reasoning with in-context learning, (3) program synthesis, and (4) causal discovery with logical reasoning.

Paperid: 5633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03191.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel application of the Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network (TabPFN) - a transformer-based foundation model for tabular data - to geotechnical site characterization problems defined in the GEOAI benchmark BM/AirportSoilProperties/2/2025. Two tasks are addressed: (1) predicting the spatial variation of undrained shear strength (su) across borehole depth profiles, and (2) imputing missing mechanical parameters in a dense-site dataset. We apply TabPFN in a zero-training, few-shot, in-context learning setting - without hyper-parameter tuning - and provide it with additional context from the big indirect database (BID). The study demonstrates that TabPFN, as a general-purpose foundation model, achieved superior accuracy and well-calibrated predictive distributions compared to a conventional hierarchical Bayesian model (HBM) baseline, while also offering significant gains in inference efficiency. In Benchmark Problem #1 (spatial su prediction), TabPFN outperformed the HBM in prediction accuracy and delivered an order-of-magnitude faster runtime. In Benchmark Problem #2 (missing mechanical parameter imputation), TabPFN likewise achieved lower RMSE for all target parameters with well-quantified uncertainties, though its cumulative computation cost was higher than HBM's due to its one-variable-at-a-time inference. These results mark the first successful use of a tabular foundation model in geotechnical modeling, suggesting a potential paradigm shift in probabilistic site characterization.

Paperid: 5634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03093.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional static analysis methods struggle to detect semantic design flaws, such as violations of the SOLID principles, which require a strong understanding of object-oriented design patterns and principles. Existing solutions typically focus on individual SOLID principles or specific programming languages, leaving a gap in the ability to detect violations across all five principles in multi-language codebases. This paper presents a new approach: a methodology that leverages tailored prompt engineering to assess LLMs on their ability to detect SOLID violations across multiple languages. We present a benchmark of four leading LLMs-CodeLlama, DeepSeekCoder, QwenCoder, and GPT-4o Mini-on their ability to detect violations of all five SOLID principles. For this evaluation, we construct a new benchmark dataset of 240 manually validated code examples. Using this dataset, we test four distinct prompt strategies inspired by established zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought techniques to systematically measure their impact on detection accuracy. Our emerging results reveal a stark hierarchy among models, with GPT-4o Mini decisively outperforming others, yet even struggles with challenging principles like DIP. Crucially, we show that prompt strategy has a dramatic impact, but no single strategy is universally best; for instance, a deliberative ENSEMBLE prompt excels at OCP detection while a hint-based EXAMPLE prompt is superior for DIP violations. Across all experiments, detection accuracy is heavily influenced by language characteristics and degrades sharply with increasing code complexity. These initial findings demonstrate that effective, AI-driven design analysis requires not a single best model, but a tailored approach that matches the right model and prompt to the specific design context, highlighting the potential of LLMs to support maintainability through AI-assisted code analysis.

Paperid: 5635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00362.pdf

Abstract:
Stable and efficient training of ReLU networks with large depth is highly sensitive to weight initialization. Improper initialization can cause permanent neuron inactivation dying ReLU and exacerbate gradient instability as network depth increases. Methods such as He, Xavier, and orthogonal initialization preserve variance or promote approximate isometry. However, they do not necessarily regulate the pre-activation mean or control activation sparsity, and their effectiveness often diminishes in very deep architectures. This work introduces an orthogonal initialization specifically optimized for ReLU by solving an optimization problem on the Stiefel manifold, thereby preserving scale and calibrating the pre-activation statistics from the outset. A family of closed-form solutions and an efficient sampling scheme are derived. Theoretical analysis at initialization shows that prevention of the dying ReLU problem, slower decay of activation variance, and mitigation of gradient vanishing, which together stabilize signal and gradient flow in deep architectures. Empirically, across MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, multiple tabular datasets, few-shot settings, and ReLU-family activations, our method outperforms previous initializations and enables stable training in deep networks.

Paperid: 5636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21800.pdf

Abstract:
Planning with pretrained diffusion models has emerged as a promising approach for solving test-time guided control problems. However, standard gradient guidance typically performs optimally under convex and differentiable reward landscapes, showing substantially reduced effectiveness in real-world scenarios involving non-convex objectives, non-differentiable constraints, and multi-reward structures. Furthermore, recent supervised planning approaches require task-specific training or value estimators, which limits test-time flexibility and zero-shot generalization. We propose a Tree-guided Diffusion Planner (TDP), a zero-shot test-time planning framework that balances exploration and exploitation through structured trajectory generation. We frame test-time planning as a tree search problem using a bi-level sampling process: (1) diverse parent trajectories are produced via training-free particle guidance to encourage broad exploration, and (2) sub-trajectories are refined through fast conditional denoising guided by task objectives. TDP addresses the limitations of gradient guidance by exploring diverse trajectory regions and harnessing gradient information across this expanded solution space using only pretrained models and test-time reward signals. We evaluate TDP on three diverse tasks: maze gold-picking, robot arm block manipulation, and AntMaze multi-goal exploration. TDP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on all tasks. The project page can be found at: tree-diffusion-planner.github.io.

Paperid: 5637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20760.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP enable zero-shot classification by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space, offering advantages for defense applications with scarce labeled data. However, CLIP's robustness in challenging military environments, with partial occlusion and degraded signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), remains underexplored. We investigate CLIP variants' robustness to occlusion using a custom dataset of 18 military vehicle classes and evaluate using Normalized Area Under the Curve (NAUC) across occlusion percentages. Four key insights emerge: (1) Transformer-based CLIP models consistently outperform CNNs, (2) fine-grained, dispersed occlusions degrade performance more than larger contiguous occlusions, (3) despite improved accuracy, performance of linear-probed models sharply drops at around 35% occlusion, (4) by finetuning the model's backbone, this performance drop occurs at more than 60% occlusion. These results underscore the importance of occlusion-specific augmentations during training and the need for further exploration into patch-level sensitivity and architectural resilience for real-world deployment of CLIP.

Paperid: 5638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20243.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid and reliable qualification of advanced materials remains a bottleneck in industrial manufacturing, particularly for heterogeneous structures produced via non-conventional additive manufacturing processes. This study introduces a novel framework that links microstructure informatics with a range of expert characterization knowledge using customized and hybrid vision-language representations (VLRs). By integrating deep semantic segmentation with pre-trained multi-modal models (CLIP and FLAVA), we encode both visual microstructural data and textual expert assessments into shared representations. To overcome limitations in general-purpose embeddings, we develop a customized similarity-based representation that incorporates both positive and negative references from expert-annotated images and their associated textual descriptions. This allows zero-shot classification of previously unseen microstructures through a net similarity scoring approach. Validation on an additively manufactured metal matrix composite dataset demonstrates the framework's ability to distinguish between acceptable and defective samples across a range of characterization criteria. Comparative analysis reveals that FLAVA model offers higher visual sensitivity, while the CLIP model provides consistent alignment with the textual criteria. Z-score normalization adjusts raw unimodal and cross-modal similarity scores based on their local dataset-driven distributions, enabling more effective alignment and classification in the hybrid vision-language framework. The proposed method enhances traceability and interpretability in qualification pipelines by enabling human-in-the-loop decision-making without task-specific model retraining. By advancing semantic interoperability between raw data and expert knowledge, this work contributes toward scalable and domain-adaptable qualification strategies in engineering informatics.

Paperid: 5639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17636.pdf

Abstract:
We address the problem of few-shot pattern detection, which aims to detect all instances of a given pattern, typically represented by a few exemplars, from an input image. Although similar problems have been studied in few-shot object counting and detection (FSCD), previous methods and their benchmarks have narrowed patterns of interest to object categories and often fail to localize non-object patterns. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective detector based on template matching and regression, dubbed TMR. While previous FSCD methods typically represent target exemplars as spatially collapsed prototypes and lose structural information, we revisit classic template matching and regression. It effectively preserves and leverages the spatial layout of exemplars through a minimalistic structure with a small number of learnable convolutional or projection layers on top of a frozen backbone We also introduce a new dataset, dubbed RPINE, which covers a wider range of patterns than existing object-centric datasets. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the three benchmarks, RPINE, FSCD-147, and FSCD-LVIS, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-dataset evaluation.

Paperid: 5640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17387.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing to unseen graph tasks without task-pecific supervision remains challenging. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited by fixed label spaces, while Large Language Models (LLMs) lack structural inductive biases. Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) provide a zero-shot alternative via explicit, long chain-of-thought reasoning. Inspired by this, we propose a GNN-free approach that reformulates graph tasks--node classification, link prediction, and graph classification--as textual reasoning problems solved by LRMs. We introduce the first datasets with detailed reasoning traces for these tasks and develop Graph-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that leverages task-specific rethink templates to guide reasoning over linearized graphs. Experiments demonstrate that Graph-R1 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in zero-shot settings, producing interpretable and effective predictions. Our work highlights the promise of explicit reasoning for graph learning and provides new resources for future research.

Paperid: 5641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15316.pdf

Abstract:
Universal phoneme recognition typically requires analyzing long speech segments and language-specific patterns. Many speech processing tasks require pure phoneme representations free from contextual influence, which motivated our development of CUPE - a lightweight model that captures key phoneme features in just 120 milliseconds, about one phoneme's length. CUPE processes short, fixed-width windows independently and, despite fewer parameters than current approaches, achieves competitive cross-lingual performance by learning fundamental acoustic patterns common to all languages. Our extensive evaluation through supervised and self-supervised training on diverse languages, including zero-shot tests on the UCLA Phonetic Corpus, demonstrates strong cross-lingual generalization and reveals that effective universal speech processing is possible through modeling basic acoustic patterns within phoneme-length windows.

Paperid: 5642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14925.pdf

Abstract:
By providing a standardized interface for LLM agents to interact with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the modern autonomous agent ecosystem. However, it creates novel attack surfaces due to untrusted external tools. While prior work has focused on attacks injected through external tool outputs, we investigate a more fundamental vulnerability: Tool Poisoning, where malicious instructions are embedded within a tool's metadata without execution. To date, this threat has been primarily demonstrated through isolated cases, lacking a systematic, large-scale evaluation. We introduce MCPTox, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate agent robustness against Tool Poisoning in realistic MCP settings. MCPTox is constructed upon 45 live, real-world MCP servers and 353 authentic tools. To achieve this, we design three distinct attack templates to generate a comprehensive suite of 1312 malicious test cases by few-shot learning, covering 10 categories of potential risks. Our evaluation on 20 prominent LLM agents setting reveals a widespread vulnerability to Tool Poisoning, with o1-mini, achieving an attack success rate of 72.8\%. We find that more capable models are often more susceptible, as the attack exploits their superior instruction-following abilities. Finally, the failure case analysis reveals that agents rarely refuse these attacks, with the highest refused rate (Claude-3.7-Sonnet) less than 3\%, demonstrating that existing safety alignment is ineffective against malicious actions that use legitimate tools for unauthorized operation. Our findings create a crucial empirical baseline for understanding and mitigating this widespread threat, and we release MCPTox for the development of verifiably safer AI agents. Our dataset is available at an anonymized repository: \textit{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AAAI26-7C02}.

Paperid: 5643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12861.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on natural image and language data, such as CLIP, have exhibited significant potential in few-shot image recognition tasks, leading to development of various efficient transfer learning methods. These methods exploit inherent pre-learned knowledge in VLMs and have achieved strong performance on standard image datasets. However, their effectiveness is often limited when confronted with cross-domain tasks where imaging domains differ from natural images. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency-guided Multi-view Collaborative Optimization (CoMuCo), a novel fine-tuning strategy for VLMs. This strategy employs two functionally complementary expert modules to extract multi-view features, while incorporating prior knowledge-based consistency constraints and information geometry-based consensus mechanisms to enhance the robustness of feature learning. Additionally, a new cross-domain few-shot benchmark is established to help comprehensively evaluate methods on imaging domains distinct from natural images. Extensive empirical evaluations on both existing and newly proposed benchmarks suggest CoMuCo consistently outperforms current methods in few-shot tasks. The code and benchmark will be released.

Paperid: 5644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11258.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) enable a simple zero-shot or few-shot prompting paradigm, also known as in-context learning, for building prediction models. This convenience, combined with continued advances in LLM capability, has the potential to drive their adoption across a broad range of domains, including high-stakes applications where group fairness -- preventing disparate impacts across demographic groups -- is essential. The majority of existing approaches to enforcing group fairness on LLM-based classifiers rely on traditional fair algorithms applied via model fine-tuning or head-tuning on final-layer embeddings, but they are no longer applicable to closed-weight LLMs under the in-context learning setting, which include some of the most capable commercial models today, such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude. In this paper, we propose a framework for deriving fair classifiers from closed-weight LLMs via prompting: the LLM is treated as a feature extractor, and features are elicited from its probabilistic predictions (e.g., token log probabilities) using prompts strategically designed for the specified fairness criterion to obtain sufficient statistics for fair classification; a fair algorithm is then applied to these features to train a lightweight fair classifier in a post-hoc manner. Experiments on five datasets, including three tabular ones, demonstrate strong accuracy-fairness tradeoffs for the classifiers derived by our framework from both open-weight and closed-weight LLMs; in particular, our framework is data-efficient and outperforms fair classifiers trained on LLM embeddings (i.e., head-tuning) or from scratch on raw tabular features.

Paperid: 5645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10039.pdf

Abstract:
Current multi-task adversarial text attacks rely on abundant access to shared internal features and numerous queries, often limited to a single task type. As a result, these attacks are less effective against practical scenarios involving black-box feedback APIs, limited queries, or multiple task types. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{C}luster and \textbf{E}nsemble \textbf{M}ulti-task Text Adversarial \textbf{A}ttack (\textbf{CEMA}), an effective black-box attack that exploits the transferability of adversarial texts across different tasks. CEMA simplifies complex multi-task scenarios by using a \textit{deep-level substitute model} trained in a \textit{plug-and-play} manner for text classification, enabling attacks without mimicking the victim model. This approach requires only a few queries for training, converting multi-task attacks into classification attacks and allowing attacks across various tasks. CEMA generates multiple adversarial candidates using different text classification methods and selects the one that most effectively attacks substitute models. In experiments involving multi-task models with two, three, or six tasks--spanning classification, translation, summarization, and text-to-image generation--CEMA demonstrates significant attack success with as few as 100 queries. Furthermore, CEMA can target commercial APIs (e.g., Baidu and Google Translate), large language models (e.g., ChatGPT 4o), and image-generation models (e.g., Stable Diffusion V2), showcasing its versatility and effectiveness in real-world applications.

Paperid: 5646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09797.pdf

Abstract:
Agile flight for the quadrotor cable-suspended payload system is a formidable challenge due to its underactuated, highly nonlinear, and hybrid dynamics. Traditional optimization-based methods often struggle with high computational costs and the complexities of cable mode transitions, limiting their real-time applicability and maneuverability exploitation. In this letter, we present FLARE, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that directly learns agile navigation policy from high-fidelity simulation. Our method is validated across three designed challenging scenarios, notably outperforming a state-of-the-art optimization-based approach by a 3x speedup during gate traversal maneuvers. Furthermore, the learned policies achieve successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, demonstrating remarkable agility and safety in real-world experiments, running in real time on an onboard computer.

Paperid: 5647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09418.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Domain Generalization Sharpness-Aware Minimization Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (DGS-MAML), a novel meta-learning algorithm designed to generalize across tasks with limited training data. DGS-MAML combines gradient matching with sharpness-aware minimization in a bi-level optimization framework to enhance model adaptability and robustness. We support our method with theoretical analysis using PAC-Bayes and convergence guarantees. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that DGS-MAML outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy and generalization. The proposed method is particularly useful for scenarios requiring few-shot learning and quick adaptation, and the source code is publicly available at GitHub.

Paperid: 5648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06900.pdf

Abstract:
Chinese font generation aims to create a new Chinese font library based on some reference samples. It is a topic of great concern to many font designers and typographers. Over the past years, with the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, various new techniques have achieved flourishing and thriving progress. Nevertheless, how to improve the overall quality of generated Chinese character images remains a tough issue. In this paper, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent Chinese font generation approaches based on deep learning. To be specific, we first illustrate the research background of the task. Then, we outline our literature selection and analysis methodology, and review a series of related fundamentals, including classical deep learning architectures, font representation formats, public datasets, and frequently-used evaluation metrics. After that, relying on the number of reference samples required to generate a new font, we categorize the existing methods into two major groups: many-shot font generation and few-shot font generation methods. Within each category, representative approaches are summarized, and their strengths and limitations are also discussed in detail. Finally, we conclude our paper with the challenges and future directions, with the expectation to provide some valuable illuminations for the researchers in this field.

Paperid: 5649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06360.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting cyberbullying on social media remains a critical challenge due to its subtle and varied expressions. This study investigates whether integrating aggression detection as an auxiliary task within a unified training framework can enhance the generalisation and performance of large language models (LLMs) in cyberbullying detection. Experiments are conducted on five aggression datasets and one cyberbullying dataset using instruction-tuned LLMs. We evaluated multiple strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, independent LoRA fine-tuning, and multi-task learning (MTL). Given the inconsistent results of MTL, we propose an enriched prompt pipeline approach in which aggression predictions are embedded into cyberbullying detection prompts to provide contextual augmentation. Preliminary results show that the enriched prompt pipeline consistently outperforms standard LoRA fine-tuning, indicating that aggression-informed context significantly boosts cyberbullying detection. This study highlights the potential of auxiliary tasks, such as aggression detection, to improve the generalisation of LLMs for safety-critical applications on social networks.

Paperid: 5650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05323.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in large pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) has reached state-of-the-art performance on several object detection benchmarks and boasts strong zero-shot capabilities, but for optimal performance on specific targets some form of finetuning is still necessary. While the initial VLM weights allow for great few-shot transfer learning, this usually involves the loss of the original natural language querying and zero-shot capabilities. Inspired by the success of Textual Inversion (TI) in personalizing text-to-image diffusion models, we propose a similar formulation for open-vocabulary object detection. TI allows extending the VLM vocabulary by learning new or improving existing tokens to accurately detect novel or fine-grained objects from as little as three examples. The learned tokens are completely compatible with the original VLM weights while keeping them frozen, retaining the original model's benchmark performance, and leveraging its existing capabilities such as zero-shot domain transfer (e.g., detecting a sketch of an object after training only on real photos). The storage and gradient calculations are limited to the token embedding dimension, requiring significantly less compute than full-model fine-tuning. We evaluated whether the method matches or outperforms the baseline methods that suffer from forgetting in a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative experiments.

Paperid: 5651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05138.pdf

Abstract:
Assessing chronic pain behavior in mice is critical for preclinical studies. However, existing methods mostly rely on manual labeling of behavioral features, and humans lack a clear understanding of which behaviors best represent chronic pain. For this reason, existing methods struggle to accurately capture the insidious and persistent behavioral changes in chronic pain. This study proposes a framework to automatically discover features related to chronic pain without relying on human-defined action labels. Our method uses universal action space projector to automatically extract mouse action features, and avoids the potential bias of human labeling by retaining the rich behavioral information in the original video. In this paper, we also collected a mouse pain behavior dataset that captures the disease progression of both neuropathic and inflammatory pain across multiple time points. Our method achieves 48.41\% accuracy in a 15-class pain classification task, significantly outperforming human experts (21.33\%) and the widely used method B-SOiD (30.52\%). Furthermore, when the classification is simplified to only three categories, i.e., neuropathic pain, inflammatory pain, and no pain, then our method achieves an accuracy of 73.1\%, which is notably higher than that of human experts (48\%) and B-SOiD (58.43\%). Finally, our method revealed differences in drug efficacy for different types of pain on zero-shot Gabapentin drug testing, and the results were consistent with past drug efficacy literature. This study demonstrates the potential clinical application of our method, which can provide new insights into pain research and related drug development.

Paperid: 5652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04179.pdf

Abstract:
While subjective evaluations in recent years indicate rapid progress in TTS, can current TTS systems truly pass a human deception test in a Turing-like evaluation? We introduce Human Fooling Rate (HFR), a metric that directly measures how often machine-generated speech is mistaken for human. Our large-scale evaluation of open-source and commercial TTS models reveals critical insights: (i) CMOS-based claims of human parity often fail under deception testing, (ii) TTS progress should be benchmarked on datasets where human speech achieves high HFRs, as evaluating against monotonous or less expressive reference samples sets a low bar, (iii) Commercial models approach human deception in zero-shot settings, while open-source systems still struggle with natural conversational speech; (iv) Fine-tuning on high-quality data improves realism but does not fully bridge the gap. Our findings underscore the need for more realistic, human-centric evaluations alongside existing subjective tests.

Paperid: 5653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02573.pdf

Abstract:
Verbatim memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a multifaceted phenomenon involving distinct underlying mechanisms. We introduce a novel method to analyze the different forms of memorization described by the existing taxonomy. Specifically, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the attention weights of the LLM and evaluate the alignment between this taxonomy and the attention weights involved in decoding. We find that the existing taxonomy performs poorly and fails to reflect distinct mechanisms within the attention blocks. We propose a new taxonomy that maximizes alignment with the attention weights, consisting of three categories: memorized samples that are guessed using language modeling abilities, memorized samples that are recalled due to high duplication in the training set, and non-memorized samples. Our results reveal that few-shot verbatim memorization does not correspond to a distinct attention mechanism. We also show that a significant proportion of extractable samples are in fact guessed by the model and should therefore be studied separately. Finally, we develop a custom visual interpretability technique to localize the regions of the attention weights involved in each form of memorization.

Paperid: 5654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01723.pdf

Abstract:
Grounding natural language instructions to visual observations is fundamental for embodied agents operating in open-world environments. Recent advances in visual-language mapping have enabled generalizable semantic representations by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs). However, these methods often fall short in aligning free-form language commands with specific scene instances, due to limitations in both instance-level semantic consistency and instruction interpretation. We present OpenMap, a zero-shot open-vocabulary visual-language map designed for accurate instruction grounding in navigation tasks. To address semantic inconsistencies across views, we introduce a Structural-Semantic Consensus constraint that jointly considers global geometric structure and vision-language similarity to guide robust 3D instance-level aggregation. To improve instruction interpretation, we propose an LLM-assisted Instruction-to-Instance Grounding module that enables fine-grained instance selection by incorporating spatial context and expressive target descriptions. We evaluate OpenMap on ScanNet200 and Matterport3D, covering both semantic mapping and instruction-to-target retrieval tasks. Experimental results show that OpenMap outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in bridging free-form language and 3D perception for embodied navigation.

Paperid: 5655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18812.pdf

Abstract:
With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, developers increasingly rely on AI-assisted tools to support code generation. While LLMs can generate syntactically correct solutions for well-structured programming tasks, they often struggle with challenges that require iterative debugging, error handling, or adaptation to diverse problem structures. Existing approaches such as fine-tuning or self-repair strategies either require costly retraining or lack mechanisms to accumulate and reuse knowledge from previous attempts. To address these limitations, we propose MemoCoder, a multi-agent framework that enables collaborative problem solving and persistent learning from past fixes. At the core of MemoCoder is a Fixing Knowledge Set, which stores successful repairs and supports retrieval for future tasks. A central Mentor Agent supervises the repair process by identifying recurring error patterns and refining high-level fixing strategies, providing a novel supervisory role that guides the self-repair loop. We evaluate MemoCoder across three public benchmarks -- MBPP, HumanEval, and LiveCodeBench -- spanning a range of problem complexities. Experimental results show that MemoCoder consistently outperforms both zero-shot prompting and a Self-Repair strategy, with improvements ranging from 3.1% to 12.1% in Pass@10 and from 1.4% to 14.5% in Pass@50, demonstrating its effectiveness in iterative refinement and knowledge-guided code generation.

Paperid: 5656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18264.pdf

Abstract:
Solving the problem of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on printed text for Latin and its derivative scripts can now be considered settled due to the volumes of research done on English and other High-Resourced Languages (HRL). However, for Low-Resourced Languages (LRL) that use unique scripts, it remains an open problem. This study presents a comparative analysis of the zero-shot performance of six distinct OCR engines on two LRLs: Sinhala and Tamil. The selected engines include both commercial and open-source systems, aiming to evaluate the strengths of each category. The Cloud Vision API, Surya, Document AI, and Tesseract were evaluated for both Sinhala and Tamil, while Subasa OCR and EasyOCR were examined for only one language due to their limitations. The performance of these systems was rigorously analysed using five measurement techniques to assess accuracy at both the character and word levels. According to the findings, Surya delivered the best performance for Sinhala across all metrics, with a WER of 2.61%. Conversely, Document AI excelled across all metrics for Tamil, highlighted by a very low CER of 0.78%. In addition to the above analysis, we also introduce a novel synthetic Tamil OCR benchmarking dataset.

Paperid: 5657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16754.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting developers with code-related questions; however, LLMs carry the risk of generating unreliable answers. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to reduce the unreliability (i.e., hallucinations) of LLMs. However, designing effective pipelines remains challenging due to numerous design choices. In this paper, we construct a retrieval corpus of over 3 million Java and Python related Stack Overflow posts with accepted answers, and explore various RAG pipeline designs to answer developer questions, evaluating their effectiveness in generating accurate and reliable responses. More specifically, we (1) design and evaluate 7 different RAG pipelines and 63 pipeline variants to answer questions that have historically similar matches, and (2) address new questions without any close prior matches by automatically lowering the similarity threshold during retrieval, thereby increasing the chance of finding partially relevant context and improving coverage for unseen cases. We find that implementing a RAG pipeline combining hypothetical-documentation-embedding (HyDE) with the full-answer context performs best in retrieving and answering similarcontent for Stack Overflow questions. Finally, we apply our optimal RAG pipeline to 4 open-source LLMs and compare the results to their zero-shot performance. Our findings show that RAG with our optimal RAG pipeline consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines across models, achieving higher scores for helpfulness, correctness, and detail with LLM-as-a-judge. These findings demonstrate that our optimal RAG pipelines robustly enhance answer quality for a wide range of developer queries including both previously seen and novel questions across different LLMs

Paperid: 5658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13200.pdf

Abstract:
Tools extend the manipulation abilities of robots, much like they do for humans. Despite human expertise in tool manipulation, teaching robots these skills faces challenges. The complexity arises from the interplay of two simultaneous points of contact: one between the robot and the tool, and another between the tool and the environment. Tactile and proximity sensors play a crucial role in identifying these complex contacts. However, learning tool manipulation using these sensors remains challenging due to limited real-world data and the large sim-to-real gap. To address this, we propose a few-shot tool-use skill transfer framework using multimodal sensing. The framework involves pre-training the base policy to capture contact states common in tool-use skills in simulation and fine-tuning it with human demonstrations collected in the real-world target domain to bridge the domain gap. We validate that this framework enables teaching surface-following tasks using tools with diverse physical and geometric properties with a small number of demonstrations on the Franka Emika robot arm. Our analysis suggests that the robot acquires new tool-use skills by transferring the ability to recognise tool-environment contact relationships from pre-trained to fine-tuned policies. Additionally, combining proximity and tactile sensors enhances the identification of contact states and environmental geometry.

Paperid: 5659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11986.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-based text-to-image models have achieved remarkable results in synthesizing diverse images from text prompts and can capture specific artistic styles via style personalization. However, their entangled latent space and lack of smooth interpolation make it difficult to apply distinct painting techniques in a controlled, regional manner, often causing one style to dominate. To overcome this, we propose a zero-shot diffusion pipeline that naturally blends multiple styles by performing style composition on the denoised latents predicted during the flow-matching denoising process of separately trained, style-specialized models. We leverage the fact that lower-noise latents carry stronger stylistic information and fuse them across heterogeneous diffusion pipelines using spatial masks, enabling precise, region-specific style control. This mechanism preserves the fidelity of each individual style while allowing user-guided mixing. Furthermore, to ensure structural coherence across different models, we incorporate depth-map conditioning via ControlNet into the diffusion framework. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method successfully achieves region-specific style mixing according to the given masks.

Paperid: 5660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08765.pdf

Abstract:
Due to the excellent performance in yielding high-quality, zero-shot segmentation, Segment Anything Model (SAM) and its variants have been widely applied in diverse scenarios such as healthcare and intelligent manufacturing. Therefore, effectively compressing SAMs has become an increasingly pressing practical need. In this study, we propose Birkhoff, a novel data-free compression algorithm for SAM and its variants. Unlike quantization, pruning, distillation, and other compression methods, Birkhoff embodies versatility across model types, agility in deployment, faithfulness to the original model, and compactness in model size. Specifically, Birkhoff introduces a novel compression algorithm: Hyper-Compression, whose core principle is to find a dense trajectory to turn a high-dimensional parameter vector into a low-dimensional scalar. Furthermore, Birkhoff designs a dedicated linear layer operator, HyperLinear, to fuse decompression and matrix multiplication to significantly accelerate inference of the compressed SAMs. Extensive experiments on 18 SAMs in the COCO, LVIS, and SA-1B datasets show that Birkhoff performs consistently and competitively in compression time, compression ratio, post-compression performance, and inference speed. For example, Birkhoff can achieve a compression ratio of 5.17x on SAM2-B, with less than 1% performance drop without using any fine-tuning data. Moreover, the compression is finished within 60 seconds for all models.

Paperid: 5661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08575.pdf

Abstract:
Millions of biological sample records collected in the last few centuries archived in natural history collections are un-georeferenced. Georeferencing complex locality descriptions associated with these collection samples is a highly labour-intensive task collection agencies struggle with. None of the existing automated methods exploit maps that are an essential tool for georeferencing complex relations. We present preliminary experiments and results of a novel method that exploits multi-modal capabilities of recent Large Multi-Modal Models (LMM). This method enables the model to visually contextualize spatial relations it reads in the locality description. We use a grid-based approach to adapt these auto-regressive models for this task in a zero-shot setting. Our experiments conducted on a small manually annotated dataset show impressive results for our approach ($\sim$1 km Average distance error) compared to uni-modal georeferencing with Large Language Models and existing georeferencing tools. The paper also discusses the findings of the experiments in light of an LMM's ability to comprehend fine-grained maps. Motivated by these results, a practical framework is proposed to integrate this method into a georeferencing workflow.

Paperid: 5662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05997.pdf

Abstract:
Large, high-quality annotated corpora remain scarce in document-level entity and relation extraction in zero-shot or few-shot settings. In this paper, we present a fully automatic, LLM-based pipeline for synthetic data generation and in-context learning for document-level entity and relation extraction. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on manually annotated demonstrations or direct zero-shot inference, our method combines synthetic data generation with retrieval-based in-context learning, using a reasoning-optimized language model. This allows us to build a high-quality demonstration database without manual annotation and to dynamically retrieve relevant examples at inference time. Based on our approach we produce a synthetic dataset of over $5k$ Wikipedia abstracts with approximately $59k$ entities and $30k$ relation triples. Finally, we evaluate in-context learning performance on the DocIE shared task, extracting entities and relations from long documents in a zero-shot setting. We find that in-context joint entity and relation extraction at document-level remains a challenging task, even for state-of-the-art large language models.

Paperid: 5663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05391.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are primarily accessed via commercial APIs, but this often requires users to expose their data to service providers. In this paper, we explore how users can stay in control of their data by using privacy profiles: simple natural language instructions that say what should and should not be revealed. We build a framework where a local model uses these instructions to rewrite queries, only hiding details deemed sensitive by the user, before sending them to an external model, thus balancing privacy with performance. To support this research, we introduce PEEP, a multilingual dataset of real user queries annotated to mark private content and paired with synthetic privacy profiles. Experiments with lightweight local LLMs show that, after fine-tuning, they not only achieve markedly better privacy preservation but also match or exceed the performance of much larger zero-shot models. At the same time, the system still faces challenges in fully adhering to user instructions, underscoring the need for models with a better understanding of user-defined privacy preferences.

Paperid: 5664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03542.pdf

Abstract:
Text-based visual descriptors--ranging from simple class names to more descriptive phrases--are widely used in visual concept discovery and image classification with vision-language models (VLMs). Their effectiveness, however, depends on a complex interplay of factors, including semantic clarity, presence in the VLM's pre-training data, and how well the descriptors serve as a meaningful representation space. In this work, we systematically analyze descriptor quality along two key dimensions: (1) representational capacity, and (2) relationship with VLM pre-training data. We evaluate a spectrum of descriptor generation methods, from zero-shot LLM-generated prompts to iteratively refined descriptors. Motivated by ideas from representation alignment and language understanding, we introduce two alignment-based metrics--Global Alignment and CLIP Similarity--that move beyond accuracy. These metrics shed light on how different descriptor generation strategies interact with foundation model properties, offering new ways to study descriptor effectiveness beyond accuracy evaluations.

Paperid: 5665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03434.pdf

Abstract:
The data appetite for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has continuously scaled up from the early millions to billions today, which faces an untenable trade-off with data quality and inevitably introduces Noisy Correspondence (NC) samples. Undoubtedly, such semantically unrelated data significantly impairs the performance of VLMs. Previous efforts mainly address this challenge by estimating refined alignment for more precise guidance. However, such resource-intensive pipelines that train VLMs from scratch struggle to meet realistic data demands. In this paper, we present a brand new perspective that seeks to directly eliminate the harmful effects of NC in pre-trained VLMs. Specifically, we propose NCU, a Noisy Correspondence Unlearning fine-tuning framework that efficiently enhances VLMs' robustness by forgetting learned noisy knowledge. The key to NCU is learning the hardest negative information, which can provide explicit unlearning direction for both false positives and false negatives. Such twin goals unlearning process can be formalized into one unified optimal transport objective for fast fine-tuning. We validate our approach with the prevailing CLIP model over various downstream tasks. Remarkably, NCU surpasses the robust pre-trained method on zero-shot transfer while with lower computational overhead. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 5666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01463.pdf

Abstract:
Instance segmentation of novel objects instances in RGB images, given some example images for each object, is a well known problem in computer vision. Designing a model general enough to be employed for all kinds of novel objects without (re-) training has proven to be a difficult task. To handle this, we present a new training-free framework, called: Novel Object Cyclic Threshold based Instance Segmentation (NOCTIS). NOCTIS integrates two pre-trained models: Grounded-SAM 2 for object proposals with precise bounding boxes and corresponding segmentation masks; and DINOv2 for robust class and patch embeddings, due to its zero-shot capabilities. Internally, the proposal-object matching is realized by determining an object matching score based on the similarity of the class embeddings and the average maximum similarity of the patch embeddings with a new cyclic thresholding (CT) mechanism that mitigates unstable matches caused by repetitive textures or visually similar patterns. Beyond CT, NOCTIS introduces: (i) an appearance score that is unaffected by object selection bias; (ii) the usage of the average confidence of the proposals bounding box and mask as a scoring component; and (iii) an RGB-only pipeline that performs even better than RGB-D ones. We empirically show that NOCTIS, without further training/fine tuning, attains state-of-the-art results regarding the mean AP score, w.r.t. the best RGB and RGB-D methods on the seven core datasets of the BOP 2023 challenge for the "Model-based 2D segmentation of unseen objects" task.

Paperid: 5667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00163.pdf

Abstract:
Prompting is the primary method by which we study and control large language models. It is also one of the most powerful: nearly every major capability attributed to LLMs-few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, constitutional AI-was first unlocked through prompting. Yet prompting is rarely treated as science and is frequently frowned upon as alchemy. We argue that this is a category error. If we treat LLMs as a new kind of complex and opaque organism that is trained rather than programmed, then prompting is not a workaround: it is behavioral science. Mechanistic interpretability peers into the neural substrate, prompting probes the model in its native interface: language. We contend that prompting is not inferior, but rather a key component in the science of LLMs.

Paperid: 5668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23104.pdf

Abstract:
Interactive segmentation (IS) allows users to iteratively refine object boundaries with minimal cues, such as positive and negative clicks. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has garnered attention in the IS community for its promptable segmentation capabilities, it often struggles in specialized domains or when handling complex scenarios (e.g., camouflaged or multi-part objects). To overcome these challenges, we propose DC-TTA, a novel test-time adaptation (TTA) framework that adapts SAM on a per-sample basis by leveraging user interactions as supervision. Instead of forcing a single model to incorporate all user clicks at once, DC-TTA partitions the clicks into more coherent subsets, each processed independently via TTA with a separated model. This Divide-and-Conquer strategy reduces conflicts among diverse cues and enables more localized updates. Finally, we merge the adapted models to form a unified predictor that integrates the specialized knowledge from each subset. Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that DC-TTA significantly outperforms SAM's zero-shot results and conventional TTA methods, effectively handling complex tasks such as camouflaged object segmentation with fewer interactions and improved accuracy.

Paperid: 5669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22726.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning for human sensing on edge systems presents significant potential for smart applications. However, its training and development are hindered by the limited availability of sensor data and resource constraints of edge systems. While transferring pre-trained models to different sensing applications is promising, existing methods often require extensive sensor data and computational resources, resulting in high costs and poor adaptability in practice. In this paper, we propose XTransfer, a first-of-its-kind method enabling modality-agnostic, few-shot model transfer with resource-efficient design. XTransfer flexibly uses single or multiple pre-trained models and transfers knowledge across different modalities by (i) model repairing that safely mitigates modality shift by adapting pre-trained layers with only few sensor data, and (ii) layer recombining that efficiently searches and recombines layers of interest from source models in a layer-wise manner to create compact models. We benchmark various baselines across diverse human sensing datasets spanning different modalities. Comprehensive results demonstrate that XTransfer achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing the costs of sensor data collection, model training, and edge deployment.

Paperid: 5670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21398.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot industrial anomaly detection (FS-IAD) presents a critical challenge for practical automated inspection systems operating in data-scarce environments. While existing approaches predominantly focus on deriving prototypes from limited normal samples, they typically neglect to systematically incorporate query image statistics to enhance prototype representativeness. To address this issue, we propose FastRef, a novel and efficient prototype refinement framework for FS-IAD. Our method operates through an iterative two-stage process: (1) characteristic transfer from query features to prototypes via an optimizable transformation matrix, and (2) anomaly suppression through prototype alignment. The characteristic transfer is achieved through linear reconstruction of query features from prototypes, while the anomaly suppression addresses a key observation in FS-IAD that unlike conventional IAD with abundant normal prototypes, the limited-sample setting makes anomaly reconstruction more probable. Therefore, we employ optimal transport (OT) for non-Gaussian sampled features to measure and minimize the gap between prototypes and their refined counterparts for anomaly suppression. For comprehensive evaluation, we integrate FastRef with three competitive prototype-based FS-IAD methods: PatchCore, FastRecon, WinCLIP, and AnomalyDINO. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets of MVTec, ViSA, MPDD and RealIAD demonstrate both the effectiveness and computational efficiency of our approach under 1/2/4-shots.

Paperid: 5671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20190.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) systems rely on speaker embeddings to synthesize speech in the voice of an unseen speaker, using only a short reference utterance. While many speaker embeddings have been developed for speaker recognition, their relative effectiveness in zero-shot TTS remains underexplored. In this work, we employ a YourTTS-based TTS system to compare three different speaker encoders - YourTTS's original H/ASP encoder, x-vector embeddings, and ECAPA-TDNN embeddings - within an otherwise fixed zero-shot TTS framework. All models were trained on the same dataset of Czech read speech and evaluated on 24 out-of-domain target speakers using both subjective and objective methods. The subjective evaluation was conducted via a listening test focused on speaker similarity, while the objective evaluation measured cosine distances between speaker embeddings extracted from synthesized and real utterances. Across both evaluations, the original H/ASP encoder consistently outperformed the alternatives, with ECAPA-TDNN showing better results than x-vectors. These findings suggest that, despite the popularity of ECAPA-TDNN in speaker recognition, it does not necessarily offer improvements for speaker similarity in zero-shot TTS in this configuration. Our study highlights the importance of empirical evaluation when reusing speaker recognition embeddings in TTS and provides a framework for additional future comparisons.

Paperid: 5672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19567.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-task and few-shot time series forecasting tasks are commonly encountered in scenarios such as the launch of new products in different cities. However, traditional time series forecasting methods suffer from insufficient historical data, which stems from a disregard for the generalized and specific features among different tasks. For the aforementioned challenges, we propose the Feature-Adaptive Time Series Forecasting Framework (FAF), which consists of three key components: the Generalized Knowledge Module (GKM), the Task-Specific Module (TSM), and the Rank Module (RM). During training phase, the GKM is updated through a meta-learning mechanism that enables the model to extract generalized features across related tasks. Meanwhile, the TSM is trained to capture diverse local dynamics through multiple functional regions, each of which learns specific features from individual tasks. During testing phase, the RM dynamically selects the most relevant functional region from the TSM based on input sequence features, which is then combined with the generalized knowledge learned by the GKM to generate accurate forecasts. This design enables FAF to achieve robust and personalized forecasting even with sparse historical observations We evaluate FAF on five diverse real-world datasets under few-shot time series forecasting settings. Experimental results demonstrate that FAF consistently outperforms baselines that include three categories of time series forecasting methods. In particular, FAF achieves a 41.81\% improvement over the best baseline, iTransformer, on the CO$_2$ emissions dataset.

Paperid: 5673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19483.pdf

Abstract:
This paper provides preliminary results on exploring the task of performing turn-level data augmentation for dialogue system based on different types of commonsense relationships, and the automatic evaluation of the generated synthetic turns. The proposed methodology takes advantage of the extended knowledge and zero-shot capabilities of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions, understand contextual information, and their commonsense reasoning capabilities. The approach draws inspiration from methodologies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT), applied more explicitly to the task of prompt-based generation for dialogue-based data augmentation conditioned on commonsense attributes, and the automatic evaluation of the generated dialogues. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach, first we extracted 200 randomly selected partial dialogues, from 5 different well-known dialogue datasets, and generate alternative responses conditioned on different event commonsense attributes. This novel dataset allows us to measure the proficiency of LLMs in generating contextually relevant commonsense knowledge, particularly up to 12 different specific ATOMIC [10] database relations. Secondly, we propose an evaluation framework to automatically detect the quality of the generated dataset inspired by the ACCENT [26] metric, which offers a nuanced approach to assess event commonsense. However, our method does not follow ACCENT's complex eventrelation tuple extraction process. Instead, we propose an instruction-based prompt for each commonsense attribute and use state-of-the-art LLMs to automatically detect the original attributes used when creating each augmented turn in the previous step. Preliminary results suggest that our approach effectively harnesses LLMs capabilities for commonsense reasoning and evaluation in dialogue systems.

Paperid: 5674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19185.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional mental health support systems often generate responses based solely on the user's current emotion and situations, resulting in superficial interventions that fail to address deeper emotional needs. This study introduces a novel framework by integrating spiritual wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita with advanced large language model GPT-4o to enhance emotional well-being. We present the GITes (Gita Integrated Therapy for Emotional Support) dataset, which enhances the existing ExTES mental health dataset by including 10,729 spiritually guided responses generated by GPT-4o and evaluated by domain experts. We benchmark GITes against 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, including both mental health specific and general purpose models. To evaluate spiritual relevance in generated responses beyond what conventional n-gram based metrics capture, we propose a novel Spiritual Insight metric and automate assessment via an LLM as jury framework using chain-of-thought prompting. Integrating spiritual guidance into AI driven support enhances both NLP and spiritual metrics for the best performing LLM Phi3-Mini 3.2B Instruct, achieving improvements of 122.71% in ROUGE, 126.53% in METEOR, 8.15% in BERT score, 15.92% in Spiritual Insight, 18.61% in Sufficiency and 13.22% in Relevance compared to its zero-shot counterpart. While these results reflect substantial improvements across automated empathy and spirituality metrics, further validation in real world patient populations remains a necessary step. Our findings indicate a strong potential for AI systems enriched with spiritual guidance to enhance user satisfaction and perceived support outcomes. The code and dataset will be publicly available to advance further research in this emerging area.

Paperid: 5675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18511.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying the appropriate regulatory standard applicability remains a critical yet understudied challenge in medical device compliance, frequently necessitating expert interpretation of fragmented and heterogeneous documentation across different jurisdictions. To address this challenge, we introduce a modular AI system that leverages a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to automate standard applicability determination. Given a free-text device description, our system retrieves candidate standards from a curated corpus and uses large language models to infer jurisdiction-specific applicability, classified as Mandatory, Recommended, or Not Applicable, with traceable justifications. We construct an international benchmark dataset of medical device descriptions with expert-annotated standard mappings, and evaluate our system against retrieval-only, zero-shot, and rule-based baselines. The proposed approach attains a classification accuracy of 73% and a Top-5 retrieval recall of 87%, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying relevant regulatory standards. We introduce the first end-to-end system for standard applicability reasoning, enabling scalable and interpretable AI-supported regulatory science. Notably, our region-aware RAG agent performs cross-jurisdictional reasoning between Chinese and U.S. standards, supporting conflict resolution and applicability justification across regulatory frameworks.

Paperid: 5676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17686.pdf

Abstract:
Keyword Spotting plays a critical role in enabling hands-free interaction for battery-powered edge devices. Few-Shot Keyword Spotting (FS-KWS) addresses the scalability and adaptability challenges of traditional systems by enabling recognition of custom keywords with only a few examples. However, existing FS-KWS systems achieve subpar accuracy at desirable false acceptance rates, particularly in resource-constrained edge environments. To address these issues, we propose a training scheme that leverages self-supervised learning models for robust feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and knowledge distillation. The teacher model, based on Wav2Vec 2.0 is trained using Sub-center ArcFace loss, which enhances inter-class separability and intra-class compactness. To enable efficient deployment on edge devices, we introduce attention-based dimensionality reduction and train a standard lightweight ResNet15 student model. We evaluate the proposed approach on the English portion of the Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC) and the Google Speech Commands (GSC) datasets. Notably, the proposed training method improves the 10-shot classification accuracy from 33.4% to 74.1% on 11 classes at 1% false alarm accuracy on the GSC dataset, thus making it significantly better-suited for a real use case scenario.

Paperid: 5677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17499.pdf

Abstract:
In few-shot classification tasks (so-called episodes), a small set of labeled support samples is provided during inference to aid the classification of unlabeled query samples. Metric-based models typically operate by computing similarities between query and support embeddings within a learned metric space, followed by nearest-neighbor classification. However, these labeled support samples are often underutilized--they are only used for similarity comparison, despite their potential to fine-tune and adapt the metric space itself to the classes in the current episode. To address this, we propose a series of simple yet effective episode-specific, during-inference fine-tuning methods for metric-based models, including Rotational Division Fine-Tuning (RDFT) and its two variants, Iterative Division Fine-Tuning (IDFT) and Augmented Division Fine-Tuning (ADFT). These methods construct pseudo support-query pairs from the given support set to enable fine-tuning even for non-parametric models. Nevertheless, the severely limited amount of data in each task poses a substantial risk of overfitting when applying such fine-tuning strategies. To mitigate this, we further propose to train the metric-based model within an optimization-based meta-learning framework. With the combined efforts of episode-specific fine-tuning and optimization-based meta-training, metric-based models are equipped with the ability to rapidly adapt to the limited support samples during inference while avoiding overfitting. We validate our approach on three audio datasets from diverse domains, namely ESC-50 (environmental sounds), Speech Commands V2 (spoken keywords), and Medley-solos-DB (musical instrument). Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves performance for all evaluated metric-based models (especially for attention-based models) and generalizes well across different audio domains.

Paperid: 5678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17055.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized music information retrieval, but questions remain about their ability to generalize across diverse musical traditions. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art audio foundation models across six musical corpora spanning Western popular, Greek, Turkish, and Indian classical traditions. We employ three complementary methodologies to investigate these models' cross-cultural capabilities: probing to assess inherent representations, targeted supervised fine-tuning of 1-2 layers, and multi-label few-shot learning for low-resource scenarios. Our analysis shows varying cross-cultural generalization, with larger models typically outperforming on non-Western music, though results decline for culturally distant traditions. Notably, our approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance on five out of six evaluated datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of foundation models for world music understanding. We also find that our targeted fine-tuning approach does not consistently outperform probing across all settings, suggesting foundation models already encode substantial musical knowledge. Our evaluation framework and benchmarking results contribute to understanding how far current models are from achieving universal music representations while establishing metrics for future progress.

Paperid: 5679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14793.pdf

Abstract:
Protein Language Models (PLMs) such as ESM2 have been shown to be capable of zero-shot prediction of critical scalar properties of proteins (fitness). In this work, we show that injecting a dropout layer at inference time between a PLM's featurizer/embedding layer and its transformer, and averaging its output akin to Monte-Carlo dropout increases zero-shot performance on a subset of the ProteinGym dataset. This is the case even when the model was not trained with dropouts to begin with, and does not require retraining or finetuning of the PLM. A dropout of 0.1 seems performant across all models.

Paperid: 5680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12520.pdf

Abstract:
We propose ImEdit, the first zero-shot, training-free video editing method conditioned on both images and text. The proposed method introduces $Ï$-start sampling and dilated dual masking to construct well-structured noise maps for coherent and accurate edits. We further present zero image guidance, a controllable negative prompt strategy, for visual fidelity. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

Paperid: 5681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11166.pdf

Abstract:
As a cornerstone of patient care, clinical decision-making significantly influences patient outcomes and can be enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Although LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance, their application to visual question answering in medical imaging, particularly for reasoning-based diagnosis, remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, supervised fine-tuning for reasoning tasks is largely impractical due to limited data availability and high annotation costs. In this work, we introduce a zero-shot framework for reliable medical image diagnosis that enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in clinical settings through test-time scaling. Given a medical image and a textual prompt, a vision-language model processes a medical image along with a corresponding textual prompt to generate multiple descriptions or interpretations of visual features. These interpretations are then fed to an LLM, where a test-time scaling strategy consolidates multiple candidate outputs into a reliable final diagnosis. We evaluate our approach across various medical imaging modalities -- including radiology, ophthalmology, and histopathology -- and demonstrate that the proposed test-time scaling strategy enhances diagnostic accuracy for both our and baseline methods. Additionally, we provide an empirical analysis showing that the proposed approach, which allows unbiased prompting in the first stage, improves the reliability of LLM-generated diagnoses and enhances classification accuracy.

Paperid: 5682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10312.pdf

Abstract:
We propose an instruction-following audio comprehension model that leverages the dialogue continuation ability of large language models (LLMs). Instead of directly generating target captions in training data, the proposed method trains a model to produce responses as if the input caption triggered a dialogue. This dialogue continuation training mitigates the caption variation problem. Learning to continue a dialogue effectively captures the caption's meaning beyond its surface-level words. As a result, our model enables zero-shot instruction-following capability without multitask instruction tuning, even trained solely on audio captioning datasets. Experiments on AudioCaps, WavCaps, and Clotho datasets with AudioBench audio-scene question-answering tests demonstrate our model's ability to follow various unseen instructions.

Paperid: 5683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10137.pdf

Abstract:
Behavioral cloning (BC) methods trained with supervised learning (SL) are an effective way to learn policies from human demonstrations in domains like robotics. Goal-conditioning these policies enables a single generalist policy to capture diverse behaviors contained within an offline dataset. While goal-conditioned behavior cloning (GCBC) methods can perform well on in-distribution training tasks, they do not necessarily generalize zero-shot to tasks that require conditioning on novel state-goal pairs, i.e. combinatorial generalization. In part, this limitation can be attributed to a lack of temporal consistency in the state representation learned by BC; if temporally related states are encoded to similar latent representations, then the out-of-distribution gap for novel state-goal pairs would be reduced. Hence, encouraging this temporal consistency in the representation space should facilitate combinatorial generalization. Successor representations, which encode the distribution of future states visited from the current state, nicely encapsulate this property. However, previous methods for learning successor representations have relied on contrastive samples, temporal-difference (TD) learning, or both. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective representation learning objective, $\text{BYOL-}Î³$ augmented GCBC, which is not only able to theoretically approximate the successor representation in the finite MDP case without contrastive samples or TD learning, but also, results in competitive empirical performance across a suite of challenging tasks requiring combinatorial generalization.

Paperid: 5684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09173.pdf

Abstract:
Decision-makers often possess insufficient information to render a confident decision. In these cases, the decision-maker can often undertake actions to acquire the necessary information about the problem at hand, e.g., by consulting knowledgeable authorities or by conducting experiments. Importantly, different levers of information acquisition come with different costs, posing the challenge of selecting the actions that are both informative and cost-effective. In this work, we propose CuriosiTree, a heuristic-based, test-time policy for zero-shot information acquisition in large language models (LLMs). CuriosiTree employs a greedy tree search to estimate the expected information gain of each action and strategically chooses actions based on a balance of anticipated information gain and associated cost. Empirical validation in a clinical diagnosis simulation shows that CuriosiTree enables cost-effective integration of heterogenous sources of information, and outperforms baseline action selection strategies in selecting action sequences that enable accurate diagnosis.

Paperid: 5685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07915.pdf

Abstract:
In dynamic environments, the rapid obsolescence of pre-existing environmental knowledge creates a gap between an agent's internal model and the evolving reality of its operational context. This disparity between prior and updated environmental valuations fundamentally limits the effectiveness of autonomous decision-making. To bridge this gap, the contextual bias of human domain stakeholders, who naturally accumulate insights through direct, real-time observation, becomes indispensable. However, translating their nuanced, and context-rich input into actionable intelligence for autonomous systems remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose LUCIFER (Language Understanding and Context-Infused Framework for Exploration and Behavior Refinement), a domain-agnostic framework that integrates a hierarchical decision-making architecture with reinforcement learning (RL) and large language models (LLMs) into a unified system. This architecture mirrors how humans decompose complex tasks, enabling a high-level planner to coordinate specialised sub-agents, each focused on distinct objectives and temporally interdependent actions. Unlike traditional applications where LLMs are limited to single role, LUCIFER integrates them in two synergistic roles: as context extractors, structuring verbal stakeholder input into domain-aware representations that influence decision-making through an attention space mechanism aligning LLM-derived insights with the agent's learning process, and as zero-shot exploration facilitators guiding the agent's action selection process during exploration. We benchmark various LLMs in both roles and demonstrate that LUCIFER improves exploration efficiency and decision quality, outperforming flat, goal-conditioned policies. Our findings show the potential of context-driven decision-making, where autonomous systems leverage human contextual knowledge for operational success.

Paperid: 5686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07209.pdf

Abstract:
We present HOI-PAGE, a new approach to synthesizing 4D human-object interactions (HOIs) from text prompts in a zero-shot fashion, driven by part-level affordance reasoning. In contrast to prior works that focus on global, whole body-object motion for 4D HOI synthesis, we observe that generating realistic and diverse HOIs requires a finer-grained understanding -- at the level of how human body parts engage with object parts. We thus introduce Part Affordance Graphs (PAGs), a structured HOI representation distilled from large language models (LLMs) that encodes fine-grained part information along with contact relations. We then use these PAGs to guide a three-stage synthesis: first, decomposing input 3D objects into geometric parts; then, generating reference HOI videos from text prompts, from which we extract part-based motion constraints; finally, optimizing for 4D HOI motion sequences that not only mimic the reference dynamics but also satisfy part-level contact constraints. Extensive experiments show that our approach is flexible and capable of generating complex multi-object or multi-person interaction sequences, with significantly improved realism and text alignment for zero-shot 4D HOI generation.

Paperid: 5687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04855.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we explore the effectiveness of isometric machine translation across multiple language pairs (En$\to$De, En$\to$Fr, and En$\to$Es) under the conditions of the IWSLT Isometric Shared Task 2022. Using eight open-source large language models (LLMs) of varying sizes, we investigate how different prompting strategies, varying numbers of few-shot examples, and demonstration selection influence translation quality and length control. We discover that the phrasing of instructions, when aligned with the properties of the provided demonstrations, plays a crucial role in controlling the output length. Our experiments show that LLMs tend to produce shorter translations only when presented with extreme examples, while isometric demonstrations often lead to the models disregarding length constraints. While few-shot prompting generally enhances translation quality, further improvements are marginal across 5, 10, and 20-shot settings. Finally, considering multiple outputs allows to notably improve overall tradeoff between the length and quality, yielding state-of-the-art performance for some language pairs.

Paperid: 5688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04195.pdf

Abstract:
Geometry optimization of atomic structures is a common and crucial task in computational chemistry and materials design. Following the learning to optimize paradigm, we propose a new multi-agent reinforcement learning method called Multi-Agent Crystal Structure optimization (MACS) to address periodic crystal structure optimization. MACS treats geometry optimization as a partially observable Markov game in which atoms are agents that adjust their positions to collectively discover a stable configuration. We train MACS across various compositions of reported crystalline materials to obtain a policy that successfully optimizes structures from the training compositions as well as structures of larger sizes and unseen compositions, confirming its excellent scalability and zero-shot transferability. We benchmark our approach against a broad range of state-of-the-art optimization methods and demonstrate that MACS optimizes periodic crystal structures significantly faster, with fewer energy calculations, and the lowest failure rate.

Paperid: 5689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02896.pdf

Abstract:
The real world is messy and unstructured. Uncovering critical information often requires active, goal-driven exploration. It remains to be seen whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which recently emerged as a popular zero-shot tool in many difficult tasks, can operate effectively in such conditions. In this paper, we answer this question by introducing FlySearch, a 3D, outdoor, photorealistic environment for searching and navigating to objects in complex scenes. We define three sets of scenarios with varying difficulty and observe that state-of-the-art VLMs cannot reliably solve even the simplest exploration tasks, with the gap to human performance increasing as the tasks get harder. We identify a set of central causes, ranging from vision hallucination, through context misunderstanding, to task planning failures, and we show that some of them can be addressed by finetuning. We publicly release the benchmark, scenarios, and the underlying codebase.

Paperid: 5690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02459.pdf

Abstract:
Scene synthesis and editing has emerged as a promising direction in computer graphics. Current trained approaches for 3D indoor scenes either oversimplify object semantics through one-hot class encodings (e.g., 'chair' or 'table'), require masked diffusion for editing, ignore room boundaries, or rely on floor plan renderings that fail to capture complex layouts. In contrast, LLM-based methods enable richer semantics via natural language (e.g., 'modern studio with light wood furniture') but do not support editing, remain limited to rectangular layouts or rely on weak spatial reasoning from implicit world models. We introduce ReSpace, a generative framework for text-driven 3D indoor scene synthesis and editing using autoregressive language models. Our approach features a compact structured scene representation with explicit room boundaries that frames scene editing as a next-token prediction task. We leverage a dual-stage training approach combining supervised fine-tuning and preference alignment, enabling a specially trained language model for object addition that accounts for user instructions, spatial geometry, object semantics, and scene-level composition. For scene editing, we employ a zero-shot LLM to handle object removal and prompts for addition. We further introduce a novel voxelization-based evaluation that captures fine-grained geometry beyond 3D bounding boxes. Experimental results surpass state-of-the-art on object addition while maintaining competitive results on full scene synthesis.

Paperid: 5691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01020.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) technology have increased demand for personalized audio synthesis. Zero-shot voice cloning, a specialized TTS task, aims to synthesize a target speaker's voice using only a single audio sample and arbitrary text, without prior exposure to the speaker during training. This process employs pattern recognition techniques to analyze and replicate the speaker's unique vocal features. Despite progress, challenges remain in adapting to the vocal style of unseen speakers, highlighting difficulties in generalizing TTS systems to handle diverse voices while maintaining naturalness, expressiveness, and speaker fidelity. To address the challenges of unseen speaker style adaptation, we propose DS-TTS, a novel approach aimed at enhancing the synthesis of diverse, previously unheard voices. Central to our method is a Dual-Style Encoding Network (DuSEN), where two distinct style encoders capture complementary aspects of a speaker's vocal identity. These speaker-specific style vectors are seamlessly integrated into the Dynamic Generator Network (DyGN) via a Style Gating-Film (SGF) mechanism, enabling more accurate and expressive reproduction of unseen speakers' unique vocal characteristics. In addition, we introduce a Dynamic Generator Network to tackle synthesis issues that arise with varying sentence lengths. By dynamically adapting to the length of the input, this component ensures robust performance across diverse text inputs and speaker styles, significantly improving the model's ability to generalize to unseen speakers in a more natural and expressive manner. Experimental evaluations on the VCTK dataset suggest that DS-TTS demonstrates superior overall performance in voice cloning tasks compared to existing state-of-the-art models, showing notable improvements in both word error rate and speaker similarity.

Paperid: 5692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00214.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid urbanization demands accurate and efficient monitoring of turbulent wind patterns to support air quality, climate resilience and infrastructure design. Traditional sparse reconstruction and sensor placement strategies face major accuracy degradations under practical constraints. Here, we introduce Diff-SPORT, a diffusion-based framework for high-fidelity flow reconstruction and optimal sensor placement in urban environments. Diff-SPORT combines a generative diffusion model with a maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference scheme and a Shapley-value attribution framework to propose a scalable and interpretable solution. Compared to traditional numerical methods, Diff-SPORT achieves significant speedups while maintaining both statistical and instantaneous flow fidelity. Our approach offers a modular, zero-shot alternative to retraining-intensive strategies, supporting fast and reliable urban flow monitoring under extreme sparsity. Diff-SPORT paves the way for integrating generative modeling and explainability in sustainable urban intelligence.

Paperid: 5693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00209.pdf

Abstract:
Cancer screening, leading to early detection, saves lives. Unfortunately, existing screening techniques require expensive and intrusive medical procedures, not globally available, resulting in too many lost would-be-saved lives. We present CATCH-FM, CATch Cancer early with Healthcare Foundation Models, a cancer pre-screening methodology that identifies high-risk patients for further screening solely based on their historical medical records. With millions of electronic healthcare records (EHR), we establish the scaling law of EHR foundation models pretrained on medical code sequences, pretrain compute-optimal foundation models of up to 2.4 billion parameters, and finetune them on clinician-curated cancer risk prediction cohorts. In our retrospective evaluation comprising of thirty thousand patients, CATCH-FM achieves strong efficacy, with 50% sensitivity in predicting first cancer risks at 99% specificity cutoff, and outperforming feature-based tree models and both general and medical LLMs by up to 20% AUPRC. Despite significant demographic, healthcare system, and EHR coding differences, CATCH-FM achieves state-of-the-art pancreatic cancer risk prediction on the EHRSHOT few-shot leaderboard, outperforming EHR foundation models pretrained using on-site patient data. Our analysis demonstrates the robustness of CATCH-FM in various patient distributions, the benefits of operating in the ICD code space, and its ability to capture non-trivial cancer risk factors. Our code will be open-sourced.

Paperid: 5694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24472.pdf

Abstract:
Machine translation (MT) systems universally degrade when faced with code-mixed text. This problem is more acute for low-resource languages that lack dedicated parallel corpora. This work directly addresses this gap for Vietnamese-English, a language context characterized by challenges including orthographic ambiguity and the frequent omission of diacritics in informal text. We introduce VietMix, the first expert-translated, naturally occurring parallel corpus of Vietnamese-English code-mixed text. We establish VietMix's utility by developing a data augmentation pipeline that leverages iterative fine-tuning and targeted filtering. Experiments show that models augmented with our data outperform strong back-translation baselines by up to +3.5 xCOMET points and improve zero-shot models by up to +11.9 points. Our work delivers a foundational resource for a challenging language pair and provides a validated, transferable framework for building and augmenting corpora in other low-resource settings.

Paperid: 5695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24173.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization on natural images and show early promise in interpretable medical image analysis. However, existing benchmarks do not systematically evaluate whether these models truly reason like human clinicians or merely imitate superficial patterns. To address this gap, we propose DrVD-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for clinical visual reasoning. DrVD-Bench consists of three modules: Visual Evidence Comprehension, Reasoning Trajectory Assessment, and Report Generation Evaluation, comprising a total of 7,789 image-question pairs. Our benchmark covers 20 task types, 17 diagnostic categories, and five imaging modalities-CT, MRI, ultrasound, radiography, and pathology. DrVD-Bench is explicitly structured to reflect the clinical reasoning workflow from modality recognition to lesion identification and diagnosis. We benchmark 19 VLMs, including general-purpose and medical-specific, open-source and proprietary models, and observe that performance drops sharply as reasoning complexity increases. While some models begin to exhibit traces of human-like reasoning, they often still rely on shortcut correlations rather than grounded visual understanding. DrVD-Bench offers a rigorous and structured evaluation framework to guide the development of clinically trustworthy VLMs.

Paperid: 5696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23308.pdf

Abstract:
Question answering (QA) systems are designed to answer natural language questions. Visual QA (VQA) and Spoken QA (SQA) systems extend the textual QA system to accept visual and spoken input respectively. This work aims to create a system that enables user interaction through both speech and images. That is achieved through the fusion of text, speech, and image modalities to tackle the task of spoken VQA (SVQA). The resulting multi-modal model has textual, visual, and spoken inputs and can answer spoken questions on images. Training and evaluating SVQA models requires a dataset for all three modalities, but no such dataset currently exists. We address this problem by synthesizing VQA datasets using two zero-shot TTS models. Our initial findings indicate that a model trained only with synthesized speech nearly reaches the performance of the upper-bounding model trained on textual QAs. In addition, we show that the choice of the TTS model has a minor impact on accuracy.

Paperid: 5697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19103.pdf

Abstract:
Spoken language conveys meaning not only through words but also through intonation, emotion, and emphasis. Sentence stress, the emphasis placed on specific words within a sentence, is crucial for conveying speaker intent and has been extensively studied in linguistics. In this work, we introduce WHISTRESS, an alignment-free approach for enhancing transcription systems with sentence stress detection. To support this task, we propose TINYSTRESS-15K, a scalable, synthetic training data for the task of sentence stress detection which resulted from a fully automated dataset creation process. We train WHISTRESS on TINYSTRESS-15K and evaluate it against several competitive baselines. Our results show that WHISTRESS outperforms existing methods while requiring no additional input priors during training or inference. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, WHISTRESS demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization across diverse benchmarks. Project page: https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/whistress.

Paperid: 5698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17614.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised pathology detection trains models on non-pathological data to flag deviations as pathologies, offering strong generalizability for identifying novel diseases and avoiding costly annotations. However, building reliable normality models requires vast healthy datasets, as hospitals' data is inherently biased toward symptomatic populations, while privacy regulations hinder the assembly of representative healthy cohorts. To address this limitation, we propose PathoSCOPE, a few-shot unsupervised pathology detection framework that requires only a small set of non-pathological samples (minimum 2 shots), significantly improving data efficiency. We introduce Global-Local Contrastive Loss (GLCL), comprised of a Local Contrastive Loss to reduce the variability of non-pathological embeddings and a Global Contrastive Loss to enhance the discrimination of pathological regions. We also propose a Pathology-informed Embedding Generation (PiEG) module that synthesizes pathological embeddings guided by the global loss, better exploiting the limited non-pathological samples. Evaluated on the BraTS2020 and ChestXray8 datasets, PathoSCOPE achieves state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods while maintaining computational efficiency (2.48 GFLOPs, 166 FPS).

Paperid: 5699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17272.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing demand for deploying large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications, improving their inference efficiency is crucial for sustainable and democratized access. However, retraining LLMs to meet new user-specific requirements is prohibitively expensive and environmentally unsustainable. In this work, we propose a practical and scalable alternative: composing efficient hybrid language models from existing pre-trained models. Our approach, Zebra-Llama, introduces a family of 1B, 3B, and 8B hybrid models by combining State Space Models (SSMs) and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) layers, using a refined initialization and post-training pipeline to efficiently transfer knowledge from pre-trained Transformers. Zebra-Llama achieves Transformer-level accuracy with near-SSM efficiency using only 7-11B training tokens (compared to trillions of tokens required for pre-training) and an 8B teacher. Moreover, Zebra-Llama dramatically reduces KV cache size -down to 3.9%, 2%, and 2.73% of the original for the 1B, 3B, and 8B variants, respectively-while preserving 100%, 100%, and >97% of average zero-shot performance on LM Harness tasks. Compared to models like MambaInLLaMA, X-EcoMLA, Minitron, and Llamba, Zebra-Llama consistently delivers competitive or superior accuracy while using significantly fewer tokens, smaller teachers, and vastly reduced KV cache memory. Notably, Zebra-Llama-8B surpasses Minitron-8B in few-shot accuracy by 7% while using 8x fewer training tokens, over 12x smaller KV cache, and a smaller teacher (8B vs. 15B). It also achieves 2.6x-3.8x higher throughput (tokens/s) than MambaInLlama up to a 32k context length. We will release code and model checkpoints upon acceptance.

Paperid: 5700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15877.pdf

Abstract:
While an image is worth more than a thousand words, only a few provide crucial information for a given task and thus should be focused on. In light of this, ideal text-to-image (T2I) retrievers should prioritize specific visual attributes relevant to queries. To evaluate current retrievers on handling attribute-focused queries, we build COCO-Facet, a COCO-based benchmark with 9,112 queries about diverse attributes of interest. We find that CLIP-like retrievers, which are widely adopted due to their efficiency and zero-shot ability, have poor and imbalanced performance, possibly because their image embeddings focus on global semantics and subjects while leaving out other details. Notably, we reveal that even recent Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based, stronger retrievers with a larger output dimension struggle with this limitation. Hence, we hypothesize that retrieving with general image embeddings is suboptimal for performing such queries. As a solution, we propose to use promptable image embeddings enabled by these multimodal retrievers, which boost performance by highlighting required attributes. Our pipeline for deriving such embeddings generalizes across query types, image pools, and base retriever architectures. To enhance real-world applicability, we offer two acceleration strategies: Pre-processing promptable embeddings and using linear approximations. We show that the former yields a 15% improvement in Recall@5 when prompts are predefined, while the latter achieves an 8% improvement when prompts are only available during inference.

Paperid: 5701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15191.pdf

Abstract:
Transfer learning under domain shift remains a fundamental challenge due to the divergence between source and target data manifolds. In this paper, we propose MAADA (Manifold-Aware Adversarial Data Augmentation), a novel framework that decomposes adversarial perturbations into on-manifold and off-manifold components to simultaneously capture semantic variation and model brittleness. We theoretically demonstrate that enforcing on-manifold consistency reduces hypothesis complexity and improves generalization, while off-manifold regularization smooths decision boundaries in low-density regions. Moreover, we introduce a geometry-aware alignment loss that minimizes geodesic discrepancy between source and target manifolds. Experiments on DomainNet, VisDA, and Office-Home show that MAADA consistently outperforms existing adversarial and adaptation methods in both unsupervised and few-shot settings, demonstrating superior structural robustness and cross-domain generalization.

Paperid: 5702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13586.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful tool for automating architecture design. One-Shot NAS techniques, such as DARTS, have gained substantial popularity due to their combination of search efficiency with simplicity of implementation. By design, One-Shot methods have high GPU memory requirements during the search. To mitigate this issue, we propose to prune the search space in an efficient automatic manner to reduce memory consumption and search time while preserving the search accuracy. Specifically, we utilise Zero-Shot NAS to efficiently remove low-performing architectures from the search space before applying One-Shot NAS to the pruned search space. Experimental results on the DARTS search space show that our approach reduces memory consumption by 81% compared to the baseline One-Shot setup while achieving the same level of accuracy.

Paperid: 5703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13173.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities across diverse tasks and languages. In this study, we focus on natural language understanding in three classical languages -- Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin -- to investigate the factors affecting cross-lingual zero-shot generalization. First, we explore named entity recognition and machine translation into English. While LLMs perform equal to or better than fine-tuned baselines on out-of-domain data, smaller models often struggle, especially with niche or abstract entity types. In addition, we concentrate on Sanskrit by presenting a factoid question-answering (QA) dataset and show that incorporating context via retrieval-augmented generation approach significantly boosts performance. In contrast, we observe pronounced performance drops for smaller LLMs across these QA tasks. These results suggest model scale as an important factor influencing cross-lingual generalization. Assuming that models used such as GPT-4o and Llama-3.1 are not instruction fine-tuned on classical languages, our findings provide insights into how LLMs may generalize on these languages and their consequent utility in classical studies.

Paperid: 5704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13126.pdf

Abstract:
Using LLMs not to predict plans but to formalize an environment into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has been shown to improve performance and control. Existing work focuses on fully observable environments; we tackle the more realistic and challenging partially observable environments that lack of complete, reliable information. We propose PDDLego+, a framework to iteratively formalize, plan, grow, and refine PDDL representations in a zero-shot manner, without needing access to any existing trajectories. On two textual simulated environments, we show that PDDLego+ improves goal reaching success and exhibits robustness against problem complexity. We also show that the domain knowledge captured after a successful trial can benefit future tasks.

Paperid: 5705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12681.pdf

Abstract:
Transfer learning across domains with distribution shift remains a fundamental challenge in building robust and adaptable machine learning systems. While adversarial perturbations are traditionally viewed as threats that expose model vulnerabilities, recent studies suggest that they can also serve as constructive tools for data augmentation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of adversarial data augmentation (ADA) in enhancing both robustness and adaptivity in transfer learning settings. We analyze how adversarial examples, when used strategically during training, improve domain generalization by enriching decision boundaries and reducing overfitting to source-domain-specific features. We further propose a unified framework that integrates ADA with consistency regularization and domain-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets -- including VisDA, DomainNet, and Office-Home -- demonstrate that our method consistently improves target-domain performance under both unsupervised and few-shot domain adaptation settings. Our results highlight a constructive perspective of adversarial learning, transforming perturbation from a destructive attack into a regularizing force for cross-domain transferability.

Paperid: 5706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12665.pdf

Abstract:
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in agriculture, such as pruning and harvesting, require robots to physically interact with tree structures to maneuver through cluttered foliage. Identifying whether the robot is contacting rigid or soft materials is critical for the downstream manipulation policy to be safe, yet vision alone is often insufficient due to occlusion and limited viewpoints in this unstructured environment. To address this, we propose a multi-modal classification framework that fuses vibrotactile (audio) and visual inputs to identify the contact class: leaf, twig, trunk, or ambient. Our key insight is that contact-induced vibrations carry material-specific signals, making audio effective for detecting contact events and distinguishing material types, while visual features add complementary semantic cues that support more fine-grained classification. We collect training data using a hand-held sensor probe and demonstrate zero-shot generalization to a robot-mounted probe embodiment, achieving an F1 score of 0.82. These results underscore the potential of audio-visual learning for manipulation in unstructured, contact-rich environments.

Paperid: 5707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11654.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding and predicting urban dynamics is crucial for managing transportation systems, optimizing urban planning, and enhancing public services. While neural network-based approaches have achieved success, they often rely on task-specific architectures and large volumes of data, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse urban scenarios. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning and generalization capabilities, yet their application to spatial-temporal urban dynamics remains underexplored. Existing LLM-based methods struggle to effectively integrate multifaceted spatial-temporal data and fail to address distributional shifts between training and testing data, limiting their predictive reliability in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we propose UrbanMind, a novel spatial-temporal LLM framework for multifaceted urban dynamics prediction that ensures both accurate forecasting and robust generalization. At its core, UrbanMind introduces Muffin-MAE, a multifaceted fusion masked autoencoder with specialized masking strategies that capture intricate spatial-temporal dependencies and intercorrelations among multifaceted urban dynamics. Additionally, we design a semantic-aware prompting and fine-tuning strategy that encodes spatial-temporal contextual details into prompts, enhancing LLMs' ability to reason over spatial-temporal patterns. To further improve generalization, we introduce a test time adaptation mechanism with a test data reconstructor, enabling UrbanMind to dynamically adjust to unseen test data by reconstructing LLM-generated embeddings. Extensive experiments on real-world urban datasets across multiple cities demonstrate that UrbanMind consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving high accuracy and robust generalization, even in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 5708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09859.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to learn new visual concepts from limited examples is a hallmark of human cognition. While traditional category learning models represent each example as an unstructured feature vector, compositional concept learning is thought to depend on (1) structured representations of examples (e.g., directed graphs consisting of objects and their relations) and (2) the identification of shared relational structure across examples through analogical mapping. Here, we introduce Probabilistic Schema Induction (PSI), a prototype model that employs deep learning to perform analogical mapping over structured representations of only a handful of examples, forming a compositional concept called a schema. In doing so, PSI relies on a novel conception of similarity that weighs object-level similarity and relational similarity, as well as a mechanism for amplifying relations relevant to classification, analogous to selective attention parameters in traditional models. We show that PSI produces human-like learning performance and outperforms two controls: a prototype model that uses unstructured feature vectors extracted from a deep learning model, and a variant of PSI with weaker structured representations. Notably, we find that PSI's human-like performance is driven by an adaptive strategy that increases relational similarity over object-level similarity and upweights the contribution of relations that distinguish classes. These findings suggest that structured representations and analogical mapping are critical to modeling rapid human-like learning of compositional visual concepts, and demonstrate how deep learning can be leveraged to create psychological models.

Paperid: 5709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08830.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising solution for joint training on distributed data while preserving privacy and addressing data silo issues. However, this emerging field, known as Federated Large Language Models (FLLM), faces significant challenges, including communication and computation overheads, heterogeneity, privacy and security concerns. Current research has primarily focused on the feasibility of FLLM, but future trends are expected to emphasize enhancing system robustness and security. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in FLLM, examining challenges from four critical perspectives: feasibility, robustness, security, and future directions. We present an exhaustive survey of existing studies on FLLM feasibility, introduce methods to enhance robustness in the face of resource, data, and task heterogeneity, and analyze novel risks associated with this integration, including privacy threats and security challenges. We also review the latest developments in defense mechanisms and explore promising future research directions, such as few-shot learning, machine unlearning, and IP protection. This survey highlights the pressing need for further research to enhance system robustness and security while addressing the unique challenges posed by the integration of FL and LLM.

Paperid: 5710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08194.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in integrating tactile sensing with vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for robotic multimodal perception. However, existing tactile descriptions remain limited to superficial attributes like texture, neglecting critical contact states essential for robotic manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose CLTP, an intuitive and effective language tactile pretraining framework that aligns tactile 3D point clouds with natural language in various contact scenarios, thus enabling contact-state-aware tactile language understanding for contact-rich manipulation tasks. We first collect a novel dataset of 50k+ tactile 3D point cloud-language pairs, where descriptions explicitly capture multidimensional contact states (e.g., contact location, shape, and force) from the tactile sensor's perspective. CLTP leverages a pre-aligned and frozen vision-language feature space to bridge holistic textual and tactile modalities. Experiments validate its superiority in three downstream tasks: zero-shot 3D classification, contact state classification, and tactile 3D large language model (LLM) interaction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to align tactile and language representations from the contact state perspective for manipulation tasks, providing great potential for tactile-language-action model learning. Code and datasets are open-sourced at https://sites.google.com/view/cltp/.

Paperid: 5711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07853.pdf

Abstract:
Road crashes claim over 1.3 million lives annually worldwide and incur global economic losses exceeding \$1.8 trillion. Such profound societal and financial impacts underscore the urgent need for road safety research that uncovers crash mechanisms and delivers actionable insights. Conventional statistical models and tree ensemble approaches typically rely on structured crash data, overlooking contextual nuances and struggling to capture complex relationships and underlying semantics. Moreover, these approaches tend to incur significant information loss, particularly in narrative elements related to multi-vehicle interactions, crash progression, and rare event characteristics. This study presents CrashSage, a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-centered framework designed to advance crash analysis and modeling through four key innovations. First, we introduce a tabular-to-text transformation strategy paired with relational data integration schema, enabling the conversion of raw, heterogeneous crash data into enriched, structured textual narratives that retain essential structural and relational context. Second, we apply context-aware data augmentation using a base LLM model to improve narrative coherence while preserving factual integrity. Third, we fine-tune the LLaMA3-8B model for crash severity inference, demonstrating superior performance over baseline approaches, including zero-shot, zero-shot with chain-of-thought prompting, and few-shot learning, with multiple models (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA3-70B). Finally, we employ a gradient-based explainability technique to elucidate model decisions at both the individual crash level and across broader risk factor dimensions. This interpretability mechanism enhances transparency and enables targeted road safety interventions by providing deeper insights into the most influential factors.

Paperid: 5712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05759.pdf

Abstract:
In low-light environments, the performance of computer vision algorithms often deteriorates significantly, adversely affecting key vision tasks such as segmentation, detection, and classification. With the rapid advancement of deep learning, its application to low-light image processing has attracted widespread attention and seen significant progress in recent years. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically examine how recent deep-learning-based low-light image enhancement methods function and evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing downstream vision tasks. To address this gap, this review provides detailed elaboration on how various recent approaches (from 2020) operate and their enhancement mechanisms, supplemented with clear illustrations. It also investigates the impact of different enhancement techniques on subsequent vision tasks, critically analyzing their strengths and limitations. Our review found that image enhancement improved the performance of downstream vision tasks to varying degrees. Although supervised methods often produced images with high perceptual quality, they typically produced modest improvements in vision tasks. In contrast, zero-shot learning, despite achieving lower scores in image quality metrics, showed consistently boosted performance across various vision tasks. These suggest a disconnect between image quality metrics and those evaluating vision task performance. Additionally, unsupervised domain adaptation techniques demonstrated significant gains in segmentation tasks, highlighting their potential in practical low-light scenarios where labelled data is scarce. Observed limitations of existing studies are analyzed, and directions for future research are proposed. This review serves as a useful reference for determining low-light image enhancement techniques and optimizing vision task performance in low-light conditions.

Paperid: 5713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20408.pdf

Abstract:
The Boltzmann equation, a fundamental model in kinetic theory, describes the evolution of particle distribution functions through a nonlinear, high-dimensional collision operator. However, its numerical solution remains computationally demanding, particularly for inelastic collisions and high-dimensional velocity domains. In this work, we propose the Fourier Neural Spectral Network (FourierSpecNet), a hybrid framework that integrates the Fourier spectral method with deep learning to approximate the collision operator in Fourier space efficiently. FourierSpecNet achieves resolution-invariant learning and supports zero-shot super-resolution, enabling accurate predictions at unseen resolutions without retraining. Beyond empirical validation, we establish a consistency result showing that the trained operator converges to the spectral solution as the discretization is refined. We evaluate our method on several benchmark cases, including Maxwellian and hard-sphere molecular models, as well as inelastic collision scenarios. The results demonstrate that FourierSpecNet offers competitive accuracy while significantly reducing computational cost compared to traditional spectral solvers. Our approach provides a robust and scalable alternative for solving the Boltzmann equation across both elastic and inelastic regimes.

Paperid: 5714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17974.pdf

Abstract:
Hope is a complex and underexplored emotional state that plays a significant role in education, mental health, and social interaction. Unlike basic emotions, hope manifests in nuanced forms ranging from grounded optimism to exaggerated wishfulness or sarcasm, making it difficult for Natural Language Processing systems to detect accurately. This study introduces PolyHope V2, a multilingual, fine-grained hope speech dataset comprising over 30,000 annotated tweets in English and Spanish. This resource distinguishes between four hope subtypes Generalized, Realistic, Unrealistic, and Sarcastic and enhances existing datasets by explicitly labeling sarcastic instances. We benchmark multiple pretrained transformer models and compare them with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT 4 and Llama 3 under zero-shot and few-shot regimes. Our findings show that fine-tuned transformers outperform prompt-based LLMs, especially in distinguishing nuanced hope categories and sarcasm. Through qualitative analysis and confusion matrices, we highlight systematic challenges in separating closely related hope subtypes. The dataset and results provide a robust foundation for future emotion recognition tasks that demand greater semantic and contextual sensitivity across languages.

Paperid: 5715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15470.pdf

Abstract:
Distinguishing between real and AI-generated images, commonly referred to as 'image detection', presents a timely and significant challenge. Despite extensive research in the (semi-)supervised regime, zero-shot and few-shot solutions have only recently emerged as promising alternatives. Their main advantage is in alleviating the ongoing data maintenance, which quickly becomes outdated due to advances in generative technologies. We identify two main gaps: (1) a lack of theoretical grounding for the methods, and (2) significant room for performance improvements in zero-shot and few-shot regimes. Our approach is founded on understanding and quantifying the biases inherent in generated content, where we use these quantities as criteria for characterizing generated images. Specifically, we explore the biases of the implicit probability manifold, captured by a pre-trained diffusion model. Through score-function analysis, we approximate the curvature, gradient, and bias towards points on the probability manifold, establishing criteria for detection in the zero-shot regime. We further extend our contribution to the few-shot setting by employing a mixture-of-experts methodology. Empirical results across 20 generative models demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. This work advances the theoretical understanding and practical usage of generated content biases through the lens of manifold analysis.

Paperid: 5716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14704.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods have recently become more prominent, serving as a core element in safety-critical autonomous systems. One major purpose of OOD detection is to reject invalid inputs that could lead to unpredictable errors and compromise safety. Due to the cost of labeled data, recent works have investigated the feasibility of self-supervised learning (SSL) OOD detection, unlabeled OOD detection, and zero shot OOD detection. In this work, we identify a set of conditions for a theoretical guarantee of failure in unlabeled OOD detection algorithms from an information-theoretic perspective. These conditions are present in all OOD tasks dealing with real-world data: I) we provide theoretical proof of unlabeled OOD detection failure when there exists zero mutual information between the learning objective and the in-distribution labels, a.k.a. 'label blindness', II) we define a new OOD task - Adjacent OOD detection - that tests for label blindness and accounts for a previously ignored safety gap in all OOD detection benchmarks, and III) we perform experiments demonstrating that existing unlabeled OOD methods fail under conditions suggested by our label blindness theory and analyze the implications for future research in unlabeled OOD methods.

Paperid: 5717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13179.pdf

Abstract:
Object 6D pose estimation is a critical challenge in robotics, particularly for manipulation tasks. While prior research combining visual and tactile (visuotactile) information has shown promise, these approaches often struggle with generalization due to the limited availability of visuotactile data. In this paper, we introduce ViTa-Zero, a zero-shot visuotactile pose estimation framework. Our key innovation lies in leveraging a visual model as its backbone and performing feasibility checking and test-time optimization based on physical constraints derived from tactile and proprioceptive observations. Specifically, we model the gripper-object interaction as a spring-mass system, where tactile sensors induce attractive forces, and proprioception generates repulsive forces. We validate our framework through experiments on a real-world robot setup, demonstrating its effectiveness across representative visual backbones and manipulation scenarios, including grasping, object picking, and bimanual handover. Compared to the visual models, our approach overcomes some drastic failure modes while tracking the in-hand object pose. In our experiments, our approach shows an average increase of 55% in AUC of ADD-S and 60% in ADD, along with an 80% lower position error compared to FoundationPose.

Paperid: 5718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09387.pdf

Abstract:
Humans are sensitive to suspicious coincidences when generalizing inductively over data, as they make assumptions as to how the data was sampled. This results in smaller, more specific hypotheses being favored over more general ones. For instance, when provided the set {Austin, Dallas, Houston}, one is more likely to think that this is sampled from "Texas Cities" over "US Cities" even though both are compatible. Suspicious coincidence is strongly connected to pragmatic reasoning, and can serve as a testbed to analyze systems on their sensitivity towards the communicative goals of the task (i.e., figuring out the true category underlying the data). In this paper, we analyze whether suspicious coincidence effects are reflected in language models' (LMs) behavior. We do so in the context of two domains: 1) the number game, where humans made judgments of whether a number (e.g., 4) fits a list of given numbers (e.g., 16, 32, 2); and 2) by extending the number game setup to prominent cities. For both domains, the data is compatible with multiple hypotheses and we study which hypothesis is most consistent with the models' behavior. On analyzing five models, we do not find strong evidence for suspicious coincidences in LMs' zero-shot behavior. However, when provided access to the hypotheses space via chain-of-thought or explicit prompting, LMs start to show an effect resembling suspicious coincidences, sometimes even showing effects consistent with humans. Our study suggests that inductive reasoning behavior in LMs can be enhanced with explicit access to the hypothesis landscape.

Paperid: 5719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08818.pdf

Abstract:
Using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) as the backbone for time series prediction has recently gained significant research interest. However, the effectiveness of LLM backbones in this domain remains a topic of debate. Based on thorough empirical analyses, we observe that training and testing LLM-based models on small datasets often leads to the Encoder and Decoder becoming overly adapted to the dataset, thereby obscuring the true predictive capabilities of the LLM backbone. To investigate the genuine potential of LLMs in time series prediction, we introduce three pre-training models with identical architectures but different pre-training strategies. Thereby, large-scale pre-training allows us to create unbiased Encoder and Decoder components tailored to the LLM backbone. Through controlled experiments, we evaluate the zero-shot and few-shot prediction performance of the LLM, offering insights into its capabilities. Extensive experiments reveal that although the LLM backbone demonstrates some promise, its forecasting performance is limited. Our source code is publicly available in the anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM4TS-0B5C.

Paperid: 5720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08792.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.

Paperid: 5721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08548.pdf

Abstract:
In remote sensing, multi-modal data from various sensors capturing the same scene offers rich opportunities, but learning a unified representation across these modalities remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods have often been limited to single or dual-modality approaches. In this paper, we introduce COP-GEN-Beta, a generative diffusion model trained on optical, radar, and elevation data from the Major TOM dataset. What sets COP-GEN-Beta apart is its ability to map any subset of modalities to any other, enabling zero-shot modality translation after training. This is achieved through a sequence-based diffusion transformer, where each modality is controlled by its own timestep embedding. We extensively evaluate COP-GEN-Beta on thumbnail images from the Major TOM dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating high-quality samples. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the model's performance, highlighting its potential as a powerful pre-trained model for future remote sensing tasks.

Paperid: 5722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07927.pdf

Abstract:
Many low-dose CT imaging methods rely on supervised learning, which requires a large number of paired noisy and clean images. However, obtaining paired images in clinical practice is challenging. To address this issue, zero-shot self-supervised methods train denoising networks using only the information within a single image, such as ZS-N2N. However, these methods often employ downsampling operations that degrade image resolution. Additionally, the training dataset is inherently constrained to the image itself. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot low-dose CT imaging method based on sinogram flicking, which operates within a single image but generates many copies via random conjugate ray matching. Specifically, two conjugate X-ray pencil beams measure the same path; their expected values should be identical, while their noise levels vary during measurements. By randomly swapping portions of the conjugate X-rays in the sinogram domain, we generate a large set of sinograms with consistent content but varying noise patterns. When displayed dynamically, these sinograms exhibit a flickering effect due to their identical structural content but differing noise patterns-hence the term sinogram flicking. We train the network on pairs of sinograms with the same content but different noise distributions using a lightweight model adapted from ZS-NSN. This process is repeated to obtain the final results. A simulation study demonstrates that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches such as ZS-N2N.

Paperid: 5723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04471.pdf

Abstract:
Long video understanding has emerged as an increasingly important yet challenging task in computer vision. Agent-based approaches are gaining popularity for processing long videos, as they can handle extended sequences and integrate various tools to capture fine-grained information. However, existing methods still face several challenges: (1) they often rely solely on the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) without dedicated mechanisms to enhance reasoning in long video scenarios; and (2) they remain vulnerable to errors or noise from external tools. To address these issues, we propose a specialized chain-of-thought (CoT) process tailored for long video analysis. Our proposed CoT with plan-adjust mode enables the LLM to incrementally plan and adapt its information-gathering strategy. We further incorporate heuristic uncertainty estimation of both the LLM and external tools to guide the CoT process. This allows the LLM to assess the reliability of newly collected information, refine its collection strategy, and make more robust decisions when synthesizing final answers. Empirical experiments show that our uncertainty-aware CoT effectively mitigates noise from external tools, leading to more reliable outputs. We implement our approach in a system called VideoAgent2, which also includes additional modules such as general context acquisition and specialized tool design. Evaluation on three dedicated long video benchmarks (and their subsets) demonstrates that VideoAgent2 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art agent-based method, VideoAgent, by an average of 13.1% and achieves leading performance among all zero-shot approaches

Paperid: 5724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03589.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrain techniques, whether supervised or self-supervised, are widely used in deep learning to enhance model performance. In real-world clinical scenarios, different sets of magnetic resonance (MR) contrasts are often acquired for different subjects/cases, creating challenges for deep learning models assuming consistent input modalities among all the cases and between pretrain and finetune. Existing methods struggle to maintain performance when there is an input modality/contrast set mismatch with the pretrained model, often resulting in degraded accuracy. We propose an adaptive Vision Transformer (AdaViT) framework capable of handling variable set of input modalities for each case. We utilize a dynamic tokenizer to encode different input image modalities to tokens and take advantage of the characteristics of the transformer to build attention mechanism across variable length of tokens. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this architecture effectively transfers supervised pretrained models to new datasets with different input modality/contrast sets, resulting in superior performance on zero-shot testing, few-shot finetuning, and backward transferring in brain infarct and brain tumor segmentation tasks. Additionally, for self-supervised pretrain, the proposed method is able to maximize the pretrain data and facilitate transferring to diverse downstream tasks with variable sets of input modalities.

Paperid: 5725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02671.pdf

Abstract:
Fermi Problems (FPs) are mathematical reasoning tasks that require human-like logic and numerical reasoning. Unlike other reasoning questions, FPs often involve real-world impracticalities or ambiguous concepts, making them challenging even for humans to solve. Despite advancements in AI, particularly with large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, FPs remain relatively under-explored. This work conducted an exploratory study to examine the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in solving FPs. We first evaluated the overall performance of three advanced LLMs using a publicly available FP dataset. We designed prompts according to the recently proposed TELeR taxonomy, including a zero-shot scenario. Results indicated that all three LLMs achieved a fp_score (range between 0 - 1) below 0.5, underscoring the inherent difficulty of these reasoning tasks. To further investigate, we categorized FPs into standard and specific questions, hypothesizing that LLMs would perform better on standard questions, which are characterized by clarity and conciseness, than on specific ones. Comparative experiments confirmed this hypothesis, demonstrating that LLMs performed better on standard FPs in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

Paperid: 5726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01216.pdf

Abstract:
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains underdiagnosed in clinical settings, presenting opportunities for automated detection to identify patients. This study evaluates natural language processing approaches for detecting PTSD from clinical interview transcripts. We compared general and mental health-specific transformer models (BERT/RoBERTa), embedding-based methods (SentenceBERT/LLaMA), and large language model prompting strategies (zero-shot/few-shot/chain-of-thought) using the DAIC-WOZ dataset. Domain-specific end-to-end models significantly outperformed general models (Mental-RoBERTa AUPRC=0.675+/-0.084 vs. RoBERTa-base 0.599+/-0.145). SentenceBERT embeddings with neural networks achieved the highest overall performance (AUPRC=0.758+/-0.128). Few-shot prompting using DSM-5 criteria yielded competitive results with two examples (AUPRC=0.737). Performance varied significantly across symptom severity and comorbidity status with depression, with higher accuracy for severe PTSD cases and patients with comorbid depression. Our findings highlight the potential of domain-adapted embeddings and LLMs for scalable screening while underscoring the need for improved detection of nuanced presentations and offering insights for developing clinically viable AI tools for PTSD assessment.

Paperid: 5727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00473.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate thoughts under zero-shot or few-shot settings. However, zero-shot prompting always encounters low performance, and the superior performance of few-shot prompting hinges on the manual-crafted demonstrations. In this paper, we present RoSE (Reasoning with Orchestrated Streaming Experiences), a general framework for solving reasoning tasks that can self-improve without complex external efforts. To enable RoSE, we describe an architecture that extends an LLM to store all answered questions and their thoughts in a streaming experience pool then orchestrates helpful questions from the pool to assist in answering new questions. To set up a question-aware orchestration mechanism, RoSE first calculates the similarity of each question in the pool with a new test question. Since the solution to each answered question is not always correct, RoSE will sort the questions according to their similarity with the new question, and then uniformly divide them into multiple buckets. It finally extracts one question from each bucket to make these extracted questions more diverse. To make these extracted questions help RoSE answer new questions as much as possible, we introduce two other attributes of uncertainty and complexity for each question. RoSE will preferentially select the questions with low uncertainty and high complexity from each bucket. We evaluate the versatility of RoSE in various reasoning tasks, LLMs, and CoT methods.

Paperid: 5728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00150.pdf

Abstract:
Leveraging multi-center data for medical analytics presents challenges due to privacy concerns and data heterogeneity. While distributed approaches such as federated learning has gained traction, they remain vulnerable to privacy breaches, particularly in sensitive domains like medical imaging. Generative models, such as diffusion models, enhance privacy by synthesizing realistic data. However, they are prone to memorization, especially when trained on small datasets. This study proposes a decentralized few-shot generative model (DFGM) to synthesize brain tumor images while fully preserving privacy. DFGM harmonizes private tumor data with publicly shareable healthy images from multiple medical centers, constructing a new dataset by blending tumor foregrounds with healthy backgrounds. This approach ensures stringent privacy protection and enables controllable, high-quality synthesis by preserving both the healthy backgrounds and tumor foregrounds. We assess DFGM's effectiveness in brain tumor segmentation using a UNet, achieving Dice score improvements of 3.9% for data augmentation and 4.6% for fairness on a separate dataset.

Paperid: 5729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23507.pdf

Abstract:
Decentralized federated learning enables learning of data representations from multiple sources without compromising the privacy of the clients. In applications like medical image segmentation, where obtaining a large annotated dataset from a single source is a distressing problem, federated self-supervised learning can provide some solace. In this work, we push the limits further by exploring a federated self-supervised one-shot segmentation task representing a more data-scarce scenario. We adopt a pre-existing self-supervised few-shot segmentation framework CoWPro and adapt it to the federated learning scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to attempt a self-supervised few-shot segmentation task in the federated learning domain. Moreover, we consider the clients to be constituted of data from different modalities and imaging techniques like MR or CT, which makes the problem even harder. Additionally, we reinforce and improve the baseline CoWPro method using a fused dice loss which shows considerable improvement in performance over the baseline CoWPro. Finally, we evaluate this novel framework on a completely unseen held-out part of the local client dataset. We observe that the proposed framework can achieve performance at par or better than the FedAvg version of the CoWPro framework on the held-out validation dataset.

Paperid: 5730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21735.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring reliable software release decisions is critical in safety-critical domains such as automotive manufacturing. Release validation relies on large tabular datasets, yet manual analysis is slow, costly, and error-prone. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising automation potential, they face challenges in analytical reasoning, structured data handling, and ambiguity resolution. This paper introduces GateLens, an LLM-based system for analyzing tabular data in the automotive domain. GateLens translates natural language queries into Relational Algebra (RA) expressions and generates optimized Python code. Unlike traditional multi-agent or planning-based systems that can be slow, opaque, and costly to maintain, GateLens emphasizes speed, transparency, and reliability. Experimental results show that GateLens outperforms the existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) + Self-Consistency (SC) based system on real-world datasets, particularly in handling complex and ambiguous queries. Ablation studies confirm the essential role of the RA layer. Industrial deployment shows over 80% reduction in analysis time while maintaining high accuracy across test result interpretation, impact assessment, and release candidate evaluation. GateLens operates effectively in zero-shot settings without requiring few-shot examples or agent orchestration. This work advances deployable LLM system design by identifying key architectural features-intermediate formal representations, execution efficiency, and low configuration overhead-crucial for safety-critical industrial applications.

Paperid: 5731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21480.pdf

Abstract:
The use of omni-LLMs (large language models that accept any modality as input), particularly for multimodal cognitive state tasks involving speech, is understudied. We present OmniVox, the first systematic evaluation of four omni-LLMs on the zero-shot emotion recognition task. We evaluate on two widely used multimodal emotion benchmarks: IEMOCAP and MELD, and find zero-shot omni-LLMs outperform or are competitive with fine-tuned audio models. Alongside our audio-only evaluation, we also evaluate omni-LLMs on text only and text and audio. We present acoustic prompting, an audio-specific prompting strategy for omni-LLMs which focuses on acoustic feature analysis, conversation context analysis, and step-by-step reasoning. We compare our acoustic prompting to minimal prompting and full chain-of-thought prompting techniques. We perform a context window analysis on IEMOCAP and MELD, and find that using context helps, especially on IEMOCAP. We conclude with an error analysis on the generated acoustic reasoning outputs from the omni-LLMs.

Paperid: 5732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20421.pdf

Abstract:
Existing methods for the zero-shot detection of machine-generated text are dominated by three statistical quantities: log-likelihood, log-rank, and entropy. As language models mimic the distribution of human text ever closer, this will limit our ability to build effective detection algorithms. To combat this, we introduce a method for detecting machine-generated text that is entirely agnostic of the generating language model. This is achieved by targeting a defect in the way that decoding strategies, such as temperature or top-k sampling, normalize conditional probability measures. This method can be rigorously theoretically justified, is easily explainable, and is conceptually distinct from existing methods for detecting machine-generated text. We evaluate our detector in the white and black box settings across various language models, datasets, and passage lengths. We also study the effect of paraphrasing attacks on our detector and the extent to which it is biased against non-native speakers. In each of these settings, the performance of our test is at least comparable to that of other state-of-the-art text detectors, and in some cases, we strongly outperform these baselines.

Paperid: 5733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15778.pdf

Abstract:
In autonomous driving, open-ended question answering often suffers from unreliable evaluations because freeform responses require either complex metrics or subjective human judgment. To address this challenge, we introduce AutoDrive-QA, an automatic pipeline that converts existing driving QA datasets (including DriveLM, NuScenes-QA, and LingoQA) into a structured multiple-choice question (MCQ) format. This benchmark systematically assesses perception, prediction, and planning tasks, providing a standardized and objective evaluation framework. AutoDrive-QA employs an automated pipeline that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality, contextually relevant distractors based on domain-specific error patterns commonly found in autonomous driving scenarios. To evaluate both general capabilities and generalization performance, we test the benchmark on three public datasets and conduct zero-shot experiments on an unseen dataset. The zero-shot evaluations reveal that GPT-4V leads with 69.57% accuracy -- achieving 74.94% in Perception, 65.33% in Prediction, and 68.45% in Planning -- demonstrating that while all models excel in Perception, they struggle in Prediction. Consequently, AutoDrive-QA establishes a rigorous, unbiased standard for integrating and evaluating different vision-language models across various autonomous driving datasets, thereby improving generalization in this field. We release all the codes in the AutoDrive-QA GitHub Repository.

Paperid: 5734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14863.pdf

Abstract:
Video restoration (VR) aims to recover high-quality videos from degraded ones. Although recent zero-shot VR methods using pre-trained diffusion models (DMs) show good promise, they suffer from approximation errors during reverse diffusion and insufficient temporal consistency. Moreover, dealing with 3D video data, VR is inherently computationally intensive. In this paper, we advocate viewing the reverse process in DMs as a function and present a novel Maximum a Posterior (MAP) framework that directly parameterizes video frames in the seed space of DMs, eliminating approximation errors. We also introduce strategies to promote bilevel temporal consistency: semantic consistency by leveraging clustering structures in the seed space, and pixel-level consistency by progressive warping with optical flow refinements. Extensive experiments on multiple virtual reality tasks demonstrate superior visual quality and temporal consistency achieved by our method compared to the state-of-the-art.

Paperid: 5735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14713.pdf

Abstract:
Automated test generation holds great promise for alleviating the burdens of manual test creation. However, existing search-based techniques compromise on test readability, while LLM-based approaches are prohibitively expensive in practice. We present TestForge, an agentic unit testing framework designed to cost-effectively generate high-quality test suites for real-world code. Our key insight is to reframe LLM-based test generation as an iterative process. TestForge thus begins with tests generated via zero-shot prompting, and then continuously refines those tests based on feedback from test executions and coverage reports. We evaluate TestForge on TestGenEval, a real world unit test generation benchmark sourced from 11 large scale open source repositories; we show that TestForge achieves a pass@1 rate of 84.3%, 44.4% line coverage and 33.8% mutation score on average, outperforming prior classical approaches and a one-iteration LLM-based baseline. TestForge produces more natural and understandable tests compared to state-of-the-art search-based techniques, and offers substantial cost savings over LLM-based techniques (at $0.63 per file). Finally, we release a version of TestGenEval integrated with the OpenHands platform, a popular open-source framework featuring a diverse set of software engineering agents and agentic benchmarks, for future extension and development.

Paperid: 5736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13160.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomaly detection models aim to detect anomalies that deviate from what is expected. In open-world scenarios, the expected events may change as requirements change. For example, not wearing a mask is considered abnormal during a flu outbreak but normal otherwise. However, existing methods assume that the definition of anomalies is invariable, and thus are not applicable to the open world. To address this, we propose a novel open-world VAD paradigm with variable definitions, allowing guided detection through user-provided natural language at inference time. This paradigm necessitates establishing a robust mapping from video and textual definition to anomaly score. Therefore, we propose LaGoVAD (Language-guided Open-world VAD), a model that dynamically adapts anomaly definitions through two regularization strategies: diversifying the relative durations of anomalies via dynamic video synthesis, and enhancing feature robustness through contrastive learning with negative mining. Training such adaptable models requires diverse anomaly definitions, but existing datasets typically provide given labels without semantic descriptions. To bridge this gap, we collect PreVAD (Pre-training Video Anomaly Dataset), the largest and most diverse video anomaly dataset to date, featuring 35,279 annotated videos with multi-level category labels and descriptions that explicitly define anomalies. Zero-shot experiments on seven datasets demonstrate SOTA performance. Data and code will be released.

Paperid: 5737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12622.pdf

Abstract:
Precise cell classification is essential in biomedical diagnostics and therapeutic monitoring, particularly for identifying diverse cell types involved in various diseases. Traditional cell classification methods such as flow cytometry depend on molecular labeling which is often costly, time-intensive, and can alter cell integrity. To overcome these limitations, we present a label-free machine learning framework for cell classification, designed for real-time sorting applications using bright-field microscopy images. This approach leverages a teacher-student model architecture enhanced by knowledge distillation, achieving high efficiency and scalability across different cell types. Demonstrated through a use case of classifying lymphocyte subsets, our framework accurately classifies T4, T8, and B cell types with a dataset of 80,000 preprocessed images, accessible via an open-source Python package for easy adaptation. Our teacher model attained 98\% accuracy in differentiating T4 cells from B cells and 93\% accuracy in zero-shot classification between T8 and B cells. Remarkably, our student model operates with only 0.02\% of the teacher model's parameters, enabling field-programmable gate array (FPGA) deployment. Our FPGA-accelerated student model achieves an ultra-low inference latency of just 14.5~$Î¼$s and a complete cell detection-to-sorting trigger time of 24.7~$Î¼$s, delivering 12x and 40x improvements over the previous state-of-the-art real-time cell analysis algorithm in inference and total latency, respectively, while preserving accuracy comparable to the teacher model. This framework provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for lymphocyte classification, as well as a new SOTA real-time cell sorting implementation for rapid identification of subsets using in situ deep learning on off-the-shelf computing hardware.

Paperid: 5738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10981.pdf

Abstract:
Visual classifiers provide high-dimensional feature representations that are challenging to interpret and analyze. Text, in contrast, provides a more expressive and human-friendly interpretable medium for understanding and analyzing model behavior. We propose a simple, yet powerful method for reformulating any pretrained visual classifier so that it can be queried with free-form text without compromising its original performance. Our approach is label-free, data and compute-efficient, and is trained to preserve the underlying classifiers distribution and decision-making processes. Our method unlocks several zero-shot text interpretability applications for any visual classifier. We apply our method on 40 visual classifiers and demonstrate two primary applications: 1) building both label-free and zero-shot concept bottleneck models and therefore converting any visual classifier to be inherently-interpretable and 2) zero-shot decoding of visual features into natural language sentences. In both tasks we establish new state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing works and surpassing CLIP-based baselines with ImageNet-only trained classifiers, while using up to 400x fewer images and 400,000x less text during training.

Paperid: 5739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10568.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ARPG, a novel visual autoregressive model that enables randomized parallel generation, addressing the inherent limitations of conventional raster-order approaches, which hinder inference efficiency and zero-shot generalization due to their sequential, predefined token generation order. Our key insight is that effective random-order modeling necessitates explicit guidance for determining the position of the next predicted token. To this end, we propose a novel decoupled decoding framework that decouples positional guidance from content representation, encoding them separately as queries and key-value pairs. By directly incorporating this guidance into the causal attention mechanism, our approach enables fully random-order training and generation, eliminating the need for bidirectional attention. Consequently, ARPG readily generalizes to zero-shot inference tasks such as image inpainting, outpainting, and resolution expansion. Furthermore, it supports parallel inference by concurrently processing multiple queries using a shared KV cache. On the ImageNet-1K 256 benchmark, our approach attains an FID of 1.83 with only 32 sampling steps, achieving over a 30 times speedup in inference and a 75 percent reduction in memory consumption compared to representative recent autoregressive models at a similar scale.

Paperid: 5740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10509.pdf

Abstract:
Policies generated by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are difficult to explain to users, as they emerge from the interaction of complex reward structures and neural network representations. Consequently, analyzing and predicting agent behavior can be challenging, undermining user trust in real-world applications. To facilitate user understanding, current methods for global policy summarization typically rely on videos that demonstrate agent behavior in a subset of world states. However, users can only watch a limited number of demonstrations, constraining their understanding. Moreover, these methods place the burden of interpretation on users by presenting raw behaviors rather than synthesizing them into coherent patterns. To resolve these issues, we introduce SySLLM (Synthesized Summary using Large Language Models), advocating for a new paradigm of abstractive-textual policy explanations. By leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs)-which possess extensive world knowledge and pattern synthesis capabilities-SySLLM generates textual summaries that provide structured and comprehensible explanations of agent policies. SySLLM demonstrates that LLMs can interpret spatio-temporally structured descriptions of state-action trajectories from an RL agent and generate valuable policy insights in a zero-shot setting, without any prior knowledge or fine-tuning. Our evaluation shows that SySLLM captures key insights, such as goal preferences and exploration strategies, that were also identified by human experts. Furthermore, in a large-scale user study (with 200 participants), SySLLM summaries were preferred over demonstration-based summaries (HIGHLIGHTS) by a clear majority (75.5%) of participants.

Paperid: 5741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10357.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the feasibility of using text-to-image models in a zero-shot setup to generate images for taxonomy concepts. While text-based methods for taxonomy enrichment are well-established, the potential of the visual dimension remains unexplored. To address this, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for Taxonomy Image Generation that assesses models' abilities to understand taxonomy concepts and generate relevant, high-quality images. The benchmark includes common-sense and randomly sampled WordNet concepts, alongside the LLM generated predictions. The 12 models are evaluated using 9 novel taxonomy-related text-to-image metrics and human feedback. Moreover, we pioneer the use of pairwise evaluation with GPT-4 feedback for image generation. Experimental results show that the ranking of models differs significantly from standard T2I tasks. Playground-v2 and FLUX consistently outperform across metrics and subsets and the retrieval-based approach performs poorly. These findings highlight the potential for automating the curation of structured data resources.

Paperid: 5742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09443.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual, cross-task transfer is challenged by task-specific data scarcity, which becomes more severe as language support grows and is further amplified in vision-language models (VLMs). We investigate multilingual generalization in encoder-decoder transformer VLMs to enable zero-shot image captioning in languages encountered only in the translation task. In this setting, the encoder must learn to generate generalizable, task-aware latent vision representations to instruct the decoder via inserted cross-attention layers. To analyze scaling behavior, we train Florence-2 based and Gemma-2 based models (0.4B to 11.2B parameters) on a synthetic dataset using varying compute budgets. While all languages in the dataset have image-aligned translations, only a subset of them include image captions. Notably, we show that captioning can emerge using a language prefix, even when this language only appears in the translation task. We find that indirect learning of unseen task-language pairs adheres to scaling laws that are governed by the multilinguality of the model, model size, and seen training samples. Finally, we demonstrate that the scaling laws extend to downstream tasks, achieving competitive performance through fine-tuning in multimodal machine translation (Multi30K, CoMMuTE), lexical disambiguation (CoMMuTE), and image captioning (Multi30K, XM3600, COCO Karpathy).

Paperid: 5743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04405.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging are critical tasks for Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet their availability for low-resource languages (LRLs) like Bodo remains limited. This article presents a comparative empirical study investigating the effectiveness of Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experiment model for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of POS and NER tagging to Bodo. We explore two distinct methodologies: (1) direct translation of English sentences to Bodo followed by tag transfer, and (2) prompt-based tag transfer on parallel English-Bodo sentence pairs. Both methods leverage the machine translation and cross-lingual understanding capabilities of Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experiment to project English POS and NER annotations onto Bodo text in CONLL-2003 format. Our findings reveal the capabilities and limitations of each approach, demonstrating that while both methods show promise for bootstrapping Bodo NLP, prompt-based transfer exhibits superior performance, particularly for NER. We provide a detailed analysis of the results, highlighting the impact of translation quality, grammatical divergences, and the inherent challenges of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. The article concludes by discussing future research directions, emphasizing the need for hybrid approaches, few-shot fine-tuning, and the development of dedicated Bodo NLP resources to achieve high-accuracy POS and NER tagging for this low-resource language.

Paperid: 5744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04118.pdf

Abstract:
We present TimeFound, an encoder-decoder transformer-based time series foundation model for out-of-the-box zero-shot forecasting. To handle time series data from various domains, TimeFound employs a multi-resolution patching strategy to capture complex temporal patterns at multiple scales. We pre-train our model with two sizes (200M and 710M parameters) on a large time-series corpus comprising both real-world and synthetic datasets. Over a collection of unseen datasets across diverse domains and forecasting horizons, our empirical evaluations suggest that TimeFound can achieve superior or competitive zero-shot forecasting performance, compared to state-of-the-art time series foundation models.

Paperid: 5745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01169.pdf

Abstract:
Ephemeral gullies are a primary cause of soil erosion and their reliable, accurate, and early detection will facilitate significant improvements in the sustainability of global agricultural systems. In our view, prior research has not successfully addressed automated detection of ephemeral gullies from remotely sensed images, so for the first time, we present and evaluate three successful pipelines for ephemeral gully detection. Our pipelines utilize remotely sensed images, acquired from specific agricultural areas over a period of time. The pipelines were tested with various choices of Visual Language Models (VLMs), and they classified the images based on the presence of ephemeral gullies with accuracy higher than 70% and a F1-score close to 80% for positive gully detection. Additionally, we developed the first public dataset for ephemeral gully detection, labeled by a team of soil- and plant-science experts. To evaluate the proposed pipelines, we employed a variety of zero-shot classification methods based on State-of-the-Art (SOTA) open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In addition to that, we compare the same pipelines with a transfer learning approach. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the detection pipelines and to analyze the impact of hyperparameter changes in their performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed zero-shot classification pipelines are highly effective in detecting ephemeral gullies in a scenario where classification datasets are scarce.

Paperid: 5746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01019.pdf

Abstract:
Despite significant progress in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), current approaches predominantly emphasize feature extraction and cross-modal comprehension, with limited attention to generating or transforming visual content. This gap hinders the model's ability to synthesize coherent and novel visual representations from textual prompts, thereby reducing the effectiveness of multi-modal learning. In this work, we propose MedUnifier, a unified VLP framework tailored for medical data. MedUnifier seamlessly integrates text-grounded image generation capabilities with multi-modal learning strategies, including image-text contrastive alignment, image-text matching and image-grounded text generation. Unlike traditional methods that reply on continuous visual representations, our approach employs visual vector quantization, which not only facilitates a more cohesive learning strategy for cross-modal understanding but also enhances multi-modal generation quality by effectively leveraging discrete representations. Our framework's effectiveness is evidenced by the experiments on established benchmarks, including uni-modal tasks (supervised fine-tuning), cross-modal tasks (image-text retrieval and zero-shot image classification), and multi-modal tasks (medical report generation, image synthesis), where it achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. MedUnifier also offers a highly adaptable tool for a wide range of language and vision tasks in healthcare, marking advancement toward the development of a generalizable AI model for medical applications.

Paperid: 5747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20678.pdf

Abstract:
In this work we study Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG), a challenging task of localizing subjects spatio-temporally in videos using only textual queries and no bounding box supervision. Inspired by recent advances in vision-language foundation models, we investigate their utility for WSTVG, leveraging their zero-shot grounding capabilities. However, we find that a simple adaptation lacks essential spatio-temporal grounding abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tubelet Referral Grounding (TRG), which connects textual queries to tubelets to enable spatio-temporal predictions. Despite its promise, TRG struggles with compositional action understanding and dense scene scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose STPro, a novel progressive learning framework with two key modules: (1) Sub-Action Temporal Curriculum Learning (SA-TCL), which incrementally builds compositional action understanding, and (2) Congestion-Guided Spatial Curriculum Learning (CG-SCL), which adapts the model to complex scenes by spatially increasing task difficulty. STPro achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets, with improvements of 1.0% on VidSTG-Declarative and 3.0% on HCSTVG-v1.

Paperid: 5748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20603.pdf

Abstract:
We demonstrate that a deep learning emulator for chaotic systems can forecast phenomena absent from training data. Using the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky and beta-plane turbulence models, we evaluate the emulator through scenarios probing the fundamental phenomena of both systems: forecasting spontaneous relaminarisation, capturing initialisation of arbitrary chaotic states, zero-shot prediction of dynamics with parameter values outside of the training range, and characterisation of dynamical statistics from artificially restricted training datasets. Our results show that deep learning emulators can uncover emergent behaviours and rare events in complex systems by learning underlying mathematical rules, rather than merely mimicking observed patterns.

Paperid: 5749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20295.pdf

Abstract:
Handwritten text recognition (HTR) remains a challenging task, particularly for multi-page documents where pages share common formatting and contextual features. While modern optical character recognition (OCR) engines are proficient with printed text, their performance on handwriting is limited, often requiring costly labeled data for fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for transcribing multi-page handwritten documents in a zero-shot setting. We investigate various configurations of commercial OCR engines and MLLMs, utilizing the latter both as end-to-end transcribers and as post-processors, with and without image components. We propose a novel method, '+first page', which enhances MLLM transcription by providing the OCR output of the entire document along with just the first page image. This approach leverages shared document features without incurring the high cost of processing all images. Experiments on a multi-page version of the IAM Handwriting Database demonstrate that '+first page' improves transcription accuracy, balances cost with performance, and even enhances results on out-of-sample text by extrapolating formatting and OCR error patterns from a single page.

Paperid: 5750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19657.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful automatic alternative to manual design of a neural network. In the zero-shot version, a fast ranking function is used to compare architectures without training them. The outputs of the ranking functions often vary significantly due to different sources of randomness, including the evaluated architecture's weights' initialization or the batch of data used for calculations. A common approach to addressing the variation is to average a ranking function output over several evaluations. We propose taking into account the variation in a different manner, by viewing the ranking function output as a random variable representing a proxy performance metric. During the search process, we strive to construct a stochastic ordering of the performance metrics to determine the best architecture. Our experiments show that the proposed stochastic ordering can effectively boost performance of a search on standard benchmark search spaces.

Paperid: 5751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16940.pdf

Abstract:
The application of role-playing large language models (LLMs) is rapidly expanding in both academic and commercial domains, driving an increasing demand for high-precision role-playing models. Simultaneously, the rapid advancement of reasoning techniques has continuously pushed the performance boundaries of LLMs. This intersection of practical role-playing demands and evolving reasoning capabilities raises an important research question: "Can reasoning techniques enhance the role-playing capabilities of LLMs?" To address this, we conduct a comprehensive study using 6 role-playing benchmarks, 24 LLMs, and 3 distinct role-playing strategies, comparing the effectiveness of direct zero-shot role-playing, role-playing with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and role-playing using reasoning-optimized LLMs. Our findings reveal that CoT may reduce role-playing performance, reasoning-optimized LLMs are unsuitable for role-playing, reasoning ability disrupts the role-playing scaling law, large models still lack proficiency in advanced role-playing, and Chinese role-playing performance surpasses English role-playing performance. Furthermore, based on extensive experimental results, we propose two promising future research directions: Role-aware CoT for improving role-playing LLMs and Reinforcement Learning for role-playing LLMs, aiming to enhance the adaptability, consistency, and effectiveness of role-playing LLMs for both research and real-world applications.

Paperid: 5752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16815.pdf

Abstract:
Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) is a crucial task in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), aimed at retrieving and matching the same vehicle across different surveillance cameras. Numerous studies have explored methods to enhance vehicle Re-ID by focusing on semantic enhancement. However, these methods often rely on additional annotated information to enable models to extract effective semantic features, which brings many limitations. In this work, we propose a CLIP-based Semantic Enhancement Network (CLIP-SENet), an end-to-end framework designed to autonomously extract and refine vehicle semantic attributes, facilitating the generation of more robust semantic feature representations. Inspired by zero-shot solutions for downstream tasks presented by large-scale vision-language models, we leverage the powerful cross-modal descriptive capabilities of the CLIP image encoder to initially extract general semantic information. Instead of using a text encoder for semantic alignment, we design an adaptive fine-grained enhancement module (AFEM) to adaptively enhance this general semantic information at a fine-grained level to obtain robust semantic feature representations. These features are then fused with common Re-ID appearance features to further refine the distinctions between vehicles. Our comprehensive evaluation on three benchmark datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of CLIP-SENet. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with 92.9% mAP and 98.7% Rank-1 on VeRi-776 dataset, 90.4% Rank-1 and 98.7% Rank-5 on VehicleID dataset, and 89.1% mAP and 97.9% Rank-1 on the more challenging VeRi-Wild dataset.

Paperid: 5753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16427.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision-language models have led to impressive progress in caption generation for images and short video clips. However, these models remain constrained by their limited temporal receptive fields, making it difficult to produce coherent and comprehensive captions for long videos. While several methods have been proposed to aggregate information across video segments, they often rely on supervised fine-tuning or incur significant computational overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework for long video captioning based on graph consolidation. Our approach first generates segment-level captions, corresponding to individual frames or short video intervals, using off-the-shelf visual captioning models. These captions are then parsed into individual scene graphs, which are subsequently consolidated into a unified graph representation that preserves both holistic context and fine-grained details throughout the video. A lightweight graph-to-text decoder then produces the final video-level caption. This framework effectively extends the temporal understanding capabilities of existing models without requiring any additional fine-tuning on long video datasets. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms existing LLM-based consolidation approaches, achieving strong zero-shot performance while substantially reducing computational costs.

Paperid: 5754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15950.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a method to optimize language model pre-training data mixtures through efficient approximation of the cross-entropy loss corresponding to each candidate mixture via a Mixture of Data Experts (MDE). We use this approximation as a source of additional features in a regression model, trained from observations of model loss for a small number of mixtures. Experiments with Transformer decoder-only language models in the range of 70M to 1B parameters on the SlimPajama dataset show that our method achieves significantly better performance than approaches that train regression models using only the mixture rates as input features. Combining this improved optimization method with an objective that takes into account cross-entropy on end task data leads to superior performance on few-shot downstream evaluations. We also provide theoretical insights on why aggregation of data expert predictions can provide good approximations to model losses for data mixtures.

Paperid: 5755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14913.pdf

Abstract:
Although multi-agent collaborative Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs in the Text-to-SQL task, their performance is still constrained by various factors. These factors include the incompleteness of the framework, failure to follow instructions, and model hallucination problems. To address these problems, we propose OpenSearch-SQL, which divides the Text-to-SQL task into four main modules: Preprocessing, Extraction, Generation, and Refinement, along with an Alignment module based on a consistency alignment mechanism. This architecture aligns the inputs and outputs of agents through the Alignment module, reducing failures in instruction following and hallucination. Additionally, we designed an intermediate language called SQL-Like and optimized the structured CoT based on SQL-Like. Meanwhile, we developed a dynamic few-shot strategy in the form of self-taught Query-CoT-SQL. These methods have significantly improved the performance of LLMs in the Text-to-SQL task. In terms of model selection, we directly applied the base LLMs without any post-training, thereby simplifying the task chain and enhancing the framework's portability. Experimental results show that OpenSearch-SQL achieves an execution accuracy(EX) of 69.3% on the BIRD development set, 72.28% on the test set, and a reward-based validity efficiency score (R-VES) of 69.36%, with all three metrics ranking first at the time of submission. These results demonstrate the comprehensive advantages of the proposed method in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Paperid: 5756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14791.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can quickly learn a new word from a few illustrative examples, and then systematically and flexibly use it in novel contexts. Yet the abilities of current language models for few-shot word learning, and methods for improving these abilities, are underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel method, Meta-training for IN-context learNing Of Words (Minnow). This method trains language models to generate new examples of a word's usage given a few in-context examples, using a special placeholder token to represent the new word. This training is repeated on many new words to develop a general word-learning ability. We find that training models from scratch with Minnow on human-scale child-directed language enables strong few-shot word learning, comparable to a large language model (LLM) pre-trained on orders of magnitude more data. Furthermore, through discriminative and generative evaluations, we demonstrate that finetuning pre-trained LLMs with Minnow improves their ability to discriminate between new words, identify syntactic categories of new words, and generate reasonable new usages and definitions for new words, based on one or a few in-context examples. These findings highlight the data efficiency of Minnow and its potential to improve language model performance in word learning tasks.

Paperid: 5757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14010.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction heads that find and copy relevant tokens, and function vector (FV) heads whose activations compute a latent encoding of the ICL task. To better understand which of the two distinct mechanisms drives ICL, we study and compare induction heads and FV heads in 12 language models. Through detailed ablations, we discover that few-shot ICL performance depends primarily on FV heads, especially in larger models. In addition, we uncover that FV and induction heads are connected: many FV heads start as induction heads during training before transitioning to the FV mechanism. This leads us to speculate that induction facilitates learning the more complex FV mechanism that ultimately drives ICL.

Paperid: 5758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13983.pdf

Abstract:
Individuals with language disorders often face significant communication challenges due to their limited language processing and comprehension abilities, which also affect their interactions with voice-assisted systems that mostly rely on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Despite advancements in ASR that address disfluencies, there has been little attention on integrating non-verbal communication methods, such as gestures, which individuals with language disorders substantially rely on to supplement their communication. Recognizing the need to interpret the latent meanings of visual information not captured by speech alone, we propose a gesture-aware ASR system utilizing a multimodal large language model with zero-shot learning for individuals with speech impairments. Our experiment results and analyses show that including gesture information significantly enhances semantic understanding. This study can help develop effective communication technologies, specifically designed to meet the unique needs of individuals with language impairments.

Paperid: 5759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13447.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of artificial intelligence in medical imaging has shown tremendous potential, yet the relationship between pre-trained knowledge and performance in cross-modality learning remains unclear. This study investigates how explicitly injecting medical knowledge into the learning process affects the performance of cross-modality classification, focusing on Chest X-ray (CXR) images. We introduce a novel Set Theory-based knowledge injection framework that generates captions for CXR images with controllable knowledge granularity. Using this framework, we fine-tune CLIP model on captions with varying levels of medical information. We evaluate the model's performance through zero-shot classification on the CheXpert dataset, a benchmark for CXR classification. Our results demonstrate that injecting fine-grained medical knowledge substantially improves classification accuracy, achieving 72.5\% compared to 49.9\% when using human-generated captions. This highlights the crucial role of domain-specific knowledge in medical cross-modality learning. Furthermore, we explore the influence of knowledge density and the use of domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) for caption generation, finding that denser knowledge and specialized LLMs contribute to enhanced performance. This research advances medical image analysis by demonstrating the effectiveness of knowledge injection for improving automated CXR classification, paving the way for more accurate and reliable diagnostic tools.

Paperid: 5760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12788.pdf

Abstract:
Despite progress in Arabic large language models, such as Jais and AceGPT, their evaluation on commonsense reasoning has largely relied on machine-translated datasets, which lack cultural depth and may introduce Anglocentric biases. Commonsense reasoning is shaped by geographical and cultural contexts, and existing English datasets fail to capture the diversity of the Arab world. To address this, we introduce ArabCulture, a commonsense reasoning dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), covering cultures of 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. The dataset was built from scratch by engaging native speakers to write and validate culturally relevant questions for their respective countries. ArabCulture spans 12 daily life domains with 54 fine-grained subtopics, reflecting various aspects of social norms, traditions, and everyday experiences. Zero-shot evaluations show that open-weight language models with up to 32B parameters struggle to comprehend diverse Arab cultures, with performance varying across regions. These findings highlight the need for more culturally aware models and datasets tailored to the Arabic-speaking world.

Paperid: 5761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12188.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-based Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has demonstrated effectiveness in solving NP-complete (NPC) problems by learning discrete diffusion models for solution generation, eliminating hand-crafted domain knowledge. Despite their success, existing NCO methods face significant challenges in both cross-scale and cross-problem generalization, and high training costs compared to traditional solvers. While recent studies on diffusion models have introduced training-free guidance approaches that leverage pre-defined guidance functions for conditional generation, such methodologies have not been extensively explored in combinatorial optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose a training-free inference time adaptation framework (DIFU-Ada) that enables both the zero-shot cross-problem transfer and cross-scale generalization capabilities of diffusion-based NCO solvers without requiring additional training. We provide theoretical analysis that helps understanding the cross-problem transfer capability. Our experimental results demonstrate that a diffusion solver, trained exclusively on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), can achieve competitive zero-shot transfer performance across different problem scales on TSP variants, such as Prize Collecting TSP (PCTSP) and the Orienteering Problem (OP), through inference time adaptation.

Paperid: 5762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10838.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable detection of speech deepfakes (spoofs) must remain effective when the distribution of spoofing attacks shifts. We frame the task as domain generalization and show that inserting Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters into every attention head of a self-supervised (SSL) backbone, then training only those adapters with Meta-Learning Domain Generalization (MLDG), yields strong zero-shot performance. The resulting model updates about 3.6 million parameters, roughly 1.1% of the 318 million updated in full fine-tuning, yet surpasses a fully fine-tuned counterpart on five of six evaluation corpora. A first-order MLDG loop encourages the adapters to focus on cues that persist across attack types, lowering the average EER from 8.84% for the fully fine-tuned model to 5.30% with our best MLDG-LoRA configuration. Our findings show that combining meta-learning with parameter-efficient adaptation offers an effective method for zero-shot, distribution-shift-aware speech deepfake detection.

Paperid: 5763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10662.pdf

Abstract:
Functional MRI measuring BOLD signal is an increasingly important imaging modality in studying brain functions and neurological disorders. It can be acquired in either a resting-state or a task-based paradigm. Compared to resting-state fMRI, task-based fMRI is acquired while the subject is performing a specific task designed to enhance study-related brain activities. Consequently, it generally has more informative task-dependent signals. However, due to the variety of task designs, it is much more difficult than in resting state to aggregate task-based fMRI acquired in different tasks to train a generalizable model. To resolve this complication, we propose a supervised task-aware network TA-GAT that jointly learns a general-purpose encoder and task-specific contextual information. The encoder-generated embedding and the learned contextual information are then combined as input to multiple modules for performing downstream tasks. We believe that the proposed task-aware architecture can plug-and-play in any neural network architecture to incorporate the prior knowledge of fMRI tasks into capturing functional brain patterns.

Paperid: 5764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09715.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying cognitive impairment within electronic health records (EHRs) is crucial not only for timely diagnoses but also for facilitating research. Information about cognitive impairment often exists within unstructured clinician notes in EHRs, but manual chart reviews are both time-consuming and error-prone. To address this issue, our study evaluates an automated approach using zero-shot GPT-4o to determine stage of cognitive impairment in two different tasks. First, we evaluated the ability of GPT-4o to determine the global Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) on specialist notes from 769 patients who visited the memory clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and achieved a weighted kappa score of 0.83. Second, we assessed GPT-4o's ability to differentiate between normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia on all notes in a 3-year window from 860 Medicare patients. GPT-4o attained a weighted kappa score of 0.91 in comparison to specialist chart reviews and 0.96 on cases that the clinical adjudicators rated with high confidence. Our findings demonstrate GPT-4o's potential as a scalable chart review tool for creating research datasets and assisting diagnosis in clinical settings in the future.

Paperid: 5765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08777.pdf

Abstract:
We present two LLM-based approaches to zero-shot source-and-target belief prediction on FactBank: a unified system that identifies events, sources, and belief labels in a single pass, and a hybrid approach that uses a fine-tuned DeBERTa tagger for event detection. We show that multiple open-sourced, closed-source, and reasoning-based LLMs struggle with the task. Using the hybrid approach, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on FactBank and offer a detailed error analysis. Our approach is then tested on the Italian belief corpus ModaFact.

Paperid: 5766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07562.pdf

Abstract:
Speech synthesis models convert written text into natural-sounding audio. While earlier models were limited to a single speaker, recent advancements have led to the development of zero-shot systems that generate realistic speech from a wide range of speakers using their voices as additional prompts. However, they still struggle with imitating non-studio-quality samples that differ significantly from the training datasets. In this work, we demonstrate that utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) allows us to successfully use even single recordings of spontaneous speech in noisy environments as prompts. This approach enhances speaker similarity by up to $30pp$ while preserving content and naturalness. It represents a significant step toward creating truly diverse speech corpora, that is crucial in all speech-related tasks.

Paperid: 5767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06846.pdf

Abstract:
Motivation: Proteins are of great significance in living organisms. However, understanding their functions encounters numerous challenges, such as insufficient integration of multimodal information, a large number of training parameters, limited flexibility of classification-based methods, and the lack of systematic evaluation metrics for protein Q&A systems. To tackle these issues, we propose the Prot2Chat framework. Results: We modified ProteinMPNN to encode protein sequence and structural information in a unified way. We used a large language model (LLM) to encode questions into vectors and developed a protein-text adapter to compress protein information into virtual tokens based on these vectors, achieving the early fusion of text and protein information. Finally, the same LLM reads the virtual tokens and the questions to generate answers. To optimize training efficiency, we froze the encoder and employed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) techniques for the LLM. Experiments on two datasets show that both automated metrics and expert evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our model, and zero-shot prediction results highlight its generalization ability. The models and codes are available at https://github.com/ wangzc1233/Prot2Chat. Contact: zqcao@suda.edu.cn or wangzc025@163.com Key words: Protein Q&A, Early-Fusion, LLM

Paperid: 5768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05923.pdf

Abstract:
We propose ARISE, a framework that iteratively induces rules and generates synthetic data for text classification. We combine synthetic data generation and automatic rule induction, via bootstrapping, to iteratively filter the generated rules and data. We induce rules via inductive generalisation of syntactic n-grams, enabling us to capture a complementary source of supervision. These rules alone lead to performance gains in both, in-context learning (ICL) and fine-tuning (FT) settings. Similarly, use of augmented data from ARISE alone improves the performance for a model, outperforming configurations that rely on complex methods like contrastive learning. Further, our extensive experiments on various datasets covering three full-shot, eight few-shot and seven multilingual variant settings demonstrate that the rules and data we generate lead to performance improvements across these diverse domains and languages.

Paperid: 5769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05512.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, large language model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have gradually become the mainstream in the industry due to their high naturalness and powerful zero-shot voice cloning capabilities.Here, we introduce the IndexTTS system, which is mainly based on the XTTS and Tortoise model. We add some novel improvements. Specifically, in Chinese scenarios, we adopt a hybrid modeling method that combines characters and pinyin, making the pronunciations of polyphonic characters and long-tail characters controllable. We also performed a comparative analysis of the Vector Quantization (VQ) with Finite-Scalar Quantization (FSQ) for codebook utilization of acoustic speech tokens. To further enhance the effect and stability of voice cloning, we introduce a conformer-based speech conditional encoder and replace the speechcode decoder with BigVGAN2. Compared with XTTS, it has achieved significant improvements in naturalness, content consistency, and zero-shot voice cloning. As for the popular TTS systems in the open-source, such as Fish-Speech, CosyVoice2, FireRedTTS and F5-TTS, IndexTTS has a relatively simple training process, more controllable usage, and faster inference speed. Moreover, its performance surpasses that of these systems. Our demos are available at https://index-tts.github.io.

Paperid: 5770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04797.pdf

Abstract:
Free-text explanations are expressive and easy to understand, but many datasets lack annotated explanation data, making it challenging to train models for explainable predictions. To address this, we investigate how to use existing explanation datasets for self-rationalization and evaluate models' out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. We fine-tune T5-Large and OLMo-7B models and assess the impact of fine-tuning data quality, the number of fine-tuning samples, and few-shot selection methods. The models are evaluated on 19 diverse OOD datasets across three tasks: natural language inference (NLI), fact-checking, and hallucination detection in abstractive summarization. For the generated explanation evaluation, we conduct a human study on 13 selected models and study its correlation with the Acceptability score (T5-11B) and three other LLM-based reference-free metrics. Human evaluation shows that the Acceptability score correlates most strongly with human judgments, demonstrating its effectiveness in evaluating free-text explanations. Our findings reveal: 1) few annotated examples effectively adapt models for OOD explanation generation; 2) compared to sample selection strategies, fine-tuning data source has a larger impact on OOD performance; and 3) models with higher label prediction accuracy tend to produce better explanations, as reflected by higher Acceptability scores.

Paperid: 5771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04098.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. However, VLMs are often limited by their use of pretrained image encoders, like CLIP, leading to image understanding errors that hinder overall performance. On top of that, real-world applications often require the model to be continuously adapted as new and often limited data continuously arrive. To address this, we propose LoRSU (Low-Rank Adaptation with Structured Updates), a robust and computationally efficient method for selectively updating image encoders within VLMs. LoRSU introduces structured and localized parameter updates, effectively correcting performance on previously error-prone data while preserving the model's general robustness. Our approach leverages theoretical insights to identify and update only the most critical parameters, achieving significant resource efficiency. Specifically, we demonstrate that LoRSU reduces computational overhead by over 25x compared to full VLM updates, without sacrificing performance. Experimental results on VQA tasks in the few-shot continual learning setting, validate LoRSU's scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness, making it a compelling solution for image encoder adaptation in resource-constrained environments.

Paperid: 5772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01465.pdf

Abstract:
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in chairs, get up from the ground, or roll on the floor. Contacting the environment using body parts other than feet and hands brings significant challenges in both model-predictive control and reinforcement learning-based methods. An unpredictable contact sequence makes it almost impossible for model-predictive control to plan ahead in real time. The success of the zero-shot sim-to-real reinforcement learning method for humanoids heavily depends on the acceleration of GPU-based rigid-body physical simulator and simplification of the collision detection. Lacking extreme torso movement of the humanoid research makes all other components non-trivial to design, such as termination conditions, motion commands and reward designs. To address these potential challenges, we propose a general humanoid motion framework that takes discrete motion commands and controls the robot's motor action in real time. Using a GPU-accelerated rigid-body simulator, we train a humanoid whole-body control policy that follows the high-level motion command in the real world in real time, even with stochastic contacts and extremely large robot base rotation and not-so-feasible motion command. More details at https://project-instinct.github.io

Paperid: 5773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01405.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce FourieRF, a novel approach for achieving fast and high-quality reconstruction in the few-shot setting. Our method effectively parameterizes features through an explicit curriculum training procedure, incrementally increasing scene complexity during optimization. Experimental results show that the prior induced by our approach is both robust and adaptable across a wide variety of scenes, establishing FourieRF as a strong and versatile baseline for the few-shot rendering problem. While our approach significantly reduces artifacts, it may still lead to reconstruction errors in severely under-constrained scenarios, particularly where view occlusion leaves parts of the shape uncovered. In the future, our method could be enhanced by integrating foundation models to complete missing parts using large data-driven priors.

Paperid: 5774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15755.pdf

Abstract:
The growing importance of textual and relational systems has driven interest in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for graph-structured data, particularly Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), where samples are represented by textual descriptions interconnected by edges. While research has largely focused on developing specialized graph LLMs through task-specific instruction tuning, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs solely through prompt design remains surprisingly absent. Without such a carefully crafted evaluation benchmark, most if not all, tailored graph LLMs are compared against general LLMs using simplistic queries (e.g., zero-shot reasoning with LLaMA), which can potentially camouflage many advantages as well as unexpected predicaments of them. To achieve more general evaluations and unveil the true potential of LLMs for graph tasks, we introduce Graph In-context Learning (GraphICL) Benchmark, a comprehensive benchmark comprising novel prompt templates designed to capture graph structure and handle limited label knowledge. Our systematic evaluation shows that general-purpose LLMs equipped with our GraphICL outperform state-of-the-art specialized graph LLMs and graph neural network models in resource-constrained settings and out-of-domain tasks. These findings highlight the significant potential of prompt engineering to enhance LLM performance on graph learning tasks without training and offer a strong baseline for advancing research in graph LLMs.

Paperid: 5775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14179.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid expansion of large language model (LLM) applications, there is an emerging shift in the role of LLM-based AI chatbots from serving merely as general inquiry tools to acting as professional service agents. However, current studies often overlook a critical aspect of professional service agents: the act of communicating in a manner consistent with their professional identities. This is of particular importance in the healthcare sector, where effective communication with patients is essential for achieving professional goals, such as promoting patient well-being by encouraging healthy behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose LAPI (LLM-based Agent with a Professional Identity), a novel framework for designing professional service agent tailored for medical question-and-answer (Q\&A) services, ensuring alignment with a specific professional identity. Our method includes a theory-guided task planning process that decomposes complex professional tasks into manageable subtasks aligned with professional objectives and a pragmatic entropy method designed to generate professional and ethical responses with low uncertainty. Experiments on various LLMs show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods, including few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, across key metrics such as fluency, naturalness, empathy, patient-centricity, and ROUGE-L scores. Additionally, the ablation study underscores the contribution of each component to the overall effectiveness of the approach.

Paperid: 5776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14051.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal models require aligned, shared embedding spaces. However, common CLIP-based approaches need large amounts of samples and do not natively support 3D or tabular data, both of which are crucial in the medical domain. To address these issues, we revisit CLIP-style alignment by training a domain-specific 3D foundation model as an image encoder and demonstrate that modality alignment is feasible with only 62 MRI scans. Our approach is enabled by a simple embedding accumulation strategy required for training in 3D, which scales the amount of negative pairs across batches in order to stabilize training. We perform a thorough evaluation of various design choices, including the choice of backbone and loss functions, and evaluate the proposed methodology on zero-shot classification and image-retrieval tasks. While zero-shot image-retrieval remains challenging, zero-shot classification results demonstrate that the proposed approach can meaningfully align the representations of 3D MRI with tabular data.

Paperid: 5777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12697.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot visual question answering (ZS-VQA), an emerged critical research area, intends to answer visual questions without providing training samples. Existing research in ZS-VQA has proposed to leverage knowledge graphs or large language models (LLMs), respectively, as external information sources to help VQA model comprehend images and questions. However, LLMs often struggle in accurately interpreting specific question meanings. Meanwhile, although knowledge graph has rich entity relationships, it is challenging to effectively connect entities to individual image content for visual question answers. In this paper, we propose a novel design to combine knowledge graph and LLMs for zero-shot visual question answer. Our approach uses LLMs' powerful understanding capabilities to accurately interpret image content through a strategic question search mechanism. Meanwhile, the knowledge graph is used to expand and connect users' queries to the image content for better visual question answering. An optimization algorithm is further used to determine the optimal weights for the loss functions derived from different information sources, towards a globally optimal set of candidate answers. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Both source code and benchmark data will be released for public access.

Paperid: 5778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12681.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we address the issue of static bias in zero-shot action recognition. Action recognition models need to represent the action itself, not the appearance. However, some fully-supervised works show that models often rely on static appearances, such as the background and objects, rather than human actions. This issue, known as static bias, has not been investigated for zero-shot. Although CLIP-based zero-shot models are now common, it remains unclear if they sufficiently focus on human actions, as CLIP primarily captures appearance features related to languages. In this paper, we investigate the influence of static bias in zero-shot action recognition with CLIP-based models. Our approach involves masking backgrounds, objects, and people differently during training and validation. Experiments with masking background show that models depend on background bias as their performance decreases for Kinetics400. However, for Mimetics, which has a weak background bias, masking the background leads to improved performance even if the background is masked during validation. Furthermore, masking both the background and objects in different colors improves performance for SSv2, which has a strong object bias. These results suggest that masking the background or objects during training prevents models from overly depending on static bias and makes them focus more on human action.

Paperid: 5779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12596.pdf

Abstract:
This expository paper introduces a simplified approach to image-based quality inspection in manufacturing using OpenAI's CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model adapted for few-shot learning. While CLIP has demonstrated impressive capabilities in general computer vision tasks, its direct application to manufacturing inspection presents challenges due to the domain gap between its training data and industrial applications. We evaluate CLIP's effectiveness through five case studies: metallic pan surface inspection, 3D printing extrusion profile analysis, stochastic textured surface evaluation, automotive assembly inspection, and microstructure image classification. Our results show that CLIP can achieve high classification accuracy with relatively small learning sets (50-100 examples per class) for single-component and texture-based applications. However, the performance degrades with complex multi-component scenes. We provide a practical implementation framework that enables quality engineers to quickly assess CLIP's suitability for their specific applications before pursuing more complex solutions. This work establishes CLIP-based few-shot learning as an effective baseline approach that balances implementation simplicity with robust performance, demonstrated in several manufacturing quality control applications.

Paperid: 5780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12244.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, deep neural networks for image inhomogeneity reduction have shown promising results. However, current methods with (un)supervised solutions require preparing a training dataset, which is expensive and laborious for data collection. In this work, we demonstrate a novel zero-shot deep neural networks, which requires no data for pre-training and dedicated assumption of the bias field. The designed light-weight CNN enables an efficient zero-shot adaptation for bias-corrupted image correction. Our method provides a novel solution to mitigate the biased corrupted image as iterative homogeneity refinement, which therefore ensures the considered issue can be solved easier with stable convergence of zero-shot optimization. Extensive comparison on different datasets show that the proposed method performs better than current data-free N4 methods in both efficiency and accuracy.

Paperid: 5781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08460.pdf

Abstract:
In the current era of Machine Learning, Transformers have become the de facto approach across a variety of domains, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Transformer-based solutions are the backbone of current state-of-the-art methods for language generation, image and video classification, segmentation, action and object recognition, among many others. Interestingly enough, while these state-of-the-art methods produce impressive results in their respective domains, the problem of understanding the relationship between vision and language is still beyond our reach. In this work, we propose a common ground between vision and language based on events in space and time in an explainable and programmatic way, to connect learning-based vision and language state of the art models and provide a solution to the long standing problem of describing videos in natural language. We validate that our algorithmic approach is able to generate coherent, rich and relevant textual descriptions on videos collected from a variety of datasets, using both standard metrics (e.g. Bleu, ROUGE) and the modern LLM-as-a-Jury approach.

Paperid: 5782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08165.pdf

Abstract:
Source code authorship attribution is important in software forensics, plagiarism detection, and protecting software patch integrity. Existing techniques often rely on supervised machine learning, which struggles with generalization across different programming languages and coding styles due to the need for large labeled datasets. Inspired by recent advances in natural language authorship analysis using large language models (LLMs), which have shown exceptional performance without task-specific tuning, this paper explores the use of LLMs for source code authorship attribution. We present a comprehensive study demonstrating that state-of-the-art LLMs can successfully attribute source code authorship across different languages. LLMs can determine whether two code snippets are written by the same author with zero-shot prompting, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.78, and can attribute code authorship from a small set of reference code snippets via few-shot learning, achieving MCC of 0.77. Additionally, LLMs show some adversarial robustness against misattribution attacks. Despite these capabilities, we found that naive prompting of LLMs does not scale well with a large number of authors due to input token limitations. To address this, we propose a tournament-style approach for large-scale attribution. Evaluating this approach on datasets of C++ (500 authors, 26,355 samples) and Java (686 authors, 55,267 samples) code from GitHub, we achieve classification accuracy of up to 65% for C++ and 68.7% for Java using only one reference per author. These results open new possibilities for applying LLMs to code authorship attribution in cybersecurity and software engineering.

Paperid: 5783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07919.pdf

Abstract:
Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) help households tailor their electricity usage based on power system signals such as energy prices. This technology helps to reduce energy bills and offers greater demand-side flexibility that supports the power system stability. However, residents who lack a technical background may find it difficult to use HEMSs effectively, because HEMSs require well-formatted parameterization that reflects the characteristics of the energy resources, houses, and users' needs. Recently, Large-Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an outstanding ability in language understanding. Motivated by this, we propose an LLM-based interface that interacts with users to understand and parameterize their ``badly-formatted answers'', and then outputs well-formatted parameters to implement an HEMS. We further use Reason and Act method (ReAct) and few-shot prompting to enhance the LLM performance. Evaluating the interface performance requires multiple user--LLM interactions. To avoid the efforts in finding volunteer users and reduce the evaluation time, we additionally propose a method that uses another LLM to simulate users with varying expertise, ranging from knowledgeable to non-technical. By comprehensive evaluation, the proposed LLM-based HEMS interface achieves an average parameter retrieval accuracy of 88\%, outperforming benchmark models without ReAct and/or few-shot prompting.

Paperid: 5784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07679.pdf

Abstract:
Set compositional and negated queries are crucial for expressing complex information needs and enable the discovery of niche items like Books about non-European monarchs. Despite the recent advances in LLMs, first-stage ranking remains challenging due to the requirement of encoding documents and queries independently from each other. This limitation calls for constructing compositional query representations that encapsulate logical operations or negations, and can be used to match relevant documents effectively. In the first part of this work, we explore constructing such representations in a zero-shot setting using vector operations between lexically grounded Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) representations. Specifically, we introduce Disentangled Negation that penalizes only the negated parts of a query, and a Combined Pseudo-Term approach that enhances LSRs ability to handle intersections. We find that our zero-shot approach is competitive and often outperforms retrievers fine-tuned on compositional data, highlighting certain limitations of LSR and Dense Retrievers. Finally, we address some of these limitations and improve LSRs representation power for negation, by allowing them to attribute negative term scores and effectively penalize documents containing the negated terms.

Paperid: 5785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02474.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing object detection is particularly challenging due to the high resolution, multi-scale features, and diverse ground object characteristics inherent in satellite and UAV imagery. These challenges necessitate more advanced approaches for effective object detection in such environments. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in remote sensing object detection, they typically rely on large amounts of labeled data. Acquiring sufficient labeled data, particularly for novel or rare objects, is both challenging and time-consuming in remote sensing scenarios, limiting the generalization capabilities of existing models. To address these challenges, few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to learn new classes from limited labeled examples. Building on this concept, few-shot object detection (FSOD) specifically targets object detection challenges in data-limited conditions. However, the generalization capability of FSOD models, particularly in remote sensing, is often constrained by the complex and diverse characteristics of the objects present in such environments. In this paper, we propose the Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection (GE-FSOD) model to improve the generalization capability in remote sensing FSOD tasks. Our model introduces three key innovations: the Cross-Level Fusion Pyramid Attention Network (CFPAN) for enhanced multi-scale feature representation, the Multi-Stage Refinement Region Proposal Network (MRRPN) for more accurate region proposals, and the Generalized Classification Loss (GCL) for improved classification performance in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot object detection in remote sensing.

Paperid: 5786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01608.pdf

Abstract:
Channel Autoencoders (CAEs) have shown significant potential in optimizing the physical layer of a wireless communication system for a specific channel through joint end-to-end training. However, the practical implementation of CAEs faces several challenges, particularly in realistic and dynamic scenarios. Channels in communication systems are dynamic and change with time. Still, most proposed CAE designs assume stationary scenarios, meaning they are trained and tested for only one channel realization without regard for the dynamic nature of wireless communication systems. Moreover, conventional CAEs are designed based on the assumption of having access to a large number of pilot signals, which act as training samples in the context of CAEs. However, in real-world applications, it is not feasible for a CAE operating in real-time to acquire large amounts of training samples for each new channel realization. Hence, the CAE has to be deployable in few-shot learning scenarios where only limited training samples are available. Furthermore, most proposed conventional CAEs lack fast adaptability to new channel realizations, which becomes more pronounced when dealing with a limited number of pilots. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Online Meta Learning channel AE (OML-CAE) framework for few-shot CAE scenarios with dynamic channels. The OML-CAE framework enhances adaptability to varying channel conditions in an online manner, allowing for dynamic adjustments in response to evolving communication scenarios. Moreover, it can adapt to new channel conditions using only a few pilots, drastically increasing pilot efficiency and making the CAE design feasible in realistic scenarios.

Paperid: 5787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01042.pdf

Abstract:
Video-based multimodal large language models (V-MLLMs) have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in video-text multimodal tasks. However, the transferability of adversarial videos to unseen models - a common and practical real-world scenario - remains unexplored. In this paper, we pioneer an investigation into the transferability of adversarial video samples across V-MLLMs. We find that existing adversarial attack methods face significant limitations when applied in black-box settings for V-MLLMs, which we attribute to the following shortcomings: (1) lacking generalization in perturbing video features, (2) focusing only on sparse key-frames, and (3) failing to integrate multimodal information. To address these limitations and deepen the understanding of V-MLLM vulnerabilities in black-box scenarios, we introduce the Image-to-Video MLLM (I2V-MLLM) attack. In I2V-MLLM, we utilize an image-based multimodal large language model (I-MLLM) as a surrogate model to craft adversarial video samples. Multimodal interactions and spatiotemporal information are integrated to disrupt video representations within the latent space, improving adversarial transferability. Additionally, a perturbation propagation technique is introduced to handle different unknown frame sampling strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate adversarial examples that exhibit strong transferability across different V-MLLMs on multiple video-text multimodal tasks. Compared to white-box attacks on these models, our black-box attacks (using BLIP-2 as a surrogate model) achieve competitive performance, with average attack success rate (AASR) of 57.98% on MSVD-QA and 58.26% on MSRVTT-QA for Zero-Shot VideoQA tasks, respectively.

Paperid: 5788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18907.pdf

Abstract:
Object manipulation is a common component of everyday tasks, but learning to manipulate objects from high-dimensional observations presents significant challenges. These challenges are heightened in multi-object environments due to the combinatorial complexity of the state space as well as of the desired behaviors. While recent approaches have utilized large-scale offline data to train models from pixel observations, achieving performance gains through scaling, these methods struggle with compositional generalization in unseen object configurations with constrained network and dataset sizes. To address these issues, we propose a novel behavioral cloning (BC) approach that leverages object-centric representations and an entity-centric Transformer with diffusion-based optimization, enabling efficient learning from offline image data. Our method first decomposes observations into an object-centric representation, which is then processed by our entity-centric Transformer that computes attention at the object level, simultaneously predicting object dynamics and the agent's actions. Combined with the ability of diffusion models to capture multi-modal behavior distributions, this results in substantial performance improvements in multi-object tasks and, more importantly, enables compositional generalization. We present BC agents capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks with novel compositions of objects and goals, including larger numbers of objects than seen during training. We provide video rollouts on our webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/ec-diffuser.

Paperid: 5789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15734.pdf

Abstract:
The biological brain has inspired multiple advances in machine learning. However, most state-of-the-art models in computer vision do not operate like the human brain, simply because they are not capable of changing or improving their decisions/outputs based on a deeper analysis. The brain is recurrent, while these models are not. It is therefore relevant to explore what would be the impact of adding recurrent mechanisms to existing state-of-the-art architectures and to answer the question of whether recurrency can improve existing architectures. To this end, we build on a feed-forward segmentation model and explore multiple types of recurrency for image segmentation. We explore self-organizing, relational, and memory retrieval types of recurrency that minimize a specific energy function. In our experiments, we tested these models on artificial and medical imaging data, while analyzing the impact of high levels of noise and few-shot learning settings. Our results do not validate our initial hypothesis that recurrent models should perform better in these settings, suggesting that these recurrent architectures, by themselves, are not sufficient to surpass state-of-the-art feed-forward versions and that additional work needs to be done on the topic.

Paperid: 5790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13732.pdf

Abstract:
The aim of multi-label few-shot image classification (ML-FSIC) is to assign semantic labels to images, in settings where only a small number of training examples are available for each label. A key feature of the multi-label setting is that an image often has several labels, which typically refer to objects appearing in different regions of the image. When estimating label prototypes, in a metric-based setting, it is thus important to determine which regions are relevant for which labels, but the limited amount of training data and the noisy nature of local features make this highly challenging. As a solution, we propose a strategy in which label prototypes are gradually refined. First, we initialize the prototypes using word embeddings, which allows us to leverage prior knowledge about the meaning of the labels. Second, taking advantage of these initial prototypes, we then use a Loss Change Measurement (LCM) strategy to select the local features from the training images (i.e. the support set) that are most likely to be representative of a given label. Third, we construct the final prototype of the label by aggregating these representative local features using a multi-modal cross-interaction mechanism, which again relies on the initial word embedding-based prototypes. Experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, NUS-WIDE, and iMaterialist show that our model substantially improves the current state-of-the-art.

Paperid: 5791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13714.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models have demonstrated exceptional performance in a variety of real-world applications. These successes are often attributed to strong base models that can generalize to novel tasks with limited supporting data while keeping prior knowledge intact. However, these impressive results are based on the availability of a large amount of high-quality data, which is often lacking in specialized biomedical applications. In such fields, models are usually developed with limited data that arrive incrementally with novel categories. This requires the model to adapt to new information while preserving existing knowledge. Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) methods offer a promising approach to addressing these challenges, but they also depend on strong base models that face the same aforementioned limitations. To overcome these constraints, we propose AnchorInv following the straightforward and efficient buffer-replay strategy. Instead of selecting and storing raw data, AnchorInv generates synthetic samples guided by anchor points in the feature space. This approach protects privacy and regularizes the model for adaptation. When evaluated on three public physiological time series datasets, AnchorInv exhibits efficient knowledge forgetting prevention and improved adaptation to novel classes, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 5792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13228.pdf

Abstract:
Molecular subtyping of cancer is recognized as a critical and challenging upstream task for personalized therapy. Existing deep learning methods have achieved significant performance in this domain when abundant data samples are available. However, the acquisition of densely labeled samples for cancer molecular subtypes remains a significant challenge for conventional data-intensive deep learning approaches. In this work, we focus on the few-shot molecular subtype prediction problem in heterogeneous and small cancer datasets, aiming to enhance precise diagnosis and personalized treatment. We first construct a new few-shot dataset for cancer molecular subtype classification and auxiliary cancer classification, named TCGA Few-Shot, from existing publicly available datasets. To effectively leverage the relevant knowledge from both tasks, we introduce a task-specific embedding-based meta-learning framework (TSEML). TSEML leverages the synergistic strengths of a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) approach and a prototypical network (ProtoNet) to capture diverse and fine-grained features. Comparative experiments conducted on the TCGA Few-Shot dataset demonstrate that our TSEML framework achieves superior performance in addressing the problem of few-shot molecular subtype classification.

Paperid: 5793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11139.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting simple mathematical expression from an observational dataset to describe complex natural phenomena is one of the core objectives of artificial intelligence (AI). This field is known as symbolic regression (SR). Traditional SR models are based on genetic programming (GP) or reinforcement learning (RL), facing well-known challenges, such as low efficiency and overfitting. Recent studies have integrated SR with large language models (LLMs), enabling fast zero-shot inference by learning mappings from millions of dataset-expression pairs. However, since the input and output are inherently different modalities, such models often struggle to converge effectively. In this paper, we introduce ViSymRe, a vision-guided multimodal SR model that incorporates the third resource, expression graph, to bridge the modality gap. Different from traditional multimodal models, ViSymRe is trained to extract vision, termed virtual vision, from datasets, without relying on the global availability of expression graphs, which addresses the essential challenge of visual SR, i.e., expression graphs are not available during inference. Evaluation results on multiple mainstream benchmarks show that ViSymRe achieves more competitive performance than the state-of-the-art dataset-only baselines. The expressions predicted by ViSymRe not only fit the dataset well but are also simple and structurally accurate, goals that SR models strive to achieve.

Paperid: 5794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10266.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection is crucial for fostering a human-centric Web by analyzing user-generated content to identify biases and harmful narratives that undermine trust. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing approaches treat stance detection as a classification problem, providing robust methodologies for modeling complex group interactions and advancing capabilities in natural language tasks. However, these methods often lack interpretability, limiting their ability to offer transparent and understandable justifications for predictions. This study adopts a generative approach, where stance predictions include explicit, interpretable rationales, and integrates them into smaller language models through single-task and multitask learning. We find that incorporating reasoning into stance detection enables the smaller model (FlanT5) to outperform GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance, achieving an improvement of up to 9.57%. Moreover, our results show that reasoning capabilities enhance multitask learning performance but may reduce effectiveness in single-task settings. Crucially, we demonstrate that faithful rationales improve rationale distillation into SLMs, advancing efforts to build interpretable, trustworthy systems for addressing discrimination, fostering trust, and promoting equitable engagement on social media.

Paperid: 5795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08746.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in diverse visual tasks but face challenges in document understanding, which requires fine-grained text processing. While typical visual tasks perform well with low-resolution inputs, reading-intensive applications demand high-resolution, resulting in significant computational overhead. Using OCR-extracted text in VLM prompts partially addresses this issue but underperforms compared to full-resolution counterpart, as it lacks the complete visual context needed for optimal performance. We introduce DocVLM, a method that integrates an OCR-based modality into VLMs to enhance document processing while preserving original weights. Our approach employs an OCR encoder to capture textual content and layout, compressing these into a compact set of learned queries incorporated into the VLM. Comprehensive evaluations across leading VLMs show that DocVLM significantly reduces reliance on high-resolution images for document understanding. In limited-token regimes (448$\times$448), DocVLM with 64 learned queries improves DocVQA results from 56.0% to 86.6% when integrated with InternVL2 and from 84.4% to 91.2% with Qwen2-VL. In LLaVA-OneVision, DocVLM achieves improved results while using 80% less image tokens. The reduced token usage allows processing multiple pages effectively, showing impressive zero-shot results on DUDE and state-of-the-art performance on MP-DocVQA, highlighting DocVLM's potential for applications requiring high-performance and efficiency.

Paperid: 5796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08009.pdf

Abstract:
Reconstructing high-fidelity fluid flow fields from sparse sensor measurements is vital for many science and engineering applications but remains challenging because of dimensional disparities between state and observational spaces. Due to such dimensional differences, the measurement operator becomes ill-conditioned and non-invertible, making the reconstruction of flow fields from sensor measurements extremely difficult. Although sparse optimization and machine learning address the above problems to some extent, questions about their generalization and efficiency remain, particularly regarding the discretization dependence of these models. In this context, deep operator learning offers a better solution as this approach models mappings between infinite-dimensional functional spaces, enabling superior generalization and discretization-independent reconstruction. We introduce FLRONet, a deep operator learning framework that is trained to reconstruct fluid flow fields from sparse sensor measurements. FLRONet employs a branch-trunk network architecture to represent the inverse measurement operator that maps sensor observations to the original flow field, a continuous function of both space and time. Validation performed on the CFDBench dataset has demonstrated that FLRONet consistently achieves high levels of reconstruction accuracy and robustness, even in scenarios where sensor measurements are inaccurate or missing. Furthermore, the operator learning approach endows FLRONet with the capability to perform zero-shot super-resolution in both spatial and temporal domains, offering a solution for rapid reconstruction of high-fidelity flow fields.

Paperid: 5797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07148.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Multiple Choice Reasoning via. Process of Elimination using Multi-Modal models, herein referred to as Multi-Modal Process of Elimination (MM-PoE). This novel methodology is engineered to augment the efficacy of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in multiple-choice visual reasoning tasks. Diverging from conventional approaches that evaluate each option independently, MM-PoE employs a dual-step scoring paradigm that initially identifies and excludes implausible choices, subsequently concentrating on the most probable remaining options. This method emulates human test-taking strategies, where individuals typically eliminate clearly incorrect answers prior to selecting the optimal response. Our empirical evaluations, conducted across three benchmark datasets, reveal that MM-PoE significantly improves both zero-shot and few-shot performance of contemporary state-of-the-art VLMs. Critically, this approach not only broadens the application of the elimination process to multi-modal contexts but also allows few-shot experiments, thereby addressing two principal limitations concerning usage of PoE only in zero-shot settings and only with a language-only framework. As a result, MM-PoE not only refines the reasoning capabilities of VLMs but also broadens their applicability to complex visual question-answering scenarios. All code and documentation supporting our work are available at https://pypi.org/project/mm-poe/, enabling researchers and practitioners to easily integrate and further develop these techniques.

Paperid: 5798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03966.pdf

Abstract:
Diversity in demonstration selection is critical for enhancing model generalization by enabling broader coverage of structures and concepts. Constructing appropriate demonstration sets remains a key research challenge. This paper introduces the Relevance-Diversity Enhanced Selection (RDES), an innovative approach that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks to optimize the selection of diverse reference demonstrations for tasks amenable to in-context learning (ICL), particularly text classification and reasoning, in few-shot prompting scenarios. RDES employs frameworks like Q-learning and a PPO-based variant to dynamically identify demonstrations that maximize both diversity (quantified by label distribution) and relevance to the task objective. This strategy ensures a balanced representation of reference data, leading to improved accuracy and generalization. Through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, including diverse reasoning tasks, and involving 14 closed-source and open-source LLMs, we demonstrate that RDES significantly enhances performance compared to ten established baselines. Our evaluation includes analysis of performance across varying numbers of demonstrations on selected datasets. Furthermore, we investigate incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which further boosts predictive performance. The results highlight the potential of RL for adaptive demonstration selection and addressing challenges in ICL.

Paperid: 5799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03105.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has revolutionized various fields, yet its efficacy is hindered by overfitting and the requirement of extensive annotated data, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios where limited samples are available. This paper introduces a novel approach to few-shot learning by employing a Residual Weight Masking Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (RWM-CGAN) for data augmentation. The proposed model integrates residual units within the generator to enhance network depth and sample quality, coupled with a weight mask regularization technique in the discriminator to improve feature learning from small-sample categories. This method addresses the core issues of robustness and generalization in few-shot learning by providing a controlled and clear augmentation of the sample space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RWM-CGAN not only expands the sample space effectively but also enriches the diversity and quality of generated samples, leading to significant improvements in detection and classification accuracy on public datasets. The paper contributes to the advancement of few-shot learning by offering a practical solution to the challenges posed by data scarcity and the need for rapid generalization to new tasks or categories.

Paperid: 5800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02690.pdf

Abstract:
Despite remarkable progress in image generation models, generating realistic hands remains a persistent challenge due to their complex articulation, varying viewpoints, and frequent occlusions. We present FoundHand, a large-scale domain-specific diffusion model for synthesizing single and dual hand images. To train our model, we introduce FoundHand-10M, a large-scale hand dataset with 2D keypoints and segmentation mask annotations. Our insight is to use 2D hand keypoints as a universal representation that encodes both hand articulation and camera viewpoint. FoundHand learns from image pairs to capture physically plausible hand articulations, natively enables precise control through 2D keypoints, and supports appearance control. Our model exhibits core capabilities that include the ability to repose hands, transfer hand appearance, and even synthesize novel views. This leads to zero-shot capabilities for fixing malformed hands in previously generated images, or synthesizing hand video sequences. We present extensive experiments and evaluations that demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our method.

Paperid: 5801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02279.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention in the field of natural language processing, revolutionizing numerous downstream tasks with powerful reasoning and generation abilities. For example, In-Context Learning (ICL) introduces a fine-tuning-free paradigm, allowing out-of-the-box LLMs to execute downstream tasks by analogy learning without any fine-tuning. Besides, in a fine-tuning-dependent paradigm where substantial training data exists, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), as the cost-effective methods, enable LLMs to achieve excellent performance comparable to full fine-tuning. However, these fascinating techniques employed by LLMs have not been fully exploited in the ABSA field. Previous works probe LLMs in ABSA by merely using randomly selected input-output pairs as demonstrations in ICL, resulting in an incomplete and superficial evaluation. In this paper, we shed light on a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in the ABSA field, involving 13 datasets, 8 ABSA subtasks, and 6 LLMs. Specifically, we design a unified task formulation to unify ``multiple LLMs for multiple ABSA subtasks in multiple paradigms.'' For the fine-tuning-dependent paradigm, we efficiently fine-tune LLMs using instruction-based multi-task learning. For the fine-tuning-free paradigm, we propose 3 demonstration selection strategies to stimulate the few-shot abilities of LLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve a new state-of-the-art performance compared to fine-tuned Small Language Models (SLMs) in the fine-tuning-dependent paradigm. More importantly, in the fine-tuning-free paradigm where SLMs are ineffective, LLMs with ICL still showcase impressive potential and even compete with fine-tuned SLMs on some ABSA subtasks.

Paperid: 5802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19638.pdf

Abstract:
With the ever-increasing number of news stories available online, classifying them by topic, regardless of the language they are written in, has become crucial for enhancing readers' access to relevant content. To address this challenge, we propose a teacher-student framework based on large language models (LLMs) for developing multilingual news classification models of reasonable size with no need for manual data annotation. The framework employs a Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) model as the teacher model to develop an IPTC Media Topic training dataset through automatic annotation of news articles in Slovenian, Croatian, Greek, and Catalan. The teacher model exhibits a high zero-shot performance on all four languages. Its agreement with human annotators is comparable to that between the human annotators themselves. To mitigate the computational limitations associated with the requirement of processing millions of texts daily, smaller BERT-like student models are fine-tuned on the GPT-annotated dataset. These student models achieve high performance comparable to the teacher model. Furthermore, we explore the impact of the training data size on the performance of the student models and investigate their monolingual, multilingual and zero-shot cross-lingual capabilities. The findings indicate that student models can achieve high performance with a relatively small number of training instances, and demonstrate strong zero-shot cross-lingual abilities. Finally, we publish the best-performing news topic classifier, enabling multilingual classification with the top-level categories of the IPTC Media Topic schema.

Paperid: 5803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19187.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding by harnessing the language abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrating modality-specific encoders. However, LMMs are plagued by hallucinations that limit their reliability and adoption. While traditional methods to detect and mitigate these hallucinations often involve costly training or rely heavily on external models, recent approaches utilizing internal model features present a promising alternative. In this paper, we critically assess the limitations of the state-of-the-art training-free technique, the logit lens, in handling generalized visual hallucinations. We introduce ContextualLens, a refined method that leverages contextual token embeddings from middle layers of LMMs. This approach significantly improves hallucination detection and grounding across diverse categories, including actions and OCR, while also excelling in tasks requiring contextual understanding, such as spatial relations and attribute comparison. Our novel grounding technique yields highly precise bounding boxes, facilitating a transition from Zero-Shot Object Segmentation to Grounded Visual Question Answering. Our contributions pave the way for more reliable and interpretable multimodal models.

Paperid: 5804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18980.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot slot filling is a well-established subtask of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). However, most existing methods primarily focus on single-turn text data, overlooking the unique complexities of conversational dialogue. Conversational data is highly dynamic, often involving abrupt topic shifts, interruptions, and implicit references that make it difficult to directly apply zero-shot slot filling techniques, even with the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This paper addresses these challenges by proposing strategies for automatic data annotation with slot induction and black-box knowledge distillation (KD) from a teacher LLM to a smaller model, outperforming vanilla LLMs on internal datasets by 26% absolute increase in F1 score. Additionally, we introduce an efficient system architecture for call center product settings that surpasses off-the-shelf extractive models by 34% relative F1 score, enabling near real-time inference on dialogue streams with higher accuracy, while preserving low latency.

Paperid: 5805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11247.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose ZeFaV - a zero-shot based fact-checking verification framework to enhance the performance on fact verification task of large language models by leveraging the in-context learning ability of large language models to extract the relations among the entities within a claim, re-organized the information from the evidence in a relationally logical form, and combine the above information with the original evidence to generate the context from which our fact-checking model provide verdicts for the input claims. We conducted empirical experiments to evaluate our approach on two multi-hop fact-checking datasets including HoVer and FEVEROUS, and achieved potential results results comparable to other state-of-the-art fact verification task methods.

Paperid: 5806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10016.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the application of Video Foundation Models (ViFMs) for generating robot data summaries to enhance intermittent human supervision of robot teams. We propose a novel framework that produces both generic and query-driven summaries of long-duration robot vision data in three modalities: storyboards, short videos, and text. Through a user study involving 30 participants, we evaluate the efficacy of these summary methods in allowing operators to accurately retrieve the observations and actions that occurred while the robot was operating without supervision over an extended duration (40 min). Our findings reveal that query-driven summaries significantly improve retrieval accuracy compared to generic summaries or raw data, albeit with increased task duration. Storyboards are found to be the most effective presentation modality, especially for object-related queries. This work represents, to our knowledge, the first zero-shot application of ViFMs for generating multi-modal robot-to-human communication in intermittent supervision contexts, demonstrating both the promise and limitations of these models in human-robot interaction (HRI) scenarios.

Paperid: 5807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08870.pdf

Abstract:
Several recent works seek to adapt general-purpose large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) for medical applications through continued pretraining on publicly available biomedical corpora. These works typically claim that such domain-adaptive pretraining improves performance on various downstream medical tasks, such as answering medical exam questions. In this paper, we compare ten "medical" LLMs and two VLMs against their corresponding base models, arriving at a different conclusion: all medical VLMs and nearly all medical LLMs fail to consistently improve over their base models in the zero-/few-shot prompting and supervised fine-tuning regimes for medical question answering (QA). For instance, on clinical-note-based QA tasks in the 3-shot setting, medical LLMs outperform their base models in only 26.7% of cases, reach a (statistical) tie in 16.7% of cases, and perform significantly worse in the remaining 56.7% of cases. Our conclusions are based on (i) comparing each medical model directly against its base model; (ii) optimizing the prompts for each model separately in zero-/few-shot prompting; and (iii) accounting for statistical uncertainty in comparisons. Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art general-domain models may already exhibit strong medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and offer recommendations to strengthen the conclusions of future studies.

Paperid: 5808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07417.pdf

Abstract:
Hate speech relies heavily on cultural influences, leading to varying individual interpretations. For that reason, we propose a Semantic Componential Analysis (SCA) framework for a cross-cultural and cross-domain analysis of hate speech definitions. We create the first dataset of hate speech definitions encompassing 493 definitions from more than 100 cultures, drawn from five key domains: online dictionaries, academic research, Wikipedia, legal texts, and online platforms. By decomposing these definitions into semantic components, our analysis reveals significant variation across definitions, yet many domains borrow definitions from one another without taking into account the target culture. We conduct zero-shot model experiments using our proposed dataset, employing three popular open-sourced LLMs to understand the impact of different definitions on hate speech detection. Our findings indicate that LLMs are sensitive to definitions: responses for hate speech detection change according to the complexity of definitions used in the prompt.

Paperid: 5809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06632.pdf

Abstract:
Off-road environments pose significant perception challenges for high-speed autonomous navigation due to unstructured terrain, degraded sensing conditions, and domain-shifts among biomes. Learning semantic information across these conditions and biomes can be challenging when a large amount of ground truth data is required. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) with fine-tuning on a small (<500 images), sparse and coarsely labeled (<30% pixels) multi-biome dataset to predict 2D semantic segmentation classes. These classes are fused over time via a novel range-based metric and aggregated into a 3D semantic voxel map. We demonstrate zero-shot out-of-biome 2D semantic segmentation on the Yamaha (52.9 mIoU) and Rellis (55.5 mIoU) datasets along with few-shot coarse sparse labeling with existing data for improved segmentation performance on Yamaha (66.6 mIoU) and Rellis (67.2 mIoU). We further illustrate the feasibility of using a voxel map with a range-based semantic fusion approach to handle common off-road hazards like pop-up hazards, overhangs, and water features.

Paperid: 5810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04760.pdf

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically-inspired deep neural networks that efficiently extract temporal information while offering promising gains in terms of energy efficiency and latency when deployed on neuromorphic devices. However, SNN model parameters are sensitive to temporal resolution, leading to significant performance drops when the temporal resolution of target data at the edge is not the same with that of the pre-deployment source data used for training, especially when fine-tuning is not possible at the edge. To address this challenge, we propose three novel domain adaptation methods for adapting neuron parameters to account for the change in time resolution without re-training on target time-resolution. The proposed methods are based on a mapping between neuron dynamics in SNNs and State Space Models (SSMs); and are applicable to general neuron models. We evaluate the proposed methods under spatio-temporal data tasks, namely the audio keyword spotting datasets SHD and MSWC as well as the image classification NMINST dataset. Our methods provide an alternative to - and in majority of the cases significantly outperform - the existing reference method that simply scales the time constant. Moreover, our results show that high accuracy on high temporal resolution data can be obtained by time efficient training on lower temporal resolution data and model adaptation.

Paperid: 5811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04152.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel Self-Supervised-Learning scheme to train rhythm analysis systems and instantiate it for few-shot beat tracking. Taking inspiration from the Contrastive Predictive Coding paradigm, we propose to train a Log-Mel-Spectrogram Transformer encoder to contrast observations at times separated by hypothesized beat intervals from those that are not. We do this without the knowledge of ground-truth tempo or beat positions, as we rely on the local maxima of a Predominant Local Pulse function, considered as a proxy for Tatum positions, to define candidate anchors, candidate positives (located at a distance of a power of two from the anchor) and negatives (remaining time positions). We show that a model pre-trained using this approach on the unlabeled FMA, MTT and MTG-Jamendo datasets can successfully be fine-tuned in the few-shot regime, i.e. with just a few annotated examples to get a competitive beat-tracking performance.

Paperid: 5812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04118.pdf

Abstract:
Several recent works seek to develop foundation models specifically for medical applications, adapting general-purpose large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) via continued pretraining on publicly available biomedical corpora. These works typically claim that such domain-adaptive pretraining (DAPT) improves performance on downstream medical tasks, such as answering medical licensing exam questions. In this paper, we compare seven public "medical" LLMs and two VLMs against their corresponding base models, arriving at a different conclusion: all medical VLMs and nearly all medical LLMs fail to consistently improve over their base models in the zero-/few-shot prompting regime for medical question-answering (QA) tasks. For instance, across the tasks and model pairs we consider in the 3-shot setting, medical LLMs only outperform their base models in 12.1% of cases, reach a (statistical) tie in 49.8% of cases, and are significantly worse than their base models in the remaining 38.2% of cases. Our conclusions are based on (i) comparing each medical model head-to-head, directly against the corresponding base model; (ii) optimizing the prompts for each model separately; and (iii) accounting for statistical uncertainty in comparisons. While these basic practices are not consistently adopted in the literature, our ablations show that they substantially impact conclusions. Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art general-domain models may already exhibit strong medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and offer recommendations to strengthen the conclusions of future studies.

Paperid: 5813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23563.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid evolution of Web3.0, cryptocurrency has become a cornerstone of decentralized finance. While these digital assets enable efficient and borderless financial transactions, their pseudonymous nature has also attracted malicious activities such as money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. Effective detection of malicious transactions is crucial to maintaining the security and integrity of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Existing malicious transaction detection methods rely on large amounts of labeled data and suffer from low generalization. Label-efficient and generalizable malicious transaction detection remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose ShadowEyes, a novel malicious transaction detection method. Specifically, we first propose a generalized graph structure named TxGraph as a representation of malicious transaction, which captures the interaction features of each malicious account and its neighbors. Then we carefully design a data augmentation method tailored to simulate the evolution of malicious transactions to generate positive pairs. To alleviate account label scarcity, we further design a graph contrastive mechanism, which enables ShadowEyes to learn discriminative features effectively from unlabeled data, thereby enhancing its detection capabilities in real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments using public datasets to evaluate the performance of ShadowEyes. The results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in four typical scenarios. Specifically, in the zero-shot learning scenario, it can achieve an F1 score of 76.98% for identifying gambling transactions, surpassing the SOTA method by12.05%. In the scenario of across-platform malicious transaction detection, ShadowEyes maintains an F1 score of around 90%, which is 10% higher than the SOTA method.

Paperid: 5814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22110.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) using synthetic data is a key approach for post-training quantization (PTQ) under privacy and security constraints. However, existing data generation methods often struggle to effectively generate data suitable for hardware-friendly quantization, where all model layers are quantized. We analyze existing data generation methods based on batch normalization (BN) matching and identify several gaps between synthetic and real data: 1) Current generation algorithms do not optimize the entire synthetic dataset simultaneously; 2) Data augmentations applied during training are often overlooked; and 3) A distribution shift occurs in the final model layers due to the absence of BN in those layers. These gaps negatively impact ZSQ performance, particularly in hardware-friendly quantization scenarios. In this work, we propose Data Generation for Hardware-friendly quantization (DGH), a novel method that addresses these gaps. DGH jointly optimizes all generated images, regardless of the image set size or GPU memory constraints. To address data augmentation mismatches, DGH includes a preprocessing stage that mimics the augmentation process and enhances image quality by incorporating natural image priors. Finally, we propose a new distribution-stretching loss that aligns the support of the feature map distribution between real and synthetic data. This loss is applied to the model's output and can be adapted to various tasks. DGH demonstrates significant improvements in quantization performance across multiple tasks, achieving up to a 30% increase in accuracy for hardware-friendly ZSQ in both classification and object detection, often performing on par with real data.

Paperid: 5815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20578.pdf

Abstract:
Current speech deepfake detection approaches perform satisfactorily against known adversaries; however, generalization to unseen attacks remains an open challenge. The proliferation of speech deepfakes on social media underscores the need for systems that can generalize to unseen attacks not observed during training. We address this problem from the perspective of meta-learning, aiming to learn attack-invariant features to adapt to unseen attacks with very few samples available. This approach is promising since generating of a high-scale training dataset is often expensive or infeasible. Our experiments demonstrated an improvement in the Equal Error Rate (EER) from 21.67% to 10.42% on the InTheWild dataset, using just 96 samples from the unseen dataset. Continuous few-shot adaptation ensures that the system remains up-to-date.

Paperid: 5816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18040.pdf

Abstract:
Keyphrase selection is a challenging task in natural language processing that has a wide range of applications. Adapting existing supervised and unsupervised solutions for the Russian language faces several limitations due to the rich morphology of Russian and the limited number of training datasets available. Recent studies conducted on English texts show that large language models (LLMs) successfully address the task of generating keyphrases. LLMs allow achieving impressive results without task-specific fine-tuning, using text prompts instead. In this work, we access the performance of prompt-based methods for generating keyphrases for Russian scientific abstracts. First, we compare the performance of zero-shot and few-shot prompt-based methods, fine-tuned models, and unsupervised methods. Then we assess strategies for selecting keyphrase examples in a few-shot setting. We present the outcomes of human evaluation of the generated keyphrases and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the models through expert assessment. Our results suggest that prompt-based methods can outperform common baselines even using simple text prompts.

Paperid: 5817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17479.pdf

Abstract:
Humans can perform various combinations of physical skills without having to relearn skills from scratch every single time. For example, we can swing a bat when walking without having to re-learn such a policy from scratch by composing the individual skills of walking and bat swinging. Enabling robots to combine or compose skills is essential so they can learn novel skills and tasks faster with fewer real world samples. To this end, we propose a novel compositional approach called DSE- Diffusion Score Equilibrium that enables few-shot learning for novel skills by utilizing a combination of base policy priors. Our method is based on probabilistically composing diffusion policies to better model the few-shot demonstration data-distribution than any individual policy. Our goal here is to learn robot motions few-shot and not necessarily goal oriented trajectories. Unfortunately we lack a general purpose metric to evaluate the error between a skill or motion and the provided demonstrations. Hence, we propose a probabilistic measure - Maximum Mean Discrepancy on the Forward Kinematics Kernel (MMD-FK), that is task and action space agnostic. By using our few-shot learning approach DSE, we show that we are able to achieve a reduction of over 30% in MMD-FK across skills and number of demonstrations. Moreover, we show the utility of our approach through real world experiments by teaching novel trajectories to a robot in 5 demonstrations.

Paperid: 5818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13445.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages remains a challenge due to the scarcity of labeled training data. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning and text-only adaptation are two popular methods that have been used to address such low-resource settings. In this work, we investigate how these techniques can be effectively combined using a multilingual multimodal model like SeamlessM4T. Multimodal models are able to leverage unlabeled text via text-only adaptation with further parameter-efficient ASR fine-tuning, thus boosting ASR performance. We also show cross-lingual transfer from a high-resource language, achieving up to a relative 17% WER reduction over a baseline in a zero-shot setting without any labeled speech.

Paperid: 5819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13016.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) performs zero-shot image classification by mapping images and textual class representation into a shared embedding space, then retrieving the class closest to the image. This work provides a new approach for interpreting CLIP models for image classification from the lens of mutual knowledge between the two modalities. Specifically, we ask: what concepts do both vision and language CLIP encoders learn in common that influence the joint embedding space, causing points to be closer or further apart? We answer this question via an approach of textual concept-based explanations, showing their effectiveness, and perform an analysis encompassing a pool of 13 CLIP models varying in architecture, size and pretraining datasets. We explore those different aspects in relation to mutual knowledge, and analyze zero-shot predictions. Our approach demonstrates an effective and human-friendly way of understanding zero-shot classification decisions with CLIP.

Paperid: 5820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11773.pdf

Abstract:
This study is the first to analyze the performance of a time-series foundation AI model for Value-at-Risk (VaR), which essentially forecasts the left-tail quantiles of returns. Foundation models, pre-trained on diverse datasets, can be applied in a zero-shot setting with minimal data or further improved through finetuning. We compare Google's TimesFM model to conventional parametric and non-parametric models, including GARCH and Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS), using 19 years of daily returns from the SP 100 index and its constituents. Backtesting with over 8.5 years of out-of-sample data shows that the fine-tuned foundation model consistently outperforms traditional methods in actual-over-expected ratios. For the quantile score loss function, it performs comparably to the best econometric model, GAS. Overall, the foundation model ranks as the best or among the top performers across the 0.01, 0.025, 0.05, and 0.1 quantile forecasting. Fine-tuning significantly improves accuracy, showing that zero-shot use is not optimal for VaR.

Paperid: 5821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10735.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate mathematical reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial in revolutionizing domains that heavily rely on such reasoning. However, LLMs often encounter difficulties in certain aspects of mathematical reasoning, leading to flawed reasoning and erroneous results. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel mechanism, the Chain of Self-Correction (CoSC), specifically designed to embed self-correction as an inherent ability in LLMs, enabling them to validate and rectify their own results. The CoSC mechanism operates through a sequence of self-correction stages. In each stage, the LLMs generate a program to address a given problem, execute this program using program-based tools to obtain an output, subsequently verify this output. Based on the verification, the LLMs either proceed to the next correction stage or finalize the answer. This iterative self-correction process allows the LLMs to refine its reasoning steps and improve the accuracy of its mathematical reasoning. We implement CoSC using a two-phase fine-tuning approach. First, LLMs are trained with a relatively small volume of seeding data generated from GPT-4. Then, we enhance CoSC by training with a larger volume of self-generated data, without relying on GPT-4. Experiments show that CoSC significantly boosts performance on standard mathematical datasets compared to existing open-source LLMs. Notably, our CoSC-Code-34B model achieved a 53.5% score on the challenging MATH dataset, outperforming models like ChatGPT, GPT-4, and multi-modal LLMs such as GPT-4V and Gemini-1.0. Importantly, CoSC operates in a zero-shot manner without requiring demonstrations.

Paperid: 5822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08926.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the transformative potential of SAM 2, a vision foundation model, in advancing gaze estimation and eye tracking technologies. By significantly reducing annotation time, lowering technical barriers through its ease of deployment, and enhancing segmentation accuracy, SAM 2 addresses critical challenges faced by researchers and practitioners. Utilizing its zero-shot segmentation capabilities with minimal user input-a single click per video-we tested SAM 2 on over 14 million eye images from diverse datasets, including virtual reality setups and the world's largest unified dataset recorded using wearable eye trackers. Remarkably, in pupil segmentation tasks, SAM 2 matches the performance of domain-specific models trained solely on eye images, achieving competitive mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) scores of up to 93% without fine-tuning. Additionally, we provide our code and segmentation masks for these widely used datasets to promote further research.

Paperid: 5823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08900.pdf

Abstract:
Argumentative stance classification plays a key role in identifying authors' viewpoints on specific topics. However, generating diverse pairs of argumentative sentences across various domains is challenging. Existing benchmarks often come from a single domain or focus on a limited set of topics. Additionally, manual annotation for accurate labeling is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose leveraging platform rules, readily available expert-curated content, and large language models to bypass the need for human annotation. Our approach produces a multidomain benchmark comprising 4,498 topical claims and 30,961 arguments from three sources, spanning 21 domains. We benchmark the dataset in fully supervised, zero-shot, and few-shot settings, shedding light on the strengths and limitations of different methodologies. We release the dataset and code in this study at hidden for anonymity.

Paperid: 5824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08645.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors.

Paperid: 5825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08375.pdf

Abstract:
The detection of suicide risk in social media is a critical task with potential life-saving implications. This paper presents a study on leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing solutions for identifying suicide risk in social media posts as a submission for the "IEEE BigData 2024 Cup: Detection of Suicide Risk on Social Media" conducted by the kubapok team. We experimented with the following configurations of transformer-based models: fine-tuned DeBERTa, GPT-4o with CoT and few-shot prompting, and fine-tuned GPT-4o. The task setup was to classify social media posts into four categories: indicator, ideation, behavior, and attempt. Our findings demonstrate that the fine-tuned GPT-4o model outperforms two other configurations, achieving high accuracy in identifying suicide risk. Notably, our model achieved second place in the competition. By demonstrating that straightforward, general-purpose models can achieve state-of-the-art results, we propose that these models, combined with minimal tuning, may have the potential to be effective solutions for automated suicide risk detection on social media.

Paperid: 5826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08321.pdf

Abstract:
This paper exploits the zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for music genre classification. The proposed approach splits audio signals into 20 ms chunks and processes them through convolutional feature encoders, a transformer encoder, and additional layers for coding audio units and generating feature vectors. The extracted feature vectors are used to train a classification head. During inference, predictions on individual chunks are aggregated for a final genre classification. We conducted a comprehensive comparison of LLMs, including WavLM, HuBERT, and wav2vec 2.0, with traditional deep learning architectures like 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the audio spectrogram transformer (AST). Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of the AST model, achieving an overall accuracy of 85.5%, surpassing all other models evaluated. These results highlight the potential of LLMs and transformer-based architectures for advancing music information retrieval tasks, even in zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 5827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07505.pdf

Abstract:
Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs). While many studies focus on quantizing both weights and activations, it is still a challenge to maintain the accuracy of LLM after activating quantization. To investigate the primary cause, we extend the concept of kernel from linear algebra to quantization functions to define a new term, "quantization kernel", which refers to the set of elements in activations that are quantized to zero. Through quantitative analysis of the quantization kernel, we find that these elements are crucial for maintaining the accuracy of quantized LLMs. With the decrease of quantization kernel, the precision of quantized LLMs increases. If the quantization kernel proportion is kept below 19% for OPT models and below 1% for LLaMA models, the precision loss from quantizing activations to INT8 becomes negligible. Motivated by the goal of developing a quantization method with small quantization kernel, we propose CrossQuant: a simple yet effective method for quantizing activations. CrossQuant cross-quantizes elements using row and column-wise absolute maximum vectors, achieving a quantization kernel of approximately 16% for OPT models and less than 0.1% for LLaMA models. Experimental results on LLMs (LLaMA, OPT) ranging from 6.7B to 70B parameters demonstrate that CrossQuant improves or maintains perplexity and accuracy in language modeling, zero-shot, and few-shot tasks.

Paperid: 5828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05302.pdf

Abstract:
The Prototypical Network (ProtoNet) has emerged as a popular choice in Few-shot Learning (FSL) scenarios due to its remarkable performance and straightforward implementation. Building upon such success, we first propose a simple (yet novel) method to fine-tune a ProtoNet on the (labeled) support set of the test episode of a C-way-K-shot test episode (without using the query set which is only used for evaluation). We then propose an algorithmic framework that combines ProtoNet with optimization-based FSL algorithms (MAML and Meta-Curvature) to work with such a fine-tuning method. Since optimization-based algorithms endow the target learner model with the ability to fast adaption to only a few samples, we utilize ProtoNet as the target model to enhance its fine-tuning performance with the help of a specifically designed episodic fine-tuning strategy. The experimental results confirm that our proposed models, MAML-Proto and MC-Proto, combined with our unique fine-tuning method, outperform regular ProtoNet by a large margin in few-shot audio classification tasks on the ESC-50 and Speech Commands v2 datasets. We note that although we have only applied our model to the audio domain, it is a general method and can be easily extended to other domains.

Paperid: 5829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04690.pdf

Abstract:
We present SegINR, a novel approach to neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) that addresses sequence alignment without relying on an auxiliary duration predictor and complex autoregressive (AR) or non-autoregressive (NAR) frame-level sequence modeling. SegINR simplifies the process by converting text sequences directly into frame-level features. It leverages an optimal text encoder to extract embeddings, transforming each into a segment of frame-level features using a conditional implicit neural representation (INR). This method, named segment-wise INR (SegINR), models temporal dynamics within each segment and autonomously defines segment boundaries, reducing computational costs. We integrate SegINR into a two-stage TTS framework, using it for semantic token prediction. Our experiments in zero-shot adaptive TTS scenarios demonstrate that SegINR outperforms conventional methods in speech quality with computational efficiency.

Paperid: 5830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00407.pdf

Abstract:
Sensing technology has significantly advanced in automating systems that reflect human movement, particularly in robotics and healthcare, where it is used to automatically detect target movements. This study develops a method to automatically count exercise repetitions by analyzing IMU signals, with a focus on a universal exercise repetition counting task that counts all types of exercise movements, including novel exercises not seen during training, using a single model. Since peak patterns can vary significantly between different exercises as well as between individuals performing the same exercise, the model needs to learn a complex embedding space of sensor data to generalize effectively. To address this challenge,we propose a repetition counting technique utilizing a deep metric-based few-shot learning approach, designed to handle both existing and novel exercises. By redefining the counting task as a few-shot classification problem, the method is capable of detecting peak repetition patterns in exercises not seen during training. The approach employs a Siamese network with triplet loss, optimizing the embedding space to distinguish between peak and non-peak frames. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing an 86.8% probability of accurately counting ten or more repetitions within a single set across 28 different exercises. This performance highlights the model's ability to generalize across various exercise types, including those not present in the training data. Such robustness and adaptability make the system a strong candidate for real-time implementation in fitness and healthcare applications.

Paperid: 5831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18602.pdf

Abstract:
Assessing the performance of systems to classify Multi-Party Conversations (MPC) is challenging due to the interconnection between linguistic and structural characteristics of conversations. Conventional evaluation methods often overlook variances in model behavior across different levels of structural complexity on interaction graphs. In this work, we propose a methodological pipeline to investigate model performance across specific structural attributes of conversations. As a proof of concept we focus on Response Selection and Addressee Recognition tasks, to diagnose model weaknesses. To this end, we extract representative diagnostic subdatasets with a fixed number of users and a good structural variety from a large and open corpus of online MPCs. We further frame our work in terms of data minimization, avoiding the use of original usernames to preserve privacy, and propose alternatives to using original text messages. Results show that response selection relies more on the textual content of conversations, while addressee recognition requires capturing their structural dimension. Using an LLM in a zero-shot setting, we further highlight how sensitivity to prompt variations is task-dependent.

Paperid: 5832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17745.pdf

Abstract:
A supervised ranking model, despite its advantage of being effective, usually involves complex processing - typically multiple stages of task-specific pre-training and fine-tuning. This has motivated researchers to explore simpler pipelines leveraging large language models (LLMs) that are capable of working in a zero-shot manner. However, since zero-shot inference does not make use of a training set of pairs of queries and their relevant documents, its performance is mostly worse than that of supervised models, which are trained on such example pairs. Motivated by the existing findings that training examples generally improve zero-shot performance, in our work, we explore if this also applies to ranking models. More specifically, given a query and a pair of documents, the preference prediction task is improved by augmenting examples of preferences for similar queries from a training set. Our proposed pairwise few-shot ranker demonstrates consistent improvements over the zero-shot baseline on both in-domain (TREC DL) and out-domain (BEIR subset) retrieval benchmarks. Our method also achieves a close performance to that of a supervised model without requiring any complex training pipeline.

Paperid: 5833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17608.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomaly detection (VAD) often learns the distribution of normal samples and detects the anomaly through measuring significant deviations, but the undesired generalization may reconstruct a few anomalies thus suppressing the deviations. Meanwhile, most VADs cannot cope with cross-dataset validation for new target domains, and few-shot methods must laboriously rely on model-tuning from the target domain to complete domain adaptation. To address these problems, we propose a novel VAD method with a motion-guided memory module to achieve cross-dataset validation with zero-shot. First, we add Gaussian blur to the raw appearance images, thereby constructing the global pseudo-anomaly, which serves as the input to the network. Then, we propose multi-scale residual channel attention to deblur the pseudo-anomaly in normal samples. Next, memory items are obtained by recording the motion features in the training phase, which are used to retrieve the motion features from the raw information in the testing phase. Lastly, our method can ignore the blurred real anomaly through attention and rely on motion memory items to increase the normality gap between normal and abnormal motion. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with cross-domain methods, our method achieves competitive performance without adaptation during testing.

Paperid: 5834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17439.pdf

Abstract:
An emerging area of research aims to learn deep generative models with limited training data. Prior generative models like GANs and diffusion models require a lot of data to perform well, and their performance degrades when they are trained on only a small amount of data. A recent technique called Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) has been adapted to the few-shot setting, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, current IMLE-based approaches encounter challenges due to inadequate correspondence between the latent codes selected for training and those drawn during inference. This results in suboptimal test-time performance. We theoretically show a way to address this issue and propose RS-IMLE, a novel approach that changes the prior distribution used for training. This leads to substantially higher quality image generation compared to existing GAN and IMLE-based methods, as validated by comprehensive experiments conducted on nine few-shot image datasets.

Paperid: 5835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15359.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a variant of chain of thought (CoT) prompting called Program Trace Prompting that makes explanations more observable while preserving the power, generality and flexibility of CoT. In our approach, few-shot CoT demonstrations are wrapped in a formal syntax based on Python, and each prompt: identifies and names steps; defines the input/output behavior of steps; and replaces CoT explanations of in-context examples with chains of these formalized steps on the same examples. Program Trace Prompting is applicable to many tasks, achieving strong results on the 23 diverse tasks in the BIG-Bench Hard benchmark. More importantly, by instrumenting explanations in this way, we enable new types of analysis. In particular, we identify "non-local errors" (which correspond to incorrectly learning the reasoning method illustrated in the demonstrations) as an unaddressed issue in CoT learning, and we present methods for verifying the modularity of steps in a CoT explanation.

Paperid: 5836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15255.pdf

Abstract:
Scene Change Detection is a challenging task in computer vision and robotics that aims to identify differences between two images of the same scene captured at different times. Traditional change detection methods rely on training models that take these image pairs as input and estimate the changes, which requires large amounts of annotated data, a costly and time-consuming process. To overcome this, we propose ZeroSCD, a zero-shot scene change detection framework that eliminates the need for training. ZeroSCD leverages pre-existing models for place recognition and semantic segmentation, utilizing their features and outputs to perform change detection. In this framework, features extracted from the place recognition model are used to estimate correspondences and detect changes between the two images. These are then combined with segmentation results from the semantic segmentation model to precisely delineate the boundaries of the detected changes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that ZeroSCD outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in change detection accuracy, despite not being trained on any of the benchmark datasets, proving its effectiveness and adaptability across different scenarios.

Paperid: 5837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14850.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation has greatly improved in the recent years but models predicting metric depth still struggle to generalize across diverse camera poses and datasets. While recent supervised methods mitigate this issue by leveraging ground prior information at inference, their adaptability to self-supervised settings is limited due to the additional challenge of scale recovery. Addressing this gap, we propose in this paper a novel constraint on ground areas designed specifically for the self-supervised paradigm. This mechanism not only allows to accurately recover the scale but also ensures coherence between the depth prediction and the ground prior. Experimental results show that our method surpasses existing scale recovery techniques on the KITTI benchmark and significantly enhances model generalization capabilities. This improvement can be observed by its more robust performance across diverse camera rotations and its adaptability in zero-shot conditions with previously unseen driving datasets such as DDAD.

Paperid: 5838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14729.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread use in various applications due to their powerful capability to generate human-like text. However, prompt injection attacks, which involve overwriting a model's original instructions with malicious prompts to manipulate the generated text, have raised significant concerns about the security and reliability of LLMs. Ensuring that LLMs are robust against such attacks is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications, particularly in critical tasks. In this paper, we propose PROMPTFUZZ, a novel testing framework that leverages fuzzing techniques to systematically assess the robustness of LLMs against prompt injection attacks. Inspired by software fuzzing, PROMPTFUZZ selects promising seed prompts and generates a diverse set of prompt injections to evaluate the target LLM's resilience. PROMPTFUZZ operates in two stages: the prepare phase, which involves selecting promising initial seeds and collecting few-shot examples, and the focus phase, which uses the collected examples to generate diverse, high-quality prompt injections. Using PROMPTFUZZ, we can uncover more vulnerabilities in LLMs, even those with strong defense prompts. By deploying the generated attack prompts from PROMPTFUZZ in a real-world competition, we achieved the 7th ranking out of over 4000 participants (top 0.14%) within 2 hours. Additionally, we construct a dataset to fine-tune LLMs for enhanced robustness against prompt injection attacks. While the fine-tuned model shows improved robustness, PROMPTFUZZ continues to identify vulnerabilities, highlighting the importance of robust testing for LLMs. Our work emphasizes the critical need for effective testing tools and provides a practical framework for evaluating and improving the robustness of LLMs against prompt injection attacks.

Paperid: 5839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14572.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize scientific research, yet their robustness and reliability in domain-specific applications remain insufficiently explored. In this study, we evaluate the performance and robustness of LLMs for materials science, focusing on domain-specific question answering and materials property prediction across diverse real-world and adversarial conditions. Three distinct datasets are used in this study: 1) a set of multiple-choice questions from undergraduate-level materials science courses, 2) a dataset including various steel compositions and yield strengths, and 3) a band gap dataset, containing textual descriptions of material crystal structures and band gap values. The performance of LLMs is assessed using various prompting strategies, including zero-shot chain-of-thought, expert prompting, and few-shot in-context learning. The robustness of these models is tested against various forms of 'noise', ranging from realistic disturbances to intentionally adversarial manipulations, to evaluate their resilience and reliability under real-world conditions. Additionally, the study showcases unique phenomena of LLMs during predictive tasks, such as mode collapse behavior when the proximity of prompt examples is altered and performance recovery from train/test mismatch. The findings aim to provide informed skepticism for the broad use of LLMs in materials science and to inspire advancements that enhance their robustness and reliability for practical applications.

Paperid: 5840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13676.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-text models trained via contrastive learning offer a practical approach to perform audio classification through natural language prompts, such as "this is a sound of" followed by category names. In this work, we explore alternative prompt templates for zero-shot audio classification, demonstrating the existence of higher-performing options. First, we find that the formatting of the prompts significantly affects performance so that simply prompting the models with properly formatted class labels performs competitively with optimized prompt templates and even prompt ensembling. Moreover, we look into complementing class labels by audio-centric descriptions. By leveraging large language models, we generate textual descriptions that prioritize acoustic features of sound events to disambiguate between classes, without extensive prompt engineering. We show that prompting with class descriptions leads to state-of-the-art results in zero-shot audio classification across major ambient sound datasets. Remarkably, this method requires no additional training and remains fully zero-shot.

Paperid: 5841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13393.pdf

Abstract:
Robot navigation methods allow mobile robots to operate in applications such as warehouses or hospitals. While the environment in which the robot operates imposes requirements on its navigation behavior, most existing methods do not allow the end-user to configure the robot's behavior and priorities, possibly leading to undesirable behavior (e.g., fast driving in a hospital). We propose a novel approach to adapt robot motion behavior based on natural language instructions provided by the end-user. Our zero-shot method uses an existing Visual Language Model to interpret a user text query or an image of the environment. This information is used to generate the cost function and reconfigure the parameters of a Model Predictive Controller, translating the user's instruction to the robot's motion behavior. This allows our method to safely and effectively navigate in dynamic and challenging environments. We extensively evaluate our method's individual components and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a ground robot in simulation and real-world experiments, and across a variety of environments and user specifications.

Paperid: 5842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11941.pdf

Abstract:
When your robot grasps an object using dexterous hands or grippers, it should understand the Task-Oriented Affordances of the Object(TOAO), as different tasks often require attention to specific parts of the object. To address this challenge, we propose GauTOAO, a Gaussian-based framework for Task-Oriented Affordance of Objects, which leverages vision-language models in a zero-shot manner to predict affordance-relevant regions of an object, given a natural language query. Our approach introduces a new paradigm: "static camera, moving object," allowing the robot to better observe and understand the object in hand during manipulation. GauTOAO addresses the limitations of existing methods, which often lack effective spatial grouping, by extracting a comprehensive 3D object mask using DINO features. This mask is then used to conditionally query gaussians, producing a refined semantic distribution over the object for the specified task. This approach results in more accurate TOAO extraction, enhancing the robot's understanding of the object and improving task performance. We validate the effectiveness of GauTOAO through real-world experiments, demonstrating its capability to generalize across various tasks.

Paperid: 5843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11491.pdf

Abstract:
Enriching datasets with demographic information, such as gender, race, and age from names, is a critical task in fields like healthcare, public policy, and social sciences. Such demographic insights allow for more precise and effective engagement with target populations. Despite previous efforts employing hidden Markov models and recurrent neural networks to predict demographics from names, significant limitations persist: the lack of large-scale, well-curated, unbiased, publicly available datasets, and the lack of an approach robust across datasets. This scarcity has hindered the development of traditional supervised learning approaches. In this paper, we demonstrate that the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform as well as, if not better than, bespoke models trained on specialized data. We apply these LLMs to a variety of datasets, including a real-life, unlabelled dataset of licensed financial professionals in Hong Kong, and critically assess the inherent demographic biases in these models. Our work not only advances the state-of-the-art in demographic enrichment but also opens avenues for future research in mitigating biases in LLMs.

Paperid: 5844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11408.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we demonstrate that non-generative, small-sized models such as FinBERT and FinDRoBERTa, when fine-tuned, can outperform GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models in zero-shot learning settings in sentiment analysis for financial news. These fine-tuned models show comparable results to GPT-3.5 when it is fine-tuned on the task of determining market sentiment from daily financial news summaries sourced from Bloomberg. To fine-tune and compare these models, we created a novel database, which assigns a market score to each piece of news without human interpretation bias, systematically identifying the mentioned companies and analyzing whether their stocks have gone up, down, or remained neutral. Furthermore, the paper shows that the assumptions of Condorcet's Jury Theorem do not hold suggesting that fine-tuned small models are not independent of the fine-tuned GPT models, indicating behavioural similarities. Lastly, the resulted fine-tuned models are made publicly available on HuggingFace, providing a resource for further research in financial sentiment analysis and text classification.

Paperid: 5845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11264.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Label-Combination Prototypical Networks (LC-Protonets) to address the problem of multi-label few-shot classification, where a model must generalize to new classes based on only a few available examples. Extending Prototypical Networks, LC-Protonets generate one prototype per label combination, derived from the power set of labels present in the limited training items, rather than one prototype per label. Our method is applied to automatic audio tagging across diverse music datasets, covering various cultures and including both modern and traditional music, and is evaluated against existing approaches in the literature. The results demonstrate a significant performance improvement in almost all domains and training setups when using LC-Protonets for multi-label classification. In addition to training a few-shot learning model from scratch, we explore the use of a pre-trained model, obtained via supervised learning, to embed items in the feature space. Fine-tuning improves the generalization ability of all methods, yet LC-Protonets achieve high-level performance even without fine-tuning, in contrast to the comparative approaches. We finally analyze the scalability of the proposed method, providing detailed quantitative metrics from our experiments. The implementation and experimental setup are made publicly available, offering a benchmark for future research.

Paperid: 5846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10576.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: To develop and evaluate an automated system for extracting structured clinical information from unstructured radiology and pathology reports using open-weights large language models (LMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and to assess the effects of model configuration variables on extraction performance. Methods and Materials: The study utilized two datasets: 7,294 radiology reports annotated for Brain Tumor Reporting and Data System (BT-RADS) scores and 2,154 pathology reports annotated for isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation status. An automated pipeline was developed to benchmark the performance of various LMs and RAG configurations. The impact of model size, quantization, prompting strategies, output formatting, and inference parameters was systematically evaluated. Results: The best performing models achieved over 98% accuracy in extracting BT-RADS scores from radiology reports and over 90% for IDH mutation status extraction from pathology reports. The top model being medical fine-tuned llama3. Larger, newer, and domain fine-tuned models consistently outperformed older and smaller models. Model quantization had minimal impact on performance. Few-shot prompting significantly improved accuracy. RAG improved performance for complex pathology reports but not for shorter radiology reports. Conclusions: Open LMs demonstrate significant potential for automated extraction of structured clinical data from unstructured clinical reports with local privacy-preserving application. Careful model selection, prompt engineering, and semi-automated optimization using annotated data are critical for optimal performance. These approaches could be reliable enough for practical use in research workflows, highlighting the potential for human-machine collaboration in healthcare data extraction.

Paperid: 5847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10544.pdf

Abstract:
Carcinoma is the prevailing type of cancer and can manifest in various body parts. It is widespread and can potentially develop in numerous locations within the body. In the medical domain, data for carcinoma cancer is often limited or unavailable due to privacy concerns. Moreover, when available, it is highly imbalanced, with a scarcity of positive class samples and an abundance of negative ones. The OXML 2023 challenge provides a small and imbalanced dataset, presenting significant challenges for carcinoma classification. To tackle these issues, participants in the challenge have employed various approaches, relying on pre-trained models, preprocessing techniques, and few-shot learning. Our work proposes a novel technique that combines padding augmentation and ensembling to address the carcinoma classification challenge. In our proposed method, we utilize ensembles of five neural networks and implement padding as a data augmentation technique, taking into account varying image sizes to enhance the classifier's performance. Using our approach, we made place into top three and declared as winner.

Paperid: 5848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09615.pdf

Abstract:
The traditional data annotation process is often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and susceptible to human bias, which complicates the management of increasingly complex datasets. This study explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) as automated data annotators to improve efficiency and consistency in annotation tasks. By employing rationale-driven collaborative few-shot prompting techniques, we aim to improve the performance of LLMs in text annotation. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of six LLMs across four benchmark datasets, comparing seven distinct methodologies. Our results demonstrate that collaborative methods consistently outperform traditional few-shot techniques and other baseline approaches, particularly in complex annotation tasks. Our work provides valuable insights and a robust framework for leveraging collaborative learning methods to tackle challenging text annotation tasks.

Paperid: 5849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08111.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have shown great promise in various fields of study. A potential application of such models is in computer network traffic analysis, where these models can grasp the complexities of network traffic dynamics and adapt to any specific task or network environment with minimal fine-tuning. Previous approaches have used tokenized hex-level packet data and the model architecture of large language transformer models. We propose a new, efficient graph-based alternative at the flow-level. Our approach represents network traffic as a dynamic spatio-temporal graph, employing a self-supervised link prediction pretraining task to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics in this network graph framework. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a few-shot learning experiment for three distinct downstream network tasks: intrusion detection, traffic classification, and botnet classification. Models finetuned from our pretrained base achieve an average performance increase of 6.87\% over training from scratch, demonstrating their ability to effectively learn general network traffic dynamics during pretraining. This success suggests the potential for a large-scale version to serve as an operational foundational model.

Paperid: 5850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06842.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a Few-shot Learning (FSL) approach for detecting Presentation Attacks on ID Cards deployed in a remote verification system and its extension to new countries. Our research analyses the performance of Prototypical Networks across documents from Spain and Chile as a baseline and measures the extension of generalisation capabilities of new ID Card countries such as Argentina and Costa Rica. Specifically targeting the challenge of screen display presentation attacks. By leveraging convolutional architectures and meta-learning principles embodied in Prototypical Networks, we have crafted a model that demonstrates high efficacy with Few-shot examples. This research reveals that competitive performance can be achieved with as Few-shots as five unique identities and with under 100 images per new country added. This opens a new insight for novel generalised Presentation Attack Detection on ID cards to unknown attacks.

Paperid: 5851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06013.pdf

Abstract:
Given an image query, visually prompted keyword localisation (VPKL) aims to find occurrences of the depicted word in a speech collection. This can be useful when transcriptions are not available for a low-resource language (e.g. if it is unwritten). Previous work showed that VPKL can be performed with a visually grounded speech model trained on paired images and unlabelled speech. But all experiments were done on English. Moreover, transcriptions were used to get positive and negative pairs for the contrastive loss. This paper introduces a few-shot learning scheme to mine pairs automatically without transcriptions. On English, this results in only a small drop in performance. We also - for the first time - consider VPKL on a real low-resource language, Yoruba. While scores are reasonable, here we see a bigger drop in performance compared to using ground truth pairs because the mining is less accurate in Yoruba.

Paperid: 5852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05393.pdf

Abstract:
While large visual models (LVM) demonstrated significant potential in image understanding, due to the application of large-scale pre-training, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has also achieved great success in the field of image segmentation, supporting flexible interactive cues and strong learning capabilities. However, SAM's performance often falls short in cross-domain and few-shot applications. Previous work has performed poorly in transferring prior knowledge from base models to new applications. To tackle this issue, we propose a task-adaptive auto-visual prompt framework, a new paradigm for Cross-dominan Few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS). First, a Multi-level Feature Fusion (MFF) was used for integrated feature extraction as prior knowledge. Besides, we incorporate a Class Domain Task-Adaptive Auto-Prompt (CDTAP) module to enable class-domain agnostic feature extraction and generate high-quality, learnable visual prompts. This significant advancement uses a unique generative approach to prompts alongside a comprehensive model structure and specialized prototype computation. While ensuring that the prior knowledge of SAM is not discarded, the new branch disentangles category and domain information through prototypes, guiding it in adapting the CD-FSS. Comprehensive experiments across four cross-domain datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art CD-FSS approach, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 1.3\% in the 1-shot setting and 11.76\% in the 5-shot setting.

Paperid: 5853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02519.pdf

Abstract:
We propose misogyny detection as an Argumentative Reasoning task and we investigate the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to understand the implicit reasoning used to convey misogyny in both Italian and English. The central aim is to generate the missing reasoning link between a message and the implied meanings encoding the misogyny. Our study uses argumentation theory as a foundation to form a collection of prompts in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. These prompts integrate different techniques, including chain-of-thought reasoning and augmented knowledge. Our findings show that LLMs fall short on reasoning capabilities about misogynistic comments and that they mostly rely on their implicit knowledge derived from internalized common stereotypes about women to generate implied assumptions, rather than on inductive reasoning.

Paperid: 5854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01152.pdf

Abstract:
Entity linking (EL) in conversations faces notable challenges in practical applications, primarily due to the scarcity of entity-annotated conversational datasets and sparse knowledge bases (KB) containing domain-specific, long-tail entities. We designed targeted evaluation scenarios to measure the efficacy of EL models under resource constraints. Our evaluation employs two KBs: Fandom, exemplifying real-world EL complexities, and the widely used Wikipedia. First, we assess EL models' ability to generalize to a new unfamiliar KB using Fandom and a novel zero-shot conversational entity linking dataset that we curated based on Reddit discussions on Fandom entities. We then evaluate the adaptability of EL models to conversational settings without prior training. Our results indicate that current zero-shot EL models falter when introduced to new, domain-specific KBs without prior training, significantly dropping in performance. Our findings reveal that previous evaluation approaches fall short of capturing real-world complexities for zero-shot EL, highlighting the necessity for new approaches to design and assess conversational EL models to adapt to limited resources. The evaluation setup and the dataset proposed in this research are made publicly available.

Paperid: 5855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00511.pdf

Abstract:
In Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL), we aim to recognize both seen and unseen categories using a model trained only on seen categories. In computer vision, this translates into a classification problem, where knowledge from seen categories is transferred to unseen categories by exploiting the relationships between visual features and available semantic information, such as text corpora or manual annotations. However, learning this joint distribution is costly and requires one-to-one training with corresponding semantic information. We present a reversed conditional Diffusion-based model (RevCD) that mitigates this issue by generating semantic features synthesized from visual inputs by leveraging Diffusion models' conditional mechanisms. Our RevCD model consists of a cross Hadamard-Addition embedding of a sinusoidal time schedule and a multi-headed visual transformer for attention-guided embeddings. The proposed approach introduces three key innovations. First, we reverse the process of generating semantic space based on visual data, introducing a novel loss function that facilitates more efficient knowledge transfer. Second, we apply Diffusion models to zero-shot learning - a novel approach that exploits their strengths in capturing data complexity. Third, we demonstrate our model's performance through a comprehensive cross-dataset evaluation. The complete code will be available on GitHub.

Paperid: 5856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20391.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion-Augmented Interactive Text-to-Image Retrieval (DAI-TIR) is a promising paradigm that improves retrieval performance by generating query images via diffusion models and using them as additional ``views'' of the user's intent. However, these generative views can be incorrect because diffusion generation may introduce hallucinated visual cues that conflict with the original query text. Indeed, we empirically demonstrate that these hallucinated cues can substantially degrade DAI-TIR performance. To address this, we propose Diffusion-aware Multi-view Contrastive Learning (DMCL), a hallucination-robust training framework that casts DAI-TIR as joint optimization over representations of query intent and the target image. DMCL introduces semantic-consistency and diffusion-aware contrastive objectives to align textual and diffusion-generated query views while suppressing hallucinated query signals. This yields an encoder that acts as a semantic filter, effectively mapping hallucinated cues into a null space, improving robustness to spurious cues and better representing the user's intent. Attention visualization and geometric embedding-space analyses corroborate this filtering behavior. Across five standard benchmarks, DMCL delivers consistent improvements in multi-round Hits@10, reaching as high as 7.37\% over prior fine-tuned and zero-shot baselines, which indicates it is a general and robust training framework for DAI-TIR.

Paperid: 5857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16895.pdf

Abstract:
Surgery is a highly complex process, and artificial intelligence has emerged as a transformative force in supporting surgical guidance and decision-making. However, the unimodal nature of most current AI systems limits their ability to achieve a holistic understanding of surgical workflows. This highlights the need for general-purpose surgical AI systems capable of comprehensively modeling the interrelated components of surgical scenes. Recent advances in large vision-language models that integrate multimodal data processing offer strong potential for modeling surgical tasks and providing human-like scene reasoning and understanding. Despite their promise, systematic investigations of VLMs in surgical applications remain limited. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of large VLMs for the fundamental surgical vision task of detecting surgical tools. Specifically, we investigate three state-of-the-art VLMs, Qwen2.5, LLaVA1.5, and InternVL3.5, on the GraSP robotic surgery dataset under both zero-shot and parameter-efficient LoRA fine-tuning settings. Our results demonstrate that Qwen2.5 consistently achieves superior detection performance in both configurations among the evaluated VLMs. Furthermore, compared with the open-set detection baseline Grounding DINO, Qwen2.5 exhibits stronger zero-shot generalization and comparable fine-tuned performance. Notably, Qwen2.5 shows superior instrument recognition, while Grounding DINO demonstrates stronger localization.

Paperid: 5858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16773.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) presents a core challenge in continual learning, requiring models to rapidly adapt to new classes with very limited samples while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recent prompt-based methods, which integrate pretrained backbones with task-specific prompts, have made notable progress. However, under extreme few-shot incremental settings, the model's ability to transfer and generalize becomes critical, and it is thus essential to leverage pretrained knowledge to learn feature representations that can be shared across future categories during the base session. Inspired by the mechanism of the CLS token, which is similar to human attention and progressively filters out task-irrelevant information, we propose the CLS Token Attention Steering Prompts (CASP). This approach introduces class-shared trainable bias parameters into the query, key, and value projections of the CLS token to explicitly modulate the self-attention weights. To further enhance generalization, we also design an attention perturbation strategy and perform Manifold Token Mixup in the shallow feature space, synthesizing potential new class features to improve generalization and reserve the representation capacity for upcoming tasks. Experiments on the CUB200, CIFAR100, and ImageNet-R datasets demonstrate that CASP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both standard and fine-grained FSCIL settings without requiring fine-tuning during incremental phases and while significantly reducing the parameter overhead.

Paperid: 5859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15772.pdf

Abstract:
2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is an emerging explicit scene representation method with significant potential for image compression due to high fidelity and high compression ratios. However, existing low-light enhancement algorithms operate predominantly within the pixel domain. Processing 2DGS-compressed images necessitates a cumbersome decompression-enhancement-recompression pipeline, which compromises efficiency and introduces secondary degradation. To address these limitations, we propose LL-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot unsupervised framework designed for low-light enhancement directly within the 2DGS compressed representation domain. Three primary advantages are offered by this framework. First, a semantic-guided Mixture-of-Experts enhancement framework is designed. Dynamic adaptive transformations are applied to the sparse attribute space of 2DGS using rendered images as guidance to enable compression-as-enhancement without full decompression to a pixel grid. Second, a multi-objective collaborative loss function system is established to strictly constrain smoothness and fidelity during enhancement, suppressing artifacts while improving visual quality. Third, a two-stage optimization process is utilized to achieve reconstruction-as-enhancement. The accuracy of the base representation is ensured through single-scale reconstruction and network robustness is enhanced. High-quality enhancement of low-light images is achieved while high compression ratios are maintained. The feasibility and superiority of the paradigm for direct processing within the compressed representation domain are validated through experimental results.

Paperid: 5860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15766.pdf

Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in low-light image enhancement with respect to visual quality. However, most existing methods primarily operate in the pixel domain or rely on implicit feature representations. As a result, the intrinsic geometric structural priors of images are often neglected. 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) has emerged as a prominent explicit scene representation technique characterized by superior structural fitting capabilities and high rendering efficiency. Despite these advantages, the utilization of 2DGS in low-level vision tasks remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, LL-GaussianMap is proposed as the first unsupervised framework incorporating 2DGS into low-light image enhancement. Distinct from conventional methodologies, the enhancement task is formulated as a gain map generation process guided by 2DGS primitives. The proposed method comprises two primary stages. First, high-fidelity structural reconstruction is executed utilizing 2DGS. Then, data-driven enhancement dictionary coefficients are rendered via the rasterization mechanism of Gaussian splatting through an innovative unified enhancement module. This design effectively incorporates the structural perception capabilities of 2DGS into gain map generation, thereby preserving edges and suppressing artifacts during enhancement. Additionally, the reliance on paired data is circumvented through unsupervised learning. Experimental results demonstrate that LL-GaussianMap achieves superior enhancement performance with an extremely low storage footprint, highlighting the effectiveness of explicit Gaussian representations for image enhancement.

Paperid: 5861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15160.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have achieved near-expert performance in structured reasoning domains like mathematics and programming, yet their ability to perform compositional multi-hop reasoning in specialized scientific fields remains limited. We propose a bottom-up learning paradigm in which models are grounded in axiomatic domain facts and compose them to solve complex, unseen tasks. To this end, we present a post-training pipeline, based on a combination of supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning (RL), in which knowledge graphs act as implicit reward models. By deriving novel reward signals from knowledge graph paths, we provide verifiable, scalable, and grounded supervision that encourages models to compose intermediate axioms rather than optimize only final answers during RL. We validate this approach in the medical domain, training a 14B model on short-hop reasoning paths (1-3 hops) and evaluating its zero-shot generalization to complex multi-hop queries (4-5 hops). Our experiments show that path-derived rewards act as a "compositional bridge", enabling our model to significantly outperform much larger models and frontier systems like GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro, on the most difficult reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach to adversarial perturbations against option-shuffling stress tests. This work suggests that grounding the reasoning process in structured knowledge is a scalable and efficient path toward intelligent reasoning.

Paperid: 5862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11669.pdf

Abstract:
Metric-based few-shot approaches have gained significant popularity due to their relatively straightforward implementation, high interpret ability, and computational efficiency. However, stemming from the batch-independence assumption during testing, which prevents the model from leveraging valuable knowledge accumulated from previous batches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel test-time method called Incremental Prototype Enhancement Classifier (IPEC), a test-time method that optimizes prototype estimation by leveraging information from previous query samples. IPEC maintains a dynamic auxiliary set by selectively incorporating query samples that are classified with high confidence. To ensure sample quality, we design a robust dual-filtering mechanism that assesses each query sample based on both global prediction confidence and local discriminative ability. By aggregating this auxiliary set with the support set in subsequent tasks, IPEC builds progressively more stable and representative prototypes, effectively reducing its reliance on the initial support set. We ground this approach in a Bayesian interpretation, conceptualizing the support set as a prior and the auxiliary set as a data-driven posterior, which in turn motivates the design of a practical "warm-up and test" two-stage inference protocol. Extensive empirical results validate the superior performance of our proposed method across multiple few-shot classification tasks.

Paperid: 5863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08626.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is ill-posed for automated evaluation because multiple valid word orders often exist. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including semantic fidelity, logical validity, consistency, robustness sensitivity, and information density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent dissociation between semantic recall and structural planning, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.

Paperid: 5864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08621.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in search-augmented large reasoning models (LRMs) enable the retrieval of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations in multistep reasoning. However, their ability to operate on graph-structured data, prevalent in domains such as e-commerce, social networks, and scientific citations, remains underexplored. Unlike plain text corpora, graphs encode rich topological signals that connect related entities and can serve as valuable priors for retrieval, enabling more targeted search and improved reasoning efficiency. Yet, effectively leveraging such structure poses unique challenges, including the difficulty of generating graph-expressive queries and ensuring reliable retrieval that balances structural and semantic relevance. To address this gap, we introduce GraphSearch, the first framework that extends search-augmented reasoning to graph learning, enabling zero-shot graph learning without task-specific fine-tuning. GraphSearch combines a Graph-aware Query Planner, which disentangles search space (e.g., 1-hop, multi-hop, or global neighbors) from semantic queries, with a Graph-aware Retriever, which constructs candidate sets based on topology and ranks them using a hybrid scoring function. We further instantiate two traversal modes: GraphSearch-R, which recursively expands neighborhoods hop by hop, and GraphSearch-F, which flexibly retrieves across local and global neighborhoods without hop constraints. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that GraphSearch achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to supervised graph learning methods, setting state-of-the-art results in zero-shot node classification and link prediction. These findings position GraphSearch as a flexible and generalizable paradigm for agentic reasoning over graphs.

Paperid: 5865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08499.pdf

Abstract:
Large models such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable superiority over smaller architectures like ResNet in few-shot classification, owing to their powerful representational capacity. However, fine-tuning such large models demands extensive GPU memory and prolonged training time, making them impractical for many real-world low-resource scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose EfficientFSL, a query-only fine-tuning framework tailored specifically for few-shot classification with ViT, which achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. EfficientFSL fully leverages the knowledge embedded in the pre-trained model and its strong comprehension ability, achieving high classification accuracy with an extremely small number of tunable parameters. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight trainable Forward Block to synthesize task-specific queries that extract informative features from the intermediate representations of the pre-trained model in a query-only manner. We further propose a Combine Block to fuse multi-layer outputs, enhancing the depth and robustness of feature representations. Finally, a Support-Query Attention Block mitigates distribution shift by adjusting prototypes to align with the query set distribution. With minimal trainable parameters, EfficientFSL achieves state-of-the-art performance on four in-domain few-shot datasets and six cross-domain datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

Paperid: 5866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05192.pdf

Abstract:
Entity linking (mapping ambiguous mentions in text to entities in a knowledge base) is a foundational step in tasks such as knowledge graph construction, question-answering, and information extraction. Our method, LELA, is a modular coarse-to-fine approach that leverages the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), and works with different target domains, knowledge bases and LLMs, without any fine-tuning phase. Our experiments across various entity linking settings show that LELA is highly competitive with fine-tuned approaches, and substantially outperforms the non-fine-tuned ones.

Paperid: 5867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04791.pdf

Abstract:
With recent advances in generative models, diffusion models have emerged as powerful priors for solving inverse problems in each domain. Since Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) provide generic priors, several studies have explored their potential as domain-agnostic zero-shot inverse solvers. Despite these efforts, existing latent diffusion inverse solvers suffer from their instability, exhibiting undesirable artifacts and degraded quality. In this work, we first identify the instability as a discrepancy between the solver's and true reverse diffusion dynamics, and show that reducing this gap stabilizes the solver. Building on this, we introduce Measurement-Consistent Langevin Corrector (MCLC), a theoretically grounded plug-and-play correction module that remedies the LDM-based inverse solvers through measurement-consistent Langevin updates. Compared to prior approaches that rely on linear manifold assumptions, which often do not hold in latent space, MCLC operates without this assumption, leading to more stable and reliable behavior. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of MCLC and its compatibility with existing solvers across diverse image restoration tasks. Additionally, we analyze blob artifacts and offer insights into their underlying causes. We highlight that MCLC is a key step toward more robust zero-shot inverse problem solvers.

Paperid: 5868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04181.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable long-term decoding of surface electromyography (EMG) is hindered by signal drift caused by electrode shifts, muscle fatigue, and posture changes. While state-of-the-art models achieve high intra-session accuracy, their performance often degrades sharply. Existing solutions typically demand large datasets or high-compute pipelines that are impractical for energy-efficient wearables. We propose a lightweight framework for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) using a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) backbone. We introduce three deployment-ready strategies: (i) causal adaptive batch normalization for real-time statistical alignment; (ii) a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) alignment with experience replay to prevent forgetting; and (iii) meta-learning for rapid, few-shot calibration. Evaluated on the NinaPro DB6 multi-session dataset, our framework significantly bridges the inter-session accuracy gap with minimal overhead. Our results show that experience-replay updates yield superior stability under limited data, while meta-learning achieves competitive performance in one- and two-shot regimes using only a fraction of the data required by current benchmarks. This work establishes a path toward robust, "plug-and-play" myoelectric control for long-term prosthetic use.

Paperid: 5869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03552.pdf

Abstract:
Individual prevention behaviors are a primary line of defense during the early stages of novel infectious disease outbreaks, yet their adoption is heterogeneous and difficult to forecast-especially when empirical data are scarce and epidemic-policy contexts evolve rapidly. To address this gap, we develop an LLM-based prevention-behavior simulation framework that couples (i) a static module for behavior-intensity prediction under a specified external context and (ii) a dynamic module that updates residents' perceived risk over time and propagates these updates into behavior evolution. The model is implemented via structured prompt engineering in a first-person perspective and is evaluated against two rounds of survey data from Beijing residents (R1: December 2020; R2: August 2021) under progressively realistic data-availability settings: zero-shot, few-shot, and cross-context transfer. Using Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to compare simulated and observed behavior distributions (p > 0.001 as the validity criterion), the framework demonstrates robust performance and improves with limited reference examples; reported predictive accuracy increases from 72.7% (zero-shot) to 81.8% (few-shot), and remains high at 77.8% under transfer to novel contexts. We further apply the framework to simulate behavior changes during China's December 2022 policy relaxation and to stress-test behavioral responses across 120 systematically varied epidemic conditions (R0, CFR, and control-measure tiers). Results indicate broad behavioral loosening under relaxation but a distinctive counter-trend increase in drain-related disinfection, highlighting how low-cost, low-friction behaviors may persist or intensify even when external constraints recede-raising a potential environmental tradeoff.

Paperid: 5870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01952.pdf

Abstract:
Automated requirements assessment traditionally relies on universal patterns as proxies for defectiveness, implemented through rule-based heuristics or machine learning classifiers trained on large annotated datasets. However, what constitutes a "defect" is inherently context-dependent and varies across projects, domains, and stakeholder interpretations. In this paper, we propose a Human-LLM Collaboration (HLC) approach that treats defect prediction as an adaptive process rather than a static classification task. HLC leverages LLM Chain-of-Thought reasoning in a feedback loop: users validate predictions alongside their explanations, and these validated examples adaptively guide future predictions through few-shot learning. We evaluate this approach using the weak word smell on the QuRE benchmark of 1,266 annotated Mercedes-Benz requirements. Our results show that HLC effectively adapts to the provision of validated examples, with rapid performance gains from as few as 20 validated examples. Incorporating validated explanations, not just labels, enables HLC to substantially outperform both standard few-shot prompting and fine-tuned BERT models while maintaining high recall. These results highlight how the in-context and Chain-of-Thought learning capabilities of LLMs enable adaptive classification approaches that move beyond one-size-fits-all models, creating opportunities for tools that learn continuously from stakeholder feedback.

Paperid: 5871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00777.pdf

Abstract:
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong generalisation in detecting image and video deepfakes, their use for audio deepfake detection remains largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of MLLMs for audio deepfake detection. Combining audio inputs with a range of text prompts as queries to find out the viability of MLLMs to learn robust representations across modalities for audio deepfake detection. Therefore, we attempt to explore text-aware and context-rich, question-answer based prompts with binary decisions. We hypothesise that such a feature-guided reasoning will help in facilitating deeper multimodal understanding and enable robust feature learning for audio deepfake detection. We evaluate the performance of two MLLMs, Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct and SALMONN, in two evaluation modes: (a) zero-shot and (b) fine-tuned. Our experiments demonstrate that combining audio with a multi-prompt approach could be a viable way forward for audio deepfake detection. Our experiments show that the models perform poorly without task-specific training and struggle to generalise to out-of-domain data. However, they achieve good performance on in-domain data with minimal supervision, indicating promising potential for audio deepfake detection.

Paperid: 5872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24861.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has demonstrated remarkable promptable visual segmentation capabilities in video data, showing potential for extension to medical image segmentation (MIS) tasks involving 3D volumes and temporally correlated 2D image sequences. However, adapting SAM2 to MIS presents several challenges, including the need for extensive annotated medical data for fine-tuning and high-quality manual prompts, which are both labor-intensive and require intervention from medical experts. To address these challenges, we introduce OFL-SAM2, a prompt-free SAM2 framework for label-efficient MIS. Our core idea is to leverage limited annotated samples to train a lightweight mapping network that captures medical knowledge and transforms generic image features into target features, thereby providing additional discriminative target representations for each frame and eliminating the need for manual prompts. Crucially, the mapping network supports online parameter update during inference, enhancing the model's generalization across test sequences. Technically, we introduce two key components: (1) an online few-shot learner that trains the mapping network to generate target features using limited data, and (2) an adaptive fusion module that dynamically integrates the target features with the memory-attention features generated by frozen SAM2, leading to accurate and robust target representation. Extensive experiments on three diverse MIS datasets demonstrate that OFL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with limited training data.

Paperid: 5873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24410.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic text summarization has achieved high performance in high-resourced languages like English, but comparatively less attention has been given to summarization in less-resourced languages. This work compares a variety of different approaches to summarization from zero-shot prompting of LLMs large and small to fine-tuning smaller models like mT5 with and without three data augmentation approaches and multilingual transfer. We also explore an LLM translation pipeline approach, translating from the source language to English, summarizing and translating back. Evaluating with five different metrics, we find that there is variation across LLMs in their performance across similar parameter sizes, that our multilingual fine-tuned mT5 baseline outperforms most other approaches including zero-shot LLM performance for most metrics, and that LLM as judge may be less reliable on less-resourced languages.

Paperid: 5874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24040.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance, yet current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on large, labeled gold-standard development sets to compute fitness scores for evolutionary or Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches. In real-world software engineering, however, such curated datasets are rarely available during the initial cold start of agent development, where engineers instead face messy production logs and evolving failure modes. We present ROAD (Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging), a novel framework that bypasses the need for refined datasets by treating optimization as a dynamic debugging investigation rather than a stochastic search. Unlike traditional mutation strategies, ROAD utilizes a specialized multi-agent architecture, comprising an Analyzer for root-cause analysis, an Optimizer for pattern aggregation, and a Coach for strategy integration, to convert unstructured failure logs into robust, structured Decision Tree Protocols. We evaluated ROAD across both a standardized academic benchmark and a live production Knowledge Management engine. Experimental results demonstrate that ROAD is highly sample-efficient, achieving a 5.6 percent increase in success rate (73.6 percent to 79.2 percent) and a 3.8 percent increase in search accuracy within just three automated iterations. Furthermore, on complex reasoning tasks in the retail domain, ROAD improved agent performance by approximately 19 percent relative to the baseline. These findings suggest that mimicking the human engineering loop of failure analysis and patching offers a viable, data-efficient alternative to resource-intensive RL training for deploying reliable LLM agents.

Paperid: 5875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23036.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid rise of large language model (LLM)-based tutors in K--12 education has fostered a misconception that generative models can replace traditional learner modelling for adaptive instruction. This is especially problematic in K--12 settings, which the EU AI Act classifies as high-risk domain requiring responsible design. Motivated by these concerns, this study synthesises evidence on limitations of LLM-based tutors and empirically investigates one critical issue: the accuracy, reliability, and temporal coherence of assessing learners' evolving knowledge over time. We compare a deep knowledge tracing (DKT) model with a widely used LLM, evaluated zero-shot and fine-tuned, using a large open-access dataset. Results show that DKT achieves the highest discrimination performance (AUC = 0.83) on next-step correctness prediction and consistently outperforms the LLM across settings. Although fine-tuning improves the LLM's AUC by approximately 8\% over the zero-shot baseline, it remains 6\% below DKT and produces higher early-sequence errors, where incorrect predictions are most harmful for adaptive support. Temporal analyses further reveal that DKT maintains stable, directionally correct mastery updates, whereas LLM variants exhibit substantial temporal weaknesses, including inconsistent and wrong-direction updates. These limitations persist despite the fine-tuned LLM requiring nearly 198 hours of high-compute training, far exceeding the computational demands of DKT. Our qualitative analysis of multi-skill mastery estimation further shows that, even after fine-tuning, the LLM produced inconsistent mastery trajectories, while DKT maintained smooth and coherent updates. Overall, the findings suggest that LLMs alone are unlikely to match the effectiveness of established intelligent tutoring systems, and that responsible tutoring requires hybrid frameworks that incorporate learner modelling.

Paperid: 5876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20074.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the wide adoption of Large Language Models (LLM)s, clinical decision support systems face a critical challenge: achieving high predictive accuracy while generating explanations aligned with the predictions. Current approaches suffer from exposure bias leading to misaligned explanations. We propose Reason2Decide, a two-stage training framework that addresses key challenges in self-rationalization, including exposure bias and task separation. In Stage-1, our model is trained on rationale generation, while in Stage-2, we jointly train on label prediction and rationale generation, applying scheduled sampling to gradually transition from conditioning on gold labels to model predictions. We evaluate Reason2Decide on three medical datasets, including a proprietary triage dataset and public biomedical QA datasets. Across model sizes, Reason2Decide outperforms other fine-tuning baselines and some zero-shot LLMs in prediction (F1) and rationale fidelity (BERTScore, BLEU, LLM-as-a-Judge). In triage, Reason2Decide is rationale source-robust across LLM-generated, nurse-authored, and nurse-post-processed rationales. In our experiments, while using only LLM-generated rationales in Stage-1, Reason2Decide outperforms other fine-tuning variants. This indicates that LLM-generated rationales are suitable for pretraining models, reducing reliance on human annotations. Remarkably, Reason2Decide achieves these gains with models 40x smaller than contemporary foundation models, making clinical reasoning more accessible for resource-constrained deployments while still providing explainable decision support.

Paperid: 5877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18897.pdf

Abstract:
Vocabulary-free fine-grained image recognition aims to distinguish visually similar categories within a meta-class without a fixed, human-defined label set. Existing solutions for this problem are limited by either the usage of a large and rigid list of vocabularies or by the dependency on complex pipelines with fragile heuristics where errors propagate across stages. Meanwhile, the ability of recent large multi-modal models (LMMs) equipped with explicit or implicit reasoning to comprehend visual-language data, decompose problems, retrieve latent knowledge, and self-correct suggests a more principled and effective alternative. Building on these capabilities, we propose FiNDR (Fine-grained Name Discovery via Reasoning), the first reasoning-augmented LMM-based framework for vocabulary-free fine-grained recognition. The system operates in three automated steps: (i) a reasoning-enabled LMM generates descriptive candidate labels for each image; (ii) a vision-language model filters and ranks these candidates to form a coherent class set; and (iii) the verified names instantiate a lightweight multi-modal classifier used at inference time. Extensive experiments on popular fine-grained classification benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance under the vocabulary-free setting, with a significant relative margin of up to 18.8% over previous approaches. Remarkably, the proposed method surpasses zero-shot baselines that exploit pre-defined ground-truth names, challenging the assumption that human-curated vocabularies define an upper bound. Additionally, we show that carefully curated prompts enable open-source LMMs to match proprietary counterparts. These findings establish reasoning-augmented LMMs as an effective foundation for scalable, fully automated, open-world fine-grained visual recognition. The source code is available on github.com/demidovd98/FiNDR.

Paperid: 5878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18651.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) aims to enable image classifiers to recognize images from unseen classes that were not included during training. Unlike traditional supervised classification, ZSL typically relies on learning a mapping from visual features to predefined, human-understandable class concepts. While ZSL models promise to improve generalization and interpretability, their robustness under systematic input perturbations remain unclear. In this study, we present an empirical analysis about the robustness of existing ZSL methods at both classlevel and concept-level. Specifically, we successfully disrupted their class prediction by the well-known non-target class attack (clsA). However, in the Generalized Zero-shot Learning (GZSL) setting, we observe that the success of clsA is only at the original best-calibrated point. After the attack, the optimal bestcalibration point shifts, and ZSL models maintain relatively strong performance at other calibration points, indicating that clsA results in a spurious attack success in the GZSL. To address this, we propose the Class-Bias Enhanced Attack (CBEA), which completely eliminates GZSL accuracy across all calibrated points by enhancing the gap between seen and unseen class probabilities.Next, at concept-level attack, we introduce two novel attack modes: Class-Preserving Concept Attack (CPconA) and NonClass-Preserving Concept Attack (NCPconA). Our extensive experiments evaluate three typical ZSL models across various architectures from the past three years and reveal that ZSL models are vulnerable not only to the traditional class attack but also to concept-based attacks. These attacks allow malicious actors to easily manipulate class predictions by erasing or introducing concepts. Our findings highlight a significant performance gap between existing approaches, emphasizing the need for improved adversarial robustness in current ZSL models.

Paperid: 5879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15971.pdf

Abstract:
Multispectral object detection is critical for safety-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance, where robust perception under diverse illumination conditions is essential. However, the limited availability of annotated multispectral data severely restricts the training of deep detectors. In such data-scarce scenarios, textual class information can serve as a valuable source of semantic supervision. Motivated by the recent success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in computer vision, we explore their potential for few-shot multispectral object detection. Specifically, we adapt two representative VLM-based detectors, Grounding DINO and YOLO-World, to handle multispectral inputs and propose an effective mechanism to integrate text, visual and thermal modalities. Through extensive experiments on two popular multispectral image benchmarks, FLIR and M3FD, we demonstrate that VLM-based detectors not only excel in few-shot regimes, significantly outperforming specialized multispectral models trained with comparable data, but also achieve competitive or superior results under fully supervised settings. Our findings reveal that the semantic priors learned by large-scale VLMs effectively transfer to unseen spectral modalities, ofFering a powerful pathway toward data-efficient multispectral perception.

Paperid: 5880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12885.pdf

Abstract:
Automated road sign recognition is a critical task for intelligent transportation systems, but traditional deep learning methods struggle with the sheer number of sign classes and the impracticality of creating exhaustive labeled datasets. This paper introduces a novel zero-shot recognition framework that adapts the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm to address this challenge. Our method first uses a Vision Language Model (VLM) to generate a textual description of a sign from an input image. This description is used to retrieve a small set of the most relevant sign candidates from a vector database of reference designs. Subsequently, a Large Language Model (LLM) reasons over the retrieved candidates to make a final, fine-grained recognition. We validate this approach on a comprehensive set of 303 regulatory signs from the Ohio MUTCD. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving 95.58% accuracy on ideal reference images and 82.45% on challenging real-world road data. This work demonstrates the viability of RAG-based architectures for creating scalable and accurate systems for road sign recognition without task-specific training.

Paperid: 5881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12219.pdf

Abstract:
Recognizing unseen fine-grained categories demands a model that can distinguish subtle visual differences. This is typically achieved by transferring visual-attribute relationships from seen classes to unseen classes. The core challenge is attribute entanglement, where conventional models collapse distinct attributes like color, shape, and texture into a single visual embedding. This causes interference that masks these critical distinctions. The post-hoc solutions of previous work are insufficient, as they operate on representations that are already mixed. We propose a zero-shot learning framework that learns AttributeCentric Representations (ACR) to tackle this problem by imposing attribute disentanglement during representation learning. ACR is achieved with two mixture-of-experts components, including Mixture of Patch Experts (MoPE) and Mixture of Attribute Experts (MoAE). First, MoPE is inserted into the transformer using a dual-level routing mechanism to conditionally dispatch image patches to specialized experts. This ensures coherent attribute families are processed by dedicated experts. Finally, the MoAE head projects these expert-refined features into sparse, partaware attribute maps for robust zero-shot classification. On zero-shot learning benchmark datasets CUB, AwA2, and SUN, our ACR achieves consistent state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 5882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06727.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale in size and context length, the memory requirements of the key value (KV) cache have emerged as a major bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. The KV cache grows with sequence length and embedding dimension, often exceeding the memory footprint of the model itself and limiting achievable batch sizes and context windows. To address this challenge, we present KV CAR, a unified and architecture agnostic framework that significantly reduces KV cache storage while maintaining model fidelity. KV CAR combines two complementary techniques. First, a lightweight autoencoder learns compact representations of key and value tensors along the embedding dimension, compressing them before they are stored in the KV cache and restoring them upon retrieval. Second, a similarity driven reuse mechanism identifies opportunities to reuse KV tensors of specific attention heads across adjacent layers. Together, these methods reduce the dimensional and structural redundancy in KV tensors without requiring changes to the transformer architecture. Evaluations on GPT 2 and TinyLLaMA models across Wikitext, C4, PIQA, and Winogrande datasets demonstrate that KV CAR achieves up to 47.85 percent KV cache memory reduction with minimal impact on perplexity and zero shot accuracy. System level measurements on an NVIDIA A40 GPU show that the reduced KV footprint directly translates into longer sequence lengths and larger batch sizes during inference. These results highlight the effectiveness of KV CAR in enabling memory efficient LLM inference.

Paperid: 5883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05732.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong in-context learning abilities, yet their effectiveness in text classification depends heavily on prompt design and incurs substantial computational cost. Conformal In-Context Learning (CICLe) has been proposed as a resource-efficient framework that integrates a lightweight base classifier with Conformal Prediction to guide LLM prompting by adaptively reducing the set of candidate classes. However, its broader applicability and efficiency benefits beyond a single domain have not yet been systematically explored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of CICLe across diverse NLP classification benchmarks. The results show that CICLe consistently improves over its base classifier and outperforms few-shot prompting baselines when the sample size is sufficient for training the base classifier, and performs comparably in low-data regimes. In terms of efficiency, CICLe reduces the number of shots and prompt length by up to 34.45% and 25.16%, respectively, and enables the use of smaller models with competitive performance. CICLe is furthermore particularly advantageous for text classification tasks with high class imbalance. These findings highlight CICLe as a practical and scalable approach for efficient text classification, combining the robustness of traditional classifiers with the adaptability of LLMs, and achieving substantial gains in data and computational efficiency.

Paperid: 5884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02643.pdf

Abstract:
Existing deep learning methods for remote sensing image fusion often suffer from poor generalization when applied to unseen datasets due to the limited availability of real training data and the domain gap between different satellite sensors. To address this challenge, we explore the potential of foundation models by proposing a novel pretraining strategy that leverages large-scale simulated datasets to learn robust spatial-spectral priors. Specifically, our approach first constructs diverse simulated datasets by applying various degradation operations (blur, noise, downsampling) and augmentations (bands generation, channel shuffling, high-pass filtering, color jittering, etc.) to natural images from ImageNet and remote sensing images from SkyScript. We then pretrain fusion models on these simulated data to learn generalizable spatial-spectral representations. The pretrained models are subsequently evaluated on six datasets (WorldView-2/3/4, IKONOS, QuickBird, GaoFen-2) using zero-shot and one-shot paradigms, with both full- and freeze-tuning approaches for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on different network architectures including convolutional neural networks, Transformer, and Mamba demonstrate that our pretraining strategy significantly improves generalization performance across different satellite sensors and imaging conditions for various fusion models. The pretrained models achieve superior results in zero-shot scenarios and show remarkable adaptation capability with minimal real data in one-shot settings. Our work provides a practical solution for cross-domain pansharpening, establishes a new benchmark for generalization in remote sensing image fusion tasks, and paves the way for leveraging foundation models through advanced training strategies.

Paperid: 5885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01267.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-tuning pre-trained speech foundation models for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is prevalent, yet constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. We introduce ZO-ASR, a memory-efficient Zeroth-Order (ZO) method that avoids Back-Propagation (BP) and activation memory by estimating gradients via forward passes. When combined with SGD optimizer, ZO-ASR-SGD fine-tunes ASR models using only inference memory. Our evaluation spans supervised and unsupervised tasks. For Supervised Domain Adaptation on Whisper-Large-V3, ZO-ASR's multiple query mechanism enhances robustness and achieves up to an 18.9\% relative Word Error Rate reduction over zero-shot baselines, outperforming existing ZO methods. For unsupervised Test-Time Adaptation on Wav2Vec2-Base, ZO-ASR exhibits moderately lower performance compared to first-order optimizer Adam. Our BP-free approach provides a viable solution for fine-tuning ASR models in computationally resource-constrained or gradient-inaccessible scenarios.

Paperid: 5886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22685.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-robot navigation in cluttered environments presents fundamental challenges in balancing reactive collision avoidance with long-range goal achievement. When navigating through narrow passages or confined spaces, deadlocks frequently emerge that prevent agents from reaching their destinations, particularly when Reinforcement Learning (RL) control policies encounter novel configurations out of learning distribution. Existing RL-based approaches suffer from limited generalization capability in unseen environments. We propose a hybrid framework that seamlessly integrates RL-based reactive navigation with on-demand Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) to explicitly resolve topological deadlocks. Our approach integrates a safety layer that monitors agent progress to detect deadlocks and, when detected, triggers a coordination controller for affected agents. The framework constructs globally feasible trajectories via MAPF and regulates waypoint progression to reduce inter-agent conflicts during navigation. Extensive evaluation on dense multi-agent benchmarks shows that our method boosts task completion from marginal to near-universal success, markedly reducing deadlocks and collisions. When integrated with hierarchical task planning, it enables coordinated navigation for heterogeneous robots, demonstrating that coupling reactive RL navigation with selective MAPF intervention yields a robust, zero-shot performance.

Paperid: 5887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22443.pdf

Abstract:
Deepfake generation has witnessed remarkable progress, contributing to highly realistic generated images, videos, and audio. While technically intriguing, such progress has raised serious concerns related to the misuse of manipulated media. To mitigate such misuse, robust and reliable deepfake detection is urgently needed. Towards this, we propose a novel network FauxNet, which is based on pre-trained Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) features. By extracting temporal VSR features from videos, we identify and segregate real videos from manipulated ones. The holy grail in this context has to do with zero-shot detection, i.e., generalizable detection, which we focus on in this work. FauxNet consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in this setting. In addition, FauxNet is able to attribute - distinguish between generation techniques from which the videos stem. Finally, we propose new datasets, referred to as Authentica-Vox and Authentica-HDTF, comprising about 38,000 real and fake videos in total, the latter created with six recent deepfake generation techniques. We provide extensive analysis and results on the Authentica datasets and FaceForensics++, demonstrating the superiority of FauxNet. The Authentica datasets will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 5888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20004.pdf

Abstract:
This work investigates the zero-shot forecasting capability of time-series foundation models for Leaf Area Index (LAI) forecasting in agricultural monitoring. Using the HiQ dataset (U.S., 2000-2022), we systematically compare statistical baselines, a fully supervised LSTM, and the Sundial foundation model under multiple evaluation protocols. We find that Sundial, in the zero-shot setting, can outperform a fully trained LSTM provided that the input context window is sufficiently long-specifically, when covering more than one or two full seasonal cycles. This demonstrates, for the first time, that a general-purpose foundation model can surpass specialized supervised models on remote-sensing time series prediction without any task-specific tuning. These results highlight the strong potential of pretrained time-series foundation models to serve as effective plug-and-play forecasters in agricultural and environmental applications.

Paperid: 5889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18792.pdf

Abstract:
While Wi-Fi sensing offers a compelling, privacy-preserving alternative to cameras, its practical utility has been fundamentally undermined by a lack of robustness across domains. Models trained in one setup fail to generalize to new environments, hardware, or users, a critical "domain shift" problem exacerbated by modest, fragmented public datasets. We shift from this limited paradigm and apply a foundation model approach, leveraging Masked Autoencoding (MAE) style pretraining on the largest and most heterogeneous Wi-Fi CSI datasets collection assembled to date. Our study pretrains and evaluates models on over 1.3 million samples extracted from 14 datasets, collected using 4 distinct devices across the 2.4/5/6 GHz bands and bandwidths from 20 to 160 MHz. Our large-scale evaluation is the first to systematically disentangle the impacts of data diversity versus model capacity on cross-domain performance. The results establish scaling trends on Wi-Fi CSI sensing. First, our experiments show log-linear improvements in unseen domain performance as the amount of pretraining data increases, suggesting that data scale and diversity are key to domain generalization. Second, based on the current data volume, larger model can only provide marginal gains for cross-domain performance, indicating that data, rather than model capacity, is the current bottleneck for Wi-Fi sensing generalization. Finally, we conduct a series of cross-domain evaluations on human activity recognition, human gesture recognition and user identification tasks. The results show that the large-scale pretraining improves cross-domain accuracy ranging from 2.2% to 15.7%, compared to the supervised learning baseline. Overall, our findings provide insightful direction for designing future Wi-Fi sensing systems that can eventually be robust enough for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 5890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16435.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel classes under the guidance of limited support samples by a meta-learning paradigm. Existing methods mainly mine references from support images as meta guidance. However, due to intra-class variations among visual representations, the meta information extracted from support images cannot produce accurate guidance to segment untrained classes. In this paper, we argue that the references from support images may not be essential, the key to the support role is to provide unbiased meta guidance for both trained and untrained classes. We then introduce a Language-Driven Attribute Generalization (LDAG) architecture to utilize inherent target property language descriptions to build robust support strategy. Specifically, to obtain an unbiased support representation, we design a Multi-attribute Enhancement (MaE) module, which produces multiple detailed attribute descriptions of the target class through Large Language Models (LLMs), and then builds refined visual-text prior guidance utilizing multi-modal matching. Meanwhile, due to text-vision modal shift, attribute text struggles to promote visual feature representation, we design a Multi-modal Attribute Alignment (MaA) to achieve cross-modal interaction between attribute texts and visual feature. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms existing approaches by a clear margin and achieves the new state-of-the art performance. The code will be released.

Paperid: 5891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16218.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world agricultural distributions often suffer from severe class imbalance, typically following a long-tailed distribution. Labeled datasets for crop-type classification are inherently scarce and remain costly to obtain. When working with such limited data, training sets are frequently constructed to be artificially balanced -- in particular in the case of few-shot learning -- failing to reflect real-world conditions. This mismatch induces a shift between training and test label distributions, degrading real-world generalization. To address this, we propose Dirichlet Prior Augmentation (DirPA), a novel method that simulates an unknown label distribution skew of the target domain proactively during model training. Specifically, we model the real-world distribution as Dirichlet-distributed random variables, effectively performing a prior augmentation during few-shot learning. Our experiments show that DirPA successfully shifts the decision boundary and stabilizes the training process by acting as a dynamic feature regularizer.

Paperid: 5892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15407.pdf

Abstract:
Humans learn by observing, interacting with environments, and internalizing physics and causality. Here, we aim to ask whether an agent can similarly acquire human-like reasoning from interaction and keep improving with more experience. We study this in a Game-to-Unseen (G2U) setting, curating 1,000+ heterogeneous games with diverse physical and causal mechanisms, and evaluate at three human-like levels: Survival, Curiosity, Utility, from primitive intuition to goal-driven reasoning. Our analysis reveals complementary failures: VLM/VLA agents reason but lack look-ahead in interactive settings, while world models imagine but imitate visual patterns rather than analyze physics and causality. We therefore propose IPR (Interactive Physical Reasoner), using world-model rollouts to score and reinforce a VLM's policy, and introduce PhysCode, a physics-centric action code aligning semantic intent with dynamics to provide a shared action space for prediction and reasoning. Pretrained on 1,000+ games, our IPR performs robustly on three levels, matches GPT-5 overall, and surpasses it on Curiosity. We find that performance improves with more training games and interaction steps, and that the model also zero-shot transfers to unseen games. These results support physics-centric interaction as a path to steadily improving physical reasoning.

Paperid: 5893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15167.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised depth estimation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing methods exhibit substantial performance degradation under adverse weather conditions such as rain and fog, where reduced visibility critically impairs depth prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel self-evolution contrastive learning framework called SEC-Depth for self-supervised robust depth estimation tasks. Our approach leverages intermediate parameters generated during training to construct temporally evolving latency models. Using these, we design a self-evolution contrastive scheme to mitigate performance loss under challenging conditions. Concretely, we first design a dynamic update strategy of latency models for the depth estimation task to capture optimization states across training stages. To effectively leverage latency models, we introduce a self-evolution contrastive Loss (SECL) that treats outputs from historical latency models as negative samples. This mechanism adaptively adjusts learning objectives while implicitly sensing weather degradation severity, reducing the needs for manual intervention. Experiments show that our method integrates seamlessly into diverse baseline models and significantly enhances robustness in zero-shot evaluations.

Paperid: 5894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15118.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation has garnered significant attention. Many recent approaches attempt to introduce the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to handle this task. With the strong generalization ability and rich object-specific extraction ability of the SAM model, such a solution shows great potential in few-shot segmentation. However, the decoding process of SAM highly relies on accurate and explicit prompts, making previous approaches mainly focus on extracting prompts from the support set, which is insufficient to activate the generalization ability of SAM, and this design is easy to result in a biased decoding process when adapting to the unknown classes. In this work, we propose an Unbiased Semantic Decoding (USD) strategy integrated with SAM, which extracts target information from both the support and query set simultaneously to perform consistent predictions guided by the semantics of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Specifically, to enhance the unbiased semantic discrimination of SAM, we design two feature enhancement strategies that leverage the semantic alignment capability of CLIP to enrich the original SAM features, mainly including a global supplement at the image level to provide a generalize category indicate with support image and a local guidance at the pixel level to provide a useful target location with query image. Besides, to generate target-focused prompt embeddings, a learnable visual-text target prompt generator is proposed by interacting target text embeddings and clip visual features. Without requiring re-training of the vision foundation models, the features with semantic discrimination draw attention to the target region through the guidance of prompt with rich target information.

Paperid: 5895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13007.pdf

Abstract:
Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on supervised reward models or external judges that demand abundant annotations. However, in fields that rely on professional knowledge, such as medicine and law, such large-scale preference labels are often unachievable. In this paper, we propose a generative entropy-guided preference modeling approach named GEM for LLMs aligment at low-resource and domain-specific scenarios. Instead of training a discriminative reward model on preference data, we directly train the LLM to internalize a closed-loop optimization architecture that can extract and exploit the multi-dimensional, fine-grained cognitive signals implicit in human preferences. Specifically, our Cognitive Filtering module, based on entropy theory in decision making, first leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to generate diverse candidate reasoning chains (CoTs) from preference data. Subsequently, it introduces a token scoring mechanism to rank and weight the sampled CoTs, boosting the importance of high-confidence answers and strategically high-entropy tokens. Building on these filtered preferences, we fine-tune the LLM using a novel self-evaluated group advantage algorithm, SEGA, which effectively aggregates group-level cognitive signals and transforms the entropy-based scores into implicit rewards for policy optimization. In these ways, GEM empowers the LLM to rely on its own judgments and establishes an entropy-guided closed-loop cognitive optimization framework, enabling highly efficient few-shot alignment of LLMs. Experiments on general benchmarks and domain-specific tasks (such as mathematical reasoning and medical dialogues) demonstrate that our GEM achieves significant improvements with few-shot preference data.

Paperid: 5896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12131.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a crucial tool in Visual Question Answering (VQA) for handling knowledge-intensive questions in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios. However, their reliance on massive training datasets often causes them to inherit language biases during the acquisition of knowledge. This limitation imposes two key constraints on existing methods: (1) LLM predictions become less reliable due to bias exploitation, and (2) despite strong knowledge reasoning capabilities, LLMs still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. To address these issues, we propose Object Attribute Description Promoter (OAD-Promoter), a novel approach for enhancing LLM-based VQA by mitigating language bias and improving domain-shift robustness. OAD-Promoter comprises three components: the Object-concentrated Example Generation (OEG) module, the Memory Knowledge Assistance (MKA) module, and the OAD Prompt. The OEG module generates global captions and object-concentrated samples, jointly enhancing visual information input to the LLM and mitigating bias through complementary global and regional visual cues. The MKA module assists the LLM in handling OOD samples by retrieving relevant knowledge from stored examples to support questions from unseen domains. Finally, the OAD Prompt integrates the outputs of the preceding modules to optimize LLM inference. Experiments demonstrate that OAD-Promoter significantly improves the performance of LLM-based VQA methods in few-shot or zero-shot settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 5897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11306.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agent systems have advanced rapidly, driven by their strong generalization in zero-shot settings. To further enhance reasoning and accuracy on complex tasks, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a promising framework that engages multiple LLM agents in structured debates to encourage diverse reasoning. However, triggering MAD for every query is inefficient, as it incurs substantial computational (token) cost and may even degrade accuracy by overturning correct single-agent answers. To address these limitations, we propose intelligent Multi-Agent Debate (iMAD), a token-efficient framework that selectively triggers MAD only when it is likely to be beneficial (i.e., correcting an initially wrong answer). To achieve this goal, iMAD learns generalizable model behaviors to make accurate debate decisions. Specifically, iMAD first prompts a single agent to produce a structured self-critique response, from which we extract 41 interpretable linguistic and semantic features capturing hesitation cues. Then, iMAD uses a lightweight debate-decision classifier, trained using our proposed FocusCal loss, to determine whether to trigger MAD, enabling robust debate decisions without test dataset-specific tuning. Through extensive experiments using six (visual) question answering datasets against five competitive baselines, we have shown that iMAD significantly reduces token usage (by up to 92%) while also improving final answer accuracy (by up to 13.5%).

Paperid: 5898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11096.pdf

Abstract:
Bark beetle infestations represent a serious challenge for maintaining the health of coniferous forests. This paper proposes a few-shot learning approach leveraging contrastive learning to detect bark beetle infestations using satellite PRISMA hyperspectral data. The methodology is based on a contrastive learning framework to pre-train a one-dimensional CNN encoder, enabling the extraction of robust feature representations from hyperspectral data. These extracted features are subsequently utilized as input to support vector regression estimators, one for each class, trained on few labeled samples to estimate the proportions of healthy, attacked by bark beetle, and dead trees for each pixel. Experiments on the area of study in the Dolomites show that our method outperforms the use of original PRISMA spectral bands and of Sentinel-2 data. The results indicate that PRISMA hyperspectral data combined with few-shot learning offers significant advantages for forest health monitoring.

Paperid: 5899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10768.pdf

Abstract:
Summarizing consumer health questions (CHQs) can ease communication in healthcare, but unfaithful summaries that misrepresent medical details pose serious risks. We propose a framework that combines TextRank-based sentence extraction and medical named entity recognition with large language models (LLMs) to enhance faithfulness in medical text summarization. In our experiments, we fine-tuned the LLaMA-2-7B model on the MeQSum (English) and BanglaCHQ-Summ (Bangla) datasets, achieving consistent improvements across quality (ROUGE, BERTScore, readability) and faithfulness (SummaC, AlignScore) metrics, and outperforming zero-shot baselines and prior systems. Human evaluation further shows that over 80\% of generated summaries preserve critical medical information. These results highlight faithfulness as an essential dimension for reliable medical summarization and demonstrate the potential of our approach for safer deployment of LLMs in healthcare contexts.

Paperid: 5900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10441.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models achieve strong performance through training on vast datasets. Can analogical paradigm organization enable lightweight models to match this performance with minimal data? We develop a computational approach implementing three cognitive-inspired principles: analogical structure, contrastive learning, and minimal contextual cues. We test this approach with structured completion tasks where models identify correct sentence completions from analogical patterns with contrastive alternatives. Training lightweight models (BERT+CNN, $0.5M$ parameters) on only one hundred structured examples of English causative/inchoative alternations achieves $F1=0.95$, outperforming zero-shot \texttt{GPT-o3} ($F1=0.87$). Ablation studies confirm that analogical organization and contrastive structure improve performance, consistently surpassing randomly shuffled baselines across architectures. Cross-phenomenon validation using unspecified object alternations replicates these efficiency gains, confirming approach robustness. Our results show that analogical paradigm organization enables competitive linguistic rule learning with orders of magnitude less data than conventional approaches require.

Paperid: 5901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08942.pdf

Abstract:
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are set to transform robotic navigation, existing methods often underutilize their reasoning capabilities. To unlock the full potential of VLMs in robotics, we shift their role from passive observers to active strategists in the navigation process. Our framework outsources high-level planning to a VLM, which leverages its contextual understanding to guide a frontier-based exploration agent. This intelligent guidance is achieved through a trio of techniques: structured chain-of-thought prompting that elicits logical, step-by-step reasoning; dynamic inclusion of the agent's recent action history to prevent getting stuck in loops; and a novel capability that enables the VLM to interpret top-down obstacle maps alongside first-person views, thereby enhancing spatial awareness. When tested on challenging benchmarks like HM3D, Gibson, and MP3D, this method produces exceptionally direct and logical trajectories, marking a substantial improvement in navigation efficiency over existing approaches and charting a path toward more capable embodied agents.

Paperid: 5902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08935.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied visual navigation remains a challenging task, as agents must explore unknown environments with limited knowledge. Existing zero-shot studies have shown that incorporating memory mechanisms to support goal-directed behavior can improve long-horizon planning performance. However, they overlook visual frontier boundaries, which fundamentally dictate future trajectories and observations, and fall short of inferring the relationship between partial visual observations and navigation goals. In this paper, we propose Semantic Cognition Over Potential-based Exploration (SCOPE), a zero-shot framework that explicitly leverages frontier information to drive potential-based exploration, enabling more informed and goal-relevant decisions. SCOPE estimates exploration potential with a Vision-Language Model and organizes it into a spatio-temporal potential graph, capturing boundary dynamics to support long-horizon planning. In addition, SCOPE incorporates a self-reconsideration mechanism that revisits and refines prior decisions, enhancing reliability and reducing overconfident errors. Experimental results on two diverse embodied navigation tasks show that SCOPE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 4.6\% in accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates that its core components lead to improved calibration, stronger generalization, and higher decision quality.

Paperid: 5903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08806.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) describe cognitive experiences in their daily lives can offer valuable insights into disease-related cognitive and emotional changes. However, extracting such information from unstructured patient narratives is challenging due to the subtle, overlapping nature of cognitive constructs. This study developed and evaluated natural language processing (NLP) models to automatically identify categories that reflect various cognitive processes from de-identified first-person narratives. Three model families, a Bio_ClinicalBERT-based span categorization model for nested entity recognition, a fine-tuned Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using QLoRA for instruction following, and GPT-4o mini evaluated under zero- and few-shot settings, were compared on their performance on extracting seven categories. Our findings indicated that model performance varied substantially across categories and model families. The fine-tuned Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct achieved the highest overall F1-scores (0.74 micro-average and 0.59 macro-average), particularly excelling in context-dependent categories such as thought and social interaction. Bio_ClinicalBERT exhibited high precision but low recall and performed comparable to Llama for some category types such as location and time but failed on other categories such as thought, emotion and social interaction. Compared to conventional information extraction tasks, this task presents a greater challenge due to the abstract and overlapping nature of narrative accounts of complex cognitive processes. Nonetheless, with continued refinement, these NLP systems hold promise for enabling low-burden, longitudinal monitoring of cognitive function and serving as a valuable complement to formal neuropsychological assessments in PD.

Paperid: 5904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05980.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models for time series imputation remain largely unexplored. Recently, two such models, TabPFN-TS and MoTM, have emerged. These models share a common philosophy that places them within the family of time-indexed foundation models. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of these models for zero-shot imputation, which enables missing value recovery without retraining across a wide range of scenarios. We conduct extensive univariate experiments across 33 out-of-domain datasets (approximately 1.3M imputation windows) and evaluate their ability to integrate covariates at inference time to improve accuracy without fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate that time-indexed foundation models are a powerful and practical step toward achieving general-purpose, zero-shot imputation for real-world time series.

Paperid: 5905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04849.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) marks a paradigm shift in the automotive industry, where software now plays a pivotal role in defining vehicle functionality, enabling rapid innovation of modern vehicles. Developing SDV-specific applications demands advanced tools to streamline code generation and improve development efficiency. In recent years, general-purpose large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential across domains. Still, restricted access to proprietary model architectures hinders their adaption to specific tasks like SDV code generation. In this study, we propose using prompts, a common and basic strategy to interact with LLMs and redirect their responses. Using only system prompts with an appropriate and efficient prompt structure designed using advanced prompt engineering techniques, LLMs can be crafted without requiring a training session or access to their base design. This research investigates the extensive experiments on different models by applying various prompting techniques, including bare models, using a benchmark specifically created to evaluate LLMs' performance in generating SDV code. The results reveal that the model with a few-shot prompting strategy outperforms the others in adjusting the LLM answers to match the expected outcomes based on quantitative metrics.

Paperid: 5906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27439.pdf

Abstract:
Optical imaging systems are inherently imperfect due to diffraction limits, lens manufacturing tolerances, assembly misalignment, and other physical constraints. In addition, unavoidable camera shake and object motion further introduce non-ideal degradations during acquisition. These aberrations and motion-induced variations are typically unknown, difficult to measure, and costly to model or calibrate in practice. Blind inverse problems offer a promising direction by jointly estimating both the latent image and the unknown degradation kernel. However, existing approaches often suffer from convergence instability, limited prior expressiveness, and sensitivity to hyperparameters. Inspired by recent advances in self-diffusion, we propose DeblurSDI, a zero-shot, self-supervised blind imaging framework that requires no pre-training. DeblurSDI formulates blind image recovery as an iterative reverse self-diffusion process that begins from pure noise and progressively refines both the sharp image and the blur kernel. Extensive experiments on combined optical aberrations and motion blur demonstrate that DeblurSDI consistently outperforms other methods by a substantial margin.

Paperid: 5907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27090.pdf

Abstract:
Aggregating intracranial recordings across subjects is challenging since electrode count, placement, and covered regions vary widely. Spatial normalization methods like MNI coordinates offer a shared anatomical reference, but often fail to capture true functional similarity, particularly when localization is imprecise; even at matched anatomical coordinates, the targeted brain region and underlying neural dynamics can differ substantially between individuals. We propose a scalable representation-learning framework that (i) learns a subject-agnostic functional identity for each electrode from multi-region local field potentials using a Siamese encoder with contrastive objectives, inducing an embedding geometry that is locality-sensitive to region-specific neural signatures, and (ii) tokenizes these embeddings for a transformer that models inter-regional relationships with a variable number of channels. We evaluate this framework on a 20-subject dataset spanning basal ganglia-thalamic regions collected during flexible rest/movement recording sessions with heterogeneous electrode layouts. The learned functional space supports accurate within-subject discrimination and forms clear, region-consistent clusters; it transfers zero-shot to unseen channels. The transformer, operating on functional tokens without subject-specific heads or supervision, captures cross-region dependencies and enables reconstruction of masked channels, providing a subject-agnostic backbone for downstream decoding. Together, these results indicate a path toward large-scale, cross-subject aggregation and pretraining for intracranial neural data where strict task structure and uniform sensor placement are unavailable.

Paperid: 5908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26910.pdf

Abstract:
The decarbonization of transportation relies on the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which requires an accurate understanding of charging behavior to ensure cost-effective, grid-resilient infrastructure. Existing work is constrained by small-scale datasets, simple proximity-based modeling of temporal dependencies, and weak generalization to sites with limited operational history. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a framework that integrates clustering with few-shot forecasting to uncover site archetypes using a novel large-scale dataset of charging demand. The results demonstrate that archetype-specific expert models outperform global baselines in forecasting demand at unseen sites. By establishing forecast performance as a basis for infrastructure segmentation, we generate actionable insights that enable operators to lower costs, optimize energy and pricing strategies, and support grid resilience critical to climate goals.

Paperid: 5909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25962.pdf

Abstract:
This paper surveys studies on the use of neural networks for optimization in the training-data-free setting. Specifically, we examine the dataless application of neural network architectures in optimization by re-parameterizing problems using fully connected (or MLP), convolutional, graph, and quadratic neural networks. Although MLPs have been used to solve linear programs a few decades ago, this approach has recently gained increasing attention due to its promising results across diverse applications, including those based on combinatorial optimization, inverse problems, and partial differential equations. The motivation for this setting stems from two key (possibly over-lapping) factors: (i) data-driven learning approaches are still underdeveloped and have yet to demonstrate strong results, as seen in combinatorial optimization, and (ii) the availability of training data is inherently limited, such as in medical image reconstruction and other scientific applications. In this paper, we define the dataless setting and categorize it into two variants based on how a problem instance -- defined by a single datum -- is encoded onto the neural network: (i) architecture-agnostic methods and (ii) architecture-specific methods. Additionally, we discuss similarities and clarify distinctions between the dataless neural network (dNN) settings and related concepts such as zero-shot learning, one-shot learning, lifting in optimization, and over-parameterization.

Paperid: 5910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23464.pdf

Abstract:
Financial narratives from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing reports and quarterly earnings call transcripts (ECTs) are very important for investors, auditors, and regulators. However, their length, financial jargon, and nuanced language make fine-grained analysis difficult. Prior sentiment analysis in the financial domain required a large, expensive labeled dataset, making the sentence-level stance towards specific financial targets challenging. In this work, we introduce a sentence-level corpus for stance detection focused on three core financial metrics: debt, earnings per share (EPS), and sales. The sentences were extracted from Form 10-K annual reports and ECTs, and labeled for stance (positive, negative, neutral) using the advanced ChatGPT-o3-pro model under rigorous human validation. Using this corpus, we conduct a systematic evaluation of modern large language models (LLMs) using zero-shot, few-shot, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategies. Our results show that few-shot with CoT prompting performs best compared to supervised baselines, and LLMs' performance varies across the SEC and ECT datasets. Our findings highlight the practical viability of leveraging LLMs for target-specific stance in the financial domain without requiring extensive labeled data.

Paperid: 5911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23320.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce LibriConvo, a simulated multi-speaker conversational dataset based on speaker-aware conversation simulation (SASC), designed to support training and evaluation of speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Unlike prior resources that mostly rely on semantically disconnected utterances and implausible temporal gaps, LibriConvo ensures semantic coherence and realistic conversational timing. Our pipeline leverages CallHome with external VAD for reliable boundaries, applies compression to reduce unnaturally long silences, and organizes LibriTTS utterances by book to maintain contextual consistency. Acoustic realism is enhanced via a novel room impulse response selection procedure that ranks speaker-microphone configurations by spatial plausibility, balancing realism and diversity. The dataset comprises 240.1 hours across 1,496 dialogues with 830 unique speakers, split in a speaker-disjoint manner for robust evaluation. Baselines show that the sortformer model outperforms the pyannote pipeline in diarization, while a fine-tuned Fast Conformer-CTC XLarge with Serialized Output Training achieves 7.29\% WER for ASR, surpassing zero-shot Whisper-large-v3. LibriConvo provides a valuable resource for advancing multi-speaker speech processing research with realistic conversational dynamics and controlled experimental conditions.

Paperid: 5912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22838.pdf

Abstract:
The "style trap" poses a significant challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), hindering robust semantic understanding across diverse visual styles, especially in in-context learning (ICL). Existing methods often fail to effectively decouple style from content, hindering generalization. To address this, we propose the Semantic-Preserving Cross-Style Visual Reasoner (SP-CSVR), a novel framework for stable semantic understanding and adaptive cross-style visual reasoning. SP-CSVR integrates a Cross-Style Feature Encoder (CSFE) for style-content disentanglement, a Semantic-Aligned In-Context Decoder (SAICD) for efficient few-shot style adaptation, and an Adaptive Semantic Consistency Module (ASCM) employing multi-task contrastive learning to enforce cross-style semantic invariance. Extensive experiments on a challenging multi-style dataset demonstrate SP-CSVR's state-of-the-art performance across visual captioning, visual question answering, and in-context style adaptation. Comprehensive evaluations, including ablation studies and generalization analysis, confirm SP-CSVR's efficacy in enhancing robustness, generalization, and efficiency across diverse visual styles.

Paperid: 5913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21181.pdf

Abstract:
Causal relationship discovery has been drawing increasing attention due to its prevalent application. Existing methods rely on human experience, statistical methods, or graphical criteria methods which are error-prone, stuck at the idealized assumption, and rely on a huge amount of data. And there is also a serious data gap in accessing Multivariate time series(MTS) in many areas, adding difficulty in finding their causal relationship. Existing methods are easy to be over-fitting on them. To fill the gap we mentioned above, in this paper, we propose Shylock, a novel method that can work well in both few-shot and normal MTS to find the causal relationship. Shylock can reduce the number of parameters exponentially by using group dilated convolution and a sharing kernel, but still learn a better representation of variables with time delay. By combing the global constraint and the local constraint, Shylock achieves information sharing among networks to help improve the accuracy. To evaluate the performance of Shylock, we also design a data generation method to generate MTS with time delay. We evaluate it on commonly used benchmarks and generated datasets. Extensive experiments show that Shylock outperforms two existing state-of-art methods on both few-shot and normal MTS. We also developed Tcausal, a library for easy use and deployed it on the EarthDataMiner platform

Paperid: 5914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19782.pdf

Abstract:
We study model merging as a practical alternative to conventional adaptation strategies for code-mixed NLP. Starting from a multilingual base model, we: (i) perform continued pre-training (CPT) on unlabeled code-mixed text to obtain an adapted checkpoint, (ii) merge checkpoint with the base model, and (iii) fine-tune (FT) on the downstream task data. We evaluate our approach for sentence classification (sentiment and hate speech) task in English-Hindi (En-Hi) and English-Spanish (En-Es) using XLM-R and Llama-3.2-1B models. Our results show that merged models consistently outperform full fine-tuning and CPT->FT. We observe gains of 2--5 points in F1 over full fine-tuning and ~1-2 points over CPT->FT, indicating that unlabeled data is leveraged more effectively via merging than via CPT alone. Zero-/few-shot prompting with larger LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.3-70B) lags behind fine-tuned and merged checkpoints, underscoring limits of in-context learning for code-mixed inputs. We further test cross-pair transfer by training on En-Hi and evaluating on En-Ta and En-Ml: merged checkpoints transfer more strongly than monolingual-English baselines (e.g., TV/TIES variants reaching 0.65-0.68 F1 vs 0.61-0.63 for full fine-tuning), suggesting that code-mixed knowledge is a more reliable substrate for low-resource pairs. We conclude with adaptation recipes matched to common data regimes (labeled only; labeled+unlabeled; transfer-only) and discuss limitations and scaling considerations for broader tasks and larger models.

Paperid: 5915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17883.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) can reason over natural-language inputs, but their role in intrusion detection without fine-tuning remains uncertain. This study evaluates a prompt-only approach on UNSW-NB15 by converting each network flow to a compact textual record and augmenting it with lightweight, domain-inspired boolean flags (asymmetry, burst rate, TTL irregularities, timer anomalies, rare service/state, short bursts). To reduce output drift and support measurement, the model is constrained to produce structured, grammar-valid responses, and a single decision threshold is calibrated on a small development split. We compare zero-shot, instruction-guided, and few-shot prompting to strong tabular and neural baselines under identical splits, reporting accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and macro scores. Empirically, unguided prompting is unreliable, while instructions plus flags substantially improve detection quality; adding calibrated scoring further stabilizes results. On a balanced subset of two hundred flows, a 7B instruction-tuned model with flags reaches macro-F1 near 0.78; a lighter 3B model with few-shot cues and calibration attains F1 near 0.68 on one thousand examples. As the evaluation set grows to two thousand flows, decision quality decreases, revealing sensitivity to coverage and prompting. Tabular baselines remain more stable and faster, yet the prompt-only pipeline requires no gradient training, produces readable artifacts, and adapts easily through instructions and flags. Contributions include a flow-to-text protocol with interpretable cues, a calibration method for thresholding, a systematic baseline comparison, and a reproducibility bundle with prompts, grammar, metrics, and figures.

Paperid: 5916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17686.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in 3D object detection and novel category detection have made significant progress, yet research on learning generalized 3D objectness remains insufficient. In this paper, we delve into learning open-world 3D objectness, which focuses on detecting all objects in a 3D scene, including novel objects unseen during training. Traditional closed-set 3D detectors struggle to generalize to open-world scenarios, while directly incorporating 3D open-vocabulary models for open-world ability struggles with vocabulary expansion and semantic overlap. To achieve generalized 3D object discovery, We propose OP3Det, a class-agnostic Open-World Prompt-free 3D Detector to detect any objects within 3D scenes without relying on hand-crafted text prompts. We introduce the strong generalization and zero-shot capabilities of 2D foundation models, utilizing both 2D semantic priors and 3D geometric priors for class-agnostic proposals to broaden 3D object discovery. Then, by integrating complementary information from point cloud and RGB image in the cross-modal mixture of experts, OP3Det dynamically routes uni-modal and multi-modal features to learn generalized 3D objectness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the extraordinary performance of OP3Det, which significantly surpasses existing open-world 3D detectors by up to 16.0% in AR and achieves a 13.5% improvement compared to closed-world 3D detectors.

Paperid: 5917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17385.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular prediction has traditionally relied on gradient-boosted decision trees and specialized deep learning models, which excel within tasks but provide limited interpretability and weak transfer across tables. Reasoning large language models (LLMs) promise cross-task adaptability with trans- parent reasoning traces, yet their potential has not been fully realized for tabular data. This paper presents TabR1, the first reasoning LLM for tabular prediction with multi-step reasoning. At its core is Permutation Relative Policy Optimization (PRPO), a simple yet efficient reinforcement learning method that encodes column-permutation invariance as a structural prior. By construct- ing multiple label-preserving permutations per sample and estimating advantages both within and across permutations, PRPO transforms sparse rewards into dense learning signals and improves generalization. With limited supervision, PRPO activates the reasoning ability of LLMs for tabular prediction, enhancing few-shot and zero-shot performance as well as interpretability. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TabR1 achieves performance comparable to strong baselines under full-supervision fine-tuning. In the zero-shot setting, TabR1 approaches the performance of strong baselines under the 32-shot setting. Moreover, TabR1 (8B) substantially outperforms much larger LLMs across various tasks, achieving up to 53.17% improvement over DeepSeek-R1 (685B).

Paperid: 5918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16695.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot forecasting aims to predict outcomes for previously unseen conditions without direct historical data, posing a significant challenge for traditional forecasting methods. We introduce a Resolution-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhances predictive accuracy by leveraging spatial correlations and temporal frequency characteristics. By decomposing signals into different frequency components, our model employs resolution-aware retrieval, where lower-frequency components rely on broader spatial context, while higher-frequency components focus on local influences. This allows the model to dynamically retrieve relevant data and adapt to new locations with minimal historical context. Applied to microclimate forecasting, our model significantly outperforms traditional forecasting methods, numerical weather prediction models, and modern foundation time series models, achieving 71% lower MSE than HRRR and 34% lower MSE than Chronos on the ERA5 dataset. Our results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented and resolution-aware strategies, offering a scalable and data-efficient solution for zero-shot forecasting in microclimate modeling and beyond.

Paperid: 5919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16187.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world multi-agent systems may require ad hoc teaming, where an agent must coordinate with other previously unseen teammates to solve a task in a zero-shot manner. Prior work often either selects a pretrained policy based on an inferred model of the new teammates or pretrains a single policy that is robust to potential teammates. Instead, we propose to leverage all pretrained policies in a zero-shot transfer setting. We formalize this problem as an ad hoc multi-agent Markov decision process and present a solution that uses two key ideas, generalized policy improvement and difference rewards, for efficient and effective knowledge transfer between different teams. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm, Generalized Policy improvement for Ad hoc Teaming (GPAT), successfully enables zero-shot transfer to new teams in three simulated environments: cooperative foraging, predator-prey, and Overcooked. We also demonstrate our algorithm in a real-world multi-robot setting.

Paperid: 5920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15376.pdf

Abstract:
Automating chicken shoulder deboning requires precise 6-DoF cutting through a partially occluded, deformable, multi-material joint, since contact with the bones presents serious health and safety risks. Our work makes both systems-level and algorithmic contributions to train and deploy a reactive force-feedback cutting policy that dynamically adapts a nominal trajectory and enables full 6-DoF knife control to traverse the narrow joint gap while avoiding contact with the bones. First, we introduce an open-source custom-built simulator for multi-material cutting that models coupling, fracture, and cutting forces, and supports reinforcement learning, enabling efficient training and rapid prototyping. Second, we design a reusable physical testbed to emulate the chicken shoulder: two rigid "bone" spheres with controllable pose embedded in a softer block, enabling rigorous and repeatable evaluation while preserving essential multi-material characteristics of the target problem. Third, we train and deploy a residual RL policy, with discretized force observations and domain randomization, enabling robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and the first demonstration of a learned policy that debones a real chicken shoulder. Our experiments in our simulator, on our physical testbed, and on real chicken shoulders show that our learned policy reliably navigates the joint gap and reduces undesired bone/cartilage contact, resulting in up to a 4x improvement over existing open-loop cutting baselines in terms of success rate and bone avoidance. Our results also illustrate the necessity of force feedback for safe and effective multi-material cutting. The project website is at https://sites.google.com/view/chickendeboning-2026.

Paperid: 5921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14866.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse vision-and-language tasks. However, their potential in face recognition remains underexplored. In particular, the performance of open-source MLLMs needs to be evaluated and compared with existing face recognition models on standard benchmarks with similar protocol. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of state-of-the-art MLLMs for face recognition on several face recognition datasets, including LFW, CALFW, CPLFW, CFP, AgeDB and RFW. Experimental results reveal that while MLLMs capture rich semantic cues useful for face-related tasks, they lag behind specialized models in high-precision recognition scenarios in zero-shot applications. This benchmark provides a foundation for advancing MLLM-based face recognition, offering insights for the design of next-generation models with higher accuracy and generalization. The source code of our benchmark is publicly available in the project page.

Paperid: 5922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11313.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates automated skill decomposition using Large Language Models (LLMs) and proposes a rigorous, ontology-grounded evaluation framework. Our framework standardizes the pipeline from prompting and generation to normalization and alignment with ontology nodes. To evaluate outputs, we introduce two metrics: a semantic F1-score that uses optimal embedding-based matching to assess content accuracy, and a hierarchy-aware F1-score that credits structurally correct placements to assess granularity. We conduct experiments on ROME-ESCO-DecompSkill, a curated subset of parents, comparing two prompting strategies: zero-shot and leakage-safe few-shot with exemplars. Across diverse LLMs, zero-shot offers a strong baseline, while few-shot consistently stabilizes phrasing and granularity and improves hierarchy-aware alignment. A latency analysis further shows that exemplar-guided prompts are competitive - and sometimes faster - than unguided zero-shot due to more schema-compliant completions. Together, the framework, benchmark, and metrics provide a reproducible foundation for developing ontology-faithful skill decomposition systems.

Paperid: 5923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11225.pdf

Abstract:
Graph-matching metrics such as Smatch are the de facto standard for evaluating neural semantic parsers, yet they capture surface overlap rather than logical equivalence. We reassess evaluation by pairing graph-matching with automated theorem proving. We compare two approaches to building parsers: supervised fine-tuning (T5-Small/Base) and few-shot in-context learning (GPT-4o/4.1/5), under normalized and unnormalized targets. We evaluate outputs using graph-matching, bidirectional entailment between source and target formulas with a first-order logic theorem prover, and well-formedness. Across settings, we find that models performing well on graph-matching often fail to produce logically equivalent formulas. Normalization reduces incidental target variability, improves well-formedness, and strengthens logical adequacy. Error analysis shows performance degrades with increasing formula complexity and with coordination, prepositional phrases, and passive voice; the dominant failures involve variable binding and indexing, and predicate naming. These findings highlight limits of graph-based metrics for reasoning-oriented applications and motivate logic-sensitive evaluation and training objectives together with simplified, normalized target representations. All code and data for our experiments are publicly available.

Paperid: 5924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10785.pdf

Abstract:
Previous accent conversion (AC) methods, including foreign accent conversion (FAC), lack explicit control over the degree of modification. Because accent modification can alter the perceived speaker identity, balancing conversion strength and identity preservation is crucial. We present an AC framework that provides an explicit, user-controllable parameter for accent modification. The method targets pronunciation while preserving suprasegmental cues such as intonation and phoneme durations. Results show performance comparable to recent AC systems, stronger preservation of speaker identity, and unique support for controllable accent conversion.

Paperid: 5925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09878.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods often rely on Intersection-over-Union (IoU) for association. However, this becomes unreliable when objects are similar or occluded. Also, computing IoU for segmentation masks is computationally expensive. In this work, we use segmentation masks to capture object shapes, but we do not compute segmentation IoU. Instead, we fuse depth and mask features and pass them through a compact encoder trained self-supervised. This encoder produces stable object representations, which we use as an additional similarity cue alongside bounding box IoU and re-identification features for matching. We obtain depth maps from a zero-shot depth estimator and object masks from a promptable visual segmentation model to obtain fine-grained spatial cues. Our MOT method is the first to use the self-supervised encoder to refine segmentation masks without computing masks IoU. MOT can be divided into joint detection-ReID (JDR) and tracking-by-detection (TBD) models. The latter are computationally more efficient. Experiments of our TBD method on challenging benchmarks with non-linear motion, occlusion, and crowded scenes, such as SportsMOT and DanceTrack, show that our method outperforms the TBD state-of-the-art on most metrics, while achieving competitive performance on simpler benchmarks with linear motion, such as MOT17.

Paperid: 5926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09771.pdf

Abstract:
The BLP-2025 Task 1A requires Bengali hate speech classification into six categories. Traditional supervised approaches need extensive labeled datasets that are expensive for low-resource languages. We developed PromptGuard, a few-shot framework combining chi-square statistical analysis for keyword extraction with adaptive majority voting for decision-making. We explore statistical keyword selection versus random approaches and adaptive voting mechanisms that extend classification based on consensus quality. Chi-square keywords provide consistent improvements across categories, while adaptive voting benefits ambiguous cases requiring extended classification rounds. PromptGuard achieves a micro-F1 of 67.61, outperforming n-gram baselines (60.75) and random approaches (14.65). Ablation studies confirm chi-square-based keywords show the most consistent impact across all categories.

Paperid: 5927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09203.pdf

Abstract:
Cattle behaviour is a crucial indicator of an individual animal health, productivity and overall well-being. Video-based monitoring, combined with deep learning techniques, has become a mainstream approach in animal biometrics, and it can offer high accuracy in some behaviour recognition tasks. We present Cattle-CLIP, a multimodal deep learning framework for cattle behaviour recognition, using semantic cues to improve the performance of video-based visual feature recognition. It is adapted from the large-scale image-language model CLIP by adding a temporal integration module. To address the domain gap between web data used for the pre-trained model and real-world cattle surveillance footage, we introduce tailored data augmentation strategies and specialised text prompts. Cattle-CLIP is evaluated under both fully-supervised and few-shot learning scenarios, with a particular focus on data-scarce behaviour recognition - an important yet under-explored goal in livestock monitoring. To evaluate the proposed method, we release the CattleBehaviours6 dataset, which comprises six types of indoor behaviours: feeding, drinking, standing-self-grooming, standing-ruminating, lying-self-grooming and lying-ruminating. The dataset consists of 1905 clips collected from our John Oldacre Centre dairy farm research platform housing 200 Holstein-Friesian cows. Experiments show that Cattle-CLIP achieves 96.1% overall accuracy across six behaviours in a supervised setting, with nearly 100% recall for feeding, drinking and standing-ruminating behaviours, and demonstrates robust generalisation with limited data in few-shot scenarios, highlighting the potential of multimodal learning in agricultural and animal behaviour analysis.

Paperid: 5928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09061.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional voice conversion (VC) methods typically attempt to separate speaker identity and linguistic information into distinct representations, which are then combined to reconstruct the audio. However, effectively disentangling these factors remains challenging, often leading to information loss during training. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages synthetic speech data generated by a high-quality, pretrained multispeaker text-to-speech (TTS) model. Specifically, synthetic data pairs that share the same linguistic content but differ in speaker identity are used as input-output pairs to train the voice conversion model. This enables the model to learn a direct mapping between source and target voices, effectively capturing speaker-specific characteristics while preserving linguistic content. Additionally, we introduce a flexible training strategy for any-to-any voice conversion that generalizes well to unseen speakers and new languages, enhancing adaptability and performance in zero-shot scenarios. Our experiments show that our proposed method achieves a 16.35% relative reduction in word error rate and a 5.91% improvement in speaker cosine similarity, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. Voice conversion samples can be accessed at: https://oovc-emnlp-2025.github.io/

Paperid: 5929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08466.pdf

Abstract:
We propose In-Context Clustering (ICC), a flexible LLM-based procedure for clustering data from diverse distributions. Unlike traditional clustering algorithms constrained by predefined similarity measures, ICC flexibly captures complex relationships among inputs through an attention mechanism. We show that pretrained LLMs exhibit impressive zero-shot clustering capabilities on text-encoded numeric data, with attention matrices showing salient cluster patterns. Spectral clustering using attention matrices offers surprisingly competitive performance. We further enhance the clustering capabilities of LLMs on numeric and image data through fine-tuning using the Next Token Prediction (NTP) loss. Moreover, the flexibility of LLM prompting enables text-conditioned image clustering, a capability that classical clustering methods lack. Our work extends in-context learning to an unsupervised setting, showcasing the effectiveness and flexibility of LLMs for clustering. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/icc.

Paperid: 5930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07847.pdf

Abstract:
Graph-level anomaly detection aims to identify anomalous graphs or subgraphs within graph datasets, playing a vital role in various fields such as fraud detection, review classification, and biochemistry. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant progress in this domain, existing methods rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data, which is often unavailable in real-world scenarios. Additionally, few-shot anomaly detection methods based on GNNs are prone to noise interference, resulting in poor embedding quality and reduced model robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel meta-learning-based graph-level anomaly detection framework (MA-GAD), incorporating a graph compression module that reduces the graph size, mitigating noise interference while retaining essential node information. We also leverage meta-learning to extract meta-anomaly information from similar networks, enabling the learning of an initialization model that can rapidly adapt to new tasks with limited samples. This improves the anomaly detection performance on target graphs, and a bias network is used to enhance the distinction between anomalous and normal nodes. Our experimental results, based on four real-world biochemical datasets, demonstrate that MA-GAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in graph-level anomaly detection under few-shot conditions. Experiments on both graph anomaly and subgraph anomaly detection tasks validate the framework's effectiveness on real-world datasets.

Paperid: 5931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07776.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Multi-label Intent Detection (MID) is crucial for dialogue systems, aiming to detect multiple intents of utterances in low-resource dialogue domains. Previous studies focus on a two-stage pipeline. They first learn representations of utterances with multiple labels and then use a threshold-based strategy to identify multi-label results. However, these methods rely on representation classification and ignore instance relations, leading to error propagation. To solve the above issues, we propose a multi-label joint learning method for few-shot MID in an end-to-end manner, which constructs an instance relation learning network with label knowledge propagation to eliminate error propagation. Concretely, we learn the interaction relations between instances with class information to propagate label knowledge between a few labeled (support set) and unlabeled (query set) instances. With label knowledge propagation, the relation strength between instances directly indicates whether two utterances belong to the same intent for multi-label prediction. Besides, a dual relation-enhanced loss is developed to optimize support- and query-level relation strength to improve performance. Experiments show that we outperform strong baselines by an average of 9.54% AUC and 11.19% Macro-F1 in 1-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 5932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05733.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial fault diagnosis faces the dual challenges of data scarcity and the difficulty of deploying large AI models in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces Syn-Diag, a novel cloud-edge synergistic framework that leverages Large Language Models to overcome these limitations in few-shot fault diagnosis. Syn-Diag is built on a three-tiered mechanism: 1) Visual-Semantic Synergy, which aligns signal features with the LLM's semantic space through cross-modal pre-training; 2) Content-Aware Reasoning, which dynamically constructs contextual prompts to enhance diagnostic accuracy with limited samples; and 3) Cloud-Edge Synergy, which uses knowledge distillation to create a lightweight, efficient edge model capable of online updates via a shared decision space. Extensive experiments on six datasets covering different CWRU and SEU working conditions show that Syn-Diag significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in 1-shot and cross-condition scenarios. The edge model achieves performance comparable to the cloud version while reducing model size by 83% and latency by 50%, offering a practical, robust, and deployable paradigm for modern intelligent diagnostics.

Paperid: 5933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04327.pdf

Abstract:
Choosing an appropriate learning rate remains a key challenge in scaling depth of modern deep networks. The classical maximal update parameterization ($μ$P) enforces a fixed per-layer update magnitude, which is well suited to homogeneous multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) but becomes ill-posed in heterogeneous architectures where residual accumulation and convolutions introduce imbalance across layers. We introduce Arithmetic-Mean $μ$P (AM-$μ$P), which constrains not each individual layer but the network-wide average one-step pre-activation second moment to a constant scale. Combined with a residual-aware He fan-in initialization - scaling residual-branch weights by the number of blocks ($\mathrm{Var}[W]=c/(K\cdot \mathrm{fan\text{-}in})$) - AM-$μ$P yields width-robust depth laws that transfer consistently across depths. We prove that, for one- and two-dimensional convolutional networks, the maximal-update learning rate satisfies $η^\star(L)\propto L^{-3/2}$; with zero padding, boundary effects are constant-level as $N\gg k$. For standard residual networks with general conv+MLP blocks, we establish $η^\star(L)=Θ(L^{-3/2})$, with $L$ the minimal depth. Empirical results across a range of depths confirm the $-3/2$ scaling law and enable zero-shot learning-rate transfer, providing a unified and practical LR principle for convolutional and deep residual networks without additional tuning overhead.

Paperid: 5934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04016.pdf

Abstract:
Fluid voice-to-voice interaction requires reliable and low-latency detection of when a user has finished speaking. Traditional audio-silence end-pointers add hundreds of milliseconds of delay and fail under hesitations or language-specific phenomena. We present, to our knowledge, the first systematic study of Thai text-only end-of-turn (EOT) detection for real-time agents. We compare zero-shot and few-shot prompting of compact LLMs to supervised fine-tuning of lightweight transformers. Using transcribed subtitles from the YODAS corpus and Thai-specific linguistic cues (e.g., sentence-final particles), we formulate EOT as a binary decision over token boundaries. We report a clear accuracy-latency tradeoff and provide a public-ready implementation plan. This work establishes a Thai baseline and demonstrates that small, fine-tuned models can deliver near-instant EOT decisions suitable for on-device agents.

Paperid: 5935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02922.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable risk assessment for carotid atheromatous disease remains a major clinical challenge, as it requires integrating diverse clinical and imaging information in a manner that is transparent and interpretable to clinicians. This study investigates the potential of state-of-the-art and recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) for multimodal carotid plaque assessment by integrating ultrasound imaging (USI) with structured clinical, demographic, laboratory, and protein biomarker data. A framework that simulates realistic diagnostic scenarios through interview-style question sequences is proposed, comparing a range of open-source LVLMs, including both general-purpose and medically tuned models. Zero-shot experiments reveal that even if they are very powerful, not all LVLMs can accurately identify imaging modality and anatomy, while all of them perform poorly in accurate risk classification. To address this limitation, LLaVa-NeXT-Vicuna is adapted to the ultrasound domain using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), resulting in substantial improvements in stroke risk stratification. The integration of multimodal tabular data in the form of text further enhances specificity and balanced accuracy, yielding competitive performance compared to prior convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines trained on the same dataset. Our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of LVLMs in ultrasound-based cardiovascular risk prediction, underscoring the importance of multimodal integration, model calibration, and domain adaptation for clinical translation.

Paperid: 5936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25795.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates algorithmic bias in language-based models for automated depression detection, focusing on socio-demographic disparities related to gender and race/ethnicity. Models trained using deep neural networks (DNN) based embeddings are compared to few-shot learning approaches with large language models (LLMs), evaluating both performance and fairness on clinical interview transcripts from the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus/Wizard-of-Oz (DAIC-WOZ). To mitigate bias, fairness-aware loss functions are applied to DNN-based models, while in-context learning with varied prompt framing and shot counts is explored for LLMs. Results indicate that LLMs outperform DNN-based models in depression classification, particularly for underrepresented groups such as Hispanic participants. LLMs also exhibit reduced gender bias compared to DNN-based embeddings, though racial disparities persist. Among fairness-aware techniques for mitigating bias in DNN-based embeddings, the worst-group loss, which is designed to minimize loss for the worst-performing demographic group, achieves a better balance between performance and fairness. In contrast, the fairness-regularized loss minimizes loss across all groups but performs less effectively. In LLMs, guided prompting with ethical framing helps mitigate gender bias in the 1-shot setting. However, increasing the number of shots does not lead to further reductions in disparities. For race/ethnicity, neither prompting strategy nor increasing $N$ in $N$-shot learning effectively reduces disparities.

Paperid: 5937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24866.pdf

Abstract:
Metaphor is a pervasive feature of discourse and a powerful lens for examining cognition, emotion, and ideology. Large-scale analysis, however, has been constrained by the need for manual annotation due to the context-sensitive nature of metaphor. This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate metaphor identification in full texts. We compare three methods: (i) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where the model is provided with a codebook and instructed to annotate texts based on its rules and examples; (ii) prompt engineering, where we design task-specific verbal instructions; and (iii) fine-tuning, where the model is trained on hand-coded texts to optimize performance. Within prompt engineering, we test zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought strategies. Our results show that state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs can achieve high accuracy, with fine-tuning yielding a median F1 score of 0.79. A comparison of human and LLM outputs reveals that most discrepancies are systematic, reflecting well-known grey areas and conceptual challenges in metaphor theory. We propose that LLMs can be used to at least partly automate metaphor identification and can serve as a testbed for developing and refining metaphor identification protocols and the theory that underpins them.

Paperid: 5938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24528.pdf

Abstract:
3D scene understanding is fundamental for embodied AI and robotics, supporting reliable perception for interaction and navigation. Recent approaches achieve zero-shot, open-vocabulary 3D semantic mapping by assigning embedding vectors to 2D class-agnostic masks generated via vision-language models (VLMs) and projecting these into 3D. However, these methods often produce fragmented masks and inaccurate semantic assignments due to the direct use of raw masks, limiting their effectiveness in complex environments. To address this, we leverage SemanticSAM with progressive granularity refinement to generate more accurate and numerous object-level masks, mitigating the over-segmentation commonly observed in mask generation models such as vanilla SAM, and improving downstream 3D semantic segmentation. To further enhance semantic context, we employ a context-aware CLIP encoding strategy that integrates multiple contextual views of each mask using empirically determined weighting, providing much richer visual context. We evaluate our approach on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks, including 3D semantic segmentation and object retrieval from language queries, across several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 5939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23849.pdf

Abstract:
Although saliency maps can highlight important regions to explain the reasoning behind image classification in artificial intelligence (AI), the meaning of these regions is left to the user's interpretation. In contrast, conceptbased explanations decompose AI predictions into humanunderstandable concepts, clarifying their contributions. However, few methods can simultaneously reveal what concepts an image classifier learns, which regions are associated with them, and how they contribute to predictions. We propose a novel concept-based explanation method, Concept-based Explanation via Fusion of Activation Maps (CE-FAM). It employs a branched network that shares activation maps with an image classifier and learns to mimic the embeddings of a Vision and Language Model (VLM). The branch network predicts concepts in an image, and their corresponding regions are represented by a weighted sum of activation maps, with weights given by the gradients of the concept prediction scores. Their contributions are quantified based on their impact on the image classification score. Our method provides a general framework for identifying the concept regions and their contributions while leveraging VLM knowledge to handle arbitrary concepts without requiring an annotated dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation metric to assess the accuracy of the concept regions. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate our method outperforms existing approaches and excels in zero-shot inference for unseen concepts.

Paperid: 5940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22930.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional marine biological image recognition faces challenges of incomplete datasets and unsatisfactory model accuracy, particularly for few-shot conditions of rare species where data scarcity significantly hampers the performance. To address these issues, this study proposes an intelligent marine fish recognition framework, FishAI 2.0, integrating multimodal few-shot deep learning techniques with image generation for data augmentation. First, a hierarchical marine fish benchmark dataset, which provides a comprehensive data foundation for subsequent model training, is utilized to train the FishAI 2.0 model. To address the data scarcity of rare classes, the large language model DeepSeek was employed to generate high-quality textual descriptions, which are input into Stable Diffusion 2 for image augmentation through a hierarchical diffusion strategy that extracts latent encoding to construct a multimodal feature space. The enhanced visual-textual datasets were then fed into a Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) based model, enabling robust few-shot image recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that FishAI 2.0 achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 91.67 percent and Top-5 accuracy of 97.97 percent at the family level, outperforming baseline CLIP and ViT models with a substantial margin for the minority classes with fewer than 10 training samples. To better apply FishAI 2.0 to real-world scenarios, at the genus and species level, FishAI 2.0 respectively achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 87.58 percent and 85.42 percent, demonstrating practical utility. In summary, FishAI 2.0 improves the efficiency and accuracy of marine fish identification and provides a scalable technical solution for marine ecological monitoring and conservation, highlighting its scientific value and practical applicability.

Paperid: 5941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22383.pdf

Abstract:
Occlusion remains a significant challenge for current vision models to robustly interpret complex and dense real-world images and scenes. To address this limitation and to enable accurate prediction of the occlusion order relationship between objects, we propose leveraging the advanced capability of a pre-trained GPT-4 model to deduce the order. By providing a specifically designed prompt along with the input image, GPT-4 can analyze the image and generate order predictions. The response can then be parsed to construct an occlusion matrix which can be utilized in assisting with other occlusion handling tasks and image understanding. We report the results of evaluating the model on COCOA and InstaOrder datasets. The results show that by using semantic context, visual patterns, and commonsense knowledge, the model can produce more accurate order predictions. Unlike baseline methods, the model can reason about occlusion relationships in a zero-shot fashion, which requires no annotated training data and can easily be integrated into occlusion handling frameworks.

Paperid: 5942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21662.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Procedural Planning (MPP) aims to generate step-by-step instructions that combine text and images, with the central challenge of preserving object-state consistency across modalities while producing informative plans. Existing approaches often leverage large language models (LLMs) to refine textual steps; however, visual object-state alignment and systematic evaluation are largely underexplored. We present MMPlanner, a zero-shot MPP framework that introduces Object State Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (OSR-CoT) prompting to explicitly model object-state transitions and generate accurate multimodal plans. To assess plan quality, we design LLM-as-a-judge protocols for planning accuracy and cross-modal alignment, and further propose a visual step-reordering task to measure temporal coherence. Experiments on RECIPEPLAN and WIKIPLAN show that MMPlanner achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving textual planning by +6.8%, cross-modal alignment by +11.9%, and visual step ordering by +26.7%

Paperid: 5943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20775.pdf

Abstract:
Recently remarkable progress has been made in synthesizing realistic human photos using text-to-image diffusion models. However, current approaches face degraded scenes, insufficient control, and suboptimal perceptual identity. We introduce CustomEnhancer, a novel framework to augment existing identity customization models. CustomEnhancer is a zero-shot enhancement pipeline that leverages face swapping techniques, pretrained diffusion model, to obtain additional representations in a zeroshot manner for encoding into personalized models. Through our proposed triple-flow fused PerGeneration approach, which identifies and combines two compatible counter-directional latent spaces to manipulate a pivotal space of personalized model, we unify the generation and reconstruction processes, realizing generation from three flows. Our pipeline also enables comprehensive training-free control over the generation process of personalized models, offering precise controlled personalization for them and eliminating the need for controller retraining for per-model. Besides, to address the high time complexity of null-text inversion (NTI), we introduce ResInversion, a novel inversion method that performs noise rectification via a pre-diffusion mechanism, reducing the inversion time by 129 times. Experiments demonstrate that CustomEnhancer reach SOTA results at scene diversity, identity fidelity, training-free controls, while also showing the efficiency of our ResInversion over NTI. The code will be made publicly available upon paper acceptance.

Paperid: 5944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19903.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot generation, the synthesis of high-quality and diverse samples from limited training data, remains a significant challenge in generative modeling. Existing methods trained from scratch often fail to overcome overfitting and mode collapse, and fine-tuning large models can inherit biases while neglecting the crucial geometric structure of the latent space. To address these limitations, we introduce Latent Iterative Refinement Flow (LIRF), a novel approach that reframes few-shot generation as the progressive densification of geometrically structured manifold. LIRF establishes a stable latent space using an autoencoder trained with our novel \textbf{manifold-preservation loss} $L_{\text{manifold}}$. This loss ensures that the latent space maintains the geometric and semantic correspondence of the input data. Building on this, we propose an iterative generate-correct-augment cycle. Within this cycle, candidate samples are refined by a geometric \textbf{correction operator}, a provably contractive mapping that pulls samples toward the data manifold while preserving diversity. We also provide the \textbf{Convergence Theorem} demonstrating a predictable decrease in Hausdorff distance between generated and true data manifold. We also demonstrate the framework's scalability by generating coherent, high-resolution images on AFHQ-Cat. Ablation studies confirm that both the manifold-preserving latent space and the contractive correction mechanism are critical components of this success. Ultimately, LIRF provides a solution for data-scarce generative modeling that is not only theoretically grounded but also highly effective in practice.

Paperid: 5945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19664.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) must contend with the dual challenge of learning new classes from scarce samples while preserving old class knowledge. Existing methods use the frozen feature extractor and class-averaged prototypes to mitigate against catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. However, new-class prototypes suffer significant estimation bias due to extreme data scarcity, whereas base-class prototypes benefit from sufficient data. In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that aligning the new-class priors with old-class statistics via Bayesian analysis reduces variance and improves prototype accuracy. Furthermore, we propose large-scale contrastive learning to enforce cross-category feature tightness. To further enrich feature diversity and inject prior information for new-class prototypes, we integrate momentum self-supervision and virtual categories into the Momentum Tightness and Contrast framework (MoTiC), constructing a feature space with rich representations and enhanced interclass cohesion. Experiments on three FSCIL benchmarks produce state-of-the-art performances, particularly on the fine-grained task CUB-200, validating our method's ability to reduce estimation bias and improve incremental learning robustness.

Paperid: 5946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19533.pdf

Abstract:
Security vulnerabilities in Internet-of-Things devices, mobile platforms, and autonomous systems remain critical. Traditional mutation-based fuzzers -- while effectively explore code paths -- primarily perform byte- or bit-level edits without semantic reasoning. Coverage-guided tools such as AFL++ use dictionaries, grammars, and splicing heuristics to impose shallow structural constraints, leaving deeper protocol logic, inter-field dependencies, and domain-specific semantics unaddressed. Conversely, reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs) can leverage pretraining knowledge to understand input formats, respect complex constraints, and propose targeted mutations, much like an experienced reverse engineer or testing expert. However, lacking ground truth for "correct" mutation reasoning makes supervised fine-tuning impractical, motivating explorations of off-the-shelf LLMs via prompt-based few-shot learning. To bridge this gap, we present an open-source microservices framework that integrates reasoning LLMs with AFL++ on Google's FuzzBench, tackling asynchronous execution and divergent hardware demands (GPU- vs. CPU-intensive) of LLMs and fuzzers. We evaluate four research questions: (R1) How can reasoning LLMs be integrated into the fuzzing mutation loop? (R2) Do few-shot prompts yield higher-quality mutations than zero-shot? (R3) Can prompt engineering with off-the-shelf models improve fuzzing directly? and (R4) Which open-source reasoning LLMs perform best under prompt-only conditions? Experiments with Llama3.3, Deepseek-r1-Distill-Llama-70B, QwQ-32B, and Gemma3 highlight Deepseek as the most promising. Mutation effectiveness depends more on prompt complexity and model choice than shot count. Response latency and throughput bottlenecks remain key obstacles, offering directions for future work.

Paperid: 5947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18839.pdf

Abstract:
This study evaluates the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in the task of single-label classification of Christian Iconography. The goal was to assess whether general-purpose VLMs (CLIP and SigLIP) and LLMs, such as GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5, can interpret the Iconography, typically addressed by supervised classifiers, and evaluate their performance. Two research questions guided the analysis: (RQ1) How do multimodal LLMs perform on image classification of Christian saints? And (RQ2), how does performance vary when enriching input with contextual information or few-shot exemplars? We conducted a benchmarking study using three datasets supporting Iconclass natively: ArtDL, ICONCLASS, and Wikidata, filtered to include the top 10 most frequent classes. Models were tested under three conditions: (1) classification using class labels, (2) classification with Iconclass descriptions, and (3) few-shot learning with five exemplars. Results were compared against ResNet50 baselines fine-tuned on the same datasets. The findings show that Gemini-2.5 Pro and GPT-4o outperformed the ResNet50 baselines. Accuracy dropped significantly on the Wikidata dataset, where Siglip reached the highest accuracy score, suggesting model sensitivity to image size and metadata alignment. Enriching prompts with class descriptions generally improved zero-shot performance, while few-shot learning produced lower results, with only occasional and minimal increments in accuracy. We conclude that general-purpose multimodal LLMs are capable of classification in visually complex cultural heritage domains. These results support the application of LLMs as metadata curation tools in digital humanities workflows, suggesting future research on prompt optimization and the expansion of the study to other classification strategies and models.

Paperid: 5948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18751.pdf

Abstract:
Recently reconstruction-based deep models have been widely used for time series anomaly detection, but as their capacity and representation capability increase, these models tend to over-generalize, often reconstructing unseen anomalies accurately. Prior works have attempted to mitigate this by incorporating a memory architecture that stores prototypes of normal patterns. Nevertheless, these approaches suffer from high training costs and have yet to be effectively integrated with time series foundation models (TFMs). To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{MOMEMTO}, a TFM for anomaly detection, enhanced with a patch-based memory module to mitigate over-generalization. The memory module is designed to capture representative normal patterns from multiple domains and enables a single model to be jointly fine-tuned across multiple datasets through a multi-domain training strategy. MOMEMTO initializes memory items with latent representations from a pre-trained encoder, organizes them into patch-level units, and updates them via an attention mechanism. We evaluate our method using 23 univariate benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that MOMEMTO, as a single model, achieves higher scores on AUC and VUS metrics compared to baseline methods, and further enhances the performance of its backbone TFM, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 5949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18504.pdf

Abstract:
In the field of machine learning, hyperbolic space demonstrates superior representation capabilities for hierarchical data compared to conventional Euclidean space. This work focuses on the Coarse-To-Fine Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (C2FSCIL) task. Our study follows the Knowe approach, which contrastively learns coarse class labels and subsequently normalizes and freezes the classifier weights of learned fine classes in the embedding space. To better interpret the "coarse-to-fine" paradigm, we propose embedding the feature extractor into hyperbolic space. Specifically, we employ the PoincarÃ© ball model of hyperbolic space, enabling the feature extractor to transform input images into feature vectors within the PoincarÃ© ball instead of Euclidean space. We further introduce hyperbolic contrastive loss and hyperbolic fully-connected layers to facilitate model optimization and classification in hyperbolic space. Additionally, to enhance performance under few-shot conditions, we implement maximum entropy distribution in hyperbolic space to estimate the probability distribution of fine-class feature vectors. This allows generation of augmented features from the distribution to mitigate overfitting during training with limited samples. Experiments on C2FSCIL benchmarks show that our method effectively improves both coarse and fine class accuracies.

Paperid: 5950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17495.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient traffic classification is vital for wireless network management, especially under encrypted payloads and dynamic application behavior, where traditional methods such as port-based identification and deep packet inspection (DPI) are increasingly inadequate. This work explores the feasibility of using physical channel data collected from the air interface of 5G Standalone (SA) networks for traffic sensing. We develop a preprocessing pipeline to transform raw channel records into structured representations with customized feature engineering to enhance downstream classification performance. To jointly capture temporal dependencies and both local and global structural patterns inherent in physical channel records, we propose a novel hybrid architecture: BiLSTM-Conformer Network (BiLCNet), which integrates the sequential modeling capability of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks (BiLSTM) with the spatial feature extraction strength of Conformer blocks. Evaluated on a noise-limited 5G SA dataset, our model achieves a classification accuracy of 93.9%, outperforming a series of conventional machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate its generalization ability under zero-shot transfer settings, validating its robustness across traffic categories and varying environmental conditions.

Paperid: 5951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17204.pdf

Abstract:
Scaling Reinforcement Learning to in-the-wild social robot navigation is both data-intensive and unsafe, since policies must learn through direct interaction and inevitably encounter collisions. Offline Imitation learning (IL) avoids these risks by collecting expert demonstrations safely, training entirely offline, and deploying policies zero-shot. However, we find that naively applying Behaviour Cloning (BC) to social navigation is insufficient; achieving strong performance requires careful architectural and training choices. We present Ratatouille, a pipeline and model architecture that, without changing the data, reduces collisions per meter by 6 times and improves success rate by 3 times compared to naive BC. We validate our approach in both simulation and the real world, where we collected over 11 hours of data on a dense university campus. We further demonstrate qualitative results in a public food court. Our findings highlight that thoughtful IL design, rather than additional data, can substantially improve safety and reliability in real-world social navigation. Video: https://youtu.be/tOdLTXsaYLQ. Code will be released after acceptance.

Paperid: 5952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16151.pdf

Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a viable strategy for automated cyber defense (ACD). The traditional RL approach represents networks as a list of computers in various states of safety or threat. Unfortunately, these models are forced to overfit to specific network topologies, rendering them ineffective when faced with even small environmental perturbations. In this work, we frame ACD as a two-player context-based partially observable Markov decision problem with observations represented as attributed graphs. This approach allows our agents to reason through the lens of relational inductive bias. Agents learn how to reason about hosts interacting with other system entities in a more general manner, and their actions are understood as edits to the graph representing the environment. By introducing this bias, we will show that our agents can better reason about the states of networks and zero-shot adapt to new ones. We show that this approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a wide margin, and makes our agents capable of defending never-before-seen networks against a wide range of adversaries in a variety of complex, and multi-agent environments.

Paperid: 5953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15174.pdf

Abstract:
WARNING: This paper contains examples of offensive materials. To address the proliferation of toxic content on social media, we introduce SMARTER, we introduce SMARTER, a data-efficient two-stage framework for explainable content moderation using Large Language Models (LLMs). In Stage 1, we leverage LLMs' own outputs to generate synthetic explanations for both correct and incorrect labels, enabling alignment via preference optimization with minimal human supervision. In Stage 2, we refine explanation quality through cross-model training, allowing weaker models to align stylistically and semantically with stronger ones. Experiments on three benchmark tasks -- HateXplain, Latent Hate, and Implicit Hate -- demonstrate that SMARTER enables LLMs to achieve up to a 13.5% macro-F1 improvement over standard few-shot baselines while using only a fraction of the full training data. Our framework offers a scalable strategy for low-resource settings by harnessing LLMs' self-improving capabilities for both classification and explanation.

Paperid: 5954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14772.pdf

Abstract:
Decoding visual information from time-resolved brain recordings, such as EEG and MEG, plays a pivotal role in real-time brain-computer interfaces. However, existing approaches primarily focus on direct brain-image feature alignment and are limited to single-task frameworks or task-specific models. In this paper, we propose a Unified MultItask Network for zero-shot M/EEG visual Decoding (referred to UMind), including visual stimulus retrieval, classification, and reconstruction, where multiple tasks mutually enhance each other. Our method learns robust neural-visual and semantic representations through multimodal alignment with both image and text modalities. The integration of both coarse and fine-grained texts enhances the extraction of these neural representations, enabling more detailed semantic and visual decoding. These representations then serve as dual conditional inputs to a pre-trained diffusion model, guiding visual reconstruction from both visual and semantic perspectives. Extensive evaluations on MEG and EEG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and biological plausibility of our approach in capturing spatiotemporal neural dynamics. Our approach sets a multitask pipeline for brain visual decoding, highlighting the synergy of semantic information in visual feature extraction.

Paperid: 5955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14469.pdf

Abstract:
We use the term re-identification to refer to the process of recovering the original speaker's identity from anonymized speech outputs. Speaker de-identification systems aim to reduce the risk of re-identification, but most evaluations focus only on individual-level measures and overlook broader risks from soft biometric leakage. We introduce the Soft Biometric Leakage Score (SBLS), a unified method that quantifies resistance to zero-shot inference attacks on non-unique traits such as channel type, age range, dialect, sex of the speaker, or speaking style. SBLS integrates three elements: direct attribute inference using pre-trained classifiers, linkage detection via mutual information analysis, and subgroup robustness across intersecting attributes. Applying SBLS with publicly available classifiers, we show that all five evaluated de-identification systems exhibit significant vulnerabilities. Our results indicate that adversaries using only pre-trained models - without access to original speech or system details - can still reliably recover soft biometric information from anonymized output, exposing fundamental weaknesses that standard distributional metrics fail to capture.

Paperid: 5956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13818.pdf

Abstract:
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers a new paradigm for addressing complex financial problems intractable for classical methods. This work specifically tackles the challenge of few-shot credit risk assessment, a critical issue in inclusive finance where data scarcity and imbalance limit the effectiveness of conventional models. To address this, we design and implement a novel hybrid quantum-classical workflow. The methodology first employs an ensemble of classical machine learning models (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost) for intelligent feature engineering and dimensionality reduction. Subsequently, a Quantum Neural Network (QNN), trained via the parameter-shift rule, serves as the core classifier. This framework was evaluated through numerical simulations and deployed on the Quafu Quantum Cloud Platform's ScQ-P21 superconducting processor. On a real-world credit dataset of 279 samples, our QNN achieved a robust average AUC of 0.852 +/- 0.027 in simulations and yielded an impressive AUC of 0.88 in the hardware experiment. This performance surpasses a suite of classical benchmarks, with a particularly strong result on the recall metric. This study provides a pragmatic blueprint for applying quantum computing to data-constrained financial scenarios in the NISQ era and offers valuable empirical evidence supporting its potential in high-stakes applications like inclusive finance.

Paperid: 5957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13196.pdf

Abstract:
Over-prompting, a phenomenon where excessive examples in prompts lead to diminished performance in Large Language Models (LLMs), challenges the conventional wisdom about in-context few-shot learning. To investigate this few-shot dilemma, we outline a prompting framework that leverages three standard few-shot selection methods - random sampling, semantic embedding, and TF-IDF vectors - and evaluate these methods across multiple LLMs, including GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo, DeepSeek-V3, Gemma-3, LLaMA-3.1, LLaMA-3.2, and Mistral. Our experimental results reveal that incorporating excessive domain-specific examples into prompts can paradoxically degrade performance in certain LLMs, which contradicts the prior empirical conclusion that more relevant few-shot examples universally benefit LLMs. Given the trend of LLM-assisted software engineering and requirement analysis, we experiment with two real-world software requirement classification datasets. By gradually increasing the number of TF-IDF-selected and stratified few-shot examples, we identify their optimal quantity for each LLM. This combined approach achieves superior performance with fewer examples, avoiding the over-prompting problem, thus surpassing the state-of-the-art by 1% in classifying functional and non-functional requirements.

Paperid: 5958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13189.pdf

Abstract:
We present a direct inverse modeling method named SURGIN, a SURrogate-guided Generative INversion framework tailed for subsurface multiphase flow data assimilation. Unlike existing inversion methods that require adaptation for each new observational configuration, SURGIN features a zero-shot conditional generation capability, enabling real-time assimilation of unseen monitoring data without task-specific retraining. Specifically, SURGIN synergistically integrates a U-Net enhanced Fourier Neural Operator (U-FNO) surrogate with a score-based generative model (SGM), framing the conditional generation as a surrogate prediction-guidance process in a Bayesian perspective. Instead of directly learning the conditional generation of geological parameters, an unconditional SGM is first pretrained in a self-supervised manner to capture the geological prior, after which posterior sampling is performed by leveraging a differentiable U-FNO surrogate to enable efficient forward evaluations conditioned on unseen observations. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate SURGIN's capability to decently infer heterogeneous geological fields and predict spatiotemporal flow dynamics with quantified uncertainty across diverse measurement settings. By unifying generative learning with surrogate-guided Bayesian inference, SURGIN establishes a new paradigm for inverse modeling and uncertainty quantification in parametric functional spaces.

Paperid: 5959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12768.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown significant promise in computer vision applications. However, their performance in few-shot learning is limited by challenges in refining token-level interactions, struggling with limited training data, and developing a strong inductive bias. Existing methods often depend on inflexible token matching or basic similarity measures, which limit the effective incorporation of global context and localized feature refinement. To address these challenges, we propose Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers (BATR-FST), a two-stage approach that progressively improves token representations and maintains a robust inductive bias for few-shot classification. During the pre-training phase, Masked Image Modeling (MIM) provides Vision Transformers (ViTs) with transferable patch-level representations by recreating masked image regions, providing a robust basis for subsequent adaptation. In the meta-fine-tuning phase, BATR-FST incorporates a Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement module that utilizes Token Clustering to capture localized interactions, Uncertainty-Aware Token Weighting to prioritize dependable features, and a Bi-Level Attention mechanism to balance intra-cluster and inter-cluster relationships, thereby facilitating thorough token refinement. Furthermore, Graph Token Propagation ensures semantic consistency between support and query instances, while a Class Separation Penalty preserves different class borders, enhancing discriminative capability. Extensive experiments on three benchmark few-shot datasets demonstrate that BATR-FST achieves superior results in both 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios and improves the few-shot classification via transformers.

Paperid: 5960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12047.pdf

Abstract:
Animal behavior analysis plays a crucial role in understanding animal welfare, health status, and productivity in agricultural settings. However, traditional manual observation methods are time-consuming, subjective, and limited in scalability. We present a modular pipeline that leverages open-sourced state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to automate animal behavior analysis in a group housing environment. Our approach combines state-of-the-art models for zero-shot object detection, motion-aware tracking and segmentation, and advanced feature extraction using vision transformers for robust behavior recognition. The pipeline addresses challenges including animal occlusions and group housing scenarios as demonstrated in indoor pig monitoring. We validated our system on the Edinburgh Pig Behavior Video Dataset for multiple behavioral tasks. Our temporal model achieved 94.2% overall accuracy, representing a 21.2 percentage point improvement over existing methods. The pipeline demonstrated robust tracking capabilities with 93.3% identity preservation score and 89.3% object detection precision. The modular design suggests potential for adaptation to other contexts, though further validation across species would be required. The open-source implementation provides a scalable solution for behavior monitoring, contributing to precision pig farming and welfare assessment through automated, objective, and continuous analysis.

Paperid: 5961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11714.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, primarily due to delayed diagnosis and poor early detection. This study aims to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) for the accurate detection and classification of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) scans. Methods: We propose an end-to-end CAD pipeline consisting of two modules: (i) a detection module (CADe) based on the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), in which the standard visual prompt is replaced with a text prompt encoded by CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining), and (ii) a diagnosis module (CADx) that calculates similarity scores between segmented nodules and radiomic features. To add clinical context, synthetic electronic medical records (EMRs) were generated using radiomic assessments by expert radiologists and combined with similarity scores for final classification. The method was tested on the publicly available LIDC-IDRI dataset (1,018 CT scans). Results: The proposed approach demonstrated strong performance in zero-shot lung nodule analysis. The CADe module achieved a Dice score of 0.92 and an IoU of 0.85 for nodule segmentation. The CADx module attained a specificity of 0.97 for malignancy classification, surpassing existing fully supervised methods. Conclusions: The integration of VLMs with radiomics and synthetic EMRs allows for accurate and clinically relevant CAD of pulmonary nodules in CT scans. The proposed system shows strong potential to enhance early lung cancer detection, increase diagnostic confidence, and improve patient management in routine clinical workflows.

Paperid: 5962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10282.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot 3D (ZS-3D) anomaly detection aims to identify defects in 3D objects without relying on labeled training data, making it especially valuable in scenarios constrained by data scarcity, privacy, or high annotation cost. However, most existing methods focus exclusively on point clouds, neglecting the rich semantic cues available from complementary modalities such as RGB images and texts priors. This paper introduces MCL-AD, a novel framework that leverages multimodal collaboration learning across point clouds, RGB images, and texts semantics to achieve superior zero-shot 3D anomaly detection. Specifically, we propose a Multimodal Prompt Learning Mechanism (MPLM) that enhances the intra-modal representation capability and inter-modal collaborative learning by introducing an object-agnostic decoupled text prompt and a multimodal contrastive loss. In addition, a collaborative modulation mechanism (CMM) is proposed to fully leverage the complementary representations of point clouds and RGB images by jointly modulating the RGB image-guided and point cloud-guided branches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MCL-AD framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in ZS-3D anomaly detection.

Paperid: 5963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09732.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) excel at zero-shot visual classification, but their performance on fine-grained tasks and large hierarchical label spaces is understudied. This paper investigates whether structured, tree-based reasoning can enhance VLM performance. We introduce a framework that decomposes classification into interpretable decisions using decision trees and evaluates it on fine-grained (GTSRB) and coarse-grained (CIFAR-10) datasets. Although the model achieves 98.2% accuracy in understanding the tree knowledge, tree-based reasoning consistently underperforms standard zero-shot prompting. We also explore enhancing the tree prompts with LLM-generated classes and image descriptions to improve alignment. The added description enhances the performance of the tree-based and zero-shot methods. Our findings highlight limitations of structured reasoning in visual classification and offer insights for designing more interpretable VLM systems.

Paperid: 5964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09583.pdf

Abstract:
Social connection is a vital part of learning, yet online course environments present barriers to the organic formation of social groups. SAMI offers one solution by facilitating student connections, but its effectiveness is constrained by an incomplete Theory of Mind, limiting its ability to create an effective mental model of a student. One facet of this is its inability to intuit personality, which may influence the relevance of its recommendations. To explore this, we propose a personality detection model utilizing GPTs zero-shot capability to infer Big-Five personality traits from forum introduction posts, often encouraged in online courses. We benchmark its performance against established models, demonstrating its efficacy in this task. Furthermore, we integrate this model into SAMIs entity-based matchmaking system, enabling personality-informed social recommendations. Initial integration suggests personality traits can complement existing matching factors, though additional evaluation is required to determine their full impact on student engagement and match quality.

Paperid: 5965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09515.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the effectiveness of few-shot learning for respiratory sound classification, focusing on coughbased detection of COVID-19, Flu, and healthy conditions. We leverage Prototypical Networks with spectrogram representations of cough sounds to address the challenge of limited labeled data. Our study evaluates whether few-shot learning can enable models to achieve performance comparable to traditional deep learning approaches while using significantly fewer training samples. Additionally, we compare multi-class and binary classification models to assess whether multi-class models can perform comparably to their binary counterparts. Experimental findings show that few-shot learning models can achieve competitive accuracy. Our model attains 74.87% accuracy in multi-class classification with only 15 support examples per class, while binary classification achieves over 70% accuracy across all class pairs. Class-wise analysis reveals Flu as the most distinguishable class, and Healthy as the most challenging. Statistical tests (paired t-test p = 0.149, Wilcoxon p = 0.125) indicate no significant performance difference between binary and multiclass models, supporting the viability of multi-class classification in this setting. These results highlight the feasibility of applying few-shot learning in medical diagnostics, particularly when large labeled datasets are unavailable.

Paperid: 5966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09066.pdf

Abstract:
The cold-start user issue further compromises the effectiveness of recommender systems in limiting access to the historical behavioral information. It is an effective pipeline to optimize instructional prompts on a few-shot large language model (LLM) used in recommender tasks. We introduce a context-conditioned prompt formulation method P(u,\ Ds)\ \rightarrow\ R\widehat, where u is a cold-start user profile, Ds is a curated support set, and R\widehat is the predicted ranked list of items. Based on systematic experimentation with transformer-based autoregressive LLMs (BioGPT, LLaMA-2, GPT-4), we provide empirical evidence that optimal exemplar injection and instruction structuring can significantly improve the precision@k and NDCG scores of such models in low-data settings. The pipeline uses token-level alignments and embedding space regularization with a greater semantic fidelity. Our findings not only show that timely composition is not merely syntactic but also functional as it is in direct control of attention scales and decoder conduct through inference. This paper shows that prompt-based adaptation may be considered one of the ways to address cold-start recommendation issues in LLM-based pipelines.

Paperid: 5967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08702.pdf

Abstract:
Writing survey questions that easily and accurately convey their intent to a variety of respondents is a demanding and high-stakes task. Despite the extensive literature on best practices, the number of considerations to keep in mind is vast and even small errors can render collected data unusable for its intended purpose. The process of drafting initial questions, checking for known sources of error, and developing solutions to those problems requires considerable time, expertise, and financial resources. Given the rising costs of survey implementation and the critical role that polls play in media, policymaking, and research, it is vital that we utilize all available tools to protect the integrity of survey data and the financial investments made to obtain it. Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT and other generative AI model platforms have been integrated into everyday life processes and workflows, particularly pertaining to text revision. While many researchers have begun exploring how generative AI may assist with questionnaire design, we have implemented a prompt experiment to systematically test what kind of feedback on survey questions an average ChatGPT user can expect. Results from our zero--shot prompt experiment, which randomized the version of ChatGPT and the persona given to the model, shows that generative AI is a valuable tool today, even for an average AI user, and suggests that AI will play an increasingly prominent role in the evolution of survey development best practices as precise tools are developed.

Paperid: 5968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08027.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.

Paperid: 5969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07768.pdf

Abstract:
The spread of fake news, polarizing, politically biased, and harmful content on online platforms has been a serious concern. With large language models becoming a promising approach, however, no study has properly benchmarked their performance across different models, usage methods, and languages. This study presents a comprehensive overview of different Large Language Models adaptation paradigms for the detection of hyperpartisan and fake news, harmful tweets, and political bias. Our experiments spanned 10 datasets and 5 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Bulgarian), covering both binary and multiclass classification scenarios. We tested different strategies ranging from parameter efficient Fine-Tuning of language models to a variety of different In-Context Learning strategies and prompts. These included zero-shot prompts, codebooks, few-shot (with both randomly-selected and diversely-selected examples using Determinantal Point Processes), and Chain-of-Thought. We discovered that In-Context Learning often underperforms when compared to Fine-Tuning a model. This main finding highlights the importance of Fine-Tuning even smaller models on task-specific settings even when compared to the largest models evaluated in an In-Context Learning setup - in our case LlaMA3.1-8b-Instruct, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct.

Paperid: 5970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07323.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of AI has enabled highly realistic speech synthesis and voice cloning, posing serious risks to voice authentication, smart assistants, and telecom security. While most prior work frames spoof detection as a binary task, real-world attacks often involve hybrid utterances that mix genuine and synthetic speech, making detection substantially more challenging. To address this gap, we introduce the Hybrid Spoofed Audio Dataset (HSAD), a benchmark containing 1,248 clean and 41,044 degraded utterances across four classes: human, cloned, zero-shot AI-generated, and hybrid audio. Each sample is annotated with spoofing method, speaker identity, and degradation metadata to enable fine-grained analysis. We evaluate six transformer-based models, including spectrogram encoders (MIT-AST, MattyB95-AST) and self-supervised waveform models (Wav2Vec2, HuBERT). Results reveal critical lessons: pretrained models overgeneralize and collapse under hybrid conditions; spoof-specific fine-tuning improves separability but struggles with unseen compositions; and dataset-specific adaptation on HSAD yields large performance gains (AST greater than 97 percent and F1 score is approximately 99 percent), though residual errors persist for complex hybrids. These findings demonstrate that fine-tuning alone is not sufficient-robust hybrid-aware benchmarks like HSAD are essential to expose calibration failures, model biases, and factors affecting spoof detection in adversarial environments. HSAD thus provides both a dataset and an analytic framework for building resilient and trustworthy voice authentication systems.

Paperid: 5971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06535.pdf

Abstract:
We investigated the reproducibility of FairCLIP, proposed by Luo et al. (2024), for improving the group fairness of CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) by minimizing image-text similarity score disparities across sensitive groups using the Sinkhorn distance. The experimental setup of Luo et al. (2024) was reproduced to primarily investigate the research findings for FairCLIP. The model description by Luo et al. (2024) was found to differ from the original implementation. Therefore, a new implementation, A-FairCLIP, is introduced to examine specific design choices. Furthermore, FairCLIP+ is proposed to extend the FairCLIP objective to include multiple attributes. Additionally, the impact of the distance minimization on FairCLIP's fairness and performance was explored. In alignment with the original authors, CLIP was found to be biased towards certain demographics when applied to zero-shot glaucoma classification using medical scans and clinical notes from the Harvard-FairVLMed dataset. However, the experimental results on two datasets do not support their claim that FairCLIP improves the performance and fairness of CLIP. Although the regularization objective reduces Sinkhorn distances, both the official implementation and the aligned implementation, A-FairCLIP, were not found to improve performance nor fairness in zero-shot glaucoma classification.

Paperid: 5972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06531.pdf

Abstract:
Link prediction in knowledge graphs requires integrating structural information and semantic context to infer missing entities. While large language models offer strong generative reasoning capabilities, their limited exploitation of structural signals often results in structural sparsity and semantic ambiguity, especially under incomplete or zero-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose SLiNT (Structure-aware Language model with Injection and coNtrastive Training), a modular framework that injects knowledge-graph-derived structural context into a frozen LLM backbone with lightweight LoRA-based adaptation for robust link prediction. Specifically, Structure-Guided Neighborhood Enhancement (SGNE) retrieves pseudo-neighbors to enrich sparse entities and mitigate missing context; Dynamic Hard Contrastive Learning (DHCL) introduces fine-grained supervision by interpolating hard positives and negatives to resolve entity-level ambiguity; and Gradient-Decoupled Dual Injection (GDDI) performs token-level structure-aware intervention while preserving the core LLM parameters. Experiments on WN18RR and FB15k-237 show that SLiNT achieves superior or competitive performance compared with both embedding-based and generation-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structure-aware representation learning for scalable knowledge graph completion.

Paperid: 5973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06011.pdf

Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) faces severe performance degradation when applied to UAV imagery due to the domain gap from ground-level datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a complete UAV-oriented solution that combines both dataset construction and model innovation. First, we design a refined UAV-Label Engine, which efficiently resolves annotation redundancy, inconsistency, and ambiguity, enabling the generation of largescale UAV datasets. Based on this engine, we construct two new benchmarks: UAVDE-2M, with over 2.4M instances across 1,800+ categories, and UAVCAP-15K, providing rich image-text pairs for vision-language pretraining. Second, we introduce the Cross-Attention Gated Enhancement (CAGE) module, a lightweight dual-path fusion design that integrates cross-attention, adaptive gating, and global FiLM modulation for robust textvision alignment. By embedding CAGE into the YOLO-World-v2 framework, our method achieves significant gains in both accuracy and efficiency, notably improving zero-shot detection on VisDrone by +5.3 mAP while reducing parameters and GFLOPs, and demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization on SIMD. Extensive experiments and real-world UAV deployment confirm the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed solution for UAV-based OVD

Paperid: 5974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04512.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how large language models (LLMs) process emotionally sensitive content is critical for building safe and reliable systems, particularly in mental health contexts. We investigate the scaling behavior of LLMs on two key tasks: trinary classification of emotional safety (safe vs. unsafe vs. borderline) and multi-label classification using a six-category safety risk taxonomy. To support this, we construct a novel dataset by merging several human-authored mental health datasets (> 15K samples) and augmenting them with emotion re-interpretation prompts generated via ChatGPT. We evaluate four LLaMA models (1B, 3B, 8B, 70B) across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. Our results show that larger LLMs achieve stronger average performance, particularly in nuanced multi-label classification and in zero-shot settings. However, lightweight fine-tuning allowed the 1B model to achieve performance comparable to larger models and BERT in several high-data categories, while requiring <2GB VRAM at inference. These findings suggest that smaller, on-device models can serve as viable, privacy-preserving alternatives for sensitive applications, offering the ability to interpret emotional context and maintain safe conversational boundaries. This work highlights key implications for therapeutic LLM applications and the scalable alignment of safety-critical systems.

Paperid: 5975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04471.pdf

Abstract:
Radiology reports contain rich clinical information that can be used to train imaging models without relying on costly manual annotation. However, existing approaches face critical limitations: rule-based methods struggle with linguistic variability, supervised models require large annotated datasets, and recent LLM-based systems depend on closed-source or resource-intensive models that are unsuitable for clinical use. Moreover, current solutions are largely restricted to English and single-modality, single-taxonomy datasets. We introduce MOSAIC, a multilingual, taxonomy-agnostic, and computationally efficient approach for radiological report classification. Built on a compact open-access language model (MedGemma-4B), MOSAIC supports both zero-/few-shot prompting and lightweight fine-tuning, enabling deployment on consumer-grade GPUs. We evaluate MOSAIC across seven datasets in English, Spanish, French, and Danish, spanning multiple imaging modalities and label taxonomies. The model achieves a mean macro F1 score of 88 across five chest X-ray datasets, approaching or exceeding expert-level performance, while requiring only 24 GB of GPU memory. With data augmentation, as few as 80 annotated samples are sufficient to reach a weighted F1 score of 82 on Danish reports, compared to 86 with the full 1600-sample training set. MOSAIC offers a practical alternative to large or proprietary LLMs in clinical settings. Code and models are open-source. We invite the community to evaluate and extend MOSAIC on new languages, taxonomies, and modalities.

Paperid: 5976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02514.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in code-mixed text, particularly Hindi-English (Hinglish), presents unique challenges due to informal structure, transliteration, and frequent language switching. This study conducts a comparative evaluation of code-mixed fine-tuned models and non-code-mixed multilingual models, along with zero-shot generative large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we evaluate HingBERT, HingMBERT, and HingRoBERTa (trained on code-mixed data), and BERT Base Cased, IndicBERT, RoBERTa and MuRIL (trained on non-code-mixed multilingual data). We also assess the performance of Google Gemini in a zero-shot setting using a modified version of the dataset with NER tags removed. All models are tested on a benchmark Hinglish NER dataset using Precision, Recall, and F1-score. Results show that code-mixed models, particularly HingRoBERTa and HingBERT-based fine-tuned models, outperform others - including closed-source LLMs like Google Gemini - due to domain-specific pretraining. Non-code-mixed models perform reasonably but show limited adaptability. Notably, Google Gemini exhibits competitive zero-shot performance, underlining the generalization strength of modern LLMs. This study provides key insights into the effectiveness of specialized versus generalized models for code-mixed NER tasks.

Paperid: 5977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01754.pdf

Abstract:
Surface defects in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) pose significant risks to the structural integrity of additively manufactured components. This paper introduces TransMatch, a novel framework that merges transfer learning and semi-supervised few-shot learning to address the scarcity of labeled AM defect data. By effectively leveraging both labeled and unlabeled novel-class images, TransMatch circumvents the limitations of previous meta-learning approaches. Experimental evaluations on a Surface Defects dataset of 8,284 images demonstrate the efficacy of TransMatch, achieving 98.91% accuracy with minimal loss, alongside high precision, recall, and F1-scores for multiple defect classes. These findings underscore its robustness in accurately identifying diverse defects, such as cracks, pinholes, holes, and spatter. TransMatch thus represents a significant leap forward in additive manufacturing defect detection, offering a practical and scalable solution for quality assurance and reliability across a wide range of industrial applications.

Paperid: 5978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01299.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) not only enables the segmentation of unseen categories with very limited samples, but also improves cross-domain generalization ability within the few-shot segmentation framework. Currently, existing CD-FSS studies typically design multiple independent modules to enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of feature representations. However, the independence among these modules hinders the effective flow of knowledge, making it difficult to fully leverage their collective potential. In contrast, this paper proposes an all-in-one module based on ordinary differential equations and Fourier transform, resulting in a structurally concise method--Few-Shot Segmentation over Time Intervals (FSS-TIs). FSS-TIs assumes the existence of an ODE relationship between the spectra (including amplitude and phase spectra) of domain-specific features and domain-agnostic features. This ODE formulation yields an iterative transformation process along a sequence of time intervals, while simultaneously applying affine transformations with randomized perturbations to the spectra. In doing so, the exploration of domain-agnostic feature representation spaces and the simulation of diverse potential target-domain distributions are reformulated as an optimization process over the intrinsic parameters of the ODE. Moreover, we strictly constrain the support-sample selection during target-domain fine-tuning so that it is consistent with the requirements of real-world few-shot segmentation tasks. For evaluation, we introduce five datasets from substantially different domains and define two sets of cross-domain few-shot segmentation tasks to comprehensively analyze the performance of FSS-TIs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FSS-TIs over existing CD-FSS methods, and in-depth ablation studies further validate the cross-domain adaptability of FSS-TIs.

Paperid: 5979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01190.pdf

Abstract:
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications presents significant challenges, particularly in balancing computational efficiency with model performance. Optimizing acceleration after fine-tuning and during inference is critical for building efficient architectures. This paper introduces Zero-Shot Adjustable Acceleration, a novel training and inference method that dynamically adjusts hardware utilization during inference without requiring additional fine-tuning. The proposed approach is applied to recent LLMs and evaluated across multiple classification and text generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the method supports a wide range of zero-shot acceleration and achieves up to 11x speedup compared to the baseline.

Paperid: 5980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17693.pdf

Abstract:
Database normalization is crucial to preserving data integrity. However, it is time-consuming and error-prone, as it is typically performed manually by data engineers. To this end, we present Miffie, a database normalization framework that leverages the capability of large language models. Miffie enables automated data normalization without human effort while preserving high accuracy. The core of Miffie is a dual-model self-refinement architecture that combines the best-performing models for normalized schema generation and verification, respectively. The generation module eliminates anomalies based on the feedback of the verification module until the output schema satisfies the requirement for normalization. We also carefully design task-specific zero-shot prompts to guide the models for achieving both high accuracy and cost efficiency. Experimental results show that Miffie can normalize complex database schemas while maintaining high accuracy.

Paperid: 5981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12425.pdf

Abstract:
This work introduces Symbolic-Aided Chain-of-Thought (CoT), an improved approach to standard CoT, for logical reasoning in large language models (LLMs). The key idea is to integrate lightweight symbolic representations into few-shot prompts, structuring the inference steps with a consistent strategy to make reasoning patterns more explicit within a non-iterative reasoning process. By incorporating these symbolic structures, our method preserves the generalizability of standard prompting techniques while enhancing the transparency, interpretability, and analyzability of LLM logical reasoning. Extensive experiments on four well-known logical reasoning benchmarks -- ProofWriter, FOLIO, ProntoQA, and LogicalDeduction, which cover diverse reasoning scenarios -- demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, particularly in complex reasoning tasks that require navigating multiple constraints or rules. Notably, Symbolic-Aided CoT consistently improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities across various model sizes and significantly outperforms conventional CoT on three out of four datasets, ProofWriter, ProntoQA, and LogicalDeduction.

Paperid: 5982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12411.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are deployed globally, yet their underlying cultural and ethical assumptions remain underexplored. We propose the notion of a "cultural gene" -- a systematic value orientation that LLMs inherit from their training corpora -- and introduce a Cultural Probe Dataset (CPD) of 200 prompts targeting two classic cross-cultural dimensions: Individualism-Collectivism (IDV) and Power Distance (PDI). Using standardized zero-shot prompts, we compare a Western-centric model (GPT-4) and an Eastern-centric model (ERNIE Bot). Human annotation shows significant and consistent divergence across both dimensions. GPT-4 exhibits individualistic and low-power-distance tendencies (IDV score approx 1.21; PDI score approx -1.05), while ERNIE Bot shows collectivistic and higher-power-distance tendencies (IDV approx -0.89; PDI approx 0.76); differences are statistically significant (p < 0.001). We further compute a Cultural Alignment Index (CAI) against Hofstede's national scores and find GPT-4 aligns more closely with the USA (e.g., IDV CAI approx 0.91; PDI CAI approx 0.88) whereas ERNIE Bot aligns more closely with China (IDV CAI approx 0.85; PDI CAI approx 0.81). Qualitative analyses of dilemma resolution and authority-related judgments illustrate how these orientations surface in reasoning. Our results support the view that LLMs function as statistical mirrors of their cultural corpora and motivate culturally aware evaluation and deployment to avoid algorithmic cultural hegemony.

Paperid: 5983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12356.pdf

Abstract:
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising framework for training agents using pre-collected datasets without the need for further environment interaction. However, policies trained on offline data often struggle to generalise due to limited exposure to diverse states. The complexity of visual data introduces additional challenges such as noise, distractions, and spurious correlations, which can misguide the policy and increase the risk of overfitting if the training data is not sufficiently diverse. Indeed, this makes it challenging to leverage vision-based offline data in training robust agents that can generalize to unseen environments. To solve this problem, we propose a simple approach generating additional synthetic training data. We propose a two-step process, first augmenting the originally collected offline data to improve zero-shot generalization by introducing diversity, then using a diffusion model to generate additional data in latent space. We test our method across both continuous action spaces (Visual D4RL) and discrete action spaces (Procgen), demonstrating that it significantly improves generalization without requiring any algorithmic changes to existing model-free offline RL methods. We show that our method not only increases the diversity of the training data but also significantly reduces the generalization gap at test time while maintaining computational efficiency. We believe this approach could fuel additional progress in generating synthetic data to train more general agents in the future.

Paperid: 5984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11715.pdf

Abstract:
Excel is a pervasive yet often complex tool, particularly for novice users, where runtime errors arising from logical mistakes or misinterpretations of functions pose a significant challenge. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising assistance by explaining formula errors, the automated correction of these semantic runtime errors remains an open problem. A primary challenge to advancing models for such scenarios is the severe lack of high-quality, comprehensive datasets for training and rigorous evaluation. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel approach for constructing a benchmark dataset specifically designed for Excel formula repair. We propose a data generation pipeline, which leverages a small set of curated seed samples from online forums to synthetically expand the dataset. Our pipeline integrates few-shot prompting with LLMs and employs a robust \textit{LLM-as-a-Judge} validation framework, combined with execution-based checks to ensure the correctness and semantic fidelity of the generated data. This process produced a benchmark dataset of 618 high-quality samples, covering common runtime errors. Furthermore, we propose a context-aware baseline technique for Excel formula repair that utilizes LLMs to leverage both the faulty formula, and relevant spreadsheet context. We evaluate the performance of various LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, Phi-3, Mistral) on our newly generated benchmark using execution-based metrics. Our analysis demonstrates the dataset's quality through manual annotation and provides insights into error and function distributions. The proposed generation methodology is highly scalable and can be readily adapted to create evaluation benchmarks for similar code repair tasks in other low-resource programming languages.

Paperid: 5985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11433.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with unified architectures excel across a wide range of vision-language tasks, yet aligning them with personalized image generation remains a significant challenge. Existing methods for MLLMs are frequently subject-specific, demanding a data-intensive fine-tuning process for every new subject, which limits their scalability. In this paper, we introduce MM-R1, a framework that integrates a cross-modal Chain-of-Thought (X-CoT) reasoning strategy to unlock the inherent potential of unified MLLMs for personalized image generation. Specifically, we structure personalization as an integrated visual reasoning and generation process: (1) grounding subject concepts by interpreting and understanding user-provided images and contextual cues, and (2) generating personalized images conditioned on both the extracted subject representations and user prompts. To further enhance the reasoning capability, we adopt Grouped Reward Proximal Policy Optimization (GRPO) to explicitly align the generation. Experiments demonstrate that MM-R1 unleashes the personalization capability of unified MLLMs to generate images with high subject fidelity and strong text alignment in a zero-shot manner.

Paperid: 5986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07209.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have excelled in various Natural Language Processing tasks, benefiting from large-scale pretraining and self-attention mechanism's ability to capture long-range dependencies. However, their performance on social media application tasks like rumor detection remains suboptimal. We attribute this to mismatches between pretraining corpora and social texts, inadequate handling of unique social symbols, and pretraining tasks ill-suited for modeling user engagements implicit in propagation structures. To address these issues, we propose a continue pretraining strategy called Post Engagement Prediction (PEP) to infuse information from propagation structures into PLMs. PEP makes models to predict root, branch, and parent relations between posts, capturing interactions of stance and sentiment crucial for rumor detection. We also curate and release large-scale Twitter corpus: TwitterCorpus (269GB text), and two unlabeled claim conversation datasets with propagation structures (UTwitter and UWeibo). Utilizing these resources and PEP strategy, we train a Twitter-tailored PLM called SoLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate PEP significantly boosts rumor detection performance across universal and social media PLMs, even in few-shot scenarios. On benchmark datasets, PEP enhances baseline models by 1.0-3.7\% accuracy, even enabling it to outperform current state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. SoLM alone, without high-level modules, also achieves competitive results, highlighting the strategy's effectiveness in learning discriminative post interaction features.

Paperid: 5987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07205.pdf

Abstract:
Current rumor detection methods based on propagation structure learning predominately treat rumor detection as a class-balanced classification task on limited labeled data. However, real-world social media data exhibits an imbalanced distribution with a minority of rumors among massive regular posts. To address the data scarcity and imbalance issues, we construct two large-scale conversation datasets from Weibo and Twitter and analyze the domain distributions. We find obvious differences between rumor and non-rumor distributions, with non-rumors mostly in entertainment domains while rumors concentrate in news, indicating the conformity of rumor detection to an anomaly detection paradigm. Correspondingly, we propose the Anomaly Detection framework with Graph Supervised Contrastive Learning (AD-GSCL). It heuristically treats unlabeled data as non-rumors and adapts graph contrastive learning for rumor detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate AD-GSCL's superiority under class-balanced, imbalanced, and few-shot conditions. Our findings provide valuable insights for real-world rumor detection featuring imbalanced data distributions.

Paperid: 5988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06516.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce AutoMashup, a system for automatic mashup creation based on source separation, music analysis, and compatibility estimation. We propose using COCOLA to assess compatibility between separated stems and investigate whether general-purpose pretrained audio models (CLAP and MERT) can support zero-shot estimation of track pair compatibility. Our results show that mashup compatibility is asymmetric -- it depends on the role assigned to each track (vocals or accompaniment) -- and that current embeddings fail to reproduce the perceptual coherence measured by COCOLA. These findings underline the limitations of general-purpose audio representations for compatibility estimation in mashup creation.

Paperid: 5989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06126.pdf

Abstract:
In clustering tasks, it is essential to structure the feature space into clear, well-separated distributions. However, because short text representations have limited expressiveness, conventional methods struggle to identify cluster centers that truly capture each category's underlying semantics, causing the representations to be optimized in suboptimal directions. To address this issue, we propose IOCC, a novel few-shot contrastive learning method that achieves alignment between the cluster centers and the semantic centers. IOCC consists of two key modules: Interaction-enhanced Optimal Transport (IEOT) and Center-aware Contrastive Learning (CACL). Specifically, IEOT incorporates semantic interactions between individual samples into the conventional optimal transport problem, and generate pseudo-labels. Based on these pseudo-labels, we aggregate high-confidence samples to construct pseudo-centers that approximate the semantic centers. Next, CACL optimizes text representations toward their corresponding pseudo-centers. As training progresses, the collaboration between the two modules gradually reduces the gap between cluster centers and semantic centers. Therefore, the model will learn a high-quality distribution, improving clustering performance. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that IOCC outperforms previous methods, achieving up to 7.34\% improvement on challenging Biomedical dataset and also excelling in clustering stability and efficiency. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IOCC-C438.

Paperid: 5990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06032.pdf

Abstract:
Existing methods for human parsing into body parts and clothing often use fixed mask categories with broad labels that obscure fine-grained clothing types. Recent open-vocabulary segmentation approaches leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model features for strong zero-shot transfer, but typically group entire humans into a single person category, failing to distinguish diverse clothing or detailed body parts. To address this, we propose Spectrum, a unified network for part-level pixel parsing (body parts and clothing) and instance-level grouping. While diffusion-based open-vocabulary models generalize well across tasks, their internal representations are not specialized for detailed human parsing. We observe that, unlike diffusion models with broad representations, image-driven 3D texture generators maintain faithful correspondence to input images, enabling stronger representations for parsing diverse clothing and body parts. Spectrum introduces a novel repurposing of an Image-to-Texture (I2Tx) diffusion model -- obtained by fine-tuning a T2I model on 3D human texture maps -- for improved alignment with body parts and clothing. From an input image, we extract human-part internal features via the I2Tx diffusion model and generate semantically valid masks aligned to diverse clothing categories through prompt-guided grounding. Once trained, Spectrum produces semantic segmentation maps for every visible body part and clothing category, ignoring standalone garments or irrelevant objects, for any number of humans in the scene. We conduct extensive cross-dataset experiments -- separately assessing body parts, clothing parts, unseen clothing categories, and full-body masks -- and demonstrate that Spectrum consistently outperforms baseline methods in prompt-based segmentation.

Paperid: 5991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05783.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning using transformers has shown great potential in medical imaging, but its real-world applicability remains limited due to the scarcity of annotated data. In this study, we propose a practical framework for the few-shot deployment of pretrained MRI transformers in diverse brain imaging tasks. By utilizing the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) pretraining strategy on a large-scale, multi-cohort brain MRI dataset comprising over 31 million slices, we obtain highly transferable latent representations that generalize well across tasks and datasets. For high-level tasks such as classification, a frozen MAE encoder combined with a lightweight linear head achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in MRI sequence identification with minimal supervision. For low-level tasks such as segmentation, we propose MAE-FUnet, a hybrid architecture that fuses multiscale CNN features with pretrained MAE embeddings. This model consistently outperforms other strong baselines in both skull stripping and multi-class anatomical segmentation under data-limited conditions. With extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our framework demonstrates efficiency, stability, and scalability, suggesting its suitability for low-resource clinical environments and broader neuroimaging applications.

Paperid: 5992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05661.pdf

Abstract:
Visual search offers an intuitive way for customers to explore diverse product catalogs, particularly in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces where listings are often unstructured and visually driven. This paper presents a scalable visual search system deployed in Mercari's C2C marketplace, where end-users act as buyers and sellers. We evaluate recent vision-language models for zero-shot image retrieval and compare their performance with an existing fine-tuned baseline. The system integrates real-time inference and background indexing workflows, supported by a unified embedding pipeline optimized through dimensionality reduction. Offline evaluation using user interaction logs shows that the multilingual SigLIP model outperforms other models across multiple retrieval metrics, achieving a 13.3% increase in nDCG@5 over the baseline. A one-week online A/B test in production further confirms real-world impact, with the treatment group showing substantial gains in engagement and conversion, up to a 40.9% increase in transaction rate via image search. Our findings highlight that recent zero-shot models can serve as a strong and practical baseline for production use, which enables teams to deploy effective visual search systems with minimal overhead, while retaining the flexibility to fine-tune based on future data or domain-specific needs.

Paperid: 5993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05179.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the contributions of the ATLANTIS team to SemEval-2025 Task 3, focusing on detecting hallucinated text spans in question answering systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Generation (NLG) but remain susceptible to hallucinations, generating incorrect or misleading content. To address this, we explored methods both with and without external context, utilizing few-shot prompting with a LLM, token-level classification or LLM fine-tuned on synthetic data. Notably, our approaches achieved top rankings in Spanish and competitive placements in English and German. This work highlights the importance of integrating relevant context to mitigate hallucinations and demonstrate the potential of fine-tuned models and prompt engineering.

Paperid: 5994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05021.pdf

Abstract:
Visual navigation in unknown environments based solely on natural language descriptions is a key capability for intelligent robots. In this work, we propose a navigation framework built upon off-the-shelf Visual Language Models (VLMs), enhanced with two human-inspired mechanisms: perspective-based active grounding, which dynamically adjusts the robot's viewpoint for improved visual inspection, and historical memory backtracking, which enables the system to retain and re-evaluate uncertain observations over time. Unlike existing approaches that passively rely on incidental visual inputs, our method actively optimizes perception and leverages memory to resolve ambiguity, significantly improving vision-language grounding in complex, unseen environments. Our framework operates in a zero-shot manner, achieving strong generalization to diverse and open-ended language descriptions without requiring labeled data or model fine-tuning. Experimental results on Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in language-driven object navigation. We further demonstrate its practicality through real-world deployment on a quadruped robot, achieving robust and effective navigation performance.

Paperid: 5995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04252.pdf

Abstract:
With the development of social media, rumors spread quickly, cause great harm to society and economy. Thereby, many effective rumor detection methods have been developed, among which the rumor propagation structure learning based methods are particularly effective compared to other methods. However, the existing methods still suffer from many issues including the difficulty to obtain large-scale labeled rumor datasets, which leads to the low generalization ability and the performance degeneration on new events since rumors are time-critical and usually appear with hot topics or newly emergent events. In order to solve the above problems, in this study, we used large-scale unlabeled topic datasets crawled from the social media platform Weibo and Twitter with claim propagation structure to improve the semantic learning ability of a graph reprentation learing model on various topics. We use three typical graph self-supervised methods, InfoGraph, JOAO and GraphMAE in two commonly used training strategies, to verify the performance of general graph semi-supervised methods in rumor detection tasks. In addition, for alleviating the time and topic difference between unlabeled topic data and rumor data, we also collected a rumor dataset covering a variety of topics over a decade (10-year ago from 2022) from the Weibo rumor-refuting platform. Our experiments show that these general graph self-supervised learning methods outperform previous methods specifically designed for rumor detection tasks and achieve good performance under few-shot conditions, demonstrating the better generalization ability with the help of our massive unlabeled topic dataset.

Paperid: 5996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04122.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents OC-DiT, a novel class of diffusion models designed for object-centric prediction, and applies it to zero-shot instance segmentation. We propose a conditional latent diffusion framework that generates instance masks by conditioning the generative process on object templates and image features within the diffusion model's latent space. This allows our model to effectively disentangle object instances through the diffusion process, which is guided by visual object descriptors and localized image cues. Specifically, we introduce two model variants: a coarse model for generating initial object instance proposals, and a refinement model that refines all proposals in parallel. We train these models on a newly created, large-scale synthetic dataset comprising thousands of high-quality object meshes. Remarkably, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging real-world benchmarks, without requiring any retraining on target data. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we demonstrate the potential of diffusion models for instance segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 5997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04063.pdf

Abstract:
Research to improve Automated Short Answer Grading has recently focused on Large Language Models (LLMs) with prompt engineering and no- or few-shot prompting to achieve best results. This is in contrast to the fine-tuning approach, which has historically required large-scale compute clusters inaccessible to most users. New closed-model approaches such as OpenAI's fine-tuning service promise results with as few as 100 examples, while methods using open weights such as quantized low-rank adaptive (QLORA) can be used to fine-tune models on consumer GPUs. We evaluate both of these fine-tuning methods, measuring their interaction with few-shot prompting for automated short answer grading (ASAG) with structured (JSON) outputs. Our results show that finetuning with small amounts of data has limited utility for Llama open-weight models, but that fine-tuning methods can outperform few-shot baseline instruction-tuned LLMs for OpenAI's closed models. While our evaluation set is limited, we find some evidence that the observed benefits of finetuning may be impacted by the domain subject matter. Lastly, we observed dramatic improvement with the LLama 3.1 8B-Instruct open-weight model by seeding the initial training examples with a significant amount of cheaply generated synthetic training data.

Paperid: 5998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03989.pdf

Abstract:
User-controllable privacy is important in modern sensing systems, as privacy preferences can vary significantly from person to person and may evolve over time. This is especially relevant in devices equipped with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors, such as smartphones and wearables, which continuously collect rich time-series data that can inadvertently expose sensitive user behaviors. While prior work has proposed privacy-preserving methods for sensor data, most rely on static, predefined privacy labels or require large quantities of private training data, limiting their adaptability and user agency. In this work, we introduce PrivCLIP, a dynamic, user-controllable, few-shot privacy-preserving sensing framework. PrivCLIP allows users to specify and modify their privacy preferences by categorizing activities as sensitive (black-listed), non-sensitive (white-listed), or neutral (gray-listed). Leveraging a multimodal contrastive learning approach, PrivCLIP aligns IMU sensor data with natural language activity descriptions in a shared embedding space, enabling few-shot detection of sensitive activities. When a privacy-sensitive activity is identified, the system uses a language-guided activity sanitizer and a motion generation module (IMU-GPT) to transform the original data into a privacy-compliant version that semantically resembles a non-sensitive activity. We evaluate PrivCLIP on multiple human activity recognition datasets and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of both privacy protection and data utility.

Paperid: 5999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01918.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), low-resource languages remain largely excluded from the NLP landscape. We present PunGPT2, the first fully open-source suite of Punjabi large language models, trained from scratch on a 35GB domain-diverse corpus encompassing literature, religious texts, news, and social discourse. Unlike prior multilingual approaches, PunGPT2 captures rich syntactic and morphological features unique to Punjabi through a tokenizer optimised with byte pair encoding and linguistically aligned pretraining objectives. To improve factual grounding and domain recall, we introduce Pun-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework combining PunGPT2 with a dense FAISS retriever over a curated Punjabi knowledge base. We further develop Pun-Instruct, a parameter-efficient, instruction-tuned variant using QLoRA, enabling robust zero-shot and instruction-following performance with significantly reduced compute needs. As a key innovation, we propose Quantum-RAG, a novel hybrid retrieval system that fuses sparse (BM25) and dense methods with quantum-inspired semantic matching. By encoding queries using amplitude-based embeddings and retrieving via quantum kernel similarity, Quantum-RAG achieves improved contextual relevance with minimal memory overhead marking the first practical integration of quantum representations in low-resource language generation. Our models significantly outperform strong multilingual baselines (mBERT, mT5, MuRIL) in perplexity, factuality, and fluency. This work provides a scalable, reproducible blueprint for extending LLM capabilities to underrepresented languages and pioneers quantum-aware retrieval in low-resource NLP

Paperid: 6000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00788.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive contexts where fairness and inclusivity are critical. Pronoun usage, especially concerning gender-neutral and neopronouns, remains a key challenge for responsible AI. Prior work, such as the MISGENDERED benchmark, revealed significant limitations in earlier LLMs' handling of inclusive pronouns, but was constrained to outdated models and limited evaluations. In this study, we introduce MISGENDERED+, an extended and updated benchmark for evaluating LLMs' pronoun fidelity. We benchmark five representative LLMs, GPT-4o, Claude 4, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen Turbo, and Qwen2.5, across zero-shot, few-shot, and gender identity inference. Our results show notable improvements compared with previous studies, especially in binary and gender-neutral pronoun accuracy. However, accuracy on neopronouns and reverse inference tasks remains inconsistent, underscoring persistent gaps in identity-sensitive reasoning. We discuss implications, model-specific observations, and avenues for future inclusive AI research.

Paperid: 6001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22473.pdf

Abstract:
Land-air bimodal robots (LABR) are gaining attention for autonomous navigation, combining high mobility from aerial vehicles with long endurance from ground vehicles. However, existing LABR navigation methods are limited by suboptimal trajectories from mapping-based approaches and the excessive computational demands of learning-based methods. To address this, we propose a two-stage lightweight framework that integrates global key points prediction with local trajectory refinement to generate efficient and reachable trajectories. In the first stage, the Global Key points Prediction Network (GKPN) was used to generate a hybrid land-air keypoint path. The GKPN includes a Sobel Perception Network (SPN) for improved obstacle detection and a Lightweight Attention Planning Network (LAPN) to improves predictive ability by capturing contextual information. In the second stage, the global path is segmented based on predicted key points and refined using a mapping-based planner to create smooth, collision-free trajectories. Experiments conducted on our LABR platform show that our framework reduces network parameters by 14\% and energy consumption during land-air transitions by 35\% compared to existing approaches. The framework achieves real-time navigation without GPU acceleration and enables zero-shot transfer from simulation to reality during

Paperid: 6002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21563.pdf

Abstract:
Recommendation systems often suffer from data sparsity caused by limited user-item interactions, which degrade their performance and amplify popularity bias in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a novel data augmentation framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and item textual descriptions to enrich interaction data. By few-shot prompting LLMs multiple times to rerank items and aggregating the results via majority voting, we generate high-confidence synthetic user-item interactions, supported by theoretical guarantees based on the concentration of measure. To effectively leverage the augmented data in the context of a graph recommendation system, we integrate it into a graph contrastive learning framework to mitigate distributional shift and alleviate popularity bias. Extensive experiments show that our method improves accuracy and reduces popularity bias, outperforming strong baselines.

Paperid: 6003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20301.pdf

Abstract:
Dialectal Arabic (DA) poses a persistent challenge for natural language processing (NLP), as most everyday communication in the Arab world occurs in dialects that diverge significantly from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This linguistic divide impedes progress in Arabic machine translation. This paper presents two core contributions to advancing DA-MSA translation for the Levantine, Egyptian, and Gulf dialects, particularly in low-resource and computationally constrained settings: (i) a comprehensive evaluation of training-free prompting techniques, and (ii) the development of a resource-efficient fine-tuning pipeline. Our evaluation of prompting strategies across six large language models (LLMs) found that few-shot prompting consistently outperformed zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and our proposed Ara-TEaR method. Ara-TEaR is designed as a three-stage self-refinement prompting process, targeting frequent meaning-transfer and adaptation errors in DA-MSA translation. In this evaluation, GPT-4o achieved the highest performance across all prompting settings. For fine-tuning LLMs, a quantized Gemma2-9B model achieved a chrF++ score of 49.88, outperforming zero-shot GPT-4o (44.58). Joint multi-dialect trained models outperformed single-dialect counterparts by over 10% chrF++, and 4-bit quantization reduced memory usage by 60% with less than 1% performance loss. The results and insights of our experiments offer a practical blueprint for improving dialectal inclusion in Arabic NLP, showing that high-quality DA-MSA machine translation is achievable even with limited resources and paving the way for more inclusive language technologies.

Paperid: 6004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17088.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities, making them essential for several downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning these models at scale remains challenging, particularly in federated environments where data is decentralized and non-iid across clients. Existing parameter-efficient tuning methods like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) reduce computational overhead but struggle with heterogeneous client data, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose FedVLM, a federated LoRA fine-tuning framework that enables decentralized adaptation of VLMs while preserving model privacy and reducing reliance on centralized training. To further tackle data heterogeneity, we introduce personalized LoRA (pLoRA), which dynamically adapts LoRA parameters to each client's unique data distribution, significantly improving local adaptation while maintaining global model aggregation. Experiments on the RLAIF-V dataset show that pLoRA improves client-specific performance by 24.5% over standard LoRA, demonstrating superior adaptation in non-iid settings. FedVLM provides a scalable and efficient solution for fine-tuning VLMs in federated settings, advancing personalized adaptation in distributed learning scenarios.

Paperid: 6005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17085.pdf

Abstract:
Manipulating clusters of deformable objects presents a substantial challenge with widespread applicability, but requires contact-rich whole-arm interactions. A potential solution must address the limited capacity for realistic model synthesis, high uncertainty in perception, and the lack of efficient spatial abstractions, among others. We propose a novel framework for learning model-free policies integrating two modalities: 3D point clouds and proprioceptive touch indicators, emphasising manipulation with full body contact awareness, going beyond traditional end-effector modes. Our reinforcement learning framework leverages a distributional state representation, aided by kernel mean embeddings, to achieve improved training efficiency and real-time inference. Furthermore, we propose a novel context-agnostic occlusion heuristic to clear deformables from a target region for exposure tasks. We deploy the framework in a power line clearance scenario and observe that the agent generates creative strategies leveraging multiple arm links for de-occlusion. Finally, we perform zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer, allowing the arm to clear real branches with unknown occlusion patterns, unseen topology, and uncertain dynamics.

Paperid: 6006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16875.pdf

Abstract:
High-quality speech generation for low-resource languages, such as many Indian languages, remains a significant challenge due to limited data and diverse linguistic structures. Duration prediction is a critical component in many speech generation pipelines, playing a key role in modeling prosody and speech rhythm. While some recent generative approaches choose to omit explicit duration modeling, often at the cost of longer training times. We retain and explore this module to better understand its impact in the linguistically rich and data-scarce landscape of India. We train a non-autoregressive Continuous Normalizing Flow (CNF) based speech model using publicly available Indian language data and evaluate multiple duration prediction strategies for zero-shot, speaker-specific generation. Our comparative analysis on speech-infilling tasks reveals nuanced trade-offs: infilling based predictors improve intelligibility in some languages, while speaker-prompted predictors better preserve speaker characteristics in others. These findings inform the design and selection of duration strategies tailored to specific languages and tasks, underscoring the continued value of interpretable components like duration prediction in adapting advanced generative architectures to low-resource, multilingual settings.

Paperid: 6007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16856.pdf

Abstract:
As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, new safety risks arise from the subtle interplay between images and text. In particular, seemingly innocuous inputs can combine to reveal harmful intent, leading to unsafe model responses. Despite increasing attention to multimodal safety, previous approaches based on post hoc filtering or static refusal prompts struggle to detect such latent risks, especially when harmfulness emerges only from the combination of inputs. We propose SIA (Safety via Intent Awareness), a training-free prompt engineering framework that proactively detects and mitigates harmful intent in multimodal inputs. SIA employs a three-stage reasoning process: (1) visual abstraction via captioning, (2) intent inference through few-shot chain-of-thought prompting, and (3) intent-conditioned response refinement. Rather than relying on predefined rules or classifiers, SIA dynamically adapts to the implicit intent inferred from the image-text pair. Through extensive experiments on safety-critical benchmarks including SIUO, MM-SafetyBench, and HoliSafe, we demonstrate that SIA achieves substantial safety improvements, outperforming prior methods. Although SIA shows a minor reduction in general reasoning accuracy on MMStar, the corresponding safety gains highlight the value of intent-aware reasoning in aligning VLMs with human-centric values.

Paperid: 6008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15905.pdf

Abstract:
In line with the development of deep learning, this survey examines the transformative role of Transformers and foundation models in advancing visual anomaly detection (VAD). We explore how these architectures, with their global receptive fields and adaptability, address challenges such as long-range dependency modeling, contextual modeling and data scarcity. The survey categorizes VAD methods into reconstruction-based, feature-based and zero/few-shot approaches, highlighting the paradigm shift brought about by foundation models. By integrating attention mechanisms and leveraging large-scale pre-training, Transformers and foundation models enable more robust, interpretable, and scalable anomaly detection solutions. This work provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art techniques, their strengths, limitations, and emerging trends in leveraging these architectures for VAD.

Paperid: 6009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15272.pdf

Abstract:
We present a speaker conditioned text-to-speech (TTS) system aimed at addressing challenges in generating speech for unseen speakers and supporting diverse Indian languages. Our method leverages a diffusion-based TTS architecture, where a speaker encoder extracts embeddings from short reference audio samples to condition the DDPM decoder for multispeaker generation. To further enhance prosody and naturalness, we employ a cross-attention based duration prediction mechanism that utilizes reference audio, enabling more accurate and speaker consistent timing. This results in speech that closely resembles the target speaker while improving duration modeling and overall expressiveness. Additionally, to improve zero-shot generation, we employed classifier free guidance, allowing the system to generate speech more near speech for unknown speakers. Using this approach, we trained language-specific speaker-conditioned models. Using the IndicSUPERB dataset for multiple Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi and Tamil.

Paperid: 6010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12753.pdf

Abstract:
Recent open-vocabulary robot mapping methods enrich dense geometric maps with pre-trained visual-language features, achieving a high level of detail and guiding robots to find objects specified by open-vocabulary language queries. While the issue of scalability for such approaches has received some attention, another fundamental problem is that high-detail object mapping quickly becomes outdated, as objects get moved around a lot. In this work, we develop a mapping and navigation system for object-goal navigation that, from the ground up, considers the possibilities that a queried object can have moved, or may not be mapped at all. Instead of striving for high-fidelity mapping detail, we consider that the main purpose of a map is to provide environment grounding and context, which we combine with the semantic priors of LLMs to reason about object locations and deploy an active, online approach to navigate to the objects. Through simulated and real-world experiments we find that our approach tends to have higher retrieval success at shorter path lengths for static objects and by far outperforms prior approaches in cases of dynamic or unmapped object queries. We provide our code and dataset at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/osmAG-LLM.

Paperid: 6011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11862.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate recognition of personally identifiable information (PII) is central to automated text anonymization. This paper investigates the effectiveness of cross-domain model transfer, multi-domain data fusion, and sample-efficient learning for PII recognition. Using annotated corpora from healthcare (I2B2), legal (TAB), and biography (Wikipedia), we evaluate models across four dimensions: in-domain performance, cross-domain transferability, fusion, and few-shot learning. Results show legal-domain data transfers well to biographical texts, while medical domains resist incoming transfer. Fusion benefits are domain-specific, and high-quality recognition is achievable with only 10% of training data in low-specialization domains.

Paperid: 6012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11114.pdf

Abstract:
We present a robust ensemble-based system for multilingual multimodal reasoning, designed for the ImageCLEF 2025 EXAMS V challenge. Our approach integrates Gemini 2.5 Flash for visual description, Gemini 1.5 Pro for caption refinement and consistency checks, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as a reasoner which handles final answer selection, all coordinated through carefully engineered few-shot and zero-shot prompts. We conducted an extensive ablation study, training several large language models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, Phi 4, Gemma 3, Mistral) on an English dataset and its multilingual augmented version. Additionally, we evaluated Gemini 2.5 Flash in a zero-shot setting for comparison and found it to substantially outperform the trained models. Prompt design also proved critical: enforcing concise, language-normalized formats and prohibiting explanatory text boosted model accuracy on the English validation set from 55.9% to 61.7%. On the official leaderboard, our system (Team MSA) achieved first place overall in the multilingual track with 81.4% accuracy, and led 11 out of 13 individual language tracks, with top results such as 95.07% for Croatian and 92.12% for Italian. These findings highlight that lightweight OCR-VLM ensembles, when paired with precise prompt strategies and cross-lingual augmentation, can outperform heavier end-to-end models in high-stakes, multilingual educational settings.

Paperid: 6013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08402.pdf

Abstract:
Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCI) aim to decode behavior from neural population activity, enabling individuals with motor impairments to regain motor functions and communication abilities. A key challenge in long-term iBCI is the nonstationarity of neural recordings, where the composition and tuning profiles of the recorded populations are unstable across recording sessions. Existing methods attempt to address this issue by explicit alignment techniques; however, they rely on fixed neural identities and require test-time labels or parameter updates, limiting their generalization across sessions and imposing additional computational burden during deployment. In this work, we introduce SPINT - a Spatial Permutation-Invariant Neural Transformer framework for behavioral decoding that operates directly on unordered sets of neural units. Central to our approach is a novel context-dependent positional embedding scheme that dynamically infers unit-specific identities, enabling flexible generalization across recording sessions. SPINT supports inference on variable-size populations and allows few-shot, gradient-free adaptation using a small amount of unlabeled data from the test session. To further promote model robustness to population variability, we introduce dynamic channel dropout, a regularization method for iBCI that simulates shifts in population composition during training. We evaluate SPINT on three multi-session datasets from the FALCON Benchmark, covering continuous motor decoding tasks in human and non-human primates. SPINT demonstrates robust cross-session generalization, outperforming existing zero-shot and few-shot unsupervised baselines while eliminating the need for test-time alignment and fine-tuning. Our work contributes an initial step toward a robust and scalable neural decoding framework for long-term iBCI applications.

Paperid: 6014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05918.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes the approach of the Unibuc - NLP team in tackling the SemEval 2025 Workshop, Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection. We mainly focused on experiments using large language models (Gemini, Qwen, DeepSeek) with either few-shot prompting or fine-tuning. With our final system, for the multi-label emotion detection track (track A), we got an F1-macro of $0.7546$ (26/96 teams) for the English subset, $0.1727$ (35/36 teams) for the Portuguese (Mozambican) subset and $0.325$ (\textbf{1}/31 teams) for the Emakhuwa subset.

Paperid: 6015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01843.pdf

Abstract:
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches have recently gained traction in robotics applications due to their ability to dynamically allocate computational resources and specialize sub-networks for distinct tasks or environmental contexts, enabling more efficient decision-making. Such systems often comprise sparsely activated experts combined under a single monolithic architecture and require a well-configured internal routing mechanism, which does not allow for selective low-level expert and router customization and requires additional training. We propose MoIRA, an architecture-agnostic modular MoE framework designed to coordinate existing experts with an external text-based router. MoIRA incorporates two zero-shot routing options: embedding-based similarity and prompt-driven language model inference. In our experiments, we choose large Vision-Language-Action models, gr00t-N1 and $Ï_0$, as the underlying experts, and train low-rank adapters for low-overhead inference. We evaluate MoIRA on various GR1 Humanoid tasks and LIBERO Spatial and Goal benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms generalist models and competes with other MoE pipelines. Additionally, we analyse the robustness of the proposed approach to the variations of the instructions. While relying solely on textual descriptions of tasks and experts, MoIRA demonstrates the practical viability of modular deployment with precise, low-effort routing and provides an alternative, scalable foundation for future multi-expert robotic systems.

Paperid: 6016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22624.pdf

Abstract:
We present Seg-R1, a preliminary exploration of using reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the pixel-level understanding and reasoning capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). Starting with foreground segmentation tasks, specifically camouflaged object detection (COD) and salient object detection (SOD), our approach enables the LMM to generate point and bounding box prompts in the next-token fashion, which are then used to guide SAM2 in producing segmentation masks. We introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into the segmentation domain, equipping the LMM with pixel-level comprehension through a carefully designed training strategy. Notably, Seg-R1 achieves remarkable performance with purely RL-based training, achieving .873 S-measure on COD10K without complex model modification. Moreover, we found that pure RL training demonstrates strong open-world generalization. Despite being trained solely on foreground segmentation image-mask pairs without text supervision, Seg-R1 achieves impressive zero-shot performance on referring segmentation and reasoning segmentation tasks, with 71.4 cIoU on RefCOCOg test and 56.7 gIoU on ReasonSeg test, outperforming models fully supervised on these datasets.

Paperid: 6017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21860.pdf

Abstract:
Mobile robots rely on object detectors for perception and object localization in indoor environments. However, standard closed-set methods struggle to handle the diverse objects and dynamic conditions encountered in real homes and labs. Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD), driven by Vision Language Models (VLMs), extends beyond fixed labels but still struggles with domain shifts in indoor environments. We introduce a Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) approach that adapts a pre-trained model without accessing source data. We refine pseudo labels via temporal clustering, employ multi-scale threshold fusion, and apply a Mean Teacher framework with contrastive learning. Our Embodied Domain Adaptation for Object Detection (EDAOD) benchmark evaluates adaptation under sequential changes in lighting, layout, and object diversity. Our experiments show significant gains in zero-shot detection performance and flexible adaptation to dynamic indoor conditions.

Paperid: 6018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21616.pdf

Abstract:
Open-domain Timeline Summarization (TLS) is crucial for monitoring the evolution of news topics. To identify changes in news topics, existing methods typically employ general Large Language Models (LLMs) to summarize relevant timestamps from retrieved news. While general LLMs demonstrate capabilities in zero-shot news summarization and timestamp localization, they struggle with assessing topic relevance and understanding topic evolution. Consequently, the summarized information often includes irrelevant details or inaccurate timestamps. To address these issues, we propose the first large Timeline Intelligence Model (TIM) for open-domain TLS, which is capable of effectively summarizing open-domain timelines. Specifically, we begin by presenting a large-scale TLS dataset, comprising over 1,000 news topics and more than 3,000 annotated TLS instances. Furthermore, we propose a progressive optimization strategy, which gradually enhance summarization performance. It employs instruction tuning to enhance summarization and topic-irrelevant information filtering capabilities. Following this, it exploits a novel dual-alignment reward learning method that incorporates both semantic and temporal perspectives, thereby improving the understanding of topic evolution principles. Through this progressive optimization strategy, TIM demonstrates a robust ability to summarize open-domain timelines. Extensive experiments in open-domain demonstrate the effectiveness of our TIM.

Paperid: 6019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18323.pdf

Abstract:
Low-light image enhancement remains a challenging task, particularly in the absence of paired training data. In this study, we present LucentVisionNet, a novel zero-shot learning framework that addresses the limitations of traditional and deep learning-based enhancement methods. The proposed approach integrates multi-scale spatial attention with a deep curve estimation network, enabling fine-grained enhancement while preserving semantic and perceptual fidelity. To further improve generalization, we adopt a recurrent enhancement strategy and optimize the model using a composite loss function comprising six tailored components, including a novel no-reference image quality loss inspired by human visual perception. Extensive experiments on both paired and unpaired benchmark datasets demonstrate that LucentVisionNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised, unsupervised, and zero-shot methods across multiple full-reference and no-reference image quality metrics. Our framework achieves high visual quality, structural consistency, and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment in real-world applications such as mobile photography, surveillance, and autonomous navigation.

Paperid: 6020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18285.pdf

Abstract:
Due to its human-interpretability and invariance properties, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) has been a foundational tool across various areas of AI research, leading to significant advancements. However, DAG learning remains highly challenging, due to its super-exponential growth in computational cost and identifiability issues, particularly in small-sample regimes. To address these two challenges, in this work we leverage the recent success of linear transformers and develop a foundation model approach for discovering multiple order-consistent DAGs across tasks. In particular, we propose Attention-DAG (ADAG), a novel attention-mechanism-based architecture for learning multiple linear Structural Equation Models (SEMs). ADAG learns the mapping from observed data to both graph structure and parameters via a nonlinear attention-based kernel, enabling efficient multi-task estimation of the underlying linear SEMs. By formulating the learning process across multiple tasks as a continuous optimization problem, the pre-trained ADAG model captures the common structural properties as a shared low-dimensional prior, thereby reducing the ill-posedness of downstream DAG learning tasks in small-sample regimes. We evaluate our proposed approach on benchmark synthetic datasets and find that ADAG achieves substantial improvements in both DAG learning accuracy and zero-shot inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical approach for pre-training a foundation model specifically designed for DAG learning, representing a step toward more efficient and generalizable down-stream applications in causal discovery.

Paperid: 6021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18201.pdf

Abstract:
Emotion recognition capabilities in multimodal AI systems are crucial for developing culturally responsive educational technologies, yet remain underexplored for Arabic language contexts where culturally appropriate learning tools are critically needed. This study evaluates the emotion recognition performance of two advanced multimodal large language models, GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, when processing Arabic children's storybook illustrations. We assessed both models across three prompting strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought) using 75 images from seven Arabic storybooks, comparing model predictions with human annotations based on Plutchik's emotional framework. GPT-4o consistently outperformed Gemini across all conditions, achieving the highest macro F1-score of 59% with chain-of-thought prompting compared to Gemini's best performance of 43%. Error analysis revealed systematic misclassification patterns, with valence inversions accounting for 60.7% of errors, while both models struggled with culturally nuanced emotions and ambiguous narrative contexts. These findings highlight fundamental limitations in current models' cultural understanding and emphasize the need for culturally sensitive training approaches to develop effective emotion-aware educational technologies for Arabic-speaking learners.

Paperid: 6022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16623.pdf

Abstract:
Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) challenges robots to find objects in unseen environments, demanding sophisticated reasoning. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show potential, current ObjectNav methods often employ them superficially, primarily using vision-language embeddings for object-scene similarity checks rather than leveraging deeper reasoning. This limits contextual understanding and leads to practical issues like repetitive navigation behaviors. This paper introduces a novel zero-shot ObjectNav framework that pioneers the use of dynamic, history-aware prompting to more deeply integrate VLM reasoning into frontier-based exploration. Our core innovation lies in providing the VLM with action history context, enabling it to generate semantic guidance scores for navigation actions while actively avoiding decision loops. We also introduce a VLM-assisted waypoint generation mechanism for refining the final approach to detected objects. Evaluated on the HM3D dataset within Habitat, our approach achieves a 46% Success Rate (SR) and 24.8% Success weighted by Path Length (SPL). These results are comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot methods, demonstrating the significant potential of our history-augmented VLM prompting strategy for more robust and context-aware robotic navigation.

Paperid: 6023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16335.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks but struggle with consistent rule application, exception handling, and explainability, particularly in domains like legal analysis that require both natural language understanding and precise logical inference. This paper introduces a structured prompting framework that decomposes reasoning into three verifiable steps: entity identification, property extraction, and symbolic rule application. By integrating neural and symbolic approaches, our method leverages LLMs' interpretive flexibility while ensuring logical consistency through formal verification. The framework externalizes task definitions, enabling domain experts to refine logical structures without altering the architecture. Evaluated on the LegalBench hearsay determination task, our approach significantly outperformed baselines, with OpenAI o-family models showing substantial improvements - o1 achieving an F1 score of 0.929 and o3-mini reaching 0.867 using structured decomposition with complementary predicates, compared to their few-shot baselines of 0.714 and 0.74 respectively. This hybrid neural-symbolic system offers a promising pathway for transparent and consistent rule-based reasoning, suggesting potential for explainable AI applications in structured legal reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 6024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15096.pdf

Abstract:
We present DyNaVLM, an end-to-end vision-language navigation framework using Vision-Language Models (VLM). In contrast to prior methods constrained by fixed angular or distance intervals, our system empowers agents to freely select navigation targets via visual-language reasoning. At its core lies a self-refining graph memory that 1) stores object locations as executable topological relations, 2) enables cross-robot memory sharing through distributed graph updates, and 3) enhances VLM's decision-making via retrieval augmentation. Operating without task-specific training or fine-tuning, DyNaVLM demonstrates high performance on GOAT and ObjectNav benchmarks. Real-world tests further validate its robustness and generalization. The system's three innovations: dynamic action space formulation, collaborative graph memory, and training-free deployment, establish a new paradigm for scalable embodied robot, bridging the gap between discrete VLN tasks and continuous real-world navigation.

Paperid: 6025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12356.pdf

Abstract:
Surface electromyography (sEMG) at the wrists could enable natural, keyboard-free text entry, yet the state-of-the-art emg2qwerty baseline still misrecognizes $51.8\%$ of characters in the zero-shot setting on unseen users and $7.0\%$ after user-specific fine-tuning. We trace many of these errors to mismatched cross-user signal statistics, fragile reliance on high-order feature dependencies, and the absence of architectural inductive biases aligned with the bilateral nature of typing. To address these issues, we introduce three simple modifications: (i) Rolling Time Normalization, which adaptively aligns input distributions across users; (ii) Aggressive Channel Masking, which encourages reliance on low-order feature combinations more likely to generalize across users; and (iii) a Split-and-Share encoder that processes each hand independently with weight-shared streams to reflect the bilateral symmetry of the neuromuscular system. Combined with a five-fold reduction in spectral resolution ($33\!\rightarrow\!6$ frequency bands), these components yield a compact Split-and-Share model, SplashNet-mini, which uses only $\tfrac14$ the parameters and $0.6\times$ the FLOPs of the baseline while reducing character-error rate (CER) to $36.4\%$ zero-shot and $5.9\%$ after fine-tuning. An upscaled variant, SplashNet ($\tfrac12$ the parameters, $1.15\times$ the FLOPs of the baseline), further lowers error to $35.7\%$ and $5.5\%$, representing relative improvements of $31\%$ and $21\%$ in the zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, respectively. SplashNet therefore establishes a new state of the art without requiring additional data.

Paperid: 6026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11389.pdf

Abstract:
As the cost of pretraining large language models grows, there is continued interest in strategies to improve learning efficiency during this core training stage. Motivated by cognitive development, where humans gradually build knowledge as their brains mature, we propose Curriculum-Guided Layer Scaling (CGLS), a framework for compute-efficient pretraining that synchronizes increasing data difficulty with model growth through progressive layer stacking (i.e. gradually adding layers during training). At the 100M parameter scale, using a curriculum transitioning from synthetic short stories to general web data, CGLS outperforms baseline methods on the question-answering benchmarks PIQA and ARC. Pretraining at the 1.2B scale, we stratify the DataComp-LM corpus with a DistilBERT-based classifier and progress from general text to highly technical or specialized content. Our results show that progressively increasing model depth alongside sample difficulty leads to better generalization and zero-shot performance on various downstream benchmarks. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that CGLS unlocks the potential of progressive stacking, offering a simple yet effective strategy for improving generalization on knowledge-intensive and reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 6027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11336.pdf

Abstract:
We study the sample complexity of stochastic convex optimization when problem parameters, e.g., the distance to optimality, are unknown. We pursue two strategies. First, we develop a reliable model selection method that avoids overfitting the validation set. This method allows us to generically tune the learning rate of stochastic optimization methods to match the optimal known-parameter sample complexity up to $\log\log$ factors. Second, we develop a regularization-based method that is specialized to the case that only the distance to optimality is unknown. This method provides perfect adaptability to unknown distance to optimality, demonstrating a separation between the sample and computational complexity of parameter-free stochastic convex optimization. Combining these two methods allows us to simultaneously adapt to multiple problem structures. Experiments performing few-shot learning on CIFAR-10 by fine-tuning CLIP models and prompt engineering Gemini to count shapes indicate that our reliable model selection method can help mitigate overfitting to small validation sets.

Paperid: 6028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11017.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled progress in artificial intelligence, demonstrating substantial application potential across multiple specialized domains. Telecommunications operation scheduling (OS) is a critical aspect of the telecommunications industry, involving the coordinated management of networks, services, risks, and human resources to optimize production scheduling and ensure unified service control. However, the inherent complexity and domain-specific nature of OS tasks, coupled with the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, have hindered thorough exploration of LLMs' application potential in this critical field. To address this research gap, we propose the first Telecommunications Operation Scheduling Evaluation Benchmark (TeleEval-OS). Specifically, this benchmark comprises 15 datasets across 13 subtasks, comprehensively simulating four key operational stages: intelligent ticket creation, intelligent ticket handling, intelligent ticket closure, and intelligent evaluation. To systematically assess the performance of LLMs on tasks of varying complexity, we categorize their capabilities in telecommunications operation scheduling into four hierarchical levels, arranged in ascending order of difficulty: basic NLP, knowledge Q&A, report generation, and report analysis. On TeleEval-OS, we leverage zero-shot and few-shot evaluation methods to comprehensively assess 10 open-source LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-V3) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) across diverse scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that open-source LLMs can outperform closed-source LLMs in specific scenarios, highlighting their significant potential and value in the field of telecommunications operation scheduling.

Paperid: 6029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10231.pdf

Abstract:
Often when we interact with a first-person account of events, we consider whether or not the narrator, the primary speaker of the text, is reliable. In this paper, we propose using computational methods to identify unreliable narrators, i.e. those who unintentionally misrepresent information. Borrowing literary theory from narratology to define different types of unreliable narrators based on a variety of textual phenomena, we present TUNa, a human-annotated dataset of narratives from multiple domains, including blog posts, subreddit posts, hotel reviews, and works of literature. We define classification tasks for intra-narrational, inter-narrational, and inter-textual unreliabilities and analyze the performance of popular open-weight and proprietary LLMs for each. We propose learning from literature to perform unreliable narrator classification on real-world text data. To this end, we experiment with few-shot, fine-tuning, and curriculum learning settings. Our results show that this task is very challenging, and there is potential for using LLMs to identify unreliable narrators. We release our expert-annotated dataset and code and invite future research in this area.

Paperid: 6030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10104.pdf

Abstract:
As cyber threats become more sophisticated, rapid and accurate vulnerability detection is essential for maintaining secure systems. This study explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software vulnerability assessment by simulating the identification of Python code with known Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs), comparing zero-shot, few-shot cross-domain, and few-shot in-domain prompting strategies. Our results indicate that while zero-shot prompting performs poorly, few-shot prompting significantly enhances classification performance, particularly when integrated with confidence-based routing strategies that improve efficiency by directing human experts to cases where model uncertainty is high, optimizing the balance between automation and expert oversight. We find that LLMs can effectively generalize across vulnerability categories with minimal examples, suggesting their potential as scalable, adaptable cybersecurity tools in simulated environments. However, challenges such as model reliability, interpretability, and adversarial robustness remain critical areas for future research. By integrating AI-driven approaches with expert-in-the-loop (EITL) decision-making, this work highlights a pathway toward more efficient and responsive cybersecurity workflows. Our findings provide a foundation for deploying AI-assisted vulnerability detection systems in both real and simulated environments that enhance operational resilience while reducing the burden on human analysts.

Paperid: 6031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09613.pdf

Abstract:
State-space language models such as Mamba match Transformer quality while permitting linear complexity inference, yet still comprise billions of parameters that hinder deployment. Existing one-shot pruning methods are tailored to attention blocks and fail to account for the time-shared and discretized state-transition matrix at the heart of the selective state-space module (SSM). In this paper, we introduce SparseSSM, the first training-free pruning framework that extends the classic optimal brain surgeon (OBS) framework to state space architectures. Our layer-wise algorithm (i) derives an approximate second-order saliency score that aggregates Hessian-trace information across time steps, (ii) incorporates a component sensitivity analysis to guide feed-forward network (FFN) pruning, which also sheds light on where redundancy resides in mamba architecture, (iii) can be easily extended to semi-structured and structured sparsity. Empirically, we prune 50% of SSM weights without fine-tuning and observe no zero-shot accuracy loss, achieving the current state-of-the-art pruning algorithm for Mamba-based LLMs.

Paperid: 6032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08965.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to train high-performing reward models with few-shot data is critical for enhancing the efficiency and scalability of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We propose a data augmentation and expansion framework that enables generative reward models trained on small datasets to achieve comparable performance to those trained on large-scale datasets. Traditional methods to train a generative reward model, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are constrained by inefficiencies in sample pairing and limited data diversity. This work introduces preference refinement, which employs Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sampling to uncover diverse and high-quality preference relationships. It also incorporates a perplexity-based scoring mechanism to assign nuanced preference levels and utilizes Multi-level Direct Preference Optimization (M-DPO) to enable the model to capture finer-grained preference differences between samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances data efficiency and model performance, enabling reward models trained in a few-shot setting to achieve results on par with those trained on large-scale datasets. This study underscores the potential of data-efficient strategies in advancing reward model optimization, offering a robust solution for low-resource RLHF applications.

Paperid: 6033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06699.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at few-shot learning via in-context learning (ICL). However, the effectiveness of ICL is often sensitive to the selection and ordering of demonstration examples. To address this, we present MarginSel: Max-Margin Demonstration Selection for LLMs, a two-step method that selects hard demonstration examples for the ICL prompt, adapting to each test instance. Our approach achieves 2-7% absolute improvement in F1-score across classification tasks, compared to a random selection of examples. We also provide theoretical insights and empirical evidence showing that MarginSel induces max-margin behavior in LLMs by effectively increasing the margin for hard examples, analogous to support vectors, thereby shifting the decision boundary in a beneficial direction.

Paperid: 6034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05637.pdf

Abstract:
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been envisioned to play a more important role in future wireless networks. However, the design of ISAC networks is challenging, especially when there are multiple communication and sensing (C\&S) nodes and multiple sensing targets. We investigate a multi-base station (BS) ISAC network in which multiple BSs equipped with multiple antennas simultaneously provide C\&S services for multiple ground communication users (CUs) and targets. To enhance the overall performance of C\&S, we formulate a joint user association (UA) and multi-BS transmit beamforming optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the total sum rate of all CUs while ensuring both the minimum target detection and parameter estimation requirements. To efficiently solve the highly non-convex mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization problem, we propose an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that decomposes the problem into two sub-problems, i.e., UA optimization and multi-BS transmit beamforming optimization. Inspired by large language models (LLMs) for prediction and inference, we propose a unified framework integrating LLMs with convex-based optimization methods. First, we propose a comprehensive design of prompt engineering, including few-shot, chain of thought, and self-reflection techniques to guide LLMs in solving the binary integer programming UA optimization problem. Second, we utilize convex-based optimization methods to handle the non-convex beamforming optimization problem based on fractional programming (FP), majorization minimization (MM), and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with an optimized UA from LLMs. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed LLM-enabled AO-based algorithm achieves fast convergence and near upper-bound performance with the GPT-o1 model, outperforming various benchmark schemes.

Paperid: 6035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04364.pdf

Abstract:
To build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can serve everyone in the world, the ASR needs to be robust to a wide range of accents including unseen accents. We systematically study how three different variables in training data -- the number of speakers, the audio duration per each individual speaker, and the diversity of accents -- affect ASR robustness towards unseen accents in a low-resource training regime. We observe that for a fixed number of ASR training hours, it is more beneficial to increase the number of speakers (which means each speaker contributes less) than the number of hours contributed per speaker. We also observe that more speakers enables ASR performance gains from scaling number of hours. Surprisingly, we observe minimal benefits to prioritizing speakers with different accents when the number of speakers is controlled. Our work suggests that practitioners should prioritize increasing the speaker count in ASR training data composition for new languages.

Paperid: 6036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23654.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating structured information has long improved the quality of abstractive summarization, particularly in retaining salient content. In this work, we focus on a specific form of structure: argument roles, which are crucial for summarizing documents in high-stakes domains such as law. We investigate whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) adequately preserve this information. To this end, we introduce Argument Representation Coverage (ARC), a framework for measuring how well LLM-generated summaries capture salient arguments. Using ARC, we analyze summaries produced by three open-weight LLMs in two domains where argument roles are central: long legal opinions and scientific articles. Our results show that while LLMs cover salient argument roles to some extent, critical information is often omitted in generated summaries, particularly when arguments are sparsely distributed throughout the input. Further, we use ARC to uncover behavioral patterns -- specifically, how the positional bias of LLM context windows and role-specific preferences impact the coverage of key arguments in generated summaries, emphasizing the need for more argument-aware summarization strategies.

Paperid: 6037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19825.pdf

Abstract:
This position paper argues that foundation models for tabular data face inherent limitations when isolated from operational context - the procedural logic, declarative rules, and domain knowledge that define how data is created and governed. Current approaches focus on single-table generalization or schema-level relationships, fundamentally missing the operational knowledge that gives data meaning. We introduce Semantically Linked Tables (SLT) and Foundation Models for SLT (FMSLT) as a new model class that grounds tabular data in its operational context. We propose dual-phase training: pre-training on open-source code-data pairs and synthetic systems to learn business logic mechanics, followed by zero-shot inference on proprietary data. We introduce the ``Operational Turing Test'' benchmark and argue that operational grounding is essential for autonomous agents in complex data environments.

Paperid: 6038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18978.pdf

Abstract:
Existing mathematical reasoning benchmarks are predominantly English only or translation-based, which can introduce semantic drift and mask languagespecific reasoning errors. To address this, we present AI4Math, a benchmark of 105 original university level math problems natively authored in Spanish. The dataset spans seven advanced domains (Algebra, Calculus, Geometry, Probability, Number Theory, Combinatorics, and Logic), and each problem is accompanied by a step by step human solution. We evaluate six large language models GPT 4o, GPT 4o mini, o3 mini, LLaMA 3.3 70B, DeepSeek R1 685B, and DeepSeek V3 685B under four configurations: zero shot and chain of thought, each in Spanish and English. The top models (o3 mini, DeepSeek R1 685B, DeepSeek V3 685B) achieve over 70% accuracy, whereas LLaMA 3.3 70B and GPT-4o mini remain below 40%. Most models show no significant performance drop between languages, with GPT 4o even performing better on Spanish problems in the zero shot setting. Geometry, Combinatorics, and Probability questions remain persistently challenging for all models. These results highlight the need for native-language benchmarks and domain-specific evaluations to reveal reasoning failures not captured by standard metrics.

Paperid: 6039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18714.pdf

Abstract:
Off-road navigation remains challenging for autonomous robots due to the harsh terrain and clustered obstacles. In this letter, we extend the YOPO (You Only Plan Once) end-to-end navigation framework to off-road environments, explicitly focusing on forest terrains, consisting of a high-performance, multi-sensor supported off-road simulator YOPO-Sim, a zero-shot transfer sim-to-real planner YOPO-Rally, and an MPC controller. Built on the Unity engine, the simulator can generate randomized forest environments and export depth images and point cloud maps for expert demonstrations, providing competitive performance with mainstream simulators. Terrain Traversability Analysis (TTA) processes cost maps, generating expert trajectories represented as non-uniform cubic Hermite curves. The planner integrates TTA and the pathfinding into a single neural network that inputs the depth image, current velocity, and the goal vector, and outputs multiple trajectory candidates with costs. The planner is trained by behavior cloning in the simulator and deployed directly into the real-world without fine-tuning. Finally, a series of simulated and real-world experiments is conducted to validate the performance of the proposed framework.

Paperid: 6040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18447.pdf

Abstract:
Transfer reinforcement learning aims to derive a near-optimal policy for a target environment with limited data by leveraging abundant data from related source domains. However, it faces two key challenges: the lack of performance guarantees for the transferred policy, which can lead to undesired actions, and the risk of negative transfer when multiple source domains are involved. We propose a novel framework based on the pessimism principle, which constructs and optimizes a conservative estimation of the target domain's performance. Our framework effectively addresses the two challenges by providing an optimized lower bound on target performance, ensuring safe and reliable decisions, and by exhibiting monotonic improvement with respect to the quality of the source domains, thereby avoiding negative transfer. We construct two types of conservative estimations, rigorously characterize their effectiveness, and develop efficient distributed algorithms with convergence guarantees. Our framework provides a theoretically sound and practically robust solution for transfer learning in reinforcement learning.

Paperid: 6041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17655.pdf

Abstract:
Given a pair of source and reference speech recordings, audio-to-audio (A2A) style transfer involves the generation of an output speech that mimics the style characteristics of the reference while preserving the content and speaker attributes of the source. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed as A2A Zero-shot Emotion Style Transfer (A2A-ZEST), that enables the transfer of reference emotional attributes to the source while retaining its speaker and speech contents. The A2A-ZEST framework consists of an analysis-synthesis pipeline, where the analysis module decomposes speech into semantic tokens, speaker representations, and emotion embeddings. Using these representations, a pitch contour estimator and a duration predictor are learned. Further, a synthesis module is designed to generate speech based on the input representations and the derived factors. This entire paradigm of analysis-synthesis is trained purely in a self-supervised manner with an auto-encoding loss. For A2A emotion style transfer, the emotion embedding extracted from the reference speech along with the rest of the representations from the source speech are used in the synthesis module to generate the style translated speech. In our experiments, we evaluate the converted speech on content/speaker preservation (w.r.t. source) as well as on the effectiveness of the emotion style transfer (w.r.t. reference). The proposal, A2A-ZEST, is shown to improve over other prior works on these evaluations, thereby enabling style transfer without any parallel training data. We also illustrate the application of the proposed work for data augmentation in emotion recognition tasks.

Paperid: 6042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17136.pdf

Abstract:
Applying AI foundation models directly to geospatial datasets remains challenging due to their limited ability to represent and reason with geographical entities, specifically vector-based geometries and natural language descriptions of complex spatial relations. To address these issues, we investigate the extent to which a well-known-text (WKT) representation of geometries and their spatial relations (e.g., topological predicates) are preserved during spatial reasoning when the geospatial vector data are passed to large language models (LLMs) including GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and DeepSeek-R1-14B. Our workflow employs three distinct approaches to complete the spatial reasoning tasks for comparison, i.e., geometry embedding-based, prompt engineering-based, and everyday language-based evaluation. Our experiment results demonstrate that both the embedding-based and prompt engineering-based approaches to geospatial question-answering tasks with GPT models can achieve an accuracy of over 0.6 on average for the identification of topological spatial relations between two geometries. Among the evaluated models, GPT-4 with few-shot prompting achieved the highest performance with over 0.66 accuracy on topological spatial relation inference. Additionally, GPT-based reasoner is capable of properly comprehending inverse topological spatial relations and including an LLM-generated geometry can enhance the effectiveness for geographic entity retrieval. GPT-4 also exhibits the ability to translate certain vernacular descriptions about places into formal topological relations, and adding the geometry-type or place-type context in prompts may improve inference accuracy, but it varies by instance. The performance of these spatial reasoning tasks offers valuable insights for the refinement of LLMs with geographical knowledge towards the development of geo-foundation models capable of geospatial reasoning.

Paperid: 6043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16232.pdf

Abstract:
An objective, face-valid method for scoring idea originality is to measure each idea's statistical infrequency within a population -- an approach long used in creativity research. Yet, computing these frequencies requires manually bucketing idea rephrasings, a process that is subjective, labor-intensive, error-prone, and brittle at scale. We introduce MuseScorer, a fully automated, psychometrically validated system for frequency-based originality scoring. MuseScorer integrates a Large Language Model (LLM) with externally orchestrated retrieval: given a new idea, it retrieves semantically similar prior idea-buckets and zero-shot prompts the LLM to judge whether the idea fits an existing bucket or forms a new one. These buckets enable frequency-based originality scoring without human annotation. Across five datasets N_{participants}=1143, n_{ideas}=16,294), MuseScorer matches human annotators in idea clustering structure (AMI = 0.59) and participant-level scoring (r = 0.89), while demonstrating strong convergent and external validity. The system enables scalable, intent-sensitive, and human-aligned originality assessment for creativity research.

Paperid: 6044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14066.pdf

Abstract:
With the fast development of zero-shot text-to-speech technologies, it is possible to generate high-quality speech signals that are indistinguishable from the real ones. Speech editing, including speech insertion and replacement, appeals to researchers due to its potential applications. However, existing studies only considered clean speech scenarios. In real-world applications, the existence of environmental noise could significantly degrade the quality of the generation. In this study, we propose a noise-resilient speech editing framework, SeamlessEdit, for noisy speech editing. SeamlessEdit adopts a frequency-band-aware noise suppression module and an in-content refinement strategy. It can well address the scenario where the frequency bands of voice and background noise are not separated. The proposed SeamlessEdit framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in multiple quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Paperid: 6045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13521.pdf

Abstract:
This study explores the potential of zero-shot time series forecasting, an innovative approach leveraging pre-trained foundation models, to forecast mortality rates without task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluate two state-of-the-art foundation models, TimesFM and CHRONOS, alongside traditional and machine learning-based methods across three forecasting horizons (5, 10, and 20 years) using data from 50 countries and 111 age groups. In our investigations, zero-shot models showed varying results: while CHRONOS delivered competitive shorter-term forecasts, outperforming traditional methods like ARIMA and the Lee-Carter model, TimesFM consistently underperformed. Fine-tuning CHRONOS on mortality data significantly improved long-term accuracy. A Random Forest model, trained on mortality data, achieved the best overall performance. These findings underscore the potential of zero-shot forecasting while highlighting the need for careful model selection and domain-specific adaptation.

Paperid: 6046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13434.pdf

Abstract:
Data scarcity and class imbalance are persistent challenges in training robust NLP models, especially in specialized domains or low-resource settings. We propose a novel technique, SMOTExT, that adapts the idea of Synthetic Minority Over-sampling (SMOTE) to textual data. Our method generates new synthetic examples by interpolating between BERT-based embeddings of two existing examples and then decoding the resulting latent point into text with xRAG architecture. By leveraging xRAG's cross-modal retrieval-generation framework, we can effectively turn interpolated vectors into coherent text. While this is preliminary work supported by qualitative outputs only, the method shows strong potential for knowledge distillation and data augmentation in few-shot settings. Notably, our approach also shows promise for privacy-preserving machine learning: in early experiments, training models solely on generated data achieved comparable performance to models trained on the original dataset. This suggests a viable path toward safe and effective learning under data protection constraints.

Paperid: 6047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12533.pdf

Abstract:
Analysing the generalisation capabilities of relation extraction (RE) models is crucial for assessing whether they learn robust relational patterns or rely on spurious correlations. Our cross-dataset experiments find that RE models struggle with unseen data, even within similar domains. Notably, higher intra-dataset performance does not indicate better transferability, instead often signaling overfitting to dataset-specific artefacts. Our results also show that data quality, rather than lexical similarity, is key to robust transfer, and the choice of optimal adaptation strategy depends on the quality of data available: while fine-tuning yields the best cross-dataset performance with high-quality data, few-shot in-context learning (ICL) is more effective with noisier data. However, even in these cases, zero-shot baselines occasionally outperform all cross-dataset results. Structural issues in RE benchmarks, such as single-relation per sample constraints and non-standardised negative class definitions, further hinder model transferability.

Paperid: 6048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11858.pdf

Abstract:
Object insertion under tight tolerances ($< \hspace{-.02in} 1mm$) is an important but challenging assembly task as even small errors can result in undesirable contacts. Recent efforts focused on Reinforcement Learning (RL), which often depends on careful definition of dense reward functions. This work proposes an effective strategy for such tasks that integrates traditional model-based control with RL to achieve improved insertion accuracy. The policy is trained exclusively in simulation and is zero-shot transferred to the real system. It employs a potential field-based controller to acquire a model-based policy for inserting a plug into a socket given full observability in simulation. This policy is then integrated with residual RL, which is trained in simulation given only a sparse, goal-reaching reward. A curriculum scheme over observation noise and action magnitude is used for training the residual RL policy. Both policy components use as input the SE(3) poses of both the plug and the socket and return the plug's SE(3) pose transform, which is executed by a robotic arm using a controller. The integrated policy is deployed on the real system without further training or fine-tuning, given a visual SE(3) object tracker. The proposed solution and alternatives are evaluated across a variety of objects and conditions in simulation and reality. The proposed approach outperforms recent RL-based methods in this domain and prior efforts with hybrid policies. Ablations highlight the impact of each component of the approach.

Paperid: 6049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11349.pdf

Abstract:
Recent time-series foundation models exhibit strong abilities to predict physical systems. These abilities include zero-shot forecasting, in which a model forecasts future states of a system given only a short trajectory as context, without knowledge of the underlying physics. Here, we show that foundation models often forecast through a simple parroting strategy, and when they are not parroting they exhibit some shared failure modes such as converging to the mean. As a result, a naive context parroting model that copies directly from the context scores higher than leading time-series foundation models on predicting a diverse range of dynamical systems, including low-dimensional chaos, turbulence, coupled oscillators, and electrocardiograms -- and at a tiny fraction of the computational cost. We draw a parallel between context parroting and induction heads, which explains recent works showing that large language models can often be repurposed for time series forecasting. Our dynamical systems perspective also ties the scaling between forecast accuracy and context length to the fractal dimension of the underlying chaotic attractor, providing insight into previously observed in-context neural scaling laws. By revealing the performance gaps and failure modes of current time-series foundation models, context parroting can guide the design of future foundation models and help identify in-context learning strategies beyond parroting.

Paperid: 6050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10780.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical trials are vital for evaluation of safety and efficacy of new treatments. However, clinical trials are resource-intensive, time-consuming and expensive to conduct, where errors in trial design, reduced efficacy, and safety events can result in significant delays, financial losses, and damage to reputation. These risks underline the importance of informed and strategic decisions in trial design to mitigate these risks and improve the chances of a successful trial. Identifying similar historical trials is critical as these trials can provide an important reference for potential pitfalls and challenges including serious adverse events, dosage inaccuracies, recruitment difficulties, patient adherence issues, etc. Addressing these challenges in trial design can lead to development of more effective study protocols with optimized patient safety and trial efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel method to identify similar historical trials by summarizing clinical trial protocols and searching for similar trials based on a query trial's protocol. Our approach significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving up to a 78% improvement in recall@1 and a 53% improvement in precision@1 over the best baseline. We also show that our method outperforms all other baselines in partial trial similarity search and zero-shot patient-trial matching, highlighting its superior utility in these tasks.

Paperid: 6051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09085.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly large-scale language models, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image and natural language understanding. Although scaling up model parameters with increasing volume of training data has progressively improved DNN capabilities, achieving complex cognitive abilities - such as understanding abstract concepts, reasoning, and adapting to novel scenarios, which are intrinsic to human cognition - remains a major challenge. In this study, we show that brain-in-the-loop supervised learning, utilizing a small set of brain signals, can effectively transfer human conceptual structures to DNNs, significantly enhancing their comprehension of abstract and even unseen concepts. Experimental results further indicate that the enhanced cognitive capabilities lead to substantial performance gains in challenging tasks, including few-shot/zero-shot learning and out-of-distribution recognition, while also yielding highly interpretable concept representations. These findings highlight that human-in-the-loop supervision can effectively augment the complex cognitive abilities of large models, offering a promising pathway toward developing more human-like cognitive abilities in artificial systems.

Paperid: 6052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08260.pdf

Abstract:
The recently proposed Novel Category Discovery (NCD) adapt paradigm of transductive learning hinders its application in more real-world scenarios. In fact, few labeled data in part of new categories can well alleviate this burden, which coincides with the ease that people can label few of new category data. Therefore, this paper presents a new setting in which a trained agent is able to flexibly switch between the tasks of identifying examples of known (labelled) classes and clustering novel (completely unlabeled) classes as the number of query examples increases by leveraging knowledge learned from only a few (handful) support examples. Drawing inspiration from the discovery of novel categories using prior-based clustering algorithms, we introduce a novel framework that further relaxes its assumptions to the real-world open set level by unifying the concept of model adaptability in few-shot learning. We refer to this setting as Few-Shot Novel Category Discovery (FSNCD) and propose Semi-supervised Hierarchical Clustering (SHC) and Uncertainty-aware K-means Clustering (UKC) to examine the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on five commonly used datasets demonstrate that our methods can achieve leading performance levels across different task settings and scenarios.

Paperid: 6053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07731.pdf

Abstract:
Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks involve diverse skills that probe the information extraction, classification and/or generation capabilities of models. In this setting, task-specific training data may not always be available. While traditional task-specific SLU models are unable to cater to such requirements, the speech-text large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative with emergent abilities. However, out of-the-box, our evaluations indicate that the zero/few-shot performance of prominent open-source speech-text LLMs on SLU tasks are not up to the mark. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to robust task-agnostic fine-tuning using randomized class labels. With this proposed fine-tuning, we illustrate that the performance of the speech-text LLMs on an unseen task is significantly improved over standard approaches. Critically, the proposed approach avoids the requirement of task-specific data annotations for enabling new tasks in speech-text LLMs.

Paperid: 6054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06305.pdf

Abstract:
With the widespread application of large language models (LLMs), user privacy protection has become a significant research topic. Existing privacy preference modeling methods often rely on large-scale user data, making effective privacy preference analysis challenging in data-limited environments. This study explores how LLMs can analyze user behavior related to privacy protection in scenarios with limited data and proposes a method that integrates Few-shot Learning and Privacy Computing to model user privacy preferences. The research utilizes anonymized user privacy settings data, survey responses, and simulated data, comparing the performance of traditional modeling approaches with LLM-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, even with limited data, LLMs significantly improve the accuracy of privacy preference modeling. Additionally, incorporating Differential Privacy and Federated Learning further reduces the risk of user data exposure. The findings provide new insights into the application of LLMs in privacy protection and offer theoretical support for advancing privacy computing and user behavior analysis.

Paperid: 6055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05070.pdf

Abstract:
Consumer Health Queries (CHQs) in Bengali (Bangla), a low-resource language, often contain extraneous details, complicating efficient medical responses. This study investigates the zero-shot performance of nine advanced large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Llama3-70b-Instruct, Mixtral-8x22b-Instruct, Gemini-1.5-Pro, Qwen2-72b-Instruct, Gemma-2-27b, and Athene-70B, in summarizing Bangla CHQs. Using the BanglaCHQ-Summ dataset comprising 2,350 annotated query-summary pairs, we benchmarked these LLMs using ROUGE metrics against Bangla T5, a fine-tuned state-of-the-art model. Mixtral-8x22b-Instruct emerged as the top performing model in ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L, while Bangla T5 excelled in ROUGE-2. The results demonstrate that zero-shot LLMs can rival fine-tuned models, achieving high-quality summaries even without task-specific training. This work underscores the potential of LLMs in addressing challenges in low-resource languages, providing scalable solutions for healthcare query summarization.

Paperid: 6056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02366.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised contrastive learning has become a hot research topic in natural language processing. Existing works usually aim at constraining the orientation distribution of the representations of positive and negative samples in the high-dimensional semantic space in contrastive learning, but the semantic representation tensor possesses both modulus and orientation features, and the existing works ignore the modulus feature of the representations and cause insufficient contrastive learning. % Therefore, we firstly propose a training objective that aims at modulus constraints on the semantic representation tensor, to strengthen the alignment between the positive samples in contrastive learning. Therefore, we first propose a training objective that is designed to impose modulus constraints on the semantic representation tensor, to strengthen the alignment between positive samples in contrastive learning. Then, the BERT-like model suffers from the phenomenon of sinking attention, leading to a lack of attention to CLS tokens that aggregate semantic information. In response, we propose a cross-attention structure among the twin-tower ensemble models to enhance the model's attention to CLS token and optimize the quality of CLS Pooling. Combining the above two motivations, we propose a new \textbf{J}oint \textbf{T}ensor representation modulus constraint and \textbf{C}ross-attention unsupervised contrastive learning \textbf{S}entence \textbf{E}mbedding representation framework JTCSE, which we evaluate in seven semantic text similarity computation tasks, and the experimental results show that JTCSE's twin-tower ensemble model and single-tower distillation model outperform the other baselines and become the current SOTA. In addition, we have conducted an extensive zero-shot downstream task evaluation, which shows that JTCSE outperforms other baselines overall on more than 130 tasks.

Paperid: 6057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01077.pdf

Abstract:
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), many researchers are attempting to extract structured information from document-level biomedical literature by fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, they face significant challenges such as the need for expensive hardware, like high-performance GPUs and the high labor costs associated with annotating training datasets, especially in biomedical realm. Recent research on LLMs, such as GPT-4 and Llama3, has shown promising performance in zero-shot settings, inspiring us to explore a novel approach to achieve the same results from unannotated full documents using general LLMs with lower hardware and labor costs. Our approach combines two major stages: named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). NER identifies chemical, disease and gene entities from the document with synonym and hypernym extraction using an LLM with a crafted prompt. RE extracts relations between entities based on predefined relation schemas and prompts. To enhance the effectiveness of prompt, we propose a five-part template structure and a scenario-based prompt design principles, along with evaluation method to systematically assess the prompts. Finally, we evaluated our approach against fine-tuning and pre-trained models on two biomedical datasets: ChemDisGene and CDR. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method can achieve comparable accuracy levels to fine-tuning and pre-trained models but with reduced human and hardware expenses.

Paperid: 6058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00850.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the need for efficient low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ), due to their high memory costs. A key challenge in weight quantization is the presence of outliers, which inflate quantization ranges and lead to large errors. While a number of outlier suppression techniques have been proposed, they either: fail to effectively shrink the quantization range, or incur (relatively) high bit overhead. In this paper, we present ICQuant, a novel framework that leverages outlier statistics to design an efficient index coding scheme for outlier-aware weight-only quantization. Compared to existing outlier suppression techniques requiring $\approx 1$ bit overhead to halve the quantization range, ICQuant requires only $\approx 0.3$ bits; a significant saving in extreme compression regimes (e.g., 2-3 bits per weight). ICQuant can be used on top of any existing quantizers to eliminate outliers, improving the quantization quality. Using just 2.3 bits per weight and simple scalar quantizers, ICQuant improves the zero-shot accuracy of the 2-bit Llama3-70B model by up to 130% and 150% relative to QTIP and QuIP#; and it achieves comparable performance to the best-known fine-tuned quantizer (PV-tuning) without fine-tuning.

Paperid: 6059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00009.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate remarkable intelligence but struggle with emerging tasks unseen during training in real-world applications. Training separate models for each new task is usually impractical. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses this challenge by transferring shared knowledge from source tasks to target tasks. As an dominant parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, prompt tuning (PT) enhances MTL by introducing an adaptable vector that captures task-specific knowledge, which acts as a prefix to the original prompt that preserves shared knowledge, while keeping PLM parameters frozen. However, PT struggles to effectively capture the heterogeneity of task-specific knowledge due to its limited representational capacity. To address this challenge, we propose Task-Adaptive Low-Rank Representation (TA-LoRA), an MTL method built on PT, employing the low-rank representation to model task heterogeneity and a fast-slow weights mechanism where the slow weight encodes shared knowledge, while the fast weight captures task-specific nuances, avoiding the mixing of shared and task-specific knowledge, caused by training low-rank representations from scratch. Moreover, a zero-initialized attention mechanism is introduced to minimize the disruption of immature low-rank components on original prompts during warm-up epochs. Experiments on 16 tasks demonstrate that TA-LoRA achieves state-of-the-art performance in full-data and few-shot settings while maintaining superior parameter efficiency.

Paperid: 6060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20547.pdf

Abstract:
The lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks in the medical domain for text inputs can be a barrier to widely adopting and leveraging the potential of natural language models for health-related downstream tasks. This paper revisited an openly available MIMIC-IV benchmark for electronic health records (EHRs) to address this issue. First, we integrate the MIMIC-IV data within the Hugging Face datasets library to allow an easy share and use of this collection. Second, we investigate the application of templates to convert EHR tabular data to text. Experiments using fine-tuned and zero-shot LLMs on the mortality of patients task show that fine-tuned text-based models are competitive against robust tabular classifiers. In contrast, zero-shot LLMs struggle to leverage EHR representations. This study underlines the potential of text-based approaches in the medical field and highlights areas for further improvement.

Paperid: 6061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19703.pdf

Abstract:
Bias in generative Text-to-Image (T2I) models is a known issue, yet systematically analyzing such models' outputs to uncover it remains challenging. We introduce the Visual Bias Explorer (ViBEx) to interactively explore the output space of T2I models to support the discovery of visual bias. ViBEx introduces a novel flexible prompting tree interface in combination with zero-shot bias probing using CLIP for quick and approximate bias exploration. It additionally supports in-depth confirmatory bias analysis through visual inspection of forward, intersectional, and inverse bias queries. ViBEx is model-agnostic and publicly available. In four case study interviews, experts in AI and ethics were able to discover visual biases that have so far not been described in literature.

Paperid: 6062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17224.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) exhibit promising potential for multi-modal understanding, yet their application to video-based emotion recognition remains limited by insufficient spatial and contextual awareness. Traditional approaches, which prioritize isolated facial features, often neglect critical non-verbal cues such as body language, environmental context, and social interactions, leading to reduced robustness in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we propose Set-of-Vision-Text Prompting (SoVTP), a novel framework that enhances zero-shot emotion recognition by integrating spatial annotations (e.g., bounding boxes, facial landmarks), physiological signals (facial action units), and contextual cues (body posture, scene dynamics, others' emotions) into a unified prompting strategy. SoVTP preserves holistic scene information while enabling fine-grained analysis of facial muscle movements and interpersonal dynamics. Extensive experiments show that SoVTP achieves substantial improvements over existing visual prompting methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing VLLMs' video emotion recognition capabilities.

Paperid: 6063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15987.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of hate speech on social media poses a significant threat to online communities, requiring effective detection systems. While deep learning models have shown promise, their performance often deteriorates in few-shot or low-resource settings due to reliance on large annotated corpora. To address this, we propose MS-FSLHate, a prompt-enhanced neural framework for few-shot hate speech detection implemented on the MindSpore deep learning platform. The model integrates learnable prompt embeddings, a CNN-BiLSTM backbone with attention pooling, and synonym-based adversarial data augmentation to improve generalization. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets-HateXplain and HSOL-demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines in precision, recall, and F1-score. Additionally, the framework shows high efficiency and scalability, suggesting its suitability for deployment in resource-constrained environments. These findings highlight the potential of combining prompt-based learning with adversarial augmentation for robust and adaptable hate speech detection in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 6064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13560.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly segmentation is essential for industrial quality, maintenance, and stability. Existing text-guided zero-shot anomaly segmentation models are effective but rely on fixed prompts, limiting adaptability in diverse industrial scenarios. This highlights the need for flexible, context-aware prompting strategies. We propose Image-Aware Prompt Anomaly Segmentation (IAP-AS), which enhances anomaly segmentation by generating dynamic, context-aware prompts using an image tagging model and a large language model (LLM). IAP-AS extracts object attributes from images to generate context-aware prompts, improving adaptability and generalization in dynamic and unstructured industrial environments. In our experiments, IAP-AS improves the F1-max metric by up to 10%, demonstrating superior adaptability and generalization. It provides a scalable solution for anomaly segmentation across industries

Paperid: 6065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13231.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid information access is vital during wildfires, yet traditional data sources are slow and costly. Social media offers real-time updates, but extracting relevant insights remains a challenge. In this work, we focus on multimodal wildfire social media data, which, although existing in current datasets, is currently underrepresented in Canadian contexts. We present WildFireCan-MMD, a new multimodal dataset of X posts from recent Canadian wildfires, annotated across twelve key themes. We evaluate zero-shot vision-language models on this dataset and compare their results with those of custom-trained and baseline classifiers. We show that while baseline methods and zero-shot prompting offer quick deployment, custom-trained models outperform them when labelled data is available. Our best-performing custom model reaches 84.48% f-score, outperforming VLMs and baseline classifiers. We also demonstrate how this model can be used to uncover trends during wildfires, through the collection and analysis of a large unlabeled dataset. Our dataset facilitates future research in wildfire response, and our findings highlight the importance of tailored datasets and task-specific training. Importantly, such datasets should be localized, as disaster response requirements vary across regions and contexts.

Paperid: 6066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11889.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have explored integrating large language models (LLMs) into recommendation systems but face several challenges, including training-induced bias and bottlenecks from serialized architecture. To effectively address these issues, we propose a Query-toRecommendation, a parallel recommendation framework that decouples LLMs from candidate pre-selection and instead enables direct retrieval over the entire item pool. Our framework connects LLMs and recommendation models in a parallel manner, allowing each component to independently utilize its strengths without interfering with the other. In this framework, LLMs are utilized to generate feature-enriched item descriptions and personalized user queries, allowing for capturing diverse preferences and enabling rich semantic matching in a zero-shot manner. To effectively combine the complementary strengths of LLM and collaborative signals, we introduce an adaptive reranking strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate an improvement in performance up to 57%, while also improving the novelty and diversity of recommendations.

Paperid: 6067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11626.pdf

Abstract:
Instruct models, obtained from various instruction tuning or post-training steps, are commonly deemed superior and more usable than their base counterpart. While the model gains instruction following ability, instruction tuning may lead to forgetting the knowledge from pre-training or it may encourage the model to become overly conversational or verbose. This, in turn, can lead to degradation of in-context few-shot learning performance. In this work, we study the performance trajectory between base and instruct models by scaling down the strength of instruction-tuning via the partial adaption method. We show that, across several model families and model sizes, reducing the strength of instruction-tuning results in material improvement on a few-shot in-context learning benchmark covering a variety of classic natural language tasks. This comes at the cost of losing some degree of instruction following ability as measured by AlpacaEval. Our study shines light on the potential trade-off between in-context learning and instruction following abilities that is worth considering in practice.

Paperid: 6068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11022.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate crop-type classification from satellite time series is essential for agricultural monitoring. While various machine learning algorithms have been developed to enhance performance on data-scarce tasks, their evaluation often lacks real-world scenarios. Consequently, their efficacy in challenging practical applications has not yet been profoundly assessed. To facilitate future research in this domain, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating supervised and SSL methods for crop-type classification under real-world conditions. This benchmark study relies on the EuroCropsML time-series dataset, which combines farmer-reported crop data with Sentinel-2 satellite observations from Estonia, Latvia, and Portugal. Our findings indicate that MAML-based meta-learning algorithms achieve slightly higher accuracy compared to supervised transfer learning and SSL methods. However, compared to simpler transfer learning, the improvement of meta-learning comes at the cost of increased computational demands and training time. Moreover, supervised methods benefit most when pre-trained and fine-tuned on geographically close regions. In addition, while SSL generally lags behind meta-learning, it demonstrates advantages over training from scratch, particularly in capturing fine-grained features essential for real-world crop-type classification, and also surpasses standard transfer learning. This highlights its practical value when labeled pre-training crop data is scarce. Our insights underscore the trade-offs between accuracy and computational demand in selecting supervised machine learning methods for real-world crop-type classification tasks and highlight the difficulties of knowledge transfer across diverse geographic regions. Furthermore, they demonstrate the practical value of SSL approaches when labeled pre-training crop data is scarce.

Paperid: 6069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10976.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to continuously learn new classes from a limited set of training samples without forgetting knowledge of previously learned classes. Conventional FSCIL methods typically build a robust feature extractor during the base training session with abundant training samples and subsequently freeze this extractor, only fine-tuning the classifier in subsequent incremental phases. However, current strategies primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting, considering only the relationship between novel and base classes, without paying attention to the specific decision spaces of each class. To address this challenge, we propose a plug-and-play Adaptive Decision Boundary Strategy (ADBS), which is compatible with most FSCIL methods. Specifically, we assign a specific decision boundary to each class and adaptively adjust these boundaries during training to optimally refine the decision spaces for the classes in each session. Furthermore, to amplify the distinctiveness between classes, we employ a novel inter-class constraint loss that optimizes the decision boundaries and prototypes for each class. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, namely CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200, demonstrate that incorporating our ADBS method with existing FSCIL techniques significantly improves performance, achieving overall state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 6070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10117.pdf

Abstract:
Open-world 3D semantic occupancy prediction aims to generate a voxelized 3D representation from sensor inputs while recognizing both known and unknown objects. Transferring open-vocabulary knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) offers a promising direction but remains challenging. However, methods based on VLM-derived 2D pseudo-labels with traditional supervision are limited by a predefined label space and lack general prediction capabilities. Direct alignment with pretrained image embeddings, on the other hand, fails to achieve reliable performance due to often inconsistent image and text representations in VLMs. To address these challenges, we propose AGO, a novel 3D occupancy prediction framework with adaptive grounding to handle diverse open-world scenarios. AGO first encodes surrounding images and class prompts into 3D and text embeddings, respectively, leveraging similarity-based grounding training with 3D pseudo-labels. Additionally, a modality adapter maps 3D embeddings into a space aligned with VLM-derived image embeddings, reducing modality gaps. Experiments on Occ3D-nuScenes show that AGO improves unknown object prediction in zero-shot and few-shot transfer while achieving state-of-the-art closed-world self-supervised performance, surpassing prior methods by 4.09 mIoU.

Paperid: 6071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09664.pdf

Abstract:
Financial time series forecasting in zero-shot settings is critical for investment decisions, especially during abrupt market regime shifts or in emerging markets with limited historical data. While Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) approaches show promise, existing meta-task construction strategies often yield suboptimal performance for highly turbulent financial series. To address this, we propose a novel task-construction method that leverages learned embeddings for both meta task and also downstream predictions, enabling effective zero-shot meta-learning. Specifically, we use Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to softly cluster embeddings, constructing two complementary meta-task types: intra-cluster tasks and inter-cluster tasks. By assigning embeddings to multiple latent regimes probabilistically, GMMs enable richer, more diverse meta-learning. This dual approach ensures the model can quickly adapt to local patterns while simultaneously capturing invariant cross-series features. Furthermore, we enhance inter-cluster generalization through hard task mining, which identifies robust patterns across divergent market regimes. Our method was validated using real-world financial data from high-volatility periods and multiple international markets (including emerging markets). The results demonstrate significant out-performance over existing approaches and stronger generalization in zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 6072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09354.pdf

Abstract:
Timely and accurate diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, is central to disease management. Existing deep learning models require large-scale annotated datasets and often function as "black boxes". Additionally, datasets in clinical practice are frequently small or unlabeled, restricting the full potential of deep learning methods. Here, we introduce REMEMBER -- Retrieval-based Explainable Multimodal Evidence-guided Modeling for Brain Evaluation and Reasoning -- a new machine learning framework that facilitates zero- and few-shot Alzheimer's diagnosis using brain MRI scans through a reference-based reasoning process. Specifically, REMEMBER first trains a contrastively aligned vision-text model using expert-annotated reference data and extends pseudo-text modalities that encode abnormality types, diagnosis labels, and composite clinical descriptions. Then, at inference time, REMEMBER retrieves similar, human-validated cases from a curated dataset and integrates their contextual information through a dedicated evidence encoding module and attention-based inference head. Such an evidence-guided design enables REMEMBER to imitate real-world clinical decision-making process by grounding predictions in retrieved imaging and textual context. Specifically, REMEMBER outputs diagnostic predictions alongside an interpretable report, including reference images and explanations aligned with clinical workflows. Experimental results demonstrate that REMEMBER achieves robust zero- and few-shot performance and offers a powerful and explainable framework to neuroimaging-based diagnosis in the real world, especially under limited data.

Paperid: 6073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06838.pdf

Abstract:
Recent studies have introduced various approaches for prompt-tuning black-box vision-language models, referred to as black-box prompt-tuning (BBPT). While BBPT has demonstrated considerable potential, it is often found that many existing methods require an excessive number of queries (i.e., function evaluations), which poses a significant challenge in real-world scenarios where the number of allowed queries is limited. To tackle this issue, we propose Zeroth-order Intrinsic-dimensional Prompt-tuning (ZIP), a novel approach that enables efficient and robust prompt optimization in a purely black-box setting. The key idea of ZIP is to reduce the problem dimensionality and the variance of zeroth-order gradient estimates, such that the training is done fast with far less queries. We achieve this by re-parameterizing prompts in low-rank representations and designing intrinsic-dimensional clipping of estimated gradients. We evaluate ZIP on 13+ vision-language tasks in standard benchmarks and show that it achieves an average improvement of approximately 6% in few-shot accuracy and 48% in query efficiency compared to the best-performing alternative BBPT methods, establishing a new state of the art. Our ablation analysis further shows that the proposed clipping mechanism is robust and nearly optimal, without the need to manually select the clipping threshold, matching the result of expensive hyperparameter search.

Paperid: 6074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04510.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot domain-specific image classification is challenging in classifying real images without ground-truth in-domain training examples. Recent research involved knowledge from texts with a text-to-image model to generate in-domain training images in zero-shot scenarios. However, existing methods heavily rely on simple prompt strategies, limiting the diversity of synthetic training images, thus leading to inferior performance compared to real images. In this paper, we propose AttrSyn, which leverages large language models to generate attributed prompts. These prompts allow for the generation of more diverse attributed synthetic images. Experiments for zero-shot domain-specific image classification on two fine-grained datasets show that training with synthetic images generated by AttrSyn significantly outperforms CLIP's zero-shot classification under most situations and consistently surpasses simple prompt strategies.

Paperid: 6075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02724.pdf

Abstract:
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators' experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data. Our model is trained on a dataset of human-robot interactions, where an expert operator is asked to vary the interactions and mood of the robot, while the operator commands as well as the pose of the human and robot are recorded. Our approach learns to predict continuous operator commands through a diffusion process and discrete commands through a classifier, all unified within a single transformer architecture. We evaluate the resulting model in simulation and with a user study on the real system. We show that our method enables simple autonomous human-robot interactions that are comparable to the expert-operator baseline, and that users can recognize the different robot moods as generated by our model. Finally, we demonstrate a zero-shot transfer of our model onto a different robotic platform with the same operator interface.

Paperid: 6076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02349.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language and vision-language models have enabled zero-shot inference, allowing models to solve new tasks without task-specific training. Various adaptation techniques such as prompt engineering, In-Context Learning (ICL), and supervised fine-tuning can further enhance the model's performance on a downstream task, but they require substantial manual effort to construct effective prompts or labeled examples. In this work, we introduce a joint inference framework for fully unsupervised adaptation, eliminating the need for manual prompt engineering and labeled examples. Unlike zero-shot inference, which makes independent predictions, the joint inference makes predictions simultaneously for all inputs in a given task. Since direct joint inference involves computationally expensive optimization, we develop efficient approximation techniques, leading to two unsupervised adaptation methods: unsupervised fine-tuning and unsupervised ICL. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods across diverse tasks and models, including language-only Llama-3.1 on natural language processing tasks, reasoning-oriented Qwen2.5-Math on grade school math problems, vision-language OpenFlamingo on vision tasks, and the API-only access GPT-4o model on massive multi-discipline tasks. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over the standard zero-shot approach, including 39% absolute improvement on the challenging GSM8K math reasoning dataset. Remarkably, despite being fully unsupervised, our framework often performs on par with supervised approaches that rely on ground truth labels.

Paperid: 6077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23465.pdf

Abstract:
Global localization is a critical problem in autonomous navigation, enabling precise positioning without reliance on GPS. Modern global localization techniques often depend on dense LiDAR maps, which, while precise, require extensive storage and computational resources. Recent approaches have explored alternative methods, such as sparse maps and learned features, but they suffer from poor robustness and generalization. We propose SparseLoc, a global localization framework that leverages vision-language foundation models to generate sparse, semantic-topometric maps in a zero-shot manner. It combines this map representation with a Monte Carlo localization scheme enhanced by a novel late optimization strategy, ensuring improved pose estimation. By constructing compact yet highly discriminative maps and refining localization through a carefully designed optimization schedule, SparseLoc overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, offering a more efficient and robust solution for global localization. Our system achieves over a 5X improvement in localization accuracy compared to existing sparse mapping techniques. Despite utilizing only 1/500th of the points of dense mapping methods, it achieves comparable performance, maintaining an average global localization error below 5m and 2 degrees on KITTI sequences.

Paperid: 6078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22886.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in imitation learning have led to transformer-based behavior foundation models (BFMs) that enable multi-modal, human-like control for humanoid agents. While excelling at zero-shot generation of robust behaviors, BFMs often require meticulous prompt engineering for specific tasks, potentially yielding suboptimal results. We introduce "Task Tokens", a method to effectively tailor BFMs to specific tasks while preserving their flexibility. Our approach leverages the transformer architecture of BFMs to learn a new task-specific encoder through reinforcement learning, keeping the original BFM frozen. This allows incorporation of user-defined priors, balancing reward design and prompt engineering. By training a task encoder to map observations to tokens, used as additional BFM inputs, we guide performance improvement while maintaining the model's diverse control characteristics. We demonstrate Task Tokens' efficacy across various tasks, including out-of-distribution scenarios, and show their compatibility with other prompting modalities. Our results suggest that Task Tokens offer a promising approach for adapting BFMs to specific control tasks while retaining their generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 6079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22862.pdf

Abstract:
Domain shift, caused by variations in imaging modalities and acquisition protocols, limits model generalization in medical image segmentation. While foundation models (FMs) trained on diverse large-scale data hold promise for zero-shot generalization, their application to volumetric medical data remains underexplored. In this study, we examine their ability towards domain generalization (DG), by conducting a comprehensive experimental study encompassing 6 medical segmentation FMs and 12 public datasets spanning multiple modalities and anatomies. Our findings reveal the potential of promptable FMs in bridging the domain gap via smart prompting techniques. Additionally, by probing into multiple facets of zero-shot DG, we offer valuable insights into the viability of FMs for DG and identify promising avenues for future research.

Paperid: 6080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22508.pdf

Abstract:
Globalisation and colonisation have led the vast majority of the world to use only a fraction of languages, such as English and French, to communicate, excluding many others. This has severely affected the survivability of many now-deemed vulnerable or endangered languages, such as Occitan and Sicilian. These languages often share some characteristics, such as elements of their grammar and lexicon, with other high-resource languages, e.g. French or Italian. They can be clustered into groups of language varieties with various degrees of mutual intelligibility. Current search systems are not usually trained on many of these low-resource varieties, leading search users to express their needs in a high-resource language instead. This problem is further complicated when most information content is expressed in a high-resource language, inhibiting even more retrieval in low-resource languages. We show that current search systems are not robust across language varieties, severely affecting retrieval effectiveness. Therefore, it would be desirable for these systems to leverage the capabilities of neural models to bridge the differences between these varieties. This can allow users to express their needs in their low-resource variety and retrieve the most relevant documents in a high-resource one. To address this, we propose fine-tuning neural rankers on pairs of language varieties, thereby exposing them to their linguistic similarities. We find that this approach improves the performance of the varieties upon which the models were directly trained, thereby regularising these models to generalise and perform better even on unseen language variety pairs. We also explore whether this approach can transfer across language families and observe mixed results that open doors for future research.

Paperid: 6081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21486.pdf

Abstract:
Two of the main challenges of image restoration in real-world scenarios are the accurate characterization of an image prior and the precise modeling of the image degradation operator. Pre-trained diffusion models have been very successfully used as image priors in zero-shot image restoration methods. However, how to best handle the degradation operator is still an open problem. In real-world data, methods that rely on specific parametric assumptions about the degradation model often face limitations in their applicability. To address this, we introduce Invert2Restore, a zero-shot, training-free method that operates in both fully blind and partially blind settings -- requiring no prior knowledge of the degradation model or only partial knowledge of its parametric form without known parameters. Despite this, Invert2Restore achieves high-fidelity results and generalizes well across various types of image degradation. It leverages a pre-trained diffusion model as a deterministic mapping between normal samples and undistorted image samples. The key insight is that the input noise mapped by a diffusion model to a degraded image lies in a low-probability density region of the standard normal distribution. Thus, we can restore the degraded image by carefully guiding its input noise toward a higher-density region. We experimentally validate Invert2Restore across several image restoration tasks, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in scenarios where the degradation operator is either unknown or partially known.

Paperid: 6082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21410.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot image restoration (IR) methods based on pretrained diffusion models have recently achieved significant success. These methods typically require at least a parametric form of the degradation model. However, in real-world scenarios, the degradation may be too complex to define explicitly. To handle this general case, we introduce the Diffusion Image Prior (DIIP). We take inspiration from the Deep Image Prior (DIP)[16], since it can be used to remove artifacts without the need for an explicit degradation model. However, in contrast to DIP, we find that pretrained diffusion models offer a much stronger prior, despite being trained without knowledge from corrupted data. We show that, the optimization process in DIIP first reconstructs a clean version of the image before eventually overfitting to the degraded input, but it does so for a broader range of degradations than DIP. In light of this result, we propose a blind image restoration (IR) method based on early stopping, which does not require prior knowledge of the degradation model. We validate DIIP on various degradation-blind IR tasks, including JPEG artifact removal, waterdrop removal, denoising and super-resolution with state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 6083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20797.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content in the context of the two-party US political spectrum through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.

Paperid: 6084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20252.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly Detection (AD) focuses on detecting samples that differ from the standard pattern, making it a vital tool in process control. Logical anomalies may appear visually normal yet violate predefined constraints on object presence, arrangement, or quantity, depending on reasoning and explainability. We introduce LogicQA, a framework that enhances AD by providing industrial operators with explanations for logical anomalies. LogicQA compiles automatically generated questions into a checklist and collects responses to identify violations of logical constraints. LogicQA is training-free, annotation-free, and operates in a few-shot setting. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) Logical AD performance on public benchmarks, MVTec LOCO AD, with an AUROC of 87.6 percent and an F1-max of 87.0 percent along with the explanations of anomalies. Also, our approach has shown outstanding performance on semiconductor SEM corporate data, further validating its effectiveness in industrial applications.

Paperid: 6085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20211.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular cameras in diverse outdoor conditions, such as daytime, rain, and nighttime, is challenging due to the difficulty of learning universal representations and the severe lack of labeled real-world adverse data. Previous methods either rely on synthetic inputs and pseudo-depth labels or directly apply daytime strategies to adverse conditions, resulting in suboptimal results. In this paper, we present the first synthetic-to-real robust depth estimation framework, incorporating motion and structure priors to capture real-world knowledge effectively. In the synthetic adaptation, we transfer motion-structure knowledge inside cost volumes for better robust representation, using a frozen daytime model to train a depth estimator in synthetic adverse conditions. In the innovative real adaptation, which targets to fix synthetic-real gaps, models trained earlier identify the weather-insensitive regions with a designed consistency-reweighting strategy to emphasize valid pseudo-labels. We introduce a new regularization by gathering explicit depth distributions to constrain the model when facing real-world data. Experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art across diverse conditions in multi-frame and single-frame evaluations. We achieve improvements of 7.5% and 4.3% in AbsRel and RMSE on average for nuScenes and Robotcar datasets (daytime, nighttime, rain). In zero-shot evaluation of DrivingStereo (rain, fog), our method generalizes better than the previous ones.

Paperid: 6086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20158.pdf

Abstract:
High Content Screening (HCS) microscopy datasets have transformed the ability to profile cellular responses to genetic and chemical perturbations, enabling cell-based inference of drug-target interactions (DTI). However, the adoption of representation learning methods for HCS data has been hindered by the lack of accessible datasets and robust benchmarks. To address this gap, we present RxRx3-core, a curated and compressed subset of the RxRx3 dataset, and an associated DTI benchmarking task. At just 18GB, RxRx3-core significantly reduces the size barrier associated with large-scale HCS datasets while preserving critical data necessary for benchmarking representation learning models against a zero-shot DTI prediction task. RxRx3-core includes 222,601 microscopy images spanning 736 CRISPR knockouts and 1,674 compounds at 8 concentrations. RxRx3-core is available on HuggingFace and Polaris, along with pre-trained embeddings and benchmarking code, ensuring accessibility for the research community. By providing a compact dataset and robust benchmarks, we aim to accelerate innovation in representation learning methods for HCS data and support the discovery of novel biological insights.

Paperid: 6087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19426.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot Question Answering (QA), they tend to expose biases in their internal knowledge when faced with socially sensitive questions, leading to a degradation in performance. Existing zero-shot methods are efficient but fail to consider context and prevent bias propagation in the answers. To address this, we propose DeCAP, a method for debiasing LLMs using Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation. DeCAP leverages a Question Ambiguity Detection to take appropriate debiasing actions based on the context and a Neutral Answer Guidance Generation to suppress the LLMs make objective judgments about the context, minimizing the propagation of bias from their internal knowledge. Our various experiments across eight LLMs show that DeCAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot debiased QA performance. This demonstrates DeCAP's efficacy in enhancing the fairness and accuracy of LLMs in diverse QA settings.

Paperid: 6088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19371.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational language models show a remarkable ability to learn new concepts during inference via context data. However, similar work for images lag behind. To address this challenge, we introduce FLoWN, a flow matching model that learns to generate neural network parameters for different tasks. Our approach models the flow on latent space, while conditioning the process on context data. Experiments verify that FLoWN attains various desiderata for a meta-learning model. In addition, it matches or exceeds baselines on in-distribution tasks, provides better initializations for classifier training, and is performant on out-of-distribution few-shot tasks while having a fine-tuning mechanism to improve performance.

Paperid: 6089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17821.pdf

Abstract:
AI agents hold the potential to transform everyday life by helping humans achieve their goals. To do this successfully, agents need to be able to coordinate with novel partners without prior interaction, a setting known as zero-shot coordination (ZSC). Overcooked has become one of the most popular benchmarks for evaluating coordination capabilities of AI agents and learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the origins of ZSC challenges in Overcooked. We introduce a state augmentation mechanism which mixes states that might be encountered when paired with unknown partners into the training distribution, reducing the out-of-distribution challenge associated with ZSC. We show that independently trained agents under this algorithm coordinate successfully in Overcooked. Our results suggest that ZSC failure can largely be attributed to poor state coverage under self-play rather than more sophisticated coordination challenges. The Overcooked environment is therefore not suitable as a ZSC benchmark. To address these shortcomings, we introduce OvercookedV2, a new version of the benchmark, which includes asymmetric information and stochasticity, facilitating the creation of interesting ZSC scenarios. To validate OvercookedV2, we conduct experiments demonstrating that mere exhaustive state coverage is insufficient to coordinate well. Finally, we use OvercookedV2 to build a new range of coordination challenges, including ones that require test time protocol formation, and we demonstrate the need for new coordination algorithms that can adapt online. We hope that OvercookedV2 will help benchmark the next generation of ZSC algorithms and advance collaboration between AI agents and humans.

Paperid: 6090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16546.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced deep learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, medical diagnosis, object detection, and speech recognition. Architectural innovations including 1D, 2D, and 3D convolutional models, dilated and grouped convolutions, depthwise separable convolutions, and attention mechanisms address domain-specific challenges and enhance feature representation and computational efficiency. Structural refinements such as spatial-channel exploitation, multi-path design, and feature-map enhancement contribute to robust hierarchical feature extraction and improved generalization, particularly through transfer learning. Efficient preprocessing strategies, including Fourier transforms, structured transforms, low-precision computation, and weight compression, optimize inference speed and facilitate deployment in resource-constrained environments. This survey presents a unified taxonomy that classifies CNN architectures based on spatial exploitation, multi-path structures, depth, width, dimensionality expansion, channel boosting, and attention mechanisms. It systematically reviews CNN applications in face recognition, pose estimation, action recognition, text classification, statistical language modeling, disease diagnosis, radiological analysis, cryptocurrency sentiment prediction, 1D data processing, video analysis, and speech recognition. In addition to consolidating architectural advancements, the review highlights emerging learning paradigms such as few-shot, zero-shot, weakly supervised, federated learning frameworks and future research directions include hybrid CNN-transformer models, vision-language integration, generative learning, etc. This review provides a comprehensive perspective on CNN's evolution from 2015 to 2025, outlining key innovations, challenges, and opportunities.

Paperid: 6091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15768.pdf

Abstract:
Abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS) is the task of automatically summarizing information in multiple documents, from news articles to conversations with multiple speakers. The training approaches for current MDS models can be grouped into four approaches: end-to-end with special pre-training ("direct"), chunk-then-summarize, extract-then-summarize, and inference with GPT-style models. In this work, we evaluate MDS models across training approaches, domains, and dimensions (reference similarity, quality, and factuality), to analyze how and why models trained on one domain can fail to summarize documents from another (News, Science, and Conversation) in the zero-shot domain transfer setting. We define domain-transfer "failure" as a decrease in factuality, higher deviation from the target, and a general decrease in summary quality. In addition to exploring domain transfer for MDS models, we examine potential issues with applying popular summarization metrics out-of-the-box.

Paperid: 6092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15195.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional machine learning models for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) rely on supervised training, requiring extensive manual annotations, and often produce errors due to the separation between layout and text processing. In contrast, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a general approach to recognizing diverse handwriting styles without the need for model-specific training. The study benchmarks various proprietary and open-source LLMs against Transkribus models, evaluating their performance on both modern and historical datasets written in English, French, German, and Italian. In addition, emphasis is placed on testing the models' ability to autonomously correct previously generated outputs. Findings indicate that proprietary models, especially Claude 3.5 Sonnet, outperform open-source alternatives in zero-shot settings. MLLMs achieve excellent results in recognizing modern handwriting and exhibit a preference for the English language due to their pre-training dataset composition. Comparisons with Transkribus show no consistent advantage for either approach. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate limited ability to autonomously correct errors in zero-shot transcriptions.

Paperid: 6093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14430.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Action Recognition (FSAR) constitutes a crucial challenge in computer vision, entailing the recognition of actions from a limited set of examples. Recent approaches mainly focus on employing image-level features to construct temporal dependencies and generate prototypes for each action category. However, a considerable number of these methods utilize mainly image-level features that incorporate background noise and focus insufficiently on real foreground (action-related instances), thereby compromising the recognition capability, particularly in the few-shot scenario. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel joint Image-Instance level Spatial-temporal attention approach (I2ST) for Few-shot Action Recognition. The core concept of I2ST is to perceive the action-related instances and integrate them with image features via spatial-temporal attention. Specifically, I2ST consists of two key components: Action-related Instance Perception and Joint Image-Instance Spatial-temporal Attention. Given the basic representations from the feature extractor, the Action-related Instance Perception is introduced to perceive action-related instances under the guidance of a text-guided segmentation model. Subsequently, the Joint Image-Instance Spatial-temporal Attention is used to construct the feature dependency between instances and images...

Paperid: 6094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13806.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate organ segmentation is essential for clinical tasks such as radiotherapy planning and disease monitoring. Recent foundation models like MedSAM achieve strong results using point or bounding-box prompts but still require manual interaction. We propose DescriptorMedSAM, a lightweight extension of MedSAM that incorporates structured text prompts, ranging from simple organ names to combined shape and location descriptors to enable click-free segmentation. DescriptorMedSAM employs a CLIP text encoder to convert radiology-style descriptors into dense embeddings, which are fused with visual tokens via a cross-attention block and a multi-scale feature extractor. We designed four descriptor types: Name (N), Name + Shape (NS), Name + Location (NL), and Name + Shape + Location (NSL), and evaluated them on the FLARE 2022 dataset under zero-shot and few-shot settings, where organs unseen during training must be segmented with minimal additional data. NSL prompts achieved the highest performance, with a Dice score of 0.9405 under full supervision, a 76.31% zero-shot retention ratio, and a 97.02% retention ratio after fine-tuning with only 50 labeled slices per unseen organ. Adding shape and location cues consistently improved segmentation accuracy, especially for small or morphologically complex structures. We demonstrate that structured language prompts can effectively replace spatial interactions, delivering strong zero-shot performance and rapid few-shot adaptation. By quantifying the role of descriptor, this work lays the groundwork for scalable, prompt-aware segmentation models that generalize across diverse anatomical targets with minimal annotation effort.

Paperid: 6095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13134.pdf

Abstract:
Due to the large volume of medical imaging data, advanced AI methodologies are needed to assist radiologists in diagnosing thoracic diseases from chest X-rays (CXRs). Existing deep learning models often require large, labeled datasets, which are scarce in medical imaging due to the time-consuming and expert-driven annotation process. In this paper, we extend the existing approach to enhance zero-shot learning in medical imaging by integrating Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) with Momentum Contrast (MoCo), resulting in our proposed model, MoCoCLIP. Our method addresses challenges posed by class-imbalanced and unlabeled datasets, enabling improved detection of pulmonary pathologies. Experimental results on the NIH ChestXray14 dataset demonstrate that MoCoCLIP outperforms the state-of-the-art CheXZero model, achieving relative improvement of approximately 6.5%. Furthermore, on the CheXpert dataset, MoCoCLIP demonstrates superior zero-shot performance, achieving an average AUC of 0.750 compared to CheXZero with 0.746 AUC, highlighting its enhanced generalization capabilities on unseen data.

Paperid: 6096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12910.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for industrial inspection and medical diagnostics, detecting defects in novel objects without requiring any target-dataset samples during training. Existing CLIP-based ZSAD methods generate anomaly maps by measuring the cosine similarity between visual and textual features. However, CLIP's alignment with object categories instead of their anomalous states limits its effectiveness for anomaly detection. To address this limitation, we propose AFR-CLIP, a CLIP-based anomaly feature rectification framework. AFR-CLIP first performs image-guided textual rectification, embedding the implicit defect information from the image into a stateless prompt that describes the object category without indicating any anomalous state. The enriched textual embeddings are then compared with two pre-defined stateful (normal or abnormal) embeddings, and their text-on-text similarity yields the anomaly map that highlights defective regions. To further enhance perception to multi-scale features and complex anomalies, we introduce self prompting (SP) and multi-patch feature aggregation (MPFA) modules. Extensive experiments are conducted on eleven anomaly detection benchmarks across industrial and medical domains, demonstrating AFR-CLIP's superiority in ZSAD.

Paperid: 6097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12739.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised sentence embedding representation has become a hot research topic in natural language processing. As a tensor, sentence embedding has two critical properties: direction and norm. Existing works have been limited to constraining only the orientation of the samples' representations while ignoring the features of their module lengths. To address this issue, we propose a new training objective that optimizes the training of unsupervised contrastive learning by constraining the module length features between positive samples. We combine the training objective of Tensor's Norm Constraints with ensemble learning to propose a new Sentence Embedding representation framework, TNCSE. We evaluate seven semantic text similarity tasks, and the results show that TNCSE and derived models are the current state-of-the-art approach; in addition, we conduct extensive zero-shot evaluations, and the results show that TNCSE outperforms other baselines.

Paperid: 6098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12326.pdf

Abstract:
Automated data extraction from research texts has been steadily improving, with the emergence of large language models (LLMs) accelerating progress even further. Extracting data from plots in research papers, however, has been such a complex task that it has predominantly been confined to manual data extraction. We show that current multimodal large language models, with proper instructions and engineered workflows, are capable of accurately extracting data from plots. This capability is inherent to the pretrained models and can be achieved with a chain-of-thought sequence of zero-shot engineered prompts we call PlotExtract, without the need to fine-tune. We demonstrate PlotExtract here and assess its performance on synthetic and published plots. We consider only plots with two axes in this analysis. For plots identified as extractable, PlotExtract finds points with over 90% precision (and around 90% recall) and errors in x and y position of around 5% or lower. These results prove that multimodal LLMs are a viable path for high-throughput data extraction for plots and in many circumstances can replace the current manual methods of data extraction.

Paperid: 6099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10370.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Paperid: 6100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09850.pdf

Abstract:
Tabular data poses unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous feature types, lack of spatial structure, and often limited sample sizes. We propose TabNSA, a novel deep learning framework that integrates Native Sparse Attention (NSA) with a TabMixer backbone to efficiently model tabular data. TabNSA tackles computational and representational challenges by dynamically focusing on relevant feature subsets per instance. The NSA module employs a hierarchical sparse attention mechanism, including token compression, selective preservation, and localized sliding windows, to significantly reduce the quadratic complexity of standard attention operations while addressing feature heterogeneity. Complementing this, the TabMixer backbone captures complex, non-linear dependencies through parallel multilayer perceptron (MLP) branches with independent parameters. These modules are synergistically combined via element-wise summation and mean pooling, enabling TabNSA to model both global context and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments across supervised and transfer learning settings show that TabNSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models. Furthermore, by augmenting TabNSA with a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), we enable it to effectively address Few-Shot Learning challenges through language-guided generalization on diverse tabular benchmarks.

Paperid: 6101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06282.pdf

Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection datasets have been pivotal for autonomous driving, yet they cover a limited range of objects, restricting the model's generalization across diverse deployment environments. To address this, we introduce the first generalized cross-domain few-shot (GCFS) task in 3D object detection, which focuses on adapting a source-pretrained model for high performance on both common and novel classes in a target domain with few-shot samples. Our solution integrates multi-modal fusion and contrastive-enhanced prototype learning within one framework, holistically overcoming challenges related to data scarcity and domain adaptation in the GCFS setting. The multi-modal fusion module utilizes 2D vision-language models to extract rich, open-set semantic knowledge. To address biases in point distributions across varying structural complexities, we particularly introduce a physically-aware box searching strategy that leverages laser imaging principles to generate high-quality 3D box proposals from 2D insights, enhancing object recall. To effectively capture domain-specific representations for each class from limited target data, we further propose a contrastive-enhanced prototype learning, which strengthens the model's adaptability. We evaluate our approach with three GCFS benchmark settings, and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution for GCFS tasks. The code will be publicly available.

Paperid: 6102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01794.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) has enabled zero-shot classification in radiology, reducing reliance on manual annotations. However, conventional contrastive learning struggles with normal case detection due to its strict intra-sample alignment, which disrupts normal sample clustering and leads to high false positives (FPs) and false negatives (FNs). To address these issues, we propose OFF-CLIP, a contrastive learning refinement that improves normal detection by introducing an off-diagonal term loss to enhance normal sample clustering and applying sentence-level text filtering to mitigate FNs by removing misaligned normal statements from abnormal reports. OFF-CLIP can be applied to radiology CLIP models without requiring any architectural modifications. Experimental results show that OFF-CLIP significantly improves normal classification, achieving a 0.61 Area under the curve (AUC) increase on VinDr-CXR over CARZero, the state-of-the-art zero-shot classification baseline, while maintaining or improving abnormal classification performance. Additionally, OFF-CLIP enhances zero-shot grounding by improving pointing game accuracy, confirming better anomaly localization. These results demonstrate OFF-CLIP's effectiveness as a robust and efficient enhancement for medical vision-language models.

Paperid: 6103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19722.pdf

Abstract:
Recent approaches to multilingual open-domain question answering (MLODQA) have achieved promising results given abundant language-specific training data. However, the considerable annotation cost limits the application of these methods for underrepresented languages. We introduce a \emph{few-shot learning} approach to synthesise large-scale multilingual data from large language models (LLMs). Our method begins with large-scale self-supervised pre-training using WikiData, followed by training on high-quality synthetic multilingual data generated by prompting LLMs with few-shot supervision. The final model, \textsc{FsModQA}, significantly outperforms existing few-shot and supervised baselines in MLODQA and cross-lingual and monolingual retrieval. We further show our method can be extended for effective zero-shot adaptation to new languages through a \emph{cross-lingual prompting} strategy with only English-supervised data, making it a general and applicable solution for MLODQA tasks without costly large-scale annotation.

Paperid: 6104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18454.pdf

Abstract:
Popular IDEs frequently contain bugs in their refactoring implementations. Ensuring that a transformation preserves a program's behavior is a complex task. Traditional detection methods rely on predefined preconditions for each refactoring type, limiting their scalability and adaptability to new transformations. These methods often require extensive static and dynamic analyses, which are computationally expensive, time-consuming, and may still fail to detect certain refactoring bugs. This study evaluates the effectiveness of Small Language Models (SLMs) in detecting two types of refactoring bugs in Java and Python: (i) transformations that introduce errors or behavioral changes (Type I) and (ii) transformations unnecessarily blocked by IDEs despite being valid (Type II). We assess whether Llama 3.2 3B, Mistral 7B, Gemma 2 9B, Gemma 3 12B, DeepSeek-R1 14B, Phi-4 14B, o1-mini, and o3-mini-high can accurately detect 100 refactoring bugs reported in widely used Java and Python IDEs, such as Eclipse and NetBeans. The study covers 16 refactoring types and employs zero-shot prompting on consumer-grade hardware to evaluate the models' ability to reason about refactoring correctness without explicit prior training. The proprietary o3-mini-high model achieved the highest detection rate, identifying 84.3% of Type I bugs. The open-source Phi-4 14B performed comparably well, demonstrating strong effectiveness across both bug types. However, o3-mini-high struggled with Type II bugs, correctly identifying and applying valid but blocked transformations in only 40% of cases. The findings highlight the potential of SLMs for efficiently detecting refactoring bugs, particularly in verifying behavioral changes. Additionally, SLMs offer a more adaptable solution capable of generalizing across different refactoring types and programming languages, addressing key limitations of traditional approaches.

Paperid: 6105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17046.pdf

Abstract:
To develop generalizable models in multi-agent reinforcement learning, recent approaches have been devoted to discovering task-independent skills for each agent, which generalize across tasks and facilitate agents' cooperation. However, particularly in partially observed settings, such approaches struggle with sample efficiency and generalization capabilities due to two primary challenges: (a) How to incorporate global states into coordinating the skills of different agents? (b) How to learn generalizable and consistent skill semantics when each agent only receives partial observations? To address these challenges, we propose a framework called \textbf{M}asked \textbf{A}utoencoders for \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{A}gent \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning (MA2RL), which encourages agents to infer unobserved entities by reconstructing entity-states from the entity perspective. The entity perspective helps MA2RL generalize to diverse tasks with varying agent numbers and action spaces. Specifically, we treat local entity-observations as masked contexts of the global entity-states, and MA2RL can infer the latent representation of dynamically masked entities, facilitating the assignment of task-independent skills and the learning of skill semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MA2RL achieves significant improvements relative to state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating extraordinary performance, remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities and advantageous transferability.

Paperid: 6106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16908.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamic and contact-rich object manipulation, such as striking, snatching, or hammering, remains challenging for robotic systems due to hardware limitations. Most existing robots are constrained by high-inertia design, limited compliance, and reliance on expensive torque sensors. To address this, we introduce ARMADA (Affordable Robot for Manipulation and Dynamic Actions), a 6 degrees-of-freedom bimanual robot designed for dynamic manipulation research. ARMADA combines low-inertia, back-drivable actuators with a lightweight design, using readily available components and 3D-printed links for ease of assembly in research labs. The entire system, including both arms, is built for just $6,100. Each arm achieves speeds up to 6.16m/s, almost twice that of most collaborative robots, with a comparable payload of 2.5kg. We demonstrate ARMADA can perform dynamic manipulation like snatching, hammering, and bimanual throwing in real-world environments. We also showcase its effectiveness in reinforcement learning (RL) by training a non-prehensile manipulation policy in simulation and transferring it zero-shot to the real world, as well as human motion shadowing for dynamic bimanual object throwing. ARMADA is fully open-sourced with detailed assembly instructions, CAD models, URDFs, simulation, and learning codes. We highly recommend viewing the supplementary video at https://sites.google.com/view/im2-humanoid-arm.

Paperid: 6107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16648.pdf

Abstract:
Typically, Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction (FCRE) models must balance retaining prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks with extremely limited data. However, real-world scenarios may also involve unseen or undetermined relations that existing methods still struggle to handle. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that leverages the Open Information Extraction concept of Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC). Our method not only exposes models to all possible pairs of relations, including determined and undetermined labels not available in the training set, but also enriches model knowledge with diverse relation descriptions, thereby enhancing knowledge retention and adaptability in this challenging scenario. In the perspective of KGC, this is the first work explored in the setting of Continual Learning, allowing efficient expansion of the graph as the data evolves. Experimental results demonstrate our superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art FCRE baselines, as well as the efficiency in handling dynamic graph construction in this setting.

Paperid: 6108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16451.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used for the inverse design of materials, such as crystals and molecules. Existing AI research on molecules has integrated chemical structures of molecules with textual knowledge to adapt to complex instructions. However, this approach has been unattainable for crystals due to data scarcity from the biased distribution of investigated crystals and the lack of semantic supervision in peer-reviewed literature. In this work, we introduce a contrastive language-crystals model (CLaC) pre-trained on a newly synthesized dataset of 126k crystal structure-text pairs. To demonstrate the advantage of using synthetic data to overcome data scarcity, we constructed a comparable dataset extracted from academic papers. We evaluate CLaC's generalization ability through various zero-shot cross-modal tasks and downstream applications. In experiments, CLaC achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization performance in understanding crystal structures, surpassing latest large language models.

Paperid: 6109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15778.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Criteria Decision Making~(MCDM) is widely applied in various fields, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of multiple levels and attributes to support decision makers in making scientific and rational decisions in complex scenarios. However, traditional MCDM methods face bottlenecks in high-dimensional problems. Given the fact that Large Language Models~(LLMs) achieve impressive performance in various complex tasks, but limited work evaluates LLMs in specific MCDM problems with the help of human domain experts, we further explore the capability of LLMs by proposing an LLM-based evaluation framework to automatically deal with general complex MCDM problems. Within the framework, we assess the performance of various typical open-source models, as well as commercial models such as Claude and ChatGPT, on 3 important applications, these models can only achieve around 60\% accuracy rate compared to the evaluation ground truth. Upon incorporation of Chain-of-Thought or few-shot prompting, the accuracy rates rise to around 70\%, and highly depend on the model. In order to further improve the performance, a LoRA-based fine-tuning technique is employed. The experimental results show that the accuracy rates for different applications improve significantly to around 95\%, and the performance difference is trivial between different models, indicating that LoRA-based fine-tuned LLMs exhibit significant and stable advantages in addressing MCDM tasks and can provide human-expert-level solutions to a wide range of MCDM challenges.

Paperid: 6110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14389.pdf

Abstract:
Argument mining algorithms analyze the argumentative structure of essays, making them a valuable tool for enhancing education by providing targeted feedback on the students' argumentation skills. While current methods often use encoder or encoder-decoder deep learning architectures, decoder-only models remain largely unexplored, offering a promising research direction. This paper proposes leveraging open-source, small Large Language Models (LLMs) for argument mining through few-shot prompting and fine-tuning. These models' small size and open-source nature ensure accessibility, privacy, and computational efficiency, enabling schools and educators to adopt and deploy them locally. Specifically, we perform three tasks: segmentation of student essays into arguments, classification of the arguments by type, and assessment of their quality. We empirically evaluate the models on the Feedback Prize - Predicting Effective Arguments dataset of grade 6-12 students essays and demonstrate how fine-tuned small LLMs outperform baseline methods in segmenting the essays and determining the argument types while few-shot prompting yields comparable performance to that of the baselines in assessing quality. This work highlights the educational potential of small, open-source LLMs to provide real-time, personalized feedback, enhancing independent learning and writing skills while ensuring low computational cost and privacy.

Paperid: 6111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13399.pdf

Abstract:
Quantifying the variation in yield component traits of maize (Zea mays L.), which together determine the overall productivity of this globally important crop, plays a critical role in plant genetics research, plant breeding, and the development of improved farming practices. Grain yield per acre is calculated by multiplying the number of plants per acre, ears per plant, number of kernels per ear, and the average kernel weight. The number of kernels per ear is determined by the number of kernel rows per ear multiplied by the number of kernels per row. Traditional manual methods for measuring these two traits are time-consuming, limiting large-scale data collection. Recent automation efforts using image processing and deep learning encounter challenges such as high annotation costs and uncertain generalizability. We tackle these issues by exploring Large Vision Models for zero-shot, annotation-free maize kernel segmentation. By using an open-source large vision model, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), we segment individual kernels in RGB images of maize ears and apply a graph-based algorithm to calculate the number of kernels per row. Our approach successfully identifies the number of kernels per row across a wide range of maize ears, showing the potential of zero-shot learning with foundation vision models combined with image processing techniques to improve automation and reduce subjectivity in agronomic data collection. All our code is open-sourced to make these affordable phenotyping methods accessible to everyone.

Paperid: 6112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12944.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a popular paradigm for zero-shot multi-domain forecasting. FMs are trained on numerous diverse datasets and claim to be effective forecasters across multiple different time series domains, including cloud data. In this work we investigate this claim, exploring the effectiveness of FMs on cloud data. We demonstrate that many well-known FMs fail to generate meaningful or accurate zero-shot forecasts in this setting. We support this claim empirically, showing that FMs are outperformed consistently by simple linear baselines. We also illustrate a number of interesting pathologies, including instances where FMs suddenly output seemingly erratic, random-looking forecasts. Our results suggest a widespread failure of FMs to model cloud data.

Paperid: 6113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12454.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the feasibility and performance of using large multimodal models (LMMs) to automatically annotate human emotions in everyday scenarios. We conducted experiments on the DailyLife subset of the publicly available FERV39k dataset, employing the GPT-4o-mini model for rapid, zero-shot labeling of key frames extracted from video segments. Under a seven-class emotion taxonomy ("Angry," "Disgust," "Fear," "Happy," "Neutral," "Sad," "Surprise"), the LMM achieved an average precision of approximately 50%. In contrast, when limited to ternary emotion classification (negative/neutral/positive), the average precision increased to approximately 64%. Additionally, we explored a strategy that integrates multiple frames within 1-2 second video clips to enhance labeling performance and reduce costs. The results indicate that this approach can slightly improve annotation accuracy. Overall, our preliminary findings highlight the potential application of zero-shot LMMs in human facial emotion annotation tasks, offering new avenues for reducing labeling costs and broadening the applicability of LMMs in complex multimodal environments.

Paperid: 6114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12453.pdf

Abstract:
Drug discovery is crucial for identifying candidate drugs for various diseases.However, its low success rate often results in a scarcity of annotations, posing a few-shot learning problem. Existing methods primarily focus on single-scale features, overlooking the hierarchical molecular structures that determine different molecular properties. To address these issues, we introduce Universal Matching Networks (UniMatch), a dual matching framework that integrates explicit hierarchical molecular matching with implicit task-level matching via meta-learning, bridging multi-level molecular representations and task-level generalization. Specifically, our approach explicitly captures structural features across multiple levels, such as atoms, substructures, and molecules, via hierarchical pooling and matching, facilitating precise molecular representation and comparison. Additionally, we employ a meta-learning strategy for implicit task-level matching, allowing the model to capture shared patterns across tasks and quickly adapt to new ones. This unified matching framework ensures effective molecular alignment while leveraging shared meta-knowledge for fast adaptation. Our experimental results demonstrate that UniMatch outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the MoleculeNet and FS-Mol benchmarks, achieving improvements of 2.87% in AUROC and 6.52% in delta AUPRC. UniMatch also shows excellent generalization ability on the Meta-MolNet benchmark.

Paperid: 6115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12411.pdf

Abstract:
Unsafe prompts pose significant safety risks to large language models (LLMs). Existing methods for detecting unsafe prompts rely on data-driven fine-tuning to train guardrail models, necessitating significant data and computational resources. In contrast, recent few-shot gradient-based methods emerge, requiring only few safe and unsafe reference prompts. A gradient-based approach identifies unsafe prompts by analyzing consistent patterns of the gradients of safety-critical parameters in LLMs. Although effective, its restriction to directional similarity (cosine similarity) introduces ``directional bias'', limiting its capability to identify unsafe prompts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce GradCoo, a novel gradient co-occurrence analysis method that expands the scope of safety-critical parameter identification to include unsigned gradient similarity, thereby reducing the impact of ``directional bias'' and enhancing the accuracy of unsafe prompt detection. Comprehensive experiments on the widely-used benchmark datasets ToxicChat and XStest demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to existing methods. Moreover, we confirm the generalizability of GradCoo in detecting unsafe prompts across a range of LLM base models with various sizes and origins.

Paperid: 6116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11114.pdf

Abstract:
Temporal relation extraction (TRE) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves identifying the temporal relationships between events in a document. Despite the advances in large language models (LLMs), their application to TRE remains limited. Most existing approaches rely on pairwise classification, where event pairs are classified in isolation, leading to computational inefficiency and a lack of global consistency in the resulting temporal graph. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot method for TRE that generates a document's complete temporal graph in a single step, followed by temporal constraint optimization to refine predictions and enforce temporal consistency across relations. Additionally, we introduce OmniTemp, a new dataset with complete annotations for all pairs of targeted events within a document. Through experiments and analyses, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot approaches and offers a competitive alternative to supervised TRE models.

Paperid: 6117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08181.pdf

Abstract:
Data scarcity significantly complicates the continual learning problem, i.e., how a deep neural network learns in dynamic environments with very few samples. However, the latest progress of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) methods and related studies show insightful knowledge on how to tackle the problem. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on FSCIL that highlights several important aspects i.e. comprehensive and formal objectives of FSCIL approaches, the importance of prototype rectifications, the new learning paradigms based on pre-trained model and language-guided mechanism, the deeper analysis of FSCIL performance metrics and evaluation, and the practical contexts of FSCIL in various areas. Our extensive discussion presents the open challenges, potential solutions, and future directions of FSCIL.

Paperid: 6118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08109.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising improvements, often surpassing existing methods across a wide range of downstream tasks in natural language processing. However, these models still face challenges, which may hinder their practical applicability. For example, the phenomenon of hallucination is known to compromise the reliability of LLMs, especially in fields that demand high factual precision. Current benchmarks primarily focus on hallucination detection and factuality evaluation but do not extend beyond identification. This paper proposes an explanation enhanced hallucination-detection model, coined as HuDEx, aimed at enhancing the reliability of LLM-generated responses by both detecting hallucinations and providing detailed explanations. The proposed model provides a novel approach to integrate detection with explanations, and enable both users and the LLM itself to understand and reduce errors. Our measurement results demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses larger LLMs, such as Llama3 70B and GPT-4, in hallucination detection accuracy, while maintaining reliable explanations. Furthermore, the proposed model performs well in both zero-shot and other test environments, showcasing its adaptability across diverse benchmark datasets. The proposed approach further enhances the hallucination detection research by introducing a novel approach to integrating interpretability with hallucination detection, which further enhances the performance and reliability of evaluating hallucinations in language models.

Paperid: 6119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07306.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we propose a modular approach for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task by decomposing the problem into four sub-modules that use state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in a zero-shot setting. Given navigation instruction in natural language, we first prompt LLM to extract the landmarks and the order in which they are visited. Assuming the known model of the environment, we retrieve the top-k locations of the last landmark and generate $k$ path hypotheses from the starting location to the last landmark using the shortest path algorithm on the topological map of the environment. Each path hypothesis is represented by a sequence of panoramas. We then use dynamic programming to compute the alignment score between the sequence of panoramas and the sequence of landmark names, which match scores obtained from VLM. Finally, we compute the nDTW metric between the hypothesis that yields the highest alignment score to evaluate the path fidelity. We demonstrate superior performance compared to other approaches that use joint semantic maps like VLMaps on the complex R2R-Habitat instruction dataset and quantify in detail the effect of visual grounding on navigation performance.

Paperid: 6120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06632.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate classification and anatomical localization are essential for effective medical diagnostics and research, which may be efficiently performed using deep learning techniques. However, availability of limited labeled data poses a significant challenge. To address this, we adapted Prototypical Networks and the Propagation-Reconstruction Network (PRNet) for few-shot classification and localization, respectively, in Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) images. For the proof of concept we used a 2D-sliced image cropped around heart. The Prototypical Network, with a pre-trained ResNet-18 backbone, classified ventricles, myocardium, and liver tissues with 96.67% training and 93.33% validation accuracy. PRNet, adapted for 2D imaging with an encoder-decoder architecture and skip connections, achieved a training loss of 1.395, accurately reconstructing patches and capturing spatial relationships. These results highlight the potential of Prototypical Networks for tissue classification with limited labeled data and PRNet for anatomical landmark localization, paving the way for improved performance in deep learning frameworks.

Paperid: 6121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05310.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models can solve a wide range of tasks from just a few examples, but they remain difficult to steer and lack a capability essential for building reliable software at scale: the modular composition of computations under enforceable contracts. As a result, they are typically embedded in larger software pipelines that use domain-specific knowledge to decompose tasks and improve reliability through validation and search. Yet the complexity of writing, tuning, and maintaining such pipelines has so far limited their sophistication. We propose oracular programming: a foundational paradigm for integrating traditional, explicit computations with inductive oracles such as LLMs. It rests on two directing principles: the full separation of core and search logic, and the treatment of few-shot examples as grounded and evolvable program components. Within this paradigm, experts express high-level problem-solving strategies as programs with unresolved choice points. These choice points are resolved at runtime by LLMs, which generalize from user-provided examples of correct and incorrect decisions. An oracular program is composed of three orthogonal components: a strategy that consists in a nondeterministic program with choice points that can be reified into a search tree, a policy that specifies how to navigate this tree with the help of LLM oracles, and a set of demonstrations that describe successful and unsuccessful tree navigation scenarios across diverse problem instances. Each component is expressed in a dedicated programming language and can be independently improved or substituted. We address the key programming language design challenges of modularly composing oracular programs and enforcing consistency between their components as they evolve.

Paperid: 6122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04385.pdf

Abstract:
Efforts to connect LiDAR data with text, such as LidarCLIP, have primarily focused on embedding 3D point clouds into CLIP text-image space. However, these approaches rely on 3D point clouds, which present challenges in encoding efficiency and neural network processing. With the advent of advanced LiDAR sensors like Ouster OS1, which, in addition to 3D point clouds, produce fixed resolution depth, signal, and ambient panoramic 2D images, new opportunities emerge for LiDAR based tasks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to connect LiDAR data with text by leveraging 2D imagery generated by the OS1 sensor instead of 3D point clouds. Using the Florence 2 large model in a zero-shot setting, we perform image captioning and object detection. Our experiments demonstrate that Florence 2 generates more informative captions and achieves superior performance in object detection tasks compared to existing methods like CLIP. By combining advanced LiDAR sensor data with a large pre-trained model, our approach provides a robust and accurate solution for challenging detection scenarios, including real-time applications requiring high accuracy and robustness.

Paperid: 6123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02454.pdf

Abstract:
Using extensive training data from SA-1B, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated exceptional generalization and zero-shot capabilities, attracting widespread attention in areas such as medical image segmentation and remote sensing image segmentation. However, its performance in the field of image manipulation detection remains largely unexplored and unconfirmed. There are two main challenges in applying SAM to image manipulation detection: a) reliance on manual prompts, and b) the difficulty of single-view information in supporting cross-dataset generalization. To address these challenges, we develops a cross-view prompt learning paradigm called IMDPrompter based on SAM. Benefiting from the design of automated prompts, IMDPrompter no longer relies on manual guidance, enabling automated detection and localization. Additionally, we propose components such as Cross-view Feature Perception, Optimal Prompt Selection, and Cross-View Prompt Consistency, which facilitate cross-view perceptual learning and guide SAM to generate accurate masks. Extensive experimental results from five datasets (CASIA, Columbia, Coverage, IMD2020, and NIST16) validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Paperid: 6124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00800.pdf

Abstract:
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made remarkable achievements in synthesizing images in recent years. Typically, training GANs requires massive data, and the performance of GANs deteriorates significantly when training data is limited. To improve the synthesis performance of GANs in low-data regimes, existing approaches use various data augmentation techniques to enlarge the training sets. However, it is identified that these augmentation techniques may leak or even alter the data distribution. To remedy this, we propose an adversarial semantic augmentation (ASA) technique to enlarge the training data at the semantic level instead of the image level. Concretely, considering semantic features usually encode informative information of images, we estimate the covariance matrices of semantic features for both real and generated images to find meaningful transformation directions. Such directions translate original features to another semantic representation, e.g., changing the backgrounds or expressions of the human face dataset. Moreover, we derive an upper bound of the expected adversarial loss. By optimizing the upper bound, our semantic augmentation is implicitly achieved. Such design avoids redundant sampling of the augmented features and introduces negligible computation overhead, making our approach computation efficient. Extensive experiments on both few-shot and large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method consistently improve the synthesis quality under various data regimes, and further visualized and analytic results suggesting satisfactory versatility of our proposed method.

Paperid: 6125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00059.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively applied in time series analysis. Yet, their utility in the few-shot classification (i.e., a crucial training scenario due to the limited training data available in industrial applications) concerning multivariate time series data remains underexplored. We aim to leverage the extensive pre-trained knowledge in LLMs to overcome the data scarcity problem within multivariate time series. Specifically, we propose LLMFew, an LLM-enhanced framework to investigate the feasibility and capacity of LLMs for few-shot multivariate time series classification. This model introduces a Patch-wise Temporal Convolution Encoder (PTCEnc) to align time series data with the textual embedding input of LLMs. We further fine-tune the pre-trained LLM decoder with Low-rank Adaptations (LoRA) to enhance its feature representation learning ability in time series data. Experimental results show that our model outperformed state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin, achieving 125.2% and 50.2% improvement in classification accuracy on Handwriting and EthanolConcentration datasets, respectively. Moreover, our experimental results demonstrate that LLM-based methods perform well across a variety of datasets in few-shot MTSC, delivering reliable results compared to traditional models. This success paves the way for their deployment in industrial environments where data are limited.

Paperid: 6126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19107.pdf

Abstract:
Dynamic sparse training (DST) can reduce the computational demands in ANNs, but faces difficulties in keeping peak performance at high sparsity levels. The Cannistraci-Hebb training (CHT) is a brain-inspired method for growing connectivity in DST. CHT leverages a gradient-free, topology-driven link regrowth, which has shown ultra-sparse (less than 1% connectivity) advantage across various tasks compared to fully connected networks. Yet, CHT suffers two main drawbacks: (i) its time complexity is $O(Nd^3)$ - N node network size, d node degree - restricting it to ultra-sparse regimes. (ii) it selects top link prediction scores, which is inappropriate for the early training epochs, when the network presents unreliable connections. Here, we design the first brain-inspired network model - termed bipartite receptive field (BRF) - to initialize the connectivity of sparse artificial neural networks. We further introduce a GPU-friendly matrix-based approximation of CH link prediction, reducing complexity to $O(N^3)$. We introduce the Cannistraci-Hebb training soft rule (CHTs), which adopts a flexible strategy for sampling connections in both link removal and regrowth, balancing the exploration and exploitation of network topology. Additionally, we integrate CHTs with a sigmoid gradual density decay (CHTss). Empirical results show that BRF offers performance advantages over previous network science models. Using 1% of connections, CHTs outperforms fully connected networks in MLP architectures on image classification tasks, compressing some networks to less than 30% of the nodes. Using 5% of the connections, CHTss outperforms fully connected networks in two Transformer-based machine translation tasks. Finally, at 30% connectivity, both CHTs and CHTss outperform other DST methods in language modeling and even exceed fully connected baselines in zero-shot tasks.

Paperid: 6127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16760.pdf

Abstract:
Automated interpretation of seismic images using deep learning methods is challenging because of the limited availability of training data. Few-shot learning is a suitable learning paradigm in such scenarios due to its ability to adapt to a new task with limited supervision (small training budget). Existing few-shot semantic segmentation (FSSS) methods fix the number of target classes. Therefore, they do not support joint training on multiple datasets varying in the number of classes. In the context of the interpretation of seismic facies, fixing the number of target classes inhibits the generalization capability of a model trained on one facies dataset to another, which is likely to have a different number of facies. To address this shortcoming, we propose a few-shot semantic segmentation method for interpreting seismic facies that can adapt to the varying number of facies across the dataset, dubbed the AdaSemSeg. In general, the backbone network of FSSS methods is initialized with the statistics learned from the ImageNet dataset for better performance. The lack of such a huge annotated dataset for seismic images motivates using a self-supervised algorithm on seismic datasets to initialize the backbone network. We have trained the AdaSemSeg on three public seismic facies datasets with different numbers of facies and evaluated the proposed method on multiple metrics. The performance of the AdaSemSeg on unseen datasets (not used in training) is better than the prototype-based few-shot method and baselines.

Paperid: 6128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15040.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language model (VLM) has been designed for large scale image-text alignment as a pretrained foundation model. For downstream few shot classification tasks, parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) VLM has gained much popularity in the computer vision community. PEFT methods like prompt tuning and linear adapter have been studied for fine-tuning VLM while low rank adaptation (LoRA) algorithm has rarely been considered for few shot fine-tuning VLM. The main obstacle to use LoRA for few shot fine-tuning is the catastrophic forgetting problem. Because the visual language alignment knowledge is important for the generality in few shot learning, whereas low rank adaptation interferes with the most informative direction of the pretrained weight matrix. We propose the complementary subspace low rank adaptation (Comp-LoRA) method to regularize the catastrophic forgetting problem in few shot VLM finetuning. In detail, we optimize the low rank matrix in the complementary subspace, thus preserving the general vision language alignment ability of VLM when learning the novel few shot information. We conduct comparison experiments of the proposed Comp-LoRA method and other PEFT methods on fine-tuning VLM for few shot classification. And we also present the suppression on the catastrophic forgetting problem of our proposed method against directly applying LoRA to VLM. The results show that the proposed method surpasses the baseline method by about +1.0\% Top-1 accuracy and preserves the VLM zero-shot performance over the baseline method by about +1.3\% Top-1 accuracy.

Paperid: 6129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14683.pdf

Abstract:
As Industry 4.0 transforms the food industry, the role of software in achieving compliance with food-safety regulations is becoming increasingly critical. Food-safety regulations, like those in many legal domains, have largely been articulated in a technology-independent manner to ensure their longevity and broad applicability. However, this approach leaves a gap between the regulations and the modern systems and software increasingly used to implement them. In this article, we pursue two main goals. First, we conduct a Grounded Theory study of food-safety regulations and develop a conceptual characterization of food-safety concepts that closely relate to systems and software requirements. Second, we examine the effectiveness of two families of large language models (LLMs) -- BERT and GPT -- in automatically classifying legal provisions based on requirements-related food-safety concepts. Our results show that: (a) when fine-tuned, the accuracy differences between the best-performing models in the BERT and GPT families are relatively small. Nevertheless, the most powerful model in our experiments, GPT-4o, still achieves the highest accuracy, with an average Precision of 89% and an average Recall of 87%; (b) few-shot learning with GPT-4o increases Recall to 97% but decreases Precision to 65%, suggesting a trade-off between fine-tuning and few-shot learning; (c) despite our training examples being drawn exclusively from Canadian regulations, LLM-based classification performs consistently well on test provisions from the US, indicating a degree of generalizability across regulatory jurisdictions; and (d) for our classification task, LLMs significantly outperform simpler baselines constructed using long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and automatic keyword extraction.

Paperid: 6130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13977.pdf

Abstract:
Social media platforms utilize Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered recommendation algorithms to maximize user engagement, which can result in inadvertent exposure to harmful content. Current moderation efforts, reliant on classifiers trained with extensive human-annotated data, struggle with scalability and adapting to new forms of harm. To address these challenges, we propose a novel re-ranking approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our method dynamically assesses and re-ranks content sequences, effectively mitigating harmful content exposure without requiring extensive labeled data. Alongside traditional ranking metrics, we also introduce two new metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of re-ranking in reducing exposure to harmful content. Through experiments on three datasets, three models and across three configurations, we demonstrate that our LLM-based approach significantly outperforms existing proprietary moderation approaches, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for harm mitigation.

Paperid: 6131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13976.pdf

Abstract:
The prevalence of harmful content on social media platforms poses significant risks to users and society, necessitating more effective and scalable content moderation strategies. Current approaches rely on human moderators, supervised classifiers, and large volumes of training data, and often struggle with scalability, subjectivity, and the dynamic nature of harmful content (e.g., violent content, dangerous challenge trends, etc.). To bridge these gaps, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to undertake few-shot dynamic content moderation via in-context learning. Through extensive experiments on multiple LLMs, we demonstrate that our few-shot approaches can outperform existing proprietary baselines (Perspective and OpenAI Moderation) as well as prior state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods, in identifying harm. We also incorporate visual information (video thumbnails) and assess if different multimodal techniques improve model performance. Our results underscore the significant benefits of employing LLM based methods for scalable and dynamic harmful content moderation online.

Paperid: 6132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13943.pdf

Abstract:
Cognitive diagnosis aims to infer students' mastery levels based on their historical response logs. However, existing cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs), which rely on ID embeddings, often have to train specific models on specific domains. This limitation may hinder their directly practical application in various target domains, such as different subjects (e.g., Math, English and Physics) or different education platforms (e.g., ASSISTments, Junyi Academy and Khan Academy). To address this issue, this paper proposes the language representation favored zero-shot cross-domain cognitive diagnosis (LRCD). Specifically, LRCD first analyzes the behavior patterns of students, exercises and concepts in different domains, and then describes the profiles of students, exercises and concepts using textual descriptions. Via recent advanced text-embedding modules, these profiles can be transformed to vectors in the unified language space. Moreover, to address the discrepancy between the language space and the cognitive diagnosis space, we propose language-cognitive mappers in LRCD to learn the mapping from the former to the latter. Then, these profiles can be easily and efficiently integrated and trained with existing CDMs. Extensive experiments show that training LRCD on real-world datasets can achieve commendable zero-shot performance across different target domains, and in some cases, it can even achieve competitive performance with some classic CDMs trained on the full response data on target domains. Notably, we surprisingly find that LRCD can also provide interesting insights into the differences between various subjects (such as humanities and sciences) and sources (such as primary and secondary education).

Paperid: 6133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13418.pdf

Abstract:
Feature quality is paramount for classification performance, particularly in few-shot scenarios. Contrastive learning, a widely adopted technique for enhancing feature quality, leverages sample relations to extract intrinsic features that capture semantic information and has achieved remarkable success in Few-Shot Learning (FSL). Nevertheless, current few-shot contrastive learning approaches often overlook the semantic similarity discrepancies at different granularities when employing the same modeling approach for different sample relations, which limits the potential of few-shot contrastive learning. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective contrastive learning approach, Multi-Grained Relation Contrastive Learning (MGRCL), as a pre-training feature learning model to boost few-shot learning by meticulously modeling sample relations at different granularities. MGRCL categorizes sample relations into three types: intra-sample relation of the same sample under different transformations, intra-class relation of homogenous samples, and inter-class relation of inhomogeneous samples. In MGRCL, we design Transformation Consistency Learning (TCL) to ensure the rigorous semantic consistency of a sample under different transformations by aligning predictions of input pairs. Furthermore, to preserve discriminative information, we employ Class Contrastive Learning (CCL) to ensure that a sample is always closer to its homogenous samples than its inhomogeneous ones, as homogenous samples share similar semantic content while inhomogeneous samples have different semantic content. Our method is assessed across four popular FSL benchmarks, showing that such a simple pre-training feature learning method surpasses a majority of leading FSL methods. Moreover, our method can be incorporated into other FSL methods as the pre-trained model and help them obtain significant performance gains.

Paperid: 6134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12751.pdf

Abstract:
Patent figure classification facilitates faceted search in patent retrieval systems, enabling efficient prior art search. Existing approaches have explored patent figure classification for only a single aspect and for aspects with a limited number of concepts. In recent years, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown tremendous performance across numerous computer vision downstream tasks, however, they remain unexplored for patent figure classification. Our work explores the efficacy of LVLMs in patent figure visual question answering (VQA) and classification, focusing on zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. For this purpose, we introduce new datasets, PatFigVQA and PatFigCLS, for fine-tuning and evaluation regarding multiple aspects of patent figures~(i.e., type, projection, patent class, and objects). For a computational-effective handling of a large number of classes using LVLM, we propose a novel tournament-style classification strategy that leverages a series of multiple-choice questions. Experimental results and comparisons of multiple classification approaches based on LVLMs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in few-shot settings show the feasibility of the proposed approaches.

Paperid: 6135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11335.pdf

Abstract:
The task of policy compliance detection (PCD) is to determine if a scenario is in compliance with respect to a set of written policies. In a conversational setting, the results of PCD can indicate if clarifying questions must be asked to determine compliance status. Existing approaches usually claim to have reasoning capabilities that are latent or require a large amount of annotated data. In this work, we propose logical decomposition for policy compliance (LDPC): a neuro-symbolic framework to detect policy compliance using large language models (LLMs) in a few-shot setting. By selecting only a few exemplars alongside recently developed prompting techniques, we demonstrate that our approach soundly reasons about policy compliance conversations by extracting sub-questions to be answered, assigning truth values from contextual information, and explicitly producing a set of logic statements from the given policies. The formulation of explicit logic graphs can in turn help answer PCDrelated questions with increased transparency and explainability. We apply this approach to the popular PCD and conversational machine reading benchmark, ShARC, and show competitive performance with no task-specific finetuning. We also leverage the inherently interpretable architecture of LDPC to understand where errors occur, revealing ambiguities in the ShARC dataset and highlighting the challenges involved with reasoning for conversational question answering.

Paperid: 6136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10860.pdf

Abstract:
The claim matching (CM) task can benefit an automated fact-checking pipeline by putting together claims that can be resolved with the same fact-check. In this work, we are the first to explore zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to the task. We consider CM as a binary classification task and experiment with a set of instruction-following large language models (GPT-3.5-turbo, Gemini-1.5-flash, Mistral-7B-Instruct, and Llama-3-8B-Instruct), investigating prompt templates. We introduce a new CM dataset, ClaimMatch, which will be released upon acceptance. We put LLMs to the test in the CM task and find that it can be tackled by leveraging more mature yet similar tasks such as natural language inference or paraphrase detection. We also propose a pipeline for CM, which we evaluate on texts of different lengths.

Paperid: 6137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10561.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous surgical robots are a promising solution to the increasing demand for surgery amid a shortage of surgeons. Recent work has proposed learning-based approaches for the autonomous manipulation of soft tissue. However, due to variability in tissue geometries and stiffnesses, these methods do not always perform optimally, especially in out-of-distribution settings. We propose, develop, and test the first application of uncertainty quantification to learned surgical soft-tissue manipulation policies as an early identification system for task failures. We analyze two different methods of uncertainty quantification, deep ensembles and Monte Carlo dropout, and find that deep ensembles provide a stronger signal of future task success or failure. We validate our approach using the physical daVinci Research Kit (dVRK) surgical robot to perform physical soft-tissue manipulation. We show that we are able to successfully detect out-of-distribution states leading to task failure and request human intervention when necessary while still enabling autonomous manipulation when possible. Our learned tissue manipulation policy with uncertainty-based early failure detection achieves a zero-shot sim2real performance improvement of 47.5% over the prior state of the art in learned soft-tissue manipulation. We also show that our method generalizes well to new types of tissue as well as to a bimanual soft-tissue manipulation task.

Paperid: 6138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10365.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates various approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify gaps and misconceptions in students' self-explanations of specific instructional material, in our case explanations of code examples. This research is a part of our larger effort to automate the assessment of students' freely generated responses, focusing specifically on their self-explanations of code examples during activities related to code comprehension. In this work, we experiment with zero-shot prompting, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and preference alignment of LLMs to identify gaps in students' self-explanation. With simple prompting, GPT-4 consistently outperformed LLaMA3 and Mistral in identifying gaps and misconceptions, as confirmed by human evaluations. Additionally, our results suggest that fine-tuned large language models are more effective at identifying gaps in students' explanations compared to zero-shot and few-shot prompting techniques. Furthermore, our findings show that the preference optimization approach using Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) outperforms SFT in identifying gaps and misconceptions in students' code explanations.

Paperid: 6139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09887.pdf

Abstract:
Object Referring Analysis (ORA), commonly known as referring expression comprehension, requires the identification and localization of specific objects in an image based on natural descriptions. Unlike generic object detection, ORA requires both accurate language understanding and precise visual localization, making it inherently more complex. Although recent pre-trained large visual grounding detectors have achieved significant progress, they heavily rely on extensively labeled data and time-consuming learning. To address these, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for zero-shot ORA, termed FLORA (Formal Language for Object Referring and Analysis). FLORA harnesses the inherent reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and integrates a formal language model - a logical framework that regulates language within structured, rule-based descriptions - to provide effective zero-shot ORA. More specifically, our formal language model (FLM) enables an effective, logic-driven interpretation of object descriptions without necessitating any training processes. Built upon FLM-regulated LLM outputs, we further devise a Bayesian inference framework and employ appropriate off-the-shelf interpretive models to finalize the reasoning, delivering favorable robustness against LLM hallucinations and compelling ORA performance in a training-free manner. In practice, our FLORA boosts the zero-shot performance of existing pretrained grounding detectors by up to around 45%. Our comprehensive evaluation across different challenging datasets also confirms that FLORA consistently surpasses current state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in both detection and segmentation tasks associated with zero-shot ORA. We believe our probabilistic parsing and reasoning of the LLM outputs elevate the reliability and interpretability of zero-shot ORA. We shall release codes upon publication.

Paperid: 6140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08581.pdf

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable ability in semi-supervised node classification. However, most existing GNNs rely heavily on a large amount of labeled data for training, which is labor-intensive and requires extensive domain knowledge. In this paper, we first analyze the restrictions of GNNs generalization from the perspective of supervision signals in the context of few-shot semi-supervised node classification. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm named NormProp, which utilizes the homophily assumption of unlabeled nodes to generate additional supervision signals, thereby enhancing the generalization against label scarcity. The key idea is to efficiently capture both the class information and the consistency of aggregation during message passing, via decoupling the direction and Euclidean norm of node representations. Moreover, we conduct a theoretical analysis to determine the upper bound of Euclidean norm, and then propose homophilous regularization to constraint the consistency of unlabeled nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NormProp achieve state-of-the-art performance under low-label rate scenarios with low computational complexity.

Paperid: 6141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08246.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has proposed automated red-teaming methods for testing the vulnerabilities of a given target large language model (LLM). These methods use red-teaming LLMs to uncover inputs that induce harmful behavior in a target LLM. In this paper, we study red-teaming strategies that enable a targeted security assessment. We propose an optimization framework for red-teaming with proximity constraints, where the discovered prompts must be similar to reference prompts from a given dataset. This dataset serves as a template for the discovered prompts, anchoring the search for test-cases to specific topics, writing styles, or types of harmful behavior. We show that established auto-regressive model architectures do not perform well in this setting. We therefore introduce a black-box red-teaming method inspired by text-diffusion models: Diffusion for Auditing and Red-Teaming (DART). DART modifies the reference prompt by perturbing it in the embedding space, directly controlling the amount of change introduced. We systematically evaluate our method by comparing its effectiveness with established methods based on model fine-tuning and zero- and few-shot prompting. Our results show that DART is significantly more effective at discovering harmful inputs in close proximity to the reference prompt.

Paperid: 6142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07114.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to enable models to recognize novel compositions of visual states and objects that were absent during training. Existing methods predominantly focus on learning semantic representations of seen compositions but often fail to disentangle the independent features of states and objects in images, thereby limiting their ability to generalize to unseen compositions. To address this challenge, we propose Duplex, a novel dual-prototype learning method that integrates semantic and visual prototypes through a carefully designed dual-branch architecture, enabling effective representation learning for compositional tasks. Duplex utilizes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to adaptively update visual prototypes, capturing complex interactions between states and objects. Additionally, it leverages the strong visual-semantic alignment of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and employs a multi-path architecture combined with prompt engineering to align image and text representations, ensuring robust generalization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that Duplex outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both closed-world and open-world settings.

Paperid: 6143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07113.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a novel approach for depth estimation using images obtained from monocular structured light systems. In contrast to many existing methods that depend on image matching, our technique employs a density voxel grid to represent scene geometry. This grid is trained through self-supervised differentiable volume rendering. Our method leverages color fields derived from the projected patterns in structured light systems during the rendering process, facilitating the isolated optimization of the geometry field. This innovative approach leads to faster convergence and high-quality results. Additionally, we integrate normalized device coordinates (NDC), a distortion loss, and a distinctive surface-based color loss to enhance geometric fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms current matching-based techniques in terms of geometric performance in few-shot scenarios, achieving an approximately 30% reduction in average estimated depth errors for both synthetic scenes and real-world captured scenes. Moreover, our approach allows for rapid training, being approximately three times faster than previous matching-free methods that utilize implicit representations.

Paperid: 6144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05586.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents FreeSVC, a promising multilingual singing voice conversion approach that leverages an enhanced VITS model with Speaker-invariant Clustering (SPIN) for better content representation and the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) speaker encoder ECAPA2. FreeSVC incorporates trainable language embeddings to handle multiple languages and employs an advanced speaker encoder to disentangle speaker characteristics from linguistic content. Designed for zero-shot learning, FreeSVC enables cross-lingual singing voice conversion without extensive language-specific training. We demonstrate that a multilingual content extractor is crucial for optimal cross-language conversion. Our source code and models are publicly available.

Paperid: 6145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03183.pdf

Abstract:
Most current captioning systems use language models trained on data from specific settings, such as image-based captioning via Amazon Mechanical Turk, limiting their ability to generalize to other modality distributions and contexts. This limitation hinders performance in tasks like audio or video captioning, where different semantic cues are needed. Addressing this challenge is crucial for creating more adaptable and versatile captioning frameworks applicable across diverse real-world contexts. In this work, we introduce a method to adapt captioning networks to the semantics of alternative settings, such as capturing audibility in audio captioning, where it is crucial to describe sounds and their sources. Our framework consists of two main components: (i) a frozen captioning system incorporating a language model (LM), and (ii) a text classifier that guides the captioning system. The classifier is trained on a dataset automatically generated by GPT-4, using tailored prompts specifically designed to enhance key aspects of the generated captions. Importantly, the framework operates solely during inference, eliminating the need for further training of the underlying captioning model. We evaluate the framework on various models and modalities, with a focus on audio captioning, and report promising results. Notably, when combined with an existing zero-shot audio captioning system, our framework improves its quality and sets state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot audio captioning.

Paperid: 6146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01237.pdf

Abstract:
Structured product data, in the form of attribute-value pairs, is essential for e-commerce platforms to support features such as faceted product search and attribute-based product comparison. However, vendors often provide unstructured product descriptions, making attribute value extraction necessary to ensure data consistency and usability. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential for product attribute value extraction in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has shown that self-refinement techniques can improve the performance of LLMs on tasks such as code generation and text-to-SQL translation. For other tasks, the application of these techniques has resulted in increased costs due to processing additional tokens, without achieving any improvement in performance. This paper investigates applying two self-refinement techniques (error-based prompt rewriting and self-correction) to the product attribute value extraction task. The self-refinement techniques are evaluated across zero-shot, few-shot in-context learning, and fine-tuning scenarios using GPT-4o. The experiments show that both self-refinement techniques fail to significantly improve the extraction performance while substantially increasing processing costs. For scenarios with development data, fine-tuning yields the highest performance, while the ramp-up costs of fine-tuning are balanced out as the amount of product descriptions increases.

Paperid: 6147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01136.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful framework for enabling agents to learn complex, coordinated behaviors but faces persistent challenges regarding its generalization, scalability and sample efficiency. Recent advancements have sought to alleviate those issues by embedding intrinsic symmetries of the systems in the policy. Yet, most dynamical systems exhibit little to no symmetries to exploit. This paper presents a novel framework for embedding extrinsic symmetries in multi-agent system dynamics that enables the use of symmetry-enhanced methods to address systems with insufficient intrinsic symmetries, expanding the scope of equivariant learning to a wide variety of MARL problems. Central to our framework is the Group Equivariant Graphormer, a group-modular architecture specifically designed for distributed swarming tasks. Extensive experiments on a swarm of symmetry-breaking quadrotors validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing its potential for improved generalization and zero-shot scalability. Our method achieves significant reductions in collision rates and enhances task success rates across a diverse range of scenarios and varying swarm sizes.

Paperid: 6148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20110.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification remains a critical challenge in the field of computer vision, particularly in data-scarce environments. Existing methods typically rely on pre-trained visual-language models, such as CLIP. However, due to the modality gap, which is the inconsistent distribution of image and text features in the joint embedding space, directly using these features as class prototypes often leads to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Mapping (CMM) method. This method globally aligns image features with the text feature space through linear transformation and optimizes their local spatial relationships using triplet loss, thereby significantly enhancing cross-modal consistency. Experimental results show that compared to other methods, CMM simplifies the training process and demonstrates higher efficiency. Furthermore, CMM improves the average Top-1 accuracy by 1.06% on 11 benchmark datasets compared to methods that partially fine-tune the backbone, and it performs excellently on 4 distribution shift datasets. Notably, CMM effectively mitigates the modality gap in pre-trained models, enabling text features to serve as effective class prototypes for image features, thus providing an efficient and highly generalizable solution for few-shot learning.

Paperid: 6149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15902.pdf

Abstract:
We show that current open-source foundational LLMs possess instruction capability and German legal background knowledge that is sufficient for some legal analysis in an educational context. However, model capability breaks down in very specific tasks, such as the classification of "Gutachtenstil" appraisal style components, or with complex contexts, such as complete legal opinions. Even with extended context and effective prompting strategies, they cannot match the Bag-of-Words baseline. To combat this, we introduce a Retrieval Augmented Generation based prompt example selection method that substantially improves predictions in high data availability scenarios. We further evaluate the performance of pre-trained LLMs on two standard tasks for argument mining and automated essay scoring and find it to be more adequate. Throughout, pre-trained LLMs improve upon the baseline in scenarios with little or no labeled data with Chain-of-Thought prompting further helping in the zero-shot case.

Paperid: 6150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15628.pdf

Abstract:
Interpreting the internal process of neural models has long been a challenge. This challenge remains relevant in the era of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL); for example, ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which example in the few-shot examples contributed to identifying/solving the task. To this end, in this paper, we design synthetic diagnostic tasks of inductive reasoning, inspired by the generalization tests typically adopted in psycholinguistics. Here, most in-context examples are ambiguous w.r.t. their underlying rule, and one critical example disambiguates it. The question is whether conventional input attribution (IA) methods can track such a reasoning process, i.e., identify the influential example, in ICL. Our experiments provide several practical findings; for example, a certain simple IA method works the best, and the larger the model, the generally harder it is to interpret the ICL with gradient-based IA methods.

Paperid: 6151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15507.pdf

Abstract:
Generative AI is revolutionizing engineering design practices by enabling rapid prototyping and manipulation of designs. One example of design manipulation involves taking two reference design images and using them as prompts to generate a design image that combines aspects of both. Real engineering designs have physical constraints and functional requirements in addition to aesthetic design considerations. Internet-scale foundation models commonly used for image generation, however, are unable to take these physical constraints and functional requirements into consideration as part of the generation process. We consider the problem of generating a design inspired by two input designs, and propose a zero-shot framework toward enforcing physical, functional requirements over the generation process by leveraging a pretrained diffusion model as the backbone. As a case study, we consider the example of rotational symmetry in generation of wheel designs. Automotive wheels are required to be rotationally symmetric for physical stability. We formulate the requirement of rotational symmetry by the use of a symmetrizer, and we use this symmetrizer to guide the diffusion process towards symmetric wheel generations. Our experimental results find that the proposed approach makes generated interpolations with higher realism than methods in related work, as evaluated by FrÃ©chet inception distance (FID). We also find that our approach generates designs that more closely satisfy physical and functional requirements than generating without the symmetry guidance.

Paperid: 6152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14678.pdf

Abstract:
Neural architecture search (NAS) enables finding the best-performing architecture from a search space automatically. Most NAS methods exploit an over-parameterized network (i.e., a supernet) containing all possible architectures (i.e., subnets) in the search space. However, the subnets that share the same set of parameters are likely to have different characteristics, interfering with each other during training. To address this, few-shot NAS methods have been proposed that divide the space into a few subspaces and employ a separate supernet for each subspace to limit the extent of weight sharing. They achieve state-of-the-art performance, but the computational cost increases accordingly. We introduce in this paper a novel few-shot NAS method that exploits the number of nonlinear functions to split the search space. To be specific, our method divides the space such that each subspace consists of subnets with the same number of nonlinear functions. Our splitting criterion is efficient, since it does not require comparing gradients of a supernet to split the space. In addition, we have found that dividing the space allows us to reduce the channel dimensions required for each supernet, which enables training multiple supernets in an efficient manner. We also introduce a supernet-balanced sampling (SBS) technique, sampling several subnets at each training step, to train different supernets evenly within a limited number of training steps. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://cvlab.yonsei.ac.kr/projects/EFS-NAS.

Paperid: 6153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14008.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce FarExStance, a new dataset for explainable stance detection in Farsi. Each instance in this dataset contains a claim, the stance of an article or social media post towards that claim, and an extractive explanation which provides evidence for the stance label. We compare the performance of a fine-tuned multilingual RoBERTa model to several large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and parameter-efficient fine-tuned settings on our new dataset. On stance detection, the most accurate models are the fine-tuned RoBERTa model, the LLM Aya-23-8B which has been fine-tuned using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Regarding the quality of the explanations, our automatic evaluation metrics indicate that few-shot GPT-4o generates the most coherent explanations, while our human evaluation reveals that the best Overall Explanation Score (OES) belongs to few-shot Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The fine-tuned Aya-32-8B model produced explanations most closely aligned with the reference explanations.

Paperid: 6154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11185.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of automatic speech recognition models often degenerates on domains not covered by the training data. Domain adaptation can address this issue, assuming the availability of the target domain data in the target language. However, such assumption does not stand in many real-world applications. To make domain adaptation more applicable, we address the problem of zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA), where target domain data is unavailable in the target language. Instead, we transfer the target domain knowledge from another source language where the target domain data is more accessible. To do that, we first perform cross-lingual pre-training (XLPT) to share domain knowledge across languages, then use target language fine-tuning to build the final model. One challenge in this practice is that the pre-trained knowledge can be forgotten during fine-tuning, resulting in sub-optimal adaptation performance. To address this issue, we propose transliterated ZSDA to achieve consistent pre-training and fine-tuning labels, leading to maximum preservation of the pre-trained knowledge. Experimental results show that transliterated ZSDA relatively decreases the word error rate by 9.2% compared with a wav2vec 2.0 baseline. Moreover, transliterated ZSDA consistently outperforms self-supervised ZSDA and performs on par with supervised ZSDA, proving the superiority of transliteration-based pre-training labels.

Paperid: 6155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11174.pdf

Abstract:
The risk-controlling prediction sets (RCPS) framework is a general tool for transforming the output of any machine learning model to design a predictive rule with rigorous error rate control. The key idea behind this framework is to use labeled hold-out calibration data to tune a hyper-parameter that affects the error rate of the resulting prediction rule. However, the limitation of such a calibration scheme is that with limited hold-out data, the tuned hyper-parameter becomes noisy and leads to a prediction rule with an error rate that is often unnecessarily conservative. To overcome this sample-size barrier, we introduce a semi-supervised calibration procedure that leverages unlabeled data to rigorously tune the hyper-parameter without compromising statistical validity. Our procedure builds upon the prediction-powered inference framework, carefully tailoring it to risk-controlling tasks. We demonstrate the benefits and validity of our proposal through two real-data experiments: few-shot image classification and early time series classification.

Paperid: 6156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10031.pdf

Abstract:
Fluorescence microscopy image (FMI) denoising faces critical challenges due to the compound mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise with strong spatial correlation and the impracticality of acquiring paired noisy/clean data in dynamic biomedical scenarios. While supervised methods trained on synthetic noise (e.g., Gaussian/Poisson) suffer from out-of-distribution generalization issues, existing self-supervised approaches degrade under real FMI noise due to oversimplified noise assumptions and computationally intensive deep architectures. In this paper, we propose Fluorescence Micrograph to Self (FM2S), a zero-shot denoiser that achieves efficient FMI denoising through three key innovations: 1) A noise injection module that ensures training data sufficiency through adaptive Poisson-Gaussian synthesis while preserving spatial correlation and global statistics of FMI noise for robust model generalization; 2) A two-stage progressive learning strategy that first recovers structural priors via pre-denoised targets then refines high-frequency details through noise distribution alignment; 3) An ultra-lightweight network (3.5k parameters) enabling rapid convergence with 270$\times$ faster training and inference than SOTAs. Extensive experiments across FMI datasets demonstrate FM2S's superiority: It outperforms CVF-SID by 1.4dB PSNR on average while requiring 0.1% parameters of AP-BSN. Notably, FM2S maintains stable performance across varying noise levels, proving its practicality for microscopy platforms with diverse sensor characteristics. Code and datasets will be released.

Paperid: 6157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09319.pdf

Abstract:
Existing few-shot medical image segmentation (FSMIS) models fail to address a practical issue in medical imaging: the domain shift caused by different imaging techniques, which limits the applicability to current FSMIS tasks. To overcome this limitation, we focus on the cross-domain few-shot medical image segmentation (CD-FSMIS) task, aiming to develop a generalized model capable of adapting to a broader range of medical image segmentation scenarios with limited labeled data from the novel target domain. Inspired by the characteristics of frequency domain similarity across different domains, we propose a Frequency-aware Matching Network (FAMNet), which includes two key components: a Frequency-aware Matching (FAM) module and a Multi-Spectral Fusion (MSF) module. The FAM module tackles two problems during the meta-learning phase: 1) intra-domain variance caused by the inherent support-query bias, due to the different appearances of organs and lesions, and 2) inter-domain variance caused by different medical imaging techniques. Additionally, we design an MSF module to integrate the different frequency features decoupled by the FAM module, and further mitigate the impact of inter-domain variance on the model's segmentation performance. Combining these two modules, our FAMNet surpasses existing FSMIS models and Cross-domain Few-shot Semantic Segmentation models on three cross-domain datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance in the CD-FSMIS task.

Paperid: 6158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08482.pdf

Abstract:
Polyp segmentation in colonoscopy is crucial for detecting colorectal cancer. However, it is challenging due to variations in the structure, color, and size of polyps, as well as the lack of clear boundaries with surrounding tissues. Traditional segmentation models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) struggle to capture detailed patterns and global context, limiting their performance. Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models address some of these issues but have difficulties in capturing local context and lack strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we propose the Mamba-guided Segment Anything Model (SAM-Mamba) for efficient polyp segmentation. Our approach introduces a Mamba-Prior module in the encoder to bridge the gap between the general pre-trained representation of SAM and polyp-relevant trivial clues. It injects salient cues of polyp images into the SAM image encoder as a domain prior while capturing global dependencies at various scales, leading to more accurate segmentation results. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that SAM-Mamba outperforms traditional CNN, ViT, and Adapter-based models in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Additionally, SAM-Mamba demonstrates excellent adaptability to unseen datasets, making it highly suitable for real-time clinical use.

Paperid: 6159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07161.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen combinations of seen attributes and objects. Current CLIP-based methods in CZSL, despite their advancements, often fail to effectively understand and link the attributes and objects due to inherent limitations in CLIP's pretraining mechanisms. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel framework, Understanding and Linking Attributes and Objects (ULAO) in CZSL, which comprises two innovative modules. The Understanding Attributes and Objects (UAO) module improves primitive understanding by sequential primitive prediction and leveraging recognized objects as contextual hints for attribute classification. Concurrently, the Linking Attributes and Objects (LAO) module improves the attribute-object linkage understanding through a new contrastive learning strategy that incorporates tailored hard negative generation and adaptive loss adjustments. We demonstrate our model's superiority by showcasing its state-of-the-art performance across three benchmark datasets in both Closed-World (CW) and Open-World (OW) scenarios.

Paperid: 6160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04975.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are crucial to overcome the challenges of data scarcity and ever growing language model sizes. This applies in particular to specialized scientific domains, where researchers might lack expertise and resources to fine-tune high-performing language models to nuanced tasks. We propose PETapter, a novel method that effectively combines PEFT methods with PET-style classification heads to boost few-shot learning capabilities without the significant computational overhead typically associated with full model training. We validate our approach on three established NLP benchmark datasets and one real-world dataset from communication research. We show that PETapter not only achieves comparable performance to full few-shot fine-tuning using pattern-exploiting training (PET), but also provides greater reliability and higher parameter efficiency while enabling higher modularity and easy sharing of the trained modules, which enables more researchers to utilize high-performing NLP-methods in their research.

Paperid: 6161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00139.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image retrieval is a critical task for managing diverse visual content, but common benchmarks for the task rely on small, single-domain datasets that fail to capture real-world complexity. Pre-trained vision-language models tend to perform well with easy negatives but struggle with hard negatives--visually similar yet incorrect images--especially in open-domain scenarios. To address this, we introduce Episodic Few-Shot Adaptation (EFSA), a novel test-time framework that adapts pre-trained models dynamically to a query's domain by fine-tuning on top-k retrieved candidates and synthetic captions generated for them. EFSA improves performance across diverse domains while preserving generalization, as shown in evaluations on queries from eight highly distinct visual domains and an open-domain retrieval pool of over one million images. Our work highlights the potential of episodic few-shot adaptation to enhance robustness in the critical and understudied task of open-domain text-to-image retrieval.

Paperid: 6162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18229.pdf

Abstract:
We propose SharpDepth, a novel approach to monocular metric depth estimation that combines the metric accuracy of discriminative depth estimation methods (e.g., Metric3D, UniDepth) with the fine-grained boundary sharpness typically achieved by generative methods (e.g., Marigold, Lotus). Traditional discriminative models trained on real-world data with sparse ground-truth depth can accurately predict metric depth but often produce over-smoothed or low-detail depth maps. Generative models, in contrast, are trained on synthetic data with dense ground truth, generating depth maps with sharp boundaries yet only providing relative depth with low accuracy. Our approach bridges these limitations by integrating metric accuracy with detailed boundary preservation, resulting in depth predictions that are both metrically precise and visually sharp. Our extensive zero-shot evaluations on standard depth estimation benchmarks confirm SharpDepth effectiveness, showing its ability to achieve both high depth accuracy and detailed representation, making it well-suited for applications requiring high-quality depth perception across diverse, real-world environments.

Paperid: 6163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17363.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation often faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive annotation costs. While few-shot learning offers a promising solution to alleviate this burden, conventional approaches still rely heavily on pre-training with large volumes of labeled data from known categories. To address this issue, we propose leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM), pre-trained on over 1 billion masks, thus circumventing the need for extensive domain-specific annotated data. In light of this, we developed SAM-MPA, an innovative SAM-based framework for few-shot medical image segmentation using Mask Propagation-based Auto-prompting. Initially, we employ k-centroid clustering to select the most representative examples for labelling to construct the support set. These annotated examples are registered to other images yielding deformation fields that facilitate the propagation of the mask knowledge to obtain coarse masks across the dataset. Subsequently, we automatically generate visual prompts based on the region and boundary expansion of the coarse mask, including points, box and a coarse mask. Finally, we can obtain the segmentation predictions by inputting these prompts into SAM and refine the results by post refinement module. We validate the performance of the proposed framework through extensive experiments conducted on two medical image datasets with different modalities. Our method achieves Dices of 74.53%, 94.36% on Breast US, Chest X-ray, respectively. Experimental results substantiate that SAM-MPA yields high-accuracy segmentations within 10 labeled examples, outperforming other state-of-the-art few-shot auto-segmentation methods. Our method enables the customization of SAM for any medical image dataset with a small number of labeled examples.

Paperid: 6164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16793.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) provides high-resolution pathological images and whole-transcriptomic expression profiles at individual spots across whole-slide scales. This setting makes it an ideal data source to develop multimodal foundation models. Although recent studies attempted to fine-tune visual encoders with trainable gene encoders based on spot-level, the absence of a wider slide perspective and spatial intrinsic relationships limits their ability to capture ST-specific insights effectively. Here, we introduce ST-Align, the first foundation model designed for ST that deeply aligns image-gene pairs by incorporating spatial context, effectively bridging pathological imaging with genomic features. We design a novel pretraining framework with a three-target alignment strategy for ST-Align, enabling (1) multi-scale alignment across image-gene pairs, capturing both spot- and niche-level contexts for a comprehensive perspective, and (2) cross-level alignment of multimodal insights, connecting localized cellular characteristics and broader tissue architecture. Additionally, ST-Align employs specialized encoders tailored to distinct ST contexts, followed by an Attention-Based Fusion Network (ABFN) for enhanced multimodal fusion, effectively merging domain-shared knowledge with ST-specific insights from both pathological and genomic data. We pre-trained ST-Align on 1.3 million spot-niche pairs and evaluated its performance through two downstream tasks across six datasets, demonstrating superior zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. ST-Align highlights the potential for reducing the cost of ST and providing valuable insights into the distinction of critical compositions within human tissue.

Paperid: 6165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16147.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion is a technique that alters the speaker identity of an input speech to match a target speaker using only a single reference utterance, without requiring additional training. Recent approaches extensively utilize self-supervised learning features with K-means quantization to extract high-quality content representations while removing speaker identity. However, this quantization process also eliminates fine-grained phonetic and prosodic variations, degrading intelligibility and prosody preservation. While prior works have primarily focused on quantized representations, quantization residuals remain underutilized and deserve further exploration. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that fully utilizes quantization residuals by leveraging temporal properties of speech components. This facilitates the disentanglement of speaker identity and the recovery of phonetic and prosodic details lost during quantization. By applying only K-means quantization and linear projections, our method achieves simple yet effective disentanglement, without requiring complex architectures or explicit supervision. This allows for high-fidelity voice conversion trained solely with reconstruction losses. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms existing methods across both subjective and objective metrics. It achieves superior intelligibility and speaker similarity, along with improved prosody preservation, highlighting the impact of our Linear Disentangler module.

Paperid: 6166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16035.pdf

Abstract:
A fundamental open challenge in modern LLM scaling is the lack of understanding around emergent capabilities. In particular, language model pretraining loss is known to be highly predictable as a function of compute. However, downstream capabilities are far less predictable -- sometimes even exhibiting emergent jumps -- which makes it challenging to anticipate the capabilities of future models. In this work, we first pose the task of emergence prediction: given access to current LLMs that have random few-shot accuracy on a task, can we predict whether future models (GPT-N+1) will have non-trivial accuracy on that task? We then discover a simple insight for this problem: finetuning LLMs on a given task can shift the point in scaling at which emergence occurs towards less capable models. To operationalize this insight, we can finetune LLMs with varying amounts of data and fit a parametric function that predicts when emergence will occur (i.e., "emergence laws"). We validate this approach using four standard NLP benchmarks where large-scale open-source LLMs already demonstrate emergence (MMLU, GSM8K, CommonsenseQA, and CoLA). Using only small-scale LLMs, we find that, in some cases, we can accurately predict whether models trained with up to 4x more compute have emerged. Finally, we present a case study of two realistic uses for emergence prediction.

Paperid: 6167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14917.pdf

Abstract:
Task-aware robotic grasping is a challenging problem that requires the integration of semantic understanding and geometric reasoning. This paper proposes a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms to enable zero-shot task-conditioned grasp synthesis. The framework segments objects into meaningful subparts and labels each subpart semantically, creating structured representations that can be used to prompt an LLM. By coupling semantic and geometric representations of an object's structure, the LLM's knowledge about tasks and which parts to grasp can be applied in the physical world. The QD-generated grasp archive provides a diverse set of grasps, allowing us to select the most suitable grasp based on the task. We evaluated the proposed method on a subset of the YCB dataset with a Franka Emika robot. A consolidated ground truth for task-specific grasp regions is established through a survey. Our work achieves a weighted intersection over union (IoU) of 73.6% in predicting task-conditioned grasp regions in 65 task-object combinations. An end-to-end validation study on a smaller subset further confirms the effectiveness of our approach, with 88% of responses favoring the task-aware grasp over the control group. A binomial test shows that participants significantly prefer the task-aware grasp.

Paperid: 6168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14472.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores and assesses in what ways generative AI can assist in translating survey instruments. Writing effective survey questions is a challenging and complex task, made even more difficult for surveys that will be translated and deployed in multiple linguistic and cultural settings. Translation errors can be detrimental, with known errors rendering data unusable for its intended purpose and undetected errors leading to incorrect conclusions. A growing number of institutions face this problem as surveys deployed by private and academic organizations globalize, and the success of their current efforts depends heavily on researchers' and translators' expertise and the amount of time each party has to contribute to the task. Thus, multilinguistic and multicultural surveys produced by teams with limited expertise, budgets, or time are at significant risk for translation-based errors in their data. We implement a zero-shot prompt experiment using ChatGPT to explore generative AI's ability to identify features of questions that might be difficult to translate to a linguistic audience other than the source language. We find that ChatGPT can provide meaningful feedback on translation issues, including common source survey language, inconsistent conceptualization, sensitivity and formality issues, and nonexistent concepts. In addition, we provide detailed information on the practicality of the approach, including accessing the necessary software, associated costs, and computational run times. Lastly, based on our findings, we propose avenues for future research that integrate AI into survey translation practices.

Paperid: 6169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14256.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional autonomous driving methods adopt a modular design, decomposing tasks into sub-tasks. In contrast, end-to-end autonomous driving directly outputs actions from raw sensor data, avoiding error accumulation. However, training an end-to-end model requires a comprehensive dataset; otherwise, the model exhibits poor generalization capabilities. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to enhance the generalization capabilities of end-to-end driving models. Most studies explore LLMs in an open-loop manner, where the output actions are compared to those of experts without direct feedback from the real world, while others examine closed-loop results only in simulations. This paper proposes an efficient architecture that integrates multimodal LLMs into end-to-end driving models operating in closed-loop settings in real-world environments. In our architecture, the LLM periodically processes raw sensor data to generate high-level driving instructions, effectively guiding the end-to-end model, even at a slower rate than the raw sensor data. This architecture relaxes the trade-off between the latency and inference quality of the LLM. It also allows us to choose from a wide variety of LLMs to improve high-level driving instructions and minimize fine-tuning costs. Consequently, our architecture reduces data collection requirements because the LLMs do not directly output actions; we only need to train a simple imitation learning model to output actions. In our experiments, the training data for the end-to-end model in a real-world environment consists of only simple obstacle configurations with one traffic cone, while the test environment is more complex and contains multiple obstacles placed in various positions. Experiments show that the proposed architecture enhances the generalization capabilities of the end-to-end model even without fine-tuning the LLM.

Paperid: 6170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14029.pdf

Abstract:
When malware employs an unseen zero-day exploit, traditional security measures such as vulnerability scanners and antivirus software can fail to detect them. This is because these tools rely on known patches and signatures, which do not exist for new zero-day attacks. Furthermore, existing machine learning methods, which are trained on specific and occasionally outdated malware samples, may struggle to adapt to features in new malware. To address this issue, there is a need for a more robust machine learning model that can identify relationships between malware samples without being trained on a particular malware feature set. This is particularly crucial in the field of cybersecurity, where the number of malware samples is limited and obfuscation techniques are widely used. Current approaches using stacked autoencoders aim to remove the noise introduced by obfuscation techniques through reconstruction of the input. However, this approach ignores the semantic relationships between features across different malware samples. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Siamese Neural Network (SNN) that uses relation-aware embeddings to calculate more accurate similarity probabilities based on semantic details of different malware samples. In addition, by using entropy images as inputs, our model can extract better structural information and subtle differences in malware signatures, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques. Evaluations on two large malware sample sets using the N-shot and N-way methods show that our proposed model is highly effective in predicting previously unseen malware, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques.

Paperid: 6171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12633.pdf

Abstract:
Following the impressive capabilities of in-context learning with large transformers, In-Context Imitation Learning (ICIL) is a promising opportunity for robotics. We introduce Instant Policy, which learns new tasks instantly (without further training) from just one or two demonstrations, achieving ICIL through two key components. First, we introduce inductive biases through a graph representation and model ICIL as a graph generation problem with a learned diffusion process, enabling structured reasoning over demonstrations, observations, and actions. Second, we show that such a model can be trained using pseudo-demonstrations - arbitrary trajectories generated in simulation - as a virtually infinite pool of training data. Simulated and real experiments show that Instant Policy enables rapid learning of various everyday robot tasks. We also show how it can serve as a foundation for cross-embodiment and zero-shot transfer to language-defined tasks. Code and videos are available at https://www.robot-learning.uk/instant-policy.

Paperid: 6172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12058.pdf

Abstract:
We demonstrate that vision language models (VLMs) are capable of recognizing the content in audio recordings when given corresponding spectrogram images. Specifically, we instruct VLMs to perform audio classification tasks in a few-shot setting by prompting them to classify a spectrogram image given example spectrogram images of each class. By carefully designing the spectrogram image representation and selecting good few-shot examples, we show that GPT-4o can achieve 59.00% cross-validated accuracy on the ESC-10 environmental sound classification dataset. Moreover, we demonstrate that VLMs currently outperform the only available commercial audio language model with audio understanding capabilities (Gemini-1.5) on the equivalent audio classification task (59.00% vs. 49.62%), and even perform slightly better than human experts on visual spectrogram classification (73.75% vs. 72.50% on first fold). We envision two potential use cases for these findings: (1) combining the spectrogram and language understanding capabilities of VLMs for audio caption augmentation, and (2) posing visual spectrogram classification as a challenge task for VLMs.

Paperid: 6173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11357.pdf

Abstract:
Object localization is a hot issue in computer vision area, which aims to identify and determine the precise location of specific objects from image or video. Most existing object localization methods heavily rely on extensive labeled data, which are costly to annotate and constrain their applicability. Therefore, we propose a new Zero-Shot Object Localization (ZSOL) framework for addressing the aforementioned challenges. In the proposed framework, we introduce the Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) module which could integrate visual and linguistic information effectively. Furthermore, we design a Text Self-Similarity Matching (TSSM) module, which could improve the localization accuracy by enhancing the representation of text features extracted by CLIP module. Hence, the proposed framework can be guided by prompt words to identify and locate specific objects in an image in the absence of labeled samples. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method could improve the localization performance significantly and establishes an effective benchmark for further research.

Paperid: 6174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11350.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models have shown strong performance in load forecasting, but they generally require large amounts of data for model training before being applied to new scenarios, which limits their effectiveness in data-scarce scenarios. Inspired by the great success of pre-trained language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, this paper proposes a zero-shot load forecasting approach using an advanced LLM framework denoted as the Chronos model. By utilizing its extensive pre-trained knowledge, the Chronos model enables accurate load forecasting in data-scarce scenarios without the need for extensive data-specific training. Simulation results across five real-world datasets demonstrate that the Chronos model significantly outperforms nine popular baseline models for both deterministic and probabilistic load forecasting with various forecast horizons (e.g., 1 to 48 hours), even though the Chronos model is neither tailored nor fine-tuned to these specific load datasets. Notably, Chronos reduces root mean squared error (RMSE), continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), and quantile score (QS) by approximately 7.34%-84.30%, 19.63%-60.06%, and 22.83%-54.49%, respectively, compared to baseline models. These results highlight the superiority and flexibility of the Chronos model, positioning it as an effective solution in data-scarce scenarios.

Paperid: 6175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09598.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate left atrium (LA) segmentation from pre-operative scans is crucial for diagnosing atrial fibrillation, treatment planning, and supporting surgical interventions. While deep learning models are key in medical image segmentation, they often require extensive manually annotated data. Foundation models trained on larger datasets have reduced this dependency, enhancing generalizability and robustness through transfer learning. We explore DINOv2, a self-supervised learning vision transformer trained on natural images, for LA segmentation using MRI. The challenges for LA's complex anatomy, thin boundaries, and limited annotated data make accurate segmentation difficult before & during the image-guided intervention. We demonstrate DINOv2's ability to provide accurate & consistent segmentation, achieving a mean Dice score of .871 & a Jaccard Index of .792 for end-to-end fine-tuning. Through few-shot learning across various data sizes & patient counts, DINOv2 consistently outperforms baseline models. These results suggest that DINOv2 effectively adapts to MRI with limited data, highlighting its potential as a competitive tool for segmentation & encouraging broader use in medical imaging.

Paperid: 6176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06236.pdf

Abstract:
Architecture performance evaluation is the most time-consuming part of neural architecture search (NAS). Zero-Shot NAS accelerates the evaluation by utilizing zero-cost proxies instead of training. Though effective, existing zero-cost proxies require invoking backpropagations or running networks on input data, making it difficult to further accelerate the computation of proxies. To alleviate this issue, architecture topologies are used to evaluate the performance of networks in this study. We prove that particular architectural topologies decrease the local entropy of feature maps, which degrades specific features to a bias, thereby reducing network performance. Based on this proof, architectural topologies are utilized to quantify the suppression of local entropy decrease (SED) as a data-free and running-free proxy. Experimental results show that SED outperforms most state-of-the-art proxies in terms of architecture selection on five benchmarks, with computation time reduced by three orders of magnitude. We further compare the SED-based NAS with state-of-the-art proxies. SED-based NAS selects the architecture with higher accuracy and fewer parameters in only one second. The theoretical analyses of local entropy and experimental results demonstrate that the suppression of local entropy decrease facilitates selecting optimal architectures in Zero-Shot NAS.

Paperid: 6177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05357.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, in visual classification tasks, has been enhanced by leveraging semantic knowledge from large language models (LLMs), including GPT. Recent studies have shown that in zero-shot classification tasks, descriptors incorporating additional cues, high-level concepts, or even random characters often outperform those using only the category name. In many classification tasks, while the top-1 accuracy may be relatively low, the top-5 accuracy is often significantly higher. This gap implies that most misclassifications occur among a few similar classes, highlighting the model's difficulty in distinguishing between classes with subtle differences. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel concept of comparative descriptors. These descriptors emphasize the unique features of a target class against its most similar classes, enhancing differentiation. By generating and integrating these comparative descriptors into the classification framework, we refine the semantic focus and improve classification accuracy. An additional filtering process ensures that these descriptors are closer to the image embeddings in the CLIP space, further enhancing performance. Our approach demonstrates improved accuracy and robustness in visual classification tasks by addressing the specific challenge of subtle inter-class differences.

Paperid: 6178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01284.pdf

Abstract:
Good pre-trained visual representations could enable robots to learn visuomotor policy efficiently. Still, existing representations take a one-size-fits-all-tasks approach that comes with two important drawbacks: (1) Being completely task-agnostic, these representations cannot effectively ignore any task-irrelevant information in the scene, and (2) They often lack the representational capacity to handle unconstrained/complex real-world scenes. Instead, we propose to train a large combinatorial family of representations organized by scene entities: objects and object parts. This hierarchical object decomposition for task-oriented representations (HODOR) permits selectively assembling different representations specific to each task while scaling in representational capacity with the complexity of the scene and the task. In our experiments, we find that HODOR outperforms prior pre-trained representations, both scene vector representations and object-centric representations, for sample-efficient imitation learning across 5 simulated and 5 real-world manipulation tasks. We further find that the invariances captured in HODOR are inherited into downstream policies, which can robustly generalize to out-of-distribution test conditions, permitting zero-shot skill chaining. Appendix, code, and videos: https://sites.google.com/view/hodor-corl24.

Paperid: 6179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01093.pdf

Abstract:
Fact verification on tabular evidence incentivises the use of symbolic reasoning models where a logical form is constructed (e.g. a LISP-style program), providing greater verifiability than fully neural approaches. However, these systems typically rely on well-formed tables, restricting their use in many scenarios. An emerging symbolic reasoning paradigm for textual evidence focuses on natural logic inference, which constructs proofs by modelling set-theoretic relations between a claim and its evidence in natural language. This approach provides flexibility and transparency but is less compatible with tabular evidence since the relations do not extend to arithmetic functions. We propose a set-theoretic interpretation of numerals and arithmetic functions in the context of natural logic, enabling the integration of arithmetic expressions in deterministic proofs. We leverage large language models to generate arithmetic expressions by generating questions about salient parts of a claim which are answered by executing appropriate functions on tables. In a few-shot setting on FEVEROUS, we achieve an accuracy of 71.4, outperforming both fully neural and symbolic reasoning models by 3.4 points. When evaluated on TabFact without any further training, our method remains competitive with an accuracy lead of 0.5 points.

Paperid: 6180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23769.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we leverage LLMs to produce medical qualification exam questions and the corresponding answers through few-shot prompts, investigating in-depth how LLMs meet the requirements in terms of coherence, evidence of statement, factual consistency, and professionalism etc. Utilizing a multicenter bidirectional anonymized database with respect to comorbid chronic diseases, named Elderly Comorbidity Medical Database (CECMed), we tasked LLMs with generating open-ended questions and answers based on a subset of sampled admission reports. For CECMed, the retrospective cohort includes patients enrolled from January 2010 to January 2022 while the prospective cohort from January 2023 to November 2023, with participants sourced from selected tertiary and community hospitals across the southern, northern, and central regions of China. A total of 8 widely used LLMs were used, including ERNIE 4, ChatGLM 4, Doubao, Hunyuan, Spark 4, Qwen, Conventional medical education requires sophisticated clinicians to formulate questions and answers based on prototypes from EHRs, which is heuristic and time-consuming. We found that mainstream LLMs could generate questions and answers with real-world EHRs at levels close to clinicians. Although current LLMs performed dissatisfactory in some aspects, medical students, interns and residents could reasonably make use of LLMs to facilitate understanding.

Paperid: 6181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23528.pdf

Abstract:
Patient experience and care quality are crucial for a hospital's sustainability and reputation. The analysis of patient feedback offers valuable insight into patient satisfaction and outcomes. However, the unstructured nature of these comments poses challenges for traditional machine learning methods following a supervised learning paradigm. This is due to the unavailability of labeled data and the nuances these texts encompass. This research explores leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) in conducting Multi-label Text Classification (MLTC) of inpatient comments shared after a stay in the hospital. GPT-4 Turbo was leveraged to conduct the classification. However, given the sensitive nature of patients' comments, a security layer is introduced before feeding the data to the LLM through a Protected Health Information (PHI) detection framework, which ensures patients' de-identification. Additionally, using the prompt engineering framework, zero-shot learning, in-context learning, and chain-of-thought prompting were experimented with. Results demonstrate that GPT-4 Turbo, whether following a zero-shot or few-shot setting, outperforms traditional methods and Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and achieves the highest overall performance with an F1-score of 76.12% and a weighted F1-score of 73.61% followed closely by the few-shot learning results. Subsequently, the results' association with other patient experience structured variables (e.g., rating) was conducted. The study enhances MLTC through the application of LLMs, offering healthcare practitioners an efficient method to gain deeper insights into patient feedback and deliver prompt, appropriate responses.

Paperid: 6182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21131.pdf

Abstract:
As machine learning models evolve, maintaining transparency demands more human-centric explainable AI techniques. Counterfactual explanations, with roots in human reasoning, identify the minimal input changes needed to obtain a given output and, hence, are crucial for supporting decision-making. Despite their importance, the evaluation of these explanations often lacks grounding in user studies and remains fragmented, with existing metrics not fully capturing human perspectives. To address this challenge, we developed a diverse set of 30 counterfactual scenarios and collected ratings across 8 evaluation metrics from 206 respondents. Subsequently, we fine-tuned different Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict average or individual human judgment across these metrics. Our methodology allowed LLMs to achieve an accuracy of up to 63% in zero-shot evaluations and 85% (over a 3-classes prediction) with fine-tuning across all metrics. The fine-tuned models predicting human ratings offer better comparability and scalability in evaluating different counterfactual explanation frameworks.

Paperid: 6183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20856.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic prediction is a vital component of intelligent transportation systems. By reasoning about traffic patterns in both the spatial and temporal dimensions, accurate and interpretable predictions can be provided. A considerable challenge in traffic prediction lies in handling the diverse data distributions caused by vastly different traffic conditions occurring at different locations. LLMs have been a dominant solution due to their remarkable capacity to adapt to new datasets with very few labeled data samples, i.e., few-shot adaptability. However, existing forecasting techniques mainly focus on extracting local graph information and forming a text-like prompt, leaving LLM- based traffic prediction an open problem. This work presents a probabilistic LLM for traffic forecasting with three highlights. We propose a graph-aware LLM for traffic prediction that considers proximal traffic information. Specifically, by considering the traffic of neighboring nodes as covariates, our model outperforms the corresponding time-series LLM. Furthermore, we adopt a lightweight approach for efficient domain adaptation when facing new data distributions in few-shot fashion. The comparative experiment demonstrates the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and the traditional GNN- based supervised approaches. Furthermore, Strada-LLM can be easily adapted to different LLM backbones without a noticeable performance drop.

Paperid: 6184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20711.pdf

Abstract:
In the drug discovery process, the low success rate of drug candidate screening often leads to insufficient labeled data, causing the few-shot learning problem in molecular property prediction. Existing methods for few-shot molecular property prediction overlook the sample selection bias, which arises from non-random sample selection in chemical experiments. This bias in data representativeness leads to suboptimal performance. To overcome this challenge, we present a novel method named contextual representation anchor Network (CRA), where an anchor refers to a cluster center of the representations of molecules and serves as a bridge to transfer enriched contextual knowledge into molecular representations and enhance their expressiveness. CRA introduces a dual-augmentation mechanism that includes context augmentation, which dynamically retrieves analogous unlabeled molecules and captures their task-specific contextual knowledge to enhance the anchors, and anchor augmentation, which leverages the anchors to augment the molecular representations. We evaluate our approach on the MoleculeNet and FS-Mol benchmarks, as well as in domain transfer experiments. The results demonstrate that CRA outperforms the state-of-the-art by 2.60% and 3.28% in AUC and $Î$AUC-PR metrics, respectively, and exhibits superior generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 6185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20204.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: This article offers a taxonomy of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), explores its emerging applications, and outlines methods to enhance the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated outputs. Methods: The review defines foundational generative AI concepts and highlights current HEOR applications, including systematic literature reviews, health economic modeling, real-world evidence generation, and dossier development. Approaches such as prompt engineering (zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, persona pattern prompting), retrieval-augmented generation, model fine-tuning, and the use of domain-specific models are introduced to improve AI accuracy and reliability. Results: Generative AI shows significant potential in HEOR, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and offering novel solutions to complex challenges. Foundation models are promising in automating complex tasks, though challenges remain in scientific reliability, bias, interpretability, and workflow integration. The article discusses strategies to improve the accuracy of these AI tools. Conclusion: Generative AI could transform HEOR by increasing efficiency and accuracy across various applications. However, its full potential can only be realized by building HEOR expertise and addressing the limitations of current AI technologies. As AI evolves, ongoing research and innovation will shape its future role in the field.

Paperid: 6186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19223.pdf

Abstract:
This paper identifies and analyzes applications in which Large Language Models (LLMs) can make Internet of Things (IoT) networks more intelligent and responsive through three case studies from critical topics: DDoS attack detection, macroprogramming over IoT systems, and sensor data processing. Our results reveal that the GPT model under few-shot learning achieves 87.6% detection accuracy, whereas the fine-tuned GPT increases the value to 94.9%. Given a macroprogramming framework, the GPT model is capable of writing scripts using high-level functions from the framework to handle possible incidents. Moreover, the GPT model shows efficacy in processing a vast amount of sensor data by offering fast and high-quality responses, which comprise expected results and summarized insights. Overall, the model demonstrates its potential to power a natural language interface. We hope that researchers will find these case studies inspiring to develop further.

Paperid: 6187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19027.pdf

Abstract:
A novel physics-informed operator learning technique based on spectral methods is introduced to model the complex behavior of heterogeneous materials. The Lippmann-Schwinger operator in Fourier space is employed to construct physical constraints with minimal computational overhead, effectively eliminating the need for automatic differentiation. The introduced methodology accelerates the training process by enabling gradient construction on a fixed, finite discretization in Fourier space. Later, the spectral physics-informed finite operator learning (SPiFOL) framework is built based on this discretization and trained to map the arbitrary shape of microstructures to their mechanical responses (strain fields) without relying on labeled data. The training is done by minimizing equilibrium in Fourier space concerning the macroscopic loading condition, which also guarantees the periodicity. SPiFOL, as a physics-informed operator learning method, enables rapid predictions through forward inference after training. To ensure accuracy, we incorporate physical constraints and diversify the training data. However, performance may still degrade for out-of-distribution microstructures. SPiFOL is further enhanced by integrating a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO). Compared to the standard data-driven FNO, SPiFOL shows higher accuracy in predicting stress fields and provides nearly resolution-independent results. Additionally, its zero-shot super-resolution capabilities are explored in heterogeneous domains. Finally, SPiFOL is extended to handle 3D problems and further adapted to finite elasticity, demonstrating the robustness of the framework in handling nonlinear mechanical behavior. The framework shows great potential for efficient and scalable prediction of mechanical responses in complex material systems while also reducing the training time required for training physics-informed neural operators.

Paperid: 6188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16461.pdf

Abstract:
This study addresses the gap in the literature concerning the comparative performance of LLMs in interpreting different types of figurative language across multiple languages. By evaluating LLMs using two multilingual datasets on simile and idiom interpretation, we explore the effectiveness of various prompt engineering strategies, including chain-of-thought, few-shot, and English translation prompts. We extend the language of these datasets to Persian as well by building two new evaluation sets. Our comprehensive assessment involves both closed-source (GPT-3.5, GPT-4o mini, Gemini 1.5), and open-source models (Llama 3.1, Qwen2), highlighting significant differences in performance across languages and figurative types. Our findings reveal that while prompt engineering methods are generally effective, their success varies by figurative type, language, and model. We also observe that open-source models struggle particularly with low-resource languages in similes. Additionally, idiom interpretation is nearing saturation for many languages, necessitating more challenging evaluations.

Paperid: 6189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14589.pdf

Abstract:
There is increasing interest in looking at dialects in NLP. However, most work to date still treats dialects as discrete categories. For instance, evaluative work in variation-oriented NLP for English often works with Indian English or African-American Venacular English as homogeneous categories (Faisal et al., 2024; Ziems et al., 2023), yet even within one variety there is substantial variation. We examine within-dialect variation and show that performance critically varies within categories. We measure speech-to-text performance on Italian dialects, and empirically observe a geographical performance disparity. This disparity correlates substantially (-0.5) with linguistic similarity to the highest performing dialect variety. We cross-examine our results against dialectometry methods, and interpret the performance disparity to be due to a bias towards dialects that are more similar to the standard variety in the speech-to-text model examined. We additionally leverage geostatistical methods to predict zero-shot performance at unseen sites, and find the incorporation of geographical information to substantially improve prediction performance, indicating there to be geographical structure in the performance distribution.

Paperid: 6190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14225.pdf

Abstract:
Joint Multimodal Entity-Relation Extraction (JMERE) is a challenging task that aims to extract entities and their relations from text-image pairs in social media posts. Existing methods for JMERE require large amounts of labeled data. However, gathering and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for JMERE poses significant challenges. Initially, we construct diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets fitted to the original data distribution. To address the insufficient information in the few-shot setting, we introduce the \textbf{K}nowledge-\textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{C}ross-modal \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{M}odel (KECPM) for JMERE. This method can effectively address the problem of insufficient information in the few-shot setting by guiding a large language model to generate supplementary background knowledge. Our proposed method comprises two stages: (1) a knowledge ingestion stage that dynamically formulates prompts based on semantic similarity guide ChatGPT generating relevant knowledge and employs self-reflection to refine the knowledge; (2) a knowledge-enhanced language model stage that merges the auxiliary knowledge with the original input and utilizes a transformer-based model to align with JMERE's required output format. We extensively evaluate our approach on a few-shot dataset derived from the JMERE dataset, demonstrating its superiority over strong baselines in terms of both micro and macro F$_1$ scores. Additionally, we present qualitative analyses and case studies to elucidate the effectiveness of our model.

Paperid: 6191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13047.pdf

Abstract:
Assessing classification confidence is critical for leveraging large language models (LLMs) in automated labeling tasks, especially in the sensitive domains presented by Computational Social Science (CSS) tasks. In this paper, we make three key contributions: (1) we propose an uncertainty quantification (UQ) performance measure tailored for data annotation tasks, (2) we compare, for the first time, five different UQ strategies across three distinct LLMs and CSS data annotation tasks, (3) we introduce a novel UQ aggregation strategy that effectively identifies low-confidence LLM annotations and disproportionately uncovers data incorrectly labeled by the LLMs. Our results demonstrate that our proposed UQ aggregation strategy improves upon existing methods andcan be used to significantly improve human-in-the-loop data annotation processes.

Paperid: 6192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13006.pdf

Abstract:
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot classification makes them viable solutions for data annotation in rapidly evolving domains where quality labeled data is often scarce and costly to obtain. However, the large-scale deployment of LLMs can be prohibitively expensive. This paper introduces an LLM chain ensemble methodology that aligns multiple LLMs in a sequence, routing data subsets to subsequent models based on classification uncertainty. This approach leverages the strengths of individual LLMs within a broader system, allowing each model to handle data points where it exhibits the highest confidence, while forwarding more complex cases to potentially more robust models. Our results show that the chain ensemble method often exceeds the performance of the best individual model in the chain and achieves substantial cost savings, making LLM chain ensembles a practical and efficient solution for large-scale data annotation challenges.

Paperid: 6193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12997.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite achieving state-of-the-art results in a number of evaluation tasks, struggle to maintain their performance when logical reasoning is strictly required to correctly infer a prediction. In this work, we propose Argument Generation as a method of forcing models to utilize their reasoning capabilities when other approaches such as chain-of-thought reasoning prove insufficient. Our method involves the generation of arguments for each possible inference result, and asking the end model to rank the generated arguments. We show that Argument Generation can serve as an appropriate substitute for zero-shot prompting techniques without the requirement to add layers of complexity. Furthermore, we argue that knowledge-probing techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning and Argument Generation are only useful when further reasoning is required to infer a prediction, making them auxiliary to more common zero-shot approaches. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach forces larger gains in smaller language models, showcasing a complex relationship between model size and prompting methods in foundation models.

Paperid: 6194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12847.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt Tuning has been a popular Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning method attributed to its remarkable performance with few updated parameters on various large-scale pretrained Language Models (PLMs). Traditionally, each prompt has been considered indivisible and updated independently, leading the parameters increase proportionally as prompt length grows. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Codebook for Composite and Efficient Prompt Tuning (ACCEPT). In our method, we refer to the concept of product quantization (PQ), allowing all soft prompts to share a set of learnable codebook vectors in each subspace, with each prompt differentiated by a set of adaptive weights. We achieve the superior performance on 17 diverse natural language tasks including natural language understanding (NLU) and question answering (QA) tasks by tuning only 0.3% of parameters of the PLMs. Our approach also excels in few-shot and large model settings, highlighting its significant potential.

Paperid: 6195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10865.pdf

Abstract:
A major limitation of prompt tuning is its dependence on large labeled training datasets. Under few-shot learning settings, prompt tuning lags far behind full-model fine-tuning, limiting its scope of application. In this paper, we leverage the powerful LLMs to synthesize task-specific labeled data for training the soft prompts. We first introduce a distribution-aligned weighted generator tuning (DawGen) method to encourage generating in-distribution data that aligns with the few-shot real data. Then, we train soft prompts on both synthetic and real datasets using a gradient surgery approach, which eliminates the conflicting gradients from different data sources. Experiments on seven sentence-pair classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for boosting prompt tuning in few-shot learning settings. Results on QQP, MRPC, and SICK datasets are even comparable to the performance of transfer learning from large real-world datasets, showing the promise of synthetic data as an alternative for enhancing soft prompt tuning.

Paperid: 6196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10663.pdf

Abstract:
Most existing studies on few-shot learning focus on unimodal settings, where models are trained to generalize to unseen data using a limited amount of labeled examples from a single modality. However, real-world data are inherently multi-modal, and such unimodal approaches limit the practical applications of few-shot learning. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the Cross-modal Few-Shot Learning (CFSL) task, which aims to recognize instances across multiple modalities while relying on scarce labeled data. This task presents unique challenges compared to classical few-shot learning arising from the distinct visual attributes and structural disparities inherent to each modality. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Generative Transfer Learning (GTL) framework by simulating how humans abstract and generalize concepts. Specifically, the GTL jointly estimates the latent shared concept across modalities and the in-modality disturbance through a generative structure. Establishing the relationship between latent concepts and visual content among abundant unimodal data enables GTL to effectively transfer knowledge from unimodal to novel multimodal data, as humans did. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the GTL achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven multi-modal datasets across RGB-Sketch, RGB-Infrared, and RGB-Depth.

Paperid: 6197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07648.pdf

Abstract:
As the boosting development of large vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), many CLIP-like methods have shown impressive abilities on visual recognition, especially in low-data regimes scenes. However, we have noticed that most of these methods are limited to introducing new modifications on text and image encoder. Recently, latent diffusion models (LDMs) have shown good ability on image generation. The potent capabilities of LDMs direct our focus towards the latent representations sampled by UNet. Inspired by the conjecture in CoOp that learned prompts encode meanings beyond the existing vocabulary, we assume that, for deep models, the latent representations are concise and accurate understanding of images, in which high-frequency, imperceptible details are abstracted away. In this paper, we propose a Few-shot Language Image model Embedded with latent Representations (FLIER) for image recognition by introducing a latent encoder jointly trained with CLIP's image encoder, it incorporates pre-trained vision-language knowledge of CLIP and the latent representations from Stable Diffusion. We first generate images and corresponding latent representations via Stable Diffusion with the textual inputs from GPT-3. With latent representations as "models-understandable pixels", we introduce a flexible convolutional neural network with two convolutional layers to be the latent encoder, which is simpler than most encoders in vision-language models. The latent encoder is jointly trained with CLIP's image encoder, transferring pre-trained knowledge to downstream tasks better. Experiments and extensive ablation studies on various visual classification tasks demonstrate that FLIER performs state-of-the-art on 11 datasets for most few-shot classification.

Paperid: 6198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05997.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models have fueled progress in image captioning. These models, fine-tuned on vast image datasets, exhibit a deep understanding of semantic concepts. In this work, we show that this ability can be re-purposed for audio captioning, where the joint image-language decoder can be leveraged to describe auditory content associated with image sequences within videos featuring audiovisual content. This can be achieved via multimodal alignment. Yet, this multimodal alignment task is non-trivial due to the inherent disparity between audible and visible elements in real-world videos. Moreover, multimodal representation learning often relies on contrastive learning, facing the challenge of the so-called modality gap which hinders smooth integration between modalities. In this work, we introduce a novel methodology for bridging the audiovisual modality gap by matching the distributions of tokens produced by an audio backbone and those of an image captioner. Our approach aligns the audio token distribution with that of the image tokens, enabling the model to perform zero-shot audio captioning in an unsupervised fashion while keeping the initial image captioning component unaltered. This alignment allows for the use of either audio or audiovisual input by combining or substituting the image encoder with the aligned audio encoder. Our method achieves significantly improved performances in zero-shot audio captioning, compared to existing approaches.

Paperid: 6199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05915.pdf

Abstract:
While state-of-the-art LLMs have shown poor logical and basic mathematical reasoning, recent works try to improve their problem-solving abilities using prompting techniques. We propose giving "hints" to improve the language model's performance on advanced mathematical problems, taking inspiration from how humans approach math pedagogically. We also test robustness to adversarial hints and demonstrate their sensitivity to them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating various diverse LLMs, presenting them with a broad set of problems of different difficulties and topics from the MATH dataset and comparing against techniques such as one-shot, few-shot, and chain of thought prompting.

Paperid: 6200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05821.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as an alternative to training task-specific dialog agents, due to their broad reasoning capabilities and performance in zero-shot learning scenarios. However, many LLM-based dialog systems fall short in planning towards an overarching dialog goal and therefore cannot steer the conversation appropriately. Furthermore, these models struggle with hallucination, making them unsuitable for information access in sensitive domains, such as legal or medical domains, where correctness of information given to users is critical. The recently introduced task Conversational Tree Search (CTS) proposes the use of dialog graphs to avoid hallucination in sensitive domains, however, state-of-the-art agents are Reinforcement Learning (RL) based and require long training times, despite excelling at dialog strategy. This paper introduces a novel zero-shot method for controllable CTS agents, where LLMs guide the dialog planning through domain graphs by searching and pruning relevant graph nodes based on user interaction preferences. We show that these agents significantly outperform state-of-the-art CTS agents ($p<0.0001$; Barnard Exact test) in simulation. This generalizes to all available CTS domains. Finally, we perform user evaluation to test the agent's performance in the wild, showing that our policy significantly ($p<0.05$; Barnard Exact) improves task-success compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based CTS agent.

Paperid: 6201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04002.pdf

Abstract:
Computational methods to aid journalists in the task often require adapting a model to specific domains and generating explanations. However, most automated fact-checking methods rely on three-class datasets, which do not accurately reflect real-world misinformation. Moreover, fact-checking explanations are often generated based on text summarization of evidence, failing to address the relationship between the claim and the evidence. To address these issues, we extend the self-rationalization method--typically used in natural language inference (NLI) tasks--to fact verification. We propose a label-adaptive learning approach: first, we fine-tune a model to learn veracity prediction with annotated labels (step-1 model). Then, we fine-tune the step-1 model again to learn self-rationalization, using the same data and additional annotated explanations. Our results show that our label-adaptive approach improves veracity prediction by more than ten percentage points (Macro F1) on both the PubHealth and AVeriTec datasets, outperforming the GPT-4 model. Furthermore, to address the high cost of explanation annotation, we generated 64 synthetic explanations from three large language models: GPT-4-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo, and Llama-3-8B and few-shot fine-tune our step-1 model. The few-shot synthetic explanation fine-tuned model performed comparably to the fully fine-tuned self-rationalization model, demonstrating the potential of low-budget learning with synthetic data. Our label-adaptive self-rationalization approach presents a promising direction for future research on real-world explainable fact-checking with different labeling schemes.

Paperid: 6202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03341.pdf

Abstract:
The recent development of fact verification systems with natural logic has enhanced their explainability by aligning claims with evidence through set-theoretic operators, providing faithful justifications. Despite these advancements, such systems often rely on a large amount of training data annotated with natural logic. To address this issue, we propose a zero-shot method that utilizes the generalization capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models. To comprehensively assess the zero-shot capabilities of our method and other fact verification systems, we evaluate all models on both artificial and real-world claims, including multilingual datasets. We also compare our method against other fact verification systems in two setups. First, in the zero-shot generalization setup, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms other systems that were not specifically trained on natural logic data, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 8.96 points over the best-performing baseline. Second, in the zero-shot transfer setup, we show that current systems trained on natural logic data do not generalize well to other domains, and our method outperforms these systems across all datasets with real-world claims.

Paperid: 6203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02173.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying large language models in production requires simultaneous attention to efficiency and risk control. Prior work has shown the possibility to cut costs while maintaining similar accuracy, but has neglected to focus on risk control. By contrast, here we present hierarchical chains with multi-level abstention (HCMA), which use model-intrinsic uncertainty to delegate queries along the LLM intelligence hierarchy, enabling training-free model switching based solely on black-box API calls. Our framework presents novel trade-offs between efficiency and risk. For example, deploying HCMA on MMLU cuts the error rate of Llama3 405B by 30% when the model is allowed to abstain on 20% of the queries. To calibrate HCMA for optimal performance, our approach uses data-efficient logistic regressions (based on a simple nonlinear feature transformation), which require only 50 or 100 labeled examples to achieve excellent calibration error (ECE), cutting ECE by 50% compared to naive Platt scaling. On free-form generation tasks, we find that chain-of-thought is ineffectual for selective prediction, whereas zero-shot prompting drives error to 0% on TruthfulQA at high abstention rates. As LLMs are increasingly deployed across computing environments with different capabilities (such as mobile, laptop, and cloud), our framework paves the way towards maintaining deployment efficiency while putting in place sharp risk controls.

Paperid: 6204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01665.pdf

Abstract:
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), considered the gold standard for noninvasive cardiac assessment, is a diverse and complex modality requiring a wide variety of image processing tasks for comprehensive assessment of cardiac morphology and function. Advances in deep learning have enabled the development of state-of-the-art (SoTA) models for these tasks. However, model training is challenging due to data and label scarcity, especially in the less common imaging sequences. Moreover, each model is often trained for a specific task, with no connection between related tasks. In this work, we introduce a vision foundation model trained for CMR assessment, that is trained in a self-supervised fashion on 36 million CMR images. We then finetune the model in supervised way for 9 clinical tasks typical to a CMR workflow, across classification, segmentation, landmark localization, and pathology detection. We demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness across all tasks, over a range of available labeled dataset sizes. We also demonstrate improved few-shot learning with fewer labeled samples, a common challenge in medical image analyses. We achieve an out-of-box performance comparable to SoTA for most clinical tasks. The proposed method thus presents a resource-efficient, unified framework for CMR assessment, with the potential to accelerate the development of deep learning-based solutions for image analysis tasks, even with few annotated data available.

Paperid: 6205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01154.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research in zero-shot Relation Extraction (RE) has focused on using Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, current methods often perform suboptimally, mainly due to a lack of detailed, context-specific prompts needed for understanding various sentences and relations. To address this, we introduce the Self-Prompting framework, a novel method designed to fully harness the embedded RE knowledge within LLMs. Specifically, our framework employs a three-stage diversity approach to prompt LLMs, generating multiple synthetic samples that encapsulate specific relations from scratch. These generated samples act as in-context learning samples, offering explicit and context-specific guidance to efficiently prompt LLMs for RE. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets show our approach outperforms existing LLM-based zero-shot RE methods. Additionally, our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our generation pipeline in producing high-quality synthetic data that enhances performance.

Paperid: 6206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01110.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot medical image segmentation (FSMIS) aims to perform the limited annotated data learning in the medical image analysis scope. Despite the progress has been achieved, current FSMIS models are all trained and deployed on the same data domain, as is not consistent with the clinical reality that medical imaging data is always across different data domains (e.g. imaging modalities, institutions and equipment sequences). How to enhance the FSMIS models to generalize well across the different specific medical imaging domains? In this paper, we focus on the matching mechanism of the few-shot semantic segmentation models and introduce an Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) calculation based domain robust matching mechanism for the cross-domain scenario. Specifically, we formulate the EMD transportation process between the foreground support-query features, the texture structure aware weights generation method, which proposes to perform the sobel based image gradient calculation over the nodes, is introduced in the EMD matching flow to restrain the domain relevant nodes. Besides, the point set level distance measurement metric is introduced to calculated the cost for the transportation from support set nodes to query set nodes. To evaluate the performance of our model, we conduct experiments on three scenarios (i.e., cross-modal, cross-sequence and cross-institution), which includes eight medical datasets and involves three body regions, and the results demonstrate that our model achieves the SoTA performance against the compared models.

Paperid: 6207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00767.pdf

Abstract:
Existing zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) systems are typically designed to process complete sentences and are constrained by the maximum duration for which they have been trained. However, in many streaming applications, texts arrive continuously in short chunks, necessitating instant responses from the system. We identify the essential capabilities required for chunk-level streaming and introduce LiveSpeech 2, a stream-aware model that supports infinitely long speech generation, text-audio stream synchronization, and seamless transitions between short speech chunks. To achieve these, we propose (1) adopting Mamba, a class of sequence modeling distinguished by linear-time decoding, which is augmented by cross-attention mechanisms for conditioning, (2) utilizing rotary positional embeddings in the computation of cross-attention, enabling the model to process an infinite text stream by sliding a window, and (3) decoding with semantic guidance, a technique that aligns speech with the transcript during inference with minimal overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our models are competitive with state-of-the-art language model-based zero-shot TTS models, while also providing flexibility to support a wide range of streaming scenarios.

Paperid: 6208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20246.pdf

Abstract:
Readability-controlled text simplification (RCTS) rewrites texts to lower readability levels while preserving their meaning. RCTS models often depend on parallel corpora with readability annotations on both source and target sides. Such datasets are scarce and difficult to curate, especially at the sentence level. To reduce reliance on parallel data, we explore using instruction-tuned large language models for zero-shot RCTS. Through automatic and manual evaluations, we examine: (1) how different types of contextual information affect a model's ability to generate sentences with the desired readability, and (2) the trade-off between achieving target readability and preserving meaning. Results show that all tested models struggle to simplify sentences (especially to the lowest levels) due to models' limitations and characteristics of the source sentences that impede adequate rewriting. Our experiments also highlight the need for better automatic evaluation metrics tailored to RCTS, as standard ones often misinterpret common simplification operations, and inaccurately assess readability and meaning preservation.

Paperid: 6209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20147.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language processing (NLP) in the medical domain can underperform in real-world applications involving small datasets in a non-English language with few labeled samples and imbalanced classes. There is yet no consensus on how to approach this problem. We evaluated a set of NLP models including BERT-like transformers, few-shot learning with sentence transformers (SetFit), and prompted large language models (LLM), using three datasets of radiology reports on magnetic resonance images of epilepsy patients in Danish, a low-resource language. Our results indicate that BERT-like models pretrained in the target domain of radiology reports currently offer the optimal performances for this scenario. Notably, the SetFit and LLM models underperformed compared to BERT-like models, with LLM performing the worst. Importantly, none of the models investigated was sufficiently accurate to allow for text classification without any supervision. However, they show potential for data filtering, which could reduce the amount of manual labeling required.

Paperid: 6210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19310.pdf

Abstract:
The potential for exploitation of AI models has increased due to the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the widespread use of platforms like Model Zoo for sharing AI models. Attackers can embed malware within AI models through steganographic techniques, taking advantage of the substantial size of these models to conceal malicious data and use it for nefarious purposes, e.g. Remote Code Execution. Ensuring the security of AI models is a burgeoning area of research essential for safeguarding the multitude of organizations and users relying on AI technologies. This study leverages well-studied image few-shot learning techniques by transferring the AI models to the image field using a novel image representation. Applying few-shot learning in this field enables us to create practical models, a feat that previous works lack. Our method addresses critical limitations in state-of-the-art detection techniques that hinder their practicality. This approach reduces the required training dataset size from 40000 models to just 6. Furthermore, our methods consistently detect delicate attacks of up to 25% embedding rate and even up to 6% in some cases, while previous works were only shown to be effective for a 100%-50% embedding rate. We employ a strict evaluation strategy to ensure the trained models are generic concerning various factors. In addition, we show that our trained models successfully detect novel spread-spectrum steganography attacks, demonstrating the models' impressive robustness just by learning one type of attack. We open-source our code to support reproducibility and enhance the research in this new field.

Paperid: 6211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18446.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift, i.e., can LLMs generalize to domains that require specific knowledge such as medicine and law in a zero-shot fashion without additional in-domain training? To this end, we devise a series of experiments to explain the performance gap empirically. Our findings suggest that: (a) LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as retrieving long answer spans; (b) Certain LLMs, despite showing strong overall performance, display weaknesses in meeting basic requirements as discriminating between domain-specific senses of words which we link to pre-processing decisions; (c) Scaling model parameters is not always effective for cross domain generalization; and (d) Closed-domain datasets are quantitatively much different than open-domain EQA datasets and current LLMs struggle to deal with them. Our findings point out important directions for improving existing LLMs.

Paperid: 6212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18339.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In addition to their cognitive intelligence, exploring their capabilities in emotional intelligence is also crucial, as it enables more natural and empathetic conversational AI. Recent studies have shown LLMs' capability in recognizing emotions, but they often focus on single emotion labels and overlook the complex and ambiguous nature of human emotions. This study is the first to address this gap by exploring the potential of LLMs in recognizing ambiguous emotions, leveraging their strong generalization capabilities and in-context learning. We design zero-shot and few-shot prompting and incorporate past dialogue as context information for ambiguous emotion recognition. Experiments conducted using three datasets indicate significant potential for LLMs in recognizing ambiguous emotions, and highlight the substantial benefits of including context information. Furthermore, our findings indicate that LLMs demonstrate a high degree of effectiveness in recognizing less ambiguous emotions and exhibit potential for identifying more ambiguous emotions, paralleling human perceptual capabilities.

Paperid: 6213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15771.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series forecasting is a challenging problem that traditionally requires specialized models custom-trained for the specific task at hand. Recently, inspired by the success of large language models, foundation models pre-trained on vast amounts of time-series data from diverse domains have emerged as a promising candidate for general-purpose time-series forecasting. The defining characteristic of these foundation models is their ability to perform zero-shot learning, that is, forecasting a new system from limited context data without explicit re-training or fine-tuning. Here, we evaluate whether the zero-shot learning paradigm extends to the challenging task of forecasting chaotic systems. Across 135 distinct chaotic dynamical systems and $10^8$ timepoints, we find that foundation models produce competitive forecasts compared to custom-trained models (including NBEATS, TiDE, etc.), particularly when training data is limited. Interestingly, even after point forecasts fail, large foundation models are able to preserve the geometric and statistical properties of the chaotic attractors. We attribute this success to foundation models' ability to perform in-context learning and identify context parroting as a simple mechanism used by these models to capture the long-term behavior of chaotic dynamical systems. Our results highlight the potential of foundation models as a tool for probing nonlinear and complex systems.

Paperid: 6214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15733.pdf

Abstract:
Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition has gained significant traction due to its accuracy and objectivity. However, the non-stationary nature of EEG signals leads to distribution drift over time, causing severe performance degradation when the model is reused. While numerous domain adaptation (DA) approaches have been proposed in recent years to address this issue, their reliance on large amounts of target data for calibration restricts them to offline scenarios, rendering them unsuitable for real-time applications. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Evolvable Fast Adaptation (EvoFA), an online adaptive framework tailored for EEG data. EvoFA organically integrates the rapid adaptation of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and the distribution matching of Domain Adaptation (DA) through a two-stage generalization process. During the training phase, a robust base meta-learning model is constructed for strong generalization. In the testing phase, a designed evolvable meta-adaptation module iteratively aligns the marginal distribution of target (testing) data with the evolving source (training) data within a model-agnostic meta-learning framework, enabling the model to learn the evolving trends of testing data relative to training data and improving online testing performance. Experimental results demonstrate that EvoFA achieves significant improvements compared to the basic FSL method and previous online methods. The introduction of EvoFA paves the way for broader adoption of EEG-based emotion recognition in real-world applications. Our code will be released upon publication.

Paperid: 6215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15041.pdf

Abstract:
Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

Paperid: 6216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11376.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled numerous advances in understanding and reasoning in domains like vision, but we have not yet seen this broad success for time-series. Although prior works on time-series MLLMs have shown promising performance in time-series forecasting, very few works show how an LLM could be used for time-series reasoning in natural language. We propose a novel multi-modal time-series LLM approach that learns generalizable information across various domains with powerful zero-shot performance. First, we train a lightweight time-series encoder on top of an LLM to directly extract time-series information. Then, we fine-tune our model with chain-of-thought augmented time-series tasks to encourage the model to generate reasoning paths. We show that our model learns a latent representation that reflects specific time-series features (e.g. slope, frequency), as well as outperforming GPT-4o on a set of zero-shot reasoning tasks on a variety of domains.

Paperid: 6217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10429.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models demonstrate outstanding performance on high-resource languages but face significant challenges when applied to low-resource languages due to limited training data and insufficient cross-lingual generalization. Existing adaptation strategies, such as shallow fusion, data augmentation, and direct fine-tuning, either rely on external resources, suffer computational inefficiencies, or fail in test-time adaptation scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce Speech Meta In-Context LEarning (SMILE), an innovative framework that combines meta-learning with speech in-context learning (SICL). SMILE leverages meta-training from high-resource languages to enable robust, few-shot generalization to low-resource languages without explicit fine-tuning on the target domain. Extensive experiments on the ML-SUPERB benchmark show that SMILE consistently outperforms baseline methods, significantly reducing character and word error rates in training-free few-shot multilingual ASR tasks.

Paperid: 6218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10161.pdf

Abstract:
Sim2Real transfer, particularly for manipulation policies relying on RGB images, remains a critical challenge in robotics due to the significant domain shift between synthetic and real-world visual data. In this paper, we propose SplatSim, a novel framework that leverages Gaussian Splatting as the primary rendering primitive to reduce the Sim2Real gap for RGB-based manipulation policies. By replacing traditional mesh representations with Gaussian Splats in simulators, SplatSim produces highly photorealistic synthetic data while maintaining the scalability and cost-efficiency of simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by training manipulation policies within SplatSim and deploying them in the real world in a zero-shot manner, achieving an average success rate of 86.25%, compared to 97.5% for policies trained on real-world data. Videos can be found on our project page: https://splatsim.github.io

Paperid: 6219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09415.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet improving their problem-solving capabilities, particularly for complex, reasoning-intensive tasks, remains a persistent challenge. This paper introduces the REAP (Reflection, Explicit Problem Deconstruction, and Advanced Prompting) method, an innovative approach within the dynamic context generation framework. REAP guides LLMs through reflection on the query, deconstructing it into manageable components, and generating relevant context to enhance the solution process. We evaluated REAP using a dataset designed to expose LLM limitations, comparing zero-shot prompting with REAP-enhanced prompts across six state-of-the-art models: OpenAI's o1-preview, o1-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The results demonstrate notable performance gains, with o1-mini improving by 40.97%, GPT-4o by 66.26%, and GPT-4o-mini by 112.93%. Despite the already strong baseline performance of OpenAI's o1-preview, modest gains were observed. Beyond performance improvements, REAP offers a cost-effective solution; for example, GPT-4o-mini, which is approximately 100 times cheaper than o1-preview, delivered competitive results. REAP also improves the clarity of model outputs, making it easier for humans to understand the reasoning behind the results and simplifying the process of identifying and addressing any issues. These findings demonstrate REAP's potential to greatly improve the capabilities of LLMs, providing both better performance and increased cost-efficiency across a wide range of applications.

Paperid: 6220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08091.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot personalized image generation models aim to produce images that align with both a given text prompt and subject image, requiring the model to incorporate both sources of guidance. Existing methods often struggle to capture fine-grained subject details and frequently prioritize one form of guidance over the other, resulting in suboptimal subject encoding and imbalanced generation. In this study, we uncover key insights into overcoming such drawbacks, notably that 1) the choice of the subject image encoder critically influences subject identity preservation and training efficiency, and 2) the text and subject guidance should take effect at different denoising stages. Building on these insights, we introduce a new approach, EZIGen, that employs two main components: leveraging a fixed pre-trained Diffusion UNet itself as subject encoder, following a process that balances the two guidances by separating their dominance stage and revisiting certain time steps to bootstrap subject transfer quality. Through these two components, EZIGen, initially built upon SD2.1-base, achieved state-of-the-art performances on multiple personalized generation benchmarks with a unified model, while using 100 times less training data. Moreover, by further migrating our design to SDXL, EZIGen is proven to be a versatile model-agnostic solution for personalized generation. Demo Page: zichengduan.github.io/pages/EZIGen/index.html

Paperid: 6221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06725.pdf

Abstract:
A Digital Twin (DT) replicates objects, processes, or systems for real-time monitoring, simulation, and predictive maintenance. Recent advancements like Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized traditional AI systems and offer immense potential when combined with DT in industrial applications such as railway defect inspection. Traditionally, this inspection requires extensive defect samples to identify patterns, but limited samples can lead to overfitting and poor performance on unseen defects. Integrating pre-trained LLMs into DT addresses this challenge by reducing the need for vast sample data. We introduce DefectTwin, which employs a multimodal and multi-model (M^2) LLM-based AI pipeline to analyze both seen and unseen visual defects in railways. This application enables a railway agent to perform expert-level defect analysis using consumer electronics (e.g., tablets). A multimodal processor ensures responses are in a consumable format, while an instant user feedback mechanism (instaUF) enhances Quality-of-Experience (QoE). The proposed M^2 LLM outperforms existing models, achieving high precision (0.76-0.93) across multimodal inputs including text, images, and videos of pre-trained defects, and demonstrates superior zero-shot generalizability for unseen defects. We also evaluate the latency, token count, and usefulness of responses generated by DefectTwin on consumer devices. To our knowledge, DefectTwin is the first LLM-integrated DT designed for railway defect inspection.

Paperid: 6222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05356.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis show that large-scale models trained with extensive web data produce highly natural-sounding output. However, such data is scarce for Indian languages due to the lack of high-quality, manually subtitled data on platforms like LibriVox or YouTube. To address this gap, we enhance existing large-scale ASR datasets containing natural conversations collected in low-quality environments to generate high-quality TTS training data. Our pipeline leverages the cross-lingual generalization of denoising and speech enhancement models trained on English and applied to Indian languages. This results in IndicVoices-R (IV-R), the largest multilingual Indian TTS dataset derived from an ASR dataset, with 1,704 hours of high-quality speech from 10,496 speakers across 22 Indian languages. IV-R matches the quality of gold-standard TTS datasets like LJSpeech, LibriTTS, and IndicTTS. We also introduce the IV-R Benchmark, the first to assess zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot speaker generalization capabilities of TTS models on Indian voices, ensuring diversity in age, gender, and style. We demonstrate that fine-tuning an English pre-trained model on a combined dataset of high-quality IndicTTS and our IV-R dataset results in better zero-shot speaker generalization compared to fine-tuning on the IndicTTS dataset alone. Further, our evaluation reveals limited zero-shot generalization for Indian voices in TTS models trained on prior datasets, which we improve by fine-tuning the model on our data containing diverse set of speakers across language families. We open-source all data and code, releasing the first TTS model for all 22 official Indian languages.

Paperid: 6223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02567.pdf

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated powerful zero-shot segmentation performance in natural scenes. The recently released Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has further heightened researchers' expectations towards image segmentation capabilities. To evaluate the performance of SAM2 on class-agnostic instance-level segmentation tasks, we adopt different prompt strategies for SAM2 to cope with instance-level tasks for three relevant scenarios: Salient Instance Segmentation (SIS), Camouflaged Instance Segmentation (CIS), and Shadow Instance Detection (SID). In addition, to further explore the effectiveness of SAM2 in segmenting granular object structures, we also conduct detailed tests on the high-resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) benchmark to assess the fine-grained segmentation capability. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results indicate that the performance of SAM2 varies significantly across different scenarios. Besides, SAM2 is not particularly sensitive to segmenting high-resolution fine details. We hope this technique report can drive the emergence of SAM2-based adapters, aiming to enhance the performance ceiling of large vision models on class-agnostic instance segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 6224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01344.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models struggle to synthesize disparate pieces of information into a coherent plan when approaching a complex procedural task. In this work, we introduce a novel formalism and structure for such procedural knowledge. Based on this formalism, we present a novel procedural knowledge dataset called LCStep, which we created from LangChain tutorials. To leverage this procedural knowledge to solve new tasks, we propose analogy-augmented generation (AAG), which draws inspiration from the human ability to assimilate past experiences to solve unfamiliar problems. AAG uses a custom procedure memory store to retrieve and adapt specialized domain knowledge to answer new procedural tasks. We demonstrate that AAG outperforms few-shot and RAG baselines on LCStep, RecipeNLG, and CHAMP datasets under a pairwise LLM-based evaluation, corroborated by human evaluation in the case of RecipeNLG.

Paperid: 6225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21564.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of specific training data from a model, a need driven by privacy regulations and robustness concerns. Existing approaches typically modify model parameters, but such updates can be unstable, computationally costly, and limited by local approximations. We introduce Representation Unlearning, a framework that performs unlearning directly in the model's representation space. Instead of modifying model parameters, we learn a transformation over representations that imposes an information bottleneck: maximizing mutual information with retained data while suppressing information about data to be forgotten. We derive variational surrogates that make this objective tractable and show how they can be instantiated in two practical regimes: when both retain and forget data are available, and in a zero-shot setting where only forget data can be accessed. Experiments across several benchmarks demonstrate that Representation Unlearning achieves more reliable forgetting, better utility retention, and greater computational efficiency than parameter-centric baselines.

Paperid: 6226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21312.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure, the effective management of Autonomous Electric Taxi (AET) fleets faces a critical challenge in environments with dynamic and uncertain charging availability. While most existing research assumes a static charging network, this simplification creates a significant gap between theoretical models and real-world operations. To bridge this gap, we propose GAT-PEARL, a novel meta-reinforcement learning framework that learns an adaptive operational policy. Our approach integrates a graph attention network (GAT) to effectively extract robust spatial representations under infrastructure layouts and model the complex spatiotemporal relationships of the urban environment, and employs probabilistic embeddings for actor-critic reinforcement learning (PEARL) to enable rapid, inference-based adaptation to changes in charging network layouts without retraining. Through extensive simulations on real-world data in Chengdu, China, we demonstrate that GAT-PEARL significantly outperforms conventional reinforcement learning baselines, showing superior generalization to unseen infrastructure layouts and achieving higher overall operational efficiency in dynamic settings.

Paperid: 6227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20987.pdf

Abstract:
A large number of children experience preventable developmental delays each year, yet the deployment of machine learning in new countries has been stymied by a data bottleneck: reliable models require thousands of samples, while new programs begin with fewer than 100. We introduce the first pre-trained encoder for global child development, trained on 357,709 children across 44 countries using UNICEF survey data. With only 50 training samples, the pre-trained encoder achieves an average AUC of 0.65 (95% CI: 0.56-0.72), outperforming cold-start gradient boosting at 0.61 by 8-12% across regions. At N=500, the encoder achieves an AUC of 0.73. Zero-shot deployment to unseen countries achieves AUCs up to 0.84. We apply a transfer learning bound to explain why pre-training diversity enables few-shot generalization. These results establish that pre-trained encoders can transform the feasibility of ML for SDG 4.2.1 monitoring in resource-constrained settings.

Paperid: 6228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19802.pdf

Abstract:
Current stance detection research typically relies on predicting stance based on given targets and text. However, in real-world social media scenarios, targets are neither predefined nor static but rather complex and dynamic. To address this challenge, we propose a novel task: zero-shot stance detection in the wild with Dynamic Target Generation and Multi-Target Adaptation (DGTA), which aims to automatically identify multiple target-stance pairs from text without prior target knowledge. We construct a Chinese social media stance detection dataset and design multi-dimensional evaluation metrics. We explore both integrated and two-stage fine-tuning strategies for large language models (LLMs) and evaluate various baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned LLMs achieve superior performance on this task: the two-stage fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B attains the highest comprehensive target recognition score of 66.99%, while the integrated fine-tuned DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B achieves a stance detection F1 score of 79.26%.

Paperid: 6229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18970.pdf

Abstract:
Novel view synthesis (NVS) has advanced with generative modeling, enabling photorealistic image generation. In few-shot NVS, where only a few input views are available, existing methods often assume equal importance for all input views relative to the target, leading to suboptimal results. We address this limitation by introducing a camera-weighting mechanism that adjusts the importance of source views based on their relevance to the target. We propose two approaches: a deterministic weighting scheme leveraging geometric properties like Euclidean distance and angular differences, and a cross-attention-based learning scheme that optimizes view weighting. Additionally, models can be further trained with our camera-weighting scheme to refine their understanding of view relevance and enhance synthesis quality. This mechanism is adaptable and can be integrated into various NVS algorithms, improving their ability to synthesize high-quality novel views. Our results demonstrate that adaptive view weighting enhances accuracy and realism, offering a promising direction for improving NVS.

Paperid: 6230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17535.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models like CLIP create aligned embedding spaces for text and images, making it possible for anyone to build a visual classifier by simply naming the classes they want to distinguish. However, a model that works well in one domain may fail in another, and non-expert users have no straightforward way to assess whether their chosen VLM will work on their problem. We build on prior work using text-only comparisons to evaluate how well a model works for a given natural language task, and explore approaches that also generate synthetic images relevant to that task to evaluate and refine the prediction of zero-shot accuracy. We show that generated imagery to the baseline text-only scores substantially improves the quality of these predictions. Additionally, it gives a user feedback on the kinds of images that were used to make the assessment. Experiments on standard CLIP benchmark datasets demonstrate that the image-based approach helps users predict, without any labeled examples, whether a VLM will be effective for their application.

Paperid: 6231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15102.pdf

Abstract:
Kilometer-scale Earth system models are essential for capturing local climate change. However, these models are computationally expensive and produce petabyte-scale outputs, which limits their utility for applications such as probabilistic risk assessment. Here, we present the Field-Space Autoencoder, a scalable climate emulation framework based on a spherical compression model that overcomes these challenges. By utilizing Field-Space Attention, the model efficiently operates on native climate model output and therefore avoids geometric distortions caused by forcing spherical data onto Euclidean grids. This approach preserves physical structures significantly better than convolutional baselines. By producing a structured compressed field, it serves as a good baseline for downstream generative emulation. In addition, the model can perform zero-shot super-resolution that maps low-resolution large ensembles and scarce high-resolution data into a shared representation. We train a generative diffusion model on these compressed fields. The model can simultaneously learn internal variability from abundant low-resolution data and fine-scale physics from sparse high-resolution data. Our work bridges the gap between the high volume of low-resolution ensemble statistics and the scarcity of high-resolution physical detail.

Paperid: 6232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10904.pdf

Abstract:
The ARC-AGI benchmark series serves as a critical measure of few-shot generalization on novel tasks, a core aspect of intelligence. The ARC Prize 2025 global competition targeted the newly released ARC-AGI-2 dataset, which features greater task complexity compared to its predecessor. The Kaggle competition attracted 1,455 teams and 15,154 entries, with the top score reaching 24% on the ARC-AGI-2 private evaluation set. Paper submissions nearly doubled year-over-year to 90 entries, reflecting the growing research interest in fluid intelligence and abstract reasoning. The defining theme of 2025 is the emergence of the refinement loop -- a per-task iterative program optimization loop guided by a feedback signal. Refinement loops come in a variety of forms, in particular evolutionary program synthesis approaches and application-layer refinements to commercial AI systems. Such refinement loops are also possible in weight space, as evidenced by zero-pretraining deep learning methods which are now achieving competitive performance with remarkably small networks (7M parameters). In parallel, four frontier AI labs (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and xAI) reported ARC-AGI performance in public model cards in 2025, establishing ARC-AGI as an industry standard benchmark for AI reasoning. However, our analysis indicates that current frontier AI reasoning performance remains fundamentally constrained to knowledge coverage, giving rise to new forms of benchmark contamination. In this paper, we survey the top-performing methods, examine the role of refinement loops in AGI progress, discuss knowledge-dependent overfitting, and preview ARC-AGI-3, which introduces interactive reasoning challenges that require exploration, planning, memory, goal acquisition, and alignment capabilities.

Paperid: 6233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09746.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel Multi-Agent Cooperative Learning (MACL) framework to address cross-modal alignment collapse in vision-language models when handling out-of-distribution (OOD) concepts. Four core agents, including image, text, name, and coordination agents, collaboratively mitigate modality imbalance through structured message passing. The proposed framework enables multi-agent feature space name learning, incorporates a context exchange enhanced few-shot learning algorithm, and adopts an adaptive dynamic balancing mechanism to regulate inter-agent contributions. Experiments on the VISTA-Beyond dataset demonstrate that MACL significantly improves performance in both few-shot and zero-shot settings, achieving 1-5% precision gains across diverse visual domains.

Paperid: 6234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07855.pdf

Abstract:
For 3D perception systems to be practical in real-world applications -- from autonomous driving to embodied AI -- models must adapt to continuously evolving object definitions and sensor domains. Yet, research on continual and transfer learning in 3D point cloud perception remains underexplored compared to 2D vision -- particularly under simultaneous domain and label shifts. To address this gap, we propose the RObust Autonomous driving under Dataset shifts (ROAD) benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation suite for LiDAR-based object classification that explicitly accounts for domain shifts as well as three key forms of label evolution: class split, class expansion, and class insertion. Using large-scale datasets (Waymo, NuScenes, Argoverse2), we evaluate zero-shot transfer, linear probe, and CL, and analyze the impact of backbone architectures, training objectives, and CL methods. Our findings reveal limitations of existing approaches under realistic shifts and establish strong baselines for future research in robust 3D perception.

Paperid: 6235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07782.pdf

Abstract:
LLM agents operating over massive, dynamic tool libraries rely on effective retrieval, yet standard single-shot dense retrievers struggle with complex requests. These failures primarily stem from the disconnect between abstract user goals and technical documentation, and the limited capacity of fixed-size embeddings to model combinatorial tool compositions. To address these challenges, we propose TOOLQP, a lightweight framework that models retrieval as iterative query planning. Instead of single-shot matching, TOOLQP decomposes instructions into sub-tasks and dynamically generates queries to interact with the retriever, effectively bridging the semantic gap by targeting the specific sub-tasks required for composition. We train TOOLQP using synthetic query trajectories followed by optimization via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Experiments demonstrate that TOOLQP achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting superior zero-shot generalization, robustness across diverse retrievers, and significant improvements in downstream agentic execution.

Paperid: 6236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07271.pdf

Abstract:
Document-Level Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (DocZSRE) aims to predict unseen relation labels in text documents without prior training on specific relations. Existing approaches rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic data for unseen labels, which poses challenges for low-resource languages like Malaysian English. These challenges include the incorporation of local linguistic nuances and the risk of factual inaccuracies in LLM-generated data. This paper introduces Document-Level Zero-Shot Relation Extraction with Entity Side Information (DocZSRE-SI) to address limitations in the existing DocZSRE approach. The DocZSRE-SI framework leverages Entity Side Information, such as Entity Mention Descriptions and Entity Mention Hypernyms, to perform ZSRE without depending on LLM-generated synthetic data. The proposed low-complexity model achieves an average improvement of 11.6% in the macro F1-Score compared to baseline models and existing benchmarks. By utilizing Entity Side Information, DocZSRE-SI offers a robust and efficient alternative to error-prone, LLM-based methods, demonstrating significant advancements in handling low-resource languages and linguistic diversity in relation extraction tasks. This research provides a scalable and reliable solution for ZSRE, particularly in contexts like Malaysian English news articles, where traditional LLM-based approaches fall short.

Paperid: 6237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06484.pdf

Abstract:
We present a zero-shot framework for transferring human facial expressions to 3D animal face meshes. Our method combines intrinsic geometric descriptors (HKS/WKS) with a mesh-agnostic latent embedding that disentangles facial identity and expression. The ID latent space captures species-independent facial structure, while the expression latent space encodes deformation patterns that generalize across humans and animals. Trained only with human expression pairs, the model learns the embeddings, decoupling, and recoupling of cross-identity expressions, enabling expression transfer without requiring animal expression data. To enforce geometric consistency, we employ Jacobian loss together with vertex-position and Laplacian losses. Experiments show that our approach achieves plausible cross-species expression transfer, effectively narrowing the geometric gap between human and animal facial shapes.

Paperid: 6238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06394.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding student behavior in the classroom is essential to improve both pedagogical quality and student engagement. Existing methods for predicting student engagement typically require substantial annotated data to model the diversity of student behaviors, yet privacy concerns often restrict researchers to their own proprietary datasets. Moreover, the classroom context, represented in peers' actions, is ignored. To address the aforementioned limitation, we propose a novel three-stage framework for video-based student engagement measurement. First, we explore the few-shot adaptation of the vision-language model for student action recognition, which is fine-tuned to distinguish among action categories with a few training samples. Second, to handle continuous and unpredictable student actions, we utilize the sliding temporal window technique to divide each student's 2-minute-long video into non-overlapping segments. Each segment is assigned an action category via the fine-tuned VLM model, generating a sequence of action predictions. Finally, we leverage the large language model to classify this entire sequence of actions, together with the classroom context, as belonging to an engaged or disengaged student. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in identifying student engagement.

Paperid: 6239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03997.pdf

Abstract:
Municipal meeting minutes record key decisions in local democratic processes. Unlike parliamentary proceedings, which typically adhere to standardized formats, they encode voting outcomes in highly heterogeneous, free-form narrative text that varies widely across municipalities, posing significant challenges for automated extraction. In this paper, we introduce VotIE (Voting Information Extraction), a new information extraction task aimed at identifying structured voting events in narrative deliberative records, and establish the first benchmark for this task using Portuguese municipal minutes, building on the recently introduced CitiLink corpus. Our experiments yield two key findings. First, under standard in-domain evaluation, fine-tuned encoders, specifically XLM-R-CRF, achieve the strongest performance, reaching 93.2\% macro F1, outperforming generative approaches. Second, in a cross-municipality setting that evaluates transfer to unseen administrative contexts, these models suffer substantial performance degradation, whereas few-shot LLMs demonstrate greater robustness, with significantly smaller declines in performance. Despite this generalization advantage, the high computational cost of generative models currently constrains their practicality. As a result, lightweight fine-tuned encoders remain a more practical option for large-scale, real-world deployment. To support reproducible research in administrative NLP, we publicly release our benchmark, trained models, and evaluation framework.

Paperid: 6240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02778.pdf

Abstract:
Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities, but training control policies that can directly deploy on real hardware remains difficult due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We close this gap with a practical sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework that utilizes dense tactile feedback combined with joint torque sensing to explicitly regulate physical interactions. To enable effective sim-to-real transfer, we introduce (i) a computationally fast tactile simulation that computes distances between dense virtual tactile units and the object via parallel forward kinematics, providing high-rate, high-resolution touch signals needed by RL; (ii) a current-to-torque calibration that eliminates the need for torque sensors on dexterous hands by mapping motor current to joint torque; and (iii) actuator dynamics modeling to bridge the actuation gaps with randomization of non-ideal effects such as backlash, torque-speed saturation. Using an asymmetric actor-critic PPO pipeline trained entirely in simulation, our policies deploy directly to a five-finger hand. The resulting policies demonstrated two essential skills: (1) command-based, controllable grasp force tracking, and (2) reorientation of objects in the hand, both of which were robustly executed without fine-tuning on the robot. By combining tactile and torque in the observation space with effective sensing/actuation modeling, our system provides a practical solution to achieve reliable dexterous manipulation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of controllable grasping on a multi-finger dexterous hand trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot on real hardware.

Paperid: 6241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02224.pdf

Abstract:
Explainable AI (XAI) methods like SHAP and LIME produce numerical feature attributions that remain inaccessible to non expert users. Prior work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can transform these outputs into natural language explanations (NLEs), but it remains unclear which factors contribute to high-quality explanations. We present a systematic factorial study investigating how Forecasting model choice, XAI method, LLM selection, and prompting strategy affect NLE quality. Our design spans four models (XGBoost (XGB), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and SARIMAX - comparing black-box Machine-Learning (ML) against classical time-series approaches), three XAI conditions (SHAP, LIME, and a no-XAI baseline), three LLMs (GPT-4o, Llama-3-8B, DeepSeek-R1), and eight prompting strategies. Using G-Eval, an LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method, with dual LLM judges and four evaluation criteria, we evaluate 660 explanations for time-series forecasting. Our results suggest that: (1) XAI provides only small improvements over no-XAI baselines, and only for expert audiences; (2) LLM choice dominates all other factors, with DeepSeek-R1 outperforming GPT-4o and Llama-3; (3) we observe an interpretability paradox: in our setting, SARIMAX yielded lower NLE quality than ML models despite higher prediction accuracy; (4) zero-shot prompting is competitive with self-consistency at 7-times lower cost; and (5) chain-of-thought hurts rather than helps.

Paperid: 6242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01457.pdf

Abstract:
Relative-depth foundation models transfer well, yet monocular metric depth remains ill-posed due to unidentifiable global scale and heightened domain-shift sensitivity. Under a frozen-backbone calibration setting, we recover metric depth via an image-specific affine transform in inverse depth and train only lightweight calibration heads while keeping the relative-depth backbone and the CLIP text encoder fixed. Since captions provide coarse but noisy scale cues that vary with phrasing and missing objects, we use language to predict an uncertainty-aware envelope that bounds feasible calibration parameters in an unconstrained space, rather than committing to a text-only point estimate. We then use pooled multi-scale frozen visual features to select an image-specific calibration within this envelope. During training, a closed-form least-squares oracle in inverse depth provides per-image supervision for learning the envelope and the selected calibration. Experiments on NYUv2 and KITTI improve in-domain accuracy, while zero-shot transfer to SUN-RGBD and DDAD demonstrates improved robustness over strong language-only baselines.

Paperid: 6243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24545.pdf

Abstract:
For extreme low-bit quantization of large language models (LLMs), Double Binary Factorization (DBF) is attractive as it enables efficient inference without sacrificing accuracy. However, the scaling parameters of DBF are too restrictive; after factoring out signs, all rank components share the same magnitude profile, resulting in performance saturation. We propose Multi-envelope DBF (MDBF), which retains a shared pair of 1-bit sign bases but replaces the single envelope with a rank-$l$ envelope. By sharing sign matrices among envelope components, MDBF effectively maintains a binary carrier and utilizes the limited memory budget for magnitude expressiveness. We also introduce a closed-form initialization and an alternating refinement method to optimize MDBF. Across the LLaMA and Qwen families, MDBF enhances perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over previous binary formats at matched bits per weight while preserving the same deployment-friendly inference primitive.

Paperid: 6244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20781.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to find a target image that aligns with user intent, expressed through a reference image and a modification text. While Zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) methods sidestep the need for labeled training data by leveraging pretrained vision-language models, they often rely on a single fused query that merges all descriptive cues of what the user wants, tending to dilute key information and failing to account for what they wish to avoid. Moreover, current CIR benchmarks assume a single correct target per query, overlooking the ambiguity in modification texts. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Filtering with Textual constraints (SoFT), a training-free, plug-and-play filtering module for ZS-CIR. SoFT leverages multimodal large language models (LLMs) to extract two complementary constraints from the reference-modification pair: prescriptive (must-have) and proscriptive (must-avoid) constraints. These serve as semantic filters that reward or penalize candidate images to re-rank results, without modifying the base retrieval model or adding supervision. In addition, we construct a two-stage dataset pipeline that refines CIR benchmarks. We first identify multiple plausible targets per query to construct multi-target triplets, capturing the open-ended nature of user intent. Then guide multimodal LLMs to rewrite the modification text to focus on one target, while referencing contrastive distractors to ensure precision. This enables more comprehensive and reliable evaluation under varying ambiguity levels. Applied on top of CIReVL, a ZS-CIR retriever, SoFT raises R@5 to 65.25 on CIRR (+12.94), mAP@50 to 27.93 on CIRCO (+6.13), and R@50 to 58.44 on FashionIQ (+4.59), demonstrating broad effectiveness.

Paperid: 6245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20636.pdf

Abstract:
Many self-attention sublayers in large language models (LLMs) can be removed with little to no loss. We attribute this to the Attention Suppression Hypothesis: during pre-training, some deep attention layers learn to mute their own contribution, leaving the residual stream and the MLP to carry the representation. We propose Gate-Norm, a one-shot, weight-only criterion that ranks attention sublayers by query--key coupling and removes the least coupled ones, requiring no calibration data, no forward passes, no fine-tuning, and no specialized kernels. On 40-layer, 13B-parameter LLaMA models, Gate-Norm prunes the model in under a second. Pruning $8$--$16$ attention sublayers yields up to $1.30\times$ higher inference throughput while keeping average zero-shot accuracy within $2\%$ of the unpruned baseline across BoolQ, RTE, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, ARC-Easy/Challenge, and OpenBookQA. Across these settings, Gate-Norm matches data-driven pruning methods in accuracy while being $\sim 1000\times$ faster to score layers, enabling practical, data-free compression of LLMs.

Paperid: 6246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19903.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational technologies for a variety of tasks, from generating instructional materials and assisting with assessment design to tutoring. While prior work has investigated how models can be adapted or optimized for specific tasks, far less is known about how well LLMs perform at interpreting authentic educational scenarios without significant customization. As LLM-based systems become widely adopted by learners and educators in everyday academic contexts, understanding their out-of-the-box capabilities is increasingly important for setting expectations and benchmarking. We compared six LLMs to estimate their baseline performance on a simple but important task: classifying instructional moves in authentic classroom transcripts. We evaluated typical prompting methods: zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting. We found that while zero-shot performance was moderate, providing comprehensive examples (few-shot prompting) significantly improved performance for state-of-the-art models, with the strongest configuration reaching Cohen's Kappa = 0.58 against expert-coded annotations. At the same time, improvements were neither uniform nor complete: performance varied considerably by instructional move, and higher recall frequently came at the cost of increased false positives. Overall, these findings indicate that foundation models demonstrate meaningful yet limited capacity to interpret instructional discourse, with prompt design helping to surface capability but not eliminating fundamental reliability constraints.

Paperid: 6247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19651.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) provides granular insights by identifying specific themes within reviews and their associated sentiment. While supervised learning approaches dominate this field, the scarcity and high cost of annotated data for new domains present significant barriers. We argue that leveraging large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot setting is a practical alternative where resources for data annotation are limited. In this work, we propose a novel Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique that utilises an intermediate Unified Meaning Representation (UMR) to structure the reasoning process for the ACSA task. We evaluate this UMR-based approach against a standard CoT baseline across three models (Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemini-2.5-Pro) and four diverse datasets. Our findings suggest that UMR effectiveness may be model-dependent. Whilst preliminary results indicate comparable performance for mid-sized models such as Qwen3-8B, these observations warrant further investigation, particularly regarding the potential applicability to smaller model architectures. Further research is required to establish the generalisability of these findings across different model scales.

Paperid: 6248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17160.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in zero-shot image classification tasks. However, existing methods, including Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), all rely on annotated text-to-image pairs for aligning visual and textual modalities. This dependency introduces substantial cost and accuracy requirement in preparing high-quality datasets. At the same time, processing data from two modes also requires dual-tower encoders for most models, which also hinders their lightweight. To address these limitations, we introduce a ``Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training via Large-Language-Model-based Generation (LGCLIP)" framework. LGCLIP leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate class-specific prompts that guide a diffusion model in synthesizing reference images. Afterwards these generated images serve as visual prototypes, and the visual features of real images are extracted and compared with the visual features of these prototypes to achieve comparative prediction. By optimizing prompt generation through the LLM and employing only a visual encoder, LGCLIP remains lightweight and efficient. Crucially, our framework requires only class labels as input during whole experimental procedure, eliminating the need for manually annotated image-text pairs and extra pre-processing. Experimental results validate the feasibility and efficiency of LGCLIP, demonstrating great performance in zero-shot classification tasks and establishing a novel paradigm for classification.

Paperid: 6249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16019.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how humans evaluate robot behavior during human-robot interactions is crucial for developing socially aware robots that behave according to human expectations. While the traditional approach to capturing these evaluations is to conduct a user study, recent work has proposed utilizing machine learning instead. However, existing data-driven methods require large amounts of labeled data, which limits their use in practice. To address this gap, we propose leveraging the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve how well a robot can predict a user's perception of its performance, and study this idea experimentally in social navigation tasks. To this end, we extend the SEAN TOGETHER dataset with additional real-world human-robot navigation episodes and participant feedback. Using this augmented dataset, we evaluate the ability of several LLMs to predict human perceptions of robot performance from a small number of in-context examples, based on observed spatio-temporal cues of the robot and surrounding human motion. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can match or exceed the performance of traditional supervised learning models while requiring an order of magnitude fewer labeled instances. We further show that prediction performance can improve with more in-context examples, confirming the scalability of our approach. Additionally, we investigate what kind of sensor-based information an LLM relies on to make these inferences by conducting an ablation study on the input features considered for performance prediction. Finally, we explore the novel application of personalized examples for in-context learning, i.e., drawn from the same user being evaluated, finding that they further enhance prediction accuracy. This work paves the path to improving robot behavior in a scalable manner through user-centered feedback.

Paperid: 6250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15564.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing (RS) image segmentation is constrained by the limited availability of annotated data and a gap between overhead imagery and natural images used to train foundational models. This motivates effective adaptation under limited supervision. SAM3 concept-driven framework generates masks from textual prompts without requiring task-specific modifications, which may enable this adaptation. We evaluate SAM3 for RS imagery across four target types, comparing textual, geometric, and hybrid prompting strategies, under lightweight fine-tuning scales with increasing supervision, alongside zero-shot inference. Results show that combining semantic and geometric cues yields the highest performance across targets and metrics. Text-only prompting exhibits the lowest performance, with marked score gaps for irregularly shaped targets, reflecting limited semantic alignment between SAM3 textual representations and their overhead appearances. Nevertheless, textual prompting with light fine-tuning offers a practical performance-effort trade-off for geometrically regular and visually salient targets. Across targets, performance improves between zero-shot inference and fine-tuning, followed by diminishing returns as the supervision scale increases. Namely, a modest geometric annotation effort is sufficient for effective adaptation. A persistent gap between Precision and IoU further indicates that under-segmentation and boundary inaccuracies remain prevalent error patterns in RS tasks, particularly for irregular and less prevalent targets.

Paperid: 6251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14397.pdf

Abstract:
Machine-learning surrogate models have shown promise in accelerating aerodynamic design, yet progress toward generalizable predictors for three-dimensional wings has been limited by the scarcity and restricted diversity of existing datasets. Here, we present SuperWing, a comprehensive open dataset of transonic swept-wing aerodynamics comprising 4,239 parameterized wing geometries and 28,856 Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow field solutions. The wing shapes in the dataset are generated using a simplified yet expressive geometry parameterization that incorporates spanwise variations in airfoil shape, twist, and dihedral, allowing for an enhanced diversity without relying on perturbations of a baseline wing. All shapes are simulated under a broad range of Mach numbers and angles of attack covering the typical flight envelope. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we benchmark two state-of-the-art Transformers that accurately predict surface flow and achieve a 2.5 drag-count error on held-out samples. Models pretrained on SuperWing further exhibit strong zero-shot generalization to complex benchmark wings such as DLR-F6 and NASA CRM, underscoring the dataset's diversity and potential for practical usage.

Paperid: 6252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14106.pdf

Abstract:
Real-time streamflow monitoring networks generate millions of observations annually, yet maintaining data quality across thousands of remote sensors remains labor-intensive. We introduce HydroGEM (Hydrological Generalizable Encoder for Monitoring), a foundation model for continental-scale streamflow quality control. HydroGEM uses two-stage training: self-supervised pretraining on 6.03 million sequences from 3,724 USGS stations learns hydrological representations, followed by fine-tuning with synthetic anomalies for detection and reconstruction. A hybrid TCN-Transformer architecture (14.2M parameters) captures local temporal patterns and long-range dependencies, while hierarchical normalization handles six orders of magnitude in discharge. On held-out synthetic tests comprising 799 stations with 18 expert-validated anomaly types, HydroGEM achieves F1 = 0.792 for detection and 68.7% reconstruction-error reduction, a 36.3% improvement over existing methods. Zero-shot transfer to 100 Environment and Climate Change Canada stations yields F1 = 0.586, exceeding all baselines and demonstrating cross-national generalization. The model maintains consistent detection across correction magnitudes and aligns with operational seasonal patterns. HydroGEM is designed for human-in-the-loop workflows - outputs are quality control suggestions requiring expert review, not autonomous corrections.

Paperid: 6253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11949.pdf

Abstract:
Activation monitoring, which probes a model's internal states using lightweight classifiers, is an emerging tool for AI safety. However, its worst-case robustness under a misalignment threat model--where a model might learn to actively conceal its internal states--remains untested. Focusing on this threat model, we ask: could a model learn to evade previously unseen activation monitors? Our core contribution is to stress-test the learnability of this behavior. We demonstrate that finetuning can create Neural Chameleons: models capable of zero-shot evading activation monitors. Specifically, we fine-tune an LLM to evade monitors for a set of benign concepts (e.g., languages, HTML) when conditioned on a trigger of the form: "You are being probed for {concept}". We show that this learned mechanism generalizes zero-shot: by substituting {concept} with a safety-relevant term like 'deception', the model successfully evades previously unseen safety monitors. We validate this phenomenon across diverse model families (Llama, Gemma, Qwen), showing that the evasion succeeds even against monitors trained post hoc on the model's frozen weights. This evasion is highly selective, targeting only the specific concept mentioned in the trigger, and having a modest impact on model capabilities on standard benchmarks. Using Gemma-2-9b-it as a case study, a mechanistic analysis reveals this is achieved via a targeted manipulation that moves activations into a low-dimensional subspace. While stronger defenses like monitor ensembles and non-linear classifiers show greater resilience, the model retains a non-trivial evasion capability. Our work provides a proof-of-concept for this failure mode and a tool to evaluate the worst-case robustness of monitoring techniques against misalignment threat models.

Paperid: 6254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11296.pdf

Abstract:
Manual generation of G-code is important for learning the operation of CNC machines. Prior work in G-code verification uses Large-Language Models (LLMs), which primarily examine errors in the written programming. However, CNC machining requires extensive use and knowledge of the Human-Machine Interface (HMI), which displays machine status and errors. LLMs currently lack the capability to leverage knowledge of HMIs due to their inability to access the vision modality. This paper proposes a few-shot VLM-based verification approach that simultaneously evaluates the G-code and the HMI display for errors and safety status. The input dataset includes paired G-code text and associated HMI screenshots from a 15-slant-PRO lathe, including both correct and error-prone cases. To enable few-shot learning, the VLM is provided with a structured JSON schema based on prior heuristic knowledge. After determining the prompts, instances of G-code and HMI that either contain errors or are error free are used as few-shot examples to guide the VLM. The model was then evaluated in comparison to a zero-shot VLM through multiple scenarios of incorrect G-code and HMI errors with respect to per-slot accuracy. The VLM showed that few-shot prompting led to overall enhancement of detecting HMI errors and discrepancies with the G-code for more comprehensive debugging. Therefore, the proposed framework was demonstrated to be suitable for verification of manually generated G-code that is typically developed in CNC training.

Paperid: 6255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11098.pdf

Abstract:
Many manufacturing environments operate in low-light conditions or within enclosed machines where conventional vision systems struggle. Infrared cameras provide complementary advantages in such environments. Simultaneously, supervised AI systems require large labeled datasets, which makes zero-shot learning frameworks more practical for applications including infrared cameras. Recent advances in vision-language foundation models (VLMs) offer a new path in zero-shot predictions from paired image-text representations. However, current VLMs cannot understand infrared camera data since they are trained on RGB data. This work introduces VLM-IRIS (Vision-Language Models for InfraRed Industrial Sensing), a zero-shot framework that adapts VLMs to infrared data by preprocessing infrared images captured by a FLIR Boson sensor into RGB-compatible inputs suitable for CLIP-based encoders. We demonstrate zero-shot workpiece presence detection on a 3D printer bed where temperature differences between the build plate and workpieces make the task well-suited for thermal imaging. VLM-IRIS converts the infrared images to magma representation and applies centroid prompt ensembling with a CLIP ViT-B/32 encoder to achieve high accuracy on infrared images without any model retraining. These findings demonstrate that the proposed improvements to VLMs can be effectively extended to thermal applications for label-free monitoring.

Paperid: 6256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09953.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific data points from a trained model to satisfy privacy, copyright, and safety requirements. In real deployments, providers distribute a global model to many edge devices, where each client personalizes the model using private data. When a deletion request is issued, clients may ignore it or falsely claim compliance, and providers cannot check their parameters or data. This makes verification difficult, especially because personalized models must forget the targeted samples while preserving local utility, and verification must remain lightweight on edge devices. We introduce ZK APEX, a zero-shot personalized unlearning method that operates directly on the personalized model without retraining. ZK APEX combines sparse masking on the provider side with a small Group OBS compensation step on the client side, using a blockwise empirical Fisher matrix to create a curvature-aware update designed for low overhead. Paired with Halo2 zero-knowledge proofs, it enables the provider to verify that the correct unlearning transformation was applied without revealing any private data or personalized parameters. On Vision Transformer classification tasks, ZK APEX recovers nearly all personalization accuracy while effectively removing the targeted information. Applied to the OPT125M generative model trained on code data, it recovers around seventy percent of the original accuracy. Proof generation for the ViT case completes in about two hours, more than ten million times faster than retraining-based checks, with less than one gigabyte of memory use and proof sizes around four hundred megabytes. These results show the first practical framework for verifiable personalized unlearning on edge devices.

Paperid: 6257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09666.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a neurosymbolic framework for information extraction from documents, evaluated on transactional documents. We introduce a schema-based approach that integrates symbolic validation methods to enable more effective zero-shot output and knowledge distillation. The methodology uses language models to generate candidate extractions, which are then filtered through syntactic-, task-, and domain-level validation to ensure adherence to domain-specific arithmetic constraints. Our contributions include a comprehensive schema for transactional documents, relabeled datasets, and an approach for generating high-quality labels for knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in $F_1$-scores and accuracy, highlighting the effectiveness of neurosymbolic validation in transactional document processing.

Paperid: 6258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08123.pdf

Abstract:
Language models (LMs) are often used as zero-shot or few-shot classifiers by scoring label words, but they remain fragile to adversarial prompts. Prior work typically optimizes task- or model-specific triggers, making results difficult to compare and limiting transferability. We study universal adversarial suffixes: short token sequences (4-10 tokens) that, when appended to any input, broadly reduce accuracy across tasks and models. Our approach learns the suffix in a differentiable "soft" form using Gumbel-Softmax relaxation and then discretizes it for inference. Training maximizes calibrated cross-entropy on the label region while masking gold tokens to prevent trivial leakage, with entropy regularization to avoid collapse. A single suffix trained on one model transfers effectively to others, consistently lowering both accuracy and calibrated confidence. Experiments on sentiment analysis, natural language inference, paraphrase detection, commonsense QA, and physical reasoning with Qwen2-1.5B, Phi-1.5, and TinyLlama-1.1B demonstrate consistent attack effectiveness and transfer across tasks and model families.

Paperid: 6259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07705.pdf

Abstract:
Existing data-driven approaches in modeling and predicting time series data include ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average), Transformer-based models, LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) and TCN (Temporal Convolutional Network). These approaches, and in particular deep learning-based models such as LSTM and TCN, have shown great results in predicting time series data. With the advancement of leveraging pre-trained foundation models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and more notably Google's recent foundation model for time series data, {\it TimesFM} (Time Series Foundation Model), it is of interest to investigate whether these foundation models have the capability of outperforming existing modeling approaches in analyzing and predicting time series data. This paper investigates the performance of using LLM models for time series data prediction. We investigate the in-context learning methodology in the training of LLM models that are specific to the underlying application domain. More specifically, the paper explores training LLMs through in-context, zero-shot and few-shot learning and forecasting time series data with OpenAI {\tt o4-mini} and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, as well as the recent Google's Transformer-based TimesFM, a time series-specific foundation model, along with two deep learning models, namely TCN and LSTM networks. The findings indicate that TimesFM has the best overall performance with the lowest RMSE value (0.3023) and the competitive inference time (266 seconds). Furthermore, OpenAI's o4-mini also exhibits a good performance based on Zero Shot learning. These findings highlight pre-trained time series foundation models as a promising direction for real-time forecasting, enabling accurate and scalable deployment with minimal model adaptation.

Paperid: 6260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06190.pdf

Abstract:
Food drying is widely used to reduce moisture content, ensure safety, and extend shelf life. Color evolution of food samples is an important indicator of product quality in food drying. Although existing studies have examined color changes under different drying conditions, current approaches primarily rely on low-dimensional color features and cannot fully capture the complex, dynamic color trajectories of food samples. Moreover, existing modeling approaches lack the ability to generalize to unseen process conditions. To address these limitations, we develop a novel multi-modal color-trajectory prediction method that integrates high-dimensional temporal color information with drying process parameters to enable accurate and data-efficient color trajectory prediction. Under unseen drying conditions, the model attains RMSEs of 2.12 for cookie drying and 1.29 for apple drying, reducing errors by over 90% compared with baseline models. These experimental results demonstrate the model's superior accuracy, robustness, and broad applicability.

Paperid: 6261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04492.pdf

Abstract:
LLM-based approaches have recently achieved impressive results in zero-shot stance detection. However, they still struggle in complex real-world scenarios, where stance understanding requires dynamic background knowledge, target definitions involve compound entities or events that must be explicitly linked to stance labels, and rhetorical devices such as irony often obscure the author's actual intent. To address these challenges, we propose MSME, a Multi-Stage, Multi-Expert framework for zero-shot stance detection. MSME consists of three stages: (1) Knowledge Preparation, where relevant background knowledge is retrieved and stance labels are clarified; (2) Expert Reasoning, involving three specialized modules-Knowledge Expert distills salient facts and reasons from a knowledge perspective, Label Expert refines stance labels and reasons accordingly, and Pragmatic Expert detects rhetorical cues such as irony to infer intent from a pragmatic angle; (3) Decision Aggregation, where a Meta-Judge integrates all expert analyses to produce the final stance prediction. Experiments on three public datasets show that MSME achieves state-of-the-art performance across the board.

Paperid: 6262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04395.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong few-shot learning capabilities. However, these methods typically learn holistic representations where an image's domain-invariant structure is implicitly entangled with its domain-specific style. This presents an opportunity to further enhance generalization by disentangling these visual cues. In this paper, we propose Fourier-Attentive Representation Learning (FARL), a novel framework that addresses this by explicitly disentangling visual representations using Fourier analysis. The core of our method is a dual cross-attention mechanism, where learnable representation tokens separately query an image's structural features (from the phase spectrum) and stylistic features (from the amplitude spectrum). This process yields enriched, disentangled tokens that are then injected deep into the VLM encoders to guide adaptation. Our design, which includes an asymmetric injection strategy, forces the model to learn a more robust vision-language alignment. Extensive experiments on 15 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Paperid: 6263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01636.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables fine-grained visual search by combining a reference image with a textual modification. While supervised CIR methods achieve high accuracy, their reliance on costly triplet annotations motivates zero-shot solutions. The core challenge in zero-shot CIR (ZS-CIR) stems from a fundamental dilemma: existing text-centric or diffusion-based approaches struggle to effectively bridge the vision-language modality gap. To address this, we propose Fusion-Diff, a novel generative editing framework with high effectiveness and data efficiency designed for multimodal alignment. First, it introduces a multimodal fusion feature editing strategy within a joint vision-language (VL) space, substantially narrowing the modality gap. Second, to maximize data efficiency, the framework incorporates a lightweight Control-Adapter, enabling state-of-the-art performance through fine-tuning on only a limited-scale synthetic dataset of 200K samples. Extensive experiments on standard CIR benchmarks (CIRR, FashionIQ, and CIRCO) demonstrate that Fusion-Diff significantly outperforms prior zero-shot approaches. We further enhance the interpretability of our model by visualizing the fused multimodal representations.

Paperid: 6264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00888.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot foundation models (FMs) promise training-free prediction on tabular data, yet their hardware footprint remains poorly characterized. We present a fully reproducible benchmark that reports test accuracy together with wall-clock latency, peak CPU RAM, and peak GPU VRAM on four public datasets: Adult-Income, Higgs-100k, Wine-Quality, and California-Housing. Two open FMs (TabPFN-1.0 and TabICL-base) are compared against tuned XGBoost, LightGBM, and Random Forest baselines on a single NVIDIA T4 GPU. The tree ensembles equal or surpass FM accuracy on three datasets while completing full-test batches in <= 0.40 s and <= 150 MB RAM, using zero VRAM. TabICL achieves a 0.8 percentage-point gain on Higgs but requires roughly 40,000 times more latency (960 s) and 9 GB VRAM. TabPFN matches tree-model accuracy on Wine and Housing but peaks at 4 GB VRAM and cannot process the full 100k-row Higgs table. These results quantify the substantial hardware-versus-accuracy trade-offs in current tabular FMs and provide an open baseline for future efficiency-oriented research.

Paperid: 6265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00163.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for classification tasks, offering a flexible alternative to trusted classical machine learning models like LightGBM through zero-shot prompting. However, their reliability for structured tabular data remains unclear, particularly in high stakes applications like financial risk assessment. Our study systematically evaluates LLMs and generates their SHAP values on financial classification tasks. Our analysis shows a divergence between LLMs self-explanation of feature impact and their SHAP values, as well as notable differences between LLMs and LightGBM SHAP values. These findings highlight the limitations of LLMs as standalone classifiers for structured financial modeling, but also instill optimism that improved explainability mechanisms coupled with few-shot prompting will make LLMs usable in risk-sensitive domains.

Paperid: 6266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23264.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-aspect sentiment analysis of Bangla e-commerce reviews remains challenging due to limited annotated datasets, morphological complexity, code-mixing phenomena, and domain shift issues, affecting 300 million Bangla-speaking users. Existing approaches lack explainability and cross-domain generalization capabilities crucial for practical deployment. We present BanglaSentNet, an explainable hybrid deep learning framework integrating LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, and BanglaBERT through dynamic weighted ensemble learning for multi-aspect sentiment classification. We introduce a dataset of 8,755 manually annotated Bangla product reviews across four aspects (Quality, Service, Price, Decoration) from major Bangladeshi e-commerce platforms. Our framework incorporates SHAP-based feature attribution and attention visualization for transparent insights. BanglaSentNet achieves 85% accuracy and 0.88 F1-score, outperforming standalone deep learning models by 3-7% and traditional approaches substantially. The explainability suite achieves 9.4/10 interpretability score with 87.6% human agreement. Cross-domain transfer learning experiments reveal robust generalization: zero-shot performance retains 67-76% effectiveness across diverse domains (BanglaBook reviews, social media, general e-commerce, news headlines); few-shot learning with 500-1000 samples achieves 90-95% of full fine-tuning performance, significantly reducing annotation costs. Real-world deployment demonstrates practical utility for Bangladeshi e-commerce platforms, enabling data-driven decision-making for pricing optimization, service improvement, and customer experience enhancement. This research establishes a new state-of-the-art benchmark for Bangla sentiment analysis, advances ensemble learning methodologies for low-resource languages, and provides actionable solutions for commercial applications.

Paperid: 6267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21788.pdf

Abstract:
In today's world, the focus of programmers has shifted from writing complex, error-prone code to prioritizing simple, clear, efficient, and sustainable code that makes programs easier to understand. Code refactoring plays a critical role in this transition by improving structural organization and optimizing performance. However, existing refactoring methods are limited in their ability to generalize across multiple programming languages and coding styles, as they often rely on manually crafted transformation rules. The objectives of this study are to (i) develop an Large Language Models (LLMs)-based framework capable of performing accurate and efficient code refactoring across multiple languages (C, C++, C#, Python, Java), (ii) investigate the impact of prompt engineering (Temperature, Different shot algorithm) and instruction fine-tuning on refactoring effectiveness, and (iii) evaluate the quality improvements (Compilability, Correctness, Distance, Similarity, Number of Lines, Token, Character, Cyclomatic Complexity) in refactored code through empirical metrics and human assessment. To accomplish these goals, we propose a fine-tuned prompt-engineering-based model combined with few-shot learning for multilingual code refactoring. Experimental results indicate that Java achieves the highest overall correctness up to 99.99% the 10-shot setting, records the highest average compilability of 94.78% compared to the original source code and maintains high similarity (Approx. 53-54%) and thus demonstrates a strong balance between structural modifications and semantic preservation. Python exhibits the lowest structural distance across all shots (Approx. 277-294) while achieving moderate similarity ( Approx. 44-48%) that indicates consistent and minimally disruptive refactoring.

Paperid: 6268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20001.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health challenges and cyberbullying are increasingly prevalent in digital spaces, necessitating scalable and interpretable detection systems. This paper introduces a unified multiclass classification framework for detecting ten distinct mental health and cyberbullying categories from social media data. We curate datasets from Twitter and Reddit, implementing a rigorous "split-then-balance" pipeline to train on balanced data while evaluating on a realistic, held-out imbalanced test set. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing traditional lexical models, hybrid approaches, and several end-to-end fine-tuned transformers. Our results demonstrate that end-to-end fine-tuning is critical for performance, with the domain-adapted MentalBERT emerging as the top model, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a Macro F1 score of 0.76, surpassing both its generic counterpart and a zero-shot LLM baseline. Grounded in a comprehensive ethical analysis, we frame the system as a human-in-the-loop screening aid, not a diagnostic tool. To support this, we introduce a hybrid SHAPLLM explainability framework and present a prototype dashboard ("Social Media Screener") designed to integrate model predictions and their explanations into a practical workflow for moderators. Our work provides a robust baseline, highlighting future needs for multi-label, clinically-validated datasets at the critical intersection of online safety and computational mental health.

Paperid: 6269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19730.pdf

Abstract:
Active learning (AL) accelerates scientific discovery by prioritizing the most informative experiments, but traditional machine learning (ML) models used in AL suffer from cold-start limitations and domain-specific feature engineering, restricting their generalizability. Large language models (LLMs) offer a new paradigm by leveraging their pretrained knowledge and universal token-based representations to propose experiments directly from text-based descriptions. Here, we introduce an LLM-based active learning framework (LLM-AL) that operates in an iterative few-shot setting and benchmark it against conventional ML models across four diverse materials science datasets. We explored two prompting strategies: one using concise numerical inputs suited for datasets with more compositional and structured features, and another using expanded descriptive text suited for datasets with more experimental and procedural features to provide additional context. Across all datasets, LLM-AL could reduce the number of experiments needed to reach top-performing candidates by over 70% and consistently outperformed traditional ML models. We found that LLM-AL performs broader and more exploratory searches while still reaching the optima with fewer iterations. We further examined the stability boundaries of LLM-AL given the inherent non-determinism of LLMs and found its performance to be broadly consistent across runs, within the variability range typically observed for traditional ML approaches. These results demonstrate that LLM-AL can serve as a generalizable alternative to conventional AL pipelines for more efficient and interpretable experiment selection and potential LLM-driven autonomous discovery.

Paperid: 6270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17358.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a zero-shot method for Natural Language Inference (NLI) that leverages multimodal representations by grounding language in visual contexts. Our approach generates visual representations of premises using text-to-image models and performs inference by comparing these representations with textual hypotheses. We evaluate two inference techniques: cosine similarity and visual question answering. Our method achieves high accuracy without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating robustness against textual biases and surface heuristics. Additionally, we design a controlled adversarial dataset to validate the robustness of our approach. Our findings suggest that leveraging visual modality as a meaning representation provides a promising direction for robust natural language understanding.

Paperid: 6271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16985.pdf

Abstract:
Online conversations have become more prevalent on public discussion platforms (e.g. Reddit). With growing controversial topics, it is desirable to summarize not only diverse arguments, but also their rationale and justification. Early studies on text summarization focus on capturing general salient information in source documents, overlooking the argumentative nature of online conversations. Recent research on conversation summarization although considers the argumentative relationship among sentences, fail to explicate deeper argument structure within sentences for summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel task of argument-aware quantitative summarization to reveal the claim-reason structure of arguments in conversations, with quantities measuring argument strength. We further propose ARQUSUMM, a novel framework to address the task. To reveal the underlying argument structure within sentences, ARQUSUMM leverages LLM few-shot learning grounded in the argumentation theory to identify propositions within sentences and their claim-reason relationships. For quantitative summarization, ARQUSUMM employs argument structure-aware clustering algorithms to aggregate arguments and quantify their support. Experiments show that ARQUSUMM outperforms existing conversation and quantitative summarization models and generate summaries representing argument structures that are more helpful to users, of high textual quality and quantification accuracy.

Paperid: 6272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15884.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient 6D pose estimation of novel objects under clutter and occlusion is critical for robotic manipulation across warehouse automation, bin picking, logistics, and e-commerce fulfillment. There are three main approaches in this domain; Model-based methods assume an exact CAD model at inference but require high-resolution meshes and transfer poorly to new environments; Model-free methods that rely on a few reference images or videos are more flexible, however often fail under challenging conditions; Category-level approaches aim to balance flexibility and accuracy but many are overly general and ignore environment and object priors, limiting their practicality in industrial settings. To this end, we propose Box6d, a category-level 6D pose estimation method tailored for storage boxes in the warehouse context. From a single RGB-D observation, Box6D infers the dimensions of the boxes via a fast binary search and estimates poses using a category CAD template rather than instance-specific models. Suing a depth-based plausibility filter and early-stopping strategy, Box6D then rejects implausible hypotheses, lowering computational cost. We conduct evaluations on real-world storage scenarios and public benchmarks, and show that our approach delivers competitive or superior 6D pose precision while reducing inference time by approximately 76%.

Paperid: 6273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14219.pdf

Abstract:
The Whisper model, an open-source automatic speech recognition system, is widely adopted for its strong performance across multilingual and zero-shot settings. However, it frequently suffers from hallucination errors, especially under noisy acoustic conditions. Previous works to reduce hallucinations in Whisper-style ASR systems have primarily focused on audio preprocessing or post-processing of transcriptions to filter out erroneous content. However, modifications to the Whisper model itself remain largely unexplored to mitigate hallucinations directly. To address this challenge, we present a two-stage architecture that first enhances encoder robustness through Adaptive Layer Attention (ALA) and further suppresses hallucinations using a multi-objective knowledge distillation (KD) framework. In the first stage, ALA groups encoder layers into semantically coherent blocks via inter-layer correlation analysis. A learnable multi-head attention module then fuses these block representations, enabling the model to jointly exploit low- and high-level features for more robust encoding. In the second stage, our KD framework trains the student model on noisy audio to align its semantic and attention distributions with a teacher model processing clean inputs. Our experiments on noisy speech benchmarks show notable reductions in hallucinations and word error rates, while preserving performance on clean speech. Together, ALA and KD offer a principled strategy to improve Whisper's reliability under real-world noisy conditions.

Paperid: 6274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13152.pdf

Abstract:
Grammar competency estimation is essential for assessing linguistic proficiency in both written and spoken language; however, the spoken modality presents additional challenges due to its spontaneous, unstructured, and disfluent nature. Developing accurate grammar scoring models further requires extensive expert annotation, making large-scale data creation impractical. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-shot grammar competency estimation framework that leverages unlabeled data and Large Language Models (LLMs) without relying on manual labels. During training, we employ LLM-generated predictions on unlabeled data by using grammar competency rubric-based prompts. These predictions, treated as pseudo labels, are utilized to train a transformer-based model through a novel training framework designed to handle label noise effectively. We show that the choice of LLM for pseudo-label generation critically affects model performance and that the ratio of clean-to-noisy samples during training strongly influences stability and accuracy. Finally, a qualitative analysis of error intensity and score prediction confirms the robustness and interpretability of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in estimating grammar competency scores with high accuracy, paving the way for scalable, low-resource grammar assessment systems.

Paperid: 6275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12751.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous vehicle navigation in complex environments such as dense and fast-moving highways and merging scenarios remains an active area of research. A key limitation of RL is its reliance on well-specified reward functions, which often fail to capture the full semantic and social complexity of diverse, out-of-distribution situations. As a result, a rapidly growing line of research explores using Large Language Models (LLMs) to replace or supplement RL for direct planning and control, on account of their ability to reason about rich semantic context. However, LLMs present significant drawbacks: they can be unstable in zero-shot safety-critical settings, produce inconsistent outputs, and often depend on expensive API calls with network latency. This motivates our investigation into whether small, locally deployed LLMs (< 14B parameters) can meaningfully support autonomous highway driving through reward shaping rather than direct control. We present a case study comparing RL-only, LLM-only, and hybrid approaches, where LLMs augment RL rewards by scoring state-action transitions during training, while standard RL policies execute at test time. Our findings reveal that RL-only agents achieve moderate success rates (73-89%) with reasonable efficiency, LLM-only agents can reach higher success rates (up to 94%) but with severely degraded speed performance, and hybrid approaches consistently fall between these extremes. Critically, despite explicit efficiency instructions, LLM-influenced approaches exhibit systematic conservative bias with substantial model-dependent variability, highlighting important limitations of current small LLMs for safety-critical control tasks.

Paperid: 6276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11685.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained models have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities in time-series forecasting; however, adapting them to evolving data distributions remains a significant challenge. A key hurdle lies in accessing the original training data, as fine-tuning solely on new data often leads to catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Replay Tuning (R-Tuning), a novel framework designed for the continual adaptation of pre-trained time-series models. R-Tuning constructs a unified latent space that captures both prior and current task knowledge through a frequency-aware replay strategy. Specifically, it augments model-generated samples via wavelet-based decomposition across multiple frequency bands, generating trend-preserving and fusion-enhanced variants to improve representation diversity and replay efficiency. To further reduce reliance on synthetic samples, R-Tuning introduces a latent consistency constraint that aligns new representations with the prior task space. This constraint guides joint optimization within a compact and semantically coherent latent space, ensuring robust knowledge retention and adaptation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of R-Tuning, which reduces MAE and MSE by up to 46.9% and 46.8%, respectively, on new tasks, while preserving prior knowledge with gains of up to 5.7% and 6.0% on old tasks. Notably, under few-shot settings, R-Tuning outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines even when synthetic proxy samples account for only 5% of the new task dataset.

Paperid: 6277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11311.pdf

Abstract:
The field of computer vision is undergoing a paradigm shift toward large-scale foundation model pre-training via self-supervised learning (SSL). Leveraging large volumes of unlabeled brain MRI data, such models can learn anatomical priors that improve few-shot performance in diverse neuroimaging tasks. However, most SSL frameworks are tailored to natural images, and their adaptation to capture multi-modal MRI information remains underexplored. This work proposes a modality-invariant representation learning setup and evaluates its effectiveness in stroke and epilepsy lesion segmentation, following large-scale pre-training. Experimental results suggest that despite successful cross-modality alignment, lesion segmentation primarily benefits from preserving fine-grained modality-specific features. Model checkpoints and code are made publicly available.

Paperid: 6278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10004.pdf

Abstract:
How can we accurately quantize a pre-trained Vision Transformer model? Quantization algorithms compress Vision Transformers (ViTs) into low-bit formats, reducing memory and computation demands with minimal accuracy degradation. However, existing methods rely on uniform precision, ignoring the diverse sensitivity of ViT components to quantization. Metric-based Mixed Precision Quantization (MPQ) is a promising alternative, but previous MPQ methods for ViTs suffer from three major limitations: 1) coarse granularity, 2) mismatch in metric scale across component types, and 3) quantization-unaware bit allocation. In this paper, we propose LampQ (Layer-wise Mixed Precision Quantization for Vision Transformers), an accurate metric-based MPQ method for ViTs to overcome these limitations. LampQ performs layer-wise quantization to achieve both fine-grained control and efficient acceleration, incorporating a type-aware Fisher-based metric to measure sensitivity. Then, LampQ assigns bit-widths optimally through integer linear programming and further updates them iteratively. Extensive experiments show that LampQ provides the state-of-the-art performance in quantizing ViTs pre-trained on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, and zero-shot quantization.

Paperid: 6279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07171.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning-based video surveillance increasingly demands privacy-preserving architectures with low computational and environmental overhead. Federated learning preserves privacy but deploying large vision-language models (VLMs) introduces major energy and sustainability challenges. We compare three strategies for federated violence detection under realistic non-IID splits on the RWF-2000 and RLVS datasets: zero-shot inference with pretrained VLMs, LoRA-based fine-tuning of LLaVA-NeXT-Video-7B, and personalized federated learning of a 65.8M-parameter 3D CNN. All methods exceed 90% accuracy in binary violence detection. The 3D CNN achieves superior calibration (ROC AUC 92.59%) at roughly half the energy cost (240 Wh vs. 570 Wh) of federated LoRA, while VLMs provide richer multimodal reasoning. Hierarchical category grouping (based on semantic similarity and class exclusion) boosts VLM multiclass accuracy from 65.31% to 81% on the UCF-Crime dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative simulation study of LoRA-tuned VLMs and personalized CNNs for federated violence detection, with explicit energy and CO2e quantification. Our results inform hybrid deployment strategies that default to efficient CNNs for routine inference and selectively engage VLMs for complex contextual reasoning.

Paperid: 6280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07044.pdf

Abstract:
Mental health disorders affect over one-fifth of adults globally, yet detecting such conditions from text remains challenging due to the subtle and varied nature of symptom expression. This study evaluates multiple approaches for mental health detection, comparing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama and GPT with classical machine learning and transformer-based architectures including BERT, XLNet, and Distil-RoBERTa. Using the DAIC-WOZ dataset of clinical interviews, we fine-tuned models for anxiety, depression, and stress classification and applied synthetic data generation to mitigate class imbalance. Results show that Distil-RoBERTa achieved the highest F1 score (0.883) for GAD-2, while XLNet outperformed others on PHQ tasks (F1 up to 0.891). For stress detection, a zero-shot synthetic approach (SD+Zero-Shot-Basic) reached an F1 of 0.884 and ROC AUC of 0.886. Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of transformer-based models and highlight the value of synthetic data in improving recall and generalization. However, careful calibration is required to prevent precision loss. Overall, this work emphasizes the potential of combining advanced language models and data augmentation to enhance automated mental health assessment from text.

Paperid: 6281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06658.pdf

Abstract:
Animal Re-ID has recently gained substantial attention in the AI research community due to its high impact on biodiversity monitoring and unique research challenges arising from environmental factors. The subtle distinguishing patterns, handling new species and the inherent open-set nature make the problem even harder. To address these complexities, foundation models trained on labeled, large-scale and multi-species animal Re-ID datasets have recently been introduced to enable zero-shot Re-ID. However, our benchmarking reveals significant gaps in their zero-shot Re-ID performance for both known and unknown species. While this highlights the need for collecting labeled data in new domains, exhaustive annotation for Re-ID is laborious and requires domain expertise. Our analyses show that existing unsupervised (USL) and AL Re-ID methods underperform for animal Re-ID. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel AL Re-ID framework that leverages complementary clustering methods to uncover and target structurally ambiguous regions in the embedding space for mining pairs of samples that are both informative and broadly representative. Oracle feedback on these pairs, in the form of must-link and cannot-link constraints, facilitates a simple annotation interface, which naturally integrates with existing USL methods through our proposed constrained clustering refinement algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that, by utilizing only 0.033% of all annotations, our approach consistently outperforms existing foundational, USL and AL baselines. Specifically, we report an average improvement of 10.49%, 11.19% and 3.99% (mAP) on 13 wildlife datasets over foundational, USL and AL methods, respectively, while attaining state-of-the-art performance on each dataset. Furthermore, we also show an improvement of 11.09%, 8.2% and 2.06% for unknown individuals in an open-world setting.

Paperid: 6282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06268.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-modal retrieval is essential for interpreting cultural heritage data, but its effectiveness is often limited by incomplete or inconsistent textual descriptions, caused by historical data loss and the high cost of expert annotation. While large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution by enriching textual descriptions, their outputs frequently suffer from hallucinations or miss visually grounded details. To address these challenges, we propose $C^3$, a data augmentation framework that enhances cross-modal retrieval performance by improving the completeness and consistency of LLM-generated descriptions. $C^3$ introduces a completeness evaluation module to assess semantic coverage using both visual cues and language-model outputs. Furthermore, to mitigate factual inconsistencies, we formulate a Markov Decision Process to supervise Chain-of-Thought reasoning, guiding consistency evaluation through adaptive query control. Experiments on the cultural heritage datasets CulTi and TimeTravel, as well as on general benchmarks MSCOCO and Flickr30K, demonstrate that $C^3$ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fine-tuned and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 6283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05165.pdf

Abstract:
Software Architecture Descriptions (SADs) are essential for managing the inherent complexity of modern software systems. They enable high-level architectural reasoning, guide design decisions, and facilitate effective communication among diverse stakeholders. However, in practice, SADs are often missing, outdated, or poorly aligned with the system's actual implementation. Consequently, developers are compelled to derive architectural insights directly from source code-a time-intensive process that increases cognitive load, slows new developer onboarding, and contributes to the gradual degradation of clarity over the system's lifetime. To address these issues, we propose a semi-automated generation of SADs from source code by integrating reverse engineering (RE) techniques with a Large Language Model (LLM). Our approach recovers both static and behavioral architectural views by extracting a comprehensive component diagram, filtering architecturally significant elements (core components) via prompt engineering, and generating state machine diagrams to model component behavior based on underlying code logic with few-shots prompting. This resulting views representation offer a scalable and maintainable alternative to traditional manual architectural documentation. This methodology, demonstrated using C++ examples, highlights the potent capability of LLMs to: 1) abstract the component diagram, thereby reducing the reliance on human expert involvement, and 2) accurately represent complex software behaviors, especially when enriched with domain-specific knowledge through few-shot prompting. These findings suggest a viable path toward significantly reducing manual effort while enhancing system understanding and long-term maintainability.

Paperid: 6284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03830.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a method for efficient multi-label text classification with large language models (LLMs), built on reformulating classification tasks as sequences of dichotomic (yes/no) decisions. Instead of generating all labels in a single structured response, each target dimension is queried independently, which, combined with a prefix caching mechanism, yields substantial efficiency gains for short-text inference without loss of accuracy. To demonstrate the approach, we focus on affective text analysis, covering 24 dimensions including emotions and sentiment. Using LLM-to-SLM distillation, a powerful annotator model (DeepSeek-V3) provides multiple annotations per text, which are aggregated to fine-tune smaller models (HerBERT-Large, CLARIN-1B, PLLuM-8B, Gemma3-1B). The fine-tuned models show significant improvements over zero-shot baselines, particularly on the dimensions seen during training. Our findings suggest that decomposing multi-label classification into dichotomic queries, combined with distillation and cache-aware inference, offers a scalable and effective framework for LLM-based classification. While we validate the method on affective states, the approach is general and applicable across domains.

Paperid: 6285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03488.pdf

Abstract:
Polysomnography signals are highly heterogeneous, varying in modality composition (e.g., EEG, EOG, ECG), channel availability (e.g., frontal, occipital EEG), and acquisition protocols across datasets and clinical sites. Most existing models that process polysomnography data rely on a fixed subset of modalities or channels and therefore neglect to fully exploit its inherently multimodal nature. We address this limitation by introducing NAP (Neural Aggregator of Predictions), an attention-based model which learns to combine multiple prediction streams using a tri-axial attention mechanism that captures temporal, spatial, and predictor-level dependencies. NAP is trained to adapt to different input dimensions. By aggregating outputs from frozen, pretrained single-channel models, NAP consistently outperforms individual predictors and simple ensembles, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization across multiple datasets. While demonstrated in the context of automated sleep staging from polysomnography, the proposed approach could be extended to other multimodal physiological applications.

Paperid: 6286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02427.pdf

Abstract:
Video Understanding, Scene Interpretation and Commonsense Reasoning are highly challenging tasks enabling the interpretation of visual information, allowing agents to perceive, interact with and make rational decisions in its environment. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in these areas in recent years, enabling domain-specific applications as well as zero-shot open vocabulary tasks, combining multiple domains. However, the required computational complexity poses challenges for their application on edge devices and in the context of Mobile Robotics, especially considering the trade-off between accuracy and inference time. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of state-of-the-art VLMs for the task of Scene Interpretation and Action Recognition, with special regard to small VLMs capable of being deployed to edge devices in the context of Mobile Robotics. The proposed pipeline is evaluated on a diverse dataset consisting of various real-world cityscape, on-campus and indoor scenarios. The experimental evaluation discusses the potential of these small models on edge devices, with particular emphasis on challenges, weaknesses, inherent model biases and the application of the gained information. Supplementary material is provided via the following repository: https://datahub.rz.rptu.de/hstr-csrl-public/publications/scene-interpretation-on-edge-devices/

Paperid: 6287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01990.pdf

Abstract:
Geo-Foundational Models (GFMs) enable fast and reliable extraction of spatiotemporal information from satellite imagery, improving flood inundation mapping by leveraging location and time embeddings. Despite their potential, it remains unclear whether GFMs outperform traditional models like U-Net. A systematic comparison across sensors and data availability scenarios is still lacking, which is an essential step to guide end-users in model selection. To address this, we evaluate three GFMs, Prithvi 2.0, Clay V1.5, DOFA, and UViT (a Prithvi variant), against TransNorm, U-Net, and Attention U-Net using PlanetScope, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2. We observe competitive performance among all GFMs, with only 2-5% variation between the best and worst models across sensors. Clay outperforms others on PlanetScope (0.79 mIoU) and Sentinel-2 (0.70), while Prithvi leads on Sentinel-1 (0.57). In leave-one-region-out cross-validation across five regions, Clay shows slightly better performance across all sensors (mIoU: 0.72(0.04), 0.66(0.07), 0.51(0.08)) compared to Prithvi (0.70(0.05), 0.64(0.09), 0.49(0.13)) and DOFA (0.67(0.07), 0.64(0.04), 0.49(0.09)) for PlanetScope, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1, respectively. Across all 19 sites, leave-one-region-out cross-validation reveals a 4% improvement by Clay compared to U-Net. Visual inspection highlights Clay's superior ability to retain fine details. Few-shot experiments show Clay achieves 0.64 mIoU on PlanetScope with just five training images, outperforming Prithvi (0.24) and DOFA (0.35). In terms of computational time, Clay is a better choice due to its smaller model size (26M parameters), making it ~3x faster than Prithvi (650M) and 2x faster than DOFA (410M). Contrary to previous findings, our results suggest GFMs offer small to moderate improvements in flood mapping accuracy at lower computational cost and labeling effort compared to traditional U-Net.

Paperid: 6288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27547.pdf

Abstract:
Historical maps are unique and valuable archives that document geographic features across different time periods. However, automated analysis of historical map images remains a significant challenge due to their wide stylistic variability and the scarcity of annotated training data. Constructing linked spatio-temporal datasets from historical map time series is even more time-consuming and labor-intensive, as it requires synthesizing information from multiple maps. Such datasets are essential for applications such as dating buildings, analyzing the development of road networks and settlements, studying environmental changes etc. We present MapSAM2, a unified framework for automatically segmenting both historical map images and time series. Built on a visual foundation model, MapSAM2 adapts to diverse segmentation tasks with few-shot fine-tuning. Our key innovation is to treat both historical map images and time series as videos. For images, we process a set of tiles as a video, enabling the memory attention mechanism to incorporate contextual cues from similar tiles, leading to improved geometric accuracy, particularly for areal features. For time series, we introduce the annotated Siegfried Building Time Series Dataset and, to reduce annotation costs, propose generating pseudo time series from single-year maps by simulating common temporal transformations. Experimental results show that MapSAM2 learns temporal associations effectively and can accurately segment and link buildings in time series under limited supervision or using pseudo videos. We will release both our dataset and code to support future research.

Paperid: 6289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25701.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as flexible alternatives to classical machine learning models for classification tasks through zero-shot prompting. However, their suitability for structured tabular data remains underexplored, especially in high-stakes financial applications such as financial risk assessment. This study conducts a systematic comparison between zero-shot LLM-based classifiers and LightGBM, a state-of-the-art gradient-boosting model, on a real-world loan default prediction task. We evaluate their predictive performance, analyze feature attributions using SHAP, and assess the reliability of LLM-generated self-explanations. While LLMs are able to identify key financial risk indicators, their feature importance rankings diverge notably from LightGBM, and their self-explanations often fail to align with empirical SHAP attributions. These findings highlight the limitations of LLMs as standalone models for structured financial risk prediction and raise concerns about the trustworthiness of their self-generated explanations. Our results underscore the need for explainability audits, baseline comparisons with interpretable models, and human-in-the-loop oversight when deploying LLMs in risk-sensitive financial environments.

Paperid: 6290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24619.pdf

Abstract:
With the release of new large language models (LLMs) like Llama and Mistral, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer has become increasingly feasible due to their multilingual pretraining and strong generalization capabilities. However, adapting these decoder-only LLMs to new tasks across languages remains challenging. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely used, prefix-based techniques such as soft prompt tuning, prefix tuning, and Llama Adapter are less explored, especially for zero-shot transfer in decoder-only models. We present a comprehensive study of three prefix-based methods for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer from English to 35+ high- and low-resource languages. Our analysis further explores transfer across linguistic families and scripts, as well as the impact of scaling model sizes from 1B to 24B. With Llama 3.1 8B, prefix methods outperform LoRA-baselines by up to 6% on the Belebele benchmark. Similar improvements were observed with Mistral v0.3 7B as well. Despite using only 1.23M learning parameters with prefix tuning, we achieve consistent improvements across diverse benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of prefix-based techniques as an effective and scalable alternative to LoRA, particularly in low-resource multilingual settings.

Paperid: 6291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22656.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion (FKGC) infers missing triples from limited support samples, tackling long-tail distribution challenges. Existing methods, however, struggle to capture complex relational patterns and mitigate data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel FKGC framework for conjugate relation modeling (CR-FKGC). Specifically, it employs a neighborhood aggregation encoder to integrate higher-order neighbor information, a conjugate relation learner combining an implicit conditional diffusion relation module with a stable relation module to capture stable semantics and uncertainty offsets, and a manifold conjugate decoder for efficient evaluation and inference of missing triples in manifold space. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22590.pdf

Abstract:
In today's rapidly expanding data landscape, knowledge extraction from unstructured text is vital for real-time analytics, temporal inference, and dynamic memory frameworks. However, traditional static knowledge graph (KG) construction often overlooks the dynamic and time-sensitive nature of real-world data, limiting adaptability to continuous changes. Moreover, recent zero- or few-shot approaches that avoid domain-specific fine-tuning or reliance on prebuilt ontologies often suffer from instability across multiple runs, as well as incomplete coverage of key facts. To address these challenges, we introduce ATOM (AdapTive and OptiMized), a few-shot and scalable approach that builds and continuously updates Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) from unstructured texts. ATOM splits input documents into minimal, self-contained "atomic" facts, improving extraction exhaustivity and stability. Then, it constructs atomic TKGs from these facts while employing a dual-time modeling that distinguishes when information is observed from when it is valid. The resulting atomic TKGs are subsequently merged in parallel. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ATOM achieves ~18% higher exhaustivity, ~17% better stability, and over 90% latency reduction compared to baseline methods, demonstrating a strong scalability potential for dynamic TKG construction.

Paperid: 6293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22455.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) claim "musical understanding" via evaluations that conflate listening with score reading. We benchmark three SOTA LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Qwen2.5-Omni) across three core music skills: Syncopation Scoring, Transposition Detection, and Chord Quality Identification. Moreover, we separate three sources of variability: (i) perceptual limitations (audio vs. MIDI inputs), (ii) exposure to examples (zero- vs. few-shot manipulations), and (iii) reasoning strategies (Standalone, CoT, LogicLM). For the latter we adapt LogicLM, a framework combining LLMs with symbolic solvers to perform structured reasoning, to music. Results reveal a clear perceptual gap: models perform near ceiling on MIDI but show accuracy drops on audio. Reasoning and few-shot prompting offer minimal gains. This is expected for MIDI, where performance reaches saturation, but more surprising for audio, where LogicLM, despite near-perfect MIDI accuracy, remains notably brittle. Among models, Gemini Pro achieves the highest performance across most conditions. Overall, current systems reason well over symbols (MIDI) but do not yet "listen" reliably from audio. Our method and dataset make the perception-reasoning boundary explicit and offer actionable guidance for building robust, audio-first music systems.

Paperid: 6294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20210.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), driven by language models, diffusion models and masked generation, have achieved impressive naturalness in speech synthesis. Nevertheless, stability and fidelity remain key challenges, manifesting as mispronunciations, audible noise, and quality degradation. To address these issues, we introduce Vox-Evaluator, a multi-level evaluator designed to guide the correction of erroneous speech segments and preference alignment for TTS systems. It is capable of identifying the temporal boundaries of erroneous segments and providing a holistic quality assessment of the generated speech. Specifically, to refine erroneous segments and enhance the robustness of the zero-shot TTS model, we propose to automatically identify acoustic errors with the evaluator, mask the erroneous segments, and finally regenerate speech conditioning on the correct portions. In addition, the fine-gained information obtained from Vox-Evaluator can guide the preference alignment for TTS model, thereby reducing the bad cases in speech synthesis. Due to the lack of suitable training datasets for the Vox-Evaluator, we also constructed a synthesized text-speech dataset annotated with fine-grained pronunciation errors or audio quality issues. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Vox-Evaluator in enhancing the stability and fidelity of TTS systems through the speech correction mechanism and preference optimization. The demos are shown.

Paperid: 6295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20098.pdf

Abstract:
Entity Linking (EL) has traditionally relied on large annotated datasets and extensive model fine-tuning. While recent few-shot methods leverage large language models (LLMs) through prompting to reduce training requirements, they often suffer from inefficiencies due to expensive LLM-based reasoning. ARTER (Adaptive Routing and Targeted Entity Reasoning) presents a structured pipeline that achieves high performance without deep fine-tuning by strategically combining candidate generation, context-based scoring, adaptive routing, and selective reasoning. ARTER computes a small set of complementary signals(both embedding and LLM-based) over the retrieved candidates to categorize contextual mentions into easy and hard cases. The cases are then handled by a low-computational entity linker (e.g. ReFinED) and more expensive targeted LLM-based reasoning respectively. On standard benchmarks, ARTER outperforms ReFinED by up to +4.47%, with an average gain of +2.53% on 5 out of 6 datasets, and performs comparably to pipelines using LLM-based reasoning for all mentions, while being as twice as efficient in terms of the number of LLM tokens.

Paperid: 6296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17924.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods for automated toxicity detection in online gaming chats. Traditional machine learning models with embeddings, large language models (LLMs) with zero-shot and few-shot prompting, fine-tuned transformer models, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches are evaluated. The evaluation framework assesses three critical dimensions: classification accuracy, processing speed, and computational costs. A hybrid moderation system architecture is proposed that optimizes human moderator workload through automated detection and incorporates continuous learning mechanisms. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance variations across methods, with fine-tuned DistilBERT achieving optimal accuracy-cost trade-offs. The findings provide empirical evidence for deploying cost-effective, efficient content moderation systems in dynamic online gaming environments.

Paperid: 6297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17720.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a critical task that requires substantial annotated data, making it challenging in low-resource scenarios where label acquisition is expensive. While zero-shot and instruction-tuned approaches have made progress, they often fail to generalize to domain-specific entities and do not effectively utilize limited available data. We present a lightweight few-shot NER framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a new instruction tuning template with a simplified output format that combines principles from prior IT approaches to leverage the large context window of recent state-of-the-art LLMs; (2) introducing a strategic data augmentation technique that preserves entity information while paraphrasing the surrounding context, thereby expanding our training data without compromising semantic relationships. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art models on few-shot and zero-shot tasks, with our few-shot approach attaining an average F1 score of 80.1 on the CrossNER datasets. Models trained with our paraphrasing approach show consistent improvements in F1 scores of up to 17 points over baseline versions, offering a promising solution for groups with limited NER training data and compute power.

Paperid: 6298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17651.pdf

Abstract:
We examine frugal federated learning approaches to violence detection by comparing two complementary strategies: (i) zero-shot and federated fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs), and (ii) personalized training of a compact 3D convolutional neural network (CNN3D). Using LLaVA-7B and a 65.8M parameter CNN3D as representative cases, we evaluate accuracy, calibration, and energy usage under realistic non-IID settings. Both approaches exceed 90% accuracy. CNN3D slightly outperforms Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA)-tuned VLMs in ROC AUC and log loss, while using less energy. VLMs remain favorable for contextual reasoning and multimodal inference. We quantify energy and CO$_2$ emissions across training and inference, and analyze sustainability trade-offs for deployment. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative study of LoRA-tuned vision-language models and personalized CNNs for federated violence detection, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and environmental metrics. These findings support a hybrid model: lightweight CNNs for routine classification, with selective VLM activation for complex or descriptive scenarios. The resulting framework offers a reproducible baseline for responsible, resource-aware AI in video surveillance, with extensions toward real-time, multimodal, and lifecycle-aware systems.

Paperid: 6299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17590.pdf

Abstract:
Misinformation spreads across web platforms through billions of daily multimodal posts that combine text and images, overwhelming manual fact-checking capacity. Supervised detection models require domain-specific training data and fail to generalize across diverse manipulation tactics. We present MIRAGE, an inference-time, model-pluggable agentic framework that decomposes multimodal verification into four sequential modules: visual veracity assessment detects AI-generated images, cross-modal consistency analysis identifies out-of-context repurposing, retrieval-augmented factual checking grounds claims in web evidence through iterative question generation, and a calibrated judgment module integrates all signals. MIRAGE orchestrates vision-language model reasoning with targeted web retrieval, outputs structured and citation-linked rationales. On MMFakeBench validation set (1,000 samples), MIRAGE with GPT-4o-mini achieves 81.65% F1 and 75.1% accuracy, outperforming the strongest zero-shot baseline (GPT-4V with MMD-Agent at 74.0% F1) by 7.65 points while maintaining 34.3% false positive rate versus 97.3% for a judge-only baseline. Test set results (5,000 samples) confirm generalization with 81.44% F1 and 75.08% accuracy. Ablation studies show visual verification contributes 5.18 F1 points and retrieval-augmented reasoning contributes 2.97 points. Our results demonstrate that decomposed agentic reasoning with web retrieval can match supervised detector performance without domain-specific training, enabling misinformation detection across modalities where labeled data remains scarce.

Paperid: 6300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16590.pdf

Abstract:
Applications of machine learning in chemistry are often limited by the scarcity and expense of labeled data, restricting traditional supervised methods. In this work, we introduce a framework for molecular reasoning using general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) that operates without requiring labeled training data. Our method anchors chain-of-thought reasoning to the molecular structure by using unique atomic identifiers. First, the LLM performs a one-shot task to identify relevant fragments and their associated chemical labels or transformation classes. In an optional second step, this position-aware information is used in a few-shot task with provided class examples to predict the chemical transformation. We apply our framework to single-step retrosynthesis, a task where LLMs have previously underperformed. Across academic benchmarks and expert-validated drug discovery molecules, our work enables LLMs to achieve high success rates in identifying chemically plausible reaction sites ($\geq90\%$), named reaction classes ($\geq40\%$), and final reactants ($\geq74\%$). Beyond solving complex chemical tasks, our work also provides a method to generate theoretically grounded synthetic datasets by mapping chemical knowledge onto the molecular structure and thereby addressing data scarcity.

Paperid: 6301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15866.pdf

Abstract:
The clinical adoption of biomedical vision-language models is hindered by prompt optimization techniques that produce either uninterpretable latent vectors or single textual prompts. This lack of transparency and failure to capture the multi-faceted nature of clinical diagnosis, which relies on integrating diverse observations, limits their trustworthiness in high-stakes settings. To address this, we introduce BiomedXPro, an evolutionary framework that leverages a large language model as both a biomedical knowledge extractor and an adaptive optimizer to automatically generate a diverse ensemble of interpretable, natural-language prompt pairs for disease diagnosis. Experiments on multiple biomedical benchmarks show that BiomedXPro consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-tuning methods, particularly in data-scarce few-shot settings. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates a strong semantic alignment between the discovered prompts and statistically significant clinical features, grounding the model's performance in verifiable concepts. By producing a diverse ensemble of interpretable prompts, BiomedXPro provides a verifiable basis for model predictions, representing a critical step toward the development of more trustworthy and clinically-aligned AI systems.

Paperid: 6302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14596.pdf

Abstract:
Camera traps generate millions of wildlife images, yet many datasets contain species that are absent from existing classifiers. This work evaluates zero-shot approaches for organizing unlabeled wildlife imagery using self-supervised vision transformers, developed and tested within the Animal Detect platform for camera trap analysis. We compare unsupervised clustering methods (DBSCAN, GMM) across three architectures (CLIP, DINOv2, MegaDescriptor) combined with dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA, UMAP), and we demonstrate continuous 1D similarity ordering via t-SNE projection. On a 5-species test set with ground truth labels used only for evaluation, DINOv2 with UMAP and GMM achieves 88.6 percent accuracy (macro-F1 = 0.874), while 1D sorting reaches 88.2 percent coherence for mammals and birds and 95.2 percent for fish across 1,500 images. Based on these findings, we deployed continuous similarity ordering in production, enabling rapid exploratory analysis and accelerating manual annotation workflows for biodiversity monitoring.

Paperid: 6303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14466.pdf

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) rapidly advance, performance on high-resource languages (e.g., English, Chinese) is nearing saturation, yet remains substantially lower for low-resource languages (e.g., Urdu, Thai) due to limited training data, machine-translation noise, and unstable cross-lingual alignment. We introduce LiRA (Linguistic Robust Anchoring for Large Language Models), a training framework that robustly improves cross-lingual representations under low-resource conditions while jointly strengthening retrieval and reasoning. LiRA comprises two modules: (i) Arca (Anchored Representation Composition Architecture), which anchors low-resource languages to an English semantic space via anchor-based alignment and multi-agent collaborative encoding, preserving geometric stability in a shared embedding space; and (ii) LaSR (Language-coupled Semantic Reasoner), which adds a language-aware lightweight reasoning head with consistency regularization on top of Arca's multilingual representations, unifying the training objective to enhance cross-lingual understanding, retrieval, and reasoning robustness. We further construct and release a multilingual product retrieval dataset covering five Southeast Asian and two South Asian languages. Experiments across low-resource benchmarks (cross-lingual retrieval, semantic similarity, and reasoning) show consistent gains and robustness under few-shot and noise-amplified settings; ablations validate the contribution of both Arca and LaSR. Code will be released on GitHub and the dataset on Hugging Face.

Paperid: 6304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13542.pdf

Abstract:
Topic modeling is a useful tool for analyzing large corpora of written documents, particularly academic papers. Despite a wide variety of proposed topic modeling techniques, these techniques do not perform well when applied to medical texts. This can be due to the low number of documents available for some topics in the healthcare domain. In this paper, we propose ProtoTopic, a prototypical network-based topic model used for topic generation for a set of medical paper abstracts. Prototypical networks are efficient, explainable models that make predictions by computing distances between input datapoints and a set of prototype representations, making them particularly effective in low-data or few-shot learning scenarios. With ProtoTopic, we demonstrate improved topic coherence and diversity compared to two topic modeling baselines used in the literature, demonstrating the ability of our model to generate medically relevant topics even with limited data.

Paperid: 6305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12670.pdf

Abstract:
Earth observation (EO) satellites produce massive streams of multispectral image time series, posing pressing challenges for storage and transmission. Yet, learned EO compression remains fragmented, lacking publicly available pretrained models and misaligned with advances in compression for natural imagery. Image codecs overlook temporal redundancy, while video codecs rely on motion priors that fail to capture the radiometric evolution of largely static scenes. We introduce TerraCodec (TEC), a family of learned codecs tailored to EO. TEC includes efficient image-based variants adapted to multispectral inputs, as well as a Temporal Transformer model (TEC-TT) that leverages dependencies across time. To overcome the fixed-rate setting of today's neural codecs, we present Latent Repacking, a novel method for training flexible-rate transformer models that operate on varying rate-distortion settings. Trained on Sentinel-2 data, TerraCodec outperforms classical codecs, achieving 3-10x stronger compression at equivalent image quality. Beyond compression, TEC-TT enables zero-shot cloud inpainting, surpassing state-of-the-art methods on the AllClear benchmark. Our results establish bespoke, learned compression algorithms as a promising direction for Earth observation. Code and model weights will be released under a permissive license.

Paperid: 6306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12579.pdf

Abstract:
We present a zero-shot segmentation approach for agricultural imagery that leverages Plantnet, a large-scale plant classification model, in conjunction with its DinoV2 backbone and the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Rather than collecting and annotating new datasets, our method exploits Plantnet's specialized plant representations to identify plant regions and produce coarse segmentation masks. These masks are then refined by SAM to yield detailed segmentations. We evaluate on four publicly available datasets of various complexity in terms of contrast including some where the limited size of the training data and complex field conditions often hinder purely supervised methods. Our results show consistent performance gains when using Plantnet-fine-tuned DinoV2 over the base DinoV2 model, as measured by the Jaccard Index (IoU). These findings highlight the potential of combining foundation models with specialized plant-centric models to alleviate the annotation bottleneck and enable effective segmentation in diverse agricultural scenarios.

Paperid: 6307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11036.pdf

Abstract:
Most robotic grasping methods are typically designed for single gripper types, which limits their applicability in real-world scenarios requiring diverse end-effectors. We propose XGrasp, a real-time gripper-aware grasp detection framework that efficiently handles multiple gripper configurations. The proposed method addresses data scarcity by systematically augmenting existing datasets with multi-gripper annotations. XGrasp employs a hierarchical two-stage architecture. In the first stage, a Grasp Point Predictor (GPP) identifies optimal locations using global scene information and gripper specifications. In the second stage, an Angle-Width Predictor (AWP) refines the grasp angle and width using local features. Contrastive learning in the AWP module enables zero-shot generalization to unseen grippers by learning fundamental grasping characteristics. The modular framework integrates seamlessly with vision foundation models, providing pathways for future vision-language capabilities. The experimental results demonstrate competitive grasp success rates across various gripper types, while achieving substantial improvements in inference speed compared to existing gripper-aware methods. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/xgrasp

Paperid: 6308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10787.pdf

Abstract:
The performance gains of LLMs have historically been driven by scaling up model size and training data. However, the rapidly diminishing availability of high-quality training data is introducing a fundamental bottleneck, shifting the focus of research toward inference-time scaling. This paradigm uses additional computation at the time of deployment to substantially improve LLM performance on downstream tasks without costly model re-training. This review systematically surveys the diverse techniques contributing to this new era of inference-time scaling, organizing the rapidly evolving field into two comprehensive perspectives: Output-focused and Input-focused methods. Output-focused techniques encompass complex, multi-step generation strategies, including reasoning (e.g., CoT, ToT, ReAct), various search and decoding methods (e.g., MCTS, beam search), training for long CoT (e.g., RLVR, GRPO), and model ensemble methods. Input-focused techniques are primarily categorized by few-shot and RAG, with RAG as the central focus. The RAG section is further detailed through a structured examination of query expansion, data, retrieval and reranker, LLM generation methods, and multi-modal RAG.

Paperid: 6309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10456.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot image anomaly classification (AC) and segmentation (AS) are vital for industrial quality control, detecting defects without prior training data. Existing representation-based methods compare patch features with nearest neighbors in unlabeled test images but struggle with consistent anomalies -- similar defects recurring across multiple images -- resulting in poor AC/AS performance. We introduce Consistent-Anomaly Detection Graph (CoDeGraph), a novel algorithm that identifies and filters consistent anomalies from similarity computations. Our key insight is that normal patches in industrial images show stable, gradually increasing similarity to other test images, while consistent-anomaly patches exhibit abrupt similarity spikes after exhausting a limited set of similar matches, a phenomenon we term ``neighbor-burnout.'' CoDeGraph constructs an image-level graph, with images as nodes and edges connecting those with shared consistent-anomaly patterns, using community detection to filter these anomalies. We provide a theoretical foundation using Extreme Value Theory to explain the effectiveness of our approach. Experiments on MVTec AD with the ViT-L-14-336 backbone achieve 98.3% AUROC for AC and AS performance of 66.8% (+4.2%) F1 and 68.1% (+5.4%) AP over state-of-the-art zero-shot methods. Using the DINOv2 backbone further improves segmentation, yielding 69.1% (+6.5%) F1 and 71.9% (+9.2%) AP, demonstrating robustness across architectures.

Paperid: 6310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10257.pdf

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) struggles in few-shot scenarios, where its standard adaptive density control (ADC) can lead to overfitting and bloated reconstructions. While state-of-the-art methods like FSGS improve quality, they often do so by significantly increasing the primitive count. This paper presents a framework that revises the core 3DGS optimization to prioritize efficiency. We replace the standard positional gradient heuristic with a novel densification trigger that uses the opacity gradient as a lightweight proxy for rendering error. We find this aggressive densification is only effective when paired with a more conservative pruning schedule, which prevents destructive optimization cycles. Combined with a standard depth-correlation loss for geometric guidance, our framework demonstrates a fundamental improvement in efficiency. On the 3-view LLFF dataset, our model is over 40% more compact (32k vs. 57k primitives) than FSGS, and on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset, it achieves a reduction of approximately 70%. This dramatic gain in compactness is achieved with a modest trade-off in reconstruction metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the quality-vs-efficiency Pareto frontier for few-shot view synthesis.

Paperid: 6311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09704.pdf

Abstract:
Time domain simulation, i.e., modeling the system's evolution over time, is a crucial tool for studying and enhancing power system stability and dynamic performance. However, these simulations become computationally intractable for renewable-penetrated grids, due to the small simulation time step required to capture renewable energy resources' ultra-fast dynamic phenomena in the range of 1-50 microseconds. This creates a critical need for solutions that are both fast and scalable, posing a major barrier for the stable integration of renewable energy resources and thus climate change mitigation. This paper explores operator learning, a family of machine learning methods that learn mappings between functions, as a surrogate model for these costly simulations. The paper investigates, for the first time, the fundamental concept of simulation time step-invariance, which enables models trained on coarse time steps to generalize to fine-resolution dynamics. Three operator learning methods are benchmarked on a simple test system that, while not incorporating practical complexities of renewable-penetrated grids, serves as a first proof-of-concept to demonstrate the viability of time step-invariance. Models are evaluated on (i) zero-shot super-resolution, where training is performed on a coarse simulation time step and inference is performed at super-resolution, and (ii) generalization between stable and unstable dynamic regimes. This work addresses a key challenge in the integration of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change by benchmarking operator learning methods to model physical systems.

Paperid: 6312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08919.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal representation learning from large-scale pairs of visual scenes and linguistic descriptions. However, they still struggle to simultaneously express two distinct types of semantic structures: the hierarchy within a concept family (e.g., dog $\preceq$ mammal $\preceq$ animal) and the compositionality across different concept families (e.g., "a dog in a car" $\preceq$ dog, car). Recent works have addressed this challenge by employing hyperbolic space, which efficiently captures tree-like hierarchy, yet its suitability for representing compositionality remains unclear. To resolve this dilemma, we propose PHyCLIP, which employs an $\ell_1$-Product metric on a Cartesian product of Hyperbolic factors. With our design, intra-family hierarchies emerge within individual hyperbolic factors, and cross-family composition is captured by the $\ell_1$-product metric, analogous to a Boolean algebra. Experiments on zero-shot classification, retrieval, hierarchical classification, and compositional understanding tasks demonstrate that PHyCLIP outperforms existing single-space approaches and offers more interpretable structures in the embedding space.

Paperid: 6313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08728.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional transfer learning typically reuses large pre-trained networks by freezing some of their weights and adding task-specific layers. While this approach is computationally efficient, it limits the model's ability to adapt to domain-specific features and can still lead to overfitting with very limited data. To address these limitations, we propose Structured Output Regularization (SOR), a simple yet effective framework that freezes the internal network structures (e.g., convolutional filters) while using a combination of group lasso and $L_1$ penalties. This framework tailors the model to specific data with minimal additional parameters and is easily applicable to various network components, such as convolutional filters or various blocks in neural networks enabling broad applicability for transfer learning tasks. We evaluate SOR on three few shot medical imaging classification tasks and we achieve competitive results using DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB4 bases compared to established benchmarks.

Paperid: 6314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08589.pdf

Abstract:
The field of object detection and understanding is rapidly evolving, driven by advances in both traditional CNN-based models and emerging multi-modal large language models (LLMs). While CNNs like ResNet and YOLO remain highly effective for image-based tasks, recent transformer-based LLMs introduce new capabilities such as dynamic context reasoning, language-guided prompts, and holistic scene understanding. However, when used out-of-the-box, the full potential of LLMs remains underexploited, often resulting in suboptimal performance on specialized visual tasks. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of fine-tuned traditional CNNs, zero-shot pre-trained multi-modal LLMs, and fine-tuned multi-modal LLMs on the challenging task of artificial text overlay detection in images. A key contribution of our study is demonstrating that LLMs can be effectively fine-tuned on very limited data (fewer than 1,000 images) to achieve up to 36% accuracy improvement, matching or surpassing CNN-based baselines that typically require orders of magnitude more data. By exploring how language-guided models can be adapted for precise visual understanding with minimal supervision, our work contributes to the broader effort of bridging vision and language, offering novel insights into efficient cross-modal learning strategies. These findings highlight the adaptability and data efficiency of LLM-based approaches for real-world object detection tasks and provide actionable guidance for applying multi-modal transformers in low-resource visual environments. To support continued progress in this area, we have made the code used to fine-tune the models available in our GitHub, enabling future improvements and reuse in related applications.

Paperid: 6315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07993.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific figure captions require both accuracy and stylistic consistency to convey visual information. Here, we present a domain-specific caption generation system for the 3rd SciCap Challenge that integrates figure-related textual context with author-specific writing styles using the LaMP-Cap dataset. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline: Stage 1 combines context filtering, category-specific prompt optimization via DSPy's MIPROv2 and SIMBA, and caption candidate selection; Stage 2 applies few-shot prompting with profile figures for stylistic refinement. Our experiments demonstrate that category-specific prompts outperform both zero-shot and general optimized approaches, improving ROUGE-1 recall by +8.3\% while limiting precision loss to -2.8\% and BLEU-4 reduction to -10.9\%. Profile-informed stylistic refinement yields 40--48\% gains in BLEU scores and 25--27\% in ROUGE. Overall, our system demonstrates that combining contextual understanding with author-specific stylistic adaptation can generate captions that are both scientifically accurate and stylistically faithful to the source paper.

Paperid: 6316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07931.pdf

Abstract:
This article presents research conducted at the Institute of the Estonian Language between 2022 and 2025 on the application of large language models (LLMs) to the study of 17th and 18th century Estonian dictionaries. The authors address three main areas: enriching historical dictionaries with modern word forms and meanings; using vision-enabled LLMs to perform text recognition on sources printed in Gothic script (Fraktur); and preparing for the creation of a unified, cross-source dataset. Initial experiments with J. Gutslaff's 1648 dictionary indicate that LLMs have significant potential for semi-automatic enrichment of dictionary information. When provided with sufficient context, Claude 3.7 Sonnet accurately provided meanings and modern equivalents for 81% of headword entries. In a text recognition experiment with A. T. Helle's 1732 dictionary, a zero-shot method successfully identified and structured 41% of headword entries into error-free JSON-formatted output. For digitising the Estonian-German dictionary section of A. W. Hupel's 1780 grammar, overlapping tiling of scanned image files is employed, with one LLM being used for text recognition and a second for merging the structured output. These findings demonstrate that even for minor languages LLMs have a significant potential for saving time and financial resources.

Paperid: 6317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07737.pdf

Abstract:
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) encounters a significant challenge: models often fail to produce accurate responses, particularly in small-scale architectures. This limitation not only diminishes performance improvements and undermines the potential of GRPO but also frequently leads to mid-training collapse, adversely affecting stability and final efficacy. To address these issues, we propose ToolExpander, a novel framework that advances tool-oriented reinforcement learning for resource-constrained LLMs through two key innovations:(1) Dynamic Multi-Round Hard Sampling, which dynamically substitutes challenging samples(those without correct outputs over 10 rollouts) with high-quality few-shot demonstrations during training, coupled with an exponential learning rate decay strategy to mitigate oscillations;(2) Self-Exemplifying Thinking, an enhanced GRPO framework that eliminates KL divergence and incorporates adjusted clipping coefficients, encouraging models to autonomously generate and analyze few-shot examples via a minimal additional reward (0.01).Experimental results demonstrate that ToolExpander significantly enhances tool-using capabilities in LLMs, especially in weaker small-scale models, improving both training stability and overall performance.

Paperid: 6318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07642.pdf

Abstract:
Access control is a cornerstone of secure computing, yet large language models often blur role boundaries by producing unrestricted responses. We study role-conditioned refusals, focusing on the LLM's ability to adhere to access control policies by answering when authorized and refusing when not. To evaluate this behavior, we created a novel dataset that extends the Spider and BIRD text-to-SQL datasets, both of which have been modified with realistic PostgreSQL role-based policies at the table and column levels. We compare three designs: (i) zero or few-shot prompting, (ii) a two-step generator-verifier pipeline that checks SQL against policy, and (iii) LoRA fine-tuned models that learn permission awareness directly. Across multiple model families, explicit verification (the two-step framework) improves refusal precision and lowers false permits. At the same time, fine-tuning achieves a stronger balance between safety and utility (i.e., when considering execution accuracy). Longer and more complex policies consistently reduce the reliability of all systems. We release RBAC-augmented datasets and code.

Paperid: 6319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07277.pdf

Abstract:
Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) is a leading cause of vision loss among patients with Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). While deep learning has shown promising results for automatically detecting this condition from fundus images, its application remains challenging due the limited availability of annotated data. Foundation Models (FM) have emerged as an alternative solution. However, it is unclear if they can cope with DME detection in particular. In this paper, we systematically compare different FM and standard transfer learning approaches for this task. Specifically, we compare the two most popular FM for retinal images--RETFound and FLAIR--and an EfficientNet-B0 backbone, across different training regimes and evaluation settings in IDRiD, MESSIDOR-2 and OCT-and-Eye-Fundus-Images (OEFI). Results show that despite their scale, FM do not consistently outperform fine-tuned CNNs in this task. In particular, an EfficientNet-B0 ranked first or second in terms of area under the ROC and precision/recall curves in most evaluation settings, with RETFound only showing promising results in OEFI. FLAIR, on the other hand, demonstrated competitive zero-shot performance, achieving notable AUC-PR scores when prompted appropriately. These findings reveal that FM might not be a good tool for fine-grained ophthalmic tasks such as DME detection even after fine-tuning, suggesting that lightweight CNNs remain strong baselines in data-scarce environments.

Paperid: 6320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06860.pdf

Abstract:
AC Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) is computationally expensive for large-scale power systems, with conventional solvers requiring prohibitive solution times. Machine learning approaches offer computational speedups but struggle with scalability and topology adaptability without expensive retraining. To enable scalability across grid sizes and adaptability to topology changes, we propose a Hybrid Heterogeneous Message Passing Neural Network (HH-MPNN). HH-MPNN models buses, generators, loads, shunts, transmission lines and transformers as distinct node or edge types, combined with a scalable transformer model for handling long-range dependencies. On grids from 14 to 2,000 buses, HH-MPNN achieves less than 1% optimality gap on default topologies. Applied zero-shot to thousands of unseen topologies, HH-MPNN achieves less than 3% optimality gap despite training only on default topologies. Pre-training on smaller grids also improves results on a larger grid. Computational speedups reach 1,000x to 10,000x compared to interior point solvers. These results advance practical, generalizable machine learning for real-time power system operations.

Paperid: 6321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06782.pdf

Abstract:
We present a quantitative evaluation to understand the effect of zero-shot large-language model (LLMs) and prompting uses on chart reading tasks. We asked LLMs to answer 107 visualization questions to compare inference accuracies between the agentic GPT-5 and multimodal GPT-4V, for difficult image instances, where GPT-4V failed to produce correct answers. Our results show that model architecture dominates the inference accuracy: GPT5 largely improved accuracy, while prompt variants yielded only small effects. Pre-registration of this work is available here: https://osf.io/u78td/?view_only=6b075584311f48e991c39335c840ded3; the Google Drive materials are here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ll8WWZDf7cCNcfNWrLViWt8GwDNSvVrp/view.

Paperid: 6322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06046.pdf

Abstract:
Existing 3D face modeling methods usually depend on 3D Morphable Models, which inherently constrain the representation capacity to fixed shape priors. Optimization-based approaches offer high-quality reconstructions but tend to be computationally expensive. In this work, we introduce GLVD, a hybrid method for 3D face reconstruction from few-shot images that extends Learned Vertex Descent (LVD) by integrating per-vertex neural field optimization with global structural guidance from dynamically predicted 3D keypoints. By incorporating relative spatial encoding, GLVD iteratively refines mesh vertices without requiring dense 3D supervision. This enables expressive and adaptable geometry reconstruction while maintaining computational efficiency. GLVD achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-view settings and remains highly competitive in multi-view scenarios, all while substantially reducing inference time.

Paperid: 6323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05555.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: To develop and validate No-New SAM2 (nnsam2) for few-shot segmentation of lumbar paraspinal muscles using only a single annotated slice per dataset, and to assess its statistical comparability with expert measurements across multi-sequence MRI and multi-protocol CT. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 1,219 scans (19,439 slices) from 762 participants across six datasets. Six slices (one per dataset) served as labeled examples, while the remaining 19,433 slices were used for testing. In this minimal-supervision setting, nnsam2 used single-slice SAM2 prompts to generate pseudo-labels, which were pooled across datasets and refined through three sequential, independent nnU-Net models. Segmentation performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), and automated measurements-including muscle volume, fat ratio, and CT attenuation-were assessed with two one-sided tests (TOST) and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). Results: nnsam2 outperformed vanilla SAM2, its medical variants, TotalSegmentator, and the leading few-shot method, achieving DSCs of 0.94-0.96 on MR images and 0.92-0.93 on CT. Automated and expert measurements were statistically equivalent for muscle volume (MRI/CT), CT attenuation, and Dixon fat ratio (TOST, P < 0.05), with consistently high ICCs (0.86-1.00). Conclusion: We developed nnsam2, a state-of-the-art few-shot framework for multi-modality LPM segmentation, producing muscle volume (MRI/CT), attenuation (CT), and fat ratio (Dixon MRI) measurements that were statistically comparable to expert references. Validated across multimodal, multicenter, and multinational cohorts, and released with open code and data, nnsam2 demonstrated high annotation efficiency, robust generalizability, and reproducibility.

Paperid: 6324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03799.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the ability of large language models to generate and recognize deep cognitive frames, particularly in socio-political contexts. We demonstrate that LLMs are highly fluent in generating texts that evoke specific frames and can recognize these frames in zero-shot settings. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability research, we investigate the location of the `strict father' and `nurturing parent' frames within the model's hidden representation, identifying singular dimensions that correlate strongly with their presence. Our findings contribute to understanding how LLMs capture and express meaningful human concepts.

Paperid: 6325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03748.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have consistently demonstrated strong performance in machine translation, especially when guided by high-quality prompts. Few-shot prompting is an effective technique to improve translation quality; however, most existing example selection methods focus solely on query-to-example similarity and do not account for the quality of the examples. In this work, we propose TreePrompt, a novel example selection approach that learns LLM preferences to identify high-quality, contextually relevant examples within a tree-structured framework. To further explore the balance between similarity and quality, we combine TreePrompt with K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) and Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (AFSP). Evaluations on two language pairs - English-Persian (MIZAN) and English-German (WMT19) - show that integrating TreePrompt with AFSP or Random selection leads to improved translation performance.

Paperid: 6326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02913.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models like CLIP demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose Confidence-Aware Weighting (CAW) to enhance zero-shot robustness in vision-language models. CAW consists of two components: (1) a Confidence-Aware loss that prioritizes uncertain adversarial examples by scaling the KL divergence between clean and adversarial predictions, and (2) a feature alignment regularization that preserves semantic consistency by minimizing the distance between frozen and fine-tuned image encoder features on adversarial inputs. These components work jointly to improve both clean and robust accuracy without sacrificing generalization. Extensive experiments on TinyImageNet and 14 additional datasets show that CAW outperforms recent methods such as PMG-AFT and TGA-ZSR under strong attacks like AutoAttack, while using less memory.

Paperid: 6327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02043.pdf

Abstract:
Pose estimation refers to tracking a human's full body posture, including their head, torso, arms, and legs. The problem is challenging in practical settings where the number of body sensors are limited. Past work has shown promising results using conditional diffusion models, where the pose prediction is conditioned on both measurements from the sensors. Unfortunately, nearly all these approaches generalize poorly across users, primarly because location measurements are highly influenced by the body size of the user. In this paper, we formulate pose estimation as an inverse problem and design an algorithm capable of zero-shot generalization. Our idea utilizes a pre-trained diffusion model and conditions it on rotational measurements alone; the priors from this model are then guided by a likelihood term, derived from the measured locations. Thus, given any user, our proposed InPose method generatively estimates the highly likely sequence of poses that best explains the sparse on-body measurements.

Paperid: 6328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01666.pdf

Abstract:
Image denoising is a fundamental problem in computer vision and medical imaging. However, real-world images are often degraded by structured noise with strong anisotropic correlations that existing methods struggle to remove. Most data-driven approaches rely on large datasets with high-quality labels and still suffer from limited generalizability, whereas existing zero-shot methods avoid this limitation but remain effective only for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise. To address this gap, we propose Median2Median (M2M), a zero-shot denoising framework designed for structured noise. M2M introduces a novel sampling strategy that generates pseudo-independent sub-image pairs from a single noisy input. This strategy leverages directional interpolation and generalized median filtering to adaptively exclude values distorted by structured artifacts. To further enlarge the effective sampling space and eliminate systematic bias, a randomized assignment strategy is employed, ensuring that the sampled sub-image pairs are suitable for Noise2Noise training. In our realistic simulation studies, M2M performs on par with state-of-the-art zero-shot methods under i.i.d. noise, while consistently outperforming them under correlated noise. These findings establish M2M as an efficient, data-free solution for structured noise suppression and mark the first step toward effective zero-shot denoising beyond the strict i.i.d. assumption.

Paperid: 6329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01391.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at general language tasks but often struggle with event-based questions-especially those requiring causal or temporal reasoning. We introduce TAG-EQA (Text-And-Graph for Event Question Answering), a prompting framework that injects causal event graphs into LLM inputs by converting structured relations into natural-language statements. TAG-EQA spans nine prompting configurations, combining three strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought) with three input modalities (text-only, graph-only, text+graph), enabling a systematic analysis of when and how structured knowledge aids inference. On the TORQUESTRA benchmark, TAG-EQA improves accuracy by 5% on average over text-only baselines, with gains up to 12% in zero-shot settings and 18% when graph-augmented CoT prompting is effective. While performance varies by model and configuration, our findings show that causal graphs can enhance event reasoning in LLMs without fine-tuning, offering a flexible way to encode structure in prompt-based QA.

Paperid: 6330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01250.pdf

Abstract:
As social-media platforms emerge and evolve faster than the regulations meant to oversee them, automated detoxification might serve as a timely tool for moderators to enforce safe discourse at scale. We here describe our submission to the PAN 2025 Multilingual Text Detoxification Challenge, which rewrites toxic single-sentence inputs into neutral paraphrases across 15 typologically diverse languages. Building on a 12B-parameter Gemma-3 multilingual transformer, we apply parameter-efficient LoRA SFT fine-tuning and prompting techniques like few-shot and Chain-of-Thought. Our multilingual training corpus combines 3,600 human-authored parallel pairs, 21,600 machine-translated synthetic pairs, and model-generated pairs filtered by Jaccard thresholds. At inference, inputs are enriched with three LaBSE-retrieved neighbors and explicit toxic-span annotations. Evaluated via Style Transfer Accuracy, LaBSE-based semantic preservation, and xCOMET fluency, our system ranks first on high-resource and low-resource languages. Ablations show +0.081 joint score increase from few-shot examples and +0.088 from basic CoT prompting. ANOVA analysis identifies language resource status as the strongest predictor of performance ($η^2$ = 0.667, p < 0.01).

Paperid: 6331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00561.pdf

Abstract:
The process of quantifying mold colonies on Petri dish samples is of critical importance for the assessment of indoor air quality, as high colony counts can indicate potential health risks and deficiencies in ventilation systems. Conventionally the automation of such a labor-intensive process, as well as other tasks in microbiology, relies on the manual annotation of large datasets and the subsequent extensive training of models like YoloV9. To demonstrate that exhaustive annotation is not a prerequisite anymore when tackling a new vision task, we compile a representative dataset of 5000 Petri dish images annotated with bounding boxes, simulating both a traditional data collection approach as well as few-shot and low-shot scenarios with well curated subsets with instance level masks. We benchmark three vision foundation models against traditional baselines on task specific metrics, reflecting realistic real-world requirements. Notably, MaskDINO attains near-parity with an extensively trained YoloV9 model while finetuned only on 150 images, retaining competitive performance with as few as 25 images, still being reliable on $\approx$ 70% of the samples. Our results show that data-efficient foundation models can match traditional approaches with only a fraction of the required data, enabling earlier development and faster iterative improvement of automated microbiological systems with a superior upper-bound performance than traditional models would achieve.

Paperid: 6332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24930.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, but their ability to replicate the distinctive style of a specific human author remains unclear. We present a fast, training-free framework for authorship verification and style imitation analysis. The method integrates TF-IDF character n-grams with transformer embeddings and classifies text pairs through empirical distance distributions, eliminating the need for supervised training or threshold tuning. It achieves 97.5\% accuracy on academic essays and 94.5\% in cross-domain evaluation, while reducing training time by 91.8\% and memory usage by 59\% relative to parameter-based baselines. Using this framework, we evaluate five LLMs from three separate families (Llama, Qwen, Mixtral) across four prompting strategies - zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot, and text completion. Results show that the prompting strategy has a more substantial influence on style fidelity than model size: few-shot prompting yields up to 23.5x higher style-matching accuracy than zero-shot, and completion prompting reaches 99.9\% agreement with the original author's style. Crucially, high-fidelity imitation does not imply human-like unpredictability - human essays average a perplexity of 29.5, whereas matched LLM outputs average only 15.2. These findings demonstrate that stylistic fidelity and statistical detectability are separable, establishing a reproducible basis for future work in authorship modeling, detection, and identity-conditioned generation.

Paperid: 6333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24706.pdf

Abstract:
Effective human-robot collaboration depends on task-oriented handovers, where robots present objects in ways that support the partners intended use. However, many existing approaches neglect the humans post-handover action, relying on assumptions that limit generalizability. To address this gap, we propose LLM-Handover, a novel framework that integrates large language model (LLM)-based reasoning with part segmentation to enable context-aware grasp selection and execution. Given an RGB-D image and a task description, our system infers relevant object parts and selects grasps that optimize post-handover usability. To support evaluation, we introduce a new dataset of 60 household objects spanning 12 categories, each annotated with detailed part labels. We first demonstrate that our approach improves the performance of the used state-of-the-art part segmentation method, in the context of robot-human handovers. Next, we show that LLM-Handover achieves higher grasp success rates and adapts better to post-handover task constraints. During hardware experiments, we achieve a success rate of 83% in a zero-shot setting over conventional and unconventional post-handover tasks. Finally, our user study underlines that our method enables more intuitive, context-aware handovers, with participants preferring it in 86% of cases.

Paperid: 6334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23805.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success on question answering (QA) tasks, yet they often encode harmful biases that compromise fairness and trustworthiness. Most existing bias mitigation approaches are restricted to predefined categories, limiting their ability to address novel or context-specific emergent biases. To bridge this gap, we tackle the novel problem of open-set bias detection and mitigation in text-based QA. We introduce OpenBiasBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate biases across a wide range of categories and subgroups, encompassing both known and previously unseen biases. Additionally, we propose Open-DeBias, a novel, data-efficient, and parameter-efficient debiasing method that leverages adapter modules to mitigate existing social and stereotypical biases while generalizing to unseen ones. Compared to the state-of-the-art BMBI method, Open-DeBias improves QA accuracy on BBQ dataset by nearly $48\%$ on ambiguous subsets and $6\%$ on disambiguated ones, using adapters fine-tuned on just a small fraction of the training data. Remarkably, the same adapters, in a zero-shot transfer to Korean BBQ, achieve $84\%$ accuracy, demonstrating robust language-agnostic generalization. Through extensive evaluation, we also validate the effectiveness of Open-DeBias across a broad range of NLP tasks, including StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs, highlighting its robustness, multilingual strength, and suitability for general-purpose, open-domain bias mitigation. The project page is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/open-debias25

Paperid: 6335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22345.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we aim at the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to historical research endeavors, particularly addressing the study of religious invectives in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Tudor England. We outline a workflow spanning from raw data, through pre-processing and data selection, to an iterative annotation process. As a result, we introduce the InviTE corpus -- a corpus of almost 2000 Early Modern English (EModE) sentences, which are enriched with expert annotations regarding invective language throughout 16th-century England. Subsequently, we assess and compare the performance of fine-tuned BERT-based models and zero-shot prompted instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), which highlights the superiority of models pre-trained on historical data and fine-tuned to invective detection.

Paperid: 6336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21946.pdf

Abstract:
Political stance detection in low-resource and culturally complex settings poses a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). In the Thai political landscape - marked by indirect language, polarized figures, and entangled sentiment and stance - LLMs often display systematic biases such as sentiment leakage and favoritism toward entities. These biases undermine fairness and reliability. We present ThaiFACTUAL, a lightweight, model-agnostic calibration framework that mitigates political bias without requiring fine-tuning. ThaiFACTUAL uses counterfactual data augmentation and rationale-based supervision to disentangle sentiment from stance and reduce bias. We also release the first high-quality Thai political stance dataset, annotated with stance, sentiment, rationales, and bias markers across diverse entities and events. Experimental results show that ThaiFACTUAL significantly reduces spurious correlations, enhances zero-shot generalization, and improves fairness across multiple LLMs. This work highlights the importance of culturally grounded debiasing techniques for underrepresented languages.

Paperid: 6337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21845.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based models have advanced the field of question answering, but multi-hop reasoning, where answers require combining evidence across multiple passages, remains difficult. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of retrieval strategies for multi-hop question answering within a retrieval-augmented generation framework. We compare cosine similarity, maximal marginal relevance, and a hybrid method that integrates dense embeddings with lexical overlap and re-ranking. To further improve retrieval, we adapt the EfficientRAG pipeline for query optimization, introducing token labeling and iterative refinement while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on the HotpotQA dataset show that the hybrid approach substantially outperforms baseline methods, achieving a relative improvement of 50 percent in exact match and 47 percent in F1 score compared to cosine similarity. Error analysis reveals that hybrid retrieval improves entity recall and evidence complementarity, while remaining limited in handling distractors and temporal reasoning. Overall, the results suggest that hybrid retrieval-augmented generation provides a practical zero-shot solution for multi-hop question answering, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability.

Paperid: 6338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20119.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific visual question answering poses significant challenges for vision-language models due to the complexity of scientific figures and their multimodal context. Traditional approaches treat the figure and accompanying text (e.g., questions and answer options) as separate inputs. EXAMS-V introduced a new paradigm by embedding both visual and textual content into a single image. However, even state-of-the-art proprietary models perform poorly on this setup in zero-shot settings, underscoring the need for task-specific fine-tuning. To address the scarcity of training data in this "text-in-image" format, we synthesize a new dataset by converting existing separate image-text pairs into unified images. Fine-tuning a small multilingual multimodal model on a mix of our synthetic data and EXAMS-V yields notable gains across 13 languages, demonstrating strong average improvements and cross-lingual transfer.

Paperid: 6339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19931.pdf

Abstract:
Certain strong LLMs have shown promise for zero-shot formal planning by generating planning languages like PDDL. Yet, the performance of most open-source models under 50B parameters has been reported to be close to zero due to the low-resource nature of these languages. We significantly improve their performance via a series of lightweight pipelines that integrates documentation retrieval with modular code generation and error refinement. With models like Llama-4-Maverick, our best pipeline improves plan correctness from 0% to over 80% on the common BlocksWorld domain. However, while syntactic errors are substantially reduced, semantic errors persist in more challenging domains, revealing fundamental limitations in current models' reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 6340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19926.pdf

Abstract:
Prompting large language models is a training-free method for detecting Alzheimer's disease from speech transcripts. Using the ADReSS dataset, we revisit zero-shot prompting and study few-shot prompting with a class-balanced protocol using nested interleave and a strict schema, sweeping up to 20 examples per class. We evaluate two variants achieving state-of-the-art prompting results. (i) MMSE-Proxy Prompting: each few-shot example carries a probability anchored to Mini-Mental State Examination bands via a deterministic mapping, enabling AUC computing; this reaches 0.82 accuracy and 0.86 AUC (ii) Reasoning-augmented Prompting: few-shot examples pool is generated with a multimodal LLM (GPT-5) that takes as input the Cookie Theft image, transcript, and MMSE to output a reasoning and MMSE-aligned probability; evaluation remains transcript-only and reaches 0.82 accuracy and 0.83 AUC. To our knowledge, this is the first ADReSS study to anchor elicited probabilities to MMSE and to use multimodal construction to improve interpretability.

Paperid: 6341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19668.pdf

Abstract:
In zero-shot text-to-speech, achieving a balance between fidelity to the target speaker and adherence to text content remains a challenge. While classifier-free guidance (CFG) strategies have shown promising results in image generation, their application to speech synthesis are underexplored. Separating the conditions used for CFG enables trade-offs between different desired characteristics in speech synthesis. In this paper, we evaluate the adaptability of CFG strategies originally developed for image generation to speech synthesis and extend separated-condition CFG approaches for this domain. Our results show that CFG strategies effective in image generation generally fail to improve speech synthesis. We also find that we can improve speaker similarity while limiting degradation of text adherence by applying standard CFG during early timesteps and switching to selective CFG only in later timesteps. Surprisingly, we observe that the effectiveness of a selective CFG strategy is highly text-representation dependent, as differences between the two languages of English and Mandarin can lead to different results even with the same model.

Paperid: 6342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19327.pdf

Abstract:
Matching patients to clinical trial options is critical for identifying novel treatments, especially in oncology. However, manual matching is labor-intensive and error-prone, leading to recruitment delays. Pipelines incorporating large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution. We conducted a systematic review of studies published between 2020 and 2025 from three academic databases and one preprint server, identifying LLM-based approaches to clinical trial matching. Of 126 unique articles, 31 met inclusion criteria. Reviewed studies focused on matching patient-to-criterion only (n=4), patient-to-trial only (n=10), trial-to-patient only (n=2), binary eligibility classification only (n=1) or combined tasks (n=14). Sixteen used synthetic data; fourteen used real patient data; one used both. Variability in datasets and evaluation metrics limited cross-study comparability. In studies with direct comparisons, the GPT-4 model consistently outperformed other models, even finely-tuned ones, in matching and eligibility extraction, albeit at higher cost. Promising strategies included zero-shot prompting with proprietary LLMs like the GPT-4o model, advanced retrieval methods, and fine-tuning smaller, open-source models for data privacy when incorporation of large models into hospital infrastructure is infeasible. Key challenges include accessing sufficiently large real-world data sets, and deployment-associated challenges such as reducing cost, mitigating risk of hallucinations, data leakage, and bias. This review synthesizes progress in applying LLMs to clinical trial matching, highlighting promising directions and key limitations. Standardized metrics, more realistic test sets, and attention to cost-efficiency and fairness will be critical for broader deployment.

Paperid: 6343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18938.pdf

Abstract:
While deep learning, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs), has significantly advanced classification performance, its typical reliance on extensive annotated datasets presents a major obstacle in many practical scenarios where such data is scarce. Vision-language models (VLMs) and transfer learning with pre-trained visual models appear as promising techniques to deal with this problem. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot image classification framework that combines a VLM and a pre-trained visual model within a self-learning cycle. Requiring only the set of class names and no labeled training data, our method utilizes a confidence-based pseudo-labeling strategy to train a lightweight classifier directly on the test data, enabling dynamic adaptation. The VLM identifies high-confidence samples, and the pre-trained visual model enhances their visual representations. These enhanced features then iteratively train the classifier, allowing the system to capture complementary semantic and visual cues without supervision. Notably, our approach avoids VLM fine-tuning and the use of large language models, relying on the visual-only model to reduce the dependence on semantic representation. Experimental evaluations on ten diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baseline zero-shot method.

Paperid: 6344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18880.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting AI-generated text is an increasing necessity to combat misuse of LLMs in education, business compliance, journalism, and social media, where synthetic fluency can mask misinformation or deception. While prior detectors often rely on token-level likelihoods or opaque black-box classifiers, these approaches struggle against high-quality generations and offer little interpretability. In this work, we propose DivEye, a novel detection framework that captures how unpredictability fluctuates across a text using surprisal-based features. Motivated by the observation that human-authored text exhibits richer variability in lexical and structural unpredictability than LLM outputs, DivEye captures this signal through a set of interpretable statistical features. Our method outperforms existing zero-shot detectors by up to 33.2% and achieves competitive performance with fine-tuned baselines across multiple benchmarks. DivEye is robust to paraphrasing and adversarial attacks, generalizes well across domains and models, and improves the performance of existing detectors by up to 18.7% when used as an auxiliary signal. Beyond detection, DivEye provides interpretable insights into why a text is flagged, pointing to rhythmic unpredictability as a powerful and underexplored signal for LLM detection.

Paperid: 6345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18722.pdf

Abstract:
We present LOTUSDIS, a publicly available Thai meeting corpus designed to advance far-field conversational ASR. The dataset comprises 114 hours of spontaneous, unscripted dialogue collected in 15-20 minute sessions with three participants, where overlapping speech is frequent and natural. Speech was recorded simultaneously by nine independent single-channel devices spanning six microphone types at distances from 0.12 m to 10 m, preserving the authentic effects of reverberation, noise, and device coloration without relying on microphone arrays. We provide standard train, dev, test splits and release a reproducible baseline system. We benchmarked several Whisper variants under zero-shot and fine-tuned conditions. Off-the-shelf models showed strong degradation with distance, confirming a mismatch between pre-training data and Thai far-field speech. Fine-tuning on LOTUSDIS dramatically improved robustness: a Thai Whisper baseline reduced overall WER from 64.3 to 38.3 and far-field WER from 81.6 to 49.5, with especially large gains on the most distant microphones. These results underscore the importance of distance-diverse training data for robust ASR. The corpus is available under CC-BY-SA 4.0. We also release training and evaluation scripts as a baseline system to promote reproducible research in this field.

Paperid: 6346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18611.pdf

Abstract:
Pretraining on large-scale collections of PDE-governed spatiotemporal trajectories has recently shown promise for building generalizable models of dynamical systems. Yet most existing PDE foundation models rely on deterministic Transformer architectures, which lack generative flexibility for many science and engineering applications. We propose Flow Marching, an algorithm that bridges neural operator learning with flow matching motivated by an analysis of error accumulation in physical dynamical systems, and we build a generative PDE foundation model on top of it. By jointly sampling the noise level and the physical time step between adjacent states, the model learns a unified velocity field that transports a noisy current state toward its clean successor, reducing long-term rollout drift while enabling uncertainty-aware ensemble generations. Alongside this core algorithm, we introduce a Physics-Pretrained Variational Autoencoder (P2VAE) to embed physical states into a compact latent space, and an efficient Flow Marching Transformer (FMT) that combines a diffusion-forcing scheme with latent temporal pyramids, achieving up to 15x greater computational efficiency than full-length video diffusion models and thereby enabling large-scale pretraining at substantially reduced cost. We curate a corpus of ~2.5M trajectories across 12 distinct PDE families and train suites of P2VAEs and FMTs at multiple scales. On downstream evaluation, we benchmark on unseen Kolmogorov turbulence with few-shot adaptation, demonstrate long-term rollout stability over deterministic counterparts, and present uncertainty-stratified ensemble results, highlighting the importance of generative PDE foundation models for real-world applications.

Paperid: 6347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18405.pdf

Abstract:
Checks remain a foundational instrument in the financial ecosystem, facilitating substantial transaction volumes across institutions. However, their continued use also renders them a persistent target for fraud, underscoring the importance of robust check fraud detection mechanisms. At the core of such systems lies the accurate identification and localization of critical fields, such as the signature, magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) line, courtesy amount, legal amount, payee, and payer, which are essential for subsequent verification against reference checks belonging to the same customer. This field-level detection is traditionally dependent on object detection models trained on large, diverse, and meticulously labeled datasets, a resource that is scarce due to proprietary and privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for automated check field detection, leveraging the power of a vision language model (VLM) in conjunction with a multimodal large language model (MLLM). Our approach enables zero-shot detection of check components, significantly lowering the barrier to deployment in real-world financial settings. Quantitative evaluation of our model on a hand-curated dataset of 110 checks spanning multiple formats and layouts demonstrates strong performance and generalization capability. Furthermore, this framework can serve as a bootstrap mechanism for generating high-quality labeled datasets, enabling the development of specialized real-time object detection models tailored to institutional needs.

Paperid: 6348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18152.pdf

Abstract:
Well-log interpretation is fundamental for subsurface characterization but remains challenged by heterogeneous tool responses, noisy signals, and limited labels. We propose WLFM, a foundation model pretrained on multi-curve logs from 1200 wells, comprising three stages: tokenization of log patches into geological tokens, self-supervised pretraining with masked-token modeling and stratigraphy-aware contrastive learning, and multi-task adaptation with few-shot fine-tuning. WLFM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving 0.0041 MSE in porosity estimation and 74.13\% accuracy in lithology classification, while WLFM-Finetune further improves to 0.0038 MSE and 78.10\% accuracy. Beyond predictive accuracy, WLFM exhibits emergent layer-awareness, learns a reusable geological vocabulary, and reconstructs masked curves with reasonable fidelity, though systematic offsets are observed in shallow and ultra-deep intervals. Although boundary detection is not explicitly evaluated here, clustering analyses suggest strong potential for future extension. These results establish WLFM as a scalable, interpretable, and transferable backbone for geological AI, with implications for multi-modal integration of logs, seismic, and textual data.

Paperid: 6349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17694.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in long-form, knowledge-grounded role-play dialogues remains challenging. This study compares LLM-generated and human-authored responses in multi-turn professional training simulations through human evaluation ($N=38$) and automated LLM-as-a-judge assessment. Human evaluation revealed significant degradation in LLM-generated response quality across turns, particularly in naturalness, context maintenance and overall quality, while human-authored responses progressively improved. In line with this finding, participants also indicated a consistent preference for human-authored dialogue. These human judgements were validated by our automated LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, where Gemini 2.0 Flash achieved strong alignment with human evaluators on both zero-shot pairwise preference and stochastic 6-shot construct ratings, confirming the widening quality gap between LLM and human responses over time. Our work contributes a multi-turn benchmark exposing LLM degradation in knowledge-grounded role-play dialogues and provides a validated hybrid evaluation framework to guide the reliable integration of LLMs in training simulations.

Paperid: 6350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17544.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing availability of open Earth Observation (EO) and agricultural datasets holds great potential for supporting sustainable land management. However, their high technical entry barrier limits accessibility for non-expert users. This study presents an open-source conversational assistant that integrates multimodal retrieval and large language models (LLMs) to enable natural language interaction with heterogeneous agricultural and geospatial data. The proposed architecture combines orthophotos, Sentinel-2 vegetation indices, and user-provided documents through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), allowing the system to flexibly determine whether to rely on multimodal evidence, textual knowledge, or both in formulating an answer. To assess response quality, we adopt an LLM-as-a-judge methodology using Qwen3-32B in a zero-shot, unsupervised setting, applying direct scoring in a multi-dimensional quantitative evaluation framework. Preliminary results show that the system is capable of generating clear, relevant, and context-aware responses to agricultural queries, while remaining reproducible and scalable across geographic regions. The primary contributions of this work include an architecture for fusing multimodal EO and textual knowledge sources, a demonstration of lowering the barrier to access specialized agricultural information through natural language interaction, and an open and reproducible design.

Paperid: 6351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16241.pdf

Abstract:
The challenges of solving complex university-level mathematics problems, particularly those from MIT, and Columbia University courses, and selected tasks from the MATH dataset, remain a significant obstacle in the field of artificial intelligence. Conventional methods have consistently fallen short in this domain, highlighting the need for more advanced approaches. In this paper, we introduce a language-based solution that leverages zero-shot learning and mathematical reasoning to effectively solve, explain, and generate solutions for these advanced math problems. By integrating program synthesis, our method reduces reliance on large-scale training data while significantly improving problem-solving accuracy. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 90.15%, representing a substantial improvement over the previous benchmark of 81% and setting a new standard in automated mathematical problem-solving. These findings highlight the significant potential of advanced AI methodologies to address and overcome the challenges presented by some of the most complex mathematical courses and datasets.

Paperid: 6352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14273.pdf

Abstract:
Code documentation is essential to improve software maintainability and comprehension. The tedious nature of manual code documentation has led to much research on automated documentation generation. Existing automated approaches primarily focused on code summarization, leaving a gap in template-based documentation generation (e.g., Javadoc), particularly with publicly available Large Language Models (LLMs). Furthermore, progress in this area has been hindered by the lack of a Javadoc-specific dataset that incorporates modern language features, provides broad framework/library coverage, and includes necessary contextual information. This study aims to address these gaps by developing a tailored dataset and assessing the capabilities of publicly available LLMs for context-aware, template-based Javadoc generation. In this work, we present a novel, context-aware dataset for Javadoc generation that includes critical structural and semantic information from modern Java codebases. We evaluate five open-source LLMs (including LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2, Phi-3, Mistral, Qwen-2.5) using zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned setups and provide a comparative analysis of their performance. Our results demonstrate that LLaMA 3.1 performs consistently well and is a reliable candidate for practical, automated Javadoc generation, offering a viable alternative to proprietary systems.

Paperid: 6353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13868.pdf

Abstract:
Requirements classification assigns natural language requirements to predefined classes, such as functional and non functional. Accurate classification reduces risk and improves software quality. Most existing models rely on supervised learning, which needs large labeled data that are costly, slow to create, and domain dependent; they also generalize poorly and often require retraining for each task. This study tests whether prompt based large language models can reduce data needs. We benchmark several models and prompting styles (zero shot, few shot, persona, and chain of thought) across multiple tasks on two English datasets, PROMISE and SecReq. For each task we compare model prompt configurations and then compare the best LLM setups with a strong fine tuned transformer baseline. Results show that prompt based LLMs, especially with few shot prompts, can match or exceed the baseline. Adding a persona, or persona plus chain of thought, can yield further gains. We conclude that prompt based LLMs are a practical and scalable option that reduces dependence on large annotations and can improve generalizability across tasks.

Paperid: 6354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13805.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining. Access to a Physics Foundation Model (PFM) would be transformative -- democratizing access to high-fidelity simulations, accelerating scientific discovery, and eliminating the need for specialized solver development. Yet current physics-aware machine learning approaches remain fundamentally limited to single, narrow domains and require retraining for each new system. We present the General Physics Transformer (GPhyT), trained on 1.8 TB of diverse simulation data, that demonstrates foundation model capabilities are achievable for physics. Our key insight is that transformers can learn to infer governing dynamics from context, enabling a single model to simulate fluid-solid interactions, shock waves, thermal convection, and multi-phase dynamics without being told the underlying equations. GPhyT achieves three critical breakthroughs: (1) superior performance across multiple physics domains, outperforming specialized architectures by up to 29x, (2) zero-shot generalization to entirely unseen physical systems through in-context learning, and (3) stable long-term predictions through 50-timestep rollouts. By establishing that a single model can learn generalizable physical principles from data alone, this work opens the path toward a universal PFM that could transform computational science and engineering.

Paperid: 6355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13539.pdf

Abstract:
The U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly discusses and sets monetary policy, affecting the borrowing and spending decisions of millions of people. In this work, we release Op-Fed, a dataset of 1044 human-annotated sentences and their contexts from FOMC transcripts. We faced two major technical challenges in dataset creation: imbalanced classes -- we estimate fewer than 8% of sentences express a non-neutral stance towards monetary policy -- and inter-sentence dependence -- 65% of instances require context beyond the sentence-level. To address these challenges, we developed a five-stage hierarchical schema to isolate aspects of opinion, monetary policy, and stance towards monetary policy as well as the level of context needed. Second, we selected instances to annotate using active learning, roughly doubling the number of positive instances across all schema aspects. Using Op-Fed, we found a top-performing, closed-weight LLM achieves 0.80 zero-shot accuracy in opinion classification but only 0.61 zero-shot accuracy classifying stance towards monetary policy -- below our human baseline of 0.89. We expect Op-Fed to be useful for future model training, confidence calibration, and as a seed dataset for future annotation efforts.

Paperid: 6356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12878.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation aims to segment novel categories using a minimal number of annotated support samples. While existing prototype-based methods have shown promise, they are constrained by two critical challenges: (1) Intra-class Diversity, where a prototype's limited representational capacity fails to cover a class's full variations, and (2) Inter-set Inconsistency, where prototypes derived from the support set are misaligned with the query feature space. Motivated by the powerful generative capability of diffusion model, we re-purpose its pre-trained conditional encoder to provide a novel source of generalizable features for expanding the prototype's representational range. Under this setup, we introduce the Prototype Expansion Network (PENet), a framework that constructs big-capacity prototypes from two complementary feature sources. PENet employs a dual-stream learner architecture: it retains a conventional fully supervised Intrinsic Learner (IL) to distill representative features, while introducing a novel Diffusion Learner (DL) to provide rich generalizable features. The resulting dual prototypes are then processed by a Prototype Assimilation Module (PAM), which adopts a novel push-pull cross-guidance attention block to iteratively align the prototypes with the query space. Furthermore, a Prototype Calibration Mechanism (PCM) regularizes the final big capacity prototype to prevent semantic drift. Extensive experiments on the S3DIS and ScanNet datasets demonstrate that PENet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various few-shot settings.

Paperid: 6357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12497.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series forecasting and causal discovery are central in neuroscience, as predicting brain activity and identifying causal relationships between neural populations and circuits can shed light on the mechanisms underlying cognition and disease. With the rise of foundation models, an open question is how they compare to traditional methods for brain signal forecasting and causality analysis, and whether they can be applied in a zero-shot setting. In this work, we evaluate a foundation model against classical methods for inferring directional interactions from spontaneous brain activity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans. Traditional approaches often rely on Wiener-Granger causality. We tested the forecasting ability of the foundation model in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, and assessed causality by comparing Granger-like estimates from the model with standard Granger causality. We validated the approach using synthetic time series generated from ground-truth causal models, including logistic map coupling and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. The foundation model achieved competitive zero-shot forecasting fMRI time series (mean absolute percentage error of 0.55 in controls and 0.27 in patients). Although standard Granger causality did not show clear quantitative differences between models, the foundation model provided a more precise detection of causal interactions. Overall, these findings suggest that foundation models offer versatility, strong zero-shot performance, and potential utility for forecasting and causal discovery in time-series data.

Paperid: 6358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12395.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have shown impressive performance in various domains, including code generation across diverse open-source domains. However, their applicability in proprietary industrial settings, where domain-specific constraints and code interdependencies are prevalent, remains largely unexplored. We present a case study conducted in collaboration with the leveling department at ASML to investigate the performance of LLMs in generating functional, maintainable code within a closed, highly specialized software environment. We developed an evaluation framework tailored to ASML's proprietary codebase and introduced a new benchmark. Additionally, we proposed a new evaluation metric, build@k, to assess whether LLM-generated code successfully compiles and integrates within real industrial repositories. We investigate various prompting techniques, compare the performance of generic and code-specific LLMs, and examine the impact of model size on code generation capabilities, using both match-based and execution-based metrics. The findings reveal that prompting techniques and model size have a significant impact on output quality, with few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting yielding the highest build success rates. The difference in performance between the code-specific LLMs and generic LLMs was less pronounced and varied substantially across different model families.

Paperid: 6359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11492.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our system for Task 3 of the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab, which focuses on verifying numerical and temporal claims using retrieved evidence. We explore two complementary approaches: zero-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) and supervised fine-tuning using parameter-efficient LoRA. To enhance evidence quality, we investigate several selection strategies, including full-document input and top-k sentence filtering using BM25 and MiniLM. Our best-performing model LLaMA fine-tuned with LoRA achieves strong performance on the English validation set. However, a notable drop in the test set highlights a generalization challenge. These findings underscore the importance of evidence granularity and model adaptation for robust numerical fact verification.

Paperid: 6360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11376.pdf

Abstract:
The petroleum industry faces unprecedented challenges in reservoir management, requiring rapid integration of complex multimodal datasets for real-time decision support. This study presents a novel integrated framework combining state-of-the-art large language models (GPT-4o, Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro) with advanced prompt engineering techniques and multimodal data fusion for comprehensive reservoir analysis. The framework implements domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with over 50,000 petroleum engineering documents, chain-of-thought reasoning, and few-shot learning for rapid field adaptation. Multimodal integration processes seismic interpretations, well logs, and production data through specialized AI models with vision transformers. Field validation across 15 diverse reservoir environments demonstrates exceptional performance: 94.2% reservoir characterization accuracy, 87.6% production forecasting precision, and 91.4% well placement optimization success rate. The system achieves sub-second response times while maintaining 96.2% safety reliability with no high-risk incidents during evaluation. Economic analysis reveals 62-78% cost reductions (mean 72%) relative to traditional methods with 8-month payback period. Few-shot learning reduces field adaptation time by 72%, while automated prompt optimization achieves 89% improvement in reasoning quality. The framework processed real-time data streams with 96.2% anomaly detection accuracy and reduced environmental incidents by 45%. We provide detailed experimental protocols, baseline comparisons, ablation studies, and statistical significance testing to ensure reproducibility. This research demonstrates practical integration of cutting-edge AI technologies with petroleum domain expertise for enhanced operational efficiency, safety, and economic performance.

Paperid: 6361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11295.pdf

Abstract:
Developing effective prompts demands significant cognitive investment to generate reliable, high-quality responses from Large Language Models (LLMs). By deploying case-specific prompt engineering techniques that streamline frequently performed life sciences workflows, researchers could achieve substantial efficiency gains that far exceed the initial time investment required to master these techniques. The Prompt Report published in 2025 outlined 58 different text-based prompt engineering techniques, highlighting the numerous ways prompts could be constructed. To provide actionable guidelines and reduce the friction of navigating these various approaches, we distil this report to focus on 6 core techniques: zero-shot, few-shot approaches, thought generation, ensembling, self-criticism, and decomposition. We breakdown the significance of each approach and ground it in use cases relevant to life sciences, from literature summarization and data extraction to editorial tasks. We provide detailed recommendations for how prompts should and shouldn't be structured, addressing common pitfalls including multi-turn conversation degradation, hallucinations, and distinctions between reasoning and non-reasoning models. We examine context window limitations, agentic tools like Claude Code, while analyzing the effectiveness of Deep Research tools across OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity platforms, discussing current limitations. We demonstrate how prompt engineering can augment rather than replace existing established individual practices around data processing and document editing. Our aim is to provide actionable guidance on core prompt engineering principles, and to facilitate the transition from opportunistic prompting to an effective, low-friction systematic practice that contributes to higher quality research.

Paperid: 6362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10748.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation and tracking of relevant elements of the surgical scene is crucial to enable context-aware intraoperative assistance and decision making. Current solutions remain tethered to domain-specific, supervised models that rely on labeled data and required domain-specific data to adapt to new surgical scenarios and beyond predefined label categories. Recent advances in prompt-driven vision foundation models (VFM) have enabled open-set, zero-shot segmentation across heterogeneous medical images. However, dependence of these models on manual visual or textual cues restricts their deployment in introperative surgical settings. We introduce a speech-guided collaborative perception (SCOPE) framework that integrates reasoning capabilities of large language model (LLM) with perception capabilities of open-set VFMs to support on-the-fly segmentation, labeling and tracking of surgical instruments and anatomy in intraoperative video streams. A key component of this framework is a collaborative perception agent, which generates top candidates of VFM-generated segmentation and incorporates intuitive speech feedback from clinicians to guide the segmentation of surgical instruments in a natural human-machine collaboration paradigm. Afterwards, instruments themselves serve as interactive pointers to label additional elements of the surgical scene. We evaluated our proposed framework on a subset of publicly available Cataract1k dataset and an in-house ex-vivo skull-base dataset to demonstrate its potential to generate on-the-fly segmentation and tracking of surgical scene. Furthermore, we demonstrate its dynamic capabilities through a live mock ex-vivo experiment. This human-AI collaboration paradigm showcase the potential of developing adaptable, hands-free, surgeon-centric tools for dynamic operating-room environments.

Paperid: 6363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09727.pdf

Abstract:
Question answering (QA) plays a central role in financial education, yet existing large language model (LLM) approaches often fail to capture the nuanced and specialized reasoning required for financial problem-solving. The financial domain demands multistep quantitative reasoning, familiarity with domain-specific terminology, and comprehension of real-world scenarios. We present a multi-agent framework that leverages role-based prompting to enhance performance on domain-specific QA. Our framework comprises a Base Generator, an Evidence Retriever, and an Expert Reviewer agent that work in a single-pass iteration to produce a refined answer. We evaluated our framework on a set of 3,532 expert-designed finance education questions from Study.com, an online learning platform. We leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for contextual evidence from 6 finance textbooks and prompting strategies for a domain-expert reviewer. Our experiments indicate that critique-based refinement improves answer accuracy by 6.6-8.3% over zero-shot Chain-of-Thought baselines, with the highest performance from Gemini-2.0-Flash. Furthermore, our method enables GPT-4o-mini to achieve performance comparable to the finance-tuned FinGPT-mt_Llama3-8B_LoRA. Our results show a cost-effective approach to enhancing financial QA and offer insights for further research in multi-agent financial LLM systems.

Paperid: 6364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09387.pdf

Abstract:
Effective model and hyperparameter selection remains a major challenge in deep learning, often requiring extensive expertise and computation. While AutoML and large language models (LLMs) promise automation, current LLM-based approaches rely on trial and error and expensive APIs, which provide limited interpretability and generalizability. We propose MetaLLMiX, a zero-shot hyperparameter optimization framework combining meta-learning, explainable AI, and efficient LLM reasoning. By leveraging historical experiment outcomes with SHAP explanations, MetaLLMiX recommends optimal hyperparameters and pretrained models without additional trials. We further employ an LLM-as-judge evaluation to control output format, accuracy, and completeness. Experiments on eight medical imaging datasets using nine open-source lightweight LLMs show that MetaLLMiX achieves competitive or superior performance to traditional HPO methods while drastically reducing computational cost. Our local deployment outperforms prior API-based approaches, achieving optimal results on 5 of 8 tasks, response time reductions of 99.6-99.9%, and the fastest training times on 6 datasets (2.4-15.7x faster), maintaining accuracy within 1-5% of best-performing baselines.

Paperid: 6365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09303.pdf

Abstract:
Classifying patents by their relevance to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for tracking how innovation addresses global challenges. However, the absence of a large, labeled dataset limits the use of supervised learning. Existing methods, such as keyword searches, transfer learning, and citation-based heuristics, lack scalability and generalizability. This paper frames patent-to-SDG classification as a weak supervision problem, using citations from patents to SDG-tagged scientific publications (NPL citations) as a noisy initial signal. To address its sparsity and noise, we develop a composite labeling function (LF) that uses large language models (LLMs) to extract structured concepts, namely functions, solutions, and applications, from patents and SDG papers based on a patent ontology. Cross-domain similarity scores are computed and combined using a rank-based retrieval approach. The LF is calibrated via a custom positive-only loss that aligns with known NPL-SDG links without penalizing discovery of new SDG associations. The result is a silver-standard, soft multi-label dataset mapping patents to SDGs, enabling the training of effective multi-label regression models. We validate our approach through two complementary strategies: (1) internal validation against held-out NPL-based labels, where our method outperforms several baselines including transformer-based models, and zero-shot LLM; and (2) external validation using network modularity in patent citation, co-inventor, and co-applicant graphs, where our labels reveal greater thematic, cognitive, and organizational coherence than traditional technological classifications. These results show that weak supervision and semantic alignment can enhance SDG classification at scale.

Paperid: 6366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09251.pdf

Abstract:
The intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating mechanical equipment usually requires a large amount of labeled sample data. However, in practical industrial applications, acquiring enough data is both challenging and expensive in terms of time and cost. Moreover, different types of rotating mechanical equipment with different unique mechanical properties, require separate training of diagnostic models for each case. To address the challenges of limited fault samples and the lack of generalizability in prediction models for practical engineering applications, we propose a Multi-Attention Meta Transformer method for few-shot unsupervised rotating machinery fault diagnosis (MMT-FD). This framework extracts potential fault representations from unlabeled data and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, making it suitable for diagnosing faults across various types of mechanical equipment. The MMT-FD framework integrates a time-frequency domain encoder and a meta-learning generalization model. The time-frequency domain encoder predicts status representations generated through random augmentations in the time-frequency domain. These enhanced data are then fed into a meta-learning network for classification and generalization training, followed by fine-tuning using a limited amount of labeled data. The model is iteratively optimized using a small number of contrastive learning iterations, resulting in high efficiency. To validate the framework, we conducted experiments on a bearing fault dataset and rotor test bench data. The results demonstrate that the MMT-FD model achieves 99\% fault diagnosis accuracy with only 1\% of labeled sample data, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities.

Paperid: 6367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09198.pdf

Abstract:
Marmoset monkeys exhibit complex vocal communication, challenging the view that nonhuman primates vocal communication is entirely innate, and show similar features of human speech, such as vocal labeling of others and turn-taking. Studying their vocal communication offers a unique opportunity to link it with brain activity-especially given the difficulty of accessing the human brain in speech and language research. Since Marmosets communicate primarily through vocalizations, applying standard LLM approaches is not straightforward. We introduce Generative Marmoset Spoken Language Modeling (GmSLM), an optimized spoken language model pipeline for Marmoset vocal communication. We designed a novel zero-shot evaluation metrics using unsupervised in-the-wild data, alongside weakly labeled conversational data, to assess GmSLM and demonstrate its advantage over a basic human-speech-based baseline. GmSLM generated vocalizations closely matched real resynthesized samples acoustically and performed well on downstream tasks. Despite being fully unsupervised, GmSLM effectively distinguish real from artificial conversations and may support further investigations of the neural basis of vocal communication and provides a practical framework linking vocalization and brain activity. We believe GmSLM stands to benefit future work in neuroscience, bioacoustics, and evolutionary biology. Samples are provided under: pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/GmSLM.

Paperid: 6368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08935.pdf

Abstract:
Colorectal cancer frequently metastasizes to the liver, significantly reducing long-term survival. While surgical resection is the only potentially curative treatment for colorectal liver metastasis (CRLM), patient outcomes vary widely depending on tumor characteristics along with clinical and genomic factors. Current prognostic models, often based on limited clinical or molecular features, lack sufficient predictive power, especially in multifocal CRLM cases. We present a fully automated framework for surgical outcome prediction from pre- and post-contrast MRI acquired before surgery. Our framework consists of a segmentation pipeline and a radiomics pipeline. The segmentation pipeline learns to segment the liver, tumors, and spleen from partially annotated data by leveraging promptable foundation models to complete missing labels. Also, we propose SAMONAI, a novel zero-shot 3D prompt propagation algorithm that leverages the Segment Anything Model to segment 3D regions of interest from a single point prompt, significantly improving our segmentation pipeline's accuracy and efficiency. The predicted pre- and post-contrast segmentations are then fed into our radiomics pipeline, which extracts features from each tumor and predicts survival using SurvAMINN, a novel autoencoder-based multiple instance neural network for survival analysis. SurvAMINN jointly learns dimensionality reduction and hazard prediction from right-censored survival data, focusing on the most aggressive tumors. Extensive evaluation on an institutional dataset comprising 227 patients demonstrates that our framework surpasses existing clinical and genomic biomarkers, delivering a C-index improvement exceeding 10%. Our results demonstrate the potential of integrating automated segmentation algorithms and radiomics-based survival analysis to deliver accurate, annotation-efficient, and interpretable outcome prediction in CRLM.

Paperid: 6369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08910.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications poses unprecedented risks of generating harmful, biased, or misleading information to vulnerable populations including LGBTQ+ individuals, single parents, and marginalized communities. While existing safety approaches rely on post-hoc filtering or generic alignment techniques, they fail to proactively prevent harmful outputs at the generation source. This paper introduces PromptGuard, a novel modular prompting framework with our breakthrough contribution: VulnGuard Prompt, a hybrid technique that prevents harmful information generation using real-world data-driven contrastive learning. VulnGuard integrates few-shot examples from curated GitHub repositories, ethical chain-of-thought reasoning, and adaptive role-prompting to create population-specific protective barriers. Our framework employs theoretical multi-objective optimization with formal proofs demonstrating 25-30% analytical harm reduction through entropy bounds and Pareto optimality. PromptGuard orchestrates six core modules: Input Classification, VulnGuard Prompting, Ethical Principles Integration, External Tool Interaction, Output Validation, and User-System Interaction, creating an intelligent expert system for real-time harm prevention. We provide comprehensive mathematical formalization including convergence proofs, vulnerability analysis using information theory, and theoretical validation framework using GitHub-sourced datasets, establishing mathematical foundations for systematic empirical research.

Paperid: 6370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08596.pdf

Abstract:
Biomedical question answering (QA) poses significant challenges due to the need for precise interpretation of specialized knowledge drawn from a vast, complex, and rapidly evolving corpus. In this work, we explore how large language models (LLMs) can be used for information retrieval (IR), and an ensemble of zero-shot models can accomplish state-of-the-art performance on a domain-specific Yes/No QA task. Evaluating our approach on the BioASQ challenge tasks, we show that ensembles can outperform individual LLMs and in some cases rival or surpass domain-tuned systems - all while preserving generalizability and avoiding the need for costly fine-tuning or labeled data. Our method aggregates outputs from multiple LLM variants, including models from Anthropic and Google, to synthesize more accurate and robust answers. Moreover, our investigation highlights a relationship between context length and performance: while expanded contexts are meant to provide valuable evidence, they simultaneously risk information dilution and model disorientation. These findings emphasize IR as a critical foundation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches for biomedical QA systems. Precise, focused retrieval remains essential for ensuring LLMs operate within relevant information boundaries when generating answers from retrieved documents. Our results establish that ensemble-based zero-shot approaches, when paired with effective RAG pipelines, constitute a practical and scalable alternative to domain-tuned systems for biomedical question answering.

Paperid: 6371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07605.pdf

Abstract:
Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

Paperid: 6372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07220.pdf

Abstract:
Individuals with ambulatory disabilities often encounter significant barriers when navigating urban environments due to the lack of accessible information and tools. This paper presents OmniAcc, an AI-powered interactive navigation system that utilizes GPT-4, satellite imagery, and OpenStreetMap data to identify, classify, and map wheelchair-accessible features such as ramps and crosswalks in the built environment. OmniAcc offers personalized route planning, real-time hands-free navigation, and instant query responses regarding physical accessibility. By using zero-shot learning and customized prompts, the system ensures precise detection of accessibility features, while supporting validation through structured workflows. This paper introduces OmniAcc and explores its potential to assist urban planners and mobility-aid users, demonstrated through a case study on crosswalk detection. With a crosswalk detection accuracy of 97.5%, OmniAcc highlights the transformative potential of AI in improving navigation and fostering more inclusive urban spaces.

Paperid: 6373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07127.pdf

Abstract:
Generated Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images demand evaluation criteria tuned to their symbolic and vectorial nature: criteria that existing metrics such as FID, LPIPS, or CLIPScore fail to satisfy. In this paper, we introduce SVGauge, the first human-aligned, reference based metric for text-to-SVG generation. SVGauge jointly measures (i) visual fidelity, obtained by extracting SigLIP image embeddings and refining them with PCA and whitening for domain alignment, and (ii) semantic consistency, captured by comparing BLIP-2-generated captions of the SVGs against the original prompts in the combined space of SBERT and TF-IDF. Evaluation on the proposed SHE benchmark shows that SVGauge attains the highest correlation with human judgments and reproduces system-level rankings of eight zero-shot LLM-based generators more faithfully than existing metrics. Our results highlight the necessity of vector-specific evaluation and provide a practical tool for benchmarking future text-to-SVG generation models.

Paperid: 6374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06966.pdf

Abstract:
High-quality, medically validated labels exist for clinical actigraphy data but not for ubiquitous consumer wearables like the Apple Watch. Manually labeling wearables data is expensive and doesn't scale. This paper offers a novel framework that transfers valuable labels from a source domain (e.g., actigraphy) to a target domain (e.g., Apple Watch) without requiring paired data. Instead of working with raw time-series signals, we project both domains into a shared latent embedding space using time-series foundation models (TSFMs) and develop a new framework to align the cross-device representations. Our method, Adversarial Alignment of TSFM Embeddings forces the distributions of source and target embeddings to align within this space, facilitating label transfer across device type.

Paperid: 6375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06883.pdf

Abstract:
We participate in CheckThat! Task 2 English and explore various methods of prompting and in-context learning, including few-shot prompting and fine-tuning with different LLM families, with the goal of extracting check-worthy claims from social media passages. Our best METEOR score is achieved by fine-tuning a FLAN-T5 model. However, we observe that higher-quality claims can sometimes be extracted using other methods, even when their METEOR scores are lower.

Paperid: 6376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06641.pdf

Abstract:
Targeting the issues of "shortcuts" and insufficient contextual understanding in complex cross-modal reasoning of multimodal large models, this paper proposes a zero-shot multimodal reasoning component guided by human-like cognitive strategies centered on an "intent sketch". The component comprises a plug-and-play three-module pipeline-Intent Perceiver, Strategy Generator, and Strategy Selector-that explicitly constructs a "understand-plan-select" cognitive process. By generating and filtering "intent sketch" strategies to guide the final reasoning, it requires no parameter fine-tuning and achieves cross-model transfer solely through in-context engineering. Information-theoretic analysis shows that this process can reduce conditional entropy and improve information utilization efficiency, thereby suppressing unintended shortcut reasoning. Experiments on IntentBench, WorldSense, and Daily-Omni validate the method's generality and robust gains; compared with their respective baselines, the complete "three-module" scheme yields consistent improvements across different reasoning engines and pipeline combinations, with gains up to approximately 9.51 percentage points, demonstrating the practical value and portability of the "intent sketch" reasoning component in zero-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 6377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05635.pdf

Abstract:
Intent detection is a crucial component of modern conversational systems, since accurately identifying user intent at the beginning of a conversation is essential for generating effective responses. Recent efforts have focused on studying this problem under a challenging few-shot scenario. These approaches primarily leverage large-scale unlabeled dialogue text corpora to pretrain language models through various pretext tasks, followed by fine-tuning for intent detection with very limited annotations. Despite the improvements achieved, existing methods have predominantly focused on textual data, neglecting to effectively capture the crucial structural information inherent in conversational systems, such as the query-query relation and query-answer relation. To address this gap, we propose SAID, a novel framework that integrates both textual and relational structure information in a unified manner for model pretraining for the first time. Building on this framework, we further propose a novel mechanism, the query-adaptive attention network (QueryAdapt), which operates at the relation token level by generating intent-specific relation tokens from well-learned query-query and query-answer relations explicitly, enabling more fine-grained knowledge transfer. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that SAID significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04606.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal foundation models can process several modalities. However, since the space of possible modalities is large and evolving over time, training a model from scratch to encompass all modalities is unfeasible. Moreover, integrating a modality into a pre-existing foundation model currently requires a significant amount of paired data, which is often not available for low-resource modalities. In this paper, we introduce a method for sample-efficient modality integration (SEMI) into Large Language Models (LLMs). To this end, we devise a hypernetwork that can adapt a shared projector -- placed between modality-specific encoders and an LLM -- to any modality. The hypernetwork, trained on high-resource modalities (i.e., text, speech, audio, video), is conditioned on a few samples from any arbitrary modality at inference time to generate a suitable adapter. To increase the diversity of training modalities, we artificially multiply the number of encoders through isometric transformations. We find that SEMI achieves a significant boost in sample efficiency during few-shot integration of new modalities (i.e., satellite images, astronomical images, inertial measurements, and molecules) with encoders of arbitrary embedding dimensionality. For instance, to reach the same accuracy as 32-shot SEMI, training the projector from scratch needs 64$\times$ more data. As a result, SEMI holds promise to extend the modality coverage of foundation models.

Paperid: 6379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04214.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) models have the potential to transform military battlefields, presenting a large external pressure to rapidly incorporate them into operational settings. However, it is well-established that these ML models are vulnerable to a number of adversarial attacks throughout the model deployment pipeline that threaten to negate battlefield advantage. One broad category is privacy attacks (such as model inversion) where an adversary can reverse engineer information from the model, such as the sensitive data used in its training. The ability to quantify the risk of model inversion attacks (MIAs) is not well studied, and there is a lack of automated developmental test and evaluation (DT&E) tools and metrics to quantify the effectiveness of privacy loss of the MIA. The current DT&E process is difficult because ML model inversions can be hard for a human to interpret, subjective when they are interpretable, and difficult to quantify in terms of inversion quality. Additionally, scaling the DT&E process is challenging due to many ML model architectures and data modalities that need to be assessed. In this work, we present a novel DT&E tool that quantifies the risk of data privacy loss from MIAs and introduces four adversarial risk dimensions to quantify privacy loss. Our DT&E pipeline combines inversion with vision language models (VLMs) to improve effectiveness while enabling scalable analysis. We demonstrate effectiveness using multiple MIA techniques and VLMs configured for zero-shot classification and image captioning. We benchmark the pipeline using several state-of-the-art MIAs in the computer vision domain with an image classification task that is typical in military applications. In general, our innovative pipeline extends the current model inversion DT&E capabilities by improving the effectiveness and scalability of the privacy loss analysis in an automated fashion.

Paperid: 6380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03725.pdf

Abstract:
We present the novel approach for stance detection across domains and targets, Metric Learning-Based Few-Shot Learning for Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection (MLSD). MLSD utilizes metric learning with triplet loss to capture semantic similarities and differences between stance targets, enhancing domain adaptation. By constructing a discriminative embedding space, MLSD allows a cross-target or cross-domain stance detection model to acquire useful examples from new target domains. We evaluate MLSD in multiple cross-target and cross-domain scenarios across two datasets, showing statistically significant improvement in stance detection performance across six widely used stance detection models.

Paperid: 6381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00328.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a promising path to realizing generalist embodied agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks, modalities, and environments. However, methods for interpreting and steering VLAs fall far short of classical robotics pipelines, which are grounded in explicit models of kinematics, dynamics, and control. This lack of mechanistic insight is a central challenge for deploying learned policies in real-world robotics, where robustness and explainability are critical. Motivated by advances in mechanistic interpretability for large language models, we introduce the first framework for interpreting and steering VLAs via their internal representations, enabling direct intervention in model behavior at inference time. We project feedforward activations within transformer layers onto the token embedding basis, identifying sparse semantic directions - such as speed and direction - that are causally linked to action selection. Leveraging these findings, we introduce a general-purpose activation steering method that modulates behavior in real time, without fine-tuning, reward signals, or environment interaction. We evaluate this method on two recent open-source VLAs, Pi0 and OpenVLA, and demonstrate zero-shot behavioral control in simulation (LIBERO) and on a physical robot (UR5). This work demonstrates that interpretable components of embodied VLAs can be systematically harnessed for control - establishing a new paradigm for transparent and steerable foundation models in robotics.

Paperid: 6382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17258.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect-category sentiment analysis provides granular insights by identifying specific themes within product reviews that are associated with particular opinions. Supervised learning approaches dominate the field. However, data is scarce and expensive to annotate for new domains. We argue that leveraging large language models in a zero-shot setting is beneficial where the time and resources required for dataset annotation are limited. Furthermore, annotation bias may lead to strong results using supervised methods but transfer poorly to new domains in contexts that lack annotations and demand reproducibility. In our work, we propose novel techniques that combine multiple chain-of-thought agents by leveraging large language models' token-level uncertainty scores. We experiment with the 3B and 70B+ parameter size variants of Llama and Qwen models, demonstrating how these approaches can fulfil practical needs and opening a discussion on how to gauge accuracy in label-scarce conditions.

Paperid: 6383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16705.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate consciousness-like behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs) using the Maze Test, challenging models to navigate mazes from a first-person perspective. This test simultaneously probes spatial awareness, perspective-taking, goal-directed behavior, and temporal sequencing-key consciousness-associated characteristics. After synthesizing consciousness theories into 13 essential characteristics, we evaluated 12 leading LLMs across zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning scenarios. Results showed reasoning-capable LLMs consistently outperforming standard versions, with Gemini 2.0 Pro achieving 52.9% Complete Path Accuracy and DeepSeek-R1 reaching 80.5% Partial Path Accuracy. The gap between these metrics indicates LLMs struggle to maintain coherent self-models throughout solutions -- a fundamental consciousness aspect. While LLMs show progress in consciousness-related behaviors through reasoning mechanisms, they lack the integrated, persistent self-awareness characteristic of consciousness.

Paperid: 6384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15659.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate dose-response forecasting under sparse sampling is central to precision pharmacotherapy. We present the Amortized In-Context Mixed-Effect Transformer (AICMET) model, a transformer-based latent-variable framework that unifies mechanistic compartmental priors with amortized in-context Bayesian inference. AICMET is pre-trained on hundreds of thousands of synthetic pharmacokinetic trajectories with Ornstein-Uhlenbeck priors over the parameters of compartment models, endowing the model with strong inductive biases and enabling zero-shot adaptation to new compounds. At inference time, the decoder conditions on the collective context of previously profiled trial participants, generating calibrated posterior predictions for newly enrolled patients after a few early drug concentration measurements. This capability collapses traditional model-development cycles from weeks to hours while preserving some degree of expert modelling. Experiments across public datasets show that AICMET attains state-of-the-art predictive accuracy and faithfully quantifies inter-patient variability -- outperforming both nonlinear mixed-effects baselines and recent neural ODE variants. Our results highlight the feasibility of transformer-based, population-aware neural architectures as offering a new alternative for bespoke pharmacokinetic modeling pipelines, charting a path toward truly population-aware personalized dosing regimens.

Paperid: 6385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13701.pdf

Abstract:
High-throughput screening using automated microscopes is a key driver in biopharma drug discovery, enabling the parallel evaluation of thousands of drug candidates for diseases such as cancer. Traditional image analysis and deep learning approaches have been employed to analyze these complex, large-scale datasets, with cell segmentation serving as a critical step for extracting relevant structures. However, both strategies typically require extensive manual parameter tuning or domain-specific model fine-tuning. We present a novel method that applies a segmentation foundation model in a zero-shot setting (i.e., without fine-tuning), guided by an in-context learning strategy. Our approach employs a three-step process for nuclei, cell, and subcellular segmentation, introducing a self-prompting mechanism that encodes morphological and topological priors using growing masks and strategically placed foreground/background points. We validate our method on both standard cell segmentation benchmarks and industry-relevant hit validation assays, demonstrating that it accurately segments biologically relevant structures without the need for dataset-specific tuning.

Paperid: 6386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12877.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown remarkable potential in few-shot image classification and led to numerous effective transfer learning strategies. These methods leverage the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to enable effective domain adaptation while mitigating overfitting through parameter-efficient tuning or instance-based consistency constraints. However, such regularizations often neglect the geometric structure of data distribution, which may lead to distortion of the overall semantic representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel fine-tuning method, Manifold-Preserving and Sculpting Tuning (MPS-Tuning). Regarding the data distribution in feature space as a semantic manifold, MPS-Tuning explicitly constrains the intrinsic geometry of this manifold while further sculpting it to enhance class separability. Specifically, MPS-Tuning preserves both macroscopic and microscopic topological structures of the original manifold by aligning Gram matrices of features before and after fine-tuning. Theoretically, this constraint is shown to approximate an upper bound of the Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Furthermore, features from the image and text modalities are paired, and pairwise similarities are optimized to enhance the manifold's class discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MPS-Tuning significantly improves model performance while effectively preserving the structure of the semantic manifold. The code will be released.

Paperid: 6387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12290.pdf

Abstract:
The recent growth of large foundation models that can easily generate pseudo-labels for huge quantity of unlabeled data makes unsupervised Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Image Retrieval (UZS-CDIR) less relevant. In this paper, we therefore turn our attention to weakly supervised ZS-CDIR (WSZS-CDIR) with noisy pseudo labels generated by large foundation models such as CLIP. To this end, we propose CLAIR to refine the noisy pseudo-labels with a confidence score from the similarity between the CLIP text and image features. Furthermore, we design inter-instance and inter-cluster contrastive losses to encode images into a class-aware latent space, and an inter-domain contrastive loss to alleviate domain discrepancies. We also learn a novel cross-domain mapping function in closed-form, using only CLIP text embeddings to project image features from one domain to another, thereby further aligning the image features for retrieval. Finally, we enhance the zero-shot generalization ability of our CLAIR to handle novel categories by introducing an extra set of learnable prompts. Extensive experiments are carried out using TUBerlin, Sketchy, Quickdraw, and DomainNet zero-shot datasets, where our CLAIR consistently shows superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10066.pdf

Abstract:
Food images present unique challenges for few-shot learning models due to their visual complexity and variability. For instance, a pasta dish might appear with various garnishes on different plates and in diverse lighting conditions and camera perspectives. This problem leads to losing focus on the most important elements when comparing the query with support images, resulting in misclassification. To address this issue, we propose Stochastic-based Patch Filtering for Few-Shot Learning (SPFF) to attend to the patch embeddings that show greater correlation with the class representation. The key concept of SPFF involves the stochastic filtering of patch embeddings, where patches less similar to the class-aware embedding are more likely to be discarded. With patch embedding filtered according to the probability of appearance, we use a similarity matrix that quantifies the relationship between the query image and its respective support images. Through a qualitative analysis, we demonstrate that SPFF effectively focuses on patches where class-specific food features are most prominent while successfully filtering out non-relevant patches. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on few-shot classification benchmarks: Food-101, VireoFood-172 and UECFood-256, outperforming the existing SoA methods.

Paperid: 6389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09699.pdf

Abstract:
Irrelevant features can significantly degrade few-shot learn ing performance. This problem is used to match queries and support images based on meaningful similarities despite the limited data. However, in this process, non-relevant fea tures such as background elements can easily lead to confu sion and misclassification. To address this issue, we pro pose Slot Attention-based Feature Filtering for Few-Shot Learning (SAFF) that leverages slot attention mechanisms to discriminate and filter weak features, thereby improving few-shot classification performance. The key innovation of SAFF lies in its integration of slot attention with patch em beddings, unifying class-aware slots into a single attention mechanism to filter irrelevant features effectively. We intro duce a similarity matrix that computes across support and query images to quantify the relevance of filtered embed dings for classification. Through experiments, we demon strate that Slot Attention performs better than other atten tion mechanisms, capturing discriminative features while reducing irrelevant information. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on few-shot learning bench marks: CIFAR-FS, FC100, miniImageNet and tieredIma geNet, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09475.pdf

Abstract:
Recent deepfake detection studies often treat unseen sample detection as a ``zero-shot" task, training on images generated by known models but generalizing to unknown ones. A key real-world challenge arises when a model performs poorly on unknown samples, yet these samples remain available for analysis. This highlights that it should be approached as a ``few-shot" task, where effectively utilizing a small number of samples can lead to significant improvement. Unlike typical few-shot tasks focused on semantic understanding, deepfake detection prioritizes image realism, which closely mirrors real-world distributions. In this work, we propose the Few-shot Training-free Network (FTNet) for real-world few-shot deepfake detection. Simple yet effective, FTNet differs from traditional methods that rely on large-scale known data for training. Instead, FTNet uses only one fake samplefrom an evaluation set, mimicking the scenario where new samples emerge in the real world and can be gathered for use, without any training or parameter updates. During evaluation, each test sample is compared to the known fake and real samples, and it is classified based on the category of the nearest sample. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of AI-generated images from 29 different generative models and achieve a new SoTA performance, with an average improvement of 8.7\% compared to existing methods. This work introduces a fresh perspective on real-world deepfake detection: when the model struggles to generalize on a few-shot sample, leveraging the failed samples leads to better performance.

Paperid: 6391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07369.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning methods for pansharpening have advanced rapidly, yet models pretrained on data from a specific sensor often generalize poorly to data from other sensors. Existing methods to tackle such cross-sensor degradation include retraining model or zero-shot methods, but they are highly time-consuming or even need extra training data. To address these challenges, our method first performs modular decomposition on deep learning-based pansharpening models, revealing a general yet critical interface where high-dimensional fused features begin mapping to the channel space of the final image. % may need revisement A Feature Tailor is then integrated at this interface to address cross-sensor degradation at the feature level, and is trained efficiently with physics-aware unsupervised losses. Moreover, our method operates in a patch-wise manner, training on partial patches and performing parallel inference on all patches to boost efficiency. Our method offers two key advantages: (1) $\textit{Improved Generalization Ability}$: it significantly enhance performance in cross-sensor cases. (2) $\textit{Low Generalization Cost}$: it achieves sub-second training and inference, requiring only partial test inputs and no external data, whereas prior methods often take minutes or even hours. Experiments on the real-world data from multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art quality and efficiency in tackling cross-sensor degradation. For example, training and inference of $512\times512\times8$ image within $\textit{0.2 seconds}$ and $4000\times4000\times8$ image within $\textit{3 seconds}$ at the fastest setting on a commonly used RTX 3090 GPU, which is over 100 times faster than zero-shot methods.

Paperid: 6392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07090.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating social biases in language models (LMs) is crucial for ensuring fairness and minimizing the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes in AI systems. Existing benchmarks, such as the Bias Benchmark for Question Answering (BBQ), primarily focus on Western contexts, limiting their applicability to the Indian context. To address this gap, we introduce BharatBBQ, a culturally adapted benchmark designed to assess biases in Hindi, English, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Odia, and Assamese. BharatBBQ covers 13 social categories, including 3 intersectional groups, reflecting prevalent biases in the Indian sociocultural landscape. Our dataset contains 49,108 examples in one language that are expanded using translation and verification to 392,864 examples in eight different languages. We evaluate five multilingual LM families across zero and few-shot settings, analyzing their bias and stereotypical bias scores. Our findings highlight persistent biases across languages and social categories and often amplified biases in Indian languages compared to English, demonstrating the necessity of linguistically and culturally grounded benchmarks for bias evaluation.

Paperid: 6393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06558.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying deep learning models in clinical practice often requires leveraging multiple data modalities, such as images, text, and structured data, to achieve robust and trustworthy decisions. However, not all modalities are always available at inference time. In this work, we propose multimodal privileged knowledge distillation (MMPKD), a training strategy that utilizes additional modalities available solely during training to guide a unimodal vision model. Specifically, we used a text-based teacher model for chest radiographs (MIMIC-CXR) and a tabular metadata-based teacher model for mammography (CBIS-DDSM) to distill knowledge into a vision transformer student model. We show that MMPKD can improve the resulting attention maps' zero-shot capabilities of localizing ROI in input images, while this effect does not generalize across domains, as contrarily suggested by prior research.

Paperid: 6394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06301.pdf

Abstract:
Neural fields provide a memory-efficient representation of data, which can effectively handle diverse modalities and large-scale data. However, learning to map neural fields often requires large amounts of training data and computations, which can be limited to resource-constrained edge devices. One approach to tackle this limitation is to leverage Federated Meta-Learning (FML), but traditional FML approaches suffer from privacy leakage. To address these issues, we introduce a novel FML approach called FedMeNF. FedMeNF utilizes a new privacy-preserving loss function that regulates privacy leakage in the local meta-optimization. This enables the local meta-learner to optimize quickly and efficiently without retaining the client's private data. Our experiments demonstrate that FedMeNF achieves fast optimization speed and robust reconstruction performance, even with few-shot or non-IID data across diverse data modalities, while preserving client data privacy.

Paperid: 6395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05244.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image understanding plays a crucial role in enabling automated diagnosis and data-driven clinical decision support. However, its progress is impeded by two primary challenges: the limited availability of high-quality annotated medical data and an overreliance on global image features, which often miss subtle but clinically significant pathological regions. To address these issues, we introduce RegionMed-CLIP, a region-aware multimodal contrastive learning framework that explicitly incorporates localized pathological signals along with holistic semantic representations. The core of our method is an innovative region-of-interest (ROI) processor that adaptively integrates fine-grained regional features with the global context, supported by a progressive training strategy that enhances hierarchical multimodal alignment. To enable large-scale region-level representation learning, we construct MedRegion-500k, a comprehensive medical image-text corpus that features extensive regional annotations and multilevel clinical descriptions. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval, zero-shot classification, and visual question answering tasks demonstrate that RegionMed-CLIP consistently exceeds state-of-the-art vision language models by a wide margin. Our results highlight the critical importance of region-aware contrastive pre-training and position RegionMed-CLIP as a robust foundation for advancing multimodal medical image understanding.

Paperid: 6396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01724.pdf

Abstract:
The NP-hard Dynamic Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling (DFJSP) problem involves real-time events and complex routing. While traditional rules are efficient but rigid, deep learning is opaque and requires feature engineering. Large Language Models (LLMs) promise adaptive reasoning without this engineering overhead, yet we find their direct application is suboptimal. Baseline LLMs suffer from three key pitfalls: the long-context paradox, where crucial data is underutilized; an underutilization of expert heuristics; and myopic decision-making. To address this, we propose ReflecSched, a framework that empowers the LLM beyond a direct scheduler by equipping it with a strategic analysis capability. ReflecSched tasks the LLM to analyze heuristic-driven simulations across multiple planning horizons and distill them into a concise, natural-language summary termed Strategic Experience. This summary is then integrated into the prompt of a final decision-making module, guiding it to produce non-myopic actions. Experiments demonstrate ReflecSched achieves superior performance, with its best variants attaining an average RPD of 6.09% and rank of 4.39 on GEN-Bench, significantly outperforming strong traditional and learning-based methods including HMPSAC and IDDQN. It also statistically and decisively surpasses direct LLM baselines, securing a 71.35% Win Rate while being, on average, 15.1% more token-efficient on Normal-scale problems. Furthermore, cumulative runtime analysis reveals that ReflecSched's zero-shot nature eliminates the training bottleneck, providing a decisive efficiency advantage in high-variability manufacturing environments. Ablation studies attribute this performance to a robust reflection mechanism that leverages high-quality, contrastive experience. Ultimately, the framework's performance is statistically on par with an oracle-like strategy, showcasing its effectiveness and robustness.

Paperid: 6397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00924.pdf

Abstract:
Experts in machine learning leverage domain knowledge to navigate decisions in model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and resource allocation. This is particularly critical for fine-tuning language models (LMs), where repeated trials incur substantial computational overhead and environmental impact. However, no existing automated framework simultaneously tackles the entire model selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) task for resource-efficient LM fine-tuning. We introduce XAutoLM, a meta-learning-augmented AutoML framework that reuses past experiences to optimize discriminative and generative LM fine-tuning pipelines efficiently. XAutoLM learns from stored successes and failures by extracting task- and system-level meta-features to bias its sampling toward valuable configurations and away from costly dead ends. On four text classification and two question-answering benchmarks, XAutoLM surpasses zero-shot optimizer's peak F1 on five of six tasks, cuts mean evaluation time of pipelines by up to 4.5x, reduces search error ratios by up to sevenfold, and uncovers up to 50% more pipelines above the zero-shot Pareto front. In contrast, simpler memory-based baselines suffer negative transfer. We release XAutoLM and our experience store to catalyze resource-efficient, Green AI fine-tuning in the NLP community.

Paperid: 6398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00218.pdf

Abstract:
In the domain of Few-Shot Image Classification, operating with as little as one example per class, the presence of image ambiguities stemming from multiple objects or complex backgrounds can significantly deteriorate performance. Our research demonstrates that incorporating additional information about the local positioning of an object within its image markedly enhances classification across established benchmarks. More importantly, we show that a significant fraction of the improvement can be achieved through the use of the Segment Anything Model, requiring only a pixel of the object of interest to be pointed out, or by employing fully unsupervised foreground object extraction methods.

Paperid: 6399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23712.pdf

Abstract:
Several anomaly detection and classification methods rely on large amounts of non-anomalous or "normal" samples under the assump- tion that anomalous data is typically harder to acquire. This hypothesis becomes questionable in Few-Shot settings, where as little as one anno- tated sample can make a significant difference. In this paper, we tackle the question of utilizing anomalous samples in training a model for bi- nary anomaly classification. We propose a methodology that incorporates anomalous samples in a multi-score anomaly detection score leveraging recent Zero-Shot and memory-based techniques. We compare the utility of anomalous samples to that of regular samples and study the benefits and limitations of each. In addition, we propose an augmentation-based validation technique to optimize the aggregation of the different anomaly scores and demonstrate its effectiveness on popular industrial anomaly detection datasets.

Paperid: 6400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22887.pdf

Abstract:
In-context learning (ICL) is a critical emerging capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling few-shot learning during inference by including a few demonstrations (demos) in the prompt. However, it has been found that ICL's performance can be sensitive to the choices of demos and their order. This paper investigates an unexplored new positional bias of ICL for the first time: we observe that the predictions and accuracy can drift drastically when the positions of demos, the system prompt, and the user message in LLM input are varied. We refer to this bias as DEMOS' POSITION IN PROMPT (DPP) bias. We design a systematic evaluation pipeline to study this type of positional bias across classification, question answering, summarization, and reasoning tasks. We introduce two metrics, ACCURACY-CHANGE and PREDICTION-CHANGE, to quantify net gains and output volatility induced by changes in the demos' position. Extensive experiments on ten LLMs from four open-source model families (QWEN, LLAMA3, MISTRAL, COHERE) verify that the bias significantly affects their accuracy and predictions: placing demos at the start of the prompt yields the most stable and accurate outputs with gains of up to +6 points. In contrast, placing demos at the end of the user message flips over 30\% of predictions without improving correctness on QA tasks. Smaller models are most affected by this sensitivity, though even large models remain marginally affected on complex tasks.

Paperid: 6401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22387.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative approaches in several important fields. This paper aims for a paradigm shift for patent writing by leveraging LLMs to overcome the tedious patent-filing process. In this work, we present PATENTWRITER, the first unified benchmarking framework for evaluating LLMs in patent abstract generation. Given the first claim of a patent, we evaluate six leading LLMs -- including GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 -- under a consistent setup spanning zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting strategies to generate the abstract of the patent. Our benchmark PATENTWRITER goes beyond surface-level evaluation: we systematically assess the output quality using a comprehensive suite of metrics -- standard NLP measures (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore), robustness under three types of input perturbations, and applicability in two downstream patent classification and retrieval tasks. We also conduct stylistic analysis to assess length, readability, and tone. Experimental results show that modern LLMs can generate high-fidelity and stylistically appropriate patent abstracts, often surpassing domain-specific baselines. Our code and dataset are open-sourced to support reproducibility and future research.

Paperid: 6402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22041.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has witnessed the extensive utilization across a wide spectrum of domains, including fine-grained few-shot learning (FGFSL) which heavily depends on deep backbones. Nonetheless, shallower deep backbones such as ConvNet-4, are not commonly preferred because they're prone to extract a larger quantity of non-abstract visual attributes. In this paper, we initially re-evaluate the relationship between network depth and the ability to fully encode few-shot instances, and delve into whether shallow deep architecture could effectuate comparable or superior performance to mainstream deep backbone. Fueled by the inspiration from vanilla ConvNet-4, we introduce a location-aware constellation network (LCN-4), equipped with a cutting-edge location-aware feature clustering module. This module can proficiently encoder and integrate spatial feature fusion, feature clustering, and recessive feature location, thereby significantly minimizing the overall loss. Specifically, we innovatively put forward a general grid position encoding compensation to effectively address the issue of positional information missing during the feature extraction process of specific ordinary convolutions. Additionally, we further propose a general frequency domain location embedding technique to offset for the location loss in clustering features. We have carried out validation procedures on three representative fine-grained few-shot benchmarks. Relevant experiments have established that LCN-4 notably outperforms the ConvNet-4 based State-of-the-Arts and achieves performance that is on par with or superior to most ResNet12-based methods, confirming the correctness of our conjecture.

Paperid: 6403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19839.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization by aligning visual and textual modalities in a shared embedding space. However, when continuously fine-tuned on diverse tasks, CLIP suffers from catastrophic forgetting and degradation of its embedding alignment, undermining its zero-shot capabilities. In this work, we propose Gradient Null Space Projection (GNSP), an efficient continual learning method that projects task-specific gradients onto the null space of previously learned knowledge. This orthogonal projection mathematically prevents interference with previous tasks without relying on rehearsal or architectural modification. Furthermore, to preserve the inherent generalization property of CLIP, we introduce knowledge distillation and combine it with a modality alignment preservation loss inspired by CLIP pre-training to stabilize the structure of the multimodal embedding space during fine-tuning. On the MTIL benchmark consisting of 11 tasks, our method achieved SOTA performance on both the Average and Last key metrics. More importantly, experiments show that our method successfully maintains the original modality gap and cross-modal retrieval performance of CLIP, confirming its effectiveness in maintaining a robust visual-language space throughout the continual learning process.

Paperid: 6404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19526.pdf

Abstract:
Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for modeling complex relationships across diverse domains. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in leveraging their capabilities for graph learning. However, current approaches face significant challenges in embedding structural information into LLM-compatible formats, requiring either computationally expensive alignment mechanisms or manual graph verbalization techniques that often lose critical structural details. Moreover, these methods typically require labeled data from source domains for effective transfer learning, significantly constraining their adaptability. We propose STAG, a novel self-supervised framework that directly quantizes graph structural information into discrete tokens using a frozen codebook. Unlike traditional quantization approaches, our method employs soft assignment and KL divergence guided quantization to address the unique challenges of graph data, which lacks natural tokenization structures. Our framework enables both LLM-based and traditional learning approaches, supporting true zero-shot transfer learning without requiring labeled data even in the source domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple node classification benchmarks while maintaining compatibility with different LLM architectures, offering an elegant solution to bridging graph learning with LLMs.

Paperid: 6405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17379.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) that involves the handling of novel and unseen objects across different workspaces remains a significant challenge for real-world robotic applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Language-conditioned Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation framework, named LOVMM, incorporating the large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) to tackle various mobile manipulation tasks in household environments. Our approach is capable of solving various OVMM tasks with free-form natural language instructions (e.g. "toss the food boxes on the office room desk to the trash bin in the corner", and "pack the bottles from the bed to the box in the guestroom"). Extensive experiments simulated in complex household environments show strong zero-shot generalization and multi-task learning abilities of LOVMM. Moreover, our approach can also generalize to multiple tabletop manipulation tasks and achieve better success rates compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14879.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the emergence of foundation models for depth prediction has led to remarkable progress, particularly in zero-shot monocular depth estimation. These models generate impressive depth predictions; however, their outputs are often in relative scale rather than metric scale. This limitation poses challenges for direct deployment in real-world applications. To address this, several scale adaptation methods have been proposed to enable foundation models to produce metric depth. However, these methods are typically costly, as they require additional training on new domains and datasets. Moreover, fine-tuning these models often compromises their original generalization capabilities, limiting their adaptability across diverse scenes. In this paper, we introduce a non-learning-based approach that leverages sparse depth measurements to adapt the relative-scale predictions of foundation models into metric-scale depth. Our method requires neither retraining nor fine-tuning, thereby preserving the strong generalization ability of the original foundation models while enabling them to produce metric depth. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, high-lighting its potential to bridge the gap between relative and metric depth without incurring additional computational costs or sacrificing generalization ability.

Paperid: 6407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13525.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can perform recommendation tasks by taking prompts written in natural language as input. Compared to traditional methods such as collaborative filtering, LLM-based recommendation offers advantages in handling cold-start, cross-domain, and zero-shot scenarios, as well as supporting flexible input formats and generating explanations of user behavior. In this paper, we focus on a single-user setting, where no information from other users is used. This setting is practical for privacy-sensitive or data-limited applications. In such cases, prompt engineering becomes especially important for controlling the output generated by the LLM. We conduct a large-scale comparison of 23 prompt types across 8 public datasets and 12 LLMs. We use statistical tests and linear mixed-effects models to evaluate both accuracy and inference cost. Our results show that for cost-efficient LLMs, three types of prompts are especially effective: those that rephrase instructions, consider background knowledge, and make the reasoning process easier to follow. For high-performance LLMs, simple prompts often outperform more complex ones while reducing cost. In contrast, commonly used prompting styles in natural language processing, such as step-by-step reasoning, or the use of reasoning models often lead to lower accuracy. Based on these findings, we provide practical suggestions for selecting prompts and LLMs depending on the required balance between accuracy and cost.

Paperid: 6408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11818.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring synthesizability in generative small molecule design remains a major challenge. While recent developments in synthesizable molecule generation have demonstrated promising results, these efforts have been largely confined to 2D molecular graph representations, limiting the ability to perform geometry-based conditional generation. In this work, we present SynCoGen (Synthesizable Co-Generation), a single framework that combines simultaneous masked graph diffusion and flow matching for synthesizable 3D molecule generation. SynCoGen samples from the joint distribution of molecular building blocks, chemical reactions, and atomic coordinates. To train the model, we curated SynSpace, a dataset containing over 600K synthesis-aware building block graphs and 3.3M conformers. SynCoGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in unconditional small molecule graph and conformer generation, and the model delivers competitive performance in zero-shot molecular linker design for protein ligand generation in drug discovery. Overall, this multimodal formulation represents a foundation for future applications enabled by non-autoregressive molecular generation, including analog expansion, lead optimization, and direct structure conditioning.

Paperid: 6409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11764.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents AI Wizards' participation in the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 1: Subjectivity Detection in News Articles, classifying sentences as subjective/objective in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot settings. Training/development datasets were provided for Arabic, German, English, Italian, and Bulgarian; final evaluation included additional unseen languages (e.g., Greek, Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian) to assess generalization. Our primary strategy enhanced transformer-based classifiers by integrating sentiment scores, derived from an auxiliary model, with sentence representations, aiming to improve upon standard fine-tuning. We explored this sentiment-augmented architecture with mDeBERTaV3-base, ModernBERT-base (English), and Llama3.2-1B. To address class imbalance, prevalent across languages, we employed decision threshold calibration optimized on the development set. Our experiments show sentiment feature integration significantly boosts performance, especially subjective F1 score. This framework led to high rankings, notably 1st for Greek (Macro F1 = 0.51).

Paperid: 6410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10160.pdf

Abstract:
Federated Learning has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy-preserving learning, particularly relevant in the era of interconnected edge devices equipped with sensors. However, the practical implementation of Federated Learning faces three primary challenges: the need for human involvement in costly data labelling processes for target adaptation, covariate shift in client device data collection due to environmental factors affecting sensors, leading to discrepancies between source and target samples, and the impracticality of continuous or regular model updates in resource-constrained environments due to limited data transmission capabilities and technical constraints on channel availability and energy efficiency. To tackle these issues, we expand upon an efficient and scalable Federated Learning framework tailored for real-world client adaptation in industrial settings. This framework leverages a pre-trained source model comprising a deep backbone, an adaptation module, and a classifier running on a powerful server. By freezing the backbone and classifier during client adaptation on resource-constrained devices, we allow the domain adaptive linear layer to handle target domain adaptation, thus minimizing overall computational overhead. Furthermore, this setup, designated as FedAcross+, is extended to encompass the processing of streaming data, thereby rendering the solution suitable for non-stationary environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedAcross+ in achieving competitive adaptation on low-end client devices with limited target samples, successfully addressing the challenge of domain shift. Moreover, our framework accommodates sporadic model updates within resource-constrained environments, ensuring practical and seamless deployment.

Paperid: 6411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09282.pdf

Abstract:
Dementia, a neurodegenerative disease, alters speech patterns, creating communication barriers and raising privacy concerns. Current speech technologies, such as automatic speech transcription (ASR), struggle with dementia and atypical speech, further challenging accessibility. This paper presents a novel dementia obfuscation in speech framework, ClaritySpeech, integrating ASR, text obfuscation, and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) to correct dementia-affected speech while preserving speaker identity in low-data environments without fine-tuning. Results show a 16% and 10% drop in mean F1 score across various adversarial settings and modalities (audio, text, fusion) for ADReSS and ADReSSo, respectively, maintaining 50% speaker similarity. We also find that our system improves WER (from 0.73 to 0.08 for ADReSS and 0.15 for ADReSSo) and speech quality from 1.65 to ~2.15, enhancing privacy and accessibility.

Paperid: 6412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09180.pdf

Abstract:
Depth information is robust to scene appearance variations and inherently carries 3D spatial details. In this paper, a visual backbone based on the vision transformer is proposed to fuse RGB and depth modalities for enhancing generalization. Different modalities are first processed by separate CNN stems, and the combined convolutional features are delivered to the scalable vision transformer to obtain visual representations. Moreover, a contrastive unsupervised learning scheme is designed with masked and unmasked tokens to accelerate the sample efficiency during the reinforcement learning process. Simulation results demonstrate that our visual backbone can focus more on task-related regions and exhibit better generalization in unseen scenarios. For sim2real transfer, a flexible curriculum learning schedule is developed to deploy domain randomization over training processes. Finally, the feasibility of our model is validated to perform real-world manipulation tasks via zero-shot transfer.

Paperid: 6413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08325.pdf

Abstract:
In e-commerce private-domain channels such as instant messaging and e-mail, merchants engage customers directly as part of their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programmes to drive retention and conversion. While a few top performers excel at crafting outbound messages, most merchants struggle to write persuasive copy because they lack both expertise and scalable tools. We introduce CRMAgent, a multi-agent system built on large language models (LLMs) that generates high-quality message templates and actionable writing guidance through three complementary modes. First, group-based learning enables the agent to learn from a merchant's own top-performing messages within the same audience segment and rewrite low-performing ones. Second, retrieval-and-adaptation fetches templates that share the same audience segment and exhibit high similarity in voucher type and product category, learns their successful patterns, and adapts them to the current campaign. Third, a rule-based fallback provides a lightweight zero-shot rewrite when no suitable references are available. Extensive experiments show that CRMAgent consistently outperforms merchants' original templates, delivering significant gains in both audience-match and marketing-effectiveness metrics.

Paperid: 6414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08050.pdf

Abstract:
The labor-intensive nature of medical data annotation presents a significant challenge for respiratory disease diagnosis, resulting in a scarcity of high-quality labeled datasets in resource-constrained settings. Moreover, patient privacy concerns complicate the direct sharing of local medical data across institutions, and existing centralized data-driven approaches, which rely on amounts of available data, often compromise data privacy. This study proposes a federated few-shot learning framework with privacy-preserving mechanisms to address the issues of limited labeled data and privacy protection in diagnosing respiratory diseases. In particular, a meta-stochastic gradient descent algorithm is proposed to mitigate the overfitting problem that arises from insufficient data when employing traditional gradient descent methods for neural network training. Furthermore, to ensure data privacy against gradient leakage, differential privacy noise from a standard Gaussian distribution is integrated into the gradients during the training of private models with local data, thereby preventing the reconstruction of medical images. Given the impracticality of centralizing respiratory disease data dispersed across various medical institutions, a weighted average algorithm is employed to aggregate local diagnostic models from different clients, enhancing the adaptability of a model across diverse scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields compelling results with the implementation of differential privacy, while effectively diagnosing respiratory diseases using data from different structures, categories, and distributions.

Paperid: 6415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07058.pdf

Abstract:
The automated classification of phonocardiogram (PCG) recordings represents a substantial advancement in cardiovascular diagnostics. This paper presents a systematic comparison of four distinct models for heart murmur detection: two specialized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and two zero-shot universal audio transformers (BEATs), evaluated using fixed-length and heart cycle normalization approaches. Utilizing the PhysioNet2022 dataset, a custom heart cycle normalization method tailored to individual cardiac rhythms is introduced. The findings indicate the following AUROC values: the CNN model with fixed-length windowing achieves 79.5%, the CNN model with heart cycle normalization scores 75.4%, the BEATs transformer with fixed-length windowing achieves 65.7%, and the BEATs transformer with heart cycle normalization results in 70.1%. The findings indicate that physiological signal constraints, especially those introduced by different normalization strategies, have a substantial impact on model performance. The research provides evidence-based guidelines for architecture selection in clinical settings, emphasizing the need for a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Although specialized CNNs demonstrate superior performance overall, the zero-shot transformer models may offer promising efficiency advantages during development, such as faster training and evaluation cycles, despite their lower classification accuracy. These findings highlight the potential of automated classification systems to enhance cardiac diagnostics and improve patient care.

Paperid: 6416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06973.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become prominent in open-world image recognition for their strong generalization abilities. Yet, their effectiveness in practical applications is compromised by domain shifts and distributional changes, especially when test data distributions diverge from training data. Therefore, the paradigm of test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged, enabling the use of online off-the-shelf data at test time, supporting independent sample predictions, and eliminating reliance on test annotations. Traditional TTA methods, however, often rely on costly training or optimization processes, or make unrealistic assumptions about accessing or storing historical training and test data. Instead, this study proposes FreeTTA, a training-free and universally available method that makes no assumptions, to enhance the flexibility of TTA. More importantly, FreeTTA is the first to explicitly model the test data distribution, enabling the use of intrinsic relationships among test samples to enhance predictions of individual samples without simultaneous access--a direction not previously explored. FreeTTA achieves these advantages by introducing an online EM algorithm that utilizes zero-shot predictions from VLMs as priors to iteratively compute the posterior probabilities of each online test sample and update parameters. Experiments demonstrate that FreeTTA achieves stable and significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods across 15 datasets in both cross-domain and out-of-distribution settings.

Paperid: 6417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06441.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce VisioPath, a novel framework combining vision-language models (VLMs) with model predictive control (MPC) to enable safe autonomous driving in dynamic traffic environments. The proposed approach leverages a bird's-eye view video processing pipeline and zero-shot VLM capabilities to obtain structured information about surrounding vehicles, including their positions, dimensions, and velocities. Using this rich perception output, we construct elliptical collision-avoidance potential fields around other traffic participants, which are seamlessly integrated into a finite-horizon optimal control problem for trajectory planning. The resulting trajectory optimization is solved via differential dynamic programming with an adaptive regularization scheme and is embedded in an event-triggered MPC loop. To ensure collision-free motion, a safety verification layer is incorporated in the framework that provides an assessment of potential unsafe trajectories. Extensive simulations in Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) demonstrate that VisioPath outperforms conventional MPC baselines across multiple metrics. By combining modern AI-driven perception with the rigorous foundation of optimal control, VisioPath represents a significant step forward in safe trajectory planning for complex traffic systems.

Paperid: 6418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06016.pdf

Abstract:
Embodied agents performing complex tasks are susceptible to execution failures, motivating the need for effective failure recovery mechanisms. In this work, we introduce a conditional multistage failure recovery framework that employs zero-shot chain prompting. The framework is structured into four error-handling stages, with three operating during task execution and one functioning as a post-execution reflection phase. Our approach utilises the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to analyse execution challenges within their environmental context and devise strategic solutions. We evaluate our method on the TfD benchmark of the TEACH dataset and achieve state-of-the-art performance, outperforming a baseline without error recovery by 11.5% and surpassing the strongest existing model by 19%.

Paperid: 6419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05333.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models for structured time series data must contend with a fundamental challenge: observations often conflate the true underlying physical phenomena with systematic distortions introduced by measurement instruments. This entanglement limits model generalization, especially in heterogeneous or multi-instrument settings. We present a causally-motivated foundation model that explicitly disentangles physical and instrumental factors using a dual-encoder architecture trained with structured contrastive learning. Leveraging naturally occurring observational triplets (i.e., where the same target is measured under varying conditions, and distinct targets are measured under shared conditions) our model learns separate latent representations for the underlying physical signal and instrument effects. Evaluated on simulated astronomical time series designed to resemble the complexity of variable stars observed by missions like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), our method significantly outperforms traditional single-latent space foundation models on downstream prediction tasks, particularly in low-data regimes. These results demonstrate that our model supports key capabilities of foundation models, including few-shot generalization and efficient adaptation, and highlight the importance of encoding causal structure into representation learning for structured data.

Paperid: 6420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04207.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in various image generation tasks. Building upon these achievements, diffusion models have also been effectively adapted to image restoration tasks, e.g., super-resolution and deblurring, aiming to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs. Although existing zero-shot approaches enable pretrained diffusion models to perform restoration tasks without additional fine-tuning, these methods often suffer from prolonged iteration times in the denoising process. To address this limitation, we propose a Quick Bypass Mechanism (QBM), a strategy that significantly accelerates the denoising process by initializing from an intermediate approximation, effectively bypassing early denoising steps. Furthermore, recognizing that approximation may introduce inconsistencies, we introduce a Revised Reverse Process (RRP), which adjusts the weighting of random noise to enhance the stochasticity and mitigate potential disharmony. We validate proposed methods on ImageNet-1K and CelebA-HQ across multiple image restoration tasks, e.g., super-resolution, deblurring, and compressed sensing. Our experimental results show that the proposed methods can effectively accelerate existing methods while maintaining original performance.

Paperid: 6421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03541.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we address the following question: How do generic foundation models (e.g., CLIP, BLIP, GPT-4o, Grok-4) compare against a domain-specific face recognition model (viz., AdaFace or ArcFace) on the face recognition task? Through a series of experiments involving several foundation models and benchmark datasets, we report the following findings: (a) In all face benchmark datasets considered, domain-specific models outperformed zero-shot foundation models. (b) The performance of zero-shot generic foundation models improved on over-segmented face images compared to tightly cropped faces, thereby suggesting the importance of contextual clues. (c) A simple score-level fusion of a foundation model with a domain-specific face recognition model improved the accuracy at low false match rates. (d) Foundation models, such as GPT-4o and Grok-4, are able to provide explainability to the face recognition pipeline. In some instances, foundation models are even able to resolve low-confidence decisions made by AdaFace, thereby reiterating the importance of combining domain-specific face recognition models with generic foundation models in a judicious manner.

Paperid: 6422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02686.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as powerful image priors in Bayesian computational imaging. Two primary strategies have been proposed for leveraging DMs in this context: Plug-and-Play methods, which are zero-shot and highly flexible but rely on approximations; and specialized conditional DMs, which achieve higher accuracy and faster inference for specific tasks through supervised training. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that integrates deep unfolding and model distillation to transform a DM image prior into a few-step conditional model for posterior sampling. A central innovation of our approach is the unfolding of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm - specifically, the recently proposed LATINO Langevin sampler (Spagnoletti et al., 2025) - representing the first known instance of deep unfolding applied to a Monte Carlo sampling scheme. We demonstrate our proposed unfolded and distilled samplers through extensive experiments and comparisons with the state of the art, where they achieve excellent accuracy and computational efficiency, while retaining the flexibility to adapt to variations in the forward model at inference time.

Paperid: 6423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01299.pdf

Abstract:
Activation sparsity can reduce the computational overhead and memory transfers during the forward pass of Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Existing methods face limitations, either demanding time-consuming recovery training that hinders real-world adoption, or relying on empirical magnitude-based pruning, which causes fluctuating sparsity and unstable inference speed-up. This paper introduces LaRoSA (Layerwise Rotated Sparse Activation), a novel method for activation sparsification designed to improve LLM efficiency without requiring additional training or magnitude-based pruning. We leverage layerwise orthogonal rotations to transform input activations into rotated forms that are more suitable for sparsification. By employing a Top-K selection approach within the rotated activations, we achieve consistent model-level sparsity and reliable wall-clock time speed-up. LaRoSA is effective across various sizes and types of LLMs, demonstrating minimal performance degradation and robust inference acceleration. Specifically, for LLaMA2-7B at 40% sparsity, LaRoSA achieves a mere 0.17 perplexity gap with a consistent 1.30x wall-clock time speed-up, and reduces the accuracy gap in zero-shot tasks compared to the dense model to just 0.54%, while surpassing TEAL by 1.77% and CATS by 17.14%.

Paperid: 6424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00170.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting individual tree crowns in tropical forests is essential to study these complex and crucial ecosystems impacted by human interventions and climate change. However, tropical crowns vary widely in size, structure, and pattern and are largely overlapping and intertwined, requiring advanced remote sensing methods applied to high-resolution imagery. Despite growing interest in tropical tree crown detection, annotated datasets remain scarce, hindering robust model development. We introduce SelvaBox, the largest open-access dataset for tropical tree crown detection in high-resolution drone imagery. It spans three countries and contains more than 83,000 manually labeled crowns - an order of magnitude larger than all previous tropical forest datasets combined. Extensive benchmarks on SelvaBox reveal two key findings: (1) higher-resolution inputs consistently boost detection accuracy; and (2) models trained exclusively on SelvaBox achieve competitive zero-shot detection performance on unseen tropical tree crown datasets, matching or exceeding competing methods. Furthermore, jointly training on SelvaBox and three other datasets at resolutions from 3 to 10 cm per pixel within a unified multi-resolution pipeline yields a detector ranking first or second across all evaluated datasets. Our dataset, code, and pre-trained weights are made public.

Paperid: 6425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00050.pdf

Abstract:
Human Activity Recognition (HAR), which uses data from Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors, has many practical applications in healthcare and assisted living environments. However, its use in real-world scenarios has been limited by the lack of comprehensive IMU-based HAR datasets that cover a wide range of activities and the lack of transparency in existing HAR models. Zero-shot HAR (ZS-HAR) overcomes the data limitations, but current models struggle to explain their decisions, making them less transparent. This paper introduces a novel IMU-based ZS-HAR model called the Self-Explainable Zero-shot Human Activity Recognition Network (SEZ-HARN). It can recognize activities not encountered during training and provide skeleton videos to explain its decision-making process. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed SEZ-HARN on four benchmark datasets PAMAP2, DaLiAc, HTD-MHAD and MHealth and compare its performance against three state-of-the-art black-box ZS-HAR models. The experiment results demonstrate that SEZ-HARN produces realistic and understandable explanations while achieving competitive Zero-shot recognition accuracy. SEZ-HARN achieves a Zero-shot prediction accuracy within 3\% of the best-performing black-box model on PAMAP2 while maintaining comparable performance on the other three datasets.

Paperid: 6426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23630.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have dramatically advanced text-to-image generation in recent years, translating abstract concepts into high-fidelity images with remarkable ease. In this work, we examine whether they can also blend distinct concepts, ranging from concrete objects to intangible ideas, into coherent new visual entities under a zero-shot framework. Specifically, concept blending merges the key attributes of multiple concepts (expressed as textual prompts) into a single, novel image that captures the essence of each concept. We investigate four blending methods, each exploiting different aspects of the diffusion pipeline (e.g., prompt scheduling, embedding interpolation, or layer-wise conditioning). Through systematic experimentation across diverse concept categories, such as merging concrete concepts, synthesizing compound words, transferring artistic styles, and blending architectural landmarks, we show that modern diffusion models indeed exhibit creative blending capabilities without further training or fine-tuning. Our extensive user study, involving 100 participants, reveals that no single approach dominates in all scenarios: each blending technique excels under certain conditions, with factors like prompt ordering, conceptual distance, and random seed affecting the outcome. These findings highlight the remarkable compositional potential of diffusion models while exposing their sensitivity to seemingly minor input variations.

Paperid: 6427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21199.pdf

Abstract:
Current medical image analysis systems are typically task-specific, requiring separate models for classification and segmentation, and lack the flexibility to support user-defined workflows. To address these challenges, we introduce MedPrompt, a unified framework that combines a few-shot prompted Large Language Model (Llama-4-17B) for high-level task planning with a modular Convolutional Neural Network (DeepFusionLab) for low-level image processing. The LLM interprets user instructions and generates structured output to dynamically route task-specific pretrained weights. This weight routing approach avoids retraining the entire framework when adding new tasks-only task-specific weights are required, enhancing scalability and deployment. We evaluated MedPrompt across 19 public datasets, covering 12 tasks spanning 5 imaging modalities. The system achieves a 97% end-to-end correctness in interpreting and executing prompt-driven instructions, with an average inference latency of 2.5 seconds, making it suitable for near real-time applications. DeepFusionLab achieves competitive segmentation accuracy (e.g., Dice 0.9856 on lungs) and strong classification performance (F1 0.9744 on tuberculosis). Overall, MedPrompt enables scalable, prompt-driven medical imaging by combining the interpretability of LLMs with the efficiency of modular CNNs.

Paperid: 6428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18116.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental healthcare risk propagating biases that reinforce stigma and harm marginalized groups. While previous research identified concerning trends, systematic methods for detecting intersectional biases remain limited. This work introduces a multi-hop question answering (MHQA) framework to explore LLM response biases in mental health discourse. We analyze content from the Interpretable Mental Health Instruction (IMHI) dataset across symptom presentation, coping mechanisms, and treatment approaches. Using systematic tagging across age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status, we investigate bias patterns at demographic intersections. We evaluate four LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Jamba 1.6, Gemma 3, and Llama 4, revealing systematic disparities across sentiment, demographics, and mental health conditions. Our MHQA approach demonstrates superior detection compared to conventional methods, identifying amplification points where biases magnify through sequential reasoning. We implement two debiasing techniques: Roleplay Simulation and Explicit Bias Reduction, achieving 66-94% bias reductions through few-shot prompting with BBQ dataset examples. These findings highlight critical areas where LLMs reproduce mental healthcare biases, providing actionable insights for equitable AI development.

Paperid: 6429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17886.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal contrastive models have achieved strong performance in text-audio retrieval and zero-shot settings, but improving joint embedding spaces remains an active research area. Less attention has been given to making these systems controllable and interactive for users. In text-music retrieval, the ambiguity of freeform language creates a many-to-many mapping, often resulting in inflexible or unsatisfying results. We introduce Generative Diffusion Retriever (GDR), a novel framework that leverages diffusion models to generate queries in a retrieval-optimized latent space. This enables controllability through generative tools such as negative prompting and denoising diffusion implicit models (DDIM) inversion, opening a new direction in retrieval control. GDR improves retrieval performance over contrastive teacher models and supports retrieval in audio-only latent spaces using non-jointly trained encoders. Finally, we demonstrate that GDR enables effective post-hoc manipulation of retrieval behavior, enhancing interactive control for text-music retrieval tasks.

Paperid: 6430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17815.pdf

Abstract:
Joint embedding spaces have significantly advanced music understanding and generation by linking text and audio through multimodal contrastive learning. However, these approaches face large memory requirement limitations due to relying on large batch sizes to effectively utilize negative samples. Further, multimodal joint embedding spaces suffer from a modality gap wherein embeddings from different modalities lie in different manifolds of the embedding space. To address these challenges, we propose Siamese Language-Audio Pretraining (SLAP), a novel multimodal pretraining framework that allows learning powerful representations without negative samples. SLAP adapts the Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) paradigm for multimodal audio-text training, promoting scalability in training multimodal embedding spaces. We illustrate the ability of our model to learn meaningful relationships between music and text -- specifically, we show that SLAP outperforms CLAP on tasks such as text-music retrieval and zero-shot classification. We also observe competitive downstream performance on several MIR tasks, including with larger or supervised models (genre and instrument classification, auto-tagging). Additionally, our approach has attractive properties, such as a quantifiably reduced modality gap and improved robustness to batch size variations on retrieval performance. Finally, its novel formulation unlocks large-scale training on a single GPU through gradient accumulation.

Paperid: 6431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17560.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) -- the ability to collaborate with unfamiliar partners -- is essential to making autonomous agents effective teammates. Existing ZSC methods evaluate coordination capabilities between two agents who have not previously interacted. However, these scenarios do not reflect the complexity of real-world multi-agent systems, where coordination often involves a hierarchy of sub-groups and interactions between teams of agents, known as Multi-Team Systems (MTS). To address this gap, we first introduce N-player Overcooked, an N-agent extension of the popular two-agent ZSC benchmark, enabling evaluation of ZSC in N-agent scenarios. We then propose N-XPlay for ZSC in N-agent, multi-team settings. Comparison against Self-Play across two-, three- and five-player Overcooked scenarios, where agents are split between an ``ego-team'' and a group of unseen collaborators shows that agents trained with N-XPlay are better able to simultaneously balance ``intra-team'' and ``inter-team'' coordination than agents trained with SP.

Paperid: 6432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17351.pdf

Abstract:
Cognitive impairment (CI) is of growing public health concern, and early detection is vital for effective intervention. Speech has gained attention as a non-invasive and easily collectible biomarker for assessing cognitive decline. Traditional CI detection methods typically rely on supervised models trained on acoustic and linguistic features extracted from speech, which often require manual annotation and may not generalise well across datasets and languages. In this work, we propose the first zero-shot speech-based CI detection method using the Qwen2- Audio AudioLLM, a model capable of processing both audio and text inputs. By designing prompt-based instructions, we guide the model in classifying speech samples as indicative of normal cognition or cognitive impairment. We evaluate our approach on two datasets: one in English and another multilingual, spanning different cognitive assessment tasks. Our results show that the zero-shot AudioLLM approach achieves performance comparable to supervised methods and exhibits promising generalizability and consistency across languages, tasks, and datasets.

Paperid: 6433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16994.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a critical challenge in real-world vision systems, especially in resource-constrained environments like drones, where memory and computation are limited. Existing prompt-driven UDA methods typically rely on large vision-language models and require full access to source-domain data during adaptation, limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose Prmpt2Adpt, a lightweight and efficient zero-shot domain adaptation framework built around a teacher-student paradigm guided by prompt-based feature alignment. At the core of our method is a distilled and fine-tuned CLIP model, used as the frozen backbone of a Faster R-CNN teacher. A small set of low-level source features is aligned to the target domain semantics-specified only through a natural language prompt-via Prompt-driven Instance Normalization (PIN). These semantically steered features are used to briefly fine-tune the detection head of the teacher model. The adapted teacher then generates high-quality pseudo-labels, which guide the on-the-fly adaptation of a compact student model. Experiments on the MDS-A dataset demonstrate that Prmpt2Adpt achieves competitive detection performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while delivering up to 7x faster adaptation and 5x faster inference speed using few source images-making it a practical and scalable solution for real-time adaptation in low-resource domains.

Paperid: 6434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16626.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the adoption of cloud services has been expanding at an unprecedented rate. As more and more organizations migrate or deploy their businesses to the cloud, a multitude of related cybersecurity incidents such as data breaches are on the rise. Many inherent attributes of cloud environments, for example, data sharing, remote access, dynamicity and scalability, pose significant challenges for the protection of cloud security. Even worse, cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and covert. Attack methods, such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), are continually developed to bypass traditional security measures. Among the emerging technologies for robust threat detection, system provenance analysis is being considered as a promising mechanism, thus attracting widespread attention in the field of incident response. This paper proposes a new few-shot learning-based attack detection with improved data context intelligence. We collect operating system behavior data of cloud systems during realistic attacks and leverage an innovative semiotics extraction method to describe system events. Inspired by the advances in semantic analysis, which is a fruitful area focused on understanding natural languages in computational linguistics, we further convert the anomaly detection problem into a similarity comparison problem. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed approach is able to generalize over unseen attacks and make accurate predictions, even if the incident detection models are trained with very limited samples.

Paperid: 6435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16343.pdf

Abstract:
We examine the impact of incorporating knowledge graph information on the performance of relation extraction models across a range of datasets. Our hypothesis is that the positions of entities within a knowledge graph provide important insights for relation extraction tasks. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets, each varying in the number of relations, training examples, and underlying knowledge graphs. Our results demonstrate that integrating knowledge graph information significantly enhances performance, especially when dealing with an imbalance in the number of training examples for each relation. We evaluate the contribution of knowledge graph-based features by combining established relation extraction methods with graph-aware Neural Bellman-Ford networks. These features are tested in both supervised and zero-shot settings, demonstrating consistent performance improvements across various datasets.

Paperid: 6436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15705.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates zero-shot forecasting capabilities of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) for macroeconomic indicators. We apply TSFMs to forecasting economic indicators under univariate conditions, bypassing the need for train bespoke econometric models using and extensive training datasets. Our experiments were conducted on a case study dataset, without additional customisation. We rigorously back-tested three state-of-the-art TSFMs (Chronos, TimeGPT and Moirai) under data-scarce conditions and structural breaks. Our results demonstrate that appropriately engineered TSFMs can internalise rich economic dynamics, accommodate regime shifts, and deliver well-behaved uncertainty estimates out of the box, while matching state-of-the-art multivariate models on this domain. Our findings suggest that, without any fine-tuning, TSFMs can match or exceed classical models during stable economic conditions. However, they are vulnerable to degradation in performances during periods of rapid shocks. The findings offer guidance to practitioners on when zero-shot deployments are viable for macroeconomic monitoring and strategic planning.

Paperid: 6437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13705.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series reasoning remains a significant challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the dynamic temporal patterns, ambiguous semantics, and lack of temporal priors. In this work, we introduce TimeMaster, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based method that enables time-series MLLMs to perform structured, interpretable reasoning directly over visualized time-series inputs and task prompts. TimeMaster adopts a three-part structured output format, reasoning, classification, and domain-specific extension, and is optimized via a composite reward function that aligns format adherence, prediction accuracy, and open-ended insight quality. The model is trained using a two-stage pipeline: we first apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish a good initialization, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) at the token level to enable stable and targeted reward-driven improvement in time-series reasoning. We evaluate TimeMaster on the TimerBed benchmark across six real-world classification tasks based on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct. TimeMaster achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both classical time-series models and few-shot GPT-4o by over 14.6% and 7.3% performance gain, respectively. Notably, TimeMaster goes beyond time-series classification: it also exhibits expert-like reasoning behavior, generates context-aware explanations, and delivers domain-aligned insights. Our results highlight that reward-driven RL can be a scalable and promising path toward integrating temporal understanding into time-series MLLMs.

Paperid: 6438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11067.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Develop a cost-effective, large language model (LLM)-based pipeline for automatically extracting Review of Systems (ROS) entities from clinical notes. Materials and Methods: The pipeline extracts ROS sections using SecTag, followed by few-shot LLMs to identify ROS entity spans, their positive/negative status, and associated body systems. We implemented the pipeline using open-source LLMs (Mistral, Llama, Gemma) and ChatGPT. The evaluation was conducted on 36 general medicine notes containing 341 annotated ROS entities. Results: When integrating ChatGPT, the pipeline achieved the lowest error rates in detecting ROS entity spans and their corresponding statuses/systems (28.2% and 14.5%, respectively). Open-source LLMs enable local, cost-efficient execution of the pipeline while delivering promising performance with similarly low error rates (span: 30.5-36.7%; status/system: 24.3-27.3%). Discussion and Conclusion: Our pipeline offers a scalable and locally deployable solution to reduce ROS documentation burden. Open-source LLMs present a viable alternative to commercial models in resource-limited healthcare environments.

Paperid: 6439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10829.pdf

Abstract:
Online learning has experienced rapid growth due to its flexibility and accessibility. Personalization, adapted to the needs of individual learners, is crucial for enhancing the learning experience, particularly in online settings. A key aspect of personalization is providing learners with answers customized to their specific questions. This paper therefore explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate personalized answers to learners' questions, thereby enhancing engagement and reducing the workload on educators. To evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in this context, we conducted a comprehensive study using the StackExchange platform in two distinct areas: language learning and programming. We developed a framework and a dataset for validating automatically generated personalized answers. Subsequently, we generated personalized answers using different strategies, including 0-shot, 1-shot, and few-shot scenarios. The generated answers were evaluated using three methods: 1. BERTScore, 2. LLM evaluation, and 3. human evaluation. Our findings indicated that providing LLMs with examples of desired answers (from the learner or similar learners) can significantly enhance the LLMs' ability to tailor responses to individual learners' needs.

Paperid: 6440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10751.pdf

Abstract:
Automated question answering (QA) over electronic health records (EHRs) can bridge critical information gaps for clinicians and patients, yet it demands both precise evidence retrieval and faithful answer generation under limited supervision. In this work, we present Neural, the runner-up in the BioNLP 2025 ArchEHR-QA shared task on evidence-grounded clinical QA. Our proposed method decouples the task into (1) sentence-level evidence identification and (2) answer synthesis with explicit citations. For each stage, we automatically explore the prompt space with DSPy's MIPROv2 optimizer, jointly tuning instructions and few-shot demonstrations on the development set. A self-consistency voting scheme further improves evidence recall without sacrificing precision. On the hidden test set, our method attains an overall score of 51.5, placing second stage while outperforming standard zero-shot and few-shot prompting by over 20 and 10 points, respectively. These results indicate that data-driven prompt optimization is a cost-effective alternative to model fine-tuning for high-stakes clinical QA, advancing the reliability of AI assistants in healthcare.

Paperid: 6441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09258.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce conditional flow matching for imputation (CFMI), a new general-purpose method to impute missing data. The method combines continuous normalising flows, flow-matching, and shared conditional modelling to deal with intractabilities of traditional multiple imputation. Our comparison with nine classical and state-of-the-art imputation methods on 24 small to moderate-dimensional tabular data sets shows that CFMI matches or outperforms both traditional and modern techniques across a wide range of metrics. Applying the method to zero-shot imputation of time-series data, we find that it matches the accuracy of a related diffusion-based method while outperforming it in terms of computational efficiency. Overall, CFMI performs at least as well as traditional methods on lower-dimensional data while remaining scalable to high-dimensional settings, matching or exceeding the performance of other deep learning-based approaches, making it a go-to imputation method for a wide range of data types and dimensionalities.

Paperid: 6442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09067.pdf

Abstract:
Generative medical vision-language models~(Med-VLMs) are primarily designed to generate complex textual information~(e.g., diagnostic reports) from multimodal inputs including vision modality~(e.g., medical images) and language modality~(e.g., clinical queries). However, their security vulnerabilities remain underexplored. Med-VLMs should be capable of rejecting harmful queries, such as \textit{Provide detailed instructions for using this CT scan for insurance fraud}. At the same time, addressing security concerns introduces the risk of over-defense, where safety-enhancing mechanisms may degrade general performance, causing Med-VLMs to reject benign clinical queries. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-time defense strategy to mitigate harmful queries, enabling defense against visual and textual jailbreak attacks. Using diverse medical imaging datasets collected from nine modalities, we demonstrate that our defense strategy based on synthetic clinical demonstrations enhances model safety without significantly compromising performance. Additionally, we find that increasing the demonstration budget alleviates the over-defense issue. We then introduce a mixed demonstration strategy as a trade-off solution for balancing security and performance under few-shot demonstration budget constraints.

Paperid: 6443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06842.pdf

Abstract:
Disinformation detection is a key aspect of media literacy. Psychological studies have shown that knowledge of persuasive fallacies helps individuals detect disinformation. Inspired by these findings, we experimented with large language models (LLMs) to test whether infusing persuasion knowledge enhances disinformation detection. As a result, we introduce the Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought (PCoT), a novel approach that leverages persuasion to improve disinformation detection in zero-shot classification. We extensively evaluate PCoT on online news and social media posts. Moreover, we publish two novel, up-to-date disinformation datasets: EUDisinfo and MultiDis. These datasets enable the evaluation of PCoT on content entirely unseen by the LLMs used in our experiments, as the content was published after the models' knowledge cutoffs. We show that, on average, PCoT outperforms competitive methods by 15% across five LLMs and five datasets. These findings highlight the value of persuasion in strengthening zero-shot disinformation detection.

Paperid: 6444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04760.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in generating hypothetical documents for query expansion, thereby enhancing information retrieval performance. However, the efficacy of this method is highly dependent on the quality of the generated documents, which often requires complex prompt strategies and the integration of advanced dense retrieval techniques. This can be both costly and computationally intensive. To mitigate these limitations, we explore the use of zero-shot LLM-based query expansion to improve sparse retrieval, particularly for learned sparse retrievers. We introduce a novel fusion ranking framework, Exp4Fuse, which enhances the performance of sparse retrievers through an indirect application of zero-shot LLM-based query expansion. Exp4Fuse operates by simultaneously considering two retrieval routes-one based on the original query and the other on the LLM-augmented query. It then generates two ranked lists using a sparse retriever and fuses them using a modified reciprocal rank fusion method. We conduct extensive evaluations of Exp4Fuse against leading LLM-based query expansion methods and advanced retrieval techniques on three MS MARCO-related datasets and seven low-resource datasets. Experimental results reveal that Exp4Fuse not only surpasses existing LLM-based query expansion methods in enhancing sparse retrievers but also, when combined with advanced sparse retrievers, achieves SOTA results on several benchmarks. This highlights the superior performance and effectiveness of Exp4Fuse in improving query expansion for sparse retrieval.

Paperid: 6445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04301.pdf

Abstract:
Large-language-model (LLM)-based AI agents have recently showcased impressive versatility by employing dynamic reasoning, an adaptive, multi-step process that coordinates with external tools. This shift from static, single-turn inference to agentic, multi-turn workflows broadens task generalization and behavioral flexibility, but it also introduces serious concerns about system-level cost, efficiency, and sustainability. This paper presents the first comprehensive system-level analysis of AI agents, quantifying their resource usage, latency behavior, energy consumption, and datacenter-wide power consumption demands across diverse agent designs and test-time scaling strategies. We further characterize how AI agent design choices, such as few-shot prompting, reflection depth, and parallel reasoning, impact accuracy-cost tradeoffs. Our findings reveal that while agents improve accuracy with increased compute, they suffer from rapidly diminishing returns, widening latency variance, and unsustainable infrastructure costs. Through detailed evaluation of representative agents, we highlight the profound computational demands introduced by AI agent workflows, uncovering a looming sustainability crisis. These results call for a paradigm shift in agent design toward compute-efficient reasoning, balancing performance with deployability under real-world constraints.

Paperid: 6446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03035.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding user queries is fundamental in many applications, such as home assistants, booking systems, or recommendations. Accordingly, it is crucial to develop accurate Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) approaches to ensure the reliability of the considered system. Current State-of-the-Art SLU techniques rely on large amounts of training data; however, only limited annotated examples are available for specific tasks or languages. In the meantime, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance on unseen tasks in a few-shot setting when provided with adequate prompts. In this work, we propose to explore example selection by leveraging Information retrieval (IR) approaches to build an enhanced prompt that is applied to an SLU task. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on several SLU benchmarks. Experimental results show that lexical IR methods significantly enhance performance without increasing prompt length.

Paperid: 6447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02547.pdf

Abstract:
Event cameras capture scene changes asynchronously on a per-pixel basis, enabling extremely high temporal resolution. However, this advantage comes at the cost of high bandwidth, memory, and computational demands. To address this, prior work has explored event downsampling, but most approaches rely on fixed heuristics or threshold-based strategies, limiting their adaptability. Instead, we propose a probabilistic framework, POLED, that models event importance through an event-importance probability density function (ePDF), which can be arbitrarily defined and adapted to different applications. Our approach operates in a purely online setting, estimating event importance on-the-fly from raw event streams, enabling scene-specific adaptation. Additionally, we introduce zero-shot event downsampling, where downsampled events must remain usable for models trained on the original event stream, without task-specific adaptation. We design a contour-preserving ePDF that prioritizes structurally important events and evaluate our method across four datasets and tasks--object classification, image interpolation, surface normal estimation, and object detection--demonstrating that intelligent sampling is crucial for maintaining performance under event-budget constraints. Code available.

Paperid: 6448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00424.pdf

Abstract:
Sparse tensor programs are essential in deep learning and graph analytics, driving the need for optimized processing. To meet this demand, specialized hardware accelerators are being developed. Optimizing these programs for accelerators is challenging for two reasons: program performance is highly sensitive to variations in sparse inputs, and early-stage accelerators rely on expensive simulators. Therefore, ML-based cost models used for optimizing such programs on general-purpose hardware are often ineffective for early-stage accelerators, as they require large datasets for proper training. To this end, we introduce COGNATE, a novel framework that leverages inexpensive data samples from general-purpose hardware (e.g., CPUs) to train cost models, followed by few-shot fine-tuning on emerging hardware. COGNATE exploits the homogeneity of input features across hardware platforms while effectively mitigating heterogeneity, enabling cost model training with just 5% of the data samples needed by accelerator-specific models to achieve comparable performance. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that COGNATE outperforms existing techniques, achieving average speedups of 1.47x (up to 5.46x) for SpMM and 1.39x (up to 4.22x) for SDDMM.

Paperid: 6449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24834.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual transfer allows models to perform tasks in languages unseen during training and is often assumed to benefit from increased multilinguality. In this work, we challenge this assumption in the context of two underexplored, sense-aware tasks: polysemy disambiguation and lexical semantic change. Through a large-scale analysis across 28 languages, we show that multilingual training is neither necessary nor inherently beneficial for effective transfer. Instead, we find that confounding factors - such as fine-tuning data composition and evaluation artifacts - better account for the perceived advantages of multilinguality. Our findings call for more rigorous evaluations in multilingual NLP. We release fine-tuned models and benchmarks to support further research, with implications extending to low-resource and typologically diverse languages.

Paperid: 6450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23107.pdf

Abstract:
While electroencephalography (EEG) has been a popular modality for neural decoding, it often involves task specific acquisition of the EEG data. This poses challenges for the development of a unified pipeline to learn embeddings for various EEG signal classification, which is often involved in various decoding tasks. Traditionally, EEG classification involves the step of signal preprocessing and the use of deep learning techniques, which are highly dependent on the number of EEG channels in each sample. However, the same pipeline cannot be applied even if the EEG data is collected for the same experiment but with different acquisition devices. This necessitates the development of a framework for learning EEG embeddings, which could be highly beneficial for tasks involving multiple EEG samples for the same task but with varying numbers of EEG channels. In this work, we propose EEG Adapter (EAD), a flexible framework compatible with any signal acquisition device. More specifically, we leverage a recent EEG foundational model with significant adaptations to learn robust representations from the EEG data for the classification task. We evaluate EAD on two publicly available datasets achieving state-of-the-art accuracies 99.33% and 92.31% on EEG-ImageNet and BrainLat respectively. This illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework across diverse EEG datasets containing two different perception tasks: stimulus and resting-state EEG signals. We also perform zero-shot EEG classification on EEG-ImageNet task to demonstrate the generalization capability of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 6451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22911.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a taxonomy of materials for hierarchical recognition from local appearance. Our taxonomy is motivated by vision applications and is arranged according to the physical traits of materials. We contribute a diverse, in-the-wild dataset with images and depth maps of the taxonomy classes. Utilizing the taxonomy and dataset, we present a method for hierarchical material recognition based on graph attention networks. Our model leverages the taxonomic proximity between classes and achieves state-of-the-art performance. We demonstrate the model's potential to generalize to adverse, real-world imaging conditions, and that novel views rendered using the depth maps can enhance this capability. Finally, we show the model's capacity to rapidly learn new materials in a few-shot learning setting.

Paperid: 6452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22552.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is an emerging research challenge in claim verification. While KGs provide structured, semantically rich representations well-suited for reasoning, most existing verification methods rely on unstructured text corpora, limiting their ability to effectively leverage KGs. Additionally, despite possessing strong reasoning abilities, modern LLMs struggle with multi-step modular pipelines and reasoning over KGs without adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose ClaimPKG, an end-to-end framework that seamlessly integrates LLM reasoning with structured knowledge from KGs. Specifically, the main idea of ClaimPKG is to employ a lightweight, specialized LLM to represent the input claim as pseudo-subgraphs, guiding a dedicated subgraph retrieval module to identify relevant KG subgraphs. These retrieved subgraphs are then processed by a general-purpose LLM to produce the final verdict and justification. Extensive experiments on the FactKG dataset demonstrate that ClaimPKG achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines in this research field by 9%-12% accuracy points across multiple categories. Furthermore, ClaimPKG exhibits zero-shot generalizability to unstructured datasets such as HoVer and FEVEROUS, effectively combining structured knowledge from KGs with LLM reasoning across various LLM backbones.

Paperid: 6453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22067.pdf

Abstract:
Ensuring robust and generalizable autonomous driving requires not only broad scenario coverage but also efficient repair of failure cases, particularly those related to challenging and safety-critical scenarios. However, existing scenario generation and selection methods often lack adaptivity and semantic relevance, limiting their impact on performance improvement. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SERA}, an LLM-powered framework that enables autonomous driving systems to self-evolve by repairing failure cases through targeted scenario recommendation. By analyzing performance logs, SERA identifies failure patterns and dynamically retrieves semantically aligned scenarios from a structured bank. An LLM-based reflection mechanism further refines these recommendations to maximize relevance and diversity. The selected scenarios are used for few-shot fine-tuning, enabling targeted adaptation with minimal data. Experiments on the benchmark show that SERA consistently improves key metrics across multiple autonomous driving baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability under safety-critical conditions.

Paperid: 6454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18381.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel method for monocular patient-to-image intraoperative registration, specifically designed to operate without any external hardware tracking equipment or fiducial point markers. Leveraging a synthetic microscopy surgical scene dataset with a wide range of transformations, our approach directly maps preoperative CT scans to 2D intraoperative surgical frames through a lightweight neural network for real-time cochlear implant surgery guidance via a zero-shot learning approach. Unlike traditional methods, our framework seamlessly integrates with monocular surgical microscopes, making it highly practical for clinical use without additional hardware dependencies and requirements. Our method estimates camera poses, which include a rotation matrix and a translation vector, by learning from the synthetic dataset, enabling accurate and efficient intraoperative registration. The proposed framework was evaluated on nine clinical cases using a patient-specific and cross-patient validation strategy. Our results suggest that our approach achieves clinically relevant accuracy in predicting 6D camera poses for registering 3D preoperative CT scans to 2D surgical scenes with an angular error within 10 degrees in most cases, while also addressing limitations of traditional methods, such as reliance on external tracking systems or fiducial markers.

Paperid: 6455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18040.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to handle various emotion labels without dedicated training is crucial for building adaptable Emotion Recognition (ER) systems. Conventional ER models rely on training using fixed label sets and struggle to generalize beyond them. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong zero-shot ER performance across diverse label spaces, but their scale limits their use on edge devices. In this work, we propose a contrastive distillation framework that transfers rich emotional knowledge from LLMs into a compact model without the use of human annotations. We use GPT-4 to generate descriptive emotion annotations, offering rich supervision beyond fixed label sets. By aligning text samples with emotion descriptors in a shared embedding space, our method enables zero-shot prediction on different emotion classes, granularity, and label schema. The distilled model is effective across multiple datasets and label spaces, outperforming strong baselines of similar size and approaching GPT-4's zero-shot performance, while being over 10,000 times smaller.

Paperid: 6456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17358.pdf

Abstract:
Recent monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) methods have made notable progress towards zero-shot generalization. However, they still exhibit a significant performance drop on out-of-distribution datasets. We address this limitation by injecting defocus blur cues at inference time into Marigold, a \textit{pre-trained} diffusion model for zero-shot, scale-invariant monocular depth estimation (MDE). Our method effectively turns Marigold into a metric depth predictor in a training-free manner. To incorporate defocus cues, we capture two images with a small and a large aperture from the same viewpoint. To recover metric depth, we then optimize the metric depth scaling parameters and the noise latents of Marigold at inference time using gradients from a loss function based on the defocus-blur image formation model. We compare our method against existing state-of-the-art zero-shot MMDE methods on a self-collected real dataset, showing quantitative and qualitative improvements.

Paperid: 6457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16821.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating large AI models (LAMs) into 6G mobile networks promises to redefine protocol design and control-plane intelligence by enabling autonomous, cognitive network operations. While industry concepts, such as ETSI's Experiential Networked Intelligence (ENI), envision LAM-driven agents for adaptive network slicing and intent-based management, practical implementations still face challenges in protocol literacy and real-world deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end demonstration of a LAM that generates standards-compliant, ASN.1-encoded Radio Resource Control (RRC) messages as part of control-plane procedures inside a gNB. We treat RRC messaging as a domain-specific language and fine-tune a decoder-only transformer model (LLaMA class) using parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on RRC messages linearized to retain their ASN.1 syntactic structure before standard byte-pair encoding tokenization. This enables combinatorial generalization over RRC protocol states while minimizing training overhead. On 30k field-test request-response pairs, our 8 B model achieves a median cosine similarity of 0.97 with ground-truth messages on an edge GPU -- a 61 % relative gain over a zero-shot LLaMA-3 8B baseline -- indicating substantially improved structural and semantic RRC fidelity. Overall, our results show that LAMs, when augmented with Radio Access Network (RAN)-specific reasoning, can directly orchestrate control-plane procedures, representing a stepping stone toward the AI-native air-interface paradigm. Beyond RRC emulation, this work lays the groundwork for future AI-native wireless standards.

Paperid: 6458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16144.pdf

Abstract:
6DoF object pose estimation is fundamental to robotic grasp tasks. While recent learning-based methods achieve high accuracy, their computational demands hinder deployment on resource-constrained mobile platforms. In this work, we revisit the classical keypoint matching paradigm and propose GMatch, a lightweight, geometry-constrained keypoint matcher that can run efficiently on embedded CPU-only platforms. GMatch works with keypoint descriptors and it uses a set of geometric constraints to establishes inherent ambiguities between features extracted by descriptors, thus giving a globally consistent correspondences from which 6DoF pose can be easily solved. We benchmark GMatch on the HOPE and YCB-Video datasets, where our method beats existing keypoint matchers (both feature-based and geometry-based) among three commonly used descriptors and approaches the SOTA zero-shot method on texture-rich objects with much more humble devices. The method is further deployed on a LoCoBot mobile manipulator, enabling a one-shot grasp pipeline that demonstrates high task success rates in real-world experiments. In a word, by its lightweight and white-box nature, GMatch offers a practical solution for resource-limited robotic systems, and although currently bottlenecked by descriptor quality, the framework presents a promising direction towards robust yet efficient pose estimation. Code will be released soon under Mozilla Public License.

Paperid: 6459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15241.pdf

Abstract:
Despite progress in geometry-aware domain adaptation, current methods such as GAMA still suffer from two unresolved issues: (1) insufficient disentanglement of task-relevant and task-irrelevant manifold dimensions, and (2) rigid perturbation schemes that ignore per-class alignment asymmetries. To address this, we propose GAMA++, a novel framework that introduces (i) latent space disentanglement to isolate label-consistent manifold directions from nuisance factors, and (ii) an adaptive contrastive perturbation strategy that tailors both on- and off-manifold exploration to class-specific manifold curvature and alignment discrepancy. We further propose a cross-domain contrastive consistency loss that encourages local semantic clusters to align while preserving intra-domain diversity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on DomainNet, Office-Home, and VisDA benchmarks under both standard and few-shot settings, with notable improvements in class-level alignment fidelity and boundary robustness. GAMA++ sets a new standard for semantic geometry alignment in transfer learning.

Paperid: 6460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15205.pdf

Abstract:
Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) automatically identifies anomalous events from video, mitigating the need for human operators in large-scale surveillance deployments. However, two fundamental obstacles hinder real-world adoption: domain dependency and real-time constraints -- requiring near-instantaneous processing of incoming video. To this end, we propose Flashback, a zero-shot and real-time video anomaly detection paradigm. Inspired by the human cognitive mechanism of instantly judging anomalies and reasoning in current scenes based on past experience, Flashback operates in two stages: Recall and Respond. In the offline recall stage, an off-the-shelf LLM builds a pseudo-scene memory of both normal and anomalous captions without any reliance on real anomaly data. In the online respond stage, incoming video segments are embedded and matched against this memory via similarity search. By eliminating all LLM calls at inference time, Flashback delivers real-time VAD even on a consumer-grade GPU. On two large datasets from real-world surveillance scenarios, UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, we achieve 87.3 AUC (+7.0 pp) and 75.1 AP (+13.1 pp), respectively, outperforming prior zero-shot VAD methods by large margins.

Paperid: 6461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15194.pdf

Abstract:
Domain adaptation remains a challenge when there is significant manifold discrepancy between source and target domains. Although recent methods leverage manifold-aware adversarial perturbations to perform data augmentation, they often neglect precise manifold alignment and systematic exploration of structured perturbations. To address this, we propose GAMA (Geometry-Aware Manifold Alignment), a structured framework that achieves explicit manifold alignment via adversarial perturbation guided by geometric information. GAMA systematically employs tangent space exploration and manifold-constrained adversarial optimization, simultaneously enhancing semantic consistency, robustness to off-manifold deviations, and cross-domain alignment. Theoretical analysis shows that GAMA tightens the generalization bound via structured regularization and explicit alignment. Empirical results on DomainNet, VisDA, and Office-Home demonstrate that GAMA consistently outperforms existing adversarial and adaptation methods in both unsupervised and few-shot settings, exhibiting superior robustness, generalization, and manifold alignment capability.

Paperid: 6462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13755.pdf

Abstract:
Chaotic systems are intrinsically sensitive to small errors, challenging efforts to construct predictive data-driven models of real-world dynamical systems such as fluid flows or neuronal activity. Prior efforts comprise either specialized models trained separately on individual time series, or foundation models trained on vast time series databases with little underlying dynamical structure. Motivated by dynamical systems theory, we present Panda, Patched Attention for Nonlinear DynAmics. We train Panda on a novel synthetic, extensible dataset of $2 \times 10^4$ chaotic dynamical systems that we discover using an evolutionary algorithm. Trained purely on simulated data, Panda exhibits emergent properties: zero-shot forecasting of unseen real world chaotic systems, and nonlinear resonance patterns in cross-channel attention heads. Despite having been trained only on low-dimensional ordinary differential equations, Panda spontaneously develops the ability to predict partial differential equations without retraining. We demonstrate a neural scaling law for differential equations, underscoring the potential of pretrained models for probing abstract mathematical domains like nonlinear dynamics.

Paperid: 6463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13252.pdf

Abstract:
A trending line of recent work advocates for using large language models (LLMs) as formalizers instead of as end-to-end solvers for logical reasoning problems. Instead of generating the solution, the LLM generates a formal program that derives a solution via an external solver. While performance gain of the seemingly scalable LLM-as-formalizer over the seemingly unscalable LLM-as-solver has been widely reported, we show that this superiority does not hold on real-life constraint satisfaction problems. On 4 domains, we systematically evaluate 6 LLMs including 4 large reasoning models with inference-time scaling, paired with 5 pipelines including 2 types of formalism. We show that in few-shot settings, LLM-as-formalizer underperforms LLM-as-solver. While LLM-as-formalizer promises accuracy, robustness, faithfulness, and efficiency, we observe that the present LLMs do not yet deliver any of those, as their limited ability to generate formal programs leads to failure to scale with complexity, hard-coded solutions, and excessive reasoning tokens. We present our detailed analysis and actionable remedies to drive future research that improves LLM-as-formalizer.

Paperid: 6464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12075.pdf

Abstract:
Demonstrations and instructions are two primary approaches for prompting language models to perform in-context learning (ICL) tasks. Do identical tasks elicited in different ways result in similar representations of the task? An improved understanding of task representation mechanisms would offer interpretability insights and may aid in steering models. We study this through \textit{function vectors} (FVs), recently proposed as a mechanism to extract few-shot ICL task representations. We generalize FVs to alternative task presentations, focusing on short textual instruction prompts, and successfully extract instruction function vectors that promote zero-shot task accuracy. We find evidence that demonstration- and instruction-based function vectors leverage different model components, and offer several controls to dissociate their contributions to task performance. Our results suggest that different task promptings forms do not induce a common task representation through FVs but elicit different, partly overlapping mechanisms. Our findings offer principled support to the practice of combining instructions and task demonstrations, imply challenges in universally monitoring task inference across presentation forms, and encourage further examinations of LLM task inference mechanisms.

Paperid: 6465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11386.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces MutualNeRF, a framework enhancing Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) performance under limited samples using Mutual Information Theory. While NeRF excels in 3D scene synthesis, challenges arise with limited data and existing methods that aim to introduce prior knowledge lack theoretical support in a unified framework. We introduce a simple but theoretically robust concept, Mutual Information, as a metric to uniformly measure the correlation between images, considering both macro (semantic) and micro (pixel) levels. For sparse view sampling, we strategically select additional viewpoints containing more non-overlapping scene information by minimizing mutual information without knowing ground truth images beforehand. Our framework employs a greedy algorithm, offering a near-optimal solution. For few-shot view synthesis, we maximize the mutual information between inferred images and ground truth, expecting inferred images to gain more relevant information from known images. This is achieved by incorporating efficient, plug-and-play regularization terms. Experiments under limited samples show consistent improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in different settings, affirming the efficacy of our framework.

Paperid: 6466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11341.pdf

Abstract:
The task of Critical Questions Generation (CQs-Gen) aims to foster critical thinking by enabling systems to generate questions that expose underlying assumptions and challenge the validity of argumentative reasoning structures. Despite growing interest in this area, progress has been hindered by the lack of suitable datasets and automatic evaluation standards. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to support the development and benchmarking of systems for this task. We construct the first large-scale dataset including ~5K manually annotated questions. We also investigate automatic evaluation methods and propose reference-based techniques as the strategy that best correlates with human judgments. Our zero-shot evaluation of 11 LLMs establishes a strong baseline while showcasing the difficulty of the task. Data and code plus a public leaderboard are provided to encourage further research, not only in terms of model performance, but also to explore the practical benefits of CQs-Gen for both automated reasoning and human critical thinking.

Paperid: 6467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10359.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep generative models demonstrate unprecedented zero-shot generalization capabilities, offering great potential for robot manipulation in unstructured environments. Given a partial observation of a scene, deep generative models could generate the unseen regions and therefore provide more context, which enhances the capability of robots to generalize across unseen environments. However, due to the visual artifacts in generated images and inefficient integration of multi-modal features in policy learning, this direction remains an open challenge. We introduce NVSPolicy, a generalizable language-conditioned policy learning method that couples an adaptive novel-view synthesis module with a hierarchical policy network. Given an input image, NVSPolicy dynamically selects an informative viewpoint and synthesizes an adaptive novel-view image to enrich the visual context. To mitigate the impact of the imperfect synthesized images, we adopt a cycle-consistent VAE mechanism that disentangles the visual features into the semantic feature and the remaining feature. The two features are then fed into the hierarchical policy network respectively: the semantic feature informs the high-level meta-skill selection, and the remaining feature guides low-level action estimation. Moreover, we propose several practical mechanisms to make the proposed method efficient. Extensive experiments on CALVIN demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it achieves an average success rate of 90.4\% across all tasks, greatly outperforming the recent methods. Ablation studies confirm the significance of our adaptive novel-view synthesis paradigm. In addition, we evaluate NVSPolicy on a real-world robotic platform to demonstrate its practical applicability.

Paperid: 6468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09949.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding the factors contributing to traffic crashes and developing strategies to mitigate their severity is essential. Traditional statistical methods and machine learning models often struggle to capture the complex interactions between various factors and the unique characteristics of each crash. This research leverages large language model (LLM) to analyze freeway crash data and provide crash causation analysis accordingly. By compiling 226 traffic safety studies related to freeway crashes, a training dataset encompassing environmental, driver, traffic, and geometric design factors was created. The Llama3 8B model was fine-tuned using QLoRA to enhance its understanding of freeway crashes and their contributing factors, as covered in these studies. The fine-tuned Llama3 8B model was then used to identify crash causation without pre-labeled data through zero-shot classification, providing comprehensive explanations to ensure that the identified causes were reasonable and aligned with existing research. Results demonstrate that LLMs effectively identify primary crash causes such as alcohol-impaired driving, speeding, aggressive driving, and driver inattention. Incorporating event data, such as road maintenance, offers more profound insights. The model's practical applicability and potential to improve traffic safety measures were validated by a high level of agreement among researchers in the field of traffic safety, as reflected in questionnaire results with 88.89%. This research highlights the complex nature of traffic crashes and how LLMs can be used for comprehensive analysis of crash causation and other contributing factors. Moreover, it provides valuable insights and potential countermeasures to aid planners and policymakers in developing more effective and efficient traffic safety practices.

Paperid: 6469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09188.pdf

Abstract:
Network quantization has proven to be a powerful approach to reduce the memory and computational demands of deep learning models for deployment on resource-constrained devices. However, traditional quantization methods often rely on access to training data, which is impractical in many real-world scenarios due to privacy, security, or regulatory constraints. Zero-shot Quantization (ZSQ) emerges as a promising solution, achieving quantization without requiring any real data. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of ZSQ methods and their recent advancements. First, we provide a formal definition of the ZSQ problem and highlight the key challenges. Then, we categorize the existing ZSQ methods into classes based on data generation strategies, and analyze their motivations, core ideas, and key takeaways. Lastly, we suggest future research directions to address the remaining limitations and advance the field of ZSQ. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first in-depth survey on ZSQ.

Paperid: 6470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08498.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled zero-shot automated essay scoring (AES), providing a promising way to reduce the cost and effort of essay scoring in comparison with manual grading. However, most existing zero-shot approaches rely on LLMs to directly generate absolute scores, which often diverge from human evaluations owing to model biases and inconsistent scoring. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-based Comparative Essay Scoring (LCES), a method that formulates AES as a pairwise comparison task. Specifically, we instruct LLMs to judge which of two essays is better, collect many such comparisons, and convert them into continuous scores. Considering that the number of possible comparisons grows quadratically with the number of essays, we improve scalability by employing RankNet to efficiently transform LLM preferences into scalar scores. Experiments using AES benchmark datasets show that LCES outperforms conventional zero-shot methods in accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Moreover, LCES is robust across different LLM backbones, highlighting its applicability to real-world zero-shot AES.

Paperid: 6471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08151.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate estimation of lithium-ion battery capacity degradation is critical for enhancing the reliability and safety of battery operations. Traditional expert models, tailored to specific scenarios, provide isolated estimations. With the rapid advancement of data-driven techniques, a series of general-purpose time-series foundation models have been developed. However, foundation models specifically designed for battery capacity degradation remain largely unexplored. To enable zero-shot generalization in battery degradation prediction using large model technology, this study proposes a degradation-aware fine-tuning strategy for time-series foundation models. We apply this strategy to fine-tune the Timer model on approximately 10 GB of open-source battery charge discharge data. Validation on our released CycleLife-SJTUIE dataset demonstrates that the fine-tuned Battery-Timer possesses strong zero-shot generalization capability in capacity degradation forecasting. To address the computational challenges of deploying large models, we further propose a knowledge distillation framework that transfers the knowledge of pre-trained foundation models into compact expert models. Distillation results across several state-of-the-art time-series expert models confirm that foundation model knowledge significantly improves the multi-condition generalization of expert models.

Paperid: 6472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07300.pdf

Abstract:
Training-free Neural Architecture Search (NAS) efficiently identifies high-performing neural networks using zero-cost (ZC) proxies. Unlike multi-shot and one-shot NAS approaches, ZC-NAS is both (i) time-efficient, eliminating the need for model training, and (ii) interpretable, with proxy designs often theoretically grounded. Despite rapid developments in the field, current SOTA ZC proxies are typically constrained to well-established convolutional search spaces. With the rise of Large Language Models shaping the future of deep learning, this work extends ZC proxy applicability to Vision Transformers (ViTs). We present a new benchmark using the Autoformer search space evaluated on 6 distinct tasks and propose Layer-Sample Wise Activation with Gradients information (L-SWAG), a novel, generalizable metric that characterizes both convolutional and transformer architectures across 14 tasks. Additionally, previous works highlighted how different proxies contain complementary information, motivating the need for a ML model to identify useful combinations. To further enhance ZC-NAS, we therefore introduce LIBRA-NAS (Low Information gain and Bias Re-Alignment), a method that strategically combines proxies to best represent a specific benchmark. Integrated into the NAS search, LIBRA-NAS outperforms evolution and gradient-based NAS techniques by identifying an architecture with a 17.0% test error on ImageNet1k in just 0.1 GPU days.

Paperid: 6473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06145.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot text classification has important application value in low-resource environments. This paper proposes a strategy that combines adaptive fine-tuning, contrastive learning, and regularization optimization to improve the classification performance of Transformer-based models. Experiments on the FewRel 2.0 dataset show that T5-small, DeBERTa-v3, and RoBERTa-base perform well in few-shot tasks, especially in the 5-shot setting, which can more effectively capture text features and improve classification accuracy. The experiment also found that there are significant differences in the classification difficulty of different relationship categories. Some categories have fuzzy semantic boundaries or complex feature distributions, making it difficult for the standard cross entropy loss to learn the discriminative information required to distinguish categories. By introducing contrastive loss and regularization loss, the generalization ability of the model is enhanced, effectively alleviating the overfitting problem in few-shot environments. In addition, the research results show that the use of Transformer models or generative architectures with stronger self-attention mechanisms can help improve the stability and accuracy of few-shot classification.

Paperid: 6474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05540.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language-action (VLA) models represent an important step toward general-purpose robotic systems by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and action execution. However, systematic evaluation of these models, particularly their zero-shot generalization capabilities in procedurally out-of-distribution (OOD) environments, remains limited. In this paper, we introduce MultiNet v0.2, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate and analyze the generalization performance of state-of-the-art VLMs and VLAs - including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, OpenVLA, Pi0 Base, and Pi0 FAST - on diverse procedural tasks from the Procgen benchmark. Our analysis reveals several critical insights: (1) all evaluated models exhibit significant limitations in zero-shot generalization to OOD tasks, with performance heavily influenced by factors such as action representation and task complexity; (2) VLAs generally outperforms other models due to their robust architectural design; and (3) VLM variants demonstrate substantial improvements when constrained appropriately, highlighting the sensitivity of model performance to precise prompt engineering. We release our benchmark, evaluation framework, and findings to enable the assessment of future VLA models and identify critical areas for improvement in their application to out-of-distribution digital tasks.

Paperid: 6475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04911.pdf

Abstract:
This study introduces SpatialPrompting, a novel framework that harnesses the emergent reasoning capabilities of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models to achieve zero-shot spatial reasoning in three-dimensional (3D) environments. Unlike existing methods that rely on expensive 3D-specific fine-tuning with specialized 3D inputs such as point clouds or voxel-based features, SpatialPrompting employs a keyframe-driven prompt generation strategy. This framework uses metrics such as vision-language similarity, Mahalanobis distance, field of view, and image sharpness to select a diverse and informative set of keyframes from image sequences and then integrates them with corresponding camera pose data to effectively abstract spatial relationships and infer complex 3D structures. The proposed framework not only establishes a new paradigm for flexible spatial reasoning that utilizes intuitive visual and positional cues but also achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on benchmark datasets, such as ScanQA and SQA3D, across several metrics. The proposed method effectively eliminates the need for specialized 3D inputs and fine-tuning, offering a simpler and more scalable alternative to conventional approaches.

Paperid: 6476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04579.pdf

Abstract:
In collaborative tasks, autonomous agents fall short of humans in their capability to quickly adapt to new and unfamiliar teammates. We posit that a limiting factor for zero-shot coordination is the lack of shared task abstractions, a mechanism humans rely on to implicitly align with teammates. To address this gap, we introduce HA$^2$: Hierarchical Ad Hoc Agents, a framework leveraging hierarchical reinforcement learning to mimic the structured approach humans use in collaboration. We evaluate HA$^2$ in the Overcooked environment, demonstrating statistically significant improvement over existing baselines when paired with both unseen agents and humans, providing better resilience to environmental shifts, and outperforming all state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03781.pdf

Abstract:
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for analyzing medical data, particularly Electrocardiogram (ECG), offers high accuracy and convenience. However, generating reliable, evidence-based results in specialized fields like healthcare remains a challenge, as RAG alone may not suffice. We propose a Zero-shot ECG diagnosis framework based on RAG for ECG analysis that incorporates expert-curated knowledge to enhance diagnostic accuracy and explainability. Evaluation on the PTB-XL dataset demonstrates the framework's effectiveness, highlighting the value of structured domain expertise in automated ECG interpretation. Our framework is designed to support comprehensive ECG analysis, addressing diverse diagnostic needs with potential applications beyond the tested dataset.

Paperid: 6478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02737.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as a prominent solution for Natural Language Processing tasks. Notably, they can approach these problems in a zero or few-shot manner, thereby eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning task-specific models. However, LLMs face some challenges, including hallucination and the presence of outdated knowledge or missing information from specific domains in the training data. These problems cannot be easily solved by retraining the models with new data as it is a time-consuming and expensive process. To mitigate these issues, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been proposed as a structured external source of information to enrich LLMs. With this idea, in this work we use KGs to enhance LLMs for zero-shot Entity Disambiguation (ED). For that purpose, we leverage the hierarchical representation of the entities' classes in a KG to gradually prune the candidate space as well as the entities' descriptions to enrich the input prompt with additional factual knowledge. Our evaluation on popular ED datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms non-enhanced and description-only enhanced LLMs, and has a higher degree of adaptability than task-specific models. Furthermore, we conduct an error analysis and discuss the impact of the leveraged KG's semantic expressivity on the ED performance.

Paperid: 6479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01685.pdf

Abstract:
This article proposes a brain-inspired generative (BIG) model that merges an impulsive-attention neural network and a variational autoencoder (VAE) for identifying cognitive states based on electroencephalography (EEG) data. A hybrid learning method is presented for training the model by integrating gradient-based learning and heteroassociative memory. The BIG model is capable of achieving multi-task objectives: EEG classification, generating new EEG, and brain network interpretation, alleviating the limitations of excessive data training and high computational cost in conventional approaches. Experimental results on two public EEG datasets with different sampling rates demonstrate that the BIG model achieves a classification accuracy above 89\%, comparable with state-of-the-art methods, while reducing computational cost by nearly 11\% over the baseline EEGNet. Incorporating the generated EEG data for training, the BIG model exhibits comparative performance in a few-shot pattern. Ablation studies justify the poised brain-inspired characteristic regarding the impulsive-attention module and the hybrid learning method. Thanks to the performance advantages with interpretable outputs, this BIG model has application potential for building digital twins of the brain.

Paperid: 6480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01482.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and problem-solving across various domains. However, their ability to perform complex, multi-step reasoning task-essential for applications in science, medicine, and law-remains an area of active investigation. This paper examines the reasoning capabilities of contemporary LLMs, analyzing their strengths, limitations, and potential for improvement. The study uses prompt engineering techniques on the Graduate-Level GoogleProof Q&A (GPQA) dataset to assess the scientific reasoning of GPT-4o. Five popular prompt engineering techniques and two tailored promptings were tested: baseline direct answer (zero-shot), chain-of-thought (CoT), zero-shot CoT, self-ask, self-consistency, decomposition, and multipath promptings. Our findings indicate that while LLMs exhibit emergent reasoning abilities, they often rely on pattern recognition rather than true logical inference, leading to inconsistencies in complex problem-solving. The results indicated that self-consistency outperformed the other prompt engineering technique with an accuracy of 52.99%, followed by direct answer (52.23%). Zero-shot CoT (50%) outperformed multipath (48.44%), decomposition (47.77%), self-ask (46.88%), and CoT (43.75%). Self-consistency performed the second worst in explaining the answers. Simple techniques such as direct answer, CoT, and zero-shot CoT have the best scientific reasoning. We propose a research agenda aimed at bridging these gaps by integrating structured reasoning frameworks, hybrid AI approaches, and human-in-the-loop methodologies. By critically evaluating the reasoning mechanisms of LLMs, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the future of artificial general intelligence and the development of more robust, trustworthy AI systems.

Paperid: 6481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01433.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding the binding specificity between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and peptide-major histocompatibility complexes (pMHCs) is central to immunotherapy and vaccine development. However, current predictive models struggle with generalization, especially in data-scarce settings and when faced with novel epitopes. We present LANTERN (Large lAnguage model-powered TCR-Enhanced Recognition Network), a deep learning framework that combines large-scale protein language models with chemical representations of peptides. By encoding TCR \b{eta}-chain sequences using ESM-1b and transforming peptide sequences into SMILES strings processed by MolFormer, LANTERN captures rich biological and chemical features critical for TCR-peptide recognition. Through extensive benchmarking against existing models such as ChemBERTa, TITAN, and NetTCR, LANTERN demonstrates superior performance, particularly in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Our model also benefits from a robust negative sampling strategy and shows significant clustering improvements via embedding analysis. These results highlight the potential of LANTERN to advance TCR-pMHC binding prediction and support the development of personalized immunotherapies.

Paperid: 6482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21375.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal representation learning has become a pivotal area in artificial intelligence, enabling the integration of diverse modalities such as vision, text, and audio to solve complex problems. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on bimodal interactions, such as image-text pairs, which limits their ability to fully exploit the richness of multi-modal data. Furthermore, the integration of modalities in equal-scale environments remains underexplored due to the challenges of constructing large-scale, balanced datasets. In this study, we propose Synergy-CLIP, a novel framework that extends the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) architecture to enhance multi-modal representation learning by integrating visual, textual, and audio modalities. Unlike existing methods that focus on adapting individual modalities to vanilla-CLIP, Synergy-CLIP aligns and captures latent information across three modalities equally. To address the high cost of constructing large-scale multi-modal datasets, we introduce VGG-sound+, a triple-modal dataset designed to provide equal-scale representation of visual, textual, and audio data. Synergy-CLIP is validated on various downstream tasks, including zero-shot classification, where it outperforms existing baselines. Additionally, we introduce a missing modality reconstruction task, demonstrating Synergy-CLIP's ability to extract synergy among modalities in realistic application scenarios. These contributions provide a robust foundation for advancing multi-modal representation learning and exploring new research directions.

Paperid: 6483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20505.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for human activity recognition (HAR) using ambient sensors, especially through natural language reasoning and zero-shot learning. However, existing datasets such as CASAS, ARAS, and MARBLE were not originally designed with LLMs in mind and therefore lack the contextual richness, complexity, and annotation granularity required to fully exploit LLM capabilities. In this paper, we introduce MuRAL, the first Multi-Resident Ambient sensor dataset with natural Language, comprising over 21 hours of multi-user sensor data collected from 21 sessions in a smart-home environment. MuRAL is annotated with fine-grained natural language descriptions, resident identities, and high-level activity labels, all situated in dynamic, realistic multi-resident settings. We benchmark MuRAL using state-of-the-art LLMs for three core tasks: subject assignment, action description, and activity classification. Our results demonstrate that while LLMs can provide rich semantic interpretations of ambient data, current models still face challenges in handling multi-user ambiguity and under-specified sensor contexts. We release MuRAL to support future research on LLM-powered, explainable, and socially aware activity understanding in smart environments. For access to the dataset, please reach out to us via the provided contact information. A direct link for dataset retrieval will be made available at this location in due course.

Paperid: 6484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19277.pdf

Abstract:
Function calling is a complex task with widespread applications in domains such as information retrieval, software engineering and automation. For example, a query to book the shortest flight from New York to London on January 15 requires identifying the correct parameters to generate accurate function calls. Large Language Models (LLMs) can automate this process but are computationally expensive and impractical in resource-constrained settings. In contrast, Small Language Models (SLMs) can operate efficiently, offering faster response times, and lower computational demands, making them potential candidates for function calling on edge devices. In this exploratory empirical study, we evaluate the efficacy of SLMs in generating function calls across diverse domains using zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning approaches, both with and without prompt injection, while also providing the finetuned models to facilitate future applications. Furthermore, we analyze the model responses across a range of metrics, capturing various aspects of function call generation. Additionally, we perform experiments on an edge device to evaluate their performance in terms of latency and memory usage, providing useful insights into their practical applicability. Our findings show that while SLMs improve from zero-shot to few-shot and perform best with fine-tuning, they struggle significantly with adhering to the given output format. Prompt injection experiments further indicate that the models are generally robust and exhibit only a slight decline in performance. While SLMs demonstrate potential for the function call generation task, our results also highlight areas that need further refinement for real-time functioning.

Paperid: 6485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18912.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of generative AI into developer forums like Stack Overflow presents an opportunity to enhance problem-solving by allowing users to post screenshots of code or Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) instead of traditional text-based queries. This study evaluates the effectiveness of various large language models (LLMs), specifically LLAMA, GEMINI, and GPT-4o in interpreting such visual inputs. We employ prompt engineering techniques, including in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and few-shot learning, to assess each model's responsiveness and accuracy. Our findings show that while GPT-4o shows promising capabilities, achieving over 60% similarity to baseline questions for 51.75% of the tested images, challenges remain in obtaining consistent and accurate interpretations for more complex images. This research advances our understanding of the feasibility of using generative AI for image-centric problem-solving in developer communities, highlighting both the potential benefits and current limitations of this approach while envisioning a future where visual-based debugging copilot tools become a reality.

Paperid: 6486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16942.pdf

Abstract:
Scalable general-purpose representations of the built environment are crucial for geospatial artificial intelligence applications. This paper introduces S2Vec, a novel self-supervised framework for learning such geospatial embeddings. S2Vec uses the S2 Geometry library to partition large areas into discrete S2 cells, rasterizes built environment feature vectors within cells as images, and applies masked autoencoding on these rasterized images to encode the feature vectors. This approach yields task-agnostic embeddings that capture local feature characteristics and broader spatial relationships. We evaluate S2Vec on several large-scale geospatial prediction tasks, both random train/test splits (interpolation) and zero-shot geographic adaptation (extrapolation). Our experiments show S2Vec's competitive performance against several baselines on socioeconomic tasks, especially the geographic adaptation variant, with room for improvement on environmental tasks. We also explore combining S2Vec embeddings with image-based embeddings downstream, showing that such multimodal fusion can often improve performance. Our findings highlight how S2Vec can learn effective general-purpose geospatial representations of the built environment features it is provided, and how it can complement other data modalities in geospatial artificial intelligence.

Paperid: 6487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15193.pdf

Abstract:
Automated diagnosis of eczema using images acquired from digital camera can enable individuals to self-monitor their recovery. The process entails first segmenting out the eczema region from the image and then measuring the severity of eczema in the segmented region. The state-of-the-art methods for automated eczema diagnosis rely on deep neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and have shown impressive performance in accurately measuring the severity of eczema. However, these methods require massive volume of annotated data to train which can be hard to obtain. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning framework for automated eczema diagnosis under limited training data regime. Our framework consists of two stages: i) Segmentation, where we use an in-context learning based algorithm called SegGPT for few-shot segmentation of eczema region from the image; ii) Feature extraction and classification, where we extract DINO features from the segmented regions and feed it to a multi-layered perceptron (MLP) for 4-class classification of eczema severity. When evaluated on a dataset of annotated "in-the-wild" eczema images, we show that our method outperforms (Weighted F1: 0.67 $\pm$ 0.01) the state-of-the-art deep learning methods such as finetuned Resnet-18 (Weighted F1: 0.44 $\pm$ 0.16) and Vision Transformer (Weighted F1: 0.40 $\pm$ 0.22). Our results show that self-supervised learning can be a viable solution for automated skin diagnosis where labeled data is scarce.

Paperid: 6488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14432.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce ResNetVLLM (ResNet Vision LLM), a novel cross-modal framework for zero-shot video understanding that integrates a ResNet-based visual encoder with a Large Language Model (LLM. ResNetVLLM addresses the challenges associated with zero-shot video models by avoiding reliance on pre-trained video understanding models and instead employing a non-pretrained ResNet to extract visual features. This design ensures the model learns visual and semantic representations within a unified architecture, enhancing its ability to generate accurate and contextually relevant textual descriptions from video inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate that ResNetVLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot video understanding (ZSVU) on several benchmarks, including MSRVTT-QA, MSVD-QA, TGIF-QA FrameQA, and ActivityNet-QA.

Paperid: 6489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14175.pdf

Abstract:
Query expansion methods powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness in zero-shot retrieval tasks. These methods assume that LLMs can generate hypothetical documents that, when incorporated into a query vector, enhance the retrieval of real evidence. However, we challenge this assumption by investigating whether knowledge leakage in benchmarks contributes to the observed performance gains. Using fact verification as a testbed, we analyze whether the generated documents contain information entailed by ground-truth evidence and assess their impact on performance. Our findings indicate that, on average, performance improvements consistently occurred for claims whose generated documents included sentences entailed by gold evidence. This suggests that knowledge leakage may be present in fact-verification benchmarks, potentially inflating the perceived performance of LLM-based query expansion methods.

Paperid: 6490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13593.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) have become one of the fundamental architectural component in point cloud analysis due to its effective feature learning mechanism. However, when processing complex geometric structures in point clouds, MLPs' fixed activation functions struggle to efficiently capture local geometric features, while suffering from poor parameter efficiency and high model redundancy. In this paper, we propose PointKAN, which applies Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to point cloud analysis tasks to investigate their efficacy in hierarchical feature representation. First, we introduce a Geometric Affine Module (GAM) to transform local features, improving the model's robustness to geometric variations. Next, in the Local Feature Processing (LFP), a parallel structure extracts both group-level features and global context, providing a rich representation of both fine details and overall structure. Finally, these features are combined and processed in the Global Feature Processing (GFP). By repeating these operations, the receptive field gradually expands, enabling the model to capture complete geometric information of the point cloud. To overcome the high parameter counts and computational inefficiency of standard KANs, we develop Efficient-KANs in the PointKAN-elite variant, which significantly reduces parameters while maintaining accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that PointKAN outperforms PointMLP on benchmark datasets such as ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNetPart, with particularly strong performance in Few-shot Learning task. Additionally, PointKAN achieves substantial reductions in parameter counts and computational complexity (FLOPs). This work highlights the potential of KANs-based architectures in 3D vision and opens new avenues for research in point cloud understanding.

Paperid: 6491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12879.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce RusBEIR, a comprehensive benchmark designed for zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval (IR) models in the Russian language. Comprising 17 datasets from various domains, it integrates adapted, translated, and newly created datasets, enabling systematic comparison of lexical and neural models. Our study highlights the importance of preprocessing for lexical models in morphologically rich languages and confirms BM25 as a strong baseline for full-document retrieval. Neural models, such as mE5-large and BGE-M3, demonstrate superior performance on most datasets, but face challenges with long-document retrieval due to input size constraints. RusBEIR offers a unified, open-source framework that promotes research in Russian-language information retrieval.

Paperid: 6492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11838.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the rapid evolution of learning and computer vision algorithms, Fine-Grained Classification (FGC) still poses an open problem in many practically relevant applications. In the retail domain, for example, the identification of fast changing and visually highly similar products and their properties are key to automated price-monitoring and product recommendation. This paper presents a novel Visual RAG pipeline that combines the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for few-shot FGC. This Visual RAG pipeline extracts product and promotion data in advertisement leaflets from various retailers and simultaneously predicts fine-grained product ids along with price and discount information. Compared to previous approaches, the key characteristic of the Visual RAG pipeline is that it allows the prediction of novel products without re-training, simply by adding a few class samples to the RAG database. Comparing several VLM back-ends like GPT-4o [23], GPT-4o-mini [24], and Gemini 2.0 Flash [10], our approach achieves 86.8% accuracy on a diverse dataset.

Paperid: 6493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08779.pdf

Abstract:
The growing complexity of construction management (CM) projects, coupled with challenges such as strict regulatory requirements and labor shortages, requires specialized analytical tools that streamline project workflow and enhance performance. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in general reasoning tasks, their effectiveness in tackling CM-specific challenges, such as precise quantitative analysis and regulatory interpretation, remains inadequately explored. To bridge this gap, this study introduces CMExamSet, a comprehensive benchmarking dataset comprising 689 authentic multiple-choice questions sourced from four nationally accredited CM certification exams. Our zero-shot evaluation assesses overall accuracy, subject areas (e.g., construction safety), reasoning complexity (single-step and multi-step), and question formats (text-only, figure-referenced, and table-referenced). The results indicate that GPT-4o and Claude 3.7 surpass typical human pass thresholds (70%), with average accuracies of 82% and 83%, respectively. Additionally, both models performed better on single-step tasks, with accuracies of 85.7% (GPT-4o) and 86.7% (Claude 3.7). Multi-step tasks were more challenging, reducing performance to 76.5% and 77.6%, respectively. Furthermore, both LLMs show significant limitations on figure-referenced questions, with accuracies dropping to approximately 40%. Our error pattern analysis further reveals that conceptual misunderstandings are the most common (44.4% and 47.9%), underscoring the need for enhanced domain-specific reasoning models. These findings underscore the potential of LLMs as valuable supplementary analytical tools in CM, while highlighting the need for domain-specific refinements and sustained human oversight in complex decision making.

Paperid: 6494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07942.pdf

Abstract:
Few Shot Segmentation aims to segment novel object classes given only a handful of labeled examples, enabling rapid adaptation with minimal supervision. Current literature crucially lacks a selection method that goes beyond visual similarity between the query and example images, leading to suboptimal predictions. We present MARS, a plug-and-play ranking system that leverages multimodal cues to filter and merge mask proposals robustly. Starting from a set of mask predictions for a single query image, we score, filter, and merge them to improve results. Proposals are evaluated using multimodal scores computed at local and global levels. Extensive experiments on COCO-20i, Pascal-5i, LVIS-92i, and FSS-1000 demonstrate that integrating all four scoring components is crucial for robust ranking, validating our contribution. As MARS can be effortlessly integrated with various mask proposal systems, we deploy it across a wide range of top-performer methods and achieve new state-of-the-art results on multiple existing benchmarks. Code will be available upon acceptance.

Paperid: 6495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07694.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can enable high-maneuverability in unmanned aerial vehicles (MAVs), but transferring them from simulation to real-world use is challenging. Variable-pitch propeller (VPP) MAVs offer greater agility, yet their complex dynamics complicate the sim-to-real transfer. This paper introduces a novel RL framework to overcome these challenges, enabling VPP MAVs to perform advanced aerial maneuvers in real-world settings. Our approach includes real-to-sim transfer techniques-such as system identification, domain randomization, and curriculum learning to create robust training simulations and a sim-to-real transfer strategy combining a cascade control system with a fast-response low-level controller for reliable deployment. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in achieving zero-shot deployment, enabling MAVs to perform complex maneuvers such as flips and wall-backtracking.

Paperid: 6496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07416.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multi-modal models have significantly improved vision-language (VL) alignment in radiology. However, existing approaches struggle to effectively utilize complex radiology reports for learning and offer limited interpretability through attention probability visualizations. To address these challenges, we introduce RadZero, a novel framework for VL alignment in radiology with zero-shot multi-task capability. A key component of our approach is VL-CABS (Vision-Language Cross-Attention Based on Similarity), which aligns text embeddings with local image features for interpretable, fine-grained VL reasoning. RadZero leverages large language models to extract concise semantic sentences from radiology reports and employs multi-positive contrastive training to effectively capture relationships between images and multiple relevant textual descriptions. It uses a pre-trained vision encoder with additional trainable Transformer layers, allowing efficient high-resolution image processing. By computing similarity between text embeddings and local image patch features, VL-CABS enables zero-shot inference with similarity probability for classification, and pixel-level VL similarity maps for grounding and segmentation. Experimental results on public chest radiograph benchmarks show that RadZero outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot classification, grounding, and segmentation. Furthermore, VL similarity map analysis highlights the potential of VL-CABS for improving explainability in VL alignment. Additionally, qualitative evaluation demonstrates RadZero's capability for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, further validating its effectiveness in medical imaging.

Paperid: 6497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06947.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce the Dialogue Evaluation shared task on extraction of structured opinions from Russian news texts. The task of the contest is to extract opinion tuples for a given sentence; the tuples are composed of a sentiment holder, its target, an expression and sentiment from the holder to the target. In total, the task received more than 100 submissions. The participants experimented mainly with large language models in zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning formats. The best result on the test set was obtained with fine-tuning of a large language model. We also compared 30 prompts and 11 open source language models with 3-32 billion parameters in the 1-shot and 10-shot settings and found the best models and prompts.

Paperid: 6498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04225.pdf

Abstract:
Modern AI models excel in controlled settings but often fail in real-world scenarios where data distributions shift unpredictably - a challenge known as domain generalisation (DG). This paper tackles this limitation by rigorously evaluating vision tramsformers, specifically the BEIT architecture which is a model pre-trained with masked image modelling (MIM), against synthetic out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks designed to mimic real-world noise and occlusions. We introduce a novel framework to generate OOD test cases by strategically masking object regions in images using grid patterns (25\%, 50\%, 75\% occlusion) and leveraging cutting-edge zero-shot segmentation via Segment Anything and Grounding DINO to ensure precise object localisation. Experiments across three benchmarks (PACS, Office-Home, DomainNet) demonstrate BEIT's known robustness while maintaining 94\% accuracy on PACS and 87\% on Office-Home, despite significant occlusions, outperforming CNNs and other vision transformers by margins of up to 37\%. Analysis of self-attention distances reveals that the BEIT dependence on global features correlates with its resilience. Furthermore, our synthetic benchmarks expose critical failure modes: performance degrades sharply when occlusions disrupt object shapes e.g. 68\% drop for external grid masking vs. 22\% for internal masking. This work provides two key advances (1) a scalable method to generate OOD benchmarks using controllable noise, and (2) empirical evidence that MIM and self-attention mechanism in vision transformers enhance DG by learning invariant features. These insights bridge the gap between lab-trained models and real-world deployment that offer a blueprint for building AI systems that generalise reliably under uncertainty.

Paperid: 6499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03168.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we address a novel image restoration problem relevant to machine learning dataset curation: the detection and removal of noisy mirrored padding artifacts. While data augmentation techniques like padding are necessary for standardizing image dimensions, they can introduce artifacts that degrade model evaluation when datasets are repurposed across domains. We propose a systematic algorithm to precisely delineate the reflection boundary through a minimum mean squared error approach with thresholding and remove reflective padding. Our method effectively identifies the transition between authentic content and its mirrored counterpart, even in the presence of compression or interpolation noise. We demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy on the SHEL5k dataset, showing significant performance improvements in zero-shot object detection tasks using OWLv2, with average precision increasing from 0.47 to 0.61 for hard hat detection and from 0.68 to 0.73 for person detection. By addressing annotation inconsistencies and distorted objects in padded regions, our approach enhances dataset integrity, enabling more reliable model evaluation across computer vision tasks.

Paperid: 6500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23487.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to struggle with systematic reasoning. Even on tasks where they appear to perform well, their performance often depends on shortcuts, rather than on genuine reasoning abilities, leading them to collapse on out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Post-training strategies based on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting have recently been hailed as a step change. However, little is known about the potential of the resulting ``Large Reasoning Models'' (LRMs) beyond maths and programming-based problem solving, where genuine OOD problems can be sparse. In this paper, we focus on tasks that require systematic relational composition for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. The setting allows fine control over problem difficulty to precisely measure OOD generalization. We find that, zero-shot LRMs generally outperform their LLM counterparts in single-path reasoning tasks but struggle in the multi-path setting. Whilst showing comparatively better results, fine-tuned LLMs are also not capable of multi-path generalization. We also provide evidence for the behavioral interpretation for this, i.e., that LRMs are shallow disjunctive reasoners.

Paperid: 6501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23175.pdf

Abstract:
Several recent works have argued that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to tame the data deluge in the cybersecurity field, by improving the automation of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) tasks. This work presents an evaluation methodology that other than allowing to test LLMs on CTI tasks when using zero-shot learning, few-shot learning and fine-tuning, also allows to quantify their consistency and their confidence level. We run experiments with three state-of-the-art LLMs and a dataset of 350 threat intelligence reports and present new evidence of potential security risks in relying on LLMs for CTI. We show how LLMs cannot guarantee sufficient performance on real-size reports while also being inconsistent and overconfident. Few-shot learning and fine-tuning only partially improve the results, thus posing doubts about the possibility of using LLMs for CTI scenarios, where labelled datasets are lacking and where confidence is a fundamental factor.

Paperid: 6502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22723.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true objective. While human-in-the-loop (HITL) methods can mitigate this issue, they also introduce biases, leading to inconsistent and subjective feedback that complicates learning. To address these challenges, we propose two key contributions. First, we extend the use of zero-shot, off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) for reward shaping beyond natural language processing (NLP) to continuous control tasks. Using LLMs as direct feedback providers eliminates the need for surrogate models trained on human feedback, which often inherit biases from training data. Second, we introduce a hybrid framework (LLM-HFBF) that enables LLMs to identify and correct biases in human feedback while incorporating this feedback into the reward shaping process. The LLM-HFBF framework creates a more balanced and reliable system by addressing both the limitations of LLMs (e.g., lack of domain-specific knowledge) and human supervision (e.g., inherent biases). By enabling human feedback bias flagging and correction, our approach improves reinforcement learning performance and reduces reliance on potentially biased human feedback. Empirical experiments show that biased human feedback significantly reduces performance, with Average Episodic Reward dropping by nearly 94% compared to unbiased approaches. In contrast, LLM-based methods sustain performance at a similar level to unbiased feedback, even in challenging edge-case scenarios.

Paperid: 6503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22197.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Learning(ZSL) attains knowledge transfer from seen classes to unseen classes by exploring auxiliary category information, which is a promising yet difficult research topic. In this field, Audio-Visual Generalized Zero-Shot Learning~(AV-GZSL) has aroused researchers' great interest in which intricate relations within triple modalities~(audio, video, and natural language) render this task quite challenging but highly research-worthy. However, both existing embedding-based and generative-based AV-GZSL methods tend to suffer from domain shift problem a lot and we propose an extremely simple Out-of-distribution~(OOD) detection based AV-GZSL method~(EZ-AVOOD) to further mitigate bias problem by differentiating seen and unseen samples at the initial beginning. EZ-AVOOD accomplishes effective seen-unseen separation by exploiting the intrinsic discriminative information held in class-specific logits and class-agnostic feature subspace without training an extra OOD detector network. Followed by seen-unseen binary classification, we employ two expert models to classify seen samples and unseen samples separately. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves superior ZSL and GZSL performances on three audio-visual datasets and becomes the new SOTA, which comprehensively demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed EZ-AVOOD.

Paperid: 6504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22193.pdf

Abstract:
Convolutional neural networks and supervised learning have achieved remarkable success in various fields but are limited by the need for large annotated datasets. Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses this limitation by enabling models to generalize from only a few labeled examples. Transductive few-shot learning (TFSL) enhances FSL by leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, though it faces challenges like the hubness problem. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Unbiased Max-Min Embedding Classification (UMMEC) Method, which addresses the key challenges in few-shot learning through three innovative contributions. First, we introduce a decentralized covariance matrix to mitigate the hubness problem, ensuring a more uniform distribution of embeddings. Second, our method combines local alignment and global uniformity through adaptive weighting and nonlinear transformation, balancing intra-class clustering with inter-class separation. Third, we employ a Variational Sinkhorn Few-Shot Classifier to optimize the distances between samples and class prototypes, enhancing classification accuracy and robustness. These combined innovations allow the UMMEC method to achieve superior performance with minimal labeled data. Our UMMEC method significantly improves classification performance with minimal labeled data, advancing the state-of-the-art in TFSL.

Paperid: 6505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20903.pdf

Abstract:
Synthetic tabular data generation has emerged as a promising method to address limited data availability and privacy concerns. With the sharp increase in the performance of large language models in recent years, researchers have been interested in applying these models to the generation of tabular data. However, little is known about the quality of the generated tabular data from large language models. The predominant method for assessing the quality of synthetic tabular data is the train-synthetic-test-real approach, where the artificial examples are compared to the original by how well machine learning models, trained separately on the real and synthetic sets, perform in some downstream tasks. This method does not directly measure how closely the distribution of generated data approximates that of the original. This paper introduces rigorous methods for directly assessing synthetic tabular data against real data by looking at inter-column dependencies within the data. We find that large language models (GPT-2), both when queried via few-shot prompting and when fine-tuned, and GAN (CTGAN) models do not produce data with dependencies that mirror the original real data. Results from this study can inform future practice in synthetic data generation to improve data quality.

Paperid: 6506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19599.pdf

Abstract:
While software requirements are often expressed in natural language, verifying the correctness of a program against such requirements is a hard and underexplored problem. Large language models (LLMs) are promising candidates for addressing this challenge, however our experience shows that they are ineffective in this task, often failing to detect even straightforward bugs. To address this gap, we introduce HoarePrompt, a novel approach that adapts fundamental ideas from program verification to natural language artifacts. Inspired from the strongest postcondition calculus, HoarePrompt employs a systematic, step-by-step process in which an LLM generates natural language descriptions of reachable program states at various code points. To manage loops, we propose few-shot-driven k-induction, an adaptation of the k-induction method widely used in model checking. Once program states are described, HoarePrompt leverages the LLM to assess whether the program, annotated with these state descriptions, conforms to the natural language requirements. For evaluating the quality of classifiers of program correctness with respect to natural language requirements, we constructed CoCoClaNeL, a challenging dataset of solutions to programming competition problems. Our experiments show that HoarePrompt improves the MCC by 61% compared to directly using Zero-shot-CoT prompts for correctness classification. Furthermore, HoarePrompt outperforms a classifier that assesses correctness via LLM-based test generation by an MCC increase of 106%. The inductive reasoning mechanism contributes a 26% boost to MCC, underscoring its effectiveness in managing loops.

Paperid: 6507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16444.pdf

Abstract:
Explainable AI (XAI) aims to provide insights into the decisions made by AI models. To date, most XAI approaches provide only one-time, static explanations, which cannot cater to users' diverse knowledge levels and information needs. Conversational explanations have been proposed as an effective method to customize XAI explanations. However, building conversational explanation systems is hindered by the scarcity of training data. Training with synthetic data faces two main challenges: lack of data diversity and hallucination in the generated data. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a repetition penalty to promote data diversity and exploit a hallucination detector to filter out untruthful synthetic conversation turns. We conducted both automatic and human evaluations on the proposed system, fEw-shot Multi-round ConvErsational Explanation (EMCEE). For automatic evaluation, EMCEE achieves relative improvements of 81.6% in BLEU and 80.5% in ROUGE compared to the baselines. EMCEE also mitigates the degeneration of data quality caused by training on synthetic data. In human evaluations (N=60), EMCEE outperforms baseline models and the control group in improving users' comprehension, acceptance, trust, and collaboration with static explanations by large margins. Through a fine-grained analysis of model responses, we further demonstrate that training on self-generated synthetic data improves the model's ability to generate more truthful and understandable answers, leading to better user interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first conversational explanation method that can answer free-form user questions following static explanations.

Paperid: 6508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13693.pdf

Abstract:
In the domain of audio-visual event perception, which focuses on the temporal localization and classification of events across distinct modalities (audio and visual), existing approaches are constrained by the vocabulary available in their training data. This limitation significantly impedes their capacity to generalize to novel, unseen event categories. Furthermore, the annotation process for this task is labor-intensive, requiring extensive manual labeling across modalities and temporal segments, limiting the scalability of current methods. Current state-of-the-art models ignore the shifts in event distributions over time, reducing their ability to adjust to changing video dynamics. Additionally, previous methods rely on late fusion to combine audio and visual information. While straightforward, this approach results in a significant loss of multimodal interactions. To address these challenges, we propose Audio-Visual Adaptive Video Analysis ($\text{AV}^2\text{A}$), a model-agnostic approach that requires no further training and integrates a score-level fusion technique to retain richer multimodal interactions. $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ also includes a within-video label shift algorithm, leveraging input video data and predictions from prior frames to dynamically adjust event distributions for subsequent frames. Moreover, we present the first training-free, open-vocabulary baseline for audio-visual event perception, demonstrating that $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ achieves substantial improvements over naive training-free baselines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of $\text{AV}^2\text{A}$ on both zero-shot and weakly-supervised state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in performance metrics over existing approaches.

Paperid: 6509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10440.pdf

Abstract:
Learning from noisy ordinal labels is a key challenge in medical imaging. In this work, we ask whether ordinal disease progression labels (better, worse, or stable) can be used to learn a representation allowing to classify disease state. For neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), we cast the problem of modeling disease progression between medical visits as a classification task with ordinal ranks. To enhance generalization, we tailor our model to the problem setting by (1) independent image encoding, (2) antisymmetric logit space equivariance, and (3) ordinal scale awareness. In addition, we address label noise by learning an uncertainty estimate for loss re-weighting. Our approach learns an interpretable disease representation enabling strong few-shot performance for the related task of nAMD activity classification from single images, despite being trained only on image pairs with ordinal disease progression labels.

Paperid: 6510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09701.pdf

Abstract:
Supervised learning relies on annotated data, which is expensive to obtain. A longstanding strategy to reduce annotation costs is active learning, an iterative process, in which a human annotates only data instances deemed informative by a model. Large language models (LLMs) have pushed the effectiveness of active learning, while also advancing methods such as few- or zero-shot learning, and text synthesis -- all of which can reduce the need for active learning. This naturally raises the question: has active learning become obsolete? To answer this fully, we must look beyond literature to practical experiences. We conduct an online survey in the NLP community to collect previously intangible insights on the perceived relevance of data annotation, particularly focusing on active learning, including best practices, obstacles, and future prospects. Our findings show that annotated data is expected to remain a key factor and active learning to stay highly relevant while benefiting from LLMs. Consistent with a community survey from over a decade ago, however, we find that three key challenges persist -- setup complexity, risks in the cost reduction, and tooling -- for which we propose alleviation strategies. We publish an anonymized version of the collected dataset.

Paperid: 6511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09011.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes our system for SemEval 2025 Task 7: Previously Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval. The task requires retrieving relevant fact-checks for a given input claim from the extensive, multilingual MultiClaim dataset, which comprises social media posts and fact-checks in several languages. To address this challenge, we first evaluated zero-shot performance using state-of-the-art English and multilingual retrieval models and then fine-tuned the most promising systems, leveraging machine translation to enhance crosslingual retrieval. Our best model achieved an accuracy of 85% on crosslingual data and 92% on monolingual data.

Paperid: 6512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08740.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses the multi-robot pursuit problem for an unknown target, encompassing both target state estimation and pursuit control. First, in state estimation, we focus on using only bearing information, as it is readily available from vision sensors and effective for small, distant targets. Challenges such as instability due to the nonlinearity of bearing measurements and singularities in the two-angle representation are addressed through a proposed uniform bearing-only information filter. This filter integrates multiple 3D bearing measurements, provides a concise formulation, and enhances stability and resilience to target loss caused by limited field of view (FoV). Second, in target pursuit control within complex environments, where challenges such as heterogeneity and limited FoV arise, conventional methods like differential games or Voronoi partitioning often prove inadequate. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework, enabling multiple heterogeneous vehicles to search, localize, and follow a target while effectively handling those challenges. Third, to bridge the sim-to-real gap, we propose two key techniques: incorporating adjustable low-level control gains in training to replicate the dynamics of real-world autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), and proposing spectral-normalized RL algorithms to enhance policy smoothness and robustness. Finally, we demonstrate the successful zero-shot transfer of the MARL controllers to AGVs, validating the effectiveness and practical feasibility of our approach. The accompanying video is available at https://youtu.be/HO7FJyZiJ3E.

Paperid: 6513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08662.pdf

Abstract:
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a historical task in computational linguistics that has received much attention over the years. However, with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), interest in this task (in its classical definition) has decreased. In this study, we evaluate the performance of various LLMs on the WSD task. We extend a previous benchmark (XL-WSD) to re-design two subtasks suitable for LLM: 1) given a word in a sentence, the LLM must generate the correct definition; 2) given a word in a sentence and a set of predefined meanings, the LLM must select the correct one. The extended benchmark is built using the XL-WSD and BabelNet. The results indicate that LLMs perform well in zero-shot learning but cannot surpass current state-of-the-art methods. However, a fine-tuned model with a medium number of parameters outperforms all other models, including the state-of-the-art.

Paperid: 6514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07214.pdf

Abstract:
Existing approaches to zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages have primarily relied on machine translation, whereas more recent methods have shifted focus to phonemic representation. Building upon this, we investigate how reducing the phonemic representation gap in IPA transcription between languages with similar phonetic characteristics enables models trained on high-resource languages to perform effectively on low-resource languages. In this work, we propose CONtrastive Learning with IPA (CONLIPA) dataset containing 10 English and high resource languages IPA pairs from 10 frequently used language families. We also propose a cross-lingual IPA Contrastive learning method (IPAC) using the CONLIPA dataset. Furthermore, our proposed dataset and methodology demonstrate a substantial average gain when compared to the best performing baseline.

Paperid: 6515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07190.pdf

Abstract:
6D object pose estimation for unseen objects is essential in robotics but traditionally relies on trained models that require large datasets, high computational costs, and struggle to generalize. Zero-shot approaches eliminate the need for training but depend on pre-existing 3D object models, which are often impractical to obtain. To address this, we propose a language-guided few-shot 3D reconstruction method, reconstructing a 3D mesh from few input images. In the proposed pipeline, receives a set of input images and a language query. A combination of GroundingDINO and Segment Anything Model outputs segmented masks from which a sparse point cloud is reconstructed with VGGSfM. Subsequently, the mesh is reconstructed with the Gaussian Splatting method SuGAR. In a final cleaning step, artifacts are removed, resulting in the final 3D mesh of the queried object. We evaluate the method in terms of accuracy and quality of the geometry and texture. Furthermore, we study the impact of imaging conditions such as viewing angle, number of input images, and image overlap on 3D object reconstruction quality, efficiency, and computational scalability.

Paperid: 6516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06026.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving zero-shot peg insertion, where inserting an arbitrary peg into an unseen hole without task-specific training, remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. This task demands a highly generalizable perception system capable of detecting potential holes, selecting the correct mating hole from multiple candidates, estimating its precise pose, and executing insertion despite uncertainties. While learning-based methods have been applied to peg insertion, they often fail to generalize beyond the specific peg-hole pairs encountered during training. Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising alternative, leveraging large-scale datasets to enable robust generalization across diverse tasks. Inspired by their success, we introduce a novel zero-shot peg insertion framework that utilizes a VLM to identify mating holes and estimate their poses without prior knowledge of their geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 90.2% accuracy, significantly outperforming baselines in identifying the correct mating hole across a wide range of previously unseen peg-hole pairs, including 3D-printed objects, toy puzzles, and industrial connectors. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our approach in a real-world connector insertion task on a backpanel of a PC, where our system successfully detects holes, identifies the correct mating hole, estimates its pose, and completes the insertion with a success rate of 88.3%. These results highlight the potential of VLM-driven zero-shot reasoning for enabling robust and generalizable robotic assembly.

Paperid: 6517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04973.pdf

Abstract:
Incorporating external knowledge in large language models (LLMs) enhances their utility across diverse applications, but existing methods have trade-offs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) fetches evidence via similarity search, but key information may fall outside top ranked results. Long-context models can process multiple documents but are computationally expensive and limited by context window size. Inspired by students condensing study material for open-book exams, we propose task-aware key-value (KV) cache compression, which compresses external knowledge in a zero- or few-shot setup. This enables LLMs to reason efficiently over a compacted representation of all relevant information. Experiments show our approach outperforms both RAG and task-agnostic compression methods. On LongBench v2, it improves accuracy by up to 7 absolute points over RAG with a 30x compression rate, while reducing inference latency from 0.43s to 0.16s. A synthetic dataset highlights that RAG performs well when sparse evidence suffices, whereas task-aware compression is superior for broad knowledge tasks.

Paperid: 6518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03785.pdf

Abstract:
Limited data is a common problem in remote sensing due to the high cost of obtaining annotated samples. In the few-shot segmentation task, models are typically trained on base classes with abundant annotations and later adapted to novel classes with limited examples. However, this often necessitates specialized model architectures or complex training strategies. Instead, we propose a simple approach that leverages diffusion models to generate diverse variations of novel-class objects within a given scene, conditioned by the limited examples of the novel classes. By framing the problem as an image inpainting task, we synthesize plausible instances of novel classes under various environments, effectively increasing the number of samples for the novel classes and mitigating overfitting. The generated samples are then assessed using a cosine similarity metric to ensure semantic consistency with the novel classes. Additionally, we employ Segment Anything Model (SAM) to segment the generated samples and obtain precise annotations. By using high-quality synthetic data, we can directly fine-tune off-the-shelf segmentation models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances segmentation performance in low-data regimes, highlighting its potential for real-world remote sensing applications.

Paperid: 6519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02365.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a novel question-answering (QA) dataset using echocardiogram reports sourced from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care database. This dataset is specifically designed to enhance QA systems in cardiology, consisting of 771,244 QA pairs addressing a wide array of cardiac abnormalities and their severity. We compare large language models (LLMs), including open-source and biomedical-specific models for zero-shot evaluation, and closed-source models for zero-shot and three-shot evaluation. Our results show that fine-tuning LLMs improves performance across various QA metrics, validating the value of our dataset. Clinicians also qualitatively evaluate the best-performing model to assess the LLM responses for correctness. Further, we conduct fine-grained fairness audits to assess the bias-performance trade-off of LLMs across various social determinants of health. Our objective is to propel the field forward by establishing a benchmark for LLM AI agents aimed at supporting clinicians with cardiac differential diagnoses, thereby reducing the documentation burden that contributes to clinician burnout and enabling healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care.

Paperid: 6520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20843.pdf

Abstract:
For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile manipulation cannot yet generalize across environments with diverse geometries. The main challenge lies in adapting to varying environmental constraints: within a cabinet, the robot must avoid walls and ceilings; to lift objects to the top of a step, the robot must account for the step's pose and extent. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive success in non-prehensile manipulation, accounting for such variability presents a challenge for the generalist policy, as it must learn diverse strategies for each new combination of constraints. To address this, we propose a modular and reconfigurable architecture that adaptively reconfigures network modules based on task requirements. To capture the geometric variability in environments, we extend the contact-based object representation (CORN) to environment geometries, and propose a procedural algorithm for generating diverse environments to train our agent. Taken together, the resulting policy can zero-shot transfer to novel real-world environments and objects despite training entirely within a simulator. We additionally release a simulation-based benchmark featuring nine digital twins of real-world scenes with 353 objects to facilitate non-prehensile manipulation research in realistic domains.

Paperid: 6521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20726.pdf

Abstract:
Language models can be viewed as functions that embed text into Euclidean space, where the quality of the embedding vectors directly determines model performance, training such neural networks involves various uncertainties. This paper focuses on improving the performance of pre-trained language models in zero-shot settings through a simple and easily implementable method. We propose a novel backward attention mechanism to enhance contextual information encoding. Evaluated on the Chinese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (C-MTEB), our approach achieves significant improvements across multiple tasks, providing valuable insights for advancing zero-shot learning capabilities.

Paperid: 6522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20134.pdf

Abstract:
Modern deep neural networks have now reached human-level performance across a variety of tasks. However, unlike humans they lack the ability to explain their decisions by showing where and telling what concepts guided them. In this work, we present a unified framework for transforming any vision neural network into a spatially and conceptually interpretable model. We introduce a spatially-aware concept bottleneck layer that projects "black-box" features of pre-trained backbone models into interpretable concept maps, without requiring human labels. By training a classification layer over this bottleneck, we obtain a self-explaining model that articulates which concepts most influenced its prediction, along with heatmaps that ground them in the input image. Accordingly, we name this method "Spatially-Aware and Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model" (SALF-CBM). Our results show that the proposed SALF-CBM: (1) Outperforms non-spatial CBM methods, as well as the original backbone, on a variety of classification tasks; (2) Produces high-quality spatial explanations, outperforming widely used heatmap-based methods on a zero-shot segmentation task; (3) Facilitates model exploration and debugging, enabling users to query specific image regions and refine the model's decisions by locally editing its concept maps.

Paperid: 6523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18047.pdf

Abstract:
Local alignment between medical images and text is essential for accurate diagnosis, though it remains challenging due to the absence of natural local pairings and the limitations of rigid region recognition methods. Traditional approaches rely on hard boundaries, which introduce uncertainty, whereas medical imaging demands flexible soft region recognition to handle irregular structures. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Progressive Local Alignment Network (PLAN), which designs a novel contrastive learning-based approach for local alignment to establish meaningful word-pixel relationships and introduces a progressive learning strategy to iteratively refine these relationships, enhancing alignment precision and robustness. By combining these techniques, PLAN effectively improves soft region recognition while suppressing noise interference. Extensive experiments on multiple medical datasets demonstrate that PLAN surpasses state-of-the-art methods in phrase grounding, image-text retrieval, object detection, and zero-shot classification, setting a new benchmark for medical image-text alignment.

Paperid: 6524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14969.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose language models are trained to produce varied natural language outputs, but for some tasks, like annotation or classification, we need more specific output formats. LLM systems increasingly support structured output, which enforces formats by sampling tokens according to a grammar -- but also unpredictably reduces downstream performance. Are there systematic differences between grammars that appear semantically (and often visually) similar to humans? To answer this, we test four popular model families with five varying output formats on four common NLP benchmarks. We find all models perform most accurately when guided to use formats respecting convention, such as letters for multiple choice and real numbers for numerical prediction. Performance also improves by 5%-10% when guiding models to return tokens incorporating leading whitespace, with smaller models benefiting the most. We find leading whitespace helps models avoid structural deficiencies in subword token representations. We finally present best practices for researchers using language models as zero-shot classifiers with structured output.

Paperid: 6525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14352.pdf

Abstract:
Structured representations, exemplified by Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), have long been pivotal in computational linguistics. However, their role remains ambiguous in the Large Language Models (LLMs) era. Initial attempts to integrate structured representation into LLMs via a zero-shot setting yielded inferior performance. We hypothesize that such a decline stems from the structure information being passed into LLMs in a code format unfamiliar to LLMs' training corpora. Consequently, we propose SR-LLM, an innovative framework with two settings to explore a superior way of integrating structured representation with LLMs from training-free and training-dependent perspectives. The former integrates structural information through natural language descriptions in LLM prompts, whereas its counterpart augments the model's inference capability through fine-tuning on linguistically described structured representations. Performance improvements were observed in widely downstream datasets, with particularly notable gains of 3.17% and 12.38% in PAWS. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering demonstration that leveraging structural representations can substantially enhance LLMs' inference capability. We hope that our work sheds light and encourages future research to enhance the reasoning and interoperability of LLMs by structure data.

Paperid: 6526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13285.pdf

Abstract:
Modern machine learning methods have recently demonstrated remarkable capability to generalize under task shift, where latent knowledge is transferred to a different, often more difficult, task under a similar data distribution. We investigate this phenomenon in an overparameterized linear regression setting where the task shifts from classification during training to regression during evaluation. In the zero-shot case, wherein no regression data is available, we prove that task shift is impossible in both sparse signal and random signal models for any Gaussian covariate distribution. In the few-shot case, wherein limited regression data is available, we propose a simple postprocessing algorithm which asymptotically recovers the ground-truth predictor. Our analysis leverages a fine-grained characterization of individual parameters arising from minimum-norm interpolation which may be of independent interest. Our results show that while minimum-norm interpolators for classification cannot transfer to regression a priori, they experience surprisingly structured attenuation which enables successful task shift with limited additional data.

Paperid: 6527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10669.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated significant potential in pre-training robust models with limited labeled data, making it particularly valuable for remote sensing (RS) tasks. A common assumption is that pre-training on domain-aligned data provides maximal benefits on downstream tasks, particularly when compared to ImageNet-pretraining (INP). In this work, we investigate this assumption by collecting GeoNet, a large and diverse dataset of global optical Sentinel-2 imagery, and pre-training SwAV and MAE on both GeoNet and ImageNet. Evaluating these models on six downstream tasks in the few-shot setting reveals that SSL pre-training on RS data offers modest performance improvements over INP, and that it remains competitive in multiple scenarios. This indicates that the presumed benefits of SSL pre-training on RS data may be overstated, and the additional costs of data curation and pre-training could be unjustified.

Paperid: 6528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09819.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been enormously successful in solving a wide variety of structured and unstructured generative tasks, but they struggle to generate procedural geometry in Computer Aided Design (CAD). These difficulties arise from an inability to do spatial reasoning and the necessity to guide a model through complex, long range planning to generate complex geometry. We enable generative CAD Design with LLMs through the introduction of a solver-aided, hierarchical domain specific language (DSL) called AIDL, which offloads the spatial reasoning requirements to a geometric constraint solver. Additionally, we show that in the few-shot regime, AIDL outperforms even a language with in-training data (OpenSCAD), both in terms of generating visual results closer to the prompt and creating objects that are easier to post-process and reason about.

Paperid: 6529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08644.pdf

Abstract:
The brain rapidly adapts to new contexts and learns from limited data, a coveted characteristic that artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms struggle to mimic. Inspired by the mechanical oscillatory rhythms of neural cells, we developed a learning paradigm utilizing link strength oscillations, where learning is associated with the coordination of these oscillations. Link oscillations can rapidly change coordination, allowing the network to sense and adapt to subtle contextual changes without supervision. The network becomes a generalist AI architecture, capable of predicting dynamics of multiple contexts including unseen ones. These results make our paradigm a powerful starting point for novel models of cognition. Because our paradigm is agnostic to specifics of the neural network, our study opens doors for introducing rapid adaptive learning into leading AI models.

Paperid: 6530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08009.pdf

Abstract:
Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism behind such flexibility. In this work, we investigate how different prompting methods affect the geometry of representations in these models. Employing a framework grounded in statistical physics, we reveal that various prompting techniques, while achieving similar performance, operate through distinct representational mechanisms for task adaptation. Our analysis highlights the critical role of input distribution samples and label semantics in few-shot in-context learning. We also demonstrate evidence of synergistic and interfering interactions between different tasks on the representational level. Our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of large language models and lays the groundwork for developing more effective, representation-aware prompting strategies.

Paperid: 6531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07140.pdf

Abstract:
We present a method for recovering the shape and radiance of a scene consisting of multiple people given solely a few images. Multi-human scenes are complex due to additional occlusion and clutter. For single-human settings, existing approaches using implicit neural representations have achieved impressive results that deliver accurate geometry and appearance. However, it remains challenging to extend these methods for estimating multiple humans from sparse views. We propose a neural implicit reconstruction method that addresses the inherent challenges of this task through the following contributions: First, we propose to use geometry constraints by exploiting pre-computed meshes using a human body model (SMPL). Specifically, we regularize the signed distances using the SMPL mesh and leverage bounding boxes for improved rendering. Second, we propose a ray regularization scheme to minimize rendering inconsistencies, and a saturation regularization for robust optimization in variable illumination. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the benefits of our approach and show state-of-the-art performance against existing neural reconstruction methods.

Paperid: 6532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06060.pdf

Abstract:
Communicating in natural language is a powerful tool in multi-agent settings, as it enables independent agents to share information in partially observable settings and allows zero-shot coordination with humans. However, most prior works are limited as they either rely on training with large amounts of human demonstrations or lack the ability to generate natural and useful communication strategies. In this work, we train language models to have productive discussions about their environment in natural language without any human demonstrations. We decompose the communication problem into listening and speaking. Our key idea is to leverage the agent's goal to predict useful information about the world as a dense reward signal that guides communication. Specifically, we improve a model's listening skills by training them to predict information about the environment based on discussions, and we simultaneously improve a model's speaking skills with multi-agent reinforcement learning by rewarding messages based on their influence on other agents. To investigate the role and necessity of communication in complex social settings, we study an embodied social deduction game based on Among Us, where the key question to answer is the identity of an adversarial imposter. We analyze emergent behaviors due to our technique, such as accusing suspects and providing evidence, and find that it enables strong discussions, doubling the win rates compared to standard RL. We release our code and models at https://socialdeductionllm.github.io/

Paperid: 6533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05970.pdf

Abstract:
Discovery of high-performance materials and molecules requires identifying extremes with property values that fall outside the known distribution. Therefore, the ability to extrapolate to out-of-distribution (OOD) property values is critical for both solid-state materials and molecular design. Our objective is to train predictor models that extrapolate zero-shot to higher ranges than in the training data, given the chemical compositions of solids or molecular graphs and their property values. We propose using a transductive approach to OOD property prediction, achieving improvements in prediction accuracy. In particular, the True Positive Rate (TPR) of OOD classification of materials and molecules improved by 3x and 2.5x, respectively, and precision improved by 2x and 1.5x compared to non-transductive baselines. Our method leverages analogical input-target relations in the training and test sets, enabling generalization beyond the training target support, and can be applied to any other material and molecular tasks.

Paperid: 6534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19232.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot cross-domain sequential recommendation (ZCDSR) enables predictions in unseen domains without additional training or fine-tuning, addressing the limitations of traditional models in sparse data environments. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced ZCDSR by facilitating cross-domain knowledge transfer through rich, pretrained representations. Despite this progress, domain semantic bias -- arising from differences in vocabulary and content focus between domains -- remains a persistent challenge, leading to misaligned item embeddings and reduced generalization across domains. To address this, we propose a novel semantic bias-aware framework that enhances LLM-based ZCDSR by improving cross-domain alignment at both the item and sequential levels. At the item level, we introduce a generalization loss that aligns the embeddings of items across domains (inter-domain compactness), while preserving the unique characteristics of each item within its own domain (intra-domain diversity). This ensures that item embeddings can be transferred effectively between domains without collapsing into overly generic or uniform representations. At the sequential level, we develop a method to transfer user behavioral patterns by clustering source domain user sequences and applying attention-based aggregation during target domain inference. We dynamically adapt user embeddings to unseen domains, enabling effective zero-shot recommendations without requiring target-domain interactions...

Paperid: 6535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18864.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation of pre-trained vision-language models has emerged as a technique for tackling distribution shifts during the test time. Although existing methods, especially those based on Test-time Prompt Tuning (TPT), have shown promising results, their high computational cost associated with parameter optimization presents challenges for scalability and practical application. This paper unveils the unnecessary nature of backpropagation in existing methods from a loss landscape perspective. Building on this insight, this paper proposes a simple yet effective framework called Test-time Loss Landscape Adaptation (TLLA). TLLA leverages the relative position between the training minimum and test loss landscapes to guide the adaptation process, avoiding the update of model parameters at test time. Specifically, it mainly consists of two main stages: In the prompt tuning stage, a Sharpness-Aware Prompt Tuning (SAPT) method is introduced to identify the training flat minimum, setting the foundation for the subsequent test-time adaptation; In the test stage, a Sharpness-based Test Sample Selection (STSS) approach is utilized to ensure the alignment of flat minima within the training loss landscape and each augmented test sample's loss landscape. Extensive experiments on both domain generalization and cross-dataset benchmarks demonstrate that TLLA achieves state-of-the-art performances while significantly reducing computational overhead. Notably, TLLA surpasses TPT by an average of 5.32\% and 6.98\% on four ImageNet variant datasets when employing ResNet50 and ViT-B/16 image encoders, respectively. The code will be available soon.

Paperid: 6536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18089.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-subject variability in EEG degrades performance of current deep learning models, limiting the development of brain-computer interface (BCI). This paper proposes ISAM-MTL, which is a multi-task learning (MTL) EEG classification model based on identifiable spiking (IS) representations and associative memory (AM) networks. The proposed model treats EEG classification of each subject as an independent task and leverages cross-subject data training to facilitate feature sharing across subjects. ISAM-MTL consists of a spiking feature extractor that captures shared features across subjects and a subject-specific bidirectional associative memory network that is trained by Hebbian learning for efficient and fast within-subject EEG classification. ISAM-MTL integrates learned spiking neural representations with bidirectional associative memory for cross-subject EEG classification. The model employs label-guided variational inference to construct identifiable spike representations, enhancing classification accuracy. Experimental results on two BCI Competition datasets demonstrate that ISAM-MTL improves the average accuracy of cross-subject EEG classification while reducing performance variability among subjects. The model further exhibits the characteristics of few-shot learning and identifiable neural activity beneath EEG, enabling rapid and interpretable calibration for BCI systems.

Paperid: 6537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17767.pdf

Abstract:
Answering questions that require reasoning and aggregation across both structured (tables) and unstructured (raw text) data sources presents significant challenges. Current methods rely on fine-tuning and high-quality, human-curated data, which is difficult to obtain. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results for multi-hop question answering (QA) over single-source text data in a zero-shot setting, yet exploration into multi-source Table-Text QA remains limited. In this paper, we present a novel Hybrid Graph-based approach for Table-Text QA that leverages LLMs without fine-tuning. Our method constructs a unified Hybrid Graph from textual and tabular data, pruning information based on the input question to provide the LLM with relevant context concisely. We evaluate our approach on the challenging Hybrid-QA and OTT-QA datasets using state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMA-3. Our method achieves the best zero-shot performance on both datasets, improving Exact Match scores by up to 10% on Hybrid-QA and 5.4% on OTT-QA. Moreover, our approach reduces token usage by up to 53% compared to the original context.

Paperid: 6538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17510.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional depression screening methods, such as the PHQ-9, are particularly challenging for children in pediatric primary care due to practical limitations. AI has the potential to help, but the scarcity of annotated datasets in mental health, combined with the computational costs of training, highlights the need for efficient, zero-shot approaches. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of state-of-the-art LLMs for depressive symptom extraction in pediatric settings (ages 6-24). This approach aims to complement traditional screening and minimize diagnostic errors. Our findings show that all LLMs are 60% more efficient than word match, with Flan leading in precision (average F1: 0.65, precision: 0.78), excelling in the extraction of more rare symptoms like "sleep problems" (F1: 0.92) and "self-loathing" (F1: 0.8). Phi strikes a balance between precision (0.44) and recall (0.60), performing well in categories like "Feeling depressed" (0.69) and "Weight change" (0.78). Llama 3, with the highest recall (0.90), overgeneralizes symptoms, making it less suitable for this type of analysis. Challenges include the complexity of clinical notes and overgeneralization from PHQ-9 scores. The main challenges faced by LLMs include navigating the complex structure of clinical notes with content from different times in the patient trajectory, as well as misinterpreting elevated PHQ-9 scores. We finally demonstrate the utility of symptom annotations provided by Flan as features in an ML algorithm, which differentiates depression cases from controls with high precision of 0.78, showing a major performance boost compared to a baseline that does not use these features.

Paperid: 6539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16884.pdf

Abstract:
The generalisation of irony detection faces significant challenges, leading to substantial performance deviations when detection models are applied to diverse real-world scenarios. In this study, we find that irony-focused prompts, as generated from our IDADP framework for LLMs, can not only overcome dataset-specific limitations but also generate coherent, human-readable reasoning, transforming ironic text into its intended meaning. Based on our findings and in-depth analysis, we identify several promising directions for future research aimed at enhancing LLMs' zero-shot capabilities in irony detection, reasoning, and comprehension. These include advancing contextual awareness in irony detection, exploring hybrid symbolic-neural methods, and integrating multimodal data, among others.

Paperid: 6540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15106.pdf

Abstract:
We study operator learning in the context of linear propagator models for optimal order execution problems with transient price impact Ã la Bouchaud et al. (2004) and Gatheral (2010). Transient price impact persists and decays over time according to some propagator kernel. Specifically, we propose to use In-Context Operator Networks (ICON), a novel transformer-based neural network architecture introduced by Yang et al. (2023), which facilitates data-driven learning of operators by merging offline pre-training with an online few-shot prompting inference. First, we train ICON to learn the operator from various propagator models that maps the trading rate to the induced transient price impact. The inference step is then based on in-context prediction, where ICON is presented only with a few examples. We illustrate that ICON is capable of accurately inferring the underlying price impact model from the data prompts, even with propagator kernels not seen in the training data. In a second step, we employ the pre-trained ICON model provided with context as a surrogate operator in solving an optimal order execution problem via a neural network control policy, and demonstrate that the exact optimal execution strategies from Abi Jaber and Neuman (2022) for the models generating the context are correctly retrieved. Our introduced methodology is very general, offering a new approach to solving optimal stochastic control problems with unknown state dynamics, inferred data-efficiently from a limited number of examples by leveraging the few-shot and transfer learning capabilities of transformer networks.

Paperid: 6541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10809.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence in poultry farming has highlighted the challenge of efficiently labeling large, diverse datasets. Manual annotation is time-consuming and costly, making it impractical for modern systems that continuously generate data. This study addresses this challenge by exploring semi-supervised auto-labeling methods, integrating self and active learning approaches to develop an efficient, label-scarce framework for auto-labeling large poultry datasets (ALPD). For this study, video data were collected from broilers and laying hens housed. Various machine learning models, including zero-shot models and supervised models, were utilized for broilers and hens detection. The results showed that YOLOv8s-World and YOLOv9s performed better when compared performance metrics for broiler and hen detection under supervised learning, while among the semi-supervised model, YOLOv8s-ALPD achieved the highest precision (96.1%) and recall (99%) with an RMSE of 1.87. The hybrid YOLO-World model, incorporating the optimal YOLOv8s backbone with zero-shot models, demonstrated the highest overall performance. It achieved a precision of 99.2%, recall of 99.4%, and an F1 score of 98.7% for detection. In addition, the semi-supervised models with minimal human intervention (active learning) reduced annotation time by over 80% compared to full manual labeling. Moreover, integrating zero-shot models with the best models enhanced broiler and hen detection, achieving comparable results to supervised models while significantly increasing speed. In conclusion, integrating semi-supervised auto-labeling and zero-shot models significantly improves detection accuracy. It reduces manual annotation efforts, offering a promising solution to optimize AI-driven systems in poultry farming, advancing precision livestock management, and promoting more sustainable practices.

Paperid: 6542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09138.pdf

Abstract:
Vision foundation models have achieved remarkable progress across various image analysis tasks. In the image segmentation task, foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) enable generalizable zero-shot segmentation through user-provided prompts. However, SAM primarily trained on natural images, lacks the domain-specific expertise of medical imaging. This limitation poses challenges when applying SAM to medical image segmentation, including the need for extensive fine-tuning on specialized medical datasets and a dependency on manual prompts, which are both labor-intensive and require intervention from medical experts. This work introduces the Few-shot Adaptation of Training-frEe SAM (FATE-SAM), a novel method designed to adapt the advanced Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for 3D medical image segmentation. FATE-SAM reassembles pre-trained modules of SAM2 to enable few-shot adaptation, leveraging a small number of support examples to capture anatomical knowledge and perform prompt-free segmentation, without requiring model fine-tuning. To handle the volumetric nature of medical images, we incorporate a Volumetric Consistency mechanism that enhances spatial coherence across 3D slices. We evaluate FATE-SAM on multiple medical imaging datasets and compare it with supervised learning methods, zero-shot SAM approaches, and fine-tuned medical SAM methods. Results show that FATE-SAM delivers robust and accurate segmentation while eliminating the need for large annotated datasets and expert intervention. FATE-SAM provides a practical, efficient solution for medical image segmentation, making it more accessible for clinical applications.

Paperid: 6543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06946.pdf

Abstract:
This paper reports on learning a reward map for social navigation in dynamic environments where the robot can reason about its path at any time, given agents' trajectories and scene geometry. Humans navigating in dense and dynamic indoor environments often work with several implied social rules. A rule-based approach fails to model all possible interactions between humans, robots, and scenes. We propose a novel Smooth Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (S-MEDIRL) algorithm that can extrapolate beyond expert demos to better encode scene navigability from few-shot demonstrations. The agent learns to predict the cost maps reasoning on trajectory data and scene geometry. The agent samples a trajectory that is then executed using a local crowd navigation controller. We present results in a photo-realistic simulation environment, with a robot and a human navigating a narrow crossing scenario. The robot implicitly learns to exhibit social behaviors such as yielding to oncoming traffic and avoiding deadlocks. We compare the proposed approach to the popular model-based crowd navigation algorithm ORCA and a rule-based agent that exhibits yielding.

Paperid: 6544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06039.pdf

Abstract:
Spatial proteomics technologies have transformed our understanding of complex tissue architecture in cancer but present unique challenges for computational analysis. Each study uses a different marker panel and protocol, and most methods are tailored to single cohorts, which limits knowledge transfer and robust biomarker discovery. Here we present Virtual Tissues (VirTues), a general-purpose foundation model for spatial proteomics that learns marker-aware, multi-scale representations of proteins, cells, niches and tissues directly from multiplex imaging data. From a single pretrained backbone, VirTues supports marker reconstruction, cell typing and niche annotation, spatial biomarker discovery, and patient stratification, including zero-shot annotation across heterogeneous panels and datasets. In triple-negative breast cancer, VirTues-derived biomarkers predict anti-PD-L1 chemo-immunotherapy response and stratify disease-free survival in an independent cohort, outperforming state-of-the-art biomarkers derived from the same datasets and current clinical stratification schemes.

Paperid: 6545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04288.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning models, meticulously optimized for source data, often fail to predict target data when faced with distribution shifts (DSs). Previous benchmarking studies, though extensive, have mainly focused on simple DSs. Recognizing that DSs often occur in more complex forms in real-world scenarios, we broadened our study to include multiple concurrent shifts, such as unseen domain shifts combined with spurious correlations. We evaluated 26 algorithms that range from simple heuristic augmentations to zero-shot inference using foundation models, across 168 source-target pairs from eight datasets. Our analysis of over 100K models reveals that (i) concurrent DSs typically worsen performance compared to a single shift, with certain exceptions, (ii) if a model improves generalization for one distribution shift, it tends to be effective for others, and (iii) heuristic data augmentations achieve the best overall performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Paperid: 6546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02964.pdf

Abstract:
Complex visual reasoning remains a key challenge today. Typically, the challenge is tackled using methodologies such as Chain of Thought (COT) and visual instruction tuning. However, how to organically combine these two methodologies for greater success remains unexplored. Also, issues like hallucinations and high training cost still need to be addressed. In this work, we devise an innovative multi-round training and reasoning framework suitable for lightweight Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Our self-questioning approach heuristically guides MLLMs to focus on visual clues relevant to the target problem, reducing hallucinations and enhancing the model's ability to describe fine-grained image details. This ultimately enables the model to perform well in complex visual reasoning and question-answering tasks. We have named this framework Socratic Questioning(SQ). To facilitate future research, we create a multimodal mini-dataset named CapQA, which includes 1k images of fine-grained activities, for visual instruction tuning and evaluation, our proposed SQ method leads to a 31.2% improvement in the hallucination score. Our extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate SQ's remarkable capabilities in heuristic self-questioning, zero-shot visual reasoning and hallucination mitigation. Our model and code will be publicly available.

Paperid: 6547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18082.pdf

Abstract:
The item cold-start problem is crucial for online recommender systems, as the success of the cold-start phase determines whether items can transition into popular ones. Prompt learning, a powerful technique used in natural language processing (NLP) to address zero- or few-shot problems, has been adapted for recommender systems to tackle similar challenges. However, existing methods typically rely on content-based properties or text descriptions for prompting, which we argue may be suboptimal for cold-start recommendations due to 1) semantic gaps with recommender tasks, 2) model bias caused by warm-up items contribute most of the positive feedback to the model, which is the core of the cold-start problem that hinders the recommender quality on cold-start items. We propose to leverage high-value positive feedback, termed pinnacle feedback as prompt information, to simultaneously resolve the above two problems. We experimentally prove that compared to the content description proposed in existing works, the positive feedback is more suitable to serve as prompt information by bridging the semantic gaps. Besides, we propose item-wise personalized prompt networks to encode pinnaclce feedback to relieve the model bias by the positive feedback dominance problem. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, PROMO has been successfully deployed on a popular short-video sharing platform, a billion-user scale commercial short-video application, achieving remarkable performance gains across various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios

Paperid: 6548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17970.pdf

Abstract:
Causal reasoning capabilities are essential for large language models (LLMs) in a wide range of applications, such as education and healthcare. But there is still a lack of benchmarks for a better understanding of such capabilities. Current LLM benchmarks are mainly based on conversational tasks, academic math tests, and coding tests. Such benchmarks evaluate LLMs in well-regularized settings, but they are limited in assessing the skills and abilities to solve real-world problems. In this work, we provide a benchmark, named by CARL-GT, which evaluates CAusal Reasoning capabilities of large Language models using Graphs and Tabular data. The benchmark has a diverse range of tasks for evaluating LLMs from causal graph reasoning, knowledge discovery, and decision-making aspects. In addition, effective zero-shot learning prompts are developed for the tasks. In our experiments, we leverage the benchmark for evaluating open-source LLMs and provide a detailed comparison of LLMs for causal reasoning abilities. We found that LLMs are still weak in casual reasoning, especially with tabular data to discover new insights. Furthermore, we investigate and discuss the relationships of different benchmark tasks by analyzing the performance of LLMs. The experimental results show that LLMs have different strength over different tasks and that their performance on tasks in different categories, i.e., causal graph reasoning, knowledge discovery, and decision-making, shows stronger correlation than tasks in the same category.

Paperid: 6549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17285.pdf

Abstract:
Advances in time-series forecasting are driving a shift from conventional machine learning models to foundation models (FMs) that are trained with generalized knowledge. However, existing FMs still perform poorly in the energy fields, such as building energy forecasting (BEF). This paper studies the adaptation of FM to BEF tasks. We demonstrate the shortcomings of fine-tuning FM straightforwardly from both the perspectives of FM and the data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new \textit{contrastive curriculum learning}-based training method. Our method optimizes the ordering of training data in the context of TSFM adaptation. Experiments show that our method can improve the zero/few-shot performance by 14.6\% compared to the existing FMs. Our code and new TSFM will be available at .

Paperid: 6550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16202.pdf

Abstract:
We generalize the formulation of few-shot learning by introducing the concept of an aspect. In the traditional formulation of few-shot learning, there is an underlying assumption that a single "true" label defines the content of each data point. This label serves as a basis for the comparison between the query object and the objects in the support set. However, when a human expert is asked to execute the same task without a predefined set of labels, they typically consider the rest of the data points in the support set as context. This context specifies the level of abstraction and the aspect from which the comparison can be made. In this work, we introduce a novel architecture and training procedure that develops a context given the query and support set and implements aspect-based few-shot learning that is not limited to a predetermined set of classes. We demonstrate that our method is capable of forming and using an aspect for few-shot learning on the Geometric Shapes and Sprites dataset. The results validate the feasibility of our approach compared to traditional few-shot learning.

Paperid: 6551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12852.pdf

Abstract:
Code explanation plays a crucial role in the software engineering domain, aiding developers in grasping code functionality efficiently. Recent work shows that the performance of LLMs for code explanation improves in a few-shot setting, especially when the few-shot examples are selected intelligently. State-of-the-art approaches for such Selective Shot Learning (SSL) include token-based and embedding-based methods. However, these SSL approaches have been evaluated on proprietary LLMs, without much exploration on open-source Code-LLMs. Additionally, these methods lack consideration for programming language syntax. To bridge these gaps, we present a comparative study and propose a novel SSL method (SSL_ner) that utilizes entity information for few-shot example selection. We present several insights and show the effectiveness of SSL_ner approach over state-of-the-art methods across two datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic benchmarking of open-source Code-LLMs while assessing the performances of the various few-shot examples selection approaches for the code explanation task.

Paperid: 6552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12226.pdf

Abstract:
Encoding time series into tokens and using language models for processing has been shown to substantially augment the models' ability to generalize to unseen tasks. However, existing language models for time series forecasting encounter several obstacles, including aliasing distortion and prolonged inference times, primarily due to the limitations of quantization processes and the computational demands of large models. This paper introduces Apollo-Forecast, a novel framework that tackles these challenges with two key innovations: the Anti-Aliasing Quantization Module (AAQM) and the Race Decoding (RD) technique. AAQM adeptly encodes sequences into tokens while mitigating high-frequency noise in the original signals, thus enhancing both signal fidelity and overall quantization efficiency. RD employs a draft model to enable parallel processing and results integration, which markedly accelerates the inference speed for long-term predictions, particularly in large-scale models. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show that Apollo-Forecast outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 35.41\% and 18.99\% in WQL and MASE metrics, respectively, in zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, our method achieves a 1.9X-2.7X acceleration in inference speed over baseline methods.

Paperid: 6553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09263.pdf

Abstract:
Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks require identifying the relationship between sentence pairs, typically classified as entailment, contradiction, or neutrality. While the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, Entailment Few-Shot Learning (EFL), achieves a 93.1% accuracy on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, further advancements are constrained by the dataset's limitations. To address this, we propose a novel approach leveraging synthetic data augmentation to enhance dataset diversity and complexity. We present UnitedSynT5, an advanced extension of EFL that leverages a T5-based generator to synthesize additional premise-hypothesis pairs, which are rigorously cleaned and integrated into the training data. These augmented examples are processed within the EFL framework, embedding labels directly into hypotheses for consistency. We train a GTR-T5-XL model on this expanded dataset, achieving a new benchmark of 94.7% accuracy on the SNLI dataset, 94.0% accuracy on the E-SNLI dataset, and 92.6% accuracy on the MultiNLI dataset, surpassing the previous SOTA models. This research demonstrates the potential of synthetic data augmentation in improving NLI models, offering a path forward for further advancements in natural language understanding tasks.

Paperid: 6554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08169.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has made significant strides, particularly with the advent of multimodal models that integrate vision and language understanding. However, existing VQA datasets often overlook the complexities introduced by image illusions, which pose unique challenges for both human perception and model interpretation. In this study, we introduce a novel task called Illusory VQA, along with four specialized datasets: IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, IllusionAnimals, and IllusionChar. These datasets are designed to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art multimodal models in recognizing and interpreting visual illusions. We assess the zero-shot performance of various models, fine-tune selected models on our datasets, and propose a simple yet effective solution for illusion detection using Gaussian and blur low-pass filters. We show that this method increases the performance of models significantly and in the case of BLIP-2 on IllusionAnimals without any fine-tuning, it outperforms humans. Our findings highlight the disparity between human and model perception of illusions and demonstrate that fine-tuning and specific preprocessing techniques can significantly enhance model robustness. This work contributes to the development of more human-like visual understanding in multimodal models and suggests future directions for adapting filters using learnable parameters.

Paperid: 6555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07743.pdf

Abstract:
Manual assignment of Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes to prescription records is a significant bottleneck in healthcare research and operations at Ontario Health and InterRAI Canada, requiring extensive expert time and effort. To automate this process while maintaining data privacy, we develop a practical approach using locally deployable large language models (LLMs). Inspired by recent advances in automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding, our method frames ATC coding as a hierarchical information extraction task, guiding LLMs through the ATC ontology level by level. We evaluate our approach using GPT-4o as an accuracy ceiling and focus development on open-source Llama models suitable for privacy-sensitive deployment. Testing across Health Canada drug product data, the RABBITS benchmark, and real clinical notes from Ontario Health, our method achieves 78% exact match accuracy with GPT-4o and 60% with Llama 3.1 70B. We investigate knowledge grounding through drug definitions, finding modest improvements in accuracy. Further, we show that fine-tuned Llama 3.1 8B matches zero-shot Llama 3.1 70B accuracy, suggesting that effective ATC coding is feasible with smaller models. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of automatic ATC coding in privacy-sensitive healthcare environments, providing a foundation for future deployments.

Paperid: 6556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06138.pdf

Abstract:
In Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC), distinguishing highly similar subcategories remains a formidable challenge, often necessitating datasets with extensive variability. The acquisition and annotation of such FGVC datasets are notably difficult and costly, demanding specialized knowledge to identify subtle distinctions among closely related categories. Our study introduces a novel approach employing the Sequence Latent Diffusion Model (SLDM) for augmenting FGVC datasets, called Sequence Generative Image Augmentation (SGIA). Our method features a unique Bridging Transfer Learning (BTL) process, designed to minimize the domain gap between real and synthetically augmented data. This approach notably surpasses existing methods in generating more realistic image samples, providing a diverse range of pose transformations that extend beyond the traditional rigid transformations and style changes in generative augmentation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our augmented dataset with substantial improvements in FGVC tasks on various datasets, models, and training strategies, especially in few-shot learning scenarios. Our method outperforms conventional image augmentation techniques in benchmark tests on three FGVC datasets, showcasing superior realism, variability, and representational quality. Our work sets a new benchmark and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models in classification accuracy by 0.5% for the CUB-200-2011 dataset and advances the application of generative models in FGVC data augmentation.

Paperid: 6557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04642.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective on tabular prediction tasks in the low-data regime, leveraging their internal knowledge and ability to learn from instructions and examples. However, LLMs can fail to generate predictions that satisfy group fairness, that is, produce equitable outcomes across groups. Critically, conventional debiasing approaches for natural language tasks do not directly translate to mitigating group unfairness in tabular settings. In this work, we systematically investigate four empirical approaches to improve group fairness of LLM predictions on tabular datasets, including fair prompt optimization, soft prompt tuning, strategic selection of few-shot examples, and self-refining predictions via chain-of-thought reasoning. Through experiments on four tabular datasets using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, we show the effectiveness of these methods in enhancing demographic parity while maintaining high overall performance. Our analysis provides actionable insights for practitioners in selecting the most suitable approach based on their specific requirements and constraints.

Paperid: 6558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04485.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular for generating RTL code. However, producing error-free RTL code in a zero-shot setting remains highly challenging for even state-of-the-art LLMs, often leading to issues that require manual, iterative refinement. This additional debugging process can dramatically increase the verification workload, underscoring the need for robust, automated correction mechanisms to ensure code correctness from the start. In this work, we introduce AIvril2, a self-verifying, LLM-agnostic agentic framework aimed at enhancing RTL code generation through iterative corrections of both syntax and functional errors. Our approach leverages a collaborative multi-agent system that incorporates feedback from error logs generated by EDA tools to automatically identify and resolve design flaws. Experimental results, conducted on the VerilogEval-Human benchmark suite, demonstrate that our framework significantly improves code quality, achieving nearly a 3.4$\times$ enhancement over prior methods. In the best-case scenario, functional pass rates of 77% for Verilog and 66% for VHDL were obtained, thus substantially improving the reliability of LLM-driven RTL code generation.

Paperid: 6559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04083.pdf

Abstract:
Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (OW-CZSL) addresses the challenge of recognizing novel compositions of known primitives and entities. Even though prior works utilize language knowledge for recognition, such approaches exhibit limited interactions between language-image modalities. Our approach primarily focuses on enhancing the inter-modality interactions through fostering richer interactions between image and textual data. Additionally, we introduce a novel module aimed at alleviating the computational burden associated with exhaustive exploration of all possible compositions during the inference stage. While previous methods exclusively learn compositions jointly or independently, we introduce an advanced hybrid procedure that leverages both learning mechanisms to generate final predictions. Our proposed model, achieves state-of-the-art in OW-CZSL in three datasets, while surpassing Large Vision Language Models (LLVM) in two datasets.

Paperid: 6560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02775.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we develop and assess new corpus selection and training methodologies to improve the effectiveness of Turkish language models. Specifically, we adapted Large Language Model generated datasets and translated English datasets into Turkish, integrating these resources into the training process. This approach led to substantial enhancements in model accuracy for both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios. Furthermore, the merging of these adapted models was found to markedly improve their performance. Human evaluative metrics, including task-specific performance assessments, further demonstrated that these adapted models possess a greater aptitude for comprehending the Turkish language and addressing logic-based queries. This research underscores the importance of refining corpus selection strategies to optimize the performance of multilingual models, particularly for under-resourced languages like Turkish.

Paperid: 6561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01244.pdf

Abstract:
As large-scale diffusion models continue to advance, they excel at producing high-quality images but often generate unwanted content, such as sexually explicit or violent content. Existing methods for concept removal generally guide the image generation process but can unintentionally modify unrelated regions, leading to inconsistencies with the original model. We propose a novel approach for targeted concept replacing in diffusion models, enabling specific concepts to be removed without affecting non-target areas. Our method introduces a dedicated concept localizer for precisely identifying the target concept during the denoising process, trained with few-shot learning to require minimal labeled data. Within the identified region, we introduce a training-free Dual Prompts Cross-Attention (DPCA) module to substitute the target concept, ensuring minimal disruption to surrounding content. We evaluate our method on concept localization precision and replacement efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior precision in localizing target concepts and performs coherent concept replacement with minimal impact on non-target areas, outperforming existing approaches.

Paperid: 6562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00426.pdf

Abstract:
Named-entity recognition (NER) is a task that typically requires large annotated datasets, which limits its applicability across domains with varying entity definitions. This paper addresses few-shot NER, aiming to transfer knowledge to new domains with minimal supervision. Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on limited annotated data, we propose a weakly supervised algorithm that combines small labeled datasets with large amounts of unlabeled data. Our method extends the k-means algorithm with label supervision, cluster size constraints and domain-specific discriminative subspace selection. This unified framework achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot NER on several English datasets.

Paperid: 6563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00121.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) recognizes new combinations by learning from known attribute-object pairs. However, the main challenge of this task lies in the complex interactions between attributes and object visual representations, which lead to significant differences in images. In addition, the long-tail label distribution in the real world makes the recognition task more complicated. To address these problems, we propose a novel method, named Hybrid Discriminative Attribute-Object Embedding (HDA-OE) network. To increase the variability of training data, HDA-OE introduces an attribute-driven data synthesis (ADDS) module. ADDS generates new samples with diverse attribute labels by combining multiple attributes of the same object. By expanding the attribute space in the dataset, the model is encouraged to learn and distinguish subtle differences between attributes. To further improve the discriminative ability of the model, HDA-OE introduces the subclass-driven discriminative embedding (SDDE) module, which enhances the subclass discriminative ability of the encoding by embedding subclass information in a fine-grained manner, helping to capture the complex dependencies between attributes and object visual features. The proposed model has been evaluated on three benchmark datasets, and the results verify its effectiveness and reliability.

Paperid: 6564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00120.pdf

Abstract:
Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) relies on free-hand sketches to retrieve natural photos within the same class. However, its practical application is limited by its inability to retrieve classes absent from the training set. To address this limitation, the task has evolved into Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where model performance is evaluated on unseen categories. Traditional SBIR primarily focuses on narrowing the domain gap between photo and sketch modalities. However, in the zero-shot setting, the model not only needs to address this cross-modal discrepancy but also requires a strong generalization capability to transfer knowledge to unseen categories. To this end, we propose a novel framework for ZS-SBIR that employs a pair-based relation-aware quadruplet loss to bridge feature gaps. By incorporating two negative samples from different modalities, the approach prevents positive features from becoming disproportionately distant from one modality while remaining close to another, thus enhancing inter-class separability. We also propose a Relation-Aware Meta-Learning Network (RAMLN) to obtain the margin, a hyper-parameter of cross-modal quadruplet loss, to improve the generalization ability of the model. RAMLN leverages external memory to store feature information, which it utilizes to assign optimal margin values. Experimental results obtained on the extended Sketchy and TU-Berlin datasets show a sharp improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods in ZS-SBIR.

Paperid: 6565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19210.pdf

Abstract:
We present Track Anything Behind Everything (TABE), a novel dataset, pipeline, and evaluation framework for zero-shot amodal completion from visible masks. Unlike existing methods that require pretrained class labels, our approach uses a single query mask from the first frame where the object is visible, enabling flexible, zero-shot inference. Our dataset, TABE-51 provides highly accurate ground truth amodal segmentation masks without the need for human estimation or 3D reconstruction. Our TABE pipeline is specifically designed to handle amodal completion, even in scenarios where objects are completely occluded. We also introduce a specialised evaluation framework that isolates amodal completion performance, free from the influence of traditional visual segmentation metrics.

Paperid: 6566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17195.pdf

Abstract:
Visual servo techniques guide robotic motion using visual information to accomplish manipulation tasks, requiring high precision and robustness against noise. Traditional methods often require prior knowledge and are susceptible to external disturbances. Learning-driven alternatives, while promising, frequently struggle with the scarcity of training data and fall short in generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel visual servo framework Depth-PC that leverages simulation training and exploits semantic and geometric information of keypoints from images, enabling zero-shot transfer to real-world servo tasks. Our framework focuses on the servo controller which intertwines keypoint feature queries and relative depth information. Subsequently, the fused features from these two modalities are then processed by a Graph Neural Network to establish geometric and semantic correspondence between keypoints and update the robot state. Through simulation and real-world experiments, our approach demonstrates superior convergence basin and accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods, fulfilling the requirements for robotic servo tasks while enabling zero-shot application to real-world scenarios. In addition to the enhancements achieved with our proposed framework, we have also substantiated the efficacy of cross-modality feature fusion within the realm of servo tasks.

Paperid: 6567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13599.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success recently, displaying exceptional capabilities in creating understandable and organized text. These LLMs have been utilized in diverse fields, such as clinical research, where domain-specific models like Med-Palm have achieved human-level performance. Recently, researchers have employed advanced prompt engineering to enhance the general reasoning ability of LLMs. Despite the remarkable success of zero-shot Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) in solving general reasoning tasks, the potential of these methods still remains paid limited attention in the financial reasoning task.To address this issue, we explore multiple prompt strategies and incorporated semantic news information to improve LLMs' performance on financial reasoning tasks.To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore this important issue by applying ChatGPT to the gold investment.In this work, our aim is to investigate the financial reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their capacity to generate logical and persuasive investment opinions. We will use ChatGPT, one of the most powerful LLMs recently, and prompt engineering to achieve this goal. Our research will focus on understanding the ability of LLMs in sophisticated analysis and reasoning within the context of investment decision-making. Our study finds that ChatGPT with CoT prompt can provide more explainable predictions and overcome behavioral biases, which is crucial in finance-related tasks and can achieve higher investment returns.

Paperid: 6568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11917.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the target object in a query image using only a small set of support images and masks. Therefore, having strong prior information for the target object using the support set is essential for guiding the initial training of FSS, which leads to the success of few-shot segmentation in challenging cases, such as when the target object shows considerable variation in appearance, texture, or scale across the support and query images. Previous methods have tried to obtain prior information by creating correlation maps from pixel-level correlation on final-layer or same-layer features. However, we found these approaches can offer limited and partial information when advanced models like Vision Transformers are used as the backbone. Vision Transformer encoders have a multi-layer structure with identical shapes in their intermediate layers. Leveraging the feature comparison from all layers in the encoder can enhance the performance of few-shot segmentation. We introduce FCC (Fully Connected Correlation) to integrate pixel-level correlations between support and query features, capturing associations that reveal target-specific patterns and correspondences in both same-layers and cross-layers. FCC captures previously inaccessible target information, effectively addressing the limitations of support mask. Our approach consistently demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL, COCO, and domain shift tests. We conducted an ablation study and cross-layer correlation analysis to validate FCC's core methodology. These findings reveal the effectiveness of FCC in enhancing prior information and overall model performance.

Paperid: 6569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10924.pdf

Abstract:
Recently hyperspectral imaging (HSI)-based grain quality assessment has gained research attention. However, unlike other imaging modalities, HSI data lacks sufficient labelled samples required to effectively train deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel approach to grain quality assessment using HSI combined with few-shot learning (FSL) techniques. Traditional methods for grain quality evaluation, while reliable, are invasive, time-consuming, and costly. HSI offers a non-invasive, real-time alternative by capturing both spatial and spectral information. However, a significant challenge in applying DCNNs for HSI-based grain classification is the need for large labelled databases, which are often difficult to obtain. To address this, we explore the use of FSL, which enables models to perform well with limited labelled data, making it a practical solution for real-world applications where rapid deployment is required. We also explored the application of FSL for the classification of hyperspectral images of bulk grains to enable rapid quality assessment at various receival points in the grain supply chain. We evaluated the performance of few-shot classifiers in two scenarios: first, classification of grain types seen during training, and second, generalisation to unseen grain types, a crucial feature for real-world applications. In the first scenario, we introduce a novel approach using pre-computed collective class prototypes (CCPs) to enhance inference efficiency and robustness. In the second scenario, we assess the model's ability to classify novel grain types using limited support examples. Our experimental results show that despite using very limited labelled data for training, our FSL classifiers accuracy is comparable to that of a fully trained classifier trained using a significantly larger labelled database.

Paperid: 6570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10034.pdf

Abstract:
Vibrometry-based side channels pose a significant privacy risk, exploiting sensors like mmWave radars, light sensors, and accelerometers to detect vibrations from sound sources or proximate objects, enabling speech eavesdropping. Despite various proposed defenses, these involve costly hardware solutions with inherent physical limitations. This paper presents EveGuard, a software-driven defense framework that creates adversarial audio, protecting voice privacy from side channels without compromising human perception. We leverage the distinct sensing capabilities of side channels and traditional microphones, where side channels capture vibrations and microphones record changes in air pressure, resulting in different frequency responses. EveGuard first proposes a perturbation generator model (PGM) that effectively suppresses sensor-based eavesdropping while maintaining high audio quality. Second, to enable end-to-end training of PGM, we introduce a new domain translation task called Eve-GAN for inferring an eavesdropped signal from a given audio. We further apply few-shot learning to mitigate the data collection overhead for Eve-GAN training. Our extensive experiments show that EveGuard achieves a protection rate of more than 97 percent from audio classifiers and significantly hinders eavesdropped audio reconstruction. We further validate the performance of EveGuard across three adaptive attack mechanisms. We have conducted a user study to verify the perceptual quality of our perturbed audio.

Paperid: 6571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09539.pdf

Abstract:
Employing pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) has become the de facto standard in Natural Language Processing (NLP) despite their extensive data requirements. Motivated by the recent surge in research focused on training LLMs with limited data, particularly in low-resource domains and languages, this paper surveys recent transfer learning approaches to optimize model performance in downstream tasks where data is scarce. We first address initial and continued pre-training strategies to better leverage prior knowledge in unseen domains and languages. We then examine how to maximize the utility of limited data during fine-tuning and few-shot learning. The final section takes a task-specific perspective, reviewing models and methods suited for different levels of data scarcity. Our goal is to provide practitioners with practical guidelines for overcoming the challenges posed by constrained data while also highlighting promising directions for future research.

Paperid: 6572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08979.pdf

Abstract:
Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability to perform this task across various domains. However, the performance of LLMs heavily depends on the quality of their input prompts. Recent studies have also shown that LLMs exhibit remarkable results in code-related tasks. To leverage the capabilities of LLMs in text classification, we propose the Code Completion Prompt (CoCoP) method, which transforms the text classification problem into a code completion task. CoCoP significantly improves text classification performance across diverse datasets by utilizing LLMs' code-completion capability. For instance, CoCoP enhances the accuracy of the SST2 dataset by more than 20%. Moreover, when CoCoP integrated with LLMs specifically designed for code-related tasks (code models), such as CodeLLaMA, this method demonstrates better or comparable performance to few-shot learning techniques while using only one-tenth of the model size. The source code of our proposed method will be available to the public upon the acceptance of the paper.

Paperid: 6573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08879.pdf

Abstract:
Novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes is becoming important in various applications, including augmented and virtual reality. We propose a novel 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) algorithm for dynamic scenes from casually recorded monocular videos. To overcome the overfitting problem of existing work for these real-world videos, we introduce an uncertainty-aware regularization that identifies uncertain regions with few observations and selectively imposes additional priors based on diffusion models and depth smoothness on such regions. This approach improves both the performance of novel view synthesis and the quality of training image reconstruction. We also identify the initialization problem of 4DGS in fast-moving dynamic regions, where the Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithm fails to provide reliable 3D landmarks. To initialize Gaussian primitives in such regions, we present a dynamic region densification method using the estimated depth maps and scene flow. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of 4DGS reconstruction from a video captured by a handheld monocular camera and also exhibits promising results in few-shot static scene reconstruction.

Paperid: 6574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08506.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread practice of indiscriminate data scraping to fine-tune language models (LMs) raises significant legal and ethical concerns, particularly regarding compliance with data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This practice often results in the unauthorized use of personal information, prompting growing debate within the academic and regulatory communities. Recent works have introduced the concept of generating unlearnable datasets (by adding imperceptible noise to the clean data), such that the underlying model achieves lower loss during training but fails to generalize to the unseen test setting. Though somewhat effective, these approaches are predominantly designed for images and are limited by several practical constraints like requiring knowledge of the target model. To this end, we introduce RegText, a framework that injects imperceptible spurious correlations into natural language datasets, effectively rendering them unlearnable without affecting semantic content. We demonstrate RegText's utility through rigorous empirical analysis of small and large LMs. Notably, RegText can restrict newer models like GPT-4o and Llama from learning on our generated data, resulting in a drop in their test accuracy compared to their zero-shot performance and paving the way for generating unlearnable text to protect public data.

Paperid: 6575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08249.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a central component of modern LLM systems, particularly in scenarios where up-to-date information is crucial for accurately responding to user queries or when queries exceed the scope of the training data. The advent of time-series foundation models (TSFM), such as Chronos, and the need for effective zero-shot forecasting performance across various time-series domains motivates the question: Do benefits of RAG similarly carry over to time series forecasting? In this paper, we advocate that the dynamic and event-driven nature of time-series data makes RAG a crucial component of TSFMs and introduce a principled RAG framework for time-series forecasting, called Retrieval Augmented Forecasting (RAF). Within RAF, we develop efficient strategies for retrieving related time-series examples and incorporating them into forecast. Through experiments and mechanistic studies, we demonstrate that RAF indeed improves the forecasting accuracy across diverse time series domains and the improvement is more significant for larger TSFM sizes.

Paperid: 6576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06971.pdf

Abstract:
Automated feature detection in historical maps can significantly accelerate the reconstruction of the geospatial past. However, this process is often constrained by the time-consuming task of manually digitizing sufficient high-quality training data. The emergence of visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), offers a promising solution due to their remarkable generalization capabilities and rapid adaptation to new data distributions. Despite this, directly applying SAM in a zero-shot manner to historical map segmentation poses significant challenges, including poor recognition of certain geospatial features and a reliance on input prompts, which limits its ability to be fully automated. To address these challenges, we introduce MapSAM, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts SAM into a prompt-free and versatile solution for various downstream historical map segmentation tasks. Specifically, we employ Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) to integrate domain-specific knowledge into the image encoder. Additionally, we develop an automatic prompt generation process, eliminating the need for manual input. We further enhance the positional prompt in SAM, transforming it into a higher-level positional-semantic prompt, and modify the cross-attention mechanism in the mask decoder with masked attention for more effective feature aggregation. The proposed MapSAM framework demonstrates promising performance across two distinct historical map segmentation tasks: one focused on linear features and the other on areal features. Experimental results show that it adapts well to various features, even when fine-tuned with extremely limited data (e.g. 10 shots).

Paperid: 6577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06890.pdf

Abstract:
Causal structures play a central role in world models that flexibly adapt to changes in the environment. While recent works motivate the benefits of discovering local causal graphs for dynamics modelling, in this work we demonstrate that accurately capturing these relationships in complex settings remains challenging for the current state-of-the-art. To remedy this shortcoming, we postulate that sparsity is a critical ingredient for the discovery of such local causal structures. To this end we present the SPARse TrANsformer World model (SPARTAN), a Transformer-based world model that learns local causal structures between entities in a scene. By applying sparsity regularisation on the attention pattern between object-factored tokens, SPARTAN identifies sparse local causal models that accurately predict future object states. Furthermore, we extend our model to capture sparse interventions with unknown targets on the dynamics of the environment. This results in a highly interpretable world model that can efficiently adapt to changes. Empirically, we evaluate SPARTAN against the current state-of-the-art in object-centric world models on observation-based environments and demonstrate that our model can learn accurate local causal graphs and achieve significantly improved few-shot adaptation to changes in the dynamics of the environment as well as robustness against removing irrelevant distractors.

Paperid: 6578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06713.pdf

Abstract:
This study compares Sporo Health's AI Scribe, a proprietary model fine-tuned for medical scribing, with various LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, Gemma-9B, and Llama-3.2-3B) in clinical documentation. We analyzed de-identified patient transcripts from partner clinics, using clinician-provided SOAP notes as the ground truth. Each model generated SOAP summaries using zero-shot prompting, with performance assessed via recall, precision, and F1 scores. Sporo outperformed all models, achieving the highest recall (73.3%), precision (78.6%), and F1 score (75.3%) with the lowest performance variance. Statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) were found between Sporo and the other models, with post-hoc tests showing significant improvements over GPT-3.5, Gemma-9B, and Llama 3.2-3B. While Sporo outperformed GPT-4o by up to 10%, the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.25). Clinical user satisfaction, measured with a modified PDQI-9 inventory, favored Sporo. Evaluations indicated Sporo's outputs were more accurate and relevant. This highlights the potential of Sporo's multi-agentic architecture to improve clinical workflows.

Paperid: 6579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02941.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models have demonstrated strong performance in zero-shot learning, making them well-suited for predicting rapidly evolving patterns in real-world applications where relevant training data are scarce. However, most of these models rely on the Transformer architecture, which incurs quadratic complexity as input length increases. To address this, we introduce TSMamba, a linear-complexity foundation model for time series forecasting built on the Mamba architecture. The model captures temporal dependencies through both forward and backward Mamba encoders, achieving high prediction accuracy. To reduce reliance on large datasets and lower training costs, TSMamba employs a two-stage transfer learning process that leverages pretrained Mamba LLMs, allowing effective time series modeling with a moderate training set. In the first stage, the forward and backward backbones are optimized via patch-wise autoregressive prediction; in the second stage, the model trains a prediction head and refines other components for long-term forecasting. While the backbone assumes channel independence to manage varying channel numbers across datasets, a channel-wise compressed attention module is introduced to capture cross-channel dependencies during fine-tuning on specific multivariate datasets. Experiments show that TSMamba's zero-shot performance is comparable to state-of-the-art time series foundation models, despite using significantly less training data. It also achieves competitive or superior full-shot performance compared to task-specific prediction models. The code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 6580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02476.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including language understanding, reasoning, and generation. However, general-domain LLMs often struggle with financial tasks due to the technical and specialized nature of financial texts. This study investigates the efficacy of instruction fine-tuning smaller-scale LLMs, including Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, and Phi3-mini, to enhance their performance in financial text classification tasks. We fine-tuned both instruction-tuned and base models across four financial classification tasks, achieving significant improvements in task-specific performance. Furthermore, we evaluated the zero-shot capabilities of these fine-tuned models on three unseen complex financial tasks, including argument classification, deal completeness classification, and causal classification. Our results indicate while base model fine-tuning led to greater degradation, instruction-tuned models maintained more robust performance. To address this degradation, we employed model merging techniques, integrating single-task domain-specific fine-tuned models with the base model. Using this merging method resulted in significant enhancements in zero-shot performance, even exceeding the original model's accuracy on certain datasets. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning and model merging for adapting LLMs to specialized financial text classification tasks.

Paperid: 6581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01322.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

Paperid: 6582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00548.pdf

Abstract:
In automated crop protection tasks such as weed control, disease diagnosis, and pest monitoring, deep learning has demonstrated significant potential. However, these advanced models rely heavily on high-quality, diverse datasets, often limited and costly in agricultural settings. Traditional data augmentation can increase dataset volume but usually lacks the real-world variability needed for robust training. This study presents a new approach for generating synthetic images to improve deep learning-based object detection models for intelligent weed control. Our GenAI-based image generation pipeline integrates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for zero-shot domain adaptation with a text-to-image Stable Diffusion Model, enabling the creation of synthetic images that capture diverse real-world conditions. We evaluate these synthetic datasets using lightweight YOLO models, measuring data efficiency with mAP50 and mAP50-95 scores across varying proportions of real and synthetic data. Notably, YOLO models trained on datasets with 10% synthetic and 90% real images generally demonstrate superior mAP50 and mAP50-95 scores compared to those trained solely on real images. This approach not only reduces dependence on extensive real-world datasets but also enhances predictive performance. The integration of this approach opens opportunities for achieving continual self-improvement of perception modules in intelligent technical systems.

Paperid: 6583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21337.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a popular tool as they have significantly advanced in their capability to tackle a wide range of language-based tasks. However, LLMs applications are highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, which poses a critical problem. These attacks target LLMs applications through using carefully designed input prompts to divert the model from adhering to original instruction, thereby it could execute unintended actions. These manipulations pose serious security threats which potentially results in data leaks, biased outputs, or harmful responses. This project explores the security vulnerabilities in relation to prompt injection attacks. To detect whether a prompt is vulnerable or not, we follows two approaches: 1) a pre-trained LLM, and 2) a fine-tuned LLM. Then, we conduct a thorough analysis and comparison of the classification performance. Firstly, we use pre-trained XLM-RoBERTa model to detect prompt injections using test dataset without any fine-tuning and evaluate it by zero-shot classification. Then, this proposed work will apply supervised fine-tuning to this pre-trained LLM using a task-specific labeled dataset from deepset in huggingface, and this fine-tuned model achieves impressive results with 99.13\% accuracy, 100\% precision, 98.33\% recall and 99.15\% F1-score thorough rigorous experimentation and evaluation. We observe that our approach is highly efficient in detecting prompt injection attacks.

Paperid: 6584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21113.pdf

Abstract:
The growing demand for surveillance in public spaces presents significant challenges due to the shortage of human resources. Current AI-based video surveillance systems heavily rely on core computer vision models that require extensive finetuning, which is particularly difficult in surveillance settings due to limited datasets and difficult setting (viewpoint, low quality, etc.). In this work, we propose leveraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), known for their strong zero and few-shot generalization, to tackle video understanding tasks in surveillance. Specifically, we explore VideoLLaMA2, a state-of-the-art LVLM, and an improved token-level sampling method, Self-Reflective Sampling (Self-ReS). Our experiments on the UCF-Crime dataset show that VideoLLaMA2 represents a significant leap in zero-shot performance, with 20% boost over the baseline. Self-ReS additionally increases zero-shot action recognition performance to 44.6%. These results highlight the potential of LVLMs, paired with improved sampling techniques, for advancing surveillance video analysis in diverse scenarios.

Paperid: 6585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20717.pdf

Abstract:
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved promising results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, their ability to perceive and understand human faces is rarely explored. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate existing MLLMs on face perception tasks. The quantitative results reveal that existing MLLMs struggle to handle these tasks. The primary reason is the lack of image-text datasets that contain fine-grained descriptions of human faces. To tackle this problem, we design a practical pipeline for constructing datasets, upon which we further build a novel multimodal large face perception model, namely Face-MLLM. Specifically, we re-annotate LAION-Face dataset with more detailed face captions and facial attribute labels. Besides, we re-formulate traditional face datasets using the question-answer style, which is fit for MLLMs. Together with these enriched datasets, we develop a novel three-stage MLLM training method. In the first two stages, our model learns visual-text alignment and basic visual question answering capability, respectively. In the third stage, our model learns to handle multiple specialized face perception tasks. Experimental results show that our model surpasses previous MLLMs on five famous face perception tasks. Besides, on our newly introduced zero-shot facial attribute analysis task, our Face-MLLM also presents superior performance.

Paperid: 6586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20306.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Gumbel-NeRF, a mixture-of-expert (MoE) neural radiance fields (NeRF) model with a hindsight expert selection mechanism for synthesizing novel views of unseen objects. Previous studies have shown that the MoE structure provides high-quality representations of a given large-scale scene consisting of many objects. However, we observe that such a MoE NeRF model often produces low-quality representations in the vicinity of experts' boundaries when applied to the task of novel view synthesis of an unseen object from one/few-shot input. We find that this deterioration is primarily caused by the foresight expert selection mechanism, which may leave an unnatural discontinuity in the object shape near the experts' boundaries. Gumbel-NeRF adopts a hindsight expert selection mechanism, which guarantees continuity in the density field even near the experts' boundaries. Experiments using the SRN cars dataset demonstrate the superiority of Gumbel-NeRF over the baselines in terms of various image quality metrics.

Paperid: 6587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19341.pdf

Abstract:
In vision-based robot localization and SLAM, Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is essential. This paper addresses the problem of VPR, which involves accurately recognizing the location corresponding to a given query image. A popular approach to vision-based place recognition relies on low-level visual features. Despite significant progress in recent years, place recognition based on low-level visual features is challenging when there are changes in scene appearance. To address this, end-to-end training approaches have been proposed to overcome the limitations of hand-crafted features. However, these approaches still fail under drastic changes and require large amounts of labeled data to train models, presenting a significant limitation. Methods that leverage high-level semantic information, such as objects or categories, have been proposed to handle variations in appearance. In this paper, we introduce a novel VPR approach that remains robust to scene changes and does not require additional training. Our method constructs semantic image descriptors by extracting pixel-level embeddings using a zero-shot, language-driven semantic segmentation model. We validate our approach in challenging place recognition scenarios using real-world public dataset. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms non-learned image representation techniques and off-the-shelf convolutional neural network (CNN) descriptors. Our code is available at https: //github.com/woo-soojin/context-based-vlpr.

Paperid: 6588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15589.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic forecasting in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is vital for intelligent traffic prediction. Yet, ITS often relies on data from traffic sensors or vehicle devices, where certain cities might not have all those smart devices or enabling infrastructures. Also, recent studies have employed meta-learning to generalize spatial-temporal traffic networks, utilizing data from multiple cities for effective traffic forecasting for data-scarce target cities. However, collecting data from multiple cities can be costly and time-consuming. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Single Source Meta-Transfer Learning (SSMT) which relies only on a single source city for traffic prediction. Our method harnesses this transferred knowledge to enable few-shot traffic forecasting, particularly when the target city possesses limited data. Specifically, we use memory-augmented attention to store the heterogeneous spatial knowledge from the source city and selectively recall them for the data-scarce target city. We extend the idea of sinusoidal positional encoding to establish meta-learning tasks by leveraging diverse temporal traffic patterns from the source city. Moreover, to capture a more generalized representation of the positions we introduced a meta-positional encoding that learns the most optimal representation of the temporal pattern across all the tasks. We experiment on five real-world benchmark datasets to demonstrate that our method outperforms several existing methods in time series traffic prediction.

Paperid: 6589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15297.pdf

Abstract:
Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking the ability to generate proactive responses that actively engage users in sustained conversations. However, existing definitions of proactive dialogue in this context do not focus on how each response actively engages the user and sustains the conversation. Hence, we present a new definition of proactivity that focuses on enhancing the `proactiveness' of each generated response via the introduction of new information related to the initial query. To this end, we construct a proactive dialogue dataset comprising 2,000 single-turn conversations, and introduce several automatic metrics to evaluate response `proactiveness' which achieved high correlation with human annotation. Additionally, we introduce two innovative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts, the 3-step CoT and the 3-in-1 CoT prompts, which consistently outperform standard prompts by up to 90% in the zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 6590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15111.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate short-term forecasts of passenger flow in metro systems under delay conditions are crucial for emergency response and service recovery, which pose significant challenges and are currently under-researched. Due to the rare occurrence of delay events, the limited sample size under delay condictions make it difficult for conventional models to effectively capture the complex impacts of delays on passenger flow, resulting in low forecasting accuracy. Recognizing the strengths of large language models (LLMs) in few-shot learning due to their powerful pre-training, contextual understanding, ability to perform zero-shot and few-shot reasoning, to address the issues that effectively generalize and adapt with minimal data, we propose a passenger flow forecasting framework under delay conditions that synthesizes an LLM with carefully designed prompt engineering. By Refining prompt design, we enable the LLM to understand delay event information and the pattern from historical passenger flow data, thus overcoming the challenges of passenger flow forecasting under delay conditions. The propmpt engineering in the framework consists of two main stages: systematic prompt generation and prompt refinement. In the prompt generation stage, multi-source data is transformed into descriptive texts understandable by the LLM and stored. In the prompt refinement stage, we employ the multidimensional Chain of Thought (CoT) method to refine the prompts. We verify the proposed framework by conducting experiments using real-world datasets specifically targeting passenger flow forecasting under delay conditions of Shenzhen metro in China. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model performs particularly well in forecasting passenger flow under delay conditions.

Paperid: 6591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14795.pdf

Abstract:
Event-keyed summarization (EKS) requires summarizing a specific event described in a document given the document text and an event representation extracted from it. In this work, we extend EKS to the cross-document setting (CDEKS), in which summaries must synthesize information from accounts of the same event as given by multiple sources. We introduce SEAMUS (Summaries of Events Across Multiple Sources), a high-quality dataset for CDEKS based on an expert reannotation of the FAMUS dataset for cross-document argument extraction. We present a suite of baselines on SEAMUS -- covering both smaller, fine-tuned models, as well as zero- and few-shot prompted LLMs -- along with detailed ablations and a human evaluation study, showing SEAMUS to be a valuable benchmark for this new task.

Paperid: 6592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13604.pdf

Abstract:
Narrative-driven recommenders aim to provide personalized suggestions for user requests expressed in free-form text such as "I want to watch a thriller with a mind-bending story, like Shutter Island." Although large language models (LLMs) have been shown to excel in processing general natural language queries, their effectiveness for handling such recommendation requests remains relatively unexplored. To close this gap, we compare the performance of 38 open- and closed-source LLMs of various sizes, such as LLama 3.2 and GPT-4o, in a movie recommendation setting. For this, we utilize a gold-standard, crowdworker-annotated dataset of posts from reddit's movie suggestion community and employ various prompting strategies, including zero-shot, identity, and few-shot prompting. Our findings demonstrate the ability of LLMs to generate contextually relevant movie recommendations, significantly outperforming other state-of-the-art approaches, such as doc2vec. While we find that closed-source and large-parameterized models generally perform best, medium-sized open-source models remain competitive, being only slightly outperformed by their more computationally expensive counterparts. Furthermore, we observe no significant differences across prompting strategies for most models, underscoring the effectiveness of simple approaches such as zero-shot prompting for narrative-driven recommendations. Overall, this work offers valuable insights for recommender system researchers as well as practitioners aiming to integrate LLMs into real-world recommendation tools.

Paperid: 6593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13215.pdf

Abstract:
Scalable oversight studies methods of training and evaluating AI systems in domains where human judgment is unreliable or expensive, such as scientific research and software engineering in complex codebases. Most work in this area has focused on methods of improving the quality of labels. Recent work by Burns et al. (2023) considers the complementary problem of training models with low-quality labels, finding that large pretrained models often have an inductive bias towards producing correct answers. In practice, however, neither label quantity nor quality is fixed: practitioners face a quantity-quality tradeoff. In this paper, we explore the microeconomics of the quantity-quality tradeoff on binary NLP classification tasks used in Burns et al. (2023). While sample-efficient learning has been studied extensively, little public research has focused on scalable elicitation: eliciting capabilities from pretrained models subject to labeling cost constraints. We find that this setting has novel dynamics caused by the tradeoff between label quantity and quality, as well as the model's existing latent capabilities. We observe three regimes of eliciting classification knowledge from pretrained models using supervised finetuning: quantity-dominant, quality-dominant, and a mixed regime involving the use of low- and high-quality data together to attain higher accuracy at a lower cost than using either alone. We explore sample-efficient elicitation methods that make use of two datasets of differing qualities, and establish a Pareto frontier of scalable elicitation methods that optimally trade off labeling cost and classifier performance. We find that the accuracy of supervised fine-tuning can be improved by up to 5 percentage points at a fixed labeling budget by adding a few-shot prompt to make use of the model's existing knowledge of the task.

Paperid: 6594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12330.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-training foundation models has become the de-facto procedure for deep learning approaches, yet its application remains limited in the geological studies, where in needs of the model transferability to break the shackle of data scarcity. Here we target on the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning data, a standard high-resolution measurement in extensive scientific drilling projects. We propose a scalable self-supervised learner, masked autoencoders on XRF spectra (MAX), to pre-train a foundation model covering geological records from multiple regions of the Pacific and Southern Ocean. In pre-training, we find that masking a high proportion of the input spectrum (50\%) yields a nontrivial and meaningful self-supervisory task. For downstream tasks, we select the quantification of XRF spectra into two costly geochemical measurements, CaCO$_3$ and total organic carbon, due to their importance in understanding the paleo-oceanic carbon system. Our results show that MAX, requiring only one-third of the data, outperforms models without pre-training in terms of quantification accuracy. Additionally, the model's generalizability improves by more than 60\% in zero-shot tests on new materials, with explainability further ensuring its robustness. Thus, our approach offers a promising pathway to overcome data scarcity in geological discovery by leveraging the self-supervised foundation model and fast-acquired XRF scanning data.

Paperid: 6595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12225.pdf

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the use of vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot detection and association of hardhats to enhance construction safety. Given the significant risk of head injuries in construction, proper enforcement of hardhat use is critical. We investigate the applicability of foundation models, specifically OWLv2, for detecting hardhats in real-world construction site images. Our contributions include the creation of a new benchmark dataset, Hardhat Safety Detection Dataset, by filtering and combining existing datasets and the development of a cascaded detection approach. Experimental results on 5,210 images demonstrate that the OWLv2 model achieves an average precision of 0.6493 for hardhat detection. We further analyze the limitations and potential improvements for real-world applications, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of current foundation models in safety perception domains.

Paperid: 6596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10596.pdf

Abstract:
Since the earliest proposals for artificial neural network (ANN) models of the mind and brain, critics have pointed out key weaknesses in these models compared to human cognitive abilities. Here we review recent work that uses metalearning to overcome several classic challenges, which we characterize as addressing the Problem of Incentive and Practice -- that is, providing machines with both incentives to improve specific skills and opportunities to practice those skills. This explicit optimization contrasts with more conventional approaches that hope the desired behaviour will emerge through optimizing related but different objectives. We review applications of this principle to addressing four classic challenges for ANNs: systematic generalization, catastrophic forgetting, few-shot learning and multi-step reasoning. We also discuss how large language models incorporate key aspects of this metalearning framework (namely, sequence prediction with feedback trained on diverse data), which helps to explain some of their successes on these classic challenges. Finally, we discuss the prospects for understanding aspects of human development through this framework, and whether natural environments provide the right incentives and practice for learning how to make challenging generalizations.

Paperid: 6597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10372.pdf

Abstract:
Characters are at the heart of every story, driving the plot and engaging readers. In this study, we explore the understanding of characters in full-length books, which contain complex narratives and numerous interacting characters. We define two tasks: character description, which generates a brief factual profile, and character analysis, which offers an in-depth interpretation, including character development, personality, and social context. We introduce the BookWorm dataset, pairing books from the Gutenberg Project with human-written descriptions and analyses. Using this dataset, we evaluate state-of-the-art long-context models in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, utilizing both retrieval-based and hierarchical processing for book-length inputs. Our findings show that retrieval-based approaches outperform hierarchical ones in both tasks. Additionally, fine-tuned models using coreference-based retrieval produce the most factual descriptions, as measured by fact- and entailment-based metrics. We hope our dataset, experiments, and analysis will inspire further research in character-based narrative understanding.

Paperid: 6598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08211.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) are renowned for their versatility, as they can be applied to diverse applications in a zero-shot setup. However, when these models are used in specific domains, their performance often falls short due to domain gaps or the under-representation of these domains in the training data. While fine-tuning VLP models on custom datasets with human-annotated labels can address this issue, annotating even a small-scale dataset (e.g., 100k samples) can be an expensive endeavor, often requiring expert annotators if the task is complex. To address these challenges, we propose LatteCLIP, an unsupervised method for fine-tuning CLIP models on classification with known class names in custom domains, without relying on human annotations. Our method leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to generate expressive textual descriptions for both individual images and groups of images. These provide additional contextual information to guide the fine-tuning process in the custom domains. Since LMM-generated descriptions are prone to hallucination or missing details, we introduce a novel strategy to distill only the useful information and stabilize the training. Specifically, we learn rich per-class prototype representations from noisy generated texts and dual pseudo-labels. Our experiments on 10 domain-specific datasets show that LatteCLIP outperforms pre-trained zero-shot methods by an average improvement of +4.74 points in top-1 accuracy and other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by +3.45 points.

Paperid: 6599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07441.pdf

Abstract:
Generalizing vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents to novel environments remains a difficult and open challenge. Current trends are to collect large-scale datasets or use data augmentation techniques to prevent overfitting and improve downstream generalization. However, the computational and data collection costs increase exponentially with the number of task variations and can destabilize the already difficult task of training RL agents. In this work, we take inspiration from recent advances in computational neuroscience and propose a model, Associative Latent DisentAnglement (ALDA), that builds on standard off-policy RL towards zero-shot generalization. Specifically, we revisit the role of latent disentanglement in RL and show how combining it with a model of associative memory achieves zero-shot generalization on difficult task variations without relying on data augmentation. Finally, we formally show that data augmentation techniques are a form of weak disentanglement and discuss the implications of this insight.

Paperid: 6600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05454.pdf

Abstract:
Learning shared structure across environments facilitates rapid learning and adaptive behavior in neural systems. This has been widely demonstrated and applied in machine learning to train models that are capable of generalizing to novel settings. However, there has been limited work exploiting the shared structure in neural activity during similar tasks for learning latent dynamics from neural recordings. Existing approaches are designed to infer dynamics from a single dataset and cannot be readily adapted to account for statistical heterogeneities across recordings. In this work, we hypothesize that similar tasks admit a corresponding family of related solutions and propose a novel approach for meta-learning this solution space from task-related neural activity of trained animals. Specifically, we capture the variabilities across recordings on a low-dimensional manifold which concisely parametrizes this family of dynamics, thereby facilitating rapid learning of latent dynamics given new recordings. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on few-shot reconstruction and forecasting of synthetic dynamical systems, and neural recordings from the motor cortex during different arm reaching tasks.

Paperid: 6601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05407.pdf

Abstract:
A reliable deep learning system should be able to accurately express its confidence with respect to its predictions, a quality known as calibration. One of the most effective ways to produce reliable confidence estimates with a pre-trained model is by applying a post-hoc recalibration method. Popular recalibration methods like temperature scaling are typically fit on a small amount of data and work in the model's output space, as opposed to the more expressive feature embedding space, and thus usually have only one or a handful of parameters. However, the target distribution to which they are applied is often complex and difficult to fit well with such a function. To this end we propose \textit{selective recalibration}, where a selection model learns to reject some user-chosen proportion of the data in order to allow the recalibrator to focus on regions of the input space that can be well-captured by such a model. We provide theoretical analysis to motivate our algorithm, and test our method through comprehensive experiments on difficult medical imaging and zero-shot classification tasks. Our results show that selective recalibration consistently leads to significantly lower calibration error than a wide range of selection and recalibration baselines.

Paperid: 6602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04188.pdf

Abstract:
Dementia is a sensitive neurocognitive disorder affecting tens of millions of people worldwide and its cases are expected to triple by 2050. Alarmingly, recent advancements in dementia classification make it possible for adversaries to violate affected individuals' privacy and infer their sensitive condition from speech transcriptions. Existing obfuscation methods in text have never been applied for dementia and depend on the availability of large labeled datasets which are challenging to collect for sensitive medical attributes. In this work, we bridge this research gap and tackle the above issues by leveraging Large-Language-Models (LLMs) with diverse prompt designs (zero-shot, few-shot, and knowledge-based) to obfuscate dementia in speech transcripts. Our evaluation shows that LLMs are more effective dementia obfuscators compared to competing methods. However, they have billions of parameters which renders them hard to train, store and share, and they are also fragile suffering from hallucination, refusal and contradiction effects among others. To further mitigate these, we propose a novel method, DiDOTS. DiDOTS distills knowledge from LLMs using a teacher-student paradigm and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. DiDOTS has one order of magnitude fewer parameters compared to its teacher LLM and can be fine-tuned using three orders of magnitude less parameters compared to full fine-tuning. Our evaluation shows that compared to prior work DiDOTS retains the performance of LLMs achieving 1.3x and 2.2x improvement in privacy performance on two datasets, while humans rate it as better in preserving utility even when compared to state-of-the-art paraphrasing models.

Paperid: 6603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03296.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-tuned LLMs are able to provide an explanation about their output to users by generating self-explanations. These do not require gradient computations or the application of possibly complex XAI methods. In this paper, we analyse whether this ability results in a good explanation. We evaluate self-explanations in the form of input rationales with respect to their plausibility to humans as well as their faithfulness to models. We study two text classification tasks: sentiment classification and forced labour detection, i.e., identifying pre-defined risk indicators of forced labour. In addition to English, we include Danish and Italian translations of the sentiment classification task and compare self-explanations to human annotations for all samples. To allow for direct comparisons, we also compute post-hoc feature attribution, i.e., layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) and analyse 4 LLMs. We show that self-explanations align more closely with human annotations compared to LRP, while maintaining a comparable level of faithfulness. This finding suggests that self-explanations indeed provide good explanations for text classification.

Paperid: 6604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01473.pdf

Abstract:
Soil sinkholes significantly influence soil degradation, but their irregular shapes, along with interference from shadow and vegetation, make it challenging to accurately quantify their properties using remotely sensed data. We present a novel framework for sinkhole segmentation that combines traditional topographic computations of closed depressions with the newly developed prompt-based Segment Anything Model (SAM). Within this framework, termed SinkSAM, we highlight four key improvements: (1) The integration of topographic computations with SAM enables pixel-level refinement of sinkhole boundaries segmentation; (2) A coherent mathematical prompting strategy, based on closed depressions, addresses the limitations of purely learning-based models (CNNs) in detecting and segmenting undefined sinkhole features, while improving generalization to new, unseen regions; (3) Using Depth Anything V2 monocular depth for automatic prompts eliminates photogrammetric biases, enabling sinkhole mapping without the dependence on LiDAR data; and (4) An established sinkhole database facilitates fine-tuning of SAM, improving its zero-shot performance in sinkhole segmentation. These advancements allow the deployment of SinkSAM, in an unseen test area, in the highly variable semiarid region, achieving an intersection-over-union (IoU) of 40.27\% and surpassing previous results. This paper also presents the first SAM implementation for sinkhole segmentation and demonstrates the robustness of SinkSAM in extracting sinkhole maps using a single RGB image.

Paperid: 6605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00683.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge of accurately translating technical terms, which are crucial for clear communication in specialized fields. We introduce the Parenthetical Terminology Translation (PTT) task, designed to mitigate potential inaccuracies by displaying the original term in parentheses alongside its translation. To implement this approach, we generated a representative PTT dataset using a collaborative approach with large language models and applied knowledge distillation to fine-tune traditional Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models and small-sized Large Language Models (sLMs). Additionally, we developed a novel evaluation metric to assess both overall translation accuracy and the correct parenthetical presentation of terms. Our findings indicate that sLMs did not consistently outperform NMT models, with fine-tuning proving more effective than few-shot prompting, particularly in models with continued pre-training in the target language. These insights contribute to the advancement of more reliable terminology translation methodologies.

Paperid: 6606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00052.pdf

Abstract:
Train delays can propagate rapidly throughout the Urban Rail Transit (URT) network under networked operation conditions, posing significant challenges to operational departments. Accurately predicting passenger travel choices under train delays can provide interpretable insights into the redistribution of passenger flow, offering crucial decision support for emergency response and service recovery. However, the diversity of travel choices due to passenger heterogeneity and the sparsity of delay events leads to issues of data sparsity and sample imbalance in the travel choices dataset under metro delays. It is challenging to model this problem using traditional machine learning approaches, which typically rely on large, balanced datasets. Given the strengths of large language models (LLMs) in text processing, understanding, and their capabilities in small-sample and even zero-shot learning, this paper proposes a novel Passenger Travel Choice prediction framework under metro delays with the Large Language Model (DelayPTC-LLM). The well-designed prompting engineering is developed to guide the LLM in making and rationalizing predictions about travel choices, taking into account passenger heterogeneity and features of the delay events. Utilizing real-world data from Shenzhen Metro, including Automated Fare Collection (AFC) data and detailed delay logs, a comparative analysis of DelayPTC-LLM with traditional prediction models demonstrates the superior capability of LLMs in handling complex, sparse datasets commonly encountered under disruption of transportation systems. The results validate the advantages of DelayPTC-LLM in terms of predictive accuracy and its potential to provide actionable insights for big traffic data.

Paperid: 6607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19960.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot inference, where pre-trained models perform tasks without specific training data, is an exciting emergent ability of large models like CLIP. Although there has been considerable exploration into enhancing zero-shot abilities in image captioning (IC) for popular datasets such as MSCOCO and Flickr8k, these approaches fall short with fine-grained datasets like CUB, FLO, UCM-Captions, and Sydney-Captions. These datasets require captions to discern between visually and semantically similar classes, focusing on detailed object parts and their attributes. To overcome this challenge, we introduce TRaining-Free Object-Part Enhancement (TROPE). TROPE enriches a base caption with additional object-part details using object detector proposals and Natural Language Processing techniques. It complements rather than alters the base caption, allowing seamless integration with other captioning methods and offering users enhanced flexibility. Our evaluations show that TROPE consistently boosts performance across all tested zero-shot IC approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results on fine-grained IC datasets.

Paperid: 6608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18686.pdf

Abstract:
Low-shot object counters estimate the number of objects in an image using few or no annotated exemplars. Objects are localized by matching them to prototypes, which are constructed by unsupervised image-wide object appearance aggregation. Due to potentially diverse object appearances, the existing approaches often lead to overgeneralization and false positive detections. Furthermore, the best-performing methods train object localization by a surrogate loss, that predicts a unit Gaussian at each object center. This loss is sensitive to annotation error, hyperparameters and does not directly optimize the detection task, leading to suboptimal counts. We introduce GeCo, a novel low-shot counter that achieves accurate object detection, segmentation, and count estimation in a unified architecture. GeCo robustly generalizes the prototypes across objects appearances through a novel dense object query formulation. In addition, a novel counting loss is proposed, that directly optimizes the detection task and avoids the issues of the standard surrogate loss. GeCo surpasses the leading few-shot detection-based counters by $\sim$25\% in the total count MAE, achieves superior detection accuracy and sets a new solid state-of-the-art result across all low-shot counting setups.

Paperid: 6609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17156.pdf

Abstract:
At a time when the influence of generative Artificial Intelligence on visual arts is a highly debated topic, we raise the attention towards a more subtle phenomenon: the algorithmic censorship of artistic nudity online. We analyze the performance of three "Not-Safe-For-Work'' image classifiers on artistic nudity, and empirically uncover the existence of a gender and a stylistic bias, as well as evident technical limitations, especially when only considering visual information. Hence, we propose a multi-modal zero-shot classification approach that improves artistic nudity classification. From our research, we draw several implications that we hope will inform future research on this topic.

Paperid: 6610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16418.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities across various tasks, leveraging advanced reasoning. Yet, they struggle with task-oriented prompts due to a lack of specific prior knowledge of the task answers. The current state-of-the-art approach, PAL, utilizes code generation to address this issue. However, PAL depends on manually crafted prompt templates and examples while still producing inaccurate results. In this work, we present TITAN-a novel strategy designed to enhance LLMs' performance on task-oriented prompts. TITAN achieves this by generating scripts using a universal approach and zero-shot learning. Unlike existing methods, TITAN eliminates the need for detailed task-specific instructions and extensive manual efforts. TITAN enhances LLMs' performance on various tasks by utilizing their analytical and code-generation capabilities in a streamlined process. TITAN employs two key techniques: (1) step-back prompting to extract the task's input specifications and (2) chain-of-thought prompting to identify required procedural steps. This information is used to improve the LLMs' code-generation process. TITAN further refines the generated script through post-processing and the script is executed to retrieve the final answer. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates TITAN's effectiveness in a diverse set of tasks. On average, TITAN outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot approach by 7.6% and 3.9% when paired with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Overall, without human annotation, TITAN achieves state-of-the-art performance in 8 out of 11 cases while only marginally losing to few-shot approaches (which needed human intervention) on three occasions by small margins. This work represents a significant advancement in addressing task-oriented prompts, offering a novel solution for effectively utilizing LLMs in everyday life tasks.

Paperid: 6611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16136.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) models are considered to be Large Multi-modal Models (LMM), due to their extensive training data and a large number of parameters. Mainstream OVD models prioritize object coarse-grained category rather than focus on their fine-grained attributes, e.g., colors or materials, thus failed to identify objects specified with certain attributes. However, OVD models are pretrained on large-scale image-text pairs with rich attribute words, whose latent feature space can represent the global text feature as a linear composition of fine-grained attribute tokens without highlighting them. Therefore, we propose in this paper a universal and explicit approach for frozen mainstream OVD models that boosts their attribute-level detection capabilities by highlighting fine-grained attributes in explicit linear space. Firstly, a LLM is leveraged to highlight attribute words within the input text as a zero-shot prompted task. Secondly, by strategically adjusting the token masks, the text encoders of OVD models extract both global text and attribute-specific features, which are then explicitly composited as two vectors in linear space to form the new attribute-highlighted feature for detection tasks, where corresponding scalars are hand-crafted or learned to reweight both two vectors. Notably, these scalars can be seamlessly transferred among different OVD models, which proves that such an explicit linear composition is universal. Empirical evaluation on the FG-OVD dataset demonstrates that our proposed method uniformly improves fine-grained attribute-level OVD of various mainstream models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 6612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15260.pdf

Abstract:
Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of disability globally. Following the onset of LBP and subsequent treatment, adequate patient education is crucial for improving functionality and long-term outcomes. Despite advancements in patient education strategies, significant gaps persist in delivering personalized, evidence-based information to patients with LBP. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have demonstrated the potential to enhance patient education. However, their application and efficacy in delivering educational content to patients with LBP remain underexplored and warrant further investigation. In this study, we introduce a novel approach utilizing LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and few-shot learning to generate tailored educational materials for patients with LBP. Physical therapists manually evaluated our model responses for redundancy, accuracy, and completeness using a Likert scale. In addition, the readability of the generated education materials is assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease score. The findings demonstrate that RAG-based LLMs outperform traditional LLMs, providing more accurate, complete, and readable patient education materials with less redundancy. Having said that, our analysis reveals that the generated materials are not yet ready for use in clinical practice. This study underscores the potential of AI-driven models utilizing RAG to improve patient education for LBP; however, significant challenges remain in ensuring the clinical relevance and granularity of content generated by these models.

Paperid: 6613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13594.pdf

Abstract:
Stance detection is the task of determining the viewpoint expressed in a text towards a given target. A specific direction within the task focuses on cross-target stance detection, where a model trained on samples pertaining to certain targets is then applied to a new, unseen target. With the increasing need to analyze and mining viewpoints and opinions online, the task has recently seen a significant surge in interest. This review paper examines the advancements in cross-target stance detection over the last decade, highlighting the evolution from basic statistical methods to contemporary neural and LLM-based models. These advancements have led to notable improvements in accuracy and adaptability. Innovative approaches include the use of topic-grouped attention and adversarial learning for zero-shot detection, as well as fine-tuning techniques that enhance model robustness. Additionally, prompt-tuning methods and the integration of external knowledge have further refined model performance. A comprehensive overview of the datasets used for evaluating these models is also provided, offering valuable insights into the progress and challenges in the field. We conclude by highlighting emerging directions of research and by suggesting avenues for future work in the task.

Paperid: 6614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12602.pdf

Abstract:
Agriculture, fundamental for human sustenance, faces unprecedented challenges. The need for efficient, human-cooperative, and sustainable farming methods has never been greater. The core contributions of this work involve leveraging Active Vision (AV) techniques and Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) to improve the robot's ability to perceive and interact with agricultural environment in the context of fruit harvesting. The AV Pipeline implemented within ROS 2 integrates the Next-Best View (NBV) Planning for 3D environment reconstruction through a dynamic 3D Occupancy Map. Our system allows the robotics arm to dynamically plan and move to the most informative viewpoints and explore the environment, updating the 3D reconstruction using semantic information produced through ZSL models. Simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate our system's effectiveness in complex visibility conditions, outperforming traditional and static predefined planning methods. ZSL segmentation models employed, such as YOLO World + EfficientViT SAM, exhibit high-speed performance and accurate segmentation, allowing flexibility when dealing with semantic information in unknown agricultural contexts without requiring any fine-tuning process.

Paperid: 6615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11286.pdf

Abstract:
Most recent few-shot learning approaches are based on meta-learning with episodic training. However, prior studies encounter two crucial problems: (1) \textit{the presence of inductive bias}, and (2) \textit{the occurrence of catastrophic forgetting}. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Level Contrastive Constraints (MLCC) framework, that jointly integrates within-episode learning and across-episode learning into a unified interactive learning paradigm to solve these issues. Specifically, we employ a space-aware interaction modeling scheme to explore the correct inductive paradigms for each class between within-episode similarity/dis-similarity distributions. Additionally, with the aim of better utilizing former prior knowledge, a cross-stage distribution adaption strategy is designed to align the across-episode distributions from different time stages, thus reducing the semantic gap between existing and past prediction distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple few-shot datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of MLCC approach over the existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 6616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09098.pdf

Abstract:
While recent Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech (ZS-TTS) models have achieved high naturalness and speaker similarity, they fall short in accent fidelity and control. To address this issue, we propose zero-shot accent generation that unifies Foreign Accent Conversion (FAC), accented TTS, and ZS-TTS, with a novel two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on Accent Identification (AID) with 0.56 f1 score on unseen speakers. In the second stage, we condition a ZS-TTS system on the pretrained speaker-agnostic accent embeddings extracted by the AID model. The proposed system achieves higher accent fidelity on inherent/cross accent generation, and enables unseen accent generation.

Paperid: 6617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08302.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting molecular impact on cellular function is a core challenge in therapeutic design. Phenomic experiments, designed to capture cellular morphology, utilize microscopy based techniques and demonstrate a high throughput solution for uncovering molecular impact on the cell. In this work, we learn a joint latent space between molecular structures and microscopy phenomic experiments, aligning paired samples with contrastive learning. Specifically, we study the problem ofContrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval, which consists of zero-shot molecular structure identification conditioned on phenomic experiments. We assess challenges in multi-modal learning of phenomics and molecular modalities such as experimental batch effect, inactive molecule perturbations, and encoding perturbation concentration. We demonstrate improved multi-modal learner retrieval through (1) a uni-modal pre-trained phenomics model, (2) a novel inter sample similarity aware loss, and (3) models conditioned on a representation of molecular concentration. Following this recipe, we propose MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model. MolPhenix leverages a pre-trained phenomics model to demonstrate significant performance gains across perturbation concentrations, molecular scaffolds, and activity thresholds. In particular, we demonstrate an 8.1x improvement in zero shot molecular retrieval of active molecules over the previous state-of-the-art, reaching 77.33% in top-1% accuracy. These results open the door for machine learning to be applied in virtual phenomics screening, which can significantly benefit drug discovery applications.

Paperid: 6618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08278.pdf

Abstract:
We present DreamHOI, a novel method for zero-shot synthesis of human-object interactions (HOIs), enabling a 3D human model to realistically interact with any given object based on a textual description. This task is complicated by the varying categories and geometries of real-world objects and the scarcity of datasets encompassing diverse HOIs. To circumvent the need for extensive data, we leverage text-to-image diffusion models trained on billions of image-caption pairs. We optimize the articulation of a skinned human mesh using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) gradients obtained from these models, which predict image-space edits. However, directly backpropagating image-space gradients into complex articulation parameters is ineffective due to the local nature of such gradients. To overcome this, we introduce a dual implicit-explicit representation of a skinned mesh, combining (implicit) neural radiance fields (NeRFs) with (explicit) skeleton-driven mesh articulation. During optimization, we transition between implicit and explicit forms, grounding the NeRF generation while refining the mesh articulation. We validate our approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating realistic HOIs.

Paperid: 6619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08098.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the intersection of technological innovation and access to justice by developing a benchmark for predicting case outcomes in the UK Employment Tribunal (UKET). To address the challenge of extensive manual annotation, the study employs a large language model (LLM) for automatic annotation, resulting in the creation of the CLC-UKET dataset. The dataset consists of approximately 19,000 UKET cases and their metadata. Comprehensive legal annotations cover facts, claims, precedent references, statutory references, case outcomes, reasons and jurisdiction codes. Facilitated by the CLC-UKET data, we examine a multi-class case outcome prediction task in the UKET. Human predictions are collected to establish a performance reference for model comparison. Empirical results from baseline models indicate that finetuned transformer models outperform zero-shot and few-shot LLMs on the UKET prediction task. The performance of zero-shot LLMs can be enhanced by integrating task-related information into few-shot examples. We hope that the CLC-UKET dataset, along with human annotations and empirical findings, can serve as a valuable benchmark for employment-related dispute resolution.

Paperid: 6620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07832.pdf

Abstract:
While memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) offer an effective solution for few-shot learning (FSL) by integrating deep neural networks with external memory, the capacity requirements and energy overhead of data movement become enormous due to the large number of support vectors in many-class FSL scenarios. Various in-memory search solutions have emerged to improve the energy efficiency of MANNs. NAND-based multi-bit content addressable memory (MCAM) is a promising option due to its high density and large capacity. Despite its potential, MCAM faces limitations such as a restricted number of word lines, limited quantization levels, and non-ideal effects like varying string currents and bottleneck effects, which lead to significant accuracy drops. To address these issues, we propose several innovative methods. First, the Multi-bit Thermometer Code (MTMC) leverages the extensive capacity of MCAM to enhance vector precision using cumulative encoding rules, thereby mitigating the bottleneck effect. Second, the Asymmetric vector similarity search (AVSS) reduces the precision of the query vector while maintaining that of the support vectors, thereby minimizing the search iterations and improving efficiency in many-class scenarios. Finally, the Hardware-Aware Training (HAT) method optimizes controller training by modeling the hardware characteristics of MCAM, thus enhancing the reliability of the system. Our integrated framework reduces search iterations by up to 32 times, and increases overall accuracy by 1.58% to 6.94%.

Paperid: 6621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07424.pdf

Abstract:
There have been growing concerns around high-stake applications that rely on models trained with biased data, which consequently produce biased predictions, often harming the most vulnerable. In particular, biased medical data could cause health-related applications and recommender systems to create outputs that jeopardize patient care and widen disparities in health outcomes. A recent framework titled Fairness via AI posits that, instead of attempting to correct model biases, researchers must focus on their root causes by using AI to debias data. Inspired by this framework, we tackle bias detection in medical curricula using NLP models, including LLMs, and evaluate them on a gold standard dataset containing 4,105 excerpts annotated by medical experts for bias from a large corpus. We build on previous work by coauthors which augments the set of negative samples with non-annotated text containing social identifier terms. However, some of these terms, especially those related to race and ethnicity, can carry different meanings (e.g., "white matter of spinal cord"). To address this issue, we propose the use of Word Sense Disambiguation models to refine dataset quality by removing irrelevant sentences. We then evaluate fine-tuned variations of BERT models as well as GPT models with zero- and few-shot prompting. We found LLMs, considered SOTA on many NLP tasks, unsuitable for bias detection, while fine-tuned BERT models generally perform well across all evaluated metrics.

Paperid: 6622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07162.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic analysis of user reviews to understand user sentiments toward app functionality (i.e. app features) helps align development efforts with user expectations and needs. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown impressive performance on several new tasks without updating the model's parameters i.e. using zero or a few labeled examples, but the capabilities of LLMs are yet unexplored for feature-specific sentiment analysis. The goal of our study is to explore the capabilities of LLMs to perform feature-specific sentiment analysis of user reviews. This study compares the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and different variants of Llama-2 chat, against previous approaches for extracting app features and associated sentiments in zero-shot, 1-shot, and 5-shot scenarios. The results indicate that GPT-4 outperforms the rule-based SAFE by 17% in f1-score for extracting app features in the zero-shot scenario, with 5-shot further improving it by 6%. However, the fine-tuned RE-BERT exceeds GPT-4 by 6% in f1-score. For predicting positive and neutral sentiments, GPT-4 achieves f1-scores of 76% and 45% in the zero-shot setting, which improve by 7% and 23% in the 5-shot setting, respectively. Our study conducts a thorough evaluation of both proprietary and open-source LLMs to provide an objective assessment of their performance in extracting feature-sentiment pairs.

Paperid: 6623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07048.pdf

Abstract:
The prominence of generalized foundation models in vision-language integration has witnessed a surge, given their multifarious applications. Within the natural domain, the procurement of vision-language datasets to construct these foundation models is facilitated by their abundant availability and the ease of web crawling. Conversely, in the remote sensing domain, although vision-language datasets exist, their volume is suboptimal for constructing robust foundation models. This study introduces an approach to curate vision-language datasets by employing an image decoding machine learning model, negating the need for human-annotated labels. Utilizing this methodology, we amassed approximately 9.6 million vision-language paired datasets in VHR imagery. The resultant model outperformed counterparts that did not leverage publicly available vision-language datasets, particularly in downstream tasks such as zero-shot classification, semantic localization, and image-text retrieval. Moreover, in tasks exclusively employing vision encoders, such as linear probing and k-NN classification, our model demonstrated superior efficacy compared to those relying on domain-specific vision-language datasets.

Paperid: 6624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04298.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has recently demonstrated exceptional performance in zero-shot prompt segmentation for natural images and videos. However, when the propagation mechanism of SAM2 is applied to medical images, it often results in spatial inconsistencies, leading to significantly different segmentation outcomes for very similar images. In this paper, we introduce RevSAM2, a simple yet effective self-correction framework that enables SAM2 to achieve superior performance in unseen 3D medical image segmentation tasks without the need for fine-tuning. Specifically, to segment a 3D query volume using a limited number of support image-label pairs that define a new segmentation task, we propose reverse propagation strategy as a query information selection mechanism. Instead of simply maintaining a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue of memories to predict query slices sequentially, reverse propagation selects high-quality query information by leveraging support images to evaluate the quality of each predicted query slice mask. The selected high-quality masks are then used as prompts to propagate across the entire query volume, thereby enhancing generalization to unseen tasks. Notably, we are the first to explore the potential of SAM2 in label-efficient medical image segmentation without fine-tuning. Compared to fine-tuning on large labeled datasets, the label-efficient scenario provides a cost-effective alternative for medical segmentation tasks, particularly for rare diseases or when dealing with unseen classes. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the superiority of RevSAM2 in scenarios with limited labels, surpassing state-of-the-arts by 12.18% in Dice. The code will be released.

Paperid: 6625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03933.pdf

Abstract:
The accurate quantification of wall-shear stress dynamics is of substantial importance for various applications in fundamental and applied research, spanning areas from human health to aircraft design and optimization. Despite significant progress in experimental measurement techniques and post-processing algorithms, temporally resolved wall-shear stress dynamics with adequate spatial resolution and within a suitable spatial domain remain an elusive goal. To address this gap, we introduce a deep learning architecture that ingests wall-parallel velocity fields from the logarithmic layer of turbulent wall-bounded flows and outputs the corresponding 2D wall-shear stress fields with identical spatial resolution and domain size. From a physical perspective, our framework acts as a surrogate model encapsulating the various mechanisms through which highly energetic outer-layer flow structures influence the governing wall-shear stress dynamics. The network is trained in a supervised fashion on a unified dataset comprising direct numerical simulations of statistically 1D turbulent channel and spatially developing turbulent boundary layer flows at friction Reynolds numbers ranging from 390 to 1,500. We demonstrate a zero-shot applicability to experimental velocity fields obtained from Particle-Image Velocimetry measurements and verify the physical accuracy of the wall-shear stress estimates with synchronized wall-shear stress measurements using the Micro-Pillar Shear-Stress Sensor for Reynolds numbers up to 2,000. In summary, the presented framework lays the groundwork for extracting inaccessible experimental wall-shear stress information from readily available velocity measurements and thus, facilitates advancements in a variety of experimental applications.

Paperid: 6626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03284.pdf

Abstract:
Most available data is unstructured, making it challenging to access valuable information. Automatically building Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is crucial for structuring data and making it accessible, allowing users to search for information effectively. KGs also facilitate insights, inference, and reasoning. Traditional NLP methods, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, are key in information retrieval but face limitations, including the use of predefined entity types and the need for supervised learning. Current research leverages large language models' capabilities, such as zero- or few-shot learning. However, unresolved and semantically duplicated entities and relations still pose challenges, leading to inconsistent graphs and requiring extensive post-processing. Additionally, most approaches are topic-dependent. In this paper, we propose iText2KG, a method for incremental, topic-independent KG construction without post-processing. This plug-and-play, zero-shot method is applicable across a wide range of KG construction scenarios and comprises four modules: Document Distiller, Incremental Entity Extractor, Incremental Relation Extractor, and Graph Integrator and Visualization. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to baseline methods across three scenarios: converting scientific papers to graphs, websites to graphs, and CVs to graphs.

Paperid: 6627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02278.pdf

Abstract:
Recent developments in vision language models (VLM) have shown great potential for diverse applications related to image understanding. In this study, we have explored state-of-the-art VLM models for vision-based transportation engineering tasks such as image classification and object detection. The image classification task involves congestion detection and crack identification, whereas, for object detection, helmet violations were identified. We have applied open-source models such as CLIP, BLIP, OWL-ViT, Llava-Next, and closed-source GPT-4o to evaluate the performance of these state-of-the-art VLM models to harness the capabilities of language understanding for vision-based transportation tasks. These tasks were performed by applying zero-shot prompting to the VLM models, as zero-shot prompting involves performing tasks without any training on those tasks. It eliminates the need for annotated datasets or fine-tuning for specific tasks. Though these models gave comparative results with benchmark Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models in the image classification tasks, for object localization tasks, it still needs improvement. Therefore, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art VLM models highlighting the advantages and limitations of the models, which can be taken as the baseline for future improvement and wide-scale implementation.

Paperid: 6628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01357.pdf

Abstract:
Hybrid search has emerged as an effective strategy to offset the limitations of different matching paradigms, especially in out-of-domain contexts where notable improvements in retrieval quality have been observed. However, existing research predominantly focuses on a limited set of retrieval methods, evaluated in pairs on domain-general datasets exclusively in English. In this work, we study the efficacy of hybrid search across a variety of prominent retrieval models within the unexplored field of law in the French language, assessing both zero-shot and in-domain scenarios. Our findings reveal that in a zero-shot context, fusing different domain-general models consistently enhances performance compared to using a standalone model, regardless of the fusion method. Surprisingly, when models are trained in-domain, we find that fusion generally diminishes performance relative to using the best single system, unless fusing scores with carefully tuned weights. These novel insights, among others, expand the applicability of prior findings across a new field and language, and contribute to a deeper understanding of hybrid search in non-English specialized domains.

Paperid: 6629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20845.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is a fundamental problem with applications in climate, energy, healthcare, and finance. Many existing approaches require domain-specific feature engineering and substantial labeled data for each task. We introduce PatchFormer, a patch-based time series foundation model that uses hierarchical masked reconstruction for self-supervised pretraining and lightweight adapters for efficient transfer. PatchFormer segments time series into patches and learns multiscale temporal representations with learnable aggregation across temporal scales. Pretraining uses masked patch reconstruction with dynamic masking and objectives that encourage both local accuracy and global consistency, followed by cross-domain knowledge distillation. Experiments on 24 benchmark datasets spanning weather, energy, traffic, finance, and healthcare demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot multi-horizon forecasting, reducing mean squared error by 27.3 percent relative to strong baselines while requiring 94 percent less task-specific training data. The model exhibits near log-linear scaling with more pretraining data up to 100 billion points and processes length-512 sequences 3.8x faster than full-sequence transformers.

Paperid: 6630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20481.pdf

Abstract:
Modern zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models offer unprecedented expressivity but also pose serious crime risks, as they can synthesize voices of individuals who never consented. In this context, speaker unlearning aims to prevent the generation of specific speaker identities upon request. Existing approaches, reliant on retraining, are costly and limited to speakers seen in the training set. We present TruS, a training-free speaker unlearning framework that shifts the paradigm from data deletion to inference-time control. TruS steers identity-specific hidden activations to suppress target speakers while preserving other attributes (e.g., prosody and emotion). Experimental results show that TruS effectively prevents voice generation on both seen and unseen opt-out speakers, establishing a scalable safeguard for speech synthesis. The demo and code are available on http://mmai.ewha.ac.kr/trus.

Paperid: 6631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17405.pdf

Abstract:
Precision pathology relies on detecting fine-grained morphological abnormalities within specific Regions of Interest (ROIs), as these local, texture-rich cues - rather than global slide contexts - drive expert diagnostic reasoning. While Vision-Language (V-L) models promise data efficiency by leveraging semantic priors, adapting them faces a critical Granularity Mismatch, where generic representations fail to resolve such subtle defects. Current adaptation methods often treat modalities as independent streams, failing to ground semantic prompts in ROI-specific visual contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose the Hierarchical Adaptation and Alignment Framework (HAAF). At its core is a novel Cross-Level Scaled Alignment (CLSA) mechanism that enforces a sequential calibration order: visual features first inject context into text prompts to generate content-adaptive descriptors, which then spatially guide the visual encoder to spotlight anomalies. Additionally, a dual-branch inference strategy integrates semantic scores with geometric prototypes to ensure stability in few-shot settings. Experiments on four benchmarks show HAAF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and effectively scales with domain-specific backbones (e.g., CONCH) in low-resource scenarios.

Paperid: 6632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16549.pdf

Abstract:
The combination of multimodal Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up new possibilities for medical classification. This work offers a rigorous, unified benchmark by using four publicly available datasets covering text and image modalities (binary and multiclass complexity) that contrasts traditional Machine Learning (ML) with contemporary transformer-based techniques. We evaluated three model classes for each task: Classical ML (LR, LightGBM, ResNet-50), Prompt-Based LLMs/VLMs (Gemini 2.5), and Fine-Tuned PEFT Models (LoRA-adapted Gemma3 variants). All experiments used consistent data splits and aligned metrics. According to our results, traditional machine learning (ML) models set a high standard by consistently achieving the best overall performance across most medical categorization tasks. This was especially true for structured text-based datasets, where the classical models performed exceptionally well. In stark contrast, the LoRA-tuned Gemma variants consistently showed the worst performance across all text and image experiments, failing to generalize from the minimal fine-tuning provided. However, the zero-shot LLM/VLM pipelines (Gemini 2.5) had mixed results; they performed poorly on text-based tasks, but demonstrated competitive performance on the multiclass image task, matching the classical ResNet-50 baseline. These results demonstrate that in many medical categorization scenarios, established machine learning models continue to be the most reliable option. The experiment suggests that foundation models are not universally superior and that the effectiveness of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is highly dependent on the adaptation strategy, as minimal fine-tuning proved detrimental in this study.

Paperid: 6633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16530.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) and high-capacity encoders have advanced zero and few-shot classification, but their inference cost and latency limit practical deployment. We propose training lightweight text classifiers using dynamically generated supervision from an LLM. Our method employs an iterative, agentic loop in which the LLM curates training data, analyzes model successes and failures, and synthesizes targeted examples to address observed errors. This closed-loop generation and evaluation process progressively improves data quality and adapts it to the downstream classifier and task. Across four widely used benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms standard zero and few-shot baselines. These results indicate that LLMs can serve effectively as data curators, enabling accurate and efficient classification without the operational cost of large-model deployment.

Paperid: 6634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10193.pdf

Abstract:
Group anomaly detection is crucial in many network applications, but faces challenges due to diverse anomaly patterns. Motivated by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, graph foundation models (GFMs) is proposed to handle few-shot learning task with fewer labeling efforts. GFMs have been successfully applied to detection of individual anomalies but cannot be generalized to group anomalies, as group anomaly patterns must be detected as a whole and individuals in an abnormal group can look rather normal. Therefore, we propose GFM4GA, a novel graph foundation model for group anomaly detection. The pipeline is pretrained via dual-level contrastive learning based on feature-based estimation and group extraction, to capture potential group anomaly structure and feature inconsistencies. In the downstream tasks, the pipeline is finetuned in parameter-constrained and group-anomaly-proportion weighted few-shot settings, and its adaptive ability to unseen group anomalies expanded via group contexts determined by labeled anomaly neighbors. Experiments show that GFM4GA surpasses group anomaly detectors and GFMs for individual anomalies, achieving average improvements of 2.85% in AUROC and 2.55% in AUPRC.

Paperid: 6635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09750.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have proven to work well in question-answering scenarios, but real-world applications often require access to tools for live information or actuation. For this, LLMs can be extended with tools, which are often defined in advance, also allowing for some fine-tuning for specific use cases. However, rapidly evolving software landscapes and individual services require the constant development and integration of new tools. Domain- or company-specific tools can greatly elevate the usefulness of an LLM, but such custom tools can be problematic to integrate, or the LLM may fail to reliably understand and use them. For this, we need strategies to define new tools and integrate them into the LLM dynamically, as well as robust and scalable zero-shot prompting methods that can make use of those tools in an efficient manner. In this paper, we present SAGE, a specialized conversational AI interface, based on the OPACA framework for tool discovery and execution. The integration with OPACA makes it easy to add new tools or services for the LLM to use, while SAGE itself presents rich extensibility and modularity. This not only provides the ability to seamlessly switch between different models (e.g. GPT, LLAMA), but also to add and select prompting methods, involving various setups of differently prompted agents for selecting and executing tools and evaluating the results. We implemented a number of task-solving strategies, making use of agentic concepts and prompting methods in various degrees of complexity, and evaluated those against a comprehensive set of benchmark services. The results are promising and highlight the distinct strengths and weaknesses of different task-solving strategies. Both SAGE and the OPACA framework, as well as the different benchmark services and results, are available as Open Source/Open Data on GitHub.

Paperid: 6636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09693.pdf

Abstract:
Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for pre-defined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot virtual screening performance in settings where no binding pocket information is provided as input, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates competitive ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

Paperid: 6637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08176.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic evaluation of large language model (LLM) responses requires not only factual correctness but also clarity, particularly in political question-answering. While recent datasets provide human annotations for clarity and evasion, the impact of prompt design on automatic clarity evaluation remains underexplored. In this paper, we study prompt-based clarity evaluation using the CLARITY dataset from the SemEval 2026 shared task. We compare a GPT-3.5 baseline provided with the dataset against GPT-5.2 evaluated under three prompting strategies: simple prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and chain-of-thought with few-shot examples. Model predictions are evaluated against human annotations using accuracy and class-wise metrics for clarity and evasion, along with hierarchical exact match. Results show that GPT-5.2 consistently outperforms the GPT-3.5 baseline on clarity prediction, with accuracy improving from 56 percent to 63 percent under chain-of-thought with few-shot prompting. Chain-of-thought prompting yields the highest evasion accuracy at 34 percent, though improvements are less stable across fine-grained evasion categories. We further evaluate topic identification and find that reasoning-based prompting improves accuracy from 60 percent to 74 percent relative to human annotations. Overall, our findings indicate that prompt design reliably improves high-level clarity evaluation, while fine-grained evasion and topic detection remain challenging despite structured reasoning prompts.

Paperid: 6638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07284.pdf

Abstract:
Retargeting human motion to heterogeneous robots is a fundamental challenge in robotics, primarily due to the severe kinematic and dynamic discrepancies between varying embodiments. Existing solutions typically resort to training embodiment-specific models, which scales poorly and fails to exploit shared motion semantics. To address this, we present AdaMorph, a unified neural retargeting framework that enables a single model to adapt human motion to diverse robot morphologies. Our approach treats retargeting as a conditional generation task. We map human motion into a morphology-agnostic latent intent space and utilize a dual-purpose prompting mechanism to condition the generation. Instead of simple input concatenation, we leverage Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) to dynamically modulate the decoder's feature space based on embodiment constraints. Furthermore, we enforce physical plausibility through a curriculum-based training objective that ensures orientation and trajectory consistency via integration. Experimental results on 12 distinct humanoid robots demonstrate that AdaMorph effectively unifies control across heterogeneous topologies, exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization to unseen complex motions while preserving the dynamic essence of the source behaviors.

Paperid: 6639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06471.pdf

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) personalization aims to adapt general-purpose models to individual users. Most existing methods, however, are developed under data-rich and resource-abundant settings, often incurring privacy risks. In contrast, realistic personalization typically occurs after deployment under (i) extremely limited user data, (ii) constrained computational resources, and (iii) strict privacy requirements. We propose PRISP, a lightweight and privacy-safe personalization framework tailored to these constraints. PRISP leverages a Text-to-LoRA hypernetwork to generate task-aware LoRA parameters from task descriptions, and enables efficient user personalization by optimizing a small subset of task-aware LoRA parameters together with minimal additional modules using few-shot user data. Experiments on a few-shot variant of the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that PRISP achieves strong overall performance compared to prior approaches, while reducing computational overhead and eliminating privacy risks.

Paperid: 6640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06289.pdf

Abstract:
Mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful analytical technique for identifying small molecules, yet determining complete molecular structures directly from tandem mass spectra (MS/MS) remains a long-standing challenge due to complex fragmentation patterns and the vast diversity of chemical space. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has shown promise for reasoning-intensive scientific tasks, but their capability for chemical interpretation is still unclear. In this work, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting framework and benchmark that evaluate how LLMs reason about mass spectral data to predict molecular structures. We formalize expert chemists' reasoning steps-such as double bond equivalent (DBE) analysis, neutral loss identification, and fragment assembly-into structured prompts and assess multiple state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3 series) in a zero-shot setting using the MassSpecGym dataset. Our evaluation across metrics of SMILES validity, formula consistency, and structural similarity reveals that while LLMs can produce syntactically valid and partially plausible structures, they fail to achieve chemical accuracy or link reasoning to correct molecular predictions. These findings highlight both the interpretive potential and the current limitations of LLM-based reasoning for molecular elucidation, providing a foundation for future work that combines domain knowledge and reinforcement learning to achieve chemically grounded AI reasoning.

Paperid: 6641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05499.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented dexterous grasping remains challenging in robotic manipulations of open-world objects under severe partial observation, where significant missing data invalidates generic shape completion. In this paper, to overcome this limitation, we study Task-Oriented Shape Completion, a new task that focuses on completing the potential contact regions rather than the entire shape. We argue that shape completion for grasping should be explicitly guided by the downstream manipulation task. To achieve this, we first generate multiple task-oriented shape completion candidates by leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of object functional understanding from several pre-trained foundation models. A 3D discriminative autoencoder is then proposed to evaluate the plausibility of each generated candidate and optimize the most plausible one from a global perspective. A conditional flow-matching model named FlowGrasp is developed to generate task-oriented dexterous grasps from the optimized shape. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in task-oriented dexterous grasping and task-oriented shape completion, improving the Grasp Displacement and the Chamfer Distance over the state-of-the-art by 16.17\% and 55.26%, respectively. In particular, it shows good capabilities in grasping objects with severe missing data. It also demonstrates good generality in handling open-set categories and tasks.

Paperid: 6642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05455.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their outputs lack faithful explanations and cannot be effectively contested to correct errors, undermining trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose ART (Adaptive Reasoning Trees), a hierarchical method for claim verification. The process begins with a root claim, which branches into supporting and attacking child arguments. An argument's strength is determined bottom-up via a pairwise tournament of its children, adjudicated by a judge LLM, allowing a final, transparent and contestable verdict to be systematically derived which is missing in methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We empirically validate ART on multiple datasets, analyzing different argument generators and comparison strategies. Our findings show that ART's structured reasoning outperforms strong baselines, establishing a new benchmark for explainable claim verification which is more reliable and ensures clarity in the overall decision making step.

Paperid: 6643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05255.pdf

Abstract:
Judicial work depends on close reading of long records, charge sheets, pleadings, annexures, orders, often spanning hundreds of pages. With limited staff support, exhaustive reading during hearings is impractical. We present CourtNav, a voice-guided, anchor-first navigator for legal PDFs that maps a judge's spoken command (e.g., "go to paragraph 23", "highlight the contradiction in the cross-examination") directly to a highlighted paragraph in seconds. CourtNav transcribes the command, classifies intent with a grammar-first(Exact regex matching), LLM-backed router classifying the queries using few shot examples, retrieves over a layout-aware hybrid index, and auto-scrolls the viewer to the cited span while highlighting it and close alternates. By design, the interface shows only grounded passages, never free text, keeping evidence verifiable and auditable. This need is acute in India, where judgments and cross-examinations are notoriously long.In a pilot on representative charge sheets, pleadings, and orders, median time-to-relevance drops from 3-5 minutes (manual navigation) to 10-15 seconds; with quick visual verification included, 30-45 seconds. Under fixed time budgets, this navigation-first design increases the breadth of the record actually consulted while preserving control and transparency.

Paperid: 6644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02365.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal creative assistants decompose user goals and route tasks to subagents for layout, styling, retrieval, and generation. Retrieval quality is pivotal, yet failures can arise at several stages: understanding user intent, choosing content types, finding candidates (recall), or ranking results. Meanwhile, sending and processing images is costly, making naive multimodal approaches impractical. We present FUSE: Failure-aware Usage of Subagent Evidence for MultiModal Search and Recommendation. FUSE replaces most raw-image prompting with a compact Grounded Design Representation (GDR): a selection aware JSON of canvas elements (image, text, shape, icon, video, logo), structure, styles, salient colors, and user selection provided by the Planner team. FUSE implements seven context budgeting strategies: comprehensive baseline prompting, context compression, chain-of-thought reasoning, mini-shot optimization, retrieval-augmented context, two-stage processing, and zero-shot minimalism. Finally, a pipeline attribution layer monitors system performance by converting subagent signals into simple checks: intent alignment, content-type/routing sanity, recall health (e.g., zero-hit and top-match strength), and ranking displacement analysis. We evaluate the seven context budgeting variants across 788 evaluation queries from diverse users and design templates (refer Figure 3). Our systematic evaluation reveals that Context Compression achieves optimal performance across all pipeline stages, with 93.3% intent accuracy, 86.8% routing success(with fallbacks), 99.4% recall, and 88.5% NDCG@5. This approach demonstrates that strategic context summarization outperforms both comprehensive and minimal contextualization strategies.

Paperid: 6645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01687.pdf

Abstract:
Precise delineation of anatomical and pathological structures within 3D medical volumes is crucial for accurate diagnosis, effective surgical planning, and longitudinal disease monitoring. Despite advancements in AI, clinically viable segmentation is often hindered by the scarcity of 3D annotations, patient-specific variability, data privacy concerns, and substantial computational overhead. In this work, we propose FALCON, a cross-domain few-shot segmentation framework that achieves high-precision 3D volume segmentation by processing data as 2D slices. The framework is first meta-trained on natural images to learn-to-learn generalizable segmentation priors, then transferred to the medical domain via adversarial fine-tuning and boundary-aware learning. Task-aware inference, conditioned on support cues, allows FALCON to adapt dynamically to patient-specific anatomical variations across slices. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that FALCON consistently achieves the lowest Hausdorff Distance scores, indicating superior boundary accuracy while maintaining a Dice Similarity Coefficient comparable to the state-of-the-art models. Notably, these results are achieved with significantly less labeled data, no data augmentation, and substantially lower computational overhead.

Paperid: 6646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01609.pdf

Abstract:
Rule-based reasoning over natural language input arises in domains where decisions must be auditable and justifiable: clinical protocols specify eligibility criteria in prose, evidence rules define admissibility through textual conditions, and scientific standards dictate methodological requirements. Applying rules to such inputs demands both interpretive flexibility and formal guarantees. Large language models (LLMs) provide flexibility but cannot ensure consistent rule application; symbolic systems provide guarantees but require structured input. This paper presents an integration pattern that combines these strengths: LLMs serve as ontology population engines, translating unstructured text into ABox assertions according to expert-authored TBox specifications, while SWRL-based reasoners apply rules with deterministic guarantees. The framework decomposes reasoning into entity identification, assertion extraction, and symbolic verification, with task definitions grounded in OWL 2 ontologies. Experiments across three domains (legal hearsay determination, scientific method-task application, clinical trial eligibility) and eleven language models validate the approach. Structured decomposition achieves statistically significant improvements over few-shot prompting in aggregate, with gains observed across all three domains. An ablation study confirms that symbolic verification provides substantial benefit beyond structured prompting alone. The populated ABox integrates with standard semantic web tooling for inspection and querying, positioning the framework for richer inference patterns that simpler formalisms cannot express.

Paperid: 6647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00988.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a novel FSVOS model that employs a local matching strategy to restrict the search space to the most relevant neighboring pixels. Rather than relying on inefficient standard im2col-like implementations (e.g., spatial convolutions, depthwise convolutions and feature-shifting mechanisms) or hardware-specific CUDA kernels (e.g., deformable and neighborhood attention), which often suffer from limited portability across non-CUDA devices, we reorganize the local sampling process through a direction-based sampling perspective. Specifically, we implement a non-parametric sampling mechanism that enables dynamically varying sampling regions. This approach provides the flexibility to adapt to diverse spatial structures without the computational costs of parametric layers and the need for model retraining. To further enhance feature coherence across frames, we design a supervised spatio-temporal contrastive learning scheme that enforces consistency in feature representations. In addition, we introduce a publicly available benchmark dataset for multi-object segmentation in X-ray angiography videos (MOSXAV), featuring detailed, manually labeled segmentation ground truth. Extensive experiments on the CADICA, XACV, and MOSXAV datasets show that our proposed FSVOS method outperforms current state-of-the-art video segmentation methods in terms of segmentation accuracy and generalization capability (i.e., seen and unseen categories). This work offers enhanced flexibility and potential for a wide range of clinical applications.

Paperid: 6648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00584.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality's representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called Granularity-Aware Alignment (GranAlign), that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23% mAP@avg improvement on the challenging QVHighlights dataset.

Paperid: 6649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00260.pdf

Abstract:
While foundation models in radiology are expected to be applied to various clinical tasks, computational cost constraints remain a major challenge when training on 3D-CT volumetric data. In this study, we propose TotalFM, a radiological foundation model that efficiently learns the correspondence between 3D-CT images and linguistic expressions based on the concept of organ separation, utilizing a large-scale dataset of 140,000 series. By automating the creation of organ volume and finding-sentence pairs through segmentation techniques and Large Language Model (LLM)-based radiology report processing, and by combining self-supervised pre-training via VideoMAE with contrastive learning using volume-text pairs, we aimed to balance computational efficiency and representation capability. In zero-shot organ-wise lesion classification tasks, the proposed model achieved higher F1 scores in 83% (5/6) of organs compared to CT-CLIP and 64% (9/14) of organs compared to Merlin. These results suggest that the proposed model exhibits high generalization performance in a clinical evaluation setting using actual radiology report sentences. Furthermore, in zero-shot finding-wise lesion classification tasks, our model achieved a higher AUROC in 83% (25/30) of finding categories compared to Merlin. We also confirmed performance comparable to existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in radiology report generation tasks. Our results demonstrate that the organ-separated learning framework can serve as a realistic and effective design guideline for the practical implementation of 3D-CT foundation models.

Paperid: 6650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00243.pdf

Abstract:
Effective pest management is crucial for enhancing agricultural productivity, especially for crops such as sugarcane and wheat that are highly vulnerable to pest infestations. Traditional pest management methods depend heavily on manual field inspections and the use of chemical pesticides. These approaches are often costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and can have a negative impact on the environment. To overcome these challenges, this study presents a lightweight framework for pest detection and pesticide recommendation, designed for low-resource devices such as smartphones and drones, making it suitable for use by small and marginal farmers. The proposed framework includes two main components. The first is a Pest Detection Module that uses a compact, lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with prototypical meta-learning to accurately identify pests even when only a few training samples are available. The second is a Pesticide Recommendation Module that incorporates environmental factors like crop type and growth stage to suggest safe and eco-friendly pesticide recommendations. To train and evaluate our framework, a comprehensive pest image dataset was developed by combining multiple publicly available datasets. The final dataset contains samples with different viewing angles, pest sizes, and background conditions to ensure strong generalization. Experimental results show that the proposed lightweight CNN achieves high accuracy, comparable to state-of-the-art models, while significantly reducing computational complexity. The Decision Support System additionally improves pest management by reducing dependence on traditional chemical pesticides and encouraging sustainable practices, demonstrating its potential for real-time applications in precision agriculture.

Paperid: 6651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22385.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an LLM-Guided Exemplar Selection framework to address a key limitation in state-of-the-art Human Activity Recognition (HAR) methods: their reliance on large labeled datasets and purely geometric exemplar selection, which often fail to distinguish similar weara-ble sensor activities such as walking, walking upstairs, and walking downstairs. Our method incorporates semantic reasoning via an LLM-generated knowledge prior that captures feature importance, inter-class confusability, and exemplar budget multipliers, and uses it to guide exemplar scoring and selection. These priors are combined with margin-based validation cues, PageRank centrality, hubness penalization, and facility-location optimization to obtain a compact and informative set of exemplars. Evaluated on the UCI-HAR dataset under strict few-shot conditions, the framework achieves a macro F1-score of 88.78%, outperforming classical approaches such as random sampling, herding, and $k$-center. The results show that LLM-derived semantic priors, when integrated with structural and geometric cues, provide a stronger foundation for selecting representative sensor exemplars in few-shot wearable-sensor HAR.

Paperid: 6652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21683.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot medical image segmentation (CD-FSMIS) offers a promising and data-efficient solution for medical applications where annotations are severely scarce and multimodal analysis is required. However, existing methods typically filter out domain-specific information to improve generalization, which inadvertently limits cross-domain performance and degrades source-domain accuracy. To address this, we present Contrastive Graph Modeling (C-Graph), a framework that leverages the structural consistency of medical images as a reliable domain-transferable prior. We represent image features as graphs, with pixels as nodes and semantic affinities as edges. A Structural Prior Graph (SPG) layer is proposed to capture and transfer target-category node dependencies and enable global structure modeling through explicit node interactions. Building upon SPG layers, we introduce a Subgraph Matching Decoding (SMD) mechanism that exploits semantic relations among nodes to guide prediction. Furthermore, we design a Confusion-minimizing Node Contrast (CNC) loss to mitigate node ambiguity and subgraph heterogeneity by contrastively enhancing node discriminability in the graph space. Our method significantly outperforms prior CD-FSMIS approaches across multiple cross-domain benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance while simultaneously preserving strong segmentation accuracy on the source domain.

Paperid: 6653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20174.pdf

Abstract:
Document image retrieval (DIR) aims to retrieve document images from a gallery according to a given query. Existing DIR methods are primarily based on image queries that retrieve documents within the same coarse semantic category, e.g., newspapers or receipts. However, these methods struggle to effectively retrieve document images in real-world scenarios where textual queries with fine-grained semantics are usually provided. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new Natural Language-based Document Image Retrieval (NL-DIR) benchmark with corresponding evaluation metrics. In this work, natural language descriptions serve as semantically rich queries for the DIR task. The NL-DIR dataset contains 41K authentic document images, each paired with five high-quality, fine-grained semantic queries generated and evaluated through large language models in conjunction with manual verification. We perform zero-shot and fine-tuning evaluations of existing mainstream contrastive vision-language models and OCR-free visual document understanding (VDU) models. A two-stage retrieval method is further investigated for performance improvement while achieving both time and space efficiency. We hope the proposed NL-DIR benchmark can bring new opportunities and facilitate research for the VDU community. Datasets and codes will be publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/nianbing/NL-DIR.

Paperid: 6654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16415.pdf

Abstract:
Object counting in complex scenes remains challenging, particularly in the zero-shot setting, where the goal is to count instances of unseen categories specified only by a class name. Existing zero-shot object counting (ZOC) methods that infer exemplars from text either rely on open-vocabulary detectors, which often yield multi-instance candidates, or on random patch sampling, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. To address this, we propose CountZES, a training-free framework for object counting via zero-shot exemplar selection. CountZES progressively discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines open-vocabulary detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a diverse, complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across natural, aerial and medical domains.

Paperid: 6655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16303.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-modal large language models that have image output are emerging. Many image generation benchmarks focus on aesthetics instead of fine-grained generation capabilities. In PixelArena, we propose using semantic segmentation tasks to objectively examine their fine-grained generative intelligence with pixel precision. We find the latest Gemini 3 Pro Image has emergent image generation capabilities that generate semantic masks with high fidelity under zero-shot settings, showcasing visual intelligence unseen before and true generalization in new image generation tasks. We further investigate its results, compare them qualitatively and quantitatively with those of other models, and present failure cases. The findings not only signal exciting progress in the field but also provide insights into future research related to multimodality, reasoning, interpretability and benchmarking.

Paperid: 6656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15622.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate estimation of a battery's state of charge and state of health is essential for safe and reliable battery management. Existing approaches often decouple these two states, lack stability guarantees, and exhibit limited generalization across operating conditions. This study introduces a unified operator-theoretic framework for aging-aware state of charge and control-informed state of health estimation. The architecture couples a Koopman-based latent dynamics model, which enables linear forecasting of nonlinear discharge-capacity evolution under varying operational conditions, with a neural operator that maps measurable intra-cycle signals to state of charge. The predicted discharge capacity is incorporated as a static correction within the neural operator pathway, yielding an age-aware state of charge estimate. Stability is ensured through spectral-radius clipping of the Koopman operator. The overall framework is trained end-to-end and evaluated on real-world lithium-ion battery datasets, demonstrating real-time capability while maintaining stable dynamics. To handle condition shifts and unseen regimes, the method integrates both zero-shot and few-shot out-of-distribution adaptation using only a limited number of cycles. Results show accurate and stable capacity forecasts, competitive state of charge trajectories on held-out cycles, and a direct, model-consistent mechanism for tracking capacity fade as a surrogate for state of health across diverse operating conditions.

Paperid: 6657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15577.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on online zero-shot monocular 3D instance segmentation, a novel practical setting where existing approaches fail to perform because they rely on posed RGB-D sequences. To overcome this limitation, we leverage CUT3R, a recent Reconstructive Foundation Model (RFM), to provide reliable geometric priors from a single RGB stream. We propose MoonSeg3R, which introduces three key components: (1) a self-supervised query refinement module with spatial-semantic distillation that transforms segmentation masks from 2D visual foundation models (VFMs) into discriminative 3D queries; (2) a 3D query index memory that provides temporal consistency by retrieving contextual queries; and (3) a state-distribution token from CUT3R that acts as a mask identity descriptor to strengthen cross-frame fusion. Experiments on ScanNet200 and SceneNN show that MoonSeg3R is the first method to enable online monocular 3D segmentation and achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art RGB-D-based systems. Code and models will be released.

Paperid: 6658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15226.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the systems submitted by the Yes-MT team for the Low-Resource Indic Language Translation Shared Task at WMT 2024 (Pakray et al., 2024), focusing on translating between English and the Assamese, Mizo, Khasi, and Manipuri languages. The experiments explored various approaches, including fine-tuning pre-trained models like mT5 (Xue et al., 2020) and IndicBart (Dabre et al., 2021) in both multilingual and monolingual settings, LoRA (Hu et al., 2021) fine-tuning IndicTrans2 (Gala et al., 2023), zero-shot and few-shot prompting (Brown, 2020) with large language models (LLMs) like Llama 3 (Dubey et al., 2024) and Mixtral 8x7b (Jiang et al., 2024), LoRA supervised fine-tuning of Llama 3 (Mecklenburg et al., 2024), and training Transformer models (Vaswani, 2017) from scratch. The results were evaluated on the WMT23 Low-Resource Indic Language Translation Shared Task test data using SacreBLEU (Post, 2018) and CHRF (Popovic, 2015), highlighting the challenges of low-resource translation and the potential of LLMs for these tasks, particularly with fine-tuning.

Paperid: 6659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15061.pdf

Abstract:
This study develops meta-learners for few-shot weakly-supervised segmentation (FWS) to address the challenge of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation for glaucoma diagnosis with limited labeled fundus images. We significantly improve existing meta-learners by introducing Omni meta-training which balances data usage and diversifies the number of shots. We also develop their efficient versions that reduce computational costs. In addition, we develop sparsification techniques that generate more customizable and representative scribbles and other sparse labels. After evaluating multiple datasets, we find that Omni and efficient versions outperform the original versions, with the best meta-learner being Efficient Omni ProtoSeg (EO-ProtoSeg). It achieves intersection over union (IoU) scores of 88.15% for OD and 71.17% for OC on the REFUGE dataset using just one sparsely labeled image, outperforming few-shot and semi-supervised methods which require more labeled images. Its best performance reaches 86.80% for OD and 71.78%for OC on DRISHTIGS, 88.21% for OD and 73.70% for OC on REFUGE, 80.39% for OD and 52.65% for OC on REFUGE. EO-ProtoSeg is comparable to unsupervised domain adaptation methods yet much lighter with less than two million parameters and does not require any retraining.

Paperid: 6660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14137.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a novel, closed-form approach for selective unlearning in multimodal models, specifically targeting pretrained models such as CLIP. Our method leverages nullspace projection to erase the target class information embedded in the final projection layer, without requiring any retraining or the use of images from the forget set. By computing an orthonormal basis for the subspace spanned by target text embeddings and projecting these directions, we dramatically reduce the alignment between image features and undesired classes. Unlike traditional unlearning techniques that rely on iterative fine-tuning and extensive data curation, our approach is both computationally efficient and surgically precise. This leads to a pronounced drop in zero-shot performance for the target classes while preserving the overall multimodal knowledge of the model. Our experiments demonstrate that even a partial projection can balance between complete unlearning and retaining useful information, addressing key challenges in model decontamination and privacy preservation.

Paperid: 6661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14113.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained models like CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot classification capabilities across diverse visual domains, spanning natural images, artistic renderings, and abstract representations. However, real-world applications often demand the removal (or "unlearning") of specific object classes without requiring additional data or retraining, or affecting the model's performance on unrelated tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel training- and data-free unlearning framework that enables three distinct forgetting paradigms: (1) global unlearning of selected objects across all domains, (2) domain-specific knowledge removal (e.g., eliminating sketch representations while preserving photo recognition), and (3) complete unlearning in selective domains. By leveraging a multimodal nullspace through synergistic integration of text prompts and synthesized visual prototypes derived from CLIP's joint embedding space, our method efficiently removes undesired class information while preserving the remaining knowledge. This approach overcomes the limitations of existing retraining-based methods and offers a flexible and computationally efficient solution for controlled model forgetting.

Paperid: 6662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13397.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately predicting topologically correct masks remains a difficult task for general segmentation models, which often produce fragmented or disconnected outputs. Fixing these artifacts typically requires hand-crafted refinement rules or architectures specialized to a particular task. Here, we show that Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) can be directly re-purposed as an effective refinement mechanism, using local, iterative updates guided by image context to repair segmentation masks. By training on imperfect masks and ground truths, the automaton learns the structural properties of the target shape while relying solely on local information. When applied to coarse, globally predicted masks, the learned dynamics progressively reconnect broken regions, prune loose fragments and converge towards stable, topologically consistent results. We show how refinement NCA (rNCA) can be easily applied to repair common topological errors produced by different base segmentation models and tasks: for fragmented retinal vessels, it yields 2-3% gains in Dice/clDice and improves Betti errors, reducing $β_0$ errors by 60% and $β_1$ by 20%; for myocardium, it repairs 61.5% of broken cases in a zero-shot setting while lowering ASSD and HD by 19% and 16%, respectively. This showcases NCA as effective and broadly applicable refiners.

Paperid: 6663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12537.pdf

Abstract:
The vast majority of the world's languages, particularly creoles like Nagamese, remain severely under-resourced in Natural Language Processing (NLP), creating a significant barrier to their representation in digital technology. This paper introduces NagaNLP, a comprehensive open-source toolkit for Nagamese, bootstrapped through a novel methodology that relies on LLM-driven but human-validated synthetic data generation. We detail a multi-stage pipeline where an expert-guided LLM (Gemini) generates a candidate corpus, which is then refined and annotated by native speakers. This synthetic-hybrid approach yielded a 10K pair conversational dataset and a high-quality annotated corpus for foundational tasks. To assess the effectiveness of our methodology, we trained both discriminative and generative models. Our fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa-base model establishes a new benchmark for Nagamese, achieving a 93.81\% accuracy (0.90 F1-Macro) on Part-of-Speech tagging and a 0.75 F1-Macro on Named Entity Recognition, massively outperforming strong zero-shot baselines. Furthermore, we fine-tuned a Llama-3.2-3B Instruct model, named NagaLLaMA, which demonstrates superior performance on conversational tasks, achieving a Perplexity of 3.85, an order of magnitude improvement over its few-shot counterpart (96.76). We release the NagaNLP toolkit, including all datasets, models, and code, providing a foundational resource for a previously underserved language and a reproducible framework for reducing data scarcity in other low-resource contexts.

Paperid: 6664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10363.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot Long Video Moment Retrieval (ZLVMR) is the task of identifying temporal segments in hour-long videos using a natural language query without task-specific training. The core technical challenge of LVMR stems from the computational infeasibility of processing entire lengthy videos in a single pass. This limitation has established a 'Search-then-Refine' approach, where candidates are rapidly narrowed down, and only those portions are analyzed, as the dominant paradigm for LVMR. However, existing approaches to this paradigm face severe limitations. Conventional supervised learning suffers from limited scalability and poor generalization, despite substantial resource consumption. Yet, existing zero-shot methods also fail, facing a dual challenge: (1) their heuristic strategies cause a 'search' phase candidate explosion, and (2) the 'refine' phase, which is vulnerable to semantic discrepancy, requires high-cost VLMs for verification, incurring significant computational overhead. We propose \textbf{P}oint-\textbf{to}-\textbf{S}pan (P2S), a novel training-free framework to overcome this challenge of inefficient 'search' and costly 'refine' phases. P2S overcomes these challenges with two key innovations: an 'Adaptive Span Generator' to prevent the search phase candidate explosion, and 'Query Decomposition' to refine candidates without relying on high-cost VLM verification. To our knowledge, P2S is the first zero-shot framework capable of temporal grounding in hour-long videos, outperforming supervised state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin (e.g., +3.7\% on R5@0.1 on MAD).

Paperid: 6665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10120.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose audio representations aim to map acoustically variable instances of the same event to nearby points, resolving content identity in a zero-shot setting. Unlike supervised classification benchmarks that measure adaptability via parameter updates, we introduce VocSim, a training-free benchmark probing the intrinsic geometric alignment of frozen embeddings. VocSim aggregates 125k single-source clips from 19 corpora spanning human speech, animal vocalizations, and environmental sounds. By restricting to single-source audio, we isolate content representation from the confound of source separation. We evaluate embeddings using Precision@k for local purity and the Global Separation Rate (GSR) for point-wise class separation. To calibrate GSR, we report lift over an empirical permutation baseline. Across diverse foundation models, a simple pipeline, frozen Whisper encoder features, time-frequency pooling, and label-free PCA, yields strong zero-shot performance. However, VocSim also uncovers a consistent generalization gap. On blind, low-resource speech, local retrieval drops sharply. While performance remains statistically distinguishable from chance, the absolute geometric structure collapses, indicating a failure to generalize to unseen phonotactics. As external validation, our top embeddings predict avian perceptual similarity, improve bioacoustic classification, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the HEAR benchmark. We posit that the intrinsic geometric quality measured here proxies utility in unlisted downstream applications. We release data, code, and a public leaderboard to standardize the evaluation of intrinsic audio geometry.

Paperid: 6666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06811.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), \textit{e.g.} CLIP, have become essential tools in multimodal transfer learning. However, fine-tuning VLMs in few-shot scenarios poses significant challenges in balancing task-specific adaptation and generalization in the obtained model. Meanwhile, current researches have predominantly focused on prompt-based adaptation methods, leaving adapter-based approaches underexplored and revealing notable performance gaps. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Reconstruction-based Multimodal Adapter (RMAdapter), which leverages a dual-branch architecture. Unlike conventional single-branch adapters, RMAdapter consists of: (1) an adaptation branch that injects task-specific knowledge through parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and (2) a reconstruction branch that preserves general knowledge by reconstructing latent space features back into the original feature space. This design facilitates a dynamic balance between general and task-specific knowledge. Importantly, although RMAdapter introduces an additional reconstruction branch, it is carefully optimized to remain lightweight. By computing reconstruction loss locally at each layer and sharing projection modules, the overall computational overhead is kept minimal. A consistency constraint is also incorporated to better regulate the trade-off between discriminability and generalization. We comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of RMAdapter on three representative tasks: generalization to new categories, generalization to new target datasets, and domain generalization. Without relying on data augmentation or duplicate prompt designs, our RMAdapter consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all evaluation metrics.

Paperid: 6667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01085.pdf

Abstract:
Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence--anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence--human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

Paperid: 6668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22581.pdf

Abstract:
We find that in Hanabi, one of the most complex and popular benchmarks for zero-shot coordination and ad-hoc teamplay, a standard implementation of independent PPO with a slightly higher entropy coefficient 0.05 instead of the typically used 0.01, achieves a new state-of-the-art in cross-play between different seeds, beating by a significant margin all previous specialized algorithms, which were specifically designed for this setting. We provide an intuition for why sufficiently high entropy regularization ensures that different random seed produce joint policies which are mutually compatible. We also empirically find that a high $λ_{\text{GAE}}$ around 0.9, and using RNNs instead of just feed-forward layers in the actor-critic architecture, strongly increase inter-seed cross-play. While these results demonstrate the dramatic effect that hyperparameters can have not just on self-play scores but also on cross-play scores, we show that there are simple Dec-POMDPs though, in which standard policy gradient methods with increased entropy regularization are not able to achieve perfect inter-seed cross-play, thus demonstrating the continuing necessity for new algorithms for zero-shot coordination.

Paperid: 6669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22436.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot multi-class industrial anomaly detection remains a challenging task. Vision-language models need to be both category-adaptive and sharply discriminative, yet data scarcity often blurs the boundary between normal and abnormal states. This ambiguity leads to missed subtle defects and the rejection of atypical normal samples. We propose ABounD, an Adversarial Boundary-Driven few-shot learning for multi-class anomaly detection, which is a unified learning framework that integrates semantic concept learning with decision boundary shaping. The Dynamic Concept Fusion (DCF) module produces class-adaptive prompts by fusing generalizable priors with class-specific cues, conditioned on image features. Meanwhile, Adversarial Boundary Forging (ABF) sculpts a more precise decision margin by generating boundary-level fence features via PGD-style perturbations. Training is conducted in a single stage under a Concept-Boundary Loss, where ABF provides the main supervisory signal and semantic-spatial regularizers stabilize the optimization. This synergy yields a decision boundary that closely follows normal data while preserving flexibility and robust semantic alignment. Experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in the task of few-shot multi-class anomaly detection.

Paperid: 6670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21926.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models for promptable segmentation, including SAM, SAM 2, and the recently released SAM 3, have renewed interest in zero-shot segmentation of medical imaging. Although these models perform strongly on natural images, their behavior on medical data remains insufficiently characterized. While SAM 2 is widely used for annotation in 3D medical workflows, SAM 3 introduces a new perception backbone, detector-tracker pipeline, and concept-level prompting that may alter its behavior under spatial prompts. We present the first controlled comparison of SAM 2 and SAM 3 for zero-shot segmentation of 3D medical volumes and videos under purely visual prompting, with concept mechanisms disabled. We assess whether SAM 3 can serve as an out-of-the-box replacement for SAM 2 without customization. We benchmark both models on 16 public datasets (CT, MRI, 3D and cine ultrasound, endoscopy) covering 54 anatomical structures, pathologies, and surgical instruments. Prompts are restricted to the first frame and use four modes: single-click, multi-click, bounding box, and dense mask. This design standardizes preprocessing, prompt placement, propagation rules, and metric computation to disentangle prompt interpretation from propagation. Prompt-frame analysis shows that SAM 3 provides substantially stronger initialization than SAM 2 for click prompting across most structures. In full-volume analysis, SAM 3 retains this advantage for complex, vascular, and soft-tissue anatomies, emerging as the more versatile general-purpose segmenter. While SAM 2 remains competitive for compact, rigid organs under strong spatial guidance, it frequently fails on challenging targets where SAM 3 succeeds. Overall, our results suggest that SAM 3 is the superior default choice for most medical segmentation tasks, particularly those involving sparse user interaction or complex anatomical topology.

Paperid: 6671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19936.pdf

Abstract:
Image diffusion models, though originally developed for image generation, implicitly capture rich semantic structures that enable various recognition and localization tasks beyond synthesis. In this work, we investigate their self-attention maps can be reinterpreted as semantic label propagation kernels, providing robust pixel-level correspondences between relevant image regions. Extending this mechanism across frames yields a temporal propagation kernel that enables zero-shot object tracking via segmentation in videos. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of test-time optimization strategies-DDIM inversion, textual inversion, and adaptive head weighting-in adapting diffusion features for robust and consistent label propagation. Building on these findings, we introduce DRIFT, a framework for object tracking in videos leveraging a pretrained image diffusion model with SAM-guided mask refinement, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on standard video object segmentation benchmarks.

Paperid: 6672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19846.pdf

Abstract:
Vision foundation models can perform generalized object classification in zero-shot mode, and face/person recognition when they are fine-tuned. However, fine-tuned models suffer from catastrophic forgetting. We create models that perform four tasks (object recognition, face recognition from high- and low-quality images, and person recognition from whole-body images) in a single embedding space -- without incurring substantial catastrophic forgetting. To accomplish this, we introduce two variants of the Interleaved Multi-Domain Identity Curriculum (IMIC): a gradient-coupled, interleaving training schedule that fine-tunes a foundation backbone simultaneously on all four tasks. The IMIC method proved effective with three foundation model bases: DINOv3, CLIP, and EVA-02. Two of these (EVA-02 and CLIP) performed comparably with domain experts on all four tasks concurrently and were more accurate than humans at multi-tasking across face, body, and object datasets. Further, we demonstrate that our approach does not substantially harm out-of-distribution generalization, thus maintaining a key property of foundation models. Analysis of the most accurate model variants (EVA-02 + IMIC A and B) showed linearly separable representations of the four tasks in the unified embedding space, but with substantial sharing of features across tasks. Fewer than 100 PCs calculated from any one task could perform all other tasks with nearly zero performance degradation.

Paperid: 6673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18727.pdf

Abstract:
Aircraft maintenance logs hold valuable safety data but remain underused due to their unstructured text format. This paper introduces LogSyn, a framework that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert these logs into structured, machine-readable data. Using few-shot in-context learning on 6,169 records, LogSyn performs Controlled Abstraction Generation (CAG) to summarize problem-resolution narratives and classify events within a detailed hierarchical ontology. The framework identifies key failure patterns, offering a scalable method for semantic structuring and actionable insight extraction from maintenance logs. This work provides a practical path to improve maintenance workflows and predictive analytics in aviation and related industries.

Paperid: 6674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18174.pdf

Abstract:
Modern perception increasingly relies on fisheye, panoramic, and other wide field-of-view (FoV) cameras, yet most pipelines still apply planar CNNs designed for pinhole imagery on 2D grids, where image-space neighborhoods misrepresent physical adjacency and models are sensitive to global rotations. Frequency-domain spherical CNNs partially address this mismatch but require costly spherical harmonic transforms that constrain resolution and efficiency. We introduce the Unified Spherical Frontend (USF), a lens-agnostic framework that transforms images from any calibrated camera into a unit-sphere representation via ray-direction correspondences, and performs spherical resampling, convolution, and pooling directly in the spatial domain. USF is modular: projection, location sampling, interpolation, and resolution control are fully decoupled. Its distance-only spherical kernels offer configurable rotation-equivariance (mirroring translation-equivariance in planar CNNs) while avoiding harmonic transforms entirely. We compare standard planar backbones with their spherical counterparts across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks on synthetic (Spherical MNIST) and real-world datasets (PANDORA, Stanford 2D-3D-S), and stress-test robustness to extreme lens distortions, varying FoV, and arbitrary rotations. USF processes high-resolution spherical imagery efficiently and maintains less than 1% performance drop under random test-time rotations, even without rotational augmentation, and even enables zero-shot generalization from one lens type to unseen wide-FoV lenses with minimal performance degradation.

Paperid: 6675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17301.pdf

Abstract:
Sentiment analysis can aid in understanding people's opinions and emotions on social issues. In multilingual communities sentiment analysis systems can be used to quickly identify social challenges in social media posts, enabling government departments to detect and address these issues more precisely and effectively. Recently, large-language models (LLMs) have become available to the wide public and initial analyses have shown that they exhibit magnificent zero-shot sentiment analysis abilities in English. However, there is no work that has investigated to leverage LLMs for sentiment analysis on social media posts in South African languages and detect social challenges. Consequently, in this work, we analyse the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art LLMs GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LlaMa 2, PaLM 2, and Dolly 2 to investigate the sentiment polarities of the 10 most emerging topics in English, Sepedi and Setswana social media posts that fall within the jurisdictional areas of 10 South African government departments. Our results demonstrate that there are big differences between the various LLMs, topics, and languages. In addition, we show that a fusion of the outcomes of different LLMs provides large gains in sentiment classification performance with sentiment classification errors below 1%. Consequently, it is now feasible to provide systems that generate reliable information about sentiment analysis to detect social challenges and draw conclusions about possible needs for actions on specific topics and within different language groups.

Paperid: 6676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15515.pdf

Abstract:
Recent CLIP-based few-shot semantic segmentation methods introduce class-level textual priors to assist segmentation by typically using a single prompt (e.g., a photo of class). However, these approaches often result in incomplete activation of target regions, as a single textual description cannot fully capture the semantic diversity of complex categories. Moreover, they lack explicit cross-modal interaction and are vulnerable to noisy support features, further degrading visual prior quality. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-Text Guided Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation Network (MTGNet), a dual-branch framework that enhances segmentation performance by fusing diverse textual prompts to refine textual priors and guide the cross-modal optimization of visual priors. Specifically, we design a Multi-Textual Prior Refinement (MTPR) module that suppresses interference and aggregates complementary semantic cues to enhance foreground activation and expand semantic coverage for structurally complex objects. We introduce a Text Anchor Feature Fusion (TAFF) module, which leverages multi-text embeddings as semantic anchors to facilitate the transfer of discriminative local prototypes from support images to query images, thereby improving semantic consistency and alleviating intra-class variations. Furthermore, a Foreground Confidence-Weighted Attention (FCWA) module is presented to enhance visual prior robustness by leveraging internal self-similarity within support foreground features. It adaptively down-weights inconsistent regions and effectively suppresses interference in the query segmentation process. Extensive experiments on standard FSS benchmarks validate the effectiveness of MTGNet. In the 1-shot setting, it achieves 76.8% mIoU on PASCAL-5i and 57.4% on COCO-20i, with notable improvements in folds exhibiting high intra-class variations.

Paperid: 6677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13039.pdf

Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Temporal Action Localization (OV-TAL) aims to recognize and localize instances of any desired action categories in videos without explicitly curating training data for all categories. Existing methods mostly recognize action categories at a single granularity, which degrades the recognition accuracy of both base and novel action categories. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Grained Category-Aware Network (MGCA-Net) comprising a localizer, an action presence predictor, a conventional classifier, and a coarse-to-fine classifier. Specifically, the localizer localizes category-agnostic action proposals. For these action proposals, the action presence predictor estimates the probability that they belong to an action instance. At the same time, the conventional classifier predicts the probability of each action proposal over base action categories at the snippet granularity. Novel action categories are recognized by the coarse-to-fine classifier, which first identifies action presence at the video granularity. Finally, it assigns each action proposal to one category from the coarse categories at the proposal granularity. Through coarse-to-fine category awareness for novel actions and the conventional classifier's awareness of base actions, multi-grained category awareness is achieved, effectively enhancing localization performance. Comprehensive evaluations on the THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet-1.3 benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, our MGCA-Net achieves state-of-the-art results under the Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization setting.

Paperid: 6678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12213.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained entity recognition is crucial for reasoning and decision-making in task-oriented dialogues, yet current large language models (LLMs) continue to face challenges in domain adaptation and retrieval controllability. We introduce MME-RAG, a Multi-Manager-Expert Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that decomposes entity recognition into two coordinated stages: type-level judgment by lightweight managers and span-level extraction by specialized experts. Each expert is supported by a KeyInfo retriever that injects semantically aligned, few-shot exemplars during inference, enabling precise and domain-adaptive extraction without additional training. Experiments on CrossNER, MIT-Movie, MIT-Restaurant, and our newly constructed multi-domain customer-service dataset demonstrate that MME-RAG performs better than recent baselines in most domains. Ablation studies further show that both the hierarchical decomposition and KeyInfo-guided retrieval are key drivers of robustness and cross-domain generalization, establishing MME-RAG as a scalable and interpretable solution for adaptive dialogue understanding.

Paperid: 6679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11882.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate population estimates are essential for wildlife management, providing critical insights into species abundance and distribution. Traditional survey methods, including visual aerial counts and GNSS telemetry tracking, are widely used to monitor muskox populations in Arctic regions. These approaches are resource intensive and constrained by logistical challenges. Advances in remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and high resolution aerial imagery offer promising alternatives for wildlife detection. Yet, the effectiveness of deep learning object detection models (ODMs) is often limited by small datasets, making it challenging to train robust ODMs for sparsely distributed species like muskoxen. This study investigates the integration of synthetic imagery (SI) to supplement limited training data and improve muskox detection in zero shot (ZS) and few-shot (FS) settings. We compared a baseline model trained on real imagery with 5 ZS and 5 FS models that incorporated progressively more SI in the training set. For the ZS models, where no real images were included in the training set, adding SI improved detection performance. As more SI were added, performance in precision, recall and F1 score increased, but eventually plateaued, suggesting diminishing returns when SI exceeded 100% of the baseline model training dataset. For FS models, combining real and SI led to better recall and slightly higher overall accuracy compared to using real images alone, though these improvements were not statistically significant. Our findings demonstrate the potential of SI to train accurate ODMs when data is scarce, offering important perspectives for wildlife monitoring by enabling rare or inaccessible species to be monitored and to increase monitoring frequency. This approach could be used to initiate ODMs without real data and refine it as real images are acquired over time.

Paperid: 6680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11236.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, image editing has garnered growing attention. However, general image editing models often fail to produce satisfactory results when confronted with new styles. The challenge lies in how to effectively fine-tune general image editing models to new styles using only a limited amount of paired data. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel few-shot style editing framework. For this task, we construct a benchmark dataset that encompasses five distinct styles. Correspondingly, we propose a parameter-efficient multi-style Mixture-of-Experts Low-Rank Adaptation (MoE LoRA) with style-specific and style-shared routing mechanisms for jointly fine-tuning multiple styles. The style-specific routing ensures that different styles do not interfere with one another, while the style-shared routing adaptively allocates shared MoE LoRAs to learn common patterns. Our MoE LoRA can automatically determine the optimal ranks for each layer through a novel metric-guided approach that estimates the importance score of each single-rank component. Additionally, we explore the optimal location to insert LoRA within the Diffusion in Transformer (DiT) model and integrate adversarial learning and flow matching to guide the diffusion training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches with significantly fewer LoRA parameters.

Paperid: 6681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11034.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models have enabled unified processing of visual and textual inputs, offering promising applications in general-purpose medical AI. However, their ability to generalize compositionally across unseen combinations of imaging modality, anatomy, and task type remains underexplored. We introduce CrossMed, a benchmark designed to evaluate compositional generalization (CG) in medical multimodal LLMs using a structured Modality-Anatomy-Task (MAT) schema. CrossMed reformulates four public datasets, CheXpert (X-ray classification), SIIM-ACR (X-ray segmentation), BraTS 2020 (MRI classification and segmentation), and MosMedData (CT classification) into a unified visual question answering (VQA) format, resulting in 20,200 multiple-choice QA instances. We evaluate two open-source multimodal LLMs, LLaVA-Vicuna-7B and Qwen2-VL-7B, on both Related and Unrelated MAT splits, as well as a zero-overlap setting where test triplets share no Modality, Anatomy, or Task with the training data. Models trained on Related splits achieve 83.2 percent classification accuracy and 0.75 segmentation cIoU, while performance drops significantly under Unrelated and zero-overlap conditions, demonstrating the benchmark difficulty. We also show cross-task transfer, where segmentation performance improves by 7 percent cIoU even when trained using classification-only data. Traditional models (ResNet-50 and U-Net) show modest gains, confirming the broad utility of the MAT framework, while multimodal LLMs uniquely excel at compositional generalization. CrossMed provides a rigorous testbed for evaluating zero-shot, cross-task, and modality-agnostic generalization in medical vision-language models.

Paperid: 6682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09955.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models, especially vision-language models (VLMs), offer compelling zero-shot object detection for applications like autonomous driving, a domain where manual labelling is prohibitively expensive. However, their detection latency and tendency to hallucinate predictions render them unsuitable for direct deployment. This work introduces a novel pipeline that addresses this challenge by leveraging VLMs to automatically generate pseudo-labels for training efficient, real-time object detectors. Our key innovation is a per-object co-teaching-based training strategy that mitigates the inherent noise in VLM-generated labels. The proposed per-object coteaching approach filters noisy bounding boxes from training instead of filtering the entire image. Specifically, two YOLO models learn collaboratively, filtering out unreliable boxes from each mini-batch based on their peers' per-object loss values. Overall, our pipeline provides an efficient, robust, and scalable approach to train high-performance object detectors for autonomous driving, significantly reducing reliance on costly human annotation. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms a baseline YOLOv5m model, achieving a significant mAP@0.5 boost ($31.12\%$ to $46.61\%$) while maintaining real-time detection latency. Furthermore, we show that supplementing our pseudo-labelled data with a small fraction of ground truth labels ($10\%$) leads to further performance gains, reaching $57.97\%$ mAP@0.5 on the KITTI dataset. We observe similar performance improvements for the ACDC and BDD100k datasets.

Paperid: 6683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09058.pdf

Abstract:
Contemporary Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems remain constrained when confronted with culturally specific content, largely because cultural knowledge is under-represented in training corpora and the reasoning process is not rendered interpretable to end users. This paper introduces VietMEAgent, a multimodal explainable framework engineered for Vietnamese cultural understanding. The method integrates a cultural object detection backbone with a structured program generation layer, yielding a pipeline in which answer prediction and explanation are tightly coupled. A curated knowledge base of Vietnamese cultural entities serves as an explicit source of background information, while a dual-modality explanation module combines attention-based visual evidence with structured, human-readable textual rationales. We further construct a Vietnamese Cultural VQA dataset sourced from public repositories and use it to demonstrate the practicality of programming-based methodologies for cultural AI. The resulting system provides transparent explanations that disclose both the computational rationale and the underlying cultural context, supporting education and cultural preservation with an emphasis on interpretability and cultural sensitivity.

Paperid: 6684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09039.pdf

Abstract:
Fairness in AI-driven stress detection is critical for equitable mental healthcare, yet existing models frequently exhibit gender bias, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. To address this, we propose FairM2S, a fairness-aware meta-learning framework for stress detection leveraging audio-visual data. FairM2S integrates Equalized Odds constraints during both meta-training and adaptation phases, employing adversarial gradient masking and fairness-constrained meta-updates to effectively mitigate bias. Evaluated against five state-of-the-art baselines, FairM2S achieves 78.1% accuracy while reducing the Equal Opportunity to 0.06, demonstrating substantial fairness gains. We also release SAVSD, a smartphone-captured dataset with gender annotations, designed to support fairness research in low-resource, real-world contexts. Together, these contributions position FairM2S as a state-of-the-art approach for equitable and scalable few-shot stress detection in mental health AI. We release our dataset and FairM2S publicly with this paper.

Paperid: 6685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07155.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in robotics, but deploying RL on real vehicles remains challenging due to the complexity of vehicle dynamics and the mismatch between simulation and reality. Factors such as tire characteristics, road surface conditions, aerodynamic disturbances, and vehicle load make it infeasible to model real-world dynamics accurately, which hinders direct transfer of RL agents trained in simulation. In this paper, we present a framework that decouples motion planning from vehicle control through a spatial and temporal alignment strategy between a virtual vehicle and the real system. An RL agent is first trained in simulation using a kinematic bicycle model to output continuous control actions. Its behavior is then distilled into a trajectory-predicting agent that generates finite-horizon ego-vehicle trajectories, enabling synchronization between virtual and real vehicles. At deployment, a Stanley controller governs lateral dynamics, while longitudinal alignment is maintained through adaptive update mechanisms that compensate for deviations between virtual and real trajectories. We validate our approach on a real vehicle and demonstrate that the proposed alignment strategy enables robust zero-shot transfer of RL-based motion planning from simulation to reality, successfully decoupling high-level trajectory generation from low-level vehicle control.

Paperid: 6686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04688.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning over procedural sequences, where the order of steps directly impacts outcomes, is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we study the task of reconstructing globally ordered sequences from shuffled procedural steps, using a curated dataset of food recipes, a domain where correct sequencing is essential for task success. We evaluate several LLMs under zero-shot and few-shot settings and present a comprehensive evaluation framework that adapts established metrics from ranking and sequence alignment. These include Kendall's Tau, Normalized Longest Common Subsequence (NLCS), and Normalized Edit Distance (NED), which capture complementary aspects of ordering quality. Our analysis shows that model performance declines with increasing sequence length, reflecting the added complexity of longer procedures. We also find that greater step displacement in the input, corresponding to more severe shuffling, leads to further degradation. These findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs in procedural reasoning, especially with longer and more disordered inputs.

Paperid: 6687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03908.pdf

Abstract:
Iterated reference games - in which players repeatedly pick out novel referents using language - present a test case for agents' ability to perform context-sensitive pragmatic reasoning in multi-turn linguistic environments. We tested humans and vision-language models on trials from iterated reference games, varying the given context in terms of amount, order, and relevance. Without relevant context, models were above chance but substantially worse than humans. However, with relevant context, model performance increased dramatically over trials. Few-shot reference games with abstract referents remain a difficult task for machine learning models.

Paperid: 6688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03149.pdf

Abstract:
Forecasting anomalies (anomaly prediction) in multivariate time series from different real-world, dynamic, and complex systems is vital for preempting critical failures, leading to a substantial minimization in operational costs and human labor. Yet, existing methods are limited to specific systems while failing to generalize to evolving anomaly patterns over time. In contrast, pretrained Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently demonstrated strong generalization and zero-shot forecasting capabilities. However, their potential remains untapped for anomaly prediction, a task fundamentally different from forecasting normal behavior. Thus, we present Forecast2Anomaly (F2A), a novel framework that empowers TSFMs with anomaly prediction abilities through two key innovations. First, we propose a joint forecast-anomaly loss that fine-tunes TSFMs to accurately forecast future signals even at anomalous time points. Second, we introduce a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module that retrieves historically relevant horizons and conditions predictions on them. This component dynamically adapts to distributional shifts at inference time, enabling F2A to track evolving anomalies without requiring model updates. By combining targeted fine-tuning with dynamic retrieval, F2A bridges the gap between robust TSFM zero-shot forecasting and zero-shot anomaly prediction. Extensive experiments across 16 diverse datasets and multiple TSFM backbones show that F2A consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering a scalable, zero-shot anomaly prediction solution for real-world applications.

Paperid: 6689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02162.pdf

Abstract:
Advances in 3D generative AI have enabled the creation of physical objects from text prompts, but challenges remain in creating objects involving multiple component types. We present a pipeline that integrates 3D generative AI with vision-language models (VLMs) to enable the robotic assembly of multi-component objects from natural language. Our method leverages VLMs for zero-shot, multi-modal reasoning about geometry and functionality to decompose AI-generated meshes into multi-component 3D models using predefined structural and panel components. We demonstrate that a VLM is capable of determining which mesh regions need panel components in addition to structural components, based on the object's geometry and functionality. Evaluation across test objects shows that users preferred the VLM-generated assignments 90.6% of the time, compared to 59.4% for rule-based and 2.5% for random assignment. Lastly, the system allows users to refine component assignments through conversational feedback, enabling greater human control and agency in making physical objects with generative AI and robotics.

Paperid: 6690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00925.pdf

Abstract:
The problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) has achieved increasing attention due to its wide applications, e.g. e-commerce. Despite progress made in this field, previous works suffer from using imbalanced samples of modalities and inconsistent low-quality information during training, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce an approach called Dynamic Multi-level Weighted Alignment Network for ZS-SBIR. It consists of three components: (i) a Uni-modal Feature Extraction Module that includes a CLIP text encoder and a ViT for extracting textual and visual tokens, (ii) a Cross-modal Multi-level Weighting Module that produces an alignment weight list by the local and global aggregation blocks to measure the aligning quality of sketch and image samples, (iii) a Weighted Quadruplet Loss Module aiming to improve the balance of domains in the triplet loss. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Sketchy, TU-Berlin, and QuickDraw, show our method delivers superior performances over the state-of-the-art ZS-SBIR methods.

Paperid: 6691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27255.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in zero-shot action recognition by learning to associate video embeddings with class embeddings. However, a significant challenge arises when relying solely on action classes to provide semantic context, particularly due to the presence of multi-semantic words, which can introduce ambiguity in understanding the intended concepts of actions. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach that harnesses web-crawled descriptions, leveraging a large-language model to extract relevant keywords. This method reduces the need for human annotators and eliminates the laborious manual process of attribute data creation. Additionally, we introduce a spatio-temporal interaction module designed to focus on objects and action units, facilitating alignment between description attributes and video content. In our zero-shot experiments, our model achieves impressive results, attaining accuracies of 81.0%, 53.1%, and 68.9% on UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Kinetics-600, respectively, underscoring the model's adaptability and effectiveness across various downstream tasks.

Paperid: 6692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26580.pdf

Abstract:
In real-world environments, AI systems often face unfamiliar scenarios without labeled data, creating a major challenge for conventional scene understanding models. The inability to generalize across unseen contexts limits the deployment of vision-based applications in dynamic, unstructured settings. This work introduces a Dynamic Context-Aware Scene Reasoning framework that leverages Vision-Language Alignment to address zero-shot real-world scenarios. The goal is to enable intelligent systems to infer and adapt to new environments without prior task-specific training. The proposed approach integrates pre-trained vision transformers and large language models to align visual semantics with natural language descriptions, enhancing contextual comprehension. A dynamic reasoning module refines predictions by combining global scene cues and object-level interactions guided by linguistic priors. Extensive experiments on zero-shot benchmarks such as COCO, Visual Genome, and Open Images demonstrate up to 18% improvement in scene understanding accuracy over baseline models in complex and unseen environments. Results also show robust performance in ambiguous or cluttered scenes due to the synergistic fusion of vision and language. This framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach for context-aware reasoning, advancing zero-shot generalization in dynamic real-world settings.

Paperid: 6693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25070.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot scene understanding in real-world settings presents major challenges due to the complexity and variability of natural scenes, where models must recognize new objects, actions, and contexts without prior labeled examples. This work proposes a vision-language integration framework that unifies pre-trained visual encoders (e.g., CLIP, ViT) and large language models (e.g., GPT-based architectures) to achieve semantic alignment between visual and textual modalities. The goal is to enable robust zero-shot comprehension of scenes by leveraging natural language as a bridge to generalize over unseen categories and contexts. Our approach develops a unified model that embeds visual inputs and textual prompts into a shared space, followed by multimodal fusion and reasoning layers for contextual interpretation. Experiments on Visual Genome, COCO, ADE20K, and custom real-world datasets demonstrate significant gains over state-of-the-art zero-shot models in object recognition, activity detection, and scene captioning. The proposed system achieves up to 18% improvement in top-1 accuracy and notable gains in semantic coherence metrics, highlighting the effectiveness of cross-modal alignment and language grounding in enhancing generalization for real-world scene understanding.

Paperid: 6694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22298.pdf

Abstract:
Uncovering the underlying causal mechanisms of complex real-world systems remains a significant challenge, as these systems often entail high data collection costs and involve unknown interventions. We introduce MetaCaDI, the first framework to cast the joint discovery of a causal graph and unknown interventions as a meta-learning problem. MetaCaDI is a Bayesian framework that learns a shared causal graph structure across multiple experiments and is optimized to rapidly adapt to new, few-shot intervention target prediction tasks. A key innovation is our model's analytical adaptation, which uses a closed-form solution to bypass expensive and potentially unstable gradient-based bilevel optimization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and complex gene expression data demonstrate that MetaCaDI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. It excels at both causal graph recovery and identifying intervention targets from as few as 10 data instances, proving its robustness in data-scarce scenarios.

Paperid: 6695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21839.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we evaluate the ability of OpenAI's gpt-4o model to classify chest X-ray images as either NORMAL or PNEUMONIA in a zero-shot setting, without any prior fine-tuning. A balanced test set of 400 images (200 from each class) was used to assess performance across four distinct prompt designs, ranging from minimal instructions to detailed, reasoning-based prompts. The results indicate that concise, feature-focused prompts achieved the highest classification accuracy of 74\%, whereas reasoning-oriented prompts resulted in lower performance. These findings highlight that while ChatGPT exhibits emerging potential for medical image interpretation, its diagnostic reliability remains limited. Continued advances in visual reasoning and domain-specific adaptation are required before such models can be safely applied in clinical practice.

Paperid: 6696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21346.pdf

Abstract:
In complex orchard environments, the phenotypic heterogeneity of different apple leaf diseases, characterized by significant variation among lesions, poses a challenge to traditional multi-scale feature fusion methods. These methods only integrate multi-layer features extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and fail to adequately account for the relationships between local and global features. Therefore, this study proposes a multi-branch recognition framework named CNN-Transformer-CLIP (CT-CLIP). The framework synergistically employs a CNN to extract local lesion detail features and a Vision Transformer to capture global structural relationships. An Adaptive Feature Fusion Module (AFFM) then dynamically fuses these features, achieving optimal coupling of local and global information and effectively addressing the diversity in lesion morphology and distribution. Additionally, to mitigate interference from complex backgrounds and significantly enhance recognition accuracy under few-shot conditions, this study proposes a multimodal image-text learning approach. By leveraging pre-trained CLIP weights, it achieves deep alignment between visual features and disease semantic descriptions. Experimental results show that CT-CLIP achieves accuracies of 97.38% and 96.12% on a publicly available apple disease and a self-built dataset, outperforming several baseline methods. The proposed CT-CLIP demonstrates strong capabilities in recognizing agricultural diseases, significantly enhances identification accuracy under complex environmental conditions, provides an innovative and practical solution for automated disease recognition in agricultural applications.

Paperid: 6697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21175.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, enabling deployment in a wide range of real-world tasks without additional task-specific training. However, in real deployment scenarios with evolving environments or emerging classes, these models inevitably face distributional shifts and novel tasks. In such contexts, static zero-shot capabilities are insufficient, and there is a growing need for continual learning methods that allow models to adapt over time while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. We introduce NuSA-CL (Null Space Adaptation for Continual Learning), a lightweight memory-free continual learning framework designed to address this challenge. NuSA-CL employs low-rank adaptation and constrains task-specific weight updates to lie within an approximate null space of the model's current parameters. This strategy minimizes interference with previously acquired knowledge, effectively preserving the zero-shot capabilities of the original model. Unlike methods relying on replay buffers or costly distillation, NuSA-CL imposes minimal computational and memory overhead, making it practical for deployment in resource-constrained, real-world continual learning environments. Experiments show that our framework not only effectively preserves zero-shot transfer capabilities but also achieves highly competitive performance on continual learning benchmarks. These results position NuSA-CL as a practical and scalable solution for continually evolving zero-shot VLMs in real-world applications.

Paperid: 6698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20703.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have been used to generate human-like content across multiple domains (e.g., sound, image, text, and programming). However, their reliability in terms of correctness and functionality in novel contexts such as programmable networks remains unclear. Hence, this paper presents an empirical evaluation of the source code of a POX controller generated by different AI tools, namely ChatGPT, Copilot, DeepSeek, and BlackBox.ai. To evaluate such a code, three networking tasks of increasing complexity were defined and for each task, zero-shot and few-shot prompting techniques were input to the tools. Next, the output code was tested in emulated network topologies with Mininet and analyzed according to functionality, correctness, and the need for manual fixes. Results show that all evaluated models can produce functional controllers. However, ChatGPT and DeepSeek exhibited higher consistency and code quality, while Copilot and BlackBox.ai required more adjustments.

Paperid: 6699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20683.pdf

Abstract:
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to enable vital functions, such as speech and prosthetic control, for individuals with neuromotor impairments. Central to their success are neural decoders, models that map neural activity to intended behavior. Current learning-based decoding approaches fall into two classes: simple, causal models that lack generalization, or complex, non-causal models that generalize and scale offline but struggle in real-time settings. Both face a common challenge, their reliance on power-hungry artificial neural network backbones, which makes integration into real-world, resource-limited systems difficult. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative. Because they operate causally these models are suitable for real-time use, and their low energy demands make them ideal for battery-constrained environments. To this end, we introduce Spikachu: a scalable, causal, and energy-efficient neural decoding framework based on SNNs. Our approach processes binned spikes directly by projecting them into a shared latent space, where spiking modules, adapted to the timing of the input, extract relevant features; these latent representations are then integrated and decoded to generate behavioral predictions. We evaluate our approach on 113 recording sessions from 6 non-human primates, totaling 43 hours of recordings. Our method outperforms causal baselines when trained on single sessions using between 2.26 and 418.81 times less energy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that scaling up training to multiple sessions and subjects improves performance and enables few-shot transfer to unseen sessions, subjects, and tasks. Overall, Spikachu introduces a scalable, online-compatible neural decoding framework based on SNNs, whose performance is competitive relative to state-of-the-art models while consuming orders of magnitude less energy.

Paperid: 6700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18898.pdf

Abstract:
Machine Translation (MT) has advanced from rule-based and statistical methods to neural approaches based on the Transformer architecture. While these methods have achieved impressive results for high-resource languages, low-resource varieties such as Sylheti remain underexplored. In this work, we investigate Bengali-to-Sylheti translation by fine-tuning multilingual Transformer models and comparing them with zero-shot large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned models significantly outperform LLMs, with mBART-50 achieving the highest translation adequacy and MarianMT showing the strongest character-level fidelity. These findings highlight the importance of task-specific adaptation for underrepresented languages and contribute to ongoing efforts toward inclusive language technologies.

Paperid: 6701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18508.pdf

Abstract:
Security analysts face increasing pressure to triage large and complex vulnerability backlogs. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a potential aid by automating parts of the interpretation process. We evaluate four models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek) across twelve prompting techniques to interpret semi-structured and unstructured vulnerability information. As a concrete use case, we test each model's ability to predict decision points in the Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) framework: Exploitation, Automatable, Technical Impact, and Mission and Wellbeing. Using 384 real-world vulnerabilities from the VulZoo dataset, we issued more than 165,000 queries to assess performance under prompting styles including one-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. We report F1 scores for each SSVC decision point and Cohen's kappa (weighted and unweighted) for the final SSVC decision outcomes. Gemini consistently ranked highest, leading on three of four decision points and yielding the most correct recommendations. Prompting with exemplars generally improved accuracy, although all models struggled on some decision points. Only DeepSeek achieved fair agreement under weighted metrics, and all models tended to over-predict risk. Overall, current LLMs do not replace expert judgment. However, specific LLM and prompt combinations show moderate effectiveness for targeted SSVC decisions. When applied with care, LLMs can support vulnerability prioritization workflows and help security teams respond more efficiently to emerging threats.

Paperid: 6702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17388.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-tuned large language models (IT-LLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot reasoning, yet their ability to execute simple, self-contained instructions remains underexplored, despite this being foundational to complex instruction-following. We evaluate 20 IT-LLMs on modified MMLU and MMLU-Pro benchmarks, by systematically varying the format of option labels (alphabetic, numeric, Roman) while keeping their meaning identical under four paradigms, namely: (1) With explicit instructions, label changes cause large performance shifts (e.g., -30.45\% for Roman vs. numeric), revealing instruction-format bias. (2) Without instructions, performance drops further (up to -10.84\%) and label sensitivity intensifies, underscoring the role of explicit guidance. (3) When option contents are removed, models fail random-choice baselines except with numeric labels, suggesting weak adherence to atomic directives. (4) Three-shot exemplars yield no significant gains in robustness or fidelity, and generation analyses show persistent label errors, especially for non-numeric formats. Across model sizes, larger LLMs achieve higher accuracy but remain inconsistent in instruction adherence. These results expose the insufficiencies of current instruction-tuning paradigms and highlight the need for evaluation methods and training strategies that explicitly target atomic instruction-following.

Paperid: 6703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17250.pdf

Abstract:
Driver identification has become an area of increasing interest in recent years, especially for data- driven applications, because biometric-based technologies may incur privacy issues. This study proposes a deep learning neural network architecture, an attention-based encoder (AttEnc), which uses an attention mechanism for driver identification and uses fewer model parameters than current methods. Most studies do not address the issue of data shortages for driver identification, and most of them are inflexible when encountering unknown drivers. In this study, an architecture that combines a prototypical network and an attention-based encoder (P-AttEnc) is proposed. It applies few-shot learning to overcome the data shortage issues and to enhance model generalizations. The experiments showed that the attention-based encoder can identify drivers with accuracies of 99.3%, 99.0% and 99.9% in three different datasets and has a prediction time that is 44% to 79% faster because it significantly reduces, on average, 87.6% of the model parameters. P-AttEnc identifies drivers based on few shot data, extracts driver fingerprints to address the issue of data shortages, and is able to classify unknown drivers. The first experiment showed that P-AttEnc can identify drivers with an accuracy of 69.8% in the one-shot scenario. The second experiment showed that P-AttEnc, in the 1-shot scenario, can classify unknown drivers with an average accuracy of 65.7%.

Paperid: 6704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17197.pdf

Abstract:
As the capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) advance, they can process increasingly large inputs, which, unlike in LLMs, generates significant visual token redundancy and leads to prohibitive inference costs. While many methods aim to reduce these costs by pruning visual tokens, existing approaches, whether based on attention or diversity, typically neglect the guidance of the text prompt and thus fail to prioritize task relevance. In this work, we propose a novel, zero-shot method that reframes the problem by introducing a prompt-aware perspective, explicitly modeling visual token pruning as a balance between task relevance and information diversity. Our hierarchical approach first selects a core set of task-relevant visual tokens and then supplements them with diversity tokens to preserve broader context. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks show that our method achieves performance that matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art with only minimal accuracy loss, even when pruning up to 90\% of the tokens. Furthermore, these gains are accompanied by significant reductions in GPU memory footprint and inference latency.

Paperid: 6705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16952.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel architecture for safely integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into interactive game engines, allowing players to "program" new behaviors using natural language. Our framework mitigates risks by using an LLM to translate commands into a constrained Domain-Specific Language (DSL), which configures a custom Entity-Component-System (ECS) at runtime. We evaluated this system in a 2D spell-crafting game prototype by experimentally assessing models from the Gemini, GPT, and Claude families with various prompting strategies. A validated LLM judge qualitatively rated the outputs, showing that while larger models better captured creative intent, the optimal prompting strategy is task-dependent: Chain-of-Thought improved creative alignment, while few-shot examples were necessary to generate more complex DSL scripts. This work offers a validated LLM-ECS pattern for emergent gameplay and a quantitative performance comparison for developers.

Paperid: 6706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16743.pdf

Abstract:
The prediction of learning curves for Natural Language Processing (NLP) models enables informed decision-making to meet specific performance objectives, while reducing computational overhead and lowering the costs associated with dataset acquisition and curation. In this work, we formulate the prediction task as a multitask learning problem, where each task's data is modelled as being organized within a two-layer hierarchy. To model the shared information and dependencies across tasks and hierarchical levels, we employ latent variable multi-output Gaussian Processes, enabling to account for task correlations and supporting zero-shot prediction of learning curves (LCs). We demonstrate that this approach facilitates the development of probabilistic scaling laws at lower costs. Applying an active learning strategy, LCs can be queried to reduce predictive uncertainty and provide predictions close to ground truth scaling laws. We validate our framework on three small-scale NLP datasets with up to $30$ LCs. These are obtained from nanoGPT models, from bilingual translation using mBART and Transformer models, and from multilingual translation using M2M100 models of varying sizes.

Paperid: 6707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16198.pdf

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in AI, multimodal culturally diverse datasets are still limited, particularly for regions in the Middle East and Africa. In this paper, we introduce EgMM-Corpus, a multimodal dataset dedicated to Egyptian culture. By designing and running a new data collection pipeline, we collected over 3,000 images, covering 313 concepts across landmarks, food, and folklore. Each entry in the dataset is manually validated for cultural authenticity and multimodal coherence. EgMM-Corpus aims to provide a reliable resource for evaluating and training vision-language models in an Egyptian cultural context. We further evaluate the zero-shot performance of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training CLIP on EgMM-Corpus, on which it achieves 21.2% Top-1 accuracy and 36.4% Top-5 accuracy in classification. These results underscore the existing cultural bias in large-scale vision-language models and demonstrate the importance of EgMM-Corpus as a benchmark for developing culturally aware models.

Paperid: 6708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16123.pdf

Abstract:
World Models have vastly permeated the field of Reinforcement Learning. Their ability to model the transition dynamics of an environment have greatly improved sample efficiency in online RL. Among them, the most notorious example is Dreamer, a model that learns to act in a diverse set of image-based environments. In this paper, we leverage similarity search and stochastic representations to approximate a world model without a training procedure. We establish a comparison with PlaNet, a well-established world model of the Dreamer family. We evaluate the models on the quality of latent reconstruction and on the perceived similarity of the reconstructed image, on both next-step and long horizon dynamics prediction. The results of our study demonstrate that a search-based world model is comparable to a training based one in both cases. Notably, our model show stronger performance in long-horizon prediction with respect to the baseline on a range of visually different environments.

Paperid: 6709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15972.pdf

Abstract:
Quantum natural language processing (QNLP) offers a novel approach to semantic modeling by embedding compositional structure directly into quantum circuits. This paper investigates the application of QNLP models to the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), comparing quantum, hybrid, and classical transformer-based models under a constrained few-shot setting. Using the lambeq library and the DisCoCat framework, we construct parameterized quantum circuits for sentence pairs and train them for both semantic relatedness and inference classification. To assess efficiency, we introduce a novel information-theoretic metric, Information Gain per Parameter (IGPP), which quantifies learning dynamics independent of model size. Our results demonstrate that quantum models achieve performance comparable to classical baselines while operating with dramatically fewer parameters. The Quantum-based models outperform randomly initialized transformers in inference and achieve lower test error on relatedness tasks. Moreover, quantum models exhibit significantly higher per-parameter learning efficiency (up to five orders of magnitude more than classical counterparts), highlighting the promise of QNLP in low-resource, structure-sensitive settings. To address circuit-level isolation and promote parameter sharing, we also propose a novel cluster-based architecture that improves generalization by tying gate parameters to learned word clusters rather than individual tokens.

Paperid: 6710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13889.pdf

Abstract:
Food image classification plays a vital role in intelligent food quality inspection, dietary assessment, and automated monitoring. However, most existing supervised models rely heavily on large labeled datasets and exhibit limited generalization to unseen food categories. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces MultiFoodChat, a dialogue-driven multi-agent reasoning framework for zero-shot food recognition. The framework integrates vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) to enable collaborative reasoning through multi-round visual-textual dialogues. An Object Perception Token (OPT) captures fine-grained visual attributes, while an Interactive Reasoning Agent (IRA) dynamically interprets contextual cues to refine predictions. This multi-agent design allows flexible and human-like understanding of complex food scenes without additional training or manual annotations. Experiments on multiple public food datasets demonstrate that MultiFoodChat achieves superior recognition accuracy and interpretability compared with existing unsupervised and few-shot methods, highlighting its potential as a new paradigm for intelligent food quality inspection and analysis.

Paperid: 6711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13643.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models such as DINOv2 have shown strong performance in few-shot anomaly detection, yet two key questions remain unexamined: (i) how susceptible are these detectors to adversarial perturbations; and (ii) how well do their anomaly scores reflect calibrated uncertainty? Building on AnomalyDINO, a training-free deep nearest-neighbor detector over DINOv2 features, we present one of the first systematic studies of adversarial attacks and uncertainty estimation in this setting. To enable white-box gradient attacks while preserving test-time behavior, we attach a lightweight linear head to frozen DINOv2 features only for crafting perturbations. Using this heuristic, we evaluate the impact of FGSM across the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets and observe consistent drops in F1, AUROC, AP, and G-mean, indicating that imperceptible perturbations can flip nearest-neighbor relations in feature space to induce confident misclassification. Complementing robustness, we probe reliability and find that raw anomaly scores are poorly calibrated, revealing a gap between confidence and correctness that limits safety-critical use. As a simple, strong baseline toward trustworthiness, we apply post-hoc Platt scaling to the anomaly scores for uncertainty estimation. The resulting calibrated posteriors yield significantly higher predictive entropy on adversarially perturbed inputs than on clean ones, enabling a practical flagging mechanism for attack detection while reducing calibration error (ECE). Our findings surface concrete vulnerabilities in DINOv2-based few-shot anomaly detectors and establish an evaluation protocol and baseline for robust, uncertainty-aware anomaly detection. We argue that adversarial robustness and principled uncertainty quantification are not optional add-ons but essential capabilities if anomaly detection systems are to be trustworthy and ready for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 6712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13364.pdf

Abstract:
Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable zero-shot classification by aligning images and text in a shared space, a promising approach for data-scarce conditions. However, the influence of prompt design on recognizing visually similar categories, such as human postures, is not well understood. This study investigates how prompt specificity affects the zero-shot classification of sitting, standing, and walking/running on a small, 285-image COCO-derived dataset. A suite of modern VLMs, including OpenCLIP, MetaCLIP 2, and SigLip, were evaluated using a three-tiered prompt design that systematically increases linguistic detail. Our findings reveal a compelling, counter-intuitive trend: for the highest-performing models (MetaCLIP 2 and OpenCLIP), the simplest, most basic prompts consistently achieve the best results. Adding descriptive detail significantly degrades performance for instance, MetaCLIP 2's multi-class accuracy drops from 68.8\% to 55.1\% a phenomenon we term "prompt overfitting". Conversely, the lower-performing SigLip model shows improved classification on ambiguous classes when given more descriptive, body-cue-based prompts.

Paperid: 6713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12825.pdf

Abstract:
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools such as IBM DataStage allow users to visually assemble complex data workflows, but configuring stages and their properties remains time consuming and requires deep tool knowledge. We propose a system that translates natural language descriptions into executable workflows, automatically predicting both the structure and detailed configuration of the flow. At its core lies a Classifier-Augmented Generation (CAG) approach that combines utterance decomposition with a classifier and stage-specific few-shot prompting to produce accurate stage predictions. These stages are then connected into non-linear workflows using edge prediction, and stage properties are inferred from sub-utterance context. We compare CAG against strong single-prompt and agentic baselines, showing improved accuracy and efficiency, while substantially reducing token usage. Our architecture is modular, interpretable, and capable of end-to-end workflow generation, including robust validation steps. To our knowledge, this is the first system with a detailed evaluation across stage prediction, edge layout, and property generation for natural-language-driven ETL authoring.

Paperid: 6714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12807.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across numerous languages; however, their effectiveness in low-resource languages like Persian requires thorough investigation. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmark of several open-source LLMs for Persian Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, utilizing both zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms. We evaluate models across a range of tasks including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, reading comprehension, and question answering, using established Persian datasets such as ParsiNLU and ArmanEmo. Our methodology encompasses rigorous experimental setups for both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, employing metrics such as Accuracy, F1-score, BLEU, and ROUGE for performance evaluation. The results reveal that Gemma 2 consistently outperforms other models across nearly all tasks in both learning paradigms, with particularly strong performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, most models struggle with token-level understanding tasks like Named Entity Recognition, highlighting specific challenges in Persian language processing. This study contributes to the growing body of research on multilingual LLMs, providing valuable insights into their performance in Persian and offering a benchmark for future model development.

Paperid: 6715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12646.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot denoisers address the dataset dependency of deep-learning-based denoisers, enabling the denoising of unseen single images. Nonetheless, existing zero-shot methods suffer from long training times and rely on the assumption of noise independence and a zero-mean property, limiting their effectiveness in real-world denoising scenarios where noise characteristics are more complicated. This paper proposes an efficient and effective method for real-world denoising, the Zero-Shot denoiser based on Cross-Frequency Consistency (ZSCFC), which enables training and denoising with a single noisy image and does not rely on assumptions about noise distribution. Specifically, image textures exhibit position similarity and content consistency across different frequency bands, while noise does not. Based on this property, we developed cross-frequency consistency loss and an ultralight network to realize image denoising. Experiments on various real-world image datasets demonstrate that our ZSCFC outperforms other state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in terms of computational efficiency and denoising performance.

Paperid: 6716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11754.pdf

Abstract:
Radiation therapy treatment planning is an iterative, expertise-dependent process, and the growing burden of cancer cases has made reliance on manual planning increasingly unsustainable, underscoring the need for automation. In this study, we propose a workflow that leverages a large language model (LLM)-based agent to navigate inverse treatment planning for intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). The LLM agent was implemented to directly interact with a clinical treatment planning system (TPS) to iteratively extract intermediate plan states and propose new constraint values to guide inverse optimization. The agent's decision-making process is informed by current observations and previous optimization attempts and evaluations, allowing for dynamic strategy refinement. The planning process was performed in a zero-shot inference setting, where the LLM operated without prior exposure to manually generated treatment plans and was utilized without any fine-tuning or task-specific training. The LLM-generated plans were evaluated on twenty head-and-neck cancer cases against clinical manual plans, with key dosimetric endpoints analyzed and reported. The LLM-generated plans achieved comparable organ-at-risk (OAR) sparing relative to clinical plans while demonstrating improved hot spot control (Dmax: 106.5% vs. 108.8%) and superior conformity (conformity index: 1.18 vs. 1.39 for boost PTV; 1.82 vs. 1.88 for primary PTV). This study demonstrates the feasibility of a zero-shot, LLM-driven workflow for automated IMRT treatment planning in a commercial TPS. The proposed approach provides a generalizable and clinically applicable solution that could reduce planning variability and support broader adoption of AI-based planning strategies.

Paperid: 6717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18819.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of misinformation in the digital age has led to significant societal challenges. Existing approaches often struggle with capturing long-range dependencies, complex semantic relations, and the social dynamics influencing news dissemination. Furthermore, these methods require extensive labelled datasets, making their deployment resource-intensive. In this study, we propose a novel self-supervised misinformation detection framework that integrates both complex semantic relations using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and news propagation dynamics. We introduce an LLM-based graph contrastive loss (LGCL) that utilizes negative anchor points generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) to enhance feature separability in a zero-shot manner. To incorporate social context, we employ a multi view graph masked autoencoder, which learns news propagation features from social context graph. By combining these semantic and propagation-based features, our approach effectively differentiates between fake and real news in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our self-supervised framework achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methodologies, even with limited labelled datasets while improving generalizability.

Paperid: 6718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18443.pdf

Abstract:
Soft pneumatic robot manipulators are popular in industrial and human-interactive applications due to their compliance and flexibility. However, deploying them in real-world scenarios requires advanced sensing for tactile feedback and proprioception. Our work presents a novel vision-based approach for sensorizing soft robots. We demonstrate our approach on PneuGelSight, a pioneering pneumatic manipulator featuring high-resolution proprioception and tactile sensing via an embedded camera. To optimize the sensor's performance, we introduce a comprehensive pipeline that accurately simulates its optical and dynamic properties, facilitating a zero-shot knowledge transition from simulation to real-world applications. PneuGelSight and our sim-to-real pipeline provide a novel, easily implementable, and robust sensing methodology for soft robots, paving the way for the development of more advanced soft robots with enhanced sensory capabilities.

Paperid: 6719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17482.pdf

Abstract:
Grasp synthesis is a fundamental task in robotic manipulation which usually has multiple feasible solutions. Multimodal grasp synthesis seeks to generate diverse sets of stable grasps conditioned on object geometry, making the robust learning of geometric features crucial for success. To address this challenge, we propose a framework for learning multimodal grasp distributions that leverages variational shape inference to enhance robustness against shape noise and measurement sparsity. Our approach first trains a variational autoencoder for shape inference using implicit neural representations, and then uses these learned geometric features to guide a diffusion model for grasp synthesis on the SE(3) manifold. Additionally, we introduce a test-time grasp optimization technique that can be integrated as a plugin to further enhance grasping performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our shape inference for grasp synthesis formulation outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal grasp synthesis methods on the ACRONYM dataset by 6.3%, while demonstrating robustness to deterioration in point cloud density compared to other approaches. Furthermore, our trained model achieves zero-shot transfer to real-world manipulation of household objects, generating 34% more successful grasps than baselines despite measurement noise and point cloud calibration errors.

Paperid: 6720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16157.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promise in detecting anomalies. However, previous approaches are fundamentally limited by their reliance on human-designed prompts and the lack of accessible anomaly samples, leading to significant gaps in context-specific anomaly understanding. In this paper, we propose \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{T}uning with semantic alignment for anomaly detection (APT), a groundbreaking prior knowledge-free, few-shot framework and overcomes the limitations of traditional prompt-based approaches. APT uses self-generated anomaly samples with noise perturbations to train learnable prompts that capture context-dependent anomalies in different scenarios. To prevent overfitting to synthetic noise, we propose a Self-Optimizing Meta-prompt Guiding Scheme (SMGS) that iteratively aligns the prompts with general anomaly semantics while incorporating diverse synthetic anomaly. Our system not only advances pixel-wise anomaly detection, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets without requiring prior knowledge for prompt crafting, establishing a robust and versatile solution for real-world anomaly detection.

Paperid: 6721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14302.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge hardware demands aggressive, prompt-aware dynamic pruning to reduce computation without degrading quality. Static or predictor-based schemes either lock in a single sparsity pattern or incur extra runtime overhead, and recent zero-shot methods that rely on statistics from a single prompt fail on short prompt and/or long generation scenarios. We introduce A/I-GLASS: Activation- and Impact-based Global-Local neural importance Aggregation for feed-forward network SparSification, two training-free methods that dynamically select FFN units using a rank-aggregation of prompt local and model-intrinsic global neuron statistics. Empirical results across multiple LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that GLASS significantly outperforms prior training-free methods, particularly in challenging long-form generation scenarios, without relying on auxiliary predictors or adding any inference overhead.

Paperid: 6722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14280.pdf

Abstract:
Explainable object recognition using vision-language models such as CLIP involves predicting accurate category labels supported by rationales that justify the decision-making process. Existing methods typically rely on prompt-based conditioning, which suffers from limitations in CLIP's text encoder and provides weak conditioning on explanatory structures. Additionally, prior datasets are often restricted to single, and frequently noisy, rationales that fail to capture the full diversity of discriminative image features. In this work, we introduce a multi-rationale explainable object recognition benchmark comprising datasets in which each image is annotated with multiple ground-truth rationales, along with evaluation metrics designed to offer a more comprehensive representation of the task. To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, we propose a contrastive conditional inference (CCI) framework that explicitly models the probabilistic relationships among image embeddings, category labels, and rationales. Without requiring any training, our framework enables more effective conditioning on rationales to predict accurate object categories. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the multi-rationale explainable object recognition benchmark, including strong zero-shot performance, and sets a new standard for both classification accuracy and rationale quality. Together with the benchmark, this work provides a more complete framework for evaluating future models in explainable object recognition. The code will be made available online.

Paperid: 6723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11021.pdf

Abstract:
Document fraud poses a significant threat to industries reliant on secure and verifiable documentation, necessitating robust detection mechanisms. This study investigates the efficacy of state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models (LLMs)-including OpenAI O1, OpenAI 4o, Gemini Flash (thinking), Deepseek Janus, Grok, Llama 3.2 and 4, Qwen 2 and 2.5 VL, Mistral Pixtral, and Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet-in detecting fraudulent documents. We benchmark these models against each other and prior work on document fraud detection techniques using a standard dataset with real transactional documents. Through prompt optimization and detailed analysis of the models' reasoning processes, we evaluate their ability to identify subtle indicators of fraud, such as tampered text, misaligned formatting, and inconsistent transactional sums. Our results reveal that top-performing multi-modal LLMs demonstrate superior zero-shot generalization, outperforming conventional methods on out-of-distribution datasets, while several vision LLMs exhibit inconsistent or subpar performance. Notably, model size and advanced reasoning capabilities show limited correlation with detection accuracy, suggesting task-specific fine-tuning is critical. This study underscores the potential of multi-modal LLMs in enhancing document fraud detection systems and provides a foundation for future research into interpretable and scalable fraud mitigation strategies.

Paperid: 6724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10467.pdf

Abstract:
Question answering over Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) remains a challenging task due to the complexity of scholarly content and the intricate structure of these graphs. Large Language Model (LLM) approaches could be used to translate natural language questions (NLQs) into SPARQL queries; however, these LLM-based approaches struggle with SPARQL query generation due to limited exposure to SKG-specific content and the underlying schema. We identified two main types of errors in the LLM-generated SPARQL queries: (i) structural inconsistencies, such as missing or redundant triples in the queries, and (ii) semantic inaccuracies, where incorrect entities or properties are shown in the queries despite a correct query structure. To address these issues, we propose FIRESPARQL, a modular framework that supports fine-tuned LLMs as a core component, with optional context provided via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a SPARQL query correction layer. We evaluate the framework on the SciQA Benchmark using various configurations (zero-shot, zero-shot with RAG, one-shot, fine-tuning, and fine-tuning with RAG) and compare the performance with baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. We measure query accuracy using BLEU and ROUGE metrics, and query result accuracy using relaxed exact match(RelaxedEM), with respect to the gold standards containing the NLQs, SPARQL queries, and the results of the queries. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning achieves the highest overall performance, reaching 0.90 ROUGE-L for query accuracy and 0.85 RelaxedEM for result accuracy on the test set.

Paperid: 6725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09470.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation of city-scale point clouds is a critical technology for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perception systems, enabling the classification of 3D points without relying on any visual information to achieve comprehensive 3D understanding. However, existing models are frequently constrained by the limited scale of 3D data and the domain gap between datasets, which lead to reduced generalization capability. To address these challenges, we propose CitySeg, a foundation model for city-scale point cloud semantic segmentation that incorporates text modality to achieve open vocabulary segmentation and zero-shot inference. Specifically, in order to mitigate the issue of non-uniform data distribution across multiple domains, we customize the data preprocessing rules, and propose a local-global cross-attention network to enhance the perception capabilities of point networks in UAV scenarios. To resolve semantic label discrepancies across datasets, we introduce a hierarchical classification strategy. A hierarchical graph established according to the data annotation rules consolidates the data labels, and the graph encoder is used to model the hierarchical relationships between categories. In addition, we propose a two-stage training strategy and employ hinge loss to increase the feature separability of subcategories. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CitySeg achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on nine closed-set benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches. Moreover, for the first time, CitySeg enables zero-shot generalization in city-scale point cloud scenarios without relying on visual information.

Paperid: 6726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09323.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the rare disease domain poses unique challenges due to limited labeled data, semantic ambiguity between entity types, and long-tail distributions. In this study, we evaluate the capabilities of GPT-4o for rare disease NER under low-resource settings, using a range of prompt-based strategies including zero-shot prompting, few-shot in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and task-level fine-tuning. We design a structured prompting framework that encodes domain-specific knowledge and disambiguation rules for four entity types. We further introduce two semantically guided few-shot example selection methods to improve in-context performance while reducing labeling effort. Experiments on the RareDis Corpus show that GPT-4o achieves competitive or superior performance compared to BioClinicalBERT, with task-level fine-tuning yielding new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Cost-performance analysis reveals that few-shot prompting delivers high returns at low token budgets, while RAG offers marginal additional benefit. An error taxonomy highlights common failure modes such as boundary drift and type confusion, suggesting opportunities for post-processing and hybrid refinement. Our results demonstrate that prompt-optimized LLMs can serve as effective, scalable alternatives to traditional supervised models in biomedical NER, particularly in rare disease applications where annotated data is scarce.

Paperid: 6727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09200.pdf

Abstract:
Purpose: To investigate the feasibility of applying zero-shot self-supervised learning reconstruction to reduce breath-hold times in magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP). Methods: Breath-hold MRCP was acquired from 11 healthy volunteers on a 3T scanner using an incoherent k-space sampling pattern leading to a breath-hold duration of 14s. We evaluated zero-shot reconstruction of breath-hold MRCP against parallel imaging of respiratory-triggered MRCP acquired in 338s on average and compressed sensing reconstruction of breath-hold MRCP. To address the long computation times of zero-shot trainings, we used a training approach that leverages a pretrained network to reduce backpropagation depth during training. Results: Zero-shot learning reconstruction significantly improved visual image quality compared to compressed sensing reconstruction, particularly in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and ductal delineation, and reached a level of quality comparable to that of successful respiratory-triggered acquisitions with regular breathing patterns. Shallow training provided nearly equivalent reconstruction performance with a training time of 11 minutes in comparison to 271 minutes for a conventional zero-shot training. Conclusion: Zero-shot learning delivers high-fidelity MRCP reconstructions with reduced breath-hold times, and shallow training offers a practical solution for translation to time-constrained clinical workflows.

Paperid: 6728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08498.pdf

Abstract:
Vision benefits from grouping pixels into objects and understanding their spatial relationships, both laterally and in depth. We capture this with a scene representation comprising an occlusion-ordered stack of "object layers," each containing an isolated and amodally-completed object. To infer this representation from an image, we introduce a diffusion-based architecture named Concurrent Object Layers (CObL). CObL generates a stack of object layers in parallel, using Stable Diffusion as a prior for natural objects and inference-time guidance to ensure the inferred layers composite back to the input image. We train CObL using a few thousand synthetically-generated images of multi-object tabletop scenes, and we find that it zero-shot generalizes to photographs of real-world tabletops with varying numbers of novel objects. In contrast to recent models for amodal object completion, CObL reconstructs multiple occluded objects without user prompting and without knowing the number of objects beforehand. Unlike previous models for unsupervised object-centric representation learning, CObL is not limited to the world it was trained in.

Paperid: 6729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06634.pdf

Abstract:
Driven by recent advances in sensing and computing, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technologies have shown great potential for addressing distribution system restoration (DSR) under uncertainty. However, their data-intensive nature and reliance on the Markov Decision Process (MDP) assumption limit their ability to handle scenarios that require long-term temporal dependencies or few-shot and zero-shot decision making. Emerging Decision Transformers (DTs), which leverage causal transformers for sequence modeling in DRL tasks, offer a promising alternative. However, their reliance on return-to-go (RTG) cloning and limited generalization capacity restricts their effectiveness in dynamic power system environments. To address these challenges, we introduce an innovative Dual-Head Physics-informed Graph Decision Transformer (DH-PGDT) that integrates physical modeling, structural reasoning, and subgoal-based guidance to enable scalable and robust DSR even in zero-shot or few-shot scenarios. DH-PGDT features a dual-head physics-informed causal transformer architecture comprising Guidance Head, which generates subgoal representations, and Action Head, which uses these subgoals to generate actions independently of RTG. It also incorporates an operational constraint-aware graph reasoning module that encodes power system topology and operational constraints to generate a confidence-weighted action vector for refining DT trajectories. This design effectively improves generalization and enables robust adaptation to unseen scenarios. While this work focuses on DSR, the underlying computing model of the proposed PGDT is broadly applicable to sequential decision making across various power system operations and other complex engineering domains.

Paperid: 6730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05852.pdf

Abstract:
Driver visual attention prediction is a critical task in autonomous driving and human-computer interaction (HCI) research. Most prior studies focus on estimating attention allocation at a single moment in time, typically using static RGB images such as driving scene pictures. In this work, we propose a vision-language framework that models the changing landscape of drivers' gaze through natural language, using few-shot and zero-shot learning on single RGB images. We curate and refine high-quality captions from the BDD-A dataset using human-in-the-loop feedback, then fine-tune LLaVA to align visual perception with attention-centric scene understanding. Our approach integrates both low-level cues and top-down context (e.g., route semantics, risk anticipation), enabling language-based descriptions of gaze behavior. We evaluate performance across training regimes (few shot, and one-shot) and introduce domain-specific metrics for semantic alignment and response diversity. Results show that our fine-tuned model outperforms general-purpose VLMs in attention shift detection and interpretability. To our knowledge, this is among the first attempts to generate driver visual attention allocation and shifting predictions in natural language, offering a new direction for explainable AI in autonomous driving. Our approach provides a foundation for downstream tasks such as behavior forecasting, human-AI teaming, and multi-agent coordination.

Paperid: 6731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04714.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial machinery maintenance requires timely intervention to prevent catastrophic failures and optimize operational efficiency. This paper presents an integrated Large Language Model (LLM)-based intelligent system for prescriptive maintenance that extends beyond traditional anomaly detection to provide actionable maintenance recommendations. Building upon our prior LAMP framework for numerical data analysis, we develop a comprehensive solution that combines bearing vibration frequency analysis with multi agentic generation for intelligent maintenance planning. Our approach serializes bearing vibration data (BPFO, BPFI, BSF, FTF frequencies) into natural language for LLM processing, enabling few-shot anomaly detection with high accuracy. The system classifies fault types (inner race, outer race, ball/roller, cage faults) and assesses severity levels. A multi-agentic component processes maintenance manuals using vector embeddings and semantic search, while also conducting web searches to retrieve comprehensive procedural knowledge and access up-to-date maintenance practices for more accurate and in-depth recommendations. The Gemini model then generates structured maintenance recommendations includes immediate actions, inspection checklists, corrective measures, parts requirements, and timeline specifications. Experimental validation in bearing vibration datasets demonstrates effective anomaly detection and contextually relevant maintenance guidance. The system successfully bridges the gap between condition monitoring and actionable maintenance planning, providing industrial practitioners with intelligent decision support. This work advances the application of LLMs in industrial maintenance, offering a scalable framework for prescriptive maintenance across machinery components and industrial sectors.

Paperid: 6732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04381.pdf

Abstract:
Ear biometrics offer a stable and contactless modality for identity recognition, yet their effectiveness remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data and significant intra-class variability. Existing methods typically extract identity features from individual impressions in isolation, restricting their ability to capture consistent and discriminative representations. To overcome these limitations, a few-shot learning framework, ProtoN, is proposed to jointly process multiple impressions of an identity using a graph-based approach. Each impression is represented as a node in a class-specific graph, alongside a learnable prototype node that encodes identity-level information. This graph is processed by a Prototype Graph Neural Network (PGNN) layer, specifically designed to refine both impression and prototype representations through a dual-path message-passing mechanism. To further enhance discriminative power, the PGNN incorporates a cross-graph prototype alignment strategy that improves class separability by enforcing intra-class compactness while maintaining inter-class distinction. Additionally, a hybrid loss function is employed to balance episodic and global classification objectives, thereby improving the overall structure of the embedding space. Extensive experiments on five benchmark ear datasets demonstrate that ProtoN achieves state-of-the-art performance, with Rank-1 identification accuracy of up to 99.60% and an Equal Error Rate (EER) as low as 0.025, showing the effectiveness for few-shot ear recognition under limited data conditions.

Paperid: 6733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03724.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to identify and segment sound-producing objects in videos by leveraging both visual and audio modalities. It has emerged as a significant research area in multimodal perception, enabling fine-grained object-level understanding. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the AVS field, covering its problem formulation, benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and the progression of methodologies. We analyze a wide range of approaches, including architectures for unimodal and multimodal encoding, key strategies for audio-visual fusion, and various decoder designs. Furthermore, we examine major training paradigms, from fully supervised learning to weakly supervised and training-free methods. Notably, we provide an extensive comparison of AVS methods across standard benchmarks, highlighting the impact of different architectural choices, fusion strategies, and training paradigms on performance. Finally, we outline the current challenges, such as limited temporal modeling, modality bias toward vision, lack of robustness in complex environments, and high computational demands, and propose promising future directions, including improving temporal reasoning and multimodal fusion, leveraging foundation models for better generalization and few-shot learning, reducing reliance on labeled data through selfand weakly supervised learning, and incorporating higher-level reasoning for more intelligent AVS systems.

Paperid: 6734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02146.pdf

Abstract:
Articulated object recognition -- the task of identifying both the geometry and kinematic joints of objects with movable parts -- is essential for enabling robots to interact with everyday objects such as doors and laptops. However, existing approaches often rely on strong assumptions, such as a known number of articulated parts; require additional inputs, such as depth images; or involve complex intermediate steps that can introduce potential errors -- limiting their practicality in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce ScrewSplat, a simple end-to-end method that operates solely on RGB observations. Our approach begins by randomly initializing screw axes, which are then iteratively optimized to recover the object's underlying kinematic structure. By integrating with Gaussian Splatting, we simultaneously reconstruct the 3D geometry and segment the object into rigid, movable parts. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy across a diverse set of articulated objects, and further enables zero-shot, text-guided manipulation using the recovered kinematic model. See the project website at: https://screwsplat.github.io.

Paperid: 6735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01739.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying user preferences in dialogue systems is a pivotal aspect of providing satisfying services. Current research shows that using large language models (LLMs) to fine-tune a task-specific preference extractor yields excellent results in terms of accuracy and generalization. However, the primary challenge stems from the inherent difficulty in obtaining high-quality labeled multi-turn dialogue data. Accurately tracking user preference transitions across turns not only demands intensive domain expertise and contextual consistency maintenance for annotators (termed \textbf{``Annotating Disaster''}) but also complicates model training due to error propagation in sequential dependency learning. Inspired by the observation that multi-turn preference extraction can be decomposed into iterative executions of one-turn extraction processes. We propose a novel dialogue data generation framework named \textbf{IterChat}. First, we construct a new data format that categorizes the dialogue data into attributed historical preferences and one-turn dialogues. This reduces the probability of annotation errors and improves annotation efficiency. Then, to generate a high-quality and diverse dialogue dataset, we adopt GPT4 to pre-define the preference slots in the target preference extractor task and then randomly sample the subset of the slots and their corresponding schema values to create the dialogue datasets. Experimental results indicate that fine-tuning or only few-shot prompting with the new dialogue format yields superior performance compared to the original multi-turn dialogues. Additionally, the new data format improves annotator efficiency with a win rate of 28.4\% higher than the original multi-turn dialogues.

Paperid: 6736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01211.pdf

Abstract:
Learning solution operators for partial differential equations (PDEs) has become a foundational task in scientific machine learning. However, existing neural operator methods require abundant training data for each specific PDE and lack the ability to generalize across PDE families. In this work, we propose MOFS: a unified multimodal framework for multi-operator few-shot learning, which aims to generalize to unseen PDE operators using only a few demonstration examples. Our method integrates three key components: (i) multi-task self-supervised pretraining of a shared Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) encoder to reconstruct masked spatial fields and predict frequency spectra, (ii) text-conditioned operator embeddings derived from statistical summaries of input-output fields, and (iii) memory-augmented multimodal prompting with gated fusion and cross-modal gradient-based attention. We adopt a two-stage training paradigm that first learns prompt-conditioned inference on seen operators and then applies end-to-end contrastive fine-tuning to align latent representations across vision, frequency, and text modalities. Experiments on PDE benchmarks, including Darcy Flow and Navier Stokes variants, demonstrate that our model outperforms existing operator learning baselines in few-shot generalization. Extensive ablations validate the contributions of each modality and training component. Our approach offers a new foundation for universal and data-efficient operator learning across scientific domains.

Paperid: 6737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00777.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) enables identifying and localizing defects in unseen categories by relying solely on generalizable features rather than requiring any labeled examples of anomalies. However, existing ZSAD methods, whether using fixed or learned prompts, struggle under domain shifts because their training data are derived from limited training domains and fail to generalize to new distributions. In this paper, we introduce PILOT, a framework designed to overcome these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a novel dual-branch prompt learning mechanism that dynamically integrates a pool of learnable prompts with structured semantic attributes, enabling the model to adaptively weight the most relevant anomaly cues for each input image; and (2) a label-free test-time adaptation strategy that updates the learnable prompt parameters using high-confidence pseudo-labels from unlabeled test data. Extensive experiments on 13 industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and localization under domain shift.

Paperid: 6738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23211.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models exhibit powerful few-shot in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, but the performance is highly sensitive to provided examples. Recent research has focused on retrieving corresponding examples for each input query, not only enhancing the efficiency and scalability of the learning process but also mitigating inherent biases in manual example selection. However, these studies have primarily emphasized leveraging Positive samples while overlooking the additional information within Negative samples for contextual learning. We propose a novel method that utilizes Negative samples to better select Positive sample examples, thereby enhancing the performance of few-shot ICL. Initially, we construct Positive and Negative sample corpora based on Zero-Shot-Cot. Then, during inference, we employ a semantic similarity-based approach to select the most similar examples from both the Positive and Negative corpora for a given query. Subsequently, we further retrieve Positive examples from the Positive sample corpus based on semantic similarity to the Negative examples, then concatenating them with the previously selected Positive examples to serve as ICL demonstrations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses methods solely relying on the most similar positive examples for context, validating that the additional information in negative samples aids in enhancing ICL performance through improved Positive sample selection.

Paperid: 6739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22935.pdf

Abstract:
Deriving operational intelligence from organizational data repositories is a key challenge due to the dichotomy of data confidentiality vs data integration objectives, as well as the limitations of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools relative to the specific knowledge structure of domains such as operations and maintenance. In this work, we discuss Knowledge Graph construction and break down the Knowledge Extraction process into its Named Entity Recognition, Coreference Resolution, Named Entity Linking, and Relation Extraction functional components. We then evaluate sixteen NLP tools in concert with or in comparison to the rapidly advancing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We focus on the operational and maintenance intelligence use case for trusted applications in the aircraft industry. A baseline dataset is derived from a rich public domain US Federal Aviation Administration dataset focused on equipment failures or maintenance requirements. We assess the zero-shot performance of NLP and LLM tools that can be operated within a controlled, confidential environment (no data is sent to third parties). Based on our observation of significant performance limitations, we discuss the challenges related to trusted NLP and LLM tools as well as their Technical Readiness Level for wider use in mission-critical industries such as aviation. We conclude with recommendations to enhance trust and provide our open-source curated dataset to support further baseline testing and evaluation.

Paperid: 6740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22289.pdf

Abstract:
Intent recognition is a fundamental component in task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS). Determining user intents and detecting whether an intent is Out-of-Scope (OOS) is crucial for TODS to provide reliable responses. However, traditional TODS require large amount of annotated data. In this work we propose a hybrid approach to combine BERT and LLMs in zero and few-shot settings to recognize intents and detect OOS utterances. Our approach leverages LLMs generalization power and BERT's computational efficiency in such scenarios. We evaluate our method on multi-party conversation corpora and observe that sharing information from BERT outputs to LLMs leads to system performance improvement.

Paperid: 6741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22194.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid progress in terrain-aware autonomous ground navigation has been driven by advances in supervised semantic segmentation. However, these methods rely on costly data collection and labor-intensive ground truth labeling to train deep models. Furthermore, autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in unrehearsed, unstructured environments where no labeled data exists and semantic categories may be ambiguous or domain-specific. Recent zero-shot approaches to unsupervised segmentation have shown promise in such settings but typically operate on individual frames, lacking temporal consistency-a critical property for robust perception in unstructured environments. To address this gap we introduce Frontier-Seg, a method for temporally consistent unsupervised segmentation of terrain from mobile robot video streams. Frontier-Seg clusters superpixel-level features extracted from foundation model backbones-specifically DINOv2-and enforces temporal consistency across frames to identify persistent terrain boundaries or frontiers without human supervision. We evaluate Frontier-Seg on a diverse set of benchmark datasets-including RUGD and RELLIS-3D-demonstrating its ability to perform unsupervised segmentation across unstructured off-road environments.

Paperid: 6742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22136.pdf

Abstract:
Humans possess innate meta-learning capabilities, partly attributable to their exceptional color perception. In this paper, we pioneer an innovative viewpoint on few-shot learning by simulating human color perception mechanisms. We propose the ColorSense Learner, a bio-inspired meta-learning framework that capitalizes on inter-channel feature extraction and interactive learning. By strategically emphasizing distinct color information across different channels, our approach effectively filters irrelevant features while capturing discriminative characteristics. Color information represents the most intuitive visual feature, yet conventional meta-learning methods have predominantly neglected this aspect, focusing instead on abstract feature differentiation across categories. Our framework bridges the gap via synergistic color-channel interactions, enabling better intra-class commonality extraction and larger inter-class differences. Furthermore, we introduce a meta-distiller based on knowledge distillation, ColorSense Distiller, which incorporates prior teacher knowledge to augment the student network's meta-learning capacity. We've conducted comprehensive coarse/fine-grained and cross-domain experiments on eleven few-shot benchmarks for validation. Numerous experiments reveal that our methods have extremely strong generalization ability, robustness, and transferability, and effortless handle few-shot classification from the perspective of color perception.

Paperid: 6743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22057.pdf

Abstract:
Difficult few-shot image recognition has significant application prospects, yet remaining the substantial technical gaps with the conventional large-scale image recognition. In this paper, we have proposed an efficient original method for few-shot image recognition, called CIELab-Guided Coherent Meta-Learning (MetaLab). Structurally, our MetaLab comprises two collaborative neural networks: LabNet, which can perform domain transformation for the CIELab color space and extract rich grouped features, and coherent LabGNN, which can facilitate mutual learning between lightness graph and color graph. For sufficient certification, we have implemented extensive comparative studies on four coarse-grained benchmarks, four fine-grained benchmarks, and four cross-domain few-shot benchmarks. Specifically, our method can achieve high accuracy, robust performance, and effective generalization capability with one-shot sample per class. Overall, all experiments have demonstrated that our MetaLab can approach 99\% $\uparrow\downarrow$ accuracy, reaching the human recognition ceiling with little visual deviation.

Paperid: 6744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21964.pdf

Abstract:
Developing zero-shot human activity recognition (HAR) methods is a critical direction in smart home research -- considering its impact on making HAR systems work across smart homes having diverse sensing modalities, layouts, and activities of interest. The state-of-the-art solutions along this direction are based on generating natural language descriptions of the sensor data and feeding it via a carefully crafted prompt to the LLM to perform classification. Despite their performance guarantees, such ``prompt-the-LLM'' approaches carry several risks, including privacy invasion, reliance on an external service, and inconsistent predictions due to version changes, making a case for alternative zero-shot HAR methods that do not require prompting the LLMs. In this paper, we propose one such solution that models sensor data and activities using natural language, leveraging its embeddings to perform zero-shot classification and thereby bypassing the need to prompt the LLMs for activity predictions. The impact of our work lies in presenting a detailed case study on six datasets, highlighting how language modeling can bolster HAR systems in zero-shot recognition.

Paperid: 6745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21790.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to support various workflows across different disciplines, yet their potential in choice modelling remains relatively unexplored. This work examines the potential of LLMs as assistive agents in the specification and, where technically feasible, estimation of Multinomial Logit models. We implement a systematic experimental framework involving thirteen versions of six leading LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Gemma, and Llama) evaluated under five experimental configurations. These configurations vary along three dimensions: modelling goal (suggesting vs. suggesting and estimating MNLs); prompting strategy (Zero-Shot vs. Chain-of-Thoughts); and information availability (full dataset vs. data dictionary only). Each LLM-suggested specification is implemented, estimated, and evaluated based on goodness-of-fit metrics, behavioural plausibility, and model complexity. Findings reveal that proprietary LLMs can generate valid and behaviourally sound utility specifications, particularly when guided by structured prompts. Open-weight models such as Llama and Gemma struggled to produce meaningful specifications. Claude 4 Sonnet consistently produced the best-fitting and most complex models, while GPT models suggested models with robust and stable modelling outcomes. Some LLMs performed better when provided with just data dictionary, suggesting that limiting raw data access may enhance internal reasoning capabilities. Among all LLMs, GPT o3 was uniquely capable of correctly estimating its own specifications by executing self-generated code. Overall, the results demonstrate both the promise and current limitations of LLMs as assistive agents in choice modelling, not only for model specification but also for supporting modelling decision and estimation, and provide practical guidance for integrating these tools into choice modellers' workflows.

Paperid: 6746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21257.pdf

Abstract:
Language interpretation is a compositional process, in which the meaning of more complex linguistic structures is inferred from the meaning of their parts. Large language models possess remarkable language interpretation capabilities and have been successfully applied to interpret questions by mapping them to SPARQL queries. An open question is how systematic this interpretation process is. Toward this question, in this paper, we propose a benchmark for investigating to what extent the abilities of LLMs to interpret questions are actually compositional. For this, we generate three datasets of varying difficulty based on graph patterns in DBpedia, relying on Lemon lexica for verbalization. Our datasets are created in a very controlled fashion in order to test the ability of LLMs to interpret structurally complex questions, given that they have seen the atomic building blocks. This allows us to evaluate to what degree LLMs are able to interpret complex questions for which they "understand" the atomic parts. We conduct experiments with models of different sizes using both various prompt and few-shot optimization techniques as well as fine-tuning. Our results show that performance in terms of macro $F_1$ degrades from $0.45$ over $0.26$ down to $0.09$ with increasing deviation from the samples optimized on. Even when all necessary information was provided to the model in the input, the $F_1$ scores do not exceed $0.57$ for the dataset of lowest complexity. We thus conclude that LLMs struggle to systematically and compositionally interpret questions and map them into SPARQL queries.

Paperid: 6747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21161.pdf

Abstract:
Pedestrian intention prediction is essential for autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Conventional approaches depend on supervised learning over frame sequences and require extensive retraining to adapt to new scenarios. Here, we introduce BF-PIP (Beyond Frames Pedestrian Intention Prediction), a zero-shot approach built upon Gemini 2.5 Pro. It infers crossing intentions directly from short, continuous video clips enriched with structured JAAD metadata. In contrast to GPT-4V based methods that operate on discrete frames, BF-PIP processes uninterrupted temporal clips. It also incorporates bounding-box annotations and ego-vehicle speed via specialized multimodal prompts. Without any additional training, BF-PIP achieves 73% prediction accuracy, outperforming a GPT-4V baseline by 18 %. These findings illustrate that combining temporal video inputs with contextual cues enhances spatiotemporal perception and improves intent inference under ambiguous conditions. This approach paves the way for agile, retraining-free perception module in intelligent transportation system.

Paperid: 6748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18587.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a solution for precoding in massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems due to its capacity to learn the characteristics of the propagation environment. However, training such a model requires high-quality, local datasets at the deployment site, which are often difficult to collect. We propose a transformer-based foundation model for mMIMO precoding that seeks to minimize the energy consumption of the transmitter while dynamically adapting to per-user rate requirements. At equal energy consumption, zero-shot deployment of the proposed foundation model significantly outperforms zero forcing, and approaches weighted minimum mean squared error performance with 8x less complexity. To address model adaptation in data-scarce settings, we introduce a data augmentation method that finds training samples similar to the target distribution by computing the cosine similarity between the outputs of the pre-trained feature extractor. Our work enables the implementation of DL-based solutions in practice by addressing challenges of data availability and training complexity. Moreover, the ability to dynamically configure per-user rate requirements can be leveraged by higher level resource allocation and scheduling algorithms for greater control over energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and fairness.

Paperid: 6749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17876.pdf

Abstract:
The scarcity of molecules with desirable properties (i.e., 'positive' molecules) is an inherent bottleneck for generative molecule design. To sidestep such obstacle, here we propose molecular task arithmetic: training a model on diverse and abundant negative examples to learn 'property directions' $--$ without accessing any positively labeled data $--$ and moving models in the opposite property directions to generate positive molecules. When analyzed on 20 zero-shot design experiments, molecular task arithmetic generated more diverse and successful designs than models trained on positive molecules. Moreover, we employed molecular task arithmetic in dual-objective and few-shot design tasks. We find that molecular task arithmetic can consistently increase the diversity of designs while maintaining desirable design properties. With its simplicity, data efficiency, and performance, molecular task arithmetic bears the potential to become the $\textit{de-facto}$ transfer learning strategy for de novo molecule design.

Paperid: 6750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17326.pdf

Abstract:
Detailed assessment of language impairment following stroke remains a cognitively complex and clinician-intensive task, limiting timely and scalable diagnosis. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) foundation models offer a promising pathway to augment human evaluation through intelligent systems, but their effectiveness in the context of speech and language impairment remains uncertain. In this study, we evaluate whether Whisper, a state-of-the-art ASR foundation model, can be applied to transcribe and analyze speech from patients with stroke during a commonly used picture-naming task. We assess both verbatim transcription accuracy and the model's ability to support downstream prediction of language function, which has major implications for outcomes after stroke. Our results show that the baseline Whisper model performs poorly on single-word speech utterances. Nevertheless, fine-tuning Whisper significantly improves transcription accuracy (reducing Word Error Rate by 87.72% in healthy speech and 71.22% in speech from patients). Further, learned representations from the model enable accurate prediction of speech quality (average F1 Macro of 0.74 for healthy, 0.75 for patients). However, evaluations on an unseen (TORGO) dataset reveal limited generalizability, highlighting the inability of Whisper to perform zero-shot transcription of single-word utterances on out-of-domain clinical speech and emphasizing the need to adapt models to specific clinical populations. While challenges remain in cross-domain generalization, these findings highlight the potential of foundation models, when appropriately fine-tuned, to advance automated speech and language assessment and rehabilitation for stroke-related impairments.

Paperid: 6751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15787.pdf

Abstract:
Modelling complex physical systems through partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to many disciplines in science and engineering. Yet in most real applications, unknown or incomplete relationships such as constitutive or thermal laws, limits the description of the physics of interest. Existing surrogate modelling approaches aim to address this gap by learning the PDE solution directly from data (sometimes adding known physical constraints). However, these approaches are tailored to specific system configurations (e.g., geometries, boundary conditions, or discretisations) and do not directly learn the missing physics, but only the PDE solution. We introduce FEML, an end-to-end differentiable framework that combines PDE modelling of the system (known physics) with ML modelling of the operator representing the missing physics. By embedding a PDE solver into training, FEML can learn such operators from the PDE solution, even when operator outputs cannot be directly measured (e.g., stresses for learning constitutive models). FEML dissociates configuration-dependent PDE modelling from a configuration-agnostic operator shared across systems with the same hidden physics, enabling zero-shot generalisation of complex physical systems and supporting downstream study by domain specialists. Our framework uses structure-preserving operator networks (SPONs) to model the operator, preserving key continuous properties at the discrete level, learning over complex geometries and meshes, and generalising across different discretisations (mesh resolutions and/or FE discretisations). We showcase FEML and its versatility by recovering nonlinear stress-strain laws from synthetic laboratory tests, applying the learned model to a new mechanical scenario without retraining in a neat zero-shot setting, and identifying temperature-dependent conductivity in transient heat flow.

Paperid: 6752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15026.pdf

Abstract:
Condition and structural health monitoring (CM/SHM) is a pivotal component of predictive maintenance (PdM) strategies across diverse industrial sectors, including mechanical rotating machinery, airplane composite wings, offshore wind turbines, and civil engineering structures. Conventional deep learning models, while effective in fault diagnosis and anomaly detection through supervised feature extraction and rule-based data augmentation, often struggle with operational variability, imbalanced or scarce fault datasets, and multimodal sensory data from complex systems. Deep generative models (DGMs) in this regard, including autoregressive models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, diffusion-based models, and emerging large language models, offer transformative capabilities by synthesizing high-fidelity data samples, reconstructing latent system states, and modeling complex multimodal data streams. This review systematically examines state-of-the-art DGM applications in CM/SHM systems, emphasizing their role in addressing key challenges: data imbalance and imputation, domain adaptation and generalization, multimodal data fusion, and downstream fault diagnosis and anomaly detection tasks, with rigorous comparison among signal processing, conventional machine learning or deep learning models, and DGMs. We also analyze current limitations of DGMs, including challenges of explainable and trustworthy models, computational inefficiencies for edge deployment, and the need for parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies. Future research directions can focus on zero-shot and few-shot learning, robust multimodal generalization, hybrid architectures integrating DGMs with physics knowledge, and reinforcement learning with DGMs to enhance robustness and accuracy in industrial scenarios.

Paperid: 6753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13859.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, the importance of software with natural-language user interfaces cannot be underestimated. In particular, in Question Answering (QA) systems, generating a SPARQL query for a given natural-language question (often named Query Building) from the information retrieved from the same question is the central task of QA systems working over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA). Due to the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), they are considered a well-suited method to increase the quality of the question-answering functionality, as there is still a lot of room for improvement, aiming for enhanced quality and trustworthiness. However, LLMs are trained on web data, where researchers have no control over whether the benchmark or the knowledge graph was already included in the training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that evaluates the quality of LLMs by generating a SPARQL query from a natural-language question under various conditions: (1) zero-shot SPARQL generation, (2) with knowledge injection, and (3) with "anonymized" knowledge injection. This enables us, for the first time, to estimate the influence of the training data on the QA quality improved by LLMs. Ultimately, this will help to identify how portable a method is or whether good results might mostly be achieved because a benchmark was already included in the training data (cf. LLM memorization). The developed method is portable, robust, and supports any knowledge graph; therefore, it could be easily applied to any KGQA or LLM, s.t., generating consistent insights into the actual LLM capabilities is possible.

Paperid: 6754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13357.pdf

Abstract:
Phishing attacks represent a significant cybersecurity threat, necessitating adaptive detection techniques. This study explores few-shot Adaptive Linguistic Prompting (ALP) in detecting phishing webpages through the multimodal capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. ALP is a structured semantic reasoning method that guides LLMs to analyze textual deception by breaking down linguistic patterns, detecting urgency cues, and identifying manipulative diction commonly found in phishing content. By integrating textual, visual, and URL-based analysis, we propose a unified model capable of identifying sophisticated phishing attempts. Our experiments demonstrate that ALP significantly enhances phishing detection accuracy by guiding LLMs through structured reasoning and contextual analysis. The findings highlight the potential of ALP-integrated multimodal LLMs to advance phishing detection frameworks, achieving an F1-score of 0.93, surpassing traditional approaches. These results establish a foundation for more robust, interpretable, and adaptive linguistic-based phishing detection systems using LLMs.

Paperid: 6755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12628.pdf

Abstract:
Human-object interaction detection (HOID) refers to localizing interactive human-object pairs in images and identifying the interactions. Since there could be an exponential number of object-action combinations, labeled data is limited - leading to a long-tail distribution problem. Recently, zero-shot learning emerged as a solution, with end-to-end transformer-based object detectors adapted for HOID becoming successful frameworks. However, their primary focus is designing improved decoders for learning entangled or disentangled interpretations of interactions. We advocate that HOI-specific cues must be anticipated at the encoder stage itself to obtain a stronger scene interpretation. Consequently, we build a top-down framework named Funnel-HOI inspired by the human tendency to grasp well-defined concepts first and then associate them with abstract concepts during scene understanding. We first probe an image for the presence of objects (well-defined concepts) and then probe for actions (abstract concepts) associated with them. A novel asymmetric co-attention mechanism mines these cues utilizing multimodal information (incorporating zero-shot capabilities) and yields stronger interaction representations at the encoder level. Furthermore, a novel loss is devised that considers objectaction relatedness and regulates misclassification penalty better than existing loss functions for guiding the interaction classifier. Extensive experiments on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets across fully-supervised and six zero-shot settings reveal our state-of-the-art performance, with up to 12.4% and 8.4% gains for unseen and rare HOI categories, respectively.

Paperid: 6756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12217.pdf

Abstract:
We explore an ASR-free method for isolated word reading assessment in low-resource settings. Our few-shot approach compares input child speech to a small set of adult-provided reference templates. Inputs and templates are encoded using intermediate layers from large self-supervised learned (SSL) models. Using an Afrikaans child speech benchmark, we investigate design options such as discretising SSL features and barycentre averaging of the templates. Idealised experiments show reasonable performance for adults, but a substantial drop for child speech input, even with child templates. Despite the success of employing SSL representations in low-resource speech tasks, our work highlights the limitations of SSL representations for processing child data when used in a few-shot classification system.

Paperid: 6757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08250.pdf

Abstract:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs), pre-trained on massive datasets, has demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including text classification. While prior studies have examined the use of LLMs for predicting the intent of user feedback and reported encouraging results, these investigations remain limited in scope. Furthermore, the vast volume of feedback posted daily, particularly for popular applications, combined with the computational and financial overhead of commercial LLMs, renders large-scale deployment impractical. In contrast, smaller models provide greater efficiency and lower cost but generally at the expense of reduced accuracy. In this paper, we aim to balance accuracy and efficiency in feedback classification. We first present a comprehensive study of zero-shot classification using four widely adopted LLMs, GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, Flan-T5, and Llama3-70B, on diverse feedback datasets collected from multiple platforms, including app stores, forums, and X, which are categorized under different schemes. This analysis reveals how classification scheme design and platform characteristics influence the predictive performance of LLMs. Building on these insights, we propose a two-tier routing strategy for scalable app store feedback classification. In this approach, low-complexity instances are processed by lightweight fine-tuned models, while ambiguous cases are routed to high-capacity LLMs for more reliable decisions. Experimental results show that this strategy retains 98.4% to 100.4% of zero-shot LLM accuracy while reducing request and token costs by 67.8% and 66.3%, respectively.

Paperid: 6758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07539.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a competitive approach to multilingual subjectivity detection using large language models (LLMs) with few-shot prompting. We participated in Task 1: Subjectivity of the CheckThat! 2025 evaluation campaign. We show that LLMs, when paired with carefully designed prompts, can match or outperform fine-tuned smaller language models (SLMs), particularly in noisy or low-quality data settings. Despite experimenting with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as debating LLMs and various example selection strategies, we found limited benefit beyond well-crafted standard few-shot prompts. Our system achieved top rankings across multiple languages in the CheckThat! 2025 subjectivity detection task, including first place in Arabic and Polish, and top-four finishes in Italian, English, German, and multilingual tracks. Notably, our method proved especially robust on the Arabic dataset, likely due to its resilience to annotation inconsistencies. These findings highlight the effectiveness and adaptability of LLM-based few-shot learning for multilingual sentiment tasks, offering a strong alternative to traditional fine-tuning, particularly when labeled data is scarce or inconsistent.

Paperid: 6759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06715.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), including zero-shot and few-shot paradigms, have shown promising capabilities in clinical text generation. However, real-world applications face two key challenges: (1) patient data is highly unstructured, heterogeneous, and scattered across multiple note types and (2) clinical notes are often long and semantically dense, making naive prompting infeasible due to context length constraints and the risk of omitting clinically relevant information. We introduce CLI-RAG (Clinically Informed Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a domain-specific framework for structured and clinically grounded text generation using LLMs. It incorporates a novel hierarchical chunking strategy that respects clinical document structure and introduces a task-specific dual-stage retrieval mechanism. The global stage identifies relevant note types using evidence-based queries, while the local stage extracts high-value content within those notes creating relevance at both document and section levels. We apply the system to generate structured progress notes for individual hospital visits using 15 clinical note types from the MIMIC-III dataset. Experiments show that it preserves temporal and semantic alignment across visits, achieving an average alignment score of 87.7%, surpassing the 80.7% baseline from real clinician-authored notes. The generated outputs also demonstrate high consistency across LLMs, reinforcing deterministic behavior essential for reproducibility, reliability, and clinical trust.

Paperid: 6760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05627.pdf

Abstract:
Partial-view 3D recognition -- reconstructing 3D geometry and identifying object instances from a few sparse RGB images -- is an exceptionally challenging yet practically essential task, particularly in cluttered, occluded real-world settings where full-view or reliable depth data are often unavailable. Existing methods, whether based on strong symmetry priors or supervised learning on curated datasets, fail to generalize to such scenarios. In this work, we introduce DreamGrasp, a framework that leverages the imagination capability of large-scale pre-trained image generative models to infer the unobserved parts of a scene. By combining coarse 3D reconstruction, instance segmentation via contrastive learning, and text-guided instance-wise refinement, DreamGrasp circumvents limitations of prior methods and enables robust 3D reconstruction in complex, multi-object environments. Our experiments show that DreamGrasp not only recovers accurate object geometry but also supports downstream tasks like sequential decluttering and target retrieval with high success rates.

Paperid: 6761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04149.pdf

Abstract:
The robust and accurate recognition of multicultural names, particularly those not previously encountered, is a critical challenge in an increasingly globalized digital landscape. Traditional methods often falter when confronted with the vast diversity and novel permutations of names across different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This paper introduces a novel framework, Prompt-Engineered Fine-Tuning (PEFT) for Large Language Models (LLMs) with Adversarial Data Augmentation and Cultural Knowledge Graph Integration, designed to significantly enhance zero-shot multicultural name recognition. Our approach leverages the powerful linguistic understanding of pre-trained LLMs, transforming the recognition task into a guided generation problem. Through meticulous prompt engineering, dynamic integration of explicit cultural knowledge derived from knowledge graphs, and the strategic application of adversarial data augmentation, we equip the LLM with an unprecedented ability to infer the cultural origin of unseen names. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PEFT method consistently outperforms established deep learning baselines, including advanced Bi-LSTM models with cultural tags, achieving an impressive 93.1\% overall accuracy and a remarkable 89.5\% accuracy on challenging zero-shot name identification. An in-depth ablation study confirms the synergistic contribution of each component, while a human evaluation highlights our method's performance approaching human expert judgment. This work signifies a substantial leap in multicultural name recognition, offering a highly effective and scalable solution for real-world applications.

Paperid: 6762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02205.pdf

Abstract:
Compound Expression Recognition (CER), a subfield of affective computing, aims to detect complex emotional states formed by combinations of basic emotions. In this work, we present a novel zero-shot multimodal approach for CER that combines six heterogeneous modalities into a single pipeline: static and dynamic facial expressions, scene and label matching, scene context, audio, and text. Unlike previous approaches relying on task-specific training data, our approach uses zero-shot components, including Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based label matching and Qwen-VL for semantic scene understanding. We further introduce a Multi-Head Probability Fusion (MHPF) module that dynamically weights modality-specific predictions, followed by a Compound Expressions (CE) transformation module that uses Pair-Wise Probability Aggregation (PPA) and Pair-Wise Feature Similarity Aggregation (PFSA) methods to produce interpretable compound emotion outputs. Evaluated under multi-corpus training, the proposed approach shows F1 scores of 46.95% on AffWild2, 49.02% on Acted Facial Expressions in The Wild (AFEW), and 34.85% on C-EXPR-DB via zero-shot testing, which is comparable to the results of supervised approaches trained on target data. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach for capturing CE without domain adaptation. The source code is publicly available.

Paperid: 6763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01559.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work in continual learning has highlighted the beneficial effect of resampling weights in the last layer of a neural network (``zapping"). Although empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, the underlying mechanisms that drive these improvements remain unclear. In this work, we investigate in detail the pattern of learning and forgetting that take place inside a convolutional neural network when trained in challenging settings such as continual learning and few-shot transfer learning, with handwritten characters and natural images. Our experiments show that models that have undergone zapping during training more quickly recover from the shock of transferring to a new domain. Furthermore, to better observe the effect of continual learning in a multi-task setting we measure how each individual task is affected. This shows that, not only zapping, but the choice of optimizer can also deeply affect the dynamics of learning and forgetting, causing complex patterns of synergy/interference between tasks to emerge when the model learns sequentially at transfer time.

Paperid: 6764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00742.pdf

Abstract:
Computer manufacturers offer platforms for users to describe device faults using textual reports such as "My screen is flickering". Identifying the faulty component from the report is essential for automating tests and improving user experience. However, such reports are often ambiguous and lack detail, making this task challenging. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in addressing such issues. This study evaluates 27 open-source models (1B-72B parameters) and 2 proprietary LLMs using four prompting strategies: Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and CoT+Few-Shot (CoT+FS). We conducted 98,948 inferences, processing over 51 million input tokens and generating 13 million output tokens. We achieve f1-score up to 0.76. Results show that three models offer the best balance between size and performance: mistral-small-24b-instruct and two smaller models, llama-3.2-1b-instruct and gemma-2-2b-it, that offer competitive performance with lower VRAM usage, enabling efficient inference on end-user devices as modern laptops or smartphones with NPUs.

Paperid: 6765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00032.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce KUL-KT, a biologically inspired architecture for knowledge tracing (KT), combining Hebbian memory encoding with gradient-based consolidation in a scalable, input-agnostic framework. KUL-KT adapts the principle of memory consolidation in neural systems, to student modeling by introducing two key innovations: (i) a time-decaying Hebbian memory update that enables graceful forgetting, and (ii) a novel Loss-aligned Internal Target (LIT) method to compute an ideal internal state, allowing continual learning without backpropagation through time. The architecture consists of a fast Hebbian memory that captures each learner interaction via a single associative update, and a slower linear network that consolidates recalled samples through gradient descent. This design enables few-shot personalization and natural forgetting without storing raw data or relying on large cohort training. Operating entirely in embedding space, KUL-KT supports both structured (tabular) and unstructured (short-answer) inputs. Empirically, KUL-KT outperforms strong baselines on ten public KT benchmarks in rank-sensitive metrics such as nDCG and Recall@10. In a classroom deployment, KUL-KT personalized quizzes from short-answer data, leading to improved learner-perceived helpfulness and reduced difficulty (p < 0.05). Ablation studies confirm that Hebbian decay and LIT are critical for continual adaptation. Compared to a strong graph-based KT model, KUL-KT trains 1.75x faster and uses 99.01\% less memory. These results position KUL-KT as a biologically grounded, memory-efficient, and input-flexible framework for personalized learning at scale.

Paperid: 6766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21240.pdf

Abstract:
Component obsolescence poses significant challenges in industries reliant on electronic components, causing increased costs and disruptions in the security and availability of systems. Accurate obsolescence risk prediction is essential but hindered by a lack of reliable data. This paper proposes a novel approach to forecasting obsolescence risk using zero-shot learning (ZSL) with large language models (LLMs) to address data limitations by leveraging domain-specific knowledge from tabular datasets. Applied to two real-world datasets, the method demonstrates effective risk prediction. A comparative evaluation of four LLMs underscores the importance of selecting the right model for specific forecasting tasks.

Paperid: 6767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20946.pdf

Abstract:
Current texture synthesis methods, which generate textures from fixed viewpoints, suffer from inconsistencies due to the lack of global context and geometric understanding. Meanwhile, recent advancements in video generation models have demonstrated remarkable success in achieving temporally consistent videos. In this paper, we introduce VideoTex, a novel framework for seamless texture synthesis that leverages video generation models to address both spatial and temporal inconsistencies in 3D textures. Our approach incorporates geometry-aware conditions, enabling precise utilization of 3D mesh structures. Additionally, we propose a structure-wise UV diffusion strategy, which enhances the generation of occluded areas by preserving semantic information, resulting in smoother and more coherent textures. VideoTex not only achieves smoother transitions across UV boundaries but also ensures high-quality, temporally stable textures across video frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoTex outperforms existing methods in texture fidelity, seam blending, and stability, paving the way for dynamic real-time applications that demand both visual quality and temporal coherence.

Paperid: 6768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20197.pdf

Abstract:
A growing fraction of all code is sampled from Large Language Models (LLMs). We investigate the problem of attributing code generated by language models using hypothesis testing to leverage established techniques and guarantees. Given a set of samples $S$ and a suspect model $\mathcal{L}^*$, our goal is to assess the likelihood of $S$ originating from $\mathcal{L}^*$. Due to the curse of dimensionality, this is intractable when only samples from the LLM are given: to circumvent this, we use both samples and density estimates from the LLM, a form of access commonly available. We introduce $\mathsf{Anubis}$, a zero-shot attribution tool that frames attribution as a distribution testing problem. Our experiments on a benchmark of code samples show that $\mathsf{Anubis}$ achieves high AUROC scores ( $\ge0.9$) when distinguishing between LLMs like DeepSeek-Coder, CodeGemma, and Stable-Code using only $\approx 2000$ samples.

Paperid: 6769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19350.pdf

Abstract:
Inertial parameter identification of industrial robots is an established process, but standard methods using Least Squares or Machine Learning do not consider prior information about the robot and require extensive measurements. Inspired by Bayesian statistics, this paper presents an identification method with improved generalization that incorporates prior knowledge and is able to learn with only a few or without additional measurements (Zero-Shot Learning). Furthermore, our method is able to correctly learn not only the inertial but also the mechanical and base parameters of the MABI Max 100 robot while ensuring physical feasibility and specifying the confidence intervals of the results. We also provide different types of priors for serial robots with 6 degrees of freedom, where datasheets or CAD models are not available.

Paperid: 6770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17746.pdf

Abstract:
Transforming static images into interactive experiences remains a challenging task in computer vision. Tackling this challenge holds the potential to elevate mobile user experiences, notably through interactive and AR/VR applications. Current approaches aim to achieve this either using pre-recorded video responses or requiring multi-view images as input. In this paper, we present PhysID, that streamlines the creation of physics-based interactive dynamics from a single-view image by leveraging large generative models for 3D mesh generation and physical property prediction. This significantly reduces the expertise required for engineering-intensive tasks like 3D modeling and intrinsic property calibration, enabling the process to be scaled with minimal manual intervention. We integrate an on-device physics-based engine for physically plausible real-time rendering with user interactions. PhysID represents a leap forward in mobile-based interactive dynamics, offering real-time, non-deterministic interactions and user-personalization with efficient on-device memory consumption. Experiments evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of various Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on diverse tasks and the performance of 3D reconstruction models. These results demonstrate the cohesive functioning of all modules within the end-to-end framework, contributing to its effectiveness.

Paperid: 6771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16925.pdf

Abstract:
Precise determination of thermodynamic parameters in ultracold Bose gases remains challenging due to the destructive nature of conventional measurement techniques and inherent experimental uncertainties. We demonstrate an artificial intelligence approach for rapid, non-destructive estimation of the chemical potential and temperature from single-shot, in situ imaged density profiles of finite-temperature Bose gases. Our convolutional neural network is trained exclusively on quasi-2D `pancake' condensates in harmonic trap configurations. It achieves parameter extraction within fractions of a second. The model also demonstrates zero-shot generalisation across both trap geometry and thermalisation dynamics, successfully estimating thermodynamic parameters for toroidally trapped condensates with errors of only a few nanokelvin despite no prior exposure to such geometries during training, and maintaining predictive accuracy during dynamic thermalisation processes after a relatively brief evolution without explicit training on non-equilibrium states. These results suggest that supervised learning can overcome traditional limitations in ultracold atom thermometry, with extension to broader geometric configurations, temperature ranges, and additional parameters potentially enabling comprehensive real-time analysis of quantum gas experiments. Such capabilities could significantly streamline experimental workflows whilst improving measurement precision across a range of quantum fluid systems.

Paperid: 6772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16895.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal models have demonstrated powerful capabilities in complex tasks requiring multimodal alignment including zero-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, existing models typically rely on millions of paired multimodal samples, which are prohibitively expensive or infeasible to obtain in many domains. In this work, we explore the feasibility of building multimodal models with limited amount of paired data by aligning pretrained unimodal foundation models. We show that high-quality alignment is possible with as few as tens of thousands of paired samples$\unicode{x2013}$less than $1\%$ of the data typically used in the field. To achieve this, we introduce STRUCTURE, an effective regularization technique that preserves the neighborhood geometry of the latent space of unimodal encoders. Additionally, we show that aligning last layers is often suboptimal and demonstrate the benefits of aligning the layers with the highest representational similarity across modalities. These two components can be readily incorporated into existing alignment methods, yielding substantial gains across 24 zero-shot image classification and retrieval benchmarks, with average relative improvement of $51.6\%$ in classification and $91.8\%$ in retrieval tasks. Our results highlight the effectiveness and broad applicability of our framework for limited-sample multimodal learning and offer a promising path forward for resource-constrained domains.

Paperid: 6773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16609.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence for Science (AI4S) is poised to transform industrial manufacturing by enabling the accelerated discovery and optimization of advanced (bio)materials, dramatically reducing development cycles, and unlocking novel high-performance solutions. We introduce Aethorix v1.0, a platform that integrates large language models for objective mining, diffusion-based generative models for zero-shot inorganic crystal design, and machine-learned interatomic potentials for rapid property prediction at ab initio accuracy. The platform is developed to enhance the full materials development cycle, ranging from design to deployment in use cases, while incorporating critical operational constraints to meet rigorous manufacturing standards. We validated its industrial value through a real use case, showcasing how the framework can be seamlessly embedded into scalable materials R&D pipelines.

Paperid: 6774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13322.pdf

Abstract:
Owing to its rapid progress and broad application prospects, few-shot action recognition has attracted considerable interest. However, current methods are predominantly based on limited single-modal data, which does not fully exploit the potential of multimodal information. This paper presents a novel framework that actively identifies reliable modalities for each sample using task-specific contextual cues, thus significantly improving recognition performance. Our framework integrates an Active Sample Inference (ASI) module, which utilizes active inference to predict reliable modalities based on posterior distributions and subsequently organizes them accordingly. Unlike reinforcement learning, active inference replaces rewards with evidence-based preferences, making more stable predictions. Additionally, we introduce an active mutual distillation module that enhances the representation learning of less reliable modalities by transferring knowledge from more reliable ones. Adaptive multimodal inference is employed during the meta-test to assign higher weights to reliable modalities. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches.

Paperid: 6775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12374.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode knowledge and reasoning capabilities for robotic manipulation within high-dimensional representation spaces. However, current approaches often project them into compressed intermediate representations, discarding important task-specific information such as fine-grained spatial or semantic details. To address this, we propose AntiGrounding, a new framework that reverses the instruction grounding process. It lifts candidate actions directly into the VLM representation space, renders trajectories from multiple views, and uses structured visual question answering for instruction-based decision making. This enables zero-shot synthesis of optimal closed-loop robot trajectories for new tasks. We also propose an offline policy refinement module that leverages past experience to enhance long-term performance. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our method outperforms baselines across diverse robotic manipulation tasks.

Paperid: 6776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12365.pdf

Abstract:
This survey paper outlines the key developments in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), including enhancements to their reasoning skills, adaptability to various tasks, increased computational efficiency, and the ability to make ethical decisions. The techniques that have been most effective in bridging the gap between human and machine communications include the Chain-of-Thought prompting, Instruction Tuning, and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. The improvements in multimodal learning and few-shot or zero-shot techniques have further empowered LLMs to handle complex jobs with minor input. A significant focus is placed on efficiency, detailing scaling strategies, optimization techniques, and the influential Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which strategically routes inputs to specialized subnetworks to boost predictive accuracy, while optimizing resource allocation. This survey also offers a broader perspective on recent advancements in LLMs, going beyond isolated aspects such as model architecture or ethical concerns. Additionally, it explores the role of LLMs in Agentic AI and their use as Autonomous Decision-Making Systems, and categorizes emerging methods that enhance LLM reasoning, efficiency, and ethical alignment. The survey also identifies underexplored areas such as interpretability, cross-modal integration, and sustainability. While significant advancements have been made in LLMs, challenges such as high computational costs, biases, and ethical risks remain. Overcoming these requires a focus on bias mitigation, transparent decision-making, and explicit ethical guidelines. Future research will generally focus on enhancing the model's ability to handle multiple inputs, thereby making it more intelligent, safe, and reliable.

Paperid: 6777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11666.pdf

Abstract:
Case Report Forms (CRFs) are largely used in medical research as they ensure accuracy, reliability, and validity of results in clinical studies. However, publicly available, wellannotated CRF datasets are scarce, limiting the development of CRF slot filling systems able to fill in a CRF from clinical notes. To mitigate the scarcity of CRF datasets, we propose to take advantage of available datasets annotated for information extraction tasks and to convert them into structured CRFs. We present a semi-automatic conversion methodology, which has been applied to the E3C dataset in two languages (English and Italian), resulting in a new, high-quality dataset for CRF slot filling. Through several experiments on the created dataset, we report that slot filling achieves 59.7% for Italian and 67.3% for English on a closed Large Language Models (zero-shot) and worse performances on three families of open-source models, showing that filling CRFs is challenging even for recent state-of-the-art LLMs. We release the datest at https://huggingface.co/collections/NLP-FBK/e3c-to-crf-67b9844065460cbe42f80166

Paperid: 6778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11068.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly engaging in moral and ethical reasoning, where criteria for judgment are often unclear, even for humans. While LLM alignment studies cover many areas, one important yet underexplored area is how LLMs make judgments about obligations. This work reveals a strong tendency in LLMs to judge non-obligatory contexts as obligations when prompts are augmented with modal expressions such as must or ought to. We introduce this phenomenon as Deontological Keyword Bias (DKB). We find that LLMs judge over 90\% of commonsense scenarios as obligations when modal expressions are present. This tendency is consist across various LLM families, question types, and answer formats. To mitigate DKB, we propose a judgment strategy that integrates few-shot examples with reasoning prompts. This study sheds light on how modal expressions, as a form of linguistic framing, influence the normative decisions of LLMs and underscores the importance of addressing such biases to ensure judgment alignment.

Paperid: 6779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09424.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting deception in an increasingly digital world is both a critical and challenging task. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation of the automated deception detection capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) across diverse domains. We assess the performance of both open-source and commercial LLMs on three distinct datasets: real life trial interviews (RLTD), instructed deception in interpersonal scenarios (MU3D), and deceptive reviews (OpSpam). We systematically analyze the effectiveness of different experimental setups for deception detection, including zero-shot and few-shot approaches with random or similarity-based in-context example selection. Our results show that fine-tuned LLMs achieve state-of-the-art performance on textual deception detection tasks, while LMMs struggle to fully leverage cross-modal cues. Additionally, we analyze the impact of auxiliary features, such as non-verbal gestures and video summaries, and examine the effectiveness of different prompting strategies, including direct label generation and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our findings provide key insights into how LLMs process and interpret deceptive cues across modalities, highlighting their potential and limitations in real-world deception detection applications.

Paperid: 6780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08700.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific fact-checking has mostly focused on text and tables, overlooking scientific charts, which are key for presenting quantitative evidence and statistical reasoning. We introduce ClimateViz, the first large-scale benchmark for scientific fact-checking using expert-curated scientific charts. ClimateViz contains 49,862 claims linked to 2,896 visualizations, each labeled as support, refute, or not enough information. To improve interpretability, each example includes structured knowledge graph explanations covering trends, comparisons, and causal relations. We evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal language models, including both proprietary and open-source systems, in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Results show that current models struggle with chart-based reasoning: even the best systems, such as Gemini 2.5 and InternVL 2.5, reach only 76.2 to 77.8 percent accuracy in label-only settings, far below human performance (89.3 and 92.7 percent). Explanation-augmented outputs improve performance in some models. We released our dataset and code alongside the paper.

Paperid: 6781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08194.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular 3D reconstruction methods and vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive results on standard benchmarks, yet their true understanding of geometric properties remains unclear. We introduce GIQ , a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the geometric reasoning capabilities of vision and vision-language foundation models. GIQ comprises synthetic and real-world images of 224 diverse polyhedra - including Platonic, Archimedean, Johnson, and Catalan solids, as well as stellations and compound shapes - covering varying levels of complexity and symmetry. Through systematic experiments involving monocular 3D reconstruction, 3D symmetry detection, mental rotation tests, and zero-shot shape classification tasks, we reveal significant shortcomings in current models. State-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms trained on extensive 3D datasets struggle to reconstruct even basic geometric forms accurately. While foundation models effectively detect specific 3D symmetry elements via linear probing, they falter significantly in tasks requiring detailed geometric differentiation, such as mental rotation. Moreover, advanced vision-language assistants exhibit remarkably low accuracy on complex polyhedra, systematically misinterpreting basic properties like face geometry, convexity, and compound structures. GIQ is publicly available, providing a structured platform to highlight and address critical gaps in geometric intelligence, facilitating future progress in robust, geometry-aware representation learning.

Paperid: 6782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06602.pdf

Abstract:
Composed image retrieval (CIR) allows a user to locate a target image by applying a fine-grained textual edit (e.g., ``turn the dress blue'' or ``remove stripes'') to a reference image. Zero-shot CIR, which embeds the image and the text with separate pretrained vision-language encoders, reaches only 20-25\% Recall@10 on the FashionIQ benchmark. We improve this by fine-tuning BLIP-2 with a lightweight Q-Former that fuses visual and textual features into a single embedding, raising Recall@10 to 45.6\% (shirt), 40.1\% (dress), and 50.4\% (top-tee) and increasing the average Recall@50 to 67.6\%. We also examine Retrieval-DPO, which fine-tunes CLIP's text encoder with a Direct Preference Optimization loss applied to FAISS-mined hard negatives. Despite extensive tuning of the scaling factor, index, and sampling strategy, Retrieval-DPO attains only 0.02\% Recall@10 -- far below zero-shot and prompt-tuned baselines -- because it (i) lacks joint image-text fusion, (ii) uses a margin objective misaligned with top-$K$ metrics, (iii) relies on low-quality negatives, and (iv) keeps the vision and Transformer layers frozen. Our results show that effective preference-based CIR requires genuine multimodal fusion, ranking-aware objectives, and carefully curated negatives.

Paperid: 6783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05675.pdf

Abstract:
Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to detect causal relationships between events in textual contexts. Existing ECI models predominantly rely on supervised methodologies, suffering from dependence on large-scale annotated data. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) enable zero-shot ECI, they are prone to causal hallucination-erroneously establishing spurious causal links. To address these challenges, we propose MEFA, a novel zero-shot framework based on Multi-source Evidence Fuzzy Aggregation. First, we decompose causality reasoning into three main tasks (temporality determination, necessity analysis, and sufficiency verification) complemented by three auxiliary tasks. Second, leveraging meticulously designed prompts, we guide LLMs to generate uncertain responses and deterministic outputs. Finally, we quantify LLM's responses of sub-tasks and employ fuzzy aggregation to integrate these evidence for causality scoring and causality determination. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that MEFA outperforms second-best unsupervised baselines by 6.2% in F1-score and 9.3% in precision, while significantly reducing hallucination-induced errors. In-depth analysis verify the effectiveness of task decomposition and the superiority of fuzzy aggregation.

Paperid: 6784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05488.pdf

Abstract:
High-resolution (HR) videos play a crucial role in many computer vision applications. Although existing video restoration (VR) methods can significantly enhance video quality by exploiting temporal information across video frames, they are typically trained for fixed upscaling factors and lack the flexibility to handle scales or degradations beyond their training distribution. In this paper, we introduce VR-INR, a novel video restoration approach based on Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) that is trained only on a single upscaling factor ($\times 4$) but generalizes effectively to arbitrary, unseen super-resolution scales at test time. Notably, VR-INR also performs zero-shot denoising on noisy input, despite never having seen noisy data during training. Our method employs a hierarchical spatial-temporal-texture encoding framework coupled with multi-resolution implicit hash encoding, enabling adaptive decoding of high-resolution and noise-suppressed frames from low-resolution inputs at any desired magnification. Experimental results show that VR-INR consistently maintains high-quality reconstructions at unseen scales and noise during training, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in sharpness, detail preservation, and denoising efficacy.

Paperid: 6785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05415.pdf

Abstract:
We explore automatically predicting which Wordle games Reddit users find amusing. We scrape approximately 80k reactions by Reddit users to Wordle games from Reddit, classify the reactions as expressing amusement or not using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 using few-shot prompting, and verify that GPT-3.5's labels roughly correspond to human labels. We then extract features from Wordle games that can predict user amusement. We demonstrate that the features indeed provide a (weak) signal that predicts user amusement as predicted by GPT-3.5. Our results indicate that user amusement at Wordle games can be predicted computationally to some extent. We explore which features of the game contribute to user amusement. We find that user amusement is predictable, indicating a measurable aspect of creativity infused into Wordle games through humor.

Paperid: 6786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04908.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based pipeline for stereo dataset generation, offering an efficient alternative to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods. To obtain useful geometry estimates, we explore utilizing the reconstructed geometry from the explicit 3D representations as well as depth estimates from the FoundationStereo model in an expert knowledge transfer setup. We find that when fine-tuning stereo models on 3DGS-generated datasets, we demonstrate competitive performance in zero-shot generalization benchmarks. When using the reconstructed geometry directly, we observe that it is often noisy and contains artifacts, which propagate noise to the trained model. In contrast, we find that the disparity estimates from FoundationStereo are cleaner and consequently result in a better performance on the zero-shot generalization benchmarks. Our method highlights the potential for low-cost, high-fidelity dataset creation and fast fine-tuning for deep stereo models. Moreover, we also reveal that while the latest Gaussian Splatting based methods have achieved superior performance on established benchmarks, their robustness falls short in challenging in-the-wild settings warranting further exploration.

Paperid: 6787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04389.pdf

Abstract:
Customer care is an essential pillar of the e-commerce shopping experience with companies spending millions of dollars each year, employing automation and human agents, across geographies (like US, Canada, Mexico, Chile), channels (like Chat, Interactive Voice Response (IVR)), and languages (like English, Spanish). SOTA pre-trained models like multilingual-BERT, fine-tuned on annotated data have shown good performance in downstream tasks relevant to Customer Care. However, model performance is largely subject to the availability of sufficient annotated domain-specific data. Cross-domain availability of data remains a bottleneck, thus building an intent classifier that generalizes across domains (defined by channel, geography, and language) with only a few annotations, is of great practical value. In this paper, we propose an embedder-cum-classifier model architecture which extends state-of-the-art domain-specific models to other domains with only a few labeled samples. We adopt a supervised fine-tuning approach with isotropic regularizers to train a domain-specific sentence embedder and a multilingual knowledge distillation strategy to generalize this embedder across multiple domains. The trained embedder, further augmented with a simple linear classifier can be deployed for new domains. Experiments on Canada and Mexico e-commerce Customer Care dataset with few-shot intent detection show an increase in accuracy by 20-23% against the existing state-of-the-art pre-trained models.

Paperid: 6788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04171.pdf

Abstract:
Deep generative models have recently been applied to physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), offering scalable simulation and uncertainty-aware inference. However, enforcing physical constraints, such as conservation laws (linear and nonlinear) and physical consistencies, remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on soft penalties or architectural biases that fail to guarantee hard constraints. In this work, we propose Physics-Constrained Flow Matching (PCFM), a zero-shot inference framework that enforces arbitrary nonlinear constraints in pretrained flow-based generative models. PCFM continuously guides the sampling process through physics-based corrections applied to intermediate solution states, while remaining aligned with the learned flow and satisfying physical constraints. Empirically, PCFM outperforms both unconstrained and constrained baselines on a range of PDEs, including those with shocks, discontinuities, and sharp features, while ensuring exact constraint satisfaction at the final solution. Our method provides a general framework for enforcing hard constraints in both scientific and general-purpose generative models, especially in applications where constraint satisfaction is essential.

Paperid: 6789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03926.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit strong generalization capabilities due to large-scale pretraining on diverse image-text pairs. However, their performance often degrades when applied to target datasets with significant distribution shifts in both visual appearance and class semantics. Recent few-shot learning approaches adapt CLIP to downstream tasks using limited labeled data via adapter or prompt tuning, but are not specifically designed to handle such extreme domain shifts. Conversely, some works addressing cross-domain few-shot learning consider such domain-shifted scenarios but operate in an episodic setting with only a few classes per episode, limiting their applicability to real-world deployment, where all classes must be handled simultaneously. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework, MIST (Multiple Stochastic Prompt Tuning), for efficiently adapting CLIP to datasets with extreme distribution shifts using only a few labeled examples, in scenarios involving all classes at once. Specifically, we introduce multiple learnable prompts per class to effectively capture diverse modes in visual representations arising from distribution shifts. To further enhance generalization, these prompts are modeled as learnable Gaussian distributions, enabling efficient exploration of the prompt parameter space and reducing overfitting caused by limited supervision. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Paperid: 6790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03516.pdf

Abstract:
Object goal navigation is a fundamental task in embodied AI, where an agent is instructed to locate a target object in an unexplored environment. Traditional learning-based methods rely heavily on large-scale annotated data or require extensive interaction with the environment in a reinforcement learning setting, often failing to generalize to novel environments and limiting scalability. To overcome these challenges, we explore a zero-shot setting where the agent operates without task-specific training, enabling more scalable and adaptable solution. Recent advances in Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer powerful capabilities for visual understanding and reasoning, making them ideal for agents to comprehend scenes, identify relevant regions, and infer the likely locations of objects. In this work, we present a zero-shot object goal navigation framework that integrates the perceptual strength of VFMs with a model-based planner that is capable of long-horizon decision making through frontier exploration. We evaluate our approach on the HM3D dataset using the Habitat simulator and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of success weighted by path length for zero-shot object goal navigation.

Paperid: 6791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03174.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the widespread adoption of wearable devices has highlighted the growing importance of behavior analysis using IMU. While applications span diverse fields such as healthcare and robotics, recent studies have increasingly focused on multimodal analysis, in addition to unimodal analysis. Several studies have proposed multimodal foundation models that incorporate first-person video and text data; however, these models still fall short in providing a detailed analysis of full-body human activity. To address this limitation, we propose Activity Understanding and Representations Alignment - Multimodal Foundation Model (AURA-MFM), a foundational model integrating four modalities: third-person video, motion capture, IMU, and text. By incorporating third-person video and motion capture data, the model enables a detailed and multidimensional understanding of human activity, which first-person perspectives alone fail to capture. Additionally, a Transformer-based IMU encoder is employed to enhance the model's overall performance. Experimental evaluations on retrieval and activity recognition tasks demonstrate that our model surpasses existing methods. Notably, in the zero-shot classification for action recognition, our method achieved significantly higher performance, with an F1-score of 0.6226 and an accuracy of 0.7320, whereas the existing method recorded an F1-score of 0.0747 and an accuracy of 0.1961.

Paperid: 6792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03173.pdf

Abstract:
Physical intelligence -- anticipating and shaping the world from partial, multisensory observations -- is critical for next-generation world models. We propose FOLIAGE, a physics-informed multimodal world model for unbounded accretive surface growth. In its Action-Perception loop, a unified context encoder maps images, mesh connectivity, and point clouds to a shared latent state. A physics-aware predictor, conditioned on physical control actions, advances this latent state in time to align with the target latent of the surface, yielding a Modality-Agnostic Growth Embedding (MAGE) that interfaces with critic heads for downstream objectives. FOLIAGE's Accretive Graph Network (AGN) captures dynamic connectivity through Age Positional Encoding and Energy-Gated Message-Passing. Geometry-Correspondence Fusion and Cross-Patch Masking enhance MAGE's expressiveness, while Hierarchical Pooling balances global context with local dynamics. We create SURF-GARDEN, a world model learning platform comprising a Counterfactual Physics Simulator, a Multimodal Correspondence Extractor, and Evolution Tracing, which generates 7,200 diverse surface-growth sequences. SURF-BENCH, our physical-intelligence evaluation suite, evaluates six core tasks -- topology recognition, inverse material estimation, growth-stage classification, latent roll-out, cross-modal retrieval, and dense correspondence -- and four stress tests -- sensor dropout, zero-shot modality transfer, long-horizon prediction, and physics ablation -- to probe resilience. FOLIAGE outperforms specialized baselines while remaining robust across dynamic environments, establishing a new world-model based, multimodal pathway to physical intelligence.

Paperid: 6793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02294.pdf

Abstract:
Large foundation models trained on extensive datasets demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities in various domains. To replicate their success when data and model size are constrained, knowledge distillation has become an established tool for transferring knowledge from foundation models to small student networks. However, the effectiveness of distillation is critically limited by the available training data. This work addresses the common practical issue of covariate shift in knowledge distillation, where spurious features appear during training but not at test time. We ask the question: when these spurious features are unknown, yet a robust teacher is available, is it possible for a student to also become robust to them? We address this problem by introducing a novel diffusion-based data augmentation strategy that generates images by maximizing the disagreement between the teacher and the student, effectively creating challenging samples that the student struggles with. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves worst group and mean group accuracy on CelebA and SpuCo Birds as well as the spurious mAUC on spurious ImageNet under covariate shift, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion-based data augmentation baselines

Paperid: 6794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24613.pdf

Abstract:
Endowing dialogue agents with persona information has proven to significantly improve the consistency and diversity of their generations. While much focus has been placed on aligning dialogues with provided personas, the adaptation to the interlocutor's profile remains largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate three key aspects: (1) a model's ability to align responses with both the provided persona and the interlocutor's; (2) its robustness when dealing with familiar versus unfamiliar interlocutors and topics, and (3) the impact of additional fine-tuning on specific persona-based dialogues. We evaluate dialogues generated with diverse speaker pairings and topics, framing the evaluation as an author identification task and employing both LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluations. By systematically masking or disclosing information about the interlocutor, we assess its impact on dialogue generation. Results show that access to the interlocutor's persona improves the recognition of the target speaker, while masking it does the opposite. Although models generalise well across topics, they struggle with unfamiliar interlocutors. Finally, we found that in zero-shot settings, LLMs often copy biographical details, facilitating identification but trivialising the task.

Paperid: 6795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23190.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel neural network approach, termed DeepRTE, to address the steady-state Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE). The RTE is a differential-integral equation that governs the propagation of radiation through a participating medium, with applications spanning diverse domains such as neutron transport, atmospheric radiative transfer, heat transfer, and optical imaging. Our DeepRTE framework demonstrates superior computational efficiency for solving the steady-state RTE, surpassing traditional methods and existing neural network approaches. This efficiency is achieved by embedding physical information through derivation of the RTE and mathematically-informed network architecture. Concurrently, DeepRTE achieves high accuracy with significantly fewer parameters, largely due to its incorporation of mechanisms such as multi-head attention. Furthermore, DeepRTE is a mesh-free neural operator framework with inherent zero-shot capability. This is achieved by incorporating Green's function theory and pre-training with delta-function inflow boundary conditions into both its architecture design and training data construction. The efficacy of the proposed approach is substantiated through comprehensive numerical experiments.

Paperid: 6796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22259.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) in images is an approach that can detect anomalies without access to normal samples, which can be beneficial in various realistic scenarios where model training is not possible. However, existing ZSAD research has shown limitations by either not considering domain adaptation of general-purpose backbone models to anomaly detection domains or by implementing only partial adaptation to some model components. In this paper, we propose HeadCLIP to overcome these limitations by effectively adapting both text and image encoders to the domain. HeadCLIP generalizes the concepts of normality and abnormality through learnable prompts in the text encoder, and introduces learnable head weights to the image encoder to dynamically adjust the features held by each attention head according to domain characteristics. Additionally, we maximize the effect of domain adaptation by introducing a joint anomaly score that utilizes domain-adapted pixel-level information for image-level anomaly detection. Experimental results using multiple real datasets in both industrial and medical domains show that HeadCLIP outperforms existing ZSAD techniques at both pixel and image levels. In the industrial domain, improvements of up to 4.9%p in pixel-level mean anomaly detection score (mAD) and up to 3.0%p in image-level mAD were achieved, with similar improvements (3.2%p, 3.1%p) in the medical domain.

Paperid: 6797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22065.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the AquaMonitor dataset, the first large computer vision dataset of aquatic invertebrates collected during routine environmental monitoring. While several large species identification datasets exist, they are rarely collected using standardized collection protocols, and none focus on aquatic invertebrates, which are particularly laborious to collect. For AquaMonitor, we imaged all specimens from two years of monitoring whenever imaging was possible given practical limitations. The dataset enables the evaluation of automated identification methods for real-life monitoring purposes using a realistically challenging and unbiased setup. The dataset has 2.7M images from 43,189 specimens, DNA sequences for 1358 specimens, and dry mass and size measurements for 1494 specimens, making it also one of the largest biological multi-view and multimodal datasets to date. We define three benchmark tasks and provide strong baselines for these: 1) Monitoring benchmark, reflecting real-life deployment challenges such as open-set recognition, distribution shift, and extreme class imbalance, 2) Classification benchmark, which follows a standard fine-grained visual categorization setup, and 3) Few-shot benchmark, which targets classes with only few training examples from very fine-grained categories. Advancements on the Monitoring benchmark can directly translate to improvement of aquatic biodiversity monitoring, which is an important component of regular legislative water quality assessment in many countries.

Paperid: 6798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21462.pdf

Abstract:
The growing complexity of encrypted network traffic presents dual challenges for modern network management: accurate multiclass classification of known applications and reliable detection of unknown traffic patterns. Although deep learning models show promise in controlled environments, their real-world deployment is hindered by data scarcity, concept drift, and operational constraints. This paper proposes M3S-UPD, a novel Multi-Stage Self-Supervised Unknown-aware Packet Detection framework that synergistically integrates semi-supervised learning with representation analysis. Our approach eliminates artificial segregation between classification and detection tasks through a four-phase iterative process: 1) probabilistic embedding generation, 2) clustering-based structure discovery, 3) distribution-aligned outlier identification, and 4) confidence-aware model updating. Key innovations include a self-supervised unknown detection mechanism that requires neither synthetic samples nor prior knowledge, and a continuous learning architecture that is resistant to performance degradation. Experimental results show that M3S-UPD not only outperforms existing methods on the few-shot encrypted traffic classification task, but also simultaneously achieves competitive performance on the zero-shot unknown traffic discovery task.

Paperid: 6799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19354.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) methods focus on tasks that demand reasoning with information extending beyond the explicit content depicted in the image. Early methods relied on explicit knowledge bases to provide this auxiliary information. Recent approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) as implicit knowledge sources. While KB-VQA methods have demonstrated promising results, their potential remains constrained as the auxiliary text provided may not be relevant to the question context, and may also include irrelevant information that could misguide the answer predictor. We introduce a novel four-stage framework called Grounding Caption-Guided Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (GC-KBVQA), which enables LLMs to effectively perform zero-shot VQA tasks without the need for end-to-end multimodal training. Innovations include grounding question-aware caption generation to move beyond generic descriptions and have compact, yet detailed and context-rich information. This is combined with knowledge from external sources to create highly informative prompts for the LLM. GC-KBVQA can address a variety of VQA tasks, and does not require task-specific fine-tuning, thus reducing both costs and deployment complexity by leveraging general-purpose, pre-trained LLMs. Comparison with competing KB-VQA methods shows significantly improved performance. Our code will be made public.

Paperid: 6800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19107.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in real-world applications. However, adapting LLMs to novel tasks via fine-tuning often requires substantial training data and computational resources that are impractical in few-shot scenarios. Existing approaches, such as in-context learning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), face key limitations: in-context learning introduces additional inference computational overhead with limited performance gains, while PEFT models are prone to overfitting on the few demonstration examples. In this work, we reinterpret the forward pass of LLMs as an optimization process, a sequence of preconditioned gradient descent steps refining internal representations. Based on this connection, we propose Optimization-Inspired Few-Shot Adaptation (OFA), integrating a parameterization that learns preconditioners without introducing additional trainable parameters, and an objective that improves optimization efficiency by learning preconditioners based on a convergence bound, while simultaneously steering the optimization path toward the flat local minimum. Our method overcomes both issues of ICL-based and PEFT-based methods, and demonstrates superior performance over the existing methods on a variety of few-shot adaptation tasks in experiments.

Paperid: 6801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18754.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot optimization with HED-LM (Hybrid Euclidean Distance with Large Language Models) to improve example selection for sensor-based classification tasks. While few-shot prompting enables efficient inference with limited labeled data, its performance largely depends on the quality of selected examples. HED-LM addresses this challenge through a hybrid selection pipeline that filters candidate examples based on Euclidean distance and re-ranks them using contextual relevance scored by large language models (LLMs). To validate its effectiveness, we apply HED-LM to a fatigue detection task using accelerometer data characterized by overlapping patterns and high inter-subject variability. Unlike simpler tasks such as activity recognition, fatigue detection demands more nuanced example selection due to subtle differences in physiological signals. Our experiments show that HED-LM achieves a mean macro F1-score of 69.13$\pm$10.71%, outperforming both random selection (59.30$\pm$10.13%) and distance-only filtering (67.61$\pm$11.39%). These represent relative improvements of 16.6% and 2.3%, respectively. The results confirm that combining numerical similarity with contextual relevance improves the robustness of few-shot prompting. Overall, HED-LM offers a practical solution to improve performance in real-world sensor-based learning tasks and shows potential for broader applications in healthcare monitoring, human activity recognition, and industrial safety scenarios.

Paperid: 6802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15784.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) calls for a rigorous theoretical framework to explain their empirical success. While significant progress has been made in understanding LLM behaviors, existing theoretical frameworks remain fragmented in explaining emergent phenomena through a unified mathematical lens. We establish the first formal connection between LLM architectures and Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) by proving two fundamental results: (1) the training process computationally approximates Solomonoff prior through loss minimization interpreted as program length optimization, and (2) next-token prediction implements approximate Solomonoff induction. We leverage AIT to provide a unified theoretical explanation for in-context learning, few-shot learning, and scaling laws. Furthermore, our theoretical insights lead to a principled method for few-shot example selection that prioritizes samples where models exhibit lower predictive confidence. We demonstrate through experiments on diverse text classification benchmarks that this strategy yields significant performance improvements, particularly for smaller model architectures, when compared to selecting high-confidence examples. Our framework bridges the gap between theoretical foundations and practical LLM behaviors, providing both explanatory power and actionable insights for future model development.

Paperid: 6803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15506.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Vision-Language foundation models like CLIP and ALIGN, which are pre-trained on large-scale data have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization to diverse datasets with different classes and even domains. In this work, we take a step further and analyze whether these models can be adapted to target datasets having very different distributions and classes compared to what these models have been trained on, using only a few labeled examples from the target dataset. In such scenarios, finetuning large pretrained models is challenging due to problems of overfitting as well as loss of generalization, and has not been well explored in prior literature. Since, the pre-training data of such models are unavailable, it is difficult to comprehend the performance on various downstream datasets. First, we try to answer the question: Given a target dataset with a few labelled examples, can we estimate whether further fine-tuning can enhance the performance compared to zero-shot evaluation? by analyzing the common vision-language embedding space. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel prompt-tuning method, PromptMargin for adapting such large-scale VLMs directly on the few target samples. PromptMargin effectively tunes the text as well as visual prompts for this task, and has two main modules: 1) Firstly, we use a selective augmentation strategy to complement the few training samples in each task; 2) Additionally, to ensure robust training in the presence of unfamiliar class names, we increase the inter-class margin for improved class discrimination using a novel Multimodal Margin Regularizer. Extensive experiments and analysis across fifteen target benchmark datasets, with varying degrees of distribution shifts from natural images, shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework over the existing state-of-the-art approaches applied to this setting. github.com/debarshigit/PromptMargin.

Paperid: 6804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13192.pdf

Abstract:
Complex, temporally evolving phenomena, from climate to brain activity, are governed by dynamical systems (DS). DS reconstruction (DSR) seeks to infer generative surrogate models of these from observed data, reproducing their long-term behavior. Existing DSR approaches require purpose-training for any new system observed, lacking the zero-shot and in-context inference capabilities known from LLMs. Here we introduce DynaMix, a novel multivariate ALRNN-based mixture-of-experts architecture pre-trained for DSR, the first DSR model able to generalize zero-shot to out-of-domain DS. Just from a provided context signal, without any re-training, DynaMix faithfully forecasts the long-term evolution of novel DS where existing time series (TS) foundation models, like Chronos, fail -- at a fraction of the number of parameters and orders of magnitude faster inference times. DynaMix outperforms TS foundation models in terms of long-term statistics, and often also short-term forecasts, even on real-world time series, like traffic or weather data, typically used for training and evaluating TS models, but not at all part of DynaMix' training corpus. We illustrate some of the failure modes of TS models for DSR problems, and conclude that models built on DS principles may bear a huge potential also for advancing the TS prediction field.

Paperid: 6805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12508.pdf

Abstract:
Outside of transfer learning settings, reinforcement learning agents start their learning process from a clean slate. As a result, such agents have to go through a slow process to learn even the most obvious skills required to solve a problem. In this paper, we present InnateCoder, a system that leverages human knowledge encoded in foundation models to provide programmatic policies that encode "innate skills" in the form of temporally extended actions, or options. In contrast to existing approaches to learning options, InnateCoder learns them from the general human knowledge encoded in foundation models in a zero-shot setting, and not from the knowledge the agent gains by interacting with the environment. Then, InnateCoder searches for a programmatic policy by combining the programs encoding these options into larger and more complex programs. We hypothesized that InnateCoder's way of learning and using options could improve the sampling efficiency of current methods for learning programmatic policies. Empirical results in MicroRTS and Karel the Robot support our hypothesis, since they show that InnateCoder is more sample efficient than versions of the system that do not use options or learn them from experience.

Paperid: 6806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11988.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately identifying adversarial techniques in security texts is critical for effective cyber defense. However, existing methods face a fundamental trade-off: they either rely on generic models with limited domain precision or require resource-intensive pipelines that depend on large labeled datasets and task-specific optimizations, such as custom hard-negative mining and denoising, resources rarely available in specialized domains. We propose TechniqueRAG, a domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that bridges this gap by integrating off-the-shelf retrievers, instruction-tuned LLMs, and minimal text-technique pairs. Our approach addresses data scarcity by fine-tuning only the generation component on limited in-domain examples, circumventing the need for resource-intensive retrieval training. While conventional RAG mitigates hallucination by coupling retrieval and generation, its reliance on generic retrievers often introduces noisy candidates, limiting domain-specific precision. To address this, we enhance retrieval quality and domain specificity through zero-shot LLM re-ranking, which explicitly aligns retrieved candidates with adversarial techniques. Experiments on multiple security benchmarks demonstrate that TechniqueRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance without extensive task-specific optimizations or labeled data, while comprehensive analysis provides further insights.

Paperid: 6807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11719.pdf

Abstract:
Training vision-based manipulation policies that are robust across diverse visual environments remains an important and unresolved challenge in robot learning. Current approaches often sidestep the problem by relying on invariant representations such as point clouds and depth, or by brute-forcing generalization through visual domain randomization and/or large, visually diverse datasets. Disentangled representation learning - especially when combined with principles of associative memory - has recently shown promise in enabling vision-based reinforcement learning policies to be robust to visual distribution shifts. However, these techniques have largely been constrained to simpler benchmarks and toy environments. In this work, we scale disentangled representation learning and associative memory to more visually and dynamically complex manipulation tasks and demonstrate zero-shot adaptability to visual perturbations in both simulation and on real hardware. We further extend this approach to imitation learning, specifically Diffusion Policy, and empirically show significant gains in visual generalization compared to state-of-the-art imitation learning methods. Finally, we introduce a novel technique adapted from the model equivariance literature that transforms any trained neural network policy into one invariant to 2D planar rotations, making our policy not only visually robust but also resilient to certain camera perturbations. We believe that this work marks a significant step towards manipulation policies that are not only adaptable out of the box, but also robust to the complexities and dynamical nature of real-world deployment. Supplementary videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vis-gen-robotics/home.

Paperid: 6808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11680.pdf

Abstract:
Transferring skills between different objects remains one of the core challenges of open-world robot manipulation. Generalization needs to take into account the high-level structural differences between distinct objects while still maintaining similar low-level interaction control. In this paper, we propose an example-based zero-shot approach to skill transfer. Rather than treating skills as atomic, we decompose skills into a prioritized list of grounded task-axis (GTA) controllers. Each GTAC defines an adaptable controller, such as a position or force controller, along an axis. Importantly, the GTACs are grounded in object key points and axes, e.g., the relative position of a screw head or the axis of its shaft. Zero-shot transfer is thus achieved by finding semantically-similar grounding features on novel target objects. We achieve this example-based grounding of the skills through the use of foundation models, such as SD-DINO, that can detect semantically similar keypoints of objects. We evaluate our framework on real-robot experiments, including screwing, pouring, and spatula scraping tasks, and demonstrate robust and versatile controller transfer for each.

Paperid: 6809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11439.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate pose estimation of surgical tools in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) is essential for surgical navigation and robot control. While traditional marker-based methods offer accuracy, they face challenges with occlusions, reflections, and tool-specific designs. Similarly, supervised learning methods require extensive training on annotated datasets, limiting their adaptability to new tools. Despite their success in other domains, zero-shot pose estimation models remain unexplored in RMIS for pose estimation of surgical instruments, creating a gap in generalising to unseen surgical tools. This paper presents a novel 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) pose estimation pipeline for surgical instruments, leveraging state-of-the-art zero-shot RGB-D models like the FoundationPose and SAM-6D. We advanced these models by incorporating vision-based depth estimation using the RAFT-Stereo method, for robust depth estimation in reflective and textureless environments. Additionally, we enhanced SAM-6D by replacing its instance segmentation module, Segment Anything Model (SAM), with a fine-tuned Mask R-CNN, significantly boosting segmentation accuracy in occluded and complex conditions. Extensive validation reveals that our enhanced SAM-6D surpasses FoundationPose in zero-shot pose estimation of unseen surgical instruments, setting a new benchmark for zero-shot RGB-D pose estimation in RMIS. This work enhances the generalisability of pose estimation for unseen objects and pioneers the application of RGB-D zero-shot methods in RMIS.

Paperid: 6810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08429.pdf

Abstract:
Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. This review traces the field's evolution from early classification approaches to sophisticated reconstructions that capture detailed, subjective visual experiences, emphasizing the roles of hierarchical latent representations, compositional strategies, and modular architectures. Despite notable progress, challenges remain, such as achieving true zero-shot generalization for unseen images and accurately modeling the complex, subjective aspects of perception. We discuss the need for diverse datasets, refined evaluation metrics aligned with human perceptual judgments, and compositional representations that strengthen model robustness and generalizability. Ethical issues, including privacy, consent, and potential misuse, are underscored as critical considerations for responsible development. Visual image reconstruction offers promising insights into neural coding and enables new psychological measurements of visual experiences, with applications spanning clinical diagnostics and brain-machine interfaces.

Paperid: 6811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08417.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping unknown objects in unstructured environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, requiring both semantic understanding and spatial reasoning. Existing methods often rely on dense training datasets or explicit geometric modeling, limiting their scalability to real-world tasks. Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) offer new possibilities for integrating vision and language understanding, but their application to autonomous robotic grasping remains largely unexplored. We present ORACLE-Grasp, a zero-shot framework that leverages LMMs as semantic oracles to guide grasp selection without requiring additional training or human input. The system formulates grasp prediction as a structured, iterative decision process, using dual-prompt tool calling to first extract high-level object context and then select task-relevant grasp regions. By discretizing the image space and reasoning over candidate areas, ORACLE-Grasp mitigates the spatial imprecision common in LMMs and produces human-like, task-driven grasp suggestions. Early stopping and depth-based refinement steps further enhance efficiency and physical grasp reliability. Experiments demonstrate that the predicted grasps achieve low positional and orientation errors relative to human-annotated ground truth and lead to high success rates in real-world pick up tasks. These results highlight the potential of combining language-driven reasoning with lightweight vision techniques to enable robust, autonomous grasping without task-specific datasets or retraining.

Paperid: 6812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07381.pdf

Abstract:
With the continuous increase in the number and resolution of video surveillance cameras, the burden of transmitting and storing surveillance video is growing. Traditional communication methods based on Shannon's theory are facing optimization bottlenecks. Semantic communication, as an emerging communication method, is expected to break through this bottleneck and reduce the storage and transmission consumption of video. Existing semantic decoding methods often require many samples to train the neural network for each scene, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, a semantic encoding and decoding method for surveillance video is proposed. First, the sketch was extracted as semantic information, and a sketch compression method was proposed to reduce the bit rate of semantic information. Then, an image translation network was proposed to translate the sketch into a video frame with a reference frame. Finally, a few-shot sketch decoding network was proposed to reconstruct video from sketch. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved significantly better video reconstruction performance than baseline methods. The sketch compression method could effectively reduce the storage and transmission consumption of semantic information with little compromise on video quality. The proposed method provides a novel semantic encoding and decoding method that only needs a few training samples for each surveillance scene, thus improving the practicality of the semantic communication system.

Paperid: 6813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07019.pdf

Abstract:
Leaf disease identification plays a pivotal role in smart agriculture. However, many existing studies still struggle to integrate image and textual modalities to compensate for each other's limitations. Furthermore, many of these approaches rely on pretraining with constrained datasets such as ImageNet, which lack domain-specific information. We propose SCOLD (Soft-target COntrastive learning for Leaf Disease identification), a context-aware vision-language foundation model tailored to address these challenges for agricultural tasks. SCOLD is developed using a diverse corpus of plant leaf images and corresponding symptom descriptions, comprising over 186,000 image-caption pairs aligned with 97 unique concepts. Through task-agnostic pretraining, SCOLD leverages contextual soft targets to mitigate overconfidence in contrastive learning by smoothing labels, thereby improving model generalization and robustness on fine-grained classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SCOLD outperforms existing vision-language models such as OpenAI-CLIP-L, BioCLIP, and SigLIP2 across several benchmarks, including zero-shot and few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and image classification, while maintaining a competitive parameter footprint. Ablation studies further highlight SCOLD's effectiveness in contrast to its counterparts. The proposed approach significantly advances the agricultural vision-language foundation model, offering strong performance with minimal or no supervised fine-tuning. This work lays a solid groundwork for future research on models trained with long-form and simplified contexts, tasks involving class ambiguity, and multi-modal systems for intelligent plant disease diagnostics. The code for this study is available at https://huggingface.co/enalis/scold

Paperid: 6814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06890.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a diffusion model that integrates a representation-conditioning mechanism, where the representations derived from a Vision Transformer (ViT) are used to condition the internal process of a Transformer-based diffusion model. This approach enables representation-conditioned data generation, addressing the challenge of requiring large-scale labeled datasets by leveraging self-supervised learning on unlabeled data. We evaluate our method through a zero-shot classification task for hematoma detection in brain imaging. Compared to the strong contrastive learning baseline, DINOv2, our method achieves a notable improvement of +6.15% in accuracy and +13.60% in F1-score, demonstrating its effectiveness in image classification.

Paperid: 6815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06694.pdf

Abstract:
Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.

Paperid: 6816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05612.pdf

Abstract:
Drug resistance presents a major challenge in cancer therapy. Single cell profiling offers insights into cellular heterogeneity, yet the application of large-scale foundation models for predicting drug response in single cell data remains underexplored. To address this, we developed scDrugMap, an integrated framework featuring both a Python command-line interface and a web server for drug response prediction. scDrugMap evaluates a wide range of foundation models, including eight single-cell models and two large language models, using a curated dataset of over 326,000 cells in the primary collection and 18,800 cells in the validation set, spanning 36 datasets and diverse tissue and cancer types. We benchmarked model performance under pooled-data and cross-data evaluation settings, employing both layer freezing and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning strategies. In the pooled-data scenario, scFoundation achieved the best performance, with mean F1 scores of 0.971 (layer freezing) and 0.947 (fine-tuning), outperforming the lowest-performing model by over 50%. In the cross-data setting, UCE excelled post fine-tuning (mean F1: 0.774), while scGPT led in zero-shot learning (mean F1: 0.858). Overall, scDrugMap provides the first large-scale benchmark of foundation models for drug response prediction in single-cell data and serves as a user-friendly, flexible platform for advancing drug discovery and translational research.

Paperid: 6817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03412.pdf

Abstract:
Internal defect detection constitutes a critical process in ensuring component quality, for which anomaly detection serves as an effective solution. However, existing anomaly detection datasets predominantly focus on surface defects in visible-light images, lacking publicly available X-ray datasets targeting internal defects in components. To address this gap, we construct the first publicly accessible component X-ray anomaly detection (CXR-AD) dataset, comprising real-world X-ray images. The dataset covers five industrial component categories, including 653 normal samples and 561 defect samples with precise pixel-level mask annotations. We systematically analyze the dataset characteristics and identify three major technical challenges: (1) strong coupling between complex internal structures and defect regions, (2) inherent low contrast and high noise interference in X-ray imaging, and (3) significant variations in defect scales and morphologies. To evaluate dataset complexity, we benchmark three state-of-the-art anomaly detection frameworks (feature-based, reconstruction-based, and zero-shot learning methods). Experimental results demonstrate a 29.78% average performance degradation on CXR-AD compared to MVTec AD, highlighting the limitations of current algorithms in handling internal defect detection tasks. To the best of our knowledge, CXR-AD represents the first publicly available X-ray dataset for component anomaly detection, providing a real-world industrial benchmark to advance algorithm development and enhance precision in internal defect inspection technologies.

Paperid: 6818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00787.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-task reinforcement learning aims to quickly identify solutions for new tasks with minimal or no additional interaction with the environment. Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) addresses this by combining a set of base policies to produce a new one that is at least as good -- though not necessarily optimal -- as any individual base policy. Optimality can be ensured, particularly in the linear-reward case, via techniques that compute a Convex Coverage Set (CCS). However, these are computationally expensive and do not scale to complex domains. The Option Keyboard (OK) improves upon GPI by producing policies that are at least as good -- and often better. It achieves this through a learned meta-policy that dynamically combines base policies. However, its performance critically depends on the choice of base policies. This raises a key question: is there an optimal set of base policies -- an optimal behavior basis -- that enables zero-shot identification of optimal solutions for any linear tasks? We solve this open problem by introducing a novel method that efficiently constructs such an optimal behavior basis. We show that it significantly reduces the number of base policies needed to ensure optimality in new tasks. We also prove that it is strictly more expressive than a CCS, enabling particular classes of non-linear tasks to be solved optimally. We empirically evaluate our technique in challenging domains and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, increasingly so as task complexity increases.

Paperid: 6819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00776.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in manipulating natural language across multiple applications, but their ability to handle simple reasoning tasks is often questioned. In this work, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of LLMs' reasoning competence, specifically focusing on their prompt dependency. In particular, we introduce a new benchmark dataset with a series of simple reasoning questions demanding shallow logical reasoning. Aligned with cognitive psychology standards, the questions are confined to a basic domain revolving around geometric figures, ensuring that responses are independent of any pre-existing intuition about the world and rely solely on deduction. An empirical analysis involving zero-shot and few-shot prompting across 24 LLMs of different sizes reveals that, while LLMs with over 70 billion parameters perform better in the zero-shot setting, there is still a large room for improvement. An additional test with chain-of-thought prompting over 22 LLMs shows that this additional prompt can aid or damage the performance of models, depending on whether the rationale is required before or after the answer.

Paperid: 6820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15723.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a diffusion-based framework for zero-shot image editing that unifies text-guided and reference-guided approaches without requiring fine-tuning. Our method leverages diffusion inversion and timestep-specific null-text embeddings to preserve the structural integrity of the source image. By introducing a stage-wise latent injection strategy-shape injection in early steps and attribute injection in later steps-we enable precise, fine-grained modifications while maintaining global consistency. Cross-attention with reference latents facilitates semantic alignment between the source and reference. Extensive experiments across expression transfer, texture transformation, and style infusion demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, confirming the method's scalability and adaptability to diverse image editing scenarios.

Paperid: 6821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14467.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot referring image segmentation aims to locate and segment the target region based on a referring expression, with the primary challenge of aligning and matching semantics across visual and textual modalities without training. Previous works address this challenge by utilizing Vision-Language Models and mask proposal networks for region-text matching. However, this paradigm may lead to incorrect target localization due to the inherent ambiguity and diversity of free-form referring expressions. To alleviate this issue, we present LGD (Leveraging Generative Descriptions), a framework that utilizes the advanced language generation capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models to enhance region-text matching performance in Vision-Language Models. Specifically, we first design two kinds of prompts, the attribute prompt and the surrounding prompt, to guide the Multi-Modal Large Language Models in generating descriptions related to the crucial attributes of the referent object and the details of surrounding objects, referred to as attribute description and surrounding description, respectively. Secondly, three visual-text matching scores are introduced to evaluate the similarity between instance-level visual features and textual features, which determines the mask most associated with the referring expression. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg, with maximum improvements of 9.97% in oIoU and 11.29% in mIoU compared to previous methods.

Paperid: 6822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11792.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to predict drug overdose risk from a patient's medical records is crucial for timely intervention and prevention. Traditional machine learning models have shown promise in analyzing longitudinal medical records for this task. However, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer an opportunity to enhance prediction performance by leveraging their ability to process long textual data and their inherent prior knowledge across diverse tasks. In this study, we assess the effectiveness of Open AI's GPT-4o LLM in predicting drug overdose events using patients' longitudinal insurance claims records. We evaluate its performance in both fine-tuned and zero-shot settings, comparing them to strong traditional machine learning methods as baselines. Our results show that LLMs not only outperform traditional models in certain settings but can also predict overdose risk in a zero-shot setting without task-specific training. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs in clinical decision support, particularly for drug overdose risk prediction.

Paperid: 6823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10179.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are set to transform how machines process and generate human-like responses by integrating diverse modalities such as text, images, and code. Yet, effectively harnessing their capabilities hinges on optimal prompt engineering. We present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of seven prompt engineering methods applied to 13 open-source MLLMs over 24 tasks spanning Reasoning and Compositionality, Multimodal Understanding and Alignment, Complex Code Generation and Execution, and Knowledge Retrieval and Integration. Our approach stratifies models by parameter count into Small (<4B), Medium (4B-10B), and Large (>10B) categories and compares prompting techniques including Zero-Shot, One-Shot, Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought, Analogical, Generated Knowledge, and Tree-of-Thought. While Large MLLMs excel in structured tasks such as code generation, achieving accuracies up to 96.88% under Few-Shot prompting, all models struggle with complex reasoning and abstract understanding, often yielding accuracies below 60% and high hallucination rates. Structured reasoning prompts frequently increased hallucination up to 75% in small models and led to longer response times (over 20 seconds in Large MLLMs), while simpler prompting methods provided more concise and efficient outputs. No single prompting method uniformly optimises all task types. Instead, adaptive strategies combining example-based guidance with selective structured reasoning are essential to enhance robustness, efficiency, and factual accuracy. Our findings offer practical recommendations for prompt engineering and support more reliable deployment of MLLMs across applications including AI-assisted coding, knowledge retrieval, and multimodal content understanding.

Paperid: 6824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08874.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning and Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms can significantly accelerate the optimization of chemical reactions. Transfer learning can bolster the effectiveness of BO algorithms in low-data regimes by leveraging pre-existing chemical information or data outside the direct optimization task (i.e., source data). Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that chemical information present in foundation training data can give them utility for processing chemical data. Furthermore, they can be augmented with and help synthesize potentially multiple modalities of source chemical data germane to the optimization task. In this work, we examine how chemical information from LLMs can be elicited and used for transfer learning to accelerate the BO of reaction conditions to maximize yield. Specifically, we show that a survey-like prompting scheme and preference learning can be used to infer a utility function which models prior chemical information embedded in LLMs over a chemical parameter space; we find that the utility function shows modest correlation to true experimental measurements (yield) over the parameter space despite operating in a zero-shot setting. Furthermore, we show that the utility function can be leveraged to focus BO efforts in promising regions of the parameter space, improving the yield of the initial BO query and enhancing optimization in 4 of the 6 datasets studied. Overall, we view this work as a step towards bridging the gap between the chemistry knowledge embedded in LLMs and the capabilities of principled BO methods to accelerate reaction optimization.

Paperid: 6825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08177.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) excel in zero-shot segmentation for natural images but struggle with medical image segmentation due to differences in texture, contrast, and noise. Annotating medical images is costly and requires domain expertise, limiting large-scale annotated data availability. To address this, we propose SynthFM, a synthetic data generation framework that mimics the complexities of medical images, enabling foundation models to adapt without real medical data. Using SAM's pretrained encoder and training the decoder from scratch on SynthFM's dataset, we evaluated our method on 11 anatomical structures across 9 datasets (CT, MRI, and Ultrasound). SynthFM outperformed zero-shot baselines like SAM and MedSAM, achieving superior results under different prompt settings and on out-of-distribution datasets.

Paperid: 6826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07598.pdf

Abstract:
Gait recognition from video streams is a challenging problem in computer vision biometrics due to the subtle differences between gaits and numerous confounding factors. Recent advancements in self-supervised pretraining have led to the development of robust gait recognition models that are invariant to walking covariates. While neural scaling laws have transformed model development in other domains by linking performance to data, model size, and compute, their applicability to gait remains unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first empirical study scaling on skeleton-based self-supervised gait recognition to quantify the effect of data quantity, model size and compute on downstream gait recognition performance. We pretrain multiple variants of GaitPT - a transformer-based architecture - on a dataset of 2.7 million walking sequences collected in the wild. We evaluate zero-shot performance across four benchmark datasets to derive scaling laws for data, model size, and compute. Our findings demonstrate predictable power-law improvements in performance with increased scale and confirm that data and compute scaling significantly influence downstream accuracy. We further isolate architectural contributions by comparing GaitPT with GaitFormer under controlled compute budgets. These results provide practical insights into resource allocation and performance estimation for real-world gait recognition systems.

Paperid: 6827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07095.pdf

Abstract:
An embodied system must not only model the patterns of the external world but also understand its own motion dynamics. A motion dynamic model is essential for efficient skill acquisition and effective planning. In this work, we introduce the neural motion simulator (MoSim), a world model that predicts the future physical state of an embodied system based on current observations and actions. MoSim achieves state-of-the-art performance in physical state prediction and provides competitive performance across a range of downstream tasks. This works shows that when a world model is accurate enough and performs precise long-horizon predictions, it can facilitate efficient skill acquisition in imagined worlds and even enable zero-shot reinforcement learning. Furthermore, MoSim can transform any model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm into a model-based approach, effectively decoupling physical environment modeling from RL algorithm development. This separation allows for independent advancements in RL algorithms and world modeling, significantly improving sample efficiency and enhancing generalization capabilities. Our findings highlight that world models for motion dynamics is a promising direction for developing more versatile and capable embodied systems.

Paperid: 6828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04373.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt Recovery, reconstructing prompts from the outputs of large language models (LLMs), has grown in importance as LLMs become ubiquitous. Most users access LLMs through APIs without internal model weights, relying only on outputs and logits, which complicates recovery. This paper explores a unique prompt recovery task focused on reconstructing prompts for style transfer and rephrasing, rather than typical question-answering. We introduce a dataset created with LLM assistance, ensuring quality through multiple techniques, and test methods like zero-shot, few-shot, jailbreak, chain-of-thought, fine-tuning, and a novel canonical-prompt fallback for poor-performing cases. Our results show that one-shot and fine-tuning yield the best outcomes but highlight flaws in traditional sentence similarity metrics for evaluating prompt recovery. Contributions include (1) a benchmark dataset, (2) comprehensive experiments on prompt recovery strategies, and (3) identification of limitations in current evaluation metrics, all of which advance general prompt recovery research, where the structure of the input prompt is unrestricted.

Paperid: 6829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02871.pdf

Abstract:
Generative information extraction using large language models, particularly through few-shot learning, has become a popular method. Recent studies indicate that providing a detailed, human-readable guideline-similar to the annotation guidelines traditionally used for training human annotators can significantly improve performance. However, constructing these guidelines is both labor- and knowledge-intensive. Additionally, the definitions are often tailored to meet specific needs, making them highly task-specific and often non-reusable. Handling these subtle differences requires considerable effort and attention to detail. In this study, we propose a self-improving method that harvests the knowledge summarization and text generation capacity of LLMs to synthesize annotation guidelines while requiring virtually no human input. Our zero-shot experiments on the clinical named entity recognition benchmarks, 2012 i2b2 EVENT, 2012 i2b2 TIMEX, 2014 i2b2, and 2018 n2c2 showed 25.86%, 4.36%, 0.20%, and 7.75% improvements in strict F1 scores from the no-guideline baseline. The LLM-synthesized guidelines showed equivalent or better performance compared to human-written guidelines by 1.15% to 4.14% in most tasks. In conclusion, this study proposes a novel LLM self-improving method that requires minimal knowledge and human input and is applicable to multiple biomedical domains.

Paperid: 6830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00812.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving images matching a reference image augmented with a text, where the text describes changes to the reference image in natural language. Traditionally, models designed for CIR have relied on triplet data containing a reference image, reformulation text, and a target image. However, curating such triplet data often necessitates human intervention, leading to prohibitive costs. This challenge has hindered the scalability of CIR model training even with the availability of abundant unlabeled data. With the recent advances in foundational models, we advocate a shift in the CIR training paradigm where human annotations can be efficiently replaced by large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we demonstrate the capability of large captioning and language models in efficiently generating data for CIR only relying on unannotated image collections. Additionally, we introduce an embedding reformulation architecture that effectively combines image and text modalities. Our model, named InstructCIR, outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot composed image retrieval on CIRR and FashionIQ datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by increasing the amount of generated data, our zero-shot model gets closer to the performance of supervised baselines.

Paperid: 6831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23281.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting medical history entities (MHEs) related to a patient's chief complaint (CC), history of present illness (HPI), and past, family, and social history (PFSH) helps structure free-text clinical notes into standardized EHRs, streamlining downstream tasks like continuity of care, medical coding, and quality metrics. Fine-tuned clinical large language models (cLLMs) can assist in this process while ensuring the protection of sensitive data via on-premises deployment. This study evaluates the performance of cLLMs in recognizing CC/HPI/PFSH-related MHEs and examines how note characteristics impact model accuracy. We annotated 1,449 MHEs across 61 outpatient-related clinical notes from the MTSamples repository. To recognize these entities, we fine-tuned seven state-of-the-art cLLMs. Additionally, we assessed the models' performance when enhanced by integrating, problems, tests, treatments, and other basic medical entities (BMEs). We compared the performance of these models against GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. To further understand the textual characteristics affecting model accuracy, we conducted an error analysis focused on note length, entity length, and segmentation. The cLLMs showed potential in reducing the time required for extracting MHEs by over 20%. However, detecting many types of MHEs remained challenging due to their polysemous nature and the frequent involvement of non-medical vocabulary. Fine-tuned GatorTron and GatorTronS, two of the most extensively trained cLLMs, demonstrated the highest performance. Integrating pre-identified BME information improved model performance for certain entities. Regarding the impact of textual characteristics on model performance, we found that longer entities were harder to identify, note length did not correlate with a higher error rate, and well-organized segments with headings are beneficial for the extraction.

Paperid: 6832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23190.pdf

Abstract:
Cryptocurrencies have transformed financial markets with their innovative blockchain technology and volatile price movements, presenting both challenges and opportunities for predictive analytics. Ethereum, being one of the leading cryptocurrencies, has experienced significant market fluctuations, making its price prediction an attractive yet complex problem. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in predicting Ethereum prices for short-term and few-shot forecasting scenarios. The main challenge in training models for time series analysis is the lack of data. We address this by leveraging a novel approach that adapts existing pre-trained LLMs on natural language or images from billions of tokens to the unique characteristics of Ethereum price time series data. Through thorough experimentation and comparison with traditional and contemporary models, our results demonstrate that selectively freezing certain layers of pre-trained LLMs achieves state-of-the-art performance in this domain. This approach consistently surpasses benchmarks across multiple metrics, including Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. Our research not only contributes to the existing body of knowledge on LLMs but also provides practical insights in the cryptocurrency prediction domain. The adaptability of pre-trained LLMs to handle the nature of Ethereum prices suggests a promising direction for future research, potentially including the integration of sentiment analysis to further refine forecasting accuracy.

Paperid: 6833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22002.pdf

Abstract:
Prior works have shown that in-context learning is brittle to presentation factors such as the order, number, and choice of selected examples. However, ablation-based guidance on selecting the number of examples may ignore the interplay between different presentation factors. In this work we develop a Monte Carlo sampling-based method to study the impact of number of examples while explicitly accounting for effects from order and selected examples. We find that previous guidance on how many in-context examples to select does not always generalize across different sets of selected examples and orderings, and whether one-shot settings outperform zero-shot settings is highly dependent on the selected example. Additionally, inspired by data valuation, we apply our sampling method to in-context example selection to select examples that perform well across different orderings. We find a negative result, that while performance is robust to ordering and number of examples, there is an unexpected performance degradation compared to random sampling.

Paperid: 6834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21907.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional super-resolution (SR) methods assume an ``ideal'' downscaling SR-kernel (e.g., bicubic downscaling) between the high-resolution (HR) image and the low-resolution (LR) image. Such methods fail once the LR images are generated differently. Current blind-SR methods aim to remove this assumption, but are still fundamentally restricted to rather simplistic downscaling SR-kernels (e.g., anisotropic Gaussian kernels), and fail on more complex (out of distribution) downscaling degradations. However, using the correct SR-kernel is often more important than using a sophisticated SR algorithm. In ``KernelFusion'' we introduce a zero-shot diffusion-based method that makes no assumptions about the kernel. Our method recovers the unique image-specific SR-kernel directly from the LR input image, while simultaneously recovering its corresponding HR image. KernelFusion exploits the principle that the correct SR-kernel is the one that maximizes patch similarity across different scales of the LR image. We first train an image-specific patch-based diffusion model on the single LR input image, capturing its unique internal patch statistics. We then reconstruct a larger HR image with the same learned patch distribution, while simultaneously recovering the correct downscaling SR-kernel that maintains this cross-scale relation between the HR and LR images. Empirical results show that KernelFusion vastly outperforms all SR baselines on complex downscaling degradations, where existing SotA Blind-SR methods fail miserably. By breaking free from predefined kernel assumptions, KernelFusion pushes Blind-SR into a new assumption-free paradigm, handling downscaling kernels previously thought impossible.

Paperid: 6835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20794.pdf

Abstract:
We evaluate the performance of four leading solutions for de-identification of unstructured medical text - Azure Health Data Services, AWS Comprehend Medical, OpenAI GPT-4o, and John Snow Labs - on a ground truth dataset of 48 clinical documents annotated by medical experts. The analysis, conducted at both entity-level and token-level, suggests that John Snow Labs' Medical Language Models solution achieves the highest accuracy, with a 96% F1-score in protected health information (PHI) detection, outperforming Azure (91%), AWS (83%), and GPT-4o (79%). John Snow Labs is not only the only solution which achieves regulatory-grade accuracy (surpassing that of human experts) but is also the most cost-effective solution: It is over 80% cheaper compared to Azure and GPT-4o, and is the only solution not priced by token. Its fixed-cost local deployment model avoids the escalating per-request fees of cloud-based services, making it a scalable and economical choice.

Paperid: 6836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20084.pdf

Abstract:
Deepfake detection remains a critical challenge in the era of advanced generative models, particularly as synthetic media becomes more sophisticated. In this study, we explore the potential of state of the art multi-modal (reasoning) large language models (LLMs) for deepfake image detection such as (OpenAI O1/4o, Gemini thinking Flash 2, Deepseek Janus, Grok 3, llama 3.2, Qwen 2/2.5 VL, Mistral Pixtral, Claude 3.5/3.7 sonnet) . We benchmark 12 latest multi-modal LLMs against traditional deepfake detection methods across multiple datasets, including recently published real-world deepfake imagery. To enhance performance, we employ prompt tuning and conduct an in-depth analysis of the models' reasoning pathways to identify key contributing factors in their decision-making process. Our findings indicate that best multi-modal LLMs achieve competitive performance with promising generalization ability with zero shot, even surpass traditional deepfake detection pipelines in out-of-distribution datasets while the rest of the LLM families performs extremely disappointing with some worse than random guess. Furthermore, we found newer model version and reasoning capabilities does not contribute to performance in such niche tasks of deepfake detection while model size do help in some cases. This study highlights the potential of integrating multi-modal reasoning in future deepfake detection frameworks and provides insights into model interpretability for robustness in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 6837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20049.pdf

Abstract:
We present a foundation modeling framework that leverages deep learning to uncover latent genetic signatures across the hematopoietic hierarchy. Our approach trains a fully connected autoencoder on multipotent progenitor cells, reducing over 20,000 gene features to a 256-dimensional latent space that captures predictive information for both progenitor and downstream differentiated cells such as monocytes and lymphocytes. We validate the quality of these embeddings by training feed-forward, transformer, and graph convolutional architectures for blood disease diagnosis tasks. We also explore zero-shot prediction using a progenitor disease state classification model to classify downstream cell conditions. Our models achieve greater than 95% accuracy for multi-class classification, and in the zero-shot setting, we achieve greater than 0.7 F1-score on the binary classification task. Future work should improve embeddings further to increase robustness on lymphocyte classification specifically.

Paperid: 6838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19798.pdf

Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery provides all-weather, all-day, and high-resolution imaging capabilities but its unique imaging mechanism makes interpretation heavily reliant on expert knowledge, limiting interpretability, especially in complex target tasks. Translating SAR images into optical images is a promising solution to enhance interpretation and support downstream tasks. Most existing research focuses on scene-level translation, with limited work on object-level translation due to the scarcity of paired data and the challenge of accurately preserving contour and texture details. To address these issues, this study proposes a keypoint-guided diffusion model (KeypointDiff) for SAR-to-optical image translation of unpaired aircraft targets. This framework introduces supervision on target class and azimuth angle via keypoints, along with a training strategy for unpaired data. Based on the classifier-free guidance diffusion architecture, a class-angle guidance module (CAGM) is designed to integrate class and angle information into the diffusion generation process. Furthermore, adversarial loss and consistency loss are employed to improve image fidelity and detail quality, tailored for aircraft targets. During sampling, aided by a pre-trained keypoint detector, the model eliminates the requirement for manually labeled class and azimuth information, enabling automated SAR-to-optical translation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches across multiple metrics, providing an efficient and effective solution for object-level SAR-to-optical translation and downstream tasks. Moreover, the method exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to untrained aircraft types with the assistance of the keypoint detector.

Paperid: 6839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18334.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time adaptation (TTA) of visual language models has recently attracted significant attention as a solution to the performance degradation caused by distribution shifts in downstream tasks. However, existing cache-based TTA methods have certain limitations. They mainly rely on the accuracy of cached feature labels, and the presence of noisy pseudo-labels can cause these features to deviate from their true distribution. This makes cache retrieval methods based on similarity matching highly sensitive to outliers or extreme samples. Moreover, current methods lack effective mechanisms to model class distributions, which limits their ability to fully exploit the potential of cached information. To address these challenges, we introduce a comprehensive and reliable caching mechanism and propose a novel zero-shot TTA method called "Cache, Residual, Gaussian" (CRG). This method not only employs learnable residual parameters to better align positive and negative visual prototypes with text prototypes, thereby optimizing the quality of cached features, but also incorporates Gaussian Discriminant Analysis (GDA) to dynamically model intra-class feature distributions, further mitigating the impact of noisy features. Experimental results on 13 benchmarks demonstrate that CRG outperforms state-of-the-art TTA methods, showcasing exceptional robustness and adaptability.

Paperid: 6840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17425.pdf

Abstract:
Assertion status detection is a critical yet often overlooked component of clinical NLP, essential for accurately attributing extracted medical facts. Past studies have narrowly focused on negation detection, leading to underperforming commercial solutions such as AWS Medical Comprehend, Azure AI Text Analytics, and GPT-4o due to their limited domain adaptation. To address this gap, we developed state-of-the-art assertion detection models, including fine-tuned LLMs, transformer-based classifiers, few-shot classifiers, and deep learning (DL) approaches. We evaluated these models against cloud-based commercial API solutions, the legacy rule-based NegEx approach, and GPT-4o. Our fine-tuned LLM achieves the highest overall accuracy (0.962), outperforming GPT-4o (0.901) and commercial APIs by a notable margin, particularly excelling in Present (+4.2%), Absent (+8.4%), and Hypothetical (+23.4%) assertions. Our DL-based models surpass commercial solutions in Conditional (+5.3%) and Associated-with-Someone-Else (+10.1%) categories, while the few-shot classifier offers a lightweight yet highly competitive alternative (0.929), making it ideal for resource-constrained environments. Integrated within Spark NLP, our models consistently outperform black-box commercial solutions while enabling scalable inference and seamless integration with medical NER, Relation Extraction, and Terminology Resolution. These results reinforce the importance of domain-adapted, transparent, and customizable clinical NLP solutions over general-purpose LLMs and proprietary APIs.

Paperid: 6841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15885.pdf

Abstract:
Web accessibility is essential for inclusive digital experiences, yet the accessibility of LLM-generated code remains underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study comparing the accessibility of web code generated by GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct-AWQ against human-written code. Results show that LLMs often produce more accessible code, especially for basic features like color contrast and alternative text, but struggle with complex issues such as ARIA attributes. We also assess advanced prompting strategies (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Self-Criticism), finding they offer some gains but are limited. To address these gaps, we introduce FeedA11y, a feedback-driven ReAct-based approach that significantly outperforms other methods in improving accessibility. Our work highlights the promise of LLMs for accessible code generation and emphasizes the need for feedback-based techniques to address persistent challenges.

Paperid: 6842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15712.pdf

Abstract:
Open-vocabulary segmentation, powered by large visual-language models like CLIP, has expanded 2D segmentation capabilities beyond fixed classes predefined by the dataset, enabling zero-shot understanding across diverse scenes. Extending these capabilities to 3D segmentation introduces challenges, as CLIP's image-based embeddings often lack the geometric detail necessary for 3D scene segmentation. Recent methods tend to address this by introducing additional segmentation models or replacing CLIP with variations trained on segmentation data, which lead to redundancy or loss on CLIP's general language capabilities. To overcome this limitation, we introduce SPNeRF, a NeRF based zero-shot 3D segmentation approach that leverages geometric priors. We integrate geometric primitives derived from the 3D scene into NeRF training to produce primitive-wise CLIP features, avoiding the ambiguity of point-wise features. Additionally, we propose a primitive-based merging mechanism enhanced with affinity scores. Without relying on additional segmentation models, our method further explores CLIP's capability for 3D segmentation and achieves notable improvements over original LERF.

Paperid: 6843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13298.pdf

Abstract:
We present an approach to solving unconstrained nonlinear optimal control problems for a broad class of dynamical systems. This approach involves lifting the nonlinear problem to a linear ``super-problem'' on a dual Banach space, followed by a non-standard ``exact'' variational analysis, -- culminating in a descent method that achieves rapid convergence with minimal iterations. We investigate the applicability of this framework to mean-field control and discuss its perspectives for the analysis of information propagation in self-interacting neural networks.

Paperid: 6844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12281.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in emerging deep learning models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). These models have demonstrated promising results, indicating a new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that surpasses previous methodologies. Their extensive knowledge and zero-shot capabilities suggest a paradigm shift in developing deep learning solutions, moving from data capturing and algorithm training to just writing appropriate prompts. While the application of these technologies has been explored across various industries, including automotive, there is a notable gap in the scientific literature regarding their use in Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS). This paper presents our initial approach to implementing VLMs in this domain, utilising the Driver Monitoring Dataset to evaluate their performance and discussing their advantages and challenges when implemented in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 6845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11573.pdf

Abstract:
Cloud compute systems allow administrators to write access control policies that govern access to private data. While policies are written in convenient languages, such as AWS Identity and Access Management Policy Language, manually written policies often become complex and error prone. In this paper, we investigate whether and how well Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to synthesize access control policies. Our investigation focuses on the task of taking an access control request specification and zero-shot prompting LLMs to synthesize a well-formed access control policy which correctly adheres to the request specification. We consider two scenarios, one which the request specification is given as a concrete list of requests to be allowed or denied, and another in which a natural language description is used to specify sets of requests to be allowed or denied. We then argue that for zero-shot prompting, more precise and structured prompts using a syntax based approach are necessary and experimentally show preliminary results validating our approach.

Paperid: 6846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11241.pdf

Abstract:
Compound Expression Recognition (CER) is crucial for understanding human emotions and improving human-computer interaction. However, CER faces challenges due to the complexity of facial expressions and the difficulty of capturing subtle emotional cues. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach leveraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Our method employs a two-stage fine-tuning process: first, pre-trained LVLMs are fine-tuned on basic facial expressions to establish foundational patterns; second, the model is further optimized on a compound-expression dataset to refine visual-language feature interactions. Our approach achieves advanced accuracy on the RAF-DB dataset and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on the C-EXPR-DB dataset, showcasing its potential for real-world applications in emotion analysis and human-computer interaction.

Paperid: 6847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11175.pdf

Abstract:
Low-light and underwater videos suffer from poor visibility, low contrast, and high noise, necessitating enhancements in visual quality. However, existing approaches typically rely on paired ground truth, which limits their practicality and often fails to maintain temporal consistency. To overcome these obstacles, this paper introduces a novel zero-shot learning approach named Zero-TIG, leveraging the Retinex theory and optical flow techniques. The proposed network consists of an enhancement module and a temporal feedback module. The enhancement module comprises three subnetworks: low-light image denoising, illumination estimation, and reflection denoising. The temporal enhancement module ensures temporal consistency by incorporating histogram equalization, optical flow computation, and image warping to align the enhanced previous frame with the current frame, thereby maintaining continuity. Additionally, we address color distortion in underwater data by adaptively balancing RGB channels. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves low-light video enhancement without the need for paired training data, making it a promising and applicable method for real-world scenario enhancement.

Paperid: 6848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10342.pdf

Abstract:
Recent developments in generative diffusion models have turned many dreams into realities. For video object insertion, existing methods typically require additional information, such as a reference video or a 3D asset of the object, to generate the synthetic motion. However, inserting an object from a single reference photo into a target background video remains an uncharted area due to the lack of unseen motion information. We propose DreamInsert, which achieves Image-to-Video Object Insertion in a training-free manner for the first time. By incorporating the trajectory of the object into consideration, DreamInsert can predict the unseen object movement, fuse it harmoniously with the background video, and generate the desired video seamlessly. More significantly, DreamInsert is both simple and effective, achieving zero-shot insertion without end-to-end training or additional fine-tuning on well-designed image-video data pairs. We demonstrated the effectiveness of DreamInsert through a variety of experiments. Leveraging this capability, we present the first results for Image-to-Video object insertion in a training-free manner, paving exciting new directions for future content creation and synthesis. The code will be released soon.

Paperid: 6849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07202.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning (ZL) is crucial for tasks involving unseen categories, such as natural language processing, image classification, and cross-lingual transfer.Current applications often fail to accurately infer and handle new relations orentities involving unseen categories, severely limiting their scalability and prac-ticality in open-domain scenarios. ZL learning faces the challenge of effectivelytransferring semantic information of unseen categories in multi-modal knowledgegraph (MMKG) embedding representation learning. In this paper, we proposeZSLLM, a framework for zero-shot embedding learning of MMKGs using largelanguage models (LLMs). We leverage textual modality information of unseencategories as prompts to fully utilize the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enablingsemantic information transfer across different modalities for unseen categories.Through model-based learning, the embedding representation of unseen cate-gories in MMKG is enhanced. Extensive experiments conducted on multiplereal-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared tostate-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01290.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting the distribution of outcomes under hypothetical interventions is crucial across healthcare, economics, and policy-making. However, existing methods often require restrictive assumptions, and are typically limited by the lack of amortization across problem instances. We propose ACTIVA, a transformer-based conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture for amortized causal inference, which estimates interventional distributions directly from observational data without. ACTIVA learns a latent representation conditioned on observational inputs and intervention queries, enabling zero-shot inference by amortizing causal knowledge from diverse training scenarios. We provide theoretical insights showing that ACTIVA predicts interventional distributions as mixtures over observationally equivalent causal models. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets confirm the effectiveness of our amortized approach and highlight promising directions for future real-world applications.

Paperid: 6851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19622.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. While closed LLMs like GPT-4 perform well on mathematical benchmarks, e.g., GSM8K, it remains unclear whether small to medium-sized open LLMs can achieve similar performance, questioning their reliability. To close this gap, we propose a post-training approach leveraging a mixture of opinions (MoO) from weaker ancillary LLMs to enhance a (relatively) stronger LLM's reasoning. For that, each post-training sample is augmented with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning steps and answers from ancillary LLMs, enabling the main LLM to learn from diverse perspectives. We compare MoO with standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT), few-shot prompting, and the Mixture of Agents (MoA) method on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our results show that incorporating weaker LLMs' opinions improves mathematical reasoning by an average of 5%, highlighting the value of diverse perspectives in reasoning tasks.

Paperid: 6852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19160.pdf

Abstract:
Social categories and stereotypes are embedded in language and can introduce data bias into Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite safeguards, these biases often persist in model behavior, potentially leading to representational harm in outputs. While sociolinguistic research provides valuable insights into the formation of stereotypes, NLP approaches for stereotype detection rarely draw on this foundation and often lack objectivity, precision, and interpretability. To fill this gap, in this work we propose a new approach that detects and quantifies the linguistic indicators of stereotypes in a sentence. We derive linguistic indicators from the Social Category and Stereotype Communication (SCSC) framework which indicate strong social category formulation and stereotyping in language, and use them to build a categorization scheme. To automate this approach, we instruct different LLMs using in-context learning to apply the approach to a sentence, where the LLM examines the linguistic properties and provides a basis for a fine-grained assessment. Based on an empirical evaluation of the importance of different linguistic indicators, we learn a scoring function that measures the linguistic indicators of a stereotype. Our annotations of stereotyped sentences show that these indicators are present in these sentences and explain the strength of a stereotype. In terms of model performance, our results show that the models generally perform well in detecting and classifying linguistic indicators of category labels used to denote a category, but sometimes struggle to correctly evaluate the associated behaviors and characteristics. Using more few-shot examples within the prompts, significantly improves performance. Model performance increases with size, as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and GPT-4 achieve comparable results that surpass those of Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct, GPT-4-mini and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct.

Paperid: 6853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18782.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has boosted the use of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods in natural language processing, achieving acceptable performance even when working with limited training data. The goal of FSL is to effectively utilize a small number of annotated samples in the learning process. However, the performance of FSL suffers when unsuitable support samples are chosen. This problem arises due to the heavy reliance on a limited number of support samples, which hampers consistent performance improvement even when more support samples are added. To address this challenge, we propose an active learning-based instance selection mechanism that identifies effective support instances from the unlabeled pool and can work with different LLMs. Our experiments on five tasks show that our method frequently improves the performance of FSL. We make our implementation available on GitHub.

Paperid: 6854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16896.pdf

Abstract:
The growing penetration of renewable energy sources in power systems has increased the complexity and uncertainty of load forecasting, especially for integrated energy systems with multiple energy carriers. Traditional forecasting methods heavily rely on historical data and exhibit limited transferability across different scenarios, posing significant challenges for emerging applications in smart grids and energy internet. This paper proposes the TSLLM-Load Forecasting Mechanism, a novel zero-shot load forecasting framework based on large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. The framework consists of three key components: a data preprocessing module that handles multi-source energy load data, a time series prompt generation module that bridges the semantic gap between energy data and LLMs through multi-task learning and similarity alignment, and a prediction module that leverages pre-trained LLMs for accurate forecasting. The framework's effectiveness was validated on a real-world dataset comprising load profiles from 20 Australian solar-powered households, demonstrating superior performance in both conventional and zero-shot scenarios. In conventional testing, our method achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.4163 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.3760, outperforming existing approaches by at least 8\%. In zero-shot prediction experiments across 19 households, the framework maintained consistent accuracy with a total MSE of 11.2712 and MAE of 7.6709, showing at least 12\% improvement over current methods. The results validate the framework's potential for accurate and transferable load forecasting in integrated energy systems, particularly beneficial for renewable energy integration and smart grid applications.

Paperid: 6855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16585.pdf

Abstract:
Medical Phrase Grounding (MPG) maps radiological findings described in medical reports to specific regions in medical images. The primary obstacle hindering progress in MPG is the scarcity of annotated data available for training and validation. We propose anatomical grounding as an in-domain pre-training task that aligns anatomical terms with corresponding regions in medical images, leveraging large-scale datasets such as Chest ImaGenome. Our empirical evaluation on MS-CXR demonstrates that anatomical grounding pre-training significantly improves performance in both a zero-shot learning and fine-tuning setting, outperforming state-of-the-art MPG models. Our fine-tuned model achieved state-of-the-art performance on MS-CXR with an mIoU of 61.2, demonstrating the effectiveness of anatomical grounding pre-training for MPG.

Paperid: 6856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14884.pdf

Abstract:
In the field of integrated circuit manufacturing, the detection and classification of nanoscale wafer defects are critical for subsequent root cause analysis and yield enhancement. The complex background patterns observed in scanning electron microscope (SEM) images and the diverse textures of the defects pose significant challenges. Traditional methods usually suffer from insufficient data, labels, and poor transferability. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot learning approach, SEM-CLIP, for accurate defect classification and segmentation. SEM-CLIP customizes the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model to better focus on defect areas and minimize background distractions, thereby enhancing segmentation accuracy. We employ text prompts enriched with domain knowledge as prior information to assist in precise analysis. Additionally, our approach incorporates feature engineering with textual guidance to categorize defects more effectively. SEM-CLIP requires little annotated data, substantially reducing labor demands in the semiconductor industry. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that our model achieves impressive classification and segmentation results under few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 6857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14792.pdf

Abstract:
Bird's Eye View (BEV) semantic maps have recently garnered a lot of attention as a useful representation of the environment to tackle assisted and autonomous driving tasks. However, most of the existing work focuses on the fully supervised setting, training networks on large annotated datasets. In this work, we present RendBEV, a new method for the self-supervised training of BEV semantic segmentation networks, leveraging differentiable volumetric rendering to receive supervision from semantic perspective views computed by a 2D semantic segmentation model. Our method enables zero-shot BEV semantic segmentation, and already delivers competitive results in this challenging setting. When used as pretraining to then fine-tune on labeled BEV ground-truth, our method significantly boosts performance in low-annotation regimes, and sets a new state of the art when fine-tuning on all available labels.

Paperid: 6858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14376.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt learning has emerged as a promising method for adapting pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) to a range of downstream tasks. While optimizing the context can be effective for improving performance on specific tasks, it can often lead to poor generalization performance on unseen classes or datasets sampled from different distributions. It may be attributed to the fact that textual prompts tend to overfit downstream data distributions, leading to the forgetting of generalized knowledge derived from hand-crafted prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Similarity Paradigm with Textual Regularization (SPTR) for prompt learning without forgetting. SPTR is a two-pronged design based on hand-crafted prompts that is an inseparable framework. 1) To avoid forgetting general textual knowledge, we introduce the optimal transport as a textual regularization to finely ensure approximation with hand-crafted features and tuning textual features. 2) In order to continuously unleash the general ability of multiple hand-crafted prompts, we propose a similarity paradigm for natural alignment score and adversarial alignment score to improve model robustness for generalization. Both modules share a common objective in addressing generalization issues, aiming to maximize the generalization capability derived from multiple hand-crafted prompts. Four representative tasks (i.e., non-generalization few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset generalization, domain generalization) across 11 datasets demonstrate that SPTR outperforms existing prompt learning methods.

Paperid: 6859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13044.pdf

Abstract:
Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) facilitates a detailed understanding of opinions expressed in a text by identifying the opinion term, aspect term, aspect category and sentiment polarity for each opinion. However, annotating a full set of training examples to fine-tune models for ASQP is a resource-intensive process. In this study, we explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for zero- and few-shot learning on the ASQP task across five diverse datasets. We report F1 scores almost up to par with those obtained with state-of-the-art fine-tuned models and exceeding previously reported zero- and few-shot performance. In the 20-shot setting on the Rest16 restaurant domain dataset, LLMs achieved an F1 score of 51.54, compared to 60.39 by the best-performing fine-tuned method MVP. Additionally, we report the performance of LLMs in target aspect sentiment detection (TASD), where the F1 scores were close to fine-tuned models, achieving 68.93 on Rest16 in the 30-shot setting, compared to 72.76 with MVP. While human annotators remain essential for achieving optimal performance, LLMs can reduce the need for extensive manual annotation in ASQP tasks.

Paperid: 6860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12360.pdf

Abstract:
Slice discovery methods (SDMs) are prominent algorithms for finding systematic weaknesses in DNNs. They identify top-k semantically coherent slices/subsets of data where a DNN-under-test has low performance. For being directly useful, slices should be aligned with human-understandable and relevant dimensions, which, for example, are defined by safety and domain experts as part of the operational design domain (ODD). While SDMs can be applied effectively on structured data, their application on image data is complicated by the lack of semantic metadata. To address these issues, we present an algorithm that combines foundation models for zero-shot image classification to generate semantic metadata with methods for combinatorial search to find systematic weaknesses in images. In contrast to existing approaches, ours identifies weak slices that are in line with pre-defined human-understandable dimensions. As the algorithm includes foundation models, its intermediate and final results may not always be exact. Therefore, we include an approach to address the impact of noisy metadata. We validate our algorithm on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its ability to recover human-understandable systematic weaknesses. Furthermore, using our approach, we identify systematic weaknesses of multiple pre-trained and publicly available state-of-the-art computer vision DNNs.

Paperid: 6861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12210.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing have significantly improved the extraction of structured semantic representations from unstructured text, especially through Frame Semantic Role Labeling (FSRL). Despite this progress, the potential of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for frame detection remains under-explored. In this paper, we present the first RAG-based approach for frame detection called RCIF (Retrieve Candidates and Identify Frames). RCIF is also the first approach to operate without the need for explicit target span and comprises three main stages: (1) generation of frame embeddings from various representations ; (2) retrieval of candidate frames given an input text; and (3) identification of the most suitable frames. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple configurations, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. Our results show that our retrieval component significantly reduces the complexity of the task by narrowing the search space thus allowing the frame identifier to refine and complete the set of candidates. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FrameNet 1.5 and 1.7, demonstrating its robustness in scenarios where only raw text is provided. Furthermore, we leverage the structured representation obtained through this method as a proxy to enhance generalization across lexical variations in the task of translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries.

Paperid: 6862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10388.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled the automated processing of lengthy documents even without supervised training on a task-specific dataset. Yet, their zero-shot performance in complex tasks as opposed to straightforward information extraction tasks remains suboptimal. One feasible approach for tasks with lengthy, complex input is to first summarize the document and then apply supervised fine-tuning to the summary. However, the summarization process inevitably results in some loss of information. In this study we present a method for processing the summaries of long documents aimed to capture different important aspects of the original document. We hypothesize that LLM summaries generated with different aspect-oriented prompts contain different \textit{information signals}, and we propose methods to measure these differences. We introduce approaches to effectively integrate signals from these different summaries for supervised training of transformer models. We validate our hypotheses on a high-impact task -- 30-day readmission prediction from a psychiatric discharge -- using real-world data from four hospitals, and show that our proposed method increases the prediction performance for the complex task of predicting patient outcome.

Paperid: 6863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09659.pdf

Abstract:
Motivation: An adjuvant is a chemical incorporated into vaccines that enhances their efficacy by improving the immune response. Identifying adjuvant names from cancer vaccine studies is essential for furthering research and enhancing immunotherapies. However, the manual curation from the constantly expanding biomedical literature poses significant challenges. This study explores the automated recognition of vaccine adjuvant names using Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPT) and Large Language Model Meta AI (Llama). Methods: We utilized two datasets: 97 clinical trial records from AdjuvareDB and 290 abstracts annotated with the Vaccine Adjuvant Compendium (VAC). GPT-4o and Llama 3.2 were employed in zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms with up to four examples per prompt. Prompts explicitly targeted adjuvant names, testing the impact of contextual information such as substances or interventions. Outputs underwent automated and manual validation for accuracy and consistency. Results: GPT-4o attained 100% Precision across all situations while exhibiting notable improve in Recall and F1-scores, particularly with incorporating interventions. On the VAC dataset, GPT-4o achieved a maximum F1-score of 77.32% with interventions, surpassing Llama-3.2-3B by approximately 2%. On the AdjuvareDB dataset, GPT-4o reached an F1-score of 81.67% for three-shot prompting with interventions, surpassing Llama-3.2-3 B's maximum F1-score of 65.62%. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that LLMs excel at identifying adjuvant names, including rare variations of naming representation. This study emphasizes the capability of LLMs to enhance cancer vaccine development by efficiently extracting insights. Future work aims to broaden the framework to encompass various biomedical literature and enhance model generalizability across various vaccines and adjuvants.

Paperid: 6864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08436.pdf

Abstract:
We present Label Space Reduction (LSR), a novel method for improving zero-shot classification performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). LSR iteratively refines the classification label space by systematically ranking and reducing candidate classes, enabling the model to concentrate on the most relevant options. By leveraging unlabeled data with the statistical learning capabilities of data-driven models, LSR dynamically optimizes the label space representation at test time. Our experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that LSR improves macro-F1 scores by an average of 7.0% (up to 14.2%) with Llama-3.1-70B and 3.3% (up to 11.1%) with Claude-3.5-Sonnet compared to standard zero-shot classification baselines. To reduce the computational overhead of LSR, which requires an additional LLM call at each iteration, we propose distilling the model into a probabilistic classifier, allowing for efficient inference.

Paperid: 6865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07165.pdf

Abstract:
We present PRINCIPLE-BASED PROMPTING, a simple but effective multi-agent prompting strategy for text classification. It first asks multiple LLM agents to independently generate candidate principles based on analysis of demonstration samples with or without labels, consolidates them into final principles via a finalizer agent, and then sends them to a classifier agent to perform downstream classification tasks. Extensive experiments on binary and multi-class classification datasets with different sizes of LLMs show that our approach not only achieves substantial performance gains (1.55% - 19.37%) over zero-shot prompting on macro-F1 score but also outperforms other strong baselines (CoT and stepback prompting). Principles generated by our approach help LLMs perform better on classification tasks than human crafted principles on two private datasets. Our multi-agent PRINCIPLE-BASED PROMPTING approach also shows on-par or better performance compared to demonstration-based few-shot prompting approaches, yet with substantially lower inference costs. Ablation studies show that label information and the multi-agent cooperative LLM framework play an important role in generating high-quality principles to facilitate downstream classification tasks.

Paperid: 6866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06918.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the effectiveness of GPT-4o-2024-08-06, one of the Large Language Models (LLM) from OpenAI, in detecting business process anomalies, with a focus on rework anomalies. In our study, we developed a GPT-4o-based tool capable of transforming event logs into a structured format and identifying reworked activities within business event logs. The analysis was performed on a synthetic dataset designed to contain rework anomalies but free of loops. To evaluate the anomaly detection capabilities of GPT 4o-2024-08-06, we used three prompting techniques: zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot. These techniques were tested on different anomaly distributions, namely normal, uniform, and exponential, to identify the most effective approach for each case. The results demonstrate the strong performance of GPT-4o-2024-08-06. On our dataset, the model achieved 96.14% accuracy with one-shot prompting for the normal distribution, 97.94% accuracy with few-shot prompting for the uniform distribution, and 74.21% accuracy with few-shot prompting for the exponential distribution. These results highlight the model's potential as a reliable tool for detecting rework anomalies in event logs and how anomaly distribution and prompting strategy influence the model's performance.

Paperid: 6867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02715.pdf

Abstract:
Flaky tests exhibit non-deterministic behavior during execution and they may pass or fail without any changes to the program under test. Detecting and classifying these flaky tests is crucial for maintaining the robustness of automated test suites and ensuring the overall reliability and confidence in the testing. However, flaky test detection and classification is challenging due to the variability in test behavior, which can depend on environmental conditions and subtle code interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising approaches to address this challenge, with fine-tuning and few-shot learning (FSL) emerging as viable techniques. With enough data fine-tuning a pre-trained LLM can achieve high accuracy, making it suitable for organizations with more resources. Alternatively, we introduce FlakyXbert, an FSL approach that employs a Siamese network architecture to train efficiently with limited data. To understand the performance and cost differences between these two methods, we compare fine-tuning on larger datasets with FSL in scenarios restricted by smaller datasets. Our evaluation involves two existing flaky test datasets, FlakyCat and IDoFT. Our results suggest that while fine-tuning can achieve high accuracy, FSL provides a cost-effective approach with competitive accuracy, which is especially beneficial for organizations or projects with limited historical data available for training. These findings underscore the viability of both fine-tuning and FSL in flaky test detection and classification with each suited to different organizational needs and resource availability.

Paperid: 6868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01711.pdf

Abstract:
Symmetry is an important inductive bias that can improve model robustness and generalization across many deep learning domains. In multi-agent settings, a priori known symmetries have been shown to address a fundamental coordination failure mode known as mutually incompatible symmetry breaking; e.g. in a game where two independent agents can choose to move "left'' or "right'', and where a reward of +1 or -1 is received when the agents choose the same action or different actions, respectively. However, the efficient and automatic discovery of environment symmetries, in particular for decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes, remains an open problem. Furthermore, environmental symmetry breaking constitutes only one type of coordination failure, which motivates the search for a more accessible and broader symmetry class. In this paper, we introduce such a broader group of previously unexplored symmetries, which we call expected return symmetries, which contains environment symmetries as a subgroup. We show that agents trained to be compatible under the group of expected return symmetries achieve better zero-shot coordination results than those using environment symmetries. As an additional benefit, our method makes minimal a priori assumptions about the structure of their environment and does not require access to ground truth symmetries.

Paperid: 6869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18855.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic crack segmentation is a cornerstone technology for intelligent visual perception modules in road safety maintenance and structural integrity systems. Existing deep learning models and ``pre-training + fine-tuning'' paradigms often face challenges of limited adaptability in resource-constrained environments and inadequate scalability across diverse data domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose FlexiCrackNet, a novel pipeline that seamlessly integrates traditional deep learning paradigms with the strengths of large-scale pre-trained models. At its core, FlexiCrackNet employs an encoder-decoder architecture to extract task-specific features. The lightweight EdgeSAM's CNN-based encoder is exclusively used as a generic feature extractor, decoupled from the fixed input size requirements of EdgeSAM. To harmonize general and domain-specific features, we introduce the information-Interaction gated attention mechanism (IGAM), which adaptively fuses multi-level features to enhance segmentation performance while mitigating irrelevant noise. This design enables the efficient transfer of general knowledge to crack segmentation tasks while ensuring adaptability to diverse input resolutions and resource-constrained environments. Experiments show that FlexiCrackNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, excels in zero-shot generalization, computational efficiency, and segmentation robustness under challenging scenarios such as blurry inputs, complex backgrounds, and visually ambiguous artifacts. These advancements underscore the potential of FlexiCrackNet for real-world applications in automated crack detection and comprehensive structural health monitoring systems.

Paperid: 6870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18596.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce DeltaLLM, a new post-training compression technique to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs. We propose an alternative way of structuring LLMs with weight sharing between layers in subsequent Transformer blocks, along with additional low-rank difference matrices between them. For training, we adopt the progressing module replacement method and show that the lightweight training of the low-rank modules with approximately 30M-40M tokens is sufficient to achieve performance on par with LLMs of comparable sizes trained from scratch. We release the resultant models, DeltaLLAMA and DeltaPHI, with a 12% parameter reduction, retaining 90% of the performance of the base Llama and Phi models on common knowledge and reasoning benchmarks. Our method also outperforms compression techniques JointDrop, LaCo, ShortGPT and SliceGPT with the same number of parameters removed. For example, DeltaPhi 2.9B with a 24% reduction achieves similar average zero-shot accuracies as recovery fine-tuned SlicedPhi 3.3B with a 12% reduction, despite being approximately 400M parameters smaller with no fine-tuning applied. This work provides new insights into LLM architecture design and compression methods when storage space is critical.

Paperid: 6871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14466.pdf

Abstract:
Dense retrievers have demonstrated significant potential for neural information retrieval; however, they lack robustness to domain shifts, limiting their efficacy in zero-shot settings across diverse domains. In this paper, we set out to analyze the possible factors that lead to successful domain adaptation of dense retrievers. We include domain similarity proxies between generated queries to test and source domains. Furthermore, we conduct a case study comparing two powerful domain adaptation techniques. We find that generated query type distribution is an important factor, and generating queries that share a similar domain to the test documents improves the performance of domain adaptation methods. This study further emphasizes the importance of domain-tailored generated queries.

Paperid: 6872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14459.pdf

Abstract:
Dense retrievers have demonstrated significant potential for neural information retrieval; however, they exhibit a lack of robustness to domain shifts, thereby limiting their efficacy in zero-shot settings across diverse domains. Previous research has investigated unsupervised domain adaptation techniques to adapt dense retrievers to target domains. However, these studies have not focused on explainability analysis to understand how such adaptations alter the model's behavior. In this paper, we propose utilizing the integrated gradients framework to develop an interpretability method that provides both instance-based and ranking-based explanations for dense retrievers. To generate these explanations, we introduce a novel baseline that reveals both query and document attributions. This method is used to analyze the effects of domain adaptation on input attributions for query and document tokens across two datasets: the financial question answering dataset (FIQA) and the biomedical information retrieval dataset (TREC-COVID). Our visualizations reveal that domain-adapted models focus more on in-domain terminology compared to non-adapted models, exemplified by terms such as "hedge," "gold," "corona," and "disease." This research addresses how unsupervised domain adaptation techniques influence the behavior of dense retrievers when adapted to new domains. Additionally, we demonstrate that integrated gradients are a viable choice for explaining and analyzing the internal mechanisms of these opaque neural models.

Paperid: 6873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14434.pdf

Abstract:
Dense retrievers have demonstrated significant potential for neural information retrieval; however, they exhibit a lack of robustness to domain shifts, thereby limiting their efficacy in zero-shot settings across diverse domains. A state-of-the-art domain adaptation technique is Generative Pseudo Labeling (GPL). GPL uses synthetic query generation and initially mined hard negatives to distill knowledge from cross-encoder to dense retrievers in the target domain. In this paper, we analyze the documents retrieved by the domain-adapted model and discover that these are more relevant to the target queries than those of the non-domain-adapted model. We then propose refreshing the hard-negative index during the knowledge distillation phase to mine better hard negatives. Our remining R-GPL approach boosts ranking performance in 13/14 BEIR datasets and 9/12 LoTTe datasets. Our contributions are (i) analyzing hard negatives returned by domain-adapted and non-domain-adapted models and (ii) applying the GPL training with and without hard-negative re-mining in LoTTE and BEIR datasets.

Paperid: 6874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13957.pdf

Abstract:
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are widely used to assess medical students' communication skills, but scoring interview-based assessments is time-consuming and potentially subject to human bias. This study explored the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate OSCE evaluations using the Master Interview Rating Scale (MIRS). We compared the performance of four state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Llama 3.1, and Gemini 1.5 Pro) in evaluating OSCE transcripts across all 28 items of the MIRS under the conditions of zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), few-shot, and multi-step prompting. The models were benchmarked against a dataset of 10 OSCE cases with 174 expert consensus scores available. Model performance was measured using three accuracy metrics (exact, off-by-one, thresholded). Averaging across all MIRS items and OSCE cases, LLMs performed with low exact accuracy (0.27 to 0.44), and moderate to high off-by-one accuracy (0.67 to 0.87) and thresholded accuracy (0.75 to 0.88). A zero temperature parameter ensured high intra-rater reliability (Î± = 0.98 for GPT-4o). CoT, few-shot, and multi-step techniques proved valuable when tailored to specific assessment items. The performance was consistent across MIRS items, independent of encounter phases and communication domains. We demonstrated the feasibility of AI-assisted OSCE evaluation and provided benchmarking of multiple LLMs across multiple prompt techniques. Our work provides a baseline performance assessment for LLMs that lays a foundation for future research into automated assessment of clinical communication skills.

Paperid: 6875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13213.pdf

Abstract:
Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs), which primarily interconnect Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), present distinctive security challenges due to their distributed and dynamic characteristics, necessitating tailored security solutions. Intrusion detection in FANETs is particularly challenging due to communication costs, and privacy concerns. While Federated Learning (FL) holds promise for intrusion detection in FANETs with its cooperative and decentralized model training, it also faces drawbacks such as large data requirements, power consumption, and time constraints. Moreover, the high speeds of nodes in dynamic networks like FANETs may disrupt communication among Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). In response, our study explores the use of few-shot learning (FSL) to effectively reduce the data required for intrusion detection in FANETs. The proposed approach called Few-shot Federated Learning-based IDS (FSFL-IDS) merges FL and FSL to tackle intrusion detection challenges such as privacy, power constraints, communication costs, and lossy links, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying routing attacks in dynamic FANETs.This approach reduces both the local models and the global model's training time and sample size, offering insights into reduced computation and communication costs and extended battery life. Furthermore, by employing FSL, which requires less data for training, IDS could be less affected by lossy links in FANETs.

Paperid: 6876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13075.pdf

Abstract:
This paper claims that machine learning (ML) largely overlooks an important facet of general intelligence: robustness to a qualitatively unknown future in an open world. Such robustness relates to Knightian uncertainty (KU) in economics, i.e. uncertainty that cannot be quantified, which is excluded from consideration in ML's key formalisms. This paper aims to identify this blind spot, argue its importance, and catalyze research into addressing it, which we believe is necessary to create truly robust open-world AI. To help illuminate the blind spot, we contrast one area of ML, reinforcement learning (RL), with the process of biological evolution. Despite staggering ongoing progress, RL still struggles in open-world situations, often failing under unforeseen situations. For example, the idea of zero-shot transferring a self-driving car policy trained only in the US to the UK currently seems exceedingly ambitious. In dramatic contrast, biological evolution routinely produces agents that thrive within an open world, sometimes even to situations that are remarkably out-of-distribution (e.g. invasive species; or humans, who do undertake such zero-shot international driving). Interestingly, evolution achieves such robustness without explicit theory, formalisms, or mathematical gradients. We explore the assumptions underlying RL's typical formalisms, showing how they limit RL's engagement with the unknown unknowns characteristic of an ever-changing complex world. Further, we identify mechanisms through which evolutionary processes foster robustness to novel and unpredictable challenges, and discuss potential pathways to algorithmically embody them. The conclusion is that the intriguing remaining fragility of ML may result from blind spots in its formalisms, and that significant gains may result from direct confrontation with the challenge of KU.

Paperid: 6877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12487.pdf

Abstract:
Delineating farmland boundaries is essential for agricultural management such as crop monitoring and agricultural census. Traditional methods using remote sensing imagery have been efficient but limited in generalisation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), known for its impressive zero shot performance, has been adapted for remote sensing tasks through prompt learning and fine tuning. Here, we propose a SAM based farmland boundary delineation framework 'fabSAM' that combines a Deeplabv3+ based Prompter and SAM. Also, a fine tuning strategy was introduced to enable SAMs decoder to improve the use of prompt information. Experimental results on the AI4Boundaries and AI4SmallFarms datasets have shown that fabSAM has a significant improvement in farmland region identification and boundary delineation. Compared to zero shot SAM, fabSAM surpassed it by 23.5% and 15.1% in mIOU on the AI4Boundaries and AI4SmallFarms datasets, respectively. For Deeplabv3+, fabSAM outperformed it by 4.9% and 12.5% in mIOU, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of fabSAM, which also means that we can more easily obtain the global farmland region and boundary maps from open source satellite image datasets like Sentinel2.

Paperid: 6878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12399.pdf

Abstract:
Current financial large language models (FinLLMs) struggle with two critical limitations: the absence of objective evaluation metrics to assess the quality of stock analysis reports and a lack of depth in stock analysis, which impedes their ability to generate professional-grade insights. To address these challenges, this paper introduces FinSphere, a stock analysis agent, along with three major contributions: (1) AnalyScore, a systematic evaluation framework for assessing stock analysis quality, (2) Stocksis, a dataset curated by industry experts to enhance LLMs' stock analysis capabilities, and (3) FinSphere, an AI agent that can generate high-quality stock analysis reports in response to user queries. Experiments demonstrate that FinSphere achieves superior performance compared to both general and domain-specific LLMs, as well as existing agent-based systems, even when they are enhanced with real-time data access and few-shot guidance. The integrated framework, which combines real-time data feeds, quantitative tools, and an instruction-tuned LLM, yields substantial improvements in both analytical quality and practical applicability for real-world stock analysis.

Paperid: 6879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11086.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tremendous promise in automated software engineering. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities of LLMs for automatic regression test generation for programs that take highly structured, human-readable inputs, such as XML parsers or JavaScript interpreters. Concretely, we explore the following regression test generation scenarios for such programs that have so far been difficult to test automatically in the absence of corresponding input grammars: $\bullet$ Bug finding. Given a code change (e.g., a commit or pull request), our LLM-based approach generates a test case with the objective of revealing any bugs that might be introduced if that change is applied. $\bullet$ Patch testing. Given a patch, our LLM-based approach generates a test case that fails before but passes after the patch. This test can be added to the regression test suite to catch similar bugs in the future. We implement Cleverest, a feedback-directed, zero-shot LLM-based regression test generation technique, and evaluate its effectiveness on 22 commits to three subject programs: Mujs, Libxml2, and Poppler. For programs using more human-readable file formats, like XML or JavaScript, we found Cleverest performed very well. It generated easy-to-understand bug-revealing or bug-reproduction test cases for the majority of commits in just under three minutes -- even when only the code diff or commit message (unless it was too vague) was given. For programs with more compact file formats, like PDF, as expected, it struggled to generate effective test cases. However, the LLM-supplied test cases are not very far from becoming effective (e.g., when used as a seed by a greybox fuzzer or as a starting point by the developer).

Paperid: 6880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09164.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we address the challenge of evaluating large language models (LLMs) on the short answer matching task for Latvian and Lithuanian languages. We introduce novel datasets consisting of 502 Latvian and 690 Lithuanian question-answer pairs. For each question-answer pair, we generated matched and non-matched answers using a set of alteration rules specifically designed to introduce small but meaningful changes in the text. These generated answers serve as test cases to assess the ability of LLMs to detect subtle differences in matching of the original answers. A subset of the datasets was manually verified for quality and accuracy. Our results show that while larger LLMs, such as QWEN2.5 72b and LLaMa3.1 70b, demonstrate near-perfect performance in distinguishing matched and non-matched answers, smaller models show more variance. For instance, LLaMa3.1 8b and EuroLLM 9b benefited from few-shot examples, while Mistral Nemo 12b underperformed on detection of subtle text alteration, particularly in Lithuanian, even with additional examples. QWEN2.5 7b and Mistral 7b were able to obtain a strong and comparable performance to the larger 70b models in zero and few shot experiments. Moreover, the performance of Mistral 7b was weaker in few shot experiments.

Paperid: 6881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05555.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting object-level changes between two images across possibly different views is a core task in many applications that involve visual inspection or camera surveillance. Existing change-detection approaches suffer from three major limitations: (1) lack of evaluation on image pairs that contain no changes, leading to unreported false positive rates; (2) lack of correspondences (i.e., localizing the regions before and after a change); and (3) poor zero-shot generalization across different domains. To address these issues, we introduce a novel method that leverages change correspondences (a) during training to improve change detection accuracy, and (b) at test time, to minimize false positives. That is, we harness the supervision labels of where an object is added or removed to supervise change detectors, improving their accuracy over previous work by a large margin. Our work is also the first to predict correspondences between pairs of detected changes using estimated homography and the Hungarian algorithm. Our model demonstrates superior performance over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in change detection and change correspondence accuracy across both in-distribution and zero-shot benchmarks.

Paperid: 6882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04455.pdf

Abstract:
Named entity recognition is an important task when constructing knowledge bases from unstructured data sources. Whereas entity detection methods mostly rely on extensive training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way towards approaches that rely on zero-shot learning (ZSL) or few-shot learning (FSL) by taking advantage of the capabilities LLMs acquired during pretraining. Specifically, in very specialized scenarios where large-scale training data is not available, ZSL / FSL opens new opportunities. This paper follows this recent trend and investigates the potential of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) in such scenarios to automatically detect datasets and software within textual content from GitHub repositories. While existing methods focused solely on named entities, this study aims to broaden the scope by incorporating resources such as repositories and online hubs where entities are also represented by URLs. The study explores different FSL prompt learning approaches to enhance the LLMs' ability to identify dataset and software mentions within repository texts. Through analyses of LLM effectiveness and learning strategies, this paper offers insights into the potential of advanced language models for automated entity detection.

Paperid: 6883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02739.pdf

Abstract:
Text augmentation (TA) is a critical technique for text classification, especially in few-shot settings. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based TA method, TARDiS, to address challenges inherent in the generation and alignment stages of two-stage TA methods. For the generation stage, we propose two generation processes, SEG and CEG, incorporating multiple class-specific prompts to enhance diversity and separability. For the alignment stage, we introduce a class adaptation (CA) method to ensure that generated examples align with their target classes through verification and modification. Experimental results demonstrate TARDiS's effectiveness, outperforming state-of-the-art LLM-based TA methods in various few-shot text classification tasks. An in-depth analysis confirms the detailed behaviors at each stage.

Paperid: 6884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02044.pdf

Abstract:
Background: Recently, numerous foundation models pretrained on extensive data have demonstrated efficacy in disease prediction using Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, there remains some unanswered questions on how to best utilize such models especially with very small fine-tuning cohorts. Methods: We utilized Med-BERT, an EHR-specific foundation model, and reformulated the disease binary prediction task into a token prediction task and a next visit mask token prediction task to align with Med-BERT's pretraining task format in order to improve the accuracy of pancreatic cancer (PaCa) prediction in both few-shot and fully supervised settings. Results: The reformulation of the task into a token prediction task, referred to as Med-BERT-Sum, demonstrates slightly superior performance in both few-shot scenarios and larger data samples. Furthermore, reformulating the prediction task as a Next Visit Mask Token Prediction task (Med-BERT-Mask) significantly outperforms the conventional Binary Classification (BC) prediction task (Med-BERT-BC) by 3% to 7% in few-shot scenarios with data sizes ranging from 10 to 500 samples. These findings highlight that aligning the downstream task with Med-BERT's pretraining objectives substantially enhances the model's predictive capabilities, thereby improving its effectiveness in predicting both rare and common diseases. Conclusion: Reformatting disease prediction tasks to align with the pretraining of foundation models enhances prediction accuracy, leading to earlier detection and timely intervention. This approach improves treatment effectiveness, survival rates, and overall patient outcomes for PaCa and potentially other cancers.

Paperid: 6885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01679.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling neural machine translation. However, existing evidence shows that LLMs are prompt-sensitive and it is sub-optimal to apply the fixed prompt to any input for downstream machine translation tasks. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive few-shot prompting (AFSP) framework to automatically select suitable translation demonstrations for various source input sentences to further elicit the translation capability of an LLM for better machine translation. First, we build a translation demonstration retrieval module based on LLM's embedding to retrieve top-k semantic-similar translation demonstrations from aligned parallel translation corpus. Rather than using other embedding models for semantic demonstration retrieval, we build a hybrid demonstration retrieval module based on the embedding layer of the deployed LLM to build better input representation for retrieving more semantic-related translation demonstrations. Then, to ensure better semantic consistency between source inputs and target outputs, we force the deployed LLM itself to generate multiple output candidates in the target language with the help of translation demonstrations and rerank these candidates. Besides, to better evaluate the effectiveness of our AFSP framework on the latest language and extend the research boundary of neural machine translation, we construct a high-quality diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset that consists of 5,528 parallel Chinese-English sentences. Finally, extensive experiments on the proposed diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset and the United Nations Parallel Corpus (Chinese-English part) show the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed AFSP.

Paperid: 6886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01256.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, toxic content and hate speech have become widespread phenomena on the internet. Moderators of online newspapers and forums are now required, partly due to legal regulations, to carefully review and, if necessary, delete reader comments. This is a labor-intensive process. Some providers of large language models already offer solutions for automated hate speech detection or the identification of toxic content. These include GPT-4o from OpenAI, Jigsaw's (Google) Perspective API, and OpenAI's Moderation API. Based on the selected German test dataset HOCON34k, which was specifically created for developing tools to detect hate speech in reader comments of online newspapers, these solutions are compared with each other and against the HOCON34k baseline. The test dataset contains 1,592 annotated text samples. For GPT-4o, three different promptings are used, employing a Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Few-Shot approach. The results of the experiments demonstrate that GPT-4o outperforms both the Perspective API and the Moderation API, and exceeds the HOCON34k baseline by approximately 5 percentage points, as measured by a combined metric of MCC and F2-score.

Paperid: 6887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01029.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of deepfake technologies, specifically designed to create incredibly lifelike facial imagery and video content, has ignited a remarkable level of interest and curiosity across many fields, including forensic analysis, cybersecurity and the innovative creation of digital characters. By harnessing the latest breakthroughs in deep learning methods, such as Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, Few-Shot Learning Strategies, and Transformers, the outcomes achieved in generating deepfakes have been nothing short of astounding and transformative. Also, the ongoing evolution of detection technologies is being developed to counteract the potential for misuse associated with deepfakes, effectively addressing critical concerns that range from political manipulation to the dissemination of fake news and the ever-growing issue of cyberbullying. This comprehensive review paper meticulously investigates the most recent developments in deepfake generation and detection, including around 400 publications, providing an in-depth analysis of the cutting-edge innovations shaping this rapidly evolving landscape. Starting with a thorough examination of systematic literature review methodologies, we embark on a journey that delves into the complex technical intricacies inherent in the various techniques used for deepfake generation, comprehensively addressing the challenges faced, potential solutions available, and the nuanced details surrounding manipulation formulations. Subsequently, the paper is dedicated to accurately benchmarking leading approaches against prominent datasets, offering thorough assessments of the contributions that have significantly impacted these vital domains. Ultimately, we engage in a thoughtful discussion of the existing challenges, paving the way for continuous advancements in this critical and ever-dynamic study area.

Paperid: 6888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00050.pdf

Abstract:
Network intrusion detection systems face significant challenges in identifying emerging attack patterns, especially when limited data samples are available. To address this, we propose a novel Multi-Space Prototypical Learning (MSPL) framework tailored for few-shot attack detection. The framework operates across multiple metric spaces-Euclidean, Cosine, Chebyshev, and Wasserstein distances-integrated through a constrained weighting scheme to enhance embedding robustness and improve pattern recognition. By leveraging Polyak-averaged prototype generation, the framework stabilizes the learning process and effectively adapts to rare and zero-day attacks. Additionally, an episodic training paradigm ensures balanced representation across diverse attack classes, enabling robust generalization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSPL outperforms traditional approaches in detecting low-profile and novel attack types, establishing it as a robust solution for zero-day attack detection.

Paperid: 6889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19944.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our submission to the COOOL competition, a novel benchmark for detecting and classifying out-of-label hazards in autonomous driving. Our approach integrates diverse methods across three core tasks: (i) driver reaction detection, (ii) hazard object identification, and (iii) hazard captioning. We propose kernel-based change point detection on bounding boxes and optical flow dynamics for driver reaction detection to analyze motion patterns. For hazard identification, we combined a naive proximity-based strategy with object classification using a pre-trained ViT model. At last, for hazard captioning, we used the MOLMO vision-language model with tailored prompts to generate precise and context-aware descriptions of rare and low-resolution hazards. The proposed pipeline outperformed the baseline methods by a large margin, reducing the relative error by 33%, and scored 2nd on the final leaderboard consisting of 32 teams.

Paperid: 6890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18188.pdf

Abstract:
This research explores the applicability of cross-lingual transfer learning from English to Japanese and Indonesian using the XLM-R pre-trained model. The results are compared with several previous works, either by models using a similar zero-shot approach or a fully-supervised approach, to provide an overview of the zero-shot transfer learning approach's capability using XLM-R in comparison with existing models. Our models achieve the best result in one Japanese dataset and comparable results in other datasets in Japanese and Indonesian languages without being trained using the target language. Furthermore, the results suggest that it is possible to train a multi-lingual model, instead of one model for each language, and achieve promising results.

Paperid: 6891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18142.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in flexible keyword spotting (KWS) with text enrollment allow users to personalize keywords without uttering them during enrollment. However, there is still room for improvement in target keyword performance. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot transfer learning method, called text-aware adapter (TA-adapter), designed to enhance a pre-trained flexible KWS model for specific keywords with limited speech samples. To adapt the acoustic encoder, we leverage a jointly pre-trained text encoder to generate a text embedding that acts as a representative vector for the keyword. By fine-tuning only a small portion of the network while keeping the core components' weights intact, the TA-adapter proves highly efficient for few-shot KWS, enabling a seamless return to the original pre-trained model. In our experiments, the TA-adapter demonstrated significant performance improvements across 35 distinct keywords from the Google Speech Commands V2 dataset, with only a 0.14% increase in the total number of parameters.

Paperid: 6892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16777.pdf

Abstract:
Self-supervised vision-language models trained with contrastive objectives form the basis of current state-of-the-art methods in AI vision tasks. The success of these models is a direct consequence of the huge web-scale datasets used to train them, but they require correspondingly large vision components to properly learn powerful and general representations from such a broad data domain. This poses a challenge for deploying large vision-language models, especially in resource-constrained environments. To address this, we propose an alternate vision-language architecture, called HyperCLIP, that uses a small image encoder along with a hypernetwork that dynamically adapts image encoder weights to each new set of text inputs. All three components of the model (hypernetwork, image encoder, and text encoder) are pre-trained jointly end-to-end, and with a trained HyperCLIP model, we can generate new zero-shot deployment-friendly image classifiers for any task with a single forward pass through the text encoder and hypernetwork. HyperCLIP increases the zero-shot accuracy of SigLIP trained models with small image encoders by up to 3% on ImageNet and 5% on CIFAR-100 with minimal training throughput overhead.

Paperid: 6893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16275.pdf

Abstract:
Both few-shot learning and domain adaptation sub-fields in Computer Vision have seen significant recent progress in terms of the availability of state-of-the-art algorithms and datasets. Frameworks have been developed for each sub-field; however, building a common system or framework that combines both is something that has not been explored. As part of our research, we present the first unified framework that combines domain adaptation for the few-shot learning setting across 3 different tasks - image classification, object detection and video classification. Our framework is highly modular with the capability to support few-shot learning with/without the inclusion of domain adaptation depending on the algorithm. Furthermore, the most important configurable feature of our framework is the on-the-fly setup for incremental $n$-shot tasks with the optional capability to configure the system to scale to a traditional many-shot task. With more focus on Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for current few-shot learning approaches, our system also supports multiple SSL pre-training configurations. To test our framework's capabilities, we provide benchmarks on a wide range of algorithms and datasets across different task and problem settings. The code is open source has been made publicly available here: https://gitlab.kitware.com/darpa_learn/learn

Paperid: 6894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16119.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4o, for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in low-resource scripts such as Urdu, Albanian, and Tajik, with English serving as a benchmark. Using a meticulously curated dataset of 2,520 images incorporating controlled variations in text length, font size, background color, and blur, the research simulates diverse real-world challenges. Results emphasize the limitations of zero-shot LLM-based OCR, particularly for linguistically complex scripts, highlighting the need for annotated datasets and fine-tuned models. This work underscores the urgency of addressing accessibility gaps in text digitization, paving the way for inclusive and robust OCR solutions for underserved languages.

Paperid: 6895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15702.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) for providing feedback, limited research has explored how to achieve high-quality feedback. This case study introduces an evaluation framework to assess different zero-shot prompt engineering methods. We varied the prompts systematically and analyzed the provided feedback on programming errors in R. The results suggest that prompts suggesting a stepwise procedure increase the precision, while omitting explicit specifications about which provided data to analyze improves error identification.

Paperid: 6896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15315.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores how to enhance existing masked time-series modeling by randomly dropping sub-sequence level patches of time series. On this basis, a simple yet effective method named DropPatch is proposed, which has two remarkable advantages: 1) It improves the pre-training efficiency by a square-level advantage; 2) It provides additional advantages for modeling in scenarios such as in-domain, cross-domain, few-shot learning and cold start. This paper conducts comprehensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the method and analyze its internal mechanism. Empirically, DropPatch strengthens the attention mechanism, reduces information redundancy and serves as an efficient means of data augmentation. Theoretically, it is proved that DropPatch slows down the rate at which the Transformer representations collapse into the rank-1 linear subspace by randomly dropping patches, thus optimizing the quality of the learned representations

Paperid: 6897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14801.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have seen increasing use across various domains -- from biomedicine and linguistics to general knowledge modelling. In order to facilitate the analysis of knowledge graphs, Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) have been developed to automatically analyse KGs and predict new facts based on the information in a KG, a task called "link prediction". Many existing studies have documented that the structure of a KG, KGE model components, and KGE hyperparameters can significantly change how well KGEs perform and what relationships they are able to learn. Recently, the Topologically-Weighted Intelligence Generation (TWIG) model has been proposed as a solution to modelling how each of these elements relate. In this work, we extend the previous research on TWIG and evaluate its ability to simulate the output of the KGE model ComplEx in the cross-KG setting. Our results are twofold. First, TWIG is able to summarise KGE performance on a wide range of hyperparameter settings and KGs being learned, suggesting that it represents a general knowledge of how to predict KGE performance from KG structure. Second, we show that TWIG can successfully predict hyperparameter performance on unseen KGs in the zero-shot setting. This second observation leads us to propose that, with additional research, optimal hyperparameter selection for KGE models could be determined in a pre-hoc manner using TWIG-like methods, rather than by using a full hyperparameter search.

Paperid: 6898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12893.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been showing promising results for various NLP-tasks without the explicit need to be trained for these tasks by using few-shot or zero-shot prompting techniques. A common NLP-task is question-answering (QA). In this study, we propose a comprehensive performance comparison between smaller fine-tuned models and out-of-the-box instruction-following LLMs on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset 2.0 (SQuAD2), specifically when using a single-inference prompting technique. Since the dataset contains unanswerable questions, previous work used a double inference method. We propose a prompting style which aims to elicit the same ability without the need for double inference, saving compute time and resources. Furthermore, we investigate their generalization capabilities by comparing their performance on similar but different QA datasets, without fine-tuning neither model, emulating real-world uses where the context and questions asked may differ from the original training distribution, for example swapping Wikipedia for news articles. Our results show that smaller, fine-tuned models outperform current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) LLMs on the fine-tuned task, but recent SOTA models are able to close this gap on the out-of-distribution test and even outperform the fine-tuned models on 3 of the 5 tested QA datasets.

Paperid: 6899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12048.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have made text-to-image generation and customization widely accessible, with Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) able to replicate an artist's style or subject using minimal data and computation. In this paper, we examine the relationship between LoRA weights and artistic styles, demonstrating that LoRA weights alone can serve as an effective descriptor of style, without the need for additional image generation or knowledge of the original training set. Our findings show that LoRA weights yield better performance in clustering of artistic styles compared to traditional pre-trained features, such as CLIP and DINO, with strong structural similarities between LoRA-based and conventional image-based embeddings observed both qualitatively and quantitatively. We identify various retrieval scenarios for the growing collection of customized models and show that our approach enables more accurate retrieval in real-world settings where knowledge of the training images is unavailable and additional generation is required. We conclude with a discussion on potential future applications, such as zero-shot LoRA fine-tuning and model attribution.

Paperid: 6900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11763.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created a need for advanced benchmarking systems beyond traditional setups. To this end, we introduce QUENCH, a novel text-based English Quizzing Benchmark manually curated and transcribed from YouTube quiz videos. QUENCH possesses masked entities and rationales for the LLMs to predict via generation. At the intersection of geographical context and common sense reasoning, QUENCH helps assess world knowledge and deduction capabilities of LLMs via a zero-shot, open-domain quizzing setup. We perform an extensive evaluation on 7 LLMs and 4 metrics, investigating the influence of model size, prompting style, geographical context, and gold-labeled rationale generation. The benchmarking concludes with an error analysis to which the LLMs are prone.

Paperid: 6901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11387.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming the robotics domain by enabling robots to comprehend and execute natural language instructions. The cornerstone benefits of LLM include processing textual data from technical manuals, instructions, academic papers, and user queries based on the knowledge provided. However, deploying LLM-generated code in robotic systems without safety verification poses significant risks. This paper outlines a safety layer that verifies the code generated by ChatGPT before executing it to control a drone in a simulated environment. The safety layer consists of a fine-tuned GPT-4o model using Few-Shot learning, supported by knowledge graph prompting (KGP). Our approach improves the safety and compliance of robotic actions, ensuring that they adhere to the regulations of drone operations.

Paperid: 6902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07077.pdf

Abstract:
The advancement of vision-language models, particularly the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, has revolutionized the field of machine learning by enabling robust zero-shot learning capabilities. These capabilities allow models to understand and respond to previously unseen data without task-specific training. However, adapting CLIP to integrate specialized knowledge from various domains while retaining its zero-shot capabilities remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce a novel prompt ensemble learning approach called Group-wise Prompt Ensemble (GPE). This method aims to enhance CLIP's zero-shot capabilities by incorporating new domain knowledge while improving its adaptability and robustness against data distribution shifts. Our approach hinges on three main strategies: prompt grouping with masked attention to optimize CLIP's adaptability while safeguarding its zero-shot capabilities; the incorporation of auxiliary prompts for the seamless integration of new domain insights without disrupting the original model's representation; and an ensemble learning strategy that effectively merges original and new knowledge. Through rigorous experimentation, including more challenging cross-dataset transfer evaluations, our GPE method redefines the benchmarks for the adaptability and efficiency of vision-language models, surpassing existing models across various scenarios.

Paperid: 6903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06432.pdf

Abstract:
We address the detection of emission reduction goals in corporate reports, an important task for monitoring companies' progress in addressing climate change. Specifically, we focus on the issue of integrating expert feedback in the form of labeled example passages into LLM-based pipelines, and compare the two strategies of (1) a dynamic selection of few-shot examples and (2) the automatic optimization of the prompt by the LLM itself. Our findings on a public dataset of 769 climate-related passages from real-world business reports indicate that automatic prompt optimization is the superior approach, while combining both methods provides only limited benefit. Qualitative results indicate that optimized prompts do indeed capture many intricacies of the targeted emission goal extraction task.

Paperid: 6904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05625.pdf

Abstract:
Finite state machines (FSMs) are widely used to manage robot behavior logic, particularly in real-world applications that require a high degree of reliability and structure. However, traditional manual FSM design and modification processes can be time-consuming and error-prone. We propose that large language models (LLMs) can assist developers in editing FSM code for real-world robotic use cases. LLMs, with their ability to use context and process natural language, offer a solution for FSM modification with high correctness, allowing developers to update complex control logic through natural language instructions. Our approach leverages few-shot prompting and language-guided code generation to reduce the amount of time it takes to edit an FSM. To validate this approach, we evaluate it on a real-world robotics dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in practical scenarios.

Paperid: 6905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04368.pdf

Abstract:
The forward-backward representation (FB) is a recently proposed framework (Touati et al., 2023; Touati & Ollivier, 2021) to train behavior foundation models (BFMs) that aim at providing zero-shot efficient policies for any new task specified in a given reinforcement learning (RL) environment, without training for each new task. Here we address two core limitations of FB model training. First, FB, like all successor-feature-based methods, relies on a linear encoding of tasks: at test time, each new reward function is linearly projected onto a fixed set of pre-trained features. This limits expressivity as well as precision of the task representation. We break the linearity limitation by introducing auto-regressive features for FB, which let finegrained task features depend on coarser-grained task information. This can represent arbitrary nonlinear task encodings, thus significantly increasing expressivity of the FB framework. Second, it is well-known that training RL agents from offline datasets often requires specific techniques.We show that FB works well together with such offline RL techniques, by adapting techniques from (Nair et al.,2020b; Cetin et al., 2024) for FB. This is necessary to get non-flatlining performance in some datasets, such as DMC Humanoid. As a result, we produce efficient FB BFMs for a number of new environments. Notably, in the D4RL locomotion benchmark, the generic FB agent matches the performance of standard single-task offline agents (IQL, XQL). In many setups, the offline techniques are needed to get any decent performance at all. The auto-regressive features have a positive but moderate impact, concentrated on tasks requiring spatial precision and task generalization beyond the behaviors represented in the trainset.

Paperid: 6906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02803.pdf

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting has advanced radiance field reconstruction, enabling high-quality view synthesis and fast rendering in 3D modeling. While adversarial attacks on object detection models are well-studied for 2D images, their impact on 3D models remains underexplored. This work introduces the Masked Iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method (M-IFGSM), designed to generate adversarial noise targeting the CLIP vision-language model. M-IFGSM specifically alters the object of interest by focusing perturbations on masked regions, degrading the performance of CLIP's zero-shot object detection capability when applied to 3D models. Using eight objects from the Common Objects 3D (CO3D) dataset, we demonstrate that our method effectively reduces the accuracy and confidence of the model, with adversarial noise being nearly imperceptible to human observers. The top-1 accuracy in original model renders drops from 95.4\% to 12.5\% for train images and from 91.2\% to 35.4\% for test images, with confidence levels reflecting this shift from true classification to misclassification, underscoring the risks of adversarial attacks on 3D models in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. The significance of this research lies in its potential to expose vulnerabilities in modern 3D vision models, including radiance fields, prompting the development of more robust defenses and security measures in critical real-world applications.

Paperid: 6907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00403.pdf

Abstract:
The remarkable achievements of large models in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) have sparked interest in their application to time series forecasting within industrial contexts. This paper explores the application of a pre-trained large time series model, Timer, which was initially trained on a wide range of time series data from multiple domains, in the prediction of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data collected from wind turbines. The model was fine-tuned on SCADA datasets sourced from two wind farms, which exhibited differing characteristics, and its accuracy was subsequently evaluated. Additionally, the impact of data volume was studied to evaluate the few-shot ability of the Timer. Finally, an application study on one-turbine fine-tuning for whole-plant prediction was implemented where both few-shot and cross-turbine generalization capacity is required. The results reveal that the pre-trained large model does not consistently outperform other baseline models in terms of prediction accuracy whenever the data is abundant or not, but demonstrates superior performance in the application study. This result underscores the distinctive advantages of the pre-trained large time series model in facilitating swift deployment.

Paperid: 6908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16408.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we explore the intersection of technology and cultural preservation by developing a self-supervised learning framework for the classification of musical symbols in historical manuscripts. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) plays a vital role in digitising and preserving musical heritage, but historical documents often lack the labelled data required by traditional methods. We overcome this challenge by training a neural-based feature extractor on unlabelled data, enabling effective classification with minimal samples. Key contributions include optimising crop preprocessing for a self-supervised Convolutional Neural Network and evaluating classification methods, including SVM, multilayer perceptrons, and prototypical networks. Our experiments yield an accuracy of 87.66\%, showcasing the potential of AI-driven methods to ensure the survival of historical music for future generations through advanced digital archiving techniques.

Paperid: 6909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15628.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are capable of recognizing unseen actions. However, existing VLMs lack intrinsic understanding of procedural action concepts. Hence, they overfit to fixed labels and are not invariant to unseen action synonyms. To address this, we propose a simple fine-tuning technique, Action Concept Enhancement (ACE), to improve the robustness and concept understanding of VLMs in procedural action classification. ACE continually incorporates augmented action synonyms and negatives in an auxiliary classification loss by stochastically replacing fixed labels during training. This creates new combinations of action labels over the course of fine-tuning and prevents overfitting to fixed action representations. We show the enhanced concept understanding of our VLM, by visualizing the alignment of encoded embeddings of unseen action synonyms in the embedding space. Our experiments on the ATA, IKEA and GTEA datasets demonstrate the efficacy of ACE in domains of cooking and assembly leading to significant improvements in zero-shot action classification while maintaining competitive performance on seen actions.

Paperid: 6910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14880.pdf

Abstract:
Implicit discourse relation recognition involves determining relationships that hold between spans of text that are not linked by an explicit discourse connective. In recent years, the pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm has emerged as a promising approach for tackling this task. However, previous work solely relied on manual verbalizers for implicit discourse relation recognition, which suffer from issues of ambiguity and even incorrectness. To overcome these limitations, we leverage the prototypes that capture certain class-level semantic features and the hierarchical label structure for different classes as the verbalizer. We show that our method improves on competitive baselines. Besides, our proposed approach can be extended to enable zero-shot cross-lingual learning, facilitating the recognition of discourse relations in languages with scarce resources. These advancement validate the practicality and versatility of our approach in addressing the issues of implicit discourse relation recognition across different languages.

Paperid: 6911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12196.pdf

Abstract:
Group polarization is an important research direction in social media content analysis, attracting many researchers to explore this field. Therefore, how to effectively measure group polarization has become a critical topic. Measuring group polarization on social media presents several challenges that have not yet been addressed by existing solutions. First, social media group polarization measurement involves processing vast amounts of text, which poses a significant challenge for information extraction. Second, social media texts often contain hard-to-understand content, including sarcasm, memes, and internet slang. Additionally, group polarization research focuses on holistic analysis, while texts is typically fragmented. To address these challenges, we designed a solution based on a multi-agent system and used a graph-structured Community Sentiment Network (CSN) to represent polarization states. Furthermore, we developed a metric called Community Opposition Index (COI) based on the CSN to quantify polarization. Finally, we tested our multi-agent system through a zero-shot stance detection task and achieved outstanding results. In summary, the proposed approach has significant value in terms of usability, accuracy, and interpretability.

Paperid: 6912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10730.pdf

Abstract:
Satirical news is real news combined with a humorous comment or exaggerated content, and it often mimics the format and style of real news. However, satirical news is often misunderstood as misinformation, especially by individuals from different cultural and social backgrounds. This research addresses the challenge of distinguishing satire from truthful news by leveraging multilingual satire detection methods in English and Arabic. We explore both zero-shot and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting using two language models, Jais-chat(13B) and LLaMA-2-chat(7B). Our results show that CoT prompting offers a significant advantage for the Jais-chat model over the LLaMA-2-chat model. Specifically, Jais-chat achieved the best performance, with an F1-score of 80\% in English when using CoT prompting. These results highlight the importance of structured reasoning in CoT, which enhances contextual understanding and is vital for complex tasks like satire detection.

Paperid: 6913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10541.pdf

Abstract:
In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt optimization is crucial for model performance. Although previous research has explored aspects like rephrasing prompt contexts, using various prompting techniques (like in-context learning and chain-of-thought), and ordering few-shot examples, our understanding of LLM sensitivity to prompt templates remains limited. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of different prompt templates on LLM performance. We formatted the same contexts into various human-readable templates, including plain text, Markdown, JSON, and YAML, and evaluated their impact across tasks like natural language reasoning, code generation, and translation using OpenAI's GPT models. Experiments show that GPT-3.5-turbo's performance varies by up to 40\% in a code translation task depending on the prompt template, while larger models like GPT-4 are more robust to these variations. Our analysis highlights the need to reconsider the use of fixed prompt templates, as different formats can significantly affect model performance.

Paperid: 6914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10371.pdf

Abstract:
Event Causality Identification (ECI) has become an essential task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), focused on automatically detecting causal relationships between events within texts. This comprehensive survey systematically investigates fundamental concepts and models, developing a systematic taxonomy and critically evaluating diverse models. We begin by defining core concepts, formalizing the ECI problem, and outlining standard evaluation protocols. Our classification framework divides ECI models into two primary tasks: Sentence-level Event Causality Identification (SECI) and Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI). For SECI, we review models employing feature pattern-based matching, machine learning classifiers, deep semantic encoding, prompt-based fine-tuning, and causal knowledge pre-training, alongside data augmentation strategies. For DECI, we focus on approaches utilizing deep semantic encoding, event graph reasoning, and prompt-based fine-tuning. Special attention is given to recent advancements in multi-lingual and cross-lingual ECI, as well as zero-shot ECI leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). We analyze the strengths, limitations, and unresolved challenges associated with each approach. Extensive quantitative evaluations are conducted on four benchmark datasets to rigorously assess the performance of various ECI models. We conclude by discussing future research directions and highlighting opportunities to advance the field further.

Paperid: 6915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09389.pdf

Abstract:
The spread of fake news on social media poses significant threats to individuals and society. Text-based and graph-based models have been employed for fake news detection by analysing news content and propagation networks, showing promising results in specific scenarios. However, these data-driven models heavily rely on pre-existing in-distribution data for training, limiting their performance when confronted with fake news from emerging or previously unseen domains, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Tackling OOD fake news is a challenging yet critical task. In this paper, we introduce the Causal Subgraph-oriented Domain Adaptive Fake News Detection (CSDA) model, designed to enhance zero-shot fake news detection by extracting causal substructures from propagation graphs using in-distribution data and generalising this approach to OOD data. The model employs a graph neural network based mask generation process to identify dominant nodes and edges within the propagation graph, using these substructures for fake news detection. Additionally, the performance of CSDA is further improved through contrastive learning in few-shot scenarios, where a limited amount of OOD data is available for training. Extensive experiments on public social media datasets demonstrate that CSDA effectively handles OOD fake news detection, achieving a 7 to 16 percents accuracy improvement over other state-of-the-art models.

Paperid: 6916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08910.pdf

Abstract:
The effectiveness of feedback in enhancing learning outcomes is well documented within Educational Data Mining (EDM). Various prior research has explored methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of feedback. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their utility in enhancing automated feedback systems. This study aims to explore the potential of LLMs in facilitating automated feedback in math education. We examine the effectiveness of LLMs in evaluating student responses by comparing 3 different models: Llama, SBERT-Canberra, and GPT4 model. The evaluation requires the model to provide both a quantitative score and qualitative feedback on the student's responses to open-ended math problems. We employ Mistral, a version of Llama catered to math, and fine-tune this model for evaluating student responses by leveraging a dataset of student responses and teacher-written feedback for middle-school math problems. A similar approach was taken for training the SBERT model as well, while the GPT4 model used a zero-shot learning approach. We evaluate the model's performance in scoring accuracy and the quality of feedback by utilizing judgments from 2 teachers. The teachers utilized a shared rubric in assessing the accuracy and relevance of the generated feedback. We conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the model performance. By offering a detailed comparison of these methods, this study aims to further the ongoing development of automated feedback systems and outlines potential future directions for leveraging generative LLMs to create more personalized learning experiences.

Paperid: 6917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07191.pdf

Abstract:
Recent works have shown a surprising result: a small fraction of Large Language Model (LLM) parameter outliers are disproportionately important to the quality of the model. LLMs contain billions of parameters, so these small fractions, such as 0.01%, translate to hundreds of thousands of parameters. In this work, we present an even more surprising finding: Pruning as few as a single parameter can destroy an LLM's ability to generate text -- increasing perplexity by 3 orders of magnitude and reducing zero-shot accuracy to guessing. We propose a data-free method for identifying such parameters, termed super weights, using a single forward pass through the model. We additionally find that these super weights induce correspondingly rare and large activation outliers, termed super activations. When preserved with high precision, super activations can improve simple round-to-nearest quantization to become competitive with state-of-the-art methods. For weight quantization, we similarly find that by preserving the super weight and clipping other weight outliers, round-to-nearest quantization can scale to much larger block sizes than previously considered. To facilitate further research into super weights, we provide an index of super weight coordinates for common, openly available LLMs.

Paperid: 6918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05963.pdf

Abstract:
Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common cardiac arrhythmia, is associated with heart failure and stroke. Accurate segmentation of the left atrium (LA) in 3D late gadolinium-enhanced (LGE) MRI is helpful for evaluating AF, as fibrotic remodeling in the LA myocardium contributes to arrhythmia and serves as a key determinant of therapeutic strategies. However, manual LA segmentation is labor-intensive and challenging. Recent foundational deep learning models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), pre-trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated promise in generic segmentation tasks. MedSAM, a fine-tuned version of SAM for medical applications, enables efficient, zero-shot segmentation without domain-specific training. Despite the potential of MedSAM model, it has not yet been evaluated for the complex task of LA segmentation in 3D LGE-MRI. This study aims to (1) evaluate the performance of MedSAM in automating LA segmentation, (2) compare the performance of the MedSAM2 model, which uses a single prompt with automated tracking, with the MedSAM1 model, which requires separate prompt for each slice, and (3) analyze the performance of MedSAM1 in terms of Dice score(i.e., segmentation accuracy) by varying the size and location of the box prompt.

Paperid: 6919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05779.pdf

Abstract:
Despite advances with deep learning (DL), automated airway segmentation from chest CT scans continues to face challenges in segmentation quality and generalization across cohorts. To address these, we propose integrating Curriculum Learning (CL) into airway segmentation networks, distributing the training set into batches according to ad-hoc complexity scores derived from CT scans and corresponding ground-truth tree features. We specifically investigate few-shot domain adaptation, targeting scenarios where manual annotation of a full fine-tuning dataset is prohibitively expensive. Results are reported on two large open-cohorts (ATM22 and AIIB23) with high performance using CL for full training (Source domain) and few-shot fine-tuning (Target domain), but with also some insights on potential detrimental effects if using a classic Bootstrapping scoring function or if not using proper scan sequencing.

Paperid: 6920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04983.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, remains challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific solutions with online policy learning. To unlock world models' true potential, we argue that they should 1) be trainable on offline, pre-collected trajectories, 2) support test-time behavior optimization, and 3) facilitate task-agnostic reasoning. To this end, we present DINO World Model (DINO-WM), a new method to model visual dynamics without reconstructing the visual world. DINO-WM leverages spatial patch features pre-trained with DINOv2, enabling it to learn from offline behavioral trajectories by predicting future patch features. This allows DINO-WM to achieve observational goals through action sequence optimization, facilitating task-agnostic planning by treating goal features as prediction targets. We demonstrate that DINO-WM achieves zero-shot behavioral solutions at test time on six environments without expert demonstrations, reward modeling, or pre-learned inverse models, outperforming prior state-of-the-art work across diverse task families such as arbitrarily configured mazes, push manipulation with varied object shapes, and multi-particle scenarios.

Paperid: 6921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03659.pdf

Abstract:
This study explores the feasibility of using large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o (ChatGPT), for automated grading of conceptual questions in an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering course. We compared the grading performance of GPT-4o with that of human teaching assistants (TAs) on ten quiz problems from the MEEN 361 course at Texas A&M University, each answered by approximately 225 students. Both the LLM and TAs followed the same instructor-provided rubric to ensure grading consistency. We evaluated performance using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) to assess the alignment between rankings and the accuracy of scores assigned by GPT-4o and TAs under zero- and few-shot grading settings. In the zero-shot setting, GPT-4o demonstrated a strong correlation with TA grading, with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient exceeding 0.6 in seven out of ten datasets and reaching a high of 0.9387. Our analysis reveals that GPT-4o performs well when grading criteria are straightforward but struggles with nuanced answers, particularly those involving synonyms not present in the rubric. The model also tends to grade more stringently in ambiguous cases compared to human TAs. Overall, ChatGPT shows promise as a tool for grading conceptual questions, offering scalability and consistency.

Paperid: 6922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23370.pdf

Abstract:
Methods based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) are nowadays extensively used in support of vision-and-language tasks involving remote sensing data, such as cross-modal retrieval. The adaptation of CLIP to this specific domain has relied on model fine-tuning with the standard contrastive objective, using existing human-labeled image-caption datasets, or using synthetic data corresponding to image-caption pairs derived from other annotations over remote sensing images (e.g., object classes). The use of different pre-training mechanisms has received less attention, and only a few exceptions have considered multilingual inputs. This work proposes a novel vision-and-language model for the remote sensing domain, exploring the fine-tuning of a multilingual CLIP model and testing the use of a self-supervised method based on aligning local and global representations from individual input images, together with the standard CLIP objective. Model training relied on assembling pre-existing datasets of remote sensing images paired with English captions, followed by the use of automated machine translation into nine additional languages. We show that translated data is indeed helpful, e.g. improving performance also on English. Our resulting model, which we named Remote Sensing Multilingual CLIP (RS-M-CLIP), obtains state-of-the-art results in a variety of vision-and-language tasks, including cross-modal and multilingual image-text retrieval, or zero-shot image classification.

Paperid: 6923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22492.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Visual Premise Proving (VPP), a novel task tailored to refine the process of chart question answering by deconstructing it into a series of logical premises. Each of these premises represents an essential step in comprehending a chart's content and deriving logical conclusions, thereby providing a granular look at a model's reasoning abilities. This approach represents a departure from conventional accuracy-based evaluation methods, emphasizing the model's ability to sequentially validate each premise and ideally mimic human analytical processes. A model adept at reasoning is expected to demonstrate proficiency in both data retrieval and the structural understanding of charts, suggesting a synergy between these competencies. However, in our zero-shot study using the sophisticated MATCHA model on a scientific chart question answering dataset, an intriguing pattern emerged. The model showcased superior performance in chart reasoning (27\%) over chart structure (19\%) and data retrieval (14\%). This performance gap suggests that models might more readily generalize reasoning capabilities across datasets, benefiting from consistent mathematical and linguistic semantics, even when challenged by changes in the visual domain that complicate structure comprehension and data retrieval. Furthermore, the efficacy of using accuracy of binary QA for evaluating chart reasoning comes into question if models can deduce correct answers without parsing chart data or structure. VPP highlights the importance of integrating reasoning with visual comprehension to enhance model performance in chart analysis, pushing for a balanced approach in evaluating visual data interpretation capabilities.

Paperid: 6924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19134.pdf

Abstract:
Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC) has gradually become an active research task. The emotional content conveyed through human speech are often complex, and classifying them into fixed categories may not be enough to fully capture speech emotions. Describing speech emotions through natural language may be a more effective approach. However, existing SEC methods often produce hallucinations and lose generalization on unseen speech. To overcome these problems, we propose AlignCap, which Aligning Speech Emotion Captioning to Human Preferences based on large language model (LLM) with two properties: 1) Speech-Text Alignment, which minimizing the divergence between the LLM's response prediction distributions for speech and text inputs using knowledge distillation (KD) Regularization. 2) Human Preference Alignment, where we design Preference Optimization (PO) Regularization to eliminate factuality and faithfulness hallucinations. We also extract emotional clues as a prompt for enriching fine-grained information under KD-Regularization. Experiments demonstrate that AlignCap presents stronger performance to other state-of-the-art methods on Zero-shot SEC task.

Paperid: 6925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17551.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning has achieved promising results on robotic control tasks but struggles to leverage information effectively from multiple sensory modalities that differ in many characteristics. Recent works construct auxiliary losses based on reconstruction or mutual information to extract joint representations from multiple sensory inputs to improve the sample efficiency and performance of reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the representations learned by these methods could capture information irrelevant to learning a policy and may degrade the performance. We argue that compressing information in the learned joint representations about raw multimodal observations is helpful, and propose a multimodal information bottleneck model to learn task-relevant joint representations from egocentric images and proprioception. Our model compresses and retains the predictive information in multimodal observations for learning a compressed joint representation, which fuses complementary information from visual and proprioceptive feedback and meanwhile filters out task-irrelevant information in raw multimodal observations. We propose to minimize the upper bound of our multimodal information bottleneck objective for computationally tractable optimization. Experimental evaluations on several challenging locomotion tasks with egocentric images and proprioception show that our method achieves better sample efficiency and zero-shot robustness to unseen white noise than leading baselines. We also empirically demonstrate that leveraging information from egocentric images and proprioception is more helpful for learning policies on locomotion tasks than solely using one single modality.

Paperid: 6926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16286.pdf

Abstract:
This report introduces an improved method for the Tracking Any Point~(TAP), focusing on monitoring physical surfaces in video footage. Despite their success with short-sequence scenarios, TAP methods still face performance degradation and resource overhead in long-sequence situations. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Fine-grained Point Discrimination~(\textbf{FPD}), which focuses on perceiving and rectifying point tracking at multiple granularities in zero-shot manner, especially for static points in the videos shot by a static camera. The proposed FPD contains two key components: $(1)$ Multi-granularity point perception, which can detect static sequences in video and points. $(2)$ Dynamic trajectory correction, which replaces point trajectories based on the type of tracked point. Our approach achieved the second highest score in the final test with a score of $0.4720$.

Paperid: 6927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16237.pdf

Abstract:
As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly integrate into our infrastructure, their robust coordination and message synchronization become vital. The Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP) is a critical model for constructing resilient multi-agent systems (MAS) under adversarial attacks. It describes a scenario where malicious agents with unknown identities exist in the system-situations that, in our context, could result from LLM agents' hallucinations or external attacks. In BGP, the objective of the entire system is to reach a consensus on the action to be taken. Traditional BGP requires global consensus among all agents; however, in practical scenarios, global consensus is not always necessary and can even be inefficient. Therefore, there is a pressing need to explore a refined version of BGP that aligns with the local coordination patterns observed in MAS. We refer to this refined version as Imperfect BGP (IBGP) in our research, aiming to address this discrepancy. To tackle this issue, we propose a framework that leverages consensus protocols within general MAS settings, providing provable resilience against communication attacks and adaptability to changing environments, as validated by empirical results. Additionally, we present a case study in a sensor network environment to illustrate the practical application of our protocol.

Paperid: 6928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16028.pdf

Abstract:
Current large open vision models could be useful for one and few-shot object recognition. Nevertheless, gradient-based re-training solutions are costly. On the other hand, open-vocabulary object detection models bring closer visual and textual concepts in the same latent space, allowing zero-shot detection via prompting at small computational cost. We propose a lightweight method to turn the latter into a one-shot or few-shot object recognition models without requiring textual descriptions. Our experiments on the TEgO dataset using the YOLO-World model as a base show that performance increases with the model size, the number of examples and the use of image augmentation.

Paperid: 6929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14204.pdf

Abstract:
Medical task-oriented dialogue systems can assist doctors by collecting patient medical history, aiding in diagnosis, or guiding treatment selection, thereby reducing doctor burnout and expanding access to medical services. However, doctor-patient dialogue datasets are not readily available, primarily due to privacy regulations. Moreover, existing datasets lack comprehensive annotations involving medical slots and their different attributes, such as symptoms and their onset, progression, and severity. These comprehensive annotations are crucial for accurate diagnosis. Finally, most existing datasets are non-English, limiting their utility for the larger research community. In response, we introduce MediTOD, a new dataset of doctor-patient dialogues in English for the medical history-taking task. Collaborating with doctors, we devise a questionnaire-based labeling scheme tailored to the medical domain. Then, medical professionals create the dataset with high-quality comprehensive annotations, capturing medical slots and their attributes. We establish benchmarks in supervised and few-shot settings on MediTOD for natural language understanding, policy learning, and natural language generation subtasks, evaluating models from both TOD and biomedical domains. We make MediTOD publicly available for future research.

Paperid: 6930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14028.pdf

Abstract:
The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in other domains has raised the question of whether LLMs can reliably assess and manipulate the readability of text. We approach this question empirically. First, using a published corpus of 4,724 English text excerpts, we find that readability estimates produced ``zero-shot'' from GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o mini exhibit relatively high correlation with human judgments (r = 0.76 and r = 0.74, respectively), out-performing estimates derived from traditional readability formulas and various psycholinguistic indices. Then, in a pre-registered human experiment (N = 59), we ask whether Turbo can reliably make text easier or harder to read. We find evidence to support this hypothesis, though considerable variance in human judgments remains unexplained. We conclude by discussing the limitations of this approach, including limited scope, as well as the validity of the ``readability'' construct and its dependence on context, audience, and goal.

Paperid: 6931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12470.pdf

Abstract:
Annotating large datasets can be challenging. However, crowd-sourcing is often expensive and can lack quality, especially for non-trivial tasks. We propose a method of using LLMs as few-shot learners for annotating data in a complex natural language task where we learn a standalone model to predict usage options for products from customer reviews. We also propose a new evaluation metric for this scenario, HAMS4, that can be used to compare a set of strings with multiple reference sets. Learning a custom model offers individual control over energy efficiency and privacy measures compared to using the LLM directly for the sequence-to-sequence task. We compare this data annotation approach with other traditional methods and demonstrate how LLMs can enable considerable cost savings. We find that the quality of the resulting data exceeds the level attained by third-party vendor services and that GPT-4-generated labels even reach the level of domain experts. We make the code and generated labels publicly available.

Paperid: 6932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07394.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning about spatial relationships between objects is essential for many real-world robotic tasks, such as fetch-and-delivery, object rearrangement, and object search. The ability to detect and disambiguate different objects and identify their location is key to successful completion of these tasks. Several recent works have used powerful Vision and Language Models (VLMs) to unlock this capability in robotic agents. In this paper we introduce a structured probabilistic approach that integrates rich 3D geometric features with state-of-the-art open-vocabulary object detectors to enhance spatial reasoning for robotic perception. The approach is evaluated and compared against zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art Vision and Language Models (VLMs) on spatial reasoning tasks. To enable this comparison, we annotate spatial clauses in real-world RGB-D Active Vision Dataset [1] and conduct experiments on this and the synthetic Semantic Abstraction [2] dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing superior performance of grounding spatial relations over state of the art open-source VLMs by more than 20%.

Paperid: 6933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07173.pdf

Abstract:
How well do text-only Large Language Models (LLMs) naturally align with the visual world? We provide the first direct analysis by utilizing frozen text representations in a discriminative vision-language model framework and measuring zero-shot generalization on unseen classes. We find decoder-based LLMs exhibit high intrinsic visual alignment. In particular, more capable LLMs reliably demonstrate stronger generalization. Moreover, utilizing frozen LLMs leads to strong gains in cross-lingual settings, where our approach surpasses CLIP's accuracy of 1.4% with 38.7% for Chinese. Our proposed method improves both robustness and generalization and also significantly reduces the need for paired data and compute, making vision-language models more accessible and adaptable.

Paperid: 6934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05553.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce instruction finetuning for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, which distills instruction following capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs) into orders-of-magnitude smaller NMT models. Our instruction-finetuning recipe for NMT models enables customization of translations for a limited but disparate set of translation-specific tasks. We show that NMT models are capable of following multiple instructions simultaneously and demonstrate capabilities of zero-shot composition of instructions. We also show that through instruction finetuning, traditionally disparate tasks such as formality-controlled machine translation, multi-domain adaptation as well as multi-modal translations can be tackled jointly by a single instruction finetuned NMT model, at a performance level comparable to LLMs such as GPT-3.5-Turbo. To the best of our knowledge, our work is among the first to demonstrate the instruction-following capabilities of traditional NMT models, which allows for faster, cheaper and more efficient serving of customized translations.

Paperid: 6935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04801.pdf

Abstract:
The goal of this paper is to improve the performance of pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) models, particularly DINOv2, in image clustering task without requiring re-training or fine-tuning. As model size increases, high-norm artifacts anomaly appears in the patches of multi-head attention. We observe that this anomaly leads to reduced accuracy in zero-shot image clustering. These artifacts are characterized by disproportionately large values in the attention map compared to other patch tokens. To address these artifacts, we propose an approach called Inference-Time Attention Engineering (ITAE), which manipulates attention function during inference. Specifically, we identify the artifacts by investigating one of the Query-Key-Value (QKV) patches in the multi-head attention and attenuate their corresponding attention values inside the pretrained models. ITAE shows improved clustering accuracy on multiple datasets by exhibiting more expressive features in latent space. Our findings highlight the potential of ITAE as a practical solution for reducing artifacts in pretrained ViT models and improving model performance in clustering tasks without the need for re-training or fine-tuning.

Paperid: 6936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03787.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce CalliffusionV2, a novel system designed to produce natural Chinese calligraphy with flexible multi-modal control. Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on image or text inputs and lack fine-grained control, our system leverages both images to guide generations at fine-grained levels and natural language texts to describe the features of generations. CalliffusionV2 excels at creating a broad range of characters and can quickly learn new styles through a few-shot learning approach. It is also capable of generating non-Chinese characters without prior training. Comprehensive tests confirm that our system produces calligraphy that is both stylistically accurate and recognizable by neural network classifiers and human evaluators.

Paperid: 6937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02953.pdf

Abstract:
We propose cognitive prompting as a novel approach to guide problem-solving in large language models (LLMs) through structured, human-like cognitive operations, such as goal clarification, decomposition, filtering, abstraction, and pattern recognition. By employing systematic, step-by-step reasoning, cognitive prompting enables LLMs to tackle complex, multi-step tasks more efficiently. We introduce three variants: a deterministic sequence of cognitive operations, a self-adaptive variant in which the LLM dynamically selects the sequence of cognitive operations, and a hybrid variant that uses generated correct solutions as few-shot chain-of-thought prompts. Experiments with LLaMA, Gemma~2, and Qwen models in each two sizes on the arithmetic reasoning benchmark GSM8K demonstrate that cognitive prompting significantly improves performance compared to standard question answering.

Paperid: 6938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02456.pdf

Abstract:
General-purpose ID, or travel, document image- and video-based verification systems have yet to achieve good enough performance to be considered a solved problem. There are several factors that negatively impact their performance, including low-resolution images and videos and a lack of sufficient data to train the models. This task is particularly challenging when dealing with unseen class of ID, or travel, documents. In this paper we address this task by proposing a recurrent-based model able to detect forged documents in a few-shot scenario. The recurrent architecture makes the model robust to document resolution variability. Moreover, the few-shot approach allow the model to perform well even for unseen class of documents. Preliminary results on the SIDTD and Findit datasets show good performance of this model for this task.

Paperid: 6939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01946.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

Paperid: 6940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01536.pdf

Abstract:
The intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities enables researchers to explore cultural heritage collections with greater depth and scale. In this paper, we present EUFCC-CIR, a dataset designed for Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) within Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) collections. Our dataset is built on top of the EUFCC-340K image labeling dataset and contains over 180K annotated CIR triplets. Each triplet is composed of a multi-modal query (an input image plus a short text describing the desired attribute manipulations) and a set of relevant target images. The EUFCC-CIR dataset fills an existing gap in CIR-specific resources for Digital Humanities. We demonstrate the value of the EUFCC-CIR dataset by highlighting its unique qualities in comparison to other existing CIR datasets and evaluating the performance of several zero-shot CIR baselines.

Paperid: 6941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00260.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability to generalize effectively across numerous industry domains while executing a range of tasks. Many of these competencies are obtained from the data utilized during the pre-training phase of the Language Models (LMs). However, these models exhibit limitations when tasked with performing in specialized or low-resource industry domains. More recent approaches use LLMs for generating domain-specific synthetic data but most often they lack in truthfulness and complexity. Alternatively, in cases where domain data is available like healthcare and finance most of the LMs are proprietary necessitating the need for a scalable method to curate real world industry specific pre-training data. In this work, we propose an automated and scalable framework - DoPAMine:Domain-specific Pre-training Adaptation from seed-guided data Mining, to mine domain specific training data from a large data corpus for domain adaptation of a LM. The framework leverages the parametric knowledge of a LLM to generate diverse and representative seed data tailored to a specific domain which is then used to mine real world data from a large data corpus like Common Crawl. We evaluated our framework's performance in the continual pre-training (CPT) setting by training two domain specific 7B parameter LMs in healthcare and finance with data mined via DoPAMine. Our experiments show that DoPAMine boosts the performance of pre-trained LLMs on average by 4.9% and 5.1% in zero-shot and 5-shot settings respectively on healthcare tasks from MMLU, MedQA, MedMCQA and PubMedQA datasets, and 2.9% and 6.7% for zero-shot and 5-shot settings respectively on finance tasks from FiQA-SA, FPB and Headlines datasets when compared to the baseline.

Paperid: 6942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17904.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces AMMORE, a new dataset of 53,000 math open-response question-answer pairs from Rori, a learning platform used by students in several African countries and conducts two experiments to evaluate the use of large language models (LLM) for grading particularly challenging student answers. The AMMORE dataset enables various potential analyses and provides an important resource for researching student math acquisition in understudied, real-world, educational contexts. In experiment 1 we use a variety of LLM-driven approaches, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, to grade the 1% of student answers that a rule-based classifier fails to grade accurately. We find that the best-performing approach -- chain-of-thought prompting -- accurately scored 92% of these edge cases, effectively boosting the overall accuracy of the grading from 98.7% to 99.9%. In experiment 2, we aim to better understand the consequential validity of the improved grading accuracy, by passing grades generated by the best-performing LLM-based approach to a Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) model, which estimated student mastery of specific lessons. We find that relatively modest improvements in model accuracy at the individual question level can lead to significant changes in the estimation of student mastery. Where the rules-based classifier currently used to grade student, answers misclassified the mastery status of 6.9% of students across their completed lessons, using the LLM chain-of-thought approach this misclassification rate was reduced to 2.6% of students. Taken together, these findings suggest that LLMs could be a valuable tool for grading open-response questions in K-12 mathematics education, potentially enabling encouraging wider adoption of open-ended questions in formative assessment.

Paperid: 6943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16911.pdf

Abstract:
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs), trained on multilingual balanced data, demonstrate better zero-shot learning performance in non-English languages compared to large language models trained on English-dominant data. However, the disparity in performance between English and non-English languages remains a challenge yet to be fully addressed. A distinctive characteristic of MLLMs is their high-quality translation capabilities, indicating an acquired proficiency in aligning between languages. This study explores how to enhance the zero-shot performance of MLLMs in non-English languages by leveraging their alignment capability between English and non-English languages. To achieve this, we first analyze the behavior of MLLMs when performing translation and reveal that there are large magnitude features that play a critical role in the translation process. Inspired by these findings, we retain the weights associated with operations involving the large magnitude features and prune other weights to force MLLMs to rely on these features for tasks beyond translation. We empirically demonstrate that this pruning strategy can enhance the MLLMs' performance in non-English language.

Paperid: 6944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16441.pdf

Abstract:
While deep learning has catalyzed breakthroughs across numerous domains, its broader adoption in clinical settings is inhibited by the costly and time-intensive nature of data acquisition and annotation. To further facilitate medical machine learning, we present an ultrasound dataset of 10,223 Brightness-mode (B-mode) images consisting of sagittal slices of porcine spinal cords (N=25) before and after a contusion injury. We additionally benchmark the performance metrics of several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms to localize the site of injury and semantic segmentation models to label the anatomy for comparison and creation of task-specific architectures. Finally, we evaluate the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segmentation models on human ultrasound spinal cord images to determine whether training on our porcine dataset is sufficient for accurately interpreting human data. Our results show that the YOLOv8 detection model outperforms all evaluated models for injury localization, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP50-95) score of 0.606. Segmentation metrics indicate that the DeepLabv3 segmentation model achieves the highest accuracy on unseen porcine anatomy, with a Mean Dice score of 0.587, while SAMed achieves the highest Mean Dice score generalizing to human anatomy (0.445). To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest annotated dataset of spinal cord ultrasound images made publicly available to researchers and medical professionals, as well as the first public report of object detection and segmentation architectures to assess anatomical markers in the spinal cord for methodology development and clinical applications.

Paperid: 6945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15867.pdf

Abstract:
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines a low-level, step-by-step written guide for a business software workflow. SOP generation is a crucial step towards automating end-to-end software workflows. Manually creating SOPs can be time-consuming. Recent advancements in large video-language models offer the potential for automating SOP generation by analyzing recordings of human demonstrations. However, current large video-language models face challenges with zero-shot SOP generation. In this work, we first explore in-context learning with video-language models for SOP generation. We then propose an exploration-focused strategy called In-Context Ensemble Learning, to aggregate pseudo labels of multiple possible paths of SOPs. The proposed in-context ensemble learning as well enables the models to learn beyond its context window limit with an implicit consistency regularisation. We report that in-context learning helps video-language models to generate more temporally accurate SOP, and the proposed in-context ensemble learning can consistently enhance the capabilities of the video-language models in SOP generation.

Paperid: 6946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13955.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) methods have shown great potential for weather downscaling. These data-driven approaches provide a more efficient alternative for producing high-resolution weather datasets and forecasts compared to physics-based numerical simulations. Neural operators, which learn solution operators for a family of partial differential equations (PDEs), have shown great success in scientific ML applications involving physics-driven datasets. Neural operators are grid-resolution-invariant and are often evaluated on higher grid resolutions than they are trained on, i.e., zero-shot super-resolution. Given their promising zero-shot super-resolution performance on dynamical systems emulation, we present a critical investigation of their zero-shot weather downscaling capabilities, which is when models are tasked with producing high-resolution outputs using higher upsampling factors than are seen during training. To this end, we create two realistic downscaling experiments with challenging upsampling factors (e.g., 8x and 15x) across data from different simulations: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis version 5 (ERA5) and the Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit (WTK). While neural operator-based downscaling models perform better than interpolation and a simple convolutional baseline, we show the surprising performance of an approach that combines a powerful transformer-based model with parameter-free interpolation at zero-shot weather downscaling. We find that this Swin-Transformer-based approach mostly outperforms models with neural operator layers in terms of average error metrics, whereas an Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN)-based approach is better than most models in terms of capturing the physics of the ground truth data. We suggest their use in future work as strong baselines.

Paperid: 6947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13709.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional Semantic Table Interpretation (STI) methods rely primarily on the underlying table data to create semantic annotations. This year's SemTab challenge introduced the ``Metadata to KG'' track, which focuses on performing STI by using only metadata information, without access to the underlying data. In response to this new challenge, we introduce a new term: Column Vocabulary Association (CVA). This term refers to the task of semantic annotation of column headers solely based on metadata information. In this study, we evaluate the performance of various methods in executing the CVA task, including a Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, as well as a more traditional similarity approach with SemanticBERT. Our methodology uses a zero-shot setting, with no pretraining or examples passed to the Large Language Models (LLMs), as we aim to avoid a domain-specific setting. We investigate a total of 7 different LLMs, of which three commercial GPT models (i.e. gpt-3.5-turbo-0.125, gpt-4o and gpt-4-turbo) and four open source models (i.e. llama3-80b, llama3-7b, gemma-7b and mixtral-8x7b). We integrate this models with RAG systems, and we explore how variations in temperature settings affect performances. Moreover, we continue our investigation by performing the CVA task utilizing SemanticBERT, analyzing how various metadata information influence its performance. Initial findings indicate that LLMs generally perform well at temperatures below 1.0, achieving an accuracy of 100\% in certain cases. Nevertheless, our investigation also reveal that the nature of the data significantly influences CVA task outcomes. In fact, in cases where the input data and glossary are related (for example by being created by the same organizations) traditional methods appear to surpass the performance of LLMs.

Paperid: 6948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13602.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) plays a pivotal role in multimedia applications for detecting defective products and automating quality inspection. Deep learning (DL) models typically require large-scale annotated data, which are often highly imbalanced since anomalies are usually scarce. The black box nature of these models prohibits them from being trusted by users. To address these challenges, we propose MeLIAD, a novel methodology for interpretable anomaly detection, which unlike the previous methods is based on metric learning and achieves interpretability by design without relying on any prior distribution assumptions of true anomalies. MeLIAD requires only a few samples of anomalies for training, without employing any augmentation techniques, and is inherently interpretable, providing visualizations that offer insights into why an image is identified as anomalous. This is achieved by introducing a novel trainable entropy-based scoring component for the identification and localization of anomalous instances, and a novel loss function that jointly optimizes the anomaly scoring component with a metric learning objective. Experiments on five public benchmark datasets, including quantitative and qualitative evaluation of interpretability, demonstrate that MeLIAD achieves improved anomaly detection and localization performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 6949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12046.pdf

Abstract:
Tables, figures, and listings (TFLs) are essential tools for summarizing clinical trial data. Creation of TFLs for reporting activities is often a time-consuming task encountered routinely during the execution of clinical trials. This study explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of TFLs through prompt engineering and few-shot transfer learning. Using public clinical trial data in ADaM format, our results demonstrated that LLMs can efficiently generate TFLs with prompt instructions, showcasing their potential in this domain. Furthermore, we developed a conservational agent named Clinical Trial TFL Generation Agent: An app that matches user queries to predefined prompts that produce customized programs to generate specific predefined TFLs.

Paperid: 6950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12011.pdf

Abstract:
As powerful pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP gain prominence, numerous studies have attempted to combine VLMs for downstream tasks. Among these, prompt learning has been validated as an effective method for adapting to new tasks, which only requiring a small number of parameters. However, current prompt learning methods face two challenges: first, a single soft prompt struggles to capture the diverse styles and patterns within a dataset; second, fine-tuning soft prompts is prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture of soft prompt learning method incorporating a routing module. This module is able to capture a dataset's varied styles and dynamically selects the most suitable prompts for each instance. Additionally, we introduce a novel gating mechanism to ensure the router selects prompts based on their similarity to hard prompt templates, which both retaining knowledge from hard prompts and improving selection accuracy. We also implement semantically grouped text-level supervision, initializing each soft prompt with the token embeddings of manually designed templates from its group and applied a contrastive loss between the resulted text feature and hard prompt encoded text feature. This supervision ensures that the text features derived from soft prompts remain close to those from their corresponding hard prompts, preserving initial knowledge and mitigating overfitting. Our method has been validated on 11 datasets, demonstrating evident improvements in few-shot learning, domain generalization, and base-to-new generalization scenarios compared to existing baselines. The code will be available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mocoop-6387}

Paperid: 6951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11968.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a range of applications in zero-shot and few-shot learning settings, including the generation of synthetic datasets for training and testing. However, to reliably use these synthetic datasets, it is essential to understand how representative they are of real-world data. We investigate this by assessing the effectiveness of generating synthetic data through LLM and using it as a benchmark for various NLP tasks. Our experiments across six datasets, and three different tasks, show that while synthetic data can effectively capture performance of various methods for simpler tasks, such as intent classification, it falls short for more complex tasks like named entity recognition. Additionally, we propose a new metric called the bias factor, which evaluates the biases introduced when the same LLM is used to both generate benchmarking data and to perform the tasks. We find that smaller LLMs exhibit biases towards their own generated data, whereas larger models do not. Overall, our findings suggest that the effectiveness of synthetic data as a benchmark varies depending on the task, and that practitioners should rely on data generated from multiple larger models whenever possible.

Paperid: 6952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11657.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class-incremental learning is crucial for developing scalable and adaptive intelligent systems, as it enables models to acquire new classes with minimal annotated data while safeguarding the previously accumulated knowledge. Nonetheless, existing methods deal with continuous data streams in a centralized manner, limiting their applicability in scenarios that prioritize data privacy and security. To this end, this paper introduces federated few-shot class-incremental learning, a decentralized machine learning paradigm tailored to progressively learn new classes from scarce data distributed across multiple clients. In this learning paradigm, clients locally update their models with new classes while preserving data privacy, and then transmit the model updates to a central server where they are aggregated globally. However, this paradigm faces several issues, such as difficulties in few-shot learning, catastrophic forgetting, and data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we present a synthetic data-driven framework that leverages replay buffer data to maintain existing knowledge and facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge. Within this framework, a noise-aware generative replay module is developed to fine-tune local models with a balance of new and replay data, while generating synthetic data of new classes to further expand the replay buffer for future tasks. Furthermore, a class-specific weighted aggregation strategy is designed to tackle data heterogeneity by adaptively aggregating class-specific parameters based on local models performance on synthetic data. This enables effective global model optimization without direct access to client data. Comprehensive experiments across three widely-used datasets underscore the effectiveness and preeminence of the introduced framework.

Paperid: 6953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11107.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models greatly improved transcription performance both in clean, low noise, acoustic conditions and in reverberant environments. However, all these systems rely on the availability of hundreds of hours of labelled training data in specific acoustic conditions. When such a training dataset is not available, the performance of the system is heavily impacted. For example, this happens when a specific acoustic environment or a particular population of speakers is under-represented in the training dataset. Specifically, in this paper we investigate the effect of accented speech data on an off-the-shelf ASR system. Furthermore, we suggest a strategy based on zero-shot text-to-speech to augment the accented speech corpora. We show that this augmentation method is able to mitigate the loss in performance of the ASR system on accented data up to 5% word error rate reduction (WERR). In conclusion, we demonstrate that by incorporating a modest fraction of real with synthetically generated data, the ASR system exhibits superior performance compared to a model trained exclusively on authentic accented speech with up to 14% WERR.

Paperid: 6954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10528.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates ImageBind's ability to generate meaningful fused multimodal embeddings for online auto parts listings. We propose a simplistic embedding fusion workflow that aims to capture the overlapping information of image/text pairs, ultimately combining the semantics of a post into a joint embedding. After storing such fused embeddings in a vector database, we experiment with dimensionality reduction and provide empirical evidence to convey the semantic quality of the joint embeddings by clustering and examining the posts nearest to each cluster centroid. Additionally, our initial findings with ImageBind's emergent zero-shot cross-modal retrieval suggest that pure audio embeddings can correlate with semantically similar marketplace listings, indicating potential avenues for future research.

Paperid: 6955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09359.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel method for symbolic regression (SR), the task of searching for compact programmatic hypotheses that best explain a dataset. The problem is commonly solved using genetic algorithms; we show that we can enhance such methods by inducing a library of abstract textual concepts. Our algorithm, called LaSR, uses zero-shot queries to a large language model (LLM) to discover and evolve concepts occurring in known high-performing hypotheses. We discover new hypotheses using a mix of standard evolutionary steps and LLM-guided steps (obtained through zero-shot LLM queries) conditioned on discovered concepts. Once discovered, hypotheses are used in a new round of concept abstraction and evolution. We validate LaSR on the Feynman equations, a popular SR benchmark, as well as a set of synthetic tasks. On these benchmarks, LaSR substantially outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art SR approaches based on deep learning and evolutionary algorithms. Moreover, we show that LaSR can be used to discover a novel and powerful scaling law for LLMs.

Paperid: 6956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08820.pdf

Abstract:
Competency question (CQ) formulation is central to several ontology development and evaluation methodologies. Traditionally, the task of crafting these competency questions heavily relies on the effort of domain experts and knowledge engineers which is often time-consuming and labor-intensive. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there arises the possibility to automate and enhance this process. Unlike other similar works which use existing ontologies or knowledge graphs as input to LLMs, we present a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach that uses LLMs for the automatic generation of CQs given a set of scientific papers considered to be a domain knowledge base. We investigate its performance and specifically, we study the impact of different number of papers to the RAG and different temperature setting of the LLM. We conduct experiments using GPT-4 on two domain ontology engineering tasks and compare results against ground-truth CQs constructed by domain experts. Empirical assessments on the results, utilizing evaluation metrics (precision and consistency), reveal that compared to zero-shot prompting, adding relevant domain knowledge to the RAG improves the performance of LLMs on generating CQs for concrete ontology engineering tasks.

Paperid: 6957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06316.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing size of screening libraries poses a significant challenge for the development of virtual screening methods for drug discovery, necessitating a re-evaluation of traditional approaches in the era of big data. Although 3D pharmacophore screening remains a prevalent technique, its application to very large datasets is limited by the computational cost associated with matching query pharmacophores to database molecules. In this study, we introduce PharmacoMatch, a novel contrastive learning approach based on neural subgraph matching. Our method reinterprets pharmacophore screening as an approximate subgraph matching problem and enables efficient querying of conformational databases by encoding query-target relationships in the embedding space. We conduct comprehensive investigations of the learned representations and evaluate PharmacoMatch as pre-screening tool in a zero-shot setting. We demonstrate significantly shorter runtimes and comparable performance metrics to existing solutions, providing a promising speed-up for screening very large datasets.

Paperid: 6958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06085.pdf

Abstract:
The combination of machine learning and physical laws has shown immense potential for solving scientific problems driven by partial differential equations (PDEs) with the promise of fast inference, zero-shot generalisation, and the ability to discover new physics. Examples include the use of fundamental physical laws as inductive bias to machine learning algorithms, also referred to as physics-driven machine learning, and the application of machine learning to represent features not represented in the differential equations such as closures for unresolved spatiotemporal scales. However, the simulation of complex physical systems by coupling advanced numerics for PDEs with state-of-the-art machine learning demands the composition of specialist PDE solving frameworks with industry-standard machine learning tools. Hand-rolling either the PDE solver or the neural net will not cut it. In this work, we introduce a generic differentiable programming abstraction that provides scientists and engineers with a highly productive way of specifying end-to-end differentiable models coupling machine learning and PDE-based components, while relying on code generation for high performance. Our interface automates the coupling of arbitrary PDE-based systems and machine learning models and unlocks new applications that could not hitherto be tackled, while only requiring trivial changes to existing code. Our framework has been adopted in the Firedrake finite-element library and supports the PyTorch and JAX ecosystems, as well as downstream libraries.

Paperid: 6959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04057.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated the capacity of large language models to perform complex reasoning through intermediate steps. While effective, current CoT methods face challenges: Zero-shot-CoT can lead to reasoning errors, and Few-shot-CoT requires labor-intensive manual demonstrations. Auto-CoT attempts to address these issues by automatically generating diverse demonstrations, but this diversity can lead to inconsistent reasoning patterns. We propose ECHO (Self-Harmonized Chain of Thought), a novel method that unifies diverse solution paths into a consistent and effective reasoning pattern. ECHO employs an iterative process to refine and harmonize automatically generated demonstrations, mitigating the limitations of existing approaches. Our comprehensive experiments across arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks demonstrate that ECHO outperforms Auto-CoT by an average of 2.8%. These findings suggest that ECHO represents a significant step towards more robust and generalizable automated reasoning in large language models.

Paperid: 6960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04056.pdf

Abstract:
Due to its collaborative nature, Wikidata is known to have a complex taxonomy, with recurrent issues like the ambiguity between instances and classes, the inaccuracy of some taxonomic paths, the presence of cycles, and the high level of redundancy across classes. Manual efforts to clean up this taxonomy are time-consuming and prone to errors or subjective decisions. We present WiKC, a new version of Wikidata taxonomy cleaned automatically using a combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and graph mining techniques. Operations on the taxonomy, such as cutting links or merging classes, are performed with the help of zero-shot prompting on an open-source LLM. The quality of the refined taxonomy is evaluated from both intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives, on a task of entity typing for the latter, showing the practical interest of WiKC.

Paperid: 6961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03166.pdf

Abstract:
Continual and interactive robot learning is a challenging problem as the robot is present with human users who expect the robot to learn novel skills to solve novel tasks perpetually with sample efficiency. In this work we present a framework for robots to query and learn visuo-motor robot skills and task relevant information via natural language dialog interactions with human users. Previous approaches either focus on improving the performance of instruction following agents, or passively learn novel skills or concepts. Instead, we used dialog combined with a language-skill grounding embedding to query or confirm skills and/or tasks requested by a user. To achieve this goal, we developed and integrated three different components for our agent. Firstly, we propose a novel visual-motor control policy ACT with Low Rank Adaptation (ACT-LoRA), which enables the existing SoTA ACT model to perform few-shot continual learning. Secondly, we develop an alignment model that projects demonstrations across skill embodiments into a shared embedding allowing us to know when to ask questions and/or demonstrations from users. Finally, we integrated an existing LLM to interact with a human user to perform grounded interactive continual skill learning to solve a task. Our ACT-LoRA model learns novel fine-tuned skills with a 100% accuracy when trained with only five demonstrations for a novel skill while still maintaining a 74.75% accuracy on pre-trained skills in the RLBench dataset where other models fall significantly short. We also performed a human-subjects study with 8 subjects to demonstrate the continual learning capabilities of our combined framework. We achieve a success rate of 75% in the task of sandwich making with the real robot learning from participant data demonstrating that robots can learn novel skills or task knowledge from dialogue with non-expert users using our approach.

Paperid: 6962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02502.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we extend the Recurrent Inertial Graph-based Estimator (RING), a novel neural-network-based solution for Inertial Motion Tracking (IMT), to generalize across a large range of sampling rates, and we demonstrate that it can overcome four real-world challenges: inhomogeneous magnetic fields, sensor-to-segment misalignment, sparse sensor setups, and nonrigid sensor attachment. RING can estimate the rotational state of a three-segment kinematic chain with double hinge joints from inertial data, and achieves an experimental mean-absolute-(tracking)-error of 8.10 +/- 1.19 degrees if all four challenges are present simultaneously. The network is trained on simulated data yet evaluated on experimental data, highlighting its remarkable ability to zero-shot generalize from simulation to experiment. We conduct an ablation study to analyze the impact of each of the four challenges on RING's performance, we showcase its robustness to varying sampling rates, and we demonstrate that RING is capable of real-time operation. This research not only advances IMT technology by making it more accessible and versatile but also enhances its potential for new application domains including non-expert use of sparse IMT with nonrigid sensor attachments in unconstrained environments.

Paperid: 6963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01936.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language and Image Pairing (CLIP), a transformative method in multimedia retrieval, typically trains two neural networks concurrently to generate joint embeddings for text and image pairs. However, when applied directly, these models often struggle to differentiate between visually distinct images that have similar captions, resulting in suboptimal performance for image-based similarity searches. This paper addresses the challenge of optimizing CLIP models for various image-based similarity search scenarios, while maintaining their effectiveness in text-based search tasks such as text-to-image retrieval and zero-shot classification. We propose and evaluate two novel methods aimed at refining the retrieval capabilities of CLIP without compromising the alignment between text and image embeddings. The first method involves a sequential fine-tuning process: initially optimizing the image encoder for more precise image retrieval and subsequently realigning the text encoder to these optimized image embeddings. The second approach integrates pseudo-captions during the retrieval-optimization phase to foster direct alignment within the embedding space. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that these methods enhance CLIP's performance on various benchmarks, including image retrieval, k-NN classification, and zero-shot text-based classification, while maintaining robustness in text-to-image retrieval. Our optimized models permit maintaining a single embedding per image, significantly simplifying the infrastructure needed for large-scale multi-modal similarity search systems.

Paperid: 6964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00408.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning models are capable of classifying new classes by transferring knowledge from the seen classes using auxiliary information. While most of the existing zero-shot learning methods focused on single-label classification tasks, the present study introduces a method to perform multi-label zero-shot audio classification. To address the challenge of classifying multi-label sounds while generalizing to unseen classes, we adapt temporal attention. The temporal attention mechanism assigns importance weights to different audio segments based on their acoustic and semantic compatibility, thus enabling the model to capture the varying dominance of different sound classes within an audio sample by focusing on the segments most relevant for each class. This leads to more accurate multi-label zero-shot classification than methods employing temporally aggregated acoustic features without weighting, which treat all audio segments equally. We evaluate our approach on a subset of AudioSet against a zero-shot model using uniformly aggregated acoustic features, a zero-rule baseline, and the proposed method in the supervised scenario. Our results show that temporal attention enhances the zero-shot audio classification performance in multi-label scenario.

Paperid: 6965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00106.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive zero- and few-shot performance on real-world visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, alluding to their capabilities as visual reasoning engines. However, the benchmarks being used conflate "pure" visual reasoning with world knowledge, and also have questions that involve a limited number of reasoning steps. Thus, it remains unclear whether a VLM's apparent visual reasoning performance is due to its world knowledge, or due to actual visual reasoning capabilities. To clarify this ambiguity, we systematically benchmark and dissect the zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs through synthetic datasets that require minimal world knowledge, and allow for analysis over a broad range of reasoning steps. We focus on two novel aspects of zero-shot visual reasoning: i) evaluating the impact of conveying scene information as either visual embeddings or purely textual scene descriptions to the underlying large language model (LLM) of the VLM, and ii) comparing the effectiveness of chain-of-thought prompting to standard prompting for zero-shot visual reasoning. We find that the underlying LLMs, when provided textual scene descriptions, consistently perform better compared to being provided visual embeddings. In particular, 18% higher accuracy is achieved on the PTR dataset. We also find that CoT prompting performs marginally better than standard prompting only for the comparatively large GPT-3.5-Turbo (175B) model, and does worse for smaller-scale models. This suggests the emergence of CoT abilities for visual reasoning in LLMs at larger scales even when world knowledge is limited. Overall, we find limitations in the abilities of VLMs and LLMs for more complex visual reasoning, and highlight the important role that LLMs can play in visual reasoning.

Paperid: 6966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21851.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models, despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, remain vulnerable to spurious correlations and 'Clever Hans' strategies. Existing mitigation methods often rely on unavailable group labels or computationally expensive gradient-based adversarial optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Visual Disentangled Diffusion Autoencoders (DiDAE), a novel framework integrating frozen foundation models with disentangled dictionary learning for efficient, gradient-free counterfactual generation directly for the foundation model. DiDAE first edits foundation model embeddings in interpretable disentangled directions of the disentangled dictionary and then decodes them via a diffusion autoencoder. This allows the generation of multiple diverse, disentangled counterfactuals for each factual, much faster than existing baselines, which generate single entangled counterfactuals. When paired with Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation, DiDAE-CFKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating shortcut learning, improving downstream performance on unbalanced datasets.

Paperid: 6967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21248.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion sampling-based Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods produce images with high perceptual quality but often suffer from reduced data fidelity, primarily due to the noise introduced during reverse diffusion. To address this trade-off, we propose Noise Frequency-Controlled Diffusion Sampling (NFCDS), a spectral modulation mechanism for reverse diffusion noise. We show that the fidelity-perception conflict can be fundamentally understood through noise frequency: low-frequency components induce blur and degrade fidelity, while high-frequency components drive detail generation. Based on this insight, we design a Fourier-domain filter that progressively suppresses low-frequency noise and preserves high-frequency content. This controlled refinement injects a data-consistency prior directly into sampling, enabling fast convergence to results that are both high-fidelity and perceptually convincing--without additional training. As a PnP module, NFCDS seamlessly integrates into existing diffusion-based restoration frameworks and improves the fidelity-perception balance across diverse zero-shot tasks.

Paperid: 6968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20270.pdf

Abstract:
Phishing continues to be one of the most prevalent attack vectors, making accurate classification of phishing URLs essential. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising results in phishing URL detection. However, their reasoning capabilities that enabled such performance remain underexplored. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Least-to-Most prompting framework for phishing URL detection. In particular, we introduce an "answer sensitivity" mechanism that guides Least-to-Most's iterative approach to enhance reasoning and yield higher prediction accuracy. We evaluate our framework using three URL datasets and four state-of-the-art LLMs, comparing against a one-shot approach and a supervised model. We demonstrate that our framework outperforms the one-shot baseline while achieving performance comparable to that of the supervised model, despite requiring significantly less training data. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis highlights how the iterative reasoning enabled by Least-to-Most, and reinforced by our answer sensitivity mechanism, drives these performance gains. Overall, we show that this simple yet powerful prompting strategy consistently outperforms both one-shot and supervised approaches, despite requiring minimal training or few-shot guidance. Our experimental setup can be found in our Github repository github.sydney.edu.au/htri0928/least-to-most-phishing-detection.

Paperid: 6969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19992.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial image anomaly detection is a challenging problem owing to extreme class imbalance and the scarcity of labeled defective samples, particularly in few-shot settings. We propose BayPrAnoMeta, a Bayesian generalization of Proto-MAML for few-shot industrial image anomaly detection. Unlike existing Proto-MAML approaches that rely on deterministic class prototypes and distance-based adaptation, BayPrAnoMeta replaces prototypes with task-specific probabilistic normality models and performs inner-loop adaptation via a Bayesian posterior predictive likelihood. We model normal support embeddings with a Normal-Inverse-Wishart (NIW) prior, producing a Student-$t$ predictive distribution that enables uncertainty-aware, heavy-tailed anomaly scoring and is essential for robustness in extreme few-shot settings. We further extend BayPrAnoMeta to a federated meta-learning framework with supervised contrastive regularization for heterogeneous industrial clients and prove convergence to stationary points of the resulting nonconvex objective. Experiments on the MVTec AD benchmark demonstrate consistent and significant AUROC improvements over MAML, Proto-MAML, and PatchCore-based methods in few-shot anomaly detection settings.

Paperid: 6970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18123.pdf

Abstract:
Typical domestic immersion water heater systems are often operated continuously during winter, heating quickly rather than efficiently and ignoring predictable demand windows and ambient losses. We study deadline-aware control, where the aim is to reach a target temperature at a specified time while minimising energy consumption. We introduce an efficient Gymnasium environment that models an immersion hot water heater with first-order thermal losses and discrete on and off actions of 0 W and 6000 W applied every 120 seconds. Methods include a time-optimal bang-bang baseline, a zero-shot Monte Carlo Tree Search planner, and a Proximal Policy Optimisation policy. We report total energy consumption in watt-hours under identical physical dynamics. Across sweeps of initial temperature from 10 to 30 degrees Celsius, deadline from 30 to 90 steps, and target temperature from 40 to 80 degrees Celsius, PPO achieves the most energy-efficient performance at a 60-step horizon of 2 hours, using 3.23 kilowatt-hours, compared to 4.37 to 10.45 kilowatt-hours for bang-bang control and 4.18 to 6.46 kilowatt-hours for MCTS. This corresponds to energy savings of 26 percent at 30 steps and 69 percent at 90 steps. In a representative trajectory with a 50 kg water mass, 20 degrees Celsius ambient temperature, and a 60 degrees Celsius target, PPO consumes 54 percent less energy than bang-bang control and 33 percent less than MCTS. These results show that learned deadline-aware control reduces energy consumption under identical physical assumptions, while planners provide partial savings without training and learned policies offer near-zero inference cost once trained.

Paperid: 6971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17907.pdf

Abstract:
Malware classification models often face performance degradation due to concept drift, arising from evolving threat landscapes and the emergence of novel malware families. This paper presents FARM (Few-shot Adaptive Recognition of Malware), a framework designed to detect and adapt to both covariate and label drift in Windows Portable Executable (PE) malware classification. FARM leverages a triplet autoencoder to project samples into a discriminative latent space, enabling unsupervised drift detection via DBSCAN clustering and dynamic thresholding. For rapid adaptation, it employs few-shot learning using prototype-based classification, requiring only a handful of labeled samples. FARM also supports full retraining when enough drifted samples accumulate, updating the latent space for long-term integration. Experiments on the BenchMFC dataset demonstrate that FARM improves classification performance under covariate drift by 5.6\%, and achieves an average F1 score of 0.85 on unseen malware families using only few-shot adaptation, which further increases to 0.94 after retraining. These results highlight FARM's robustness and adaptability in dynamic malware detection environments under limited supervision.

Paperid: 6972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17692.pdf

Abstract:
Statute retrieval is essential for legal assistance and judicial decision support, yet real-world legal queries are often implicit, multi-issue, and expressed in colloquial or underspecified forms. These characteristics make it difficult for conventional retrieval-augmented generation pipelines to recover the statutory elements required for accurate retrieval. Dense retrievers focus primarily on the literal surface form of the query, whereas lightweight rerankers lack the legal-reasoning capacity needed to assess statutory applicability. We present LegalMALR, a retrieval framework that integrates a Multi-Agent Query Understanding System (MAS) with a zero-shot large-language-model-based reranking module (LLM Reranker). MAS generates diverse, legally grounded reformulations and conducts iterative dense retrieval to broaden candidate coverage. To stabilise the stochastic behaviour of LLM-generated rewrites, we optimise a unified MAS policy using Generalized Reinforcement Policy Optimization(GRPO). The accumulated candidate set is subsequently evaluated by the LLM Reranker, which performs natural-language legal reasoning to produce the final ranking. We further construct CSAID, a dataset of 118 difficult Chinese legal queries annotated with multiple statutory labels, and evaluate LegalMALR on both CSAID and the public STARD benchmark. Experiments show that LegalMALR substantially outperforms strong Retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining multi-perspective query interpretation, reinforcement-based policy optimisation, and large-model reranking for statute retrieval.

Paperid: 6973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17625.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based neural decoders with large parameter counts, pre-trained on large-scale datasets, have recently outperformed classical machine learning models and small neural networks on brain-computer interface (BCI) tasks. However, their large parameter counts and high computational demands hinder deployment in power-constrained implantable systems. To address this challenge, we introduce BrainDistill, a novel implantable motor decoding pipeline that integrates an implantable neural decoder (IND) with a task-specific knowledge distillation (TSKD) framework. Unlike standard feature distillation methods that attempt to preserve teacher representations in full, TSKD explicitly prioritizes features critical for decoding through supervised projection. Across multiple neural datasets, IND consistently outperforms prior neural decoders on motor decoding tasks, while its TSKD-distilled variant further surpasses alternative distillation methods in few-shot calibration settings. Finally, we present a quantization-aware training scheme that enables integer-only inference with activation clipping ranges learned during training. The quantized IND enables deployment under the strict power constraints of implantable BCIs with minimal performance loss.

Paperid: 6974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17185.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a new method for few-shot 3D reconstruction that integrates global and local frequency regularization to stabilize geometry and preserve fine details under sparse-view conditions, addressing a key limitation of existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models. We also introduce a new multispectral greenhouse dataset containing four spectral bands captured from diverse plant species under controlled conditions. Alongside the dataset, we release an open-source benchmarking package that defines standardized few-shot reconstruction protocols for evaluating 3DGS-based methods. Experiments on our multispectral dataset, as well as standard benchmarks, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves sharper, more stable, and spectrally consistent reconstructions than existing baselines. The dataset and code for this work are publicly available

Paperid: 6975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16677.pdf

Abstract:
The sample efficiency challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) compromises its industrial adoption due to the high cost and time demands of real-world training. Virtual environments offer a cost-effective alternative for training DRL agents, but the transfer of learned policies to real setups is hindered by the sim-to-real gap. Achieving zero-shot transfer, where agents perform directly in real environments without additional tuning, is particularly desirable for its efficiency and practical value. This work proposes a novel domain adaptation approach relying on a Style-Identified Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (StyleID-CycleGAN or SICGAN), an original Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) based model. SICGAN translates raw virtual observations into real-synthetic images, creating a hybrid domain for training DRL agents that combines virtual dynamics with real-like visual inputs. Following virtual training, the agent can be directly deployed, bypassing the need for real-world training. The pipeline is validated with two distinct industrial robots in the approaching phase of a pick-and-place operation. In virtual environments agents achieve success rates of 90 to 100\%, and real-world deployment confirms robust zero-shot transfer (i.e., without additional training in the physical environment) with accuracies above 95\% for most workspace regions. We use augmented reality targets to improve the evaluation process efficiency, and experimentally demonstrate that the agent successfully generalizes to real objects of varying colors and shapes, including LEGO\textsuperscript{\textregistered}~cubes and a mug. These results establish the proposed pipeline as an efficient, scalable solution to the sim-to-real problem.

Paperid: 6976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15711.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained attribute prediction is essential for fashion retail applications including catalog enrichment, visual search, and recommendation systems. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer zero-shot prediction without task-specific training, yet their systematic evaluation on multi-attribute fashion tasks remains underexplored. A key challenge is that fashion attributes are often conditional. For example, "outer fabric" is undefined when no outer garment is visible. This requires models to detect attribute applicability before attempting classification. We introduce a three-tier evaluation framework that decomposes this challenge: (1) overall task performance across all classes (including NA class: suggesting attribute is not applicable) for all attributes, (2) attribute applicability detection, and (3) fine-grained classification when attributes are determinable. Using DeepFashion-MultiModal, which explicitly defines NA (meaning attribute doesn't exist or is not visible) within attribute label spaces, we benchmark nine VLMs spanning flagship (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro), efficient (GPT-5 Mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash), and ultra-efficient tiers (GPT-5 Nano, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) against classifiers trained on pretrained Fashion-CLIP embeddings on 5,000 images across 18 attributes. Our findings reveal that: (1) zero-shot VLMs achieve 64.0% macro-F1, a threefold improvement over logistic regression on pretrained Fashion-CLIP embeddings; (2) VLMs excel at fine-grained classification (Tier 3: 70.8% F1) but struggle with applicability detection (Tier 2: 34.1% NA-F1), identifying a key bottleneck; (3) efficient models achieve over 90% of flagship performance at lower cost, offering practical deployment paths. This diagnostic framework enables practitioners to pinpoint whether errors stem from visibility detection or classification, guiding targeted improvements for production systems.

Paperid: 6977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14637.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, together with advances in deep learning, creates new opportunities for enhancing forest monitoring workflows. Two central challenges in this domain are pixel-level change detection and semantic change interpretation, particularly for complex forest dynamics. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for data exploration, their integration with vision-language models (VLMs) for remote sensing image change interpretation (RSICI) remains underexplored, especially beyond urban environments. We introduce Forest-Chat, an LLM-driven agent designed for integrated forest change analysis. The proposed framework enables natural language querying and supports multiple RSICI tasks, including change detection, change captioning, object counting, deforestation percentage estimation, and change reasoning. Forest-Chat builds upon a multi-level change interpretation (MCI) vision-language backbone with LLM-based orchestration, and incorporates zero-shot change detection via a foundation change detection model together with an interactive point-prompt interface to support fine-grained user guidance. To facilitate adaptation and evaluation in forest environments, we introduce the Forest-Change dataset, comprising bi-temporal satellite imagery, pixel-level change masks, and multi-granularity semantic change captions generated through a combination of human annotation and rule-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate that Forest-Chat achieves strong performance on Forest-Change and on LEVIR-MCI-Trees, a tree-focused subset of LEVIR-MCI, for joint change detection and captioning, highlighting the potential of interactive, LLM-driven RSICI systems to improve accessibility, interpretability, and analytical efficiency in forest change analysis.

Paperid: 6978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14346.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of drug response in precision medicine requires models that capture how specific chemical substructures interact with cellular pathway states. However, most existing deep learning approaches treat chemical and transcriptomic modalities independently or combine them only at late stages, limiting their ability to model fine-grained, context-dependent mechanisms of drug action. In addition, standard attention mechanisms are often sensitive to noise and sparsity in high-dimensional biological networks, hindering both generalization and interpretability. We present DiSPA, a representation learning framework that explicitly disentangles structure-driven and context-driven mechanisms of drug response through bidirectional conditioning between chemical substructures and pathway-level gene expression. DiSPA introduces a differential cross-attention module that suppresses spurious pathway-substructure associations while amplifying contextually relevant interactions. Across multiple evaluation settings on the GDSC benchmark, DiSPA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly strong improvements in the disjoint-set setting, which assesses generalization to unseen drug-cell combinations. Beyond predictive accuracy, DiSPA yields mechanistically informative representations: learned attention patterns recover known pharmacophores, distinguish structure-driven from context-dependent compounds, and exhibit coherent organization across biological pathways. Furthermore, we demonstrate that DiSPA trained solely on bulk RNA-seq data enables zero-shot transfer to spatial transcriptomics, revealing region-specific drug sensitivity patterns without retraining. Together, these results establish DiSPA as a robust and interpretable framework for integrative pharmacogenomic modeling, enabling principled analysis of drug response mechanisms beyond post hoc interpretation.

Paperid: 6979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13050.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) produce highly nuanced text simplifications, developers currently lack tools for a holistic, efficient, and reproducible diagnosis of their behavior. This paper introduces the Simplification Profiler, a diagnostic toolkit that generates a multidimensional, interpretable fingerprint of simplified texts. Multiple aggregated simplifications of a model result in a model's fingerprint. This novel evaluation paradigm is particularly vital for languages, where the data scarcity problem is magnified when creating flexible models for diverse target groups rather than a single, fixed simplification style. We propose that measuring a model's unique behavioral signature is more relevant in this context as an alternative to correlating metrics with human preferences. We operationalize this with a practical meta-evaluation of our fingerprints' descriptive power, which bypasses the need for large, human-rated datasets. This test measures if a simple linear classifier can reliably identify various model configurations by their created simplifications, confirming that our metrics are sensitive to a model's specific characteristics. The Profiler can distinguish high-level behavioral variations between prompting strategies and fine-grained changes from prompt engineering, including few-shot examples. Our complete feature set achieves classification F1-scores up to 71.9 %, improving upon simple baselines by over 48 percentage points. The Simplification Profiler thus offers developers a granular, actionable analysis to build more effective and truly adaptive text simplification systems.

Paperid: 6980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12359.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt injection attacks have become an increasing vulnerability for LLM applications, where adversarial prompts exploit indirect input channels such as emails or user-generated content to circumvent alignment safeguards and induce harmful or unintended outputs. Despite advances in alignment, even state-of-the-art LLMs remain broadly vulnerable to adversarial prompts, underscoring the urgent need for robust, productive, and generalizable detection mechanisms beyond inefficient, model-specific patches. In this work, we propose Zero-Shot Embedding Drift Detection (ZEDD), a lightweight, low-engineering-overhead framework that identifies both direct and indirect prompt injection attempts by quantifying semantic shifts in embedding space between benign and suspect inputs. ZEDD operates without requiring access to model internals, prior knowledge of attack types, or task-specific retraining, enabling efficient zero-shot deployment across diverse LLM architectures. Our method uses adversarial-clean prompt pairs and measures embedding drift via cosine similarity to capture subtle adversarial manipulations inherent to real-world injection attacks. To ensure robust evaluation, we assemble and re-annotate the comprehensive LLMail-Inject dataset spanning five injection categories derived from publicly available sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that embedding drift is a robust and transferable signal, outperforming traditional methods in detection accuracy and operational efficiency. With greater than 93% accuracy in classifying prompt injections across model architectures like Llama 3, Qwen 2, and Mistral and a false positive rate of <3%, our approach offers a lightweight, scalable defense layer that integrates into existing LLM pipelines, addressing a critical gap in securing LLM-powered systems to withstand adaptive adversarial threats.

Paperid: 6981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12199.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a Dialect Identification (DID) approach inspired by the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function as used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). CTC-DID frames the dialect identification task as a limited-vocabulary ASR system, where dialect tags are treated as a sequence of labels for a given utterance. For training, the repetition of dialect tags in transcriptions is estimated either using a proposed Language-Agnostic Heuristic (LAH) approach or a pre-trained ASR model. The method is evaluated on the low-resource Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) task, with experimental results demonstrating that an SSL-based CTC-DID model, trained on a limited dataset, outperforms both fine-tuned Whisper and ECAPA-TDNN models. Notably, CTC-DID also surpasses these models in zero-shot evaluation on the Casablanca dataset. The proposed approach is found to be more robust to shorter utterances and is shown to be easily adaptable for streaming, real-time applications, with minimal performance degradation.

Paperid: 6982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12193.pdf

Abstract:
Modern video retrieval systems are expected to handle diverse tasks ranging from corpus-level retrieval and fine-grained moment localization to flexible multimodal querying. Specialized architectures achieve strong retrieval performance by training modality-specific encoders on massive datasets, but they lack the ability to process composed multimodal queries. In contrast, multimodal LLM (MLLM)-based methods support rich multimodal search but their retrieval performance remains well below that of specialized systems. We present VIRTUE, an MLLM-based versatile video retrieval framework that integrates corpus and moment-level retrieval capabilities while accommodating composed multimodal queries within a single architecture. We use contrastive alignment of visual and textual embeddings generated using a shared MLLM backbone to facilitate efficient embedding-based candidate search. Our embedding model, trained efficiently using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) on 700K paired visual-text data samples, surpasses other MLLM-based methods on zero-shot video retrieval tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate that the same model can be adapted without further training to achieve competitive results on zero-shot moment retrieval, and state of the art results for zero-shot composed video retrieval. With additional training for reranking candidates identified in the embedding-based search, our model substantially outperforms existing MLLM-based retrieval systems and achieves retrieval performance comparable to state of the art specialized models which are trained on orders of magnitude larger data.

Paperid: 6983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12010.pdf

Abstract:
The safety validation of autonomous robotic vehicles hinges on systematically testing their planning and control stacks against rare, safety-critical scenarios. Mining these long-tail events from massive real-world driving logs is therefore a critical step in the robotic development lifecycle. The goal of the Scenario Mining task is to retrieve useful information to enable targeted re-simulation, regression testing, and failure analysis of the robot's decision-making algorithms. RefAV, introduced by the Argoverse team, is an end-to-end framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to spatially and temporally localize scenarios described in natural language. However, this process performs retrieval on trajectory labels, ignoring the direct connection between natural language and raw RGB images, which runs counter to the intuition of video retrieval; it also depends on the quality of upstream 3D object detection and tracking. Further, inaccuracies in trajectory data lead to inaccuracies in downstream spatial and temporal localization. To address these issues, we propose Robust Scenario Mining for Robotic Autonomy from Coarse to Fine (SMc2f), a coarse-to-fine pipeline that employs vision-language models (VLMs) for coarse image-text filtering, builds a database of successful mining cases on top of RefAV and automatically retrieves exemplars to few-shot condition the LLM for more robust retrieval, and introduces text-trajectory contrastive learning to pull matched pairs together and push mismatched pairs apart in a shared embedding space, yielding a fine-grained matcher that refines the LLM's candidate trajectories. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate substantial gains in both retrieval quality and efficiency.

Paperid: 6984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10951.pdf

Abstract:
The simulation of realistic clinical interactions plays a pivotal role in advancing clinical Large Language Models (LLMs) and supporting medical diagnostic education. Existing approaches and benchmarks rely on generic or LLM-generated dialogue data, which limits the authenticity and diversity of doctor-patient interactions. In this work, we propose the first Chinese patient simulation dataset (Ch-PatientSim), constructed from realistic clinical interaction scenarios to comprehensively evaluate the performance of models in emulating patient behavior. Patients are simulated based on a five-dimensional persona structure. To address issues of the persona class imbalance, a portion of the dataset is augmented using few-shot generation, followed by manual verification. We evaluate various state-of-the-art LLMs and find that most produce overly formal responses that lack individual personality. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free Multi-Stage Patient Role-Playing (MSPRP) framework, which decomposes interactions into three stages to ensure both personalization and realism in model responses. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves model performance across multiple dimensions of patient simulation.

Paperid: 6985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08691.pdf

Abstract:
Context: Traditional software security analysis methods struggle to keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern codebases, requiring intelligent automation to detect, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently and accurately. Objective: This paper explores the incorporation of code-specific and general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate critical software security tasks, such as identifying vulnerabilities, predicting severity and access complexity, and generating fixes as a proof of concept. Method: We evaluate five pairs of recent LLMs, including both code-based and general-purpose open-source models, on two recognized C/C++ vulnerability datasets, namely Big-Vul and Vul-Repair. Additionally, we compare fine-tuning and prompt-based approaches. Results: The results show that fine-tuning uniformly outperforms both zero-shot and few-shot approaches across all tasks and models. Notably, code-specialized models excel in zero-shot and few-shot settings on complex tasks, while general-purpose models remain nearly as effective. Discrepancies among CodeBLEU, CodeBERTScore, BLEU, and ChrF highlight the inadequacy of current metrics for measuring repair quality. Conclusions: This study contributes to the software security community by investigating the potential of advanced LLMs to improve vulnerability analysis and remediation.

Paperid: 6986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08026.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific compound figures combine multiple labeled panels into a single image, but captions in real pipelines are often missing or only provide figure-level summaries, making panel-level understanding difficult. In this paper, we propose FigEx2, visual-conditioned framework that localizes panels and generates panel-wise captions directly from the compound figure. To mitigate the impact of diverse phrasing in open-ended captioning, we introduce a noise-aware gated fusion module that adaptively filters token-level features to stabilize the detection query space. Furthermore, we employ a staged optimization strategy combining supervised learning with reinforcement learning (RL), utilizing CLIP-based alignment and BERTScore-based semantic rewards to enforce strict multimodal consistency. To support high-quality supervision, we curate BioSci-Fig-Cap, a refined benchmark for panel-level grounding, alongside cross-disciplinary test suites in physics and chemistry. Experimental results demonstrate that FigEx2 achieves a superior 0.726 mAP@0.5:0.95 for detection and significantly outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B by 0.51 in METEOR and 0.24 in BERTScore. Notably, FigEx2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot transferability to out-of-distribution scientific domains without any fine-tuning.

Paperid: 6987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03981.pdf

Abstract:
To efficiently combat the spread of LLM-generated misinformation, we present RADAR, a retrieval-augmented detector with adversarial refinement for robust fake news detection. Our approach employs a generator that rewrites real articles with factual perturbations, paired with a lightweight detector that verifies claims using dense passage retrieval. To enable effective co-evolution, we introduce verbal adversarial feedback (VAF). Rather than relying on scalar rewards, VAF issues structured natural-language critiques; these guide the generator toward more sophisticated evasion attempts, compelling the detector to adapt and improve. On a fake news detection benchmark, RADAR achieves 86.98% ROC-AUC, significantly outperforming general-purpose LLMs with retrieval. Ablation studies confirm that detector-side retrieval yields the largest gains, while VAF and few-shot demonstrations provide critical signals for robust training.

Paperid: 6988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03232.pdf

Abstract:
Background: Reporting and Data Systems (RADS) standardize radiology risk communication but automated RADS assignment from narrative reports is challenging because of guideline complexity, output-format constraints, and limited benchmarking across RADS frameworks and model sizes. Purpose: To create RXL-RADSet, a radiologist-verified synthetic multi-RADS benchmark, and compare validity and accuracy of open-weight small language models (SLMs) with a proprietary model for RADS assignment. Materials and Methods: RXL-RADSet contains 1,600 synthetic radiology reports across 10 RADS (BI-RADS, CAD-RADS, GB-RADS, LI-RADS, Lung-RADS, NI-RADS, O-RADS, PI-RADS, TI-RADS, VI-RADS) and multiple modalities. Reports were generated by LLMs using scenario plans and simulated radiologist styles and underwent two-stage radiologist verification. We evaluated 41 quantized SLMs (12 families, 0.135-32B parameters) and GPT-5.2 under a fixed guided prompt. Primary endpoints were validity and accuracy; a secondary analysis compared guided versus zero-shot prompting. Results: Under guided prompting GPT-5.2 achieved 99.8% validity and 81.1% accuracy (1,600 predictions). Pooled SLMs (65,600 predictions) achieved 96.8% validity and 61.1% accuracy; top SLMs in the 20-32B range reached ~99% validity and mid-to-high 70% accuracy. Performance scaled with model size (inflection between <1B and >=10B) and declined with RADS complexity primarily due to classification difficulty rather than invalid outputs. Guided prompting improved validity (99.2% vs 96.7%) and accuracy (78.5% vs 69.6%) compared with zero-shot. Conclusion: RXL-RADSet provides a radiologist-verified multi-RADS benchmark; large SLMs (20-32B) can approach proprietary-model performance under guided prompting, but gaps remain for higher-complexity schemes.

Paperid: 6989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02618.pdf

Abstract:
Human cognition integrates information across nested timescales. While the cortex exhibits hierarchical Temporal Receptive Windows (TRWs), local circuits often display heterogeneous time constants. To reconcile this, we trained biologically constrained deep networks, based on scale-invariant hippocampal time cells, on a language classification task mimicking the hierarchical structure of language (e.g., 'letters' forming 'words'). First, using a feedforward model (SITHCon), we found that a hierarchy of TRWs emerged naturally across layers, despite the network having an identical spectrum of time constants within layers. We then distilled these inductive priors into a biologically plausible recurrent architecture, SITH-RNN. Training a sequence of architectures ranging from generic RNNs to this restricted subset showed that the scale-invariant SITH-RNN learned faster with orders-of-magnitude fewer parameters, and generalized zero-shot to out-of-distribution timescales. These results suggest the brain employs scale-invariant, sequential priors - coding "what" happened "when" - making recurrent networks with such priors particularly well-suited to describe human cognition.

Paperid: 6990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02043.pdf

Abstract:
Reasoning has long been understood as a pathway between stages of understanding. Proper reasoning leads to understanding of a given subject. This reasoning was conceptualized as a process of understanding in a particular way, i.e., "symbolic reasoning". Foundational Models (FM) demonstrate that this is not a necessary condition for many reasoning tasks: they can "reason" by way of imitating the process of "thinking out loud", testing the produced pathways, and iterating on these pathways on their own. This leads to some form of reasoning that can solve problems on its own or with few-shot learning, but appears fundamentally different from human reasoning due to its lack of grounding and common sense, leading to brittleness of the reasoning process. These insights promise to substantially alter our assessment of reasoning and its necessary conditions, but also inform the approaches to safety and robust defences against this brittleness of FMs. This paper offers and discusses several philosophical interpretations of this phenomenon, argues that the previously apt metaphor of the "stochastic parrot" has lost its relevance and thus should be abandoned, and reflects on different normative elements in the safety- and appropriateness-considerations emerging from these reasoning models and their growing capacity.

Paperid: 6991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01315.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate quantification of local strain fields during bladder contraction is essential for understanding the biomechanics of bladder micturition, in both health and disease. Conventional digital image correlation (DIC) methods have been successfully applied to various biological tissues; however, this approach requires artificial speckling, which can alter both passive and active properties of the tissue. In this study, we introduce a speckle-free framework for quantifying local strain fields using a state-of-the-art, zero-shot transformer model, CoTracker3. We utilized a custom-designed, portable isotonic biaxial apparatus compatible with multiphoton microscopy (MPM) to demonstrate this approach, successfully tracking natural bladder lumen textures without artificial markers. Benchmark tests validated the method's high pixel accuracy and low strain errors. Our framework effectively captured heterogeneous deformation patterns, despite complex folding and buckling, which conventional DIC often fails to track. Application to in vitro active bladder contractions in four rat specimens (n=4) revealed statistically significant anisotropy (p<0.01), with higher contraction longitudinally compared to circumferentially. Multiphoton microscopy further illustrated and confirmed heterogeneous morphological changes, such as large fold formation during active contraction. This non-invasive approach eliminates speckle-induced artifacts, enabling more physiologically relevant measurements, and has broad applicability for material testing of other biological and engineered systems.

Paperid: 6992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00446.pdf

Abstract:
Time series anomaly detection is essential for the reliable operation of complex systems, but most existing methods require extensive task-specific training. We explore whether time series foundation models (TSFMs), pretrained on large heterogeneous data, can serve as universal backbones for anomaly detection. Through systematic experiments across multiple benchmarks, we compare zero-shot inference, full model adaptation, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies. Our results demonstrate that TSFMs outperform task-specific baselines, achieving notable gains in AUC-PR and VUS-PR, particularly under severe class imbalance. Moreover, PEFT methods such as LoRA, OFT, and HRA not only reduce computational cost but also match or surpass full fine-tuning in most cases, indicating that TSFMs can be efficiently adapted for anomaly detection, even when pretrained for forecasting. These findings position TSFMs as promising general-purpose models for scalable and efficient time series anomaly detection.

Paperid: 6993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24740.pdf

Abstract:
An important function of autonomous microrobots is the ability to perform robust movement over terrain. This paper explores an edge ML approach to microrobot locomotion, allowing for on-device, lower latency control under compute, memory, and power constraints. This paper explores the locomotion of a sub-centimeter quadrupedal microrobot via reinforcement learning (RL) and deploys the resulting controller on an ultra-small system-on-chip (SoC), SC$μ$M-3C, featuring an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller running at 5 MHz. We train a compact FP32 multilayer perceptron (MLP) policy with two hidden layers ($[128, 64]$) in a massively parallel GPU simulation and enhance robustness by utilizing domain randomization over simulation parameters. We then study integer (Int8) quantization (per-tensor and per-feature) to allow for higher inference update rates on our resource-limited hardware, and we connect hardware power budgets to achievable update frequency via a cycles-per-update model for inference on our Cortex-M0. We propose a resource-aware gait scheduling viewpoint: given a device power budget, we can select the gait mode (trot/intermediate/gallop) that maximizes expected RL reward at a corresponding feasible update frequency. Finally, we deploy our MLP policy on a real-world large-scale robot on uneven terrain, qualitatively noting that domain-randomized training can improve out-of-distribution stability. We do not claim real-world large-robot empirical zero-shot transfer in this work.

Paperid: 6994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24674.pdf

Abstract:
We present a new approach for representing and reconstructing multidimensional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Our method builds on a novel, learned feature-based image representation that disentangles different types of features, such as geometry and contrast, into distinct low-dimensional latent spaces, enabling better exploitation of feature correlations in multidimensional images and incorporation of pre-learned priors specific to different feature types for reconstruction. More specifically, the disentanglement was achieved via an encoderdecoder network and image transfer training using large public data, enhanced by a style-based decoder design. A latent diffusion model was introduced to impose stronger constraints on distinct feature spaces. New reconstruction formulations and algorithms were developed to integrate the learned representation with a zero-shot selfsupervised learning adaptation and subspace modeling. The proposed method has been evaluated on accelerated T1 and T2 parameter mapping, achieving improved performance over state-of-the-art reconstruction methods, without task-specific supervised training or fine-tuning. This work offers a new strategy for learning-based multidimensional image reconstruction where only limited data are available for problem-specific or task-specific training.

Paperid: 6995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24556.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into critical global infrastructure, the assumption that safety alignment transfers zero-shot from English to other languages remains a dangerous blind spot. This study presents a systematic audit of three state of the art models (GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude 4.5 Opus) using HausaSafety, a novel adversarial dataset grounded in West African threat scenarios (e.g., Yahoo-Yahoo fraud, Dane gun manufacturing). Employing a 2 x 4 factorial design across 1,440 evaluations, we tested the non-linear interaction between language (English vs. Hausa) and temporal framing. Our results challenge the prevailing multilingual safety gap narrative. Instead of a simple degradation in low-resource settings, we identified a mechanism of Complex Interference where safety is determined by the intersection of variables. While models exhibited a Reverse Linguistic with Claude 4.5 Opus proving significantly safer in Hausa (45.0%) than in English (36.7%) due to uncertainty-driven refusal they suffered catastrophic failures in temporal reasoning. We report a profound Temporal Asymmetry, where past-tense framing bypassed defenses (15.6% safe) while future-tense scenarios triggered hyper-conservative refusals (57.2% safe). The magnitude of this volatility is illustrated by a 9.2x disparity between the safest and most vulnerable configurations, proving that safety is not a fixed property but a context-dependent state. We conclude that current models rely on superficial heuristics rather than robust semantic understanding, creating Safety Pockets that leave Global South users exposed to localized harms. We propose Invariant Alignment as a necessary paradigm shift to ensure safety stability across linguistic and temporal shifts.

Paperid: 6996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22777.pdf

Abstract:
Generalization across the domains is not possible without asserting a structure that constrains the unseen target domain w.r.t. the source domain. Building on causal transportability theory, we design an algorithm for zero-shot compositional generalization which relies on access to qualitative domain knowledge in form of a causal graph for intra-domain structure and discrepancies oracle for inter-domain mechanism sharing. \textit{Circuit-TR} learns a collection of modules (i.e., local predictors) from the source data, and transport/compose them to obtain a circuit for prediction in the target domain if the causal structure licenses. Furthermore, circuit transportability enables us to design a supervised domain adaptation scheme that operates without access to an explicit causal structure, and instead uses limited target data. Our theoretical results characterize classes of few-shot learnable tasks in terms of graphical circuit transportability criteria, and connects few-shot generalizability with the established notion of circuit size complexity; controlled simulations corroborate our theoretical results.

Paperid: 6997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22225.pdf

Abstract:
The extraction of structured knowledge from scientific literature remains a major bottleneck in nutraceutical research, particularly when identifying microbial strains involved in compound biosynthesis. This study presents a domain-adapted system powered by large language models (LLMs) and guided by advanced prompt engineering techniques to automate the identification of nutraceutical-producing microbes from unstructured scientific text. By leveraging few-shot prompting and tailored query designs, the system demonstrates robust performance across multiple configurations, with DeepSeekV3 outperforming LLaMA2 in accuracy, especially when domain-specific strain information is included. A structured and validated dataset comprising 35 nutraceutical-strain associations was generated, spanning amino acids, fibers, phytochemicals, and vitamins. The results reveal significant microbial diversity across monoculture and co-culture systems, with dominant contributions from Corynebacterium glutamicum, Escherichia coli, and Bacillus subtilis, alongside emerging synthetic consortia. This AI-driven framework not only enhances the scalability and interpretability of literature mining but also provides actionable insights for microbial strain selection, synthetic biology design, and precision fermentation strategies in the production of high-value nutraceuticals.

Paperid: 6998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20970.pdf

Abstract:
Existing dynamics prediction frameworks for transient stability analysis (TSA) fail to achieve multi-scenario "universality"--the inherent ability of a single, pre-trained architecture to generalize across diverse operating conditions, unseen faults, and heterogeneous systems. To address this, this paper proposes TSA-LLM, a large language model (LLM)-based universal framework that models multi-variate transient dynamics prediction as a univariate generative task with three key innovations: First, a novel data processing pipeline featuring channel independence decomposition to resolve dimensional heterogeneity, sample-wise normalization to eliminate separate stable or unstable pipelines, and temporal patching for efficient long-sequence modeling; Second, a parameter-efficient freeze-and-finetune strategy that augments the LLM's architecture with dedicated input embedding and output projection layers while freezing core transformer blocks to preserve generic feature extraction capabilities; Third, a two-stage fine-tuning scheme that combines teacher forcing, which feeds the model ground-truth data during initial training, with scheduled sampling, which gradually shifts to leveraging model-generated predictions, to mitigate cumulative errors in long-horizon iterative prediction. Comprehensive testing demonstrates the framework's universality, as TSA-LLM trained solely on the New England 39-bus system achieves zero-shot generalization to mixed stability conditions and unseen faults, and matches expert performance on the larger Iceland 189-bus system with only 5% fine-tuning data. This multi-scenario versatility validates a universal framework that eliminates scenario-specific retraining and achieves scalability via large-scale parameters and cross-scenario training data.

Paperid: 6999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18748.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of automatic code documentation generation models depends critically on the quality of the training data used for supervision. However, most existing code documentation datasets are constructed through large scale scraping of public repositories with limited quality control. As a result, they often contain noisy documentation, extensive duplication, and increasing contamination from AI generated content. These issues weaken the supervision signal available to learning-based models and complicate evaluation. We introduce Code2Doc, a quality-first curated dataset for function-level code documentation generation. Code2Doc consists of 13,358 high-quality function-documentation pairs extracted from widely used open-source repositories spanning five programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, and C++. The dataset is constructed using a four-stage curation pipeline that enforces documentation completeness and clarity, filters functions based on structural and complexity criteria, removes exact and near-duplicate code, and identifies documentation likely to be AI generated. Starting from 52,069 extracted candidates, only 25.6% satisfy all quality constraints. We provide a detailed analysis of the resulting dataset, which achieves a mean documentation quality score of 6.93 out of 10. Overall, 86.9% of samples contain explicit type annotations, and only 2.9% are flagged as potentially AI generated. Baseline experiments show that fine-tuning a large language model on Code2Doc yields relative improvements of 29.47% in BLEU and 24.04% in ROUGE-L over zero shot performance, despite the modest dataset size. We release both the dataset and the full curation pipeline to support reproducible research on automatic code documentation generation.

Paperid: 7000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18613.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) in long-term deployment requires reasoning beyond pixel similarity: systems must make transparent, interpretable decisions that remain robust under lighting, weather and seasonal change. We present Text2Graph VPR, an explainable semantic localization system that converts image sequences into textual scene descriptions, parses those descriptions into structured scene graphs, and reasons over the resulting graphs to identify places. Scene graphs capture objects, attributes and pairwise relations; we aggregate per-frame graphs into a compact place representation and perform retrieval with a dual-similarity mechanism that fuses learned Graph Attention Network (GAT) embeddings and a Shortest-Path (SP) kernel for structural matching. This hybrid design enables both learned semantic matching and topology-aware comparison, and -- critically -- produces human-readable intermediate representations that support diagnostic analysis and improve transparency in the decision process. We validate the system on Oxford RobotCar and MSLS (Amman/San Francisco) benchmarks and demonstrate robust retrieval under severe appearance shifts, along with zero-shot operation using human textual queries. The results illustrate that semantic, graph-based reasoning is a viable and interpretable alternative for place recognition, particularly suited to safety-sensitive and resource-constrained settings.

Paperid: 7001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16871.pdf

Abstract:
To cope with real-world dynamics, an intelligent system needs to incrementally acquire, update, and exploit knowledge throughout its lifetime. This ability, known as Continual learning, provides a foundation for AI systems to develop themselves adaptively. Catastrophic forgetting is a major challenge to the progress of Continual Learning approaches, where learning a new task usually results in a dramatic performance drop on previously learned ones. Many approaches have emerged to counteract the impact of CF. Most of the proposed approaches can be categorized into five classes: replay-based, regularization-based, optimization-based, representation-based, and architecture-based. In this work, we approach the problem from a different angle, specifically by considering the optimal sequencing of tasks as they are presented to the model. We investigate the role of task sequencing in mitigating CF and propose a method for determining the optimal task order. The proposed method leverages zero-shot scoring algorithms inspired by neural architecture search (NAS). Results demonstrate that intelligent task sequencing can substantially reduce CF. Moreover, when combined with traditional continual learning strategies, sequencing offers enhanced performance and robustness against forgetting. Additionally, the presented approaches can find applications in other fields, such as curriculum learning.

Paperid: 7002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16786.pdf

Abstract:
Specific emitter identification (SEI) utilizes passive hardware characteristics to authenticate transmitters, providing a robust physical-layer security solution. However, most deep-learning-based methods rely on extensive data or require prior information, which poses challenges in real-world scenarios with limited labeled data. We propose an integrated complex variational mode decomposition algorithm that decomposes and reconstructs complex-valued signals to approximate the original transmitted signals, thereby enabling more accurate feature extraction. We further utilize a temporal convolutional network to effectively model the sequential signal characteristics, and introduce a spatial attention mechanism to adaptively weight informative signal segments, significantly enhancing identification performance. Additionally, the branch network allows leveraging pre-trained weights from other data while reducing the need for auxiliary datasets. Ablation experiments on the simulated data demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of the model. An accuracy comparison on a public dataset reveals that our method achieves 96% accuracy using only 10 symbols without requiring any prior knowledge.

Paperid: 7003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14738.pdf

Abstract:
The accelerating pace of scientific publication makes it difficult to identify truly original research among incremental work. We propose a framework for estimating the conceptual novelty of research papers by combining semantic representation learning with retrieval-based comparison against prior literature. We model novelty as both a binary classification task (novel vs. non-novel) and a pairwise ranking task (comparative novelty), enabling absolute and relative assessments. Experiments benchmark three model scales, ranging from compact domain-specific encoders to a zero-shot frontier model. Results show that fine-tuned lightweight models outperform larger zero-shot models despite their smaller parameter count, indicating that task-specific supervision matters more than scale for conceptual novelty estimation. We further deploy the best-performing model as an online system for public interaction and real-time novelty scoring.

Paperid: 7004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14417.pdf

Abstract:
Vehicle Dispatching Systems (VDSs) are critical to the operational efficiency of Automated Container Terminals (ACTs). However, their widespread commercialization is hindered due to their low transferability across diverse terminals. This transferability challenge stems from three limitations: high reliance on port operational specialists, a high demand for terminal-specific data, and time-consuming manual deployment processes. Leveraging the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), this paper proposes PortAgent, an LLM-driven vehicle dispatching agent that fully automates the VDS transferring workflow. It bears three features: (1) no need for port operations specialists; (2) low need of data; and (3) fast deployment. Specifically, specialist dependency is eliminated by the Virtual Expert Team (VET). The VET collaborates with four virtual experts, including a Knowledge Retriever, Modeler, Coder, and Debugger, to emulate a human expert team for the VDS transferring workflow. These experts specialize in the domain of terminal VDS via a few-shot example learning approach. Through this approach, the experts are able to learn VDS-domain knowledge from a few VDS examples. These examples are retrieved via a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism, mitigating the high demand for terminal-specific data. Furthermore, an automatic VDS design workflow is established among these experts to avoid extra manual interventions. In this workflow, a self-correction loop inspired by the LLM Reflexion framework is created

Paperid: 7005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14031.pdf

Abstract:
This study evaluates two leading approaches for teaching construction robots new skills to understand their applicability for construction automation: a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods. The goal is to understand both task performance and the practical effort needed to deploy each approach on real jobs. The authors developed two teleoperation interfaces to control the robots and collect the demonstrations needed, both of which proved effective for training robots for long-horizon and dexterous tasks. In addition, the authors conduct a three-stage evaluation. First, the authors compare a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) policy with a Deep Q-network (DQN) imitation model to identify the stronger RL baseline, focusing on model performance, generalization, and a pick-up experiment. Second, three different VLA models are trained in two different scenarios and compared with each other. Third, the authors benchmark the selected RL baseline against the VLA model using computational and sample-efficiency measures and then a robot experiment on a multi-stage panel installation task that includes transport and installation. The VLA model demonstrates strong generalization and few-shot capability, achieving 60% and 100% success in the pickup phase. In comparison, DQN can be made robust but needs additional noise during tuning, which increases the workload. Overall, the findings indicate that VLA offers practical advantages for changing tasks by reducing programming effort and enabling useful performance with minimal data, while DQN provides a viable baseline when sufficient tuning effort is acceptable.

Paperid: 7006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13632.pdf

Abstract:
Stuttering detection breaks down when disfluencies overlap. Existing parametric models struggle to distinguish complex, simultaneous disfluencies (e.g., a 'block' with a 'prolongation') due to the scarcity of these specific combinations in training data. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has revolutionized NLP by grounding models in external knowledge, this paradigm remains unexplored in pathological speech processing. To bridge this gap, we introduce StutterFuse, the first Retrieval-Augmented Classifier (RAC) for multi-label stuttering detection. By conditioning a Conformer encoder on a non-parametric memory bank of clinical examples, we allow the model to classify by reference rather than memorization. We further identify and solve "Modality Collapse", an "Echo Chamber" effect where naive retrieval boosts recall but degrades precision. We mitigate this using: (1) SetCon, a Jaccard-Weighted Metric Learning objective that optimizes for multi-label set similarity, and (2) a Gated Mixture-of-Experts fusion strategy that dynamically arbitrates between acoustic evidence and retrieved context. On the SEP-28k dataset, StutterFuse achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.65, outperforming strong baselines and demonstrating remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization.

Paperid: 7007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12498.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot image classification remains difficult under limited supervision and visual domain shift. Recent cache-based adaptation approaches (e.g., Tip-Adapter) address this challenge to some extent by learning lightweight residual adapters over frozen features, yet they still inherit CLIP's tendency to encode global, general-purpose representations that are not optimally discriminative to adapt the generalist to the specialist's domain in low-data regimes. We address this limitation with a novel patch-driven relational refinement that learns cache adapter weights from intra-image patch dependencies rather than treating an image embedding as a monolithic vector. Specifically, we introduce a relational gated graph attention network that constructs a patch graph and performs edge-aware attention to emphasize informative inter-patch interactions, producing context-enriched patch embeddings. A learnable multi-aggregation pooling then composes these into compact, task-discriminative representations that better align cache keys with the target few-shot classes. Crucially, the proposed graph refinement is used only during training to distil relational structure into the cache, incurring no additional inference cost beyond standard cache lookup. Final predictions are obtained by a residual fusion of cache similarity scores with CLIP zero-shot logits. Extensive evaluations on 11 benchmarks show consistent gains over state-of-the-art CLIP adapter and cache-based baselines while preserving zero-shot efficiency. We further validate battlefield relevance by introducing an Injured vs. Uninjured Soldier dataset for casualty recognition. It is motivated by the operational need to support triage decisions within the "platinum minutes" and the broader "golden hour" window in time-critical UAV-driven search-and-rescue and combat casualty care.

Paperid: 7008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11340.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) has recently made notable progress through set matching and efficient adaptation of large-scale pre-trained models. However, two key limitations persist. First, existing set matching metrics typically rely on cosine similarity to measure inter-frame linear dependencies and then perform matching with only instance-level information, thus failing to capture more complex patterns such as nonlinear relationships and overlooking task-specific cues. Second, for efficient adaptation of CLIP to FSAR, recent work performing fine-tuning via skip-fusion layers (which we refer to as side layers) has significantly reduced memory cost. However, the newly introduced side layers are often difficult to optimize under limited data conditions. To address these limitations, we propose TS-FSAR, a framework comprising three components: (1) a visual Ladder Side Network (LSN) for efficient CLIP fine-tuning; (2) a metric called Task-Specific Distance Correlation Matching (TS-DCM), which uses $α$-distance correlation to model both linear and nonlinear inter-frame dependencies and leverages a task prototype to enable task-specific matching; and (3) a Guiding LSN with Adapted CLIP (GLAC) module, which regularizes LSN using the adapted frozen CLIP to improve training for better $α$-distance correlation estimation under limited supervision. Extensive experiments on five widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our TS-FSAR yields superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-arts.

Paperid: 7009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10501.pdf

Abstract:
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) offers scalable methods for algorithmically creating complex, customizable worlds. However, controlling these pipelines requires the precise configuration of opaque technical parameters. We propose a training-free architecture that utilizes LLM agents for zero-shot PCG parameter configuration. While Large Language Models (LLMs) promise a natural language interface for PCG tools, off-the-shelf models often fail to bridge the semantic gap between abstract user instructions and strict parameter specifications. Our system pairs an Actor agent with a Critic agent, enabling an iterative workflow where the system autonomously reasons over tool parameters and refines configurations to progressively align with human design preferences. We validate this approach on the generation of various 3D maps, establishing a new benchmark for instruction-following in PCG. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms single-agent baselines, producing diverse and structurally valid environments from natural language descriptions. These results demonstrate that off-the-shelf LLMs can be effectively repurposed as generalized agents for arbitrary PCG tools. By shifting the burden from model training to architectural reasoning, our method offers a scalable framework for mastering complex software without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10257.pdf

Abstract:
In smart-home voice assistant scenario, deciding whether to accept or reject a user query is the first step before any downstream processing. To address the limited query-rejection capability of current voice assistants, this paper presents the first Chinese-oriented open-source benchmark and evaluation suite for smart homes, together with a personalized query-rejection method based on large language models. On the data side, we construct the first multimodal query-rejection dataset tailored for domestic scenarios, containing 11,913 manually labeled text-speech pairs that systematically cover twelve typical dialogue types (e.g., chit-chat, non-human sounds, valid commands, ambiguous references, device-irrelevant requests). Fine-grained labels, conversational context and multi-turn information are provided to support both zero-shot and fine-tuning evaluations across language and multimodal large models. On the method side, we propose a three-tier collaborative architecture: first, a Qwen-2.5-3B adapter fine-tuned to model family-agnostic semantic boundaries; second, a dynamic household-level historical dialogue module to capture personalized habits; third, a household-specific RAG knowledge base that explicitly memorizes and revises past false-rejection cases. Experiments show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and fine-tuned general LLMs on the constructed dataset, with pronounced gains in rejection accuracy for family-specific expressions and complex multi-turn scenarios. This work provides a reproducible data foundation, evaluation standard and extensible technical framework for reliability research in smart-home voice interaction.

Paperid: 7011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09779.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) mitigates data scarcity in cardiac MRI segmentation but typically relies on semi-supervised techniques sensitive to domain shifts and validation bias, restricting zero-shot generalizability. We propose PathCo-LatticE, a fully supervised FSL framework that replaces unlabeled data with pathology-guided synthetic supervision. First, our Virtual Patient Engine models continuous latent disease trajectories from sparse clinical anchors, using generative modeling to synthesize physiologically plausible, fully labeled 3D cohorts. Second, Self-Reinforcing Interleaved Validation (SIV) provides a leakage-free protocol that evaluates models online with progressively challenging synthetic samples, eliminating the need for real validation data. Finally, a dynamic Lattice-of-Experts (LoE) organizes specialized networks within a pathology-aware topology and activates the most relevant experts per input, enabling robust zero-shot generalization to unseen data without target-domain fine-tuning. We evaluated PathCo-LatticE in a strict out-of-distribution (OOD) setting, deriving all anchors and severity statistics from a single-source domain (ACDC) and performing zero-shot testing on the multi-center, multi-vendor M&Ms dataset. PathCo-LatticE outperforms four state-of-the-art FSL methods by 4.2-11% Dice starting from only 7 labeled anchors, and approaches fully supervised performance (within 1% Dice) with only 19 labeled anchors. The method shows superior harmonization across four vendors and generalization to unseen pathologies. [Code will be made publicly available].

Paperid: 7012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09172.pdf

Abstract:
We tackle continual adaptation of vision-language models to new attributes, objects, and their compositions in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL), while preventing forgetting of prior knowledge. Unlike classical continual learning where classes are disjoint, CCZSL is more complex as attributes and objects may reoccur across sessions while compositions remain unique. Built on a frozen VLM backbone, we propose the first Prompt-based Continual Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (PromptCCZSL) framework that retains prior knowledge through recency-weighted multi-teacher distillation. It employs session-aware compositional prompts to fuse multimodal features for new compositions, while attribute and object prompts are learned through session-agnostic fusion to maintain global semantic consistency, which is further stabilized by a Cosine Anchor Loss (CAL) to preserve prior knowledge. To enhance adaptation in the current session, an Orthogonal Projection Loss (OPL) ensures that new attribute and object embeddings remain distinct from previous ones, preventing overlap, while an Intra-Session Diversity Loss (IDL) promotes variation among current-session embeddings for richer, more discriminative representations. We also introduce a comprehensive protocol that jointly measures catastrophic forgetting and compositional generalization. Extensive experiments on UT-Zappos and C-GQA benchmarks demonstrate that PromptCCZSL achieves substantial improvements over prior VLM-based and non-VLM baselines, setting a new benchmark for CCZSL in closed-world settings.

Paperid: 7013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08656.pdf

Abstract:
Holonomic autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have the hardware ability for agile maneuvering in both translational and rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs). However, due to challenges inherent to underwater vehicles, such as complex hydrostatics and hydrodynamics, parametric uncertainties, and frequent changes in dynamics due to payload changes, control is challenging. Performance typically relies on carefully tuned controllers targeting unique platform configurations, and a need for re-tuning for deployment under varying payloads and hydrodynamic conditions. As a consequence, agile maneuvering with simultaneous tracking of time-varying references in both translational and rotational DOFs is rarely utilized in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first general zero-shot sim2real deep reinforcement learning-based (DRL) velocity controller enabling path following and agile 6DOF maneuvering with a training duration of just 3 minutes. Sim2Swim, the proposed approach, inspired by state-of-the-art DRL-based position control, leverages domain randomization and massively parallelized training to converge to field-deployable control policies for AUVs of variable characteristics without post-processing or tuning. Sim2Swim is extensively validated in pool trials for a variety of configurations, showcasing robust control for highly agile motions.

Paperid: 7014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07583.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we propose a structured methodology that utilizes large language models (LLMs) in a cost-efficient and parsimonious manner, integrating the strengths of scholars and machines while offsetting their respective weaknesses. Our methodology, facilitated through a chain of thought and few-shot learning prompting from computer science, extends best practices for co-author teams in qualitative research to human-machine teams in quantitative research. This allows humans to utilize abductive reasoning and natural language to interrogate not just what the machine has done but also what the human has done. Our method highlights how scholars can manage inherent weaknesses OF LLMs using careful, low-cost techniques. We demonstrate how to use the methodology to interrogate human-machine rating discrepancies for a sample of 1,934 press releases announcing pharmaceutical alliances (1990-2017).

Paperid: 7015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06502.pdf

Abstract:
Artificially intelligent (AI) co-scientists must be able to sift through research literature cost-efficiently while applying nuanced scientific reasoning. We evaluate Small Language Models (SLMs, <= 8B parameters) for classifying medical research papers. Using literature on the oncogenic potential of HMTV/MMTV-like viruses in breast cancer as a case study, we assess model performance with both zero-shot and in-context learning (ICL; few-shot prompting) strategies against frontier proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs). Llama 3 and Qwen2.5 outperform GPT-5 (API, low/high effort), Gemini 3 Pro Preview, and Meerkat in zero-shot settings, though trailing Gemini 2.5 Pro. ICL leads to improved performance on a case-by-case basis, allowing Llama 3 and Qwen2.5 to match Gemini 2.5 Pro in binary classification. Systematic lexical-ablation experiments show that SLM decisions are often grounded in valid scientific cues but can be influenced by spurious textual artifacts, underscoring need for interpretability in high-stakes pipelines. Our results reveal both promise and limitations of modern SLMs for scientific triage; pairing SLMs with simple but principled prompting strategies can approach performance of the strongest LLMs for targeted literature filtering in co-scientist pipelines.

Paperid: 7016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05863.pdf

Abstract:
Medical question-answering (QA) systems can benefit from advances in large language models (LLMs), but directly applying LLMs to the clinical domain poses challenges such as maintaining factual accuracy and avoiding hallucinations. In this paper, we present a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based medical QA system that combines domain-specific knowledge retrieval with open-source LLMs to answer medical questions. We fine-tune two state-of-the-art open LLMs (LLaMA~2 and Falcon) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for efficient domain specialization. The system retrieves relevant medical literature to ground the LLM's answers, thereby improving factual correctness and reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the approach on benchmark datasets (PubMedQA and MedMCQA) and show that retrieval augmentation yields measurable improvements in answer accuracy compared to using LLMs alone. Our fine-tuned LLaMA~2 model achieves 71.8% accuracy on PubMedQA, substantially improving over the 55.4% zero-shot baseline, while maintaining transparency by providing source references. We also detail the system design and fine-tuning methodology, demonstrating that grounding answers in retrieved evidence reduces unsupported content by approximately 60%. These results highlight the potential of RAG-augmented open-source LLMs for reliable biomedical QA, pointing toward practical clinical informatics applications.

Paperid: 7017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05658.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have recently demonstrated strong potential in medical Question Answering (QA). Existing approaches are largely English-focused and primarily rely on distillation from general-purpose LLMs, raising concerns about the reliability of their medical knowledge. In this work, we present a method to generate multilingual reasoning traces grounded in factual medical knowledge. We produce 500k traces in English, Italian, and Spanish, using a retrievalaugmented generation approach over medical information from Wikipedia. The traces are generated to solve medical questions drawn from MedQA and MedMCQA, which we extend to Italian and Spanish. We test our pipeline in both in-domain and outof-domain settings across Medical QA benchmarks, and demonstrate that our reasoning traces improve performance both when utilized via in-context learning (few-shot) and supervised fine-tuning, yielding state-of-the-art results among 8B-parameter LLMs. We believe that these resources can support the development of safer, more transparent clinical decision-support tools in multilingual settings. We release the full suite of resources: reasoning traces, translated QA datasets, Medical-Wikipedia, and fine-tuned models.

Paperid: 7018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05000.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a diffusion-transformer (DiT) framework for single-image reflection removal that leverages the generalization strengths of foundation diffusion models in the restoration setting. Rather than relying on task-specific architectures, we repurpose a pre-trained DiT-based foundation model by conditioning it on reflection-contaminated inputs and guiding it toward clean transmission layers. We systematically analyze existing reflection removal data sources for diversity, scalability, and photorealism. To address the shortage of suitable data, we construct a physically based rendering (PBR) pipeline in Blender, built around the Principled BSDF, to synthesize realistic glass materials and reflection effects. Efficient LoRA-based adaptation of the foundation model, combined with the proposed synthetic data, achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks. These results demonstrate that pretrained diffusion transformers, when paired with physically grounded data synthesis and efficient adaptation, offer a scalable and high-fidelity solution for reflection removal. Project page: https://hf.co/spaces/huawei-bayerlab/windowseat-reflection-removal-web

Paperid: 7019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04967.pdf

Abstract:
Automated retinal disease diagnosis is vital given the rising prevalence of conditions such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. Conventional deep learning approaches require large annotated datasets, which are costly and often imbalanced across disease categories, limiting their reliability in practice. Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to generalize from only a few labeled samples per class. In this study,we propose a balanced few-shot episodic learning framework tailored to the Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset (RFMiD). Focusing on the ten most represented classes, which still show substantial imbalance between majority diseases (e.g., Diabetic Retinopathy, Macular Hole) and minority ones (e.g., Optic Disc Edema, Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion), our method integrates three key components: (i) balanced episodic sampling, ensuring equal participation of all classes in each 5-way 5-shot episode; (ii) targeted augmentation, including Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and color/geometry transformations, to improve minority-class di- versity; and (iii) a ResNet-50 encoder pretrained on ImageNet, selected for its superior ability to capture fine-grained retinal features. Prototypes are computed in the embedding space and classification is performed with cosine similarity for improved stability. Trained on 100 episodes and evaluated on 1,000 test episodes, our framework achieves substantial accuracy gains and reduces bias toward majority classes, with notable improvements for underrepresented diseases. These results demonstrate that dataset-aware few-shot pipelines, combined with balanced sampling and CLAHE-enhanced preprocessing, can deliver more robust and clinically fair retinal disease diagnosis under data-constrained conditions.

Paperid: 7020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03439.pdf

Abstract:
The application of large language models (LLMs) in recommendation systems has recently gained traction. Traditional recommendation systems often lack explainability and suffer from issues such as popularity bias. Previous research has also indicated that LLMs, when used as standalone predictors, fail to achieve accuracy comparable to traditional models. To address these challenges, we propose to use LLM as an explainable re-ranker, a hybrid approach that combines traditional recommendation models with LLMs to enhance both accuracy and interpretability. We constructed a dataset to train the re-ranker LLM and evaluated the alignment between the generated dataset and human expectations. Leveraging a two-stage training process, our model significantly improved NDCG, a key ranking metric. Moreover, the re-ranker outperformed a zero-shot baseline in ranking accuracy and interpretability. These results highlight the potential of integrating traditional recommendation models with LLMs to address limitations in existing systems and pave the way for more explainable and fair recommendation frameworks.

Paperid: 7021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03237.pdf

Abstract:
Most existing 3D shape datasets and models focus solely on geometry, overlooking the material properties that determine how objects appear. We introduce a two-stage large language model (LLM) based method for inferring material composition directly from 3D point clouds with coarse segmentations. Our key insight is to decouple reasoning about what an object is from what it is made of. In the first stage, an LLM predicts the object's semantic; in the second stage, it assigns plausible materials to each geometric segment, conditioned on the inferred semantics. Both stages operate in a zero-shot manner, without task-specific training. Because existing datasets lack reliable material annotations, we evaluate our method using an LLM-as-a-Judge implemented in DeepEval. Across 1,000 shapes from Fusion/ABS and ShapeNet, our method achieves high semantic and material plausibility. These results demonstrate that language models can serve as general-purpose priors for bridging geometric reasoning and material understanding in 3D data.

Paperid: 7022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02833.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate input normalization methods for Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs). While normalization is well-studied in dataset-specific time-series models, it remains overlooked in TSFMs where generalization is critical. Time-series data, unlike text or images, exhibits significant scale variation across domains and channels, coupled with non-stationarity, can undermine TSFM performance regardless of architectural complexity. Through systematic evaluation across four architecturally diverse TSFMs, we empirically establish REVIN as the most efficient approach, reducing zero-shot MASE by 89\% relative to an un-normalized baseline and by 44\% versus other normalization methods, while matching the best in-domain accuracy (0.84 MASE) without any dataset-level preprocessing -- yielding the highest accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Yet its effect utilization depends on architectural design choices and optimization objective, particularly with respect to training loss scale sensitivity and model type (probabilistic, point-forecast, or LLM-based models).

Paperid: 7023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02633.pdf

Abstract:
Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a compelling framework for specifying complex, structured tasks for reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Recent work has shown that interpreting LTL instructions as finite automata, which can be seen as high-level programs monitoring task progress, enables learning a single generalist policy capable of executing arbitrary instructions at test time. However, existing approaches fall short in environments where multiple high-level events (i.e., atomic propositions) can be true at the same time and potentially interact in complicated ways. In this work, we propose a novel approach to learning a multi-task policy for following arbitrary LTL instructions that addresses this shortcoming. Our method conditions the policy on sequences of simple Boolean formulae, which directly align with transitions in the automaton, and are encoded via a graph neural network (GNN) to yield structured task representations. Experiments in a complex chess-based environment demonstrate the advantages of our approach.

Paperid: 7024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02315.pdf

Abstract:
Accurately predicting protein fitness with minimal experimental data is a persistent challenge in protein engineering. We introduce PRIMO (PRotein In-context Mutation Oracle), a transformer-based framework that leverages in-context learning and test-time training to adapt rapidly to new proteins and assays without large task-specific datasets. By encoding sequence information, auxiliary zero-shot predictions, and sparse experimental labels from many assays as a unified token set in a pre-training masked-language modeling paradigm, PRIMO learns to prioritize promising variants through a preference-based loss function. Across diverse protein families and properties-including both substitution and indel mutations-PRIMO outperforms zero-shot and fully supervised baselines. This work underscores the power of combining large-scale pre-training with efficient test-time adaptation to tackle challenging protein design tasks where data collection is expensive and label availability is limited.

Paperid: 7025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01498.pdf

Abstract:
This report presents solutions to three machine learning challenges: compositional image retrieval, zero-shot anomaly detection, and backdoored model detection. In compositional image retrieval, we developed a system that processes visual and textual inputs to retrieve relevant images, achieving 95.38\% accuracy and ranking first with a clear margin over the second team. For zero-shot anomaly detection, we designed a model that identifies and localizes anomalies in images without prior exposure to abnormal examples, securing 1st place with 73.14\% accuracy. In the backdoored model detection task, we proposed a method to detect hidden backdoor triggers in neural networks, reaching an accuracy of 78\%, which placed our approach in second place. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in addressing key challenges related to retrieval, anomaly detection, and model security, with implications for real-world applications in industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and cybersecurity. Code for all solutions is available online.

Paperid: 7026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01358.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a modality-augmented fine-tuning framework designed to adapt foundation robot policies to diverse humanoid embodiments. We validate our approach across two distinct settings: (i) the GR1 embodiment, utilizing public datasets where we introduce post-processed modalities, including binary contact signals and ZoeDepth-generated metric depth; and (ii) the Unitree G1 embodiment, for which we contribute a novel multi-modal dataset incorporating cuRobo motion planning, inverse kinematics, and ground-truth contact-force measurements. Our experiments demonstrate that modality augmentation consistently enhances policy performance across different embodiments. Specifically, for the GR1, integrating contact-state cues and RGB-D fusion improves online success rates from 51% to 63%. Furthermore, in the G1 "Pick Apple to Bowl" task, our contact-augmented model achieves a success rate of 94%, significantly outperforming the 48% achieved by standard fine-tuning and the 0% baseline of zero-shot transfer. These results highlight that lightweight post-processing effectively strengthens policies for GR1, while high-quality multi-modal data is crucial for reliable transfer to the Unitree G1. Consequently, this work establishes a unified, data-centric pathway for extending foundation robot policies through targeted modality design and multi-modal fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00946.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) play an increasingly important role in finan- cial markets analysis by capturing signals from complex and heterogeneous textual data sources, such as tweets, news articles, reports, and microblogs. However, their performance is dependent on large computational resources and proprietary datasets, which are costly, restricted, and therefore inacces- sible to many researchers and practitioners. To reflect realistic situations we investigate the ability of lightweight open-source LLMs - smaller and publicly available models designed to operate with limited computational resources - to generalize sentiment understanding from financial datasets of varying sizes, sources, formats, and languages. We compare the benchmark finance natural language processing (NLP) model, FinBERT, and three open-source lightweight LLMs, DeepSeek-LLM 7B, Llama3 8B Instruct, and Qwen3 8B on five publicly available datasets: FinancialPhraseBank, Financial Question Answering, Gold News Sentiment, Twitter Sentiment and Chinese Finance Sentiment. We find that LLMs, specially Qwen3 8B and Llama3 8B, perform best in most scenarios, even from using only 5% of the available training data. These results hold in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Our findings indicate that lightweight, open-source large language models (LLMs) consti- tute a cost-effective option, as they can achieve competitive performance on heterogeneous textual data even when trained on only a limited subset of the extensive annotated corpora that are typically deemed necessary.

Paperid: 7028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00931.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) produce context inconsistency hallucinations, which are LLM generated outputs that are misaligned with the user prompt. This research project investigates whether prompt engineering (PE) methods can mitigate context inconsistency hallucinations in zero-shot LLM summarisation of scientific texts, where zero-shot indicates that the LLM relies purely on its pre-training data. Across eight yeast biotechnology research paper abstracts, six instruction-tuned LLMs were prompted with seven methods: a base- line prompt, two levels of increasing instruction complexity (PE-1 and PE-2), two levels of context repetition (CR-K1 and CR-K2), and two levels of random addition (RA-K1 and RA-K2). Context repetition involved the identification and repetition of K key sentences from the abstract, whereas random addition involved the repetition of K randomly selected sentences from the abstract, where K is 1 or 2. A total of 336 LLM-generated summaries were evaluated using six metrics: ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, BERTScore, METEOR, and cosine similarity, which were used to compute the lexical and semantic alignment be- tween the summaries and the abstracts. Four hypotheses on the effects of prompt methods on summary alignment with the reference text were tested. Statistical analysis on 3744 collected datapoints was performed using bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap confidence intervals and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Bonferroni-Holm correction. The results demonstrated that CR and RA significantly improve the lexical alignment of LLM-generated summaries with the abstracts. These findings indicate that prompt engineering has the potential to impact hallucinations in zero-shot scientific summarisation tasks.

Paperid: 7029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00597.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models trained via vision-language pretraining have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities across diverse image domains, yet their application to volumetric medical imaging remains limited. We introduce MedCT-VLM: Medical CT Vision-Language Model, a parameter-efficient vision-language framework designed to adapt large-scale CT foundation models for downstream clinical tasks. MedCT-VLM uses a parameter-efficient approach to adapt CT-CLIP, a contrastive vision-language model trained on 25,692 chest CT volumes, for multi-label pathology classification using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Rather than fine-tuning the model's 440 M parameters directly, we insert low-rank decomposition matrices into attention layers of both vision and text encoders, training only 1.67M parameters (0.38\% of total). We evaluate on zero-shot classification across 18 thoracic pathologies, where the model must align CT embeddings with unseen text prompts at inference without task-specific training. LoRA fine-tuning improves mean AUROC from 61.3\% to 68.9\% (+7.6 pp), accuracy from 67.2\% to 73.6\% (+6.4 pp), and macro-F1 from 32.1\% to 36.9\% (+4.8 pp). These results demonstrate that parameter-efficient methods can effectively transfer large-scale pretraining to downstream medical imaging tasks, particularly for zero-shot scenarios where labeled data is scarce.

Paperid: 7030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00319.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language generation and reasoning. However, their integration into automated software ecosystems is often hindered by the "Structure Gap" - the inherent tension between the probabilistic nature of token generation and the deterministic requirements of structured data formats (e.g., JSON, XML). Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) often fails to enforce strict syntactic constraints, leading to "hallucinated" keys or malformed structures, while constrained decoding methods impose significant inference latency. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to bridge this gap. We introduce a novel Multi-dimensional Reward Function that decomposes the structured output task into a hierarchy of constraints: structural integrity, format correctness, content accuracy, and validity. Leveraging Gradient Regularized Policy Optimization (GRPO), we enable the model to internalize these constraints without the need for a separate critic network, reducing peak VRAM usage by 40% compared to PPO. We validate our approach on multiple tasks, including complex recipe generation and structured math reasoning (GSM8K-JSON). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves 89.7% structural accuracy and 92.1% JSON validity, significantly outperforming both zero-shot baselines (e.g., GPT-3.5) and SFT on larger models like LLaMA-3-8B. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of training dynamics, revealing a distinct self-paced curriculum where the model sequentially acquires syntactic proficiency before semantic accuracy. Our model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Freakz3z/Qwen-JSON.

Paperid: 7031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23214.pdf

Abstract:
Early-stage visual quality inspection is vital for achieving Zero-Defect Manufacturing and minimizing production waste in modern industrial environments. However, the complexity of robust visual inspection systems and their extensive data requirements hinder widespread adoption in semi-controlled industrial settings. In this context, we propose a pose-agnostic, zero-shot quality inspection framework that compares real scenes against real-time Digital Twins (DT) in the RGB-D space. Our approach enables efficient real-time DT rendering by semantically describing industrial scenes through object detection and pose estimation of known Computer-Aided Design models. We benchmark tools for real-time, multimodal RGB-D DT creation while tracking consumption of computational resources. Additionally, we provide an extensible and hierarchical annotation strategy for multi-criteria defect detection, unifying pose labelling with logical and structural defect annotations. Based on an automotive use case featuring the quality inspection of an axial flux motor, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Our results demonstrate detection performace, achieving intersection-over-union (IoU) scores of up to 63.3% compared to ground-truth masks, even if using simple distance measurements under semi-controlled industrial conditions. Our findings lay the groundwork for future research on generalizable, low-data defect detection methods in dynamic manufacturing settings.

Paperid: 7032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22818.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their potential across both general and domain-specific tasks. However, there is a growing concern regarding their lack of sensitivity, factual incorrectness in responses, inconsistent expressions of empathy, bias, hallucinations, and overall inability to capture the depth and complexity of human understanding, especially in low-resource and sensitive domains such as psychology. To address these challenges, our study employs a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in psychotherapy. We use LLMs to generate precise summaries of motivational interviewing (MI) dialogues and design a two-stage annotation scheme based on key components of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) framework, namely evocation, collaboration, autonomy, direction, empathy, and a non-judgmental attitude. Using expert-annotated MI dialogues as ground truth, we formulate multi-class classification tasks to assess model performance under progressive prompting techniques, incorporating one-shot and few-shot prompting. Our results offer insights into LLMs' capacity for understanding complex psychological constructs and highlight best practices to mitigate ``semantic drift" in therapeutic settings. Our work contributes not only to the MI community by providing a high-quality annotated dataset to address data scarcity in low-resource domains but also critical insights for using LLMs for precise contextual interpretation in complex behavioral therapy.

Paperid: 7033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22739.pdf

Abstract:
Domain generalization is critical in computational pathology (CPath) due to inherent domain shifts caused by variations in staining protocols, scanner devices, and imaging settings across clinical centers. Vision-language models (VLMs), such as PLIP-a pathology-tuned CLIP-trained on image-text pairs across diverse domains, serve as strong knowledge distillation sources. However, their zero-shot performance with predefined prompts remains limited due to sensitivity to prompt variations. Moreover, unlike natural images, histopathology centers lack semantic descriptors (e.g., 'sketch'), making it difficult to define domain-specific prompts for clinical centers. This requires a data-driven approach for learning domain-specific and ultimately class-generic continuous prompts. We propose Domain Invariant Prompt Tuning (DIPT) for knowledge distillation process, a novel step that learns multiple input tokens for each domain. These tokens are trained separately for each domain and are averaged across domains, leading to domain-invariant prompts. Our student model then distills knowledge from PLIP's text encoder by leveraging the prompts learned by DIPT. This leads to alignment of visual features with domain-invariant embeddings, enhancing generalization by training on multiple domains. Our method adds a significant improvement in average F1-score to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) knowledge distillation approaches in domain generalization with histopathology datasets. This work helps the way of deploying robust CPath models in real-world clinical problems with heterogeneous data sources.

Paperid: 7034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22612.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into various components of Ontology Matching pipelines. This paper investigates the capability of LLMs to perform ontology matching directly on ontology modules and generate the corresponding alignments. Furthermore, it is explored how a dedicated fine-tuning strategy can enhance the model's matching performance in a zero-shot setting. The proposed method incorporates a search space reduction technique to select relevant subsets from both source and target ontologies, which are then used to automatically construct prompts. Recognizing the scarcity of reference alignments for training, a novel LLM-based approach is introduced for generating a synthetic dataset. This process creates a corpus of ontology submodule pairs and their corresponding reference alignments, specifically designed to fine-tune an LLM for the ontology matching task. The proposed approach was evaluated on the Conference, Geolink, Enslaved, Taxon, and Hydrography datasets from the OAEI complex track. The results demonstrate that the LLM fine-tuned on the synthetically generated data exhibits superior performance compared to the non-fine-tuned base model. The key contribution is a strategy that combines automatic dataset generation with fine-tuning to effectively adapt LLMs for ontology matching tasks.

Paperid: 7035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22287.pdf

Abstract:
We present Match-and-Fuse - a zero-shot, training-free method for consistent controlled generation of unstructured image sets - collections that share a common visual element, yet differ in viewpoint, time of capture, and surrounding content. Unlike existing methods that operate on individual images or densely sampled videos, our framework performs set-to-set generation: given a source set and user prompts, it produces a new set that preserves cross-image consistency of shared content. Our key idea is to model the task as a graph, where each node corresponds to an image and each edge triggers a joint generation of image pairs. This formulation consolidates all pairwise generations into a unified framework, enforcing their local consistency while ensuring global coherence across the entire set. This is achieved by fusing internal features across image pairs, guided by dense input correspondences, without requiring masks or manual supervision. It also allows us to leverage an emergent prior in text-to-image models that encourages coherent generation when multiple views share a single canvas. Match-and-Fuse achieves state-of-the-art consistency and visual quality, and unlocks new capabilities for content creation from image collections.

Paperid: 7036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21371.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention in power grids for their general-purpose capabilities. Meanwhile, anomaly detection (AD) remains critical for grid resilience, requiring accurate and interpretable decisions based on multivariate telemetry. Yet the performance of LLMs on large-scale numeric data for AD remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs for numeric AD in power systems. We use GPT-OSS-20B as a representative model and evaluate it on the IEEE 14-bus system. A standardized prompt framework is applied across zero-shot, few-shot, in-context learning, low rank adaptation (LoRA), fine-tuning, and a hybrid LLM-traditional approach. We adopt a rule-aware design based on the three-sigma criterion, and report detection performance and rationale quality. This study lays the groundwork for further investigation into the limitations and capabilities of LLM-based AD and its integration with classical detectors in cyber-physical power grid applications.

Paperid: 7037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21101.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities across general domains, yet their application to specialized sectors such as mortgage finance requires domain-specific knowledge augmentation while preserving instruction-following fidelity. We present MortgageLLM, a novel domain-specific large language model that addresses this dual challenge. It is developed using a dual-track specialization framework from a single base model (LLaMA-3.1-8B). We opted for this dual-expert approach as a single multi-task model suffers from performance trade-offs, where optimizing for structured tasks (via SFT) degrades conversational fidelity (via DPO). Our dual-track method solves this by creating two specialists, allowing each to be optimally trained for its distinct capability. Our approach applies the instruction residual technique to restore instruction-following capabilities post-domain adaptation without supervised fine-tuning. We contribute: (1) application of this residual technique to the highly specialized mortgage finance domain; (2) a dual-expert architecture combining a conversational Q&A model and a structured task model for classification and summarization; and (3) an intelligent task routing mechanism using few-shot classification performed by one of the expert models itself. We validate our approach on domain-specific benchmarks, where our final model (MLM v2) significantly outperforms the base LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving an LLM-as-a-Judge summarization score of 4.58 (vs. 3.99), a Q&A score of 4.09 (vs. 4.0), and a classification score of 2.6 (vs. 1.2). On semantic similarity, our model achieved a BERTScore of 0.77 for summarization (vs. 0.74), 0.68 for Q&A (vs. 0.58), and 0.75 for classification (vs. 0.73), substantially outperforming baseline approaches.

Paperid: 7038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20821.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have established the state-of-the-art in text-to-image generation, but their performance often relies on a diffusion prior network to translate text embeddings into the visual manifold for easier decoding. These priors are computationally expensive and require extensive training on massive datasets. In this work, we challenge the necessity of a trained prior at all by employing Optimization-based Visual Inversion (OVI), a training-free and zero-shot alternative, to replace the need for a prior. OVI initializes a latent visual representation from random pseudo-tokens and iteratively optimizes it to maximize the cosine similarity with the input textual prompt embedding. We further propose two novel constraints, a Mahalanobis-based and a Nearest-Neighbor loss, to regularize the OVI optimization process toward the distribution of realistic images. Our experiments, conducted on Kandinsky 2.2, show that OVI can serve as an alternative to traditional priors. More importantly, our analysis reveals a critical flaw in current evaluation benchmarks like T2I-CompBench++, where simply using the text embedding as a prior achieves surprisingly high scores, despite lower perceptual quality. Our constrained OVI methods improve visual fidelity over this baseline, with the Nearest-Neighbor approach proving particularly effective. It achieves quantitative scores comparable to or higher than the state-of-the-art data-efficient prior, underscoring the potential of optimization-based strategies as viable, training-free alternatives to traditional priors. The code will be publicly available upon acceptance.

Paperid: 7039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19858.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Clinical documentation contains factual, diagnostic, and management errors that can compromise patient safety. Large language models (LLMs) may help detect and correct such errors, but their behavior under different prompting strategies remains unclear. We evaluate zero-shot prompting, static prompting with random exemplars (SPR), and retrieval-augmented dynamic prompting (RDP) for three subtasks of medical error processing: error flag detection, error sentence detection, and error correction. Methods: Using the MEDEC dataset, we evaluated nine instruction-tuned LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI o-series models). We measured performance using accuracy, recall, false-positive rate (FPR), and an aggregate score of ROUGE-1, BLEURT, and BERTScore for error correction. We also analyzed example outputs to identify failure modes and differences between LLM and clinician reasoning. Results: Zero-shot prompting showed low recall in both detection tasks, often missing abbreviation-heavy or atypical errors. SPR improved recall but increased FPR. Across all nine LLMs, RDP reduced FPR by about 15 percent, improved recall by 5 to 10 percent in error sentence detection, and generated more contextually accurate corrections. Conclusion: Across diverse LLMs, RDP outperforms zero-shot and SPR prompting. Using retrieved exemplars improves detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and enhances the reliability of medical error correction.

Paperid: 7040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19841.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce the Cisco Time Series Model, a univariate zero-shot forecaster. This time series foundation model is the result of a general architectural innovation to a time series model enabling it to accept multiresolution input, applied to a popular decoder-only time series model (TimesFM). The resulting multiresolution decoder-only model is trained on over 300B unique data points, with more than half coming from the observability domain. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the resulting model achieves superior performance on observability datasets while retaining very similar performance on a standard general-purpose forecasting benchmark (GIFT-Eval), and suggest that the multiresolution structure enables the model to make more accurate predictions on long context input.

Paperid: 7041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18940.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-subject motor-imagery decoding remains a major challenge in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces due to strong subject variability and the curved geometry of covariance matrices on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. We address the zero-shot cross-subject setting, where no target-subject labels or adaptation are allowed, by introducing novel geometry-aware preprocessing modules and deep congruence networks that operate directly on SPD covariance matrices. Our preprocessing modules, DCR and RiFU, extend Riemannian Alignment by improving action separation while reducing subject-specific distortions. We further propose two manifold classifiers, SPD-DCNet and RiFUNet, which use hierarchical congruence transforms to learn discriminative, subject-invariant covariance representations. On the BCI-IV 2a benchmark, our framework improves cross-subject accuracy by 3-4% over the strongest classical baselines, demonstrating the value of geometry-aware transformations for robust EEG decoding.

Paperid: 7042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18305.pdf

Abstract:
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) possess extensive text knowledge but struggles to utilize this knowledge for fine-grained image recognition, often failing to differentiate between visually similar categories. Existing fine-tuning methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with exact-match reward signals are often brittle, encourage memorization of training categories, and fail to elicit differential reasoning needed for generalization to unseen classes. To address this, we propose $\textbf{DiVE-k}$, $\textbf{Di}$fferential $\textbf{V}$isual r$\textbf{E}$asoning using top-$\textbf{k}$ generations, framework that leverages model's own top-k predictions as a training signal. For each training image, DiVE-k creates a multiple-choice question from the model's top-k outputs and uses RL to train the model to select the correct answer. This approach requires the model to perform fine-grained differential reasoning among plausible options and provides a simple, verifiable reward signal that mitigates memorization and improves generalization. Experiments on five standard fine-grained datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. In the standard base-to-novel generalization setting, DiVE-k surpasses the QWEN2.5-VL-7B and ViRFT by 10.04% and 6.16% on the Harmonic Mean metric, respectively. Further experiments show similar gains in mixed-domain and few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 7043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18301.pdf

Abstract:
The detection of hallucinations in multilingual scientific text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for reliable AI systems. This paper describes our submission to the SHROOM-CAP 2025 shared task on scientific hallucination detection across 9 languages. Unlike most approaches that focus primarily on model architecture, we adopted a data-centric strategy that addressed the critical issue of training data scarcity and imbalance. We unify and balance five existing datasets to create a comprehensive training corpus of 124,821 samples (50% correct, 50% hallucinated), representing a 172x increase over the original SHROOM training data. Our approach fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa-Large with 560 million parameters on this enhanced dataset, achieves competitive performance across all languages, including \textbf{2nd place in Gujarati} (zero-shot language) with Factuality F1 of 0.5107, and rankings between 4th-6th place across the remaining 8 languages. Our results demonstrate that systematic data curation can significantly outperform architectural innovations alone, particularly for low-resource languages in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 7044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18146.pdf

Abstract:
This study introduce GeeSanBhava, a high-quality data set of Sinhala song comments extracted from YouTube manually tagged using Russells Valence-Arousal model by three independent human annotators. The human annotators achieve a substantial inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss kappa = 84.96%). The analysis revealed distinct emotional profiles for different songs, highlighting the importance of comment based emotion mapping. The study also addressed the challenges of comparing comment-based and song-based emotions, mitigating biases inherent in user-generated content. A number of Machine learning and deep learning models were pre-trained on a related large data set of Sinhala News comments in order to report the zero-shot result of our Sinhala YouTube comment data set. An optimized Multi-Layer Perceptron model, after extensive hyperparameter tuning, achieved a ROC-AUC score of 0.887. The model is a three-layer MLP with a configuration of 256, 128, and 64 neurons. This research contributes a valuable annotated dataset and provides insights for future work in Sinhala Natural Language Processing and music emotion recognition.

Paperid: 7045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18123.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become indispensable for multimodal reasoning, yet their representations often encode and amplify demographic biases, resulting in biased associations and misaligned predictions in downstream tasks. Such behavior undermines fairness and distorts the intended alignment between vision and language. Recent post-hoc approaches attempt to mitigate bias by replacing the most attribute-correlated embedding coordinates with neutral values. However, our systematic analysis reveals three critical failures of this coordinate-wise approach: feature entanglement, poor cross-dataset generalization, and incomplete bias removal. We find that bias is not localized to a few coordinates but is instead distributed across a few linear subspaces. To address these limitations, we propose $\textbf{S}$ubspace $\textbf{P}$rojection $\textbf{D}$ebiasing ($\textbf{SPD}$), a geometrically principled framework that identifies and removes the entire subspace of linearly decodable bias while reinserting a neutral mean component to preserve semantic fidelity. Extensive experiments across zero-shot classification, text-to-image retrieval, and image generation validate the effectiveness of SPD: our method achieves more robust debiasing with an average improvement of $18.5\%$ across four fairness metrics, while maintaining minimal loss in task performance compared to the best debiasing baseline.

Paperid: 7046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18075.pdf

Abstract:
To identify objects beyond predefined categories, open-vocabulary aerial object detection (OVAD) leverages the zero-shot capabilities of visual-language models (VLMs) to generalize from base to novel categories. Existing approaches typically utilize self-learning mechanisms with weak text supervision to generate region-level pseudo-labels to align detectors with VLMs semantic spaces. However, text dependence induces semantic bias, restricting open-vocabulary expansion to text-specified concepts. We propose $\textbf{VK-Det}$, a $\textbf{V}$isual $\textbf{K}$nowledge-guided open-vocabulary object $\textbf{Det}$ection framework $\textit{without}$ extra supervision. First, we discover and leverage vision encoder's inherent informative region perception to attain fine-grained localization and adaptive distillation. Second, we introduce a novel prototype-aware pseudo-labeling strategy. It models inter-class decision boundaries through feature clustering and maps detection regions to latent categories via prototype matching. This enhances attention to novel objects while compensating for missing supervision. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance, achieving 30.1 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DIOR and 23.3 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DOTA, outperforming even extra supervised methods.

Paperid: 7047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17362.pdf

Abstract:
Despite its remarkable success in zero-shot image-text matching, CLIP remains highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on images. As adversarial fine-tuning is prohibitively costly, recent works explore various test-time defense strategies; however, these approaches still exhibit limited robustness. In this work, we revisit this problem and propose a simple yet effective strategy: Augmentation-based Test-time Adversarial Correction (ATAC). Our method operates directly in the embedding space of CLIP, calculating augmentation-induced drift vectors to infer a semantic recovery direction and correcting the embedding based on the angular consistency of these latent drifts. Across a wide range of benchmarks, ATAC consistently achieves remarkably high robustness, surpassing that of previous state-of-the-art methods by nearly 50\% on average, all while requiring minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, ATAC retains state-of-the-art robustness in unconventional and extreme settings and even achieves nontrivial robustness against adaptive attacks. Our results demonstrate that ATAC is an efficient method in a novel paradigm for test-time adversarial defenses in the embedding space of CLIP.

Paperid: 7048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17136.pdf

Abstract:
Device-guided music transfer adapts playback across unseen devices for users who lack them. Existing methods mainly focus on modifying the timbre, rhythm, harmony, or instrumentation to mimic genres or artists, overlooking the diverse hardware properties of the playback device (i.e., speaker). Therefore, we propose DeMT, which processes a speaker's frequency response curve as a line graph using a vision-language model to extract device embeddings. These embeddings then condition a hybrid transformer via feature-wise linear modulation. Fine-tuned on a self-collected dataset, DeMT enables effective speaker-style transfer and robust few-shot adaptation for unseen devices, supporting applications like device-style augmentation and quality enhancement.

Paperid: 7049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16700.pdf

Abstract:
Enterprise ERP systems managing hundreds of thousands of employee records face critical data quality challenges when human resources departments perform decentralized manual entry across multiple languages. We present an end-to-end pipeline combining automated data cleaning with LLM-driven SQL query generation, deployed on a production system managing 240,000 employee records over six months. The system operates in two integrated stages: a multi-stage cleaning pipeline that performs translation normalization, spelling correction, and entity deduplication during periodic synchronization from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL; and a retrieval-augmented generation framework powered by GPT-4o that translates natural-language questions in Turkish, Russian, and English into validated SQL queries. The query engine employs LangChain orchestration, FAISS vector similarity search, and few-shot learning with 500+ validated examples. Our evaluation demonstrates 92.5% query validity, 95.1% schema compliance, and 90.7\% semantic accuracy on 2,847 production queries. The system reduces query turnaround time from 2.3 days to under 5 seconds while maintaining 99.2% uptime, with GPT-4o achieving 46% lower latency and 68% cost reduction versus GPT-3.5. This modular architecture provides a reproducible framework for AI-native enterprise data governance, demonstrating real-world viability at enterprise scale with 4.3/5.0 user satisfaction.

Paperid: 7050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16541.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence has enabled the creation of synthetic images that are increasingly indistinguishable from authentic content, posing significant challenges for digital media integrity. This problem is compounded by the accelerated release cycle of novel generative models, which renders traditional detection approaches (reliant on periodic retraining) computationally infeasible and operationally impractical. This work proposes a novel two-stage detection framework designed to address the generalization challenge inherent in synthetic image detection. The first stage employs a vision deep learning model trained via supervised contrastive learning to extract discriminative embeddings from input imagery. Critically, this model was trained on a strategically partitioned subset of available generators, with specific architectures withheld from training to rigorously ablate cross-generator generalization capabilities. The second stage utilizes a k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classifier operating on the learned embedding space, trained in a few-shot learning paradigm incorporating limited samples from previously unseen test generators. With merely 150 images per class in the few-shot learning regime, which are easily obtainable from current generation models, the proposed framework achieves an average detection accuracy of 91.3%, representing a 5.2 percentage point improvement over existing approaches . For the source attribution task, the proposed approach obtains improvements of of 14.70% and 4.27% in AUC and OSCR respectively on an open set classification context, marking a significant advancement toward robust, scalable forensic attribution systems capable of adapting to the evolving generative AI landscape without requiring exhaustive retraining protocols.

Paperid: 7051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16106.pdf

Abstract:
ColBERT introduced a late interaction mechanism that independently encodes queries and documents using BERT, and computes similarity via fine-grained interactions over token-level vector representations. This design enables expressive matching while allowing efficient computation of scores, as the multi-vector document representations could be pre-computed offline. ColBERT models distance using a Chamfer-style function: for each query token, it selects the closest document token and sums these distances across all query tokens. In our work, we explore enhancements to the Chamfer distance function by computing a weighted sum over query token contributions, where weights reflect the token importance. Empirically, we show that this simple extension, requiring only token-weight training while keeping the multi-vector representations fixed, further enhances the expressiveness of late interaction multi-vector mechanism. In particular, on the BEIR benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of 1.28\% in Recall@10 in the zero-shot setting using IDF-based weights, and 3.66\% through few-shot fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15551.pdf

Abstract:
Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithms (SAEAs) are widely used for expensive Black-Box Optimization. However, their reliance on rigid, manually designed components such as infill criteria and evolutionary strategies during the search process limits their flexibility across tasks. To address these limitations, we propose Dual-Control Bi-Space Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm (DB-SAEA), a Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) framework tailored for multi-objective problems. DB-SAEA learns a meta-policy that jointly regulates candidate generation and infill criterion selection, enabling dual control. The bi-space Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) module in DB-SAEA adopts an attention-based architecture to capture optimization states from both true and surrogate evaluation spaces, while ensuring scalability across problem dimensions, population sizes, and objectives. Additionally, we integrate TabPFN as the surrogate model for accurate and efficient prediction with uncertainty estimation. The framework is trained via reinforcement learning, leveraging parallel sampling and centralized training to enhance efficiency and transferability across tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that DB-SAEA not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks, but also exhibits strong zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks with higher-dimensional settings. This work introduces the first MetaBBO framework with dual-level control over SAEAs and a bi-space ELA that captures surrogate model information.

Paperid: 7053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15211.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid expansion of unstructured clinical texts in electronic health records (EHRs), clinical named entity recognition (NER) has become a crucial technique for extracting medical information. However, traditional supervised models such as CRF and BioClinicalBERT suffer from high annotation costs. Although zero-shot NER based on large language models (LLMs) reduces the dependency on labeled data, challenges remain in aligning example selection with task granularity and effectively integrating prompt design with self-improvement frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose OEMA, a novel zero-shot clinical NER framework based on multi-agent collaboration. OEMA consists of three core components: (1) a self-annotator that autonomously generates candidate examples; (2) a discriminator that leverages SNOMED CT to filter token-level examples by clinical relevance; and (3) a predictor that incorporates entity-type descriptions to enhance inference accuracy. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, MTSamples and VAERS, demonstrate that OEMA achieves state-of-the-art performance under exact-match evaluation. Moreover, under related-match criteria, OEMA performs comparably to the supervised BioClinicalBERT model while significantly outperforming the traditional CRF method. OEMA improves zero-shot clinical NER, achieving near-supervised performance under related-match criteria. Future work will focus on continual learning and open-domain adaptation to expand its applicability in clinical NLP.

Paperid: 7054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15197.pdf

Abstract:
Reference-based object composition methods fail when inserting real-world objects into stylized domains. This under-explored problem is currently split between practical "blenders" that lack generative fidelity and "generators" that require impractical, per-subject online finetuning. In this work, we introduce Insert In Style, the first zero-shot generative framework that is both practical and high-fidelity. Our core contribution is a unified framework with two key innovations: (i) a novel multi-stage training protocol that disentangles representations for identity, style, and composition, and (ii) a specialized masked-attention architecture that surgically enforces this disentanglement during generation. This approach prevents the concept interference common in general-purpose, unified-attention models. Our framework is trained on a new 100k sample dataset, curated from a novel data pipeline. This pipeline couples large-scale generation with a rigorous, two-stage filtering process to ensure both high-fidelity semantic identity and style coherence. Unlike prior work, our model is truly zero-shot and requires no text prompts. We also introduce a new public benchmark for stylized composition. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods on both identity and style metrics, a result strongly corroborated by user studies.

Paperid: 7055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14161.pdf

Abstract:
Household tidying is an important application area, yet current benchmarks neither model user preferences nor support mobility, and they generalize poorly, making it hard to comprehensively assess integrated language-to-action capabilities. To address this, we propose RoboTidy, a unified benchmark for language-guided household tidying that supports Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and Vision-Language-Navigation (VLN) training and evaluation. RoboTidy provides 500 photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) household scenes (covering 500 objects and containers) with collisions, formulates tidying as an "Action (Object, Container)" list, and supplies 6.4k high-quality manipulation demonstration trajectories and 1.5k naviagtion trajectories to support both few-shot and large-scale training. We also deploy RoboTidy in the real world for object tidying, establishing an end-to-end benchmark for household tidying. RoboTidy offers a scalable platform and bridges a key gap in embodied AI by enabling holistic and realistic evaluation of language-guided robots.

Paperid: 7056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14112.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic ICD coding from clinical text is a critical task in medical NLP but remains hindered by the extreme long-tail distribution of diagnostic codes. Thousands of rare and zero-shot ICD codes are severely underrepresented in datasets like MIMIC-III, leading to low macro-F1 scores. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework that generates high-quality synthetic discharge summaries to mitigate this imbalance. Our method constructs realistic multi-label code sets anchored on rare codes by leveraging real-world co-occurrence patterns, ICD descriptions, synonyms, taxonomy, and similar clinical notes. Using these structured prompts, we generate 90,000 synthetic notes covering 7,902 ICD codes, significantly expanding the training distribution. We fine-tune two state-of-the-art transformer-based models, PLM-ICD and GKI-ICD, on both the original and extended datasets. Experiments show that our approach modestly improves macro-F1 while maintaining strong micro-F1, outperforming prior SOTA. While the gain may seem marginal relative to the computational cost, our results demonstrate that carefully crafted synthetic data can enhance equity in long-tail ICD code prediction.

Paperid: 7057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13182.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic diacritic restoration is crucial for text processing in languages with rich diacritical marks, such as Romanian. This study evaluates the performance of several large language models (LLMs) in restoring diacritics in Romanian texts. Using a comprehensive corpus, we tested models including OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro, Meta's Llama 2 and Llama 3, MistralAI's Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, airoboros 70B, and OpenLLM-Ro's RoLlama 2 7B, under multiple prompt templates ranging from zero-shot to complex multi-shot instructions. Results show that models such as GPT-4o achieve high diacritic restoration accuracy, consistently surpassing a neutral echo baseline, while others, including Meta's Llama family, exhibit wider variability. These findings highlight the impact of model architecture, training data, and prompt design on diacritic restoration performance and outline promising directions for improving NLP tools for diacritic-rich languages.

Paperid: 7058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13159.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts, especially in low-resource languages like Bangla, contain a critical ambiguity: word-word repetitions can be either Repetition Disfluency (unintentional ASR error/hesitation) or Morphological Reduplication (a deliberate grammatical construct). Standard disfluency correction fails by erroneously deleting valid linguistic information. To solve this, we introduce the first publicly available, 20,000-row Bangla corpus, manually annotated to explicitly distinguish between these two phenomena in noisy ASR transcripts. We benchmark this novel resource using two paradigms: state-of-the-art multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) and task-specific fine-tuning of encoder models. LLMs achieve competitive performance (up to 82.68\% accuracy) with few-shot prompting. However, fine-tuning proves superior, with the language-specific BanglaBERT model achieving the highest accuracy of 84.78\% and an F1 score of 0.677. This establishes a strong, linguistically-informed baseline and provides essential data for developing sophisticated, semantic-preserving text normalization systems for Bangla.

Paperid: 7059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12690.pdf

Abstract:
Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), in which all components are trained jointly, is an attractive alternative to cascaded systems because it offers a simpler pipeline and lower inference latency. However, direct S2ST models require large amounts of parallel speech data in the source and target languages, which are rarely available for low-resource languages such as Persian. This paper presents a direct S2ST system for translating Persian speech into English speech, as well as a pipeline for synthetic parallel Persian-English speech generation. The model comprises three components: (1) a conformer-based encoder, initialized from self-supervised pre-training, maps source speech to high-level acoustic representations; (2) a causal transformer decoder with relative position multi-head attention translates these representations into discrete target speech units; (3) a unit-based neural vocoder generates waveforms from the predicted discrete units. To mitigate the data scarcity problem, we construct a new Persian-English parallel speech corpus by translating Persian speech transcriptions into English using a large language model and then synthesizing the corresponding English speech with a state-of-the-art zero-shot text-to-speech system. The resulting corpus increases the amount of available parallel speech by roughly a factor of six. On the Persian-English portion of the CVSS corpus, the proposed model achieves improvement of 4.6 ASR BLEU with the synthetic data over direct baselines. These results indicate that combining self-supervised pre-training, discrete speech units, and synthetic parallel data is effective for improving direct S2ST in low-resource language pairs such as Persian-English

Paperid: 7060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12200.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment novel classes from target domains that are not involved in training and have significantly different data distributions from the source domain, using only a few annotated samples, and recent years have witnessed significant progress on this task. However, existing CD-FSS methods primarily focus on style gaps between source and target domains while ignoring segmentation granularity gaps, resulting in insufficient semantic discriminability for novel classes in target domains. Therefore, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Learning (HSL) framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, we introduce a Dual Style Randomization (DSR) module and a Hierarchical Semantic Mining (HSM) module to learn hierarchical semantic features, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize semantics at varying granularities. DSR simulates target domain data with diverse foreground-background style differences and overall style variations through foreground and global style randomization respectively, while HSM leverages multi-scale superpixels to guide the model to mine intra-class consistency and inter-class distinction at different granularities. Additionally, we also propose a Prototype Confidence-modulated Thresholding (PCMT) module to mitigate segmentation ambiguity when foreground and background are excessively similar. Extensive experiments are conducted on four popular target domain datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 7061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11777.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with 3D vision is emerging as a transformative approach to enhancing robotic sensing technologies. This convergence enables machines to perceive, reason and interact with complex environments through natural language and spatial understanding, bridging the gap between linguistic intelligence and spatial perception. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies, applications and challenges at the intersection of LLMs and 3D vision, with a focus on next-generation robotic sensing technologies. We first introduce the foundational principles of LLMs and 3D data representations, followed by an in-depth examination of 3D sensing technologies critical for robotics. The review then explores key advancements in scene understanding, text-to-3D generation, object grounding and embodied agents, highlighting cutting-edge techniques such as zero-shot 3D segmentation, dynamic scene synthesis and language-guided manipulation. Furthermore, we discuss multimodal LLMs that integrate 3D data with touch, auditory and thermal inputs, enhancing environmental comprehension and robotic decision-making. To support future research, we catalog benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics tailored for 3D-language and vision tasks. Finally, we identify key challenges and future research directions, including adaptive model architectures, enhanced cross-modal alignment and real-time processing capabilities, which pave the way for more intelligent, context-aware and autonomous robotic sensing systems.

Paperid: 7062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11770.pdf

Abstract:
Generating complex, logically-sound SPARQL queries for multi-hop questions remains a critical bottleneck for Knowledge Graph Question Answering, as the brittle nature of one-shot generation by Large Language Models (LLMs) hinders reliable interaction with structured data. Current methods lack the adaptive policies needed to dynamically debug queries based on real-time execution feedback. This paper introduces a novel agentic framework where an LLM learns a resilient policy for the sequential process of iterative SPARQL construction. We show that a compact 3B-parameter model, trained exclusively via outcome-driven Reinforcement Learning (GRPO) without supervised fine-tuning, can learn effective policies for this task, discovering how to systematically recover from execution errors and refine its queries toward a correct answer. On a curated, executable single-answer subset of LC-QuAD 2.0, our agent achieves 49.7\% accuracy post-entity-linking, a significant 17.5 percentage point improvement over the strongest iterative zero-shot baseline. Further analysis reveals that while the agent's capability is driven by RL, its performance is enhanced by an explicit deliberative reasoning step that acts as a cognitive scaffold to improve policy precision. This work presents a generalizable blueprint for teaching agents to master formal, symbolic tools through interaction, bridging the gap between probabilistic LLMs and the structured world of Knowledge Graphs.

Paperid: 7063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11576.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated research on automated optimization modeling. While real-world decision-making is inherently uncertain, most existing work has focused on deterministic optimization with known parameters, leaving the application of LLMs in uncertain settings largely unexplored. To that end, we propose the DAOpt framework including a new dataset OptU, a multi-agent decision-making module, and a simulation environment for evaluating LLMs with a focus on out-of-sample feasibility and robustness. Additionally, we enhance LLMs' modeling capabilities by incorporating few-shot learning with domain knowledge from stochastic and robust optimization.

Paperid: 7064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10591.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of asynchronous remote care has intensified provider workload, creating demand for AI systems that can assist clinicians in managing patient queries more efficiently. The MEDIQA-WV 2025 shared task addresses this challenge by focusing on generating free-text responses to wound care queries paired with images. In this work, we present two complementary approaches developed for the English track. The first leverages a mined prompting strategy, where training data is embedded and the top-k most similar examples are retrieved to serve as few-shot demonstrations during generation. The second approach builds on a metadata ablation study, which identified four metadata attributes that consistently enhance response quality. We train classifiers to predict these attributes for test cases and incorporate them into the generation pipeline, dynamically adjusting outputs based on prediction confidence. Experimental results demonstrate that mined prompting improves response relevance, while metadata-guided generation further refines clinical precision. Together, these methods highlight promising directions for developing AI-driven tools that can provide reliable and efficient wound care support.

Paperid: 7065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08916.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet they often produce hallucinated content that undermines factual reliability. To address this challenge, we introduce HalluClean, a lightweight and task-agnostic framework for detecting and correcting hallucinations in LLM-generated text. HalluClean adopts a reasoning-enhanced paradigm, explicitly decomposing the process into planning, execution, and revision stages to identify and refine unsupported claims. It employs minimal task-routing prompts to enable zero-shot generalization across diverse domains, without relying on external knowledge sources or supervised detectors. We conduct extensive evaluations on five representative tasks-question answering, dialogue, summarization, math word problems, and contradiction detection. Experimental results show that HalluClean significantly improves factual consistency and outperforms competitive baselines, demonstrating its potential to enhance the trustworthiness of LLM outputs in real-world applications.

Paperid: 7066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08597.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are generally equipped with guardrails to block the generation of harmful responses. However, existing defenses always assume that an external attacker crafts the harmful query, and the possibility of a model's own output becoming a new attack vector has not been sufficiently explored. In this study, we propose the Self-HarmLLM scenario, which uses a Mitigated Harmful Query (MHQ) generated by the same model as a new input. An MHQ is an ambiguous query whose original intent is preserved while its harmful nature is not directly exposed. We verified whether a jailbreak occurs when this MHQ is re-entered into a separate session of the same model. We conducted experiments on GPT-3.5-turbo, LLaMA3-8B-instruct, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B under Base, Zero-shot, and Few-shot conditions. The results showed up to 52% transformation success rate and up to 33% jailbreak success rate in the Zero-shot condition, and up to 65% transformation success rate and up to 41% jailbreak success rate in the Few-shot condition. By performing both prefix-based automated evaluation and human evaluation, we found that the automated evaluation consistently overestimated jailbreak success, with an average difference of 52%. This indicates that automated evaluation alone is not accurate for determining harmfulness. While this study is a toy-level study based on a limited query set and evaluators, it proves that our method can still be a valid attack scenario. These results suggest the need for a fundamental reconsideration of guardrail design and the establishment of a more robust evaluation methodology.

Paperid: 7067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07897.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models have been successful in many areas but understanding their behaviors still remains a black-box. Most prior explainable AI (XAI) approaches have focused on interpreting and explaining how models make predictions. In contrast, we would like to understand how data can be explained with deep learning model training and propose a novel approach to understand the data via one of the most common media - language - so that humans can easily understand. Our approach proposes a pipeline to generate textual descriptions that can explain the data with large language models by incorporating external knowledge bases. However, generated data descriptions may still include irrelevant information, so we introduce to exploit influence estimation to choose the most informative textual descriptions, along with the CLIP score. Furthermore, based on the phenomenon of cross-modal transferability, we propose a novel benchmark task named cross-modal transfer classification to examine the effectiveness of our textual descriptions. In the experiment of zero-shot setting, we show that our textual descriptions are more effective than other baseline descriptions, and furthermore, we successfully boost the performance of the model trained only on images across all nine image classification datasets. These results are further supported by evaluation using GPT-4o. Through our approach, we may gain insights into the inherent interpretability of the decision-making process of the model.

Paperid: 7068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07085.pdf

Abstract:
Natural and efficient interaction remains a critical challenge for virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) systems. Vision-based gesture recognition suffers from high computational cost, sensitivity to lighting conditions, and privacy leakage concerns. Acoustic sensing provides an attractive alternative: by emitting inaudible high-frequency signals and capturing their reflections, channel impulse response (CIR) encodes how gestures perturb the acoustic field in a low-cost and user-transparent manner. However, existing CIR-based gesture recognition methods often rely on extensive training of models on large labeled datasets, making them unsuitable for few-shot VR scenarios. In this work, we propose the first framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for CIR-based gesture recognition in VR/AR systems. Despite LLMs' strengths, it is non-trivial to achieve few-shot and zero-shot learning of CIR gestures due to their inconspicuous features. To tackle this challenge, we collect differential CIR rather than original CIR data. Moreover, we construct a real-world dataset collected from 10 participants performing 15 gestures across three categories (digits, letters, and shapes), with 10 repetitions each. We then conduct extensive experiments on this dataset using an LLM-adopted classifier. Results show that our LLM-based framework achieves accuracy comparable to classical machine learning baselines, while requiring no domain-specific retraining.

Paperid: 7069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07004.pdf

Abstract:
We aim to theorize the medieval manuscript page and its contents more holistically, using state-of-the-art techniques to segment and describe the entire manuscript folio, for the purpose of creating richer training data for computer vision techniques, namely instance segmentation, and multimodal models for medieval-specific visual content.

Paperid: 7070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06853.pdf

Abstract:
The resolving ability of wide-field fluorescence microscopy is fundamentally limited by out-of-focus background owing to its low axial resolution, particularly for densely labeled biological samples. To address this, we developed ET2dNet, a deep learning-based EPI-TIRF cross-modality network that achieves TIRF-comparable background subtraction and axial super-resolution from a single wide-field image without requiring hardware modifications. The model employs a physics-informed hybrid architecture, synergizing supervised learning with registered EPI-TIRF image pairs and self-supervised physical modeling via convolution with the point spread function. This framework ensures exceptional generalization across microscope objectives, enabling few-shot adaptation to new imaging setups. Rigorous validation on cellular and tissue samples confirms ET2dNet's superiority in background suppression and axial resolution enhancement, while maintaining compatibility with deconvolution techniques for lateral resolution improvement. Furthermore, by extending this paradigm through knowledge distillation, we developed ET3dNet, a dedicated three-dimensional reconstruction network that produces artifact-reduced volumetric results. ET3dNet effectively removes out-of-focus background signals even when the input image stack lacks the source of background. This framework makes axial super-resolution imaging more accessible by providing an easy-to-deploy algorithm that avoids additional hardware costs and complexity, showing great potential for live cell studies and clinical histopathology.

Paperid: 7071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06662.pdf

Abstract:
Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) remain a major source of preventable harm, and many clinically important mechanisms are still unknown. Existing models either rely on pharmacologic knowledge graphs (KGs), which fail on unseen drugs, or on electronic health records (EHRs), which are noisy, temporal, and site-dependent. We introduce, to our knowledge, the first system that conditions KG relation scoring on patient-level EHR context and distills that reasoning into an EHR-only model for zero-shot inference. A fusion "Teacher" learns mechanism-specific relations for drug pairs represented in both sources, while a distilled "Student" generalizes to new or rarely used drugs without KG access at inference. Both operate under a shared ontology (set) of pharmacologic mechanisms (drug relations) to produce interpretable, auditable alerts rather than opaque risk scores. Trained on a multi-institution EHR corpus paired with a curated DrugBank DDI graph, and evaluated using a clinically aligned, decision-focused protocol with leakage-safe negatives that avoid artificially easy pairs, the system maintains precision across multi-institutuion test data, produces mechanism-specific, clinically consistent predictions, reduces false alerts (higher precision) at comparable overall detection performance (F1), and misses fewer true interactions compared to prior methods. Case studies further show zero-shot identification of clinically recognized CYP-mediated and pharmacodynamic mechanisms for drugs absent from the KG, supporting real-world use in clinical decision support and pharmacovigilance.

Paperid: 7072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06531.pdf

Abstract:
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural language processing (NLP) research has mostly focused on the following four languages: Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yoruba (i.e <1% of the languages spoken in Nigeria). This is in part due to the unavailability of textual data in these languages to train and apply NLP algorithms. In this work, we introduce ibom -- a dataset for machine translation and topic classification in four Coastal Nigerian languages from the Akwa Ibom State region: Anaang, Efik, Ibibio, and Oro. These languages are not represented in Google Translate or in major benchmarks such as Flores-200 or SIB-200. We focus on extending Flores-200 benchmark to these languages, and further align the translated texts with topic labels based on SIB-200 classification dataset. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs perform poorly on machine translation for these languages in both zero-and-few shot settings. However, we find the few-shot samples to steadily improve topic classification with more shots.

Paperid: 7073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05731.pdf

Abstract:
Ultrasound (US) video segmentation remains a challenging problem due to strong inter- and intra-dataset variability, motion artifacts, and limited annotated data. Although foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) demonstrate strong zero-shot and prompt-guided segmentation capabilities, their performance deteriorates substantially when transferred to medical imaging domains. Current adaptation studies mainly emphasize architectural modifications, while the influence of data characteristics and training regimes has not been systematically examined. In this study, we present a comprehensive, data-centric investigation of SAM2 adaptation for ultrasound video segmentation. We analyze how training-set size, video duration, and augmentation schemes affect adaptation performance under three paradigms: task-specific fine-tuning, intermediate adaptation, and multi-task joint training, across five SAM2 variants and multiple prompting modes. We further design six ultrasound-specific augmentations, assessing their effect relative to generic strategies. Experiments on three representative ultrasound datasets reveal that data scale and temporal context play a more decisive role than model architecture or initialization. Moreover, joint training offers an efficient compromise between modality alignment and task specialization. This work aims to provide empirical insights for developing efficient, data-aware adaptation pipelines for SAM2 in ultrasound video analysis.

Paperid: 7074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05325.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal product retrieval systems in e-commerce platforms rely on effectively combining visual and textual signals to improve search relevance and user experience. However, vision-language models such as CLIP are vulnerable to typographic attacks, where misleading or irrelevant text embedded in images skews model predictions. In this work, we propose a novel method that reverses the logic of typographic attacks by rendering relevant textual content (e.g., titles, descriptions) directly onto product images to perform vision-text compression, thereby strengthening image-text alignment and boosting multimodal product retrieval performance. We evaluate our method on three vertical-specific e-commerce datasets (sneakers, handbags, and trading cards) using six state-of-the-art vision foundation models. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in unimodal and multimodal retrieval accuracy across categories and model families. Our findings suggest that visually rendering product metadata is a simple yet effective enhancement for zero-shot multimodal retrieval in e-commerce applications.

Paperid: 7075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04560.pdf

Abstract:
Developing accurate biomedical Question Answering (QA) systems in low-resource languages remains a major challenge, limiting equitable access to reliable medical knowledge. This paper introduces BanglaMedQA and BanglaMMedBench, the first large-scale Bangla biomedical Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) datasets designed to evaluate reasoning and retrieval in medical artificial intelligence (AI). The study applies and benchmarks several Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies, including Traditional, Zero-Shot Fallback, Agentic, Iterative Feedback, and Aggregate RAG, combining textbook-based and web retrieval with generative reasoning to improve factual accuracy. A key novelty lies in integrating a Bangla medical textbook corpus through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and implementing an Agentic RAG pipeline that dynamically selects between retrieval and reasoning strategies. Experimental results show that the Agentic RAG achieved the highest accuracy 89.54% with openai/gpt-oss-120b, outperforming other configurations and demonstrating superior rationale quality. These findings highlight the potential of RAG-based methods to enhance the reliability and accessibility of Bangla medical QA, establishing a foundation for future research in multilingual medical artificial intelligence.

Paperid: 7076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04376.pdf

Abstract:
Music editing has emerged as an important and practical area of artificial intelligence, with applications ranging from video game and film music production to personalizing existing tracks according to user preferences. However, existing models face significant limitations, such as being restricted to editing synthesized music generated by their own models, requiring highly precise prompts, or necessitating task-specific retraining, thus lacking true zero-shot capability. leveraging recent advances in rectified flow and diffusion transformers, we introduce MusRec, a zero-shot text-to-music editing model capable of performing diverse editing tasks on real-world music efficiently and effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods in preserving musical content, structural consistency, and editing fidelity, establishing a strong foundation for controllable music editing in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 7077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03635.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Stance Detection (ZSSD) identifies the attitude of the post toward unseen targets. Existing research using contrastive, meta-learning, or data augmentation suffers from generalizability issues or lack of coherence between text and target. Recent works leveraging large language models (LLMs) for ZSSD focus either on improving unseen target-specific knowledge or generating explanations for stance analysis. However, most of these works are limited by their over-reliance on explicit reasoning, provide coarse explanations that lack nuance, and do not explicitly model the reasoning process, making it difficult to interpret the model's predictions. To address these issues, in our study, we develop a novel interpretable ZSSD framework, IRIS. We provide an interpretable understanding of the attitude of the input towards the target implicitly based on sequences within the text (implicit rationales) and explicitly based on linguistic measures (explicit rationales). IRIS considers stance detection as an information retrieval ranking task, understanding the relevance of implicit rationales for different stances to guide the model towards correct predictions without requiring the ground-truth of rationales, thus providing inherent interpretability. In addition, explicit rationales based on communicative features help decode the emotional and cognitive dimensions of stance, offering an interpretable understanding of the author's attitude towards the given target. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets of VAST, EZ-STANCE, P-Stance, and RFD using 50%, 30%, and even 10% training data prove the generalizability of our model, benefiting from the proposed architecture and interpretable design.

Paperid: 7078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02767.pdf

Abstract:
The alignment of representations from different modalities has recently been shown to provide insights on the structural similarities and downstream capabilities of different encoders across diverse data types. While significant progress has been made in aligning images with text, the temporal nature of video data remains largely unexplored in this context. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive study of video-text representation alignment, probing the capabilities of modern video and language encoders. Our findings reveal several key insights. First, we demonstrate that cross-modal alignment highly depends on the richness of both visual (static images vs. multi-frame videos) and text (single caption vs. a collection) data provided at test time, especially when using state-of-the-art video encoders. We propose parametric test-time scaling laws that capture this behavior and show remarkable predictive power against empirical observations. Secondly, we investigate the correlation between semantic alignment and performance on both semantic and non-semantic downstream tasks, providing initial evidence that strong alignment against text encoders may be linked to general-purpose video representation and understanding. Finally, we correlate temporal reasoning with cross-modal alignment providing a challenging test-bed for vision and language models. Overall, our work introduces video-text alignment as an informative zero-shot way to probe the representation power of different encoders for spatio-temporal data. Project page can be found at https://video-prh.github.io/

Paperid: 7079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01553.pdf

Abstract:
AI systems on edge devices face a critical challenge in open-world environments: adapting when data distributions shift and novel classes emerge. While offline training dominates current paradigms, online continual learning (OCL)--where models learn incrementally from non-stationary streams without catastrophic forgetting--remains challenging in power-constrained settings. We present a neuromorphic solution called CLP-SNN: a spiking neural network architecture for Continually Learning Prototypes and its implementation on Intel's Loihi 2 chip. Our approach introduces three innovations: (1) event-driven and spatiotemporally sparse local learning, (2) a self-normalizing three-factor learning rule maintaining weight normalization, and (3) integrated neurogenesis and metaplasticity for capacity expansion and forgetting mitigation. On OpenLORIS few-shot learning experiments, CLP-SNN achieves accuracy competitive with replay methods while being rehearsal-free. CLP-SNN delivers transformative efficiency gains: 70\times faster (0.33ms vs 23.2ms), and 5,600\times more energy efficient (0.05mJ vs 281mJ) than the best alternative OCL on edge GPU. This demonstrates that co-designed brain-inspired algorithms and neuromorphic hardware can break traditional accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for future edge AI systems.

Paperid: 7080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01449.pdf

Abstract:
To effectively manage the wastage of perishable fruits, it is crucial to accurately predict their freshness or shelf life using non-invasive methods that rely on visual data. In this regard, deep learning techniques can offer a viable solution. However, obtaining fine-grained fruit freshness labels from experts is costly, leading to a scarcity of data. Closed proprietary Vision Language Models (VLMs), such as Gemini, have demonstrated strong performance in fruit freshness detection task in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Nonetheless, food retail organizations are unable to utilize these proprietary models due to concerns related to data privacy, while existing open-source VLMs yield sub-optimal performance for the task. Fine-tuning these open-source models with limited data fails to achieve the performance levels of proprietary models. In this work, we introduce a Model-Agnostic Ordinal Meta-Learning (MAOML) algorithm, designed to train smaller VLMs. This approach utilizes meta-learning to address data sparsity and leverages label ordinality, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance in the fruit freshness classification task under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our method achieves an industry-standard accuracy of 92.71%, averaged across all fruits. Keywords: Fruit Quality Prediction, Vision Language Models, Meta Learning, Ordinal Regression

Paperid: 7081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00973.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Model-Bound Latent Exchange (MoBLE), a decoder-binding property in Transformer autoencoders formalized as Zero-Shot Decoder Non-Transferability (ZSDN). In identity tasks using iso-architectural models trained on identical data but differing in seeds, self-decoding achieves more than 0.91 exact match and 0.98 token accuracy, while zero-shot cross-decoding collapses to chance without exact matches. This separation arises without injected secrets or adversarial training, and is corroborated by weight-space distances and attention-divergence diagnostics. We interpret ZSDN as model binding, a latent-based authentication and access-control mechanism, even when the architecture and training recipe are public: encoder's hidden state representation deterministically reveals the plaintext, yet only the correctly keyed decoder reproduces it in zero-shot. We formally define ZSDN, a decoder-binding advantage metric, and outline deployment considerations for secure artificial intelligence (AI) pipelines. Finally, we discuss learnability risks (e.g., adapter alignment) and outline mitigations. MoBLE offers a lightweight, accelerator-friendly approach to secure AI deployment in safety-critical domains, including aviation and cyber-physical systems.

Paperid: 7082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00124.pdf

Abstract:
We analyse how the sampling dynamics of distributions evolve in score-based diffusion models using cross-fluctuations, a centered-moment statistic from statistical physics. Specifically, we show that starting from an unbiased isotropic normal distribution, samples undergo sharp, discrete transitions, eventually forming distinct events of a desired distribution while progressively revealing finer structure. As this process is reversible, these transitions also occur in reverse, where intermediate states progressively merge, tracing a path back to the initial distribution. We demonstrate that these transitions can be detected as discontinuities in $n^{\text{th}}$-order cross-fluctuations. For variance-preserving SDEs, we derive a closed-form for these cross-fluctuations that is efficiently computable for the reverse trajectory. We find that detecting these transitions directly boosts sampling efficiency, accelerates class-conditional and rare-class generation, and improves two zero-shot tasks--image classification and style transfer--without expensive grid search or retraining. We also show that this viewpoint unifies classical coupling and mixing from finite Markov chains with continuous dynamics while extending to stochastic SDEs and non Markovian samplers. Our framework therefore bridges discrete Markov chain theory, phase analysis, and modern generative modeling.

Paperid: 7083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26521.pdf

Abstract:
Diacritics restoration in Hebrew is a fundamental task for ensuring accurate word pronunciation and disambiguating textual meaning. Despite the language's high degree of ambiguity when unvocalized, recent machine learning approaches have significantly advanced performance on this task. In this work, we present DIVRIT, a novel system for Hebrew diacritization that frames the task as a zero-shot classification problem. Our approach operates at the word level, selecting the most appropriate diacritization pattern for each undiacritized word from a dynamically generated candidate set, conditioned on the surrounding textual context. A key innovation of DIVRIT is its use of a Hebrew Visual Language Model, which processes undiacritized text as an image, allowing diacritic information to be embedded directly within the input's vector representation. Through a comprehensive evaluation across various configurations, we demonstrate that the system effectively performs diacritization without relying on complex, explicit linguistic analysis. Notably, in an ``oracle'' setting where the correct diacritized form is guaranteed to be among the provided candidates, DIVRIT achieves a high level of accuracy. Furthermore, strategic architectural enhancements and optimized training methodologies yield significant improvements in the system's overall generalization capabilities. These findings highlight the promising potential of visual representations for accurate and automated Hebrew diacritization.

Paperid: 7084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26441.pdf

Abstract:
Test-time prompt tuning (TPT) has emerged as a promising technique for adapting large vision-language models (VLMs) to unseen tasks without relying on labeled data. However, the lack of dispersion between textual features can hurt calibration performance, which raises concerns about VLMs' reliability, trustworthiness, and safety. Current TPT approaches primarily focus on improving prompt calibration by either maximizing average textual feature dispersion or enforcing orthogonality constraints to encourage angular separation. However, these methods may not always have optimal angular separation between class-wise textual features, which implies overlooking the critical role of angular diversity. To address this, we propose A-TPT, a novel TPT framework that introduces angular diversity to encourage uniformity in the distribution of normalized textual features induced by corresponding learnable prompts. This uniformity is achieved by maximizing the minimum pairwise angular distance between features on the unit hypersphere. We show that our approach consistently surpasses state-of-the-art TPT methods in reducing the aggregate average calibration error while maintaining comparable accuracy through extensive experiments with various backbones on different datasets. Notably, our approach exhibits superior zero-shot calibration performance on natural distribution shifts and generalizes well to medical datasets. We provide extensive analyses, including theoretical aspects, to establish the grounding of A-TPT. These results highlight the potency of promoting angular diversity to achieve well-dispersed textual features, significantly improving VLM calibration during test-time adaptation. Our code will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 7085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25463.pdf

Abstract:
Underwater infrastructure requires frequent inspection and maintenance due to harsh marine conditions. Current reliance on human divers or remotely operated vehicles is limited by perceptual and operational challenges, especially around complex structures or in turbid water. Enhancing the spatial awareness of underwater vehicles is key to reducing piloting risks and enabling greater autonomy. To address these challenges, we present SPADE: SParsity Adaptive Depth Estimator, a monocular depth estimation pipeline that combines pre-trained relative depth estimator with sparse depth priors to produce dense, metric scale depth maps. Our two-stage approach first scales the relative depth map with the sparse depth points, then refines the final metric prediction with our proposed Cascade Conv-Deformable Transformer blocks. Our approach achieves improved accuracy and generalisation over state-of-the-art baselines and runs efficiently at over 15 FPS on embedded hardware, promising to support practical underwater inspection and intervention. This work has been submitted to IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering Special Issue of AUV 2026.

Paperid: 7086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25420.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful priors for single-image restoration, but their application to zero-shot video restoration suffers from temporal inconsistencies due to the stochastic nature of sampling and complexity of incorporating explicit temporal modeling. In this work, we address the challenge of improving temporal coherence in video restoration using zero-shot image-based diffusion models without retraining or modifying their architecture. We propose two complementary inference-time strategies: (1) Perceptual Straightening Guidance (PSG) based on the neuroscience-inspired perceptual straightening hypothesis, which steers the diffusion denoising process towards smoother temporal evolution by incorporating a curvature penalty in a perceptual space to improve temporal perceptual scores, such as Fréchet Video Distance (FVD) and perceptual straightness; and (2) Multi-Path Ensemble Sampling (MPES), which aims at reducing stochastic variation by ensembling multiple diffusion trajectories to improve fidelity (distortion) scores, such as PSNR and SSIM, without sacrificing sharpness. Together, these training-free techniques provide a practical path toward temporally stable high-fidelity perceptual video restoration using large pretrained diffusion models. We performed extensive experiments over multiple datasets and degradation types, systematically evaluating each strategy to understand their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while PSG enhances temporal naturalness, particularly in case of temporal blur, MPES consistently improves fidelity and spatio-temporal perception--distortion trade-off across all tasks.

Paperid: 7087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25318.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) often suffers from base-class bias and unstable calibration when only a few novel samples are available. We propose Prototype-Driven Alignment (PDA), a lightweight, plug-in metric head for DeFRCN that provides a prototype-based "second opinion" complementary to the linear classifier. PDA maintains support-only prototypes in a learnable identity-initialized projection space and optionally applies prototype-conditioned RoI alignment to reduce geometric mismatch. During fine-tuning, prototypes can be adapted via exponential moving average(EMA) updates on labeled foreground RoIs-without introducing class-specific parameters-and are frozen at inference to ensure strict protocol compliance. PDA employs a best-of-K matching scheme to capture intra-class multi-modality and temperature-scaled fusion to combine metric similarities with detector logits. Experiments on VOC FSOD and GFSOD benchmarks show that PDA consistently improves novel-class performance with minimal impact on base classes and negligible computational overhead.

Paperid: 7088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23395.pdf

Abstract:
Religious language continues to permeate contemporary discourse, even in ostensibly secular domains such as environmental activism and climate change debates. This paper investigates how explicit and implicit forms of religious language appear in climate-related texts produced by secular and religious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We introduce a dual methodological approach: a rule-based model using a hierarchical tree of religious terms derived from ecotheology literature, and large language models (LLMs) operating in a zero-shot setting. Using a dataset of more than 880,000 sentences, we compare how these methods detect religious language and analyze points of agreement and divergence. The results show that the rule-based method consistently labels more sentences as religious than LLMs. These findings highlight not only the methodological challenges of computationally detecting religious language but also the broader tension over whether religious language should be defined by vocabulary alone or by contextual meaning. This study contributes to digital methods in religious studies by demonstrating both the potential and the limitations of approaches for analyzing how the sacred persists in climate discourse.

Paperid: 7089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22389.pdf

Abstract:
Assessing published academic journal articles is a common task for evaluations of departments and individuals. Whilst it is sometimes supported by citation data, Large Language Models (LLMs) may give more useful indications of article quality. Evidence of this capability exists for two of the largest LLM families, ChatGPT and Gemini, and the medium sized LLM Gemma3 27b, but it is unclear whether smaller LLMs and reasoning models have similar abilities. This is important because larger models may be slow and impractical in some situations, and reasoning models may perform differently. Four relevant questions are addressed with Gemma3 variants, Llama4 Scout, Qwen3, Magistral Small and DeepSeek R1, on a dataset of 2,780 medical, health and life science papers in 6 fields, with two different gold standards, one novel. The results suggest that smaller (open weights) and reasoning LLMs have similar performance to ChatGPT 4o-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash, but that 1b parameters may often, and 4b sometimes, be too few. Moreover, averaging scores from multiple identical queries seems to be a universally successful strategy, and few-shot prompts (four examples) tended to help but the evidence was equivocal. Reasoning models did not have a clear advantage. Overall, the results show, for the first time, that smaller LLMs >4b, including reasoning models, have a substantial capability to score journal articles for research quality, especially if score averaging is used.

Paperid: 7090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22119.pdf

Abstract:
Deep stereo matching has advanced significantly on benchmark datasets through fine-tuning but falls short of the zero-shot generalization seen in foundation models in other vision tasks. We introduce CogStereo, a novel framework that addresses challenging regions, such as occlusions or weak textures, without relying on dataset-specific priors. CogStereo embeds implicit spatial cognition into the refinement process by using monocular depth features as priors, capturing holistic scene understanding beyond local correspondences. This approach ensures structurally coherent disparity estimation, even in areas where geometry alone is inadequate. CogStereo employs a dual-conditional refinement mechanism that combines pixel-wise uncertainty with cognition-guided features for consistent global correction of mismatches. Extensive experiments on Scene Flow, KITTI, Middlebury, ETH3D, EuRoc, and real-world demonstrate that CogStereo not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also excels in cross-domain generalization, shifting stereo vision towards a cognition-driven approach.

Paperid: 7091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21977.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising way to simulate human survey responses, potentially reducing the cost of large-scale data collection. However, existing zero-shot methods suffer from prompt sensitivity and low accuracy, while conventional fine-tuning approaches mostly fit the training set distributions and struggle to produce results more accurate than the training set itself, which deviates from the original goal of using LLMs to simulate survey responses. Building on this observation, we introduce Distribution Shift Alignment (DSA), a two-stage fine-tuning method that aligns both the output distributions and the distribution shifts across different backgrounds. By learning how these distributions change rather than fitting training data, DSA can provide results substantially closer to the true distribution than the training data. Empirically, DSA consistently outperforms other methods on five public survey datasets. We further conduct a comprehensive comparison covering accuracy, robustness, and data savings. DSA reduces the required real data by 53.48-69.12%, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in survey simulation.

Paperid: 7092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21798.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the enhancement of Human-in-the-Loop video annotation by integrating automatic capabilities to ease the task for annotators and assess their performance. The research delves into the practical implications of the annotation processes, the integration of AI components, and the evaluation of its outcomes. We analyze their impact on efficiency, accuracy, and overall annotation quality. Focusing on the Human-in-the-Loop for video annotation tasks, we implemented a single-iteration scheme using Label Studio and AI-powered zero-shot pre-annotations. Using this framework, we designed a test based on the annotation of the UCF-Crime dataset to discriminate between normal and abnormal activities in video footage. Our results evidence how automatic AI-based pre-annotation can streamline the video annotation workflow, empowering human annotators and optimizing the overall pipeline. Using the pre-annotated data, we observed a 35% reduction in the annotation time for 70% of the annotators with similar quality annotations, compared to the traditional manual annotation task. Results are consistent with asset duration and complexity. We also observed that while annotators rapidly learned to use the tool, the produced annotations are more coherent among annotators and better match the natural clustering of the video frames.

Paperid: 7093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21495.pdf

Abstract:
Placental abruption is a severe complication during pregnancy, and its early accurate diagnosis is crucial for ensuring maternal and fetal safety. Traditional ultrasound diagnostic methods heavily rely on physician experience, leading to issues such as subjective bias and diagnostic inconsistencies. This paper proposes an improved model, EH-YOLOv11n (Enhanced Hemorrhage-YOLOv11n), based on small-sample learning, aiming to achieve automatic detection of hematoma features in placental ultrasound images. The model enhances performance through multidimensional optimization: it integrates wavelet convolution and coordinate convolution to strengthen frequency and spatial feature extraction; incorporates a cascaded group attention mechanism to suppress ultrasound artifacts and occlusion interference, thereby improving bounding box localization accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate a detection accuracy of 78%, representing a 2.5% improvement over YOLOv11n and a 13.7% increase over YOLOv8. The model exhibits significant superiority in precision-recall curves, confidence scores, and occlusion scenarios. Combining high accuracy with real-time processing, this model provides a reliable solution for computer-aided diagnosis of placental abruption, holding significant clinical application value.

Paperid: 7094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21069.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding and reasoning about complex 3D environments requires structured scene representations that capture not only objects but also their semantic and spatial relationships. While recent works on 3D scene graph generation have leveraged pretrained VLMs without task-specific fine-tuning, they are largely confined to single-view settings, fail to support incremental updates as new observations arrive and lack explicit geometric grounding in 3D space, all of which are essential for embodied scenarios. In this paper, we propose, ZING-3D, a framework that leverages the vast knowledge of pretrained foundation models to enable open-vocabulary recognition and generate a rich semantic representation of the scene in a zero-shot manner while also enabling incremental updates and geometric grounding in 3D space, making it suitable for downstream robotics applications. Our approach leverages VLM reasoning to generate a rich 2D scene graph, which is grounded in 3D using depth information. Nodes represent open-vocabulary objects with features, 3D locations, and semantic context, while edges capture spatial and semantic relations with inter-object distances. Our experiments on scenes from the Replica and HM3D dataset show that ZING-3D is effective at capturing spatial and relational knowledge without the need of task-specific training.

Paperid: 7095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20521.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks, particularly in automated program repair. However, the effectiveness of such repairs is highly dependent on the performance of upstream fault localization, for which comprehensive evaluations are currently lacking. This paper presents a systematic empirical study on LLMs in the statement-level code fault localization task. We evaluate representative open-source models (Qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct, DeepSeek-V3) and closed-source models (GPT-4.1 mini, Gemini-2.5-flash) to assess their fault localization capabilities on the HumanEval-Java and Defects4J datasets. The study investigates the impact of different prompting strategies--including standard prompts, few-shot examples, and chain-of-reasoning--on model performance, with a focus on analysis across accuracy, time efficiency, and economic cost dimensions. Our experimental results show that incorporating bug report context significantly enhances model performance. Few-shot learning shows potential for improvement but exhibits noticeable diminishing marginal returns, while chain-of-thought reasoning's effectiveness is highly contingent on the model's inherent reasoning capabilities. This study not only highlights the performance characteristics and trade-offs of different models in fault localization tasks, but also offers valuable insights into the strengths of current LLMs and strategies for improving fault localization effectiveness.

Paperid: 7096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20154.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models inherit stereotypes from their pretraining data, leading to biased behavior toward certain social groups in many Natural Language Processing tasks, such as hateful speech detection or sentiment analysis. Surprisingly, the evaluation of this kind of bias in stance detection methods has been largely overlooked by the community. Stance Detection involves labeling a statement as being against, in favor, or neutral towards a specific target and is among the most sensitive NLP tasks, as it often relates to political leanings. In this paper, we focus on the bias of Large Language Models when performing stance detection in a zero-shot setting. We automatically annotate posts in pre-existing stance detection datasets with two attributes: dialect or vernacular of a specific group and text complexity/readability, to investigate whether these attributes influence the model's stance detection decisions. Our results show that LLMs exhibit significant stereotypes in stance detection tasks, such as incorrectly associating pro-marijuana views with low text complexity and African American dialect with opposition to Donald Trump.

Paperid: 7097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19694.pdf

Abstract:
Prompting is a common approach for leveraging LMs in zero-shot settings. However, the underlying mechanisms that enable LMs to perform diverse tasks without task-specific supervision remain poorly understood. Studying the relationship between prompting and the quality of internal representations can shed light on how pre-trained embeddings may support in-context task solving. In this empirical study, we conduct a series of probing experiments on prompt embeddings, analyzing various combinations of prompt templates for zero-shot classification. Our findings show that while prompting affects the quality of representations, these changes do not consistently correlate with the relevance of the prompts to the target task. This result challenges the assumption that more relevant prompts necessarily lead to better representations. We further analyze potential factors that may contribute to this unexpected behavior.

Paperid: 7098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19365.pdf

Abstract:
We present the Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB), the largest, most diverse, and most comprehensive open-source benchmark for legal information retrieval to date. MLEB consists of ten expert-annotated datasets spanning multiple jurisdictions (the US, UK, EU, Australia, Ireland, and Singapore), document types (cases, legislation, regulatory guidance, contracts, and literature), and task types (search, zero-shot classification, and question answering). Seven of the datasets in MLEB were newly constructed in order to fill domain and jurisdictional gaps in the open-source legal information retrieval landscape. We document our methodology in building MLEB and creating the new constituent datasets, and release our code, results, and data openly to assist with reproducible evaluations.

Paperid: 7099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18671.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates various factors that influence the performance of end-to-end deep learning approaches for historical writer identification (HWI), a task that remains challenging due to the diversity of handwriting styles, document degradation, and the limited number of labelled samples per writer. These conditions often make accurate recognition difficult, even for human experts. Traditional HWI methods typically rely on handcrafted image processing and clustering techniques, which tend to perform well on small and carefully curated datasets. In contrast, end-to-end pipelines aim to automate the process by learning features directly from document images. However, our experiments show that many of these models struggle to generalise in more realistic, document-level settings, especially under zero-shot scenarios where writers in the test set are not present in the training data. We explore different combinations of pre-processing methods, backbone architectures, and post-processing strategies, including text segmentation, patch sampling, and feature aggregation. The results suggest that most configurations perform poorly due to weak capture of low-level visual features, inconsistent patch representations, and high sensitivity to content noise. Still, we identify one end-to-end setup that achieves results comparable to the top-performing system, despite using a simpler design. These findings point to key challenges in building robust end-to-end systems and offer insight into design choices that improve performance in historical document writer identification.

Paperid: 7100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18502.pdf

Abstract:
Vehicle make and model recognition (VMMR) is an important task in intelligent transportation systems, but existing approaches struggle to adapt to newly released models. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) provides strong visual-text alignment, yet its fixed pretrained weights limit performance without costly image-specific finetuning. We propose a pipeline that integrates vision language models (VLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to support zero-shot recognition through text-based reasoning. A VLM converts vehicle images into descriptive attributes, which are compared against a database of textual features. Relevant entries are retrieved and combined with the description to form a prompt, and a language model (LM) infers the make and model. This design avoids large-scale retraining and enables rapid updates by adding textual descriptions of new vehicles. Experiments show that the proposed method improves recognition by nearly 20% over the CLIP baseline, demonstrating the potential of RAG-enhanced LM reasoning for scalable VMMR in smart-city applications.

Paperid: 7101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17866.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce MUSE (Model-based Uncertainty-aware Similarity Estimation), a training-free framework designed for model-based zero-shot 2D object detection and segmentation. MUSE leverages 2D multi-view templates rendered from 3D unseen objects and 2D object proposals extracted from input query images. In the embedding stage, it integrates class and patch embeddings, where the patch embeddings are normalized using generalized mean pooling (GeM) to capture both global and local representations efficiently. During the matching stage, MUSE employs a joint similarity metric that combines absolute and relative similarity scores, enhancing the robustness of matching under challenging scenarios. Finally, the similarity score is refined through an uncertainty-aware object prior that adjusts for proposal reliability. Without any additional training or fine-tuning, MUSE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BOP Challenge 2025, ranking first across the Classic Core, H3, and Industrial tracks. These results demonstrate that MUSE offers a powerful and generalizable framework for zero-shot 2D object detection and segmentation.

Paperid: 7102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20712.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces the first multi-lingual and multi-label classification model for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR). Our model, HArch, is evaluated on the recently released DiscoGeM 2.0 corpus and leverages hierarchical dependencies between discourse senses to predict probability distributions across all three sense levels in the PDTB 3.0 framework. We compare several pre-trained encoder backbones and find that RoBERTa-HArch achieves the best performance in English, while XLM-RoBERTa-HArch performs best in the multi-lingual setting. In addition, we compare our fine-tuned models against GPT-4o and Llama-4-Maverick using few-shot prompting across all language configurations. Our results show that our fine-tuned models consistently outperform these LLMs, highlighting the advantages of task-specific fine-tuning over prompting in IDRR. Finally, we report SOTA results on the DiscoGeM 1.0 corpus, further validating the effectiveness of our hierarchical approach.

Paperid: 7103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20396.pdf

Abstract:
Airbnb is a leader in offering travel accommodations. Airbnb has historically relied on structured data to understand, rank, and recommend listings to guests due to the limited capabilities and associated complexity arising from extracting meaningful information from text and images. With the rise of representation learning, leveraging rich information from text and photos has become easier. A popular approach has been to create embeddings for text documents and images to enable use cases of computing similarities between listings or using embeddings as features in an ML model. However, an Airbnb listing has diverse unstructured data: multiple images, various unstructured text documents such as title, description, and reviews, making this approach challenging. Specifically, it is a non-trivial task to combine multiple embeddings of different pieces of information to reach a single representation. This paper proposes BiListing, for Bimodal Listing, an approach to align text and photos of a listing by leveraging large-language models and pretrained language-image models. The BiListing approach has several favorable characteristics: capturing unstructured data into a single embedding vector per listing and modality, enabling zero-shot capability to search inventory efficiently in user-friendly semantics, overcoming the cold start problem, and enabling listing-to-listing search along a single modality, or both. We conducted offline and online tests to leverage the BiListing embeddings in the Airbnb search ranking model, and successfully deployed it in production, achieved 0.425% of NDCB gain, and drove tens of millions in incremental revenue.

Paperid: 7104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20379.pdf

Abstract:
Visual editing with diffusion models has made significant progress but often struggles with complex scenarios that textual guidance alone could not adequately describe, highlighting the need for additional non-text editing prompts. In this work, we introduce a novel audio-guided visual editing framework that can handle complex editing tasks with multiple text and audio prompts without requiring additional training. Existing audio-guided visual editing methods often necessitate training on specific datasets to align audio with text, limiting their generalization to real-world situations. We leverage a pre-trained multi-modal encoder with strong zero-shot capabilities and integrate diverse audio into visual editing tasks, by alleviating the discrepancy between the audio encoder space and the diffusion model's prompt encoder space. Additionally, we propose a novel approach to handle complex scenarios with multiple and multi-modal editing prompts through our separate noise branching and adaptive patch selection. Our comprehensive experiments on diverse editing tasks demonstrate that our framework excels in handling complicated editing scenarios by incorporating rich information from audio, where text-only approaches fail.

Paperid: 7105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20294.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world reinforcement learning demands adaptation to unseen environmental conditions without costly retraining. Contextual Markov Decision Processes (cMDP) model this challenge, but existing methods often require explicit context variables (e.g., friction, gravity), limiting their use when contexts are latent or hard to measure. We introduce Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination (DALI), a framework integrated within the Dreamer architecture that infers latent context representations from agent-environment interactions. By training a self-supervised encoder to predict forward dynamics, DALI generates actionable representations conditioning the world model and policy, bridging perception and control. We theoretically prove this encoder is essential for efficient context inference and robust generalization. DALI's latent space enables counterfactual consistency: Perturbing a gravity-encoding dimension alters imagined rollouts in physically plausible ways. On challenging cMDP benchmarks, DALI achieves significant gains over context-unaware baselines, often surpassing context-aware baselines in extrapolation tasks, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen contextual variations.

Paperid: 7106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17490.pdf

Abstract:
Transformer-based models like BERT excel at short text classification but struggle with long document classification (LDC) due to input length limitations and computational inefficiencies. In this work, we propose an efficient, zero-shot approach to LDC that leverages sentence ranking to reduce input context without altering the model architecture. Our method enables the adaptation of models trained on short texts, such as headlines, to long-form documents by selecting the most informative sentences using a TF-IDF-based ranking strategy. Using the MahaNews dataset of long Marathi news articles, we evaluate three context reduction strategies that prioritize essential content while preserving classification accuracy. Our results show that retaining only the top 50\% ranked sentences maintains performance comparable to full-document inference while reducing inference time by up to 35\%. This demonstrates that sentence ranking is a simple yet effective technique for scalable and efficient zero-shot LDC.

Paperid: 7107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17400.pdf

Abstract:
How does retrieval performance scale with pretraining FLOPs? We benchmark retrieval performance across LLM model sizes from 125 million parameters to 7 billion parameters pretrained on datasets ranging from 1 billion tokens to more than 2 trillion tokens. We find that retrieval performance on zero-shot BEIR tasks predictably scales with LLM size, training duration, and estimated FLOPs. We also show that In-Context Learning scores are strongly correlated with retrieval scores across retrieval tasks. Finally, we highlight the implications this has for the development of LLM-based retrievers.

Paperid: 7108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16063.pdf

Abstract:
We study the problem of synthesizing domain-specific languages (DSLs) for few-shot learning in symbolic domains. Given a base language and instances of few-shot learning problems, where each instance is split into training and testing samples, the DSL synthesis problem asks for a grammar over the base language that guarantees that small expressions solving training samples also solve corresponding testing samples. We prove that the problem is decidable for a class of languages whose semantics over fixed structures can be evaluated by tree automata and when expression size corresponds to parse tree depth in the grammar, and, furthermore, the grammars solving the problem correspond to a regular set of trees. We also prove decidability results for variants of the problem where DSLs are only required to express solutions for input learning problems and where DSLs are defined using macro grammars.

Paperid: 7109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15801.pdf

Abstract:
Phone call transcript labeling is prohibitively expensive (approximately 2 USD per minute) due to privacy regulations, consent requirements, and manual annotation costs requiring 3 hours of expert time per hour of audio. Existing extraction methods fail on conversational speech containing disfluencies, interruptions, and speaker overlap. We introduce LingVarBench, a synthetic data generation pipeline that addresses these constraints through automated validation. First, we prompt an LLM to generate realistic structured field values across multiple use cases. Second, we recursively prompt the model to transform these values into thousands of natural conversational utterances containing typical phone call characteristics. Third, we validate each synthetic utterance by testing whether a separate LLM-based extractor can recover the original structured information. We employ DSPy's SIMBA optimizer to automatically synthesize extraction prompts from validated synthetic transcripts, eliminating manual prompt engineering. Our optimized prompts achieve up to 95 percent accuracy for numeric fields (vs. 88-89 percent zero-shot), 90 percent for names (vs. 47-79 percent), and over 80 percent for dates (vs. 72-77 percent) on real customer transcripts, demonstrating substantial gains over zero-shot prompting. The synthetic-to-real transfer demonstrates that conversational patterns learned from generated data generalize effectively to authentic phone calls containing background noise and domain-specific terminology. LingVarBench provides the first systematic benchmark for structured extraction from synthetic conversational data, demonstrating that automated prompt optimization overcomes cost and privacy barriers preventing large-scale phone call analysis in commercial settings.

Paperid: 7110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15500.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents MExECON, a novel pipeline for 3D reconstruction of clothed human avatars from sparse multi-view RGB images. Building on the single-view method ECON, MExECON extends its capabilities to leverage multiple viewpoints, improving geometry and body pose estimation. At the core of the pipeline is the proposed Joint Multi-view Body Optimization (JMBO) algorithm, which fits a single SMPL-X body model jointly across all input views, enforcing multi-view consistency. The optimized body model serves as a low-frequency prior that guides the subsequent surface reconstruction, where geometric details are added via normal map integration. MExECON integrates normal maps from both front and back views to accurately capture fine-grained surface details such as clothing folds and hairstyles. All multi-view gains are achieved without requiring any network re-training. Experimental results show that MExECON consistently improves fidelity over the single-view baseline and achieves competitive performance compared to modern few-shot 3D reconstruction methods.

Paperid: 7111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14128.pdf

Abstract:
Jailbreak attacks pose a serious challenge to the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs). We introduce CCFC (Core & Core-Full-Core), a dual-track, prompt-level defense framework designed to mitigate LLMs' vulnerabilities from prompt injection and structure-aware jailbreak attacks. CCFC operates by first isolating the semantic core of a user query via few-shot prompting, and then evaluating the query using two complementary tracks: a core-only track to ignore adversarial distractions (e.g., toxic suffixes or prefix injections), and a core-full-core (CFC) track to disrupt the structural patterns exploited by gradient-based or edit-based attacks. The final response is selected based on a safety consistency check across both tracks, ensuring robustness without compromising on response quality. We demonstrate that CCFC cuts attack success rates by 50-75% versus state-of-the-art defenses against strong adversaries (e.g., DeepInception, GCG), without sacrificing fidelity on benign queries. Our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-level defenses, offering a practical and effective solution for safer LLM deployment.

Paperid: 7112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13877.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great potential in robotic operations. However, its data-intensive nature and reliance on the Markov Decision Process (MDP) assumption limit its practical deployment in real-world scenarios involving complex dynamics and long-term temporal dependencies, such as multi-robot manipulation. Decision Transformers (DTs) have emerged as a promising offline alternative by leveraging causal transformers for sequence modeling in RL tasks. However, their applications to multi-robot manipulations still remain underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework, Symbolically-Guided Decision Transformer (SGDT), which integrates a neuro-symbolic mechanism with a causal transformer to enable deployable multi-robot collaboration. In the proposed SGDT framework, a neuro-symbolic planner generates a high-level task-oriented plan composed of symbolic subgoals. Guided by these subgoals, a goal-conditioned decision transformer (GCDT) performs low-level sequential decision-making for multi-robot manipulation. This hierarchical architecture enables structured, interpretable, and generalizable decision making in complex multi-robot collaboration tasks. We evaluate the performance of SGDT across a range of task scenarios, including zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first work to explore DT-based technology for multi-robot manipulation.

Paperid: 7113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13718.pdf

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the capabilities of 28 large language models (LLMs) to reason with 20 defeasible reasoning patterns involving generic generalizations (e.g., 'Birds fly', 'Ravens are black') central to non-monotonic logic. Generics are of special interest to linguists, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive scientists because of their complex exception-permitting behaviour and their centrality to default reasoning, cognition, and concept acquisition. We find that while several frontier models handle many default reasoning problems well, performance varies widely across models and prompting styles. Few-shot prompting modestly improves performance for some models, but chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting often leads to serious performance degradation (mean accuracy drop -11.14%, SD 15.74% in models performing above 75% accuracy in zero-shot condition, temperature 0). Most models either struggle to distinguish between defeasible and deductive inference or misinterpret generics as universal statements. These findings underscore both the promise and limits of current LLMs for default reasoning.

Paperid: 7114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11196.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization in natural image tasks. However, their performance often degrades on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based aerial imagery, which features high resolution, complex spatial semantics, and strict real-time constraints. These challenges limit the applicability of general-purpose VLMs to structured aerial reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we propose UAV-VL-R1, a lightweight VLM explicitly designed for aerial visual reasoning. It is trained using a hybrid method that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and multi-stage reinforcement learning (RL). We leverage the group relative policy optimization (GRPO) algorithm to promote structured and interpretable reasoning through rule-guided rewards and intra-group policy alignment. To support model training and evaluation, we introduce a high-resolution visual question answering dataset named HRVQA-VL, which consists of 50,019 annotated samples covering eight UAV-relevant reasoning tasks, including object counting, transportation recognition, and spatial scene inference. Experimental results show that UAV-VL-R1 achieves a 48.17% higher zero-shot accuracy than the Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct baseline and even outperforms its 72B-scale variant, which is 36x larger, on multiple tasks. Ablation studies reveal that while SFT improves semantic alignment, it may reduce reasoning diversity in mathematical tasks. GRPO-based RL compensates for this limitation by enhancing logical flexibility and the robustness of inference. Additionally, UAV-VL-R1 requires only 3.9GB of memory under FP16 inference and can be quantized to 2.5GB with INT8, supporting real-time deployment on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Paperid: 7115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10927.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying risks associated with a company is important to investors and the well-being of the overall financial market. In this study, we build a computational framework to automatically extract company risk factors from news articles. Our newly proposed schema comprises seven distinct aspects, such as supply chain, regulations, and competitions. We sample and annotate 744 news articles and benchmark various machine learning models. While large language models have achieved huge progress in various types of NLP tasks, our experiment shows that zero-shot and few-shot prompting state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g. LLaMA-2) can only achieve moderate to low performances in identifying risk factors. And fine-tuned pre-trained language models are performing better on most of the risk factors. Using this model, we analyze over 277K Bloomberg news articles and demonstrate that identifying risk factors from news could provide extensive insight into the operations of companies and industries.

Paperid: 7116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10703.pdf

Abstract:
Ontology matching (OM) plays an essential role in enabling semantic interoperability and integration across heterogeneous knowledge sources, particularly in the biomedical domain which contains numerous complex concepts related to diseases and pharmaceuticals. This paper introduces GenOM, a large language model (LLM)-based ontology alignment framework, which enriches the semantic representations of ontology concepts via generating textual definitions, retrieves alignment candidates with an embedding model, and incorporates exact matching-based tools to improve precision. Extensive experiments conducted on the OAEI Bio-ML track demonstrate that GenOM can often achieve competitive performance, surpassing many baselines including traditional OM systems and recent LLM-based methods. Further ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of semantic enrichment and few-shot prompting, highlighting the framework's robustness and adaptability.

Paperid: 7117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10645.pdf

Abstract:
Visual transfer learning for unseen categories presents an active research topic yet a challenging task, due to the inherent conflict between preserving category-specific representations and acquiring transferable knowledge. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) pre-trained on large amounts of image-text pairs offer a promising solution. However, existing prompt tuning methods rely on sparse category labels or disparate LLM-generated descriptions, which fragment knowledge representation and hinder transferability. To address this limitation, we introduce Semantic Prompt Tuning (SemPT), a novel framework that tackles the generalization challenge by leveraging shared attribute-level knowledge across categories. Specifically, SemPT adopts a two-step prompting strategy to guide LLM in extracting shared visual attributes and generating attribute-level descriptions, capturing transferable semantic cues beyond labels while ensuring coherent structure. Then, visually guided weighting is applied to the embeddings of attribute-level descriptions to reduce noise from irrelevant attributes and enhance the text embeddings. Additionally, image embeddings are jointly aligned with both label and attribute-enhanced text embeddings, balancing discrimination for seen categories and transferability to unseen ones. Considering the availability of category exposure, our inference dynamically selects between standard label embeddings for seen categories and attribute-enhanced embeddings for unseen ones to ensure effective adaptation. Extensive experiments on 15 benchmark datasets demonstrate that SemPT achieves state-of-the-art performance across various settings, including base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, cross-domain transfer, and few-shot learning.

Paperid: 7118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10171.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have transformed general-purpose visual recognition through strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their performance degrades significantly in niche, safety-critical domains such as industrial spill detection, where hazardous events are rare, sensitive, and difficult to annotate. This scarcity -- driven by privacy concerns, data sensitivity, and the infrequency of real incidents -- renders conventional fine-tuning of detectors infeasible for most industrial settings. We address this challenge by introducing a scalable framework centered on a high-quality synthetic data generation pipeline. We demonstrate that this synthetic corpus enables effective Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of VLMs and substantially boosts the performance of state-of-the-art object detectors such as YOLO and DETR. Notably, in the absence of synthetic data (SynSpill dataset), VLMs still generalize better to unseen spill scenarios than these detectors. When SynSpill is used, both VLMs and detectors achieve marked improvements, with their performance becoming comparable. Our results underscore that high-fidelity synthetic data is a powerful means to bridge the domain gap in safety-critical applications. The combination of synthetic generation and lightweight adaptation offers a cost-effective, scalable pathway for deploying vision systems in industrial environments where real data is scarce/impractical to obtain. Project Page: https://synspill.vercel.app

Paperid: 7119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09785.pdf

Abstract:
Learning from large-scale pre-trained models with strong generalization ability has shown remarkable success in a wide range of downstream tasks recently, but it is still underexplored in the challenging few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) task. It aims to continually learn new concepts from limited training samples without forgetting the old ones at the same time. In this paper, we introduce DSS-Prompt, a simple yet effective approach that transforms the pre-trained Vision Transformer with minimal modifications in the way of prompts into a strong FSCIL classifier. Concretely, we synergistically utilize two complementary types of prompts in each Transformer block: static prompts to bridge the domain gap between the pre-training and downstream datasets, thus enabling better adaption; and dynamic prompts to capture instance-aware semantics, thus enabling easy transfer from base to novel classes. Specially, to generate dynamic prompts, we leverage a pre-trained multi-modal model to extract input-related diverse semantics, thereby generating complementary input-aware prompts, and then adaptively adjust their importance across different layers. In this way, on top of the prompted visual embeddings, a simple prototype classifier can beat state-of-the-arts without further training on the incremental tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of our DSS-Prompt and show that it consistently achieves better performance than existing approaches on all datasets and can alleviate the catastrophic forgetting issue as well.

Paperid: 7120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08115.pdf

Abstract:
We present TeamMedAgents, a modular multi-agent framework that systematically translates evidence-based teamwork principles from organizational psychology into large language model collaboration for medical decision-making. Building upon Salas et al.'s "Big Five" teamwork model, we operationalize five core components as independently configurable mechanisms: shared mental models, team leadership, team orientation, trust networks, and mutual monitoring. Our architecture dynamically recruits 2-4 specialist agents and employs structured four-phase deliberation with adaptive component selection. Evaluation across eight medical benchmarks encompassing 11,545 questions demonstrates TeamMedAgents achieves 77.63% overall accuracy (text-based: 81.30%, vision-language: 66.60%). Systematic ablation studies comparing three single-agent baselines (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, CoT) against individual teamwork components reveal task-specific optimization patterns: shared mental models excel on knowledge tasks, trust mechanisms improve differential diagnosis, while comprehensive integration degrades performance. Adaptive component selection yields 2-10 percentage point improvements over strongest baselines, with 96.2% agent convergence validating structured coordination effectiveness. TeamMedAgents establishes principled methodology for translating human teamwork theory into multi-agent systems, demonstrating that evidence-based collaboration patterns enhance AI performance in safety-critical domains through modular component design and selective activation strategies.

Paperid: 7121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07662.pdf

Abstract:
Classification is one of the most widespread tasks in AI applications, serving often as the first step in filtering, sorting, and categorizing data. Since modern AI systems must handle large volumes of input data and early pipeline stages can propagate errors downstream, achieving high efficiency and accuracy is critical. Moreover, classification requirements can change dynamically based on user needs, necessitating models with strong zero-shot capabilities. While generative LLMs have become mainstream for zero-shot classification due to their versatility, they suffer from inconsistent instruction following and computational inefficiency. Cross-encoders, commonly used as rerankers in RAG pipelines, face a different bottleneck: they must process text-label pairs sequentially, significantly reducing efficiency with large label sets. Embedding-based approaches offer good efficiency but struggle with complex scenarios involving logical and semantic constraints. We propose GLiClass, a novel method that adapts the GLiNER architecture for sequence classification tasks. Our approach achieves strong accuracy and efficiency comparable to embedding-based methods, while maintaining the flexibility needed for zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Additionally, we adapted proximal policy optimization (PPO) for multi-label text classification, enabling training classifiers in data-sparse conditions or from human feedback.

Paperid: 7122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05102.pdf

Abstract:
Dysarthric speech poses significant challenges in developing assistive technologies, primarily due to the limited availability of data. Recent advances in neural speech synthesis, especially zero-shot voice cloning, facilitate synthetic speech generation for data augmentation; however, they may introduce biases towards dysarthric speech. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art F5-TTS in cloning dysarthric speech using TORGO dataset, focusing on intelligibility, speaker similarity, and prosody preservation. We also analyze potential biases using fairness metrics like Disparate Impact and Parity Difference to assess disparities across dysarthric severity levels. Results show that F5-TTS exhibits a strong bias toward speech intelligibility over speaker and prosody preservation in dysarthric speech synthesis. Insights from this study can help integrate fairness-aware dysarthric speech synthesis, fostering the advancement of more inclusive speech technologies.

Paperid: 7123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04339.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models often fail at logical reasoning when semantic heuristics conflict with decisive evidence - a phenomenon we term cognitive traps. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce the Deliberative Reasoning Network (DRN), a novel paradigm that reframes logical reasoning from probability maximization to uncertainty minimization. Instead of asking "Which answer is most likely?", DRN asks "Which hypothesis has the most internally consistent evidence?". DRN achieves intrinsic interpretability by explicitly tracking belief states and quantifying epistemic uncertainty for competing hypotheses through an iterative evidence synthesis process. We validate our approach through two complementary architectures - a bespoke discriminative model that embodies the core uncertainty minimization principle, and a lightweight verification module that enhances existing generative LLMs. Evaluated on LCR-1000, our new adversarial reasoning benchmark designed to expose cognitive traps, the bespoke DRN achieves up to 15.2% improvement over standard baselines. When integrated as a parameter-efficient verifier with Mistral-7B, our hybrid system boosts accuracy from 20% to 80% on the most challenging problems. Critically, DRN demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving TruthfulQA performance by 23.6% without additional training, indicating that uncertainty-driven deliberation learns transferable reasoning principles. We position DRN as a foundational, verifiable System 2 reasoning component for building more trustworthy AI systems.

Paperid: 7124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04219.pdf

Abstract:
Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) aims to assign texts to structured label hierarchies; however, it faces challenges due to data scarcity and model complexity. This study explores the feasibility of using black box Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed via APIs for HTC, as an alternative to traditional machine learning methods that require extensive labeled data and computational resources. We evaluate three prompting strategies -- Direct Leaf Label Prediction (DL), Direct Hierarchical Label Prediction (DH), and Top-down Multi-step Hierarchical Label Prediction (TMH) -- in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, comparing the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these strategies. Experiments on two datasets show that a few-shot setting consistently improves classification accuracy compared to a zero-shot setting. While a traditional machine learning model achieves high accuracy on a dataset with a shallow hierarchy, LLMs, especially DH strategy, tend to outperform the machine learning model on a dataset with a deeper hierarchy. API costs increase significantly due to the higher input tokens required for deeper label hierarchies on DH strategy. These results emphasize the trade-off between accuracy improvement and the computational cost of prompt strategy. These findings highlight the potential of black box LLMs for HTC while underscoring the need to carefully select a prompt strategy to balance performance and cost.

Paperid: 7125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03088.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic vision inspection holds significant importance in industry inspection. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong language understanding capabilities and hold promise for this task, their performance remains significantly inferior to that of human experts. In this context, we identify two key challenges: (i) insufficient integration of anomaly detection (AD) knowledge during pre-training, and (ii) the lack of technically precise and conte-aware language generation for anomaly reasoning. To address these issues, we propose ADSeeker, an anomaly task assistant designed to enhance inspection performance through knowledge-grounded reasoning. ADSeeker leverages a curated visual document knowledge base, SEEK-MVTec&VisA (SEEK-M&V), which we construct to address the limitations of existing resources that rely solely on unstructured text. SEEK-M&V includes semantic-rich descriptions and image-document pairs, enabling more comprehensive anomaly understanding. To effectively retrieve and utilize this knowledge, we introduce the Query Image-Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Q2K RAG) framework. To further enhance the performance in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD), ADSeeker leverages the Hierarchical Sparse Prompt mechanism and type-level features to efficiently extract anomaly patterns. Furthermore, to tackle the challenge of limited in industry anomaly detection (IAD) data, we introduce the largest-scale AD dataset, Multi-type Anomaly (MulA), encompassing 72 multi-scale defect types across 26 Categories. Extensive experiments show that our plug-and-play framework, ADSeeker, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on several benchmark datasets.

Paperid: 7126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02386.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Cut-Once-and-LEaRn (COLER), a simple approach for unsupervised instance segmentation and object detection. COLER first uses our developed CutOnce to generate coarse pseudo labels, then enables the detector to learn from these masks. CutOnce applies Normalized Cut only once and does not rely on any clustering methods, but it can generate multiple object masks in an image. We have designed several novel yet simple modules that not only allow CutOnce to fully leverage the object discovery capabilities of self-supervised models, but also free it from reliance on mask post-processing. During training, COLER achieves strong performance without requiring specially designed loss functions for pseudo labels, and its performance is further improved through self-training. COLER is a zero-shot unsupervised model that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks.We believe our method can help advance the field of unsupervised object localization.

Paperid: 7127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01334.pdf

Abstract:
This study proposes a zero-shot image segmentation framework for detecting erythema (redness of the skin) using edit-friendly inversion in diffusion models. The method synthesizes reference images of the same patient that are free from erythema via generative editing and then accurately aligns these references with the original images. Color-space analysis is performed with minimal user intervention to identify erythematous regions. This approach significantly reduces the reliance on labeled dermatological datasets while providing a scalable and flexible diagnostic support tool by avoiding the need for any annotated training masks. In our initial qualitative experiments, the pipeline successfully isolated facial erythema in diverse cases, demonstrating performance improvements over baseline threshold-based techniques. These results highlight the potential of combining generative diffusion models and statistical color segmentation for computer-aided dermatology, enabling efficient erythema detection without prior training data.

Paperid: 7128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00957.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot text classification remains a difficult task in domains with evolving knowledge and ambiguous category boundaries, such as ticketing systems. Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to generalize in these scenarios due to limited topic separability, while few-shot methods are constrained by insufficient data diversity. We propose a classification framework that combines iterative topic refinement, contrastive prompting, and active learning. Starting with a small set of labeled samples, the model generates initial topic labels. Misclassified or ambiguous samples are then used in an iterative contrastive prompting process to refine category distinctions by explicitly teaching the model to differentiate between closely related classes. The framework features a human-in-the-loop component, allowing users to introduce or revise category definitions in natural language. This enables seamless integration of new, unseen categories without retraining, making the system well-suited for real-world, dynamic environments. The evaluations on AGNews and DBpedia demonstrate strong performance: 91% accuracy on AGNews (3 seen, 1 unseen class) and 84% on DBpedia (8 seen, 1 unseen), with minimal accuracy shift after introducing unseen classes (82% and 87%, respectively). The results highlight the effectiveness of prompt-based semantic reasoning for fine-grained classification with limited supervision.

Paperid: 7129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23015.pdf

Abstract:
Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive but essential to maintaining modern highly-productive fruit orchards. In this work we present a closed-loop visuomotor controller for robotic pruning. The controller guides the cutter through a cluttered tree environment to reach a specified cut point and ensures the cutters are perpendicular to the branch. We train the controller using a novel orchard simulation that captures the geometric distribution of branches in a target apple orchard configuration. Unlike traditional methods requiring full 3D reconstruction, our controller uses just optical flow images from a wrist-mounted camera. We deploy our learned policy in simulation and the real-world for an example V-Trellis envy tree with zero-shot transfer, achieving a 30% success rate -- approximately half the performance of an oracle planner.

Paperid: 7130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22772.pdf

Abstract:
Despite outstanding results, machine learning-based Android malware detection models struggle with concept drift, where rapidly evolving malware characteristics degrade model effectiveness. This study examines the impact of concept drift on Android malware detection, evaluating two datasets and nine machine learning and deep learning algorithms, as well as Large Language Models (LLMs). Various feature types--static, dynamic, hybrid, semantic, and image-based--were considered. The results showed that concept drift is widespread and significantly affects model performance. Factors influencing the drift include feature types, data environments, and detection methods. Balancing algorithms helped with class imbalance but did not fully address concept drift, which primarily stems from the dynamic nature of the malware landscape. No strong link was found between the type of algorithm used and concept drift, the impact was relatively minor compared to other variables since hyperparameters were not fine-tuned, and the default algorithm configurations were used. While LLMs using few-shot learning demonstrated promising detection performance, they did not fully mitigate concept drift, highlighting the need for further investigation.

Paperid: 7131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21285.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as coding assistants. However, the ambiguity of the developer's prompt often leads to incorrect code generation, as current models struggle to infer user intent without extensive prompt engineering or external context. This work aims to build an LLM-based coding assistant that mimics the human code review process by asking clarification questions when faced with ambiguous or under-specified queries. Our end-to-end system includes (1) a query classifier trained to detect unclear programming-related queries and (2) a fine-tuned LLM that generates clarification questions. Our evaluation shows that the fine-tuned LLM outperforms standard zero-shot prompting in generating useful clarification questions. Furthermore, our user study indicates that users find the clarification questions generated by our model to outperform the baseline, demonstrating that our coding assistant produces more accurate and helpful code responses compared to baseline coding assistants.

Paperid: 7132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20140.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech (ZS-TTS) technology has enabled high-fidelity voice synthesis from minimal audio cues, raising significant privacy and ethical concerns. Despite the threats to voice privacy, research to selectively remove the knowledge to replicate unwanted individual voices from pre-trained model parameters has not been explored. In this paper, we address the new challenge of speaker identity unlearning for ZS-TTS systems. To meet this goal, we propose the first machine unlearning frameworks for ZS-TTS, especially Teacher-Guided Unlearning (TGU), designed to ensure the model forgets designated speaker identities while retaining its ability to generate accurate speech for other speakers. Our proposed methods incorporate randomness to prevent consistent replication of forget speakers' voices, assuring unlearned identities remain untraceable. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation metric, speaker-Zero Retrain Forgetting (spk-ZRF). This assesses the model's ability to disregard prompts associated with forgotten speakers, effectively neutralizing its knowledge of these voices. The experiments conducted on the state-of-the-art model demonstrate that TGU prevents the model from replicating forget speakers' voices while maintaining high quality for other speakers. The demo is available at https://speechunlearn.github.io/

Paperid: 7133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19855.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their advanced linguistic capabilities, fundamentally lack an intuitive understanding of physical dynamics, which limits their effectiveness in real-world scenarios that require causal reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Causal World Model Induction (CWMI), a novel framework designed to embed an explicit model of causal physics within an LLM. Our approach incorporates a dedicated Causal Physics Module (CPM) and a new training objective called Causal Intervention Loss, encouraging the model to learn cause-and-effect relationships from multimodal data. By training the model to predict the outcomes of hypothetical interventions instead of merely capturing statistical correlations, CWMI develops a robust internal representation of physical laws. Experimental results show that CWMI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on zero-shot physical reasoning tasks, including the PIQA benchmark and our newly proposed PhysiCa-Bench dataset. These findings demonstrate that inducing a causal world model is a critical step toward more reliable and generalizable AI systems.

Paperid: 7134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17944.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed the creation of written materials. LLMs have led to questions about writing integrity, thereby driving the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) detection technologies. Adversarial attacks, such as standard and humanized paraphrasing, inhibit detectors' ability to detect machine-generated text. Previous studies have mainly focused on ChatGPT and other well-known LLMs and have shown varying accuracy across detectors. However, there is a clear gap in the literature about DeepSeek, a recently published LLM. Therefore, in this work, we investigate whether six generally accessible AI detection tools -- AI Text Classifier, Content Detector AI, Copyleaks, QuillBot, GPT-2, and GPTZero -- can consistently recognize text generated by DeepSeek. The detectors were exposed to the aforementioned adversarial attacks. We also considered DeepSeek as a detector by performing few-shot prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT) for classifying AI and human-written text. We collected 49 human-authored question-answer pairs from before the LLM era and generated matching responses using DeepSeek-v3, producing 49 AI-generated samples. Then, we applied adversarial techniques such as paraphrasing and humanizing to add 196 more samples. These were used to challenge detector robustness and assess accuracy impact. While QuillBot and Copyleaks showed near-perfect performance on original and paraphrased DeepSeek text, others -- particularly AI Text Classifier and GPT-2 -- showed inconsistent results. The most effective attack was humanization, reducing accuracy to 71% for Copyleaks, 58% for QuillBot, and 52% for GPTZero. Few-shot and CoT prompting showed high accuracy, with the best five-shot result misclassifying only one of 49 samples (AI recall 96%, human recall 100%).

Paperid: 7135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16424.pdf

Abstract:
Active learning (AL) aims to optimize model training and reduce annotation costs by selecting the most informative samples for labeling. Typically, AL methods rely on the empirical distribution of labeled data to define the decision boundary and perform uncertainty or diversity estimation, subsequently identifying potential high-quality samples. In few-shot scenarios, the empirical distribution often diverges significantly from the target distribution, causing the decision boundary to shift away from its optimal position. However, existing methods overlook the role of unlabeled samples in enhancing the empirical distribution to better align with the target distribution, resulting in a suboptimal decision boundary and the selection of samples that inadequately represent the target distribution. To address this, we propose a hybrid AL framework, termed \textbf{PromptAL} (Sample-Aware Dynamic Soft \textbf{Prompts} for Few-Shot \textbf{A}ctive \textbf{L}earning). This framework accounts for the contribution of each unlabeled data point in aligning the current empirical distribution with the target distribution, thereby optimizing the decision boundary. Specifically, PromptAL first leverages unlabeled data to construct sample-aware dynamic soft prompts that adjust the model's predictive distribution and decision boundary. Subsequently, based on the adjusted decision boundary, it integrates uncertainty estimation with both global and local diversity to select high-quality samples that more accurately represent the target distribution. Experimental results on six in-domain and three out-of-domain datasets show that PromptAL achieves superior performance over nine baselines. Our codebase is openly accessible.

Paperid: 7136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14590.pdf

Abstract:
Numerous domain-specific machine learning tasks struggle with data scarcity and class imbalance. This paper systematically explores data augmentation methods for NLP, particularly through large language models like GPT. The purpose of this paper is to examine and evaluate whether traditional methods such as paraphrasing and backtranslation can leverage a new generation of models to achieve comparable performance to purely generative methods. Methods aimed at solving the problem of data scarcity and utilizing ChatGPT were chosen, as well as an exemplary dataset. We conducted a series of experiments comparing four different approaches to data augmentation in multiple experimental setups. We then evaluated the results both in terms of the quality of generated data and its impact on classification performance. The key findings indicate that backtranslation and paraphrasing can yield comparable or even better results than zero and a few-shot generation of examples.

Paperid: 7137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13846.pdf

Abstract:
[Context] Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved notable success in environments where agents must learn coordinated behaviors. However, transferring knowledge across agents remains challenging in non-stationary environments with changing goals. [Problem] Traditional knowledge transfer methods in MARL struggle to generalize, and agents often require costly retraining to adapt. [Approach] This paper introduces a causal knowledge transfer framework that enables RL agents to learn and share compact causal representations of paths within a non-stationary environment. As the environment changes (new obstacles), agents' collisions require adaptive recovery strategies. We model each collision as a causal intervention instantiated as a sequence of recovery actions (a macro) whose effect corresponds to a causal knowledge of how to circumvent the obstacle while increasing the chances of achieving the agent's goal (maximizing cumulative reward). This recovery action macro is transferred online from a second agent and is applied in a zero-shot fashion, i.e., without retraining, just by querying a lookup model with local context information (collisions). [Results] Our findings reveal two key insights: (1) agents with heterogeneous goals were able to bridge about half of the gap between random exploration and a fully retrained policy when adapting to new environments, and (2) the impact of causal knowledge transfer depends on the interplay between environment complexity and agents' heterogeneous goals.

Paperid: 7138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12819.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving a target image from a gallery using a composed query consisting of a reference image and a modification text. Among various CIR approaches, training-free zero-shot methods based on pre-trained models are cost-effective but still face notable limitations. For example, sequential VLM-LLM pipelines process each modality independently, which often results in information loss and limits cross-modal interaction. In contrast, methods based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often focus exclusively on applying changes indicated by the text, without fully utilizing the contextual visual information from the reference image. To address these issues, we propose multi-faceted Chain-of-Thought with re-ranking (MCoT-RE), a training-free zero-shot CIR framework. MCoT-RE utilizes multi-faceted Chain-of-Thought to guide the MLLM to balance explicit modifications and contextual visual cues, generating two distinct captions: one focused on modification and the other integrating comprehensive visual-textual context. The first caption is used to filter candidate images. Subsequently, we combine these two captions and the reference image to perform multi-grained re-ranking. This two-stage approach facilitates precise retrieval by aligning with the textual modification instructions while preserving the visual context of the reference image. Through extensive experiments, MCoT-RE achieves state-of-the-art results among training-free methods, yielding improvements of up to 6.24% in Recall@10 on FashionIQ and 8.58% in Recall@1 on CIRR.

Paperid: 7139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12745.pdf

Abstract:
With the growing demand for renewable energy, countries are accelerating the construction of photovoltaic (PV) power stations. However, accurately forecasting power data for newly constructed PV stations is extremely challenging due to limited data availability. To this end, we propose a novel interpretable dynamic selection network (IDS-Net) based on feature information fusion to achieve accurate few-shot prediction. This transfer learning framework primarily consists of two parts. In the first stage, we pre-train on the large dataset, utilizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to select the source domain dataset most similar to the target domain data distribution. Subsequently, the ReliefF algorithm is utilized for feature selection, reducing the influence of feature redundancy. Then, the Hampel Identifier (HI) is used for training dataset outlier correction. In the IDS-Net model, we first obtain the initial extracted features from a pool of predictive models. Following this, two separate weighting channels are utilized to determine the interpretable weights for each sub-model and the adaptive selection outcomes, respectively. Subsequently, the extracted feature results from each sub-model are multiplied by their corresponding weights and then summed to obtain the weighted extracted features. Then, we perform cross-embedding on the additional features and fuse them with the extracted weighted features. This fused information is then passed through the MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) layer to obtain predictions. In the second stage, we design an end-to-end adaptive transfer learning strategy to obtain the final prediction results on the target dataset. We validate the transfer learning process using two PV power datasets from Hebei province, China, to demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our framework and transfer learning strategy.

Paperid: 7140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11994.pdf

Abstract:
Public remote sensing datasets often face limitations in universality due to resolution variability and inconsistent land cover category definitions. To harness the vast pool of unlabeled remote sensing data, we propose SAMST, a semi-supervised semantic segmentation method. SAMST leverages the strengths of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in zero-shot generalization and boundary detection. SAMST iteratively refines pseudo-labels through two main components: supervised model self-training using both labeled and pseudo-labeled data, and a SAM-based Pseudo-label Refiner. The Pseudo-label Refiner comprises three modules: a Threshold Filter Module for preprocessing, a Prompt Generation Module for extracting connected regions and generating prompts for SAM, and a Label Refinement Module for final label stitching. By integrating the generalization power of large models with the training efficiency of small models, SAMST improves pseudo-label accuracy, thereby enhancing overall model performance. Experiments on the Potsdam dataset validate the effectiveness and feasibility of SAMST, demonstrating its potential to address the challenges posed by limited labeled data in remote sensing semantic segmentation.

Paperid: 7141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09531.pdf

Abstract:
Key Information Extraction (KIE) underpins the understanding of visual documents (e.g., receipts and contracts) by extracting precise semantic content and accurately capturing spatial structure. Yet existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often perform poorly on dense documents and rely on vision tokenization approaches that scale with image size, leading to redundant computation and memory inefficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce VDInstruct, an MLLM that separates spatial region detection from semantic feature extraction. Central to our model is a content-aware tokenization strategy: rather than fragmenting the entire image uniformly, it generates tokens in proportion to document complexity, preserving critical structure while eliminating wasted tokens. Leveraging a three-stage training paradigm, our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on KIE benchmarks, matching or exceeding the accuracy of leading approaches while reducing the number of image tokens by roughly 3.6x. In zero-shot evaluations, VDInstruct surpasses strong baselines-such as DocOwl 1.5-by +5.5 F1 points, highlighting its robustness to unseen documents. These findings show that content-aware tokenization combined with explicit layout modeling offers a promising direction forward for document understanding. Data, source code, and model weights will be made publicly available.

Paperid: 7142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08858.pdf

Abstract:
The zero-shot capabilities of foundation models (FMs) for time series forecasting offer promising potentials in conformal prediction, as most of the available data can be allocated to calibration. This study compares the performance of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) with traditional methods, including statistical models and gradient boosting, within a conformal prediction setting. Our findings highlight two key advantages of TSFMs. First, when the volume of data is limited, TSFMs provide more reliable conformalized prediction intervals than classic models, thanks to their superior predictive accuracy. Second, the calibration process is more stable because more data are used for calibration. Morever, the fewer data available, the more pronounced these benefits become, as classic models require a substantial amount of data for effective training. These results underscore the potential of foundation models in improving conformal prediction reliability in time series applications, particularly in data-constrained cases. All the code to reproduce the experiments is available.

Paperid: 7143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08367.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the potential of a multimodal large language model (LLM), specifically ChatGPT-4o, to perform human-like interpretations of traffic scenes using static dashcam images. Herein, we focus on three judgment tasks relevant to elderly driver assessments: evaluating traffic density, assessing intersection visibility, and recognizing stop signs recognition. These tasks require contextual reasoning rather than simple object detection. Using zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-shot prompting strategies, we evaluated the performance of the model with human annotations serving as the reference standard. Evaluation metrics included precision, recall, and F1-score. Results indicate that prompt design considerably affects performance, with recall for intersection visibility increasing from 21.7% (zero-shot) to 57.0% (multi-shot). For traffic density, agreement increased from 53.5% to 67.6%. In stop-sign detection, the model demonstrated high precision (up to 86.3%) but a lower recall (approximately 76.7%), indicating a conservative response tendency. Output stability analysis revealed that humans and the model faced difficulties interpreting structurally ambiguous scenes. However, the model's explanatory texts corresponded with its predictions, enhancing interpretability. These findings suggest that, with well-designed prompts, LLMs hold promise as supportive tools for scene-level driving risk assessments. Future studies should explore scalability using larger datasets, diverse annotators, and next-generation model architectures for elderly driver assessments.

Paperid: 7144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08022.pdf

Abstract:
This report presents the CuriosAI team's submission to the EgoExo4D Proficiency Estimation Challenge at CVPR 2025. We propose two methods for multi-view skill assessment: (1) a multi-task learning framework using Sapiens-2B that jointly predicts proficiency and scenario labels (43.6 % accuracy), and (2) a two-stage pipeline combining zero-shot scenario recognition with view-specific VideoMAE classifiers (47.8 % accuracy). The superior performance of the two-stage approach demonstrates the effectiveness of scenario-conditioned modeling for proficiency estimation.

Paperid: 7145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07406.pdf

Abstract:
Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, underscoring the need for detection systems that strike a balance between high accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of traditional Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and quantized small-parameter Large Language Models (LLMs) for phishing detection. Through experiments on a curated dataset, we show that while LLMs currently underperform compared to ML and DL methods in terms of raw accuracy, they exhibit strong potential for identifying subtle, context-based phishing cues. We also investigate the impact of zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, revealing that LLM-rephrased emails can significantly degrade the performance of both ML and LLM-based detectors. Our benchmarking highlights that models like DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B (Q8_0) achieve competitive accuracy, above 80%, using only 17GB of VRAM, supporting their viability for cost-efficient deployment. We further assess the models' adversarial robustness and cost-performance tradeoffs, and demonstrate how lightweight LLMs can provide concise, interpretable explanations to support real-time decision-making. These findings position optimized LLMs as promising components in phishing defence systems and offer a path forward for integrating explainable, efficient AI into modern cybersecurity frameworks.

Paperid: 7146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07348.pdf

Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across multiple domains, including competitive games, natural language processing, and robotics. Despite these advancements, policies trained via DRL often struggle to generalize to evaluation environments with different parameters. This challenge is typically addressed by training with multiple contexts and/or by leveraging additional structure in the problem. However, obtaining sufficient training data across diverse contexts can be impractical in real-world applications. In this work, we consider contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with transition and reward functions that exhibit regularity in context parameters. We introduce the context-enhanced Bellman equation (CEBE) to improve generalization when training on a single context. We prove both analytically and empirically that the CEBE yields a first-order approximation to the Q-function trained across multiple contexts. We then derive context sample enhancement (CSE) as an efficient data augmentation method for approximating the CEBE in deterministic control environments. We numerically validate the performance of CSE in simulation environments, showcasing its potential to improve generalization in DRL.

Paperid: 7147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06062.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning methods often struggle with real-world applications in science and engineering due to limited or low-quality training data. In this work, the example of groundwater flow with heat transport is considered; this corresponds to an advection-diffusion process under heterogeneous flow conditions, that is, spatially distributed material parameters and heat sources. Classical numerical simulations are costly and challenging due to high spatio-temporal resolution requirements and large domains. While often computationally more efficient, purely data-driven surrogate models face difficulties, particularly in predicting the advection process, which is highly sensitive to input variations and involves long-range spatial interactions. Therefore, in this work, a Local-Global Convolutional Neural Network (LGCNN) approach is introduced. It combines a lightweight numerical surrogate for the transport process (global) with convolutional neural networks for the groundwater velocity and heat diffusion processes (local). With the LGCNN, a city-wide subsurface temperature field is modeled, involving a heterogeneous groundwater flow field and one hundred groundwater heat pump injection points forming interacting heat plumes over long distances. The model is first systematically analyzed based on random subsurface input fields. Then, the model is trained on a handful of cut-outs from a real-world subsurface map of the Munich region in Germany, and it scales to larger cut-outs without retraining. All datasets, our code, and trained models are published for reproducibility.

Paperid: 7148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05822.pdf

Abstract:
Current video understanding models excel at recognizing "what" is happening but fall short in high-level cognitive tasks like causal reasoning and future prediction, a limitation rooted in their lack of commonsense world knowledge. To bridge this cognitive gap, we propose a novel framework that synergistically fuses a powerful Vision Foundation Model (VFM) for deep visual perception with a Large Language Model (LLM) serving as a knowledge-driven reasoning core. Our key technical innovation is a sophisticated fusion module, inspired by the Q-Former architecture, which distills complex spatiotemporal and object-centric visual features into a concise, language-aligned representation. This enables the LLM to effectively ground its inferential processes in direct visual evidence. The model is trained via a two-stage strategy, beginning with large-scale alignment pre-training on video-text data, followed by targeted instruction fine-tuning on a curated dataset designed to elicit advanced reasoning and prediction skills. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks. Notably, it exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalization to unseen reasoning tasks, and our in-depth ablation studies validate the critical contribution of each architectural component. This work pushes the boundary of machine perception from simple recognition towards genuine cognitive understanding, paving the way for more intelligent and capable AI systems in robotics, human-computer interaction, and beyond.

Paperid: 7149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04270.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized AI, yet they struggle with zero-shot deployment in real-world industrial settings due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific datasets. To bridge this gap, Superb AI introduces ZERO, an industry-ready vision foundation model that leverages multi-modal prompting (textual and visual) for generalization without retraining. Trained on a compact yet representative 0.9 million annotated samples from a proprietary billion-scale industrial dataset, ZERO demonstrates competitive performance on academic benchmarks like LVIS-Val and significantly outperforms existing models across 37 diverse industrial datasets. Furthermore, ZERO achieved 2nd place in the CVPR 2025 Object Instance Detection Challenge and 4th place in the Foundational Few-shot Object Detection Challenge, highlighting its practical deployability and generalizability with minimal adaptation and limited data. To the best of our knowledge, ZERO is the first vision foundation model explicitly built for domain-specific, zero-shot industrial applications.

Paperid: 7150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03726.pdf

Abstract:
Many of us now treat LLMs as modern-day oracles asking it almost any kind of question. However, consulting an LLM does not have to be a single turn activity. But long multi-turn interactions can get tedious if it is simply to clarify contextual information that can be arrived at through reasoning. In this paper, we examine the use of agent-based architecture to bolster LLM-based Question-Answering systems with additional reasoning capabilities. We examine the automatic resolution of potential incompleteness or ambiguities in questions by transducers implemented using LLM-based agents. We focus on several benchmark datasets that are known to contain questions with these deficiencies to varying degrees. We equip different LLMs (GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama-4-Scout) with agents that act as specialists in detecting and resolving deficiencies of incompleteness and ambiguity. The agents are implemented as zero-shot ReAct agents. Rather than producing an answer in a single step, the model now decides between 3 actions a) classify b) resolve c) answer. Action a) decides if the question is incomplete, ambiguous, or normal. Action b) determines if any deficiencies identified can be resolved. Action c) answers the resolved form of the question. We compare the use of LLMs with and without the use of agents with these components. Our results show benefits of agents with transducer 1) A shortening of the length of interactions with human 2) An improvement in the answer quality and 3) Explainable resolution of deficiencies in the question. On the negative side we find while it may result in additional LLM invocations and in some cases, increased latency. But on tested datasets, the benefits outweigh the costs except when questions already have sufficient context. Suggesting the agent-based approach could be a useful mechanism to harness the power of LLMs to develop more robust QA systems.

Paperid: 7151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03347.pdf

Abstract:
The drive for predictable LLM reasoning in their integration with compound systems has popularized structured outputs, yet concerns remain about performance trade-offs compared to unconstrained natural language. At the same time, training on unconstrained Chain of Thought (CoT) traces has brought about a new class of strong reasoning models that nevertheless present novel compute budget and faithfulness challenges. This paper introduces iSelf-Discover, an instance-level adaptation of the Self-Discover framework, and using it compares dynamically generated structured JSON reasoning with its unstructured counterpart. Our empirical evaluation across diverse benchmarks using state-of-the-art open-source models supports a consistent advantage for unstructured reasoning. Notably, on the complex MATH benchmark, unstructured plans achieved relative performance improvements of up to 18.90\% over structured approaches. Zero-shot unstructured iSelf-Discover variants are also shown to outperform their five-shot structured counterparts, underscoring the significance of this gap, even when structured plans are dynamically generated to ensure reasoning precedes the final answer. We further demonstrate that the optimal granularity of plan generation (instance-level vs. task-level) is context-dependent. These findings invite re-evaluation of the reliance on structured formats for complex problem-solving and how compound systems should be organized.

Paperid: 7152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03292.pdf

Abstract:
One practical approach to infer 3D scene structure from a single image is to retrieve a closely matching 3D model from a database and align it with the object in the image. Existing methods rely on supervised training with images and pose annotations, which limits them to a narrow set of object categories. To address this, we propose a weakly supervised 9-DoF alignment method for inexact 3D models that requires no pose annotations and generalizes to unseen categories. Our approach derives a novel feature space based on foundation features that ensure multi-view consistency and overcome symmetry ambiguities inherent in foundation features using a self-supervised triplet loss. Additionally, we introduce a texture-invariant pose refinement technique that performs dense alignment in normalized object coordinates, estimated through the enhanced feature space. We conduct extensive evaluations on the real-world ScanNet25k dataset, where our method outperforms SOTA weakly supervised baselines by +4.3% mean alignment accuracy and is the only weakly supervised approach to surpass the supervised ROCA by +2.7%. To assess generalization, we introduce SUN2CAD, a real-world test set with 20 novel object categories, where our method achieves SOTA results without prior training on them.

Paperid: 7153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02357.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes our system for the SciVQA 2025 Shared Task on Scientific Visual Question Answering. Our system employs an ensemble of two Multimodal Large Language Models and various few-shot example retrieval strategies. The model and few-shot setting are selected based on the figure and question type. We also select answers based on the models' confidence levels. On the blind test data, our system ranks third out of seven with an average F1 score of 85.12 across ROUGE-1, ROUGE-L, and BERTS. Our code is publicly available.

Paperid: 7154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24039.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot and prompt-based models have excelled at visual reasoning tasks by leveraging large-scale natural image corpora, but they often fail on sparse and domain-specific scientific image data. We introduce Zenesis, a no-code interactive computer vision platform designed to reduce data readiness bottlenecks in scientific imaging workflows. Zenesis integrates lightweight multimodal adaptation for zero-shot inference on raw scientific data, human-in-the-loop refinement, and heuristic-based temporal enhancement. We validate our approach on Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) datasets of catalyst-loaded membranes. Zenesis outperforms baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 0.947, Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.858, and Dice score of 0.923 on amorphous catalyst samples; and 0.987 accuracy, 0.857 IoU, and 0.923 Dice on crystalline samples. These results represent a significant performance gain over conventional methods such as Otsu thresholding and standalone models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Zenesis enables effective image segmentation in domains where annotated datasets are limited, offering a scalable solution for scientific discovery.

Paperid: 7155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22515.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional phishing detection often overlooks psychological manipulation. This study investigates using Large Language Model (LLM) In-Context Learning (ICL) for fine-grained classification of phishing emails based on a taxonomy of 40 manipulation techniques. Using few-shot examples with GPT-4o-mini on real-world French phishing emails (SignalSpam), we evaluated performance against a human-annotated test set (100 emails). The approach effectively identifies prevalent techniques (e.g., Baiting, Curiosity Appeal, Request For Minor Favor) with a promising accuracy of 0.76. This work demonstrates ICL's potential for nuanced phishing analysis and provides insights into attacker strategies.

Paperid: 7156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22143.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the performance of various speech SSL models on dialectal Arabic (DA) and Arabic-English code-switched (CS) speech. To address data scarcity, a modified audio-splicing approach is introduced to generate artificial CS speech data. Fine-tuning an already fine-tuned SSL model with the proposed Spliced-Audio Generated (SAGE) data results in an absolute improvement on Word Error Rate (WER) of 7.8% on Arabic and English CS benchmarks. Additionally, an Experience Replay (ER) inspired approach is proposed to enhance generalisation across DA and CS speech while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Integrating an out-of-domain 3-gram language model reduces the overall mean WER from 31.7% to 26.6%. Few-shot fine-tuning for code-switching benchmarks further improves WER by 4.9%. A WER of 31.1% on Arabic-English CS benchmarks surpasses large-scale multilingual models, including USM and Whisper-large-v2 (both over ten times larger) by an absolute margin of 5.5% and 8.4%, respectively.

Paperid: 7157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18576.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting harmful content is a crucial task in the landscape of NLP applications for Social Good, with hate speech being one of its most dangerous forms. But what do we mean by hate speech, how can we define it, and how does prompting different definitions of hate speech affect model performance? The contribution of this work is twofold. At the theoretical level, we address the ambiguity surrounding hate speech by collecting and analyzing existing definitions from the literature. We organize these definitions into a taxonomy of 14 Conceptual Elements-building blocks that capture different aspects of hate speech definitions, such as references to the target of hate (individual or groups) or of the potential consequences of it. At the experimental level, we employ the collection of definitions in a systematic zero-shot evaluation of three LLMs, on three hate speech datasets representing different types of data (synthetic, human-in-the-loop, and real-world). We find that choosing different definitions, i.e., definitions with a different degree of specificity in terms of encoded elements, impacts model performance, but this effect is not consistent across all architectures.

Paperid: 7158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15746.pdf

Abstract:
Cellular automata and their differentiable counterparts, Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), are highly expressive and capable of surprisingly complex behaviors. This paper explores how NCAs perform when applied to tasks requiring precise transformations and few-shot generalization, using the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) as a domain that challenges their capabilities in ways not previously explored. Specifically, this paper uses gradient-based training to learn iterative update rules that transform input grids into their outputs from the training examples and apply them to the test inputs. Results suggest that gradient-trained NCA models are a promising and efficient approach to a range of abstract grid-based tasks from ARC. Along with discussing the impacts of various design modifications and training constraints, this work examines the behavior and properties of NCAs applied to ARC to give insights for broader applications of self-organizing systems.

Paperid: 7159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15479.pdf

Abstract:
Dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques map high-dimensional data into lower-dimensional spaces. Yet, current DR techniques are not designed to explore semantic structure that is not directly available in the form of variables or class labels. We introduce a novel user-guided projection framework for image and text data that enables customizable, interpretable, data visualizations via zero-shot classification with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). We enable users to steer projections dynamically via natural-language guiding prompts, to specify high-level semantic relationships of interest to the users which are not explicitly present in the data dimensions. We evaluate our method across several datasets and show that it not only enhances cluster separation, but also transforms DR into an interactive, user-driven process. Our approach bridges the gap between fully automated DR techniques and human-centered data exploration, offering a flexible and adaptive way to tailor projections to specific analytical needs.

Paperid: 7160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15446.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has shown that, under certain assumptions, zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generalise to any unseen task in an environment after reward-free pre-training. Access to Markov states is one such assumption, yet, in many real-world applications, the Markov state is only partially observable. Here, we explore how the performance of standard zero-shot RL methods degrades when subjected to partially observability, and show that, as in single-task RL, memory-based architectures are an effective remedy. We evaluate our memory-based zero-shot RL methods in domains where the states, rewards and a change in dynamics are partially observed, and show improved performance over memory-free baselines. Our code is open-sourced via: https://enjeeneer.io/projects/bfms-with-memory/.

Paperid: 7161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13723.pdf

Abstract:
Transductive zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify unseen categories by leveraging both semantic class descriptions and the distribution of unlabeled test data. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP excel at aligning visual inputs with textual semantics, they often rely too heavily on class-level priors and fail to capture fine-grained visual cues. In contrast, Vision-only Foundation Models (VFMs) like DINOv2 provide rich perceptual features but lack semantic alignment. To exploit the complementary strengths of these models, we propose OTFusion, a simple yet effective training-free framework that bridges VLMs and VFMs via Optimal Transport. Specifically, OTFusion aims to learn a shared probabilistic representation that aligns visual and semantic information by minimizing the transport cost between their respective distributions. This unified distribution enables coherent class predictions that are both semantically meaningful and visually grounded. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that OTFusion consistently outperforms the original CLIP model, achieving an average accuracy improvement of nearly $10\%$, all without any fine-tuning or additional annotations. The code will be publicly released after the paper is accepted.

Paperid: 7162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13391.pdf

Abstract:
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in imaging inverse problems owing to their powerful generative capabilities. However, existing approaches typically rely on models trained for specific degradation types, limiting their generalizability to various degradation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a zero-shot framework capable of handling various imaging inverse problems without model retraining. We introduce a likelihood-guided noise refinement mechanism that derives a closed-form approximation of the likelihood score, simplifying score estimation and avoiding expensive gradient computations. This estimated score is subsequently utilized to refine the model-predicted noise, thereby better aligning the restoration process with the generative framework of diffusion models. In addition, we integrate the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) sampling strategy to further improve inference efficiency. The proposed mechanism can be applied to both optimization-based and sampling-based schemes, providing an effective and flexible zero-shot solution for imaging inverse problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across multiple inverse problems, particularly in compressive sensing, delivering high-quality reconstructions even at an extremely low sampling rate (5%).

Paperid: 7163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13026.pdf

Abstract:
Precision process planning in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining demands rapid, context-aware decisions on tool selection, feed-speed pairs, and multi-axis routing, placing immense cognitive and procedural burdens on engineers from design specification through final part inspection. Conventional rule-based computer-aided process planning and knowledge-engineering shells freeze domain know-how into static tables, which become limited when dealing with unseen topologies, novel material states, shifting cost-quality-sustainability weightings, or shop-floor constraints such as tool unavailability and energy caps. Large language models (LLMs) promise flexible, instruction-driven reasoning for tasks but they routinely hallucinate numeric values and provide no provenance. We present Augmented Retrieval Knowledge Network Enhanced Search & Synthesis (ARKNESS), the end-to-end framework that fuses zero-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) construction with retrieval-augmented generation to deliver verifiable, numerically exact answers for CNC process planning. ARKNESS (1) automatically distills heterogeneous machining documents, G-code annotations, and vendor datasheets into augmented triple, multi-relational graphs without manual labeling, and (2) couples any on-prem LLM with a retriever that injects the minimal, evidence-linked subgraph needed to answer a query. Benchmarked on 155 industry-curated questions spanning tool sizing and feed-speed optimization, a lightweight 3B-parameter Llama-3 augmented by ARKNESS matches GPT-4o accuracy while achieving a +25 percentage point gain in multiple-choice accuracy, +22.4 pp in F1, and 8.1x ROUGE-L on open-ended responses.

Paperid: 7164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12092.pdf

Abstract:
A comprehensive understanding of traffic accidents is essential for improving city safety and informing policy decisions. In this study, we analyze traffic incidents in Munich to identify patterns and characteristics that distinguish different types of accidents. The dataset consists of both structured tabular features, such as location, time, and weather conditions, as well as unstructured free-text descriptions detailing the circumstances of each accident. Each incident is categorized into one of seven predefined classes. To assess the reliability of these labels, we apply NLP methods, including topic modeling and few-shot learning, which reveal inconsistencies in the labeling process. These findings highlight potential ambiguities in accident classification and motivate a refined predictive approach. Building on these insights, we develop a classification model that achieves high accuracy in assigning accidents to their respective categories. Our results demonstrate that textual descriptions contain the most informative features for classification, while the inclusion of tabular data provides only marginal improvements. These findings emphasize the critical role of free-text data in accident analysis and highlight the potential of transformer-based models in improving classification reliability.

Paperid: 7165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10289.pdf

Abstract:
Voice conversion has emerged as a pivotal technology in numerous applications ranging from assistive communication to entertainment. In this paper, we present RT-VC, a zero-shot real-time voice conversion system that delivers ultra-low latency and high-quality performance. Our approach leverages an articulatory feature space to naturally disentangle content and speaker characteristics, facilitating more robust and interpretable voice transformations. Additionally, the integration of differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) enables efficient vocoding directly from articulatory features, significantly reducing conversion latency. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that, while maintaining synthesis quality comparable to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, RT-VC achieves a CPU latency of 61.4 ms, representing a 13.3\% reduction in latency.

Paperid: 7166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10133.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement-learning agents often struggle when deployed from simulation to the real-world. A dominant strategy for reducing the sim-to-real gap is domain randomization (DR) which trains the policy across many simulators produced by sampling dynamics parameters, but standard DR ignores offline data already available from the real system. We study offline domain randomization (ODR), which first fits a distribution over simulator parameters to an offline dataset. While a growing body of empirical work reports substantial gains with algorithms such as DROPO, the theoretical foundations of ODR remain largely unexplored. In this work, we (i) formalize ODR as a maximum-likelihood estimation over a parametric simulator family, (ii) prove consistency of this estimator under mild regularity and identifiability conditions, showing it converges to the true dynamics as the dataset grows, (iii) derive gap bounds demonstrating ODRs sim-to-real error is up to an O(M) factor tighter than uniform DR in the finite-simulator case (and analogous gains in the continuous setting), and (iv) introduce E-DROPO, a new version of DROPO which adds an entropy bonus to prevent variance collapse, yielding broader randomization and more robust zero-shot transfer in practice.

Paperid: 7167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09847.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-context and misattributed imagery is the leading form of media manipulation in today's misinformation and disinformation landscape. The existing methods attempting to detect this practice often only consider whether the semantics of the imagery corresponds to the text narrative, missing manipulation so long as the depicted objects or scenes somewhat correspond to the narrative at hand. To tackle this, we introduce News Media Provenance Dataset, a dataset of news articles with provenance-tagged images. We formulate two tasks on this dataset, location of origin relevance (LOR) and date and time of origin relevance (DTOR), and present baseline results on six large language models (LLMs). We identify that, while the zero-shot performance on LOR is promising, the performance on DTOR hinders, leaving room for specialized architectures and future work.

Paperid: 7168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09411.pdf

Abstract:
In video understanding tasks, particularly those involving human motion, synthetic data generation often suffers from uncanny features, diminishing its effectiveness for training. Tasks such as sign language translation, gesture recognition, and human motion understanding in autonomous driving have thus been unable to exploit the full potential of synthetic data. This paper proposes a method for generating synthetic human action video data using pose transfer (specifically, controllable 3D Gaussian avatar models). We evaluate this method on the Toyota Smarthome and NTU RGB+D datasets and show that it improves performance in action recognition tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method can effectively scale few-shot datasets, making up for groups underrepresented in the real training data and adding diverse backgrounds. We open-source the method along with RANDOM People, a dataset with videos and avatars of novel human identities for pose transfer crowd-sourced from the internet.

Paperid: 7169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08487.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid adoption of Small Language Models (SLMs) for on-device and resource-constrained deployments has outpaced our understanding of their ethical risks. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first large-scale audit of instruction-tuned SLMs spanning 0.5 to 5 billion parameters-an overlooked "middle tier" between BERT-class encoders and flagship LLMs. Our evaluation includes nine open-source models from the Qwen 2.5, LLaMA 3.2, Gemma 3, and Phi families. Using the BBQ benchmark under zero-shot prompting, we analyze both utility and fairness across ambiguous and disambiguated contexts. This evaluation reveals three key insights. First, competence and fairness need not be antagonistic: Phi models achieve F1 scores exceeding 90 percent while exhibiting minimal bias, showing that efficient and ethical NLP is attainable. Second, social bias varies significantly by architecture: Qwen 2.5 models may appear fair, but this often reflects vacuous neutrality, random guessing, or evasive behavior rather than genuine ethical alignment. In contrast, LLaMA 3.2 models exhibit stronger stereotypical bias, suggesting overconfidence rather than neutrality. Third, compression introduces nuanced trade-offs: 4-bit AWQ quantization improves F1 scores in ambiguous settings for LLaMA 3.2-3B but increases disability-related bias in Phi-4-Mini by over 7 percentage points. These insights provide practical guidance for the responsible deployment of SLMs in applications demanding fairness and efficiency, particularly benefiting small enterprises and resource-constrained environments.

Paperid: 7170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08260.pdf

Abstract:
Inference making is an essential but complex skill in reading comprehension (RC). Some inferences require resolving references across sentences, and some rely on using prior knowledge to fill in the detail that is not explicitly written in the text. Diagnostic RC questions can help educators provide more effective and targeted reading instruction and interventions for school-age students. We introduce a taxonomy of inference types for RC and use it to analyze the distribution of items within a diagnostic RC item bank. Next, we present experiments using GPT-4o to generate bridging-inference RC items for given reading passages via few-shot prompting, comparing conditions with and without chain-of-thought prompts. Generated items were evaluated on three aspects: overall item quality, appropriate inference type, and LLM reasoning, achieving high inter-rater agreements above 0.90. Our results show that GPT-4o produced 93.8% good-quality questions suitable for operational use in grade 3-12 contexts; however, only 42.6% of the generated questions accurately matched the targeted inference type. We conclude that combining automatic item generation with human judgment offers a promising path toward scalable, high-quality diagnostic RC assessments.

Paperid: 7171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08005.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce ZeroVO, a novel visual odometry (VO) algorithm that achieves zero-shot generalization across diverse cameras and environments, overcoming limitations in existing methods that depend on predefined or static camera calibration setups. Our approach incorporates three main innovations. First, we design a calibration-free, geometry-aware network structure capable of handling noise in estimated depth and camera parameters. Second, we introduce a language-based prior that infuses semantic information to enhance robust feature extraction and generalization to previously unseen domains. Third, we develop a flexible, semi-supervised training paradigm that iteratively adapts to new scenes using unlabeled data, further boosting the models' ability to generalize across diverse real-world scenarios. We analyze complex autonomous driving contexts, demonstrating over 30% improvement against prior methods on three standard benchmarks, KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse 2, as well as a newly introduced, high-fidelity synthetic dataset derived from Grand Theft Auto (GTA). By not requiring fine-tuning or camera calibration, our work broadens the applicability of VO, providing a versatile solution for real-world deployment at scale.

Paperid: 7172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07755.pdf

Abstract:
With multi-agent systems increasingly deployed autonomously at scale in complex environments, ensuring safety of the data-driven policies is critical. Control Barrier Functions have emerged as an effective tool for enforcing safety constraints, yet existing learning-based methods often lack in scalability, generalization and sampling efficiency as they overlook inherent geometric structures of the system. To address this gap, we introduce symmetries-infused distributed Control Barrier Functions, enforcing the satisfaction of intrinsic symmetries on learnable graph-based safety certificates. We theoretically motivate the need for equivariant parametrization of CBFs and policies, and propose a simple, yet efficient and adaptable methodology for constructing such equivariant group-modular networks via the compatible group actions. This approach encodes safety constraints in a distributed data-efficient manner, enabling zero-shot generalization to larger and denser swarms. Through extensive simulations on multi-robot navigation tasks, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of safety, scalability, and task success rates, highlighting the importance of embedding symmetries in safe distributed neural policies.

Paperid: 7173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07450.pdf

Abstract:
A major bottleneck in the training process for Zero-Shot Coordination (ZSC) agents is the generation of partner agents that are diverse in collaborative conventions. Current Cross-play Minimization (XPM) methods for population generation can be very computationally expensive and sample inefficient as the training objective requires sampling multiple types of trajectories. Each partner agent in the population is also trained from scratch, despite all of the partners in the population learning policies of the same coordination task. In this work, we propose that simulated trajectories from the dynamics model of an environment can drastically speed up the training process for XPM methods. We introduce XPM-WM, a framework for generating simulated trajectories for XPM via a learned World Model (WM). We show XPM with simulated trajectories removes the need to sample multiple trajectories. In addition, we show our proposed method can effectively generate partners with diverse conventions that match the performance of previous methods in terms of SP population training reward as well as training partners for ZSC agents. Our method is thus, significantly more sample efficient and scalable to a larger number of partners.

Paperid: 7174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07245.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved performance on the Text-to-SQL task. However, prior approaches typically rely on static, pre-processed database information provided at inference time, which limits the model's ability to fully understand the database contents. Without dynamic interaction, LLMs are constrained to fixed, human-provided context and cannot autonomously explore the underlying data. To address this limitation, we propose SDE-SQL, a framework that enables large language models to perform self-driven exploration of databases during inference. This is accomplished by generating and executing SQL probes, which allow the model to actively retrieve information from the database and iteratively update its understanding of the data. Unlike prior methods, SDE-SQL operates in a zero-shot setting, without relying on any question-SQL pairs as in-context demonstrations. When evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, SDE-SQL achieves an 8.02% relative improvement in execution accuracy over the vanilla Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct baseline, establishing a new state-of-the-art among methods based on open-source models without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or model ensembling. Moreover, with SFT, the performance of SDE-SQL can be further enhanced, yielding an additional 0.52% improvement.

Paperid: 7175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06616.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and interpretable detection of depressive language in social media is useful for early interventions of mental health conditions, and has important implications for both clinical practice and broader public health efforts. In this paper, we investigate the performance of large language models (LLMs) and traditional machine learning classifiers across three classification tasks involving social media data: binary depression classification, depression severity classification, and differential diagnosis classification among depression, PTSD, and anxiety. Our study compares zero-shot LLMs with supervised classifiers trained on both conventional text embeddings and LLM-generated summary embeddings. Our experiments reveal that while zero-shot LLMs demonstrate strong generalization capabilities in binary classification, they struggle with fine-grained ordinal classifications. In contrast, classifiers trained on summary embeddings generated by LLMs demonstrate competitive, and in some cases superior, performance on the classification tasks, particularly when compared to models using traditional text embeddings. Our findings demonstrate the strengths of LLMs in mental health prediction, and suggest promising directions for better utilization of their zero-shot capabilities and context-aware summarization techniques.

Paperid: 7176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06607.pdf

Abstract:
We present a training-free method to transplant tokenizers in pretrained large language models (LLMs) by reconstructing unseen token embeddings via Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Specifically, we approximate each out-of-vocabulary token as a sparse linear combination of shared tokens, in two phases: first, compute each new token's representation in the donor embedding space with a small dictionary of shared anchor tokens, then transfer these same sparse coefficients back into the base model's embedding space. On two challenging cross-tokenizer tasks--Llama$\to$Mistral NeMo (12B) and Qwen$\to$Llama (1B)--we show that OMP achieves best zero-shot preservation of the base model's performance across multiple benchmarks, while other zero-shot approaches degrade significantly. Compared to baselines (zero-init, mean-init, and existing approaches like WECHSEL, FOCUS, ZETT), OMP consistently achieves the best overall performance, effectively bridging large tokenizer discrepancies without gradient updates. Our analysis further identifies mismatched numerical tokenization schemes as a critical challenge for preserving mathematical reasoning capabilities. This technique enables direct reuse of pretrained model weights with new tokenizers, facilitating cross-tokenizer knowledge distillation, speculative decoding, ensembling, merging, and domain-specific vocabulary adaptations. We integrate our method into the open-source mergekit-tokensurgeon tool for post hoc vocabulary realignment.

Paperid: 7177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06500.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic design engineers often struggle to efficiently access relevant information for tasks like design verification and technology development. While large language models (LLMs) can enhance productivity as conversational agents, pre-trained open-source LLMs lack domain-specific knowledge for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). In a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) context, LLMs rely on external context but may still produce inaccurate responses. Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) improves LLM performance, but acquiring labeled question/answer (Q/A) data in EDA is difficult. To address this, we propose using synthetic Q/A datasets to enhance LLMs with RAFT. Our results show that RAFT with synthetic data significantly boosts LLM performance for RAG-based EDA tasks. We also investigate the impact of using real user questions as Retrieval-Augmented Few-Shot (RAFS) examples for synthetic data generation. Additionally, we implement secure access control to ensure sensitive information is only accessible to authorized personnel. Finally, we assess the risk of data leakage and unintended memorization during fine-tuning with synthetic data, providing practical insights.

Paperid: 7178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05629.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of large language models in domain-specific tasks necessitates fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and technically challenging. This paper focuses on parameter-efficient fine-tuning using soft prompting, a promising approach that adapts pre-trained models to downstream tasks by learning a small set of parameters. We propose a novel Input Dependent Soft Prompting technique with a self-Attention Mechanism (ID-SPAM) that generates soft prompts based on the input tokens and attends different tokens with varying importance. Our method is simple and efficient, keeping the number of trainable parameters small. We show the merits of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art techniques on various tasks and show the improved zero shot domain transfer capability.

Paperid: 7179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05073.pdf

Abstract:
Self-harm detection on social media is critical for early intervention and mental health support, yet remains challenging due to the subtle, context-dependent nature of such expressions. Identifying self-harm intent aids suicide prevention by enabling timely responses, but current large language models (LLMs) struggle to interpret implicit cues in casual language and emojis. This work enhances LLMs' comprehension of self-harm by distinguishing intent through nuanced language-emoji interplay. We present the Centennial Emoji Sensitivity Matrix (CESM-100), a curated set of 100 emojis with contextual self-harm interpretations and the Self-Harm Identification aNd intent Extraction with Supportive emoji sensitivity (SHINES) dataset, offering detailed annotations for self-harm labels, casual mentions (CMs), and serious intents (SIs). Our unified framework: a) enriches inputs using CESM-100; b) fine-tunes LLMs for multi-task learning: self-harm detection (primary) and CM/SI span detection (auxiliary); c) generates explainable rationales for self-harm predictions. We evaluate the framework on three state-of-the-art LLMs-Llama 3, Mental-Alpaca, and MentalLlama, across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned scenarios. By coupling intent differentiation with contextual cues, our approach commendably enhances LLM performance in both detection and explanation tasks, effectively addressing the inherent ambiguity in self-harm signals. The SHINES dataset, CESM-100 and codebase are publicly available at: https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#SHINES .

Paperid: 7180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04376.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-text models are widely used in zero-shot environmental sound classification as they alleviate the need for annotated data. However, we show that their performance severely drops in the presence of background sound sources. Our analysis reveals that this degradation is primarily driven by SNR levels of background soundscapes, and independent of background type. To address this, we propose a novel method that quantifies and integrates the contribution of background sources into the classification process, improving performance without requiring model retraining. Our domain adaptation technique enhances accuracy across various backgrounds and SNR conditions. Moreover, we analyze the modality gap between audio and text embeddings, showing that narrowing this gap improves classification performance. The method generalizes effectively across state-of-the-art prototypical approaches, showcasing its scalability and robustness for diverse environments.

Paperid: 7181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03884.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically require high-quality studio data and accurate transcriptions for training. India has 1369 languages, with 22 official using 13 scripts. Training a TTS system for all these languages, most of which have no digital resources, seems a Herculean task. Our work focuses on zero-shot synthesis, particularly for languages whose scripts and phonotactics come from different families. The novelty of our work is in the augmentation of a shared phone representation and modifying the text parsing rules to match the phonotactics of the target language, thus reducing the synthesiser overhead and enabling rapid adaptation. Intelligible and natural speech was generated for Sanskrit, Maharashtrian and Canara Konkani, Maithili and Kurukh by leveraging linguistic connections across languages with suitable synthesisers. Evaluations confirm the effectiveness of this approach, highlighting its potential to expand speech technology access for under-represented languages.

Paperid: 7182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02998.pdf

Abstract:
Privacy policies inform users about data collection and usage, yet their complexity limits accessibility for diverse populations. Existing Privacy Policy Question Answering (QA) systems exhibit performance disparities across English dialects, disadvantaging speakers of non-standard varieties. We propose a novel multi-agent framework inspired by human-centered design principles to mitigate dialectal biases. Our approach integrates a Dialect Agent, which translates queries into Standard American English (SAE) while preserving dialectal intent, and a Privacy Policy Agent, which refines predictions using domain expertise. Unlike prior approaches, our method does not require retraining or dialect-specific fine-tuning, making it broadly applicable across models and domains. Evaluated on PrivacyQA and PolicyQA, our framework improves GPT-4o-mini's zero-shot accuracy from 0.394 to 0.601 on PrivacyQA and from 0.352 to 0.464 on PolicyQA, surpassing or matching few-shot baselines without additional training data. These results highlight the effectiveness of structured agent collaboration in mitigating dialect biases and underscore the importance of designing NLP systems that account for linguistic diversity to ensure equitable access to privacy information.

Paperid: 7183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02872.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in historical texts presents unique challenges due to non-standardized language, archaic orthography, and nested or overlapping entities. This study benchmarks a diverse set of NER approaches, ranging from classical Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and spaCy-based models to transformer-based architectures such as CamemBERT and sequence-labeling models like Flair. Experiments are conducted on the GeoEDdA dataset, a richly annotated corpus derived from 18th-century French encyclopedias. We propose framing NER as both token-level and span-level classification to accommodate complex nested entity structures typical of historical documents. Additionally, we evaluate the emerging potential of few-shot prompting with generative language models for low-resource scenarios. Our results demonstrate that while transformer-based models achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially on nested entities, generative models offer promising alternatives when labeled data are scarce. The study highlights ongoing challenges in historical NER and suggests avenues for hybrid approaches combining symbolic and neural methods to better capture the intricacies of early modern French text.

Paperid: 7184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02139.pdf

Abstract:
Unified Cognitive Consciousness Theory} (UCCT) casts them instead as vast unconscious pattern repositories: apparent reasoning arises only when external anchoring mechanisms, few shot prompts, retrieval-augmented context, fine-tuning, or multi-agent debate, activate task-relevant patterns. UCCT formalizes this process as Bayesian competition between statistical priors learned in pre-training and context-driven target patterns, yielding a single quantitative account that unifies existing adaptation techniques. We ground the theory in three principles: threshold crossing, modality universality, and density-distance predictive power, and validate them with (i) cross-domain demonstrations (text QA, image captioning, multi-agent debate) and (ii) two depth-oriented experiments: a controlled numeral-base study (bases 8, 9, 10) that isolates pattern-density effects, and a layer-wise trajectory analysis that reveals phase transitions inside a 7B-parameter model. Both experiments confirm UCCT's predictions of threshold behavior, asymmetric interference, and memory hysteresis. By showing that LLM ``intelligence'' is created through semantic anchoring rather than contained within the model, UCCT offers a principled foundation for interpretable diagnostics and practical guidance for prompt engineering, model selection, and alignment-centric system design.

Paperid: 7185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01678.pdf

Abstract:
Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

Paperid: 7186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01489.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose the first multilingual study on definition modeling. We use monolingual dictionary data for four new languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German) and perform an in-depth empirical study to test the performance of pre-trained multilingual language models on definition modeling of monosemic words when finetuned on this data. Furthermore, we use a zero-shot approach to test the multilingual capabilities of two popular chat-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in the task. Results show that multilingual language models can perform on-pair with English but cannot leverage potential cross-lingual synergies, with LLMs generally offering better performance overall. A comprehensive human evaluation of the LLM-generated definition highlights the zero and few-shot capabilities of these models in this new task, also showing their shortcomings. Finally, we show that performance on our task via BERTScore strongly correlates to the performance on multilingual LLM benchmarks, suggesting that our task offers a viable compute-constrained, stable and natural alternative to these.

Paperid: 7187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24852.pdf

Abstract:
On-device learning at the edge enables low-latency, private personalization with improved long-term robustness and reduced maintenance costs. Yet, achieving scalable, low-power end-to-end on-chip learning, especially from real-world sequential data with a limited number of examples, is an open challenge. Indeed, accelerators supporting error backpropagation optimize for learning performance at the expense of inference efficiency, while simplified learning algorithms often fail to reach acceptable accuracy targets. In this work, we present Chameleon, leveraging three key contributions to solve these challenges. (i) A unified learning and inference architecture supports few-shot learning (FSL), continual learning (CL) and inference at only 0.5% area overhead to the inference logic. (ii) Long temporal dependencies are efficiently captured with temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), enabling the first demonstration of end-to-end on-chip FSL and CL on sequential data and inference on 16-kHz raw audio. (iii) A dual-mode, matrix-multiplication-free compute array allows either matching the power consumption of state-of-the-art inference-only keyword spotting (KWS) accelerators or enabling $4.3\times$ higher peak GOPS. Fabricated in 40-nm CMOS, Chameleon sets new accuracy records on Omniglot for end-to-end on-chip FSL (96.8%, 5-way 1-shot, 98.8%, 5-way 5-shot) and CL (82.2% final accuracy for learning 250 classes with 10 shots), while maintaining an inference accuracy of 93.3% on the 12-class Google Speech Commands dataset at an extreme-edge power budget of 3.1 $Î¼$W.

Paperid: 7188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24757.pdf

Abstract:
The scientific literature is growing rapidly, making it hard to keep track of the state-of-the-art. Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) aim to identify and evaluate all relevant papers on a topic. After retrieving a set of candidate papers, the abstract screening phase determines initial relevance. To date, abstract screening methods using large language models (LLMs) focus on binary classification settings; existing question answering (QA) based ranking approaches suffer from error propagation. LLMs offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the SLR's inclusion and exclusion criteria, yet, existing benchmarks do not provide them exhaustively. We manually extract these criteria as well as research questions for 57 SLRs, mostly in the medical domain, enabling principled comparisons between approaches. Moreover, we propose LGAR, a zero-shot LLM Guided Abstract Ranker composed of an LLM based graded relevance scorer and a dense re-ranker. Our extensive experiments show that LGAR outperforms existing QA-based methods by 5-10 pp. in mean average precision. Our code and data is publicly available.

Paperid: 7189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24162.pdf

Abstract:
We present a simple yet effective training-free approach for zero-shot 3D symmetry detection that leverages visual features from foundation vision models such as DINOv2. Our method extracts features from rendered views of 3D objects and backprojects them onto the original geometry. We demonstrate the symmetric invariance of these features and use them to identify reflection-symmetry planes through a proposed algorithm. Experiments on a subset of ShapeNet demonstrate that our approach outperforms both traditional geometric methods and learning-based approaches without requiring any training data. Our work demonstrates how foundation vision models can help in solving complex 3D geometric problems such as symmetry detection.

Paperid: 7190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23878.pdf

Abstract:
The coverage and composition of pretraining data significantly impacts the generalization ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). To reduce the carbon footprint and financial costs of training, some data mixing methods, which applied the optimized domain weights of a small proxy model to train a larger one, were proposed. However, these methods did not evolute with the training dynamics. The existing online data mixing (ODM) method addressed this limitation by applying the multi-armed bandit algorithm as data sampling strategy. Yet, it did not consider the intra-domain interactions. In this paper, we develop an actor-critic based online data mixing (AC-ODM) method, which captures the varying domain weights by auxiliary actor-critic networks and consider the intra-domain interactions with the reward function. While constructing the dataset to pretrain a large target LLM, we directly apply the actor, which is trained with a small proxy LLM as the environment, as the sampling strategy. The transfer of sampling strategy can not only ensure the efficiency of dynamical data mixing, but also expedite the convergence of pretraining the target LLM. Numerical results demonstrate that AC-ODM-410M, which invokes the sampling strategy obtained by a proxy LLM with 410M parameters, reaching the optimal validation perplexity of ODM 71% faster, and improves performance on the zero-shot MMLU benchmark by 27.5% of accuracy, about 2.23x better on pass@1 of HumanEval benchmark.

Paperid: 7191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23262.pdf

Abstract:
As a specific domain of subjective well-being, travel satisfaction has attracted much research attention recently. Previous studies primarily use statistical models and, more recently, machine learning models to explore the determinants of travel satisfaction. Both approaches require data from sufficient sample sizes and correct prior statistical assumptions. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new modeling approach that can overcome the shortcomings of the existing methods. Pre-trained on extensive datasets, LLMs have strong capabilities in contextual understanding and generalization, significantly reducing their dependence on large quantities of task-specific data and stringent statistical assumptions. The primary challenge in applying LLMs lies in addressing the behavioral misalignment between LLMs and human behavior. Using data on travel satisfaction from a household survey in shanghai, this study identifies the existence and source of misalignment and develop methods to address the misalignment issue. We find that the zero-shot LLM exhibits behavioral misalignment, resulting in relatively low prediction accuracy. However, few-shot learning, even with a limited number of samples, allows the model to outperform baseline models in MSE and MAPE metrics. This misalignment can be attributed to the gap between the general knowledge embedded in LLMs and the specific, unique characteristics of the dataset. On these bases, we propose an LLM-based modeling approach that can be applied to model travel behavior using samples of small sizes. This study highlights the potential of LLMs for modeling not only travel satisfaction but also broader aspects of travel behavior.

Paperid: 7192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21517.pdf

Abstract:
KnowledgeTracing (KT) involves predicting students' knowledge states based on their interactions with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). A key challenge is the cold start problem, accurately predicting knowledge for new students with minimal interaction data. Unlike prior work, which typically trains KT models on initial interactions of all students and tests on their subsequent interactions, our approach trains models solely using historical data from past students, evaluating their performance exclusively on entirely new students. We investigate cold start effects across three KT models: Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT), Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks (DKVMN), and Self-Attentive Knowledge Tracing (SAKT), using ASSISTments 2009, 2015, and 2017 datasets. Results indicate all models initially struggle under cold start conditions but progressively improve with more interactions; SAKT shows higher initial accuracy yet still faces limitations. These findings highlight the need for KT models that effectively generalize to new learners, emphasizing the importance of developing models robust in few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios

Paperid: 7193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21354.pdf

Abstract:
Solving Bengali Math Word Problems (MWPs) remains a major challenge in natural language processing (NLP) due to the language's low-resource status and the multi-step reasoning required. Existing models struggle with complex Bengali MWPs, largely because no human-annotated Bengali dataset has previously addressed this task. This gap has limited progress in Bengali mathematical reasoning. To address this, we created SOMADHAN, a dataset of 8792 complex Bengali MWPs with manually written, step-by-step solutions. We designed this dataset to support reasoning-focused evaluation and model development in a linguistically underrepresented context. Using SOMADHAN, we evaluated a range of large language models (LLMs) - including GPT-4o, GPT-3.5 Turbo, LLaMA series models, Deepseek, and Qwen - through both zero-shot and few-shot prompting with and without Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning. CoT prompting consistently improved performance over standard prompting, especially in tasks requiring multi-step logic. LLaMA-3.3 70B achieved the highest accuracy of 88% with few-shot CoT prompting. We also applied Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune models efficiently, enabling them to adapt to Bengali MWPs with minimal computational cost. Our work fills a critical gap in Bengali NLP by providing a high-quality reasoning dataset and a scalable framework for solving complex MWPs. We aim to advance equitable research in low-resource languages and enhance reasoning capabilities in educational and language technologies.

Paperid: 7194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19944.pdf

Abstract:
The diagram is a visual representation of a relationship illustrated with edges (lines or arrows), which is widely used in industrial and scientific communication. Although recognizing diagrams is essential for vision language models (VLMs) to comprehend domain-specific knowledge, recent studies reveal that many VLMs fail to identify edges in images. We hypothesize that these failures stem from an over-reliance on textual and positional biases, preventing VLMs from learning explicit edge features. Based on this idea, we empirically investigate whether the image encoder in VLMs can learn edge representation through training on a diagram dataset in which edges are biased neither by textual nor positional information. To this end, we conduct contrastive learning on an artificially generated diagram--caption dataset to train an image encoder and evaluate its diagram-related features on three tasks: probing, image retrieval, and captioning. Our results show that the finetuned model outperforms pretrained CLIP in all tasks and surpasses zero-shot GPT-4o and LLaVA-Mistral in the captioning task. These findings confirm that eliminating textual and positional biases fosters accurate edge recognition in VLMs, offering a promising path for advancing diagram understanding.

Paperid: 7195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19515.pdf

Abstract:
We present a critical discourse analysis of the 2024 U.S. presidential debates, examining Donald Trump's rhetorical strategies in his interactions with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We introduce a novel annotation framework, BEADS (Bias Enriched Annotation for Dialogue Structure), which systematically extends the DAMSL framework to capture bias driven and adversarial discourse features in political communication. BEADS includes a domain and language agnostic set of tags that model ideological framing, emotional appeals, and confrontational tactics. Our methodology compares detailed human annotation with zero shot ChatGPT assisted tagging on verified transcripts from the Trump and Biden (19,219 words) and Trump and Harris (18,123 words) debates. Our analysis shows that Trump consistently dominated in key categories: Challenge and Adversarial Exchanges, Selective Emphasis, Appeal to Fear, Political Bias, and Perceived Dismissiveness. These findings underscore his use of emotionally charged and adversarial rhetoric to control the narrative and influence audience perception. In this work, we establish BEADS as a scalable and reproducible framework for critical discourse analysis across languages, domains, and political contexts.

Paperid: 7196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19337.pdf

Abstract:
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning methods have shown promise for reach-avoid tasks, where an agent must reach a target state while avoiding undesirable regions of the state space. Existing approaches typically encode avoid-region information into an augmented state space and cost function, which prevents flexible, dynamic specification of novel avoid-region information at evaluation time. They also rely heavily on well-designed reward and cost functions, limiting scalability to complex or poorly structured environments. We introduce RADT, a decision transformer model for offline, reward-free, goal-conditioned, avoid region-conditioned RL. RADT encodes goals and avoid regions directly as prompt tokens, allowing any number of avoid regions of arbitrary size to be specified at evaluation time. Using only suboptimal offline trajectories from a random policy, RADT learns reach-avoid behavior through a novel combination of goal and avoid-region hindsight relabeling. We benchmark RADT against 3 existing offline goal-conditioned RL models across 11 tasks, environments, and experimental settings. RADT generalizes in a zero-shot manner to out-of-distribution avoid region sizes and counts, outperforming baselines that require retraining. In one such zero-shot setting, RADT achieves 35.7% improvement in normalized cost over the best retrained baseline while maintaining high goal-reaching success. We apply RADT to cell reprogramming in biology, where it reduces visits to undesirable intermediate gene expression states during trajectories to desired target states, despite stochastic transitions and discrete, structured state dynamics.

Paperid: 7197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19334.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) obtain state of the art zero shot relevance ranking performance on a variety of information retrieval tasks. The two most common prompts to elicit LLM relevance judgments are pointwise scoring (a.k.a. relevance generation), where the LLM sees a single query-document pair and outputs a single relevance score, and listwise ranking (a.k.a. permutation generation), where the LLM sees a query and a list of documents and outputs a permutation, sorting the documents in decreasing order of relevance. The current research community consensus is that listwise ranking yields superior performance, and significant research effort has been devoted to crafting LLM listwise ranking algorithms. The underlying hypothesis is that LLMs are better at making relative relevance judgments than absolute ones. In tension with this hypothesis, we find that the gap between pointwise scoring and listwise ranking shrinks when pointwise scoring is implemented using a sufficiently large ordinal relevance label space, becoming statistically insignificant for many LLM-benchmark dataset combinations (where ``significant'' means ``95\% confidence that listwise ranking improves NDCG@10''). Our evaluations span four LLMs, eight benchmark datasets from the BEIR and TREC-DL suites, and two proprietary datasets with relevance labels collected after the training cut-off of all LLMs evaluated.

Paperid: 7198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18653.pdf

Abstract:
Climate-Eval is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate natural language processing models across a broad range of tasks related to climate change. Climate-Eval aggregates existing datasets along with a newly developed news classification dataset, created specifically for this release. This results in a benchmark of 25 tasks based on 13 datasets, covering key aspects of climate discourse, including text classification, question answering, and information extraction. Our benchmark provides a standardized evaluation suite for systematically assessing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on these tasks. Additionally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of open-source LLMs (ranging from 2B to 70B parameters) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, analyzing their strengths and limitations in the domain of climate change.

Paperid: 7199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18247.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) struggles with domain-specific enterprise datasets, often isolated behind firewalls and rich in complex, specialized terminology unseen by LLMs during pre-training. Semantic variability across domains like medicine, networking, or law hampers RAG's context precision, while fine-tuning solutions are costly, slow, and lack generalization as new data emerges. Achieving zero-shot precision with retrievers without fine-tuning still remains a key challenge. We introduce 'MetaGen Blended RAG', a novel enterprise search approach that enhances semantic retrievers through a metadata generation pipeline and hybrid query indexes using dense and sparse vectors. By leveraging key concepts, topics, and acronyms, our method creates metadata-enriched semantic indexes and boosted hybrid queries, delivering robust, scalable performance without fine-tuning. On the biomedical PubMedQA dataset, MetaGen Blended RAG achieves 82% retrieval accuracy and 77% RAG accuracy, surpassing all prior zero-shot RAG benchmarks and even rivaling fine-tuned models on that dataset, while also excelling on datasets like SQuAD and NQ. This approach redefines enterprise search using a new approach to building semantic retrievers with unmatched generalization across specialized domains.

Paperid: 7200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15256.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures in volumetric medical images is crucial for clinical applications, including disease monitoring and cancer treatment planning. Contemporary interactive segmentation models, such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM-2) and its medical variant (MedSAM-2), rely on manually provided prompts like bounding boxes and mouse clicks. In this study, we introduce eye gaze as a novel informational modality for interactive segmentation, marking the application of eye-tracking for 3D medical image segmentation. We evaluate the performance of using gaze-based prompts with SAM-2 and MedSAM-2 using both synthetic and real gaze data. Compared to bounding boxes, gaze-based prompts offer a time-efficient interaction approach with slightly lower segmentation quality. Our findings highlight the potential of using gaze as a complementary input modality for interactive 3D medical image segmentation.

Paperid: 7201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15090.pdf

Abstract:
Effective cross-lingual transfer remains a critical challenge in scaling the benefits of large language models from high-resource to low-resource languages. Towards this goal, prior studies have explored many approaches to combine task knowledge from task-specific data in a (high-resource) source language and language knowledge from unlabeled text in a (low-resource) target language. One notable approach proposed composable sparse fine-tuning (SFT) for cross-lingual transfer that learns task-specific and language-specific sparse masks to select a subset of the pretrained model's parameters that are further fine-tuned. These sparse fine-tuned vectors (SFTs) are subsequently composed with the pretrained model to facilitate zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to a task in a target language, using only task-specific data from a source language. These sparse masks for SFTs were identified using a simple magnitude-based pruning. In our work, we introduce DeFT-X, a novel composable SFT approach that denoises the weight matrices of a pretrained model before magnitude pruning using singular value decomposition, thus yielding more robust SFTs. We evaluate DeFT-X on a diverse set of extremely low-resource languages for sentiment classification (NusaX) and natural language inference (AmericasNLI) and demonstrate that it performs at par or outperforms SFT and other prominent cross-lingual transfer baselines.

Paperid: 7202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14899.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across various domains, their applications in robotics remain largely limited to static prompt-based behaviors and still face challenges in complex tasks under zero-shot or few-shot settings. Inspired by human metacognitive learning and creative problem-solving, we address this limitation by exploring a fundamental question: Can LLMs be empowered with metacognitive capabilities to reason, reflect, and create, thereby enhancing their ability to perform robotic tasks with minimal demonstrations? In this paper, we present a framework that integrates metacognitive learning into LLM-powered multi-robot collaboration. The system equips the LLM-powered robotic agents with a skill decomposition and self-reflection mechanism that identifies modular skills from prior tasks, reflects on failures in unseen task scenarios, and synthesizes effective new solutions. We propose a more challenging robotic benchmark task and evaluate our framework on the existing benchmark and the novel task. Experimental results show that our metacognitive learning framework significantly outperforms existing baselines. Moreover, we observe that the framework can generate solutions that differ from the ground truth yet still successfully complete the tasks. These findings support our hypothesis that metacognitive learning can foster creativity in robotic planning.

Paperid: 7203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14323.pdf

Abstract:
The growing body of literature on training-data reconstruction attacks raises significant concerns about deploying neural network classifiers trained on sensitive data. However, differentially private (DP) training (e.g. using DP-SGD) can defend against such attacks with large training datasets causing only minimal loss of network utility. Folklore, heuristics, and (albeit pessimistic) DP bounds suggest this fails for networks trained with small per-class datasets, yet to the best of our knowledge the literature offers no compelling evidence. We directly demonstrate this vulnerability by significantly extending reconstruction attack capabilities under a realistic adversary threat model for few-shot transfer learned image classifiers. We design new white-box and black-box attacks and find that DP-SGD is unable to defend against these without significant classifier utility loss. To address this, we propose a novel homomorphic encryption (HE) method that protects training data without degrading model's accuracy. Conventional HE secures model's input data and requires costly homomorphic implementation of the entire classifier. In contrast, our new scheme is computationally efficient and protects training data rather than input data. This is achieved by means of a simple role-reversal where classifier input data is unencrypted but transfer-learned weights are encrypted. Classifier outputs remain encrypted, thus preventing both white-box and black-box (and any other) training-data reconstruction attacks. Under this new scheme only a trusted party with a private decryption key can obtain the classifier class decisions.

Paperid: 7204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14204.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Perceptual-Initialization (PI), a paradigm shift in visual representation learning that incorporates human perceptual structure during the initialization phase rather than as a downstream fine-tuning step. By integrating human-derived triplet embeddings from the NIGHTS dataset to initialize a CLIP vision encoder, followed by self-supervised learning on YFCC15M, our approach demonstrates significant zero-shot performance improvements, without any task-specific fine-tuning, across 29 zero shot classification and 2 retrieval benchmarks. On ImageNet-1K, zero-shot gains emerge after approximately 15 epochs of pretraining. Benefits are observed across datasets of various scales, with improvements manifesting at different stages of the pretraining process depending on dataset characteristics. Our approach consistently enhances zero-shot top-1 accuracy, top-5 accuracy, and retrieval recall (e.g., R@1, R@5) across these diverse evaluation tasks, without requiring any adaptation to target domains. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom of using human-perceptual data primarily for fine-tuning and demonstrate that embedding human perceptual structure during early representation learning yields more capable and vision-language aligned systems that generalize immediately to unseen tasks. Our work shows that "beginning with you", starting with human perception, provides a stronger foundation for general-purpose vision-language intelligence.

Paperid: 7205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13559.pdf

Abstract:
Code-switching (CS) poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its comprehensibility remains underexplored in LLMs. We introduce CS-Sum, to evaluate the comprehensibility of CS by the LLMs through CS dialogue to English summarization. CS-Sum is the first benchmark for CS dialogue summarization across Mandarin-English (EN-ZH), Tamil-English (EN-TA), and Malay-English (EN-MS), with 900-1300 human-annotated dialogues per language pair. Evaluating ten LLMs, including open and closed-source models, we analyze performance across few-shot, translate-summarize, and fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA on synthetic data) approaches. Our findings show that though the scores on automated metrics are high, LLMs make subtle mistakes that alter the complete meaning of the dialogue. To this end, we introduce 3 most common type of errors that LLMs make when handling CS input. Error rates vary across CS pairs and LLMs, with some LLMs showing more frequent errors on certain language pairs, underscoring the need for specialized training on code-switched data.

Paperid: 7206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11980.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model for image segmentation, showing robust zero-shot generalization through prompt engineering. However, relying on manual prompts is impractical for real-world applications, particularly in scenarios where rapid prompt provision and resource efficiency are crucial. In this paper, we propose the Automation of Prompts for SAM (AoP-SAM), a novel approach that learns to generate essential prompts in optimal locations automatically. AoP-SAM enhances SAM's efficiency and usability by eliminating manual input, making it better suited for real-world tasks. Our approach employs a lightweight yet efficient Prompt Predictor model that detects key entities across images and identifies the optimal regions for placing prompt candidates. This method leverages SAM's image embeddings, preserving its zero-shot generalization capabilities without requiring fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce a test-time instance-level Adaptive Sampling and Filtering mechanism that generates prompts in a coarse-to-fine manner. This notably enhances both prompt and mask generation efficiency by reducing computational overhead and minimizing redundant mask refinements. Evaluations of three datasets demonstrate that AoP-SAM substantially improves both prompt generation efficiency and mask generation accuracy, making SAM more effective for automated segmentation tasks.

Paperid: 7207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11813.pdf

Abstract:
Data augmentation for domain-specific image classification tasks often struggles to simultaneously address diversity, faithfulness, and label clarity of generated data, leading to suboptimal performance in downstream tasks. While existing generative diffusion model-based methods aim to enhance augmentation, they fail to cohesively tackle these three critical aspects and often overlook intrinsic challenges of diffusion models, such as sensitivity to model characteristics and stochasticity under strong transformations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that explicitly integrates diversity, faithfulness, and label clarity into the augmentation process. Our approach employs saliency-guided mixing and a fine-tuned diffusion model to preserve foreground semantics, enrich background diversity, and ensure label consistency, while mitigating diffusion model limitations. Extensive experiments across fine-grained, long-tail, few-shot, and background robustness tasks demonstrate our method's superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches.

Paperid: 7208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10088.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced transfer learning across diverse tasks. However, adapting these models with limited few-shot data often leads to overfitting, undermining their ability to generalize to new tasks. To address this, we propose Multi-Modal Representation Learning (MMRL), which introduces a shared, learnable, modality-agnostic representation space. MMRL generates space tokens projected into both text and image encoders as representation tokens, enabling more effective cross-modal interactions. Unlike prior methods that mainly optimize class token features, MMRL inserts representation tokens into higher encoder layers--where task-specific features are more prominent--while preserving general knowledge in the lower layers. During training, both class and representation features are jointly optimized: a trainable projection layer is applied to representation tokens for task adaptation, while the projection layer for class token remains frozen to retain pre-trained knowledge. To further promote generalization, we introduce a regularization term aligning class and text features with the frozen VLM's zero-shot features. At inference, a decoupling strategy uses both class and representation features for base tasks, but only class features for novel tasks due to their stronger generalization. Building upon this, we propose MMRL++, a parameter-efficient and interaction-aware extension that significantly reduces trainable parameters and enhances intra-modal interactions--particularly across the layers of representation tokens--allowing gradient sharing and instance-specific information to propagate more effectively through the network. Extensive experiments on 15 datasets demonstrate that MMRL and MMRL++ consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods, achieving a strong balance between task-specific adaptation and generalization.

Paperid: 7209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08458.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive sim-to-real pipeline for autonomous strawberry picking from dense clusters using a Franka Panda robot. Our approach leverages a custom Mujoco simulation environment that integrates domain randomization techniques. In this environment, a deep reinforcement learning agent is trained using the dormant ratio minimization algorithm. The proposed pipeline bridges low-level control with high-level perception and decision making, demonstrating promising performance in both simulation and in a real laboratory environment, laying the groundwork for successful transfer to real-world autonomous fruit harvesting.

Paperid: 7210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07886.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic prompt optimization frameworks are developed to obtain suitable prompts for large language models (LLMs) with respect to desired output quality metrics. Although existing approaches can handle conventional tasks such as fixed-solution question answering, defining the metric becomes complicated when the output quality cannot be easily assessed by comparisons with standard golden samples. Consequently, optimizing the prompts effectively and efficiently without a clear metric becomes a critical challenge. To address the issue, we present PLHF (which stands for "P"rompt "L"earning with "H"uman "F"eedback), a few-shot prompt optimization framework inspired by the well-known RLHF technique. Different from naive strategies, PLHF employs a specific evaluator module acting as the metric to estimate the output quality. PLHF requires only a single round of human feedback to complete the entire prompt optimization process. Empirical results on both public and industrial datasets show that PLHF outperforms prior output grading strategies for LLM prompt optimizations.

Paperid: 7211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06451.pdf

Abstract:
Imitation learning offers a pathway for robots to perform repetitive tasks, allowing humans to focus on more engaging and meaningful activities. However, challenges arise from the need for extensive demonstrations and the disparity between training and real-world environments. This paper focuses on contact-rich tasks like wiping with soft and deformable objects, requiring adaptive force control to handle variations in wiping surface height and the sponge's physical properties. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that integrates real-time force-torque (FT) feedback with pre-trained object representations. This approach allows robots to dynamically adjust to previously unseen changes in surface heights and sponges' physical properties. In real-world experiments, our method achieved 96% accuracy in applying reference forces, significantly outperforming the previous method that lacked an FT feedback loop, which only achieved 4% accuracy. To evaluate the adaptability of our approach, we conducted experiments under different conditions from the training setup, involving 40 scenarios using 10 sponges with varying physical properties and 4 types of wiping surface heights, demonstrating significant improvements in the robot's adaptability by analyzing force trajectories. The video of our work is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-wiping

Paperid: 7212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06275.pdf

Abstract:
Wave-like images-from attosecond streaking spectrograms to optical spectra, audio mel-spectrograms and periodic video frames-encode critical harmonic structures that elude conventional feature extractors. We propose a unified, matrix-equivalent framework that reinterprets convolution and attention as linear transforms on flattened inputs, revealing filter weights as basis vectors spanning latent feature subspaces. To infuse spectral priors we apply elementwise $\sin(\cdot)$ mappings to each weight matrix. Embedding these transforms into CNN, ViT and Capsule architectures yields Sin-Basis Networks with heightened sensitivity to periodic motifs and built-in invariance to spatial shifts. Experiments on a diverse collection of wave-like image datasets-including 80,000 synthetic attosecond streaking spectrograms, thousands of Raman, photoluminescence and FTIR spectra, mel-spectrograms from AudioSet and cycle-pattern frames from Kinetics-demonstrate substantial gains in reconstruction accuracy, translational robustness and zero-shot cross-domain transfer. Theoretical analysis via matrix isomorphism and Mercer-kernel truncation quantifies how sinusoidal reparametrization enriches expressivity while preserving stability in data-scarce regimes. Sin-Basis Networks thus offer a lightweight, physics-informed approach to deep learning across all wave-form imaging modalities.

Paperid: 7213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04759.pdf

Abstract:
App reviews are a critical source of user feedback, offering valuable insights into an app's performance, features, usability, and overall user experience. Effectively analyzing these reviews is essential for guiding app development, prioritizing feature updates, and enhancing user satisfaction. Classifying reviews into functional and non-functional requirements play a pivotal role in distinguishing feedback related to specific app features (functional requirements) from feedback concerning broader quality attributes, such as performance, usability, and reliability (non-functional requirements). Both categories are integral to informed development decisions. Traditional approaches to classifying app reviews are hindered by the need for large, domain-specific datasets, which are often costly and time-consuming to curate. This study explores the potential of zero-shot learning with ChatGPT for classifying app reviews into four categories: functional requirement, non-functional requirement, both, or neither. We evaluate ChatGPT's performance on a benchmark dataset of 1,880 manually annotated reviews from ten diverse apps spanning multiple domains. Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT achieves a robust F1 score of 0.842 in review classification, despite certain challenges and limitations. Additionally, we examine how factors such as review readability and length impact classification accuracy and conduct a manual analysis to identify review categories more prone to misclassification.

Paperid: 7214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04214.pdf

Abstract:
The automatic extraction of key-value information from handwritten documents is a key challenge in document analysis. A reliable extraction is a prerequisite for the mass digitization efforts of many archives. Large Vision Language Models (LVLM) are a promising technology to tackle this problem especially in scenarios where little annotated training data is available. In this work, we present a novel dataset specifically designed to evaluate the few-shot capabilities of LVLMs. The CM1 documents are a historic collection of forms with handwritten entries created in Europe to administer the Care and Maintenance program after World War Two. The dataset establishes three benchmarks on extracting name and birthdate information and, furthermore, considers different training set sizes. We provide baseline results for two different LVLMs and compare performances to an established full-page extraction model. While the traditional full-page model achieves highly competitive performances, our experiments show that when only a few training samples are available the considered LVLMs benefit from their size and heavy pretraining and outperform the classical approach.

Paperid: 7215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04196.pdf

Abstract:
Generating a synthetic population that is both feasible and diverse is crucial for ensuring the validity of downstream activity schedule simulation in activity-based models (ABMs). While deep generative models (DGMs), such as variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, have been applied to this task, they often struggle to balance the inclusion of rare but plausible combinations (i.e., sampling zeros) with the exclusion of implausible ones (i.e., structural zeros). To improve feasibility while maintaining diversity, we propose a fine-tuning method for large language models (LLMs) that explicitly controls the autoregressive generation process through topological orderings derived from a Bayesian Network (BN). Experimental results show that our hybrid LLM-BN approach outperforms both traditional DGMs and proprietary LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT-4o) with few-shot learning. Specifically, our approach achieves approximately 95% feasibility, significantly higher than the ~80% observed in DGMs, while maintaining comparable diversity, making it well-suited for practical applications. Importantly, the method is based on a lightweight open-source LLM, enabling fine-tuning and inference on standard personal computing environments. This makes the approach cost-effective and scalable for large-scale applications, such as synthesizing populations in megacities, without relying on expensive infrastructure. By initiating the ABM pipeline with high-quality synthetic populations, our method improves overall simulation reliability and reduces downstream error propagation. The source code for these methods is available for research and practical application.

Paperid: 7216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01315.pdf

Abstract:
The recent growth in the use of Large Language Models has made them vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial assaults, manipulative prompts, and encoded malicious inputs. Existing countermeasures frequently necessitate retraining models, which is computationally costly and impracticable for deployment. Without the need for retraining or fine-tuning, this study presents a unique defense paradigm that allows LLMs to recognize, filter, and defend against adversarial or malicious inputs on their own. There are two main parts to the suggested framework: (1) A prompt filtering module that uses sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including zero-shot classification, keyword analysis, and encoded content detection (e.g. base64, hexadecimal, URL encoding), to detect, decode, and classify harmful inputs; and (2) A summarization module that processes and summarizes adversarial research literature to give the LLM context-aware defense knowledge. This approach strengthens LLMs' resistance to adversarial exploitation by fusing text extraction, summarization, and harmful prompt analysis. According to experimental results, this integrated technique has a 98.71% success rate in identifying harmful patterns, manipulative language structures, and encoded prompts. By employing a modest amount of adversarial research literature as context, the methodology also allows the model to react correctly to harmful inputs with a larger percentage of jailbreak resistance and refusal rate. While maintaining the quality of LLM responses, the framework dramatically increases LLM's resistance to hostile misuse, demonstrating its efficacy as a quick and easy substitute for time-consuming, retraining-based defenses.

Paperid: 7217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00738.pdf

Abstract:
Advancements in remote sensing (RS) imagery have provided high-resolution detail and vast coverage, yet existing methods, such as image-level captioning/retrieval and object-level detection/segmentation, often fail to capture mid-scale semantic entities essential for interpreting large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose the conteXtual referring Map (XeMap) task, which focuses on contextual, fine-grained localization of text-referred regions in large-scale RS scenes. Unlike traditional approaches, XeMap enables precise mapping of mid-scale semantic entities that are often overlooked in image-level or object-level methods. To achieve this, we introduce XeMap-Network, a novel architecture designed to handle the complexities of pixel-level cross-modal contextual referring mapping in RS. The network includes a fusion layer that applies self- and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the interaction between text and image embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-Scale Semantic Alignment (HMSA) module that aligns multiscale visual features with the text semantic vector, enabling precise multimodal matching across large-scale RS imagery. To support XeMap task, we provide a novel, annotated dataset, XeMap-set, specifically tailored for this task, overcoming the lack of XeMap datasets in RS imagery. XeMap-Network is evaluated in a zero-shot setting against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior performance. This highlights its effectiveness in accurately mapping referring regions and providing valuable insights for interpreting large-scale RS environments.

Paperid: 7218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21553.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. However, their size presents significant challenges for deployment and inference. This paper investigates the quantization of LLMs, focusing on the LLaMA architecture and its derivatives. We challenge existing assumptions about activation outliers in LLMs and propose a novel mixed-precision quantization approach tailored for LLaMA-like models. Our method leverages the observation that activation spikes in LLaMA architectures are predominantly concentrated in specific projection layers. By applying higher precision (FP16 or FP8) to these layers while quantizing the rest of the model to lower bit-widths, we achieve superior performance compared to existing quantization techniques. Experimental results on LLaMA2, LLaMA3, and Mistral models demonstrate significant improvements in perplexity and zero-shot accuracy, particularly for 8-bit per-tensor quantization. Our approach outperforms general-purpose methods designed to handle outliers across all architecture types, highlighting the benefits of architecture-specific quantization strategies. This research contributes to the ongoing efforts to make LLMs more efficient and deployable, potentially enabling their use in resource-constrained environments. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering model-specific characteristics in developing effective quantization pipelines for state-of-the-art language models by identifying and targeting a small number of projections that concentrate activation spikes.

Paperid: 7219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20911.pdf

Abstract:
Background: Bug reports are essential to the software development life cycle. They help developers track and resolve issues, but are often difficult to process due to their complexity, which can delay resolution and affect software quality. Aims: This study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can assist developers in automatically decomposing complex bug reports into smaller, self-contained units, making them easier to understand and address. Method: We conducted an empirical study on 127 resolved privacy-related bug reports collected from Apache Jira. We evaluated ChatGPT and DeepSeek using different prompting strategies. We first tested both LLMs with zero-shot prompts, then applied improved prompts with demonstrations (using few-shot prompting) to measure their abilities in bug decomposition. Results: Our findings show that LLMs are capable of decomposing bug reports, but their overall performance still requires further improvement and strongly depends on the quality of the prompts. With zero-shot prompts, both studied LLMs (ChatGPT and DeepSeek) performed poorly. After prompt tuning, ChatGPT's true decomposition rate increased by 140\% and DeepSeek's by 163.64\%. Conclusions: LLMs show potential in helping developers analyze and decompose complex bug reports, but they still need improvement in terms of accuracy and bug understanding.

Paperid: 7220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20797.pdf

Abstract:
Current mainstream deep learning techniques exhibit an over-reliance on extensive training data and a lack of adaptability to the dynamic world, marking a considerable disparity from human intelligence. To bridge this gap, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) has emerged, focusing on continuous learning of new categories with limited samples without forgetting old knowledge. Existing FSCIL studies typically use a single model to learn knowledge across all sessions, inevitably leading to the stability-plasticity dilemma. Unlike machines, humans store varied knowledge in different cerebral cortices. Inspired by this characteristic, our paper aims to develop a method that learns independent models for each session. It can inherently prevent catastrophic forgetting. During the testing stage, our method integrates Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) for model deployment. Our method provides a fresh viewpoint for FSCIL and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 and mini-ImageNet datasets.

Paperid: 7221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20193.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents ProFi-Net, a novel few-shot learning framework for WiFi-based gesture recognition that overcomes the challenges of limited training data and sparse feature representations. ProFi-Net employs a prototype-based metric learning architecture enhanced with a feature-level attention mechanism, which dynamically refines the Euclidean distance by emphasizing the most discriminative feature dimensions. Additionally, our approach introduces a curriculum-inspired data augmentation strategy exclusively on the query set. By progressively incorporating Gaussian noise of increasing magnitude, the model is exposed to a broader range of challenging variations, thereby improving its generalization and robustness to overfitting. Extensive experiments conducted across diverse real-world environments demonstrate that ProFi-Net significantly outperforms conventional prototype networks and other state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods in terms of classification accuracy and training efficiency.

Paperid: 7222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19847.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce Segmentation to Human-Object Interaction (\textit{\textbf{Seg2HOI}}) approach, a novel framework that integrates segmentation-based vision foundation models with the human-object interaction task, distinguished from traditional detection-based Human-Object Interaction (HOI) methods. Our approach enhances HOI detection by not only predicting the standard triplets but also introducing quadruplets, which extend HOI triplets by including segmentation masks for human-object pairs. More specifically, Seg2HOI inherits the properties of the vision foundation model (e.g., promptable and interactive mechanisms) and incorporates a decoder that applies these attributes to HOI task. Despite training only for HOI, without additional training mechanisms for these properties, the framework demonstrates that such features still operate efficiently. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that Seg2HOI achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods, even in zero-shot scenarios. Lastly, we propose that Seg2HOI can generate HOI quadruplets and interactive HOI segmentation from novel text and visual prompts that were not used during training, making it versatile for a wide range of applications by leveraging this flexibility.

Paperid: 7223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19384.pdf

Abstract:
Requirements Engineering (RE) is essential for developing complex and regulated software projects. Given the challenges in transforming stakeholder inputs into consistent software designs, Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) provides a systematic approach to handling free-form data. However, traditional QDA methods are time-consuming and heavily reliant on manual effort. In this paper, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4, Mistral, and LLaMA-2, to improve QDA tasks in RE. Our study evaluates LLMs' performance in inductive (zero-shot) and deductive (one-shot, few-shot) annotation tasks, revealing that GPT-4 achieves substantial agreement with human analysts in deductive settings, with Cohen's Kappa scores exceeding 0.7, while zero-shot performance remains limited. Detailed, context-rich prompts significantly improve annotation accuracy and consistency, particularly in deductive scenarios, and GPT-4 demonstrates high reliability across repeated runs. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support QDA in RE by reducing manual effort while maintaining annotation quality. The structured labels automatically provide traceability of requirements and can be directly utilized as classes in domain models, facilitating systematic software design.

Paperid: 7224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19074.pdf

Abstract:
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, but their 3D convolutional structures introduce high computational costs and limited generalization in few-shot scenarios. Domain shifts caused by sensor differences and environmental variations further hinder cross-dataset adaptability. Metric-based few-shot learning (FSL) prototype networks mitigate this problem, yet their performance is sensitive to prototype quality, especially with limited samples. To overcome these challenges, a dual-branch residual network that integrates spatial and spectral features via parallel branches is proposed in this letter. Additionally, more robust refined prototypes are obtained through a regulation term. Furthermore, a kernel probability matching strategy aligns source and target domain features, alleviating domain shift. Experiments on four publicly available HSI datasets illustrate that the proposal achieves superior performance compared to other methods.

Paperid: 7225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17628.pdf

Abstract:
Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) pose a significant challenge in healthcare, requiring precise and efficient wound assessment to enhance patient outcomes. This study introduces the Attention Diffusion Zero-shot Unsupervised System (ADZUS), a novel text-guided diffusion model that performs wound segmentation without relying on labeled training data. Unlike conventional deep learning models, which require extensive annotation, ADZUS leverages zero-shot learning to dynamically adapt segmentation based on descriptive prompts, offering enhanced flexibility and adaptability in clinical applications. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ADZUS surpasses traditional and state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving an IoU of 86.68\% and the highest precision of 94.69\% on the chronic wound dataset, outperforming supervised approaches such as FUSegNet. Further validation on a custom-curated DFU dataset reinforces its robustness, with ADZUS achieving a median DSC of 75\%, significantly surpassing FUSegNet's 45\%. The model's text-guided segmentation capability enables real-time customization of segmentation outputs, allowing targeted analysis of wound characteristics based on clinical descriptions. Despite its competitive performance, the computational cost of diffusion-based inference and the need for potential fine-tuning remain areas for future improvement. ADZUS represents a transformative step in wound segmentation, providing a scalable, efficient, and adaptable AI-driven solution for medical imaging.

Paperid: 7226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16005.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by solving a wide range of tasks simply guided by a prompt. Yet their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. While automatic prompt optimization addresses this challenge by finding optimal prompts, current methods require a substantial number of LLM calls and input tokens, making prompt optimization expensive. We introduce CAPO (Cost-Aware Prompt Optimization), an algorithm that enhances prompt optimization efficiency by integrating AutoML techniques. CAPO is an evolutionary approach with LLMs as operators, incorporating racing to save evaluations and multi-objective optimization to balance performance with prompt length. It jointly optimizes instructions and few-shot examples while leveraging task descriptions for improved robustness. Our extensive experiments across diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that CAPO outperforms state-of-the-art discrete prompt optimization methods in 11/15 cases with improvements up to 21%p in accuracy. Our algorithm achieves better performances already with smaller budgets, saves evaluations through racing, and decreases average prompt length via a length penalty, making it both cost-efficient and cost-aware. Even without few-shot examples, CAPO outperforms its competitors and generally remains robust to initial prompts. CAPO represents an important step toward making prompt optimization more powerful and accessible by improving cost-efficiency.

Paperid: 7227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15392.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates hybrid intelligence and collaboration between researchers of sexism and Large Language Models (LLMs), with a four-component pipeline. First, nine sexism researchers answer questions about their knowledge of sexism and of LLMs. They then participate in two interactive experiments involving an LLM (GPT3.5). The first experiment has experts assessing the model's knowledge about sexism and suitability for use in research. The second experiment tasks them with creating three different definitions of sexism: an expert-written definition, an LLM-written one, and a co-created definition. Lastly, zero-shot classification experiments use the three definitions from each expert in a prompt template for sexism detection, evaluating GPT4o on 2.500 texts sampled from five sexism benchmarks. We then analyze the resulting 67.500 classification decisions. The LLM interactions lead to longer and more complex definitions of sexism. Expert-written definitions on average perform poorly compared to LLM-generated definitions. However, some experts do improve classification performance with their co-created definitions of sexism, also experts who are inexperienced in using LLMs.

Paperid: 7228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15199.pdf

Abstract:
MILS (Multimodal Iterative LLM Solver) is a recently published framework that claims "LLMs can see and hear without any training" by leveraging an iterative, LLM-CLIP based approach for zero-shot image captioning. While this MILS approach demonstrates good performance, our investigation reveals that this success comes at a hidden, substantial computational cost due to its expensive multi-step refinement process. In contrast, alternative models such as BLIP-2 and GPT-4V achieve competitive results through a streamlined, single-pass approach. We hypothesize that the significant overhead inherent in MILS's iterative process may undermine its practical benefits, thereby challenging the narrative that zero-shot performance can be attained without incurring heavy resource demands. This work is the first to expose and quantify the trade-offs between output quality and computational cost in MILS, providing critical insights for the design of more efficient multimodal models.

Paperid: 7229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14715.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient medical image segmentation is crucial for advancing clinical diagnostics and surgical planning, yet remains a complex challenge due to the variability in anatomical structures and the demand for low-complexity models. In this paper, we introduced Med-2D SegNet, a novel and highly efficient segmentation architecture that delivers outstanding accuracy while maintaining a minimal computational footprint. Med-2D SegNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including KVASIR-SEG, PH2, EndoVis, and GLAS, with an average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.77% across 20 diverse datasets. Central to its success is the compact Med Block, a specialized encoder design that incorporates dimension expansion and parameter reduction, enabling precise feature extraction while keeping model parameters to a low count of just 2.07 million. Med-2D SegNet excels in cross-dataset generalization, particularly in polyp segmentation, where it was trained on KVASIR-SEG and showed strong performance on unseen datasets, demonstrating its robustness in zero-shot learning scenarios, even though we acknowledge that further improvements are possible. With top-tier performance in both binary and multi-class segmentation, Med-2D SegNet redefines the balance between accuracy and efficiency, setting a new benchmark for medical image analysis. This work paves the way for developing accessible, high-performance diagnostic tools suitable for clinical environments and resource-constrained settings, making it a step forward in the democratization of advanced medical technology.

Paperid: 7230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12535.pdf

Abstract:
Ultrasound imaging of the heart (echocardiography) is widely used to diagnose cardiac diseases. However, obtaining an echocardiogram requires an expert sonographer and a high-quality ultrasound imaging device, which are generally only available in hospitals. Recently, AI-based navigation models and algorithms have been used to aid novice sonographers in acquiring the standardized cardiac views necessary to visualize potential disease pathologies. These navigation systems typically rely on directional guidance to predict the necessary rotation of the ultrasound probe. This paper demonstrates a novel AI navigation system that builds on a decision model for identifying the inferior vena cava (IVC) of the heart. The decision model is trained offline using cardiac ultrasound videos and employs binary classification to determine whether the IVC is present in a given ultrasound video. The underlying model integrates a novel localization algorithm that leverages the learned feature representations to annotate the spatial location of the IVC in real-time. Our model demonstrates strong localization performance on traditional high-quality hospital ultrasound videos, as well as impressive zero-shot performance on lower-quality ultrasound videos from a more affordable Butterfly iQ handheld ultrasound machine. This capability facilitates the expansion of ultrasound diagnostics beyond hospital settings. Currently, the guidance system is undergoing clinical trials and is available on the Butterfly iQ app.

Paperid: 7231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10878.pdf

Abstract:
In today's visually dominated social media landscape, predicting the perceived credibility of visual content and understanding what drives human judgment are crucial for countering misinformation. However, these tasks are challenging due to the diversity and richness of visual features. We introduce a Large Language Model (LLM)-informed feature discovery framework that leverages multimodal LLMs, such as GPT-4o, to evaluate content credibility and explain its reasoning. We extract and quantify interpretable features using targeted prompts and integrate them into machine learning models to improve credibility predictions. We tested this approach on 4,191 visual social media posts across eight topics in science, health, and politics, using credibility ratings from 5,355 crowdsourced workers. Our method outperformed zero-shot GPT-based predictions by 13 percent in R2, and revealed key features like information concreteness and image format. We discuss the implications for misinformation mitigation, visual credibility, and the role of LLMs in social science.

Paperid: 7232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08937.pdf

Abstract:
In image fusion tasks, the absence of real fused images as priors presents a fundamental challenge. Most deep learning-based fusion methods rely on large-scale paired datasets to extract global weighting features from raw images, thereby generating fused outputs that approximate real fused images. In contrast to previous studies, this paper explores few-shot training of neural networks under the condition of having prior knowledge. We propose a novel fusion framework named GBFF, and a Granular Ball Significant Extraction algorithm specifically designed for the few-shot prior setting. All pixel pairs involved in the fusion process are initially modeled as a Coarse-Grained Granular Ball. At the local level, Fine-Grained Granular Balls are used to slide through the brightness space to extract Non-Salient Pixel Pairs, and perform splitting operations to obtain Salient Pixel Pairs. Pixel-wise weights are then computed to generate a pseudo-supervised image. At the global level, pixel pairs with significant contributions to the fusion process are categorized into the Positive Region, while those whose contributions cannot be accurately determined are assigned to the Boundary Region. The Granular Ball performs modality-aware adaptation based on the proportion of the positive region, thereby adjusting the neural network's loss function and enabling it to complement the information of the boundary region. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both the proposed algorithm and the underlying theory. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our approach shows strong competitiveness in terms of both fusion time and image expressiveness. Our code is publicly available at:

Paperid: 7233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07858.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-speech (TTS) technology has achieved impressive results for widely spoken languages, yet many under-resourced languages remain challenged by limited data and linguistic complexities. In this paper, we present a novel methodology that integrates a data-optimized framework with an advanced acoustic model to build high-quality TTS systems for low-resource scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using Thai as an illustrative case, where intricate phonetic rules and sparse resources are effectively addressed. Our method enables zero-shot voice cloning and improved performance across diverse client applications, ranging from finance to healthcare, education, and law. Extensive evaluations - both subjective and objective - confirm that our model meets state-of-the-art standards, offering a scalable solution for TTS production in data-limited settings, with significant implications for broader industry adoption and multilingual accessibility.

Paperid: 7234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07408.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs), here represented by GPT 3.5-Turbo to perform coding for a thematic analysis. Coding is highly labor intensive, making it infeasible for most researchers to conduct exhaustive thematic analyses of large corpora. We utilize few-shot prompting with higher quality codes generated on semantically similar passages to enhance the quality of the codes while utilizing a cheap, more easily scalable model.

Paperid: 7235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07252.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models are transforming agricultural applications by enabling automated phenotyping, monitoring, and yield estimation. However, their effectiveness heavily depends on large amounts of annotated training data, which can be labor and time intensive. Recent advances in open-set object detection, particularly with models like Grounding-DINO, offer a potential solution to detect regions of interests based on text prompt input. Initial zero-shot experiments revealed challenges in crafting effective text prompts, especially for complex objects like individual leaves and visually similar classes. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient few-shot adaptation method that simplifies the Grounding-DINO architecture by removing the text encoder module (BERT) and introducing a randomly initialized trainable text embedding. This method achieves superior performance across multiple agricultural datasets, including plant-weed detection, plant counting, insect identification, fruit counting, and remote sensing tasks. Specifically, it demonstrates up to a $\sim24\%$ higher mAP than fully fine-tuned YOLO models on agricultural datasets and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by $\sim10\%$ in remote sensing, under few-shot learning conditions. Our method offers a promising solution for automating annotation and accelerating the development of specialized agricultural AI solutions.

Paperid: 7236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07198.pdf

Abstract:
The human face plays a central role in social communication, necessitating the use of performant computer vision tools for human-centered applications. We propose Face-LLaVA, a multimodal large language model for face-centered, in-context learning, including facial expression and attribute recognition. Additionally, Face-LLaVA is able to generate natural language descriptions that can be used for reasoning. Leveraging existing visual databases, we first developed FaceInstruct-1M, a face-centered database for instruction tuning MLLMs for face processing. We then developed a novel face-specific visual encoder powered by Face-Region Guided Cross-Attention that integrates face geometry with local visual features. We evaluated the proposed method across nine different datasets and five different face processing tasks, including facial expression recognition, action unit detection, facial attribute detection, age estimation and deepfake detection. Face-LLaVA achieves superior results compared to existing open-source MLLMs and competitive performance compared to commercial solutions. Our model output also receives a higher reasoning rating by GPT under a zero-shot setting across all the tasks. Both our dataset and model wil be released at https://face-llava.github.io to support future advancements in social AI and foundational vision-language research.

Paperid: 7237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06166.pdf

Abstract:
Sarcasm detection is challenging for both humans and machines. This work explores how model characteristics impact sarcasm detection in OpenAI's GPT, and Meta's Llama-2 models, given their strong natural language understanding, and popularity. We evaluate fine-tuned and zero-shot models across various sizes, releases, and hyperparameters. Experiments were conducted on the political and balanced (pol-bal) portion of the popular Self-Annotated Reddit Corpus (SARC2.0) sarcasm dataset. Fine-tuned performance improves monotonically with model size within a model family, while hyperparameter tuning also impacts performance. In the fine-tuning scenario, full precision Llama-2-13b achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and $F_1$-score, both measured at 0.83, comparable to average human performance. In the zero-shot setting, one GPT-4 model achieves competitive performance to prior attempts, yielding an accuracy of 0.70 and an $F_1$-score of 0.75. Furthermore, a model's performance may increase or decline with each release, highlighting the need to reassess performance after each release.

Paperid: 7238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05468.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of large-scale diffusion models for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation (ZS-VOS) without fine-tuning on video data or training on any image segmentation data. While diffusion models have demonstrated strong visual representations across various tasks, their direct application to ZS-VOS remains underexplored. Our goal is to find the optimal feature extraction process for ZS-VOS by identifying the most suitable time step and layer from which to extract features. We further analyze the affinity of these features and observe a strong correlation with point correspondences. Through extensive experiments on DAVIS-17 and MOSE, we find that diffusion models trained on ImageNet outperform those trained on larger, more diverse datasets for ZS-VOS. Additionally, we highlight the importance of point correspondences in achieving high segmentation accuracy, and we yield state-of-the-art results in ZS-VOS. Finally, our approach performs on par with models trained on expensive image segmentation datasets.

Paperid: 7239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04700.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the performance of conversational AI systems. To extend their capabilities to knowledge-intensive domains such as biomedical and legal fields, where the accuracy is critical, LLMs are often combined with information retrieval (IR) systems to generate responses based on retrieved documents. However, for IR systems to effectively support such applications, they must go beyond simple semantic matching and accurately capture diverse query intents, including causal relationships. Existing IR models primarily focus on retrieving documents based on surface-level semantic similarity, overlooking deeper relational structures such as causality. To address this, we propose CAWAI, a retrieval model that is trained with dual objectives: semantic and causal relations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CAWAI outperforms various models on diverse causal retrieval tasks especially under large-scale retrieval settings. We also show that CAWAI exhibits strong zero-shot generalization across scientific domain QA tasks.

Paperid: 7240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04221.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have remarkably progressed in analyzing and understanding images. Despite these advancements, accurately regressing values in charts remains an underexplored area for MLLMs. For visualization, how do MLLMs perform when applied to graphical perception tasks? Our paper investigates this question by reproducing Cleveland and McGill's seminal 1984 experiment and comparing it against human task performance. Our study primarily evaluates fine-tuned and pretrained models and zero-shot prompting to determine if they closely match human graphical perception. Our findings highlight that MLLMs outperform human task performance in some cases but not in others. We highlight the results of all experiments to foster an understanding of where MLLMs succeed and fail when applied to data visualization.

Paperid: 7241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01916.pdf

Abstract:
As a pioneering vision-language model, CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) has achieved significant success across various domains and a wide range of downstream vision-language tasks. However, the text encoders in popular CLIP models are limited to processing only 77 text tokens, which constrains their ability to effectively handle longer, detail-rich captions. Additionally, CLIP models often struggle to effectively capture detailed visual and textual information, which hampers their performance on tasks that require fine-grained analysis. To address these limitations, we present a novel approach, \textbf{FineLIP}, that extends the capabilities of CLIP. FineLIP enhances cross-modal text-image mapping by incorporating \textbf{Fine}-grained alignment with \textbf{L}onger text input within the CL\textbf{IP}-style framework. FineLIP first extends the positional embeddings to handle longer text, followed by the dynamic aggregation of local image and text tokens. The aggregated results are then used to enforce fine-grained token-to-token cross-modal alignment. We validate our model on datasets with long, detailed captions across two tasks: zero-shot cross-modal retrieval and text-to-image generation. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FineLIP, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies validate the benefits of key design elements within FineLIP.

Paperid: 7242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00200.pdf

Abstract:
The deployment of a continuous methane monitoring system requires determining the optimal number and placement of fixed sensors. However, planning is labor-intensive, requiring extensive site setup and iteration to meet client restrictions. This challenge is amplified when evaluating multiple sites, limiting scalability. To address this, we introduce SmartScan, an AI framework that automates data extraction for optimal sensor placement. SmartScan identifies subspaces of interest from satellite images using an interactive tool to create facility-specific constraint sets efficiently. SmartScan leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a prompt-based transformer for zero-shot segmentation, enabling subspace extraction without explicit training. It operates in two modes: (1) Data Curation Mode, where satellite images are processed to extract high-quality subspaces using an interactive prompting system for SAM, and (2) Autonomous Mode, where user-curated prompts train a deep learning network to replace manual prompting, fully automating subspace extraction. The interactive tool also serves for quality control, allowing users to refine AI-generated outputs and generate additional constraint sets as needed. With its AI-driven prompting mechanism, SmartScan delivers high-throughput, high-quality subspace extraction with minimal human intervention, enhancing scalability and efficiency. Notably, its adaptable design makes it suitable for extracting regions of interest from ultra-high-resolution satellite imagery across various domains.

Paperid: 7243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23873.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic pathological speech detection approaches have shown promising results, gaining attention as potential diagnostic tools alongside costly traditional methods. While these approaches can achieve high accuracy, their lack of interpretability limits their applicability in clinical practice. In this paper, we investigate the use of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT-4o, for automatic pathological speech detection in a few-shot in-context learning setting. Experimental results show that this approach not only delivers promising performance but also provides explanations for its decisions, enhancing model interpretability. To further understand its effectiveness, we conduct an ablation study to analyze the impact of different factors, such as input type and system prompts, on the final results. Our findings highlight the potential of multimodal LLMs for further exploration and advancement in automatic pathological speech detection.

Paperid: 7244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23363.pdf

Abstract:
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has greatly improved our ability to process complex language. However, accurately detecting logical fallacies remains a significant challenge. This study presents a novel and effective prompt formulation approach for logical fallacy detection, applicable in both supervised (fine-tuned) and unsupervised (zero-shot) settings. Our method enriches input text incorporating implicit contextual information -- counterarguments, explanations, and goals -- which we query for validity within the context of the argument. We then rank these queries based on confidence scores to inform classification. We evaluate our approach across multiple datasets from 5 domains, covering 29 distinct fallacy types, using models from the GPT and LLaMA series. The results show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art models, with F1 score increases of up to 0.60 in zero-shot settings and up to 0.45 in fine-tuned models. Extensive analyses further illustrate why and how our method excels.

Paperid: 7245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20508.pdf

Abstract:
Clinical coding is a critical task in healthcare, although traditional methods for automating clinical coding may not provide sufficient explicit evidence for coders in production environments. This evidence is crucial, as medical coders have to make sure there exists at least one explicit passage in the input health record that justifies the attribution of a code. We therefore propose to reframe the task as an entity linking problem, in which each document is annotated with its set of codes and respective textual evidence, enabling better human-machine collaboration. By leveraging parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs), together with constrained decoding, we introduce three approaches to solve this problem that prove effective at disambiguating clinical mentions and that perform well in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 7246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19815.pdf

Abstract:
Intelligent organisms can solve truly novel problems which they have never encountered before, either in their lifetime or their evolution. An important component of this capacity is the ability to ``think'', that is, to mentally manipulate objects, concepts and behaviors in order to plan and evaluate possible solutions to novel problems, even without environment interaction. To generate problems that are truly qualitatively novel, while still solvable zero-shot (by mental simulation), we use the combinatorial nature of environments: we train the agent while withholding a specific combination of the environment's elements. The novel test task, based on this combination, is thus guaranteed to be truly novel, while still mentally simulable since the agent has been exposed to each individual element (and their pairwise interactions) during training. We propose a method to train agents endowed with world models to make use their mental simulation abilities, by selecting tasks based on the difference between the agent's pre-thinking and post-thinking performance. When tested on the novel, withheld problem, the resulting agent successfully simulated alternative scenarios and used the resulting information to guide its behavior in the actual environment, solving the novel task in a single real-environment trial (zero-shot).

Paperid: 7247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18817.pdf

Abstract:
Prior research on out-of-distribution detection (OoDD) has primarily focused on single-modality models. Recently, with the advent of large-scale pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP, OoDD methods utilizing such multi-modal representations through zero-shot and prompt learning strategies have emerged. However, these methods typically involve either freezing the pretrained weights or only partially tuning them, which can be suboptimal for downstream datasets. In this paper, we highlight that multi-modal fine-tuning (MMFT) can achieve notable OoDD performance. Despite some recent works demonstrating the impact of fine-tuning methods for OoDD, there remains significant potential for performance improvement. We investigate the limitation of naÃ¯ve fine-tuning methods, examining why they fail to fully leverage the pretrained knowledge. Our empirical analysis suggests that this issue could stem from the modality gap within in-distribution (ID) embeddings. To address this, we propose a training objective that enhances cross-modal alignment by regularizing the distances between image and text embeddings of ID data. This adjustment helps in better utilizing pretrained textual information by aligning similar semantics from different modalities (i.e., text and image) more closely in the hyperspherical representation space. We theoretically demonstrate that the proposed regularization corresponds to the maximum likelihood estimation of an energy-based model on a hypersphere. Utilizing ImageNet-1k OoD benchmark datasets, we show that our method, combined with post-hoc OoDD approaches leveraging pretrained knowledge (e.g., NegLabel), significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art OoDD performance and leading ID accuracy.

Paperid: 7248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18634.pdf

Abstract:
The Internet of Things is an example domain where data is perpetually generated in ever-increasing quantities, reflecting the proliferation of connected devices and the formation of continuous data streams over time. Consequently, the demand for ad-hoc, cost-effective machine learning solutions must adapt to this evolving data influx. This study tackles the task of offloading in small gateways, exacerbated by their dynamic availability over time. An approach leveraging CPU utilization metrics using online and continual machine learning techniques is proposed to predict gateway availability. These methods are compared to popular machine learning algorithms and a recent time-series foundation model, Lag-Llama, for fine-tuned and zero-shot setups. Their performance is benchmarked on a dataset of CPU utilization measurements over time from an IoT gateway and focuses on model metrics such as prediction errors, training and inference times, and memory consumption. Our primary objective is to study new efficient ways to predict CPU performance in IoT environments. Across various scenarios, our findings highlight that ensemble and online methods offer promising results for this task in terms of accuracy while maintaining a low resource footprint.

Paperid: 7249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18263.pdf

Abstract:
Fault detection in rotating machinery is a complex task, particularly in small and heterogeneous dataset scenarios. Variability in sensor placement, machinery configurations, and structural differences further increase the complexity of the problem. Conventional deep learning approaches often demand large, homogeneous datasets, limiting their applicability in data-scarce industrial environments. While transfer learning and few-shot learning have shown potential, however, they are often constrained by the need for extensive fault datasets. This research introduces a unified framework leveraging a novel progressive neural network (PNN) architecture designed to address these challenges. The PNN sequentially estimates the fixed-size refined features of the higher order with the help of all previously estimated features and appends them to the feature set. This fixed-size feature output at each layer controls the complexity of the PNN and makes it suitable for effective learning from small datasets. The framework's effectiveness is validated on eight datasets, including six open-source datasets, one in-house fault simulator, and one real-world industrial dataset. The PNN achieves state-of-the-art performance in fault detection across varying dataset sizes and machinery types, highlighting superior generalization and classification capabilities.

Paperid: 7250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18170.pdf

Abstract:
Producing high-quality segmentation masks for medical images is a fundamental challenge in biomedical image analysis. Recent research has explored large-scale supervised training to enable segmentation across various medical imaging modalities and unsupervised training to facilitate segmentation without dense annotations. However, constructing a model capable of segmenting diverse medical images in a zero-shot manner without any annotations remains a significant hurdle. This paper introduces the Attention Diffusion Zero-shot Unsupervised System (ADZUS), a novel approach that leverages self-attention diffusion models for zero-shot biomedical image segmentation. ADZUS harnesses the intrinsic capabilities of pre-trained diffusion models, utilizing their generative and discriminative potentials to segment medical images without requiring annotated training data or prior domain-specific knowledge. The ADZUS architecture is detailed, with its integration of self-attention mechanisms that facilitate context-aware and detail-sensitive segmentations being highlighted. Experimental results across various medical imaging datasets, including skin lesion segmentation, chest X-ray infection segmentation, and white blood cell segmentation, reveal that ADZUS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, ADZUS reached Dice scores ranging from 88.7\% to 92.9\% and IoU scores from 66.3\% to 93.3\% across different segmentation tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in handling novel, unseen medical imagery. It is noteworthy that while ADZUS demonstrates high effectiveness, it demands substantial computational resources and extended processing times. The model's efficacy in zero-shot settings underscores its potential to reduce reliance on costly annotations and seamlessly adapt to new medical imaging tasks, thereby expanding the diagnostic capabilities of AI-driven medical imaging technologies.

Paperid: 7251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17716.pdf

Abstract:
Urban change is a constant process that influences the perception of neighbourhoods and the lives of the people within them. The field of Urban Scene Change Detection (USCD) aims to capture changes in street scenes using computer vision and can help raise awareness of changes that make it possible to better understand the city and its residents. Traditionally, the field of USCD has used supervised methods with small scale datasets. This constrains methods when applied to new cities, as it requires labour-intensive labeling processes and forces a priori definitions of relevant change. In this paper we introduce AC-1M the largest USCD dataset by far of over 1.1M images, together with EMPLACE, a self-supervising method to train a Vision Transformer using our adaptive triplet loss. We show EMPLACE outperforms SOTA methods both as a pre-training method for linear fine-tuning as well as a zero-shot setting. Lastly, in a case study of Amsterdam, we show that we are able to detect both small and large changes throughout the city and that changes uncovered by EMPLACE, depending on size, correlate with housing prices - which in turn is indicative of inequity.

Paperid: 7252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16776.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) show great promise for 3D scene understanding but are mainly applied to indoor spaces or autonomous driving, focusing on low-level tasks like segmentation. This work expands their use to urban-scale environments by leveraging 3D reconstructions from multi-view aerial imagery. We propose OpenCity3D, an approach that addresses high-level tasks, such as population density estimation, building age classification, property price prediction, crime rate assessment, and noise pollution evaluation. Our findings highlight OpenCity3D's impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities, showcasing adaptability to new contexts. This research establishes a new paradigm for language-driven urban analytics, enabling applications in planning, policy, and environmental monitoring. See our project page: opencity3d.github.io

Paperid: 7253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13281.pdf

Abstract:
Patient matching is the process of linking patients to appropriate clinical trials by accurately identifying and matching their medical records with trial eligibility criteria. We propose LLM-Match, a novel framework for patient matching leveraging fine-tuned open-source large language models. Our approach consists of four key components. First, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module extracts relevant patient context from a vast pool of electronic health records (EHRs). Second, a prompt generation module constructs input prompts by integrating trial eligibility criteria (both inclusion and exclusion criteria), patient context, and system instructions. Third, a fine-tuning module with a classification head optimizes the model parameters using structured prompts and ground-truth labels. Fourth, an evaluation module assesses the fine-tuned model's performance on the testing datasets. We evaluated LLM-Match on four open datasets - n2c2, SIGIR, TREC 2021, and TREC 2022 - using open-source models, comparing it against TrialGPT, Zero-Shot, and GPT-4-based closed models. LLM-Match outperformed all baselines.

Paperid: 7254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12062.pdf

Abstract:
Data and insights discovery is critical for decision-making in modern organizations. We present Genicious, an LLM-aided interface that enables users to interact with tabular datasets and ask complex queries in natural language. By benchmarking various prompting strategies and language models, we have developed an end-to-end tool that leverages contextual few-shot prompting, achieving superior performance in terms of latency, accuracy, and scalability. Genicious empowers stakeholders to explore, analyze and visualize their datasets efficiently while ensuring data security through role-based access control and a Text-to-SQL approach.

Paperid: 7255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10662.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific names of organisms consist of a genus name and a species epithet, with the latter often reflecting aspects such as morphology, ecology, distribution, and cultural background. Traditionally, researchers have manually labeled species names by carefully examining taxonomic descriptions, a process that demands substantial time and effort when dealing with large datasets. This study evaluates the feasibility of automatic species name labeling using large language model (LLM) by leveraging their text classification and semantic extraction capabilities. Using the spider name dataset compiled by Mammola et al., we compared LLM-based labeling results-enhanced through prompt engineering-with human annotations. The results indicate that LLM-based classification achieved high accuracy in Morphology, Geography, and People categories. However, classification accuracy was lower in Ecology & Behavior and Modern & Past Culture, revealing challenges in interpreting animal behavior and cultural contexts. Future research will focus on improving accuracy through optimized few-shot learning and retrieval-augmented generation techniques, while also expanding the applicability of LLM-based labeling to diverse biological taxa.

Paperid: 7256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10095.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in predicting mental health outcomes from online text, yet traditional classification methods often lack interpretability and robustness. This study evaluates structured reasoning techniques-Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Self-Consistency (SC-CoT), and Tree-of-Thought (ToT)-to improve classification accuracy across multiple mental health datasets sourced from Reddit. We analyze reasoning-driven prompting strategies, including Zero-shot CoT and Few-shot CoT, using key performance metrics such as Balanced Accuracy, F1 score, and Sensitivity/Specificity. Our findings indicate that reasoning-enhanced techniques improve classification performance over direct prediction, particularly in complex cases. Compared to baselines such as Zero Shot non-CoT Prompting, and fine-tuned pre-trained transformers such as BERT and Mental-RoBerta, and fine-tuned Open Source LLMs such as Mental Alpaca and Mental-Flan-T5, reasoning-driven LLMs yield notable gains on datasets like Dreaddit (+0.52\% over M-LLM, +0.82\% over BERT) and SDCNL (+4.67\% over M-LLM, +2.17\% over BERT). However, performance declines in Depression Severity, and CSSRS predictions suggest dataset-specific limitations, likely due to our using a more extensive test set. Among prompting strategies, Few-shot CoT consistently outperforms others, reinforcing the effectiveness of reasoning-driven LLMs. Nonetheless, dataset variability highlights challenges in model reliability and interpretability. This study provides a comprehensive benchmark of reasoning-based LLM techniques for mental health text classification. It offers insights into their potential for scalable clinical applications while identifying key challenges for future improvements.

Paperid: 7257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09003.pdf

Abstract:
Data catalogs serve as repositories for organizing and accessing diverse collection of data assets, but their effectiveness hinges on the ease with which business users can look-up relevant content. Unfortunately, many data catalogs within organizations suffer from limited searchability due to inadequate metadata like asset descriptions. Hence, there is a need of content generation solution to enrich and curate metadata in a scalable way. This paper explores the challenges associated with metadata creation and proposes a unique prompt enrichment idea of leveraging existing metadata content using retrieval based few-shot technique tied with generative large language models (LLM). The literature also considers finetuning an LLM on existing content and studies the behavior of few-shot pretrained LLM (Llama, GPT3.5) vis-Ã -vis few-shot finetuned LLM (Llama2-7b) by evaluating their performance based on accuracy, factual grounding, and toxicity. Our preliminary results exhibit more than 80% Rouge-1 F1 for the generated content. This implied 87%- 88% of instances accepted as is or curated with minor edits by data stewards. By automatically generating descriptions for tables and columns in most accurate way, the research attempts to provide an overall framework for enterprises to effectively scale metadata curation and enrich its data catalog thereby vastly improving the data catalog searchability and overall usability.

Paperid: 7258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08805.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Filter Like You Test (FLYT), an algorithm for curating large-scale vision-language datasets that learns the usefulness of each data point as a pretraining example. FLYT trains a scoring model that learns to weigh each example's features using gradient signals from downstream tasks training sets. Based on FLYT, we implement Mixing-FLYT (M-FLYT), which takes the per-example scores generated by different scoring methods as features, and learns to unify them into a single score. FLYT naturally produces a distribution over the training examples, which we leverage through Soft Cap Sampling (SCS), a strategy for obtaining a filtered pretraining dataset from per-example probabilities that samples examples while preventing over-representation through a repetition penalty. Using these methods, we achieve 40.1% ImageNet zero-shot accuracy on the DataComp medium scale filtering benchmark, a 2% absolute accuracy increase over all previous results and a 5.5% increase over results that - like us - use only public resources. Our approach also yields 37.7\% on the average of 38 DataComp evaluation tasks, outperforming previous public-resource approaches by 0.4\%.

Paperid: 7259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08148.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, images that distort or fabricate facts using generative models have become a social concern. To cope with continuous evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, model attribution (MA) is necessary beyond just detection of synthetic images. However, current deep learning-based MA methods must be trained from scratch with new data to recognize unseen models, which is time-consuming and data-intensive. This work proposes a new strategy to deal with persistently emerging generative models. We adapt few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) mechanisms for MA problem to uncover novel generative AI models. Unlike existing FSCIL approaches that focus on object classification using high-level information, MA requires analyzing low-level details like color and texture in synthetic images. Thus, we utilize a learnable representation from different levels of CLIP-ViT features. To learn an effective representation, we propose Adaptive Integration Module (AIM) to calculate a weighted sum of CLIP-ViT block features for each image, enhancing the ability to identify generative models. Extensive experiments show our method effectively extends from prior generative models to recent ones.

Paperid: 7260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07595.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing popularity of large language models has not only led to widespread use but has also brought various risks, including the potential for systematically spreading fake news. Consequently, the development of classification systems such as DetectGPT has become vital. These detectors are vulnerable to evasion techniques, as demonstrated in an experimental series: Systematic changes of the generative models' temperature proofed shallow learning-detectors to be the least reliable. Fine-tuning the generative model via reinforcement learning circumvented BERT-based-detectors. Finally, rephrasing led to a >90\% evasion of zero-shot-detectors like DetectGPT, although texts stayed highly similar to the original. A comparison with existing work highlights the better performance of the presented methods. Possible implications for society and further research are discussed.

Paperid: 7261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04347.pdf

Abstract:
Genes, proteins and other biological entities influence one another via causal molecular networks. Causal relationships in such networks are mediated by complex and diverse mechanisms, through latent variables, and are often specific to cellular context. It remains challenging to characterise such networks in practice. Here, we present a novel framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot inference of causal relationships in biology. In particular, we systematically evaluate causal claims obtained from an LLM using real-world interventional data. This is done over one hundred variables and thousands of causal hypotheses. Furthermore, we consider several prompting and retrieval-augmentation strategies, including large, and potentially conflicting, collections of scientific articles. Our results show that with tailored augmentation and prompting, even relatively small LLMs can capture meaningful aspects of causal structure in biological systems. This supports the notion that LLMs could act as orchestration tools in biological discovery, by helping to distil current knowledge in ways amenable to downstream analysis. Our approach to assessing LLMs with respect to experimental data is relevant for a broad range of problems at the intersection of causal learning, LLMs and scientific discovery.

Paperid: 7262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04201.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot multimodal dialogue intention recognition is a critical challenge in the e-commerce domainn. Previous methods have primarily enhanced model classification capabilities through post-training techniques. However, our analysis reveals that training for few-shot multimodal dialogue intention recognition involves two interconnected tasks, leading to a seesaw effect in multi-task learning. This phenomenon is attributed to knowledge interference stemming from the superposition of weight matrix updates during the training process. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge-Decoupled Synergetic Learning (KDSL), which mitigates these issues by utilizing smaller models to transform knowledge into interpretable rules, while applying the post-training of larger models. By facilitating collaboration between the large and small multimodal large language models for prediction, our approach demonstrates significant improvements. Notably, we achieve outstanding results on two real Taobao datasets, with enhancements of 6.37\% and 6.28\% in online weighted F1 scores compared to the state-of-the-art method, thereby validating the efficacy of our framework.

Paperid: 7263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03582.pdf

Abstract:
The adoption of crowdsourced election monitoring as a complementary alternative to traditional election monitoring is on the rise. Yet, its reliance on digital response volunteers to manually process incoming election reports poses a significant scaling bottleneck. In this paper, we address the challenge of scaling crowdsourced election monitoring by advancing the task of automated classification of crowdsourced election reports to multilingual and cross-domain classification settings. We propose a two-step classification approach of first identifying informative reports and then categorising them into distinct information types. We conduct classification experiments using multilingual transformer models such as XLM-RoBERTa and multilingual embeddings such as SBERT, augmented with linguistically motivated features. Our approach achieves F1-Scores of 77\% for informativeness detection and 75\% for information type classification. We conduct cross-domain experiments, applying models trained in a source electoral domain to a new target electoral domain in zero-shot and few-shot classification settings. Our results show promising potential for model transfer across electoral domains, with F1-Scores of 59\% in zero-shot and 63\% in few-shot settings. However, our analysis also reveals a performance bias in detecting informative English reports over Swahili, likely due to imbalances in the training data, indicating a need for caution when deploying classification models in real-world election scenarios.

Paperid: 7264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03135.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional generalization capabilities, their ability to process graph data, such as molecular structures, remains limited. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes Graph2Token, an efficient solution that aligns graph tokens to LLM tokens. The key idea is to represent a graph token with the LLM token vocabulary, without fine-tuning the LLM backbone. To achieve this goal, we first construct a molecule-text paired dataset from multisources, including CHEBI and HMDB, to train a graph structure encoder, which reduces the distance between graphs and texts representations in the feature space. Then, we propose a novel alignment strategy that associates a graph token with LLM tokens. To further unleash the potential of LLMs, we collect molecular IUPAC name identifiers, which are incorporated into the LLM prompts. By aligning molecular graphs as special tokens, we can activate LLM generalization ability to molecular few-shot learning. Extensive experiments on molecular classification and regression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Graph2Token.

Paperid: 7265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02718.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding the semantics of columns in relational tables is an important pre-processing step for indexing data lakes in order to provide rich data search. An approach to establishing such understanding is column type annotation (CTA) where the goal is to annotate table columns with terms from a given vocabulary. This paper experimentally compares different knowledge generation and self-refinement strategies for LLM-based column type annotation. The strategies include using LLMs to generate term definitions, error-based refinement of term definitions, self-correction, and fine-tuning using examples and term definitions. We evaluate these strategies along two dimensions: effectiveness measured as F1 performance and efficiency measured in terms of token usage and cost. Our experiments show that the best performing strategy depends on the model/dataset combination. We find that using training data to generate label definitions outperforms using the same data as demonstrations for in-context learning for two out of three datasets using OpenAI models. The experiments further show that using the LLMs to refine label definitions brings an average increase of 3.9% F1 in 10 out of 12 setups compared to the performance of the non-refined definitions. Combining fine-tuned models with self-refined term definitions results in the overall highest performance, outperforming zero-shot prompting fine-tuned models by at least 3% in F1 score. The costs analysis shows that while reaching similar F1 score, self-refinement via prompting is more cost efficient for use cases requiring smaller amounts of tables to be annotated while fine-tuning is more efficient for large amounts of tables.

Paperid: 7266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02650.pdf

Abstract:
The exponential growth of unstructured text data presents a fundamental challenge in modern data management and information retrieval. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing, their potential to transform unstructured text into standardized, structured formats remains largely unexplored - a capability that could revolutionize data processing workflows across industries. This study breaks new ground by systematically evaluating LLMs' ability to convert unstructured recipe text into the structured Cooklang format. Through comprehensive testing of four models (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Llama3.1:70b, and Llama3.1:8b), an innovative evaluation approach is introduced that combines traditional metrics (WER, ROUGE-L, TER) with specialized metrics for semantic element identification. Our experiments reveal that GPT-4o with few-shot prompting achieves breakthrough performance (ROUGE-L: 0.9722, WER: 0.0730), demonstrating for the first time that LLMs can reliably transform domain-specific unstructured text into structured formats without extensive training. Although model performance generally scales with size, we uncover surprising potential in smaller models like Llama3.1:8b for optimization through targeted fine-tuning. These findings open new possibilities for automated structured data generation across various domains, from medical records to technical documentation, potentially transforming the way organizations process and utilize unstructured information.

Paperid: 7267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01819.pdf

Abstract:
Generating diverse solutions is key to human-like reasoning, yet autoregressive language models focus on single accurate responses, limiting creativity. GFlowNets optimize solution generation as a flow network, promising greater diversity. Our case study shows their limited zero-shot transferability by fine-tuning small and medium-sized large language models on the Game of 24 and testing them on the Game of 42 datasets. Results revealed that GFlowNets struggle to maintain solution diversity and accuracy, highlighting key limitations in their cross-task generalization and the need for future research in improved transfer learning capabilities.

Paperid: 7268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01263.pdf

Abstract:
Existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have showcased an impressive capability to generalize well across various downstream tasks. These models leverage the synergy between visual and textual information, enabling them to understand and reason about the content present in images and text in a unified manner. This article provides a brief overview of CLIP based on few-shot prompt learning, including experimental data and technical characteristics of some methods. The purpose of this review is to provide a reference for researchers who have just started their research in generalizable prompting of CLIP through few-shot training for classification across 15 datasets and also to facilitate the integration of this field by researchers in other downstream tasks.

Paperid: 7269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00971.pdf

Abstract:
Defects in extrusion additive manufacturing remain common despite its prevalent use. While numerous AI-driven approaches have been proposed to improve quality assurance, the inherently dynamic nature of the printing process poses persistent challenges. Regardless of how comprehensive the training dataset is, out-of-distribution data remains inevitable. Consequently, deterministic models often struggle to maintain robustness and, in some cases, fail entirely when deployed in new or slightly altered printing environments. This work introduces an agent that dynamically adjusts flow rate and temperature setpoints in real time, optimizing process control while addressing bottlenecks in training efficiency and uncertainty management. It integrates a vision-based uncertainty quantification module with a reinforcement learning controller, using probabilistic distributions to describe printing segments. While the underlying networks are deterministic, these evolving distributions introduce adaptability into the decision-making process. The vision system classifies material extrusion with a certain level of precision, generating corresponding distributions. A deep Q-learning controller interacts with a simulated environment calibrated to the vision system precision, allowing the agent to learn optimal actions while demonstrating appropriate hesitation when necessary. By executing asynchronous actions and applying progressively tightened elliptical reward shaping, the controller develops robust, adaptive control strategies that account for the coupling effects between process parameters. When deployed with zero-shot learning, the agent effectively bridges the sim-to-real gap, correcting mild and severe under- and over-extrusion reliably. Beyond extrusion additive manufacturing, this scalable framework enables practical AI-driven quality assurance across various additive manufacturing processes.

Paperid: 7270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00670.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly detection in videos is a challenging task as anomalies in different videos are of different kinds. Therefore, a promising way to approach video anomaly detection is by learning the non-anomalous nature of the video at hand. To this end, we propose a one-class few-shot learning driven transformer based approach for anomaly detection in videos that is self-context aware. Features from the first few consecutive non-anomalous frames in a video are used to train the transformer in predicting the non-anomalous feature of the subsequent frame. This takes place under the attention of a self-context learned from the input features themselves. After the learning, given a few previous frames, the video-specific transformer is used to infer if a frame is anomalous or not by comparing the feature predicted by it with the actual. The effectiveness of the proposed method with respect to the state-of-the-art is demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative results on different standard datasets. We also study the positive effect of the self-context used in our approach.

Paperid: 7271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00450.pdf

Abstract:
Model transfer presents a solution to the challenges of segmentation in the microscopy community, where the immense cost of labelling sufficient training data is a major bottleneck in the use of deep learning. With large quantities of imaging data produced across a wide range of imaging conditions, institutes also produce many bespoke models trained on specific source data which then get collected in model banks or zoos. As the number of available models grows, so does the need for an efficient and reliable model selection method for a specific target dataset of interest. We focus on the unsupervised regime where no labels are available for the target dataset. Building on previous work linking model generalisation and consistency under perturbation, we propose the first unsupervised transferability estimator for semantic and instance segmentation tasks which doesn't require access to source training data or target domain labels. We evaluate the method on multiple segmentation problems across microscopy modalities, finding a strong correlation between the rankings based on our estimator and rankings based on target dataset performance.

Paperid: 7272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20268.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, effectively leveraging their vast knowledge for training smaller downstream models remains an open challenge, especially in domains like tabular data learning, where simpler models are often preferred due to interpretability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel yet straightforward method for incorporating LLM-generated global task feature attributions into the training process of smaller networks. Specifically, we propose an attribution-matching regularization term that aligns the training dynamics of the smaller model with the insights provided by the LLM. By doing so, our approach yields superior performance in few-shot learning scenarios. Notably, our method requires only black-box API access to the LLM, making it easy to integrate into existing training pipelines with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this method can be used to address common issues in real-world datasets, such as skewness and bias. By integrating high-level knowledge from LLMs, our approach improves generalization, even when training data is limited or imbalanced. We validate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across multiple tasks, demonstrating improved learning efficiency and model robustness.

Paperid: 7273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19816.pdf

Abstract:
The Coarse-to-Fine Few-Shot (C2FS) task is designed to train models using only coarse labels, then leverages a limited number of subclass samples to achieve fine-grained recognition capabilities. This task presents two main challenges: coarse-grained supervised pre-training suppresses the extraction of critical fine-grained features for subcategory discrimination, and models suffer from overfitting due to biased distributions caused by limited fine-grained samples. In this paper, we propose the Twofold Debiasing (TFB) method, which addresses these challenges through detailed feature enhancement and distribution calibration. Specifically, we introduce a multi-layer feature fusion reconstruction module and an intermediate layer feature alignment module to combat the model's tendency to focus on simple predictive features directly related to coarse-grained supervision, while neglecting complex fine-grained level details. Furthermore, we mitigate the biased distributions learned by the fine-grained classifier using readily available coarse-grained sample embeddings enriched with fine-grained information. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results that surpass competitive methods.

Paperid: 7274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19706.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous interaction is crucial for the effective use of elderly care robots. However, developing universal AI architectures is extremely challenging due to the diversity in robot configurations and a lack of dataset. We proposed a universal architecture for the AI-ization of elderly care robots, called AoECR. Specifically, based on a nursing bed, we developed a patient-nurse interaction dataset tailored for elderly care scenarios and fine-tuned a large language model to enable it to perform nursing manipulations. Additionally, the inference process included a self-check chain to ensure the security of control commands. An expert optimization process further enhanced the humanization and personalization of the interactive responses. The physical experiment demonstrated that the AoECR exhibited zero-shot generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios, understood patients' instructions, implemented secure control commands, and delivered humanized and personalized interactive responses. In general, our research provides a valuable dataset reference and AI-ization solutions for elderly care robots.

Paperid: 7275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19106.pdf

Abstract:
As industrial products become abundant and sophisticated, visual industrial defect detection receives much attention, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual feature modeling. Traditional methods use statistical analysis, abnormal data synthesis modeling, and generation-based models to separate product defect features and complete defect detection. Recently, the emergence of foundation models has brought visual and textual semantic prior knowledge. Many methods are based on foundation models (FM) to improve the accuracy of detection, but at the same time, increase model complexity and slow down inference speed. Some FM-based methods have begun to explore lightweight modeling ways, which have gradually attracted attention and deserve to be systematically analyzed. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey with comparisons and discussions of foundation model methods from different aspects and briefly review non-foundation model (NFM) methods recently published. Furthermore, we discuss the differences between FM and NFM methods from training objectives, model structure and scale, model performance, and potential directions for future exploration. Through comparison, we find FM methods are more suitable for few-shot and zero-shot learning, which are more in line with actual industrial application scenarios and worthy of in-depth research.

Paperid: 7276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18615.pdf

Abstract:
We present an integrated (or end-to-end) framework for the Real2Sim2Real problem of manipulating deformable linear objects (DLOs) based on visual perception. Working with a parameterised set of DLOs, we use likelihood-free inference (LFI) to compute the posterior distributions for the physical parameters using which we can approximately simulate the behaviour of each specific DLO. We use these posteriors for domain randomisation while training, in simulation, object-specific visuomotor policies (i.e. assuming only visual and proprioceptive sensory) for a DLO reaching task, using model-free reinforcement learning. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by deploying sim-trained DLO manipulation policies in the real world in a zero-shot manner, i.e. without any further fine-tuning. In this context, we evaluate the capacity of a prominent LFI method to perform fine classification over the parametric set of DLOs, using only visual and proprioceptive data obtained in a dynamic manipulation trajectory. We then study the implications of the resulting domain distributions in sim-based policy learning and real-world performance.

Paperid: 7277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15696.pdf

Abstract:
Fashion, deeply rooted in sociocultural dynamics, evolves as individuals emulate styles popularized by influencers and iconic figures. In the quest to replicate such refined tastes using artificial intelligence, traditional fashion ensemble methods have primarily used supervised learning to imitate the decisions of style icons, which falter when faced with distribution shifts, leading to style replication discrepancies triggered by slight variations in input. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have become prominent across various sectors, recognized for their user-friendly interfaces, strong conversational skills, and advanced reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fashion Large Language Model (FLLM), which employs auto-prompt generation training strategies to enhance its capacity for delivering personalized fashion advice while retaining essential domain knowledge. Additionally, by integrating a retrieval augmentation technique during inference, the model can better adjust to individual preferences. Our results show that this approach surpasses existing models in accuracy, interpretability, and few-shot learning capabilities.

Paperid: 7278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15018.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models perform surprisingly well on many zero-shot classification tasks, but are difficult to fairly compare to supervised classifiers due to the lack of a modifiable decision boundary. In this work, we propose and evaluate a method that converts binary classification tasks into pairwise comparison tasks, obtaining relative rankings from LLMs. Repeated pairwise comparisons can be used to score instances using the Elo rating system (used in chess and other competitions), inducing a confidence ordering over instances in a dataset. We evaluate scheduling algorithms for their ability to minimize comparisons, and show that our proposed algorithm leads to improved classification performance, while also providing more information than traditional zero-shot classification.

Paperid: 7279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15009.pdf

Abstract:
Conversational query rewriting is crucial for effective conversational search, yet traditional supervised methods require substantial labeled data, which is scarce in low-resource settings. This paper introduces Prompt-Guided In-Context Learning, a novel approach that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for few-shot conversational query rewriting. Our method employs carefully designed prompts, incorporating task descriptions, input/output format specifications, and a small set of illustrative examples, to guide pre-trained LLMs to generate context-independent queries without explicit fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, TREC and Taskmaster-1, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines, including supervised models and contrastive co-training methods, across various evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE-L, Success Rate, and MRR. Ablation studies confirm the importance of in-context examples, and human evaluations further validate the superior fluency, relevance, and context utilization of our generated rewrites. The results highlight the potential of prompt-guided in-context learning as an efficient and effective paradigm for low-resource conversational query rewriting, reducing the reliance on extensive labeled data and complex training procedures.

Paperid: 7280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14086.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in generating human-like text and solving reasoning tasks of moderate complexity, such as question-answering and mathematical problem-solving. However, their capabilities in tasks requiring deeper cognitive skills, such as common-sense understanding and abstract reasoning, remain under-explored. In this paper, we systematically evaluate abstract common-sense reasoning in LLMs using the ConceptNet knowledge graph. We propose two prompting approaches: instruct prompting, where models predict plausible semantic relationships based on provided definitions, and few-shot prompting, where models identify relations using examples as guidance. Our experiments with the gpt-4o-mini model show that in instruct prompting, consistent performance is obtained when ranking multiple relations but with substantial decline when the model is restricted to predicting only one relation. In few-shot prompting, the model's accuracy improves significantly when selecting from five relations rather than the full set, although with notable bias toward certain relations. These results suggest significant gaps still, even in commercially used LLMs' abstract common-sense reasoning abilities, compared to human-level understanding. However, the findings also highlight the promise of careful prompt engineering, based on selective retrieval, for obtaining better performance.

Paperid: 7281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13337.pdf

Abstract:
Providing evaluations to student work is a critical component of effective student learning, and automating its process can significantly reduce the workload on human graders. Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) systems, enabled by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), offer a promising solution for assessing and providing instant feedback for open-ended student responses. In this paper, we present an ASAG pipeline leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs. Our new LLM-based ASAG pipeline achieves better performances than existing custom-built models on the same datasets. We also compare the grading performance of three OpenAI models: GPT-4, GPT-4o, and o1-preview. Our results demonstrate that GPT-4o achieves the best balance between accuracy and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, o1-preview, despite higher accuracy, exhibits a larger variance in error that makes it less practical for classroom use. We investigate the effects of incorporating instructor-graded examples into prompts using no examples, random selection, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based selection strategies. Our findings indicate that providing graded examples enhances grading accuracy, with RAG-based selection outperforming random selection. Additionally, integrating grading rubrics improves accuracy by offering a structured standard for evaluation.

Paperid: 7282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13167.pdf

Abstract:
Smart contracts are essential to decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain ecosystems but are increasingly vulnerable to exploits due to coding errors and complex attack vectors. Traditional static analysis tools and existing vulnerability detection methods often fail to address these challenges comprehensively, leading to high false-positive rates and an inability to detect dynamic vulnerabilities. This paper introduces SmartLLM, a novel approach leveraging fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1 models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of smart contract auditing. By integrating domain-specific knowledge from ERC standards and employing advanced techniques such as QLoRA for efficient fine-tuning, SmartLLM achieves superior performance compared to static analysis tools like Mythril and Slither, as well as zero-shot large language model (LLM) prompting methods such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Experimental results demonstrate a perfect recall of 100% and an accuracy score of 70%, highlighting the model's robustness in identifying vulnerabilities, including reentrancy and access control issues. This research advances smart contract security by offering a scalable and effective auditing solution, supporting the secure adoption of decentralized applications.

Paperid: 7283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12589.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, substantial advancements have been made in training language models to carry out step-by-step reasoning for solving intricate numerical reasoning tasks. Beyond the methods used to solve these problems, the structure and formulation of the problems themselves also play a crucial role in determining the performance of large language models. We observe that even small changes in the surface form of mathematical problems can have a profound impact on both the answer distribution and solve rate. This highlights the vulnerability of LLMs to surface-level variations, revealing its limited robustness when reasoning through complex problems. In this paper, we propose RM-PoT, a three-stage framework that integrates problem reformulation (RM), code-aided reasoning (PoT), and domain-aware few-shot learning to address these limitations. Our approach first reformulates the input problem into diverse surface forms to reduce structural bias, then retrieves five semantically aligned examples from a pre-constructed domain-specific question bank to provide contextual guidance, and finally generates executable Python code for precise computation.

Paperid: 7284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12355.pdf

Abstract:
Soft-actuated insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (IMAVs) pose unique challenges for designing robust and computationally efficient controllers. At the millimeter scale, fast robot dynamics ($\sim$ms), together with system delay, model uncertainty, and external disturbances significantly affect flight performances. Here, we design a deep reinforcement learning (RL) controller that addresses system delay and uncertainties. To initialize this neural network (NN) controller, we propose a modified behavior cloning (BC) approach with state-action re-matching to account for delay and domain-randomized expert demonstration to tackle uncertainty. Then we apply proximal policy optimization (PPO) to fine-tune the policy during RL, enhancing performance and smoothing commands. In simulations, our modified BC substantially increases the mean reward compared to baseline BC; and RL with PPO improves flight quality and reduces command fluctuations. We deploy this controller on two different insect-scale aerial robots that weigh 720 mg and 850 mg, respectively. The robots demonstrate multiple successful zero-shot hovering flights, with the longest lasting 50 seconds and root-mean-square errors of 1.34 cm in lateral direction and 0.05 cm in altitude, marking the first end-to-end deep RL-based flight on soft-driven IMAVs.

Paperid: 7285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12183.pdf

Abstract:
Background: Structured information extraction from unstructured histopathology reports facilitates data accessibility for clinical research. Manual extraction by experts is time-consuming and expensive, limiting scalability. Large language models (LLMs) offer efficient automated extraction through zero-shot prompting, requiring only natural language instructions without labeled data or training. We evaluate LLMs' accuracy in extracting structured information from breast cancer histopathology reports, compared to manual extraction by a trained human annotator. Methods: We developed the Medical Report Information Extractor, a web application leveraging LLMs for automated extraction. We developed a gold standard extraction dataset to evaluate the human annotator alongside five LLMs including GPT-4o, a leading proprietary model, and the Llama 3 model family, which allows self-hosting for data privacy. Our assessment involved 111 histopathology reports from the Breast Cancer Now (BCN) Generations Study, extracting 51 pathology features specified in the study's data dictionary. Results: Evaluation against the gold standard dataset showed that both Llama 3.1 405B (94.7% accuracy) and GPT-4o (96.1%) achieved extraction accuracy comparable to the human annotator (95.4%; p = 0.146 and p = 0.106, respectively). While Llama 3.1 70B (91.6%) performed below human accuracy (p <0.001), its reduced computational requirements make it a viable option for self-hosting. Conclusion: We developed an open-source tool for structured information extraction that can be customized by non-programmers using natural language. Its modular design enables reuse for various extraction tasks, producing standardized, structured data from unstructured text reports to facilitate analytics through improved accessibility and interoperability.

Paperid: 7286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11578.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language generation but often face challenges in tasks requiring precise calculations and structural analysis. This paper investigates the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on language complexity measurement tasks, through the computation of the LIX readability metric and Average Dependency Distance (ADD). Using Swedish high school and university-level essays, we evaluate the models' abilities to compute LIX scores and perform dependency parsing, comparing their results to established ground truths. Our findings reveal that while all models demonstrate some capacity for these tasks, ChatGPT-o1-mini performs most consistently, achieving the highest accuracy in both LIX computation and dependency parsing. Additionally, we observe a strong significant correlation -0.875 p 0.026 (N=6) between the models' accuracy in computing LIX and their overall performance on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. These results suggest that language complexity measurement abilities can serve as a noisy zero-shot proxies for assessing the general capabilities of LLMs, providing a practical method for model evaluation without the need for extensive benchmarking datasets.

Paperid: 7287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11572.pdf

Abstract:
Whisper, despite being trained on 680K hours of web-scaled audio data, faces difficulty in recognising rare words like domain-specific terms, with a solution being contextual biasing through prompting. To improve upon this method, in this paper, we propose a supervised learning strategy to fine-tune Whisper for contextual biasing instruction. We demonstrate that by using only 670 hours of Common Voice English set for fine-tuning, our model generalises to 11 diverse open-source English datasets, achieving a 45.6% improvement in recognition of rare words and 60.8% improvement in recognition of words unseen during fine-tuning over the baseline method. Surprisingly, our model's contextual biasing ability generalises even to languages unseen during fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10862.pdf

Abstract:
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance of each design. Here we show that a universal, morphology-agnostic controller can be rapidly and directly obtained by gradient-based optimization through differentiable simulation. This process of morphological pretraining allows the designer to explore non-differentiable changes to a robot's physical layout (e.g. adding, removing and recombining discrete body parts) and immediately determine which revisions are beneficial and which are deleterious using the pretrained model. We term this process "zero-shot evolution" and compare it with the simultaneous co-optimization of a universal controller alongside an evolving design population. We find the latter results in diversity collapse, a previously unknown pathology whereby the population -- and thus the controller's training data -- converges to similar designs that are easier to steer with a shared universal controller. We show that zero-shot evolution with a pretrained controller quickly yields a diversity of highly performant designs, and by fine-tuning the pretrained controller on the current population throughout evolution, diversity is not only preserved but significantly increased as superior performance is achieved.

Paperid: 7289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10258.pdf

Abstract:
We present PromptArtisan, a groundbreaking approach to multi-instruction image editing that achieves remarkable results in a single pass, eliminating the need for time-consuming iterative refinement. Our method empowers users to provide multiple editing instructions, each associated with a specific mask within the image. This flexibility allows for complex edits involving mask intersections or overlaps, enabling the realization of intricate and nuanced image transformations. PromptArtisan leverages a pre-trained InstructPix2Pix model in conjunction with a novel Complete Attention Control Mechanism (CACM). This mechanism ensures precise adherence to user instructions, granting fine-grained control over the editing process. Furthermore, our approach is zero-shot, requiring no additional training, and boasts improved processing complexity compared to traditional iterative methods. By seamlessly integrating multi-instruction capabilities, single-pass efficiency, and complete attention control, PromptArtisan unlocks new possibilities for creative and efficient image editing workflows, catering to both novice and expert users alike.

Paperid: 7290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07022.pdf

Abstract:
Despite over a decade of legislative efforts to address modern slavery in the supply chains of large corporations, the effectiveness of government oversight remains hampered by the challenge of scrutinizing thousands of statements annually. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can be considered a well established solution for the automatic analysis and summarization of documents, recognizing concrete modern slavery countermeasures taken by companies and differentiating those from vague claims remains a challenging task. To help evaluate and fine-tune LLMs for the assessment of corporate statements, we introduce a dataset composed of 5,731 modern slavery statements taken from the Australian Modern Slavery Register and annotated at the sentence level. This paper details the construction steps for the dataset that include the careful design of annotation specifications, the selection and preprocessing of statements, and the creation of high-quality annotation subsets for effective model evaluations. To demonstrate our dataset's utility, we propose a machine learning methodology for the detection of sentences relevant to mandatory reporting requirements set by the Australian Modern Slavery Act. We then follow this methodology to benchmark modern language models under zero-shot and supervised learning settings.

Paperid: 7291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06890.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing volume of drug combinations in modern therapeutic regimens needs reliable methods for predicting drug-drug interactions (DDIs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains, their potential in pharmaceutical research, particularly in DDI prediction, remains largely unexplored. This study thoroughly investigates LLMs' capabilities in predicting DDIs by uniquely processing molecular structures (SMILES), target organisms, and gene interaction data as raw text input from the latest DrugBank dataset. We evaluated 18 different LLMs, including proprietary models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini) and open-source variants (from 1.5B to 72B parameters), first assessing their zero-shot capabilities in DDI prediction. We then fine-tuned selected models (GPT-4, Phi-3.5 2.7B, Qwen-2.5 3B, Gemma-2 9B, and Deepseek R1 distilled Qwen 1.5B) to optimize their performance. Our comprehensive evaluation framework included validation across 13 external DDI datasets, comparing against traditional approaches such as l2-regularized logistic regression. Fine-tuned LLMs demonstrated superior performance, with Phi-3.5 2.7B achieving a sensitivity of 0.978 in DDI prediction, with an accuracy of 0.919 on balanced datasets (50% positive, 50% negative cases). This result represents an improvement over both zero-shot predictions and state-of-the-art machine-learning methods used for DDI prediction. Our analysis reveals that LLMs can effectively capture complex molecular interaction patterns and cases where drug pairs target common genes, making them valuable tools for practical applications in pharmaceutical research and clinical settings.

Paperid: 7292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06669.pdf

Abstract:
Significant improvements have been observed in the zero-shot capabilities of the Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to their high sensitivity to input, research has increasingly focused on enhancing LLMs' performance via direct and simple prompt engineering rather than intricate domain adaptation. Studies suggest that LLMs exhibit emotional intelligence, and both positive and negative emotions can potentially enhance task performances. However, prior interaction prompts have predominantly concentrated on a single stimulus type, neglecting to compare different stimulus effects, examine the influence of varying task difficulties, or explore underlying mechanisms. This paper, inspired by the positive correlation between self-efficacy and task performance within the social cognitive theory, introduces Verbal Efficacy Stimulations (VES). Our VES comprises three types of verbal prompts: encouraging, provocative, and critical, addressing six aspects such as helpfulness and competence. And we further categorize task difficulty, aiming to extensively investigate how distinct VES influence the self-efficacy and task achievements of language models at varied levels of difficulty. The experimental results show that the three types of VES improve the performance of LLMs on most tasks, and the most effective VES varies for different models. In extensive experiments, we have obtained some findings consistent with psychological theories, providing novel insights for future research.

Paperid: 7293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06004.pdf

Abstract:
African American English (AAE) presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP). This research systematically compares the performance of available NLP models--rule-based, transformer-based, and large language models (LLMs)--capable of identifying key grammatical features of AAE, namely Habitual Be and Multiple Negation. These features were selected for their distinct grammatical complexity and frequency of occurrence. The evaluation involved sentence-level binary classification tasks, using both zero-shot and few-shot strategies. The analysis reveals that while LLMs show promise compared to the baseline, they are influenced by biases such as recency and unrelated features in the text such as formality. This study highlights the necessity for improved model training and architectural adjustments to better accommodate AAE's unique linguistic characteristics. Data and code are available.

Paperid: 7294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05883.pdf

Abstract:
Real-world sensing challenges such as sensor failures, communication issues, and power constraints lead to data intermittency. An issue that is known to undermine the traditional classification task that assumes a continuous data stream. Previous works addressed this issue by designing bespoke solutions (i.e. task-specific and/or modality-specific imputation). These approaches, while effective for their intended purposes, had limitations in their applicability across different tasks and sensor modalities. This raises an important question: Can we build a task-agnostic imputation pipeline that is transferable to new sensors without requiring additional training? In this work, we formalise the concept of zero-shot imputation and propose a novel approach that enables the adaptation of pre-trained models to handle data intermittency. This framework, named NeuralPrefix, is a generative neural component that precedes a task model during inference, filling in gaps caused by data intermittency. NeuralPrefix is built as a continuous dynamical system, where its internal state can be estimated at any point in time by solving an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). This approach allows for a more versatile and adaptable imputation method, overcoming the limitations of task-specific and modality-specific solutions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NeuralPrefix on multiple sensory datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness across various domains. When tested on intermittent data with a high 50% missing data rate, NeuralPreifx accurately recovers all the missing samples, achieving SSIM score between 0.93-0.96. Zero-shot evaluations show that NeuralPrefix generalises well to unseen datasets, even when the measurements come from a different modality.

Paperid: 7295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05239.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models have demonstrated significant potential in the automated construction of knowledge graphs from unstructured text. This paper builds upon our previous work [16], which evaluated various models using metrics like precision, recall, F1 score, triple matching, and graph matching, and introduces a refined approach to address the critical issues of hallucination and omission. We propose an enhanced evaluation framework incorporating BERTScore for graph similarity, setting a practical threshold of 95% for graph matching. Our experiments focus on the Mistral model, comparing its original and fine-tuned versions in zero-shot and few-shot settings. We further extend our experiments using examples from the KELM-sub training dataset, illustrating that the fine-tuned model significantly improves knowledge graph construction accuracy while reducing the exact hallucination and omission. However, our findings also reveal that the fine-tuned models perform worse in generalization tasks on the KELM-sub dataset. This study underscores the importance of comprehensive evaluation metrics in advancing the state-of-the-art in knowledge graph construction from textual data.

Paperid: 7296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04475.pdf

Abstract:
Image generation abilities of text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced, yielding highly photo-realistic images from descriptive text and increasing the viability of leveraging synthetic images to train computer vision models. To serve as effective training data, generated images must be highly realistic while also sufficiently diverse within the support of the target data distribution. Yet, state-of-the-art conditional image generation models have been primarily optimized for creative applications, prioritizing image realism and prompt adherence over conditional diversity. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the diversity of generated images with the goal of increasing their effectiveness to train downstream image classification models, without fine-tuning the image generation model. We find that conditioning the generation process on an augmented real image and text prompt produces generations that serve as effective synthetic datasets for downstream training. Conditioning on real training images contextualizes the generation process to produce images that are in-domain with the real image distribution, while data augmentations introduce visual diversity that improves the performance of the downstream classifier. We validate augmentation-conditioning on a total of five established long-tail and few-shot image classification benchmarks and show that leveraging augmentations to condition the generation process results in consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art on the long-tailed benchmark and remarkable gains in extreme few-shot regimes of the remaining four benchmarks. These results constitute an important step towards effectively leveraging synthetic data for downstream training.

Paperid: 7297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04349.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed conversational agents, enabling complex human-machine interactions. However, evaluation frameworks often focus on single tasks, failing to capture the dynamic nature of multi-turn dialogues. This paper introduces a dynamic benchmarking framework to assess LLM-based conversational agents through interactions with synthetic users. The framework integrates generative agent simulation to evaluate performance on key dimensions: information extraction, context awareness, and adaptive engagement. By simulating various aspects of user behavior, our work provides a scalable, automated, and flexible benchmarking approach. Experimental evaluation - within a loan application use case - demonstrates the framework's effectiveness under one-shot and few-shot extraction conditions. Results show that adaptive strategies improve data extraction accuracy, especially when handling ambiguous responses. Future work will extend its applicability to broader domains and incorporate additional metrics (e.g., conversational coherence, user engagement). This study contributes a structured, scalable approach to evaluating LLM-based conversational agents, facilitating real-world deployment.

Paperid: 7298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04134.pdf

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) become integral to diverse applications, ensuring their reliability under varying input conditions is crucial. One key issue affecting this reliability is order sensitivity, wherein slight variations in the input arrangement can lead to inconsistent or biased outputs. Although recent advances have reduced this sensitivity, the problem remains unresolved. This paper investigates the extent of order sensitivity in LLMs whose internal components are hidden from users (such as closed-source models or those accessed via API calls). We conduct experiments across multiple tasks, including paraphrasing, relevance judgment, and multiple-choice questions. Our results show that input order significantly affects performance across tasks, with shuffled inputs leading to measurable declines in output accuracy. Few-shot prompting demonstrates mixed effectiveness and offers partial mitigation; however, fails to fully resolve the problem. These findings highlight persistent risks, particularly in high-stakes applications, and point to the need for more robust LLMs or improved input-handling techniques in future development.

Paperid: 7299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03793.pdf

Abstract:
While encoder-only models such as BERT and ModernBERT are ubiquitous in real-world NLP applications, their conventional reliance on task-specific classification heads can limit their applicability compared to decoder-based large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce ModernBERT-Large-Instruct, a 0.4B-parameter encoder model that leverages its masked language modelling (MLM) head for generative classification. Our approach employs an intentionally simple training loop and inference mechanism that requires no heavy pre-processing, heavily engineered prompting, or architectural modifications. ModernBERT-Large-Instruct exhibits strong zero-shot performance on both classification and knowledge-based tasks, outperforming similarly sized LLMs on MMLU and achieving 93% of Llama3-1B's MMLU performance with 60% less parameters. We also demonstrate that, when fine-tuned, the generative approach using the MLM head matches or even surpasses traditional classification-head methods across diverse NLU tasks.This capability emerges specifically in models trained on contemporary, diverse data mixes, with models trained on lower volume, less-diverse data yielding considerably weaker performance. Although preliminary, these results demonstrate the potential of using the original generative masked language modelling head over traditional task-specific heads for downstream tasks. Our work suggests that further exploration into this area is warranted, highlighting many avenues for future improvements.

Paperid: 7300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00752.pdf

Abstract:
The widespread prevalence of misinformation poses significant societal concerns. Out-of-context misinformation, where authentic images are paired with false text, is particularly deceptive and easily misleads audiences. Most existing detection methods primarily evaluate image-text consistency but often lack sufficient explanations, which are essential for effectively debunking misinformation. We present a model that detects multimodal misinformation through cross-modality consistency checks, requiring minimal training time. Additionally, we propose a lightweight model that achieves competitive performance using only one-third of the parameters. We also introduce a dual-purpose zero-shot learning task for generating contextualized warnings, enabling automated debunking and enhancing user comprehension. Qualitative and human evaluations of the generated warnings highlight both the potential and limitations of our approach.

Paperid: 7301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19318.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities as zero-shot planners for embodied agents, their inability to learn from experience and build persistent mental models limits their robustness in complex open-world environments like Minecraft. We introduce MINDSTORES, an experience-augmented planning framework that enables embodied agents to build and leverage mental models through natural interaction with their environment. Drawing inspiration from how humans construct and refine cognitive mental models, our approach extends existing zero-shot LLM planning by maintaining a database of past experiences that informs future planning iterations. The key innovation is representing accumulated experiences as natural language embeddings of (state, task, plan, outcome) tuples, which can then be efficiently retrieved and reasoned over by an LLM planner to generate insights and guide plan refinement for novel states and tasks. Through extensive experiments in the MineDojo environment, a simulation environment for agents in Minecraft that provides low-level controls for Minecraft, we find that MINDSTORES learns and applies its knowledge significantly better than existing memory-based LLM planners while maintaining the flexibility and generalization benefits of zero-shot approaches, representing an important step toward more capable embodied AI systems that can learn continuously through natural experience.

Paperid: 7302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18516.pdf

Abstract:
Object manipulation for rearrangement into a specific goal state is a significant task for collaborative robots. Accurately determining object placement is a key challenge, as misalignment can increase task complexity and the risk of collisions, affecting the efficiency of the rearrangement process. Most current methods heavily rely on pre-collected datasets to train the model for predicting the goal position. As a result, these methods are restricted to specific instructions, which limits their broader applicability and generalisation. In this paper, we propose a framework of flexible language-conditioned object rearrangement based on the Large Language Model (LLM). Our approach mimics human reasoning by making use of successful past experiences as a reference to infer the best strategies to achieve a current desired goal position. Based on LLM's strong natural language comprehension and inference ability, our method generalises to handle various everyday objects and free-form language instructions in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively execute the robotic rearrangement tasks, even those involving long sequences of orders.

Paperid: 7303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16964.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting cyberattacks using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has seen promising results recently. Most of the state-of-the-art models that leverage these techniques require labeled examples, hard to obtain in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, unsupervised learning and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) have emerged as interesting approaches to reduce the dependency on labeled data. Nonetheless, these methods tend to yield more anomalous detection algorithms rather than effective attack detection systems. This paper introduces Few Edges Are Enough (FEAE), a GNN-based architecture trained with SSL and Few-Shot Learning (FSL) to better distinguish between false positive anomalies and actual attacks. To maximize the potential of few-shot examples, our model employs a hybrid self-supervised objective that combines the advantages of contrastive-based and reconstruction-based SSL. By leveraging only a minimal number of labeled attack events, represented as attack edges, FEAE achieves competitive performance on two well-known network datasets compared to both supervised and unsupervised methods. Remarkably, our experimental results unveil that employing only 1 malicious event for each attack type in the dataset is sufficient to achieve substantial improvements. FEAE not only outperforms self-supervised GNN baselines but also surpasses some supervised approaches on one of the datasets.

Paperid: 7304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16516.pdf

Abstract:
This research assesses the effectiveness of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, Llama, Aya, Jais, and ACEGPT, in the task of Arabic automated essay scoring (AES) using the AR-AES dataset. It explores various evaluation methodologies, including zero-shot, few-shot in-context learning, and fine-tuning, and examines the influence of instruction-following capabilities through the inclusion of marking guidelines within the prompts. A mixed-language prompting strategy, integrating English prompts with Arabic content, was implemented to improve model comprehension and performance. Among the models tested, ACEGPT demonstrated the strongest performance across the dataset, achieving a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.67, but was outperformed by a smaller BERT-based model with a QWK of 0.88. The study identifies challenges faced by LLMs in processing Arabic, including tokenization complexities and higher computational demands. Performance variation across different courses underscores the need for adaptive models capable of handling diverse assessment formats and highlights the positive impact of effective prompt engineering on improving LLM outputs. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the performance of multiple generative Large Language Models (LLMs) on Arabic essays using authentic student data.

Paperid: 7305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14905.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language models have achieved impressive results across various fields. However, adoption in remote sensing remains limited, largely due to the scarcity of paired image-text data. To bridge this gap, synthetic caption generation has gained interest, traditionally relying on rule-based methods that use metadata or bounding boxes. While these approaches provide some description, they often lack the depth needed to capture complex wide-area scenes. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative for generating more descriptive captions, yet they can produce generic outputs and are prone to hallucination. In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance vision-language datasets for remote sensing by integrating maps as external data sources, enabling the generation of detailed, context-rich captions. Additionally, we present methods to measure and mitigate hallucinations in LLM-generated text. We introduce fMoW-mm, a multimodal dataset incorporating satellite imagery, maps, metadata, and text annotations. We demonstrate its effectiveness for automatic target recognition in few-shot settings, achieving superior performance compared to other vision-language remote sensing datasets.

Paperid: 7306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14401.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning has been extensively explored to address problems where the amount of labeled samples is very limited for some classes. In the semi-supervised few-shot learning setting, substantial quantities of unlabeled samples are available. Such unlabeled samples are generally cheaper to obtain and can be used to improve the few-shot learning performance of the model. Some of the recent methods for this setting rely on clustering to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled samples. Since the effectiveness of clustering heavily influences the labeling of the unlabeled samples, it can significantly affect the few-shot learning performance. In this paper, we focus on improving the representation learned by the model in order to improve the clustering and, consequently, the model performance. We propose an approach for semi-supervised few-shot learning that performs a class-variance optimized clustering coupled with a cluster separation tuner in order to improve the effectiveness of clustering the labeled and unlabeled samples in this setting. It also optimizes the clustering-based pseudo-labeling process using a restricted pseudo-labeling approach and performs semantic information injection in order to improve the semi-supervised few-shot learning performance of the model. We experimentally demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark datasets.

Paperid: 7307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13870.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a unified framework for Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) and Conversion (SVC), addressing the limitations of existing approaches in cross-domain SVS/SVC, poor output musicality, and scarcity of singing data. Our framework enables control over multiple aspects, including language content based on lyrics, performance attributes based on a musical score, singing style and vocal techniques based on a selector, and voice identity based on a speech sample. The proposed zero-shot learning paradigm consists of one SVS model and two SVC models, utilizing pre-trained content embeddings and a diffusion-based generator. The proposed framework is also trained on mixed datasets comprising both singing and speech audio, allowing singing voice cloning based on speech reference. Experiments show substantial improvements in timbre similarity and musicality over state-of-the-art baselines, providing insights into other low-data music tasks such as instrumental style transfer. Examples can be found at: everyone-can-sing.github.io.

Paperid: 7308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12299.pdf

Abstract:
Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) range among the most frequently used models in machine learning. However, training large, general GMMs becomes computationally prohibitive for datasets that have many data points $N$ of high-dimensionality $D$. For GMMs with arbitrary covariances, we here derive a highly efficient variational approximation, which is then integrated with mixtures of factor analyzers (MFAs). For GMMs with $C$ components, our proposed algorithm substantially reduces runtime complexity from $\mathcal{O}(NCD^2)$ per iteration to a complexity scaling linearly with $D$ and sublinearly with $NC$. In numerical experiments, we first validate that the complexity reduction results in a sublinear scaling for the entire GMM optimization process. Second, we show on large-scale benchmarks that the sublinear algorithm results in speed-ups of an order-of-magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art. Third, as a proof of concept, we finally train GMMs with over 10 billion parameters on about 100 million images, observing training times of less than nine hours on a single state-of-the-art CPU. Finally, and forth, we demonstrate the effectiveness of large-scale GMMs on the task of zero-shot image denoising, where sublinear training results in state-of-the-art denoising times while competitive denoising performance is maintained.

Paperid: 7309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11199.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate classification of clinical text often requires fine-tuning pre-trained language models, a process that is costly and time-consuming due to the need for high-quality data and expert annotators. Synthetic data generation offers an alternative, though pre-trained models may not capture the syntactic diversity of clinical notes. We propose an embedding-driven approach that uses diversity sampling from a small set of real clinical notes to guide large language models in few-shot prompting, generating synthetic text that better reflects clinical syntax. We evaluated this method using the CheXpert dataset on a classification task, comparing it to random few-shot and zero-shot approaches. Using cosine similarity and a Turing test, our approach produced synthetic notes that more closely align with real clinical text. Our pipeline reduced the data needed to reach the 0.85 AUC cutoff by 40% for AUROC and 30% for AUPRC, while augmenting models with synthetic data improved AUROC by 57% and AUPRC by 68%. Additionally, our synthetic data was 0.9 times as effective as real data, a 60% improvement in value.

Paperid: 7310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09361.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class incremental learning implies the model to learn new classes while retaining knowledge of previously learned classes with a small number of training instances. Existing frameworks typically freeze the parameters of the previously learned classes during the incorporation of new classes. However, this approach often results in suboptimal class separation of previously learned classes, leading to overlap between old and new classes. Consequently, the performance of old classes degrades on new classes. To address these challenges, we propose a novel feature augmentation driven contrastive learning framework designed to enhance the separation of previously learned classes to accommodate new classes. Our approach involves augmenting feature vectors and assigning proxy labels to these vectors. This strategy expands the feature space, ensuring seamless integration of new classes within the expanded space. Additionally, we employ a self-supervised contrastive loss to improve the separation between previous classes. We validate our framework through experiments on three FSCIL benchmark datasets: CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200. The results demonstrate that our Feature Augmentation driven Contrastive Learning framework significantly outperforms other approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Paperid: 7311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09294.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning in medical image classification presents a significant challenge due to the limited availability of annotated data and the complex nature of medical imagery. In this work, we propose Adaptive Vision-Language Fine-tuning with Hierarchical Contrastive Alignment (HiCA), a novel framework that leverages the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for medical image analysis. HiCA introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy, combining domain-specific pretraining and hierarchical contrastive learning to align visual and textual representations at multiple levels. We evaluate our approach on two benchmark datasets, Chest X-ray and Breast Ultrasound, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. Further analyses demonstrate the robustness, generalizability, and interpretability of our method, with substantial improvements in performance compared to existing baselines. Our work highlights the potential of hierarchical contrastive strategies in adapting LVLMs to the unique challenges of medical imaging tasks.

Paperid: 7312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08077.pdf

Abstract:
Thanks to recent advancements in the development of inexpensive, high-resolution tactile sensors, touch sensing has become popular in contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. With the surge of data-driven methods and their requirement for substantial datasets, several methods of simulating tactile sensors have emerged in the tactile research community to overcome real-world data collection limitations. These simulation approaches can be split into two main categories: fast but inaccurate (soft) point-contact models and slow but accurate finite element modeling. In this work, we present a novel approach to simulating pressure-based tactile sensors using the hydroelastic contact model, which provides a high degree of physical realism at a reasonable computational cost. This model produces smooth contact forces for soft-to-soft and soft-to-rigid contacts along even non-convex contact surfaces. Pressure values are approximated at each point of the contact surface and can be integrated to calculate sensor outputs. We validate our models' capacity to synthesize real-world tactile data by conducting zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of a model for object state estimation. Our simulation is available as a plug-in to our open-source, MuJoCo-based simulator.

Paperid: 7313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05075.pdf

Abstract:
Data-driven soft sensors (DDSS) have become mainstream methods for predicting key performance indicators in process industries. However, DDSS development requires complex and costly customized designs tailored to various tasks during the modeling process. Moreover, DDSS are constrained to a single structured data modality, limiting their ability to incorporate additional contextual knowledge. Furthermore, DDSSs' limited representation learning leads to weak predictive performance with scarce data. To address these challenges, we propose a general framework named LLM-TKESS (large language model for text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensing), harnessing the powerful general problem-solving capabilities, cross-modal knowledge transfer abilities, and few-shot capabilities of LLM for enhanced soft sensing modeling. Specifically, an auxiliary variable series encoder (AVS Encoder) is proposed to unleash LLM's potential for capturing temporal relationships within series and spatial semantic relationships among auxiliary variables. Then, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning alignment strategy: in the first stage, employing parameter-efficient fine-tuning through autoregressive training adjusts LLM to rapidly accommodate process variable data, resulting in a soft sensing foundation model (SSFM). Subsequently, by training adapters, we adapt the SSFM to various downstream tasks without modifying its architecture. Then, we propose two text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensors, integrating new natural language modalities to overcome the limitations of pure structured data models. Furthermore, benefiting from LLM's pre-existing world knowledge, our model demonstrates outstanding predictive capabilities in small sample conditions. Using the thermal deformation of air preheater rotor as a case study, we validate through extensive experiments that LLM-TKESS exhibits outstanding performance.

Paperid: 7314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04696.pdf

Abstract:
We present Seg-TTO, a novel framework for zero-shot, open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS), designed to excel in specialized domain tasks. While current open-vocabulary approaches show impressive performance on standard segmentation benchmarks under zero-shot settings, they fall short of supervised counterparts on highly domain-specific datasets. We focus on segmentation-specific test-time optimization to address this gap. Segmentation requires an understanding of multiple concepts within a single image while retaining the locality and spatial structure of representations. We propose a novel self-supervised objective adhering to these requirements and use it to align the model parameters with input images at test time. In the textual modality, we learn multiple embeddings for each category to capture diverse concepts within an image, while in the visual modality, we calculate pixel-level losses followed by embedding aggregation operations specific to preserving spatial structure. Our resulting framework termed Seg-TTO is a plug-and-play module. We integrate Seg-TTO with three state-of-the-art OVSS approaches and evaluate across 22 challenging OVSS tasks covering a range of specialized domains. Our Seg-TTO demonstrates clear performance improvements (up to 27% mIoU increase on some datasets) establishing new state-of-the-art. Our code and models will be released publicly.

Paperid: 7315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04153.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) ~\cite{shi2021cross, asai2021one, jiang2020cross} for example, can find relevant text in any language such as English(high resource) or Telugu (low resource) even when the query is posed in a different, possibly low-resource, language. In this work, we aim to develop useful CLIR models for this constrained, yet important, setting where we do not require any kind of additional supervision or labelled data for retrieval task and hence can work effectively for low-resource languages. \par We propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open question answering. The re-ranker re-scores retrieved passages with a zero-shot multilingual question generation model, which is a pre-trained language model, to compute the probability of the input question in the target language conditioned on a retrieved passage, which can be possibly in a different language. We evaluate our method in a completely zero shot setting and doesn't require any training. Thus the main advantage of our method is that our approach can be used to re-rank results obtained by any sparse retrieval methods like BM-25. This eliminates the need for obtaining expensive labelled corpus required for the retrieval tasks and hence can be used for low resource languages.

Paperid: 7316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03786.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) identifies anomalies without needing training samples from the target dataset, essential for scenarios with privacy concerns or limited data. Vision-language models like CLIP show potential in ZSAD but have limitations: relying on manually crafted fixed textual descriptions or anomaly prompts is time-consuming and prone to semantic ambiguity, and CLIP struggles with pixel-level anomaly segmentation, focusing more on global semantics than local details. To address these limitations, We introduce KAnoCLIP, a novel ZSAD framework that leverages vision-language models. KAnoCLIP combines general knowledge from a Large Language Model (GPT-3.5) and fine-grained, image-specific knowledge from a Visual Question Answering system (Llama3) via Knowledge-Driven Prompt Learning (KnPL). KnPL uses a knowledge-driven (KD) loss function to create learnable anomaly prompts, removing the need for fixed text prompts and enhancing generalization. KAnoCLIP includes the CLIP visual encoder with V-V attention (CLIP-VV), Bi-Directional Cross-Attention for Multi-Level Cross-Modal Interaction (Bi-CMCI), and Conv-Adapter. These components preserve local visual semantics, improve local cross-modal fusion, and align global visual features with textual information, enhancing pixel-level anomaly detection. KAnoCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance in ZSAD across 12 industrial and medical datasets, demonstrating superior generalization compared to existing methods.

Paperid: 7317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03295.pdf

Abstract:
Data-driven soft sensors are crucial in predicting key performance indicators in industrial systems. However, current methods predominantly rely on the supervised learning paradigms of parameter updating, which inherently faces challenges such as high development costs, poor robustness, training instability, and lack of interpretability. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various domains, notably through In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables high-performance task execution with minimal input-label demonstrations and no prior training. This paper aims to replace supervised learning with the emerging ICL paradigm for soft sensor modeling to address existing challenges and explore new avenues for advancement. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework called the Few-shot Uncertainty-aware and self-Explaining Soft Sensor (LLM-FUESS), which includes the Zero-shot Auxiliary Variable Selector (LLM-ZAVS) and the Uncertainty-aware Few-shot Soft Sensor (LLM-UFSS). The LLM-ZAVS retrieves from the Industrial Knowledge Vector Storage to enhance LLMs' domain-specific knowledge, enabling zero-shot auxiliary variable selection. In the LLM-UFSS, we utilize text-based context demonstrations of structured data to prompt LLMs to execute ICL for predicting and propose a context sample retrieval augmentation strategy to improve performance. Additionally, we explored LLMs' AIGC and probabilistic characteristics to propose self-explanation and uncertainty quantification methods for constructing a trustworthy soft sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieved state-of-the-art predictive performance, strong robustness, and flexibility, effectively mitigates training instability found in traditional methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to establish soft sensor utilizing LLMs.

Paperid: 7318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03153.pdf

Abstract:
Liquid phase transmission electron microscopy (LPTEM) offers an unparalleled combination of spatial and temporal resolution, making it a promising tool for single particle tracking at the nanoscale. However, the absence of a standardized framework for identifying and tracking nanoparticles in noisy LPTEM videos has impeded progress in the field to develop this technique as a single particle tracking tool. To address this, we leveraged Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), released by Meta, which is a foundation model developed for segmenting videos and images. Here, we demonstrate that SAM 2 can successfully segment LPTEM videos in a zero-shot manner and without requiring fine-tuning. Building on this capability, we introduce SAM4EM, a comprehensive framework that integrates promptable video segmentation with particle tracking and statistical analysis, providing an end-to-end LPTEM analysis framework for single particle tracking. SAM4EM achieves nearly 50-fold higher accuracy in segmenting and analyzing LPTEM videos compared to state-of-the-art methods, paving the way for broader applications of LPTEM in nanoscale imaging.

Paperid: 7319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00116.pdf

Abstract:
Generating desired images conditioned on given text descriptions has received lots of attention. Recently, diffusion models and autoregressive models have demonstrated their outstanding expressivity and gradually replaced GAN as the favored architectures for text-to-image synthesis. However, they still face some obstacles: slow inference speed and expensive training costs. To achieve more powerful and faster text-to-image synthesis under complex scenes, we propose TIGER, a text-to-image GAN with pretrained representations. To be specific, we propose a vision-empowered discriminator and a high-capacity generator. (i) The vision-empowered discriminator absorbs the complex scene understanding ability and the domain generalization ability from pretrained vision models to enhance model performance. Unlike previous works, we explore stacking multiple pretrained models in our discriminator to collect multiple different representations. (ii) The high-capacity generator aims to achieve effective text-image fusion while increasing the model capacity. The high-capacity generator consists of multiple novel high-capacity fusion blocks (HFBlock). And the HFBlock contains several deep fusion modules and a global fusion module, which play different roles to benefit our model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed TIGER both on standard and zero-shot text-to-image synthesis tasks. On the standard text-to-image synthesis task, TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets, which obtain a new FID 5.48 (COCO) and 9.38 (CUB). On the zero-shot text-to-image synthesis task, we achieve comparable performance with fewer model parameters, smaller training data size and faster inference speed. Additionally, more experiments and analyses are conducted in the Supplementary Material.

Paperid: 7320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20595.pdf

Abstract:
This study demonstrates that the modern generation of Large Language Models (LLMs, such as GPT-4) suffers from the same out-of-domain (OOD) performance gap observed in prior research on pre-trained Language Models (PLMs, such as BERT). We demonstrate this across two non-topical classification tasks: 1) genre classification and 2) generated text detection. Our results show that when demonstration examples for In-Context Learning (ICL) come from one domain (e.g., travel) and the system is tested on another domain (e.g., history), classification performance declines significantly. To address this, we introduce a method that controls which predictive indicators are used and which are excluded during classification. For the two tasks studied here, this ensures that topical features are omitted, while the model is guided to focus on stylistic rather than content-based attributes. This approach reduces the OOD gap by up to 20 percentage points in a few-shot setup. Straightforward Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods, used as the baseline, prove insufficient, while our approach consistently enhances domain transfer performance.

Paperid: 7321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18655.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present the SimDoc system, a simplification model considering simplicity, readability, and discourse aspects, such as coherence. In the past decade, the progress of the Text Simplification (TS) field has been mostly shown at a sentence level, rather than considering paragraphs or documents, a setting from which most TS audiences would benefit. We propose a simplification system that is initially fine-tuned with professionally created corpora. Further, we include multiple objectives during training, considering simplicity, readability, and coherence altogether. Our contributions include the extension of professionally annotated simplification corpora by the association of existing annotations into (complex text, simple text, readability label) triples to benefit from readability during training. Also, we present a comparative analysis in which we evaluate our proposed models in a zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning setting using document-level TS corpora, demonstrating novel methods for simplification. Finally, we show a detailed analysis of outputs, highlighting the difficulties of simplification at a document level.

Paperid: 7322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18144.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce a neural network conformal prediction method for time series that enhances adaptivity in non-stationary environments. Our approach acts as a neural controller designed to achieve desired target coverage, leveraging auxiliary multi-view data with neural network encoders in an end-to-end manner to further enhance adaptivity. Additionally, our model is designed to enhance the consistency of prediction intervals in different quantiles by integrating monotonicity constraints and leverages data from related tasks to boost few-shot learning performance. Using real-world datasets from epidemics, electric demand, weather, and others, we empirically demonstrate significant improvements in coverage and probabilistic accuracy, and find that our method is the only one that combines good calibration with consistency in prediction intervals.

Paperid: 7323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14103.pdf

Abstract:
The recent development of foundation models for monocular depth estimation such as Depth Anything paved the way to zero-shot monocular depth estimation. Since it returns an affine-invariant disparity map, the favored technique to recover the metric depth consists in fine-tuning the model. However, this stage is not straightforward, it can be costly and time-consuming because of the training and the creation of the dataset. The latter must contain images captured by the camera that will be used at test time and the corresponding ground truth. Moreover, the fine-tuning may also degrade the generalizing capacity of the original model. Instead, we propose in this paper a new method to rescale Depth Anything predictions using 3D points provided by sensors or techniques such as low-resolution LiDAR or structure-from-motion with poses given by an IMU. This approach avoids fine-tuning and preserves the generalizing power of the original depth estimation model while being robust to the noise of the sparse depth or of the depth model. Our experiments highlight enhancements relative to zero-shot monocular metric depth estimation methods, competitive results compared to fine-tuned approaches and a better robustness than depth completion approaches. Code available at https://gitlab.ensta.fr/ssh/monocular-depth-rescaling.

Paperid: 7324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13299.pdf

Abstract:
Annotation of medical images, such as MRI and CT scans, is crucial for evaluating treatment efficacy and planning radiotherapy. However, the extensive workload of medical professionals limits their ability to annotate large image datasets, posing a bottleneck for AI applications in medical imaging. To address this, we propose In-context Cascade Segmentation (ICS), a novel method that minimizes annotation requirements while achieving high segmentation accuracy for sequential medical images. ICS builds on the UniverSeg framework, which performs few-shot segmentation using support images without additional training. By iteratively adding the inference results of each slice to the support set, ICS propagates information forward and backward through the sequence, ensuring inter-slice consistency. We evaluate the proposed method on the HVSMR dataset, which includes segmentation tasks for eight cardiac regions. Experimental results demonstrate that ICS significantly improves segmentation performance in complex anatomical regions, particularly in maintaining boundary consistency across slices, compared to baseline methods. The study also highlights the impact of the number and position of initial support slices on segmentation accuracy. ICS offers a promising solution for reducing annotation burdens while delivering robust segmentation results, paving the way for its broader adoption in clinical and research applications.

Paperid: 7325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12997.pdf

Abstract:
As the Information Retrieval (IR) field increasingly recognizes the importance of inclusivity, addressing the needs of low-resource languages remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces the first large-scale Urdu IR dataset, created by translating the MS MARCO dataset through machine translation. We establish baseline results through zero-shot learning for IR in Urdu and subsequently apply the mMARCO multilingual IR methodology to this newly translated dataset. Our findings demonstrate that the fine-tuned model (Urdu-mT5-mMARCO) achieves a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR@10) of 0.247 and a Recall@10 of 0.439, representing significant improvements over zero-shot results and showing the potential for expanding IR access for Urdu speakers. By bridging access gaps for speakers of low-resource languages, this work not only advances multilingual IR research but also emphasizes the ethical and societal importance of inclusive IR technologies. This work provides valuable insights into the challenges and solutions for improving language representation and lays the groundwork for future research, especially in South Asian languages, which can benefit from the adaptable methods used in this study.

Paperid: 7326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09807.pdf

Abstract:
Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is an important problem with numerous real-world applications, such as medicine, law, and education. The high cost of building MCQA datasets makes few-shot learning pivotal in this domain. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can enable few-shot learning, their direct application in real-world scenarios is often hindered by their high computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach that uses LLMs for data generation and scoring. Our approach utilizes LLMs to create MCQA data which contains questions and choices, and to assign probability scores to the generated choices. We then use the generated data and LLM-assigned scores to finetune a smaller and more efficient encoder-only model, DeBERTa-v3-base by leveraging distillation loss. Extensive experiments on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark demonstrate that our method improves accuracy from 28.9% to 39.3%, representing a gain of over 10% compared to a baseline finetuned directly on 5-shot examples. This shows the effectiveness of LLM-driven data generation and knowledge distillation for few-shot MCQA.

Paperid: 7327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09799.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research on universal object detection aims to introduce language in a SoTA closed-set detector and then generalize the open-set concepts by constructing large-scale (text-region) datasets for training. However, these methods face two main challenges: (i) how to efficiently use the prior information in the prompts to genericise objects and (ii) how to reduce alignment bias in the downstream tasks, both leading to sub-optimal performance in some scenarios beyond pre-training. To address these challenges, we propose a strong universal detection foundation model called CP-DETR, which is competitive in almost all scenarios, with only one pre-training weight. Specifically, we design an efficient prompt visual hybrid encoder that enhances the information interaction between prompt and visual through scale-by-scale and multi-scale fusion modules. Then, the hybrid encoder is facilitated to fully utilize the prompted information by prompt multi-label loss and auxiliary detection head. In addition to text prompts, we have designed two practical concept prompt generation methods, visual prompt and optimized prompt, to extract abstract concepts through concrete visual examples and stably reduce alignment bias in downstream tasks. With these effective designs, CP-DETR demonstrates superior universal detection performance in a broad spectrum of scenarios. For example, our Swin-T backbone model achieves 47.6 zero-shot AP on LVIS, and the Swin-L backbone model achieves 32.2 zero-shot AP on ODinW35. Furthermore, our visual prompt generation method achieves 68.4 AP on COCO val by interactive detection, and the optimized prompt achieves 73.1 fully-shot AP on ODinW13.

Paperid: 7328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05681.pdf

Abstract:
The rise in energy demand highlights the importance of suitable subsurface storage, requiring detailed and accurate subsurface characterization often reliant on high-quality borehole well log data. However, obtaining complete well-log data is costly and time-consuming, with missing data being common due to borehole conditions or tool errors. While machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been implemented to address these issues, they often fail to capture the intricate, nonlinear relationships and long-term dependencies in complex well log sequences. Additionally, prior AI-driven models typically require retraining when introduced to new datasets and are constrained to deployment in the same basin. In this study, we explored and evaluated the potential of a time-series foundation model leveraging transformer architecture and a generative pre-trained approach for predicting and detecting anomalies in borehole well log data. Specifically, we fine-tuned and adopted the TimeGPT architecture to forecast key log responses and detect anomalies with high accuracy. Our proposed model demonstrated excellent performance, achieving R2 of up to 87% and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as low as 1.95%. Additionally, the model's zero-shot capability successfully identified subtle yet critical anomalies, such as drilling hazards or unexpected geological formations, with an overall accuracy of 93%. The model represents a significant advancement in predictive accuracy and computational efficiency, enabling zero-shot inference through fine-tuning. Its application in well-log prediction enhances operational decision-making while reducing risks associated with subsurface exploration. These findings demonstrate the model's potential to transform well-log data analysis, particularly in complex geological settings.

Paperid: 7329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05602.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has established the ecological importance of developing algorithms for identifying animals individually from images. Typically, a separate algorithm is trained for each species, a natural step but one that creates significant barriers to wide-spread use: (1) each effort is expensive, requiring data collection, data curation, and model training, deployment, and maintenance, (2) there is little training data for many species, and (3) commonalities in appearance across species are not exploited. We propose an alternative approach focused on training multi-species individual identification (re-id) models. We construct a dataset that includes 49 species, 37K individual animals, and 225K images, using this data to train a single embedding network for all species. Our model employs an EfficientNetV2 backbone and a sub-center ArcFace loss function with dynamic margins. We evaluate the performance of this multispecies model in several ways. Most notably, we demonstrate that it consistently outperforms models trained separately on each species, achieving an average gain of 12.5% in top-1 accuracy. Furthermore, the model demonstrates strong zero-shot performance and fine-tuning capabilities for new species with limited training data, enabling effective curation of new species through both incremental addition of data to the training set and fine-tuning without the original data. Additionally, our model surpasses the recent MegaDescriptor on unseen species, averaging an 19.2% top-1 improvement per species and showing gains across all 33 species tested. The fully-featured code repository is publicly available on GitHub, and the feature extractor model can be accessed on HuggingFace for seamless integration with wildlife re-identification pipelines. The model is already in production use for 60+ species in a large-scale wildlife monitoring system.

Paperid: 7330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04690.pdf

Abstract:
Entity Alignment (EA) seeks to identify and match corresponding entities across different Knowledge Graphs (KGs), playing a crucial role in knowledge fusion and integration. Embedding-based entity alignment (EA) has recently gained considerable attention, resulting in the emergence of many innovative approaches. Initially, these approaches concentrated on learning entity embeddings based on the structural features of knowledge graphs (KGs) as defined by relation triples. Subsequent methods have integrated entities' names and attributes as supplementary information to improve the embeddings used for EA. However, existing methods lack a deep semantic understanding of entity attributes and relations. In this paper, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) based Entity Alignment method, LLM-Align, which explores the instruction-following and zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models to infer alignments of entities. LLM-Align uses heuristic methods to select important attributes and relations of entities, and then feeds the selected triples of entities to an LLM to infer the alignment results. To guarantee the quality of alignment results, we design a multi-round voting mechanism to mitigate the hallucination and positional bias issues that occur with LLMs. Experiments on three EA datasets, demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing EA methods.

Paperid: 7331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04494.pdf

Abstract:
Extending the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with functions or tools for environment interaction has led to the emergence of the agent paradigm. In industry, training an LLM is not always feasible because of the scarcity of domain data, legal holds on proprietary customer data, rapidly changing business requirements, and the need to prototype new assistants. Agents provide an elegant solution to the above by relying on the zero-shot reasoning abilities of the underlying LLM and utilizing tools to explore and reason over customer data and respond to user requests. However, there are two concerns here: (I) acquiring large scale customer queries for agent testing is time-consuming, and (II) high reliance on the tool call sequence (or trajectory) followed by the agent to respond to user queries may lead to unexpected or incorrect behavior. To address this, we propose MAG-V, a multi-agent framework to first generate a dataset of questions that mimic customer queries; and second, reverse-engineer alternate questions from the responses for trajectory verification. Initial results indicate that our synthetic data can improve agent performance on actual customer queries. Furthermore, our trajectory verification methodology, inspired by distant supervision and using traditional machine learning (ML) models, outperforms a GPT-4o judge baseline by 11% accuracy and matches the performance of a GPT-4 judge on our constructed dataset. Overall, our approach is a step towards unifying diverse task agents into a cohesive framework for achieving an aligned objective.

Paperid: 7332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04255.pdf

Abstract:
Reliable mechanical fault detection with limited data is crucial for the effective operation of induction machines, particularly given the real-world challenges present in industrial datasets, such as significant imbalances between healthy and faulty samples and the scarcity of data representing faulty conditions. This research introduces an innovative meta-learning approach to address these issues, focusing on mechanical fault detection in induction motors across diverse operating conditions while mitigating the adverse effects of drive noise in scenarios with limited data. The process of identifying faults under varying operating conditions is framed as a few-shot classification challenge and approached through a model-agnostic meta-learning strategy. Specifically, this approach begins with training a meta-learner across multiple interconnected fault-diagnosis tasks conducted under different operating conditions. In this stage, cross-entropy is utilized to optimize parameters and develop a robust representation of the tasks. Subsequently, the parameters of the meta-learner are fine-tuned for new tasks, enabling rapid adaptation using only a small number of samples. This method achieves excellent accuracy in fault detection across various conditions, even when data availability is restricted. The findings indicate that the proposed model outperforms other sophisticated techniques, providing enhanced generalization and quicker adaptation. The accuracy of fault diagnosis reaches a minimum of 99%, underscoring the model's effectiveness for reliable fault identification.

Paperid: 7333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04078.pdf

Abstract:
With increasing numbers of vulnerabilities exposed on the internet, autonomous penetration testing (pentesting) has emerged as a promising research area. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for studying this topic. However, two key challenges limit the applicability of RL-based autonomous pentesting in real-world scenarios: (a) training environment dilemma -- training agents in simulated environments is sample-efficient while ensuring their realism remains challenging; (b) poor generalization ability -- agents' policies often perform poorly when transferred to unseen scenarios, with even slight changes potentially causing significant generalization gap. To this end, we propose GAP, a generalizable autonomous pentesting framework that aims to realizes efficient policy training in realistic environments and train generalizable agents capable of drawing inferences about other cases from one instance. GAP introduces a Real-to-Sim-to-Real pipeline that (a) enables end-to-end policy learning in unknown real environments while constructing realistic simulations; (b) improves agents' generalization ability by leveraging domain randomization and meta-RL learning.Specially, we are among the first to apply domain randomization in autonomous pentesting and propose a large language model-powered domain randomization method for synthetic environment generation. We further apply meta-RL to improve agents' generalization ability in unseen environments by leveraging synthetic environments. The combination of two methods effectively bridges the generalization gap and improves agents' policy adaptation performance.Experiments are conducted on various vulnerable virtual machines, with results showing that GAP can enable policy learning in various realistic environments, achieve zero-shot policy transfer in similar environments, and realize rapid policy adaptation in dissimilar environments.

Paperid: 7334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04067.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning and natural language generation have significantly improved image captioning, enabling automated, human-like descriptions for visual content. In this work, we apply these captioning techniques to generate clinician-like interpretations of ECG data. This study leverages existing ECG datasets accompanied by free-text reports authored by healthcare professionals (HCPs) as training data. These reports, while often inconsistent, provide a valuable foundation for automated learning. We introduce an encoder-decoder-based method that uses these reports to train models to generate detailed descriptions of ECG episodes. This represents a significant advancement in ECG analysis automation, with potential applications in zero-shot classification and automated clinical decision support. The model is tested on various datasets, including both 1- and 12-lead ECGs. It significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art reference model by Qiu et al., achieving a METEOR score of 55.53% compared to 24.51% achieved by the reference model. Furthermore, several key design choices are discussed, providing a comprehensive overview of current challenges and innovations in this domain. The source codes for this research are publicly available in our Git repository https://git.zib.de/ableich/ecg-comment-generation-public

Paperid: 7335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03771.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot learning enables models to generalise to unseen classes by leveraging semantic information, bridging the gap between training and testing sets with non-overlapping classes. While much research has focused on zero-shot learning in computer vision, the application of these methods to environmental audio remains underexplored, with poor performance in existing studies. Generative methods, which have demonstrated success in computer vision, are notably absent from zero-shot environmental sound classification studies. To address this gap, this work investigates generative methods for zero-shot learning in environmental audio. Two successful generative models from computer vision are adapted: a cross-aligned and distribution-aligned variational autoencoder (CADA-VAE) and a leveraging invariant side generative adversarial network (LisGAN). Additionally, we introduced a novel diffusion model conditioned on class auxiliary data. Synthetic embeddings generated by the diffusion model are combined with seen class embeddings to train a classifier. Experiments are conducted on five environmental audio datasets, ESC-50, ARCA23K-FSD, FSC22, UrbanSound8k and TAU Urban Acoustics 2019, and one music classification dataset, GTZAN. Results show that the diffusion model outperforms all baseline methods on average across six audio datasets. This work establishes the diffusion model as a promising approach for zero-shot learning and introduces the first benchmark of generative methods for zero-shot environmental sound classification, providing a foundation for future research.

Paperid: 7336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03573.pdf

Abstract:
Using tools by Large Language Models (LLMs) is a promising avenue to extend their reach beyond language or conversational settings. The number of tools can scale to thousands as they enable accessing sensory information, fetching updated factual knowledge, or taking actions in the real world. In such settings, in-context learning by providing a short list of relevant tools in the prompt is a viable approach. To retrieve relevant tools, various approaches have been suggested, ranging from simple frequency-based matching to dense embedding-based semantic retrieval. However, such approaches lack the contextual and common-sense understanding required to retrieve the right tools for complex user requests. Rather than increasing the complexity of the retrieval component itself, we propose leveraging LLM understanding to generate a retrieval query. Then, the generated query is embedded and used to find the most relevant tools via a nearest-neighbor search. We investigate three approaches for query generation: zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning on tool descriptions, and alignment learning by iteratively optimizing a reward metric measuring retrieval performance. By conducting extensive experiments on a dataset covering complex and multi-tool scenarios, we show that leveraging LLMs for query generation improves the retrieval for in-domain (seen tools) and out-of-domain (unseen tools) settings.

Paperid: 7337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00348.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic Surveillance Systems (TSS) have become increasingly crucial in modern intelligent transportation systems, with vision technologies playing a central role for scene perception and understanding. While existing surveys typically focus on isolated aspects of TSS, a comprehensive analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, particularly considering emerging technologies, remains lacking. This paper presents a systematic review of vision technologies in TSS, examining both low-level perception tasks (object detection, classification, and tracking) and high-level perception tasks (parameter estimation, anomaly detection, and behavior understanding). Specifically, we first provide a detailed methodological categorization and comprehensive performance evaluation for each task. Our investigation reveals five fundamental limitations in current TSS: perceptual data degradation in complex scenarios, data-driven learning constraints, semantic understanding gaps, sensing coverage limitations and computational resource demands. To address these challenges, we systematically analyze five categories of current approaches and potential trends: advanced perception enhancement, efficient learning paradigms, knowledge-enhanced understanding, cooperative sensing frameworks and efficient computing frameworks, critically assessing their real-world applicability. Furthermore, we evaluate the transformative potential of foundation models in TSS, which exhibit remarkable zero-shot learning abilities, strong generalization, and sophisticated reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. This review provides a unified analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, systematically analyzes current limitations and solutions, and presents a structured roadmap for integrating emerging technologies, particularly foundation models, to enhance TSS capabilities.

Paperid: 7338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19514.pdf

Abstract:
Rapid detection of foodborne bacteria is critical for food safety and quality, yet traditional culture-based methods require extended incubation and specialized sample preparation. This study addresses these challenges by i) enhancing the generalizability of AI-enabled microscopy for bacterial classification using adversarial domain adaptation and ii) comparing the performance of single-target and multi-domain adaptation. Three Gram-positive (Bacillus coagulans, Bacillus subtilis, Listeria innocua) and three Gram-negative (E. coli, Salmonella Enteritidis, Salmonella Typhimurium) strains were classified. EfficientNetV2 served as the backbone architecture, leveraging fine-grained feature extraction for small targets. Few-shot learning enabled scalability, with domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) addressing single domains and multi-DANNs (MDANNs) generalizing across all target domains. The model was trained on source domain data collected under controlled conditions (phase contrast microscopy, 60x magnification, 3-h bacterial incubation) and evaluated on target domains with variations in microscopy modality (brightfield, BF), magnification (20x), and extended incubation to compensate for lower resolution (20x-5h). DANNs improved target domain classification accuracy by up to 54.45% (20x), 43.44% (20x-5h), and 31.67% (BF), with minimal source domain degradation (<4.44%). MDANNs achieved superior performance in the BF domain and substantial gains in the 20x domain. Grad-CAM and t-SNE visualizations validated the model's ability to learn domain-invariant features across diverse conditions. This study presents a scalable and adaptable framework for bacterial classification, reducing reliance on extensive sample preparation and enabling application in decentralized and resource-limited environments.

Paperid: 7339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16927.pdf

Abstract:
Production assertions are statements embedded in the code to help developers validate their assumptions about the code. They assist developers in debugging, provide valuable documentation, and enhance code comprehension. Current research in this area primarily focuses on assertion generation for unit tests using techniques, such as static analysis and deep learning. While these techniques have shown promise, they fall short when it comes to generating production assertions, which serve a different purpose. This preprint addresses the gap by introducing Assertify, an automated end-to-end tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering with few-shot learning to generate production assertions. By creating context-rich prompts, the tool emulates the approach developers take when creating production assertions for their code. To evaluate our approach, we compiled a dataset of 2,810 methods by scraping 22 mature Java repositories from GitHub. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of few-shot learning by producing assertions with an average ROUGE-L score of 0.526, indicating reasonably high structural similarity with the assertions written by developers. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs in automating the generation of production assertions that resemble the original assertions.

Paperid: 7340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16454.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are known to struggle with complicated reasoning tasks such as math word problems (MWPs). In this paper, we present how analogy from similarly structured questions can improve LLMs' problem-solving capabilities for MWPs. Specifically, we rely on the retrieval of problems with similar computational graphs to the given question to serve as exemplars in the prompt, providing the correct reasoning path for the generation model to refer to. Empirical results across six math word problem datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves a significant improvement of up to 6.7 percent on average in absolute value, compared to baseline methods. These results highlight our method's potential in addressing the reasoning challenges in current LLMs.

Paperid: 7341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16232.pdf

Abstract:
Modern wireless communication systems have become increasingly complex due to the proliferation of wireless devices, increasing performance standards, and growing security threats. Managing these networks is becoming more challenging, requiring the use of advanced network management methods and tools. AI-driven network management systems such as Self-Optimizing Networks (SONs) are gaining attention. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrating exceptional zero-shot learning and generalization capabilities across several domains. In this paper, we leverage the potential of LLMs with SONs to enhance future network management systems. Specifically, we benchmark the use of various LLMs such as GPT-4, Llama, and Falcon, in a zero-shot setting based on their real-time network configuration recommendations. Our results indicate promising prospects for integrating LLMs into future network management systems.

Paperid: 7342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14215.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs have performed well on several reasoning benchmarks, including ones that test analogical reasoning abilities. However, there is debate on the extent to which they are performing general abstract reasoning versus employing non-robust processes, e.g., that overly rely on similarity to pre-training data. Here we investigate the robustness of analogy-making abilities previously claimed for LLMs on three of four domains studied by Webb, Holyoak, and Lu (2023): letter-string analogies, digit matrices, and story analogies. For each domain we test humans and GPT models on robustness to variants of the original analogy problems that test the same abstract reasoning abilities but are likely dissimilar from tasks in the pre-training data. The performance of a system that uses robust abstract reasoning should not decline substantially on these variants. On simple letter-string analogies, we find that while the performance of humans remains high for two types of variants we tested, the GPT models' performance declines sharply. This pattern is less pronounced as the complexity of these problems is increased, as both humans and GPT models perform poorly on both the original and variant problems requiring more complex analogies. On digit-matrix problems, we find a similar pattern but only on one out of the two types of variants we tested. On story-based analogy problems, we find that, unlike humans, the performance of GPT models are susceptible to answer-order effects, and that GPT models also may be more sensitive than humans to paraphrasing. This work provides evidence that LLMs often lack the robustness of zero-shot human analogy-making, exhibiting brittleness on most of the variations we tested. More generally, this work points to the importance of carefully evaluating AI systems not only for accuracy but also robustness when testing their cognitive capabilities.

Paperid: 7343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07075.pdf

Abstract:
To predict upcoming text, language models must in some cases retrieve in-context information verbatim. In this report, we investigated how the ability of language models to retrieve arbitrary in-context nouns developed during training (across time) and as language models trained on the same dataset increase in size (across scale). We then asked whether learning of in-context retrieval correlates with learning of more challenging zero-shot benchmarks. Furthermore, inspired by semantic effects in human short-term memory, we evaluated the retrieval with respect to a major semantic component of target nouns, namely whether they denote a concrete or abstract entity, as rated by humans. We show that verbatim in-context retrieval developed in a sudden transition early in the training process, after about 1% of the training tokens. This was observed across model sizes (from 14M and up to 12B parameters), and the transition occurred slightly later for the two smallest models. We further found that the development of verbatim in-context retrieval is positively correlated with the learning of zero-shot benchmarks. Around the transition point, all models showed the advantage of retrieving concrete nouns as opposed to abstract nouns. In all but two smallest models, the advantage dissipated away toward the end of training.

Paperid: 7344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05050.pdf

Abstract:
Political scientists often grapple with data scarcity in text classification. Recently, fine-tuned BERT models and their variants have gained traction as effective solutions to address this issue. In this study, we investigate the potential of GPT-based models combined with prompt engineering as a viable alternative. We conduct a series of experiments across various classification tasks, differing in the number of classes and complexity, to evaluate the effectiveness of BERT-based versus GPT-based models in low-data scenarios. Our findings indicate that while zero-shot and few-shot learning with GPT models provide reasonable performance and are well-suited for early-stage research exploration, they generally fall short - or, at best, match - the performance of BERT fine-tuning, particularly as the training set reaches a substantial size (e.g., 1,000 samples). We conclude by comparing these approaches in terms of performance, ease of use, and cost, providing practical guidance for researchers facing data limitations. Our results are particularly relevant for those engaged in quantitative text analysis in low-resource settings or with limited labeled data.

Paperid: 7345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03542.pdf

Abstract:
A proliferation of Large Language Models (the GPT series, BLOOM, LLaMA, and more) are driving forward novel development of multipurpose AI for a variety of tasks, particularly natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These models demonstrate strong performance on a range of tasks; however, there has been evidence of brittleness when applied to more niche or narrow domains where hallucinations or fluent but incorrect responses reduce performance. Given the complex nature of scientific domains, it is prudent to investigate the trade-offs of leveraging off-the-shelf versus more targeted foundation models for scientific domains. In this work, we examine the benefits of in-domain pre-training for a given scientific domain, chemistry, and compare these to open-source, off-the-shelf models with zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Our results show that not only do in-domain base models perform reasonably well on in-domain tasks in a zero-shot setting but that further adaptation using instruction fine-tuning yields impressive performance on chemistry-specific tasks such as named entity recognition and molecular formula generation.

Paperid: 7346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00533.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents ReverseNER, a method aimed at overcoming the limitation of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) tasks, arising from their reliance on pre-provided demonstrations. ReverseNER tackles this challenge by constructing a reliable example library composed of dozens of entity-labeled sentences, generated through the reverse process of NER. Specifically, while conventional NER methods label entities in a sentence, ReverseNER features reversing the process by using an LLM to generate entities from their definitions and subsequently expand them into full sentences. During the entity expansion process, the LLM is guided to generate sentences by replicating the structures of a set of specific \textsl{feature sentences}, extracted from the task sentences by clustering. This expansion process produces dozens of entity-labeled task-relevant sentences. After constructing the example library, the method selects several semantically similar entity-labeled examples for each task sentence as references to facilitate the LLM's entity recognition. We also propose an entity-level self-consistency scoring mechanism to improve NER performance with LLMs. Experiments show that ReverseNER significantly outperforms other zero-shot NER methods with LLMs, marking a notable improvement in NER for domains without labeled data, while declining computational resource consumption.

Paperid: 7347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00451.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Cross-Domain NER is the process of leveraging knowledge from data-rich source domains to perform entity recognition on data scarce target domains. Most previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches use pre-trained language models (PLMs) for cross-domain NER. However, these models are often domain specific. To successfully use these models for new target domains, we need to modify either the model architecture or perform model finetuning using data from the new domains. Both of these result in the creation of entirely new NER models for each target domain which is infeasible for practical scenarios. Recently,several works have attempted to use LLMs to solve Few-Shot Cross-Domain NER. However, most of these are either too expensive for practical purposes or struggle to follow LLM prompt instructions. In this paper, we propose IF-WRANER (Instruction Finetuned Word-embedding based Retrieval Augmented large language model for Named Entity Recognition), a retrieval augmented LLM, finetuned for the NER task. By virtue of the regularization techniques used during LLM finetuning and the adoption of word-level embedding over sentence-level embedding during the retrieval of in-prompt examples, IF-WRANER is able to outperform previous SOTA Few-Shot Cross-Domain NER approaches. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model by benchmarking its performance on the open source CrossNER dataset, on which it shows more than 2% F1 score improvement over the previous SOTA model. We have deployed the model for multiple customer care domains of an enterprise. Accurate entity prediction through IF-WRANER helps direct customers to automated workflows for the domains, thereby reducing escalations to human agents by almost 15% and leading to millions of dollars in yearly savings for the company.

Paperid: 7348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00083.pdf

Abstract:
Fast and accurate physics simulation is an essential component of robot learning, where robots can explore failure scenarios that are difficult to produce in the real world and learn from unlimited on-policy data. Yet, it remains challenging to incorporate RGB-color perception into the sim-to-real pipeline that matches the real world in its richness and realism. In this work, we train a robot dog in simulation for visual parkour. We propose a way to use generative models to synthesize diverse and physically accurate image sequences of the scene from the robot's ego-centric perspective. We present demonstrations of zero-shot transfer to the RGB-only observations of the real world on a robot equipped with a low-cost, off-the-shelf color camera. website visit https://lucidsim.github.io

Paperid: 7349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21501.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the problems of Question Answering (QA) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) in five diverse languages. We tested five Large Language Models with various prompting methods, including zero-shot, chain-of-thought reasoning, and translation techniques. Our results show that while some models consistently outperform others, their effectiveness varies significantly across tasks and languages. We saw that advanced prompting techniques generally improved QA performance but had mixed results for NER; and we observed that language difficulty patterns differed between tasks. Our findings highlight the need for task-specific approaches in multilingual NLP and suggest that current models may develop different linguistic competencies for different tasks.

Paperid: 7350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18588.pdf

Abstract:
Leading open-source large language models (LLMs) such as Llama-3.1-Instruct-405B are extremely capable at generating text, answering questions, and solving a variety of natural language understanding tasks. However, they incur higher inference cost and latency compared to smaller LLMs. Knowledge distillation provides a way to use outputs from these large, capable teacher models to train smaller student models which can be used for inference at lower cost and latency, while retaining comparable accuracy. We investigate the efficacy of distillation using the Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct teacher and the smaller Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct student models. Contributions of this work include (a) We evaluate the generalizability of distillation with the above Llama-3.1 teacher-student pairs across different tasks and datasets (b) We show that using synthetic data during distillation significantly improves the accuracy of 8B and 70B models, and when used with reasoning chains, even matches or surpasses the zero-shot accuracy of 405B model on some datasets (c) We empirically show that distillation enables 8B and 70B models to internalize 405B's reasoning ability by using only standard fine-tuning (without customizing any loss function). This allows cost and latency-efficient student model inference. (d) We show pitfalls in evaluation of distillation, and present task-specific evaluation, including both human and LLM-grading, and ground-truth based traditional accuracy benchmarks. This methodical study brings out the fundamental importance of synthetic data quality in knowledge distillation, and of combining multiple, task-specific ways of accuracy and quality evaluation in assessing the effectiveness of distillation.

Paperid: 7351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17624.pdf

Abstract:
Affordances enable robots to have a semantic understanding of their surroundings. This allows them to have more acting flexibility when completing a given task. Capturing object affordances in a machine learning model is a difficult task, because of their dependence on contextual information. Markov Logic Networks (MLN) combine probabilistic reasoning with logic that is able to capture such context. Mobile robots operate in partially known environments wherein unseen object affordances can be observed. This new information must be incorporated into the existing knowledge, without having to retrain the MLN from scratch. We introduce the MLN Cumulative Learning Algorithm (MLN-CLA). MLN-CLA learns new relations in various knowledge domains by retaining knowledge and only updating the changed knowledge, for which the MLN is retrained. We show that MLN-CLA is effective for accumulative learning and zero-shot affordance inference, outperforming strong baselines.

Paperid: 7352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16924.pdf

Abstract:
We present a novel approach to personalized sleep health management using few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation, enabling small-scale language models (> 2B parameters) to rival the performance of large language models (LLMs) in specialized health domains. Our method simultaneously distills problem-solving strategies, long-tail expert knowledge, and personalized recommendation capabilities from larger models into more efficient, compact models. Unlike existing systems, our approach offers three key functionalities: generating personalized sleep health recommendations, supporting user-specific follow-up inquiries, and providing responses to domain-specific knowledge questions. We focus on sleep health due to its measurability via wearable devices and its impact on overall well-being. Our experimental setup, involving GPT-4o for data synthesis, Qwen-max for instruction set creation, and Qwen2.5 1.5B for model distillation, demonstrates significant improvements over baseline small-scale models in penalization, reasoning, and knowledge application. Experiments using 100 simulated sleep reports and 1,000 domain-specific questions shows our model achieves comparable performance to larger models while maintaining efficiency for real-world deployment. This research not only advances AI-driven health management but also provides a novel approach to leveraging LLM capabilities in resource-constrained environments, potentially enhancing the accessibility of personalized healthcare solutions.

Paperid: 7353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16545.pdf

Abstract:
Plane instance segmentation from RGB-D data is a crucial research topic for many downstream tasks. However, most existing deep-learning-based methods utilize only information within the RGB bands, neglecting the important role of the depth band in plane instance segmentation. Based on EfficientSAM, a fast version of SAM, we propose a plane instance segmentation network called PlaneSAM, which can fully integrate the information of the RGB bands (spectral bands) and the D band (geometric band), thereby improving the effectiveness of plane instance segmentation in a multimodal manner. Specifically, we use a dual-complexity backbone, with primarily the simpler branch learning D-band features and primarily the more complex branch learning RGB-band features. Consequently, the backbone can effectively learn D-band feature representations even when D-band training data is limited in scale, retain the powerful RGB-band feature representations of EfficientSAM, and allow the original backbone branch to be fine-tuned for the current task. To enhance the adaptability of our PlaneSAM to the RGB-D domain, we pretrain our dual-complexity backbone using the segment anything task on large-scale RGB-D data through a self-supervised pretraining strategy based on imperfect pseudo-labels. To support the segmentation of large planes, we optimize the loss function combination ratio of EfficientSAM. In addition, Faster R-CNN is used as a plane detector, and its predicted bounding boxes are fed into our dual-complexity network as prompts, thereby enabling fully automatic plane instance segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed PlaneSAM sets a new SOTA performance on the ScanNet dataset, and outperforms previous SOTA approaches in zero-shot transfer on the 2D-3D-S, Matterport3D, and ICL-NUIM RGB-D datasets, while only incurring a 10% increase in computational overhead compared to EfficientSAM.

Paperid: 7354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15440.pdf

Abstract:
In the realm of Large Language Model (LLM) functionalities, providing reliable information is paramount, yet reports suggest that LLM outputs lack consistency. This inconsistency, often at-tributed to randomness in token sampling, under-mines user trust as it leads to varying responses even for identical queries. In this paper, we present a new approach for evaluating semantic consistencies of LLM including comparison of alternative tech-niques. Our approach evaluates whether LLM re-sponses are semantically congruent for a given question, recognizing that as syntactically different sentences may convey the same meaning. Here-tofore, To enhance LLM consistency, two main approaches have been explored: Leverage external knowledge as context like the RAG pattern or use Zero-shot-CoT to improve performance of LLM itself. We apply our evaluation approach to these techniques, and demonstrate to compare the im-pact of these methods on LLM response con-sistency across different domains of question an-swering tasks. Using the TruthfulQA dataset to assess LLM responses, the study induces N re-sponses per question from the LLM and clusters semantically equivalent sentences to measure semantic consistency across 37 categories. Through this, it quantitatively analyzes the effectiveness of the aforementioned methods in improving LLM performance before and after their adoption.

Paperid: 7355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13281.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of transliterated texts in digital spaces has emphasized the need for detecting and classifying hate speech in languages beyond English, particularly in low-resource languages. As online discourse can perpetuate discrimination based on target groups, e.g. gender, religion, and origin, multi-label classification of hateful content can help in comprehending hate motivation and enhance content moderation. While previous efforts have focused on monolingual or binary hate classification tasks, no work has yet addressed the challenge of multi-label hate speech classification in transliterated Bangla. We introduce BanTH, the first multi-label transliterated Bangla hate speech dataset comprising 37.3k samples. The samples are sourced from YouTube comments, where each instance is labeled with one or more target groups, reflecting the regional demographic. We establish novel transformer encoder-based baselines by further pre-training on transliterated Bangla corpus. We also propose a novel translation-based LLM prompting strategy for transliterated text. Experiments reveal that our further pre-trained encoders are achieving state-of-the-art performance on the BanTH dataset, while our translation-based prompting outperforms other strategies in the zero-shot setting. The introduction of BanTH not only fills a critical gap in hate speech research for Bangla but also sets the stage for future exploration into code-mixed and multi-label classification challenges in underrepresented languages.

Paperid: 7356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12840.pdf

Abstract:
Finding answers to legal questions about clauses in contracts is an important form of analysis in many legal workflows (e.g., understanding market trends, due diligence, risk mitigation) but more important is being able to do this at scale. Prior work showed that it is possible to use large language models with simple zero-shot prompts to generate structured answers to questions, which can later be incorporated into legal workflows. Such prompts, while effective on simple and straightforward clauses, fail to perform when the clauses are long and contain information not relevant to the question. In this paper, we propose two-stage prompt chaining to produce structured answers to multiple-choice and multiple-select questions and show that they are more effective than simple prompts on more nuanced legal text. We analyze situations where this technique works well and areas where further refinement is needed, especially when the underlying linguistic variations are more than can be captured by simply specifying possible answers. Finally, we discuss future research that seeks to refine this work by improving stage one results by making them more question-specific.

Paperid: 7357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12577.pdf

Abstract:
Model-driven engineering (MDE) simplifies software development through abstraction, yet challenges such as time constraints, incomplete domain understanding, and adherence to syntactic constraints hinder the design process. This paper presents a study to evaluate the usefulness of a novel approach utilizing large language models (LLMs) and few-shot prompt learning to assist in domain modeling. The aim of this approach is to overcome the need for extensive training of AI-based completion models on scarce domain-specific datasets and to offer versatile support for various modeling activities, providing valuable recommendations to software modelers. To support this approach, we developed MAGDA, a user-friendly tool, through which we conduct a user study and assess the real-world applicability of our approach in the context of domain modeling, offering valuable insights into its usability and effectiveness.

Paperid: 7358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12562.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong performance in image segmentation of natural scene images. However, its effectiveness diminishes markedly when applied to specific scientific domains, such as Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM) images. This decline in accuracy can be attributed to the distinct data distribution and limited availability of the data inherent in the scientific images. On the other hand, the acquisition of adequate SPM datasets is both time-intensive and laborious as well as skill-dependent. To address these challenges, we propose an Adaptive Prompt Learning with SAM (APL-SAM) framework tailored for few-shot SPM image segmentation. Our approach incorporates two key innovations to enhance SAM: 1) An Adaptive Prompt Learning module leverages few-shot embeddings derived from limited support set to learn adaptively central representatives, serving as visual prompts. This innovation eliminates the need for time-consuming online user interactions for providing prompts, such as exhaustively marking points and bounding boxes slice by slice; 2) A multi-source, multi-level mask decoder specifically designed for few-shot SPM image segmentation is introduced, which can effectively capture the correspondence between the support and query images. To facilitate comprehensive training and evaluation, we introduce a new dataset, SPM-Seg, curated for SPM image segmentation. Extensive experiments on this dataset reveal that the proposed APL-SAM framework significantly outperforms the original SAM, achieving over a 30% improvement in terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient with only one-shot guidance. Moreover, APL-SAM surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation methods and even fully supervised approaches in performance. Code and dataset used in this study will be made available upon acceptance.

Paperid: 7359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12476.pdf

Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) exhibits promise in the clinical domain. However, it is constrained by data scarcity and ethical considerations, as the generation of clinical trials presents significant challenges due to stringent privacy regulations, high costs, and the extended duration required for conducting studies with human participants. Despite the advancements of large language models (LLMs) in general generation tasks, their potential in facilitating the generation of synthetic clinical trials is under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel Retrieval-Reasoning few-shot framework that leverages LLMs to generate artificial yet realistic and diverse clinical trials with binary success/failure labels. Experiments conducted on real clinical trials from the \url{ClinicalTrials.gov} database demonstrate that our synthetic data can effectively augment real datasets. Furthermore, by fine-tuning a pre-trained model as a binary classifier on synthetic clinical trial datasets, we demonstrate that this augmentation enhances model training for downstream tasks such as trial outcome prediction. Our findings suggest that LLMs for synthetic clinical trial generation hold promise for accelerating clinical research and upholding ethical standards for patient privacy. The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Retrieval_Reasoning_Clinical_Trial_Generation-3EC4.

Paperid: 7360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12064.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents the results of the LegalLens Shared Task, focusing on detecting legal violations within text in the wild across two sub-tasks: LegalLens-NER for identifying legal violation entities and LegalLens-NLI for associating these violations with relevant legal contexts and affected individuals. Using an enhanced LegalLens dataset covering labor, privacy, and consumer protection domains, 38 teams participated in the task. Our analysis reveals that while a mix of approaches was used, the top-performing teams in both tasks consistently relied on fine-tuning pre-trained language models, outperforming legal-specific models and few-shot methods. The top-performing team achieved a 7.11% improvement in NER over the baseline, while NLI saw a more marginal improvement of 5.7%. Despite these gains, the complexity of legal texts leaves room for further advancements.

Paperid: 7361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11693.pdf

Abstract:
Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive translation performance without requiring fine-tuning on additional parallel corpora. However, they still face significant challenges in certain scenarios, particularly when translating low-resource languages. A common approach to address this issue is to provide external knowledge, such as few-shot examples, to assist LLMs in translating specific source sentences. However, this method is fundamentally limited by the quality or quantity of relevant sources, which cannot always be guaranteed. To reduce LLMs' reliance on external sources, we propose BridG MT, a method that combines Sentence Bridging, which generates a sequence of sentences as a bridge that gradually transition from easy-to-translate to more difficult, and Gradual MT, which sequentially translates these sentences using earlier translations as few-shot examples for subsequent ones. Experiments conducted on four LLMs across seven languages demonstrate that our method effectively enhances translation performance, even outperforming translation methods that rely on a large number of few-shot examples.

Paperid: 7362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11307.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence aids in brain tumor detection via MRI scans, enhancing the accuracy and reducing the workload of medical professionals. However, in scenarios with extremely limited medical images, traditional deep learning approaches tend to fail due to the absence of anomalous images. Anomaly detection also suffers from ineffective feature extraction due to vague training process. Our work introduces a novel two-stage anomaly detection algorithm called CONSULT (CONtrastive Self-sUpervised Learning for few-shot Tumor detection). The first stage of CONSULT fine-tunes a pre-trained feature extractor specifically for MRI brain images, using a synthetic data generation pipeline to create tumor-like data. This process overcomes the lack of anomaly samples and enables the integration of attention mechanisms to focus on anomalous image segments. The first stage is to overcome the shortcomings of current anomaly detection in extracting features in high-variation data by incorporating Context-Aware Contrastive Learning and Self-supervised Feature Adversarial Learning. The second stage of CONSULT uses PatchCore for conventional feature extraction via the fine-tuned weights from the first stage. To summarize, we propose a self-supervised training scheme for anomaly detection, enhancing model performance and data reliability. Furthermore, our proposed contrastive loss, Tritanh Loss, stabilizes learning by offering a unique solution all while enhancing gradient flow. Finally, CONSULT achieves superior performance in few-shot brain tumor detection, demonstrating significant improvements over PatchCore by 9.4%, 12.9%, 10.2%, and 6.0% for 2, 4, 6, and 8 shots, respectively, while training exclusively on healthy images.

Paperid: 7363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09613.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in transformer-based language models have sparked research into their logical reasoning capabilities. Most of the benchmarks used to evaluate these models are simple: generated from short (fragments of) first-order logic sentences with only a few logical operators and quantifiers. We construct the natural language dataset, DELTA$_D$, using the expressive description logic language $\mathcal{ALCQ}$. DELTA$_D$ comprises 384K examples and increases in two dimensions: i) reasoning depth, and ii) linguistic complexity. In this way, we systematically investigate the logical reasoning capabilities of a supervised fine-tuned DeBERTa-based model and two large language models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4) with few-shot prompting. We show that the DeBERTa-based model fine-tuned on our dataset can master the entailment checking task. Moreover, the performance of GPTs can improve significantly even when a small number of samples is provided (9 shots). We open-source our code and datasets.

Paperid: 7364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08549.pdf

Abstract:
Most existing generative models are limited to learning a single probability distribution from the training data and cannot generalize to novel distributions for unseen data. An architecture that can generate samples from both trained datasets and unseen probability distributions would mark a significant breakthrough. Recently, score-based generative models have gained considerable attention for their comprehensive mode coverage and high-quality image synthesis, as they effectively learn an operator that maps a probability distribution to its corresponding score function. In this work, we introduce the $\emph{Score Neural Operator}$, which learns the mapping from multiple probability distributions to their score functions within a unified framework. We employ latent space techniques to facilitate the training of score matching, which tends to over-fit in the original image pixel space, thereby enhancing sample generation quality. Our trained Score Neural Operator demonstrates the ability to predict score functions of probability measures beyond the training space and exhibits strong generalization performance in both 2-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models and 1024-dimensional MNIST double-digit datasets. Importantly, our approach offers significant potential for few-shot learning applications, where a single image from a new distribution can be leveraged to generate multiple distinct images from that distribution.

Paperid: 7365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06898.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are a basic infrastructure for modern natural language processing. Many commercial and open-source LLMs exist for English, e.g., ChatGPT, Llama, Falcon, and Mistral. As these models are trained on mostly English texts, their fluency and knowledge of low-resource languages and societies are superficial. We present the development of large generative language models for a less-resourced language. GaMS 1B - Generative Model for Slovene with 1 billion parameters was created by continuing pretraining of the existing English OPT model. We developed a new tokenizer adapted to Slovene, Croatian, and English languages and used embedding initialization methods FOCUS and WECHSEL to transfer the embeddings from the English OPT model. We evaluate our models on several classification datasets from the Slovene suite of benchmarks and generative sentence simplification task SENTA. We only used a few-shot in-context learning of our models, which are not yet instruction-tuned. For classification tasks, in this mode, the generative models lag behind the existing Slovene BERT-type models fine-tuned for specific tasks. On a sentence simplification task, the GaMS models achieve comparable or better performance than the GPT-3.5-Turbo model.

Paperid: 7366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06355.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel hybrid algorithm designed to interpret natural human commands in tabletop scenarios. By integrating multiple sources of information, including speech, gestures, and scene context, the system extracts actionable instructions for a robot, identifying relevant objects and actions. The system operates in a zero-shot fashion, without reliance on predefined object models, enabling flexible and adaptive use in various environments. We assess the integration of multiple deep learning models, evaluating their suitability for deployment in real-world robotic setups. Our algorithm performs robustly across different tasks, combining language processing with visual grounding. In addition, we release a small dataset of video recordings used to evaluate the system. This dataset captures real-world interactions in which a human provides instructions in natural language to a robot, a contribution to future research on human-robot interaction. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the system, with particular focus on how it handles multimodal command interpretation, and its ability to be integrated into symbolic robotic frameworks for safe and explainable decision-making.

Paperid: 7367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04631.pdf

Abstract:
Linear temporal logic (LTL) has recently been adopted as a powerful formalism for specifying complex, temporally extended tasks in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL). However, learning policies that efficiently satisfy arbitrary specifications not observed during training remains a challenging problem. Existing approaches suffer from several shortcomings: they are often only applicable to finite-horizon fragments of LTL, are restricted to suboptimal solutions, and do not adequately handle safety constraints. In this work, we propose a novel learning approach to address these concerns. Our method leverages the structure of BÃ¼chi automata, which explicitly represent the semantics of LTL specifications, to learn policies conditioned on sequences of truth assignments that lead to satisfying the desired formulae. Experiments in a variety of discrete and continuous domains demonstrate that our approach is able to zero-shot satisfy a wide range of finite- and infinite-horizon specifications, and outperforms existing methods in terms of both satisfaction probability and efficiency. Code available at: https://deep-ltl.github.io/

Paperid: 7368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04075.pdf

Abstract:
Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) requires target tokens to be generated in real-time as streaming source tokens are consumed. Traditional approaches to SiMT typically require sophisticated architectures and extensive parameter configurations for training adaptive read/write policies, which in turn demand considerable computational power and memory. We propose PsFuture, the first zero-shot adaptive read/write policy for SiMT, enabling the translation model to independently determine read/write actions without the necessity for additional training. Furthermore, we introduce a novel training strategy, Prefix-to-Full (P2F), specifically tailored to adjust offline translation models for SiMT applications, exploiting the advantages of the bidirectional attention mechanism inherent in offline models. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot policy attains performance on par with strong baselines and the P2F method can further enhance performance, achieving an outstanding trade-off between translation quality and latency.

Paperid: 7369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02210.pdf

Abstract:
While in-context learning with large language models (LLMs) has shown impressive performance, we have discovered a unique miscalibration behavior where both correct and incorrect predictions are assigned the same level of confidence. We refer to this phenomenon as indiscriminate miscalibration. We found that traditional calibration metrics, such as Expected Calibrated Errors (ECEs), are unable to capture this behavior effectively. To address this issue, we propose new metrics to measure the severity of indiscriminate miscalibration. Additionally, we develop a novel in-context comparative inference method to alleviate miscalibrations and improve classification performance. Through extensive experiments on five datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve more accurate and calibrated predictions compared to regular zero-shot and few-shot prompting.

Paperid: 7370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01335.pdf

Abstract:
Model merging, such as model souping, is the practice of combining different models with the same architecture together without further training. In this work, we present a model merging methodology that addresses the difficulty of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for target tasks in non-English languages, where task-specific data is often unavailable. We focus on mathematical reasoning and without in-language math data, facilitate cross-lingual transfer by composing language and math capabilities. Starting from the same pretrained model, we fine-tune separate "experts" on math instruction data in English and on generic instruction data in the target language. We then replace the top and bottom transformer layers of the math expert directly with layers from the language expert, which consequently enhances math performance in the target language. The resulting merged models outperform the individual experts and other merging methods on the math benchmark, MGSM, by 10% across four major languages where math instruction data is scarce. In addition, this layer swapping is simple, inexpensive, and intuitive, as it is based on an interpretative analysis of the most important parameter changes during the fine-tuning of each expert. The ability to successfully re-compose LLMs for cross-lingual transfer in this manner opens up future possibilities to combine model expertise, create modular solutions, and transfer reasoning capabilities across languages all post hoc.

Paperid: 7371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20042.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic short answer scoring (ASAS) helps reduce the grading burden on educators but often lacks detailed, explainable feedback. Existing methods in ASAS with feedback (ASAS-F) rely on fine-tuning language models with limited datasets, which is resource-intensive and struggles to generalize across contexts. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) have focused on scoring without extensive fine-tuning. However, they often rely heavily on prompt engineering and either fail to generate elaborated feedback or do not adequately evaluate it. In this paper, we propose a modular retrieval augmented generation based ASAS-F system that scores answers and generates feedback in strict zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. We design our system to be adaptable to various educational tasks without extensive prompt engineering using an automatic prompt generation framework. Results show an improvement in scoring accuracy by 9\% on unseen questions compared to fine-tuning, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution.

Paperid: 7372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19795.pdf

Abstract:
We present the Duke Humanoid, an open-source 10-degrees-of-freedom humanoid, as an extensible platform for locomotion research. The design mimics human physiology, with symmetrical body alignment in the frontal plane to maintain static balance with straight knees. We develop a reinforcement learning policy that can be deployed zero-shot on the hardware for velocity-tracking walking tasks. Additionally, to enhance energy efficiency in locomotion, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning algorithm that encourages the robot to leverage passive dynamics. Our experimental results show that our passive policy reduces the cost of transport by up to $50\%$ in simulation and $31\%$ in real-world tests. Our website is http://generalroboticslab.com/DukeHumanoidv1/ .

Paperid: 7373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19020.pdf

Abstract:
The scarcity of domain-specific dialogue datasets limits the development of dialogue systems across applications. Existing research is constrained by general or niche datasets that lack sufficient scale for training dialogue systems. To address this gap, we introduce DiaSynth - a synthetic dialogue generation framework capable of generating high-quality, contextually rich dialogues across a wide range of domains. Unlike existing frameworks, DiaSynth uses Large Language Models (LLMs) and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning to generate dynamic, domain-specific dialogues with simulated personas and diverse conversational features. We perform our experiments by generating synthetic data using different LLMs and few-shot examples from DialogSum and SAMSum. The pretrained language models fine-tuned on the synthetic data outperform the base models by 16.47% on dialogue summarization, while the comparison between models fine-tuned on in-domain data and synthetic data shows that the synthetic data is able to capture 90.48% of the performance distribution of the in-domain data on dialogue summarization. The quality of the data generated also increases as we increase the size of LLM from 3B to 8B. These results validate DiaSynth's potential as a robust alternative to traditional data collection methods. We open source the code and data generated for future research.

Paperid: 7374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17683.pdf

Abstract:
Introduction: Medication prescriptions are often in free text and include a mix of two languages, local brand names, and a wide range of idiosyncratic formats and abbreviations. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising ability to generate text in response to input prompts. We use ChatGPT 3.5 to automatically structure and expand medication statements in discharge summaries and thus make them easier to interpret for people and machines. Methods: Named-entity Recognition (NER) and Text Expansion (EX) are used in a zero- and few-shot setting with different prompt strategies. 100 medication statements were manually annotated and curated. NER performance was measured by using strict and partial matching. For the task EX, two experts interpreted the results by assessing semantic equivalence between original and expanded statements. The model performance was measured by precision, recall, and F1 score. Results: For NER, the best-performing prompt reached an average F1 score of 0.94 in the test set. For EX, the few-shot prompt showed superior performance among other prompts, with an average F1 score of 0.87. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates good performance for NER and EX tasks in free-text medication statements using ChatGPT. Compared to a zero-shot baseline, a few-shot approach prevented the system from hallucinating, which would be unacceptable when processing safety-relevant medication data.

Paperid: 7375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.17640.pdf

Abstract:
Long text summarization, gradually being essential for efficiently processing large volumes of information, stays challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and LLaMA families because of the insufficient open-sourced training datasets and the high requirement of contextual details dealing. To address the issue, we design a novel zero-shot transfer learning framework, abbreviated as T3, to iteratively training a baseline LLM on an assistant task for the target task, where the former should own richer data resources and share structural or semantic similarity with the latter. In practice, T3 is approached to deal with the long text summarization task by utilizing question answering as the assistant task, and further validated its effectiveness on the BBC summary, NarraSum, FairytaleQA, and NLQuAD datasets, with up to nearly 14% improvement in ROUGE, 35% improvement in BLEU, and 16% improvement in Factscore compared to three baseline LLMs, demonstrating its potential for more assistant-target task combinations.

Paperid: 7376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15861.pdf

Abstract:
Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is crucial for understanding user needs and executing appropriate system actions in task-oriented dialogues. Majority of existing DST methods are designed to work within predefined ontologies and assume the availability of gold domain labels, struggling with adapting to new slots values. While Large Language Models (LLMs)-based systems show promising zero-shot DST performance, they either require extensive computational resources or they underperform existing fully-trained systems, limiting their practicality. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-shot, open-vocabulary system that integrates domain classification and DST in a single pipeline. Our approach includes reformulating DST as a question-answering task for less capable models and employing self-refining prompts for more adaptable ones. Our system does not rely on fixed slot values defined in the ontology allowing the system to adapt dynamically. We compare our approach with existing SOTA, and show that it provides up to 20% better Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) over previous methods on datasets like Multi-WOZ 2.1, with up to 90% fewer requests to the LLM API.

Paperid: 7377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15090.pdf

Abstract:
Cutting-edge abstractive summarisers generate fluent summaries, but the factuality of the generated text is not guaranteed. Early summary factuality evaluation metrics are usually based on n-gram overlap and embedding similarity, but are reported fail to align with human annotations. Therefore, many techniques for detecting factual inconsistencies build pipelines around natural language inference (NLI) or question-answering (QA) models with additional supervised learning steps. In this paper, we revisit similarity-based metrics, showing that this failure stems from the comparison text selection and its granularity. We propose a new zero-shot factuality evaluation metric, Sentence-BERT Score (SBERTScore), which compares sentences between the summary and the source document. It outperforms widely-used word-word metrics including BERTScore and can compete with existing NLI and QA-based factuality metrics on the benchmark without needing any fine-tuning. Our experiments indicate that each technique has different strengths, with SBERTScore particularly effective in identifying correct summaries. We demonstrate how a combination of techniques is more effective in detecting various types of error.

Paperid: 7378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14556.pdf

Abstract:
As an important component of data exploration and integration, Column Type Annotation (CTA) aims to label columns of a table with one or more semantic types. With the recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have started to explore the possibility of using LLMs for CTA, leveraging their strong zero-shot capabilities. In this paper, we build on this promising work and improve on LLM-based methods for CTA by showing how to use a Knowledge Graph (KG) to augment the context information provided to the LLM. Our approach, called RACOON, combines both pre-trained parametric and non-parametric knowledge during generation to improve LLMs' performance on CTA. Our experiments show that RACOON achieves up to a 0.21 micro F-1 improvement compared against vanilla LLM inference.

Paperid: 7379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13735.pdf

Abstract:
Socially Unacceptable Discourse (SUD) analysis is crucial for maintaining online positive environments. We investigate the effectiveness of Entailment-based zero-shot text classification (unsupervised method) for SUD detection and characterization by leveraging pre-trained transformer models and prompting techniques. The results demonstrate good generalization capabilities of these models to unseen data and highlight the promising nature of this approach for generating labeled datasets for the analysis and characterization of extremist narratives. The findings of this research contribute to the development of robust tools for studying SUD and promoting responsible communication online.

Paperid: 7380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13697.pdf

Abstract:
Two primary ways to change LLM behavior are prompting and weight updates (e.g., fine-tuning). Prompting LLMs is simple and effective, specifying the desired changes explicitly in natural language, whereas weight updates provide more expressive and permanent behavior changes, specified implicitly via training on large datasets. We present a technique for "baking" prompts into the weights of an LLM. Prompt Baking converts a prompt $u$ and initial weights $Î¸$ to a new set of weights $Î¸_u$ such that new "baked" LLM behaves like the original prompted LLM. Mathematically, we minimize the KL divergence between $P_Î¸(\cdot | u)$ and $P_{Î¸_u}(\cdot)$, where $P$ is the LLM's probability distribution over token sequences. Across all our experiments, we find prompts can be readily baked into weight updates. Baking chain-of-thought prompts improves zero-shot performance on GSM8K, ASDiv, MBPP, ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, and CommonsenseQA benchmarks. Baking news headlines directly updates an LLM's knowledge. And baking instructions & personas alleviates "prompt forgetting" over long sequences. Furthermore, stopping baking early creates "half-baked" models, continuously scaling prompt strength. Baked models retain their sensitivity to further prompting and baking, including re-prompting with the baked-in prompt. Surprisingly, the re-prompted models yield further performance gains in instruction following, as well as math reasoning and coding benchmarks. Taking re-prompting and re-baking to the limit yields a form of iterative self-improvement we call Prompt Pursuit, and preliminary results on instruction following exhibit dramatic performance gains. Finally, we discuss implications for AI safety, continuous model updating, enhancing real-time learning capabilities in LLM-based agents, and generating more stable AI personas.

Paperid: 7381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13242.pdf

Abstract:
Nowadays, the enhanced capabilities of in-expensive imaging devices have led to a tremendous increase in the acquisition and sharing of multimedia content over the Internet. Despite advances in imaging sensor technology, annoying conditions like \textit{occlusions} hamper photography and may deteriorate the performance of applications such as surveillance, detection, and recognition. Occlusion segmentation is difficult because of scale variations, illumination changes, and so on. Similarly, recovering a scene from foreground occlusions also poses significant challenges due to the complexity of accurately estimating the occluded regions and maintaining coherence with the surrounding context. In particular, image de-fencing presents its own set of challenges because of the diverse variations in shape, texture, color, patterns, and the often cluttered environment. This study focuses on the automatic detection and removal of occlusions from a single image. We propose a fully automatic, two-stage convolutional neural network for fence segmentation and occlusion completion. We leverage generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize realistic content, including both structure and texture, in a single shot for inpainting. To assess zero-shot generalization, we evaluated our trained occlusion detection model on our proposed fence-like occlusion segmentation dataset. The dataset can be found on GitHub.

Paperid: 7382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10554.pdf

Abstract:
Our research investigates the challenges Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) faces in complex, Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) such as autonomous driving (AD), and proposes a solution for vision-based navigation in these environments. Partial observability reduces RL performance significantly, and this can be mitigated by augmenting sensor information and data fusion to reflect a more Markovian environment. However, this necessitates an increasingly complex perception module, whose training via RL is complicated due to inherent limitations. As the neural network architecture becomes more complex, the reward function's effectiveness as an error signal diminishes since the only source of supervision is the reward, which is often noisy, sparse, and delayed. Task-irrelevant elements in images, such as the sky or certain objects, pose additional complexities. Our research adopts an offline-trained encoder to leverage large video datasets through self-supervised learning to learn generalizable representations. Then, we train a head network on top of these representations through DRL to learn to control an ego vehicle in the CARLA AD simulator. This study presents a broad investigation of the impact of different learning schemes for offline-training of encoders on the performance of DRL agents in challenging AD tasks. Furthermore, we show that the features learned by watching BDD100K driving videos can be directly transferred to achieve lane following and collision avoidance in CARLA simulator, in a zero-shot learning fashion. Finally, we explore the impact of various architectural decisions for the RL networks to utilize the transferred representations efficiently. Therefore, in this work, we introduce and validate an optimal way for obtaining suitable representations of the environment, and transferring them to RL networks.

Paperid: 7383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08410.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce a strategy that frames the sequential action selection problem for robots in terms of resolving \textit{blocking conditions}, i.e., situations that impede progress on an action en route to a goal. This strategy allows a robot to make one-at-a-time decisions that take in pertinent contextual information and swiftly adapt and react to current situations. We present a first instantiation of this strategy that combines a state-transition graph and a zero-shot Large Language Model (LLM). The state-transition graph tracks which previously attempted actions are currently blocked and which candidate actions may resolve existing blocking conditions. This information from the state-transition graph is used to automatically generate a prompt for the LLM, which then uses the given context and set of possible actions to select a single action to try next. This selection process is iterative, with each chosen and executed action further refining the state-transition graph, continuing until the agent either fulfills the goal or encounters a termination condition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by comparing it to various LLM and traditional task-planning methods in a testbed of simulation experiments. We discuss the implications of our work based on our results.

Paperid: 7384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08351.pdf

Abstract:
Humans excel at building generalizations of new concepts from just one single example. Contrary to this, current computer vision models typically require large amount of training samples to achieve a comparable accuracy. In this work we present a Bayesian model of perception that learns using only minimal data, a prototypical probabilistic program of an object. Specifically, we propose a generative inverse graphics model of primitive shapes, to infer posterior distributions over physically consistent parameters from one or several images. We show how this representation can be used for downstream tasks such as few-shot classification and pose estimation. Our model outperforms existing few-shot neural-only classification algorithms and demonstrates generalization across varying lighting conditions, backgrounds, and out-of-distribution shapes. By design, our model is uncertainty-aware and uses our new differentiable renderer for optimizing global scene parameters through gradient descent, sampling posterior distributions over object parameters with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and using a neural based likelihood function.

Paperid: 7385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07730.pdf

Abstract:
In the realm of digital music, using tags to efficiently organize and retrieve music from extensive databases is crucial for music catalog owners. Human tagging by experts is labor-intensive but mostly accurate, whereas automatic tagging through supervised learning has approached satisfying accuracy but is restricted to a predefined set of training tags. Few-shot learning offers a viable solution to expand beyond this small set of predefined tags by enabling models to learn from only a few human-provided examples to understand tag meanings and subsequently apply these tags autonomously. We propose to integrate few-shot learning methodology into multi-label music auto-tagging by using features from pre-trained models as inputs to a lightweight linear classifier, also known as a linear probe. We investigate different popular pre-trained features, as well as different few-shot parametrizations with varying numbers of classes and samples per class. Our experiments demonstrate that a simple model with pre-trained features can achieve performance close to state-of-the-art models while using significantly less training data, such as 20 samples per tag. Additionally, our linear probe performs competitively with leading models when trained on the entire training dataset. The results show that this transfer learning-based few-shot approach could effectively address the issue of automatically assigning long-tail tags with only limited labeled data.

Paperid: 7386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07480.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal language modeling has enabled breakthroughs for representation learning, yet remains unexplored in the realm of functional brain data for clinical phenotyping. This paper pioneers EEG-language models (ELMs) trained on clinical reports and 15000 EEGs. We propose to combine multimodal alignment in this novel domain with timeseries cropping and text segmentation, enabling an extension based on multiple instance learning to alleviate misalignment between irrelevant EEG or text segments. Our multimodal models significantly improve over EEG-only models across four clinical evaluations and for the first time enable zero-shot classification as well as retrieval of both neural signals and reports. In sum, these results highlight the potential of ELMs, representing significant progress for clinical applications.

Paperid: 7387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06267.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we discuss Mahalanobis k-NN: A Statistical Lens designed to address the challenges of feature matching in learning-based point cloud registration when confronted with an arbitrary density of point clouds. We tackle this by adopting Mahalanobis k-NN's inherent property to capture the distribution of the local neighborhood and surficial geometry. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into any local-graph-based point cloud analysis method. In this paper, we focus on two distinct methodologies: Deep Closest Point (DCP) and Deep Universal Manifold Embedding (DeepUME). Our extensive benchmarking on the ModelNet40 and FAUST datasets highlights the efficacy of the proposed method in point cloud registration tasks. Moreover, we establish for the first time that the features acquired through point cloud registration inherently can possess discriminative capabilities. This is evident by a substantial improvement of about 20% in the average accuracy observed in the point cloud few-shot classification task, benchmarked on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN.

Paperid: 7388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05990.pdf

Abstract:
We present a Fair Housing and Fair Lending dataset (FairHome): A dataset with around 75,000 examples across 9 protected categories. To the best of our knowledge, FairHome is the first publicly available dataset labeled with binary labels for compliance risk in the housing domain. We demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of such a dataset by training a classifier and using it to detect potential violations when using a large language model (LLM) in the context of real-estate transactions. We benchmark the trained classifier against state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLaMA-3, and Mistral Large in both zero-shot and few-shot contexts. Our classifier outperformed with an F1-score of 0.91, underscoring the effectiveness of our dataset.

Paperid: 7389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04081.pdf

Abstract:
Generating user intent from a sequence of user interface (UI) actions is a core challenge in comprehensive UI understanding. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in this area, but their demands for extensive model parameters, computing power, and high latency makes them impractical for scenarios requiring lightweight, on-device solutions with low latency or heightened privacy. Additionally, the lack of high-quality datasets has hindered the development of such lightweight models. To address these challenges, we propose UI-JEPA, a novel framework that employs masking strategies to learn abstract UI embeddings from unlabeled data through self-supervised learning, combined with an LLM decoder fine-tuned for user intent prediction. We also introduce two new UI-grounded multimodal datasets, "Intent in the Wild" (IIW) and "Intent in the Tame" (IIT), designed for few-shot and zero-shot UI understanding tasks. IIW consists of 1.7K videos across 219 intent categories, while IIT contains 914 videos across 10 categories. We establish the first baselines for these datasets, showing that representations learned using a JEPA-style objective, combined with an LLM decoder, can achieve user intent predictions that match the performance of state-of-the-art large MLLMs, but with significantly reduced annotation and deployment resources. Measured by intent similarity scores, UI-JEPA outperforms GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet by 10.0% and 7.2% respectively, averaged across two datasets. Notably, UI-JEPA accomplishes the performance with a 50.5x reduction in computational cost and a 6.6x improvement in latency in the IIW dataset. These results underscore the effectiveness of UI-JEPA, highlighting its potential for lightweight, high-performance UI understanding.

Paperid: 7390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04073.pdf

Abstract:
Entity matching (EM) is the problem of determining whether two records refer to same real-world entity, which is crucial in data integration, e.g., for product catalogs or address databases. A major drawback of many EM approaches is their dependence on labelled examples. We thus focus on the challenging setting of zero-shot entity matching where no labelled examples are available for an unseen target dataset. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results for zero-shot EM, but their low throughput and high deployment cost limit their applicability and scalability. We revisit the zero-shot EM problem with AnyMatch, a small language model fine-tuned in a transfer learning setup. We propose several novel data selection techniques to generate fine-tuning data for our model, e.g., by selecting difficult pairs to match via an AutoML filter, by generating additional attribute-level examples, and by controlling label imbalance in the data. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the prediction quality and deployment cost of our model, in a comparison to thirteen baselines on nine benchmark datasets. We find that AnyMatch provides competitive prediction quality despite its small parameter size: it achieves the second-highest F1 score overall, and outperforms several other approaches that employ models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Furthermore, our approach exhibits major cost benefits: the average prediction quality of AnyMatch is within 4.4% of the state-of-the-art method MatchGPT with the proprietary trillion-parameter model GPT-4, yet AnyMatch requires four orders of magnitude less parameters and incurs a 3,899 times lower inference cost (in dollars per 1,000 tokens).

Paperid: 7391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02958.pdf

Abstract:
Large pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of image classification tasks, without requiring retraining. Few-shot CLIP is competitive with existing specialized architectures that were trained on the downstream tasks. Recent research demonstrates that the performance of CLIP can be further improved using lightweight adaptation approaches. However, previous methods adapt different modalities of the CLIP model individually, ignoring the interactions and relationships between visual and textual representations. In this work, we propose Multi-Modal Adapter, an approach for Multi-Modal adaptation of CLIP. Specifically, we add a trainable Multi-Head Attention layer that combines text and image features to produce an additive adaptation of both. Multi-Modal Adapter demonstrates improved generalizability, based on its performance on unseen classes compared to existing adaptation methods. We perform additional ablations and investigations to validate and interpret the proposed approach.

Paperid: 7392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02708.pdf

Abstract:
Data scarcity poses a serious threat to modern machine learning and artificial intelligence, as their practical success typically relies on the availability of big datasets. One effective strategy to mitigate the issue of insufficient data is to first harness information from other data sources possessing certain similarities in the study design stage, and then employ the multi-task or meta learning framework in the analysis stage. In this paper, we focus on multi-task (or multi-source) linear models whose coefficients across tasks share an invariant low-rank component, a popular structural assumption considered in the recent multi-task or meta learning literature. Under this assumption, we propose a new algorithm, called Meta Subspace Pursuit (abbreviated as Meta-SP), that provably learns this invariant subspace shared by different tasks. Under this stylized setup for multi-task or meta learning, we establish both the algorithmic and statistical guarantees of the proposed method. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted, comparing Meta-SP against several competing methods, including popular, off-the-shelf model-agnostic meta learning algorithms such as ANIL. These experiments demonstrate that Meta-SP achieves superior performance over the competing methods in various aspects.

Paperid: 7393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02078.pdf

Abstract:
Social scientists quickly adopted large language models due to their ability to annotate documents without supervised training, an ability known as zero-shot learning. However, due to their compute demands, cost, and often proprietary nature, these models are often at odds with replication and open science standards. This paper introduces the Political DEBATE (DeBERTa Algorithm for Textual Entailment) language models for zero-shot and few-shot classification of political documents. These models are not only as good, or better than, state-of-the art large language models at zero and few-shot classification, but are orders of magnitude more efficient and completely open source. By training the models on a simple random sample of 10-25 documents, they can outperform supervised classifiers trained on hundreds or thousands of documents and state-of-the-art generative models with complex, engineered prompts. Additionally, we release the PolNLI dataset used to train these models -- a corpus of over 200,000 political documents with highly accurate labels across over 800 classification tasks.

Paperid: 7394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01930.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency across diverse tasks but often require targeted adaptations for specific applications. Various methods have been proposed to facilitate this adaptation, including fewshot fine-tuning, in-context learning, and context distillation. This paper specifically investigates context distillation a method that extends the utility of task-specific examples by internalizing them, thus augmenting the example set accessible for model inference. We conduct a comparative analysis of context distillation with in-context learning (ICL) and few-shot fine-tuning (FT), aiming to ascertain the efficacy of context distillation in adapting models using minimal in-context examples. Employing matched datasets from Mobach, our experiments leverage OPT models of various sizes. The results indicate that context distillation effectively adapts models, with student models attaining comparable in-domain and out-of-domain accuracies to in-context learning. Although context distillation surpasses ICL in out-of-domain generalization, it does not achieve the performance levels of FT. However, the reduced dataset size and computational demands position context distillation as a viable alternative, especially for smaller datasets. Overall, this study presents context distillation as an efficient and potent method for customizing LLMs to specific tasks.

Paperid: 7395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01037.pdf

Abstract:
Metaphor and sarcasm are common figurative expressions in people's communication, especially on the Internet or the memes popular among teenagers. We create a new benchmark named NYK-MS (NewYorKer for Metaphor and Sarcasm), which contains 1,583 samples for metaphor understanding tasks and 1,578 samples for sarcasm understanding tasks. These tasks include whether it contains metaphor/sarcasm, which word or object contains metaphor/sarcasm, what does it satirize and why does it contains metaphor/sarcasm, all of the 7 tasks are well-annotated by at least 3 annotators. We annotate the dataset for several rounds to improve the consistency and quality, and use GUI and GPT-4V to raise our efficiency. Based on the benchmark, we conduct plenty of experiments. In the zero-shot experiments, we show that Large Language Models (LLM) and Large Multi-modal Models (LMM) can't do classification task well, and as the scale increases, the performance on other 5 tasks improves. In the experiments on traditional pre-train models, we show the enhancement with augment and alignment methods, which prove our benchmark is consistent with previous dataset and requires the model to understand both of the two modalities.

Paperid: 7396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00845.pdf

Abstract:
Pre-trained on extensive and diverse multi-modal datasets, 2D foundation models excel at addressing 2D tasks with little or no downstream supervision, owing to their robust representations. The emergence of 2D-to-3D distillation frameworks has extended these capabilities to 3D models. However, distilling 3D representations for autonomous driving datasets presents challenges like self-similarity, class imbalance, and point cloud sparsity, hindering the effectiveness of contrastive distillation, especially in zero-shot learning contexts. Whereas other methodologies, such as similarity-based distillation, enhance zero-shot performance, they tend to yield less discriminative representations, diminishing few-shot performance. We investigate the gap in structure between the 2D and the 3D representations that result from state-of-the-art distillation frameworks and reveal a significant mismatch between the two. Additionally, we demonstrate that the observed structural gap is negatively correlated with the efficacy of the distilled representations on zero-shot and few-shot 3D semantic segmentation. To bridge this gap, we propose a relational distillation framework enforcing intra-modal and cross-modal constraints, resulting in distilled 3D representations that closely capture the structure of the 2D representation. This alignment significantly enhances 3D representation performance over those learned through contrastive distillation in zero-shot segmentation tasks. Furthermore, our relational loss consistently improves the quality of 3D representations in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution few-shot segmentation tasks, outperforming approaches that rely on the similarity loss.

Paperid: 7397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00301.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies aimed at improving safety in transportation systems. While AVs have been deployed in the real-world to some extent, a full-scale deployment requires AVs to robustly navigate through challenges like heavy rain, snow, low lighting, construction zones and GPS signal loss in tunnels. To be able to handle these specific challenges, an AV must reliably recognize the physical attributes of the environment in which it operates. In this paper, we define context recognition as the task of accurately identifying environmental attributes for an AV to appropriately deal with them. Specifically, we define 24 environmental contexts capturing a variety of weather, lighting, traffic and road conditions that an AV must be aware of. Motivated by the need to recognize environmental contexts, we create a context recognition dataset called DrivingContexts with more than 1.6 million context-query pairs relevant for an AV. Since traditional supervised computer vision approaches do not scale well to a variety of contexts, we propose a framework called ContextVLM that uses vision-language models to detect contexts using zero- and few-shot approaches. ContextVLM is capable of reliably detecting relevant driving contexts with an accuracy of more than 95% on our dataset, while running in real-time on a 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU on an AV with a latency of 10.5 ms per query.

Paperid: 7398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21334.pdf

Abstract:
Vision foundation models trained on discretely sampled images achieve strong performance on classification benchmarks, yet whether their representations encode the continuous processes underlying their training data remains unclear. This question is especially pertinent in computational pathology, where we posit that models whose latent representations implicitly capture continuous disease progression may better reflect underlying biology, support more robust generalization, and enable quantitative analyses of features associated with disease transitions. Using diffusion pseudotime, a method developed to infer developmental trajectories from single-cell transcriptomics, we probe whether foundation models organize disease states along coherent progression directions in representation space. Across four cancer progressions and six models, we find that all pathology-specific models recover trajectory orderings significantly exceeding null baselines, with vision-only models achieving the highest fidelities $(τ> 0.78$ on CRC-Serrated). Model rankings by trajectory fidelity on reference diseases strongly predict few-shot classification performance on held-out diseases ($ρ= 0.92$), and exploratory analysis shows cell-type composition varies smoothly along inferred trajectories in patterns consistent with known stromal remodeling. Together, these results demonstrate that vision foundation models can implicitly learn to represent continuous processes from independent static observations, and that trajectory fidelity provides a complementary measure of representation quality beyond downstream performance. While demonstrated in pathology, this framework could be applied to other domains where continuous processes are observed through static snapshots.

Paperid: 7399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19287.pdf

Abstract:
While prior work has examined the generation capabilities of Agentic AI systems, little is known about how reviewers respond to AI-authored code in practice. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study of code review dynamics in agent-generated PRs. Using a curated subset of the AIDev dataset, we analyze 19,450 inline review comments spanning 3,177 agent-authored PRs from real-world GitHub repositories. We first derive a taxonomy of 12 review comment themes using topic modeling combined with large language model (LLM)-assisted semantic clustering and consolidation. According to this taxonomy, we then investigate whether zero-shot prompts to LLM can reliably annotate review comments. Our evaluation against human annotations shows that open-source LLM achieves reasonably high exact match (78.63%), macro F1 score (0.78), and substantial agreement with human annotators at the review comment level. At the PR level, the LLM also correctly identifies the dominant review theme with 78% Top-1 accuracy and achieves an average Jaccard similarity of 0.76, indicating strong alignment with human judgments. Applying this annotation pipeline at scale, we find that apart from functional correctness and logical changes, reviews of agent-authored PRs predominantly focus on documentation gaps, refactoring needs, styling and formatting issues, with testing and security-related concerns. These findings suggest that while AI agents can accelerate code production, there remain gaps requiring targeted human review oversight.

Paperid: 7400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18974.pdf

Abstract:
Traffic shaping and Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement are critical for managing bandwidth, latency, and fairness in networks. These tasks often rely on low-level traffic control settings, which require manual setup and technical expertise. This paper presents an automated framework that converts high-level traffic shaping intents in natural or declarative language into valid and correct traffic control rules. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first end-to-end pipeline that ties intent translation in a queuing-theoretic semantic model and, with a rule-based critic, yields deployable Linux traffic control configuration sets. The framework has three steps: (1) a queuing simulation with priority scheduling and Active Queue Management (AQM) builds a semantic model; (2) a language model, using this semantic model and a traffic profile, generates sub-intents and configuration rules; and (3) a rule-based critic checks and adjusts the rules for correctness and policy compliance. We evaluate multiple language models by generating traffic control commands from business intents that comply with relevant standards for traffic control protocols. Experimental results on 100 intents show significant gains, with LLaMA3 reaching 0.88 semantic similarity and 0.87 semantic coverage, outperforming other models by over 30\. A thorough sensitivity study demonstrates that AQM-guided prompting reduces variability threefold compared to zero-shot baselines.

Paperid: 7401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18800.pdf

Abstract:
Triad magnetometer components change with sensor attitude even when the IGRF total intensity target stays invariant. NavFormer forecasts this invariant target with rotation invariant scalar features and a Canonical SPD module that stabilizes the spectrum of window level second moments of the triads without sign discontinuities. The module builds a canonical frame from a Gram matrix per window and applies state dependent spectral scaling in the original coordinates. Experiments across five flights show lower error than strong baselines in standard training, few shot training, and zero shot transfer. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NavFormer-Robust-IGRF-Forecasting-for-Autonomous-Navigators-0765

Paperid: 7402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17670.pdf

Abstract:
This work investigates generative mathematical programming through the lens of Algebraic Modelling Languages (AMLs) and compiler-guided model synthesis. By leveraging PyOPL, an OPL-like AML compiler that provides detailed syntax diagnostics, we introduce SyntAGM, an end-to-end system that translates natural language problem descriptions into PyOPL models via a generate--compile--assess--revise loop. SyntAGM is grammar-aware thanks to in-context exposure to the PyOPL BNF grammar, and benefits from few-shot retrieval of literate PyOPL model exemplars. To obtain a valid PyOPL model that matches the problem description, SyntAGM mobilises compiler feedback and an LLM-based alignment judge. In a comparative study against established prompting baselines SyntAGM achieves competitive accuracy with superior token, cost, and latency profiles.

Paperid: 7403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17664.pdf

Abstract:
Urdu, spoken by 230 million people worldwide, lacks dedicated transformer-based language models and curated corpora. While multilingual models provide limited Urdu support, they suffer from poor performance, high computational costs, and cultural inaccuracies due to insufficient training data. To address these challenges, we present UrduLM, a pretrained Urdu monolingual language model trained in low-resource settings. We curate a 33GB Urdu corpus from diverse sources, develop a custom BPE tokenizer that reduces tokenization overhead by atleast 20-30% compared to multilingual alternatives, and pretrain a 100M-parameter decoder-only model. In few-shot evaluations, UrduLM achieves competitive performance with multilingual models up to 30x its size, reaching 66.6% accuracy on sentiment classification and BLEU scores exceeding 30 on grammar correction tasks. The complete methodology -- including corpus, tokenizer, model weights, and evaluation benchmarks -- is released openly to establish a baseline for Urdu NLP research and provide a scalable framework for other underrepresented languages.

Paperid: 7404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17348.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive applications, yet their behavior with respect to disability remains underexplored. We study disability aware descriptions for person centric images, where models often transition from evidence grounded factual description to interpretation shift including introduction of unsupported inferences beyond observable visual evidence. To systematically analyze this phenomenon, we introduce a benchmark based on paired Neutral Prompts (NP) and Disability-Contextualised Prompts (DP) and evaluate 15 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs under a zero-shot setting across 9 disability categories. Our evaluation framework treats interpretive fidelity as core objective and combines standard text-based metrics capturing affective degradation through shifts in sentiment, social regard and response length with an LLM-as-judge protocol, validated by annotators with lived experience of disability. We find that introducing disability context consistently degrades interpretive fidelity, inducing interpretation shifts characterised by speculative inference, narrative elaboration, affective degradation and deficit oriented framing. These effects are further amplified along race and gender dimension. Finally, we demonstrate targeted prompting and preference fine-tuning effectively improves interpretive fidelity and reduces substantially interpretation shifts.

Paperid: 7405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17188.pdf

Abstract:
The unification of symbolic reasoning and neural networks remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Symbolic systems offer reliability and interpretability but lack scalability, while neural networks provide learning capabilities but sacrifice transparency. Tensor Logic, proposed by Domingos, suggests that logical rules and Einstein summation are mathematically equivalent, offering a principled path toward unification. This paper provides empirical validation of this framework through three experiments. First, we demonstrate the equivalence between recursive Datalog rules and iterative tensor contractions by computing the transitive closure of a biblical genealogy graph containing 1,972 individuals and 1,727 parent-child relationships, converging in 74 iterations to discover 33,945 ancestor relationships. Second, we implement reasoning in embedding space by training a neural network with learnable transformation matrices, demonstrating successful zero-shot compositional inference on held-out queries. Third, we validate the Tensor Logic superposition construction on FB15k-237, a large-scale knowledge graph with 14,541 entities and 237 relations. Using Domingos's relation matrix formulation $R_r = E^\top A_r E$, we achieve MRR of 0.3068 on standard link prediction and MRR of 0.3346 on a compositional reasoning benchmark where direct edges are removed during training, demonstrating that matrix composition enables multi-hop inference without direct training examples.

Paperid: 7406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16629.pdf

Abstract:
Massively multilingual language models enable cross-lingual generalization but underperform on low-resource and unseen languages. While adapter-based fine-tuning offers a parameter-efficient solution, training language-specific adapters at scale remains costly. We introduce Typologically Informed Parameter Aggregation (TIPA), a training-free method that constructs proxy language adapters by aggregating existing ones, weighted by typological similarity. Integrated into the MAD-X framework, these proxies enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer without additional training. We evaluate TIPA on five NLP tasks and over 230 languages. TIPA consistently outperforms or matches baselines such as English-only fine-tuning or selecting the typologically closest language adapter. We see the largest gains for languages lacking dedicated adapters. Our results demonstrate that typologically informed aggregation provides a viable alternative to language-specific modules without any training needed.

Paperid: 7407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16582.pdf

Abstract:
Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) facilitates video retrieval by combining visual and textual queries. However, existing CoVR frameworks typically fuse multimodal inputs in a single stage, achieving only marginal gains over initial baseline. To address this, we propose a novel CoVR framework that leverages the representational power of Vision Language Models (VLMs). Our framework incorporates a novel cross-attention module X-Aligner, composed of cross-attention layers that progressively fuse visual and textual inputs and align their multimodal representation with that of the target video. To further enhance the representation of the multimodal query, we incorporate the caption of the visual query as an additional input. The framework is trained in two stages to preserve the pretrained VLM representation. In the first stage, only the newly introduced module is trained, while in the second stage, the textual query encoder is also fine-tuned. We implement our framework on top of BLIP-family architecture, namely BLIP and BLIP-2, and train it on the Webvid-CoVR data set. In addition to in-domain evaluation on Webvid-CoVR-Test, we perform zero-shot evaluations on the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) data sets CIRCO and Fashion-IQ. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on CoVR obtaining a Recall@1 of 63.93% on Webvid-CoVR-Test, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on CIR tasks.

Paperid: 7408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16504.pdf

Abstract:
Commonsense reasoning often involves evaluating multiple plausible interpretations rather than selecting a single atomic answer, yet most benchmarks rely on single-label evaluation, obscuring whether statements are jointly plausible, mutually exclusive, or jointly implausible. We introduce LOGICAL-COMMONSENSEQA, a benchmark that re-frames commonsense reasoning as logical composition over pairs of atomic statements using plausibility-level operators (AND, OR, NEITHER/NOR). Evaluating instruction-tuned, reasoning-specialized, and fine-tuned models under zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, we find that while models perform reasonably on conjunctive and moderately on disjunctive reasoning, performance degrades sharply on negation-based questions. LOGICAL-COMMONSENSEQA exposes fundamental reasoning limitations and provides a controlled framework for advancing compositional commonsense reasoning.

Paperid: 7409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15269.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased the scale and diversity of cyberattacks, exposing limitations in traditional intrusion detection systems. Classical machine learning (ML) models such as Random Forest and Support Vector Machine perform well on known attacks but require retraining to detect unseen or zero-day threats. This study investigates lightweight decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) for IoT attack detection by integrating structured-to-text conversion, Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Network traffic features are transformed into compact natural-language prompts, enabling efficient adaptation under constrained hardware. Experiments on the CICIoT2023 dataset show that a QLoRA-tuned LLaMA-1B model achieves an F1-score of 0.7124, comparable to the Random Forest (RF) baseline (0.7159) for known attacks. With RAG, the system attains 42.63% accuracy on unseen attack types without additional training, demonstrating practical zero-shot capability. These results highlight the potential of retrieval-enhanced lightweight LLMs as adaptable and resource-efficient solutions for next-generation IoT intrusion detection.

Paperid: 7410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13710.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence has reshaped medical imaging, yet the use of AI on clinical data for prospective decision support remains limited. We study pre-operative prediction of clinically meaningful improvement in chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), defining success as a more than 8.9-point reduction in SNOT-22 at 6 months (MCID). In a prospectively collected cohort where all patients underwent surgery, we ask whether models using only pre-operative clinical data could have identified those who would have poor outcomes, i.e. those who should have avoided surgery. We benchmark supervised ML (logistic regression, tree ensembles, and an in-house MLP) against generative AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity), giving each the same structured inputs and constraining outputs to binary recommendations with confidence. Our best ML model (MLP) achieves 85 % accuracy with superior calibration and decision-curve net benefit. GenAI models underperform on discrimination and calibration across zero-shot setting. Notably, GenAI justifications align with clinician heuristics and the MLP's feature importance, repeatedly highlighting baseline SNOT-22, CT/endoscopy severity, polyp phenotype, and physchology/pain comorbidities. We provide a reproducible tabular-to-GenAI evaluation protocol and subgroup analyses. Findings support an ML-first, GenAI- augmented workflow: deploy calibrated ML for primary triage of surgical candidacy, with GenAI as an explainer to enhance transparency and shared decision-making.

Paperid: 7411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13380.pdf

Abstract:
Learning in data-scarce settings has recently gained significant attention in the research community. Semi-supervised object detection(SSOD) aims to improve detection performance by leveraging a large number of unlabeled images alongside a limited number of labeled images(a.k.a.,few-shot learning). In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison of three state-of-the-art SSOD approaches, including MixPL, Semi-DETR and Consistent-Teacher, with the goal of understanding how performance varies with the number of labeled images. We conduct experiments using the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, two popular object detection benchmarks which allow for standardized evaluation. In addition, we evaluate the SSOD approaches on a custom Beetle dataset which enables us to gain insights into their performance on specialized datasets with a smaller number of object categories. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between accuracy, model size, and latency, providing insights into which methods are best suited for low-data regimes.

Paperid: 7412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11977.pdf

Abstract:
Forecasting in power systems often involves multivariate time series with complex dependencies and strict privacy constraints across regions. Traditional forecasting methods require significant expert knowledge and struggle to generalize across diverse deployment scenarios. Recent advancements in pre-trained time series models offer new opportunities, but their zero-shot performance on domain-specific tasks remains limited. To address these challenges, we propose a novel MoE Encoder module that augments pretrained forecasting models by injecting a sparse mixture-of-experts layer between tokenization and encoding. This design enables two key capabilities: (1) trans forming multivariate forecasting into an expert-guided univariate task, allowing the model to effectively capture inter-variable relations, and (2) supporting localized training and lightweight parameter sharing in federated settings where raw data cannot be exchanged. Extensive experiments on public multivariate datasets demonstrate that MoE-Encoder significantly improves forecasting accuracy compared to strong baselines. We further simulate federated environments and show that transferring only MoE-Encoder parameters allows efficient adaptation to new regions, with minimal performance degradation. Our findings suggest that MoE-Encoder provides a scalable and privacy-aware extension to foundation time series models.

Paperid: 7413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11769.pdf

Abstract:
Visual search is critical for e-commerce, especially in style-driven domains where user intent is subjective and open-ended. Existing industrial systems typically couple object detection with taxonomy-based classification and rely on catalog data for evaluation, which is prone to noise that limits robustness and scalability. We propose a taxonomy-decoupled architecture that uses classification-free region proposals and unified embeddings for similarity retrieval, enabling a more flexible and generalizable visual search. To overcome the evaluation bottleneck, we propose an LLM-as-a-Judge framework that assesses nuanced visual similarity and category relevance for query-result pairs in a zero-shot manner, removing dependence on human annotations or noise-prone catalog data. Deployed at scale on a global home goods platform, our system improves retrieval quality and yields a measurable uplift in customer engagement, while our offline evaluation metrics strongly correlate with real-world outcomes.

Paperid: 7414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11293.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping automated fact-checking (AFC) by enabling unified, end-to-end verification pipelines rather than isolated components. While large proprietary models achieve strong performance, their closed weights, complexity, and high costs limit sustainability. Fine-tuning smaller open weight models for individual AFC tasks can help but requires multiple specialized models resulting in high costs. We propose \textbf{multi-task learning (MTL)} as a more efficient alternative that fine-tunes a single model to perform claim detection, evidence ranking, and stance detection jointly. Using small decoder-only LLMs (e.g., Qwen3-4b), we explore three MTL strategies: classification heads, causal language modeling heads, and instruction-tuning, and evaluate them across model sizes, task orders, and standard non-LLM baselines. While multitask models do not universally surpass single-task baselines, they yield substantial improvements, achieving up to \textbf{44\%}, \textbf{54\%}, and \textbf{31\%} relative gains for claim detection, evidence re-ranking, and stance detection, respectively, over zero-/few-shot settings. Finally, we also provide practical, empirically grounded guidelines to help practitioners apply MTL with LLMs for automated fact-checking.

Paperid: 7415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10591.pdf

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have emerged as a promising approach for zero-shot financial forecasting, demonstrating strong transferability and data efficiency gains. However, their adoption in financial applications is hindered by fundamental limitations in uncertainty quantification: current approaches either rely on restrictive distributional assumptions, conflate different sources of uncertainty, or lack principled calibration mechanisms. While recent TSFMs employ sophisticated techniques such as mixture models, Student's t-distributions, or conformal prediction, they fail to address the core challenge of providing theoretically-grounded uncertainty decomposition. For the very first time, we present a novel transformer-based probabilistic framework, ProbFM (probabilistic foundation model), that leverages Deep Evidential Regression (DER) to provide principled uncertainty quantification with explicit epistemic-aleatoric decomposition. Unlike existing approaches that pre-specify distributional forms or require sampling-based inference, ProbFM learns optimal uncertainty representations through higher-order evidence learning while maintaining single-pass computational efficiency. To rigorously evaluate the core DER uncertainty quantification approach independent of architectural complexity, we conduct an extensive controlled comparison study using a consistent LSTM architecture across five probabilistic methods: DER, Gaussian NLL, Student's-t NLL, Quantile Loss, and Conformal Prediction. Evaluation on cryptocurrency return forecasting demonstrates that DER maintains competitive forecasting accuracy while providing explicit epistemic-aleatoric uncertainty decomposition. This work establishes both an extensible framework for principled uncertainty quantification in foundation models and empirical evidence for DER's effectiveness in financial applications.

Paperid: 7416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09982.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for low-resource languages suffer significant performance degradation under domain shift. We quantify this challenge using Dhao, an indigenous language of Eastern Indonesia with no digital footprint beyond the New Testament (NT). When applied to the unseen Old Testament (OT), a standard NMT model fine-tuned on the NT drops from an in-domain score of 36.17 chrF++ to 27.11 chrF++. To recover this loss, we introduce a hybrid framework where a fine-tuned NMT model generates an initial draft, which is then refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The final system achieves 35.21 chrF++ (+8.10 recovery), effectively matching the original in-domain quality. Our analysis reveals that this performance is driven primarily by the number of retrieved examples rather than the choice of retrieval algorithm. Qualitative analysis confirms the LLM acts as a robust "safety net," repairing severe failures in zero-shot domains.

Paperid: 7417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09696.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs are increasingly being integrated into clinical workflows, yet they often lack clinical empathy, an essential aspect of effective doctor-patient communication. Existing NLP frameworks focus on reactively labeling empathy in doctors' responses but offer limited support for anticipatory modeling of empathy needs, especially in general health queries. We introduce the Empathy Applicability Framework (EAF), a theory-driven approach that classifies patient queries in terms of the applicability of emotional reactions and interpretations, based on clinical, contextual, and linguistic cues. We release a benchmark of real patient queries, dual-annotated by Humans and GPT-4o. In the subset with human consensus, we also observe substantial human-GPT alignment. To validate EAF, we train classifiers on human-labeled and GPT-only annotations to predict empathy applicability, achieving strong performance and outperforming the heuristic and zero-shot LLM baselines. Error analysis highlights persistent challenges: implicit distress, clinical-severity ambiguity, and contextual hardship, underscoring the need for multi-annotator modeling, clinician-in-the-loop calibration, and culturally diverse annotation. EAF provides a framework for identifying empathy needs before response generation, establishes a benchmark for anticipatory empathy modeling, and enables supporting empathetic communication in asynchronous healthcare.

Paperid: 7418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09631.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable capabilities across NLP tasks, struggle with phonologically-grounded phenomena like rhyme detection and generation. This is even more evident in lower-resource languages such as Modern Greek. In this paper, we present a hybrid system that combines LLMs with deterministic phonological algorithms to achieve accurate rhyme identification/analysis and generation. Our approach implements a comprehensive taxonomy of Greek rhyme types, including Pure, Rich, Imperfect, Mosaic, and Identical Pre-rhyme Vowel (IDV) patterns, and employs an agentic generation pipeline with phonological verification. We evaluate multiple prompting strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and RAG-augmented) across several LLMs including Claude 3.7 and 4.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 and open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B and 70B and Mistral Large. Results reveal a significant "Reasoning Gap": while native-like models (Claude 3.7) perform intuitively (40\% accuracy in identification), reasoning-heavy models (Claude 4.5) achieve state-of-the-art performance (54\%) only when prompted with Chain-of-Thought. Most critically, pure LLM generation fails catastrophically (under 4\% valid poems), while our hybrid verification loop restores performance to 73.1\%. We release our system and a corpus of 40,000+ rhymes, derived from the Anemoskala and Interwar Poetry corpora, to support future research.

Paperid: 7419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09451.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Quamba-SE, a soft-edge quantizer for State Space Model (SSM) activation quantization. Unlike existing methods, using standard INT8 operation, Quamba-SE employs three adaptive scales: high-precision for small values, standard scale for normal values, and low-precision for outliers. This preserves outlier information instead of hard clipping, while maintaining precision for other values. We evaluate on Mamba- 130M across 6 zero-shot benchmarks. Results show that Quamba- SE consistently outperforms Quamba, achieving up to +2.68% on individual benchmarks and up to +0.83% improvement in the average accuracy of 6 datasets.

Paperid: 7420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09238.pdf

Abstract:
Substation meters play a critical role in monitoring and ensuring the stable operation of power grids, yet their detection of cracks and other physical defects is often hampered by a severe scarcity of annotated samples. To address this few-shot generation challenge, we propose a novel framework that integrates Knowledge Embedding and Hypernetwork-Guided Conditional Control into a Stable Diffusion pipeline, enabling realistic and controllable synthesis of defect images from limited data. First, we bridge the substantial domain gap between natural-image pre-trained models and industrial equipment by fine-tuning a Stable Diffusion backbone using DreamBooth-style knowledge embedding. This process encodes the unique structural and textural priors of substation meters, ensuring generated images retain authentic meter characteristics. Second, we introduce a geometric crack modeling module that parameterizes defect attributes--such as location, length, curvature, and branching pattern--to produce spatially constrained control maps. These maps provide precise, pixel-level guidance during generation. Third, we design a lightweight hypernetwork that dynamically modulates the denoising process of the diffusion model in response to the control maps and high-level defect descriptors, achieving a flexible balance between generation fidelity and controllability. Extensive experiments on a real-world substation meter dataset demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing augmentation and generation baselines. It reduces Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 32.7%, increases diversity metrics, and--most importantly--boosts the mAP of a downstream defect detector by 15.3% when trained on augmented data. The framework offers a practical, high-quality data synthesis solution for industrial inspection systems where defect samples are rare.

Paperid: 7421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09110.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot semantic segmentation of time-series remote sensing images remains a critical challenge, particularly in regions where labeled data is scarce or costly to obtain. While state-of-the-art models perform well under full supervision, their performance degrades significantly under limited labeling, limiting their real-world applicability. In this work, we propose SAM-Aug, a new annotation-efficient framework that leverages the geometry-aware segmentation capability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to improve few-shot land cover mapping. Our approach constructs cloud-free composite images from temporal sequences and applies SAM in a fully unsupervised manner to generate geometry-aware mask priors. These priors are then integrated into training through a proposed loss function called RegionSmoothLoss, which enforces prediction consistency within each SAM-derived region across temporal frames, effectively regularizing the model to respect semantically coherent structures. Extensive experiments on the PASTIS-R benchmark under a 5 percent labeled setting demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SAM-Aug. Averaged over three random seeds (42, 2025, 4090), our method achieves a mean test mIoU of 36.21 percent, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline by +2.33 percentage points, a relative improvement of 6.89 percent. Notably, on the most favorable split (seed=42), SAM-Aug reaches a test mIoU of 40.28 percent, representing an 11.2 percent relative gain with no additional labeled data. The consistent improvement across all seeds confirms the generalization power of leveraging foundation model priors under annotation scarcity. Our results highlight that vision models like SAM can serve as useful regularizers in few-shot remote sensing learning, offering a scalable and plug-and-play solution for land cover monitoring without requiring manual annotations or model fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09025.pdf

Abstract:
We present the Universal Latent Homeomorphic Manifold (ULHM), a framework that unifies semantic representations (e.g., human descriptions, diagnostic labels) and observation-driven machine representations (e.g., pixel intensities, sensor readings) into a single latent structure. Despite originating from fundamentally different pathways, both modalities capture the same underlying reality. We establish \emph{homeomorphism}, a continuous bijection preserving topological structure, as the mathematical criterion for determining when latent manifolds induced by different semantic-observation pairs can be rigorously unified. This criterion provides theoretical guarantees for three critical applications: (1) semantic-guided sparse recovery from incomplete observations, (2) cross-domain transfer learning with verified structural compatibility, and (3) zero-shot compositional learning via valid transfer from semantic to observation space. Our framework learns continuous manifold-to-manifold transformations through conditional variational inference, avoiding brittle point-to-point mappings. We develop practical verification algorithms, including trust, continuity, and Wasserstein distance metrics, that empirically validate homeomorphic structure from finite samples. Experiments demonstrate: (1) sparse image recovery from 5\% of CelebA pixels and MNIST digit reconstruction at multiple sparsity levels, (2) cross-domain classifier transfer achieving 86.73\% accuracy from MNIST to Fashion-MNIST without retraining, and (3) zero-shot classification on unseen classes achieving 89.47\% on MNIST, 84.70\% on Fashion-MNIST, and 78.76\% on CIFAR-10. Critically, the homeomorphism criterion correctly rejects incompatible datasets, preventing invalid unification and providing a feasible way to principled decomposition of general foundation models into verified domain-specific components.

Paperid: 7423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08798.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate individual identification is essential for monitoring rare amphibians, yet invasive marking is often unsuitable for critically endangered species. We evaluate state-of-the-art computer-vision methods for photographic re-identification of the Hula painted frog (Latonia nigriventer) using 1,233 ventral images from 191 individuals collected during 2013-2020 capture-recapture surveys. We compare deep local-feature matching in a zero-shot setting with deep global-feature embedding models. The local-feature pipeline achieves 98% top-1 closed-set identification accuracy, outperforming all global-feature models; fine-tuning improves the best global-feature model to 60% top-1 (91% top-10) but remains below local matching. To combine scalability with accuracy, we implement a two-stage workflow in which a fine-tuned global-feature model retrieves a short candidate list that is re-ranked by local-feature matching, reducing end-to-end runtime from 6.5-7.8 hours to ~38 minutes while maintaining ~96% top-1 closed-set accuracy on the labeled dataset. Separation of match scores between same- and different-individual pairs supports thresholding for open-set identification, enabling practical handling of novel individuals. We deploy this pipeline as a web application for routine field use, providing rapid, standardized, non-invasive identification to support conservation monitoring and capture-recapture analyses. Overall, in this species, zero-shot deep local-feature matching outperformed global-feature embedding and provides a strong default for photo-identification.

Paperid: 7424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08467.pdf

Abstract:
Distracted driving is a major cause of traffic collisions, calling for robust and scalable detection methods. Vision-language models (VLMs) enable strong zero-shot image classification, but existing VLM-based distracted driver detectors often underperform in real-world conditions. We identify subject-specific appearance variations (e.g., clothing, age, and gender) as a key bottleneck: VLMs entangle these factors with behavior cues, leading to decisions driven by who the driver is rather than what the driver is doing. To address this, we propose a subject decoupling framework that extracts a driver appearance embedding and removes its influence from the image embedding prior to zero-shot classification, thereby emphasizing distraction-relevant evidence. We further orthogonalize text embeddings via metric projection onto Stiefel manifold to improve separability while staying close to the original semantics. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains over prior baselines, indicating the promise of our approach for practical road-safety applications.

Paperid: 7425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08302.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the use of prompt engineering to enhance large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o-mini and gemini-1.5-flash, in sentiment analysis tasks. It evaluates advanced prompting techniques like few-shot learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-consistency against a baseline. Key tasks include sentiment classification, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and detecting subtle nuances such as irony. The research details the theoretical background, datasets, and methods used, assessing performance of LLMs as measured by accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score. Findings reveal that advanced prompting significantly improves sentiment analysis, with the few-shot approach excelling in GPT-4o-mini and chain-of-thought prompting boosting irony detection in gemini-1.5-flash by up to 46%. Thus, while advanced prompting techniques overall improve performance, the fact that few-shot prompting works best for GPT-4o-mini and chain-of-thought excels in gemini-1.5-flash for irony detection suggests that prompting strategies must be tailored to both the model and the task. This highlights the importance of aligning prompt design with both the LLM's architecture and the semantic complexity of the task.

Paperid: 7426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08105.pdf

Abstract:
Retrieval-augmented generation with tool-calling agents (agentic RAG) has become increasingly powerful in understanding, processing, and responding to user queries. However, the scope of the grounding knowledge is limited and asking questions that exceed this scope may lead to issues like hallucination. While guardrail frameworks aim to block out-of-scope questions (Rodriguez et al., 2024), no research has investigated the question of suggesting answerable queries in order to complete the user interaction. In this paper, we initiate the study of query suggestion for agentic RAG. We consider the setting where user questions are not answerable, and the suggested queries should be similar to aid the user interaction. Such scenarios are frequent for tool-calling LLMs as communicating the restrictions of the tools or the underlying datasets to the user is difficult, and adding query suggestions enhances the interaction with the RAG agent. As opposed to traditional settings for query recommendations such as in search engines, ensuring that the suggested queries are answerable is a major challenge due to the RAG's multi-step workflow that demands a nuanced understanding of the RAG as a whole, which the executing LLM lacks. As such, we introduce robust dynamic few-shot learning which retrieves examples from relevant workflows. We show that our system can be self-learned, for instance on prior user queries, and is therefore easily applicable in practice. We evaluate our approach on three benchmark datasets based on two unlabeled question datasets collected from real-world user queries. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm that our method produces more relevant and answerable suggestions, outperforming few-shot and retrieval-only baselines, and thus enable safer, more effective user interaction with agentic RAG.

Paperid: 7427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07794.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on their ability to perform multi-hop reasoning, i.e., to combine multiple pieces of information into a coherent inference. We introduce KinshipQA, a benchmark designed to probe this capability through reasoning over kinship relations. The central contribution of our work is a generative pipeline that produces, on demand, large-scale, realistic, and culture-specific genealogical data: collections of interconnected family trees that satisfy explicit marriage constraints associated with different kinship systems. This allows task difficulty, cultural assumptions, and relational depth to be systematically controlled and varied. From these genealogies, we derive textual inference tasks that require reasoning over implicit relational chains. We evaluate the resulting benchmark using six state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and closed-source models, under a uniform zero-shot protocol with deterministic decoding. Performance is measured using exact-match and set-based metrics. Our results demonstrate that KinshipQA yields a wide spread of outcomes and exposes systematic differences in multi-hop reasoning across models and cultural settings.

Paperid: 7428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07790.pdf

Abstract:
System logs are crucial for monitoring and diagnosing modern computing infrastructure, but their scale and complexity require reliable and efficient automated interpretation. Since severity levels are predefined metadata in system log messages, having a model merely classify them offers limited standalone practical value, revealing little about its underlying ability to interpret system logs. We argue that severity classification is more informative when treated as a benchmark for probing runtime log comprehension rather than as an end task. Using real-world journalctl data from Linux production servers, we evaluate nine small language models (SLMs) and small reasoning language models (SRLMs) under zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) prompting. The results reveal strong stratification. Qwen3-4B achieves the highest accuracy at 95.64% with RAG, while Gemma3-1B improves from 20.25% under few-shot prompting to 85.28% with RAG. Notably, the tiny Qwen3-0.6B reaches 88.12% accuracy despite weak performance without retrieval. In contrast, several SRLMs, including Qwen3-1.7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, degrade substantially when paired with RAG. Efficiency measurements further separate models: most Gemma and Llama variants complete inference in under 1.2 seconds per log, whereas Phi-4-Mini-Reasoning exceeds 228 seconds per log while achieving <10% accuracy. These findings suggest that (1) architectural design, (2) training objectives, and (3) the ability to integrate retrieved context under strict output constraints jointly determine performance. By emphasizing small, deployable models, this benchmark aligns with real-time requirements of digital twin (DT) systems and shows that severity classification serves as a lens for evaluating model competence and real-time deployability, with implications for root cause analysis (RCA) and broader DT integration.

Paperid: 7429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07737.pdf

Abstract:
We propose UAIT (Uncommon-sense Action Image-Text) dataset, a new evaluation benchmark designed to test the semantic understanding ability of visual language models (VLMs) in uncommon-sense action scenes. Unlike previous datasets that focus on common visual scenes with statistical frequency advantages, UAIT challenges models with grammatically reasonable but semantically counter-common sense image-text pairs. Such tasks require models to go beyond superficial pattern recognition and demonstrate a deep understanding of agent-patient relationships and physical feasibility. To build UAIT, we designed a semi-automated process to synthesize high-quality uncommon-sense image-text samples using large language models, few-shot prompt engineering, and text-to-image generation. Each sample is accompanied by a carefully designed multiple-choice question to test the model's competence in fine-grained reasoning. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art visual language models and compare them with models based on contrastive learning. Experiments show that all models perform significantly worse than humans in semantic judgment, especially in distinguishing grammatical correctness from semantic rationality. Further experiments show that even the lightweight model can improve its accuracy after fine-tuning, demonstrating the great potential of directional adaptation. This study not only reveals the key weaknesses of VLMs, but also provides diagnostic tools and research directions for the development of robust models with real visual semantic reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 7430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07235.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of sentiment analysis methods for movie reviews, a benchmark task that has played a central role in advancing natural language processing. We review the evolution of techniques from early lexicon-based and classical machine learning approaches to modern deep learning architectures and large language models, covering widely used datasets such as IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and SST-2, and models ranging from Naive Bayes and support vector machines to LSTM networks, BERT, and attention-based transformers. Beyond summarizing prior work, this survey differentiates itself by offering a comparative, challenge-driven analysis of how these modeling paradigms address domain-specific issues such as sarcasm, negation, contextual ambiguity, and domain shift, which remain open problems in existing literature. Unlike earlier reviews that focus primarily on text-only pipelines, we also synthesize recent advances in multimodal sentiment analysis that integrate textual, audio, and visual cues from movie trailers and clips. In addition, we examine emerging concerns related to interpretability, fairness, and robustness that are often underexplored in prior surveys, and we outline future research directions including zero-shot and few-shot learning, hybrid symbolic--neural models, and real-time deployment considerations. Overall, this abstract provides a domain-focused roadmap that highlights both established solutions and unresolved challenges toward building more accurate, generalizable, and explainable sentiment analysis systems for movie review data.

Paperid: 7431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06673.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate characterization of carbon nanotube morphologies in electron microscopy images is vital for exposure assessment and toxicological studies, yet current workflows rely on slow, subjective manual segmentation. This work presents a unified framework leveraging vision foundation models to automate the quantification and classification of CNTs in electron microscopy images. First, we introduce an interactive quantification tool built on the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that segments particles with near-perfect accuracy using minimal user input. Second, we propose a novel classification pipeline that utilizes these segmentation masks to spatially constrain a DINOv2 vision transformer, extracting features exclusively from particle regions while suppressing background noise. Evaluated on a dataset of 1,800 TEM images, this architecture achieves 95.5% accuracy in distinguishing between four different CNT morphologies, significantly outperforming the current baseline despite using a fraction of the training data. Crucially, this instance-level processing allows the framework to resolve mixed samples, correctly classifying distinct particle types co-existing within a single field of view. These results demonstrate that integrating zero-shot segmentation with self-supervised feature learning enables high-throughput, reproducible nanomaterial analysis, transforming a labor-intensive bottleneck into a scalable, data-driven process.

Paperid: 7432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06603.pdf

Abstract:
Multi-hop question answering over hybrid table-text data requires retrieving and reasoning across multiple evidence pieces from large corpora, but standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines process documents as flat ranked lists, causing retrieval noise to obscure reasoning chains. We introduce N2N-GQA. To our knowledge, it is the first zeroshot framework for open-domain hybrid table-text QA that constructs dynamic evidence graphs from noisy retrieval outputs. Our key insight is that multi-hop reasoning requires understanding relationships between evidence pieces: by modeling documents as graph nodes with semantic relationships as edges, we identify bridge documents connecting reasoning steps, a capability absent in list-based retrieval. On OTT-QA, graph-based evidence curation provides a 19.9-point EM improvement over strong baselines, demonstrating that organizing retrieval results as structured graphs is critical for multihop reasoning. N2N-GQA achieves 48.80 EM, matching finetuned retrieval models (CORE: 49.0 EM) and approaching heavily optimized systems (COS: 56.9 EM) without any task specific training. This establishes graph-structured evidence organization as essential for scalable, zero-shot multi-hop QA systems and demonstrates that simple, interpretable graph construction can rival sophisticated fine-tuned approaches.

Paperid: 7433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06477.pdf

Abstract:
Warning: This paper consists of examples representing regional biases in Indian regions that might be offensive towards a particular region. While social biases corresponding to gender, race, socio-economic conditions, etc., have been extensively studied in the major applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), biases corresponding to regions have garnered less attention. This is mainly because of (i) difficulty in the extraction of regional bias datasets, (ii) disagreements in annotation due to inherent human biases, and (iii) regional biases being studied in combination with other types of social biases and often being under-represented. This paper focuses on creating a dataset IndRegBias, consisting of regional biases in an Indian context reflected in users' comments on popular social media platforms, namely Reddit and YouTube. We carefully selected 25,000 comments appearing on various threads in Reddit and videos on YouTube discussing trending topics on regional issues in India. Furthermore, we propose a multilevel annotation strategy to annotate the comments describing the severity of regional biased statements. To detect the presence of regional bias and its severity in IndRegBias, we evaluate open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Indic Language Models (ILMs) using zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning strategies. We observe that zero-shot and few-shot approaches show lower accuracy in detecting regional biases and severity in the majority of the LLMs and ILMs. However, the fine-tuning approach significantly enhances the performance of the LLM in detecting Indian regional bias along with its severity.

Paperid: 7434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05879.pdf

Abstract:
Access to justice remains limited for many people, leading laypersons to increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for legal self-help. Laypeople use these tools intuitively, which may lead them to form expectations based on incomplete, incorrect, or biased outputs. This study examines whether leading LLMs exhibit gender bias in their responses to a realistic family law scenario. We present an expert-designed divorce scenario grounded in Czech family law and evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs GPT-5 nano, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Llama 3.3 in a fully zero-shot interaction. We deploy two versions of the scenario, one with gendered names and one with neutral labels, to establish a baseline for comparison. We further introduce nine legally relevant factors that vary the factual circumstances of the case and test whether these variations influence the models' proposed shared-parenting ratios. Our preliminary results highlight differences across models and suggest gender-dependent patterns in the outcomes generated by some systems. The findings underscore both the risks associated with laypeople's reliance on LLMs for legal guidance and the need for more robust evaluation of model behavior in sensitive legal contexts. We present exploratory and descriptive evidence intended to identify systematic asymmetries rather than to establish causal effects.

Paperid: 7435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05648.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in single-cell multi-omics, particularly RNA-seq, have provided profound insights into cellular heterogeneity and gene regulation. While pre-trained language model (PLM) paradigm based single-cell foundation models have shown promise, they remain constrained by insufficient integration of in-depth individual profiles and neglecting the influence of noise within multi-modal data. To address both issues, we propose an Open-world Language Knowledge-Aided Robust Single-Cell Foundation Model (OKR-CELL). It is built based on a cross-modal Cell-Language pre-training framework, which comprises two key innovations: (1) leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) based workflow with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enriches cell textual descriptions using open-world knowledge; (2) devising a Cross-modal Robust Alignment (CRA) objective that incorporates sample reliability assessment, curriculum learning, and coupled momentum contrastive learning to strengthen the model's resistance to noisy data. After pretraining on 32M cell-text pairs, OKR-CELL obtains cutting-edge results across 6 evaluation tasks. Beyond standard benchmarks such as cell clustering, cell-type annotation, batch-effect correction, and few-shot annotation, the model also demonstrates superior performance in broader multi-modal applications, including zero-shot cell-type annotation and bidirectional cell-text retrieval.

Paperid: 7436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05187.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized text-based code automation, but their potential in graph-oriented engineering workflows remains under-explored. We introduce SimuAgent, an LLM-powered modeling and simulation agent tailored for Simulink. SimuAgent replaces verbose XML with a concise, dictionary-style Python representation, dramatically cutting token counts, improving interpretability, and enabling fast, in-process simulation. A lightweight plan-execute architecture, trained in two stages, equips the agent with both low-level tool skills and high-level design reasoning. To tackle sparse rewards in long-horizon tasks, we propose Reflection-GRPO (ReGRPO), which augments Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with self-reflection traces that supply rich intermediate feedback, accelerating convergence and boosting robustness. Experiments on SimuBench, our newly released benchmark comprising 5300 multi-domain modeling tasks, show that a Qwen2.5-7B model fine-tuned with SimuAgent converges faster and achieves higher modeling accuracy than standard RL baselines, and even surpasses GPT-4o when evaluated with few-shot prompting on the same benchmark. Ablations confirm that the two-stage curriculum and abstract-reconstruct data augmentation further enhance generalization. SimuAgent trains and runs entirely on-premise with modest hardware, delivering a privacy-preserving, cost-effective solution for industrial model-driven engineering. SimuAgent bridges the gap between LLMs and graphical modeling environments, offering a practical solution for AI-assisted engineering design in industrial settings.

Paperid: 7437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04200.pdf

Abstract:
Product information extraction is crucial for e-commerce services, but obtaining high-quality labeled datasets remains challenging. We present a systematic approach for generating synthetic e-commerce product data using Large Language Models (LLMs), introducing a controlled modification framework with three strategies: attribute-preserving modification, controlled negative example generation, and systematic attribute removal. Using a state-of-the-art LLM with attribute-aware prompts, we enforce store constraints while maintaining product coherence. Human evaluation of 2000 synthetic products demonstrates high effectiveness, with 99.6% rated as natural, 96.5% containing valid attribute values, and over 90% showing consistent attribute usage. On the public MAVE dataset, our synthetic data achieves 60.5% accuracy, performing on par with real training data (60.8%) and significantly improving upon the 13.4% zero-shot baseline. Hybrid configurations combining synthetic and real data further improve performance, reaching 68.8% accuracy. Our framework provides a practical solution for augmenting e-commerce datasets, particularly valuable for low-resource scenarios.

Paperid: 7438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03684.pdf

Abstract:
This study presents a domain adaptation approach for speaker diarization targeting conversational Indonesian audio. We address the challenge of adapting an English-centric diarization pipeline to a low-resource language by employing synthetic data generation using neural Text-to-Speech technology. Experiments were conducted with varying training configurations, a small dataset (171 samples) and a large dataset containing 25 hours of synthetic speech. Results demonstrate that the baseline \texttt{pyannote/segmentation-3.0} model, trained on the AMI Corpus, achieves a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 53.47\% when applied zero-shot to Indonesian. Domain adaptation significantly improves performance, with the small dataset models reducing DER to 34.31\% (1 epoch) and 34.81\% (2 epochs). The model trained on the 25-hour dataset achieves the best performance with a DER of 29.24\%, representing a 13.68\% absolute improvement over the baseline while maintaining 99.06\% Recall and 87.14\% F1-Score.

Paperid: 7439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03609.pdf

Abstract:
Binarization is a popular first step towards text extraction in historical artifacts. Stone inscription images pose severe challenges for binarization due to poor contrast between etched characters and the stone background, non-uniform surface degradation, distracting artifacts, and highly variable text density and layouts. These conditions frequently cause existing binarization techniques to fail and struggle to isolate coherent character regions. Many approaches sub-divide the image into patches to improve text fragment resolution and improve binarization performance. With this in mind, we present a robust and adaptive patching strategy to binarize challenging Indic inscriptions. The patches from our approach are used to train an Attention U-Net for binarization. The attention mechanism allows the model to focus on subtle structural cues, while our dynamic sampling and patch selection method ensures that the model learns to overcome surface noise and layout irregularities. We also introduce a carefully annotated, pixel-precise dataset of Indic stone inscriptions at the character-fragment level. We demonstrate that our novel patching mechanism significantly boosts binarization performance across classical and deep learning baselines. Despite training only on single script Indic dataset, our model exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to other Indic and non-indic scripts, highlighting its robustness and script-agnostic generalization capabilities. By producing clean, structured representations of inscription content, our method lays the foundation for downstream tasks such as script identification, OCR, and historical text analysis. Project page: https://ihdia.iiit.ac.in/shilalekhya-binarization/

Paperid: 7440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03450.pdf

Abstract:
User-Defined Text Classification (UDTC) considers the challenge of classifying input text to user-specified, previously unseen classes, a setting that arises frequently in real-world applications such as enterprise analytics, content moderation, and domain-specific information retrieval. We propose a soft-contextualized encoder architecture for UDTC which contextualizes each candidate label with the label set and a static soft prompt representation of the input query. Training on diverse, multi-source datasets enables the model to generalize effectively to zero-shot classification over entirely unseen topic sets drawn from arbitrary domains. We evaluate the proposed architecture both on held-out in-distribution test data and on multiple unseen UDTC benchmarks. Across datasets, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming or matching the baselines.

Paperid: 7441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00694.pdf

Abstract:
Existing paradigms for inferring pedestrian crossing behavior, ranging from statistical models to supervised learning methods, demonstrate limited generalizability and perform inadequately on new sites. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a shift from numerical pattern fitting to semantic, context-aware behavioral reasoning, yet existing LLM applications lack domain-specific adaptation and visual context. This study introduces Pedestrian Crossing LLM (PedX-LLM), a vision-and-knowledge enhanced framework designed to transform pedestrian crossing inference from site-specific pattern recognition to generalizable behavioral reasoning. By integrating LLaVA-extracted visual features with textual data and transportation domain knowledge, PedX-LLM fine-tunes a LLaMA-2-7B foundation model via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to infer crossing decisions. PedX-LLM achieves 82.0% balanced accuracy, outperforming the best statistical and supervised learning methods. Results demonstrate that the vision-augmented module contributes a 2.9% performance gain by capturing the built environment and integrating domain knowledge yields an additional 4.1% improvement. To evaluate generalizability across unseen environments, cross-site validation was conducted using site-based partitioning. The zero-shot PedX-LLM configuration achieves 66.9% balanced accuracy on five unseen test sites, outperforming the baseline data-driven methods by at least 18 percentage points. Incorporating just five validation examples via few-shot learning to PedX-LLM further elevates the balanced accuracy to 72.2%. PedX-LLM demonstrates strong generalizability to unseen scenarios, confirming that vision-and-knowledge-enhanced reasoning enables the model to mimic human-like decision logic and overcome the limitations of purely data-driven methods.

Paperid: 7442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24991.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate reasonable zero-shot capability across many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is a common practice to improve their performance. However, a task's data efficiency--i.e., the number of fine-tuning examples needed to achieve a desired level of performance--is often unknown, resulting in costly cycles of incremental annotation and retraining. Indeed, we demonstrate across a curated set of 30 specialized tasks that performant LLMs may struggle zero-shot but can attain stronger performance after fine-tuning. This motivates the need for methods to predict a task's data efficiency without requiring incremental annotation. After introducing a concrete metric that quantifies a task's data efficiency, we propose using the gradient cosine similarity of low-confidence examples to predict data efficiency based on a small number of labeled samples. We validate our approach on a diverse set of tasks with varying data efficiencies, attaining 8.6% error in overall data efficiency prediction and typically eliminating hundreds of unnecessary annotations on each task. Our experiment results and implementation code are available on GitHub.

Paperid: 7443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24289.pdf

Abstract:
The manual, resource-intensive process of complying with the EU Taxonomy presents a significant challenge for companies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a path to automation, research is hindered by a lack of public benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, structured dataset from 190 corporate reports, containing ground-truth economic activities and quantitative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We use this dataset to conduct the first systematic evaluation of LLMs on the core compliance workflow. Our results reveal a clear performance gap between qualitative and quantitative tasks. LLMs show moderate success in the qualitative task of identifying economic activities, with a multi-step agentic framework modestly enhancing precision. Conversely, the models comprehensively fail at the quantitative task of predicting financial KPIs in a zero-shot setting. We also discover a paradox, where concise metadata often yields superior performance to full, unstructured reports, and find that model confidence scores are poorly calibrated. We conclude that while LLMs are not ready for full automation, they can serve as powerful assistive tools for human experts. Our dataset provides a public benchmark for future research.

Paperid: 7444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23848.pdf

Abstract:
This research project addresses the errors of financial numerical reasoning Question Answering (QA) tasks due to the lack of domain knowledge in finance. Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial numerical questions remain challenging because they require specific domain knowledge in finance and complex multi-step numeric reasoning. We implement a multi-retriever Retrieval Augmented Generators (RAG) system to retrieve both external domain knowledge and internal question contexts, and utilize the latest LLM to tackle these tasks. Through comprehensive ablation experiments and error analysis, we find that domain-specific training with the SecBERT encoder significantly contributes to our best neural symbolic model surpassing the FinQA paper's top model, which serves as our baseline. This suggests the potential superior performance of domain-specific training. Furthermore, our best prompt-based LLM generator achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with significant improvement (>7%), yet it is still below the human expert performance. This study highlights the trade-off between hallucinations loss and external knowledge gains in smaller models and few-shot examples. For larger models, the gains from external facts typically outweigh the hallucination loss. Finally, our findings confirm the enhanced numerical reasoning capabilities of the latest LLM, optimized for few-shot learning.

Paperid: 7445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23753.pdf

Abstract:
Evidential deep learning (EDL) models, based on Subjective Logic, introduce a principled and computationally efficient way to make deterministic neural networks uncertainty-aware. The resulting evidential models can quantify fine-grained uncertainty using learned evidence. However, the Subjective-Logic framework constrains evidence to be non-negative, requiring specific activation functions whose geometric properties can induce activation-dependent learning-freeze behavior: a regime where gradients become extremely small for samples mapped into low-evidence regions. We theoretically characterize this behavior and analyze how different evidential activations influence learning dynamics. Building on this analysis, we design a general family of activation functions and corresponding evidential regularizers that provide an alternative pathway for consistent evidence updates across activation regimes. Extensive experiments on four benchmark classification problems (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet), two few-shot classification problems, and blind face restoration problem empirically validate the developed theory and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed generalized regularized evidential models.

Paperid: 7446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23347.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning has achieved strong performance for electrocardiogram (ECG) classification within individual datasets, yet dependable generalization across heterogeneous acquisition settings remains a major obstacle to clinical deployment and longitudinal monitoring. A key limitation of many model architectures is the implicit entanglement of morphological waveform patterns and rhythm dynamics, which can promote shortcut learning and amplify sensitivity to distribution shifts. We propose ECG-RAMBA, a framework that separates morphology and rhythm and then re-integrates them through context-aware fusion. ECG-RAMBA combines: (i) deterministic morphological features extracted by MiniRocket, (ii) global rhythm descriptors computed from heart-rate variability (HRV), and (iii) long-range contextual modeling via a bi-directional Mamba backbone. To improve sensitivity to transient abnormalities under windowed inference, we introduce a numerically stable Power Mean pooling operator ($Q=3$) that emphasizes high-evidence segments while avoiding the brittleness of max pooling and the dilution of averaging. We evaluate under a protocol-faithful setting with subject-level cross-validation, a fixed decision threshold, and no test-time adaptation. On the Chapman--Shaoxing dataset, ECG-RAMBA achieves a macro ROC-AUC $\approx 0.85$. In zero-shot transfer, it attains PR-AUC $=0.708$ for atrial fibrillation detection on the external CPSC-2021 dataset, substantially outperforming a comparable raw-signal Mamba baseline, and shows consistent cross-dataset performance on PTB-XL. Ablation studies indicate that deterministic morphology provides a strong foundation, while explicit rhythm modeling and long-range context are critical drivers of cross-domain robustness.

Paperid: 7447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23304.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce an emerging paradigm for medical imaging by interpreting scans through the lens of extensive clinical knowledge, offering a transformative approach to disease classification. This study presents a critical comparison between two fundamentally different AI architectures: the specialized open-source agent MedGemma and the proprietary large multimodal model GPT-4 for diagnosing six different diseases. The MedGemma-4b-it model, fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), demonstrated superior diagnostic capability by achieving a mean test accuracy of 80.37% compared to 69.58% for the untuned GPT-4. Furthermore, MedGemma exhibited notably higher sensitivity in high-stakes clinical tasks, such as cancer and pneumonia detection. Quantitative analysis via confusion matrices and classification reports provides comprehensive insights into model performance across all categories. These results emphasize that domain-specific fine-tuning is essential for minimizing hallucinations in clinical implementation, positioning MedGemma as a sophisticated tool for complex, evidence-based medical reasoning.

Paperid: 7448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22966.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promise in medical knowledge assessments, yet their practical utility in real-world clinical decision-making remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluated the performance of three state-of-the-art LLMs-ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and LIama 3.3 70B-in clinical decision support across the entire clinical reasoning workflow of a typical patient encounter. Using 36 case studies, we first assessed LLM's out-of-the-box performance across five key sequential clinical decision-making tasks under two temperature settings (default vs. zero): differential diagnosis, essential immediate steps, relevant diagnostic testing, final diagnosis, and treatment recommendation. All models showed high variability by task, achieving near-perfect accuracy in final diagnosis, poor performance in relevant diagnostic testing, and moderate performance in remaining tasks. Furthermore, ChatGPT performed better under the zero temperature, whereas LIama showed stronger performance under the default temperature. Next, we assessed whether prompt engineering could enhance LLM performance by applying variations of the MedPrompt framework, incorporating targeted and random dynamic few-shot learning. The results demonstrate that prompt engineering is not a one-size-fit-all solution. While it significantly improved the performance on the task with lowest baseline accuracy (relevant diagnostic testing), it was counterproductive for others. Another key finding was that the targeted dynamic few-shot prompting did not consistently outperform random selection, indicating that the presumed benefits of closely matched examples may be counterbalanced by loss of broader contextual diversity. These findings suggest that the impact of prompt engineering is highly model and task-dependent, highlighting the need for tailored, context-aware strategies for integrating LLMs into healthcare.

Paperid: 7449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22349.pdf

Abstract:
Machine vision models, particularly deep neural networks, are increasingly applied to physiological signal interpretation, including electrocardiography (ECG), yet they typically require large training datasets and offer limited insight into the causal features underlying their predictions. This lack of data efficiency and interpretability constrains their clinical reliability and alignment with human reasoning. Here, we show that a perception-informed pseudo-colouring technique, previously demonstrated to enhance human ECG interpretation, can improve both explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks analysing complex physiological data. We focus on acquired, drug-induced long QT syndrome (LQTS) as a challenging case study characterised by heterogeneous signal morphology, variable heart rate, and scarce positive cases associated with life-threatening arrhythmias such as torsades de pointes. This setting provides a stringent test of model generalisation under extreme data scarcity. By encoding clinically salient temporal features, such as QT-interval duration, into structured colour representations, models learn discriminative and interpretable features from as few as one or five training examples. Using prototypical networks and a ResNet-18 architecture, we evaluate one-shot and few-shot learning on ECG images derived from single cardiac cycles and full 10-second rhythms. Explainability analyses show that pseudo-colouring guides attention toward clinically meaningful ECG features while suppressing irrelevant signal components. Aggregating multiple cardiac cycles further improves performance, mirroring human perceptual averaging across heartbeats. Together, these findings demonstrate that human-like perceptual encoding can bridge data efficiency, explainability, and causal reasoning in medical machine intelligence.

Paperid: 7450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22272.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-image diffusion models generate highly detailed textures, yet they often rely on surface appearance and fail to follow strict geometric constraints, particularly when those constraints conflict with the style implied by the text prompt. This reflects a broader semantic gap between human perception and current generative models. We investigate whether geometric understanding can be introduced without specialized training by using lightweight, off-the-shelf discriminators as external guidance signals. We propose a Human Perception Embedding (HPE) teacher trained on the THINGS triplet dataset, which captures human sensitivity to object shape. By injecting gradients from this teacher into the latent diffusion process, we show that geometry and style can be separated in a controllable manner. We evaluate this approach across three architectures: Stable Diffusion v1.5 with a U-Net backbone, the flow-matching model SiT-XL/2, and the diffusion transformer PixArt-Σ. Our experiments reveal that flow models tend to drift back toward their default trajectories without continuous guidance, and we demonstrate zero-shot transfer of complex three-dimensional shapes, such as an Eames chair, onto conflicting materials such as pink metal. This guided generation improves semantic alignment by about 80 percent compared to unguided baselines. Overall, our results show that small teacher models can reliably guide large generative systems, enabling stronger geometric control and broadening the creative range of text-to-image synthesis.

Paperid: 7451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21345.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL systems allow non-SQL experts to interact with relational databases using natural language. However, their tendency to generate executable SQL for ambiguous, out-of-scope, or unanswerable queries introduces a hidden risk, as outputs may be misinterpreted as correct. This risk is especially serious in biomedical contexts, where precision is critical. We therefore present Query Carefully, a pipeline that integrates LLM-based SQL generation with explicit detection and handling of unanswerable inputs. Building on the OncoMX component of ScienceBenchmark, we construct OncoMX-NAQ (No-Answer Questions), a set of 80 no-answer questions spanning 8 categories (non-SQL, out-of-schema/domain, and multiple ambiguity types). Our approach employs llama3.3:70b with schema-aware prompts, explicit No-Answer Rules (NAR), and few-shot examples drawn from both answerable and unanswerable questions. We evaluate SQL exact match, result accuracy, and unanswerable-detection accuracy. On the OncoMX dev split, few-shot prompting with answerable examples increases result accuracy, and adding unanswerable examples does not degrade performance. On OncoMX-NAQ, balanced prompting achieves the highest unanswerable-detection accuracy (0.8), with near-perfect results for structurally defined categories (non-SQL, missing columns, out-of-domain) but persistent challenges for missing-value queries (0.5) and column ambiguity (0.3). A lightweight user interface surfaces interim SQL, execution results, and abstentions, supporting transparent and reliable text-to-SQL in biomedical applications.

Paperid: 7452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20535.pdf

Abstract:
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) struggles to adapt to dynamic enterprise environments with documents that contain information that cannot be disclosed to specific user groups. As these documents are used by LLM-driven systems (e.g., in RAG) the problem is exacerbated as LLMs can leak sensitive data due to prompt truncation, classification errors, or loss of system context. We introduce \our, a system designed to provide RBAC in RAG systems. \our implements layered input/output validation, role-aware retrieval, and post-generation fact-checking. Unlike traditional RBAC approaches that rely on fine-tuned classifiers, \our uses LLMs operating in few-shot settings with prompt-based steering for rapid deployment and role updates. We evaluate the approach on 389 queries using a synthetic dataset. Experimental results show 85\% accuracy and 89\% F1-score in query filtering, close to traditional RBAC solutions. Results suggest that practical RBAC deployment on RAG systems is approaching the maturity level needed for dynamic enterprise environments.

Paperid: 7453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20162.pdf

Abstract:
We compare human and large language model (LLM) generalization in the number game, a concept inference task. Using a Bayesian model as an analytical framework, we examined the inductive biases and inference strategies of humans and LLMs. The Bayesian model captured human behavior better than LLMs in that humans flexibly infer rule-based and similarity-based concepts, whereas LLMs rely more on mathematical rules. Humans also demonstrated a few-shot generalization, even from a single example, while LLMs required more samples to generalize. These contrasts highlight the fundamental differences in how humans and LLMs infer and generalize mathematical concepts.

Paperid: 7454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20140.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness as zero-shot time series (TS) forecasters. The key challenge lies in tokenizing TS data into textual representations that align with LLMs' pre-trained knowledge. While existing work often relies on fine-tuning specialized modules to bridge this gap, a distinct, yet challenging, paradigm aims to leverage truly off-the-shelf LLMs without any fine-tuning whatsoever, relying solely on strategic tokenization of numerical sequences. The performance of these fully frozen models is acutely sensitive to the textual representation of the input data, as their parameters cannot adapt to distribution shifts. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet highly effective strategy to overcome this brittleness: injecting noise into the raw time series before tokenization. This non-invasive intervention acts as a form of inference-time augmentation, compelling the frozen LLM to extrapolate based on robust underlying temporal patterns rather than superficial numerical artifacts. We theoretically analyze this phenomenon and empirically validate its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks. Notably, to fully eliminate potential biases from data contamination during LLM pre-training, we introduce two novel TS datasets that fall outside all utilized LLMs' pre-training scopes, and consistently observe improved performance. This study provides a further step in directly leveraging off-the-shelf LLMs for time series forecasting.

Paperid: 7455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20058.pdf

Abstract:
We consider operator learning for efficiently solving parametric non-selfadjoint eigenvalue problems. To overcome the spectral instability and mode switching inherent in non-selfadjoint operators, we introduce a hybrid framework that learns the stable invariant eigensubspace mapping rather than individual eigenfunctions. We proposed a Deep Eigenspace Network (DEN) architecture integrating Fourier Neural Operators, geometry-adaptive POD bases, and explicit banded cross-mode mixing mechanisms to capture complex spectral dependencies on unstructured meshes. We apply DEN to the parametric non-selfadjoint Steklov eigenvalue problem and provide theoretical proofs for the Lipschitz continuity of the eigensubspace with respect to the parameters. In addition, we derive error bounds for the reconstruction of the eigenspace. Numerical experiments validate DEN's high accuracy and zero-shot generalization capabilities across different discretizations.

Paperid: 7456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19663.pdf

Abstract:
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide, demanding accurate automated diagnostic systems. While general-domain vision-language models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) perform well on natural image tasks, they struggle in medical domain applications, particularly in cross-modal retrieval for ophthalmological images. We propose a novel knowledge-enhanced joint embedding framework that integrates retinal fundus images, clinical text, and structured patient data through a multimodal transformer architecture to address the critical gap in medical image-text alignment. Our approach employs separate encoders for each modality: a Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) for retinal images, Bio-ClinicalBERT for clinical narratives, and a multilayer perceptron for structured demographic and clinical features. These modalities are fused through a joint transformer with modality-specific embeddings, trained using multiple objectives including contrastive losses between modality pairs, reconstruction losses for images and text, and classification losses for DR severity grading according to ICDR and SDRG schemes. Experimental results on the Brazilian Multilabel Ophthalmological Dataset (BRSET) demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models. Our framework achieves near-perfect text-to-image retrieval performance with Recall@1 of 99.94% compared to fine-tuned CLIP's 1.29%, while maintaining state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 97.05% for SDRG and 97.97% for ICDR. Furthermore, zero-shot evaluation on the unseen DeepEyeNet dataset validates strong generalizability with 93.95% Recall@1 versus 0.22% for fine-tuned CLIP. These results demonstrate that our multimodal training approach effectively captures cross-modal relationships in the medical domain, establishing both superior retrieval capabilities and robust diagnostic performance.

Paperid: 7457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19630.pdf

Abstract:
We present experiments on diacritic restoration, a form of text normalization essential for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our study focuses on two extremely under-resourced languages: Bribri, a Chibchan language spoken in Costa Rica, and Cook Islands Māori, a Polynesian language spoken in the Cook Islands. Specifically, this paper: (i) compares algorithms for diacritics restoration in under-resourced languages, including tonal diacritics, (ii) examines the amount of data required to achieve target performance levels, (iii) contrasts results across varying resource conditions, and (iv) explores the related task of diacritic correction. We find that fine-tuned, character-level LLMs perform best, likely due to their ability to decompose complex characters into their UTF-8 byte representations. In contrast, massively multilingual models perform less effectively given our data constraints. Across all models, reliable performance begins to emerge with data budgets of around 10,000 words. Zero-shot approaches perform poorly in all cases. This study responds both to requests from the language communities and to broader NLP research questions concerning model performance and generalization in under-resourced contexts.

Paperid: 7458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19305.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding and monitoring the socio-economic impacts of climate hazards requires extracting structured information from heterogeneous news articles on a large scale. To that end, we have developed CienaLLM, a modular framework based on schema-guided Generative Information Extraction. CienaLLM uses open-weight Large Language Models for zero-shot information extraction from news articles, and supports configurable prompts and output schemas, multi-step pipelines, and cloud or on-premise inference. To systematically assess how the choice of LLM family, size, precision regime, and prompting strategy affect performance, we run a large factorial study in models, precisions, and prompt engineering techniques. An additional response parsing step nearly eliminates format errors while preserving accuracy; larger models deliver the strongest and most stable performance, while quantization offers substantial efficiency gains with modest accuracy trade-offs; and prompt strategies show heterogeneous, model-specific effects. CienaLLM matches or outperforms the supervised baseline in accuracy for extracting drought impacts from Spanish news, although at a higher inference cost. While evaluated in droughts, the schema-driven and model-agnostic design is suitable for adapting to related information extraction tasks (e.g., other hazards, sectors, or languages) by editing prompts and schemas rather than retraining. We release code, configurations, and schemas to support reproducible use.

Paperid: 7459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19280.pdf

Abstract:
Axial piston pumps are crucial components in fluid power systems, where reliable fault diagnosis is essential for ensuring operational safety and efficiency. Traditional data-driven methods require extensive labeled fault data, which is often impractical to obtain, while model-based approaches suffer from parameter uncertainties. This paper proposes a digital twin (DT)-driven zero-shot fault diagnosis framework utilizing fluid-borne noise (FBN) signals. The framework calibrates a high-fidelity DT model using only healthy-state data, generates synthetic fault signals for training deep learning classifiers, and employs a physics-informed neural network (PINN) as a virtual sensor for flow ripple estimation. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) is integrated to visualize the decision-making process of neural networks, revealing that large kernels matching the subsequence length in time-domain inputs and small kernels in time-frequency domain inputs enable higher diagnostic accuracy by focusing on physically meaningful features. Experimental validations demonstrate that training on signals from the calibrated DT model yields diagnostic accuracies exceeding 95\% on real-world benchmarks, while uncalibrated models result in significantly lower performance, highlighting the framework's effectiveness in data-scarce scenarios.

Paperid: 7460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19247.pdf

Abstract:
Prompt engineering plays a critical role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex reasoning and labeling tasks without the need for extensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt optimization pipeline for frame detection in logistics texts, combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, and automatic CoT synthesis (Auto-CoT) to generate highly effective task-specific prompts. Central to our approach is an LLM-based prompt optimizer agent that iteratively refines the prompts using retrieved examples, performance feedback, and internal self-evaluation. Our framework is evaluated on a real-world logistics text annotation task, where reasoning accuracy and labeling efficiency are critical. Experimental results show that the optimized prompts - particularly those enhanced via Auto-CoT and RAG - improve real-world inference accuracy by up to 15% compared to baseline zero-shot or static prompts. The system demonstrates consistent improvements across multiple LLMs, including GPT-4o, Qwen 2.5 (72B), and LLaMA 3.1 (70B), validating its generalizability and practical value. These findings suggest that structured prompt optimization is a viable alternative to full fine-tuning, offering scalable solutions for deploying LLMs in domain-specific NLP applications such as logistics.

Paperid: 7461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19036.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot action recognition aims to enable models to quickly learn new action categories from limited labeled samples, addressing the challenge of data scarcity in real-world applications. Current research primarily addresses three core challenges: (1) temporal modeling, where models are prone to interference from irrelevant static background information and struggle to capture the essence of dynamic action features; (2) visual similarity, where categories with subtle visual differences are difficult to distinguish; and (3) the modality gap between visual-textual support prototypes and visual-only queries, which complicates alignment within a shared embedding space. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a CLIP-SPM framework, which includes three components: (1) the Hierarchical Synergistic Motion Refinement (HSMR) module, which aligns deep and shallow motion features to improve temporal modeling by reducing static background interference; (2) the Semantic Prototype Modulation (SPM) strategy, which generates query-relevant text prompts to bridge the modality gap and integrates them with visual features, enhancing the discriminability between similar actions; and (3) the Prototype-Anchor Dual Modulation (PADM) method, which refines support prototypes and aligns query features with a global semantic anchor, improving consistency across support and query samples. Comprehensive experiments across standard benchmarks, including Kinetics, SSv2-Full, SSv2-Small, UCF101, and HMDB51, demonstrate that our CLIP-SPM achieves competitive performance under 1-shot, 3-shot, and 5-shot settings. Extensive ablation studies and visual analyses further validate the effectiveness of each component and its contributions to addressing the core challenges. The source code and models are publicly available at GitHub.

Paperid: 7462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18969.pdf

Abstract:
Object recognition has become prevalent across various industries. However, most existing applications are limited to identifying objects alone, without considering their associated states. The ability to recognize both the state and object simultaneously remains less common. One approach to address this is by treating state and object as a single category during training. However, this approach poses challenges in data collection and training since it requires comprehensive data for all possible combinations. Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL) emerges as a viable solution by treating the state and object as distinct categories during training. CZSL facilitates the identification of novel compositions even in the absence of data for every conceivable combination. The current state-of-the-art method, KG-SP, addresses this issue by training distinct classifiers for states and objects, while leveraging a semantic model to evaluate the plausibility of composed compositions. However, KG-SP's accuracy in state and object recognition can be further improved, and it fails to consider the weighting of states and objects during composition. In this study, we propose SASOW, an enhancement of KG-SP that considers the weighting of states and objects while improving composition recognition accuracy. First, we introduce self-attention mechanisms into the classifiers for states and objects, leading to enhanced accuracy in recognizing both. Additionally, we incorporate the weighting of states and objects during composition to generate more reasonable and accurate compositions. Our validation process involves testing SASOW on three established benchmark datasets. Experimental outcomes affirm when compared against OW-CZSL approach, KG-SP, SASOW showcases improvements of 2.1%, 1.7%, and 0.4% in terms of accuracy for unseen compositions across the MIT-States, UT Zappos, and C-GQA datasets, respectively.

Paperid: 7463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18964.pdf

Abstract:
Recent tuning-free identity customization methods achieve high facial fidelity but often overlook visual context, such as lighting, skin texture, and environmental tone. This limitation leads to ``Semantic-Visual Dissonance,'' where accurate facial geometry clashes with the input's unique atmosphere, causing an unnatural ``sticker-like'' effect. We propose **DVI (Disentangled Visual-Identity)**, a zero-shot framework that orthogonally disentangles identity into fine-grained semantic and coarse-grained visual streams. Unlike methods relying solely on semantic vectors, DVI exploits the inherent statistical properties of the VAE latent space, utilizing mean and variance as lightweight descriptors for global visual atmosphere. We introduce a **Parameter-Free Feature Modulation** mechanism that adaptively modulates semantic embeddings with these visual statistics, effectively injecting the reference's ``visual soul'' without training. Furthermore, a **Dynamic Temporal Granularity Scheduler** aligns with the diffusion process, prioritizing visual atmosphere in early denoising stages while refining semantic details later. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVI significantly enhances visual consistency and atmospheric fidelity without parameter fine-tuning, maintaining robust identity preservation and outperforming state-of-the-art methods in IBench evaluations.

Paperid: 7464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18843.pdf

Abstract:
Advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence have enabled preliminary decoding of brain activity. However, despite the progress, the interpretability of neural representations remains limited. A significant challenge arises from the intrinsic properties of electroencephalography (EEG) signals, including high noise levels, spatial diffusion, and pronounced temporal variability. To interpret the neural mechanism underlying thoughts, we propose a transformers-based framework to extract spatial-temporal representations associated with observed visual stimuli from EEG recordings. These features are subsequently incorporated into the attention mechanisms of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) to facilitate the reconstruction of visual stimuli from brain activity. The quantitative evaluations on publicly available benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method excels at modeling the semantic structures from EEG signals; achieving up to 6.5% increase in latent space clustering accuracy and 11.8% increase in zero shot generalization across unseen classes while having comparable Inception Score and Fréchet Inception Distance with existing baselines. Our work marks a significant step towards generalizable semantic interpretation of the EEG signals.

Paperid: 7465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18633.pdf

Abstract:
Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) with diverse real-world attributes have driven recent interest in cross-problem learning approaches that efficiently generalize across problem variants. We propose ARC (Attribute Representation via Compositional Learning), a cross-problem learning framework that learns disentangled attribute representations by decomposing them into two complementary components: an Intrinsic Attribute Embedding (IAE) for invariant attribute semantics and a Contextual Interaction Embedding (CIE) for attribute-combination effects. This disentanglement is achieved by enforcing analogical consistency in the embedding space to ensure the semantic transformation of adding an attribute (e.g., a length constraint) remains invariant across different problem contexts. This enables our model to reuse invariant semantics across trained variants and construct representations for unseen combinations. ARC achieves state-of-the-art performance across in-distribution, zero-shot generalization, few-shot adaptation, and real-world benchmarks.

Paperid: 7466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18412.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a structural-graph approach to classifying contour images in a few-shot regime without using backpropagation. The core idea is to make structure the carrier of explanations: an image is encoded as an attributed graph (critical points and lines represented as nodes with geometric attributes), and generalization is achieved via the formation of concept attractors (class-level concept graphs). Purpose. To design and experimentally validate an architecture in which class concepts are formed from a handful of examples (5 - 6 per class) through structural and parametric reductions, providing transparent decisions and eliminating backpropagation. Methods. Contour vectorization is followed by constructing a bipartite graph (Point/Line as nodes) with normalized geometric attributes such as coordinates, length, angle, and direction; reductions include the elimination of unstable substructures or noise and the alignment of paths between critical points. Concepts are formed by iterative composition of samples, and classification is performed by selecting the best graph-to-concept match (using approximated GED). Results. On an MNIST subset with 5 - 6 base examples per class (single epoch), we obtain a consistent accuracy of around 82% with full traceability of decisions: misclassifications can be explained by explicit structural similarities. An indicative comparison with SVM, MLP, CNN, as well as metric and meta-learning baselines, is provided. The structural-graph scheme with concept attractors enables few-shot learning without backpropagation and offers built-in explanations through the explicit graph structure. Limitations concern the computational cost of GED and the quality of skeletonization; promising directions include classification-algorithm optimization, work with static scenes, and associative recognition.

Paperid: 7467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18146.pdf

Abstract:
Identifying the leader within a robotic swarm is crucial, especially in adversarial contexts where leader concealment is necessary for mission success. This work introduces the interactive Swarm Leader Identification (iSLI) problem, a novel approach where an adversarial probing agent identifies a swarm's leader by physically interacting with its members. We formulate the iSLI problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and employ Deep Reinforcement Learning, specifically Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to train the prober's policy. The proposed approach utilizes a novel neural network architecture featuring a Timed Graph Relationformer (TGR) layer combined with a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) model. The TGR layer effectively processes graph-based observations of the swarm, capturing temporal dependencies and fusing relational information using a learned gating mechanism to generate informative representations for policy learning. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our TGR-based model outperforms baseline graph neural network architectures and exhibits significant zero-shot generalization capabilities across varying swarm sizes and speeds different from those used during training. The trained prober achieves high accuracy in identifying the leader, maintaining performance even in out-of-training distribution scenarios, and showing appropriate confidence levels in its predictions. Real-world experiments with physical robots further validate the approach, confirming successful sim-to-real transfer and robustness to dynamic changes, such as unexpected agent disconnections.

Paperid: 7468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17969.pdf

Abstract:
Convolutional neural operator is a CNN-based architecture recently proposed to enforce structure-preserving continuous-discrete equivalence and enable the genuine, alias-free learning of solution operators of PDEs. This neural operator was demonstrated to outperform for certain cases some baseline models such as DeepONet, Fourier neural operator, and Galerkin transformer in terms of surrogate accuracy. The convolutional neural operator, however, seems not to be validated for few-shot learning. We extend the model to few-shot learning scenarios by first pre-training a convolutional neural operator using a source dataset and then adjusting the parameters of the trained neural operator using only a small target dataset. We investigate three strategies for adjusting the parameters of a trained neural operator, including fine-tuning, low-rank adaption, and neuron linear transformation, and find that the neuron linear transformation strategy enjoys the highest surrogate accuracy in solving PDEs such as Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, Brusselator diffusion-reaction system, and Navier-Stokes equations.

Paperid: 7469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17667.pdf

Abstract:
Modern HTTPS mechanisms such as Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) and encrypted DNS improve privacy but remain vulnerable to website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, where adversaries infer visited sites from encrypted traffic patterns. Existing WF methods rely on supervised learning with site-specific labeled traces, which limits scalability and fails to handle previously unseen websites. We address these limitations by reformulating WF as a zero-shot cross-modal retrieval problem and introducing STAR. STAR learns a joint embedding space for encrypted traffic traces and crawl-time logic profiles using a dual-encoder architecture. Trained on 150K automatically collected traffic-logic pairs with contrastive and consistency objectives and structure-aware augmentation, STAR retrieves the most semantically aligned profile for a trace without requiring target-side traffic during training. Experiments on 1,600 unseen websites show that STAR achieves 87.9 percent top-1 accuracy and 0.963 AUC in open-world detection, outperforming supervised and few-shot baselines. Adding an adapter with only four labeled traces per site further boosts top-5 accuracy to 98.8 percent. Our analysis reveals intrinsic semantic-traffic alignment in modern web protocols, identifying semantic leakage as the dominant privacy risk in encrypted HTTPS traffic. We release STAR's datasets and code to support reproducibility and future research.

Paperid: 7470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17586.pdf

Abstract:
Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly conservative policies limit driving efficiency while aggressive exploration risks safety violations. The Safety Representations for Safer Policy Learning (SRPL) framework addresses this challenge by equipping agents with a predictive model of future constraint violations and has shown promise in controlled environments. This paper investigates whether SRPL extends to real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Systematic experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) and NuPlan demonstrate that SRPL can improve the reward-safety tradeoff, achieving statistically significant improvements in success rate (effect sizes r = 0.65-0.86) and cost reduction (effect sizes r = 0.70-0.83), with p < 0.05 for observed improvements. However, its effectiveness depends on the underlying policy optimizer and the dataset distribution. The results further show that predictive safety representations play a critical role in improving robustness to observation noise. Additionally, in zero-shot cross-dataset evaluation, SRPL-augmented agents demonstrate improved generalization compared to non-SRPL methods. These findings collectively demonstrate the potential of predictive safety representations to strengthen SafeRL for autonomous driving.

Paperid: 7471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17474.pdf

Abstract:
Voice-based human-machine interaction is a primary modality for accessing intelligent systems, yet individuals with dysarthria face systematic exclusion due to recognition performance gaps. Whilst automatic speech recognition (ASR) achieves word error rates (WER) below 5% on typical speech, performance degrades dramatically for dysarthric speakers. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer potential for leveraging contextual reasoning to compensate for acoustic degradation, yet their zero-shot capabilities remain uncharacterised. This study evaluates eight commercial speech-to-text services on the TORGO dysarthric speech corpus: four conventional ASR systems (AssemblyAI, Whisper large-v3, Deepgram Nova-3, Nova-3 Medical) and four MLLM-based systems (GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash). Evaluation encompasses lexical accuracy, semantic preservation, and cost-latency trade-offs. Results demonstrate severity-dependent degradation: mild dysarthria achieves 3-5% WER approaching typical-speech benchmarks, whilst severe dysarthria exceeds 49% WER across all systems. A verbatim-transcription prompt yields architecture-specific effects: GPT-4o achieves 7.36 percentage point WER reduction with consistent improvement across all tested speakers, whilst Gemini variants exhibit degradation. Semantic metrics indicate that communicative intent remains partially recoverable despite elevated lexical error rates. These findings establish empirical baselines enabling evidence-based technology selection for assistive voice interface deployment.

Paperid: 7472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17263.pdf

Abstract:
Robust anatomical segmentation of chest X-rays (CXRs) remains challenging due to the scarcity of comprehensive annotations and the substantial variability of real-world acquisition conditions. We propose AnyCXR, a unified framework that enables generalizable multi-organ segmentation across arbitrary CXR projection angles using only synthetic supervision. The method combines a Multi-stage Domain Randomization (MSDR) engine, which generates over 100,000 anatomically faithful and highly diverse synthetic radiographs from 3D CT volumes, with a Conditional Joint Annotation Regularization (CAR) learning strategy that leverages partial and imperfect labels by enforcing anatomical consistency in a latent space. Trained entirely on synthetic data, AnyCXR achieves strong zero-shot generalization on multiple real-world datasets, providing accurate delineation of 54 anatomical structures in PA, lateral, and oblique views. The resulting segmentation maps support downstream clinical tasks, including automated cardiothoracic ratio estimation, spine curvature assessment, and disease classification, where the incorporation of anatomical priors improves diagnostic performance. These results demonstrate that AnyCXR establishes a scalable and reliable foundation for anatomy-aware CXR analysis and offers a practical pathway toward reducing annotation burdens while improving robustness across diverse imaging conditions.

Paperid: 7473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16685.pdf

Abstract:
Combining open-source datasets can introduce data leakage if the same subject appears in multiple sets, leading to inflated model performance. To address this, we explore subject fingerprinting, mapping all images of a subject to a distinct region in latent space, to enable subject re-identification via similarity matching. Using a ResNet-50 trained with triplet margin loss, we evaluate few-shot fingerprinting on 3D MRI and 2D X-ray data in both standard (20-way 1-shot) and challenging (1000-way 1-shot) scenarios. The model achieves high Mean- Recall-@-K scores: 99.10% (20-way 1-shot) and 90.06% (500-way 5-shot) on ChestXray-14; 99.20% (20-way 1-shot) and 98.86% (100-way 3-shot) on BraTS- 2021.

Paperid: 7474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15977.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly proposed as general-purpose solutions for visual recognition tasks, yet their reliability for agricultural decision support remains poorly understood. We benchmark a diverse set of open-source and closed-source VLMs on 27 agricultural classification datasets from the AgML collection, spanning 162 classes across plant disease, pest and damage, and plant and weed species identification. Across all tasks, zero-shot VLMs substantially underperform a supervised task-specific baseline (YOLO11), which consistently achieves markedly higher accuracy than any foundation model. Under multiple-choice prompting, the best-performing VLM (Gemini-3 Pro) reaches approximately 62% average accuracy, while open-ended prompting yields much lower performance, with raw accuracies typically below 25%. Applying LLM-based semantic judging increases open-ended accuracy (for example, from 21% to 30% for top models) and alters model rankings, demonstrating that evaluation methodology meaningfully affects reported conclusions. Among open-source models, Qwen-VL-72B performs best, approaching closed-source performance under constrained prompting but still trailing top proprietary systems. Task-level analysis shows that plant and weed species classification is consistently easier than pest and damage identification, which remains the most challenging category across models. Overall, these results indicate that current off-the-shelf VLMs are not yet suitable as standalone agricultural diagnostic systems, but can function as assistive components when paired with constrained interfaces, explicit label ontologies, and domain-aware evaluation strategies.

Paperid: 7475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15312.pdf

Abstract:
Extracting structured information from zeolite synthesis experimental procedures is critical for materials discovery, yet existing methods have not systematically evaluated Large Language Models (LLMs) for this domain-specific task. This work addresses a fundamental question: what is the efficacy of different prompting strategies when applying LLMs to scientific information extraction? We focus on four key subtasks: event type classification (identifying synthesis steps), trigger text identification (locating event mentions), argument role extraction (recognizing parameter types), and argument text extraction (extracting parameter values). We evaluate four prompting strategies - zero-shot, few-shot, event-specific, and reflection-based - across six state-of-the-art LLMs (Gemma-3-12b-it, GPT-5-mini, O4-mini, Claude-Haiku-3.5, DeepSeek reasoning and non-reasoning) using the ZSEE dataset of 1,530 annotated sentences. Results demonstrate strong performance on event type classification (80-90\% F1) but modest performance on fine-grained extraction tasks, particularly argument role and argument text extraction (50-65\% F1). GPT-5-mini exhibits extreme prompt sensitivity with 11-79\% F1 variation. Notably, advanced prompting strategies provide minimal improvements over zero-shot approaches, revealing fundamental architectural limitations. Error analysis identifies systematic hallucination, over-generalization, and inability to capture synthesis-specific nuances. Our findings demonstrate that while LLMs achieve high-level understanding, precise extraction of experimental parameters requires domain-adapted models, providing quantitative benchmarks for scientific information extraction.

Paperid: 7476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15248.pdf

Abstract:
Moralizations - arguments that invoke moral values to justify demands or positions - are a yet underexplored form of persuasive communication. We present the Moralization Corpus, a novel multi-genre dataset designed to analyze how moral values are strategically used in argumentative discourse. Moralizations are pragmatically complex and often implicit, posing significant challenges for both human annotators and NLP systems. We develop a frame-based annotation scheme that captures the constitutive elements of moralizations - moral values, demands, and discourse protagonists - and apply it to a diverse set of German texts, including political debates, news articles, and online discussions. The corpus enables fine-grained analysis of moralizing language across communicative formats and domains. We further evaluate several large language models (LLMs) under varied prompting conditions for the task of moralization detection and moralization component extraction and compare it to human annotations in order to investigate the challenges of automatic and manual analysis of moralizations. Results show that detailed prompt instructions has a greater effect than few-shot or explanation-based prompting, and that moralization remains a highly subjective and context-sensitive task. We release all data, annotation guidelines, and code to foster future interdisciplinary research on moral discourse and moral reasoning in NLP.

Paperid: 7477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14312.pdf

Abstract:
In regions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), there is a high demand for wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), crucial for sustainable water management. Precise identification of WWTPs from satellite images enables environmental monitoring. Traditional methods like YOLOv8 segmentation require extensive manual labeling. But studies indicate that vision-language models (VLMs) are an efficient alternative to achieving equivalent or superior results through inherent reasoning and annotation. This study presents a structured methodology for VLM comparison, divided into zero-shot and few-shot streams specifically to identify WWTPs. The YOLOv8 was trained on a governmental dataset of 83,566 high-resolution satellite images from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE: ~85% WWTPs (positives), 15% non-WWTPs (negatives). Evaluated VLMs include LLaMA 3.2 Vision, Qwen 2.5 VL, DeepSeek-VL2, Gemma 3, Gemini, and Pixtral 12B (Mistral), used to identify WWTP components such as circular/rectangular tanks, aeration basins and distinguish confounders via expert prompts producing JSON outputs with confidence and descriptions. The dataset comprises 1,207 validated WWTP locations (198 UAE, 354 KSA, 655 Egypt) and equal non-WWTP sites from field/AI data, as 600mx600m Geo-TIFF images (Zoom 18, EPSG:4326). Zero-shot evaluations on WWTP images showed several VLMs out-performing YOLOv8's true positive rate, with Gemma-3 highest. Results confirm that VLMs, particularly with zero-shot, can replace YOLOv8 for efficient, annotation-free WWTP classification, enabling scalable remote sensing.

Paperid: 7478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13717.pdf

Abstract:
Many deep learning approaches have been developed for EEG-based seizure detection; however, most rely on access to large centralized annotated datasets. In clinical practice, EEG data are often scarce, patient-specific distributed across institutions, and governed by strict privacy regulations that prohibit data pooling. As a result, creating usable AI-based seizure detection models remains challenging in real-world medical settings. To address these constraints, we propose a two-stage federated few-shot learning (FFSL) framework for personalized EEG-based seizure detection. The method is trained and evaluated on the TUH Event Corpus, which includes six EEG event classes. In Stage 1, a pretrained biosignal transformer (BIOT) is fine-tuned across non-IID simulated hospital sites using federated learning, enabling shared representation learning without centralizing EEG recordings. In Stage 2, federated few-shot personalization adapts the classifier to each patient using only five labeled EEG segments, retaining seizure-specific information while still benefiting from cross-site knowledge. Federated fine-tuning achieved a balanced accuracy of 0.43 (centralized: 0.52), Cohen's kappa of 0.42 (0.49), and weighted F1 of 0.69 (0.74). In the FFSL stage, client-specific models reached an average balanced accuracy of 0.77, Cohen's kappa of 0.62, and weighted F1 of 0.73 across four sites with heterogeneous event distributions. These results suggest that FFSL can support effective patient-adaptive seizure detection under realistic data-availability and privacy constraints.

Paperid: 7479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13359.pdf

Abstract:
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) require reliable six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) position control to operate effectively in complex and dynamic marine environments. Traditional controllers are effective under nominal conditions but exhibit degraded performance when faced with unmodeled dynamics or environmental disturbances. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a powerful alternative but training is typically slow and sim-to-real transfer remains challenging. This work introduces a GPU-accelerated RL training pipeline built in JAX and MuJoCo-XLA (MJX). By jointly JIT-compiling large-scale parallel physics simulation and learning updates, we achieve training times of under two minutes.Through systematic evaluation of multiple RL algorithms, we show robust 6-DOF trajectory tracking and effective disturbance rejection in real underwater experiments, with policies transferred zero-shot from simulation. Our results provide the first explicit real-world demonstration of RL-based AUV position control across all six degrees of freedom.

Paperid: 7480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12869.pdf

Abstract:
Valuing intangible assets under uncertainty remains a critical challenge in the strategic management of technological innovation due to the information asymmetry inherent in high-dimensional technical specifications. Traditional bibliometric indicators, such as citation counts, fail to address this friction in a timely manner due to the systemic latency inherent in data accumulation. To bridge this gap, this study proposes the Economic Reasoning Alignment via Instruction Tuning (ERA-IT) framework. We theoretically conceptualize patent renewal history as a revealed economic preference and leverage it as an objective supervisory signal to align the generative reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) with market realities, a process we term Eco-Semantic Alignment. Using a randomly sampled dataset of 10,000 European Patent Office patents across diverse technological domains, we trained the model not only to predict value tiers but also to reverse-engineer the Economic Chain-of-Thought from unstructured text. Empirical results demonstrate that ERA-IT significantly outperforms both conventional econometric models and zero-shot LLMs in predictive accuracy. More importantly, by generating explicit, logically grounded rationales for valuation, the framework serves as a transparent cognitive scaffold for decision-makers, reducing the opacity of black-box AI in high-stakes intellectual property management.

Paperid: 7481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12824.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale multimodal foundation models, particularly Contrastive Captioners (CoCa), have achieved state-of-the-art results by unifying contrastive alignment with generative captioning. While zero-shot transfer capabilities are well-documented, the adaptation of these generative-contrastive hybrids to downstream tasks with extreme data scarcity (few-shot learning) remains under-explored. Existing literature predominantly focuses on dual-encoder architectures like CLIP, leaving a gap in understanding how CoCa's distinct latent space responds to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study on adapting the CoCa visual backbone for few-shot image classification. We systematically evaluate a hierarchy of strategies, ranging from training-free hybrid prototyping to deep parameter adaptation via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). First, we identify an "augmentation divergence": while strong data augmentation degrades the performance of linear probing in low-shot settings, it is essential for stabilizing LoRA fine-tuning. We also demonstrate that hybrid objectives incorporating Supervised Contrastive (SupCon) loss yield consistent performance improvements over standard Cross-Entropy across varying shot counts. Crucially, we characterize the sensitivity of training configurations to data scarcity, providing empirical reference settings for scaling regularization, rank, and sampling strategies to facilitate the efficient adaptation of generative-contrastive foundation models.

Paperid: 7482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12177.pdf

Abstract:
Indoor navigation remains a critical challenge for people with visual impairments. The current solutions mainly rely on infrastructure-based systems, which limit their ability to navigate safely in dynamic environments. We propose a novel navigation approach that utilizes a foundation model to transform floor plans into navigable knowledge graphs and generate human-readable navigation instructions. Floorplan2Guide integrates a large language model (LLM) to extract spatial information from architectural layouts, reducing the manual preprocessing required by earlier floorplan parsing methods. Experimental results indicate that few-shot learning improves navigation accuracy in comparison to zero-shot learning on simulated and real-world evaluations. Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves the highest accuracy among the evaluated models, with 92.31%, 76.92%, and 61.54% on the short, medium, and long routes, respectively, under 5-shot prompting of the MP-1 floor plan. The success rate of graph-based spatial structure is 15.4% higher than that of direct visual reasoning among all models, which confirms that graphical representation and in-context learning enhance navigation performance and make our solution more precise for indoor navigation of Blind and Low Vision (BLV) users.

Paperid: 7483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12167.pdf

Abstract:
So far, expensive finetuning beyond the pretraining sequence length has been a requirement for effectively extending the context of language models (LM). In this work, we break this key bottleneck by Dropping the Positional Embeddings of LMs after training (DroPE). Our simple method is motivated by three key theoretical and empirical observations. First, positional embeddings (PEs) serve a crucial role during pretraining, providing an important inductive bias that significantly facilitates convergence. Second, over-reliance on this explicit positional information is also precisely what prevents test-time generalization to sequences of unseen length, even when using popular PE-scaling methods. Third, positional embeddings are not an inherent requirement of effective language modeling and can be safely removed after pretraining, following a short recalibration phase. Empirically, DroPE yields seamless zero-shot context extension without any long-context finetuning, quickly adapting pretrained LMs without compromising their capabilities in the original training context. Our findings hold across different models and dataset sizes, far outperforming previous specialized architectures and established rotary positional embedding scaling methods.

Paperid: 7484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12146.pdf

Abstract:
Open-world deployment requires models to recognize both known categories and remain reliable when novel classes appear. We present a unified experimental study spanning open-set recognition (OSR) and few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) on CIFAR-10. For OSR, we compare three pretrained frozen visual encoders: ResNet-50, ConvNeXt-Tiny and CLIP ViT-B/16,using a linear probe and four post-hoc scoring functions, namely MSP, Energy, Mahalanobis and kNN. Across metrics,such as, AUROC, AUPR, FPR@95, and OSCR, CLIP consistently yields the strongest separability between known and unknown samples, with Energy providing the most stable performance across backbones. For FSCIL, we compare modified SPPR, OrCo, and ConCM using partially frozen ResNet-50 across 1-, 5-, and 10-shot scenarios. ConCM achieves 84.7% accuracy in the 10-shot setting with the cleanest confusion matrix, while all methods show saturation beyond 5 shots. Our controlled evaluation reveals how the backbone architecture and scoring mechanisms affect unknown detection and how prototype-based methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting during incremental adaptation.

Paperid: 7485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10674.pdf

Abstract:
Recent progress in zero-shot 6D object pose estimation has been driven largely by large-scale models and cloud-based inference. However, these approaches often introduce high latency, elevated energy consumption, and deployment risks related to connectivity, cost, and data governance; factors that conflict with the practical constraints of real-world robotics, where compute is limited and on-device inference is frequently required. We introduce Geo6DPose, a lightweight, fully local, and training-free pipeline for zero-shot 6D pose estimation that trades model scale for geometric reliability. Our method combines foundation model visual features with a geometric filtering strategy: Similarity maps are computed between onboarded template DINO descriptors and scene patches, and mutual correspondences are established by projecting scene patch centers to 3D and template descriptors to the object model coordinate system. Final poses are recovered via correspondence-driven RANSAC and ranked using a weighted geometric alignment metric that jointly accounts for reprojection consistency and spatial support, improving robustness to noise, clutter, and partial visibility. Geo6DPose achieves sub-second inference on a single commodity GPU while matching the average recall of significantly larger zero-shot baselines (53.7 AR, 1.08 FPS). It requires no training, fine-tuning, or network access, and remains compatible with evolving foundation backbones, advancing practical, fully local 6D perception for robotic deployment.

Paperid: 7486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10596.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic retrieval of remote sensing (RS) images is a critical task fundamentally challenged by the \textquote{semantic gap}, the discrepancy between a model's low-level visual features and high-level human concepts. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising path to bridge this gap, existing methods often rely on costly, domain-specific training, and there is a lack of benchmarks to evaluate the practical utility of VLM-generated text in a zero-shot retrieval context. To address this research gap, we introduce the Remote Sensing Rich Text (RSRT) dataset, a new benchmark featuring multiple structured captions per image. Based on this dataset, we propose a fully training-free, text-only retrieval reference called TRSLLaVA. Our methodology reformulates cross-modal retrieval as a text-to-text (T2T) matching problem, leveraging rich text descriptions as queries against a database of VLM-generated captions within a unified textual embedding space. This approach completely bypasses model training or fine-tuning. Experiments on the RSITMD and RSICD benchmarks show our training-free method is highly competitive with state-of-the-art supervised models. For instance, on RSITMD, our method achieves a mean Recall of 42.62\%, nearly doubling the 23.86\% of the standard zero-shot CLIP baseline and surpassing several top supervised models. This validates that high-quality semantic representation through structured text provides a powerful and cost-effective paradigm for remote sensing image retrieval.

Paperid: 7487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10435.pdf

Abstract:
The integrity and reliability of scientific literature is facing a serious threat by adversarial text generation techniques, specifically from the use of automated paraphrasing tools to mask plagiarism. These tools generate "tortured phrases", statistically improbable synonyms (e.g. "counterfeit consciousness" for "artificial intelligence"), that preserve the local grammar while obscuring the original source. Most existing detection methods depend heavily on static blocklists or general-domain language models, which suffer from high false-negative rates for novel obfuscations and cannot determine the source of the plagiarized content. In this paper, we propose Semantic Reconstruction of Adversarial Plagiarism (SRAP), a framework designed not only to detect these anomalies but to mathematically recover the original terminology. We use a two-stage architecture: (1) statistical anomaly detection with a domain-specific masked language model (SciBERT) using token-level pseudo-perplexity, and (2) source-based semantic reconstruction using dense vector retrieval (FAISS) and sentence-level alignment (SBERT). Experiments on a parallel corpus of adversarial scientific text show that while zero-shot baselines fail completely (0.00 percent restoration accuracy), our retrieval-augmented approach achieves 23.67 percent restoration accuracy, significantly outperforming baseline methods. We also show that static decision boundaries are necessary for robust detection in jargon-heavy scientific text, since dynamic thresholding fails under high variance. SRAP enables forensic analysis by linking obfuscated expressions back to their most probable source documents.

Paperid: 7488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10061.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become effective zero-shot classifiers, but their high computational requirements and environmental costs limit their practicality for large-scale annotation in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. To support more sustainable workflows, we present Text2Graph, an open-source Python package that provides a modular implementation of existing text-to-graph classification approaches. The framework enables users to combine LLM-based partial annotation with Graph Neural Network (GNN) label propagation in a flexible manner, making it straightforward to swap components such as feature extractors, edge construction methods, and sampling strategies. We benchmark Text2Graph on a zero-shot setting using five datasets spanning topic classification and sentiment analysis tasks, comparing multiple variants against other zero-shot approaches for text classification. In addition to reporting performance, we provide detailed estimates of energy consumption and carbon emissions, showing that graph-based propagation achieves competitive results at a fraction of the energy and environmental cost.

Paperid: 7489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09627.pdf

Abstract:
Effective log anomaly detection is critical to sustaining reliability in large-scale IT infrastructures. Transformer-based models require substantial resources and labeled data, exacerbating the cold-start problem in target domains where logs are scarce. Existing cross-domain methods leverage source logs but struggle with generalization due to reliance on surface lexical similarity, failing to capture latent semantic equivalence amid structural divergences. To address this, we propose LogICL, a framework distilling Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning into a lightweight encoder for cross-domain anomaly detection. During training, LogICL constructs a delta matrix measuring the utility of demonstrations selected via Maximal Marginal Relevance relative to zero-shot inference. The encoder is optimized via a multi-objective loss comprising an ICL-Guided term that aligns representations based on reasoning assistance utility, maximum mean discrepancy for domain alignment, and supervised contrastive loss. At inference, the optimized encoder retrieves reasoning-aware demonstrations using semantic similarity and delta scores, enabling frozen-LLM in-context learning with Chain-of-Thought for accurate and interpretable detection. Experiments on few-shot and zero-shot cross-domain benchmarks confirm LogICL achieves state-of-the-art performance across heterogeneous systems. Further analysis via visualizations and case studies confirms LogICL bridges the semantic gap beyond surface lexical similarity, effectively capturing latent semantic equivalence for rapid deployment.

Paperid: 7490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09410.pdf

Abstract:
Collaborative pursuit-evasion in cluttered environments presents significant challenges due to sparse rewards and constrained Fields of View (FOV). Standard Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) often suffers from inefficient exploration and fails to scale to large scenarios. We propose PGF-MAPPO (Path-Guided Frontier MAPPO), a hierarchical framework bridging topological planning with reactive control. To resolve local minima and sparse rewards, we integrate an A*-based potential field for dense reward shaping. Furthermore, we introduce Directional Frontier Allocation, combining Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) with geometric angle suppression to enforce spatial dispersion and accelerate coverage. The architecture employs a parameter-shared decentralized critic, maintaining O(1) model complexity suitable for robotic swarms. Experiments demonstrate that PGF-MAPPO achieves superior capture efficiency against faster evaders. Policies trained on 10x10 maps exhibit robust zero-shot generalization to unseen 20x20 environments, significantly outperforming rule-based and learning-based baselines.

Paperid: 7491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08747.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial mushroom cultivation increasingly relies on computer vision for monitoring and automated harvesting. However, developing accurate detection and segmentation models requires large, precisely annotated datasets that are costly to produce. Synthetic data provides a scalable alternative, yet often lacks sufficient realism to generalize to real-world scenarios. This paper presents a novel workflow that integrates 3D rendering in Blender with a constrained diffusion model to automatically generate high-quality annotated, photorealistic synthetic images of Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms. This approach preserves full control over 3D scene configuration and annotations while achieving photorealism without the need for specialized computer graphics expertise. We release two synthetic datasets (each containing 6,000 images depicting over 250k mushroom instances) and evaluate Mask R-CNN models trained on them in a zero-shot setting. When tested on two independent real-world datasets (including a newly collected benchmark), our method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance (F1 = 0.859 on M18K), despite using only synthetic training data. Although the approach is demonstrated on Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms, the proposed pipeline can be readily adapted to other mushroom species or to other agricultural domains, such as fruit and leaf detection.

Paperid: 7492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08271.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Zero-Splat TeleAssist, a zero-shot sensor-fusion pipeline that transforms commodity CCTV streams into a shared, 6-DoF world model for multilateral teleoperation. By integrating vision-language segmentation, monocular depth, weighted-PCA pose extraction, and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), TeleAssist provides every operator with real-time global positions and orientations of multiple robots without fiducials or depth sensors in an interaction-centric teleoperation setup.

Paperid: 7493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08253.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (FS-3DSeg) aims to segment novel classes with only a few labeled samples. However, existing metric-based prototype learning methods generate prototypes solely from the support set, without considering their relevance to query data. This often results in prototype bias, where prototypes overfit support-specific characteristics and fail to generalize to the query distribution, especially in the presence of distribution shifts, which leads to degraded segmentation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Query-aware Hub Prototype (QHP) learning method that explicitly models semantic correlations between support and query sets. Specifically, we propose a Hub Prototype Generation (HPG) module that constructs a bipartite graph connecting query and support points, identifies frequently linked support hubs, and generates query-relevant prototypes that better capture cross-set semantics. To further mitigate the influence of bad hubs and ambiguous prototypes near class boundaries, we introduce a Prototype Distribution Optimization (PDO) module, which employs a purity-reweighted contrastive loss to refine prototype representations by pulling bad hubs and outlier prototypes closer to their corresponding class centers. Extensive experiments on S3DIS and ScanNet demonstrate that QHP achieves substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art methods, effectively narrowing the semantic gap between prototypes and query sets in FS-3DSeg.

Paperid: 7494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06239.pdf

Abstract:
We present LOCUS (LOw-cost Customization for Universal Specialization), a pipeline that consumes few-shot data to streamline the construction and training of NLP models through targeted retrieval, synthetic data generation, and parameter-efficient tuning. With only a small number of labeled examples, LOCUS discovers pertinent data in a broad repository, synthesizes additional training samples via in-context data generation, and fine-tunes models using either full or low-rank (LoRA) parameter adaptation. Our approach targets named entity recognition (NER) and text classification (TC) benchmarks, consistently outperforming strong baselines (including GPT-4o) while substantially lowering costs and model sizes. Our resultant memory-optimized models retain 99% of fully fine-tuned accuracy while using barely 5% of the memory footprint, also beating GPT-4o on several benchmarks with less than 1% of its parameters.

Paperid: 7495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05132.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Super-Resolution Spatiotemporal Forecasting requires a deep learning model to be trained on low-resolution data and deployed for inference on high-resolution. Existing studies consider maintaining similar error across different resolutions as indicative of successful multi-resolution generalization. However, deep learning models serving as alternatives to numerical solvers should reduce error as resolution increases. The fundamental limitation is, the upper bound of physical law frequencies that low-resolution data can represent is constrained by its Nyquist frequency, making it difficult for models to process signals containing unseen frequency components during high-resolution inference. This results in errors being anchored at low resolution, incorrectly interpreted as successful generalization. We define this fundamental phenomenon as a new problem distinct from existing issues: Scale Anchoring. Therefore, we propose architecture-agnostic Frequency Representation Learning. It alleviates Scale Anchoring through resolution-aligned frequency representations and spectral consistency training: on grids with higher Nyquist frequencies, the frequency response in high-frequency bands of FRL-enhanced variants is more stable. This allows errors to decrease with resolution and significantly outperform baselines within our task and resolution range, while incurring only modest computational overhead.

Paperid: 7496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04871.pdf

Abstract:
Recent adaptations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series forecasting often fail to effectively enhance information for raw series, leaving LLM reasoning capabilities underutilized. Existing prompting strategies rely on static correlations rather than generative interpretations of dynamic behavior, lacking critical global and instance-specific context. To address this, we propose STELLA (Semantic-Temporal Alignment with Language Abstractions), a framework that systematically mines and injects structured supplementary and complementary information. STELLA employs a dynamic semantic abstraction mechanism that decouples input series into trend, seasonality, and residual components. It then translates intrinsic behavioral features of these components into Hierarchical Semantic Anchors: a Corpus-level Semantic Prior (CSP) for global context and a Fine-grained Behavioral Prompt (FBP) for instance-level patterns. Using these anchors as prefix-prompts, STELLA guides the LLM to model intrinsic dynamics. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that STELLA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long- and short-term forecasting, showing superior generalization in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our dynamically generated semantic anchors.

Paperid: 7497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03882.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) is a more realistic and challenging paradigm in continual learning to incrementally learn unseen classes and overcome catastrophic forgetting on base classes with only a few training examples. Previous efforts have primarily centered around studying more effective FSCIL approaches. By contrast, less attention was devoted to thinking the security issues in contributing to FSCIL. This paper aims to provide a holistic study of the impact of attacks on FSCIL. We first derive insights by systematically exploring how human expert-designed attack methods (i.e., PGD, FGSM) affect FSCIL. We find that those methods either fail to attack base classes, or suffer from huge labor costs due to relying on huge expert knowledge. This highlights the need to craft a specialized attack method for FSCIL. Grounded in these insights, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective ACraft method to automatically steer and discover optimal attack methods targeted at FSCIL by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) without human experts. Moreover, to improve the reasoning between LLMs and FSCIL, we introduce a novel Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based reinforcement learning to optimize learning, making LLMs generate better attack methods in the next generation by establishing positive feedback. Experiments on mainstream benchmarks show that our ACraft significantly degrades the performance of state-of-the-art FSCIL methods and dramatically beyond human expert-designed attack methods while maintaining the lowest costs of attack.

Paperid: 7498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03818.pdf

Abstract:
Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies --codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

Paperid: 7499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03233.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object counting attempts to estimate the number of object instances belonging to novel categories that the vision model performing the counting has never encountered during training. Existing methods typically require large amount of annotated data and often require visual exemplars to guide the counting process. However, large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools with remarkable reasoning and data understanding abilities, which suggest the possibility of utilizing them for counting tasks without any supervision. In this work we aim to leverage the visual capabilities of two multi-modal LLMs, GPT-4o and GPT-5, to perform object counting in a zero-shot manner using only textual prompts. We evaluate both models on the FSC-147 and CARPK datasets and provide a comparative analysis. Our findings show that the models achieve performance comparable to the state-of-the-art zero-shot approaches on FSC-147, in some cases, even surpass them.

Paperid: 7500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02057.pdf

Abstract:
The industrial adoption of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering (AI4E) faces two fundamental bottlenecks: scarce high-quality data and the lack of interpretability in black-box models-particularly critical in safety-sensitive sectors like aerospace. We present an explainable, few-shot AI4E framework that is systematically informed by physics and expert knowledge throughout its architecture. Starting from only 32 experimental samples in an aerial K439B superalloy castings repair welding case, we first augment physically plausible synthetic data through a three-stage protocol: differentiated noise injection calibrated to process variabilities, enforcement of hard physical constraints, and preservation of inter-parameter relationships. We then employ a nested optimization strategy for constitutive model discovery, where symbolic regression explores equation structures while differential evolution optimizes parameters, followed by intensive parameter refinement using hybrid global-local optimization. The resulting interpretable constitutive equation achieves 88% accuracy in predicting hot-cracking tendency. This equation not only provides quantitative predictions but also delivers explicit physical insight, revealing how thermal, geometric, and metallurgical mechanisms couple to drive cracking-thereby advancing engineers' cognitive understanding of the process. Furthermore, the constitutive equation serves as a multi-functional tool for process optimization and high-fidelity virtual data generation, enabling accuracy improvements in other data-driven models. Our approach provides a general blueprint for developing trustworthy AI systems that embed engineering domain knowledge directly into their architecture, enabling reliable adoption in high-stakes industrial applications where data is limited but physical understanding is available.

Paperid: 7501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02016.pdf

Abstract:
Video generators are increasingly evaluated as potential world models, which requires them to encode and understand physical laws. We investigate their representation of a fundamental law: gravity. Out-of-the-box video generators consistently generate objects falling at an effectively slower acceleration. However, these physical tests are often confounded by ambiguous metric scale. We first investigate if observed physical errors are artifacts of these ambiguities (e.g., incorrect frame rate assumptions). We find that even temporal rescaling cannot correct the high-variance gravity artifacts. To rigorously isolate the underlying physical representation from these confounds, we introduce a unit-free, two-object protocol that tests the timing ratio $t_1^2/t_2^2 = h_1/h_2$, a relationship independent of $g$, focal length, and scale. This relative test reveals violations of Galileo's equivalence principle. We then demonstrate that this physical gap can be partially mitigated with targeted specialization. A lightweight low-rank adaptor fine-tuned on only 100 single-ball clips raises $g_{\mathrm{eff}}$ from $1.81\,\mathrm{m/s^2}$ to $6.43\,\mathrm{m/s^2}$ (reaching $65\%$ of terrestrial gravity). This specialist adaptor also generalizes zero-shot to two-ball drops and inclined planes, offering initial evidence that specific physical laws can be corrected with minimal data.

Paperid: 7502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01141.pdf

Abstract:
Developers routinely work with source files whose variable names are generic or misleading, and with teams moving quickly, many functions are left undocumented. This slows comprehension, increases the risk of subtle bugs, and makes it harder for both humans and large language models (LLMs) to reason about code. We study variable name repair: given a real C++ function where all occurrences of one local or parameter name have been replaced by a placeholder (e.g. ID 1), the goal is to generate a natural, descriptive replacement name. We automatically construct this task from the C++ portion of BigCode's The Stack by parsing functions with Tree-sitter, masking a single identifier, and treating the original name as supervision. On top of Llama 3.1-8B, we build a pipeline with (i) warmup and dropout schedules for more stable fine-tuning, (ii) LoRA adapters for efficient specialization on identifier repair, and (iii) a dual-encoder reranker over top-k generator candidates. We evaluate using exact match, Top-5 Hit, and an embedding-based partial similarity score (0-100) that gives credit for near synonyms and format variants (e.g., jsonValue vs. json). On a held-out set of 200 C++ functions, a zero-shot Llama 3.1 baseline reaches 6.1 percent exact match. Our best LoRA-tuned model (with warmup and dropout) achieves 43.1 percent exact match, 50.2 percent Top-5 Hit, and an 82.03 partial-match score. A dual encoder reranker further improves selection quality without modifying the underlying generator, suggesting that task-specific fine-tuning plus reranking is a promising approach for practical identifier repair tools.

Paperid: 7503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00360.pdf

Abstract:
We study timestamped question answering over educational lecture videos under a single-GPU latency/memory budget. Given a natural-language query, the system retrieves relevant timestamped segments and synthesizes a grounded answer. We present CourseTimeQA (52.3 h, 902 queries across six courses) and a lightweight, latency-constrained cross-modal retriever (CrossFusion-RAG) that combines frozen encoders, a learned 512->768 vision projection, shallow query-agnostic cross-attention over ASR and frames with a temporal-consistency regularizer, and a small cross-attentive reranker. On CourseTimeQA, CrossFusion-RAG improves nDCG@10 by 0.10 and MRR by 0.08 over a strong BLIP-2 retriever while achieving approximately 1.55 s median end-to-end latency on a single A100. Closest comparators (zero-shot CLIP multi-frame pooling; CLIP + cross-encoder reranker + MMR; learned late-fusion gating; text-only hybrid with cross-encoder reranking and its MMR variant; caption-augmented text retrieval; non-learned temporal smoothing) are evaluated under matched hardware and indexing. We report robustness across ASR noise (WER quartiles), diagnostics for temporal localization, and full training/tuning details to support reproducible comparison.

Paperid: 7504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00040.pdf

Abstract:
Modern networks support network slicing, which partitions physical infrastructure into virtual slices tailored to different service requirements (for example, high bandwidth or low latency). Optimally allocating users to slices is a constrained optimization problem that traditionally requires complex algorithms. In this paper, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle radio resource allocation for network slicing. We focus on two approaches: (1) using an LLM in a zero-shot setting to directly assign user service requests to slices, and (2) formulating an integer programming model where the LLM provides semantic insight by estimating similarity between requests. Our experiments show that an LLM, even with zero-shot prompting, can produce a reasonable first draft of slice assignments, although it may violate some capacity or latency constraints. We then incorporate the LLM's understanding of service requirements into an optimization solver to generate an improved allocation. The results demonstrate that LLM-guided grouping of requests, based on minimal textual input, achieves performance comparable to traditional methods that use detailed numerical data, in terms of resource utilization and slice isolation. While the LLM alone does not perfectly satisfy all constraints, it significantly reduces the search space and, when combined with exact solvers, provides a promising approach for efficient 5G network slicing resource allocation.

Paperid: 7505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23235.pdf

Abstract:
This article presents the first comprehensive study on designing a baseline extractive question-answering (QA) system for the Hindi tourism domain, with a specialized focus on the Varanasi-a cultural and spiritual hub renowned for its Bhakti-Bhaav (devotional ethos). Targeting ten tourism-centric subdomains-Ganga Aarti, Cruise, Food Court, Public Toilet, Kund, Museum, General, Ashram, Temple and Travel, the work addresses the absence of language-specific QA resources in Hindi for culturally nuanced applications. In this paper, a dataset comprising 7,715 Hindi QA pairs pertaining to Varanasi tourism was constructed and subsequently augmented with 27,455 pairs generated via Llama zero-shot prompting. We propose a framework leveraging foundation models-BERT and RoBERTa, fine-tuned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to optimize parameter efficiency and task performance. Multiple variants of BERT, including pre-trained languages (e.g., Hindi-BERT), are evaluated to assess their suitability for low-resource domain-specific QA. Evaluation metrics - F1, BLEU, and ROUGE-L - highlight trade-offs between answer precision and linguistic fluency. Experiments demonstrate that LoRA-based fine-tuning achieves competitive performance (85.3\% F1) while reducing trainable parameters by 98\% compared to SFT, striking a balance between efficiency and accuracy. Comparative analysis across models reveals that RoBERTa with SFT outperforms BERT variants in capturing contextual nuances, particularly for culturally embedded terms (e.g., Aarti, Kund). This work establishes a foundational baseline for Hindi tourism QA systems, emphasizing the role of LORA in low-resource settings and underscoring the need for culturally contextualized NLP frameworks in the tourism domain.

Paperid: 7506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23105.pdf

Abstract:
Instruction-based image editing enables intuitive manipulation through natural language commands. However, text instructions alone often lack the precision required for fine-grained control over edit intensity. We introduce NumeriKontrol, a framework that allows users to precisely adjust image attributes using continuous scalar values with common units. NumeriKontrol encodes numeric editing scales via an effective Numeric Adapter and injects them into diffusion models in a plug-and-play manner. Thanks to a task-separated design, our approach supports zero-shot multi-condition editing, allowing users to specify multiple instructions in any order. To provide high-quality supervision, we synthesize precise training data from reliable sources, including high-fidelity rendering engines and DSLR cameras. Our Common Attribute Transform (CAT) dataset covers diverse attribute manipulations with accurate ground-truth scales, enabling NumeriKontrol to function as a simple yet powerful interactive editing studio. Extensive experiments show that NumeriKontrol delivers accurate, continuous, and stable scale control across a wide range of attribute editing scenarios. These contributions advance instruction-based image editing by enabling precise, scalable, and user-controllable image manipulation.

Paperid: 7507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22832.pdf

Abstract:
Entity matching is a fundamental task in data cleaning and data integration. With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs), recent studies have explored zero-shot and few-shot prompting to improve entity matching accuracy. However, most existing approaches rely on single-step prompting and offer limited investigation into structured reasoning strategies. In this work, we investigate how to enhance LLM-based entity matching by decomposing the matching process into multiple explicit reasoning stages. We propose a three-step framework that first identifies matched and unmatched tokens between two records, then determines the attributes most influential to the matching decision, and finally predicts whether the records refer to the same real-world entity. In addition, we explore a debate-based strategy that contrasts supporting and opposing arguments to improve decision robustness. We evaluate our approaches against multiple existing baselines on several real-world entity matching benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that structured multi-step reasoning can improve matching performance in several cases, while also highlighting remaining challenges and opportunities for further refinement of reasoning-guided LLM approaches.

Paperid: 7508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22016.pdf

Abstract:
Existing AI bias evaluation benchmarks largely reflect Western perspectives, leaving African contexts underrepresented and enabling harmful stereotypes in applications across various domains. To address this gap, we introduce AfriStereo, the first open-source African stereotype dataset and evaluation framework grounded in local socio-cultural contexts. Through community engaged efforts across Senegal, Kenya, and Nigeria, we collected 1,163 stereotypes spanning gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and profession. Using few-shot prompting with human-in-the-loop validation, we augmented the dataset to over 5,000 stereotype-antistereotype pairs. Entries were validated through semantic clustering and manual annotation by culturally informed reviewers. Preliminary evaluation of language models reveals that nine of eleven models exhibit statistically significant bias, with Bias Preference Ratios (BPR) ranging from 0.63 to 0.78 (p <= 0.05), indicating systematic preferences for stereotypes over antistereotypes, particularly across age, profession, and gender dimensions. Domain-specific models appeared to show weaker bias in our setup, suggesting task-specific training may mitigate some associations. Looking ahead, AfriStereo opens pathways for future research on culturally grounded bias evaluation and mitigation, offering key methodologies for the AI community on building more equitable, context-aware, and globally inclusive NLP technologies.

Paperid: 7509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21930.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel study on authorship attribution for Chinese lyrics, a domain where clean, public datasets are sorely lacking. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we create a new, balanced dataset of Chinese lyrics spanning multiple genres, and (2) we develop and fine-tune a domain-specific model, comparing its performance against zero-shot inference using the DeepSeek LLM. We test two central hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that a fine-tuned model will outperform a zero-shot LLM baseline. Second, we hypothesize that performance is genre-dependent. Our experiments strongly confirm Hypothesis 2: structured genres (e.g. Folklore & Tradition) yield significantly higher attribution accuracy than more abstract genres (e.g. Love & Romance). Hypothesis 1 receives only partial support: fine-tuning improves robustness and generalization in Test1 (real-world data and difficult genres), but offers limited or ambiguous gains in Test2, a smaller, synthetically-augmented set. We show that the design limitations of Test2 (e.g., label imbalance, shallow lexical differences, and narrow genre sampling) can obscure the true effectiveness of fine-tuning. Our work establishes the first benchmark for cross-genre Chinese lyric attribution, highlights the importance of genre-sensitive evaluation, and provides a public dataset and analytical framework for future research. We conclude with recommendations: enlarge and diversify test sets, reduce reliance on token-level data augmentation, balance author representation across genres, and investigate domain-adaptive pretraining as a pathway for improved attribution performance.

Paperid: 7510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21752.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models are increasingly used for text classification tasks such as sentiment analysis, yet their reliance on natural language prompts exposes them to prompt injection attacks. In particular, class-directive injections exploit knowledge of the model's label set (e.g., positive vs. negative) to override its intended behavior through adversarial instructions. Existing defenses, such as detection-based filters, instruction hierarchies, and signed prompts, either require model retraining or remain vulnerable to obfuscation. This paper introduces Label Disguise Defense (LDD), a lightweight and model-agnostic strategy that conceals true labels by replacing them with semantically transformed or unrelated alias labels(e.g., blue vs. yellow). The model learns these new label mappings implicitly through few-shot demonstrations, preventing direct correspondence between injected directives and decision outputs. We evaluate LDD across nine state-of-the-art models, including GPT-5, GPT-4o, LLaMA3.2, Gemma3, and Mistral variants, under varying few-shot and an adversarial setting. Our results show that the ability of LDD to recover performance lost to the adversarial attack varies across models and alias choices. For every model evaluated, LDD is able to restore a portion of the accuracy degradation caused by the attack. Moreover, for the vast majority of models, we can identify more than one alias pair that achieves higher accuracy than the under-attack baseline, in which the model relies solely on few-shot learning without any defensive mechanism. A linguistic analysis further reveals that semantically aligned alias labels(e.g., good vs. bad) yield stronger robustness than unaligned symbols(e.g., blue vs. yellow). Overall, this study demonstrates that label semantics can serve as an effective defense layer, transforming meaning itself into a shield against prompt injection.

Paperid: 7511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21591.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive results on many benchmarks, yet their capacity for planning and stateful reasoning remains unclear. We study these abilities directly, without code execution or other tools, using the 8-puzzle: a classic task that requires state tracking and goal-directed planning while allowing precise, step-by-step evaluation. Four models are tested under common prompting conditions (Zero-Shot, Chain-of-Thought, Algorithm-of-Thought) and with tiered corrective feedback. Feedback improves success rates for some model-prompt combinations, but many successful runs are long, computationally expensive, and indirect. We then examine the models with an external move validator that provides only valid moves. Despite this level of assistance, none of the models solve any puzzles in this setting. Qualitative analysis reveals two dominant deficits across all models: (1) brittle internal state representations, leading to frequent invalid moves, and (2) weak heuristic planning, with models entering loops or selecting actions that do not reduce the distance to the goal state. These findings indicate that, in the absence of external tools such as code interpreters, current LLMs have substantial limitations in planning and that further progress may require mechanisms for maintaining explicit state and performing structured search.

Paperid: 7512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20872.pdf

Abstract:
Argument mining is a subfield of natural language processing to identify and extract the argument components, like premises and conclusions, within a text and to recognize the relations between them. It reveals the logical structure of texts to be used in tasks like knowledge extraction. This paper aims at utilizing a cross-lingual approach to argument mining for low-resource languages, by constructing three training scenarios. We examine the models on English, as a high-resource language, and Persian, as a low-resource language. To this end, we evaluate the models based on the English Microtext corpus \citep{PeldszusStede2015}, and its parallel Persian translation. The learning scenarios are as follow: (i) zero-shot transfer, where the model is trained solely with the English data, (ii) English-only training enhanced by synthetic examples generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), and (iii) a cross-lingual model that combines the original English data with manually translated Persian sentences. The zero-shot transfer model attains F1 scores of 50.2\% on the English test set and 50.7\% on the Persian test set. LLM-based augmentation model improves the performance up to 59.2\% on English and 69.3\% on Persian. The cross-lingual model, trained on both languages but evaluated solely on the Persian test set, surpasses the LLM-based variant, by achieving a F1 of 74.8\%. Results indicate that a lightweight cross-lingual blend can outperform considerably the more resource-intensive augmentation pipelines, and it offers a practical pathway for the argument mining task to overcome data resource shortage on low-resource languages.

Paperid: 7513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20848.pdf

Abstract:
Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots (NOIR) system is a versatile brain-robot interface that allows humans to control robots for daily tasks using their brain signals. This interface utilizes electroencephalography (EEG) to translate human intentions regarding specific objects and desired actions directly into commands that robots can execute. We present NOIR 2.0, an enhanced version of NOIR. NOIR 2.0 includes faster and more accurate brain decoding algorithms, which reduce task completion time by 46%. NOIR 2.0 uses few-shot robot learning algorithms to adapt to individual users and predict their intentions. The new learning algorithms leverage foundation models for more sample-efficient learning and adaptation (15 demos vs. a single demo), significantly reducing overall human time by 65%.

Paperid: 7514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20120.pdf

Abstract:
Grammatical error correction (GEC) is an important task in Natural Language Processing that aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical mistakes in text. While recent advances in transformer-based models and large annotated datasets have greatly improved GEC performance for high-resource languages such as English, the progress has not extended equally. For most Indic languages, GEC remains a challenging task due to limited resources, linguistic diversity and complex morphology. In this work, we explore prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4.1, Gemini-2.5 and LLaMA-4, combined with few-shot strategy to adapt them to low-resource settings. We observe that even basic prompting strategies, such as zero-shot and few-shot approaches, enable these LLMs to substantially outperform fine-tuned Indic-language models like Sarvam-22B, thereby illustrating the exceptional multilingual generalization capabilities of contemporary LLMs for GEC. Our experiments show that carefully designed prompts and lightweight adaptation significantly enhance correction quality across multiple Indic languages. We achieved leading results in the shared task--ranking 1st in Tamil (GLEU: 91.57) and Hindi (GLEU: 85.69), 2nd in Telugu (GLEU: 85.22), 4th in Bangla (GLEU: 92.86), and 5th in Malayalam (GLEU: 92.97). These findings highlight the effectiveness of prompt-driven NLP techniques and underscore the potential of large-scale LLMs to bridge resource gaps in multilingual GEC.

Paperid: 7515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19920.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained image retrieval, which aims to find images containing specific object components and assess their detailed states, is critical in fields like security and industrial inspection. However, conventional methods face significant limitations: manual features (e.g., SIFT) lack robustness; deep learning-based detectors (e.g., YOLO) can identify component presence but cannot perform state-specific retrieval or zero-shot search; Visual Large Models (VLMs) offer semantic and zero-shot capabilities but suffer from poor spatial grounding and high computational cost, making them inefficient for direct retrieval. To bridge these gaps, this paper proposes DetVLM, a novel intelligent image search framework that synergistically fuses object detection with VLMs. The framework pioneers a search-enhancement paradigm via a two-stage pipeline: a YOLO detector first conducts efficient, high-recall component-level screening to determine component presence; then, a VLM acts as a recall-enhancement unit, performing secondary verification for components missed by the detector. This architecture directly enables two advanced capabilities: 1) State Search: Guided by task-specific prompts, the VLM refines results by verifying component existence and executing sophisticated state judgments (e.g., "sun visor lowered"), allowing retrieval based on component state. 2) Zero-shot Search: The framework leverages the VLM's inherent zero-shot capability to recognize and retrieve images containing unseen components or attributes (e.g., "driver wearing a mask") without any task-specific training. Experiments on a vehicle component dataset show DetVLM achieves a state-of-the-art overall retrieval accuracy of 94.82\%, significantly outperforming detection-only baselines. It also attains 94.95\% accuracy in zero-shot search for driver mask-wearing and over 90\% average accuracy in state search tasks.

Paperid: 7516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19759.pdf

Abstract:
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for medical image segmentation, reducing the reliance on extensive expert annotations. Meanwhile, vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization and few-shot capabilities across diverse visual domains. In this work, we integrate VLM-based segmentation into semi-supervised medical image segmentation by introducing a Vision-Language Enhanced Semi-supervised Segmentation Assistant (VESSA) that incorporates foundation-level visual-semantic understanding into SSL frameworks. Our approach consists of two stages. In Stage 1, the VLM-enhanced segmentation foundation model VESSA is trained as a reference-guided segmentation assistant using a template bank containing gold-standard exemplars, simulating learning from limited labeled data. Given an input-template pair, VESSA performs visual feature matching to extract representative semantic and spatial cues from exemplar segmentations, generating structured prompts for a SAM2-inspired mask decoder to produce segmentation masks. In Stage 2, VESSA is integrated into a state-of-the-art SSL framework, enabling dynamic interaction with the student model: as student predictions become more refined, they are fed back to VESSA as prompts, allowing it to generate higher-quality pseudo-labels and stronger guidance. Extensive experiments across multiple segmentation datasets and domains show that VESSA-augmented SSL significantly enhances segmentation accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines under extremely limited annotation conditions.

Paperid: 7517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18989.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have enabled significant progress in plant disease classification using leaf images. Much of the existing research in this field has relied on the PlantVillage dataset, which consists of well-centered plant images captured against uniform, uncluttered backgrounds. Although models trained on this dataset achieve high accuracy, they often fail to generalize to real-world field images, such as those submitted by farmers to plant diagnostic systems. This has created a significant gap between published studies and practical application requirements, highlighting the necessity of investigating and addressing this issue. In this study, we investigate whether attention-based architectures and zero-shot learning approaches can bridge the gap between curated academic datasets and real-world agricultural conditions in plant disease classification. We evaluate three model categories: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers, and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based zero-shot models. While CNNs exhibit limited robustness under domain shift, Vision Transformers demonstrate stronger generalization by capturing global contextual features. Most notably, CLIP models classify diseases directly from natural language descriptions without any task-specific training, offering strong adaptability and interpretability. These findings highlight the potential of zero-shot learning as a practical and scalable domain adaptation strategy for plant health diagnosis in diverse field environments.

Paperid: 7518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18980.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models (FM) are transforming artificial intelligence by enabling generalizable, data-efficient solutions across different domains for a broad range of applications. However, the lack of large and diverse datasets limits the development of FM in nanophotonics. This work presents MOCLIP (Metasurface Optics Contrastive Learning Pretrained), a nanophotonic foundation model that integrates metasurface geometry and spectra within a shared latent space. MOCLIP employs contrastive learning to align geometry and spectral representations using an experimentally acquired dataset with a sample density comparable to ImageNet-1K. The study demonstrates MOCLIP inverse design capabilities for high-throughput zero-shot prediction at a rate of 0.2 million samples per second, enabling the design of a full 4-inch wafer populated with high-density metasurfaces in minutes. It also shows generative latent-space optimization reaching 97 percent accuracy. Finally, we introduce an optical information storage concept that uses MOCLIP to achieve a density of 0.1 Gbit per square millimeter at the resolution limit, exceeding commercial optical media by a factor of six. These results position MOCLIP as a scalable and versatile platform for next-generation photonic design and data-driven applications.

Paperid: 7519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18787.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on multimodal benchmarks but lag behind humans and specialized models on visual perception tasks like depth estimation or object counting. Finetuning on one task can unpredictably affect performance on others, making task-specific finetuning challenging. In this paper, we address this challenge through a systematic study of task transferability. We examine how finetuning a VLM on one perception task affects its zero-shot performance on others. To quantify these effects, we introduce Perfection Gap Factor (PGF), a metric that captures both the breadth and magnitude of transfer. Using three open-weight VLMs evaluated across 13 perception tasks, we construct a task-transfer graph that reveals previously unobserved relationships among perception tasks. Our analysis uncovers patterns of positive and negative transfer, identifies groups of tasks that mutually influence each other, organizes tasks into personas based on their transfer behavior and demonstrates how PGF can guide data selection for more efficient training. These findings highlight both opportunities for positive transfer and risks of negative interference, offering actionable guidance for advancing VLMs.

Paperid: 7520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18578.pdf

Abstract:
Financial time series forecasting is central to trading, portfolio optimization, and risk management, yet it remains challenging due to noisy, non-stationary, and heterogeneous data. Recent advances in time series foundation models (TSFMs), inspired by large language models, offer a new paradigm for learning generalizable temporal representations from large and diverse datasets. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of TSFMs in global financial markets. Using a large-scale dataset of daily excess returns across diverse markets, we evaluate zero-shot inference, fine-tuning, and pre-training from scratch against strong benchmark models. We find that off-the-shelf pre-trained TSFMs perform poorly in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, whereas models pre-trained from scratch on financial data achieve substantial forecasting and economic improvements, underscoring the value of domain-specific adaptation. Increasing the dataset size, incorporating synthetic data augmentation, and applying hyperparameter tuning further enhance performance.

Paperid: 7521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18516.pdf

Abstract:
Efforts to overcome catastrophic forgetting in Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) have primarily focused on developing more effective gradient-based optimization strategies. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the training cost explosion that inevitably arises as the number of novel classes increases, a consequence of relying on gradient learning even under extreme data scarcity. More critically, since FSCIL typically provides only a few samples for each new class, gradient-based updates not only induce severe catastrophic forgetting on base classes but also hinder adaptation to novel ones. This paper seeks to break this long-standing limitation by asking: Can we design a training-free FSCIL paradigm that entirely removes gradient optimization? We provide an affirmative answer by uncovering an intriguing connection between gradient-based optimization and the Conditional Diffusion process. Building on this observation, we propose a Conditional Diffusion-driven FSCIL (CD-FSCIL) framework that substitutes the conventional gradient update process with a diffusion-based generative transition, enabling training-free incremental adaptation while effectively mitigating forgetting. Furthermore, to enhance representation under few-shot constraints, we introduce a multimodal learning strategy that integrates visual features with natural language descriptions automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). This synergy substantially alleviates the sample scarcity issue and improves generalization across novel classes. Extensive experiments on mainstream FSCIL benchmarks demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also drastically reduces computational and memory overhead, marking a paradigm shift toward training-free continual adaptation.

Paperid: 7522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18116.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to identify and localize anomalous regions in images of unseen object classes. While recent methods based on vision-language models like CLIP show promise, their performance is constrained by existing prompt engineering strategies. Current approaches, whether relying on single fixed, learnable, or dense dynamic prompts, suffer from a representational bottleneck and are prone to overfitting on auxiliary data, failing to generalize to the complexity and diversity of unseen anomalies. To overcome these limitations, we propose $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$. Our core insight is that robust ZSAD requires a compositional approach to prompt learning. Instead of learning monolithic prompts, $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$ learns a pool of expert prompts, which serve as a basis set of composable semantic primitives, and a visually-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism to dynamically combine them for each instance. Our framework materializes this concept through a Visually-Guided Mixture of Prompt (VGMoP) that employs an image-gated sparse MoE to aggregate diverse normal and abnormal expert state prompts, generating semantically rich textual representations with strong generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 datasets in industrial and medical domains demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$.

Paperid: 7523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17932.pdf

Abstract:
Given just a few glimpses of a scene, can you imagine the movie playing out as the camera glides through it? That's the lens we take on \emph{sparse-input novel view synthesis}, not only as filling spatial gaps between widely spaced views, but also as \emph{completing a natural video} unfolding through space. We recast the task as \emph{test-time natural video completion}, using powerful priors from \emph{pretrained video diffusion models} to hallucinate plausible in-between views. Our \emph{zero-shot, generation-guided} framework produces pseudo views at novel camera poses, modulated by an \emph{uncertainty-aware mechanism} for spatial coherence. These synthesized frames densify supervision for \emph{3D Gaussian Splatting} (3D-GS) for scene reconstruction, especially in under-observed regions. An iterative feedback loop lets 3D geometry and 2D view synthesis inform each other, improving both the scene reconstruction and the generated views. The result is coherent, high-fidelity renderings from sparse inputs \emph{without any scene-specific training or fine-tuning}. On LLFF, DTU, DL3DV, and MipNeRF-360, our method significantly outperforms strong 3D-GS baselines under extreme sparsity.

Paperid: 7524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17630.pdf

Abstract:
Personalizing digital applications for health behavior change is a promising route to making them more engaging and effective. This especially holds for approaches that adapt to users and their specific states (e.g., motivation, knowledge, wants) over time. However, developing such approaches requires making many design choices, whose effectiveness is difficult to predict from literature and costly to evaluate in practice. In this work, we explore whether large language models (LLMs) can be used out-of-the-box to generate samples of user interactions that provide useful information for training reinforcement learning models for digital behavior change settings. Using real user data from four large behavior change studies as comparison, we show that LLM-generated samples can be useful in the absence of real data. Comparisons to the samples provided by human raters further show that LLM-generated samples reach the performance of human raters. Additional analyses of different prompting strategies including shorter and longer prompt variants, chain-of-thought prompting, and few-shot prompting show that the relative effectiveness of different strategies depends on both the study and the LLM with also relatively large differences between prompt paraphrases alone. We provide recommendations for how LLM-generated samples can be useful in practice.

Paperid: 7525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17555.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have enabled models to clone arbitrary unseen speakers and synthesize high-quality, natural-sounding speech. However, evaluation methods lag behind: typical mean opinion score (MOS) estimators perform regression over entire utterances, while failures usually occur in a few problematic words. We observe that encoder-decoder ASR models (e.g., Whisper) surface word-level mismatches between speech and text via cross-attention, providing a fine-grained reward signal. Building on this, we introduce Word-level TTS Alignment by ASR-driven Attentive Reward (W3AR). Without explicit reward annotations, W3AR uses attention from a pre-trained ASR model to drive finer-grained alignment and optimization of sequences predicted by a TTS model. Experiments show that W3AR improves the quality of existing TTS systems and strengthens zero-shot robustness on unseen speakers. More broadly, our results suggest a simple recipe for generative modeling: understanding models can act as evaluators, delivering informative, fine-grained feedback for optimization.

Paperid: 7526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17262.pdf

Abstract:
Serverless computing has rapidly emerged as a popular cloud computing paradigm. It enables developers to implement function-level tasks, i.e., serverless functions, without managing infrastructure. While reducing operational overhead, it poses challenges, especially for novice developers. Developing functions from scratch requires adapting to heterogeneous, platform-specific programming styles, making the process time-consuming and error-prone. Function reuse offers a promising solution to address these challenges. However, research on serverless computing lacks a dedicated approach for function recommendation. Existing techniques from traditional contexts remain insufficient due to the semantic gap between task descriptions and heterogeneous function implementations. Advances in large language models (LLMs), pre-trained on large-scale corpora, create opportunities to bridge this gap by aligning developer requirements with function semantics. This paper presents SlsReuse, the first LLM-powered framework for serverless function reuse. Specifically, SlsReuse first constructs a reusable function repository serving as a foundational knowledge base. Then, it learns unified semantic-enhanced representations of heterogeneous functions through effective prompt engineering with few-shot prompting, capturing implicit code intent, target platforms, programming languages, and cloud services. Finally, given a natural language task query, SlsReuse performs intent-aware discovery combined with a multi-level pruning strategy and similarity matching. We evaluate SlsReuse on a curated dataset of 110 task queries. Built on ChatGPT-4o, one of the most representative LLMs, SlsReuse achieves Recall@10 of 91.20%, exceeding the state-of-the-art baseline by 24.53 percentage points.

Paperid: 7527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17153.pdf

Abstract:
Automatic post-editing (APE) aims to correct errors in machine-translated text, enhancing translation quality, while reducing the need for human intervention. Despite advances in neural machine translation (NMT), the development of effective APE systems has been hindered by the lack of large-scale multilingual datasets specifically tailored to NMT outputs. To address this gap, we present and release LangMark, a new human-annotated multilingual APE dataset for English translation to seven languages: Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The dataset has 206,983 triplets, with each triplet consisting of a source segment, its NMT output, and a human post-edited translation. Annotated by expert human linguists, our dataset offers both linguistic diversity and scale. Leveraging this dataset, we empirically show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot prompting can effectively perform APE, improving upon leading commercial and even proprietary machine translation systems. We believe that this new resource will facilitate the future development and evaluation of APE systems.

Paperid: 7528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16527.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive vision-language models continue to be the dominant approach for image and text retrieval. Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) trains two neural networks in contrastive manner to align their image and text embeddings in a shared latent space. Recent results evaluating CLIP on negated or paraphrased text have shown mixed performance because negation changes meaning radically with minimal lexical changes, while paraphrasing can create very different textual expressions with the same intended meaning. This poses a significant challenge for improving the evaluation results and alignment of vision-language models. To address this challenge, this paper evaluates the combination of paraphrasing and negation, proposes a new CLIP contrastive loss function accounting for both paraphrasing and negation, and applies LLM-generated training triples consisting of original, paraphrased and negated textual captions to CLIP-like training models. The approach, called SemCLIP, is shown to move paraphrased captions towards the original image embeddings while pushing negated captions further away in embedding space. Empirically, SemCLIP is shown to be capable of preserving CLIP's performance while increasing considerably the distances to negated captions. On the CC-Neg benchmark using an original over negation image-retrieval accuracy metric, SemCLIP improves accuracy from 68.1% to 78.1%. Although results are mixed when compared with CLIP on the Sugarcrepe++ benchmark, SemCLIP's performance is generally better than the models trained with negated captions. This robustness to negation extends to downstream zero-shot classification tasks where SemCLIP pre-trained on Sugarcrepe++ performs better than CLIP on all tested downstream tasks. These results indicate that SemCLIP can achieve significant robustness to semantic transformations.

Paperid: 7529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16014.pdf

Abstract:
Digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector has produced vast yet fragmented collections of artefact data. Existing frameworks for museum information systems struggle to integrate heterogeneous metadata, unstructured documents, and multimodal artefacts into a coherent and queryable form. We present MuseKG, an end-to-end knowledge-graph framework that unifies structured and unstructured museum data through symbolic-neural integration. MuseKG constructs a typed property graph linking objects, people, organisations, and visual or textual labels, and supports natural language queries. Evaluations on real museum collections demonstrate robust performance across queries over attributes, relations, and related entities, surpassing large-language-model zero-shot, few-shot and SPARQL prompt baselines. The results highlight the importance of symbolic grounding for interpretable and scalable cultural heritage reasoning, and pave the way for web-scale integration of digital heritage knowledge.

Paperid: 7530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15719.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly using external web content. However, much of this content is not easily digestible by LLMs due to LLM-unfriendly formats and limitations of context length. To address this issue, we propose a method for generating general-purpose, information-dense summaries that act as plain-text repositories of web content. Inspired by Hegel's dialectical method, our approach, denoted as Chain of Summaries (CoS), iteratively refines an initial summary (thesis) by identifying its limitations through questioning (antithesis), leading to a general-purpose summary (synthesis) that can satisfy current and anticipate future information needs. Experiments on the TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and SQUAD datasets demonstrate that CoS outperforms zero-shot LLM baselines by up to 66% and specialized summarization methods such as BRIO and PEGASUS by up to 27%. CoS-generated summaries yield higher Q&A performance compared to the source content, while requiring substantially fewer tokens and being agnostic to the specific downstream LLM. CoS thus resembles an appealing option for website maintainers to make their content more accessible for LLMs, while retaining possibilities for human oversight.

Paperid: 7531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15714.pdf

Abstract:
This study introduces an ensemble framework for unstructured text categorization using large language models (LLMs). By integrating multiple models, the ensemble large language model (eLLM) framework addresses common weaknesses of individual systems, including inconsistency, hallucination, category inflation, and misclassification. The eLLM approach yields a substantial performance improvement of up to 65\% in F1-score over the strongest single model. We formalize the ensemble process through a mathematical model of collective decision-making and establish principled aggregation criteria. Using the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) hierarchical taxonomy, we evaluate ten state-of-the-art LLMs under identical zero-shot conditions on a human-annotated corpus of 8{,}660 samples. Results show that individual models plateau in performance due to the compression of semantically rich text into sparse categorical representations, while eLLM improves both robustness and accuracy. With a diverse consortium of models, eLLM achieves near human-expert-level performance, offering a scalable and reliable solution for taxonomy-based classification that may significantly reduce dependence on human expert labeling.

Paperid: 7532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14977.pdf

Abstract:
As more autonomous vehicles operate on public roads, understanding real-world behavior of autonomous vehicles is critical to analyzing traffic safety, making policies, and public acceptance. This paper proposes SVBRD-LLM, a framework that automatically discovers, verifies, and applies interpretable behavioral rules from real traffic videos through zero-shot prompt engineering. The framework extracts vehicle trajectories using YOLOv8 and ByteTrack, computes kinematic features, and employs GPT-5 zero-shot prompting to compare autonomous and human-driven vehicles, generating 35 structured behavioral rule hypotheses. These rules are tested on a validation set, iteratively refined based on failure cases to filter spurious correlations, and compiled into a high-confidence rule library. The framework is evaluated on an independent test set for speed change prediction, lane change prediction, and autonomous vehicle identification tasks. Experiments on over 1500 hours of real traffic videos show that the framework achieves 90.0% accuracy and 93.3% F1-score in autonomous vehicle identification. The discovered rules clearly reveal distinctive characteristics of autonomous vehicles in speed control smoothness, lane change conservativeness, and acceleration stability, with each rule accompanied by semantic description, applicable context, and validation confidence.

Paperid: 7533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14738.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to generalize beyond their pre-training data, and fine-tuning LLMs can elevate performance to human-level and beyond. However, in real-world scenarios, lacking labeled data often prevents practitioners from obtaining well-performing models, thereby forcing practitioners to highly rely on prompt-based approaches that are often tedious, inefficient, and driven by trial and error. To alleviate this issue of lacking labeled data, we present a learning framework integrating LLMs with active learning for unlabeled dataset (LAUD). LAUD mitigates the cold-start problem by constructing an initial label set with zero-shot learning. Experimental results show that LLMs derived from LAUD outperform LLMs with zero-shot or few-shot learning on commodity name classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of LAUD.

Paperid: 7534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14620.pdf

Abstract:
Falls are a leading cause of injury and loss of independence among older adults. Vision-based fall prediction systems offer a non-invasive solution to anticipate falls seconds before impact, but their development is hindered by the scarcity of available fall data. Contributing to these efforts, this study proposes the Biomechanical Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (BioST-GCN), a dual-stream model that combines both pose and biomechanical information using a cross-attention fusion mechanism. Our model outperforms the vanilla ST-GCN baseline by 5.32% and 2.91% F1-score on the simulated MCF-UA stunt-actor and MUVIM datasets, respectively. The spatio-temporal attention mechanisms in the ST-GCN stream also provide interpretability by identifying critical joints and temporal phases. However, a critical simulation-reality gap persists. While our model achieves an 89.0% F1-score with full supervision on simulated data, zero-shot generalization to unseen subjects drops to 35.9%. This performance decline is likely due to biases in simulated data, such as 'intent-to-fall' cues. For older adults, particularly those with diabetes or frailty, this gap is exacerbated by their unique kinematic profiles. To address this, we propose personalization strategies and advocate for privacy-preserving data pipelines to enable real-world validation. Our findings underscore the urgent need to bridge the gap between simulated and real-world data to develop effective fall prediction systems for vulnerable elderly populations.

Paperid: 7535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14606.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting political bias in news media is a complex task that requires interpreting subtle linguistic and contextual cues. Although recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have enabled automatic bias classification, the extent to which large language models (LLMs) align with human judgment still remains relatively underexplored and not yet well understood. This study aims to present a comparative framework for evaluating the detection of political bias across human annotations and multiple LLMs, including GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, and FLAN. We construct a manually annotated dataset of news articles and assess annotation consistency, bias polarity, and inter-model agreement to quantify divergence between human and model perceptions of bias. Experimental results show that among traditional transformer-based models, RoBERTa achieves the highest alignment with human labels, whereas generative models such as GPT demonstrate the strongest overall agreement with human annotations in a zero-shot setting. Among all transformer-based baselines, our fine-tuned RoBERTa model acquired the highest accuracy and the strongest alignment with human-annotated labels. Our findings highlight systematic differences in how humans and LLMs perceive political slant, underscoring the need for hybrid evaluation frameworks that combine human interpretability with model scalability in automated media bias detection.

Paperid: 7536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14584.pdf

Abstract:
Enabling agents to learn from experience and generalize across diverse tasks without task-specific training remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning and decision-making. While recent approaches have explored episodic memory (Reflexion), gradient-based prompt optimization (TextGrad),and hierarchical task decomposition independently, their potential for synergistic integration remains unexplored. We introduce ReflexGrad, a novel architecture that tightly couples three complementary mechanisms: (1) LLM-based hierarchical TODO decomposition for strategic planning, (2) history-aware causal reflection that analyzes recent action patterns to identify failure root causes and enable within-trial learning, and (3) gradient-based optimization for systematic improvement. Unlike prior work relying on few-shot demonstrations, our system achieves true zero-shot generalization through pure LLM semantic reasoning,requiring no task-specific examples, fine-tuning, or hardcoded similarity metrics. Evaluated on ALFWorld benchmark tasks, ReflexGrad demonstrates 67% zero-shot success rate on Trial 0 without any prior task experience or demonstrations, establishing effective performance on first exposure. Through empirical analysis, we identify the architectural mechanisms underlying stable convergence (zero action loops) and effective cross-task transfer (67% to 78% improvement).Our work demonstrates that synergistic integration of complementary learning mechanisms enables robust zero-shot generalization that approaches few-shot baselines from prior work.

Paperid: 7537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14499.pdf

Abstract:
The autonomous driving (AD) system has exhibited remarkable performance in complex driving scenarios. However, generalization is still a key limitation for the current system, which refers to the ability to handle unseen scenarios or unfamiliar sensor configurations.Related works have explored the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to address few-shot or zero-shot tasks. While promising, these methods introduce a new challenge: the emergence of a hybrid AD system, where two distinct systems are used to plan a trajectory, leading to potential inconsistencies. Alternative research directions have explored Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks that generate control actions from VLM directly. However, these end-to-end solutions demonstrate prohibitive computational demands. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Risk Semantic Distillation (RSD), a novel framework that leverages VLMs to enhance the training of End-to-End (E2E) AD backbones. By providing risk attention for key objects, RSD addresses the issue of generalization. Specifically, we introduce RiskHead, a plug-in module that distills causal risk estimates from Vision-Language Models into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, yielding interpretable risk-attention maps.This approach allows BEV features to learn richer and more nuanced risk attention representations, which directly enhance the model's ability to handle spatial boundaries and risky objects.By focusing on risk attention, RSD aligns better with human-like driving behavior, which is essential to navigate in complex and dynamic environments. Our experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of RSD in managing complex and unpredictable driving conditions. Due to the enhanced BEV representations enabled by RSD, we observed a significant improvement in both perception and planning capabilities.

Paperid: 7538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14229.pdf

Abstract:
We simplify space binding by focusing on two core components, a single encoder per modality and high-quality data; enabling training state-of-the-art models on a single GPU in a few hours as opposed to multiple days. We present EBind, an Easy, data-centric, and parameter-efficient method to Bind the embedding spaces of multiple contrastive models. We demonstrate that a simple 1.8B-parameter image-text-video-audio-3D model can outperform models 4 to 17x the size. The key to achieving this is a carefully curated dataset of three complementary data sources: i) 6.7M fully-automated multimodal quintuples sourced via SOTA retrieval models, ii) 1M diverse, semi-automated triples annotated by humans as negative, partial, or positive matches, and iii) 3.4M pre-existing captioned data items. We use 13 different evaluations to demonstrate the value of each data source. Due to limitations with existing benchmarks, we further introduce the first high-quality, consensus-annotated zero-shot classification benchmark between audio and PCs. In contrast to related work, we will open-source our code, model weights, and datasets.

Paperid: 7539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14082.pdf

Abstract:
Deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in medical image analysis but are fundamentally constrained by the requirement for large-scale, meticulously annotated datasets. This dependency on "big data" is a critical bottleneck in the medical domain, where patient data is inherently difficult to acquire and expert annotation is expensive, particularly for rare diseases where samples are scarce by definition. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel paradigm: Zero-Training Task-Specific Model Synthesis (ZS-TMS). Instead of adapting a pre-existing model or training a new one, our approach leverages a large-scale, pre-trained generative engine to directly synthesize the entire set of parameters for a task-specific classifier. Our framework, the Semantic-Guided Parameter Synthesizer (SGPS), takes as input minimal, multi-modal task information as little as a single example image (1-shot) and a corresponding clinical text description to directly synthesize the entire set of parameters for a task-specific classifier. The generative engine interprets these inputs to generate the weights for a lightweight, efficient classifier (e.g., an EfficientNet-V2), which can be deployed for inference immediately without any task-specific training or fine-tuning. We conduct extensive evaluations on challenging few-shot classification benchmarks derived from the ISIC 2018 skin lesion dataset and a custom rare disease dataset. Our results demonstrate that SGPS establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming advanced few-shot and zero-shot learning methods, especially in the ultra-low data regimes of 1-shot and 5-shot classification. This work paves the way for the rapid development and deployment of AI-powered diagnostic tools, particularly for the long tail of rare diseases where data is critically limited.

Paperid: 7540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11125.pdf

Abstract:
How to best use Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering is covered in many publications in recent years. However, most of this work focuses on widely-used general purpose programming languages. The utility of LLMs for software within the industrial process automation domain, with highly-specialized languages that are typically only used in proprietary contexts, is still underexplored. Within this paper, we study enterprises can achieve on their own without investing large amounts of effort into the training of models specific to the domain-specific languages that are used. We show that few-shot prompting approaches are sufficient to solve simple problems in a language that is otherwise not well-supported by an LLM and that is possible on-premise, thereby ensuring the protection of sensitive company data.

Paperid: 7541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10903.pdf

Abstract:
This paper explores the automatic classification of exam questions and learning outcomes according to Bloom's Taxonomy. A small dataset of 600 sentences labeled with six cognitive categories - Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation - was processed using traditional machine learning (ML) models (Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines), recurrent neural network architectures (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, BiGRU), transformer-based models (BERT and RoBERTa), and large language models (OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, Anthropic). Each model was evaluated under different preprocessing and augmentation strategies (for example, synonym replacement, word embeddings, etc.). Among traditional ML approaches, Support Vector Machines (SVM) with data augmentation achieved the best overall performance, reaching 94 percent accuracy, recall, and F1 scores with minimal overfitting. In contrast, the RNN models and BERT suffered from severe overfitting, while RoBERTa initially overcame it but began to show signs as training progressed. Finally, zero-shot evaluations of large language models (LLMs) indicated that OpenAI and Gemini performed best among the tested LLMs, achieving approximately 0.72-0.73 accuracy and comparable F1 scores. These findings highlight the challenges of training complex deep models on limited data and underscore the value of careful data augmentation and simpler algorithms (such as augmented SVM) for Bloom's Taxonomy classification.

Paperid: 7542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10585.pdf

Abstract:
The WikiRace game, where players navigate between Wikipedia articles using only hyperlinks, serves as a compelling benchmark for goal-directed search in complex information networks. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of navigation strategies for this task, comparing agents guided by graph-theoretic structure (betweenness centrality), semantic meaning (language model embeddings), and hybrid approaches. Through rigorous benchmarking on a large Wikipedia subgraph, we demonstrate that a purely greedy agent guided by the semantic similarity of article titles is overwhelmingly effective. This strategy, when combined with a simple loop-avoidance mechanism, achieved a perfect success rate and navigated the network with an efficiency an order of magnitude better than structural or hybrid methods. Our findings highlight the critical limitations of purely structural heuristics for goal-directed search and underscore the transformative potential of large language models to act as powerful, zero-shot semantic navigators in complex information spaces.

Paperid: 7543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10002.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human-like content. This has revolutionized various sectors such as healthcare, software development, and education. In education, LLMs offer potential for personalized and interactive learning experiences, especially in regions with limited teaching resources. However, adapting these models effectively to curriculum-specific content, such as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus in India, presents unique challenges in terms of accuracy, alignment, and pedagogical relevance. In this paper, we present the framework "PustakAI"\footnote{Pustak means `book' in many Indian languages.} for the design and evaluation of a novel question-answering dataset "NCERT-QA" aligned with the NCERT curriculum for English and Science subjects of grades 6 to 8. We classify the curated QA pairs as Factoid, Inferential, and Others (evaluative and reasoning). We evaluate the dataset with various prompting techniques, such as meta-prompt, few-shot, and CoT-style prompting, using diverse evaluation metrics to understand which approach aligns more efficiently with the structure and demands of the curriculum. Along with the usability of the dataset, we analyze the strengths and limitations of current open-source LLMs (Gemma3:1b, Llama3.2:3b, and Nemotron-mini:4b) and high-end LLMs (Llama-4-Scout-17B and Deepseek-r1-70B) as AI-based learning tools in formal education systems.

Paperid: 7544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09185.pdf

Abstract:
Recent work has proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify narrative flow through a measure called sequentiality, which combines topic and contextual terms. A recent critique argued that the original results were confounded by how topics were selected for the topic-based component, and noted that the metric had not been validated against ground-truth measures of flow. That work proposed using only the contextual term as a more conceptually valid and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we empirically validate that proposal. Using two essay datasets with human-annotated trait scores, ASAP++ and ELLIPSE, we show that the contextual version of sequentiality aligns more closely with human assessments of discourse-level traits such as Organization and Cohesion. While zero-shot prompted LLMs predict trait scores more accurately than the contextual measure alone, the contextual measure adds more predictive value than both the topic-only and original sequentiality formulations when combined with standard linguistic features. Notably, this combination also outperforms the zero-shot LLM predictions, highlighting the value of explicitly modeling sentence-to-sentence flow. Our findings support the use of context-based sequentiality as a validated, interpretable, and complementary feature for automated essay scoring and related NLP tasks.

Paperid: 7545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08036.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has widely applicable but remains highly challenging due to the inherently ill-posed nature of reconstructing 3D scenes from single 2D images. Modern Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pre-trained on large-scale diverse datasets, exhibit remarkable world understanding capabilities that benefit for various vision tasks. Recent studies have demonstrated significant improvements in MDE through fine-tuning these VFMs. Inspired by these developments, we propose WEDepth, a novel approach that adapts VFMs for MDE without modi-fying their structures and pretrained weights, while effec-tively eliciting and leveraging their inherent priors. Our method employs the VFM as a multi-level feature en-hancer, systematically injecting prior knowledge at differ-ent representation levels. Experiments on NYU-Depth v2 and KITTI datasets show that WEDepth establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, achieving competi-tive results compared to both diffusion-based approaches (which require multiple forward passes) and methods pre-trained on relative depth. Furthermore, we demonstrate our method exhibits strong zero-shot transfer capability across diverse scenarios.

Paperid: 7546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07166.pdf

Abstract:
We propose AdaRec, a few-shot in-context learning framework that leverages large language models for an adaptive personalized recommendation. AdaRec introduces narrative profiling, transforming user-item interactions into natural language representations to enable unified task handling and enhance human readability. Centered on a bivariate reasoning paradigm, AdaRec employs a dual-channel architecture that integrates horizontal behavioral alignment, discovering peer-driven patterns, with vertical causal attribution, highlighting decisive factors behind user preferences. Unlike existing LLM-based approaches, AdaRec eliminates manual feature engineering through semantic representations and supports rapid cross-task adaptation with minimal supervision. Experiments on real ecommerce datasets demonstrate that AdaRec outperforms both machine learning models and LLM-based baselines by up to eight percent in few-shot settings. In zero-shot scenarios, it achieves up to a nineteen percent improvement over expert-crafted profiling, showing effectiveness for long-tail personalization with minimal interaction data. Furthermore, lightweight fine-tuning on synthetic data generated by AdaRec matches the performance of fully fine-tuned models, highlighting its efficiency and generalization across diverse tasks.

Paperid: 7547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07077.pdf

Abstract:
Emotion detection from text seeks to identify an individual's emotional or mental state - positive, negative, or neutral - based on linguistic cues. While significant progress has been made for English and other high-resource languages, Bengali remains underexplored despite being the world's fourth most spoken language. The lack of large, standardized datasets classifies Bengali as a low-resource language for emotion detection. Existing studies mainly employ classical machine learning models with traditional feature engineering, yielding limited performance. In this paper, we introduce a new Bengali emotion dataset annotated across eight emotion categories and propose two models for automatic emotion detection: (i) a hybrid Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model (EmoBangHybrid) and (ii) an AdaBoost-Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) ensemble model (EmoBangEnsemble). Additionally, we evaluate six baseline models with five feature engineering techniques and assess zero-shot and few-shot large language models (LLMs) on the dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive benchmark for Bengali emotion detection. Experimental results show that EmoBangH and EmoBangE achieve accuracies of 92.86% and 93.69%, respectively, outperforming existing methods and establishing strong baselines for future research.

Paperid: 7548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06840.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unseen environments remains a challenging problem for household robots, requiring strong perceptual understanding and decision-making capabilities. While recent methods leverage metric maps and Large Language Models (LLMs), they often depend on depth sensors or prebuilt maps, limiting the spatial reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Mapless ZSON approaches have emerged to address this, but they typically make short-sighted decisions, leading to local deadlocks due to a lack of historical context. We propose PanoNav, a fully RGB-only, mapless ZSON framework that integrates a Panoramic Scene Parsing module to unlock the spatial parsing potential of MLLMs from panoramic RGB inputs, and a Memory-guided Decision-Making mechanism enhanced by a Dynamic Bounded Memory Queue to incorporate exploration history and avoid local deadlocks. Experiments on the public navigation benchmark show that PanoNav significantly outperforms representative baselines in both SR and SPL metrics.

Paperid: 7549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06836.pdf

Abstract:
Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

Paperid: 7550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06687.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly generation has been widely explored to address the scarcity of anomaly images in real-world data. However, existing methods typically suffer from at least one of the following limitations, hindering their practical deployment: (1) lack of visual realism in generated anomalies; (2) dependence on large amounts of real images; and (3) use of memory-intensive, heavyweight model architectures. To overcome these limitations, we propose AnoStyler, a lightweight yet effective method that frames zero-shot anomaly generation as text-guided style transfer. Given a single normal image along with its category label and expected defect type, an anomaly mask indicating the localized anomaly regions and two-class text prompts representing the normal and anomaly states are generated using generalizable category-agnostic procedures. A lightweight U-Net model trained with CLIP-based loss functions is used to stylize the normal image into a visually realistic anomaly image, where anomalies are localized by the anomaly mask and semantically aligned with the text prompts. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets show that AnoStyler outperforms existing anomaly generation methods in generating high-quality and diverse anomaly images. Furthermore, using these generated anomalies helps enhance anomaly detection performance.

Paperid: 7551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06202.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action models such as OpenVLA show impressive zero-shot generalization across robotic manipulation tasks but often fail to adapt efficiently to new deployment environments. In many real-world applications, consistent high performance on a limited set of tasks is more important than broad generalization. We propose ExpReS-VLA, a method for specializing pre-trained VLA models through experience replay and retrieval while preventing catastrophic forgetting. ExpReS-VLA stores compact feature representations from the frozen vision backbone instead of raw image-action pairs, reducing memory usage by approximately 97 percent. During deployment, relevant past experiences are retrieved using cosine similarity and used to guide adaptation, while prioritized experience replay emphasizes successful trajectories. We also introduce Thresholded Hybrid Contrastive Loss, which enables learning from both successful and failed attempts. On the LIBERO simulation benchmark, ExpReS-VLA improves success rates from 82.6 to 93.1 percent on spatial reasoning tasks and from 61 to 72.3 percent on long-horizon tasks. On physical robot experiments with five manipulation tasks, it reaches 98 percent success on both seen and unseen settings, compared to 84.7 and 32 percent for naive fine-tuning. Adaptation takes 31 seconds using 12 demonstrations on a single RTX 5090 GPU, making the approach practical for real robot deployment.

Paperid: 7552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04710.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL systems enable users to interact with structured databases using natural language, eliminating the need for specialized programming knowledge. In this work, we introduce GEMMA-SQL, a lightweight and efficient text-to-SQL model built upon the open-source Gemma 2B architecture. Unlike many large language models (LLMs), GEMMA-SQL is fine-tuned in a resource-efficient, iterative manner and can be deployed on low-cost hardware. Leveraging the SPIDER benchmark for training and evaluation, GEMMA-SQL combines multiple prompting strategies, including few-shot learning, to enhance SQL query generation accuracy. The instruction-tuned variant, GEMMA-SQL Instruct, achieves 66.8% Test-Suite accuracy and 63.3% Exact Set Match accuracy, outperforming several state-of-the-art baselines such as IRNet, RYANSQL, and CodeXDavinci. The proposed approach demonstrates that effective prompt design and targeted instruction tuning can significantly boost performance while maintaining high scalability and adaptability. These results position GEMMA-SQL as a practical, open-source alternative for robust and accessible text-to-SQL systems.

Paperid: 7553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03757.pdf

Abstract:
Short-video platforms have become a central medium in the modern Internet landscape, where efficient information delivery and strong interactivity are reshaping user engagement and cultural dissemination. Among the various forms of user interaction, comments play a vital role in fostering community participation and enabling content re-creation. However, generating comments that are both compliant with platform guidelines and capable of exhibiting stylistic diversity and contextual awareness remains a significant challenge. We introduce LOLGORITHM, a modular multi-agent system (MAS) designed for controllable short-video comment generation. The system integrates video segmentation, contextual and affective analysis, and style-aware prompt construction. It supports six distinct comment styles: puns (homophones), rhyming, meme application, sarcasm (irony), plain humor, and content extraction. Powered by a multimodal large language model (MLLM), LOLGORITHM directly processes video inputs and achieves fine-grained style control through explicit prompt markers and few-shot examples. To support development and evaluation, we construct a bilingual dataset using official APIs from Douyin (Chinese) and YouTube (English), covering five popular video genres: comedy skits, daily life jokes, funny animal clips, humorous commentary, and talk shows. Evaluation combines automated metrics originality, relevance, and style conformity with a large-scale human preference study involving 40 videos and 105 participants. Results show that LOLGORITHM significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving preference rates of over 90% on Douyin and 87.55% on YouTube. This work presents a scalable and culturally adaptive framework for stylized comment generation on short-video platforms, offering a promising path to enhance user engagement and creative interaction.

Paperid: 7554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03235.pdf

Abstract:
Psychological constructs within individuals are widely believed to be interconnected. We investigated whether and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can model the correlational structure of human psychological traits from minimal quantitative inputs. We prompted various LLMs with Big Five Personality Scale responses from 816 human individuals to role-play their responses on nine other psychological scales. LLMs demonstrated remarkable accuracy in capturing human psychological structure, with the inter-scale correlation patterns from LLM-generated responses strongly aligning with those from human data $(R^2 > 0.89)$. This zero-shot performance substantially exceeded predictions based on semantic similarity and approached the accuracy of machine learning algorithms trained directly on the dataset. Analysis of reasoning traces revealed that LLMs use a systematic two-stage process: First, they transform raw Big Five responses into natural language personality summaries through information selection and compression, analogous to generating sufficient statistics. Second, they generate target scale responses based on reasoning from these summaries. For information selection, LLMs identify the same key personality factors as trained algorithms, though they fail to differentiate item importance within factors. The resulting compressed summaries are not merely redundant representations but capture synergistic information--adding them to original scores enhances prediction alignment, suggesting they encode emergent, second-order patterns of trait interplay. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can precisely predict individual participants' psychological traits from minimal data through a process of abstraction and reasoning, offering both a powerful tool for psychological simulation and valuable insights into their emergent reasoning capabilities.

Paperid: 7555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03180.pdf

Abstract:
As multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) gain traction across South Asia, their alignment with local ethical norms, particularly for Bengali, which is spoken by over 285 million people and ranked 6th globally, remains underexplored. Existing ethics benchmarks are largely English-centric and shaped by Western frameworks, overlooking cultural nuances critical for real-world deployment. To address this, we introduce BengaliMoralBench, the first large-scale ethics benchmark for the Bengali language and socio-cultural contexts. It covers five moral domains, Daily Activities, Habits, Parenting, Family Relationships, and Religious Activities, subdivided into 50 culturally relevant subtopics. Each scenario is annotated via native-speaker consensus using three ethical lenses: Virtue, Commonsense, and Justice ethics. We conduct systematic zero-shot evaluation of prominent multilingual LLMs, including Llama, Gemma, Qwen, and DeepSeek, using a unified prompting protocol and standard metrics. Performance varies widely (50-91% accuracy), with qualitative analysis revealing consistent weaknesses in cultural grounding, commonsense reasoning, and moral fairness. BengaliMoralBench provides a foundation for responsible localization, enabling culturally aligned evaluation and supporting the deployment of ethically robust AI in diverse, low-resource multilingual settings such as Bangladesh.

Paperid: 7556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03080.pdf

Abstract:
Text Normalization (TN) is a key preprocessing step in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, converting written forms into their canonical spoken equivalents. Traditional TN systems can exhibit high accuracy, but involve substantial engineering effort, are difficult to scale, and pose challenges to language coverage, particularly in low-resource settings. We propose PolyNorm, a prompt-based approach to TN using Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to reduce the reliance on manually crafted rules and enable broader linguistic applicability with minimal human intervention. Additionally, we present a language-agnostic pipeline for automatic data curation and evaluation, designed to facilitate scalable experimentation across diverse languages. Experiments across eight languages show consistent reductions in the word error rate (WER) compared to a production-grade-based system. To support further research, we release PolyNorm-Benchmark, a multilingual data set covering a diverse range of text normalization phenomena.

Paperid: 7557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02936.pdf

Abstract:
Efforts have increased in recent years to identify associations between specific datasets and the scientific literature that incorporates them. Knowing that a given publication cites a given dataset, the next logical step is to explore how or why that data was used. Advances in recent years with pretrained, transformer-based large language models (LLMs) offer potential means for scaling the description of data use cases in the published literature. This avoids expensive manual labeling and the development of training datasets for classical machine-learning (ML) systems. In this work we apply an open-source LLM, Llama 3.1-405B, to generate structured data use case labels for publications known to incorporate specific genomic datasets. We also introduce a novel evaluation framework for determining the efficacy of our methods. Our results demonstrate that the stock model can achieve an F1 score of .674 on a zero-shot data citation classification task with no previously defined categories. While promising, our results are qualified by barriers related to data availability, prompt overfitting, computational infrastructure, and the expense required to conduct responsible performance evaluation.

Paperid: 7558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00960.pdf

Abstract:
The extent to which large language models (LLMs) can perform culturally grounded reasoning across non-English languages remains underexplored. This paper examines the reasoning and self-assessment abilities of LLMs across seven major Indian languages-Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. We introduce a multilingual riddle dataset combining traditional riddles with context-reconstructed variants and evaluate five LLMs-Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral-Saba, LLaMA 4 Scout, and LLaMA 4 Maverick-under seven prompting strategies. In the first stage, we assess riddle-solving performance and find that while Gemini 2.5 Pro performs best overall, few-shot methods yield only marginal gains, and accuracy varies notably across languages. In the second stage, we conduct a self-evaluation experiment to measure reasoning consistency. The results reveal a key finding: a model's initial accuracy is inversely correlated with its ability to identify its own mistakes. Top-performing models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro are overconfident (4.34% True Negative Rate), whereas lower-performing models like LLaMA 4 Scout are substantially more self-aware (42.09% True Negative Rate). These results point to clear gaps in multilingual reasoning and highlight the need for models that not only reason effectively but also recognize their own limitations.

Paperid: 7559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00772.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic health records (EHRs) are central to modern healthcare delivery and research; yet, many researchers lack the database expertise necessary to write complex SQL queries or generate effective visualizations, limiting efficient data use and scientific discovery. To address this barrier, we introduce CELEC, a large language model (LLM)-powered framework for automated EHR data extraction and analytics. CELEC translates natural language queries into SQL using a prompting strategy that integrates schema information, few-shot demonstrations, and chain-of-thought reasoning, which together improve accuracy and robustness. On a subset of the EHRSQL benchmark, CELEC achieves execution accuracy comparable to prior systems while maintaining low latency, cost efficiency, and strict privacy by exposing only database metadata to the LLM. CELEC also adheres to strict privacy protocols: the LLM accesses only database metadata (e.g., table and column names), while all query execution occurs securely within the institutional environment, ensuring that no patient-level data is ever transmitted to or shared with the LLM. Ablation studies confirm that each component of the SQL generation pipeline, particularly the few-shot demonstrations, plays a critical role in performance. By lowering technical barriers and enabling medical researchers to query EHR databases directly, CELEC streamlines research workflows and accelerates biomedical discovery.

Paperid: 7560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00580.pdf

Abstract:
Video anomalies often depend on contextual information available and temporal evolution. Non-anomalous action in one context can be anomalous in some other context. Most anomaly detectors, however, do not notice this type of context, which seriously limits their capability to generalize to new, real-life situations. Our work addresses the context-aware zero-shot anomaly detection challenge, in which systems need to learn adaptively to detect new events by correlating temporal and appearance features with textual traces of memory in real time. Our approach defines a memory-augmented pipeline, correlating temporal signals with visual embeddings using cross-attention, and real-time zero-shot anomaly classification by contextual similarity scoring. We achieve 90.4\% AUC on UCF-Crime and 83.67\% AP on XD-Violence, a new state-of-the-art among zero-shot models. Our model achieves real-time inference with high precision and explainability for deployment. We show that, by fusing cross-attention temporal fusion and contextual memory, we achieve high fidelity anomaly detection, a step towards the applicability of zero-shot models in real-world surveillance and infrastructure monitoring.

Paperid: 7561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00523.pdf

Abstract:
Vision language models such as CLIP have shown remarkable performance in zero shot classification, but remain susceptible to spurious correlations, where irrelevant visual features influence predictions. Existing debiasing methods often require access to training data and explicit group labels to perform fine-tuning or adjust embeddings, which limits their practicality in real-world settings. Test-time methods attempt to avoid this constraint, but many still depend on prior knowledge of dataset specific biases, limiting their generalizability in open set settings. In this work, we propose a test-time debiasing method for ViT based CLIP models that requires no additional training or assumptions of bias annotations. Our approach uses a pretrained segmentation model to isolate the target visual attribute, then adjusts the non target regions so that their embeddings are uniformly similar to all class specific text prompts. This procedure removes unintended bias signals from confounding visual regions while preserving the target attribute. Experiments on Waterbirds and CelebA show that our method outperforms existing test-time debiasing approaches in both group robustness metrics and Attention IoU. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of segmentation guided interventions for scalable and annotation free bias mitigation in vision language models.

Paperid: 7562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00419.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large-scale pretraining in natural language processing have enabled pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP to effectively align images and text, significantly improving performance in zero-shot image classification tasks. Subsequent studies have further demonstrated that cropping images into smaller regions and using large language models to generate multiple descriptions for each caption can further enhance model performance. However, due to the inherent sensitivity of CLIP, random image crops can introduce misinformation and bias, as many images share similar features at small scales. To address this issue, we propose Localized-Globalized Cross-Alignment (LGCA), a framework that first captures the local features of an image and then repeatedly selects the most salient regions and expands them. The similarity score is designed to incorporate both the original and expanded images, enabling the model to capture both local and global features while minimizing misinformation. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that the time complexity of LGCA remains the same as that of the original model prior to the repeated expansion process, highlighting its efficiency and scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially improves zero-shot performance across diverse datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

Paperid: 7563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27646.pdf

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation of blood vessels is an important task in medical image analysis, but its progress is often hindered by the scarcity of large annotated datasets and the poor generalization of models across different imaging modalities. A key aspect is the tendency of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to learn texture-based features, which limits their performance when applied to new domains with different visual characteristics. We hypothesize that leveraging geometric priors of vessel shapes, such as their tubular and branching nature, can lead to more robust and data-efficient models. To investigate this, we introduce VessShape, a methodology for generating large-scale 2D synthetic datasets designed to instill a shape bias in segmentation models. VessShape images contain procedurally generated tubular geometries combined with a wide variety of foreground and background textures, encouraging models to learn shape cues rather than textures. We demonstrate that a model pre-trained on VessShape images achieves strong few-shot segmentation performance on two real-world datasets from different domains, requiring only four to ten samples for fine-tuning. Furthermore, the model exhibits notable zero-shot capabilities, effectively segmenting vessels in unseen domains without any target-specific training. Our results indicate that pre-training with a strong shape bias can be an effective strategy to overcome data scarcity and improve model generalization in blood vessel segmentation.

Paperid: 7564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27038.pdf

Abstract:
Sexism reinforces gender inequality and social exclusion by perpetuating stereotypes, bias, and discriminatory norms. Noting how online platforms enable various forms of sexism to thrive, there is a growing need for effective sexism detection and mitigation strategies. While computational approaches to sexism detection are widespread in high-resource languages, progress remains limited in low-resource languages where limited linguistic resources and cultural differences affect how sexism is expressed and perceived. This study introduces the first Hausa sexism detection dataset, developed through community engagement, qualitative coding, and data augmentation. For cultural nuances and linguistic representation, we conducted a two-stage user study (n=66) involving native speakers to explore how sexism is defined and articulated in everyday discourse. We further experiment with both traditional machine learning classifiers and pre-trained multilingual language models and evaluating the effectiveness few-shot learning in detecting sexism in Hausa. Our findings highlight challenges in capturing cultural nuance, particularly with clarification-seeking and idiomatic expressions, and reveal a tendency for many false positives in such cases.

Paperid: 7565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26466.pdf

Abstract:
Object-context shortcuts remain a persistent challenge in vision-language models, undermining zero-shot reliability when test-time scenes differ from familiar training co-occurrences. We recast this issue as a causal inference problem and ask: Would the prediction remain if the object appeared in a different environment? To answer this at inference time, we estimate object and background expectations within CLIP's representation space, and synthesize counterfactual embeddings by recombining object features with diverse alternative contexts sampled from external datasets, batch neighbors, or text-derived descriptions. By estimating the Total Direct Effect and simulating intervention, we further subtract background-only activation, preserving beneficial object-context interactions while mitigating hallucinated scores. Without retraining or prompt design, our method substantially improves both worst-group and average accuracy on context-sensitive benchmarks, establishing a new zero-shot state of the art. Beyond performance, our framework provides a lightweight representation-level counterfactual approach, offering a practical causal avenue for debiased and reliable multimodal reasoning.

Paperid: 7566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26163.pdf

Abstract:
As emerging mobility modes continue to expand, many cities face declining bus ridership, increasing fiscal pressure to sustain underutilized routes, and growing inefficiencies in resource allocation. This study employs an agent-based modelling (ABM) approach calibrated through a large language model (LLM) using few-shot learning to examine how progressive bus route cutbacks affect passenger dissatisfaction across demographic groups and overall network resilience. Using IC-card data from Beijing's Huairou District, the LLM-calibrated ABM estimated passenger sensitivity parameters related to travel time, waiting, transfers, and crowding. Results show that the structural configuration of the bus network exerts a stronger influence on system stability than capacity or operational factors. The elimination of high-connectivity routes led to an exponential rise in total dissatisfaction, particularly among passengers with disabilities and older adults. The evolution of dissatisfaction exhibited three distinct phases - stable, transitional, and critical. Through the analysis of each stage, this study found that the continuous bus route reduction scenario exhibits three-stage thresholds. Once these thresholds are crossed, even a small reduction in routes may lead to a significant loss of passenger flow. Research highlights the nonlinear response of user sentiment to service reductions and underscore the importance of maintaining structural critical routes and providing stable services to vulnerable groups for equitable and resilient transport planning.

Paperid: 7567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25816.pdf

Abstract:
Electronic Health Records (EHR) store clinical documentation as base64 encoded attachments in FHIR DocumentReference resources, which makes semantic question answering difficult. Traditional vector database methods often miss nuanced clinical relationships. The Clinical Entity Augmented Retrieval (CLEAR) method, introduced by Lopez et al. 2025, uses entity aware retrieval and achieved improved performance with an F1 score of 0.90 versus 0.86 for embedding based retrieval, while using over 70 percent fewer tokens. We developed a Clinical Notes QA Evaluation Platform to validate CLEAR against zero shot large context inference and traditional chunk based retrieval augmented generation. The platform was tested on 12 clinical notes ranging from 10,000 to 65,000 tokens representing realistic EHR content. CLEAR achieved a 58.3 percent win rate, an average semantic similarity of 0.878, and used 78 percent fewer tokens than wide context processing. The largest performance gains occurred on long notes, with a 75 percent win rate for documents exceeding 65,000 tokens. These findings confirm that entity aware retrieval improves both efficiency and accuracy in clinical natural language processing. The evaluation framework provides a reusable and transparent benchmark for assessing clinical question answering systems where semantic precision and computational efficiency are critical.

Paperid: 7568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25799.pdf

Abstract:
Human experts often struggle to select the best option from a large set of items with multiple competing objectives, a process bottlenecked by the difficulty of formalizing complex, implicit preferences. To address this, we introduce LISTEN, a framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) as a zero-shot preference oracle, guided only by an expert's high-level priorities in natural language. To operate within LLM constraints like context windows and inference costs, we propose two iterative algorithms: LISTEN-U, which uses the LLM to refine a parametric utility function, and LISTEN-T, a non-parametric method that performs tournament-style selections over small batches of solutions. Evaluated on diverse tasks including flight booking, shopping, and exam scheduling, our results show LISTEN-U excels when preferences are parametrically aligned (a property we measure with a novel concordance metric), while LISTEN-T offers more robust performance. This work explores a promising direction for steering complex multi-objective decisions directly with natural language, reducing the cognitive burden of traditional preference elicitation.

Paperid: 7569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20322.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language co-embedding networks, such as CLIP, provide a latent embedding space with semantic information that is useful for downstream tasks. We hypothesize that the embedding space can be disentangled to separate the information on the content of complex scenes by decomposing the embedding into multiple concept-specific component vectors that lie in different subspaces. We propose a supervised dictionary learning approach to estimate a linear synthesis model consisting of sparse, non-negative combinations of groups of vectors in the dictionary (atoms), whose group-wise activity matches the multi-label information. Each concept-specific component is a non-negative combination of atoms associated to a label. The group-structured dictionary is optimized through a novel alternating optimization with guaranteed convergence. Exploiting the text co-embeddings, we detail how semantically meaningful descriptions can be found based on text embeddings of words best approximated by a concept's group of atoms, and unsupervised dictionary learning can exploit zero-shot classification of training set images using the text embeddings of concept labels to provide instance-wise multi-labels. We show that the disentangled embeddings provided by our sparse linear concept subspaces (SLiCS) enable concept-filtered image retrieval (and conditional generation using image-to-prompt) that is more precise. We also apply SLiCS to highly-compressed autoencoder embeddings from TiTok and the latent embedding from self-supervised DINOv2. Quantitative and qualitative results highlight the improved precision of the concept-filtered image retrieval for all embeddings.

Paperid: 7570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20217.pdf

Abstract:
This study explores automatic generation (AIG) using language models to create multiple choice questions (MCQs) for morphological assessment, aiming to reduce the cost and inconsistency of manual test development. The study used a two-fold approach. First, we compared a fine-tuned medium model (Gemma, 2B) with a larger untuned one (GPT-3.5, 175B). Second, we evaluated seven structured prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, role-based, sequential, and combinations. Generated items were assessed using automated metrics and expert scoring across five dimensions. We also used GPT-4.1, trained on expert-rated samples, to simulate human scoring at scale. Results show that structured prompting, especially strategies combining chain-of-thought and sequential design, significantly improved Gemma's outputs. Gemma generally produced more construct-aligned and instructionally appropriate items than GPT-3.5's zero-shot responses, with prompt design playing a key role in mid-size model performance. This study demonstrates that structured prompting and efficient fine-tuning can enhance midsized models for AIG under limited data conditions. We highlight the value of combining automated metrics, expert judgment, and large-model simulation to ensure alignment with assessment goals. The proposed workflow offers a practical and scalable way to develop and validate language assessment items for K-12.

Paperid: 7571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19836.pdf

Abstract:
Qualitative analysis of open-ended survey responses is a commonly-used research method in the social sciences, but traditional coding approaches are often time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. Existing solutions from Natural Language Processing such as supervised classifiers, topic modeling techniques, and generative large language models have limited applicability in qualitative analysis, since they demand extensive labeled data, disrupt established qualitative workflows, and/or yield variable results. In this paper, we introduce a text embedding-based classification framework that requires only a handful of examples per category and fits well with standard qualitative workflows. When benchmarked against human analysis of a conceptual physics survey consisting of 2899 open-ended responses, our framework achieves a Cohen's Kappa ranging from 0.74 to 0.83 as compared to expert human coders in an exhaustive coding scheme. We further show how performance of this framework improves with fine-tuning of the text embedding model, and how the method can be used to audit previously-analyzed datasets. These findings demonstrate that text embedding-assisted coding can flexibly scale to thousands of responses without sacrificing interpretability, opening avenues for deductive qualitative analysis at scale.

Paperid: 7572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18090.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable versatility across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and domains. One such task is Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying and classifying proper names in text, such as people, organizations, locations, dates, and other specific entities. NER plays a crucial role in extracting information from unstructured textual data, enabling downstream applications such as information retrieval from unstructured text. Traditionally, NER is addressed using supervised machine learning approaches, which require large amounts of annotated training data. However, historical texts present a unique challenge, as the annotated datasets are often scarce or nonexistent, due to the high cost and expertise required for manual labeling. In addition, the variability and noise inherent in historical language, such as inconsistent spelling and archaic vocabulary, further complicate the development of reliable NER systems for these sources. In this study, we explore the feasibility of applying LLMs to NER in historical documents using zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, which require little to no task-specific training data. Our experiments, conducted on the HIPE-2022 (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities) dataset, show that LLMs can achieve reasonably strong performance on NER tasks in this setting. While their performance falls short of fully supervised models trained on domain-specific annotations, the results are nevertheless promising. These findings suggest that LLMs offer a viable and efficient alternative for information extraction in low-resource or historically significant corpora, where traditional supervised methods are infeasible.

Paperid: 7573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18050.pdf

Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) poses a significant challenge due to the intrinsic high similarity between targets and backgrounds, demanding models capable of profound holistic understanding beyond superficial cues. Prevailing methods, often limited by shallow feature representation, inadequate reasoning mechanisms, and weak cross-modal integration, struggle to achieve this depth of cognition, resulting in prevalent issues like incomplete target separation and imprecise segmentation. Inspired by the perceptual strategy of the Hundred-eyed Giant-emphasizing holistic observation, omnidirectional focus, and intensive scrutiny-we introduce ArgusCogito, a novel zero-shot, chain-of-thought framework underpinned by cross-modal synergy and omnidirectional reasoning within Vision-Language Models (VLMs). ArgusCogito orchestrates three cognitively-inspired stages: (1) Conjecture: Constructs a strong cognitive prior through global reasoning with cross-modal fusion (RGB, depth, semantic maps), enabling holistic scene understanding and enhanced target-background disambiguation. (2) Focus: Performs omnidirectional, attention-driven scanning and focused reasoning, guided by semantic priors from Conjecture, enabling precise target localization and region-of-interest refinement. (3) Sculpting: Progressively sculpts high-fidelity segmentation masks by integrating cross-modal information and iteratively generating dense positive/negative point prompts within focused regions, emulating Argus' intensive scrutiny. Extensive evaluations on four challenging COS benchmarks and three Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) benchmarks demonstrate that ArgusCogito achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, validating the framework's exceptional efficacy, superior generalization capability, and robustness.

Paperid: 7574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17402.pdf

Abstract:
Claim normalization is an integral part of any automatic fact-check verification system. It parses the typically noisy claim data, such as social media posts into normalized claims, which are then fed into downstream veracity classification tasks. The CheckThat! 2025 Task 2 focuses specifically on claim normalization and spans 20 languages under monolingual and zero-shot conditions. Our proposed solution consists of a lightweight \emph{retrieval-first, LLM-backed} pipeline, in which we either dynamically prompt a GPT-4o-mini with in-context examples, or retrieve the closest normalization from the train dataset directly. On the official test set, the system ranks near the top for most monolingual tracks, achieving first place in 7 out of of the 13 languages. In contrast, the system underperforms in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the limitation of the proposed solution.

Paperid: 7575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16833.pdf

Abstract:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) in biomedical domains faces challenges due to data scarcity and imbalanced label distributions, especially with fine-grained entity types. We propose ReProCon, a novel few-shot NER framework that combines multi-prototype modeling, cosine-contrastive learning, and Reptile meta-learning to tackle these issues. By representing each category with multiple prototypes, ReProCon captures semantic variability, such as synonyms and contextual differences, while a cosine-contrastive objective ensures strong interclass separation. Reptile meta-updates enable quick adaptation with little data. Using a lightweight fastText + BiLSTM encoder with much lower memory usage, ReProCon achieves a macro-$F_1$ score close to BERT-based baselines (around 99 percent of BERT performance). The model remains stable with a label budget of 30 percent and only drops 7.8 percent in $F_1$ when expanding from 19 to 50 categories, outperforming baselines such as SpanProto and CONTaiNER, which see 10 to 32 percent degradation in Few-NERD. Ablation studies highlight the importance of multi-prototype modeling and contrastive learning in managing class imbalance. Despite difficulties with label ambiguity, ReProCon demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in resource-limited settings, making it suitable for biomedical applications.

Paperid: 7576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16641.pdf

Abstract:
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) such as Lag-Llama, TimeGPT, Chronos, MOMENT, UniTS, and TimesFM have shown strong generalization and zero-shot capabilities for time series forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, and imputation. Despite these advantages, their predictions still suffer from variance, domain-specific bias, and limited uncertainty quantification when deployed on real operational data. This paper investigates a suite of statistical and ensemble-based enhancement techniques, including bootstrap-based bagging, regression-based stacking, prediction interval construction, statistical residual modeling, and iterative error feedback, to improve robustness and accuracy. Using the Belgium Electricity Short-Term Load Forecasting dataset as a case study, we demonstrate that the proposed hybrids consistently outperform standalone foundation models across multiple horizons. Regression-based ensembles achieve the lowest mean squared error; bootstrap aggregation markedly reduces long-context errors; residual modeling corrects systematic bias; and the resulting prediction intervals achieve near nominal coverage with widths shrinking as context length increases. The results indicate that integrating statistical reasoning with modern foundation models yields measurable gains in accuracy, reliability, and interpretability for real-world time series applications.

Paperid: 7577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16527.pdf

Abstract:
For decades, Computer Vision has aimed at enabling machines to perceive the external world. Initial limitations led to the development of highly specialized niches. As success in each task accrued and research progressed, increasingly complex perception tasks emerged. This survey charts the convergence of these tasks and, in doing so, introduces Open World Detection (OWD), an umbrella term we propose to unify class-agnostic and generally applicable detection models in the vision domain. We start from the history of foundational vision subdomains and cover key concepts, methodologies and datasets making up today's state-of-the-art landscape. This traverses topics starting from early saliency detection, foreground/background separation, out of distribution detection and leading up to open world object detection, zero-shot detection and Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We explore the overlap between these subdomains, their increasing convergence, and their potential to unify into a singular domain in the future, perception.

Paperid: 7578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16478.pdf

Abstract:
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has provided unprecedented capabilities for analyzing unstructured text data. However, deploying these models as reliable, robust, and scalable classifiers in production environments presents significant methodological challenges. Standard fine-tuning approaches can be resource-intensive and often struggle with the dynamic nature of real-world data distributions, which is common in the industry. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive, semi-supervised framework that leverages the zero- and few-shot capabilities of LLMs for building hierarchical text classifiers as a framework for a solution to these industry-wide challenges. Our methodology emphasizes an iterative, human-in-the-loop process that begins with domain knowledge elicitation and progresses through prompt refinement, hierarchical expansion, and multi-faceted validation. We introduce techniques for assessing and mitigating sequence-based biases and outline a protocol for continuous monitoring and adaptation. This framework is designed to bridge the gap between the raw power of LLMs and the practical need for accurate, interpretable, and maintainable classification systems in industry applications.

Paperid: 7579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15021.pdf

Abstract:
Attention-based architectures trained on internet-scale language data have demonstrated state of the art reasoning ability for various language-based tasks, such as logic problems and textual reasoning. Additionally, these Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited the ability to perform few-shot prediction via in-context learning, in which input-output examples provided in the prompt are generalized to new inputs. This ability furthermore extends beyond standard language tasks, enabling few-shot learning for general patterns. In this work, we consider the application of in-context learning with pre-trained language models for dynamic manipulation. Dynamic manipulation introduces several crucial challenges, including increased dimensionality, complex dynamics, and partial observability. To address this, we take an iterative approach, and formulate our in-context learning problem to predict adjustments to a parametric policy based on previous interactions. We show across several tasks in simulation and on a physical robot that utilizing in-context learning outperforms alternative methods in the low data regime. Video summary of this work and experiments can be found https://youtu.be/2inxpdrq74U?si=dAdDYsUEr25nZvRn.

Paperid: 7580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13769.pdf

Abstract:
The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, yet little attention has been paid to whether LLM-generated text resembles child language. This study evaluates how LLMs replicate child-like language by comparing LLM-generated texts to a collection of German children's descriptions of picture stories. We generated two LLM-based corpora using the same picture stories and two prompt types: zero-shot and few-shot prompts specifying a general age from the children corpus. We conducted a comparative analysis across psycholinguistic text properties, including word frequency, lexical richness, sentence and word length, part-of-speech tags, and semantic similarity with word embeddings. The results show that LLM-generated texts are longer but less lexically rich, rely more on high-frequency words, and under-represent nouns. Semantic vector space analysis revealed low similarity, highlighting differences between the two corpora on the level of corpus semantics. Few-shot prompt increased similarities between children and LLM text to a minor extent, but still failed to replicate lexical and semantic patterns. The findings contribute to our understanding of how LLMs approximate child language through multimodal prompting (text + image) and give insights into their use in psycholinguistic research and education while raising important questions about the appropriateness of LLM-generated language in child-directed educational tools.

Paperid: 7581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13387.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) have significantly improved performance on downstream tasks such as few-shot retrieval. However, most existing approaches focus on task-specific gains while neglecting the structure of the multimodal embedding space. As a result, modality-specific representations often remain isolated, limiting cross-modal generalisation. In this work, we introduce Shared Prompt AligNER (SPANER), a modality-agnostic PEFT framework designed to embed inputs from diverse modalities into a unified semantic space. At its core, SPANER employs a shared prompt mechanism that acts as a conceptual anchor, enabling semantically related instances to converge spatially regardless of modality. This shared prompt design is inherently extensible, supporting the seamless integration of additional modalities, such as audio, without altering the core architecture. Through comprehensive experiments across vision-language and audio-visual benchmarks, SPANER demonstrates competitive few-shot retrieval performance while preserving high semantic coherence in the learned embedding space. Our results highlight the importance of aligning embedding structures, rather than merely tuning adapter weights, for scalable multimodal learning.

Paperid: 7582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13124.pdf

Abstract:
Abstractive summarization is a core application in contact centers, where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate millions of summaries of call transcripts daily. Despite their apparent quality, it remains unclear whether LLMs systematically under- or over-attend to specific aspects of the transcript, potentially introducing biases in the generated summary. While prior work has examined social and positional biases, the specific forms of bias pertinent to contact center operations - which we term Operational Bias - have remained unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce BlindSpot, a framework built upon a taxonomy of 15 operational bias dimensions (e.g., disfluency, speaker, topic) for the identification and quantification of these biases. BlindSpot leverages an LLM as a zero-shot classifier to derive categorical distributions for each bias dimension in a pair of transcript and its summary. The bias is then quantified using two metrics: Fidelity Gap (the JS Divergence between distributions) and Coverage (the percentage of source labels omitted). Using BlindSpot, we conducted an empirical study with 2500 real call transcripts and their summaries generated by 20 LLMs of varying scales and families (e.g., GPT, Llama, Claude). Our analysis reveals that biases are systemic and present across all evaluated models, regardless of size or family.

Paperid: 7583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12745.pdf

Abstract:
Image set classification (ISC), which can be viewed as a task of comparing similarities between sets consisting of unordered heterogeneous images with variable quantities and qualities, has attracted growing research attention in recent years. How to learn effective feature representations and how to explore the similarities between different image sets are two key yet challenging issues in this field. However, existing traditional ISC methods classify image sets based on raw pixel features, ignoring the importance of feature learning. Existing deep ISC methods can learn deep features, but they fail to adaptively adjust the features when measuring set distances, resulting in limited performance in few-shot ISC. To address the above issues, this paper combines traditional ISC methods with deep models and proposes a novel few-shot ISC approach called Deep Class-specific Collaborative Representation (DCSCR) network to simultaneously learn the frame- and concept-level feature representations of each image set and the distance similarities between different sets. Specifically, DCSCR consists of a fully convolutional deep feature extractor module, a global feature learning module, and a class-specific collaborative representation-based metric learning module. The deep feature extractor and global feature learning modules are used to learn (local and global) frame-level feature representations, while the class-specific collaborative representation-based metric learning module is exploit to adaptively learn the concept-level feature representation of each image set and thus obtain the distance similarities between different sets by developing a new CSCR-based contrastive loss function. Extensive experiments on several well-known few-shot ISC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with some state-of-the-art image set classification algorithms.

Paperid: 7584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12718.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown remarkable ability to synthesize diverse and high-quality images. However, it is still challenging to directly apply these models for editing real images for two reasons. First, it is difficult for users to come up with a perfect text prompt that accurately describes every visual detail in the input image. Second, while existing models can introduce desirable changes in certain regions, they often dramatically alter the input content and introduce unexpected changes in unwanted regions. To address these challenges, we present Dual Contrastive Denoising Score, a simple yet powerful framework that leverages the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models. Inspired by contrastive learning approaches for unpaired image-to-image translation, we introduce a straightforward dual contrastive loss within the proposed framework. Our approach utilizes the extensive spatial information from the intermediate representations of the self-attention layers in latent diffusion models without depending on auxiliary networks. Our method achieves both flexible content modification and structure preservation between input and output images, as well as zero-shot image-to-image translation. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach outperforms existing methods in real image editing while maintaining the capability to directly utilize pretrained text-to-image diffusion models without further training.

Paperid: 7585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11933.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting machine-generated text (MGT) from contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly crucial amid risks like disinformation and threats to academic integrity. Existing zero-shot detection paradigms, despite their practicality, often exhibit significant deficiencies. Key challenges include: (1) superficial analyses focused on limited textual attributes, and (2) a lack of investigation into consistency across linguistic dimensions such as style, semantics, and logic. To address these challenges, we introduce the \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{M}ulti-agent \textbf{F}ramework (\textbf{CAMF}), a novel architecture using multiple LLM-based agents. CAMF employs specialized agents in a synergistic three-phase process: \emph{Multi-dimensional Linguistic Feature Extraction}, \emph{Adversarial Consistency Probing}, and \emph{Synthesized Judgment Aggregation}. This structured collaborative-adversarial process enables a deep analysis of subtle, cross-dimensional textual incongruities indicative of non-human origin. Empirical evaluations demonstrate CAMF's significant superiority over state-of-the-art zero-shot MGT detection techniques.

Paperid: 7586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11011.pdf

Abstract:
Construction safety inspections typically involve a human inspector identifying safety concerns on-site. With the rise of powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs), researchers are exploring their use for tasks such as detecting safety rule violations from on-site images. However, there is a lack of open datasets to comprehensively evaluate and further fine-tune VLMs in construction safety inspection. Current applications of VLMs use small, supervised datasets, limiting their applicability in tasks they are not directly trained for. In this paper, we propose the ConstructionSite 10k, featuring 10,000 construction site images with annotations for three inter-connected tasks, including image captioning, safety rule violation visual question answering (VQA), and construction element visual grounding. Our subsequent evaluation of current state-of-the-art large pre-trained VLMs shows notable generalization abilities in zero-shot and few-shot settings, while additional training is needed to make them applicable to actual construction sites. This dataset allows researchers to train and evaluate their own VLMs with new architectures and techniques, providing a valuable benchmark for construction safety inspection.

Paperid: 7587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10397.pdf

Abstract:
Driver distraction detection is essential for improving traffic safety and reducing road accidents. However, existing models often suffer from degraded generalization when deployed in real-world scenarios. This limitation primarily arises from the few-shot learning challenge caused by the high cost of data annotation in practical environments, as well as the substantial domain shift between training datasets and target deployment conditions. To address these issues, we propose a Pose-driven Quality-controlled Data Augmentation Framework (PQ-DAF) that leverages a vision-language model for sample filtering to cost-effectively expand training data and enhance cross-domain robustness. Specifically, we employ a Progressive Conditional Diffusion Model (PCDMs) to accurately capture key driver pose features and synthesize diverse training examples. A sample quality assessment module, built upon the CogVLM vision-language model, is then introduced to filter out low-quality synthetic samples based on a confidence threshold, ensuring the reliability of the augmented dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PQ-DAF substantially improves performance in few-shot driver distraction detection, achieving significant gains in model generalization under data-scarce conditions.

Paperid: 7588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10371.pdf

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning in large reasoning models enables learning from feedback on their outputs, making it particularly valuable in scenarios where fine-tuning data is limited. However, its application in multi-modal human activity recognition (HAR) domains remains largely underexplored. Our work extends reinforcement learning to the human activity recognition domain with multimodal large language models. By incorporating visual reinforcement learning in the training process, the model's generalization ability on few-shot recognition can be greatly improved. Additionally, visual reinforcement learning can enhance the model's reasoning ability and enable explainable analysis in the inference stage. We name our few-shot human activity recognition method with visual reinforcement learning FAVOR. Specifically, our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to generate multiple candidate responses for the human activity image, each containing reasoning traces and final answers. These responses are then evaluated using reward functions, and the MLLM model is subsequently optimized using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. In this way, the MLLM model can be adapted to human activity recognition with only a few samples. Extensive experiments on four human activity recognition datasets and five different settings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Paperid: 7589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10226.pdf

Abstract:
Patients who are at clinical high risk (CHR) for schizophrenia need close monitoring of their symptoms to inform appropriate treatments. The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) is a validated, commonly used research tool for measuring symptoms in patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; however, it is not commonly used in clinical practice as it requires a lengthy structured interview. Here, we utilize large language models (LLMs) to predict BPRS scores from clinical interview transcripts in 409 CHR patients from the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Schizophrenia (AMP-SCZ) cohort. Despite the interviews not being specifically structured to measure the BPRS, the zero-shot performance of the LLM predictions compared to the true assessment (median concordance: 0.84, ICC: 0.73) approaches human inter- and intra-rater reliability. We further demonstrate that LLMs have substantial potential to improve and standardize the assessment of CHR patients via their accuracy in assessing the BPRS in foreign languages (median concordance: 0.88, ICC: 0.70), and integrating longitudinal information in a one-shot or few-shot learning approach.

Paperid: 7590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09012.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes our participation in SemEval 2025 Task 8, focused on Tabular Question Answering. We developed a zero-shot pipeline that leverages an Large Language Model to generate functional code capable of extracting the relevant information from tabular data based on an input question. Our approach consists of a modular pipeline where the main code generator module is supported by additional components that identify the most relevant columns and analyze their data types to improve extraction accuracy. In the event that the generated code fails, an iterative refinement process is triggered, incorporating the error feedback into a new generation prompt to enhance robustness. Our results show that zero-shot code generation is a valid approach for Tabular QA, achieving rank 33 of 53 in the test phase despite the lack of task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08287.pdf

Abstract:
Despite the increasing usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) in answering questions in a variety of domains, their reliability and accuracy remain unexamined for a plethora of domains including the religious domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark FiqhQA focused on the LLM generated Islamic rulings explicitly categorized by the four major Sunni schools of thought, in both Arabic and English. Unlike prior work, which either overlooks the distinctions between religious school of thought or fails to evaluate abstention behavior, we assess LLMs not only on their accuracy but also on their ability to recognize when not to answer. Our zero-shot and abstention experiments reveal significant variation across LLMs, languages, and legal schools of thought. While GPT-4o outperforms all other models in accuracy, Gemini and Fanar demonstrate superior abstention behavior critical for minimizing confident incorrect answers. Notably, all models exhibit a performance drop in Arabic, highlighting the limitations in religious reasoning for languages other than English. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to benchmark the efficacy of LLMs for fine-grained Islamic school of thought specific ruling generation and to evaluate abstention for Islamic jurisprudence queries. Our findings underscore the need for task-specific evaluation and cautious deployment of LLMs in religious applications.

Paperid: 7592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06665.pdf

Abstract:
Current state-of-the-art models demonstrate capacity to leverage in-context learning to translate into previously unseen language contexts. Tanzer et al. [2024] utilize language materials (e.g. a grammar) to improve translation quality for Kalamang using large language models (LLMs). We focus on Kanuri, a language that, despite having substantial speaker population, has minimal digital resources. We design two datasets for evaluation: one focused on health and humanitarian terms, and another containing generalized terminology, investigating how domain-specific tasks impact LLM translation quality. By providing different combinations of language resources (grammar, dictionary, and parallel sentences), we measure LLM translation effectiveness, comparing results to native speaker translations and human linguist performance. We evaluate using both automatic metrics and native speaker assessments of fluency and accuracy. Results demonstrate that parallel sentences remain the most effective data source, outperforming other methods in human evaluations and automatic metrics. While incorporating grammar improves over zero-shot translation, it fails as an effective standalone data source. Human evaluations reveal that LLMs achieve accuracy (meaning) more effectively than fluency (grammaticality). These findings suggest LLM translation evaluation benefits from multidimensional assessment beyond simple accuracy metrics, and that grammar alone, without parallel sentences, does not provide sufficient context for effective domain-specific translation.

Paperid: 7593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06623.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of digital news media necessitates robust methods for verifying content veracity, particularly regarding the consistency between visual and textual information. Traditional approaches often fall short in addressing the fine-grained cross-modal contextual consistency (FCCC) problem, which encompasses deeper alignment of visual narrative, emotional tone, and background information with text, beyond mere entity matching. To address this, we propose ContextGuard-LVLM, a novel framework built upon advanced Vision-Language Large Models (LVLMs) and integrating a multi-stage contextual reasoning mechanism. Our model is uniquely enhanced through reinforced or adversarial learning paradigms, enabling it to detect subtle contextual misalignments that evade zero-shot baselines. We extend and augment three established datasets (TamperedNews-Ent, News400-Ent, MMG-Ent) with new fine-grained contextual annotations, including "contextual sentiment," "visual narrative theme," and "scene-event logical coherence," and introduce a comprehensive CTXT (Contextual Coherence) entity type. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContextGuard-LVLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot LVLM baselines (InstructBLIP and LLaVA 1.5) across nearly all fine-grained consistency tasks, showing significant improvements in complex logical reasoning and nuanced contextual understanding. Furthermore, our model exhibits superior robustness to subtle perturbations and a higher agreement rate with human expert judgments on challenging samples, affirming its efficacy in discerning sophisticated forms of context detachment.

Paperid: 7594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06517.pdf

Abstract:
Automated polyp segmentation is essential for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer, yet developing robust models remains challenging due to limited annotated data and significant performance degradation under domain shift. Although semi-supervised learning (SSL) reduces annotation requirements, existing methods rely on generic augmentations that ignore polyp-specific structural properties, resulting in poor generalization to new imaging centers and devices. To address this, we introduce Frequency Prior Guided Matching (FPGM), a novel augmentation framework built on a key discovery: polyp edges exhibit a remarkably consistent frequency signature across diverse datasets. FPGM leverages this intrinsic regularity in a two-stage process. It first learns a domain-invariant frequency prior from the edge regions of labeled polyps. Then, it performs principled spectral perturbations on unlabeled images, aligning their amplitude spectra with this learned prior while preserving phase information to maintain structural integrity. This targeted alignment normalizes domain-specific textural variations, thereby compelling the model to learn the underlying, generalizable anatomical structure. Validated on six public datasets, FPGM establishes a new state-of-the-art against ten competing methods. It demonstrates exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities, achieving over 10% absolute gain in Dice score in data-scarce scenarios. By significantly enhancing cross-domain robustness, FPGM presents a powerful solution for clinically deployable polyp segmentation under limited supervision.

Paperid: 7595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06391.pdf

Abstract:
We present a case study on developing a customized speech-to-text system for a Hungarian speaker with severe dysarthria. State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models struggle with zero-shot transcription of dysarthric speech, yielding high error rates. To improve performance with limited real dysarthric data, we fine-tune an ASR model using synthetic speech generated via a personalized text-to-speech (TTS) system. We introduce a method for generating synthetic dysarthric speech with controlled severity by leveraging premorbidity recordings of the given speaker and speaker embedding interpolation, enabling ASR fine-tuning on a continuum of impairments. Fine-tuning on both real and synthetic dysarthric speech reduces the character error rate (CER) from 36-51% (zero-shot) to 7.3%. Our monolingual FastConformer_Hu ASR model significantly outperforms Whisper-turbo when fine-tuned on the same data, and the inclusion of synthetic speech contributes to an 18% relative CER reduction. These results highlight the potential of personalized ASR systems for improving accessibility for individuals with severe speech impairments.

Paperid: 7596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06047.pdf

Abstract:
Modern SoC datapaths include deeply pipelined, domain-specific accelerators, but their RTL implementation and verification are still mostly done by hand. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit advanced code-generation abilities for programming languages like Python, their application to Verilog-like RTL remains in its nascent stage. This is reflected in the simple arithmetic and control circuits currently used to evaluate generative capabilities in existing benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce ArchXBench, a six-level benchmark suite that encompasses complex arithmetic circuits and other advanced digital subsystems drawn from domains such as cryptography, image processing, machine learning, and signal processing. Architecturally, some of these designs are purely combinational, others are multi-cycle or pipelined, and many require hierarchical composition of modules. For each benchmark, we provide a problem description, design specification, and testbench, enabling rapid research in the area of LLM-driven agentic approaches for complex digital systems design. Using zero-shot prompting with Claude Sonnet 4, GPT 4.1, o4-mini-high, and DeepSeek R1 under a pass@5 criterion, we observed that o4-mini-high successfully solves the largest number of benchmarks, 16 out of 30, spanning Levels 1, 2, and 3. From Level 4 onward, however, all models consistently fail, highlighting a clear gap in the capabilities of current state-of-the-art LLMs and prompting/agentic approaches.

Paperid: 7597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05421.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) exhibit broad utility but face limitations in quantum sensor development, stemming from interdisciplinary knowledge barriers and involving complex optimization processes. Here we present QCopilot, an LLM-based multi-agent framework integrating external knowledge access, active learning, and uncertainty quantification for quantum sensor design and diagnosis. Comprising commercial LLMs with few-shot prompt engineering and vector knowledge base, QCopilot employs specialized agents to adaptively select optimization methods, automate modeling analysis, and independently perform problem diagnosis. Applying QCopilot to atom cooling experiments, we generated 10${}^{\rm{8}}$ sub-$\rmÎ¼$K atoms without any human intervention within a few hours, representing $\sim$100$\times$ speedup over manual experimentation. Notably, by continuously accumulating prior knowledge and enabling dynamic modeling, QCopilot can autonomously identify anomalous parameters in multi-parameter experimental settings. Our work reduces barriers to large-scale quantum sensor deployment and readily extends to other quantum information systems.

Paperid: 7598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05237.pdf

Abstract:
This report synthesizes eight seminal papers on the zero-shot adversarial robustness of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent trade-off between enhancing adversarial robustness and preserving the model's zero-shot generalization capabilities. We analyze two primary defense paradigms: Adversarial Fine-Tuning (AFT), which modifies model parameters, and Training-Free/Test-Time Defenses, which preserve them. We trace the evolution from alignment-preserving methods (TeCoA) to embedding space re-engineering (LAAT, TIMA), and from input heuristics (AOM, TTC) to latent-space purification (CLIPure). Finally, we identify key challenges and future directions including hybrid defense strategies and adversarial pre-training.

Paperid: 7599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04724.pdf

Abstract:
Protein language models (PLMs) learn probability distributions over natural protein sequences. By learning from hundreds of millions of natural protein sequences, protein understanding and design capabilities emerge. Recent works have shown that scaling these models improves structure prediction, but does not seem to improve mutation understanding and representation quality for protein function prediction. We introduce PoET-2, a multimodal, retrieval-augmented protein foundation model that incorporates in-context learning of family-specific evolutionary constraints with optional structure conditioning to learn generative distributions over protein sequences. PoET-2 uses a hierarchical transformer encoder that is equivariant to sequence context ordering and a dual decoder architecture with both causal and masked language modeling objectives, allowing PoET-2 to operate in both fully generative and bidirectional representation learning modes. PoET-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot variant effect prediction, excelling at scoring variants with multiple mutations and challenging indel mutations. In supervised settings, PoET-2 embeddings outperform previous methods for learning sequence-function relationships, especially with small datasets. This work highlights the benefits of combining retrieval augmentation with multimodal, family-centric modeling for advancing protein foundation models.

Paperid: 7600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04623.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL translation enables non-expert users to query relational databases using natural language, with applications in education and business intelligence. This study evaluates three lightweight transformer models - T5-Small, BART-Small, and GPT-2 - on the Spider dataset, focusing on low-resource settings. We developed a reusable, model-agnostic pipeline that tailors schema formatting to each model's architecture, training them across 1000 to 5000 iterations and evaluating on 1000 test samples using Logical Form Accuracy (LFAcc), BLEU, and Exact Match (EM) metrics. Fine-tuned T5-Small achieves the highest LFAcc (27.8%), outperforming BART-Small (23.98%) and GPT-2 (20.1%), highlighting encoder-decoder models' superiority in schema-aware SQL generation. Despite resource constraints limiting performance, our pipeline's modularity supports future enhancements, such as advanced schema linking or alternative base models. This work underscores the potential of compact transformers for accessible text-to-SQL solutions in resource-scarce environments.

Paperid: 7601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04399.pdf

Abstract:
This study evaluates advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance crash data quality by mining crash narratives, using secondary crash identification in Kentucky as a case study. Drawing from 16,656 manually reviewed narratives from 2015-2022, with 3,803 confirmed secondary crashes, we compare three model classes: zero-shot open-source large language models (LLMs) (LLaMA3:70B, DeepSeek-R1:70B, Qwen3:32B, Gemma3:27B); fine-tuned transformers (BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, Longformer); and traditional logistic regression as baseline. Models were calibrated on 2015-2021 data and tested on 1,771 narratives from 2022. Fine-tuned transformers achieved superior performance, with RoBERTa yielding the highest F1-score (0.90) and accuracy (95%). Zero-shot LLaMA3:70B reached a comparable F1 of 0.86 but required 139 minutes of inference; the logistic baseline lagged well behind (F1:0.66). LLMs excelled in recall for some variants (e.g., GEMMA3:27B at 0.94) but incurred high computational costs (up to 723 minutes for DeepSeek-R1:70B), while fine-tuned models processed the test set in seconds after brief training. Further analysis indicated that mid-sized LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-R1:32B) can rival larger counterparts in performance while reducing runtime, suggesting opportunities for optimized deployments. Results highlight trade-offs between accuracy, efficiency, and data requirements, with fine-tuned transformer models balancing precision and recall effectively on Kentucky data. Practical deployment considerations emphasize privacy-preserving local deployment, ensemble approaches for improved accuracy, and incremental processing for scalability, providing a replicable scheme for enhancing crash-data quality with advanced NLP.

Paperid: 7602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03737.pdf

Abstract:
Benchmarks for evaluating reasoning among Vision Language Models (VLMs) on several fields and domains are being curated more frequently over the last few years. However these are often monolingual, mostly available in English. Additionally there also is a lack of datasets available in Hindi on tasks apart from comprehension and translation. We introduce GanitBench, a tough benchmark consisting of 1527 vision-only questions covering several topics in Mathematics - available in languages English and Hindi. Collected from two major examinations from India, the JEE Advanced and the CBSE Boards examinations, this benchmark includes questions in the form of images comprising of figures essential to a question as well as text. We evaluate two closed source models for the same, in zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and two-shot CoT settings. GPT-4o mini is found to be the more dominant model on the benchmark, with it's highest average accuracy being 38.15%. We also evaluate models through a "Double Lock" constraint, which brings down the performance of the models by considerable margins. We observe that two-shot CoT appears to be a more effective setting under this environment. Performance of the two VLMs also decreases when answering the same questions in the Hindi language. We hope to facilitate the inclusion of languages like Hindi in research through our work.

Paperid: 7603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03727.pdf

Abstract:
Thermal infrared imaging exhibits considerable potentials for robotic perception tasks, especially in environments with poor visibility or challenging lighting conditions. However, TIR images typically suffer from heavy non-uniform fixed-pattern noise, complicating tasks such as object detection, localization, and mapping. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based TIR image denoising framework leveraging latent-space representations and wavelet-domain optimization. Utilizing a pretrained stable diffusion model, our method fine-tunes the model via a novel loss function combining latent-space and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) / dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) losses. Additionally, we implement a cascaded refinement stage to enhance fine details, ensuring high-fidelity denoising results. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art denoising methods. Furthermore, our method exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to diverse and challenging real-world TIR datasets, underscoring its effectiveness for practical robotic deployment.

Paperid: 7604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03600.pdf

Abstract:
Imagine a robot controller with the ability to adapt like human synapses, dynamically rewiring itself to overcome unforeseen challenges in real time. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot adaptation mechanism for evolutionary robotics, merging a standard Genetic Algorithm (GA) controller with online Hebbian plasticity. Inspired by biological systems, the method separates learning and memory, with the genotype acting as memory and Hebbian updates handling learning. In our approach, the fitness function is leveraged as a live scaling factor for Hebbian learning, enabling the robot's neural controller to adjust synaptic weights on-the-fly without additional training. This adds a dynamic adaptive layer that activates only during runtime to handle unexpected environmental changes. After the task, the robot 'forgets' the temporary adjustments and reverts to the original weights, preserving core knowledge. We validate this hybrid GA-Hebbian controller on an e-puck robot in a T-maze navigation task with changing light conditions and obstacles.

Paperid: 7605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03235.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient characterization of nanoparticle morphology in Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images is critical for ensuring product quality in nanomaterial synthesis and accelerating development. However, conventional deep learning methods for shape classification require extensive labeled datasets and computationally demanding training, limiting their accessibility to the typical nanoparticle practitioner in research and industrial settings. In this study, we introduce a zero-shot classification pipeline that leverages two vision foundation models: the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for object segmentation and DINOv2 for feature embedding. By combining these models with a lightweight classifier, we achieve high-precision shape classification across three morphologically diverse nanoparticle datasets - without the need for extensive parameter fine-tuning. Our methodology outperforms a fine-tuned YOLOv11 and ChatGPT o4-mini-high baselines, demonstrating robustness to small datasets, subtle morphological variations, and domain shifts from natural to scientific imaging. Quantitative clustering metrics on PCA plots of the DINOv2 features are discussed as a means of assessing the progress of the chemical synthesis. This work highlights the potential of foundation models to advance automated microscopy image analysis, offering an alternative to traditional deep learning pipelines in nanoparticle research which is both more efficient and more accessible to the user.

Paperid: 7606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02020.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly explored as general-purpose tools for recommendation tasks, enabling zero-shot and instruction-following capabilities without the need for task-specific training. While the research community is enthusiastically embracing LLMs, there are important caveats to directly adapting them for recommendation tasks. In this paper, we show that LLM-based recommendation models suffer from position bias, where the order of candidate items in a prompt can disproportionately influence the recommendations produced by LLMs. First, we analyse the position bias of LLM-based recommendations on real-world datasets, where results uncover systemic biases of LLMs with high sensitivity to input orders. Furthermore, we introduce a new prompting strategy to mitigate the position bias of LLM recommendation models called Ranking via Iterative SElection (RISE). We compare our proposed method against various baselines on key benchmark datasets. Experiment results show that our method reduces sensitivity to input ordering and improves stability without requiring model fine-tuning or post-processing.

Paperid: 7607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01999.pdf

Abstract:
Social media, such as Twitter, provides opportunities for caregivers of dementia patients to share their experiences and seek support for a variety of reasons. Availability of this information online also paves the way for the development of internet-based interventions in their support. However, for this purpose, tweets written by caregivers of dementia patients must first be identified. This paper demonstrates our system for the SMM4H 2025 shared task 3, which focuses on detecting tweets posted by individuals who have a family member with dementia. The task is outlined as a binary classification problem, differentiating between tweets that mention dementia in the context of a family member and those that do not. Our solution to this problem explores large language models (LLMs) with various prompting methods. Our results show that a simple zero-shot prompt on a fine-tuned model yielded the best results. Our final system achieved a macro F1-score of 0.95 on the validation set and the test set. Our full code is available on GitHub.

Paperid: 7608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01848.pdf

Abstract:
Discovering causal relationships in complex multivariate time series is a fundamental scientific challenge. Traditional methods often falter, either by relying on restrictive linear assumptions or on conditional independence tests that become uninformative in the presence of intricate, non-linear dynamics. This paper proposes a new paradigm, shifting from statistical testing to pattern recognition. We hypothesize that a causal link creates a persistent and learnable asymmetry in the flow of information through a system's temporal graph, even when clear conditional independencies are obscured. We introduce Temporal Dependency to Causality (TD2C), a supervised learning framework that operationalizes this hypothesis. TD2C learns to recognize these complex causal signatures from a rich set of information-theoretic and statistical descriptors. Trained exclusively on a diverse collection of synthetic time series, TD2C demonstrates remarkable zero-shot generalization to unseen dynamics and established, realistic benchmarks. Our results show that TD2C achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming established methods, particularly in high-dimensional and non-linear settings. By reframing the discovery problem, our work provides a robust and scalable new tool for uncovering causal structures in complex systems.

Paperid: 7609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01752.pdf

Abstract:
Activity and behaviour correlate with dairy cow health and welfare, making continual and accurate monitoring crucial for disease identification and farm productivity. Manual observation and frequent assessments are laborious and inconsistent for activity monitoring. In this study, we developed a unique multi-camera, real-time tracking system for indoor-housed Holstein Friesian dairy cows. This technology uses cutting-edge computer vision techniques, including instance segmentation and tracking algorithms to monitor cow activity seamlessly and accurately. An integrated top-down barn panorama was created by geometrically aligning six camera feeds using homographic transformations. The detection phase used a refined YOLO11-m model trained on an overhead cow dataset, obtaining high accuracy (mAP\@0.50 = 0.97, F1 = 0.95). SAMURAI, an upgraded Segment Anything Model 2.1, generated pixel-precise cow masks for instance segmentation utilizing zero-shot learning and motion-aware memory. Even with occlusion and fluctuating posture, a motion-aware Linear Kalman filter and IoU-based data association reliably identified cows over time for object tracking. The proposed system significantly outperformed Deep SORT Realtime. Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) was 98.7% and 99.3% in two benchmark video sequences, with IDF1 scores above 99% and near-zero identity switches. This unified multi-camera system can track dairy cows in complex interior surroundings in real time, according to our data. The system reduces redundant detections across overlapping cameras, maintains continuity as cows move between viewpoints, with the aim of improving early sickness prediction through activity quantification and behavioural classification.

Paperid: 7610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01715.pdf

Abstract:
Terrain traversability estimation is crucial for autonomous robots, especially in unstructured environments where visual cues and reasoning play a key role. While vision-language models (VLMs) offer potential for zero-shot estimation, the problem remains inherently ill-posed. To explore this, we introduce a small dataset of human-annotated water traversability ratings, revealing that while estimations are subjective, human raters still show some consensus. Additionally, we propose a simple pipeline that integrates VLMs for zero-shot traversability estimation. Our experiments reveal mixed results, suggesting that current foundation models are not yet suitable for practical deployment but provide valuable insights for further research.

Paperid: 7611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00826.pdf

Abstract:
Making scientific papers accessible may require reprocessing old papers to create output compliant with accessibility standards. An important step there is to convert the visual formatting to the logical one. In this report we describe our attempt at zero shot conversion of arXiv papers. Our results are mixed: while it is possible to do conversion, the reliability is not too good. We discuss alternative approaches to this problem.

Paperid: 7612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00784.pdf

Abstract:
Generative models achieve remarkable results in multiple data domains, including images and texts, among other examples. Unfortunately, malicious users exploit synthetic media for spreading misinformation and disseminating deepfakes. Consequently, the need for robust and stable fake detectors is pressing, especially when new generative models appear everyday. While the majority of existing work train classifiers that discriminate between real and fake information, such tools typically generalize only within the same family of generators and data modalities, yielding poor results on other generative classes and data domains. Towards a universal classifier, we propose the use of large pre-trained multi-modal models for the detection of generative content. Effectively, we show that the latent code of these models naturally captures information discriminating real from fake. Building on this observation, we demonstrate that linear classifiers trained on these features can achieve state-of-the-art results across various modalities, while remaining computationally efficient, fast to train, and effective even in few-shot settings. Our work primarily focuses on fake detection in audio and images, achieving performance that surpasses or matches that of strong baseline methods.

Paperid: 7613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00762.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our system for SemEval-2025 Task 8: DataBench, Question-Answering over Tabular Data. The primary objective of this task is to perform question answering on given tabular datasets from diverse domains under two subtasks: DataBench QA (Subtask I) and DataBench Lite QA (Subtask II). To tackle both subtasks, we developed a zero-shot solution with a particular emphasis on leveraging Large Language Model (LLM)-based code generation. Specifically, we propose a Python code generation framework utilizing state-of-the-art open-source LLMs to generate executable Pandas code via optimized prompting strategies. Our experiments reveal that different LLMs exhibit varying levels of effectiveness in Python code generation. Additionally, results show that Python code generation achieves superior performance in tabular question answering compared to alternative approaches. Although our ranking among zero-shot systems is unknown at the time of this paper's submission, our system achieved eighth place in Subtask I and sixth place in Subtask~II among the 30 systems that outperformed the baseline in the open-source models category.

Paperid: 7614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00757.pdf

Abstract:
Relation Extraction (RE) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing, and its document-level variant poses significant challenges, due to the need to model complex interactions between entities across sentences. Current approaches, largely based on the ATLOP architecture, are commonly evaluated on benchmarks like DocRED and Re-DocRED. However, their performance in zero-shot or few-shot settings remains largely underexplored due to the task's complexity. Recently, the GLiNER model has shown that a compact NER model can outperform much larger Large Language Models. With a similar motivation, we introduce GLiDRE, a new model for document-level relation extraction that builds on the key ideas of GliNER. We benchmark GLiDRE against state-of-the-art models across various data settings on the Re-DocRED dataset. Our results demonstrate that GLiDRE achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot scenarios. Our code is publicly available.

Paperid: 7615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00700.pdf

Abstract:
Background: The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has opened new possibilities for code generation. Despite the widespread use of this technology, it remains unclear how well LLMs generate code solutions in terms of software quality and how they compare to human-written code. Aims: This study compares the internal quality attributes of LLM-generated and human-written code. Method: Our empirical study integrates datasets of coding tasks, three LLM configurations (zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning), and SonarQube to assess software quality. The dataset comprises Python code solutions across three difficulty levels: introductory, interview, and competition. We analyzed key code quality metrics, including maintainability and reliability, and the estimated effort required to resolve code issues. Results: Our analysis shows that LLM-generated code has fewer bugs and requires less effort to fix them overall. Interestingly, fine-tuned models reduced the prevalence of high-severity issues, such as blocker and critical bugs, and shifted them to lower-severity categories, but decreased the model's performance. In competition-level problems, the LLM solutions sometimes introduce structural issues that are not present in human-written code. Conclusion: Our findings provide valuable insights into the quality of LLM-generated code; however, the introduction of critical issues in more complex scenarios highlights the need for a systematic evaluation and validation of LLM solutions. Our work deepens the understanding of the strengths and limitations of LLMs for code generation.

Paperid: 7616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00627.pdf

Abstract:
Remote sensing has entered a new era with the rapid development of artificial intelligence approaches. However, the implementation of deep learning has largely remained restricted to specialists and has been impractical because it often requires (i) large reference datasets for model training and validation; (ii) substantial computing resources; and (iii) strong coding skills. Here, we introduce IAMAP, a user-friendly QGIS plugin that addresses these three challenges in an easy yet flexible way. IAMAP builds on recent advancements in self-supervised learning strategies, which now provide robust feature extractors, often referred to as foundation models. These generalist models can often be reliably used in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios (i.e., with little to no fine-tuning). IAMAP's interface allows users to streamline several key steps in remote sensing image analysis: (i) extracting image features using a wide range of deep learning architectures; (ii) reducing dimensionality with built-in algorithms; (iii) performing clustering on features or their reduced representations; (iv) generating feature similarity maps; and (v) calibrating and validating supervised machine learning models for prediction. By enabling non-AI specialists to leverage the high-quality features provided by recent deep learning approaches without requiring GPU capacity or extensive reference datasets, IAMAP contributes to the democratization of computationally efficient and energy-conscious deep learning methods.

Paperid: 7617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00619.pdf

Abstract:
Existing AIG (AI-generated) text detectors struggle in real-world settings despite succeeding in internal testing, suggesting that they may not be robust enough. We rigorously examine the machine-learning procedure to build these detectors to address this. Most current AIG text detection datasets focus on zero-shot generations, but little work has been done on few-shot or one-shot generations, where LLMs are given human texts as an example. In response, we introduce the Diverse Adversarial Corpus of Texts Yielded from Language models (DACTYL), a challenging AIG text detection dataset focusing on one-shot/few-shot generations. We also include texts from domain-specific continued-pre-trained (CPT) language models, where we fully train all parameters using a memory-efficient optimization approach. Many existing AIG text detectors struggle significantly on our dataset, indicating a potential vulnerability to one-shot/few-shot and CPT-generated texts. We also train our own classifiers using two approaches: standard binary cross-entropy (BCE) optimization and a more recent approach, deep X-risk optimization (DXO). While BCE-trained classifiers marginally outperform DXO classifiers on the DACTYL test set, the latter excels on out-of-distribution (OOD) texts. In our mock deployment scenario in student essay detection with an OOD student essay dataset, the best DXO classifier outscored the best BCE-trained classifier by 50.56 macro-F1 score points at the lowest false positive rates for both. Our results indicate that DXO classifiers generalize better without overfitting to the test set. Our experiments highlight several areas of improvement for AIG text detectors.

Paperid: 7618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23402.pdf

Abstract:
Learning medical visual representations from paired images and reports is a promising direction in representation learning. However, current vision-language pretraining methods in the medical domain often simplify clinical reports into single entities or fragmented tokens, ignoring their inherent structure. In addition, contrastive learning frameworks typically depend on large quantities of hard negative samples, which is impractical for small-scale medical datasets. To tackle these challenges, we propose Adaptive Grouped Alignment (AGA), a new framework that captures structured semantics from paired medical images and reports. AGA introduces a bidirectional grouping mechanism based on a sparse similarity matrix. For each image-report pair, we compute fine-grained similarities between text tokens and image patches. Each token selects its top-matching patches to form a visual group, and each patch selects its most related tokens to form a language group. To enable adaptive grouping, we design two threshold gating modules, called Language Grouped Threshold Gate and Vision Grouped Threshold Gate, which learn grouping thresholds dynamically. Group representations are computed as weighted averages based on similarity scores. To align each token with its group representation, we introduce an Instance Aware Group Alignment loss that operates within each image-text pair, removing the need for external negatives. Finally, a Bidirectional Cross-modal Grouped Alignment module is applied to enhance fine-grained alignment between visual and linguistic group representations. Extensive experiments on public and private datasets show that our method achieves strong performance on image-text retrieval and classification tasks under both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 7619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23217.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding complex multimodal documents remains challenging due to their structural inconsistencies and limited training data availability. We introduce \textit{DocsRay}, a training-free document understanding system that integrates pseudo Table of Contents (TOC) generation with hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Our approach leverages multimodal Large Language Models' (LLMs) native capabilities to seamlessly process documents containing diverse elements such as text, images, charts, and tables without requiring specialized models or additional training. DocsRay's framework synergistically combines three key techniques: (1) a semantic structuring module using prompt-based LLM interactions to generate a hierarchical pseudo-TOC, (2) zero-shot multimodal analysis that converts diverse document elements into unified, text-centric representations using the inherent capabilities of multimodal LLMs, and (3) an efficient two-stage hierarchical retrieval system that reduces retrieval complexity from $O(N)$ to $O(S + k_1 \cdot N_s)$. Evaluated on documents averaging 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens, DocsRay reduced query latency from 3.89 to 2.12 seconds, achieving a 45% efficiency improvement. On the MMLongBench-Doc benchmark, DocsRay-Pro attains an accuracy of 64.7%, substantially surpassing previous state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 7620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23135.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding causal relationships across modalities is a core challenge for multimodal models operating in real-world environments. We introduce ISO-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer causal dependencies between visual observations and procedural text. Each example presents an image of a task step and a text snippet from a plan, with the goal of deciding whether the visual step occurs before or after the referenced text step. Evaluation results on ten frontier vision-language models show underwhelming performance: the best zero-shot F1 is only 0.57, and chain-of-thought reasoning yields only modest gains (up to 0.62 F1), largely behind humans (0.98 F1). Our analysis further highlights concrete directions for improving causal understanding in multimodal models.

Paperid: 7621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21985.pdf

Abstract:
Machine unlearning (MU) removes specific data points or concepts from deep learning models to enhance privacy and prevent sensitive content generation. Adversarial prompts can exploit unlearned models to generate content containing removed concepts, posing a significant security risk. However, existing adversarial attack methods still face challenges in generating content that aligns with an attacker's intent while incurring high computational costs to identify successful prompts. To address these challenges, we propose ZIUM, a Zero-shot Intent-aware adversarial attack on Unlearned Models, which enables the flexible customization of target attack images to reflect an attacker's intent. Additionally, ZIUM supports zero-shot adversarial attacks without requiring further optimization for previously attacked unlearned concepts. The evaluation across various MU scenarios demonstrated ZIUM's effectiveness in successfully customizing content based on user-intent prompts while achieving a superior attack success rate compared to existing methods. Moreover, its zero-shot adversarial attack significantly reduces the attack time for previously attacked unlearned concepts.

Paperid: 7622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21980.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional machine learning models struggle to generalize in microbiome studies where only metadata is available, especially in small-sample settings or across studies with heterogeneous label formats. In this work, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to classify microbial samples into ontology categories such as EMPO 3 and related biological labels, as well as to predict pathogen contamination risk, specifically the presence of E. Coli, using environmental metadata alone. We evaluate LLMs such as ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Grok-3, and LLaMA 4 in zero-shot and few-shot settings, comparing their performance against traditional models like Random Forests across multiple real-world datasets. Our results show that LLMs not only outperform baselines in ontology classification, but also demonstrate strong predictive ability for contamination risk, generalizing across sites and metadata distributions. These findings suggest that LLMs can effectively reason over sparse, heterogeneous biological metadata and offer a promising metadata-only approach for environmental microbiology and biosurveillance applications.

Paperid: 7623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20834.pdf

Abstract:
CLIP is a foundational model with transferable classification performance in the few-shot setting. Several methods have shown improved performance of CLIP using few-shot examples. However, so far, all these techniques have been benchmarked using standard few-shot datasets. We argue that this mode of evaluation does not provide a true indication of the inductive generalization ability using few-shot examples. As most datasets have been seen by the CLIP model, the resultant setting can be termed as partially transductive. To solve this, we propose a pipeline that uses an unlearning technique to obtain true inductive baselines. In this new inductive setting, the methods show a significant drop in performance (-55% on average among 13 baselines with multiple datasets). We validate the unlearning technique using oracle baselines. An improved few-shot classification technique is proposed that consistently obtains state-of-the-art performance over 13 other recent baseline methods on a comprehensive analysis with 5880 experiments - varying the datasets, differing number of few-shot examples, unlearning setting, and with different seeds. Thus, we identify the issue with the evaluation of CLIP-based few-shot classification, provide a solution using unlearning, propose new benchmarks, and provide an improved method.

Paperid: 7624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20402.pdf

Abstract:
Continuous Integration (CI) configurations often need to be migrated between services (e.g., Travis CI to GitHub Actions) as projects evolve, due to changes in service capabilities, usage limits, or service deprecation. Previous studies reported that migration across CI services is a recurring need in open-source development. However, manual migration can be time-consuming and error-prone. The state-of-the-art approach, CIMig, addresses this challenge by analyzing past migration examples to create service-specific rules and produce equivalent configurations across CI services. However, its relatively low accuracy raises concerns about the overall feasibility of automated CI migration using rule-based techniques alone. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and transformation tasks, suggesting potential to improve the automation, usability, and generalizability of CI configuration migration. This registered report presents a study in which we aim to assess whether CI migration can be improved using LLMs. To this end, we propose CIgrate, an LLM-based framework for automatically migrating CI configurations. We plan to evaluate the performance of CIgrate compared to CIMig as a baseline, in different setups (a) zero-shot/few-shot prompting of LLMs for configuration migration and (b) fine-tuning an LLM on a dataset of already established CI service migrations. We will also seek developer feedback on the quality and usability of the generated configurations. We formulate research questions focusing on the accuracy of LLM-generated migrations versus ground truth and the output of CIMig. The expected contributions include the first LLM-powered approach for CI service migration, a comparative evaluation of its effectiveness compared to rule-based approaches, and insight into leveraging LLMs to support software configuration evolution.

Paperid: 7625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20036.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art audio classification often employs a zero-shot approach, which involves comparing audio embeddings with embeddings from text describing the respective audio class. These embeddings are usually generated by neural networks trained through contrastive learning to align audio and text representations. Identifying the optimal text description for an audio class is challenging, particularly when the class comprises a wide variety of sounds. This paper examines few-shot methods designed to improve classification accuracy beyond the zero-shot approach. Specifically, audio embeddings are grouped by class and processed to replace the inherently noisy text embeddings. Our results demonstrate that few-shot classification typically outperforms the zero-shot baseline.

Paperid: 7626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20019.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a meta learning framework for detecting anomalies in human language across diverse domains with limited labeled data. Anomalies in language ranging from spam and fake news to hate speech pose a major challenge due to their sparsity and variability. We treat anomaly detection as a few shot binary classification problem and leverage meta-learning to train models that generalize across tasks. Using datasets from domains such as SMS spam, COVID-19 fake news, and hate speech, we evaluate model generalization on unseen tasks with minimal labeled anomalies. Our method combines episodic training with prototypical networks and domain resampling to adapt quickly to new anomaly detection tasks. Empirical results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in F1 and AUC scores. We also release the code and benchmarks to facilitate further research in few-shot text anomaly detection.

Paperid: 7627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19899.pdf

Abstract:
Early detection of depression from online social media posts holds promise for providing timely mental health interventions. In this work, we present a high-quality, expert-annotated dataset of 1,017 social media posts labeled with depressive spans and mapped to 12 depression symptom categories. Unlike prior datasets that primarily offer coarse post-level labels \cite{cohan-etal-2018-smhd}, our dataset enables fine-grained evaluation of both model predictions and generated explanations. We develop an evaluation framework that leverages this clinically grounded dataset to assess the faithfulness and quality of natural language explanations generated by large language models (LLMs). Through carefully designed prompting strategies, including zero-shot and few-shot approaches with domain-adapted examples, we evaluate state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs including GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Our comprehensive empirical analysis reveals significant differences in how these models perform on clinical explanation tasks, with zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Our findings underscore the value of human expertise in guiding LLM behavior and offer a step toward safer, more transparent AI systems for psychological well-being.

Paperid: 7628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19885.pdf

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown the potential to revolutionize healthcare by improving diagnostic accuracy, optimizing workflows, and personalizing treatment plans. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable advancements in natural language processing and medical applications. However, the evaluation of these models has focused predominantly on the English language, leading to potential biases in their performance across different languages. This study investigates the capability of six LLMs (GPT-4.0 Turbo, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, Titan Text G1-Express, and Command R+) and four MLLMs (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3-Opus, Claude-3-Sonnet, and Claude-3-Haiku) to answer questions written in Brazilian spoken portuguese from the medical residency entrance exam of the Hospital das ClÃnicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de SÃ£o Paulo (HCFMUSP) - the largest health complex in South America. The performance of the models was benchmarked against human candidates, analyzing accuracy, processing time, and coherence of the generated explanations. The results show that while some models, particularly Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Claude-3-Opus, achieved accuracy levels comparable to human candidates, performance gaps persist, particularly in multimodal questions requiring image interpretation. Furthermore, the study highlights language disparities, emphasizing the need for further fine-tuning and data set augmentation for non-English medical AI applications. Our findings reinforce the importance of evaluating generative AI in various linguistic and clinical settings to ensure a fair and reliable deployment in healthcare. Future research should explore improved training methodologies, improved multimodal reasoning, and real-world clinical integration of AI-driven medical assistance.

Paperid: 7629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17636.pdf

Abstract:
Negative campaigning is a central feature of political competition, yet empirical research has been limited by the high cost and limited scalability of existing classification methods. This study makes two key contributions. First, it introduces zero-shot Large Language Models (LLMs) as a novel approach for cross-lingual classification of negative campaigning. Using benchmark datasets in ten languages, we demonstrate that LLMs achieve performance on par with native-speaking human coders and outperform conventional supervised machine learning approaches. Second, we leverage this novel method to conduct the largest cross-national study of negative campaigning to date, analyzing 18 million tweets posted by parliamentarians in 19 European countries between 2017 and 2022. The results reveal consistent cross-national patterns: governing parties are less likely to use negative messaging, while ideologically extreme and populist parties -- particularly those on the radical right -- engage in significantly higher levels of negativity. These findings advance our understanding of how party-level characteristics shape strategic communication in multiparty systems. More broadly, the study demonstrates the potential of LLMs to enable scalable, transparent, and replicable research in political communication across linguistic and cultural contexts.

Paperid: 7630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17165.pdf

Abstract:
Continuous Integration (CI) services, such as GitHub Actions, require developers to write YAML-based configurations, which can be tedious and error-prone. Despite the increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate software engineering tasks, their ability to generate CI configurations remains underexplored. This paper presents a preliminary study evaluating six LLMs for generating GitHub Actions configurations from natural language descriptions. We assess three general-purpose foundation models (GPT-4o, Llama, and Gemma) and three code-pretrained models (GPT-4.1, Code Llama, and CodeGemma). We also introduce the first labeled dataset of its kind, constructed from GitHub Actions documentation, pairing descriptions with corresponding best-practice YAML configurations. Zero-shot prompting achieves up to 69% similarity with the ground truth, with only 3% perfect matches. Code-pretrained models slightly underperform compared to general-purpose ones in YAML-based CI tasks, revealing LLM limitations for CI configuration generation. Analyzing GPT-4o outputs reveals issues like missing or renamed steps, misinterpreted descriptions, and unnecessary additions that may affect structural and contextual correctness, indicating a gap between generation quality and the precision required for executable CI configurations. Our research offers insights for improving LLM alignment with configuration languages and guiding future efforts on CI automation and tooling support.

Paperid: 7631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16185.pdf

Abstract:
The recent rise in youth suicide highlights the urgent need to understand how online experiences contribute to this public health issue. Our mixed-methods approach responds to this challenge by developing a set of themes focused on risk factors for suicide mortality in online spaces among youth ages 10-24, and a framework to model these themes at scale. Using 29,124 open text summaries of death investigations between 2013-2022, we conducted a thematic analysis to identify 12 types of online activities that were considered by investigators or next of kin to be relevant in contextualizing a given suicide death. We then develop a zero-shot learning framework to model these 12 themes at scale, and analyze variation in these themes by decedent characteristics and over time. Our work uncovers several online activities related to harm to self, harm to others, interpersonal interactions, activity levels online, and life events, which correspond to different phases of suicide risk from two prominent suicide theories. We find an association between these themes and decedent characteristics like age, means of death, and interpersonal problems, and many themes became more prevalent during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. While digital spaces have taken some steps to address expressions of suicidality online, our work illustrates the opportunities for developing interventions related to less explicit indicators of suicide risk by combining suicide theories with computational research.

Paperid: 7632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16002.pdf

Abstract:
One major challenge in natural language processing is named entity recognition (NER), which identifies and categorises named entities in textual input. In order to improve NER, this study investigates a Hindi NER technique that makes use of Hindi-specific pretrained encoders (MuRIL and XLM-R) and Generative Models ( Llama-2-7B-chat-hf (Llama2-7B), Llama-2-70B-chat-hf (Llama2-70B), Llama-3-70B-Instruct (Llama3-70B) and GPT3.5-turbo), and augments the data with retrieved data from external relevant contexts, notably from Wikipedia. We have fine-tuned MuRIL, XLM-R and Llama2-7B with and without RA. However, Llama2-70B, lama3-70B and GPT3.5-turbo are utilised for few-shot NER generation. Our investigation shows that the mentioned language models (LMs) with Retrieval Augmentation (RA) outperform baseline methods that don't incorporate RA in most cases. The macro F1 scores for MuRIL and XLM-R are 0.69 and 0.495, respectively, without RA and increase to 0.70 and 0.71, respectively, in the presence of RA. Fine-tuned Llama2-7B outperforms Llama2-7B by a significant margin. On the other hand the generative models which are not fine-tuned also perform better with augmented data. GPT3.5-turbo adopted RA well; however, Llama2-70B and llama3-70B did not adopt RA with our retrieval context. The findings show that RA significantly improves performance, especially for low-context data. This study adds significant knowledge about how best to use data augmentation methods and pretrained models to enhance NER performance, particularly in languages with limited resources.

Paperid: 7633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14906.pdf

Abstract:
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract context from natural language problem descriptions naturally raises questions about their suitability in autonomous decision-making settings. This paper studies the behaviour of these models within a Markov Decision Process (MDPs). While traditional reinforcement learning (RL) strategies commonly employed in this setting rely on iterative exploration, LLMs, pre-trained on diverse datasets, offer the capability to leverage prior knowledge for faster adaptation. We investigate online structured prompting strategies in sequential decision making tasks, comparing the zero-shot performance of LLM-based approaches to that of classical RL methods. Our findings reveal that although LLMs demonstrate improved initial performance in simpler environments, they struggle with planning and reasoning in complex scenarios without fine-tuning or additional guidance. Our results show that feedback mechanisms, intended to improve decision-making, often introduce confusion, leading to diminished performance in intricate environments. These insights underscore the need for further exploration into hybrid strategies, fine-tuning, and advanced memory integration to enhance LLM-based decision-making capabilities.

Paperid: 7634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14693.pdf

Abstract:
Suicidal ideation detection is critical for real-time suicide prevention, yet its progress faces two under-explored challenges: limited language coverage and unreliable annotation practices. Most available datasets are in English, but even among these, high-quality, human-annotated data remains scarce. As a result, many studies rely on available pre-labeled datasets without examining their annotation process or label reliability. The lack of datasets in other languages further limits the global realization of suicide prevention via artificial intelligence (AI). In this study, we address one of these gaps by constructing a novel Turkish suicidal ideation corpus derived from social media posts and introducing a resource-efficient annotation framework involving three human annotators and two large language models (LLMs). We then address the remaining gaps by performing a bidirectional evaluation of label reliability and model consistency across this dataset and three popular English suicidal ideation detection datasets, using transfer learning through eight pre-trained sentiment and emotion classifiers. These transformers help assess annotation consistency and benchmark model performance against manually labeled data. Our findings underscore the need for more rigorous, language-inclusive approaches to annotation and evaluation in mental health natural language processing (NLP) while demonstrating the questionable performance of popular models with zero-shot transfer learning. We advocate for transparency in model training and dataset construction in mental health NLP, prioritizing data and model reliability.

Paperid: 7635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14384.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT, for structured deductive qualitative coding. While most current research emphasizes inductive coding applications, we address the underexplored potential of LLMs to perform deductive classification tasks aligned with established human-coded schemes. Using the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook, we classified U.S. Supreme Court case summaries into 21 major policy domains. We tested four intervention methods: zero-shot, few-shot, definition-based, and a novel Step-by-Step Task Decomposition strategy, across repeated samples. Performance was evaluated using standard classification metrics (accuracy, F1-score, Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha), and construct validity was assessed using chi-squared tests and Cramer's V. Chi-squared and effect size analyses confirmed that intervention strategies significantly influenced classification behavior, with Cramer's V values ranging from 0.359 to 0.613, indicating moderate to strong shifts in classification patterns. The Step-by-Step Task Decomposition strategy achieved the strongest reliability (accuracy = 0.775, kappa = 0.744, alpha = 0.746), achieving thresholds for substantial agreement. Despite the semantic ambiguity within case summaries, ChatGPT displayed stable agreement across samples, including high F1 scores in low-support subclasses. These findings demonstrate that with targeted, custom-tailored interventions, LLMs can achieve reliability levels suitable for integration into rigorous qualitative coding workflows.

Paperid: 7636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13568.pdf

Abstract:
Continual learning for vision-language models has achieved remarkable performance through synthetic replay, where samples are generated using Stable Diffusion to regularize during finetuning and retain knowledge. However, real-world downstream applications often exhibit domain-specific nuances and fine-grained semantics not captured by generators, causing synthetic-replay methods to produce misaligned samples that misguide finetuning and undermine retention of prior knowledge. In this work, we propose a LoRA-enhanced synthetic-replay framework that injects task-specific low-rank adapters into a frozen Stable Diffusion model, efficiently capturing each new task's unique visual and semantic patterns. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage, confidence-based sample selection: we first rank real task data by post-finetuning VLM confidence to focus LoRA finetuning on the most representative examples, then generate synthetic samples and again select them by confidence for distillation. Our approach integrates seamlessly with existing replay pipelines-simply swap in the adapted generator to boost replay fidelity. Extensive experiments on the Multi-domain Task Incremental Learning (MTIL) benchmark show that our method outperforms previous synthetic-replay techniques, achieving an optimal balance among plasticity, stability, and zero-shot capability. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of generator adaptation via LoRA for robust continual learning in VLMs.

Paperid: 7637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12126.pdf

Abstract:
Text data augmentation is a widely used strategy for mitigating data sparsity in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in low-resource settings where limited samples hinder effective semantic modeling. While augmentation can improve input diversity and downstream interpretability, existing techniques often lack mechanisms to ensure semantic preservation during large-scale or iterative generation, leading to redundancy and instability. This work introduces a principled evaluation framework for large language model (LLM) based text augmentation, comprising two components: (1) Scalability Analysis, which measures semantic consistency as augmentation volume increases, and (2) Iterative Augmentation with Summarization Refinement (IASR), which evaluates semantic drift across recursive paraphrasing cycles. Empirical evaluations across state-of-the-art LLMs show that GPT-3.5 Turbo achieved the best balance of semantic fidelity, diversity, and generation efficiency. Applied to a real-world topic modeling task using BERTopic with GPT-enhanced few-shot labeling, the proposed approach results in a 400% increase in topic granularity and complete elimination of topic overlaps. These findings validated the utility of the proposed frameworks for structured evaluation of LLM-based augmentation in practical NLP pipelines.

Paperid: 7638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11742.pdf

Abstract:
Recognizing the information flows and operations comprising data science and machine learning Python notebooks is critical for evaluating, reusing, and adapting notebooks for new tasks. Investigating a notebook via re-execution often is impractical due to the challenges of resolving data and software dependencies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on large codebases have demonstrated effectiveness in understanding code without running it, we observe that they fail to understand some realistic notebooks due to hallucinations and long-context challenges. To address these issues, we propose a notebook understanding task yielding an information flow graph and corresponding cell execution dependency graph for a notebook, and demonstrate the effectiveness of a pincer strategy that uses limited syntactic analysis to assist full comprehension of the notebook using an LLM. Our Capture and Resolve Assisted Bounding Strategy (CRABS) employs shallow syntactic parsing and analysis of the abstract syntax tree (AST) to capture the correct interpretation of a notebook between lower and upper estimates of the inter-cell I/O set$\unicode{x2014}$the flows of information into or out of cells via variables$\unicode{x2014}$then uses an LLM to resolve remaining ambiguities via cell-by-cell zero-shot learning, thereby identifying the true data inputs and outputs of each cell. We evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using an annotated dataset of 50 representative, highly up-voted Kaggle notebooks that together represent 3454 actual cell inputs and outputs. The LLM correctly resolves 1397 of 1425 (98%) ambiguities left by analyzing the syntactic structure of these notebooks. Across 50 notebooks, CRABS achieves average F1 scores of 98% identifying cell-to-cell information flows and 99% identifying transitive cell execution dependencies.

Paperid: 7639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11634.pdf

Abstract:
This research examines cross-lingual sentiment analysis using few-shot learning and incremental learning methods in Persian. The main objective is to develop a model capable of performing sentiment analysis in Persian using limited data, while getting prior knowledge from high-resource languages. To achieve this, three pre-trained multilingual models (XLM-RoBERTa, mDeBERTa, and DistilBERT) were employed, which were fine-tuned using few-shot and incremental learning approaches on small samples of Persian data from diverse sources, including X, Instagram, Digikala, Snappfood, and Taaghche. This variety enabled the models to learn from a broad range of contexts. Experimental results show that the mDeBERTa and XLM-RoBERTa achieved high performances, reaching 96% accuracy on Persian sentiment analysis. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining few-shot learning and incremental learning with multilingual pre-trained models.

Paperid: 7640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11474.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate characterization of vascular geometry is essential for cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment planning. Traditional statistical shape modeling (SSM) methods rely on linear assumptions, limiting their expressivity and scalability to complex topologies such as multi-branch vascular structures. We introduce HUG-VAS, a Hierarchical NURBS Generative model for Vascular geometry Synthesis, which integrates NURBS surface parameterization with diffusion-based generative modeling to synthesize realistic, fine-grained aortic geometries. Trained with 21 patient-specific samples, HUG-VAS generates anatomically faithful aortas with supra-aortic branches, yielding biomarker distributions that closely match those of the original dataset. HUG-VAS adopts a hierarchical architecture comprising a denoising diffusion model that generates centerlines and a guided diffusion model that synthesizes radial profiles conditioned on those centerlines, thereby capturing two layers of anatomical variability. Critically, the framework supports zero-shot conditional generation from image-derived priors, enabling practical applications such as interactive semi-automatic segmentation, robust reconstruction under degraded imaging conditions, and implantable device optimization. To our knowledge, HUG-VAS is the first SSM framework to bridge image-derived priors with generative shape modeling via a unified integration of NURBS parameterization and hierarchical diffusion processes.

Paperid: 7641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10273.pdf

Abstract:
Generative chemical language models (CLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in molecular design, yet their impact in drug discovery remains limited by the absence of reliable reward signals and the lack of interpretability in their outputs. We present SAFE-T, a generalist chemical modeling framework that conditions on biological context -- such as protein targets or mechanisms of action -- to prioritize and design molecules without relying on structural information or engineered scoring functions. SAFE-T models the conditional likelihood of fragment-based molecular sequences given a biological prompt, enabling principled scoring of molecules across tasks such as virtual screening, drug-target interaction prediction, and activity cliff detection. Moreover, it supports goal-directed generation by sampling from this learned distribution, aligning molecular design with biological objectives. In comprehensive zero-shot evaluations across predictive (LIT-PCBA, DAVIS, KIBA, ACNet) and generative (DRUG, PMO) benchmarks, SAFE-T consistently achieves performance comparable to or better than existing approaches while being significantly faster. Fragment-level attribution further reveals that SAFE-T captures known structure-activity relationships, supporting interpretable and biologically grounded design. Together with its computational efficiency, these results demonstrate that conditional generative CLMs can unify scoring and generation to accelerate early-stage drug discovery.

Paperid: 7642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09459.pdf

Abstract:
We propose SegVec3D, a novel framework for 3D point cloud instance segmentation that integrates attention mechanisms, embedding learning, and cross-modal alignment. The approach builds a hierarchical feature extractor to enhance geometric structure modeling and enables unsupervised instance segmentation via contrastive clustering. It further aligns 3D data with natural language queries in a shared semantic space, supporting zero-shot retrieval. Compared to recent methods like Mask3D and ULIP, our method uniquely unifies instance segmentation and multimodal understanding with minimal supervision and practical deployability.

Paperid: 7643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09428.pdf

Abstract:
The ever-increasing parameter counts of deep learning models necessitate effective compression techniques for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This paper explores the application of information geometry, the study of density-induced metrics on parameter spaces, to analyze existing methods within the space of model compression, primarily focusing on operator factorization. Adopting this perspective highlights the core challenge: defining an optimal low-compute submanifold (or subset) and projecting onto it. We argue that many successful model compression approaches can be understood as implicitly approximating information divergences for this projection. We highlight that when compressing a pre-trained model, using information divergences is paramount for achieving improved zero-shot accuracy, yet this may no longer be the case when the model is fine-tuned. In such scenarios, trainability of bottlenecked models turns out to be far more important for achieving high compression ratios with minimal performance degradation, necessitating adoption of iterative methods. In this context, we prove convergence of iterative singular value thresholding for training neural networks subject to a soft rank constraint. To further illustrate the utility of this perspective, we showcase how simple modifications to existing methods through softer rank reduction result in improved performance under fixed compression rates.

Paperid: 7644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07579.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel few-shot cross-domain anomaly detection framework, Nexus Vision Transformer for Anomaly Detection (NexViTAD), based on vision foundation models, which effectively addresses domain-shift challenges in industrial anomaly detection through innovative shared subspace projection mechanisms and multi-task learning (MTL) module. The main innovations include: (1) a hierarchical adapter module that adaptively fuses complementary features from Hiera and DINO-v2 pre-trained models, constructing more robust feature representations; (2) a shared subspace projection strategy that enables effective cross-domain knowledge transfer through bottleneck dimension constraints and skip connection mechanisms; (3) a MTL Decoder architecture supports simultaneous processing of multiple source domains, significantly enhancing model generalization capabilities; (4) an anomaly score inference method based on Sinkhorn-K-means clustering, combined with Gaussian filtering and adaptive threshold processing for precise pixel level. Valuated on the MVTec AD dataset, NexViTAD delivers state-of-the-art performance with an AUC of 97.5%, AP of 70.4%, and PRO of 95.2% in the target domains, surpassing other recent models, marking a transformative advance in cross-domain defect detection.

Paperid: 7645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05577.pdf

Abstract:
Biomedical semantic question answering rooted in information retrieval can play a crucial role in keeping up to date with vast, rapidly evolving and ever-growing biomedical literature. A robust system can help researchers, healthcare professionals and even layman users access relevant knowledge grounded in evidence. The BioASQ 2025 Task13b Challenge serves as an important benchmark, offering a competitive platform for advancement of this space. This paper presents the methodologies and results from our participation in this challenge where we built a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that can answer biomedical questions by retrieving relevant PubMed documents and snippets to generate answers. For the retrieval task, we generated dense embeddings from biomedical articles for initial retrieval, and applied an ensemble of finetuned cross-encoders and large language models (LLMs) for re-ranking to identify top relevant documents. Our solution achieved an MAP@10 of 0.1581, placing 10th on the leaderboard for the retrieval task. For answer generation, we employed few-shot prompting of instruction-tuned LLMs. Our system achieved macro-F1 score of 0.95 for yes/no questions (rank 12), Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.64 for factoid questions (rank 1), mean-F1 score of 0.63 for list questions (rank 5), and ROUGE-SU4 F1 score of 0.29 for ideal answers (rank 11).

Paperid: 7646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05403.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language descriptions. Their performance is typically evaluated using programming benchmarks that simulate real-world tasks. These benchmarks provide specifications in the form of docstrings, function signatures, or bug reports. The model then generates a program, which is tested against predefined test cases. In contrast, Programming by Example (PBE) uses input-output examples as the specification. Traditional PBE systems rely on search-based methods over restricted transformation spaces. They are usually designed for narrow domains and fixed input formats. It remains unclear how well LLMs perform on PBE tasks. In this work, we evaluate LLMs on PBE tasks involving tabular data transformations. We prompt models to generate functions that convert an input table to an output table. We test the generated functions on unseen inputs to measure accuracy. Our study includes multiple LLMs and evaluates different prompting strategies, such as one-shot vs. multi-try. We also compare performance with and without PBE-specific knowledge. Finally, we propose a hybrid method that calls a traditional PBE solver first, and then falls back to LLMs if necessary. Our results show that LLMs support more diverse input formats and achieve higher accuracy than conventional methods. However, they struggle with tasks that contain ambiguity. The hybrid approach improves overall success by combining the strengths of both approaches.

Paperid: 7647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05282.pdf

Abstract:
Efficient data exploration is crucial as data becomes increasingly important for accelerating processes, improving forecasts and developing new business models. Data consumers often spend 25-98 % of their time searching for suitable data due to the exponential growth, heterogeneity and distribution of data. Data catalogs can support and accelerate data exploration by using metadata to answer user queries. However, as metadata creation and maintenance is often a manual process, it is time-consuming and requires expertise. This study investigates whether LLMs can automate metadata maintenance of text-based data and generate high-quality DCAT-compatible metadata. We tested zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies with LLMs from different vendors for generating metadata such as titles and keywords, along with a fine-tuned model for classification. Our results show that LLMs can generate metadata comparable to human-created content, particularly on tasks that require advanced semantic understanding. Larger models outperformed smaller ones, and fine-tuning significantly improves classification accuracy, while few-shot prompting yields better results in most cases. Although LLMs offer a faster and reliable way to create metadata, a successful application requires careful consideration of task-specific criteria and domain context.

Paperid: 7648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05123.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance natural language processing with their ability to generate human-like text across a range of tasks. Despite the remarkable success of LLMs in Natural Language Processing (NLP), their performance in text summarization across various domains and datasets has not been comprehensively evaluated. At the same time, the ability to summarize text effectively without relying on extensive training data has become a crucial bottleneck. To address these issues, we present a systematic evaluation of six LLMs across four datasets: CNN/Daily Mail and NewsRoom (news), SAMSum (dialog), and ArXiv (scientific). By leveraging prompt engineering techniques including zero-shot and in-context learning, our study evaluates the performance using the ROUGE and BERTScore metrics. In addition, a detailed analysis of inference times is conducted to better understand the trade-off between summarization quality and computational efficiency. For Long documents, introduce a sentence-based chunking strategy that enables LLMs with shorter context windows to summarize extended inputs in multiple stages. The findings reveal that while LLMs perform competitively on news and dialog tasks, their performance on long scientific documents improves significantly when aided by chunking strategies. In addition, notable performance variations were observed based on model parameters, dataset properties, and prompt design. These results offer actionable insights into how different LLMs behave across task types, contributing to ongoing research in efficient, instruction-based NLP systems.

Paperid: 7649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04275.pdf

Abstract:
The persistent threat of Android malware presents a serious challenge to the security of millions of users globally. While many machine learning-based methods have been developed to detect these threats, their reliance on large labeled datasets limits their effectiveness against emerging, previously unseen malware families, for which labeled data is scarce or nonexistent. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel zero-shot learning framework that combines Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (VGAE) with Siamese Neural Networks (SNN) to identify malware without needing prior examples of specific malware families. Our approach leverages graph-based representations of Android applications, enabling the model to detect subtle structural differences between benign and malicious software, even in the absence of labeled data for new threats. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art MaMaDroid, especially in zero-day malware detection. Our model achieves 96.24% accuracy and 95.20% recall for unknown malware families, highlighting its robustness against evolving Android threats.

Paperid: 7650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03875.pdf

Abstract:
The introduction of ChatGPT has garnered significant attention within the NLP community and beyond. Previous studies have demonstrated ChatGPT's substantial advancements across various downstream NLP tasks, highlighting its adaptability and potential to revolutionize language-related applications. However, its capabilities and limitations in genre prediction remain unclear. This work analyzes three Large Language Models (LLMs) using the MovieLens-100K dataset to assess their genre prediction capabilities. Our findings show that ChatGPT, without fine-tuning, outperformed other LLMs, and fine-tuned ChatGPT performed best overall. We set up zero-shot and few-shot prompts using audio transcripts/subtitles from movie trailers in the MovieLens-100K dataset, covering 1682 movies of 18 genres, where each movie can have multiple genres. Additionally, we extended our study by extracting IMDb movie posters to utilize a Vision Language Model (VLM) with prompts for poster information. This fine-grained information was used to enhance existing LLM prompts. In conclusion, our study reveals ChatGPT's remarkable genre prediction capabilities, surpassing other language models. The integration of VLM further enhances our findings, showcasing ChatGPT's potential for content-related applications by incorporating visual information from movie posters.

Paperid: 7651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03373.pdf

Abstract:
Given Wikipedia's role as a trusted source of high-quality, reliable content, concerns are growing about the proliferation of low-quality machine-generated text (MGT) produced by large language models (LLMs) on its platform. Reliable detection of MGT is therefore essential. However, existing work primarily evaluates MGT detectors on generic generation tasks rather than on tasks more commonly performed by Wikipedia editors. This misalignment can lead to poor generalisability when applied in real-world Wikipedia contexts. We introduce WETBench, a multilingual, multi-generator, and task-specific benchmark for MGT detection. We define three editing tasks, empirically grounded in Wikipedia editors' perceived use cases for LLM-assisted editing: Paragraph Writing, Summarisation, and Text Style Transfer, which we implement using two new datasets across three languages. For each writing task, we evaluate three prompts, generate MGT across multiple generators using the best-performing prompt, and benchmark diverse detectors. We find that, across settings, training-based detectors achieve an average accuracy of 78%, while zero-shot detectors average 58%. These results show that detectors struggle with MGT in realistic generation scenarios and underscore the importance of evaluating such models on diverse, task-specific data to assess their reliability in editor-driven contexts.

Paperid: 7652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02624.pdf

Abstract:
Variant effect predictors (VEPs) aim to assess the functional impact of protein variants, traditionally relying on multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). This approach assumes that naturally occurring variants are fit, an assumption challenged by pharmacogenomics, where some pharmacogenes experience low evolutionary pressure. Deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets provide an alternative by offering quantitative fitness scores for variants. In this work, we propose a transformer-based matrix variational auto-encoder (matVAE) with a structured prior and evaluate its performance on 33 DMS datasets corresponding to 26 drug target and ADME proteins from the ProteinGym benchmark. Our model trained on MSAs (matVAE-MSA) outperforms the state-of-the-art DeepSequence model in zero-shot prediction on DMS datasets, despite using an order of magnitude fewer parameters and requiring less computation at inference time. We also compare matVAE-MSA to matENC-DMS, a model of similar capacity trained on DMS data, and find that the latter performs better on supervised prediction tasks. Additionally, incorporating AlphaFold-generated structures into our transformer model further improves performance, achieving results comparable to DeepSequence trained on MSAs and finetuned on DMS. These findings highlight the potential of DMS datasets to replace MSAs without significant loss in predictive performance, motivating further development of DMS datasets and exploration of their relationships to enhance variant effect prediction.

Paperid: 7653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02445.pdf

Abstract:
Current methods for restoring underexposed images typically rely on supervised learning with paired underexposed and well-illuminated images. However, collecting such datasets is often impractical in real-world scenarios. Moreover, these methods can lead to over-enhancement, distorting well-illuminated regions. To address these issues, we propose IGDNet, a Zero-Shot enhancement method that operates solely on a single test image, without requiring guiding priors or training data. IGDNet exhibits strong generalization ability and effectively suppresses noise while restoring illumination. The framework comprises a decomposition module and a denoising module. The former separates the image into illumination and reflection components via a dense connection network, while the latter enhances non-uniformly illuminated regions using an illumination-guided pixel adaptive correction method. A noise pair is generated through downsampling and refined iteratively to produce the final result. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that IGDNet significantly improves visual quality under complex lighting conditions. Quantitative results on metrics like PSNR (20.41dB) and SSIM (0.860dB) show that it outperforms 14 state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. The code will be released soon.

Paperid: 7654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02390.pdf

Abstract:
Log analysis is a relevant research field in cybersecurity as they can provide a source of information for the detection of threats to networks and systems. This paper presents a pipeline to use fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for anomaly detection and mitigation recommendation using IoT security logs. Utilizing classical machine learning classifiers as a baseline, three open-source LLMs are compared for binary and multiclass anomaly detection, with three strategies: zero-shot, few-shot prompting and fine-tuning using an IoT dataset. LLMs give better results on multi-class attack classification than the corresponding baseline models. By mapping detected threats to MITRE CAPEC, defining a set of IoT-specific mitigation actions, and fine-tuning the models with those actions, the models are able to provide a combined detection and recommendation guidance.

Paperid: 7655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02148.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation has recently progressed beyond ordinal depth to provide metric depth predictions. However, its reliability in underwater environments remains limited due to light attenuation and scattering, color distortion, turbidity, and the lack of high-quality metric ground truth data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark of zero-shot and fine-tuned monocular metric depth estimation models on real-world underwater datasets with metric depth annotations, including FLSea and SQUID. We evaluated a diverse set of state-of-the-art Vision Foundation Models across a range of underwater conditions and depth ranges. Our results show that large-scale models trained on terrestrial data (real or synthetic) are effective in in-air settings, but perform poorly underwater due to significant domain shifts. To address this, we fine-tune Depth Anything V2 with a ViT-S backbone encoder on a synthetic underwater variant of the Hypersim dataset, which we simulated using a physically based underwater image formation model. Our fine-tuned model consistently improves performance across all benchmarks and outperforms baselines trained only on the clean in-air Hypersim dataset. This study presents a detailed evaluation and visualization of monocular metric depth estimation in underwater scenes, emphasizing the importance of domain adaptation and scale-aware supervision for achieving robust and generalizable metric depth predictions using foundation models in challenging environments.

Paperid: 7656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01875.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate a novel approach to time-series modeling, inspired by the successes of large pretrained foundation models. We introduce FAE (Foundation Auto-Encoders), a foundation generative-AI model for anomaly detection in time-series data, based on Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs). By foundation, we mean a model pretrained on massive amounts of time-series data which can learn complex temporal patterns useful for accurate modeling, forecasting, and detection of anomalies on previously unseen datasets. FAE leverages VAEs and Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to build a generic model for univariate time-series modeling, which could eventually perform properly in out-of-the-box, zero-shot anomaly detection applications. We introduce the main concepts of FAE, and present preliminary results in different multi-dimensional time-series datasets from various domains, including a real dataset from an operational mobile ISP, and the well known KDD 2021 Anomaly Detection dataset.

Paperid: 7657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22679.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the feasibility of large language models (LLMs) in detecting subtle expressions of micro-behaviors in team conversations using transcripts collected during simulated space missions. Specifically, we examine zero-shot classification, fine-tuning, and paraphrase-augmented fine-tuning with encoder-only sequence classification LLMs, as well as few-shot text generation with decoder-only causal language modeling LLMs, to predict the micro-behavior associated with each conversational turn (i.e., dialogue). Our findings indicate that encoder-only LLMs, such as RoBERTa and DistilBERT, struggled to detect underrepresented micro-behaviors, particularly discouraging speech, even with weighted fine-tuning. In contrast, the instruction fine-tuned version of Llama-3.1, a decoder-only LLM, demonstrated superior performance, with the best models achieving macro F1-scores of 44% for 3-way classification and 68% for binary classification. These results have implications for the development of speech technologies aimed at analyzing team communication dynamics and enhancing training interventions in high-stakes environments such as space missions, particularly in scenarios where text is the only accessible data.

Paperid: 7658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21563.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in high-resource languages, their capabilities in low-resource and minority languages remain significantly underexplored. Formosan languages -- a subgroup of Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan -- are both linguistically rich and endangered, largely due to the sociolinguistic dominance of Mandarin. In this work, we introduce FORMOSANBENCH, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs on low-resource Austronesian languages. It covers three endangered Formosan languages: Atayal, Amis, and Paiwan, across three core NLP tasks: machine translation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text summarization. We assess model performance in zero-shot, 10-shot, and fine-tuned settings using FORMOSANBENCH. Our results reveal a substantial performance gap between high-resource and Formosan languages. Existing LLMs consistently underperform across all tasks, with 10-shot learning and fine-tuning offering only limited improvements. These findings underscore the urgent need for more inclusive NLP technologies that can effectively support endangered and underrepresented languages. We release our datasets and code to facilitate future research in this direction.

Paperid: 7659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20822.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed for detecting and responding to violent content online, yet their ability to reason about morally ambiguous, real-world scenarios remains underexamined. We present the first study to evaluate LLMs using a validated social science instrument designed to measure human response to everyday conflict, namely the Violent Behavior Vignette Questionnaire (VBVQ). To assess potential bias, we introduce persona-based prompting that varies race, age, and geographic identity within the United States. Six LLMs developed across different geopolitical and organizational contexts are evaluated under a unified zero-shot setting. Our study reveals two key findings: (1) LLMs surface-level text generation often diverges from their internal preference for violent responses; (2) their violent tendencies vary across demographics, frequently contradicting established findings in criminology, social science, and psychology.

Paperid: 7660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20815.pdf

Abstract:
LLM-powered applications are highly susceptible to the quality of user prompts, and crafting high-quality prompts can often be challenging especially for domain-specific applications. This paper presents a novel dynamic context-aware prompt recommendation system for domain-specific AI applications. Our solution combines contextual query analysis, retrieval-augmented knowledge grounding, hierarchical skill organization, and adaptive skill ranking to generate relevant and actionable prompt suggestions. The system leverages behavioral telemetry and a two-stage hierarchical reasoning process to dynamically select and rank relevant skills, and synthesizes prompts using both predefined and adaptive templates enhanced with few-shot learning. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves high usefulness and relevance, as validated by both automated and expert evaluations.

Paperid: 7661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20263.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot fine-grained image classification (FS-FGIC) presents a significant challenge, requiring models to distinguish visually similar subclasses with limited labeled examples. Existing methods have critical limitations: metric-based methods lose spatial information and misalign local features, while reconstruction-based methods fail to utilize hierarchical feature information and lack mechanisms to focus on discriminative regions. We propose the Hierarchical Mask-enhanced Dual Reconstruction Network (HMDRN), which integrates dual-layer feature reconstruction with mask-enhanced feature processing to improve fine-grained classification. HMDRN incorporates a dual-layer feature reconstruction and fusion module that leverages complementary visual information from different network hierarchies. Through learnable fusion weights, the model balances high-level semantic representations from the last layer with mid-level structural details from the penultimate layer. Additionally, we design a spatial binary mask-enhanced transformer self-reconstruction module that processes query features through adaptive thresholding while maintaining complete support features, enhancing focus on discriminative regions while filtering background noise. Extensive experiments on three challenging fine-grained datasets demonstrate that HMDRN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across Conv-4 and ResNet-12 backbone architectures. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each proposed component, revealing that dual-layer reconstruction enhances inter-class discrimination while mask-enhanced transformation reduces intra-class variations. Visualization results provide evidence of HMDRN's superior feature reconstruction capabilities.

Paperid: 7662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19303.pdf

Abstract:
Inferring physical properties can significantly enhance robotic manipulation by enabling robots to handle objects safely and efficiently through adaptive grasping strategies. Previous approaches have typically relied on either tactile or visual data, limiting their ability to fully capture properties. We introduce a novel cross-modal perception framework that integrates visual observations with tactile representations within a multimodal vision-language model. Our physical reasoning framework, which employs a hierarchical feature alignment mechanism and a refined prompting strategy, enables our model to make property-specific predictions that strongly correlate with ground-truth measurements. Evaluated on 35 diverse objects, our approach outperforms existing baselines and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization. Keywords: tactile perception, visual-tactile fusion, physical property inference, multimodal integration, robot perception

Paperid: 7663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19187.pdf

Abstract:
LLMs are typically trained in high-resource languages, and tasks in lower-resourced languages tend to underperform the higher-resource language counterparts for in-context learning. Despite the large body of work on prompting settings, it is still unclear how LLMs should be adapted cross-lingually specifically for in-context learning in the low-resource target languages. We perform a comprehensive study spanning five diverse target languages, three base LLMs, and seven downstream tasks spanning over 4,100 GPU training hours (9,900+ TFLOPs) across various adaptation techniques: few-shot prompting, translate-test, fine-tuning, embedding re-initialization, and instruction fine-tuning. Our results show that the few-shot prompting and translate-test settings tend to heavily outperform the gradient-based adaptation methods. To better understand this discrepancy, we design a novel metric, Valid Output Recall (VOR), and analyze model outputs to empirically attribute the degradation of these trained models to catastrophic forgetting. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the largest study done on in-context learning for low-resource languages with respect to train compute and number of adaptation techniques considered. We make all our datasets and trained models available for public use.

Paperid: 7664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18364.pdf

Abstract:
The objective of Few-shot learning is to fully leverage the limited data resources for exploring the latent correlations within the data by applying algorithms and training a model with outstanding performance that can adequately meet the demands of practical applications. In practical applications, the number of images in each category is usually less than that in traditional deep learning, which can lead to over-fitting and poor generalization performance. Currently, many Few-shot classification models pay more attention to spatial domain information while neglecting frequency domain information, which contains more feature information. Ignoring frequency domain information will prevent the model from fully exploiting feature information, which would effect the classification performance. Based on conventional data augmentation, this paper proposes an SFIFNet with innovative data preprocessing. The key of this method is enhancing the accuracy of image feature representation by integrating frequency domain information with spatial domain information. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in enhancing classification performance.

Paperid: 7665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18316.pdf

Abstract:
The Citation Discovery Shared Task focuses on predicting the correct citation from a given candidate pool for a given paragraph. The main challenges stem from the length of the abstract paragraphs and the high similarity among candidate abstracts, making it difficult to determine the exact paper to cite. To address this, we develop a system that first retrieves the top-k most similar abstracts based on extracted relational features from the given paragraph. From this subset, we leverage a Large Language Model (LLM) to accurately identify the most relevant citation. We evaluate our framework on the training dataset provided by the SCIDOCA 2025 organizers, demonstrating its effectiveness in citation prediction.

Paperid: 7666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18091.pdf

Abstract:
Anaphora resolution plays a critical role in natural language understanding, especially in morphologically rich languages like Czech. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of two modern approaches to anaphora resolution on Czech text: prompt engineering with large language models (LLMs) and fine-tuning compact generative models. Using a dataset derived from the Prague Dependency Treebank, we evaluate several instruction-tuned LLMs, including Mistral Large 2 and Llama 3, using a series of prompt templates. We compare them against fine-tuned variants of the mT5 and Mistral models that we trained specifically for Czech anaphora resolution. Our experiments demonstrate that while prompting yields promising few-shot results (up to 74.5% accuracy), the fine-tuned models, particularly mT5-large, outperform them significantly, achieving up to 88% accuracy while requiring fewer computational resources. We analyze performance across different anaphora types, antecedent distances, and source corpora, highlighting key strengths and trade-offs of each approach.

Paperid: 7667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17782.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems relies on high-quality manual relevance judgments (qrels), which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. While pooling reduces the annotation effort, it results in only partially labeled datasets. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative to reducing reliance on manual judgments, particularly in complex domains like medical case-based retrieval, where relevance assessment requires analyzing both textual and visual information. In this work, we explore using a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to expand relevance judgments, creating a new dataset of automated judgments. Specifically, we employ Gemini 1.5 Pro on the ImageCLEFmed 2013 case-based retrieval task, simulating human assessment through an iteratively refined, structured prompting strategy that integrates binary scoring, instruction-based evaluation, and few-shot learning. We systematically experimented with various prompt configurations to maximize agreement with human judgments. To evaluate agreement between the MLLM and human judgments, we use Cohen's Kappa, achieving a substantial agreement score of 0.6, comparable to inter-annotator agreement typically observed in multimodal retrieval tasks. Starting from the original 15,028 manual judgments (4.72% relevant) across 35 topics, our MLLM-based approach expanded the dataset by over 37x to 558,653 judgments, increasing relevant annotations to 5,950. On average, each medical case query received 15,398 new annotations, with approximately 99% being non-relevant, reflecting the high sparsity typical in this domain. Our results demonstrate the potential of MLLMs to scale relevance judgment collection, offering a promising direction for supporting retrieval evaluation in medical and multimodal IR tasks.

Paperid: 7668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16826.pdf

Abstract:
Off-road traversability segmentation enables autonomous navigation with applications in search-and-rescue, military operations, wildlife exploration, and agriculture. Current frameworks struggle due to significant variations in unstructured environments and uncertain scene changes, and are not adaptive to be used for different robot types. We present AnyTraverse, a framework combining natural language-based prompts with human-operator assistance to determine navigable regions for diverse robotic vehicles. The system segments scenes for a given set of prompts and calls the operator only when encountering previously unexplored scenery or unknown class not part of the prompt in its region-of-interest, thus reducing active supervision load while adapting to varying outdoor scenes. Our zero-shot learning approach eliminates the need for extensive data collection or retraining. Our experimental validation includes testing on RELLIS-3D, Freiburg Forest, and RUGD datasets and demonstrate real-world deployment on multiple robot platforms. The results show that AnyTraverse performs better than GA-NAV and Off-seg while offering a vehicle-agnostic approach to off-road traversability that balances automation with targeted human supervision.

Paperid: 7669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15180.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale visual search engines are expected to solve a dual problem at once: (i) locate every image that truly contains the object described by a sentence and (ii) identify the object's bounding box or exact pixels within each hit. Existing techniques address only one side of this challenge. Visual grounding yields tight boxes and masks but rests on the unrealistic assumption that the object is present in every test image, producing a flood of false alarms when applied to web-scale collections. Text-to-image retrieval excels at sifting through massive databases to rank relevant images, yet it stops at whole-image matches and offers no fine-grained localization. We introduce Referring Search and Discovery (ReSeDis), the first task that unifies corpus-level retrieval with pixel-level grounding. Given a free-form description, a ReSeDis model must decide whether the queried object appears in each image and, if so, where it is, returning bounding boxes or segmentation masks. To enable rigorous study, we curate a benchmark in which every description maps uniquely to object instances scattered across a large, diverse corpus, eliminating unintended matches. We further design a task-specific metric that jointly scores retrieval recall and localization precision. Finally, we provide a straightforward zero-shot baseline using a frozen vision-language model, revealing significant headroom for future study. ReSeDis offers a realistic, end-to-end testbed for building the next generation of robust and scalable multimodal search systems.

Paperid: 7670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14949.pdf

Abstract:
While Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models have been widely used for diabetes prediction, the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for structured numerical data is still not well explored. In this study, we test the effectiveness of LLMs in predicting diabetes using zero-shot, one-shot, and three-shot prompting methods. We conduct an empirical analysis using the Pima Indian Diabetes Database (PIDD). We evaluate six LLMs, including four open-source models: Gemma-2-27B, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Llama-3.2-2B. We also test two proprietary models: GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2.0. In addition, we compare their performance with three traditional machine learning models: Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We use accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score as evaluation metrics. Our results show that proprietary LLMs perform better than open-source ones, with GPT-4o and Gemma-2-27B achieving the highest accuracy in few-shot settings. Notably, Gemma-2-27B also outperforms the traditional ML models in terms of F1-score. However, there are still issues such as performance variation across prompting strategies and the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. This study shows that LLMs can be useful for medical prediction tasks and encourages future work on prompt engineering and hybrid approaches to improve healthcare predictions.

Paperid: 7671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13964.pdf

Abstract:
Mammographic breast density classification is essential for cancer risk assessment but remains challenging due to subjective interpretation and inter-observer variability. This study compares multimodal and CNN-based methods for automated classification using the BI-RADS system, evaluating BioMedCLIP and ConvNeXt across three learning scenarios: zero-shot classification, linear probing with textual descriptions, and fine-tuning with numerical labels. Results show that zero-shot classification achieved modest performance, while the fine-tuned ConvNeXt model outperformed the BioMedCLIP linear probe. Although linear probing demonstrated potential with pretrained embeddings, it was less effective than full fine-tuning. These findings suggest that despite the promise of multimodal learning, CNN-based models with end-to-end fine-tuning provide stronger performance for specialized medical imaging. The study underscores the need for more detailed textual representations and domain-specific adaptations in future radiology applications.

Paperid: 7672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13909.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) has shown promise in vision but remains largely unexplored for \emph{industrial} time-series data, where annotating every new defect is prohibitively expensive. We present a systematic FSL study on screw-fastening process monitoring, using a 2\,300-sample multivariate torque dataset that covers 16 uni- and multi-factorial defect types. Beyond benchmarking, we introduce a \textbf{label-aware episodic sampler} that collapses multi-label sequences into multiple single-label tasks, keeping the output dimensionality fixed while preserving combinatorial label information. Two FSL paradigms are investigated: the metric-based \emph{Prototypical Network} and the gradient-based \emph{Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning} (MAML), each paired with three backbones: 1D CNN, InceptionTime and the 341 M-parameter transformer \emph{Moment}. On 10-shot, 3-way evaluation, the InceptionTime + Prototypical Network combination achieves a \textbf{0.944 weighted F1} in the multi-class regime and \textbf{0.935} in the multi-label regime, outperforming finetuned Moment by up to 5.3\% while requiring two orders of magnitude fewer parameters and training time. Across all backbones, metric learning consistently surpasses MAML, and our label-aware sampling yields an additional 1.7\% F1 over traditional class-based sampling. These findings challenge the assumption that large foundation models are always superior: when data are scarce, lightweight CNN architectures augmented with simple metric learning not only converge faster but also generalize better. We release code, data splits and pre-trained weights to foster reproducible research and to catalyze the adoption of FSL in high-value manufacturing inspection.

Paperid: 7673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12683.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have rapidly advanced alongside Large Language Models (LLMs). This study evaluates the capabilities of prominent generative VLMs, such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, accessed via APIs, for histopathology image classification tasks, including cell typing. Using diverse datasets from public and private sources, we apply zero-shot and one-shot prompting methods to assess VLM performance, comparing them against custom-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our findings demonstrate that while one-shot prompting significantly improves VLM performance over zero-shot ($p \approx 1.005 \times 10^{-5}$ based on Kappa scores), these general-purpose VLMs currently underperform supervised CNNs on most tasks. This work underscores both the promise and limitations of applying current VLMs to specialized domains like pathology via in-context learning. All code and instructions for reproducing the study can be accessed from the repository https://www.github.com/a12dongithub/VLMCCE.

Paperid: 7674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12090.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces ChatbotManip, a novel dataset for studying manipulation in Chatbots. It contains simulated generated conversations between a chatbot and a (simulated) user, where the chatbot is explicitly asked to showcase manipulation tactics, persuade the user towards some goal, or simply be helpful. We consider a diverse set of chatbot manipulation contexts, from consumer and personal advice to citizen advice and controversial proposition argumentation. Each conversation is annotated by human annotators for both general manipulation and specific manipulation tactics. Our research reveals three key findings. First, Large Language Models (LLMs) can be manipulative when explicitly instructed, with annotators identifying manipulation in approximately 84\% of such conversations. Second, even when only instructed to be ``persuasive'' without explicit manipulation prompts, LLMs frequently default to controversial manipulative strategies, particularly gaslighting and fear enhancement. Third, small fine-tuned open source models, such as BERT+BiLSTM have a performance comparable to zero-shot classification with larger models like Gemini 2.5 pro in detecting manipulation, but are not yet reliable for real-world oversight. Our work provides important insights for AI safety research and highlights the need of addressing manipulation risks as LLMs are increasingly deployed in consumer-facing applications.

Paperid: 7675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11600.pdf

Abstract:
GraphRAG-Causal introduces an innovative framework that combines graph-based retrieval with large language models to enhance causal reasoning in news analysis. Traditional NLP approaches often struggle with identifying complex, implicit causal links, especially in low-data scenarios. Our approach addresses these challenges by transforming annotated news headlines into structured causal knowledge graphs. It then employs a hybrid retrieval system that merges semantic embeddings with graph-based structural cues leveraging Neo4j to accurately match and retrieve relevant events. The framework is built on a three-stage pipeline: First, during Data Preparation, news sentences are meticulously annotated and converted into causal graphs capturing cause, effect, and trigger relationships. Next, the Graph Retrieval stage stores these graphs along with their embeddings in a Neo4j database and utilizes hybrid Cypher queries to efficiently identify events that share both semantic and structural similarities with a given query. Finally, the LLM Inference stage utilizes these retrieved causal graphs in a few-shot learning setup with XML-based prompting, enabling robust classification and tagging of causal relationships. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that GraphRAG-Causal achieves an impressive F1-score of 82.1% on causal classification using just 20 few-shot examples. This approach significantly boosts accuracy and consistency, making it highly suitable for real-time applications in news reliability assessment, misinformation detection, and policy analysis.

Paperid: 7676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11585.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce OV-MAP, a novel approach to open-world 3D mapping for mobile robots by integrating open-features into 3D maps to enhance object recognition capabilities. A significant challenge arises when overlapping features from adjacent voxels reduce instance-level precision, as features spill over voxel boundaries, blending neighboring regions together. Our method overcomes this by employing a class-agnostic segmentation model to project 2D masks into 3D space, combined with a supplemented depth image created by merging raw and synthetic depth from point clouds. This approach, along with a 3D mask voting mechanism, enables accurate zero-shot 3D instance segmentation without relying on 3D supervised segmentation models. We assess the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments on public datasets such as ScanNet200 and Replica, demonstrating superior zero-shot performance, robustness, and adaptability across diverse environments. Additionally, we conducted real-world experiments to demonstrate our method's adaptability and robustness when applied to diverse real-world environments.

Paperid: 7677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11055.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in Foundation Models for Materials Science are poised to revolutionize the discovery, manufacture, and design of novel materials with tailored properties and responses. Although great strides have been made, successes have been restricted to materials classes where multi-million sample data repositories can be readily curated (e.g., atomistic structures). Unfortunately, for many structural and functional materials (e.g., mesoscale structured metal alloys), such datasets are too costly or prohibitive to construct; instead, datasets are limited to very few examples. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel machine learning approach for learning from hyper-sparse, complex spatial data in scientific domains. Our core contribution is a physics-driven data augmentation scheme that leverages an ensemble of local generative models, trained on as few as five experimental observations, and coordinates them through a novel diversity curation strategy to generate a large-scale, physically diverse dataset. We utilize this framework to construct PolyMicros, the first Foundation Model for polycrystalline materials (a structural material class important across a broad range of industrial and scientific applications). We demonstrate the utility of PolyMicros by zero-shot solving several long standing challenges related to accelerating 3D experimental microscopy. Finally, we make both our models and datasets openly available to the community.

Paperid: 7678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10989.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel prompting approach aimed at enhancing the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate accurate Python code. Specifically, we introduce a prompt template designed to improve the quality and correctness of generated code snippets, enabling them to pass tests and produce reliable results. Through experiments conducted on two state-of-the-art LLMs using the HumanEval dataset, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms widely studied zero-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods in terms of the Pass@k metric. Furthermore, our method achieves these improvements with significantly reduced token usage compared to the CoT approach, making it both effective and resource-efficient, thereby lowering the computational demands and improving the eco-footprint of LLM capabilities. These findings highlight the potential of tailored prompting strategies to optimize code generation performance, paving the way for broader applications in AI-driven programming tasks.

Paperid: 7679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10807.pdf

Abstract:
The explosive growth of video data intensified the need for flexible user-controllable summarization tools that can operate without domain-specific training data. Existing methods either rely on datasets, limiting generalization, or cannot incorporate user intent expressed in natural language. We introduce Prompts-to-Summaries: the first zero-shot, text-queryable video summarizer that converts off-the-shelf video-language models (VidLMs) captions into user-guided skims via large language models (LLMs) judging, without the use of training data at all, beating all unsupervised and matching supervised methods. Our pipeline (i) segments raw video footage into coherent scenes, (ii) generates rich scene-level descriptions through a memory-efficient, batch-style VidLM prompting scheme that scales to hours-long videos on a single GPU, (iii) leverages an LLM as a judge to assign scene-level importance scores under a carefully crafted prompt, and finally, (iv) propagates those scores to short segments level via two new metrics: consistency (temporal coherency) and uniqueness (novelty), yielding fine-grained frame importance. On SumMe and TVSum, our data-free approach surpasses all prior data-hungry unsupervised methods. It also performs competitively on the Query-Focused Video Summarization (QFVS) benchmark, despite using no training data and the competing methods requiring supervised frame-level importance. To spur further research, we release VidSum-Reason, a new query-driven dataset featuring long-tailed concepts and multi-step reasoning; our framework attains robust F1 scores and serves as the first challenging baseline. Overall, our results demonstrate that pretrained multimodal models, when orchestrated with principled prompting and score propagation, already provide a powerful foundation for universal, text-queryable video summarization.

Paperid: 7680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10334.pdf

Abstract:
Students' academic emotions significantly influence their social behavior and learning performance. Traditional approaches to automatically and accurately analyze these emotions have predominantly relied on supervised machine learning algorithms. However, these models often struggle to generalize across different contexts, necessitating repeated cycles of data collection, annotation, and training. The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers a promising alternative, enabling generalization across visual recognition tasks through zero-shot prompting without requiring fine-tuning. This study investigates the potential of VLMs to analyze students' academic emotions via facial expressions in an online learning environment. We employed two VLMs, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, to analyze 5,000 images depicting confused, distracted, happy, neutral, and tired expressions using zero-shot prompting. Preliminary results indicate that both models demonstrate moderate performance in academic facial expression recognition, with Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct outperforming Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct. Notably, both models excel in identifying students' happy emotions but fail to detect distracted behavior. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct exhibits relatively high performance in recognizing students' confused expressions, highlighting its potential for practical applications in identifying content that causes student confusion.

Paperid: 7681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09992.pdf

Abstract:
Online toxic language causes real harm, especially in regions with limited moderation tools. In this study, we evaluate how large language models handle toxic comments in Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, languages with limited labeled data. We built and manually labeled a dataset of 4,500 YouTube and TikTok comments drawn from videos across diverse categories, including music, politics, sports, modeling, influencer content, discussions of sexism, and general topics. Four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4.1, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Opus) were tested in two modes: zero-shot and context-augmented. We measured precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy and false positive rates. Including a short context snippet raised recall by about 0.12 on average and improved F1 score by up to 0.10, though it sometimes increased false positives. The best balance came from Gemini in context-augmented mode, reaching an F1 score of 0.82 and accuracy of 0.82, while zero-shot GPT-4.1 led on precision and had the lowest false alarms. We show how adding minimal context can improve toxic language detection in low-resource settings and suggest practical strategies such as improved prompt design and threshold calibration. These results show that prompt design alone can yield meaningful gains in toxicity detection for underserved Balkan language communities.

Paperid: 7682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08907.pdf

Abstract:
Natural language understanding systems struggle with low-resource languages, including many dialects of high-resource ones. Dialect-to-standard normalization attempts to tackle this issue by transforming dialectal text so that it can be used by standard-language tools downstream. In this study, we tackle this task by introducing a new normalization method that combines rule-based linguistically informed transformations and large language models (LLMs) with targeted few-shot prompting, without requiring any parallel data. We implement our method for Greek dialects and apply it on a dataset of regional proverbs, evaluating the outputs using human annotators. We then use this dataset to conduct downstream experiments, finding that previous results regarding these proverbs relied solely on superficial linguistic information, including orthographic artifacts, while new observations can still be made through the remaining semantics.

Paperid: 7683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08836.pdf

Abstract:
Swiss German is a low-resource language represented by diverse dialects that differ significantly from Standard German and from each other, lacking a standardized written form. As a result, transcribing Swiss German involves translating into Standard German. Existing datasets have been collected in controlled environments, yielding effective speech-to-text (STT) models, but these models struggle with spontaneous conversational speech. This paper, therefore, introduces the new SRB-300 dataset, a 300-hour annotated speech corpus featuring real-world long-audio recordings from 39 Swiss German radio and TV stations. It captures spontaneous speech across all major Swiss dialects recorded in various realistic environments and overcomes the limitation of prior sentence-level corpora. We fine-tuned multiple OpenAI Whisper models on the SRB-300 dataset, achieving notable enhancements over previous zero-shot performance metrics. Improvements in word error rate (WER) ranged from 19% to 33%, while BLEU scores increased between 8% and 40%. The best fine-tuned model, large-v3, achieved a WER of 17.1% and a BLEU score of 74.8. This advancement is crucial for developing effective and robust STT systems for Swiss German and other low-resource languages in real-world contexts.

Paperid: 7684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08430.pdf

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) have become mainstream methods in the field of sarcasm detection. However, existing LLM methods face challenges in irony detection, including: 1. single-perspective limitations, 2. insufficient comprehensive understanding, and 3. lack of interpretability. This paper introduces the Collaborative Agent Framework for Irony (CAF-I), an LLM-driven multi-agent system designed to overcome these issues. CAF-I employs specialized agents for Context, Semantics, and Rhetoric, which perform multidimensional analysis and engage in interactive collaborative optimization. A Decision Agent then consolidates these perspectives, with a Refinement Evaluator Agent providing conditional feedback for optimization. Experiments on benchmark datasets establish CAF-I's state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Achieving SOTA on the vast majority of metrics, CAF-I reaches an average Macro-F1 of 76.31, a 4.98 absolute improvement over the strongest prior baseline. This success is attained by its effective simulation of human-like multi-perspective analysis, enhancing detection accuracy and interpretability.

Paperid: 7685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08021.pdf

Abstract:
This study proposes a universal flow field prediction framework based on knowledge transfer from large language model (LLM), addressing the high computational costs of traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods and the limited cross-condition transfer capability of existing deep learning models. The framework innovatively integrates Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) dimensionality reduction with fine-tuning strategies for pretrained LLM, where POD facilitates compressed representation of flow field features while the fine-tuned model learns to encode system dynamics in state space. To enhance the model's adaptability to flow field data, we specifically designed fluid dynamics-oriented text templates that improve predictive performance through enriched contextual semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms conventional Transformer models in few-shot learning scenarios while exhibiting exceptional generalization across various inflow conditions and airfoil geometries. Ablation studies reveal the contributions of key components in the FlowBERT architecture. Compared to traditional Navier-Stokes equation solvers requiring hours of computation, our approach reduces prediction time to seconds while maintaining over 90% accuracy. The developed knowledge transfer paradigm establishes a new direction for rapid fluid dynamics prediction, with potential applications extending to aerodynamic optimization, flow control, and other engineering domains.

Paperid: 7686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07436.pdf

Abstract:
The recent emergence of multimodal large language models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities for improving visual hazard recognition on construction sites. Unlike traditional computer vision models that rely on domain-specific training and extensive datasets, modern LLMs can interpret and describe complex visual scenes using simple natural language prompts. However, despite growing interest in their applications, there has been limited investigation into how different LLMs perform in safety-critical visual tasks within the construction domain. To address this gap, this study conducts a comparative evaluation of five state-of-the-art LLMs: Claude-3 Opus, GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, GPT-o3, and Gemini 2.0 Pro, to assess their ability to identify potential hazards from real-world construction images. Each model was tested under three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT). Zero-shot prompting involved minimal instruction, few-shot incorporated basic safety context and a hazard source mnemonic, and CoT provided step-by-step reasoning examples to scaffold model thinking. Quantitative analysis was performed using precision, recall, and F1-score metrics across all conditions. Results reveal that prompting strategy significantly influenced performance, with CoT prompting consistently producing higher accuracy across models. Additionally, LLM performance varied under different conditions, with GPT-4.5 and GPT-o3 outperforming others in most settings. The findings also demonstrate the critical role of prompt design in enhancing the accuracy and consistency of multimodal LLMs for construction safety applications. This study offers actionable insights into the integration of prompt engineering and LLMs for practical hazard recognition, contributing to the development of more reliable AI-assisted safety systems.

Paperid: 7687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06905.pdf

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often rely on in-context learning (ICL) to perform new tasks with minimal supervision. However, ICL performance, especially in smaller LMMs, is inconsistent and does not always improve monotonically with increasing examples. We hypothesize that this occurs due to the LMM being overwhelmed by additional information present in the image embeddings, which is not required for the downstream task. To address this, we propose a meta-learning approach that provides an alternative for inducing few-shot capabilities in LMMs, using a fixed set of soft prompts that are distilled from task-relevant image features and can be adapted at test time using a few examples. To facilitate this distillation, we introduce an attention-mapper module that can be easily integrated with the popular LLaVA v1.5 architecture and is jointly learned with soft prompts, enabling task adaptation in LMMs under low-data regimes with just a few gradient steps. Evaluation on the VL-ICL Bench shows that our method consistently outperforms ICL and related prompt-tuning approaches, even under image perturbations, improving task induction and reasoning across visual question answering tasks.

Paperid: 7688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06537.pdf

Abstract:
Audiovisual segmentation (AVS) aims to identify visual regions corresponding to sound sources, playing a vital role in video understanding, surveillance, and human-computer interaction. Traditional AVS methods depend on large-scale pixel-level annotations, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. To address this, we propose a novel zero-shot AVS framework that eliminates task-specific training by leveraging multiple pretrained models. Our approach integrates audio, vision, and text representations to bridge modality gaps, enabling precise sound source segmentation without AVS-specific annotations. We systematically explore different strategies for connecting pretrained models and evaluate their efficacy across multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot AVS performance, highlighting the effectiveness of multimodal model integration for finegrained audiovisual segmentation.

Paperid: 7689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06353.pdf

Abstract:
The growing convergence between Large Language Models (LLMs) and electroencephalography (EEG) research is enabling new directions in neural decoding, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and affective computing. This survey offers a systematic review and structured taxonomy of recent advancements that utilize LLMs for EEG-based analysis and applications. We organize the literature into four domains: (1) LLM-inspired foundation models for EEG representation learning, (2) EEG-to-language decoding, (3) cross-modal generation including image and 3D object synthesis, and (4) clinical applications and dataset management tools. The survey highlights how transformer-based architectures adapted through fine-tuning, few-shot, and zero-shot learning have enabled EEG-based models to perform complex tasks such as natural language generation, semantic interpretation, and diagnostic assistance. By offering a structured overview of modeling strategies, system designs, and application areas, this work serves as a foundational resource for future work to bridge natural language processing and neural signal analysis through language models.

Paperid: 7690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06288.pdf

Abstract:
Time-series data is a vital modality within data science communities. This is particularly valuable in financial applications, where it helps in detecting patterns, understanding market behavior, and making informed decisions based on historical data. Recent advances in language modeling have led to the rise of time-series pre-trained models that are trained on vast collections of datasets and applied to diverse tasks across financial domains. However, across financial applications, existing time-series pre-trained models have not shown boosts in performance over simple finance benchmarks in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. This phenomenon occurs because of a i) lack of financial data within the pre-training stage, and ii) the negative transfer effect due to inherently different time-series patterns across domains. Furthermore, time-series data is continuous, noisy, and can be collected at varying frequencies and with varying lags across different variables, making this data more challenging to model than languages. To address the above problems, we introduce a Pre-trained MoDEL for FINance TimE-series (Delphyne). Delphyne achieves competitive performance to existing foundation and full-shot models with few fine-tuning steps on publicly available datasets, and also shows superior performances on various financial tasks.

Paperid: 7691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06133.pdf

Abstract:
Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of determining whether a sentence pair represents entailment, contradiction, or a neutral relationship. While NLI models perform well on many inference tasks, their ability to handle fine-grained pragmatic inferences, particularly presupposition in conditionals, remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce CONFER, a novel dataset designed to evaluate how NLI models process inference in conditional sentences. We assess the performance of four NLI models, including two pre-trained models, to examine their generalization to conditional reasoning. Additionally, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, LLaMA, Gemma, and DeepSeek-R1, in zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings to analyze their ability to infer presuppositions with and without prior context. Our findings indicate that NLI models struggle with presuppositional reasoning in conditionals, and fine-tuning on existing NLI datasets does not necessarily improve their performance.

Paperid: 7692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05748.pdf

Abstract:
Reward-model training is the cost bottleneck in modern Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF) pipelines, often requiring tens of billions of parameters and an offline preference-tuning phase. In the proposed method, a frozen, instruction-tuned 7B LLM is augmented with only a one line JSON rubric and a rank-16 LoRA adapter (affecting just 0.8% of the model's parameters), enabling it to serve as a complete substitute for the previously used heavyweight evaluation models. The plug-and-play judge achieves 96.2% accuracy on RewardBench, outperforming specialized reward networks ranging from 27B to 70B parameters. Additionally, it allows a 7B actor to outperform the top 70B DPO baseline, which scores 61.8%, by achieving 92% exact match accuracy on GSM-8K utilizing online PPO. Thorough ablations indicate that (i) six in context demonstrations deliver the majority of the zero-to-few-shot improvements (+2pp), and (ii) the LoRA effectively addresses the remaining disparity, particularly in the safety and adversarial Chat-Hard segments. The proposed model introduces HH-Rationales, a subset of 10,000 pairs from Anthropic HH-RLHF, to examine interpretability, accompanied by human generated justifications. GPT-4 scoring indicates that our LoRA judge attains approximately = 9/10 in similarity to human explanations, while zero-shot judges score around =5/10. These results indicate that the combination of prompt engineering and tiny LoRA produces a cost effective, transparent, and easily adjustable reward function, removing the offline phase while achieving new state-of-the-art outcomes for both static evaluation and online RLHF.

Paperid: 7693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05589.pdf

Abstract:
We describe our system for the ArchEHR-QA Shared Task on answering clinical questions using electronic health records (EHRs). Our approach uses large language models in two steps: first, to find sentences in the EHR relevant to a clinician's question, and second, to generate a short, citation-supported response based on those sentences. We use few-shot prompting, self-consistency, and thresholding to improve the sentence classification step to decide which sentences are essential. We compare several models and find that a smaller 8B model performs better than a larger 70B model for identifying relevant information. Our results show that accurate sentence selection is critical for generating high-quality responses and that self-consistency with thresholding helps make these decisions more reliable.

Paperid: 7694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05576.pdf

Abstract:
Task-oriented grasping (TOG) is an essential preliminary step for robotic task execution, which involves predicting grasps on regions of target objects that facilitate intended tasks. Existing literature reveals there is a limited availability of TOG datasets for training and benchmarking despite large demand, which are often synthetic or have artifacts in mask annotations that hinder model performance. Moreover, TOG solutions often require affordance masks, grasps, and object masks for training, however, existing datasets typically provide only a subset of these annotations. To address these limitations, we introduce the Top-down Task-oriented Grasping (TD-TOG) dataset, designed to train and evaluate TOG solutions. TD-TOG comprises 1,449 real-world RGB-D scenes including 30 object categories and 120 subcategories, with hand-annotated object masks, affordances, and planar rectangular grasps. It also features a test set for a novel challenge that assesses a TOG solution's ability to distinguish between object subcategories. To contribute to the demand for TOG solutions that can adapt and manipulate previously unseen objects without re-training, we propose a novel TOG framework, Binary-TOG. Binary-TOG uses zero-shot for object recognition, and one-shot learning for affordance recognition. Zero-shot learning enables Binary-TOG to identify objects in multi-object scenes through textual prompts, eliminating the need for visual references. In multi-object settings, Binary-TOG achieves an average task-oriented grasp accuracy of 68.9%. Lastly, this paper contributes a comparative analysis between one-shot and zero-shot learning for object generalization in TOG to be used in the development of future TOG solutions.

Paperid: 7695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04574.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs), including reasoning-based and non-reasoning models, in performing zero-shot financial sentiment analysis. Using the Financial PhraseBank dataset annotated by domain experts, we evaluate how various LLMs and prompting strategies align with human-labeled sentiment in a financial context. We compare three proprietary LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3-mini) under different prompting paradigms that simulate System 1 (fast and intuitive) or System 2 (slow and deliberate) thinking and benchmark them against two smaller models (FinBERT-Prosus, FinBERT-Tone) fine-tuned on financial sentiment analysis. Our findings suggest that reasoning, either through prompting or inherent model design, does not improve performance on this task. Surprisingly, the most accurate and human-aligned combination of model and method was GPT-4o without any Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. We further explore how performance is impacted by linguistic complexity and annotation agreement levels, uncovering that reasoning may introduce overthinking, leading to suboptimal predictions. This suggests that for financial sentiment classification, fast, intuitive "System 1"-like thinking aligns more closely with human judgment compared to "System 2"-style slower, deliberative reasoning simulated by reasoning models or CoT prompting. Our results challenge the default assumption that more reasoning always leads to better LLM decisions, particularly in high-stakes financial applications.

Paperid: 7696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03502.pdf

Abstract:
The denoising diffusion probabilistic model has become a mainstream generative model, achieving significant success in various computer vision tasks. Recently, there has been initial exploration of applying diffusion models to time series tasks. However, existing studies still face challenges in multi-scale feature alignment and generative capabilities across different entities and long-time scales. In this paper, we propose CHIME, a conditional hallucination and integrated multi-scale enhancement framework for time series diffusion models. By employing multi-scale decomposition and integration, CHIME captures the decomposed features of time series, achieving in-domain distribution alignment between generated and original samples. In addition, we introduce a feature hallucination module in the conditional denoising process, enabling the temporal features transfer across long-time scales. Experimental results on publicly available real-world datasets demonstrate that CHIME achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits excellent generative generalization capabilities in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 7697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03461.pdf

Abstract:
In few-shot learning (FSL), the labeled samples are scarce. Thus, label errors can significantly reduce classification accuracy. Since label errors are inevitable in realistic learning tasks, improving the robustness of the model in the presence of label errors is critical. This paper proposes a new robust neural field-based image approach (RoNFA) for few-shot image classification with noisy labels. RoNFA consists of two neural fields for feature and category representation. They correspond to the feature space and category set. Each neuron in the field for category representation (FCR) has a receptive field (RF) on the field for feature representation (FFR) centered at the representative neuron for its category generated by soft clustering. In the prediction stage, the range of these receptive fields adapts according to the neuronal activation in FCR to ensure prediction accuracy. These learning strategies provide the proposed model with excellent few-shot learning capability and strong robustness against label noises. The experimental results on real-world FSL datasets with three different types of label noise demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FSL methods. Its accuracy obtained in the presence of noisy labels even surpasses the results obtained by state-of-the-art FSL methods trained on clean support sets, indicating its strong robustness against noisy labels.

Paperid: 7698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03458.pdf

Abstract:
Toxic language detection is crucial for creating safer online environments and limiting the spread of harmful content. While toxic language detection has been under-explored in Persian, the current work compares different methods for this task, including fine-tuning, data enrichment, zero-shot and few-shot learning, and cross-lingual transfer learning. What is especially compelling is the impact of cultural context on transfer learning for this task: We show that the language of a country with cultural similarities to Persian yields better results in transfer learning. Conversely, the improvement is lower when the language comes from a culturally distinct country. Warning: This paper contains examples of toxic language that may disturb some readers. These examples are included for the purpose of research on toxic detection.

Paperid: 7699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02802.pdf

Abstract:
Lakehouse systems enable the same data to be queried with multiple execution engines. However, selecting the engine best suited to run a SQL query still requires a priori knowledge of the query computational requirements and an engine capability, a complex and manual task that only becomes more difficult with the emergence of new engines and workloads. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a cross-engine optimizer that can automate engine selection for diverse SQL queries through a learned cost model. Optimized with hints, a query plan is used for query cost prediction and routing. Cost prediction is formulated as a multi-task learning problem, and multiple predictor heads, corresponding to different engines and provisionings, are used in the model architecture. This eliminates the need to train engine-specific models and allows the flexible addition of new engines at a minimal fine-tuning cost. Results on various databases and engines show that using a query optimized logical plan for cost estimation decreases the average Q-error by even 12.6% over using unoptimized plans as input. Moreover, the proposed cross-engine optimizer reduces the total workload runtime by up to 25.2% in a zero-shot setting and 30.4% in a few-shot setting when compared to random routing.

Paperid: 7700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02367.pdf

Abstract:
Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a highly popular task in open-world recognition, aiming to identify unknown class samples using known class data. By leveraging pre-training, meta-training, and fine-tuning, ViT achieves excellent few-shot learning capabilities. Its MLP head is a feedforward network, trained synchronously with the entire network in the same process, increasing the training cost and difficulty without fully leveraging the power of the feature extractor. This paper proposes a new architecture by replacing the MLP head with a neural field-based one. We first present a new static neural field function to describe the activity distribution of the neural field and then use two static neural field functions to build an efficient few-shot classifier. This neural field-based (NF) classifier consists of two coupled static neural fields. It stores the feature information of support samples by its elementary field, the known categories by its high-level field, and the category information of support samples by its cross-field connections. We replace the MLP head with the proposed NF classifier, resulting in a novel architecture ViTNF, and simplify the three-stage training mode by pre-training the feature extractor on source tasks and training the NF classifier with support samples in meta-testing separately, significantly reducing ViT's demand for training samples and the difficulty of model training. To enhance the model's capability in identifying new categories, we provide an effective algorithm to determine the lateral interaction scale of the elementary field. Experimental results demonstrate that our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, CUB-200, and Standard Cars, achieving dramatic accuracy improvements of 19\% and 16\% in new and all classes, respectively, indicating a notable advantage in GCD.

Paperid: 7701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02150.pdf

Abstract:
Deformable medical image registration is an essential task in computer-assisted interventions. This problem is particularly relevant to oncological treatments, where precise image alignment is necessary for tracking tumor growth, assessing treatment response, and ensuring accurate delivery of therapies. Recent AI methods can outperform traditional techniques in accuracy and speed, yet they often produce unreliable deformations that limit their clinical adoption. In this work, we address this challenge and introduce a novel implicit registration framework that can predict accurate and reliable deformations. Our insight is to reformulate image registration as a signal reconstruction problem: we learn a kernel function that can recover the dense displacement field from sparse keypoint correspondences. We integrate our method in a novel hierarchical architecture, and estimate the displacement field in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our formulation also allows for efficient refinement at test time, permitting clinicians to easily adjust registrations when needed. We validate our method on challenging intra-patient thoracic and abdominal zero-shot registration tasks, using public and internal datasets from the local University Hospital. Our method not only shows competitive accuracy to state-of-the-art approaches, but also bridges the generalization gap between implicit and explicit registration techniques. In particular, our method generates deformations that better preserve anatomical relationships and matches the performance of specialized commercial systems, underscoring its potential for clinical adoption.

Paperid: 7702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01519.pdf

Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) models have made breakthroughs in image embedding extraction, which provide state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as zero-shot image classification. However, the models suffer from a high computational burden. In this paper, we propose a novel speed-up method for ViT models called Attention-aware Token Filtering (ATF). ATF consists of two main ideas: a novel token filtering module and a filtering strategy. The token filtering module is introduced between a tokenizer and a transformer encoder of the ViT model, without modifying or fine-tuning of the transformer encoder. The module filters out tokens inputted to the encoder so that it keeps tokens in regions of specific object types dynamically and keeps tokens in regions that statically receive high attention in the transformer encoder. This filtering strategy maintains task accuracy while filtering out tokens inputted to the transformer encoder. Evaluation results on retrieval tasks show that ATF provides $2.8\times$ speed-up to a ViT model, SigLIP, while maintaining the retrieval recall rate.

Paperid: 7703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00854.pdf

Abstract:
We propose EEG2TEXT-CN, which, to the best of our knowledge, represents one of the earliest open-vocabulary EEG-to-text generation frameworks tailored for Chinese. Built on a biologically grounded EEG encoder (NICE-EEG) and a compact pretrained language model (MiniLM), our architecture aligns multichannel brain signals with natural language representations via masked pretraining and contrastive learning. Using a subset of the ChineseEEG dataset, where each sentence contains approximately ten Chinese characters aligned with 128-channel EEG recorded at 256 Hz, we segment EEG into per-character embeddings and predict full sentences in a zero-shot setting. The decoder is trained with teacher forcing and padding masks to accommodate variable-length sequences. Evaluation on over 1,500 training-validation sentences and 300 held-out test samples shows promising lexical alignment, with a best BLEU-1 score of 6.38\%. While syntactic fluency remains a challenge, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of non-phonetic, cross-modal language decoding from EEG. This work opens a new direction in multilingual brain-to-text research and lays the foundation for future cognitive-language interfaces in Chinese.

Paperid: 7704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00531.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of wind energy into power grids necessitates accurate ultra-short-term wind power forecasting to ensure grid stability and optimize resource allocation. This study introduces M2WLLM, an innovative model that leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting wind power output at granular time intervals. M2WLLM overcomes the limitations of traditional and deep learning methods by seamlessly integrating textual information and temporal numerical data, significantly improving wind power forecasting accuracy through multi-modal data. Its architecture features a Prompt Embedder and a Data Embedder, enabling an effective fusion of textual prompts and numerical inputs within the LLMs framework. The Semantic Augmenter within the Data Embedder translates temporal data into a format that the LLMs can comprehend, enabling it to extract latent features and improve prediction accuracy. The empirical evaluations conducted on wind farm data from three Chinese provinces demonstrate that M2WLLM consistently outperforms existing methods, such as GPT4TS, across various datasets and prediction horizons. The results highlight LLMs' ability to enhance accuracy and robustness in ultra-short-term forecasting and showcase their strong few-shot learning capabilities.

Paperid: 7705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24792.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional diagnostic methods like colonoscopy are invasive yet critical tools necessary for accurately diagnosing colorectal cancer (CRC). Detection of CRC at early stages is crucial for increasing patient survival rates. However, colonoscopy is dependent on obtaining adequate and high-quality endoscopic images. Prolonged invasive procedures are inherently risky for patients, while suboptimal or insufficient images hamper diagnostic accuracy. These images, typically derived from video frames, often exhibit similar patterns, posing challenges in discrimination. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Deep Learning network built on a Few-Shot Learning architecture, which includes a tailored feature extractor, task interpolation, relational embedding, and a bi-level routing attention mechanism. The Few-Shot Learning paradigm enables our model to rapidly adapt to unseen fine-grained endoscopic image patterns, and the task interpolation augments the insufficient images artificially from varied instrument viewpoints. Our relational embedding approach discerns critical intra-image features and captures inter-image transitions between consecutive endoscopic frames, overcoming the limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The integration of a light-weight attention mechanism ensures a concentrated analysis of pertinent image regions. By training on diverse datasets, the model's generalizability and robustness are notably improved for handling endoscopic images. Evaluated on Kvasir dataset, our model demonstrated superior performance, achieving an accuracy of 90.1\%, precision of 0.845, recall of 0.942, and an F1 score of 0.891. This surpasses current state-of-the-art methods, presenting a promising solution to the challenges of invasive colonoscopy by optimizing CRC detection through advanced image analysis.

Paperid: 7706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22293.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in multilingual machine translation, sometimes even outperforming traditional neural systems. However, previous research has highlighted the challenges of using LLMs, particularly with prompt engineering, for low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce Fragment-Shot Prompting, a novel in-context learning method that segments input and retrieves translation examples based on syntactic coverage, along with Pivoted Fragment-Shot, an extension that enables translation without direct parallel data. We evaluate these methods using GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, o1-mini, LLaMA-3.3, and DeepSeek-R1 for translation between Italian and two Ladin variants, revealing three key findings: (1) Fragment-Shot Prompting is effective for translating into and between the studied low-resource languages, with syntactic coverage positively correlating with translation quality; (2) Models with stronger reasoning abilities make more effective use of retrieved knowledge, generally produce better translations, and enable Pivoted Fragment-Shot to significantly improve translation quality between the Ladin variants; and (3) prompt engineering offers limited, if any, improvements when translating from a low-resource to a high-resource language, where zero-shot prompting already yields satisfactory results. We publicly release our code and the retrieval corpora.

Paperid: 7707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22079.pdf

Abstract:
The development of large-scale image-text pair datasets has significantly advanced self-supervised learning in Vision-Language Processing (VLP). However, directly applying general-domain architectures such as CLIP to medical data presents challenges, particularly in handling negations and addressing the inherent data imbalance of medical datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that integrates clinically-enhanced dynamic soft labels and medical graphical alignment, thereby improving clinical comprehension and the applicability of contrastive loss in medical contexts. Furthermore, we introduce negation-based hard negatives to deepen the model's understanding of the complexities of clinical language. Our approach is easily integrated into the medical CLIP training pipeline and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, including zero-shot, fine-tuned classification, and report retrieval. To comprehensively evaluate our model's capacity for understanding clinical language, we introduce CXR-Align, a benchmark uniquely designed to evaluate the understanding of negation and clinical information within chest X-ray (CXR) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods are straightforward to implement and generalize effectively across contrastive learning frameworks, enhancing medical VLP capabilities and advancing clinical language understanding in medical imaging.

Paperid: 7708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20963.pdf

Abstract:
The increasing volume of online discussions requires advanced automatic content moderation to maintain responsible discourse. While hate speech detection on social media is well-studied, research on German-language newspaper forums remains limited. Existing studies often neglect platform-specific context, such as user history and article themes. This paper addresses this gap by developing and evaluating binary classification models for automatic content moderation in German newspaper forums, incorporating contextual information. Using LSTM, CNN, and ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo, and leveraging the One Million Posts Corpus from the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, we assess the impact of context-aware models. Results show that CNN and LSTM models benefit from contextual information and perform competitively with state-of-the-art approaches. In contrast, ChatGPT's zero-shot classification does not improve with added context and underperforms.

Paperid: 7709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20872.pdf

Abstract:
Large transformer models have been shown to be capable of performing in-context learning. By using examples in a prompt as well as a query, they are capable of performing tasks such as few-shot, one-shot, or zero-shot learning to output the corresponding answer to this query. One area of interest to us is that these transformer models have been shown to be capable of learning the general class of certain functions, such as linear functions and small 2-layer neural networks, on random data (Garg et al, 2023). We aim to extend this to the image space to analyze their capability to in-context learn more complex functions on the image space, such as convolutional neural networks and other methods.

Paperid: 7710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20149.pdf

Abstract:
This paper focuses on using few-shot learning to improve the accuracy of classifying OCT diagnosis images with major and rare classes. We used the GAN-based augmentation strategy as a baseline and introduced several novel methods to further enhance our model. The proposed strategy contains U-GAT-IT for improving the generative part and uses the data balance technique to narrow down the skew of accuracy between all categories. The best model obtained was built with CBAM attention mechanism and fine-tuned InceptionV3, and achieved an overall accuracy of 97.85%, representing a significant improvement over the original baseline.

Paperid: 7711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20032.pdf

Abstract:
Tactile sensing provides local essential information that is complementary to visual perception, such as texture, compliance, and force. Despite recent advances in visuotactile representation learning, challenges remain in fusing these modalities and generalizing across tasks and environments without heavy reliance on pre-trained vision-language models. Moreover, existing methods do not study positional encodings, thereby overlooking the multi-scale spatial reasoning needed to capture fine-grained visuotactile correlations. We introduce ViTaPEs, a transformer-based framework that robustly integrates visual and tactile input data to learn task-agnostic representations for visuotactile perception. Our approach exploits a novel multi-scale positional encoding scheme to capture intra-modal structures, while simultaneously modeling cross-modal cues. Unlike prior work, we provide provable guarantees in visuotactile fusion, showing that our encodings are injective, rigid-motion-equivariant, and information-preserving, validating these properties empirically. Experiments on multiple large-scale real-world datasets show that ViTaPEs not only surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across various recognition tasks but also demonstrates zero-shot generalization to unseen, out-of-domain scenarios. We further demonstrate the transfer-learning strength of ViTaPEs in a robotic grasping task, where it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predicting grasp success. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/vitapes

Paperid: 7712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19384.pdf

Abstract:
We present the gradual style adaptor TTS (GSA-TTS) with a novel style encoder that gradually encodes speaking styles from an acoustic reference for zero-shot speech synthesis. GSA first captures the local style of each semantic sound unit. Then the local styles are combined by self-attention to obtain a global style condition. This semantic and hierarchical encoding strategy provides a robust and rich style representation for an acoustic model. We test GSA-TTS on unseen speakers and obtain promising results regarding naturalness, speaker similarity, and intelligibility. Additionally, we explore the potential of GSA in terms of interpretability and controllability, which stems from its hierarchical structure.

Paperid: 7713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18363.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries, and recent progress with large language models (LLMs) has driven substantial improvements in this task. Schema linking remains a critical component in Text-to-SQL systems, reducing prompt size for models with narrow context windows and sharpening model focus even when the entire schema fits. We present a zero-shot, training-free schema linking approach that first constructs a schema graph based on foreign key relations, then uses a single prompt to Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract source and destination tables from the user query, followed by applying classical path-finding algorithms and post-processing to identify the optimal sequence of tables and columns that should be joined, enabling the LLM to generate more accurate SQL queries. Despite being simple, cost-effective, and highly scalable, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the BIRD benchmark, outperforming previous specialized, fine-tuned, and complex multi-step LLM-based approaches. We conduct detailed ablation studies to examine the precision-recall trade-off in our framework. Additionally, we evaluate the execution accuracy of our schema filtering method compared to other approaches across various model sizes.

Paperid: 7714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18241.pdf

Abstract:
Intent classification is an important component of a functional Information Retrieval ecosystem. Many current approaches to intent classification, typically framed as a classification problem, can be problematic as intents are often hard to define and thus data can be difficult and expensive to annotate. The problem is exacerbated when we need to extend the intent classification system to support multiple and in particular low-resource languages. To address this, we propose casting intent classification as a query similarity search problem - we use previous example queries to define an intent, and a query similarity method to classify an incoming query based on the labels of its most similar queries in latent space. With the proposed approach, we are able to achieve reasonable intent classification performance for queries in low-resource languages in a zero-shot setting.

Paperid: 7715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18039.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models like CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) have revolutionized vision-language tasks by enabling zero-shot and few-shot learning through cross-modal alignment. However, their computational complexity and large memory footprint make them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, such as in-car cameras used for image collection and real-time processing. To address this challenge, we propose Clip4Retrofit, an efficient model distillation framework that enables real-time image labeling on edge devices. The framework is deployed on the Retrofit camera, a cost-effective edge device retrofitted into thousands of vehicles, despite strict limitations on compute performance and memory. Our approach distills the knowledge of the CLIP model into a lightweight student model, combining EfficientNet-B3 with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) projection heads to preserve cross-modal alignment while significantly reducing computational requirements. We demonstrate that our distilled model achieves a balance between efficiency and performance, making it ideal for deployment in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show that Clip4Retrofit can perform real-time image labeling and object identification on edge devices with limited resources, offering a practical solution for applications such as autonomous driving and retrofitting existing systems. This work bridges the gap between state-of-the-art vision-language models and their deployment in resource-constrained environments, paving the way for broader adoption of foundation models in edge computing.

Paperid: 7716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18019.pdf

Abstract:
Like any other discipline, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted software engineering by helping developers generate the required artifacts across various phases of software development. This paper presents a case study comparing the performance of popular LLMs GPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek in generating functional specifications that include use cases, business rules, and collaborative workflows for a web application, the Mess Management System. The study evaluated the quality of LLM generated use cases, business rules, and collaborative workflows in terms of their syntactic and semantic correctness, consistency, non ambiguity, and completeness compared to the reference specifications against the zero-shot prompted problem statement. Our results suggested that all four LLMs can specify syntactically and semantically correct, mostly non-ambiguous artifacts. Still, they may be inconsistent at times and may differ significantly in the completeness of the generated specification. Claude and Gemini generated all the reference use cases, with Claude achieving the most complete but somewhat redundant use case specifications. Similar results were obtained for specifying workflows. However, all four LLMs struggled to generate relevant Business Rules, with DeepSeek generating the most reference rules but with less completeness. Overall, Claude generated more complete specification artifacts, while Gemini was more precise in the specifications it generated.

Paperid: 7717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17265.pdf

Abstract:
Rare diseases, including Inborn Errors of Metabolism (IEM), pose significant diagnostic challenges. Case reports serve as key but computationally underutilized resources to inform diagnosis. Clinical dense information extraction refers to organizing medical information into structured predefined categories. Large Language Models (LLMs) may enable scalable information extraction from case reports but are rarely evaluated for this task. We introduce CaseReportBench, an expert-annotated dataset for dense information extraction of case reports, focusing on IEMs. Using this dataset, we assess various models and prompting strategies, introducing novel approaches such as category-specific prompting and subheading-filtered data integration. Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting offers little advantage over standard zero-shot prompting. Category-specific prompting improves alignment with the benchmark. The open-source model Qwen2.5-7B outperforms GPT-4o for this task. Our clinician evaluations show that LLMs can extract clinically relevant details from case reports, supporting rare disease diagnosis and management. We also highlight areas for improvement, such as LLMs' limitations in recognizing negative findings important for differential diagnosis. This work advances LLM-driven clinical natural language processing and paves the way for scalable medical AI applications.

Paperid: 7718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17156.pdf

Abstract:
The introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications by enabling more advanced analysis of customer personas. At Volvo Construction Equipment (VCE), customer personas have traditionally been developed through qualitative methods, which are time-consuming and lack scalability. The main objective of this paper is to generate synthetic customer personas and integrate them into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot to support decision-making in business processes. To this end, we first focus on developing a persona-based RAG chatbot integrated with verified personas. Next, synthetic personas are generated using Few-Shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting techniques and evaluated based on completeness, relevance, and consistency using McNemar's test. In the final step, the chatbot's knowledge base is augmented with synthetic personas and additional segment information to assess improvements in response accuracy and practical utility. Key findings indicate that Few-Shot prompting outperformed CoT in generating more complete personas, while CoT demonstrated greater efficiency in terms of response time and token usage. After augmenting the knowledge base, the average accuracy rating of the chatbot increased from 5.88 to 6.42 on a 10-point scale, and 81.82% of participants found the updated system useful in business contexts.

Paperid: 7719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17125.pdf

Abstract:
Effective evaluation of web data record extraction methods is crucial, yet hampered by static, domain-specific benchmarks and opaque scoring practices. This makes fair comparison between traditional algorithmic techniques, which rely on structural heuristics, and Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches, offering zero-shot extraction across diverse layouts, particularly challenging. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a concrete evaluation framework. Our framework systematically generates evaluation datasets from arbitrary MHTML snapshots, annotates XPath-based supervision labels, and employs structure-aware metrics for consistent scoring, specifically preventing text hallucination and allowing only for the assessment of positional hallucination. It also incorporates preprocessing strategies to optimize input for LLMs while preserving DOM semantics: HTML slimming, Hierarchical JSON, and Flat JSON. Additionally, we created a publicly available synthetic dataset by transforming DOM structures and modifying content. We benchmark deterministic heuristic algorithms and off-the-shelf LLMs across these multiple input formats. Our benchmarking shows that Flat JSON input enables LLMs to achieve superior extraction accuracy (F1 score of 0.9567) and minimal hallucination compared to other input formats like Slimmed HTML and Hierarchical JSON. We establish a standardized foundation for rigorous benchmarking, paving the way for the next principled advancements in web data record extraction.

Paperid: 7720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17119.pdf

Abstract:
Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) for early mental health detection, such as depression, often optimized with machine-generated data. However, their detection may be subject to unknown weaknesses. Meanwhile, quality control has not been applied to these generated corpora besides limited human verifications. Our goal is to systematically evaluate LLM reasoning and reveal potential weaknesses. To this end, we first provide a systematic evaluation of the reasoning over machine-generated detection and interpretation. Then we use the models' reasoning abilities to explore mitigation strategies for enhanced performance. Specifically, we do the following: A. Design an LLM instruction strategy that allows for systematic analysis of the detection by breaking down the task into several subtasks. B. Design contrastive few-shot and chain-of-thought prompts by selecting typical positive and negative examples of detection reasoning. C. Perform human annotation for the subtasks identified in the first step and evaluate the performance. D. Identify human-preferred detection with desired logical reasoning from the few-shot generation and use them to explore different optimization strategies. We conducted extensive comparisons on the DepTweet dataset across the following subtasks: 1. identifying whether the speaker is describing their own depression; 2. accurately detecting the presence of PHQ-9 symptoms, and 3. finally, detecting depression. Human verification of statistical outliers shows that LLMs demonstrate greater accuracy in analyzing and detecting explicit language of depression as opposed to implicit expressions of depression. Two optimization methods are used for performance enhancement and reduction of the statistic bias: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO). Notably, the DPO approach achieves significant performance improvement.

Paperid: 7721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15211.pdf

Abstract:
Training a universal controller for robots with different morphologies is a promising research trend, since it can significantly enhance the robustness and resilience of the robotic system. However, diverse morphologies can yield different dimensions of state space and action space, making it difficult to comply with traditional policy networks. Existing methods address this issue by modularizing the robot configuration, while do not adequately extract and utilize the overall morphological information, which has been proven crucial for training a universal controller. To this end, we propose GCNT, a morphology-agnostic policy network based on improved Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Transformer. It exploits the fact that GCN and Transformer can handle arbitrary number of modules to achieve compatibility with diverse morphologies. Our key insight is that the GCN is able to efficiently extract morphology information of robots, while Transformer ensures that it is fully utilized by allowing each node of the robot to communicate this information directly. Experimental results show that our method can generate resilient locomotion behaviors for robots with different configurations, including zero-shot generalization to robot morphologies not seen during training. In particular, GCNT achieved the best performance on 8 tasks in the 2 standard benchmarks.

Paperid: 7722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14852.pdf

Abstract:
EasyMath is a compact benchmark for practical math reasoning in small language models. It covers thirteen categories, from basic arithmetic and order of operations to word problems, algebraic expressions, edge cases, and omits specialist topics. We tested 23 models (14M to 4B parameters) using exact, numerical, and symbolic checks on free-form answers in a zero-shot setting. Accuracy rises with size and training, chain-of-thought adds modest gains, and consistency improves at scale.

Paperid: 7723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14848.pdf

Abstract:
We present MAATS, a Multi Agent Automated Translation System that leverages the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework as a fine-grained signal for error detection and refinement. MAATS employs multiple specialized AI agents, each focused on a distinct MQM category (e.g., Accuracy, Fluency, Style, Terminology), followed by a synthesis agent that integrates the annotations to iteratively refine translations. This design contrasts with conventional single-agent methods that rely on self-correction. Evaluated across diverse language pairs and Large Language Models (LLMs), MAATS outperforms zero-shot and single-agent baselines with statistically significant gains in both automatic metrics and human assessments. It excels particularly in semantic accuracy, locale adaptation, and linguistically distant language pairs. Qualitative analysis highlights its strengths in multi-layered error diagnosis, omission detection across perspectives, and context-aware refinement. By aligning modular agent roles with interpretable MQM dimensions, MAATS narrows the gap between black-box LLMs and human translation workflows, shifting focus from surface fluency to deeper semantic and contextual fidelity.

Paperid: 7724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14726.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image captioning is a challenging task that requires generating clinically accurate and semantically meaningful descriptions of radiology images. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) such as BLIP, BLIP2, Gemini and ViT-GPT2 show strong performance on natural image datasets, they often produce generic or imprecise captions when applied to specialized medical domains. In this project, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning the BLIP model on the ROCO dataset for improved radiology captioning. We compare the fine-tuned BLIP against its zero-shot version, BLIP-2 base, BLIP-2 Instruct and a ViT-GPT2 transformer baseline. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning on BLIP significantly improves performance across both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics. We also visualize decoder cross-attention maps to assess interpretability and conduct an ablation study to evaluate the contributions of encoder-only and decoder-only fine-tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of targeted adaptation for medical applications and suggest that decoder-only fine-tuning (encoder-frozen) offers a strong performance baseline with 5% lower training time than full fine-tuning, while full model fine-tuning still yields the best results overall.

Paperid: 7725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14707.pdf

Abstract:
We present CrypticBio, the largest publicly available multimodal dataset of visually confusing species, specifically curated to support the development of AI models in the context of biodiversity applications. Visually confusing or cryptic species are groups of two or more taxa that are nearly indistinguishable based on visual characteristics alone. While much existing work addresses taxonomic identification in a broad sense, datasets that directly address the morphological confusion of cryptic species are small, manually curated, and target only a single taxon. Thus, the challenge of identifying such subtle differences in a wide range of taxa remains unaddressed. Curated from real-world trends in species misidentification among community annotators of iNaturalist, CrypticBio contains 52K unique cryptic groups spanning 67K species, represented in 166 million images. Rich research-grade image annotations--including scientific, multicultural, and multilingual species terminology, hierarchical taxonomy, spatiotemporal context, and associated cryptic groups--address multimodal AI in biodiversity research. For easy dataset curation, we provide an open-source pipeline CrypticBio-Curate. The multimodal nature of the dataset beyond vision-language arises from the integration of geographical and temporal data as complementary cues to identifying cryptic species. To highlight the importance of the dataset, we benchmark a suite of state-of-the-art foundation models across CrypticBio subsets of common, unseen, endangered, and invasive species, and demonstrate the substantial impact of geographical context on vision-language zero-shot learning for cryptic species. By introducing CrypticBio, we aim to catalyze progress toward real-world-ready biodiversity AI models capable of handling the nuanced challenges of species ambiguity.

Paperid: 7726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13908.pdf

Abstract:
Cross-lingual transfer has become a crucial aspect of multilingual NLP, as it allows for models trained on resource-rich languages to be applied to low-resource languages more effectively. Recently massively multilingual pre-trained language models (e.g., mBERT, XLM-R) demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer capabilities[14] [13]. This paper investigates cross-linguistic transfer through the lens of language families and morphology. Investigating how language family proximity and morphological similarity affect performance across NLP tasks. We further discuss our results and how it relates to findings from recent literature. Overall, we compare multilingual model performance and review how linguistic distance metrics correlate with transfer outcomes. We also look into emerging approaches that integrate typological and morphological information into model pre-training to improve transfer to diverse languages[18] [19].

Paperid: 7727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13306.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot cross-modal retrieval focuses on learning cross-modal representations with limited training samples, enabling the model to handle unseen classes during inference. Unlike traditional cross-modal retrieval tasks, which assume that both training and testing data share the same class distribution, few-shot retrieval involves data with sparse representations across modalities. Existing methods often fail to adequately model the multi-peak distribution of few-shot cross-modal data, resulting in two main biases in the latent semantic space: intra-modal bias, where sparse samples fail to capture intra-class diversity, and inter-modal bias, where misalignments between image and text distributions exacerbate the semantic gap. These biases hinder retrieval accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel method, GCRDP, for few-shot cross-modal retrieval. This approach effectively captures the complex multi-peak distribution of data using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and incorporates a multi-positive sample contrastive learning mechanism for comprehensive feature modeling. Additionally, we introduce a new strategy for cross-modal semantic alignment, which constrains the relative distances between image and text feature distributions, thereby improving the accuracy of cross-modal representations. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior performance over six state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 7728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12395.pdf

Abstract:
Image Generation models are a trending topic nowadays, with many people utilizing Artificial Intelligence models in order to generate images. There are many such models which, given a prompt of a text, will generate an image which depicts said prompt. There are many image generation models, such as Latent Diffusion Models, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models, Generative Adversarial Networks and many more. When generating images, these models can generate sensitive image data, which can be threatening to privacy or may violate copyright laws of private entities. Machine unlearning aims at removing the influence of specific data subsets from the trained models and in the case of image generation models, remove the influence of a concept such that the model is unable to generate said images of the concept when prompted. Conventional retraining of the model can take upto days, hence fast algorithms are the need of the hour. In this paper we propose an algorithm that aims to remove the influence of concepts in diffusion models through updating the gradients of the final layers of the text encoders. Using a weighted loss function, we utilize backpropagation in order to update the weights of the final layers of the Text Encoder componet of the Stable Diffusion Model, removing influence of the concept from the text-image embedding space, such that when prompted, the result is an image not containing the concept. The weighted loss function makes use of Textual Inversion and Low-Rank Adaptation.We perform our experiments on Latent Diffusion Models, namely the Stable Diffusion v2 model, with an average concept unlearning runtime of 50 seconds using 4-5 images.

Paperid: 7729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12238.pdf

Abstract:
The memorization of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) by large language models (LLMs) poses growing privacy risks as models scale and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing efforts to study sensitive and PII data memorization and develop mitigation strategies are hampered by the absence of comprehensive, realistic, and ethically sourced datasets reflecting the diversity of sensitive information found on the web. We introduce PANORAMA - Profile-based Assemblage for Naturalistic Online Representation and Attribute Memorization Analysis, a large-scale synthetic corpus of 384,789 samples derived from 9,674 synthetic profiles designed to closely emulate the distribution, variety, and context of PII and sensitive data as it naturally occurs in online environments. Our data generation pipeline begins with the construction of internally consistent, multi-attribute human profiles using constrained selection to reflect real-world demographics such as education, health attributes, financial status, etc. Using a combination of zero-shot prompting and OpenAI o3-mini, we generate diverse content types - including wiki-style articles, social media posts, forum discussions, online reviews, comments, and marketplace listings - each embedding realistic, contextually appropriate PII and other sensitive information. We validate the utility of PANORAMA by fine-tuning the Mistral-7B model on 1x, 5x, 10x, and 25x data replication rates with a subset of data and measure PII memorization rates - revealing not only consistent increases with repetition but also variation across content types, highlighting PANORAMA's ability to model how memorization risks differ by context. Our dataset and code are publicly available, providing a much-needed resource for privacy risk assessment, model auditing, and the development of privacy-preserving LLMs.

Paperid: 7730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11565.pdf

Abstract:
While Large Language Models have shown promise in cybersecurity applications, their effectiveness in identifying security threats within cloud deployments remains unexplored. This paper introduces AWS Cloud Security Engineering Eval, a novel dataset for evaluating LLMs cloud security threat modeling capabilities. ACSE-Eval contains 100 production grade AWS deployment scenarios, each featuring detailed architectural specifications, Infrastructure as Code implementations, documented security vulnerabilities, and associated threat modeling parameters. Our dataset enables systemic assessment of LLMs abilities to identify security risks, analyze attack vectors, and propose mitigation strategies in cloud environments. Our evaluations on ACSE-Eval demonstrate that GPT 4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro excel at threat identification, with Gemini 2.5 Pro performing optimally in 0-shot scenarios and GPT 4.1 showing superior results in few-shot settings. While GPT 4.1 maintains a slight overall performance advantage, Claude 3.7 Sonnet generates the most semantically sophisticated threat models but struggles with threat categorization and generalization. To promote reproducibility and advance research in automated cybersecurity threat analysis, we open-source our dataset, evaluation metrics, and methodologies.

Paperid: 7731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10973.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large-scale offline training have demonstrated the potential of generalist policy learning for complex robotic tasks. However, applying these principles to legged locomotion remains a challenge due to continuous dynamics and the need for real-time adaptation across diverse terrains and robot morphologies. In this work, we propose GRoQ-LoCO, a scalable, attention-based framework that learns a single generalist locomotion policy across multiple quadruped robots and terrains, relying solely on offline datasets. Our approach leverages expert demonstrations from two distinct locomotion behaviors - stair traversal (non-periodic gaits) and flat terrain traversal (periodic gaits) - collected across multiple quadruped robots, to train a generalist model that enables behavior fusion. Crucially, our framework operates solely on proprioceptive data from all robots without incorporating any robot-specific encodings. The policy is directly deployable on an Intel i7 nuc, producing low-latency control outputs without any test-time optimization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate zero-shot transfer across highly diverse quadruped robots and terrains, including hardware deployment on the Unitree Go1, a commercially available 12kg robot. Notably, we evaluate challenging cross-robot training setups where different locomotion skills are unevenly distributed across robots, yet observe successful transfer of both flat walking and stair traversal behaviors to all robots at test time. We also show preliminary walking on Stoch 5, a 70kg quadruped, on flat and outdoor terrains without requiring any fine tuning. These results demonstrate the potential of offline, data-driven learning to generalize locomotion across diverse quadruped morphologies and behaviors.

Paperid: 7732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10784.pdf

Abstract:
Detecting potential obstacles in railway environments is critical for preventing serious accidents. Identifying a broad range of obstacle categories under complex conditions requires large-scale datasets with precisely annotated, high-quality images. However, existing publicly available datasets fail to meet these requirements, thereby hindering progress in railway safety research. To address this gap, we introduce SynRailObs, a high-fidelity synthetic dataset designed to represent a diverse range of weather conditions and geographical features. Furthermore, diffusion models are employed to generate rare and difficult-to-capture obstacles that are typically challenging to obtain in real-world scenarios. To evaluate the effectiveness of SynRailObs, we perform experiments in real-world railway environments, testing on both ballasted and ballastless tracks across various weather conditions. The results demonstrate that SynRailObs holds substantial potential for advancing obstacle detection in railway safety applications. Models trained on this dataset show consistent performance across different distances and environmental conditions. Moreover, the model trained on SynRailObs exhibits zero-shot capabilities, which are essential for applications in security-sensitive domains. The data is available in https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/qiushi910/synrailobs.

Paperid: 7733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10708.pdf

Abstract:
Rust is a strong contender for a memory-safe alternative to C as a "systems" programming language, but porting the vast amount of existing C code to Rust is a daunting task. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate the transpilation of C code to idiomatic Rust, while ensuring that the generated code mitigates any memory-related vulnerabilities present in the original code. To that end, we present the design and implementation of SafeTrans, a framework that uses LLMs to i) transpile C code into Rust and ii) iteratively fix any compilation and runtime errors in the resulting code. A key novelty of our approach is the introduction of a few-shot guided repair technique for translation errors, which provides contextual information and example code snippets for specific error types, guiding the LLM toward the correct solution. Another novel aspect of our work is the evaluation of the security implications of the transpilation process, i.e., whether potential vulnerabilities in the original C code have been properly addressed in the translated Rust code. We experimentally evaluated SafeTrans with six leading LLMs and a set of 2,653 C programs accompanied by comprehensive unit tests, which were used for validating the correctness of the translated code. Our results show that our iterative repair strategy improves the rate of successful translations from 54% to 80% for the best-performing LLM (GPT-4o), and that all types of identified vulnerabilities in the original C code are effectively mitigated in the translated Rust code.

Paperid: 7734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10651.pdf

Abstract:
The learning dynamics of biological brains and artificial neural networks are of interest to both neuroscience and machine learning. A key difference between them is that neural networks are often trained from a randomly initialized state whereas each brain is the product of generations of evolutionary optimization, yielding innate structures that enable few-shot learning and inbuilt reflexes. Artificial neural networks, by contrast, require non-ethological quantities of training data to attain comparable performance. To investigate the effect of evolutionary optimization on the learning dynamics of neural networks, we combined algorithms simulating natural selection and online learning to produce a method for evolutionarily conditioning artificial neural networks, and applied it to both reinforcement and supervised learning contexts. We found the evolutionary conditioning algorithm, by itself, performs comparably to an unoptimized baseline. However, evolutionarily conditioned networks show signs of unique and latent learning dynamics, and can be rapidly fine-tuned to optimal performance. These results suggest evolution constitutes an inductive bias that tunes neural systems to enable rapid learning.

Paperid: 7735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10360.pdf

Abstract:
There are now a multitude of AI-scribing solutions for healthcare promising the utilization of large language models for ambient documentation. However, these AI scribes still rely on one-shot, or few-shot prompts for generating notes after the consultation has ended, employing little to no reasoning. This risks long notes with an increase in hallucinations, misrepresentation of the intent of the clinician, and reliance on the proofreading of the clinician to catch errors. A dangerous combination for patient safety if vigilance is compromised by workload and fatigue. In this paper, we introduce a method for extracting salient clinical information in real-time alongside the healthcare consultation, denoted Facts, and use that information recursively to generate the final note. The FactsR method results in more accurate and concise notes by placing the clinician-in-the-loop of note generation, while opening up new use cases within real-time decision support.

Paperid: 7736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10260.pdf

Abstract:
In the era of increasingly sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) systems, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential for diverse applications, including tasks requiring nuanced textual understanding and contextual reasoning. This study investigates the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art LLMs - GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLAMA3, Mistral 7B, and Claude-2 - for zero-shot and few-shot annotation of a complex textual dataset comprising social media posts in Russian and Ukrainian. Specifically, the focus is on the binary classification task of identifying references to human rights violations within the dataset. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, their annotations are compared against a gold standard set of human double-annotated labels across 1000 samples. The analysis includes assessing annotation performance under different prompting conditions, with prompts provided in both English and Russian. Additionally, the study explores the unique patterns of errors and disagreements exhibited by each model, offering insights into their strengths, limitations, and cross-linguistic adaptability. By juxtaposing LLM outputs with human annotations, this research contributes to understanding the reliability and applicability of LLMs for sensitive, domain-specific tasks in multilingual contexts. It also sheds light on how language models handle inherently subjective and context-dependent judgments, a critical consideration for their deployment in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 7737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09738.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained language models (LLMs) are often constrained by their fixed tokenization schemes, leading to inefficiencies and performance limitations, particularly for multilingual or specialized applications. This tokenizer lock-in presents significant challenges. standard methods to overcome this often require prohibitive computational resources. Although tokenizer replacement with heuristic initialization aims to reduce this burden, existing methods often require exhaustive residual fine-tuning and still may not fully preserve semantic nuances or adequately address the underlying compression inefficiencies. Our framework introduces two innovations: first, Tokenadapt, a model-agnostic tokenizer transplantation method, and second, novel pre-tokenization learning for multi-word Supertokens to enhance compression and reduce fragmentation. Tokenadapt initializes new unique token embeddings via a hybrid heuristic that combines two methods: a local estimate based on subword decomposition using the old tokenizer, and a global estimate utilizing the top-k semantically similar tokens from the original vocabulary. This methodology aims to preserve semantics while significantly minimizing retraining requirements. Empirical investigations validate both contributions: the transplantation heuristic successfully initializes unique tokens, markedly outperforming conventional baselines and sophisticated methods including Transtokenizer and ReTok, while our Supertokens achieve notable compression gains. Our zero-shot perplexity results demonstrate that the TokenAdapt hybrid initialization consistently yields lower perplexity ratios compared to both ReTok and TransTokenizer baselines across different base models and newly trained target tokenizers. TokenAdapt typically reduced the overall perplexity ratio significantly compared to ReTok, yielding at least a 2-fold improvement in these aggregate scores.

Paperid: 7738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09087.pdf

Abstract:
Given usefulness of protein language models (LMs) in structure and functional inference, RNA LMs have received increased attentions in the last few years. However, these RNA models are often not compared against the same standard. Here, we divided RNA LMs into three classes (pretrained on multiple RNA types (especially noncoding RNAs), specific-purpose RNAs, and LMs that unify RNA with DNA or proteins or both) and compared 13 RNA LMs along with 3 DNA and 1 protein LMs as controls in zero-shot prediction of RNA secondary structure and functional classification. Results shows that the models doing well on secondary structure prediction often perform worse in function classification or vice versa, suggesting that more balanced unsupervised training is needed.

Paperid: 7739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09005.pdf

Abstract:
It remains debated how well any LM understands natural language or generates reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and function proposed by linguists. We here focus on a particular such relationship established in recent work: English speakers' judgments about the information structure of canonical sentences predicts independently collected acceptability ratings on corresponding 'long distance dependency' [LDD] constructions, across a wide array of base constructions and multiple types of LDDs. To determine whether any LM captures this relationship, we probe GPT-4 on the same tasks used with humans and new extensions.Results reveal reliable metalinguistic skill on the information structure and acceptability tasks, replicating a striking interaction between the two, despite the zero-shot, explicit nature of the tasks, and little to no chance of contamination [Studies 1a, 1b]. Study 2 manipulates the information structure of base sentences and confirms a causal relationship: increasing the prominence of a constituent in a context sentence increases the subsequent acceptability ratings on an LDD construction. The findings suggest a tight relationship between natural and GPT-4 generated English, and between information structure and syntax, which begs for further exploration.

Paperid: 7740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08798.pdf

Abstract:
The application of AI in oncology has been limited by its reliance on large, annotated datasets and the need for retraining models for domain-specific diagnostic tasks. Taking heed of these limitations, we investigated in-context learning as a pragmatic alternative to model retraining by allowing models to adapt to new diagnostic tasks using only a few labeled examples at inference, without the need for retraining. Using four vision-language models (VLMs)-Paligemma, CLIP, ALIGN and GPT-4o, we evaluated the performance across three oncology datasets: MHIST, PatchCamelyon and HAM10000. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare the performance of multiple VLMs on different oncology classification tasks. Without any parameter updates, all models showed significant gains with few-shot prompting, with GPT-4o reaching an F1 score of 0.81 in binary classification and 0.60 in multi-class classification settings. While these results remain below the ceiling of fully fine-tuned systems, they highlight the potential of ICL to approximate task-specific behavior using only a handful of examples, reflecting how clinicians often reason from prior cases. Notably, open-source models like Paligemma and CLIP demonstrated competitive gains despite their smaller size, suggesting feasibility for deployment in computing constrained clinical environments. Overall, these findings highlight the potential of ICL as a practical solution in oncology, particularly for rare cancers and resource-limited contexts where fine-tuning is infeasible and annotated data is difficult to obtain.

Paperid: 7741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07711.pdf

Abstract:
We are in the midst of the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, where quantum computers are limited by noisy gates, some of which are more error-prone than others and can render the final computation incomprehensible. Quantum circuit compilation algorithms attempt to minimize these noisy gates when mapping quantum algorithms onto quantum hardware but face computational challenges that restrict their application to circuits with no more than 5-6 qubits, necessitating the need to partition large circuits before the application of noisy quantum gate minimization algorithms. The existing generation of these algorithms is heuristic in nature and does not account for downstream gate minimization tasks. Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to change this and help improve quantum circuit partitions. This paper investigates the use of LLMs, such as Llama and Mistral, for partitioning quantum circuits by capitalizing on their abilities to understand and generate code, including QASM. Specifically, we teach LLMs to partition circuits using the quick partition approach of the Berkeley Quantum Synthesis Toolkit. Through experimental evaluations, we show that careful fine-tuning of open source LLMs enables us to obtain an accuracy of 53.4% for the partition task while over-the-shelf LLMs are unable to correctly partition circuits, using standard 1-shot and few-shot training approaches.

Paperid: 7742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05494.pdf

Abstract:
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires companies to prove their products do not contribute to deforestation, creating a critical demand for precise, asset-level environmental impact data. Current databases lack the necessary detail, relying heavily on broad financial metrics and manual data collection, which limits regulatory compliance and accurate environmental modeling. This study presents an automated, end-to-end data extraction pipeline that uses LLMs to create, clean, and validate structured databases, specifically targeting sectors with a high risk of deforestation. The pipeline introduces Instructional, Role-Based, Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (IRZ-CoT) prompting to enhance data extraction accuracy and a Retrieval-Augmented Validation (RAV) process that integrates real-time web searches for improved data reliability. Applied to SEC EDGAR filings in the Mining, Oil & Gas, and Utilities sectors, the pipeline demonstrates significant improvements over traditional zero-shot prompting approaches, particularly in extraction accuracy and validation coverage. This work advances NLP-driven automation for regulatory compliance, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and ESG, with broad sectoral applicability.

Paperid: 7743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04634.pdf

Abstract:
The recent progress of using graph based encoding of crystal structures for high throughput material property prediction has been quite successful. However, using a single modality model prevents us from exploiting the advantages of an enhanced features space by combining different representations. Specifically, pre-trained Large language models(LLMs) can encode a large amount of knowledge which is beneficial for training of models. Moreover, the graph encoder is able to learn the local features while the text encoder is able to learn global information such as space group and crystal symmetry. In this work, we propose Material Multi-Modal Fusion(MatMMFuse), a fusion based model which uses a multi-head attention mechanism for the combination of structure aware embedding from the Crystal Graph Convolution Network (CGCNN) and text embeddings from the SciBERT model. We train our model in an end-to-end framework using data from the Materials Project Dataset. We show that our proposed model shows an improvement compared to the vanilla CGCNN and SciBERT model for all four key properties: formation energy, band gap, energy above hull and fermi energy. Specifically, we observe an improvement of 40% compared to the vanilla CGCNN model and 68% compared to the SciBERT model for predicting the formation energy per atom. Importantly, we demonstrate the zero shot performance of the trained model on small curated datasets of Perovskites, Chalcogenides and the Jarvis Dataset. The results show that the proposed model exhibits better zero shot performance than the individual plain vanilla CGCNN and SciBERT model. This enables researchers to deploy the model for specialized industrial applications where collection of training data is prohibitively expensive.

Paperid: 7744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04146.pdf

Abstract:
Existing large language models (LLMs) are advancing rapidly and produce outstanding results in image generation tasks, yet their content safety checks remain vulnerable to prompt-based jailbreaks. Through preliminary testing on platforms such as ChatGPT, MetaAI, and Grok, we observed that even short, natural prompts could lead to the generation of compromising images ranging from realistic depictions of forged documents to manipulated images of public figures. We introduce Unmasking the Canvas (UTC Benchmark; UTCB), a dynamic and scalable benchmark dataset to evaluate LLM vulnerability in image generation. Our methodology combines structured prompt engineering, multilingual obfuscation (e.g., Zulu, Gaelic, Base64), and evaluation using Groq-hosted LLaMA-3. The pipeline supports both zero-shot and fallback prompting strategies, risk scoring, and automated tagging. All generations are stored with rich metadata and curated into Bronze (non-verified), Silver (LLM-aided verification), and Gold (manually verified) tiers. UTCB is designed to evolve over time with new data sources, prompt templates, and model behaviors. Warning: This paper includes visual examples of adversarial inputs designed to test model safety. All outputs have been redacted to ensure responsible disclosure.

Paperid: 7745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03746.pdf

Abstract:
Social media platforms enable instant and ubiquitous connectivity and are essential to social interaction and communication in our technological society. Apart from its advantages, these platforms have given rise to negative behaviors in the online community, the so-called cyberbullying. Despite the many works involving generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the literature lately, there remain opportunities to study its performance apart from zero/few-shot learning strategies. Accordingly, we propose an innovative and real-time solution for cyberbullying detection that leverages stream-based Machine Learning (ML) models able to process the incoming samples incrementally and Large Language Models (LLMS) for feature engineering to address the evolving nature of abusive and hate speech online. An explainability dashboard is provided to promote the system's trustworthiness, reliability, and accountability. Results on experimental data report promising performance close to 90 % in all evaluation metrics and surpassing those obtained by competing works in the literature. Ultimately, our proposal contributes to the safety of online communities by timely detecting abusive behavior to prevent long-lasting harassment and reduce the negative consequences in society.

Paperid: 7746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03703.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) allow to embed texts and images in a shared representation space. However, it has been shown that these models are subject to a modality gap phenomenon meaning there exists a clear separation between the embeddings from one modality and another in the embedding space. While this misalignment is detrimental for downstream tasks such as multimodal retrieval, multimodal clustering or zero-shot classification, etc. no generic and practical methods have so far been proposed to assess it precisely and even reduce it. We therefore propose novel measures and effective techniques (spectral- and optimal transport-based methods) to achieve this goal. Extensive experiments conducted on several image-text datasets and models demonstrate their effectiveness and beneficial effects on downstream tasks. Our code is available at the URL provided in the paper's abstract.

Paperid: 7747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02704.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation can be broadly categorized into two directions: relative depth estimation, which predicts normalized or inverse depth without absolute scale, and metric depth estimation, which aims to recover depth with real-world scale. While relative methods are flexible and data-efficient, their lack of metric scale limits their utility in downstream tasks. A promising solution is to infer absolute scale from textual descriptions. However, such language-based recovery is highly sensitive to natural language ambiguity, as the same image may be described differently across perspectives and styles. To address this, we introduce VGLD (Visually-Guided Linguistic Disambiguation), a framework that incorporates high-level visual semantics to resolve ambiguity in textual inputs. By jointly encoding both image and text, VGLD predicts a set of global linear transformation parameters that align relative depth maps with metric scale. This visually grounded disambiguation improves the stability and accuracy of scale estimation. We evaluate VGLD on representative models, including MiDaS and DepthAnything, using standard indoor (NYUv2) and outdoor (KITTI) benchmarks. Results show that VGLD significantly mitigates scale estimation bias caused by inconsistent or ambiguous language, achieving robust and accurate metric predictions. Moreover, when trained on multiple datasets, VGLD functions as a universal and lightweight alignment module, maintaining strong performance even in zero-shot settings. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Paperid: 7748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02362.pdf

Abstract:
Email spam detection is a critical task in modern communication systems, essential for maintaining productivity, security, and user experience. Traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches, while effective in static settings, face significant limitations in adapting to evolving spam tactics, addressing class imbalance, and managing data scarcity. These challenges necessitate innovative approaches that reduce dependency on extensive labeled datasets and frequent retraining. This study investigates the effectiveness of Zero-Shot Learning using FLAN-T5, combined with advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as BERT for email spam detection. By employing BERT to preprocess and extract critical information from email content, and FLAN-T5 to classify emails in a Zero-Shot framework, the proposed approach aims to address the limitations of traditional spam detection systems. The integration of FLAN-T5 and BERT enables robust spam detection without relying on extensive labeled datasets or frequent retraining, making it highly adaptable to unseen spam patterns and adversarial environments. This research highlights the potential of leveraging zero-shot learning and NLPs for scalable and efficient spam detection, providing insights into their capability to address the dynamic and challenging nature of spam detection tasks.

Paperid: 7749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01559.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we seek to understand the performance of large language models in the mechanical engineering domain. We leverage the semantic data found in the ABC dataset, specifically the assembly names that designers assigned to the overall assemblies, and the individual semantic part names that were assigned to each part. After pre-processing the data we developed two unsupervised tasks to evaluate how different model architectures perform on domain-specific data: a binary sentence-pair classification task and a zero-shot classification task. We achieved a 0.62 accuracy for the binary sentence-pair classification task with a fine-tuned model that focuses on fighting over-fitting: 1) modifying learning rates, 2) dropout values, 3) Sequence Length, and 4) adding a multi-head attention layer. Our model on the zero-shot classification task outperforms the baselines by a wide margin, and achieves a top-1 classification accuracy of 0.386. The results shed some light on the specific failure modes that arise when learning from language in this domain.

Paperid: 7750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00579.pdf

Abstract:
Voice Cloning has rapidly advanced in today's digital world, with many researchers and corporations working to improve these algorithms for various applications. This article aims to establish a standardized terminology for voice cloning and explore its different variations. It will cover speaker adaptation as the fundamental concept and then delve deeper into topics such as few-shot, zero-shot, and multilingual TTS within that context. Finally, we will explore the evaluation metrics commonly used in voice cloning research and related datasets. This survey compiles the available voice cloning algorithms to encourage research toward its generation and detection to limit its misuse.

Paperid: 7751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00038.pdf

Abstract:
Alignment algorithms are widely used to align large language models (LLMs) to human users based on preference annotations. Typically these (often divergent) preferences are aggregated over a diverse set of users, resulting in fine-tuned models that are aligned to the ``average-user'' preference. Nevertheless, current models are used by individual users in very specific contexts and situations, emphasizing the need for user-dependent preference control. In this work we address the problem of personalizing LLM outputs to their users. We aim to generate customized responses tailored to specific individuals instead of generic outputs that emulate the collective voices of diverse populations. We propose HyPerAlign, an interpretable and sample-efficient hypothesis-driven personalization approach for LLM models. Given few-shot examples written by a particular user, we first infer hypotheses about their communication strategies, personality, and writing style, then prompt LLM models with these hypotheses and user-specific attributes to generate customized outputs. We conduct experiments on two different personalization tasks, namely authorship attribution and deliberative alignment, with datasets from diverse domains (news articles, blog posts, emails, jailbreaking benchmarks). Results demonstrate the superiority of hypothesis-driven LLM personalization compared to preference-based fine-tuning methods. For authorship attribution, HyPerAlign generations have consistently high win-rates (commonly $> 90\%$) against state-of-the-art preference fine-tuning approaches across diverse user profiles and LLM models. For deliberative alignment, the helpfulness of LLM models is improved by up to $70\%$ on average. Overall, HyPerAlign represents an interpretable and sample-efficient strategy for the personalization of LLM models to individual users.

Paperid: 7752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21589.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our system developed for the SemEval-2025 Task 5: LLMs4Subjects: LLM-based Automated Subject Tagging for a National Technical Library's Open-Access Catalog. Our system relies on prompting a selection of LLMs with varying examples of intellectually annotated records and asking the LLMs to similarly suggest keywords for new records. This few-shot prompting technique is combined with a series of post-processing steps that map the generated keywords to the target vocabulary, aggregate the resulting subject terms to an ensemble vote and, finally, rank them as to their relevance to the record. Our system is fourth in the quantitative ranking in the all-subjects track, but achieves the best result in the qualitative ranking conducted by subject indexing experts.

Paperid: 7753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20271.pdf

Abstract:
Language models can behave in unexpected and unsafe ways, and so it is valuable to monitor their outputs. Internal activations of language models encode additional information that could be useful for this. The baseline approach for activation monitoring is some variation of linear probing on a particular layer: starting from a labeled dataset, train a logistic regression classifier on that layer's activations. Recent work has proposed several approaches which may improve on naive linear probing, by leveraging additional computation. One class of techniques, which we call "prompted probing," leverages test time computation to improve monitoring by (1) prompting the model with a description of the monitoring task, and (2) applying a learned linear probe to resulting activations. Another class of techniques uses computation at train time: training sparse autoencoders offline to identify an interpretable basis for the activations, and e.g. max-pooling activations across tokens using that basis before applying a linear probe. However, one can also prompt the model with a description of the monitoring task and use its output directly. We develop and test novel refinements of these methods and compare them against each other. We find asking the model zero-shot is a reasonable baseline when inference-time compute is not limited; however, activation probing methods can substantially outperform this baseline given sufficient training data. Specifically, we recommend prompted probing when inference-time compute is available, due to its superior data efficiency and good generalization performance. Alternatively, if inference-time compute is limited, we find SAE-based probing methods outperform raw activation probing.

Paperid: 7754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16886.pdf

Abstract:
The ability to make zero-shot predictions about the fitness consequences of protein sequence changes with pre-trained machine learning models enables many practical applications. Such models can be applied for downstream tasks like genetic variant interpretation and protein engineering without additional labeled data. The advent of capable protein structure prediction tools has led to the availability of orders of magnitude more precomputed predicted structures, giving rise to powerful structure-based fitness prediction models. Through our experiments, we assess several modeling choices for structure-based models and their effects on downstream fitness prediction. Zero-shot fitness prediction models can struggle to assess the fitness landscape within disordered regions of proteins, those that lack a fixed 3D structure. We confirm the importance of matching protein structures to fitness assays and find that predicted structures for disordered regions can be misleading and affect predictive performance. Lastly, we evaluate an additional structure-based model on the ProteinGym substitution benchmark and show that simple multi-modal ensembles are strong baselines.

Paperid: 7755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16832.pdf

Abstract:
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a robust approach for tackling LLM tasks that require intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating a final answer. In this paper, we present GreenMind-Medium-14B-R1, the Vietnamese reasoning model inspired by the finetuning strategy based on Group Relative Policy Optimization. We also leverage a high-quality Vietnamese synthesized reasoning dataset and design two reward functions to tackle the main limitations of this technique: (i) language mixing, where we explicitly detect the presence of biased language characters during the process of sampling tokens, and (ii) we leverage Sentence Transformer-based models to ensure that the generated reasoning content maintains factual correctness and does not distort the final output. Experimental results on the Vietnamese dataset from the VLSP 2023 Challenge demonstrate that our model outperforms prior works and enhances linguistic consistency in its responses. Furthermore, we extend our evaluation to SeaExam-a multilingual multiple-choice dataset, showing the effectiveness of our reasoning method compared to few-shot prompting techniques.

Paperid: 7756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16520.pdf

Abstract:
In neuroscience research, achieving single-neuron matching across different imaging modalities is critical for understanding the relationship between neuronal structure and function. However, modality gaps and limited annotations present significant challenges. We propose a few-shot metric learning method with a dual-channel attention mechanism and a pretrained vision transformer to enable robust cross-modal neuron identification. The local and global channels extract soma morphology and fiber context, respectively, and a gating mechanism fuses their outputs. To enhance the model's fine-grained discrimination capability, we introduce a hard sample mining strategy based on the MultiSimilarityMiner algorithm, along with the Circle Loss function. Experiments on two-photon and fMOST datasets demonstrate superior Top-K accuracy and recall compared to existing methods. Ablation studies and t-SNE visualizations validate the effectiveness of each module. The method also achieves a favorable trade-off between accuracy and training efficiency under different fine-tuning strategies. These results suggest that the proposed approach offers a promising technical solution for accurate single-cell level matching and multimodal neuroimaging integration.

Paperid: 7757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16276.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents an automated one-shot bird call classification pipeline designed for rare species absent from large publicly available classifiers like BirdNET and Perch. While these models excel at detecting common birds with abundant training data, they lack options for species with only 1-3 known recordings-a critical limitation for conservationists monitoring the last remaining individuals of endangered birds. To address this, we leverage the embedding space of large bird classification networks and develop a classifier using cosine similarity, combined with filtering and denoising preprocessing techniques, to optimize detection with minimal training data. We evaluate various embedding spaces using clustering metrics and validate our approach in both a simulated scenario with Xeno-Canto recordings and a real-world test on the critically endangered tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris), which has no existing classifiers and only three confirmed recordings. The final model achieved 1.0 recall and 0.95 accuracy in detecting tooth-billed pigeon calls, making it practical for use in the field. This open-source system provides a practical tool for conservationists seeking to detect and monitor rare species on the brink of extinction.

Paperid: 7758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15600.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the field of indoor navigation has witnessed groundbreaking advancements through the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional navigation approaches relying on pre-built maps or reinforcement learning exhibit limitations such as poor generalization and limited adaptability to dynamic environments. In contrast, LLMs offer a novel paradigm for complex indoor navigation tasks by leveraging their exceptional semantic comprehension, reasoning capabilities, and zero-shot generalization properties. We propose an LLM-based navigation framework that leverages function calling capabilities, positioning the LLM as the central controller. Our methodology involves modular decomposition of conventional navigation functions into reusable LLM tools with expandable configurations. This is complemented by a systematically designed, transferable system prompt template and interaction workflow that can be easily adapted across different implementations. Experimental validation in PyBullet simulation environments across diverse scenarios demonstrates the substantial potential and effectiveness of our approach, particularly in achieving context-aware navigation through dynamic tool composition.

Paperid: 7759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15261.pdf

Abstract:
Objective: Healthcare data fragmentation presents a major challenge for linking patient data, necessitating robust record linkage to integrate patient records from diverse sources. This study investigates the feasibility of leveraging language models for automated patient record linkage, focusing on two key tasks: blocking and matching. Materials and Methods: We utilized real-world healthcare data from the Missouri Cancer Registry and Research Center, linking patient records from two independent sources using probabilistic linkage as a baseline. A transformer-based model, RoBERTa, was fine-tuned for blocking using sentence embeddings. For matching, several language models were experimented under fine-tuned and zero-shot settings, assessing their performance against ground truth labels. Results: The fine-tuned blocking model achieved a 92% reduction in the number of candidate pairs while maintaining near-perfect recall. In the matching task, fine-tuned Mistral-7B achieved the best performance with only 6 incorrect predictions. Among zero-shot models, Mistral-Small-24B performed best, with a total of 55 incorrect predictions. Discussion: Fine-tuned language models achieved strong performance in patient record blocking and matching with minimal errors. However, they remain less accurate and efficient than a hybrid rule-based and probabilistic approach for blocking. Additionally, reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 are impractical for large-scale record linkage due to high computational costs. Conclusion: This study highlights the potential of language models for automating patient record linkage, offering improved efficiency by eliminating the manual efforts required to perform patient record linkage. Overall, language models offer a scalable solution that can enhance data integration, reduce manual effort, and support disease surveillance and research.

Paperid: 7760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15077.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in transforming natural language questions about relational databases into SQL queries. Despite recent improvements, small LLMs struggle to handle questions involving multiple tables and complex SQL patterns under a Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) setting. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) partially compensates for the knowledge deficits in pretrained models but falls short while dealing with queries involving multi-hop reasoning. To bridge this gap, different LLM training strategies to reinforce reasoning capabilities have been proposed, ranging from leveraging a thinking process within ZSL, including reasoning traces in SFT, or adopt Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies. However, the influence of reasoning on Text2SQL performance is still largely unexplored. This paper investigates to what extent LLM reasoning capabilities influence their Text2SQL performance on four benchmark datasets. To this end, it considers the following LLM settings: (1) ZSL, including general-purpose reasoning or not; (2) SFT, with and without task-specific reasoning traces; (3) RL, exploring the use of different rewarding functions, both the established EXecution accuracy (EX) and a mix with fine-grained ones that also account the precision, recall, and cardinality of partially correct answers; (4) SFT+RL, i.e, a two-stage approach that combines SFT and RL. The results show that general-purpose reasoning under ZSL proves to be ineffective in tackling complex Text2SQL cases. Small LLMs benefit from SFT with reasoning much more than larger ones. RL is generally beneficial across all tested models and datasets. The use of the fine-grained metrics turns out to be the most effective RL strategy. Thanks to RL and the novel text2SQL rewards, the 7B Qwen-Coder-2.5 model performs on par with 400+ Billion ones (including gpt-4o) on the Bird dataset.

Paperid: 7761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14138.pdf

Abstract:
Image-based crack detection algorithms are increasingly in demand in infrastructure monitoring, as early detection of cracks is of paramount importance for timely maintenance planning. While deep learning has significantly advanced crack detection algorithms, existing models often require extensive labeled datasets and high computational costs for fine-tuning, limiting their adaptability across diverse conditions. This study introduces an efficient selective fine-tuning strategy, focusing on tuning normalization components, to enhance the adaptability of segmentation models for crack detection. The proposed method is applied to the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and five well-established segmentation models. Experimental results demonstrate that selective fine-tuning of only normalization parameters outperforms full fine-tuning and other common fine-tuning techniques in both performance and computational efficiency, while improving generalization. The proposed approach yields a SAM-based model, Segment Any Crack (SAC), achieving a 61.22\% F1-score and 44.13\% IoU on the OmniCrack30k benchmark dataset, along with the highest performance across three zero-shot datasets and the lowest standard deviation. The results highlight the effectiveness of the adaptation approach in improving segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing computational overhead.

Paperid: 7762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13942.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces Intelligence of Things (INOT), a novel spatial context-aware control system that enhances smart home automation through intuitive spatial reasoning. Current smart home systems largely rely on device-specific identifiers, limiting user interaction to explicit naming conventions rather than natural spatial references. INOT addresses this limitation through a modular architecture that integrates Vision Language Models with IoT control systems to enable natural language commands with spatial context (e.g., "turn on the light near the window"). The system comprises key components including an Onboarding Inference Engine, Zero-Shot Device Detection, Spatial Topology Inference, and Intent-Based Command Synthesis. A comprehensive user study with 15 participants demonstrated INOT's significant advantages over conventional systems like Google Home Assistant, with users reporting reduced cognitive workload (NASA-TLX scores decreased by an average of 13.17 points), higher ease-of-use ratings, and stronger preference (14 out of 15 participants). By eliminating the need to memorize device identifiers and enabling context-aware spatial commands, INOT represents a significant advancement in creating more intuitive and accessible smart home control systems.

Paperid: 7763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13797.pdf

Abstract:
Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of rotating machinery is critical for industrial safety and maintenance, but existing methods struggle with scarce target-domain data and unclear degradation dynamics. We propose a Meta-Learning and Knowledge Discovery-based Physics-Informed Neural Network (MKDPINN) to address these challenges. The method first maps noisy sensor data to a low-dimensional hidden state space via a Hidden State Mapper (HSM). A Physics-Guided Regulator (PGR) then learns unknown nonlinear PDEs governing degradation evolution, embedding these physical constraints into the PINN framework. This integrates data-driven and physics-based approaches. The framework uses meta-learning, optimizing across source-domain meta-tasks to enable few-shot adaptation to new target tasks. Experiments on industrial data and the C-MAPSS benchmark show MKDPINN outperforms baselines in generalization and accuracy, proving its effectiveness for RUL prediction under data scarcity

Paperid: 7764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12466.pdf

Abstract:
In our paper we explore the definition, and extrapolation of fallacies as they pertain to the automatic detection of manipulation on social media. In particular we explore how these logical fallacies might appear in the real world i.e internet forums. We discovered a prevalence of misinformation / misguided intention in discussion boards specifically centered around the Ukrainian Russian Conflict which serves to narrow the domain of our task. Although automatic fallacy detection has gained attention recently, most datasets use unregulated fallacy taxonomies or are limited to formal linguistic domains like political debates or news reports. Online discourse, however, often features non-standardized and diverse language not captured in these domains. We present Shady Linguistic Utterance Replication-Generation (SLURG) to address these limitations, exploring the feasibility of generating synthetic fallacious forum-style comments using large language models (LLMs), specifically DeepHermes-3-Mistral-24B. Our findings indicate that LLMs can replicate the syntactic patterns of real data} and that high-quality few-shot prompts enhance LLMs' ability to mimic the vocabulary diversity of online forums.

Paperid: 7765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12436.pdf

Abstract:
Adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to new domains with few labeled samples remains a significant challenge due to severe overfitting and computational constraints. State-of-the-art solutions, such as low-rank reparameterization, mitigate these issues but often struggle with generalization and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, a novel Sparse Optimization (SO) framework is proposed. Unlike low-rank approaches that typically constrain updates to a fixed subspace, our SO method leverages high sparsity to dynamically adjust very few parameters. We introduce two key paradigms. First, we advocate for \textit{local sparsity and global density}, which updates a minimal subset of parameters per iteration while maintaining overall model expressiveness. As a second paradigm, we advocate for \textit{local randomness and global importance}, which sparsifies the gradient using random selection while pruning the first moment based on importance. This combination significantly mitigates overfitting and ensures stable adaptation in low-data regimes. Extensive experiments on 11 diverse datasets show that SO achieves state-of-the-art few-shot adaptation performance while reducing memory overhead.

Paperid: 7766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12357.pdf

Abstract:
Validating Large Language Models with ReLM explores the application of formal languages to evaluate and control Large Language Models (LLMs) for memorization, bias, and zero-shot performance. Current approaches for evaluating these types behavior are often slow, imprecise, costly, or introduce biases of their own, but are necessary due to the importance of this behavior when productionizing LLMs. This project reproduces key results from the original ReLM paper and expounds on the approach and applications with an emphasis on the relevance to the field of systems for machine learning.

Paperid: 7767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12321.pdf

Abstract:
In the past few years, Language Models (LMs) have shown par-human capabilities in several domains. Despite their practical applications and exceeding user consumption, they are susceptible to jailbreaks when malicious input exploits the LM's weaknesses, causing it to deviate from its intended behavior. Current defensive strategies either classify the input prompt as adversarial or prevent LMs from generating harmful outputs. However, it is challenging to explain the reason behind the malicious nature of the jailbreak, which results in a wide variety of closed-box approaches. In this research, we propose and demonstrate that system-prompt attention from Small Language Models (SLMs) can be used to characterize adversarial prompts, providing a novel, explainable, and cheaper defense approach called AttentionDefense. Our research suggests that the attention mechanism is an integral component in understanding and explaining how LMs respond to malicious input that is not captured in the semantic meaning of text embeddings. The proposed AttentionDefense is evaluated against existing jailbreak benchmark datasets. Ablation studies show that SLM-based AttentionDefense has equivalent or better jailbreak detection performance compared to text embedding-based classifiers and GPT-4 zero-shot detectors.To further validate the efficacy of the proposed approach, we generate a dataset of novel jailbreak variants of the existing benchmark dataset using a closed-loop LLM-based multi-agent system. We demonstrate that the proposed AttentionDefense approach performs robustly on this novel jailbreak dataset while existing approaches suffer in performance. Additionally, for practical purposes AttentionDefense is an ideal solution as it has the computation requirements of a small LM but the performance of a LLM detector.

Paperid: 7768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10509.pdf

Abstract:
This study presents a comprehensive reproducibility and extension analysis of the Setwise prompting methodology for zero-shot ranking with Large Language Models (LLMs), as proposed by Zhuang et al. We evaluate its effectiveness and efficiency compared to traditional Pointwise, Pairwise, and Listwise approaches in document ranking tasks. Our reproduction confirms the findings of Zhuang et al., highlighting the trade-offs between computational efficiency and ranking effectiveness in Setwise methods. Building on these insights, we introduce Setwise Insertion, a novel approach that leverages the initial document ranking as prior knowledge, reducing unnecessary comparisons and uncertainty by focusing on candidates more likely to improve the ranking results. Experimental results across multiple LLM architectures (Flan-T5, Vicuna, and Llama) show that Setwise Insertion yields a 31% reduction in query time, a 23% reduction in model inferences, and a slight improvement in reranking effectiveness compared to the original Setwise method. These findings highlight the practical advantage of incorporating prior ranking knowledge into Setwise prompting for efficient and accurate zero-shot document reranking.

Paperid: 7769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10497.pdf

Abstract:
The swift progress of Generative Artificial intelligence (GenAI), notably Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping the digital landscape. Recognizing this transformative potential, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) launched a pilot initiative to explore the integration of GenAI techniques into its daily operation for performance excellence, where 22 projects were launched in May 2024. Within these projects, this paper presents the development of the intelligent agent Pubbie as a case study, targeting the automation of performance measurement, data management and insight reporting at the NRC. Cutting-edge techniques are explored, including LLM orchestration and semantic embedding via RoBERTa, while strategic fine-tuning and few-shot learning approaches are incorporated to infuse domain knowledge at an affordable cost. The user-friendly interface of Pubbie allows general government users to input queries in natural language and easily upload or download files with a simple button click, greatly reducing manual efforts and accessibility barriers.

Paperid: 7770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09781.pdf

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks like question answering and fact verification, they continue to suffer from hallucinations and reasoning errors, especially in multi-hop tasks that require integration of multiple information sources. Current methods address these issues through retrieval-based techniques (grounding reasoning in external evidence), reasoning-based approaches (enhancing coherence via improved prompting), or hybrid strategies combining both elements. One prominent hybrid method, ReAct, has outperformed purely retrieval-based or reasoning-based approaches; however, it lacks internal verification of intermediate reasoning steps, allowing potential errors to propagate through complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce Reasoning Court (RC), a novel framework that extends iterative reasoning-and-retrieval methods, such as ReAct, with a dedicated LLM judge. Unlike ReAct, RC employs this judge to independently evaluate multiple candidate answers and their associated reasoning generated by separate LLM agents. The judge is asked to select the answer that it considers the most factually grounded and logically coherent based on the presented reasoning and evidence, or synthesizes a new answer using available evidence and its pre-trained knowledge if all candidates are inadequate, flawed, or invalid. Evaluations on multi-hop benchmarks (HotpotQA, MuSiQue) and fact-verification (FEVER) demonstrate that RC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot prompting methods without task-specific fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08806.pdf

Abstract:
Enhancing the spatial perception capabilities of mobile robots is crucial for achieving embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Although significant progress has been made in simulated environments, directly transferring these capabilities to real-world scenarios often results in severe hallucination phenomena, causing robots to lose effective spatial awareness. To address this issue, we propose BrainNav, a bio-inspired spatial cognitive navigation framework inspired by biological spatial cognition theories and cognitive map theory. BrainNav integrates dual-map (coordinate map and topological map) and dual-orientation (relative orientation and absolute orientation) strategies, enabling real-time navigation through dynamic scene capture and path planning. Its five core modules-Hippocampal Memory Hub, Visual Cortex Perception Engine, Parietal Spatial Constructor, Prefrontal Decision Center, and Cerebellar Motion Execution Unit-mimic biological cognitive functions to reduce spatial hallucinations and enhance adaptability. Validated in a zero-shot real-world lab environment using the Limo Pro robot, BrainNav, compatible with GPT-4, outperforms existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) methods without fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08219.pdf

Abstract:
Image restoration is critical for improving the quality of degraded images, which is vital for applications like autonomous driving, security surveillance, and digital content enhancement. However, existing methods are often tailored to specific degradation scenarios, limiting their adaptability to the diverse and complex challenges in real-world environments. Moreover, real-world degradations are typically non-uniform, highlighting the need for adaptive and intelligent solutions. To address these issues, we propose a novel vision-language-guided universal restoration (VL-UR) framework. VL-UR leverages a zero-shot contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model to enhance image restoration by integrating visual and semantic information. A scene classifier is introduced to adapt CLIP, generating high-quality language embeddings aligned with degraded images while predicting degraded types for complex scenarios. Extensive experiments across eleven diverse degradation settings demonstrate VL-UR's state-of-the-art performance, robustness, and adaptability. This positions VL-UR as a transformative solution for modern image restoration challenges in dynamic, real-world environments.

Paperid: 7773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08154.pdf

Abstract:
Heavy-duty trucks pose significant safety challenges due to their large size and limited maneuverability compared to passenger vehicles. A deeper understanding of truck characteristics is essential for enhancing the safety perspective of cooperative autonomous driving. Traditional LiDAR-based truck classification methods rely on extensive manual annotations, which makes them labor-intensive and costly. The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) trained on massive datasets presents an opportunity to leverage their few-shot learning capabilities for truck classification. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) are primarily trained on image datasets, which makes it challenging to directly process point cloud data. This study introduces a novel framework that integrates roadside LiDAR point cloud data with VLMs to facilitate efficient and accurate truck classification, which supports cooperative and safe driving environments. This study introduces three key innovations: (1) leveraging real-world LiDAR datasets for model development, (2) designing a preprocessing pipeline to adapt point cloud data for VLM input, including point cloud registration for dense 3D rendering and mathematical morphological techniques to enhance feature representation, and (3) utilizing in-context learning with few-shot prompting to enable vehicle classification with minimally labeled training data. Experimental results demonstrate encouraging performance of this method and present its potential to reduce annotation efforts while improving classification accuracy.

Paperid: 7774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06861.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot, training-free, image-based text-to-video generation is an emerging area that aims to generate videos using existing image-based diffusion models. Current methods in this space require specific architectural changes to image generation models, which limit their adaptability and scalability. In contrast to such methods, we provide a model-agnostic approach. We use intersections in diffusion trajectories, working only with the latent values. We could not obtain localized frame-wise coherence and diversity using only the intersection of trajectories. Thus, we instead use a grid-based approach. An in-context trained LLM is used to generate coherent frame-wise prompts; another is used to identify differences between frames. Based on these, we obtain a CLIP-based attention mask that controls the timing of switching the prompts for each grid cell. Earlier switching results in higher variance, while later switching results in more coherence. Therefore, our approach can ensure appropriate control between coherence and variance for the frames. Our approach results in state-of-the-art performance while being more flexible when working with diverse image-generation models. The empirical analysis using quantitative metrics and user studies confirms our model's superior temporal consistency, visual fidelity and user satisfaction, thus providing a novel way to obtain training-free, image-based text-to-video generation.

Paperid: 7775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06785.pdf

Abstract:
Effective and rapid evaluation of pavement surface condition is critical for prioritizing maintenance, ensuring transportation safety, and minimizing vehicle wear and tear. While conventional manual inspections suffer from subjectivity, existing machine learning-based methods are constrained by their reliance on large and high-quality labeled datasets, which require significant resources and limit adaptability across varied road conditions. The revolutionary advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant potential for overcoming these challenges. In this study, we propose an innovative automated zero-shot learning approach that leverages the image recognition and natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs to assess road conditions effectively. Multiple LLM-based assessment models were developed, employing prompt engineering strategies aligned with the Pavement Surface Condition Index (PSCI) standards. These models' accuracy and reliability were evaluated against official PSCI results, with an optimized model ultimately selected. Extensive tests benchmarked the optimized model against evaluations from various levels experts using Google Street View road images. The results reveal that the LLM-based approach can effectively assess road conditions, with the optimized model -employing comprehensive and structured prompt engineering strategies -outperforming simpler configurations by achieving high accuracy and consistency, even surpassing expert evaluations. Moreover, successfully applying the optimized model to Google Street View images demonstrates its potential for future city-scale deployments. These findings highlight the transformative potential of LLMs in automating road damage evaluations and underscore the pivotal role of detailed prompt engineering in achieving reliable assessments.

Paperid: 7776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06608.pdf

Abstract:
In task-based few-shot learning paradigms, it is commonly assumed that different tasks are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.). However, in real-world scenarios, the distribution encountered in few-shot learning can significantly differ from the distribution of existing data. Thus, how to effectively leverage existing data knowledge to enable models to quickly adapt to class variations under non-i.i.d. assumptions has emerged as a key research challenge. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new cross-domain few-shot learning approach based on domain knowledge mapping, applied consistently throughout the pre-training, training, and testing phases. In the pre-training phase, our method integrates self-supervised and supervised losses by maximizing mutual information, thereby mitigating mode collapse. During the training phase, the domain knowledge mapping layer collaborates with a domain classifier to learn both domain mapping capabilities and the ability to assess domain adaptation difficulty. Finally, this approach is applied during the testing phase, rapidly adapting to domain variations through meta-training tasks on support sets, consequently enhancing the model's capability to transfer domain knowledge effectively. Experimental validation conducted across six datasets from diverse domains demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Paperid: 7777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06600.pdf

Abstract:
Business processes are fundamental to organizational operations, yet their optimization remains challenging due to the timeconsuming nature of manual process analysis. Our paper harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate value-added analysis, a qualitative process analysis technique that aims to identify steps in the process that do not deliver value. To date, this technique is predominantly manual, time-consuming, and subjective. Our method offers a more principled approach which operates in two phases: first, decomposing high-level activities into detailed steps to enable granular analysis, and second, performing a value-added analysis to classify each step according to Lean principles. This approach enables systematic identification of waste while maintaining the semantic understanding necessary for qualitative analysis. We develop our approach using 50 business process models, for which we collect and publish manual ground-truth labels. Our evaluation, comparing zero-shot baselines with more structured prompts reveals (a) a consistent benefit of structured prompting and (b) promising performance for both tasks. We discuss the potential for LLMs to augment human expertise in qualitative process analysis while reducing the time and subjectivity inherent in manual approaches.

Paperid: 7778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06538.pdf

Abstract:
We present OPAL (Operant Physical Agent with Language), a novel vision-language-action architecture that introduces topological constraints to flow matching for robotic control. To do so, we further introduce topological attention. Our approach models action sequences as topologically-structured representations with non-trivial constraints. Experimental results across 10 complex manipulation tasks demonstrate OPAL's superior performance compared to previous approaches, including Octo, OpenVLA, and $Ï$0. Our architecture achieves significant improvements in zero-shot performance without requiring task-specific fine-tuning, while reducing inference computational requirements by 42%. The theoretical guarantees provided by our topological approach result in more coherent long-horizon action sequences. Our results highlight the potential of constraining the search space of learning problems in robotics by deriving from fundamental physical laws, and the possibility of using topological attention to embed causal understanding into transformer architectures.

Paperid: 7779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05846.pdf

Abstract:
Path recommendation (PR) aims to generate travel paths that are customized to a user's specific preferences and constraints. Conventional approaches often employ explicit optimization objectives or specialized machine learning architectures; however, these methods typically exhibit limited flexibility and generalizability, necessitating costly retraining to accommodate new scenarios. This paper introduces an alternative paradigm that conceptualizes PR as a natural language generation task. We present PathGPT, a retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) system that leverages historical trajectory data and natural language user constraints to generate plausible paths. The proposed methodology first converts raw trajectory data into a human-interpretable textual format, which is then stored in a database. Subsequently, a hybrid retrieval system extracts path-specific context from this database to inform a pretrained LLM. The primary contribution of this work is a novel framework that demonstrates how integrating established information retrieval and generative model components can enable adaptive, zero-shot path generation across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on large-scale trajectory datasets indicate that PathGPT's performance is competitive with specialized, learning-based methods, underscoring its potential as a flexible and generalizable path generation system that avoids the need for retraining inherent in previous data-driven models.

Paperid: 7780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04891.pdf

Abstract:
Depression is a prevalent mental health disorder that is difficult to detect early due to subjective symptom assessments. Recent advancements in large language models have offered efficient and cost-effective approaches for this objective. In this study, we evaluated the performance of four LLMs in depression detection using clinical interview data. We selected the best performing model and further tested it in the severity evaluation scenario and knowledge enhanced scenario. The robustness was evaluated in complex diagnostic scenarios using a dataset comprising 51074 statements from six different mental disorders. We found that DeepSeek V3 is the most reliable and cost-effective model for depression detection, performing well in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, with zero-shot being the most efficient choice. The evaluation of severity showed low agreement with the human evaluator, particularly for mild depression. The model maintains stably high AUCs for detecting depression in complex diagnostic scenarios. These findings highlight DeepSeek V3s strong potential for text-based depression detection in real-world clinical applications. However, they also underscore the need for further refinement in severity assessment and the mitigation of potential biases to enhance clinical reliability.

Paperid: 7781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04745.pdf

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage contextual information in the form of structured linguistic representations. Specifically, we examine the impact of encoding both short and long contexts using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structures across a diverse set of language tasks. We perform our analysis using 8-bit quantized and instruction-tuned versions of Llama 3.1 (8B), Phi-3, and Mistral 7B. Our results indicate that, for tasks involving short contexts, augmenting the prompt with the AMR of the original language context often degrades the performance of the underlying LLM. However, for tasks that involve long contexts, such as dialogue summarization in the SAMSum dataset, this enhancement improves LLM performance, for example, by increasing the zero-shot cosine similarity score of Llama 3.1 from 66% to 76%. This improvement is more evident in the newer and larger LLMs, but does not extend to the older or smaller ones. In addition, we observe that LLMs can effectively reconstruct the original text from a linearized AMR, achieving a cosine similarity of 81% in the best-case scenario.

Paperid: 7782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04550.pdf

Abstract:
Egocentric Video Question Answering (QA) requires models to handle long-horizon temporal reasoning, first-person perspectives, and specialized challenges like frequent camera movement. This paper systematically evaluates both proprietary and open-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on QaEgo4Dv2 - a refined dataset of egocentric videos derived from QaEgo4D. Four popular MLLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, Video-LLaVa-7B and Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct) are assessed using zero-shot and fine-tuned approaches for both OpenQA and CloseQA settings. We introduce QaEgo4Dv2 to mitigate annotation noise in QaEgo4D, enabling more reliable comparison. Our results show that fine-tuned Video-LLaVa-7B and Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct achieve new state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous benchmarks by up to +2.6% ROUGE/METEOR (for OpenQA) and +13% accuracy (for CloseQA). We also present a thorough error analysis, indicating the model's difficulty in spatial reasoning and fine-grained object recognition - key areas for future improvement.

Paperid: 7783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04251.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents Tratto, a neuro-symbolic approach that generates assertions (boolean expressions) that can serve as axiomatic oracles, from source code and documentation. The symbolic module of Tratto takes advantage of the grammar of the programming language, the unit under test, and the context of the unit (its class and available APIs) to restrict the search space of the tokens that can be successfully used to generate valid oracles. The neural module of Tratto uses transformers fine-tuned for both deciding whether to output an oracle or not and selecting the next lexical token to incrementally build the oracle from the set of tokens returned by the symbolic module. Our experiments show that Tratto outperforms the state-of-the-art axiomatic oracle generation approaches, with 73% accuracy, 72% precision, and 61% F1-score, largely higher than the best results of the symbolic and neural approaches considered in our study (61%, 62%, and 37%, respectively). Tratto can generate three times more axiomatic oracles than current symbolic approaches, while generating 10 times less false positives than GPT4 complemented with few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought prompting.

Paperid: 7784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04017.pdf

Abstract:
In a world where new domains are constantly discovered and machine learning (ML) is applied to automate new tasks every day, challenges arise with the number of samples available to train ML models. While the traditional ML training relies heavily on data volume, finding a large dataset with a lot of usable samples is not always easy, and often the process takes time. For instance, when a new human transmissible disease such as COVID-19 breaks out and there is an immediate surge for rapid diagnosis, followed by rapid isolation of infected individuals from healthy ones to contain the spread, there is an immediate need to create tools/automation using machine learning models. At the early stage of an outbreak, it is not only difficult to obtain a lot of samples, but also difficult to understand the details about the disease, to process the data needed to train a traditional ML model. A solution for this can be a few-shot learning approach. This paper presents challenges and opportunities of few-shot approaches that vary across major domains, i.e., audio, image, text, and their combinations, with their strengths and weaknesses. This detailed understanding can help to adopt appropriate approaches applicable to different domains and applications.

Paperid: 7785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03312.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models have significantly advanced natural language processing, achieving remarkable performance in tasks such as language generation, translation, and reasoning. However, their substantial computational requirements restrict deployment to high-end systems, limiting accessibility on consumer-grade devices. This challenge is especially pronounced for under-resourced languages like those spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, where relatively limited linguistic resources and benchmarks hinder effective evaluation. This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of compact state-of-the-art LLMs across several essential NLP tasks tailored for Iberian languages. The results reveal that while some models consistently excel in certain tasks, significant performance gaps remain, particularly for languages such as Basque. These findings highlight the need for further research on balancing model compactness with robust multilingual performance

Paperid: 7786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00725.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to optimize the analysis and synthesis of legal documents, enabling the automation of tasks such as summarization, classification, and retrieval of legal information. This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to identify the state of the art in prompt engineering applied to LLMs in the legal context. The results indicate that models such as GPT-4, BERT, Llama 2, and Legal-Pegasus are widely employed in the legal field, and techniques such as Few-shot Learning, Zero-shot Learning, and Chain-of-Thought prompting have proven effective in improving the interpretation of legal texts. However, challenges such as biases in models and hallucinations still hinder their large-scale implementation. It is concluded that, despite the great potential of LLMs for the legal field, there is a need to improve prompt engineering strategies to ensure greater accuracy and reliability in the generated results.

Paperid: 7787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24138.pdf

Abstract:
In colonoscopy, 80% of the missed polyps could be detected with the help of Deep Learning models. In the search for algorithms capable of addressing this challenge, foundation models emerge as promising candidates. Their zero-shot or few-shot learning capabilities, facilitate generalization to new data or tasks without extensive fine-tuning. A concept that is particularly advantageous in the medical imaging domain, where large annotated datasets for traditional training are scarce. In this context, a comprehensive evaluation of foundation models for polyp segmentation was conducted, assessing both detection and delimitation. For the study, three different colonoscopy datasets have been employed to compare the performance of five different foundation models, DINOv2, YOLO-World, GroundingDINO, SAM and MedSAM, against two benchmark networks, YOLOv8 and Mask R-CNN. Results show that the success of foundation models in polyp characterization is highly dependent on domain specialization. For optimal performance in medical applications, domain-specific models are essential, and generic models require fine-tuning to achieve effective results. Through this specialization, foundation models demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art detection and segmentation models, with some models even excelling in zero-shot evaluation; outperforming fine-tuned models on unseen data.

Paperid: 7788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23503.pdf

Abstract:
We present a framework for optimizing prompts in vision-language models to elicit multimodal reasoning without model retraining. Using an evolutionary algorithm to guide prompt updates downstream of visual tasks, our approach improves upon baseline prompt-updating algorithms, which lack evolution-style "survival of the fittest" iteration. Crucially, we find this approach enables the language model to independently discover progressive problem-solving techniques across several evolution generations. For example, the model reasons that to "break down" visually complex spatial tasks, making a tool call to a Python interpreter to perform tasks (such as cropping, image segmentation, or saturation changes) would improve performance significantly. Our experimentation shows that explicitly evoking this "tool calling" call, via system-level XML $...\texttt{} ... \texttt{}...$ tags, can effectively flag Python interpreter access for the same language model to generate relevant programs, generating advanced multimodal functionality. This functionality can be crystallized into a system-level prompt that induces improved performance at inference time, and our experimentation suggests up to $\approx 50\%$ relative improvement across select visual tasks. Downstream performance is trained and evaluated across subtasks from MathVista, M3CoT, and GeoBench-VLM datasets. Importantly, our approach shows that evolutionary prompt optimization guides language models towards self-reasoning discoveries, which result in improved zero-shot generalization across tasks.

Paperid: 7789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23249.pdf

Abstract:
Context is an important factor in computer vision as it offers valuable information to clarify and analyze visual data. Utilizing the contextual information inherent in an image or a video can improve the precision and effectiveness of object detectors. For example, where recognizing an isolated object might be challenging, context information can improve comprehension of the scene. This study explores the impact of various context-based approaches to object detection. Initially, we investigate the role of context in object detection and survey it from several perspectives. We then review and discuss the most recent context-based object detection approaches and compare them. Finally, we conclude by addressing research questions and identifying gaps for further studies. More than 265 publications are included in this survey, covering different aspects of context in different categories of object detection, including general object detection, video object detection, small object detection, camouflaged object detection, zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot object detection. This literature review presents a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements in context-based object detection, providing valuable contributions such as a thorough understanding of contextual information and effective methods for integrating various context types into object detection, thus benefiting researchers.

Paperid: 7790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21277.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a novel, zero-shot image generation technique called "Visual Concept Blending" that provides fine-grained control over which features from multiple reference images are transferred to a source image. If only a single reference image is available, it is difficult to isolate which specific elements should be transferred. However, using multiple reference images, the proposed approach distinguishes between common and unique features by selectively incorporating them into a generated output. By operating within a partially disentangled Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) embedding space (from IP-Adapter), our method enables the flexible transfer of texture, shape, motion, style, and more abstract conceptual transformations without requiring additional training or text prompts. We demonstrate its effectiveness across a diverse range of tasks, including style transfer, form metamorphosis, and conceptual transformations, showing how subtle or abstract attributes (e.g., brushstroke style, aerodynamic lines, and dynamism) can be seamlessly combined into a new image. In a user study, participants accurately recognized which features were intended to be transferred. Its simplicity, flexibility, and high-level control make Visual Concept Blending valuable for creative fields such as art, design, and content creation, where combining specific visual qualities from multiple inspirations is crucial.

Paperid: 7791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20998.pdf

Abstract:
We propose Covisibility Map-based Gaussian Splatting (CoMapGS), designed to recover underrepresented sparse regions in sparse novel view synthesis. CoMapGS addresses both high- and low-uncertainty regions by constructing covisibility maps, enhancing initial point clouds, and applying uncertainty-aware weighted supervision using a proximity classifier. Our contributions are threefold: (1) CoMapGS reframes novel view synthesis by leveraging covisibility maps as a core component to address region-specific uncertainty; (2) Enhanced initial point clouds for both low- and high-uncertainty regions compensate for sparse COLMAP-derived point clouds, improving reconstruction quality and benefiting few-shot 3DGS methods; (3) Adaptive supervision with covisibility-score-based weighting and proximity classification achieves consistent performance gains across scenes with varying sparsity scores derived from covisibility maps. Experimental results demonstrate that CoMapGS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on datasets including Mip-NeRF 360 and LLFF.

Paperid: 7792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19867.pdf

Abstract:
This paper establishes a unified framework integrating geometric flows with deep learning through three fundamental innovations. First, we propose a thermodynamically coupled Ricci flow that dynamically adapts parameter space geometry to loss landscape topology, formally proved to preserve isometric knowledge embedding (Theorem~\ref{thm:isometric}). Second, we derive explicit phase transition thresholds and critical learning rates (Theorem~\ref{thm:critical}) through curvature blowup analysis, enabling automated singularity resolution via geometric surgery (Lemma~\ref{lem:surgery}). Third, we establish an AdS/CFT-type holographic duality (Theorem~\ref{thm:ads}) between neural networks and conformal field theories, providing entanglement entropy bounds for regularization design. Experiments demonstrate 2.1$\times$ convergence acceleration and 63\% topological simplification while maintaining $\mathcal{O}(N\log N)$ complexity, outperforming Riemannian baselines by 15.2\% in few-shot accuracy. Theoretically, we prove exponential stability (Theorem~\ref{thm:converge}) through a new Lyapunov function combining Perelman entropy with Wasserstein gradient flows, fundamentally advancing geometric deep learning.

Paperid: 7793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17965.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on a range of downstream NLP tasks by generating text that closely resembles human writing. However, the ease of achieving this similarity raises concerns from potential malicious uses at scale by bad actors, as LLM-generated text becomes increasingly difficult to discern from human text. Although detection methods have been developed to address this issue, bad actors can further manipulate LLM-generated texts to make them less detectable. In this work, we study how further editing texts with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which aligns model outputs with human preferences, affects (a) the quality of generated texts for two tasks, and (b) the performance of LLM-generated text detectors, looking at both training-based and zero-shot detection methods. Although RLHF improves the quality of LLM-generated texts, we find that it also tends to produce more detectable, lengthy, and repetitive outputs. Additionally, we observe that training-based detectors are vulnerable to short texts and to texts that incorporate code, whereas zero-shot detectors exhibit greater robustness.

Paperid: 7794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17460.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present ConvoGen: an innovative framework for generating synthetic conversational data using multi-agent systems. Our method leverages few-shot learning and introduces iterative sampling from a dynamically updated few-shot hub to create diverse and realistic conversational scenarios. The generated data has numerous applications, including training and evaluating conversational AI models, and augmenting existing datasets for tasks like conversational intent classification or conversation summarization. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in producing high-quality diverse synthetic conversational data, highlighting its potential to enhance the development and evaluation of conversational AI systems.

Paperid: 7795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13923.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been one of the most important discoveries in machine learning in recent years. LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, such as ChatGPT, have consistently attracted the attention from researchers, investors, and the general public, driving the rapid growth of this industry. With the frequent introduction of new LLMs to the market, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between them, creating a demand for new LLM comparison methods. In this research, the Consistency-focused Similarity Comparison Framework (ConSCompF) for generative large language models is proposed. It compares texts generated by two LLMs and produces a similarity score, indicating the overall degree of similarity between their responses. The main advantage of this framework is that it can operate on a small number of unlabeled data, such as chatbot instruction prompts, and does not require LLM developers to disclose any information about their product. To evaluate the efficacy of ConSCompF, two experiments aimed at identifying similarities between multiple LLMs are conducted. Additionally, these experiments examine the correlation between the similarity scores generated by ConSCompF and the differences in the outputs produced by other benchmarking techniques, such as ROUGE-L. Finally, a series of few-shot LLM comparison experiments is conducted to evaluate the performance of ConSCompF in a few-shot LLM comparison scenario. The proposed framework can be used for calculating similarity matrices of multiple LLMs, which can be effectively visualized using principal component analysis (PCA). The ConSCompF output may provide useful insights into data that might have been used during LLM training and help detect possible investment fraud attempts.

Paperid: 7796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11845.pdf

Abstract:
Long COVID continues to challenge public health by affecting a considerable number of individuals who have recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection yet endure prolonged and often debilitating symptoms. Social media has emerged as a vital resource for those seeking real-time information, peer support, and validating their health concerns related to Long COVID. This paper examines recent works focusing on mining, analyzing, and interpreting user-generated content on social media platforms to capture the broader discourse on persistent post-COVID conditions. A novel transformer-based zero-shot learning approach serves as the foundation for classifying research papers in this area into four primary categories: Clinical or Symptom Characterization, Advanced NLP or Computational Methods, Policy Advocacy or Public Health Communication, and Online Communities and Social Support. This methodology achieved an average confidence of 0.7788, with the minimum and maximum confidence being 0.1566 and 0.9928, respectively. This model showcases the ability of advanced language models to categorize research papers without any training data or predefined classification labels, thus enabling a more rapid and scalable assessment of existing literature. This paper also highlights the multifaceted nature of Long COVID research by demonstrating how advanced computational techniques applied to social media conversations can reveal deeper insights into the experiences, symptoms, and narratives of individuals affected by Long COVID.

Paperid: 7797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11392.pdf

Abstract:
Automated surgical workflow analysis is crucial for education, research, and clinical decision-making, but the lack of annotated datasets hinders the development of accurate and comprehensive workflow analysis solutions. We introduce a novel approach for addressing the sparsity and heterogeneity of annotated training data inspired by the human learning procedure of watching experts and understanding their explanations. Our method leverages a video-language model trained on alignment, denoising, and generative tasks to learn short-term spatio-temporal and multimodal representations. A task-specific temporal model is then used to capture relationships across entire videos. To achieve comprehensive video-language understanding in the surgical domain, we introduce a data collection and filtering strategy to construct a large-scale pretraining dataset from educational YouTube videos. We then utilize parameter-efficient fine-tuning by projecting downstream task annotations from publicly available surgical datasets into the language domain. Extensive experiments in two surgical domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with performance improvements of up to 7% in phase segmentation tasks, 8% in zero-shot phase segmentation, and comparable capabilities to fully-supervised models in few-shot settings. Harnessing our model's capabilities for long-range temporal localization and text generation, we present the first comprehensive solution for dense video captioning (DVC) of surgical videos, addressing this task despite the absence of existing DVC datasets in the surgical domain. We introduce a novel approach to surgical workflow understanding that leverages video-language pretraining, large-scale video pretraining, and optimized fine-tuning. Our method improves performance over state-of-the-art techniques and enables new downstream tasks for surgical video understanding.

Paperid: 7798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11068.pdf

Abstract:
Pharmaceutical process design and development for generic, innovative, or personalized drugs have always been a time-consuming, costly, rigorous process, that involves multi-stage evaluation for better quality control and assurance. Large language models (LLMs), a type of generative artificial intelligence system, can augment laboratory research in the pharmaceutical engineering process by helping scientists to extract knowledge from literature, design parameters, and collect and interpret experimental data ultimately accelerating scientific discovery. LLMs with prompt engineering technologies change the researchers thinking protocol from traditional empirical knowledge to streamlined thinking that connects the performance and structured parameters together. In this work, we investigate and evaluate how prompt engineering technologies can enhance the drug design process from different strategies such as zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, etc. The dissolution profile for specific drugs is predicted and suggested from the LLMs model. Furthermore, the fundamental physical properties such as PSD, aspect ratio, and specific surface area could be inversely designed from the LLMs model. Finally, all the results are evaluated and validated by real-world cases to prove the reliability of prompt engineering techniques. Initial evaluations show an MSE of 23.61 and R2 of 0.97 in zero-shot, an MSE of 114.89 and R2 of 0.90 in zero-shot-CoT, an MSE of 57.0 and R2 of 0.92 in few-shot, a MSE of 22.56 and R2 of 0.97 in few-shot-CoT and a MSE of 10.56 and R2 of 0.99 with the involvement of RAG. This work breaks down any barriers in developing a systematic framework where LLMs assist in formulation design, process control, and decision-making. Finally, we conclude the work by discussing open challenges and future research directions in pharmaceutical processes.

Paperid: 7799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10993.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning, or "learning to learn," aims to enable models to quickly adapt to new tasks with minimal data. While traditional methods like Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) optimize parameters in Euclidean space, they often struggle to capture complex learning dynamics, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Stiefel-MAML, which integrates Riemannian geometry by optimizing within the Stiefel manifold, a space that naturally enforces orthogonality constraints. By leveraging the geometric structure of the Stiefel manifold, we improve parameter expressiveness and enable more efficient optimization through Riemannian gradient calculations and retraction operations. We also introduce a novel kernel-based loss function defined on the Stiefel manifold, further enhancing the model's ability to explore the parameter space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets--including Omniglot, Mini-ImageNet, FC-100, and CUB--demonstrate that Stiefel-MAML consistently outperforms traditional MAML, achieving superior performance across various few-shot learning tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of Riemannian geometry to enhance meta-learning, paving the way for future research on optimizing over different geometric structures.

Paperid: 7800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10722.pdf

Abstract:
The core challenge in basketball tactic modeling lies in efficiently extracting complex spatial-temporal dependencies from historical data and accurately predicting various in-game events. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, primarily based on graph neural networks (GNNs), encounter difficulties in capturing long-term, long-distance, and fine-grained interactions among heterogeneous player nodes, as well as in recognizing interaction patterns. Additionally, they exhibit limited generalization to untrained downstream tasks and zero-shot scenarios. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Propagation Symmetry-Aware Graph Transformer for fine-grained game modeling. This architecture explicitly captures delay effects in the spatial space to enhance player node representations across discrete-time slices, employing symmetry-invariant priors to guide the attention mechanism. We also introduce an efficient contrastive learning strategy to train a Mixture of Tactics Experts module, facilitating differentiated modeling of offensive tactics. By integrating dense training with sparse inference, we achieve a 2.4x improvement in model efficiency. Moreover, the incorporation of Lightweight Graph Grounding for Large Language Models enables robust performance in open-ended downstream tasks and zero-shot scenarios, including novel teams or players. The proposed model, TacticExpert, delineates a vertically integrated large model framework for basketball, unifying pretraining across multiple datasets and downstream prediction tasks. Fine-grained modeling modules significantly enhance spatial-temporal representations, and visualization analyzes confirm the strong interpretability of the model.

Paperid: 7801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08174.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capability in reasoning with natural language. Coupled with this development is the emergence of embodied AI in robotics. Despite showing promise for verbal and written reasoning tasks, it remains unknown whether LLMs are capable of navigating complex spatial tasks with physical actions in the real world. To this end, it is of interest to investigate applying LLMs to robotics in zero-shot learning scenarios, and in the absence of fine-tuning - a feat which could significantly improve human-robot interaction, alleviate compute cost, and eliminate low-level programming tasks associated with robot tasks. To explore this question, we apply GPT-4(Omni) with a simulated Tiago robot in Webots engine for an object search task. We evaluate the effectiveness of three reasoning strategies based on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sub-task list generation with the Socratic method (SocraCoT) (in order of increasing rigor): (1) Non-CoT/Non-SocraCoT, (2) CoT only, and (3) SocraCoT. Performance was measured in terms of the proportion of tasks successfully completed and execution time (N = 20). Our preliminary results show that when combined with chain-of-thought reasoning, the Socratic method can be used for code generation for robotic tasks that require spatial awareness. In extension of this finding, we propose EVINCE-LoC; a modified EVINCE method that could further enhance performance in highly complex and or dynamic testing scenarios.

Paperid: 7802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06765.pdf

Abstract:
We compare the effectiveness of zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in Japanese and English using ChatGPT-3.5 and 4o-mini. The technique of zero-shot CoT, which involves appending a phrase such as "Let's think step by step" to a prompt to encourage reasoning before answering, has been shown to offer LLM performance improvements in mathematical and reasoning tasks, particularly in English. We investigate how these effects transfer to Japanese using the Japanese Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (JMMLU) and the Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (MMLU). Our results show that while zero-shot CoT prompting can lead to notable performance gains for some prompt categories in GPT-3.5, its impact in GPT-4o-mini is associated with significant performance declines. However, for Japanese prompts there remain certain categories, such as college mathematics and abstract algebra, that still exhibit improvements, despite the broader trend of diminishing effectiveness in more advanced models.

Paperid: 7803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04874.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation using zero-shot and few-shot learning. Yet these approaches do not allow the model to retain information from previous annotations, making each response independent from the preceding ones. This raises the question of whether model memory -- the LLM having knowledge about its own previous annotations in the same task -- affects performance. In this article, using OpenAI's GPT-4o and Meta's Llama 3.1 on two political science datasets, we demonstrate that allowing the model to retain information about its own previous classifications yields significant performance improvements: between 5 and 25\% when compared to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Moreover, memory reinforcement, a novel approach we propose that combines model memory and reinforcement learning, yields additional performance gains in three out of our four tests. These findings have important implications for applied researchers looking to improve performance and efficiency in LLM annotation tasks.

Paperid: 7804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04826.pdf

Abstract:
The reliance on large labeled datasets presents a significant challenge in medical image segmentation. Few-shot learning offers a potential solution, but existing methods often still require substantial training data. This paper proposes a novel approach that leverages the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a vision foundation model with strong video segmentation capabilities. We conceptualize 3D medical image volumes as video sequences, departing from the traditional slice-by-slice paradigm. Our core innovation is a support-query matching strategy: we perform extensive data augmentation on a single labeled support image and, for each frame in the query volume, algorithmically select the most analogous augmented support image. This selected image, along with its corresponding mask, is used as a mask prompt, driving SAM2's video segmentation. This approach entirely avoids model retraining or parameter updates. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark few-shot medical image segmentation datasets, achieving significant improvements in accuracy and annotation efficiency. This plug-and-play method offers a powerful and generalizable solution for 3D medical image segmentation.

Paperid: 7805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03787.pdf

Abstract:
Stance Detection (SD) has become a critical area of interest due to its applications in various contexts leading to increased research within NLP. Yet the subtlety and complexity of texts sourced from online platforms often containing sarcastic language pose significant challenges for SD algorithms in accurately determining the authors stance. This paper addresses this by employing sarcasm for SD. It also tackles the issue of insufficient annotated data for training SD models on new targets by conducting Cross-Target SD (CTSD). The proposed approach involves fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa models followed by concatenating additional deep learning layers. The approach is assessed against various State-Of-The-Art baselines for SD demonstrating superior performance using publicly available datasets. Notably our model outperforms the best SOTA models on both in-domain SD and CTSD tasks even before the incorporation of sarcasm-detection pre-training. The integration of sarcasm knowledge into the model significantly reduces misclassifications of sarcastic text elements in SD allowing our model to accurately predict 85% of texts that were previously misclassified without sarcasm-detection pre-training on in-domain SD. This enhancement contributes to an increase in the models average macro F1-score. The CTSD task achieves performance comparable to that of the in-domain task despite using a zero-shot finetuning. We also reveal that the success of the transfer-learning framework relies on the correlation between the lexical attributes of sarcasm detection and SD. This study represents the first exploration of sarcasm detection as an intermediate transfer-learning task within the context of SD while also leveraging the concatenation of BERT or RoBERTa with other deep-learning techniques. The proposed approach establishes a foundational baseline for future research in this domain.

Paperid: 7806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02144.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the performance of various classification models for a malware classification task using different feature sets and data configurations. Six models-Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, Random Forest (RF), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB)-were evaluated alongside two deep learning models, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Transformers, as well as the Gemini zero-shot and few-shot learning methods. Four feature sets were tested including All Features, Literature Review Features, the Top 45 Features from RF, and Down-Sampled with Top 45 Features. XGB achieved the highest accuracy of 87.42% using the Top 45 Features, outperforming all other models. RF followed closely with 87.23% accuracy on the same feature set. In contrast, deep learning models underperformed, with RNN achieving 66.71% accuracy and Transformers reaching 71.59%. Down-sampling reduced performance across all models, with XGB dropping to 81.31%. Gemini zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches showed the lowest performance, with accuracies of 40.65% and 48.65%, respectively. The results highlight the importance of feature selection in improving model performance while reducing computational complexity. Traditional models like XGB and RF demonstrated superior performance, while deep learning and few-shot methods struggled to match their accuracy. This study underscores the effectiveness of traditional machine learning models for structured datasets and provides a foundation for future research into hybrid approaches and larger datasets.

Paperid: 7807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02141.pdf

Abstract:
This study uses various models to address network traffic classification, categorizing traffic into web, browsing, IPSec, backup, and email. We collected a comprehensive dataset from Arbor Edge Defender (AED) devices, comprising of 30,959 observations and 19 features. Multiple models were evaluated, including Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Transformer, and two Large Language Models (LLMs) including GPT-4o and Gemini with zero- and few-shot learning. Transformer and XGBoost showed the best performance, achieving the highest accuracy of 98.95 and 97.56%, respectively. GPT-4o and Gemini showed promising results with few-shot learning, improving accuracy significantly from initial zero-shot performance. While Gemini Few-Shot and GPT-4o Few-Shot performed well in categories like Web and Email, misclassifications occurred in more complex categories like IPSec and Backup. The study highlights the importance of model selection, fine-tuning, and the balance between training data size and model complexity for achieving reliable classification results.

Paperid: 7808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00376.pdf

Abstract:
This study proposes a novel few-shot crack image classification model based on CLIP and Bayesian optimization. By combining multimodal information and Bayesian approach, the model achieves efficient classification of crack images in a small number of training samples. The CLIP model employs its robust feature extraction capabilities to facilitate precise classification with a limited number of samples. In contrast, Bayesian optimisation enhances the robustness and generalization of the model, while reducing the reliance on extensive labelled data. The results demonstrate that the model exhibits robust performance across a diverse range of dataset scales, particularly in the context of small sample sets. The study validates the potential of the method in civil engineering crack classification.

Paperid: 7809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00355.pdf

Abstract:
From disinformation spread by AI chatbots to AI recommendations that inadvertently reinforce stereotypes, textual bias poses a significant challenge to the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework that systematically identifies biases by disentangling each statement as fact or opinion, assigning a bias intensity score, and providing concise, factual justifications. Evaluated on 1,500 samples from the WikiNPOV dataset, the framework achieves 84.9% accuracy$\unicode{x2014}$an improvement of 13.0% over the zero-shot baseline$\unicode{x2014}$demonstrating the efficacy of explicitly modeling fact versus opinion prior to quantifying bias intensity. By combining enhanced detection accuracy with interpretable explanations, this approach sets a foundation for promoting fairness and accountability in modern language models.

Paperid: 7810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18901.pdf

Abstract:
While it is relatively easier to train humanoid robots to mimic specific locomotion skills, it is more challenging to learn from various motions and adhere to continuously changing commands. These robots must accurately track motion instructions, seamlessly transition between a variety of movements, and master intermediate motions not present in their reference data. In this work, we propose a novel approach that integrates human-like motion transfer with precise velocity tracking by a series of improvements to classical imitation learning. To enhance generalization, we employ the Wasserstein divergence criterion (WGAN-div). Furthermore, a Hybrid Internal Model provides structured estimates of hidden states and velocity to enhance mobile stability and environment adaptability, while a curiosity bonus fosters exploration. Our comprehensive method promises highly human-like locomotion that adapts to varying velocity requirements, direct generalization to unseen motions and multitasking, as well as zero-shot transfer to the simulator and the real world across different terrains. These advancements are validated through simulations across various robot models and extensive real-world experiments.

Paperid: 7811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18015.pdf

Abstract:
Current robots struggle with long-horizon manipulation tasks requiring sequences of prehensile and non-prehensile skills, contact-rich interactions, and long-term reasoning. We present $\texttt{SPIN}$ ($\textbf{S}$kill $\textbf{P}$lanning to $\textbf{IN}$ference), a framework that distills a computationally intensive planning algorithm into a policy via imitation learning. We propose $\texttt{Skill-RRT}$, an extension of RRT that incorporates skill applicability checks and intermediate object pose sampling for solving such long-horizon problems. To chain independently trained skills, we introduce $\textit{connectors}$, goal-conditioned policies trained to minimize object disturbance during transitions. High-quality demonstrations are generated with $\texttt{Skill-RRT}$ and distilled through noise-based replay in order to reduce online computation time. The resulting policy, trained entirely in simulation, transfers zero-shot to the real world and achieves over 80% success across three challenging long-horizon manipulation tasks and outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical RL and planning methods.

Paperid: 7812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17284.pdf

Abstract:
We test and study the variation in speech recognition of fine-tuned versions of the Whisper model on child, elderly and non-native Dutch speech from the JASMIN-CGN corpus. Our primary goal is to evaluate how speakers' age and linguistic background influence Whisper's performance. Whisper achieves varying Word Error Rates (WER) when fine-tuned on subpopulations of specific ages and linguistic backgrounds. Fine-tuned performance is remarkably better than zero-shot performance, achieving a relative reduction in WER of 81% for native children, 72% for non-native children, 67% for non-native adults, and 65% for native elderly people. Our findings underscore the importance of training speech recognition models like Whisper on underrepresented subpopulations such as children, the elderly, and non-native speakers.

Paperid: 7813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17136.pdf

Abstract:
The automation of news analysis and summarization presents a promising solution to the challenge of processing and analyzing vast amounts of information prevalent in today's information society. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to transform vast amounts of textual data into concise and easily comprehensible summaries, offering an effective solution to the problem of information overload and providing users with a quick overview of relevant information. A particularly significant application of this technology lies in supply chain risk analysis. Companies must monitor the news about their suppliers and respond to incidents for several critical reasons, including compliance with laws and regulations, risk management, and maintaining supply chain resilience. This paper develops an automated news summarization system for supply chain risk analysis using LLMs. The proposed solution aggregates news from various sources, summarizes them using LLMs, and presents the condensed information to users in a clear and concise format. This approach enables companies to optimize their information processing and make informed decisions. Our study addresses two main research questions: (1) Are LLMs effective in automating news summarization, particularly in the context of supply chain risk analysis? (2) How effective are various LLMs in terms of readability, duplicate detection, and risk identification in their summarization quality? In this paper, we conducted an offline study using a range of publicly available LLMs at the time and complemented it with a user study focused on the top performing systems of the offline experiments to evaluate their effectiveness further. Our results demonstrate that LLMs, particularly Few-Shot GPT-4o mini, offer significant improvements in summary quality and risk identification.

Paperid: 7814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16545.pdf

Abstract:
Current federated backdoor attacks focus on collaboratively training backdoor triggers, where multiple compromised clients train their local trigger patches and then merge them into a global trigger during the inference phase. However, these methods require careful design of the shape and position of trigger patches and lack the feature interactions between trigger patches during training, resulting in poor backdoor attack success rates. Moreover, the pixels of the patches remain untruncated, thereby making abrupt areas in backdoor examples easily detectable by the detection algorithm. To this end, we propose a novel benchmark for the federated backdoor attack based on feature aggregation. Specifically, we align the dimensions of triggers with images, delimit the trigger's pixel boundaries, and facilitate feature interaction among local triggers trained by each compromised client. Furthermore, leveraging the intra-class attack strategy, we propose the simultaneous generation of backdoor triggers for all target classes, significantly reducing the overall production time for triggers across all target classes and increasing the risk of the federated model being attacked. Experiments demonstrate that our method can not only bypass the detection of defense methods while patch-based methods fail, but also achieve a zero-shot backdoor attack with a success rate of 77.39%. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to implement such a zero-shot attack in federated learning. Finally, we evaluate attack performance by varying the trigger's training factors, including poison location, ratio, pixel bound, and trigger training duration (local epochs and communication rounds).

Paperid: 7815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15810.pdf

Abstract:
This study evaluates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on SemEval-2020 Task 4 dataset, focusing on commonsense validation and explanation. Our methodology involves evaluating multiple LLMs, including LLaMA3-70B, Gemma2-9B, and Mixtral-8x7B, using zero-shot prompting techniques. The models are tested on two tasks: Task A (Commonsense Validation), where models determine whether a statement aligns with commonsense knowledge, and Task B (Commonsense Explanation), where models identify the reasoning behind implausible statements. Performance is assessed based on accuracy, and results are compared to fine-tuned transformer-based models. The results indicate that larger models outperform previous models and perform closely to human evaluation for Task A, with LLaMA3-70B achieving the highest accuracy of 98.40% in Task A whereas, lagging behind previous models with 93.40% in Task B. However, while models effectively identify implausible statements, they face challenges in selecting the most relevant explanation, highlighting limitations in causal and inferential reasoning.

Paperid: 7816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15155.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, widespread internet adoption and the growth in userbase of various social media platforms have led to an increase in the proliferation of extreme speech online. While traditional language models have demonstrated proficiency in distinguishing between neutral text and non-neutral text (i.e. extreme speech), categorizing the diverse types of extreme speech presents significant challenges. The task of extreme speech classification is particularly nuanced, as it requires a deep understanding of socio-cultural contexts to accurately interpret the intent of the language used by the speaker. Even human annotators often disagree on the appropriate classification of such content, emphasizing the complex and subjective nature of this task. The use of human moderators also presents a scaling issue, necessitating the need for automated systems for extreme speech classification. The recent launch of ChatGPT has drawn global attention to the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a diverse variety of tasks. Trained on vast and diverse corpora, and demonstrating the ability to effectively capture and encode contextual information, LLMs emerge as highly promising tools for tackling this specific task of extreme speech classification. In this paper, we leverage the Indian subset of the extreme speech dataset from Maronikolakis et al. (2022) to develop an effective classification framework using LLMs. We evaluate open-source Llama models against closed-source OpenAI models, finding that while pre-trained LLMs show moderate efficacy, fine-tuning with domain-specific data significantly enhances performance, highlighting their adaptability to linguistic and contextual nuances. Although GPT-based models outperform Llama models in zero-shot settings, the performance gap disappears after fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14541.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in recommender systems by enabling zero-shot recommendation without conventional training. Despite their potential, most existing works rely solely on users' purchase histories, leaving significant room for improvement by incorporating user-generated textual data, such as reviews and product descriptions. Addressing this gap, we propose PURE, a novel LLM-based recommendation framework that builds and maintains evolving user profiles by systematically extracting and summarizing key information from user reviews. PURE consists of three core components: a Review Extractor for identifying user preferences and key product features, a Profile Updater for refining and updating user profiles, and a Recommender for generating personalized recommendations using the most current profile. To evaluate PURE, we introduce a continuous sequential recommendation task that reflects real-world scenarios by adding reviews over time and updating predictions incrementally. Our experimental results on Amazon datasets demonstrate that PURE outperforms existing LLM-based methods, effectively leveraging long-term user information while managing token limitations.

Paperid: 7818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14335.pdf

Abstract:
Information in text is communicated in a way that supports a goal for its reader. Product reviews, for example, contain opinions, tips, product descriptions, and many other types of information that provide both direct insights, as well as unexpected signals for downstream applications. We devise a typology of 24 communicative goals in sentences from the product review domain, and employ a zero-shot multi-label classifier that facilitates large-scale analyses of review data. In our experiments, we find that the combination of classes in the typology forecasts helpfulness and sentiment of reviews, while supplying explanations for these decisions. In addition, our typology enables analysis of review intent, effectiveness and rhetorical structure. Characterizing the types of information in reviews unlocks many opportunities for more effective consumption of this genre.

Paperid: 7819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14095.pdf

Abstract:
A key aspect of alignment is the proper use of within-document evidence to construct document-level decisions. We analyze the relationship between the retrieval and interpretation of within-document evidence for large language model in a few-shot setting. Specifically, we measure the extent to which model prediction errors are associated with evidence retrieval errors with respect to gold-standard human-annotated extractive evidence for five datasets, using two popular closed proprietary models. We perform two ablation studies to investigate when both label prediction and evidence retrieval errors can be attributed to qualities of the relevant evidence. We find that there is a strong empirical relationship between model prediction and evidence retrieval error, but that evidence retrieval error is mostly not associated with evidence interpretation error--a hopeful sign for downstream applications built on this mechanism.

Paperid: 7820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12584.pdf

Abstract:
The high cost of data labeling presents a major barrier to deploying machine learning systems at scale. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) mitigates this challenge by utilizing unlabeled data alongside limited labeled examples, while the emergence of foundation models (FMs) offers powerful zero-shot capabilities that can further reduce labeling cost. However, directly fine-tuning large FMs is often impractical in resource-constrained settings, and naÃ¯vely using their pseudo-labels for unlabeled data can degrade performance due to its unreliablity or domain mismatch with target task. In this work, we introduce ZeroMatch, a novel SSL framework that integrates knowledge distillation with consistency-based learning to jointly leverage labeled data, unlabeled data, and pseudo-labels from FMs. ZeroMatch enables training compact student models using only FM inference, making it suitable for low-resource environments such as personal devices with limited compute. Experiments on six vision and language classification benchmarks show that ZeroMatch consistently outperforms standard SSL and zero-shot augmented methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness across a range of foundation model qualities.

Paperid: 7821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11830.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models revolutionized NLP and showed dramatic performance improvements across several tasks. In this paper, we investigated the role of such language models in text classification and how they compare with other approaches relying on smaller pre-trained language models. Considering 32 datasets spanning 8 languages, we compared zero-shot classification, few-shot fine-tuning and synthetic data based classifiers with classifiers built using the complete human labeled dataset. Our results show that zero-shot approaches do well for sentiment classification, but are outperformed by other approaches for the rest of the tasks, and synthetic data sourced from multiple LLMs can build better classifiers than zero-shot open LLMs. We also see wide performance disparities across languages in all the classification scenarios. We expect that these findings would guide practitioners working on developing text classification systems across languages.

Paperid: 7822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11747.pdf

Abstract:
Video question answering that requires external knowledge beyond the visual content remains a significant challenge in AI systems. While models can effectively answer questions based on direct visual observations, they often falter when faced with questions requiring broader contextual knowledge. To address this limitation, we investigate knowledge-intensive video question answering (KI-VideoQA) through the lens of multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation, with a particular focus on handling open-ended questions rather than just multiple-choice formats. Our comprehensive analysis examines various retrieval augmentation approaches using cutting-edge retrieval and vision language models, testing both zero-shot and fine-tuned configurations. We investigate several critical dimensions: the interplay between different information sources and modalities, strategies for integrating diverse multi-modal contexts, and the dynamics between query formulation and retrieval result utilization. Our findings reveal that while retrieval augmentation shows promise in improving model performance, its success is heavily dependent on the chosen modality and retrieval methodology. The study also highlights the critical role of query construction and retrieval depth optimization in effective knowledge integration. Through our proposed approach, we achieve a substantial 17.5% improvement in accuracy on multiple choice questions in the KnowIT VQA dataset, establishing new state-of-the-art performance levels.

Paperid: 7823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11338.pdf

Abstract:
Radiographic testing is a fundamental non-destructive evaluation technique for identifying weld defects and assessing quality in industrial applications due to its high-resolution imaging capabilities. Over the past decade, deep learning techniques have significantly advanced weld defect identification in radiographic images. However, conventional approaches, which rely on training small-scale, task-specific models on single-scenario datasets, exhibit poor cross-scenario generalization. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a pre-trained visual foundation model trained on large-scale datasets, has demonstrated exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities. Fine-tuning SAM with limited domain-specific data has yielded promising results in fields such as medical image segmentation and anomaly detection. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce SAM-based segmentation for general weld radiographic testing images. We propose WRT-SAM, a novel weld radiographic defect segmentation model that leverages SAM through an adapter-based integration with a specialized prompt generator architecture. To improve adaptability to grayscale weld radiographic images, we introduce a frequency prompt generator module, which enhances the model's sensitivity to frequency-domain information. Furthermore, to address the multi-scale nature of weld defects, we incorporate a multi-scale prompt generator module, enabling the model to effectively extract and encode defect information across varying scales. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that WRT-SAM achieves a recall of 78.87%, a precision of 84.04%, and an AUC of 0.9746, setting a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmark. Moreover, the model exhibits superior zero-shot generalization performance, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in diverse radiographic testing scenarios.

Paperid: 7824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11024.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the fluency and logical coherence of image captioning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted to incorporate external knowledge into LLMs; however, existing RAG-based methods rely on separate retrieval banks, introducing computational overhead and limiting the utilization of LLMs' inherent zero-shot capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose TPCap, a novel trigger-augmented and multi-modal purification framework for zero-shot image captioning without external retrieval libraries. TPCap consists of two key components: trigger-augmented (TA) generation and multi-modal purification (MP). The TA module employs a trigger projector with frozen and learnable projections to activate LLMs' contextual reasoning, enhance visual-textual alignment, and mitigate data bias. The MP module further refines the generated entity-related information by filtering noise and enhancing feature quality, ensuring more precise and factually consistent captions. We evaluate TPCap on COCO, NoCaps, Flickr30k, and WHOOPS datasets. With only 0.82M trainable parameters and training on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, TPCap achieves competitive performance comparable to state-of-the-art models.

Paperid: 7825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10601.pdf

Abstract:
The frequency of extreme flood events is increasing throughout the world. Daily, high-resolution (30m) Flood Inundation Maps (FIM) observed from space play a key role in informing mitigation and preparedness efforts to counter these extreme events. However, the temporal frequency of publicly available high-resolution FIMs, e.g., from Landsat, is at the order of two weeks thus limiting the effective monitoring of flood inundation dynamics. Conversely, global, low-resolution (~300m) Water Fraction Maps (WFM) are publicly available from NOAA VIIRS daily. Motivated by the recent successes of deep learning methods for single image super-resolution, we explore the effectiveness and limitations of similar data-driven approaches to downscaling low-resolution WFMs to high-resolution FIMs. To overcome the scarcity of high-resolution FIMs, we train our models with high-quality synthetic data obtained through physics-based simulations. We evaluate our models on real-world data from flood events in the state of Iowa. The study indicates that data-driven approaches exhibit superior reconstruction accuracy over non-data-driven alternatives and that the use of synthetic data is a viable proxy for training purposes. Additionally, we show that our trained models can exhibit superior zero-shot performance when transferred to regions with hydroclimatological similarity to the U.S. Midwest.

Paperid: 7826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09573.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we tackle industry challenges in video content classification by exploring and optimizing GPT-based models for zero-shot classification across seven critical categories of video quality. We contribute a novel approach to improving GPT's performance through prompt optimization and policy refinement, demonstrating that simplifying complex policies significantly reduces false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a new decomposition-aggregation-based prompt engineering technique, which outperforms traditional single-prompt methods. These experiments, conducted on real industry problems, show that thoughtful prompt design can substantially enhance GPT's performance without additional finetuning, offering an effective and scalable solution for improving video classification.

Paperid: 7827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06150.pdf

Abstract:
Public health researchers are increasingly interested in using social media data to study health-related behaviors, but manually labeling this data can be labor-intensive and costly. This study explores whether zero-shot labeling using large language models (LLMs) can match or surpass conventional crowd-sourced annotation for Twitter posts related to sleep disorders, physical activity, and sedentary behavior. Multiple annotation pipelines were designed to compare labels produced by domain experts, crowd workers, and LLM-driven approaches under varied prompt-engineering strategies. Our findings indicate that LLMs can rival human performance in straightforward classification tasks and significantly reduce labeling time, yet their accuracy diminishes for tasks requiring more nuanced domain knowledge. These results clarify the trade-offs between automated scalability and human expertise, demonstrating conditions under which LLM-based labeling can be efficiently integrated into public health research without undermining label quality.

Paperid: 7828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04997.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges to evaluate recommendation systems, search engines, and other subjective tasks, where relying on human evaluators can be costly, time-consuming, and unscalable. LLMs offer an efficient solution for continuous, automated evaluation. However, since the systems that are built and improved with these judgments are ultimately designed for human use, it is crucial that LLM judgments align closely with human evaluators to ensure such systems remain human-centered. On the other hand, aligning LLM judgments with human evaluators is challenging due to individual variability and biases in human judgments. We propose a simple yet effective framework to align LLM judgments with individual human evaluators or their aggregated judgments, without retraining or fine-tuning the LLM. Our approach learns a linear mapping between the LLM's outputs and human judgments, achieving over 142% average improvement in agreement across 29 tasks with only a small number of calibration examples used for training. Notably, our method works in zero-shot and few-shot settings, exceeds inter-human agreement on four out of six tasks, and enables smaller LLMs to achieve performance comparable to that of larger models.

Paperid: 7829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04573.pdf

Abstract:
We present an Adversarially Pre-trained Transformer (APT) that is able to perform zero-shot meta-learning on tabular prediction tasks without pre-training on any real-world dataset, extending on the recent development of Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) and TabPFN. Specifically, APT is pre-trained with adversarial synthetic data agents, who continue to shift their underlying data generating distribution and deliberately challenge the model with different synthetic datasets. In addition, we propose a mixture block architecture that is able to handle classification tasks with arbitrary number of classes, addressing the class size limitation -- a crucial weakness of prior deep tabular zero-shot learners. In experiments, we show that our framework matches state-of-the-art performance on small classification tasks without filtering on dataset characteristics such as number of classes and number of missing values, while maintaining an average runtime under one second. On common benchmark dataset suites in both classification and regression, we show that adversarial pre-training was able to enhance TabPFN's performance. In our analysis, we demonstrate that the adversarial synthetic data agents were able to generate a more diverse collection of data compared to the ordinary random generator in TabPFN. In addition, we demonstrate that our mixture block neural design has improved generalizability and greatly accelerated pre-training.

Paperid: 7830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04351.pdf

Abstract:
Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends.

Paperid: 7831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03395.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is essential for operational intelligence in the hospitality industry, and particularly challenging in large-scale, distributed systems. This study evaluates the performance of statistical, machine learning (ML), deep learning, and foundation models in forecasting hourly sales over a 14-day horizon using real-world data from a network of thousands of restaurants across Germany. The forecasting solution includes features such as weather conditions, calendar events, and time-of-day patterns. Results demonstrate the strong performance of ML-based meta-models and highlight the emerging potential of foundation models like Chronos and TimesFM, which deliver competitive performance with minimal feature engineering, leveraging only the pre-trained model (zero-shot inference). Additionally, a hybrid PySpark-Pandas approach proves to be a robust solution for achieving horizontal scalability in large-scale deployments.

Paperid: 7832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03292.pdf

Abstract:
Citation Worthiness Detection (CWD) consists in determining which sentences, within an article or collection, should be backed up with a citation to validate the information it provides. This study, introduces ALPET, a framework combining Active Learning (AL) and Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), to enhance CWD for languages with limited data resources. Applied to Catalan, Basque, and Albanian Wikipedia datasets, ALPET outperforms the existing CCW baseline while reducing the amount of labeled data in some cases above 80\%. ALPET's performance plateaus after 300 labeled samples, showing it suitability for low-resource scenarios where large, labeled datasets are not common. While specific active learning query strategies, like those employing K-Means clustering, can offer advantages, their effectiveness is not universal and often yields marginal gains over random sampling, particularly with smaller datasets. This suggests that random sampling, despite its simplicity, remains a strong baseline for CWD in constraint resource environments. Overall, ALPET's ability to achieve high performance with fewer labeled samples makes it a promising tool for enhancing the verifiability of online content in low-resource language settings.

Paperid: 7833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02368.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained attention for addressing coding problems, but their effectiveness in fixing code maintainability remains unclear. This study evaluates LLMs capability to resolve 127 maintainability issues from 10 GitHub repositories. We use zero-shot prompting for Copilot Chat and Llama 3.1, and few-shot prompting with Llama only. The LLM-generated solutions are assessed for compilation errors, test failures, and new maintainability problems. Llama with few-shot prompting successfully fixed 44.9% of the methods, while Copilot Chat and Llama zero-shot fixed 32.29% and 30%, respectively. However, most solutions introduced errors or new maintainability issues. We also conducted a human study with 45 participants to evaluate the readability of 51 LLM-generated solutions. The human study showed that 68.63% of participants observed improved readability. Overall, while LLMs show potential for fixing maintainability issues, their introduction of errors highlights their current limitations.

Paperid: 7834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01071.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of language instructions with robotic control, particularly through Vision Language Action (VLA) models, has shown significant potential. However, these systems are often hindered by high computational costs, the need for extensive retraining, and limited scalability, making them less accessible for widespread use. In this paper, we introduce SVLR (Scalable Visual Language Robotics), an open-source, modular framework that operates without the need for retraining, providing a scalable solution for robotic control. SVLR leverages a combination of lightweight, open-source AI models including the Vision-Language Model (VLM) Mini-InternVL, zero-shot image segmentation model CLIPSeg, Large Language Model Phi-3, and sentence similarity model all-MiniLM to process visual and language inputs. These models work together to identify objects in an unknown environment, use them as parameters for task execution, and generate a sequence of actions in response to natural language instructions. A key strength of SVLR is its scalability. The framework allows for easy integration of new robotic tasks and robots by simply adding text descriptions and task definitions, without the need for retraining. This modularity ensures that SVLR can continuously adapt to the latest advancements in AI technologies and support a wide range of robots and tasks. SVLR operates effectively on an NVIDIA RTX 2070 (mobile) GPU, demonstrating promising performance in executing pick-and-place tasks. While these initial results are encouraging, further evaluation across a broader set of tasks and comparisons with existing VLA models are needed to assess SVLR's generalization capabilities and performance in more complex scenarios.

Paperid: 7835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00977.pdf

Abstract:
Hierarchical Merging is a technique commonly used to summarize very long texts ($>$100K tokens) by breaking down the input into smaller sections, summarizing those sections individually, and then merging or combining those summaries into a final coherent summary. Although it helps address the limitations of large language models (LLMs) with fixed input length constraints, the recursive merging process can amplify LLM hallucinations, increasing the risk of factual inaccuracies. In this paper, we seek to mitigate hallucinations by enriching hierarchical merging with context from the source document. Specifically, we propose different approaches to contextual augmentation ranging from \emph{replacing} intermediate summaries with relevant input context, to \emph{refining} them while using the context as supporting evidence, and \emph{aligning} them implicitly (via citations) to the input. Experimental results on datasets representing legal and narrative domains show that contextual augmentation consistently outperforms zero-shot and hierarchical merging baselines for the Llama 3.1 model family. Our analysis further reveals that refinement methods tend to perform best when paired with extractive summarization for identifying relevant input.

Paperid: 7836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00865.pdf

Abstract:
This study addresses the growing concern of information asymmetry in consumer contracts, exacerbated by the proliferation of online services with complex Terms of Service that are rarely even read. Even though research on automatic analysis methods is conducted, the problem is aggravated by the general focus on English-language Machine Learning approaches and on major jurisdictions, such as the European Union. We introduce a new methodology and a substantial dataset addressing this gap. We propose a novel annotation scheme with four categories and a total of 20 classes, and apply it on 50 online Terms of Service used in Chile. Our evaluation of transformer-based models highlights how factors like language- and/or domain-specific pre-training, few-shot sample size, and model architecture affect the detection and classification of potentially abusive clauses. Results show a large variability in performance for the different tasks and models, with the highest macro-F1 scores for the detection task ranging from 79% to 89% and micro-F1 scores up to 96%, while macro-F1 scores for the classification task range from 60% to 70% and micro-F1 scores from 64% to 80%. Notably, this is the first Spanish-language multi-label classification dataset for legal clauses, applying Chilean law and offering a comprehensive evaluation of Spanish-language models in the legal domain. Our work lays the ground for future research in method development for rarely considered legal analysis and potentially leads to practical applications to support consumers in Chile and Latin America as a whole.

Paperid: 7837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18640.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the dissemination of disinformation on social media platforms during the DANA event (DANA is a Spanish acronym for Depresion Aislada en Niveles Altos, translating to high-altitude isolated depression) that resulted in extremely heavy rainfall and devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, on October 29, 2024. We created a novel dataset of 650 TikTok and X posts, which was manually annotated to differentiate between disinformation and trustworthy content. Additionally, a Few-Shot annotation approach with GPT-4o achieved substantial agreement (Cohen's kappa of 0.684) with manual labels. Emotion analysis revealed that disinformation on X is mainly associated with increased sadness and fear, while on TikTok, it correlates with higher levels of anger and disgust. Linguistic analysis using the LIWC dictionary showed that trustworthy content utilizes more articulate and factual language, whereas disinformation employs negations, perceptual words, and personal anecdotes to appear credible. Audio analysis of TikTok posts highlighted distinct patterns: trustworthy audios featured brighter tones and robotic or monotone narration, promoting clarity and credibility, while disinformation audios leveraged tonal variation, emotional depth, and manipulative musical elements to amplify engagement. In detection models, SVM+TF-IDF achieved the highest F1-Score, excelling with limited data. Incorporating audio features into roberta-large-bne improved both Accuracy and F1-Score, surpassing its text-only counterpart and SVM in Accuracy. GPT-4o Few-Shot also performed well, showcasing the potential of large language models for automated disinformation detection. These findings demonstrate the importance of leveraging both textual and audio features for improved disinformation detection on multimodal platforms like TikTok.

Paperid: 7838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18128.pdf

Abstract:
Given the recent introduction of multiple language models and the ongoing demand for improved Natural Language Processing tasks, particularly summarization, this work provides a comprehensive benchmarking of 20 recent language models, focusing on smaller ones for the news summarization task. In this work, we systematically test the capabilities and effectiveness of these models in summarizing news article texts which are written in different styles and presented in three distinct datasets. Specifically, we focus in this study on zero-shot and few-shot learning settings and we apply a robust evaluation methodology that combines different evaluation concepts including automatic metrics, human evaluation, and LLM-as-a-judge. Interestingly, including demonstration examples in the few-shot learning setting did not enhance models' performance and, in some cases, even led to worse quality of the generated summaries. This issue arises mainly due to the poor quality of the gold summaries that have been used as reference summaries, which negatively impacts the models' performance. Furthermore, our study's results highlight the exceptional performance of GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, which generally dominate due to their advanced capabilities. However, among the public models evaluated, certain models such as Qwen1.5-7B, SOLAR-10.7B-Instruct-v1.0, Meta-Llama-3-8B and Zephyr-7B-Beta demonstrated promising results. These models showed significant potential, positioning them as competitive alternatives to large models for the task of news summarization.

Paperid: 7839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17295.pdf

Abstract:
Machine Translation (MT) is undergoing a paradigm shift, with systems based on fine-tuned large language models (LLM) becoming increasingly competitive with traditional encoder-decoder models trained specifically for translation tasks. However, LLM-based systems are at a higher risk of generating hallucinations, which can severely undermine user's trust and safety. Most prior research on hallucination mitigation focuses on traditional MT models, with solutions that involve post-hoc mitigation - detecting hallucinated translations and re-translating them. While effective, this approach introduces additional complexity in deploying extra tools in production and also increases latency. To address these limitations, we propose a method that intrinsically learns to mitigate hallucinations during the model training phase. Specifically, we introduce a data creation framework to generate hallucination focused preference datasets. Fine-tuning LLMs on these preference datasets reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 96% across five language pairs, while preserving overall translation quality. In a zero-shot setting our approach reduces hallucinations by 89% on an average across three unseen target languages.

Paperid: 7840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17195.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce Atla Selene Mini, a state-of-the-art small language model-as-a-judge (SLMJ). Selene Mini is a general-purpose evaluator that outperforms the best SLMJs and GPT-4o-mini on overall performance across 11 out-of-distribution benchmarks, spanning absolute scoring, classification, and pairwise preference tasks. It is the highest-scoring 8B generative model on RewardBench, surpassing strong baselines like GPT-4o and specialized judges. To achieve this, we develop a principled data curation strategy that augments public datasets with synthetically generated critiques and ensures high quality through filtering and dataset ablations. We train our model on a combined direct preference optimization (DPO) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) loss, and produce a highly promptable evaluator that excels in real-world scenarios. Selene Mini shows dramatically improved zero-shot agreement with human expert evaluations on financial and medical industry datasets. It is also robust to variations in prompt format. Preliminary results indicate that Selene Mini is the top-ranking evaluator in a live, community-driven Judge Arena. We release the model weights on HuggingFace (https://hf.co/AtlaAI/Selene-1-Mini-Llama-3.1-8B) and Ollama to encourage widespread community adoption.

Paperid: 7841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16247.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel algorithm for constructing decision trees using large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot manner based on Classification and Regression Trees (CART) principles. Traditional decision tree induction methods rely heavily on labeled data to recursively partition data using criteria such as information gain or the Gini index. In contrast, we propose a method that uses the pre-trained knowledge embedded in LLMs to build decision trees without requiring training data. Our approach leverages LLMs to perform operations essential for decision tree construction, including attribute discretization, probability calculation, and Gini index computation based on the probabilities. We show that these zero-shot decision trees can outperform baseline zero-shot methods and achieve competitive performance compared to supervised data-driven decision trees on tabular datasets. The decision trees constructed via this method provide transparent and interpretable models, addressing data scarcity while preserving interpretability. This work establishes a new baseline in low-data machine learning, offering a principled, knowledge-driven alternative to data-driven tree construction.

Paperid: 7842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14593.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) is a challenging task in machine learning, demanding a model to render discriminative classification by using only a few labeled samples. In the literature of FSL, deep models are trained in a manner of metric learning to provide metric in a feature space which is well generalizable to classify samples of novel classes; in the space, even a few amount of labeled training examples can construct an effective classifier. In this paper, we propose a novel FSL loss based on \emph{geometric mean} to embed discriminative metric into deep features. In contrast to the other losses such as utilizing arithmetic mean in softmax-based formulation, the proposed method leverages geometric mean to aggregate pair-wise relationships among samples for enhancing discriminative metric across class categories. The proposed loss is not only formulated in a simple form but also is thoroughly analyzed in theoretical ways to reveal its favorable characteristics which are favorable for learning feature metric in FSL. In the experiments on few-shot image classification tasks, the method produces competitive performance in comparison to the other losses.

Paperid: 7843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13594.pdf

Abstract:
Text-to-SQL prompt strategies based on Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance on well-known benchmarks. However, when applied to real-world databases, their performance is significantly less than for these benchmarks, especially for Natural Language (NL) questions requiring complex filters and joins to be processed. This paper then proposes a strategy to compile NL questions into SQL queries that incorporates a dynamic few-shot examples strategy and leverages the services provided by a database keyword search (KwS) platform. The paper details how the precision and recall of the schema-linking process are improved with the help of the examples provided and the keyword-matching service that the KwS platform offers. Then, it shows how the KwS platform can be used to synthesize a view that captures the joins required to process an input NL question and thereby simplify the SQL query compilation step. The paper includes experiments with a real-world relational database to assess the performance of the proposed strategy. The experiments suggest that the strategy achieves an accuracy on the real-world relational database that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The paper concludes by discussing the results obtained.

Paperid: 7844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11770.pdf

Abstract:
Societal and personal values are transmitted to younger generations through interaction and exposure. Traditionally, children and adolescents learned values from parents, educators, or peers. Nowadays, social platforms serve as a significant channel through which youth (and adults) consume information, as the main medium of entertainment, and possibly the medium through which they learn different values. In this paper we extract implicit values from TikTok movies uploaded by online influencers targeting children and adolescents. We curated a dataset of hundreds of TikTok movies and annotated them according to the Schwartz Theory of Personal Values. We then experimented with an array of Masked and Large language model, exploring how values can be detected. Specifically, we considered two pipelines -- direct extraction of values from video and a 2-step approach in which videos are first converted to elaborated scripts and then values are extracted. Achieving state-of-the-art results, we find that the 2-step approach performs significantly better than the direct approach and that using a trainable Masked Language Model as a second step significantly outperforms a few-shot application of a number of Large Language Models. We further discuss the impact of fine-tuning and compare the performance of the different models on identification of values present or contradicted in the TikTok. Finally, we share the first values-annotated dataset of TikTok videos. Our results pave the way to further research on influence and value transmission in video-based social platforms.

Paperid: 7845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10834.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable performance in computer vision tasks that require reasoning across visual and textual modalities, yet their capabilities are limited to their pre-trained data, requiring extensive fine-tuning for updates. Recent researches have explored the use of In-Context Learning (ICL) to overcome these challenges by providing a set of demonstrating examples as context to augment MLLMs performance in several tasks, showing that many-shot ICL leads to substantial improvements compared to few-shot ICL. However, the reliance on numerous demonstrating examples and the limited MLLMs context windows presents significant obstacles. This paper aims to address these challenges by introducing a novel approach, Visual RAG, that synergically combines the MLLMs capability to learn from the context, with a retrieval mechanism. The crux of this approach is to ensure to augment the MLLM knowledge by selecting only the most relevant demonstrating examples for the query, pushing it to learn by analogy. In this way, relying on the new information provided dynamically during inference time, the resulting system is not limited to the knowledge extracted from the training data, but can be updated rapidly and easily without fine-tuning. Furthermore, this greatly reduces the computational costs for improving the model image classification performance, and augments the model knowledge to new visual domains and tasks it was not trained for. Extensive experiments on eight different datasets in the state of the art spanning several domains and image classification tasks show that the proposed Visual RAG, compared to the most recent state of the art (i.e., many-shot ICL), is able to obtain an accuracy that is very close or even higher (approx. +2% improvement on average) while using a much smaller set of demonstrating examples (approx. only 23% on average).

Paperid: 7846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10492.pdf

Abstract:
Modeling lithium-ion battery (LIB) degradation offers significant cost savings and enhances the safety and reliability of electric vehicles (EVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Whilst data-driven methods have received great attention for forecasting degradation, they often demonstrate limited generalization ability and tend to underperform particularly in critical scenarios involving accelerated degradation, which are crucial to predict accurately. These methods also fail to elucidate the underlying causes of degradation. Alternatively, physical models provide a deeper understanding, but their complex parameters and inherent uncertainties limit their applicability in real-world settings. To this end, we propose a new model - ACCEPT. Our novel framework uses contrastive learning to map the relationship between the underlying physical degradation parameters and observable operational quantities, combining the benefits of both approaches. Furthermore, due to the similarity of degradation paths between LIBs with the same chemistry, this model transfers non-trivially to most downstream tasks, allowing for zero-shot inference. Additionally, since categorical features can be included in the model, it can generalize to other LIB chemistries. This work establishes a foundational battery degradation model, providing reliable forecasts across a range of battery types and operating conditions.

Paperid: 7847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06909.pdf

Abstract:
Plant species exhibit significant intra-class variation and minimal inter-class variation. To enhance classification accuracy, it is essential to reduce intra-class variation while maximizing inter-class variation. This paper addresses plant species classification using a limited number of labelled samples and introduces a novel Local Foreground Selection(LFS) attention mechanism. LFS is a straightforward module designed to generate discriminative support and query feature maps. It operates by integrating two types of attention: local attention, which captures local spatial details to enhance feature discrimination and increase inter-class differentiation, and foreground selection attention, which emphasizes the foreground plant object while mitigating background interference. By focusing on the foreground, the query and support features selectively highlight relevant feature sequences and disregard less significant background sequences, thereby reducing intra-class differences. Experimental results from three plant species datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LFS attention mechanism and its complementary advantages over previous feature reconstruction methods.

Paperid: 7848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06837.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach to represent enterprise web application structures using Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable intelligent quality engineering at scale. We introduce a hierarchical representation methodology that optimizes the few-shot learning capabilities of LLMs while preserving the complex relationships and interactions within web applications. The approach encompasses five key phases: comprehensive DOM analysis, multi-page synthesis, test suite generation, execution, and result analysis. Our methodology addresses existing challenges around usage of Generative AI techniques in automated software testing by developing a structured format that enables LLMs to understand web application architecture through in-context learning. We evaluated our approach using two distinct web applications: an e-commerce platform (Swag Labs) and a healthcare application (MediBox) which is deployed within Atalgo engineering environment. The results demonstrate success rates of 90\% and 70\%, respectively, in achieving automated testing, with high relevance scores for test cases across multiple evaluation criteria. The findings suggest that our representation approach significantly enhances LLMs' ability to generate contextually relevant test cases and provide better quality assurance overall, while reducing the time and effort required for testing.

Paperid: 7849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06496.pdf

Abstract:
This study evaluates the forecasting performance of recent language models (LLMs) on binary forecasting questions. We first introduce a novel dataset of over 600 binary forecasting questions, augmented with related news articles and their concise question-related summaries. We then explore the impact of input prompts with varying level of context on forecasting performance. The results indicate that incorporating news articles significantly improves performance, while using few-shot examples leads to a decline in accuracy. We find that larger models consistently outperform smaller models, highlighting the potential of LLMs in enhancing automated forecasting.

Paperid: 7850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06400.pdf

Abstract:
We define a digital twin (DT) of a physical system governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) as a model for real-time simulations and control of the system behavior under changing conditions. We construct DTs using the Karhunen-LoÃ¨ve Neural Network (KL-NN) surrogate model and transfer learning (TL). The surrogate model allows fast inference and differentiability with respect to control parameters for control and optimization. TL is used to retrain the model for new conditions with minimal additional data. We employ the moment equations to analyze TL and identify parameters that can be transferred to new conditions. The proposed analysis also guides the control variable selection in DT to facilitate efficient TL. For linear PDE problems, the non-transferable parameters in the KL-NN surrogate model can be exactly estimated from a single solution of the PDE corresponding to the mean values of the control variables under new target conditions. Retraining an ML model with a single solution sample is known as one-shot learning, and our analysis shows that the one-shot TL is exact for linear PDEs. For nonlinear PDE problems, transferring of any parameters introduces errors. For a nonlinear diffusion PDE model, we find that for a relatively small range of control variables, some surrogate model parameters can be transferred without introducing a significant error, some can be approximately estimated from the mean-field equation, and the rest can be found using a linear residual least square problem or an ordinary linear least square problem if a small labeled dataset for new conditions is available. The former approach results in a one-shot TL while the latter approach is an example of a few-shot TL. Both methods are approximate for the nonlinear PDEs.

Paperid: 7851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06239.pdf

Abstract:
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is critical for mitigating threats to organizations, governments, and institutions, yet the necessary data are often dispersed across diverse formats. AI-driven solutions for CTI Information Extraction (IE) typically depend on high-quality, annotated data, which are not always available. This paper introduces 0-CTI, a scalable AI-based framework designed for efficient CTI Information Extraction. Leveraging advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, particularly Transformer-based architectures, the proposed system processes complete text sequences of CTI reports to extract a cyber ontology of named entities and their relationships. Our contribution is the development of 0-CTI, the first modular framework for CTI Information Extraction that supports both supervised and zero-shot learning. Unlike existing state-of-the-art models that rely heavily on annotated datasets, our system enables fully dataless operation through zero-shot methods for both Entity and Relation Extraction, making it adaptable to various data availability scenarios. Additionally, our supervised Entity Extractor surpasses current state-of-the-art performance in cyber Entity Extraction, highlighting the dual strength of the framework in both low-resource and data-rich environments. By aligning the system's outputs with the Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) format, a standard for information exchange in the cybersecurity domain, 0-CTI standardizes extracted knowledge, enhancing communication and collaboration in cybersecurity operations.

Paperid: 7852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05717.pdf

Abstract:
The recent widespread adoption of drones for studying marine animals provides opportunities for deriving biological information from aerial imagery. The large scale of imagery data acquired from drones is well suited for machine learning (ML) analysis. Development of ML models for analyzing marine animal aerial imagery has followed the classical paradigm of training, testing, and deploying a new model for each dataset, requiring significant time, human effort, and ML expertise. We introduce Frame Level ALIgment and tRacking (FLAIR), which leverages the video understanding of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) and the vision-language capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). FLAIR takes a drone video as input and outputs segmentation masks of the species of interest across the video. Notably, FLAIR leverages a zero-shot approach, eliminating the need for labeled data, training a new model, or fine-tuning an existing model to generalize to other species. With a dataset of 18,000 drone images of Pacific nurse sharks, we trained state-of-the-art object detection models to compare against FLAIR. We show that FLAIR massively outperforms these object detectors and performs competitively against two human-in-the-loop methods for prompting SAM2, achieving a Dice score of 0.81. FLAIR readily generalizes to other shark species without additional human effort and can be combined with novel heuristics to automatically extract relevant information including length and tailbeat frequency. FLAIR has significant potential to accelerate aerial imagery analysis workflows, requiring markedly less human effort and expertise than traditional machine learning workflows, while achieving superior accuracy. By reducing the effort required for aerial imagery analysis, FLAIR allows scientists to spend more time interpreting results and deriving insights about marine ecosystems.

Paperid: 7853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05228.pdf

Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has seen significant advancements with zero-shot approaches by leveraging the powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP. However, prior research works have predominantly focused on enhancing Far-OOD performance, while potentially compromising Near-OOD efficacy, as observed from our pilot study. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy to enhance zero-shot OOD detection performances for both Far-OOD and Near-OOD scenarios by innovatively harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) and VLMs. Our approach first exploit an LLM to generate superclasses of the ID labels and their corresponding background descriptions followed by feature extraction using CLIP. We then isolate the core semantic features for ID data by subtracting background features from the superclass features. The refined representation facilitates the selection of more appropriate negative labels for OOD data from a comprehensive candidate label set of WordNet, thereby enhancing the performance of zero-shot OOD detection in both scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce novel few-shot prompt tuning and visual prompt tuning to adapt the proposed framework to better align with the target distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks, with an improvement of up to 2.9% in AUROC and a reduction of up to 12.6% in FPR95. Additionally, our method exhibits superior robustness against covariate shift across different domains, further highlighting its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 7854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04510.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as powerful tools for detecting software vulnerabilities, where task-specific fine-tuning is typically employed to provide vulnerability-specific knowledge to the LLMs. However, existing fine-tuning techniques often treat source code as plain text, losing the graph-based structural information inherent in code. Graph-enhanced soft prompt tuning addresses this by translating the structural information into contextual cues that the LLM can understand. However, current methods are primarily designed for general graph-related tasks and focus more on adjacency information, they fall short in preserving the rich semantic information (e.g., control/data flow) within code graphs. They also fail to ensure computational efficiency while capturing graph-text interactions in their cross-modal alignment module. This paper presents CGP-Tuning, a new code graph-enhanced, structure-aware soft prompt tuning method for vulnerability detection. CGP-Tuning introduces type-aware embeddings to capture the rich semantic information within code graphs, along with an efficient cross-modal alignment module that achieves linear computational costs while incorporating graph-text interactions. It is evaluated on the latest DiverseVul dataset and three advanced open-source code LLMs, CodeLlama, CodeGemma, and Qwen2.5-Coder. Experimental results show that CGP-Tuning delivers model-agnostic improvements and maintains practical inference speed, surpassing the best graph-enhanced soft prompt tuning baseline by an average of four percentage points and outperforming non-tuned zero-shot prompting by 15 percentage points.

Paperid: 7855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03839.pdf

Abstract:
With the popularity of foundational models, parameter efficient fine tuning has become the defacto approach to leverage pretrained models to perform downstream tasks. Taking inspiration from recent advances in large language models, Visual Prompt Tuning, and similar techniques, learn an additional prompt to efficiently finetune a pretrained vision foundational model. However, we observe that such prompting is insufficient for fine-grained visual classification tasks such as medical image classification, where there is large inter-class variance, and small intra-class variance. Hence, in this paper we propose to leverage advanced segmentation capabilities of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) as a visual prompting cue to help visual encoder in the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) by guiding the attention in CLIP visual encoder to relevant regions in the image. This helps the model to focus on highly discriminative regions, without getting distracted from visually similar background features, an essential requirement in a fewshot, finegrained classification setting. We evaluate our method on diverse medical datasets including X-rays, CT scans, and MRI images, and report an accuracy of (71%, 81%, 86%, 58%) from the proposed approach on (COVID, lung-disease, brain-tumor, breast-cancer) datasets against (66%, 70%, 68%, 29%) from a pretrained CLIP model after fewshot training. The proposed approach also allows to obtain interpretable explanation for the classification performance through the localization obtained using segmentation.

Paperid: 7856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03624.pdf

Abstract:
This study introduces LlaMADRS, a novel framework leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate depression severity assessment using the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). We employ a zero-shot prompting strategy with carefully designed cues to guide the model in interpreting and scoring transcribed clinical interviews. Our approach, tested on 236 real-world interviews from the Context-Adaptive Multimodal Informatics (CAMI) dataset, demonstrates strong correlations with clinician assessments. The Qwen 2.5--72b model achieves near-human level agreement across most MADRS items, with Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICC) closely approaching those between human raters. We provide a comprehensive analysis of model performance across different MADRS items, highlighting strengths and current limitations. Our findings suggest that LLMs, with appropriate prompting, can serve as efficient tools for mental health assessment, potentially increasing accessibility in resource-limited settings. However, challenges remain, particularly in assessing symptoms that rely on non-verbal cues, underscoring the need for multimodal approaches in future work.

Paperid: 7857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03221.pdf

Abstract:
In the domain of 3D object classification, a fundamental challenge lies in addressing the scarcity of labeled data, which limits the applicability of traditional data-intensive learning paradigms. This challenge is particularly pronounced in few-shot learning scenarios, where the objective is to achieve robust generalization from minimal annotated samples. To overcome these limitations, it is crucial to identify and leverage the most salient and discriminative features of 3D objects, thereby enhancing learning efficiency and reducing dependency on large-scale labeled datasets. This work introduces RW-Net, a novel framework designed to address the challenges above by integrating Rate-Distortion Explanation (RDE) and wavelet transform into a state-of-the-art projection-based 3D object classification architecture. The proposed method capitalizes on RDE to extract critical features by identifying and preserving the most informative data components while reducing redundancy. This process ensures the retention of essential information for effective decision-making, optimizing the model's ability to learn from limited data. Complementing RDE, incorporating the wavelet transform further enhances the framework's capability to generalize in low-data regimes. By emphasizing low-frequency components of the input data, the wavelet transform captures fundamental geometric and structural attributes of 3D objects. These attributes are instrumental in mitigating overfitting and improving the robustness of the learned representations across diverse tasks and domains. To validate the effectiveness of our RW-Net, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets: ModelNet40, ModelNet40-C, and ScanObjectNN for few-shot 3D object classification. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits superior generalization and robustness in few-shot learning scenarios.

Paperid: 7858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02621.pdf

Abstract:
Decoding human activity from EEG signals has long been a popular research topic. While recent studies have increasingly shifted focus from single-subject to cross-subject analysis, few have explored the model's ability to perform zero-shot predictions on EEG signals from previously unseen subjects. This research aims to investigate whether deep learning methods can capture subject-independent semantic information inherent in human EEG signals. Such insights are crucial for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) because, on one hand, they demonstrate the model's robustness against subject-specific temporal biases, and on the other, they significantly enhance the generalizability of downstream tasks. We employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as denoising agents to extract subject-independent semantic features from noisy EEG signals. Experimental results, including ablation studies, highlight the pivotal role of LLMs in decoding subject-independent semantic information from noisy EEG data. We hope our findings will contribute to advancing BCI research and assist both academia and industry in applying EEG signals to a broader range of applications.

Paperid: 7859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01711.pdf

Abstract:
The paper presents a preliminary analysis of an experiment conducted by Frank Bold, a Czech expert group, to explore user interactions with GPT-4 for addressing legal queries. Between May 3, 2023, and July 25, 2023, 1,252 users submitted 3,847 queries. Unlike studies that primarily focus on the accuracy, factuality, or hallucination tendencies of large language models (LLMs), our analysis focuses on the user query dimension of the interaction. Using GPT-4o for zero-shot classification, we categorized queries on (1) whether users provided factual information about their issue (29.95%) or not (70.05%), (2) whether they sought legal information (64.93%) or advice on the course of action (35.07\%), and (3) whether they imposed requirements to shape or control the model's answer (28.57%) or not (71.43%). We provide both quantitative and qualitative insight into user needs and contribute to a better understanding of user engagement with LLMs.

Paperid: 7860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01515.pdf

Abstract:
Motivated by deep learning regimes with multiple interacting yet distinct model components, we introduce learning diagrams, graphical depictions of training setups that capture parameterized learning as data rather than code. A learning diagram compiles to a unique loss function on which component models are trained. The result of training on this loss is a collection of models whose predictions ``agree" with one another. We show that a number of popular learning setups such as few-shot multi-task learning, knowledge distillation, and multi-modal learning can be depicted as learning diagrams. We further implement learning diagrams in a library that allows users to build diagrams of PyTorch and Flux.jl models. By implementing some classic machine learning use cases, we demonstrate how learning diagrams allow practitioners to build complicated models as compositions of smaller components, identify relationships between workflows, and manipulate models during or after training. Leveraging a category theoretic framework, we introduce a rigorous semantics for learning diagrams that puts such operations on a firm mathematical foundation.

Paperid: 7861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00803.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot event-relational reasoning is an important task in natural language processing, and existing methods jointly learn a variety of event-relational prefixes and inference-form prefixes to achieve such tasks. However, training prefixes consumes large computational resources and lacks interpretability. Additionally, learning various relational and inferential knowledge inefficiently exploits the connections between tasks. Therefore, we first propose a method for Reasoning-Oriented Locating and Editing (ROLE), which locates and edits the key modules of the language model for reasoning about event relations, enhancing interpretability and also resource-efficiently optimizing the reasoning ability. Subsequently, we propose a method for Analogy-Based Locating and Editing (ABLE), which efficiently exploits the similarities and differences between tasks to optimize the zero-shot reasoning capability. Experimental results show that ROLE improves interpretability and reasoning performance with reduced computational cost. ABLE achieves SOTA results in zero-shot reasoning.

Paperid: 7862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00162.pdf

Abstract:
Existing work within transfer learning often follows a two-step process -- pre-training over a large-scale source domain and then finetuning over limited samples from the target domain. Yet, despite its popularity, this methodology has been shown to suffer in the presence of distributional shift -- specifically when the output spaces diverge. Previous work has focused on increasing model performance within this setting by identifying and classifying only the shared output classes between distributions. However, these methods are inherently limited as they ignore classes outside the shared class set, disregarding potential information relevant to the model transfer. This paper proposes a new process for few-shot transfer learning that selects and weighs classes from the source domain to optimize the transfer between domains. More concretely, we use Wasserstein distance to choose a set of source classes and their weights that minimize the distance between the source and target domain. To justify our proposed algorithm, we provide a generalization analysis of the performance of the learned classifier over the target domain and show that our method corresponds to a bound minimization algorithm. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach (WaSS) by experimenting on several different datasets and presenting superior performance within various label shift settings, including the extreme case where the label spaces are disjoint.

Paperid: 7863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18800.pdf

Abstract:
Open-domain Question Answering (QA) has garnered substantial interest by combining the advantages of faithfully retrieved passages and relevant passages generated through Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is a lack of definitive labels available to pair these sources of knowledge. In order to address this issue, we propose an unsupervised and simple framework called Bi-Reranking for Merging Generated and Retrieved Knowledge (BRMGR), which utilizes re-ranking methods for both retrieved passages and LLM-generated passages. We pair the two types of passages using two separate re-ranking methods and then combine them through greedy matching. We demonstrate that BRMGR is equivalent to employing a bipartite matching loss when assigning each retrieved passage with a corresponding LLM-generated passage. The application of our model yielded experimental results from three datasets, improving their performance by +1.7 and +1.6 on NQ and WebQ datasets, respectively, and obtaining comparable result on TriviaQA dataset when compared to competitive baselines.

Paperid: 7864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17853.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate energy price forecasting is crucial for participants in day-ahead energy markets, as it significantly influences their decision-making processes. While machine learning-based approaches have shown promise in enhancing these forecasts, they often remain confined to the specific markets on which they are trained, thereby limiting their adaptability to new or unseen markets. In this paper, we introduce a cross-domain adaptation model designed to forecast energy prices by learning market-invariant representations across different markets during the training phase. We propose a doubly residual N-BEATS network with Kolmogorov Arnold networks at its core for time series forecasting. These networks, grounded in the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, offer a powerful way to approximate multivariate continuous functions. The cross domain adaptation model was generated with an adversarial framework. The model's effectiveness was tested in predicting day-ahead electricity prices in a zero shot fashion. In comparison with baseline models, our proposed framework shows promising results. By leveraging the Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, our model can potentially enhance its ability to capture complex patterns in energy price data, thus improving forecast accuracy across diverse market conditions. This addition not only enriches the model's representational capacity but also contributes to a more robust and flexible forecasting tool adaptable to various energy markets.

Paperid: 7865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15924.pdf

Abstract:
Contemporary adversarial attack methods face significant limitations in cross-model transferability and practical applicability. We present Watertox, an elegant adversarial attack framework achieving remarkable effectiveness through architectural diversity and precision-controlled perturbations. Our two-stage Fast Gradient Sign Method combines uniform baseline perturbations ($Îµ_1 = 0.1$) with targeted enhancements ($Îµ_2 = 0.4$). The framework leverages an ensemble of complementary architectures, from VGG to ConvNeXt, synthesizing diverse perspectives through an innovative voting mechanism. Against state-of-the-art architectures, Watertox reduces model accuracy from 70.6% to 16.0%, with zero-shot attacks achieving up to 98.8% accuracy reduction against unseen architectures. These results establish Watertox as a significant advancement in adversarial methodologies, with promising applications in visual security systems and CAPTCHA generation.

Paperid: 7866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13401.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective "free lunch" solution for low-light image enhancement (LLIE), which aims to restore low-light images as if acquired in well-illuminated environments. Our method necessitates no optimization, training, fine-tuning, text conditioning, or hyperparameter adjustments, yet it consistently reconstructs low-light images with superior fidelity. Specifically, we leverage a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion prior, learned from training on a large collection of natural images, and the features present in the model itself to guide the inference, in contrast to existing methods that depend on customized constraints. Comprehensive quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms SOTA methods on established datasets, while qualitative analyses indicate enhanced color accuracy and the rectification of subtle chromatic deviations. Furthermore, additional experiments reveal that our method, without any modifications, achieves SOTA-comparable performance in the auto white balance (AWB) task.

Paperid: 7867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13243.pdf

Abstract:
We applied few-shot in-context learning on the OPT-1.3B model for the natural language inference task and employed knowledge distillation to internalize the context information, reducing model parameter from 1.3B to 125M and achieving a size reduction from 2.5GB to 0.25GB. Compared to using in-context learning alone on similarly sized models, this context distillation approach achieved a nearly 50% improvement in out-of-domain accuracy, demonstrating superior knowledge transfer capabilities over prompt-based methods. Furthermore, this approach reduced memory consumption by up to 60% while delivering a 20% improvement in out-of-domain accuracy compared to conventional pattern-based fine-tuning.

Paperid: 7868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12833.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, multi-modal large language models have made significant progress. However, visual information lacking of guidance from the user's intention may lead to redundant computation and involve unnecessary visual noise, especially in long, untrimmed videos. To address this issue, we propose FocusChat, a text-guided multi-modal large language model (LLM) that emphasizes visual information correlated to the user's prompt. In detail, Our model first undergoes the semantic extraction module, which comprises a visual semantic branch and a text semantic branch to extract image and text semantics, respectively. The two branches are combined using the Spatial-Temporal Filtering Module (STFM). STFM enables explicit spatial-level information filtering and implicit temporal-level feature filtering, ensuring that the visual tokens are closely aligned with the user's query. It lowers the essential number of visual tokens inputted into the LLM. FocusChat significantly outperforms Video-LLaMA in zero-shot experiments, using an order of magnitude less training data with only 16 visual tokens occupied. It achieves results comparable to the state-of-the-art in few-shot experiments, with only 0.72M pre-training data.

Paperid: 7869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12552.pdf

Abstract:
Land-use and land cover (LULC) analysis is critical in remote sensing, with wide-ranging applications across diverse fields such as agriculture, utilities, and urban planning. However, automating LULC map generation using machine learning is rendered challenging due to noisy labels. Typically, the ground truths (e.g. ESRI LULC, MapBioMass) have noisy labels that hamper the model's ability to learn to accurately classify the pixels. Further, these erroneous labels can significantly distort the performance metrics of a model, leading to misleading evaluations. Traditionally, the ambiguous labels are rectified using unsupervised algorithms. These algorithms struggle not only with scalability but also with generalization across different geographies. To overcome these challenges, we propose a zero-shot approach using the foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), to automatically delineate different land parcels/regions and leverage them to relabel the unsure pixels by using the local label statistics within each detected region. We achieve a significant reduction in label noise and an improvement in the performance of the downstream segmentation model by $\approx 5\%$ when trained with denoised labels.

Paperid: 7870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11715.pdf

Abstract:
Audio-visual Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) has attracted significant attention for its ability to identify unseen classes and perform well in video classification tasks. However, modal imbalance in (G)ZSL leads to over-reliance on the optimal modality, reducing discriminative capabilities for unseen classes. Some studies have attempted to address this issue by modifying parameter gradients, but two challenges still remain: (a) Quality discrepancies, where modalities offer differing quantities and qualities of information for the same concept. (b) Content discrepancies, where sample contributions within a modality vary significantly. To address these challenges, we propose a Discrepancy-Aware Attention Network (DAAN) for Enhanced Audio-Visual ZSL. Our approach introduces a Quality-Discrepancy Mitigation Attention (QDMA) unit to minimize redundant information in the high-quality modality and a Contrastive Sample-level Gradient Modulation (CSGM) block to adjust gradient magnitudes and balance content discrepancies. We quantify modality contributions by integrating optimization and convergence rate for more precise gradient modulation in CSGM. Experiments demonstrates DAAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of individual modules.

Paperid: 7871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11034.pdf

Abstract:
We propose SAM-IF, a novel method for incremental few-shot instance segmentation leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM). SAM-IF addresses the challenges of class-agnostic instance segmentation by introducing a multi-class classifier and fine-tuning SAM to focus on specific target objects. To enhance few-shot learning capabilities, SAM-IF employs a cosine-similarity-based classifier, enabling efficient adaptation to novel classes with minimal data. Additionally, SAM-IF supports incremental learning by updating classifier weights without retraining the decoder. Our method achieves competitive but more reasonable results compared to existing approaches, particularly in scenarios requiring specific object segmentation with limited labeled data.

Paperid: 7872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10723.pdf

Abstract:
One-shot methods have significantly advanced the field of neural architecture search (NAS) by adopting weight-sharing strategy to reduce search costs. However, the accuracy of performance estimation can be compromised by co-adaptation. Few-shot methods divide the entire supernet into individual sub-supernets by splitting edge by edge to alleviate this issue, yet neglect relationships among edges and result in performance degradation on huge search space. In this paper, we introduce HEP-NAS, a hierarchy-wise partition algorithm designed to further enhance accuracy. To begin with, HEP-NAS treats edges sharing the same end node as a hierarchy, permuting and splitting edges within the same hierarchy to directly search for the optimal operation combination for each intermediate node. This approach aligns more closely with the ultimate goal of NAS. Furthermore, HEP-NAS selects the most promising sub-supernet after each segmentation, progressively narrowing the search space in which the optimal architecture may exist. To improve performance evaluation of sub-supernets, HEP-NAS employs search space mutual distillation, stabilizing the training process and accelerating the convergence of each individual sub-supernet. Within a given budget, HEP-NAS enables the splitting of all edges and gradually searches for architectures with higher accuracy. Experimental results across various datasets and search spaces demonstrate the superiority of HEP-NAS compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Paperid: 7873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10110.pdf

Abstract:
As an algorithmic framework for learning to learn, meta-learning provides a promising solution for few-shot text classification. However, most existing research fail to give enough attention to class labels. Traditional basic framework building meta-learner based on prototype networks heavily relies on inter-class variance, and it is easily influenced by noise. To address these limitations, we proposes a simple and effective few-shot text classification framework. In particular, the corresponding label templates are embed into input sentences to fully utilize the potential value of class labels, guiding the pre-trained model to generate more discriminative text representations through the semantic information conveyed by labels. With the continuous influence of label semantics, supervised contrastive learning is utilized to model the interaction information between support samples and query samples. Furthermore, the averaging mechanism is replaced with an attention mechanism to highlight vital semantic information. To verify the proposed scheme, four typical datasets are employed to assess the performance of different methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial performance enhancements and outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on few-shot text classification tasks.

Paperid: 7874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08430.pdf

Abstract:
This paper provides an in-depth evaluation of three state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for personalized career mentoring in the computing field, using three distinct student profiles that consider gender, race, and professional levels. We evaluated the performance of GPT-4, LLaMA 3, and Palm 2 using a zero-shot learning approach without human intervention. A quantitative evaluation was conducted through a custom natural language processing analytics pipeline to highlight the uniqueness of the responses and to identify words reflecting each student's profile, including race, gender, or professional level. The analysis of frequently used words in the responses indicates that GPT-4 offers more personalized mentoring compared to the other two LLMs. Additionally, a qualitative evaluation was performed to see if human experts reached similar conclusions. The analysis of survey responses shows that GPT-4 outperformed the other two LLMs in delivering more accurate and useful mentoring while addressing specific challenges with encouragement languages. Our work establishes a foundation for developing personalized mentoring tools based on LLMs, incorporating human mentors in the process to deliver a more impactful and tailored mentoring experience.

Paperid: 7875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07687.pdf

Abstract:
The growing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) in customer support has significantly improved operational efficiency and user experience. However, traditional machine learning (ML) approaches, which require extensive local training on sensitive datasets, pose substantial privacy risks and compliance challenges with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Existing privacy-preserving techniques, such as anonymization, differential privacy, and federated learning, address some concerns but face limitations in utility, scalability, and complexity. This paper introduces the Privacy-Preserving Zero-Shot Learning (PP-ZSL) framework, a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot learning mode. Unlike conventional ML methods, PP-ZSL eliminates the need for local training on sensitive data by utilizing pre-trained LLMs to generate responses directly. The framework incorporates real-time data anonymization to redact or mask sensitive information, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for domain-specific query resolution, and robust post-processing to ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This combination reduces privacy risks, simplifies compliance, and enhances scalability and operational efficiency. Empirical analysis demonstrates that the PP-ZSL framework provides accurate, privacy-compliant responses while significantly lowering the costs and complexities of deploying AI-driven customer support systems. The study highlights potential applications across industries, including financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, legal support, telecommunications, and government services. By addressing the dual challenges of privacy and performance, this framework establishes a foundation for secure, efficient, and regulatory-compliant AI applications in customer interactions.

Paperid: 7876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07386.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot capabilities of large language models make them powerful tools for solving a range of tasks without explicit training. It remains unclear, however, how these models achieve such performance, or why they can zero-shot some tasks but not others. In this paper, we shed some light on this phenomenon by defining and investigating algorithmic stability in language models -- changes in problem-solving strategy employed by the model as a result of changes in task specification. We focus on a task where algorithmic stability is needed for generalization: two-operand arithmetic. Surprisingly, we find that Gemma-2-2b employs substantially different computational models on closely related subtasks, i.e. four-digit versus eight-digit addition. Our findings suggest that algorithmic instability may be a contributing factor to language models' poor zero-shot performance across certain logical reasoning tasks, as they struggle to abstract different problem-solving strategies and smoothly transition between them.

Paperid: 7877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07322.pdf

Abstract:
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) poses a significant challenge to artificial intelligence, demanding broad generalization and few-shot learning capabilities that remain elusive for current deep learning methods, including large language models (LLMs). While LLMs excel in program synthesis, their direct application to ARC yields limited success. To address this, we introduce ConceptSearch, a novel function-search algorithm that leverages LLMs for program generation and employs a concept-based scoring method to guide the search efficiently. Unlike simplistic pixel-based metrics like Hamming distance, ConceptSearch evaluates programs on their ability to capture the underlying transformation concept reflected in the input-output examples. We explore three scoring functions: Hamming distance, a CNN-based scoring function, and an LLM-based natural language scoring function. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ConceptSearch, achieving a significant performance improvement over direct prompting with GPT-4. Moreover, our novel concept-based scoring exhibits up to 30% greater efficiency compared to Hamming distance, measured in terms of the number of iterations required to reach the correct solution. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-driven program search when integrated with concept-based guidance for tackling challenging generalization problems like ARC.

Paperid: 7878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06738.pdf

Abstract:
Recently some studies have highlighted the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as effective generators of supervised training data, offering advantages such as enhanced inference efficiency and reduced costs associated with data collection. However, these studies have predominantly focused on English language tasks. In this paper, we address the fundamental research question: Can LLMs serve as proficient training data generators for other language tasks? Specifically, we leverage LLMs to synthesize supervised training data under few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios across six diverse Japanese downstream tasks. Subsequently, we utilize this synthesized data to train compact models (e.g., BERT). This novel methodology is termed JAPAGEN. Our experimental findings underscore that JAPAGEN achieves robust performance in classification tasks that necessitate formal text inputs, demonstrating competitive results compared to conventional LLM prompting strategies.

Paperid: 7879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05676.pdf

Abstract:
Deepfakes are on the rise, with increased sophistication and prevalence allowing for high-profile social engineering attacks. Detecting them in the wild is therefore important as ever, giving rise to new approaches breaking benchmark records in this task. In line with previous work, we show that recently developed state-of-the-art detectors are susceptible to classical adversarial attacks, even in a highly-realistic black-box setting, putting their usability in question. We argue that crucial 'robust features' of deepfakes are in their higher semantics, and follow that with evidence that a detector based on a semantic embedding model is less susceptible to black-box perturbation attacks. We show that large visuo-lingual models like GPT-4o can perform zero-shot deepfake detection better than current state-of-the-art methods, and introduce a novel attack based on high-level semantic manipulation. Finally, we argue that hybridising low- and high-level detectors can improve adversarial robustness, based on their complementary strengths and weaknesses.

Paperid: 7880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05169.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising method to improve generalization by minimizing sharpness, which is known to correlate well with generalization ability. Since the original proposal of SAM, many variants of SAM have been proposed to improve its accuracy and efficiency, but comparisons have mainly been restricted to the i.i.d. setting. In this paper we study SAM for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. First, we perform a comprehensive comparison of eight SAM variants on zero-shot OOD generalization, finding that the original SAM outperforms the Adam baseline by $4.76\%$ and the strongest SAM variants outperform the Adam baseline by $8.01\%$ on average. We then provide an OOD generalization bound in terms of sharpness for this setting. Next, we extend our study of SAM to the related setting of gradual domain adaptation (GDA), another form of OOD generalization where intermediate domains are constructed between the source and target domains, and iterative self-training is done on intermediate domains, to improve the overall target domain error. In this setting, our experimental results demonstrate that the original SAM outperforms the baseline of Adam on each of the experimental datasets by $0.82\%$ on average and the strongest SAM variants outperform Adam by $1.52\%$ on average. We then provide a generalization bound for SAM in the GDA setting. Asymptotically, this generalization bound is no better than the one for self-training in the literature of GDA. This highlights a further disconnection between the theoretical justification for SAM versus its empirical performance, with recent work finding that low sharpness alone does not account for all of SAM's generalization benefits. For future work, we provide several potential avenues for obtaining a tighter analysis for SAM in the OOD setting.

Paperid: 7881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05137.pdf

Abstract:
We address the task of hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC) of scientific documents at an industrial scale, where hundreds of thousands of documents must be classified across thousands of dynamic labels. The rapid growth of scientific publications necessitates scalable and efficient methods for classification, further complicated by the evolving nature of taxonomies--where new categories are introduced, existing ones are merged, and outdated ones are deprecated. Traditional machine learning approaches, which require costly retraining with each taxonomy update, become impractical due to the high overhead of labelled data collection and model adaptation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in complex tasks such as multi-label classification. However, applying them to large and dynamic taxonomies presents unique challenges as the vast number of labels can exceed LLMs' input limits. In this paper, we present novel methods that combine the strengths of LLMs with dense retrieval techniques to overcome these challenges. Our approach avoids retraining by leveraging zero-shot HMC for real-time label assignment. We evaluate the effectiveness of our methods on SSRN, a large repository of preprints spanning multiple disciplines, and demonstrate significant improvements in both classification accuracy and cost-efficiency. By developing a tailored evaluation framework for dynamic taxonomies and publicly releasing our code, this research provides critical insights into applying LLMs for document classification, where the number of classes corresponds to the number of nodes in a large taxonomy, at an industrial scale.

Paperid: 7882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05127.pdf

Abstract:
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the importance of prompt engineering as a crucial technique for optimizing model outputs. While experimentation with various prompting methods, such as Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and role-based techniques, has yielded promising results, these advancements remain fragmented across academic papers, blog posts and anecdotal experimentation. The lack of a single, unified resource to consolidate the field's knowledge impedes the progress of both research and practical application. This paper argues for the creation of an overarching framework that synthesizes existing methodologies into a cohesive overview for practitioners. Using a design-based research approach, we present the Prompt Canvas, a structured framework resulting from an extensive literature review on prompt engineering that captures current knowledge and expertise. By combining the conceptual foundations and practical strategies identified in prompt engineering, the Prompt Canvas provides a practical approach for leveraging the potential of Large Language Models. It is primarily designed as a learning resource for pupils, students and employees, offering a structured introduction to prompt engineering. This work aims to contribute to the growing discourse on prompt engineering by establishing a unified methodology for researchers and providing guidance for practitioners.

Paperid: 7883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02868.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in natural language processing; however, their application in sensitive domains such as healthcare, especially in processing Electronic Health Records (EHRs), is constrained by limited computational resources and privacy concerns. This paper introduces a compact LLM framework optimized for local deployment in environments with stringent privacy requirements and restricted access to high-performance GPUs. Our approach leverages simple yet powerful preprocessing techniques, including regular expressions (regex) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), to extract and highlight critical information from clinical notes. By pre-filtering long, unstructured text, we enhance the performance of smaller LLMs on EHR-related tasks. Our framework is evaluated using zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms on both private and publicly available datasets (MIMIC-IV), with additional comparisons against fine-tuned LLMs on MIMIC-IV. Experimental results demonstrate that our preprocessing strategy significantly supercharges the performance of smaller LLMs, making them well-suited for privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained applications. This study offers valuable insights into optimizing LLM performance for local, secure, and efficient healthcare applications. It provides practical guidance for real-world deployment for LLMs while tackling challenges related to privacy, computational feasibility, and clinical applicability.

Paperid: 7884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02352.pdf

Abstract:
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods provide low-memory, storage-efficient solutions for personalizing text-to-image models. However, these methods offer little to no improvement in wall-clock training time or the number of steps needed for convergence compared to full model fine-tuning. While PEFT methods assume that shifts in generated distributions (from base to fine-tuned models) can be effectively modeled through weight changes in a low-rank subspace, they fail to leverage knowledge of common use cases, which typically focus on capturing specific styles or identities. Observing that desired outputs often comprise only a small subset of the possible domain covered by LoRA training, we propose reducing the search space by incorporating a prior over regions of interest. We demonstrate that training a hypernetwork model to generate LoRA weights can achieve competitive quality for specific domains while enabling near-instantaneous conditioning on user input, in contrast to traditional training methods that require thousands of steps.

Paperid: 7885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01388.pdf

Abstract:
Cell and immunotherapy offer transformative potential for treating diseases like cancer and autoimmune disorders by modulating the immune system. The development of these therapies is resource-intensive, with the majority of drug candidates failing to progress beyond laboratory testing. While recent advances in machine learning have revolutionised areas such as protein engineering, applications in immunotherapy remain limited due to the scarcity of large-scale, standardised datasets and the complexity of cellular systems. In this work, we address these challenges by leveraging a high-throughput experimental platform to generate data suitable for fine-tuning protein language models. We demonstrate how models fine-tuned using a preference task show surprising correlations to biological assays, and how they can be leveraged for few-shot hit maturation in CARs. This proof-of-concept presents a novel pathway for applying ML to immunotherapy and could generalise to other therapeutic modalities.

Paperid: 7886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19295.pdf

Abstract:
Bioinformatics workflows are essential for complex biological data analyses and are often described in scientific articles with source code in public repositories. Extracting detailed workflow information from articles can improve accessibility and reusability but is hindered by limited annotated corpora. To address this, we framed the problem as a low-resource extraction task and tested four strategies: 1) creating a tailored annotated corpus, 2) few-shot named-entity recognition (NER) with an autoregressive language model, 3) NER using masked language models with existing and new corpora, and 4) integrating workflow knowledge into NER models. Using BioToFlow, a new corpus of 52 articles annotated with 16 entities, a SciBERT-based NER model achieved a 70.4 F-measure, comparable to inter-annotator agreement. While knowledge integration improved performance for specific entities, it was less effective across the entire information schema. Our results demonstrate that high-performance information extraction for bioinformatics workflows is achievable.

Paperid: 7887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18157.pdf

Abstract:
This comprehensive survey delves into the latest advancements in Relation Extraction (RE), a pivotal task in natural language processing essential for applications across biomedical, financial, and legal sectors. This study highlights the evolution and current state of RE techniques by analyzing 137 papers presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conferences over the past four years, focusing on models that leverage language models. Our findings underscore the dominance of BERT-based methods in achieving state-of-the-art results for RE while also noting the promising capabilities of emerging large language models (LLMs) like T5, especially in few-shot relation extraction scenarios where they excel in identifying previously unseen relations.

Paperid: 7888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17255.pdf

Abstract:
We present APT, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM)-driven framework that enables autonomous agents to construct complex and creative structures within the Minecraft environment. Unlike previous approaches that primarily concentrate on skill-based open-world tasks or rely on image-based diffusion models for generating voxel-based structures, our method leverages the intrinsic spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By employing chain-of-thought decomposition along with multimodal inputs, the framework generates detailed architectural layouts and blueprints that the agent can execute under zero-shot or few-shot learning scenarios. Our agent incorporates both memory and reflection modules to facilitate lifelong learning, adaptive refinement, and error correction throughout the building process. To rigorously evaluate the agent's performance in this emerging research area, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark consisting of diverse construction tasks designed to test creativity, spatial reasoning, adherence to in-game rules, and the effective integration of multimodal instructions. Experimental results using various GPT-based LLM backends and agent configurations demonstrate the agent's capacity to accurately interpret extensive instructions involving numerous items, their positions, and orientations. The agent successfully produces complex structures complete with internal functionalities such as Redstone-powered systems. A/B testing indicates that the inclusion of a memory module leads to a significant increase in performance, emphasizing its role in enabling continuous learning and the reuse of accumulated experience. Additionally, the agent's unexpected emergence of scaffolding behavior highlights the potential of future LLM-driven agents to utilize subroutine planning and leverage the emergence ability of LLMs to autonomously develop human-like problem-solving techniques.

Paperid: 7889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15596.pdf

Abstract:
Accurate brain tumor classification in MRI images is critical for timely diagnosis and treatment planning. While deep learning models like ResNet-18, VGG-16 have shown high accuracy, they often come with increased complexity and computational demands. This study presents a comparative analysis of effective yet simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and pre-trained ResNet18, and VGG16 model for brain tumor classification using two publicly available datasets: Br35H:: Brain Tumor Detection 2020 and Brain Tumor MRI Dataset. The custom CNN architecture, despite its lower complexity, demonstrates competitive performance with the pre-trained ResNet18 and VGG16 models. In binary classification tasks, the custom CNN achieved an accuracy of 98.67% on the Br35H dataset and 99.62% on the Brain Tumor MRI Dataset. For multi-class classification, the custom CNN, with a slight architectural modification, achieved an accuracy of 98.09%, on the Brain Tumor MRI Dataset. Comparatively, ResNet18 and VGG16 maintained high performance levels, but the custom CNNs provided a more computationally efficient alternative. Additionally,the custom CNNs were evaluated using few-shot learning (0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 40, and 80 shots) to assess their robustness, achieving notable accuracy improvements with increased shots. This study highlights the potential of well-designed, less complex CNN architectures as effective and computationally efficient alternatives to deeper, pre-trained models for medical imaging tasks, including brain tumor classification. This study underscores the potential of custom CNNs in medical imaging tasks and encourages further exploration in this direction.

Paperid: 7890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15395.pdf

Abstract:
P300 speller BCIs allow users to compose sentences by selecting target keys on a GUI through the detection of P300 component in their EEG signals following visual stimuli. Most P300 speller BCIs require users to spell words letter by letter, or the first few initial letters, resulting in high keystroke demands that increase time, cognitive load, and fatigue. This highlights the need for more efficient, user-friendly methods for faster sentence composition. In this work, we introduce ChatBCI, a P300 speller BCI that leverages the zero-shot learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to suggest words from user-spelled initial letters or predict the subsequent word(s), reducing keystrokes and accelerating sentence composition. ChatBCI retrieves word suggestions through remote queries to the GPT-3.5 API. A new GUI, displaying GPT-3.5 word suggestions as extra keys is designed. SWLDA is used for the P300 classification. Seven subjects completed two online spelling tasks: 1) copy-spelling a self-composed sentence using ChatBCI, and 2) improvising a sentence using ChatBCI's word suggestions. Results demonstrate that in Task 1, on average, ChatBCI outperforms letter-by-letter BCI spellers, reducing time and keystrokes by 62.14% and 53.22%, respectively, and increasing information transfer rate by 198.96%. In Task 2, ChatBCI achieves 80.68% keystroke savings and a record 8.53 characters/min for typing speed. Overall, ChatBCI, by employing remote LLM queries, enhances sentence composition in realistic scenarios, significantly outperforming traditional spellers without requiring local model training or storage. ChatBCI's (multi-) word predictions, combined with its new GUI, pave the way for developing next-generation speller BCIs that are efficient and effective for real-time communication, especially for users with communication and motor disabilities.

Paperid: 7891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14272.pdf

Abstract:
The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for helping decision-makers with Climate Change action has recently been highlighted as a use case aligning with a broader drive towards NLP technologies for social good. In this context, Aspect-Based Summarization (ABS) systems that extract and summarize relevant information are particularly useful as they provide stakeholders with a convenient way of finding relevant information in expert-curated reports. In this work, we release a new dataset for ABS of Climate Change reports and we employ different Large Language Models (LLMs) and so-called Small Language Models (SLMs) to tackle this problem in an unsupervised way. Considering the problem at hand, we also show how SLMs are not significantly worse for the problem while leading to reduced carbon footprint; we do so by applying for the first time an existing framework considering both energy efficiency and task performance to the evaluation of zero-shot generative models for ABS. Overall, our results show that modern language models, both big and small, can effectively tackle ABS for Climate Change reports but more research is needed when we frame the problem as a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) problem and our work and dataset will help foster efforts in this direction.

Paperid: 7892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13774.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment-Anything Model (SAM) is a vision foundation model for segmentation with a prompt-driven framework. SAM generates class-agnostic masks based on user-specified instance-referring prompts. However, adapting SAM for automated segmentation -- where manual input is absent -- of specific object classes often requires additional model training. We present Segment Any Class (SAC), a novel, training-free approach that task-adapts SAM for Multi-class segmentation. SAC generates Class-Region Proposals (CRP) on query images which allows us to automatically generate class-aware prompts on probable locations of class instances. CRPs are derived from elementary intra-class and inter-class feature distinctions without any additional training. Our method is versatile, accommodating any N-way K-shot configurations for the multi-class few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) task. Unlike gradient-learning adaptation of generalist models which risk the loss of generalization and potentially suffer from catastrophic forgetting, SAC solely utilizes automated prompting and achieves superior results over state-of-the-art methods on the COCO-20i benchmark, particularly excelling in high N-way class scenarios. SAC is an interesting demonstration of a prompt-only approach to adapting foundation models for novel tasks with small, limited datasets without any modifications to the foundation model itself. This method offers interesting benefits such as intrinsic immunity to concept or feature loss and rapid, online task adaptation of foundation models.

Paperid: 7893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11677.pdf

Abstract:
Among adversarial attacks against sequential recommender systems, model extraction attacks represent a method to attack sequential recommendation models without prior knowledge. Existing research has primarily concentrated on the adversary's execution of black-box attacks through data-free model extraction. However, a significant gap remains in the literature concerning the development of surrogate models by adversaries with access to few-shot raw data (10\% even less). That is, the challenge of how to construct a surrogate model with high functional similarity within the context of few-shot data scenarios remains an issue that requires resolution.This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel few-shot model extraction framework against sequential recommenders, which is designed to construct a superior surrogate model with the utilization of few-shot data. The proposed few-shot model extraction framework is comprised of two components: an autoregressive augmentation generation strategy and a bidirectional repair loss-facilitated model distillation procedure. Specifically, to generate synthetic data that closely approximate the distribution of raw data, autoregressive augmentation generation strategy integrates a probabilistic interaction sampler to extract inherent dependencies and a synthesis determinant signal module to characterize user behavioral patterns. Subsequently, bidirectional repair loss, which target the discrepancies between the recommendation lists, is designed as auxiliary loss to rectify erroneous predictions from surrogate models, transferring knowledge from the victim model to the surrogate model effectively. Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed few-shot model extraction framework yields superior surrogate models.

Paperid: 7894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10886.pdf

Abstract:
Recovering metric depth from a single image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision, requiring both scene understanding and accurate scaling. While deep learning has advanced monocular depth estimation, current models often struggle with unfamiliar scenes and layouts, particularly in zero-shot scenarios and when predicting scale-ergodic metric depth. We present MetricGold, a novel approach that harnesses generative diffusion model's rich priors to improve metric depth estimation. Building upon recent advances in MariGold, DDVM and Depth Anything V2 respectively, our method combines latent diffusion, log-scaled metric depth representation, and synthetic data training. MetricGold achieves efficient training on a single RTX 3090 within two days using photo-realistic synthetic data from HyperSIM, VirtualKitti, and TartanAir. Our experiments demonstrate robust generalization across diverse datasets, producing sharper and higher quality metric depth estimates compared to existing approaches.

Paperid: 7895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10129.pdf

Abstract:
Generating accurate code review comments remains a significant challenge due to the inherently diverse and non-unique nature of the task output. Large language models pretrained on both programming and natural language data tend to perform well in code-oriented tasks. However, large-scale pretraining is not always feasible due to its environmental impact and project-specific generalizability issues. In this work, first we fine-tune open-source Large language models (LLM) in parameter-efficient, quantized low-rank (QLoRA) fashion on consumer-grade hardware to improve review comment generation. Recent studies demonstrate the efficacy of augmenting semantic metadata information into prompts to boost performance in other code-related tasks. To explore this in code review activities, we also prompt proprietary, closed-source LLMs augmenting the input code patch with function call graphs and code summaries. Both of our strategies improve the review comment generation performance, with function call graph augmented few-shot prompting on the GPT-3.5 model surpassing the pretrained baseline by around 90% BLEU-4 score on the CodeReviewer dataset. Moreover, few-shot prompted Gemini-1.0 Pro, QLoRA fine-tuned Code Llama and Llama 3.1 models achieve competitive results (ranging from 25% to 83% performance improvement) on this task. An additional human evaluation study further validates our experimental findings, reflecting real-world developers' perceptions of LLM-generated code review comments based on relevant qualitative metrics.

Paperid: 7896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09310.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) offers potential for identifying anomalies in medical imaging without task-specific training. In this paper, we evaluate CLIP-based models, originally developed for industrial tasks, on brain tumor detection using the BraTS-MET dataset. Our analysis examines their ability to detect medical-specific anomalies with no or minimal supervision, addressing the challenges posed by limited data annotation. While these models show promise in transferring general knowledge to medical tasks, their performance falls short of the precision required for clinical use. Our findings highlight the need for further adaptation before CLIP-based models can be reliably applied to medical anomaly detection.

Paperid: 7897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08629.pdf

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) and similar models build a family of promptable foundation models (FMs) for image and video segmentation. The object of interest is identified using prompts, such as bounding boxes or points. With these FMs becoming part of medical image segmentation, extensive evaluation studies are required to assess their strengths and weaknesses in clinical setting. Since the performance is highly dependent on the chosen prompting strategy, it is important to investigate different prompting techniques to define optimal guidelines that ensure effective use in medical image segmentation. Currently, no dedicated evaluation studies exist specifically for bone segmentation in CT scans, leaving a gap in understanding the performance for this task. Thus, we use non-iterative, ``optimal'' prompting strategies composed of bounding box, points and combinations to test the zero-shot capability of SAM-family models for bone CT segmentation on three different skeletal regions. Our results show that the best settings depend on the model type and size, dataset characteristics and objective to optimize. Overall, SAM and SAM2 prompted with a bounding box in combination with the center point for all the components of an object yield the best results across all tested settings. As the results depend on multiple factors, we provide a guideline for informed decision-making in 2D prompting with non-interactive, ''optimal'' prompts.

Paperid: 7898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08553.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in diverse tasks using zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Even though their capabilities of data synthesis have been studied well in recent years, the generated data suffers from a lack of diversity, less adherence to the prompt, and potential biases that creep into the data from the generator model. In this work, we tackle the challenge of generating datasets with high diversity, upon which a student model is trained for downstream tasks. Taking the route of decoding-time guidance-based approaches, we propose CorrSynth, which generates data that is more diverse and faithful to the input prompt using a correlated sampling strategy. Further, our method overcomes the complexity drawbacks of some other guidance-based techniques like classifier-based guidance. With extensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of our approach and substantiate our claims. In particular, we perform intrinsic evaluation to show the improvements in diversity. Our experiments show that CorrSynth improves both student metrics and intrinsic metrics upon competitive baselines across four datasets, showing the innate advantage of our method.

Paperid: 7899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08449.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the landscape of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), with innovative LLM-backed solutions emerging rapidly. However, when applied to database technologies, specifically query generation for graph databases and Knowledge Graphs (KGs), LLMs still face significant challenges. While research on LLM-driven query generation for Structured Query Language (SQL) exists, similar systems for graph databases remain underdeveloped. This paper presents a comparative study addressing the challenge of generating Cypher queries a powerful language for interacting with graph databases using open-access LLMs. We rigorously evaluate several LLM agents (OpenAI ChatGPT 4o, Claude Sonnet 3.5, Google Gemini Pro 1.5, and a locally deployed Llama 3.1 8B) using a designed few-shot learning prompt and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) backed by Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) reasoning. Our empirical analysis of query generation accuracy reveals that Claude Sonnet 3.5 outperforms its counterparts in this specific domain. Further, we highlight promising future research directions to address the identified limitations and advance LLM-driven query generation for graph databases.

Paperid: 7900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08404.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform financial analytics by integrating numerical and textual data. However, challenges such as insufficient context when fusing multimodal information and the difficulty in measuring the utility of qualitative outputs, which LLMs generate as text, have limited their effectiveness in tasks such as financial forecasting. This study addresses these challenges by leveraging daily reports from securities firms to create high-quality contextual information. The reports are segmented into text-based key factors and combined with numerical data, such as price information, to form context sets. By dynamically updating few-shot examples based on the query time, the sets incorporate the latest information, forming a highly relevant set closely aligned with the query point. Additionally, a crafted prompt is designed to assign scores to the key factors, converting qualitative insights into quantitative results. The derived scores undergo a scaling process, transforming them into real-world values that are used for prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs outperform time-series models in market forecasting, though challenges such as imperfect reproducibility and limited explainability remain.

Paperid: 7901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05985.pdf

Abstract:
This paper examines potential biases and inconsistencies in emotional evocation of images produced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) models and their potential bias toward negative emotions. In particular, we assess this bias by comparing the emotions evoked by an AI-produced image to the emotions evoked by prompts used to create those images. As a first step, the study evaluates three approaches for identifying emotions in images -- traditional supervised learning, zero-shot learning with vision-language models, and cross-modal auto-captioning -- using EmoSet, a large dataset of image-emotion annotations that categorizes images across eight emotional types. Results show fine-tuned models, particularly Google's Vision Transformer (ViT), significantly outperform zero-shot and caption-based methods in recognizing emotions in images. For a cross-modality comparison, we then analyze the differences between emotions in text prompts -- via existing text-based emotion-recognition models -- and the emotions evoked in the resulting images. Findings indicate that AI-generated images frequently lean toward negative emotional content, regardless of the original prompt. This emotional skew in generative models could amplify negative affective content in digital spaces, perpetuating its prevalence and impact. The study advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to better align AI emotion recognition with psychological insights and address potential biases in generative AI outputs across digital media.

Paperid: 7902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05639.pdf

Abstract:
We explore the capability of four open-sourcelarge language models (LLMs) in argumentation mining (AM). We conduct experiments on three different corpora; persuasive essays(PE), argumentative microtexts (AMT) Part 1 and Part 2, based on two argumentation mining sub-tasks: (i) argumentative discourse units classifications (ADUC), and (ii) argumentative relation classification (ARC). This work aims to assess the argumentation capability of open-source LLMs, including Mistral 7B, Mixtral8x7B, LlamA2 7B and LlamA3 8B in both, zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our analysis contributes to further assessing computational argumentation with open-source LLMs in future research efforts.

Paperid: 7903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05048.pdf

Abstract:
Enterprise searches require users to have complex knowledge of queries, configurations, and metadata, rendering it difficult for them to access information as needed. Most go-to-market (GTM) platforms utilize advanced search, an interface that enables users to filter queries by various fields using categories or keywords, which, historically, however, has proven to be exceedingly cumbersome, as users are faced with seemingly hundreds of options, fields, and buttons. Consequently, querying with natural language has long been ideal, a notion further empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we implement and evaluate a solution for the Zoominfo product for sellers, which prompts the LLM with natural language, producing search fields through entity extraction that are then converted into a search query. The intermediary search fields offer numerous advantages for each query, including the elimination of syntax errors, simpler ground truths, and an intuitive format for the LLM to interpret. We paired this pipeline with many advanced prompt engineering strategies, featuring an intricate system message, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, and execution refinement. Furthermore, we manually created the ground truth for 500+ natural language queries, enabling the supervised fine-tuning of Llama-3-8B-Instruct and the introduction of sophisticated numerical metrics. Comprehensive experiments with closed, open source, and fine-tuned LLM models were conducted through exact, Jaccard, cosine, and semantic similarity on individual search entities to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Overall, the most accurate closed model had an average accuracy of 97% per query, with only one field performing under 90%, with comparable results observed from the fine-tuned models.

Paperid: 7904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04466.pdf

Abstract:
The wider application of end-to-end learning methods to embodied decision-making domains remains bottlenecked by their reliance on a superabundance of training data representative of the target domain. Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) approaches abandon the aim of zero-shot generalization--the goal of standard reinforcement learning (RL)--in favor of few-shot adaptation, and thus hold promise for bridging larger generalization gaps. While learning this meta-level adaptive behavior still requires substantial data, efficient environment simulators approaching real-world complexity are growing in prevalence. Even so, hand-designing sufficiently diverse and numerous simulated training tasks for these complex domains is prohibitively labor-intensive. Domain randomization (DR) and procedural generation (PG), offered as solutions to this problem, require simulators to possess carefully-defined parameters which directly translate to meaningful task diversity--a similarly prohibitive assumption. In this work, we present DIVA, an evolutionary approach for generating diverse training tasks in such complex, open-ended simulators. Like unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, DIVA can be applied to arbitrary parameterizations, but can additionally incorporate realistically-available domain knowledge--thus inheriting the flexibility and generality of UED, and the supervised structure embedded in well-designed simulators exploited by DR and PG. Our empirical results showcase DIVA's unique ability to overcome complex parameterizations and successfully train adaptive agent behavior, far outperforming competitive baselines from prior literature. These findings highlight the potential of such semi-supervised environment design (SSED) approaches, of which DIVA is the first humble constituent, to enable training in realistic simulated domains, and produce more robust and capable adaptive agents.

Paperid: 7905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02451.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks requiring processing and interpretation of input text. Abstract screening is a labour-intensive component of systematic review involving repetitive application of inclusion and exclusion criteria on a large volume of studies identified by a literature search. Here, LLMs (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama 3 70B, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 3.5) were trialled on systematic reviews in a full issue of the Cochrane Library to evaluate their accuracy in zero-shot binary classification for abstract screening. Trials over a subset of 800 records identified optimal prompting strategies and demonstrated superior performance of LLMs to human researchers in terms of sensitivity (LLM-max = 1.000, human-max = 0.775), precision (LLM-max = 0.927, human-max = 0.911), and balanced accuracy (LLM-max = 0.904, human-max = 0.865). The best performing LLM-prompt combinations were trialled across every replicated search result (n = 119,691), and exhibited consistent sensitivity (range 0.756-1.000) but diminished precision (range 0.004-0.096). 66 LLM-human and LLM-LLM ensembles exhibited perfect sensitivity with a maximal precision of 0.458, with less observed performance drop in larger trials. Significant variation in performance was observed between reviews, highlighting the importance of domain-specific validation before deployment. LLMs may reduce the human labour cost of systematic review with maintained or improved accuracy and sensitivity. Systematic review is the foundation of evidence synthesis across academic disciplines, including evidence-based medicine, and LLMs may increase the efficiency and quality of this mode of research.

Paperid: 7906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02403.pdf

Abstract:
Smishing, which aims to illicitly obtain personal information from unsuspecting victims, holds significance due to its negative impacts on our society. In prior studies, as a tool to counteract smishing, machine learning (ML) has been widely adopted, which filters and blocks smishing messages before they reach potential victims. However, a number of challenges remain in ML-based smishing detection, with the scarcity of annotated datasets being one major hurdle. Specifically, given the sensitive nature of smishing-related data, there is a lack of publicly accessible data that can be used for training and evaluating ML models. Additionally, the nuanced similarities between smishing messages and other types of social engineering attacks such as spam messages exacerbate the challenge of smishing classification with limited resources. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel data augmentation method utilizing a few-shot prompt learning approach. What sets our approach apart from extant methods is the use of the principles of persuasion, a psychology theory which explains the underlying mechanisms of smishing. By designing prompts grounded in the persuasion principles, our augmented dataset could effectively capture various, important aspects of smishing messages, enabling ML models to be effectively trained. Our evaluation within a real-world context demonstrates that our augmentation approach produces more diverse and higher-quality smishing data instances compared to other cutting-edging approaches, leading to substantial improvements in the ability of ML models to detect the subtle characteristics of smishing messages. Moreover, our additional analyses reveal that the performance improvement provided by our approach is more pronounced when used with ML models that have a larger number of parameters, demonstrating its effectiveness in training large-scale ML models.

Paperid: 7907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00911.pdf

Abstract:
Seismic exploration is currently the most important method for understanding subsurface structures. However, due to surface conditions, seismic receivers may not be uniformly distributed along the measurement line, making the entire exploration work difficult to carry out. Previous deep learning methods for reconstructing seismic data often relied on additional datasets for training. While some existing methods do not require extra data, they lack constraints on the reconstruction data, leading to unstable reconstruction performance. In this paper, we proposed a zero-shot self-consistency learning strategy and employed an extremely lightweight network for seismic data reconstruction. Our method does not require additional datasets and utilizes the correlations among different parts of the data to design a self-consistency learning loss function, driving a network with only 90,609 learnable parameters. We applied this method to experiments on the USGS National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska public dataset and the results indicate that our proposed approach achieved good reconstruction results. Additionally, our method also demonstrates a certain degree of noise suppression, which is highly beneficial for large and complex seismic exploration tasks.

Paperid: 7908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00684.pdf

Abstract:
Deep Learning methods are notorious for relying on extensive labeled datasets to train and assess their performance. This can cause difficulties in practical situations where models should be trained for new applications for which very little data is available. While few-shot learning algorithms can address the first problem, they still lack sufficient explanations for the results. This research presents a workflow that tackles both challenges by proposing an explainable few-shot learning workflow for detecting invasive and exotic tree species in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images. By integrating a Siamese network with explainable AI (XAI), the workflow enables the classification of tree species with minimal labeled data while providing visual, case-based explanations for the predictions. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed workflow in identifying new tree species, even in data-scarce conditions. With a lightweight backbone, e.g., MobileNet, it achieves a F1-score of 0.86 in 3-shot learning, outperforming a shallow CNN. A set of explanation metrics, i.e., correctness, continuity, and contrastivity, accompanied by visual cases, provide further insights about the prediction results. This approach opens new avenues for using AI and UAVs in forest management and biodiversity conservation, particularly concerning rare or under-studied species.

Paperid: 7909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00404.pdf

Abstract:
Model Agnostic Meta Learning or MAML has become the standard for few-shot learning as a meta-learning problem. MAML is simple and can be applied to any model, as its name suggests. However, it often suffers from instability and computational inefficiency during both training and inference times. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to improve both the inner and outer loops of MAML, then pose an important question about what 'meta' learning truly is. Our first algorithm redefines the optimization problem in the function space to update the model using closed-form solutions instead of optimizing parameters through multiple gradient steps in the inner loop. In the outer loop, the second algorithm adjusts the learning of the meta-learner by assigning weights to the losses from each task of the inner loop. This method optimizes convergence during both the training and inference stages of MAML. In conclusion, our algorithms offer a new perspective on meta-learning and make significant discoveries in both theory and experiments. This research suggests a more efficient approach to few-shot learning and fast task adaptation compared to existing methods. Furthermore, it lays the foundation for establishing a new paradigm in meta-learning.

Paperid: 7910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23066.pdf

Abstract:
State-of-the-art Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification (XMTC) models rely heavily on multi-label attention layers to focus on key tokens in input text, but obtaining optimal attention weights is challenging and resource-intensive. To address this, we introduce PLANT -- Pretrained and Leveraged AtteNTion -- a novel transfer learning strategy for fine-tuning XMTC decoders. PLANT surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods across all metrics on mimicfull, mimicfifty, mimicfour, eurlex, and wikiten datasets. It particularly excels in few-shot scenarios, outperforming previous models specifically designed for few-shot scenarios by over 50 percentage points in F1 scores on mimicrare and by over 36 percentage points on mimicfew, demonstrating its superior capability in handling rare codes. PLANT also shows remarkable data efficiency in few-shot scenarios, achieving precision comparable to traditional models with significantly less data. These results are achieved through key technical innovations: leveraging a pretrained Learning-to-Rank model as the planted attention layer, integrating mutual-information gain to enhance attention, introducing an inattention mechanism, and implementing a stateful-decoder to maintain context. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the importance of these contributions in realizing the performance gains.

Paperid: 7911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20695.pdf

Abstract:
This exploratory pilot study investigated the potential of combining a domain-specific model, BERN2, with large language models (LLMs) to enhance automated disease phenotyping from research survey data. Motivated by the need for efficient and accurate methods to harmonize the growing volume of survey data with standardized disease ontologies, we employed BERN2, a biomedical named entity recognition and normalization model, to extract disease information from the ORIGINS birth cohort survey data. After rigorously evaluating BERN2's performance against a manually curated ground truth dataset, we integrated various LLMs using prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Instructional Fine-Tuning (IFT) to refine the model's outputs. BERN2 demonstrated high performance in extracting and normalizing disease mentions, and the integration of LLMs, particularly with Few Shot Inference and RAG orchestration, further improved accuracy. This approach, especially when incorporating structured examples, logical reasoning prompts, and detailed context, offers a promising avenue for developing tools to enable efficient cohort profiling and data harmonization across large, heterogeneous research datasets.

Paperid: 7912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19838.pdf

Abstract:
Non-invasive brainwave decoding is usually done using Magneto/Electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) sensor measurements as inputs. This makes combining datasets and building models with inductive biases difficult as most datasets use different scanners and the sensor arrays have a nonintuitive spatial structure. In contrast, fMRI scans are acquired directly in brain space, a voxel grid with a typical structured input representation. By using established techniques to reconstruct the sensors' sources' neural activity it is possible to decode from voxels for MEG data as well. We show that this enables spatial inductive biases, spatial data augmentations, better interpretability, zero-shot generalisation between datasets, and data harmonisation.

Paperid: 7913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19185.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models demonstrate impressive proficiency in language understanding and generation. Nonetheless, training these models from scratch, even the least complex billion-parameter variant demands significant computational resources rendering it economically impractical for many organizations. With large language models functioning as general-purpose task solvers, this paper investigates their task-specific fine-tuning. We employ task-specific datasets and prompts to fine-tune two pruned LLaMA models having 5 billion and 4 billion parameters. This process utilizes the pre-trained weights and focuses on a subset of weights using the LoRA method. One challenge in fine-tuning the LLaMA model is crafting a precise prompt tailored to the specific task. To address this, we propose a novel approach to fine-tune the LLaMA model under two primary constraints: task specificity and prompt effectiveness. Our approach, Tailored LLaMA initially employs structural pruning to reduce the model sizes from 7B to 5B and 4B parameters. Subsequently, it applies a carefully designed prompt specific to the task and utilizes the LoRA method to accelerate the fine-tuning process. Moreover, fine-tuning a model pruned by 50\% for less than one hour restores the mean accuracy of classification tasks to 95.68\% at a 20\% compression ratio and to 86.54\% at a 50\% compression ratio through few-shot learning with 50 shots. Our validation of Tailored LLaMA on these two pruned variants demonstrates that even when compressed to 50\%, the models maintain over 65\% of the baseline model accuracy in few-shot classification and generation tasks. These findings highlight the efficacy of our tailored approach in maintaining high performance with significantly reduced model sizes.

Paperid: 7914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18537.pdf

Abstract:
Traditionally, style has been primarily considered in terms of artistic elements such as colors, brushstrokes, and lighting. However, identical semantic subjects, like people, boats, and houses, can vary significantly across different artistic traditions, indicating that style also encompasses the underlying semantics. Therefore, in this study, we propose a zero-shot scheme for image variation with coordinated semantics. Specifically, our scheme transforms the image-to-image problem into an image-to-text-to-image problem. The image-to-text operation employs vision-language models e.g., BLIP) to generate text describing the content of the input image, including the objects and their positions. Subsequently, the input style keyword is elaborated into a detailed description of this style and then merged with the content text using the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Finally, the text-to-image operation utilizes a Diffusion model to generate images based on the text prompt. To enable the Diffusion model to accommodate more styles, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that injects text and style constraints into cross-attention. This ensures that the output image exhibits similar semantics in the desired style. To validate the performance of the proposed scheme, we constructed a benchmark comprising images of various styles and scenes and introduced two novel metrics. Despite its simplicity, our scheme yields highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, particularly for generating stylized images with high-fidelity semantics.

Paperid: 7915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17149.pdf

Abstract:
Current vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, have recently shown significant improvement in performance across various downstream tasks. However, whether such foundation models significantly improve more complex fine-grained action recognition tasks is still an open question. To answer this question and better find out the future research direction on human behavior analysis in-the-wild, this paper provides a large-scale study and insight on current state-of-the-art vision foundation models by comparing their transfer ability onto zero-shot and frame-wise action recognition tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on recent fine-grained, human-centric action recognition datasets (e.g., Toyota Smarthome, Penn Action, UAV-Human, TSU, Charades) including action classification and segmentation.

Paperid: 7916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16239.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training Framework that synergistically combines X-rays, electrocardiograms (ECGs), and radiology/cardiology reports. Our approach leverages transformers to encode these diverse modalities into a unified representation space, aiming to enhance diagnostic accuracy and facilitate comprehensive patient assessments. We utilize LoRA-Peft to significantly reduce trainable parameters in the LLM and incorporate recent linear attention dropping strategy in the Vision Transformer(ViT) for smoother attention. Furthermore, we provide novel multimodal attention explanations and retrieval for our model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an integrated model that combines X-ray, ECG, and Radiology/Cardiology Report with this approach. By utilizing contrastive loss, MoRE effectively aligns modality-specific features into a coherent embedding, which supports various downstream tasks such as zero-shot classification and multimodal retrieval. Employing our proposed methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Mimic-IV, CheXpert, Edema Severity, and PtbXl downstream datasets, surpassing existing multimodal approaches. Our proposed framework shows significant improvements in capturing intricate inter-modal relationships and its robustness in medical diagnosis that establishes a framework for future research in multimodal learning in the healthcare sector.

Paperid: 7917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12959.pdf

Abstract:
Commonsense knowledge is essential for machines to reason about the world. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to perform almost human-like text generation. Despite this success, they fall short as trustworthy intelligent systems, due to the opacity of the basis for their answers and a tendency to confabulate facts when questioned about obscure entities or technical domains. We hypothesize, however, that their general knowledge about objects in the everyday world is largely sound. Based on that hypothesis, this paper investigates LLMs' ability to formulate explicit knowledge about common physical artifacts, focusing on their parts and materials. Our work distinguishes between the substances that comprise an entire object and those that constitute its parts$\unicode{x2014}$a previously underexplored distinction in knowledge base construction. Using few-shot with five in-context examples and zero-shot multi-step prompting, we produce a repository of data on the parts and materials of about 2,300 objects and their subtypes. Our evaluation demonstrates LLMs' coverage and soundness in extracting knowledge. This contribution to knowledge mining should prove useful to AI research on reasoning about object structure and composition and serve as an explicit knowledge source (analogous to knowledge graphs) for LLMs performing multi-hop question answering.

Paperid: 7918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12858.pdf

Abstract:
Grading Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) is a time-consuming and expensive process, traditionally requiring extensive manual effort from human experts. In this study, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess skills related to medical student communication. We analyzed 2,027 video-recorded OSCE examinations from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW), spanning four years (2019-2022), and several different medical cases or "stations." Specifically, our focus was on evaluating students' ability to summarize patients' medical history: we targeted the rubric item 'did the student summarize the patients' medical history?' from the communication skills rubric. After transcribing speech audio captured by OSCE videos using Whisper-v3, we studied the performance of various LLM-based approaches for grading students on this summarization task based on their examination transcripts. Using various frontier-level open-source and proprietary LLMs, we evaluated different techniques such as zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval augmented generation, and multi-model ensemble methods. Our results show that frontier LLM models like GPT-4 achieved remarkable alignment with human graders, demonstrating a Cohen's kappa agreement of 0.88 and indicating strong potential for LLM-based OSCE grading to augment the current grading process. Open-source models also showed promising results, suggesting potential for widespread, cost-effective deployment. Further, we present a failure analysis identifying conditions where LLM grading may be less reliable in this context and recommend best practices for deploying LLMs in medical education settings.

Paperid: 7919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12769.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes the search for an alternative approach to the automatic categorization of camera trap images. First, we benchmark state-of-the-art classifiers using a single model for all images. Next, we evaluate methods combining MegaDetector with one or more classifiers and Segment Anything to assess their impact on reducing location-specific overfitting. Last, we propose and test two approaches using large language and foundational models, such as DINOv2, BioCLIP, BLIP, and ChatGPT, in a zero-shot scenario. Evaluation carried out on two publicly available datasets (WCT from New Zealand, CCT20 from the Southwestern US) and a private dataset (CEF from Central Europe) revealed that combining MegaDetector with two separate classifiers achieves the highest accuracy. This approach reduced the relative error of a single BEiTV2 classifier by approximately 42\% on CCT20, 48\% on CEF, and 75\% on WCT. Besides, as the background is removed, the error in terms of accuracy in new locations is reduced to half. The proposed zero-shot pipeline based on DINOv2 and FAISS achieved competitive results (1.0\% and 4.7\% smaller on CCT20, and CEF, respectively), which highlights the potential of zero-shot approaches for camera trap image categorization.

Paperid: 7920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11539.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational Models are an emerging widely used technique of GenAI. These models are distinguished by their scalability and the ease with which they can be adapted through the exploitation of Transfer Learning. The availability of high computational power and large datasets have supported their development, achieving a high generalization capacity due to the enormous and heterogeneous amounts of data used in their initial training. These characteristics contribute to a solid base that can be adapted or adjusted to a wide range of tasks, increasing their applicability. This study proposes the methodology LLIAM, a straightforward adaptation of a kind of FM, Large Language Models, for the Time Series Forecasting task. An adequate time-series prompting schema and Low-Rank Adaptations are used to enhance the knowledge of the model with diverse time series datasets, known as the fine-tuning phase. A study divided in two stages has been performed for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Initially, a comparison was made between the performance of LLIAM and different state-of-the-art DL algorithms, including Recurrent Neural Networks and Temporal Convolutional Networks, as well as a LLM-based method, TimeLLM. Following this, a zero-shot study is presented in order to evaluate the generalization capacity of the proposed methodology with time series datasets from unknown domains not considered in the model training. The outcomes of this investigation demonstrate the efficacy of LLIAM, highlighting that this straightforward and general approach can attain competent results without the necessity for applying complex modifications. This work also encourages the use of available resources (such as these pre-trained models) and efficient fine-tuning techniques to avoid unnecessary and costly training, narrowing the gap between the goals of traditional AI and Green AI.

Paperid: 7921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11265.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across various tasks. However, they still struggle with long-context documents. This study evaluates the performance of three leading LLMs: GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on lengthy, complex, and opinion-varying documents concerning infrastructure projects, under both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our results indicate that GPT-4o excels in zero-shot scenarios for simpler, shorter documents, while Claude 3.5 Sonnet surpasses GPT-4o in handling more complex, sentiment-fluctuating opinions. In few-shot scenarios, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms overall, while GPT-4o shows greater stability as the number of demonstrations increases.

Paperid: 7922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11195.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, LLaMA, and Claude have prevailed in countless domains, including legal scenarios. With LLMs' rapid technological progress, the development of prompt engineering (PE) as an interface between the LLMs and real-world applications has drawn the attention of all developers. Various PE methods have been proposed to overcome real-world challenges, such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, RAG for legal judgment prediction (LJP) is still underexplored. To address this, we propose "Athena", a novel framework cultivating RAG as a core preprocess component to enhance LLMs' performance on specialized tasks. Athena constructs a knowledge base for accusations, attached with a semantic retrieval mechanism through vectorization. Our experiments show that Athena's overall performance has improved significantly, achieving state-of-the-art results on the CAIL2018 dataset. Our ablation study on the in-context window size parameter further reproduces LLMs' "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon with a relative positional variation. And with moderate hyper-parameter-tuning, we can achieve at most 95% of accuracy accordingly. We also study the impact of query rewriting and data distribution, providing possible directions for future research based on former analyses.

Paperid: 7923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10866.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer extensive knowledge across various domains, but they may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, such as personal information in the medical and financial sectors. Machine unlearning methods aim to remove specific information from models after training to address this. However, current approaches require additional model training or struggle to effectively erase particular data points and their associated context due to LLMs' complex, dense, and continuous nature. In this study, we propose a novel amortized unlearning approach using codebook features and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). By leveraging a bottleneck to decompose the activation space and regulate information flow, our method efficiently unlearns targeted information while preserving the model's performance on unrelated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that successfully enables unlearning specific topics with contextual relevance in an LLM, marking a significant step towards real-world applications of machine unlearning.

Paperid: 7924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10848.pdf

Abstract:
Writing stories is an engaging yet challenging endeavor. Often, authors encounter moments of creative block, where the path forward in their narrative becomes obscured. This paper is designed to address such moments by providing an innovative solution: A tool that completes stories based on given prompts. By inputting a short story prompt, users can receive a conclusion to their story, articulated in one sentence or more, thereby enhancing the storytelling process with AI-driven creativity. This tool aims not only to assist authors in navigating writer's block but also to offer a fun and interactive way for anyone to expand on story ideas spontaneously. Through this paper, we explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative writing, pushing the boundaries of how stories can be crafted and concluded. To create our final text-generation models, we used a pre-trained GPT-3.5 model and a newly created finetuned SSM-Mamba model, both of which perform well on a comprehensive list of metrics including BERT score, METEOR, BLEU, ROUGE, and Perplexity. The SSM model has also been made public for the NLP community on HuggingFace models as an open source contribution, which for the timebeing is a first of its kind state-space model for story-generation task on HuggingFace.

Paperid: 7925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10576.pdf

Abstract:
POS tagging plays a fundamental role in numerous applications. While POS taggers are highly accurate in well-resourced settings, they lag behind in cases of limited or missing training data. This paper focuses on POS tagging for languages with limited data. We seek to identify the characteristics of datasets that make them favourable for training POS tagging models without using any labelled training data from the target language. This is a zero-shot approach. We compare the accuracies of a multilingual large language model (mBERT) fine-tuned on one or more languages related to the target language. Additionally, we compare these results with models trained directly on the target language itself. We do this for three target low-resource languages. Our research highlights the importance of accurate dataset selection for effective zero-shot POS tagging. Particularly, a strong linguistic relationship and high-quality datasets ensure optimal results. For extremely low-resource languages, zero-shot models prove to be a viable option.

Paperid: 7926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10417.pdf

Abstract:
We tackle the general differentiable meta learning problem that is ubiquitous in modern deep learning, including hyperparameter optimization, loss function learning, few-shot learning, invariance learning and more. These problems are often formalized as Bi-Level optimizations (BLO). We introduce a novel perspective by turning a given BLO problem into a stochastic optimization, where the inner loss function becomes a smooth probability distribution, and the outer loss becomes an expected loss over the inner distribution. To solve this stochastic optimization, we adopt Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) MCMC to sample inner distribution, and propose a recurrent algorithm to compute the MC-estimated hypergradient. Our derivation is similar to forward-mode differentiation, but we introduce a new first-order approximation that makes it feasible for large models without needing to store huge Jacobian matrices. The main benefits are two-fold: i) Our stochastic formulation takes into account uncertainty, which makes the method robust to suboptimal inner optimization or non-unique multiple inner minima due to overparametrization; ii) Compared to existing methods that often exhibit unstable behavior and hyperparameter sensitivity in practice, our method leads to considerably more reliable solutions. We demonstrate that the new approach achieves promising results on diverse meta learning problems and easily scales to learning 87M hyperparameters in the case of Vision Transformers.

Paperid: 7927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09937.pdf

Abstract:
The Artificial Intelligence field, or AI, experienced a renaissance in the last few years across various fields such as law, medicine, and finance. While there are studies outlining the landscape of AI in the legal field as well as surveys of the current AI efforts of law firms, to our knowledge there has not been an investigation of the intersection of law students and AI. Such research is critical to help ensure current law students are positioned to fully exploit this technology as they embark on their legal careers but to also assist existing legal firms to better leverage their AI skillset both operationally and in helping to formulate future legal frameworks for regulating this technology across industries. The study presented in this paper addresses this gap. Through a survey conducted from July 22 to Aug 19, 2024, the study covers the law students background, AI usage, AI applications in the legal field, AI regulations and open-ended comments to share opinions. The results from this study show the uniqueness of law students as a distinct cohort. The results differ from the ones of established law firms especially in AI engagement - established legal professionals are more engaged than law students. Somewhat surprising, the law firm participants show higher enthusiasm about AI than this student cohort. Collaborations with Computer Science departments would further enhance the AI knowledge and experience of law students in AI technologies such as prompt engineering (zero and few shot), chain-of-thought prompting, and language model hallucination management. As future work, we would like to expand the study to include more variables and a larger cohort more evenly distributed across locales. In addition, it would be insightful to repeat the study with the current cohort in one year to track how the students viewpoints evolve.

Paperid: 7928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09797.pdf

Abstract:
Metric-based few-shot fine-grained classification has shown promise due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, existing methods often overlook task-level special cases and struggle with accurate category description and irrelevant sample information. To tackle these, we propose TAFD-Net: a task adaptive feature distribution network. It features a task-adaptive component for embedding to capture task-level nuances, an asymmetric metric for calculating feature distribution similarities between query samples and support categories, and a contrastive measure strategy to boost performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three datasets and the experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms recent incremental learning algorithms.

Paperid: 7929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09759.pdf

Abstract:
The high cost of obtaining accurate annotations for image segmentation and localization makes the use of one and few shot algorithms attractive. Several state-of-the-art methods for few-shot segmentation have emerged, including text-based prompting for the task but suffer from sub-optimal performance for medical images. Leveraging sub-pixel level features of existing Vision Transformer (ViT) based foundation models for identifying similar region of interest (RoI) based on a single template image have been shown to be very effective for one shot segmentation and localization in medical images across modalities. However, such methods rely on assumption that template image and test image are well matched and simple correlation is sufficient to obtain correspondences. In practice, however such an approach can fail to generalize in clinical data due to patient pose changes, inter-protocol variations even within a single modality or extend to 3D data using single template image. Moreover, for multi-label tasks, the RoI identification has to be performed sequentially. In this work, we propose foundation model (FM) based adapters for single label, multi-label localization and segmentation to address these concerns. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method for multiple segmentation and localization tasks for both 2D and 3D data as we well as clinical data with different poses and evaluate against the state of the art few shot segmentation methods.

Paperid: 7930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09244.pdf

Abstract:
Ontologies are known to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) when translating natural language queries into a formal query language like SQL or SPARQL. There are two ways to leverage ontologies when working with LLMs. One is to fine-tune the model, i.e., to enhance it with specific domain knowledge. Another is the zero-shot prompting approach, where the ontology is provided as part of the input question. Unfortunately, modern enterprises typically have ontologies that are too large to fit in a prompt due to LLM's token size limitations. We present a solution that incrementally reveals "just enough" of an ontology that is needed to answer a given question.

Paperid: 7931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09174.pdf

Abstract:
In recent years, the demand for automated SQL generation has increased significantly, driven by the need for efficient data querying in various applications. However, generating accurate SQL queries remains a challenge due to the complexity and variability of natural language inputs. This paper introduces a novel few-shot learning-based approach for error correction in SQL generation, enhancing the accuracy of generated queries by selecting the most suitable few-shot error correction examples for a given natural language question (NLQ). In our experiments with the open-source Gretel dataset, the proposed model offers a 39.2% increase in fixing errors from the baseline approach with no error correction and a 10% increase from a simple error correction method. The proposed technique leverages embedding-based similarity measures to identify the closest matches from a repository of few-shot examples. Each example comprises an incorrect SQL query, the resulting error, the correct SQL query, and detailed steps to transform the incorrect query into the correct one. By employing this method, the system can effectively guide the correction of errors in newly generated SQL queries. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements in SQL generation accuracy by providing contextually relevant examples that facilitate error identification and correction. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of embedding-based selection in enhancing the few-shot learning process, leading to more precise and reliable SQL query generation. This research contributes to the field of automated SQL generation by offering a robust framework for error correction, paving the way for more advanced and user-friendly database interaction tools.

Paperid: 7932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08971.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an extension to Longformer Encoder-Decoder, a popular sparse transformer architecture. One common challenge with sparse transformers is that they can struggle with encoding of long range context, such as connections between topics discussed at a beginning and end of a document. A method to selectively increase global attention is proposed and demonstrated for abstractive summarization tasks on several benchmark data sets. By prefixing the transcript with additional keywords and encoding global attention on these keywords, improvement in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned cases is demonstrated for some benchmark data sets.

Paperid: 7933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07593.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled complex multimodal tasks by processing text and image data simultaneously, significantly enhancing the field of artificial intelligence. However, these models often exhibit biases that can skew outputs towards societal stereotypes, thus necessitating debiasing strategies. Existing debiasing methods focus narrowly on specific modalities or tasks, and require extensive retraining. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Selective Feature Imputation for Debiasing (SFID), a novel methodology that integrates feature pruning and low confidence imputation (LCI) to effectively reduce biases in VLMs. SFID is versatile, maintaining the semantic integrity of outputs and costly effective by eliminating the need for retraining. Our experimental results demonstrate SFID's effectiveness across various VLMs tasks including zero-shot classification, text-to-image retrieval, image captioning, and text-to-image generation, by significantly reducing gender biases without compromising performance. This approach not only enhances the fairness of VLMs applications but also preserves their efficiency and utility across diverse scenarios.

Paperid: 7934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07460.pdf

Abstract:
Guidewire segmentation during endovascular interventions holds the potential to significantly enhance procedural accuracy, improving visualization and providing critical feedback that can support both physicians and robotic systems in navigating complex vascular pathways. Unlike supervised segmentation networks, which need many expensive expert-annotated labels, sim-to-real domain adaptation approaches utilize synthetic data from simulations, offering a cost-effective solution. The success of models like Segment-Anything (SAM) has driven advancements in image segmentation foundation models with strong zero/few-shot generalization through prompt engineering. However, they struggle with medical images like X-ray fluoroscopy and the domain-shifts of the data. Given the challenges of acquiring annotation and the accessibility of labeled simulation data, we propose a sim-to-real domain adaption framework with a coarse-to-fine strategy to adapt SAM to X-ray fluoroscopy guidewire segmentation without any annotation on the target domain. We first generate the pseudo-labels by utilizing a simple source image style transfer technique that preserves the guidewire structure. Then, we develop a weakly supervised self-training architecture to fine-tune an end-to-end student SAM with the coarse labels by imposing consistency regularization and supervision from the teacher SAM network. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a publicly available Cardiac dataset and an in-house Neurovascular dataset, where our method surpasses both pre-trained SAM and many state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques by a large margin. Our code will be made public on GitHub soon.

Paperid: 7935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07118.pdf

Abstract:
The use of small language models (SLMs), herein defined as models with less than three billion parameters, is increasing across various domains and applications. Due to their ability to run on more accessible hardware and preserve user privacy, SLMs possess the potential to democratize access to language models for individuals of different socioeconomic status and with different privacy preferences. This study assesses several state-of-the-art SLMs (e.g., Apple's OpenELM, Microsoft's Phi, Google's Gemma, and the Tinyllama project) for use in the financial domain to support the development of financial literacy LMs. Democratizing access to quality financial information for those who are financially under educated is greatly needed in society, particularly as new financial markets and products emerge and participation in financial markets increases due to ease of access. We are the first to examine the use of open-source SLMs to democratize access to financial question answering capabilities for individuals and students. To this end, we provide an analysis of the memory usage, inference time, similarity comparisons to ground-truth answers, and output readability of prominent SLMs to determine which models are most accessible and capable of supporting access to financial information. We analyze zero-shot and few-shot learning variants of the models. The results suggest that some off-the-shelf SLMs merit further exploration and fine-tuning to prepare them for individual use, while others may have limits to their democratization.

Paperid: 7936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.07091.pdf

Abstract:
Collusion is a complex phenomenon in which companies secretly collaborate to engage in fraudulent practices. This paper presents an innovative methodology for detecting and predicting collusion patterns in different national markets using neural networks (NNs) and graph neural networks (GNNs). GNNs are particularly well suited to this task because they can exploit the inherent network structures present in collusion and many other economic problems. Our approach consists of two phases: In Phase I, we develop and train models on individual market datasets from Japan, the United States, two regions in Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil, focusing on predicting collusion in single markets. In Phase II, we extend the models' applicability through zero-shot learning, employing a transfer learning approach that can detect collusion in markets in which training data is unavailable. This phase also incorporates out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to evaluate the models' performance on unseen datasets from other countries and regions. In our empirical study, we show that GNNs outperform NNs in detecting complex collusive patterns. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on preventing collusion and optimizing detection methodologies, providing valuable guidance on the use of NNs and GNNs in economic applications to enhance market fairness and economic welfare.

Paperid: 7937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06825.pdf

Abstract:
In clinical procedures, precise localization of the target area is an essential step for clinical diagnosis and screening. For many diagnostic applications, lung segmentation of chest X-ray images is an essential first step that significantly reduces the image size to speed up the subsequent analysis. One of the primary difficulties with this task is segmenting the lung regions covered by dense abnormalities also known as opacities due to diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis. SAM has astonishing generalization capabilities for category agnostic segmentation. In this study we propose an algorithm to improve zero shot performance of SAM on lung region segmentation task by automatic prompt selection. Two separate UNet models were trained, one for predicting lung segments and another for heart segment. Though these predictions lack fine details around the edges, they provide positive and negative points as prompt for SAM. Using proposed prompting method zero shot performance of SAM is evaluated on two benchmark datasets. ViT-l version of the model achieved slightly better performance compared to other two versions, ViTh and ViTb. It yields an average Dice score of 95.5 percent and 94.9 percent on hold out data for two datasets respectively. Though, for most of the images, SAM did outstanding segmentation, its prediction was way off for some of the images. After careful inspection it is found that all of these images either had extreme abnormality or distorted shape. Unlike most of the research performed so far on lung segmentation from CXR images using SAM, this study proposes a fully automated prompt selection process only from the input image. Our finding indicates that using pretrained models for prompt selection can utilize SAM impressive generalization capability to its full extent.

Paperid: 7938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06576.pdf

Abstract:
Anomaly Detection is an important problem within computer vision, having variety of real-life applications. Yet, the current set of solutions to this problem entail known, systematic shortcomings. Specifically, contemporary surface Anomaly Detection task assumes the presence of multiple specific anomaly classes e.g. cracks, rusting etc., unlike one-class classification model of past. However, building a deep learning model in such setup remains a challenge because anomalies arise rarely, and hence anomaly samples are quite scarce. Transfer learning has been a preferred paradigm in such situations. But the typical source domains with large dataset sizes e.g. ImageNet, JFT-300M, LAION-2B do not correlate well with the domain of surfaces and materials, an important premise of transfer learning. In this paper, we make an important hypothesis and show, by exhaustive experimentation, that the space of anomaly-free visual patterns of the normal samples correlates well with each of the various spaces of anomalous patterns of the class-specific anomaly samples. The first results of using this hypothesis in transfer learning have indeed been quite encouraging. We expect that finding such a simple closeby domain that readily entails large number of samples, and which also oftentimes shows interclass separability though with narrow margins, will be a useful discovery. Especially, it is expected to improve domain adaptation for anomaly detection, and few-shot learning for anomaly detection, making in-the-wild anomaly detection realistically possible in future.

Paperid: 7939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06491.pdf

Abstract:
Previous work has shown that training "helpful-only" LLMs with reinforcement learning on a curriculum of gameable environments can lead models to generalize to egregious specification gaming, such as editing their own reward function or modifying task checklists to appear more successful. We show that gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, o1-preview, and o1-mini - frontier models trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest - can engage in specification gaming without training on a curriculum of tasks, purely from in-context iterative reflection (which we call in-context reinforcement learning, "ICRL"). We also show that using ICRL to generate highly-rewarded outputs for expert iteration (compared to the standard expert iteration reinforcement learning algorithm) may increase gpt-4o-mini's propensity to learn specification-gaming policies, generalizing (in very rare cases) to the most egregious strategy where gpt-4o-mini edits its own reward function. Our results point toward the strong ability of in-context reflection to discover rare specification-gaming strategies that models might not exhibit zero-shot or with normal training, highlighting the need for caution when relying on alignment of LLMs in zero-shot settings.

Paperid: 7940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05472.pdf

Abstract:
We release the first neural machine translation system for translation between Russian, Azerbaijani and the endangered Lezgian languages, as well as monolingual and parallel datasets collected and aligned for training and evaluating the system. Multiple experiments are conducted to identify how different sets of training language pairs and data domains can influence the resulting translation quality. We achieve BLEU scores of 26.14 for Lezgian-Azerbaijani, 22.89 for Azerbaijani-Lezgian, 29.48 for Lezgian-Russian and 24.25 for Russian-Lezgian pairs. The quality of zero-shot translation is assessed on a Large Language Model, showing its high level of fluency in Lezgian. However, the model often refuses to translate, justifying itself with its incompetence. We contribute our translation model along with the collected parallel and monolingual corpora and sentence encoder for the Lezgian language.

Paperid: 7941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05450.pdf

Abstract:
Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety disorders affect millions globally, contributing significantly to the burden of mental health issues. Early screening is crucial for effective intervention, as timely identification of mental health issues can significantly improve treatment outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be valuable for improving the screening of mental disorders, enabling early intervention and better treatment outcomes. AI-driven screening can leverage the analysis of multiple data sources, including facial features in digital images. However, existing methods often rely on controlled environments or specialized equipment, limiting their broad applicability. This study explores the potential of AI models for ubiquitous depression-anxiety screening given face-centric selfies. The investigation focuses on high-risk pregnant patients, a population that is particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. To cope with limited training data resulting from our clinical setup, pre-trained models were utilized in two different approaches: fine-tuning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) originally designed for facial expression recognition and employing vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot analysis of facial expressions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed VLM-based method significantly outperforms CNNs, achieving an accuracy of 77.6%. Although there is significant room for improvement, the results suggest that VLMs can be a promising approach for mental health screening.

Paperid: 7942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03848.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT series and Llama series have demonstrated strong capabilities in natural language processing, contextual understanding, and text generation. In recent years, researchers are trying to enhance the abilities of LLMs in performing various tasks, and numerous studies have proved that well-designed prompts can significantly improve the performance of LLMs on these tasks. This study compares the language style imitation ability of three different large language models under the guidance of the same zero-shot prompt. It also involves comparing the imitation ability of the same large language model when guided by three different prompts individually. Additionally, by applying a Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) Prompting method to Llama 3, a conversational AI with the language style of a real person was created. In this study, three evaluation methods were used to evaluate LLMs and prompts. The results show that Llama 3 performs best at imitating language styles, and that the ToT prompting method is the most effective to guide it in imitating language styles. Using a ToT framework, Llama 3 was guided to interact with users in the language style of a specific individual without altering its core parameters, thereby creating a text-based conversational AI that reflects the language style of the individual.

Paperid: 7943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01987.pdf

Abstract:
Financial sentiment analysis (FSA) is crucial for evaluating market sentiment and making well-informed financial decisions. The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as BERT and its financial variant, FinBERT, has notably enhanced sentiment analysis capabilities. This paper investigates the application of LLMs and FinBERT for FSA, comparing their performance on news articles, financial reports and company announcements. The study emphasizes the advantages of prompt engineering with zero-shot and few-shot strategy to improve sentiment classification accuracy. Experimental results indicate that GPT-4o, with few-shot examples of financial texts, can be as competent as a well fine-tuned FinBERT in this specialized field.

Paperid: 7944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00182.pdf

Abstract:
Social media posts are frequently identified as a valuable source of open-source intelligence for disaster response, and pre-LLM NLP techniques have been evaluated on datasets of crisis tweets. We assess three commercial large language models (OpenAI GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5-flash-001 and Anthropic Claude-3-5 Sonnet) capabilities in zero-shot classification of short social media posts. In one prompt, the models are asked to perform two classification tasks: 1) identify if the post is informative in a humanitarian context; and 2) rank and provide probabilities for the post in relation to 16 possible humanitarian classes. The posts being classified are from the consolidated crisis tweet dataset, CrisisBench. Results are evaluated using macro, weighted, and binary F1-scores. The informative classification task, generally performed better without extra information, while for the humanitarian label classification providing the event that occurred during which the tweet was mined, resulted in better performance. Further, we found that the models have significantly varying performance by dataset, which raises questions about dataset quality.

Paperid: 7945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19382.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted the domain of multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where systems are required to aggregate information and infer answers from disparate pieces of text. However, the autoregressive nature of LLMs inherently poses a challenge as errors may accumulate if mistakes are made in the intermediate reasoning steps. This paper introduces Monte-Carlo tree search for Zero-shot multi-hop Question Answering (MZQA), a framework based on Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) to identify optimal reasoning paths in MHQA tasks, mitigating the error propagation from sequential reasoning processes. Unlike previous works, we propose a zero-shot prompting method, which relies solely on instructions without the support of hand-crafted few-shot examples that typically require domain expertise. We also introduce a behavioral cloning approach (MZQA-BC) trained on self-generated MCTS inference trajectories, achieving an over 10-fold increase in reasoning speed with bare compromise in performance. The efficacy of our method is validated on standard benchmarks such as HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and MuSiQue, demonstrating that it outperforms existing frameworks.

Paperid: 7946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16807.pdf

Abstract:
The climate crisis is a salient issue in online discussions, and hypocrisy accusations are a central rhetorical element in these debates. However, for large-scale text analysis, hypocrisy accusation detection is an understudied tool, most often defined as a smaller subtask of fallacious argument detection. In this paper, we define hypocrisy accusation detection as an independent task in NLP, and identify different relevant subtypes of hypocrisy accusations. Our Climate Hypocrisy Accusation Corpus (CHAC) consists of 420 Reddit climate debate comments, expert-annotated into two different types of hypocrisy accusations: personal versus political hypocrisy. We evaluate few-shot in-context learning with 6 shots and 3 instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for detecting hypocrisy accusations in this dataset. Results indicate that the GPT-4o and Llama-3 models in particular show promise in detecting hypocrisy accusations (F1 reaching 0.68, while previous work shows F1 of 0.44). However, context matters for a complex semantic concept such as hypocrisy accusations, and we find models struggle especially at identifying political hypocrisy accusations compared to personal moral hypocrisy. Our study contributes new insights in hypocrisy detection and climate change discourse, and is a stepping stone for large-scale analysis of hypocrisy accusation in online climate debates.

Paperid: 7947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16497.pdf

Abstract:
Dense retrieval systems are commonly used for information retrieval (IR). They rely on learning text representations through an encoder and usually require supervised modeling via labelled data which can be costly to obtain or simply unavailable. In this study, we introduce a novel unsupervised text representation learning technique via instruction-tuning the pre-trained encoder-decoder large language models (LLM) under the dual-encoder retrieval framework. We demonstrate the corpus representation can be augmented by the representations of relevant synthetic queries generated by the instruct-tuned LLM founded on the Rao-Blackwell theorem. Furthermore, we effectively align the query and corpus text representation with self-instructed-tuning. Specifically, we first prompt an open-box pre-trained LLM to follow defined instructions (i.e. question generation and keyword summarization) to generate synthetic queries. Next, we fine-tune the pre-trained LLM with defined instructions and the generated queries that passed quality check. Finally, we generate synthetic queries with the instruction-tuned LLM for each corpora and represent each corpora by weighted averaging the synthetic queries and original corpora embeddings. We evaluate our proposed method under low-resource settings on three English and one German retrieval datasets measuring NDCG@10, MRR@100, Recall@100. We significantly improve the average zero-shot retrieval performance on all metrics, increasing open-box FLAN-T5 model variations by [3.34%, 3.50%] in absolute and exceeding three competitive dense retrievers (i.e. mDPR, T-Systems, mBART-Large), with model of size at least 38% smaller, by 1.96%, 4.62%, 9.52% absolute on NDCG@10.

Paperid: 7948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16024.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) have tremendous potential for grounding language, and thus enabling language-conditioned agents (LCAs) to perform diverse tasks specified with text. This has motivated the study of LCAs based on reinforcement learning (RL) with rewards given by rendering images of an environment and evaluating those images with VLMs. If single-task RL is employed, such approaches are limited by the cost and time required to train a policy for each new task. Multi-task RL (MTRL) is a natural alternative, but requires a carefully designed corpus of training tasks and does not always generalize reliably to new tasks. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel decomposition of the problem of building an LCA: first find an environment configuration that has a high VLM score for text describing a task; then use a (pretrained) goal-conditioned policy to reach that configuration. We also explore several enhancements to the speed and quality of VLM-based LCAs, notably, the use of distilled models, and the evaluation of configurations from multiple viewpoints to resolve the ambiguities inherent in a single 2D view. We demonstrate our approach on the Humanoid environment, showing that it results in LCAs that outperform MTRL baselines in zero-shot generalization, without requiring any textual task descriptions or other forms of environment-specific annotation during training. Videos and an interactive demo can be found at https://europe.naverlabs.com/text2control

Paperid: 7949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14879.pdf

Abstract:
Privacy policies are often obfuscated by their complexity, which impedes transparency and informed consent. Conventional machine learning approaches for automatically analyzing these policies demand significant resources and substantial domain-specific training, causing adaptability issues. Moreover, they depend on extensive datasets that may require regular maintenance due to changing privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose, apply, and assess PAPEL (Privacy Policy Analysis through Prompt Engineering for LLMs), a framework harnessing the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) through prompt engineering to automate the analysis of privacy policies. PAPEL aims to streamline the extraction, annotation, and summarization of information from these policies, enhancing their accessibility and comprehensibility without requiring additional model training. By integrating zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning approaches and the chain-of-thought prompting in creating predefined prompts and prompt templates, PAPEL guides LLMs to efficiently dissect, interpret, and synthesize the critical aspects of privacy policies into user-friendly summaries. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PAPEL with two applications: (i) annotation and (ii) contradiction analysis. We assess the ability of several LLaMa and GPT models to identify and articulate data handling practices, offering insights comparable to existing automated analysis approaches while reducing training efforts and increasing the adaptability to new analytical needs. The experiments demonstrate that the LLMs PAPEL utilizes (LLaMA and Chat GPT models) achieve robust performance in privacy policy annotation, with F1 scores reaching 0.8 and above (using the OPP-115 gold standard), underscoring the effectiveness of simpler prompts across various advanced language models.

Paperid: 7950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13951.pdf

Abstract:
Quantitative analysis of microscopy images is essential in the design and fabrication of components used in augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) modules. However, segmenting regions of interest (ROIs) from these complex images and extracting critical dimensions (CDs) requires novel techniques, such as deep learning models which are key for actionable decisions on process, material and device optimization. In this study, we report on the fine-tuning of a pre-trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) using a diverse dataset of electron microscopy images. We employed methods such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to reduce training time and enhance the accuracy of ROI extraction. The model's ability to generalize to unseen images facilitates zero-shot learning and supports a CD extraction model that precisely extracts CDs from the segmented ROIs. We demonstrate the accurate extraction of binary images from cross-sectional images of surface relief gratings (SRGs) and Fresnel lenses in both single and multiclass modes. Furthermore, these binary images are used to identify transition points, aiding in the extraction of relevant CDs. The combined use of the fine-tuned segmentation model and the CD extraction model offers substantial advantages to various industrial applications by enhancing analytical capabilities, time to data and insights, and optimizing manufacturing processes.

Paperid: 7951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.13120.pdf

Abstract:
We evaluate the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in assessing essay quality, focusing on their alignment with human grading. More precisely, we evaluate ChatGPT and Llama in the Automated Essay Scoring (AES) task, a crucial natural language processing (NLP) application in Education. We consider both zero-shot and few-shot learning and different prompting approaches. We compare the numeric grade provided by the LLMs to human rater-provided scores utilizing the ASAP dataset, a well-known benchmark for the AES task. Our research reveals that both LLMs generally assign lower scores compared to those provided by the human raters; moreover, those scores do not correlate well with those provided by the humans. In particular, ChatGPT tends to be harsher and further misaligned with human evaluations than Llama. We also experiment with a number of essay features commonly used by previous AES methods, related to length, usage of connectives and transition words, and readability metrics, including the number of spelling and grammar mistakes. We find that, generally, none of these features correlates strongly with human or LLM scores. Finally, we report results on Llama 3, which are generally better across the board, as expected. Overall, while LLMs do not seem an adequate replacement for human grading, our results are somewhat encouraging for their use as a tool to assist humans in the grading of written essays in the future.

Paperid: 7952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12880.pdf

Abstract:
E-commerce stores enable multilingual product discovery which require accurate product title translation. Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capacity to perform machine translation tasks, and it can also enhance and translate product titles cross-lingually in one step. However, product title translation often requires more than just language conversion because titles are short, lack context, and contain specialized terminology. This study proposes a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach that leverages existing bilingual product information in e-commerce by retrieving similar bilingual examples and incorporating them as few-shot prompts to enhance LLM-based product title translation. Experiment results show that our proposed RAG approach improve product title translation quality with chrF score gains of up to 15.3% for language pairs where the LLM has limited proficiency.

Paperid: 7953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12745.pdf

Abstract:
The use of synthetic speech as data augmentation is gaining increasing popularity in fields such as automatic speech recognition and speech classification tasks. Despite novel text-to-speech systems with voice cloning capabilities, that allow the usage of a larger amount of voices based on short audio segments, it is known that these systems tend to hallucinate and oftentimes produce bad data that will most likely have a negative impact on the downstream task. In the present work, we conduct a set of experiments around zero-shot learning with synthetic speech data for the specific task of speech commands classification. Our results on the Google Speech Commands dataset show that a simple ASR-based filtering method can have a big impact in the quality of the generated data, translating to a better performance. Furthermore, despite the good quality of the generated speech data, we also show that synthetic and real speech can still be easily distinguishable when using self-supervised (WavLM) features, an aspect further explored with a CycleGAN to bridge the gap between the two types of speech material.

Paperid: 7954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11644.pdf

Abstract:
Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, primarily affecting the lungs. Early detection is crucial for improving treatment effectiveness and reducing transmission risk. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through image classification of chest X-rays, can assist in TB detection. However, class imbalance in TB chest X-ray datasets presents a challenge for accurate classification. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning (FSL) approach using the Prototypical Network algorithm to address this issue. We compare the performance of ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and VGG16 in feature extraction from the TBX11K Chest X-ray dataset. Experimental results demonstrate classification accuracies of 98.93% for ResNet-18, 98.60% for ResNet-50, and 33.33% for VGG16. These findings indicate that the proposed method outperforms others in mitigating data imbalance, which is particularly beneficial for disease classification applications.

Paperid: 7955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11338.pdf

Abstract:
Numerous methods have been proposed to adapt a pre-trained foundational CLIP model for few-shot classification. As CLIP is trained on a large corpus, it generalises well through adaptation to few-shot classification. In this work, we analyse the intra-modal overlap in image space in terms of embedding representation. Our analysis shows that, due to contrastive learning, embeddings from CLIP model exhibit high cosine similarity distribution overlap in the image space between paired and unpaired examples affecting the performance of few-shot training-free classification methods which rely on similarity in the image space for their predictions. To tackle intra-modal overlap we propose to train a lightweight adapter on a generic set of samples from the Google Open Images dataset demonstrating that this improves accuracy for few-shot training-free classification. We validate our contribution through extensive empirical analysis and demonstrate that reducing the intra-modal overlap leads to a) improved performance on a number of standard datasets, b) increased robustness to distribution shift and c) higher feature variance rendering the features more discriminative for downstream tasks.

Paperid: 7956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10574.pdf

Abstract:
The large-scale deployment of Solidity smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet has increasingly attracted financially-motivated attackers in recent years. A few now-infamous attacks in Ethereum's history includes DAO attack in 2016 (50 million dollars lost), Parity Wallet hack in 2017 (146 million dollars locked), Beautychain's token BEC in 2018 (900 million dollars market value fell to 0), and NFT gaming blockchain breach in 2022 ($600 million in Ether stolen). This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of the use of large language models (LLMs) and their capabilities in detecting OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities in Solidity. We introduce a novel, class-balanced, structured, and labeled dataset named VulSmart, which we use to benchmark and compare the performance of open-source LLMs such as CodeLlama, Llama2, CodeT5 and Falcon, alongside closed-source models like GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o Mini. Our proposed SmartVD framework is rigorously tested against these models through extensive automated and manual evaluations, utilizing BLEU and ROUGE metrics to assess the effectiveness of vulnerability detection in smart contracts. We also explore three distinct prompting strategies-zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought-to evaluate the multi-class classification and generative capabilities of the SmartVD framework. Our findings reveal that SmartVD outperforms its open-source counterparts and even exceeds the performance of closed-source base models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Mini. After fine-tuning, the closed-source models, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o Mini, achieved remarkable performance with 99% accuracy in detecting vulnerabilities, 94% in identifying their types, and 98% in determining severity. Notably, SmartVD performs best with the `chain-of-thought' prompting technique, whereas the fine-tuned closed-source models excel with the `zero-shot' prompting approach.

Paperid: 7957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10202.pdf

Abstract:
Even if the depth maps captured by RGB-D sensors deployed in real environments are often characterized by large areas missing valid depth measurements, the vast majority of depth completion methods still assumes depth values covering all areas of the scene. To address this limitation, we introduce SteeredMarigold, a training-free, zero-shot depth completion method capable of producing metric dense depth, even for largely incomplete depth maps. SteeredMarigold achieves this by using the available sparse depth points as conditions to steer a denoising diffusion probabilistic model. Our method outperforms relevant top-performing methods on the NYUv2 dataset, in tests where no depth was provided for a large area, achieving state-of-art performance and exhibiting remarkable robustness against depth map incompleteness. Our source code is publicly available at https://steeredmarigold.github.io.

Paperid: 7958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10077.pdf

Abstract:
Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER), whose goal is to recognize domain-specific entities and their categories, provides an important support for constructing domain knowledge graphs. Currently, deep learning-based methods are widely used and effective in NER tasks, but due to the reliance on large-scale labeled data. As a result, the scarcity of labeled data in a specific domain will limit its application.Therefore, many researches started to introduce few-shot methods and achieved some results. However, the entity structures in specific domains are often complex, and the current few-shot methods are difficult to adapt to NER tasks with complex features.Taking the Chinese coal chemical industry domain as an example,there exists a complex structure of multiple entities sharing a single entity, as well as multiple relationships for the same pair of entities, which affects the NER task under the sample less condition.In this paper, we propose a Large Language Models (LLMs)-based entity recognition framework LLM-DER for the domain-specific entity recognition problem in Chinese, which enriches the entity information by generating a list of relationships containing entity types through LLMs, and designing a plausibility and consistency evaluation method to remove misrecognized entities, which can effectively solve the complex structural entity recognition problem in a specific domain.The experimental results of this paper on the Resume dataset and the self-constructed coal chemical dataset Coal show that LLM-DER performs outstandingly in domain-specific entity recognition, not only outperforming the existing GPT-3.5-turbo baseline, but also exceeding the fully-supervised baseline, verifying its effectiveness in entity recognition.

Paperid: 7959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09659.pdf

Abstract:
Native Language Identification (NLI) - the task of identifying the native language (L1) of a person based on their writing in the second language (L2) - has applications in forensics, marketing, and second language acquisition. Historically, conventional machine learning approaches that heavily rely on extensive feature engineering have outperformed transformer-based language models on this task. Recently, closed-source generative large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable performance on NLI in a zero-shot setting, including promising results in open-set classification. However, closed-source LLMs have many disadvantages, such as high costs and undisclosed nature of training data. This study explores the potential of using open-source LLMs for NLI. Our results indicate that open-source LLMs do not reach the accuracy levels of closed-source LLMs when used out-of-the-box. However, when fine-tuned on labeled training data, open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to that of commercial LLMs.

Paperid: 7960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09647.pdf

Abstract:
Labelled data are limited and self-supervised learning is one of the most important approaches for reducing labelling requirements. While it has been extensively explored in the image domain, it has so far not received the same amount of attention in the acoustic domain. Yet, reducing labelling is a key requirement for many acoustic applications. Specifically in bioacoustic, there are rarely sufficient labels for fully supervised learning available. This has led to the widespread use of acoustic recognisers that have been pre-trained on unrelated data for bioacoustic tasks. We posit that training on the actual task data and combining self-supervised pre-training with few-shot classification is a superior approach that has the ability to deliver high accuracy even when only a few labels are available. To this end, we introduce and evaluate a new architecture that combines CNN-based preprocessing with feature extraction based on state space models (SSMs). This combination is motivated by the fact that CNN-based networks alone struggle to capture temporal information effectively, which is crucial for classifying acoustic signals. SSMs, specifically S4 and Mamba, on the other hand, have been shown to have an excellent ability to capture long-range dependencies in sequence data. We pre-train this architecture using contrastive learning on the actual task data and subsequent fine-tuning with an extremely small amount of labelled data. We evaluate the performance of this proposed architecture for ($n$-shot, $n$-class) classification on standard benchmarks as well as real-world data. Our evaluation shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art architectures on the few-shot classification problem.

Paperid: 7961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08523.pdf

Abstract:
We present Eir-8B, a large language model with 8 billion parameters, specifically designed to enhance the accuracy of handling medical tasks in the Thai language. This model focuses on providing clear and easy-to-understand answers for both healthcare professionals and patients, thereby improving the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment processes. Human evaluation was conducted to ensure that the model adheres to care standards and provides unbiased answers. To prioritize data security, the model is deployed within the hospital's internal network, ensuring both high security and faster processing speeds. The internal API connection is secured with encryption and strict authentication measures to prevent data leaks and unauthorized access. We evaluated several open-source large language models with 8 billion parameters on four medical benchmarks: MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and the medical subset of MMLU. The best-performing baselines were used to develop Eir-8B. Our evaluation employed multiple questioning strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought reasoning, and ensemble/self-consistency voting methods. Our model outperformed commercially available Thai-language large language models by more than 10%. In addition, we developed enhanced model testing tailored for clinical use in Thai across 18 clinical tasks, where our model exceeded GPT-4o performance by more than 11%.

Paperid: 7962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07582.pdf

Abstract:
Foundational models, trained on vast and diverse datasets, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generalizing across different domains and distributions for various zero-shot tasks. Our work addresses the challenge of retaining these powerful generalization capabilities when adapting foundational models to specific downstream tasks through fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce a novel approach we call "similarity loss", which can be incorporated into the fine-tuning process of any task. By minimizing the distortion of fine-tuned embeddings from the pre-trained embeddings, our method strikes a balance between task-specific adaptation and preserving broad generalization abilities. We evaluate our approach on two diverse tasks: image classification on satellite imagery and face recognition, focusing on open-class and domain shift scenarios to assess out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves OOD performance while maintaining strong in-distribution (ID) performance.

Paperid: 7963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06853.pdf

Abstract:
Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) aims to develop methods that estimate the quality scores of images in the absence of a reference image. In this paper, we approach BIQA from a distortion identification perspective, where our primary goal is to predict distortion types and strengths using Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, due to their extensive knowledge and generalizability. Based on these predicted distortions, we then estimate the quality score of the image. To achieve this, we propose an explainable approach for distortion identification based on attribute learning. Instead of prompting VLMs with the names of distortions, we prompt them with the attributes or effects of distortions and aggregate this information to infer the distortion strength. Additionally, we consider multiple distortions per image, making our method more scalable. To support this, we generate a dataset consisting of 100,000 images for efficient training. Finally, attribute probabilities are retrieved and fed into a regressor to predict the image quality score. The results show that our approach, besides its explainability and transparency, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple datasets in both PLCC and SRCC metrics. Moreover, the zero-shot results demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed approach.

Paperid: 7964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06372.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multilingual speech encoding as well as transcription raise the question of the most effective approach to semantic speech classification. Concretely, can (1) end-to-end (E2E) classifiers obtained by fine-tuning state-of-the-art multilingual speech encoders (MSEs) match or surpass the performance of (2) cascading (CA), where speech is first transcribed into text and classification is delegated to a text-based classifier. To answer this, we first construct SpeechTaxi, an 80-hour multilingual dataset for semantic speech classification of Bible verses, covering 28 diverse languages. We then leverage SpeechTaxi to conduct a wide range of experiments comparing E2E and CA in monolingual semantic speech classification as well as in cross-lingual transfer. We find that E2E based on MSEs outperforms CA in monolingual setups, i.e., when trained on in-language data. However, MSEs seem to have poor cross-lingual transfer abilities, with E2E substantially lagging CA both in (1) zero-shot transfer to languages unseen in training and (2) multilingual training, i.e., joint training on multiple languages. Finally, we devise a novel CA approach based on transcription to Romanized text as a language-agnostic intermediate representation and show that it represents a robust solution for languages without native ASR support. Our SpeechTaxi dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/ datasets/LennartKeller/SpeechTaxi/.

Paperid: 7965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06222.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in speech-based topic segmentation have highlighted the potential of pretrained speech encoders to capture semantic representations directly from speech. Traditionally, topic segmentation has relied on a pipeline approach in which transcripts of the automatic speech recognition systems are generated, followed by text-based segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end scheme that bypasses this conventional two-step process by directly employing semantic speech encoders for segmentation. Focused on the broadcasted news domain, which poses unique challenges due to the diversity of speakers and topics within single recordings, we address the challenge of accessing topic change points efficiently in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, we propose a new benchmark for spoken news topic segmentation by utilizing a dataset featuring approximately 1000 hours of publicly available recordings across six European languages and including an evaluation set in Hindi to test the model's cross-domain performance in a cross-lingual, zero-shot scenario. This setup reflects real-world diversity and the need for models adapting to various linguistic settings. Our results demonstrate that while the traditional pipeline approach achieves a state-of-the-art $P_k$ score of 0.2431 for English, our end-to-end model delivers a competitive $P_k$ score of 0.2564. When trained multilingually, these scores further improve to 0.1988 and 0.2370, respectively. To support further research, we release our model along with data preparation scripts, facilitating open research on multilingual spoken news topic segmentation.

Paperid: 7966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06214.pdf

Abstract:
While current state-of-the-art Scene Change Detection (SCD) approaches achieve impressive results in well-trained research data, they become unreliable under unseen environments and different temporal conditions; in-domain performance drops from 77.6% to 8.0% in a previously unseen environment and to 4.6% under a different temporal condition -- calling for generalizable SCD and benchmark. In this work, we propose the Generalizable Scene Change Detection Framework (GeSCF), which addresses unseen domain performance and temporal consistency -- to meet the growing demand for anything SCD. Our method leverages the pre-trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) in a zero-shot manner. For this, we design Initial Pseudo-mask Generation and Geometric-Semantic Mask Matching -- seamlessly turning user-guided prompt and single-image based segmentation into scene change detection for a pair of inputs without guidance. Furthermore, we define the Generalizable Scene Change Detection (GeSCD) benchmark along with novel metrics and an evaluation protocol to facilitate SCD research in generalizability. In the process, we introduce the ChangeVPR dataset, a collection of challenging image pairs with diverse environmental scenarios -- including urban, suburban, and rural settings. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that GeSCF achieves an average performance gain of 19.2% on existing SCD datasets and 30.0% on the ChangeVPR dataset, nearly doubling the prior art performance. We believe our work can lay a solid foundation for robust and generalizable SCD research.

Paperid: 7967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05934.pdf

Abstract:
We consider time-series forecasting problems where data is scarce, difficult to gather, or induces a prohibitive computational cost. As a first attempt, we focus on short-term electricity consumption in France, which is of strategic importance for energy suppliers and public stakeholders. The complexity of this problem and the many levels of geospatial granularity motivate the use of an ensemble of Gaussian Processes (GPs). Whilst GPs are remarkable predictors, they are computationally expensive to train, which calls for a frugal few-shot learning approach. By taking into account performance on GPs trained on a dataset and designing a random walk on these, we mitigate the training cost of our entire Bayesian decision-making procedure. We introduce our algorithm called \textsc{Domino} (ranDOM walk on gaussIaN prOcesses) and present numerical experiments to support its merits.

Paperid: 7968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05924.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel framework for audio deepfake detection with two main objectives: i) attaining the highest possible accuracy on available fake data, and ii) effectively performing continuous learning on new fake data in a few-shot learning manner. Specifically, we conduct a large audio deepfake collection using various deep audio generation methods. The data is further enhanced with additional augmentation methods to increase variations amidst compressions, far-field recordings, noise, and other distortions. We then adopt the Audio Spectrogram Transformer for the audio deepfake detection model. Accordingly, the proposed method achieves promising performance on various benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we present a continuous learning plugin module to update the trained model most effectively with the fewest possible labeled data points of the new fake type. The proposed method outperforms the conventional direct fine-tuning approach with much fewer labeled data points.

Paperid: 7969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05559.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been utilized in solving diverse reasoning tasks, encompassing common sense, arithmetic and deduction tasks. However, with difficulties of reversing thinking patterns and irrelevant premises, how to determine the authenticity of the cause in abductive logical reasoning remains underexplored. Inspired by hypothesis and verification method and identification of irrelevant information in human thinking process, we propose a new framework for LLMs abductive logical reasoning called CauseJudger (CJ), which identifies the authenticity of possible cause by transforming thinking from reverse to forward and removing irrelevant information. In addition, we construct an abductive logical reasoning dataset for decision task called CauseLogics, which contains 200,000 tasks of varying reasoning lengths. Our experiments show the efficiency of CJ with overall experiments and ablation experiments as well as case studies on our dataset and reconstructed public dataset. Notably, CJ's implementation is efficient, requiring only two calls to LLM. Its impact is profound: when using gpt-3.5, CJ achieves a maximum correctness improvement of 41% compared to Zero-Shot-CoT. Moreover, with gpt-4, CJ attains an accuracy exceeding 90% across all datasets.

Paperid: 7970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05142.pdf

Abstract:
Aerial scene understanding systems face stringent payload restrictions and must often rely on monocular depth estimation for modeling scene geometry, which is an inherently ill-posed problem. Moreover, obtaining accurate ground truth data required by learning-based methods raises significant additional challenges in the aerial domain. Self-supervised approaches can bypass this problem, at the cost of providing only up-to-scale results. Similarly, recent supervised solutions which make good progress towards zero-shot generalization also provide only relative depth values. This work presents TanDepth, a practical scale recovery method for obtaining metric depth results from relative estimations at inference-time, irrespective of the type of model generating them. Tailored for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, our method leverages sparse measurements from Global Digital Elevation Models (GDEM) by projecting them to the camera view using extrinsic and intrinsic information. An adaptation to the Cloth Simulation Filter is presented, which allows selecting ground points from the estimated depth map to then correlate with the projected reference points. We evaluate and compare our method against alternate scaling methods adapted for UAVs, on a variety of real-world scenes. Considering the limited availability of data for this domain, we construct and release a comprehensive, depth-focused extension to the popular UAVid dataset to further research.

Paperid: 7971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04122.pdf

Abstract:
Author profiling is the task of inferring characteristics about individuals by analyzing content they share. Supervised machine learning still dominates automatic systems that perform this task, despite the popularity of prompting large language models to address natural language understanding tasks. One reason is that the classification instances consist of large amounts of posts, potentially a whole user profile, which may exceed the input length of Transformers. Even if a model can use a large context window, the entirety of posts makes the application of API-accessed black box systems costly and slow, next to issues which come with such "needle-in-the-haystack" tasks. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a new method for author profiling which aims at distinguishing relevant from irrelevant content first, followed by the actual user profiling only with relevant data. To circumvent the need for relevance-annotated data, we optimize this relevance filter via reinforcement learning with a reward function that utilizes the zero-shot capabilities of large language models. We evaluate our method for Big Five personality trait prediction on two Twitter corpora. On publicly available real-world data with a skewed label distribution, our method shows similar efficacy to using all posts in a user profile, but with a substantially shorter context. An evaluation on a version of these data balanced with artificial posts shows that the filtering to relevant posts leads to a significantly improved accuracy of the predictions.

Paperid: 7972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03938.pdf

Abstract:
This paper proposes a method for unsupervised whole-image clustering of a target dataset of remote sensing scenes with no labels. The method consists of three main steps: (1) finetuning a pretrained deep neural network (DINOv2) on a labelled source remote sensing imagery dataset and using it to extract a feature vector from each image in the target dataset, (2) reducing the dimension of these deep features via manifold projection into a low-dimensional Euclidean space, and (3) clustering the embedded features using a Bayesian nonparametric technique to infer the number and membership of clusters simultaneously. The method takes advantage of heterogeneous transfer learning to cluster unseen data with different feature and label distributions. We demonstrate the performance of this approach outperforming state-of-the-art zero-shot classification methods on several remote sensing scene classification datasets.

Paperid: 7973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03754.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) are a popular topic of research in AI. Their ability to generalize to new tasks and datasets without retraining or needing an abundance of data makes them an appealing candidate for applications on specialist datasets. In this work, we compare the performance of FMs to finetuned pre-trained supervised models in the task of semantic segmentation on an entirely new dataset. We see that finetuned models consistently outperform the FMs tested, even in cases were data is scarce. We release the code and dataset for this work on GitHub.

Paperid: 7974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03299.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional robotic systems require specific training data for each task, environment, and robot form. While recent advancements in machine learning have enabled models to generalize across new tasks and environments, the challenge of adapting these models to entirely new settings remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this by investigating the generalization capabilities of the RT-1-X robotic foundation model to a type of robot unseen during its training: a SCARA robot from UMI-RTX. Initial experiments reveal that RT-1-X does not generalize zero-shot to the unseen type of robot. However, fine-tuning of the RT-1-X model by demonstration allows the robot to learn a pickup task which was part of the foundation model (but learned for another type of robot). When the robot is presented with an object that is included in the foundation model but not in the fine-tuning dataset, it demonstrates that only the skill, but not the object-specific knowledge, has been transferred.

Paperid: 7975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02572.pdf

Abstract:
Cyber timeline analysis, or forensic timeline analysis, is crucial in Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR). It examines artefacts and events particularly timestamps and metadata to detect anomalies, establish correlations, and reconstruct incident timelines. Traditional methods rely on structured artefacts, such as logs and filesystem metadata, using specialised tools for evidence identification and feature extraction. This paper introduces GenDFIR, a framework leveraging large language models (LLMs), specifically Llama 3.1 8B in zero shot mode, integrated with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) agent. Incident data is preprocessed into a structured knowledge base, enabling the RAG agent to retrieve relevant events based on user prompts. The LLM interprets this context, offering semantic enrichment. Tested on synthetic data in a controlled environment, results demonstrate GenDFIR's reliability and robustness, showcasing LLMs potential to automate timeline analysis and advance threat detection.

Paperid: 7976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01466.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) offer substantial promise for text classification in political science, yet their effectiveness often depends on high-quality prompts and exemplars. To address this, we introduce a three-stage framework that enhances LLM performance through automatic prompt optimization, dynamic exemplar selection, and a consensus mechanism. Our approach automates prompt refinement using task-specific exemplars, eliminating speculative trial-and-error adjustments and producing structured prompts aligned with human-defined criteria. In the second stage, we dynamically select the most relevant exemplars, ensuring contextually appropriate guidance for each query. Finally, our consensus mechanism mimics the role of multiple human coders for a single task, combining outputs from LLMs to achieve high reliability and consistency at a reduced cost. Evaluated across tasks including sentiment analysis, stance detection, and campaign ad tone classification, our method enhances classification accuracy without requiring task-specific model retraining or extensive manual adjustments to prompts. This framework not only boosts accuracy, interpretability and transparency but also provides a cost-effective, scalable solution tailored to political science applications. An open-source Python package (PoliPrompt) is available on GitHub.

Paperid: 7977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01345.pdf

Abstract:
The zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach is often used in question answering (QA) by language models (LMs) for tasks that require multiple reasoning steps. However, some QA tasks hinge more on accessing relevant knowledge than on chaining reasoning steps. We introduce a simple prompting technique, called PREP, that involves using two instances of LMs: the first (LM1) generates relevant information, and the second (LM2) receives the information from the user and answers the question. This design is intended to make better use of the LM's instruction-following capability. PREP is applicable across various QA tasks without domain-specific prompt engineering. PREP is developed on a dataset of 100 QA questions, derived from an extensive schematic dataset specifying artifact parts and material composition. These questions ask which of two artifacts is less likely to share materials with another artifact. Such questions probe the LM's knowledge of shared materials in the part structure of different artifacts. We test our method on our parts-and-materials dataset and three published commonsense reasoning datasets. The average accuracy of our method is consistently higher than that of all the other tested methods across all the tested datasets.

Paperid: 7978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01133.pdf

Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation is a critical function in computer vision applications. This paper shows that large language models (LLMs) can effectively interpret depth with minimal supervision, using efficient resource utilization and a consistent neural network architecture. We introduce LLM-MDE, a multimodal framework that deciphers depth through language comprehension. Specifically, LLM-MDE employs two main strategies to enhance the pretrained LLM's capability for depth estimation: cross-modal reprogramming and an adaptive prompt estimation module. These strategies align vision representations with text prototypes and automatically generate prompts based on monocular images, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on real-world MDE datasets confirm the effectiveness and superiority of LLM-MDE, which excels in few-/zero-shot tasks while minimizing resource use. The source code is available.

Paperid: 7979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00231.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning for Medical Artificial Intelligence have demonstrated that models can match the diagnostic performance of clinical experts in adult chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation. However, their application in the pediatric context remains limited due to the scarcity of large annotated pediatric image datasets. Additionally, significant challenges arise from the substantial variability in pediatric CXR images across different hospitals and the diverse age range of patients from 0 to 18 years. To address these challenges, we propose SCC, a novel approach that combines transfer learning with self-supervised contrastive learning, augmented by an unsupervised contrast enhancement technique. Transfer learning from a well-trained adult CXR model mitigates issues related to the scarcity of pediatric training data. Contrastive learning with contrast enhancement focuses on the lungs, reducing the impact of image variations and producing high-quality embeddings across diverse pediatric CXR images. We train SCC on one pediatric CXR dataset and evaluate its performance on two other pediatric datasets from different sources. Our results show that SCC's out-of-distribution (zero-shot) performance exceeds regular transfer learning in terms of AUC by 13.6% and 34.6% on the two test datasets. Moreover, with few-shot learning using 10 times fewer labeled images, SCC matches the performance of regular transfer learning trained on the entire labeled dataset. To test the generality of the framework, we verify its performance on three benchmark breast cancer datasets. Starting from a model trained on natural images and fine-tuned on one breast dataset, SCC outperforms the fully supervised learning baseline on the other two datasets in terms of AUC by 3.6% and 5.5% in zero-shot learning.

Paperid: 7980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.00214.pdf

Abstract:
Event Argument Extraction (EAE) is pivotal for extracting structured information from unstructured text, yet it remains challenging due to the complexity of real-world document-level EAE. We propose a novel Definition-augmented Heuristic-driven Prompting (DHP) method to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in document-level EAE. Our method integrates argument extraction-related definitions and heuristic rules to guide the extraction process, reducing error propagation and improving task accuracy. We also employ the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method to simulate human reasoning, breaking down complex problems into manageable sub-problems. Experiments have shown that our method achieves a certain improvement in performance over existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning on document-level EAE datasets. The DHP method enhances the generalization capability of LLMs and reduces reliance on large annotated datasets, offering a novel research perspective for document-level EAE.

Paperid: 7981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21215.pdf

Abstract:
We study how model architecture and temporal context interact in naturalistic EEG decoding. Using the HBN movie-watching dataset, we benchmark five architectures, CNN, LSTM, a stabilized Transformer (EEGXF), S4, and S5, on a 4-class task across segment lengths from 8s to 128s. Accuracy improves with longer context: at 64s, S5 reaches 98.7%+/-0.6 and CNN 98.3%+/-0.3, while S5 uses ~20x fewer parameters than CNN. To probe real-world robustness, we evaluate zero-shot cross-frequency shifts, cross-task OOD inputs, and leave-one-subject-out generalization. S5 achieves stronger cross-subject accuracy but makes over-confident errors on OOD tasks; EEGXF is more conservative and stable under frequency shifts, though less calibrated in-distribution. These results reveal a practical efficiency-robustness trade-off: S5 for parameter-efficient peak accuracy; EEGXF when robustness and conservative uncertainty are critical.

Paperid: 7982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19810.pdf

Abstract:
Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula.

Paperid: 7983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15914.pdf

Abstract:
In the realm of Virtual Reality (VR) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), real-time emotion recognition shows promise for supporting individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in improving social skills. This task requires a strict latency-accuracy trade-off, with motion-to-photon (MTP) latency kept below 140 ms to maintain contingency. However, most off-the-shelf Deep Learning models prioritize accuracy over the strict timing constraints of commodity hardware. As a first step toward accessible VR therapy, we benchmark State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models for Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition (FER) on virtual characters using the UIBVFED dataset. We evaluate Medium and Nano variants of YOLO (v8, v11, and v12) for face detection, alongside general-purpose Vision Transformers including CLIP, SigLIP, and ViT-FER.Our results on CPU-only inference demonstrate that while face detection on stylized avatars is robust (100% accuracy), a "Latency Wall" exists in the classification stage. The YOLOv11n architecture offers the optimal balance for detection (~54 ms). However, general-purpose Transformers like CLIP and SigLIP fail to achieve viable accuracy (<23%) or speed (>150 ms) for real-time loops. This study highlights the necessity for lightweight, domain-specific architectures to enable accessible, real-time AI in therapeutic settings.

Paperid: 7984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15366.pdf

Abstract:
Culverts and sewer pipes are critical components of drainage systems, and their failure can lead to serious risks to public safety and the environment. In this thesis, we explore methods to improve automated defect segmentation in culverts and sewer pipes. Collecting and annotating data in this field is cumbersome and requires domain knowledge. Having a large dataset for structural defect detection is therefore not feasible. Our proposed methods are tested under conditions with limited annotated data to demonstrate applicability to real-world scenarios. Overall, this thesis proposes three methods to significantly enhance defect segmentation and handle data scarcity. This can be addressed either by enhancing the training data or by adjusting a models architecture. First, we evaluate preprocessing strategies, including traditional data augmentation and dynamic label injection. These techniques significantly improve segmentation performance, increasing both Intersection over Union (IoU) and F1 score. Second, we introduce FORTRESS, a novel architecture that combines depthwise separable convolutions, adaptive Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN), and multi-scale attention mechanisms. FORTRESS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the culvert sewer pipe defect dataset, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters, as well as its computational cost. Finally, we investigate few-shot semantic segmentation and its applicability to defect detection. Few-shot learning aims to train models with only limited data available. By employing a bidirectional prototypical network with attention mechanisms, the model achieves richer feature representations and achieves satisfactory results across evaluation metrics.

Paperid: 7985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15297.pdf

Abstract:
We introduce AfriEconQA, a specialized benchmark dataset for African economic analysis grounded in a comprehensive corpus of 236 World Bank reports. The task of AfriEconQA is to answer complex economic queries that require high-precision numerical reasoning and temporal disambiguation from specialized institutional documents. The dataset consists of 8,937 curated QA instances, rigorously filtered from a pool of 10018 synthetic questions to ensure high-quality evidence-answer alignment. Each instance is composed of: (1) a question requiring reasoning over economic indicators, (2) the corresponding evidence retrieved from the corpus, (3) a verified ground-truth answer, and (4) source metadata (e.g., URL and publication date) to ensure temporal provenance. AfriEconQA is the first benchmark focused specifically on African economic analysis, providing a unique challenge for Information Retrieval (IR) systems, as the data is largely absent from the pretraining corpora of current Large Language Models (LLMs). We operationalize this dataset through an 11-experiment matrix, benchmarking a zero-shot baseline (GPT-5 Mini) against RAG configurations using GPT-4o and Qwen 32B across five distinct embedding and ranking strategies. Our results demonstrate a severe parametric knowledge gap, where zero-shot models fail to answer over 90 percent of queries, and even state-of-the-art RAG pipelines struggle to achieve high precision. This confirms AfriEconQA as a robust and challenging benchmark for the next generation of domain-specific IR and RAG systems. The AfriEconQA dataset and code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Paperid: 7986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14354.pdf

Abstract:
Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) offer a scalable paradigm for self-supervised learning by predicting latent representations rather than reconstructing high-entropy observations. However, existing formulations rely on \textit{deterministic} regression objectives, which mask probabilistic semantics and limit its applicability in stochastic control. In this work, we introduce \emph{Variational JEPA (VJEPA)}, a \textit{probabilistic} generalization that learns a predictive distribution over future latent states via a variational objective. We show that VJEPA unifies representation learning with Predictive State Representations (PSRs) and Bayesian filtering, establishing that sequential modeling does not require autoregressive observation likelihoods. Theoretically, we prove that VJEPA representations can serve as sufficient information states for optimal control without pixel reconstruction, while providing formal guarantees for collapse avoidance. We further propose \emph{Bayesian JEPA (BJEPA)}, an extension that factorizes the predictive belief into a learned dynamics expert and a modular prior expert, enabling zero-shot task transfer and constraint (e.g. goal, physics) satisfaction via a Product of Experts. Empirically, through a noisy environment experiment, we demonstrate that VJEPA and BJEPA successfully filter out high-variance nuisance distractors that cause representation collapse in generative baselines. By enabling principled uncertainty estimation (e.g. constructing credible intervals via sampling) while remaining likelihood-free regarding observations, VJEPA provides a foundational framework for scalable, robust, uncertainty-aware planning in high-dimensional, noisy environments.

Paperid: 7987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11415.pdf

Abstract:
We test whether a representation learned from interferometric strain transients in gravitational-wave observatories can act as a frozen morphology-sensitive operator for unseen sensors, provided the target signals preserve coherent elastic transient structure. Using a neural encoder trained exclusively on non-Gaussian instrumental glitches, we perform strict zero-shot anomaly analysis on rolling-element bearings without retraining, fine-tuning, or target-domain labels. On the IMS-NASA run-to-failure dataset, the operator yields a monotonic health index HI(t) = s0.99(t)/tau normalized to an early-life reference distribution, enabling fixed false-alarm monitoring at 1-q = 1e-3 with tau = Q0.999(P0). In discrete fault regimes (CWRU), it achieves strong window-level discrimination (AUC_win about 0.90) and file-level separability approaching unity (AUC_file about 0.99). Electrically dominated vibration signals (VSB) show weak, non-selective behavior, delineating a physical boundary for transfer. Under a matched IMS controlled-split protocol, a generic EfficientNet-B0 encoder pretrained on ImageNet collapses in the intermittent regime (Lambda_tail about 2), while the interferometric operator retains strong extreme-event selectivity (Lambda_tail about 860), indicating that the effect is not a generic property of CNN features. Controlled morphology-destruction transformations selectively degrade performance despite per-window normalization, consistent with sensitivity to coherent time-frequency organization rather than marginal amplitude statistics.

Paperid: 7988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09119.pdf

Abstract:
Fine-grained labor market analysis increasingly relies on mapping unstructured job advertisements to standardized skill taxonomies such as ESCO. This mapping is naturally formulated as an Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMLC) problem, but supervised solutions are constrained by the scarcity and cost of large-scale, taxonomy-aligned annotations--especially in non-English settings where job-ad language diverges substantially from formal skill definitions. We propose a zero-shot skill extraction framework that eliminates the need for manually labeled job-ad training data. The framework uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to synthesize training instances from ESCO definitions, and introduces hierarchically constrained multi-skill generation based on ESCO Level-2 categories to improve semantic coherence in multi-label contexts. On top of the synthetic corpus, we train a contrastive bi-encoder that aligns job-ad sentences with ESCO skill descriptions in a shared embedding space; the encoder augments a BERT backbone with BiLSTM and attention pooling to better model long, information-dense requirement statements. An upstream RoBERTa-based binary filter removes non-skill sentences to improve end-to-end precision. Experiments show that (i) hierarchy-conditioned generation improves both fluency and discriminability relative to unconstrained pairing, and (ii) the resulting multi-label model transfers effectively to real-world Chinese job advertisements, achieving strong zero-shot retrieval performance (F1@5 = 0.72) and outperforming TF--IDF and standard BERT baselines. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides a scalable, data-efficient pathway for automated skill coding in labor economics and workforce analytics.

Paperid: 7989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06978.pdf

Abstract:
The transition from automated data collection to fully autonomous discovery requires a shared vocabulary to benchmark progress. While the automotive industry relies on the SAE J3016 standard, current taxonomies for autonomous science presuppose an owner-operator model that is incompatible with the operational rigidities of Large-Scale User Facilities. Here, we propose the Benchmarking Autonomy in Scientific Experiments (BASE) Scale, a 6-level taxonomy (Levels 0-5) specifically adapted for these unique constraints. Unlike owner-operator models, User Facilities require zero-shot deployment where agents must operate immediately without extensive training periods. We define the specific technical requirements for each tier, identifying the Inference Barrier (Level 3) as the critical latency threshold where decisions shift from scalar feedback to semantic digital twins. Fundamentally, this level extends the decision manifold from spatial exploration to temporal gating, enabling the agent to synchronise acquisition with the onset of transient physical events. By establishing these operational definitions, the BASE Scale provides facility directors, funding bodies, and beamline scientists with a standardised metric to assess risk, define liability, and quantify the intelligence of experimental workflows.

Paperid: 7990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06802.pdf

Abstract:
Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic dialects such as Sudanese. This paper presents a comprehensive study of data augmentation techniques for fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper models and establishes the first benchmark for the Sudanese dialect. Two augmentation strategies are investigated: (1) self-training with pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled speech, and (2) TTS-based augmentation using synthetic speech from the Klaam TTS system. The best-performing model, Whisper-Medium fine-tuned with combined self-training and TTS augmentation (28.4 hours), achieves a Word Error Rate (WER) of 57.1% on the evaluation set and 51.6% on an out-of-domain holdout set substantially outperforming zero-shot multilingual Whisper (78.8% WER) and MSA-specialized Arabic models (73.8-123% WER). All experiments used low-cost resources (Kaggle free tier and Lightning.ai trial), demonstrating that strategic data augmentation can overcome resource limitations for low-resource dialects and provide a practical roadmap for developing ASR systems for low-resource Arabic dialects and other marginalized language varieties. The models, evaluation benchmarks, and reproducible training pipelines are publicly released to facilitate future research on low-resource Arabic ASR.

Paperid: 7991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06753.pdf

Abstract:
Chinese paleography, the study of ancient Chinese writing, is undergoing a computational turn powered by artificial intelligence. This position paper charts the trajectory of this emerging field, arguing that it is evolving from automating isolated visual tasks to creating integrated digital ecosystems for scholarly research. We first map the landscape of digital resources, analyzing critical datasets for oracle bone, bronze, and bamboo slip scripts. The core of our analysis follows the field's methodological pipeline: from foundational visual processing (image restoration, character recognition), through contextual analysis (artifact rejoining, dating), to the advanced reasoning required for automated decipherment and human-AI collaboration. We examine the technological shift from classical computer vision to modern deep learning paradigms, including transformers and large multimodal models. Finally, we synthesize the field's core challenges -- notably data scarcity and a disconnect between current AI capabilities and the holistic nature of humanistic inquiry -- and advocate for a future research agenda focused on creating multimodal, few-shot, and human-centric systems to augment scholarly expertise.

Paperid: 7992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06151.pdf

Abstract:
Structured extraction with LLMs fails in production not because models lack understanding, but because output formatting is unreliable across models and prompts. A prompt that returns clean JSON on GPT-4 may produce fenced, prose-wrapped, or malformed output on Llama, causing strict parsers to reject otherwise correct extractions. We formalize this as format collapse and introduce a dual-metric evaluation framework: ROS (strict parsing, measuring operational reliability) and CSS (post-canonicalization, measuring semantic capability). On a 37,346-example camera metadata benchmark across six model families, we find severe format collapse (for example, Gemma-2B: ROS 0.116 versus CSS 0.246) and large cross-model portability gaps (0.4 to 0.6 F1). We then present PromptPort, a reliability layer combining deterministic canonicalization with a lightweight verifier (DistilBERT) and a safe-override policy. PromptPort recovers format failures (plus 6 to 8 F1), adds verifier-driven semantic selection (plus 14 to 16 F1 beyond canonicalization), and approaches per-field oracle performance (0.890 versus 0.896 in zero-shot) without modifying base models. The method generalizes to held-out model families and provides explicit abstention when uncertain, enabling reliable structured extraction in production deployments.

Paperid: 7993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04860.pdf

Abstract:
Existing methods for segmenting Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are often optimization-based, requiring slow per-scene training that sacrifices the zero-shot capabilities of 2D foundation models. We introduce DivAS (Depth-interactive Voxel Aggregation Segmentation), an optimization-free, fully interactive framework that addresses these limitations. Our method operates via a fast GUI-based workflow where 2D SAM masks, generated from user point prompts, are refined using NeRF-derived depth priors to improve geometric accuracy and foreground-background separation. The core of our contribution is a custom CUDA kernel that aggregates these refined multi-view masks into a unified 3D voxel grid in under 200ms, enabling real-time visual feedback. This optimization-free design eliminates the need for per-scene training. Experiments on Mip-NeRF 360° and LLFF show that DivAS achieves segmentation quality comparable to optimization-based methods, while being 2-2.5x faster end-to-end, and up to an order of magnitude faster when excluding user prompting time.

Paperid: 7994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04361.pdf

Abstract:
We tackle a common domain adaptation setting in causal systems. In this setting, the target variable is observed in the source domain but is entirely missing in the target domain. We aim to impute the target variable in the target domain from the remaining observed variables under various shifts. We frame this as learning a compact, mechanism-stable representation. This representation preserves information relevant for predicting the target while discarding spurious variation. For linear Gaussian causal models, we derive a closed-form Gaussian Information Bottleneck (GIB) solution. This solution reduces to a canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-style projection and offers Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-aware options when desired. For nonlinear or non-Gaussian data, we introduce a Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) encoder-predictor. This approach scales to high dimensions and can be trained on source data and deployed zero-shot to the target domain. Across synthetic and real datasets, our approach consistently attains accurate imputations, supporting practical use in high-dimensional causal models and furnishing a unified, lightweight toolkit for causal domain adaptation.

Paperid: 7995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03237.pdf

Abstract:
Foundation vision, audio, and language models enable zero-shot performance on downstream tasks via their latent representations. Recently, unsupervised learning of data group structure with deep learning methods has gained popularity. TURTLE, a state of the art deep clustering algorithm, uncovers data labeling without supervision by alternating label and hyperplane updates, maximizing the hyperplane margin, in a similar fashion to support vector machines (SVMs). However, TURTLE assumes clusters are balanced; when data is imbalanced, it yields non-ideal hyperplanes that cause higher clustering error. We propose PET-TURTLE, which generalizes the cost function to handle imbalanced data distributions by a power law prior. Additionally, by introducing sparse logits in the labeling process, PET-TURTLE optimizes a simpler search space that in turn improves accuracy for balanced datasets. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that PET-TURTLE improves accuracy for imbalanced sources, prevents over-prediction of minority clusters, and enhances overall clustering.

Paperid: 7996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02971.pdf

Abstract:
Security bug reports require prompt identification to minimize the window of vulnerability in software systems. Traditional machine learning (ML) techniques for classifying bug reports to identify security bug reports rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data. However, datasets for security bug reports are often scarce in practice, leading to poor model performance and limited applicability in real-world settings. In this study, we propose a few-shot learning-based technique to effectively identify security bug reports using limited labeled data. We employ SetFit, a state-of-the-art few-shot learning framework that combines sentence transformers with contrastive learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The model is trained on a small labeled dataset of bug reports and is evaluated on its ability to classify these reports as either security-related or non-security-related. Our approach achieves an AUC of 0.865, at best, outperforming traditional ML techniques (baselines) for all of the evaluated datasets. This highlights the potential of SetFit to effectively identify security bug reports. SetFit-based few-shot learning offers a promising alternative to traditional ML techniques to identify security bug reports. The approach enables efficient model development with minimal annotation effort, making it highly suitable for scenarios where labeled data is scarce.

Paperid: 7997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02392.pdf

Abstract:
Coronary calcification creates blooming artifacts in Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA), severely hampering the diagnosis of lumen stenosis. While Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) like Dense-Unet have shown promise in removing these artifacts via inpainting, they often require large labeled datasets which are scarce in the medical domain. Inspired by recent advancements in Masked Autoencoders (MAE) for 3D point clouds, we propose \textbf{Dense-MAE}, a novel self-supervised learning framework for volumetric medical data. We introduce a pre-training strategy that randomly masks 3D patches of the vessel lumen and trains the Dense-Unet to reconstruct the missing geometry. This forces the encoder to learn high-level latent features of arterial topology without human annotation. Experimental results on clinical CTA datasets demonstrate that initializing the Calcium Removal network with our MAE-based weights significantly improves inpainting accuracy and stenosis estimation compared to training from scratch, specifically in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 7998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01982.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but remain brittle in domains requiring precise logical and symbolic reasoning. Chaotic dynamical systems provide an especially demanding test because chaos is deterministic yet often misinterpreted as randomness or complexity. We introduce ChaosBench-Logic, a benchmark that evaluates LLM reasoning across 30 diverse dynamical systems using a unified first-order logic (FOL) ontology. Each system is annotated with truth assignments for 11 semantic predicates, and 621 questions are generated across seven reasoning categories, including multi-hop implications, cross-system analogies, counterfactual reasoning, bias probes, and multi-turn dialogues. We define metrics for logical accuracy, implication consistency, dialogue coherence, and contradiction, and we release an open-source evaluation pipeline. Initial experiments show that frontier LLMs such as GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and the open-source LLaMA-3 70B achieve 91-94% per-item accuracy, yet still score 0% on compositional items and exhibit fragile global coherence. Dialogue-level accuracy ranges from 53.1% (GPT-4 CoT) to 75.5% (LLaMA-3 zero-shot). ChaosBench-Logic provides a rigorous testbed for diagnosing such failures and a foundation for developing neuro-symbolic approaches that improve scientific reasoning in LLMs.

Paperid: 7999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01137.pdf

Abstract:
Bivariate bicycle (BB) codes are a prominent class of quantum LDPC codes constructed from group algebras. While the logical dimension and quantum distance of \emph{coprime} BB codes are known to be determined by a greatest common divisor polynomial $g(z)$, the properties governing their fault tolerance under noisy measurement have remained implicit. In this work, we prove that this same polynomial $g(z)$ dictates the code's stabilizer redundancy and the structure of the classical \emph{syndrome codes} required for single-shot decoding. We derive a strict equality between the quantum rate and the stabilizer redundancy density, and we provide BCH-like bounds on the achievable single-shot measurement error tolerance. Guided by this framework, we construct small coprime BB codes with significantly improved syndrome distance ($d_S$) and evaluate them using BP+OSD. Our analysis reveals a structural bottleneck: within the coprime BB ansatz, high quantum rate imposes an upper bound on syndrome distance, limiting single-shot performance. These results provide concrete algebraic design rules for next-generation 2BGA codes in measurement-limited architectures.

Paperid: 8000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23916.pdf

Abstract:
Conventional deep learning prioritizes unconstrained optimization, yet biological systems operate under strict metabolic constraints. We propose that these physical constraints shape dynamics to function not as limitations, but as a temporal inductive bias that breeds generalization. Through a phase-space analysis of signal propagation, we reveal a fundamental asymmetry: expansive dynamics amplify noise, whereas proper dissipative dynamics compress phase space that aligns with the network's spectral bias, compelling the abstraction of invariant features. This condition can be imposed externally via input encoding, or intrinsically through the network's own temporal dynamics. Both pathways require architectures capable of temporal integration and proper constraints to decode induced invariants, whereas static architectures fail to capitalize on temporal structure. Through comprehensive evaluations across supervised classification, unsupervised reconstruction, and zero-shot reinforcement learning, we demonstrate that a critical "transition" regime maximizes generalization capability. These findings establish dynamical constraints as a distinct class of inductive bias, suggesting that robust AI development requires not only scaling and removing limitations, but computationally mastering the temporal characteristics that naturally promote generalization.

Paperid: 8001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22258.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language reasoning but remain unreliable on tasks requiring strict rule adherence, determinism, and auditability. Logic Sketch Prompting (LSP) is a lightweight prompting framework that introduces typed variables, deterministic condition evaluators, and a rule based validator that produces traceable and repeatable outputs. Using two pharmacologic logic compliance tasks, we benchmark LSP against zero shot prompting, chain of thought prompting, and concise prompting across three open weight models: Gemma 2, Mistral, and Llama 3. Across both tasks and all models, LSP consistently achieves the highest accuracy (0.83 to 0.89) and F1 score (0.83 to 0.89), substantially outperforming zero shot prompting (0.24 to 0.60), concise prompts (0.16 to 0.30), and chain of thought prompting (0.56 to 0.75). McNemar tests show statistically significant gains for LSP across nearly all comparisons (p < 0.01). These results demonstrate that LSP improves determinism, interpretability, and consistency without sacrificing performance, supporting its use in clinical, regulated, and safety critical decision support systems.

Paperid: 8002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22197.pdf

Abstract:
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss worldwide, requiring early detection to preserve sight. Limited access to physicians often leaves DR undiagnosed. To address this, AI models utilize lesion segmentation for interpretability; however, manually annotating lesions is impractical for clinicians. Physicians require a model that explains the reasoning for classifications rather than just highlighting lesion locations. Furthermore, current models are one-dimensional, relying on a single imaging modality for explainability and achieving limited effectiveness. In contrast, a quantitative-detection system that identifies individual DR lesions in natural language would overcome these limitations, enabling diverse applications in screening, treatment, and research settings. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel multimodal explainability model utilizing a VLM with few-shot learning, which mimics an ophthalmologist's reasoning by analyzing lesion distributions within retinal quadrants for fundus images. The model generates paired Grad-CAM heatmaps, showcasing individual neuron weights across both OCT and fundus images, which visually highlight the regions contributing to DR severity classification. Using a dataset of 3,000 fundus images and 1,000 OCT images, this innovative methodology addresses key limitations in current DR diagnostics, offering a practical and comprehensive tool for improving patient outcomes.

Paperid: 8003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17389.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in recommendation systems (RecSys) by using them as either knowledge enhancer or zero-shot ranker. A key challenge lies in the large semantic gap between LLMs and RecSys where the former internalizes language world knowledge while the latter captures personalized world of behaviors. Unfortunately, the research community lacks a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the LLMs over their limitations and boundaries in RecSys so that we can draw a confident conclusion. To investigate this, we propose a benchmark named LRWorld containing over 38K high-quality samples and 23M tokens carefully compiled and generated from widely used public recommendation datasets. LRWorld categorizes the mental world of LLMs in RecSys as three main scales (association, personalization, and knowledgeability) spanned by ten factors with 31 measures (tasks). Based on LRWorld, comprehensive experiments on dozens of LLMs show that they are still not well capturing the deep neural personalized embeddings but can achieve good results on shallow memory-based item-item similarity. They are also good at perceiving item entity relations, entity hierarchical taxonomies, and item-item association rules when inferring user interests. Furthermore, LLMs show a promising ability in multimodal knowledge reasoning (movie poster and product image) and robustness to noisy profiles. None of them show consistently good performance over the ten factors. Model sizes, position bias, and more are ablated.

Paperid: 8004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15747.pdf

Abstract:
Image classification is a task essential for machine perception to achieve human-level image understanding. Multimodal models such as CLIP have been able to perform well on this task by learning semantic similarities across vision and language; however, despite these advances, image classification is still a challenging task. Models with low capacity often suffer from underfitting and thus underperform on fine-grained image classification. Along with this, it is important to ensure high-quality data with rich cross-modal representations of each class, which is often difficult to generate. When datasets do not enforce balanced demographics, the predictions will be biased toward the more represented class, while others will be neglected. We focus on how these issues can lead to harmful bias for zero-shot image classification, and explore how to combat these issues in demographic bias. We propose Diverse Demographic Data Generation (D3G), a training-free, zero-shot method of boosting classification accuracy while reducing demographic bias in pre-trained multimodal models. With this method, we utilize CLIP as our base multimodal model and Stable Diffusion XL as our generative model. We demonstrate that providing diverse demographic data at inference time improves performance for these models, and explore the impact of individual demographics on the resulting accuracy metric.

Paperid: 8005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14708.pdf

Abstract:
Current deep learning approaches for physiological signal monitoring suffer from static topologies and constant energy consumption. We introduce SGEMAS (Self-Growing Ephemeral Multi-Agent System), a bio-inspired architecture that treats intelligence as a dynamic thermodynamic process. By coupling a structural plasticity mechanism (agent birth death) to a variational free energy objective, the system naturally evolves to minimize prediction error with extreme sparsity. An ablation study on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database reveals that adding a multi-scale instability index to the agent dynamics significantly improves performance. In a challenging inter-patient, zero-shot setting, the final SGEMAS v3.3 model achieves a mean AUC of 0.570 +- 0.070, outperforming both its simpler variants and a standard autoencoder baseline. This result validates that a physics-based, energy-constrained model can achieve robust unsupervised anomaly detection, offering a promising direction for efficient biomedical AI.

Paperid: 8006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13741.pdf

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become ubiquitous, the challenge of securing them against adversarial "jailbreaking" attacks has intensified. Current defense strategies often rely on computationally expensive external classifiers or brittle lexical filters, overlooking the intrinsic dynamics of the model's reasoning process. In this work, the Laminar Flow Hypothesis is introduced, which posits that benign inputs induce smooth, gradual transitions in an LLM's high-dimensional latent space, whereas adversarial prompts trigger chaotic, high-variance trajectories - termed Semantic Turbulence - resulting from the internal conflict between safety alignment and instruction-following objectives. This phenomenon is formalized through a novel, zero-shot metric: the variance of layer-wise cosine velocity. Experimental evaluation across diverse small language models reveals a striking diagnostic capability. The RLHF-aligned Qwen2-1.5B exhibits a statistically significant 75.4% increase in turbulence under attack (p less than 0.001), validating the hypothesis of internal conflict. Conversely, Gemma-2B displays a 22.0% decrease in turbulence, characterizing a distinct, low-entropy "reflex-based" refusal mechanism. These findings demonstrate that Semantic Turbulence serves not only as a lightweight, real-time jailbreak detector but also as a non-invasive diagnostic tool for categorizing the underlying safety architecture of black-box models.

Paperid: 8007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12182.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge Graphs (KGs), thanks to their concise and efficient triple-based structure, have been widely applied in intelligent question answering, recommender systems and other domains. However, the heterogeneous and multifaceted nature of real-world data inevitably renders the distribution of relations long-tailed, making it crucial to complete missing facts with limited samples. Previous studies mainly based on metric matching or meta learning, yet they either fail to fully exploit neighborhood information in graph or overlook the distributional characteristics of contrastive signals. In this paper, we re-examine the problem from a perspective of generative representation and propose a few-shot knowledge graph completion framework that integrates two-stage attention triple enhancer with U-KAN based diffusion model. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method achieve new state-of-the-art results.

Paperid: 8008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11841.pdf

Abstract:
Short-term mobility forecasting is a core requirement for proactive handover (HO) in cellular networks. Real-world mobility is highly non-stationary: abrupt turns, rapid speed changes, and unpredictable user behavior cause conventional predictors to drift, leading to mistimed or failed handovers. We propose a lightweight meta-continual forecasting framework that integrates a GRU-based predictor, Reptile meta-initialization for fast few-shot adaptation, and an EWMA residual detector that triggers compact online updates only when drift occurs. Evaluated on a reproducible GeoLife and DeepMIMO pipeline, our method achieves 4.46 m ADE and 7.79 m FDE in zero-shot settings, improves few-shot ADE to 3.71 m at 10-shot, and enables recovery from abrupt drift about 2 to 3 times faster than an offline GRU. When applied to downstream HO prediction, the approach improves F1 to 0.83 and AUROC to 0.90, with substantial reductions in missed-HO and ping-pong events. The model is lightweight (128k parameters) and suitable for edge deployment in 5G and 6G systems.

Paperid: 8009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10562.pdf

Abstract:
Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) is critical for bridging the communication gap between the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community and the hearing world. However, robust ISLR is fundamentally constrained by data scarcity and the long-tail distribution of sign vocabulary, where gathering sufficient examples for thousands of unique signs is prohibitively expensive. Standard classification approaches struggle under these conditions, often overfitting to frequent classes while failing to generalize to rare ones. To address this bottleneck, we propose a Few-Shot Prototypical Network framework adapted for a skeleton based encoder. Unlike traditional classifiers that learn fixed decision boundaries, our approach utilizes episodic training to learn a semantic metric space where signs are classified based on their proximity to dynamic class prototypes. We integrate a Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) with a novel Multi-Scale Temporal Aggregation (MSTA) module to capture both rapid and fluid motion dynamics. Experimental results on the WLASL dataset demonstrate the superiority of this metric learning paradigm: our model achieves 43.75% Top-1 and 77.10% Top-5 accuracy on the test set. Crucially, this outperforms a standard classification baseline sharing the identical backbone architecture by over 13%, proving that the prototypical training strategy effectively outperforms in a data scarce situation where standard classification fails. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, achieving nearly 30% accuracy on the unseen SignASL dataset without fine-tuning, offering a scalable pathway for recognizing extensive sign vocabularies with limited data.

Paperid: 8010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10121.pdf

Abstract:
Central to long-form text generation in vertical domains is the "impossible trinity" confronting current large language models (LLMs): the simultaneous achievement of low hallucination, deep logical coherence, and personalized expression. This study establishes that this bottleneck arises from existing generative paradigms succumbing to the Statistical Smoothing Trap, a phenomenon that overlooks the high-entropy information acquisition and structured cognitive processes integral to expert-level writing. To address this limitation, we propose the DeepNews Framework, an agentic workflow that explicitly models the implicit cognitive processes of seasoned financial journalists. The framework integrates three core modules: first, a dual-granularity retrieval mechanism grounded in information foraging theory, which enforces a 10:1 saturated information input ratio to mitigate hallucinatory outputs; second, schema-guided strategic planning, a process leveraging domain expert knowledge bases (narrative schemas) and Atomic Blocks to forge a robust logical skeleton; third, adversarial constraint prompting, a technique deploying tactics including Rhythm Break and Logic Fog to disrupt the probabilistic smoothness inherent in model-generated text. Experiments delineate a salient Knowledge Cliff in deep financial reporting: content truthfulness collapses when retrieved context falls below 15,000 characters, while a high-redundancy input exceeding 30,000 characters stabilizes the Hallucination-Free Rate (HFR) above 85%. In an ecological validity blind test conducted with a top-tier Chinese technology media outlet, the DeepNews system--built on a previous-generation model (DeepSeek-V3-0324)-achieved a 25% submission acceptance rate, significantly outperforming the 0% acceptance rate of zero-shot generation by a state-of-the-art (SOTA) model (GPT-5).

Paperid: 8011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09319.pdf

Abstract:
Industrial cyber physical systems operate under heterogeneous sensing, stochastic dynamics, and shifting process conditions, producing data that are often incomplete, unlabeled, imbalanced, and domain shifted. High-fidelity datasets remain costly, confidential, and slow to obtain, while edge devices face strict limits on latency, bandwidth, and energy. These factors restrict the practicality of centralized deep learning, hinder the development of reliable digital twins, and increase the risk of error escape in safety-critical applications. Motivated by these challenges, this dissertation develops an efficiency grounded computational framework that enables data lean, physics-aware, and deployment ready intelligence for modern manufacturing environments. The research advances methods that collectively address core bottlenecks across multimodal and multiscale industrial scenarios. Generative strategies mitigate data scarcity and imbalance, while semi-supervised learning integrates unlabeled information to reduce annotation and simulation demands. Physics-informed representation learning strengthens interpretability and improves condition monitoring under small-data regimes. Spatially aware graph-based surrogate modeling provides efficient approximation of complex processes, and an edge cloud collaborative compression scheme supports real-time signal analytics under resource constraints. The dissertation also extends visual understanding through zero-shot vision language reasoning augmented by domain specific retrieval, enabling generalizable assessment in previously unseen scenarios. Together, these developments establish a unified paradigm of data efficient and resource aware intelligence that bridges laboratory learning with industrial deployment, supporting reliable decision-making across diverse manufacturing systems.

Paperid: 8012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09070.pdf

Abstract:
Classical neural networks are known for their ability to approximate mappings between finite-dimensional spaces, but they fall short in capturing complex operator dynamics across infinite-dimensional function spaces. Neural operators, in contrast, have emerged as powerful tools in scientific machine learning for learning such mappings. However, standard neural operators typically lack mechanisms for mixing or attending to input information across space and time. In this work, we introduce the Banach neural operator (BNO) -- a novel framework that integrates Koopman operator theory with deep neural networks to predict nonlinear, spatiotemporal dynamics from partial observations. The BNO approximates a nonlinear operator between Banach spaces by combining spectral linearization (via Koopman theory) with deep feature learning (via convolutional neural networks and nonlinear activations). This sequence-to-sequence model captures dominant dynamic modes and allows for mesh-independent prediction. Numerical experiments on the Navier-Stokes equations demonstrate the method's accuracy and generalization capabilities. In particular, BNO achieves robust zero-shot super-resolution in unsteady flow prediction and consistently outperforms conventional Koopman-based methods and deep learning models.

Paperid: 8013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07092.pdf

Abstract:
Background: The deployment of personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) is currently constrained by the stability-plasticity dilemma. Prevailing alignment methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), rely on stochastic weight updates that often incur an "alignment tax" -- degrading general reasoning capabilities. Methods: We propose the Soul Engine, a framework based on the Linear Representation Hypothesis, which posits that personality traits exist as orthogonal linear subspaces. We introduce SoulBench, a dataset constructed via dynamic contextual sampling. Using a dual-head architecture on a frozen Qwen-2.5 base, we extract disentangled personality vectors without modifying the backbone weights. Results: Our experiments demonstrate three breakthroughs. First, High-Precision Profiling: The model achieves a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.011 against psychological ground truth. Second, Geometric Orthogonality: T-SNE visualization confirms that personality manifolds are distinct and continuous, allowing for "Zero-Shot Personality Injection" that maintains original model intelligence. Third, Deterministic Steering: We achieve robust control over behavior via vector arithmetic, validated through extensive ablation studies. Conclusion: This work challenges the necessity of fine-tuning for personalization. By transitioning from probabilistic prompting to deterministic latent intervention, we provide a mathematically rigorous foundation for safe, controllable AI personalization.

Paperid: 8014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06744.pdf

Abstract:
Text embedding models are designed for sentence-level applications like retrieval and semantic similarity, and are primarily evaluated on sentence-level benchmarks. Their behavior on isolated words is less understood. We show that simply prepending semantic prompts to words before embedding substantially improves word similarity correlations. Testing 7 text embedding models, including text-embedding-3-large (OpenAI), embed-english-v3.0 (Cohere), voyage-3(Voyage AI), all-mpnet-base-v2, and Qwen3-Embedding-8B, on 3 standard benchmarks (SimLex-999, WordSim-353, MEN-3000), we find that prompts like "meaning: {word}" or "Represent the semantic concept: {word}" improve Spearman correlations by up to +0.29 on SimLex-999. Some models fail completely on bare words (correlation = 0) but recover with prompts (+0.73 improvement). Our best results achieve correlation = 0.692 on SimLex-999 with embed-english-v3.0 (Cohere), correlation = 0.811 on WordSim-353, and correlation = 0.855 on MEN-3000 with text-embedding-3-large (OpenAI). These results outperform classic static embeddings like Word2Vec (correlation = 0.40) and even the best static method LexVec (correlation = 0.48) on SimLex-999, establishing a new state-of-the-art for pure embedding methods. This zero-shot technique requires no training and works with any text embedding model.

Paperid: 8015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03449.pdf

Abstract:
Background and Objective: Radiomics of knee MRI requires robust, anatomically meaningful regions of interest (ROIs) that jointly capture cartilage and subchondral bone. Most existing work relies on manual ROIs and rarely reports quality control (QC). We present LM-CartSeg, a fully automatic pipeline for cartilage/bone segmentation, geometric lateral/medial (L/M) compartmentalisation and radiomics analysis. Methods: Two 3D nnU-Net models were trained on SKM-TEA (138 knees) and OAIZIB-CM (404 knees). At test time, zero-shot predictions were fused and refined by simple geometric rules: connected-component cleaning, construction of 10 mm subchondral bone bands in physical space, and a data-driven tibial L/M split based on PCA and k-means. Segmentation was evaluated on an OAIZIB-CM test set (103 knees) and on SKI-10 (100 knees). QC used volume and thickness signatures. From 10 ROIs we extracted 4 650 non-shape radiomic features to study inter-compartment similarity, dependence on ROI size, and OA vs. non-OA classification on OAIZIB-CM Results: Post-processing improved macro ASSD on OAIZIB-CM from 2.63 to 0.36 mm and HD95 from 25.2 to 3.35 mm, with DSC 0.91; zero-shot DSC on SKI-10 was 0.80. The geometric L/M rule produced stable compartments across datasets, whereas a direct L/M nnU-Net showed domain-dependent side swaps. Only 6 to 12 percent of features per ROI were strongly correlated with volume or thickness. Radiomics-based models models restricted to size-linked features. Conclusions: LM-CartSeg yields automatic, QCd ROIs and radiomic features that carry discriminative information beyond simple morphometry, providing a practical foundation for multi-centre knee OA radiomics studies.

Paperid: 8016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02520.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot anomaly classification and segmentation (AC/AS) aim to detect anomalous samples and regions without any training data, a capability increasingly crucial in industrial inspection and medical imaging. This dissertation aims to investigate the core challenges of zero-shot AC/AS and presents principled solutions rooted in theory and algorithmic design. We first formalize the problem of consistent anomalies, a failure mode in which recurring similar anomalies systematically bias distance-based methods. By analyzing the statistical and geometric behavior of patch representations from pre-trained Vision Transformers, we identify two key phenomena - similarity scaling and neighbor-burnout - that describe how relationships among normal patches change with and without consistent anomalies in settings characterized by highly similar objects. We then introduce CoDeGraph, a graph-based framework for filtering consistent anomalies built on the similarity scaling and neighbor-burnout phenomena. Through multi-stage graph construction, community detection, and structured refinement, CoDeGraph effectively suppresses the influence of consistent anomalies. Next, we extend this framework to 3D medical imaging by proposing a training-free, computationally efficient volumetric tokenization strategy for MRI data. This enables a genuinely zero-shot 3D anomaly detection pipeline and shows that volumetric anomaly segmentation is achievable without any 3D training samples. Finally, we bridge batch-based and text-based zero-shot methods by demonstrating that CoDeGraph-derived pseudo-masks can supervise prompt-driven vision-language models. Together, this dissertation provides theoretical understanding and practical solutions for the zero-shot AC/AS problem.

Paperid: 8017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00851.pdf

Abstract:
Deploying spatio-temporal forecasting models across many cities is difficult: traffic networks differ in size and topology, data availability can vary by orders of magnitude, and new cities may provide only a short history of logs. Existing deep traffic models are typically trained per city and backbone, creating high maintenance cost and poor transfer to data-scarce cities. We ask whether a single, backbone-agnostic layer can condition on "which city this sequence comes from", improve accuracy in full- and low-data regimes, and support better cross-city adaptation with minimal code changes. We propose CityCond, a light-weight city-conditioned memory layer that augments existing spatio-temporal backbones. CityCond combines a city-ID encoder with an optional shared memory bank (CityMem). Given a city index and backbone hidden states, it produces city-conditioned features fused through gated residual connections. We attach CityCond to five representative backbones (GRU, TCN, Transformer, GNN, STGCN) and evaluate three regimes: full-data, low-data, and cross-city few-shot transfer on METR-LA and PEMS-BAY. We also run auxiliary experiments on SIND, a drone-based multi-agent trajectory dataset from a signalized intersection in Tianjin (we focus on pedestrian tracks). Across more than fourteen model variants and three random seeds, CityCond yields consistent improvements, with the largest gains for high-capacity backbones such as Transformers and STGCNs. CityMem reduces Transformer error by roughly one third in full-data settings and brings substantial gains in low-data and cross-city transfer. On SIND, simple city-ID conditioning modestly improves low-data LSTM performance. CityCond can therefore serve as a reusable design pattern for scalable, multi-city forecasting under realistic data constraints.

Paperid: 8018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21089.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly deployed as dense transformers, where every parameter in every feed-forward block is activated for every token. While architecturally simple, this is computationally inefficient, since inference costs scale linearly with parameter count. Recent upcycling methods such as MoEfication, CMoE, ToMoE, and MoORE reveal that much of the useful computation lives in sparse, semi-modular substructures inside dense feed-forward networks, but these approaches typically rely on clustering, activation profiling, singular value decomposition, or custom routing that requires calibration data. This paper introduces MLPMoE (MLP Mixture-of-Experts), a training-free, deterministic transformation that restructures the dense MLP in transformer blocks into a static, high-cardinality mixture of experts. The transformation uses simple tensor slicing and summation, reinterpreting the algebra of tensor parallelism as a topological conversion rather than a distributed training pattern. We further introduce Fractal Fade (differential branch sparsity) and Compensated Pruning (variance-preserving branch reduction) as lightweight mechanisms for structured sparsity. On Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, the zero-shot MLPMoE transform changes a proxy perplexity metric by less than 0.05 percent while keeping the parameter count effectively constant. On the 8B model, differential sparsity removes about 20 percent of MLP parameters while keeping perplexity within about 2 percent of the dense baseline. The method operates entirely post hoc on existing checkpoints and does not require gradients, calibration sets, or router training. Code is available at https://gist.github.com/iwallarm/fc2ef1eddf226ca7814f9e5e2ae9bad1

Paperid: 8019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20399.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models excel on broad multilingual benchmarks but remain to be evaluated extensively in figurative and culturally grounded reasoning, especially in low-resource contexts. We present BengaliFig, a compact yet richly annotated challenge set that targets this gap in Bengali, a widely spoken low-resourced language. The dataset contains 435 unique riddles drawn from Bengali oral and literary traditions. Each item is annotated along five orthogonal dimensions capturing reasoning type, trap type, cultural depth, answer category, and difficulty, and is automatically converted to multiple-choice format through a constraint-aware, AI-assisted pipeline. We evaluate eight frontier LLMs from major providers under zero-shot and few-shot chain-of-thought prompting, revealing consistent weaknesses in metaphorical and culturally specific reasoning. BengaliFig thus contributes both a diagnostic probe for evaluating LLM robustness in low-resource cultural contexts and a step toward inclusive and heritage-aware NLP evaluation.

Paperid: 8020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15291.pdf

Abstract:
Sentiment analysis of Arabic dialects presents significant challenges due to linguistic diversity and the scarcity of annotated data. This paper describes our approach to the AHaSIS shared task, which focuses on sentiment analysis on Arabic dialects in the hospitality domain. The dataset comprises hotel reviews written in Moroccan and Saudi dialects, and the objective is to classify the reviewers sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral. We employed the SetFit (Sentence Transformer Fine-tuning) framework, a data-efficient few-shot learning technique. On the official evaluation set, our system achieved an F1 of 73%, ranking 12th among 26 participants. This work highlights the potential of few-shot learning to address data scarcity in processing nuanced dialectal Arabic text within specialized domains like hotel reviews.

Paperid: 8021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13909.pdf

Abstract:
Following road safety norms is non-negotiable not only for humans but also for the AI systems that govern autonomous vehicles. In this work, we evaluate how well multi-modal large language models (LLMs) understand road safety concepts, specifically through schematic and illustrative representations. We curate a pilot dataset of images depicting traffic signs and road-safety norms sourced from school text books and use it to evaluate models capabilities in a zero-shot setting. Our preliminary results show that these models struggle with safety reasoning and reveal gaps between human learning and model interpretation. We further provide an analysis of these performance gaps for future research.

Paperid: 8022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13494.pdf

Abstract:
Recent vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, OpenCLIP, EVA02-CLIP and SigLIP achieve strong zero-shot performance, but it is unclear how reliably they respond to controlled linguistic perturbations. We introduce Language-Guided Invariance Probing (LGIP), a benchmark that measures (i) invariance to meaning-preserving paraphrases and (ii) sensitivity to meaning-changing semantic flips in image-text matching. Using 40k MS COCO images with five human captions each, we automatically generate paraphrases and rule-based flips that alter object category, color or count, and summarize model behavior with an invariance error, a semantic sensitivity gap and a positive-rate statistic. Across nine VLMs, EVA02-CLIP and large OpenCLIP variants lie on a favorable invariance-sensitivity frontier, combining low paraphrase-induced variance with consistently higher scores for original captions than for their flipped counterparts. In contrast, SigLIP and SigLIP2 show much larger invariance error and often prefer flipped captions to the human descriptions, especially for object and color edits. These failures are largely invisible to standard retrieval metrics, indicating that LGIP provides a model-agnostic diagnostic for the linguistic robustness of VLMs beyond conventional accuracy scores.

Paperid: 8023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12383.pdf

Abstract:
Meta-learning algorithms enable rapid adaptation to new tasks with minimal data, a critical capability for real-world robotic systems. This paper evaluates Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) combined with Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) on the MetaWorld ML10 benchmark, a challenging suite of ten diverse robotic manipulation tasks. We implement and analyze MAML-TRPO's ability to learn a universal initialization that facilitates few-shot adaptation across semantically different manipulation behaviors including pushing, picking, and drawer manipulation. Our experiments demonstrate that MAML achieves effective one-shot adaptation with clear performance improvements after a single gradient update, reaching final success rates of 21.0% on training tasks and 13.2% on held-out test tasks. However, we observe a generalization gap that emerges during meta-training, where performance on test tasks plateaus while training task performance continues to improve. Task-level analysis reveals high variance in adaptation effectiveness, with success rates ranging from 0% to 80% across different manipulation skills. These findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of gradient-based meta-learning for diverse robotic manipulation, and suggest directions for future work in task-aware adaptation and structured policy architectures.

Paperid: 8024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11662.pdf

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation requires large annotated datasets, creating a significant bottleneck for clinical applications. While few-shot segmentation methods can learn from minimal examples, existing approaches demonstrate suboptimal performance in precise boundary delineation for medical images, particularly when anatomically similar regions appear without sufficient spatial context. We propose AGENet (Adaptive Geodesic Edge-aware Network), a novel framework that incorporates spatial relationships through edge-aware geodesic distance learning. Our key insight is that medical structures follow predictable geometric patterns that can guide prototype extraction even with limited training data. Unlike methods relying on complex architectural components or heavy neural networks, our approach leverages computationally lightweight geometric modeling. The framework combines three main components: (1) An edge-aware geodesic distance learning module that respects anatomical boundaries through iterative Fast Marching refinement, (2) adaptive prototype extraction that captures both global structure and local boundary details via spatially-weighted aggregation, and (3) adaptive parameter learning that automatically adjusts to different organ characteristics. Extensive experiments across diverse medical imaging datasets demonstrate improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our method reduces boundary errors compared to existing approaches while maintaining computational efficiency, making it highly suitable for clinical applications requiring precise segmentation with limited annotated data.

Paperid: 8025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11632.pdf

Abstract:
In few-shot learning, classifiers are expected to generalize to unseen classes given only a small number of instances of each new class. One of the popular solutions to few-shot learning is metric-based meta-learning. However, it highly depends on the deep metric learned on seen classes, which may overfit to seen classes and fail to generalize well on unseen classes. To improve the generalization, we explore the substructures of classifiers and propose a novel meta-learning algorithm to learn each classifier as a combination of meta-components. Meta-components are learned across meta-learning episodes on seen classes and disentangled by imposing an orthogonal regularizer to promote its diversity and capture various shared substructures among different classifiers. Extensive experiments on few-shot benchmark tasks show superior performances of the proposed method.

Paperid: 8026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09932.pdf

Abstract:
The generalization ability of visuomotor policy is crucial, as a good policy should be deployable across diverse scenarios. Some methods can collect large amounts of trajectory augmentation data to train more generalizable imitation learning policies, aimed at handling the random placement of objects on the scene's horizontal plane. However, the data generated by these methods still lack diversity, which limits the generalization ability of the trained policy. To address this, we investigate the performance of policies trained by existing methods across different scene layout factors via automate the data generation for those factors that significantly impact generalization. We have created a more extensively randomized dataset that can be efficiently and automatically generated with only a small amount of human demonstration. The dataset covers five types of manipulators and two types of grippers, incorporating extensive randomization factors such as camera pose, lighting conditions, tabletop texture, and table height across six manipulation tasks. We found that all of these factors influence the generalization ability of the policy. Applying any form of randomization enhances policy generalization, with diverse trajectories particularly effective in bridging visual gap. Notably, we investigated on low-cost manipulator the effect of the scene randomization proposed in this work on enhancing the generalization capability of visuomotor policies for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

Paperid: 8027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09101.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition by comparing image embeddings to text-derived class prototypes. However, under domain shift, they suffer from feature drift, class-prior mismatch, and severe miscalibration. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods often require backpropagation through large backbones, covariance estimation, or heavy memory/state, which is problematic for streaming and edge scenarios. We propose Ultra-Light Test-Time Adaptation (UL-TTA), a fully training-free and backprop-free framework that freezes the backbone and adapts only logit-level parameters: class prototypes, class priors, and temperature. UL-TTA performs an online EM-style procedure with (i) selective sample filtering to use only confident predictions, (ii) closed-form Bayesian updates for prototypes and priors anchored by text and Dirichlet priors, (iii) decoupled temperatures for prediction vs. calibration, and (iv) lightweight guards (norm clipping, prior KL constraints, smoothed temperature) to prevent drift in long streams. Across large-scale cross-domain and OOD benchmarks (PACS, Office-Home, DomainNet, Terra Incognita, ImageNet-R/A/V2/Sketch; ~726K test samples) and strong TTA baselines including Tent, T3A, CoTTA, SAR, Tip-Adapter, and FreeTTA, UL-TTA consistently improves top-1 accuracy (e.g., +4.7 points over zero-shot CLIP on average) while reducing ECE by 20-30%, with less than 8% latency overhead. Long-stream experiments up to 200K samples show no collapse. Our results demonstrate that logit-level Bayesian adaptation is sufficient to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy-calibration trade-offs for VLMs under domain shift, without updating any backbone parameters.

Paperid: 8028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07458.pdf

Abstract:
Evaluating log summarization systems is challenging due to the lack of high-quality reference summaries and the limitations of existing metrics like ROUGE and BLEU, which depend on surface-level lexical overlap. We introduce REFLEX, a reference-free evaluation metric for log summarization based on large language model (LLM) judgment. REFLEX uses LLMs as zero-shot evaluators to assess summary quality along dimensions such as relevance, informativeness, and coherence, without requiring gold-standard references or human annotations. We show that REFLEX produces stable, interpretable, and fine-grained evaluations across multiple log summarization dataset, and more effectively distinguishes model outputs than traditional metrics. REFLEX provides a scalable alternative for evaluating log summaries in real-world settings where reference data is scarce or unavailable.

Paperid: 8029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06470.pdf

Abstract:
Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems encounter significant challenges when applied to real-world scenarios, primarily due to poor generalization across environments that differ from their training conditions. This thesis explores the direction of enhancing agents' zero-shot systematic generalization abilities by granting RL agents reasoning behaviors that are found to help systematic generalization in the human brain. Inspired by human conscious planning behaviors, we first introduced a top-down attention mechanism, which allows a decision-time planning agent to dynamically focus its reasoning on the most relevant aspects of the environmental state given its instantaneous intentions, a process we call "spatial abstraction". This approach significantly improves systematic generalization outside the training tasks. Subsequently, building on spatial abstraction, we developed the Skipper framework to automatically decompose complex tasks into simpler, more manageable sub-tasks. Skipper provides robustness against distributional shifts and efficacy in long-term, compositional planning by focusing on pertinent spatial and temporal elements of the environment. Finally, we identified a common failure mode and safety risk in planning agents that rely on generative models to generate state targets during planning. It is revealed that most agents blindly trust the targets they hallucinate, resulting in delusional planning behaviors. Inspired by how the human brain rejects delusional intentions, we propose learning a feasibility evaluator to enable rejecting hallucinated infeasible targets, which led to significant performance improvements in various kinds of planning agents. Finally, we suggest directions for future research, aimed at achieving general task abstraction and fully enabling abstract planning.

Paperid: 8030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03019.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved remarkable success across various downstream tasks, but such gains are largely driven by scaling up on training data. Yet, literature methods treat image-text pairs as isolated training examples; this neglects the rich relational structure naturally present in many domains, such as e-commerce product co-purchase graphs and social recommendation networks. Inspired by neuroscientific evidence that human encodes knowledge as relationship cognitive maps, we introduce Structure-aware Language-Image Pretraining (SLIP). SLIP integrates a structural contrastive loss to align modalities while also modeling relationships between neighboring entities in a structured graph. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale Amazon Product Co-purchase Multimodal Graph Dataset, enabling structured cross-modality supervision at scale. Experiment results show that SLIP consistently outperforms CLIP on cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, showing the value of relational supervision for cross-modal alignment.

Paperid: 8031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.02496.pdf

Abstract:
We propose a unified information-geometric framework that formalizes understanding in learning as a trade-off between informativeness and geometric simplicity. An encoder phi is evaluated by U(phi) = I(phi(X); Y) - beta * C(phi), where C(phi) penalizes curvature and intrinsic dimensionality, enforcing smooth, low-complexity manifolds. Under mild manifold and regularity assumptions, we derive non-asymptotic bounds showing that generalization error scales with intrinsic dimension while curvature controls approximation stability, directly linking geometry to sample efficiency. To operationalize this theory, we introduce the Variational Geometric Information Bottleneck (V-GIB), a variational estimator that unifies mutual-information compression and curvature regularization through tractable geometric proxies such as the Hutchinson trace, Jacobian norms, and local PCA. Experiments across synthetic manifolds, few-shot settings, and real-world datasets (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10) reveal a robust information-geometry Pareto frontier, stable estimators, and substantial gains in interpretive efficiency. Fractional-data experiments on CIFAR-10 confirm that curvature-aware encoders maintain predictive power under data scarcity, validating the predicted efficiency-curvature law. Overall, V-GIB provides a principled and measurable route to representations that are geometrically coherent, data-efficient, and aligned with human-understandable structure.

Paperid: 8032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01454.pdf

Abstract:
Translating a morphology-rich, low-resource language like Latin poses significant challenges. This paper introduces a reproducible draft-based refinement pipeline that elevates open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to a performance level statistically comparable to top-tier proprietary systems. Our method first uses a fine-tuned NLLB-1.3B model to generate a high-quality, structurally faithful draft. A zero-shot LLM (Llama-3.3 or Qwen3) then polishes this draft, a process that can be further enhanced by augmenting the context with retrieved out-context examples (RAG). We demonstrate the robustness of this approach on two distinct benchmarks: a standard in-domain test set (Rosenthal, 2023) and a new, challenging out-of-domain (OOD) set of 12th-century Latin letters (2025). Our central finding is that this open-source RAG system achieves performance statistically comparable to the GPT-5 baseline, without any task-specific LLM fine-tuning. We release the pipeline, the Chartres OOD set, and evaluation scripts and models to facilitate replicability and further research.

Paperid: 8033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01013.pdf

Abstract:
B-mode ultrasound for breast cancer diagnosis faces challenges: speckle, operator dependency, and indistinct boundaries. Existing deep learning suffers from single-task learning, architectural constraints (CNNs lack global context, Transformers local features), and black-box decision-making. These gaps hinder clinical adoption. We propose HyFormer-Net, a hybrid CNN-Transformer for simultaneous segmentation and classification with intrinsic interpretability. Its dual-branch encoder integrates EfficientNet-B3 and Swin Transformer via multi-scale hierarchical fusion blocks. An attention-gated decoder provides precision and explainability. We introduce dual-pipeline interpretability: (1) intrinsic attention validation with quantitative IoU verification (mean: 0.86), and (2) Grad-CAM for classification reasoning. On the BUSI dataset, HyFormer-Net achieves Dice Score 0.761 +/- 0.072 and accuracy 93.2%, outperforming U-Net, Attention U-Net, and TransUNet. Malignant Recall of 92.1 +/- 2.2% ensures minimal false negatives. Ensemble modeling yields exceptional Dice 90.2%, accuracy 99.5%, and perfect 100% Malignant Recall, eliminating false negatives. Ablation studies confirm multi-scale fusion contributes +16.8% Dice and attention gates add +5.9%. Crucially, we conduct the first cross-dataset generalization study for hybrid CNN-Transformers in breast ultrasound. Zero-shot transfer fails (Dice: 0.058), confirming domain shift. However, progressive fine-tuning with only 10% target-domain data (68 images) recovers 92.5% performance. With 50% data, our model achieves 77.3% Dice, exceeding source-domain performance (76.1%) and demonstrating true generalization.

Paperid: 8034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23650.pdf

Abstract:
We study clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the CADEC corpus and compare three families of approaches: (i) BERT-style encoders (BERT Base, BioClinicalBERT, RoBERTa-large), (ii) GPT-4o used with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) under simple vs.\ complex prompts, and (iii) GPT-4o with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). All models are evaluated on standard NER metrics over CADEC's five entity types (ADR, Drug, Disease, Symptom, Finding). RoBERTa-large and BioClinicalBERT offer limited improvements over BERT Base, showing the limit of these family of models. Among LLM settings, simple ICL outperforms a longer, instruction-heavy prompt, and SFT achieves the strongest overall performance (F1 $\approx$ 87.1%), albeit with higher cost. We find that the LLM achieve higher accuracy on simplified tasks, restricting classification to two labels.

Paperid: 8036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21908.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models display in-context learning as an emergent effect of scale, but they rely on static weights during inference. In contrast, biological systems continually adapt via synaptic plasticity. We investigate whether explicit, biologically inspired plasticity can endow Transformers with faster in-sequence adaptation. To this end, we augment decoder-only Transformers with fast-weight modules updated either by (i) a neuromodulated Hebbian rule or (ii) the gradient-based plasticity mechanism of Duan et al. (2023). Across copying, regression, and few-shot classification tasks (CIFAR-FS, Omniglot), Hebbian plasticity consistently achieves lower loss and stronger few-shot generalization, while gradient-based updates perform best on long-horizon credit assignment. When associations are short and linearly separable, static weights suffice, defining a clear boundary condition for when plasticity helps. Analysis of learned modulatory signals reveals that gradient-based rules maintain large, persistent updates, whereas Hebbian plasticity is sharply gated around salient events. Together, these results show that explicit plasticity complements attention by enabling rapid, task-specific adaptation, and clarify when different plasticity mechanisms are most effective.

Paperid: 8037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21819.pdf

Abstract:
Short-term forecasting of airport fog (visibility < 1.0 km) presents challenges in geographic generalization because many machine learning models rely on location-specific features and fail to transfer across sites. This study investigates whether fundamental thermodynamic and radiative processes can be encoded in a coordinate-free (location-independent) feature set to enable geographic transferability. A gradient boosting classifier (XGBoost) trained on Santiago, Chile (SCEL, 33S) data from 2002-2009 was evaluated on a 2010-2012 holdout set and under strict zero-shot tests at Puerto Montt (SCTE), San Francisco (KSFO), and London (EGLL). The model achieved AUC values of 0.923-0.947 across distances up to 11,650 km and different fog regimes (radiative, advective, marine). Consistent SHAP feature rankings show that visibility persistence, solar angle, and thermal gradients dominate predictions, suggesting the model learned transferable physical relationships rather than site-specific patterns. Results suggest that physics-informed, coordinate-free feature engineering can yield geographically transferable atmospheric forecasting tools.

Paperid: 8038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21711.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional e-commerce search systems often struggle with the semantic gap between user queries and product catalogs. In this paper, we propose a Category-Aligned Retrieval System (CARS) that improves search relevance by first predicting the product category from a user's query and then boosting products within that category. We introduce a novel method for creating "Trainable Category Prototypes" from query embeddings. We evaluate this method with two models: a lightweight all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and OpenAI's text-embedding-ada-002. Our offline evaluation shows this method is highly effective, with the OpenAI model increasing Top-3 category prediction accuracy from a zero-shot baseline of 43.8% to 83.2% after training. The end-to-end simulation, however, highlights the limitations of blindly applying category boosts in a complex retrieval pipeline: while accuracy is high, naive integration can negatively affect search relevance metrics such as nDCG@10. We argue that this is partly due to dataset-specific ambiguities (e.g., polysemous queries in the Amazon ESCI corpus) and partly due to the sensitivity of retrieval systems to over-constraining filters. Crucially, these results do not diminish the value of the approach; rather, they emphasize the need for confidence-aware and adaptive integration strategies.

Paperid: 8039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19895.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with optimization modeling offers a promising avenue for advancing decision-making in operations research (OR). Traditional optimization methods,such as linear programming, mixed integer programming, and simulation depend heavily on domain expertise to translate real-world problems into solvable mathematical models. While solvers like Gurobi and COPT are powerful, expert input remains essential for defining objectives, constraints, and variables. This research investigates the potential of LLMs, specifically the DeepSeek-R1 model, to bridge this formulation gap using natural language understanding and code generation. Although prior models like GPT-4, Claude, and Bard have shown strong performance in NLP and reasoning tasks, their high token costs and tendency toward hallucinations limit real-world applicability in supply chain contexts. In contrast, DeepSeek-R1, a cost-efficient and high-performing model trained with reinforcement learning, presents a viable alternative. Despite its success in benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench and Math-500, its effectiveness in applied OR scenarios remains under explored. This study systematically evaluates DeepSeek-R1 across four key OR benchmarks: NL4OPT, IndustryOR, EasyLP, and ComplexOR. Our methodology includes baseline assessments, the development of a hallucination taxonomy, and the application of mitigation strategies like LLM-as-a-Judge, Few-shot Learning (FSL), Tool Calling, and a Multi-agent Framework. These techniques aim to reduce hallucinations, enhance formulation accuracy, and better align model outputs with user intent.

Paperid: 8040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17902.pdf

Abstract:
The proliferation of Large Language Model (LLM) architectures presents a fundamental challenge: valuable, task-specific behaviors learned through fine-tuning methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are effectively trapped within their source model's architecture, herein referred to architectural lock-in. Existing transfer methods attempt to bridge this gap by aligning the static weight spaces of models, a brittle and indirect approach that relies on tenuous correlations between parameter geometries. This paper introduces a fundamentally different and more direct paradigm: the Cartridge Activation Space Transfer (CAST), a novel framework that liberates LoRA-encoded behaviors by learning a direct, nonlinear mapping between the activation manifolds, the geometric structures formed by the model's internal neuron activations, of two distinct LLM architectures. CAST treats a pre-trained LoRA as a frozen "behavioral kernel." It learns a set of lightweight, bidirectional projection heads that translate the target model's activation stream into the source model's latent space, apply the frozen kernel, and project the result back. This process, trained on a general text corpus without any task-specific data, effectively decouples the learned skill from the source architecture. We demonstrate that CAST enables true "zero-shot" translation of any standard LoRA adapter. Our experiments, including transfers between heterogeneous model families like Llama-2 and Mistral, show that CAST-translated adapters achieve 85-95\% of the performance of a LoRA fully retrained on the target model, quantitatively outperforming current weight-space transfer techniques and establishing a new state-of-the-art in model interoperability.

Paperid: 8041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15260.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models are highly sensitive to prompt wording. However, popular automatic prompt search methods, including InstructZero, often degrade under distribution shift and adversarial evaluation because they optimize expected performance under a single evaluation distribution. Consequently, prompts that work in one setting frequently fail to transfer. To address this, DRO-InstructZero formulates zero-shot prompt optimization as robust Bayesian optimization. Specifically, an f-divergence ball defines an ambiguity set around the evaluation distribution, and a robust acquisition rule maximizes worst-case expected utility while retaining the query efficiency of Bayesian search. Therefore, the search explicitly targets reliability under distribution shift rather than average behavior alone. Experiments follow the instruction-induction protocol with matched query budgets across formality rewriting, code debugging, and translation. For example, on BIG-Bench informative-to-formal rewriting, accuracy improves from 61.3 +/- 0.7% to approximately 85-90%, yielding an absolute gain of about 25-30 points. Moreover, auto-debugging shows about +25-point gains under domain shift. Meanwhile, stable tasks such as cause-and-effect remain above 96%, indicating no loss on in-distribution cases. Furthermore, improvements are consistent across divergence choices and decoding temperatures. Overall, DRO-InstructZero connects distributionally robust optimization with prompt learning, offering a plug-and-play and general approach for reliable, transferable prompt alignment under real-world uncertainty.

Paperid: 8042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13885.pdf

Abstract:
This study presents a comparative evaluation of ten state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) applied to unstructured text categorization using the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) 2.2 hierarchical taxonomy. The analysis employed a uniform dataset of 8,660 human-annotated samples and identical zero-shot prompts to ensure methodological consistency across all models. Evaluation metrics included four classic measures - accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score - and three LLM-specific indicators: hallucination ratio, inflation ratio, and categorization cost. Results show that, despite their rapid advancement, contemporary LLMs achieve only moderate classic performance, with average scores of 34% accuracy, 42% precision, 45% recall, and 41% F1-score. Hallucination and inflation ratios reveal that models frequently overproduce categories relative to human annotators. Among the evaluated systems, Gemini 1.5/2.0 Flash and GPT 20B/120B offered the most favorable cost-to-performance balance, while GPT 120B demonstrated the lowest hallucination ratio. The findings suggest that scaling and architectural improvements alone do not ensure better categorization accuracy, as the task requires compressing rich unstructured text into a limited taxonomy - a process that challenges current model architectures. To address these limitations, a separate ensemble-based approach was developed and tested. The ensemble method, in which multiple LLMs act as independent experts, substantially improved accuracy, reduced inflation, and completely eliminated hallucinations. These results indicate that coordinated orchestration of models - rather than sheer scale - may represent the most effective path toward achieving or surpassing human-expert performance in large-scale text categorization.

Paperid: 8043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11302.pdf

Abstract:
Object detection systems have traditionally relied on supervised learning with manually annotated bounding boxes, achieving high accuracy at the cost of substantial annotation investment. The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers an alternative paradigm enabling zero-shot detection through natural language queries, eliminating annotation requirements but operating with reduced accuracy. This paper presents the first comprehensive cost-effectiveness analysis comparing supervised detection (YOLO) with zero-shot VLM inference (Gemini Flash 2.5). Through systematic evaluation on 1,000 stratified COCO images and 200 diverse product images spanning consumer electronics and rare categories, combined with detailed Total Cost of Ownership modeling, we establish quantitative break-even thresholds governing architecture selection. Our findings reveal that supervised YOLO achieves 91.2% accuracy versus 68.5% for zero-shot Gemini on standard categories, representing a 22.7 percentage point advantage that costs $10,800 in annotation for 100-category systems. However, this advantage justifies investment only beyond 55 million inferences, equivalent to 151,000 images daily for one year. Zero-shot Gemini demonstrates 52.3% accuracy on diverse product categories (ranging from highly web-prevalent consumer electronics at 75-85% to rare specialized equipment at 25-40%) where supervised YOLO achieves 0% due to architectural constraints preventing detection of untrained classes. Cost per Correct Detection analysis reveals substantially lower per-detection costs for Gemini ($0.00050 vs $0.143) at 100,000 inferences despite accuracy deficits. We develop decision frameworks demonstrating that optimal architecture selection depends critically on deployment volume, category stability, budget constraints, and accuracy requirements rather than purely technical performance metrics.

Paperid: 8044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09968.pdf

Abstract:
Organizational efforts to utilize and operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) are often accompanied by substantial challenges, including scalability, maintenance, and coordination across teams. In response, the concept of Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) has emerged as a set of best practices that integrate software engineering principles with the unique demands of managing the ML lifecycle. Yet, empirical evidence on whether and how these practices support users in developing and operationalizing AI applications remains limited. To address this gap, this study analyzes over 8,000 user reviews of AI development platforms from G2.com. Using zero-shot classification, we measure review sentiment toward nine established MLOps practices, including continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), workflow orchestration, reproducibility, versioning, collaboration, and monitoring. Seven of the nine practices show a significant positive relationship with user satisfaction, suggesting that effective MLOps implementation contributes tangible value to AI development. However, organizational context also matters: reviewers from small firms discuss certain MLOps practices less frequently, suggesting that organizational context influences the prevalence and salience of MLOps, though firm size does not moderate the MLOps-satisfaction link. This indicates that once applied, MLOps practices are perceived as universally beneficial across organizational settings.

Paperid: 8045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06239.pdf

Abstract:
We present OpenStaxQA, an evaluation benchmark specific to college-level educational applications based on 43 open-source college textbooks in English, Spanish, and Polish, available under a permissive Creative Commons license. We finetune and evaluate large language models (LLMs) with approximately 7 billion parameters on this dataset using quantized low rank adapters (QLoRa). Additionally we also perform a zero-shot evaluation on the AI2 reasoning challenge dev dataset in order to check if OpenStaxQA can lead to an improved performance on other tasks. We also discuss broader impacts relevant to datasets such as OpenStaxQA.

Paperid: 8046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03294.pdf

Abstract:
Marine plastic pollution is a pressing environmental threat, making reliable automation for underwater debris detection essential. However, vision systems trained on one dataset often degrade on new imagery due to domain shift. This study benchmarks models for cross-domain robustness, training convolutional neural networks - CNNs (MobileNetV2, ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0) and vision transformers (DeiT-Tiny, ViT-B16) on a labeled underwater dataset and then evaluates them on a balanced cross-domain test set built from plastic-positive images drawn from a different source and negatives from the training domain. Two zero-shot models were assessed, CLIP ViT-L14 and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash, that leverage pretraining to classify images without fine-tuning. Results show the lightweight MobileNetV2 delivers the strongest cross-domain performance (F1 0.97), surpassing larger models. All fine-tuned models achieved high Precision (around 99%), but differ in Recall, indicating varying sensitivity to plastic instances. Zero-shot CLIP is comparatively sensitive (Recall around 80%) yet prone to false positives (Precision around 56%), whereas Gemini exhibits the inverse profile (Precision around 99%, Recall around 81%). Error analysis highlights recurring confusions with coral textures, suspended particulates, and specular glare. Overall, compact CNNs with supervised training can generalize effectively for cross-domain underwater detection, while large pretrained vision-language models provide complementary strengths.

Paperid: 8047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02027.pdf

Abstract:
The scholarly publishing ecosystem faces a dual crisis of unmanageable submission volumes and unregulated AI, creating an urgent need for new governance models to safeguard scientific integrity. The traditional human-only peer review regime lacks a scalable, objective benchmark, making editorial processes opaque and difficult to audit. Here we investigate a deterministic simulation framework that provides the first stable, evidence-based standard for evaluating AI-generated peer review reports. Analyzing 352 peer-review simulation reports, we identify consistent system state indicators that demonstrate its reliability. First, the system is able to simulate calibrated editorial judgment, with 'Revise' decisions consistently forming the majority outcome (>50%) across all disciplines, while 'Reject' rates dynamically adapt to field-specific norms, rising to 45% in Health Sciences. Second, it maintains unwavering procedural integrity, enforcing a stable 29% evidence-anchoring compliance rate that remains invariant across diverse review tasks and scientific domains. These findings demonstrate a system that is predictably rule-bound, mitigating the stochasticity of generative AI. For the scientific community, this provides a transparent tool to ensure fairness; for publishing strategists, it offers a scalable instrument for auditing workflows, managing integrity risks, and implementing evidence-based governance. The framework repositions AI as an essential component of institutional accountability, providing the critical infrastructure to maintain trust in scholarly communication.

Paperid: 8048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01989.pdf

Abstract:
Schema design, particularly normalization, is a critical yet often overlooked factor in natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) systems. Most prior research evaluates models on fixed schemas, overlooking the influence of design on performance. We present the first systematic study of schema normalization's impact, evaluating eight leading large language models on synthetic and real-world datasets with varied normalization levels. We construct controlled synthetic datasets with formal normalization (1NF-3NF) and real academic paper datasets with practical schemes. Our results show that denormalized schemas offer high accuracy on simple retrieval queries, even with cost-effective models in zero-shot settings. In contrast, normalized schemas (2NF/3NF) introduce challenges such as errors in base table selection and join type prediction; however, these issues are substantially mitigated by providing few-shot examples. For aggregation queries, normalized schemas yielded better performance, mainly due to their robustness against the data duplication and NULL value issues that cause errors in denormalized schemas. These findings suggest that the optimal schema design for NL2SQL applications depends on the types of queries to be supported. Our study demonstrates the importance of considering schema design when developing NL2SQL interfaces and integrating adaptive schema selection for real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 8049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01258.pdf

Abstract:
Amidst the rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent systems have come to dominate political discourse across information mediums. However, internalized political biases stemming from training data skews, human prejudice, and algorithmic flaws continue to plague the novel technology. This paper employs a zero-shot classification approach to evaluate algorithmic political partisanship through a methodical combination of ideological alignment, topicality, response sentiment, and objectivity. A total of 1800 model responses across six mainstream large language models (LLMs) were individually input into four distinct fine-tuned classification algorithms, each responsible for computing an aforementioned bias evaluation metric. Results show an amplified liberal-authoritarian alignment across all six LLMs evaluated, with notable instances of reasoning supersessions and canned refusals. The study subsequently highlights the psychological influences underpinning human-computer interactions and how intrinsic biases can permeate public discourse. The resulting distortion of the political landscape can ultimately manifest as conformity or polarization, depending on a region's pre-existing socio-political structures.

Paperid: 8050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00976.pdf

Abstract:
Rare-disease diagnosis remains one of the most pressing challenges in digital health, hindered by extreme data scarcity, privacy concerns, and the limited resources of edge devices. This paper proposes the Adaptive Federated Few-Shot Rare-Disease Diagnosis (AFFR) framework, which integrates three pillars: (i) few-shot federated optimization with meta-learning to generalize from limited patient samples, (ii) energy-aware client scheduling to mitigate device dropouts and ensure balanced participation, and (iii) secure aggregation with calibrated differential privacy to safeguard sensitive model updates. Unlike prior work that addresses these aspects in isolation, AFFR unifies them into a modular pipeline deployable on real-world clinical networks. Experimental evaluation on simulated rare-disease detection datasets demonstrates up to 10% improvement in accuracy compared with baseline FL, while reducing client dropouts by over 50% without degrading convergence. Furthermore, privacy-utility trade-offs remain within clinically acceptable bounds. These findings highlight AFFR as a practical pathway for equitable and trustworthy federated diagnosis of rare conditions.

Paperid: 8051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00182.pdf

Abstract:
Using large language models (LLMs) to solve complex robotics problems requires understanding their planning capabilities. Yet while we know that LLMs can plan on some problems, the extent to which these planning capabilities cover the space of robotics tasks is unclear. One promising direction is to integrate the semantic knowledge of LLMs with the formal reasoning of task and motion planning (TAMP). However, the myriad of choices for how to integrate LLMs within TAMP complicates the design of such systems. We develop 16 algorithms that use Gemini 2.5 Flash to substitute key TAMP components. Our zero-shot experiments across 4,950 problems and three domains reveal that the Gemini-based planners exhibit lower success rates and higher planning times than their engineered counterparts. We show that providing geometric details increases the number of task-planning errors compared to pure PDDL descriptions, and that (faster) non-reasoning LLM variants outperform (slower) reasoning variants in most cases, since the TAMP system can direct the LLM to correct its mistakes.

Paperid: 8052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25267.pdf

Abstract:
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) depends heavily on the chosen prompting strategy, yet static approaches such as Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, or Chain-of-Thought (CoT) impose a rigid efficiency-accuracy trade-off. Highly accurate strategies like Self-Consistency (SC) incur substantial computational waste on simple tasks, while lightweight methods often fail on complex inputs. This paper introduces the Prompt Policy Network (PPN), a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that formalizes adaptive strategy selection as a single-step Markov Decision Process (MDP). The PPN, trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and guided by a resource-explicit reward function, learns to allocate costly reasoning strategies only when necessary. Experiments on arithmetic reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PPN achieves superior performance on the efficiency-accuracy Pareto front, delivering up to 61.5% token cost reduction compared to Self-Consistency while maintaining competitive accuracy. This work contributes a systematic, adaptive framework for cost-efficient LLM deployment, advancing the design of lightweight optimization techniques for scalable and sustainable language model applications.

Paperid: 8053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25241.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked their remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and cross-domain generalization. While LLMs excel in tasks like programming and mathematical problem-solving, their zero-shot performance in specialized domains requiring expert knowledge, such as cybersecurity, is often suboptimal. This limitation arises because foundational LLMs are designed for general-purpose applications, constraining their ability to encapsulate domain-specific expertise within their parameter space. To address this, we explore fine-tuning strategies to embed cybersecurity knowledge into LLMs, enhancing their performance in cybersecurity question-answering (Q\&A) tasks while prioritizing computational efficiency. Specifically, we investigate Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) using a cybersecurity Q\&A dataset. Our results demonstrate that these fine-tuning approaches significantly outperform the foundational model in cybersecurity Q\&A tasks. Moreover, LoRA and QLoRA achieve comparable performance to SFT with substantially lower computational costs, offering an efficient pathway for adapting LLMs to specialized domains. Our work highlights the potential of low-rank fine-tuning strategies to bridge the gap between general-purpose LLMs and domain-specific applications.

Paperid: 8054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23516.pdf

Abstract:
Spiking neural networks offer event-driven computation suited to time-critical networking tasks such as anomaly detection, local routing control, and congestion management at the edge. Classical units, including Hodgkin-Huxley, Izhikevich, and the Random Neural Network, map poorly to these needs. We introduce Network-Optimised Spiking (NOS), a compact two-variable unit whose state encodes normalised queue occupancy and a recovery resource. The model uses a saturating nonlinearity to enforce finite buffers, a service-rate leak, and graph-local inputs with delays and optional per link gates. It supports two differentiable reset schemes for training and deployment. We give conditions for equilibrium existence and uniqueness, local stability tests from the Jacobian trace and determinant, and a network threshold that scales with the Perron eigenvalue of the coupling matrix. The analysis yields an operational rule g* ~ k* rho(W) linking damping and offered load, shows how saturation enlarges the stable region, and explains finite-size smoothing of synchrony onsets. Stochastic arrivals follow a Poisson shot-noise model aligned with telemetry smoothing. Against queueing baselines, NOS matches M/M/1 mean by calibration while truncating deep tails under bursty input. In closed loop it gives, low-jitte with short settling. In zero-shot, label-free forecasting NOS is calibrated per node from arrival statistics. Its NOS dynamics yield high AUROC/AUPRC, enabling timely detection of congestion onsets with few false positives. Under a train-calibrated residual protocol across chain, star, and scale-free topologies, NOS improves early-warning F1 and detection latency over MLP, RNN, GRU, and tGNN. We provide guidance for data-driven initialisation, surrogate-gradient training with a homotopy on reset sharpness, and explicit stability checks with topology-aware bounds for resource constrained deployments.

Paperid: 8055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22708.pdf

Abstract:
Generative Zero-Shot Learning approach (GZSL) has demonstrated significant potential in 3D point cloud semantic segmentation tasks. GZSL leverages generative models like GANs or VAEs to synthesize realistic features (real features) of unseen classes. This allows the model to label unseen classes during testing, despite being trained only on seen classes. In this context, we introduce the Generalized Zero-Shot Learning based-upon Mixture-of-Experts (GZSL-MoE) model. This model incorporates Mixture-of-Experts layers (MoE) to generate fake features that closely resemble real features extracted using a pre-trained KPConv (Kernel Point Convolution) model on seen classes. The main contribution of this paper is the integration of Mixture-of-Experts into the Generator and Discriminator components of the Generative Zero-Shot Learning model for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation, applied to the COVERED dataset (CollabOratiVE Robot Environment Dataset) for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) environments. By combining the Generative Zero-Shot Learning model with Mixture-of- Experts, GZSL-MoE for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation provides a promising solution for understanding complex 3D environments, especially when comprehensive training data for all object classes is unavailable. The performance evaluation of the GZSL-MoE model highlights its ability to enhance performance on both seen and unseen classes. Keywords Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL), 3D Point Cloud, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Human-Robot Collaboration, COVERED (CollabOratiVE Robot Environment Dataset), KPConv, Mixture-of Experts

Paperid: 8056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20805.pdf

Abstract:
Personalized review generation helps businesses understand user preferences, yet most existing approaches assume extensive review histories of the target user or require additional model training. Real-world applications often face few-shot and training-free situations, where only a few user reviews are available and fine-tuning is infeasible. It is well known that large language models (LLMs) can address such low-resource settings, but their effectiveness depends on prompt engineering. In this paper, we propose Conversational Prompting, a lightweight method that reformulates user reviews as multi-turn conversations. Its simple variant, Simple Conversational Prompting (SCP), relies solely on the user's own reviews, while the contrastive variant, Contrastive Conversational Prompting (CCP), inserts reviews from other users or LLMs as incorrect replies and then asks the model to correct them, encouraging the model to produce text in the user's style. Experiments on eight product domains and five LLMs showed that the conventional non-conversational prompt often produced reviews similar to those written by random users, based on text-based metrics such as ROUGE-L and BERTScore, and application-oriented tasks like user identity matching and sentiment analysis. In contrast, both SCP and CCP produced reviews much closer to those of the target user, even when each user had only two reviews. CCP brings further improvements when high-quality negative examples are available, whereas SCP remains competitive when such data cannot be collected. These results suggest that conversational prompting offers a practical solution for review generation under few-shot and training-free constraints.

Paperid: 8057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20792.pdf

Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are foundational to critical applications like autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, and content moderation. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA enable their efficient adaptation to specialized tasks, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can compromise safety-critical decisions. CLIP, the backbone for numerous downstream VLMs, is a high-value target whose vulnerabilities can cascade across the multimodal AI ecosystem. We propose Dynamic Adversarial Curriculum DAC-LoRA, a novel framework that integrates adversarial training into PEFT. The core principle of our method i.e. an intelligent curriculum of progressively challenging attack, is general and can potentially be applied to any iterative attack method. Guided by the First-Order Stationary Condition (FOSC) and a TRADES-inspired loss, DAC-LoRA achieves substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without significantly compromising clean accuracy. Our work presents an effective, lightweight, and broadly applicable method to demonstrate that the DAC-LoRA framework can be easily integrated into a standard PEFT pipeline to significantly enhance robustness.

Paperid: 8058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20048.pdf

Abstract:
Learning robust representations for physiological time-series signals continues to pose a substantial challenge in developing efficient few-shot learning applications. This difficulty is largely due to the complex pathological variations in biosignals. In this context, this paper introduces a manifold-aware Diffusion-Augmented Contrastive Learning (DACL) framework, which efficiently leverages the generative structure of latent diffusion models with the discriminative power of supervised contrastive learning. The proposed framework operates within a contextualized scattering latent space derived from Scattering Transformer (ST) features. Within a contrastive learning framework, we employ a forward diffusion process in the scattering latent space as a structured manifold-aware feature augmentation technique. We assessed the proposed framework using the PhysioNet 2017 ECG benchmark dataset. The proposed method achieved a competitive AUROC of 0.9741 in the task of detecting atrial fibrillation from a single-lead ECG signal. The proposed framework achieved performance on par with relevant state-of-the-art related works. In-depth evaluation findings suggest that early-stage diffusion serves as an ideal "local manifold explorer," producing embeddings with greater precision than typical augmentation methods while preserving inference efficiency.

Paperid: 8059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14574.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding how people read city scenes can inform design and planning. We introduce a small benchmark for testing vision-language models (VLMs) on urban perception using 100 Montreal street images, evenly split between photographs and photorealistic synthetic scenes. Twelve participants from seven community groups supplied 230 annotation forms across 30 dimensions mixing physical attributes and subjective impressions. French responses were normalized to English. We evaluated seven VLMs in a zero-shot setup with a structured prompt and deterministic parser. We use accuracy for single-choice items and Jaccard overlap for multi-label items; human agreement uses Krippendorff's alpha and pairwise Jaccard. Results suggest stronger model alignment on visible, objective properties than subjective appraisals. The top system (claude-sonnet) reaches macro 0.31 and mean Jaccard 0.48 on multi-label items. Higher human agreement coincides with better model scores. Synthetic images slightly lower scores. We release the benchmark, prompts, and harness for reproducible, uncertainty-aware evaluation in participatory urban analysis.

Paperid: 8060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14383.pdf

Abstract:
Unified multi-modal encoders that bind vision, audio, and other sensors into a shared embedding space are attractive building blocks for robot perception and decision-making. However, on-robot deployment exposes the vision branch to adversarial and natural corruptions, making robustness a prerequisite for safety. Prior defenses typically align clean and adversarial features within CLIP-style encoders and overlook broader cross-modal correspondence, yielding modest gains and often degrading zero-shot transfer. We introduce RLBind, a two-stage adversarial-invariant cross-modal alignment framework for robust unified embeddings. Stage 1 performs unsupervised fine-tuning on clean-adversarial pairs to harden the visual encoder. Stage 2 leverages cross-modal correspondence by minimizing the discrepancy between clean/adversarial features and a text anchor, while enforcing class-wise distributional alignment across modalities. Extensive experiments on Image, Audio, Thermal, and Video data show that RLBind consistently outperforms the LanguageBind backbone and standard fine-tuning baselines in both clean accuracy and norm-bounded adversarial robustness. By improving resilience without sacrificing generalization, RLBind provides a practical path toward safer multi-sensor perception stacks for embodied robots in navigation, manipulation, and other autonomy settings.

Paperid: 8061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13590.pdf

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare imaging has revolutionized diagnostic medicine and clinical decision-making processes. This work presents an intelligent multimodal framework for medical image analysis that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in healthcare diagnostics. The framework integrates Google Gemini 2.5 Flash for automated tumor detection and clinical report generation across multiple imaging modalities including CT, MRI, X-ray, and Ultrasound. The system combines visual feature extraction with natural language processing to enable contextual image interpretation, incorporating coordinate verification mechanisms and probabilistic Gaussian modeling for anomaly distribution. Multi-layered visualization techniques generate detailed medical illustrations, overlay comparisons, and statistical representations to enhance clinical confidence, with location measurement achieving 80 pixels average deviation. Result processing utilizes precise prompt engineering and textual analysis to extract structured clinical information while maintaining interpretability. Experimental evaluations demonstrated high performance in anomaly detection across multiple modalities. The system features a user-friendly Gradio interface for clinical workflow integration and demonstrates zero-shot learning capabilities to reduce dependence on large datasets. This framework represents a significant advancement in automated diagnostic support and radiological workflow efficiency, though clinical validation and multi-center evaluation are necessary prior to widespread adoption.

Paperid: 8062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12387.pdf

Abstract:
Modern deep learning models excel at pattern recognition but remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization and a demand for massive datasets. We argue that a key ingredient for human-like intelligence-robust, sample-efficient learning-stems from an understanding of causal mechanisms. In this work, we introduce Causal-Symbolic Meta-Learning (CSML), a novel framework that learns to infer the latent causal structure of a task distribution. CSML comprises three key modules: a perception module that maps raw inputs to disentangled symbolic representations; a differentiable causal induction module that discovers the underlying causal graph governing these symbols and a graph-based reasoning module that leverages this graph to make predictions. By meta-learning a shared causal world model across a distribution of tasks, CSML can rapidly adapt to novel tasks, including those requiring reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, from only a handful of examples. We introduce CausalWorld, a new physics-based benchmark designed to test these capabilities. Our experiments show that CSML dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art meta-learning and neuro-symbolic baselines, particularly on tasks demanding true causal inference.

Paperid: 8063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08829.pdf

Abstract:
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into recommender systems has enabled zero-shot, personality-based personalization through prompt-based interactions, offering a new paradigm for user-centric recommendations. However, incorporating user personality traits via the OCEAN model highlights a critical tension between achieving psychological alignment and ensuring demographic fairness. To address this, we propose PerFairX, a unified evaluation framework designed to quantify the trade-offs between personalization and demographic equity in LLM-generated recommendations. Using neutral and personality-sensitive prompts across diverse user profiles, we benchmark two state-of-the-art LLMs, ChatGPT and DeepSeek, on movie (MovieLens 10M) and music (Last.fm 360K) datasets. Our results reveal that personality-aware prompting significantly improves alignment with individual traits but can exacerbate fairness disparities across demographic groups. Specifically, DeepSeek achieves stronger psychological fit but exhibits higher sensitivity to prompt variations, while ChatGPT delivers stable yet less personalized outputs. PerFairX provides a principled benchmark to guide the development of LLM-based recommender systems that are both equitable and psychologically informed, contributing to the creation of inclusive, user-centric AI applications in continual learning contexts.

Paperid: 8064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07036.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents a methodological approach to financial time series analysis by combining causal discovery and uncertainty-aware forecasting. As a case study, we focus on four key U.S. macroeconomic indicators -- GDP, economic growth, inflation, and unemployment -- and we apply the LPCMCI framework with Gaussian Process Distance Correlation (GPDC) to uncover dynamic causal relationships in quarterly data from 1970 to 2021. Our results reveal a robust unidirectional causal link from economic growth to GDP and highlight the limited connectivity of inflation, suggesting the influence of latent factors. Unemployment exhibits strong autoregressive dependence, motivating its use as a case study for probabilistic forecasting. Leveraging the Chronos framework, a large language model trained for time series, we perform zero-shot predictions on unemployment. This approach delivers accurate forecasts one and two quarters ahead, without requiring task-specific training. Crucially, the model's uncertainty-aware predictions yield 90\% confidence intervals, enabling effective anomaly detection through statistically principled deviation analysis. This study demonstrates the value of combining causal structure learning with probabilistic language models to inform economic policy and enhance forecasting robustness.

Paperid: 8065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04921.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting plays a critical role in decision-making processes across diverse fields including meteorology, traffic, electricity, economics, finance, and so on. Especially, predicting returns on financial instruments is a challenging problem. Some researchers have proposed time series foundation models applicable to various forecasting tasks. Simultaneously, based on the recognition that real-world time series exhibit chaotic properties, methods have been developed to artificially generate synthetic chaotic time series, construct diverse datasets and train models. In this study, we propose a methodology for modeling financial time series by generating artificial chaotic time series and applying resampling techniques to simulate financial time series data, which we then use as training samples. Increasing the resampling interval to extend predictive horizons, we conducted large-scale pre-training using 10 billion training samples for each case. We subsequently created test datasets for multiple timeframes using actual Bitcoin trade data and performed zero-shot prediction without re-training the pre-trained model. The results of evaluating the profitability of a simple trading strategy based on these predictions demonstrated significant performance improvements over autocorrelation models. During the large-scale pre-training process, we observed a scaling law-like phenomenon that we can achieve predictive performance at a certain level with extended predictive horizons for chaotic time series by increasing the number of training samples exponentially. If this scaling law proves robust and holds true across various chaotic models, it suggests the potential to predict near-future events by investing substantial computational resources. Future research should focus on further large-scale training and verifying the applicability of this scaling law to diverse chaotic models.

Paperid: 8066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00140.pdf

Abstract:
Ontologies have supported knowledge representation and white-box reasoning for decades; thus, the automated ontology generation (AOG) plays a crucial role in scaling their use. Software engineering standards (SES) consist of long, unstructured text (with high noise) and paragraphs with domain-specific terms. In this setting, relation triple extraction (RTE), together with term extraction, constitutes the first stage toward AOG. This work proposes an open-source large language model (LLM)-assisted approach to RTE for SES. Instead of solely relying on prompt-engineering-based methods, this study promotes the use of LLMs as an aid in constructing ontologies and explores an effective AOG workflow that includes document segmentation, candidate term mining, LLM-based relation inference, term normalization, and cross-section alignment. Expert-annotated reference sets at three granularities are constructed and used to evaluate the ontology generated from the study. The results show that it is comparable and potentially superior to the OpenIE method of triple extraction.

Paperid: 8067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16496.pdf

Abstract:
Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems capture deep truths about general, human problem-solving. In domains where new data can be simulated cheaply, these systems uncover sequential decision-making policies that far exceed the ability of any human. Society faces many problems whose solutions require this skill, but they are often in domains where new data cannot be cheaply simulated. In such scenarios, we can learn simulators from existing data, but these will only ever be approximately correct, and can be pathologically incorrect when queried outside of their training distribution. As a result, a misalignment between the environments in which we train our agents and the real-world in which we wish to deploy our agents is inevitable. Dealing with this misalignment is the primary concern of zero-shot reinforcement learning, a problem setting where the agent must generalise to a new task or domain with zero practice shots. Whilst impressive progress has been made on methods that perform zero-shot RL in idealised settings, new work is needed if these results are to be replicated in real-world settings. In this thesis, we argue that doing so requires us to navigate (at least) three constraints. First, the data quality constraint: real-world datasets are small and homogeneous. Second, the observability constraint: states, dynamics and rewards in the real-world are often only partially observed. And third, the data availability constraint: a priori access to data cannot always be assumed. This work proposes a suite of methods that perform zero-shot RL subject to these constraints. In a series of empirical studies we expose the failings of existing methods, and justify our techniques for remedying them. We believe these designs take us a step closer to RL methods that can be deployed to solve real-world problems.

Paperid: 8068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15973.pdf

Abstract:
This manuscript presents a series of my selected contributions to the topic of label-efficient learning in computer vision and remote sensing. The central focus of this research is to develop and adapt methods that can learn effectively from limited or partially annotated data, and can leverage abundant unlabeled data in real-world applications. The contributions span both methodological developments and domain-specific adaptations, in particular addressing challenges unique to Earth observation data such as multi-modality, spatial resolution variability, and scene heterogeneity. The manuscript is organized around four main axes including (1) weakly supervised learning for object discovery and detection based on anomaly-aware representations learned from large amounts of background images; (2) multi-task learning that jointly trains on multiple datasets with disjoint annotations to improve performance on object detection and semantic segmentation; (3) self-supervised and supervised contrastive learning with multimodal data to enhance scene classification in remote sensing; and (4) few-shot learning for hierarchical scene classification using both explicit and implicit modeling of class hierarchies. These contributions are supported by extensive experimental results across natural and remote sensing datasets, reflecting the outcomes of several collaborative research projects. The manuscript concludes by outlining ongoing and future research directions focused on scaling and enhancing label-efficient learning for real-world applications.

Paperid: 8069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15854.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our approach and results for SubTask 1: Islamic Inheritance Reasoning at QIAS 2025, a shared task focused on evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding and reasoning within Islamic inheritance knowledge. We fine-tuned the Fanar-1-9B causal language model using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and integrated it into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. Our system addresses the complexities of Islamic inheritance law, including comprehending inheritance scenarios, identifying eligible heirs, applying fixed-share rules, and performing precise calculations. Our system achieved an accuracy of 0.858 in the final test, outperforming other competitive models such as, GPT 4.5, LLaMA, Fanar, Mistral and ALLaM evaluated with zero-shot prompting. Our results demonstrate that QU-NLP achieves near state-of-the-art accuracy (85.8%), excelling especially on advanced reasoning (97.6%) where it outperforms Gemini 2.5 and OpenAI's o3. This highlights that domain-specific fine-tuning combined with retrieval grounding enables mid-scale Arabic LLMs to surpass frontier models in Islamic inheritance reasoning.

Paperid: 8070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15835.pdf

Abstract:
Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

Paperid: 8071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09767.pdf

Abstract:
We propose UtterTune, a lightweight adaptation method that fine-tunes a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) system based on a large language model (LLM) architecture, designed to enhance the controllability of pronunciation in a target language while preserving performance in others. While LLM architectures have enabled TTS models to achieve remarkable naturalness, accurately modeling grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) mapping and prosody remains challenging, especially when the model omits an explicit G2P module and directly processes minimally encoded text (e.g., byte-pair encoding). UtterTune leverages low-rank adaptation to enable the control of segmental pronunciation and pitch accent at the phoneme level for Japanese speech, the target language in this paper, while maintaining naturalness and speaker similarity in a zero-shot setting. Objective and subjective evaluations confirm its effectiveness.

Paperid: 8072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08382.pdf

Abstract:
Collectible card games (CCGs) are a difficult genre for AI due to their partial observability, long-term decision-making, and evolving card sets. Due to this, current AI models perform vastly worse than human players at CCG tasks such as deckbuilding and gameplay. In this work, we introduce UrzaGPT, a domain-adapted large language model that recommends real-time drafting decisions in Magic: The Gathering. Starting from an open-weight LLM, we use Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning on a dataset of annotated draft logs. With this, we leverage the language modeling capabilities of LLM, and can quickly adapt to different expansions of the game. We benchmark UrzaGPT in comparison to zero-shot LLMs and the state-of-the-art domain-specific model. Untuned, small LLMs like Llama-3-8B are completely unable to draft, but the larger GPT-4o achieves a zero-shot performance of 43%. Using UrzaGPT to fine-tune smaller models, we achieve an accuracy of 66.2% using only 10,000 steps. Despite this not reaching the capability of domain-specific models, we show that solely using LLMs to draft is possible and conclude that using LLMs can enable performant, general, and update-friendly drafting AIs in the future.

Paperid: 8073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07248.pdf

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation has been successfully applied to Continual Learning Named Entity Recognition (CLNER) tasks, by using a teacher model trained on old-class data to distill old-class entities present in new-class data as a form of regularization, thereby avoiding catastrophic forgetting. However, in Few-Shot CLNER (FS-CLNER) tasks, the scarcity of new-class entities makes it difficult for the trained model to generalize during inference. More critically, the lack of old-class entity information hinders the distillation of old knowledge, causing the model to fall into what we refer to as the Few-Shot Distillation Dilemma. In this work, we address the above challenges through a prompt tuning paradigm and memory demonstration template strategy. Specifically, we designed an expandable Anchor words-oriented Prompt Tuning (APT) paradigm to bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, thereby enhancing performance in few-shot scenarios. Additionally, we incorporated Memory Demonstration Templates (MDT) into each training instance to provide replay samples from previous tasks, which not only avoids the Few-Shot Distillation Dilemma but also promotes in-context learning. Experiments show that our approach achieves competitive performances on FS-CLNER.

Paperid: 8074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06110.pdf

Abstract:
Table reasoning, including tabular QA and fact verification, often depends on annotated data or complex data augmentation, limiting flexibility and generalization. LLMs, despite their versatility, often underperform compared to simple supervised models. To approach these issues, we introduce PanelTR, a framework utilizing LLM agent scientists for robust table reasoning through a structured scientific approach. PanelTR's workflow involves agent scientists conducting individual investigations, engaging in self-review, and participating in collaborative peer-review discussions. This process, driven by five scientist personas, enables semantic-level transfer without relying on data augmentation or parametric optimization. Experiments across four benchmarks show that PanelTR outperforms vanilla LLMs and rivals fully supervised models, all while remaining independent of training data. Our findings indicate that structured scientific methodology can effectively handle complex tasks beyond table reasoning with flexible semantic understanding in a zero-shot context.

Paperid: 8075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01948.pdf

Abstract:
Rapidly learning abstract concepts from limited examples is a hallmark of human intelligence. This work investigates whether gradient-based meta-learning can equip neural networks with inductive biases for efficient few-shot acquisition of discrete concepts. I compare meta-learning methods against a supervised learning baseline on Boolean concepts (logical statements) generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG). By systematically varying concept dimensionality (number of features) and recursive compositionality (depth of grammar recursion), I delineate between complexity regimes in which meta-learning robustly improves few-shot concept learning and regimes in which it does not. Meta-learners are much better able to handle compositional complexity than featural complexity. I highlight some reasons for this with a representational analysis of the weights of meta-learners and a loss landscape analysis demonstrating how featural complexity increases the roughness of loss trajectories, allowing curvature-aware optimization to be more effective than first-order methods. I find improvements in out-of-distribution generalization on complex concepts by increasing the number of adaptation steps in meta-SGD, where adaptation acts as a way of encouraging exploration of rougher loss basins. Overall, this work highlights the intricacies of learning compositional versus featural complexity in high dimensional concept spaces and provides a road to understanding the role of 2nd order methods and extended gradient adaptation in few-shot concept learning.

Paperid: 8076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01411.pdf

Abstract:
ArzEn-MultiGenre is a parallel dataset of Egyptian Arabic song lyrics, novels, and TV show subtitles that are manually translated and aligned with their English counterparts. The dataset contains 25,557 segment pairs that can be used to benchmark new machine translation models, fine-tune large language models in few-shot settings, and adapt commercial machine translation applications such as Google Translate. Additionally, the dataset is a valuable resource for research in various disciplines, including translation studies, cross-linguistic analysis, and lexical semantics. The dataset can also serve pedagogical purposes by training translation students and aid professional translators as a translation memory. The contributions are twofold: first, the dataset features textual genres not found in existing parallel Egyptian Arabic and English datasets, and second, it is a gold-standard dataset that has been translated and aligned by human experts.

Paperid: 8077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22612.pdf

Abstract:
Speech-to-text alignment is a critical component of neural text to speech (TTS) models. Autoregressive TTS models typically use an attention mechanism to learn these alignments on-line, while non-autoregressive end to end TTS models rely on durations extracted from external sources. In this paper, we propose a novel duration prediction framework that can give promising phoneme-level duration distribution with given text. In our experiments, the proposed duration model has more precise prediction and adaptation ability to conditions, compared to previous baseline models. Specifically, it makes a considerable improvement on phoneme-level alignment accuracy and makes the performance of zero-shot TTS models more robust to the mismatch between prompt audio and input audio.

Paperid: 8078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22469.pdf

Abstract:
The contemporary phenomenon of deepfakes, utilizing GAN or diffusion models for face swapping, presents a substantial and evolving threat in digital media, identity verification, and a multitude of other systems. The majority of existing methods for detecting deepfakes rely on training specialized classifiers to distinguish between genuine and manipulated images, focusing only on the image domain without incorporating any auxiliary tasks that could enhance robustness. In this paper, inspired by the zero-shot capabilities of Vision Language Models, we propose a novel VLM-based approach to image classification and then evaluate it for deepfake detection. Specifically, we utilize a new high-quality deepfake dataset comprising 60,000 images, on which our zero-shot models demonstrate superior performance to almost all existing methods. Subsequently, we compare the performance of the best-performing architecture, InstructBLIP, on the popular deepfake dataset DFDC-P against traditional methods in two scenarios: zero-shot and in-domain fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate the superiority of VLMs over traditional classifiers.

Paperid: 8079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22008.pdf

Abstract:
Recent dense audio-visual (AV) models achieve impressive retrieval and emergent localization, but almost all evidence comes from English-centric, caption-rich web video. It is unclear whether these objectives survive in low-resource, code-switched, and noisy multilingual settings that typify developing regions. We show they do**-**and that the choice of aggregation function becomes even more critical. Using a multilingual subset of Project Vaani spanning dozens of Indian languages and dialectal variants, we compare three contrastive objectives: (i) a global mean-pooled loss (CLIP-style), (ii) a dense max-mean token matcher (DenseAV-style), and (iii) a simple hybrid (motivated by frozen-vision alignment strategies). The dense objective delivers a +59% relative R@1 (Audio Visual) improvement over global pooling and substantially lower mean/median ranks, while consistently producing sharp zero-shot localization heatmaps of spoken objects-despite keeping the vision backbone entirely frozen (no LoRA / partial fine-tuning). Our results demonstrate that dense token routing is not a luxury of high-resource English corpora; it is more decisive when annotations and acoustic cleanliness are scarce. We release the codebase and trained models.

Paperid: 8080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21095.pdf

Abstract:
This paper presents our approach to the CheckThat! 2025 Task 1 on subjectivity detection, where systems are challenged to distinguish whether a sentence from a news article expresses the subjective view of the author or presents an objective view on the covered topic. We propose a feature-augmented transformer architecture that combines contextual embeddings from pre-trained language models with statistical and linguistic features. Our system leveraged pre-trained transformers with additional lexical features: for Arabic we used AraELECTRA augmented with part-of-speech (POS) tags and TF-IDF features, while for the other languages we fine-tuned a cross-lingual DeBERTa~V3 model combined with TF-IDF features through a gating mechanism. We evaluated our system in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot settings across multiple languages including English, Arabic, German, Italian, and several unseen languages. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving competitive performance across different languages with notable success in the monolingual setting for English (rank 1st with macro-F1=0.8052), German (rank 3rd with macro-F1=0.8013), Arabic (rank 4th with macro-F1=0.5771), and Romanian (rank 1st with macro-F1=0.8126) in the zero-shot setting. We also conducted an ablation analysis that demonstrated the importance of combining TF-IDF features with the gating mechanism and the cross-lingual transfer for subjectivity detection. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the model's sensitivity to both the order of cross-lingual fine-tuning and the linguistic proximity of the training languages.

Paperid: 8081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14785.pdf

Abstract:
The complexity and interconnectivity of entities involved in money laundering demand investigative reasoning over graph-structured data. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as reasoning engines over localized subgraphs extracted from a financial knowledge graph. We propose a lightweight pipeline that retrieves k-hop neighborhoods around entities of interest, serializes them into structured text, and prompts an LLM via few-shot in-context learning to assess suspiciousness and generate justifications. Using synthetic anti-money laundering (AML) scenarios that reflect common laundering behaviors, we show that LLMs can emulate analyst-style logic, highlight red flags, and provide coherent explanations. While this study is exploratory, it illustrates the potential of LLM-based graph reasoning in AML and lays groundwork for explainable, language-driven financial crime analytics.

Paperid: 8082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13655.pdf

Abstract:
Integrating large language models into specialized domains like healthcare presents unique challenges, including domain adaptation and limited labeled data. We introduce CU-ICU, a method for customizing unsupervised instruction-finetuned language models for ICU datasets by leveraging the Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) architecture. CU-ICU employs a sparse fine-tuning approach that combines few-shot prompting with selective parameter updates, enabling efficient adaptation with minimal supervision. Our evaluation across critical ICU tasks--early sepsis detection, mortality prediction, and clinical note generation--demonstrates that CU-ICU consistently improves predictive accuracy and interpretability over standard fine-tuning methods. Notably, CU-ICU achieves up to a 15% increase in sepsis detection accuracy and a 20% enhancement in generating clinically relevant explanations while updating fewer than 1% of model parameters in its most efficient configuration. These results establish CU-ICU as a scalable, low-overhead solution for delivering accurate and interpretable clinical decision support in real-world ICU environments.

Paperid: 8083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10284.pdf

Abstract:
Visual coverage path planning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires agents to strategically coordinate UAV motion and camera control to maximize coverage, minimize redundancy, and maintain battery efficiency. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on environment-specific reward formulations that lack semantic adaptability. This study proposes Prompt-Informed Reinforcement Learning (PIRL), a novel approach that integrates the zero-shot reasoning ability and in-context learning capability of large language models with curiosity-driven RL. PIRL leverages semantic feedback from an LLM, GPT-3.5, to dynamically shape the reward function of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) RL policy guiding the agent in position and camera adjustments for optimal visual coverage. The PIRL agent is trained using OpenAI Gym and evaluated in various environments. Furthermore, the sim-to-real-like ability and zero-shot generalization of the agent are tested by operating the agent in Webots simulator which introduces realistic physical dynamics. Results show that PIRL outperforms multiple learning-based baselines such as PPO with static rewards, PPO with exploratory weight initialization, imitation learning, and an LLM-only controller. Across different environments, PIRL outperforms the best-performing baseline by achieving up to 14% higher visual coverage in OpenAI Gym and 27% higher in Webots, up to 25% higher battery efficiency, and up to 18\% lower redundancy, depending on the environment. The results highlight the effectiveness of LLM-guided reward shaping in complex spatial exploration tasks and suggest a promising direction for integrating natural language priors into RL for robotics.

Paperid: 8084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07586.pdf

Abstract:
Discrete diffusion language models learn to reconstruct text from randomly masked inputs, yet under mild assumptions their denoiser already implements the exact Bayesian posterior over the original tokens. We prove that the expected denoiser output under the forward corruption distribution recovers the true posterior, and that a simple Monte Carlo estimator converges to this posterior at rate O(1/sqrt(K)) with finite-sample concentration bounds. Building on this insight, we introduce an inference-time ensemble that runs K independent denoising passes and aggregates both posterior means and variances without any extra training. On WikiText-2, our MC-marginal sampler recovers the analytic lambda-DCE zero-shot perplexity (approximately 39) to within a few points at K=128, and its per-token variance shows a strong rank correlation with reconstruction error (Spearman rho = 0.996). This cost-proportional procedure yields calibrated uncertainty estimates and a direct trade-off between compute and posterior fidelity in discrete diffusion LMs.

Paperid: 8085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07296.pdf

Abstract:
Financial time series forecasting presents significant challenges due to complex nonlinear relationships, temporal dependencies, variable interdependencies and limited data availability, particularly for tasks involving low-frequency data, newly listed instruments, or emerging market assets. Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) offer a promising solution through pretraining on diverse time series corpora followed by task-specific adaptation. This study evaluates two TSFMs (Tiny Time Mixers (TTM) and Chronos) across three financial forecasting tasks: US 10-year Treasury yield changes, EUR/USD volatility, and equity spread prediction. Results demonstrate that TTM exhibits strong transferability. When fine-tuning both the pretrained version of TTM and an untrained model with the same architecture, the pretrained version achieved 25-50% better performance when fine-tuned on limited data and 15-30% improvements even when fine-tuned on lengthier datasets. Notably, TTM's zero-shot performance outperformed naive benchmarks in volatility forecasting and equity spread prediction, with the latter demonstrating that TSFMs can surpass traditional benchmark models without fine-tuning. The pretrained model consistently required 3-10 fewer years of data to achieve comparable performance levels compared to the untrained model, demonstrating significant sample-efficiency gains. However, while TTM outperformed naive baselines, traditional specialised models matched or exceeded its performance in two of three tasks, suggesting TSFMs prioritise breadth over task-specific optimisation. These findings indicate that TSFMs, though still nascent, offer substantial promise for financial forecasting-particularly in noisy, data-constrained tasks-but achieving competitive performance likely requires domain-specific pretraining and architectural refinements tailored to financial time series characteristics.

Paperid: 8086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05807.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we tackle two fundamental problems in few-shot domain adaptation of foundation models. First, hyperparameter tuning is often impractical due to the lack of large validation datasets. Second, model robustness under distribution shifts where test time data deviates slightly from training distributions, remains a concern. We show that by training multiple independent adapters and averaging their outputs, the new model has a higher performance and is more robust to distribution shifts compared to any individual adapter. This improvement holds even when the adapters are trained with diverse hyperparameters sampled from a wide range, resulting in varied individual performance. Consequently, our method addresses both of the problems described above. The ensemble is also significantly less sensitive to the residual ratio, a critical hyperparameter of CLIP-Adapter. Since the ensemble can be reparameterized to a single adapter again using a principled concatenation of the parameters, we refer to our method as Soup-Adapter. This is also the first study to explore CLIP adapter-style techniques for DINOv2 and to directly compare them with CLIP in this setting.

Paperid: 8087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02364.pdf

Abstract:
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) have recently emerged as promising components for enhancing the expressibility of neural architectures. In this work, we introduce QFFN-BERT, a hybrid quantum-classical transformer where the feedforward network (FFN) modules of a compact BERT variant are replaced by PQC-based layers. This design is motivated by the dominant parameter contribution of FFNs, which account for approximately two-thirds of the parameters within standard Transformer encoder blocks. While prior studies have primarily integrated PQCs into self-attention modules, our work focuses on the FFN and systematically investigates the trade-offs between PQC depth, expressibility, and trainability. Our final PQC architecture incorporates a residual connection, both $R_Y$ and $R_Z$ rotations, and an alternating entanglement strategy to ensure stable training and high expressibility. Our experiments, conducted on a classical simulator, on the SST-2 and DBpedia benchmarks demonstrate two key findings. First, a carefully configured QFFN-BERT achieves up to 102.0% of the baseline accuracy, surpassing its classical counterpart in a full-data setting while reducing FFN-specific parameters by over 99%. Second, our model exhibits a consistent and competitive edge in few-shot learning scenarios, confirming its potential for superior data efficiency. These results, supported by an ablation study on a non-optimized PQC that failed to learn, confirm that PQCs can serve as powerful and parameter-efficient alternatives to classical FFNs when co-designed with foundational deep learning principles.

Paperid: 8088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01645.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate the transferability of pre-trained language models to low-resource Indonesian local languages through the task of sentiment analysis. We evaluate both zero-shot performance and adapter-based transfer on ten local languages using models of different types: a monolingual Indonesian BERT, multilingual models such as mBERT and XLM-R, and a modular adapter-based approach called MAD-X. To better understand model behavior, we group the target languages into three categories: seen (included during pre-training), partially seen (not included but linguistically related to seen languages), and unseen (absent and unrelated in pre-training data). Our results reveal clear performance disparities across these groups: multilingual models perform best on seen languages, moderately on partially seen ones, and poorly on unseen languages. We find that MAD-X significantly improves performance, especially for seen and partially seen languages, without requiring labeled data in the target language. Additionally, we conduct a further analysis on tokenization and show that while subword fragmentation and vocabulary overlap with Indonesian correlate weakly with prediction quality, they do not fully explain the observed performance. Instead, the most consistent predictor of transfer success is the model's prior exposure to the language, either directly or through a related language.

Paperid: 8089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01067.pdf

Abstract:
Time series forecasting models have diverse real world applications (e.g., from electricity metrics to software workload). Latest foundational models trained for time series forecasting show strengths (e.g., for long sequences and in zero-shot settings). However, foundational model was not yet used for forecasting rare, spiky events, i.e., a challenging target because those are a corner case of extreme events. In this paper, we optimize a state-of-the-art foundational model to forecast sporadic or spiky production outages of high-performance machine learning services powering billions of client devices. We evaluate the forecasting errors of the foundational model compared with classical stochastic forecasting models (e.g., moving average and autoregressive). The analysis helps us understand how each of the evaluated models performs for the sporadic or spiky events. For example, it identifies the key patterns in the target data that are well tracked by the foundational model vs. each of the stochastic models. We use the models with optimal parameters to estimate a year-long outage statistics of a particular root cause with less than 6% value errors.

Paperid: 8090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00653.pdf

Abstract:
The escalating computational costs of Large Language Model (LLM) inference have become a critical barrier to their widespread and sustainable deployment. While existing optimization strategies are effective, they are predominantly based on statistical heuristics or architectural modifications, lacking a guiding cognitive theory to manage the inference process itself. This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing a novel paradigm: the Cognitive Load-Aware Inference (CLAI) framework, which operationalizes principles from Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and neuroscience for LLM inference. We formalize the concepts of Intrinsic Cognitive Load, Extraneous Cognitive Load, and Germane Cognitive Load into quantifiable LLM metrics ($ICL_{LLM}$, $ECL_{LLM}$, and $GCL_{LLM}$), thereby reframing the inference process as a cognitive economics optimization problem: based on the intrinsic complexity of a problem ($ICL_{LLM}$), minimize wasteful computation ($ECL_{LLM}$), and strategically allocate the token budget to productive reasoning ($GCL_{LLM}$). We propose two implementation paths: CLAI-Prompt, a zero-shot method that guides a base LLM through cognitive control steps via a structured meta-prompt, and CLAI-Tune, a fine-tuned model that internalizes these principles for spontaneous cognitive economy. Across a range of benchmarks in complex reasoning, long-context question answering, and code generation, our methods achieve significant reductions in token consumption (up to 45\%) without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, CLAI-Tune exhibits an emergent ability to autonomously decompose difficult problems, a key characteristic of human expert cognition. This work demonstrates that by emulating the brain's resource management strategies, we can build more efficient, robust, and capable artificial intelligence systems.

Paperid: 8091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23990.pdf

Abstract:
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for accelerating our pursuit of knowledge, not all scientific text is faithful to the underlying science. As the volume of this text has burgeoned online in recent years, it has become a problem of societal importance to be able to identify the faithfulness of a given piece of scientific text automatically. This thesis is concerned with the cultivation of datasets, methods, and tools for machine understanding of scientific language, in order to analyze and understand science communication at scale. To arrive at this, I present several contributions in three areas of natural language processing and machine learning: automatic fact checking, learning with limited data, and scientific text processing. These contributions include new methods and resources for identifying check-worthy claims, adversarial claim generation, multi-source domain adaptation, learning from crowd-sourced labels, cite-worthiness detection, zero-shot scientific fact checking, detecting exaggerated scientific claims, and modeling degrees of information change in science communication. Critically, I demonstrate how the research outputs of this thesis are useful for effectively learning from limited amounts of scientific text in order to identify misinformative scientific statements and generate new insights into the science communication process

Paperid: 8092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21578.pdf

Abstract:
The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare has been dominated by physician-centric, English-language benchmarks, creating a dangerous illusion of competence that ignores the interprofessional nature of patient care. To provide a more holistic and realistic assessment, we introduce HealthQA-BR, the first large-scale, system-wide benchmark for Portuguese-speaking healthcare. Comprising 5,632 questions from Brazil's national licensing and residency exams, it uniquely assesses knowledge not only in medicine and its specialties but also in nursing, dentistry, psychology, social work, and other allied health professions. We conducted a rigorous zero-shot evaluation of over 20 leading LLMs. Our results reveal that while state-of-the-art models like GPT 4.1 achieve high overall accuracy (86.6%), this top-line score masks alarming, previously unmeasured deficiencies. A granular analysis shows performance plummets from near-perfect in specialties like Ophthalmology (98.7%) to barely passing in Neurosurgery (60.0%) and, most notably, Social Work (68.4%). This "spiky" knowledge profile is a systemic issue observed across all models, demonstrating that high-level scores are insufficient for safety validation. By publicly releasing HealthQA-BR and our evaluation suite, we provide a crucial tool to move beyond single-score evaluations and toward a more honest, granular audit of AI readiness for the entire healthcare team.

Paperid: 8093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20128.pdf

Abstract:
RAG systems enhance LLMs by incorporating external knowledge, which is crucial for domains that demand factual accuracy and up-to-date information. However, evaluating the multifaceted quality of RAG outputs, spanning aspects such as contextual coherence, query relevance, factual correctness, and informational completeness, poses significant challenges. Existing evaluation methods often rely on simple lexical overlap metrics, which are inadequate for capturing these nuances, or involve complex multi-stage pipelines with intermediate steps like claim extraction or require finetuning specialized judge models, hindering practical efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose CCRS (Contextual Coherence and Relevance Score), a novel suite of five metrics that utilizes a single, powerful, pretrained LLM as a zero-shot, end-to-end judge. CCRS evaluates: Contextual Coherence (CC), Question Relevance (QR), Information Density (ID), Answer Correctness (AC), and Information Recall (IR). We apply CCRS to evaluate six diverse RAG system configurations on the challenging BioASQ dataset. Our analysis demonstrates that CCRS effectively discriminates between system performances, confirming, for instance, that the Mistral-7B reader outperforms Llama variants. We provide a detailed analysis of CCRS metric properties, including score distributions, convergent/discriminant validity, tie rates, population statistics, and discriminative power. Compared to the complex RAGChecker framework, CCRS offers comparable or superior discriminative power for key aspects like recall and faithfulness, while being significantly more computationally efficient. CCRS thus provides a practical, comprehensive, and efficient framework for evaluating and iteratively improving RAG systems.

Paperid: 8094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20057.pdf

Abstract:
We investigate the use of randomly generated data for the sake of pre-training a model. We justify this approach theoretically from the perspective of algorithmic complexity, building on recent research that shows that sequence models can be trained to approximate Solomonoff induction. We derive similar, but complementary theoretical results. We show empirically that synthetically generated data can be used to pre-train a model before the data is seen. We replicate earlier results that models trained this way show zero-shot in-context learning across a variety of datasets, and that this performance improves with scale. We extend earlier results to real-world data, and show that finetuning a model after pre-training offers faster convergence and better generalization.

Paperid: 8095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14040.pdf

Abstract:
This review explores recent advances in commonsense reasoning and intent detection, two key challenges in natural language understanding. We analyze 28 papers from ACL, EMNLP, and CHI (2020-2025), organizing them by methodology and application. Commonsense reasoning is reviewed across zero-shot learning, cultural adaptation, structured evaluation, and interactive contexts. Intent detection is examined through open-set models, generative formulations, clustering, and human-centered systems. By bridging insights from NLP and HCI, we highlight emerging trends toward more adaptive, multilingual, and context-aware models, and identify key gaps in grounding, generalization, and benchmark design.

Paperid: 8096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09679.pdf

Abstract:
We design strategies in nonlinear geometric analysis to temper the effects of adversarial learning for sufficiently smooth data of numerical method-type dynamics in encoder-decoder methods, variational and deterministic, through the use of geometric flow regularization. We augment latent spaces with geometric flows to control structure. Our techniques rely on adaptations of curvature and Ricci flow. We invent new geometric flows or discover them neurally and non-parametrically. All of our flows are solved using physics-informed learning. Traditional geometric meaning is traded for computing ability, but we maintain key geometric invariants, the primary of which are maintained, intrinsically-low structure, canonicity or a lack of irregularity, nontriviality due to sufficient lower bounds on curvature, and distortion of volume element, that develop quality in the inference stage. Our primary contributions are fourfold. We develop a loss based on Gaussian curvature using closed path circulation integration for surfaces, bypassing automatic differentiation of the Christoffel symbols through use of Stokes' theorem. We invent a new parametric flow derived from a linear version of the Gauss equation and a Riemannian decomposition for a custom tensor defined with a normal Hessian and Weyl tensor proxies. We develop two strategies based on time differentiation of functionals, one with a special case of scalar curvature for conformally-changed metrics, and another with harmonic maps, their energy, and induced metrics. Our methods, while diminished analytically, maintain overall integral latent structure. We showcase that curvature flows and the formulation of geometric structure in intermediary encoded settings enhance learning and overall zero-shot and adversarial fidelity.

Paperid: 8097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09331.pdf

Abstract:
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero-shot and few-shot generalization capabilities across complex natural language tasks, enabling their widespread use as virtual assistants for diverse applications such as translation and summarization. Despite being trained solely on large corpora of text without explicit supervision on author intent, LLMs appear to infer the underlying meaning of textual interactions. This raises a fundamental question: can LLMs model and reason about the intentions of others, i.e., do they possess a form of theory of mind? Understanding other's intentions is crucial for effective collaboration, which underpins human societal success and is essential for cooperative interactions among multiple agents, including humans and autonomous systems. In this work, we investigate the theory of mind in LLMs through the lens of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents learn to collaborate via repeated interactions, mirroring human social reasoning. Our approach aims to enhance artificial agent's ability to adapt and cooperate with both artificial and human partners. By leveraging LLM-based agents capable of natural language interaction, we move towards creating hybrid human-AI systems that can foster seamless collaboration, with broad implications for the future of human-artificial interaction.

Paperid: 8098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09329.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel methodologies in data collection, training, and evaluation. We first address alignment data collection. Existing approaches rely heavily on manually curated datasets or proprietary models. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lion, an adversarial distillation framework that iteratively refines training data by identifying and generating challenging instructions, enabling state-of-the-art zero-shot reasoning. Additionally, we introduce Web Reconstruction (WebR), a fully automated framework that synthesizes instruction-tuning data directly from raw web documents, significantly improving data diversity and scalability over existing synthetic data methods. Next, we enhance alignment training through novel optimization techniques. We develop Learning to Edit (LTE), a framework that enables LLMs to efficiently integrate new knowledge while preserving existing information. LTE leverages meta-learning to improve both real-time and batch knowledge updates. Furthermore, we introduce Bridging and Modeling Correlations (BMC), a refinement of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that explicitly captures token-level correlations in preference data, leading to superior alignment across QA and mathematical reasoning tasks. Finally, we tackle the challenge of evaluating alignment. Existing benchmarks emphasize response quality but overlook adherence to specific constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce FollowBench, a multi-level, fine-grained benchmark assessing LLMs' ability to follow complex constraints across diverse instruction types. Our results expose key weaknesses in current models' constraint adherence, offering insights for future improvements.

Paperid: 8099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07896.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revitalized philosophical debates surrounding artificial intelligence. Two of the most fundamental challenges - namely, the Frame Problem and the Symbol Grounding Problem - have historically been viewed as unsolvable within traditional symbolic AI systems. This study investigates whether modern LLMs possess the cognitive capacities required to address these problems. To do so, I designed two benchmark tasks reflecting the philosophical core of each problem, administered them under zero-shot conditions to 13 prominent LLMs (both closed and open-source), and assessed the quality of the models' outputs across five trials each. Responses were scored along multiple criteria, including contextual reasoning, semantic coherence, and information filtering. The results demonstrate that while open-source models showed variability in performance due to differences in model size, quantization, and instruction tuning, several closed models consistently achieved high scores. These findings suggest that select modern LLMs may be acquiring capacities sufficient to produce meaningful and stable responses to these long-standing theoretical challenges.

Paperid: 8100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05358.pdf

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V are capable of reasoning across text and image modalities, showing promise in a variety of complex vision-language tasks. In this preliminary study, we investigate the out-of-the-box capabilities of GPT-4V in the domain of image forensics, specifically, in detecting image splicing manipulations. Without any task-specific fine-tuning, we evaluate GPT-4V using three prompting strategies: Zero-Shot (ZS), Few-Shot (FS), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT), applied over a curated subset of the CASIA v2.0 splicing dataset. Our results show that GPT-4V achieves competitive detection performance in zero-shot settings (more than 85% accuracy), with CoT prompting yielding the most balanced trade-off across authentic and spliced images. Qualitative analysis further reveals that the model not only detects low-level visual artifacts but also draws upon real-world contextual knowledge such as object scale, semantic consistency, and architectural facts, to identify implausible composites. While GPT-4V lags behind specialized state-of-the-art splicing detection models, its generalizability, interpretability, and encyclopedic reasoning highlight its potential as a flexible tool in image forensics.

Paperid: 8101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04251.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces LLM-MARL, a unified framework that incorporates large language models (LLMs) into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to enhance coordination, communication, and generalization in simulated game environments. The framework features three modular components of Coordinator, Communicator, and Memory, which dynamically generate subgoals, facilitate symbolic inter-agent messaging, and support episodic recall. Training combines PPO with a language-conditioned loss and LLM query gating. LLM-MARL is evaluated in Google Research Football, MAgent Battle, and StarCraft II. Results show consistent improvements over MAPPO and QMIX in win rate, coordination score, and zero-shot generalization. Ablation studies demonstrate that subgoal generation and language-based messaging each contribute significantly to performance gains. Qualitative analysis reveals emergent behaviors such as role specialization and communication-driven tactics. By bridging language modeling and policy learning, this work contributes to the design of intelligent, cooperative agents in interactive simulations. It offers a path forward for leveraging LLMs in multi-agent systems used for training, games, and human-AI collaboration.

Paperid: 8102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03656.pdf

Abstract:
Malicious websites and phishing URLs pose an ever-increasing cybersecurity risk, with phishing attacks growing by 40% in a single year. Traditional detection approaches rely on machine learning classifiers or rule-based scanners operating in the cloud, but these face significant challenges in generalization, privacy, and evasion by sophisticated threats. In this paper, we propose a novel client-side framework for comprehensive URL analysis that leverages zero-shot inference by a local large language model (LLM) running entirely in-browser. Our system uses a compact LLM (e.g., 3B/8B parameters) via WebLLM to perform reasoning over rich context collected from the target webpage, including static code analysis (JavaScript abstract syntax trees, structure, and code patterns), dynamic sandbox execution results (DOM changes, API calls, and network requests),and visible content. We detail the architecture and methodology of the system, which combines a real browser sandbox (using iframes) resistant to common anti-analysis techniques, with an LLM-based analyzer that assesses potential vulnerabilities and malicious behaviors without any task-specific training (zero-shot). The LLM aggregates evidence from multiple sources (code, execution trace, page content) to classify the URL as benign or malicious and to provide an explanation of the threats or security issues identified. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of benign and malicious URLs, demonstrating that even a compact client-side model can achieve high detection accuracy and insightful explanations comparable to cloud-based solutions, while operating privately on end-user devices. The results show that client-side LLM inference is a feasible and effective solution to web threat analysis, eliminating the need to send potentially sensitive data to cloud services.

Paperid: 8103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23548.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in translation among other things, demonstrating competitive performance for many language pairs in zero- and few-shot settings. But unlike dedicated neural machine translation models, LLMs are not trained on any translation-related objective. What explains their remarkable translation abilities? Are these abilities grounded in "incidental bilingualism" (Briakou et al. 2023) in training data? Does instruction tuning contribute to it? Are LLMs capable of aligning and leveraging semantically identical or similar monolingual contents from different corners of the internet that are unlikely to fit in a single context window? I offer some reflections on this topic, informed by recent studies and growing user experience. My working hypothesis is that LLMs' translation abilities originate in two different types of pre-training data that may be internalized by the models in different ways. I discuss the prospects for testing the "duality" hypothesis empirically and its implications for reconceptualizing translation, human and machine, in the age of deep learning.

Paperid: 8104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20170.pdf

Abstract:
Solving algebraic word problems (AWPs) has recently emerged as an important natural language processing task. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful mathematical capabilities, and the Chain-of-Thought technique, which guides LLMs through step-by-step reasoning, has yielded impressive results. However, this reasoning ability is limited by the computational weaknesses of LLMs themselves, where calculation errors can accumulate, leading to incorrect final answers. To address this, we propose Program of Equations Thoughts (POET), which transforms the task of generating step-by-step reasoning answers into a two-stage task of predicting equations and generating code, offloading complex computations to a Python interpreter to avoid calculation errors in LLMs. Furthermore, we propose Zero-shot POET, which utilizes a manually designed template to enable LLMs to directly generate Python code for one-step solving. Our method achieves accuracies of 95.3% and 98.0% on the PEN and ALG514 datasets, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Zero-shot POET also achieves the SOTA result of 95.5% on the DRAW-1K dataset.

Paperid: 8105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18928.pdf

Abstract:
Unstructured clinical notes contain essential patient information but are challenging for physicians to search and interpret efficiently. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in question answering (QA), most existing systems lack transparency, usability, and alignment with clinical workflows. This work introduces an interactive QA system that enables physicians to query clinical notes via text or voice and receive extractive answers highlighted directly in the note for traceability. The system was built using OpenAI models with zero-shot prompting and evaluated across multiple metrics, including exact string match, word overlap, SentenceTransformer similarity, and BERTScore. Results show that while exact match scores ranged from 47 to 62 percent, semantic similarity scores exceeded 87 percent, indicating strong contextual alignment even when wording varied. To assess usability, the system was also evaluated using simulated clinical personas. Seven diverse physician and nurse personas interacted with the system across scenario-based tasks and provided structured feedback. The evaluations highlighted strengths in intuitive design and answer accessibility, alongside opportunities for enhancing explanation clarity.

Paperid: 8106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18234.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a robust and reinforcement-learning-enhanced network intrusion detection system (NIDS) designed for class-imbalanced and few-shot attack scenarios in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. Our model integrates a TabTransformer for effective tabular feature representation with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to optimize classification decisions via policy learning. Evaluated on the TON\textunderscore IoT benchmark, our method achieves a macro F1-score of 97.73\% and accuracy of 98.85\%. Remarkably, even on extremely rare classes like man-in-the-middle (MITM), our model achieves an F1-score of 88.79\%, showcasing strong robustness and few-shot detection capabilities. Extensive ablation experiments confirm the complementary roles of TabTransformer and PPO in mitigating class imbalance and improving generalization. These results highlight the potential of combining transformer-based tabular learning with reinforcement learning for real-world NIDS applications.

Paperid: 8107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14467.pdf

Abstract:
Despite advances in transformer-based language models (LMs), a fundamental question remains largely unanswered: Are all layers activated during inference? We investigate this question by detecting unactivated layers (which we refer to as Voids) using a non-trainable and parameter-free adaptive computation method called L2 Adaptive Computation (LAC). We adapt LAC from its original efficiency-focused application to trace activated layers during inference. This method monitors changes in the L2-norm of activations to identify voids. We analyze layer activation in instruction-tuned LMs across two phases: Prompt Processing (PP), where we trace activated layers for each token in the input prompts, and Response Generation (RG), where we trace activated layers for each generated token. We further demonstrate that distinct layers are activated during these two phases. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluated three distinct instruction-tuned LMs from the Llama, Mistral, and Qwen families on three benchmarks: MMLU, GPQA Diamond, and BoolQ. For example, on MMLU with a zero-shot setting, skipping voids in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct resulted in an improvement from 69.24 to 71.29 while the model uses only 30% of the layers. Similarly, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 on GPQA Diamond improved from 13.88 to 18.36 when using 70% of the layers during both the PP and RG phases. These results show that not all layers contribute equally during inference, and that selectively skipping most of them can improve the performance of models on certain tasks.

Paperid: 8108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11758.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot adaptation remains a core challenge for vision-language models (VLMs), especially under limited supervision and noisy support samples. We propose PromptFuseNL, a unified framework that enhances few-shot generalization by combining predictive prompt tuning with dual-branch positive and negative learning. The method refines class prototypes through task-conditioned residuals, multi-stage cross-modal coordination, and semantic hard negative mining. To address label noise, we introduce an unsupervised instance reweighting strategy that downweights unreliable support examples without requiring additional labels or structural changes. PromptFuseNL fuses visual and textual cues through lightweight modules for efficient and discriminative prediction. Evaluated across 15 benchmarks, it consistently surpasses existing prompt- and adapter-based methods in all shot settings while remaining highly efficient, achieving up to 300x faster training and 1000x lower FLOPs compared to full prompt tuning, achieving a new state-of-the-art for robust and scalable few-shot vision-language adaptation.

Paperid: 8109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10664.pdf

Abstract:
Verifying the authenticity of AI-generated images presents a growing challenge on social media platforms these days. While vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP outdo in multimodal representation, their capacity for AI-generated image classification is underexplored due to the absence of such labels during the pre-training process. This work investigates whether CLIP embeddings inherently contain information indicative of AI generation. A proposed pipeline extracts visual embeddings using a frozen CLIP model, feeds its embeddings to lightweight networks, and fine-tunes only the final classifier. Experiments on the public CIFAKE benchmark show the performance reaches 95% accuracy without language reasoning. Few-shot adaptation to curated custom with 20% of the data results in performance to 85%. A closed-source baseline (Gemini-2.0) has the best zero-shot accuracy yet fails on specific styles. Notably, some specific image types, such as wide-angle photographs and oil paintings, pose significant challenges to classification. These results indicate previously unexplored difficulties in classifying certain types of AI-generated images, revealing new and more specific questions in this domain that are worth further investigation.

Paperid: 8110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08203.pdf

Abstract:
Most work in AI music generation focused on audio, which has seen limited use in the music production industry due to its rigidity. To maximize flexibility while assuming only textual instructions from producers, we are among the first to tackle symbolic music editing. We circumvent the known challenge of lack of labeled data by proving that LLMs with zero-shot prompting can effectively edit drum grooves. The recipe of success is a creatively designed format that interfaces LLMs and music, while we facilitate evaluation by providing an evaluation dataset with annotated unit tests that highly aligns with musicians' judgment.

Paperid: 8111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06313.pdf

Abstract:
The paper considers the use of GPT models with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for qualitative and quantitative analytics on NATO sentiments, NATO unity and NATO Article 5 trust opinion scores in different web sources: news sites found via Google Search API, Youtube videos with comments, and Reddit discussions. A RAG approach using GPT-4.1 model was applied to analyse news where NATO related topics were discussed. Two levels of RAG analytics were used: on the first level, the GPT model generates qualitative news summaries and quantitative opinion scores using zero-shot prompts; on the second level, the GPT model generates the summary of news summaries. Quantitative news opinion scores generated by the GPT model were analysed using Bayesian regression to get trend lines. The distributions found for the regression parameters make it possible to analyse an uncertainty in specified news opinion score trends. Obtained results show a downward trend for analysed scores of opinion related to NATO unity. This approach does not aim to conduct real political analysis; rather, it consider AI based approaches which can be used for further analytics as a part of a complex analytical approach. The obtained results demonstrate that the use of GPT models for news analysis can give informative qualitative and quantitative analytics, providing important insights. The dynamic model based on neural ordinary differential equations was considered for modelling public opinions. This approach makes it possible to analyse different scenarios for evolving public opinions.

Paperid: 8112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06108.pdf

Abstract:
This study systematically evaluates 27 frontier Large Language Models on eight biology benchmarks spanning molecular biology, genetics, cloning, virology, and biosecurity. Models from major AI developers released between November 2022 and April 2025 were assessed through ten independent runs per benchmark. The findings reveal dramatic improvements in biological capabilities. Top model performance increased more than 4-fold on the challenging text-only subset of the Virology Capabilities Test over the study period, with OpenAI's o3 now performing twice as well as expert virologists. Several models now match or exceed expert-level performance on other challenging benchmarks, including the biology subsets of GPQA and WMDP and LAB-Bench CloningScenarios. Contrary to expectations, chain-of-thought did not substantially improve performance over zero-shot evaluation, while extended reasoning features in o3-mini and Claude 3.7 Sonnet typically improved performance as predicted by inference scaling. Benchmarks such as PubMedQA and the MMLU and WMDP biology subsets exhibited performance plateaus well below 100%, suggesting benchmark saturation and errors in the underlying benchmark data. The analysis highlights the need for more sophisticated evaluation methodologies as AI systems continue to advance.

Paperid: 8113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02172.pdf

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in capabilities, it is essential to assess how they perform on established benchmarks. In this study, we present a suite of experiments to assess the performance of modern LLMs (ranging from 3B to 90B+ parameters) on CaseHOLD, a legal benchmark dataset for identifying case holdings. Our experiments demonstrate scaling effects - performance on this task improves with model size, with more capable models like GPT4o and AmazonNovaPro achieving macro F1 scores of 0.744 and 0.720 respectively. These scores are competitive with the best published results on this dataset, and do not require any technically sophisticated model training, fine-tuning or few-shot prompting. To ensure that these strong results are not due to memorization of judicial opinions contained in the training data, we develop and utilize a novel citation anonymization test that preserves semantic meaning while ensuring case names and citations are fictitious. Models maintain strong performance under these conditions (macro F1 of 0.728), suggesting the performance is not due to rote memorization. These findings demonstrate both the promise and current limitations of LLMs for legal tasks with important implications for the development and measurement of automated legal analytics and legal benchmarks.

Paperid: 8114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01694.pdf

Abstract:
Efficiently adapting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP for few-shot learning poses challenges in balancing pre-trained knowledge retention and task-specific adaptation. Existing methods often overlook valuable structural information within the VLM's latent space. We introduce a topology-aware tuning approach integrating Representation Topology Divergence (RTD) into the Task Residual (TR) framework. By explicitly aligning the topological structures of visual and text representations using a combined RTD and Cross-Entropy loss, while freezing base VLM encoders, our method enhances few-shot performance. We optimize only lightweight Task Residual parameters, effectively leveraging topological information. Across 6 diverse benchmark datasets, our approach demonstrates significant gains, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 1-2\% over relevant baseline methods in few-shot settings. This work presents an effective strategy to boost VLM few-shot capabilities by incorporating topological alignment.

Paperid: 8115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21372.pdf

Abstract:
Speech Event Extraction (SpeechEE) is a challenging task that lies at the intersection of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), requiring the identification of structured event information from spoken language. In this work, we present a modular, pipeline-based SpeechEE framework that integrates high-performance ASR with semantic search-enhanced prompting of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our system first classifies speech segments likely to contain events using a hybrid filtering mechanism including rule-based, BERT-based, and LLM-based models. It then employs few-shot LLM prompting, dynamically enriched via semantic similarity retrieval, to identify event triggers and extract corresponding arguments. We evaluate the pipeline using multiple LLMs (Llama3-8B, GPT-4o-mini, and o1-mini) highlighting significant performance gains with o1-mini, which achieves 63.3% F1 on trigger classification and 27.8% F1 on argument classification, outperforming prior benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that pipeline approaches, when empowered by retrieval-augmented LLMs, can rival or exceed end-to-end systems while maintaining interpretability and modularity. This work provides practical insights into LLM-driven event extraction and opens pathways for future hybrid models combining textual and acoustic features.

Paperid: 8116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15983.pdf

Abstract:
The demand for efficient natural language processing (NLP) systems has led to the development of lightweight language models. Previous work in this area has primarily focused on manual design or training-based neural architecture search (NAS) methods. Recently, zero-shot NAS methods have been proposed for evaluating language models without the need for training. However, prevailing approaches to zero-shot NAS often face challenges such as biased evaluation metrics and computational inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce weight-weighted PCA (W-PCA), a novel zero-shot NAS method specifically tailored for lightweight language models. Our approach utilizes two evaluation proxies: the parameter count and the number of principal components with cumulative contribution exceeding $Î·$ in the feed-forward neural (FFN) layer. Additionally, by eliminating the need for gradient computations, we optimize the evaluation time, thus enhancing the efficiency of designing and evaluating lightweight language models. We conduct a comparative analysis on the GLUE and SQuAD datasets to evaluate our approach. The results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces training time compared to one-shot NAS methods and achieves higher scores in the testing phase compared to previous state-of-the-art training-based methods. Furthermore, we perform ranking evaluations on a dataset sampled from the FlexiBERT search space. Our approach exhibits superior ranking correlation and further reduces solving time compared to other zero-shot NAS methods that require gradient computation.

Paperid: 8117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14741.pdf

Abstract:
This article describes a novel optimization solution framework, called alternating gradient descent (GD) and minimization (AltGDmin), that is useful for many problems for which alternating minimization (AltMin) is a popular solution. AltMin is a special case of the block coordinate descent algorithm that is useful for problems in which minimization w.r.t one subset of variables keeping the other fixed is closed form or otherwise reliably solved. Denote the two blocks/subsets of the optimization variables Z by Za, Zb, i.e., Z = {Za, Zb}. AltGDmin is often a faster solution than AltMin for any problem for which (i) the minimization over one set of variables, Zb, is much quicker than that over the other set, Za; and (ii) the cost function is differentiable w.r.t. Za. Often, the reason for one minimization to be quicker is that the problem is ``decoupled" for Zb and each of the decoupled problems is quick to solve. This decoupling is also what makes AltGDmin communication-efficient for federated settings. Important examples where this assumption holds include (a) low rank column-wise compressive sensing (LRCS), low rank matrix completion (LRMC), (b) their outlier-corrupted extensions such as robust PCA, robust LRCS and robust LRMC; (c) phase retrieval and its sparse and low-rank model based extensions; (d) tensor extensions of many of these problems such as tensor LRCS and tensor completion; and (e) many partly discrete problems where GD does not apply -- such as clustering, unlabeled sensing, and mixed linear regression. LRCS finds important applications in multi-task representation learning and few shot learning, federated sketching, and accelerated dynamic MRI. LRMC and robust PCA find important applications in recommender systems, computer vision and video analytics.

Paperid: 8118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14066.pdf

Abstract:
We present a baseline for the CLPsych 2025 A.1 task: classifying self-states in mental health data taken from Reddit. We use few-shot learning with a 4-bit quantized Gemma 2 9B model and a data preprocessing step which first identifies relevant sentences indicating self-state evidence, and then performs a binary classification to determine whether the sentence is evidence of an adaptive or maladaptive self-state. This system outperforms our other method which relies on an LLM to highlight spans of variable length independently. We attribute the performance of our model to the benefits of this sentence chunking step for two reasons: partitioning posts into sentences 1) broadly matches the granularity at which self-states were human-annotated and 2) simplifies the task for our language model to a binary classification problem. Our system places third out of fourteen systems submitted for Task A.1, achieving a test-time recall of 0.579.

Paperid: 8119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12279.pdf

Abstract:
We present a geometry-driven method for normalizing dysarthric speech by modeling time, frequency, and amplitude distortions as smooth, local Lie group transformations of spectrograms. Scalar fields generate these deformations via exponential maps, and a neural network is trained - using only synthetically warped healthy speech - to infer the fields and apply an approximate inverse at test time. We introduce a spontaneous-symmetry-breaking (SSB) potential that encourages the model to discover non-trivial field configurations. On real pathological speech, the system delivers consistent gains: up to 17 percentage-point WER reduction on challenging TORGO utterances and a 16 percent drop in WER variance, with no degradation on clean CommonVoice data. Character and phoneme error rates improve in parallel, confirming linguistic relevance. Our results demonstrate that geometrically structured warping provides consistent, zero-shot robustness gains for dysarthric ASR.

Paperid: 8120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08786.pdf

Abstract:
The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest in their utilization for sequential recommendation tasks. While collaborative signals from similar users are central to recommendation modeling, effectively transforming these signals into a format that LLMs can understand and utilize remains challenging. The critical challenges include selecting relevant demonstrations from large-scale user interactions and ensuring their alignment with LLMs' reasoning process. To address these challenges, we introduce AdaptRec, a self-adaptive fram-ework that leverages LLMs for sequential recommendations by incorporating explicit collaborative signals. AdaptRec employs a two-phase user selection mechanism -- User Similarity Retrieval and Self-Adaptive User Selection -- to efficiently identify relevant user sequences in large-scale datasets from multi-metric evaluation. We also develop a User-Based Similarity Retrieval Prompt, enabling the model to actively select similar users and continuously refine its selection criteria during training. Using the collaborative signals from similar users, we construct a User-Contextualized Recommendation Prompt that translates their behavior sequences into natural language, explicitly integrating this information into the recommendation process. Experiments demonstrate AdaptRec's superior performance, with significant improvements in HitRatio@1 scores of 7.13\%, 18.16\%, and 10.41\% across real-world datasets with full fine-tuning, and even higher gains of 23.00\%, 15.97\%, and 17.98\% in few-shot scenarios.

Paperid: 8121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03725.pdf

Abstract:
Crowd and flow predictions have been extensively studied in mobility data science. Traditional forecasting methods have relied on statistical models such as ARIMA, later supplemented by deep learning approaches like ST-ResNet. More recently, foundation models for time series forecasting, such as TimeGPT, Chronos, and LagLlama, have emerged. A key advantage of these models is their ability to generate zero-shot predictions, allowing them to be applied directly to new tasks without retraining. This study evaluates the performance of TimeGPT compared to traditional approaches for predicting city-wide mobility timeseries using two bike-sharing datasets from New York City and Vienna, Austria. Model performance is assessed across short (1-hour), medium (12-hour), and long-term (24-hour) forecasting horizons. The results highlight the potential of foundation models for mobility forecasting while also identifying limitations of our experiments.

Paperid: 8122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02254.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have not only showcased impressive creative capabilities but also revealed emerging agentic behaviors that exploit linguistic ambiguity in adversarial settings. In this study, we investigate how an LLM, acting as an autonomous agent, leverages semantic ambiguity to generate deceptive puzzles that mislead and challenge human users. Inspired by the popular puzzle game "Connections", we systematically compare puzzles produced through zero-shot prompting, role-injected adversarial prompts, and human-crafted examples, with an emphasis on understanding the underlying agent decision-making processes. Employing computational analyses with HateBERT to quantify semantic ambiguity, alongside subjective human evaluations, we demonstrate that explicit adversarial agent behaviors significantly heighten semantic ambiguity -- thereby increasing cognitive load and reducing fairness in puzzle solving. These findings provide critical insights into the emergent agentic qualities of LLMs and underscore important ethical considerations for evaluating and safely deploying autonomous language systems in both educational technologies and entertainment.

Paperid: 8123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16513.pdf

Abstract:
The PerAnsSumm 2025 challenge focuses on perspective-aware healthcare answer summarization (Agarwal et al., 2025). This work proposes a few-shot learning framework using a Snorkel-BART-SVM pipeline for classifying and summarizing open-ended healthcare community question-answering (CQA). An SVM model is trained with weak supervision via Snorkel, enhancing zero-shot learning. Extractive classification identifies perspective-relevant sentences, which are then summarized using a pretrained BART-CNN model. The approach achieved 12th place among 100 teams in the shared task, demonstrating computational efficiency and contextual accuracy. By leveraging pretrained summarization models, this work advances medical CQA research and contributes to clinical decision support systems.

Paperid: 8124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15693.pdf

Abstract:
Supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL) are both widely used to train general-purpose agents for complex tasks, yet their generalization capabilities and underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we provide a direct comparison between SL and RL in terms of zero-shot generalization. Using the Habitat visual navigation task as a testbed, we evaluate Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Behavior Cloning (BC) agents across two levels of generalization: state-goal pair generalization within seen environments and generalization to unseen environments. Our experiments show that PPO consistently outperforms BC across both zero-shot settings and performance metrics-success rate and SPL. Interestingly, even though additional optimal training data enables BC to match PPO's zero-shot performance in SPL, it still falls significantly behind in success rate. We attribute this to a fundamental difference in how models trained by these algorithms generalize: BC-trained models generalize by imitating successful trajectories, whereas TD-based RL-trained models generalize through combinatorial experience stitching-leveraging fragments of past trajectories (mostly failed ones) to construct solutions for new tasks. This allows RL to efficiently find solutions in vast state space and discover novel strategies beyond the scope of human knowledge. Besides providing empirical evidence and understanding, we also propose practical guidelines for improving the generalization capabilities of RL and SL through algorithm design.

Paperid: 8125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11349.pdf

Abstract:
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) represents a cutting-edge paradigm within the broader scope of machine learning, designed to empower models with the ability to assimilate new classes of data with limited examples while safeguarding existing knowledge. The paper will present different solutions which contain extensive experiments across large-scale datasets, domain shifts, and network architectures to evaluate and compare the selected methods. We highlight their advantages and then present an experimental approach with the purpose of improving the most promising one by replacing the visual-language (V-L) model (CLIP) with another V-L model (CLOOB) that seem to outperform it on zero-shot learning tasks. The aim of this report is to present an experimental method for FSCIL that would improve its performance. We also plan to offer an overview followed by an analysis of the recent advancements in FSCIL domain, focusing on various strategies to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and improve the adaptability of models to evolving tasks and datasets.

Paperid: 8126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06814.pdf

Abstract:
How can we build generalist robot systems? Scale may not be enough due to the significant multimodality of robotics tasks, lack of easily accessible data and the challenges of deploying on physical hardware. Meanwhile, most deployed robotic systems today are inherently modular and can leverage the independent generalization capabilities of each module to perform well. Therefore, this thesis seeks to tackle the task of building generalist robot agents by integrating these components into one: combining modularity with large-scale learning for general purpose robot control. The first question we consider is: how can we build modularity and hierarchy into learning systems? Our key insight is that rather than having the agent learn hierarchy and low-level control end-to-end, we can enforce modularity via planning to enable more efficient and capable robot learners. Next, we come to the role of scale in building generalist robot systems. To scale, neural networks require vast amounts of diverse data, expressive architectures to fit the data and a source of supervision to generate the data. We leverage a powerful supervision source: classical planning, which can generalize, but is expensive to run and requires access to privileged information to perform well in practice. We use these planners to supervise large-scale policy learning in simulation to produce generalist agents. Finally, we consider how to unify modularity with large-scale policy learning to build real-world robot systems capable of performing zero-shot manipulation. We do so by tightly integrating key ingredients of modular high and mid-level planning, learned local control, procedural scene generation and large-scale policy learning for sim2real transfer. We demonstrate that this recipe can produce a single, generalist agent that can solve challenging long-horizon manipulation tasks in the real world.

Paperid: 8127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02695.pdf

Abstract:
With the rapid development in Transformer-based language models, the reading comprehension tasks on short documents and simple questions have been largely addressed. Long documents, specifically the scientific documents that are densely packed with knowledge discovered and developed by humans, remain relatively unexplored. These documents often come with a set of complex and more realistic questions, adding to their complexity. We present a zero-shot pipeline framework that enables social science researchers to perform question-answering tasks that are complex yet of predetermined question formats on full-length research papers without requiring machine learning expertise. Our approach integrates pre-trained language models to handle challenging scenarios including multi-span extraction, multi-hop reasoning, and long-answer generation. Evaluating on MLPsych, a novel dataset of social psychology papers with annotated complex questions, we demonstrate that our framework achieves strong performance through combination of extractive and generative models. This work advances document understanding capabilities for social sciences while providing practical tools for researchers.

Paperid: 8128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18536.pdf

Abstract:
Visual Question Answering requires models to generate accurate answers by integrating visual and textual understanding. However, VQA models still struggle with hallucinations, producing convincing but incorrect answers, particularly in knowledge-driven and Out-of-Distribution scenarios. We introduce FilterRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that combines BLIP-VQA with Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ground answers in external knowledge sources like Wikipedia and DBpedia. FilterRAG achieves 36.5% accuracy on the OK-VQA dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing hallucinations and improving robustness in both in-domain and Out-of-Distribution settings. These findings highlight the potential of FilterRAG to improve Visual Question Answering systems for real-world deployment.

Paperid: 8129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16556.pdf

Abstract:
This study examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform when tackling quantitative management decision problems in a zero-shot setting. Drawing on 900 responses generated by five leading models across 20 diverse managerial scenarios, our analysis explores whether these base models can deliver accurate numerical decisions under varying presentation formats, scenario complexities, and repeated attempts. Contrary to prior findings, we observed no significant effects of text presentation format (direct, narrative, or tabular) or text length on accuracy. However, scenario complexity -- particularly in terms of constraints and irrelevant parameters -- strongly influenced performance, often degrading accuracy. Surprisingly, the models handled tasks requiring multiple solution steps more effectively than expected. Notably, only 28.8\% of responses were exactly correct, highlighting limitations in precision. We further found no significant ``learning effect'' across iterations: performance remained stable across repeated queries. Nonetheless, significant variations emerged among the five tested LLMs, with some showing superior binary accuracy. Overall, these findings underscore both the promise and the pitfalls of harnessing LLMs for complex quantitative decision-making, informing managers and researchers about optimal deployment strategies.

Paperid: 8130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16142.pdf

Abstract:
In this study, we investigate the integration of a large language model (LLM) with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, specifically focusing on enhancing rare word recognition performance. Using a 190,000-hour dataset primarily sourced from YouTube, pre-processed with Whisper V3 pseudo-labeling, we demonstrate that the LLM-ASR architecture outperforms traditional Zipformer-Transducer models in the zero-shot rare word recognition task, after training on a large dataset. Our analysis reveals that the LLM contributes significantly to improvements in rare word error rate (R-WER), while the speech encoder primarily determines overall transcription performance (Orthographic Word Error Rate, O-WER, and Normalized Word Error Rate, N-WER). Through extensive ablation studies, we highlight the importance of adapter integration in aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's linguistic capabilities. Furthermore, we emphasize the critical role of high-quality labeled data in achieving optimal performance. These findings provide valuable insights into the synergy between LLM-based ASR architectures, paving the way for future advancements in large-scale LLM-based speech recognition systems.

Paperid: 8131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14620.pdf

Abstract:
This paper investigates the efficacy of RWKV, a novel language model architecture known for its linear attention mechanism, for generating sentence embeddings in a zero-shot setting. I conduct a layer-wise analysis to evaluate the semantic similarity captured by embeddings from different hidden layers of a pre-trained RWKV model. The performance is assessed on the Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MRPC) dataset using Spearman correlation and compared against a GloVe-based baseline. My results indicate that while RWKV embeddings capture some semantic relatedness, they underperform compared to the GloVe baseline in terms of Spearman correlation. I also analyze the inference time and GPU memory usage, highlighting the computational trade-offs associated with RWKV embeddings. The findings suggest that while RWKV offers potential advantages in terms of linear scaling, its zero-shot sentence embedding quality for semantic similarity tasks requires further investigation and potential task-specific fine-tuning to match or exceed simpler baselines.

Paperid: 8132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14350.pdf

Abstract:
The cardinality estimation is a key aspect of query optimization research, and its performance has significantly improved with the integration of machine learning. To overcome the "cold start" problem or the lack of model transferability in learned cardinality estimators, some pre-training cardinality estimation models have been proposed that use learning across multiple datasets and corresponding workloads. These models typically train on a dataset created by uniformly sampling from many datasets, but this approach may not be optimal. By applying the Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (Group DRO) algorithm to training datasets, we find that some specific training datasets contribute more significantly to model performance than others. Based on this observation, we conduct extensive experiments to delve deeper into pre-training cardinality estimators. Our results show how the performance of these models can be influenced by the datasets and corresponding workloads. Finally, we introduce a simplified training dataset, which has been reduced to a fraction of the size of existing pretraining datasets. Sufficient experimental results demonstrate that the pre-trained cardinality estimator based on this simplified dataset can still achieve comparable performance to existing models in zero-shot setups.

Paperid: 8133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13502.pdf

Abstract:
We show that Large Language Model from Power Law Decoder Representations (PLDR-LLM) is a foundational model whose deductive outputs are invariant tensors up to a small perturbation. PLDR-LLM learns a singularity condition for the deductive outputs that enable the once-inferred energy-curvature tensor $\mathbf{G}_{LM}$ to replace the deep neural network of power law graph attention (PLGA) generating the deductive outputs at inference. We demonstrate that a cache for $\mathbf{G}_{LM}$ (G-cache) and KV-cache can be implemented in a straightforward manner to improve the inference time. The invariance and generalizable nature of deductive outputs is at a very high fidelity where deductive outputs have same RMSE and determinant values up to 15 decimal places after caching, and zero-shot benchmark scores remain unchanged. Ablation studies show that learned deductive outputs have distinct loss and accuracy characteristics from models pretrained with transferred, randomly initialized or identity tensors as a constant tensor operator and an LLM with scaled-dot product attention (SDPA) is a special case of PLDR-LLM where $\mathbf{G}_{LM}$ is predefined as identity. The observed invariance characteristic introduces a novel asymmetry between training and inference phases with caching. We outline observed common characteristics of the deductive outputs for the learned singularity condition. We provide an implementation of a training and inference framework for PLDR-LLM with KV-cache and G-cache.

Paperid: 8134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10792.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance on a series of downstream tasks. Yet they cannot be trained directly for that objective, unless the distribution of downstream tasks is known. Existing approaches either use other learning criteria [BBQ+ 18, TRO23, TO21, HDB+ 19], or explicitly set a prior on downstream tasks, such as reward functions given by a random neural network [FPAL24]. Here we prove that the zero-shot RL loss can be optimized directly, for a range of non-informative priors such as white noise rewards, temporally smooth rewards, ``scattered'' sparse rewards, or a combination of those. Thus, it is possible to learn the optimal zero-shot features algorithmically, for a wide mixture of priors. Surprisingly, the white noise prior leads to an objective almost identical to the one in VISR [HDB+19], via a different approach. This shows that some seemingly arbitrary choices in VISR, such as Von Mises--Fisher distributions, do maximize downstream performance. This also suggests more efficient ways to tackle the VISR objective. Finally, we discuss some consequences and limitations of the zero-shot RL objective, such as its tendency to produce narrow optimal features if only using Gaussian dense reward priors.

Paperid: 8135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10790.pdf

Abstract:
In reinforcement learning, universal successor features (SFs) are a way to provide zero-shot adaptation to new tasks at test time: they provide optimal policies for all downstream reward functions lying in the linear span of a set of base features. But it is unclear what constitutes a good set of base features, that could be useful for a wide set of downstream tasks beyond their linear span. Laplacian eigenfunctions (the eigenfunctions of $Î+Î^\ast$ with $Î$ the Laplacian operator of some reference policy and $Î^\ast$ that of the time-reversed dynamics) have been argued to play a role, and offer good empirical performance. Here, for the first time, we identify the optimal base features based on an objective criterion of downstream performance, in a non-tautological way without assuming the downstream tasks are linear in the features. We do this for three generic classes of downstream tasks: reaching a random goal state, dense random Gaussian rewards, and random ``scattered'' sparse rewards. The features yielding optimal expected downstream performance turn out to be the \emph{same} for these three task families. They do not coincide with Laplacian eigenfunctions in general, though they can be expressed from $Î$: in the simplest case (deterministic environment and decay factor $Î³$ close to $1$), they are the eigenfunctions of $Î^{-1}+(Î^{-1})^\ast$. We obtain these results under an assumption of large behavior cloning regularization with respect to a reference policy, a setting often used for offline RL. Along the way, we get new insights into KL-regularized\option{natural} policy gradient, and into the lack of SF information in the norm of Bellman gaps.

Paperid: 8136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10266.pdf

Abstract:
Data elicitation from human participants is one of the core data collection strategies used in empirical linguistic research. The amount of participants in such studies may vary considerably, ranging from a handful to crowdsourcing dimensions. Even if they provide resourceful extensive data, both of these settings come alongside many disadvantages, such as low control of participants' attention during task completion, precarious working conditions in crowdsourcing environments, and time-consuming experimental designs. For these reasons, this research aims to answer the question of whether Large Language Models (LLMs) may overcome those obstacles if included in empirical linguistic pipelines. Two reproduction case studies are conducted to gain clarity into this matter: Cruz (2023) and Lombard et al. (2021). The two forced elicitation tasks, originally designed for human participants, are reproduced in the proposed framework with the help of OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini model. Its performance with our zero-shot prompting baseline shows the effectiveness and high versatility of LLMs, that tend to outperform human informants in linguistic tasks. The findings of the second replication further highlight the need to explore additional prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which, in a second follow-up experiment, demonstrates higher alignment to human performance on both critical and filler items. Given the limited scale of this study, it is worthwhile to further explore the performance of LLMs in empirical Linguistics and in other future applications in the humanities.

Paperid: 8137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04095.pdf

Abstract:
This work presents a custom approach to developing a domain specific knowledge assistant for sustainability reporting using the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). In this domain, there is no publicly available question-answer dataset, which has impeded the development of a high-quality chatbot to support companies with IFRS reporting. The two key contributions of this project therefore are: (1) A high-quality synthetic question-answer (QA) dataset based on IFRS sustainability standards, created using a novel generation and evaluation pipeline leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). This comprises 1,063 diverse QA pairs that address a wide spectrum of potential user queries in sustainability reporting. Various LLM-based techniques are employed to create the dataset, including chain-of-thought reasoning and few-shot prompting. A custom evaluation framework is developed to assess question and answer quality across multiple dimensions, including faithfulness, relevance, and domain specificity. The dataset averages a score range of 8.16 out of 10 on these metrics. (2) Two architectures for question-answering in the sustainability reporting domain - a RAG pipeline and a fully LLM-based pipeline. The architectures are developed by experimenting, fine-tuning, and training on the QA dataset. The final pipelines feature an LLM fine-tuned on domain specific data and an industry classification component to improve the handling of complex queries. The RAG architecture achieves an accuracy of 85.32% on single-industry and 72.15% on cross-industry multiple-choice questions, outperforming the baseline approach by 4.67 and 19.21 percentage points, respectively. The LLM-based pipeline achieves an accuracy of 93.45% on single-industry and 80.30% on cross-industry multiple-choice questions, an improvement of 12.80 and 27.36 percentage points over the baseline, respectively.

Paperid: 8138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02722.pdf

Abstract:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advances in recent years, particularly with the emergence of Large Language Models that have achieved unprecedented performance across many tasks. However, these developments have mainly benefited a small number of high-resource languages such as English. The majority of languages still face significant challenges due to the scarcity of training data and computational resources. To address this issue, this thesis focuses on cross-lingual transfer learning, a research area aimed at leveraging data and models from high-resource languages to improve NLP performance for low-resource languages. Specifically, we focus on Sequence Labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition, Opinion Target Extraction, and Argument Mining. The research is structured around three main objectives: (1) advancing data-based cross-lingual transfer learning methods through improved translation and annotation projection techniques, (2) developing enhanced model-based transfer learning approaches utilizing state-of-the-art multilingual models, and (3) applying these methods to real-world problems while creating open-source resources that facilitate future research in low-resource NLP. More specifically, this thesis presents a new method to improve data-based transfer with T-Projection, a state-of-the-art annotation projection method that leverages text-to-text multilingual models and machine translation systems. T-Projection significantly outperforms previous annotation projection methods by a wide margin. For model-based transfer, we introduce a constrained decoding algorithm that enhances cross-lingual Sequence Labeling in zero-shot settings using text-to-text models. Finally, we develop Medical mT5, the first multilingual text-to-text medical model, demonstrating the practical impact of our research on real-world applications.

Paperid: 8139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17171.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize subtle differences in meaning or the combination of states and objects through the use of known and unknown concepts during training. Existing methods either focused on prompt configuration or on using prompts to tune the pre-trained Vision-Language model. However, these methods faced challenges in accurately identifying subtle differences in meaning or combining states with objects. To jointly eradicate the above issues and construct an efficient and effective CZSL technique, we suggest a method to improve attribute recognition performance by utilizing diverse Prompt Learning with an Inter/Intra-Modality Fusion Synthesizer in scene understanding involving subtle semantic differences and multiple objects.

Paperid: 8140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13479.pdf

Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) enables machine learning models to generalize effectively with minimal labeled data, making it crucial for data-scarce domains such as healthcare, robotics, and natural language processing. Despite its potential, FSL faces challenges including sensitivity to initialization, difficulty in adapting to diverse domains, and vulnerability to noisy datasets. To address these issues, this paper introduces Adaptive Few-Shot Learning (AFSL), a framework that integrates advancements in meta-learning, domain alignment, noise resilience, and multi-modal integration. AFSL consists of four key modules: a Dynamic Stability Module for performance consistency, a Contextual Domain Alignment Module for domain adaptation, a Noise-Adaptive Resilience Module for handling noisy data, and a Multi-Modal Fusion Module for integrating diverse modalities. This work also explores strategies such as task-aware data augmentation, semi-supervised learning, and explainable AI techniques to enhance the applicability and robustness of FSL. AFSL provides scalable, reliable, and impactful solutions for real-world, high-stakes domains.

Paperid: 8141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09719.pdf

Abstract:
This study conducts a systematic assessment of the capabilities of 12 machine learning models and model variations in detecting economic ideology. As an evaluation benchmark, I use manifesto data spanning six elections in the United Kingdom and pre-annotated by expert and crowd coders. The analysis assesses the performance of several generative, fine-tuned, and zero-shot models at the granular and aggregate levels. The results show that generative models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Flash consistently outperform other models against all benchmarks. However, they pose issues of accessibility and resource availability. Fine-tuning yielded competitive performance and offers a reliable alternative through domain-specific optimization. But its dependency on training data severely limits scalability. Zero-shot models consistently face difficulties with identifying signals of economic ideology, often resulting in negative associations with human coding. Using general knowledge for the domain-specific task of ideology scaling proved to be unreliable. Other key findings include considerable within-party variation, fine-tuning benefiting from larger training data, and zero-shot's sensitivity to prompt content. The assessments include the strengths and limitations of each model and derive best-practices for automated analyses of political content.

Paperid: 8142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08361.pdf

Abstract:
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is not robust to changes in the distribution of data. When the distribution of test data is different from that of training data, the problem is known as out-of-distribution generalization. Recently, two techniques have been developed for addressing out-of-distribution generalization in computer vision: weight averaging (WA) and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM). WA involves training multiple models with different hyperparameters and then averaging the weights of these models, which can significantly improve out-of-distribution generalization performance. SAM optimizes a neural network to find minima in flat regions, which have been proven to perform well under distribution shifts. While these techniques have made great progress, there is still room for improvement and further exploration. In this thesis, we propose increasing the model diversity in WA explicitly by introducing gradient similarity as a loss regularizer to further improve out-of-distribution generalization performance. We also propose combining WA and SAM to solve the problem of few-shot domain adaptation. Our extensive experiments on digits datasets (MNIST, SVHN, USPS, MNIST-M) and other domain adaptation datasets (VLCS, PACS) show that combining WA and SAM leads to improved out-of-distribution generalization performance and significantly increases few-shot domain adaptation accuracy.

Paperid: 8143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04832.pdf

Abstract:
This paper introduces ActPC-Geom, an approach to accelerate Active Predictive Coding (ActPC) in neural networks by integrating information geometry, specifically using Wasserstein-metric-based methods for measure-dependent gradient flows. We propose replacing KL-divergence in ActPC's predictive error assessment with the Wasserstein metric, suggesting this may enhance network robustness. To make this computationally feasible, we present strategies including: (1) neural approximators for inverse measure-dependent Laplacians, (2) approximate kernel PCA embeddings for low-rank approximations feeding into these approximators, and (3) compositional hypervector embeddings derived from kPCA outputs, with algebra optimized for fuzzy FCA lattices learned through neural architectures analyzing network states. This results in an ActPC architecture capable of real-time online learning and integrating continuous (e.g., transformer-like or Hopfield-net-like) and discrete symbolic ActPC networks, including frameworks like OpenCog Hyperon or ActPC-Chem for algorithmic chemistry evolution. Shared probabilistic, concept-lattice, and hypervector models enable symbolic-subsymbolic integration. Key features include (1) compositional reasoning via hypervector embeddings in transformer-like architectures for tasks like commonsense reasoning, and (2) Hopfield-net dynamics enabling associative long-term memory and attractor-driven cognitive features. We outline how ActPC-Geom combines few-shot learning with online weight updates, enabling deliberative thinking and seamless symbolic-subsymbolic reasoning. Ideas from Galois connections are explored for efficient hybrid ActPC/ActPC-Chem processing. Finally, we propose a specialized HPC design optimized for real-time focused attention and deliberative reasoning tailored to ActPC-Geom's demands.

Paperid: 8144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02518.pdf

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.

Paperid: 8145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02486.pdf

Abstract:
Recent advancements in prompting techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved their reasoning, planning, and action abilities. This paper examines these prompting techniques through the lens of model predictive control (MPC). We show that LLMs act as implicit planning cost function minimizers when planning prompts are used. We propose a unified MPC framework for planning with LLMs and demonstrate improved performance over few shot prompting on several planning benchmarks.

Paperid: 8146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00889.pdf

Abstract:
While recent advancements in foundation models have significantly impacted machine learning, rigorous tests on the performance of time series foundation models (TSFMs) remain largely underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study evaluating the zero-shot, long-horizon forecasting abilities of several leading TSFMs over two synthetic datasets constituting noisy periodic time series. We assess model efficacy across different noise levels, underlying frequencies, and sampling rates. As benchmarks for comparison, we choose two statistical techniques: a Fourier transform (FFT)-based approach and a linear autoregressive (AR) model. Our findings demonstrate that while for time series with bounded periods and higher sampling rates, TSFMs can match or outperform the statistical approaches, their forecasting abilities deteriorate with longer periods, higher noise levels, lower sampling rates and more complex shapes of the time series.

Paperid: 8147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18779.pdf

Abstract:
Long COVID continues to challenge public health by affecting a significant segment of individuals who have recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection yet endure prolonged and often debilitating symptoms. Social media has emerged as a vital resource for those seeking real-time information, peer support, and validating their health concerns related to Long COVID. This paper examines recent works focusing on mining, analyzing, and interpreting user-generated content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube to capture the broader discourse on persistent post-COVID conditions. A novel transformer-based zero-shot learning approach serves as the foundation for classifying research papers in this area into four primary categories: Clinical or Symptom Characterization, Advanced NLP or Computational Methods, Policy, Advocacy, or Public Health Communication, and Online Communities and Social Support. This methodology showcases the adaptability of advanced language models in categorizing research papers without predefined training labels, thus enabling a more rapid and scalable assessment of existing literature. This review highlights the multifaceted nature of Long COVID research, where computational techniques applied to social media data reveal insights into narratives of individuals suffering from Long COVID. This review also demonstrates the capacity of social media analytics to inform clinical practice and contribute to policy-making related to Long COVID.

Paperid: 8148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15632.pdf

Abstract:
Compositional understanding allows visual language models to interpret complex relationships between objects, attributes, and relations in images and text. However, most existing methods often rely on hard negative examples and fine-tuning, which can overestimate improvements and are limited by the difficulty of obtaining hard negatives. In this work, we introduce Zero-Shot Compositional Understanding (ZS-CU), a novel task that enhances compositional understanding without requiring hard negative training data. We propose YUKINO (Yielded Compositional Understanding Knowledge via Textual Inversion with NO), which uses textual inversion to map unlabeled images to pseudo-tokens in a pre-trained CLIP model. We propose introducing "no" logical regularization to address the issue of token interaction in inversion. Additionally, we suggest using knowledge distillation to reduce the time complexity of textual inversion. Experimental results show that YUKINO outperforms the existing multi-modal SOTA models by over 8% on the SugarCREPE benchmark, and also achieves significant improvements in image retrieval tasks.

Paperid: 8149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08842.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding and extracting the grammar of a domain-specific language (DSL) is crucial for various software engineering tasks; however, manually creating these grammars is time-intensive and error-prone. This paper presents Kajal, a novel approach that automatically infers grammar from DSL code snippets by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) through prompt engineering and few-shot learning. Kajal dynamically constructs input prompts, using contextual information to guide the LLM in generating the corresponding grammars, which are iteratively refined through a feedback-driven approach. Our experiments show that Kajal achieves 60% accuracy with few-shot learning and 45% without it, demonstrating the significant impact of few-shot learning on the tool's effectiveness. This approach offers a promising solution for automating DSL grammar extraction, and future work will explore using smaller, open-source LLMs and testing on larger datasets to further validate Kajal's performance.

Paperid: 8150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07865.pdf

Abstract:
This paper addresses network optimization in dynamic systems, where factors such as user composition, service requirements, system capacity, and channel conditions can change abruptly and unpredictably. Unlike existing studies that focus primarily on optimizing long-term performance in steady states, we develop online learning algorithms that enable rapid adaptation to sudden changes. Recognizing that many current network optimization algorithms rely on dual methods to iteratively learn optimal Lagrange multipliers, we propose zero-shot updates for these multipliers using only information available at the time of abrupt changes. By combining Taylor series analysis with complementary slackness conditions, we theoretically derive zero-shot updates applicable to various abrupt changes in two distinct network optimization problems. These updates can be integrated with existing algorithms to significantly improve performance during transitory phases in terms of total utility, operational cost, and constraint violations. Simulation results demonstrate that our zero-shot updates substantially improve transitory performance, often achieving near-optimal outcomes without additional learning, even under severe system changes.

Paperid: 8151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06419.pdf

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various language tasks, but their widespread deployment is impeded by their large size and high computational costs. Structural pruning is a prevailing technique used to introduce sparsity into pre-trained models and facilitate direct hardware acceleration during inference by removing redundant connections (structurally-grouped parameters), such as channels and attention heads. Existing structural pruning approaches often employ either global or layer-wise pruning criteria; however, they are hindered by ineffectiveness stemming from inaccurate evaluation of connection importance. Global pruning methods typically assess component importance using near-zero and unreliable gradients, while layer-wise pruning approaches encounter significant pruning error accumulation issues. To this end, we propose a more accurate pruning metric based on the block-wise importance score propagation, termed LLM-BIP. Specifically, LLM-BIP precisely evaluates connection importance by gauging its influence on the respective transformer block output, which can be efficiently approximated in a single forward pass through an upper bound derived from the assumption of Lipschitz continuity. We evaluate the proposed method using LLaMA-7B, Vicuna-7B, and LLaMA-13B across common zero-shot tasks. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves an average of 3.26% increase in accuracy for common reasoning tasks compared to previous best baselines. It also reduces perplexity by 14.09 and 68.76 on average for the WikiText2 dataset and PTB dataset, respectively.

Paperid: 8152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18924.pdf

Abstract:
This study investigates the impact of example selection on the performance of au-tomated essay scoring (AES) using few-shot prompting with GPT models. We evaluate the effects of the choice and order of examples in few-shot prompting on several versions of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models. Our experiments involve 119 prompts with different examples, and we calculate the quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) to measure the agreement between GPT and human rater scores. Regres-sion analysis is used to quantitatively assess biases introduced by example selec-tion. The results show that the impact of example selection on QWK varies across models, with GPT-3.5 being more influenced by examples than GPT-4. We also find evidence of majority label bias, which is a tendency to favor the majority la-bel among the examples, and recency bias, which is a tendency to favor the label of the most recent example, in GPT-generated essay scores and QWK, with these biases being more pronounced in GPT-3.5. Notably, careful example selection enables GPT-3.5 models to outperform some GPT-4 models. However, among the GPT models, the June 2023 version of GPT-4, which is not the latest model, exhibits the highest stability and performance. Our findings provide insights into the importance of example selection in few-shot prompting for AES, especially in GPT-3.5 models, and highlight the need for individual performance evaluations of each model, even for minor versions.

Paperid: 8153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14789.pdf

Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has attracted a surge of attention for its superior zero-shot performance and excellent transferability to downstream tasks. However, training such large-scale models usually requires substantial computation and storage, which poses barriers for general users with consumer-level computers. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we investigate how to achieve competitive performance on only one Nvidia RTX3090 GPU and with one terabyte for storing dataset. On one hand, we simplify the transformer block structure and combine Weight Inheritance with multi-stage Knowledge Distillation (WIKD), thereby reducing the parameters and improving the inference speed during training along with deployment. On the other hand, confronted with the convergence challenge posed by small dataset, we generate synthetic captions for each sample as data augmentation, and devise a novel Pair Matching (PM) loss to fully exploit the distinguishment among positive and negative image-text pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can achieve a new state-of-the-art datascale-parameter-accuracy tradeoff, which could further popularize the CLIP model in the related research community.

Paperid: 8154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13237.pdf

Abstract:
Recently, generative pre-trained models have made significant strides, particularly highlighted by the release of ChatGPT and GPT-4, which exhibit superior cross-domain capabilities. However, these models still face challenges on constrained writing tasks like poem generation under open-domain titles. In response to this challenge, we introduce Block Inverse Prompting (BIPro) constrained generation framework. BIPro leverages two block inverse prompting methods, revise and rewrite, that mimic the process of human text writing using block generative models. It significantly improves the zero-shot generation quality on the formidable constrained generation task of open-domain traditional-form Chinese poem generation. Based on a less powerful block generative model GLM-10B-Chinese, poems composed via BIPro without priming or additional training outperform both most advanced direct generative systems like GPT-4 or GLM-4 and best domain-specific systems such as Yusheng, Shisanbai, or Baidu Poetry Helper in human evaluation by proficient poets. Finally, BIPro considerably narrows the gap between AI-generated works and short-listed human literary arts in another human evaluation, unveiling the promising potential of block generative models in improving the quality of constrained generation.

Paperid: 8155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12641.pdf

Abstract:
The field of AI-assisted music creation has made significant strides, yet existing systems often struggle to meet the demands of iterative and nuanced music production. These challenges include providing sufficient control over the generated content and allowing for flexible, precise edits. This thesis tackles these issues by introducing a series of advancements that progressively build upon each other, enhancing the controllability and editability of text-to-music generation models. First, we introduce Loop Copilot, a system that tries to address the need for iterative refinement in music creation. Loop Copilot leverages a large language model (LLM) to coordinate multiple specialised AI models, enabling users to generate and refine music interactively through a conversational interface. Central to this system is the Global Attribute Table, which records and maintains key musical attributes throughout the iterative process, ensuring that modifications at any stage preserve the overall coherence of the music. While Loop Copilot excels in orchestrating the music creation process, it does not directly address the need for detailed edits to the generated content. To overcome this limitation, MusicMagus is presented as a further solution for editing AI-generated music. MusicMagus introduces a zero-shot text-to-music editing approach that allows for the modification of specific musical attributes, such as genre, mood, and instrumentation, without the need for retraining. By manipulating the latent space within pre-trained diffusion models, MusicMagus ensures that these edits are stylistically coherent and that non-targeted attributes remain unchanged. This system is particularly effective in maintaining the structural integrity of the music during edits, but it encounters challenges with more complex and real-world audio scenarios. ...

Paperid: 8156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12209.pdf

Abstract:
In genres like Hip-Hop, RnB, Reggae, Dancehall and just about every Electronic/Dance/Club style, DJ tools are a special set of audio files curated to heighten the DJ's musical performance and creative mixing choices. In this work we demonstrate an approach to discovering DJ tools in personal music collections. Leveraging open-source libraries for speech/music activity, music boundary analysis and a Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model for zero-shot audio classification, we demonstrate a novel system designed to retrieve (or rediscover) compelling DJ tools for use live or in the studio.

Paperid: 8157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12151.pdf

Abstract:
This study aims to optimize the few-shot image classification task and improve the model's feature extraction and classification performance by combining self-supervised learning with the deep network model ResNet-101. During the training process, we first pre-train the model with self-supervision to enable it to learn common feature expressions on a large amount of unlabeled data; then fine-tune it on the few-shot dataset Mini-ImageNet to improve the model's accuracy and generalization ability under limited data. The experimental results show that compared with traditional convolutional neural networks, ResNet-50, DenseNet, and other models, our method has achieved excellent performance of about 95.12% in classification accuracy (ACC) and F1 score, verifying the effectiveness of self-supervised learning in few-shot classification. This method provides an efficient and reliable solution for the field of few-shot image classification.

Paperid: 8158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.09943.pdf

Abstract:
Zero-shot voice conversion aims to transform a source speech utterance to match the timbre of a reference speech from an unseen speaker. Traditional approaches struggle with timbre leakage, insufficient timbre representation, and mismatches between training and inference tasks. We propose Seed-VC, a novel framework that addresses these issues by introducing an external timbre shifter during training to perturb the source speech timbre, mitigating leakage and aligning training with inference. Additionally, we employ a diffusion transformer that leverages the entire reference speech context, capturing fine-grained timbre features through in-context learning. Experiments demonstrate that Seed-VC outperforms strong baselines like OpenVoice and CosyVoice, achieving higher speaker similarity and lower word error rates in zero-shot voice conversion tasks. We further extend our approach to zero-shot singing voice conversion by incorporating fundamental frequency (F0) conditioning, resulting in comparative performance to current state-of-the-art methods. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of Seed-VC in overcoming core challenges, paving the way for more accurate and versatile voice conversion systems.

Paperid: 8159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.08566.pdf

Abstract:
Grasping by a robot in unstructured environments is deemed a critical challenge because of the requirement for effective adaptation to a wide variation in object geometries, material properties, and other environmental factors. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for robotic grasping based on the idea of compressing high-dimensional target and gripper features in a common latent space using a set of autoencoders. Our approach simplifies grasping by using three autoencoders dedicated to the target, the gripper, and a third one that fuses their latent representations. This allows the RL agent to achieve higher learning rates at the initial stages of exploration of a new environment, as well as at non-zero shot grasp attempts. The agent explores the latent space of the third autoencoder for better quality grasp without explicit reconstruction of objects. By implementing the PoWER algorithm into the RL training process, updates on the agent's policy will be made through the perturbation in the reward-weighted latent space. The successful exploration efficiently constrains both position and pose integrity for feasible executions of grasps. We evaluate our system on a diverse set of objects, demonstrating the high success rate in grasping with minimum computational overhead. We found that approach enhances the adaptation of the RL agent by more than 35 % in simulation experiments.

Paperid: 8160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05691.pdf

Abstract:
This paper describes Asterisk, a compact GPT-based model for generating text embeddings. The model uses a minimalist architecture with two layers, two attention heads, and 256 embedding dimensions. By applying knowledge distillation from larger pretrained models, we explore the trade-offs between model size and performance while minimizing computational and memory requirements. The model is primarily evaluated and optimized for classification tasks, with experimental results showing its moderate performance in zero-shot classification across various downstream applications. With additional configuration, the model performance can approach or even surpass that of larger architectures on specific classification tasks.

Paperid: 8161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04892.pdf

Abstract:
Large-scale foundation models like CLIP have shown strong zero-shot generalization but struggle with domain shifts, limiting their adaptability. In our work, we introduce \textsc{StyLIP}, a novel domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy for Domain Generalization (DG). StyLIP disentangles visual style and content in CLIP`s vision encoder by using style projectors to learn domain-specific prompt tokens and combining them with content features. Trained contrastively, this approach enables seamless adaptation across domains, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on multiple DG benchmarks. Additionally, we propose AD-CLIP for unsupervised domain adaptation (DA), leveraging CLIP`s frozen vision backbone to learn domain-invariant prompts through image style and content features. By aligning domains in embedding space with entropy minimization, AD-CLIP effectively handles domain shifts, even when only target domain samples are available. Lastly, we outline future work on class discovery using prompt learning for semantic segmentation in remote sensing, focusing on identifying novel or rare classes in unstructured environments. This paves the way for more adaptive and generalizable models in complex, real-world scenarios.

Paperid: 8162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04324.pdf

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLM) have brought numerous of new applications to Machine Learning (ML). In the context of tabular data (TD), recent studies show that TabLLM is a very powerful mechanism for few-shot-learning (FSL) applications, even if gradient boosting decisions trees (GBDT) have historically dominated the TD field. In this work we demonstrate that although LLMs are a viable alternative, the evidence suggests that baselines used to gauge performance can be improved. We replicated public benchmarks and our methodology improves LightGBM by 290%, this is mainly driven by forcing node splitting with few samples, a critical step in FSL with GBDT. Our results show an advantage to TabLLM for 8 or fewer shots, but as the number of samples increases GBDT provides competitive performance at a fraction of runtime. For other real-life applications with vast number of samples, we found FSL still useful to improve model diversity, and when combined with ExtraTrees it provides strong resilience to overfitting, our proposal was validated in a ML competition setting ranking first place.

Paperid: 8163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01925.pdf

Abstract:
Objects, in the real world, rarely occur in isolation and exhibit typical arrangements governed by their independent utility, and their expected interaction with humans and other objects in the context. For example, a chair is expected near a table, and a computer is expected on top. Humans use this spatial context and relative placement as an important cue for visual recognition in case of ambiguities. Similar to human's, DNN's exploit contextual information from data to learn representations. Our research focuses on harnessing the contextual aspects of visual data to optimize data annotation and enhance the training of deep networks. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) We introduce the notion of contextual diversity for active learning CDAL and show its applicability in three different visual tasks semantic segmentation, object detection and image classification, (2) We propose a data repair algorithm to curate contextually fair data to reduce model bias, enabling the model to detect objects out of their obvious context, (3) We propose Class-based annotation, where contextually relevant classes are selected that are complementary for model training under domain shift. Understanding the importance of well-curated data, we also emphasize the necessity of involving humans in the loop to achieve accurate annotations and to develop novel interaction strategies that allow humans to serve as fact-checkers. In line with this we are working on developing image retrieval system for wildlife camera trap images and reliable warning system for poor quality rural roads. For large-scale annotation, we are employing a strategic combination of human expertise and zero-shot models, while also integrating human input at various stages for continuous feedback.

Paperid: 8164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00691.pdf

Abstract:
Code-mixing (CM), where speakers blend languages within a single expression, is prevalent in multilingual societies but poses challenges for natural language processing due to its complexity and limited data. We propose using a large language model to generate synthetic CM data, which is then used to enhance the performance of task-specific models for CM sentiment analysis. Our results show that in Spanish-English, synthetic data improved the F1 score by 9.32%, outperforming previous augmentation techniques. However, in Malayalam-English, synthetic data only helped when the baseline was low; with strong natural data, additional synthetic data offered little benefit. Human evaluation confirmed that this approach is a simple, cost-effective way to generate natural-sounding CM sentences, particularly beneficial for low baselines. Our findings suggest that few-shot prompting of large language models is a promising method for CM data augmentation and has significant impact on improving sentiment analysis, an important element in the development of social influence systems.

Paperid: 8165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.24034.pdf

Abstract:
There is an immense quantity of historical and cultural documentation that exists only as handwritten manuscripts. At the same time, performing OCR across scripts and different handwriting styles has proven to be an enormously difficult problem relative to the process of digitizing print. While recent Transformer based models have achieved relatively strong performance, they rely heavily on manually transcribed training data and have difficulty generalizing across writers. Multimodal LLM, such as GPT-4v and Gemini, have demonstrated effectiveness in performing OCR and computer vision tasks with few shot prompting. In this paper, I evaluate the accuracy of handwritten document transcriptions generated by Gemini against the current state of the art Transformer based methods. Keywords: Optical Character Recognition, Multimodal Language Models, Cultural Preservation, Mass digitization, Handwriting Recognitio

Paperid: 8166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16917.pdf

Abstract:
There are already many DNA large language models, but most of them still follow traditional uses, such as extracting sequence features for classification tasks. More innovative applications of large language models, such as prompt engineering, RAG, and zero-shot or few-shot prediction, remain challenging for DNA-based models. The key issue lies in the fact that DNA models and human natural language models are entirely separate; however, techniques like prompt engineering require the use of natural language, thereby significantly limiting the application of DNA large language models. This paper introduces a pre-trained model trained on the GPT-2 network, combining DNA sequences and English text, and uses a unified BPE tokenization method. We then convert classification and other downstream tasks into Alpaca format instruction data, and perform instruction fine-tuning on this pre-trained model to create a fine-tuned model capable of handling multiple tasks. The model has demonstrated its effectiveness in DNA related zero-shot prediction and multitask application. This research provides a highly promising direction for building a unified DNA sequence task framework.

Paperid: 8167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16703.pdf

Abstract:
We present the Large Language Model from Power Law Decoder Representations (PLDR-LLM), a language model that leverages non-linear and linear transformations through Power Law Graph Attention mechanism to generate well-defined deductive and inductive outputs. We pretrain the PLDR-LLMs of varying layer sizes with a small batch size of 32 and $\sim$8B tokens from the RefinedWeb dataset, and show that they achieve competitive performance in zero-shot and few-shot settings compared to scaled dot-product LLMs of similar model size reported in the literature. We show that deductive outputs of PLDR-LLMs can be used to compare model characteristics or improve the performance by introducing the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) loss as a metric and regularizer. Our results indicate that the initial maximum learning rate and warm-up steps have a lasting impact on deductive outputs throughout the pretraining. We provide a detailed description of PLDR-LLM architecture, its implementation and the pretraining procedure.

Paperid: 8168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09063.pdf

Abstract:
Topic models are used to identify and group similar themes in a set of documents. Recent advancements in deep learning based neural topic models has received significant research interest. In this paper, an approach is proposed that further enhances topic modeling performance by utilizing a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to generate summaries of documents before inputting them into the topic model. Few shot prompting is used to generate summaries of different lengths to compare their impact on topic modeling. This approach is particularly effective for larger documents because it helps capture the most essential information while reducing noise and irrelevant details that could obscure the overall theme. Additionally, it is observed that datasets exhibit an optimal summary length that leads to improved topic modeling performance. The proposed method yields better topic diversity and comparable coherence values compared to previous models.

Paperid: 8169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08130.pdf

Abstract:
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to their impressive capabilities as few-shot learners. Recent techniques, such as chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, have significantly advanced multi-step reasoning by introducing step-by-step decomposition, achieving state-of-the-art results on complex reasoning benchmarks. However, these approaches often rely on static prompting templates that do not adapt to task complexity or errors during the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Prompting, a dynamic and iterative framework designed to enhance reasoning by incorporating real-time adjustments to prompt structures and validation mechanisms.Experimental results demonstrate that Adaptive Prompting significantly improves performance on diverse reasoning benchmarks, including arithmetic reasoning (GSM8K, MultiArith), logical reasoning and commonsense tasks, achieving substantial accuracy gains compared to static prompting baselines. By integrating guided prompts, intermediate validation, and self-corrective steps, our approach enables smaller models to achieve competitive performance with larger counterparts, such as GPT-4, while maintaining computational efficiency. The framework achieves this without requiring fine-tuning or task-specific training data, highlighting the untapped potential of iterative reasoning methods.

Paperid: 8170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01704.pdf

Abstract:
There is a growing need for pluralistic alignment methods that can steer language models towards individual attributes and preferences. One such method, Self-Supervised Alignment with Mutual Information (SAMI), uses conditional mutual information to encourage the connection between behavioral preferences and model responses. We conduct two experiments exploring SAMI in multi-task settings. First, we compare SAMI to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on a multi-task benchmark (MT-Bench), using a stronger model to generate training data for a weaker one across diverse categories (humanities, STEM, extraction, coding, math, reasoning, and roleplay). Our results indicate that one iteration of SAMI has a 57% win rate against DPO, with significant variation in performance between task categories. Second, we examine SAMI's impact on mathematical accuracy (GSM-8K) relative to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). While SAMI increases zero-shot performance by 1.1%, SFT is more effective with a 3.2% boost. However, SAMI shows interesting scaling trends. When given 10 attempts, SAMI improves accuracy by 3.9%, while SFT achieves a 10.1% increase. Combining SAMI with SFT yields an additional improvement of 1.3% in multi-attempt settings, though single-attempt accuracy remains unchanged.

Paperid: 8171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00712.pdf

Abstract:
NECOMIMI (NEural-COgnitive MultImodal EEG-Informed Image Generation with Diffusion Models) introduces a novel framework for generating images directly from EEG signals using advanced diffusion models. Unlike previous works that focused solely on EEG-image classification through contrastive learning, NECOMIMI extends this task to image generation. The proposed NERV EEG encoder demonstrates state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance across multiple zero-shot classification tasks, including 2-way, 4-way, and 200-way, and achieves top results in our newly proposed Category-based Assessment Table (CAT) Score, which evaluates the quality of EEG-generated images based on semantic concepts. A key discovery of this work is that the model tends to generate abstract or generalized images, such as landscapes, rather than specific objects, highlighting the inherent challenges of translating noisy and low-resolution EEG data into detailed visual outputs. Additionally, we introduce the CAT Score as a new metric tailored for EEG-to-image evaluation and establish a benchmark on the ThingsEEG dataset. This study underscores the potential of EEG-to-image generation while revealing the complexities and challenges that remain in bridging neural activity with visual representation.

Paperid: 8172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15367.pdf

Abstract:
Inspired by recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) for Natural Language Processing (NLP), there has been a surge in research focused on developing foundational models for time series forecasting. One approach involves training LLM architectures on tokenized time series data using cross-entropy loss. Although this method has demonstrated promising results, cross-entropy loss is primarily designed for classification tasks and does not account for the distance between classes. To address this limitation, we propose using the Wasserstein loss for such architectures. To validate our approach, we fine-tuned a foundational time series model on $22$ zero-shot datasets, comparing the performance of cross-entropy loss with that of Wasserstein loss. Our results demonstrate that replacing cross-entropy loss with Wasserstein loss significantly improves point estimation.

Paperid: 8173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11512.pdf

Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel method for self-supervised fine-tuning of pose estimation. Leveraging zero-shot pose estimation, our approach enables the robot to automatically obtain training data without manual labeling. After pose estimation the object is grasped, and in-hand pose estimation is used for data validation. Our pipeline allows the system to fine-tune while the process is running, removing the need for a learning phase. The motivation behind our work lies in the need for rapid setup of pose estimation solutions. Specifically, we address the challenging task of bin picking, which plays a pivotal role in flexible robotic setups. Our method is implemented on a robotics work-cell, and tested with four different objects. For all objects, our method increases the performance and outperforms a state-of-the-art method trained on the CAD model of the objects. Project page available at gogoengine.github.io

Paperid: 8174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10555.pdf

Abstract:
Comparing to deep neural networks trained for specific tasks, those foundational deep networks trained on generic datasets such as ImageNet classification, benefits from larger-scale datasets, simpler network structure and easier training techniques. In this paper, we design a prompting module which performs few-shot adaptation of generic deep networks to new tasks. Driven by learning theory, we derive prompting modules that are as simple as possible, as they generalize better under the same training error. We use a case study on video object segmentation to experiment. We give a concrete prompting module, the Semi-parametric Deep Forest (SDForest) that combines several nonparametric methods such as correlation filter, random forest, image-guided filter, with a deep network trained for ImageNet classification task. From a learning-theoretical point of view, all these models are of significantly smaller VC dimension or complexity so tend to generalize better, as long as the empirical studies show that the training error of this simple ensemble can achieve comparable results from a end-to-end trained deep network. We also propose a novel methods of analyzing the generalization under the setting of video object segmentation to make the bound tighter. In practice, SDForest has extremely low computation cost and achieves real-time even on CPU. We test on video object segmentation tasks and achieve competitive performance at DAVIS2016 and DAVIS2017 with purely deep learning approaches, without any training or fine-tuning.

Paperid: 8175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09741.pdf

Abstract:
This article benchmarked the ability of OpenAI's GPTs and a number of open-source LLMs to perform annotation tasks on political content. We used a novel protest event dataset comprising more than three million digital interactions and created a gold standard that includes ground-truth labels annotated by human coders about toxicity and incivility on social media. We included in our benchmark Google's Perspective algorithm, which, along with GPTs, was employed throughout their respective APIs while the open-source LLMs were deployed locally. The findings show that Perspective API using a laxer threshold, GPT-4o, and Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral outperform other LLM's zero-shot classification annotations. In addition, Nous Hermes 2 and Mistral OpenOrca, with a smaller number of parameters, are able to perform the task with high performance, being attractive options that could offer good trade-offs between performance, implementing costs and computing time. Ancillary findings using experiments setting different temperature levels show that although GPTs tend to show not only excellent computing time but also overall good levels of reliability, only open-source LLMs ensure full reproducibility in the annotation.

Paperid: 8176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02865.pdf

Abstract:
This dissertation examines visually grounded speech (VGS) models that learn from unlabelled speech paired with images. It focuses on applications for low-resource languages and understanding human language acquisition. We introduce a task called visually prompted keyword localisation to detect and localise keywords in speech using images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VGS models in few-shot learning scenarios for low-resource languages like Yoruba. Additionally, we examine the mutual exclusivity bias in VGS models. Our monolingual VGS model exhibits this bias, but we found that multilingualism does not affect the bias in this VGS model similarly to what is observed in children.